Yorke, who thought him, said Warburton, likely to attach that Lord's
liking to him, as he was a young nobleman of elegance, and loved
painting and music. In the following year he lost his father, in the
disposition of whose affairs he was less considered than he thought
himself entitled to expect. What the reason for this partiality was, it
would be vain to conjecture; nor have we any means of knowing whether
the disappointment determined him to the choice of a profession which he
made soon after (in 1754), when he entered into the church. From the
following passage, in a letter of Warburton's, it appears that the step
was not taken without some hesitation. "Mr. Mason has called on me. I
found him yet unresolved whether he would take the living. I said, was
the question about a mere secular employment, I should blame him without
reserve if he refused the offer. But as I regarded going into orders in
another light, I frankly owned to him he ought not to go unless he had a
call; by which I meant, I told him, nothing fanatical or superstitious,
but an inclination, and on that a resolution, to dedicate all his
studies to the science of religion, and totally to abandon his poetry:
he entirely agreed with me in thinking that decency, reputation, and
religion, all required this sacrifice of him, and that if he went into
orders he intended to give it." This was surely an absurd squeamishness
in one of the same profession, as Warburton was, who had begun his
career by translations in prose and verse from Latin writers, had then
mingled in the literary cabals of the day, and afterwards did not think
his time misemployed in editing and commenting on Shakspeare and Pope.
Yet he was unreasonable enough to continue his expectations that Mason
should do what he had, without any apparent compunction, omitted to do
himself; for after speaking of Brown, the unfortunate author of
Barbarossa, who was also an ecclesiastic, he adds: "How much shall I
honour one, who has a stronger propensity to poetry, and has got a
greater name in it, if he performs his promise to me of putting away
these idle baggages after his sacred espousal." After all, this proved
to be one of the vows at which Jove laughs. The sacred espousal did not
lessen his devotion to the idle baggages; and it is very doubtful
whether he discharged his duties as King's Chaplain or Rector of Aston
(for both which appointments he was indebted to the kindness of Lord
Holdernesse) at all the worse for this attachment, which he was indeed
barefaced enough to avow two years after by the publication of some of
his odes. At his Rectory of Aston, in Yorkshire, he continued to live
for great part of his remaining life, with occasional absences in the
metropolis, at Cambridge, or at York, where he was made Precentor and
Canon of the Cathedral, and where his residence was therefore sometimes
required. I have not learnt whether he had any other preferment. Hurd,
in a letter written in 1768, mentions that the death of a Dr. Atwell
threw a good living into his hands. Be this as it might, he was rich
enough, and had an annual income of about fifteen hundred pounds at his
death. Lord Orford says of him somewhere in his letters, that he
intended to have refused a bishopric if it had been offered him. He
might have spared himself the pains of coming to this resolution; for
mitres, "though they fell on many a critic's head," and on that of his
friend Hurd among the rest, did not seem adapted to the brows of a poet.
When the death of Cibber had made the laurel vacant, he was informed
that "being in orders he was thought merely on that account less
eligible for the office than a layman." "A reason," said he, "so
politely put, I was glad to hear assigned; and if I had thought it a
weak one, they who know me will readily believe that I am the last man
in the world who would have attempted to controvert it." Of the laurel,
he probably was not more ambitious than of the mitre; though he was
still so obstinate as to believe that he might unite the characters of a
clerk and a poet, to which he would fain have superadded that of a
statist also. Caractacus, another tragedy on the ancient plan, but which
made a better figure on the stage, appeared in 1759; and in 1762, three
elegies. In 1769, Harris heard him preach at St. James's early prayers,
and give a fling at the French for the invasion of Corsica. Thus
politics, added his hearer, have entered the sanctuary. The sermon is
the sixth in his printed collection. A fling at the French was at all
times a favourite topic with him. In the discourse delivered before
George III on the Sunday preceding his Coronation, he has stretched the
text a little that he may take occasion to descant on the blessings of
civil liberty, and has quoted Montesquieu's opinion of the British
Government. In praising our religious toleration, he is careful to
justify our exception of the church of Rome from the general indulgence.
Nor was it in the pulpit only that he acted the politician. He was one
of those, as we are told in the Biographical Dictionary, who thought the
decision of Parliament on the Middlesex election a violation of the
rights of the people; and when the counties began, in 1779, to associate
for parliamentary reform, he took an active part in assisting their
deliberations, and wrote several patriotic manifestos. In the same year
appeared his Ode to the Naval Officers of Great Britain, on the trial of
Admiral Keppel, in which the poetry is strangled by the politics. His
harp was in better tune, when, in 1782, an Ode to Mr. Pitt declared the
hopes he had conceived of the son of Chatham; for, like many others, who
espoused the cause of freedom, he had ranged himself among the partisans
of the youthful statesman, who was then doing all he could to persuade
others, as he had no doubt persuaded himself, that he was one of the
number.
In the mean time Gray, who, if he had lived longer, might, perhaps, have
restrained him from mixing in this turmoil, was no more. The office
which he performed of biographer, or rather of editor, for his deceased
friend, has given us one of the most delightful books in its kind that
our language can boast. It is just that this acknowledgment should be
made to Mason, although Mr. Mathias has recently added many others of
Gray's most valuable papers, which his former editor was scarcely
scholar enough to estimate as they deserved; and Mr. Mitford has shewn
us, that some omissions, and perhaps some alterations, were
unnecessarily made by him in the letters themselves. As to the task
which the latter of these gentlemen imposed on himself, few will think
that every passage which he has admitted, though there be nothing in any
to detract from the real worth of Gray, could have been made public
consistently with those sacred feelings of regard for his memory, by
which the mind of Mason was impressed, and that reluctance which he must
have had to conquer, before he resolved on the publication at all. The
following extract from a letter, written by the Rev. Edward Jones,
brings us into the presence of Mason, and almost to an acquaintance with
his thoughts at this time, and on this occasion. "Being at York in
September 1771," (Gray died on the thirtieth of July preceding), "I was
introduced to Mr. Mason, then in residence. On my first visit, he was
sitting in an attitude of much attention to a drawing, pinned up near
the fire-place; and another gentleman, whom I afterwards found to be a
Mr. Varlet, a miniature painter, who has since settled at Bath, had
evidently been in conversation with him about it. My friend begged leave
to ask _whom_ it was intended to represent. Mr. Mason hesitated, and
looked earnestly at Mr. Varlet. I could not resist (though I instantly
felt a wish to have been silent) saying, surely from the strong likeness
it must be the late Mr. Gray. Mr. Mason at once certainly forgave the
intrusion, by asking my opinion as to his fears of having caricatured
his poor friend. The features were certainly softened down, previously
to the engraving."[1]--_Nichols's Literary Anecdotes_, vol. ix. p. 718.
In the next year, 1772, appeared the first book of the English Garden.
The other three followed separately in 1777, 1779, and 1782. The very
title of this poem was enough to induce a suspicion, that the art which
it taught (if art it can be called) was not founded on general and
permanent principles. It was rather a mode which the taste of the time
and country had rendered prevalent, and which the love of novelty is
already supplanting. In the neighbourhood of those buildings which man
constructs for use or magnificence, there is no reason why he should
prefer irregularity to order, or dispose his paths in curved lines,
rather than in straight. Homer, when he describes the cavern of Calypso,
covers it with a vine, and scatters the alder, the poplar, and the
cypress, without any symmetry about it; but near the palace of Alcinous
he lays out the garden by the rule and compass. Our first parents in
Paradise, are placed by Milton amidst
A happy rural seat of various view;
but let the same poet represent himself in his pensive or his cheerful
moods, and he is at one time walking "by hedge-row elms on hillocks
green;" and at another, "in trim gardens." When we are willing to escape
from the tedium of uniformity, nature and accident supply numberless
varieties, which we shall for the most part vainly strive to heighten
and improve. It is too much to say, that we will use the face of the
country as the painter does his canvas;
Take thy plastic spade,
It is thy pencil; take thy seeds, thy plants,
They are thy colours.
The analogy can scarcely hold farther than in a parterre; and even
there very imperfectly. Mason could not hear to see his own system
pushed to that excess into which it naturally led; and bitterly resented
the attempts made by the advocates of the picturesque, to introduce into
his landscapes more factitious wildness than he intended.
In 1783 he published a Translation from the Latin of Du Fresnoy's Art of
Painting, in which the precepts are more capable of being reduced to
practice. He had undertaken the task when young, partly as an exercise
in versification, and partly to fix on his mind the principles of an art
in which he had himself some skill. Sir Joshua Reynolds, having desired
to see it, added some notes, and induced him to revise and publish it.
The artist found in it the theory of ideal beauty, which had been taught
him by Zachary Mudge, from the writings of Plato, and which enabled him
to rise above the mere mechanism of his predecessors. That Mason's
version surpasses the original, is not saying much in its praise. In
some prefatory lines addressed to Reynolds, he has described the
character of Dryden with much happiness.
The last poem which he published separately, was a Secular Ode on the
Revolution in 1688. It was formal and vapid; but sufficed to shew that
time, though it had checked "the lyric rapture," had left him his ardour
in the cause of freedom. Like the two leaders of the opposite parties,
Pitt and Fox, he hailed with glad voice the dawn of French liberty. It
was only for the gifted eye of Burke to foresee the storm that was
impending.
At the same time he recommended the cause of the enslaved Negroes from
the pulpit. The abolition of the slave trade was one of the few
political subjects, the introduction of which seemed to be allowable in
that place. In 1788, appeared also his Memoirs of William Whitehead,
attached to the posthumous works of that writer; a piece of biography,
as little to be compared in interest to the former, as Whitehead himself
can be compared to Gray.
His old age glided on in solitude and peace amid his favourite pursuits,
at his rectory of Aston, where he had taught his two acres of garden to
command the inequalities of "hill and dale," and to combine "use with
beauty." The sonnet in which he dedicated his poems to his patron, the
Earl of Holdernesse, describes in his best manner the happiness he
enjoyed in this retreat. He was not long permitted to add to his other
pleasures the comforts of a connubial life. In 1765 he had married Mary,
daughter of William Shermon, Esq., of Kingston-upon-Hull, who in two
years left him a widower. Her epitaph is one of those little poems to
which we can always return with a melancholy pleasure. I have heard that
this lady had so little regard for the art in which her husband
excelled, that on his presenting her with a copy of verses, after the
wedding was over, she crumpled them up and put them into her pocket
unread. When he had entered his seventieth year, Hurd, who had been his
first friend, and the faithful monitor of his studies from youth,
confined him "to a sonnet once a year, or so;" warning him, that "age,
like infancy, should forbear to play with pointed tools." He had more
latitude allowed in prose; for in 1795 he published Essays, Historical
and Critical, on English Church Music. In the former part of his
subject, he is said, by those who have the best means of knowing, to be
well informed and accurate; but in the latter to err on the side of a
dry simplicity, which, in the present refined state of the art, it would
not answer any good purpose to introduce into the music of our churches.
In speaking of a wind instrument, which William of Malmsbury seems to
describe as being acted on by the vapour arising from hot water, he has
unfortunately gone out of his way to ridicule the projected invention of
the steam-boat by Lord Stanhope. The atrocities committed during the
fury of the French Revolution had so entirely cured him of his
predilection for the popular part of our Government, that he could not
resist the opportunity, however ill-timed, of casting a slur on this
nobleman, who was accused of being over-partial to it. In the third
Essay, on Parochial Psalmody, he gives the preference to Merrick's weak
and affected version over the two other translations that are used in
our churches. The late Bishop Horsley, in his Commentary on the Psalms,
was, I believe, the first who was hardy enough to claim that palm for
Sternhold, to which, with all its awkwardness, his rude vigour entitles
him.
When he comes to speak of _Christianizing_ our hymns, the apprehension
which he expresses of deviating from the present practice of our
establishment, seems to have restrained him from saying something which
he would otherwise have said. The question surely is not so much, what
the practice of our present establishment is, as what that of the first
Christians was. There is, perhaps, no alteration in our service that
could be made with better effect than this, provided it were made with
as great caution as its importance demands.
His death, which was at last sudden, was caused by a hurt on his shin,
that happened when he was stepping out of his carriage. On the Sunday
(two days after) he felt so little inconvenience from the accident, as
to officiate in his church at Aston. But on the next Wednesday, the 7th
of April, 1797, a rapid mortification brought him to his grave. His
monument, of which Bacon was the sculptor, is placed in Westminster
Abbey, near that of Gray, with the following inscription:--
Optimo Viro
Gulielmo Mason, A.M.
Poetae,
Si quis alius
Culto, Casto, Pio
Sacrum.
Ob. 7. Apr. 1797.
Aet. 72.
Mason is reported to have been ugly in his person. His portrait by
Reynolds gives to features, ill-formed and gross, an expression of
intelligence and benignity. In the latter part of life, his character
appears to have undergone a greater change, from its primitive openness
and good nature, than mere time and experience of the world should have
wrought in it. Perhaps this was nothing more than a slight perversion
which he had contracted in the school of Warburton. What was a coarse
arrogance in the master himself, assumed the form of nicety and
superciliousness in the less confident and better regulated tempers of
Mason and Hurd. His harmless vanity cleaved to him longer. As a proof of
this, it is related that, several years after the publication of Isis,
when he was travelling through Oxford, and happened to pass over
Magdalen Bridge at a late hour of the evening, he turned round to a
friend who was riding with him, and remarked that it was luckily grown
dusk, for they should enter the University unobserved. When his friend,
with some surprise inquired into the reason of this caution: What, (said
he) do you not remember my Isis?
He was very sensible to the annoyance of the periodical critics, which
Gray was too philosophical or too proud to regard otherwise than as
matter of amusement. He was the butt for a long line of satirists or
lampooners. Churchill, Lloyd, Colman, the author of the Probationary
Odes, and, if I remember right, Paul Whitehead and Wolcot, all levelled
their shafts at him in turn. In the Probationary Odes, his peculiarities
were well caught: when the writer of these pages repeated some of the
lines in which he was imitated to Anna Seward, whose admiration of Mason
is recorded in her letters, she observed, that what was meant for a
burlesque was in itself excellent. There is reason to suppose that he
sometimes indulged himself in the same license under which he suffered
from others. If he was indeed the author of the Heroic Epistle to Sir
William Chambers, and of some other anonymous satires which have been
imputed to him, he must have felt Hayley's intended compliment as a
severe reproach:
Sublimer Mason! not to thee belong
The reptile beauties of invenom'd song.
Of the Epistle, when it was remarked, in the hearing of Thomas Warton,
that it had more energy than could have been expected from Walpole, to
whom others ascribed it, Warton remarked that it might have been written
by Walpole, and buckramed by Mason. Indeed, it is not unlikely that one
supplied the venom, and the other spotted the snake. In a letter of
expostulation to Warton, Mason did not go the length of disclaiming the
satire, though he was angry enough that it should be laid at his door. I
have heard that he received with much apathy the praises offered him by
Hayley, in the Essay on Epic Poetry. He has remarked, "that if rhyme
does not condense the sense, which passes through its vehicle, it ceases
to be good, either as verse or rhyme."[2] This rule is laid down too
broadly. His own practice was not always consonant with it, as Hayley's
never was. With Darwin's poetry, it is said that he was much pleased.
His way of composing, as we learn from Gray's remarks upon his poems,
was to cast down his first thoughts carelessly, and at large, and then
clip them here and there at leisure. "This method," as his friend
observed, "will leave behind it a laxity, a diffuseness. The force of a
thought (otherwise well-invented, well-turned, and well-placed) is often
weakened by it." He might have added, that it is apt to give to poetry
the air of declamation.
Mason wished to join what he considered the correctness of Pope with the
high imaginative power of Milton, and the lavish colouring of Spenser.
In the attempt to unite qualities so heterogeneous, the effect of each
is in a great measure lost, and little better than a caput mortuum
remains. With all his praises of simplicity, he is generally much afraid
of saying any thing in a plain and natural manner. He often expresses
the commonest thoughts in a studied periphrasis. He is like a man, who
being admitted into better company than his birth and education have
fitted him for, is under continual apprehension, lest his attitude and
motions should betray his origin. Even his negligence is studied. His
muse resembles the Prioresse in Chaucer,
That pained her to counterfete chere,
Of court and be stateliche of manere,
And to been holden digne of reverence.
Yet there were happier moments in which he delivered himself up to the
ruling inspiration. So it was when he composed the choruses in the
Caractacus, beginning,
Mona on Snowdon calls--
Hail, thou harp of Phrygian frame--
and
Hark! heard ye not yon footstep dread--
of which it is scarcely too much to say that in some parts they remind
us of the ancient tragedians.
In each of his two Tragedies, the incidents are conducted with so much
skill, and there is so much power of moving the affections, that one is
tempted to wish he had pursued this line, though he perhaps would never
have done any thing much better in it. One great fault is, that the
dramatis personae are too much employed in pointing out the Claudes and
Salvator Rosas, with which they are surrounded. They seem to want
nothing but long poles in their hands to make them very good conductors
over a gallery of pictures. When Earl Orgar, on seeing the habitation of
his daughter, begins--
How nobly does this venerable wood,
Gilt with the glories of the orient sun,
Embosom yon fair mansion! The soft air
Salutes me with most cool and temperate breath
And, as I tread, the flower-besprinkled lawn
Sends up a cloud of fragance--
and Aulus Didius opens the other play with a description somewhat more
appropriate:
This is the secret centre of the isle:
Here, Romans, pause, and let the eye of wonder
Gaze on the solemn scene; behold yon oak,
How stern he frowns, and with his broad brown arms
Chills the pale plain beneath him: mark yon altar,
The dark stream brawling round its rugged base,
These cliffs, these yawning caverns, this wide circus,
Skirted with unhewn stone: they awe my soul,
As if the very genius of the place
Himself appear'd, and with terrific tread
Stalk'd through his drear domain--
we could fancy that both these personages had come fresh from the study
of the English garden. The distresses of Elfrida, and the heroism of
Caractacus, are in danger of becoming objects of secondary
consideration, while we are admiring the shades of Harewood, and the
rocks of Mona. He has attempted to shelter himself under the authority
of Sophocles; but though there are some exquisite touches of landscape
painting in that drama, the poet has introduced them with a much more
sparing hand. It is said that Hurd pruned away a great deal more
luxuriance of this kind, with which the first draught of the Elfrida was
overrun; and we learn from Gray, in his admirable letter of criticism on
the Caractacus, that the opening of that tragedy was, as it at first
stood, even much more objectionable than at present. Such descriptions
are better suited to the Masque, a species of drama founded on some wild
and romantic adventure, and of which the interest does not depend on the
manners or the passions. It is therefore more in its place in Argentile
and Curan, which he calls a legendary drama, written on the old English
model. He composed it after the other two, and during the short time
that his wife lived; but, like several of his poems, it was not
published till the year of his decease. The beginning promises well: and
the language of our old writers is at first tolerably well imitated.
There is afterwards too much trick and too many prettinesses; such is
that of the nosegay which the princess finds, and concludes from its
tasteful arrangement to be the work of princely fingers. The subordinate
parts, of the Falconer, and Ralph, his deputy, are not sustained
according to the author's first conception of them. The story is well
put together. He has, perhaps, nothing else that is equal in expression
to the following passage.
Thou know'st, when we did quit our anchor'd barks,
We cross'd a pleasant valley; rather say
A nest of sister vales, o'erhung with hills
Of varied form and foliage; every vale
Had its own proper brook, the which it hugg'd
In its green breast, as if it fear'd to lose
The treasur'd crystal. You might mark the course
Of these cool rills more by the ear than eye,
For, though they oft would to the sun unfold
Their silver as they past, 'twas quickly lost;
But ever did they murmur. On the verge
Of one of these clear streams, there stood a cell
O'ergrown with moss and ivy; near to which,
On a fall'n trunk, that bridged the little brook
A hermit sat. Of him we ask'd the name
Of this sweet valley, and he call'd it Hakeness.
(_Argentile and Curan_, A, 1.)
In two lines more, we are unluckily reminded that this is no living
landscape.
Thither, my Sewold, go, or pitch thy tent
Near to thy ships, for they are near the _scene_.
Since the time of Mason, this rage for describing what is called
scenery (and scenery indeed it often is, having little of nature in it)
has infected many of our play-writers and novelists.
Argentile's intention of raising a rustic monument to the memory of his
father, is taken from Shakspeare.
This grove my sighs shall consecrate; in shape
Of some fair tomb, here will I heap the turf
And call it Adelbright's. Yon aged yew,
Whose rifted trunk, rough bark, and gnarled roots
Give solemn proof of its high ancientry,
Shall canopy the shrine. There's not a flower,
That hangs the dewy head, and seems to weep,
As pallid blue-bells, crow-tyes and marsh lilies,
But I'll plant here, and if they chance to wither,
My tears shall water them; there's not a bird
That trails a sad soft note, as ringdoves do,
Or twitters painfully like the dun martlet,
But I will lure by my best art, to roost
And plain them in these branches. Larks and finches
Will I fright hence, nor aught shall dare approach
This pensive spot, save solitary things
That love to mourn as I do.
How cold and lifeless are these pretty lines, when compared to the
"wench-like words," of the young princes, which suggested them.
If he be gone he'll make his grave a bed
With female fairies will his tomb be haunted,
And worms will not come to thee.
_Arv_. With fairest flow'rs,
Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,
I'll sweeten thy sad grave. Thou shalt not lack
The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose; nor
The azured hare-bell, like thy veins; no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,
Out-sweeten'd not thy breath: the ruddock would
With charitable bill (O bill, fore-shaming
The rich-left heirs, that let their fathers lie
Without a monument!) bring thee all this;
Yea, and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none,
To winter-ground thy corse.
This is grief, seeking to relieve and forget itself in fiction and
fancy; the other, though the occasion required an expression of deeper
sorrow, is a mere pomp of feeling.
His blank verse in the English Garden has not the majesty of Akenside,
the sweetness of Dyer, or the terseness of Armstrong. Its characteristic
is delicacy; but it is a delicacy approaching nearer to weakness than to
grace. It has more resemblance to the rill that trickles over its
fretted channel, than to the stream that winds with a full tide, and
"warbles as it flows." The practice of cutting it into dialogue had
perhaps crippled him. As he has made the characters in his plays too
attentive to the decorations of the scene-painter, so in the last book
of the English Garden he has turned his landscape into a theatre, for
the representation of a play. The story of Nerina is too long and too
complicated for an episode in a didactic poem. He will seldom bear to be
confronted with those writers whom he is found either by accident or
design to resemble. His picture of the callow young in a bird's-nest is,
I think, with some alteration, copied from Statius.
--Her young meanwhile
Callow and cold, from their moss-woven nest
Peep forth; they stretch their little eager throats
Broad to the wind, and plead to the lone spray
Their famish'd plaint importunately shrill.
(_English Garden_, b. 3.)
--Volucrum sic turba recentum,
Cum reducem longo prospexit in aethere matrem,
Ire cupit contra, summaque e margine nidi
Extat hians; jam jamque cadat ni pectore toto
Obstet aperta parens et amantibus increpet alis.
(_Theb._ lib. x. 458.)
Oppian's imitation of this is happier.
[Greek: Os dhopot aptaenessi pherei bosin dortalichoisi
Maetaer, eiarinae Zephurou protangelos ornis,
Oi dapalon truzontes epithroskousi kaliae,
Gaethusunoi peri maetri, kai imeirontes edodaes
Xeilos anaptussousin apan depi doma lelaeken
Andros xeinodochoio liga klazousi neossois.]
(Halieut. I. in. 248.)
Hurd, in the letter he addressed to him on the Marks of Imitation,
observed, that the imagery with which the Ode to Memory opens, is
borrowed from Strada's Prolusions. The chorus in Elfrida, beginning
Hail to thy living light,
Ambrosial morn! all hail thy roseate ray:
is taken from the Hymnus in Auroram, by Flaminio.
His Sappho, a lyrical drama, is one of the few attempts that have been
made to bring amongst us that tuneful trifle, the modern Opera of the
Italians. It has been transferred by Mr. Mathias into that language, to
which alone it seemed properly to belong. Mr. Glasse has done as much
for Caractacus by giving it up to the Greek. Of the two Odes, which are
all, excepting some few fragments, that remain to us of the Lesbian
poetess, he has introduced Translations into his drama. There is more
glitter of phrase than in the versions made, if I recollect right, by
Ambrose Phillips, which are inserted in the Spectator, No. 222 and 229;
but much less of that passionate emotion which marks the original. Most
of my readers will remember that which begins,
Blest as the immortal Gods is he,
The youth who fondly sits by thee,
And hears and sees thee, all the while,
Softly speak and sweetly smile.
It is thus rendered by Mason:
The youth that gazes on thy charms,
Rivals in bliss the Gods on high,
Whose ear thy pleasing converse warms,
Thy lovely smile his eye.