"One peculiar and remarkable tribute to the merit of the Elegy," says Professor Henry Reed, "is to be noticed in the great number of translations which have been made of it into various languages, both of ancient and modern Europe. It is the same kind of tribute which has been rendered to Robinson Crusoe and to The Pilgrim's Progress, and is proof of the same universality of interest, transcending the limits of language and of race. To no poem in the English language has the same kind of homage been paid so abundantly. Of what other poem is there a polyglot edition? Italy and England have competed with their polyglot editions of the Elegy: Torri's, bearing the title, Elegia di Tomaso Gray sopra un Cimitero di Campagna, tradotta dall' Inglese in più lingue: Verona, 1817; Livorno, 1843;' and Van Voorst's London edition." Professor Reed adds a list of the translations (which, however, is incomplete), including one in Hebrew, seven in Greek, twelve in Latin, thirteen in Italian, fifteen in French, six in German, and one in Portuguese. "Had Gray written nothing but his Elegy," remarks Byron, "high as he stands, am not sure that he would not stand higher; it is the cornerstone of his glory." The tribute paid the poem by General Wolfe is familiar to all, but we cannot refrain from quoting Lord Mahon's beautiful account of it in his History of England. On the night of September 13th, 1759, the night before the battle on the Plains of Abraham, Wolfe was descending the St. Lawrence with a part of his troops. The historian says: "Swiftly, but silently, did the boats fall down with the tide, unobserved by the enemy's sentinels at their posts along the shore. Of the soldiers on board, how eagerly must every heart have throbbed at the coming conflict how intently must every eye have contemplated the dark outline, as it lay pencilled upon the midnight sky, and as every moment it grew closer and clearer, of the hostile heights! Not a word was spoken-not a sound heard beyond the rippling of the stream. Wolfe alone-thus tradition has told us-repeated in a low tone to the other officers in his boat those beautiful stanzas with which a country churchyard inspired the muse of Gray. One noble line, 6 The paths of glory lead but to the grave,' must have seemed at such a moment fraught with mournful meaning. At the close of the recitation Wolfe added, 'Now, gentlemen, I would rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec.' Hales, in his Introduction to the poem, remarks: "The Elegy is perhaps the most widely known poem in our language. The reason of this extensive popularity is perhaps to be sought in the fact that it expresses in an exquisite manner feelings and thoughts that are universal. In the current of ideas in the Elegy there is perhaps nothing that is rare, or exceptional, or out of the common way. The musings are of the most rational and obvious character possible; it is difficult to conceive of any one musing under similar circumstances who should not muse so; but they are not the less deep and moving on this account. The mystery of life does not become clearer, or less solemn and awful, for any amount of contemplation. Such inevitable, such everlasting questions as rise on the mind when one lingers in the precincts of Death can never lose their It is with such ques freshness, never cease to fascinate and to move. tions, that would have been commonplace long ages since if they could ever be so, that the Elegy deals. It deals with them in no lofty philosophical manner, but in a simple, humble, unpretentious way, always with the truest and the broadest humanity. The poet's thoughts turn to the poor; he forgets the fine tombs inside the church, and thinks only of the 'mouldering heaps' in the churchyard. Hence the problem that especially suggests itself is the potential greatness, when they lived, of the 'rude forefathers' that now lie at his feet. He does not, and cannot solve it, though he finds considerations to mitigate the sadness it must inspire; but he expresses it in all its awfulness in the most effective language and with the deepest feeling; and his expression of it has become a living part of our language." The writer in the North American Review (vol. 96) from whom we have elsewhere quoted says of the Elegy: "It is upon this that Gray's fame as a poet must chiefly rest. By this he will be known forever alike to the lettered and the unlettered. Many, in future ages, who may never have heard of his classic Odes, his various learning, or his sparkling letters, will revere him only as the author of the Elegy. For this he will be enshrined through all time in the hearts of the myriads who shall speak our English tongue. For this his name will be held in glad remembrance in the far-off summer isles of the Pacific, and amidst the waste of polar snows. If he had written nothing else, his place as a leading poet in our language would still be assured. Many have asserted, with Johnson, that he was a mere mechanical poet-one who brought from without, but never found within; that the gift of inspiration was not native to him; that his imagination was borrowed finery, his fancy tinsel, and his invention the world's well-worn jewels; that whatever in his verse was poetic was not new, and what was new was not poetic; that he was only an unworldly dyspeptic, living amid many books, and laboriously delving for a lifetime between musty covers, picking out now and then another's gems and bits of ore, and fashioning them into ill-compacted mosaics, which he wrongly called his own. To all this the Elegy is a sufficient answer. It is not old-it is not bookish; it is new and human. Books could not make its maker: he was born of the divine breath alone. Consider all the commentators, the scholiasts, the interpreters, the annotators, and other like book-worms, from Aristarchus down to Döderlein; and may it not be said that, among them all, 'Nec viget quidquam simile aut secundum?' Gray wrote but little, yet he wrote that little well. He might have done far more for us; the same is true of most men, even of the greatest. The possibilities of a life are always in advance of its performance. But we cannot say that his life was a wasted one. Even this little Elegy alone should go for much. For, suppose that he had never written this, but instead had done much else in other ways, according to his powers: that he had written many learned treatises; that he had, with keen criticism, expounded and reconstructed Greek classics; that he had, perchance, sat upon the woolsack, and laid rich offerings at the feet of blind Justice;-taking the years together, would it have been, on the whole, better for him or for us? Would he have added so much to the sum of human happiness? He might thus have made himself a power for a time, to be dethroned by some new usurper in the realm of knowledge; now he is a power and a joy forever to countless thousands." Three manuscripts of the Elegy, in Gray's handwriting, still exist. The poet bequeathed his library, letters, and many miscellaneous papers, to his friends the Rev. William Mason and the Rev. James Browne, as joint literary executors. Mason bequeathed the entire trust to Mr. Stonhewer. The latter, in making his will, divided the legacy into two parts. The larger share went to the Master and Fellows of Pembroke Hall. Among the papers, which are still in the possession of the College, was found a copy of the Elegy. An excellent fac-simile of this manuscript appears in Mathias's edition of Gray, published in 1814, and from this our readings are taken. In referring to it hereafter we shall designate it as the "Pembroke" MS. The remaining portion of Gray's literary bequest, including the other manuscript of the Elegy, was left by Mr. Stonhewer to his friend, Mr. Bright. In 1845 Mr. Bright's sons sold the collection at auction. The MS. of the Elegy was bought by Mr. Granville John Penn, of Stoke Park, for one hundred pounds-the highest sum that had ever been known to be paid for a single sheet of paper. In 1854 this manuscript came again into the market, and was knocked down to Mr. Robert Charles Wrightson, of Birmingham, for £131. On the 28th 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, and a transcript (100 copies), edited by Sir William Fraser, was printed in 1884.* For convenience we shall Fraser" MS. Gosse calls it the "Mason" MS. There can be little doubt that the Fraser MS. is the original one, and that the Pembroke MS. is a fair copy inade 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. refer to it as the 66 The third MS., which belonged to Wharton and is now among the Egerton MSS. (No. 2400) in the British Museum, was evidently written a little earlier than the Pembroke MS., from which it differs but slightly. The Fraser MS., like the other two, has in the first stanza, "The lowing Herd wind slowly," etc. See our note on this line, p. 83 below. In the 2d stanza, it reads, "And now the Air," and "Or drowzy." In 3d stanza, it has "stray too" written above "wandring," and "& pry into" above "Molest her;" as if the poet had thought of reading "Of such as stray too near her secret bower And pry into her solitary reign." * We have had the privilege of consulting a copy of the photograph belonging to Rev. James Freeman Clarke, D.D., of Boston, as well as the Fraser reprint in the possession of the Harpers. We are also indebted to Dr. Clarke for the use of an exact transcript of the Egerton MS. made for him at the British Museum. The two stanzas of which a fac-simile is given on page 73 are from the Pembroke MS., but the wood-cut hardly does justice to the feminine delicacy of the poet's handwriting. In 4th stanza, "Village" is crossed out,* and "Hamlet" written above. "For ever sleep: the breezy Call of Morn, The 6th stanza has "Nor climb;" and 'envied" is written above 'coming," which is underlined, and “doubtful” is put in the margin as an alternative reading. In 8th stanza, "useful" is underlined, and “homely” put in the margin; and the next line has "rustic Joys." In 10th stanza, the first two lines read: The 11th stanza has "awake the silent Dust," with "awake" underlined and "provoke" in the margin. The 12th stanza has "Reins of Empire." The next stanza in the MS. (marked, however, for transposition) reads thus: "Some Village Cato with dauntless Breast The little Tyrant of his Fields withstood; * It should be understood that words are not crossed out in the MS. when others are written above, below. or in the margin, except in the instances specified by us. †The Saturday Review for June 19, 1875, has a long article 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." The first line is indistinct, owing (as the photograph shows) to the wear in folding the sheet, and the pronoun after "Cato" is illegible. The Fraser reprint reads as above. The 13th stanza (present numbering) has "Chill Penury had damp'd,” with " depress'd" and "repress'd" written above. The 17th stanza has "Their Fate" with "Lot" above; and "Their struggling Virtues," with "growing" above. The 18th stanza has "And at the Shrine," with "crown "above "at the." The next line begins with "Burn," which is crossed out and "With" written above; and it has "hallow'd in the Muse's Flame," with "by" written above "in," and "kindled at" under "hallow'd in." After this stanza, the MS. has the following four stanzas, which have a line drawn beside them, indicating that they are to be omitted: "The thoughtless World to Majesty may bow But more to Innocence their Safety owe And thou, who mindful of the unhonour'd Dead To linger in the gloomy Walks of Fate Hark how the sacred Calm, that broods around No more with Reason & thyself at Strife 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 21st stanza, "Fame, & Epitaph," etc. In the 23d stanza, the last line reads, "And buried Ashes glow with social Fires." After this stanza the MS. has "For Thee, who mindful &c.: as above," indicating that the stanza is to be transposed to this point. The 24th stanza reads, "If chance that e'er some pensive Spirit more, By sympathetic Musings here delay d, With vain, tho' kind, Enquiry shall explore Thy once-loved Haunt, this long-deserted Shade." The first line of the 25th stanza has "shall say;" and the last two lines read, "With hasty Footsteps brush the Dews away On the high Brow of yonder hanging Lawn." |