Transcribed from the 1907 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org
IMMORTAL MEMORIES
By
CLEMENT SHORTER
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON MCMVII
_Butler and Tanner_, _The Selwood Printing Works_, _Frome_, _and London_.
PREFATORY
The following addresses were delivered at the request of various literary
societies and commemorative committees. They amused me to write, and
they apparently interested the audiences for which they were primarily
intended. Perhaps they do not bear an appearance in print. But they are
not for my brother-journalists to read nor for the judicious men of
letters. I prefer to think that they are intended solely for those whom
Hazlitt styled "sensible people." Hazlitt said that "the most sensible
people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world." I
am hoping that these will buy my book and that some of them will like it.
It is recorded by Sir Henry Taylor of Samuel Rogers that when he wrote
that very indifferent poem, _Italy_, he said, "I will make people buy.
Turner shall illustrate my verse." It is of no importance that the
biographer of Rogers tells us that the poet first made the artist known
to the world by these illustrations. Taylor's story is a good one, and
the moral worth taking to heart. The late Lord Acton, most learned and
most accomplished of men, wrote out a list of the hundred best books as
he considered them to be. They were printed in a popular magazine. They
naturally excited much interest. I have rescued them from the pages of
the _Pall Mall Magazine_. Those who will not buy my book for its seven
other essays may do so on account of Lord Acton's list of books being
here first preserved "between boards." I shall be equally well pleased.
CLEMENT SHORTER.
GREAT MISSENDEN,
BUCKS.
I. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON
A toast proposed at the Johnson Birthday Celebration held at the Three
Crowns Inn, Lichfield, in September, 1906.
In rising to propose this toast I cannot ignore what must be in many of
your minds, the recollection that last year it was submitted by a very
dear friend of my own, who, alas! has now gone to his rest, I mean Dr.
Richard Garnett. {3} Many of you who heard him in this place will
recall, with kindly memories, that venerable scholar. I am one of those
who, in the interval have stood beside his open grave; and I know you
will permit me to testify here to the fact that rarely has such brilliant
scholarship been combined with so kindly a nature, and with so much
generosity to other workers in the literary field. One may sigh that it
is not possible to perpetuate for all time for the benefit of others the
vast mass of learning which such men as Dr. Garnett are able to
accumulate. One may lament even more that one is not able to present in
some concrete form, as an example to those who follow, his fine qualities
of heart and mind--his generous faculty for 'helping lame dogs over
stiles.'
Dr. Garnett had not only a splendid erudition that specially qualified
him for proposing this toast, he had also what many of you may think an
equally exceptional qualification--he was a native of Lichfield; he was
born in this fine city. As a Londoner--like Boswell when charged with
the crime of being a Scotsman I may say that I cannot help it--I suppose
I should come to you with hesitating footsteps. Perhaps it was rash of
me to come at all, in spite of an invitation so kindly worded. Yet how
gladly does any lover, not only of Dr. Johnson, but of all good
literature, come to Lichfield. Four cathedral cities of our land stand
forth in my mind with a certain magnetic power to draw even the most
humble lover of books towards them--Oxford, Bath, Norwich, Lichfield,
these four and no others. Oxford we all love and revere as the
nourishing mother of so many famous men. Here we naturally recall Dr.
Johnson's love of it--his defence of it against all comers. The glamour
of Oxford and the memory of the great men who from age to age have walked
its streets and quadrangles, is with us upon every visit. Bath again has
noble memories. Upon house after house in that fine city is inscribed
the fact that it was at one time the home of a famous man or woman of the
past. Through its streets many of our great imaginative writers have
strolled, and those streets have been immortalized in the pages of
several great novelists, notably of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.
For the City of Norwich I have a particular affection, as for long the
home in quite separate epochs of Sir Thomas Browne and of George Borrow.
I recall that in the reign of one of its Bishops--the father of Dean
Stanley--there was a literary circle of striking character, that men and
women of intellect met in the episcopal palace to discuss all 'obstinate
questionings.'
But if he were asked to choose between the golden age of Bath, of
Norwich, or of Lichfield, I am sure that any man who knew his books would
give the palm to Lichfield, and would recall that period in the life of
Lichfield when Dr. Seward resided in the Bishop's Palace, with his two
daughters, and when they were there entertaining so many famous friends.
I saw the other day the statement that Anna Seward's name was unknown to
the present generation. Now I have her works in nine volumes {6}; I have
read them, and I doubt not but that there are many more who have done the
same. Sir Walter Scott's friendship would alone preserve her memory if
every line she wrote deserved to be forgotten as is too readily assumed.
Scott, indeed, professed admiration for her verse, and a yet greater
poet, Wordsworth, wrote in praise of two fine lines at the close of one
of her sonnets, that entitled 'Invitation to a Friend,' lines which I
believe present the first appearance in English poetry of the form of
blank verse immortalized by Tennyson.
Come, that I may not hear the winds of night,
Nor count the heavy eave-drops as they fall.
"You have well criticized the poetic powers of this lady," says
Wordsworth, "but, after all, her verses please me, with all their faults,
better than those of Mrs. Barbauld, who, with much higher powers of mind,
was spoiled as a poetess by being a dissenter."
Less, however, can be said for her poetry to-day than for her capacity as
a letter writer. A letter writing faculty has immortalized more than one
English author, Horace Walpole for example, who had this in common with
Anna Seward, that he had the bad taste not to like Dr. Johnson.
Sooner or later there will be a reprint of a selection of Anna Seward's
correspondence; you will find in it a picture of country life in the
middle of the eighteenth century--and by that I mean Lichfield life--that
is quite unsurpassed. Anna Seward, her friends and her enemies, stand
before us in very marked outline. As with Walpole also, she must have
written with an eye to publication. Veracity was not her strong point,
but her literary faculty was very marked indeed. Those who have read the
letters that treat of her sister's betrothal and death, for example, will
not easily forget them. The accepted lover, you remember, was a Mr.
Porter, a son of the widow whom Johnson married; and Sarah Seward, aged
only eighteen, died soon after her betrothal to him. That is but one of
a thousand episodes in the world into which we are introduced in these
pages. {8}
The Bishop's Palace was the scene of brilliant symposiums. There one
might have met Erasmus Darwin of the _Botanic Garden_, whose fame has
been somewhat dulled by the extraordinary genius of his grandson. There
also came Richard Edgeworth, the father of Maria, whose _Castle Rackrent_
and _The Absentee_ are still among the most delightful books that we
read; and there were the two young girls, Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd, who
were destined in succession to become Richard Edgeworth's wives. There,
above all, was Thomas Day, the author of _Sanford and Merton_, a book
which delighted many of us when we were young, and which I imagine with
all its priggishness will always survive as a classic for children.
There, for a short time, came Major Andre, betrothed to Honora Sneyd, but
destined to die so tragically in the American War of Independence. It is
to Miss Seward's malicious talent as a letter writer that we owe the
exceedingly picturesque account of Day's efforts to obtain a wife upon a
particular pattern, his selection of Sabrina Sidney, whom he prepared for
that high destiny by sending her to a boarding school until she was of
the right age--his lessons in stoicism--his disappointment because she
screamed when he fired pistols at her petticoats, and yelled when he
dropped melted sealing-wax on her bare arms; it is a tragi-comic picture,
and one is glad that Sabrina married some other man than her exacting
guardian. But we would not miss Miss Seward's racy stories for anything,
nor ignore her many letters with their revelation of the glories of old-
time Lichfield, and of those 'lunar meetings' at which the wise ones
foregathered. Now and again these worthies burst into sarcasm at one
another's expense, as when Darwin satirizes the publication of Mr.
Seward's edition of _Beaumont and Fletcher_, and Dr. Johnson's edition of
_Shakspere_
From Lichfield famed two giant critics come,
Tremble, ye Poets! hear them! Fe, Fo, Fum!
By Seward's arm the mangled Beaumont bled,
And Johnson grinds poor Shakspere's bones for bread.
But perhaps after all, if we eliminate Dr. Johnson, the lover of letters
gives the second place, not to Miss Seward and her circle, but to David
Garrick. Lichfield contains more than one memento of that great man. The
actor's art is a poor sort of thing as a rule. Johnson, in his tarter
moments, expresses this attitude, as when he talked of Garrick as a man
who exhibited himself for a shilling, when he called him 'a futile
fellow,' and implied that it was very unworthy of Lord Campden to have
made much of the actor and to have ignored so distinguished a writer as
Goldsmith, when thrown into the company of both. Still undoubtedly
Johnson's last word upon Garrick is the best--'his death has eclipsed the
gaiety of nations and diminished the public stock of harmless pleasure.'
We who live more than a hundred years later are able to recognize that
Garrick has been the one great actor from that age to this. As a rule
the mummers are mimics and little more, and generations go on, giving
them their brief but glorious hour of fame, and then leaving them as mere
names in the history of the stage. Garrick was preserved from this fate,
not only by the circumstance that he had an army of distinguished
literary friends, but by his interesting personality and by his own
writings. Many lines of his plays and prologues have become part of
current speech. Moreover his must have been a great personality, as
those of us who have met Sir Henry Irving in these latter days have
realized that his was also a great personality. It is fitting,
therefore, that these two great actors, the most famous of an
interesting, if not always an heroic profession, should lie side by side
in Westminster Abbey.
I now come to my toast "The memory of Dr. Johnson." After all, Johnson
was the greatest of all Lichfieldians, and one of the great men of his
own and of all ages. We may talk about him and praise him because we
shall be the better for so doing, but we shall certainly say nothing new.
One or two points, however, seem to me worthy of emphasis in this company
of Johnsonians. I think we should resent two popular fallacies which you
will not hear from literary students, but only from one whom it is
convenient to call "the man in the street." The first is, that we should
know nothing about Johnson if it were not for Boswell's famous life, and
the second that Johnson the author is dead, and that our great hero only
lives as a brilliant conversationalist in the pages of Boswell and
others. Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ is the greatest biography in the
English language; we all admit that. It is crowded with incident and
anecdote. Neither Walter Scott nor Rousseau, each of whom has had an
equal number of pages devoted to his personality, lives so distinctly for
future ages as does Johnson in the pages of Boswell. Understanding all
this, we are entitled to ask ourselves what we should have thought of Dr.
Johnson had there been no Boswell; and to this question I do not hesitate
to answer that we should have loved him as much as ever, and that there
would still have been a mass of material with the true Boswellian
flavour. He would not have made an appeal to so large a public, but some
ingenious person would have drawn together all the anecdotes, all the
epigrams, all the touches of that fine humanity, and given us from these
various sources an amalgam of Johnson, that every bookman at least would
have desired to read and study. In Fanny Burney's _Letters and Diaries_
the presentation of Johnson is delightful. I wonder very much that all
the Johnson fragments that Miss Burney provides have not been published
separately. Then Mrs. Thrale has chatted about Johnson copiously in her
"Anecdotes," and these pleasant stories have been reprinted again and
again for the curious. I recall many other sources of information about
the great man and his wonderful talk--by Miss Hawkins, Miss Reynolds,
Miss Hannah More for example--and many of you who have Dr. Birkbeck
Hill's _Johnson Miscellanies_ have these in a pleasantly acceptable form.
My second point is concerned with Dr. Johnson's position apart from all
this fund of anecdote, and this brilliant collection of unforgettable
epigram in Boswell and elsewhere. As a writer, many will tell you, Dr.
Johnson is dead. The thing is absurd on the face of it. There is room
for some disagreement as to his position as a poet. On that question of
poetry unanimity is ever hard to seek; so many mistake rhetoric for
poetry. Only twice at the most, it seems to me, does Dr. Johnson reach
anything in the shape of real inspiration in his many poems, {15}
although it must be admitted that earlier generations admired them
greatly. To have been praised ardently by Sir Walter Scott, by Byron,
and by Tennyson should seem sufficient to demonstrate that he was a poet,
were it not that, as I could prove if time allowed, poets are almost
invariably bad critics of poetry. Sir Walter Scott read _The Vanity of
Human Wishes_ with "a choking sensation in the throat," and declared that
he had more pleasure in reading that and Johnson's other long poem,
_London_, than any other poetic compositions he could mention. But then
I think it was always the sentiment in verse, and not its quality, that
attracted Scott. Byron also declared that _The Vanity of Human Wishes_
was "a great poem." Certainly these poems are quotable poems. Who does
not recall the line about "surveying mankind from China to Peru," or
think, as Johnson taught us, to:--
Mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.
Or remember his epitaph on one who:--
Left a name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral or adorn a tale.
One line--"Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage" has done duty again
and again. I might quote a hundred such examples to show Johnson,
whatever his qualities as a poet, is very much alive indeed in his verse.
It is, however, as a great prose writer, that I prefer to consider him.
Here he is certainly one of the most permanent forces in our literature.
_Rasselas_, for example, while never ranking with us moderns quite so
high as it did with the excellent Miss Jenkins in _Cranford_, is a never
failing delight. So far from being a dead book, is there a young man or
a young woman setting out in the world of to-day, aspiring to an
all-round literary cultivation, who is not required to know it? It has
been republished continually. What novelist of our time would not give
much to have so splendid a public recognition as was provided when Lord
Beaconsfield, then Mr. Disraeli, after the Abyssinian Expedition,
pictured in the House of Commons "the elephants of Asia dragging the
artillery of Europe over the mountains of Rasselas."
Equally in evidence are those wonderful _Lives of The Poets_ which
Johnson did not complete until he was seventy-two years of age, literary
efforts which have always seemed to me to be an encouraging demonstration
that we should never allow ourselves to grow old. Many of these 'Lives'
are very beautiful. They are all suggestive. Only the other day I read
them again in the fine new edition that was prepared by that staunch
Johnsonian, Dr. Birkbeck Hill. The greatest English critic of these
latter days, Mr. Matthew Arnold, showed his appreciation by making a
selection from them for popular use. From age to age every man with the
smallest profession of interest in literature will study them. Of how
many books can this be said?
Greatest of all was Johnson as a writer in his least premeditated work,
his _Prayers and Meditations_. They take rank in my mind with the very
best things of their kind, _The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_, _The
Confessions of Rousseau_, and similar books. They are healthier than any
of their rivals. William Cowper, that always fascinating poet and
beautiful letter writer, more than once disparaged Johnson in this
connexion. Cowper said that he would like to have "dusted Johnson's
jacket until his pension rattled in his pocket," for what he had said
about Milton. He read some extracts, after Johnson's death, from the
_Meditations_, and wrote contemptuously of them. {18} But if Cowper had
always possessed, in addition to his fascinating other-worldliness the
healthy worldliness of Dr. Johnson, perhaps we should all have been the
happier. To me that collection of _Prayers and Meditations_ seems one of
the most helpful books that I have ever read, and I am surprised that it
is not constantly reprinted in a handy form. {19} It is a valuable
inspiration to men to keep up their spirits under adverse conditions, to
conquer the weaknesses of their natures; not in the stifling manner of
Thomas a Kempis, but in a breezy, robust way. Yes, I think that these
three works, _Rasselas_, _The Lives of the Poets_, and the _Prayers and
Meditations_, make it quite clear that Johnson still holds his place as
one of our greatest writers, even if we were not familiar with his many
delightful letters, and had not read his _Rambler_--which his old enemy,
Miss Anna Seward, insisted was far better than Addison's _Spectator_.
All this is only to say that we cannot have too much of Dr. Johnson. The
advantage of such a gathering as this is that it helps us to keep that
fact alive. Moreover, I feel that it is a good thing if we can hearten
those who have devoted themselves to laborious research connected with
such matters. Take, for example, the work of Dr. Birkbeck Hill: his many
volumes are a delight to the Johnson student. I knew Dr. Hill very well,
and I have often felt that his work did not receive half the
encouragement that it deserved. We hear sometimes, at least in London,
of authors who advertise themselves. I rather fancy that all such
advertisement is monopolized by the novelist, and that the newspapers do
not trouble themselves very much about literary men who work in other
fields than that of fiction. Fiction has much to be said for it, but as
a rule it reaps its reward very promptly, both in finance and in fame. No
such rewards come to the writer of biography, to the writer of history,
to the literary editor. Dr. Hill's beautiful edition of Boswell's
_Life_, with all its fascinating annotation, did not reach a second
edition in his lifetime. I am afraid that the sum that he made out of
it, or that his publishers made out of it, would seem a very poor reward
indeed when gauged by the results in other fields of labour.
Within the past few weeks I have had the privilege of reading a book that
continues these researches. Mr. Aleyn Lyell Reade has published a
handsome tome, which he has privately printed, entitled _Dr. Johnson's
Ancestry_: _His Kinsfolk and Family Connexions_. I am glad to hear that
the Johnson Museum has purchased a copy, for such a work deserves every
encouragement. The author must have spent hundreds of pounds, without
the faintest possibility of obtaining either fame or money from the
transaction. He seems to have employed copyists in every town in
Staffordshire, to copy wills, registers of births and deaths, and kindred
records from the past. Now Dr. Birkbeck Hill could not have afforded to
do this; he was by no means a rich man. Mr. Reade has clearly been able
to spare no expense, with the result that here are many interesting facts
corrective of earlier students. The whole is a valuable record of the
ancestry of Dr. Johnson. It shows clearly that whereas Dr. Johnson
thought very little of his ancestry, and scarcely knew anything of his
grandfather on the paternal or the maternal side, he really sprang from a
very remarkable stock, notably on the maternal side; and that his
mother's family, the Fords, had among their connexions all kinds of
fairly prosperous people, clergymen, officials, professional men as well
as sturdy yeomen. These ancestors of Dr. Johnson did not help him much
to push his way in the world. Of some of them he had scarcely heard. All
the same it is of great interest to us to know this; it in a manner
explains him. That before Samuel Johnson was born, one of his family had
been Lord Mayor of London, another a Sheriff, that they had been
associated in various ways, not only with the city of his birth, but also
with the great city which Johnson came to love so much, is to let in a
flood of fresh light upon our hero. My time does not permit me to do
more than make a passing reference to this book, but I should like to
offer here a word of thanks to its author for his marvellous industry,
and a word of congratulation to him for the extraordinary success that
has accrued to his researches.
I mention Mr. Reade's book because it is full of Lichfield names and
Lichfield associations, and it is with Dr. Johnson's life-long connexion
with Lichfield that all of us are thinking to-night. Now here I may say,
without any danger of being challenged by some visitor who has the
misfortune not to be a citizen of Lichfield--you who are will not wish to
challenge me--that this city has distinguished itself in quite an unique
way. I do not believe that it can be found that any other town or city
of England--I will not say of Scotland or of Ireland--has done honour to
a literary son in the same substantial measure that Lichfield has done
honour to Samuel Johnson. The peculiar glory of the deed is that it was
done to the living Johnson, not coming, as so many honours do, too late
for a man to find pleasure in the recognition. We know that--
Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread.
But I doubt whether in the whole history of literature in England it can
be found that any other purely literary man has received in his lifetime
so substantial a mark of esteem from the city which gave him birth, as
Johnson did when your Corporation, in 1767, "at a common-hall of the
bailiffs and citizens, without any solicitation," presented him with the
ninety-nine years' lease of the house in which he was born. Your
citizens not only did that for Johnson, but they gave him other marks of
their esteem. He writes from Lichfield to Sir Joshua Reynolds to express
his pleasure that his portrait has been "much visited and much admired."
"Every man," he adds, "has a lurking desire to appear considerable in his
native place." Then we all remember Boswell's naive confession that his
pleasure at finding his hero so much beloved led him, when the pair
arrived at this very hostelry, to imbibe too much of the famous Lichfield
ale. If Boswell wished, as he says, to offer incense to the spirit of
the place, how much more may we desire to do so to-night, when exactly
125 years have passed, and his hero is now more than ever recognized as a
king of men.
I do not suggest that we should honour Johnson in quite the same way that
Boswell did. This is a more abstemious age. But we must drink to his
memory all the same. Think of it. A century and a quarter have passed
since that memorable evening at the _Three Crowns_, when Johnson and
Boswell thus foregathered in this very room. You recall the journey from
Birmingham of the two companions. "We are getting out of a state of
death," the Doctor said with relief, as he approached his native city,
feeling all the magic and invigoration that is said to come to those who
in later years return to "calf-land." Then how good he was to an old
schoolfellow who called upon him here. The fact that this man had failed
in the battle of life while Johnson had succeeded, only made the Doctor
the kinder. I know of no more human picture than that--"A Mr. Jackson,"
as he is called by Boswell, "in his coarse grey coat," obviously very
poor, and as Boswell suggests, "dull and untaught." The "great Cham of
Literature" listens patiently as the worthy Jackson tells his troubles,
so much more patiently than he would have listened to one of the famous
men of his Club in London, and the hero-worshipping Boswell drinks his
deep potations, but never neglects to take notes the while. Of Boswell
one remembers further that Johnson had told Wilkes that he had brought
him to Lichfield, "my native city," "that he might see for once real
Civility--for you know he lives among savages in Scotland, and among
rakes in London." All good stories are worth hearing again and again,
and so I offer an apology for recalling the picture to your mind at this
time and in this place.
Alas! I have not the gift of the worldfamed Lord Verulam, who, as Francis
Bacon, sat in the House of Commons. The members, we are told, so
delighted in his oratory that when he rose to speak they "were fearful
lest he should make an end." I am making an end. Johnson then was not
only a great writer, a conversationalist so unique that his sayings have
passed more into current speech than those of any other Englishman, but
he was also a great moralist--a superb inspiration to a better life. We
should not love Johnson so much were he not presented to us as a man of
many weaknesses and faults akin to our own, not a saint by any means, and
therefore not so far removed from us as some more ethereal characters of
whom we may read. Johnson striving to methodize his life, to fight
against sloth and all the minor vices to which he was prone, is the
Johnson whom some of us prefer to keep ever in mind. "Here was," I quote
Carlyle, "a strong and noble man, one of our great English souls." I
love him best in his book called _Prayers and Meditations_, where we know
him as we know scarcely any other Englishman, for the good, upright
fighter in this by no means easy battle of life. It is as such a fighter
that we think of him to-night. Reading the account of _his_ battles may
help us to fight ours.
Gentlemen, I give you the toast of the evening. Let us drink in solemn
silence, upstanding, "The Immortal Memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson."
II. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF WILLIAM COWPER
An address entitled 'The Sanity of Cowper,' delivered at the Centenary
Celebration at Olney, Bucks, on the occasion of the Hundredth Anniversary
of the Death of the poet William Cowper, April 25, 1900.
I owe some apology for coming down to Olney to take part in what I
believe is a purely local celebration, in which no other Londoner, as far
as I know, has been asked to take part. I am here not because I profess
any special qualification to speak about Cowper, in the town with which
his name is so pleasantly associated, but because Mr. Mackay, {31} the
son-in-law of your Vicar, has written a book about the Brontes, and I
have done likewise, and he asked me to come. This common interest has
little, you will say, to do with the Poet of Olney. Between Cowper and
Charlotte Bronte there were, however, not a few points of likeness or at
least of contrast. Both were the children of country clergymen; both
lived lives of singular and, indeed, unusual strenuousness; both were the
very epitome of a strong Protestantism; and yet both--such is the
inevitable toleration of genius--were drawn in an unusual manner to
attachment to friends of the Roman Catholic Church--Cowper to Lady
Throckmorton, who copied out some of his translations from Homer for him,
assisted by her father-confessor, Dr. Gregson, and Miss Bronte to her
Professor, M. Heger, the man in the whole world whom she most revered.
Under circumstances of peculiar depression both these great Protestant
writers went further on occasion than their Protestant friends would have
approved, Cowper to contemplate--so he assures us in one of his
letters--the entering a French monastery, and Miss Bronte actually to
kneel in the Confessional in a Brussels church. Further, let me remind
you that there were moments in the lives of Charlotte Bronte and her
sisters, when Cowper's poem, _The Castaway_, was their most soul-stirring
reading. Then, again, Mary Unwin's only daughter became the wife of a
Vicar of Dewsbury, and it was at Dewsbury and to the very next vicar,
that Mr. Bronte, the father of Charlotte, was curate when he first went
into Yorkshire. Finally, let it be recalled that Cowper and Charlotte
Bronte have attracted as much attention by the pathos of their lives as
by anything that they wrote. Thus far, and no further, can a strained
analogy carry us. The most enthusiastic admirers of the Brontes can only
claim for them that they permanently added certain artistic treasures to
our literature. Cowper did incomparably more than this. His work marked
an epoch.
But first let me say how interested we who are strangers naturally feel
in being in Olney. To every lover of literature Olney is made classic
ground by the fact that Cowper spent some twenty years of his life in
it--not always with too genial a contemplation of the place and its
inhabitants. "The genius of Cowper throws a halo of glory over all the
surroundings of Olney and Weston," says Dean Burgon. But Olney has
claims apart from Cowper. John Newton {34} presents himself to me as an
impressive personality. There was a time, indeed, of youthful
impetuosity when I positively hated him, for Southey, whose biography I
read very early in life, certainly endeavours to assist the view that
Newton was largely responsible for the poet's periodical attacks of
insanity.
But a careful survey of the facts modifies any such impression. Newton
was narrow at times, he was over-concerned as to the letter, often
ignoring the spirit of true piety, but the student of the two volumes of
his _Life and Correspondence_ that we owe to Josiah Bull, will be
compelled to look at "the old African blasphemer" as he called himself,
with much of sympathy. That he had a note of tolerance, with which he is
not usually credited, we learn from one of his letters, where he says:
I am willing to be a debtor to the wise and to the unwise, to doctors
and shoemakers, if I can get a hint from any one without respect of
parties. When a house is on fire Churchmen and Dissenters, Methodists
and Papists, Moravians and Mystics are all welcome to bring water. At
such times nobody asks, "Pray, friend, whom do you hear?" or "What do
you think of the five points?"
Even my good friend Canon Benham, who has done so much to sustain the
honourable fame of Cowper, and who would have been here to-day but for a
long-standing engagement, is scarcely fair to Newton. {35} It is not
true, as has been suggested, that Cowper always changed his manner into
one of painful sobriety when he wrote to Newton. One of his most
humorous letters--a rhyming epistle--was addressed to that divine.
I have writ (he says) in a rhyming fit, what will make you dance, and
as you advance, will keep you still, though against your will, dancing
away, alert and gay, till you come to an end of what I have penned;
which you may do ere Madam and you are quite worn out with jigging
about, I take my leave, and here you receive a bow profound, down to
the ground, from your humble me, W. C.
Now, I quote this very familiar passage from the correspondence to remind
you that Cowper could only have written it to a man possessed of
considerable healthy geniality.
At any rate, alike as a divine and as the author of the _Olney Hymns_,
Newton holds an important place in the history of theology, and Olney has
a right to be proud of him. An even more important place is held by
Thomas Scott, {36} and it seems to me quite a wonderful thing that Olney
should sometimes have held at one and the same moment three such
remarkable men as Cowper, Newton, and Scott.
In my boyhood Scott's name was a household word, and many a time have I
thumbed the volumes of his _Commentaries_, those _Commentaries_ which Sir
James Stephen declared to be "the greatest theological performance of our
age and country." Of Scott Cardinal Newman in his _Apologia_ said, it
will be remembered, that "to him, humanly speaking, I almost owe my
soul." Even here our literary associations with Olney and its
neighbourhood are not ended, for, it was within five miles of this
town--at Easton Maudit--that Bishop Percy {37} lived and prepared those
_Reliques_ which have inspired a century of ballad literature. Here the
future Bishop of Dromore was visited by Dr. Johnson and others. What a
pity that with only five miles separating them Cowper and Johnson should
never have met! Would Cowper have reconsidered the wish made when he
read Johnson's biography of Milton in the _Lives of the Poets_: "Oh! I
could thresh his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his
pocket!"?
But it is with Cowper only that we have here to do, and when we are
talking of Cowper the difficulty is solely one of compression. So much
has been written about him and his work. The Lives of him form of
themselves a most substantial library. He has been made the subject of
what is surely the very worst biography in the language and of one that
is among the very best. The well-meaning Hayley {38a} wrote the one, in
which the word "tenderness" appears at least twice on every page, and
Southey {38b} the other. Not less fortunate has the poet been in his
critics. Walter Bagehot, James Russell Lowell, Mrs. Oliphant, George
Eliot {38c}--these are but a few of the names that occur to me as having
said something wise and to the point concerning the Poet of Olney.
I somehow feel that it is safer for me to refer to the Poet of Olney than
to speak of William Cowper, because I am not quite sure how you would
wish me to pronounce his name. _Cooper_, he himself pronounced it, as
his family are in the habit of doing. The present Lord Cowper is known
to all the world as Lord Cooper. The derivation of the name and the
family coat-of-arms justify that pronunciation, and it might be said that
a man was, and is, entitled to settle the question of the pronunciation
of his own name. And yet I plead for what I am quite willing to allow is
the incorrect pronunciation. All pronunciation, even of the simplest
words, is settled finally by a consensus of custom. Throughout the
English-speaking world the name is now constantly pronounced Cowper, as
if that most useful and ornamental animal the cow had given it its
origin. Well-read Scotland is peculiarly unanimous in the custom, and
well-read America follows suit. William Shakspere, I doubt not, called
himself Shaxspere, and we decline to imitate him, and so probably many of
us will with a light heart go on speaking of William Cowper to the end of
the chapter. At any rate Shakspere and Cowper, divergent as were their
lives and their work--and one readily recognizes the incomparably greater
position of the former--had alike a keen sense of humour, rare among
poets it would seem, and hugely would they both have enjoyed such a
controversy as this.
This suggestion of the humour of Cowper brings me to my main point.
Humour is so essentially a note of sanity, and it is the sanity of Cowper
that I desire to emphasize here. We have heard too much of the insanity
of Cowper, of the "maniac's tongue" to which Mrs. Browning referred, of
the "maniacal Calvinist" of whom Byron wrote somewhat scornfully. Only a
day or two ago I read in a high-class journal that "one fears that
Cowper's despondency and madness are better known to-day than his
poetry." That is not to know the secret of Cowper. It is true that
there were periods of maniacal depression, and these were not always
religious ones. Now, it was from sheer nervousness at the prospect of
meeting his fellows, now it was from a too logical acceptance of the
doctrine of eternal punishment. Had it not been these, it would have
been something else. It might have been politics, or a hundred things
that now and again give a twist to the mind of the wisest. With Cowper
it was generally religion. I am not here to promote a paradox. I accept
the only too well-known story of Cowper's many visitations, but, looking
back a century, for the purpose of asking what was Cowper's contribution
to the world's happiness and why we meet to speak of our love for him to-
day, I insist that these visitations are not essential to our memory of
him as a great figure in our literature--the maker of an epoch.
Cowper lived for some seventy years--sixty-nine, to be exact. Of these
years there was a period longer than the full term of Byron's life, of
Shelley's or of Keats's, of perfect sanity, and it was in this period
that he gave us what is one of the sanest achievements in our literature,
view it as we may.
Let us look backwards over the century--a century which has seen many
changes of which Cowper had scarcely any vision--the wonders of machinery
and of electricity, of commercial enterprise, of the newspaper press, of
book production. The galloping postboy is the most persistent figure in
Cowper's landscape. He has been replaced by the motor car. Nations have
arisen and fallen; a thousand writers have become popular and have ceased
to be remembered. Other writers have sprung up who have made themselves
immortal. Burns and Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Scott and Shelley
among the poets.
We ask ourselves, then, what distinctly differentiates Cowper's life from
that of his brothers in poetry, and I reply--his sanity. He did not
indulge in vulgar amours, as did Burns and Byron; he did not ruin his
moral fibre by opium, as did Coleridge; he did not shock his best friends
by an over-weening egotism, as did Wordsworth; he did not spoil his life
by reckless financial complications, as did Scott; or by too great an
enthusiasm to beat down the world's conventions, as did Shelley. I do
not here condemn any one or other of these later poets. Their lives
cannot be summed up in the mistakes they made. I only urge that, as it
is not good to be at warfare with your fellows, to be burdened with debts
that you have to kill yourself to pay, to alienate your friends by
distressing mannerisms, to cease to be on speaking terms with your
family--therefore Cowper, who avoided these things, and, out of
threescore years and more allotted to him, lived for some forty or fifty
years at least a quiet, idyllic life, surrounded by loyal and loving
friends, had chosen the saner and safer path. That, it may be granted,
was very much a matter of temperament, and for it one does not need to
praise him. The appeal to us of Robert Burns to gently scan our brother
man will necessarily find a ready acceptance to-day, and a plea on behalf
of kindly toleration for any great writer who has inspired his fellows is
natural and honourable. But Cowper does not require any such kindly
toleration. His temperament led him to a placid life, where there were
few temptations, and that life with its quiet walks, its occasional
drives, its simple recreations, has stood for a whole century as our
English ideal. It is what, amid the strain of the severest commercialism
in our great cities, we look forward to for our declining years as a
haven on this side of the grave.
But I have undertaken to plead for Cowper's sanity. I desire, therefore,
to beg you to look not at this or that episode in his life, when, as we
know, Cowper was in the clutches of evil spirits, but at his life as a
whole--a life of serene contentment in the company of his friends, his
hares Puss, Tiny and Bess, his "eight pair of tame pigeons," his
correspondents; and then I ask you to turn to his work, and to note the
essential sanity of that work also.
First there is his poetry. When after the Bastille had fallen Charles
James Fox quoted in one of his speeches Cowper's lines--written long
years before--praying that that event might occur, he paid an unconscious
tribute to the sanity of Cowper's genius. {44} Few poets who have let
their convictions and aspirations find expression in verse have come so
near the mark.
Wordsworth's verse--that which was written at the same age--is studded
with prophecy of evils that never occurred. It was not because of any
supermundane intelligence, such as latter-day poets have been pleased to
affect and latter-day critics to assume for them, that Cowper wrote in
anticipation of the fall of the Bastille in those thrilling lines, but
because his exceedingly sane outlook upon the world showed him that
France was riding fast towards revolution.
We have been told that Cowper's poetry lacked the true note of passion,
that there was an absence of the "lyric cry." I protest that I find the
note of passion in the "Lines on the Receipt of my Mother's Picture," in
his two sets of verses to Mrs. Unwin, in his sonnet to Wilberforce not
less marked than I find it in other great poets. I find in _The Task_
and elsewhere in Cowper's works a note of enthusiasm for human
brotherhood, for man's responsibility for man, for universal kinship,
that had scarcely any place in literature before he wrote quietly here at
Olney thoughts wiser and saner than he knew. To-day we call ourselves by
many names, Conservatives or Liberals, Radicals, or Socialists; we differ
widely as to ways and means; but we are all practically agreed about one
thing--that the art of politics is the art of making the world happier.
Each politician who has any aspirations beyond mere ambition desires to
leave the world a little better than he found it. This is a commonplace
of to-day. It was not a commonplace of Cowper's day. Even the great-
hearted, lovable Dr. Johnson was only concerned with the passing act of
kindliness to his fellows; patriotism he declared to be the last refuge
of a scoundrel; collective aspiration was mere charlatanry in his eyes,
and when some one said that he had lost his appetite because of a British
defeat, Johnson thought him an impostor, in which Johnson was probably
right. There have been plenty of so-called patriots who were scoundrels,
there has been plenty of affectation of sentiment which is little better
than charlatanry, but we do not consider when we weigh the influence of
men whether Rousseau was morally far inferior to Johnson. We know that
he was. But Rousseau, poor an instrument as he may have been, helped to
break many a chain, to relieve many a weary heart, to bring to whole
peoples a new era in which the horrors of the past became as a nightmare,
and in which ideals were destined to reign for ever. Cowper, an
incomparably better man than Rousseau, helped to permeate England with
that collective sentiment, which, while it does not excuse us for
neglecting our neighbour, is a good thing for preserving for nations a
healthy natural life, a more and more difficult task with the growing
complications of commercialism. Cowper here, as I say, unconsciously
performed his greatest service to humanity; and it was performed, be it
remembered, at Olney. It has been truly said that in Cowper:--
The poetry of human wrong begins, that long, long cry against
oppression and evil done by man to man, against the political, moral,
or priestly tyrant, which rings louder and louder through Burns,
Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron, ever impassioned, ever longing, ever
prophetic--never, in the darkest time, quite despairing. {47}
And Cowper achieved this without losing sight for one moment of the
essential necessity for personal worth:
Spend all thy powers
Of rant and rhapsody in Virtue's praise,
Be most sublimely good, verbosely grand,
and it profiteth nothing, he said in effect.
That was not his only service as a citizen. He struck the note of honest
patriotism as it had not been struck before since Milton, by the familiar
lines commencing:
England, with all thy faults, I love thee still,
My country!
As also in that stirring ballad "On the Loss of the _Royal George_:"
Her timbers yet are sound,
And she may float again,
Full charged with England's thunder,
And plough the distant main.
There are two other great claims that might here be made for Cowper did
time allow, that he anticipated Wordsworth alike as a lover of nature, as
one who had more than a superficial affection for it--the superficial
affection of Thomson and Gray--and that he anticipated Wordsworth also as
a lover of animal life. Cowper's love of nature was the less effective
than Wordsworth's only, surely, in that he had not had Wordsworth's
advantage of living amid impressive scenery. His love of animal life was
far less platonic than Wordsworth's. To his hares and his pigeons and
all dumb creatures he was genuinely devoted. Perhaps it was because he
had in him the blood of kings--for, curiously enough, it is no more
difficult to trace the genealogical tree of both Cowper and Byron down to
William the Conqueror than it is to trace the genealogical tree of Queen
Victoria--it was perhaps, I say, this descent from kings which led him to
be more tolerant of "sport" than was Wordsworth. At any rate, Cowper's
vigorous description of being in at the death of a fox may be contrasted
with Wordsworth's "Heart Leap Well," and you will prefer Cowper or
Wordsworth, as your tastes are for or against our old-fashioned English
sports. But even then, as often, Cowper in his poetry was less tolerant
than in his prose, for he writes in _The Task_ of:
detested sport
That owes its pleasures to another's pain,
We may note in all this the almost entire lack of indebtedness in Cowper
to his predecessors. One of his most famous phrases, indeed, that on
"the cup that cheers, but not inebriates," he borrowed from Berkeley; but
his borrowings were few, far fewer than those of any other great poet,
whereas mine would be a long essay were I to produce by the medium of
parallel columns all that other poets have borrowed from him.
Lastly, among Cowper's many excellencies as a poet let me note his
humour. His pathos, his humanity--many fine qualities he has in common
with others; but what shall we say of his humour? If the ubiquitous Scot
were present, so far from his native heath--and I daresay we have one or
two with us--he might claim that humour was also the prerogative of
Robert Burns. He might claim, also, that certain other great
characteristics of Cowper were to be found almost simultaneously in
Burns. There is virtue in the _almost_. Cowper was born in 1731, Burns
in 1759. At any rate humour has been a rare product among the greater
English poets. It was entirely absent in Wordsworth, in Shelley, in
Keats. Byron possessed a gift of satire and wit, but no humour, Tennyson
only a suspicion of it in "The Northern Farmer." From Cowper to
Browning, who also had it at times, there has been little humour in the
greatest English poetry, although plenty of it in the lesser poets--Hood
and the rest. But there was in Cowper a great sense of humour, as there
was also plenty of what Hazlitt, almost censoriously, calls "elegant
trifling." Not only in the imperishable "John Gilpin," but in the "Case
Between Nose and Eyes," "The Nightingale and Glow-worm," and other pieces
you have examples of humorous verse which will live as long as our
language endures.
Cowper's claims as a poet, then, may be emphasized under four heads:--
I. His enthusiasm for humanity.
II. His love of nature.
III. His love of animal life.
IV. His humour.
And in three of these, let it be said emphatically, he stands out as the
creator of a new era.