So little is Edward Young read in these days that we have almost forgotten
how wide was his influence in the eighteenth century. It was not merely
that he was popular in England, where his satires, _The Love of Fame, the
Universal Passion_, are said to have made him £3,000. He was also a power
on the Continent. His _Night Thoughts_ was translated not only into all
the major languages, but into Portuguese, Swedish and Magyar. It was
adopted as one of the heralds of the romantic movement in France. Even his
_Conjectures on Original Composition_, written in 1759 in the form of a
letter to Samuel Richardson, earned in foreign countries a fame that has
lasted till our own day. A new edition of the German translation was
published at Bonn so recently as 1910. In England there is no famous
author more assiduously neglected. Not so much as a line is quoted from
him in _The Oxford Book of English Verse_. I recently turned up a fairly
full anthology of eighteenth-century verse only to find that though it has
room for Mallet and Ambrose Phillips and Picken, Young has not been
allowed to contribute a purple patch even five lines long. I look round my
own shelves, and they tell the same story. Small enough poets stand there
in shivering neglect. Akenside, Churchill and Parnell have all been
thought worth keeping. But not on the coldest, topmost shelf has space
been found for Young. He scarcely survives even in popular quotations. The
copy-books have perpetuated one line:
Procrastination is the thief of time.
Apart from that, _Night Thoughts_ have been swallowed up in an eternal
night.
And certainly a study of the titles of his works will not encourage the
average reader to go to him in search of treasures of the imagination. At
the age of thirty, in 1713, he wrote a _Poem on the Last Day_, which he
dedicated to Queen Anne. In the following year he wrote _The Force of
Religion, or Vanquish'd Love_, a poem about Lady Jane Grey, which he
dedicated to the Countess of Salisbury. And no sooner was Queen Anne dead
than he made haste to salute the rising sun in an epistle _On the Late
Queen's Death and His Majesty's Accession to the Throne_. Passing over a
number of years, we find him, in 1730, publishing a so-called Pindaric
ode, _Imperium Pelagi; a Naval Lyric_, in the preface to which he declares
with characteristic italics: "_Trade_ is a very _noble_ subject in itself;
more _proper_ than any for an Englishman; and particularly _seasonable_ at
this juncture." Add to this that he was the son of a dean, that he married
the daughter of an earl, and that, other means of advancement having
failed, he became a clergyman at the age of between forty and fifty, and
the suggested portrait is that of a prudent hanger-on rather than a fiery
man of genius. His prudence was rewarded with a pension of £200 a year, a
Royal Chaplaincy, and the position (after George III.'s accession) of
Clerk of the Closet to the Princess Dowager. In the opinion of Young
himself, who lived till the age of 82, the reward was inadequate. At the
age of 79, however, he had conquered his disappointment to a sufficient
degree to write a poem on _Resignation_.
Readers who, after a hasty glance at his biography, are inclined to look
satirically on Young as a time-server, oily with the mediocrity of
self-help, will have a pleasant surprise if they read his _Conjectures on
Original Composition_ for the first time. It is a bold and masculine essay
on literary criticism, written in a style of quite brilliant, if
old-fashioned, rhetoric. Mrs. Thrale said of it: "In the _Conjectures upon
Original Composition_ ... we shall perhaps read the wittiest piece of
prose our whole language has to boast; yet from its over-twinkling, it
seems too little gazed at and too little admired perhaps." This is an
exaggerated estimate. Dr. Johnson, who heard Young read the _Conjectures_
at Richardson's house, said that "he was surprised to find Young receive
as novelties what he thought very common maxims." If one tempers Mrs.
Thrale's enthusiasms and Dr. Johnson's scorn, one will have a fairly just
idea of the quality of Young's book.
It is simply a shot fired with a good aim in the eternal war between
authority and liberty in literature. This is a controversy for which, were
men wise, there would be no need. We require in literature both the
authority of tradition and the liberty of genius to such new conquests.
Unfortunately, we cannot agree as to the proportions in which each of them
is required. The French exaggerated the importance of tradition, and so
gave us the classical drama of Racine and Corneille. Walt Whitman
exaggerated the importance of liberty, and so gave us _Leaves of Grass_.
In nearly all periods of literary energy, we find writers rushing to one
or other of these extremes. Either they declare that the classics are
perfect and cannot be surpassed but only imitated; or, like the Futurists,
they want to burn the classics and release the spirit of man for new
adventures. It is all a prolonged duel between reaction and revolution,
and the wise man of genius doing his best, like a Liberal, to bring the
two opponents to terms.
Much of the interest of Young's book is due to the fact that in an age of
reaction he came out on the revolutionary side. There was seldom a time at
which the classics were more slavishly idolized and imitated. Miss Morley
quotes from Pope the saying that "all that is left us is to recommend our
productions by the imitation of the ancients." Young threw all his
eloquence on the opposite side. He uttered the bold paradox: "The less we
copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more." "Become a
noble collateral," he advised, "not a humble descendant from them. Let us
build our compositions in the spirit, and in the taste, of the ancients,
but not with their materials. Thus will they resemble the structures of
Pericles at Athens, which Plutarch commends for having had an air of
antiquity as soon as they were built." He refuses to believe that the
moderns are necessarily inferior to the ancients. If they are inferior, it
is because they plagiarize from the ancients instead of emulating them.
"If ancients and moderns," he declares, "were no longer considered as
masters, and pupils, but as hard-matched rivals for renown, then moderns,
by the longevity of their labours, might one day become ancients
themselves."
He deplores the fact that Pope should have been so content to indenture
his genius to the work of translation and imitation:
Though we stand much obliged to him for giving us an Homer, yet had
he doubled our obligation by giving us--a Pope. He had a strong
imagination and the true sublime? That granted, we might have had
two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for I heard
the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few weeks before his
decease.
For ourselves, we hold that Pope showed himself to be as original as needs
be in his epistles to Martha Blount and Dr. Arbuthnot. None the less, the
general philosophy of Young's remarks is sound enough. We should reverence
tradition in literature, but not superstitiously. Too much awe of the old
masters may easily scare a modern into hiding his talent in a napkin.
True, we are not in much danger of servitude to tradition in literature
to-day. We no longer imitate the ancients; we only imitate each other. On
the whole, we wish there was rather more sense of the tradition in
contemporary writing. The danger of arbitrary egoism is quite as great as
the danger of classicism. Luckily, Young, in stating the case against the
classicists, has at the same time stated perfectly the case for
familiarity with the classics. "It is," he declares, "but a sort of noble
contagion, from a general familiarity with their writings, and not by any
particular sordid theft, that we can be the better for those who went
before us," However we may deride a servile classicism, we should always
set out assuming the necessity of the "noble contagion for every man of
letters."
The truth is, the man of letters must in some way reconcile himself to the
paradox that he is at once the acolyte and the rival of the ancients.
Young is optimistic enough to believe that it is possible to surpass them.
In the mechanic arts, he complains, men are always attempting to go beyond
their predecessors; in the liberal arts, they merely try to follow them.
The analogy between the continuous advance of science and a possible
continuous advance in literature is perhaps, a misleading one. Professor
Gilbert Murray, in _Religio Grammatici_, bases much of his argument on a
denial that such an analogy should be drawn. Literary genius cannot be
bequeathed and added to as a scientific discovery can. The modern poet
does not stand on Shakespeare's shoulders as the modern astronomer stands
on Galileo's shoulders. Scientific discovery is progressive. Literary
genius, like religious genius, is a miracle less dependent on time. None
the less, we may reasonably believe that literature, like science, has
ever new worlds to conquer--that, even if Æschylus and Shakespeare cannot
be surpassed, names as great as theirs may one day be added to the roll of
literary fame. And this will be possible only if men in each generation
are determined, in the words of Goldsmith, "bravely to shake off
admiration, and, undazzled by the splendour of another's reputation, to
chalk out a path to fame for themselves, and boldly cultivate untried
experiment." Goldsmith wrote these words in _The Bee_ in the same year in
which Young's _Conjectures_ was published. I feel tolerably certain that
he wrote them as a result of reading Young's work. The reaction against
traditionalism, however, was gathering general force by this time, and the
desire to be original was beginning to oust the desire to copy. Both
Young's and Goldsmith's essays are exceedingly interesting as
anticipations of the romantic movement. Young was a true romantic when he
wrote that Nature "brings us into the world all Originals--no two faces,
no two minds, are just alike; but all bear evident marks of separation on
them. Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we are Copies?" Genius, he
thinks, is commoner than is sometimes supposed, if we would make use of
it. His book is a plea for giving genius its head. He wants to see the
modern writer, instead of tilling an exhausted soil, staking out a claim
in the perfectly virgin field of his own experience. He cannot teach you
to be a man of genius; he could not even teach himself to be one. But at
least he lays down many of the right rules for the use of genius. His book
marks a most interesting stage in the development of English literary
criticism.