Sir Henry Newbolt, like Sir Sidney Colvin, no doubt, would hold that here Keats dismisses too slightingly his own best work. But how noble is Keats’s dissatisfaction with himself! It is such noble dissatisfaction as this that distinguishes the great poets from the amateurs. Poetry and religion—the impulse is very much the same. The rest is but a parlour-game.
[IX.—Edward Young as Critic]
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.