Complete Works of Edward Young, page 88
Fears are the shields of life; but if they are too many, they are an oppression, and, like the maid at the Capitol, we perish under them.
Fears we have many; but there is but one that came from heaven, (as the Romans fabled of their Ancile,) which is the fear of God: all the rest are false; and this sevenfold shield will save us from them. A falling world cannot affright him whom that shield has under its protection.
Fourthly, there is also false shame; when, through an affection of the esteem of bad men, we are ashamed of what God approves; or if ashamed of what is truly shameful, when we are ashamed with regard to men, not God. The first is blasphemy in thought; or such a thought as, if expressed in words, would be blasphemous. The second is sacrilege, giving God’s due to man. This is a shame to be ashamed of; and contrary to the apostle’s repentance not to be repented of; for shame is a repentance, or something very like it.
Shame is a sense of estimation impaired, and of our sinking in the opinion of men; I wish I could add, of God too; for men are not ashamed of injustice or profaneness, at the same time that they blush for an omission in fashion or complaisance: nay, I wish they are not often proud of the former; now pride is shame’s reverse. As shining in the opinion of others is the supreme aim of almost all men, shame must be exceeding painful, as it implies the loss, or diminution, of their greatest fancied good. [Besides, every man, while he is ashamed, wishes his condition altered; which no man does who is happy under it.]
Shame has under its banner self-condemnation, pusillanimity, regret, lying, confusion of face.
Which last puts me in mind of what I take to be peculiarities of this passion, which are three. First, other passions fly to men for redress of their grievances, this flies from them: anger flies to strike, love to embrace, fear for shelter; but shame flies from all men, and makes an eye as sharp as a sword. Shame’s bad estate is seen in this, that its hope and felicity runs so low, as to make night and oblivion, which are the terror of others, a wish, a joy; fallere et effugere est triumphus. [So that it robs man of one of his most essential good qualities, — that of his being a sociable creature.]
Secondly, shame has a more infallible mark fixed on it by nature than any of the rest, I mean blushes. Of which I take the reason to be, that this passion necessarily supposes guilt; which is not the case of any of the passions beside, except envy, which is generally marked with paleness, as shame with the contrary. Shame, I say, necessarily supposes guilt. For none are ashamed but on one of these three accounts: First, because they are directly guilty. Secondly, because they want some merit they ought to have. Thirdly, because they suffer some indignity. Now, the want of proper merit proceeds generally from omissions; suffering indignities, from sloth or cowardice; and all these are vicious. “But men are sometimes ashamed of virtue.” True; but then they consider that virtue as a fault in the eyes of those before whom they are ashamed of it: besides, then it does not only suppose, but is, guilt Thirdly, lying. This is the false cover of false shame; for true or proper shame has regard to God; and who dares, who can, lie to Him? For we cannot lie to any purpose but to fallible beings. Now, as false shame is lying eternally, though the person subject to it is ashamed without reason at first, he is sure to have ample reason for shame in the end; and, consequently, he will be pained without just cause, and with it too.
Fifthly, envy. This is the most deformed and most detestable of all the passions. A good man may be angry or ashamed, may love or fear; but a good man cannot envy. For all other passions seek good; but envy, evil. All other passions propose advantages to themselves; envy seeks the detriment of others: they, therefore, are human; this is diabolical. Anger seeks vengeance for an injury, an injury in fortune, or person, or honour; but envy pretends no injuries, and yet has an appetite for vengeance. Love seeks the possession of good; fear, the flight of evil; but envy, neither: all her good is the disadvantage of another. Hence it is most detestable; and, because most detestable, therefore, secondly, Most deformed. For it is the most detestable, because the least natural; or, what is least natural, works in us the most disadvantageous and deforming effects. We must be sometimes angry, we must love, and fear, and be ashamed, by the necessity of our nature; and there are just occasions for them all: but no necessity of our nature obliges us to envy, nor is there any just occasion for it. For all men are unhappy, only we know not where their uneasiness lies; therefore there is no natural occasion for envy: and, that there should be a moral one, is a contradiction; for, the happier others are, the more we should rejoice. As, therefore, neither our nature nor reason requires envy, it is properly unnatural; and, because unnatural, it works such terrible effects in us. How pale, keen, inhuman, and emaciated is its look, if the undeserved indulgence of constitution gets not the better of those effects! Now, all these are demonstrations of its extreme pain.
Men of imagination, therefore, have been fond of this subject, as painters, poets, historians; for the imagination delights in extremes; and nothing is more terrible than their descriptions of it but the thing itself. A cheerful heart does good, like a medicine; but envy corrodes, like a poison: it is so sharp, that it cuts the body which sheathes it. Nay, it is thought by some actually to send forth its virulence, to sit visible in the eyes, and wound its object.
Of this opinion seems our greatest English philosopher, who assigns physical reasons why persons in joy and triumph are more liable to receive this venom than others. What a wretch must the quiver of such arrows be! Such is the pain of envy, that it made the two greatest and bravest men that ever lived weep; it made them shed tears, but not of compassion, though over the monuments of the dead.
Compassion is grieved at others’ evil: envy, at others’ good. Indignation is grieved that the unworthy prosper; envy, that the meritorious prosper also. Emulation is grieved at its own wants; envy, at the enjoyments of others. Nay, it principally maligns those who deserve the greatest praise, namely, new men, the makers of their own fame and fortune; for rising glory occasions the greatest envy, as kindling fires the greatest smoke. In a word, it is the reverse of charity; and, as that is the supreme source of pleasure, so this of pain: this gathers pain, as that gathers pleasures, from all the felicities that happen to mankind. Nor is it only painful, but ignominious. The most imperfect and pusillanimous are most subject to it; the first, because their field for envy is largest; the second, because, through mistake, what is little appears great to them; and, therefore, as the proper object of envy.
Its peculiarities I take to be, first, that it seeks not (as the other passions) good, but evil; secondly, that this is lasting, the others short. We are angry or ashamed, we love or fear, for a day or year; but we envy for life; and I look on it to be the most universal source of unhappiness on earth.
It has under its banner hatred, calumny, treachery, cabal, with the meagreness of famine, venom of pestilence, and rage of war.
Nor are the good and pleasurable passions without their inconveniences and inquietudes, which is a subject hitherto, I believe, unhandled. Compassion, indignation, hope, emulation, nay, and joy itself, if fairly examined, will prove this true, without any refinement or affectation of novelty in the attempt.
First, compassion, while it has others’ misery in its eye, it has its own in its apprehension, and is struck with a quick sense of the obnoxious condition of human nature. Hence it is evident that fear and sorrow are included in it; and can there be fear and sorrow without pain?
Though I know it is disputed, I venture to affirm, that our compassion for others is accompanied with a concern for ourselves: and I am persuaded of this, from considering the persons who are most, and who are least, inclined to compassion.
The least inclined are the most confirmed in, or the most lost to, happiness. The first are not compassionate, because most secure; the second, because they have felt the worst. Little self-concern being moved by the miserable object in these men, little compassion is moved by it too.
The most inclined to it are the timid, and those who have wives, children, and relations. The first, because they are most liable to fear for themselves; the second, because they afford misfortune the largest mark.
And all are more compassionate toward their equals in age, fortune, birth, qualifications, or manners, than others; because the misfortunes of such are a more direct alarm of fear for themselves.
Secondly, indignation. This is a just and noble passion, and none but the noble-minded feel it. It is a generous zeal for right, an heroic and laudable anger at the prosperity of undeservers; an anger, therefore, foreign to the unworthy, base, and profligate, who can conceive no resentment that men, like themselves, prosper. This elevated passion has sometimes a severer pang than is consistent with life. Cato died of it. He thought no man worthy to triumph over liberty and Rome; and that violent deportment shown at his death, which has hitherto been wrongfully imputed to a ferocity of temper, was, I think, owing to this accidental passion, which was the cause of his death, — this fever, this noble inflammation of mind, this indignation for Cæsar’s unjust success. My conjecture clears his character in that respect, and makes it more consistent with that humanity which he, in a peculiar manner, manifested on many occasions in his laudable life, which was worthy our emulation, though his death was blamable at the best.
Thirdly, emulation is an exalted and glorious passion, parent of most excellencies in human life. It is enamoured of all virtue and accomplishment; its generous food is praise; its sublime profession, transcendency; and the life it pants after, immortality. It kindles at all that is illustrious, and, as it were, lights its torch at the sun. Envy seeks others’ evil; emulation, its own good: envy repines at excellence, without imitation; emulation imitates, and rejoices in it. We envy often what we cannot arrive at; we emulate nothing but what we can, or think at least we can, attain. Hence the young and magnanimous are most inflamed with emulation, and emulation rather of glory and virtue than of the goods of the body or fortune, till the world effaces nature’s first good impressions. Hœc imitamini, says Tully; per deos immortales, hœc ampla sunt, hœc divina, hœc immortalia, hœc fama celebrantur, monumentis annalium mandantur, posteritati propagantur.
But, though emulation is the pursuit of the most amiable things, and that by persons most amiable too, it cannot escape; it cannot escape in a bad world, where men judge of others by themselves, being mistaken for envy, and being treated accordingly; for it has, sometimes, such a degree of resemblance, as to give the weak occasion of error, and the malicious of excuse. Thus it falls alieno vulnere; not to mention its own natural pain, which is, at least, as uneasy to the soul as extreme thirst is to the body. Hope and fear play the heart of emulation with violence; it has its throbs, its paleness, and tremblings when carried to an height.
Exultantiaque haurit
Corda pavor pulsant, laudumque arrecta cupido.
Fourthly, hope and joy. Hope feels the stings of impatience, which is often so vehemently eager, that falling from it into the despair of its object is sometimes a sensible ease to the mind. Joy, if moderate, scarce breaks through the general disquiet of life; if immoderate, it is a fever, a tumult, a gay delirium, a transport, which signifies a man’s being beside or beyond himself; and he that is not in possession of himself can but ill be said to be in possession of any thing else: joy, in this case, goes beyond its bounds into an enemy’s country, and becomes a pain, as its tears abundantly testify. Nor has it tears only, but is sometimes mortal.
Hence some, nay, most, philosophers have placed our chief good in serenity, or indolence; but this is a mistake. Indolence, or rest, is inconsistent with our nature, and not to be found in heaven itself but in a comparative sense. On the contrary, our heaven will consist in a pleasing motion, a delightful exertion, a transporting progress, to all eternity. Annihilation is the only rest for man. What, therefore, we are to aim at, I shall show in my second discourse.
To conclude, on the passions. We consist of soul and body: the passions are the wants of the soul, as the appetites may be called the passions of the body; so that we are made up of wants, that is, of pains. Who is almost ever free from one passion or another! And, as passions are the pains, (from which they take their very name,) so are they the destroyers, too, of our nature. They pain the whole soul, they confound the memory, make wild the imagination, and hurt the understanding, like ebriety, which they resemble in their natural and moral ill consequences; and, because they injure the body also, therefore has the physician, as well as moralist, to do with them, and interdicts them to all those who desire length of days. Nay, they are more terrible than that death which they hasten; for many have fled to that from the torment of them. It seems strangest, at first sight, that fear, of all the passions, should put on this appearance of courage; but it is so far from it, in reality, that no other passion ever arrived at suicide but through the suggestion of this trembler, fear. Men die because they fear life under its present ills; whereas true valour meets those ills, whatever they are, with the same resolution with which they meet death. [Their cowardice shows a pale, feeble valour, as darkness shows the moon; but that valour is nothing compared to the true, as the moon is nothing by day.]
If this account of the passions be just, let us turn them against themselves; let us be angry with anger, ashamed of shame, afraid of fear, pity, envy, and moderate our fondness for love; for some are so idle, ridiculous, shameless, as to court the passion itself, and at a time, too, when they have the least probability of success. Love, according to the different objects it embraces, like a woman espoused, changes its name, and becomes voluptuousness, ambition, avarice, or vanity; those four predominant impulses that divide mankind between them, that beat on us, like the four winds of heaven, and keep the restless world in a perpetual storm.
On this common subject I shall endeavour to throw some new light, by showing that they all act directly counter to their own purposes, and are the reverse of that which they pretend to.
First, the voluptuous. Can this man be unhappy, whose sole aim is pleasure! whose study is the art, whose life is the chase, of delight? He may, he is, nay, he must be so; because his imagination promises much more than sense is able to pay. Hence he is always disappointed; but, through ignorance or negligence of the cause of it, though always disappointed, he is always expecting; and repeated experience serves only to upbraid, not correct, his conduct. And it must be so; for, as every new scene of voluptuousness is a new light to his understanding to show the insufficiency of those scenes to his happiness, so is it, also, a new blow to his understanding and the rectitude of his will, and weakens his power of resisting them. Hence is he reduced to the wretched estate of eternally pursuing and eternally condemning the same things; than which nothing more severe could be imposed by the greatest tyrant and greatest foe. It is not in vigorous health, boundless fortune, unrestrained liberty, or that liberty improved by skill and experience into an art of debauchery, to give him satisfaction, nay, not to give him inquietude, though virtue, though reason, did not interpose: the body only would find out the vanity, the tedium, the bad effect of voluptuousness; and bare instinct would reproach him with it. His past gives regret, his present dissatisfies, and his future deceives; his imagination imposes on his senses, his senses weaken and vex his understanding, and his understanding censures them both: they persist, that grows peevish and impotent. Thus the divided man, like a divided family, is the seat of misery, and object of contempt.
With regard to the chief branch of sensuality, and its fatal consequences, it may be truly said, that nothing is more stinging than a bad woman’s hatred, except her caresses; nothing is more to be declined than her deformity, except her charms. But as for a good woman, her price is beyond gold. She is a pillar of rest.
The man of pleasure, as the phrase is, is the most ridiculous of all beings. He travels, indeed, with his ribbon, plume, and bells, his dress, and his music; but through a toilsome and beaten road; and every day nauseously repeats the same track. Throw an eye into the gay world; what see we, for the most part, but a set of querulous, emaciated, fluttering, fantastical beings, worn out in the keen pursuit of pleasure; creatures that know, own, condemn, deplore, yet still pursue, their own infelicity? the decayed monuments of error, the thin remains of what is called delight!
In a word, to suppose sense alone can make man happy, is to suppose reason superfluous, which is blasphemous and absurd: but sensuality brings such a grossness on the understanding, that this argument will not be so much as comprehended by those who have the greatest need of being affected by it. Now, the cause of their not comprehending it is their total inexperience and ignorance of the pleasures of reason; which ignorance proves this gay, this gallant creature, this patron of pleasures, and professor of delight, what he little suspects, — in reality the greatest niggard in enjoyment, the greatest self-denier in the world.
Secondly, ambition. Voluptuousness has its intervals; when sense is satisfied, it pauses for the revival of its flame; like eruptions, it rages and rests by turns: but ambition, like a conflagration, burns on incessant; the more it has, the more it craves; the more it devours, the stronger is its fury. Success but sets it new tasks, and is as severe to the ambitious, as misfortune to other men. Every difficulty he cuts off, seven rise in its stead: so that the character of the most ambitious man that ever lived is a proper motto for all his sons, whose sport, like the leviathan’s, makes a tempest, and is the min of all about them. Nil actum reputans, dum quid superesset agendum. That is, it is their maxim to know no rest. How differs, then, ambition from slavery! As severe exercise from hard labour: the thing is the same, only here it is the necessity, and there it is choice; that is, there it is wretchedness and folly too.
