says to Mr. Unwin, ‘we have passed at once into a state of
constant engagement. Not that our society is much multiplied;
the addition of an individual has made all this difference.
Lady Austen and we pass our days alternately at each other’s
_château_. In the morning I walk with one or other of the
ladies, and in the afternoon wind thread. Thus did Hercules,
and thus probably did Samson, and thus do I; and were both
those heroes living, I should not fear to challenge them to a
trial of skill in that business, or doubt to beat them both. As
to killing lions and other amusements of that kind, with which
they were so delighted, I should be their humble servant and
beg to be excused.’
Things were in this state when she suggested to him the composition of a
new poem of some length in blank verse, and on being asked to suggest a
subject, said, Well, write upon that ‘sofa,’ whence is the title of the
first book of the _Task_. According to Cowper’s own account, it was this
poem which was the cause of the ensuing dissension.
‘On her first settlement in our neighbourhood, I made it my
own particular business (for at that time I was not employed
in writing, having published my first volume, and not begun
my second) to pay my devoirs to her ladyship every morning at
eleven. Customs very soon become laws. I began the _Task_; for
she was the lady who gave me the Sofa for a subject. Being once
engaged in the work, I began to feel the inconvenience of my
morning attendance. We had seldom breakfasted ourselves till
ten: and the intervening hour was all the time that I could
find in the whole day for writing; and occasionally it would
happen that the half of that hour was all that I could secure
for the purpose. But there was no remedy. Long usage had made
that which at first was optional, a point of good manners, and
consequently of necessity, and I was forced to neglect the
_Task_, to attend upon the Muse who had inspired the subject.
But she had ill health, and before I had quite finished the
work was obliged to repair to Bristol.’
And it is possible that this is the true account of the matter. Yet
we fancy there is a kind of awkwardness and constraint in the manner
in which it is spoken of. Of course, the plain and literal portion of
mankind have set it down at once that Cowper was in love with Lady
Austen, just as they married him over and over again to Mrs. Unwin. But
of a strong passionate love, as we have before explained, we do not think
Cowper capable, and there are certainly no signs of it in this case.
There is, however, one odd circumstance. Years after, when no longer
capable of original composition, he was fond of hearing all his poems
read to him except ‘John Gilpin.’ There were recollections, he said,
connected with those verses which were too painful. Did he mean, the worm
that dieth not—the reminiscence of the animated narratress of that not
intrinsically melancholy legend?
The literary success of Cowper opened to him a far larger circle
of acquaintance, and connected him in close bonds with many of his
relations, who had looked with an unfavourable eye at the peculiar tenets
which he had adopted, and the peculiar and recluse life which he had
been advised to lead. It is to these friends and acquaintance that we
owe that copious correspondence on which so much of Cowper’s fame at
present rests. The complete letter-writer is now an unknown animal. In
the last century, when communications were difficult, and epistles rare,
there were a great many valuable people who devoted a good deal of time
to writing elaborate letters. You wrote letters to a man whom you knew
nineteen years and a half ago, and told him what you had for dinner, and
what your second cousin said, and how the crops got on. Every detail of
life was described and dwelt on, and improved. The art of writing, at
least of writing easily, was comparatively rare, which kept the number
of such compositions within narrow limits. Sir Walter Scott says he knew
a man who remembered that the London post-bag once came to Edinburgh
with only one letter in it. One can fancy the solemn conscientious
elaborateness with which a person would write, with the notion that his
letter would have a whole coach and a whole bag to itself, and travel two
hundred miles alone, the exclusive object of a red guard’s care. The only
thing like it now—the deferential minuteness with which one public office
writes to another, conscious that the letter will travel on her Majesty’s
service three doors down the passage—sinks by comparison into cursory
brevity. No administrative reform will be able to bring even the official
mind of these days into the grave inch-an-hour conscientiousness with
which a confidential correspondent of a century ago related the growth
of apples, the manufacture of jams, the appearance of flirtations, and
other such things. All the ordinary incidents of an easy life were made
the most of; a party was epistolary capital, a race a mine of wealth. So
deeply sentimental was this intercourse, that it was much argued whether
the affections were created for the sake of the ink, or ink for the sake
of the affections. Thus it continued for many years, and the fruits
thereof are written in the volumes of family papers, which daily appear,
are praised as ‘materials for the historian,’ and consigned, as the case
may be, to posterity or oblivion. All this has now passed away. Sir
Rowland Hill is entitled to the credit, not only of introducing stamps,
but also of destroying letters. The amount of annotations which will be
required to make the notes of this day intelligible to posterity is a
wonderful idea, and no quantity of comment will make them readable. You
might as well publish a collection of telegraphs. The careful detail, the
studious minuteness, the circumstantial statement of a former time, is
exchanged for a curt brevity or only half-intelligible narration. In old
times, letters were written for people who knew nothing and required to
be told everything. Now they are written for people who know everything
except the one thing which the letter is designed to explain to them.
It is impossible in some respects not to regret the old practice. It
is well that each age should write for itself a faithful account of
its habitual existence. We do this to a certain extent in novels, but
novels are difficult materials for an historian. They raise a cause and
a controversy as to how far they are really faithful delineations. Lord
Macaulay is even now under criticism for his use of the plays of the
seventeenth century. Letters are generally true on certain points. The
least veracious man will tell truly the colour of his coat, the hour of
his dinner, the materials of his shoes. The unconscious delineation of a
recurring and familiar life is beyond the reach of a fraudulent fancy.
Horace Walpole was not a very scrupulous narrator; yet it was too much
trouble even for him to tell lies on many things. His set stories and
conspicuous scandals are no doubt often unfounded, but there is a gentle
undercurrent of daily unremarkable life and manners which he evidently
assumed as a datum for his historical imagination. Whence posterity will
derive this for the times of Queen Victoria it is difficult to fancy.
Even memoirs are no resource; they generally leave out the common life,
and try at least to bring out the uncommon events.
It is evident that this species of composition exactly harmonised with
the temperament and genius of Cowper. Detail was his forte and quietness
his element. Accordingly, his delicate humour plays over perhaps a
million letters, mostly descriptive of events which no one else would
have thought worth narrating, and yet which, when narrated, show to
us, and will show to persons to whom it will be yet more strange, the
familiar, placid, easy, ruminating, provincial existence of our great
grandfathers. Slow, Olney might be,—indescribable, it certainly was not.
We seem to have lived there ourselves.
The most copious subject of Cowper’s correspondence is his translation
of Homer. This was published by subscription, and it is pleasant to
observe the healthy facility with which one of the shyest men in the
world set himself to extract guineas from every one he had ever heard of.
In several cases he was very successful. The University of Oxford, he
tells us, declined, as of course it would, to recognise the principle of
subscribing towards literary publications; but other public bodies and
many private persons were more generous. It is to be wished that their
aid had contributed to the production of a more pleasing work. The fact
is, Cowper was not like Agamemnon. The most conspicuous feature in the
Greek heroes is a certain brisk, decisive activity, which always strikes
and always likes to strike. This quality is faithfully represented in the
poet himself. Homer is the briskest of men. The Germans have denied that
there was any such person; but they have never questioned his extreme
activity. ‘From what you tell me, sir,’ said an American, ‘I should like
to have read Homer. I should say he was a go-ahead party.’ Now this is
exactly what Cowper was not. His genius was domestic, and tranquil, and
calm. He had no sympathy, or little sympathy, even with the common,
half-asleep activities of a refined society; an evening party was too
much for him; a day’s hunt a preposterous excitement. It is absurd to
expect a man like this to sympathise with the stern stimulants of a
barbaric age, with a race who fought because they liked it, and a poet
who sang of fighting because he thought their taste judicious. As if to
make matters worse, Cowper selected a metre in which it would be scarcely
possible for any one, however gifted, to translate Homer. The two kinds
of metrical composition most essentially opposed to one another are
ballad poetry and blank verse. The very nature of the former requires a
marked pause and striking rhythm. Every line should have a distinct end
and a clear beginning. It is like martial music, there should be a tramp
in the very versification of it:—
‘Armour rusting in his halls
On the blood of Clifford calls;
“Quell the Scot,” exclaims the lance,
Bear me to the heart of France,
Is the longing of the shield:
Tell thy name, thou trembling field,
Field of death, where’er thou be,
Groan thou with our victory.’
And this is the tone of Homer. The grandest of human tongues marches
forward with its proudest steps: the clearest tones call forward—the most
marked of metres carries him on:—
‘Like a reappearing star,
Like a glory from afar—’
he ever heads, and will head, ‘the flock of war.’ Now blank verse is
the exact opposite of all this. Dr. Johnson laid down that it was verse
only to the eye, which was a bold dictum. But without going this length
it will be safe to say, that of all considerable metres in our language
it has the least distinct conclusion, least decisive repetition, the
least trumpet-like rhythm; and it is this of which Cowper made choice.
He had an idea that extreme literalness was an unequalled advantage,
and logically reasoned that it was easier to do this in that metre
than in any other. He did not quite hold with Mr. Cobbett that the
‘gewgaw fetters of rhyme were invented by the monks to enslave the
people;’ but as a man who had due experience of both, he was aware
that it is easier to write two lines of different endings than two
lines of the same ending, and supposed that by taking advantage of
this to preserve the exact grammatical meaning of his author, he was
indisputably approximating to a good translation. ‘Whether,’ he writes,
‘a translation of Homer may be best executed in blank verse or in rhyme
is a question in the decision of which no man finds difficulty who has
ever duly considered what translation ought to be, or who is in any
degree practically acquainted with those kinds of versification.... No
human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with
sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only
the full sense, of the original.’ And if the true object of translation
were to save the labour and dictionaries of construing schoolboys, there
is no question but this slavish adherence to the original would be the
most likely to gain the approbation of those diminutive but sure judges.
But if the object is to convey an idea of the general tone, scope, and
artistic effect of the original, the mechanical copying of the details
is as likely to end in a good result as a careful cast from a dead man’s
features to produce a living and speaking being. On the whole, therefore,
the condemnation remains, that Homer is not dull, and Cowper is.
With the translation of Homer terminated all the brightest period of
Cowper’s life. There is little else to say. He undertook an edition
of Milton—a most difficult task, involving the greatest and most
accurate learning, in theology, in classics, in Italian—in a word, in
all ante-Miltonic literature. By far the greater portion of this lay
quite out of Cowper’s path. He had never been a hard student, and his
evident incapacity for the task troubled and vexed him. A man who had
never been able to assume any real responsibility was not likely to
feel comfortable under the weight of a task which very few men would be
able to accomplish. Mrs. Unwin too fell into a state of helplessness
and despondency; and instead of relying on her for cheerfulness and
management, he was obliged to manage for her, and cheer her. His mind
was unequal to the task. Gradually the dark cloud of melancholy, which
had hung about him so long, grew and grew, and extended itself day by
day. In vain Lord Thurlow, who was a likely man to know, assured him
that his spiritual despondency was without ground; he smiled sadly, but
seemed to think that at any rate he was not going into Chancery. In vain
Hayley, a rival poet, but a good-natured, blundering, well-intentioned,
incoherent man, went to and fro, getting the Lord Chief Justice and
other dignitaries to attest, under their hands, that they concurred in
Thurlow’s opinion. In vain, with far wiser kindness, his relatives,
especially many of his mother’s family, from whom he had been long
divided, but who gradually drew nearer to him as they were wanted,
endeavoured to divert his mind to healthful labour and tranquil society.
The day of these things had passed away—the summer was ended. He became
quite unequal to original composition, and his greatest pleasure was
hearing his own writings read to him. After a long period of hopeless
despondency he died on April 25, in the first year of this century; and
if he needs an epitaph, let us say, that not in vain was he Nature’s
favourite. As a higher poet sings:—
‘And all day long I number yet,
All seasons through, another debt,
Which I, wherever thou art met,
To thee am owing;
An instinct call it, a blind sense,
A happy, genial influence,
Coming one knows not how nor whence,
Nor whither going.’
...
‘If stately passions in me burn,
And one chance look to thee should turn,
I drink out of an humbler urn,
A lowlier pleasure;
The homely sympathy that heeds
The common life our nature breeds;
A wisdom fitted to the needs
Of hearts at leisure.’
APPENDIX.
LETTERS ON THE FRENCH COUP D’ÉTAT OF 1851.
(_Addressed to the Editor of ‘THE INQUIRER.’_)
LETTER I.
_THE DICTATORSHIP._
PARIS: Jan. 8, 1852.
SIR,—You have asked me to tell you what I think of French affairs. I
shall be pleased to do so; but I ought perhaps to begin by cautioning
you against believing, or too much heeding, what I say. However, I do
not imagine that I need do so; for with your experience of the public
journals, you will be quite aware that it is not difficult to be an
‘occasional correspondent.’ Have your boots polished in a blacking-shop,
and call the interesting officiator an ‘intelligent _ouvrier_;’ be
shaved, and cite the _coiffeur_ as ‘a person in rather a superior
station;’ call your best acquaintance ‘a well-informed person,’ and all
others ‘persons whom I have found to be occasionally not in error,’
and—abroad, at least—you will soon have matter for a newspaper letter.
I should quite deceive you if I professed to have made these profound
researches; nor, like Sir Francis Head, ‘do I no longer know where I
am,’ because the French President has asked me to accompany him in his
ride. My perception of personal locality has not as yet been so tried. I
only know what a person who is in a foreign country during an important
political catastrophe cannot avoid knowing, what he runs against, what is
beaten into him, what he can hardly help hearing, seeing, and reflecting.
That Louis Napoleon has gone to Notre Dame to return thanks to God
for the seven millions and odd suffrages of the French people—that
he has taken up his abode at the Tuileries, and that he has had new
napoleons coined in his name—that he has broken up the trees of liberty
for firewood—that he has erased, or is erasing (for they are many),
_Liberté_, _Egalité_, and _Fraternité_ from the National buildings,—all
these things are so easy and so un-English, that I am pretty sure, with
you, they will be thought signs of pompous impotence, and I suppose
many people will be inclined to believe the best comment to be the one
which I heard—‘_Mon Dieu, il a sauvé la France: la rue du Coq s’appelle
maintenant la rue de l’Aigle!_’[33]
I am inclined, however, to imagine that this idea would be utterly
erroneous; that, on the contrary, the President is just now, at least,
really strong and really popular; that the act of December 2nd did
succeed and is succeeding; that many, that most, of the inferior people
do really and sincerely pray _Domine Salvum fac Napoleonem_.
In what I have seen of the comments of the English press upon recent
events here, two things are not quite enough kept apart—I mean the
temporary dictatorship of Louis Napoleon to meet and cope with the
expected crisis of ’52, and the continuance of that dictatorship
hereafter,—the new, or as it is called, the _Bas_-Empire—in a word, the
coming Constitution and questionable political machinery with which ‘the
nephew of my uncle’ is now proposing to endow France. Of course, in
reality these two things _are_ separate. It is one thing to hold that a
military rule is required to meet an urgent and temporary difficulty:
another, to advocate the continuance of such a system, when so critical a
necessity no longer exists.
It seems to me, or would seem, if I did not know that I was contradicted
both by much English writing and opinion, and also by many most
competent judges here, that the first point, the temporary dictatorship,
is a tolerably clear case; that it is not to be complicated with the
perplexing inquiry what form of government will permanently suit the
French people;—that the President was, under the actual facts of
the case, quite justified in assuming the responsibility, though of
course I allow that responsibility to be tremendous. My reasons for so
believing I shall in this letter endeavour to explain, except that I
shall not, I fancy, have room to say much on the moral defensibility or
indefensibility of the _coup d’état_; nor do I imagine that you want
from me any ethical speculation—that is manufactured in Printing-house
Square; but I shall give the best account I can of the matter-of-fact
consequences and antecedents of the New Revolution, of which, in some
sense, a resident in France may feel without presumption that he knows
something hardly so well known to those at home.
The political justification of Louis Napoleon is, as I apprehend, to be
found in the state of the public mind which immediately preceded the
_coup d’état_. It is very rarely that a country expects a revolution at
a given time; indeed, it is perhaps not common for ordinary persons in
any country to anticipate a revolution at all; though profound people
may speculate, the mass will ever expect to-morrow to be as this day
at least, if not more abundant. But once name the day, and all this
is quite altered. As a general rule the very people who would be most
likely to neglect general anticipation are exactly those most likely to
exaggerate the proximate consequences of a certain impending event. At
any rate, in France five weeks ago, the tradespeople talked of May, ’52,
as if it were the end of the world. Civilisation and Socialism might
probably endure, but buying and selling would surely come to an end; in
fact, they anticipated a worse era than February, ’48, when trade was
at a standstill so long that it has hardly yet recovered, and when the
Government stocks fell 40 per cent. It is hardly to be imagined upon
what petty details the dread of political dissolution at a fixed and
not distant time will condescend to intrude itself. I was present when
a huge _Flamande_, in appearance so intrepid that I respectfully pitied
her husband, came to ask the character of a _bonne_. I was amazed to hear
her say, ‘I hope the girl is strong, for when the revolution comes next
May, and I have to turn off my helper, she will have enough to do.’ It
seemed to me that a political apprehension must be pretty general, when
it affected that most non-speculative of speculations, the _reckoning_ of
a housewife. With this feeling, everybody saved their money: who would
spend in luxuries that which might so soon be necessary and invaluable!
This economy made commerce,—especially the peculiarly Parisian trade,
which is almost wholly in articles that _can_ be spared—worse and worse;
the more depressed trade became, the more the traders feared, and the
more they feared, the worse all trade inevitably grew.
I apprehend that this feeling extended very generally among all the
classes who do not find or make a livelihood by literature or by
politics. Among the clever people, who understood the subject, very
likely the expectation was extremely different; but among the stupid
ones who mind their business, and have a business to mind, there was a
universal and excessive tremor. The only notion of ’52 was ‘_on se battra
dans la rue_.’ Their dread was especially of Socialism; they expected
that the followers of M. Proudhon, who advisedly and expressly maintains
‘anarchy’ to be the best form of Government, would attempt to carry out
their theories in action, and that the division between the Legislative
and Executive power would so cripple the party of order as to make
their means of resistance for the moment feeble and difficult to use.
The more sensible did not, I own, expect the annihilation of mankind:
civilisation dies hard; the organised sense in all countries is strong;
but they expected vaguely and crudely that the party which in ’93 ruled
for many months, and which in June ’48 fought so fanatically against
the infant republic, would certainly make a desperate attack,—_might_
for some time obtain the upper hand. Of course, it is now matter of
mere argument whether the danger was real or unreal, and it is in some
quarters rather the fashion to quiz the past fear, and to deny that
any Socialists anywhere exist. In spite of the literary exertions of
Proudhon and Louis Blanc, in spite of the prison quarrels of Blanqui and
Barbès—there are certainly found people who question whether anybody buys
the books of the two former, or cares for the incarcerated dissensions
of the two latter. But however this may be, it is certain that two days
after the _coup d’état_ a mass of persons thought it worth while to
erect some dozen barricades, and among these, and superintending and
directing their every movement, there certainly were, for I saw them
myself, men whose physiognomy and accoutrements exactly resembled the
traditional Montagnard, sallow, stern, compressed, with much marked
features, which expressed but resisted suffering, and brooding one-ideaed
thought, men who from their youth upward had for ever imagined, like
Jonah, that they did well—immensely well—to be angry, men armed to the
teeth, and ready, like the soldiers of the first Republic, to use their
arms savagely and well in defence of theories broached by a Robespierre,
a Blanqui, or a Barbès, gloomy fanatics, over-principled ruffians. I
may perhaps be mistaken in reading in their features the characters of
such men, but I know that when one of them disturbed my superintendence
of barricade-making with a stern _allez vous-en_, it was not too slowly
that I departed, for I _felt_ that he would rather shoot me than not.
Having seen these people, I conceive that they exist. But supposing that
they were all simply fabulous, it would not less be certain that they
were _believed_ to be, and to be active; nor would it impair the fact
that the quiet classes awaited their onslaught in morbid apprehension,
with miserable and craven, and I fear we ought to say, _commercial_
disquietude.