GRAY.
In Collins we have seen Nature described with a perfect grace of language and a penetrating of the forms and colors of things with human sentiment, that far outwent the minute and faithful descriptions of Thomson. This same movement was maintained, I cannot say advanced, by Gray. That he had a fine feeling for Nature is apparent in his letters, which show more minute observation and greater descriptive power than his poetry. In these the beautiful scenery around the Westmoreland Lakes finds the earliest notice.
In dealing with scenery, as with other things, Nature without Art, and Art without Nature, are alike inadequate. To hit the balance is no easy task. To let in Nature fully upon the heart, by means of an art which is colorless and unperceived—this English poetry was struggling toward, and Gray helped it forward, though he himself only attained partial success. Often the art is too apparent; a false classicism is sometimes thrust in between the reader and the fresh outer world. Wordsworth has laid hold of a sonnet of Gray’s as a text to preach against false poetic diction. And yet Gray, notwithstanding his often too elaborate diction, deserves better of lovers of English poetry than to have his single sonnet thus gibbeted, merely because, instead of saying the sun rises, it makes
“Reddening Phœbus lift his golden fire.”
In the ode on Spring, it is “the rosy-bosomed hours, fair Venus’ train,” which bring spring in. Venus is thrust between you and the advent of spring, much as Adversity is made “the daughter of Jove.” For the nightingale we have “the Attic warbler,” as in another ode, for the yellow corn-fields we have “Ceres’ golden reign.” It is needless to say how abhorrent this sort of stuff is to the modern feeling about Nature. And yet, notwithstanding these blemishes, Gray did help forward the movement to a more perfect and adequate style, in which Nature should come direct to the heart, through a perfectly transparent medium of art. When he is at his best, as in the Elegy, Nature and human feeling so perfectly combine that the mind finds in all the images satisfaction and relief. There is in the Elegy no image from Greece or Rome, no intrusive heathen deity, to jar upon the feeling. From the common English landscape alone is drawn all that is needed to minister to the quiet but deep pathos of the whole.
The line of poets who carried on the description of Nature during the last century, Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper, much as they differ, have this in common. Their style, though each had his own, was in all formed by a more or less intimate study of the classic poets. And they regarded Nature, all more or less, in a meditative moralizing way. They were all thoughtful, cultivated men, with convictions and sentiments of their own—sentiments mainly of a grave cast,—they saw Nature through the light of these sentiments, and sought out those scenes and images in Nature which suited their habitual mood. None of them are born children of Nature, knowing her face before they could read or write. They were lovers of books before they became lovers of the country. Hence there is in them no rapture in the presence of Nature. For that we shall have to look elsewhere than to those scholarly gentlemen.