highest merit of letter-writing—she is concise without being affected.
Fluency, which a great orator pronounced to be the curse of orators, is
at least equally the curse of writers. There are many people, many ladies
especially, who can write letters at any length, in any number, and at
any time. We may be quite sure that the letters so written are not good
letters. Composition of any sort implies consideration; you must see
where you are going before you can go straight, or can pick your steps
as you go. On the other hand, too much consideration is unfavourable
to the ease of letter-writing, and perhaps of all writing. A letter
too much studied wants flow; it is a museum of hoarded sentences. Each
sentence sounds effective; but the whole composition wants vitality. It
was written with the memory instead of the mind; and every reader feels
the effect, though only the critical reader can detect the cause. Lady
Mary understood all this. She said what she had to say in words that were
always graphic and always sufficiently good, but she avoided curious
felicity. Her expressions seem choice, but not chosen.
At the end of her life Lady Mary pointed a subordinate but not a useless
moral. The masters of mundane ethics observe that ‘you should stay in
the world, or stay out of the world.’ Lady Mary did neither. She went
out and tried to return. Horace Walpole thus describes the result: ‘Lady
Mary Wortley is arrived; I have seen her; I think her avarice, her
art, and her vivacity are all increased. Her dress, like her language,
is a _galimatias_ of several countries; the groundwork rags, and the
embroidery nastiness. She needs no cap, no handkerchief, no gown, no
petticoat, and no shoes. An old black laced hood represents the first;
the fur of a horseman’s coat, which replaces the third, serves for the
second; a dimity petticoat is deputy and officiates for the fourth;
and slippers act the part of the last. When I was at Florence, and she
was expected there, we were drawing _sortes Virgilianas_ for her; we
literally drew
“Insanam vatem aspicies.”
It would have been a stranger prophecy now even than it was then.’ There
is a description of what the favourite of society becomes after leaving
it for years, and after indulging eccentricities for years! There is a
commentary on the blunder of exposing yourself in your old age to young
people, to whom you have always been a tradition and a name! Horace
Walpole doubtless painted up a few trivialities a little. But one of the
traits is true. Lady Mary lived before the age in which people waste half
their lives in washing the whole of their persons.
Lady Mary did not live long after her return to England. Horace Walpole’s
letter is written on the 2nd February 1762, and she died on the 21st
August in the same year. Her husband had died just before her return, and
perhaps, after so many years, she would not have returned unless he had
done so. _Requiescat in pace_; for she quarrelled all her life.
_WILLIAM COWPER._[31]
(1855.)
For the English, after all, the best literature is the English. We
understand the language; the manners are familiar to us; the scene at
home: the associations our own. Of course, a man who has not read Homer
is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a great object of
which he has no idea. But we cannot be always seeing the ocean. Its face
is always large; its smile is bright; the ever-sounding shore sounds on.
Yet we have no property in them. We stop and gaze; we pause and draw
our breath; we look and wonder at the grandeur of the other world; but
we live on shore. We fancy associations of unknown things and distant
climes, of strange men and strange manners. But we are ourselves.
Foreigners do not behave as we should, nor do the Greeks. What a strength
of imagination, what a long practice, what a facility in the details
of fancy is required to picture their past and unknown world! They are
deceased. They are said to be immortal, because they have written a good
epitaph; but they are gone. Their life and their manners have passed
away. We read with interest in the catalogue of the ships—
‘The men of Argos and Tyrintha next,
And of Hermione, that stands retired
With Asine, within her spacious bay;
Of Epidaurus, crowned with purple vines,
And of Træzena, with the Achaian youth
Of sea-begirt Ægina, and with thine
Maseta, and the dwellers on thy coast,
Waveworn Eïonæ; ...
And from Caristus and from Styra came
Their warlike multitudes, in front of whom
Elphenor marched, Calchodon’s mighty son.
With foreheads shorn and wavy locks behind,
They followed, and alike were eager all
To split the hauberk with the shortened spear.’
But they are dead. ‘“So am not I,” said the foolish fat scullion.’ We
are the English of the present day. We have cows and calves, corn and
cotton; we hate the Russians; we know where the Crimea is; we believe in
Manchester the great. A large expanse is around us; a fertile land of
corn and orchards, and pleasant hedgerows, and rising trees, and noble
prospects, and large black woods, and old church towers. The din of
great cities comes mellowed from afar. The green fields, the half-hidden
hamlets, the gentle leaves, soothe us with ‘a sweet inland murmur.’ We
have before us a vast seat of interest, and toil, and beauty, and power,
and this our own. Here is our home. The use of foreign literature is
like the use of foreign travel. It imprints in early and susceptible
years a deep impression of great, and strange, and noble objects; but we
cannot live with these. They do not resemble our familiar life; they do
not bind themselves to our intimate affection; they are picturesque and
striking, like strangers and wayfarers, but they are not of our home,
or homely; they cannot speak to our ‘business and bosoms’; they cannot
touch the hearth of the soul. It would be better to have no outlandish
literature in the mind than to have it the principal thing. We should
be like accomplished vagabonds without a country, like men with a
hundred acquaintances and no friends. We need an intellectual possession
analogous to our own life; which reflects, embodies, improves it; on
which we can repose; which will recur to us in the placid moments—which
will be a latent principle even in the acute crises of our life. Let us
be thankful if our researches in foreign literature enable us, as rightly
used they will enable us, better to comprehend our own. Let us venerate
what is old, and marvel at what is far. Let us read our own books. Let us
understand ourselves.
With these principles, if such they may be called, in our minds, we
gladly devote these early pages of our journal[32] to the new edition
of Cowper, with which Mr. Bell has favoured us. There is no writer
more exclusively English. There is no one—or hardly one, perhaps—whose
excellences are more natural to our soil, and seem so little able to
bear transplantation. We do not remember to have seen his name in any
continental book. Professed histories of English literature, we dare say,
name him; but we cannot recall any such familiar and cursory mention as
would evince a real knowledge and hearty appreciation of his writings.
The edition itself is a good one. The life of Cowper, which is
prefixed to it, though not striking, is sensible. The notes are clear,
explanatory, and, so far as we know, accurate. The special introductions
to each of the poems are short and judicious, and bring to the mind at
the proper moment the passages in Cowper’s letters most clearly relating
to the work in hand. The typography is not very elegant, but it is plain
and business-like. There is no affectation of cheap ornament.
The little book which stands second on our list belongs to a class of
narratives written for a peculiar public, inculcating peculiar doctrines,
and adapted, at least in part, to a peculiar taste. We dissent from many
of these tenets, and believe that they derive no support, but rather the
contrary, from the life of Cowper. In previous publications, written for
the same persons, these opinions have been applied to that melancholy
story in a manner which it requires strong writing to describe. In this
little volume they are more rarely expressed, and when they are it is
with diffidence, tact, and judgment.
Only a most pedantic critic would attempt to separate the criticism on
Cowper’s works from a narrative of his life. Indeed, such an attempt
would be scarcely intelligible. Cowper’s poems are almost as much
connected with his personal circumstances as his letters, and his
letters are as purely autobiographical as those of any man can be. If
all information concerning him had perished save what his poems contain,
the attention of critics would be diverted from the examination of their
interior characteristics to a conjectural dissertation on the personal
fortunes of the author. The Germans would have much to say. It would be
debated in Tübingen who were the Three Hares, why ‘The Sofa’ was written,
why John Gilpin was not called William. Halle would show with great
clearness that there was no reason why he _should_ be called William;
that it appeared by the bills of mortality that several other persons
born about the same period had also been called John; and the ablest of
all the professors would finish the subject with a monograph showing
that there was a special fitness in the name John, and that any one
with the æsthetic sense who (like the professor) had devoted many years
exclusively to the perusal of the poem, would be certain that any other
name would be quite ‘paralogistic, and in every manner impossible and
inappropriate.’ It would take a German to write upon the Hares.
William Cowper, the poet, was born on November 26, 1731, at his father’s
parsonage, at Berkhampstead. Of his father, who was chaplain to the
king, we know nothing of importance. Of his mother, who had been named
Donne, and was a Norfolk lady, he has often made mention, and it appears
that he regarded the faint recollection which he retained of her—for she
died early—with peculiar tenderness. In later life, and when his sun was
going down in gloom and sorrow, he recurred eagerly to opportunities
of intimacy with her most distant relatives, and wished to keep alive
the idea of her in his mind. That idea was not of course very definite;
indeed, as described in his poems, it is rather the abstract idea of what
a mother should be, than anything else; but he was able to recognise her
picture, and there is a suggestion of cakes and sugar-plums, which gives
a life and vividness to the rest. Soon after her death he was sent to a
school kept by a man named Pitman, at which he always described himself
as having suffered exceedingly from the cruelty of one of the boys. He
could never see him, or think of him, he has told us, without trembling.
And there must have been some solid reason for this terror, since—even
in those days, when τύπτω meant ‘I strike,’ and ‘boy’ denoted a thing
to be beaten—this juvenile inflicter of secret stripes was actually
expelled. From Mr. Pitman, Cowper, on account of a weakness in the eyes,
which remained with him through life, was transferred to the care of an
oculist,—a dreadful fate even for the most cheerful boy, and certainly
not likely to cure one with any disposition to melancholy; hardly indeed
can the boldest mind, in its toughest hour of manly fortitude, endure to
be domesticated with an operation chair. Thence he went to Westminster,
of which he has left us discrepant notices, according to the feeling
for the time being uppermost in his mind. From several parts of the
‘Tirocinium,’ it would certainly seem that he regarded the whole system
of public school teaching not only with speculative disapproval, but with
the painful hatred of a painful experience. A thousand genial passages
in his private letters, however, really prove the contrary; and in a
changing mood of mind, the very poem which was expressly written to
‘recommend private tuition at home’ gives some idea of school happiness.
‘Be it a weakness, it deserves some praise,
We love the play-place of our early days;
The scene is touching, and the heart is stone
That feels not at that sight, and feels at none.
The wall on which we tried our graving skill,
The very name we carved subsisting still,
The bench on which we sat while deep employed,
Though mangled, hacked, and hewed, not yet destroyed;
The little ones unbuttoned, glowing hot,
Playing our games, and on the very spot,
As happy as we once, to kneel and draw
The chalky ring, and knuckle down at taw;
To pitch the ball into the grounded hat,
Or drive it devious with a dextrous pat;
The pleasing spectacle at once excites
Such recollections of our own delights,
That viewing it, we seem almost t’ obtain
Our innocent sweet simple years again.
This fond attachment to the well-known place,
Whence first we started into life’s long race,
Maintains its hold with such unfailing sway,
We feel it e’en in age, and at our latest day.’
Probably we pursue an insoluble problem in seeking a suitable education
for a morbidly melancholy mind. At first it seems a dreadful thing to
place a gentle and sensitive nature in contact, in familiarity, and
even under the rule of coarse and strong buoyant natures. Nor should
this be in general attempted. The certain result is present suffering,
and the expected good is remote and disputable. Nevertheless, it is no
artificial difficulty which we here encounter—none which we can hope by
educational contrivances to meet or vanquish. The difficulty is in truth
the existence of the world. It is the fact, that by the constitution of
society the bold, the vigorous, and the buoyant, rise and rule; and that
the weak, the shrinking, and the timid, fall and serve. In after-life,
in the actual commerce of men, even too in those quiet and tranquil
pursuits in which a still and gentle mind should seem to be under the
least disadvantage, in philosophy and speculation, the strong and active,
who have confidence in themselves and their ideas, acquire and keep
dominion. It is idle to expect that this will not give great pain—that
the shrinking and timid, who are often just as ambitious as others,
will not repine—that the rough and strong will not often consciously
inflict grievous oppression—will not still more often, without knowing
it, cause to more tremulous minds a refined suffering which their coarser
texture could never experience, which it does not sympathise with, nor
comprehend. Some time in life—it is but a question of a very few years
at most—this trial must be undergone. There may be a short time, more or
less, of gentle protection and affectionate care, but the leveret grows
old—the world waits at the gate—the hounds are ready, and the huntsman
too, and there is need of strength, and pluck, and speed. Cowper indeed,
himself, as we have remarked, does not, on an attentive examination, seem
to have suffered exceedingly. In subsequent years, when a dark cloud
had passed over him, he was apt at times to exaggerate isolated days of
melancholy and pain, and fancy that the dislike which he entertained
for the system of schools, by way of speculative principle, was in fact
the result of a personal and suffering experience. But, as we shall
have (though we shall not, in fact, perhaps use them all) a thousand
occasions to observe, he had, side by side with a morbid and melancholy
humour, an easy nature, which was easily satisfied with the world as he
found it, was pleased with the gaiety of others, and liked the sight
of, and sympathy with, the more active enjoyments which he did not care
to engage in or to share. Besides, there is every evidence that cricket
and marbles (though he sometimes in his narratives suppresses the fact,
in condescension to those of his associates who believed them to be the
idols of wood and stone which are spoken of in the prophets) really
exercised a laudable and healthy supremacy over his mind. The animation
of the scene—the gay alertness which Gray looked back on so fondly in
long years of soothing and delicate musing, exerted, as the passage which
we cited shows, a great influence over a genius superior to Gray’s in
facility and freedom, though inferior in the ‘little footsteps’ of the
finest fancy,—in the rare and carefully-hoarded felicities, unequalled
save in the immeasurable abundance of the greatest writers. Of course
Cowper was unhappy at school, as he was unhappy always; and of course too
we are speaking of Westminster only. For Dr. Pitman and the oculist there
is nothing to say.
In scholarship Cowper seems to have succeeded. He was not, indeed, at
all the sort of man to attain to that bold, strong-brained, confident
scholarship which Bentley carried to such an extreme, and which, in
almost every generation since, some Englishman has been found of hard
head and stiff-clayed memory to keep up and perpetuate. His friend
Thurlow was the man for this pursuit, and the man to prolong the just
notion that those who attain early proficiency in it are likely men to
become Lord Chancellors. Cowper’s scholarship was simply the general and
delicate _impression_ which the early study of the classics invariably
leaves on a nice and susceptible mind. In point of information it was
strictly of a common nature. It is clear that his real knowledge was
mostly confined to the poets, especially the ordinary Latin poets
and Homer, and that he never bestowed any regular attention on the
historians, or orators, or philosophers of antiquity, either at school
or in after years. Nor indeed would such a course of study have in
reality been very beneficial to him. The strong, analytic, comprehensive,
reason-giving powers which are required in these dry and rational
pursuits were utterly foreign to his mind. All that was congenial to him,
he acquired in the easy intervals of apparent idleness. The friends whom
he made at Westminster, and who continued for many years to be attached
to him, preserved the probable tradition that he was a gentle and
gradual, rather than a forcible or rigorous learner.
The last hundred years have doubtless seen a vast change in the common
education of the common boy. The small and pomivorous animal which we so
call is now subjected to a treatment very elaborate and careful,—that
contrasts much with the simple alternation of classics and cuffs which
was formerly so fashionable. But it may be doubted whether for a
peculiar mind such as Cowper’s, on the intellectual side at least, the
tolerant and corpuscular theory of the last century was not preferable
to the intolerant and never-resting moral influence that has succeeded
to it. Some minds learn most when they seem to learn least. A certain,
placid, unconscious, equable in-taking of knowledge suits them, and alone
suits them. To succeed in forcing such men to attain great learning is
simply impossible; for you cannot put the fawn into the ‘Land Transport.’
The only resource is to allow them to acquire gently and casually in
their own way; and in that way they will often imbibe, as if by the mere
force of existence, much pleasant and well-fancied knowledge.
From Westminster Cowper went at once into a solicitor’s office. Of the
next few years (he was then about eighteen) we do not know much. His
attention to legal pursuits was, according to his own account, not
very profound; yet it could not have been wholly contemptible, for his
evangelical friend, Mr. Newton, who, whatever may be the worth of his
religious theories, had certainly a sound, rough judgment on topics
terrestrial, used in after years to have no mean opinion of the value of
his legal counsel. In truth, though nothing could be more out of Cowper’s
way than abstract and recondite jurisprudence, an easy and sensible
mind like his would find a great deal which was very congenial to it in
the well-known and perfectly settled maxims which regulate and rule the
daily life of common men. No strain of capacity or stress of speculative
intellect is necessary for the apprehension of these. A fair and easy
mind, which is placed within their reach, will find it has learnt them,
without knowing when or how.
After some years of legal instruction, Cowper chose to be called to the
bar, and took chambers in the Temple accordingly. He never, however, even
pretended to practise. He passed his time in literary society, in light
study, in tranquil negligence. He was intimate with Colman, Lloyd, and
other wits of those times. He wrote an essay in the _Connoisseur_, the
kind of composition then most fashionable, especially with such literary
gentlemen as were most careful not to be confounded with the professed
authors. In a word, he did ‘nothing,’ as that word is understood among
the vigorous, aspiring, and trenchant part of mankind. Nobody could seem
less likely to attain eminence. Every one must have agreed that there
was no harm in him, and few could have named any particular good which
it was likely that he would achieve. In after days he drew up a memoir
of his life, in which he speaks of those years with deep self-reproach.
It was not indeed the secular indolence of the time which excited his
disapproval. The course of life had not made him more desirous of worldly
honours, but less; and nothing could be further from his tone of feeling
than regret for not having strenuously striven to attain them. He spoke
of those years in the Puritan manner, using words which literally express
the grossest kind of active Atheism in a vague and vacant way; leaving
us to gather from external sources whether they are to be understood in
their plain and literal signification, or in that out-of-the-way and
technical sense in which they hardly have a meaning. In this case the
external evidence is so clear that there is no difficulty. The regrets of
Cowper had reference to offences which the healthy and sober consciences
of mankind will not consider to deserve them. A vague, literary,
omnitolerant idleness was perhaps their worst feature. He was himself
obliged to own that he had always been considered ‘as one religiously
inclined, if not actually religious,’ and the applicable testimony, as
well as the whole form and nature of his character, forbid us to ascribe
to him the slightest act of licence or grossness. A reverend biographer
has called his life at this time, ‘an unhappy compound of guilt and
wretchedness.’ But unless the estimable gentleman thinks it sinful to
be a barrister and wretched to live in the Temple, it is not easy to
make out what he would mean. In point of intellectual cultivation, and
with a view to preparing himself for writing his subsequent works, it
is not possible he should have spent his time better. He then acquired
that easy, familiar knowledge of terrestrial things—the vague and general
information of the superficies of all existence—the acquaintance with
life, business, hubbub, and rustling matter of fact, which seem odd
in the recluse of Olney—and enliven so effectually the cucumbers of
the ‘Task.’ It has been said that at times every man wishes to be a
man of the world, and even the most rigid critic must concede it to be
nearly essential to a writer on real life and actual manners. If a man
has not seen his brother, how can he describe him? As this world calls
happiness and blamelessness, it is not easy to fancy a life more happy—at
least with more of the common elements of happiness,—or more blameless
than those years of Cowper. An easy temper, light fancies,—hardly as
yet broken by shades of melancholy brooding;—an enjoying habit, rich
humour, literary, but not pedantic companions, a large scene of life and
observation, polished acquaintance and attached friends: these were his,
and what has a light life more? A rough hero Cowper was not and never
became, but he was then, as ever, a quiet and tranquil gentleman. If De
Béranger’s doctrine were true, ‘_Le bonheur tient au savoir-vivre_,’
there were the materials of existence here. What, indeed, would not De
Béranger have made of them?