“Time in advance behind him hides his wings,
And seems to creep decrepit with his age.
Behold him when past by! What then is seen
But his proud pinions, swifter than the winds?”
Again:
“A requesting Omnipotence? What can stun and confound thy reason
more? What more can ravish and exalt thy heart? It cannot but
ravish and exalt; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex thee,
to take in all _that_ suggests. Thou child of the dust! Thou speck
of misery and sin! How abject thy weakness! how great is thy power!
Thou crawler on earth, and possible (I was about to say) controller
of the skies! Weigh, and weigh well, the wondrous truths I have in
view: which cannot be weighed too much; which the more they are
weighed, amaze the more; which to have supposed, before they were
revealed, would have been as great madness, and to have presumed on
as great sin, as it is now madness and sin not to believe.”
Even in his Pindaric odes, in which he made the most violent efforts
against nature, he is still neither more nor less than the Young of the
“Last Day,” emptied and swept of his genius, and possessed by seven
demons of fustian and bad rhyme. Even here his “Ercles’ Vein” alternates
with his moral platitudes, and we have the perpetual text of the “Night
Thoughts:”
“Gold pleasure buys;
But pleasure dies,
For soon the gross fruition cloys;
Though raptures court,
The sense is short;
But virtue kindles living joys;—
“Joys felt alone!
Joys asked of none!
Which Time’s and fortune’s arrows miss:
Joys that subsist,
Though fates resist,
An unprecarious, endless bliss!
“Unhappy they!
And falsely gay!
Who bask forever in success;
A constant feast
Quite palls the taste,
_And long enjoyment is distress_.”
In the “Last Day,” again, which is the earliest thing he wrote, we have
an anticipation of all his greatest faults and merits. Conspicuous among
the faults is that attempt to exalt our conceptions of Deity by vulgar
images and comparisons, which is so offensive in the later “Night
Thoughts.” In a burst of prayer and homage to God, called forth by the
contemplation of Christ coming to judgment, he asks, Who brings the
change of the seasons? and answers:
“Not the great Ottoman, or Greater Czar;
Not Europe’s arbitress of peace and war!”
Conceive the soul in its most solemn moments, assuring God that it
doesn’t place his power below that of Louis Napoleon or Queen Victoria!
But in the midst of uneasy rhymes, inappropriate imagery, vaulting
sublimity that o’erleaps itself, and vulgar emotions, we have in this
poem an occasional flash of genius, a touch of simple grandeur, which
promises as much as Young ever achieved. Describing the on-coming of the
dissolution of all things, he says:
“No sun in radiant glory shines on high;
_No light but from the terrors of the sky_.”
And again, speaking of great armies:
“Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn
Rous’d the broad front, and call’d the battle on.”
And this wail of the lost souls is fine:
“And this for sin?
Could I offend if I had never been?
But still increas’d the senseless, happy mass,
Flow’d in the stream, _or shiver’d in the grass_?
Father of mercies! Why from silent earth
Didst thou awake and curse me into birth?
Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night,
And make a thankless present of thy light?
Push into being a reverse of Thee,
And _animate a clod with misery_?”
But it is seldom in Young’s rhymed poems that the effect of a felicitous
thought or image is not counteracted by our sense of the constraint he
suffered from the necessities of rhyme—that “Gothic demon,” as he
afterward called it, “which, modern poetry tasting, became mortal.” In
relation to his own power, no one will question the truth of this dictum,
that “blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaimed,
reinthroned in the true language of the gods; who never thundered nor
suffered their Homer to thunder in rhyme.” His want of mastery in rhyme
is especially a drawback on the effects of his Satires; for epigrams and
witticisms are peculiarly susceptible to the intrusion of a superfluous
word, or to an inversion which implies constraint. Here, even more than
elsewhere, the art that conceals art is an absolute requisite, and to
have a witticism presented to us in limping or cumbrous rhythm is as
counteractive to any electrifying effect as to see the tentative grimaces
by which a comedian prepares a grotesque countenance. We discern the
process, instead of being startled by the result.
This is one reason why the Satires, read _seriatim_, have a flatness to
us, which, when we afterward read picked passages, we are inclined to
disbelieve in, and to attribute to some deficiency in our own mood. But
there are deeper reasons for that dissatisfaction. Young is not a
satirist of a high order. His satire has neither the terrible vigor, the
lacerating energy of genuine indignation, nor the humor 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, insures
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 verses on a waxen image of Cupid or
a lady’s glove. He has none of these felicitious epithets, none of those
pregnant lines, by which Pope’s Satires have enriched the ordinary speech
of educated men. Young’s wit will be found in almost every instance to
consist in that antithetic combination of ideas which, of all the forms
of wit, is most within reach of a clever effort. In his gravest
arguments, as well as in his lightest satire, one might imagine that he
had set himself to work out the problem, how much antithesis might be got
out of a given subject. And there he completely succeeds. His neatest
portraits are all wrought on this plan. “Narcissus,” for example, who
“Omits no duty; nor can Envy say
He miss’d, these many years, the Church or Play:
He makes no noise in Parliament, ’tis true;
But pays his debts, and visit when ’tis due;
His character and gloves are ever clean,
And then he can out-bow the bowing Dean;
A smile eternal on his lip he wears,
Which equally the wise and worthless shares.
In gay fatigues, this most undaunted chief,
Patient of idleness beyond belief,
Most charitably lends the town his face
For ornament in every public place;
As sure as cards he to th’ assembly comes,
And is the furniture of drawing-rooms:
When Ombre calls, his hand and heart are free,
And, joined to two, he fails not—to make three;
Narcissus is the glory of his race;
For who does nothing with a better grace?
To deck my list by nature were designed
Such shining expletives of human kind,
Who want, while through blank life they dream along,
Sense to be right and passion to be wrong.”
It is but seldom that we find a touch of that easy slyness which gives an
additional zest to surprise; but here is an instance:
“See Tityrus, with merriment possest,
Is burst with laughter ere he hears the jest,
What need he stay, for when the joke is o’er,
His _teeth_ will be no whiter than before.”
Like Pope, whom he imitated, he sets out with a psychological mistake as
the basis of his satire, attributing all forms of folly to one
passion—the love of fame, or vanity—a much grosser mistake, indeed, than
Pope’s, exaggeration of the extent to which the “ruling passion”
determines conduct in the individual. Not that Young is consistent in
his mistake. He sometimes implies no more than what is the truth—that
the love of fame is the cause, not of all follies, but of many.
Young’s satires on women are superior to Pope’s, which is only saying
that they are superior to Pope’s greatest failure. We can more
frequently pick out a couplet as successful than an entire sketch. Of
the too emphatic “Syrena” he says:
“Her judgment just, her sentence is too strong;
Because she’s right, she’s ever in the wrong.”
Of the diplomatic “Julia:”
“For her own breakfast she’ll project a scheme,
Nor take her tea without a stratagem.”
Of “Lyce,” the old painted coquette:
“In vain the cock has summoned sprites away;
She walks at noon and blasts the bloom of day.”
Of the nymph, who, “gratis, clears religious mysteries:”
“’Tis hard, too, she who makes no use but chat
Of her religion, should be barr’d in that.”
The description of the literary _belle_, “Daphne,” well prefaces that of
“Stella,” admired by Johnson:
“With legs toss’d high, on her sophee she sits,
Vouchsafing audience to contending wits:
Of each performance she’s the final test;
One act read o’er, she prophecies the rest;
And then, pronouncing with decisive air,
Fully convinces all the town—_she’s fair_.
Had lonely Daphne Hecatessa’s face,
How would her elegance of taste decrease!
Some ladies’ judgment in their features lies,
And all their genius sparkles in their eyes.
But hold, she cries, lampooner! have a care;
Must I want common sense because I’m fair?
O no; see Stella: her eyes shine as bright
As if her tongue was never in the right;
And yet what real learning, judgment, fire!
She seems inspir’d, and can herself inspire.
How then (if malice ruled not all the fair)
_Could Daphne publish_, _and could she forbear_?”
After all, when we have gone through Young’s seven Satires, we seem to
have made but an indifferent meal. They are a sort of fricassee, with
some little solid meat in them, and yet the flavor is not always piquant.
It is curious to find him, when he pauses a moment from his satiric
sketching, recurring to his old platitudes:
“Can gold calm passion, or make reason shine?
Can we dig peace or wisdom from the mine?
Wisdom to gold prefer;”—
platitudes which he seems inevitably to fall into, for the same reason
that some men are constantly asserting their contempt for
criticism—because he felt the opposite so keenly.
The outburst of genius in the earlier books of the “Night Thoughts” is
the more remarkable, that in the interval between them and the Satires he
had produced nothing but his Pindaric odes, in which he fell far below
the level of his previous works. Two sources of this sudden strength
were the freedom of blank verse and the presence of a genuine emotion.
Most persons, in speaking of the “Night Thoughts,” have in their minds
only the two or three first Nights, the majority of readers rarely
getting beyond these, unless, as Wilson says, they “have but few books,
are poor, and live in the country.” And in these earlier Nights there is
enough genuine sublimity and genuine sadness to bribe us into too
favorable a judgment of them as a whole. Young had only a very few
things to say or sing—such as that life is vain, that death is imminent,
that man is immortal, that virtue is wisdom, that friendship is sweet,
and that the source of virtue is the contemplation of death and
immortality—and even in his two first Nights he had said almost all he
had to say in his finest manner. Through these first outpourings of
“complaint” we feel that the poet is really sad, that the bird is singing
over a rifled nest; and we bear with his morbid picture of the world and
of life, as the Job-like lament of a man whom “the hand of God hath
touched.” Death has carried away his best-beloved, and that “silent
land” whither they are gone has more reality for the desolate one than
this world which is empty of their love:
“This is the desert, this the solitude;
How populous, how vital is the grave!”
Joy died with the loved one:
“The disenchanted earth
Lost all her lustre. Where her glitt’ring towers?
Her golden mountains, where? All darkened down
To naked waste; a dreary vale of tears:
_The great magician’s dead_!”
Under the pang of parting, it seems to the bereaved man as if love were
only a nerve to suffer with, and he sickens at the thought of every joy
of which he must one day say—“_it __was_.” In its unreasoning anguish,
the soul rushes to the idea of perpetuity as the one element of bliss:
“O ye blest scenes of permanent delight!—
Could ye, so rich in rapture, fear an end,—
That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy,
And quite unparadise the realms of light.”
In a man under the immediate pressure of a great sorrow, we tolerate
morbid exaggerations; we are prepared to see him turn away a weary eye
from sunlight and flowers and sweet human faces, as if this rich and
glorious life had no significance but as a preliminary of death; we do
not criticise his views, we compassionate his feelings. And so it is
with Young in these earlier Nights. There is already some artificiality
even in his grief, and feeling often slides into rhetoric, but through it
all we are thrilled with the unmistakable cry of pain, which makes us
tolerant of egoism and hyperbole:
“In every varied posture, place, and hour,
How widow’d every thought of every joy!
Thought, busy thought! too busy for my peace!
Through the dark postern of time long elapsed
Led softly, by the stillness of the night,—
Led like a murderer (and such it proves!)
Strays (wretched rover!) o’er the pleasing past,—
In quest of wretchedness, perversely strays;
And finds all desert now; and meets the ghosts
Of my departed joys.”
But when he becomes didactic, rather than complaining—when he ceases to
sing his sorrows, and begins to insist on his opinions—when that distaste
for life which we pity as a transient feeling is thrust upon us as a
theory, we become perfectly cool and critical, and are not in the least
inclined to be indulgent to false views and selfish sentiments.
Seeing that we are about to be severe on Young’s failings and failures,
we ought, if a reviewer’s space were elastic, to dwell also on his
merits—on the startling vigor of his imagery—on the occasional grandeur
of his thought—on the piquant force of that grave satire into which his
meditations continually run. But, since our “limits” are rigorous, we
must content ourselves with the less agreeable half of the critic’s duty;
and we may the rather do so, because it would be difficult to say
anything new of Young, in the way of admiration, while we think there are
many salutary lessons remaining to be drawn from his faults.
One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his _radical
insincerity as a poetic artist_. This, added to the thin and artificial
texture of his wit, is the true explanation of the paradox—that a poet
who is often inopportunely witty has the opposite vice of bombastic
absurdity. The source of all grandiloquence is the want of taking for a
criterion the true qualities of the object described or the emotion
expressed. The grandiloquent man is never bent on saying what he feels
or what he sees, but on producing a certain effect on his audience; hence
he may float away into utter inanity without meeting any criterion to
arrest him. Here lies the distinction between grandiloquence and genuine
fancy or bold imaginativeness. The fantastic or the boldly imaginative
poet may be as sincere as the most realistic: he is true to his own
sensibilities or inward vision, and in his wildest flights he never
breaks loose from his criterion—the truth of his own mental state. Now,
this disruption of language from genuine thought and feeling is what we
are constantly detecting in Young; and his insincerity is the more likely
to betray him into absurdity, because he habitually treats of
abstractions, and not of concrete objects or specific emotions. He
descants perpetually on virtue, religion, “the good man,” life, death,
immortality, eternity—subjects which are apt to give a factitious
grandeur to empty wordiness. When a poet floats in the empyrean, and
only takes a bird’s-eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere
fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth
for proximity to heaven. Thus:
“His hand the good man fixes on the skies,
And bids earth roll, nor feels her idle whirl,”
may, perhaps, pass for sublime with some readers. But pause a moment to
realize the image, and the monstrous absurdity of a man’s grasping the
skies, and hanging habitually suspended there, while he contemptuously
bids the earth roll, warns you that no genuine feeling could have
suggested so unnatural a conception. Again,
“See the man immortal: him, I mean,
Who lives as such; whose heart, full bent on Heaven,
Leans all that way, his bias to the stars.”
This is worse than the previous example: for you can at least form some
imperfect conception of a man hanging from the skies, though the position
strikes you as uncomfortable and of no particular use; but you are
utterly unable to imagine how his heart can lean toward the stars.
Examples of such vicious imagery, resulting from insincerity, may be
found, perhaps, in almost every page of the “Night Thoughts.” But simple
assertions or aspirations, undisguised by imagery, are often equally
false. No writer whose rhetoric was checked by the slightest truthful
intentions could have said—
“An eye of awe and wonder let me roll,
And roll forever.”
Abstracting the more poetical associations with the eye, this is hardly
less absurd than if he had wished to stand forever with his mouth open.
Again:
“Far beneath
A soul immortal is a mortal joy.”
Happily for human nature, we are sure no man really believes that. Which
of us has the impiety not to feel that our souls are only too narrow for
the joy of looking into the trusting eyes of our children, of reposing on
the love of a husband or a wife—nay, of listening to the divine voice of
music, or watching the calm brightness of autumnal afternoons? But Young
could utter this falsity without detecting it, because, when he spoke of
“mortal joys,” he rarely had in his mind any object to which he could
attach sacredness. He was thinking of bishoprics, and benefices, of
smiling monarchs, patronizing prime ministers, and a “much indebted
muse.” Of anything between these and eternal bliss he was but rarely and
moderately conscious. Often, indeed, he sinks very much below even the
bishopric, and seems to have no notion of earthly pleasure but such as
breathes gaslight and the fumes of wine. His picture of life is
precisely such as you would expect from a man who has risen from his bed
at two o’clock in the afternoon with a headache and a dim remembrance
that he has added to his “debts of honor:”
“What wretched repetition cloys us here!
What periodic potions for the sick,
Distemper’d bodies, and distemper’d minds?”
And then he flies off to his usual antithesis:
“In an eternity what scenes shall strike!
Adventures thicken, novelties surprise!”
“Earth” means lords and levees, duchesses and Dalilahs, South-Sea dreams,
and illegal percentage; and the only things distinctly preferable to
these are eternity and the stars. Deprive Young of this antithesis, and
more than half his eloquence would be shrivelled up. Place him on a
breezy common, where the furze is in its golden bloom, where children are
playing, and horses are standing in the sunshine with fondling necks, and
he would have nothing to say. Here are neither depths of guilt nor
heights of glory; and we doubt whether in such a scene he would be able
to pay his usual compliment to the Creator:
“Where’er I turn, what claim on all applause!”
It is true that he sometimes—not often—speaks of virtue as capable of
sweetening life, as well as of taking the sting from death and winning
heaven; and, lest we should be guilty of any unfairness to him, we will
quote the two passages which convey this sentiment the most explicitly.
In the one he gives “Lorenzo” this excellent recipe for obtaining
cheerfulness:
“Go, fix some weighty truth;
Chain down some passion; do some generous good;
Teach Ignorance to see, or Grief to smile;
Correct thy friend; befriend thy greatest foe;
Or, with warm heart, and confidence divine,
Spring up, and lay strong hold on Him who made thee.”
The other passage is vague, but beautiful, and its music has murmured in
our minds for many years:
“The cuckoo seasons sing
The same dull note to such as nothing prize
But what those seasons from the teeming earth
To doting sense indulge. But nobler minds,
Which relish fruit unripened by the sun,
Make their days various; various as the dyes
On the dove’s neck, which wanton in his rays.
On minds of dove-like innocence possess’d,
On lighten’d minds that bask in Virtue’s beams,
Nothing hangs tedious, nothing old revolves
In that for which they long, for which they live.
Their glorious efforts, winged with heavenly hopes,
Each rising morning sees still higher rise;
Each bounteous dawn its novelty presents
To worth maturing, new strength, lustre, fame;
While Nature’s circle, like a chariot wheel,
Boiling beneath their elevated aims,
Makes their fair prospect fairer every hour;
Advancing virtue in a line to bliss.”
Even here, where he is in his most amiable mood, you see at what a
telescopic distance he stands from mother Earth and simple human
joys—“Nature’s circle rolls beneath.” Indeed, we remember no mind in
poetic literature that seems to have absorbed less of the beauty and the
healthy breath of the common landscape than Young’s. His images, often
grand and finely presented—witness that sublimely sudden leap of thought,
“Embryos we must be till we burst the shell,
_Yon ambient azure shell_, and spring to life”—
lie almost entirely within that circle of observation which would be
familiar to a man who lived in town, hung about the theatres, read the
newspaper, and went home often by moon and starlight.
There is no natural object nearer than the moon that seems to have any
strong attraction for him, and even to the moon he chiefly appeals for
patronage, and “pays his court” to her. It is reckoned among the many
deficiencies of “Lorenzo” that he “never asked the moon one question”—an
omission which Young thinks eminently unbecoming a rational being. He
describes nothing so well as a comet, and is tempted to linger with fond
detail over nothing more familiar than the day of judgment and an
imaginary journey among the stars. Once on Saturn’s ring he feels at
home, and his language becomes quite easy:
“What behold I now?
A wilderness of wonders burning round,
Where larger suns inhabit higher spheres;
Perhaps _the villas of descending gods_!”
It is like a sudden relief from a strained posture when, in the “Night
Thoughts,” we come on any allusion that carries us to the lanes, woods,
or fields. Such allusions are amazingly rare, and we could almost count
them on a single hand. That we may do him no injustice, we will quote
the three best:
“Like _blossom’d trees o’erturned by vernal storm_,
Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay.
* * * * *
“In the same brook none ever bathed him twice:
To the same life none ever twice awoke.
We call the brook the same—the same we think
Our life, though still more rapid in its flow;
Nor mark the much irrevocably lapsed
And mingled with the sea.”
* * * * *
“The crown of manhood is a winter joy;
An evergreen that stands the northern blast,
And blossoms in the rigor of our fate.”
The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of abstractions,
is closely allied in Young to the _want of genuine emotion_. He sees
virtue sitting on a mount serene, far above the mists and storms of
earth; he sees Religion coming down from the skies, with this world in
her left hand and the other world in her right; but we never find him
dwelling on virtue or religion as it really exists—in the emotions of a
man dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his fireside of an
evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little daughter, in
courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal triumph of justice
and pity over personal resentment, in all the sublime self-renunciation
and sweet charities which are found in the details of ordinary life.
Now, emotion links itself with particulars, and only in a faint and
secondary manner with abstractions. An orator may discourse very
eloquently on injustice in general, and leave his audience cold; but let
him state a special case of oppression, and every heart will throb. The
most untheoretic persons are aware of this relation between true emotion
and particular facts, as opposed to general terms, and implicitly
recognize it in the repulsion they feel toward any one who professes
strong feeling about abstractions—in the interjectional “Humbug!” which
immediately rises to their lips. Wherever abstractions appear to excite
strong emotion, this occurs in men of active intellect and imagination,
in whom the abstract term rapidly and vividly calls up the particulars it
represents, these particulars being the true source of the emotion; and
such men, if they wished to express their feeling, would be infallibly
prompted to the presentation of details. Strong emotion can no more be
directed to generalities apart from particulars, than skill in figures
can be directed to arithmetic apart from numbers. Generalities are the
refuge at once of deficient intellectual activity and deficient feeling.
If we except the passages in “Philander,” “Narcissa,” and “Lucia,” there
is hardly a trace of human sympathy, of self-forgetfulness in the joy or
sorrow of a fellow-being, throughout this long poem, which professes to
treat the various phases of man’s destiny. And even in the “Narcissa”
Night, Young repels us by the low moral tone of his exaggerated lament.
This married step-daughter died at Lyons, and, being a Protestant, was
denied burial, so that her friends had to bury her in secret—one of the
many miserable results of superstition, but not a fact to throw an
educated, still less a Christian man, into a fury of hatred and
vengeance, in contemplating it after the lapse of five years. Young,
however, takes great pains to simulate a bad feeling:
“Of grief
And indignation rival bursts I pour’d,
Half execration mingled with my pray’r;
Kindled at man, while I his God adored;
Sore grudg’d the savage land her sacred dust;
Stamp’d the cursed soil; _and with humanity_
(_Denied Narcissa_) _wish’d them all a grave_.”
The odiously bad taste of this last clause makes us hope that it is
simply a platitude, and not intended as witticism, until he removes the
possibility of this favorable doubt by immediately asking, “Flows my
resentment into guilt?”
When, by an afterthought, he attempts something like sympathy, he only
betrays more clearly his want of it. Thus, in the first Night, when he
turns from his private griefs to depict earth as a hideous abode of
misery for all mankind, and asks,
“What then am I, who sorrow for myself?”
he falls at once into calculating the benefit of sorrowing for others:
“More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts;
_And conscious virtue mitigates the pang_.
Nor virtue, more than prudence, bids me give
Swollen thought a second channel.”
This remarkable negation of sympathy is in perfect consistency with
Young’s theory of ethics:
“Virtue is a crime,
A crime of reason, if it costs us pain
Unpaid.”