Nor is it strange that he wondered sometimes at the gayety of his own
letters: "It is as if Harlequin should intrude himself into the gloomy
chamber, where a corpse is deposited in state. His antic gesticulations
would be unseasonable, at any rate, but more especially so if they
should distort the features of the mournful attendants into laughter."
But it is not the humour of the letters that attracts us so much as
their picture of quiet home delights in the midst of a stormy world. We
linger most over the account of those still evenings by the fireside,
while Mrs. Unwin, and perhaps their friend Lady Austen, was busy with
her needles--
Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust disused, and shine no more,
My Mary!--
and while Cowper read aloud from some book of travels and mingled his
comments with the story of the wanderer:
My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions that I seem
to partake with the navigators in all the dangers they
encountered. I lose my anchor; my mainsail is rent into shreds; I
kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all
this without moving from the fireside.
And here I cannot but regret again that we have not an edition of these
letters interspersed with the passages of _The Task_, which describe the
same scenes. I confess that two-thirds at least of that poem is indeed a
task to-day. The long tirades against vice, and the equally long
preaching of virtue, all in blank verse, lack, to my ear, the vivacity
and the sustaining power of the earlier rhymed poems, such as _Hope_
(that superb moralising on the poet's own life) and _Retirement_, to
name the best of the series. But the fourth book of _The Task_, and,
indeed, all the exquisite genre pictures of the poem:
Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in--
all this intimate correspondence with the world in verse is not only
interesting in itself, but gains a double charm by association with the
letters. "We were just sitting down to supper," writes Cowper to Mrs.
Unwin's son, "when a hasty rap alarmed us. I ran to the hall window, for
the hares being loose, it was impossible to open the door." It is
fortunate for the reader if his memory at these words calls up those
lines of _The Task_:
One sheltered hare
Has never heard the sanguinary yell
Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.
Innocent partner of my peaceful home,
Whom ten long years' experience of my care
Has made at last familiar; she has lost
Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,
Not needful here beneath a roof like mine.
Yes--thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand
That feeds thee; _thou mayst frolic on the floor
At evening_, and at night retire secure
To thy straw couch, and slumber unalarmed;
For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged
All that is human in me, to protect
Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love.
If I survive thee, I will dig thy grave;
And when I place thee in it, sighing say,
I knew at least one hare that had a friend.
How much of the letters could be illustrated in this way--the walks
about Olney, the gardening, the greenhouse, the lamentations over the
American Rebellion, the tirades against fickle fashions, and a thousand
other matters that go to make up their quiet yet variegated substance.
For it must not be supposed that Cowper, in these Olney days at least,
was ever dull. I will quote the opening paragraph of one other
letter--to his friend the Rev. William Bull, great preacher of Newport
Pagnell, and, alas! great smoker,[3] "smoke-inhaling Bull," "Dear
Taureau"--as a change from the more serious theme, and then pass on:
_Mon aimable et tres cher Ami_--It is not in the power of chaises
or chariots to carry you where my affections will not follow you;
if I heard that you were gone to finish your days in the Moon, I
should not love you the less; but should contemplate the place of
your abode, as often as it appeared in the heavens, and
say--Farewell, my friend, forever! Lost, but not forgotten! Live
happy in thy lantern, and smoke the remainder of thy pipes in
peace! Thou art rid of Earth, at least of all its cares, and so
far can I rejoice in thy removal.
Might not that have been written by Lamb to one of his cronies--by a
Lamb still of the eighteenth century?
But the Olney days must come to a close. After nineteen years of
residence there Cowper and his companion (was ever love like theirs,
that was yet not love!) were induced to move to Weston Lodge, a more
convenient house in the village of Weston Underwood, not far away.
Somehow, with the change, the letters lose the freshness of their
peculiar interest. We shall never again find him writing of his home as
he had written before of Olney:
The world is before me; I am not shut up in the Bastille; there
are no moats about my castle, _no locks upon my gates of which I
have not the key_; but an invisible, uncontrollable agency, a
local attachment, an inclination more forcible than I ever felt,
even to the place of my birth, serves me for prison-walls, and for
bounds which I cannot pass.... The very stones in the garden-walls
are my intimate acquaintance. I should miss almost the minutest
object, and be disagreeably affected by its removal, and am
persuaded that, were it possible I could leave this incommodious
nook for a twelvemonth, I should return to it again with rapture,
and be transported with the sight of objects which to all the
world beside would be at least indifferent; some of them perhaps,
such as the ragged thatch and the tottering walls of the
neighbouring cottages, disgusting. But so it is, and it is so,
because here is to be my abode, and because such is the
appointment of Him that placed me in it.
Often while reading the letters from Weston one wishes he had never
turned the key in the lock of that beloved enclosure. Fame had come to
him now. His correspondence is distributed among more people; he is
neither quite of the world, nor of the cloister. Above all, he is
busy--endlessly, wearisomely busy--with his translation of Homer. I have
often wondered what the result would have been had his good friends and
neighbours the Throckmortons converted him from his rigid Calvinism to
their own milder Catholic faith, and set him in spiritual comfort to
writing another _Task_. Idle conjecture! For the rest of his life he
toiled resolutely at a translation which the world did not want and
which brought its own tedium into his letters. And then comes the
pitiful collapse of Mrs. Unwin, broken at last by the long vigil over
her sick companion:
The twentieth year is well-nigh past,
Since first our sky was overcast;
Ah would that this might be the last!
My Mary!
Thy spirits have a fainter flow,
I see thee daily weaker grow--
'T was my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary!
The end is tragic, terrible. In 1794, Cowper sank into a state of
melancholia, in which for hours he would walk backward and forward in
his study like a caged tiger. Mrs. Unwin was dying. At last a cousin,
the Rev. John Johnson, took charge of the invalids and carried them away
into Norfolk. The last few letters, written in Cowper's ever-dwindling
moments of sanity, are without a parallel in English. The contrast of
the wild images with the stately and restrained language leaves an
impression of awe, almost of fear, on the mind. "My thoughts," he writes
to Lady Hesketh, "are like loose and dry sand, which the closer it is
grasped slips the sooner away"; and again to the same faithful friend
from Mundesley on the coast:
The cliff is here of a height that it is terrible to look down
from; and yesterday evening, by moonlight, I passed sometimes
within a foot of the edge of it, from which to have fallen would
probably have been to be dashed in pieces. But though to have been
dashed in pieces would perhaps have been best for me, I shrunk
from the precipice, and am waiting to be dashed in pieces by other
means. At two miles distance on the coast is a solitary pillar of
rock, that the crumbling cliff has left at the high-water mark. I
have visited it twice, and have found it an emblem of myself. Torn
from my natural connections, I stand alone and expect the storm
that shall displace me.
There is in this that sheer physical horror which it is not good to
write or to read. Somewhere in his earlier letters he quotes the
well-known line of Horace: "We and all ours are but a debt to death."
How the commonplace words come back with frightfully intensified meaning
as we read this story of decay! It is not good, I say, to see the
nakedness of human fate so ruthlessly revealed. The mind reverts
instinctively from this scene to the homely life at Olney. Might it not
be that if Cowper had remained in that spot where the very stones of the
garden walls were endeared to him, if he had never been torn from his
natural connections--might it not be that he would have passed from the
world in the end saddened but not frenzied by his dreams? At least in
our thoughts let us leave him, not standing alone on the crumbling cliff
over a hungry sea, but walking with his sympathetic companion arm in arm
in the peaceful valley of the Ouse.