A Study in Still Life

SHE was the sort of child that is ‘seen and not heard.’ She wore rubbers without being told. She ate her bread crusts with positive avidity. She longed to run errands for her parents. Her Sunday-school attendance card glittered with constellations of stars in rigid regularity, and her appetite for Golden Texts amounted to a passion. In short, she was that fearful synthesis of self-conscious humility, aggressive piety, and intellectual vacuity which is the proudest creation of the moral pedant.

Wordsworth calls the girl ’Lucy Gray,’ but the name is generic: it applies as well to all virtuous females of his rustic school. Over the fallible heroines of a hundred years shines the beacon light of her relentless purity; her pale hands are folded in calm resignation at the spectacle of human folly; her voice is raised in prim admonishment of a generation of boyish bobs. Lucy, like Lincoln, of whom she would not have approved, belongs to the ages.

We see her first as a child of three, performing what the poet calls her ‘pretty round of trespasses.’ He does not specify their nature, but his use of the word ‘round’ suggests that Lucy was accustomed to commit a fixed series of mild transgressions with more or less regularity. And the examination of an apocryphal diary of her early years shows an undiscouraged procession of experiments with the theory that goldfish are amphibious; together with one tear-stained page on which is recorded the solemn burial of Uncle Ezra’s false teeth — an act impelled by her shame at the discovery that a Gray was living a life of deliberate deception.

In the enjoyment of her childish happiness, however, we are saddened by the discovery that, even at an early age, Lucy knew ‘no mate, no comrade.’ To Wordsworth this may have signified merely the world’s usual indifference to a perfect purity which its coarse thumb and finger failed to plumb. But is it possible that to the neighbors Lucy’s ‘pretty round of trespasses’ lacked something of complete charm? Can we hear the strident voice of the woman next door saying, ‘Russell, I forbid you to play with that Gray child; she’s incorrigible’?

But such conjectures are dangerous; only the most charming of biographers may ignore facts. We must fall back upon the authentic statement that Lucy continued thus, ‘a little prattler among men,’ until she was eight. Then one day a strange man approached her as, primly starched and with upturned nose, she watched a group of ragamuffins teasing a stray cat. The stranger, with bovine kindness, asked her how many brothers and sisters she had. ‘We are seven,’ Lucy answered pertly. This was her first recorded speech, and it clinched her immortality.

She went on to explain that sister Jane had died after a period of prolonged moaning (the sole recorded instance of a Gray’s moaning); and that later John, too, ‘was forced to go,’ evidently at the cost of severe personal inconvenience and murmuring his disapproval to the end, yet accepting the inevitable like a little gentleman. Twelve steps — ‘or more,’ Lucy added with engaging accuracy — from her house the two lay; and Lucy often took her ' little porringer’ and ate supper there, knitting stockings, or singing by way of variety. She also played by the graves; but only, she reassured him, ‘when the grass was dry.’ The gentleman, confused by her computations, repeatedly suggested that two from seven leaves only five; but Lucy, obviously schooled in a more cosmic mathematics, insisted to the end that they were seven. In an ordinary child this would have been, at the least, obstinacy; in Lucy, as the poet explains, it was spiritual insight.

As Lucy grew older, we are told, she became a model of * benignity and home-bred sense.’ Now ‘benignity’ is sufficiently clear; but in view of Lucy’s childhood record one could wish some more reassuring definition of ‘homebred sense.’

At this time

(the poet inserts, to avoid confusion)

— round her head.

She was

(Where? you ask. Wordsworth solves the problem for you.)

But in spite of these ultrafeminine charms, Lucy, for some reason, suffered the neglect and disregard of her little world. She was

Thus with one poignant stroke the poet paints the pat hos of a child whose very family tempered the rashness of their love by withholding the treasured meed of praise. This is a far cry from Lucy’s infantile ‘pretty round of trespasses’; and across the interval of time rears the tiny germ of a grim suspicion: perhaps Lucy trespassed once too often, achieving the chagrined isolation of the child whose pranks are met by the Victorian anathema, ' We are not amused.’

Evidently this state of affairs saddened the girl. She never, as far as we know, complained. Probably she kept on knitting long after she had outgrown the porringer; the events of her adult life are simply not recorded. Possibly she fell into a decline — a reward often extended to t he precociously virtuous. We are left with only the comfortless reflection that the good die young to account for her untimely removal from the human scene. The poet’s obvious sincerity in commenting on her death is moving and persuasive, but no more so than we should expect from the fact that previously the mere thought of her demise had called forth from him the passionate ejaculation, ‘O mercy!’

And now she lies forever, we hope, beside Jane and John, leaving a record of solid virtuous achievement which has made the name of Lucy Gray a synonym for all that is womanly. The poet, with touching restraint, pictures her on one occasion as

Certainly not too bright!