Gosse's Edition of Gray's Works

MR. GOSSE’S own prose and verse indicate him as well equipped to undertake the editing of Gray.¹ His finished little monograph on the poet is of course the best evidence of his special qualification, but that was not needed to prove his capacity. He belongs, by virtue of his own pursuits, to that class of scholarly poets of which Gray is an eminent example; and if, by favor of his generation, his scholarship and his poetry are more distinctly made contributory to the public, he is more likely to perceive the conditions under which Gray worked. It is noticeable that those light, airy strains which one hears from a small company of contemporaneous English poets are not the careless pipings of amateur songsters, but that a substantial, if graceful, learning accompanies the poetic gift. Mr. Lang, besides his direct translations, has published a volume of studies in myths, and is already crowned with controversy ; Mr. Dobson finds his critical acquaintance with the Queen Anne period called into requisition by the syndics of the Clarendon Press; and Mr. Gosse himself has given abundant evidence of his familiarity with the history of poetry in the special papers which he has prepared for Mr. Ward’s anthology, and in the lectures lately delivered in this country.

The conjunction of poetry and criticism is not uncommon ; it is indeed natural that the poet should be a very severe critic of himself. Poetry and scholarship also have frequently been joined in one person ; for an art which deals in spiritual material and requires such delicate tools of words is pretty sure to find both suggestion and solace in other literary art. The mass of Gray’s work before us offers a striking illustration of the subordination of the poet to the scholar. Of the four volumes containing it, one is occupied wholly with notes on Aristophanes and Plato; two are filled with letters, which show the scholar rather than the poet; and the one which contains the distinctly poetical product shares the contents with journals, essays, and a number of purely academic exercises in Latin and Greek verse. The actual quantity of Gray’s English verse which Mr. Gosse has scraped together is comprised in less than a hundred and fifty pages.

When one comes to read these few pages, and asks how much is so exclusively Gray’s that literature would be positively poorer for its loss, the amount is still further reduced. The Elegy, a few odes, and here and there a line are imperishable. It is an easy prophecy to make that they will always be read. There is scarcely a better witness to the essential virtue of quality as against quantity in art. Here was Gray, a most accomplished man, who had the divine spark. He gently blew upon it, and there blazed up an undying flame ; then he let the fire smoulder. It made his own hearth a pleasant one, — that was all he cared for. His critical notes upon literature were clearly for his owm amusement. He published hardly any prose, but his admiring friends printed after his death all they could lay hands on. These essays and analyses and notes are just such literary work as a dilettante scholar enjoys for its own sake. To read his author, note-book in hand, to indulge in learned little dissertations, and to see his manuscript volumes increase in number is to appease any troublesome literary conscience which may annoy him with suggestions of talents in napkins. Gray was not an intellectual idler; he was an intellectual sybarite. He found a snug corner in a college, and purred.

We cannot wax very enthusiastic over Gray’s letters. They are graceful, they are sometimes touched with a gentle playfulness, and they often show a fine insight,—for the poet had a true eye, — but they are after all thin and wearisome. They lack the full flavor which comes with a rich, operative life. Think of the overflow in letters from Walter Scott! They do not show the pensive charm of individuality which makes Cowper’s letters touch the sensibilities, and they have not even the wicked cleverness of Walpole’s correspondence. Still, they characterize the writer quite completely; for they reflect his easy saunter through life, and they betray something of that winning grace which made Gray so delightful a companion, and even now attaches one to him as by a fine personal acquaintance.

It was worth while to make a critical edition of Gray, and one feels instinctively the need that he should be treated in any such work with extreme conscientiousness. One does not put a delicate bit of Sevres porcelain or of Spode upon a machine-made corner bracket, and there is a fitness in things which makes it eminently proper that Gray should be fastidiously edited. The reader of these books, therefore, follows Mr. Gosse in his punctilious treatment with a gentle satisfaction. He is not surprised, but well pleased, that Mr. Gosse should have made diligent search for original manuscripts, and should have copied scrupulously every scrap, instead of taking on trust even Mitford’s work. He feels a righteous indignation against the profane Mason, and enjoys a mild glow of satisfaction as he watches Mr. Gosse, in his imagination, pounce upon a hitherto unknown pair of verses. Mr. Gosse is frank in his statement of his work, and does not set up any unreasonable claims. His air is that of a scholar who in his weaker moments might have a passion for bricabrac, a half-amused, sub-conscious sense that the work he is about, while highly desirable, will be regarded somewhat as an idle task. We wonder if the shade of a thought ever crossed his mind that the infinite pains he was bestowing upon the accuracy of the text of Gray’s casual prose was more satisfactory to his own critical standard than essential to English literature. However that may be, there is a solid pleasure to the literary student in seeing some one else perform a labor like this with such unfaltering fidelity. To sit with the first of these four volumes in hand, reading Gray’s chary lines, and to turn now and then to Mr. Gosse’s Gray in the English Men of Letters series for the editor’s fine comment and judgment on the several poems, is to repeat in one s own experience the kind of pleasure which we fancy Gray himself would have valued highly.