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The piercing notes of a score of shrill fifes, the squall of as many clarions, the hoarse bray of a legion of tin trumpets, the angry and fitful snort of a brigade of rugged bassoons, the unintermitting rattle of a dozen or more deafening drums, the clang of bells firing in peals, the boom of gongs, with the sepulchral roar of some unknown contrivance for bass, so deep that you might almost count the vibrations of each note these are a few of the components of the horse-and-cart-organ, the sum-total of which it is impossible to add up.
He feels convinced that the sort of personal existence ascribed to such an abstraction, as well as the human shape, are merely modes of representing and drawing into unity a variety of phenomena and agencies that seem one, by means of their unintermitting continuity, and because they tend to one common purpose.
To add to the dire uproar, thunder now peals from the skies in loud, continuous roars, and in sharp angry crashes, while lightning plays about in broad sheets all over the sky, the one following so close on the other as to give the impression of perpetual flashes and an unintermitting roar; the whole scene presenting an aspect so awful, that sinful man might well suppose the season of the Earth's probation had passed away, and that the Almighty were about to hurl complete destruction upon his offending creatures.
These were succeeded by louder peals of thunder, and vivid flashes of lightning, which continued and increased, until the tempest, for such it was, burst in fury, discharging deluges of rain, that fell with unintermitting violence until an hour or more after mid-day.
Another indication of Young’s deficiency in moral, i.e., in sympathetic emotion, is his unintermitting habit of pedagogic moralizing. On its theoretic and perceptive side, morality touches science; on its emotional side, Art. Now, the products of Art are great in proportion as they result from that immediate prompting of innate power which we call Genius, and not from labored obedience to a theory or rule; and the presence of genius or innate prompting is directly opposed to the perpetual consciousness of a rule. The action of faculty is imperious, and excludes the reflection why it should act. In the same way, in proportion as morality is emotional, i.e., has affinity with Art, it will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and action, and not as the recognition of a rule. Love does not say, “I ought to love”—it loves. Pity does not say, “It is right to be pitiful”—it pities. Justice does not say, “I am bound to be just”—it feels justly. It is only where moral emotion is comparatively weak that the contemplation of a rule or theory habitually mingles with its action; and in accordance with this, we think experience, both in literature and life, has shown that the minds which are pre-eminently didactic—which insist on a “lesson,” and despise everything that will not convey a moral, are deficient in sympathetic emotion. A certain poet is recorded to have said that he “wished everything of his burned that did not impress some moral; even in love-verses, it might be flung in by the way.” What poet was it who took this medicinal view of poetry? Dr. Watts, or James Montgomery, or some other singer of spotless life and ardent piety? Not at all. It was Waller. A significant fact in relation to our position, that the predominant didactic tendency proceeds rather from the poet’s perception that it is good for other men to be moral, than from any overflow of moral feeling in himself. A man who is perpetually thinking in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admonition, can have little energy left for simple emotion. And this is the case with Young. In his highest flights of contemplation and his most wailing soliloquies he interrupts himself to fling an admonitory parenthesis at “Lorenzo,” or to hint that “folly’s creed” is the reverse of his own. Before his thoughts can flow, he must fix his eye on an imaginary miscreant, who gives unlimited scope for lecturing, and recriminates just enough to keep the spring of admonition and argument going to the extent of nine books. It is curious to see how this pedagogic habit of mind runs through Young’s contemplation of Nature. As the tendency to see our own sadness reflected in the external world has been called by Mr. Ruskin the “pathetic fallacy,” so we may call Young’s disposition to see a rebuke or a warning in every natural object, the “pedagogic fallacy.” To his mind, the heavens are “forever scolding as they shine;” and the great function of the stars is to be a “lecture to mankind.” The conception of the Deity as a didactic author is not merely an implicit point of view with him; he works it out in elaborate imagery, and at length makes it the occasion of his most extraordinary achievement in the “art of sinking,” by exclaiming,
Moreover, it is stern and uncompromising in its morality, requiring the strictest purity of life, and making virtue to consist not in the outward act, but in the secret motive which prompts the act. It is at open and unintermitting war with all the vain and vicious inclinations of the heart. It insists upon an undivided sovereignty over the whole character and life of the individual.
'When I surrender, cried Colour-Sergeant Nolan, 'it will be my dead body! Hour after hour of the unintermitting crash of the shells among the rocks and of the groans and screams of men torn and burst by the most horrible of all wounds had shaken the troops badly.
It lay down with me at night and got up with me in the morning, tinting and disturbing my dreams, and making my daily life terrible. I wonder now that I lived through the ordeal. The torment was secret and incessant, and kept my mind in unintermitting activity. Externally things went on at Knowl for some weeks in the usual routine.
I could only compare them to the loud rattle of along train of chariots driven at full speed over the stones, or a roar of unintermitting thunder. Then the disordered compass, thrown out of gear by the electric currents, confirmed me in a growing conviction.
Those who had fitted up their houses with pipes, in reliance on the guarantee of unintermitting pressure, found themselves obliged either to sacrifice the first outlay, or to expend on cisterns and their appendages further sums, varying from L.10 or L.20 up to L.50 and even, in many cases, L.100.
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