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He wishes to see the modern writer, instead of tilling an exhausted soil, staking out a claim in the perfectly virgin field of his own experience. He cannot teach you to be a man of genius; he could not even teach himself to be one. But at least he lays down many of the right rules for the use of genius. His book marks a revolutionary stage in the development of English literary criticism.

X.-GRAY AND COLLINS

The

THERE seems to be a definite connection between good writing and indolence. The men whom we call stylists have, most of them, been idlers. From Horace to Robert Louis Stevenson, nearly all have been pigs from the sty of Epicurus. They have not, to use an excellent Anglo-Irish word, "industered" like insects or millionaires. greatest men, one must admit, have mostly been as punctual at their labours as the sun-as fiery and inexhaustible. But, then, one does not think of the greatest writers as stylists. They are so much more than that. The style of Shakespeare is infinitely more marvellous than the style of Gray. But one hardly thinks of style in presence of the sea or a range of mountains or in reading Shakespeare. His munificent and gorgeous genius was as far above style as the statesmanship of Pericles or the sanctity of Joan of Arc was above good manners. The world has not endorsed Ben Jonson's retort to those who commended Shakespeare for never having "blotted out" a line: "Would he had blotted out a thousand!" We feel that so vast a genius is beyond the perfection of control we look for in a stylist. There may be badly-written scenes in Shakespeare, and pot-house jokes, and wordy hyperboles, but with all this there are enchanted continents which we may continue to explore though we live to be a hundred.

The fact that the noble impatience of a Shakespeare is above our fault-finding, however, must not be used to disparage the lazy patience of good writing. An Æschylus or a Shakespeare, a Browning or a Dickens, conquers us with an abundance like nature's. He feeds us out of a horn of plenty. This, unfortunately, is possible only to writers of the first order. The others, when they attempt profusion, become fluent rather than abundant, facile of ink rather

than generous of golden grain. Who does not agree with Pope that Dryden, though not Shakespeare, would have been a better poet if he had learned:

The last and greatest art-the art to blot?

Who is there who would not rather have written a single ode of Gray's than all the poetical works of Southey? If voluminousness alone made a man a great writer, we should have to canonize Lord Lytton. The truth is, literary genius has no rule either of voluminousness or of the opposite. The genius of one writer is a world ever moving. The genius of another is a garden often still. The greatest genius is undoubtedly of the former kind. But as there is hardly enough genius of this kind to fill a wall, much less a library, we may well encourage the lesser writers to cultivate their gardens, and, in the absence of the wilder tumult of creation, to delight us with blooms of leisurely phrase and quiet thought.

Gray and Collins were both writers who laboured in little gardens. Collins, indeed, had a small flower-bed—perhaps only a pot-rather than a garden. He produced-in it one perfect bloom-the Ode to Evening. The rest of his work is carefully written, inoffensive, historically interesting. But his continual personification of abstract ideas makes the greater part of his verse lifeless as allegories or as sculpture in a graveyard. He was a romantic, an inventor of new forms, in his own day. He seems academic to ours. His work is that of a man striking an attitude rather than of one expressing the deeps of a passionate nature. He is always careful not to confess. His Ode to Fear does not admit us to any of the secrets of his maniacal and melancholy breast. It is an anticipation of the factitious gloom of Byron, not of the nerve-shattered gloom of Dostoevsky. Collins, we cannot help feeling, says in it what he does not really think. He glorifies fear as though it were the better part of imagination, going so far as to end his ode with the lines:

O thou whose spirit most possessed

The sacred seat of Shakespeare's breast!

By all that from thy prophet broke
In thy divine emotions spoke :
Hither again thy fury deal,

Teach me but once, like him, to feel;
His cypress wreath my meed decree,

And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee!

We have only to compare these lines with Claudio's terrible speech about death in Measure for Measure to see the difference between pretence and passion in literature. Shakespeare had no fear of telling us what he knew about fear. Collins lived in a more reticent century, and attempted to fob off a disease on us as an accomplishment. What perpetually delights us in the Ode to Evening is that here at least Collins can tell the truth without falsification or chilling rhetoric. Here he is writing of the world as he has really seen it and been moved by it. He still makes use of personifications, but they have been transmuted by his emotion into imagery. In these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, Collins has summed up his view and dream of life. One knows that he was not lying or bent upon expressing any man's experiences but his own when he described how the

Air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat,
With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,
Or where the beetle winds

His small but sullen horn.

He speaks here, not in the stiffness of rhetoric, but in the liberty of a new mood, never, for all he knew or cared, expressed before. As far as all the rest of his work is concerned, his passion for style is more or less wasted. But the Ode to Evening justifies both his pains and his indolence. As for the pains he took with his work, we have it on the authority of Thomas Warton that "all his odes . . . had the marks of repeated correction: he was perpetually changing his epithets." As for his indolence, his uncle, Colonel Martin, thought him "too indolent even for the Army," and advised him to enter the Church-a step from which he was dissuaded, we are told, by "a

tobacconist in Fleet Street." For the rest, he was the son of a hatter, and went mad. He is said to have haunted the cloisters of Chichester Cathedral during his fits of melancholia, and to have uttered a strange accompaniment of groans and howls during the playing of the organ. The Castle of Indolence was for Collins no keep of the pleasures. One may doubt if it is ever this for any artist. Did not even Horace attempt to escape into Stoicism? Did not Stevenson write Pulvis et Umbra?

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Assuredly Gray, though he was as fastidious in his appetites as Collins was wild, cannot be called in as a witness to prove the Castle of Indolence a happy place. "Low spirits," he wrote, when he was still an undergraduate, are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me, go to bed with me, make journeys and return as I do; nay, and pay visits, and will even affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me." The end of the sentence shows (as do his letters, indeed, and his verses on the drowning of Horace Walpole's cat) that his indolent melancholy was not without its compensations. He was a wit, an observer of himself and the world about him, a man who wrote letters that have the genius of the essay. Further, he was Horace Walpole's friend, and (while his father had a devil in him) his mother and his aunts made a circle of quiet tenderness into which he could always retire. "I do not remember," Mr. Gosse has said of Gray, "that the history of literature presents us with the memoirs of any other poet favoured by nature with so many aunts as Gray possessed." This delicious sentence contains an important criticism of Gray. Gray was a poet of the sheltered life. His genius was shy and retiring. He had no ambition to thrust himself upon the world. He kept himself to himself, as the saying goes. He published the Elegy in a Country Churchyard in 1751 only because the editors of the Magazine of Magazines had got hold of a copy and Gray was afraid that they would publish it first. How lethargic a poet Gray was may be gathered from the fact that he began the Elegy as far back as 1746-Mason says it was

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