Short & Simple Annals

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF THOMAS GRAY (170 pp.)--Edited by Joseph Wood Krutch--Farrar, Sfraus & Young ($3.75).

He was only, he said, "a little waddling Freshman" (of Peterhouse, Cambridge) who was interested in the arts but had no unusual talent for them. He was a bosom friend of the Prime Minister's son, Horace Walpole, and might have climbed in 18th century London's brightest society. But Thomas Gray, author of one of the most celebrated poems in the English language, had no ambition to shine.

Unlike such contemporaries as James Boswell and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gray not only refused to wear his heart on his sleeve but made sure that it was permanently hidden in his boots. His letters contain no horrifying confessions, no enlightening details of an intimate nature. They describe him merely as one who was occasionally attacked by black despondency but whose usual condition was the more negative one of "white Melancholy" --"A good, easy sort of state," Thomas Gray once called it. "The only fault of it is insipidity."

Three Days a Year. There was a time in Gray's youth when it seemed he might break loose. In 1739, his friend Walpole whirled him off on a continental tour, and Gray's letters home fizzed with high spirits. Like many a tourist before & after, he found ample material for jokes in such things as French opera and royalty, nuns and pubs, Italian comedy and conversazione. Then, when he seemed to be becoming quite a man of the world, Walpole was rude to him. Gray packed his bag and went home to Cambridge, a gentleman scholar living on a modest inheritance.

He toyed with a harpsichord and browsed through his favorite books. A bachelor to the end, he interested himself in such things as gothic wallpaper, and compiled huge collections of notes for works he never executed. He pondered long and often on his special afflictions, melancholy and gout, and showed positive enthusiasm on the subject of death. "Our friend Dr. Chapman," he informed a correspondent briskly, "is not expected here again in a hurry. He is gone to his grave with five mackerel...in his belly. He eat them all at one dinner...They say he made a very good end."

On rare occasions--"not above three days in a year," he said--Gray fell into what he guardedly called "a certain disposition of mind." At. such times, he wrote poems. Over a period of ten years, he completed six of them, and Walpole, with whom he was again on friendly terms, secretly sent one of them to a publisher, who decided to publish it. Gray was horrified. How, he asked, could he "escape the Honour they would inflict upon me?" But he faced up to it. Elegy in a Country Churchyard (which probably contains more familiar phrases than any other poem of its length in the language*) was published and later appeared in an illustrated edition with its five fellows under the discreet title: Designs by Mr. R. Bentley/ for six Poems by/ Mr. T. Gray.

A Dread of Poetry. Thereafter, Gray spent much of his time escaping honors. He rejected the post of poet laureate with horror ("I would rather be Serjeant Trumpeter"). To the day of his death (in 1771), he lived in the dread that his poetry would make him look "ridiculous." Editor Krutch considers Gray's letters "deservedly among the most famous which have come down to us"; but this is strictly a scholar's opinion. On the few occasions when Gray kicked up his heels his letters brightened, but for the most part they reflect exactly the noiseless tenor of his studious way.

* E.g., "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r"; "The paths of glory lead but to the grave"; "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen"; "Some mute inglorious Milton"; "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife"; "The noiseless tenor of their way."

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