Yesterday the sullen year Saw the snowy whirlwind fly; "See the wretch, that long has tossed And breathe and walk again; The meanest flowret of the vale, To him are opening Paradise." Against the right of Gray to be considered one of the leading English men of letters no more stringent argument has been produced than is founded upon the paucity of his published work. It has fairly been said that the springs of originality in the brain of a great inventive genius are bound to bubble up more continuously and in fuller volume than could be confined within the narrow bounds of the poetry of Gray. But the sterility of the age, the east wind of discouragement steadily blowing across the poet's path, had much to do with this apparent want of fecundity, and it would be an error to insist too strongly on a general feature of the century in this individual case. When we turn to what Gray actually wrote, although the bulk of it is small, we are amazed at the originality and variety, the freshness and vigour of the mind that worked thus tardily and in miniature. As a poet Gray closes the period we have been discussing in the present chapter, and then passes beyond it. His metrical work steadily advances: we have the somewhat cold and timid odes of his youth; we proceed to the superb Elegy, in which the Thomsonian school reaches its apex, and expires; we cross over to the elaborate Pindaric odes, in which Gray throws off the last shackles of Augustan versification, and prepares the way for Shelley; and lastly, we have the purely romantic fragments of the close of his life, those lyrics inspired by the Edda and by Ossian, in which we step out of the eighteenth century altogether, and find ourselves in the full stream of romanticism. In no sketch of the genius of Gray, however slight, can we afford to ignore the range and singular fulness of his intellectual acquirements. He was described by one well qualified to judge as being in his time "perhaps the most learned man in Europe.” His knowledge of Greek literature, and especially Greek poetry, was as deep as it was subtle; he was equally keen in his study of all that suited his own peculiar habits of mind in the authors of modern Europe, and when he was already advanced in life he mastered Icelandic, at that time a language almost unknown even in continental Scandinavia. His tendency of mind was to be habitually dejected; he was solitary, and a hypochondriac. Against this constitutional melancholy, intellectual activity was his great resource, and his favourite saying was, "to be employed is to be happy." We are fortunately able to follow the development of this exquisite and sequestered mind in the copious series of his letters to his private friends, first imperfectly collected in 1775; in this remarkable correspondence, which yields to none in the language in brightness and elegance, we observe the movements of the fastidious brain and melancholy conscience, illuminated and gilded by the light of such spontaneous humour as the sprightlier poems of the writer ought to have prepared us for. Among the writings of Gray it is unquestionable that the Churchyard Elegy stands first. In other poems he has during brief passages displayed higher qualities than are illustrated here, but in no second work is the noble tone of tenderness and distinction preserved at such a uniform level of perfection. By credit of this single piece Gray stands easily at the head of all the English elegiac poets, and, as Mr. Swinburne puts it, "holds for all ages to come his unassailable and sovereign station." Encrusted as it is with layers upon layers of eulogy, bibliography, and criticism, we have but to scrape these away to find the im mortal poem beneath as fresh, as melodious, as inspiring as ever. With regard to the two great Pindaric odes, criticism has by no means spoken with the same unanimity. The contemporaries of Gray found these elaborate pieces difficult to the verge of unintelligibility. Later critics, who have not pretended to find them unmeaning, have yet objected to their overblown magnificence, their excess of allegorical apparatus, and their too manifest metrical artifice. That they do not belong to the school of simplicity may be freely admitted, but there are certain themes, suggestively described by De Quincey, in the treatment of which simplicity is out of place. The Progress of Poesy and the prophetic raptures of a dying bard may be recognised as belonging to the same class of subjects as Belshazzar's Feast. The qualities rather to be regarded in these elaborate pieces of poetic art are their originality of structure, the varied music of their balanced strophes, as of majestic antiphonal choruses answering one another in some antique temple, and the extraordinary skill with which the evolution of the theme is observed and restrained. It is in this latter characteristic that Gray shows himself, as an artist, to be far superior to Collins. The student will not fail, in some of Gray's minor writings, in the sonorous Stanzas to Mr. Bentley, in the thrilling flute-like tones and nature-sketches of the fragmentary Ode on Vicissitude, in the Gothic picturesqueness of The Descent of Odin, to detect notes and phrases of a more delicate originality than are to be found even in his more famous writings, and will dwell with peculiar pleasure on those passages in which Gray freed himself of the trammels of an artificial and conventional taste, and prophesied of the new romantic age that was coming. The faults of Gray's poetry are obvious, especially in his earlier writing; they are the results of an exaggerated taste for rhetoric and for allegory. But the main features of his work are such that we may frankly acknowledge him to have succeeded when he tells us that "the style I have aimed at is extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical." CHAPTER VIII THE NOVELISTS THERE is nothing offensive to the dignity of literary history in acknowledging that the most prominent piece of work effected by literature in England during the eighteenth century is the creation, for it can be styled nothing less, of the modern novel. In the seventeenth century there had been a very considerable movement in the direction of prose fiction. The pastoral romances of the Elizabethans had continued to circulate; France had set an example in the heroic stories of D'Urfé and La Calprenède, which English imitators and translators had been quick to follow, even as early as 1647. The Francion of Sorel and the Roman Bourgeois of Furetière (the latter, published in 1666, of especial interest to students of the English novel) had prepared the way for the exact opposite to the heroic romance, namely, the realistic story of everyday life. Bunyan and Richard Head, Mrs. Behn and Defoe-each had marked a stage in the development of English fiction. Two noble forerunners of the modern novel, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, had inflamed the curiosity and awakened the appetite of British readers; but, although there were already great satires and great romances in the language, the first quarter of the eighteenth century passed away without revealing any domestic genius in prose fiction, any master of the workings of the human heart. Meanwhile the drama had decayed. The audiences which had attended the poetic plays of the beginning and the comedies of close of the seventeenth century now found nothing on the boards of the theatre to satisfy their craving after intellectual excitement. The descendants of the men and women who had gone out to welcome the poetry of Shakespeare and the wit of Congreve were now rather readers than playgoers, and were most ready to enjoy an appeal to their feelings when that appeal reached them in book form. In the playhouse, they came to expect bustle and pantomine rather than literature. This decline in theatrical habits prepared a domestic audience for the novelists, and accounts for that feverish and apparently excessive anxiety with which the earliest great novels were awaited and received. Meanwhile, the part taken by Addison and Steele in preparing for this change of taste must not be overlooked, and the direct link between Addison, as a picturesque narrative essayist, and Richardson, as the first great English novelist, is to be found in Pierre de Marivaux (1688-1763), who imitated the Spectator, and who is often assumed, though somewhat too rashly, to have suggested the tone of Pamela. Into this latter question we shall presently have need to inquire again. It is enough to point out here that when the English novel did suddenly and irresistibly make its appearance, it had little in common with the rococo and coquettish work which had immediately preceded it in France, and which at first, even to judges so penetrating as the poet Gray, was apt to seem more excellent, because more subtle and refined. The rapidity with which the novel became domiciled amongst us, and the short space of time within which the principal masterpieces of the novelists were produced, are not more remarkable than the lassitude which fell upon English fiction as soon as the first great generation had passed away. The flourishing period of the eighteenth-century novel lasted exactly twenty-five years, during which time we have to record the publication of no less than fifteen eminent works of fiction. These fifteen are naturally divided into three groups. The first contains Pamela, Joseph Andrews, David Simple, and Jonathan Wild. In these books the art is still somewhat crude, and the science of fiction incom |