Fifty Shades of Gray

by Theodore Dalrymple (April 2014)

Few are the people who love dogs and cats equally, and there are those who love neither. I am a doggish person and I frequently stop in the street to admire, and often to speak to, dogs (they always reply, I find, with the greatest good sense). The strange thing is that their owners who have them on leads are always pleased and proud that their dogs should be so addressed by a complete stranger, though they would shrink away from such a stranger, as from a dangerous lunatic, if he addressed them, the owners, directly. Dogs are the greatest diplomats, or at least aids to diplomacy.

The hapless Nymph with wonder saw:
A whisker first and then a claw,

What female heart can gold despise?
The little victims play!
No sense they have of ills to come,

The Ministers of human fate,
The last stanza reads:

Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.

and useless to praise him.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

This is not an original thought, of course, but that is no real criticism as Pope knew, for:

True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,

That Johnson was sympathetic to the Elegy is not surprising, for his own greatest poem was The Vanity of Human Wishes, which expressed thought not dissimilar:

Yet hope not Life from Grief or Danger free,
Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes,
A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit
With the same Spirit that its Author writ,
Survey the Whole, nor seek slight Faults to find,
Where Nature moves, and Rapture warms the Mind…

Whoever thinks a faultless Piece to see,
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.)

With me the Muse shall sit, and think
How vain the ardour of the Crowd,
How low, how little are the Proud,
Given the transience of human life, and that the paths of glory lead but to the grave, it is not surprising that Gray warns us that we should, in looking at the graves who left no great name behind them:

Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor.

As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts or slow decline
Our social comforts drop away.

Well tried through many a varying year,
Officious, innocent, sincere,

But knowledge to their eyes her ample page

And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

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