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Conjectures on Original Composition. in a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison. the Second Edition.
The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the first-hand accounts of everyday people, including city dwellers and farmers, businessmen and bankers, artisans and merchants, artists and their patrons, politicians and their constituents. Original texts make the American, French, and Industrial revolutions vividly contemporary.++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition ++++British LibraryT140240Anonymous. By Edward Young. 'Sir Charles Grandison' is by Samuel printed for A. Millar; and R. and J. Dodsley, 1759. [2],113, [1]p.; 8
- GenresLiterary Criticism
122 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1759
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About the author
Edward Young
920 books11 followersEdward Young (c. 3 July 1683 – 5 April 1765) was an English poet, critic, philosopher and theologian, best remembered for Night-Thoughts.
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June 6, 2024
"Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?"
In 1759 the 75-year-old English poet Edward Young wrote "Conjectures on Original Composition," a highly engaging essay on the meaning and role of genius in the arts which concludes with a panegyric to Joseph Addison. Young wrote it, according to the opening paragraph, as an "amusement," "miscellaneous in its nature" but serious in its overall message. It was originally published anonymously and sent to Samuel Richardson as a long epistle, though Young's identity was quickly discerned. The work would go on to exert an almost unbelievable influence on poets and men of letters during the next several decades, especially in Germany. Indeed, it contributed to the so-called "Geniekult" in Germany, at the eve of the Sturm und Drang movement, thus influencing such luminaries as Hamann, Herder, and Goethe. I came across this specifically in my reading of Hamann, a lifelong enthusiast of Young's poems and essays.
"Conjectures" is not entirely original itself, though. As the introduction to this 1918 edition points out, he had numerous precursors, though Young is to be credited for wittily and paradoxically combining various emphases on genius from numerous places. For example, in his "Analysis of Beauty" (1753), William Hogarth argues that his contemporaries should not slavishly imitate the ancients, but rather be inspired by their imitation of nature. Bishop Lowth's 1753 work, "On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews" points out that what makes literature great is its truth to nature and not its reliance on classical models. Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faerie Queene (1754) highlights Spenser's massive imagination and original creativity. Joseph Warton's famous essay on Alexander Pope (1756) argues that conformity to authorities does not make someone great, but rather, vibrant imagination and pathos. Then in 1756 Burke published his "Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful" which touches upon conformity and originality.
Young comes after all these other rumination on originality, genius, and imagination and doesn't necessarily add anything entirely new, but nevertheless, he (significantly) combines approaches; the editor writes, "The treatise is a sort of literary Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence, couched not in legal and learned, but in popular and comprehensible terms, in sparkling aphorisms written with evident enjoyment and conviction" (xvi).
Young's overriding concern is to demonstrate the worth of originality, genius, over imitation. "The mind of a man of genius is a fertile and pleasant field, pleasant as Elysiusm, and fertile as Tempe; it enjoys a perpetual spring. Of that spring, Originals are the fairest flowers: Imitations are of quicker growth, but fainter bloom. Imitations are of two kinds; one of nature, one of authors: The first we call Originals, and confine the term Imitation to the second" (6). In Young's mind, originals such as Homer and Shakespeare, and not derivative, scholarly, 'learned' people drive forward the republic of letters. Indeed, learning can actually detract from genius; Milton would have been greater, in Young's estimation, if he had been less educated. For education, while useful, is not for the strongest men, but for those who lack natural abilities. They are like stars in the sky, grouped together in clumps, trying to outdo one another, while the man of genius is a sun or comet, flashing forth for all to see.
Young has no time for 'common' thoughts, 'received' knowledge, 'inherited' ideas; "Words tarnished, by passing thro' the mouths of the vulgar, are laid aside as inelegant and obsolete. So thoughts, when become too common, should lose their currency; and we should send new metal to the mint, that is, new meaning to the press" (8). (This finds a very interesting echo in Hamann who was fond of the 'language as currency' metaphor.) Shakespeare is the paragon of genius here for he is a modern writer who soared above his contemporaries to the level of the ancients, to Homer, Pindar, and Virgil, in the vigor of his originality, the depth of his psychology and the reach of his imagination.
"Why are originals so few?" Young asks. It's because illustrious examples, such as those from the ancients, "engross, prejudice, and intimidate" (9). The goal should be to fully engross ourselves in the ancients in order to emulate their approach, not to imitate their style. "When we write, let our judgement shut them out of our thoughts" (9), but not before we've been nourished by their approach, vision, and imagination. This is the goal of imitation, to imitate the man, not the composition; "The less we copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more" (11). "Let us build our Compositions with the spirit, and in the taste, of the ancients; but not with their materials..." (11).
The essay is filled with memorable paradoxes and striking images. I'll end by including some more of the best bits:
- "Have we not [the ancients'] beauties, as stars, to guide; their defects, as rocks, to be shunned; the judgment of ages on both, as a chart to conduct, and a sure helm to steer us in our passage to greater perfection than theirs?" (12).
- "Genius is a master-workman, learning is but an instrument; and an instrument, tho' most valuable, yet not always indispensable" (13).
- "A genius differs from a good understanding, as a magician from a good architect; that raises his structure by means invisible; this by the skilfull use of common tools. Hence genius is ever supposed to partake of something divine" (13).
- "For rules, like crutches, are a needful aid to the lame, tho' an impediment to the strong" (14).
- "There is something in poetry beyond prose-reason; there are mysteries in it not to be explained, but admired; which render mere prose-men infidels to their divinity" (14).*
- "Genius often then deserves most to be praised, when it is most sure to be condemned; that is, when its excellence, from mounting high, to weak eyes is quite out of sight" (14).
-"...so to neglect of learning, genius sometimes owes its greater glory" (14).
- "With regard to the moral world, conscience, with regard to the intellectual, genius, is that god within" (15).
- "Many a genius, probably, there has been, which could neither write, nor read. So that genius, that supreme lustre of literature, is less rare than you conceive" (17).
- "Learning we thank, genius we revere; That gives us pleasure, This gives us rapture; That informs, This inspires; and is itself inspired; for genius is from heaven, learning from man: This sets us above the love and illiterate; That, above the learned, and polite. Learning is borrowed knowledge; genius is knowledge innate, and quite our own" (17).
- The "nobler name" of genius, following Francis Bacon, is Wisdom (17).
- "[Nature] 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?" (20).
- "If there is a famine of invention in the land, like Joseph's brethren, we must travel far for food; we must visit the remote, and rich, Ancients; but an inventive genius may safely stay at home; that, like the widow's cruse, is divinely replenished from within" (20).
- "For there is a mine in man, which must be deeply dug ere we can conjecture its contents" (21). \
- "...I borrow two golden rules from ethics, which are no less golden in Composition, than in life. 1. Know thyself; 2. Reverence thyself" (24).
- A true author "thinks, and composes" while the learned man can only "read, and write" (24).
- "Harmony as well as eloquence is essential to poesy; and a murder of his music is putting half Homer to death. Blank is a term of diminution; what we mean by blank verse, is, verse unfilled, encrust; verse reclaim'd, reinthron'd in the true language of the gods; who never thunder'd nor suffer'd their Homer to thunder, in rhyme" (27). (This sentiment pertains to Young's strong critique of Pope's translations of Homer.)
- "Imitation is inferiority confessed; emulation is superiority contested, or denied; imitation is servile, emulation generous; that fetters, this fires; that may give a name; this, a name immortal" (29).
- "True poesy, like true religion, abhors idolatry; and though it honors the memory of the exemplary, and takes them willingly (yet cautiously) as guides in the way to glory; real, though unexampled, excellence is its only aim; nor looks it for any inspiration less than divine" (30).
- "...mule-like imitators die without issue" (30).
- "It is prudence to read, genius to relish, glory to surpass, ancient authors; and wisdom to try our strength, in an attempt in which it would be no great dishonor to fail" (33).
-"Consider, in those ancient, what is it that the world admires? Not the fewness of their faults, but the number and brightness of their beauties..." (34).
-"[Addison's] compositions are but a noble preface; the grand work is his death: That is a work which is read in heaven..." (46).
* This aside about poetry is reflected in Hamann and Herder's thought about biblical poetry. I also see this sentiment (later) in writers such as Ruskin and Chesterton. The mystery is poetry is unfathomable; that is the point! It participates in the Poesis of the Poet, the Logos.
In 1759 the 75-year-old English poet Edward Young wrote "Conjectures on Original Composition," a highly engaging essay on the meaning and role of genius in the arts which concludes with a panegyric to Joseph Addison. Young wrote it, according to the opening paragraph, as an "amusement," "miscellaneous in its nature" but serious in its overall message. It was originally published anonymously and sent to Samuel Richardson as a long epistle, though Young's identity was quickly discerned. The work would go on to exert an almost unbelievable influence on poets and men of letters during the next several decades, especially in Germany. Indeed, it contributed to the so-called "Geniekult" in Germany, at the eve of the Sturm und Drang movement, thus influencing such luminaries as Hamann, Herder, and Goethe. I came across this specifically in my reading of Hamann, a lifelong enthusiast of Young's poems and essays.
"Conjectures" is not entirely original itself, though. As the introduction to this 1918 edition points out, he had numerous precursors, though Young is to be credited for wittily and paradoxically combining various emphases on genius from numerous places. For example, in his "Analysis of Beauty" (1753), William Hogarth argues that his contemporaries should not slavishly imitate the ancients, but rather be inspired by their imitation of nature. Bishop Lowth's 1753 work, "On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews" points out that what makes literature great is its truth to nature and not its reliance on classical models. Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faerie Queene (1754) highlights Spenser's massive imagination and original creativity. Joseph Warton's famous essay on Alexander Pope (1756) argues that conformity to authorities does not make someone great, but rather, vibrant imagination and pathos. Then in 1756 Burke published his "Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful" which touches upon conformity and originality.
Young comes after all these other rumination on originality, genius, and imagination and doesn't necessarily add anything entirely new, but nevertheless, he (significantly) combines approaches; the editor writes, "The treatise is a sort of literary Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence, couched not in legal and learned, but in popular and comprehensible terms, in sparkling aphorisms written with evident enjoyment and conviction" (xvi).
Young's overriding concern is to demonstrate the worth of originality, genius, over imitation. "The mind of a man of genius is a fertile and pleasant field, pleasant as Elysiusm, and fertile as Tempe; it enjoys a perpetual spring. Of that spring, Originals are the fairest flowers: Imitations are of quicker growth, but fainter bloom. Imitations are of two kinds; one of nature, one of authors: The first we call Originals, and confine the term Imitation to the second" (6). In Young's mind, originals such as Homer and Shakespeare, and not derivative, scholarly, 'learned' people drive forward the republic of letters. Indeed, learning can actually detract from genius; Milton would have been greater, in Young's estimation, if he had been less educated. For education, while useful, is not for the strongest men, but for those who lack natural abilities. They are like stars in the sky, grouped together in clumps, trying to outdo one another, while the man of genius is a sun or comet, flashing forth for all to see.
Young has no time for 'common' thoughts, 'received' knowledge, 'inherited' ideas; "Words tarnished, by passing thro' the mouths of the vulgar, are laid aside as inelegant and obsolete. So thoughts, when become too common, should lose their currency; and we should send new metal to the mint, that is, new meaning to the press" (8). (This finds a very interesting echo in Hamann who was fond of the 'language as currency' metaphor.) Shakespeare is the paragon of genius here for he is a modern writer who soared above his contemporaries to the level of the ancients, to Homer, Pindar, and Virgil, in the vigor of his originality, the depth of his psychology and the reach of his imagination.
"Why are originals so few?" Young asks. It's because illustrious examples, such as those from the ancients, "engross, prejudice, and intimidate" (9). The goal should be to fully engross ourselves in the ancients in order to emulate their approach, not to imitate their style. "When we write, let our judgement shut them out of our thoughts" (9), but not before we've been nourished by their approach, vision, and imagination. This is the goal of imitation, to imitate the man, not the composition; "The less we copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more" (11). "Let us build our Compositions with the spirit, and in the taste, of the ancients; but not with their materials..." (11).
The essay is filled with memorable paradoxes and striking images. I'll end by including some more of the best bits:
- "Have we not [the ancients'] beauties, as stars, to guide; their defects, as rocks, to be shunned; the judgment of ages on both, as a chart to conduct, and a sure helm to steer us in our passage to greater perfection than theirs?" (12).
- "Genius is a master-workman, learning is but an instrument; and an instrument, tho' most valuable, yet not always indispensable" (13).
- "A genius differs from a good understanding, as a magician from a good architect; that raises his structure by means invisible; this by the skilfull use of common tools. Hence genius is ever supposed to partake of something divine" (13).
- "For rules, like crutches, are a needful aid to the lame, tho' an impediment to the strong" (14).
- "There is something in poetry beyond prose-reason; there are mysteries in it not to be explained, but admired; which render mere prose-men infidels to their divinity" (14).*
- "Genius often then deserves most to be praised, when it is most sure to be condemned; that is, when its excellence, from mounting high, to weak eyes is quite out of sight" (14).
-"...so to neglect of learning, genius sometimes owes its greater glory" (14).
- "With regard to the moral world, conscience, with regard to the intellectual, genius, is that god within" (15).
- "Many a genius, probably, there has been, which could neither write, nor read. So that genius, that supreme lustre of literature, is less rare than you conceive" (17).
- "Learning we thank, genius we revere; That gives us pleasure, This gives us rapture; That informs, This inspires; and is itself inspired; for genius is from heaven, learning from man: This sets us above the love and illiterate; That, above the learned, and polite. Learning is borrowed knowledge; genius is knowledge innate, and quite our own" (17).
- The "nobler name" of genius, following Francis Bacon, is Wisdom (17).
- "[Nature] 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?" (20).
- "If there is a famine of invention in the land, like Joseph's brethren, we must travel far for food; we must visit the remote, and rich, Ancients; but an inventive genius may safely stay at home; that, like the widow's cruse, is divinely replenished from within" (20).
- "For there is a mine in man, which must be deeply dug ere we can conjecture its contents" (21). \
- "...I borrow two golden rules from ethics, which are no less golden in Composition, than in life. 1. Know thyself; 2. Reverence thyself" (24).
- A true author "thinks, and composes" while the learned man can only "read, and write" (24).
- "Harmony as well as eloquence is essential to poesy; and a murder of his music is putting half Homer to death. Blank is a term of diminution; what we mean by blank verse, is, verse unfilled, encrust; verse reclaim'd, reinthron'd in the true language of the gods; who never thunder'd nor suffer'd their Homer to thunder, in rhyme" (27). (This sentiment pertains to Young's strong critique of Pope's translations of Homer.)
- "Imitation is inferiority confessed; emulation is superiority contested, or denied; imitation is servile, emulation generous; that fetters, this fires; that may give a name; this, a name immortal" (29).
- "True poesy, like true religion, abhors idolatry; and though it honors the memory of the exemplary, and takes them willingly (yet cautiously) as guides in the way to glory; real, though unexampled, excellence is its only aim; nor looks it for any inspiration less than divine" (30).
- "...mule-like imitators die without issue" (30).
- "It is prudence to read, genius to relish, glory to surpass, ancient authors; and wisdom to try our strength, in an attempt in which it would be no great dishonor to fail" (33).
-"Consider, in those ancient, what is it that the world admires? Not the fewness of their faults, but the number and brightness of their beauties..." (34).
-"[Addison's] compositions are but a noble preface; the grand work is his death: That is a work which is read in heaven..." (46).
* This aside about poetry is reflected in Hamann and Herder's thought about biblical poetry. I also see this sentiment (later) in writers such as Ruskin and Chesterton. The mystery is poetry is unfathomable; that is the point! It participates in the Poesis of the Poet, the Logos.
September 15, 2024
Young's ‘Conjectures on Original Composition’ was published in 1759. This tome reflects the incipient growth of an anti-neo- classical doctrine.
Young, in a characteristically vigorous manner moves away from imitation towards what Babbitt calls 'emotional naturalism'.
Babbitt in his ‘Rousseau and Romanticism’ notes: "Addison had asserted..........the superiority of what is original in a man, of what comes to him spontaneously, over what he acquires by conscious effort and culture, Young, a personal friend of Addison, develops this contrast between the 'natural' and the 'artificial' to its extreme consequences."
Young was one of those zealots who extolled originality at any cost and did not consider tradition of any value. Young says "Modern writers have a choice to make........ They may soar in the regions of liberty, or move in the soft fetters of easy imitation."
While he accepts and enlarges the Longinian notion that true poetic imitation is the intercourse of the aspiring poet's mind with the master spirits of the past, Young completely discards the doctrine it is a good thing to study the classic models.
His essay is an energetic recommendation of the ‘Cacoethes Scribendi’, a sustained celebration of the ‘plessures of the pen, the sweet refuge of original composition.’ “The more composition the better.” -- Young says
A striking aspect of Young's essay is his obstinate, if random, way of alluding to the invisible architectonics of original invention in metaphors of vegetable goath. The mind of genius 'is a fertile and pleasant field of which Originals are the fairest flowers. Nothing Original can rise, nothing immortal, can ripen, in any other sun, but that of our own genius ………notable is this terse antithesis.’
‘An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature, it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius, it grows, it is not made. Imitations are often a sort of manufacture wrought up by those mechanics, art and labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own.’
The passage might almost serve as a precis of Coleridge's basic distinction, half a century later, between mechanical making and organic growth, between the reorganization of given materials by artificers like Beaumont and Fletcher, and the energetic emergence of an original form in the plays of Shakespeare.
An important difference, of course, is that for Coleridge, the 'pre-existent materials of the mechanical fancy comprehend the fixities and definites of all sense perception, and not merely the elements imitated from earlier works of art.
Furthermore, Young expands the realm of the furtive poetic graces until he heralds the division of the creative mind into a conscious and everyday surface and an inscrutable fathomless depth.
Young with his insistence on Genius and originality, is surely part of the symptom of the Romantic gesture. He was not much heeded in England, where he was considered as a minor critic.
But in Germany he was respected and accepted with utmost seriousness.
Conceivably Germany, going through a period of Strum and Drung was better prepared to comprehend him.
Young, in a characteristically vigorous manner moves away from imitation towards what Babbitt calls 'emotional naturalism'.
Babbitt in his ‘Rousseau and Romanticism’ notes: "Addison had asserted..........the superiority of what is original in a man, of what comes to him spontaneously, over what he acquires by conscious effort and culture, Young, a personal friend of Addison, develops this contrast between the 'natural' and the 'artificial' to its extreme consequences."
Young was one of those zealots who extolled originality at any cost and did not consider tradition of any value. Young says "Modern writers have a choice to make........ They may soar in the regions of liberty, or move in the soft fetters of easy imitation."
While he accepts and enlarges the Longinian notion that true poetic imitation is the intercourse of the aspiring poet's mind with the master spirits of the past, Young completely discards the doctrine it is a good thing to study the classic models.
His essay is an energetic recommendation of the ‘Cacoethes Scribendi’, a sustained celebration of the ‘plessures of the pen, the sweet refuge of original composition.’ “The more composition the better.” -- Young says
A striking aspect of Young's essay is his obstinate, if random, way of alluding to the invisible architectonics of original invention in metaphors of vegetable goath. The mind of genius 'is a fertile and pleasant field of which Originals are the fairest flowers. Nothing Original can rise, nothing immortal, can ripen, in any other sun, but that of our own genius ………notable is this terse antithesis.’
‘An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature, it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius, it grows, it is not made. Imitations are often a sort of manufacture wrought up by those mechanics, art and labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own.’
The passage might almost serve as a precis of Coleridge's basic distinction, half a century later, between mechanical making and organic growth, between the reorganization of given materials by artificers like Beaumont and Fletcher, and the energetic emergence of an original form in the plays of Shakespeare.
An important difference, of course, is that for Coleridge, the 'pre-existent materials of the mechanical fancy comprehend the fixities and definites of all sense perception, and not merely the elements imitated from earlier works of art.
Furthermore, Young expands the realm of the furtive poetic graces until he heralds the division of the creative mind into a conscious and everyday surface and an inscrutable fathomless depth.
Young with his insistence on Genius and originality, is surely part of the symptom of the Romantic gesture. He was not much heeded in England, where he was considered as a minor critic.
But in Germany he was respected and accepted with utmost seriousness.
Conceivably Germany, going through a period of Strum and Drung was better prepared to comprehend him.
June 15, 2010
Conjectures on original composition. In a letter to the author of Sir Charles Grandison by Edward Young (1970)
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