spectacle of William Cowper playing spillikins or battledore and
shuttlecock with Lady Austin in the face of such preoccupations. It
is to Lady Austin, of course, that we owe some of his finest verse,
and his talent for poetry at its best is a very high quality. In these
long, rambling productions wherein, as Mr. Robert Lynd has so admirably
said, Cowper’s music progresses “as a snail of imagination laboring
under a heavy shell of eloquence,” one comes upon passages in which
the poet in a manner quite peculiar to himself makes immortal certain
scenes of nature. All that he looked upon in his afternoon walks by
the side of Mrs. Unwin, all that he noticed as he drove abroad in Lady
Hasketh’s carriage, found its place sooner or later in his poetry. And
so close was his observation, and so genuine his power of appreciation,
that something of the thrill that came to him upon those far-off
excursions is still conveyed to us. Many of his country vignettes have
in them the burden out of which unique and authentic poetry is made.
With what consummate skill he can make us see those country roads about
Olney, which to him had become so familiar! The very farm wains he
etches in:
and he that stalks
In ponderous boots beside his reeking team.
How by a few inimitable touches he can conjure up before our eyes the
look of the Winter landscape, made strange by the first fall of snow,
with its few single dead grasses or “bents” still showing above the
white surface and indeed made “conspicuous” now by being “fledged with
icy feathers.”
The cattle mourn in corners where the fence
Screens them, and seem half-petrified to sleep
In unrecumbent sadness.
We follow his steps up a long arched avenue and share his pleasure in
watching the quick movements of a Winter robin--
Pleased with his solitude, and flitting light
From spray to spray, wher’er he rests he shakes
From many a twig the pendant drops of ice
That tinkle in the withered leaves below.
The reappearance of his cousin, Lady Hasketh, into his life was
undoubtedly of the greatest advantage to Cowper. This excellent
woman did all that was in her power to enliven the poet’s days. She
persuaded the singular household to move from Olney to Weston Underwood
and encouraged its two inmates to enjoy such harmless pleasures as
were provided by the society of the neighborhood. William Cowper
had inherited from his forefathers the manners and easy grace of a
well-bred gentleman, and now that fame had come to him his cousin was
evidently anxious that he should cut something of a figure in Olney.
Commenting upon his clothes at this time, the poet says: “Green and
buff are colors in which I am oftener seen than any others, and are
become almost as natural to me as to a parrot.” The Rev. John Newton
was not a little put out by this sudden change in his friend’s manner
of life. “I find,” he wrote, “after all my supposed acquaintance with
the human heart there are windings and depths in it of which I know no
more than of the dark, unfathomable caves of the ocean,” and he never
penned a truer word. One feels in entire sympathy with the good sense
of Lady Hasketh when she declared, in explanation of her cousin’s
sadness, “The eternal praying and preaching were too much.” As a matter
of fact, the Rev. John Newton need have felt no misgiving. Cowper
remained still the helpless quarry of the Hound of Heaven, though he
disguised himself never so cleverly by “associating with gay people,
wearing a green coat and becoming an archer.”
In 1787 he tried once more to commit suicide. In superstitious awe he
would await the appearance of each new moon and the yearly return of
his black month--the month of January. Little enough it availed him to
write verses to a dead bullfinch when the following morning he would
awake in tremulous apprehension with this line from Milton ringing in
his ears:
The wonted roar is up amid the woods.
In 1791 a fresh disaster overtook him. Mrs. Unwin had a paralytic
stroke, “Oh, Mr. Cowper, don’t let me fall!” came the frightened cry
as he stood one morning at his desk in his parlor. The seizure had
an unexpected effect upon the behavior of this woman, “more polite
than a Duchess.” From thenceforth, instead of feeling concern for the
comfort of the aging and demented poet, Mary Unwin became more and more
exacting in her querulous demands upon his attention. His work, his
walks, his diversions had each in turn to be abandoned, until every
hour of his day was occupied in looking after her slightest wish and
whim.
The strain became too much. Again his hallucinations took audible form.
He heard voices. With questionable veracity a stone in the wall called
out, “I am God.” And once at midnight he listened to this mysterious
and baleful utterance, “He shall eat eleven days longer or thereabout.”
At last he was persuaded by his kinsman, “Johnny of Norfolk,” to
leave Weston and travel to East Anglia. John Baily alludes to this
drastic change in the poet’s life as “a last heroic service rendered
to him by his cousin.” The wisdom and kindness of the move have always
seemed dubious. “Johnny of Norfolk” happened to be a progenitor
of the present writer, and even as a child he remembers noting the
strangely unimaginative look of the good man’s features as represented
in a family portrait. It is incredible to believe that so spruce and
bepowdered an individual should have been able to understand the
difficult and delicate nature of the obligations he was undertaking.
There is evidence that the ailing poet resented the change. A few days
before he left he wrote on a window shutter of his home the following
words:
Farewell, dear scenes, forever closed to me;
Oh, for what sorrows must I now exchange ye?
Once in Norfolk, under the care of his energetic kinsman, things went
from bad to worse. The few remaining letters penned by Cowper hit
one to the heart. He recognized in the wayside grass of the Norfolk
lanes the same herbs that he had so often gathered for his pet birds
and is reminded of that long interim of years when he was at least
_half-happy_. He writes to Lady Hasketh:
Oh, that there could be pity, or if not that, at least forbearance,
for the most forlorn of all men! Such I am, and expect to be in a
condition worse than such tomorrow. Farewell--W. C.
Mrs. Unwin was slowly dying and the poet knew it. “Sally, is there life
above-stairs?” he asked the maidservant on the morning before the end
came. When told of her death he persisted in declaring that she was not
“actually dead,” but it was easy enough to dislodge any delusion upon
that score by simply showing him the face of the woman who had been his
constant companion for so many years. With one shrill, wild cry the
nightcapped hermaphrodite turned from the bedside, never to mention her
name again.
Slowly the years passed, with William Cowper sitting “still and
silent as a stone.” Terrible indeed must have been the thoughts that
passed through that diseased brain! Once more he heard voices; and
to counteract their influence “Johnny of Norfolk,” a man of infinite
resource, had tubes let into that silent chamber, little tin tubes,
through which he caused to have piped words of comfort in attempted
emulation of the awful voice of God!
The end approached. They asked him how he felt. “I feel,” answered
William Cowper, “unutterable despair.” On his deathbed they brought him
a cordial, but he waved it aside. “What can it signify?”
It is satisfactory to learn that in the opinion of my
great-grandfather, when at length at liberty to scrutinize the corpse,
there rested upon the dead poet’s face an expression of “holy surprise.”
Cowper was buried at East Dereham. A month before his death for one
short interval his poetic genius returned to him and taking pen in hand
he wrote “The Castaway.” Even to this day the terrible and tragic lines
of this tremendous poem trouble our imaginations. What a cry is here!
What an appalling cry!
No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone,
When, snatched from all effectual aid,
We perished, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.
JAMES THOMSON
The attitude of forlorn despair which finds perpetual recurrence in the
minds of certain types of human beings when they come to look beneath
the surface of existence, has never, perhaps, been given more complete
and final expression than in the poetry of James Thomson. There remains
indeed nothing further to be said, for this unfortunate man has found
it in him to curse the womb that bare him and the paps which he has
sucked and to outface God and go down into the pit at last with his
terrible avowals still unretracted.
James Thomson was born in 1834, of Scots parentage. His father was a
sea-captain, and a man apparently as capable of holding his own against
the storms of the Atlantic as was his son against those other more
terrible gales that beat in upon him from eternity. For six days, we
are told, the master of the good ship “Eliza Stewart” never left the
bridge; stood there, in fact, until carried below broken and paralyzed;
and up to the very last year of his tragic life his son may be said to
have remained at his post with no less resolution.
James Thomson was trained to be an army school master. At the age of
eighteen, while quartered at Ballincollig, in Cork, he fell in love
with a young girl named Matilda Wella. After he had known her for two
years she died; a calamity of which the full and bitter consciousness
remained with Thomson for a quarter of a century. There is scarcely
one of his poems that has not some allusion to this child, and in the
end, when the awful history of his days was at last concluded, a lock
of her hair was buried with him.
In Ireland, he also met Charles Bradlaugh who, having already got into
trouble for his free-thinking views, had enlisted as a common trooper.
When Bradlaugh was on sentry duty it was Thomson’s custom to walk by
his side, and one gets an interesting picture of these two men who were
destined to become so famous, discoursing philosophy under the summer
stars.
In 1862, Thomson was expelled from the service for a slight breach of
military discipline. For the next five years he lived in London in the
house of Charles Bradlaugh, earning his livelihood as best he could
by office work and journalism. This period was in all probability
the happiest of his life. With his friend to satisfy his craving for
companionship, and Hypatia and Alice Bradlaugh to satisfy his more
sentimental affections, he would seem to have attained to some measure
of contentment. In the evenings, he would tell stories to the children
or sit smoking with their father, and on Sundays and holidays the whole
party would often go out for excursions or perhaps walk together to the
grave of Charles Lamb.
It was now that his poems began to appear in the _National Reformer_.
Many of them are marred by that same tone of forced jocularity which
spoils his letters. Now and again, however, they are excellent, as, for
example, the one entitled “l’Ancien Régime,” the bitter, satyrical
quality of which is altogether characteristic of his temper.
Who has a thing to bring
For a gift to our Lord the King?
A harlot brought him her flesh,
Her lusts, and the manifold mesh
Of her wiles, intervolved with caprice;
Harlotry’s just the thing
To bring as a gift for our King.
Thomson made at this time two expeditions out of England, one to
America as the secretary to some mining corporation in Colorado,
and one to Spain as a correspondent for the New York _World_. The
latter enterprise proved a complete failure: sufficient copy was not
forthcoming. Soon after his return a quarrel with Bradlaugh threw him
once for all upon his own resources and he became for the rest of his
life what is known as a “single-room bachelor” in the East End of
London.
There were thousands and thousands of human kind
In this desert of brick and stone:
But some were deaf and some were blind,
And he was there alone.
Closed up in one small room, as it were in a cage, he dragged out the
rest of his life, day by day.
The publication in 1874, of his masterpiece “The City of Dreadful
Night,” brought him into contact with several of the more discerning
men of letters of the day. George Meredith, Philip Bourke Marston, W.
M. Rossetti, Emerson and Longfellow all recognized its value. He sent
copies of it to Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot, no comment, however,
being evoked from the former old curmudgeon, though the ethical-minded
novelist was considerate enough to write a letter to him in which she
expressed the hope “that a mind informed with so much passionate energy
would soon produce works with a wide embrace of human fellowship in
them.”
Slowly the dull years passed by with penury, disappointment and
insomnia as his three constant companions. At certain periods he would
endeavour to drown in alcohol the misery of his weary and jaded mind,
but it was only to return to his sordid surroundings, after the bout
was over, in a fit of even greater depression. That people could ever
think of time as passing swiftly was to James Thomson incomprehensible--
This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake
Wounded and slow and very venomous;
From his diaries we get a devastating insight into the dreariness of
his life, into the agony that too often, alas! in this world besets an
imaginative and sensitive nature submerged in commonplace surroundings.
Day followed day in uneventful melancholy procession, and each was
as like to each in its neutral tone as one dull English penny is to
another. From his walks along the depressing streets of London, he
would return to his lodging house, would open the dreary house-door
and, passing through the tiny hall, smelling of today’s cooking,
yesterday’s gas, and innumerable forgotten inmates, stumble up the dark
stairway to be confronted at last by the same books, the same dirty
and hateful litter that he had left so short a time before. It is no
wonder that references to the weather play so important a part in these
journals, references to the visibility or invisibility of sun or moon,
those two free luminaries that moved above his head with so large and
tranquil an assurance.
Bitter easterly. Some sun. Aftn. walk about Soho. (bought
coal-scuttle; after three years!) Moon keen as crystal, sky pale
and cloudless, stars few and dim, ground like iron, wind like a
razor.
... Cold slight snow; fine morning, livid day. Snowing pretty
heavily at night (9 p. m.). Picked just twenty-one sticks out of my
grate, the rest being quite enough to light the fire.
Nov. 2nd, 1874. Forty years old to-day. Cold; third day of fog.
Congenial natal weather.
It was at this time that James Thomson wrote that curious poem called
“In the Room.”
The afternoon has grown late and still the curtains of the apartment
remain undrawn,
And nimble mice slept, wearied out
With such a double night’s uproar;
At last in the silent dimness the very furniture becomes articulate!
The mirror, the cupboard and finally the bed, speak!
I know when men are good or bad,
When well or ill, he slowly said;
When sad or glad, when sane or mad,
And when they sleep alive or dead.
. . . . . .
The bed went on, ‘This man who lies
Upon me now is stark and cold;
He will not any more arise,
And do the things he did of old.’
But envisage his release as he might in imaginative verse, James
Thomson’s life still dragged on, dragged on, with all the horrible
tenacity of some wretched animal whose spine is broken and yet does
not die. His insomnia grew worse, but still he survived,
Feeling the hands of the Infernal Powers
Heavy upon me for enormous ill.
In his ghastly poem to insomnia he describes with intolerable
vividness, the nerve-tortured state of one to whose brain even the
solace of sleep is denied; as if he alone, James Thomson, ex-army
schoolmaster, had been selected by some incredible and malign causality
to bear the burden of an immortal consciousness when all other men had
rest.
I heard the sounding of the midnight hour;
The others one by one had left the room,
In certain assurance that the gracious power
Of sleep’s fine alchemy would bless the gloom.
. . . . . .
But I with infinite weariness outworn,
Haggard with endless nights unblessed by sleep,
Ravaged by thoughts unutterably forlorn,
Plunged in despairs unfathomably deep,
Went cold and pale and trembling with affright
Into the desert vastitude of Night
Arid and wild and black.
. . . . . .
How I got through I know not, faint as death;
And then I had to climb the awful scarp,
. . . . . .
Perspiring with faint chills instead of heat,
Trembling, and bleeding hands and knees and feet;
Falling, to rise anew;
Until, with lamentable toil and travel
Upon the ridge of arid sand and gravel
I lay supine half-dead and heard the bells chime two.
Towards the end of his life he was occupied in writing certain literary
essays, selecting, curiously enough, amongst other writers no less a
subject than Walt Whitman, whose poetry at that time was little known
in England. There is something extremely affecting in this appreciation
of the great American avoucher written by the hand of the man who of
all others was the most unhappy. Might it really have been possible,
had the two ever met, that the great, life-giving, life-accepting
heart of Walt Whitman would have had vigour enough in its ample aplomb
to fortify and sustain the darkened spirit of the London poet? At
any rate, one experiences a strange sensation, as of miraculous help
arriving suddenly in a situation of desperate need, when one comes upon
a quotation of this kind in an article by Thomson:
Let the physicians and priest go home
I seize the descending man, and raise him with resistless will.
O despairer, here is my neck:
By God! you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me.
I dilate you with tremendous breath--I buoy you up;
Every room of the house I fill with armed force,
Lovers of me; bafflers of the graves.
It would be a mistake, however, to regard Thomson as a spiritual
weakling. He was not that. Rather, like Dante’s proud Italian,
damned for ever in the blackest abyss of Hell, he raises his hand in
blasphemous imprecation against Almighty God. “Take it, God, for it is
at thee that I aim it.”
“The City of Dreadful Night” contains passages of extraordinary and
appalling power. But, as James Thomson himself declared, its appeal is
likely always to be limited.
If any care for the weak words here written,
It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten,
Whose faith and hope are dead, and who would die.
The conception of the poem, with its sombre imagery, is terrific. The
world in which we live is likened to a vast, doomed city which lifts
its “mass enorm” in the centre of an arid desert. The city is enveloped
in a dim penumbra through the nebulous light of which street-lights
burn obscurely. “Amidst the sounding solitudes,” “ranged mansions”
overshadow everything, “still as tombs” where
Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,
Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!
Along the darkened sidewalks of this tremendous and awful metropolis,
James Thomson makes his way, following close upon another figure
“because he seemed to walk with an intent.”
As I came through the desert, thus it was,
As I came through the desert.
How the reiteration of those famous lines beats in upon the brain after
a while, like the regular trending, appalling in its heavy monotony, of
hostile feet on a pavement outside one’s door:
As I came through the desert, thus it was
As I came through the desert ...
But I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear.
In the resonant alleys along which they go they see
worn faces that look deaf and blind
Like tragic masks of stone. With weary tread,
Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,
Or sit foredone and desolately ponder
Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.
They glimpse a thousand evil things ominous and dreadful.
After a hundred steps I grew aware
Of something crawling in a lane below;
It seemed a wounded creature prostrate there
That sobbed with pangs in making progress slow,
The hind limbs stretched to push, the fore limbs then
To drag.
The thing looked up, and behold it was a man:
Long grey unreverened locks befouled with mire.
A haggard filthy face with bloodshot eyes,
An infamy for manhood to behold.
At last they draw near to a vast cathedral whose portentous sculptured
mass, shadowed far up in the cold, limitless darkness of the night,
overlooks a moonlit, cloistral lawn across the wide expanse of
which dim crowds of wavering phantom citizens are hurrying. The two
travellers enter with the throng, and there in the vast, hollow,
many-aisled sanctuary, with tinted moonbeams slanting down through the
high mullioned windows, they await the Preacher. Suddenly a voice goes
echoing through the vaulted tracery.
And I have searched the heights and depths, the scope
Of all our Universe, with desperate hope
To find some solace for your wild unrest.
And now at last authentic word I bring,
Witnessed by every dead and living thing;
Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
There is no God; no Fiend with names divine
Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
It is to satiate no Being’s gall.
. . . . . .
I find no hint throughout the Universe
Of good or ill, of blessings or of curse;
I find alone Necessity Supreme;
With infinite Mystery, abysmal dark,
Unlighted ever by the faintest spark
For us the flitting shadows of a dream.
. . . . . .
The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
. . . . . .
This little life is all we must endure,
The grave’s most holy peace is ever sure,
We fall asleep and never wake again.
As the years passed, James Thomson’s melancholy grew deeper and
deeper. Dejected, poverty-stricken, unrecognized, he still tramped the
streets, and still from his bed in his lodging house stared blankly
into an ultimate void. In the beginning of the year 1882, something
seems to have given way in him at last and, fully cognizant of what
he was doing, he deliberately set about to drink himself to death.
He was thrown out into the streets by his landlord. Again and again
with a strange dogged determination he tried to force his way into the
miserable abode which, after all, was the only home he knew. “I must
have a roof over my head.”
Four months passed by and he was still alive. It is known that he
spent some part of the time in jail; for the rest, he drifted about in
the purlieus of Wapping-Old-Stairs and The Isle of Dogs. Most of his
friends lost sight of him. A few of them saw him at rare intervals, and
always from his finely moulded head, furrowed now with deep lines, his
blue eyes looked out with abject defiance. On one occasion he was seen
in a tavern, dressed in mud-stained, ragged clothes. He was wearing a
pair of carpet slippers, through the broken soles of which his naked
feet were clearly visible.
Then suddenly he appeared in the rooms of Philip Bourke Marston,
the blind poet. Although Marston could not see his guest there was
something about his wild speech that filled the blind man with terrible
misgivings. Fortunately, William Sharp, the critic, happened to come in
later in the afternoon. He found Thomson lying on Marston’s bed, in a
pool of blood, almost unconscious. He had the sick man conveyed to the
London University Hospital where, it is said, he lay for a long time
on the bare bench of the common waiting-room until the house physician
found time to attend to him. What, exactly, were Thomson’s last words
has never been divulged. It has been hinted that they were such as to
cause even his friends to look askance. “I shall get out of here on
Monday, even if it’s in my coffin” was one sentence shrieked out by
the frenzied man who could not die. His words proved happily true. On
the following Monday he, the atheist, theophobist, life hater, found
rest at last for his “homeless mind,” in a good hour, under six feet
of honest earth. No religious service was said over his grave. Free at
length from
Infections of unutterable sadness,
Infections of incalculable madness,
Infections of incurable despair,