Every one will perceive the art which enforces the truth of the general reflections that follow by the personal experience of the speaker. Again, the 'Progress of Poesy' closes with a personal allusion which, as it is a climax, might, if ill-managed, have appeared arrogant, but which is, in fact, a masterpiece of oratory. After confessing his own inferiority to Pindar, the poet proceeds:
| 'Yet oft before his infant eyes would run Such forms as glitter in the Muse's ray, With orient hues, unborrow'd of the sun; Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way, Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate, Beneath the Good how far—but far above the Great!' |
There is something very noble in the elevated manner in which the self-complacent triumph of genius, expressed by so many poets from Ennius downwards, is at once justified and chastened by the reflection in these lines. We see in them that the poet alludes to himself in the third person, and he repeats this style in the 'Elegy,' where, after the fourth line, the first personal pronoun is never again used. How just and beautiful is the turn where, after contemplating the general lot of the lowly society he is celebrating, he proceeds to identify his own fate with theirs:
| 'For thee, who, mindful of th' unhonour'd dead, Dost in these lines their artless tale relate, If, chance, by lonely contemplation led, Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate, 'Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,' etc. |
"The two great characteristics of Gray's poetry that we have noticed—his self-suppression and his sense of form and dignity—are best described by the word 'classical.' What we particularly admire in the great authors of Greece and Rome is their public spirit. Their writings are full of patriotism, good-breeding, and common-sense, and have that happy mixture of art and nature which is only acquired by men who have learned from liberty how to discipline individual instincts by social refinement. Their style is masculine, clear, and moderate; they seem, as it were, never to lose the sense of being before an audience, and, like orators who know that they are always exposed to the judgment of their intellectual equals, they aim at putting intelligible thoughts into the most natural and forcible words. Precisely the same qualities are observable in all the best English writers of the eighteenth century. Addison, Pope, and Goldsmith are perhaps the most shining examples, but the rest are 'classical' in the sense which we have just indicated; and we can hardly be wrong in ascribing this common rhetorical instinct to the intimate connection between the men of thought and the men of action, which existed both in the free states of antiquity, and in England under the rule of the aristocracy. With the advance of the eighteenth century the instinct in English literature seems to grow weaker; the style of our authors becomes more formal and constrained, and symptoms of that dislike of society encouraged by the philosophy of Rousseau more frequently betray themselves. As the poetry of Cowper shows less social instinct than that of Gray, so Gray himself is inferior in this respect to Pope and Goldsmith. But his style has the same lofty public spirit that distinguishes his favourite models, and no worthier form could be imagined to express the ardour excited in the heart of a patriotic poet by the rising fortunes of his native country. We feel that it is in every way fitting that the author of the 'Elegy' should have been the favourite of Wolfe and the countryman of Chatham."
| CLIO, THE MUSE OF HISTORY. |