chiefly the author of the Hymn to Adversity, the odes, On the Spring, On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, The Bard, and, above all, of The Elegy in a Country Churchyard. It may be fairly said that nearly all his original verse is known to everybody. Few poets travel with so little luggage, and Gray is represented almost in extenso in almost every anthology. Yet his tremendous lampoon on the first Lord Holland's absurd castle at Kingsgate deserves to be more familiar than it is better satiric verse is hardly to be found in Pope or Dryden than these vigorous quatrains. We need not perhaps lament with Matthew Arnold that Gray "never spoke out." It is true the time was unfavourable for poetry, but Collins rather than Gray felt the nip of the "spiritual east wind." The simple fact that Gray deliberately chose to spend his life in the safe and stagnant atmosphere of a university town - then far less ruffled by outside currents than it is to-day proves him lacking in the venturesome ardour which no great poet can be without. There is no trace in him of any generous indiscretion, such as, for instance, moved Tennyson to the project of volunteering with the Spanish rebels. His muse is essentially academic. Even the swan song which the Welsh bard, last of his order, chants before he plunges from the precipice is simply a prophetic review of English history and literature, which, in reality, celebrates the glories of the conqueror; and Gray's best ode, The Progress of Poesy, may be not quite unfairly described as lyrical criticism. It opens with three fine stanzas which describe the power of poetry to inspire joy, and two which celebrate its consoling and invigorating influence. Then the progress of the muses is traced from Greece to Rome, and from Rome to "Albion's sea encircled coast." A stanza is given to Shakespeare, commonplace enough; but the verse then mounts to a pitch worthy of its subject to honour Milton and Dryden, before it falls to the lamentably tame conclusion, in which Gray makes his estimate of his own work : Nor second He, that rode sublime Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy, The secrets of the abyss to spy. He passed the flaming bounds of place and time : The living throne, the sapphire blaze, Where angels tremble while they gaze, He saw; but, blasted with excess of light, Closed his eyes in endless night. Behold, where Dryden's less presumptuous car, Wide o'er the field of glory bear Two coursers of ethereal race, With necks in thunder clothed, and long-resounding pace. Hark, his hands the lyre explore! Bright-eyed Fancy, hovering o'er, Scatters from her pictured urn Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. But ah! 'tis heard no more Oh lyre divine, what daring spirit Nor the pride, nor ample pinion, Yet oft before his infant eyes would run With orient hues, unborrowed 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. Fine as it all is, one cannot but feel that it somehow lacks feeling, and savours of the glorified prize poem. The spectacle of Milton fires Gray for a moment, though the alien emotion, experienced, as it were, at second-hand, drops and leaves him in the rhetorical ingenuity "blasted with excess of P light." Compare this with the sincere poetry of Milton's own sonnet on his blindness, or compare it with the truth of fact, and rhetoric at once loses its lustre. Milton lost his eyes, not in contemplating hell or heaven, but because he turned from these contemplations to scrive and pore in the service of his country. The lines on Dryden express finely a critical eulogy of the heroic couplet, and exemplify Dryden's use of the Alexandrine, but this is only one step further from prose than the best things in Pope's Essay on Criticism. Where we find Gray the true, the sincere poet, is in the meditative stanzas of the Ode on Eton, and above all in the imperishable Elegy. Poetry, Milton said, should be "simple, sensuous, and passionate," and Gray seldom stands the test. But in the opening stanzas of the Ode on Eton we have an emotion the regret for early youth-which is simple, common to many of mankind; and we have it associated with definite sense perceptions, the towers of Windsor and the rich beauty of the Thames and its banks. Passion is lacking; and in the latter part of the ode we have a spurious rhetoric in the detailed forecast of the "fury Passions" that are to prey upon the "little victims" (in other words, the Eton boys) when they reach manhood. It is in the Elegy that Gray is wholly exempt from insincerity. In its magical opening we have again the simplicity of great art in the broad, bold strokes, the appeal to common experience, the full sensuous realisation of the scene conveyed, and beyond that, a passion of feeling, a whole nature vibrant. What the passion is under which the nature vibrates, we do not learn at once. We follow through stanza after stanza of magnificent embroidery upon the theme, as thought after thought rises to the mind's surface, presented only to be dismissed. Thus are evoked the pageantry of death in other places, "pealing anthems" under long drawn aisle and fretted vault; the wastage of life in “ village Hampdens" and "mute inglorious Miltons"; the glory that might have been, the compensations for its lack in the cool sequestered vale. All these thoughts are alien to the heart of the poem; it is with a "Yet" that we reach the central emotion, that passionate clinging to the known and homely, that passionate repugnance from the chilly silence, which no man was more likely to understand than Johnson, and which is rendered in stanzas that he who disliked Gray — has praised once and for all in a famous passage: - In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common-sense of readers, uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. The "Churchyard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas, beginning "Yet even these bones," are to me original; I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame and useless to praise him. CHAPTER XII THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY NOVELISTS HUMAN beings in a civilised society have everywhere and always demanded to be entertained by fiction; and in England the demand had been met most successfully by dramatic fiction, for which the genius of the race, in a brilliant period, had shown itself specially favourable. After the Puritan influence, hostile to the theatre, had become, what it has never wholly ceased to be, the dominant characteristic of English life, fiction was still called for, and instead of going to see plays, people read them. But in so far as a play is the telling of a story, it needs to be acted for its full effect; and a great field lay open for the writer of a story who, instead of casting it into dramatic form, would tell it primarily as a narrative; describing what on the stage would be seen enacted, suggesting a background by words, and interpolating dramatic dialogue when occasion offered. Defoe, as we have seen, did this; yet not for a long time was the lesson really grasped; and the novel, in so far as it is a story of domestic interest hinging on a love affair, was born, so to say, by accident. Samuel Richardson, a fat, short, elderly bookseller |