Edmund Gray

“ Arundel has requested her daughter to break off her engagement; I am forbidden the house; Elsie has left her mother and gone to her brother. No, sir—take the papers, and give them to some other person.'
Mr. Dering mechanically took the papers, and laid his hand upon them.
'Let me remind you,' George continued, 'how far we have got. We have proved that Edmund Gray is a real person, known to many. We have not proved the connection between him and the robberies committed in his name. He is apparently a most respectable person. The problem before you is still to fix the crime on someone. ”

“ Edmund Gray, who had the Chambers overhead. At what hours was Mr. Edmund Gray generally in his rooms? Nobody knew, not either of the partners, not any of the clerks. He might have been met going up and down the stairs, but nobody knew him by sight or anything about him. This at first sight seemed suspicious; afterwards George reflected that men may live for years on the same staircase and never know anything about each other. Men who live in Gray's Inn do not visit each other: there is little neighbourly spirit among men in Chambers, but rather an unspoken distrust. ”

“ He was Edmund Gray. In that capacity he afterwards drank to the bride and wished her happiness. And he walked all the way from Pembridge Square to South Square, Gray's Inn.
I see in the future an old man growing feeble: he leans [Pg 358] upon the arm of a girl whom he calls his Scholar, his disciple, and his child. His face is serene: he is perfectly happy: the Advent of that Kingdom whose glories he preaches is very nigh at hand. ”

“ They put on his table letters addressed to the man they call Edmund Gray. They open his safe and put things in it belonging to Edmund Gray. We're not so young as we was, and it tells upon us. We're not so regular as we should be. Sometimes we're late—and sometimes we seem, just for a bit, not to know exactly who we are nor what we are. Oh! it's nothing—nothing, but what will pass away when the trouble's over. But think of the black ingratitood, Miss—Oh! black—black. I'm not blamin' you; but I think you ought to know the trouble we're in—considering who's done it and all.'
Elsie made no reply. ”

“ Why, he constantly complains of forgetting things.'
'But the letters yesterday were addressed to Edmund Gray. How do you connect Edmund Gray with Edward Dering?'
'I don't know. But, my dear brother, the more I think of this business, the more persuaded I am that Checkley is not the prime mover, or even a confederate.'
'The same hand has doubtless been at work throughout. If not Checkley's aid to make that hand possible and successful, who is there? And look at the malignity with which he tries to fix it on some one else.'
'That may be because he is afraid of its being fixed upon him. ”

“ The fact is that Gray, the real thirteenth, was an after-thought; and I will admit that, although Gray is the author of what is perhaps the most imposing single short poem in the language, and although he has charm, skill, and distinction to a marvellous degree, his originality, his force of production, were so rigidly limited that he may scarcely be admitted to the first rank. When he published his collected poems Gray confessed himself "but a shrimp of an author," and conjectured that the book would be mistaken for "the works of a flea or a pismire." ”

“ The brothers did more in rebelling against the Classic formulas than in starting new poetic methods. There was an absence in them of "the pomps and prodigality" of genius of which Gray spoke in a noble stanza. They began with enthusiasm, but they had no native richness of expression, no store of energy. It needed a nature as [Pg 90] unfettered as Blake's, as wide as Wordsworth's, as opulent as Keats's, to push the Romantic attack on to victory. The instinct for ecstasy, ravishment, the caprices and vagaries of emotion, was there ”

“ The shrewd man of the world utterly succumbed beneath this blow of fate; it killed him. Old Mr. Gray died of that supposed disease, a [Pg 199] broken heart,—leaving a legacy of ruin, or the alternative of disgrace, to his heir.
The reins of government thus fell into Everett's hands. "The poor Grays! it's all over with them!" said the pitying world. And, indeed, the way in which the young man proceeded to arrange his father's affairs savored no less of the Visionary than had every action of his life theretofore. ”

“ Thomas Gray.
You will know of that first poem of his—Ode to Eton College; at least you know its terminal lines, which are cited on all the high-roads:—
"Where ignorance is bliss
'Tis folly to be wise!"
All the world knows, too, his Elegy, on which his fame principally rests. Its melancholy music gets somehow stamped on the brain of nearly all of us, and lends a poetic halo to every old graveyard that has the shadow of a church tower slanted over it.
Gray [14] was, like Milton, a London boy—born on Cornhill under the shadow almost of St. Paul's. ”

“ Gray is a very great drunkard, can't keep a penny in his pocket: a sad notorious lyar. If you send him upon a mile or two from Uphingham, he will get drunk, stay all day, and never come home while the middle of the night, or such time as he knows his master is in bed. He can nor will not keep any secret; neither has he so much wit as other people, for the fellow is half a fool, for if you would have business done with expedition, if he once gets out of the town, or sight of you, shall see him no more, while the next morning he serves me so and so: you must expect the same if you hire him. ”

“ Gray was born in London; his father possessed property, but was indolent and selfish; his mother was a successful woman of business, and supported her son in college from her own earnings. The poet was educated at Eton and Cambridge; at the latter place, he resided for several years after his return from a continental tour, begun in 1739. He was small and delicate in person, refined and precise in dress and manners, and shy and retiring in disposition. He was an accomplished scholar in many fields of learning, but left comparatively little finished work in any department. ”

“ He was born in Scotland, among the mountains of Ettrick and Yarrow, the son of a shepherd. When he was but six years old he commenced to earn his living as a cowherd, and by his seventh year had received all the schooling which he was destined to have—two separate periods of three months. Matthew Arnold, when accounting for the sterility of Gray as a poet, says that throughout the first nine decades of the eighteenth century, until the French Revolution roused men to generosity, "a spiritual east wind was blowing." ”

“ Gray went on, "I don't in the least judge that I am, or can be at all advertised as, one of the really big. You seem all here so hideously rich that I needn't fear to count as extraordinary; indeed I'm very competently assured I'm by all your standards a very moderate affair. And even if I were a much greater one"—he gathered force—"my appearance of it would depend only on myself. You can have means and not be blatant; you can take up, by the very fact itself, if you happen to be decent, no more room than may suit your taste. ”

“ Gray was an author of great pretensions, but of great merit. He has an air of sublimity, if not the reality. He aims at the highest things; and if he fails, it is only by a hair’s-breadth. His pathos is injured, like his sublimity, by too great an ambition after the ornaments and machinery of poetry. His craving after foreign help perhaps shows the want of the internal impulse. His Elegy in a Country Churchyard, which is the most simple, is the best of his productions. ”

“ Two things very definite here; one being that Gray isn't in the least blatant or glorious about his want, absolutely phenomenal in that world, of any faint shade of business comprehension or imagination, but is on the contrary so rather helplessly ashamed of it that he keeps any attitude imputable to him as much as possible out of the question—and in fact proceeds in the way I know. He has moments of confidence—he tells Rosanna, makes a clean breast to her and with Horton doesn't need to be explicit, beyond a point, since all his conduct expresses it. ”

“ Gray’s case is quite different. He belongs to an excellent family, his perfect respectability has never been questioned, even by his worst enemies. He leads the most regular life; has a large fortune, and yet places all these advantages, and his undoubted abilities, at the service of Communism. ”

“ The “Elegy” is one of the most celebrated poems ever written. It was begun when Gray was twenty-six years old, but he did not{83} finish it until eight years later. Its fame spread over the world, and it still holds its rank as the most perfect of English poems.
The poet lived at Cambridge, where he devoted his time to study. The “Elegy” and a later work, “The Bard,” placed him at the head of English poets. He was offered the office of poet laureate, which he refused.
In 1768 Gray accepted the chair of Modern History and Languages at Cambridge. ”

“ Gray, in a letter to Horace Walpole, says that "to him it is one of those few imitations, that has all the ease and all the spirit of an original." The other is not at all inferior to it. Johnson was not insensible to such praise; and, could he have known how favourably Gray had spoken of him, would, I doubt not, have been more just to that poet, whom, besides the petulant criticism on him in his Life, he presumed in conversation to call "a heavy fellow." ”

“ Here, we are told, lies the secret of Gray's limitation as much in life as in literature: so sensitive was he in private life, so modest in public, that the thoughts that arose in him never got full utterance, the possibilities of his genius were never fulfilled; and we, in our turn, are left the poorer for that nervous delicacy which has proved the bane of the poet, living and dead alike. ”

“ Gray had a sharp gesture. "If there's a person in the world whom I don't call a façade——!"
"You don't call her one?"—Haughty took it right up. And he added as for very compassion: "My poor man, my poor man——!"
"She loathes self-exhibition; she loathes being noticed; she loathes every form of publicity." Gray quite flushed for it.
Horton went to the mantel for another cigarette, and there was that in the calm way of it that made his friend, even though helping him this time to a light, wait in silence for his word. ”

“ That was to be for the time, by every indication, his amusing "line"—his taking so confident and insistent a view of what it must be in Gray's nature and tradition to like or not to like that, as our young man for that matter himself assured him, he couldn't have invented a more successfully insidious way of creating an appetite than by passing under a fellow's nose every sort of whiff of the indigestible. ”

“ We can only come, as we have said, to some compromise between reason and emotion. They meet together in the arena of imagination, and must settle their rival claims as they best can.
That Gray was a true poet surely no one will deny. Who has bequeathed, in proportion to the extent or volume of his writings, a greater number of those individual lines and passages which live in the memory of all men, and are recognised as the most perfect expression of a given thought or sentiment that our British world has produced? ”

“ He is beyond, he is outside of, all moral judgments, all scandalised states; he is amused at what he himself does, at his general and particular effect and effects on Gray, who is his luxury of a relation, as it were, and whom I somehow seem to want to show him feel as the only person in the whole medium appreciating his genius; in other words his detached play of mind and the deep "American humour" of it. Don't I seem to want him even as asking for something rather big?—a kind of a lump of a sum which Gray, always with amusement, answers that he will have to see about. ”

“ If few English poets have written so little, none certainly has written so little that has fallen into oblivion. And yet, though Gray is in this sense the most popular poet of his day, though he is more read than Young, or Thomson, or Collins, or Goldsmith, or many others, we do not think of him as stamping his image upon the time. He stands apart. His poetry is taken to be like an oasis in the desert; it is a sudden spring of perennial freshness gushing out in the midst of that dreary didactic, argumentative, monotonous current of versification poured forth by the imitators of Pope. ”

“ As Gray looked up he could only distinguish the vague dark outlines of the gloomy hills. A thousand men might have been hidden in the hollows and he would have been none the wiser. He listened intently, but there was no sound of human life. The wind had fallen, and the rush of the stream at the bottom of the ravine was the only sound that struck his ear. ”

“ It was at Edinburgh that he published his first poem, an ‘Elegy on a Pile of Ruins.’ It is a rather weak imitation of Gray's ‘Elegy,’ but had a great success, and caused him to be summoned to London by a company of booksellers, who, however, were bankrupt before he arrived. ”

“ Gray was thirty-eight, and tall and slender and handsome, a little bald in front, alert, quick in his movements, businesslike, prompt, decided, unsentimental, and with that kind of trim-chiselled face that just seems to glint and sparkle with frosty intellectuality! He was a renowned scientist. I do not know what the word means, but my mother would know how to use it and get effects. She would know how to depress a rat-terrier with it and make a lap-dog look sorry he came. But that is not the best one; the best one was Laboratory. ”