_These_, madam, are the proper points of consideration in the person
that humbly hopes his Majesty’s favor.
“As to _Abilities_, all I can presume to say is, I have done the best
I could to improve them.
“As to _Good manners_, I desire no favor, if any just objection lies
against them.
“As for _Service_, I have been near seven years in his Majesty’s and
never omitted any duty in it, which few can say.
“As for _Age_, I am turned of fifty.
“As for _Want_, I have no manner of preferment.
“As for _Sufferings_, I have lost £300 per ann. by being in his
Majesty’s service; as I have shown in a _Representation_ which his
Majesty has been so good as to read and consider.
“As for _Zeal_, I have written nothing without showing my duty to
their Majesties, and some pieces are dedicated to them.
“This, madam, is the short and true state of my case. They that make
their court to the ministers, and not their Majesties, succeed
better. If my case deserves some consideration, and you can serve me
in it, I humbly hope and believe you will: I shall, therefore,
trouble you no farther; but beg leave to subscribe myself, with
truest respect and gratitude,
“Yours, etc.,
EDWARD YOUNG.
“P.S. I have some hope that my Lord Townshend is my friend; if
therefore soon, and before he leaves the court, you had an
opportunity of mentioning me, with that favor you have been so good
to show, I think it would not fail of success; and, if not, I shall
owe you more than any.”—“Suffolk Letters,” vol. i. p. 285.
Young’s wife died in 1741, leaving him one son, born in 1733. That he
had attached himself strongly to her two daughters by her former
marriage, there is better evidence in the report, mentioned by Mrs.
Montagu, of his practical kindness and liberality to the younger, than in
his lamentations over the elder as the “Narcissa” of the “Night
Thoughts.” “Narcissa” had died in 1735, shortly after marriage to Mr.
Temple, the son of Lord Palmerston; and Mr. Temple himself, after a
second marriage, died in 1740, a year before Lady Elizabeth Young.
These, then, are the three deaths supposed to have inspired “The
Complaint,” which forms the three first books of the “Night Thoughts:”
“Insatiate archer, could not one suffice?
Thy shaft flew thrice: and thrice my peace was slain:
And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had fill’d her horn.”
Since we find Young departing from the truth of dates, in order to
heighten the effect of his calamity, or at least of his climax, we need
not be surprised that he allowed his imagination great freedom in other
matters besides chronology, and that the character of “Philander” can, by
no process, be made to fit Mr. Temple. The supposition that the
much-lectured “Lorenzo” of the “Night Thoughts” was Young’s own son is
hardly rendered more absurd by the fact that the poem was written when
that son was a boy, than by the obvious artificiality of the characters
Young introduces as targets for his arguments and rebukes. Among all the
trivial efforts of conjectured criticism, there can hardly be one more
futile than the attempts to discover the original of those pitiable
lay-figures, the “Lorenzos” and “Altamonts” of Young’s didactic prose and
poetry. His muse never stood face to face with a genuine living human
being; she would have been as much startled by such an encounter as a
necromancer whose incantations and blue fire had actually conjured up a
demon.
The “Night Thoughts” appeared between 1741 and 1745. Although he
declares in them that he has chosen God for his “patron” henceforth, this
is not at all to the prejudice of some half dozen lords, duchesses, and
right honorables who have the privilege of sharing finely-turned
compliments with their co-patron. The line which closed the Second Night
in the earlier editions—
“Wits spare not Heaven, O Wilmington!—nor thee”—
is an intense specimen of that perilous juxtaposition of ideas by which
Young, in his incessant search after point and novelty, unconsciously
converts his compliments into sarcasms; and his apostrophe to the moon as
more likely to be favorable to his song if he calls her “fair Portland of
the skies,” is worthy even of his Pindaric ravings. His ostentatious
renunciation of worldly schemes, and especially of his twenty-years’
siege of Court favor, are in the tone of one who retains some hope in the
midst of his querulousness.
He descended from the astronomical rhapsodies of his “Ninth Night,”
published in 1745, to more terrestrial strains in his “Reflections on the
Public Situation of the Kingdom,” dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle; but
in this critical year we get a glimpse of him through a more prosaic and
less refracting medium. He spent a part of the year at Tunbridge Wells;
and Mrs. Montagu, who was there too, gives a very lively picture of the
“divine Doctor” in her letters to the Duchess of Portland, on whom Young
had bestowed the superlative bombast to which we have recently alluded.
We shall borrow the quotations from Dr. Doran, in spite of their length,
because, to our mind, they present the most agreeable portrait we possess
of Young:
“I have 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 had 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.—Mrs. Montagu was not aware
that Cibber, whom Young had named not disparagingly in his Satires,
was the brother of his old school-fellow; but to return to our hero.
‘The waters,’ says Mrs. Montagu, ‘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.’ Among the visitors at the Wells were Lady Sunderland
(wife of Sir Robert Sutton), and her sister, Mrs. Tichborne. ‘He did
an admirable thing to Lady Sunderland: on her mentioning Sir Robert
Sutton, he asked her where Sir Robert’s lady was; on which we all
laughed very heartily, and I brought him off, half ashamed, to my
lodgings, where, during breakfast, he assured me he had asked after
Lady Sunderland, because he had a great honor for her; and that,
having a respect for her sister, he designed to have inquired after
her, if we had not put it out of his head by laughing at him. You
must know, Mrs. Tichborne sat next to Lady Sunderland. It would have
been admirable to have had him finish his compliment in that manner.’
. . . ‘His expressions all bear the stamp of novelty, and his
thoughts of sterling sense. He practises a kind of philosophical
abstinence. . . . He carried Mrs. Rolt and myself to Tunbridge, five
miles from hence, where we were to see some fine old ruins. First
rode the doctor on a tall steed, decently caparisoned in dark gray;
next, ambled Mrs. Rolt on a hackney horse; . . . then followed your
humble servant on a milk-white palfrey. I rode on in safety, and at
leisure to observe the company, especially the two figures that
brought up the rear. The first was my servant, valiantly armed with
two uncharged pistols; the last was the doctor’s man, whose uncombed
hair so resembled the mane of the horse he rode, one could not help
imagining they were of kin, and wishing, for the honor of the family,
that they had had one comb betwixt them. On his head was a velvet
cap, much resembling a black saucepan, and on his side hung a little
basket. At last we arrived at the King’s Head, where the loyalty of
the doctor induced him to alight; and then, knight-errant-like, he
took his damsels from off their palfreys, and courteously handed us
into the inn.’ . . . The party returned to the Wells; and ‘the silver
Cynthia held up her lamp in the heavens’ the while. ‘The night
silenced all but our divine doctor, who sometimes uttered things fit
to be spoken in a season when all nature seems to be hushed and
hearkening. I followed, gathering wisdom as I went, till I found, by
my horse’s stumbling, that I was in a bad road, and that the blind
was leading the blind. So I placed my servant between the doctor and
myself; which he not perceiving, went on in a most philosophical
strain, to the great admiration of my poor clown of a servant, who,
not being wrought up to any pitch of enthusiasm, nor making any
answer to all the fine things he heard, the doctor, wondering I was
dumb, and grieving I was so stupid, looked round and declared his
surprise.’”
Young’s oddity and absence of mind are gathered from other sources
besides these stories of Mrs. Montagu’s, and gave rise to the report that
he was the original of Fielding’s “Parson Adams;” but this Croft denies,
and mentions another Young, who really sat for the portrait, and who, we
imagine, had both more Greek and more genuine simplicity than the poet.
His love of chatting with Colley Cibber was an indication that the old
predilection for the stage survived, in spite of his emphatic contempt
for “all joys but joys that never can expire;” and the production of “The
Brothers,” at Drury Lane in 1753, after a suppression of fifteen years,
was perhaps not entirely due to the expressed desire to give the proceeds
to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The author’s profits
were not more than £400—in those days a disappointing sum; and Young, as
we learn from his friend Richardson, did not make this the limit of his
donation, but gave a thousand guineas to the Society. “I had some talk
with him,” says Richardson, in one of his letters, “about this great
action. ‘I always,’ said he, ‘intended to do something handsome for the
Society. Had I deferred it to my demise, I should have given away my
son’s money. All the world are inclined to pleasure; could I have given
myself a greater by disposing of the sum to a different use, I should
have done it.’” Surely he took his old friend Richardson for “Lorenzo!”
His next work was “The Centaur not Fabulous; in Six Letters to a Friend,
on the Life in Vogue,” which reads very much like the most objurgatory
parts of the “Night Thoughts” reduced to prose. It is preceded by a
preface which, though addressed to a lady, is in its denunciations of
vice as grossly indecent and almost as flippant as the epilogues written
by “friends,” which he allowed to be reprinted after his tragedies in the
latest edition of his works. We like much better than “The Centaur,”
“Conjectures on Original Composition,” written in 1759, for the sake, he
says, of communicating to the world the well-known anecdote about
Addison’s deathbed, and with the exception of his poem on Resignation,
the last thing he ever published.
The estrangement from his son, which must have embittered the later years
of his life, appears to have begun not many years after the mother’s
death. On the marriage of her second daughter, who had previously
presided over Young’s household, a Mrs. Hallows, understood to be a woman
of discreet age, and the daughter (a widow) of a clergyman who was an old
friend of Young’s, became housekeeper at Welwyn. Opinions about ladies
are apt to differ. “Mrs. Hallows was a woman of piety, improved by
reading,” says one witness. “She was a very coarse woman,” says Dr.
Johnson; and we shall presently find some indirect evidence that her
temper was perhaps not quite so much improved as her piety. Servants, it
seems, were not fond of remaining long in the house with her; a satirical
curate, named Kidgell, hints at “drops of juniper” taken as a cordial
(but perhaps he was spiteful, and a teetotaller); and Young’s son is said
to have told his father that “an old man should not resign himself to the
management of anybody.” The result was, that the son was banished from
home for the rest of his father’s life-time, though Young seems never to
have thought of disinheriting him.
Our latest glimpses of the aged poet are derived from certain letters of
Mr. Jones, his curate—letters preserved in the British Museum, and
happily made accessible to common mortals in Nichols’s “Anecdotes.” Mr.
Jones was a man of some literary activity and ambition—a collector of
interesting documents, and one of those concerned in the “Free and Candid
Disquisitions,” the design of which was “to point out such things in our
ecclesiastical establishment as want to be reviewed and amended.” On
these and kindred subjects he corresponded with Dr. Birch, occasionally
troubling him with queries and manuscripts. We have a respect for Mr.
Jones. Unlike any person who ever troubled _us_ with queries or
manuscripts, he mitigates the infliction by such gifts as “a fat pullet,”
wishing he “had anything better to send; but this depauperizing vicarage
(of Alconbury) too often checks the freedom and forwardness of my mind.”
Another day comes a “pound canister of tea,” another, a “young fatted
goose.” Clearly, Mr. Jones was entirely unlike your literary
correspondents of the present day; he forwarded manuscripts, but he had
“bowels,” and forwarded poultry too. His first letter from Welwyn is
dated June, 1759, not quite six years before Young’s death. In June,
1762, he expresses a wish to go to London “this summer. But,” he
continues:
“My time and pains are almost continually taken up here, and . . . I
have been (I now find) a considerable loser, upon the whole, by
continuing here so long. The consideration of this, and the
inconveniences I sustained, and do still experience, from my late
illness, obliged me at last to acquaint the Doctor (Young) with my
case, and to assure him that I plainly perceived the duty and
confinement here to be too much for me; for which reason I must (I
said) beg to be at liberty to resign my charge at Michaelmas. I
began to give him these notices in February, when I was very ill; and
now I perceive, by what he told me the other day, that he is in some
difficulty: for which reason he is at last (he says) resolved to
advertise, _and even_ (_which is much wondered at_) _to raise the
salary considerably __higher_. (What he allowed my predecessors was
20_l._ per annum; and now he proposes 50_l._, as he tells me.) I
never asked him to raise it for me, though I well knew it was not
equal to the duty; nor did I say a word about myself when he lately
suggested to me his intentions upon this subject.”
In a postscript to this letter he says:
“I may mention to you farther, as a friend that may be trusted, that
in all likelihood the poor old gentleman will not find it a very easy
matter, unless by dint of money, _and force upon himself_, to procure
a man that he can like for his next curate, _nor one that will stay
with him so long as I have done_. Then, his great age will recur to
people’s thoughts; and if he has any foibles, either in temper or
conduct, they will be sure not to be forgotten on this occasion by
those who know him; and those who do not will probably be on their
guard. On these and the like considerations, it is by no means an
eligible office to be seeking out for a curate for him, as he has
several times wished me to do; and would, if he knew that I am now
writing to you, wish your assistance also. But my best friends here,
_who well foresee the probable consequences_, and wish me well,
earnestly dissuade me from complying: and I will decline the office
with as much decency as I can: but high salary will, I suppose, fetch
in somebody or other, soon.”
In the following July he writes:
“The old gentleman here (I may venture to tell you freely) seems to
me to be in a pretty odd way of late—moping, dejected, self-willed,
and as if surrounded with some perplexing circumstances. Though I
visit him pretty frequently for short intervals, I say very little to
his affairs, not choosing to be a party concerned, especially in
cases of so critical and tender a nature. There is much mystery in
almost all his temporal affairs, as well as in many of his
speculative theories. Whoever lives in this neighborhood to see his
exit will probably see and hear some very strange things. Time will
show;—I am afraid, not greatly to his credit. There is thought to be
_an irremovable obstruction to his happiness within his walls_, _as
well as another without them_; but the former is the more powerful,
and like to continue so. He has this day been trying anew to engage
me to stay with him. No lucrative views can tempt me to sacrifice my
liberty or my health, to such measures as are proposed here. _Nor do
I like to __have to do with persons whose word and honor cannot be
depended on_. So much for this very odd and unhappy topic.”
In August Mr. Jones’s tone is slightly modified. Earnest entreaties, not
lucrative considerations, have induced him to cheer the Doctor’s dejected
heart by remaining at Welwyn some time longer. The Doctor is, “in
various respects, a very unhappy man,” and few know so much of these
respects as Mr. Jones. In September he recurs to the subject:
“My ancient gentleman here is still full of trouble, which moves my
concern, though it moves only the secret laughter of many, and some
untoward surmises in disfavor of him and his household. The loss of
a very large sum of money (about 200_l._) is talked of; whereof this
vill and neighborhood is full. Some disbelieve; others says, ‘_It is
no wonder_, _where about eighteen or more servants are sometimes
taken and dismissed in the course of a year_.’ The gentleman himself
is allowed by all to be far more harmless and easy in his family than
some one else who hath too much the lead in it. This, among others,
was one reason for my late motion to quit.”
No other mention of Young’s affairs occurs until April 2d, 1765, when he
says that Dr. Young is very ill, attended by two physicians.
“Having mentioned this young gentleman (Dr. Young’s son), I would
acquaint you next, that he came hither this morning, having been sent
for, as I am told, by the direction of Mrs. Hallows. Indeed, she
intimated to me as much herself. And if this be so, I must say, that
it is one of the most prudent Acts she ever did, or could have done
in such a case as this; as it may prove a means of preventing much
confusion after the death of the Doctor. I have had some little
discourse with the son: he seems much affected, and I believe really
is so. He earnestly wishes his father might be pleased to ask after
him; for you must know he has not yet done this, nor is, in my
opinion, like to do it. And it has been said farther, that upon a
late application made to him on the behalf of his son, he desired
that no more might be said to him about it. How true this may be I
cannot as yet be certain; all I shall say is, it seems not improbable
. . . I heartily wish the ancient man’s heart may prove tender toward
his son; _though_, _knowing him so well_, _I can scarce hope to hear
such desirable news_.”
Eleven days later he writes:
“I have now the pleasure to acquaint you, that the late Dr. Young,
though he had for many years kept his son at a distance from him, yet
has now at last left him all his possessions, after the payment of
certain legacies; so that the young gentleman (who bears a fair
character, and behaves well, as far as I can hear or see) will, I
hope, soon enjoy and make a prudent use of a handsome fortune. The
father, on his deathbed, and since my return from London, was applied
to in the tenderest manner, by one of his physicians, and by another
person, to admit the son into his presence, to make submission,
intreat forgiveness, and obtain his blessing. As to an interview
with his son, he intimated that he chose to decline it, as his
spirits were then low and his nerves weak. With regard to the next
particular, he said, ‘_I heartily forgive him_;’ and upon ‘mention of
this last, he gently lifted up his hand, and letting it gently fall,
pronounced these words, ‘_God bless him_!’ . . . I know it will give
you pleasure to be farther informed that he was pleased to make
respectful mention of me in his will; expressing his satisfaction in
my care of his parish, _bequeathing to me a handsome legacy_, and
appointing me to be one of his executors.”
So far Mr. Jones, in his confidential correspondence with a “friend, who
may be trusted.” In a letter communicated apparently by him to the
_Gentleman’s Magazine_, seven years later, namely, in 1782, on the
appearance of Croft’s biography of Young, we find him speaking of “the
ancient gentleman” in a tone of reverential eulogy, quite at variance
with the free comments we have just quoted. But the Rev. John Jones was
probably of opinion, with Mrs. Montagu, whose contemporary and
retrospective letters are also set in a different key, that “the
interests of religion were connected with the character of a man so
distinguished for piety as Dr. Young.” At all events, a subsequent
quasi-official statement weighs nothing as evidence against contemporary,
spontaneous, and confidential hints.
To Mrs. Hallows, Young left a legacy of £1000, with the request that she
would destroy all his manuscripts. This final request, from some unknown
cause, was not complied with, and among the papers he left behind him was
the following letter from Archbishop Secker, which probably marks the
date of his latest effort after preferment:
“DEANERY OF ST. PAUL’S, July 8, 1758.
“Good DR. YOUNG: I have long wondered that more suitable notice of
your great merit hath not been taken by persons in power. But how to
remedy the omission I see not. No encouragement hath ever been given
me to mention things of this nature to his Majesty. And therefore,
in all likelihood, the only consequence of doing it would be
weakening the little influence which else I may possibly have on some
other occasions. _Your fortune and your reputation set you above the
need of advancement_; _and your sentiments above that concern for
it_, _on your own account_, which, on that of the public, is
sincerely felt by
“Your loving Brother,
“THO. CANT.”
The loving brother’s irony is severe!
Perhaps the least questionable testimony to the better side of Young’s
character is that of Bishop Hildesley, who, as the vicar of a parish near
Welwyn, had been Young’s neighbor for upward of twenty years. The
affection of the clergy for each other, we have observed, is, like that
of the fair sex, not at all of a blind and infatuated kind; and we may
therefore the rather believe them when they give each other any
extra-official praise. Bishop Hildesley, then writing of Young to
Richardson, says:
“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.”
Mr. Langton, however, who was also a frequent visitor of Young’s,
informed Boswell—
“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 so much in intercourse with the brightest men
of what had been called the Augustan age of England; and that he
showed 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.”
The same substance, we know, will exhibit different qualities under
different tests; and, after all, imperfect reports of individual
impressions, whether immediate or traditional, are a very frail basis on
which to build our opinion of a man. One’s character may be very
indifferently mirrored in the mind of the most intimate neighbor; it all
depends on the quality of that gentleman’s reflecting surface.
But, discarding any inferences from such uncertain evidence, 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 affectations 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 unfavorable facts than on shrouding them in “charitable
speeches,” it is not because we 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 the 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.
* * * * *
Pope said of Young, that he had “much of a sublime genius without
common-sense.” The deficiency Pope meant to indicate was, we imagine,
moral rather than intellectual: it was the want of that fine sense of
what is fitting in speech and action, which is often eminently possessed
by men and women whose intellect is of a very common order, but who have
the sincerity and dignity which can never coexist with the selfish
preoccupations of vanity or interest. This was the “common-sense” in
which Young was conspicuously deficient; and it was partly owing to this
deficiency that his genius, waiting to be determined by the highest
prize, fluttered uncertainly from effort to effort, until, when he was
more than sixty, it suddenly spread its broad wing, and soared so as to
arrest the gaze of other generations besides his own. For he had no
versatility of faculty to mislead him. The “Night Thoughts” only differ
from his previous works in the degree and not in the kind of power they
manifest. Whether he writes prose or poetry, rhyme or blank verse,
dramas, satires, odes, or meditations, we see everywhere the same
Young—the same narrow circle of thoughts, the same love of abstractions,
the same telescopic view of human things, the same appetency toward
antithetic apothegm and rhapsodic climax. The passages that arrest us in
his tragedies are those in which he anticipates some fine passage in the
“Night Thoughts,” and where his characters are only transparent shadows
through which we see the bewigged _embonpoint_ of the didactic poet,
excogitating epigrams or ecstatic soliloquies by the light of a candle
fixed in a skull. Thus, in “The Revenge,” “Alonzo,” in the conflict of
jealousy and love that at once urges and forbids him to murder his wife,
says:
“This vast and solid earth, that blazing sun,
Those skies, through which it rolls, must all have end.
What then is man? The smallest part of nothing.
Day buries day; month, month; and year the year!
Our life is but a chain of many deaths.
Can then Death’s self be feared? Our life much rather:
_Life is the desert_, _life the solitude_;
Death joins us to the great majority;
’Tis to be born to Plato and to Cæsar;
’Tis to be great forever;
’Tis pleasure, ’tis ambition, then, to die.”
His prose writings all read like the “Night Thoughts,” either diluted
into prose or not yet crystallized into poetry. For example, in his
“Thoughts for Age,” he says:
“Though we stand on its awful brink, such our leaden bias to the
world, we turn our faces the wrong way; we are still looking on our
old acquaintance, _Time_; though now so wasted and reduced, that we
can see little more of him than his wings and his scythe: our age
enlarges his wings to our imagination; and our fear of death, his
scythe; as Time himself grows less. His consumption is deep; his
annihilation is at hand.”