It is simply a shot fired with a good aim in the eternal war between authority and liberty in literature.  This is a controversy for which, were men wise, there would be no need.  We require in literature both the authority of tradition and the liberty of genius to such new conquests.  Unfortunately, we cannot agree as to the proportions in which each of them is required.  The French exaggerated the importance of tradition, and so gave us the classical drama of Racine and Corneille.  Walt Whitman exaggerated the importance of liberty, and so gave us Leaves of Grass.  In nearly all periods of literary energy, we find writers rushing to one or other of these extremes.  Either they declare that the classics are perfect and cannot be surpassed but only imitated; or, like the Futurists, they want to burn the classics and release the spirit of man for new adventures.  It is all a prolonged duel between reaction and revolution, and the wise man of genius doing his best, like a Liberal, to bring the two opponents to terms.

Much of the interest of Young’s book is due to the fact that in an age of reaction he came out on the revolutionary side.  There was seldom a time at which the classics were more slavishly idolized and imitated.  Miss Morley quotes from Pope the saying that “all that is left us is to recommend our productions by the imitation of the ancients.”  Young threw all his eloquence on the opposite side.  He uttered the bold paradox:  “The less we copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more.”  “Become a noble collateral,” he advised, “not a humble descendant from them.  Let us build our compositions in the spirit, and in the taste, of the ancients, but not with their materials.  Thus will they resemble the structures of Pericles at Athens, which Plutarch commends for having had an air of antiquity as soon as they were built.”  He refuses to believe that the moderns are necessarily inferior to the ancients.  If they are inferior, it is because they plagiarize from the ancients instead of emulating them.  “If ancients and moderns,” he declares, “were no longer considered as masters, and pupils, but as hard-matched rivals for renown, then moderns, by the longevity of their labours, might one day become ancients themselves.”

He deplores the fact that Pope should have been so content to indenture his genius to the work of translation and imitation: 

Though we stand much obliged to him for giving us an Homer, yet had he doubled our obligation by giving us—­a Pope.  He had a strong imagination and the true sublime?  That granted, we might have had two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for I heard the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few weeks before his decease.

For ourselves, we hold that Pope showed himself to be as original as needs be in his epistles to Martha Blount and Dr. Arbuthnot.  None the less, the general philosophy of Young’s remarks is sound