Gray

“ Grey, is the shattered idol of my girlish adoration,—such the divinity of dust upon which I spent the treasures of my love and trust. Gray-haired, gray-hearted, mocked, and maddened in the dawn of my confiding womanhood, nominally a wife, but in reality a nameless waif, shut out from happiness, and pitied as a maniac,—such, is that most desolate and isolated woman, whom, as Agla Gerome, you have known as the mistress of this lonely place. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Gray, the gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away.... When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you.... ”

“ 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 was not one. Whether in the country churchyard, or by the grave of Horace Walpole's favourite cat, he never lost hold of himself, never let heart take whip and reins, never drowned the scholar in the poet, never, in fact, showed himself in his shirtsleeves. But before he was dead the hearts of men began to cry again. Forty years before Gray died Cowper was born; fourteen years before he died, Blake was born; twelve years before he died, Burns. ”

“ One of the most exact scholars of his day, one of the most fastidious of mortals, one of the shyest men that ever lived, a born mental aristocrat, his literary genius enabled him to write an immortal masterpiece, not about the Cambridge hierarchy, but about illiterate tillers of the soil. The Elegy is the genius of synthesis; without submitting each man in the ground to a ruthless cross-examination, Gray managed to express in impeccable beauty of language the common thoughts and feelings that have ever animated the human soul. ”

“ Equally annoying was Gray's immense delight in semi-allegorical figures. We have whole catalogues of abstract qualities scarcely personified. Ambition, bitter Scorn, grinning Infamy, Falsehood, hard Unkindness, keen Remorse, and moody Madness are all collected in one stanza not exceptional in style—beings which to us are almost as offensive as the muse whom he has pretty well ceased to invoke, though he still appeals to his lyre. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame—”
“Stop!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Gray played butler with a correctness and a poise deeply impressive to his round-eyed audience, and as he served the courses he delivered a lecture upon the etiquette of domestic service, the art of cooking, and the various niceties of a servant's calling. Nothing could have been more impressive than being waited upon by a person of his magnificence, and his lecture, moreover, was delivered in a way that drove understanding into their thick heads. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Gray, the Poet, followed: he died soon after his forlorn and melancholy pilgrimage to the Vale of Keswick, and the record left behind him of {270} what he had seen and felt in this journey, excited that pensive interest with which the human mind is ever disposed to listen to the farewell words of a man of genius. The journal of Gray feelingly showed how the gloom of ill health and low spirits had been irradiated by objects, which the Author's powers of mind enabled him to describe with distinctness and unaffected simplicity. ”

“ Lord Henry went out to the garden and found Dorian Gray burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine. He came close to him and put his hand upon his shoulder. "You are quite right to do that," he murmured. "Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul." ”

“ Breddon laughed.
'Well, if you must have the plain truth, he's called Gray Devil—or, more frequently. Devil tout court.'
'Really, now, really, you can't expect an Archdeacon to use such abominable language. I shall call him Gray—or perhaps Mr. Gray would be more respectful, seeing the shortness of our acquaintance. Do you object to the smell of smoke, Mr. Gray? The intelligent beast does not object. ”

“ Whether wife or mistress, Gray felt she was lost to him, and he sat down again upon the bank of leaves, till the shadows of the old elms stretched themselves out like giants on the meadow-grass, and the song of the reapers mingled with the hum of voices in the village; then he rose, buckled on his knapsack, and made his way through many well-remembered paths, past the old school-house, to the garden-gate opening upon his father’s little property.
Again he trod the well-remembered path, again he lifted up the latch, and, as he had hoped and expected, found old Margaret by the fire ”

“ His feet were rooted to the floor of the room, and he thought the body rose, while Gray, with his long, ghastly-looking fingers dabbled in blood, strove to hold his eyes in their sockets—to replace the splintered pieces of his fractured skull, the while he glared at him, Learmont, with such a look of stony horror, that with a shriek the squire awoke, and stood in his chamber a picture of guilty horror, staring with blood-shot eyes at the wax-lights and the morning sunshine with a racking brain and a fevered pulse. ”

“ Gray remembered Dearing's face as he staggered into the hut, the look of abject horrible fear upon it. What days and nights he must have spent in this gully, watching, waiting, no rest, never safe for a single moment!
"Poor wretch!" Gray murmured to himself. "What a life to live!" And his thoughts went back, by force of sudden contrast, to the life of another lonely man. He remembered how M'Pherson had answered, with a glad, deep peace in his old face, "It's no lonely here. There's voices everywhere." ”

“ This appears from a letter written to Sir William Forbes, his faithful friend and biographer, with whom his intimacy commenced about the same time.
I am sorry you did not see Mr. Gray on his return; you would have been much pleased with him. Setting aside his merit as a poet, which, however, in my opinion, is greater than any of his contemporaries can boast, in this or in any other nation, I found him possessed of the most exact taste, the soundest judgment, and the most extensive learning. He is happy in a singular facility of expression. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ I have to measure my poets, my authors, by their lasting power, and I find Gray has a great deal of it. He not only pleases my youth and my age, but he pleases other people’s youth and age; and I cannot help thinking this is a proof that he touches on human nature at a great many periods and at a great many levels, and, perhaps, that is as high a compliment as can be paid to the poet. There is, I admit, a certain commonplaceness of sentiment in his most famous poem, but I think there is also a certain commonplaceness of sentiment in some verses that have been famous for more than 3000 years. ”

“ Gray has expressed a simple sentiment, and as long as there are young men and middle-aged men, Gray’s poem will continue to be read and loved as in the days when it was written. There is a Spanish proverb which rebukes those people who ask something better than bread. Let those who ask for something better get something better than what Gray produced. For my own part I ask nothing better. He was, perhaps, the greatest artist in words that English [Pg 31] literature has possessed. ”

“ Gray felt a warm thrill of compassion at the agitation of this kindly, worn old soul, and he rose quickly. As he gained his feet that amazing chair behaved in a manner wholly unusual and startling; relieved of strain, the springs snapped and whined, there was a violent oscillation of the back, a shudder convulsed the thing, and it sprang after him, much as a tame rabbit thumps its feet upon the ground in an effort to bluff a kitten.
The volunteer salesman spread out his dazzling wares upon the patchwork counterpane, then stepped back to observe the effect. ”

“ Vulgar theft I don't want, but I want something to which Horty is led on and encouraged by Gray's whole attitude and state of mind face to face with the impression which he gets over there of so many of the black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions. ”

“ Na, na, Mr Gray, ye’re a’ out there; there is no ane in the parish would hear an ill word o’ Simon.—But ye’re an auld man, sir, and set an evil example to others.—Ne’er a ane do I set an evil example to but yoursel, Mr Gray; and for a’ your cant about sobriety, ye take your drams as regularly as I do; and I defy you—I defy you or ony other man to say ye e’er saw me the waur o’ liquor in your life. Besides, Mr Gray, the progress of human life is like a journey from the equator to the north pole. ”

“ Gray again; "I am not accustomed to be interrupted when I am endeavouring to awaken a hardened conscience to a sense of its condition, and I will not be now. And I call upon you at this time—now is the accepted time, sir, now is the day of salvation—to amend, amend, amend! You have been a spendthrift, profligate, everything that is bad; you have studied yourself in every action of life, and neglected the common duties due to your neighbour as well as to your Maker. ”