We had sight of George III. in our last chapter, and we shall catch
sight of him again from time to time; for he was a persistent lingerer,
and a most obstinate liver. We had glimpses, too, of that cheery,
sunny-faced, eloquent, ill-balanced man, Charles James Fox, whom we
ought to remember as a true friend to America, in those critical days
when taxation was swelling into tyranny. William Pitt, whom we also
saw, and to whom we would have been delighted to listen, would never
have won greatly upon American sympathies; too cold, too austere, too
classic, too fine. Sheridan, on the other hand, would, and did,
conquer hearts everywhere; but unfortunately spending his forces in
great paroxysms of effort; one while the greatest comedist, and again
the greatest orator, always the greatest spendthrift; {220} and anon
the greatest debtor, who only pays his debts by dying.
Sterne covered better his deficiencies of money and of soul. Who could
have put more or truer feeling into the story of the poor ill
lieutenant of the inn, whom Corporal Trim (at Uncle Toby's instance)
had gone to see, and of whom he makes report? And uncle Toby says he
will fetch him home and set him afoot in his regiment.
"Never," says Trim, "can he march."
"But he _shall_ march," says uncle Toby.
"He will die in his tracks," says Trim.
"He shall _not_ die," says Toby, with an oath--which oath, says Sterne,
the recording angel washed away, so soon as it was uttered. The Rev.
Laurence Sterne, it is to be feared, counted too largely upon the swash
of such tender recording angels. Only a host of them, with best
lachrymal equipment, could float away poor Sterne's misdeeds!
We touched upon the sad life and fate of the marvellous boy,
Chatterton--not a great poet, but with an exuberant poetic glow within
him which gave new brightness to old Romanticism, and {221} which
kindled in after days many a fancy into flame--up and down the pages of
later and bolder poets. Were his forgeries perhaps instigated by the
Ossianic mystification?
_Macpherson and other Scots._
[Sidenote: James Macpherson.]
I do not know if you have ever encountered the poems of Ossian. They
are out of fashion now; I doubt if fragments even get into the
school-books; but some of my readers may remember in a corner of the
art-gallery of Yale University a painting, with two life-size figures
in it, by Colonel John Trumbull--a limp and bleeding, and somewhat
dainty warrior, leaning upon the shoulder of a flax-haired maiden; with
a little strain from Ossian's Fingal, in the placard below, to tell the
story. The mighty Lamderg (who is the warrior) died: and Gelchossa
(the flax-haired young woman) "mourned three days beside her love. The
hunters found her dead." The picture is, I suspect, almost the only
permanent mark in America of the amazing popularity which once belonged
to the strange, weird, monotonous, gloomy, {222} thin poems of Ossian.
There are descriptions of mountain crags in them, and of splintered
pines, of thunder blasts and of ocean hoar; and there are crags again,
and bleeding warriors, and flax-haired women; harps, moonlight, broken
clouds, and crags again: I cite a few fragments:
"The oaks of the mountains fall; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the
moon herself is lost in heaven; but thou art forever the same,
rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. When the world is dark with
tempests, when thunder rolls and lightning flies, thou lookest in thy
beauty from the clouds and laughest at the storm.
... "Rise, moon, from behind thy clouds! Stars of the night arise,
lead me, some light, to the place where my love rests from the chase
alone--his bow near him unstrung; his dogs panting around him. The
stream and the wind roar aloud, I hear not the voice of my love."
[Sidenote: Poems of Ossian.]
And yet these poetic flights, which, it would seem might be made up
from collective but injudicious use of the Songs of Solomon and the
mental exaltations which come from over-indulgence in tea drinking, or
other strong waters, were borne, on a swift gale of plaudits in the
latter half of the last century all over Europe. Professors of
Literature (such as Dr. Hugh Blair) wrote {223} treatises upon their
fire and grace; such men as Goethe and Schiller were fast admirers;
Napoleon was said to be bewildered by their beauty. Of course they had
French translation; and there were versions in German, Greek, Dutch,
Spanish, and Latin. The Abbe Cesarotti, besides writing a dissertation
in favor of the authenticity of the Gaelic poems, gave an Italian
version (the favorite one of Napoleon) which in parts has a rounded
play of vocables that makes one forget all poverty of invention. Thus
when Ossian says,
"Thy side that is white as the foam of the troubled sea, when dark
winds pour it on rocky Cuthon----" it is rounded by the Italian into
this pretty bit of mellifluence:--
"Il tuo fianco ch' e candido come la spuma del turbato mare,
Quando gli oscuri venti lo spingono contro la mormorante
Roccia di Cutone----"[1]
{224}
And who, pray, was this Macpherson[2] of the Ossian poems, and what was
his claim? He was a Scotch school-master; born somewhere in the upper
valley of the Spey, beyond the Grampians and in the heart of the
Highlands. He had been at Aberdeen University awhile, and again at
Edinboro'; but took no degree at either. He wrote and printed some
poor verse when twenty; followed it up with some fragments of old
Gaelic song, which commanded wide attention; and in 1762 published that
poem of Fingal--professedly by Ossian, an old Gaelic bard; and this
made him famous. The measure and range were new, and there was a
torrent of flame and thunder and love and fury running through it which
captivated: he went up to London--was appointed to go with Governor
Johnston to Florida,[3] in America; remained there at Pensacola, a year
or more; but quarrelled with his chief (he had rare aptitude for
quarrelling) and came back in 1766. Some English {225} historical work
followed; but with little success or profit. Yet he was a canny
Scotchman, and so laid his plans that he became agent for some rich
nabob of India (from those pickings winning a great fortune
eventually); entered Parliament in 1780; had a country house at Putney,
where he entertained lavishly; and at last built a great show place in
the Highlands, near to his birth-place--which one may see to-day--with
an obelisk to his memory, looking down on the valley of the Spey; and
not so far away from the old coach-road, that passes through
Killiecrankie, from Blair Athol to Inverness, but the coachman can show
it--as he did to me--with his whip.
There were those who questioned from the beginning whether the Ossianic
poems did really come from the Gaelic;--Dr. Johnson among them, whose
contemptuous doubts infuriated the Macpherson to such a degree that he
challenged the doughty Doctor. Johnson replied in what may be called
forcible speech:--
"Mr. James Macpherson, I received your foolish and impudent letter. I
hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat, by
the menaces of a ruffian. What {226} would you have me retract? I
thought your book an imposture; I think it an imposture still. Your
rage I defy. Your abilities, since your Homer,[4] are not so
formidable: and what I hear of your morals inclines me to pay
regard--not to what you shall _say_, but to what you shall _prove_.
You may print this if you will."
Dr. Johnson carried a big oaken cudgel with him, when he travelled in
Scotland. Hume, on the other hand, was, with Scotch patriotism,
inclined to accept at first, Macpherson's story of authenticity:[5] but
even he says of this author, with whom he came into altercation--"I
have scarce ever known a man more perverse and unamiable." The
Highland Society investigated the matter, and reported that while there
was no trace of a complete poem in Gaelic corresponding {227} to
Macpherson's verse, there were snatches of Highland song and ballads
which supported his allegations. The question is not even yet fully
settled, and is hardly worth the settlement. Macpherson's own
obstinacies and petulancies put unnumbered difficulties in the way; he
resented any denial of Gaelic origin for his verse; he resented any
denial of his capacity to sing better than the Gael; he promised to
show Highland originals, and always made occasions for delay; withal he
was as touchy as a bad child, and as virulent as a fish-woman. Nothing
satisfied him; one of those men whose steak is always too much done--or
too little;--the sermon always too short or too long. He might have
been the "Stout Gentleman" of _Bracebridge Hall_: for he was a big man,
and always wore wax-topped boots. Old Mrs. Grant too--who must have
been a neighbor of his, when she lived at Laggan--says that he had
habits (with theories about social proprieties) which "excluded him
from decent society." Mrs. Grant was, however "verra" correct, and a
stickler for the minor, as well as the major virtues.
Macpherson left inheritors of his name, and of {228} his estates in
that upper valley of the Spey; and a daughter of his became the wife of
Sir David Brewster, the eminent scientist. He was buried "by special
request" in Westminster Abbey; he had been always covetous of such
public testimonials to his consequence. Yet if his book of Ossianic
poems was ten-fold better than it is, it would hardly give an enduring,
or a brilliant gloss to the memory of James Macpherson.
But whatever may be said for the Gaelic, it is certain that Scotticisms
were in those days winning their place in song and in tale. Since the
day, in the first quarter of the century (1725), when Allan Ramsay had
sent out from his book shop in Edinboro', his rustic eclogue of the
_Gentle Shepherd_, a love had been ripening and growing for those
Scottish strains which were to find their last and unsurpassable
expression by and by, in the glow and passion of Burns.
Meantime there were hundreds along the Teviot, and the Esk, and by
Ettrickdale, who rolled under their tongues delightedly the Scottish
bubbles of song, which broke--now from a bookseller, now from a
schoolmaster, now from a Jacobite, {229} and now from a "stickit"
minister.[6] I will give you one taste of this Scotticism of the
borders, were it only to clear your thought of the gloom and crags of
Ossian. It is usually attributed to Halket, a Jacobite school-master,
not so well known as Ramsay or Robert Ferguson:--
[Sidenote: Logie O'Buchan.]
"O Logie o' Buchan, O Logie the laird,
They ha'e ta'en awa' Jamie, that delved in the yard,
Wha played on the pipe, and the viol sae sma',
They ha'e ta'en awa' Jamie, the flower o' them a'.
"Tho' Sandy has ousen, has gear and has kye,
A house and a hadden, and siller forbye;
Yet I'd tak' my ain lad, wi' his staff in his hand,
Before I'd ha'e him, wi' the houses and land.
"My Daddie looks sulky, my Minnie looks sour,
They frown upon Jamie because he is poor;
Tho' I lo'e them as weel as a daughter should do
They're nae half sa dear to me, Jamie, as you.
"I sit on my creepie, I spin at my wheel
And think on the laddie that lo'ed me sae weel,
He had but ae saxpence, he brak it in twa
And gied me the hauf o't, when he ga'd awa'."
{230}
Yet the poet, from whom we quote, died only three years before Burns
was born; but I think we can see from the graces of this modest
schoolmaster singer, that taste and accomplishment were both ripening
in those north latitudes for the times and the man, in which and in
whom, such poetry as that of Burns should be possible.
There was, too, another growth in those days in that northern capital
of Great Britain; Dr. Robertson had written his History of America and
his History of Charles V. Adam Smith (the friend of Hume) was busy on
his _Wealth of Nations_ (published during the year in which Hume died).
Hugh Blair, the eloquent doctor, was delivering his lectures on
rhetoric. Henry Mackenzie, the amiable Dean of the Edinboro' literati,
was writing his _Man of Feeling_ and his _Julia de Roubigne_,--books of
great reputation in the early part of this century, but with graces in
them that were only imitative, and sentiment that was dismally affected
and over-wrought; and there was Lord Kames, the _Gentleman Farmer_,
with a fine great house in the Canongate, who wrote on criticism, with
acuteness and taste. You will not read any of the {231} books of these
last-named people; 't were unfair to ask you to do so; but they were
preparing the way for that literary development which will find
expression before many years in the columns of the _Edinburgh Review_
(established at the beginning of this century), and in the border
minstrelsy of Scott.
_George Crabbe._
[Sidenote: Crabbe.]
We step back into England now, to find two poets whose principal work
belonged to the closing years of the last century; and with echoes,
fresh and strong, trailing over into the beginning of this. Neither
their work nor their lives belonged to the noises or to the atmosphere
of London. City sounds do not press into their verse; but instead are
the sounds of sea-waves or of winds on woods, or of church bells, or of
the clink and murmur of the lives of cottagers. The first I name to
you of these two is George Crabbe[7]--a name that {232} may sound
strangely, being almost unknown and unconsidered now; yet fifty years
ago there was not a reading-book in any of the schools, nor an album
full of elegant selections, which was not open for the story of
Ph[oe]be Dawson, or a glimpse of the noble peasant, Isaac Ashford. But
all that is gone:[8]
"I see no more those white locks thinly spread
Round the bald polish of that honored head;
No more that awful glance on playful wight
Compelled to knee and tremble at the sight,
To fold his fingers all in dread the while
Till Mister Ashford softened to a smile."
This gives the manner and strain of Crabbe; it is Pope, but it is Pope
muddied and rusticated; {233} Pope in cow-skin shoes, instead of Pope
in prunella.
Crabbe was born in the little shore town of Aldborough--looking
straight out upon the North Sea; and the rhythmic beat of those waves
so stamped itself on his boyish brain, that it came out afterward--when
he could manage language, in which he had great gift--very clear and
very real; there's nothing better, all up and down his rural tales,
than his fashion of putting waves into his rhythmic measures--as you
shall see:--
"Upon the billows rising--all the deep
Is restless change: the waves so swelled and steep,
Breaking and sinking, and the sunken swells
Nor one, one moment, in its station dwells.
* * * * *
Curled as they come, they strike with furious force,
And then, renewing, take their grating course,
Raking the rounded flints, which ages past
Rolled by their rage, and shall to ages last.
* * * * *
In shore, their passage tribes of sea-gulls urge,
And drop for prey within the sweeping surge,
Oft in the rough opposing blast they fly
Far back, then turn and all their force apply,
While to the storm they give their weak complaining cry,
Or clap the sleek white pinion on the breast,
And in the restless ocean dip for rest."
{234}
Fashions of poets and of poetry may go by, but such scenes on those
North Sea shores will never go by. Crabbe was son of a customs' man,
of small, turbulent character, and the boy had starveling education; he
picked up so much as qualified him at length for surgeon (or doctor, as
we say) in that small shore town, but gained little: so, threw all
behind him--a girl he loved, and a town he did not love--and with three
guineas in his pocket, and a few manuscript poems, set off for London.
He was there, indeed, in the very times we have talked of; when wits
met at the Turk's Head, when Fox thundered in Parliament, when Sterne
was just dead; but who should care for this stout young fellow from the
shore? One man--one only, does care; it is the warm Irish-hearted
Edmund Burke, who being appealed to and having read the verses which
the adventurer brought to his notice, befriends him, takes him to his
house, makes him know old Dr. Johnson; and his first book is launched
and talked of under their patronage. Then this great friend Burke
conspires religiously with the Bishop of Norwich to plant the poet in
the Church. Why not? He has some Latin; he {235} means well, and can
write a sermon. So we find him returned to that wild North Sea shore
with a little church to feed, and the church people, in their turn, to
feed him. But the arrangement does not run smoothly; those verses of
his, unlike most rural verse, have shown all the darker colors of
peasant life; if full of sympathy, they were full of bitter, homely
truth. The muck, the mire, the griefs, the crimes, the unthrift, the
desolation, have given sombre tint to his village pictures; perhaps
those shore people resent it; perhaps he is incapable of the cheeriness
which should brighten charity; at any rate he goes away under private
preferment to a private chaplaincy at Belvoir Castle, the seat of the
Duke of Rutland.
There is not a more princely house among the baronial homes of England.
It sits among wooded hills--which to the eye of a Suffolk man would be
mountains--where Lincolnshire and Leicestershire join: the towers of
Lincoln Cathedral are in sight at the north, and Nottingham Castle in
the west: and there is a glitter in some near valley of an affluent of
the Trent, shining amid billows of foliage; while within the stately
{236} home,[9] the Suffolk doctor could have regaled himself with
examples of Rubens and of Murillo, of Teniers, Poussin, and Vandyke.
The Duke of Rutland was a kindly man, a sentimental lover of
literature, enjoying the verse of Crabbe, and proud of patronizing him,
but lacking the supreme art of putting him at ease among his titled
visitors; perhaps enjoying from his high poise, the disturbing
embarrassments with which the good-natured poet was beset under the
bewildering attentions of some butler, who outshone the host in his
trappings, and in his lordly condescension to the level of an
apothecary's apprentice.
It was not altogether pleasant for Crabbe; and when afterward he had
married his old flame of Aldborough, and by invitation of the Duke (who
was absent in Ireland) was allowed to partake of the hospitalities of
the castle, the ironical obsequience of the flunkeys all, drove him
away from the baronial roof. Through the influence of friends he
secures livings,--first in Dorset, and afterward {237} in
Leicestershire (1789), almost within sight of Belvoir towers.
Hereabout, or in near counties, where he has parochial duties, he
vegetates slumberously, for twenty years or more. He preaches,
practises his old apothecary craft, drives (his wife holding the
reins), idles, writes books and burns them, grows old, has children,
loves flowers, and on one occasion, mounts his horse and gallops sixty
miles for a scent of the salt air which he had snuffed as a boy.
Meanwhile the old haunts in London, which he knew for so brief a day,
know him no more; his old friends are dead, his hair is snowy, his
purposes wavering.
But his children are of an age now to spur him to further literary
effort; with the opening of the present century he rallies his power
for new songs; and thereafter the slowly succeeding issues of the
_Parish Register_, _The Borough_, and the _Tales of the Hall_, pave a
new way for him into the courts of Fame. He secures another and more
valuable living in the South of England (Wiltshire), where the incense
of London praises can reach him more directly. One day in 1819 he goes
away from his publishers with bills for {238} L3,000[10] in his pocket;
must take them home to show them to his boy, John; he loves that boy
and other children over much--more, it is to be feared, than he had
ever done that mother, the old flame of Aldborough, in respect of whom
there had been intimations of incompatibility; hence, perhaps, the
interjection of that sixty-mile ride for a snuff of the freedom of the
waves. He died at last down in Trowbridge (his new living), a little
way southward of Bradford in Wiltshire; and his remains lie in the
chancel of the pretty church there.
We must think of him, I believe, as a good, honest-minded, well-meaning
man; dull, I dare say as a preacher; diffuse, meandering, homely and
lumbering as a poet; yet touching with raw and lively colors the griefs
of England's country-poor; and with a realism that is hard to match,
painting the flight of petrels and of the curlew, {239} and the great
sea waves that gather and roll and break along his lines.
William Cowper.
[Sidenote: Cowper.]
The other poet, to whom allusion has been made, living beside him, in
that country of England, yet not near him nor known to him, was William
Cowper. You know him better: you ought to know him better. Yet he
would have managed a church--if a parish had been his--worse than
Crabbe did. I fear he would not have managed children so prudently;
and if he had ever married, I feel quite sure that his wife would have
managed him.
Cowper was of an excellent family, being the son[11] of a church
rector, and was born at the rectory (now destroyed), which once stood
under the wing of the pretty church that, with its new decorations,
still dominates the picturesque valley {240} town of Great-Berkhamsted,
on the line of the London and Birmingham Railway. He studied at
Westminster--being school-fellow with Churchill, the poet, and with
Warren Hastings--of whose Trial we have had somewhat to say: afterward
he entered a solicitor's office at the Temple, where Thurlow (later,
Lord Chancellor) chanced to be clerk at the same time. He had fair
amount of money, good prospect of a place under Government--his uncle,
Ashley Cowper, being a man of position and influence.
This uncle had two daughters, to one of whom this young gentleman said
tender things;--too tender to be altogether cousinly--in which regard
she proved as over-cousinly as he. But the Papa stamped out that
little fire of love before it had grown into great flame. There is
reason, however, to believe that the smouldering of it had its
influences upon Miss Theodora all through her life; and who shall say
that it did not touch the great melancholy of the future poet with a
sting of tenderness? There was, however, no outspoken lamentation; the
feminine nature of the man accepted the decision of the uncle as a
decree of fate; {241} there was never any great capacity in him for
struggle or for controversy, either with men, or with untoward
circumstance.
Meantime, the expected preferment came to young Cowper--a place, or
places of value and of permanence, which he had need only to take with
a bold hand and purpose; but the bold hand was lacking; and his
hesitancy multiplied difficulties which could only be met by
examination for fitness before the Lords; that examination stares him
awfully in the face; he wilts under the bare prospect; is hedged by
doubts; palters with his weakness; falls into a wretched state of
melancholy, and--buys laudanum to make an end of it all;--then, he has
flashes of light, and waves of a redeeming firmness chase over his
mind; but finally, on the very day on which the examination was to take
place, he makes a miserable effort at self-destruction. Was ever a
man, before or since, who would commit suicide to avoid lucrative
office? William Cowper, with only an ordinary share of average common
sense, and unhampered by the trappings of genius that belonged to him,
would have "gone on" for this place; secured it; {242} made his easy
fortune; lived a good humdrum life; died lamented, and never heard of.
The poet's fine brain, however--which had been exercised already in
musical verse--built up mountains of difficulty; he told in after
years, with a curious sincerity, all the details of his struggle--how
he held the phial of laudanum to his lips and how he flung it away; how
he held a knife at his heart; and finally, how he threw his garter,
which served for a gallows-rope, over the chamber door, and hung "till
the bitterness of temporal death was past." Righteously enough, after
all these weakly resolves, which a man of energy would have made
strong, he falls into utter distraction; religious doubts and fears
racking him, and lunacy throttling him; and so this young Templar of
the bright prospects goes away to the care of a mad-doctor. But long
curative processes are needful; and he emerges at last--the blush of
his youth all gone, and he lighted up and a-flame with tempestuous
religious exhilaration. He would go into orders, but he can never face
a congregation; so he plants himself, by the advice of friends, who
prop up his waning income, in the flats of Huntingdon, {243} where the
river Ouse winds round and round amid the low lands, and sighs among
its sedges. He seems like a castaway; what he has written has been
little--a boy's pastime; what he has purposed has been weak; and I
daresay that his uncle Ashley Cowper, and his cousin Theodora, and his
fellow-clerk Thurlow, thought they would never hear of him more, until,
on some far-off day, a funeral invitation might come.
But Cowper was presently domesticated in the home of a Rev. Mr.
Unwin--an old gentleman, who has a youngish wife (though eight or ten
years Cowper's senior) and a son, who is also a preacher. These take
kindly to the invalid; they relish his religious exuberance; they pity
his frailties; and then and there begins an intimate friendship between
Mrs. Unwin and our poet, which for its purity, its strength, its
constancy, is without a parallel, I think, in English literary annals.
It was about the year 1765 that he first fell in with Mrs. Unwin, and
he was never thereafter separated from her--for any considerable time,
counting by days--up to the year of her death in 1796.
For the first sixteen years of this exile upon {244} the flats along
the Ouse--whether at Huntingdon or at Olney (where they removed after
the death of the elder Unwin) there must have been, what most
men--whether poets or not--would count a weary and monotonous
succession of weeks and days and months. There were few neighbors of
culture; no village growth or stir; lands all tamely level; streams all
sluggish; industries of the smallest; no shooting--no fishing--no
cards--no visitors--no driving; sermon reading in the morning; sermon
reading in the evening; walks in the garden; digging in the garden
(mild insanity intervening); petting the tame hares; feeding the doves;
reading Mistress More; singing hymns; drinking tea; listening for the
larks; listening to Mrs. Unwin; drowsing--sleeping--dreaming! Only
contrast that dreary trail of days with those passed by Goldsmith, or
by Johnson, or by Hume!
But good Mrs. Unwin, who is not only kindly, but has some dormant
literary tastes, does rouse him to some poetic labors; she does have
faith in his talent; and it was in 1782, I think, that his book
containing _Table-talk_ and other {245} verse, first appeared, and by
its quiet graces and naturalness provoked inquiry in London, and
amongst cultured readers everywhere--as to who this "William Cowper of
the Inner Temple" might possibly be? The Rev. John Newton of Olney
knew, for the poet had assisted him in the preparation of a certain
_Olney Hymn Book_, published not long before: and then and thereafter
this John Newton---a good-hearted, well-meaning divine of an
old-fashioned stamp, was pounding, as occasion served, with the hard
hammer of his unblinking Calvinism upon the quivering sensibilities of
the distraught poet.
But on the breezes of this new reputation which Cowper had wrought came
in these times (1782) a fresh bird, in fine feathers, floating into the
domestic aviary of Olney. This was Lady Austen, the widow of a
baronet--who planted herself there--not without due graces of previous
introduction (1781)--between the Unwin and the Cowper for three years,
giving a new stir to the poet's brain. Out of that quickening came,
after a night of travail, that ever-fresh ballad of _John Gilpin's
Ride_; it was popular from the first; and {246} some two years
later--it was publicly recited by Henderson--a famous Falstaffian actor
of that epoch, it ran like wild-fire through the journals of the day,
while the shops along Fleet Street showed in their windows a great
jolly picture of Gilpin and his intractable nag cantering past the Bell
at Edmonton.
The shy poet, however, did not go to London to reap any honors which
might have accrued; he stayed at Olney, working at a new _Task_, toward
the conception and accomplishment of which he was led by the witty
sallies and engaging devices of the new favorite--Lady Austen. This
piquant woman, with her charming vivacities, her alluring airs, her
dazzling chat, had wrapped the quiet, melancholy poet all around with a
witchery to which he was unused and which tempted him to his best
powers of song. He was proud of his fresh successes, and grateful to
that new and fascinating member of their little household who had
provoked and prompted them. What should disturb this cheery party of
three--save the ever-lasting unfitness of the odd number? Perhaps the
thought of this came first through some {247} tender reproachful look
of good Mrs. Unwin; perhaps the poet, stirred to some new wrestle with
his withered heart, found out its emptiness; perhaps the gay,
enchanting new-comer grew weary of the song she had provoked--or weary
of a welcome that stayed so calm. At any rate she took wing;[12] there
was a little flurry of correspondence to mark the parting, which, I
dare say, both may have wished should be forgotten.
Meanwhile the new, and much-loved poem which had grown out of this
intimacy did worthily, and very largely, extend Cowper's fame. Miss
Hannah More was enchanted by it; "such an original and philosophic
thinker," she says; "such genuine Christianity, and such a divine
simplicity!" Even Corsica Boswell calls him "a genius;" and Lord
Thurlow (whose favors to the poet never went beyond words) says of his
old chum, "If there is a good man on earth, it is William Cowper!"
But the waves of applause break only with a {248} low dolorous murmur
upon the threshold of that Olney home. A cruel sense of his own
undeservings weighs upon his spirits; he cannot ask a blessing at his
meals, for who would listen? he cannot pray, for it would be mockery;
and he consoles himself with the poor satisfaction of not being a
mocker. He discusses village and public affairs with his barber,
Wilson (who had conscientiously refused to dress Lady Austen's hair
upon a Sunday). Alluding to American affairs, in that crisis when a
treaty of peace was discussed at Versailles (1783) between France and
America, he speaks of the "thirteen pitiful colonies which the king of
England chose to keep and the king of France to obtain--if he could."
A little later, at the same crisis, he says:
"I may be prejudiced against these [Americans], but I do not think them
equal to the task of establishing an empire.... You will suppose me a
politician; but, in truth, I am nothing less. These are the thoughts
that occur to me while I read the newspaper; and when I have laid it
down, I feel myself more interested in the success of my 'early
cucumbers' than in any part of this important subject."[13]
{249}
_His Later Life._
It was only in the latter part of his career that the poet made the
acquaintance of William Hayley,[14] his future biographer, who had been
drawn toward Cowper by the charms of his verse and who came to visit
him: this friend, through his wide familiarity with the outer world,
had suborned bishops and clergy and public men to write to this
melancholy exile of Olney and cheer him with their praises--all which
praises fell like hail upon Cowper's window pane. And there had been a
little trip devised, to divert that weakened and fatigued mind, down to
Eartham in Sussex, where his friend Hayley has a beautiful place, and
where he brings the artist Romney, to paint the well-known portrait;
but there is no long stay away from the old covert on the flats of
Buckinghamshire; indeed this covert had taken new life within a few
years by the advent of a cousin, the Lady {250} Hesketh, the widowed
sister of his old lost Theodora; she had come with her carriage and
trappings, and taken a fine house, and sought to revive pleasantly all
the mundane influences of Lady Austen.
From Olney there had come about in those times--at the wise suggestion
of Lady Hesketh--a move over to the near village of Weston, which
thereafter became the poet's home. [On an April day many years
ago--moved by an old New England cleaving to the poems and the poet--I
strolled down from Newport Pagnell--to which place I had taken coach
from Northampton--following all the windings of the sluggish Ouse, to
Weston; stopping at the "Cowper's Oak" inn, I found next door his old
home--its front overgrown with roses--and strolled into his old garden;
and thence, by a door the gardener unlocked, into the "Wilderness;" the
usher regaling me with stories of the crazy poet whom he had seen in
his boyhood, and who loved the birds, and who wore a white tasselled
night-cap as he wandered in the garden alleys at noon.]
It was at Weston, I think, that the translation of Homer was--if not
undertaken--most largely {251} wrought upon. The regular occupation
involved counted largely in the dispersion of those despondent mists
that were gathering round him. He brought scholarly tastes and a quick
conscience to the work; a boy would be helped more to the thieving of
the proper English by Cowper's Homer, than by Pope's; but there was not
"gallop" enough in his nature for a live rendering; and he was too far
in-shore for the rhythmic beat of the multitudinous waves and too far
from the "hollow" ships.
In the intervals of this important labor--which was only fairly
successful, and gave him no such clutch upon the publisher's guineas as
Crabbe gained at a later day--only chance things were written. But
some of these chances were brimful of suggestion and of most beautiful
issues. That relating to his mother's picture--sent to him by some
cousinly hand--a flashing from the embers of his life, as it were, the
reader must know; who knows it too well?
"Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine--thy own sweet smile I see,
{252}
The same that oft in childhood solaced me.
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!"
But it is a poem from which quotation will no way serve. After the
death of Warton, poet Laureate (1790), Lady Hesketh, and other friends
were anxious that the Olney poet should succeed to that honor; Southey
says, he might have secured it; but Cowper can never, never go up to
court for a kissing of the king's hand.
And now there are coming fast drearier days and months to these good
people of the Weston home. The poet's mind, staggered perhaps by those
later Homeric labors, but more likely by the grievous religious doubts
which overhang him, loses from time to time its poise; and he goes
maundering, or silent, and with no smile for days, into the deserts of
melancholy.
[Sidenote: Death of Cowper.]
Mrs. Unwin, worn down by long fatigues, is at last smitten by
paralysis; and she whose life has been spent in serving must herself be
served; the poor poet bringing to that service all the instincts of
affection, and the wavering purpose of a shattered mind. Yet out of
this new gloom and {253} these terrors of the home comes that faultless
little poem inscribed to "My Mary."
"Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,
Are still more lovely in my sight
Than golden beams of Orient light,
My Mary.
"For could I view--nor them--nor thee
What sight worth seeing could I see?
The sun would rise in vain for me,
My Mary.
"Partakers of thy sad decline
Thy hands their little force resign,
Yet gently prest, press gently mine,
My Mary."
But here, as before, quotation counts for nothing; it cannot bring to
mind the mellowness and the tenderness which lurk in so many of the
lines and in all the flowing measure of the little poem. Mrs. Unwin
has embalmment in it that will keep her memory alive, longer than would
any tomb in Westminster.
Well, Mrs. Unwin dies at last in the town of East Dereham, Norfolk,
where they had taken her for "diversion"; and the poor poet died there
three years later and was buried beside her. {254} They were three
dreary years--which followed upon her death--for him and for those
about him. From time to time he touched a little bit of old work, but
put no joy in it; distraught--weary--smileless--only waiting.
[Sidenote: Cowper's poetry.]
Critics are agreed that we shall not rank him among the great poets;
but he comes nearer to their rank than anybody in his day believed
possible. He is so true; he is so tender; he is so natural. If in his
longer poems there is sometimes a lack of last finish, and an overplus
of language--there is a frankness of utterance and a billowy undulation
of movement that have compensating charms. He loves Nature as a boy
loves his play; his humanities are wakened by all her voices. He not
only seizes upon exterior effects with a painter's eye and hand, but he
has a touch which steals deeper meanings and influences and transfers
them into verse that flows softly and quietly as summer brooks. He
cannot speak or rhyme but the odors of the country cling to his words.
There is no crazy whirl of expletives which would apply to a hundred
scenes, but clear, forceful epithet, full of singleness of story:--
{255}
Far spires lifting over stretches of yellow grass-grown plain; marsh
birds trailing their flight by sluggish rivers; boats dragged
slumberously at noon-tide with seething bubbles in their wake; great
banks of woodland, wading through snows, or throwing shadows by
morning, and counter-shadows at evening, over the flanks of low hills
on which they stand in leafy platoons. And for sounds--far off
church-bells waking solitudes with their tremulous beat and jangle;
birds chasing the echoes of their own songs; bees murmurous over banks
of thyme; cattle lowing in the meadows; or the bay of some
hound--breaking full and clear, and lost again--as he follows, far off,
some cold trail amongst the hills.
Above all--he is English; the household has for him the sanctity of an
altar; firesides are lighted and glow with a sacred warmth; home
interests are always golden. Prone to idleness he is perhaps--mental
and physical; much femininity in him; his thought wavering and riding
on his rhyme. But he is good, kind; crudest to himself--sticking the
John Newton darts of Calvinism into his conscience, and loving the pain
of them.
{256}
I think we must always respect the name and the work of William Cowper.
In our next chapter we shall listen to the music of a different singer,
and to the story of a jollier, and yet of a far sadder life.
[1] As a matter of curiosity I give what appears to be the
corresponding Gaelic in a couplet of lines, from the version in Rev.
Archibald Clerk's Ossian:--
"A's gile na 'n cobhar,' tha sgavilte
Air muir o ghaillinn nan sian."
l. 75, Duan 1, Fionnghal.
[2] James Macpherson: b. 1736; d. 1796.
[3] Mr. Mackenzie (_Diss. lxxxvii., Edit. Highland Soc._, London, 1807)
says that he (Macpherson) took some of his Gaelic MSS. to Florida with
him and many were lost there.
[4] Macpherson had translated and published the Iliad in 1773. It will
interest my readers to know that a copy of this letter in Johnson's
hand-writing, was sold in 1875 for L50--five times the sum which he
received for the tale of Rasselas!
[5] Sir John Sinclair, a voluminous agricultural writer of Scotland,
was strenuous supporter of Macpherson's claims--respecting Ossianic
origin, etc. The best exhibit, however, of the Gaelic side of the
question may be found in the prefatory _Dissertation_ by Rev. Archibald
Clerk, to the beautiful edition of Ossian published by Blackwood & Sons
in 1870.
[6] George Halket, a Jacobite schoolmaster, d. 1756; Alexander Ross,
minister, b. 1699; d. 1784; John Skinner, Episcopal clergyman, b. 1721;
d. 1807.
[7] George Crabbe: b. 1754; d. 1832. _The Village_, _The Borough_, and
_Tales of the Hall_, are his best-known works. _Life_, by his son
(1834), is a very full and filially devout book of interesting reading.
[8] So late as 1808, the Edinburgh Review, after speaking of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, etc., continues in language which I
suppose is Jeffery's own:--
"From these childish and absurd affectations we turn with pleasure to
the manly sense and correct picturing of Mr. Crabbe; and after being
dazzled and made giddy with the elaborate raptures and obscure
originalities of these new artists, it is refreshing to meet again with
the spirit and nature of our old masters in the nervous pages of the
author [Crabbe] now before us." Vol. xii., p. 131, Edinboro' Edition.
[9] The old castle was burned in 1816, but has been rebuilt with more
than its old splendor.
[10] Smiles, in his _Memoirs of John Murray_--the publisher in
question--intimates, however, that the sum was far too large, and
Murray a loser by the bargain. Chap. xxii., p. 72, vol. ii. See also
Murray's own statement to that effect, p. 385, vol. ii.
[11] William Cowper, b. 1731; d. 1800. Life by Hayley, 1804; another,
by Southey (regarded as standard), published with edition of his works
in 1833-37. A recent life by Thomas Wright, chiefly valuable for its
local details.
[12] Lady Austen married some years later a French gentleman, M. de
Tardif, and died in Paris in 1802. She may be counted almost
joint-author (with Cowper) of _The Task_.
[13] P. 325, Life, etc., by Thomas Wright, London, 1892.
[14] William Hayley, b. 1745; d. 1820. Life of Cowper, 1803.
{257}