FOOTNOTES:
[6] Hume's biographer, Mr. Hill Burton, gives some other verses attributed to Hume; but the impartial critic must admit that they are of inferior merit.
GRAY AND HIS SCHOOL
A remark is every now and then made about Gray by somebody who has just been reading his charming letters. Gray, it is announced, was one of the first prophets of the true faith, or, as others call it, the modern superstition, of which mountains are the temples and Alpine clubs form the congregations. Their creed may be compressed into the single article that a love of mountains is the first of the cardinal virtues. To that doctrine, with some slight reservations, I yield a very hearty assent and consent; and I am glad to reckon Gray amongst its sound adherents. A mountainous country alone, he says, can furnish truly picturesque scenery. His early enthusiasm for the Chartreuse, his admiration in later years of the Vale of Keswick and the Pass of Killiecrankie, are symptoms of an orthodoxy creditable, because rarer in his time than our own. But, though Gray shared the sentiment which was then growing up, it would be absurd to attribute to him any influence in its propagation. His descriptive letters are admirable, and show that he had a true eye for scenery; but they were not published till after his death, and certainly his 'Life and Writings,' clipped and docked by the precise Mason, was not the kind of book to generate a new enthusiasm. The real glory of revealing to mankind the new pleasure must be given—so far as it can be given to any individual writers—to men like Rousseau, whose passionate rhetoric made the love of nature a popular watchword, and Saussure, who first showed a thorough appreciation of the glories of the Alps. But in England, and not in England alone, even Rousseau was, in this respect, eclipsed by Ossian. The general estimate of those singular poems, considered as descriptive of a mountainous region, coincides, I imagine, with that of Wordsworth. The mountains of Ossian are mere daubs, vague abstractions of mist and gloom, gigantesque unrealities which speak of anything but first-hand impressions of actual scenery. You may read through Ossian—if you can read through it at all—without gaining any more distinct impressions of Highland scenery than you would have received in the Highlands themselves any time since last November. But the extraordinary influence of Ossian upon the minds of MacPherson's contemporaries is a matter of history. When Goethe went to Switzerland, he evidently considered it the correct thing to have passages from Ossian at his fingers' ends for application to the Alps; it was the mountaineer's text-book, to be quoted in Switzerland as a later generation quoted Byron or the present the writings of Mr. Ruskin. Gray was one of the earliest enthusiasts, and, though he had a critical qualm or two, was apparently more moved by the new poems than by any literary event of his time. He is 'extasié with their infinite beauty,' makes 'a thousand inquiries' about their authenticity, and in one letter declares himself to be 'cruelly disappointed' with the 'Nouvelle Héloïse,' and able to admire nothing but Fingal. He studies Croma (who now knows Croma even by name?), and picks out the finest phrase in it as though he were criticising a book of the 'Iliad.'
The Ossian fever was symptomatic of a widely-spread sentiment or fashion, due to causes far more general than the influence of any individual. It would be easy enough to show that worshippers of the picturesque had discovered the chief beauties of England before Gray wrote his letters. The tourist was already abroad. When Gray visited Gordale Scar, in Craven, he already found landscape-painters settled at the neighbouring inn and preparing views for the engraver. The reader of that maddest of books, 'John Buncle,' may remember that the hero contrives at one place to emerge out of a mysterious cavern in the mountains of Westmoreland. He observes on the occasion that the Vale of Keswick is considered to offer the finest views in England, and that they were, in truth, finer than even the Rev. Dr. Dalton had been able to make them appear in his descriptive poem. Yet Buncle thinks that Keswick is surpassed by the 'shaded fells' in the neighbourhood (apparently) of Ambleside, and that the cascades there are superior to 'dread Lodore.' The 'Rev. Dr. Dalton' appears to have published his poem—a poem, I am sorry to say, unfamiliar to me—in 1755, some years before Gray's visit. But it is needless to enlarge upon this point. It is clear enough, from many symptoms, that the love of picturesque scenery was becoming fashionable in the middle of the century, and that Gray, as a man of taste, was amongst the first to feel the impulse.
The whole matter is, perhaps, of less importance than is sometimes attached to it. There is, after all, a good deal in Macaulay's common-sense explanation of the phenomenon—that a love of mountain scenery means simply the formation of good roads and comfortable inns in mountain districts. But Gray's taste in this respect is at least significant as to Gray's own position. His contempt for Rousseau and his love of Ossian are inversions of the judgment of later times; for no one would now deny the power of Rousseau, or find much pleasure—unless possessed by some antiquarian or patriotic mania—in the epics of the mythical bard. And yet we can see that Gray represents a vein of sentiment allied to some modern modes of thought, and generally regarded as antipathetic to the spirit of his own time. With all his popularity, he appears to be an isolated phenomenon. Everybody knows his poetry by heart. The 'Elegy' has so worked itself into the popular imagination that it includes more familiar phrases than almost any poem of equal length in the language. The 'Bard' and the lines upon Eton have become so hackneyed as perhaps to acquire a certain tinge of banality. If few English poets have written so little, none certainly has written so little that has fallen into oblivion. And yet, though Gray is in this sense the most popular poet of his day, though he is more read than Young, or Thomson, or Collins, or Goldsmith, or many others, we do not think of him as stamping his image upon the time. He stands apart. His poetry is taken to be like an oasis in the desert; it is a sudden spring of perennial freshness gushing out in the midst of that dreary didactic, argumentative, monotonous current of versification poured forth by the imitators of Pope. He never used Pope's measure for serious purposes, except in one fine fragment—the least read of his poems—and is, as it were, an outsider in the literature of the time. And yet, again, it must be remembered that Wordsworth picked him out for special condemnation as the worst offender in the use of conventional language. He definitely accepted and has enlarged upon the theory which Wordsworth attempted to upset—that poetry should use a language differing from that of common life. Indeed, he gets upon stilts as deliberately and consciously as any poet of the day, and is nervously sensitive to the risk of a lapse into the vernacular.
It would be easy to give a paradoxical turn to these remarks, and to show how Gray was at once the opponent and the representative of the poetical creed of his day. The puzzle, such as it is, arises from our habit of absurdly exaggerating the difference between ourselves and our grandfathers, and speaking as if everybody was 'artificial' in the reign of Pope and 'natural' in the reign of Wordsworth. No two words in the language cover more confusion of thought than those famous phrases. It would be easy enough to twist them so as to prove that Wordsworth was more artificial than Pope, quite as clearly as the opposite is so often demonstrated; and, for my part, I am fully convinced that there was just as much human nature and as little affectation in the days of Queen Anne as in those of Victoria or in those of Elizabeth. The contrast usually drawn has, I doubt not, an important meaning; but it is so obscured by the vague talk about 'nature' that I never see the word without instinctively putting myself on my guard against some bit of slipshod criticism or sham philosophy. I heartily wish that the word could be turned out of the language. Though that, alas! is impossible, we may try to avoid the misleading associations which it continually introduces. Gray, at any rate, was a human being who liked looking at trees and hills as much as anybody does now; and he certainly succeeded in writing some verses which concentrate into a couple of pages a depth of genuine emotion such as would furnish whole volumes of modern verbiage. It is another question whether he ought to be called a natural or an artificial poet.
In the first place, however, it may be observed that Gray was not so solitary a phenomenon as we might at first sight fancy. He never entered the circle of literary men who lived in London, and who, in the later part of his career, acknowledged Johnson as their dictator. He shrank from the roughness of the 'great bear,' who, in his turn, seems to have despised Gray as a literary fop—a finikin and affected spinner of verses, who tried to be grand and succeeded only in being pompous and obscure. Gray, in his quiet cloister, led the life of a recluse and followed his own fancies with little direct reference to the public opinion of accepted dispensers of literary reputation. But no man is really independent of his time, and Gray had his allies and his followers. Amongst them were men still worth remembering, though all of them, like Gray himself, stood more or less apart from the main current of literature. In one of his early letters he speaks of the Odes just published by two young authors, who 'both deserve to last some years, but will not.' Collins, the first of these, has lasted, though destined to an early death, and scarcely more voluminous than Gray himself. Collins, like Gray, was sensitive and solitary, though in a still more morbid degree. It is recorded of him—and I know of no similar case except that of Landor in regard to 'Pericles and Aspasia'—that he repaid his publisher for the loss incurred by his Odes. It is, perhaps, not irrelevant to add that his mind soon gave symptoms of approaching imbecility. The other young poet was Joseph Warton, still remembered for his essay on Pope, the elder brother of Thomas Warton, the historian of poetry; and the two brothers were the heads of what was once called the school of the Wartons. The 'school' was not a very large one, and the poems of both the brothers—though Thomas is held to be better than Joseph—are not amongst the things that have lasted. The influence of the Wartons, however, was very conspicuous in reviving the study of the earlier models of our literature. Joseph tried to persuade the world—unsuccessfully at the time—that Pope was inferior to Spenser; and his brother's history is a considerable landmark in that revival of interest in poetical antiquities indicated by such works as Percy's 'Reliques,' or by the forgeries of Chatterton and MacPherson. I might have quoted Joseph Warton's earliest poem (1740) to show that what is called the love of nature was by no means a novelty when Gray went to the lakes. It is enough to give the title—'The Enthusiast; or, The Lover of Nature'—and to observe that Warton wishes to seat himself on a 'pinetopt precipice, abrupt and shaggy,' and to listen to 'Boreas' blasts' and the sounds of 'hollow winds and everbeating waves,' in the most approved romantic fashion. Both brothers, too, have a taste for the 'moss-grown spire and crumbling arch;' and Tom's best sonnet—one much admired by Lamb—is written on a blank leaf of Dugdale's 'Monasticon' and expresses his delight in surveying the records of 'cloister'd piety'—
Nor rough, nor barren, are the winding ways
Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers.
In another he wishes to know whether 'his pipe can aught essay to reach the ear' of that 'divine bard' Mr. Gray, for whose 'Elegy' and 'Bard' he expresses the warmest admiration.
The similarity of taste shown by the Wartons and Gray does not appear to have led to personal intercourse. They were divided by that broad, though to the outward world invisible, gulf which still separates Oxford from Cambridge. Gray's most enthusiastic disciple, Mason, had come under his influence at Cambridge, and his first performance led to a passage of arms with Tom Warton. Mason attacked the Jacobitism of Oxford in a poem called 'Isis,' stating, of course in a purely poetical sense, that Oxford men held 'infernal orgies' to the foes of freedom. Warton replied in verses which Mason admitted to be better than his own. Modesty, however, was not Mason's strong point. Years afterwards, when riding into Oxford, he remarked that he was glad that it was already dark; otherwise, as he intimated, a mob would naturally have gathered to avenge his insults to the University. Mason's odes and choruses are so obviously an echo of Gray's that one is rather surprised to find Gray praising them in language which implies that he was not aware of his responsibility. Mason himself was cordially proud of the relationship, though he took amazing liberties as an editor of his master's letters, and occasionally gave himself airs of equality, or even patronage, which strike one as a little absurd. A more distant, but perhaps still more enthusiastic, admirer of Gray was Beattie, whose early odes (which he judiciously endeavoured to suppress) are feebler echoes than Mason's of the same model, and who reverently submitted his best poem, the 'Minstrel,' to Gray's correction and, more wonderful to relate, accepted one or two of his critic's emendations. And, finally, we must include in the school of Gray the man whose levity and coxcombry has blinded many readers to his very remarkable ability. Horace Walpole, who quarrelled with Gray as with many others of his friends, for a time, and who, unlike Gray, was thoroughly immersed in the central current of London society, was no poet, but was in thorough sympathy with Gray's antiquarian tastes, and by the 'Castle of Otranto' and the sham Gothic of Strawberry Hill did more than profounder antiquarians to restore an interest in mediæval art.
The names thus brought together, to which others might of course be added, give a sufficient indication of the general tendencies of what I have called the school of Gray. They did not form a clique, like most schools, for they lived in remote regions, and most of them showed the touchiness and even sensibility which is rubbed off by the friction of large societies. Tom Warton, who was certainly sociable enough in a fashion, was buried at Oxford for nearly fifty years. Gray was so secluded in his Cambridge cloister that the young men made a rush to see him in later years—leaving their dinners, it is said; but that is scarcely credible—when he appeared by some rare accident in the college walks. Beattie stuck with equal persistence to his college in Aberdeen, and could not be induced even to take a professorship in Edinburgh, being afraid, apparently, that his 'Essay on Truth' would expose him to unpleasantness from the more metropolitan circle which admired and respected his antagonist Hume. The alarm, indeed, was more reasonable than Mason's alarm about Oxford, for the essay was not only vehement in its abuse, but had succeeded in making a great stir in the world. Mason, again, fixed himself in his Yorkshire living and his canonry, emerging only at intervals to pay a few visits to his aristocratic friends. And even Walpole made a kind of sham cloister at Strawberry Hill, and, though a man of the world, a gossip, and a politician, was as irritable and uneasy a companion as the most retired of hermits. The great movements of thought generally spread, it is supposed, from the metropolitan centres, where intellectual activity is stimulated by the constant collision of eager and excited minds. But a new taste may make its appearance in the corners to which sensitive men retire from the uncongenial atmosphere of the world, and cultivate at their ease what is first an individual crotchet and afterwards develops into a fashionable amusement.
Gray, beyond all doubt, was the one man of genius of the school after the early death of Collins, for it would be strained to give a higher name than talent even to Horace Walpole's remarkable intellectual vivacity. Tom Warton's biographer (it is impossible to speak of Thomas) has drawn an elaborate parallel, in the proper historical fashion, between his hero and Gray. They were both dons, professors, students of antiquities, lovers of nature and of the romantic, composers of odes, and so forth. The parallel contains a good deal of truth, but it is consistent with an amusing contrast. Tom Warton was the thoroughly jovial, undignified don of the period. His poetry—even if his 'Triumph of Isis' be superior to Mason's 'Isis,' and his sonnets deserve some praise in a century barren of sonnets—is not generally refreshing; the poor man had to construct some of those fanciful pieces of verse which laureates in those days were bound to manufacture for the sovereign's birthday, and one cannot glance at them (nobody can read them) without profound sympathy. But his humorous verses have still a pleasant ring about them. There is a contagion in the enthusiasm with which he celebrates the virtues of Oxford ale. When he imagines himself discommuned for his indulgence, and unable even to get longer 'tick' at the pothouse, he daringly compares himself to Adam exiled from Paradise. In another poem we have the characteristic triumph of the steady don, who has stuck to a bachelor life, over the misguided victim to matrimony and a college living. Thus will the poor fellow lament as butchers' bills and school fees become heavier year by year:—
Why did I sell my college life
(He cries) for benefice and wife?
Return, ye days when endless pleasure
I found in reading or in leisure,
When calm around the common room
I puffed my daily pipe's perfume,
Rode for a stomach, and inspected
At annual bottlings corks selected,
And din'd untaxed, untroubled, under
The portrait of our pious founder!
These of course are youthful productions; but, if all tales be true, the tastes described did not die out. Once, it is said, Warton's presence was required on some grand public function. The Professor was not to be found till an ingenious person suggested that a drum and fife should be sent through the streets performing a jovial and Jacobite tune; and before long the sweet notes enticed Warton from a public-house, pipe in mouth and with rumpled bands, to be miserably deceived in his hopes of fun. More creditable, and apparently more authentic, anecdotes relate how he took part in the boyish pranks of his brother's pupils at Winchester, and once at least composed a copy of Latin verses for a youthful companion, and insisted upon taking the half-crown which had been offered as a reward for their excellence before the mild imposture was detected.
Most men grow tired of pipes and ale and the jolly bachelor life of common rooms soon after they have put on their master's hood. In the old days, before commissions and reform, when the Universities were more frequently regarded as a permanent retreat for men who could find a pipe a sufficient substitute for a wife, such jolly fellows as Warton formed a larger part of the college society. Most of them, however, were duller dogs than Tom Warton, who, with all his enjoyment of such heavy festivities, managed to write some laborious books. A proud, fastidious, and exquisitely sensitive man like Gray looked upon the whole scene with infinite contempt and scorn. It does not appear to be very clearly made out why he should have resided permanently at Cambridge, except for the sake of the libraries. Apparently he had resented some of Walpole's supercilious conduct, and possibly conduct which deserves a harsher name; for it is said that Walpole opened a letter addressed to Gray in the expectation of finding some disrespectful notice of himself. Anyhow, Gray erased Walpole from his list of friends, though he consented to resume acquaintanceship. He might previously have condescended to accept some of the appointments which Walpole could have easily procured during his father's ministry. But the father was turned out of office whilst the son was a discarded friend, and Gray, unwilling to enter the struggle of professional life, settled down at the University, though he always regarded it and its inhabitants with unqualified contempt. Gray—as his letters prove—had a very keen sense of humour, and when he chose could put a very sharp edge to his tongue. He let his fellow-residents know that he thought them fools—an opinion which they were perverse enough to resent. The poem with which he greeted Cambridge on first returning from his travels, headed a 'Hymn to Ignorance,' is a curious contrast to Warton's enthusiastic 'Triumph of Isis.'
Hail, horrors, hail! ye ever gloomy bowers,
Ye Gothic fanes and antiquated towers,
Where rushy Camus' slowly winding flood
Perpetual draws his humid train of mud—
is the opening of his uncomplimentary address to his alma mater. 'At the very time,' says Parr, in that style of delicious pomposity which smells of his immortal wig, 'in which Mr. Gray spoke so contemptuously of Cambridge, that very University abounded in men of erudition and science, with whom the first scholars would not have disdained to converse; and who shall convict me of exaggeration when I bring forward the names' of the immortal so-and-so? The names include, it is true, some which have still a claim upon our respect—Bentley, Waterland, and Conyers Middleton, for example—but the most eminent were just dead or dying when Gray came into residence, and dignified heads of houses, like Bentley and Waterland, were in a seventh heaven of dignity, quite inaccessible to the youthful poet. It does not now appear that it can ever have been a great privilege to live in the same town with 'Provost Snape,' 'Tunstall the public orator,' or 'Asheton of Jesus.' Gray knew something of Middleton (who died in 1750, when Gray was 34), and speaks of his house as the only one in Cambridge where it was easy to converse; and he takes care to add that even Middleton was only an 'old acquaintance,' which is but an indifferent likeness of a friend. He made a few intimacies—chiefly with younger men, like Mason, who soon ceased to be residents—but the bulk of the University was in his eyes contemptible; and, on the whole, contemporary evidence would lead to the conclusion that his opinion was not far wrong. Cambridge had possessed very eminent men in the days of Bentley, Newton, Waterland, Sherlock, and Middleton, and it has had very eminent men at a later period, but Gray was himself almost the only man in the middle of the eighteenth century whom anybody need care to remember now. At any rate, there was a large proportion of that ale-drinking, tobacco-smoking element amongst the jolly fellows of the combination room, whose society Warton might relish, but whom Gray regarded with supreme contempt. The fellow-commoners appear by his account to have exceeded in audacity the young gentlemen who lately exhibited their sense of playful humour by defacing certain statues at Oxford. The wits of an earlier day put poor Gray in fear of his life. He ordered a rope ladder, to be able to escape from his rooms in case they set the college on fire; and, if I remember the tradition rightly, they set a 'booby trap' for the poet, and, raising an alarm, induced him to descend his rope ladder into a water-butt. Anyhow, poor Gray was driven from Peterhouse to Pembroke, and there abstracted his mind from the academical noises by a course of study which, according to his admirers (but who shall answer for the admirers?), made him profoundly familiar with every branch of learning except mathematics. Meanwhile his appearance and manners were calculated to intensify the mutual dislike between himself and his rougher surroundings. His rooms were scrupulously neat, with mignonette in the windows and flowers elegantly planted in china vases; he spoke little in general society, and compiled biting epigrams or classical puns with a derisory application to his special associates. In short, in outward appearance he belonged to the class fop or petit-maître, mincing, precise, affected, and as little in harmony with the rowdy fellow-commoners as Hotspur's courtier with the rough soldiers on the battle-field.
The want of harmony between Gray and his surroundings goes far to explain his singular want of fertility. In fact, we may say—without any want of respect for a venerable institution—that Gray could hardly have found a more uncongenial residence. Cambridge boasts of its poets; and a University may well be proud which has had, amongst many others, such inmates as Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Gray, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Tennyson. If a sceptic chooses to ask what share the University can claim in stimulating the genius of those illustrious men, the answer might be difficult. But, in any case, no poet except Gray loved his University well enough to become a resident. If it were not for Gray, I should be inclined to guess that a poet don was a contradiction in terms. The reason is very obvious to any one who has enjoyed the latter title. It is simply that no atmosphere can be conceived more calculated to stimulate that excessive fastidiousness which all but extinguished Gray's productive faculties. He might wrap himself in simple contempt for the ale-drinking vanity of the don. He could, in the old college slang, 'sport his oak' and despise their railings, and even the shouts of 'Fire!' of the worthy fellow-commoners. But a poet requires some sympathy, and, if possible, some worshippers. The inner circle of Gray's intimates was naturally composed of men fastidious like himself, and all of them more or less critics by profession. The reflection would be forced upon his mind, whenever he thought of publishing, What will be thought of my poems by Provost Snape, and Mr. Public-Orator Tunstall, and Asheton of Jesus, and those other luminaries whom Dr. Parr commemorates? And undoubtedly their first thought would be to show their claim to literary excellence by picking holes in their friend's compositions. They would rejoice greatly when they could show that faculties sharpened by the detection of false quantities and slips of grammar in their pupils' Latin verses were equal to the discovery of solecisms and defective rhymes in the work of a living poet. Gray's extreme sensitiveness to all such quillets of criticism is marked in every poem he wrote. Had he been forced to fight his way in literature he would have learnt to swallow his scruples and take the chance in a free give-and-take struggle for fame. In a country living he might have forgotten his tormentors and have married a wife to secure at least one thoroughly appreciative and intelligent admirer. But to be shut up in a small scholastic clique, however little he might respect their individual merits, to have the chat of combination rooms ever in his ears, to be worried by bands of professional critics at every turn, was as though a singing bird should build over a wasp's nest. The 'Elegy' and the 'Odes' just struggled into existence, though much of them was written before he settled down as a resident; but Gray, like many another don of great abilities, finished but a minute fragment of the work of which he more or less contemplated the execution. The books contemplated but never carried out by men in his position would make a melancholy and extensive catalogue. The effect of these influences upon his work is palpable to every reader of Gray. No English poet has ever given more decisive proof that he shared that secret of clothing even an obvious thought in majestic and resounding language, which we naturally call Miltonic. Though he modestly asserts that he inherits
Nor the pride nor ample pinion
That the Theban eagle bear,
Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air,
yet we feel that none of his contemporaries—perhaps none of his successors—could have equalled, in dignity and richness of style, the noble passage in which that phrase occurs. And yet we must also feel that if his 'car,' as he says of Dryden's, is borne by 'coursers of ethereal race,' they are constantly checked before they can get into full career. He takes flight as if the azure deep were the natural home in which he could sail suspended like the eagle without perceptible effort. But the wings droop before they are well unfurled, and the magnificent strain ceases without giving the promised satisfaction. Even the 'Elegy' flags a little towards the end; the 'hoary-headed swain' becomes rather flat in his remarks, and the concluding epitaph has just a little too much twang of epigrammatic smartness. I sometimes agree, indeed, with Wolfe that it was a far greater achievement to write the 'Elegy' than to storm the heights of Abram, and then hold (though I also incline to a different opinion) that only a soldier, or author, or civilian of ultra-military enthusiasm could suppose that such a comparison involved condescension on the side of the general. Gray and his personal admirers seem to have been annoyed at the preference given to this above his other writings. It proved, so he argued, that the stupid public cared for the subject instead of the art; that they liked the 'Elegy' as they liked Blair's 'Grave,' and would have liked it as well if the same thoughts had been expressed in prose. Undoubtedly the public will always refuse to make that distinction between form and matter which seems so important to the critical mind. It is not, however, that they are unaffected by the artistic skill, but that they are affected unconsciously. The meditations of Blair, of Young, and of Hervey, equally popular in their day, have fallen into disrepute for want of the exquisite felicity of language which has preserved the 'Elegy.' It is a commonplace thing to say that the power of giving freshness to commonplace is amongst the highest proofs of poetical genius. One reason is, apparently, that it is so difficult to extract the pure and ennobling element from the coarser materials in which any obvious truth comes to be embedded. The difficulty of feeling rightly is as great as the difficulty of finding a worthy utterance of the feeling. Everybody may judge of the difficulty of Gray's task who will attend to what passes at a funeral. On such an occasion one is inclined to fancy, à priori, mourners will drop all affectation and speak poetically because they will speak from their hearts; but, as a matter of fact, there is no occasion on which there is generally such a lavish expenditure of painful and jarring sentiment, of vulgarity, affectation, and insincerity; and thus Gray's meditations stand out from other treatments of a similar theme not merely by the technical merits of the language, but by the admirable truth and purity of the underlying sentiment. The temptation to be too obtrusively moral and improving, to indulge in inappropriate epigram, in sham feeling, in idle sophistry, in strained and exaggerated gloominess, or even on occasion to heighten the effect by inappropriate humour, is so strong with most people that Gray's kindness and delicacy of feeling, qualities which were perceptible to the despised public, must be regarded as contributing quite as much to the success of the 'Elegy' as the technical merits of form, which, moreover, can hardly be separated from the merits of substance.
Indeed, when we come to the other odes which have similar qualities of mere style, we are at no loss to explain the difference of reception. The beautiful 'Ode upon Eton,' for example, comes into conflict with one's common-sense. We know too well that an Eton boy is not always the happy and immaculate creature of Gray's fancy; and one feels that the reflections upon his probable degradation imply a fit of temporary ill-humour in the poet, supervening, no doubt, upon a deeper vein of melancholy. The sentiment is too splenetic to be pleasing. The 'Bard,' which has, I suppose, been recited by schoolboys as frequently as the 'Elegy,' is a more curious indication of the peculiarities of Gray's method of composition. Mason gives an account of the remarkable transformation which it underwent. Gray's first intention, it appears, was that the bard should declare prophetically that poets should never be wanting 'to celebrate true virtue and valour in immortal strains, to expose vice and infamous pleasure, and boldly censure tyranny and oppression.' Undoubtedly this gives a meaning to the ode worthy of the beginning. The victim could not make a more effective retort. But, unluckily, when the bard had got into full swing, it struck him that the facts were not what his theory required. Shakespeare, says Mason, liked Falstaff in spite of his vices; Milton censured tyranny in prose; Dryden was a court parasite; Pope, a Tory; and Addison, 'though a Whig,' was a poor poet. The poor bard was therefore in the miserable position—one of the most wretched known to humanity—of a man who has begun a fine speech and does not see his way out of it. If Gray had taken a wider view of the poet's true function, he might still have found some embodiment for his thoughts; for English poetry, though it may not have been Whiggish, may certainly be regarded as the fullest expression of the more liberal and humanising conceptions of the world which have to struggle against the pedantry and narrowness of prosaic professional theorisers. But the bard required sound Whig precedent to point his moral, and it was not forthcoming. Consequently he has to take refuge in the very scanty consolation afforded by the bare reflection that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton would begin to write some time after the descendants of a Welshman had ascended the throne. One would not grudge any satisfaction to an unfortunate gentleman just about to commit suicide; but one must admit that he was easily pleased.
This want of any central idea converts the ode into a set of splendid fragments of verse, which scarcely hold together. Contemporary critics complained grievously of its 'obscurity'—a phrase which seems ill placed to us who know by experience what obscurity may really mean. An obscurity removable by a slight knowledge of English history and a recollection of the fact that Richard II. is said to have been starved instead of stabbed, as in Shakespeare, by Exton, is not of a very grievous kind; but the absence of any intelligible motive in the bard's final rupture is more serious. A poet surely might have acted upon the tant pis pour les faits theory, and proceeded to make his general assertion without waiting for confirmatory evidence. A writer who, like Gray, secretes his poetry line by line and spreads the process over years, seems to fall into the same faults which are more frequently due to haste. He pores over his conceptions so long that he becomes blind to defects obvious to a fresh observer, and rather misses his point, as he introduces minute alterations without noticing their effect on the context. One wonders how a man of Gray's exquisite perception could have introduced the lines—
And gorgeous dames, and statesmen old
In bearded majesty appear—
without seeing that we are only saved by a comma, and a comma easily neglected, from assuming that a Julia Pastrana would have been a usual phenomenon at the court of Elizabeth. Correction continued after the freshness of the impression has died away is apt to lead to such oversight.
The learned and fastidious don shows through the inspired 'bard' by many equally unmistakable indications. His editor, Mitford, collected a number of parallel passages which curiously indicate the degree in which his mind was saturated with recollections of poetical literature. It seems to be now considered as unjustifiable plagiarism for a poet to assimilate the phrases of his predecessors. We may, indeed, find abundant proofs of familiarity with Shakespeare in Shelley, and in more recent writers; but they are generally of the unconscious kind, and would otherwise be avoided as sins against originality. The poets of the last century, such as Goldsmith, and especially Pope, had no scruples in the matter. Their work did not profess to be a sudden and spontaneous inspiration. It was a slow elaboration, with which it was perfectly allowable to interweave any quantity of previously manufactured material so long as the juncture was not palpable. Gray's adaptations seem sometimes to make the whole tissue of his poetry. He owns to an unconscious appropriation from Green (author of the 'Spleen') of the main thought of his 'Ode to the Spring,' the comparison of men to ephemeral insects. But everywhere he is giving out phrases which he has previously assimilated. So in the very spirited translation from the Norse, 'Uprose the king of men with speed,' we have a verse from the 'Allegro'—'Right against the Eastern Gate'—cropping up naturally in quite a fresh connection. A single phrase seems to combine several semi-conscious recollections. The words in the 'Bard' 'dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart' come from Shakespeare, and the preceding 'dear as the light that visits those sad eyes' are perhaps from Otway. But it is useless to accumulate instances of so palpable a process.
It is only in character, again, that Gray should have clung to a peculiar dictum, as he would have insisted upon wearing his proper academical costume in a performance in the senate-house. He would no more have dropped into Wordsworth's vernacular than he would have smoked a pipe in one of Warton's pot-houses. Wordsworth considered this dignity to be unnatural pomposity; and undoubtedly the language is frequently conventional and 'unnatural,' and a stumbling-block of offence to the generation which gave up wigs. Equally annoying was Gray's immense delight in semi-allegorical figures. We have whole catalogues of abstract qualities scarcely personified. Ambition, bitter Scorn, grinning Infamy, Falsehood, hard Unkindness, keen Remorse, and moody Madness are all collected in one stanza not exceptional in style—beings which to us are almost as offensive as the muse whom he has pretty well ceased to invoke, though he still appeals to his lyre. This fashion reached its culminating point in the celebrated invocation, somewhere recorded by Coleridge, 'Inoculation, heavenly maid!' The personified qualities are a kind of fading 'survival'—ghosts of the old allegorical persons who put on a rather more solid clothing of flesh and blood with Spenser, and with Gray scarcely putting in a stronger claim to vitality than is implied in the use of capital letters. The 'muses' were nearly extinct, and in Pope's time the gods and goddesses had come to be regarded as so much 'machinery' invented by Homer to work his epic poetry. They were, in fact, passions and qualities in masquerade; and they therefore found it very easy, in the next generation, to drop even this thin disguise, and fit themselves for poetic usage, not by taking the name of a pagan deity, but by a simple typographical device.
What would Gray have done under more congenial circumstances if he produced such inimitable fragments under such adverse conditions—when his learning threatened to choke his fire, when his exquisite taste was pampered with excessive fastidiousness, and his temper and position alienated him from the most vigorous intellectual movement of the day? Perhaps—for the region of the might-have-been is boundless—he would have produced a masterpiece of the 'grand style,' worthy of a place by Milton's finest work; or, as possibly, he would have done nothing. It is an amusing exercise of the imagination to place our favourite authors in different countries and centuries, and to trace their hypothetical development a century earlier. I fancy that Gray would have buried himself still more profoundly from the political convulsions which attracted Milton's sterner and more active spirit; he would have studied Plotinus and Maimonides, and found sympathetic companionship amongst the Cambridge Platonists; he would have written some fragment of semi-mystical reverie, showing stupendous learning and philosophic breadth of thought, and possibly have composed some divine poems for the admiration of Henry More or John Norris. Warton, doubtless, would at any period have enjoyed Oxford ale, and joined in the jolly song, 'Back and side go bare, go bare;' he would have sometimes accompanied Burton on the rambles where he was thrown into fits of laughter by listening to the ribaldry of the bargees at the bridge end; he would still have been an antiquarian, and his note-book might have contributed quaint scraps of learning to the 'Anatomy of Melancholy.' Mason, anxious not to sink the man of the world in the country parson, would have racked his unfortunate brains for conceits worthy to be placed beside the most fashionable compositions of Donne or Cowley. Horace Walpole would, of course, have been at any time the prince of gossips; he would have kept most judiciously on the safe side in the most dangerous revolutions, and have come just near enough to collect the most interesting scandals in the courts of the Stuarts; but probably his lively intellect would have led him to drop in occasionally at the meetings of the infant Royal Society, and to have been one of the early cultivators of a taste for ancient marbles or a judicious patron of Vandyke. It is, perhaps, harder to assign the precise place in our own days, when the separate niches are not so distinctly marked off, and even the Universities scarcely afford a satisfactory refuge for the would-be recluse; but at least one may assume that each of them would have been æsthetic to his finger's ends, and have been thoroughly on a level with the last new developments of taste, whether for mediæval architecture or the art of the Renaissance, or that style which is called after Queen Anne. The snapdragon which Cardinal Newman saw from his windows of Trinity, and took for the emblem of his perpetual residence in the University, was probably flourishing when Warton's residence in the same college ceased; and Warton, in spite of that love of ale which is perhaps more prominent than it should be in our impressions of his character, would beyond all doubt have been a member of that school of which his successor was the greatest ornament, and which has given a new meaning to the old phrase High Church. It was amongst the Wartons and their friends that the word 'Gothic,' used by earlier writers as a simple term of abuse, came to have a more appreciative meaning; they were the originators of the so-called romanticism made popular by Scott, and which counts for so much in the Anglo-Catholic development.
The paradox, in short, with which I started comes simply to this: that Gray and his friends were eclectics. This taste for the 'Gothic' was a kind of happy thought, a lucky discovery made by men feeling round rather vaguely for a new mode of literary and artistic enjoyment—not quite content with the exceedingly comfortable and respectable century in which they lived, and yet not clearly seeing how to improve upon it. Horace Walpole, the shrewdest of all and the least of a recluse, was, on one side, a thorough man of his time; he was a freethinker of the Voltaire type; believed—so far as he believed in anything—in Pope's poetry and Locke's philosophy; he sneered at enthusiasm and sentimentalism, and at any revolutionary movement calculated directly or indirectly to deprive Horace Walpoles of comfortable sinecures. But he had a taste, and money to spend upon it; so he made Gothic chapels and halls of lath and plaster, played with antiquarian researches, and wrote a romance which was made of literary lath and plaster to match the materials of Strawberry Hill. Gray's dilettanteism was far more serious and systematic, but it necessarily took the same direction. He did more than dabble in antiquarianism: he read with insatiable appetite; he became, I suppose, profound in Gothic architecture, so far as isolated efforts could make a man profound. But his attempts at putting his theory in practice were clearly of the Strawberry Hill kind. He instructs his friend to buy bits of plain coloured glass, and arrange the tops of his windows in a 'mosaic of his own fancy,' only observing that, to give them a 'Gothic aspect,' it will be enough to turn the fragments 'corner-ways.' Then he manages to procure 'stucco paper' at threepence a yard, which is 'rather pretty and nearly Gothic,' and apparently represents Gothic arches and niches. It will produce an awkward effect, as he admits, where the pattern has to be turned the wrong way; and, indeed, he is awake to the inadequacy of the crude revival. Painters, as he says, make objects which are more like goose pies than cathedrals. The new toy was still in a very imperfect and rickety state.
One of the quaintest illustrations of the Gothicism of that time is in Mason's 'English Garden.' It is a weary bit of didactic poetry, and a most amiable and lenient critic, Hartley Coleridge, pronounces it to be the dullest poem which he ever attempted to read. It is hard, says Coleridge, to suppose it 'wholly destitute of beauties, especially' (why especially?) 'as it consists of 2,423 lines of blank verse;' but he does not seem to have discovered any. Had the critic persevered to the end of the fourth book, he might at least have been rewarded by a smile at the author. Mason tries to enliven his performance by a story about a pattern man of taste and virtue, named Alcander, whose tragical sorrows are soothed by religion and landscape gardening. It is enough to notice his performances in the last capacity. Alcander, as his name suggests, is an English country gentleman, possessed of an ancient mansion,
Coeval with those rich cathedral fanes
(Gothic ill-named) whose harmony results
From disunited parts.
Alcander shows his taste by a restoration in the manner of the time. Let every structure, he proclaims,
needful for a farm
Arise in castle-semblance; the huge barn
Shall with a mock portcullis awe the gate
Where Ceres entering, o'er the flail-proof floor
In golden triumph rides; some tower rotund
Shall to the pigeons and their callow young
Safe roost afford, and every buttress broad
Whose proud projection seems a mass of stone
Give space to stall the heifer and the steed.
So shall each part, though turned to rural use,
Deceive the eye with those bold feudal farms
Which fancy loves to gaze on.
He afterwards adopts a similar method
To hide the structure rude where Winter pounds
In conic pit his congelations hoar;
concealing his ice-house and dairy behind a modern 'time-struck abbey.' Alcander thus displays those admirable qualities of head and heart which enable him to bear with resignation the melancholy death of a beloved object. He finally consoles himself by placing her monument in a sham hermitage. The Gothic revival of a century ago sounds absurd enough to our ears, and it must be confessed that our foolery is more systematic and scientific, as it is probably more destructive. Alcander, happily, did not 'restore' his castle, though he surrounded it with those queer farm buildings and brand-new ruins. Pope, it seems, had set the fashion of landscape gardening on the little plot of ground which, as Horace Walpole tells us, he had 'twisted and twirled, and rhymed and harmonised, till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns, opening and opening beyond one another, the whole surrounded with thick, impenetrable woods.' Mason, Spence, Shenstone, and other persons of literary note helped, according to their opportunities, to promote the revolt against the old-fashioned style in which, as Mason puts it, Folly combined with Wealth
To plan that formal, dull, disjointed scene
Which once was call'd a garden.
He denounces the stiff canals, the clipped yews and holly hedges, and the geometric patterns of 'tonsile box' with the zeal of a reformer. The theory seems to be that a garden ought to look as if it were not a garden. The change of taste, however, was doubtless symptomatic of the growing 'love of nature,' though I do not presume to discuss its merits. It was a development parallel to the literary change implied in the renewed taste for old ballads, for archaic poetry, or what passed for such under the names of Ossian and Rowley, and for Elizabethan literature.
Such tastes, however significant of the advent of a literary revolution, did not imply any revolutionary purpose in their cultivators. If Gray loved Spenser, he was even more enthusiastic about Dryden, from whom he professed to have learnt the art of versification. Cowper tried to supersede Pope's Homer. Gray declared that nobody would ever translate Homer as well as Pope. Gray was as orthodox in his literary as in his philosophical profession of faith; and his most avowed disciple Mason was, on the whole, of the same persuasion. In Warton and Beattie there is clearly some anticipation of Scott's romanticism, but Mason's experiments were rather in the classical direction. His 'English Garden' was his most ponderous and unsuccessful performance. In some other efforts he showed a keenness of style, a causticity of satire, which induced the late Mr. Dilke to suggest him (not quite seriously, I fancy) as a possible candidate for the questionable honour of being the real Junius. It would be difficult indeed to imagine that Junius could by any possibility have been a country clergyman, living for the greatest part of the year at a distance from the political gossip of the day, however much interested in the spread of sound Whig principles. It is amusing to read the correspondence between Mason and his two friends Gray and Walpole, and to note how the respectful disciple, reverently receiving from his teachers little hints of criticism—laudatory, it is true, for the most part, but also dashed with tolerably sharp sarcasm—gradually develops into the rather dandified clergyman, anxious to show that the man of the world is not altogether sunk in the rustic parson; that he is no pedant, but a man of taste, and capable of tagging his remarks with bits of fashionable French, and even of occasionally repaying in kind his correspondent's affluence of the latest scandals. Mason's clerical gown did not sit very well upon him, though he seems to have been conscientious and independent and not without some genuine kindliness of nature. But he always gives one the impression of being out of place in his cassock. It would not be easy to find a more quaint expression of the unprofessional turn of mind in a clergyman than a defence of Christianity in one of his sermons. 'If,' he says, 'the British Constitution will not enable a man to dispense with religion, we must admit that nothing can;' and he proceeds to establish a proposition which certainly would not be considered as requiring defence in a modern pulpit—that even the Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights did not supersede the Gospels. His claims to be a conceivable Junius seem to depend chiefly upon the clever squib called 'Heroic Epistle' which is an amusing burlesque of the architectural crotchets of Sir W. Chambers, and implies a want of reverence for George III. Mason took immense pains to conceal the authorship of this and some less successful sequels, and so far followed the steps of Junius; but it is impossible to fancy that the great pamphleteer would have made such a cackling over such a trifle, or have been so sensitive to the praises of his confidant Walpole.
Gray speaks of Mason's 'insatiable reforming mouth,' and remarks that he has no passions 'except a little malice and revenge.' There was a good deal of acidity in his nature, developed, perhaps, by his uncongenial position and by domestic trouble, if he had not the rancour and force which make a great satirist; but in earlier days Gray found in him a simple-minded and enthusiastic disciple, who read little or nothing, but wrote abundance, 'and that with a design to make a fortune by it.' His two poems 'Elfrida' and 'Caractacus' were fruits of this early fluency. They have been criticised elaborately by Hartley Coleridge, but belong, I think, to that kind and class of literature upon which serious criticism would be rather wasted. It is not that they are bad; rather they suggest an uncomfortable reflection upon the quantity of real talent, as well as conscientious effort, which may be thrown away in producing work unmistakably second-rate and void of genuine vitality. We can better estimate the extreme rarity and value of genius by measuring it against the achievements of remarkable cleverness. Hastily read, or read whilst still possessing the gloss of novelty, Mason's work might look like Gray's. Here, for example, is the first stanza of a chorus from 'Caractacus,' which Gray not only praised to Mason, but cites in one of his notes as a proof that sublime odes could still be written in English:—
Hark! heard ye not yon footstep dread,
That shook the earth with thund'ring tread?
'Twas Death. In haste
The warrior past;
High towered his helmed head:
I mark'd his mail; I mark'd his shield;
I 'spyed the sparkling of his spear;
I saw his giant arm the falchion wield;
Wide wav'd the lickering blade, and fir'd the angry air.[7]
Longer quotation might be tiresome; but Mason continues to the end with all the manner of a genuine poet, and doubtless cheated himself as well as Gray into the impression that he had the real stuff in him. The effect is respectable at a little distance, though the work will not bear a moment's inspection.
The general design of the plays, however, is more to my purpose than the merits of their execution. At that time the worship of Shakespeare, though sometimes extravagant, had not become a mere slavish idolatry. It was still permitted to see spots in the sun, and not yet fashionable for poets to try to revive the Elizabethan style, though Mason made one feeble attempt at a play 'on the English model.' Gray, with his catholic taste, admired Racine, and began a play in imitation of 'Britannicus;' and the faithful Mason decided that a 'medium between the French and English taste would be preferable to either.' He had also a fancy that the ancient chorus might be restored, so as at once to give greater opportunities for poetical descriptions and the graceful introduction of 'moral reflections.' Though Gray ridiculed his arguments pretty sharply, he stuck to his plan as obstinately as Sam Weller when insisting, in defiance of paternal remonstrances, upon a poetical conclusion to his love-letter. Accordingly, in 'Elfrida' and 'Caractacus,' certain bands of British virgins and druids talk the twaddle and burst into the lyrical irrelevance which are the functions of a chorus. Mason had abundant self-complacency; and though his plays had only a moderate success, owing to the bad taste of the public, he felt that his ingenious eclecticisms combined the various merits of Sophocles, Racine, and Shakespeare. Unsuccessful authors may well invoke blessings on the man who invented conceit. But Mason, after all, writes like a cultivated scholar, with sensibility to poetic excellence, though without real poetic power; and if we laugh at his taste, our grandchildren will probably laugh with equal self-satisfaction at ours.
In truth, this fashion of writing plays not intended, or scarcely intended, for the stage, of which Mason was one of the first originators, is characteristic of the whole school. I will not argue a large question here, or deny that something may be said for the practice; and yet it seems as though a play which is not to be acted has a more than superficial resemblance to the feudal castles which were not meant for defence, and the abbeys in which there were to be no monks. The form is dictated by conditions which are no longer present to the writer's mind, and are therefore apt to be a mere encumbrance. If you build a portcullis to let in cows, not to exclude marauders, it is apt to become rather ludicrously unreal. If you know that your play is to be read and not to be seen, the whole dramatic arrangement is on the way to become a mere sham. It does not grow out of the poetical conception, but is fitted on to it in compliance with a fashion. Why bother yourself to make the actors tell a story, when it is simpler and easier to tell it yourself?
In this sense literature grows more 'artificial' as it is encumbered with more dead forms having no significance except as remnants of extinct conditions. There was a time, we are told, when art was perfectly spontaneous, and the critic was happily not existent. People sang or recited by instinct, without asking how or why. That golden age—if it ever existed since men were monkeys—had long passed away even in the beginning of modern literature. Spenser and Shakespeare, for example, probably thought about the principles of their art almost as much as their modern critics, and were very consciously trying experiments and devising new forms of expression. But as the noxious animal called a critic becomes rampant, we have a different phase, which seems to be illustrated by the case of Gray and his fellows. The distinction seems to be that the critic, as he grows more conceited, not only lays down rules for the guidance of the imaginative impulse, but begins to think himself capable of producing any given effect at pleasure. He has got to the bottom of the whole affair, and can tell you what is the chemical composition of a 'Hamlet,' or an 'Agamemnon,' or an 'Iliad,' and can therefore teach you what materials to select and how to combine them. He can give you a recipe for an epic poem, or for communicating the proper mediæval or classical flavour to your performance. If he is as clever a man as Mason, he will perhaps go a little further, and show not only how to extract the peculiar essence of a Racine or a Shakespeare, but how to mix the result so as to produce something better than either. In one respect he has clearly made an advance. He is beginning to appreciate the necessity of an historical study of different literary forms. In such quaint, old-fashioned criticism as Addison applied to Milton, where Longinus, and Aristotle, and the learned M. Bossu are invoked as final authorities about the 'fable' and the 'machinery' and the character of the hero, we perceive that the critic is still persuaded that there is one absolutely correct and infallible code of art, applicable in all times and places. Milton and Homer are regarded as belonging to the same class, and are to be judged by the same laws. The later critic, taking a wider survey and rummaging amongst the antiquarian stores to discover any pearls hidden under Dryasdust's accumulations, began to see that there were many different types of art, each of which possessed its own charm and characteristic excellence. He scarcely saw at first that each form was also the outgrowth of a particular set of conditions, and could not be produced independently of them. It seemed easy to restore anything that struck him as picturesque or graceful. He could give the old ballad air by an arbitrary combination of bad spelling, or make his ruined abbey out of a scene-painter's materials.
This early race of critics had no direct hostility to their own century or to its early classicalism. They were not iconoclasts, but only adding some new idols to the old pantheon. They aimed at being men of finer and more catholic taste than their neighbours, but wished to extend the borders of orthodoxy, to repeal the anathema which had been pronounced upon the 'Gothicism' and barbarism of our old authors, not to anathematise the existing order in revenge. They were quiet, orthodox, and substantially conservative, even if nominally Whiggish, and feared or detested revolutionary impulses of any kind from the bottom of their hearts. Such men as Mason or the Wartons tried literary experiments which are now of no great value, because they represent at best the attempts of a superficial connoisseur of talent. They did something by attracting interest to researches which produced greater results when carried on by more thorough workers in the same mine. But it is also true that they were amongst the first to fall into the blunders, since repeated on a more gigantic scale by successors, who have tried more systematically to galvanise extinct forms into a semblance of vitality.
Gray, the man of real poetic genius, was also, if his friends judged rightly, the most profound antiquarian and the most deeply read of the whole school. Many of his critics have lamented the time which he spent in making elaborate tables of chronology, in studying genealogy, and annotating Dugdale's 'Monasticon,' or Grosier's 'History of the Chinese Dynasties,' or the 'Botany' of Linnæus, when he might have been writing more elegies. There is so much to regret in the world that one would not waste much lamentation upon might-have-beens. It is a thousand pities that Burns took to drink, that Byron quarrelled with his wife, that Shelley was drowned in a squall, and that Gray wasted intellect upon labours which were absolutely fruitless, but we cannot afford to sit down and cry over it all. We must take what we can get, and be thankful. But neither can one quite accept the optimist theory that Gray really did all that he could have done under different circumstances. The fire was all but choked by the fuel, and the cloisters of Pembroke acted as a tolerably effective extinguisher upon what was left. The peculiar merit of Gray is that he had force enough, though only at the cost of slow and laborious travail, to find an utterance for genuine emotion, which was enriched instead of being made unnatural by his varied culture. The critic in him never injured the quality, but only reduced the quantity, of his work. What little he left is so perfect in its kind, so far above any contemporary performances, because he never forgot, like some learned people, that the ultimate aim of the poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own, and not to exhibit his learning, or his fine taste, or his skill in mimicking the notes of his predecessors. He could rarely cast aside his reserve, or forget his academical dignity enough to speak at all; but when he does speak he always shows that the genuine depth of feeling underlies the crust of propriety. He cannot drop, nor does he desire to drop, the conventionality of style, but he makes us feel that he is a human being before he is a critic or a don. He wears stately robes because it is an ingrained habit, but he does not suppose that the tailor can make the man. In his letters this is as clear as in his poetry. His habitual reserve restrains him from sentimentalising, and he generally relieves himself by a pleasant vein of sub-acid humour. But now and then he speaks, as it were, shyly or half afraid to unbosom himself, and yet with a pathetic tenderness which conquers our sympathy. Such is the beautiful little letter to Mason on the death of his wife, or still more the letter in which he confides to his friend Nichols how he had 'discovered a thing very little known, which is that in one's whole life one can never have more than a single mother.' Sterne might have written a chapter of exquisite sentimentalising without approaching the pathetic charm of that single touch of the reserved and outwardly pedantic don. His utterance is wrung from him in spite of himself, and still half veiled by the quaintness of the phrase.
Gray's love of nature shows itself in the same way. He does not make poetical capital out of it, and indeed has an impression that it would be scarcely becoming. He would agree with Pope's contempt for 'pure description.' Fields and hills should only be admitted in the background of his dignified poetry, and just so far as they are obviously appropriate to the sentiment to be expressed. But when he does speak it is always with the most genuine feeling in every word. There is a charming little description of the Southampton Water and of a sunrise—he can 'hardly believe' that anybody ever saw a sunrise before—which are as perfect vignettes as can be put upon paper within equal limits, worth acres of more pretentious word-painting. He rather despised Mason's gardening tastes, it seems, on the ground that his sham wildernesses and waterfalls could never come up to Skiddaw and Lodore. To spend a week at Keswick is for him to be 'in Elysium.' He kept notes, too, about natural history, which seem to show as keen an interest in the behaviour of birds or insects as that of White of Selborne himself. And yet his sensibility to such impressions has scarcely left a trace in his poetry, except in the moping owl and the droning flight of the beetle in the 'Elegy.' The Spring has to appear in company with the 'rosy-bosom'd hours,' and the Muse and the insects have to preach a pathetic little sermon to justify the notice which is taken of them. Obviously this is not the kind of mountain worship which would satisfy Scott or Wordsworth. Gray was, perhaps, capable of feeling 'the impulse from the vernal wood' as truly as Wordsworth, but he would have altogether rejected the doctrine that it could teach him more than all 'the sages,' and resisted the temptation to throw his books aside except for a brief constitutional. A turn in the backs of the colleges was enough for him, as a rule, and sometimes he may thoroughly enjoy a brief holiday by the side of Derwentwater as a delightful relief after the muddy oozings of the Cam. Nobody could, in this sense, love nature with a more sincere and vivid affection; but such a love of nature is not symptomatic, as with Wordsworth, or Cowper, or Rousseau, of any preference of savage, or rustic, or simple life to the existing order of civilised society. It implied at most the development of a new taste, inadequately appreciated by the cockney men of letters of his own or the preceding generation, but not that passionate longing for relief from an effete set of conventions, poetical, political, and social, characteristic of the rising school. His head, when he travels, is evidently as full of Dugdale's 'Monasticon' as of Ossian, and he reconstructs and repeoples Netley Abbey in fancy to give a charm to the Solent. He places in it a monk, who glances at the white sail that shoots by over a stretch of blue glittering sea visible between the oak groves, and then enters and crosses himself to drive away the tempter who has thrown that distraction in his way. Gray himself pretty much shared the sentiments of his imagined monk, and only catches occasional glimpses of natural scenery from the loopholes of his retreat in an eighteenth-century cloister.