Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer, And weep the more because I weep in vain." "It will easily be perceived that the only part of this sonnet which is of any value is the lines printed in italics; it is equally obvious that except in the rhyme and in the use of the single word 'fruitless' for 'fruitlessly,' which is so far a defect, the language of these lines does in no respect differ from that of prose." I think this criticism a little ungracious, for it would not be easy to find many sonnets (even of Wordsworth's own) with five first-rate verses out of the fourteen. But what is most curious is that Wordsworth should not have seen that this very sonnet disproves the theory of diction with which he charges him. I cannot find that he had any such theory. He does, indeed, say somewhere that the language of the age is never the language of poetry, which if taken as he understood it is true, but I know not where Wordsworth found his "reasonings." Gray by the language of the age meant the language of conversation, for he goes on to say, "Except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose." Gray's correspondence with Mason proves that he had no such theory. Let a pair of instances suffice. "There is an affectation in so often using the old phrase 'or ere' for 'before.'" "Intellect is a word of science and therefore inferior to any more common word." Wordsworth should have had more sympathy with a man who loved mountains as well as he, and not wholly in the eighteenthcentury fashion either. "Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff," writes Gray from the Grande Chartreuse, "but is pregnant with religion and poetry." That was Wordsworth's own very view, his ownty-downty view one is sometimes tempted to call it, when he won't let anybody else have a share in it. After a journey in Scotland: "The Lowlands are worth seeing once, but the mountains are ecstatic and ought to be visited in pilgrimage once a year. None but those monstrous creatures of God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror. A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen that have not been among them; their imagination can be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, floweringshrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet-ditches, shell-grottoes, and Chinese rails." Sir James Mackintosh says that Gray first traced out every picturesque tour in Britain, and Gray was a perpetual invalid. He discovered the Wye before Wordsworth, and floated down it in a boat, "near forty miles, surrounded with ever-new delights; " nay, it was he who made known the Lake region to the Lakers themselves. Wordsworth, I can't help thinking, had a little unconscious jealousy of Gray, whose fame as the last great poet was perhaps somewhat obtrusive when Wordsworth was at the University. His last word about him is in a letter to Gillies in 1816. 66 'Gray failed as a poet not because he took too much pains and so extinguished his animation, but because he had very little of that fiery quality to begin with, and his pains were of the wrong sort. He wrote English verses as his brother Eton schoolboys wrote Latin, filching a phrase now from one author and now from another. I do not profess to be a person of very various reading; nevertheless, if I were to pluck out of Gray's tail all of the feathers which I know belong to other birds, he would be left very bare indeed. Do not let anybody persuade you that any quantity of be produced by mere felicity; or that an immortal style can be the growth of mere genius. Multa tulit fecitque' must be the motto of all those who are to last." 1 good verses can What would be left to Gray after this plucking would be his genius, for genius he certainly had, or he could not have produced the effect of it. The gentle Cowper, no bad critic also he, was kinder. "I have been reading Gray's works," he says, "and think him the only poet since Shakespeare entitled to the character of sublime. Perhaps you will remember that I once had a different opinion of him. I was prejudiced." In spite of unjust depreciation and misapplied criticism, Gray holds his own and bids fair to last 1 I need not point out that Wordsworth is a little confused, if not self-contradictory in this criticism. I will add only two quotations to show that accidents will happen to the best-regulated poets: "At distance heard the murmur of many waterfalls not audible in the day-time." - Gray to Wharton, 1769. "A soft and lulling sound is heard Of streams inaudible by day."— White Doe. Gray probably guided Wordsworth to the vein of gold in Dyer. as long as the language which he knew how to write so well and of which he is one of the glories. Wordsworth is justified in saying that he helped himself from everybody and everywhere- and yet he made such admirable use of what he stole (if theft there was) that we should as soon think of finding fault with a man for pillaging the dictionary. He mixed himself with whatever he tookan incalculable increment. In the editions of his poems, the thin line of text stands at the top of the page like cream, and below it is the skim-milk drawn from many milky mothers of the herd out of which it has risen. But the thing to be considered is that, no matter where the material came from, the result is Gray's own. Whether original or not, he knew how to make a poem, a very rare knowledge among men. The thought in Gray is neither uncommon nor profound, and you may call it beatified commonplace if you choose. I shall not contradict you. I have lived long enough to know that there is a vast deal of commonplace in the world of no particular use to anybody, and am thankful to the man who has the divine gift to idealize it for me. Nor am I offended with this odor of the library that hangs about Gray, for it recalls none but delightful associations. It was in the very best literature that Gray was steeped, and I am glad that both he and we should profit by it. If he appropriated a fine phrase wherever he found it, it was by right of eminent domain, for surely he was one of the masters of language. His praise is that what he touched was idealized, and kindled with some virtue that was not there before, but came from him. And he was the most conscientious of artists. Some of the verses which he discards in deference to this conscientiousness of form which sacrifices the poet to the poem, the parts to the whole, and regards nothing but the effect to be produced, would have made the fortune of another poet. Take for example this stanza omitted from the "Elegy" (just before the Epitaph), because, says Mason, "he thought it was too long a parenthesis in this place." "There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, Gray might run his pen through this, but he could not obliterate it from the memory of men. Surely Wordsworth himself never achieved a simplicity of language so pathetic in suggestion, so musical in movement as this. Any slave of the mine may find the rough gem, but it is the cutting and polishing that reveal its heart of fire; it is the setting that makes of it a jewel to hang at the ear of Time. If Gray cull his words and phrases here, there, and everywhere, it is he who charges them with the imaginative or picturesque touch which only he could give and which makes them magnetic. For example, in these two verses of "The Bard: 66 Amazement in his van with Flight combined, |