The name of Arthur Young is a familiar one to all readers of that
history which begins with the forebodings of the French Revolution.
Thousands of us learnt to be interested in him as the 'good Arthur,'
'the excellent Arthur,' of Thomas Carlyle, a writer who had the art of
making not only his own narrative, but the sources of it, attractive.
Even 'Carrion-Heath,' in the famous introductory chapter to the
_Cromwell_, is invested with a kind of charm, whilst in the stormy
firmament of the _French Revolution_ the star of Arthur Young twinkles
with a mild effulgency. The autobiography of such a man could hardly
fail to be interesting.[A] The 'good Arthur' was born in 1741, the
younger son of a small 'squarson' who inherited from his father the
manor of Bradfield Combust, in Suffolk, but held the living of Thames
Ditton. Here he made the acquaintance of the Onslow family, and
Speaker Onslow was one of Arthur's godfathers. The Rev. Dr. Young died
in 1759, much in debt. The Bradfield property had been settled for
life on his wife, who had brought her husband some fortune, and to
the manor-house she retired to economize.
[Footnote A: _The Autobiography of Arthur Young_. Edited by M. Betham
Edwards. Smith, Elder and Co.]
Arthur's education had been muddled; and an attempt to make a merchant
of him having fallen through, he found himself, on his father's death,
aged eighteen, 'without education, profession, or employment,' and his
whole fortune, during his mother's life, consisting of a copyhold farm
of 20 acres, producing as many pounds. In these circumstances, to
think of literature was well-nigh inevitable, and, in 1762, the
autobiography tells us:
'I set on foot a periodical publication, entitled the _Universal
Museum_, which came out monthly, printed with glorious imprudence
on my own account. I waited on Dr. Johnson, who was sitting by the
fire so half-dressed and slovenly a figure as to make me stare at
him. I stated my plan, and begged that he would favour me with a
paper once a month, offering at the same time any remuneration that
he might name.'
Here we see dimly prefigured a modern editor prematurely soliciting
the support of Great Names. But the Cham of literature, himself the
son of a bookseller, would have none of it.
'"No, sir," he replied; "such a work would be sure to fail if the
booksellers have not the property, and you will lose a great deal
of money by it."
'"Certainly, sir," I said, "if I am not fortunate enough to induce
authors of real talent to contribute."
'"No, sir, you are mistaken; such authors will not support such a
work, nor will you persuade them to write in it. You will purchase
disappointment by the loss of your money, and I advise you by all
means to give up the plan."
'Somebody was introduced, and I took my leave.'
The _Universal Museum_, none the less, appeared, but after five
numbers Young 'procured a meeting of ten or a dozen booksellers, and
had the luck and address to persuade them to take the whole scheme
upon themselves.' He then calmly adds, 'I believe no success ever
attended it.' It was, indeed, 100 years before its time. Literature
abandoned, Young took one of his mother's farms. 'I had no more idea
of farming than of physic or divinity,' nor did he, man of European
reputation as a farmer though he soon became, ever make farming pay.
He had an itching pen, and after four years' farming (1763-1766) he
published the result of his experience. Never, surely, before has an
author spoken of his first-born as in the autobiography Young speaks
of this publication:
'And the circumstance which perhaps of all others in my life I
most deeply regretted and considered as a sin of the blackest dye
was the publishing of my experience during these four years,
which, speaking as a farmer, was nothing but ignorance, folly,
presumption, and rascality.'
None the less, it was writing this rascally book that seems to have
given him the idea of those agricultural tours which were to make his
name famous throughout the world. His Southern tour was in 1767, his
Northern in 1768, and his Eastern in 1770. The subject he specially
illuminated in these epoch-making books was the rotation of crops,
though he occasionally diverged upon deep-ploughing and kindred
themes. The tours excited, for the first time, the agricultural spirit
of Great Britain, and their author almost at once became a celebrated
man.
In 1765 Young married the wrong woman, and started upon a career of
profound matrimonial discomfort, and even misery; a blunt, truthful
writer, he makes no bones about it. It was an unhappy marriage from
its beginning in 1765 to its end in 1815. Young himself, though by no
means vivacious in this autobiography, where he frankly complains of
himself as having no more wit than a fig, was a very popular person
with all classes and both sexes. He was an enormous diner-out, and his
authority as an agriculturist, united to his undeniable charm as a
companion, threw open to him all the great places in the country. But
his finances were a perpetual trouble. On carrot seeds and cabbages he
was an authority, but from 1766-1775 his income never exceeded £300 a
year. He had an excellent mother, whom he dearly loved, and who with
the characteristic bluntness of the family bade him think less about
carrots and more about his Creator. 'You may call all this rubbish if
you please, but a time will come when you will be convinced whose
notions are rubbish, yours or mine.' And the old lady was quite right,
as mothers so frequently turn out to be. In 1778 Young went over to
Ireland as agent to Lord Kingsborough. He got £500 down, and was to
have an annual salary of £500 and a house. Young soon got to work, and
became anxious to persuade his employer to let his lands direct to the
occupying cottar, and so get rid of the middlemen. This did not suit a
certain Major Thornhill, a relative and leaseholder, and thereupon a
pretty plot was hatched. Lady K. had a Catholic governess, a Miss
Crosby, upon whom it was thought my lord occasionally cast the eye of
partiality, whilst Arthur himself got on very well with her ladyship,
who was heard to pronounce him to be, as he was, 'one of the most
lively, agreeable fellows.' Out of these materials the Major and his
helpmeet concocted a double plot--namely, to make the lord jealous of
the steward, and the lady jealous of the governess, and to cause both
lord and lady respectively to believe that the steward was deeply
engaged both in abetting the amour of the lord and the governess, and
in prosecuting his own amour with the lady. The result was that both
governess and steward got notice to quit; but--and this is very
Irish--both went off with life annuities, the governess with one of
£50 per annum, and the steward with one of £72, and, what is still
more odd, we find Young at the end of his life in receipt of his
annuity. They were an expensive couple, these two.
In 1780 Young published his _Irish Tour_, which was immediately
successful and popular in both kingdoms. In it he attacked the bounty
paid on the land-carriage of corn to Dublin. The bounty was, in the
session of Parliament next after the publication of Young's book,
reduced by one-half, and soon given up entirely. Young maintains that
this saved Ireland £80,000 a year. Nobody seems to have said 'Thank
you.'
In May, 1783, was born the child 'Bobbin,' whose death, fourteen years
later, was to change the current of Young's life. The following year
Arthur Young paid his first visit to France, confining himself,
however, to Calais and its neighbourhood, and in the same year his
mother died, and, by an arrangement with his eldest brother, 'this
patch of landed property,' as Young calls Bradfield, descended upon
him. His first famous journey in France was made between May and
November, 1787, and cost the marvellously small sum of £118 15s. 2d.
His second and third French journeys were made in July, 1788, and in
June, 1789. The third was the longest, and extended into 1790. Three
years later Young was appointed, by Pitt, Secretary of the then Board
of Agriculture. A melancholy account is given by Young of a visit he
paid Burke at Gregory's in 1796. Young drove there in the chariot of
his fussy chief, Sir John Sinclair, to discover what Burke's
intentions might be as to an intended publication of his relating to
the price of labour. The account, which occupies four pages, is too
long for quotation. It concludes thus:
'I am glad once more to have seen and conversed with the man who I
hold to possess the greatest and most brilliant gifts of any penman
of the age in which he lived. Whose conversation has often
fascinated me, whose eloquence has charmed; whose writings have
delighted and instructed the world; whose name will without
question descend to the latest posterity. But to behold so great a
genius, so deepened with melancholy, stooping with infirmity of
body, feeling the anguish of a lacerated mind, and sinking to the
grave under accumulated misery--to see all this in a character I
venerate, and apparently without resource or comfort, wounded
every feeling of my soul, and I left him the next day almost as
low-spirited as himself.'
But Young himself was soon to pass into the same Valley of the Shadow,
not so much of Death as of Joyless Life. His beloved and idolized
Bobbin died on July 14, 1797. She seems to have been a wise little
maiden, to whom her father wrote most affectionate letters, full of
rather unsuitable details, political and financial and otherwise, and
not scrupling to speak of the child's mother in a disagreeable manner.
Bobbin replies with delightful composure to these worrying letters:
'I have just got six of the most beautiful little rabbits you ever
saw; they skip about so prettily you can't think, and I shall have
some more in a few weeks. Having had so much physic, I am right
down tired of it. I take it still twice a day--my appetite is
better. What can you mind politics so for? I don't think about
them.--Well, good-bye, and believe me, dear papa, your dutiful
Daughter.'
After poor little Bobbin's death, it happened to Arthur Young even as
his mother foretold. Carrots and crops and farming tours hastily
retreat, and we find the eminent agriculturist busying himself, with
the same seriousness and good faith he had devoted to the rotation of
the crops, with the sermons and treatises of Clarke and Jortin and
Secker and Tillotson, etc., and all to discover what had become of his
dear little Bobbin. His outlook upon the world was changed--the great
parties at Petworth, at Euston, at Woburn struck him differently; the
huge irreligion of the world filled him as for the first time with
amazement and horror:
'How few years are passed since I should have pushed on eagerly to
Woburn! This time twelve months I dined with the Duke on
Sunday--the party not very numerous, but chiefly of rank--the
entertainment more splendid than usual there. He expects me to-day,
but I have more pleasure in resting, going twice to church, and
eating a morsel of cold lamb at a very humble inn, than partaking
of gaiety and dissipation at a great table which might as well be
spread for a company of heathens as English lords and men of
fashion.'
It is all mighty fine calling this religious hypochondria and
depression of spirits. It is one of the facts of life. Young stuck to
his post, and did his work, and quarrelled with his wife to the end,
or nearly so. He cannot have been so lively and agreeable a companion
as of old, for we find him in November, 1806, at Euston, endeavouring
to impress on the Duke of Grafton that by his tenets he had placed
himself entirely under the covenant of works, and that he must be
tried for them, and that 'I would not be in such a situation for ten
thousand worlds. He was mild and more patient than I expected.'
Perhaps, after all, Carlyle was not so far wrong when he praised our
aristocracy for their 'politeness.' In 1808 Young became blind. In
1815 his wife died. In 1820 he died himself, leaving behind him seven
packets of manuscript and twelve folio volumes of correspondence.
Young's great work, _Travels during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789,
undertaken more particularly with a View of Ascertaining the
Cultivation, Wealth, Resources, and National Prosperity of the Kingdom
of France_, published in 1792, is one of those books which will always
be a great favourite with somebody. It will outlive eloquence and
outstay philosophy. It contains some famous passages.