“To be employed is to be happy. This principle of mine (and I am
convinced of its truth) has, as usual, no influence on my practice. I
am alone, and _ennuyé_ to the last degree, yet do nothing. Indeed I
have no excuse; my health (which you have so kindly inquired after) is
not extraordinary. It is no great malady, but several little ones,
that seem brewing no good to me.”
From thence to the end his languor and depression, though still often
relieved by occupation and travel, keep fatally gaining on him. At last
the depression became constant, became mechanical. “Travel I must,” he
writes to Dr. Wharton, “or cease to exist. Till this year I hardly knew
what _mechanical_ low spirits were; but now I even tremble at an east
wind.” Two months afterwards he died.
What wonder, that with this troublous cloud, throughout the whole term
of his manhood, brooding over him and weighing him down, Gray, finely
endowed though he was, richly stored with knowledge though he was, yet
produced so little, found no full and sufficient utterance, “_never_,”
as the Master of Pembroke Hall said, “_spoke out_.” He knew well enough,
himself, how it was with him.
“My _verve_ is at best, you know” (he writes to Mason), “of so delicate
a constitution, and has such weak nerves, as not to stir out of its
chamber above three days in a year.” And to Horace Walpole he says: “As
to what you say to me civilly, that I ought to write more, I will be
candid, and avow to you, that till fourscore and upward, whenever the
humor takes me, I will write; because I like it, and because I like
myself better when I do so. If I do not write much, it is because I
cannot.” How simply said, and how truly also! Fain would a man like Gray
speak out if he could, he “likes himself better” when he speaks out; if
he does not speak out, “it is because I cannot.”
Bonstetten, that mercurial Swiss who died in 1832 at the age of
eighty-seven, having been younger and livelier from his sixtieth year to
his eightieth than at any other time in his life, paid a visit in his
early days to Cambridge, and saw much of Gray, to whom he attached
himself with devotion. Gray, on his part, was charmed with his young
friend; “I never saw such a boy,” he writes; “our breed is not made on
this model.” Long afterwards Bonstetten published his reminiscences of
Gray. “I used to tell Gray,” he says, “about my life and my native
country, but _his_ life was a sealed book to me; he never would talk of
himself, never would allow me to speak to him of his poetry. If I quoted
lines of his to him, he kept silence like an obstinate child. I said to
him sometimes: ‘Will you have the goodness to give me an answer?’ But
not a word issued from his lips.” _He never spoke out._ Bonstetten
thinks that Gray’s life was poisoned by an unsatisfied sensibility, was
withered by his having never loved; by his days being passed in the
dismal cloisters of Cambridge, in the company of a set of monastic
bookworms, “whose existence no honest woman ever came to cheer.”
Sainte-Beuve, who was much attracted and interested by Gray, doubts
whether Bonstetten’s explanation of him is admissible; the secret of
Gray’s melancholy he finds rather in the sterility of his poetic talent,
“so distinguished, so rare, but so stinted;” in the poet’s despair at
his own unproductiveness.
But to explain Gray, we must do more than allege his sterility, as we
must look further than to his reclusion at Cambridge. What caused his
sterility? Was it his ill-health, his hereditary gout? Certainly we will
pay all respect to the powers of hereditary gout for afflicting us poor
mortals. But Goethe, after pointing out that Schiller, who was so
productive, was “almost constantly ill,” adds the true remark that it is
incredible how much the spirit can do, in these cases, to keep up the
body. Pope’s animation and activity through all the course of what he
pathetically calls “that long disease, my life,” is an example
presenting itself signally, in Gray’s own country and time, to confirm
what Goethe here says. What gave the power to Gray’s reclusion and
ill-health to induce his sterility?
The reason, the indubitable reason as I cannot but think it, I have
already given elsewhere. Gray, a born poet, fell upon an age of prose.
He fell upon an age whose task was such as to call forth in general
men’s powers of understanding, wit and cleverness, rather than their
deepest powers of mind and soul. As regards literary production, the
task of the eighteenth century in England was not the poetic
interpretation of the world, its task was to create a plain, clear,
straightforward, efficient prose. Poetry obeyed the bent of mind
requisite for the due fulfilment of this task of the century. It was
intellectual, argumentative, ingenious; not seeing things in their truth
and beauty, not interpretative. Gray, with the qualities of mind and
soul of a genuine poet, was isolated in his century. Maintaining and
fortifying them by lofty studies, he yet could not fully educe and enjoy
them; the want of a genial atmosphere, the failure of sympathy in his
contemporaries, were too great. Born in the same year with Milton, Gray
would have been another man; born in the same year with Burns, he would
have been another man. A man born in 1608 could profit by the larger and
more poetic scope of the English spirit in the Elizabethan age; a man
born in 1759 could profit by that European renewing of men’s minds of
which the great historical manifestation is the French Revolution.
Gray’s alert and brilliant young friend, Bonstetten, who would explain
the void in the life of Gray by his having never loved, Bonstetten
himself loved, married, and had children. Yet at the age of fifty he was
bidding fair to grow old, dismal and torpid like the rest of us, when he
was roused and made young again for some thirty years, says M.
Sainte-Beuve, by the events of 1789. If Gray, like Burns, had been just
thirty years old when the French Revolution broke out, he would have
shown, probably, productiveness and animation in plenty. Coming when he
did, and endowed as he was, he was a man born out of date, a man whose
full spiritual flowering was impossible. The same thing is to be said of
his great contemporary, Butler, the author of the _Analogy_. In the
sphere of religion, which touches that of poetry, Butler was impelled by
the endowment of his nature to strive for a profound and adequate
conception of religious things, which was not pursued by his
contemporaries, and which at that time, and in that atmosphere of mind,
was not fully attainable. Hence, in Butler too, a dissatisfaction, a
weariness, as in Gray; “great labor and weariness, great disappointment,
pain and even vexation of mind.” A sort of spiritual east wind was at
that time blowing; neither Butler nor Gray could flower. They _never
spoke out_.
Gray’s poetry was not only stinted in quantity by reason of the age
wherein he lived, it suffered somewhat in quality also. We have seen
under what obligation to Dryden Gray professed himself to be—“if there
was any excellence in his numbers, he had learned it wholly from that
great poet.” It was not for nothing that he came when Dryden had lately
“embellished,” as Johnson says, English poetry; had “found it brick and
left it marble.” It was not for nothing that he came just when “the
English ear,” to quote Johnson again, “had been accustomed to the
mellifluence of Pope’s numbers, and the diction of poetry had grown more
splendid.” Of the intellectualities, ingenuities, personifications, of
the movement and diction of Dryden and Pope, Gray caught something,
caught too much. We have little of Gray’s poetry, and that little is not
free from the faults of his age. Therefore it was important to go for
aid, as we did, to Gray’s life and letters, to see his mind and soul
there, and to corroborate from thence that high estimate of his quality
which his poetry indeed calls forth, but does not establish so amply and
irresistibly as one could desire.
For a just criticism it does, however, clearly establish it. The
difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and
all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and
composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the
soul. The difference between the two kinds of poetry is immense. They
differ profoundly in their modes of language, they differ profoundly in
their modes of evolution. The poetic language of our eighteenth century
in general is the language of men composing _without their eye on the
object_, as Wordsworth excellently said of Dryden; language merely
recalling the object, as the common language of prose does, and then
dressing it out with a certain smartness and brilliancy for the fancy
and understanding. This is called “splendid diction.” The evolution of
the poetry of our eighteenth century is likewise intellectual; it
proceeds by ratiocination, antithesis, ingenious turns and conceits.
This poetry is often eloquent, and always, in the hands of such masters
as Dryden and Pope, clever; but it does not take us much below the
surface of things, it does not give us the emotion of seeing things in
their truth and beauty. The language of genuine poetry, on the other
hand, is the language of one composing with his eye on the object; its
evolution is that of a thing which has been plunged in the poet’s soul
until it comes forth naturally and necessarily. This sort of evolution
is infinitely simpler than the other, and infinitely more satisfying;
the same thing is true of the genuine poetic language likewise. But they
are both of them also infinitely harder of attainment; they come only
from those who, as Emerson says, “live from a great depth of being.”
Goldsmith disparaged Gray who had praised his _Traveller_, and indeed in
the poem on the _Alliance of Education and Government_ had given him
hints which he used for it. In retaliation let us take from Goldsmith
himself a specimen of the poetic language of the eighteenth century.
“No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale”—
there is exactly the poetic diction of our prose century! rhetorical,
ornate,—and, poetically, quite false. Place beside it a line of genuine
poetry, such as the
“In cradle of the rude, imperious surge
of Shakespeare; and all its falseness instantly becomes apparent.
Dryden’s poem on the death of Mrs. Killigrew is, says Johnson,
“undoubtedly the noblest ode that our language ever has produced.” In
this vigorous performance Dryden has to say, what is interesting enough,
that not only in poetry did Mrs. Killigrew excel, but she excelled in
painting also. And thus he says it—
“To the next realm she stretch’d her sway,
For Painture near adjoining lay—
A plenteous province and alluring prey.
A Chamber of Dependencies was framed
(As conquerors will never want pretence
When arm’d, to justify the offence),
And the whole fief, in right of Poetry, she claim’d.”
The intellectual, ingenious, superficial evolution of poetry of this
school could not be better illustrated. Place beside it Pindar’s
αἰὼν ὰσφαλὴς
οὐχ ἔγεντ’ οὔτ’ Αἰακίδᾳ παρὰ Πηλεῖ
οὔτε παρ’ ἀντιθέῳ Κάδμῳ ...
“A secure time fell to the lot neither of Peleus the son of Æacus, nor
of the godlike Cadmus; howbeit these are said to have had, of all
mortals, the supreme of happiness, who heard the golden-snooded Muses
sing,—on the mountain the one heard them, the other in seven-gated
Thebes.”
There is the evolution of genuine poetry, and such poetry kills Dryden’s
the moment it is put near it.
Gray’s production was scanty, and scanty, as we have seen, it could not
but be. Even what he produced is not always pure in diction, true in
evolution. Still, with whatever drawbacks, he is alone, or almost alone
(for Collins has something of the like merit) in his age. Gray said
himself that “the style he aimed at was extreme conciseness of
expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical.” Compared, not with the
work of the great masters of the golden ages of poetry, but with the
poetry of his own contemporaries in general, Gray’s may be said to have
reached, in style, the excellence at which he aimed; while the evolution
also of such a piece as his _Progress of Poesy_ must be accounted not
less noble and sound than its style.