No More Learning

68. The first line, 'A bard here dwelt, more
fat than bard beseems,' is Thomson's own.


## p. 115 (#141) ############################################

Lyttelton
I15
remember the criticism of Thomson which Lyttelton introduced
in the most valuable of the Dialogues of the Dead. In answer to
a question by Boileau, Pope says:
Your description points out Thomson. He painted nature exactly, and
with great strength of pencil. His imagination was rich, extensive, and
sublime: his diction bold and glowing, but sometimes obscure and affected.
Nor did he always know when to stop, or what to reject. . . . Not only in his
plays, but all his other works, there is the purest morality, animated by piety,
and rendered more touching by the fine and delicate sentiments of a most
tender and benevolent heart1.
Lyttelton's early poems show him to have followed in the
footsteps of Pope, and the letters written to his father from France
and Italy are mainly concerned with foreign politics ; the only
prolonged passage of description in them is a formal account in
French of his journey across Mont-Cenis. In 1756, he wrote two
letters to the historian Archibald Bower, describing a journey
in north Wales. The master of Hagley, by this time, had de-
veloped a strong taste for scenery. His descriptions are excellent
and accurate, and he visited the castles of Wales with the
enthusiasm of a historian, although he fell into the error of
imagining that the ruins of Rhuddlan were those of a castle built
by Henry II. The beauty of the valleys charmed him; the
situation of Powis castle, the vales of Festiniog and Clwyd, the
wooded shores of the Menai straits and the view of the Dee valley
from Wynnstay, excited him to enthusiasm. Bala seemed to him
an oasis in the desert of Merionethshire, 'a solitude fit for Despair
to inhabit. ' Snowdon filled him with 'religious awe' rather than
admiration, and its rocks excited the idea of Burnet, of their
being the fragment of a demolished world. It is characteristic of
'
the taste of his day that the magnificent prospect of the Carnarvon-
shire mountains from Baron hill above Beaumaris, on which
Suckling had looked more than a century before, seemed to
Lyttelton inferior to the view of Plymouth sound and Dartmoor
from mount Edgcumbe. The love of nature in her wilder moods
was not yet part of English literature. 'Nature,' said Lyttelton
of the Berwyn mountains, 'is in all her majesty there; but it is the
majesty of a tyrant, frowning over the ruins and desolation of a
country. '
1 Dialogues of the Dead, XIV.
8-2


## p. 116 (#142) ############################################

CHAPTER VI
GRAY
THOMAS GRAY, a poet whose influence upon subsequent
literature was largely in excess of the volume of his published
works, was born in Cornhill, 26 December 1716. His father,
Philip Gray, was an exchange broker, but seems to have combined
with this other and more hazardous pursuits. He was a selfish,
despotic, ill-tempered man, passionate even to the verge of lunacy.
He owned the house in which the poet was born, and, about the
year 1706, let it, and the shop connected with it, to two sisters,
Mary and Dorothy Antrobus, milliners. At the same date,
approximately, he married Dorothy and came to live with her and
Mary. Thomas Gray was the fifth and only surviving child of this
marriage; the rest, to the number of seven, died in infancy; and
his own life was saved by the prompt courage of his mother, who
opened one of his veins with her own hand.
Dorothy Gray had two brothers, Robert and William Antrobus.
Robert was a fellow of Peterhouse, and had a considerable reputa-
a
tion at Cambridge. He was Gray's first teacher, not only in
classical knowledge, but, also, in the study of natural history,
especially botany, and imbued his nephew with a life-long passion
for scientific observation of the minutest kind in almost every
department of vegetable and animal life. Robert Antrobus was
sometime assistant master at Eton, but had probably resigned
before Gray entered the school in 1727. The poet's tutor there
was William, Robert's younger brother.
During the earlier part of his stay at Eton, Gray, probably,
was housed with his uncle Robert, then residing in retirement
either in the town or in the college precincts. As an oppidan, the
delicate boy had not to endure the hardships of the colleger, and
the horrors of Long Chamber. His chief friend there, in the
first instance, was Horace, son of Sir Robert Walpole, the prime


## p. 117 (#143) ############################################

School and College
117
minister, of whose wife his cousin Dorothy was a humble
intimate. Another of his Eton contemporaries was Richard West,
son of the lord chancellor of Ireland, and grandson of bishop
Burnet. At Eton, West was accounted the most brilliant of the
little coterie formed by the three and Ashton, afterwards fellow
of King's and of Eton, and called the quadruple alliance. A scholar,
with a thin vein of poetry, West was absent-minded, with a tendency
to melancholy, to some extent resembling Gray's own, and he died
prematurely in 1742.
The year 1734 brought a dislocation of the alliance. Gray
went for a time to Pembroke college, Cambridge', pending his
admission to Peterhouse in July. In March 1735, West went to
Christ Church, Oxford, whence he wrote to Gray, 14 November
1735 :
Consider me very seriously here in a strange country inhabited by things
that call themselves doctors and masters of arts; a country flowing with
syllogisms and ale, where Horace and Virgil are equally unknown.
But, as a matter of fact, all these young Etonians exhibit a petu-
lance for which youth is the only excuse; and Gray himself writes
'It is very possible that two and two make four, but I would not
give four farthings to demonstrate this ever so clearly. ' Then
follows the splenetic outburst:
Surely it was of this place, now Cambridge, but formerly known as
Babylon, that the prophet spoke when he said 'the wild beasts of the desert
shall dwell there, and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures, and owls
shall build there, and satyrs shall dance there; their forts and towers shall be
a den for ever, a joy of wild asses; there shall the great owl make her nest,
and lay and batch and gather under her shadow; it shall be a court of
dragons; the screech owl also shall nest there, and find for herself a place of
rest. '
But he was saved from the temptation to dilettantism, which beset
his friends, by the scientific bias which his uncle Robert had given
him, and which would have found quick recognition and encourage-
ment in the Cambridge of another day. Late in life, he regretted
his early neglect of mathematics, and dreamt even then of pursuing
it, while he lamented that it was generally laid aside at Cambridge
so soon as it had served to get men a degree.
His vacations were chiefly spent at Burnham, where, at Cant's
hall, he stayed with his uncle Rogers, his mother's brother-in-law,
a solicitor fond of sport, or of the habits of sport. Gray, however,
had some little literary companionship :
1 From this brief sojourn we may probably date the beginning of his friendship with
Thomas Wharton (dear, dear? Wharton).


## p. 118 (#144) ############################################

118
Gray
We have old Mr Southern, at a gentleman's house a little way off, who
often comes to see us; he is now seventy-seven years old, and has almost
wholly lost his memory; but is as agreeable as an old man can be, at least
I persuade myself so when I look at him, and think of Isabella and Oroonoko.
This interesting letter serves also to explain to us the lines towards
the conclusion of the Elegy. He writes:
My comfort amidst all this is that I have at the distance of half-a-mile,
through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar call it a common) all my own, at
least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but myself. It is a little
chaos of mountains and precipices; mountains, it is true, that do not ascend
much above the clouds, nor are the declivities quite so amazing as Dover cliff;
but just such hills as people who love their necks as well as I do may venture
to climb, and craggs that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were
dangerous: Both vale and hill are covered with the most venerable beeches,
and other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other ancient people, are
always dreaming out their old stories to the winds,
And as they bow their hoary tops relate,
In murmuring sounds, the dark decrees of fate;
While visions, as poetic eyes avow,
Cling to each leaf, and swarm on every bowl.
At the foot of one of these squats Me I (il penseroso) and there grow to the
trunk for a whole morning.
It seems that Gray's first destination, so far as it was definite,
was the law (as was also West's); for, so early as December 1736, he
writes to his friend: “You must know that I do not take degrees? '
He lingered at Cambridge, somewhat aimlessly. However, this
inertia was dispelled by a journey abroad which he undertook in
company with Walpole. His first extant letter from Amiens is
written to his mother and tells how, on 29 March N. S. 1739, the
friends left Dover. At Paris, Walpole goes out to supper with his
cousin Lord Conway; but Gray, though invited too, stops at home
and writes to West. He was, however, delighted to dine ‘at my
Lord Holdernesse's' with the abbé Prévost, whom he knows as
the author of L'Histoire de M. Cleveland, fils naturel de
Cromwel, while omitting to mention Manon Lescaut. He saw
in tragedy MacGaussin who had been Voltaire's Zaïre; saw, also,
with Walpole, Racine’s Britannicus, and, in 1747, reminded him
of the grand simplicity of diction and the undercurrent of design
а
Miller
1 If Gray's own, these are the earliest of his original English verses which we
possess. The last two lines are frequently quoted by Hazlitt.
2 In June 1738, he begins a sapphic ode to West (Favonius)
Barbaras aedes aditure mecum,
Quas Eris semper fovet inquieta,
Lis ubi latè sonat, et togatum
Æstuat agmen.


## p. 119 (#145) ############################################

Travels with Walpole
119
which they had admired in the work. His own fragmentary
Agrippina (1747 c. ) is, structurally, borrowed from this tragedy?
From Paris, the travellers went to Rheims. Gray's grand tour
is illustrated by him in a double set of notes, sometimes 'bones
exceeding dry' of quotations from Caesar in France, or Livy on
the Alps; he draws less frequently than Addison from Latin poets,
but still frequently enough ; and records his impressions of archi-
tecture, and especially of painting ; and we note among other
evidences of his independence of judgment that he finds Andrea
del Sarto anything but 'the faultless painter. ' In this adverse
judgment, he is seconded by Walpole, who comes nearer to Gray
in artistic than in any other tastes.
On their way into Piedmont, Gray received, from his first view of
mountain scenery, impressions which, on his return to England,
remained for a while dormant, but had been wakened again when
he wrote in The Progress of Poesy of scenes
Where each old poetic mountain
Inspiration breath'd around.
On 24 April 1741, the pair set out from Florence, intending to
go together to Venice, there to see the doge wed the Adriatic on
ascension day. At Reggio, they quarrelled. It would seem that the
discrepancy in their tastes became more and more a trial to both;
and they were alike open in their comments on one another to their
common friend Ashton, who disclosed Gray's to Walpole. Ashton
did not display any particular displeasure with Gray at the time,
but was put up by Walpole, in the interview at which a reconcilia-
tion was at last brought about, to affect that Gray's letter had roused
his anger. Walpole was left at Reggio, and would have died there of
quinsy but for the kind aid of Spence, the friend of Pope. Gray
went with two new friends, made at Florence, to Venice, and thence
took his homeward way. He paid a second visit to the Grande
Chartreuse, and it was probably on this occasion that he left in
the album of the fathers the beautiful alcaic ode O tu severi
Religio loci, of which a fine English version has been composed by
R E. E. Warburton?
1 Compare, with the union of Junia and Britannicus (Racine), that of Otho and
Poppaea (Gray), Nero's passion being the obstacle in both cases. Nero overhears a
conversation in both Racine and Gray; the place of Burrhus is taken by Seneca; the
false Narcissus reappears in Anicetus, Agrippina's confidante Albina in Acevonia.
2 The later story of Gray's alcaics is curious. Mitford sought the original in vain
at the monastery. He says that collectors who followed in the wake of the French
revolutionary armies made away with it. But we find that a certain Mrs Bigg, when
resident in France, was arrested in the reign of terror, and a copy of Gray was found
in her possession. The opening line, O tu severi Religio loci, suggested to the Jacobin
investigators the comment: Apparemment ce livre est quelque chose de fanatique.
a


## p. 120 (#146) ############################################

I 20
Gray
On 7 September 1741, we find Gray in London, causing a
sensation among the street boys 'by the depth of his Ruffles, the
immensity of his Bagg, and the length of his sword. ' He was still
in town in April 1742, maintaining a correspondence with West,
then ruralising in quest of health at Pope's house near Hatfield in
Hertfordshire, on Tacitus and on the fourth Dunciad, which had
just appeared. The yawn of Dulness at the end Gray describes as
among the finest things Pope has written; and this young unknown
critic here sounds the first note of discriminating praise, which has
since been repeated by all good judges, from Johnson to Thackeray.
In the same letter, he enclosed the first example of English verse
which we certainly know to be his, a fragment of Agrippina,
a tragedy never completed, of which Mason discovered the general
design among Gray's papers. As has been already seen, it is manifest
that, in Agrippina, Racine's Britannicus was to have been copied
with almost Chinese exactness, just as Gray's details, like Racine's,
are often Tacitus versified. The dignity of style to be discovered
in these disjecta membra still impresses us. But, more important
than any question of their merits, is the friendly criticism which
they occasioned. Few known passages in critical literature furnish
more instructive details as to English poetic diction than these
unpretending sentences in a letter to West of April 1742:
As to matter of stile, I have this to say: The language of the age is never
the language of poetry except among the French, whose verse, where the
thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose. Our
poetry, on the contrary, has a language peculiar to itself; to which almost
every one, that has written, has added something by enriching it with foreign
idioms and derivatives: nay sometimes words of their own composition or
invention. Shakespear and Milton have been great creators in this and
no one more licentious than Pope or Dryden, who perpetually borrow
expressions from the mer. Let me give you some instances from Dryden,
whom every body reckons a great master of our poetic tongue. -Full of
museful mopeings-unlike the trim of love-a pleasant beverage--a roundelay
of love-stood silent in his mood-with knots and knares deformed-his ireful
mood-in proud array-his boon was granted--and disarray and shameful
rout-wayward but wise-furbished for the field-the foiled doddered oaks-
disherited-smouldering flames-retchlessl of laws-crones old and ugly-the
beldam at his side-the grandam-hag-villanize his Father's fame.
Gray goes on to admit that expressions in his play—'silken son of
dalliance,' 'drowsier pretensions,’ ‘wrinkled beldam,' 'arched the
hearer's brow and riveted his eyes in fearful extasie'-may be
faulty ; though why they should be thought so, in view of his own
theory, must remain a mystery. To take but two examples, he
has compounded ‘silken son of dalliance' from that ‘New Dunciad'
way:
1 Palamon and Arcite. The form traces back to Piers Plowman.


## p. 121 (#147) ############################################

>
Correspondence with West I 21
which he has just been reading, and from Shakespeare's Henry V1;
and he gets his 'arched brow' from Pope? More generally, it is
a testimony to the great transformation of literary tastes which
Gray ultimately helped to bring about, that words so familiar even
in our everyday speech as ‘mood,' 'smouldering,” beverage,' 'array,'
boon' and 'wayward' were, in 1742, thought by some to be too
fantastic even for poetry. While this correspondence, sometimes
little more than a pretty dilettantism and strenuous idleness, was
passing between them, Gray was lulled into a false security about his
friend West. In April, he writes: 'I trust to the country, and that
easy indolence you say you enjoy there, to restore your health and
spirits. ' On the 8th, he has received a poem on the tardy spring
and 'rejoices to see you (West) putting up your prayers to the
May: she cannot choose but come at such a call. ' Pretty verses
enough3; but chiefly interesting because they are the last poetic
effort of that young and sorrow-stricken spirit to whom Gray sent
the Ode on the Spring, which he first called 'Noon-tide, an ode,' and
has left transcribed in his commonplace-book with the note ‘at
Stoke, the beginning of June 1742, sent to Fav[-onius, West]: not
knowing he was then Dead. ' In fact, West died on the first of June.
It was strange that the same theme of the opening year should
have been respectively the first and the last efforts of the devoted
friends, and that the month which silenced one young voice for ever
should have wakened the survivor into an unwonted luxuriance of
song
A very brief period of efflorescence in verse preceded
Gray's return to Cambridge. From Stoke, to which, after the
death of his father in 1741, his mother and his aunt Mary Antrobus
had gone to live with their widowed sister Mrs Rogers, he had
sent (early in June 1742) the Ode on the Spring; he wrote there
in August his Sonnet on the Death of Richard West, bis cento
the Hymn to Adversity, his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton
College and a very splenetic Hymn to Ignorance (which, happily,
remains a fragment), on his projected return to Cambridge. But
1
And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies. '
Henry V, 11, chor. 1, 2.
To where the Seine, obsequious as she runs
Pours at great Bourbon's feet her silken sons. '
Dunciad iv.
"Whom have I hurt? has poet yet, or peer
Lost the arch'd eyebrow, or Parnassian sneer? '
Ep. to Arbuthnot, 1735.
s They may be read in the volume Gray and his Friends (Cambridge, 1890), in
which all West's remains are collected.


## p. 122 (#148) ############################################

I 22
Gray
we must refer to the same date the most touching of all his
tributes to the memory of West, in which the sad thoughts of his
English poems on the same theme are combined and concealed in
a Latin dress. His ambitious fragment De Principiis Cogitandi,
begun at Florence in 1740, and dubbed by him ‘Tommy Lucretius'
is, after all, so far as it goes, only a résumé of Locke; but, in June,
so soon as he heard of his loss, he added, apparently without effort,
a lament prompted by the keen stimulus of grief, which seems to be
more spontaneous than his sonnet or the Eton Ode, and is, in fact,
the first source of these familiar verses. It will bear comparison
with Milton's Epitaphium Damonis—Charles Diodati, the friend-
ship between whom and Milton, in many ways, is an exact
counterpart to that between West and Gray. Nor can it be
denied that Gray's effort is without a certain artificiality, which,
pace Masson, renders Milton's poem more passionless, and more
self-centred and discursive.
From his letters, we see that, for the first two years after his
return to Cambridge, now as a fellow-commoner of his college,
Gray was idle, so far as he could be for one still in statu pupillari.
He must have had arrears of lectures and disputations to make up,
in order to qualify for the degree of LL. B. , an easy task for him,
though he writes ironically to Wharton,
by my own indefatigable Application for these ten years past and by the
Care and Vigilance of that worthy magistrate The Man-in-Blew%, (who I'll
assure you has not spared his Labour, nor could have done more for his own
Son) I am got half-way to the Top of Jurisprudence.
But he had previously spoken of his allegiance to our sovereign
Lady and Mistress the President of Presidents, and Head of Heads
(if I may be permitted to pronounce her name, that ineffable Octo-
grammaton) the power of Laziness. ' Nevertheless, though the
poetic impulse of 1742 had spent its force, his interest in current
literature is as keen as ever. He criticises Akenside's Pleasures
of Imagination and at once put his finger on that young poet's
chief blemish; it is infected, he says, with the jargon of Hutcheson,
the disciple of Shaftesbury. It is the fault which he noted later
in certain verses of Mason; there was a craze for Shaftesbury
among the young men of his time, and beauty and morality
were as identical for them as truth and beauty were to Keats
at a later date.
1 For the rest, a close comparison between Milton's Latin poems and Gray's would
show how much Gray owed to Milton in this department alone.
3 The vice-chancellor's servant.


## p. 123 (#149) ############################################

An Elegy in a Country Churchyard 123
In 1745, Gray and Walpole were reconciled. Of this consum-
mation, Gray wrote a satirical account to Wharton, in which his
contempt for Ashton was clearly enough expressed. After this
strange pronouncement, the irony of fate brought it about that
Gray's next poetic effort was his Ode on the Death of a Favourite
Cat, which has been discussed with a solemnity worthy of an
epic. Walpole had two favourite cats; and has not told Gray
which of these was drowned. One of them was a tortoiseshell,
the other a tabby.
During the whole of the next four years, Gray seems to have
relapsed into his normal state of facile and amusing gossip and
criticism. He is 'a chiel taking notes,' but with no intention of
printing them : yet we also discover that he is a real power in the
society that he pretends to despise, using his influence to get
fellowships for his friends, including Mason; interesting himself
in the wild and reckless Christopher Smart, then a fellow of Pem-
broke, and deploring the loss of the veteran Middleton, with whose
views he was in sympathy, and whose house was the only one in
which he felt at his ease. At the same time, his studies were
remarkably various, and his curiosity about foreign, and especially
French, literature, intense, as is particularly illustrated by his
welcome of Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois, which forestalled some
of the best thoughts in the fragmentary Alliance of Education and
Government (1748). At length, 12 June 1750, he sends from Stoke
to Walpole ‘a thing with an end to it'-a merit that most of his
writings have wanted—and one whose beginning Walpole has seen
long ago? This is the famous Elegy, and Walpole appears to have
circulated it somewhat freely in manuscript, with the result that
the magazines got hold of it; and Gray, to protect himself, makes
Walpole send it to Dodsley for immediate printing. Between The
Magazine of Magazines and Dodsley, the Elegy, on its first publi-
cation, fared but badly : 'Nurse Dodsley,' Gray says, 'has given it
a pinch or two in its cradle that I doubt it will bear the marks of
as long as it lives ’; and, together, these publishers, licensed and
unlicensed, achieved some curious readings. The moping owl
complained of those who wandered near her 'sacred bow'r': the
young man went ‘frowning,' not ‘smiling' as in scorn : the rustic's
'harrow' oft the stubborn glebe had broke; and bis frail memorial
was decked with uncouth rhymes and shapeless "culture. ' And
the mangled poet writes, “I humbly purpose for the benefit of
1 Probably in 1745 or 1746. See Gray's Poems (Cambridge, 1898), p. 130. Mason's
statement that the Elegy was begun in 1742 is possibly true of the epitaph at the end.


## p. 124 (#150) ############################################

I 24
Gray
Mr Dodsley and his matrons, that take awake for a verb, that
they should read asleep, and all will be right? '
In contrast with this incuria, so far as the public is concerned,
was the pains which he took, as evidenced by the MS preserved at
the lodge at Pembroke college, to set down what he did write
beyond the possibility of mistake.
The quatrain of ten syllables in which the Elegy was written
had been used before, but never, perhaps, with conspicuous success,
except in Dryden's Annus Mirabilis. In Gray's hands, it acquired
a new beauty, and a music of its own. It does not appear that
either the form or the diction of the poem struck the general
reader as novel. The prevalent taste was for a sort of gentle
melancholy and the mild and tranquil surroundings which minister
to the reflective spirit. There is a little truth under the gross
exaggeration with which the poet declared that he would have
been just as successful if he had written in the prose of Hervey's
Meditations among the tombs. Certain it is that Young's Night
Thoughts, completed five years before the Elegy, was, for the time
being, almost as popular. In Young's work, the sentiment is every-
thing; hence, perhaps, its vogue on the continent, where discrimi-
nating judgments on our literature were few and far between.
The Elegy seems to us simple in expression, and by no means
abstruse, and we have said that there was in it nothing that struck
even Gray's contemporaries as revolutionary. Perhaps it was
Johnson who first scented the battle from afar. He parodied, in a
version of a chorus of Medea, the style, as he conceived it, of the
Elegy, in which adjectives follow their substantives, old words are
revived, epithets are doubled and hyphenated, while subject and
object are inverted. Contrasted with this was Johnson's own
serious rendering of the same passage, in which the language was
the current language of the day, with scarcely a word in it that
was distinctly poetical? The eccentricities which he noted still
remain pitfalls. In the line ‘And all the air a solemn stillness
holds,' stillness, in spite of commentators, is the nominative, and we
almost invariably quote, with so careful a reader as Conington,
Await alike the inevitable hour,
although Gray wrote ‘Awaits,' and 'hour' is subject not object.
(The thought is that of Horace, 'One night awaits us all'; we should
a
1
the voice of Nature cries
Awake, and faithful to her wonted fires. '
(As if awake' were an imperative. )
2 Cf. Gray to West, April 1742, quoted supra.


## p. 125 (#151) ############################################

Characteristics of the Elegy 125
be less absorbed in our ambitions if we kept death in mind. )
Again, Gray wrote “The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,'
where not only is the plural suggestive of a line of cattle, but
some of these are pictured as returning from the pasture and others
from the plough. Once more, he wrote
The paths of glory lead but to the grave
meaning that whatever the path chosen, the terminus is the same
The Elegy may be looked upon as the climax of a whole series
of poems, dating from 1745, which had evening for their theme.
In his 17th year, Thomas Warton, in his Pleasures of Melancholy,
had all the accessories of the scene which Gray describes; there is
a 'sacred silence,' as in a rejected but very beautiful stanza of the
Elegy there was a 'sacred calm'; there is the owl,' and the 'ivy'
that 'with mantle green Invests some wasted tower. ' But the
young poet, in his character of devotee of melancholy, takes us
too far, when, with that gruesome enjoyment of horrors which is
the prerogative of youth, he leads us at midnight to the 'hollow
charnel' to 'watch the flame of taper dim shedding a livid glare. '
We are at once conscious of the artificial and ambitious character
of the effort, precocious as an essay in literature, but without
genuine feeling, without the correspondence between man and
nature, which alone can create a mood. And it was the power to
create a mood which was the distinctive merit of the best poems of
this class and at this date.
Joseph Warton, with the same environment, and, still more,
Collins, in his magical Ode to Evening', achieved this success.
Contrast these with the conventional beings of The Seasons, and
we become aware that we are nearing an epoch where description
is subordinated to the real emotions of humanity, and the country
bumpkin no longer chases the rainbow, or ‘unfolds,' with Akenside,
'the form of beauty smiling at his heart'
The Elegy in its MS forms brings another noteworthy fact into
prominence. These show how pitilessly the poet excised every
stanza which did not minister to the congruity of his masterpiece.
We feel for instance that Wordsworth, apt to believe that his most
tri ial fancies were inspirations, would never have parted, for any
considerations of structure, with such lines as
6
1 The true readings were all recognised and translated by the late H. A. 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.