THE BICENTENARY OF GRAY. BORN DECEMBER 26, 1716.

BY THE DEAN OF NORWICH.

It is a mere chance, but none the less suggestive, that Shakespeare’s commemoration this year should be followed by that of Gray. Shakespeare, of course, would cut up into many poets, but one of them would have been not unlike Gray; a man of a fastidious and somewhat melancholy temper but with a rare affectionateness, and a sincere love of his kind, which mingled with his critical faculty to produce a fresh and very delightful humour. However this may be, the lesser poet was drawn to the greater by a sure instinct from school-days. In a letter to Horace Walpole, written when he was just eighteen, he finds it natural to disguise his boyish affection in terms borrowed from Mrs. Quickly: ‘I have born and born, and been fub’d off and fub’d off,’ &c.; and he does so again later: ‘If I don’t hear from you this week, I shall be in a thousand Tyrrits and Frights about you.’ To his more literary friend, Richard West, another member of the ‘Quadruple Alliance,’ whose early death he was to mourn in the most exquisite of elegies, he writes with enthusiasm about Shakespeare’s language.

‘Every word in him is a picture. Pray put me the following lines into the tongue of our modern Dramatics:

and what follows. To me they appear untranslatable; and if this be the case our language is greatly degenerated.’

‘Every word in him is a picture.’ He said the same thing in a fine quatrain of the poem to Richard Bentley, contrasting the great masters of old with the poets of his own day, especially with himself, whose poems Bentley was illustrating:

In another letter to West of the same year he defends the practice of ‘judiciously and sparingly’ inserting phrases from Shakespeare into modern poetry because of their greater energy; a practice which he himself was to adopt in his later odes. Gray’s Shakespearian borrowings are always judicious, but it may be questioned whether the effect of such quotations from a greater writer by a less is not to create an impression of poverty in the borrower. It is more important to inquire how far Gray was successful in emulating the Shakespearian ‘pomp and prodigality’ of imagination. The prodigality clearly was beyond even his ambition. His Pegasus always required the spur rather than the reins. But the pomp, it must be admitted, he did not infrequently achieve. No one can be blind to the magnificence of the lines about Pindar in the ‘Progress of Poesy’:

And in the ‘Elegy’ we have many imaginative pictures that have the true Shakespearian quality:

It will be remembered that in the ‘Progress of Poesy’ English poetry is represented by three names—Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. Dryden is praised for the energy of his heroic couplet, symbolised by the

who draw his car, and also for his one great lyrical achievement, the Ode on St. Cecilia’s day. Gray’s admiration for Shakespeare and Milton as models was tempered by his recognition of what Dryden had done for the English language, in rendering it more ‘refined and free.’ To Beattie he wrote, ‘Remember Dryden and be blind to all his faults,’ and he told him in an interview (according to Mason) that ‘if there was any excellence in his own numbers he had learned it wholly from that great poet; and pressed him with great earnestness to study him, as his choice of words and versification were singularly happy and harmonious.’ If Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast’ be compared with the ‘Progress of Poesy’ we can see how successfully Gray has blended the qualities he most admired in his several masters. From Dryden he has caught the smoothness and strength of his line; but Gray’s rhythm owes more to ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Comus’ than to the commonplace movement of Dryden’s ode; while the imaginative beauty of its many pictures was part of his debt to the greatest of them all. There is one other great English poet to whom Gray was ready to acknowledge a debt. He told Norton Nicholls that he never sat down to compose poetry without reading Spenser for a considerable time previously. I do not remember that Gray ever incorporates a Spenserian phrase in his own verse; his instinct would have told him that the two styles would not agree. But his instinct would also tell him that to bathe himself in Spenser before entering the temple of his Muse was a sure way of freeing himself from any pollution of mind or spirit.

The ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ was composed at intervals between 1746 and 1750, and sent to Walpole in June of that year. Walpole showed it to many friends and in some way it got into the hands of a publisher, who wrote to Gray announcing his intention of printing it, and begging his ‘indulgence.’ Gray wrote at once to Walpole desiring him to let Dodsley print it without delay from his copy, and it accordingly appeared in February 16, 1751, in a quarto pamphlet, priced sixpence, and entitled ‘An Elegy wrote in a Country Church Yard.’ The fashionable solecism must be attributed to Walpole, who saw the poem through the press, and prefixed this short ‘advertisement’:

‘The following Poem came into my hands by Accident, if the general Approbation with which this little Piece has spread, may be call’d by so slight a Term as Accident. It is this Approbation which makes it unnecessary for me to make any Apology but to the Author: As he cannot but feel some Satisfaction in having pleas’d so many Readers already, I flatter myself he will forgive my communicating that Pleasure to many more. The Editor.’

In his letter thanking Walpole for his ‘paternal care’ of the poem Gray speaks of the advertisement as ‘saving his honour’; which can only mean that he thought the poem unworthy of being offered to the public by its author. That this was not a mere affectation is shown by his annoyance at its instant popularity, which he thought to be due to its subject. He said it would have been equally popular if written in prose. He writes to his friend Dr. Wharton, after speaking of ‘A Long Story,’ which had been ‘shew’d about in Town, and not liked at all’:

‘On the other hand the Stanzas have had the Misfortune by Mr. W.’s fault to be made still more publick, for wᶜʰ they certainly were never meant, but is too late to complain. They have been so applauded, it is quite a Shame to repeat it. I mean not to be modest; but I mean it is a Shame for those, who have said such superlative Things about them, that I can’t repeat them.’

Gray’s modesty was still further tried in the autumn of the same year by Walpole’s insistence that he should allow his still unpublished odes, on Spring, on Eton College, and on Walpole’s cat, with whatever else he had to furnish a volume, to appear with illustrations by Walpole’s protégé, Richard Bentley, a son of the great Master of Trinity. The negotiations, so far as we have them in Gray’s correspondence, are diverting. Gray discovered that it was in contemplation to prefix his own portrait; this he forbade, though it was already half engraved. He objected to the proposed title and insisted that it should be ‘Designs by Mr. R. Bentley for six poems of Mr. T. Gray,’ on the ground that ‘the verses were only subordinate and explanatory to the Drawings and suffered to come out thus only for that reason.’ Lastly, he objected to Dodsley’s proposal to omit the ‘Mr.’ before the names of the poet and artist, as being ‘an uncommon sort of simplicity that looks like affectation.’ This modesty may have been excessive, but it is not ridiculous when we reflect that Gray had not yet produced his finest work, and knew that he had it in him to write something more worthy of himself and English poetry than the occasional pieces which Walpole wished to publish, or even than the deservedly popular Elegy.

In 1757 Walpole issued, as the first book from his new printing-press at Strawberry Hill, a quarto pamphlet entitled ‘Odes by Mr. Gray,’ with a vignette on the title-page of his Gothick castle, and a motto from Pindar ΦΩΝΑΝΤΑ ΣΥΝΕΤΟΙΣΙ which Gray englished as ‘vocal to the intelligent alone.’ It contained two odes, here called simply Ode I and Ode II, ‘The Progress of Poesy’ and ‘The Bard.’ The first of these odes is undoubtedly Gray’s masterpiece, and deserves all the study that can be given to it. The subject, that of the great power of poetry, was one very near to Gray’s heart as well as to his mind, and the scheme is well thought out. There is no feeling of strain in any part of it. Personification, with Gray generally a sign of strain, is kept within the limits approved by the great masters. Thus we have ‘antic Sports and blue-eyed Pleasures’ just as in the ‘Allegro’ we have ‘Jest and youthful Jollity’; but there is no elaborate series of abstract figures like that in the two stanzas on the Passions in the Ode on Eton College. This fashionable personification perhaps justified itself to Gray as a combination of the imaginative method of Shakespeare with the clear definition of Dryden. What in Shakespeare would have been a metaphor, hinted at and immediately succeeded by another, becomes too often with Gray a substantial allegorical personage. There seems to us to-day something essentially unpoetical, because artificial, in the posturing groups of Furies and Graces, and we wonder that Gray with his fine critical sense did not feel this. We must recognise, however, that whenever he is deeply moved he escapes from the snare. Two consecutive stanzas in the ‘Ode on Vicissitude’ show how his verse becomes more direct as it deepens in feeling.

When the two odes were reissued they were styled Pindaric, and they justify their title, being constructed in a series of strophe, antistrophe, and epode like the odes of Pindar. Ben Jonson had furnished one example in the ode to the memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Morrison, one strophe of which is the often-quoted stanza beginning, ‘It is not growing like a tree.’ But the name ‘Pindarique’ had been abused by Cowley, who, holding the theory that ‘the lost excellences of another language’ should be supplied by others of our own, had substituted an expansive eloquence, one might almost say loquacity, for the terse musical phrase of his model, and had entirely ignored the interrelation of strophe and antistrophe. Gray recovered for the Pindaric ode both the music of phrase and the balance of its parts.

Gray’s second ode cannot be reckoned as unequivocal a success as its companion. It is founded on a tradition of the murder of the Welsh bards by Edward I, and the earlier portion, which consists of the spirited and justifiable curses of the last survivor on the king’s progeny to the third and fourth generation, is proper to the subject, and contains much fine rhetoric and a few passages of a nobler quality. But having written the first three groups of stanzas, Gray held his hand for a couple of years; and the conclusion does not carry out the scheme originally proposed. From the argument, which Mason printed from Gray’s commonplace book, we learn that the Bard was to predict that all the king’s cruelty ‘shall never extinguish the noble ardour of poetic genius in this island; and that men shall never be wanting to celebrate true virtue and valour in immortal strains, to expose vice and infamous pleasure, and boldly censure tyranny and oppression.’ When Gray resumed the Ode he had changed his plan, and the present conclusion can appeal to none but Welshmen, for whom it is certain that Gray did not specially write. The consolation which the Bard finds in the future is the prospect of a line of Welsh kings, the Tudors, culminating in Elizabeth:

Elizabeth’s reign is to be marked by a revival of poetry in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and an unending line beyond them. It must be allowed that the skill of the poet has disguised the weakness of the argument. For to make the consolation effective the efflorescence of poetry should have occurred under the first Tudor sovereign, in which case it might poetically have been presumed to be due to him; and the Bard should not have overlooked Chaucer, who flourished under the sway of Edward’s direct descendant Richard II, of whose accession the Bard sings in the only passage of the Ode which has passed into popular currency:

The ‘Elegy’ is an expression of the common heart, though of that common heart purified and ennobled, and therefore it is of universal appeal; of the Odes it is true to-day as in Gray’s lifetime that they are vocal only to the intellectuals. But apart from its merits all Gray’s poetry has a special interest owing to its place at the meeting-point of the Augustan and Romantic schools. On the one hand it retains the notion of poetry as a happy combination of words. Gray, in a letter to Mason, says: ‘Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry’; adding ‘this I have always aimed at and could never attain.’ Gray’s instrument was always the file; he had no taste for the verse cast at a jet; and so he could accuse Collins of having a bad ear. In the second place, there are signs in Gray of that first-hand interest in nature and that respect for the whole of human nature, and not only its intellect, which was soon to inspire Cowper and Wordsworth. Perhaps Gray is at his modernest in the ‘Ode on Vicissitude,’ and in that impromptu couplet which Norton Nicholls preserved:

if not most modern of all in that quatrain of the ‘Elegy’ which Gray’s feeling for unity expunged, but which we cannot spare:

Leslie Stephen says happily about Gray and his friends that ‘they were feeling round vaguely for a new mode of literary and artistic enjoyment.’ This feeling after something more satisfying to the whole range of thought and emotion than was afforded by the critical school of Pope had already given evidence of itself in several ways. Thomson and Dyer, following each his particular bent, had found inspiration for poetry in country life and landscape. Gray welcomed the venture of both these poets. We know from his letters how attentive was his own observation, and how he took long journeys in search of the picturesque, especially in mountain scenery; but the evidence of this in his poetry is only incidental, as in the reference to ‘Snowdon’s shaggy side.’ Another form taken by this dissatisfaction was the revival of interest in the popular ballad literature. The discovery by Thomas Percy of his famous folio started a new form of poetry in which Goldsmith led the way. But though Gray had seen Percy’s book as early as 1761, it came too late to influence his production; and we may guess that his mind was too erudite to have found expression in the simplicity of the ballad. Of far more interest to him was Macpherson’s discovery of fragments of Highland poetry. He describes himself as ‘extasié with their infinite beauty’; on which the late Mr. Tovey, to whom a great debt is owed for his scholarly edition of Gray’s letters, makes the dry comment that some of the fragments were worked up from passages in ‘The Bard.’ We may be glad that Macpherson’s discovery came, like Percy’s, too late to influence Gray’s own poetry. His interest in the early literature of the European nations has given us a few fragments from the Norse and Welch. The remark of Leslie Stephen quoted above referred to the interest that Gray and Walpole took in Gothic architecture. This influenced Gray’s poetry only indirectly; but it had some effect in the way it was presented to the public. When Walpole undertook to convert his newly purchased house at Twickenham into a Gothick castle, the artist he employed to help him in his designs was Richard Bentley; and when Gray had sprung suddenly into fame by the ‘Elegy,’ Walpole urged him to publish his other poems with designs by Bentley. Whether these deserve the poetical encomium Gray made upon them, I will not presume to say; but they are undoubtedly very ‘Gothick.’

It is as a poet that we celebrate Gray’s bicentenary, but those persons who do not care for poetry may celebrate him as a man and a letter-writer. As a man he is secure of our affection as soon as we get to know him, and any one may know him who will read his letters, of which there is a great store; and still more have come to light lately, and have been well edited by Mr. Paget Toynbee. There are few men of letters of so attractive a nature as Gray. Perhaps he is the most lovable of all except Charles Lamb, and with Lamb, despite many obvious differences, he has many points in common. They were both solitary creatures living a recluse life, in the world but not of it, their best companions among the dead; they were both exquisite critics; they were both a prey to melancholy, or rather, as Gray said, to ‘leukocholy’; white bile not black; they had both a delicate and delightful humour; they were both the soul of gentle goodness. And so it comes about that the letters of both, in which they live to us, are among the few external goods which are necessary to happiness. The charm of a letter of Gray’s lies partly in this interest of his character, and partly in the perfect felicity with which everything is said. There is nothing slovenly, or far-fetched, or pompous, or makeshift; even in the shortest and apparently most hasty note, his touch is perfectly sure and his taste faultless; if we except some Hogarthian passages which smack of the age rather than the individual. It might not seem probable beforehand that the letters of a man whose days went ‘round and round like the blind horse in the mill’—‘swinging from chapel or hall home and from home to hall or chapel’—could have much to say that would be of general interest. Occasionally, indeed, he goes a journey—the grand tour with Walpole, or to the Highlands, or to see his friend Wharton at Old Park, or to Stoke Poges to his relations, and then we get lively enough descriptions. But these are episodes. The main topics of his every-day correspondence are his melancholy or his indolence, Mason’s poetry, Cambridge and Church news, the British Museum, politics, criticism of current literature,—Rousseau, or Sterne, or Dodsley’s poets,—his dab of musick and prints,’ gothick, hyacinths, and the weather. Occasionally, only occasionally, he allows himself to slip out a little town gossip, ‘as a decayed gentlewoman would a piece of right mecklin or a little quantity of run tea, but this only now and then, not to make a practice of it.’