THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3662, 20 May 1924, Page 67

THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

[aIX RIGHTS RESaTVtn 1

HALF HOURS IN A LIBRARY

By

A. H. Grinling.

LXI. —ON GRAY AND THE ELEGY. The growth of Greater London threatens to modernise, and consequently destroy the village of Stoke I’oges or Pogis, one of the few old-world places remaining to-day in rural England. It is a place abounding in literary and historical memory, chief amongst them being the churchyard in which Gray’s elegy was written. It seems little short of desecration that the hand of the suburban builder should be violently laid upon such a spot, and that rows of suburban villas should be permitted to rear their uniform heads adjacent to the spot described by the poet, in words and phrases which have become part and parcel of our common speech: .Perhaps in tlhis neglected epot is lard Some heart once pregnant with ce lost ait fire; Hands tliat the rod ol empire might have swayed, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre. Pull many a gem of purest ray serene The dark uniathom’d caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood, Some mute ingmiluus jrnlon tiere may r,est, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood. “As for the Elegy,” says Professor Saintsbury in “The Pence of Put Augustans,” “scores, no doubt, and possibly hundreds or people im.e a any observations which they have been (or have thought themselves) obliged to make on it with some such phrase as ‘lt is, of course, vain to attempt to say anything new about it,’ and have then proceeded to attempt tlie vanity. „ Professor Saintsbury's illustrious example, T n lit- • If w-iffi • 'Vo, • n from Dr Samuel Johnson’s “Lives of the rt/Cio, .c HOUii Ot liiCll IVJLI* Al‘LliUr Waugh truly remarks, it “stands hrin, as the finest product of literary criticism in the eighteenth century—the very embodiment of the spirit and culture of its age.” Samuel Johnson was sixty years of age when he began the “Lives of the Poets,” and he was seventy-two when the work was completed. He defined poetry as “the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the aid of reason,” and in the “Lives of the Poets,” he “shows in every thought and reflection the full-orbed quality of a powerful and manly character, a typical Englishman of a strenuous and true-hearted generation.” It is this quality which renders immortal, Samuel Johnson's eulogium of Gray’s Elegy: In the character of his Elegy, I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. The ‘Churchyard’ abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas beginning ‘Yet even these bones’ are to me original. I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here, persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him. The glory of Gray’s Elegy is that it was “written in a country churchyard,” consequently the churchyard of Stoke Poges in which it was written assumes a literary importance, and any interference with its rural surroundings would amount to a national misfortune. The village of Stoke Poges is in Buckinghamshire, some twenty miles from London, and two miles north of the Slough station on the Great Western Railway. Burnham Beeches, a picturesque forest and favourite resort is three miles to the North \V est. On June Ist, 1742, the poet Gray went to Stoke Poges to visit his aunt and uncle Rogers. Gray’s father had died in the previous year in considerable financial difficulty, a circumstance whicli for a while turned the poet’s attention to the profession of the law, for which he had been originally intended. LTnder the influence of his unfortunate friend, Richard West, Gray became prolific in poetry, and it was after the death of West that the poet visited Stoke-Poges. His uncle, Mr Jonathan Rogers, died on October 21st, 1742, when Mrs Gray and her sister, Mary Antrobus, broke up their home in Cornliill, London, and joined their widowed sister Anna, at her housp in Stoke-Poges. This house, which was the poet’s home for many years, was at the West-end or northern part of the parish. “It was,” writes Mr Edmund Gosso “reached from the church from a path across the meadows, alongside the hospital, a fine brick building of the sixteenth century, and so by a lane leading out into Stoke Common. Just at the end of this lane, on the lefthand side, looking southward, with the common at its back, stood West End House, a simple farmstead of two stories, with a rustic porch before the front door, . . . It is now thoroughly altered and enlarged, and no longer contains any mark of its original simplicity. The charm of the house to the poet must have been that Burnham Beeches, Stoke Common, and Brockhurst Woods were all at hand, and within reach of the most indolent of pedestrians. So much for the poet’s dwelling; the village in which it was situated merits a

word, and again recourse is had to Mr Edmund Gosse’s monograph on Gray. “The manor of Stoke Pogis or Poges is first mentioned in a deed of 1291, and passed through the hands of a variety of eminent personages down to the great Earl of Huntingdon, in the reign of Henry VIII. The village, if such it can be called, is sparsely scattered over a wide extent of country. The church, a very picturesque structure of the fourteenth century, with a wooden spire, is believed to have been built by Sir John Molines about 1340. It stands on a little level space about four miles north of the Thames at Eton. From the neighbourhood of the church, no vestige of hamlet or village is visible, and the aspect of the place is slightly artificial like a rustic church in a park on the stage. The traveller almost expects to see the grateful peasantry of an opera, cheerfully habited, make their appearance dancing on the greensward. As he faces the church from the south, the white building, extravagantly Palladian, which lies across the meadows on his left hand, is Stoke Park, begun under the direction of Alexander Nasmyth, the landscape painter in 1789, and finished by James Wyatt, R.A., for tlie Hon. Thomas Penn, who bought the manor from the representatives of Gray’s friend, Lady Cobliam. . . Of the historical building in which Sir Christopher Hatton lived, and Sir Edward Coke died, nothing is left but fantastic chimneys, and a rough shell which is used as a stable. . . This old ruin, su full of memories, is only one of a number of ancient and curious buildings within the boundaries of Stoke Pogis.” The Elegy was begun at Stoke in October or November, 1742, continued at Stoke immediately after the funeral of Gray’s aunt, Miss Mary Antrobus, in November, 1749, and finished at Cambridge in June, 1750. Mr Gosse remarks, as “a very singular fact,” that “the death of a valued friend seems to have been the stimulus of greatest efficacy in raising Gray to the composition of poetry, and did, in fact, excite him to the completion of most of his important poems. He was a man who had a very slender hold on life himself, who walked habitually in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and whose periods of greatest vitality were those in which bereavement proved to him, that, melancholy as he was, even he had something to lose and to regret.” This leads Mr Gosse to conjecture that the beginning of tlie Elegy dates from tlie funeral of the poet's uncle, Jonathan Rogers. In “Literary By-patlis in Old England,” Mr Henry C. Shelley, an American visitor to the Homeland, pursues this subject interestingly: In tbo fulness of time Gray himself was laid to rest in the peaceful graveyard of Stoke Poges, and thus the visitor thither has the added sad pleasure of pausing by the tomb of the poet, whose verse was the motive of his pilgrimage. First to be laid in that grave was the aunt whose death he so deeply deplored, and then, four years later, there followed that tender mother to whom he owed so great a debt of affection. The inscription on the tomb, written by Gray, reads thus: “In the vault beneath are deposited, v in the hope of a joyful resurrection, the remains of Mary Antrobus. She died unmarried, November 5, 1749, aged 66. In the same pious confidence, beside her friend and sister, here sleep the remains of Dorothy Gray, widow, the careful, tender mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive her. She died March 11, 1753, aged 67.” Gray himself died in July, 1771, and in his will he left explicit instructions that his body was to be “deposited in the vault made by nay dear mother in the churchyard by Stoke Foges, near Slough, in Buckinghamshire, by her remains.” Of course, this wish was respected, but there is no inscription on the tomb to show that the poet is buried there. On the wall of the Church, however, close by, is a stone which reads: “Opposite to this stone, in the same tomb upon which he has so feelingly recorded his grief at the loss of a beloved parent, are deposited the remains of Thomas Gray, the author of the Elegy written in a country churchyard. He was buried August 6th, 1771 ” One little difference in English and American taste may be noted; in the field adjoining the churchyard on the east, a monument to the poet was erected in 1799. Mr Gosse describes it as “a heavy and hideous mausoleum, bearing a eulogistic inscription to Gray,” the work of James Wyatt, R.A. Mr Slielley calls it “a massive centotapli,” upon the four sides of which are written inscriptions. Three of these are quotations from the poet’s verses ; the fourth records that “This monument, in honour of Thomas Gray, was erected A.D. 1709, among the scenes celebrated by that great Lyric and Elegiac Poet. He died July 31, 1771, and lies unnoted, in the churchyard adjoining, under the tombstone in which he piously and pathetically recorded the interment of his aunt and lamented mother.” With proper pride and patriotism, Mr Shelley records the fact, “The cost of this monument, and the stone in the Church wall was generously borne by Mr John Penn, a grandson of the founder of Pennysylvania. At the time of their erection, and indeed for some thirty years before, Stoke Poges Manor was in the possession of the Penn family.” Mr Shelley mentions another association of Gray with Stoke Poges: Before the Elegy was printed, Horace ' Walpole appears to have handed it about in manuscript form, and one copy was seen by Lady Cobham, who was then residing at Stoke Poges Manor House. By and by the lady was surpised to find tliat the author was living: in the same parish, and she gladly availed herself of the services of two visitors to secure his acquaintance. These visitors, who were ladies, set off one dav across the fields to the farm house at West End, and not finding the poet at home, left such a message as made it compulsory for him to return the call. Out of this Incident and description of it, grew Gray’s humorous

poem entitled “A Long Story,” the closing scene of which is laid in the Manor House. It will be seen, then, how rich is tho parish of Stoke Poges in associations with the memory of Gray. From early boyhood to ripe manhood, these peaceful fields and lanes often filled his vision and ministered to his pensive spirit the tender balm of nature’s sweetest comfort. Here, too, ho experienced that love of kindred which was in part denied him in his own home, spending those “quiet autumn days of every year so peacefully in loving and being loved by those three placid old ladies at Stoke, in a warm atmosphere of musk and pot pouri.” But it is in the quiet churchyard the memory of the poet lives in its greatest intensity. So long as the pathos of lowly life appeals to the heart, so long as there is a soul not wholly lost to the charm of peaceful days spent in the “cool, sequester’d vale of life,” so long as the tender images of fading day, and unavailing reminders of the dead have power to move the spirit—so long will this God’s Acre keep freer the memory of that poet whose verse abounds with “sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.” In the chapter on “The Heights of Abraham,” in Francis Parkman’s “Montcalm and Wolfe,” there is a passage illustrating the wide influence of the Elegy; it excites the discussion as to who is the greater, the hero or the poet: “For full two hours,” writes Parkman, “the procession of boats, borne on the current, steered silently down the St. Lawrence. The stars were visible, but the night was moonless and sufficiently dark. The General was in one of the foremost boats, and near him was a young midshipman, John Robison, afterwards professor of natural philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. He used to tell in later life how Wolfe, with a low voice, repeated Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ to the officers about him. Probably it was to relieve the intense strain of his thoughts. Among the rest was the verse which his own fate was soon to illustrate ; ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’ ‘Gentlemen,’ he said as his recital ended, ‘I would rather- have written those lines than take Quebec.’ None were there to tell him that the hero is greater than the poet.” Leslie -Stephen, who makes use of the incident, adds, “Only a soldier, or author, or civilian of ultra-military enthusiasm could suppose that such a comparison involved condescension on the side of the general.” The same writer declares that only its “exquisite felicity of language” has preserved Gray’s Elegy from falling into the disrepute which has overtaken Blair’s “The Grave,” Young's “Night Thoughts,” and Hervey’s “Meditations among the Tombs.” He continues: It is a commonplace tiling to say that the power of giving freshness to commonplace is amongst the highest proofs of poetical genius. One reason is, apparently, that it is so difficult to extract the pure and ennobling element from the coarser materials in which any obvious truth comes to be embedded. The difficulty of feeling rightly is as great as the difficulty of finding a worthy utterance of the feeling. Everybody may judge of the difficulty of Gray’s task who will attend to what passes at a funeral. On such an occasion one is inclined to fancy, a priori, manners will drop all affectation and speak poetically because they will speak from their hearts; but, as a matter of fact, there is no occasion on which there is generally such a lavish expenditure of painful and jarring sentiment, of vulgarity, affectation, and insincerity; and thus Gray’s meditations stand out from other treatments of a similar theme, not merely by the technical merits of the language, but by the admirable truth and purity of the underlying sentiment. In Hazlitt's “Lectures on the English Poets,” there is a paragraph on Gray which shows Hazlitt at his best. Hazlitt regarded Gray enviously. “He bad nothing to do but to read and think and to tell his friends what he read and thought. His life was a luxurious, thoughtful dream.” Gray was always young, which causes Hazlitt to exclaim, “What a happiness never to lose or gain anything in human life by never being anything more than a looker-on.” Hazlitt’s criticism of Gray’s poems is accurate and just; it was written in 1818: Gray's Pindaric Odes are, I believe, generally given up at present; they are stately and pedantic, a kind of methodical borrowed phrenzy. But I cannot so easily give up, nor will tlie world be in any haste to part with his Elegy ‘in a Country Churchyard; it is one of the most classical productions that ever was penned by a refined and thoughtful mind, moralising on human life. Mr Coleridge (in his Literary Life) says that his friend Mr Wordsworth has undertaken to show that the language of the Elegy is unintelligible ; it has, however, been understood! The Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College is more mechanical and commonplace; but it touches on certain things about the heart that vibrate in unison to our latest breath. No one ever passes by Windsor’s “stately heights,” or sees the distant spires of Eton College below, without thinking of Gray. He deserves that we should think of him for he thoughts of others, and turned a trembling, ever-watchful ear to the “still, sad musio of humanity.”