of Pope. Great question, as is well known, has been raised whether that
very accomplished writer was a poet at all; and a secondary and equally
debated question runs side by side, whether, if a poet, he were a great
one. With the peculiar genius and personal rank of Pope we have in this
article nothing to do. But this much may be safely said, that according
to the definition which has been ventured of the poetical art, by the
greatest and most accomplished master of the other school, his works are
delicately-finished specimens of artistic excellence in one branch of it.
‘Poetry,’ says Shelley, who was surely a good judge, ‘is the expression
of the imagination,’ by which he meant of course not only the expression
of the interior sensations accompanying the faculty’s employment, but
likewise, and more emphatically, the exercise of it in the delineation
of objects which attract it. Now society, viewed as a whole, is clearly
one of those objects. There is a vast assemblage of human beings, of
all nations, tongues, and languages, each with ideas, and a personality
and a cleaving mark of its own, yet each having somewhat that resembles
something of all, much that resembles a part of many—a motley regiment,
of various forms, of a million impulses, passions, thoughts, fancies,
motives, actions; a ‘many-headed monstered thing;’ a Bashi Bazouk array;
a clown to be laughed at; a hydra to be spoken evil of; yet, in fine,
our all—the very people of the whole earth. There is nothing in nature
more attractive to the fancy than this great spectacle and congregation.
Since Herodotus went to and fro to the best of his ability over all the
earth, the spectacle of civilisation has ever drawn to itself the quick
eyes and quick tongues of seeing and roving men. Not only, says Goethe,
is man ever interesting to man, but ‘properly there is nothing else
interesting.’ There is a distinct subject for poetry—at least according
to Shelley’s definition—in selecting and working out, in idealising,
in combining, in purifying, in intensifying the great features and
peculiarities which make society, as a whole, interesting, remarkable,
fancy-taking. No doubt it is not the object of poetry to versify the
works of the eminent narrators, ‘to prose,’ according to a disrespectful
description, ‘o’er books of travelled seamen,’ to chill you with didactic
icebergs, to heat you with torrid sonnets. The difficulty of reading such
local narratives is now great—so great that a gentleman in the reviewing
department once wished ‘one man would go everywhere and say everything,’
in order that the limit of his labour at least might be settled and
defined. And it would certainly be much worse if palm trees were of
course to be in rhyme, and the dinner of the migrator only recountable in
blank verse. We do not wish this. We only maintain that there are certain
principles, causes, passions, affections, acting on and influencing
communities at large, permeating their life, ruling their principles,
directing their history, working as a subtle and wandering principle
over all their existence. These have a somewhat abstract character, as
compared with the soft ideals and passionate incarnations of purely
individual character, and seem dull beside the stirring lays of eventful
times in which the earlier and bolder poets delight. Another cause
cooperates. The tendency of civilisation is to pare away the oddness and
licence of personal character, and to leave a monotonous agreeableness as
the sole trait and comfort of mankind. This obviously tends to increase
the efficacy of general principles, to bring to view the daily efficacy
of constant causes, to suggest the hidden agency of subtle abstractions.
Accordingly, as civilisation augments and philosophy grows, we commonly
find a school of ‘common-sense poets,’ as they may be called, arise and
develop, who proceed to depict what they see around them, to describe
its _natura naturans_, to delineate its _natura naturata_, to evolve
productive agencies, to teach subtle ramifications. Complete, as the most
characteristic specimen of this class of poets, stands Pope. He was,
some one we think has said, the sort of person we cannot even conceive
existing in a barbarous age. His subject was not life at large, but
fashionable life. He described the society in which he was thrown—the
people among whom he lived. His mind was a hoard of small maxims, a
quintessence of petty observations. When he described character, he
described it, not dramatically, nor as it is in itself; but observantly
and from without, calling up in the mind not so much a vivid conception
of the man, of the real, corporeal, substantial being, as an idea of
the idea which a metaphysical bystander might refine and excruciate
concerning him. Society in Pope is scarcely a society of people, but
of pretty little atoms, coloured and painted with hoops or in coats—a
miniature of metaphysics, a puppet-show of sylphs. He elucidates the
doctrine, that the tendency of civilised poetry is towards an analytic
sketch of the existing civilisation. Nor is the effect diminished by the
pervading character of keen judgment and minute intrusive sagacity; for
no great painter of English life can be without a rough sizing of strong
sense, or he would fail from want of sympathy with his subject. Pope
exemplifies the class and type of ‘common-sense’ poets who substitute
an animated ‘_catalogue raisonné_’ of working thoughts and operative
principles—a sketch of the then present society, as a whole and as an
object, for the κλέα ἀνδρῶν, the tale of which is one subject of early
verse, and the stage effect of living, loving, passionate, impetuous men
and women, which is the special topic of another.
What Pope is to our fashionable and town life, Cowper is to our domestic
and rural life. This is perhaps the reason why he is so national. It
has been said no foreigner can live in the country. We doubt whether
any people, who felt their whole heart and entire exclusive breath of
their existence to be concentrated in a great capital, could or would
appreciate such intensely provincial pictures as are the entire scope of
Cowper’s delineation. A good many imaginative persons are really plagued
with him. Everything is so comfortable; the tea-urn hisses so plainly,
the toast is so warm, the breakfast so neat, the food so edible, that
one turns away, in excitable moments, a little angrily from anything so
quiet, tame, and sober. Have we not always hated this life? What can be
worse than regular meals, clock-moving servants, a time for everything,
and everything then done, a place for everything, without the Irish
alleviation—‘Sure, and I’m rejiced to say, that’s jist and exactly where
it isn’t,’ a common gardener, a slow parson, a heavy assortment of near
relations, a placid house flowing with milk and sugar—all that the fates
can stuff together of substantial comfort, and fed and fatted monotony?
Aspiring and excitable youth stoutly maintains it can endure anything
much better than the ‘gross fog Bœotian’—the torpid, in-door, tea-tabular
felicity. Still a great deal of tea is really consumed in the English
nation. A settled and practical people are distinctly in favour of heavy
relaxations, placid prolixities, slow comforts. A state between the mind
and the body, something intermediate, half-way from the newspaper to a
nap—this is what we may call the middle-life theory of the influential
English gentleman—the true aspiration of the ruler of the world.
‘’Tis then the understanding takes repose
In indolent vacuity of thought,
And sleeps and is refreshed. Meanwhile the face
Conceals the mood lethargic with a mask
Of deep deliberation.’
It is these in-door scenes, this common world, this gentle round of ‘calm
delights,’ the trivial course of slowly-moving pleasures, the petty
detail of quiet relaxation, that Cowper excels in. The post-boy, the
winter’s evening, the newspaper, the knitting needles, the stockings, the
waggon—these are his subjects. His sure popularity arises from his having
held up to the English people exact delineations of what they really
prefer. Perhaps one person in four hundred understands Wordsworth, about
one in eight thousand may appreciate Shelley, but there is no expressing
the small fraction who do not love dulness, who do not enter into
‘Homeborn happiness,
Fireside enjoyments, intimate delights,
And all the comforts that the lowly roof
Of undisturbed retirement, and the hours
Of long uninterrupted evening know.’
His objection to the more exciting and fashionable pleasures was perhaps,
in an extreme analysis, that they put him out. They were too great a task
for his energies—asked too much for his spirits. His comments on them
rather remind us of Mr. Rushworth—Miss Austen’s heavy hero’s remark on
the theatre, ‘I think we went on much better by ourselves before this was
thought of, doing, doing, doing _nothing_.’
The subject of these pictures, in point of interest, may be what we
choose to think it, but there is no denying great merit to the execution.
The sketches have the highest merit—suitableness of style. It would be
absurd to describe a post-boy as sonneteers their mistress—to cover his
plain face with fine similes—to put forward the ‘brow of Egypt’—to stick
metaphors upon him, as the Americans upon General Washington. The only
merit such topics have room for is an easy and dextrous plainness—a sober
suit of well-fitting expressions—a free, working, flowing, picturesque
garb of words adapted to the solid conduct of a sound and serious world,
and this merit Cowper’s style has. On the other hand, it entirely wants
the higher and rarer excellences of poetical expression. There is none
of the choice art which has studiously selected the words of one class
of great poets, or the rare, untaught, unteachable felicity which has
vivified those of others. No one, in reading Cowper, stops as if to draw
his breath more deeply over words which do not so much express or clothe
poetical ideas, as seem to intertwine, coalesce, and be blended with the
very essence of poetry itself.
Of course a poet could not deal in any measure with such subjects as
Cowper dealt with, and not become inevitably, to a certain extent,
satirical. The ludicrous is in some sort the imagination of common life.
The ‘dreary intercourse’ of which Wordsworth makes mention, would be
dreary, unless some people possessed more than he did the faculty of
making fun. A universe in which Dignity No. I. conversed decorously with
Dignity No. II. on topics befitting their state, would be perhaps a levee
of great intellects and a tea-table of enormous thoughts; but it would
want the best charm of this earth—the medley of great things and little,
of things mundane and things celestial, things low and things awful, of
things eternal and things of half a minute. It is in this contrast that
humour and satire have their place—pointing out the intense unspeakable
incongruity of the groups and juxtapositions of our world. To all of
these which fell under his own eye, Cowper was alive. A gentle sense of
propriety and consistency in daily things was evidently characteristic of
him; and if he fail of the highest success in this species of art, it is
not from an imperfect treatment of the scenes and conceptions which he
touched, but from the fact that the follies with which he deals are not
the greatest follies—that there are deeper absurdities in human life than
John Gilpin touches upon—that the superficial occurrences of ludicrous
life do not exhaust, or even deeply test, the mirthful resources of our
minds and fortunes.
As a scold, we think Cowper failed. He had a great idea of the use of
railing, and there are many pages of laudable invective against various
vices which we feel no call whatever to defend. But a great vituperator
had need to be a great hater; and of any real rage, any such gall and
bitterness as great and irritable satirists have in other ages let loose
upon men, of any thorough, brooding, burning, abiding detestation, he
was as incapable as a tame hare. His vituperation reads like the mild
man’s whose wife ate up his dinner, ‘Really, Sir, I feel quite _angry_!’
Nor has his language any of the sharp intrusive acumen which divides in
sunder both soul and spirit, and makes fierce and unforgettable reviling.
Some people may be surprised, notwithstanding our lengthy explanation, at
hearing Cowper treated as of the school of Pope. It has been customary,
at least with some critics, to speak of him as one of those who recoiled
from the artificiality of that great writer, and at least commenced a
return to a simple delineation of outward nature. And of course there
is considerable truth in this idea. The poetry (if such it is) of Pope
would be just as true if all the trees were yellow and all the grass
flesh-colour. He did not care for ‘snowy scalps,’ or ‘rolling streams,’
or ‘icy halls,’ or ‘precipice’s gloom.’ Nor, for that matter, did Cowper
either. He, as Hazlitt most justly said, was as much afraid of a shower
of rain as any man that ever lived. At the same time, the fashionable
life described by Pope has no reference whatever to the beauties of
the material universe, never regards them, could go on just as well in
the soft, sloppy, gelatinous existence which Dr. Whewell (who knows)
says is alone possible in Jupiter and Saturn. But the rural life of
Cowper’s poetry has a constant and necessary reference to the country,
is identified with its features, cannot be separated from it even in
fancy. Green fields and a slow river seem all the material of beauty
Cowper had given him. But what was more to the purpose, his attention
was well concentrated upon them. As he himself said, he did not go more
than thirteen miles from home for twenty years, and very seldom as far.
He was, therefore, well able to find out all that was charming in Olney
and its neighbourhood, and as it presented nothing which is not to be
found in any of the fresh rural parts of England, what he has left us is
really a delicate description and appreciative delineation of the simple
essential English country.
However, it is to be remarked that the description of nature in Cowper
differs altogether from the peculiar delineation of the same subject,
which has been so influential in more recent times, and which bears,
after its greatest master, the name Wordsworthian. To Cowper nature
is simply a background, a beautiful background no doubt, but still
essentially a _locus in quo_—a space in which the work and mirth of life
pass and are performed. A more professedly formal delineation does not
occur than the following:—
‘O Winter! ruler of the inverted year,
Thy scattered hair with sleet-like ashes filled,
Thy breath congealed upon thy lips, thy cheeks
Fringed with a beard made white with other snows
Than those of age, thy forehead wrapped in clouds,
A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne
A sliding car, indebted to no wheels,
But urged by storms along its slippery way;
I love thee, all unlovely as thou seemest,
And dreaded as thou art. Thou holdest the sun
A prisoner in the yet undawning east,
Shortening his journey between morn and noon,
And hurrying him, impatient of his stay,
Down to the rosy west; but kindly still
Compensating his loss with added hours
Of social converse and instructive ease,
And gathering, at short notice, in one group
The family dispersed, and fixing thought,
Not less dispersed by daylight and its cares.
I crown thee King of intimate delights,
Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness,
And all the comforts that the lowly roof
Of undisturbed retirement, and the hours
Of long uninterrupted evening know.
No rattling wheels stop short before these gates.’
After a very few lines he returns within doors to the occupation of
man and woman—to human tasks and human pastimes. To Wordsworth, on the
contrary, nature is a religion. So far from being unwilling to treat
her as a special object of study, he hardly thought any other equal or
comparable. He was so far from holding the doctrine that the earth was
made for men to live in, that it would rather seem as if he thought men
were created to see the earth. The whole aspect of nature was to him
a special revelation of an immanent and abiding power—a breath of the
pervading art—a smile of the Eternal Mind—according to the lines which
every one knows,—
‘A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused;
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’
Of this haunting, supernatural, mystical view of nature Cowper never
heard. Like the strong old lady who said, ‘_She_ was born before nerves
were invented,’ he may be said to have lived before the awakening of the
detective sensibility which reveals this deep and obscure doctrine.
In another point of view, also, Cowper is curiously contrasted with
Wordsworth, as a delineator of nature. The delineation of Cowper is
a simple delineation. He makes a sketch of the object before him,
and there he leaves it. Wordsworth, on the contrary, is not satisfied
unless he describe not only the bare outward object which others see,
but likewise the reflected high-wrought feelings which that object
excites in a brooding, self-conscious mind. His subject was not so much
nature, as nature reflected by Wordsworth. Years of deep musing and long
introspection had made him familiar with every shade and shadow in the
many-coloured impression which the universe makes on meditative genius
and observant sensibility. Now these feelings Cowper did not describe,
because, to all appearance, he did not perceive them. He had a great
pleasure in watching the common changes and common aspects of outward
things, but he was not invincibly prone to brood and pore over their
reflex effects upon his own mind:
‘A primrose by the river’s brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.’
According to the account which Cowper at first gave of his literary
occupations, his entire design was to communicate the religious views
to which he was then a convert. He fancied that the vehicle of verse
might bring many to listen to truths which they would be disinclined to
have stated to them in simple prose. And however tedious the recurrence
of these theological tenets may be to the common reader, it is certain
that a considerable portion of Cowper’s peculiar popularity may be
traced to their expression. He is the one poet of a class which have no
poets. In that once large and still considerable portion of the English
world, which regards the exercise of the fancy and the imagination as
dangerous—snares, as they speak—distracting the soul from an intense
consideration of abstract doctrine, Cowper’s strenuous inculcation of
those doctrines has obtained for him a certain toleration. Of course
all verse is perilous. The use of single words is harmless, but the
employment of two, in such a manner as to form a rhyme—the regularities
of interval and studied recurrence of the same sound, evince an attention
to time, and a partiality to things of sense. Most poets must be
prohibited; the exercise of the fancy requires watching. But Cowper is a
ticket-of-leave man. He has the chaplain’s certificate. He has expressed
himself ‘with the utmost propriety.’ The other imaginative criminals must
be left to the fates, but he may be admitted to the sacred drawing-room,
though with constant care and scrupulous _surveillance_. Perhaps,
however, taken in connection with his diseased and peculiar melancholy,
these tenets really add to the artistic effect of Cowper’s writings. The
free discussion of daily matters, the delicate delineation of domestic
detail, the passing narrative of fugitive occurrences, would seem light
and transitory, if it were not broken by the interruption of a terrible
earnestness, and relieved by the dark background of a deep and foreboding
sadness. It is scarcely artistic to describe the ‘painted veil which
those who live call life,’ and leave wholly out of view and undescribed
‘the chasm sightless and drear,’ which lies always beneath and around it.
It is of the _Task_ more than of Cowper’s earlier volume of poems that
a critic of his poetry must more peculiarly be understood to speak. All
the best qualities of his genius are there concentrated, and the alloy
is less than elsewhere. He was fond of citing the saying of Dryden, that
the rhyme had often helped him to a thought—a great but very perilous
truth. The difficulty is, that the rhyme so frequently helps to the wrong
thought—that the stress of the mind is recalled from the main thread
of the poem, from the narrative, or sentiment, or delineation, to some
wayside remark or fancy, which the casual resemblance of final sound
suggests. This is fatal, unless either a poet’s imagination be so hot
and determined as to bear down upon its objects, and to be unwilling
to hear the voice of any charmer who might distract it, or else the
nature of the poem itself should be of so desultory a character that it
does not much matter about the sequence of the thought—at least within
great and ample limits, as in some of Swift’s casual rhymes, where the
sound is in fact the connecting link of unity. Now Cowper is not often
in either of these positions; he always has a thread of argument on
which he is hanging his illustrations, and yet he has not the exclusive
interest or the undeviating energetic downrightness of mind which would
ensure his going through it without idling or turning aside; consequently
the thoughts which the rhyme suggests are constantly breaking in upon
the main matter, destroying the emphatic unity which is essential to
rhythmical delineation. His blank verse of course is exempt from this
defect, and there is moreover something in the nature of the metre which
fits it for the expression of studious and quiet reflection. The _Task_
too was composed at the healthiest period of Cowper’s later life, in the
full vigour of his faculties, and with the spur the semi-recognition of
his first volume had made it a common subject of literary discussion,
whether he was a poet or not. Many men could endure—as indeed all but
about ten do actually in every generation endure—to be without this
distinction; but few could have an idea that it was a frequent point of
argument whether they were duly entitled to possess it or not, without
at least a strong desire to settle the question by some work of decisive
excellence. This the _Task_ achieved for Cowper. Since its publication
his name has been a household word—a particularly household word in
English literature. The story of its composition is connected with one of
the most curious incidents in Cowper’s later life, and has given occasion
to a good deal of writing.
In the summer of 1781 it happened that two ladies called at a shop
exactly opposite the house at Olney where Cowper and Mrs. Unwin
resided. One of these was a familiar and perhaps tame object,—a Mrs.
Jones,—the wife of a neighbouring parson; the other, however, was so
striking, that Cowper, one of the shyest and least demonstrative of men,
immediately asked Mrs. Unwin to invite her to tea. This was a great
event, as it would appear that few or no social interruptions, casual
or contemplated, then varied what Cowper called the ‘duality of his
existence.’ This favoured individual was Lady Austen, a person of what
Mr. Hayley terms ‘colloquial talents;’ in truth an energetic, vivacious,
amusing, and rather handsome lady of the world. She had been much in
France, and is said to have caught the facility of manner and love of
easy society, which is the unchanging characteristic of that land of
change. She was a fascinating person in the great world, and it is not
difficult to imagine she must have been an excitement indeed at Olney.
She was, however, most gracious; fell in love, as Cowper says, not only
with him but with Mrs. Unwin; was called ‘Sister Ann,’ laughed and made
laugh, was every way so great an acquisition that his seeing her appeared
to him to show ‘strong marks of providential interposition.’ He thought
her superior to the curate’s wife, who was a ‘valuable person,’ but had
a family, &c. &c. The new acquaintance had much to contribute to the
Olney conversation. She had seen much of the world, and probably seen it
well, and had at least a good deal to narrate concerning it. Among other
interesting matters, she one day recounted to Cowper the story of John
Gilpin, as one which she had heard in childhood, and in a short time the
poet sent her the ballad, which every one has liked ever since. It was
written, he says, no doubt truly, in order to relieve a fit of terrible
and uncommon despondency; but altogether, for a few months after the
introduction of this new companion, he was more happy and animated than
at any other time after his first illness. Clouds, nevertheless, began
to show themselves soon. The circumstances are of the minute and female
kind, which it would require a good deal of writing to describe, even
if we knew them perfectly. The original cause of misconstruction was a
rather romantic letter of Lady Austen, drawing a sublime picture of what
she expected from Cowper’s friendship. Mr. Scott, the clergyman at Olney,
who had taken the place of Mr. Newton, and who is described as a dry
and sensible man, gave a short account of what he thought was the real
embroilment. ‘Who,’ said he, ‘can be surprised that two women should be
daily in the society of one man and then quarrel with _one another_?’
Cowper’s own description shows how likely this was.