[In the following essay, Taylor discusses how Thomas Gray was a key influence in Hardy's aesthetics and thoughts on the public culture, and how Gray's influence convinced Hardy that his highest vocation was not as a novelist, but as a poet.]

Why did Hardy, a major novelist, call his novels “mere journeywork” and say that they “have been superseded … by the more important half of my work, the verse”?¹ Consistently, over a writing career of more than 70 years, Hardy maintained that his literary vocation was that of a poet, not a novelist. His novels were what he did for a living; his poetry—enabled by the success of his novels—was what he did for immortality. Where novels for Hardy somehow pander to the society, poems resist it and yet also command it by seeking higher ground. What accounts for the force of Hardy's self-definition, given the artistic quality of his novels?

What we have not realized is a key influence on Hardy's sense of his vocation. Thomas Gray is, of course, only one of a number of influences felt by Hardy in the 1860s, from the perennial influence of Shakespeare's use of the Horatian “Exegi Monumentum” theme to the contemporary influence of Swinburne. But Gray, I would argue, is a key influence because of his unique combination of aestheticism and anxiety about the public culture.

Though Gray is little mentioned in Hardy studies, the Gray-Hardy relationship opens up a major topic: the ways poets see themselves in relation to an increasingly commercialized and invasive society. For Hardy and Gray, poetry has both a defining and antagonistic relation to the society which exalts it. In “The Bard,” Gray forecast Shelley's great formulas that poets are “the authors of language” and “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”² But when Gray said that “the language of the age is never the language of poetry,” he was also trying to withdraw poetry from circulation and contamination.³ If poetry creates language, it must also resist being co-opted and debased by the common currency of an established language. The paradox of all this, of course, is that Gray is among the most established of our writers. Gray gave Hardy the suggestion that a poet could be canonical without being compromised. It was from Gray, as confirmed by Shelley, that Hardy picked up the notion that poets purify the dialect of the tribe, while themselves remaining pure.

Gray is famous for his statements rejecting the world of published books; he complained, for example, that the “Elegy's” stanzas “had the Misfortune … to be made … publick, for w[hich] they certainly were never meant,” that “the public would have received it as well if it had been written in prose.” “The still small voice of Poetry was not made to be heard in a crowd.”⁴ When Hardy claimed “I never did care much about publication, as is proved by my keeping some of the verses forty years in MS” (CL [Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy], 6:119) and that “he was not so keenly anxious to get into print as many young men are” (L [The Life And Work of Thomas Hardy], 51), his statements parallel Gray's but are in fact inconsistent with Hardy's vital interest in his audience and in publication of both prose and verse. Gray's attitudes also lie behind Hardy's various statements, that he “did not care much for a reputation as a novelist in lieu of being able to follow the pursuit of poetry” (L, 102), that he viewed the verse “as my essential writings, & my prose as my accidental” (CL, 5:94), that poetry is much more “quintessential” in expression than prose.⁵ Hardy is nervous about the increasingly established entry of fine literature into the public marketplace, a development Gray witnessed and resisted at its early stages. The poignancy of Hardy's admiration for Gray, who blinded Hardy to the importance of his novels, is that by Hardy's time Gray's battle for the cultural independence of literature was nearly lost.⁶

The reason Gray has not assumed more prominence in Hardy studies is that he seems like the last writer one would compare with Hardy. Gray is the quintessential insider, elegant, urbane, living a leisured life, part of the establishment, a litterateur, a Cambridge man, a lifelong academic, devoted to scholarship and to high poetic genres (mostly odes) and ending with a sinecure professorship. Hardy is the famous outsider, awkward, provincial, who wrote novels for a living, finished his schooling at sixteen, was more or less denied the university, needed first to labor at architectural masonry and design before turning to novels and later to poetry. Socially, Gray occupied the position Hardy desired: independently wealthy, friend of the aristocracy, typified by his grand tour of the continent and his association with Horace Walpole. Hardy is the son of a master mason and began a slow rise up the social ladder, married above himself to a solicitor's daughter, gradually moved into the world of literary people and eventually was able to mingle with people of Gray's class, details of which he was proud to put in his “biography” (it was written largely by himself). Literarily, Gray was a fastidious poet, an eighteenth-century Mallarmé, who declined the poet laureateship and is known for one very slim volume of verse. Hardy is the regional novelist and successful entrepreneur of Dorset, whose collected works make up twenty-four volumes.

But what connects Gray and Hardy is the peculiarly testy relation they have to their culture, both high and low, a testiness rooted in their own experience of the class system. Both distrust the mobility that enabled them to prosper. Hardy is not being disingenuous but expressing the complexity of his situation when he said of himself in 1867: “He constitutionally shrank from the business of social advancement, caring for life as an emotion rather than for life as a science of climbing” (L, 54). If Hardy aspired to rise up the social ladder, Gray strove not to sink. There is in fact a sense of anxiety in Gray about the work world he had evaded. Samuel Johnson called Gray the son of a “scrivener of London” and quotes a letter describing Gray: “though without birth, or fortune, or station, his desire was to be looked upon as a private independent gentleman, who read for his amusement.”⁷ Hardy read John Mitford's life of Gray in the 1885 edition and was alert to Gray's economic struggles; where Mitford reported that Gray's mother “cheerfully maintained him on the scanty produce of her separate industry,” Hardy underlined “industry” and in the margin explained: “i.e. income.”⁸ Both men are haunted by an anxiety: that in a world requiring income, they would be unable to retain or gain their independence. For Hardy with his Grayish attitudes it was extremely painful that for lack of money he could not become a full-time poet in his twenties, a nightmare Gray had avoided thanks to his mother and some inherited wealth. With the anxiety, however, there comes for both writers some significant resentment at the world of high culture and fine literature which can so cruelly exclude its impoverished devotées. Gray and Hardy are edgy prophets, fiercely loyal but resentful of the world of high literature. They have chips on their shoulders, irritable abrasive attitudes; they condemn the commercializers but suspect the muckamucks. They are in high culture but not of it, benefiting from its hegemony but also attacking it. They are tortured, gloomy, aesthetical, pessimistic, and proud. Appropriately, their favored genre of writing, poetry, is the ultimate outsider and insider genre.

In this article I propose to demonstrate the manifold ways in which Gray shows up in Hardy's writings, and to suggest that these ways reflect the distinctive insider/outsider, disinterested/commercial anxieties which characterize Hardy's relation to Gray. I contend that the Gray-Hardy relation illuminates the problem of poetic language in a commercial culture, and in its evolution from 1771 (the date of Gray's death) to 1860 (the date of Hardy's first known poetic exercise). Gray, the poet of the polished conventional formulas, and Hardy, the poet of tortured and original phrasing, would seem again completely opposite. In fact, their two types of language are complementary expressions of a common problem: how to purify the “real language of men.” They share a common motive shaped by the differences between the eras in which they wrote. In their quest for a language which would be a permanent norm for the standard language, they achieve almost opposite results.

I.

The great instrument through which Gray influenced Hardy was The Golden Treasury, given to Hardy as a gift by Horace Moule in 1862. This was the key book of Hardy's early discovery of himself as a poet and early set the standard for what he wanted to be as a writer. As his wife later said, “His only ambition, so far as he could remember, was to have some poem or poems in a good anthology like the Golden Treasury” (L, 478).⁹ In The Golden Treasury, the chief representative of the entire eighteenth century was Gray; it quotes more of Gray's lines and more of his poems proportionately to his total oeuvre than any other poet. Of these, “The Progress of Poesy” and “The Bard” confirmed the audience's sense of Gray's magisterium in poetic history. In his copy of The Golden Treasury Hardy marked both poems. He put marginal lines next to Gray's lines 133-34 in “The Bard”: “And distant warblings lesson on my ear / That lost in long futurity expire.” These are the bard's failing attempts to hear what happens to the lyric tradition after Milton's time. Hardy, of course, hopes to pick up the fallen standard.¹⁰

In Hardy's era Gray was still considered the poet's poet, the poetic grandfather of the Victorian age, the age for which The Golden Treasury was the premier poetic anthology. In his notes, Palgrave called Gray's “Elegy” “perhaps the noblest stanzas in our language.”¹¹ According to Arnold, “Gray is our poetical classic of that literature and age. … He is the scantiest and frailest of classics in our poetry, but he is a classic”; “Gray, a born poet, fell upon an age of prose.”¹² From an 1882 Athenaeum review article (of Gosse's Gray) Hardy copied the following into his Literary Notebooks: “Gray's position as a poet is beyond all cavil; in relation to the mass of his work he is the greatest ‘maker’ of single poetic lines in our literature.”¹³ In the 1885 edition (Hardy's edition) Mitford quoted Sir James Mackintosh: “Of all English Poets he was the most finished artist. He attained the highest degree of splendour of which poetical style seems to be capable.”¹⁴ Early in his much marked copy of Henry Reed's Introduction to English Literature, Hardy read the legend, so attractive to marginalized poets, that General Wolfe on the eve of the battle of the Plains of Abraham recited Gray's “Elegy” to his officers and concluded, “Now, gentlemen, I would rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec.”¹⁵

The oddity of Palgrave's refined standard is that his anthology became a commercial success, and Gray as fastidious artist became the unofficial poet laureate, his work the ultimate in costly production for which the General Wolfe anecdote is a classy advertisement. To be included in The Golden Treasury is to be included in the most popular poetic anthology of all time.

It is not surprising then that Gray's influence should be felt through Hardy's trade productions, his novels, especially his first four.¹⁶ Gray also influenced more of Hardy's titles for his novels than anyone else. Far from the Madding Crowd's use of Gray's line (“Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,” line 73 of the “Elegy”), is well known. A little less known is that Jude the Obscure alludes to, among other things, Gray's line “Their homely joys and destiny obscure” (line 30 in the “Elegy”).¹⁷ There may also be some Gray in the title of Under the Greenwood Tree. We assume Shakespeare, but Hardy may have been influenced by a rejected stanza of the “Elegy” beginning “Him have we seen the Green-wood Side along” (which Hardy marked, though later, in his own edition of Gray).¹⁸ Later in life, Hardy's secretary asked him about Stinsford, “Mellstock” in Under the Greenwood Tree, “It's a Gray's Elegy sort of place, isn't it, Mr. Hardy?” Hardy reportedly replied, “It is Stoke Poges.”¹⁹ Gray had also an important influence on Hardy's first novel, though not its title, Desperate Remedies. Hardy names his heroine “Cytherea” and describes her with her lover: “The ‘bloom’ and the ‘purple light’ were strong on the lineaments of both” (51). In his Golden Treasury Hardy had marked lines 40-41 of Gray's “The Progress of Poesy” celebrating “Cytherea's day”: “O'er her warm cheek and rising bosom move / The bloom of young desire and purple light of love.”²⁰ Cytherea's last name is Graye. Gray's themes easily migrate to Hardy's novels.²¹

The Gray phrases alluded to in Hardy's novel titles, “far from the madding crowd,” “destiny obscure,” and perhaps “Him have we seen the Green-wood Side along,” allude to the idea of a world removed from circulation, outside the mainstream of London business. The pastoral, Georgic, nostalgic dimensions of this removal in Hardy have been thoroughly studied. But here I am concerned with Hardy's deepest sense of himself as a writer and as a poet. “The Progress of Poesy” concludes by hailing its last poet (probably Gray) who will “mount and keep his distant way / Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate.”²² Hardy in turn said that a novelist's genuine quality is “lurking like a violet in the shade of the more obvious, possibly more vulgar, talent,” that it “sifts down to a very small measure of genuine corn” (PW [Personal Writings], 116-17):

When one considers that he might have made himself a man of affluence in a few years by taking the current of popularity as it served, writing “best sellers” … his bias towards poetry must have been instinctive and disinterested.

(L, 329)

The violet image recalls Gray's “Elegy” stanza on the “gem of purest ray serene” and the “flower born to blush unseen,” images for a value which exists in itself and not in its exchange.²³

Such an admiring and critical relation to the high culture explains Gray and Hardy's similar attitudes to the world of learning and the world of the university. Gray provided Hardy with the model of the education and career of the poet, by associating poetry with learning, a learning that is elegant, removed, a bit pedantic. The poet is a scholar, not just a daemon-driven oracle. In his Dictionary of National Biography article, Leslie Stephen, echoing a Johnson quotation from William Temple, called Gray “the most learned of all our poets.”²⁴ A study of Hardy's Literary Notebooks shows that he may not be far behind. Gray's scholarly professionalism lifted Gothic into a respected category and helped begin the Gothic Revival in which Hardy participated.²⁵ Gray was in some ways too smart, too rigorous, too scholarly for his university. A century after Milton, Gray still held to the Latin education of the poet, a model Hardy followed when he moved from his self-taught Latin to his early writing of Sapphics and applied classical meters to English verse.²⁶ Gray's carefully historical interest in metrical techniques is the model for Hardy's own extensive exploration of the stanza forms.²⁷ Hardy's metrical development from conservative and classical forms, to increasingly complex and original forms, and on to single irregular stanzas parallels the slighter history of Gray who began with classical imitations, heroic and blank verse, moved to conservative ode stanzas like that of “Ode on … Eton,” and on to the complex Pindaric stanzas of “The Bard” and “The Progress of Poetry,” with stops along the way for a sonnet, a tail rhyme, and elegiac and other quatrains, and ending with the irregular freer ode form of “Ode for Music.”²⁸ Gray's definition of poetry as one of the fine arts, and his famous associations of poetry with painting, is the source of Hardy's own painting analogies in prose and verse.²⁹ But both share a view of poetry as something high, difficult, technical, learned, and traditional. But their learning makes an uneasy fit in a society where Gray is seen as too educated, Hardy as self-educated. The learned product they achieve becomes the established canon, even while they question its cannonicity.

Thus we can begin to see the importance of a major unnoticed influence of Gray on Hardy: Gray's view of the university, and the way in which this view was incorporated into Jude the Obscure. Jude's exclusion from the university may represent Hardy's deepest fear, of being excluded from the vocation of poetry. Gray would make a good Tetuphenay who haughtily reminds Jude to keep to his place. But in fact Gray and Hardy are both radically critical of the reserved world of which they were desperate to be, or remain, part. And we can now see the significance of Gray as a source for a major Hardy scene, Jude's beholding of the ghosts of Christminster.

Gray wrote his “Ode for Music … performed in the Senate-House at Cambridge, July 1, 1769, at the installation of His Grace Augustus Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton, Chancellor of the University.” In the “Ode” Gray describes ghosts parading through Cambridge: “There sit the sainted sage, the bard divine, / the few whom genius gave to shine / Through every unborn age.”³⁰ Gray moves from the intellectual and literary figures to the political ones (“and, pacing forth / With solemn steps and slow, / High potentates and dames of royal birth / And mitred fathers in long order go; / Great Edward, with the lilies on his brow”³¹); and these gathering spirits “speak in soft accord / The liquid language of the skies.”³² They “bless the place, where on their opening soul / First the genuine ardour stole,” and wonder: “What is grandeur, what is power? / Heavier toil, superior pain.”³³

Gray's poem is a source of one of Hardy's most famous fictional episodes, Jude's vision of the parading ghosts of Christminster. The university luminaries are heard in “the brushing of the wind“: “There were poets abroad. … Speculative philosophers drew along. … then official characters—such men as Governor-Generals and Lord-Lieutenants” (92-93). Like Gray, Hardy moves from literary figures to philosophers to politicians and aristocrats, and his attitude toward them is complementary to Gray's. Hardy associates the “germ of Jude the Obscure” with the “short story of a young man—‘who could not go to Oxford’” (L, 216) (a conventional-sounding phrase), but he also associates it with Cambridge: “There is something [in this] the world ought to be shown, and I am the one to show it—though I was not altogether hindered going, at least to Cambridge” (L, 53). In fact, class status and finances were obstacles for Hardy, despite his claim that his father would have helped him. Gray succeeded in doing what Hardy wanted to do, but both construct a portrait of university lights and wits, a portrait tinged with melancholy and irony, longing and criticism, admiration and scorn. Hardy outside the walls, Gray inside, construct this parallel picture of parading university ghosts.³⁴

The impossibility of being either inside or outside helps explain the famous pessimism of Gray and Hardy. The strategy of pessimism enabled the two writers to have a love-hate relationship with their culture. Hardy pointedly connected his pessimism with Gray's when he cited Gray's “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” especially the stanza beginning “Alas, regardless of their doom.”³⁵ About 1913, the year which marked a major turning point for his poetry, Hardy said of himself, “To adopt Walpole's words concerning Gray, Hardy was ‘in flower’ in these days, and, like Gray's, his flower was sad-coloured” (L, 389). Above I cited Hardy's and Gray's images of shy violets and unseen flowers. Hardy noted that an Eton master told him: “Gray is an unbearable poet.” Hardy's reflection was: “That's how they get out of it.”³⁶ Hardy seems comically to point up the relation between his and Gray's pessimism in his Greek Anthology adaptation, “Epitaph on a Pessimist” (no. 779), which may evoke Gray's Stoke Poges. Thus Hardy: “I'm Smith of Stoke, aged sixty-odd.”³⁷

Again their different orientations make us distinguish. Gray's despair was graceful, elegant, and upper class, modeled on the best authority. For Tate, Blackmur and others Hardy's pessimism has the ungainliness of a mind violated by ideas; Chesterton—famously—characterizes Hardy as the “village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot.”³⁸ But again we have to deal with the inverse complementarity. Gray's and Hardy's pessimism represents for them an integrity associated with the writing of poetry; the pessimism protects the poem from too easy commerce with a world where, as he claims in “In Tenebris II,” “stout upstanders say … ruers have nought to rue” (no. 137). Pessimism claims that the poem will not profit by its place in the world. Pessimism must also not profit from itself. The poem must be the frailest of monuments: “poetry has become, as it were, contiguous with poverty.”³⁹ Gray and Hardy are their own scholar gypsies, and Hardy marked Gray's description of the anonymous poet.⁴⁰ Hardy's “I am the One” (no. 818) is his version, mediated through Arnold, of Gray's anonymous wanderer poet: “I am the one whom ringdoves see … But stay on cooing, as if they said: / ‘Oh; it's only he.’”⁴¹ And yet such humility only seems to further the success it scorns.

So the paradox of Gray's and Hardy's relations to the literary establishment multiply: the popular poet insulated from his popularity, the obscure poet somehow famous but untainted, the university celebrity who is a gypsy-scholar, the educated poet who is too educated or “self-educated.” All of this points to the major influence on Hardy of Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and of its paradoxes of the famous obscure and the forgotten famous. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Angel discovered that the “conventional farm-folk” and the “typical and unvarying Hodge,” ceased to exist and had been replaced by “varied fellow-creatures … some mutely Miltonic, some potentially Cromwellian” (152). Hardy had made the point earlier, also with the allusion to Gray, in “The Dorsetshire Labourer” (PW, 170-71). Thus Hardy may have taken from Gray a theme which is so closely identified with Hardy as a Dorset writer. The poem “Drummer Hodge” (no. 60) may be read as a miniature Gray elegy on anonymous burial and ironic monument. “They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest” is a rougher version of “Each in his narrow cell for ever laid” but the scenic details (“His landmark is a kopje-crest”) carry a weight similar to Gray's “Beneath those rugged elms” and other landscape details which “No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.”⁴² Gray's acknowledgment that “Memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise” but “even these bones from insult to protect / Some frail memorial still erected nigh … Implores” underlies Hardy's final ironic celebration of Hodge: “And strange-eyed constellations reign / His stars eternally.”⁴³ Hardy also followed Gray's more positive note in “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’” (no. 500), which contrasts Gray's oxymoronic “annals of the poor” to “War's annals.”⁴⁴ “Let not ambition mock their useful toil,” Gray had said, and Hardy continues: “Yet this will go onward the same / Though Dynasties pass.”⁴⁵ “Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke” in Gray becomes in Hardy: “Only a man harrowing clods.”⁴⁶ Gray's “Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires” influences Hardy's “Only thin smoke without flame.”⁴⁷ Some deep longing in anonymous mankind threatens to explode.

Hardy's Wessex Poems has as frontispiece a Hardy drawing of Stinsford Churchyard, with urns and graveyard (including the grave of Hardy's father). The drawing evokes Stoke Poges Churchyard of the “Elegy” and indeed looks like one of the many illustrations made over the decades to accompany Gray's poem. Underneath his frontispiece Hardy writes a verse condensed from his poem “Friends Beyond” (no. 36): “At mothy curfew-tide / They've a way of whispering to me,” which evokes Gray's “curfew.”⁴⁸

Indeed, Gray's famous “Elegy” provided Hardy with his basic model of what a poem is. Gray's title, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” made an obscure usage (practiced by minor poets) into a common canonical practice, especially in what Meyer Abrams has called the “greater romantic lyric.”⁴⁹ After Gray, there came a flood of followers who wrote poems “written” in various places. The “Elegy” is now the archetypal model of a poem self-conscious about itself as an activity taking place and influenced by the scene being recorded.

All of this is extremely relevant to Hardy, one of whose great originalities was to conceive the poem as an object molded by the natural forces of the scene it records. A poem like “During Wind and Rain” (no. 441) creates the illusion that it is composed during wind and rain, by a speaker who is moving from tomb to tomb in a graveyard, and whose reveries about the buried are regularly interrupted by the stages of the storm. Some of Hardy's poems, like “Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard” (no. 580), seem to become speaking inscriptions: thus, we can see more fully the significance of Hardy misremembering it as “Voices from Things growing in a Country Churchyard” (L, 446). Other Hardy poems like “The Figure in the Scene” (no. 416) have verse forms seemingly shaped by rain and wind, as though they were sketching pads blown across by the water. It is a sign both of poetry's integrity and its vulnerability that it is an object in the world, not so much a well wrought urn as a battered tombstone. The poem is literally inscribed on the earth, written in place, to keep it from becoming loose change; at the same time it is discarded like an elegy written and left on a country tombstone. Gray gave Hardy the sense of the poem as a product so negligible that it created the value by which all literature is measured. We can more fully see the significance of Hardy saying: “It bridges over the years to think that Gray might have seen Wordsworth in his cradle, and Wordsworth might have seen me in mine” (L, 417).⁵⁰

II.

Gray is chronologically placed at the beginning of an historical process which had evolved to its inevitable conclusion with Hardy. That process is the one by which polite literature became professionalized and then became commercialized; it is also the process by which the noble and upper-class status of writers had been replaced by middle-class, eventually professional and sometimes working-class status. Gray, as recent studies have shown, reflects the transition between an aristocratic literary culture, to which Gray clung, and the new bourgeois entrepreneurial culture which was “marginalising all that he stood for.”⁵¹ As Chesterton says of Gray's “ploughman … as he plods away”: “when the ploughman comes back out of that twilight, he will come back different. He will be either a scientific works-manager … a free peasant or a servant of alien machinery; but never the same again. … Something was, indeed, fading before the eyes of Thomas Gray.”⁵² It was this process that prompted Gray to lament that

Commerce changes intirely the fate and genius of nations, by communicating arts and opinions, circulating money, and introducing the materials of luxury; she first opens and polishes the mind, then corrupts and enervates both that and the body.⁵³

One result is that the “English tongue … is too diffuse, & daily grows more & more enervate.”⁵⁴ The process that Gray regretted was the process that gave Hardy the opportunity to be a writer. By Hardy's time, the increasingly entrepreneurial culture had reshaped the working class for which Hardy's high accomplishment is the first canonically assured literary success. What I have called Gray's and Hardy's “inverse” complementarity has to do with their placement at the beginning and the end of this historical stream, Gray fighting not to be included in its inevitable drift, Hardy prospering because of it and then trying to climb out of it. Gray would perfect the standard language of the educated classes but distrusts the evolution of that standard language. Hardy inherits the standard language which Gray had helped polish but in his own way resists being included in it.

At first glance, it would seem that Gray echoes throughout Hardy. “Friends Beyond” (no. 36) throughout evokes echoes of the “Elegy”: “Farmer Ledlow late at plough … in Mellstock churchyard now!,” “that group of local hearts and heads,” “fellow-wight who yet abide,” “Chill detraction stirs no sigh”; and there is the turn at the end to the “me”: “murmur mildly to me now.” “Lying Awake” (no. 844) moves from the personal “I” to the impersonal “names creeping out everywhere,” with a final evocation of Gray: “You, Churchyard, are lightening faint from the shade of the yew.” Gray's subliminal pun, “That teach the rustic moralist to die” (how to die, or, to despair and die), is like some of Hardy's puns: “I shall mind not, slumbering peacefully” (“Regret Not Me” [no. 318]).⁵⁵ In “The Fading Rose” (no. 737), Hardy gives a literalist answer to Gray's question: “Can storied urn, or animated bust, / Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath”?⁵⁶ The gravedigger, “Mid text-writ stones and grassy heaps,” says that the deceased beloved “must get to you underground.” In manuscript (noted by Gibson as a variant) Hardy for “text-writ stones” had written “storied stones.” Hardy poems read like repetitions and reconstitutions of the language of Gray's “Elegy,” a poem Hardy powerfully experienced at a formative moment when he studied it in The Golden Treasury.

Gray's eloquently impoverished idiom (“No more; where ignorance is bliss, / 'Tis folly to be wise”) is picked up in Hardy poems: “Enough. As yet disquiet clings / About us. Rest shall we” (“The Impercipient” [no. 44]) and “Well, well! All's past amend, / Unchangeable. It must go. / I seem but a dead man” (“The Going” [no. 277]).⁵⁷ Gray's phrasing for this personal reference in “Ode on the Spring” (“With me the Muse shall sit, and think”) is echoed in Hardy's “The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House”: “One without looks in to-night / As we sit and think” (no. 551).⁵⁸ In “The Darkling Thrush” (no. 119) Hardy's “And all mankind that haunted nigh / Had sought their household fires. … And every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I” repeats Gray's sense of isolation and turn to the “me”: “The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, / And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”⁵⁹

But there is a major difference between Gray and Hardy as “authors of language.” Gray seeks canonicity, Hardy resists it. Gray seeks the polished formula, Hardy roughens the polish. The second two stanzas of “Afterwards” (no. 511) beginning “If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink” evoke the second stanza of the “Elegy” beginning “Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight.”⁶⁰ But there is a great difference in grace and idiom. Gray's series of eighteenth-century Virgilian abstractions, in “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,”

These shall the fury Passions tear,
          The vultures of the mind,
Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear,
          And Shame that skulks behind;
Or pining Love shall waste their youth,
Or Jealousy, with rankling tooth,
          That inly gnaws the secret heart,
And Envy wan, and faded Care,
Grim-visaged comfortless Despair,
          And Sorrow's piercing dart(61)

and continuing, forecast Hardy's specters in his great war poem, “And There Was a Great Calm” (no. 545):

There had been years of Passion—scorching, cold,
And much Despair, and Anger heaving high,
Care whitely watching, Sorrows manifold,
Among the young, among the weak and old,
And the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”

But in Hardy's poem Gray's formulas have become strangely particularized personifications.

Gray taught Hardy about the nature of poetic language and keyed his own evolution of a distinctive idiom. Hardy's copy of The Golden Treasury has multiple markings and underlinings, and a few of these are made in Gray's poems. These underlinings then became the basis of a very important notebook, entitled Studies, Specimens &c, which Hardy started keeping in 1865.⁶² The notebook contains thousands of words and phrases excerpted from many poets and writers. Gray is not in this notebook, but he is present in another, the “1867 notebook.” Here Hardy excerpts several phrases from Gray's poems: “sceptred care” from “The Bard,” “rosy Pleasure” and “the cheek of Sorrow” from the “Ode on … Vicissitude,” “the toiling hand of Care” and “Contemplation's sober eye” from the “Ode on the Spring,” “pallid Fear,” “Envy wan,” “faded Care,” “moody Madness laughing wild,” “grinning Infamy,” the four lines beginning “Lo, in the vale of years beneath,” all from the “Ode on … Eton,” “Folly's idle brood” from “Ode to Adversity,” “Grandeur … with a disdainful smile,” “The dull cold ear of Death,” and two lines from the “Elegy,” in which Hardy underlined “a smiling land” and “in a nation's eyes.”⁶³ As he read The Golden Treasury and compiled his word lists under Gray's influence, Hardy then began writing poems which he continued to do until “forced” to turn to novel writing.

From Gray Hardy learned of the poet's prophetic ambition to purify the dialect of the tribe. But in their poetic language Gray and Hardy, again, would seem to be on opposite sides of the matter, as we can see simply by citing the first stanza of Hardy's Complete Poems (“The Temporary the All” [no. 2]):

Change and chancefulness in my flowering youthtime,
Set me sun by sun near to one unchosen;
Wrought us fellowlike, and despite divergence,
          Fused us in friendship.

Compare this with Gray's lines also about “chance” (from “Ode on the Spring”):

Alike the Busy and the Gay
          But flutter thro' life's little day,
          In Fortune's varying colors drest:
Brush'd by the hand of rough Mischance,
Or chilled by Age, their airy dance
          They leave, in dust to rest.(64)

In Hardy, phrases are pasted together as though they were puzzle pieces, and words are chosen helter skelter from various classes: obsolete, Anglo-Saxon, Latinate. The lines are about accidental friendship, and have an anomalous mixture of words and phrasing consistent with the accidentality which is their theme. Gray's lines are elevated and learned, but graceful and conventional; most of the words are within the common pale, though slightly elevated. Common words are given a certain elevation by being made allegorical, capitalized. The lines are full of idioms, close to clichés: “life's little day.” By contrast, Hardy's “flowering youthtime” is deliberately anomalous, and his “sun by sun” is not so much a play with idiom as a mutilation of idiom like “day by day.” Gray ends with the witty rhyming punch line “in dust to rest,” thick coated with old idiom. Gray assumes a sophisticated reader who can enjoy his Horatian wit—“we” all agree about the Busy and the Gay. But Hardy assumes no kind of reader, and projects no clear persona; his is the language of fragmentation and diversity, whereas Gray's is the language of the great tradition, the high style for “what oft was thought.” One's initial reactions might be that Gray's style is educated, Hardy's is self-educated.

Gray is one of the great standardizing poets of the English language. The TLS article which Hardy clipped begins by quoting William Watson's lines on Gray:

Gray, who on worn thoughts conferred
That second youth, the perfect word,
That elected and predestined phrase
That had lain bound, long nights and days,
To wear at last, when once set free,
Immortal pelucidity.(65)

Such is the amazing paradox of Gray that no poet has been more accepted into our language, even though he is supposedly the poet of poetic diction and a language far removed from the language of the age. A study of the OED shows Gray's currency. As far as I can see, more words are quoted from Gray, proportionate to the size of his oeuvre, than from any other poet: 1028 words, with an additional 341 words quoted from Gray's prose. Of the 195 words cited from the “Elegy,” only nine are clearly labeled as obsolete, rare, poetic, and so on. (custom'd, haply, inglorious, jocund, lea, long-drawn, madding, “note of praise,” wonted) while the rest are now standard. Only three of the “Elegy”'s words remain unique citations, all compounds (desert-air, incense-breathing, ivy-mantled).⁶⁶ For four words Gray is the first citation (breezy, cell [grave], long-drawn, woeful-wan), but this statistic does not convey the pervasive influence of Gray on the literary language. It would seem that if many of Gray's words were veering toward the specialized and poetic, his poetic usage paradoxically made them veer back toward the standard. Many usages from elsewhere in Gray have become part of the standard idiom: “brac'd all his nerves,” “a huge imbroglio,” “a second spring,” “at our time of life” (middle age); also from the prose, “one's contemporaries,” “picking up again” (recovering), “it will do you a power of good.”⁶⁷ Gray's example of “fearful joy” antedates the OED citation.

So Gray's claim that poetic language is never the language of prose (or the language of the age) defines at best a temporarily conflicting relationship between the two.⁶⁸ The paradox of Gray can be seen in the way he is characterized by Arnold as the poet born in an age of prose, which could mean that Gray was a lonely heroic opponent of his prosy age, or that Gray was somehow tainted by this age of prose. The same paradox can be explained if we consider that poetic diction, as explained by Davie, Tillotson, and others, is diction which has a powerful sense of itself as varying the registers of prose and ordinary speech. There is an inbuilt prose sense in the use of poetic diction, and indeed poetic diction helped establish that precise sense of register we associate with a post-Dryden English.⁶⁹

But the story is more interesting even than this. There is something very odd about Gray's idioms and clichés. In fact, Gray's style, Mitford says, is like an “elaborate mosaic pavement,” a sort of imagery which was widely applied to Gray whose poetry was described as a “laborious mosaic” (Carlyle), illustrating a “tesselated mind” (Arthur Hallam), “pieced and patched together so laboriously” (Edward Fitzgerald), which sound like phrases from reviews of Hardy.⁷⁰ The TLS article noted of Gray: “His thoughts were ‘worn thoughts’ and he took immense pains to find the word for them, borrowing, as he knew well, from others and the whole sometimes became perilously near patchwork.”⁷¹ Gray said of “The Bard”: “do not wonder therefore, if some Magazine or Review call me Plagiary: I could shew them a hundred more instances, which they never will discover themselves.”⁷² Thus, Johnson said that the “Eton College” ode “suggests nothing to Gray, which every beholder does not equally think and feel,” that the “Elegy” “abounds with … sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”⁷³ From the Athenaeum review article, Hardy copied: “Gray—A spirit of gigantic proportions imprisoned in the sealed jar of eighteenth cent. convention” (LN [The Literary Notes of Thomas Hardy], 1:148). Leslie Stephen noted that the “Elegy” “includes more familiar phrases than almost any poem of equal length in the language.”⁷⁴ The poem abounds with instantly familiar platitudes which however do not quite cohere: poor country folk die and will never see their families again; but the rich and famous should not mock the simple annals of the poor; indeed the rich and famous die too; so do not mock the poor for having no monument; in any event, monuments cannot bring the dead to life; for that matter, riches and fame do no good in the tomb; besides there might have been an unknown genius among the country folk; but their lot prevented their development—and their crimes; instead they kept to the quiet life; but even they should have a small monument; for no one leaves life without regret. Gray strings together the great clichés of his time, but the string keeps knotting up. It may be this odd mixture of clarity and obscurity in the poem which made Hardy reflect that “the same lines may be lyrical to one temperament and meditative to another; nay, lyrical and not lyrical to the same reader at different times … Gray's Elegy may be instanced as a poem that has almost made itself notorious by claiming to be a lyric in particular humours, situations, and weathers, and waiving the claim in others” (PW, 77). There is something eerily familiar in Gray's platitudes, and it is fitting that in hearing Gray's “Elegy” recited by a friend at Gray's graveside in 1899 Hardy should have had a déjà vu experience:

his friend recited in a soft voice the “Elegy” from the first word to the last in leisurely and lengthy clearness—without an error (which Hardy himself could not have done without some hitch in the order of the verses). With startling suddenness while duly commending her performance he seemed to have lived through the experience before.

(L, 326)

About this experience, Hardy said: “What a thin veneer is that of rank and education over the natural woman” (L, 327). The comment reflects the “Drummer Hodge” demoticism of the “Elegy” and also shows that the “Elegy” was widely known by heart, and memorized by Hardy with only “some hitch in the order of the verses.”

What Hardy learned from Gray is the strange density of apparently obvious phrases and idioms. For example, the opening line, “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,” is one of the most standardized lines in English literature.⁷⁵ It is cited four times by the OED, under “curfew,” “toll,” “knell” and “parting.” It may seem churlish to complain about such a warranted piece of language, but the line is strangely perplexed, as though from a super-abundance of established idioms and allusions crowded together. Indeed previous allusions had used “curfew,” “toll,” and “bell” singly or in double combination, but never in triple combination.⁷⁶ “Curfew tolls” and “tolls the knell” would be unexceptionable; but all together create an odd redundancy (as does “knell of day” and “parting day”). “Curfew,” “tolls,” and “knell” are each associated with a bell sound, though the etymology is more vividly present in “tolls” than in “curfew,” a word fast losing the sense of its history (and in fact returning to its pre-bell meanings of “regulation” and “hour”). But in Gray's line these etymologies crowd forward creating a clamor which subverts the clarity of the standardized phrasing. (Campbell, for example, complains that excessively evoked etymology makes a standard style stumble.⁷⁷) “Parting” combines the descriptive and funereal associations of the word, leaving and also dying. All of this might serve, since poets traditionally exploit etymology and polysemy, and even Campbell allowed them some license. But here the excessive flurry of etymological echoes perplexes the plain sense. The formality of the personification jars against the onomatopoeia and etymology of bell sounds. The curfew is not only the bell, it is an allegorized Curfew figure which is tolling the knell; and similarly “parting day” is given some kind of allegorical status, as though the day were to raise its hand and wave good-bye. The line in fact reads like a translation (a complaint often made against Hardy), or like a yoking together of quoted phrases from elsewhere. One might compare the first line of Hardy's Gray-ish poem, “Afterwards” (no. 511): “When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,” which also yokes etymologies and personifications in strange fashion.

Some of Gray's lines are so clear they become obscure. Others are obscure but we think them clear. One example is the “Elegy”'s “Epitaph” line “Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth.” One complainant noted that “The very smoothness of Gray's lines seduces the ear and diverts the reader from an inquiry into the meaning.”⁷⁸ Some readers assumed that Gray meant: “Fair Science smiled not on his humble birth” parallel to the earlier lines, “Knowledge to their eyes her ample page … did ne'er unroll.” To figure out the line, you should remember Horace's ode (4.3) about Melpomene looking on her poet “with smiling eye” (“placido lumine”) and also remember Gray's “Ode on … Eton” (“grateful Science still adores / Her Henry's holy shade”).⁷⁹ The contortion here reflects the strange power of standard phrases, to clarify and also to dull. (It also may reflect Gray's uncertainty about the source of real knowledge, in education or in rural quiet.) The poem ends with a non-commercial exchange and a disinterested value:

He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wished) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose(80)

They “repose” in the bosom of God. This hidden value is not only alien to Gray's commercial culture; it is hidden (“so that … hearing they may hear and not understand” [Mark 4: 11-12]) behind standard idiomatic formulas which have deceptive clarity but in fact have become opaque to most readers. But in this way Gray keeps his language preserved in a world where he says a friend “overheard three People, whom by their dress & manner he takes for Lords, say, that I was impenetrable & inexplicable, and they wish'd, I had told them in prose, what I meant in verse, & then they bought me … & put me in their pocket.” Against such prosy reduction to cheap currency, Gray polishes his poetic language into the ultimate formulas of our society, so ultimate that we cannot get behind them in order to understand them. They understand us. “We think in words,” Gray said.⁸¹

“Language, like the rocks, is strewn with the fossilised wrecks of former conditions of society.”⁸² What became opaque for Gray had disappeared for Hardy:

Why thus my soul should be consigned
          To infelicity,
Why always I must feel as blind
          To sights my brethren see,
Why joys they've found I cannot find,
          Abides a mystery.

(“The Impercipient” [no. 44])

An enormous divide of social and philological history separates Gray from Hardy for whom the standard language was not only under historical critique, in his era of the OED, but also under social critique, in an era where Horne Tooke, the working man's philosopher, had proclaimed standard language the obfuscation practiced by the oppressive class system. What Gray undermined from inside the system, Hardy undermined from outside. Where Gray says “Alike the Busy and the Gay / But flutter thro' life's little day,” Hardy says: “Chance and Chancefulness in my flowering youthtime” (“The Temporary the All” [no. 2]).⁸³ Where Gray wakes us with his play on traditional formulas, Hardy wakes us with his minute scrutiny of them. The Hardy problem seems the very opposite of the Gray problem: Gray, urbane, platitudinous, with polished poetic diction; Hardy, “self-educated,” awkward, jangling. Again study of the OED illustrates this difference. Of Hardy's 243 words cited from poems and Dynasts, 41٪ remain unique citations (compare Gray's “Elegy”'s 2٪), and few are first citations (none in the first edition of the OED, but 7٪ in the second edition). Characteristic unique citations are disillusive, formularist, impercipient, Necessitator, subtrude, undecrease, unforefending and so on. Also Hardy has one of the most labeled vocabularies in literature; some 40٪ (56٪ in the first edition of the OED) of the words cited from poems and Dynasts are obsolete, poetic, dialect, and so on (compare Gray's “Elegy”'s 5٪). There is little in Hardy of Gray's pioneering of standard colloquialisms; typically, indeed, Hardy made poetic use out of some of the “Elegy”'s few non-standard words: customed, madding, haply, lea.⁸⁴ Hardy's vocabulary remains anomalous, unassimilated by the history of the standard literary language. In those minute scrutinies Hardy conducted in his early notebooks, he became so fascinated by the formulaic density of Gray's phrases that he constructed his own home-made idiom in an inversely complementary spirit.

Thus, “The Temporary the All” is full of clearly labeled words or words that never get into the dictionary at all: chancefulness (coined form), youthtime (coined after the archaic youthhood), fellowlike (“obsolete”), forthcome (occasional use), self-communed (coined), all-eclipsing (coined), forefelt (coined), breath-while (coined), life-deed (coined), outshow (“poetic”), showance (“rare”), earth-track (coined), sufficeth (archaic ending). Hardy's practice includes words which are still standard in the original OED, but given a strange aura in these contexts: fulfiller, prevision, forefelt, visioned, intermissive. Hardy's words are not only from various temporal and social classes; they seem to compound elements in unusual ways. The uneasily yoked elements in individual words—aforehand, misprision, hereto, upclomb—reflect the manipulated sense units in the sentences themselves. The way such language shapes consciousness into obsolete frames is beautifully expressed in Hardy's “The Pedigree” (no. 390) where the style fits the theme of seeing one's ancestors in the looking-glass:

                              And then did I divine
          That every heave and coil and move I made
Within my brain, and in my mood and speech,
                    Was in the glass portrayed
          As long forestalled by their so making it;
The first of them, the primest fuglemen of my line,
Being fogged in far antiqueness past surmise and reason's reach.

His mind, Hardy says in another poem, is

          scored with necrologic scrawls,
Where feeble voices rise, once full-defined,
From underground in curious calls.

(“In a Former Resort after Many Years” [no. 666])⁸⁵

Where Gray put together, Hardy took apart. Hardy makes explicit the potential perplexities in Gray's overly polished style, unleashes the hidden histories and exploits the syntactic oddities. Though both Hardy and Gray assume the power and domination of the standard language and standard literary language, both constitute assaults on its presumptuous complacency. Gray perplexes by writing in a poetic diction so standardized that it is obscure; Hardy perplexes by writing in a language that never has become standardized but continues to jangle our ears and our idioms. Gray had said: “our language not being a settled thing (like the French) has an undoubted right to words of an hundred years old.”⁸⁶ Gray's response is to naturalize the French, Hardy's to denaturalize the English. Under the influence of Victorian historical philology, he cited the mistake of treating English “as a thing crystallised at an arbitrarily selected stage of its existence, and bidden to forget that it has a past and deny that it has a future.”⁸⁷ So Hardy's style perplexes us both with the jangling of social classes of language and with the diachrony of multiple historical strands:

For, wonning in these ancient lands,
Enchased and lettered as a tomb,
And scored with prints of perished hands,
And chronicled with dates of doom,
Though my own being bear no bloom
I trace the lives such scenes enshrine,
Give past exemplars present room,
And their experience count as mine.

(“On an Invitation to the United States” [no. 75])

Hardy's language, as much as Gray's, is pointedly imbedded in historical tradition, but no longer a seamless tradition. The archeological seams of the history of language show at many points, and Hardy exposes rather than naturalizes them. When Gray said that the language of poetry is never the language of the age, he achieved a paradoxical result, a language removed from current language in order to become a new currency, refined and unchanging. Hardy a hundred years later refuses to allow his language to become currency at all; he keeps it withdrawn from circulation, by insisting on its non-standard nature, its perennial challenge to the achievement of a standard language. Thus Hardy's poem rejects the invitation to the United States, to the commercial tour which had made other authors wealthy. Hardy out-Grays Gray in order to fulfill Gray's ambition, to be a poet for all time, not just for his own time.

From Dorset, Hardy comes to London and bores inside the standard language, scrutinizing its structures and materials, undermining its idioms and syntactic grace, releasing its hidden and decentering history, doing to Gray what I did to Gray's curfew line, performing what Horace Moule called Hardy's “minute way of looking at style.”⁸⁸ Gray the poet of ultimate decorum, Hardy the poet of awkwardness, both have a testy relation to the language of the tribe, and both believe that poetry is the quintessential language of literature. Both write out of an antagonistic relation to the literary culture they seek to influence, because of the potential for betrayal by that culture, either through its exclusion of fine writers (like themselves) or its coopting of fine writing into common currency. This shared antagonism brings them together even though they are on the opposite sides of a class division and an historical era. The differences account for their respective approaches to poetic language, one polished to the point of inscrutability, the other scrutinized to the point of near anomaly. Both linguistic strategies are designed to influence the literary culture without being coopted by it. At opposite ends of the historical corridor and of the social scale, Gray and Hardy participated in a common challenge both to the commercial culture and the high hegemony of the literary tradition. In spite of a history that was changing the nature of literature and the place of poetry, Gray convinced Hardy that, in spite of having written fourteen novels, his highest vocation was poetry, because the language of poetry was a permanent purification of the language of the age.

Notes

1. Thomas Hardy, The Life And Work, ed. Michael Millgate (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985), 185-86; hereafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated L. Hardy, Collected Letters, ed. Richard Purdy and Michael Millgate, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978-1988), 6:182; hereafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated CL. Hardy's Life says that by 1886 Hardy “had quite resigned himself to novel-writing as a trade, which he had never wanted to carry on as such. He now went about the business mechanically” (189).

2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Selected Poems, Essays and Letters (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1944), 533, 568.

3. Thomas Gray, Correspondence, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 1:192. Since the three volumes of this edition are paginated continuously, further references will omit the volume number.

4. Gray, Correspondence, 335; Poems of … Gray … Collins … Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), 113; Gray, Correspondence, 296. All quotations from Gray's poetry are taken from Lonsdale's edition of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith unless indicated otherwise. The edition will be abbreviated “Lonsdale” in the notes.

5. Hardy, Personal Writings, ed. Harold Orel (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1966), 48; hereafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated PW.

6. Neil Covey, “The Decline of Poetry and Hardy's Empty Hall” (Victorian Poetry, 31 [1993]: 61-78), discusses Hardy's interest in the rarefied and marginalized status of poetry.

7. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (New York: Octagon Books, 1967), 3:421, 3:430-31.

8. Gray's Poetical Works, ed. John Mitford (London: Bell, 1885), ii (Hardy's copy, Dorset County Museum); this edition has several markings by Hardy, which confirm that Gray's earlier influence continued. Hardy also owned Gray's Poetical Works, ed. John Moultrie (Eton: Williams, 1854 [Hardy's copy, Dorset County Museum]), a gift to Hardy in 1918 and signed by him but otherwise unmarked.

9. The Golden Treasury, ed. F. T. Palgrave (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1861 [Hardy's copy, Dorset County Museum]). Discussing the four divisions of the Golden Treasury (“I to the ninety years closing about 1616, II thence to 1700, III to 1800, IV to the half century just ended”), Palgrave said “they might called the Books of Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, and Wordsworth” (Preface).

10. Hardy marked these lines and also line 62, “And Sorrow's faded form, and Solitude behind” in Mitford's edition (55, 46).

11. Palgrave, note to poem no. cxlvii.

12. From Arnold's “The Study of Poetry” and “Thomas Gray” respectively, in his Essays in Criticism, second series (London: Macmillan, 1888), 42, 91.

13. Hardy, Literary Notebooks, ed. Lennart Björk, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), 1:172; hereafter cited parenthetically by volume and page and abbreviated LN.

14. Mitford, “The Life of Thomas Gray,” prefixed to his edition of Gray, Poetical Works, lxxxix.

15. Reed, Introduction to English Literature from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Shaw, 1865), 204 (Hardy's copy, Dorset County Museum).

16. When Hardy described the invasion of Susan's death room in The Mayor of Casterbridge (“Well, poor soul; she's helpless to hinder that or anything now … And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a' didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will be as nothing!”), Hardy may have remembered the invasion of the poet's house by the ladies comically described in Gray's “A Long Story”: “Each hole and cupboard they explore … Into the drawers and china pry”; see The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), in The Works of Thomas Hardy in Prose and Verse, Wessex edn., 24 vols., (London: Macmillan, 1912-1931), 138. All quotations from Hardy's novels are from this edition and are hereafter cited parenthetically by page; titles may be inferred from the text.

17. There are at least two other allusions to Gray in Jude the Obscure. Jude and Sue are called “pleasing anxious beings” (part 5, ch. 5, second paragraph), echoing Gray's “Elegy,” lines 85-86: “For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey, / This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned” (Lonsdale, 132, ll. 85-86); and Jude (in the manuscript of 1894-95 [Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Univ.], page 98) focuses on Sue with a “fearful joy,” later disguised as “fearful bliss” (part 2, ch. 4, fourth paragraph), the deleted phrase evoking Gray's “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”: “They hear a voice in every wind, / And snatch a fearful joy.” Hardy copied these lines into his Literary Notebooks (2:463) and used “fearful joy” in Far from the Madding Crowd (181), and in The Return of the Native (166).

18. Hardy also put a single line next to the Mitford comment following this stanza, and double lines against another rejected Gray stanza beginning “There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the Year” (Mitford, 107).

19. Mary O'Rourke, Thomas Hardy: His Secretary Remembers, Monographs on the Life, Times and Works of Thomas Hardy, no. 8 (Beaminster, Dorset: Toucan Press, 1965), 7.

20. Palgrave, 131.

21. Two of Gray's lines, “Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap” from the “Elegy,” and “We frolic, while 'tis May” from “Ode on the Spring” are quoted as epigraphs to chapters in A Pair of Blue Eyes (21, 151).

22. Lonsdale, 177, ll. 121-22.

23. Hardy wrote to Amy Lowell that Keats's “words ‘pure serene’ in the Chapman's Homer sonnet may have been an unconscious memory of the line in Gray's Elegy ending, ‘purest ray serene’” (CL, 6:313). Hardy so noted this source in his 1925 copy of Amy Lowell's John Keats (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925 [Hardy's copy, Princeton Collection]), where Lowell had failed to find an English source except for Cary's translation of Dante's “pure serene.” But Hardy remembered Gray and in the margin wrote “‘purest ray serene’ Gray.”

24. Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1917-), 8:470.

25. Hardy's campaign against ruining ancient Gothic churches by improvements parallels Gray's attack on “the rage of repairing, beautifying, whitewashing, painting, and gilding, and (above all) the mixture of Greek (or Roman) ornaments in Gothic edifices” (Gray, Letter to the Rev. Mr. Bentham, Gentleman's Magazine 54 [1784], 245).

26. The opening poem of Hardy's Wessex Poems, “The Temporary the All,” is an English imitation of classical Sapphics, perhaps addressed to Horace Moule. And Gray's “first original production,” were the Sapphics, “Barbaras aedes aditure mecum,” addressed to Richard West (Lonsdale, 306). References to Hardy's poems are taken from the Complete Poems, variorum edn., ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1979) and are hereafter cited parenthetically by poem number.

27. See my Hardy's Metres and Victorian Prosody (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988). Gray's detailed and scholarly codification of metrical schemes and examples in his “The Measures of Verse” parallels Hardy's practice of making his poems into an encyclopedia of metrical schemes which include over 790 different metrical forms of which over 170 are traditional.

28. Hardy's one full dress traditional ode, “Compassion: An Ode” (no. 805), is influenced generally by the Pindaric ode tradition and specifically by “The Bard” and its three part Pindaric scheme. In subject matter, the slaughter of innocent animals for Hardy parallels the slaughter of poets for Gray. Gray proclaims a counter “voice, as of the cherub-choir” (“The Bard,” Lonsdale, 199, l. 131), and Hardy proclaims: “A mighty voice calls.”

29. Gray merits a chapter in Jean Hagstrum's The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), while Hardy is the subject of two entire books on his relation to painting (one entitled Hardy and the Sister Arts [London: Macmillan, 1979] by Joan Grundy). Hardy, teaching himself painting and allowed into recently opened public museums, early kept a “Schools of Painting” notebook and filled his novels with allusions to paintings (see Hardy, Personal Notebooks, ed. Richard Taylor [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1979]; hereafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated PN); Gray, privy to private collections, made elaborate notes on his continental tour and filled his poems with the images of painting. Hardy made a note referring to painter William Etty next to lines 40-41 of “The Progress of Poesy” in his copy of The Golden Treasury: “mem: S.K. Museum—Etty. 1863” (131).

30. Lonsdale, 268, ll. 15-17.

31. Lonsdale, 270, ll. 35-39.

32. Lonsdale, 272, ll. 57-58.

33. Lonsdale, 269, ll. 21-22; 270, ll. 35-39.

34. Hardy's important poem, “Copying Architecture in an Old Minster” (no. 369), also derives from Gray's hints. Its many details, the summoning of ghosts (“one shade appears, and another”), their emerging forth with the “eve-damps” and association with the “overhead creak of a passager's pinion,” the cast of characters (“And a Duke and his Duchess near; / And one Sir Edmund in columned gloom”), their “parle” in which they caution the unborn not to come “To a world … Of … ardours chilled and numb,” are all reworkings of the Gray and Jude passages. Hardy's ghosts speaking “of … ardours chilled” parallel Gray's ghosts recalling their bygone “genuine ardour.”

35. Vere Collins, Talks with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, 1920-1922 (London: Duckworth, 1928), 63.

36. Collins, 63.

37. Next to the last two lines of Hardy's Golden Treasury version of Gray's “Ode on … Eton,” Hardy made a note citing Sophocles's Oedipus Rex (see Hardy's Metres, 252). Again, in his copy of R. C. Jebb's edition of Sophocles's Plays and Fragments, Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1893 [Hardy's copy, Yale Collection]), Hardy marked both the Greek and the translation of Tiresias's words: “Alas, how dreadful to have wisdom where it profits not the wise!” In the margin next to the Greek, Hardy wrote: “cf. Gray” (52, ll. 316-17).

38. G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (London: Butterworth, 1913), 143.

39. Henry Weinfield on Gray, in The Poet Without a Name: Gray's Elegy and the Problem of History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1991), 96.

40. Where Gray writes “If chance, by lonely Contemplation led, / Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate” (“Elegy,” ll. 95-96), Hardy in his 1885 edition underlined and punctuated: “If, chance,” and in the margin notes: “(i.e. perchance) (or it chance).” Where Gray writes “Another came; nor yet beside the rill, / Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he,” Hardy clarifies: “Another [morning] came” (Mitford edition of Gray, Hardy's copy, 106, 108).

41. Gray, “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 135-36, ll. 98-100.

42. “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 120, l. 15 (“for ever laid”), l. 13 (“rugged elms”); 121, l. 20 (“lowly bed”).

43. “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 124, l. 38 (“trophies raise”); 132, ll. 77-80 (“Implores”). An interesting Hardy pun in “Drummer Hodge” was perhaps influenced by a Gray letter describing his walk by a tree: “and there grow to the trunk for a whole morning” (Gray, Correspondence, 48). Thus, Hardy: “His homely Northern breast and brain / [will] Grow to some Southern tree.” Hardy copied from Gosse's Gray (London: Macmillan, 1882), in which Gray's letter is quoted, and praised the work “which afforded me food for thought during several days” (CL, 1:110).

44. “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 123, l. 32.

45. “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 122, l. 29.

46. “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 122, l. 26 (“glebe has broke”). Did Hardy absorb a “hint” from a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine, (73 [1803], 1140), on Gray's “mistake … in using the word furrow instead of harrow”? The letter writer, “S. C.” (!), concludes: “Perhaps this hint may be attended to in future editions of that beautiful poem.”

47. “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 134, l. 92 (“wonted fires”).

48. “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 117, l. 1 (“curfew”).

49. Meyer Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick Hilles and Harold Bloom (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965).

50. In the back of his 1885 edition of Gray, Hardy inserted the clipping of a perceptive 1916 article on “Gray” from TLS no. 779 (1916): 617-18. The TLS article suggested that “Gray might have seen Wordsworth in his cradle” (618). Hardy simply completed the TLS sentence. For other Gray-Hardy connections, see F. B. Pinion, A Hardy Companion (London: Macmillan, 1976), 203; Björk's note in Hardy's Literary Notebooks, 1:379; Collected Letters, throughout; and my Hardy's Metres, throughout.

51. Suvir Kaul, Thomas Gray and Literary Authority (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), 8; also see Linda Zionkowski, “Bridging the Gulf Between: The Poet and the Audience in the Work of Gray,” ELH 58 (1991): 331-50. On Hardy's social class, see, among others, Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (London, Routledge, 1989).

52. Chesterton, 126.

53. Gray, Prefatory note, “The Alliance of Education and Government,” in Lonsdale, 91.

54. Gray, Correspondence, 196.

55. “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 132, l. 84 (“moralist to die”).

56. “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 125, ll. 41-42 (“fleeting breath”).

57. “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” Lonsdale, 63, ll. 99-100 (“folly to be wise”).

58. “Ode on the Spring,” Lonsdale, 50, l. 16.

59. “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 117, ll. 3-4 (“the world to darkness and to me”). At least one of Gray's contemporary readers found this usage “quaint”: see John Young, A Criticism on the Elegy, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh: Ballantine, 1810; original edition London, 1783), 36.

60. “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 118, l. 5 (“on the sight”). David Thatcher cites other verbal parallels between the two poems, in “Another Look at Hardy's ‘Afterwards,’” Victorian Newsletter 38 (Fall, 1970): 14-18: “Upland” and “thorn” occur in both pieces, and Gray's “a swain may think,” “crossed,” “dews,” “aged thorn,” and “trembling” are echoed in Hardy's “a gazer may think,” “crossing,” “dewfall,” “wind-warped thorn,” and “tremulous” (16).

61. “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” Lonsdale, 60-61, ll. 61-70.

62. Thomas Hardy's “Studies, Specimens &c ” Notebook, ed. P. Dalziel and M. Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).

63. See LN, 2:461-63: “The Bard” (l. 141), “Ode on … Vicissitude” (ll. 33, 41), “Ode on the Spring” (ll. 21, 31), “Ode on … Eton” (ll. 63, 68, 79, 74, 81), “Ode to Adversity” (l. 18), the “Elegy” (ll. 31, 44, 63-4). Gray's “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat” influenced Hardy's various poems about pets; in “Last Words to a Dumb Friend” (no. 619) Hardy imitates Gray's poetical diction. Where Gray's fourth line reads, “Demurest of the tabby kind” (Lonsdale, 81), Hardy's second line reads “Purrer of the spotless hue.”

64. Lonsdale, 52-53, ll. 35-40.

65. Hardy's clipping of “Gray,” TLS.

66. “The Bard” shows similar statistics: of its 81 words cited in the OED, only two are clearly labeled (“orb of day,” symphonious), and only four remain unique, all compounds (awe-commanding, cherub-choir, lion-port, virgin-grace).

67. Also, interestingly, free verse (under amphibrach) though not cited as such by the OED.

68. Gray made the observation that “the language of the age is never the language of poetry; except among the French, whose verse … differs in nothing from prose” (Correspondence, 83).

69. In his Mitford edition of Gray, Hardy underlined Gray's description of Dryden in “The Progress of Poesy”: “Dryden's less presumptuous car,” that is, less presumptuous than Milton and in fact more important for establishing a standard literary language (Mitford, 35, l. 103).

70. Mitford edition of Gray, cix; the other descriptions are quoted in Alan McKenzie, Thomas Gray: A Reference Guide (Boston: Hall, 1982), 57, 61, 102.

71. Hardy's clipping of “Gray,” TLS.

72. Gray, Correspondence, 477.

73. Johnson, 3:434, 441.

74. Leslie Stephen, “Gray and His School,” Cornhill Magazine 40 (1879): 70-91, 70.

75. “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 117, l. 1. In “Drawing Details in an Old Church” (no. 655) Hardy writes “And I catch the toll that follows / From the lagging bell,” evoking Gray's sounds of “tolls” and “knell.”

76. See Lonsdale, prefatory note to “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” 117.

77. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd Bitzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1988), 149.

78. Harold Williams, “Gray's ‘Elegy,’” Notes and Queries 128 (1921), 358. The line has been the subject of numerous Notes and Queries articles: McKenzie cites four (85, 110, 156, 305; McKenzie's dating of the article cited on page 110 is mistaken; the date should be 1899). The general consensus, laboriously arrived at, is that “frown'd not on” means “smiled upon.”

79. “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” Lonsdale, 56-57, ll. 3-4.

80. “Elegy,” Lonsdale, 140, ll. 123-25.

81. Gray, Correspondence, 532, 1294. This oddly dense polish may explain the famous attacks made against Gray, that “he was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet” (Johnson in James Boswell, Life of Johnson [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953], 600), that Gray's use of a word like “ruin” in “Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!” is an example of a word run to seed in allegorical dullness (Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction [Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973], 123), that Gray's emotions are not concentrated but “centrifugal” (F. W. Bateson, English Poetry and the English Language [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973], 59), that Gray's example in many poems is “decadent and disruptive” (Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953], 37). The Wordsworth-Coleridge argument over Gray's sonnet left Gray condemned either for writing artificially or else incongruously. Into his Literary Notebooks Hardy pasted a clipping of a TLS review of Courthrope's History of English Poetry; the reviewer wrote: “it is strange to find both Johnson and Goldsmith on the one hand and Wordsworth on the other finding fault with Gray because his diction was so far from natural speech” (LN, 2:301; “The Poetry of the Eighteenth Century,” TLS no. 203 [Dec. 1, 1905], 414).

82. Archibald Sayce, quoted in my Hardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 221, where I also explain the principles of working with the OED.

83. “Ode on the Spring,” Lonsdale, 52, ll. 35-36.

84. Hardy's distinctive use of un-verbs (unblooms, unvision, unspeak), is forecast by a lone second edition Gray citation: “Our defeat to be sure is a rueful affair … ; but the Duke is gone it seems … to undefeat us again” (letter to Horace Walpole, 3 February 1746, in Correspondence, 1:229) but Hardy's converts Gray's colloquial cleverness into that characteristic oddity of scrutinized idiom.

85. I have discussed Hardy's historicized style in Hardy's Literary Language.

86. Gray, Correspondence, 193.

87. I have quoted this passage in Hardy's Literary Language, 221.

88. Quoted in Hardy's Literary Language, 290.