No More Learning

J. Munro,
who, in his striking Latin version of the poem, is often its best interpreter.
• Friendship and compassion did not reconcile Johnson to the poetry of Collins,
who is nearest to Gray in the diction which their critio loathed. See Johnson's Life of
Collins, ad fin.


## p. 126 (#152) ############################################

126
Gray
Hark how the sacred Calm, that broods around
Bids ev'ry fierce tumultuous Passion cease,
In still small accents whisp'ring from the Ground
A grateful Earnest of eternal Peace.
Gray himself seems in one instance to have repented of his infanticide,
and writes in the Pembroke MS the marginal note 'insert' over the
stanza (evidently adapted but compressed from Collins's Dirge in
Cymbeline) about the violets scattered on the tomb and the little
footsteps of the redbreast which lightly print the ground there.
Memory and affection have something to do with the epitaph,
which sounds the personal note of which Gray was fond, but is,
unquestionably, the weakest part of the poem, and was, perhaps,
,
written about 1742, and inserted in the Elegy by afterthought.
In general, no poet better understood, or more strictly followed,
the Popian maxim 'survey the whole,' that golden rule which
a later generation seldom remembers or practices.
The Elegy had a curious sequel in A Long Story. After her
husband's death, in 1749, Lady Cobham must have left the famous
Stowe for the mansion house at Stoke Pogis; she had seen the
Elegy when Walpole was circulating it in MS, and learnt that the
author as in her neighbourhood. Accordingly, she caused her
niece, Miss Speed, and Lady Schaub, the wife of Sir Luke Schaub,
to visit him, at the house of Mrs Rogers, ostensibly to tell him
that a Lady Brown, one of his friends, who kept open house in town
for travellers young and old, was quite well. Gray was not at home,
and this visit of fine ladies may have caused, as Gray pretends,
some perturbation to his quiet aunt and mother. A graceful
intimacy (nothing more) grew up between the poet and Miss Speed,
though gossip declared they were to be married.
A Long Story, written with facile pen, goes far to bear out
Walpole's statement that Gray never wrote anything easily except
things of humour. His serious efforts are always the fruit of long
delay and much labour. Next followed (1752) what remains a
fragment, only because Mason found a corner of the sole MS copy
torn, supplying, more suo, words of his own to complete it. It was
entitled Stanzas to Richard Bentley, who made Designs for six
Poems by Mr T. Gray. We cannot feel sure that Mason has
given us the unmutilated part of the poem correctly. Gray knew
Pope and Dryden too well to write
The energy of Pope they might efface
And Dryden's harmony submit to mine.
1 The lady died as comtesse de Viry in 1783.


## p. 127 (#153) ############################################

A Long Story. The Progress of Poesy 127
a
It may be suspected that Mason has clumsily transposed these
epithets. As evidence how Gray nursed his thoughts we may note
that the line
And dazzle with a luxury of light
is a reminiscence of a version which he made in 1737 from Tasso's
Jerusalem Delivered, bk 14.
One other line in this brief poem lives in the memory-that in
which he attributes to Shakespeare and Milton in contrast to “this
benighted age,' a diviner inspiration,
The pomp and prodigality of heaven.
He is, later, in February 1753, in a great fret about the title
of the six poems, and, in his desire to seem unaffected, displays
a great deal of affectation. It was quite absurd to imagine
that the poems, including the Elegy, could be regarded as
secondary to the designs. It was his foible to pose; but he in-
dulged it with scanty success. In March 1753 died Gray's 'careful
tender mother,' as he calls her in the inscription for the vault in
which she was laid by the side of her sister Mary Antrobus. In
July of the same year, he went to see his friend Wharton, who
was living in Durham. Here, the author of the Elegy was made
much of; but the visit was important in another way. It coin-
cides with a change in Gray's poetic tendencies, and helped to
encourage them.
He now reverted to that love of the bold and
majestic which appears in the alcaics on the Grande Chartreuse.
In the neighbourhood of Durham, he found a faint image of those
more august scenes.
I have (he writes) one of the most beautiful vales here in England to walk
in, with prospects that change every ten steps, and open something new
wherever I turn me, all rude and romantic; in short the sweetest spot to
break your neck or drown yourself in that ever was beheld.
On 26 December 1754 was completed the ode entitled The
Progress of Poesy ; it had been nearly finished two years before.
It was not published until 1759, when Walpole secured it for the
Strawberry hill press, together with The Bard; the motto
φωνάντα συνετοίσι from Pindar belongs to them both'.
Gray did not attach any great value to the rule of strophe
and antistrophe, but he strongly objected to the merely irregular
stanzas which Cowley introduced. It was probably Congreve who
first wrote a real pindaric ode; and, whatever the value of his
Ode to the Queen, it did something, as Mason points out, to obviate
1 Subsequently the words that follow in Pindar, és 8è cò Tây épunyevwv, were added,
when Gray found explanatory notes were needed.
a


## p. 128 (#154) ############################################

I 28
Gray
Gray's objection to this form. It was written in short stanzas,
and the recurrence of the same metre was more recognisable to
the ear than when it was separated by a long interval from its
counterpart.
In Gray's time, the muse was always making the grand tour.
If the title of Collins's Ode to Simplicity were not misleading,
we should find in it an embryo Progress of Poesy, in which in-
spiration passes, as with Gray, from Greece to Italy and from Italy
to England. The clue to the mystery of the title is found when
we discover that, to Collins, ‘simplicity' is ‘nature,' as Pope under-
stood the word-nature identified with Homer, and with all her
great poetic interpreters, who idealise but do not distort her.
These pilgrimages of the muse were started by Thomson, who, in
his Liberty, chose her as his travelling companion, and brought
her home intolerably dull, and, not long before Gray's death, by
Goldsmith in his Traveller.
The most easy way of criticising The Progress of Poesy and
The Bard is to start by criticising their critics, beginning with
Francklin, regius professor of Greek at Cambridge, who mistook
the 'Aeolian lyre’ invoked in the first line of The Progress for
the instrument invented by Oswald, and objected that “such an
instrument as the Aeolian harp, which is altogether uncertain and
irregular must be very ill adapted to the dance which is one con-
tinued regular movement. ' Garrick, who spoke from professional
knowledge, grasped the truth better, and said that Gray was the
only poet who understood dancing. His original in the place which
he has in mind is a line of Homer (Odyss. bk VIII, 1. 265); but he
borrows without acknowledgment the word ‘many-twinkling' from
Thomson (Spring, l. 158) who uses it of the leaves of the aspen.
The poem begins appropriately with an imitation of Horace's
description of Pindar,
In profound, unmeasurable song
The deep-mouth'd Pindar, foaming, pours along.
This beautiful poem is marred by a personal reference at the
end, as in the case, to which we have already referred, of the
Elegy.
Between The Progress of Poesy and The Bard comes the
Fragment of an Ode found in the MS at Pembroke. It is without
a title; that which it now bears, On the pleasure arising from
Vicissitude, is probably due to Mason, who attempted to complete
the poem and excelled himself in infelicity, filling up the last
stanza as we have it, thus :


## p. 129 (#155) ############################################

Vicissitude. The Bard
I 29
6
To these, if Hebe's self should bring
The purest cup from Pleasure's spring,
Say, can they taste the flavour high
Of sober, simple, genuine Joyl?
In Vicissitude, some critics have discovered an anticipation of
Wordsworth, but we ought to distinguish. When Gray says that
'the meanest flouret of the vale' is 'opening paradise' to the
convalescent, he describes the human being under limited and
exceptional circumstances. But when Wordsworth, in robust
health, derives from the meanest flower, thoughts that often lie
too deep for tears,' and reproaches his Peter Bell for finding the
primrose a yellow primrose and nothing more, he expects from
humanity in general more than experience warrants? .
Though this fragment probably comes chronologically between
The Progress of Poesy and The Bard, we are not justified in
interposing it between them. They are dissociable from it, not
only on account of their being printed and published in juxta-
position, as Ode I and Ode II, and of the motto which clearly
applies to both, but because together they herald a generic change.
Vicissitude, with every promise of a beautiful poem, carries on
the meditative spirit in which all Gray's serious work Had been
executed hitherto. But the two odes are conceived in an atmo-
sphere rather intellectual than sentimental. They are a literary
experiment. They idealise great facts, historic or legendary, out
of which reflection may be generated—but mediately, not directly
from the poet's mind. While they have this in common, there
remains a point of contrast between them. The Bard, more
clearly than the other ode, bears traces of those studies from the
Norse which Gray had already made and which found expression
in The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin.
It inaugurates the last stage of the poet's literary history. The
design has been marred by many editors through heedlessness
in printing. They have not observed that the bard sings his
song at first as a solo, until, in the distance, he sees the ghosts
of his slain brethren, and invites them to join the chant, while
together they weave the winding sheet of Edward's race. That
done, they vanish from the bard's sight, and he finishes his
prophecy alone. The fault, perhaps inevitable, of the poem, lies
in the conclusion, which smells too much of the lamp. The
1 For another stanza he is indebted to a suggestion in Gray's pocket-book, but has
made a poor use of it.
? Gray almost directly imitates here Gresset, a favourite poet with him (Sur ma
convalescence).
9
1
E. L, X.
CH. VI.


## p. 130 (#156) ############################################

130
Gray
a
salient characteristics of the great poets of the Elizabethan era
are described with much skill, though with a certain vagueness
proper to prophecy; and yet we cannot help asking, how he can
know so much about these his very late successors, while he shows
himself rather a discerning critic, than a mighty prophet who has
just been foretelling tragic horrors and retribution. They ill suit
the majestic form graphically described before his prophecy begins.
A curious evidence of the influence of Gray's Bard upon the
ovverol is to be found in the history of the Ossianic imposture. In
Cath-Loda Duan I of this so-called collection of reliques, we have
the expression 'Thou kindlest thy hair into meteors,' and in the
'Songs of Selma' Ossian sings:
I behold my departed friends. Their gathering is on Iona, as in the days
of other years. Fingall comes like a watery column of mist! his heroes are
around: and see the bards of song, grey-haired Ullin; stately Ryno! Alpin
with the tuneful voice! the soft complaint of Minona! How are ye changed,
my friends, etc.
Gray, who had at first welcomed the frauds of Macpherson, because
he discerned in them the romantic spirit, became more reticent
as time went on, and as his common sense, against which he feebly
struggled, gained the mastery. He either did not or would not
observe that in them he was imitated or parodied. On the other
hand, he repudiated for himself the suggestion that the opening of
The Bard was modelled upon the prophecy of Nereus in Horace
(Carm. I. 15). We cannot accept the repudiation, for the resem-
blance is unmistakable, although it makes but little against the real
originality of his poem, and is on the same plane with his acknow-
ledgment that the image of the bard was modelled on the picture
by Raphael of the Supreme Being in the vision of Ezekiel, or that
of Moses breaking the tables of the law by Parmegiano. The
Bard still remains the best evidence we possess that Gray, imita-
tive as be is, was, also, an inventive genius.
It might, after all, have come down to us as a colossal fragment,
lacking the third antistrophe and epode, but for a stimulus of
which Gray gives an account. He heard at Cambridge Parry, the
blind Welsh harper, and his sensitive ear was so fascinated that
'Odikle' was put in motion again. So completely did he associate
his verse with music, that he gave elaborate directions for its
setting, and it is a very high compliment to Gray's taste that
Villiers Stanford, though he knew nothing of these instructions,
carried them out to the letter.
Before this, in 1756, occurred an event which Gray describes


## p. 131 (#157) ############################################

Gray quits Peterhouse
131
to say
only vaguely 'as a sort of aera in a life so barren of events as' his.
The affair has been treated with so much difference of opinion that
we can only summarise the conclusion at which we have arrived.
Gray had been much tormented by some young men, of whom two
were certainly fellow-commoners residing on his staircase, and he
had a nervous dread of fire, upon which they probably played. He
accordingly got Wharton to bespeak him a rope-ladder, a strong
temptation to the young men to make him put it to the proof.
It is possible that, before the outrage, they had begun kindling
fires of shavings on his staircase. At last, an early hunting party
caused the huntsmen to shout 'fire' under his window, some of
them, perhaps, before joining the party, having made the usual
blaze on the stairs. The poet put his night-capped head out of
the window and, discovering the hoax, drew it in again. This was
all that was known to Sharp, fellow of Corpus, who wrote only six
days after Gray's migration to Pembroke. The exaggerated form
in which the story is still current was shaped in 1767 by a certain
Archibald Campbell, a scribbler in a production called The
Sale of Authors, who expressly confesses that he vouches for no
details in what he describes as a harmless pleasantry. Suffice it
that the master, Dr Law, to whom Gray complained, made
light of this “boyish frolic,' as he called it, and Gray, in conse-
quence, changed his college.
The year 1759 was mainly spent in London, near the British
museum, which was opened to the public in January. Gray
revelled in MS treasures there, and made copious extracts from
them; the most interesting, perhaps, to the general reader are
letters from Richard III, and the defence of Sir Thomas Wyatt,
the poet; both of which transcripts he made for Walpole, who
used them in his Miscellaneous Antiquities and Historic Doubts.
At this time, also, he probably composed the treatise called Metrum,
and Observations on the poems of Lydgate, probably in view of a
design for the history of English poetry which was never executed.
In 1762, Gray made a tour in Yorkshire and Derby, and saw
Kirkstall abbey, the Peak, of which he thought but little, and
Chatsworth. On his return to Cambridge, he found the pro-
fessorship of modern history vacant, and caused his claim to be
represented to Lord Bute. But the professorship was given to
Lawrence Brockett, who had been tutor to Sir James Lowther,
son-in-law of the favourite Bute. In 1764, possibly with Wharton
as his companion, he made his first visit to Scotland, and, in 1765,
he repeated this visit as the guest of Lord Strathmore, formerly
!
9--2


## p. 132 (#158) ############################################

132
Gray
a fellow-commoner of Pembroke. On this second visit, he met
Robertson and other literati. It is a proof of the remarkable
catholicity of Gray's love of scenery that, in the earlier of these
years, possessed though he was with the sublime grandeur of
the mountains, he could also enjoy and describe graphically the
charms of a gentler landscape, in a part of England (Winchester,
Southampton, Netley abbey, etc. ) dear to Collins.
In the following year, he once more visited Scotland and
became acquainted with Beattie, author of The Minstrel, to the
last an unfinished poem, the earliest part of which he helped to
correct. His criticism is just but with two notable exceptions.
He truly remarks that too much is given to descriptions and
reflections ; Beattie does not know what to do with his minstrel
when he has made him. Yet Gray's remarks are in two particulars
disappointing. In direct contrast to his doctrine as stated to West
in April 1742, he says 'I think we should wholly adopt the language
of Spenser's time or wholly renounce it. You say, you have done
the latter ; but, in effect, you retain fared, forth, mead, wight,
ween, gaude, shene, in sooth, aye, eschew, etc. ' And he objects
to Beattie's use of alliteration : if he had confined himself to
censuring one line in the part of the poem which was sent him
The long-robed minstrels wake the warbling lyre
it would have been well. As it is, Beattie had an easy retort upon
him with
Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind
in the Elegy.
In 1768, Gray's poems were republished by Dodsley, and for
A Long Story were substituted the two Norse odes, The Fatal
Sisters, and The Descent of Odin. A similar edition came, at
the same time, from the press of Foulis (the Glasgow Elzevir).
When Gray wrote The Bard, he had already made some study of
Scandinavian poetry. He had The Fatal Sisters in mind when
he wrote
Weave the warp and weave the woof
The Winding sheet of Edward's race.
Perhaps, The Descent of Odin, in one passage of which' it is
•Right against the eastern gate
By the moss-grown pile he sate
Where long of yore to sleep was laid
The dust of the prophetic Maid,
Facing to the northern clime
Thrice he traced the runic rhyme;
Thrice pronounc'd, in accents dread,
The thrilling verse that wakes the dead. '
1


## p. 133 (#159) ############################################

Gray's Professorship. Tour in Lakeland 133
impossible not to recognise an anticipation of Scott, is, in this
respect, still more suggestive.
In 1768, Brockett, Cambridge professor of modern history, met
with a fatal accident on returning from Hinchingbrooke. Stone-
hewer, who had been one of Gray's closest friends at Peterhouse
and who acted as the duke of Grafton's secretary, pleaded Gray's
claims to the professorship of history, and with success. The office
was a sinecure; he had some intention of delivering lectures, but
the form of his projected inaugural lecture is in Latin, and what-
ever his design was it fell through. In his new capacity, it was
his task to write the installation ode when Grafton was made
chancellor of the University. The work proved the one exception
to the fact that he never wrote well unless spontaneously. He
lingered long before he began. At last, he startled Nicholls by
throwing open his door to his visitor and shouting 'Hence, avaunt!
'tis holy ground, and the new ode was completed. A sort of
heraldic splendour characterises this, his last great effort; in
places, it seems to step out of a page of Froissart, and, notwith-
standing the bile of Junius, the pomp and circumstance of the closing
personal panegyric do not convey any impression of inappropriate-
ness.
This business over, Gray went with Wharton towards the
English Lakes, but his companion fell ill at Brough, and Gray
pursued his journey alone. The fruit of it was a journal which
he sent from time to time to Wharton, and of which, with a
Porsonian delight in his own beautiful handwriting, there is reason
to believe that he made more than one copy. The journal was
never published until after his death, and the public did not know
till then how exactly he had surveyed the scenery. Wordsworth,
if he knew, ignored the fact that a poet whom he habitually
depreciated was, as a minute admirer of the views of nature, not
less enthusiastic than his censor. The credit of discovering the
Lakes belongs really to neither of these. It belongs to poor crazy
Brown, the author of The Estimate, who wrote of a night scene
near Keswick :
Nor voice, nor sound broke on the deep serene;
But the soft murmur of soft-gushing rills
(Unheard till now, and now scarce heard), etc.
The whole of Gray's journal is precious, abounding in description,
facts of natural history, historical detail, antique records, ex-
periences gained with a persistent effort, very creditable to one


## p. 134 (#160) ############################################

134
Gray
a
generally very nervous and timid, but careless of fatigue and risk
in his fascinating quest? .
At the beginning of 1770, Gray, through Nicholls, found a strange
young friend, to beguile for a short time his solitary days, and give
his waning life a sort of Martin's summer. Young Charles-Victor
de Bonstetten came to him to fascinate, but, also, to perplex, him.
The undergraduates puzzled the foreigner; he could not understand
the young seigneurs travestied as monks in the university glorified
by Newton. He knew so little of the real life of these neophytes
as never to suspect that their conduct and character were far
from ascetic. It was a secret Gray prudently withheld from him,
jealously keeping his disciple for himself. Bonstetten spent most
of his time in Gray's room, having, however, a young sizar to wake
him in the morning and read Milton to him. He studied from
morning to night and spent his evenings with Gray. His own
experience was, in truth, already much wider than that of his
now ageing friend. He had seen Rousseau, he had talked with
Voltaire ; he had even tried suicide, anticipating Werther under
the spell of that Weltschmerz which the Briton imperfectly under-
stood. All this, Gray never knew, or thought it best not to notice.
He wrote to the young man, who relapsed for a time into melan-
choly on his return to Switzerland, as Fénelon’s Mentor might talk
to Telemachus; and epitomises for his benefit the sixth book of
Plato's Republic. In the end, Bonstetten became an excellent
magistrate, and served Switzerland well, until the revolution
drove him into exile. He never forgot Gray, the old poet whose
last days he had brightened, and who had parted from him with
pathetic regret?
The scene had begun to close in when, in the company of
icholls, he went through five of the western counties, descended
the Wye forty miles in a boat, saw Tintern and, at Malvern, on
receiving a copy of The Deserted Village, exclaimed emphatically
'this man is a poet. ' But there was not, for the first part of 1771,
much sign of any serious ailment; apart from some indications of
failing vitality in his frame, his mind was as active as ever, till, in
June, he became conscious of a new complaint, and, on 24 July,
was taken suddenly ill in hall. On the 30th, he was dead.
A survey of Gray's work would include MSS of incredibly
larger volume than the few poems published in his lifetime. Yet
1 He travelled, of course, much on foot, but it is not probable that he always did so.
It was not his way to record on all occasions how he travelled. The distances which he
walked have been absurdly exaggerated.
? See the story told more at length in the second volume of Gray's Letters (1904).
6


## p. 135 (#161) ############################################

>
Gray's letters
135
no small part of his reputation rests, for us, upon copious MSS,
carefully preserved by him, but never intended to be seen, except
by an esoteric circle. To begin with, his invaluable letters are an
index to his whole character, and to the humorous spirit that
is often, as in the case of Hood, twin sister to melancholy. In
his letters, his life lies spread out before us; they are the only
absolutely trustworthy records for his biographers. Their interest
lies in their infinite variety. Walpole was a better historian of
social life; but his claims to erudition were slight, his obligations
to Gray, acknowledged and unacknowledged, were great, and his
scientific knowledge was nil; while, whatever the interest of his
letters for political and social history, they contain nothing com-
parable to the depth and pathos of Gray's more limited memories
and friendships. On the other hand, Gray's letters are an excellent
guide as a survey of continental literature; the best French writers
he literally devoured; his liking for inferior fiction he shared with
the fashionable world, partly because it was fashionable, but such
writers as Montesquieu, Buffon and the encyclopaedists he read
with enthusiasm. With Rousseau, except his Emile, and with
Voltaire, he is utterly out of sympathy. He plunges deep into the
pages of Froissart, the Herodotus of a barbarous age,' of Sully's
Mémoires, of Madame de Maintenon's letters, and the memoirs
of that French Fanny Burney, Madame de Staal Delaunay. He
knows, beside Froissart, all the old French chroniclers, and gives
advice as to the order and method of their study. While, at times,
like a market-gardener, he exchanges with Wharton notes as to
the dates of the returns of the seasons and the state of the crops,
he is also a man of science. He is in touch with Linnaeus, through
his disciple at Upsala, and with the English naturalist Stillingfieet.
Classical literature has, for him, no dry bones. He rises to
enthusiasm on such subjects and expects Wharton to share his
delight in the description of the retreat from Syracuse, which his
friend has just reached in the seventh book of Thucydides.
In December 1757, he was offered the laureateship, but con-
temptuously declined it; the offer, nevertheless, was a tribute to
him, as the first poet of his generation. And, indeed, in 1748,
before he had written very much, he sat in scornful judgment
upon his contemporaries.
In Dodsley's collection of that year, the
only living poets whom he can praise unreservedly are Shenstone
1 See his Anecdotes of Painting and Gray's comments; also, Gray's criticisms on
Historic Doubts (read between the lines).
* As to Walpole’s letters, see chap. XI, post.


## p. 136 (#162) ############################################

136
Gray
for The Schoolmistress, Johnson for London and Verses on the
opening of Garrick's theatre, Dyer for Grongar Hill, and, of
course, Walpole. But, he adds
What shall I say to Mr Lowth, Mr Ridley, Mr Rolle, the Rev. Mr Brown
('Estimate Brown'), Seward, etc. etc. If I say Messieurs! this is not the
thing; write prose, write sermons, write nothing at all: they will disdain me
and my advice.
Of Gray's most persistent friend and correspondent, Mason, it is
difficult to speak with justice or moderation. Gray has described
him with kindliness and sincerity, and it is, perhaps, the one
redeeming trait in Mason's edition of the correspondence that
he has preserved this description with almost Boswellian self-
sacrifice. According to Gray, he is a creature of childlike sim-
plicity, but writes too much, and hopes to make money by it, reads
very little, and is insatiable in the matter of preferment; the
simplicity we may question, and it seems incompatible with the
rest of the description. He garbled Gray's letters ruthlessly; in
their unmutilated form, they would have disposed for ever of his
claims to be his friend's compère. He may be excused for not
wishing to figure before the public as 'dear Skroddler'; but, when
he pleads the boyish levity of some of the letters as an excuse
for his expurgations, he knows better, and is simply posing, often
substituting his own bombast for Gray's plain speaking. Gray
recognised merit in Mason's Musaeus, a Monody on the death of
Pope, spite of shells and coral floors; he liked, moderately, Elfrida
and, immoderately, Caractacus, from which, in The Bard, he quotes
an example of the sublime. His elegies and other verses it would
be profitless to enumerate. They have no place in the history of
our literature. He wrote political pasquinades of no great merit;
but it may be reckoned to his credit that he was a consistent Whig,
so that, on the accession of George III, he lost all chance of further
preferment. He showed very little magnanimity in attacking, in
his Isis, the university of Oxford, then (1746 sq. ) out of favour with
the court, the bulk of whose patronage went to Cambridge. He
was answered in The Triumph of Isis by Thomas Warton, then a
youth of twenty-one, with spirit and good temper; yet, such was
his vanity that he believed he had inflicted a mortal wound, and,
years after, congratulated himself on entering Oxford at night,
without fear of a crowd of 'booing undergraduates. ' His super-
ficial resemblance to the manner of Gray did the greater poet
some harm. Their contemporaries, and certain critics of a later


## p. 137 (#163) ############################################

Mason Projected history of English poetry 137
.
generation, did not see any difference between Mason's frosty glare
and constant falsetto and the balanced eloquence of Gray.
6
If the project of a joint work with Mason on the history of
English poetry had not fallen through, Gray must have found
his associate a terrible incubus. No greater contrast existed at
that date than Mason's slipshod, as compared with Gray's scholarly
accuracy. Even the work of Warton was an inadequate substitute
for that which Gray might have given us; the probability is that
its only fault would have been too much, even as Warton has too
little, method.
There was one of Gray's preferences that contributed greatly
to the appreciation which, as the historian of our poetry, he
would have shown of its earlier stages. In strong contrast to the
elaborate and stately diction of his own verse, he loved best the
poets who were almost models of simplicity : Matthew Green, and
the French Gresset, and Dyer of Grongar Hill, and whatever
Shenstone and even Tickell had written in the same vein. His
mind was early ripe for the ballads of Percy's Reliques. He
finds, accordingly, in Gil Morrice, all the rules of Aristotle
observed by some unknown ballad-writer who had never read
Aristotle. He derives from Macpherson's fragments and his
Fingall evidence that without any respect of climates poetry
reigns in all nascent societies of men. ' The theory itself is
intrinsically better than the support on which he chose to rest it.
He was struggling in that portentous Ossianic mist which spread
from Britain to the continent, a mist through which people of
genius, the greatest as well as the least, wandered for a time,
bewildered by their own shadows. The last efforts of his muse,
dating from The Bard, are, in the history of our literature, in-
comparably the most important. From his Latin verse, which, if
we except his jocular or satiric efforts, was alone fluent and
spontaneous, and is still significant as marking the first stage in
his poetic development, we pass to a meditative mood sufficiently
conventional in form except in its extreme classicism, and trans-
cendent only because impressed by genuine feeling, and thence to
the scanty product by virtue of which we regard him as a pioneer,
who seems, like Hesperus, to lead a starry host, but really moves
with the rest in obedience to the same mysterious impulse. His
fame, in this character, has obscured without effort that of many
lesser bards whose course was in the same direction, until the
magic was transmitted to Coleridge, and then to Scott, who used
it with more persistent energy and more conspicuous effect.


## p. 138 (#164) ############################################

CHAPTER VII
YOUNG, COLLINS AND LESSER POETS
OF THE AGE OF JOHNSON
THE posthumous experience, if it may be so described, of most
of the poets to be treated in the present chapter, like that of
their predecessors, noticed in an earlier section of this History,
illustrates certain doctrines, both of the less, and of the more, vulgar
philosophy of life. For more than a century and a half, through the
successive collections of Dodsley, Pearch, Johnson, Anderson and
Chalmers, they have had opportunities of being generally known
which can hardly be said to have been shared by the verse writers
of any other period of English literary history. But, for the last
century at any rate, this familiarity with their productions has, also,
brought about its proverbial consequence. Collins, indeed, if not
nemine contradicente, yet, by a strong body of the best critical
judgment, has (putting range of kind and bulk of production out
of the question) been allowed poetical quality of almost the rarest
and purest sort. Young, despite the great volume of now im-
perfectly interesting matter comprehended in his poetical works,
and the extreme inequality of his treatment of it, despite, too, the
defects of his temper and other drawbacks, enjoyed, for a long
time, great and almost European popularity; he possesses, for the
literary historian, the attraction of having actually anticipated
Pope in one of the most characteristic directions of Pope's satiric
energy; and he can never be explored by any patient and unbiassed
investigator without the recognition of flame under the ashes,
flowers in the wilderness and fragments of no contemptible mould-
ing among the ruins. Shenstone, Dyer, Green ("Spleen '-Green),
Blair, Armstrong, Akenside, Beattie, Smart—there are associations
with each of these names which ought not to be forgotten; and,
even from the numerus which may be grouped with them, there
remains something to be gathered as to the general state and
1 See ante, vol. II, chap. vi, sec. II.


## p. 139 (#165) ############################################

a
Young's Life and Writings 139
fortunes of literature and of poetry which ought not to be missing
in such a work as the present.
An extensive notice of biographical data, not generally included
in the plan of this History, would be altogether out of place
in a collective chapter; but some references of the kind will
be found to be occasionally indispensable. Young's long life,
from the time when he entered Winchester in 1695, was exactly
divided between residence at school and in three colleges at
Oxford (New college, where he missed securing a place on the
foundation, Corpus Christi, and, lastly, All Souls, of which he
became a lay fellow in 1708) and tenure of the college living of
Welwyn, to which, having given up plans of professional and
parliamentary life and taken orders, he was presented in 1730.
Throughout each of these long periods, he appears (except at
the moment of his election at All Souls) as a disappointed man,
baffled as to regular promotion at school; wandering from college
to college; not, indeed, ever in apparent danger of the jail, but
incessantly and fruitlessly courting the patron; an unsuccessful,
or but once successful, dramatist ; a beaten candidate for parlia-
ment; and, in his second stage, perpetually desiderating, but
never, in the very slightest measure, receiving, that ecclesiastical
promotion which, in some not quite comprehensible way, almost
every eighteenth century divine seems to have thought his plain
and incontestable right. In both parts of his career, moreover,
there can be little doubt that Young suffered from that curious
recoil or rebuff for which, perhaps, not enough allowance has
been made in meting out praise or blame among the successive
literary generations of the eighteenth century. Addison's ad-
ministrative, and Prior's diplomatic, honours were not unmixed
blessings to their possessors; but there cannot be any doubt that
they made Grub street, or even places much more agreeable and
legs 'fabulous' than Grub street, all the more intolerable to the
younger generation.
Before applying the light of this (of course not novel) con-
sideration to Young's work, let us see what that work (most of
it now utterly forgotten) actually was. He began with addresses
and odes of various kinds (one on the queen's death) in the last
two years of Anne, and produced the play Busiris, a paraphrase
of Job and his Letters to Tickell, in 1719. In 1721 appeared
his one famous play The Revenge, and, a little later, in parts
(1725—8), the most important work of his younger, but not
very young, years, The Universal Passion. During the years


## p. 140 (#166) ############################################

140 Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
a
1728 to 1730 were published the amazing pieces called Ocean
and Imperium Pelagi, with others. The Complaint, or Night
Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, began to appear in
1744, when the author was nearly sixty-two. A third play, The
Brothers, followed in 1753 : and his last work of importance,
Resignation, in 1762.
The immense and long enduring popularity of Night Thoughts
hardly requires much comment, even now that it has utterly
vanished and is never likely to return. This popularity was not,
as it has been in some other cases, due to lack of insight on the
part of the public that bestowed it; but, as perhaps nearly always
happens, it was due to the fact that the merits of the work, in part,
at least, were exactly such as that public could best appreciate,
and the faults such as it was most disposed to pass over. Night
Thoughts is hard reading, nowadays, even for the most catholic
lover of poetry; and the rest of Young, even The Universal
Passion, is harder. But he must be a very exceptional critic who
can do Young justice, either without a complete reading of his
poems, or at a first reading only. Two keys, perhaps, are wanted
to unlock the cabinet. The first is an easy and wellknown key-
the effect of personal disappointment. To this feeling, in various
forms, poets are proverbially liable; but it is difficult to remember
any poet who shows it so constantly and in such various forms as
Young. It is not always very noisy in him: but it shows itself every-
where--in his satire as well as in his preachings and moralisings,
in the innumerable passages, whether longer or shorter, of a form
of flattery which sometimes carries with it a despairing sense that
nothing, or nothing adequate, will, after all, come from the flattered;
in the elegies over apparent triumphs such as Addison's, and ap-
parent failures like that of Swift's ‘little Harrison,' who was Young's
intimate friend; last of all, but not least of all, and, perhaps, most
pathetically, in the title and the substance alike of his swan-song
Resignation. That his disappointment, on the whole, was rather
unreasonable is a feeble, as well as a 'philistine,' way of dismissing
the matter: unreasonable disappointments are apt to be the most,
not the least, keenly felt.
But there was something else wrong with Young. Johnson, in
one of that great majority of his judgments on which one cannot
do better than fall back, pronounced that with all his defects he
was a man of genius and a poet. ' He was this; but, of almost all
men of genius and almost all poets, he was the most singularly
lacking in art; and he seems, to some extent, to have been aware
а


## p. 141 (#167) ############################################

Night Thoughts
141
of it, if we may judge from the frequency with which he dismissed
his own work as not worth republication. It is quite astonishing
how bad an artist Young is; for, whatever its deficiencies in other
respects and whatever its limits in the domain of art, the eighteenth
century did not usually, according to its lights, make default in
questions concerning art. In gross and in detail, Young's art,
even his mere craftsmanship, is absolutely untrustworthy. His
rimes are the worst that we have from any English poet, except
Mrs Browning. He constantly ventures, in narrative blank verse,
upon the dramatic redundant syllable, which is always a blemish,
and sometimes fatal, out of drama. The almost incredible ab-
surdities of Ocean, Imperium Pelagi and other odes come partly
from want of taste in selection of stanza, partly from infelicities of
phrase which few schoolboys would commit.
In the greater matter (as some hold it) of construction, he is
equally weak. He really did precede Pope in certain turns, as
well as in a general atmosphere, of satire, which, it may be suspected,
is the reason why some not illiterate persons are in the habit of
attributing lines and passages in Young to his greater successor.
But, in the earlier poet, the inequality, the awkwardness, the
verbiage, are still constantly present.
It ought to be set down to the credit of public taste, which
seldom receives, and does not often deserve, praise, that these defects
(except the verbiage) are somewhat less perceptible in what was long
held to be a masterpiece, and is Young's masterpiece still. Even the
annoying and defacing redundant syllable may be excused, to some
extent, on the plea that The Complaint, to all intents and purposes,
is an enormous soliloquy-a lamentation in argumentative and
reflective monologue, addressed by an actor of superhuman lung-
power to an audience of still more superhuman endurance. It has,
throughout the character of the epideictic—the rhetorical exercise
deliberately calculated and consciously accepted as a matter of
display_which is frequent in more serious eighteenth century
verse. What Shakespeare, in a few lines of Hamlet and of Macbeth,
compressed and sublimed into immortal poetry, Young watered
down or hammered out into rhetoric, with endless comments
and 'uses' and applications. But, in passages which are still
unforgotten, he allows himself a little concentration and something
that is strangely like, if it is not actually, sincerity; and, then, he
does become, in his day and in his place, 'a man of genius and
a poet. ' Indeed, if he were judged by single lines, both of the
satiric and of the reflective kind, these titles could still less be
!
а
6


## p. 142 (#168) ############################################

142
Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
refused him. And it is only fair to say that such lines and
passages occur not merely in Night Thoughts, not merely in The
Universal Passion, but almost everywhere (except in the odes),
from the early Last Day and Job to the final Resignation.
As we turn to William Collins, we come, perhaps, to the only
name the inclusion of which in this chapter may raise a cavil. 'If
Collins is to be classed with lesser poets, it may be said, 'then
who, in Collins's time, or in his century, is a greater ? ' There is
no space here for detailed controversy on such points; yet, without
some answer to the question, the literary history of the age would
be obscured or left imperfect. In the opinion of the present writer,
Collins, in part, and the chief part, of bis work, was, undoubtedly,
a 'greater poet,' and that not merely of his own time. There is
no time_Elizabethan, Georgian or Victorian-at which the best
things in the Odes would not have entitled their author to the
verdict 'poetry sans phrase. ' But there is another part of his
work, small as it may be in bulk-the whole of it is but small, and,
in the unhappy circumstances of his life, could hardly have been
larger—which is not greater poetry, which, indeed, is very distinctly
lesser; and this 'minority' occurs also, we must almost say con-
stantly, in the Odes themselves. Further, this minority or inferiority
is of a peculiar kind, hardly exampled elsewhere. Many poets are
unequal: it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that, in varying
measure, every poet is unequal. The string, be it of bow or of lyre,
cannot always be at full tension. Some-we have but just quoted an
example in Young-are unequal with an inequality which cannot
take any benefit from the old metaphor. But, at certain times,
hardly any poet, and few poets at any time, exhibit the peculiar
inequality which Collins displays; and, for historical and critical
purposes, the analysis of the special character of this difference
is, perhaps, of almost as much importance as that of the discovery
and recognition of his poetic idiosyncrasy and merit when he is at
his best; perhaps, it is of even greater importance than this.
For, here, the cross-valuation of man and time, easily abused
down to mere glib futility, yet very significant when used rightly,
becomes of the very first moment; in fact, it would not be an
exaggeration to say that there is hardly another case where it
counts for so much, and where it explains so much. Almost every-
thing that is good in Collins belongs to the man; almost everything
that is not good belongs to the time. And, consequently, there
is, again, hardly a poet of whom it may be said, with less of this


## p. 143 (#169) ############################################

Collins's Odes and Eclogues
143
+
-
futility, that even supposing his unhappy mental affliction to
have remained the same (which, in the different circumstances,
it very conceivably might not), his production, as a contemporary
of Shakespeare or of Milton, of Coleridge or of Tennyson, would
have been entirely different in all the features that are not its
best. The Collins of the Odes, at his best, is the poet of all
time in general and no time in particular; the Collins of the
Eclogues is everywhere the poetaster of the eighteenth century.
Nor is the distinction to be confined to this easy and sweeping
separation; for, in the Odes themselves, it constantly, and, to the
critical reader, not at all tiresomely, presents and represents itself.
In two succeeding poems of the collection, in two stanzas of the
same poem, in two successive lines, nay, in the very same line of
the same stanza, two writers-the Collins of eternity and the
Collins of his day-are continually manifesting themselves. The
latter talks about a 'British shell' when he means 'English poetry';
intrudes the otiose and, in fact, ludicrous, detail of its southern
site,' a sort of auctioneer's item, in his description of the temple
of Pity; indulges in constant abuse of such words as 'scene. And
he sometimes intrudes upon, though he cannot quite spoil, the
loftiest inspiration of the Collins who writes 'How sleep the brave'
and the Ode to Evening.
When this is thoroughly understood, it not merely brings the
usual reward—the fact of this understanding—but a distinct
increase of enjoyment. On the full perception of the difference
between the two Collinses, there follows, not merely pardon, as in
the proverb, but a possibility of neglecting what would otherwise
annoy. The ‘British shell' no longer suggests artillery or oysters;
the 'turtles' have no savour of the tureen; and nothing interferes
with our appreciation of the dewy eyes of Pity and the golden
hair of Peace, when the sense of incongruity is, as Coleridge says
of the sense of disbelief, 'suspended. '
In regard, indeed, to the Eclogues, the critical is almost the
only satisfaction. They occupy but little room-less than a score
of pages, containing scarcely more than three hundred lines, form
not a very severe tax upon the reader. But, in them, we certainly
find the Collins of the hour almost unrelieved by a single exhibition
of individual poetic quality. Eastern apologues in prose or verse
had been patented for the whole eighteenth century by the
authority of Addison ; and Collins was merely following one of
the various fashions beyond which it was reckoned improper,
if not positively unlawful, to stray. The consecrated couplet


## p. 144 (#170) ############################################

144 Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
>
furnishes the metre; the gradus epithet—ʻradiant morn,’ ‘wanton
gales,' 'tender passion'-lends its accustomed aid to swell and
balance the line; and, though we sometimes come on a verse that
shows forth the poet, such as
Cold is her breast like flowers that drink the dew,
unreasonable expectations of more instances of the same sort are
promptly checked by such flatnesses as the statement that 'the
virtues came along,' or such otiosities as
In distant view along the level green.
Had these attempts to compose something that might represent
the poetry of Saadi and Hafiz and Omar Khayyam stood alone,
Collins might certainly have justified the strictures of The
Gentleman's Magazine on his fellow-contributor to Dodsley.
Fortunately, they do not stand alone, but are accompanied and
effaced by the Odes. Besides the two pieces to which reference
has already been made—the Ode to Evening, with its almost, if
not quite, successful extension of the 'blank' principle to lyric,
and the exquisite softness and restraint of 'How sleep the brave'-
at least three others, in different degrees, have secured general
admiration. These are the slightly 'time-marked,' but, surely,
charming for all time, Dirge in Cymbeline, the splendid outburst
of the Liberty ode and the posthumous Superstitions of the
Highlands, of which the text may, perhaps, admit of dispute, but
certainly not the spirit and the poetic quality. Hardly one of
these, unless it be ‘How sleep the brave,' is, as a whole poem,
faultless; but Longinus would have made no mistake about the
'slips' and 'faults' of Collins, as compared with his sublimity-
and why should we?
The other poets to be mentioned in the present chapter are
inferior to these two; but, with rare exception, each has something
that would make it improper to batch or group him with others,
as was done on a former occasion; while hardly one is so distinctly
eminent that, in his case, chronological order need be disregarded
as it has been in that of Collins. We shall, therefore, observe it,
with the very slight further liberty (possibly no liberty at all)
of mentioning John Dyer, who was certainly not born within the
eighteenth century, but whose exact birth-year is unknown, before
Green and Blair, who can be positively claimed for the seventeenth.
For Dyer, though his real claims rest upon one short piece
only, and that not belonging to the very highest style of poetry,
i Cf. ante, vol. Ix, chap. VI, sec. II, p. 191.


## p. 145 (#171) ############################################

Grongar Hill
145
must be recognised as a poet, and as a very remarkable poet,
from curiously different points of view. The Fleece and The Ruins
of Rome are merely examples of the extraordinary mistakes as to
subjects proper for poetry, and the ordinary infelicity in dealing
with them, which have condemned eighteenth century verse as a
whole to a lower place than it deserves. The Country Walk, not
disagreeable in itself, is either a vastly inferior first draft, or
a still more surprisingly unsuccessful replica, of Grongar Hill.
But Grongar Hill itself is one of those poems which occupy a
place of their own, humble though it may be, as compared with
the great epics and tragedies, simple and of little variety, as com-
pared with the garlands or paradises of the essentially lyrical
poets, but secure, distinguished and, practically, unique. That
even Johnson, though he thought it ‘not very accurately written,'
allowed it to be 'pleasing,' and felt sure that when once read
it would be read again,' is a striking testimony in its favour. For
it deals almost wholly with 'prospects,' to which Johnson was
contemptuously indifferent; and its 'inaccuracy' (which, in truth,
is the highest accuracy) was to prove a very crowbar for loosening
the foundations of the prosody that he thought accurate.
The poem is really a little wonder in subject and form alike.
The devotees of 'the subject' cannot fail, if they know the facts,
to recognise in it the first definite return to that fixing of the eye
on the object in nature which, though not so absent from Dryden
as Wordsworth thought, had been growing rarer and rarer (save in
such obscure work as Lady Winchilsea's) for generation after
generation, and which was to be the most powerful process in
the revived poetry of the future. The student of form cannot
fail to perceive in that inaccuracy which Johnson (for him) gently
blamed something neither more nor less than a return to the
peculiar form of the octosyllabic couplet which, after being de-
veloped by Shakespeare and Fletcher and the pastoral poets of
the early seventeenth century, had been exquisitely employed by
Milton in the twin masterpieces of his youth. The poem appeared,
in 1726, in the Miscellany of that remarkable person Lewis 1.
Even the first of The Seasons had but just been published; and,
if there is a certain identity of spirit between this poem and
Dyer's, the expression is wholly different. Even those who are
free from any half-partisan, half-ignorant contempt for the age of
Pope and the age of Johnson, must own how strange and sweet,
amid the ordinary concert of those ages, is the sound of
1 Cf. ante, vol. ix, p. 188.
T
E. L. X.
CH. VII.
10


## p. 146 (#172) ############################################

146
Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
Who in the purple evening lie
On the mountain's lonely van . . .
or
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam on a winter's day. . .
or
Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,
Wave succeeding wave, they go
A various journey to the deep,
Like human life, to endless sleep.
That Dyer was a painter as well as a poet goes, no doubt, for
something ; that, at least, he liked to think he had married a
collateral descendant of, in his own phrase, “everybody's Shake-
spere,' may go for a great deal.
a
In Dyer-or, at least, in Grongar Hill—we see some of the
first, and almost best, fruits of the romantic spirit and style. In
Matthew Green, both style and spirit are of the other kind, but
hardly less agreeable in their own way. He, also, so far as
good verse goes, is a “single-speech' poet; but he derives some
advantage from the fact that he hardly tried to speak on any
other occasion, though a few minor pieces usually accompany The
Spleen, and a few more might, it seems, be added to them. Green
was a quaker-freethinker (a curious evolution) and a clerk in the
custom-house, where he amiably prevented a reform which would
have disestablished, or, at least, dismilked, the cats. He seems, on
the whole, to have been more like a French man of letters of the
time than like an Englishman possessing a temperament which
may, at once, have qualified and disqualified him for treating the
English disease. ' It must be admitted that his treatment is some
what superficial, and more than a little desultory; but it certainly
exhibits a condition completely opposite to that of the ailment,
and even, for the time of reading, provides an antidote. The
octosyllables, 'accurate,' as Johnson would say, without stiffness
or limpness, and slipping lightly along without any Hudibrastic
acrobatism, frame a succession of thoughts that, if never very
profound, are always expressed with a liveliness of which the well-
known
Fling but a stone, the giant dies
is by no means too favourable a specimen. Sometimes, we have
satiric glances at individuals, as that, near the beginning, at Gildon;
sometimes, lively 'thumbnails' of contemporary manners; once or
twice, more elaborate drawings, as of the often quoted
Farm some twenty miles from town.


## p. 147 (#173) ############################################

The Grave
147
The epicurean attitude of the lighter, but not the coarser, kind
has seldom been better illustrated in verse.
6
Chronology could hardly have been more complacent in contrast-
planning than by putting the author of The Grave next in order.
Here, also, we have a poet of one poem ; but the subject of that
poem has at once greater possibilities and greater dangers. A poet
who writes unpoetically on death at once proves himself to be no
poet; and Blair has not failed to pass the test. But he has passed
it with the qualification of his time; and, perhaps, so universal a
subject ought to receive rather more universality of treatment.
Even the fine coda (which did not form part of the original edition
of the poem) dates itself a little too definitely; and the suicide
passage, to name no other, is somewhat rhetorical, if not even
melodramatic. But there is no doubt that it had a powerful
influence. The very fact that contemporary critics thought the
language lacking in 'dignity'offers the best testimony to its freedom,
at least sometimes, from the always irksome, and sometimes in-
tolerable, buckram which mars Young and Thomson, Armstrong
and Akenside, and which is by no means absent from Collins or
from Gray. The blank verse, like nearly all dating from this period,
though not so badly as some of it, abuses the abrupt full-stopped
middle pause, and is too much given to dramatic redundancy.
But it has a certain almost rugged massiveness, and occasionally
flings itself down with real momentum. The line
The great negotiators of the earth
possesses sarcastic force of meaning as well as prosodic force of
structure. It would be hard to find two poets of more different
schools than Blair and Blake. Yet it was not a mere association
of contradictories when Blake illustrated Blair1.
1
The peculiar 'tumid and gorgeous' style of the eighteenth
century in blank verse, in which Johnson professed to find the only
excuse--and that inadequate-for the metre he detested, not un-
frequently gives the wary critic a certain pause before he absolutely
excludes the notion of conscious or half-conscious burlesque on
the part of its practitioners. There had been no doubt about
this burlesque in the case of The Splendid Shilling? , which,
1 The close coincidence of The Grave, which was certainly written by 1742, though
not published till the following year, and Night Thoughts, the first part of which appeared
in the earlier year, has given occasion to the usual idle disputes about priority. The
conception of each of these poems was, probably, quite independent.
? See ante, vol. IX, chap. x, p. 256.
10-2


## p. 148 (#174) ############################################

148
Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
a
undoubtedly, had led not a few of them to Milton. Even in
Thomson, a later and much stronger influence—in fact, one which
directly mastered most blank-verse writers after 1726—it is not
certain whether the temper which avowedly exists in The Castle of
Indolence may not sometimes lie concealed in The Seasons. And
John Armstrong, Thomson's intimate friend and more than
countryman-for their birthplaces, just inside the Border, were
within a few miles of each other-one of the garrison invalids of
the castle itself, was, by common consent of tradition, a remarkable
specimen of that compound of saturnine, and even churlish, humour
with real kindliness, which Scotsmen have not been indisposed to
acknowledge as a national characteristic. He seems to have pleaded
actual burlesque intent for his péché de jeunesse (as it would be
called in French literary history), The Economy of Love.