“It would be strange if I should find fault with you for reading
Isocrates; I did so myself twenty years ago, and in an edition at
least as bad as yours. The Panegyric, the De Pace, Areopagitic, and
Advice to Philip, are by far the noblest remains we have of this
writer, and equal to most things extant in the Greek tongue; but it
depends on your judgment to distinguish between his real and
occasional opinion of things, as he directly contradicts in one place
what he has advanced in another; for example, in the Panathenaic and
the De Pace, on the naval power of Athens; the latter of the two is
undoubtedly his own undisguised sentiment.”
After hearing Gray on Isocrates and Aristotle, let us hear him on
Froissart:—
“I rejoice you have met with Froissart, he is the Herodotus of a
barbarous age; had he but had the luck of writing in as good a
language, he might have been immortal. His locomotive disposition (for
then there was no other way of learning things), his simple curiosity,
his religious credulity, were much like those of the old Grecian. When
you have _tant chevauché_ as to get to the end of him, there is
Monstrelet waits to take you up, and will set you down at Philip de
Commines; but previous to all these, you should have read
Villehardouin and Joinville.”
Those judgments, with their true and clear ring, evince the high quality
of Gray’s mind, his power to command and use his learning. But Gray was
a poet; let us hear him on a poet, on Shakespeare. We must place
ourselves in the full midst of the eighteenth century and of its
criticism: Gray’s friend, West, had praised Racine for using it in his
dramas “the language of the times and that of the purest sort”; and he
had added: “I will not decide what style is fit for our English stage,
but I should rather choose one that bordered upon Cato, than upon
Shakespeare.” Gray replies:—
“As to matter of style, I have this to say: The language of the age is
never the language of poetry; except among the French, whose verse,
where the thought does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.
Our poetry, on the contrary, has a language peculiar to itself, to
which almost every one that has written has added something. In truth,
Shakespeare’s language is one of his principal beauties; and he has no
less advantage over your Addisons and Rowes in this, than in those
other great excellences you mention. Every word in him is a picture.
Pray put me the following lines into the tongue of our modern
dramatics—
‘But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass’—
and what follows? To me they appear untranslatable; and if this be the
case, our language is greatly degenerated.”
It is impossible for a poet to lay down the rules of his own art with
more insight, soundness, and certainty. Yet at that moment in England
there was perhaps not one other man, besides Gray, capable of writing
the passage just quoted.
Gray’s quality of mind, then, we see; his quality of soul will no less
bear inspection. His reserve, his delicacy, his distaste for many of the
persons and things surrounding him in the Cambridge of that day,—“this
silly, dirty place,” as he calls it,—have produced an impression of Gray
as being a man falsely fastidious, finical, effeminate. But we have
already had that grave testimony to him from the Master of Pembroke
Hall: “The thoughts I have of him will last, and will be useful to me
the few years I can expect to live.” And here is another to the same
effect from a younger man, from Gray’s friend Nicholls:—
“You know,” he writes to his mother, from abroad, when he heard of
Gray’s death, “that I considered Mr. Gray as a second parent, that I
thought only of him, built all my happiness on him, talked of him
forever, wished him with me whenever I partook of any pleasure, and
flew to him for revenge whenever I felt any uneasiness. To whom now
shall I talk of all I have seen here? Who will teach me to read, to
think, to feel? I protest to you, that whatever I did or thought had a
reference to him. If I met with any chagrins, I comforted myself that
I had a treasure at home; if all the world had despised and hated me,
I should have thought myself perfectly recompensed in his friendship.
There remains only one loss more; if I lose you, I am left alone in
the world. At present I feel that I have lost half of myself.”
Testimonies such as these are not called forth by a fastidious
effeminate weakling; they are not called forth, even, by mere qualities
of mind; they are called forth by qualities of soul. And of Gray’s high
qualities of soul, of his σπουδαιότης, his excellent seriousness, we may
gather abundant proof from his letters. Writing to Mason who had just
lost his father, he says:—
“I have seen the scene you describe, and know how dreadful it is; I
know too I am the better for it. We are all idle and thoughtless
things, and have no sense, no use in the world any longer than that
sad impression lasts; the deeper it is engraved the better.”