There seems to be a definite connection between good writing and
indolence. The men whom we call stylists have, most of them, been idlers.
From Horace to Robert Louis Stevenson, nearly all have been pigs from the
sty of Epicurus. They have not, to use an excellent Anglo-Irish word,
"industered" like insects or millionaires. The greatest men, one must
admit, have mostly been as punctual at their labours as the sun--as fiery
and inexhaustible. But, then, one does not think of the greatest writers
as stylists. They are so much more than that. The style of Shakespeare is
infinitely more marvellous than the style of Gray. But one hardly thinks
of style in presence of the sea or a range of mountains or in reading
Shakespeare. His munificent and gorgeous genius was as far above style as
the statesmanship of Pericles or the sanctity of Joan of Arc was above
good manners. The world has not endorsed Ben Jonson's retort to those who
commended Shakespeare for never having "blotted out" a line: "Would he had
blotted out a thousand!" We feel that so vast a genius is beyond the
perfection of control we look for in a stylist. There may be badly-written
scenes in Shakespeare, and pot-house jokes, and wordy hyperboles, but with
all this there are enchanted continents left in him which we may continue
to explore though we live to be a hundred.
The fact that the noble impatience of a Shakespeare is above our
fault-finding, however, must not be used to disparage the lazy patience of
good writing. An Æschylus or a Shakespeare, a Browning or a Dickens,
conquers us with an abundance like nature's. He feeds us out of a horn, of
plenty. This, unfortunately, is possible only to writers of the first
order. The others, when they attempt profusion, become fluent rather than
abundant, facile of ink rather than generous of golden grain. Who does not
agree with Pope that Dryden, though not Shakespeare, would have been a
better poet if he had learned:
The last and greatest art--the art to blot?
Who is there who would not rather have written a single ode of Gray's than
all the poetical works of Southey? If voluminousness alone made a man a
great writer, we should have to canonize Lord Lytton. The truth is,
literary genius has no rule either of voluminousness or of the opposite.
The genius of one writer is a world ever moving. The genius of another is
a garden often still. The greatest genius is undoubtedly of the former
kind. But as there is hardly enough genius of this kind to fill a wall,
much less a library, we may well encourage the lesser writers to cultivate
their gardens, and, in the absence of the wilder tumult of creation, to
delight us with blooms of leisurely phrase and quiet thought.
Gray and Collins were both writers who labored in little gardens. Collins,
indeed, had a small flower-bed--perhaps only a pot, indeed--rather than a
garden. He produced in it one perfect bloom--the _Ode to Evening_. The
rest of his work is carefully written, inoffensive, historically
interesting. But his continual personification of abstract ideas makes the
greater part of his verse lifeless as allegories or as sculpture in a
graveyard. He was a romantic, an inventor of new forms, in his own day. He
seems academic to ours. His work is that of a man striking an attitude
rather than of one expressing the deeps of a passionate nature. He is
always careful not to confess. His _Ode to Fear_ does not admit us to any
of the secrets of his maniacal and melancholy breast. It is an
anticipation of the factitious gloom of Byron, not of the nerve-shattered
gloom of Dostoevsky. Collins, we cannot help feeling, says in it what he
does not really think. He glorifies fear as though it were the better part
of imagination, going so far as to end his ode with the lines:
O thou whose spirit most possessed,
The sacred seat of Shakespeare's breast!
By all that from thy prophet broke
In thy divine emotions spoke:
Hither again thy fury deal,
Teach me but once, like him, to feel;
His cypress wreath my meed decree,
And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee!
We have only to compare these lines with Claudio's terrible speech about
death in _Measure for Measure_ to see the difference between pretence and
passion in literature. Shakespeare had no fear of telling us what he knew
about fear. Collins lived in a more reticent century, and attempted to fob
off a disease on us as an accomplishment. What perpetually delights us in
the _Ode to Evening_ is that here at least Collins can tell the truth
without falsification or chilling rhetoric. Here he is writing of the
world as he has really seen it and been moved by it. He still makes use of
personifications, but they have been transmuted by his emotion into
imagery. In these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, Collins has summed up
his view and dream of life. One knows that he was not lying or bent upon
expressing any other man's experiences but his own when he described how
the
Air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat,
With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,
Or where the beetle winds
His small but sullen horn.
He speaks here, not in the stiffness of rhetoric, but in the liberty of a
new mood, never, for all he knew or cared, expressed before. As far as all
the rest of his work is concerned, his passion for style is more or less
wasted. But the _Ode to Evening_ justifies both his pains and his
indolence. As for the pains he took with his work, we have it on the
authority of Thomas Warton that "all his odes ... had the marks of
repeated correction: he was perpetually changing his epithets." As for his
indolence, his uncle, Colonel Martin, thought him "too indolent even for
the Army," and advised him to enter the Church--a step from which he was
dissuaded, we are told, by "a tobacconist in Fleet Street." For the rest,
he was the son of a hatter, and went mad. He is said to have haunted the
cloisters of Chichester Cathedral during his fits of melancholia, and to
have uttered a strange accompaniment of groans and howls during the
playing of the organ. The Castle of Indolence was for Collins no keep of
the pleasures. One may doubt if it is ever this for any artist. Did not
even Horace attempt to escape into Stoicism? Did not Stevenson write
_Pulvis et Umbra_?
Assuredly Gray, though he was as fastidious in his appetites as Collins
was wild, cannot be called in as a witness to prove the Castle of
Indolence a happy place. "Low spirits," he wrote, when he was still an
undergraduate, "are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me,
go to bed with me, make journeys and return as I do; nay, and pay visits,
and will even affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me." The
end of the sentence shows (as do his letters, indeed, and his verses on
the drowning of Horace Walpole's cat) that his indolent melancholy was not
without its compensations. He was a wit, an observer of himself and the
world about him, a man who wrote letters that have the genius of the
essay. Further, he was Horace Walpole's friend, and (while his father had
a devil in him) his mother and his aunts made a circle of quiet tenderness
into which he could always retire. "I do not remember," Mr. Gosse has said
of Gray, "that the history of literature presents us with the memoirs of
any other poet favoured by nature with so many aunts as Gray possessed."
This delicious sentence contains an important criticism of Gray. Gray was
a poet of the sheltered life. His genius was shy and retiring. He had no
ambition to thrust himself upon the world. He kept himself to himself, as
the saying is. He published the _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_ in 1751
only because the editors of the _Magazine of Magazines_ had got hold of a
copy and Gray was afraid that they would publish it first. How lethargic a
poet Gray was may be gathered from the fact that he began the _Elegy_ as
far back as 1746--Mason says it was begun in August, 1742--and did not
finish it until June 12, 1750. Probably there is no other short poem in
English literature which was brooded over for so many seasons. Nor was
there ever a greater justification for patient brooding. Gray in this poem
liberated the English imagination after half a century of prose and
rhetoric. He restored poetry to its true function as the confession of an
individual soul. Wordsworth has blamed Gray for introducing, or at least,
assisting to introduce, the curse of poetic diction into English
literature. But poetic diction was in use long before Gray. He is
remarkable among English poets, not for having succumbed to poetic
diction, but for having triumphed over it. It is poetic feeling, not
poetic diction, that distinguishes him from the mass of eighteenth-century
writers. It is an interesting coincidence that Gray and Collins should
have brought about a poetic revival by the rediscovery of the beauty of
evening, just as Mr. Yeats and "A.E." brought about a poetic revival in
our own day by the rediscovery of the beauty of twilight. Both schools of
poetry (if it is permissible to call them schools) found in the stillness
of the evening a natural refuge for the individual soul from the
tyrannical prose of common day. There have been critics, including Matthew
Arnold, who have denied that the _Elegy_ is the greatest of Gray's poems.
This, I think, can only be because they have been unable to see the poetry
for the quotations. No other poem that Gray ever wrote was a miracle. _The
Bard_ is a masterpiece of imaginative rhetoric. But the _Elegy_ is more
than this. It is an autobiography and the creation of a world for the
hearts of men. Here Gray delivers the secret doctrine of the poets. Here
he escapes out of the eighteenth century into immortality. One realizes
what an effort it must have been to rise above his century when one reads
an earlier version of some of his most famous lines:
Some village Cato (----) with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest;
Some Cæsar guiltless of his country's blood.
Could there be a more effective example of the return to reality than we
find in the final shape of this verse?
Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.
It is as though suddenly it had been revealed to Gray that poetry is not a
mere literary exercise but the image of reality; that it does not consist
in vain admiration of models far off in time and place, but that it is as
near to one as one's breath and one's country. Not that the _Elegy_ would
have been one of the great poems of the world if it had never plunged
deeper into the heart than in this verse. It is a poem of beauty and
sorrow that cannot be symbolized by such public figures as Cromwell and
Milton. Here the genius of the parting day, and all that it means to the
imagination, its quiet movement and its music, its pensiveness and its
regrets, have been given a form more lasting than bronze. Perhaps the poem
owes a part of its popularity to the fact that it is a great homily,
though a homily transfigured. But then does not _Hamlet_ owe a great part
of its popularity to the fact that it is (among other things) a great
blood-and-thunder play with duels and a ghost?
One of the so-called mysteries of literature is the fact that Gray, having
written so greatly, should have written so little. He spoke of himself as
a "shrimp of an author," and expressed the fear that his works might be
mistaken for those of "a pismire or a flea." But to make a mystery of the
indolence of a rather timid, idle, and unadventurous scholar, who was
blessed with more fastidiousness than passion, is absurd. To say perfectly
once and for all what one has to say is surely as fine an achievement as
to keep restlessly trying to say it a thousand times over. Gray was no
blabber. It is said that he did not even let his mother and his aunts know
that he wrote poetry. He lacked boldness, volubility and vital energy. He
stood aside from life. He would not even take money from his publishers
for his poetry. No wonder that he earned the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who
said of him to Boswell, "Sir, he was dull in his company, dull in his
closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many
think him great." Luckily, Gray's reserve tempted him into his own heart
and into external nature for safety and consolation. Johnson could see in
him only a "mechanical poet." To most of us he seems the first natural
poet in modern literature.