Oxford, Oct., 1782.
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 sometimes smooth and sometimes rugged; his style is sometimes
concatenated and sometimes abrupt, sometimes diffusive and sometimes
concise. His plan seems to have started in his mind at the present
moment, and his thoughts appear the effect of chance, sometimes adverse
and sometimes lucky, with very little operation of judgment. He was not
one of those writers whom experience improves, and who, observing their
own faults, become gradually correct. His poem on the “Last Day,” his
first great performance, has an equability and propriety, which he
afterwards either never endeavoured or never attained. Many paragraphs
are noble, and few are mean, yet the whole is languid; the plan is too
much extended, and a succession of images divides and weakens the general
conception, but the great reason why the reader is disappointed is that
the thought of the LAST DAY makes every man more than poetical by
spreading over his mind a general obscurity of sacred horror, that
oppresses distinction and disdains expression. His story of “Jane Grey”
was never popular. It is written with elegance enough, but Jane is too
heroic to be pitied.
“The Universal Passion” is indeed a very great performance. It is said
to be a series of epigrams, but, if it be, it is what the author
intended; his endeavour was at the production of striking distichs and
pointed sentences, and his distichs have the weight of solid sentiments,
and his points the sharpness of resistless truth. His characters are
often selected with discernment and drawn with nicety; his illustrations
are often happy, and his reflections often just. His species of satire is
between those of Horace and Juvenal, and he has the gaiety of Horace
without his laxity of numbers, and the morality of Juvenal with greater
variation of images. He plays, indeed, only on the surface of life; he
never penetrates the recesses of the mind, and therefore the whole power
of his poetry is exhausted by a single perusal; his conceits please only
when they surprise. To translate he never condescended, unless his
“Paraphrase on Job” may be considered as a version, in which he has not,
I think, been unsuccessful; he indeed favoured himself by choosing those
parts which most easily admit the ornaments of English poetry. He had
least success in his lyric attempts, in which he seems to have been under
some malignant influence; he is always labouring to be great, and at last
is only turgid.
In his “Night Thoughts” he has exhibited a very wide display of original
poetry, variegated with deep reflections and striking allusions, a
wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of fancy scatters flowers
of every hue and of every odour. This is one of the few poems in which
blank verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage. The
wild diffusion of the sentiments and the digressive sallies of
imagination would have been compressed and restrained by confinement to
rhyme. The excellence of this work is not exactness but copiousness;
particular lines are not to be regarded; the power is in the whole, and
in the whole there is a magnificence like that ascribed to Chinese
plantation, the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity.
His last poem was the “Resignation,” in which he made, as he was
accustomed, an experiment of a new mode of writing, and succeeded better
than in his “Ocean” or his “Merchant.” It was very falsely represented
as a proof of decaying faculties. There is Young in every stanza, such
as he often was in the highest vigour. His tragedies, not making part of
the collection, I had forgotten, till Mr. Stevens recalled them to my
thoughts, by remarking, that he seemed to have one favourite catastrophe,
as his three plays all concluded with lavish suicide, a method by which,
as Dryden remarked, a poet easily rids his scene of persons whom he wants
not to keep alive. In _Busiris_ there are the greatest ebullitions of
imagination, but the pride of _Busiris_ is such as no other man can have,
and the whole is too remote from known life to raise either grief,
terror, or indignation. The _Revenge_ approaches much nearer to human
practices and manners, and therefore keeps possession of the stage; the
first design seems suggested by _Othello_, but the reflections, the
incidents, and the diction, are original. The moral observations are so
introduced and so expressed as to have all the novelty that can be
required. Of _The Brothers_ I may be allowed to say nothing, since
nothing was ever said of it by the public. It must be allowed of Young’s
poetry that it abounds in thought, but without much accuracy or
selection. When he lays hold of an illustration he pursues it beyond
expectation, sometimes happily, as in his parallel of _Quicksilver_ with
_Pleasure_, which I have heard repeated with approbation by a lady, of
whose praise he would have been justly proud, and which is very
ingenious, very subtle, and almost exact; but sometimes he is less lucky,
as when, in his “Night Thoughts,” having it dropped into his mind that
the orbs, floating in space, might be called the _cluster_ of creation,
he thinks of a cluster of grapes, and says, that they all hang on the
great vine, drinking the “nectareous juice of immortal life.” His
conceits are sometimes yet less valuable. In the “Last Day” he hopes to
illustrate the reassembly of the atoms that compose the human body at the
“Trump of Doom” by the collection of bees into a swarm at the tinkling of
a pan. The Prophet says of Tyre that “her merchants are princes.” Young
says of Tyre in his “Merchant,”
“Her merchants princes, and each _deck a throne_.”
Let burlesque try to go beyond him.
He has the trick of joining the turgid and familiar: to buy the alliance
of Britain, “Climes were paid down.” Antithesis is his favourite, “They
for kindness hate:” and “because she’s right, she’s ever in the wrong.”
His versification is his own; neither his blank nor his rhyming lines
have any resemblance to those of former writers; he picks up no
hemistichs, he copies no favourite expressions; he seems to have laid up
no stores of thought or diction, but to owe all to 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. His verses are formed by no certain model; he is no more like
himself in his different productions than he is like others. He seems
never to have studied prosody, nor to have had any direction but from his
own ear. But with all his defects, he was a man of genius and a poet.