Cowper fell in love. There were in those days two young ladies, cousins
of Cowper, residents in London, to one of whom, the Lady Hesketh of
after years, he once wrote:—‘My dear Cousin,—I wonder how it happened,
that much as I love you, I was never in love with you.’ No similar
providence protected his intimacy with her sister. Theodora Cowper,
‘One of the cousins with whom Thurlow used to giggle and make giggle in
Southampton-row,’ was a handsome and vigorous damsel. ‘What!’ said her
father, ‘What will you do if you marry William Cowper?’ meaning, in the
true parental spirit, to intrude mere pecuniary ideas. ‘Do, sir!’ she
replied, ‘Wash all day, and ride out on the great dog all night!’ a
spirited combination of domestic industry and exterior excitement. It
is doubtful, however, whether either of these species of pastime and
occupation would have been exactly congenial to Cowper. A gentle and
refined indolence must have made him an inferior washerman, and perhaps
to accompany the canine excursions of a wife ‘which clear-starched,’
would have hardly seemed enough to satisfy his accomplished and placid
ambition. At any rate, it certainly does seem that he was not a very
vigorous lover. The young lady was, as he himself oddly said:—
‘Through tedious years of doubt and pain,
Fixed in her choice and faithful ... _but in vain_.’
The poet does indeed partly allude to the parental scruples of Mr.
Cowper, her father; but house-rent would not be so high as it is, if
fathers had their way. The profits of builders are eminently dependent on
the uncontrollable nature of the best affections; and that intelligent
class of men have had a table compiled from trustworthy data, in which
the chances of parental victory are rated at ·0000000001, and those of
the young people themselves at ·999999999,—in fact, as many nines as you
can imagine. ‘It has been represented to me,’ says the actuary, ‘that
few young people ever marry without some objection, more or less slight,
on the part of their parents; and from a most laborious calculation,
from data collected in quarters both within and exterior to the bills of
mortality, I am led to believe that the above figures represent the state
of the case accurately enough to form a safe guide for the pecuniary
investments of the gentlemen, &c. &c.’ It is not likely that Theodora
Cowper understood decimals, but she had a strong opinion in favour of
her cousin, and a great idea, if we rightly read the now obscure annals
of old times, that her father’s objections might pretty easily have
been got over. In fact, we think so even now, without any prejudice of
affection, in our cool and mature judgment. Mr. Cowper the aged had
nothing to say, except that the parties were cousins—a valuable remark,
which has been frequently repeated in similar cases, but which has not
been found to prevent a mass of matches both then and since. Probably
the old gentleman thought the young gentleman by no means a working
man, and objected—believing that a small income can only be made more
by unremitting industry,—and the young gentleman admitting this horrid
and abstract fact, and agreeing, though perhaps tacitly, in his uncle’s
estimate of his personal predilections, did not object to being objected
to. The nature of Cowper was not, indeed, passionate. He required beyond
almost any man the daily society of amiable and cultivated women. It
is clear that he preferred such gentle excitement to the rough and
argumentative pleasures of more masculine companionship. His easy and
humorous nature loved and learned from female detail. But he had no
overwhelming partiality for a particular individual. One refined lady,
the first moments of shyness over, was nearly as pleasing as another
refined lady. Disappointment sits easy on such a mind. Perhaps, too,
he feared the anxious duties, the rather contentious tenderness of
matrimonial existence. At any rate, he acquiesced. Theodora never
married. Love did not, however, kill her—at least, if it did, it was
a long time at the task, as she survived these events more than sixty
years. She never, seemingly, forgot the past.
But a dark cloud was at hand. If there be any truly painful fact about
the world now tolerably well established by ample experience and ample
records, it is that an intellectual and indolent happiness is wholly
denied to the children of men. That most valuable author, Lucretius, who
has supplied us and others with an inexhaustible supply of metaphors on
this topic, ever dwells on the life of his gods with a sad and melancholy
feeling that no such life was possible on a crude and cumbersome earth.
In general, the two opposing agencies are marriage and money; either
of these breaks the lot of literary and refined inaction at once and
for ever. The first of these, as we have seen, Cowper had escaped. His
reserved and negligent reveries were still free, at least from the
invasion of affection. To this invasion, indeed, there is commonly
requisite the acquiescence or connivance of mortality; but all men are
born, not free and equal, as the Americans maintain, but, in the old
world at least, basely subjected to the yoke of coin. It is in vain that
in this hemisphere we endeavour after impecuniary fancies. In bold and
eager youth we go out on our travels. We visit Baalbec, and Paphos, and
Tadmor, and Cythera,—ancient shrines and ancient empires, seats of eager
love or gentle inspiration. We wander far and long. We have nothing to
do with our fellow-men. What are we, indeed, to diggers and counters?
We wander far; we dream to wander for ever, but we dream in vain. A
surer force than the subtlest fascination of fancy is in operation.
The purse-strings tie us to our kind. Our travel-coin runs low, and we
must return, away from Tadmor and Baalbec back to our steady, tedious
industry and dull work, to ‘_la vieille Europe_ (as Napoleon said) _qui
m’ennuie_.’ It is the same in thought. In vain we seclude ourselves in
elegant chambers, in fascinating fancies, in refined reflections. ‘By
this time,’ says Cowper, ‘my patrimony being nearly all spent, and there
being no appearance that I should ever repair the damage by a fortune
of my own getting, I began to be a little apprehensive of approaching
want.’ However little one is fit for it, it is necessary to attack some
drudgery. The vigorous and sturdy rouse themselves to the work. They find
in its regular occupation, clear decisions, and stern perplexities, a
bold and rude compensation for the necessary loss or diminution of light
fancies and delicate musings,—
‘The sights which youthful poets dream,
On summer eve by haunted stream.’
But it was not so with Cowper. A peculiar and slight nature unfitted him
for so rough and harsh a resolution. The lion may eat straw like the ox,
and the child put his head on the cockatrice’ den; but will even then the
light antelope be equal to the heavy plough? Will the gentle gazelle,
even in those days, pull the slow waggon of ordinary occupation?
The outward position of Cowper was, indeed, singularly fortunate. Instead
of having to meet the long labours of an open profession, or the anxious
decisions of a personal business, he had the choice among several
lucrative and quiet public offices, in which very ordinary abilities
would suffice, and scarcely any degree of incapacity would entail
dismissal, or reprimand, or degradation. It seemed at first scarcely
possible that even the least strenuous of men should be found unequal to
duties so little arduous or exciting. He has himself said—
‘Lucrative offices are seldom lost
For want of powers proportioned to the post;
Give e’en a dunce the employment he desires,
And he soon finds the talents it requires;
A business with an income at its heels,
Furnishes always oil for its own wheels.’
The place he chose was called the Clerkship of the Journals of the House
of Lords, one of the many quiet haunts which then slumbered under the
imposing shade of parliamentary and aristocratic privilege. Yet the idea
of it was more than he could bear.
‘In the beginning,’ he writes, ‘a strong opposition to my
friend’s right of nomination began to show itself. A powerful
party was formed among the Lords to thwart it, in favour of
an old enemy of the family, though one much indebted to its
bounty; and it appeared plain that, if we succeeded at last,
it would only be by fighting our ground by inches. Every
advantage, as I was told, would be sought for, and eagerly
seized, to disconcert us. I was bid to expect an examination
at the bar of the House, touching my sufficiency for the post
I had taken. Being necessarily ignorant of the nature of
that business, it became expedient that I should visit the
office daily, in order to qualify myself for the strictest
scrutiny. All the horror of my fears and perplexities now
returned. A thunderbolt would have been as welcome to me as
this intelligence. I knew, to demonstration, that upon these
terms the clerkship of the journals was no place for me. To
require my attendance at the bar of the House, that I might
there publicly entitle myself to the office, was, in effect, to
exclude me from it. In the meantime, the interest of my friend,
the honour of his choice, my own reputation and circumstances,
all urged me forward; all pressed me to undertake that which
I saw to be impracticable. They whose spirits are formed like
mine, to whom _a public exhibition of themselves, on any
occasion, is mortal poison_, may have some idea of the horrors
of my situation; others can have none.
‘My continual misery at length brought on a nervous fever:
quiet forsook me by day, and peace by night; a finger raised
against me was more than I could stand against. In this
posture of mind, I attended regularly at the office; where,
instead of a soul upon the rack, the most active spirits were
essentially necessary for my purpose. I expected no assistance
from anybody there, all the inferior clerks being under the
influence of my opponent; and accordingly I received none.
The journal books were indeed thrown open to me—a thing which
could not be refused; and from which, perhaps, a man in health,
and with a head turned to business, might have gained all
the information he wanted; but it was not so with me. I read
without perception, and was so distressed, that, had every
clerk in the office been my friend, it could have availed me
little; for I was not in a condition to receive instruction,
much less to elicit it out of manuscripts, without direction.
Many months went over me thus employed; constant in the use of
means, despairing as to the issue.’
As the time of trial drew near, his excitement rapidly increased. A short
excursion into the country was attended with momentary benefit; but as
soon as he returned to town he became immediately unfit for occupation,
and as unsettled as ever. He grew first to wish to become mad, next to
believe that he should become so, and only to be afraid that the expected
delirium might not come on soon enough to prevent his appearance for
examination before the lords,—a fear, the bare existence of which shows
how slight a barrier remained between him and the insanity which he
fancied that he longed for. He then began to contemplate suicide, and
not unnaturally called to mind a curious circumstance:
‘I well recollect, too,’ he writes, ‘that when I was about
eleven years of age, my father desired me to read a vindication
of self-murder, and give him my sentiments upon the question: I
did so, and argued against it. My father heard my reasons, and
was silent, neither approving nor disapproving; from whence I
inferred that he sided with the author against me; though all
the time, I believe, the true motive for his conduct was, that
he wanted, if he could, to think favourably of the state of a
departed friend, who had some years before destroyed himself,
and whose death had struck him with the deepest affliction. But
this solution of the matter never once occurred to me, and the
circumstance now weighed mightily with me.’
And he made several attempts to execute his purpose, all which are
related in a ‘Narrative,’ which he drew up after his recovery; and of
which the elaborate detail shows a strange and most painful tendency
to revive the slightest circumstances of delusions which it would
have been most safe and most wholesome never to recall. The curiously
careful style, indeed, of the narration, as elegant as that of the most
flowing and felicitous letter, reminds one of nothing so much as the
studiously beautiful and compact handwriting in which Rousseau used to
narrate and describe the most incoherent and indefinite of his personal
delusions. On the whole, nevertheless—for a long time, at least—it does
not seem that the life of Cowper was in real danger. The hesitation and
indeterminateness of nerve which rendered him liable to these fancies,
and unequal to ordinary action, also prevented his carrying out these
terrible visitations to their rigorous and fearful consequences. At last,
however, there seems to have been possible, if not actual danger:
‘Not one hesitating thought now remained, but I fell greedily
to the execution of my purpose. My garter was made of a broad
piece of scarlet binding, with a sliding buckle, being sewn
together at the ends; by the help of the buckle I formed a
noose, and fixed it about my neck, straining it so tight
that I hardly left a passage for my breath, or for the blood
to circulate; the tongue of the buckle held it fast. At each
corner of the bed was placed a wreath of carved work, fastened
by an iron pin, which passed up through the midst of it: the
other part of the garter, which made a loop, I slipped over one
of these, and hung by it some seconds, drawing up my feet under
me, that they might not touch the floor; but the iron bent, and
the carved work slipped off, and the garter with it. I then
fastened it to the frame of the tester, winding it round, and
tying it in a strong knot. The frame broke short, and let me
down again.
‘The third effort was more likely to succeed. I set the door
open, which reached within a foot of the ceiling; by the help
of a chair I could command the top of it, and the loop being
large enough to admit a large angle of the door, was easily
fixed so as not to slip off again. I pushed away the chair with
my feet, and hung at my whole length. While I hung there, I
distinctly heard a voice say three times, “_’Tis over!_” Though
I am sure of the fact, and was so at the time, yet it did not
at all alarm me, or affect my resolution. I hung so long that I
lost all sense, all consciousness of existence.
‘When I came to myself again, I thought myself in hell; the
sound of my own dreadful groans was all that I heard, and
a feeling like that produced by a flash of lightning just
beginning to seize upon me, passed over my whole body. In a few
seconds I found myself fallen on my face to the floor. In about
half a minute I recovered my feet: and, reeling and staggering,
tumbled into bed again.
‘By the blessed providence of God, the garter which had held
me till the bitterness of temporal death was past, broke just
before eternal death had taken place upon me. The stagnation
of the blood under one eye, in a broad crimson spot, and a
red circle round my neck, showed plainly that I had been on
the brink of eternity. The latter, indeed, might have been
occasioned by the pressure of the garter, but the former was
certainly the effect of strangulation; for it was not attended
with the sensation of a bruise, as it must have been, had I, in
my fall, received one in so tender a part. And I rather think
the circle round my neck was owing to the same cause; for the
part was not excoriated, not at all in pain.
‘Soon after I got into bed, I was surprised to hear a noise
in the dining-room, where the laundress was lighting a fire;
she had found the door unbolted, notwithstanding my design to
fasten it, and must have passed the bed-chamber door while I
was hanging on it, and yet never perceived me. She heard me
fall, and presently came to ask me if I was well; adding, she
feared I had been in a fit.
‘I sent her to a friend, to whom I related the whole affair,
and dispatched him to my kinsman at the coffee-house. As soon
as the latter arrived, I pointed to the broken garter, which
lay in the middle of the room, and apprised him also of the
attempt I had been making. His words were, “My dear Mr. Cowper,
you terrify me! To be sure you cannot hold the office at this
rate,—where is the deputation?” I gave him the key of the
drawer where it was deposited; and his business requiring his
immediate attendance, he took it away with him; and thus ended
all my connection with the Parliament office.’
It must have been a strange scene; for, so far as appears, the outward
manners of Cowper had undergone no remarkable change. There was always
a mild composure about them, which would have deceived any but the most
experienced observer; and it is probable that Major Cowper, his ‘kinsman’
and intimate friend, had very little or no suspicion of the conflict
which was raging beneath his tranquil and accomplished exterior. What
a contrast is the ‘broad piece of scarlet binding’ and the red circle,
‘showing plainly that I had been on the brink of eternity,’ to the daily
life of the easy gentleman ‘who contributed some essays to the “St.
James’s Magazine,” and more than one to the “St. James’s Chronicle,”’
living ‘soft years’ on a smooth superficies of existence, away from the
dark realities which are, as it were, the skeleton of our life,—which
seem to haunt us like a death’s head throughout the narrative that has
been quoted!
It was doubtless the notion of Cowper’s friends, that when all idea of
an examination before the Lords was removed, by the abandonment of his
nomination to the office in question, the excitement which that idea had
called forth would very soon pass away. But that notion was an error. A
far more complicated state of mind ensued. If we may advance a theory on
a most difficult as well as painful topic, we would say that religion is
very rarely the proximate or impulsive cause of madness. The real and
ultimate cause (as we speak) is of course that unknown something which we
variously call predisposition, or malady, or defect. But the critical and
exciting cause seems generally to be some comparatively trivial external
occasion, which falls within the necessary lot and life of the person who
becomes mad. The inherent excitability is usually awakened by some petty
casual stimulant, which looks positively not worth a thought—certainly
a terribly slight agent for the wreck and havoc which it makes. The
constitution of the human mind is such, that the great general questions,
problems, and difficulties of our state of being are not commonly capable
of producing that result. They appear to lie too far in the distance,
to require too great a stretch of imagination, to be too apt (for the
very weakness of our minds’ sake, perhaps) to be thrust out of view by
the trivial occurrences of this desultory world,—to be too impersonal,
in truth, to cause the exclusive, anxious, aching occupation which is
the common prelude and occasion of insanity. Afterwards, on the other
hand, when the wound is once struck, when the petty circumstance has been
allowed to work its awful consequence, religion very frequently becomes
the predominating topic of delusion. It would seem as if, when the mind
was once set apart by the natural consequences of the disease, and
secluded from the usual occupations of, and customary contact with, other
minds, it searched about through all the universe for causes of trouble
and anguish. A certain pain probably exists; and even in insanity, man is
so far a rational being that he seeks and craves at least the outside and
semblance of a reason for a suffering, which is really and truly without
reason. Something must be found to justify its anguish to itself. And
naturally the great difficulties inherent in the very position of man in
this world, and trying so deeply the faith and firmness of the wariest
and wisest minds, are ever ready to present plausible justifications
or causeless depression. An anxious melancholy is not without very
perplexing sophisms and very painful illustrations, with which a morbid
mind can obtain not only a fair logical position, but even apparent
argumentative victories, on many points, over the more hardy part of
mankind. The acuteness of madness soon uses these in its own wretched and
terrible justification. No originality of mind is necessary for so doing.
Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about
us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad—which read like professed
exculpations of a contemplated insanity.
‘To this moment,’ writes Cowper, immediately after the passage which
has been quoted, ‘I had felt no concern of a spiritual kind.’ But now
a conviction fell upon him that he was eternally lost. ‘All my worldly
sorrows,’ he says, ‘seemed as if they had never been; the terrors which
succeeded them seemed so great and so much more afflicting. One moment I
thought myself expressly excluded by one chapter; next by another.’ He
thought the curse of the barren fig-tree was pronounced with an especial
and designed reference to him. All day long these thoughts followed
him. He lived nearly alone, and his friends were either unaware of the
extreme degree to which his mind was excited, or unalive to the possible
alleviation with which new scenes and cheerful society might have been
attended. He fancied the people in the street stared at and despised
him—that ballads were made in ridicule of him—that the voice of his
conscience was eternally audible. He then bethought him of a Mr. Madan,
an evangelical minister, at that time held in much estimation, but who
afterwards fell into disrepute by the publication of a work on marriage
and its obligations (or rather its _non_-obligations), which Cowper has
commented on in a controversial poem. That gentleman visited Cowper at
his request, and began to explain to him the gospel.
‘He spoke,’ says Cowper, ‘of original sin, and the corruption
of every man born into the world, whereby every one is a child
of wrath. I perceived something like hope dawning in my heart.
This doctrine set me more on a level with the rest of mankind,
and made my condition appear less desperate.’
‘Next he insisted on the all-atoning efficacy of the blood of
Jesus, and His righteousness, for our justification. While I
heard this part of his discourse, and the Scriptures on which
he founded it, my heart began to burn within me; my soul was
pierced with a sense of my bitter ingratitude to so merciful
a Saviour; and those tears, which I thought impossible, burst
forth freely. I saw clearly that my case required such a
remedy, and had not the least doubt within me but that this was
the gospel of salvation.
‘Lastly, he urged the necessity of a lively faith in Jesus
Christ; not an assent only of the understanding, but a faith of
application, an actually laying hold of it, and embracing it as
a salvation wrought out for me personally. Here I failed, and
deplored my want of such a faith. He told me it was the gift
of God, which he trusted He would bestow upon me. I could only
reply, “I wish He would:” a very irreverent petition, but a
very sincere one, and such as the blessed God, in His due time,
was pleased to answer.’
It does not appear that previous to this conversation he had ever
distinctly realised the tenets which were afterwards to have so much
influence over him. For the moment they produced a good effect, but
in a few hours their novelty was over—the dark hour returned, and he
awoke from slumber with a ‘stronger alienation from God than ever.’ The
tenacity with which the mind in moments of excitement appropriates and
retains very abstract tenets, that bear even in a slight degree on the
topic of its excitement, is as remarkable as the facility and accuracy
with which it apprehends them in the midst of so great a tumult. Many
changes and many years rolled over Cowper—years of black and dark
depression, years of tranquil society, of genial labour, of literary
fame, but never in the lightest or darkest hour was he wholly unconscious
of the abstract creed of Martin Madan. At the time indeed, the body had
its rights, and maintained them.