Cowper has the charm of littleness. His life and genius were on the
miniature scale, though his tragedy was a burden for Atlas. He left
several pictures of himself in his letters, all of which make one see him
as a veritable Tom Thumb among Christians. He wrote, he tells us, at
Olney, in "a summerhouse not much bigger than a sedan-chair." At an
earlier date, when he was living at Huntingdon, he compared himself to "a
Thames wherry in a world full of tempest and commotion," and congratulated
himself on "the creek I have put into and the snugness it affords me." His
very clothes suggested that he was the inhabitant of a plaything world.
"Green and buff," he declared, "are colours in which I am oftener seen
than in any others, and are become almost as natural to me as a parrot."
"My thoughts," he informed the Rev. John Newton, "are clad in a sober
livery, for the most part as grave as that of a bishop's servants"; but
his body was dressed in parrot's colours, and his bald head was bagged or
in a white cap. If he requested one of his friends to send him anything
from town, it was usually some little thing, such as a "genteelish
toothpick case," a handsome stock-buckle, a new hat--"not a round slouch,
which I abhor, but a smart well-cocked fashionable affair"--or a
cuckoo-clock. He seems to have shared Wordsworth's taste for the last of
these. Are we not told that Wordsworth died as his favourite cuckoo-clock
was striking noon? Cowper may almost be said, so far as his tastes and
travels are concerned, to have lived in a cage. He never ventured outside
England, and even of England he knew only a few of the southern counties.
"I have lived much at Southampton," boasted at the age of sixty, "have
slept and caught a sore throat at Lyndhurst, and have swum in the Bay of
Weymouth." That was his grand tour. He made a journey to Eastham, near
Chichester, about the time of this boast, and confessed that, as he drove
with Mrs. Unwin over the downs by moonlight, "I indeed myself was a little
daunted by the tremendous height of the Sussex hills in comparison of
which all I had seen elsewhere are dwarfs." He went on a visit to some
relations on the coast of Norfolk a few years later, and, writing to Lady
Hesketh, lamented: "I shall never see Weston more. I have been tossed like
a ball into a far country, from which there is no rebound for me." Who but
the little recluse of a little world could think of Norfolk as a far
country and shake with alarm before the "tremendous height" of the Sussex
downs?
"We are strange creatures, my little friend," Cowper once wrote to
Christopher Rowley; "everything that we do is in reality important, though
half that we do seems to be push-pin." Here we see one of the main reasons
of Cowper's eternal attractiveness. He played at push-pin during most of
his life, but he did so in full consciousness of the background of doom.
He trifled because he knew, if he did not trifle, he would go mad with
thinking about Heaven and Hell. He sought in the infinitesimal a cure for
the disease of brooding on the infinite. His distractions were those not
of too light, but of too grave, a mind. If he picnicked with the ladies,
it was in order to divert his thoughts from the wrath to come. He was gay,
but on the edge of the precipice.
I do not mean to suggest that he had no natural inclination to trifling.
Even in the days when he was studying law in the Temple he dined every
Thursday with six of his old school-fellows at the Nonsense Club. His
essays in Bonnell Thornton and Coleman's paper, _The Connoisseur_, written
some time before he went mad and tried to hang himself in a garter, lead
one to believe that, if it had not been for his breakdown, he might have
equalled or surpassed Addison as a master of light prose. He was something
of the traditional idle apprentice, indeed, during his first years in a
solicitor's office, as we gather from the letter in which he reminds Lady
Hesketh how he and Thurlow used to pass the time with her and her sister,
Theodora, the object of his fruitless love. "There was I, and the future
Lord Chancellor," he wrote, "constantly employed from morning to night in
giggling and making giggle, instead of studying the law." Such was his
life till the first attack of madness came at the age of thirty-two. He
had already, it is true, on one occasion, felt an ominous shock as a
schoolboy at Westminster, when a skull thrown up by a gravedigger at St.
Margaret's rolled towards him and struck him on the leg. Again, in his
chambers in the Middle Temple, he suffered for a time from religious
melancholy, which he did his best to combat with the aid of the poems of
George Herbert. Even at the age of twenty-three he told Robert Lloyd in a
rhymed epistle that he "addressed the muse," not in order to show his
genius or his wit,
But to divert a fierce banditti
(Sworn foe to everything that's witty)
That, in a black infernal train,
Make cruel inroads in my brain,
And daily threaten to drive thence
My little garrison of sense.
It was not till after his release from the St. Alban's madhouse in his
thirties, however, that he began to build a little new world of pleasures
on the ruins of the old. He now set himself of necessity to the task of
creating a refuge within sight of the Cross, where he could live, in his
brighter moments, a sort of Epicurean of evangelical piety. He was a
damned soul that must occupy itself at all costs and not damn itself still
deeper in the process. His round of recreation, it must be admitted, was
for the most part such as would make the average modern pleasure-seeker
quail worse than any inferno of miseries. Only a nature of peculiar
sweetness could charm us from the atmosphere of endless sermons and hymns
in which Cowper learned to be happy in the Unwins' Huntingdon home.
Breakfast, he tells us, was between eight and nine. Then, "till eleven, we
read either the Scripture, or the sermons of some faithful preacher of
those holy mysteries." Church was at eleven. After that he was at
liberty to read, walk, ride, or work in the garden till the three o'clock
dinner. Then to the garden, "where with Mrs. Unwin and her son I have
generally the pleasure of religious conversation till tea-time." After tea
came a four-mile walk, and "at night we read and converse, as before, till
supper, and commonly finish the evening either with hymns or a sermon; and
last of all the family are called to prayers." In those days, it may be,
evangelical religion had some of the attractions of a new discovery.
Theories of religion were probably as exciting a theme of discussion in
the age of Wesley as theories of art and literature in the age of cubism
and _vers libre_. One has to remember this in order to be able to realize
that, as Cowper said, "such a life as this is consistent with the utmost
cheerfulness." He unquestionably found it so, and, when the Rev. Morley
Unwin was killed as the result of a fall from his horse, Cowper and Mrs.
Unwin moved to Olney in order to enjoy further evangelical companionship
in the neighbourhood of the Rev. John Newton, the converted slave-trader,
who was curate in that town. At Olney Cowper added at once to his
terrors of Hell and to his amusements. For the terrors, Newton, who seems
to have wielded the Gospel as fiercely as a slaver's whip, was largely
responsible. He had earned a reputation for "preaching people mad," and
Cowper, tortured with shyness, was even subjected to the ordeal of leading
in prayer at gatherings of the faithful. Newton, however, was a man of
tenderness, humour, and literary tastes, as well as of a somewhat savage
piety. He was not only Cowper's tyrant, but Cowper's nurse, and, in
setting Cowper to write the Olney Hymns, he gave a powerful impulse to a
talent hitherto all but hidden. At the same time, when, as a result of the
too merciless flagellation of his parishioners on the occasion of some
Fifth of November revels, Newton was attacked by a mob and driven out of
Olney, Cowper undoubtedly began to breathe more freely. Even under the eye
of Newton, however, Cowper could enjoy his small pleasures, and we have an
attractive picture of him feeding his eight pair of tame pigeons every
morning on the gravel walk in the garden. He shared with Newton his
amusements as well as his miseries. We find him in 1780 writing to the
departed Newton to tell him of his recreations as an artist and gardener.
"I draw," he said, "mountains, valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks, and
dab-chicks." He represents himself in this lively letter as a Christian
lover of baubles, rather to the disadvantage of lovers of baubles who are
not Christians:
I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and
viewed without a reference to their author, what is the earth--what
are the planets--what is the sun itself but a bauble? Better for a
man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a
brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be
able to say, "The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!" Their
eyes have never been opened to see that they are trifles; mine have
been, and will be till they are closed for ever. They think a fine
estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian
garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse
upon them with ten times more. I am pleased with a frame of four
lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be
worth a farthing; amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord Bute's
gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when I
have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it
air, I say to myself: "This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me
for the present; I must leave it soon."
In this and the following year we find him turning his thoughts more and
more frequently to writing as a means of forgetting himself. "The
necessity of amusement," he wrote to Mrs. Unwin's clergyman son, "makes me
sometimes write verses; it made me a carpenter, a birdcage maker, a
gardener; and has lately taught me to draw, and to draw too with ...
surprising proficiency in the art, considering my total ignorance of it
two months ago." His impulse towards writing verses, however, was an
impulse of a playful fancy rather than of a burning imagination. "I have
no more right to the name of poet," he once said, "than a maker of
mouse-traps has to that of an engineer.... Such a talent in verse as mine
is like a child's rattle--very entertaining to the trifler that uses it,
and very disagreeable to all beside." "Alas," he wrote in another letter,
"what can I do with my wit? I have not enough to do great things with, and
these little things are so fugitive that, while a man catches at the
subject, he is only filling his hand with smoke. I must do with it as I do
with my linnet; I keep him for the most part in a cage, but now and then
set open the door, that he may whisk about the room a little, and then
shut him up again." It may be doubted whether, if subjects had not been
imposed on him from without, he would have written much save in the vein
of "dear Mat Prior's easy jingle" or the Latin trifles of Vincent Bourne,
of whom Cowper said: "He can speak of a magpie or a cat in terms so
exquisitely appropriated to the character he draws that one would suppose
him animated by the spirit of the creature he describes."
Cowper was not to be allowed to write, except occasionally, on magpies and
cats. Mrs. Unwin, who took a serious view of the poet's art, gave him as a
subject _The Progress of Error_, and is thus mainly responsible for the
now little-read volume of moral satires, with which he began his career as
a poet at the age of fifty in 1782. It is not a book that can be read with
unmixed, or even with much, delight. It seldom rises above a good man's
rhetoric. Cowper, instead of writing about himself and his pets, and his
cucumber-frames, wrote of the wicked world from which he had retired, and
the vices of which he could not attack with that particularity that makes
satire interesting. The satires are not exactly dull, but they are lacking
in force, either of wit or of passion. They are hardly more than an
expression of sentiment and opinion. The sentiments are usually sound--for
Cowper was an honest lover of liberty and goodness--but even the cause of
liberty is not likely to gain much from such a couplet as:
Man made for kings! those optics are but dim
That tell you so--say, rather, they for him.
Nor will the manners of the clergy benefit much as the result of such an
attack on the "pleasant-Sunday-afternoon" kind of pastor as is contained
in the lines:
If apostolic gravity be free
To play the fool on Sundays, why not we?
If he the tinkling harpsichord regards
As inoffensive, what offence in cards?
These, it must in fairness be said, are not examples of the best in the
moral satires; but the latter is worth quoting as evidence of the way in
which Cowper tried to use verse as the pulpit of a rather narrow creed.
The satires are hardly more than denominational in their interest. They
belong to the religious fashion of their time, and are interesting to us
now only as the old clothes of eighteenth-century evangelicalism. The
subject-matter is secular as well as religious, but the atmosphere almost
always remains evangelical. The Rev. John Newton wrote a preface for the
volume, suggesting this and claiming that the author "aims to communicate
his own perceptions of the truth, beauty and influence of the religion of
the Bible." The publisher became so alarmed at this advertisement of the
piety of the book that he succeeded in suppressing it in the first
edition. Cowper himself had enough worldly wisdom to wish to conceal his
pious intentions from the first glance of the reader, and for this reason
opened the book, not with _The Progress of Error_, but with the more
attractively-named _Table Talk_. "My sole drift is to be useful," he told
a relation, however. "... My readers will hardly have begun to laugh
before they will be called upon to correct that levity, and peruse me with
a more serious air." He informed Newton at the same time: "Thinking myself
in a measure obliged to tickle, if I meant to please, I therefore affected
a jocularity I did not feel." He also told Newton: "I am merry that I may
decoy people into my company." On the other hand, Cowper did not write
_John Gilpin_ which is certainly his masterpiece, in the mood of a man
using wit as a decoy. He wrote it because it irresistibly demanded to be
written. "I wonder," he once wrote to Newton, "that a sportive thought
should ever knock at the door of my intellects, and still more that it
should gain admittance. It is as if harlequin should intrude himself into
the gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state." Harlequin,
luckily for us, took hold of his pen in _John Gilpin_ and in many of the
letters. In the moral satires, harlequin is dressed in a sober suit and
sent to a theological seminary. One cannot but feel that there is
something incongruous in the boast of a wit and a poet that he had "found
occasion towards the close of my last poem, called _Retirement_, to take
some notice of the modern passion for seaside entertainments, and to
direct the means by which they might be made useful as well as agreeable."
This might serve well enough as a theme for a "letter to the editor" of
_The Baptist Eye-opener_. One cannot imagine, however, its causing a
flutter in the breast of even the meekest of the nine muses.
Cowper, to say truth, had the genius not of a poet but of a letter-writer.
The interest of his verse is chiefly historical. He was a poet of the
transition to Wordsworth and the revolutionists, and was a mouthpiece of
his time. But he has left only a tiny quantity of memorable verse. Lamb
has often been quoted in his favour. "I have," he wrote to Coleridge in
1796, "been reading _The Task_ with fresh delight. I am glad you love
Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not
call that man my friend who should be offended with the 'divine chit-chat
of Cowper.'" Lamb, it should be remembered, was a youth of twenty-one when
he wrote this, and Cowper's verse had still the attractions of early
blossoms that herald the coming of spring. There is little in _The Task_
to make it worth reading to-day, except to the student of literary
history. Like the Olney Hymns and the moral satires it was a poem written
to order. Lady Austen, the vivacious widow who had meanwhile joined the
Olney group, was anxious that Cowper should show what he could do in blank
verse. He undertook to humour her if she would give him a subject. "Oh,"
she said, "you can never be in want of a subject; you can write upon any;
write upon this sofa!" Cowper, in his more ambitious verse, seems seldom
to have written under the compulsion of the subject as the great poets do.
Even the noble lines _On the Loss of the Royal George_ were written, as he
confessed, "by desire of Lady Austen, who wanted words to the March in
_Scipio_." For this Lady Austen deserves the world's thanks, as she does
for cheering him up in his low spirits with the story of John Gilpin. He
did not write _John Gilpin_ by request, however. He was so delighted on
hearing the story that he lay awake half the night laughing at it, and the
next day he felt compelled to sit down and write it out as a ballad.
"Strange as it may seem," he afterwards said of it, "the most ludicrous
lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that
saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all." "The grinners at
_John Gilpin_," he said in another letter, "little dream what the author
sometimes suffers. How I hated myself yesterday for having ever wrote it!"
It was the publication of _The Task_ and _John Gilpin_ that made Cowper
famous. It is not _The Task_ that keeps him famous to-day. There is, it
seems to me, more of the divine fire in any half-dozen of his good letters
than there is in the entire six books of _The Task_. One has only to read
the argument at the top of the third book, called _The Garden_, in order
to see in what a dreary didactic spirit it is written. Here is the
argument in full:
Self-recollection and reproof--Address to domestic happiness--Some
account of myself--The vanity of many of the pursuits which are
accounted wise--Justification of my censures--Divine illumination
necessary to the most expert philosopher--The question, what is
truth? answered by other questions--Domestic happiness addressed
again--Few lovers of the country--My tame hare--Occupations of a
retired gentleman in the
garden--Pruning--Framing--Greenhouse--Sowing of flower-seeds--The
country preferable to the town even in the winter--Reasons why it
is deserted at that season--Ruinous effects of gaming and of
expensive improvement--Book concludes with an apostrophe to the
metropolis.
It is true that, in the intervals of addresses to domestic happiness and
apostrophes to the metropolis, there is plenty of room here for Virgilian
verse if Cowper had had the genius for it. Unfortunately, when he writes
about his garden, he too often writes about it as prosaically as a
contributor to a gardening paper. His description of the making of a hot
frame is merely a blank-verse paraphrase of the commonest prose. First, he
tells us:
The stable yields a stercoraceous heap,
Impregnated with quick fermenting salts,
And potent to resist the freezing blast;
For, ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf,
Deciduous, when now November dark
Checks vegetation in the torpid plant,
Expos'd to his cold breath, the task begins.
Warily therefore, and with prudent heed
He seeks a favour'd spot; that where he builds
Th' agglomerated pile his frame may front
The sun's meridian disk, and at the back
Enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedge
Impervious to the wind.
Having further prepared the ground:
Th' uplifted frame, compact at every joint,
And overlaid with clear translucent glass,
He settles next upon the sloping mount,
Whose sharp declivity shoots off secure
From the dash'd pane the deluge as it falls.
The writing of blank verse puts the poet to the severest test, and Cowper
does not survive the test. Had _The Task_ been written in couplets he
might have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme. As it
is, he is merely ponderous--a snail of imagination labouring under a heavy
shell of eloquence. In the fragment called _Yardley Oak_ he undoubtedly
achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton. But I do not
think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good poet.
He had even ceased to read poetry by the time he began in earnest to write
it. "I reckon it," he wrote in 1781, "among my principal advantages, as a
composer of verses, that I have not read an English poet these thirteen
years, and but one these thirteen years." So mild was his interest in his
contemporaries that he had never heard Collins's name till he read about
him in Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. Though descended from Donne--his
mother was Anne Donne--he was apparently more interested in Churchill and
Beattie than in him. His one great poetical master in English was Milton,
Johnson's disparagement of whom he resented with amusing vehemence. He was
probably the least bookish poet who had ever had a classical education. He
described himself in a letter to the Rev. Walter Bagot, in his later
years, as "a poor man who has but twenty books in the world, and two of
them are your brother Chester's." The passages I have quoted give, no
doubt, an exaggerated impression of Cowper's indifference to literature.
His relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in many of his letters.
But he was incapable of such enthusiasm for the great things in literature
as Keats showed, for instance, in his sonnet on Chapman's Homer. Though
Cowper, disgusted with Pope, took the extreme step of translating Homer
into English verse, he enjoyed even Homer only with certain evangelical
reservations. "I should not have chosen to have been the original author
of such a business," he declared, while he was translating the nineteenth
book of the _Iliad_, "even though all the Nine had stood at my elbow. Time
has wonderful effects. We admire that in an ancient for which we should
send a modern bard to Bedlam." It is hardly to be wondered at that his
translation of Homer has not survived, while his delightful translation of
Vincent Bourne's _Jackdaw_ has.
Cowper's poetry, however, is to be praised, if for nothing else, because
it played so great a part in giving the world a letter-writer of genius.
It brought him one of the best of his correspondents, his cousin, Lady
Hesketh, and it gave various other people a reason for keeping his
letters. Had it not been for his fame as a poet his letters might never
have been published, and we should have missed one of the most exquisite
histories of small beer to be had outside the pages of Jane Austen. As a
letter-writer he does not, I think, stand in the same rank as Horace
Walpole and Charles Lamb. He has less wit and humour, and he mirrors less
of the world. His letters, however, have an extraordinarily soothing
charm. Cowper's occupations amuse one, while his nature delights one. His
letters, like Lamb's, have a soul of goodness--not of mere virtue, but of
goodness--and we know from his biography that in life he endured the
severest test to which a good nature can be subjected. His treatment of
Mrs. Unwin in the imbecile despotism of her old age was as fine in its way
as Lamb's treatment of his sister. Mrs. Unwin, who had supported Cowper
through so many dark and suicidal hours, afterwards became palsied and
lost her mental faculties. "Her character," as Sir James Frazer writes in
the introduction to his charming selection from the letters,[2] "underwent
a great change, and she who for years had found all her happiness in
ministering to her afflicted friend, and seemed to have no thought but for
his welfare, now became querulous and exacting, forgetful of him and
mindful, apparently, only of herself. Unable to move out of her chair
without help, or to walk across the room unless supported by two people,
her speech at times almost unintelligible, she deprived him of all his
wonted exercises, both bodily and mental, as she did not choose that he
should leave her for a moment, or even use a pen or a book, except when he
read to her. To these demands he responded with all the devotion of
gratitude and affection; he was assiduous in his attentions to her, but
the strain told heavily on his strength." To know all this does not modify
our opinion of Cowper's letters, except is so far as it strengthens it. It
helps us, however, to explain to ourselves why we love them. We love them
because, as surely as the writings of Shakespeare and Lamb, they are an
expression of that sort of heroic gentleness which can endure the fires of
the most devastating tragedy. Shakespeare finally revealed the strong
sweetness of his nature in _The Tempest_. Many people are inclined to
over-estimate _The Tempest_ as poetry simply because it gives them so
precious a clue to the character of his genius, and makes clear once more
that the grand source and material of poetry is the infinite tenderness of
the human heart. Cowper's letters are a tiny thing beside Shakespeare's
plays. But the same light falls on them. They have an eighteenth-century
restraint, and freedom from emotionalism and gush. But behind their
chronicle of trifles, their small fancies, their little vanities, one is
aware of an intensely loving and lovable personality. Cowper's poem, _To
Mary_, written to Mrs. Unwin in the days of her feebleness, is, to my
mind, made commonplace by the odious reiteration of "my Mary!" at the end
of every verse. Leave the "my Marys" out, however, and see how beautiful,
as well as moving, a poem it becomes. Cowper was at one time on the point
of marrying Mrs. Unwin, when an attack of madness prevented him. Later on
Lady Austen apparently wished to marry him. He had an extraordinary gift
for commanding the affections of those of both sexes who knew him. His
friendship with the poet Hayley, then a rocket fallen to earth, towards
the close of his life, reveals the lovableness of both men.
[2] _Letters of William Cowper_. Chosen and edited by J.G. Frazer.
Two vols. Eversley Series. Macmillan. 12s. net.
If we love Cowper, then, it is not only because of his little world, but
because of his greatness of soul that stands in contrast to it. He is like
one of those tiny pools among the rocks, left behind by the deep waters of
ocean and reflecting the blue height of the sky. His most trivial actions
acquire a pathos from what we know of the _De Profundis_ that is behind
them. When we read of the Olney household--"our snug parlour, one lady
knitting, the other netting, and the gentleman winding worsted"--we feel
that this marionette-show has some second and immortal significance. On
another day, "one of the ladies has been playing a harpsichord, while I,
with the other, have been playing at battledore and shuttlecock." It is a
game of cherubs, though of cherubs slightly unfeathered as a result of
belonging to the pious English upper-middle classes. The poet, inclined to
be fat, whose chief occupation in winter is "to walk ten times in a day
from the fireside to his cucumber frame and back again," is busy enough on
a heavenly errand. With his pet hares, his goldfinches, his dog, his
carpentry, his greenhouse--"Is not our greenhouse a cabinet of
perfumes?"--his clergymen, his ladies, and his tasks, he is not only
constantly amusing himself, but carrying on a secret battle, with all the
terrors of Hell. He is, indeed, a pilgrim who struggles out of one slough
of despond only to fall waist-deep into another. This strange creature who
passed so much of his time writing such things as _Verses written at Bath
on Finding the Heel of a Shoe, Ode to Apollo on an Ink-glass almost dried
in the Sun, Lines sent with Two Cockscombs to Miss Green_, and _On the
Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bullfinch_, stumbled along under a load of
woe and repentance as terrible as any of the sorrows that we read of in
the great tragedies. The last of his original poems, _The Castaway_, is an
image of his utter hopelessness. As he lay dying in 1880 he was asked how
he felt. He replied, "I feel unutterable despair." To face damnation with
the sweet unselfishness of William Cowper is a rare and saintly
accomplishment. It gives him a place in the company of the beloved authors
with men of far greater genius than himself--with Shakespeare and Lamb and
Dickens.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has, in one of his essays, expressed the opinion
that of all the English poets "the one who, but for a stroke of madness,
would have become our English Horace was William Cowper. He had the wit,"
he added, "with the underlying moral seriousness." As for the wit, I doubt
it. Cowper had not the wit that inevitably hardens into "jewels five words
long." Laboriously as he sought after perfection in his verse, he was
never a master of the Horatian phrase. Such phrases of his--and there are
not many of them--as have passed into the common speech flash neither with
wit nor with wisdom. Take the best-known of them:
"The cups
That cheer but not inebriate;"
"God made the country and man made the town;"
"I am monarch of all I survey;"
"Regions Cæsar never knew;" and
"England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!"
This is lead for gold. Horace, it is true, must be judged as something
more than an inventor of golden tags. But no man can hope to succeed
Horace unless his lines and phrases are of the kind that naturally pass
into golden tags. This, I know, is a matter not only of style but of
temper. But it is in temper as much as in style that Cowper differs from
Horace. Horace mixed on easy terms with the world. He enjoyed the same
pleasures; he paid his respects to the same duties. He was a man of the
world above all other poets. Cowper was in comparison a man of the
parlour. His sensibilities would, I fancy, have driven him into retreat,
even if he had been neither mad nor pious. He was the very opposite of a
worldling. He was, as he said of himself in his early thirties, "of a very
singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed
with." While claiming that he was not an absolute fool, he added: "If I
was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this--and God forbid I
should speak it in vanity--I would not change conditions with any saint in
Christendom." Had Horace lived in the eighteenth century he would almost
certainly have been a Deist. Cowper was very nearly a Methodist. The
difference, indeed, between them is fundamental. Horace was a pig, though
a charming one; Cowper was a pigeon.
This being so, it seems to me a mistake to regard Cowper as a Horace
_manqué_, instead of being content with his miraculous achievement as a
letter-writer. It may well be that his sufferings, so far from destroying
his real genius, harrowed and fertilized the soil in which it grew. He
unquestionably was more ambitious for his verse than for his prose. He
wrote his letters without labour, while he was never weary of using the
file on his poems. "To touch and retouch," he once wrote to the Rev.
William Unwin, "is, though some writers boast of negligence, and others
would be ashamed to show their foul copies, the secret of almost all good
writing, especially in verse. I am never weary of it myself." Even if we
count him only a middling poet, however, this does not mean that all his
fastidiousness of composition was wasted. He acquired in the workshop of
verse the style that stood him in such good stead in the field of familiar
prose. It is because of this hard-won ease of style that readers of
English will never grow weary of that epistolary autobiography in which he
recounts his maniacal fear that his food has been poisoned; his open-eyed
wonder at balloons; the story of his mouse; the cure of the distention of
his stomach by Lady Hesketh's gingerbread; the pulling out of a tooth at
the dinner-table unperceived by the other guests; his desire to thrash Dr.
Johnson till his pension jingled in his pocket; and the mildly fascinated
tastes to which he confesses in such a paragraph as:
I know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musical
save and except always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our
birds and fowls please me without one exception. I should not
indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up
in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a
common, or in a farm-yard, is no bad performer.
Here he is no missfire rival of Horace or Milton or Prior, or any of the
other poets. Here he has arrived at the perfection for which he was born.
How much better he was fitted to be a letter-writer than a poet may be
seen by anyone who compares his treatment of the same incidents in verse
and in prose. There is, for instance, that charming letter about the
escaped goldfinch, which is not spoiled for us even though we may take
Blake's view of caged birds:
I have two goldfinches, which in the summer occupy the greenhouse.
A few days since, being employed in cleaning out their cages, I
placed that which I had in hand upon the table, while the other
hung against the wall; the windows and the doors stood wide open. I
went to fill the fountain at the pump, and on my return was not a
little surprised to find a goldfinch sitting on the top of the cage
I had been cleaning, and singing to and kissing the goldfinch
within. I approached him, and he discovered no fear; still
nearer, and he discovered none. I advanced my hand towards him, and
he took no notice of it. I seized him, and supposed I had caught a
new bird, but casting my eye upon the other cage perceived my
mistake. Its inhabitant, during my absence, had contrived to find
an opening, where the wire had been a little bent, and made no
other use of the escape it afforded him, than to salute his friend,
and to converse with him more intimately than he had done before. I
returned him to his proper mansion, but in vain. In less than a
minute he had thrust his little person through the aperture again,
and again perched upon his neighbour's cage, kissing him, as at the
first, and singing, as if transported with the fortunate adventure.
I could not but respect such friendship, as for the sake of its
gratification had twice declined an opportunity to be free, and
consenting to their union, resolved that for the future one cage
should hold them both. I am glad of such incidents; for at a pinch,
and when I need entertainment, the versification of them serves to
divert me....
Cowper's "versification" of the incident is vapid compared to this. The
incident of the viper and the kittens again, which he "versified" in _The
Colubriad_, is chronicled far more charmingly in the letters. His quiet
prose gave him a vehicle for that intimacy of the heart and fancy which
was the deepest need of his nature. He made a full confession of himself
only to his friends. In one of his letters he compares himself, as he
rises in the morning to "an infernal frog out of Acheron, covered with the
ooze and mud of melancholy." In his most ambitious verse he is a frog
trying to blow himself out into a bull. It is the frog in him, not the
intended bull, that makes friends with us to-day.