If, as I sometimes think, a man's interest in letters is almost the
surest measure of his love for Letters in the larger sense of the word,
the busy schoolmaster of Olney ought to stand high in favour for the
labour he has bestowed on completing and rearranging the _Correspondence
of William Cowper_.[1] It may be that Mr. Wright's competence as an
editor still leaves something to be desired. Certainly, if I may speak
for my own taste, he has in one respect failed to profit by a golden
opportunity; it needed only to print the more intimate poems of Cowper
in their proper place among the letters to have produced a work doubly
interesting and perfectly unique. The correspondence itself would have
been shot through by a new light, and the poetry might have been
restored once more to its rightful seat in our affections. The fact is
that not many readers to-day can approach the verse of the eighteenth
century in a mood to enjoy or even to understand it. We have grown so
accustomed to over-emphasis in style and wasteful effusion in sentiment
that the clarity and self-restraint of that age repel us as ungenuine;
we are warned by a certain _frigus_ at the heart to seek our comfort
elsewhere. And just here was the chance for an enlightened editor. So
much of Cowper's poetry is the record of his own simple life and of the
little adventures that befell him in the valley of the Ouse, that it
would have lost its seeming artificiality and would have gained a fresh
appeal by association with the letters that relate the same events and
emotions. How, for example, the quiet grace of the fables (and good
fables are so rare in English!) would be brought back to us again if we
could read them side by side with the actual stories out of which they
grew. There is a whole charming natural history here of beast and bird
and insect and flower. The nightingale which Cowper heard on New Year's
Day sings in a letter as well as in the poem; and here, to name no
others, are the incidents of the serpent and the kittens, and of that
walk by the Ouse when the poet's dog Beau brought him the water lily.
Or, to turn to more serious things, how much the pathetic stanzas _To
Mary_ would gain in poignant realism if we came upon them immediately
after reading the letters in which Cowper lays bare his remorse for the
strain his malady had imposed upon her.
A still more striking example would be the lines written _On the Receipt
of My Mother's Picture_. By a literary tradition these are reckoned
among the most perfect examples of pathos in the language, and yet how
often to-day are they read with any deep emotion? I suspect no tears
have fallen on that page for many a long year.
Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine--thy own sweet smile I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
"Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!"
* * * * *
Short-lived possession! but the record fair,
That memory keeps of all thy kindness there,
Still outlives many a storm that has effaced
A thousand other themes less deeply traced.
Thy nightly visits to my chamber made,
That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid;
Thy morning bounties as I left my home,
The biscuit or confectionary plum:
The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed
By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed:
All this, and more enduring still than all,
Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall,--
do you not feel the expression here, the very balance of the rhymes,
to stand like a barrier between the poet's emotion and your own
susceptibility? And that _confectionary plum_--somehow the savour of
it has long ago evaporated. Even the closing lines--
Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-tost,
Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compass lost--
need some allowance to cover their artificial mode. And it is just this
allowance that association with the letters would afford; the mind would
pass without a shock from the simple recital in prose of Cowper's ruined
days to these phrases at once so metaphorical and so conventional, and
would find in them a new power to move the heart. Or compare with the
sentiment of the poem this paragraph from the letter to his cousin, Mrs.
Bodham--all of it a model of simple beauty:
The world could not have furnished you with a present so
acceptable to me, as the picture you have so kindly sent me.
I received it the night before last, and viewed it with a
trepidation of nerves and spirits somewhat akin to what I should
have felt, had the dear original presented herself to my embraces.
I kissed it and hung it where it is the last object that I see at
night, and, of course, the first on which I open my eyes in the
morning. She died when I completed my sixth year; yet I remember
her well, and am an ocular witness of the great fidelity of the
copy. I remember, too, a multitude of the maternal tendernesses
which I received from her, and which have endeared her memory to
me beyond expression.
To read together the whole of this letter and of the poem is something
more than a demonstration of what might be accomplished by a skilful
editor; it is a lesson, too, in that quality of restrained dignity, I
had almost said of self-respect, which we find it so difficult to
impress on our broken modern style.
Some day, no doubt, we shall have such an interwoven edition of Cowper's
prose and verse, to obtain which we would willingly sacrifice a full
third of the letters if this were necessary. Meanwhile, let us be
thankful for whatever fresh light our Olney editor has thrown on the
correspondence, and take the occasion to look a little more closely into
one of the strangest and most tragic of literary lives. William Cowper
was born at Great Berkhampstead in 1731. His father, who was rector of
the parish, belonged to a family of high connections, and his mother,
Anne Donne, was also of noble lineage, claiming descent through four
different lines from Henry III. The fact is of some importance, for the
son was very much the traditional gentleman, and showed the pride of
race both in his language and manners. He himself affected to think more
of his kinship to John Donne, of poetical memory, than of his other
forefathers, and, half in play, traced the irritability of his temper
and his verse-mongering back to that "venerable ancestor, the Dean of
St. Paul's."[2] It is fanciful, but one is tempted to lay upon the old
poet's meddling with coffins and ghastly thoughts some of the
responsibility for the younger man's nightly terrors. "That which we
call life is but _Hebdomada mortium_, a week of death, seven days, seven
periods of life spent in dying," preached Donne in his last sermon, and
an awful echo of the words might seem to have troubled his descendant's
nerves. But that is not yet. As a boy and young man Cowper appears to
have been high-spirited and natural. At Westminster School he passed
under the instruction of Vincent Bourne, so many of whose fables he was
to translate in after years, and who, with Milton and Prior, was most
influential in forming his poetical manner.
I love the memory of Vinny Bourne [he wrote in one of his
letters]. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus,
Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except
Ovid.... He was so good-natured, and so indolent, that I lost more
than I got by him; for he made me as idle as himself. He was such
a sloven, as if he had trusted to his genius as a cloak for
everything that could disgust you in his person.... I remember
seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy locks and box
his ears to put it out again.
After leaving Westminster he spent a few months at Berkhampstead, and
then came to London under the pretext of studying law, living first
with an attorney in Southampton Row and afterwards taking chambers in
the Middle Temple. Life went merrily for a while. He was a fellow
student with Thurlow, and there he was, he "and the future Lord
Chancellor, constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and
making giggle, instead of studying the law. Oh, fie, cousin!" he adds,
"how could you do so?" This pretty "Oh fie!" introduces us to one who
was to be his best and dearest correspondent, his cousin Harriet Cowper,
afterwards Lady Hesketh, and who was to befriend him and cheer him in a
thousand ways. It may introduce us also to Harriet's sister, Theodora,
with whom Cowper, after the fashion of idle students, fell thoughtlessly
in love. He would have married her, too, bringing an incalculable
element into his writing which I do not like to contemplate; for it is
the way of poets to describe most ideally what fortune has denied them
in reality, and Cowper's task, we know, was to portray in prose and
verse the quiet charms of the family. But the lady's father, for reasons
very common in such cases, put an end to that danger. Cowper took the
separation easily enough, if we may judge from the letters of the
period; but to Theodora, one fancies, it meant a life of sad memories.
They never exchanged letters, but in after years, when Lady Hesketh
renewed correspondence with Cowper and brought him into connection with
his kinsfolk, Theodora, as "Anonymous," sent money and other gifts to
eke out his slender living. It is generally assumed that the recipient
never guessed the name of his retiring benefactress, but I prefer to
regard it rather as a part of his delicacy and taste to affect ignorance
where the donor did not wish to be revealed, and think that his
penetration of the secret added a kind of wistful regret to his
gratitude. "On Friday I received a letter from dear Anonymous," he
writes to Lady Hesketh, "apprising me of a parcel that the coach would
bring me on Saturday. Who is there in the world that has, or thinks he
has, reason to love me to the degree that he does? But it is no matter.
He chooses to be unknown, and his choice is, and ever shall be, so
sacred to me, that if his name lay on the table before me reversed, I
would not turn the paper about that I might read it. Much as it would
gratify me to thank him, I would turn my eyes away from the forbidden
discovery." Could there be a more tactful way of conveying his thanks
and insinuating his knowledge while respecting Theodora's reserve?
But all this was to come after the great change in Cowper's life. As
with Charles Lamb, a name one likes to link with his, the terrible
shadow of madness fell upon him one day, never wholly to rise. The story
of that calamity is too well known to need retelling in detail. A first
stroke seized him in his London days, but seems not to have been
serious. He recovered, and took up again the easy life that was in
retrospect to appear to him so criminally careless. In order to
establish him in the world, his cousin, Major Cowper, offered him the
office of Clerk of the Journals to the House of Lords. There was,
however, some dispute as to the validity of the donor's powers, and it
became necessary for Cowper to prove his competency at the bar of the
House. The result was pitiable. Anxiety and nervous dread completely
prostrated him. After trying futilely to take his own life, he was
placed by his family in a private asylum at St. Albans, where he
remained about a year and a half. His recovery took the form of
religious conversion and a rapturous belief in his eternal salvation.
Instead of returning to London, he went to live in the town of
Huntingdon, drawn thither both by the retirement of the place and its
nearness to Cambridge, where his brother John resided. Here he became
acquainted with the Unwins:
... the most agreeable people imaginable; quite sociable, and as
free from the ceremonious civility of country gentlefolks as any I
ever met with. They treat me more like a near relation than a
stranger, and their house is always open to me. The old gentleman
carries me to Cambridge in his chaise. He is a man of learning and
good sense, and as simple as Parson Adams. His wife has a very
uncommon understanding, has read much to excellent purpose, and is
more polite than a duchess. The son, who belongs to Cambridge, is
a most amiable young man, and the daughter quite of a piece with
the rest of the family. They see but little company, which suits
me exactly; go when I will, I find a house full of peace and
cordiality in all its parts.
The intimacy ripened and Cowper was taken into the family almost as one
of its members. But trouble and change soon broke into this idyllic
home. Mr. Unwin was thrown from his horse and killed; the son was called
away to a charge; the daughter married. Meanwhile, Mrs. Unwin and Cowper
had gone to live at Olney, a dull town on the Ouse, where they might
enjoy the evangelical preaching of that reformed sea-captain and
slave-dealer, the Rev. John Newton.
The letters of this period are filled with a tremulous joy; it was as if
one of the timid animals he loved so well had found concealment in the
rocks and heard the baying of the hounds, thrown from the scent and far
off. "For my own part," he writes to Lady Hesketh, "who am but as a
Thames wherry, in a world full of tempest and commotion, I know so well
the value of the creek I have put into, and the snugness it affords me,
that I have a sensible sympathy with you in the pleasure you find in
being once more blown to Droxford." Books he has in abundance, and happy
country walks; friends that are more than friends to occupy his heart,
and quaint characters to engage his wit. He finds an image of his days
in Rousseau's description of an English morning, and his evenings differ
from them in nothing except that they are still more snug and quieter.
His talk is of the mercies and deliverance of God; he is eager to
convert the little world of his correspondents to his own exultant
peace; and, it must be confessed, only the charm and breeding of his
language save a number of these letters from the wearisomeness of
misplaced preaching.
Cowper removed with Mrs. Unwin to Olney in 1767. Six years later came
the miraculous event which changed the whole tenor of his life and which
gave the unique character to all the letters he was to write thereafter.
He was seized one night with a frantic despondency, and again for a year
and a half, during all which time Mr. Newton cared for him as for a
brother, suffered acute melancholia. He recovered his sanity in ordinary
matters, but the spring of joy and peace had been dried up within him.
Thenceforth he never, save for brief intervals, could shake off the
conviction that he had been abandoned by God--rather that for some
inscrutable reason God had deliberately singled him out as a victim of
omnipotent wrath and eternal damnation. No doubt there was some physical
origin, some lesion of the nerves, at the bottom of this disease, but
the peculiar form of his mania and its virulence can be traced to causes
quite within the range of literary explanation. He was a scapegoat of
his age; he accepted with perfect faith what other men talked about, and
it darkened his reason. Those were the days when a sharp and unwholesome
opposition had arisen between the compromise of the Church with worldly
forms and the evangelical absolutism of Wesley and Whitefield and John
Newton. Cowper himself, on emerging from his melancholia at St. Albans,
had adopted the extreme Calvinistic tenets in regard to the divine
omnipotence. Man was but a toy in the hands of an arbitrary Providence;
conversion was first a recognition of the utter nullity of the human
will; and there was no true religion, no salvation, until Grace had
descended freely like a fire from heaven and devoured this offering of a
man's soul. To understand Cowper's faith one should read his letter of
March 31, 1770, in which he relates the death-bed conversion of his
brother at Cambridge. Now John was a clergyman in good standing, a man
apparently of blameless life and Christian faith, yet to himself and to
William he was without hope until the miracle of regeneration had been
wrought upon him. After reading Cowper's letter one should turn to
Jonathan Edwards's treatise on _The Freedom of the Will_, and follow the
inexorable logic by which the New England divine proves that God must be
the source of all good and evil, of this man's salvation and that man's
loss: "If once it should be allowed that things may come to pass without
a Cause, we should not only have no proof of the Being of God, but we
should be without evidence of anything whatsoever but our own
immediately present ideas and consciousness. For we have no way to prove
anything else but by arguing from effects to causes." Yet the
responsibility of a man abides through all his helplessness: "The Case
of such as are given up of God to Sin and of fallen Man in general,
proves moral Necessity and Inability to be consistent with
blameworthiness." Good Dr. Holmes has said somewhere in his jaunty way
that it was only decent for a man who believed in this doctrine to go
mad. Well, Cowper believed in it; there was no insulating pad of worldly
indifference between his faith and his nerves, and he went mad.
And he was in another way the victim of his age. We have heard him
comparing his days at Huntingdon with _Rousseau's description of an
English morning_. Unfortunately, the malady also which came into the
world with Rousseau, the morbid exaggeration of personal consciousness,
had laid hold of Cowper. Even when suffering from the earlier stroke he
had written these words to his cousin: "I am of a very singular temper,
and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed with"; and this
sense of his singularity follows him through life. During the Huntingdon
days it takes the form of a magnified confidence that Heaven is
peculiarly concerned in his rescue from the fires of affliction; after
the overthrow at Olney it is reversed, and fills him with the certainty
that God has marked him out among all mankind for the special display of
vengeance:
This all-too humble soul would arrogate
Unto itself some signalising hate
From the supreme indifference of Fate!
Writing to his mentor, John Newton (who had left Olney), he declares
that there is a mystery in his destruction; and again to Lady Hesketh:
"Mine has been a life of wonders for many years, and a life of wonders I
in my heart believe it will be to the end." More than once in reply to
those who would console him he avers that there is a singularity in his
case which marks it off from that of all other men, that Providence has
chosen him as a special object of its hostility. In Rousseau, whose
mission was to preach the essential goodness of mankind, the union of
aggravated egotism with his humanitarian doctrine brought about the
conviction that the whole human race was plotting his ruin. In Cowper,
whose mind dwelt on the power and mercies of Providence, this
self-consciousness united with his Calvinism to produce the belief that
God had determined to ensnare and destroy his soul. Such was the strange
twist that accompanied the birth of romanticism in France and in
England.
The conviction came upon Cowper through the agency of dreams and
imaginary voices. The depression first seized him on the 24th of
January, 1773. About a month later a vision of the night troubled his
sleep, so distinct and terrible that the effect on his brain could never
be wholly dispelled. Years afterwards he wrote to a friend:
My thoughts are clad in a sober livery, for the most part as grave
as that of a bishop's servants. They turn upon spiritual subjects;
but the tallest fellow and the loudest among them all is he who
is continually crying with a loud voice, _Actum est de te;
periisti!_ You wish for more attention, I for less. Dissipation
[distraction] itself would be welcome to me, so it were not a
vicious one; but however earnestly invited, is coy, and keeps at a
distance. Yet with all this distressing gloom upon my mind, I
experience, as you do, the slipperiness of the present hour, and
the rapidity with which time escapes me. Every thing around us,
and every thing that befalls us, constitutes a variety, which,
whether agreeable or otherwise, has still a thievish propensity,
and steals from us days, months, and years, with such unparalleled
address, that even while we say they are here, they are gone.
That apparently was the sentence which sounded his doom on the night of
dreams: _Actum est de te; periisti_--it is done with thee, thou hast
perished! and no domestic happiness, or worldly success, or wise counsel
could ever, save for a little while, lull him to forgetfulness. He might
have said to his friends, as Socrates replied to one who came to offer
him deliverance from jail: "Such words I seem to hear, as the mystic
worshippers seem to hear the piping of flutes; and the sound of this
voice so murmurs in my ears that I can hear no other."
But it must not be supposed from all this that Cowper's letters are
morbid in tone or filled with the dejection of melancholia. Their merit,
on the contrary, lies primarily in their dignity and restraint, in a
certain high-bred ease, which is equally manifest in the language and
the thought. Curiously enough, after the fatal visitation religion
becomes entirely subordinate in his correspondence, and only at rare
intervals does he allude to his peculiar experience. He writes for the
most part like a man of the world who has seen the fashions of life and
has sought refuge from their vanity. If I were seeking for a comparison
to relieve the quality of these Olney letters (and it is these that form
the real charm of Cowper's correspondence), I would turn to Charles
Lamb. The fact that both men wrote under the shadow of insanity brings
them together immediately, and there are other points of resemblance.
Both are notable among English letter-writers for the exquisite grace of
their language, but if I had to choose between the two the one whose
style possessed the most enduring charm, a charm that appealed to the
heart most equally at all seasons and left the reader always in that
state of quiet satisfaction which is the office of the purest taste, I
should name Cowper. The wit is keener in Lamb and above all more artful;
there is a certain petulance of humour in him which surprises us oftener
into laughter, the pathos at times is more poignant; but the effort to
be entertaining is also more apparent, and the continual holding up of
the mind by the unexpected word or phrase becomes a little wearisome in
the end. The attraction of Cowper's style is in the perfect balance of
the members, an art which has become almost lost since the eighteenth
century, and in the spirit of repose which awakens in the reader such a
feeling of easy elevation as remains for a while after the book is laid
down. Lamb is of the city, Cowper of the fields. Both were admirers of
Vincent Bourne; Lamb chose naturally for translation the poems of city
life--_The Ballad Singers_, _The Rival Bells_, the _Epitaph on a Dog_:
Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie,
That wont to tend my old blind master's steps,
His guide and guard; nor, while my service lasted,
Had he occasion for that staff, with which
He now goes picking out his path in fear
Over the highways and crossings, but would plant
Safe in the conduct of my friendly string,
A firm foot forward still, till he had reached
His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide
Of passers-by in thickest confluence flowed:
To whom with loud and passionate laments
From morn to eve his dark estate he wailed.
Cowper just as inevitably selected the fables and country-pieces--_The
Glowworm_, _The Jackdaw_, _The Cricket:_
Little inmate, full of mirth,
Chirping on my kitchen hearth,
Wheresoe'er be thine abode,
Always harbinger of good,
Pay me for thy warm retreat,
With a song more soft and sweet;
In return thou shalt receive
Such a strain as I can give.
* * * * *
Though in voice and shape they be
Formed as if akin to thee,
Thou surpassest, happier far,
Happiest grasshoppers that are;
Theirs is but a summer song,
Thine endures the winter long,
Unimpaired, and shrill, and clear,
Melody throughout the year.
Neither night nor dawn of day
Puts a period to thy play:
Sing, then--and extend thy span
Far beyond the date of man;
Wretched man, whose years are spent
In repining discontent,
Lives not, aged though he be,
Half a span, compared with thee.
There is in the blind beggar something of the quality of Lamb's own
life, with its inherent loneliness imposed by an ever-present grief in
the midst of London's noisy streets; and in the verses to the cricket it
is scarcely fanciful to find an image of Cowper's "domestic life in
rural leisure passed." Lamb was twenty-five when Cowper died, in the
year 1800. One is tempted to continue in the language of fable and ask
what would have happened had the city mouse allured the country mouse to
visit his chambers in Holborn or Southampton buildings. To be sure there
was no luxury of purple robe and mighty feast in that abode; but I think
the revelry and the wit, and that hound of intemperance which always
pursued poor Lamb, would have frightened his guest back to his
hiding-place in the wilderness:
... me silva cavusque
Tutus ab insidiis tenui solabitur ervo!
Cowper, in fact, was the first writer to introduce that intimate union
of the home affections with the love of country which, in the works of
Miss Austen and a host of others, was to become one of the unique charms
and consolations of English literature. And the element of austere gloom
in his character, rarely exposed, but always, we know, in the
background, is what most of all relieves his letters from insipidity.
Lamb strove deliberately by a kind of crackling mirth to drown the sound
of the grave inner voice; Cowper listened reverently to its admonitions,
even to its threatenings; he spoke little of what he heard, but it
tempered his wit and the snug comfort of his life with that profounder
consciousness of what, disguise it as we will, lies at the bottom of the
world's experience. We call him mad because he believed himself
abandoned of God, and shuddered with remorseless conviction. Put aside
for a moment the language of the market place, and be honest with
ourselves: is there not a little of our fate, of the fate of mankind, in
Cowper's desolation? After all, was his melancholy radically different
from the state of that great Frenchman, a lover of his letters withal,
Sainte-Beuve, who dared not for a day rest from benumbing labour lest
the questionings of his own heart should make themselves heard, and who
wrote to a friend that no consolation could reach that settled sadness
which was rooted in _la grande absence de Dieu?_
It is not strange that the society from which Cowper fled should have
seemed to him whimsical and a little mad. "A line of Bourne's," he says,
"is very expressive of the spectacle which this world exhibits,
tragi-comical as the incidents of it are, absurd in themselves, but
terrible in their consequences: