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Updated: June 15, 2025
Another indication of Young’s deficiency in moral, i.e., in sympathetic emotion, is his unintermitting habit of pedagogic moralizing. On its theoretic and perceptive side, morality touches science; on its emotional side, Art. Now, the products of Art are great in proportion as they result from that immediate prompting of innate power which we call Genius, and not from labored obedience to a theory or rule; and the presence of genius or innate prompting is directly opposed to the perpetual consciousness of a rule. The action of faculty is imperious, and excludes the reflection why it should act. In the same way, in proportion as morality is emotional, i.e., has affinity with Art, it will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and action, and not as the recognition of a rule. Love does not say, “I ought to love”—it loves. Pity does not say, “It is right to be pitiful”—it pities. Justice does not say, “I am bound to be just”—it feels justly. It is only where moral emotion is comparatively weak that the contemplation of a rule or theory habitually mingles with its action; and in accordance with this, we think experience, both in literature and life, has shown that the minds which are pre-eminently didactic—which insist on a “lesson,” and despise everything that will not convey a moral, are deficient in sympathetic emotion. A certain poet is recorded to have said that he “wished everything of his burned that did not impress some moral; even in love-verses, it might be flung in by the way.” What poet was it who took this medicinal view of poetry? Dr. Watts, or James Montgomery, or some other singer of spotless life and ardent piety? Not at all. It was Waller. A significant fact in relation to our position, that the predominant didactic tendency proceeds rather from the poet’s perception that it is good for other men to be moral, than from any overflow of moral feeling in himself. A man who is perpetually thinking in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admonition, can have little energy left for simple emotion. And this is the case with Young. In his highest flights of contemplation and his most wailing soliloquies he interrupts himself to fling an admonitory parenthesis at “Lorenzo,” or to hint that “folly’s creed” is the reverse of his own. Before his thoughts can flow, he must fix his eye on an imaginary miscreant, who gives unlimited scope for lecturing, and recriminates just enough to keep the spring of admonition and argument going to the extent of nine books. It is curious to see how this pedagogic habit of mind runs through Young’s contemplation of Nature. As the tendency to see our own sadness reflected in the external world has been called by Mr. Ruskin the “pathetic fallacy,” so we may call Young’s disposition to see a rebuke or a warning in every natural object, the “pedagogic fallacy.” To his mind, the heavens are “forever scolding as they shine;” and the great function of the stars is to be a “lecture to mankind.” The conception of the Deity as a didactic author is not merely an implicit point of view with him; he works it out in elaborate imagery, and at length makes it the occasion of his most extraordinary achievement in the “art of sinking,” by exclaiming,
Well, I will pit any two pulci of Porto Rico against any ten you can bring from Italy, and I should be sure to see them bite the dust before the bites of our Porto Rico breed." His letters are filled with apothegms and reflections on life in general and his own in particular, and they alone would almost fill a book. In a letter to Mr. Kendall, of March 30, we find the following:
He had a robust confidence in the cheering virtues of air and exercise, early hours and cold water, light and warmth, temperance in tea and coffee as well as wine "Apothegms of old women," as he truly said, but tested by universal experience and found efficacious.
So Mr. Henley, and it please, you, was chosen, by father and daughter. Though she owns she proposed it first; for she does not scruple to own all which she does not scruple to act. The holy mission was his, to dole out salutary documents of reproof, and apothegms of Epictetus; and to try whether he could not release the bird-limed owl. I was overlooked! I am unfit for the office!
A virtuous hero would be a useless personage both in play and poem and the spectator or reader would fall asleep over the utterance of stale apothegms.
Even on Solon's first appearance in public life, when he inspires the Athenians to prosecute the war with Megara, he addresses the passions of the crowd, not by an oration, but a poem; and in a subsequent period, when prose composition had become familiar, it was still in verse that Hipparchus communicated his moral apothegms.
He is a great discomforter of young students, by telling them what travail it has cost him, and how often his brain turned at philosophy, and makes others fear studying as a cause of duncery. He is a man much given to apothegms, which serve him for wit, and seldom breaks any jest but which belonged to some Lacedaemonian or Roman in Lycosthenes.
The apothegms ascribed to the wise men of Greece belong to this kind of composition; being extremely valuable to a rude people who can profit by the fruits of reasoning without being able to attend to its forms, and deposite in their minds a useful precept, unencumbered with the arguments by means of which its soundness might be proved.
Charles Lamb never preached nor prescribed, but let his own actions tell their tale and produce their natural effects; neither did he deal out little apothegms or scraps of wisdom, derived from other minds. But he succeeded; and in every success there must be a mainstay of right or truth to support it; otherwise it will eventually fail.
Manso has left a collection of one hundred of his pithy sayings a suspicious amount, and unfortunately more than warranting the suspicion; for almost every one of them is traceable to some other man. They come from the Greek and Latin philosophers, and the apothegms of Erasmus.
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