Gray and Horace Walpole

If a gentleman in Calabria digs up with a spade a hitherto unknown fragment of the obscure Latin historian P. Pomponius Fatto there is great excitement about it, and research congratulates itself upon its achievements. I can quite appreciate the feeling. All treasure-trove is exciting. The smallest recovery from the long-buried past is worth having; it may, in itself, fill a gap somewhere and encourages the hope of greater finds. But why not make just as much of a palaver about Dr. Paget Toynbee’s disinterment of nearly a hundred “new” letters by the poet Gray? The new letters are included in The Correspondence of Gray, Walpole, West, and Ashton (Oxford University Press, 2 vols.); and they were found in the collection of Captain Sir F. E. Waller, who was recently killed in action, and to whose memory the volume is dedicated. Gray, Horace Walpole, Richard West, and Thomas Ashton formed a “Quadruple Alliance” at Eton. West went on to Oxford, the other three to Cambridge. We get first of all an exchange between all four; then West dies, in his twenties; then, years afterwards, relations with Ashton are broken; and, finally, there is a long series that passed between Walpole and Gray up to the time of the poet’s death in 1771. In all there are 248 letters; of these 153 were written by Gray, eighty-nine of which have never been published before. Others have never before been printed in full, and few have escaped maltreatment by previous editors. Their errors ranged from deliberate alteration, truncation, and blending to bad transcription and unintelligent acceptance. How easily the most comic errors may creep into a text where each editor neglects to use, or has not access to, original sources may be shown by the history of a single word. Gray wrote a Latin poem about the god of Love in which one line began “Ludentem fuge.” This was printed by Miss Berry as “Sudentem fuge”; and this has been “corrected” by subsequent editors into “Sudantem fuge”!

The characters of the correspondents come out very clearly. Even when, just after they have left school, they are all writing rather affectedly (and with a plethora of classical quotation), Ashton is obviously the one fundamentally insincere member of the group. He is hyperself-conscious, nastily artificial. Later on he even refers in Joseph Surface’s very own words to his “noble sentiments”: this was clearly the man to make, by his double-dealing, the temporary breach between Gray and Walpole, and, ultimately, to compel Walpole to cast him off by his incivility when Walpole was no longer useful to him. Richard West, son of an Irish Lord Chancellor, has no apparent defect save excessive seriousness. There is a touch of the priggish mixed with the high-mindedness and generosity of this able young invalid; but one can understand Gray’s devotion to him. Some of the poetry of his here given (he appeared in Dodsley’s Miscellany by the way) is surprisingly good. He was the Arthur Hallam of the eighteenth century.

The Walpole letters are, as always, unsurpassable of their kind. His undergraduate letter (in parody of Addison’s descriptions of Italy) relating a journey from London to Cambridge, is admirable; but the letters describing his continental tour with Gray are better, and those, still later, about the beau monde of Paris are perfect. There is a peculiar charm too about the correspondence with Gray as to the details and publication of his works, the half-solemn, half whimsical concentration on the tiny antiquarian details to which each was addicted, the eager little controversies and explorations, the odd little jokes. But though Gray, taking his correspondence as a whole, considering both volume, range, and formal excellence, cannot contest Walpole’s position as the greatest of English letter-writers, there is a flavour about his letters that makes them peculiarly delightful. Walpole writes fully dressed, though with exquisite manner; Gray writes naturally, and without obvious reserve sometimes even gambolling. There may be people, familiar with Gray only through his elevated and sombre verse, who fancy him an exceedingly self-contained and formal man, who feel (like the person who greatly amused him by addressing him as “The Rev. T. Gray”) that he simply must have been a divine. There were certainly contemporaries of his who met him and got the impression that he was constitutionally grave, reticent, aloof. His letters show that he was anything but that to his friends. The author of the Elegy habitually “played the goat.” There are a whole string of skit letters here: in one he writes to Walpole as “Honner’d Nurse,” addressing the illiterate screed “to mie Nuss att London”; in another he wallows in Oriental imagery about the dew of the morning; in another he applies to stagnant Cambridge a whole long passage from Isaiah describing deserted Babylon, the home of dragons and haunt of screech-owls. He had a great habit of ending his letters with something openly idiotic. Once he bursts out with “Pray, did you ever see an elephant?”; another time his peroration is:

“The Assizes are just over. I was there; but I a’nt to be transported. Adieu!”

and another excursion concludes with a ludicrous burlesque of the type of commonplaces usually to be found in letters:

“There is a curious woman here that spins Glass, and makes short Aprons and furbelow’d petticoats of it, a very genteel wear for summer, & discover’s all the motions of the limbs to great advantage. She is a successour of Jack, the Aple dumpling Spinner’s: my Duck has eat a Snail &c.: & I am—yours sincerely

T. G.”

Those who think of poets as persons without humour who live in a permanent exaltation and are quite unlike reasonable beings will be shocked with Gray’s remarks when he had, to the publisher’s alarm, withdrawn a poem from his forthcoming small volume:

“but to supply the place of it in bulk, lest my work should be mistaken for the works of a flea or a pismire, I promised to send him an equal weight of poetry or prose: so, since my return hither, I put up about two ounces of stuff: viz. The Fatal Sisters, The Descent of Odin ... with all this I shall be but a shrimp of an author.”

On a night nine years before this, General Wolfe, as his boat crept towards the Quebec bank of St. Lawrence, had recited the Elegy to his companions and told them that he had rather have written that poem than take Quebec.

Gray’s judgments on other authors (though he was unjust to the more fermentative kind of Frenchman) were uniformly good. He suspected Ossian, but hoped he was a fraud for the sake of the jest. If, he said, Macpherson had done it all to hoax fools, “I would undertake a journey into the Highlands only for the pleasure of seeing him.” He read Boswell’s early book on Corsica and almost prophetically observed:

“The pamphlet proves what I have always maintained, that any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.”

In politics he was interested only mildly, but he liked to gossip about them. “Do oblige me,” he writes to Walpole,

“with a change in the Ministry: I mean, something one may tell, that looks as if it were near at hand; or if there is no truth to be had, then a good likely falsehood for the same purpose. I am sorry to be so reduced.”

“A good likely falsehood”: is it not in perpetual demand?