THOMAS GRAY. Gray's father, a money-scrivener, is said to have shamefully neglected his duties as the head of a family, being a thorough profligate. His mother, to support herself, assisted by her sister, opened a milliner's shop in Cornhill, London; and there the future poet was born in 1716, on Dec. 26th (so Mitford; Dr Johnson says Nov. 26th, inaccurately-would that it was the only inaccuracy in his Life of Gray!) The attachment between Gray and his mother was thus especially close and tender, and so continued to the end of her honoured life. No doubt it was made the more so by the fact that of twelve children Thomas was the only one that survived infancy. Through the help of his mother's brother, then an Assistant-Master at Eton, Gray had the advantage of being educated at that school, and in due course, in 1734, proceeding to Cambridge, to Peter-House, or St Peter's College, about the same time his school-fellows Horace Walpole and West went up, the former to King's College, the latter to Christ Church, Oxford. In 1738 (the year of Johnson's London) Gray quitted the University with the intention of studying Law at the Inner Temple; but no such special career was to be his. His income presently receiving additions from private sources, he found himself possessed of a life-long competency. Thus placed above the fear of penury, he was enabled to devote himself altogether to self-culture. He travelled in France and Italy, amongst the English Lakes, in Wales, in Scotland; he studied Architecture, Botany, the Classics of Greece and Italy and England, besides other literatures, Music, Painting, Zoology, History, Heraldry; in all ways he cultivated and refined his mind. He produced a few finished poems; he wrote delightful letters; he formed many worthy literary schemes. Such was Gray's life. He resided mainly at Cambridge. In 1768 he was appointed Professor of Modern History there, but he never delivered any lectures. There he died, July 20th, 1771. He was buried in Stoke Pogis churchyard, by the side of his mother, whom he had had "the misfortune to survive" (to use his own sad words inscribed on her tombstone) some eighteen years. It might have been happy for Gray, had he felt some of those sharp goads which perpetually impelled his contemporary Johnson to action. He was certainly the most accomplished man of his time, and he was something much more than accomplished. His learning was not only wide but deep; his taste, if perhaps too fastidious, was pure and thorough; his genius was of no mean degree or order; his affections were of the truest and sincerest. What he wanted was productive impulse; his mind was insatiable in acquiring, it was tardy in creating. In this respect his cloistered life was seriously harmful. He liked neither the place nor its inhabitants, nor professed to like them, says Dr Johnson of his residence at Cambridge. Assuredly neither the place nor its inhabitants gave him that stimulus he needed. The picture his letters paint of the University of his day is dreary and dismal beyond words. So he for the most part spent his days in strenuous idleness so far as production went, his one object self-culture. He heaped up riches; in his own life he distributed but slightly, and his wealth was not of a kind that could be bequeathed. Perhaps few men of such high attainments and of such great powers have achieved so little. His career was one of unfulfilled promise. Perhaps of all our poets Milton and he were of the highest culture. In genius they differ vastly; but in this respect they are alike. The studies of Milton at Horton and in Italy from 1631 to 1639 remind one of Gray at a similar period of his life. Happily for Milton and for us the likeness ends there. Milton turned those studies, so ardently pursued, to noble political and poetical uses. Fervently as he recognized the duty of self-culture, he acknow ledged it but as a means, not as an end: "All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great Task-master's eye." See also that most noble passage in his Reason for Church Government, where he describes with what reluctance he resigned for a time, he could not say how long it might be, the darling purpose for his life for unwelcome controversies. "But were it the meanest underservice, if God by his Secretary Conscience enjoin it, it were sad for me if I should draw back.” Com. pare what is said of Gray: "He could not bear to be thought a professed man of letters, but wished to be regarded as a private gentleman who read for his amusement." But, while it is to be lamented that Gray did not do more for his own day and for posterity, let us be grateful for what he did do. That life was not lived in vain that gave us the Elegy written in a Country Churchyard. Besides this he produced some seven Odes, two Translations from the Norse, and a few other pieces of a miscellaneous sort. His fine critical taste as expressed in his letters, exercised and may exercise a beneficial influence, though the area over which it acted and acts was and is something confined. His Poems are works of refinement rather than of passion: but yet they are inspired with genuine sentiment. They are no doubt extremely artificial in form; the weight of the author's reading somewhat depresses their originality; he can with difficulty escape from his books to himself; but yet there is in him a genuine poetical spirit. His poetry, however elaborated, is sincere and truthful. If the exterior is often what Horace might have called over-filed and polished, the thought is mostly of the simplest and naturalest. When he sees the school of his youth in the distance, his eyes fill with real feeling, whatever carefully chosen phrases are on his tongue. His soul was always simple, and true, and tender, and catholic, however exquisitively select and uncommon the dialect that represents it. And even in this dialect it must be allowed that there are many felicities. It is not always cold and scholastic. often of finished beauty. It is sometimes itself tremulous with emotion. It is THE ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 1. This famous poem was begun in the year 1742, and finished in 1749. It found its way into print in this latter year, to Gray's annoyance, who thereupon published it himself in 1750. Some stanzas, written originally as part of it but afterwards rejected by the author's severe self-criticism, are given below in the course of the notes. As to the churchyard, where it was written or meditated, there is controversy; Stoke Pogis near Slough, where Gray's mother and aunt resided after his father's death, and Madingley some four miles from Cambridge, competing for the honour-Stoke Pogis perhaps with the better claims; but there is little in the poem to localize it. 2. The Elegy is perhaps the most widely known poem in our language. Many phrases and lines from it have become "household words." The reason of this extensive popularity is perhaps to be sought in the fact, that it expresses in an exquisite manner feelings and thoughts that are universal. In the current of ideas in the Elegy, there is perhaps nothing that is rare, or exceptional, or out of the common way. The musings are of the most natural and obvious character possible; it is difficult to conceive of any one musing under similar circumstances who should not muse so; but they are not the less deep and moving on this account. There are some feelings and thoughts that cannot grow old and hackneyed. The mystery of life does not become clearer, or less solemnizing and awful, for any amount of contemplation. Such inevitable, such everlasting questions as rise on the mind when one lingers in the precincts of Death can never lose their freshness, never cease to fascinate and to move. It is with such questions, that would have been commonplace long ages since if they could ever be so, that the Elegy deals. It deals with them in no lofty philosophical manner, but in a simple, humble, unpretentious way, always with the truest and broadest humanity. The poet's thoughts turn to the poor; he forgets the fine tombs inside the church, and thinks only of the "mouldring heaps" in the churchyard (see below, note on l. 13). Hence the problem that especially suggests itself, is the potential greatness when they lived, of the "rude forefathers" that now lie at his feet. He does not, and cannot solve it, though he finds considerations to mitigate the sadness it must inspire; but he expresses it in all its awfulness in the most effective language and with the deepest feeling; and his expression of it has become a living part of our language. 3. The metre of the Elegy, had been used, before Gray's time, by Sir John Davies for his Immortality of the Soul, Sir William Davenant in his Gondibert, and Dryden in his Annus Mirabilis, and others; but in no instance so happily as here by Gray. In the Elegy the quatrain has not the somewhat disjunctive and isolating effect which it has in those other works where there is continuous argument or narrative that should run on with as few metrical lets and hindrances as possible; it is well adapted to convey a series of solemn reflections, and that is its work in the Elegy. [What are the leading thoughts of the Elegy? What stanzas contain each one? many groups of stanzas are there? In what other of his poems does Gray refer to himself?] How 79. t. The curfew. See note on Il Pens. 74. It is a great mistake to suppose that the ringing of the curfew was, at its institution, a mark of Norman oppression. If such a custom was unknown before the Conquest, it only shows that the old English police was less well regulated than that of many parts of the Continent, and how much the superior civilization of the Norman-French was needed. Fires were the curse of the timber-built towns of the middle ages; "Sola pestes Londoniæ sunt stultorum immodica potatio et frequens incendium." (Fitzstephen.) The enforced extinction of domestic lights at an appointed signal was designed to be a safeguard against them. How grotesque in a historical point of view are Thomson's lines: "The shiv'ring wretches at the curfew sound Dejected sunk into their sordid beds, And through the mournful gloom of ancient times Mus'd sad, or dreamt of better." Remember'd knolling a departed friend." (Comp. Marmion, III. xiii.) 3. plod. See Shakspere, All's Well that Ends Well, III. iv. 5; "Ambitious love hath so in me offended That barefoot plod I the cold ground upon." 5. [What is meant by on the sight?] 6. [Is air the subject, or the object?] 7. See note on Lyc. 28. droning dully humming, like a drone. See Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, I. iii. "But, as it seem'd, they thought (as do the swaines Which tune their pipes on sack'd Hibernia's plaines) So they send to ask the king of bees to help in their part-song; "Who condescending gladly flew along To beare the base to his well tuned song." 10. The moping owl. See Ovid's Met. v. 550, of Ascalaphus punished by Proserpine for his too keen observation: "Fœdaque fit volucris, venturi nuncia luctus, Ignavus bubo, dirum mortalibus omen." 12. reign realm; as in Pope's Iliad: = "The wrath which hurl'd to Pluto's gloomy reign The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain." 13. As he stands in the churchyard, he thinks only of the poorer people (comp. below, bassim) because the better to do lay interred inside the church. Tennyson (In Mem. x.) speaks of resting "beneath the clover sod That takes the sunshine and the rains, Or where the kneeling hamlet drains In Gray's time, and long before, and some time after it, the former resting-place was for the poor, the latter for the rich. It was so in the first instance, for two reasons: (i) The interior of the church was regarded as of greater sanctity, and all who could, sought a place in it. The most dearly coveted spot was close by the high altar. (ii) When elaborate tombs were the fashion, they were built inside the church for the sake of security, "Gay tombs" being liable to be "robb'd." (See the funeral dirge in Webster's White Devil.) As these two considerations gradually ceased to have power, and other considerations of an opposite tendency began to prevail, the inside of the church became comparatively deserted, except when ancestral reasons gave no choice. 16. [What is the form of rude here?] 17. See Par. Lost, ix. 192: "Now when as sacred light began to dawn In Eden on the humid flowers that breathed 18. Comp. Hesiod's epithet of the swallow in Works and Days, 568 (Göttling): 20. [What is the force of shall here? What would will mean ?] 21. Comp. Lucret. iii. 894-6 (Lachmann): "Jam jam non domus accipiet te læta, neque uxor Præripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent." Hor. Ep. ii. 40. Mitford refers to Thomson's Winter, 311. 22. [What is meant by ply her evening care?] This is probably the kind of phrase which led Wordsworth to pronounce the language of the Elegy unintelligible. Compare his own "And she I cherished turned her wheel 23. Comp. Burns' Cotter's Saturday Night, 21, Shelley's Revolt of Islam, viii. 4. 24. See Georg. ii. 523. 26. [What word-form in this line has now fallen out of use?] [What is meant by furrow here ?] 80. 27. afield. See Lycid. 27. 33. [What exactly is meant by the boast of heraldry?] 38. [Explain trophies.} 39. See note to Il Penser. 157. 39. aile. Fr. aile, Old Fr aisle, Lat. axilla, which means literally a winglet, or little wing. The French spelling was common in Gray's time. fretted strictly, ornamented with frets or small fillets (or bands) intersecting each other at right angles (see Glossary of Architecture); from the Fr. fréter, to cross, or interlace, as the bars of trellis-work. Etymologically, these interlacing bands or "beads" were of iron (Lat. ferrum). Ferrata in Ital. = an iron grating. See Hamlet's fine use of the word, Hamlet, II. ii. 313: "This majestical roof fretted with golden fire." Comp. Cymb. II. iv. 38. Fretful is of quite different origin. vault arched roof. The word is ultimately derived from the Lat. volvo. 40. [What is meant by swells here?] pealing. See Il Pens. 161. 41. storied. See Il Pens. 159. animated bust. Comp. Virgil's "spirantia æra," Æn. vi. 847. Bust is radically the same word with breast, through the Fr. buste, which is a weakened form of the Germ. brust. The Germ. equivalent for our bust is brust-bild. 42. [Is fleeting here an adj. or a part.? What is the difference between an adj. and a part.?] 47. Mitford quotes Ov. Ep. v. 86: Elegy? "Sunt mihi quas possint sceptra decere manus.' 48. [Is there anything at all tautological in this line? Is there in any other line of the 50. unroll Lat. revolvere, as in Hor. Ep. II. i. 223: "Cum loca jam recitata revolvimus irrevocati." So the word volume properly applies only to the old shape of books. 51. rage. See note to The Passions, 111. 53. purest ray serene. A favourite word-order with Milton. See note to Hymn Nat. 187. Mitford quotes from Hall's Contemplations: "There is many a rich stone laid up in the bowells of the earth, many a fair pearle in the bosom of the sea, that never was seene, nor never shall bee." 55. Comp. Waller's Rape of the Lock, 622. "Go, lovely rose: Tell her that's young And shuns to have her graces spy'd, That hadst thou sprung In deserts where no men abide 57. It was in 1636 that John Hampden of Buckinghamshire (a cousin of the great Cromwell) refused to pay the ship-money tax, which the misguided king was levying without the authority of the Parliament. 58. See Hist. Eng. [What is meant by the little tyrant of his fields?] |