The Poet Gray as a Naturalist

“SULLENLY” was the adverb which Dr. Johnson chose to describe the temper in which Gray passed his days in his Cambridge chambers. For once the Leviathan’s judgment of men, usually so convincing, was at fault. The case against him has become clearer with time, and the issue of The Poet Gray as a Naturalist ¹ only serves to illustrate more vividly the perversity of phrase. Mason had written at length of Gray’s wholesome concern with the out-of-door sciences, and his protégé Bonstetten had written of his preoccupation with the Systema Naturae: “After breakfast appear Shakespeare and old Lineus [sic] struggling together as two ghosts would do for a damned soul. Sometimes the one gets the better, sometimes the other.” But not until now has it been possible to know the extent and quality of the poet’s dealings with this same old “ Lineus.” Gray’s copy of the Systema, passing through several hands, came at last to Ruskin’s, and after his death was given by his heir to Charles Eliot Norton. Now we have a selection from Gray’s notes therein and facsimiles of his drawings, edited by Mr. Norton with his familiar fine carefulness, and published in a form of much distinction and beauty.

In the three volumes of the Systema, Gray, it seems, caused to be inserted 1380 pages of interleaving, which he all but quite covered with Latin notes in his delicate, cursive script, and with easy and spirited delineations of birds and insects. Along with the laborious learning which we might expect, the notes show a skill as a descriptive naturalist which could only come from the nice observation of the types of nature, sub Jove. The relation of these studies to the classic quality of Gray’s poetic art, to his poetic taciturnity, would be a choice theme for the expatiation of a casual critic who could keep his reader in ignorance of the awkward fact that they were chiefly the occupation of Gray’s last years, when his brief poetic activity had ceased. It is, however, certainly not out of place to note how the firm hold of the substantial forms of things which marks these notes comports with the reality of image, which for all his personifications and allusiveness is the life of his poetry. And it is, at least, amusing to trace specific parallelisms between his poetry and his scientific annotation. To take a single instance : does not this description of Felis catus serve to illustrate the mood of the elegist of Selima ? “ Domesticus parum docilis, subdolus, adulatorius; domino dorsum, latera, caput, affricare amat. Junior mire lusibus deditus et jocis ; adultus tranquillior ...” and so to more technical items. Indeed, to a careful critic nothing which makes clearer the mind of a poet is quite foreign to the appreciation of his art; and this little book—so full of the reality of scholarship — is a true piece of Gray’s mind. F. G.