Gosse's Study of Gray

IF Spenser be the poet’s poet, Gray is the poet of scholars, and it was a wise judgment which gave him into the hands of a critic who is so scholarly in his work as Mr. Gosse. In dealing with Gray one feels that a very fragile yet firm and fine genius is to be handled, and that for this there is needed both delicacy of touch and decision. The eighteenth century writers invite frankness of manner in discussing them ; the limitations under which they wrote give a definiteness to their work, and one is not likely to perplex one’s self by a search for very occult influences. Gray was perhaps the most elusive of these writers, unless Goldsmith be excepted, and Mr. Gosse has shown his critical power by expending his force not upon Gray’s poetry, but upon Gray himself. He has applied a solvent to the faint lines in which the poet’s life has formally been written, and given us a clear and exceedingly interesting impression. The revelation of Gray’s character is made by so many delicate touches that the reader is scarcely aware how finished the portrait is until he has completed the book. There are no formal summaries by which one is deluded into the notion that he has acquired a rounded and symmetrical conception of the poet, but there are many suggestive passages which throw a sudden and penetrating light.

Such, for example, is Mr. Gosse’s shrewd remark: “ There never was a professional poet whose mode was so thoroughly that of the amateur.” It is not in the fastidiousness of the poet, nor in his paucity of composition, that this sentence finds it justification, but in the occasional character of his writing. Gray was a scholar of refined thought who was quite content to pass his life as a collegiate recluse, and treated his muse as a gentle friend, not as an exacting mistress. He toyed with poetry, and yet respected it too highly to treat it carelessly. The salvation of Gray from the amateur’s fate was in his poetic vision, which in a purblind age enabled him to see into the heart of things, and to read nature, for instance, as no one about him seemed to do. Mr. Gosse has pointed out with great felicity this power which Gray had, as when he says that " he reminds us of the early landscapes of Turner, with their unaffected rendering of nature; ” and he quotes with admirable effect Gray’s description of a solitary walk by Derwentwater.

The sensitiveness which so largely controlled the movements of the poet is shown in its various phases; nowhere, we think, has Mr. Gosse deliberately referred to this as the determining feature of Gray’s nature, but he has given abundant material from which to form the judgment. The want of spirits in his youth was the shrinking of a sensitive nature from the ignoble domestic scenes which confronted him; the estrangement from Walpole was the complex result, we are confident, of a sensitiveness which had suddenly found an active exercise in a wild and unsuspected natural beauty, and had been thrown back upon itself by the absence of sympathy from his traveling companion. Gray was stirred deeply for the first time in his life, and yet was forced into daily companionship with one who suited him well enough in his idler moments. The precise form which the irritation assumed and its immediate occasion are of less importance. The physical fear of fire which had so grotesque an expression all through his later life was a manifestation of an extreme bodily sensitiveness, and the timidity and dislike of whatever assailed him as coarse and vulgar were further signs of a nature very high-strung. The quickness with which he attracted other men to himself, notably in the cases of Bonstetten and Norton Nicholls, was the result of the incessant movement of Gray’s antennae, which were forever thrust before him ; and the infrequency of his poetic ventures may be ascribed with some confidence to his spiritual eremitism in an age given over to conventions. It was Gray’s fortune to be gifted with a poetic power in an unpoetic time without the complementary gift of an aggressive nature. He shrank, he did not push forward. There was a loneliness in his life which seemed to have a fatally benumbing influence over him. Whatever field he entered was one in which he found himself alone. He was a lover of nature amongst men who were only scared or bored by nature. He perceived the vitality of Gothic architecture when to others the art was only barbaric rudeness. He saw into the poetic value of the ballad and the Runic rhyme, not with a scholar’s but with a seer’s vision. He anticipated later phases of literary growth, but after all he did little to stimulate that growth, or to initiate movements.

It is true that when one looks more closely into the development of English life and art he is disposed to give greater significance to Gray’s representative position, and to regard him as one of the voices that foretold a new era; yet it would seem to be vain to seek any confirmation of this view in Gray’s consciousness. He seems to us the most unwilling of poets. The disdain with which he refused any compensation for his verse, as if he were a gentleman and not a poet, was an amusing characteristic, but it was only one sign of that spirit which marked the whole of Gray’s life. He was an exquisite instrument, kept in tune with great care, which was quite content to utter its harmonies for its own gratification. An audience was not needed and not greatly wanted.

This and much more is the outcome of Mr, Gosse’s pleasant book. It was necessary to deliver Gray from the Philistines who had heretofore had him in charge. His own letters remained to do him justice, but Mr. Gosse has now made the trivial incidents of his life, as preserved by other biographers, to yield their true meaning; and he has diligently sought for other biographic material, so that in this monograph we have for the first time a sympathetic and just presentation of one of the most interesting figures in English literary history. It is pleasant to learn that Mr. Gosse is to answer his own pertinent question, and to give us a complete edition of Gray’s writings.