And little footsteps lightly print the ground.’
Leslie Stephen says happily about Gray and his friends that ‘they were feeling round vaguely for a new mode of literary and artistic enjoyment.’ This feeling after something more satisfying to the whole range of thought and emotion than was afforded by the critical school of Pope had already given evidence of itself in several ways. Thomson and Dyer, following each his particular bent, had found inspiration for poetry in country life and landscape. Gray welcomed the venture of both these poets. We know from his letters how attentive was his own observation, and how he took long journeys in search of the picturesque, especially in mountain scenery; but the evidence of this in his poetry is only incidental, as in the reference to ‘Snowdon’s shaggy side.’ Another form taken by this dissatisfaction was the revival of interest in the popular ballad literature. The discovery by Thomas Percy of his famous folio started a new form of poetry in which Goldsmith led the way. But though Gray had seen Percy’s book as early as 1761, it came too late to influence his production; and we may guess that his mind was too erudite to have found expression in the simplicity of the ballad. Of far more interest to him was Macpherson’s discovery of fragments of Highland poetry. He describes himself as ‘extasié with their infinite beauty’; on which the late Mr. Tovey, to whom a great debt is owed for his scholarly edition of Gray’s letters, makes the dry comment that some of the fragments were worked up from passages in ‘The Bard.’ We may be glad that Macpherson’s discovery came, like Percy’s, too late to influence Gray’s own poetry. His interest in the early literature of the European nations has given us a few fragments from the Norse and Welch. The remark of Leslie Stephen quoted above referred to the interest that Gray and Walpole took in Gothic architecture. This influenced Gray’s poetry only indirectly; but it had some effect in the way it was presented to the public. When Walpole undertook to convert his newly purchased house at Twickenham into a Gothick castle, the artist he employed to help him in his designs was Richard Bentley; and when Gray had sprung suddenly into fame by the ‘Elegy,’ Walpole urged him to publish his other poems with designs by Bentley. Whether these deserve the poetical encomium Gray made upon them, I will not presume to say; but they are undoubtedly very ‘Gothick.’
It is as a poet that we celebrate Gray’s bicentenary, but those persons who do not care for poetry may celebrate him as a man and a letter-writer. As a man he is secure of our affection as soon as we get to know him, and any one may know him who will read his letters, of which there is a great store; and still more have come to light lately, and have been well edited by Mr. Paget Toynbee. There are few men of letters of so attractive a nature as Gray. Perhaps he is the most lovable of all except Charles Lamb, and with Lamb, despite many obvious differences, he has many points in common. They were both solitary creatures living a recluse life, in the world but not of it, their best companions among the dead; they were both exquisite critics; they were both a prey to melancholy, or rather, as Gray said, to ‘leukocholy’; white bile not black; they had both a delicate and delightful humour; they were both the soul of gentle goodness. And so it comes about that the letters of both, in which they live to us, are among the few external goods which are necessary to happiness. The charm of a letter of Gray’s lies partly in this interest of his character, and partly in the perfect felicity with which everything is said. There is nothing slovenly, or far-fetched, or pompous, or makeshift; even in the shortest and apparently most hasty note, his touch is perfectly sure and his taste faultless; if we except some Hogarthian passages which smack of the age rather than the individual. It might not seem probable beforehand that the letters of a man whose days went ‘round and round like the blind horse in the mill’—‘swinging from chapel or hall home and from home to hall or chapel’—could have much to say that would be of general interest. Occasionally, indeed, he goes a journey—the grand tour with Walpole, or to the Highlands, or to see his friend Wharton at Old Park, or to Stoke Poges to his relations, and then we get lively enough descriptions. But these are episodes. The main topics of his every-day correspondence are his melancholy or his indolence, Mason’s poetry, Cambridge and Church news, the British Museum, politics, criticism of current literature,—Rousseau, or Sterne, or Dodsley’s poets,—his dab of musick and prints,’ gothick, hyacinths, and the weather. Occasionally, only occasionally, he allows himself to slip out a little town gossip, ‘as a decayed gentlewoman would a piece of right mecklin or a little quantity of run tea, but this only now and then, not to make a practice of it.’
THE REAL THING: ‘S. O. S.’
BY WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON.
Copyright, 1917, by William Hope Hodgson, in the United States of America.
‘Big liner on fire in 55.43 N. and 32.19 W.,’ shouts the Captain, diving into his chart-room. ‘Here we are! Give me the parallels!’
The First Officer and the Captain figure busily for a minute.