SOURCE: Wicker, Cecil V. “Young as Romanticist” and “Young's Melancholy and His Relation to the Graveyard School.” In Edward Young and the Fear of Death: A Study of Romantic Melancholy. 11-22; 23-27. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1952.

[In the following essays, Wicker argues that Young strove to be original in his works and that he treated the melancholy of his day in a new fashion that led to Romanticism. This Romanticism can be seen in the Graveyard tradition, of which Young was one of the founders.]

YOUNG AS ROMANTICIST

What this humour is, or whence it proceeds, how it is engendered in the body, neither Galen, nor any old writer, hath sufficiently discussed, as Jacchinus thinks.

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy

Possibly the most helpful way to regard romanticism,¹ at least insofar as its eighteenth-century roots are concerned, is to accept Draper's view² that the social basis of the movement was the emergence of the merchant middle class, lacking a cultural tradition of its own and dissatisfied with that of the class it had supplanted. Thus romanticism in literature is not an isolated phenomenon, but is part of a complex development, the rise of the middle class, a development which may be traced in the social institutions of the period, the political history, the religious tendencies and movements, the art, the philosophy, and the literature.

In literature this revolt assumed various aspects, each of which has been advanced at one time or another as a complete explanation for the whole movement; namely, a distinct and rather sudden break with neo-classical authority, the more and more liberal use of subjective emotion, the development of sensibility, the “return to nature,” the moral reawakening, the great popularity of a naive and quite non-historical medievalism, the recognition and use of the creative power of the imagination, and an ever-growing emphasis upon the individual. With nearly all of these literary aspects of romanticism Edward Young was in some measure connected. We may best determine to what extent he can be considered “romantic” by examining his work in the light of these differentiae.

For the restoration of blank verse to English poetry Young must be credited along with Thomson.³ It is true that Thomson was earlier in the field, and it is equally true that as Young wrote blank verse, it is anything but a perfect medium of poetic expression. His style is turgid and monotonous, as has been pointed out innumerable times, yet occasionally, both in the dramas and in the Night Thoughts, the poetry rises to eloquence and beauty. Young's mastery of the medium or lack of it, however, is not here so important as the fact that merely by employing blank verse in a long discursive poem he aided in re-establishing a great literary tradition. In the use of lyric forms Young had no success and no influence whatever. His odes are the most unsuccessful of all his writings, and are today barely readable. His was not a singing gift. He never attempted the short lyric, and when he chose to essay the ode, his critical faculty, elsewhere very excellent, deserted him completely.

No reader of Young can deny that he was an original writer.⁴ Indeed, he strove for originality in all that he did, though not always successfully. He nearly always considered what he wrote new and called attention to the fact. Of the many instances of this characteristic that occur in his writings a few examples will serve. In the preface to his Satires he speaks of “a unity of design, which has not, I think, in a set of satires, been attempted before.”⁵ An interesting passage in the essay “On Lyric Poetry” prefixed to Ocean: An Ode, written in 1728, contains the essence of the Conjectures on Original Composition of thirty-one years later. Here Young twice compliments himself on his newness. Having distinguished between “originality” and “a due deference for the great standards of antiquity,” he says, “This is a distinction, I think, not hitherto made, and a distinction of consequence.”⁶ Of the Ode he remarks, “My subject is … hitherto unsung.” The short preface to Imperium Pelagi is full of allusions to the author's pioneering. “This Ode, I humbly conceive, is an original.” The germ-idea of the Conjectures is also found in this preface. He even took care to point out in the Conjectures themselves that his subject was new. “I begin with Original Composition; and the more willingly, as it seems an original subject to me, who have seen nothing hitherto written on it.”⁷ As further evidence of Young's originality, keeping in mind that in the age of Pope no poet could completely escape the influence of older literary manners, may be mentioned the priority of his Satires to those of Pope;⁸ his choice of subject for his earliest drama, Busiris, King of Egypt;⁹ his experiments (altogether unhappy ones) with lyric forms in his odes; several aspects of the Night Thoughts, chiefly the subjective element, the use of blank verse, the rambling structure, and the argument for immortality; and most important, of course, the critical examen of the whole movement for originality which Young provided in his Conjectures on Original Composition, in which he “defined the coming effort of the Romantic movement towards complete emancipation.”¹⁰ As Cazamian says, Young “from early youth had sought to dissociate himself from the vain crowd of servile imitators.”¹¹ It was fitting and logical that he should enunciate the importance and necessity of originality so clearly.

In the treatment of the emotions, in sensibility, Young was at the very center of the romantic reaction. His mood in the Night Thoughts, as Miss Sickels notes, is “persistently personal”;¹² he is inspired by grief and fear, and emotionalism is dominant.

The subjective nature of the work manifests itself from the beginning, in the conviction of the all-importance of this personal discussion of the after-fate of the individual; in the unrestrained expression of personal emotion; and in the emphasis placed on the service of individual instinct, feeling, in finding out truth.¹³

Some critics have thought such subjectivity the principal criterion of romanticism.¹⁴ Young valued the emotions highly as a guide to belief and action and set his emotional experience forth at such length and at such a sacrifice to form that his poem, begun with no lengthy or exact plan in mind, dragged itself out to nine books of increasing length.¹⁵ Young's Night Thoughts is much the most personal poem of the Graveyard school. This deeply subjective melancholy is of the highest importance as a romantic beginning.¹⁶ With Young we find not a return to melancholy, but a new treatment of melancholy, a dismal parading of the poet's own soul-sick self, a melancholy cast in a mold neither traditional nor conventional, but permeated with his own inner broodings. Though Young's avowed purpose in the Night Thoughts was to present a corrective to the shallow optimism of Pope and Shaftesbury, the moral and religious argument of the poem is obscured by Young's personal mood. As an exponent of the use of personal emotion in poetry, he is completely in revolt against the neo-classical dogmas, which strictly precluded the use of such material.¹⁷ That Young not only broke with the classical tradition in this respect, but poured forth his grief in such a fashion as to introduce into English poetry a new tradition of melancholy, places him definitely with the pre-romantics.

Young contributed to the growing taste for sensibility in three ways: in the idealized presentation of his own grief,¹⁸ in the relation between his nocturnal musing and the setting of night and graveyard scenery,¹⁹ and in his religious meditation on death, which was closely connected with the spread of Wesleyanism and the moral reforms of the times.²⁰ Stopford Brooke says of Young that

… the sentimental, serious melancholy he voiced in his subject had become a tendency of the times. It was a reaction from the light, trivial, gay, satirical poetry which preceded it—a new matter for imagination and fancy to work upon. This melancholy, this brooding on the sadness of life and death, on the sorrowful fates of men, and on all the images and scenes in Nature; moonlight, and night, and the grasses of graves and the dim, hoarse rolling of the sea—was the first element, in time, of the new romantic movement; and Young was its voice.²¹

Another indication of Young's essential agreement with the sentimental taste of the times may be seen in his intimate friendship with Richardson, and specifically in his letter to the author of Clarissa containing his assurance that Richardson had not violated the canons of taste or morals in permitting Clarissa to suffer while Lovelace went unpunished.²² Young must have been aware of the interest of contemporary readers in all appeals to the tender emotions, for he was by nature sentimental himself and he always had an eye to current literary fashions and to what may be termed journalistic copy.

As a poet of nature Young is far inferior to Thomson and contributed far less to the romantic tradition of naturalism, but even so the extent of his service in this respect has frequently been underestimated. The setting of the Night Thoughts played its part in the development of Gothic background²³ in both poetry and the prose romance, and Young shows in the poem a love for outdoor scenes, especially those as far removed from the pretty formalisms of neo-classic convention as possible. Legouis thinks²⁴ this feature of Young's poem made a deep impression on his readers. The most significant thing about Young's treatment of nature, however, is that in the Night Thoughts nature is not looked upon by the poet as a source of beauty; but a limited range of tiringly reiterated images—night, the night sky, graves, yew trees, the sea, for example—is merely used as atmosphere, the appropriate grab for the subject, that is, the contemplation of death and man's destiny. The few images used are sentimentalized in keeping with the tone of the whole poem. It is also important to note that Young uses this natural setting, especially the sky at night, to lead him immediately to thoughts of God and of immortality. His recognition of the approach to religious ideas through nearness to nature and harmony with it put him directly in association through Cowper with Wordsworth.²⁵

Young's reaction against classicism and his corresponding advance toward romanticism are also apparent in his participation in the wave of moral reform as well as in his religious²⁶ and philosophical ideas. What has come to be known as “middle-class morality” has its roots in the eighteenth century in the need for ethical points of view suitable to the class which rose upon the basis of growing commerce and trade and later of industrialism. The Spectator papers of Addison were calculated to supply standards of taste and conduct to the new merchant class. Young had been associated with both Addison and Steele at the outset of his literary career, and it has been suggested that the moral tone of the periodicals of the day influenced his work. Perry says, “He put into somewhat formal language, adorned with much of the crude ore of Romanticism, the yearning of his century for morality. That, we saw, inspired a good part of the Spectator,”²⁷ and van Tieghem substantiates this point,²⁸ citing Heeg as authority that Young assimilated much from the periodicals of Addison and Steele.

The moral tone of which Young made so much in the Night Thoughts appears in all his writings from the earliest to the latest, and those who can see little that qualified Young for the priesthood would do well to look again at his early poetry. At any rate, by preaching morality, Young is again in the wave of developing romanticism. To religion and philosophy, however, Young contributed little. When he set out to supply the deficiencies of Pope's Essay on Man by singing “immortal man,” and to refute the optimism which Pope had borrowed from Shaftesbury, he undertook a task for which he was poorly qualified except emotionally, for Young was hardly more of a philosophical thinker than Pope, and the result was not a great contribution either to religion or to philosophy. Bernbaum considers the Night Thoughts “one of the most important poetical treatments of the theme of immortality between Davies' Nosce Teipsum (1599) and Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850),”²⁹ but except for Young's use of Newton's astronomical discoveries to support his argument, his theology and ethics were quite orthodox. Isabel St. John Bliss has shown that the Night Thoughts, especially the last four Nights, present a “rationalistic defence of religion,” and that this defense is “largely an expression of contemporary apologetics.”³⁰ It is not, then, as an original thinker that Young is important, but as a poet who expressed emotionally “the religious melancholy associated with problems of death and destiny,”³¹ and who asserted “the imaginative element in religion and philosophy which was left out of account by the wits and rationalists.”³² Young was in agreement with the Wesleyan teachings;³³ John Wesley admired Young's poem, publishing extracts from it in 1743 and further selections in 1770. If Young's religion gave him little comfort,³⁴ it served at least to supply him with poetical material that permitted him to show again his reaction to classical influences.

With the return to the past, the revival of medievalism, Young had almost no connection. Through the association of night and melancholy he shared in setting the vogue for one aspect of Gothicism, but his temper was completely of his own times,³⁵ and nowhere does the romantic past appear in his work. His attention was too constantly centered on himself in the Night Thoughts to permit him to explore bygone eras, nor would such exploration have suited his purpose.

The outstanding social development of the eighteenth century was the progress it made toward the democratic ideal, based on two essential doctrines: the idea of the innate worth and rights of the individual and the idea that progress was possible. Many critics have considered the distinguishing feature of romanticism to be its emphasis upon the liberty, spiritual and physical, of the individual.³⁶ Whether or not this can be demonstrated, it must be admitted that the struggle for individual rights plays an important part in the romantic movement. The discovery, then, that Young was an ardent individualist is not surprising. The fullest expression of his attitude is to be found in the Conjectures on Original Composition, though it is implied in most of his writings and especially permeates the Night Thoughts. His advocacy of individual rights, moreover, is grounded in his whole life and outlook upon the world; he was above all an intense egoist, who felt that his abilities, which he regarded as of a superior order, had never been duly recognized. In the Conjectures, written toward the close of his long career at the age of seventy-five, he stands out boldly for originality and against imitation precisely on the ground that imitation destroys natural individuality. He says:

Nay, so far are we from complying with a necessity, which nature lays us under, that … by a spirit of Imitation we counteract nature, and thwart her design. She brings us into the world all Originals. No two faces, no two minds, are just alike; but all bear nature's evident mark of separation on them. Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies? That meddling ape Imitation, as soon as we come to years of Indiscretion (so let me speak), snatches the pen, and blots out nature's mark of separation, cancels her kind intention, destroys all mental individuality.³⁷

In the Conjectures also are proofs that Young held democratic views and that he believed in progress. As to the first, he declares, “I think that human souls, thro' all periods, are equal,”³⁸ and as to the second, “As great, perhaps greater than those mentioned (presumptuous as it may sound) may, possibly, arise; for who hath fathomed the mind of man?”³⁹ Young had not arrived at these ideas late in life in reversal of earlier opinions. In a sermon which he preached before Parliament on the 30th of January, 1728-1729, in St. Margaret's Church, London, on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I, he discussed the social contract and the relation of the king to the people. The sermon, An Apology for Princes, was on the text “Honour the King,” and “the moral inculcated,” says Shelley, “was that kings and kingdoms perished and were forgotten if they were controlled by selfishness,”⁴⁰ and Thomas remarks, “Young prend position comme vrai liberal et se rattache aux disciples de Locke.”⁴¹ Young, then, by precept and example, shows his belief in individualism and progress, in the democratic ideal. To the humanitarianism which was one of the most prevalent literary by-products of this trend of thought the self-centered Young, however, pays little heed. A few lines scattered through the Imperium Pelagi and other odes might be construed as revealing a sympathy for the masses of humanity, but Young was too much concerned with himself to pursue this strain very far.

As long as there is dispute as to what romanticism means and what brought it about, there will be difference of opinion as to whether Young was or was not romantic. The evidence presented here indicates that he took a considerable part in those eighteenth-century literary manifestations which led, directly or indirectly, to later romanticism. That he did not participate more fully is due partly to the limitations of his personality and partly to the necessity which every writer is under of proceeding from the old to the new. Much later writers than Young worked long under the classical influence before they arrived at romantic expression, witness Gray, Cowper, Crabbe, Rogers, and Byron, among many. To deny, as does Havens, for one, that Young was romantic because the Night Thoughts in blank verse “did not begin to appear until its author had by his satires and his Two Epistles to Mr. Pope won recognition as a thorough-going classicist,”⁴² is to beg the whole question, for it strengthens rather than weakens the argument when a writer, like Young, having followed classical fashions, finds them exhausted and breaks out new paths. That is the exact temper of romanticism.⁴³

YOUNG'S MELANCHOLY AND HIS RELATION TO THE GRAVEYARD SCHOOL

                                                                                                    O Melancholy!
Who ever yet could sound thy bottom? find
The ooze, to show what coast thy sluggish crare
Might easiliest harbour in?

Cymbeline, Act IV, Scene 2

Melancholy and mortuary verse in a profusion hardly suspected until comparatively recently⁴⁴ was produced in elegies, monodies, epitaphs, and other forms of funeral verse in an unbroken succession from the Elizabethan age to the middle of the eighteenth century. This great stream of laments was for the most part non-literary and popular, the fugitive and occasional work of non-professional writers. It was principally the by-product of Puritanism, though the quite diverse influences of Burton and Milton entered largely into the tradition as time went on. What these two latter influences were is well summarized in the following passage:

In Il Penseroso Milton seems to react against Burton's conception altogether, and while keeping the word melancholy to describe the thoughtful mood of the man who loves to be alone by night, indoors or out, reading or simply musing by himself, or who by day courts the brown shadows in the close coverts of a wood by the brook, he deliberately rejects all the associations of the word with disease, madness, suicide and fear. Deliberately, also, he sets up a new set of connotations, with saintliness, with wisdom, with beauty, with leisure, with poetry, philosophy, and music, with lovely outdoor scenes, and with a widening experience maturing with age.⁴⁵

That eighteenth-century melancholy sometimes resembled the Miltonic variety may be taken for granted in the light of the extensive influence of Milton's poems, especially from about 1730 on. But recent investigation has conclusively demonstrated that the once commonly accepted attribution⁴⁶ of the whole stream of eighteenth-century gloomy verse to Miltonic influence is unsound.⁴⁷ The early eighteenth century, before the appearance of the chief works of the Graveyard poets, also developed a neo-classic melancholy, derived from the Latin classics and from Milton with some coloring of the early seventeenth-century idea of melancholy as Burton employed the term. Amy Reed, who has thoroughly investigated this development, distinguishes death, retirement, and the complaint of life as classic melancholy themes.⁴⁸

In the early eighteenth-century verse, both literary and non-literary, melancholy revealed four chief elements: the Puritan tradition of contempt for this world and of the terrors of damnation, the pathological melancholy of Burton's Anatomy, the pleasing and instructive Miltonic contemplative melancholy of Il Penseroso with an influence also from the representation of Satan in Paradise Lost, and finally a conventional neo-classic treatment concerned with death, retirement from the world, and the complaint of life.

Of quite another sort was the romantic melancholy of the Graveyard poets⁴⁹ with the exception of Gray, whose classical scholarship is perhaps the basis of that restraint which makes the melancholy of the Elegy more nearly Miltonic than that of any other poem of the school.⁵⁰ The themes employed by the poets of the school were very much the same as those of neo-classic melancholy—love, the transitoriness of fame and life, the pleasures of solitude and retirement, and the inevitability of death—but important new elements were added. These included all the Gothic paraphernalia of ruins, towers, chains, charnel houses, and vaults;⁵¹ many borrowings from nature and lengthy descriptions of landscape of the Thomsonian variety;⁵² an increasing sentimentalism; the use of much personal material and a more subjective attitude; philosophical and religious didacticism; and reflections on the social scene. These new elements, characteristic of neither seventeenth-century melancholy nor of the neo-classical variety of the earlier eighteenth century, are all part of what is meant by pre-romanticism. But still more pointedly is the romantic character of the Graveyard influence seen in the many changes of mood that were invoked in the treatment of melancholy themes. Besides the Miltonic mood of pleasing pensiveness already noticed, the Graveyard poets color their pages with a wide range of emotional states, among them tender sensibility and mild nostalgia; complete confidence in the soul-improving effects of solitude and religious contemplation; the acceptance of unhappiness as the norm of religious experience in a world of mutability, with the other world its goal and reward; tearfulness tinged with satisfaction and improvement, not to say pleasure, to the poet; grief for the departed; the consciousness of religious consolation; and, in the contemplation of death, terror, horror, fear, deep gloom, or resignation.

The chief founders of this Graveyard tradition were Parnell, Young, Blair, Thomas Warton, and Gray. Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) wrote little and was impartially cheerful and gloomy, both with an eye on Milton, and his chief importance is the pioneer one of giving literary value to the previously crude popular elegy; in no sense does he rival Young as an innovator. Robert Blair (1699-1746) produced The Grave, his only contribution to literature, and though it was extremely popular, lending its name to the whole school, the publication of the poem postdates that of the first four of Young's “Nights”; and Blair was isolated from his English contempories and was neither habitually gloomy nor pessimistic. Thomas Warton (1728-1790) wrote at seventeen and published two years later, in 1747, The Pleasures of Melancholy, an epitome of what romanticism had thus far achieved, reflecting Milton's influence, anticipating the Gothic revival, and expressing a quite conventional and assumed melancholy. Thomas Gray (1716-1771), though he is by far the finest poet as the Elegy is the greatest poem of the school, is not exclusively a Graveyard poet; and the Elegy chiefly influenced verse expressly labelled “Elegy” or recognizably elegiac, rather than the melancholy tradition in a wider sense; furthermore, the poem is in sharp contrast to Young, being restrained, compact, perfect in form, subtle, polished, and beautifully incised, with none of Young's insistence upon self.

In establishing the romantic mood of literary melancholy, chief place among the Graveyard poets must be given to Young. First, Young's work was far more popular than that of any other poet of the school; for several generations it was a “household book” to be found in nearly every “parlor.” This popularity extended to the Continent, especially France and Germany, where Young's masterpiece was highly regarded by both critic and general reader. The poem was translated into a dozen foreign languages and at home in England went through edition after edition.

Second, though sheer bulk may be a handicap and in Young's case is both that and a sign of imperfect art, the length of the Night Thoughts is important, for the highly emotional melancholy, spun out at excessive length and poured forth with no restraint whatever, with its images of night, tombs, death, and man in sorrow repeated endlessly, suited an age that was turning to sentimentalism.

Third, melancholy is more persistently and abundantly Young's mood than it is that of any other poet of the school. It is not confined by any means to the Night Thoughts, but appears in the dramas, in many of the minor poems, in the prose works, and in his life and letters. In fact, in no other mood was Young ever quite successful.

Fourth, Young's melancholy is more closely associated than is that of the rest of the school with religious and philosophical ideas, with thoughts of the world and man, life and its meaning, with death and immortality. The broad sweep of his canvas and the sombre tones in which he painted distinguish him from the other Graveyard poets, all of whom were narrower in range and less consistently gloomy.

Fifth, the relation between nature and melancholy in Young's work also sets him apart in several respects. Young is hardly to be considered a nature poet, but he was very much aware of the universe around him. His chief uses of nature are in establishing a melancholy milieu with a rather limited range of gloomy details, often repeated, and in connecting the idea of communion with nature with knowledge of God, a connection which the poet understood very well. Notable are the descriptions of the night sky as a symbol of God's love,⁵³ the arguments for immortality drawn from the heavens,⁵⁴ and the poet's cosmic journey in search of the abode of God.⁵⁵

Sixth, and most important, Young's melancholy is far more subjective and personal than that of any other poet of the Graveyard school, and it is this quality which chiefly warrants the claim for Young of a place in the romantic development. It is his own fate he fears. Young pours out his grief without restraint, his gloomy thoughts always centering in his own experience. Self is dominant. “Immortal man I sing,” he tells us, but it is his own immortality that he seeks to prove. It is this “unabashed egoism” that more than anything else differentiates Young from his fellows. Here, then, are six marks of difference between Young's melancholy and that of the other poets of the Graveyard school. Since his is the most popular, copious, persistent and consistent, religious and philosophical, cosmic, and personal contribution, it seems reasonable to consider him the poet of the school who did most to establish romantic melancholy in English poetry.

Notes

1. Discussions of the difficulties involved in defining “romanticism” or “Romanticism” and indications of possible solutions are to be found in Paul Kaufman, “Defining Romanticism: A Survey and a Program,” Modern Language Notes, XL (April, 1925), 193 ff; A. O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” Publications of the Modern Language Assn., (June, 1924), XXXIX, 229-253, republished in the author's Essays in the History of Ideas, 228-253; A. O. Lovejoy, “The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas, II, 237-278; Jacques Barzun, Romanticism and the Modern Ego; Jacques Barzun, “Romanticism: Definition of a Period,” Magazine of Art, XLII (Nov., 1949), 243; René Wellek, “The Concept of Romanticism,” Comparative Literature, I, II, (1949); and Morse Peckham, “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” Publications of the Modern Language Assn., LXVI (March, 1951), 5-23. The latter article advances a theory which harmonizes Lovejoy's “organicism, dynamism, and diversitarianism” with Wellek's “organicism, imagination, and symbolism,” but the present writer finds far less enlightening Peckham's statement that “the idea of the creative imagination is derived from dynamic organicism” than he does the statement of C. M. Bowra “for the Romantics imagination is fundamental, because they think that without it poetry is impossible. This belief in the imagination was part of the contemporary belief in the individual self.” (The Romantic Imagination, 1).

2. John W. Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism. This view, accepted by Cazamian among many others, though not indispensible here, aids in lessening the confusion which usually results when the Romantic Movement is discussed.

3. “Blank verse was restored by Thomson and Young.” Stopford A. Brooke, Naturalism in English Poetry, 28. This view is so thoroughly established that I have found no dissent from it.

4. It is interesting in this connection to note that Raymond Dexter Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry, 159, torn between a desire to show that Young was influenced by Milton and a still stronger unwillingness to admit Young into the select company of Miltonic imitators, concludes that the poet of the Night Thoughts “does not sound particularly Miltonic,” and adds, “The author of Conjectures on Original Composition was hardly the man to copy anyone.”

5. The Poetical Works of Edward Young, vol. II, 60.

6. Ibid., 164-165.

7. Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Edith J. Morley, 4.

8. Young's The Love of Fame, The Universal Passion, in Seven Characteristical Satires was published between 1725 and 1728, whereas Pope's Satires appeared between 1733 and 1738.

9. Young's desire to break away from current fashions is apparent in all his dramas. He was among the first of his age to seek inspiration in a return to Elizabethan models.

10. Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature, Revised Edition, Two Volumes in One, vol. II, 950. Dissent from this view of the critical importance of the Conjectures is expressed by George Sherburn, A Literary History of England (ed. A. C. Baugh), 945.

11. Loc. cit.

12. Eleanor M. Sickels, The Gloomy Egoist, 29. She also speaks of Young's “unabashed egoism,” 30.

13. Margaret Sherwood, Undercurrents of Influence in English Romantic Poetry, 90.

14. A. E. Powell (Mrs. E. R. Dodds), The Romantic Theory of Poetry, An Examination in the Light of Croce's Aesthetic, ch. I, 1. “The romantic artist, then, is one who values content more than form. He … prizes emotional experience for its own sake, and aims at enlarging men's power to experience.” So also Ernest Bernbaum.

15. “It was the adoption of Thomson's manner which gave him (Young) opportunity to spin out at such great length miscellaneous argument, reflection, and description in a composition lasting over several years and conceived, not as a whole, but as a series of postscripts to his first thought.” Amy Reed, The Background of Gray's Elegy, 180.

16. Harry Hayden Clark, “A Study of Melancholy in Edward Young,” Part II, Modern Language Notes, XXXIX, 1924, 202. “There lies a deep significance in the fact that, after the neo-classic artificiality, the return of ‘I’ to literature,—the subjective, introspective tone—should be inseparably linked to the return of melancholy.” To this last phrase Miss Sickels, op. cit., 30 and 352, n.62, rightly objects that “in the light of recent researches, to speak of the return of melancholy” is exaggeration.

17. Young shows this romantic tendency to a far greater extent than Thomson does. “Self-expression with Thomson was still something discreet and indirect; with Young, self comes into the foreground. His work represents the real beginning of the literature of sensibility. Necessarily subjective in principle, it tends with all its might to bring about the overthrow of the barriers of intellectuality, measure, and order, as well as the general self-effacement, by which classicism limited, repressed, and transposed the troubled, impatient flow of the inner life.” Legouis and Cazamian, op. cit., vol. II, 853-854. Amy Reed, op. cit., 192, also makes this comparison between Thomson and Young. “But whereas Thomson's meditations had been humane, benevolent, and for the most part objective, Young, a sick soul, a disappointed man, invariably proceeds from reflections on the misery of humanity to reflections upon his own wretchedness. He thus contributed to reflective poetry at this stage a strong infusion of self-pity, an elaborate self-analysis during a mood of grief.” See also Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, 362.

18. “Mason is plainly making fun of German bad taste, when he writes to Gray that he has met a Hanoverian lady who things the Elegy ‘pretty’ but who bursts into sentimental schwarmerei over Dr. Young and the ‘dear Nitt-Toats!’” Letters of Thomas Gray, ed. Tovey, vol. I, 264, quoted by Amy Reed, op. cit., 197, n. 24.

19. For the relation of sentimentalism and melancholy to Gothic romanticism, especially in Mrs. Radcliffe's work, see Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle, 46 ff.

20. “Young and Hervey are religious sentimentalists, who have also an eye to literary elegance.” Leslie Stephen, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, 161.

21. Naturalism in English Poetry, 31.

22. Young wrote, “Is it contrary to the common method of Providence, to let the best suffer the most? No. When the best do so suffer, does it not most deeply affect the human heart? Yes. And is it not your business to affect the human heart as deeply as you can? Yes.” This was written in 1744, when Young was engaged in the production of his own work, the seventh Night having appeared earlier the same year. The letter is quoted in Henry C. Shelley, The Life and Letters of Edward Young, 184.

23. See Emile Legouis, A Short History of English Literature, 229, and Eino Railo, op. cit., 22 et passim.

24. “What most struck his contemporaries in this long and confused outpouring was the setting—the vision of the poet meditating alone in the stillness of night, his thoughts haunting newly dug graves, yews and cypresses, with the pale rays of the moon shining down upon him,” op. cit., 229.

25. A good treatment of Young's use of nature may be found in C. E. De Haas, Nature and the Country in English Poetry of the First Half of the Eighteenth Century, 157-163. Young, says De Haas, “admits the exalting influence of mountains and rocks, and desert and the ocean, and this is significant in a period when the grand and terrible in nature was generally ignored or positively disliked,” ibid., 161. See also Myra Reynolds, The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry Between Pope and Wordsworth, 112 and 119-121, though Professor Reynolds finds little nature poetry in Young. Amy Reed, op. cit., 194, says, “Young's subjectivity extends to his nature descriptions and amounts to pathetic fallacy. He understood perfectly, says M. Thomas, the influence of natural scenery upon the course of thought, and the use that he made of it in his poem proves how far he had separated himself from the English neo-classic poets. Henceforward, melancholy remains indissolubly united to the shadows of evening, the darkness of midnight, or to the moonlight falling from a clear heaven, for Young's degree of melancholy is too deep for mere noonday retirement amid sylvan shadows. By his philosophy, then, Young recalls the religious melancholy of the seventeenth century; in his treatment of nature he is influenced by the growing fondness of readers for description, but narrows his choice of scenes to such as may appropriately be viewed through a mist of tears.” As a footnote to this, she quotes from M. Thomas, Le Poète Edward Young, 337, “Un homme s'abandonnant à sa doleur en face d'un paysage dont les ténèbres et l'aspect désolé semblant renforcer les plaintes de l'affligé, voilà ce qui constitue la nouveauté des Nuits.”

26. See Isabel St. John Bliss, “Young's Night Thoughts in Relation to Contemporary Christian Apologetics,” Publications of the Modern Language Assn., XLIX (1934) 37-70; this indispensable article establishes Young as a defender of religion against attacks by deists, atheists, and others.

27. Thomas Sergeant Perry, English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, 375.

28. P. van Tieghem, La Poesie de la Nuit et des Tombeaux en Europe au XVIIIe Siecle, 29, “M. Heeg a montré que Young doit aussi beaucoup aux périodiques moraux comme le Spectator, le Tatler, le Guardian, dont il s'est assimilé les idées et même les développements. Il cite une page du Guardian ou l'athée tient le même langage que Lorenzo dans les Nuits. Philander et Lucia sont des noms qui se trouvent dans le Tatler. C'est là qu'il a pris ses idées, car penseur, il ne l'était guère. Ces empruntes expliquent certaines parenthèses qui étonnent: elles se trouvaient dans ces modèles.” Bruno Heeg's work is, Edward Young's “Night Thoughts.” Der Einfluss der zeitgenössischen Dichtung und Philosophie auf die Night Thoughts und Quellen derselben. Diss., Leipzig, 1901 I have been unable to see this work.

29. Ernest Bernbaum, Guide Through the Romantic Movement, Second edition, 14.

30. “Young's Night Thoughts in Relation to Contemporary Christian Apologetics,” Publications of the Modern Language Assn., XLIX (1934), 37-70.

31. Legouis and Cazamian, op. cit., vol. II, 853.

32. Leslie Stephen, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, 106.

33. Legouis and Cazamian, op. cit., vol. II, 957.

34. Rose Macaulay, Some Religious Elements in English Literature, 147.

35. “We must never forget that Young was the forerunner and the source of one of the great romantic tendencies in poetry—a tendency which endures, even to the present day; nor must we forget, if we wish to be accurate in stating his place in this romantic melancholy, that it was the melancholy of the present, of man seen in his own time—that it had nothing to do with that other branch of the romantic melancholy, the sad regret for the vanished splendours of the past.” Stopford A. Brooke, Naturalism in English Poetry, 34.

36. For a discussion of romanticism as individualism from the point of view of philosophy, see The Romantic Theory of Poetry, by A. E. Powell, especially Chapter I, “The Romantic Ideal,” 1-14. See also William H. Crawshaw, The Making of English Literature, 221-227 et passim, where the theory is advanced that “the new force was more than anything else the force of Individualism”; Crane Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists, 19 ff; and Margaret Sherwood, op. cit., ch. I, “A Great Transition Period.”

37. Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Edith J. Morley, 1918, 19.

38. Ibid., 10.

39. Ibid., 22.

40. The Life and Letters of Edward Young, 99.

41. Op. cit., 172.

42. Op. cit., 18.

43. In The Romanticism of Edward Young, Harry Hayden Clark finds twelve indications of Young's romanticism: “(1) scorn for the commonplace and the actual world, (2) praise of a solitude unique and distinctive, (3) apotheosis of the lawless, creative, idyllic imagination, (4) indeterminate expansiveness in the guise of religious aspiration, (5) praise of art as a means of play and escape, (6) contempt for rules and restrictions, (7) preference for native genius rather than culture and the classics, (8) recognition of nature as the ‘felt presence of the deity,’ (9) hostility to imitation and praise of militant individualism, (10) glorification of the master-passion and the hope of progress, (11) praise of a unique and idiosyncratic subjectivity, (12) the parading of a personal and singular melancholy.” Most of these points have been discussed in the present chapter.

44. John W. Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism; Amy Reed, The Background of Gray's Elegy; Eleanor M. Sickels, The Gloomy Egoist, Moods and Themes of Melancholy from Gray to Keats; Margaret Sherwood, Undercurrents of Influence in English Romantic Poetry; and Raymond Dexter Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry.

45. Amy Reed, op. cit., 19.

46. See especially H. A. Beers, A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century, ch. V, “The Miltonic Group.” In setting down the whole body of mid-century funeral poetry as the “Il Penseroso School,” (162, 175), Beers, faced with a dilemma concerning Young, whose Night Thoughts have no hint of the Miltonic mood, simply ruled Young out as a Romanticist (163-164). Phelps, whose Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement is based upon lectures by Beers, later expanded into his own work, closely follows Beers here as everywhere else. See ch. V, “The Influence of Milton in the Romantic Movement.—The Literature of Melancholy.”

47. Draper, op. cit., 13-17; Amy Reed, op. cit., 19 et passim; R. D. Havens, op. cit., 472; and Sickels, op. cit., 11-14. See also Havens, “The Literature of Melancholy,” Modern Language Notes, vol. XXIV, No. 7, November, 1909.

48. Op. cit., see especially 38 ff.

49. R. D. Havens, op. cit., 472, says, “It has often been thought that Il Penseroso had not a little to do with the rise of the ‘graveyard school’ of poetry that flourished in the eighteenth century, a natural assumption that is not borne out by the facts.” See also the same writer's “The Literature of Melancholy,” Modern Language Notes, vol. XXIV, No. 7, November, 1909.

50. Draper, op. cit., 16 and n. 64, and Sickels, op. cit., 14.

51. See Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle. A Study in the Elements of English Romanticism, London, 1927. Two very important studies are Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror, 1921, and Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest, 1939.

52. Cf. Myra Reynolds, The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry between Pope and Wordsworth.

53. Night Thoughts, edited by James Robert Boyd, Third Revised Edition. Nights IV, V, and IX.

54. Ibid., Nights IV, VII, and IX.

55. Ibid., Night IX, 1676-1895.