Mason whom Gray described, a little before this offer, as repining at his four and twenty weeks residence at York, and longing for the flesh-pots and coffee-houses of Cambridge, was notwithstanding in his friend and fellow-poet's phrase, a long while mariturient, “and praying to heaven to give him a good and gentle governess.” “No man,” says Gray, “wants such a thing more in all senses; but his greatest wants do not make him move a foot faster, nor has he, properly speaking, any thing one can call a passion about him, except a little malice and revenge.” Elsewhere he speaks of Mason's “insatiable repining mouth.” Yet there was no malice in these expressions. Gray loved him, taking him for all in all, and to have been the friend of Gray will always be considered as evidence of no ordinary worth; for it is not on intellect alone that the friendship of so good and wise a man as Gray could be founded.
When Gray first became acquainted with Mason he wrote concerning him thus. “He has much fancy, little judgement, and a good deal of modesty. I take him for a good and well-meaning creature; but then he is really in simplicity a child, and loves every body he meets with: he reads little or nothing, writes abundance, and that with a design to make his fortune by it.” In another letter “Mason grows apace in my good graces; he is very ingenious, with great good-nature and simplicity; a little vain, but in so harmless and so comical a way that it does not offend one at all; a little ambitious, but withal so ignorant in the world and its ways, that this does not hurt him in one's opinion. So sincere and so undisguised, that no mind with a spark of generosity would ever think of hurting him, he lies so open to injury; but so indolent that if he cannot overcome this habit, all his good qualities will signify nothing at all.”
This surely is the character of an amiable and very likeable man. Mason said when he printed it, “my friends, I am sure will be much amused at this; my enemies (if they please) may sneer at it, and say (which they will very truly,) that twenty-five years have made a very considerable abatement in my general philanthropy. Men of the world will not blame me for writing from so prudent a motive, as that of making my fortune by it; and yet the truth I believe, at the time was, that I was perfectly well satisfied if my publications furnished me with a few guineas to see a Play, or an Opera.”
During the short time that his wife lived after his marriage, Miller observed that he appeared more animated and agreeable in his conversation, that is to say, he was cheerful because he was happy. After her death (and who has ever perused her epitaph without emotion?) he relapsed into a discontented habit of mind, as might be expected from one who had remained unmarried too long, and who although he might be said in the worldly sense of the word to have been a fortunate man, was never, except during the short duration of his marriage, a happy one. He had no near relations, none to whom he was in any degree attached; and in Gray he lost the most intimate of his friends, probably the only one towards whom he ever felt anything approaching to a warmth of friendship. This produced a most uncomfortable effect upon him in the decline of life; for knowing that he was looked upon as one who had wealth to leave for which there were no near or natural claimants, he suspected that any marks of attention which were shewn him, whether from kindness or from respect, proceeded from selfish views. That in many cases such suspicions may be well-founded, any one who knows what the world is, will readily believe; and if they made him capricious, and rendered him liable to be accused of injustice and want of feeling, the effect is not so extraordinary as it is pitiable. It is one of the evils attendant upon the possession of riches where there is no certain heir; it is part of the punishment which those persons bring upon themselves who accumulate unnecessary wealth, without any just or definite object.
But Mason is chargeable with no such sin. When a young man he made a resolution that if he came into possession of an estate which was entailed upon him, he would accept of no additional preferment; and he adhered to that resolution, though many offers were made to him which might have induced a worldly man to depart from it. The first thing he did after the inheritance fell to him was to resign his King's Chaplainship: “a priest in that situation,” he said, “could not help looking forward to a bishoprick, a species of ambition incompatible with the simplicity and purity of the Christian character, for, the moment a man aspires to the purple that moment virtue goes out of him.” Mr. Greville who after a visit to Mason, related this in a letter to his friend Polwhele, was informed that his income was about £1500 a-year, and that of this one third was appropriated to patronage and charity.
He had made another resolution, which was not kept, because it was not reasonable. When the Earl of Holdernesse offered him the Rectory of Aston, he was not in orders, and he called upon Warburton to ask his advice. “I found him,” says Warburton, “yet unresolved whether he should take the Living. I said, was the question about a mere secular employment, I should blame him without reserve if he refused the offer. But as I regarded going into orders in another light, I frankly owned to him he ought not to go, unless he had a call: by which I meant, I told him, nothing fanatical or superstitious; but an inclination, and, on that, a resolution, to dedicate all his studies to the service of religion, and totally to abandon his poetry. This sacrifice, I said, I thought was required at any time, but more indispensably so in this, when we are fighting with infidelity pro aris et focis. This was what I said; and I will do him the justice to say, that he entirely agreed with me in thinking that decency, reputation, and religion, all required this sacrifice of him; and that, if he went into orders, he intended to give it.” “How much shall I honour him,” says Warburton in another letter, “if he performs his promise to me of putting away those idle baggages after his sacred espousals!” This unwise promise explains Mason's long silence as a poet, and may partly account for his uncomfortable state of mind as long as he considered himself bound by it.
There were other circumstances about him which were unfavourable to happiness; he seems never to have been of a cheerful, because never of a hopeful temper; otherwise Gray would not have spoken of his “insatiable repining mouth,”—the lively expression of one who clearly perceived his constitutional faults, and yet loved him, as he deserved to be loved, in spite of them. The degree of malice also, which Gray noticed as the strongest passion in his nature, is to be reckoned among those circumstances. By far the most popular of his compositions were those well known satires which he never owned, and which professional critics with their usual lack of acumen, pronounced not to be his because of their sarcastic humour and the strength of their language. He had a great deal of that sarcastic humour, and this it was which Gray called malice; in truth it partakes of maliciousness, and a man is the worse for indulging it, if he ever allows himself to give it a personal direction, except in cases where strong provocation may warrant and strict justice require it. That these satires were written by Mason will appear upon the most indisputable proof whenever his letters shall be published; and it is earnestly hoped those letters may not be allowed to perish, for in them and in them only will the character of the writer appear in its natural lights and shades.
Mason would not (especially after their signal success,) have refrained from acknowledging these satires, which are the most vigorous of his compositions, unless he had been conscious that the turn of mind they indicated was not that which ought to be found in a member of his profession. And it can only have been the same feeling which induced the Editor to withhold them from the only collective edition of his works. That edition was delayed till fourteen years after his death, and then appeared without any memoir of the author, or any the slightest prefatory mark of respect: it seems therefore that he had left none by whom his memory was cherished. But though this may have been in some degree his fault, it was probably in a far greater degree his misfortune.
Mason had obtained preferment for his literary deserts, and in such just measure as to satisfy himself, and those also who would wish that ecclesiastical preferment were always so properly bestowed. But he was not satisfied with his literary fame. Others passed him upon the stream of popularity with all their sails set, full speed before the wind, while he lay quietly upon his oars in a pleasant creek; and he did not sufficiently bear in mind that he was safe at his ease, when some of those who so triumphantly left him behind were upset and went to the bottom. He had done enough to secure for himself a respectable place among the poets of his country, and a distinguished one among those of his age. But more through indolence than from any deficiency or decay of power, he had fallen short of the promise of his youth, and of his own early aspirations. Discontent, especially when mingled with self-reproach, is an uneasy feeling, and like many others he appears to have sought relief by projecting it, and transferring as much of it as he could upon the world. He became an acrimonious whig, and took an active part in the factious measures by which Yorkshire was agitated about the close of the American war. Gray if he had been then living might perhaps have been able to have rendered him more temperate and more reasonable in his political views; certainly he would have prevailed upon him not to write, or having written not to publish or preserve, the last book of his English Garden, which is in every respect miserably bad; bad in taste as recommending sham castles and modern ruins; bad in morals, as endeavouring to serve a political cause and excite indignation against the measures of Government by a fictitious story, (which if it had been true could have had no bearing whatever upon the justice or injustice of the American war;) and bad in poetry because the story is in itself absurd. Not the least absurd part of this puerile tale is the sudden death of the heroine, at the unexpected sight of her betrothed husband, whom she was neither glad nor sorry to see; and the description of the facies Hippocratica is applied to this person, thus dying in health, youth and beauty! Dr. Dove used to instance this as a remarkable example of knowledge ignorantly misapplied.
Yet though the Doctor did not rank him higher as a physiologist than Miller did as a musician, or than Sir Joshua must have done as a painter, he found more pleasure than the organist could do in his conversation; partly because there was an air of patronage in Mason's intercourse with Miller at first, and afterwards an air of estrangement, (a sufficient reason;) and partly because Mason was more capable of enjoying the richness of the Doctor's mind, and such of its eccentricities as were allowed to appear in company where he was not wholly without reserve, than he was of appreciating the simplicity of Miller's. That vein of humour which he indulged in his correspondence opened when he was conversing with one, like the Doctor, upon whom nothing was lost; at such times the heavy saturnine character of Mason's countenance, which might almost be called morose, seemed to be cast off; and pleasantry and good-nature animated its intellectual strength. But according to Polwhele's friend, there was a “sedate benignity in his countenance, which taught me,” says Mr. Greville, “instantaneously to rely on him as a man the leading traits of whose disposition were feeling and reflection. This immediate impression of his character I found afterwards to be strictly just. I never yet met with a human being whose head and heart appear to act and re-act so reciprocally, so concordantly upon each other as his.—In his style of conversation, you can trace nothing of the vis vivida of the poet. Here his inventive powers apparently lie dormant. Those flashes of genius, those intellectual emanations which we are taught to believe great men cannot help darting forward in order to lighten up the gloom of colloquial communication, he seems to consider as affected; he therefore rejects them whenever they occur, and appears to pride himself on the preference which he gives to simplicity and perspicuity. Conversation (if you will excuse a pedantic allusion,) with him resembles the style of painting mentioned in the earlier part of the Athenian History, which consisted in representing the artist's ideas in a simple unaffected point of view, through the medium of one colour only; whereas his writings are like the pictures of Polygnotus. They glow with all the warmth of an invigorated imagination, an animated diction, and a rich luxuriant phraseology.