THOMAS GRAY. 1716-1771. I. Gray was born in 1716, in a decade when Addison and Pope, Steele and Swift, were delighting the English public with their keen wit and their ironic worldly wisdom. He died in 1771, five years before the American Declaration of Independence, and eighteen years before the Fall of the Bastille in France. His life thus covered the central portion of the eighteenth century. It was a period when no great faith or hope was exciting the world, when people admired correctness rather than originality, and when English letters inclined rather to prose than to poetry. Dr. Johnson was in London, playing the rôle of literary dictator; in his hands and in those of Oliver Goldsmith and others, periodical journals continued the tradition established in Queen Anne's day by Addison and Steele. The novel, in the hands of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett, was expressing contemporary life with a new breadth, zest, and freedom. Over on the Continent, Voltaire and Diderot were flashing a cold light across the age. Lessing, the great rationalistic critic, flourished in Germany. Far in the North, a man quite apart from his century, the scer and mystic. Emanuel Swedenborg was bearing firm witness to much that the spirit of the times most scornfully ignored. Jean Jacques Rousseau, a restless genius, full of passion destined to stir almost at once a new life in England, was, it is interesting to notice, almost an exact contempo rary of Gray: his Nouvelle Héloise appeared in 1760, ten years after the Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Poets, at this time, were few and far between. Apart from Oliver Goldsmith, the only English poet of real importance besides Gray himself was Gray's brother in spirit, Collins. "A sort of spiritual east wind," says Matthew Arnold, "was at that time blowing"; we shall probably not be wrong if we agree with him in accounting by this prevalent atmosphere for the slightness in quantity of Gray's production and for the impression it conveys of a man stirred by deeper emotions than he can express. Gray was a scholar-poet.1 A friend wrote, "Mr. Gray was perhaps the most learned man in Europe," and the claim appears to have been just. The poet was at home in every branch of history: he was an unwearied student of metaphysics and politics, an eager antiquarian, and he had a fine taste in "painting, prints, architecture, and gardening." We know him to have been an ardent student of the natural sciences as his age conceived them, a fine and fastidious lover of the classics, and an omnivorous reader in many languages. In short, he represents that union of wide culture and sound scholarship which, as specialization increases, is becoming increasingly difficult to attain, but which marked to a rare degree a few of the distinguished men of the eighteenth century. It is quite fitting that we see a man of such tastes and acquirements against the background of the great 1 It is interesting to notice, as Matthew Arnold suggests in another connection, quoting from Sainte Beuve, "how often we see the alliance, singular as it may at first sight appear, of the poetical genius with the genius for scholarship and philology." university where he spent his life. Gray's uneventful biography may be briefly chronicled. He was born of simple folk his mother and aunt, to both of whom he was sincerely attached, kept a milliners' shop in London. The father was apparently half insane, but the women of the family managed to give the clever boy the education of an English gentleman, at Eton and at Cambridge. In the eighteenth century, the English universities were hardly great centres of intellectual activity. The life in them was rather dull and languid; the education was stereotyped, confined to mediæval lines, and not nearly so stimulating as it is today. But the beautiful old town presented then as now its noble buildings and wide sweeps of greensward dotted by great trees and it had in its keeping that great gift which modern universities offer all too rarely, the gift of scholastic leisure. Here Gray's life was to be passed. But first he knew for three years the privilege that has always been deemed essential to the training of an English scholar,-extended travel on the Continent. In 1739, he went to Europe as the guest of his school friend, Horace Walpole. Walpole, the son of Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister, was an erratic, clever, rest less, superficial man. He is known in English literature as the author of many sprightly letters which throw much light on his time, and of an extraordinary story, The Castle of Otranto, one of the landmarks of the Romantic Revival. Before very long Gray and Walpole disagreed, and Gray returned to England alone, after a three years' absence, to settle down in his university. After a few years he renewed his relation with Walpole; in time he made many other friends, especially, as he grew older, among younger men. He had indeed a rare capacity for warm friendship; and we may agree with a Swiss friend of his named Bonstetten that Gray would have been a happier man and have written more poetry had he married and known the joys of fatherhood. However, the semi-monastic life at the university suited his tastes very well. He held at one time the professorship of Poetry, but, according to a curious fashion of the times, never gave any lectures. He was offered, and declined, the laureateship. There is nothing further to record in outward events, except his death, which occurred in 1771. Gray lived somewhat apart from the other literary men of his day. He declined, for instance, to meet Dr. Johnson; and the surly old dictator reciprocated with an unreasonable distaste for his poetry. But Gray's aloofness from his contemporaries was more than external: he really did undergo different experiences from theirs. They were sons of the pseudo-classic age; their great liking was for the literature of Rome and for the French books formed upon it: Gray had a fine appreciation of classical literature, but his affinity was rather for the Greek than for the Roman. They repudiated with scorn and impatience all that was "Gothicke": Gray was fascinated by Norse, Celtic and medieval literature, that is, by the remote, primitive, and rude. Few of his contemporaries cared to stir often out of London: Gray was one of the first men to be sensitive to the beauty of wild nature, and to feel toward mountains and precipices somewhat as Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Ruskin taught the nineteenth century to feel. The men of his day still used exclusively heroic couplets: Gray enjoyed and experimented with finely wrought lyrical forms. No wonder that he withdrew within himself. His instinctive reserve was increased by an inclination to a constitutional melancholy, or "leucocholy,"-as he called it, a mild "white" depression that at times threatened to inhibit his powers. He liked to write: it was, as he told Walpole, his greatest pleasure. But freedom and power seldom visited him, and when they did, made short and elusive stay. Profoundly stirred at times by the instincts of the coming age, he was ill at ease between the limitations of his own nature and the critical canons of his day. He allowed few men to penetrate his intimacy, but those few loved him keenly and honored him truly: and his reticent figure, while it still leaves the majority indifferent, will always be especially attractive to those to whom it appeals at all. II. Swinburne said that the Muse gave birth to Collins: she only gave suck to Gray. Yet in spite of this dictum we must accept the statement of Mr. Gosse that Gray is the most important poetical figure in our literature between Pope and Wordsworth. This is partly due to the preciseness with which his work represents the transition from an earlier period to that which was to follow. In his scant but highly finished achievement we can recognize clearly the "notes" of successive poetic schools, and one of the charms of these poems for the scholarly reader is the various literary associations which they evoke. Yet even while we perceive the sequence of associations, we realize that we are listening to no mere echoes of other men. Gray's genius was dis |