|AMONG its many drawbacks controversy has this in particular, that it
sometimes embroils us with our closest friends. Writing recently of Lord
Chesterfield, * we found occasion to comment upon certain couplets which
the poet of the 'Progress of Error' addressed to his Lordship concerning
his celebrated 'Letters.'
* See ante, p. 192.
What was said amounted to no more than that Cowper, in this instance at
least, had not proved himself a Juvenal,--a sentiment which, seeing
that his accredited biographer, Mr. Goldwin Smith, accuses him, as
a satirist, of brandishing a whip without a lash, could scarcely be
regarded as extravagant condemnation. Not the less, it has lain sorely
upon our conscience. Of all the lettered figures of the eighteenth
century, none is more dear to us than the gentle recluse of the sleepy
little town by the Ouse. What!--the captivating letter-writer, the
inventor of the immortal 'John Gilpin,' the delightful 'diva-gator' of
the 'Task' and the tea-urn, the kindly proprietor of those 'canonized
pets of literature,' Puss and Bess and Tiney--how, upon such a theme,
could one excusably utter things harsh or censorious! It is impossible
to picture him, when the curtains had fallen over those two windows,
that looked upon the three-cornered market-place at Olney,--his head
decorated (it may be) with the gaily ribboned cap which had been worked
for him by his cousin Lady Hesketh, * his eyes milder than they seem in
Romney's famous portrait, and placidly reading the 'Public Advertiser'
to the click-click of Mrs. Unwin's stocking-needles,--without being
smitten by a feeling of remorse. And opportunity for the expression of
such remorse arrives pleasantly with an old-fashioned _octavo_ which
supplies the pretexts for a palinode in prose.
* A writing-cap worn by Cowper, his watch, a seal-ring given
to him by his eousin Theodora (his first love), and a ball
of worsted which he wound for Mrs. Unwin, were among the
relics exhibited in the South Gallery of the Guelph
Exhibition of 1891. The exhibitors were the Rev. W. Cowper
Johnson, and the Rev. W. Cowper Johnson, jun.
Its title, 'writ large,' is 'Cowper, illustrated by a Series of Views,
in, or near, the Park of Weston-Underwood, Bucks;' and it is lavishly
4 embellished' with those mellow old plates which denote that steel had
not yet supplanted copper. The artists and engravers were James Storer
and John Greig, topographical chalcographers of some repute in the
days of conventional foregrounds, and trees that look like pressed-out
patterns in seaweed. But the 'picturesque' designs give us a good idea
of the landscape that Cowper saw when he walked from Silver End at
Olney to his friends the Throckmortons (the 'Mr. and Mrs. Frog' of his
letters) at Weston House. Here is the long bridge of 'The Task,'=
```'That with its wearisome, but needful length,
```Bestrides the wintry flood'=
between Olney and Emberton; here, bosomed in its embowering trees,
the little farmhouse called the 'Peasant's Nest.' Here, again, in the
valley, and framed between the feathery branches of the shrubbery, is
the spire of Olney Church, from which one may almost fancy that=
````'the sound of cheerful bells .
```Just undulates upon the list'ning ear;'=
here, standing out whitely from the yews and evergreens of The
Wilderness, the urn with the epitaph of Neptune. Farther on (a lovely
little landscape) is the clump of poplars by the water (not _the_
poplars of the poem: those were already felled) which the poet mistook
for elms; and here, lastly, is Cowper's own cottage at Weston, which,
with its dormer windows, and its vines and jasmines, might have served
as a model for Randolph Caldecott or Kate Greenaway. And, behold!
('blest be the art that can immortalize!') here is Mrs. Unwin in a
high waist entering at the gate, while Cowper bids her welcome from the
doorway.
Of Olney itself there are not many glimpses in the little volume. But
the vignette on the title-page shows the tiny 'boudoir' or summerhouse,
'not much bigger than a sedan chair,' which stood--nay, stands
yet--about midway between the red-brick house on the market-place
and what was once John Xewton's vicarage. It is still, say the latest
accounts, kept up by its present owner, and its walls and ceiling are
covered with the autographs of pious pilgrims. In Storer's plate you
look in at the open door, catching, through the window on the opposite
side, part of the parsonage and of the wall in which was constructed the
gate that enabled Cowper at all times to communicate with his clerical
friend. Its exact dimensions are given as six feet nine by five feet
five; and he must have been right in telling Lady Hesketh that if she
came to see him they should be 'as close-pack'd as two wax figures in
an old-fashioned picture-frame.' A trap-door or loose board in the floor
covered a receptacle in which the previous tenant, an apothecary,
had stored his bottles; and here, 'in the deep-delved earth,' one of
Cowper's wisest counsellors, the Rev. William Bull of Newport Pagnell,
the 'Carissimus Taurorum' of the letters, the=
`````'smoke-inhaling Bull,
````Always filling, never full,'=
was wont to deposit his pipes and his tobacco. 'Having furnished it with
a table and two chairs,' says Cowper, * here I write all that I write in
summer time, whether to my friends or the public. It is secure from all
noise, and a refuge from all intrusion, for intruders sometimes trouble
me in the winter evenings at Olney, but (thanks to my boudoir!) I can
now hide myself from them.'
The summer-house, * it has been stated, is still standing.
* Since this paper was first written, the summer-house, the
garden, and the 'Guinea Orchard'--a strip of field which
came between Cowper's garden and that of the Parsonage--have
been sold by auction, the purchaser being a local butcher.
The sale took place in February, 1896.
But of another favourite haunt of Cowper, which preceded and co-existed
with it, there are now no traces. This was the greenhouse.=
```''T is a bower of Arcadian sweets,
````Where Flora is still in her prime,
```A fortress to which she retreats
````From the cruel assaults of the clime'--=
he writes in his favourite rocking-horse metre, and most conventional
language, bidding his Mary remark the beauty of the pinks which it
has preserved through the frosts; and in mid-July, when the floor was
carpeted, and the sun was excluded by an awning of mats, it became
'the pleasantest retreat in Olney.' 'We eat, drink, and sleep, where we
always did,' he says to Newton; 'but here we spend all the rest of our
time, and find that the sound of the wind in the trees, and the singing
of birds, are much more agreeable to our ears than the incessant barking
of dogs and screaming of children,' from both of which, it may be
observed, they suffered considerably in the front of the house. Two
years later he tells Mr. Unwin that 'our severest winter, commonly
called the spring, is now over, and I find myself seated in my favourite
recess, the greenhouse. In such a situation, so silent, so shady, where
no human foot is heard, and where only my myrtles presume to peep in at
the window, you may suppose I have no interruption to complain of, and
that my thoughts are perfectly at my command. But the beauties of the
spot are themselves an interruption, my attention being called upon by
those very myrtles, by a double row of grass pinks, just beginning to
blossom, and by a bed of beans already in bloom; and you are to consider
it, if you please, as no small proof of my regard, that, though you have
so many powerful rivals, I disengage myself from them all, and devote
this hour entirely to you.'
Later still--a year later--he writes to Newton: 'My greenhouse is never
so pleasant as when we are just upon the point of being turned out of
it. The gentleness of the autumnal suns, and the calmness of this latter
season, make it a much more agreeable retreat than we ever find it in
the summer; when, the winds being generally brisk, we cannot cool it by
admitting a sufficient quantity of air, without being at the same time
incommoded by it. But now I sit with all the windows and the door wide
open, and am regaled with the scent of every flower, in a garden as full
of flowers as I have known how to make it. We keep no bees, but if I
lived in a hive, I should hardly hear more of their music. All the bees
in the neighbourhood resort to a bed of mignonette, opposite to the
window, and pay me for the honey they get out of it by a hum, which,
though rather monotonous, is as agreeable to my ear as the whistling of
my linnets. All the sounds that Nature utters are delightful, at least
in this country.' But he goes on, nevertheless, to except the braying of
an ass; and from another letter it seems that the serene quietude of
his bower was at times invaded by the noise of a quadruped of this kind
(inimical to poets!) which belonged to a neighbour.
It was in passing from the greenhouse to the barn that Cowper
encountered the viper, whose prompt taking off gives motive and point
to that admirable little _lusus poeticus_,--as Mr. Grimshawe
condescendingly calls it,--the 'Colubriad,' and other memories cluster
about this fragment paradise. Here 'lived happy prisoners' the two
goldfinches celebrated in 'The Faithful Bird;' here he wrote 'The Task,'
and, according to Mr. Thomas Wright, of Olney, it is to the stimulating
environment of its myrtles and mignonette that we owe, if not the germ,
at least the evolution, of 'John Gilpin.' Every one knows how, in the
current story, Lady Austen's diverting narrative of the way in which
a certain citizen 'of famous London town' rode out to celebrate the
anniversary of his marriage, gradually seduced her listener from the
moody melancholy which was fast overclouding him 'into a loud and hearty
peal of laughter.' It 'made such an impression on his mind that at night
he could not sleep; and his thoughts having taken the form of rhyme, he
sprang from bed, and committed them to paper, and in the morning brought
down to Mrs. Unwin the crude outline of "John Gilpin." All that day and
for several days he secluded himself in the greenhouse, and went on with
the task of polishing and improving what he had written. As he filled
his slips of paper he sent them across the Market-place to Mr. Wilson,
to the great delight and merriment of that jocular barber, who on
several other occasions had been favoured with the first sight of some
of Cowper's smaller poems. This version of the origin of "John Gilpin"
differs, we are aware, from the one generally received, which represents
the famous ballad as having been commenced and finished in a night; but
that the facts here stated are accurate we have the authority of Mrs.
Wilson; moreover, it has always been said in Olney that "John Gilpin"
was written in the "greenhouse," and that the first person who saw the
complete poem, and consequently the forerunner of that noble army who
made merry over its drolleries, was William Wilson the barber.' *
* Wright's 'Cowper,' 1892, pp. 311, 312. Wilson was a man of
considerable intelligence, and a local 'character.' When in
1781 he joined the Baptists, he declined to dress Lady
Austen's hair on Sundays. Consequently she was obliged to
call him in on Saturday evenings, and more than once had to
sit up all night to prevent the disarrangement of her
'head.'
Cowper has been styled by a recent editor the best of English
letter-writers, a term which Scott applied to Walpole, and it has been
applied to others. Criticism loses its balance in these superlatives.
To be the best--to use a schoolboy illustration--is to have the highest
marks all round. For epistolary vigour, for vivacity, for wit, for
humour, for ease, for simplicity, for subject--can you give Cowper the
highest marks? The answer obviously must be 'no.' Other writers excel
him in subject, in wit, in vigour. But you can certainly give him high
marks for humour; and you can give him very high marks for simplicity
and unaffectedness. He is one of the most unfeigned, most easy, most
natural of English letter-writers. In the art of shedding a sedate
playfulness over the least promising themes, in magnifying the
incidents of his 'set gray life' into occurrences worthy of record, in
communicating to his page all the variations of mood that sweep across
him as he writes, he is unrivalled. Mandeville christened Addison a
parson in a tye-wig; Cowper (at his best) is a humourist in a nightcap.
It would be easy to select from his correspondence passages that show
him in all these aspects--morbid and gloomy to Newton, genial and
friendly to Hill and Unwin, confidential and caressing to Lady Austen
and Lady Hesketh. But it is not uncommon for him to vary his tone to
each of these, for which reason we close with an epistle to that austere
friend and monitor who has perhaps been credited with a more baleful
influence over his hypochondriac correspondent than is strictly borne
out by the evidence. The reader may be told, since he must speedily
discover it, that the following letter from Cowper to John Newton, like
the title-page of Lowell's 'Fable for Critics,' is in rhymed prose:
My very dear Friend,--I am going to send, what when you have read, you
may scratch your head, and say, I suppose, there's nobody knows whether
what I have got be verse or not;--by the tune and the time, it ought
to be rhyme, but if it be, did you ever see, of late or of yore, such a
ditty before?
I have writ 'Charity,' not for popularity, but as well as I could,
in hopes to do good; and if the Reviewer should say 'to be sure the
gentleman's Muse wears Methodist shoes, you may know by her pace and
talk about grace, that she and her bard have little regard for the taste
and fashions, and ruling passions, and hoidening play, of the modern
day; and though she assume a borrowed plume, and now and then wear a
tittering air,'tis only her plan to catch, if she can, the giddy and
gay, as they go that way, by a production on a new construction: she
has baited her trap, and hopes to snap all that may come with a sugar
plum.'--His opinion in this will not be amiss;'tis what I intend, my
principal end, and, if I succeed, and folks should read, till a few are
brought to a serious thought, I shall think I am paid for all I have
said and all I have done, though I have run many a time, after a rhyme,
as far as from hence to the end of my sense, and by hook or crook, write
another book, if I live and am here, another year.
I have heard before of a room with a floor laid upon springs, and such
like things, with so much art in every part, that when you went in you
was forced to begin a minuet pace, with an air and a grace, swimming
about, now in and now out, with a deal of state, in a figure of eight,
without pipe, or string, or any such thing; and now I have writ, in a
rhyming fit, what will make you dance, and, as you advance, will keep
you still, though against your will, dancing away, alert and gay, till
you come to an end of what I have penn'd, which that you may do, ere
Madam and you are quite worn out with jigging about, I take my leave,
and here you receive a bow profound, down to the ground, from your
humble me.--W. C.