His witty verses do not require any very minute examination. He has a keen sense of the ridiculous, and a happy knack of expression; his poems are made up of a series of epigrammatic points, very felicitously turned, but revolving too much on the double meanings of words and phrases. He has humour, but he doesn't give it free play; he compresses it into the forms of wit, where it moves hampered, like the jovial Bob Fudge in his French stays. Sometimes both idea and expression are genuinely humorous; as where he makes the bishops say, when reminded of the self-denying habits of their early predecessors,

"We think it pious, but absurd ;"

and where, in one of his letters, he complains that "nothing goes right in this world, except for those with whom every thing, please God, will go wrong in the other." This almost rivals a saying he tells of Charles Lamb's, when an elderly lady, after boring him with all the good qualities of some friend of hers, ended with, "I know him, bless him!" "Well, I don't," said Lamb; "but damn him at a hazard!"

For his social qualities we are mainly dependent on the evidence of others: but they must have been great to secure him the advantages they did. Besides his peculiar gift in singing, he had a bonhomie, a vivacity, a readiness and brilliancy of wit, and an easy familiarity with social forms, which the world found irresistible; and which took an additional attraction for English circles from their association with that sort of warmth which an Irishman or a Frenchman throws into his demeanour during the most casual intercourse, and which only seems insincere to an Englishman, because to him it is not natural unless his feelings are more deeply and permanently engaged. He was quite at home in the polished and aristocratic sphere in which he moved, and never seems to have made any false com

His

pliances to gain or keep his position there. He judged things, no doubt, somewhat too much by a worldly test; and in his mode of speaking of some of his fellow poets, men of infinitely higher genius than himself, there is some trace of an air as if he had mistaken his social for real superiority. He speaks of the difficulty of not appearing fine in "such society" as he met at Christopher North's house in Edinburgh. He makes the most of any weak point in Wordsworth. He is a little superciliously surprised that Lamb only got 1707. for his Essays of Elia; "should have thought it more," he says. He estimated that he himself had made at least 20,000l. by his writings. Still, on the whole, he carried his singular fortunes without undue elation, and, though not a man who went out of his own way to interest himself in the history or welfare of others, was a kindly and well-meaning member of the brotherhood. poetry, great as are its real shortcomings and defects when compared with the reputation it once enjoyed, has this merit, that it is original; and independently of its connection with music, it will always retain a place in the history of English literature, for it has been widely read, and has a distinctive character of its own. But its cloying assemblage of all that is most captivating to the senses, and to those emotions which lie nearest to them, can never have more than a passing interest for mature and cultivated minds. The mere jingle of words without sense will please children; glitter of fancy, vague declamation, and abstract passion, are sufficient for the next stage of development; but as the mind. advances, it asks for harmony throughout all the form and essence of a poem, and in the poet for an insight wide and deep into the concrete forms of existence, above all, into those highest ones of individual life and character.

169

THE THEORY OF POETIC EXPRESSION:

GRAY.*

[August 1854.]

OF Gray's serious poems, the Elegy alone was received with general applause during his lifetime, and alone will secure his reputation. It was published by Dodsley in 1751, and before very long passed through eleven editions. Few poems have enjoyed such universal and constant attention. It is popular because the sentiments and ideas are level to universal comprehension, and it is full of tender feeling, expressed with exquisite finish of diction and harmony of verse, and with greater simplicity of language than is to be found in his other poems for Gray often loses by the over-anxious care he bestowed on the verbal clothing of his conceptions.

In the highest mode of poetical imagination, the language and the idea are united like body and spirit, and the poet would find it hard to say which suggested the other; the whole springs complete from the forming mind, and is incapable of correction; in a second and lower mode, the mind is occupied by some vivid conception, or haunted by some image of beauty: it yearns to express it, to give it outward form and utterance-it ponders over the capacities of language, and revolves all its subtle analogies to find the true outward vestiture, which shall body forth in words to itself and

*The following formed part of a criticism in the Prospective Review for August 1854, on the Correspondence of Gray and Mason, edited by the Rev. John Mitford.

others the very thing which thus possesses the imagination. Mason's poetical power (such as it was) worked in this manner. He had creative impulse-ideas and fancies did visit him and call for expression. But they were neither of a high order nor took a firm hold upon him. He possessed neither patience nor a conscientious artistic feeling. He had few fine conceptions to be true. to, and cared little to be true to such as he had. His habits of poetical composition betray his indolence and indifference to a high standard. His thoughts, as those of any man will do with a little practice, readily flowed into verse, and his custom was to write down what occurred to him, in such language and rhythm as came readiest to hand, and to preserve this rough and hasty sketch for future correction. In one place he speaks of the practice ascribed to Racine of writing out his plays in prose before he put them in verse, and is persuaded that, had he written in English, he would have availed himself of blank verse for this purpose. He is very much mistaken. The same practice has been ascribed to several eminent dramatic writers; but their object was not to have a crude first sketch to be part used, part rejected, and by degress patched and cobbled into a poem; they desired to fix and give definiteness and precision to the conception which was to obtain poetical expression from another and different effort. Thus their system is the very reverse of his own. The one requires to build a framework of thought before it ventures on the execution, the other hastens to execution before either the thoughts or the form they should bear have been adequately conceived. Gray saw clearly the defectiveness of Mason's mode of composing, and animadverted on it, but it was too natural a result from the whole cast of his mind, for him to be capable of relinquishing it. The instance that called for Gray's stricture affords in itself a curious enough specimen of Mason's careless facility alike in producing and abandoning

his poetical offspring. Hot from the perusal of a fresh book, Keysler's "Antiquitates Selectæ, Septentrionales et Celticæ," he writes an ode, and, as usual, sends it straight away to his friend to receive a pruning and polishing from his hand. He has misgivings whether the whole thing is not wrong--whether "this sort of imagery may be employed. Will its being Celtic make it Druidical? If it will not, burn it; if it will, why scratch it ad libitum, and send it me back as soon, as possible." Gray writes back, in his bantering way, with an indolent, easy contempt, softened by humour and affection:

"Dear Mason,-Why you make no more of writing an Ode, and throwing it into the fire, than of buckling and unbuckling your shoe. I have never read Keysler's book, nor you neither, I believe; if you had taken that pains, I am persuaded you would have seen that his Celtic and his Septentrional antiquities are two things entirely distinct."

After twitting him with filling his Ode with old German mythology and imagery instead of Celtic, he goes into some minutiae of criticism, and ends with this protest against Mason's practice of drafting his poems.

These are all my little objections, but I have a greater. Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry; this I have always aimed at, and never could attain; the necessity of rhyming is one great obstacle to it: another and perhaps a stronger is, that way you have chosen of casting down your first ideas carelessly and at large, and then clipping them here and there, and forming them at leisure; this method, after all possible pains, will leave behind it in some places a laxity, a diffuseness; the frame of a thought (otherwise well invented, well turned, and well placed) is often weakened by it. Do I talk nonsense, or do you understand me? persuaded what I say is true in my head, whatever it may be in prose, for I do not pretend to write prose."

I am

The process which the much-admired Epitaph on Archbishop Drummond's daughter underwent in its development, is the culmination of this mode of manu