‘Radical insincerity’ in Edward Young’s Night thoughts

STEVE CLARK

The importance of George Eliot’s essay, ‘Worldliness and other-worldliness: the poet Young’, as an historical demarcation of the writer’s reputation has probably been exaggerated. Her vigorous and principled onslaught stifles an attempted revival rather than dethrones an established eminence.I Her central charge of ‘radical insincerity as a poetic artist‘, however, persists even in an age which would largely disown her blunt juxtaposition of text and biography. It ought, in principle, to be as misguided to berate Night thoughts on account of Young’s indefatigable place-seeking as to castigate James Macpherson for not being a prehistoric Caledonian bard.”

It might be argued that our secular age is simply historically estranged from the emotionally heightened meditation of Night thoughts, and that the discursive theological poem now performs an ’obsolete task’.3 Yet this seems unlikely when the genre persists in such major twentieth-century works as Eliot’s Four quartets, and Stevens’ Notes towards a supreme fiction. The virulence of rejection seems more based on a sense of affrighted decorum. The poem is treated not merely with neglect, but with active vituperation. Our mortality remains a taboo area, painfully vulnerable. It demands a local anaesthetic of sincerity to facilitate a pact of solidarity with a similarly transient subjectivity. Night thoughts flouts this expectation: it seems brazen, coarse, almost frivolous in its habitual self-induced histrionics. The text is preoccupied with arabesquing while gesturing at eternal truths, and so becomes peculiarly odious to critics committed to an ideal of moral seriousness.4

Eliot’s onslaught retains more than polemic value, however, for its intimate insight into the gratifications of other-worldliness:

In Young, we have the type of that deficient human sympathy, that impiety towards the present and visible, which flies for its motives, its sanctities, and its

I . Quotations from Young, unless otherwise indicated, are from Edward Young: Night thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge 1989). ‘Worldliness and other worldliness: the poet Young’, Westminster review 67 (1857). p.142. reprinted in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney [hereafter ’Eliot’] (London 1968), p.335-85 (p.366). The major decline probably occurred between 1824 and 1832, a period in which the previously spectacular record of reprinting dwindled to a single pocket edition; see Henry Pettit, The English rejection of Young’s ‘Night thoughts’ (Boulder, Colorado 1957), p.23-38.

2. For a more sympathetic account. see Dustin Griffin. Literary patronage in England. 1650-1800 (Cambridge I 996). p. I 5 5-69.

3. Pat Rogers, The Augustan vision (London, 1y74), p.129. 4. See. for example, the outburst from the usually magnanimous R. D. Havens, The Influence of

Milton on Engfishpoetry (Cambridge, MA 1922). p.149.

British journdfor eighteenth-century studies 20 (1997). p.173-86 0 BSECS 0141-876X

I74 STEVE CLARK

religion, to the remote, the vague, and the unknown: in Cowper we have the type of that genuine love which cherishes things in proportion to their nearness, and feels its reverence grow in proportion to the intimacy of its knowledge.5

Cowper becomes the ‘type’ of sincerity through exemplifying the principle of sympathetic imagination: the appeal to spontaneity is itself grounded in the analytic abstraction of eighteenth-century associationist psychology. It is supposed that ‘intimacy’ of knowledge, or, to put it more technically, contiguity of ideas, involving strict fidelity to the charged particular, will induce a progressive enlargement of the faculty of benevolence, and thus a ‘reverence’ towards the human and natural worlds. Night thoughts ‘flies from’ any such dependence on the ‘present and visible’,

or authenticity founded thereon. It admits only the most stylised of personas, establishes no social context in which sympathy might operate, and presents human relationships solely in terms of worldly attachments to be cast off. (Even the praise of friendship ‘Know’st thou, Lorenzo! what a Friend contains?’ (2: 461) is immediately retracted as a deception, an additional vulnerability: ‘But Friends, how mortal? Dangerous the Desire’, 3: IS.) There is a ruthless paring down to the solitude of the night-time vigil:

By Day the Soul is passive, all her Thoughts Impos’d, precarious, broken, e’er mature. By Night from Objects free, from Passion cool, Thoughts uncontroul’d, and unimpress’d, the Births Of pure Election, arbitrary range, Not to the Limits of one World confin’d: But from Etherial Travels light on Earth, As Voyagers drop Anchor, for Repose. ( 5 : I 18-25)

Whereas the daytime self, exposed to the sensory world, is simultaneously fractured and predetermined, its nocturnal speculations remain ‘uncontroul’d, and unimpress’d’.6 We should take ‘arbitrary’ seriously, with its conflation of the unrestrained exercise of the will (OED, 4), with caprice, wilfulness (OED, 3 ) . The ‘Births / Of pure Election’ scorn the ‘limits of one World’:

Loose me from Earth’s Inclosure, from the Sun’s Contracted Circle set my Heart at large: Eliminate my Spirit, give it Range Through Provinces of Thought yet unexplor’d; (9: 588-91)

To ‘eliminate’ is to thrust out of doors, expel (OED, I); being ‘set [...I at large’ presupposes relinquishing the support and security offered by the ‘Inclosure’ and the ‘Contracted Circle’, terms which recall the ‘dark Room’ of the Lockean self and its sensory ‘Horizon’.7 This externalisation of psychic space is a characteristic

5. Eliot, p.385. 6 . ‘For in bare naked Perception, the Mind is, for the most part, only passive: and what it perceives

it cannot avoid perceiving’: John Locke, An Essay concerning human understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford 1975; rev. edn 1982). n.ix.§~.

7. Essay. I.i.57; II.xi.SI7.

‘Radical insincerity’ in Edward Young’s ‘Night thoughts’ I 75

strategy of the poem: the ‘bold excursions of the human mind’ into the ‘vast void beyond real existence’ are directed primarily against internalised prohibitioa8

Thus the cosmic voyage mirrors the retreat into inner darkness: Darkness has more Divinity for me: It strikes Thought inward: it drives back the Soul To settle on Herself, our Point supreme! ( 5 : 128-30)

‘Strikes [...I inward’ and ‘drives back’ might lead one to expect that the ‘Magic, at this planetary Hour’ (9: 2088) would produce a kind of mystical introspection. Yet this remains the voice of consciousness, deracinated certainly, but unwilling even to blur its boundaries. Young is customarily grouped in the ‘Graveyard school’ of the 1740s yet there are remarkably few attempts to evoke the reek of mortality in Night thoughts: ‘The Knell, the Shroud, the Mattock, and the Grave: / The deep, damp Vault, the Darkness, and the Worm’ are summoned only to be immediately dismissed as ‘Imagination’s Fool’ (4: 10-11, 14). ‘So far from aught Romantic, what I sing’ (8: 1187) declares Young, and the lunar meditation, far from inviting the soul to ‘settle’ in a soothing realm of reverie, demands the expulsion from the ‘visionary Mind’ of all ‘gay Chimzeras, 1 All the wild Trash of Sleep’ (8: 69-70):

I wake, emerging from a sea of Dreams Tumultuous: where my wrecked desponding Thought, From wave to wave offancg’d Misery, At random drove, her helm of Reason lost ... (I: 912)

We have already seen that the perspective of the ‘Point supreme’ is profoundly hostile to the dependence of the Lockean self on sensory ideas. What is less often recognised is that there is antagonism towards the associations underlying not only dream and fancy, but also ‘mental Individuality’ itself.9

Young’s Preface insists that ‘AS the Occasion of this Poem was Real, not Fictitious; so the Method pursued in it, was rather imposed, by what spontaneously arose in the Author’s Mind on that Occasion, than meditated, or designed’. The poem could be viewed as oscillating between the ‘Group / Of bright Ideas’ ( 3 : 945) surrounding Narcissa, and the ‘Hydru-Woe’ ( 3 : 242) resulting from her death. But there is no interest whatsoever in psychological verisimilitude. The processes of mental connection, so nuanced and implicit in Collins and Gray, are here overt and rhetorical:

In ev’ry vary’d Posture, Place, and Hour, How widowed ev’ry Thought of ev’ry Joy? Thought, busy Thought1 too busy for my Peace, Thro’ the dark Postern of Time long elaps’d.

8. Conjectures on original composition in a letter addressed to the author oJSir Charles Grandison, 2nd edn (London 1759: repr. Menston 1966). p.70. Locke comments on ‘All those sublime thoughts, which towre above the Clouds, and reach as high as Heaven itself’ that ‘In all that great Extent wherein the mind wanders, in those remote Speculations, it may seem to be elevated with, it s t i s not one jot beyond those Ideas. which Sense or Reflection, have offered for its Contemplation’ (II.i.§24).

9. Conjectures. p.42.

176 STEVE CLARK

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 Desart now: and meets the Ghosts Of my departed Joys, a numerous Train! (I: 220-29)

The puppetry of Young’s ‘boundless theatre of thought’ (9: 1392) reduces emotional crisis to a coup de thedtre. ‘Posture, Place, and Hour’ are externalised in a form of three-dimensional geometry, with the narrator himself voyeuristically savouring the internal drama of his own emotions. Thought changes kom victim to instigator, from passivity to predatory intent, a villain creeping across the boards: the proleptic parentheses seem to urge us to hiss as it delves into the ’Postern’.IO But there is nothing confessional in this incantation of the past. Certainly, memory is engaged on a continual retrospective totting up, an ‘Avarice of TIME’ (2: 25): “Tis greatly wise to talk with our past Hours’, but only to ‘ask them, what report they bore to Heaven’ (2: 376-77). And ’Treacherous Conscience’ (2: 256) is committed to continual insidious betrayal, a regime of pure indictment:

The sly Informer minutes every Fault, And her dread Diary with Horror fills... Unnoted, notes each Moment rnisapply’d: In leaves more durable than leaves of Brass, Writes our whole History: (2: 262-63, 273-75)

Young’s text seeks to annex the authority of this ‘dread Diary’: to speak from outside time with absolute knowledge, absolute repudiation.

The sheer bulk of Night thoughts would seem to demand to be fleshed out with some personal reminiscence. Yet apart from a bitter account of court patronage (’Refusal! canst thou wear a smoother Form!’, 4: 63) there is virtually nothing: Young’s own ‘whole History’ remains completely unexposed. Occasional arch hints of personal tragedy are dropped:

Why thy peculiar rancor wreckd on me? Insatiate Archer! could not One suffice? Thy shaft flew thrice, and thrice my Peace was slain (I: 210-12)

but even if these were not demonstrably fictitious, would this teasing biographical reticence be sufficient to lure us into empathy with such relentless, monstrous egotism?I1 George Eliot nevertheless tries to salvage the ‘morbid exaggerations’ of the earlier nights psychologically: ‘There is already some artificiality even in his grief, and feeling often slides into rhetoric, but through it all we are thrilled

10. ‘Postern’ is Locke’s term for a kind of psychic anteroom, where ideas congregate before being admitted to consciousness (II.iii.51).

11. For example, Young’s step-daughter, Elizabeth Temple. the prototype for Narcissa, far from being abandoned in an unmarked grave, was buried with respectable ceremony in the Swiss cemetery in Lyons. For an example of avid but groundless speculation. see The Works ofMrs Catherine Cockburn, 2 vols (London, I~SI), ii.315.

‘Radical insincerity’ in Edward Young’s ‘Night thoughts‘ I 77

with the unmistakeable cry of pain, which makes us tolerant of egoism and hyperbole.’ I2

I would reverse this, and say that though there is some grief even in his artificiality, the pleasure and the power of the text lie not in an authenticity momentarily brought on by pressure of bereavement, but in a rhetorical exhi- bitionism pushed to the point of paradoxical selflessness in this ‘uninterrnittent flux of admonition’:I3

Dost ask Lorenzo, why so warmly prest. By Repetition hammer’d on thine Ear, The Thought of Death? (5: 682-84).

Night thoughts is a supremely undidactic poem, its pretence at ratiocination invariably local and opportunist. We grow to feel that these are only matters of life and death, nothing important: ‘Or Life, or Death, is equal; neither weighs’ (4: I 5 0 ) . The power of nature lies in its subjection of the body to time and hence mortality: Young’s poetic voice refuses to concede this dependence, remaining completely disembodied, impossible to situate either spatially or perspectivally. I4

Its ascendancy depends neither on the coherence of its arguments, nor the conversion of an opponent, but on its own tirelessly ingenious self-perpetuation. Like the tale-telling of Scheherazade or the endless aggregation of the medieval testament poem, its ‘copiousness’ and ‘redundancy of thought’ seek not to explain or justify death, but merely to defer it:’5

Silence, how dead? and Darkness, how profound? Nor Eye, nor list’ning Ear, an object finds: Creation sleeps. ’Tis, as the general Pulse Of life stood still, and Nature made a Pause: An aweful pausel prophetic of her End. (I: 21-25)

If ‘Creation sleeps’, the voice will falter, the ‘Pulse’ stutter and fade, and the ‘Pause’ expand into an actual death. Like the weary ‘Traveller’, who ‘chaunts his Sonnet to deceive the Time I Till the due Season calls him to Repose’, Young seeks to ‘chase the Moments‘ (9: I , 6-7, IS). In this cause, the narrator must

Torture Invention, all Expedients tire, To lash the ling’ring moments into speed: And whirl us (happy riddance!) from ourselves. (2: 117-19)

12. Eliot, p.365-66. 13. Eliot, p.379. 14. One of the few available proofs of God absent from the poem is the teleological argument from

the structure of the body. See Isabel St John Bliss, ‘Young’s Night thoughts in relation to contemporary Christian apologetics’, PMLA 9.1 (1934), p.37-70 (p.57). 15. Samuel Johnson, Lives ofthe English poets. ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols (Oxford, 1905). iii.396; Thomas

Gray, The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols (Oxford 1935; rev. H. W. Stan-. 1971), AppendixZIII. p.1292. Cf. Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford 1991). P.35.

178 STEVE CLARK

I now wish to explore this ecstasy of ‘riddance’ in the context of what Thomas Campbell termed Young’s ‘ingenuity in the false sublime’. I6

The pursuit of sublimity has been made to excuse a multitude of sins in eighteenth-century poetry. Young, I believe, is best treated in terms of a sub- tradition of conscious bombast. It is only a short step, after all, from Edmund Burke’s argument that the ‘power of raising sensible images’ deprives poetry of a ‘considerable part of its energy’, to a rhetoric that systematically evacuates any sensory underpinning whatsoever.’7 As George Eliot says, Young’s ‘grandilo- quence’ refuses to take ‘for a criterion the true qualities of the object described, or the emotion expressed’. The ‘empty wordiness’ and ‘utter inanity’ of its centrifugal hyperbole induce us to ‘float’ amidst an ungrounded, irresponsible profusion of words.18

The aesthetic tradition exemplified by Robert Lowth and, to a lesser extent, by Burke regards the mind as compelled ‘to exert its utmost faculties’ through the experience of the sublime. It is paradoxically ennobled through its ultimate failure of understanding, which itself becomes a negative mode of transcend- ence.I9 Young, in contrast, is only interested in ‘Comprehension’s absolute Defeat’ (9: I 107). Night thoughts systematically belittles and repudiates the exercise of judgement in order to ‘whirl us [...I from ourselves’.

I would therefore argue that the isolated reference in the Conjectures to the ‘vegetable nature’ of the ‘Original’ that grows ‘spontaneously from the vital root of Genius’, has little or no relevance to Young’s own poetry. Such an organicist aesthetic would appear to elevate the synthesising power of creative imagination over the ‘Manufacture wrought by those Mechanics, Art, and Labour, out of preexistent materials not their own’. Yet ‘Art’ is itself categorised with ‘Labour’ as ‘Mechanics’, and so opposed to the faculty of ‘Genius’ which ‘differs from a good Understanding, as a Magician from a good Architect: That raises his structure by means invisible: This by skilful uses of common tools’. The Lockean ideal of the ‘Workmanship of the Understanding’ (III.iii.§~z) evident in the ‘Architect’ employing ‘common tools’ upon ‘pre-existent materials’ is antithetical to the ‘means invisible’ of ‘Genius’, whose power resides in its systematic transgression

16. Thomas Campbell’s brilliant remarks appear in Specimens of the British poets. 7 vols (London, 1819), vi.43-49 (p.45). ’Riddance’, incidentally, is defined by Johnson as I) Deliverance: z) Disen- cumbrance: loss of something one is glad to lose: 3) Act of clearing away any encumbrances.

I 7. A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beauti@, ed. J. T. Boulton (London 1958), V.v.170, V.iii.166. I would argue that Peri Bathous: or, the art of sinking in poetry, ed. E. L. Steeves (New York I952), is best read as a tribute to this new and highly respected idiom. Even Johnson remarks, almost fondly, ‘let burlesque try to go beyond him’, Lives iii.398.

18. Eliot, p.366-67. 19. ‘The greatness of the subject may be justly estimated by its difficulty: and while the imagination

labours to comprehend what is beyond its powers, this very labour itself. and these ineffectual endeavours, sufficiently demonstrate the immensity and sublimity of the object’, De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (Oxford I753), trans. G. Gregory as Lectures on the sacredpoetry of the Hebrews, z vols (London, 1787), i.353. Compare Burke, IV.i.134-36.

‘Radical insincerity’ in Edward Young’s ‘Night thoughts’ I 79

of the ‘informing Radius’ of ‘Prose-Men’: ‘Oft bursts my Song beyond the bounds of Life’ (I: 453).20

It may now be useful to consider the passage on which M. H. Abrams places so much emphasis, as giving the mind an ‘active partnership’ in sense perception and expounding the subjectivism implicit in a doctrine of original genius.” ‘Where, thy true Treasure?’, it is asked:

Seek in thy naked Self, and 6nd it There. In Being so Descended, Form’d, Endow’d; Sky-born, sky-guided, sky-returning Race! Erect, Immortal, Rational, Divine1 In Senses, which inherit Earth, and Heavens: Enjoy the various riches Nature yields: Far nobler! give the riches they enjoy; Give tast to Fruits: and harmony to Groves; Their radiant beams to Gold, and Gold’s bright Sire: Take in, at once, the Landscape of the world, At a small Inlet, which a Grain might close, And half create the wonderous World, they see. Our Senses, as our Reason, are Divine. But for the magic Organ’s powerful charm, Earth were a rude, uncolour’d Chaos still. Objects are but the Occasion: Ours th’ Exploit: Ours is the Cloth, the Pencil, and the Paint, Which Nature’s admirable Picture draws; And beautifies Creation’s ample Dome. Like Milton’s Eve, when gazing on the Lake, Man makes the matchless Image, man admires. (6: 413, 416-36)

‘Naked’ ushers in a number of reminiscences of Milton’s Paradise, becoming a virtual synonym for unfallen: for once, Young steers clear of the potential opposition between self and soul (a more typical usage would be: ‘Heaven’s Sovereign saves all Beings, but Himself, / That hideous Sight, a naked human Heart’, 3: 226-27). ‘Being’ is best read as a noun, in apposition to ‘Senses’: ‘Descended’ stresses heavenly ancestry rather than present diminishment, and ‘Endow’d’ suggests a reverse upward movement after the potential constriction of ‘Form’d’. Similarly, the locative force of ‘in’, inside, is immediately mitigated by the stress on inheritance. Yet even here the senses are elided rather than enhanced. In itself, Nature ‘yields’ nothing but a ‘rude, uncolour’d Chaos’: a ‘magic Organ’ conveniently appears, to give the various ‘riches’ that the senses ’enjoy’. How durable is its ’charm’? Is the beautifying of the ‘ample dome’ of the

20. Conjectures. p.12. 26-27, 30; Essay. III.iii.§~z. For more on Locke’s vocabulary of the ‘Industry and labour of thought’ (IV.iii.s6), see William Walker, L o c k literary criticism, and philosophy (Cambridge 1994). p.43-54.

21. M. H. Abrarns, The Mirror and the lamp: romantic theory and the critical tradition (New York and Oxford I953), p.63. One hundred and fifty lines before this passage, it should be noted, ‘Genius and Art’ are vigorously denounced as ‘Ambition’s boasted Wings’ and ’Dredalian Enginery!’ (6: 259. 261).

I80 STEVE CLARK

horizon merely ornamental! Or have we nothing but an ‘admirable Picture’, and no knowledge of the actual world? The allusion to Eve need not be favourable: a ‘matchless’ image is unreal as well as peerless, no more than a transient and insubstantial reflection. There is no stability in the ‘active partnership’ proposed, but rather a violent see-sawing. At one extreme, the object world becomes no more than the barest pretext for the activity of a faculty virtually ceded to the realm of spirit; there is, at the other, an undermining self-doubt as to the validity of the world so created.zz

The tendency towards chiasmus in Young’s poetry is too strong to be checked more than momentarily. As George Eliot observes, ‘in his gravest arguments, as well as in his lightest satire, one might imagine he had set himself to work out the problem, how much antithesis might be got out of a given s~bject’ .~3 His meditative style represents an extreme mutation of a Senecan format, aphoristic, ejaculatory, static, ~elf-elaborating.~4 The extreme segmentation of the verse, its over-punctuation, its insistence on the line unit are all designed to give the minimum personal inflection. It is a rhetoric of overworked surface in the service of hyperbolic declamation, punchy, staccato, always aiming for immediate impact, and so overworking the word or phrase at the expense of the sentence. It binds its periods together through a protracted series of antitheses, yet the transitions between individual lines are recklessly elliptical, insisting on the distance between statements rather than their relation:

How poor? how rich? how abject? how august? How complicat? how wonderful is Man? How passing wonder HE, who made him such? Who center’d in our make such strange Extremes? ... An Heir of Glory! a frail Child of Dust! Helpless Immortal! Insect infinite! A Worm! a God! I tremble at myself, And in myself am lost1 At home a Stranger, Thought wanders up and down, surpriz’d, aghast, And wond’ring at her own: How Reason reels? (I: 67-71, 78-83)

Nothing is ‘center’d in our make’: instead the rhetoric provides a matrix within which a purely formal series of displacements and permutations occurs. There is no emotional development: instead, an intensification of compression produces a momentary climax of self-abnegation. The ‘I’ is trapped within the up-and- down motion of the continuous reversals, undergoing a kind of sea-sickness amidst the choppy substitutions. The resulting personification of ‘thought’

22. For further discussion of the ’magic Organ’, see D. W. Odell, ‘Locke, Cudworth and Young’s Night thoughts’, ELN 4 (1967), p.188-93. Marjorie Hope Nicolson notes that colour, and the subjectivity implied thereby, are almost completely absent from the poem. Newton demands the muse: Newton’s ‘Opticks’ and the eighteenth-century poets (Princeton 1946), p.150.

23. Eliot, p.362. 24. His dramatic verse is comparatively fluent and continuous, though still essentially apostro-

phaic. and inclined to be end-stopped. The plays themselves can be summarised in a line from The Brothers: ‘Ye dreadful shambles, cakd with human blood’, The Works of the author of ‘The Night thoughts’. In four volumes, revised and corrected by hiinsey, 4 vols (London 1757), ii.277.

‘Radical insincerity’ in Edward Young’s ‘Night thoughts’ I 8 I

is strangely indeterminate. Rather than providing a means of renewed self- understanding, it gazes back, offering a momentary panicky disengagement from the relentless throb of paradox, a space for disquiet which is impossible to sustain against the pressure of ‘strange Extremes’.

There is no attempt at synthesis, merely unrestrained indulgence of mutually exacerbating polarities of feeling, which the poetic voice not merely presides over, but continues to inflame, accentuate, titillate. Johnson refers to Young’s ‘ebullitions’, the keeping of liquid at boiling point, the moment of its transforma- tion into g a ~ . ~ 5 This is particularly apt for his use of prosopopcia, momentary shadowy manifestations that with equal suddenness obtrude from and dissolve back into the garrulousness of the text:

A World, where Lust of Pleasure, Grandeur, Gold, Three Dlernons that divide its Realms between them, With Strokes alternate buffet to and fro Man’s restless Heart, their Sport, their flying Ball; Till, with the giddy Circle, sick, and tir’d, It pants for Peace, and drops into Despair (8: 55-59)

‘Dgmons’ presiding over ‘Realms’ perform a children’s game with an actual heart, ‘restless’ from ambition and given no respite (fi-om the ’Strokes’). Though it ‘drops’ fatigued in the final line, a neutered and dependent entity, we are not told that the enthusiasm of its tormentors has slackened, so presumably the game goes on. Personification becomes extended conceit driven on by spurts of incongruity. Unlike empirical abstraction or Platonic archetype, there is no cognitive claim involved. Young flaunts the power of genius ‘to reign arbitrarily over its own empire of Chimeras’.26 This holds sway over not merely local ornament, but also the dominant themes of Death and Time:

Who can take Death’s Portrait true? the Tyrant never sate. Our Sketch, all random Strokes, Conjecture all; Close shuts the Grave, nor tells one single Tale. Death, and his Image rising in the Brain Bear faint resemblance: never are alike: (6: 52-57)

Intellectual incapacity is seized upon as rhetorical opportunity. The necessary substitution of ‘random Strokes’ for any stable definition based on sensory ideas becomes the liberating pretext for genius to produce divine truths, ‘as wantonly as it will’, in forms ‘infinitely compounded, raised, burlesqued, dishonoured, or

Similarly, ‘AIl sensual Man, because untouch’d, unseen, / He looks

25. Lives, iii.397. 26. Conjectures, p.37. 27. Conjectures. p.38. Compare the denunciation of ’the diminishing imagery of our notions’

because all ‘sensible representations’ of the Deity ‘derogate from his dignity’, The Centaur notfubuIous. In six letters to ufriend on the Ziie in vogue, Works, iv.89-285 (p.118-19).

182 STEVE CLARK

on Time, as nothing’, and time takes revenge in a succession of extravagant metaphoric guises: ‘to stand blank Neuter he disdains’ (2: 1g2-93).28

Yet if no binding definition can be offered, ‘why’, as Young asks, ‘on Time so lavish is my Song?’ (2: 284). The most obvious rationale is that the poem both triumphs over and ultimately redeems time through adopting a Christian scheme of fall, redemption, and apocalypse. Yet such a stress on eventual integration is completely at variance with the chiasmic reversal that dominates the poem both rhetorically and thematically. The poem seeks to close, as it began, on ‘Tir’d nature’s sweet Restorer, balmy Sleep!’ (I: I):

Man’s rich Restorative: his balmy Bath, That supples, lubricates, and keeps in Play, The various Movements of this nice Machine, Which asks such frequent Periods of Repair. When tir’d with vain Rotations of the Day, Sleep winds us up for the succeeding Dawn: Fresh we spin on, till Sickness clogs our Wheels, Or Death quite breaks the Spring, and Motion ends. When will it end with Me? (9: 21 86-94)

The undemonstrativeness of the final question, its subdued directness, exposes the hollowness of the previous invocation. After the gaseous emotions of ‘airy Travel unconfin’d’ (9: 1879), there can be no re-entry of the mortal body. A Cartesian dualism lurks below the surface, consigning the ‘nice Machine’ to the realm of matter and motion (’Repair’ shades from retreat into a literal servicing, mending). Our temporal selves are helpless to do otherwise than ‘spin on’; we must look to Young’s rhetoric rather than his theology for reIease from the ‘vain Rotations’:z9

Ere man has measured half his weary Stage, His Luxuries have left him no reserve, No maiden Relishes. unbroacht Delights; On cold-serv’d Repetitions He subsists, And in the tasteless Present chaws the Past: Disgusted chews, and scarce can swallow down. (3: 3 I 6-2 I)

The recurrent metaphor of consumption identifies stale familiarity with jaded epicureanism - ‘To surfeit on the Same’ (3: 334); the senses themselves become mere vehicles of defiling sensuality. ‘The Rational foul Kennels of Excess! / Still- streaming Thorough fairs of dull Debauch!’ (3: 34-45). The poem dramatises the constrictions of the Lockean self (‘life’s sick, nauseous Iteration’, 3: 369), with great verve and ingenuity, in order to propel itself outwards against them.3”

28. My favourite is the hours, months, and days returning, on ‘unequal plumes’, to Time ‘In his Imnlutability to nest’ (2: 219). though Father T i e impaling himself ‘on his own Scythe‘ also has considerable charm (9: 308).

29. Compare the description of Ixion’s wheel as ‘endless rotation in unaltered circles of present pleasure’, Centaur. Works, iv.96-98.

30. Among the guises in which it appears are ‘Vestibule’, ‘gross impediment’ and ‘Shell’ (I : 123. 126, 131): ’Involving Cloud and ’Dark Lattice’ (3: 451. 473): ‘Cell of the Creation’ (6: 138): ‘subterranean Den’ (7: 802) and ‘dark, incarcerating Colony’ (4: 665).

‘Radical insincerity‘ in Edwnr-d Young’s ‘Night thoughts’ I 8 3

Our Freedom chain‘d: quite wingless our Desire; In Sense dark-prison’d All that ought to soar; (2: 343-44)

Thro’ Chinks, styl’d Organs, dim Liff peeps at light ( 3 : 450)

Thus the asserted plenitude of the ‘Infinite’ justifies the actual repudiation of the sensory.

I now wish to discuss how this stance of repudiation serves to unify Young‘s sublime and satiric modes.

Wordsworth praised Night thoughts, along with The Task, as poetry of a ‘composite order’, mixing Idyllium, Didactic and philosophical Satire.3I There is little or no descriptive verse, and the didacticism merely reiterates, albeit circuitously, ‘the single, the triumphant Thought’ of immortality (6: 67). But the category of philosophical Satire, which Young expands to include ’Ethics, Heathen, and Christian, and the Scriptures themselves’, deserves further consideration.

Young’s Love offume follows the bipartite structure of classical (and to some extent Popean) satire: its worldly commentator first arraigns a specific vice, and then asserts the correspondent virtue, addressing ‘a combative hollow man, an interlocutor, an Adversarius’.3’ Night thoughts expands this into a sweeping antithesis between a wholly unredeemable world and a ‘great Soul’, aged, bereaved, immersed in silence and darkness, castigating his Adversarius. Lor- enzo, from a ‘high Point, I Leaving gross Nature‘s Sediments below’ ( 6 : 251- 52).34 It may usefully be compared to the satire of Charles Churchill, which, though topical and specific, is similarly bellicose, digressive and uncumulative.3 5

The poet, devoid of any supportive community of value in his perpetual combat against a corrupt world, is compelled to rely on the coercive force of his relentIess pugnacity. The measure of his poetic authority is the spontaneity of his abuse, or the abusiveness of his spontaneity. This results in a magnification of both satirist and vice into a kind of declamatory melodrama:

Thy Father chides thy Gallantries, yet hugs An ugly, common Harlot, in the Dark; A rank Adulterer with others Gold

31 . ‘Preface of 18r5’, in The Prose works of Willinrn Wordsworth. ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W.

3 2 . Preface to Love offarne, t h P universal passion. Works. i.74. 33. I here follow M. C. Randolph. ‘The structural design of the formal verse satire’. Philological

quarterly 21 (1942). p.368-84 (p.372). Marshall Brown also argues for ‘continuity between the satiric and sublime modes’ of the period, but from the viewpoint of their equal compatibility with the ‘social bond: no attempt is made to reconcile the poem’s attempt to ‘make us conscious’ with its programmatic assault on the Lockean underpinnings of that definition of self (PrPr-arnrrriticisr,1.

34. Redefining him, according to the present needs of the argument, as a libertine, 13: a Deist rejecting revelation, 4: an advocate of Shaftesburian ridicule, 5: rejecting immortality in favour of a ‘flux of essences’, 67: a hedonist. 8: and a complete atheist, 9. (If regarded as a character. Lorenzo is remarkable chiefly for having a superhuman threshold of boredom.)

3 5 . See, for example, ‘Gotham’, ii.205-10: and ‘Independence’, 69-74. The Collected p o e m of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford 1956). See also W. B. Carnochan, ‘Satire, sublimity, and sentiment: theory and practice in post-Augustan satire’, PMLA 85 (1970), p.260-67.

Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford 1974). iii.26-39 (p.28).

p.23. 39. 36).

184 STEVE CLARK

And that Hag, Vengeance, in a Corner, charms; Hatred her Brothel has, as well as Love, Where horrid Epicures debauch in Blood; Whate’er the Motive, Pleasure is the Mark. (8: 5 5 2 - 5 8 )

If there is a luridness of generalisation this is it, a gloating retributive prurience (coarse as well: ‘Mark’ seems to be used in the Shakespearean sense of female genitals). There is a no-holds-barred gusto, almost a scurrility, in Young’s denunciation of ‘the Snout of grov’ling Appetite’ (8: 615) and ‘the coarse Drudgeries, and Sinks of Sense’ (7: 12-13). There is no common feeling for the body, as in the great Jacobean tirades against sensuality and mortality. It is a polemic delivered from outside, but, because of that, it achieves a kind of licensed extremity, the lyricism of utter estrangement.

Love offame seeks to articulate shared and self-evidently rational standards of value. In Night thoughts, ‘the sufficiency of human reason’ becomes ‘the golden calf [...I set up to be worshipped’, which must be countered by ‘a submission of our understanding, an oblation of our idolized reas0n’:3~

Oh give Eternity! or Thought destroy. But without Thought our Curse were half unfelt; Its blunted Edge would spare the throbbing Heart ... (7: 762-64)

Thought is itself the ‘Curse’ that excludes us from Eternity, with which true reason is solely concerned. Without this supporting category, ‘KNOWING is Suffring’ (7: 703). It is a ‘shocking Science, Parent of Despair’ to ‘know mgself, as the Lockean self, finite and transient (7: 677-78):

this dark Dungeon, where confin’d we lie, Close-grated by the sordid bars of Sense: All prospect of Eternity shut out; And, but for Execution, ne’er set Free. (6: 405-408)

I would stress here the extreme precision of ‘Sense’ as the self s experience in time. Young tightens the screws by depicting ideas themselves as the ultimate contraction out of which no escape is possible:

Must I thenforward only look for Death? Backward I turn mine Eye, and find him there. Man is a Self-survivor ev’ry Year. Man, like a Stream, is in perpetual flow. Death’s a destroyer of Quotidian prey. My Youth, my Noon-tide, His; my Yesterday; The bold Invader shares the present Hour. Each Moment on the former shuts the Grave. ( 5 : 709-16)

The encirclement is absolute: though death advances from the rear, the immedi- ate cause of displacement is experience of the present: ‘Each Moment has its Sickle’ (I: 192). Man survives himself in being aware of his experiences that

36. Centaur, Works. iv.112.

‘Radical insincerity’ in Edward Young’s ‘Night thoughts’ I 8 5

have already, or must soon, vanish, the ‘Quotidian prey’ swept away in the ‘perpetual flow’:

Wisdom into Folly turns Oft, the first instant, its Idea fair To labouring Thought is born. How dim our eye! The present Moment terminates our sight; Clouds, thick as those on Doomsday, drown the next; We penetrate, we prophesy in vain. Time is dealt out by Particles; and each, E’er mingled with the streaming sands of Life, By Fate’s inviolable oath is sworn Deep silence, ‘Where Eternity begins’. By Nature’s Law, what may be, may be now; There’s no Prerogative in human Hours: In human hearts what bolder Thought can rise, Than man’s Presumption on To-morrow’s dawn? Where is To-morrow? In another world. (I: 360-74)

The ‘streaming sands’, as well as being those of the hour-glass, give a peculiar sense of time flowing from the future rather than towards it, eroding the present rather than replenishing it. A close and restrictive analogy is enforced between spatial and temporal seeing, especially in the atomic opacity of the particles, whose essence, eternity, can never be known. Notice, also, the legal senses of ‘Prerogative’ as a prior right (OED, I) and ‘Presumption’ as an illegal sequestering (OED, I). Eternity exists only as a posited point of retrospective judgement, which is co-terminous with the present, always potentially the next moment. ’In another world’ is not sequential but parallel: ‘what may be, may be now’. This Archimedean point, ‘Beyond / Terrestrial Thought’s Horizon’ (9: 1847- 48), enables us to view our mortal and finite being from beyond its boundaries:

If Earth’s whole Orb, by some due-distanc’d eye, Were seen at once, her tow’ring Alps would sink, And level’d Atlas leave an even Sphere. Thus Earth, and all that earthly minds admire, Is swallow’d in Eternity’s vast Round. To that stupendous view, when souls awake, So large of late, so mountainous to man, Time’s toys subside: and equal All below. (6: 595-602)

The ‘World Material’ is ‘by Fragments, only seen’ through the ‘labouring Eye’: the ’ravisht Sight’ of the ‘illumin’d Eye’ perceives ‘From some superior Point (where, who can tell? / Suffice it, ’tis a Point where Gods reside)’ (6: 167-69, I 73-77). The perspective claimed holds absolute positions with regard to the sensory world, yet remains dependent on it as a negative mode of definition:

Embryos we must be, till we burst the Shell, Yon ambient azure shell, and spring to Life. (I: 131-32)

The poem offers no foretaste of the delights of this future ‘Life’. The sole attempt to describe a ‘Colony from Heaven’ immediately becomes a savage tirade against

186 STEVE CLARK

earthly corruption (9: 1756-1827, 1763). The frisson of such passages lies entireIy in ’burst[ing] the Shell’ and looking back on its despised fragments.

Thus, immortality in Young is best regarded as structural rather than spiritual, somewhere to see from, rather than reside in. Night thoughts decries the ‘present and visible’ in order to appeal to a vertiginous open-ended expansiveness: this in turn becomes a continuously available perspective on the modes of fallen perception, from which ‘Things Terrestrial’ are

as Dust, That dims his Sight, and shortens his Survey, Which longs, in Infinite, to lose all Bound. (8: I I 1-216)

Thus Young’s ‘ingenuity in the false sublime’ produces a language divorced from existential obligation, unchecked by referent, offering through its processes of formal dislocation an experience of ‘riddance’ or release from the Lockean self.

It may perhaps be too much to expect that we should grow to love Night thoughts, but we should at least be able to respect the ‘radicalness’ of its ‘insincerity’.