Explore "Worldliness and other-Worldliness: the Poet Young" by George Eliot on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The study of men, as they have appeared in different ages and under / various social conditions, may be considered as the natural history of / the race. Let us, then, for a moment imagine ourselves, as students of / this natural history, "dredging" the first half of the eighteenth century / in search of specimens. About the year 1730 we have hauled up a / remarkable individual of the species _divine_ -- a surprising name, / considering the nature of the animal before us, but we are used to / unsuitable names in natural history. Let us examine this individual at / our leisure. He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his / metamorphosis into the clerical form. Rather a paradoxical specimen, if / you observe him narrowly: a sort of cross between a sycophant and a / psalmist; a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the "Last Day" / and by a creation of peers, who fluctuates between rhapsodic applause of / King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah. After spending "a foolish / youth, the sport of peers and poets," after being a hanger-on of the / profligate Duke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a parliamentary / career, and angling for pensions and preferment with fulsome dedications / and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted with his imperfect success, / and has determined to retire from the general mendicancy business to a / particular branch; in other words, he has determined on that renunciation / of the world implied in "taking orders," with the prospect of a good / living and an advantageous matrimonial connection. And no man can be / better fitted for an Established Church. He personifies completely her / nice balance of temporalities and spiritualities.
He is equally impressed with the momentousness of death and of burial fees; he / languishes at once for immortal life and for "livings; " he has a fervid / attachment to patrons in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty. / He will teach, with something more than official conviction, the / nothingness of earthly things; and he will feel something more than / private disgust if his meritorious efforts in directing men's attention / to another world are not rewarded by substantial preferment in this. His / secular man believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as / characteristic attire for "an ornament of religion and virtue; " hopes / courtiers will never forget to copy Sir Robert Walpole; and writes / begging letters to the King's mistress. His spiritual man recognizes no / motives more familiar than Golgotha and "the skies; " it walks in / graveyards, or it soars among the stars. His religion exhausts itself in / ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no medium between the ecstatic and / the sententious. If it were not for the prospect of immortality, he / considers, it would be wise and agreeable to be indecent or to murder / one's father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any / man not to be a knave. Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and / the brute; the brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its "relation / to the stalls," and frightened into moderation by the contemplation of / death-beds and skulls; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this / world and exalting the next; and by this double process you get the / Christian -- "the highest style of man. " With all this, our new-made / divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the / worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean / fire.