Born at Upham, Hants, June 1683. At Winchester School, 1694–99. Matric. New Coll., Oxford, 3 Oct. 1702. Soon afterwards removed to Corpus Christi Coll. Law Fellowship, All Soul’s Coll., 1706; B.C.L., 23 April, 1714; D.C.L., 10 June 1719. Tutor to Lord Burleigh, for a short time before 1719. Play “Busiris” produced at Drury Lane, March 1719; “The Brothers,” Drury Lane, 1753. Ordained, 1727; Chaplain to George II., April 1728; Rector to Welwyn, Herts, 1730–65. Married Lady Elizabeth Leigh, 27 May 1731. Clerk of Closet to Princess Dowager, 1751. Died, at Welwyn, 5 April 1765. Buried there. Works: “Epistle to … Lord Lansdown,” 1713; “A Poem on the Lord’s Day,” 1713 (2nd edn. same year); “The Force of Religion,” 1714; “On the Late Queen’s Death,” 1714; “Oratio habita in Coll. Omnium Animarum,” 1716; “Paraphrase on part of the Book of Job,” 1719; “Busiris,” 1719; “Letter to Mr. Tickell,” 1719; “The Revenge,” 1721; “The Universal Passion” (6 pts.: anon.), 1725–28; “The Instalment,” 1726; “Cynthio” (anon.), 1727; “Ocean,” 1728; “A Vindication of Providence,” 1728 (2nd edn. same year); “An Apology for Princes,” 1729; “Imperium Pelagi” (anon.), 1730; “Two Epistles to Mr. Pope” (anon.), 1730; “The Sea-Piece,” 1730; “The Foreign Address,” 1734; “Poetical Works” (2 vols.), 1741; “The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality” (anon.; 9 pts.), 1742–46; “The Consolation” (anon.), 1745; “Reflections on the Public Situation of the Kingdom,” 1745; “The Brothers” (anon.), 1753; “The Centaur not Fabulous” (anon.), 1755; “An Argument drawn from the circumstance of Christ’s Death,” 1758; “Conjectures on Original Composition” (anon.), 1759 (2nd edn. same year); “Resignation” (anon.), 1762; “Works” (4 vols.), 1764. Posthumous: “The Merchant,” 1771. Collected Works: “Complete Works,” ed. by Dr. Doran (2 vols.), 1854.
| Must torture his invention | |
| To flatter knaves or lose his pension. |
I have a great joy in Dr. Young, whom I disturbed in a reverie. At first he started, then bowed, then fell back into a surprise; then began a speech, relapsed into his astonishment two or three times, forgot what he had been saying; began a new subject, and so went on. I told him your Grace desired he would write longer letters; to which he cried, “Ha!” most emphatically, and I leave you to interpret what it meant. He has made a friendship with one person here, whom I believe you would not imagine to have been made for his bosom friend. You would, perhaps, suppose it was a bishop or dean, a prebend, a pious preacher, a clergyman of exemplary life; or if a layman, of most virtuous conversation, one that has paraphrased St. Matthew, or wrote comments on St. Paul…. You would not guess that this associate of the Doctor’s was—old Cibber! Certainly, in their religious, moral, and civil character there is no relation; but in their dramatic capacity there is some…. The waters have raised his spirits to a fine pitch, as your Grace will imagine when I tell you how sublime an answer he made to a very vulgar question. I asked him how long he stayed at the Wells: he said, As long as my rival stayed;—as long as the sun did.
The impertinence of my frequent visits to him was amply rewarded; forasmuch as, I can truly say, he never received me but with agreeable open complacency; and I never left him but with profitable pleasure and improvement. He was one or other, the most modest, the most patient of contradiction, and the most informing and entertaining I ever conversed with—at least, of any man who had so just pretensions to pertinacity and reserve.
When he had determined to go into orders he addressed himself, like an honest man, for the best directions in the study of theology. But to whom did he apply? It may, perhaps, be thought, to Sherlock or Atterbury; to Burnet or Hare. No! to Mr. Pope; who, in a youthful frolic, recommended Thomas Aquinas to him. With this treasure he retired, in order to be free from interruption, to an obscure place in the suburbs. His director hearing no more of him in six months, and apprehending he might have carried the jest too far, sought after him, and found him out just in time to prevent an irretrievable derangement.
There are who relate, that, when first Young found himself independent, and his own master at All Souls, he was not the ornament to religion and morality which he afterwards became…. They who think ill of Young’s morality, in the early part of his life, may perhaps be wrong; but Tindal could not err in his opinion of Young’s warmth and ability in the cause of religion. Tindal used to spend much of his time at All Souls. “The other boys,” said the atheist, “I can always answer, because I always know whence they have their arguments, which I have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually pestering me with something of his own.” After all, Tindal and the censurers of Young may be reconcilable. Young might, for two or three years, have tried that kind of life in which his natural principles would not suffer him to wallow long. If this were so, he has left behind him not only his evidence in favour of virtue, but the potent testimony of experience against vice.
That there was an air of benevolence in his manner, but that he could obtain from him less information than he had hoped to receive from one who had lived too much in intercourse with the brightest men of what had been called the Augustan age of England; and that he shewed a degree of eager curiosity concerning the common occurrences that were then passing, which appeared somewhat remarkable in a man of such intellectual stores, of such an advanced age, and who had retired from life with declared disappointment in his expectations.
We stopped at Welwin, where I wished much to see, in company with Johnson, the residence of the authour of “Night Thoughts,” which was then possessed by his son, Mr. Young…. We went into the garden, where we found a gravel walk, on each side of which was a row of trees, planted by Dr. Young, which formed a handsome gothic arch. Dr. Johnson called it a fine grove. I beheld it with reverence. We sat some time in the summer-house, on the outside wall of which was inscribed “Ambulantes in horto audiebant vocem Dei;” and in reference to a brook by which it is situated, “Vivendi rectè qui prorogat horam,” &c. I said to Mr. Young that I had been told his father was cheerful. “Sir,” said he, “he was too well bred a man not to be cheerful in company; but he was gloomy when alone. He never was cheerful after my mother’s death, and he had met with many disappointments.” Dr. Johnson observed to me afterwards “That this was no favourable account of Dr. Young; for it is not becoming in a man to have so little acquiescence in the ways of Providence as to be gloomy because he has not obtained as much preferment as he expected, nor to continue gloomy for the loss of his wife. Grief has its time.”
Young, whose satires give the very anatomy of human foibles, was wholly governed by his housekeeper. She thought and acted for him, which probably greatly assisted the “Night Thoughts,” but his curate exposed the domestic economy of a man of genius by a satirical novel. If I am truly informed, in that gallery of satirical poets in his “Love of Fame,” Young has omitted one of the most striking—his own! While the poet’s eye was glancing from “earth to heaven,” he totally overlooked the lady whom he married, and who soon became the object of his contempt; and not only his wife, but his only son, who when he returned home for the vacation from Winchester school, was only admitted into the presence of his poetical father on the first and the last day; and whose unhappy life is attributed to this unnatural neglect:—a lamentable domestic catastrophe, which, I fear, has too frequently occurred amidst the ardour and occupations of literary glory.
The outline of Young’s character is too distinctly traceable in the well-attested facts of his life, and yet more in the self-betrayal that runs through all his works, for us to fear that our general estimate of him may be false. For, while no poet seems less easy and spontaneous than Young, no poet discloses himself more completely. Men’s minds have no hiding-place out of themselves—their affections do but betray another phase of their nature. And if, in the present view of Young, we seem to be more intent on laying bare unfavourable facts than on shrouding them in “charitable speeches,” it is not because we may have any irreverential pleasure in turning men’s characters the seamy side without, but because we see no great advantage in considering a man as he was not. Young’s biographers and critics have usually set out from the position that he was a great religious teacher, and that his poetry is morally sublime; and they have toned down his failings into harmony with their conception of the divine and the poet. For our own part, we set out from precisely the opposite conviction—namely, that the religious and moral spirit of Young’s poetry is low and false; and we think it of some importance to show that the “Night Thoughts” are the reflex of a mind in which the higher human sympathies were inactive. This judgment is entirely opposed to our youthful predilections and enthusiasm. The sweet garden-breath of early enjoyment lingers about many a page of the “Night Thoughts,” and even of the “Last Day,” giving an extrinsic charm to passages of stilted rhetoric and false sentiment, but the sober and repeated reading of maturer years has convinced us that it would hardly be possible to find a more typical instance than Young’s poetry, of the mistake which substitutes interested obedience for sympathetic emotion, and baptizes egoism as religion.
One of the greatest sycophants of a very adulatory age; a self-seeking, greedy, worldly man.
It was a curious chance which brought together the future author of the “Night Thoughts” and the future author of “La Pucelle;” it was a still more curious circumstance that they should have formed a friendship which remained unbroken, when the one had become the most rigid of Christian divines, and the other the most daring of anti-Christian propagandists. Many years afterwards Young dedicated to him in very flattering terms one of the most pleasing of his minor poems—the “Sea Piece.”
He closed his long career, rich indeed through his marriage with the Earl of Lichfield’s daughter, Lady Elizabeth Lee, but petulant, proud, and solitary. The insatiable ambition of Young has been the theme of many moralists, and the tendency of his personal character was indubitably parasitic; but it would be easy to show, on the other hand, that he really was, to an eminent degree, what Hobbes calls an “episcopable” person, and that his talents, his address, his loyalty, and his moral force were qualities which not only might, but for the honour of the English Church should, have been publicly acknowledged by preferment.
Night Thoughts, 1742–46
The title of my poem (Night Thoughts) not affected; for I never compose but at night, except sometimes when I am on horseback.
I will venture to say that in point of depth this poet is what Homer and Pindar are in point of grandeur. I should find it difficult to explain the effect produced upon me by my first perusal of this work. I might experience much the same impression in the heart of the desert on a dark and stormy night, when the surrounding blackness is pierced at intervals by flashes of lightning.
A great poet, who is certain to share the immortality of Swift, Shaftesbury, Pope, Addison, and Richardson.
Sir, you have conferred a high honour on my old acquaintance Young; the taste of the translator appears to be better than the author’s. You have done all that could be done in the way of bringing order into this collection of confused and bombastic platitudes…. I think that every foreigner will prefer your prose to the poetry of one who is half poet and half priest, like this Englishman.
It is all too full of tolling bells, tombs, mournful chants and cries, and phantoms; the simple and artless expression of true sorrow would be a hundred times more effective.
Looked into Young’s “Night Thoughts:” debased throughout with many poor and puerile conceits; such as making “the night weep dew over extinct nature;” the revolving spheres, “a horologe machinery divine;” “each circumstance armed with an aspic, and all a hydra woe;” “each tear mourn its own distinct distress, and each distress heightened by the whole.” Frigidity and tumour, obscurity and glare, are the two apparently opposite but striking faults of this popular and imposing poem: yet parts are in good taste: he glows with a natural and genial warmth in describing the charms of social intercourse and the blessings of friendship, towards the close of the 2d Night; and the passage in the 4th, beginning, “O my coævals, remanants of yourselves,” is animated and sublime. Johnson perhaps caught his “panting Time toiled after him in vain,” from Young’s “and leave Praise panting in the distant vale.”
No writer, ancient or modern, had a stronger imagination than Dr. Young, or one more fertile in figures of every kind. His metaphors are often new, and often natural and beautiful. But his imagination was strong and rich, rather than delicate and correct. Hence, in his “Night Thoughts,” there prevails an obscurity, and a hardness in his style. The metaphors are frequently too bold, and frequently too far pursued; the reader is dazzled, rather than enlightened; and kept constantly on the stretch to keep pace with the author.
To all the other excellencies of “Night Thoughts” let me add the great and peculiar one, that they contain not only the noblest sentiments of virtue, and contemplations on immortality, but the Christian Sacrifice, the Divine Propitiation, with all its interesting circumstances, and consolations to “a wounded spirit,” solemnly and poetically displayed in such imagery and language, as cannot fail to exalt, animate, and soothe the truly pious. No book whatever can be recommended to young persons, with better hopes of seasoning their minds with vital religion, than Young’s “Night Thoughts.”
With powers inferior to Milton, turgid, obscure, and epigrammatic, yet with occasional sallies of imagination, and bursts of sublimity that course along the gloom with the rapidity and brilliancy of lightning, Young has in his “Night Thoughts” become a favourite not only with the multitude here, but with many of the nations upon the Continent; for, with the bulk of mankind, there is little discrimination between the creative energy of Milton, and the tumid declamation of Young, or between the varied pauses of highly-finished blank-verse and a succession of monotonous lines. Young has, however, the merit of originality: for few authors who have written so much have left fainter traces of imitation, or in the happy hour of inspiration more genuine and peculiar excellence.
There is nothing of entertaining succession of parts in the “Night Thoughts.” The poem excites no anticipation as it proceeds. One book bespeaks no impatience for another, nor is found to have laid the smallest foundation for new pleasure when the succeeding Night sets in. The poet’s fancy discharges itself on the mind in short ictuses of surprise, which rather lose than increase their force by reiteration; but he is remarkably defective in progressive interest and collective effect. The power of the poem, instead of “being in the whole,” lies in short, vivid and broken gleams of genius; so that if we disregard particular lines, we shall but too often miss the only gems of ransom which the poet can bring as the price of his relief from surrounding tedium…. After all, the variety and extent of reflection in the “Night Thoughts” is to a certain degree more imposing than real. They have more metaphorical than substantial variety of thought. Questions which we had thought exhausted and laid at rest in one book, are called up again in the next in a Proteus metamorphosis of shape, and a chamelion diversity of colour. Happily the awful truths which they illustrate are few and simple. Around those truths the poet directs his course with innumerable sinuosities of fancy, like a man appearing to make a long voyage, while he is in reality only crossing and recrossing the same expanse of water.
I asked how it would be accounted for that Dr. Young’s “Night Thoughts” were less estimated than formerly. Mr. Hall replied, “Dr. Young is destined to immortality. I cannot account for the taste of the age in preferring a light and trifling literature, which, being all glare, affords no food for the mind. Another age will properly appreciate the genius of Young.”
Young’s great poem is a notable instance of the want of reserve and poetical economy. In the poetry of Cowper, Burns, Crabbe, we have abundance of sadness, and it is all the more truly and deeply sad, because it seems to come unsought, nay, rather shunned. The poet’s soul appears to crave the sunshine: he “does not love the shower nor seek the cold,” but only yields to mournful reflections because they force themselves upon him in a world of woe. But when Young so resolutely makes love to Gloom and sets his cap at Melancholy, we suspect that both are in masquerade, and that blooming forms are beneath the sable stole; when he surrounds his head with cypress, we image a snug velvet cap under the dusky wreath; when he “sits by a lamp at mid-day, and has skulls, bones, and instruments of death for the ornaments of his study,” we feel disposed to think that he makes sin, death, and sorrow a poetical amusement, and takes up these topics because they offer facilities for impressive writing more than to relieve their pressure on a burdened heart.
We commend his masterpiece to readers, partly, indeed, for its power,—a power that has hitherto rather been felt than acknowledged, rather admired in silence than analysed; but principally because, like “The Temple” of Herbert, it is holy ground. The author, amid his elaborate ingenuities, and wilful though minor perversities, never ceases to love and to honour truth; in pursuit of renown, he is never afraid to glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; and if his flights of fancy be at times too wild, and if his thoughts be often set to the tune of the tempest, it is a tempest on whose wings, to use his own simple but immortal words, “The Lord is abroad.”
Although some have called its sublimity “fustian,” and its melancholy artificial, its combinations grotesque, its phraseology involved, and its reasoning sometimes confused, it stands, on the whole, as a monument of the inexhaustible wit (in the proper sense of the word) and genius of the author. Its moral is expressly directed against that of Pope in his “Essay on Man,” wherein the world was taught to be content with the present, without troubling itself about the hereafter. A great portion of Pope’s poem consists merely of a versified translation of Pascal’s “Thoughts and Maxims;” but the sentiments of Young are, with one or two exceptions, entirely original.
Young, with his knowledge of the world and meditative piety, had enthusiasm and vivacity, and was able, like the lion instanced by Longinus, to lash himself into constant fits of sublimity, in which he frequently causes us to forget the effort, though we are not seldom reminded of it. The cardinal defect of his character and of his poetry would appear to be a lack of reverence,—of that modest, quiet, teachable spirit, which, when associated with genius, is capable of receiving and giving forth the noblest utterances of inspiration…. Too much of the “Night Thoughts” is rant, scolding, and fury. It is on many pages a truculent, tumultuous poem, filled with a sort of vinous, bacchanalian piety. The sacred Muse of Young goes forth shouting and frantic with some leaves of the thyrsus yet about her from the revels of the Duke of Wharton.
In my youthful days Young’s “Night Thoughts” was a very favourite book, especially with ladies: I knew more than one lady who had a copy of it in which particular passages were marked for her by some popular preacher.
| But never sit I quiet long | |
| Where broider’d cassock floats round Young; | |
| Whose pungent essences perfume | |
| And quirk and quibble trim the tomb; | |
| Who thinks the holy bread too plain, | |
| And in the chalice pours champagne. |
In his last years he [Herder] longed for nothing more earnestly than for some great high thought on which he might live. Klopstock’s “Odes,” Young’s “Night Thoughts,” and Müller’s “Relics” were, next to the Bible, especially the prophets, the last food of his soul.
The poem is a mighty and magnificent sermon, preached as from a graveyard, on the vanity and brevity of life and the worthlessness and folly of an ill-spent career; in the divine love to sinners; and the great propitiation offered for them; and on the bright hopes of a new and happy existence which Christianity has opened up. It startles by its scenes of death, its dark picture of the sting of death, and its glimpses into another world, where the Judge is omniscient and just. It reprobates in stern and withering language the unsatisfactoriness of infidelity, and expatiates in glowing and transcendant terms on the doctrine of immortality. The imagery of night is drawn with intense solemnity,—its darkness and its vast canopy studded with the host of heaven, all telling of the great God, and proclaiming his majesty, that man may be awed and brought in faith to the acceptance of that salvation by which he rises above the fear of dissolution, experiences at length a blessed resurrection, and is happy forever in the contemplation and enjoyment of his Saviour. The thought and style are unequal. Splendid declamation fills many a page, though it is usually mixed or followed up with close, bold, grappling appeal. The pointed antithesis may be set off against the diluting amplifications. What is original is far more than a compensating for what reminds one of Pope or Milton. The argument, always powerful, is sometimes rather ingenious than solid; and several descriptions border on hyperbole or extravagance. The lines are occasionally rugged, but the work has been always and deservedly popular, as well from its theme as for his treatment of it; and Young’s muse, with her skulls and stars, her cross and her crown, has no rival, and has had no successor.
There is a fine, fluent, sermonising vein about Young; but a flavour of cant hangs about his most ambitious efforts. To use a phrase of the day, he is a sad “Philistine;” and, through the admiration long felt or professed for him, his influence must have much tended to propagate false taste.
Perhaps the best compliment ever paid to the “Night Thoughts” is the fact that Edmund Burke committed many portions of it to memory.
Young was one of the cleverest men who ever wrote English verse, but the cleverness extinguishes the imagination. The “Night Thoughts,” owing in great measure to its subject, has enjoyed a vast popularity, in spite of its offences against all literary canons of taste…. The substance is everywhere commonplace; and Young shows his inferiority to Pope by inventing phrases for copybooks, where Pope coins proverbs for cultivated thinkers. The love of gloom, of the imagery of the grave, and the awful mysteries of life, which animated our older writers, is not absent, but it is turned to account by this clever man of the world with such ingenuity, that we become aware of the shallowness of his feeling. How hollow are the enjoyments of this world, and how deep the surrounding mystery! is the ostensible sentiment. What a clever fellow I am, and what a shame it is that I was not made a bishop! is the sentiment plainly indicated in every line. Can I not say as many smart things about death and eternity as anybody that ever wrote? Am I not a good orthodox reasoner, instead of a semi-deist like that sinner Pope? We see, as we read, the very type of the preacher of a period when the old mythology, no longer credible or really imposing to the imagination, is still regarded as capable of, at least, an ostensible demonstration, and may afford a sufficient excuse for any quality of intellectual ingenuity.
His poem is a wilderness of reflection, through which his fertile fancy scatters flowers of every hue and odor. Its strength is in the vast number of noble and sublime passages, maxims of the highest practical value, everlasting truths.
Notwithstanding the morbid spirit which pervades and overshadows much of his poetry, depriving it somewhat of its potency, it yet abounds with grand imagery and impressive eloquence. Had the poet but infused a little star-light into his “Night Thoughts” they would have possessed a tenfold charm.
It had great currency in England, and was admired, and translated, and read largely upon the Continent. For many a year, a copy of Young’s mournful, magniloquent poem, bound in morocco and gilt-edged, was reckoned one of the most acceptable and worthy gifts to a person in affliction. But of a surety it has not the same hold upon people in this century that it had in the last. There are eloquent passages in it—passages almost rising to sublimity. His love of superlatives and of wordy exaggerations served him in good stead when he came to talk of the shortness of time, and the length of eternity, and the depth of the grave, and the shadows of death. Amidst these topics he moved on the great sable pinions of his muse with a sweep of wing, and a steadiness of poise, that drew a great many sorrowing and pious souls after him.
An eloquent interpreter of the melancholy of his age…. The theme of the author of “Night Thoughts” is the old opposition between the social and the natural man. Every other element in the book—its expression of fellowship with nature, its appeal to the human conscience, its sincere conviction of man’s miserable condition, has since been expressed by many others whose voices are more persuasive than his. Yet it may be that, if we carry our minds back to 1742 and 1744—the years in which Young’s collection of poems appeared—and especially if we reflect on the condition of French lyrical poetry just at that time, we shall feel, even to-day, the partly vanished charm of such lines as these:
| O majestic Night! | |
| Nature’s great ancestor! Day’s elder-born! | |
| And fated to survive the transient sun! * * * * * |
He is not a seer, or a prophet, or an enthusiast; but a clever phrase-monger and a disappointed place-hunter, who, in his extreme verbal solicitude about the next world, contrived to keep a sharp eye upon present interests.
It is difficult to give even a guess whether this remarkable poem will ever recover much or anything of the great reputation which it long held, and which, for two generations at least, it has almost entirely lost. It has against it, the application of phrase and even of thought, merely of an age, to the greatest and most lasting subjects, and a tone only to be described as the theatrical-religious. Its almost unbroken gloom frets or tires according to the mood and temperament of the reader. On the other hand, the want of sincerity is always more apparent than real, and the moral strength and knowledge of human nature, which were the great merits of the eighteenth century, appear most unmistakably. Above all, the poem deserves the praise due to very fine and, in part at least, very original versification. If Young here deserts the couplet, it is, as we have seen, by no means because he cannot manage it; it is because he is at least partly dissatisfied with it, and sees that it will not serve his turn. And his blank verse is a fine and an individual kind. Its fault, due, no doubt, to his practice in drama, is that it is a little too declamatory, a little too suggestive of soliloquies in an inky cloak with footlights in front. But this of itself distinguishes it from the blank verse of Thomson, which came somewhat earlier. It is not a direct imitation either of Milton or of Shakespeare, and deserves to be ranked by itself.
Satires
Young’s Satires were in higher reputation when published than they stand in at present. He seems fonder of dazzling than pleasing; of raising our admiration for his wit, than our dislike of the follies he ridicules.
The chief fault in the satires of Young appear to have arisen from a too great partiality to antithesis and epigrammatic point: occasionally used, they give weight and terseness to sentiment; but, when profusely lavished, offend both the judgment and the ear. The poet likewise, instead of faithfully copying from human life, has too often had recourse to the sources of a fertile imagination; hence his pictures, though vividly and richly coloured, are defective in that truth of representation which can alone impart to them a due degree of moral influence.
Young is not a satirist of a high order. His satire has neither the terrible vigour, the lacerating energy of genuine indignation, nor the humour which owns loving fellowship with the poor human nature it laughs at; nor yet the personal bitterness which, as in Pope’s characters of Sporus and Atticus, ensures those living touches by virtue of which the individual and particular in Art becomes the universal and immortal. Young could never describe a real complex human being; but what he could do with eminent success, was to describe with neat and finished point obvious types of manners rather than of character,—to write cold and clever epigrams on personified vices and absurdities. There is no more emotion in his satire than if he were turning witty vices on a waxen image of Cupid, or a lady’s glove.
Dramas
Dr. Young’s “Revenge,” is a play which discovers genius and fire; but wants tenderness, and turns too much upon the shocking and direful passions.
Young, Thomson, and others who followed the same wordy and declamatory system of composition, contributed rather to sink than exalt the character of the stage. The two first were both men of excellent genius, as their other writings have sufficiently testified; but, as dramatists they wrought upon a false model, and their productions are of little value.
His tragedy of the “Revenge” is monkish and scholastic. Zanga is a vulgar caricature of Iago.
Young’s Tragedies of the “Revenge,” “Busiris,” and the “Brothers,” are evidently the productions of no ordinary mind. For high and eloquent declamation, they are equal to any thing which the French School has produced, either in its native soil, or in our imitative Country. Though the first is the only one of these three Tragedies which keeps possession of the Stage, yet “Busiris” appears to me to possess the most merit. The principal character is drawn with as much force and decision as Zanga, but has more of real human nature in its composition. Zanga is a fine Poetical study; the grandeur of the conception, and the power of the execution, are equal; but it has not much of truth or Nature in its composition. Compare it with the Iago of Shakspeare, of which it is evidently a copy, and it is like comparing a lay figure with a Statue. One is a fitting vehicle to convey to us the drapery of the Poet’s fancy, and the folds and forms in which he chooses to array it; but the other has the truth and power of Nature stamped upon every limb.
The literary genius of E. Young (1681–1765), on the other hand, possessed vigour and variety enough to distinguish his tragedies from the ordinary level of Augustan plays; in one of them he seems to challenge comparison in the treatment of his theme with a very different rival; but by his main characteristics as a dramatist he belongs to the school of his contemporaries.
On 18 April 1721 the “Revenge,” which ran for only six nights, was acted at the same theatre. The play, a variation upon the theme of “Othello,” afterwards had a long popularity on the stage. The character of Zanga, Young’s Iago, gave opportunity for effective rant; although Young’s mixture of bombast and epigrammatic antithesis is apt to strike the modern reader as it struck Fielding.
General
I know nothing else but a new edition of Dr. Young’s Works. If your lordship thinks like me, who hold that even in his most frantic rhapsodies there are innumerable fine things, you will like to have this edition.
I don’t know whether you have seen Dr. Young’s “Conjectures on Original Composition.” He is the finest writer of nonsense of any of this age…. But the wisest and kindest part of his work is advising writers to be original, and not imitators; that is, to be geniuses rather than blockheads.
| Where, to crown the hoary bard of night, | |
| The Muses and the Virtues all unite? |
Of Young’s poems it is difficult to give any general character; for he has no uniformity of manner: one of his pieces has no great resemblance to another. He began to write early, and continued long; and at different times had different modes of poetical excellence in view. His numbers are smooth sometimes, and sometimes rugged; his style is sometimes concatenated, and sometimes abrupt; sometimes diffusive, and sometimes concise. His plans seem to have started in his mind at the present moment, and his thoughts appeared the effect of chance, sometimes adverse, and sometimes lucky with very little operation of judgment…. His versification is his own; neither his blank nor his rhyming lines have any resemblance to those of former writers; he picks up no hemstitch, he copies no favourite expressions; he seems to have laid up no stores of thought or diction, but to owe all of the fortuitous suggestions of the present moment. Yet I have reason to believe, that, when once he had formed a new design, he then laboured it with very patient industry; and that he composed with great labour, and frequent revisions.
Young judges of human life as if he did not belong to it; his thoughts seem to have risen above himself, to search for an imperceptible spot in the immensity of the creation, where he might observe, himself unseen,
| ———What is the world?—a grave: | |
| Where is the dust which has not been alive? |
Though incapable either of tenderness or passion, he had a richness and activity of fancy that belonged rather to the days of James and Elizabeth, than to those of George and Anne:—But then, instead of indulging it, as the older writers would have done, in easy and playful inventions, in splendid descriptions, or glowing illustrations, he was led, by the restraints and established taste of his age, to work it up into strained and fantastical epigrams, or into cold and revolting hyperboles. Instead of letting it flow gracefully on, in an easy and sparkling current, he perpetually forces it out in jets, or makes it stagnate in formal canals;—and thinking it necessary to write like Pope, when the bent of his genius led him rather to copy what was best in Cowley and most fantastic in Shakespeare, he has produced something which excites wonder instead of admiration, and is felt by every one to be at once ingenious, incongruous, and unnatural.
The strained thoughts, the figurative metaphysics and solemn epigrams of Young.
Young is a gloomy epigrammatist. He has abused great powers both of thought and language. His moral reflections are sometimes excellent; but he spoils their beauty by overloading them with a religious horror, and at the same time giving them all the smart turns and quaint expressions of an enigma or repartee in verse.
Young is too often fantastical and frivolous; he pins butterflies to the pulpit-cushion; he suspends against the grating of the charnel-house coloured lamps and comic transparencies,—Cupid, and the cat and the fiddle; he opens a storehouse filled with minute particles of heterogeneous wisdom and unpalatable goblets of ill-concocted learning, contributions from the classics, from the schoolmen, from homilies, and from farces. What you expected to be an elegy turns out an epigram; and when you think he is bursting into tears he laughs in your face. Do you go with him into his closet, prepared for an admonition or a rebuke, he shakes his head, and you sneeze at the powder and perfumery of the rebuke. Wonder not if I prefer to his pungent essences the incense which Cowper burns before the altar.
Young has founded a bad school, and was not himself a good master…. Young, whom the phantom of the world pursues, even among the tombs, betrays, in his declamations on death, merely a disappointed ambition: he takes his peevishness for melancholy. There is nothing natural in his tenderness, nothing ideal in his grief: it is always a heavy hand moving slowly over the lyre.
A grander writer by spasms than by volitions.
In him the intellect had an undue predominance over the imagination and the sensibility; and hardly does he raise up before us some grand image of death, of power, or of immortality, than he turns aside to seek after remote and fantastic allusions, which instantly destroy the potent charm. Few writers are so unequal as Young, or rather, few writers of such powerful and acknowledged genius were ever so deficient in comparative or critical taste. To him every idea seemed good, provided only it was strong, original, and ingenious; and as his subject was precisely the one least suited to this species of intellectual sword-play, the conceits, unexpected analogies, and epigrammatic turns of which he was so fond, are as offensive and incongruous as would be the placing of the frippery fountains and clipped yews and trim parterres of Versailles among the glaciers and precipices of Alpine scenery…. It would be unjust were we to refuse our tribute of acknowledgment and admiration to the vast richness and fertility of imagination displayed by this powerful writer: it is the fertility of a tropical climate; or, rather, it is the abundant vegetation of a volcanic region; flowers and weeds, the hemlock and the vine, the gaudy and noxious poppy and the innocent and life-supporting wheat—all is brought forth with a boundless and indiscriminate profusion.
He had nothing of Donne’s subtle fancy, and as little of the gayety and playfulness that occasionally break out among the quibbles and contortions of Cowley. On the other hand, he has much more passion and pathos than Cowley, and, with less elegance, perhaps makes a nearer approach in some of his greatest passages to the true sublime. But his style is radically an affected and false one; and of what force it seems to possess, the greater part is the result not of any real principle of life within it, but of mere strutting and straining.
Doubtless there are brilliant flashes of imagination in his poems; seriousness and elevation are not wanting; we can even see that he aims at them; but we discover much more quickly that he makes the most of his grief, and strikes attitudes.
There is scarcely a stanza of the so-called “Odes” which does not read like an admirable and intentional burlesque. The author seems by his rhymes to have had no ear at all, and his gross and fulsome flattery is unspeakably nauseous.
His influence was not so pure as that of Thomson. The author of “Night Thoughts” was an artist of a force approaching that of genius, but his error was to build that upon rhetoric which he should have based on imagination. The history of Young is one of the most curious in the chronicles of literature. Born far back in the seventeenth century, before Pope or Gay, he wrote in the manner of the Anne wits, without special distinction, through all the years of his youth and middle life. At the age of sixty he collected his poetical works, and appeared to be a finished mediocrity. It was not until then, and after that time, that, taking advantage of a strange wind of funereal enthusiasm that swept over him, he composed the masterpiece by which the next generation knew him, his amazingly popular and often highly successful “Night Thoughts.”
