Complete Works of Edward Young, page 119
“Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be, and all was light;”
and he has set the Newtonian system to his own martial music.
We are far from contending that Young has exhausted the poetry of the theme. Since his time the telescopes of Herschell and Lord Rosse have been turned to the skies, and have greatly extended the size and splendour of that vast midnight Apparition — the starry scheme. Our recent poets have availed themselves of these discoveries, as witness the eloquent rhapsodies about the stars by Bailey, A. Smith, and Bigg. And there is even yet room for another great poem on the subject, entitled “Night,” were the author come. But Young deserves praise for the following things: —
1st, He has nobly sung the magnitude and unutterable glory of the starry hosts. His soul kindles, triumphs, exults under the midnight canopy. As the Tartar horse when led forth from his stable to the free steppes and free firmament of the desert, bounds, prances, and caracoles for joy, so does Young, in the last part of his poem. Escaped from dark and mournful contemplations on Man, Death, Infidelity, and Earth’s “melancholy map,” he sees the stars like bright milestones on the way to heaven, and his spirit is glad within him, and tumultuous is the grandeur, and fierce and rapid the torrent, of his song.
2dly, He has brought out, better than any other poet, the religion of the stars. “Night,” says Isaac Taylor, “has three daughters, Atheism, Superstition, and Religion.” Following out this fine thought, we see Atheism looking up with impudent eye, brazen brow, and naked figure, to the midnight sky, as if it were only a huge toy-shop of glittering gew-gaws; Superstition shrouding herself in a black mantle, and falling down prostrate and trembling before these innumerable fires, as if they were the eyes of an infinite enemy; while Religion turns aloft her humble, yet fearless form, her tear-trembling yet radiant visage, and murmurs, “My Father made them all.” Young, we need scarcely say, finds in the nocturnal heavens lessons neither of Atheism nor of Superstition, but of Religion, and reads in the face of Old Night her divine origin, the witness she bears to the existence of God, her dependence upon her Author, and her subordination to His purposes. He had magnified, as Newton himself could not so eloquently have done, the extent of the universe; and yet his loyalty to Scripture compels him to intimate that this system, so far from being God, or infinite, or, strictly speaking, Divine, is to perish and pass away. One look from the angry Judge, one uplifting of His rod, and its voluminous waves of glory, like another Red Sea, are to be dried up, that the people of God may pass through and enter on the land of the real Immortality, the “inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that shall never fade away.” We refer our readers to that most eloquent picture, near the beginning of the Ninth Night, of the Last Day. We once heard a lecturer on chemistry close a superb description of the material universe, with the words, “And it is to shine on for ever.” We thought of the words of Peter, “All these things shall be dissolved.” And then we fancied an invisible animalcule inhabiting one of the mountain peaks of a furnace, looking abroad from one of its surging spires, and saying, “This wondrous blaze is to burn for ever,” and yet, ere a few hours have passed, the flame is sunk in ashes, and the animalcule is gone. So the Heavens shall pass away with a great noise. They shall perish, but Thou God remainest; nay, thou Man, too, art destined to survive this splendid nursery, and to enter on new Heavens and a new Earth!
The argument of the “Night Thoughts” may be stated in general to be as follows: — It is to shew the vanity of man as mortal; to inculcate the lowness, misery, and madness of the sensual life; to prove the superiority of the Christian to the man of the world, both in life and in death, and the worthlessness of merely human friendship; to argue, from nature and reason, the truth of man’s immortality; to shew the reasonableness of religion, and to inculcate the necessity of a divine revelation, and of a propitiatory sacrifice. That this argument is always steadily pursued, or logically pled, we do not pretend. It has its flaws; — we particularly demur to many of its proofs of the immortality of the soul, which seem to us very feeble and unsatisfactory; but, taking it as a whole, it is unanswerable and overwhelming. Its links are of red-hot iron; its appeals to the conscience are irresistible; and he who can read it with indifference, or rise from it unimpressed and unawed, must be either something worse or something less than man. It needs not to be surrounded by panegyrics. Convinced, purified, elevated, saved Souls, are the gems in its crown. We are inclined to believe that, in this aspect, the “Night Thoughts” has effected more practical good than the “Paradise Lost.” The latter is a splendid picture; the former a searching, powerful sermon. Now, although pictures with a strong moral contained in them have often done much good, they want the point, emphasis, and effect of great sermons. You may gaze long enough at Milton with no feeling besides admiration of his genius; but in every page Young is grappling with your conscience, and saying, “Don’t look at me, but look to yourself.” Foster, one of the greatest of our practical reasoners on religion, has been much indebted to Young, whom he resembled also in the sombre grandeur of his genius.
Young’s imagery is distinguished by its richness, originality, and exceeding boldness. It was verily a new thing in that timid and conventional age. Like the imagery of all highest poets, it is selected alike from low and from lofty objects, from the gay and the gloomy, from stars and dunghills. His mind moves along through the poem like a great wheel, now descending and now ascending, easy to criticise, but impossible to resist. You may question the taste of many of his figures, such as that of the Sun —
“Rude drunkard, rising rosy from the main;”
or when he speaks of God as the “Great Philanthropist;” or calls the moon “the Portland of the skies;” but you always feel yourself in contact with a new, native, overflowing mind — with a mind which has read nature through man, and man through nature. There is to Young’s genius nothing common or unclean in the material universe. All points up to God, and looks round significantly to man. His imagination has no limits, and, when he is thoroughly roused, like the war-horse of Job, the “glory of his nostrils is terrible;” it is the fury of power, the revel of conscious wealth, the “prancing of a mighty one;” not the dance of mere fancy, but the earnestness and energy of one treading a winepress alone. In proof of this, we appeal to his splendid passages on the miserable state of Man, on Dreams, on Procrastination, to one half of his defence of Immortality, and to the whole of his descant on the Stars. This every one feels is power — barbarous power, if you will — savage, mismanaged power, if you please to call it so; but power that moves, agitates, overwhelms, hurries you away like an infant on the stream of a cataract.
His diction is, on the whole, a worthy medium to his thought. It has been somewhat spoiled by intimacy with Pope’s writings, and is often vitiated with antithesis, an excess in which was the mode of the day. Now and then, too, he is coarse and violent, to vulgarity, in his expressions. But whenever he forgets Pope, and remembers Milton — or, still more, when he becomes swallowed up in the magnitude of his theme — his language is easy, powerful, and magnificent. It never, as Mitford asserts, is unsupported by a “corresponding grandeur of thought.” There is more thought in Young’s poem — more sharp, clear, original reflection — more of that matter which leaves stings behind it — more moral sublimity — than in any poem which has appeared since in Britain. Mitford says, that “every image is amplified to the utmost.” Some images unquestionably are; but amplification is not a prevailing vice of Young’s style — it is, indeed, inconsistent with that pointed intensity which is his general manner; and how comes it, if he be a diffuse and wordy writer, that his pages literally sparkle with maxims, and that, next perhaps to Shakspeare, no poet has been so often quoted? What the same writer means by Young “fatiguing the reader’s mind,” we can understand; since it is fatiguing to look long at the sun, or to follow the grand parabola of the eagle’s flight; but how he should “dissatisfy” the mind of any intelligent and candid reader, is to us extraordinary. It is not true that the work has “a uniformity of subject.” Its tone is rather uniform, but its subjects are as varied as they are important. They are — Man — the World — Ambition — Pleasure — Infidelity — Immortality — Death — Judgment — Heaven — Hell — the Stars — Eternity. Mr Mitford compares Young to Seneca; as if a cold collector of stiff maxims, and a poet whose wisdom was set in enthusiasm as in a ring of fire, were proper subjects of comparison. And it is strange how he should introduce the name of Cicero, as if he were not that very master of amplification, and of over-copiousness of expression, which Mitford imagines Young to be! “No selection — no discreet and graceful reservation — no experienced taste!” — in other words, he was not Pope or Campbell, but Edward Young — not a middle-sized, neat, and well-dressed citizen, but a hirsute giant — not an elegant parterre, but an American forest, bowing only to the old Tempests, and offering up a holocaust of native wealth and glory, not to Man, but to God.
His versification is a more vulnerable point. We grant at once that it is, as a whole, rugged and imperfect, and that, while his single lines are often exceedingly melodious, he rarely reaches, any more than Pope or Johnson, those long and linked swells of sound —
“Floating, mingling, interweaving,
Rising, sinking, and receiving
Each from each, while each is giving
On to each, and each relieving
Each, the pails of gold, the living
Current through the air is heaving” —
which Goëthe has so beautifully, although unintentionally, described in these words, applied by him to the elements of Nature; and which he and Milton, and Spenser, and Coleridge, and Shelley, have so admirably exemplified in their verse. Young’s style is too broken and sententious to permit the miracles of melody which are found in some of our poets. Yet he has a few passages which approach even to this high standard. Take the following: —
“Look nature through, ’tis revolution all;
All change, no death. Day follows night, and night
The dying day; stars rise and set and rise;
Earth takes th’ example. See the summer gay,
With her green chaplet, and ambrosial flowers,
Droops into pallid autumn; winter gray,
Horrid with frost, and turbulent with storm,
Blows autumn, and his golden fruits away;
Then melts into the spring. Soft spring, with breath
Favonian, from warm chambers of the south,
Recalls the first.”
Or take the well-known burst which closes the First Night: —
“The sprightly lark’s shrill matin wakes the morn;
Grief’s sharpest thorn hard pressing on my breast,
I strive, with wakeful melody, to cheer
The sullen gloom, sweet Philomel! like thee,
And call the stars to listen: every star
Is deaf to mine, enamour’d of thy lay.
Yet be not vain; there are, who thine excel,
And charm through distant ages: wrapt in shade,
Prisoner of darkness! to the silent hours
How often I repeat their rage divine,
To lull my griefs, and steal my heart from woe!
I roll their raptures, but not catch their fire,
Dark, though not blind, like thee, Mæonides!
Or his, who made Mæonides our own.
Man, too, he sung; immortal man I sing;
Oft bursts my song beyond the bounds of life;
What, now, but immortality, can please?
O had he press’d his theme, pursued the track
Which opens out of darkness into day!
O had he, mounted on his wing of fire,
Soar’d where I sink, and sung immortal man!
How had it bless’d mankind, and rescued me!”
The reader will notice how, in this noble passage, the individual sentences and points are all subordinated to the main purpose of the poet, and being subjected to the general stress of the strain, do not detract from, but add to, its musical unity.
The comparative place of the poem, and the genius of the writer, are two subjects which are closely connected, and indeed slide into each other. The “Night Thoughts” must not be named, in interest, finish, sustained sublimity, and artistic completeness, with the “Iliad,” the “Divina Commedia,” or the “Paradise Lost.” It ranks, however, at the top of such a high class of poems as Cowper’s Poems, Thomson’s “Seasons,” Byron’s Poems, Blair’s “Grave,” Pollock’s “Course of Time,” and a few others not very often criticised now-a-days. Young, however, seems to us to have been capable of even higher things than he has effected in his works. He was one of those prolific, fiery, inexhaustible souls, who never seem nearing a limit, or dreaming of a shallow in their genius; who, often stumbling over precipices or precipitated into pools, rise stronger, and rush on faster, from their misadventures; who, sometimes stopping too long to moralise on fungi and ant-hillocks, are all the better breathed to career through endless forests, and to take Alps and Andes at a flying leap; and who are
“Ne’er so sure our pleasure to create,
As when they tread the brink of all we hate.”
His taste was not equal certainly to his other faculties, and he was guilty of occasional extravagances, and stumbled not unfrequently over the brink of the bathos; but his genius possessed the following qualities: — It was original. He had read much, but he copies little, and never slavishly. His mind looks at everything — at skulls and stars — through a medium of its own. It was subtle as well as native and strong, and in its movements it is broadly based on a vigorous intellect. It was progressive and prophetic in its spirit, and many of our recent speculations or semi-speculations on the relations of man and nature, are to be found in Young — ay, in the mere spray his mind threw off on its way to an ulterior result. Think of this, for instance, and then remember a similar expression in Carlyle: —
“Man’s grief is but his grandeur in disguise;
And discontent is immortality.”
Finally, his genius, with all its compass and daring, was reverent and religious. He gloried in the universe; he swam, as it were, and circled like a strong swimmer, in that starry sea; but he bent before the Cross, and, instead of looking up, looked down, and cried out, “God be merciful to me a sinner.”
We commend his masterpiece to readers, partly, indeed, for its power, — a power that has hitherto rather been felt than acknowledged, rather admired in silence than analysed; but principally because, like “The Temple” of Herbert, it is holy ground. The author, amid his elaborate ingenuities, and wilful though minor perversities, never ceases to love and to honour truth; in pursuit of renown, he is never afraid to glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; and if his flights of fancy be at times too wild, and if his thoughts be often set to the tune of the tempest, it is a tempest on whose wings, to use his own simple but immortal words, “The Lord is abroad.”
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Anton Chekhov
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