added, give a sufficient indication of the general tendencies of what
I have called the school of Gray. They did not form a clique, like
most schools, for they lived in remote regions, and most of them
showed the touchiness and even sensibility which is rubbed off by the
friction of large societies. Tom Warton, who was certainly sociable
enough in a fashion, was buried at Oxford for nearly fifty years. Gray
was so secluded in his Cambridge cloister that the young men made a
rush to see him in later years—leaving their dinners, it is said; but
that is scarcely credible—when he appeared by some rare accident in
the college walks. Beattie stuck with equal persistence to his college
in Aberdeen, and could not be induced even to take a professorship in
Edinburgh, being afraid, apparently, that his 'Essay on Truth' would
expose him to unpleasantness from the more metropolitan circle which
admired and respected his antagonist Hume. The alarm, indeed, was more
reasonable than Mason's alarm about Oxford, for the essay was not
only vehement in its abuse, but had succeeded in making a great stir
in the world. Mason, again, fixed himself in his Yorkshire living and
his canonry, emerging only at intervals to pay a few visits to his
aristocratic friends. And even Walpole made a kind of sham cloister
at Strawberry Hill, and, though a man of the world, a gossip, and
a politician, was as irritable and uneasy a companion as the most
retired of hermits. The great movements of thought generally spread,
it is supposed, from the metropolitan centres, where intellectual
activity is stimulated by the constant collision of eager and excited
minds. But a new taste may make its appearance in the corners to which
sensitive men retire from the uncongenial atmosphere of the world,
and cultivate at their ease what is first an individual crotchet and
afterwards develops into a fashionable amusement.
Gray, beyond all doubt, was the one man of genius of the school after
the early death of Collins, for it would be strained to give a higher
name than talent even to Horace Walpole's remarkable intellectual
vivacity. Tom Warton's biographer (it is impossible to speak of
Thomas) has drawn an elaborate parallel, in the proper historical
fashion, between his hero and Gray. They were both dons, professors,
students of antiquities, lovers of nature and of the romantic,
composers of odes, and so forth. The parallel contains a good deal of
truth, but it is consistent with an amusing contrast. Tom Warton was
the thoroughly jovial, undignified don of the period. His poetry—even
if his 'Triumph of Isis' be superior to Mason's 'Isis,' and his
sonnets deserve some praise in a century barren of sonnets—is not
generally refreshing; the poor man had to construct some of those
fanciful pieces of verse which laureates in those days were bound
to manufacture for the sovereign's birthday, and one cannot glance
at them (nobody can read them) without profound sympathy. But his
humorous verses have still a pleasant ring about them. There is a
contagion in the enthusiasm with which he celebrates the virtues of
Oxford ale. When he imagines himself discommuned for his indulgence,
and unable even to get longer 'tick' at the pothouse, he daringly
compares himself to Adam exiled from Paradise. In another poem we
have the characteristic triumph of the steady don, who has stuck to a
bachelor life, over the misguided victim to matrimony and a college
living. Thus will the poor fellow lament as butchers' bills and school
fees become heavier year by year:—
Why did I sell my college life
(He cries) for benefice and wife?
Return, ye days when endless pleasure
I found in reading or in leisure,
When calm around the common room
I puffed my daily pipe's perfume,
Rode for a stomach, and inspected
At annual bottlings corks selected,
And din'd untaxed, untroubled, under
The portrait of our pious founder!
These of course are youthful productions; but, if all tales be true,
the tastes described did not die out. Once, it is said, Warton's
presence was required on some grand public function. The Professor
was not to be found till an ingenious person suggested that a drum
and fife should be sent through the streets performing a jovial and
Jacobite tune; and before long the sweet notes enticed Warton from a
public-house, pipe in mouth and with rumpled bands, to be miserably
deceived in his hopes of fun. More creditable, and apparently more
authentic, anecdotes relate how he took part in the boyish pranks of
his brother's pupils at Winchester, and once at least composed a copy
of Latin verses for a youthful companion, and insisted upon taking the
half-crown which had been offered as a reward for their excellence
before the mild imposture was detected.
Most men grow tired of pipes and ale and the jolly bachelor life of
common rooms soon after they have put on their master's hood. In the
old days, before commissions and reform, when the Universities were
more frequently regarded as a permanent retreat for men who could
find a pipe a sufficient substitute for a wife, such jolly fellows
as Warton formed a larger part of the college society. Most of them,
however, were duller dogs than Tom Warton, who, with all his enjoyment
of such heavy festivities, managed to write some laborious books. A
proud, fastidious, and exquisitely sensitive man like Gray looked upon
the whole scene with infinite contempt and scorn. It does not appear
to be very clearly made out why he should have resided permanently
at Cambridge, except for the sake of the libraries. Apparently he
had resented some of Walpole's supercilious conduct, and possibly
conduct which deserves a harsher name; for it is said that Walpole
opened a letter addressed to Gray in the expectation of finding some
disrespectful notice of himself. Anyhow, Gray erased Walpole from his
list of friends, though he consented to resume acquaintanceship. He
might previously have condescended to accept some of the appointments
which Walpole could have easily procured during his father's ministry.
But the father was turned out of office whilst the son was a discarded
friend, and Gray, unwilling to enter the struggle of professional
life, settled down at the University, though he always regarded it
and its inhabitants with unqualified contempt. Gray—as his letters
prove—had a very keen sense of humour, and when he chose could put a
very sharp edge to his tongue. He let his fellow-residents know that
he thought them fools—an opinion which they were perverse enough to
resent. The poem with which he greeted Cambridge on first returning
from his travels, headed a 'Hymn to Ignorance,' is a curious contrast
to Warton's enthusiastic 'Triumph of Isis.'
Hail, horrors, hail! ye ever gloomy bowers,
Ye Gothic fanes and antiquated towers,
Where rushy Camus' slowly winding flood
Perpetual draws his humid train of mud—
is the opening of his uncomplimentary address to his _alma mater_. 'At
the very time,' says Parr, in that style of delicious pomposity which
smells of his immortal wig, 'in which Mr. Gray spoke so contemptuously
of Cambridge, that very University abounded in men of erudition
and science, with whom the first scholars would not have disdained
to converse; and who shall convict me of exaggeration when I bring
forward the names' of the immortal so-and-so? The names include, it
is true, some which have still a claim upon our respect—Bentley,
Waterland, and Conyers Middleton, for example—but the most eminent
were just dead or dying when Gray came into residence, and dignified
heads of houses, like Bentley and Waterland, were in a seventh heaven
of dignity, quite inaccessible to the youthful poet. It does not now
appear that it can ever have been a great privilege to live in the
same town with 'Provost Snape,' 'Tunstall the public orator,' or
'Asheton of Jesus.' Gray knew something of Middleton (who died in
1750, when Gray was 34), and speaks of his house as the only one in
Cambridge where it was easy to converse; and he takes care to add
that even Middleton was only an 'old acquaintance,' which is but an
indifferent likeness of a friend. He made a few intimacies—chiefly
with younger men, like Mason, who soon ceased to be residents—but
the bulk of the University was in his eyes contemptible; and, on the
whole, contemporary evidence would lead to the conclusion that his
opinion was not far wrong. Cambridge had possessed very eminent men in
the days of Bentley, Newton, Waterland, Sherlock, and Middleton, and
it has had very eminent men at a later period, but Gray was himself
almost the only man in the middle of the eighteenth century whom
anybody need care to remember now. At any rate, there was a large
proportion of that ale-drinking, tobacco-smoking element amongst
the jolly fellows of the combination room, whose society Warton
might relish, but whom Gray regarded with supreme contempt. The
fellow-commoners appear by his account to have exceeded in audacity
the young gentlemen who lately exhibited their sense of playful humour
by defacing certain statues at Oxford. The wits of an earlier day put
poor Gray in fear of his life. He ordered a rope ladder, to be able
to escape from his rooms in case they set the college on fire; and,
if I remember the tradition rightly, they set a 'booby trap' for the
poet, and, raising an alarm, induced him to descend his rope ladder
into a water-butt. Anyhow, poor Gray was driven from Peterhouse to
Pembroke, and there abstracted his mind from the academical noises
by a course of study which, according to his admirers (but who shall
answer for the admirers?), made him profoundly familiar with every
branch of learning except mathematics. Meanwhile his appearance and
manners were calculated to intensify the mutual dislike between
himself and his rougher surroundings. His rooms were scrupulously
neat, with mignonette in the windows and flowers elegantly planted in
china vases; he spoke little in general society, and compiled biting
epigrams or classical puns with a derisory application to his special
associates. In short, in outward appearance he belonged to the class
fop or _petit-maître_, mincing, precise, affected, and as little in
harmony with the rowdy fellow-commoners as Hotspur's courtier with the
rough soldiers on the battle-field.
The want of harmony between Gray and his surroundings goes far to
explain his singular want of fertility. In fact, we may say—without
any want of respect for a venerable institution—that Gray could
hardly have found a more uncongenial residence. Cambridge boasts
of its poets; and a University may well be proud which has had,
amongst many others, such inmates as Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Gray,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Tennyson. If a sceptic chooses to
ask what share the University can claim in stimulating the genius of
those illustrious men, the answer might be difficult. But, in any
case, no poet except Gray loved his University well enough to become
a resident. If it were not for Gray, I should be inclined to guess
that a poet don was a contradiction in terms. The reason is very
obvious to any one who has enjoyed the latter title. It is simply
that no atmosphere can be conceived more calculated to stimulate
that excessive fastidiousness which all but extinguished Gray's
productive faculties. He might wrap himself in simple contempt for
the ale-drinking vanity of the don. He could, in the old college
slang, 'sport his oak' and despise their railings, and even the
shouts of 'Fire!' of the worthy fellow-commoners. But a poet requires
some sympathy, and, if possible, some worshippers. The inner circle
of Gray's intimates was naturally composed of men fastidious like
himself, and all of them more or less critics by profession. The
reflection would be forced upon his mind, whenever he thought of
publishing, What will be thought of my poems by Provost Snape, and
Mr. Public-Orator Tunstall, and Asheton of Jesus, and those other
luminaries whom Dr. Parr commemorates? And undoubtedly their first
thought would be to show their claim to literary excellence by picking
holes in their friend's compositions. They would rejoice greatly when
they could show that faculties sharpened by the detection of false
quantities and slips of grammar in their pupils' Latin verses were
equal to the discovery of solecisms and defective rhymes in the work
of a living poet. Gray's extreme sensitiveness to all such quillets
of criticism is marked in every poem he wrote. Had he been forced
to fight his way in literature he would have learnt to swallow his
scruples and take the chance in a free give-and-take struggle for
fame. In a country living he might have forgotten his tormentors and
have married a wife to secure at least one thoroughly appreciative
and intelligent admirer. But to be shut up in a small scholastic
clique, however little he might respect their individual merits, to
have the chat of combination rooms ever in his ears, to be worried by
bands of professional critics at every turn, was as though a singing
bird should build over a wasp's nest. The 'Elegy' and the 'Odes' just
struggled into existence, though much of them was written before he
settled down as a resident; but Gray, like many another don of great
abilities, finished but a minute fragment of the work of which he
more or less contemplated the execution. The books contemplated but
never carried out by men in his position would make a melancholy and
extensive catalogue. The effect of these influences upon his work is
palpable to every reader of Gray. No English poet has ever given more
decisive proof that he shared that secret of clothing even an obvious
thought in majestic and resounding language, which we naturally call
Miltonic. Though he modestly asserts that he inherits
Nor the pride nor ample pinion
That the Theban eagle bear,
Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air,
yet we feel that none of his contemporaries—perhaps none of his
successors—could have equalled, in dignity and richness of style,
the noble passage in which that phrase occurs. And yet we must
also feel that if his 'car,' as he says of Dryden's, is borne by
'coursers of ethereal race,' they are constantly checked before they
can get into full career. He takes flight as if the azure deep were
the natural home in which he could sail suspended like the eagle
without perceptible effort. But the wings droop before they are
well unfurled, and the magnificent strain ceases without giving the
promised satisfaction. Even the 'Elegy' flags a little towards the
end; the 'hoary-headed swain' becomes rather flat in his remarks,
and the concluding epitaph has just a little too much twang of
epigrammatic smartness. I sometimes agree, indeed, with Wolfe that it
was a far greater achievement to write the 'Elegy' than to storm the
heights of Abram, and then hold (though I also incline to a different
opinion) that only a soldier, or author, or civilian of ultra-military
enthusiasm could suppose that such a comparison involved condescension
on the side of the general. Gray and his personal admirers seem to
have been annoyed at the preference given to this above his other
writings. It proved, so he argued, that the stupid public cared for
the subject instead of the art; that they liked the 'Elegy' as they
liked Blair's 'Grave,' and would have liked it as well if the same
thoughts had been expressed in prose. Undoubtedly the public will
always refuse to make that distinction between form and matter which
seems so important to the critical mind. It is not, however, that
they are unaffected by the artistic skill, but that they are affected
unconsciously. The meditations of Blair, of Young, and of Hervey,
equally popular in their day, have fallen into disrepute for want of
the exquisite felicity of language which has preserved the 'Elegy.'
It is a commonplace thing to say that the power of giving freshness
to commonplace is amongst the highest proofs of poetical genius.
One reason is, apparently, that it is so difficult to extract the
pure and ennobling element from the coarser materials in which any
obvious truth comes to be embedded. The difficulty of feeling rightly
is as great as the difficulty of finding a worthy utterance of the
feeling. Everybody may judge of the difficulty of Gray's task who
will attend to what passes at a funeral. On such an occasion one is
inclined to fancy, _à priori_, mourners will drop all affectation and
speak poetically because they will speak from their hearts; but, as a
matter of fact, there is no occasion on which there is generally such
a lavish expenditure of painful and jarring sentiment, of vulgarity,
affectation, and insincerity; and thus Gray's meditations stand out
from other treatments of a similar theme not merely by the technical
merits of the language, but by the admirable truth and purity of the
underlying sentiment. The temptation to be too obtrusively moral and
improving, to indulge in inappropriate epigram, in sham feeling,
in idle sophistry, in strained and exaggerated gloominess, or even
on occasion to heighten the effect by inappropriate humour, is so
strong with most people that Gray's kindness and delicacy of feeling,
qualities which were perceptible to the despised public, must be
regarded as contributing quite as much to the success of the 'Elegy'
as the technical merits of form, which, moreover, can hardly be
separated from the merits of substance.
Indeed, when we come to the other odes which have similar qualities of
mere style, we are at no loss to explain the difference of reception.
The beautiful 'Ode upon Eton,' for example, comes into conflict with
one's common-sense. We know too well that an Eton boy is not always
the happy and immaculate creature of Gray's fancy; and one feels that
the reflections upon his probable degradation imply a fit of temporary
ill-humour in the poet, supervening, no doubt, upon a deeper vein of
melancholy. The sentiment is too splenetic to be pleasing. The 'Bard,'
which has, I suppose, been recited by schoolboys as frequently as
the 'Elegy,' is a more curious indication of the peculiarities of
Gray's method of composition. Mason gives an account of the remarkable
transformation which it underwent. Gray's first intention, it appears,
was that the bard should declare prophetically that poets should never
be wanting 'to celebrate true virtue and valour in immortal strains,
to expose vice and infamous pleasure, and boldly censure tyranny and
oppression.' Undoubtedly this gives a meaning to the ode worthy of the
beginning. The victim could not make a more effective retort. But,
unluckily, when the bard had got into full swing, it struck him that
the facts were not what his theory required. Shakespeare, says Mason,
liked Falstaff in spite of his vices; Milton censured tyranny in
prose; Dryden was a court parasite; Pope, a Tory; and Addison, 'though
a Whig,' was a poor poet. The poor bard was therefore in the miserable
position—one of the most wretched known to humanity—of a man who has
begun a fine speech and does not see his way out of it. If Gray had
taken a wider view of the poet's true function, he might still have
found some embodiment for his thoughts; for English poetry, though it
may not have been Whiggish, may certainly be regarded as the fullest
expression of the more liberal and humanising conceptions of the world
which have to struggle against the pedantry and narrowness of prosaic
professional theorisers. But the bard required sound Whig precedent
to point his moral, and it was not forthcoming. Consequently he has
to take refuge in the very scanty consolation afforded by the bare
reflection that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton would begin to write
some time after the descendants of a Welshman had ascended the throne.
One would not grudge any satisfaction to an unfortunate gentleman just
about to commit suicide; but one must admit that he was easily pleased.
This want of any central idea converts the ode into a set of splendid
fragments of verse, which scarcely hold together. Contemporary critics
complained grievously of its 'obscurity'—a phrase which seems ill
placed to us who know by experience what obscurity may really mean.
An obscurity removable by a slight knowledge of English history and
a recollection of the fact that Richard II. is said to have been
starved instead of stabbed, as in Shakespeare, by Exton, is not of a
very grievous kind; but the absence of any intelligible motive in the
bard's final rupture is more serious. A poet surely might have acted
upon the _tant pis pour les faits_ theory, and proceeded to make his
general assertion without waiting for confirmatory evidence. A writer
who, like Gray, secretes his poetry line by line and spreads the
process over years, seems to fall into the same faults which are more
frequently due to haste. He pores over his conceptions so long that
he becomes blind to defects obvious to a fresh observer, and rather
misses his point, as he introduces minute alterations without noticing
their effect on the context. One wonders how a man of Gray's exquisite
perception could have introduced the lines—
And gorgeous dames, and statesmen old
In bearded majesty appear—
without seeing that we are only saved by a comma, and a comma easily
neglected, from assuming that a Julia Pastrana would have been a usual
phenomenon at the court of Elizabeth. Correction continued after
the freshness of the impression has died away is apt to lead to such
oversight.
The learned and fastidious don shows through the inspired 'bard'
by many equally unmistakable indications. His editor, Mitford,
collected a number of parallel passages which curiously indicate
the degree in which his mind was saturated with recollections of
poetical literature. It seems to be now considered as unjustifiable
plagiarism for a poet to assimilate the phrases of his predecessors.
We may, indeed, find abundant proofs of familiarity with Shakespeare
in Shelley, and in more recent writers; but they are generally of
the unconscious kind, and would otherwise be avoided as sins against
originality. The poets of the last century, such as Goldsmith, and
especially Pope, had no scruples in the matter. Their work did not
profess to be a sudden and spontaneous inspiration. It was a slow
elaboration, with which it was perfectly allowable to interweave any
quantity of previously manufactured material so long as the juncture
was not palpable. Gray's adaptations seem sometimes to make the whole
tissue of his poetry. He owns to an unconscious appropriation from
Green (author of the 'Spleen') of the main thought of his 'Ode to the
Spring,' the comparison of men to ephemeral insects. But everywhere
he is giving out phrases which he has previously assimilated. So in
the very spirited translation from the Norse, 'Uprose the king of men
with speed,' we have a verse from the 'Allegro'—'Right against the
Eastern Gate'—cropping up naturally in quite a fresh connection. A
single phrase seems to combine several semi-conscious recollections.
The words in the 'Bard' 'dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart'
come from Shakespeare, and the preceding 'dear as the light that
visits those sad eyes' are perhaps from Otway. But it is useless to
accumulate instances of so palpable a process.
It is only in character, again, that Gray should have clung to a
peculiar dictum, as he would have insisted upon wearing his proper
academical costume in a performance in the senate-house. He would no
more have dropped into Wordsworth's vernacular than he would have
smoked a pipe in one of Warton's pot-houses. Wordsworth considered
this dignity to be unnatural pomposity; and undoubtedly the language
is frequently conventional and 'unnatural,' and a stumbling-block of
offence to the generation which gave up wigs. Equally annoying was
Gray's immense delight in semi-allegorical figures. We have whole
catalogues of abstract qualities scarcely personified. Ambition,
bitter Scorn, grinning Infamy, Falsehood, hard Unkindness, keen
Remorse, and moody Madness are all collected in one stanza not
exceptional in style—beings which to us are almost as offensive as
the muse whom he has pretty well ceased to invoke, though he still
appeals to his lyre. This fashion reached its culminating point in the
celebrated invocation, somewhere recorded by Coleridge, 'Inoculation,
heavenly maid!' The personified qualities are a kind of fading
'survival'—ghosts of the old allegorical persons who put on a rather
more solid clothing of flesh and blood with Spenser, and with Gray
scarcely putting in a stronger claim to vitality than is implied in
the use of capital letters. The 'muses' were nearly extinct, and in
Pope's time the gods and goddesses had come to be regarded as so much
'machinery' invented by Homer to work his epic poetry. They were, in
fact, passions and qualities in masquerade; and they therefore found
it very easy, in the next generation, to drop even this thin disguise,
and fit themselves for poetic usage, not by taking the name of a
pagan deity, but by a simple typographical device.