These correspondents were, no doubt, excellent friends; but Gray never speaks to a third person in a very flattering manner of Mason. He is disposed always to deny any very close intimacy. He appears to have said to himself, Men will laugh at us two poets, communing upon verse, and flattering each other upon the muse; they will make me out also no better than a poet; whereas I am gentleman by profession and poet by accident. Writing to Walpole, he says, “I like Mr Aston Hervey’s Fable, and an ode by Mr Mason, a new acquaintance of mine.” Of this new acquaintance he had written to Warton, more than two years before, in the following strain: “Mr Mason is my acquaintance; I liked that ode very much, but have found no one else that did. He has much fancy, little judgment, 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 everybody he meets with; he reads little or nothing, writes abundance, and that with a design to make his fortune by it.” In another place he says of him that he “has not, properly speaking, anything one can call a passion about him, except a little malice and revenge.” Such phrases as these occur in his correspondence with Warton and Brown: “I do not hear from Mason;” “You think us great correspondents, but,” &c. To us it seems that he really liked the younger poet, who more, perhaps, than any other man he knew, sympathised with him on the poetical side of his character; but then he did not like to be grouped with him, in the eyes of the wits and the worldlings. They will compare us, and associate us, and think us rival candidates for popular applause.
We see this morbid sense of ridicule betray itself in his publication of his poems. He insists upon it that the poems shall be published as mere illustrations of the drawings of Bentley, which accompanied them. The book met with applause, and the Elegy became at once a popular favourite. He seems, in a letter to Warton, to reprove and to repudiate this abundant praise. “I should have been glad that you and two or three more people had liked them, which would have satisfied my ambition on this head amply.” For all this, when he published the Bard, and other odes which, from their nature, appealed still more to the select few, he was not a little nettled because “the town” found them obscure.
In his manner and carriage, Gray is described as being cold and fastidious to an offensive degree. A contemporary and admirer, Rev. William Cole, says, “I am apt to think the characters of Voltaire and Mr Gray were similar. They were both little men, very nice and exact in their persons and dress, most lively and agreeable in conversation, except that Mr Gray was apt to be too satirical, and both of them full of affectation.” And then contrasting him with Dr Farmer, he thus describes the two men: “The one (Dr Farmer) a cheerful, companionable, hearty, open, downright man, of no great regard to dress or common forms of behaviour; the other (Gray) of a most fastidious and recluse distance of carriage, rather averse to sociability, but of the graver turn; nice, and elegant in his person, dress, and behaviour, even to a degree of finicalness and effeminacy.”—Vol. i., Appendix. The contrast here drawn between Gray and Dr Farmer, suggests to us the dissimilarity and mutual distaste which existed between Gray and a still greater contemporary, Dr Johnson. They repelled each other far more by diversity of manner than by opposition of opinion. Gray refused to be personally acquainted with Johnson. Passing him in the streets of London, he whispered to the companion with whom he was walking, “There is the Great Bear! there goes Ursa Major!” and accompanied the words with a sort of shrinking and recoil. It is well known that the antipathy was mutual. The judgment passed upon Gray in the Lives of the Poets is the harshest and the least equitable criticism throughout that work. One cannot help admitting, however, that, if Gray had written the life of Johnson, there would have been a piece of criticism produced still less equitable. Gray is rarely just to any of his contemporaries. He seldom admires, and the little praise he bestows is distributed most capriciously. He speaks as highly of Lyttleton’s Monody as of the Odes of Collins. He mentions Sterne but coldly, and when he would be complimentary, always selects his Sermons! You would say that a certain superciliousness has been creeping over and into the very heart of the man.
But now change the point of view, and from this the world-aspect turn to the poetic side of the character. It was not a heartless man who wrote the Elegy and the Bard, who was the friend of West, who in later times was the friend of Bonstettin, who at all times could find society in meditation, and companionship in beauties of nature. The Letters of Gray are too well known to render it necessary for us to make extracts from them, to show how often a vein of deep feeling runs through a half-playful style of diction. His pathos touches us still more, whether he is describing nature, or speaking of himself and of his friends, from the restraint he has evidently put upon his own enthusiasm, or his own tenderness. The “melancholy Gray” was a far higher being than the witty and Walpolian Gray; and it is the blending of the two together that has made the singular charm of the Letters.
If evidence were wanted to prove that there existed uncorrupted in the mind of Gray springs of pure and genuine feeling, we should find that evidence in his attachment to Bonstettin. This young foreigner, by his own ardent temper, had broken down all those cold artificial barriers in which it is said the poet habitually intrenched himself. Gray had taken lodgings for him at Cambridge, near his own rooms, and they spent the evenings together, reading the Greek poets and philosophers. When Bonstettin returned to his native country, Switzerland, Gray felt the loss of his friend in a manner which he does not seek even to disguise, but expresses with unaffected warmth:—
“Cambridge, April 12, 1770.
“Never did I feel, my dear Bonstettin, to what a tedious length the few short moments of our life may be extended by impatience and expectation, till you had left me: nor ever knew before with so strong a conviction how much this frail body sympathises with the inquietude of the mind. I am grown old in the compass of less than three weeks, like the Sultan in the Turkish tales, that did but plunge his head into a vessel of water, and take it out again, as the standers-by affirmed, at the command of a Dervise, and found he had passed many years in captivity, and begot a large family of children. The strength and spirits that now enable me to write to you are only owing to your last letter, a temporary gleam of sunshine. Heaven knows when it may shine again. I did not conceive till now, I own, what it was to lose you, nor felt the solitude and insipidity of my own condition before I possessed the happiness of your friendship.
“But enough of this—I return to your letter. It proves at least that, in the midst of your new gaieties, I still hold some place in your memory; and, what pleases me above all, it has an air of undissembled sincerity. Go on, my best and amiable friend, to show me your heart simply, and without the shadow of disguise, and leave me to weep over it, as I now do, no matter whether from joy or sorrow.”
“April 19, 1770.