position as a master of prose, as well as of poetry. Cowper was the
greatest letter-writer in a language which has produced many great letter-
writers--Walpole, Gray, Byron, Scott, FitzGerald, and a long list. But
nearly all these men were men of affairs, of action. Given a good
literary style they could hardly have been other than interesting, they
had so much to say that they gained from external sources. Even
FitzGerald--the one recluse--had all the treasures of literature
constantly passing into his study. Cowper had but eighteen books
altogether during many of his years in Olney, and some of us who have
lent our volumes in the past and are still sighing over gaps in our
shelves find consolation in the fact that six of Cowper's books had been
returned to him after a friend had borrowed for twenty years or so. Now,
it is comparatively easy to write good letters with a library around you;
it is marvellous that Cowper could have done this with so little
material, and his letters are, from this point of view, the best of
all--"divine chit-chat" Coleridge called them. His simple style
captivates us. And here let me say--keeping to my text--that it is the
_sanest_ of styles, a style with no redundancies, no rhetoric, no
straining after effect. The outlook on life is sane--what could be finer
than the chase for the lost hare, or the call of the Parliamentary
candidate, or the flogging of the thief?--and the outlook on literature
is particularly sane.
Cowper was well-nigh the only true poet in the first rank in English
literature who was at the same time a true critic. Literary history
affords a singular revelation of the wild and incoherent judgments of
their fellows on the part of the poets. For praise or blame, there are
few literary judgments of Byron, of Shelley, of Wordsworth that will
stand. Coleridge was a critic first, and his poetry, though good, is
small in quantity, and the same may be said of Matthew Arnold. Tennyson
discreetly kept away from prose, and his letters, be it remembered, lack
distinction as do most letters of the nineteenth century. If, however,
as we are really to believe, he it was who really made the first edition
of Palgrave's _Golden Treasury of Lyric Poetry_, he came near to Cowper
in his sanity of judgment, and one delights to think that in that
precious volume Cowper ranks third--that is, after Shakspere and
Wordsworth--in the number of selections that are there given, and rightly
given, as imperishable masterpieces of English poetry. Tennyson, also,
was at one with Cowper in declaring that an appreciation of _Lycidas_ was
a touchstone of taste for poetry. To Tennyson, as to Cowper, Milton was
the one great English poet after Shakspere; and here, also, we revere the
saneness of view. More sane too, was Cowper than any of the modern
critics, in that he did not believe that mere technique was the
standpoint from which all poetry must ultimately be judged.
"Give me," he says, "a manly rough line with a deal of meaning in it,
rather than a whole poem full of musical periods, that have nothing in
them, only smoothness to recommend them!"
And thus he justified Robert Browning and many another singer.
Let us then dismiss from our minds the one-sided picture of Cowper as a
gloomy fanatic, who was always asking himself in Carlylian phrase, "Am I
saved? Am I damned?" Let us remember him as staunch to the friends of
his youth, sympathetic to his old schoolfellow, Warren Hastings, when the
world would make him out too black. Opposed in theory to tobacco, how he
delighted to welcome his good friend Mr. Bull. "My greenhouse," he says,
"wants only the flavour of your pipe to make it perfectly delightful!"
Naturally tolerant of total abstinence, he asks one friend to drink to
the success of his Homer, and thanks another for a present of
bottle-stands. From beginning to end, save in those periods of
aberration, there is no more resemblance to Cowper in the picture that
certain narrow-minded people have desired to portray than there is in
these same people's conception of Martin Luther. The real Luther, who
loved dancing and mirth and the joy of living as much as did any of the
men he so courageously opposed, was not more remote from a conception of
him once current in this country than was the real Cowper--the frank,
genial humorist, who wrote "John Gilpin," who in his youth "giggled and
made giggle" with his girl-cousins, and in his maturer years "laughed and
made laugh" with Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh.
To all men there are periods of weariness and depression, side by side
with periods of happiness and hopefulness. Cowper, alas! had more than
his share of the tragedy of life, but let us not forget that he had some
of its joy, and that joy is reflected for us in a substantial literary
achievement, which has lived, and influenced the world, while his more
tragic experiences may well be buried in oblivion. This, you may have
noted, is not a criticism of Cowper, but an eulogy. I would wish to say,
however, that the criticism of Cowper by living writers has been of
surpassing excellence. For the first fifty or sixty years of the century
that we are recalling Cowper was the most popular poet of our country,
with Burns and Byron for rivals. He has been largely dethroned by
Wordsworth and Shelley, and Tennyson, not one of whom has been praised
too much. But if Cowper has sunk somewhat out of sight of late years,
owing to inevitable circumstances, it is during these late years that he
has secured the goodwill of the best living critics. Would that Mr.
Leslie Stephen {56}--who wrote his life in the _Dictionary of National
Biography_--would that Mr. Edmund Gosse--who has so recently published a
great biography of Cowper's memorable ancestor, Dr. Donne--were, one or
other of them, here to-day; or Mr. Austin Dobson, who has visited Olney,
and described his impressions; or Dr. Jessopp, who lives near Cowper's
tomb in East Dereham Church. These writers are, alas! not with us, and
some presentment of a poet they love has fallen to less capable hands.
But not the most brilliant of speeches, not all the enthusiasm of all the
critics, can ever restore Cowper to his former immense popularity. We do
well, however, to celebrate his centenary, because it is good at certain
periods to remember our indebtedness to the great men who have helped us
in literature or in life. But that is not to say that we work for the
dethronement of later favourites. "Each age must write its own books,"
says Emerson, and this is particularly the case with the great body of
poetry. Cowper, however, will live to all time among students of
literature by his longer poems; he will live to all time among the
multitude by his ballads and certain of his lyrics. He will, assuredly,
live by his letters, to study which will be a thousand times more helpful
to the young writer than many volumes of Addison, to whom we were once
advised to devote our days and our nights. Cowper will live, above all,
as a profoundly interesting and beautiful personality, as a great and
good Englishman--the greatest of all the sons of this his adopted town.
III. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF GEORGE BORROW
An Address delivered in Norwich on the Occasion of the Borrow Centenary,
1903.
One hundred years ago there was born some two miles from the pleasant
little town of East Dereham, in this county, a child who was christened
George Henry Borrow. That is why we are assembled here this evening. I
count it one of the most interesting coincidences in literary history
that only three years earlier there should have left the world in the
same little town--a town only known perhaps to those of us who are
Norfolk men--a poet who has always seemed to me to be one of the greatest
glories of our literature: I mean William Cowper. Cowper died in April,
1800, and Borrow was born in July, 1803, in this same town of East
Dereham: and there very much it might be thought, any point of likeness
or of contrast must surely end.
Cowper and Borrow do, indeed, come into some trivial kind of kinship at
one or two points. In reading Cowper's beautiful letters I have come
across two addressed by him to one Richard Phillips, a bookseller of that
day, who had been in prison for publishing some of Thomas Paine's works.
Cowper had been asked by Phillips to write a sympathetic poem
denunciatory of the political and religious tyranny that had sent
Phillips to jail. Cowper had at first agreed, but was afterwards advised
not to have anything more to do with Phillips. Judging by the after
career of Phillips, Cowper did wisely; for Phillips was not a good man,
although twenty years later he had become a sheriff of London and was
knighted. As Sir Richard Phillips he was visited by George Borrow, then
a youth at the beginning of his career. Borrow came to Phillips armed
with an introduction from William Taylor of Norwich, and his reception is
most dramatically recorded in the pages of _Lavengro_. This is, however,
to anticipate. Then there is a poem by Cowper to Sir John Fenn {62} the
antiquary, the first editor of the famous _Paston Letters_. In it there
is a reference to Fenn's spouse, who, under the pseudonym of "Mrs.
Teachwell," wrote many books for children in her day. Now Borrow could
remember this lady--Dame Eleanor Fenn--when he was a boy. He recalled
the "Lady Bountiful leaning on her gold-headed cane, while the sleek old
footman followed at a respectful distance behind." Lady Fenn was forty-
six years old when Cowper referred to her. She was sixty-six when the
boy Borrow saw her in Dereham streets. At no other points do these great
East Dereham writers come upon common ground: Cowper during the greater
part of his life was a recluse. He practically fled from the world. In
reading the many letters he wrote--and they are among the best letters in
the English language--one is struck by the small number of his
correspondents. He had few acquaintances and still fewer friends. He
had never seen a hill until he was sixty, and then it was only the modest
hills of Sussex that seemed to him so supremely glorious. He was never
on the Continent. For half a lifetime he did not move out of one county,
the least picturesque part of Buckinghamshire, the neighbourhood of Olney
and of Weston. There he wrote the poems that have been a delight to
several generations, poems which although they may have gone out of
fashion with many are still very dear to some among us; and there, as I
have said, he wrote the incomparable letters that have an equally
permanent place in literature.
You could not conceive a more extraordinary contrast than the life of
this other writer associated with East Dereham, whom we have met to
celebrate this evening. George Borrow was the son of a soldier, who had
risen from the ranks, and of a mother who had been an actress. Soldier
and actress both imply to all of us a restless, wandering life. The
soldier was a Cornishman by birth, the actress was of French origin, and
so you have blended in this little Norfolk boy--who is a Norfolk boy in
spite of it all--every kind of nomadic habit, every kind of fiery,
imaginative enthusiasm, a temperament not usually characteristic of those
of us who claim East Anglia as the land of our birth or of our
progenitors. I wish it were possible for me to reconstruct that Norwich
world into which young George Borrow entered at thirteen years of age.
That it was a Norwich of great intellectual activity is indisputable. In
the year of Borrow's birth John Gurney, who died six years later, first
became a partner in the Norwich bank. His more famous son, Joseph John
Gurney--aged fifteen--left the Earlham home in order to study at Oxford.
His sister, the still more famous Elizabeth Fry, was now twenty-three. So
that when Borrow, the thirteen year old son of the veteran soldier--who
had already been in Ireland picking up scraps of Irish, and in Scotland
adding to his knowledge of Gaelic--settled down for some of his most
impressionable years in Norwich, Joseph John Gurney was a young man of
twenty-eight and Elizabeth Fry was thirty-six. Dr. James Martineau was
eleven years of age and his sister Harriet was fourteen. Another equally
clever woman, not then married to Austin, the famous jurist, was Sarah
Taylor, aged twenty-three. This is but to name a few of the crowd of
Norwich worthies of that day. Would that some one could produce a
picture of the literary life of Norwich of this time and of a quarter of
a century onward--a period that includes the famous Bishop Stanley's {66}
occupancy of the See of Norwich and the visits to this city from all
parts of England of a great number of famous literary men. It is my
pleasant occupation to-night to endeavour to show that Borrow, the very
least of these men and women in public estimation for a good portion of
his life, and perhaps the least in popular judgment even since his death,
was really the greatest, was really the man of all others to whom this
beautiful city should do honour if it asks for a name out of its
nineteenth century history to crown with local recognition.
For whatever homage may have fallen to Borrow during the half-century or
more since his name first came upon many tongues Norwich, it must be
admitted, has given very little of it. No one associated with your city,
I repeat, but has heard of the Gurneys and the Martineaus, of the
Stanleys and the Austins, whose life stories have made so large a part of
your literary and intellectual history during this very period. But I
turn in vain to a number of books that I have in my library for any
information concerning one who is indisputably the greatest among the
intellectual children of Norwich. I turn to Mr. Prothero's _Life of Dean
Stanley_--not one word about Borrow; to that pleasant _Memoir_ of Sarah
Austin and her mother, Mrs. Taylor, called _Three Generations of a
Norfolk Family_--again not one word. I turn to Mr. Braithwaite's
biography of Joseph John Gurney, and to Mr. Augustus Hare's book _The
Gurneys of Earlham_--upon these worthy biographers Borrow made no
impression whatever, although Joseph John Gurney was personally helpful
to him and we read in _Lavengro_ of that pleasant meeting between the
pair on the river bank when Mr. Gurney chided the boy Borrow or Lavengro
for angling. "From that day," he says, "I became less and less a
practitioner of that cruel fishing." In Harriet Martineau's
_Autobiography_, which enjoyed its hour of fame when it was published
twenty-six years ago, there is a contemptuous reference to the disciple
of William Taylor, "this polyglot gentleman, who went through Spain
disseminating Bibles." If Miss Martineau were alive now she would hear
the works of "this polyglot gentleman" praised on every hand, and would
find that a cult had arisen which to her would certainly be quite
incomprehensible. In that large, dismal book--the _Life of James
Martineau_, again, there is but one mention of Dr. Martineau's famous
schoolfellow whose name has been linked with him only by a silly story.
Do not let it be thought that I am complaining of this neglect; the world
will always treat its greatest writers in precisely this fashion. Borrow
did not lack for fame of a kind, but he was, as I desire to show, praised
in his lifetime for the wrong thing, where he was praised at all.
Everyone in the fifties and sixties read _The Bible in Spain_, as they
read a hundred other books of that period, now forgotten. Many read it
who were deceived by its title. They expected a tract. Many read it as
we to-day read the latest novel or biography of the hour. Then a new
book arises and the momentary favourite is forgotten. We think for a
whole week that we are in contact with a well-nigh immortal work. A
little later we concern ourselves not at all whether the book is immortal
or not. We go on to something else. The critic is as much to blame as
the reader. Not one man in a hundred whose profession it is to come
between the author and the public, and to guide the reader to the best in
literature, has the least perception of what is good literature. It is
easy when a writer has captured the suffrages of the crowd for the critic
to tell the world that he is great. That happened to Carlyle, to
Tennyson, to many a popular author whose earliest books commanded little
attention: but, happily, these writers did not lose heart. They kept on
writing. Borrow was otherwise made. He wrote _The Bible in Spain_--a
book of travel of surprising merit. It sold largely on its title. Mr.
Augustine Birrell has told us that he knew a boy in a very strict
household who devoured the narrative on Sunday afternoons, the title
being thought to cover a conventional missionary journey. Well, when I
was a boy _The Bible in Spain_ had gone out of fashion and the public had
not taken up with the author's greater work, _Lavengro_. Borrow was
naturally disappointed. He abused the critics and the public. Perhaps
he grew somewhat soured. He did not hesitate in _The Romany Rye_ to talk
candidly about those "ill-favoured dogs . . . the newspaper editors," and
he made the gentleman's gentleman of _Lavengro_ describe how he was
excluded from the Servants' Club in Park Lane because his master followed
a profession "so mean as literature." In fact as a reaction from the
unfriendly reception accorded to the _Romany Rye_--now one of the most
costly of his books in a first edition--he lost heart, and he grew to
despise the whole literary and writing class. Hence the various stories
presenting him in not very sympathetic guise, the story of Thackeray
being snubbed on asking Borrow if he had read the _Snob Papers_, of Miss
Agnes Strickland receiving an even more forcible rebuff when she offered
to send him her _Queens of England_. "For God's sake don't Madame; I
should not know where to put them or what to do with them." These
stories are in Gordon Hake's _Memoirs of Eighty Years_, but Mr. Francis
Hindes Groome has shown us the other side of the picture, and others also
to whom I shall refer a little later have done the same. Perhaps the
literary class is never the worse for a little plain speaking. The real
secret of Borrow is this--that he was a man of action turned into a
writer by force of circumstances.
The life of Borrow, unlike that of most famous men of letters, has not
been overwritten. His death in 1881 caused little emotion and attracted
but small attention in the newspapers. _The Times_, then as now so
excellent in its biographies as a rule, devoted but twenty lines to him.
Here I may be pardoned for being autobiographical. I was last in Norwich
in the early eighties. I had a wild enthusiasm for literature so far as
my taste had been directed--that is to say I read every book I came
across and had been doing so from my earliest boyhood. But I had never
heard of George Borrow or of his works. In my then not infrequent visits
to Norwich I cannot recall that his name was ever mentioned, and in my
life in London, among men who were, many of them, great readers, I never
heard of Borrow or of his achievement. He died in 1881, and as I do not
recall hearing his name at the time of his death or until long
afterwards, I must have missed certain articles in the _Athenaeum_--two
of them admirable "appreciations" by Mr. Watts-Dunton--and so my state of
benightedness was as I have described. It may be that those who are a
year or two older than I am and those who are younger may find this
extraordinary. You have always heard of Borrow and of his works, but I
think I am entitled to insist that when Borrow sank into his grave, an
old, and to many an eccentric and bitter man, he had fallen into the most
curious oblivion with the public that has ever come to a man, I will not
say of equal distinction, but of any distinction whatever. Mr. Egmont
Hake told the readers of the _Athenaeum_ in a biography that appeared at
the time of Borrow's death that Borrow's works were "forgotten in
England" and I find in turning to the biography of Borrow in _The
Norvicensian_, for 1882--the organ of the Norwich Grammar School--that
the writer of this obituary notice confessed that there were none of
Borrow's works in the library of the school of which Borrow had been the
most distinguished pupil.
From that time--in 1881--until 1899, a period of eighteen years, Borrow
had but little biographical recognition. A few introductions to his
books, sundry encyclopaedia articles, and one or two magazine essays made
up the sum total of information concerning the author of _Lavengro_ until
Dr. Knapp's _Life_ appeared in 1899. That _Life_ has been severely
handled by some lovers of Borrow, and lovers of Borrow are now plentiful
enough. Dr. Knapp had not the cunning of the really successful
biographer. His book still remains in the huge two-volumed form in which
it was first issued four years ago, and I do not anticipate that it will
ever be a popular book. There is no literary art in it. There is a
capacity for amassing facts, but no power of co-ordinating these facts.
Moreover Dr. Knapp did a great deal of mischief by very over-zeal. He
made too great a research into all the current gossip in Norfolk and
Suffolk concerning Borrow. If you were to make special research into the
life of any friend or acquaintance of the past you would hear much
foolish gossip and a great many wrong motives imputed, and possibly you
would not have an opportunity of checking the various statements. The
whole of Dr. Knapp's book seems to be written upon the principle of "I
would if I could" say a good many things, and, indeed, every few months
there appears in the _Eastern Daily Press_, a journal of your city that I
have read every day regularly since boyhood, a letter from some one
explaining that the less inquiry about this or that point in Borrow's
career the better for Borrow. Take, for example, last Saturday's issue
of the journal I have named, where I find the following from a
correspondent:--
Dr. Knapp, from dictates of courtesy, left it unrevealed, and as he
could say nothing to Borrow's credit, passed the affair over in
silence, and on this point all well-wishers of Borrow's reputation
would be wise to take their cue from this biographer's example.
Now there is nothing more damnatory than a sentence of this kind. What
does it amount to? What is the 'it' that is unrevealed by the courteous
Dr. Knapp? It seems to amount to the charge that Borrow is accused of
gibbeting in his books the people he dislikes; this is what every great
imaginative writer has been charged with to the perplexing of dull
people. There are many characters in Dickens's novels which are supposed
to be a presentation of near relatives or friends. These he ought to
have treated with more kindliness. That heroic little woman, Miss
Bronte, gave a picture of Madame Heger, who kept a school at Brussels,
that conveyed, I doubt not, a very mistaken presentation of the subject
of her satire. Imaginative writers have always taken these liberties.
When the worst is said it simply amounts to this, that Borrow was a good
hater. Dr. Johnson said that he loved a good hater, and he might very
well have loved Borrow. Dante, whom we all now agree to idolize, treated
people even more roughly; he placed some of his acquaintances who had ill-
used him in the very lowest circles of hell. May I express a hope,
therefore, that this type of letter to the Norwich newspapers about Dr.
Knapp's "kindness" to Borrow's reputation may cease. If Dr. Knapp had
printed the whole of the facts we should know how to deal with them; but
this is one of his limitations as a biographer. He has not in the least
helped to a determination of Borrow's real character.