Select Poems of Thomas Gray - Thomas Gray (book club reads TXT) 📗

of Birmingham, for £131. On the 29th of May, 1875, it was once more offered for sale in London, and was purchased by Sir William Fraser for £230, or about $1150. A photographic reproduction of it was published in London in 1862. For convenience we shall refer to it as the "Wrightson" MS.

There can be little doubt that the Wrightson MS. is the original one, and that the Pembroke MS. is a fair copy made from it by the poet. The former contains a greater number of alterations, and varies more from the printed text. It bears internal evidence of being the rough draft, while the other represents a later stage of the poem. We will give the variations of both from the present version.3

3 For the readings of the Wrightson MS. we have had to depend on Mason, Mitford, and other editors of the poem, and on the article in the North American Review, already referred to. The readings of the Pembroke MS. are taken from the engraved fac-simile in Mathias's edition. The two stanzas of which a fac-simile is given above are from the Pembroke MS., but the wood-cut hardly does justice to the feminine delicacy of the poet's handwriting.

The Wrightson MS. has in the first stanza, "The lowing herd wind slowly," etc. See our note on this line, below.

In the 2d stanza, it reads, "And now the air," etc.

The 5th stanza is as follows:

"For ever sleep: the breezy call of morn,
     Or swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed,
 Or Chanticleer so shrill, or echoing horn,
     No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed."

In 8th stanza, "Their rustic joys," etc.

In 10th stanza, the first two lines read,

"Forgive, ye proud, th' involuntary fault,
     If memory to these no trophies raise."

In 12th stanza, "Hands that the reins of empire," etc.

In 13th stanza, "Chill Penury depress'd," etc.

The 15th stanza reads thus:

"Some village Cato, who, with dauntless breast,
     The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
 Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest,
     Some Cæsar guiltless of his country's blood."4

4 The Saturday Review for June 19, 1875, has a long article on the change made by Gray in this stanza, entitled, "A Lesson from Gray's Elegy," from which we cull the following paragraphs: "Gray, having first of all put down the names of three Romans as illustrations of his meaning, afterwards deliberately struck them out and put the names of three Englishmen instead. This is a sign of a change in the taste of the age, a change with which Gray himself had a good deal to do. The deliberate wiping out of the names of Cato, Tully, and Cæsar, to put in the names of Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell, seems to us so obviously a change for the better that there seems to be no room for any doubt about it. It is by no means certain that Gray's own contemporaries would have thought the matter equally clear. We suspect that to many people in his day it must have seemed a daring novelty to draw illustrations from English history, especially from parts of English history which, it must be remembered, were then a great deal more recent than they are now. To be sure, in choosing English illustrations, a poet of Gray's time was in rather a hard strait. If he chose illustrations from the century or two before his own time, he could only choose names which had hardly got free from the strife of recent politics. If, in a poem of the nature of the Elegy, he had drawn illustrations from earlier times of English history, he would have found but few people in his day likely to understand him.... "The change which Gray made in this well-known stanza is not only an improvement in a particular poem, it is a sign of a general improvement in taste. He wrote first according to the vicious taste of an earlier time, and he then changed it according to his own better taste. And of that better taste he was undoubtedly a prophet to others. Gray's poetry must have done a great deal to open men's eyes to the fact that they were Englishmen, and that on them, as Englishmen, English things had a higher claim than Roman, and that to them English examples ought to be more speaking than Roman ones. But there is another side of the case not to be forgotten. Those who would have regretted the change from Cato, Tully, and Cæsar to Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell, those who perhaps really did think that the bringing in of Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell was a degradation of what they would have called the Muse, were certainly not those who had the truest knowledge of Cato, Tully, and Cæsar. The 'classic' taste from which Gray helped to deliver us was a taste which hardly deserves to be called a taste. Pardonable perhaps in the first heat of the Renaissance, when 'classic' studies and objects had the charm of novelty, it had become by his day a mere silly fashion."

In 18th stanza, "Or crown the shrine," etc.

After this stanza, the MS. has the following four stanzas, now omitted:

"The thoughtless world to Majesty may bow,
     Exalt the brave, and idolize success;
 But more to innocence their safety owe
     Than Pow'r, or Genius, e'er conspir'd to bless.

"And thou who, mindful of the unhonour'd Dead,
     Dost in these notes their artless tale relate,
 By night and lonely contemplation led
     To wander in the gloomy walks of fate:

"Hark! how the sacred Calm, that breathes around,
     Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease;
 In still small accents whisp'ring from the ground
     A grateful earnest of eternal peace.

"No more, with reason and thyself at strife,
     Give anxious cares and endless wishes room;
 But through the cool sequester'd vale of life
     Pursue the silent tenor of thy doom."5 5 We follow Mason (ed. 1778) in the text of these stanzas. The North American Review has "Power and Genius" in the first, and "linger in the lonely walks" in the second.

The second of these stanzas has been remodelled and used as the 24th of the present version. Mason thought that there was a pathetic melancholy in all four which claimed preservation. The third he considered equal to any in the whole Elegy. The poem was originally intended to end here, the introduction of "the hoary-headed swain" being a happy after-thought.

In the 19th stanza, the MS. has "never learn'd to stray."

In the 21st stanza, "fame and epitaph," etc.

In the 23d stanza, the last line reads,