An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard and The Eton College Manuscript - Thomas Gray (100 books to read txt) 📗

Publication, normally abhorrent to Gray, thus became inevitable, though apparently not contemplated by Gray himself. The private success of the poem was greater than he had anticipated, and in February of 1751 he was horrified to receive a letter from the editor of a young and undistinguished periodical, "The Magazine of Magazines," who planned to print forthwith the "ingenious poem, call'd Reflections in a Country-Churchyard." Gray hastily wrote to Walpole (11 February), insisting that he should "make Dodsley print it immediately" from Walpole's copy, without Gray's name, but with good paper and letter. He prescribed the titlepage as well as other details, and within four days Dodsley had the poem in print, and anticipated the piratical "Magazine" by one day. But the "Magazine" named Gray as the author, and success without anonymity was the fate of the "Elegy." Edition followed edition, and the poem was almost from birth an international classic.

One of the author's prescriptions for publication concerned the verse form. He told Walpole that Dodsley must "print it without any Interval between the Stanza's, because the Sense is in some Places continued beyond them." In the Egerton MS Gray had written the poem with no breaks to set off quatrains, but in the earlier MS (Eton College), where the poem is entitled, "Stanza's, wrote in a Country Church-Yard," the quatrains are spaced in normal fashion. The injunction shows Gray's sensitiveness as to metrical form. He had called the poem an Elegy only after urging by Mason, and he possibly doubted if his metre was "soft" enough for true elegy. The metre hitherto had not been common in elegies, though James Hammond's "Love Elegies" (1743) had used it and won acclaim. But the heroic (hendecasyllabic) quatrain was regarded in general as too lofty, stately, cool, for elegy. For the universal aspect of Gray's lament, however, it was highly apt as compared with the less majestic octosyllabic line, hitherto normal in this genre. For years after Gray's great success, however, most elegies, if in quatrain form, followed Gray's quatrain in manner, whether or not their subjects demanded the stately line.

The reasons why Gray is almost a poet of only one poem are not far to seek. He did not covet applause, and apart from melancholy his own emotions were too private to be published. In the "Elegy" he is true to himself and to the spirit of his age—perhaps of most ages. When he sought for material outside of his own experience, he went curiously to books, and was captivated by the "récherché." He was also caught by the rising cult of sublimity in his two great pindaric odes, and by the cult of the picturesque in his flirtations with Scandinavian materials. In these later poems he broadened the field of poetic material notably; but in them he hardly deepened the imaginative or emotional tone: his manner, rather, became elaborate and theatrical. The "Elegy" is the language of the heart sincerely perfected.

The poem has pleased many and pleased long—throughout two centuries. In part it works through "pleasing melancholy"; in part it appeals to innumerable humble readers conscious of their own unheralded merit. Inevitably, since the industrial revolution, modernist critics have tended to stress its appeal to class consciousness. This appeal, real though it is, can be overemphasized. The rude forefathers are not primarily presented as underprivileged. Though poverty-stricken and ignorant, they are happy in family life and jocund in the field. "Nature is nature wherever placed," as the intellectuals of Gray's time loved to say, and the powers of the village fathers, potentially, equal the greatest; their virtue is contentment. They neither want nor need "storied urn or animated bust." If they are unappreciated by Ambition, Grandeur, Pride, et al., the lack of appreciation is due to a corruption of values. The value commended in the "Elegy" is that of the simple life, which alone is rational and virtuous—it is the life according to nature. Sophisticated living, Gray implies in the stanza that once ended the poem, finds man at war with himself and with reason; but the cool sequestered path—its goal identical with that of the paths of Glory—finds man at peace with himself and with reason. The theme was not new before Gray made it peculiarly his own, and it has become somewhat hackneyed in the last two hundred years; but the fact that it is seldom unheard in any decade testifies to its permanency of appeal, and the fact that it was "ne'er so well express'd" as in the "Elegy" justifies our love for that poem.

George Sherburn
Harvard University

The first edition of the "Elegy" is here reproduced from a copy in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

By permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College, the manuscript preserved in the library of Eton College is also reproduced. This manuscript once belonged to Gray's friend, biographer, and editor, William Mason. In spite of its dimness, due to creases in the paper and to the fact that the ink shows through from the other side of the paper, this manuscript is chosen for reproduction because it preserves the quatrains discarded before printing the poem, and has other interesting variants in text. Two other MSS of the poem in Gray's hand are known to exist. One is preserved in the British Museum (Egerton 2400, ff. 45-6) and the other is the copy made by Gray in Volume II of his Commonplace Books. This, is appropriately preserved in the library of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Sir William Fraser bequeathed to Eton College the MS there found, which in certain editions of the poem is called "the Fraser manuscript."

LONDON:

Printed for R. DODSLEY in Pall-mall;

And sold by M. COOPER in Pater-noster-Row. 1751.

[Price Six-pence.]