… [William Collins and Thomas Gray are] connected with the school of Dryden and Pope by a certain artificial or conventional note in their diction, by a certain want of frank Naturalism; so that, even in their beautiful work, a note of commonplace is heard, a prosaic note. This is less in Collins than in Gray, but, in its occurrence in the poetry of both, they are together. The juxtaposition of their names, at this point, is not unfitting. At another point they are also together. They both went back in search of Nature and Beauty, not to Horace for an impulse to satirical poetry, or indeed to any of the Romans, not even to Vergil, but to the great nobility, simplicity and solid art of the Greek poets of the finer time—Gray more than Collins, but Collins with equal determination and an equal reverence for the Greek mastery and excellence. "Let us return," they said, "to the best masters, in order to know best how to shape our own work into beauty and dignity and exquisiteness." They did not reach the excellence they admired, but their aspiration had a profound effect on the career of the larger number of the English poets of the nineteenth century. Men rejected the artificial Classicism, with its limiting rules, of Pope, and pursued, not only after the noble, simple and passionate excellence of the Greek work, but also after the measured, temperate, selective, careful exquisiteness of the phrasing of a poet like Vergil. Moreover, they endeavoured to combine with this emulation of the classic excellence the love of the beautiful, as best disclosed in a close but ideal representation of Nature; both in the soul of man and in the images of the natural world. It was as yet only an endeavour, but it was begun.

Collins and Gray began this movement, but they lived in a prosaic age and in an age which imposed on them an artificial, not a natural, expression of their thoughts. And this prevented their work, under this new Greek impulse, from being as excellent as it might have been at another time in the history of literature. Had they been born after Wordsworth had restored the natural language of feeling to poetry, they would have been different poets indeed; and this is a point which, if I rightly remember, Matthew Arnold has made and laboured.

In these two ways—in a conventional diction which links them back to Pope and in a return to the spirit of the Greek classics—Collins and Gray may be considered as one. In other points, indeed, in their main poetic work and genius, they differed greatly from one another. The continual association of their names is a critical mistake. Collins had more natural art than Gray and desired it more. He saw and loved Simplicity, that gracious maid. She was taught by Nature to breathe her genuine thought, he said:

In numbers warmly pure and sweetly strong.

He paints her, in Attic robe arrayed, the meek sister of Truth. It was she, he said, who alone could justly order and arrange the flowers of poetry that Beauty had collected. Even when divine excess filled the poet's soul, it was Simplicity who could give the frenzy the true warmth; for she alone can, by her spirit of soothing, sober, tender music, raise the soul of him who reads the verse into the true temper to enjoy the verse. "The passions in hall and bower own thy power no more," and he is thinking of the dead poetry of his time:

Faint's the cold work till thou inspire the whole,

but give me Nature—simply Nature—the still, quiet, natural passion of the heart. There is my happiness; there my genius breathes with ease and loves its work:

These are the views concerning poetry he expresses in the "Ode to Simplicity." They are not the views of Gray—they are the views of Wordsworth—and Collins first struck this high note of Naturalism. Rising through all the conventional phrasing of the time, through its allegorising and personifying way of representing thought and emotion, is this natural, simple note which Collins, wiser than his age, strove to attain….

Thomas Gray, to whom we now turn, though not so true a poet as Collins, was more remarkable in the history of this poetic transition. He opened more new veins of poetry than Collins did, and he combined within himself a larger number of new tendencies of the time. Moreover, he was a man of greater knowledge than Collins; of wider sympathies; of a more conscious art; with a staid, moral, sententious philosophy of man, partly derived from Pope, of which philosophy Collins was, I imagine, a despiser; and with a pleasant humour of which Collins was incapable; a wider, more various man, but not a greater poet. At another point they also differed. Collins was feeble of character and many circumstances were against him. He fell at last into deep depression, almost bordering on madness, and his poetic vein dried up. Gray was strong and wise of character, his circumstances were happy and, though he suffered also from physical depression, this did not enfeeble his sane and steadfast mind. His powers remained undiminished to the end.

If we wish to know how this character of his bore upon, strengthened or enlarged his poetry, we cannot do better than read Matthew Arnold's essay upon him; which, though prefixed to extracts from his verse, says little or nothing concerning him as a poet, but very much concerning him as a man. Arnold's constant search in his later essays after the character, circumstances and society of the poets he discussed, in order to draw from these elements a critical estimate of their poetry, was useful work, provided it was kept within just limits. But he ran it into its extreme, and the extreme lowered his critical power. Finally it almost ruined it. Of course, the character of a poet has a great deal to do with his poetry, but it does not altogether make it. As far, however, as it does make it—as far as Gray's temper and life told on his poetry—we may let them alone. What Arnold has said of them could not be better said. But we must, in speaking of his poetry, mark especially the place he occupies in the growth of naturalist and romantic poetry, during this transition period.

First, an excellent scholar, he, far more than Collins, sought back to the great Classics, not as Pope did, to transfer them into modern dress, but to drench his soul with their spirit, to emulate their temperance, their high aims, their precision and clearness and, above all, their wide view of human nature. He studied them as models, but he used his study of them on his own subjects. No poet who cared for his art neglected, after him, the classic sources, however romantically he used the results of his study. Gray and Collins learned the high secrets and methods of their art from the Greeks; but the new freedom of their spirit not only prevented them from imitation, but also urged them into individual creation. They strove to assimilate the classic spirit but to use it in their own way.

Secondly, like Collins, and with greater industry, he studied the old poets of England. He felt how close and vital was the connexion between the ancient poets and the new poetry of his own day. He knew his Chaucer well. He wrote an essay on Lydgate. He loved the great Elizabethans—Spenser, Shakespeare and the rest. He read his Milton continuously. He projected a history of English poetry; and one regrets, near as he was to Dryden and Pope, that he did not trace their influence and fix their place in English poetry.

In doing this, he was continually in contact, not with artificial, but with high imaginative and passionate work, and also with a noble Naturalism, as far as Naturalism was concerned with human nature—a Naturalism freer, bolder, more universal, but less temperate than the Greek, a Naturalism which was always passing into Romanticism. And this continual contact with imagination and passion set him largely free from the power of the artificial school, and enabled him to push forward the new life in poetry. When we read his "Ode on the Progress of Poesy"—one of his fine things—we see how truly he tried to drink of these ancient springs, how fully he was conscious of the continuity of English Poetry.

Nevertheless, and this is a third matter, he was held back, by his nearness to the artificial and prosaic poetry of Dryden and Pope, from getting all out of these springs that he might otherwise have got. Neither imagination nor passion had its perfect work in him. His natural description, his criticism of life, his contemplative spirit, his melancholy, were, in his poetry, modified away from the natural expression of them, from imaginative simplicity, by the conventional school in which he had been educated. Again and again the commonplace and meaningless diction of the period spoils, or seems to spoil, the grace of his verse. Its sentiment is sometimes faded; its sententious phrasing too usual, too sententious; its expression too carefully, too academically wrought—and passion, save in his contemplative melancholy, and even in that too obviously elaborated, is altogether wanting. Nevertheless, he almost escaped from these prosaic elements. He made a great step forward. And, so far as his backward motion as a poet is concerned, I impute his nearness to full escape from mere conventions in poetry to the fact that the man he most admired, followed and studied was not Pope, but the more masculine and forceful Dryden. Gray, even though he was a somewhat sentimental moralist, a retired contemplator of man from the shades of a university, had force, when he pleased to use it, in his poetry. Yet his plain connexion with a prosaic, non-natural age, even when he was chiefly connected with the enormous power of Dryden's giant genius, prevented him from using to their full strength the new poetic elements of his time and of his own nature.

Fourthly, he was not only a Naturalist in his study of man and the natural world, he was partly a Romantic, and pushed into a higher life the romantic elements in the transition. The first element of this Romanticism, first in point of time—its sentimental, personal melancholy—was his; and the thought-weighted, scholarly, careful representation of this element gave it, not only a stronger foundation in the spirit of the time than it had as yet possessed, but also a greater finish and art in its expression. It became more distinctly a subject for poetry; and it kept for a long time Gray's moral and philosophic touch. But this was not all he did for Romanticism. He recalled to English poetry the rude, ancient, history-crowded stories, the legends and wonders of the bardic tales of the early Britons of mediœval Wales, and of the Norse mythology. He opened out that new world of Romance, though only in short translations. He welcomed the Percy Reliques, the Celtic bric-à-brac of Macpherson's Ossian; and pitied, though he exposed, the romantic forgeries of Chatterton. Moreover, those rude romantic tales of Wales chimed in with his love of rude and savage scenery, in which he delighted to wander alone in picturesque thought. In all this he initiated a new romantic impulse, or at least gave the impulse a practical poetic form.

Fifthly, his work on Nature was not as unmixed as Thomson's nor as poetically felt as Collins'. Nature, in his poems, is always a background for humanity. It is the "most graceful ornament of poetry, but not its subject"—so he said. The youth who walks through the "Elegy in the Country Churchyard" loves the dewy morning, the rising sun, the beech at whose roots the babbling brook runs by, the glimmering stillness of the evening; but he loves them not wholly for their own sake. He loves them most because they echo the note of his imagination, contemplating the life of man. Nature, when it sympathises with his mood, is taken up into the art of Gray. In the "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," the scenery recalls his youth. The fields and winds of Thames, and the hills that look on the river, bestow on him a momentary bliss and breathe into his tired manhood the gladness of his early spring. But he leaves them at once to mourn over the gloom which slowly gathers round manhood and age. The mourning is faded—so is the verse.

It is commonplace to say.

Since sorrow never comes too late.
And happiness too quickly flies.

And this commonplace note is one too frequently found in Gray.

At other times, he moralises Nature; as in the Ode "On the Spring." He paints the insect-youth at noontide; busy, eager, floating in the liquid light:

Yet he really loved Nature. She brought to him thought, feeling, poetry and religion. And he was one of the first who made her a constant study, who sought her in her wildness, who travelled far and wide to find her solitudes. His letters are full of careful and carefully composed descriptions, not so much of the cultivated and quiet landscape he loved in the "Elegy" and the "Odes," as of the mountains, moors, dells and gorges, torrents and streams of the Lake Country, of the Welsh solitudes, of the Scottish hills. In these, though he did not sing of them, he found an impulse of his song, and thence he took a deep impression into his quiet and sane religion. When he climbed the Gorge of the Grand Chartreuse, he felt the spirit of the place, "pregnant," he said, "with poetry and religion"; and it illustrates how far in front of France this English movement towards the sentiment of wild and solitary Nature was—that a modern French critic declares that the phrase could not have been written by any Frenchman of the time either in prose or verse. Here and there, in his poetry, this natural feeling for Nature (unhumanised, unmoralised) appears, but these instances are few and far between. Nor do they ever continue. They run up at once into some comparison with, some reflection on, human life. Moreover, they want that touch of simplicity, of natural joy, which Collins had. They are overwrought by art into a want of nature. The feeling in them is worn down by academic polishing. The art is more than the imagination; and as to the conception of a life, a spirit in Nature, on the edge of which he sometimes seems to tremble, and which would at once have uplifted his verse into a higher region, it is never really reached. The artificial age still stretched its dead hand over his work on Nature. It held him back from doing all he might have done in this way; from expressing all he felt. Nevertheless he set forward the poetry of Nature. He redeemed it from the mere cataloguing of Thomson. He brought into it careful composition. He harmonised it, up to a certain point, with man. It never could again be quite neglected in poetry. He opened the way to the addition to it of natural passion. That passion was at hand, and when it came, it was like the rising of the sun on the twilight landscape of Gray. He was a forerunner of it, but the true forerunner was Collins and not Gray.

There is one more thing to say of Gray as the poet of this transition time. I have dwelt on the rising tendency towards an interest in man as man, beyond the life of cities, beyond the cultivated cliques of society; interest in nations beyond England, interest in human life in the country, where it was close to Nature—in the farmer, the peasant and the poor. Gray, in spite of his wide knowledge, of his intellectual society, of his academic remoteness from the world, was touched by that growing tendency and expressed it in the poem by which he chiefly lives; which itself will always be dear to England and justly dear; the "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard." Dryden or Pope would have been for ever incapable of writing a line of it, not from want of genius, but from want of the spirit and feeling which inspires it, from want of sympathy with its subject, its view of Nature or of man. We cannot fancy Pope writing of the ploughman driving his weary oxen home, of the rude forefathers of the hamlet, of the labourer's wife and children,—of the harvesters and the woodmen in the joy of their toil, of their homely joys and destiny obscure, of the short and simple annals of the poor. And Gray writes of them, with careful art it is true, but with real sympathy. Even the somewhat exalted strain with which he treats the rustic dead, and fancies that

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire—

some soul like Hampden, Milton or Cromwell, is redeemed from its fancifulness by the innate sincerity and grace of lines like these:

Even the youth who is the personage of the poem, who mediates upon the country and the poor, has nought to do with the citied society of Dryden and Pope. He is one they would have passed by—one to fortune and to fame unknown, of wayward fancies, woeful, wan, forlorn, or crazed with care, or crossed with hopeless love—one of that wide class of solitary, sorrowful folk among the common classes of the earth, of whom the poetry of society took no notice, but whom Wordsworth chose as his friends, and the constant subject of his song.

For this advance in human sympathy—this more universal treatment of humanity—the world was now beginning to be ready. None of Gray's poems received so much acceptance from his contemporaries as this Elegy which praised the country and the poor with a poet's sympathy. And the tendency it recorded grew day by day in the heart of the public, till it built itself into the palace of Wordsworth's song. Gray did this for it. He laid its artistic foundation.