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. He
will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astronomical
religion and his charnel-house morality, in lasting verse, which will
stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and
repulsive: for this divine is Edward Young, the future author of the
“Night Thoughts.”
It would be extremely ill-bred in us to suppose that our readers are not
acquainted with the facts of Young’s life; they are among the things that
“every one knows;” but we have observed that, with regard to these
universally known matters, the majority of readers like to be treated
after the plan suggested by Monsieur Jourdain. When that distinguished
_bourgeois_ was asked if he knew Latin, he implied, “Oui, mais faîtes
comme si je ne le savais pas.” Assuming, then, as a polite writer
should, that our readers know everything about Young, it will be a direct
_sequitur_ from that assumption that we should proceed as if they knew
nothing, and recall the incidents of his biography with as much
particularity as we may without trenching on the space we shall need for
our main purpose—the reconsideration of his character as a moral and
religious poet.
Judging from Young’s works, one might imagine that the preacher had been
organized in him by hereditary transmission through a long line of
clerical forefathers—that the diamonds of the “Night Thoughts” had been
slowly condensed from the charcoal of ancestral sermons. Yet it was not
so. His grandfather, apparently, wrote himself _gentleman_, not _clerk_;
and there is no evidence that preaching had run in the family blood
before it took that turn in the person of the poet’s father, who was
quadruply clerical, being at once rector, prebendary, court chaplain, and
dean. Young was born at his father’s rectory of Upham in 1681. We may
confidently assume that even the author of the “Night Thoughts” came into
the world without a wig; but, apart from Dr. Doran’s authority, we should
not have ventured to state that the excellent rector “kissed, _with
dignified emotion_, his only son and intended namesake.” Dr. Doran
doubtless knows this, from his intimate acquaintance with clerical
physiology and psychology. He has ascertained that the paternal emotions
of prebendaries have a sacerdotal quality, and that the very chyme and
chyle of a rector are conscious of the gown and band.
In due time the boy went to Winchester College, and subsequently, though
not till he was twenty-two, to Oxford, where, for his father’s sake, he
was befriended by the wardens of two colleges, and in 1708, three years
after his father’s death, nominated by Archbishop Tenison to a law
fellowship at All Souls. Of Young’s life at Oxford in these years,
hardly anything is known. His biographer, Croft, has nothing to tell us
but the vague report that, when “Young found himself independent and his
own master at All Souls, he was not the ornament to religion and morality
that he afterward became,” and the perhaps apocryphal anecdote, that
Tindal, the atheist, confessed himself embarrassed by the originality of
Young’s arguments. Both the report and the anecdote, however, are borne
out by indirect evidence. As to the latter, Young has left us sufficient
proof that he was fond of arguing on the theological side, and that he
had his own way of treating old subjects. As to the former, we learn
that Pope, after saying other things which we know to be true of Young,
added, that he passed “a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets;”
and, from all the indications we possess of his career till he was nearly
fifty, we are inclined to think that Pope’s statement only errs by
defect, and that he should rather have said, “a foolish youth and
_middle_ age.” It is not likely that Young was a very hard student, for
he impressed Johnson, who saw him in his old age, as “not a great
scholar,” and as surprisingly ignorant of what Johnson thought “quite
common maxims” in literature; and there is no evidence that he filled
either his leisure or his purse by taking pupils. His career as an
author did not commence till he was nearly thirty, even dating from the
publication of a portion of the “Last Day,” in the _Tatler_; so that he
could hardly have been absorbed in composition. But where the fully
developed insect is parasitic, we believe the larva is usually parasitic
also, and we shall probably not be far wrong in supposing that Young at
Oxford, as elsewhere, spent a good deal of his time in hanging about
possible and actual patrons, and accommodating himself to the habits with
considerable flexibility of conscience and of tongue; being none the less
ready, upon occasion, to present himself as the champion of theology and
to rhapsodize at convenient moments in the company of the skies or of
skulls. That brilliant profligate, the Duke of Wharton, to whom Young
afterward clung as his chief patron, was at this time a mere boy; and,
though it is probable that their intimacy had commenced, since the Duke’s
father and mother were friends of the old dean, that intimacy ought not
to aggravate any unfavorable inference as to Young’s Oxford life. It is
less likely that he fell into any exceptional vice than that he differed
from the men around him chiefly in his episodes of theological advocacy
and rhapsodic solemnity. He probably sowed his wild oats after the
coarse fashion of his times, for he has left us sufficient evidence that
his moral sense was not delicate; but his companions, who were occupied
in sowing their own oats, perhaps took it as a matter of course that he
should be a rake, and were only struck with the exceptional circumstance
that he was a pious and moralizing rake.
There is some irony in the fact that the two first poetical productions
of Young, published in the same year, were his “Epistles to Lord
Lansdowne,” celebrating the recent creation of peers—Lord Lansdowne’s
creation in particular; and the “Last Day.” Other poets besides Young
found the device for obtaining a Tory majority by turning twelve
insignificant commoners into insignificant lords, an irresistible
stimulus to verse; but no other poet showed so versatile an enthusiasm—so
nearly equal an ardor for the honor of the new baron and the honor of the
Deity. But the twofold nature of the sycophant and the psalmist is not
more strikingly shown in the contrasted themes of the two poems than in
the transitions from bombast about monarchs to bombast about the
resurrection, in the “Last Day” itself. The dedication of the poem to
Queen Anne, Young afterward suppressed, for he was always ashamed of
having flattered a dead patron. In this dedication, Croft tells us, “he
gives her Majesty praise indeed for her victories, but says that the
author is more pleased to see her rise from this lower world, soaring
above the clouds, passing the first and second heavens, and leaving the
fixed stars behind her; nor will he lose her there, he says, but keep her
still in view through the boundless spaces on the other side of creation,
in her journey toward eternal bliss, till he behold the heaven of heavens
open, and angels receiving and conveying her still onward from the
stretch of his imagination, which tires in her pursuit, and falls back
again to earth.”
The self-criticism which prompted the suppression of the dedication did
not, however, lead him to improve either the rhyme or the reason of the
unfortunate couplet—
“When other Bourbons reign in other lands,
And, if men’s sins forbid not, other Annes.”
In the “Epistle to Lord Lansdowne” Young indicates his taste for the
drama; and there is evidence that his tragedy of “Busiris” was “in the
theatre” as early as this very year, 1713, though it was not brought on
the stage till nearly six years later; so that Young was now very
decidedly bent on authorship, for which his degree of B.C.L., taken in
this year, was doubtless a magical equipment. Another poem, “The Force
of Religion; or, Vanquished Love,” founded on the execution of Lady Jane
Grey and her husband, quickly followed, showing fertility in feeble and
tasteless verse; and on the Queen’s death, in 1714, Young lost no time in
making a poetical lament for a departed patron a vehicle for extravagant
laudation of the new monarch. No further literary production of his
appeared until 1716, when a Latin oration, which he delivered on the
foundation of the Codrington Library at All Souls, gave him a new
opportunity for displaying his alacrity in inflated panegyric.
In 1717 it is probable that Young accompanied the Duke of Wharton to
Ireland, though so slender are the materials for his biography that the
chief basis for this supposition is a passage in his “Conjectures on
Original Composition,” written when he was nearly eighty, in which he
intimates that he had once been in that country. But there are many
facts surviving to indicate that for the next eight or nine years Young
was a sort of _attaché_ of Wharton’s. In 1719, according to legal
records, the Duke granted him an annuity, in consideration of his having
relinquished the office of tutor to Lord Burleigh, with a life annuity of
£100 a year, on his Grace’s assurances that he would provide for him in a
much more ample manner. And again, from the same evidence, it appears
that in 1721 Young received from Wharton a bond for £600, in compensation
of expenses incurred in standing for Parliament at the Duke’s desire, and
as an earnest of greater services which his Grace had promised him on his
refraining from the spiritual and temporal advantages of taking orders,
with a certainty of two livings in the gift of his college. It is clear,
therefore, that lay advancement, as long as there was any chance of it,
had more attractions for Young than clerical preferment; and that at this
time he accepted the Duke of Wharton as the pilot of his career.
A more creditable relation of Young’s was his friendship with Tickell,
with whom he was in the habit of interchanging criticisms, and to whom in
1719—the same year, let us note, in which he took his doctor’s degree—he
addressed his “Lines on the Death of Addison.” Close upon these followed
his “Paraphrase of part of the Book of Job,” with a dedication to Parker,
recently made Lord Chancellor, showing that the possession of Wharton’s
patronage did not prevent Young from fishing in other waters. He knew
nothing of Parker, but that did not prevent him from magnifying the new
Chancellor’s merits; on the other hand, he _did_ know Wharton, but this
again did not prevent him from prefixing to his tragedy, “The Revenge,”
which appeared in 1721, a dedication attributing to the Duke all virtues,
as well as all accomplishments. In the concluding sentence of this
dedication, Young naïvely indicates that a considerable ingredient in his
gratitude was a lively sense of anticipated favors. “My present fortune
is his bounty, and my future his care; which I will venture to say will
always be remembered to his honor; since he, I know, intended his
generosity as an encouragement to merit, through his very pardonable
partiality to one who bears him so sincere a duty and respect, I happen
to receive the benefit of it.” Young was economical with his ideas and
images; he was rarely satisfied with using a clever thing once, and this
bit of ingenious humility was afterward made to do duty in the
“Instalment,” a poem addressed to Walpole:
“Be this thy partial smile, from censure free,
’Twas meant for merit, though it fell on me.”
It was probably “The Revenge” that Young was writing when, as we learn
from Spence’s anecdotes, the Duke of Wharton gave him a skull with a
candle fixed in it, as the most appropriate lamp by which to write
tragedy. According to Young’s dedication, the Duke was “accessory” to
the scenes of this tragedy in a more important way, “not only by
suggesting the most beautiful incident in them, but by making all
possible provision for the success of the whole.” A statement which is
credible, not indeed on the ground of Young’s dedicatory assertion, but
from the known ability of the Duke, who, as Pope tells us, possessed
“each gift of Nature and of Art,
And wanted nothing but an honest heart.”
The year 1722 seems to have been the period of a visit to Mr. Dodington,
of Eastbury, in Dorsetshire—the “pure Dorsetian downs” celebrated by
Thomson—in which Young made the acquaintance of Voltaire; for in the
subsequent dedication of his “Sea Piece” to “Mr. Voltaire,” he recalls
their meeting on “Dorset Downs;” and it was in this year that Christopher
Pitt, a gentleman-poet of those days, addressed an “Epistle to Dr. Edward
Young, at Eastbury, in Dorsetshire,” which has at least the merit of this
biographical couplet:
“While with your Dodington retired you sit,
Charm’d with his flowing Burgundy and wit.”
Dodington, apparently, was charmed in his turn, for he told Dr. Wharton
that Young was “far superior to the French poet in the variety and
novelty of his _bon-mots_ and repartees.” Unfortunately, the only
specimen of Young’s wit on this occasion that has been preserved to us is
the epigram represented as an extempore retort (spoken aside, surely) to
Voltaire’s criticism of Milton’s episode of sin and death:
“Thou art so witty, profligate, and thin,
At once, we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin;”—
an epigram which, in the absence of “flowing Burgundy,” does not strike
us as remarkably brilliant. Let us give Young the benefit of the doubt
thrown on the genuineness of this epigram by his own poetical dedication,
in which he represents himself as having “soothed” Voltaire’s “rage”
against Milton “with gentle rhymes;” though in other respects that
dedication is anything but favorable to a high estimate of Young’s wit.
Other evidence apart, we should not be eager for the after-dinner
conversation of the man who wrote:
“Thine is the Drama, how renown’d!
Thine Epic’s loftier trump to sound;—
_But let Arion’s sea-strung harp be mine_;
_But where’s his dolphin_? _Know’st thou where_?
_May that be found in thee_, _Voltaire_!”
The “Satires” appeared in 1725 and 1726, each, of course, with its
laudatory dedication and its compliments insinuated among the rhymes.
The seventh and last is dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole, is very short,
and contains nothing in particular except lunatic flattery of George the
First and his prime minister, attributing that royal hog’s late escape
from a storm at sea to the miraculous influence of his grand and virtuous
soul—for George, he says, rivals the angels:
“George, who in foes can soft affections raise,
And charm envenom’d satire into praise.
Nor human rage alone his pow’r perceives,
But the mad winds and the tumultuous waves,
Ev’n storms (Death’s fiercest ministers!) forbear,
And in their own wild empire learn to spare.
Thus, Nature’s self, supporting Man’s decree,
Styles Britain’s sovereign, sovereign of the sea.”