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Gray's Elegy: The Biographical Problem in Literary Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Frank H. Ellis
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Extract

It is a problem in literary criticism to know how to use the growing store of material discovered by historical research. This is only the practical aspect of a larger, theoretical problem: the relation between a written work and the biographical experiences of the writer. It has never been doubted that a poet's experiences, public and private, historical and psychological, reappear, distorted, refined, generalized, reordered, in his poetry. Hence it follows that the reconstruction of the poet's experiences from diaries, letters, accounts of friends, and public records, may illuminate his poetry. But the converse of this proposition is also assumed to be true: if the biographical experience illuminates the poetry, the poetry must also illuminate the biographical experience. The poem, in other words, is an autobiographical document.

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Type
Research Article
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PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 6 , December 1951, pp. 971 - 1008
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

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References

Note 1 in page 972 The Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Mrs. Paget Toynbee (Oxford, 1903–05), ii, 217.

Note 2 in page 972 Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley (Oxford, 1935), i, 234. Despite this setback and despite the rumor that when Cromartie was captured “he was actually found in bed with Lady Sutherland,” Lady Cromartie continued to petition the royal family until she was finally successful. Walpole, however, relates that “the Prince of Wales, whose intercession saved Cromartie, says he did it in return for old Sir W. [Lady Cromartie's father], coming down out of his death-bed to vote against my father.”

Note 3 in page 973 A Complete Collection of State Trials ..., ed. T. B. Howell (London, 1816), xviii 447–448.

Note 4 in page 974 Letters of Walpole, ii, 215–216.

Note 5 in page 974 Correspondence of Gray, i, 234–235.

Note 6 in page 975 Warwick Wroth, The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1896), p. 292.

Note 7 in page 976 Correspondence of Gray, i, 241.

Note 8 in page 976 This was the working title of the poem, as given in the MS. preserved at Eton College from which all quotations of the Stanza's below are taken. Mason, who met Gray in 1747, claimed that it was he who persuaded Gray to call the poem an elegy. At any rate, when Gray wrote to Walpole in Feb. 1751 asking him to arrange publication of the poem, he insisted that “the Title must be, Elegy, wrote in a Country Church-yard.”

Note 9 in page 977 James Foster, An Account of the Behavior of the Late Earl of Kilmarnock, After his Sentence, and on the Day of His Execution (London, 1746), p. 17.

Note 10 in page 977 Letters of Walpole, ii, 216.

Note 11 in page 977 Correspondence of Gray, i, 239–240.

Note 12 in page 978 Correspondence of Gray, i, 209.

Note 13 in page 980 William Mason, The Poems of Mr. Gray. To which are Added Memoirs of his Life and Writings (York, 1778), i 164; An Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard ... The Three Manuscripts, ed. Rintaro Fukuhara and Henry Bergen (Primrose Hill, 1933), pp. iii–iv.

Note 14 in page 980 Letters of Walpole, viii, 372. The MS. of this letter has disappeared. All modern editions of it are reprinted from John Mitford, Correspondence of Horace Walpole and the Rev. William Mason (London, 1851), i,109. If H. W. Garrod's conjecture—“Note on the Composition of Gray's Elegy,” Essays on the Eighteenth Century Presented to David Nichol Smith ... (Oxford, 1945), p. 113—that Mitford miscopied Walpole's “the 72 or more first lines” as “the 12 or more first Unes” can be accepted, then it becomes apparent that Gray showed Walpole the whole draft except the four-stanza conclusion.

Note 15 in page 981 Mason, Poems of Gray, in, 3.

Note 16 in page 983 Correspondence of Gray, iii, 1018.

Note 17 in page 988 R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Gray (London, 1935), p. 50.

Note 18 in page 988 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York, 1947), p. 107.

Note 19 in page 991 A Criticism on the Elegy written in a Country Church Yard. Being a Continuation of Dr. J—n's Criticism on the Poems of Gray (London, 1783). According to the Advertisement, this curious tirade, which pretends to be a suppressed work of Samuel Johnson, is “executed in a manner somewhat outré”—so outré, in fact, that contemporary reviewers did not know whether it was a serious criticism of the Elegy or a jeu d'esprit mocking Johnson's “atrabilious mode of criticising.” See The Monthly Review, LXIX (Sept. 1783), 259, and The Gentleman's Magazine, LIV (May 1784), 358. Walpole's guess was that “the author wishes to be taken by Gray's admirers for a ridiculer of Johnson, and by the latter's for a censurer of Gray” (Letters of Walpole, xiii, 5). In any case, the work has never been accepted as Johnson's and the ascription to John Young, a professor of classics at Glasgow, seems very unlikely.

Note 20 in page 992 David Cecil, Two Quiet Lives (London, 1948), p. 136. Ever since Mason conjectured that the poem was begun in August 1742, unsuccessful efforts have been made to read into it references to Richard West.

Note 21 in page 993 Cf. Lord David Cecil, “The Poetry of Thomas Gray,” Warton Lecture on English Poetry (London, 1945), p. 11: “This brings Gray around to himself. How does he expect to be remembered? Not as a happy man: he has been sad, obscure, misunderstood. Yet, he reminds himself with his customary balance, there have been alleviations. He has known friendship, loved learning, and attained, in part at least, to virtue.”

Note 22 in page 993 Two exceptions are J. Crofts, Gray: Poetry and Prose (Oxford, 1926), p. vi, and Herbert W. Starr, “ Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown': a Reestimation,” JEGP, XLVIII (1949), 97–107. Crofts simply mentions without any elaboration “the hypothetical epitaph of a hypothetical youth.” Starr, in an excellent rejoinder to Odell Shepard's repeated assurances that the Epitaph celebrates Richard West, develops at some length his contention that it celebrates “an imaginary rustic poet.”

Note 23 in page 994 The Monthly Review: or, Literary Journal, LIX (May 1775), 380. For the ascription of this article to John Langhorne, see Benjamin Christie Nangle, The Monthly Review . . . Indexes of Contributors and Articles (Oxford, 1934), pp. 26,116.

Note 24 in page 995 Later in the same year Gray wrote to Walpole in a similar vein: “if I cannot die like a Hero, let it at least be like a despairing lover” (Correspondence of Gray, i, 54).

Note 25 in page 995 Two Quiet Lives, p. 130.

Note 26 in page 995 “A Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown,” MP, xx (1923), 350.

Note 27 in page 997 Thomas Gray, pp. 48–49. Cf. D. C. Tovey, Gray's English Poems (London, 1898), p. 166: “the ‘personal note’ with which a very general theme is made to end is distinctly not effective.”

Note 28 in page 997 A Criticism on the Elegy . . ., pp. 73–74; John Forster, Walter Savage Landor, a Biography (London, 1869), ii, 422.

Note 29 in page 997 A Critical History of English Poetry, 2nd ed. (London, 1947), p. 226.

Note 30 in page 997 “Wordsworth and Gray,” Quart. Rev., cxxi (Jan. 1876), 110. The italics are in the original text.

Note 31 in page 998 Essays, Moral and Literary (London, 1778), p. 95. By “some” Knox evidently meant Oliver Goldsmith, but the context makes it clear that he included himself in this category. In the 5th edition (1784) of his essays (ii, 186), Knox recanted and censured Goldsmith for preferring Parnell's Night-piece on Death to the Elegy. Knox's deprecatory phrase “after all” recurs frequently in criticism of Gray. Cf. George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (New York, 1929), p. 576: “he is, after all, but a second-rate poet,” and J. Crofts, Gray: Poetry and Prose, p. vi: “But the Elegy, after all, is a complacent piece.”

Note 32 in page 998 Critical Essays on some of the Poems of several English Poets (London, 1785), pp. 185-246.

Note 33 in page 998 Correspondence of Gray, iii, 1140.

Note 34 in page 999 Cf. Propertius iv.xi.74: “haec cura et cineri spirat inusta meo.”

Note 35 in page 1000 Cf. Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, pp. 105–106.

Note 36 in page 1000 Essai sur Gray (London and Paris, 1934), p. 419.

Note 37 in page 1000 The poem does not assume “an uniform innocence in humble life,” as John Scott claimed. All it assumes is that village vices are “confined”—they cannot affect as many people as the vices of the powerful. The historical Cromwell was enabled “to wade through Slaughter to a Throne,” but the village Cromwell is at least debarred from “military criminalities.” Gray no doubt would have agreed with Scott (Critical Essays, p. 209) that “the villager will learn hide the pangs of struggling truth,' or in other words, to tell a lye with a good grace, as well as the politician or the trader.”

Note 38 in page 1001 That the poem was equally popular with royalist sympathizers cannot be ignored. It was imitated by François le vicomte de Chateaubriand in 1797 while he was a political émigré in London, and translated by Nicolas le Deist de Kérivalant, who was deprived by the Directory of his post as maître du comptes to the parlement of Brittany. A poem which appeals equally to men of violently opposed political beliefs is not likely to be a poem “with latent political ideas.” As Chateaubriand said, “Dans mon temps, j'ai aussi imité le Cimetière de campagne. (Qui ne l'a pas imité?).”

Note 39 in page 1002 Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935), p. 4.

Note 40 in page 1002 “The Author of the Elegy,” Edinburgh Rev., CCXLIV (1926), 132.

Note 41 in page 1004 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London, 1876 ii, 85.

Note 42 in page 1004 Correspondence of Gray, i, 192.

Note 43 in page 1005 Prose Works of Wordsworth, ii, 84.

Note 44 in page 1005 Correspondence of Gray, ii, 593.

Note 45 in page 1005 Practical Criticism (New York, 1929), p. 207.

Note 46 in page 1006 A. C. Benson, “The Secret of Gray,” Poetry Rev., vii (1916), 388.

Note 47 in page 1006 (Paris, 1865), iii, 15. Cf. “Tant qu'on ne s'est pas adressé sur un auteur un certain nombre de questions et qu'on n'y a pas répondu, ne fût-ce que pour soi seul et tout bas, on n'est pas sûr de le tenir entier, quand même ces questions sembleraient les plus étrangères à la nature de ces écrits:—Que pensait-il en religion?—Comment était-il affecté de spectacle de la nature?—Comment se comportait-il sur l'article des femmes? sur l'article de l'argent? —Êtait-il riche, était-il pauvre?—Quel était son régime, quelle sa manière journalière de vivre? etc.—Enfin, quel était son vice ou son faible? Tout homme en a un. Aucune des responses à ces questions n'est indifférente pour juger l'auteur d'un livre et le livre même, si ce livre n'est pas un traité de géométrie pure ...” (op. cit., iii, 28). The italics are not in the original text.

Note 48 in page 1008 C. J. Sisson, “The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare,” Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy (London, 1934).

Note 49 in page 1008 Biographia Lileraria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), i, 26, n.