Chapter 22

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.”

If there is no immortality for man—

“Sense! take the rein; blind Passion, drive us on; And Ignorance! befriend us on our way. . . Yes; give the pulse full empire; live the Brute, Since as the brute we die. The sum of man, Of godlike man, to revel and to rot.”

* * * * *

“If this life’s gain invites him to the deed, Why not his country sold, his father slain?”

* * * * *

“Ambition, avarice, by the wise disdain’d, Is perfect wisdom, while mankind are fools, And think a turf or tombstone covers all.”

* * * * *

“Die for thy country, thou romantic fool! Seize, seize the plank thyself, and let her sink.”

* * * * *

“As in the dying parent dies the child, Virtue with Immortality expires. Who tells me he denies his soul immortal, _Whate’er his boost_, _has told me he’s a knave_. _His duty ’tis to love himself alone_. _Nor care though mankind perish if he smiles_.”