EVERY boy who leaves Eton creditably is presented with a copy of the
works of Gray, for which everything has been done that the art of
printers, bookbinders and photographers can devise. This is one of the
most curious instances of the triumphs of genius, for there is hardly a
single figure in the gallery of Etonians who is so little characteristic
of Eton as Gray. His only poetical utterance about his school is one
which is hopelessly alien to the spirit of the place, though the
feelings expressed in it are an exquisite summary of those sensations of
pathetic interest which any rational man feels at the sight of a great
school. And yet, though the attitude of the teacher of youth is
professedly and rightly rather that of encouragement than of warning,
though he points to the brighter hopes of life rather than brandishes
the horrors that infest it, yet the last word that Eton says to her sons
is spoken in the language of one to whom elegy was a habitual and
deliberate tone.
Gray's was in many ways a melancholy life. His vitality was low, and
such happiness as he enjoyed was of a languid kind. Physically and
emotionally he was unfit to cope with realities, and this though he
never felt the touch of some of the most crushing evils that humanity
sustains. He was never poor, he was never despised, he had many devoted
friends; but on the other hand he had a wretched and diseased
constitution, he suffered from all sorts of prostrating complaints, from
imaginary insolences, violent antipathies, and want of sympathy. Fame
such as is rarely accorded to men came to him: he was accepted as
without doubt the first of living English poets; but he took no kind of
pleasure in it. He was horrified to find himself a celebrity; he
declined to be Poet Laureate; he refused honorary degrees; when at
Cambridge the young scholars are said to have left their dinners to see
him as he passed in the street, it was a sincere pain to him. Cowper
counterbalanced his fits of unutterable melancholy by his hours of
tranquil serenity over teacups and muffins and warm coal-fires, with the
curtains drawn close. Johnson enlivened his boding depression by
tyrannizing over an adoring circle. But Gray's only compensations were
his friends. Any one who knows Gray's letters to and about his young
friend Bonstetten, knows how close and warm it is possible for
friendship to be.
No biography is more simple than Gray's. From Eton he passed to
Cambridge, which was practically his home for the rest of his life. He
went as a young man on a long foreign tour of nearly three years with
Horace Walpole, quarrelled, and came back alone, both afterwards
claiming to have been in the wrong; he travelled in England and Scotland
a little; he lived a little in London and a good deal at Stoke Poges,
where he kept a perfect menagerie of aged aunts, and he died somewhat
prematurely at the age of fifty. He spent in all more than twenty years
at Cambridge--the only event that interrupted his life there being his
move from Peterhouse to Pembroke, across the road, in consequence of an
offensive practical joke played on him by some undergraduates, who,
working on his morbid dread of fire, induced him by their cries to leave
the window of his room by means of a rope-ladder, and descend into a tub
of water placed ready for this purpose. The authorities at Peterhouse
seem to have made no sort of attempt to punish this wanton outrage, nor
to have been anxious to keep him at their college.
So he lived on at Cambridge, hating the "silly dirty place," as he calls
it. The atmosphere, physical and mental, weighed on his spirits with
leaden dulness. In one of his early letters he speaks of it as the land
indicated by the prophet, where the ruined houses were full of owls and
doleful creatures. He often could not bring himself to go there, and
once there, his spirits sank so low that he could not prevail on himself
to move. Almost the only part he took in the public life of the place
was to write and circulate squibs and lampoons on people and local
politics, most of which have fortunately perished; those that remain are
coarse and vindictive. Nevertheless he had some true friends there:
Mason, his worshipper and biographer, Dr. Brown, the Master of Pembroke,
in whose arms he died, and several others. He held no office there and
did no work for the place, till late in his life the Professorship of
Modern History, a mere sinecure, for which he had unsuccessfully applied
six years previously, came to him unsolicited. It was his aim throughout
to be considered a gentleman who read for his own amusement, and with
that curious fastidiousness which was so characteristic of him, he
considered it beneath him to receive money for his writings, the
copyrights of which he bestowed upon his publisher. Forty pounds for a
late edition of his poems is said to be the only money of this kind that
he ever handled. But he was, as has been said, well off, at least in his
later years. He had a country-house at Wanstead which he let, a house in
Cornhill, property at Stoke, and, though he sank some money in a large
annuity, he died worth several thousand pounds.
It might be thought that such a life, meagre and solitary as it was,
would furnish few details to a biographer, and this is to a certain
extent true; but about Gray there is a peculiar atmosphere of
attractiveness. He went his own way, thought his own thoughts, and did
not concern himself in the least with the ordinary life of people round
about him, except to despise them. This disdainful attitude is always an
attractive one. The recluse stimulates curiosity; and when we pass
behind the scenes and see the high purity of the life, the wide and deep
ideals always floating before such a man, the wonder grows. He lived
unconsciously at so high a level that he could not conceive how low and
animal lives were possible to men; he owned to no physical impulses; he
held that there was no knowledge unworthy of the philosopher, except
theology; and over the whole of his existence hung that shadow of doom
which lends a pathetic interest to the lives of the meanest of mankind.
When such a man is the author of the most famous poem of pure sentiment
in the English language, as well as of smaller pieces by which some
readers are fascinated, most impressed, and each of which has enriched
the world with one or more eternal phrases, our interest is indefinitely
increased, because isolation only ceases to be interesting when it is
self-absorbed and self-centred. Gray, on the other hand, suppressed
himself so effectually in his writings that he even caused them for
some readers to forfeit that personal interest that is so attractive to
most. "We are all condemned," he says, "to lonely grief,"--"the tender
for another's pain, the unfeeling for his own;" one of the latter could
never have written these words.
The deeper that we enter into such a life, the more fascinating it
becomes. All Gray's tastes were natural and yet high; whatever he sets
his hand to ceases to be dull; he had a transfiguring touch; he was
moreover a strangely unconscious precursor of modern tastes and fancies,
in such things as his self-created taste for architecture and
antiquities, by communicating which to Horace Walpole (for Gray's
influence can be surely traced in Horace's artistic development) he
succeeded in making fashionable; his dignified preferences in art, his
rapturous devotion to music, especially to Pergolesi and the
contemporary Roman school, whose airs he would sit crooning to himself,
playing his own accompaniment on the harpsichord in the high unvisited
rooms at Pembroke; his penchant for heraldry, his educational theories,
his minute and accurate investigations of Nature, as close and loving as
Gilbert White's, recording as he does the break of dry clear weather
into warm wet winds, the first flight of ladybirds, the first push of
crocuses, the first time he heard the redstart's note in the bushes and
the thrush fluting about the butts of the old college gardens,
"scattering," as he said in a lovely impromptu line that he made in a
walk near Cambridge, "her loose notes in the waste of air." In 1740 he
wrote from Florence to a friend:
"To me there hardly appears any medium between a public life and a
private one; he who prefers the first must feel himself in a way of
being serviceable to the rest of mankind, if he has a mind to be of any
consequence among them. Nay, he must not refuse being in a certain
degree dependent upon some men who are so already; if he has the good
fortune to light on such as will make no ill use of his humility, there
is no shame in this. If not, his ambition ought to give place to a
reasonable pride, and he should apply to the cultivation of his own mind
those abilities which he has not been permitted to use for others'
service; such a private happiness (supposing a small competence of
fortune) is almost in every one's power, and is the proper enjoyment of
age, as the other is the proper employment of youth."
And this was the programme to which Gray settled down. In what vast
schemes of study he indulged we do not know; but we do know that he gave
five years to a comprehensive survey of Greek literature, taking prose
and verse alternately, like bread and cheese; he contemplated and wrote
notes for an edition of Strabo; he translated many Greek epigrams into
Latin verse, curiously weighing his words for weeks together; he read
history exhaustively, with such tenacious accuracy that he could correct
in the margin with the everlasting pencil dates and names in a Chinese
dynasty--"a dismal waste of energy and power," sigh his biographers. No,
it was no waste, for this was Gray. He wrote no more poetry, except a
few "autumnal verses" still unidentified. He could not write any. Mr.
Matthew Arnold, in his delicate essay, blames the age for this; he puts
Gray's reticence down to a want of literary sympathy and intellectual
stimulus. Had Gray been born with Milton or with Burns, he says he would
have been a different man. We may thankfully doubt it. Gray's nature,
Gray's powers of production, would have been far more liable to be
crushed into extinction by the consciousness of the existence of a
superior artist, fluent and sublime. He would have read and wondered,
and thrown aside his pen. The fact that he could strike out better verse
and nobler thoughts than his contemporaries, though it did not urge him
to prolific production, made him at least not ashamed of work that
gained by comparison with the work of all living artists; but a genius
on the scene would have elbowed Gray out altogether. To take the very
first instance that comes to hand of his fastidious discontent,
consider the two exquisite stanzas which he struck out of the Elegy for
no more adequate reason than that "they made too long a parenthesis."
There scattered oft, the earliest of the year,
By hands unseen, are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.
Him have we seen the greenwood side along,
While o'er the heath we hied, our labours done,
Oft as the woodlark piped her farewell song,
With wistful eyes pursue the setting sun.
Akenside or Mason, Dyer or Armstrong, if they had lit upon any one of
these delightful lines, would have made a whole poem in which to set it,
and have been well content.
Perhaps his own words best describe the intrinsic characteristics of his
writings: "Thoughts that breathe and words that burn." Gray's thoughts,
the elegiac poet's thoughts, are common property, after all; every one
has felt them, or something like them; the poet has got, so to speak, to
make a formula which shall cover all the vague, blind variations of
which every one is conscious. When he has thus made thought live,
expression comes next, and here Gray surpasses almost every English
poet. The words literally eat their way into memory and imagination; the
epithets seize upon the nouns and crown them. Take such a stanza as the
one to which Dr. Johnson gave a grudging admiration:
For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?
Try the effect of substitution or suppression on a stanza like that!
Nothing can be spared; the gap if created could not be filled. A good
instance of this is in a little posthumous poem of Gray's, written on a
sheet of paper from which the lower right-hand corner has been
unfortunately torn, thus depriving the last three lines of the last
stanza of their last words. Both Mason and Mitford tried their hands at
restoring the text. Mason's is the best, but they are both hopelessly
far away. The lines run thus, Mitford's emendations being given above
Mason's.
Enough to me if to some feeling breast
_convey,_
My lines a secret sympathy impart,
_is exprest_
And as the pleasing influence flows confest
_dies away._
A sigh of soft reflection heaves the heart.
The only thing of which we feel certain is that neither is near the
truth.
It is not only in Gray's poetry that this sure touch is visible. I do
not know any more simple or yet more worthy epitaph than the one that he
wrote for his mother. "In the same pious confidence, beside her friend
and sister, sleep the remains of Dorothy Gray, widow, the careful tender
mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive
her." Given the circumstances and, so to speak, the sense, how many
people could have produced such an ideal of tender dignity?
It is not within the scope of these essays to make large quotations, but
page after page of Gray's letters illustrate this felicitous and
apposite handling. In Horace Walpole's quaint diction: "His letters are
the best I ever saw, and had more novelty and wit." But besides the
perfection of style they have a charming meditative tone, combined with
a certain subtle humour running through them. Moreover, Gray exercised
to the full the privilege of allusion. Out of his teeming mind, echoes
and memories, images and unsuspected likenesses streamed, encircling all
that he thought or wrote. The perfection of classical culture, the
departure of which we cannot help deploring, even though it may have
been succeeded by a wider and freer sentiment, is seen in him; not only
are his quotations exquisite, but there is a forgotten music which
haunts his sentences and words, even in the very nicknames with which it
was his delight to dub his friends.
I venture to quote the exquisite description of Burnham Beeches, which
cannot be too well-known.
"I have, at the distance of half a mile through a green lane, a forest
(the vulgar call it a common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I
spy no human thing in it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains
and precipices, mountains, it is true, that do not ascend much above the
clouds, nor are the declivities quite so amazing as Dover Cliff, but
just such hills as people who love their necks as well as I do may
venture to climb, and crags that give the eye as much pleasure as if
they were more dangerous. Both vale and hill are covered with most
venerable beeches and other very reverend vegetables, that like most
other ancient people are always _dreaming out their old stories to the
winds_. At the foot of one of these squats ME (Il Penseroso), and there
I grow to the trunk for a whole morning. The timorous hare and sportive
squirrel gambol around me like Adam in Paradise before he had an Eve,
but I think he did not use to read Virgil as I commonly do."
In this letter emerges that fact which at least no one disputes, that
Gray discovered and introduced the taste for natural scenery. He was
nearly the first to love the hills and woods for themselves. He found
out Wordsworth's favourite prospects in the lakes when Wordsworth was a
dumb baby; he gazed upon Scotland and the Alps with a reverent awe. It
was a time when writers about Nature's loveliness were accustomed to
describe her with their back to the study-window, and the only Nature
that such men as Shenstone and Akenside revelled in was Nature as they
had themselves adapted her. Gray was the first to take her as he found
her.
To any one who is familiar with it, the quiet Buckinghamshire country
where Gray lived comes to have a peculiar charm. Lower down, nearer the
Thames, the land is oppressively flat, but Burnham and Stoke are on
higher ground, broken into innumerable little undulations, with copses
in the hollows, and little lanes, meandering about for no apparent
purpose except their own pleasure. It is a gravel soil, and immemorial
excavations which indent the surfaces of all the hills and fields give a
pleasant character to the whole. The wayfarer is for ever looking down
into pits full nearly to the brim of ferns and brambles, elder plants
and young ash-suckers; the great bare sweeps of the fields, with the
rounded gravel lying thick among the thin vegetation, are broken by
little hollows full of ragwort and the brisk hardy bugloss and a dozen
other light-soil plants. Of Burnham Beeches itself it is unnecessary to
speak. The old wreathed trunks full of gaping mouths and eyes, standing
in the green twilight knee-deep in ferns, have a character that no other
trees wear, and the breaks of moorland scenery, heathery sweeps dotted
with tall fir spinnies, out of which the owls call on summer
nights--all this is true forest, and needs no praise; but the roads and
lanes themselves, with the venerable hump-backed Buckinghamshire
cottages, with houseleek and stonecrop on the roof, the moated farms,
the parks set with noble cedars, the high-shouldered barns, all these
are full of delight. The pedestrian may climb the long slope to Burnham
and gaze up its straggling red-brick street; the quaint cupola of the
church, familiar to Gray, has lately, alas! fallen before a whirlwind of
restoration, and given place to a neat spire; he may pass on to
Britwell, a house, half-grange, half-mansion, with a modern tower, where
Gray used to live with his gouty uncle, a Nimrod _emeritus_, who, too
broken to ride out, used to regale himself upon the "comfortable sound
and stink" of his hounds. The elm-girt paddocks and the tall plane-trees
must be much as they were then. By Nut Hall, with its close of ancient
walnuts, he may pass through East Burnham village, and finally descend
upon Stoke itself by West-end House, still nestling in trees, where Gray
was petted and coddled by his old aunts till he was too lazy even to go
down to Eton, which lay full in view from the brow that spread half a
mile below him. The tall chimneys of the manor, the hideous white dome
of the park, the church ivy-girt and irregular, the churchyard
surrounded by old brick walls on three sides, over which tower the
foliage of yews and cedars--all these he may see. The only memorial of
Gray, save a tablet, is the one thing which he himself would have
loathed. On a rising ground stands a huge cube of stone with marble
panels, crowned with a sarcophagus of the kind that suggests a hopeless
prisoner for ever trying to force up the lid. This was the best that
they could do for Gray!
It is only quite lately that the aid of Mr. Thornycroft, a sculptor of a
genius akin to Gray's, has been invoked to decorate her hall with a
worthy monument of the poet.
Shelley's letters are said by some to be the best ever written, but I
cannot think that they come near to Gray's. With that independence so
characteristic of him, Gray and Horace Walpole are perhaps the only
writers of the time who entirely escape the Johnsonian contagion.
Johnson's style, as written by Johnson himself, has indeed most of the
elements of magnificence; unfortunately it is also very useful for
concealing the absence of ideas. Gray's English, on the other hand, is
pure and stately, and never diffuse; he said what he had to say and was
done with it; he never appears to be endeavouring to "get in diction,"
as so many of the imitators of the Doctor undeniably did. In this
respect it resembles Johnson's conversation, and for the art of
statement it is hardly possible to say more.
Some slight affectation is traceable in the earliest letters. They are
mostly written to his young and brilliant friend, West, by whose
premature death literature, we may believe, was a loser. "Take my word
and experience upon it," he writes for example, "doing nothing is a most
amusing business, and yet neither something nor nothing give me any
pleasure. For this little while past I have been playing at Statius. We
yesterday had a game of quoits together. You will easily forgive me for
having broke his head, as you have a little pique with him." He means to
say that he has been translating him. West replies in the same strain.
"I agree with you that you have broke Statius' head, but it is in like
manner as Apollo broke Hyacinth's--you have foiled him infinitely at his
own weapons."
This is sad posturing, and only excusable in very young and clever men.
These letters are, however, fortunately relieved by a short note, in
which he is very humanly rude to his tutor.
As a specimen of the early style at its best, I may quote the following,
written from Rome in imitation of a classical epistle:
"I am to-day just returned from Alba, a good deal fatigued, for you know
the Appian is somewhat tiresome. We dined at Pompey's; he indeed was
gone for a few days to his Tusculan, but by the care of his villicus we
made an admirable meal. We had the dugs of a pregnant sow, a peacock, a
dish of thrushes, a noble scarus just fresh from the Tyrrhene, and some
conchylia of the lake with garum sauce. For my part I never eat better
at Lucullus' table. We drank half a dozen cyathi apiece of ancient Alban
to Pholoe's health, and after bathing and playing an hour at ball, we
mounted our essedum again, and proceeded up the mount to the temple. The
priests there entertained us with an account of a wonderful shower of
birds' eggs that had fallen two days before, which had no sooner touched
the ground but they were converted into gudgeons; as also that the night
past a dreadful voice had been heard out of the Adytum, which spoke
Greek during a full half hour, but nobody understood it."
That is nothing short of admirable; it catches the subtle classical
flavour, and intermingles it with the later humour of which the Roman
mind seemed so singularly destitute.
Among these earlier letters, however, there are charming passages in his
natural manner. What could be better than this humorous description of
Peterhouse and his life there?
"My motions at present (which you are pleased to ask after) are much
like those of a pendulum or oscillatory. I swing from Chapel or Hall
home, and from home to Chapel or Hall. All the strange incidents that
happen in my journeys and returns I shall be sure to acquaint you with.
The most wonderful is that it now rains exceedingly; this has refreshed
the prospect, as the way for the most part lies between green fields on
either hand terminated with buildings at some distance--castles I
presume, and of great antiquity. The roads are very good, being as I
presume the work of Julius Caesar's army, for they still preserve in many
places the appearance of a pavement in pretty good repair, and if they
were not so near home, might perhaps be as much admired as the Via
Appia. There are at present several rivulets to be crossed, and which
serve to enliven the view all around; the country is exceeding fruitful
in ravens and such black cattle; but not to trouble you with my travels
I abruptly conclude."
But perhaps the most striking characteristic throughout the whole series
are the extraordinarily felicitous criticisms, and the soundness of the
taste which he brought to bear on an author. It is true he made
mistakes; he spoke of Collins as a writer that deserved to live, but
that would not; and he, like many other clever men, was carried off his
feet by the rage for Ossian. Like other critics he was misled by the
accounts of interviews with Macpherson, who appeared to be a dull,
unintelligent person, incapable of originating or of putting together
even such a composition as _Fingal_; besides, the difficulty of getting
solid testimony on the subject seems to have been extreme. Gray's last
word on the subject is: "For me, I admire nothing but _Fingal_, yet I
remain still in doubt about the authenticity of these poems, though
inclining to believe them genuine in spite of the world. Whether they
are the inventions of antiquity, or of a modern Scotchman, either case
is to me alike unaccountable. _Je m'y perds._" We, nowadays, with all
the barbarous treasures of Indian and Scandinavian literatures about us,
find it hard to understand how fascinating the opening of such a mine
must have been, even when the ore extracted was such thin stuff as
Ossian; the old rude primitive world, as simple as Homer, fighting and
singing in desolate Northern forests, seems to have been altogether too
much even for the discrimination of Gray; his imagination was taken
captive; he dreamed of little else; we have several disappointing
attempts of his own to imitate the ancient Icelandic staves, and of
Ossian, or rather Macpherson, he writes: "This man in short is the very
Daemon of poetry, or he has lighted on a treasure hid for ages." We may
forgive him for having floundered here. Dr. Johnson, whose imagination
was not so strong as his common-sense, was the only man not misled.
But Gray on Aristotle, Gray on Froissart is admirable; his pungent
criticism on Shaftesbury, too long to quote, is a perfect masterpiece;
even his verbal criticisms on the poor stuff with which Mason inundated
him, are wonderfully patient and acute. It may be worth while to hear
Gray on other people's elegies. He writes to Mason: "All I can say is,
that your elegy must not end with the worst line in it; it is flat, it
is prose, whereas that above all ought to sparkle, or at least to shine.
If the sentiment must stand, twist it a little into an apophthegm, stick
a flower into it, gild it with a costly expression, let it strike the
fancy, the ear or the heart, and I am satisfied." Again he writes, on
the nature of elegiac writing: "Nature and sorrow and tenderness are the
true genius of such things; poetical ornaments are foreign to the
purpose--for they only show that a man is not sorry--and devotion worse,
for that teaches him that he ought not to be sorry, which is all the
pleasure of the thing."
Yet he could condescend to a little good-natured puffing of his friend's
writings. He sends Mason's tragedy, _Caractacus_, a tiresome work, to a
friend. "You will receive to-morrow _Caractacus_, piping hot, I hope
before any one else has it. Observe it is I that send it, for Mason
makes no presents to any one whatever; and moreover you are desired to
lend it to nobody, that we may sell the more of them,--for money, not
fame, is the declared purpose of all we do. He has had infinite fits of
affectation as the hour approached, and is now gone into the country
for a week, like a new-married couple."
He mistrusts his powers as a critic: "You know I do not love, much less
pique myself on criticism, and think even a bad verse as good a thing or
better than the best observation that was ever made upon it." Indeed his
diffidence with regard to his own work was profound. This is the first
announcement of the completion of the _Elegy_: "I have been here at
Stoke a few days, and having put an end to a thing, whose beginning you
have seen long ago, I immediately send it to you. You will, I hope, look
upon it in the light of a thing with an end to it, a merit that most of
my writings have wanted and are like to want."
The following contains a pathetic touch; the diffident man's silent
hankering after recognition: "I cannot brag of my spirits, my situation,
my employments, or my fertility; the days and the nights pass, and I am
never the nearer to anything but that one to which we are all tending.
Yet I love people that leave some traces of their journey behind them,
and have strength enough to advise you to do so while you can; winter is
the season of harvest to an author."
This is his own account of his powers of composition: "I by no means
pretend to inspiration, but yet I affirm that the faculty in question
[of composition] is by no means voluntary. It is the result (I suppose)
of a certain disposition of mind, which does not depend on one's self,
and which I have not felt this long time. You that are a witness how
seldom this spirit has moved me in my life, may easily give credit to
what I say." The great Doctor, whose favourite maxim it was that any one
can write at any time who sets himself "doggedly" to it, was profoundly
irritated by this. He speaks of Gray's "fantastic" notion that he could
not write except at happy moments; a "foppery," he adds, "to which my
kindness for a man of learning makes me wish that he had been superior."
Gray was a master of the art of delicate moralising. I cannot help
wondering that more literary apophthegms have not been extracted from
his writings. Here is one for example: "I am persuaded that the whole
matter is to have always something going forward." And again: "You
mistake me, I was always a friend to employment and no foe to money; but
they are no friends to each other. Promise me to be always busy, and I
will allow you to be rich." Or more solemnly still:
"A life spent out of the world has its hours of despondence, its
inconveniences, its sufferings as numerous and real (though not quite of
the same sort) as a life spent in the midst of it. The power we have,
when we will exert it, over our own minds, joined to a little strength
and consolation, nay, a little pride we catch from those that seem to
love us, is our only support in either of these conditions. I am
sensible I cannot return to you so much of this assistance as I have
received from you. I can only tell you that one who has far more reason
than you I hope will ever have, to look on life with something worse
than indifference, is yet no enemy to it, and can look back on many
bitter moments, partly with satisfaction, and partly with patience, and
forward too, on a scene not very promising, with some hope and some
expectations of a better day."
The last extract is particularly characteristic, and strikes a note
which sounds again and again throughout the letters. Gray was deeply
serious. Seriousness unrelieved by humour is tiresome; but Gray, however
melancholy he felt, could always retire a few paces and view himself as
a spectator, with a smile. It is the truth that we do not really love a
man unless we are sure that he is serious; he may amuse us and fascinate
us, but he does nothing more. And Gray was never cynical; below his
humour and contempt lay a deep regard for the holiness of life, for
friendship and loyalty and old-fashioned virtues. Shelley attracts us,
but we do not feel sure of him: our respect for Gray grows with every
page we turn.
Of his humour it is difficult to give specimens. Isolated from the
connection in which they occur they lose half their charm; there is a
habitual tone, a point of view, of which extracts can give no idea. But
it may perhaps be worth while to give a sentence or two to illustrate
his habit of viewing himself. On settling in London he writes: "I am
just settled in my new habitation in Southampton Row; and though a
solitary and dispirited creature, not ungenial nor wholly unpleasant to
myself. I live in the Museum and write volumes of antiquity." That was
the sort of life that suited him. Nothing tires him, he declares, more
than being entertained. "I am come to my resting-place, and find it very
necessary, after living for a month in a house with three women, that
laughed from morning to night, and would allow nothing to the sulkiness
of my disposition. Company and cards at home, parties by land and water
abroad, and (what they call) _doing something_, that is, racketing about
from morning to night, are occupations I find that wear out my spirits,
especially in a situation where one might sit still and be alone with
pleasure; for the place was a hill like Clifden, opening to a very
extensive and diversified landscape, with the Thames, which is
navigable, running at its foot."
He does not indulge much in anecdote, nor indeed in witticisms of a
direct kind, but when he met with a story that pleased him, he sent it
on. The following seems to have taken his fancy, as it occurs more than
once; and it may be noted in passing that Gray was never averse to
reproducing a letter almost verbally for the benefit of two or three
friends: there are several instances of these duplicate letters. "An old
Alderman I knew, who after living forty years on the fat of the land
(not milk and honey, but arrack-punch and venison) and losing his great
toe with a mortification, said to the last that he owed it to two grapes
which he ate one day after dinner. He felt them lie cold at his stomach
the minute they were down." Again, when he was told that a certain Dr.
Plumptre, a plethoric pluralist, had had his picture painted by Wilson
with his family motto below, _Non magna loquimur sed vivimus_--Gray
humorously suggests a rendering: "We don't say much, but we hold good
livings."
Apart from actual letters, his diaries are delightfully suggestive
reading; and there is a peculiar freshness about them, because the taste
for natural scenery was not then universal. It was impossible that there
should be any cant about it then; any one who delighted in it was
peculiar in his tastes; and Gray, who practically visited all the
English districts where Nature shows herself on a more striking scale,
met with little sympathy from his friends who were writing about her
with their back to the window. It is impossible to illustrate this by
quotation; but I may perhaps be excused for giving a well-known
sentence, into which is concentrated a wealth of sympathetic
observation; it suggests lonely evenings, when the winds were blustering
round the little college-court or moaning in the tall chimneys of Stoke;
for after all it is an indoors-criticism. "Did you never observe (while
rocking winds are piping loud) that pause, as the gust is re-collecting
itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive note, like the
swell of an AEolian harp? I do assure you there is nothing in the world
so like the voice of a spirit."
It was not, of course, likely that Gray's letters would ever attain a
very wide popularity; to appreciate them, they require a rather minute
study of a very peculiar character, and a certain familiarity with the
leisurely movements of a very uneventful life. And they are moreover
touched throughout with a stately refinement, a certain delicacy and
remoteness which need almost an initiation to comprehend. In days when
vulgar romances run in a few weeks into a circulation of thousands, it
is only to be wondered at that such things as these letters get readers
at all; for they are high literature, not spiced for a jaded taste, but
somewhat austere and solemn--the intimate thoughts of a high-minded man.
Much has been said that is wide of the mark about Gray's religious
belief. The fact was that he was a pagan of the grand type. He was not
really a Christian, but he had no wish to tilt against orthodoxies and
accepted dogmas. The most that can be traced in his writings is a solemn
Theism. He recognised the huge inscrutable fate that lay behind the
inexplicable fabric of human life and human history, but of the God with
men, of the Divine hope, the consecration of life, the self-abnegation
of the Christian, he had no real cognizance. This, I think, cannot be
doubted. His contemptuous hatred of theology and of creeds is marked; he
had no patience with them; of worship he knew nothing. It has been said
that he would have found a medicine for his unhappiness in wedded love;
he would have found more than a medicine in religion.
The stately pathos of such a life is indisputable. The pale little poet,
with greatness written so largely on all his works, with keen, deep
eyes, the long aquiline nose, the heavy chin, the thin compressed lips,
the halting affected gait, is a figure to be contemplated with serious
and loving interest, spoiled for life, as he said, by retirement. How he
panted for strength and serenity! How far he was from reaching either!
Yet the bitter dignity of his thought, the diffident and fastidious
will, are of a finer type than we often meet with. We cannot spare the
men of action, it is true; yet the contemplative soul, with the body so
pitifully unequal to sustain its agonizing struggle, is an earnest of
higher things. In the valley of shadows he walked, and entered the gate
without repining. All are equal there; and the memory that he left, and
the characters that he graved on the rock, while they move our pity,
stir our wonder too.