“He who best knows our nature (for he made us what we are) by such
afflictions recalls us from our wandering thoughts and idle merriment,
from the insolence of youth and prosperity, to serious reflection, to
our duty, and to himself; nor need we hasten to get rid of these
impressions. Time (by appointment of the same Power) will cure the
smart and in some hearts soon blot out all the traces of sorrow; but
such as preserve them longest (for it is partly left in our own power)
do perhaps best acquiesce in the will of the chastiser.”
And once more to Mason, in the very hour of his wife’s death; Gray was
not sure whether or not his letter would reach Mason before the end:—
“If the worst be not yet past, you will neglect and pardon me; but if
the last struggle be over, if the poor object of your long anxieties
be no longer sensible to your kindness or to her own sufferings, allow
me, at least an idea (for what could I do, were I present, more than
this?) to sit by you in silence and pity from my heart not her, who is
at rest, but you, who lose her. May he, who made us, the Master of our
pleasures and of our pains, support you! Adieu.”
Seriousness, character, was the foundation of things with him; where
this was lacking he was always severe, whatever might be offered to him
in its stead. Voltaire’s literary genius charmed him, but the faults of
Voltaire’s nature he felt so strongly that when his young friend
Nicholls was going abroad in 1771, just before Gray’s death, he said to
him: “I have one thing to beg of you which you must not refuse.”
Nicholls answered: “You know you have only to command; what is it?”—“Do
not go to see Voltaire,” said Gray; and then added: “No one knows the
mischief that man will do.” Nicholls promised compliance with Gray’s
injunction; “But what,” he asked, “could a visit from me
signify?”—“Every tribute to such a man signifies,” Gray answered. He
admired Dryden, admired him, even, too much; had too much felt his
influence as a poet. He told Beattie “that if there was any excellence
in his own numbers he had learned it wholly from that great poet;” and
writing to Beattie afterwards he recurs to Dryden, whom Beattie, he
thought, did not honor as a poet: “Remember Dryden,” he writes, “and be
blind to all his faults.” Yes, his faults as a poet; but on the man
Dryden, nevertheless, his sentence is stern. Speaking of the
Poet-Laureateship, “Dryden,” he writes to Mason, “was as disgraceful to
the office from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been
from his verses.” Even where crying blemishes were absent, the want of
weight and depth of character in a man deprived him, in Gray’s judgment,
of serious significance. He says of Hume: “Is not that _naïveté_ and
good-humor, which his admirers celebrate in him, owing to this, that he
has continued all his days an infant, but one that has unhappily been
taught to read and write?”
And with all this strenuous seriousness, a pathetic sentiment, and an
element, likewise, of sportive and charming humor. At Keswick, by the
lakeside on an autumn evening, he has the accent of the _Rêveries_, or
of Obermann, or Wordsworth:—
“In the evening walked down alone to the lake by the side of Crow Park
after sunset and saw the solemn coloring of light draw on, the last
gleam of sunshine fading away on the hill-tops, the deep serene of the
waters, and the long shadows of the mountains thrown across them, till
they nearly touched the hithermost shore. At a distance heard the
murmur of many waterfalls, not audible in the daytime. Wished for the
Moon, but she was _dark to me and silent hid in her vacant interlunar
cave_.”
Of his humor and sportiveness his delightful letters are full; his humor
appears in his poetry too, and is by no means to be passed over there.
Horace Walpole said that “Gray never wrote anything easily but things of
humor; humor was his natural and original turn.”
Knowledge, penetration, seriousness, sentiment, humor, Gray had them
all; he had the equipment and endowment for the office of poet. But very
soon in his life appear traces of something obstructing, something
disabling; of spirits failing, and health not sound; and the evil
increases with years. He writes to West in 1737:—
“Low spirits are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me,
go to bed with me, make journeys and returns as I do; nay, pay visits
and will even affect to be jocose and force a feeble laugh with me;
but most commonly we sit alone together, and are the prettiest insipid
company in the world.”
The tone is playful, Gray was not yet twenty-one. “Mine,” he tells West
four or five years later, “mine, you are to know, is a white Melancholy,
or rather _Leucocholy_, for the most part; which, though it seldom
laughs or dances, nor ever amounts to what one calls joy or pleasure,
yet is a good easy sort of a state.” But, he adds in the same letter:—
“But there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then
felt, that has something in it like Tertullian’s rule of faith, _Credo
quia impossibile est_; for it believes, nay, is sure of everything
that is unlikely, so it be but frightful; and on the other hand
excludes and shuts its eyes to the most possible hopes, and everything
that is pleasurable; from this the Lord deliver us! for none but he
and sunshiny weather can do it.”
Six or seven years pass, and we find him writing to Wharton from
Cambridge thus:—
“The spirit of laziness (the spirit of this place) begins to possess
even me, that have so long declaimed against it. Yet has it not so
prevailed, but that I feel that discontent with myself, that _ennui_,
that ever accompanies it in its beginnings. Time will settle my
conscience, time will reconcile my languid companion to me; we shall
smoke, we shall tipple, we shall doze together, we shall have our
little jokes, like other people, and our long stories. Brandy will
finish what port began; and, a month after the time, you will see in
some corner of a London Evening Post, ‘Yesterday died the Rev. Mr.
John Gray, Senior-Fellow of Clare Hall, a facetious companion, and
well-respected by all who knew him.’”
The humorous advertisement ends, in the original letter, with a
Hogarthian touch which I must not quote. Is it Leucocholy or is it
Melancholy which predominates here? at any rate, this entry in his
diary, six years later, is black enough:—
“_Insomnia crebra, atque expergiscenti surdus quidam doloris sensus;
frequens etiam in regione sterni oppressio, et cardialgia gravis, fere
sempiterna._”