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,