given to the word nature by different schools of thought were
characteristic of profoundly different conceptions of the world and its
order. There is a sense in which it may be said with perfect accuracy
that the worship of nature, so far from being a fresh doctrine of the
new school, was the most characteristic tenet of the school from which
it dissented. All the speculative part of the English literature in the
first half of the eighteenth century is a prolonged discussion as to the
meaning and value of the law of nature, the religion of nature, and the
state of nature. The deist controversy, which occupied every one of the
keenest thinkers of the time, turned essentially upon this problem:
granting that there is an ascertainable and absolutely true religion of
nature, what is its relation to revealed religion? That, for example, is
the question explicitly discussed in Butler's typical book, which gives
the pith of the whole orthodox argument, and the same speculation
suggested the theme of Pope's 'Essay on Man,' which, in its occasional
strength and its many weaknesses, is perhaps the most characteristic,
though far from the most valuable product of the time. The religion of
nature undoubtedly meant something very different with Butler or Pope
from what it would have meant with Wordsworth or Coleridge--something so
different, indeed, that we might at first say that the two creeds had
nothing in common but the name. But we may see from Rousseau that there
was a real and intimate connection. Rousseau's philosophy, in fact, is
taken bodily from the teaching of his English predecessors. His
celebrated profession of faith through the lips of the Vicaire Savoyard,
which delighted Voltaire and profoundly influenced the leaders of the
French Revolution, is in fact the expression of a deism identical with
that of Pope's essay.[18] The political theories of the Social Contract
are founded upon the same base which served Locke and the English
political theorists of 1688; and are applied to sanction the attempt to
remodel existing societies in accordance with what they would have
called the law of nature. It is again perfectly true that Rousseau drew
from his theory consequences which inspired Robespierre, and would have
made Locke's hair stand on end; and that Pope would have been
scandalised at the too open revelation of his religious tendencies. It
is also true that Rousseau's passion was of infinitely greater
importance than his philosophy. But it remains true that the logical
framework into which his theories were fitted came to him straight from
the same school of thought which was dominant in England during the
preceding period. The real change effected by Rousseau was that he
breathed life into the dead bones. The English theorists, as has been
admirably shown by Mr. Morley in his 'Rousseau,' acted after their
national method. They accepted doctrines which, if logically developed,
would have led to a radical revolution, and therefore refused to develop
them logically. They remained in their favourite attitude of compromise,
and declined altogether to accommodate practice to theory. Locke's
political principles fairly carried out implied universal suffrage, the
absolute supremacy of the popular will, and the abolition of class
privileges. And yet it never seems to have occurred to him that he was
even indirectly attacking that complex structure of the British
Constitution, rooted in history, marked in every detail by special
conditions of growth, and therefore anomalous to the last degree when
tried by _à priori_ reasoning, of which Burke's philosophical eloquence
gives the best explanation and apology. Similarly, Clarke's theology is
pure deism, embodied in a series of propositions worked out on the model
of a mathematical text-book, and yet in his eyes perfectly consistent
with an acceptance of the orthodox dogmas which repose upon traditional
authority. This attitude of mind, so intelligible on this side of the
Channel, was utterly abhorrent to Rousseau's logical instincts.
Englishmen were content to keep their abstract theories for the closet
or the lecture-room, and dropped them as soon as they were in the pulpit
or in Parliament. Rousseau could give no quarter to any doctrine which
could not be fitted into a symmetrical edifice of abstract reasoning. He
carried into actual warfare the weapons which his English teachers had
kept for purposes of mere scholastic disputation. A monarchy, an order
of privileged nobility, a hierarchy claiming supernatural authority,
were not logically justifiable on the accepted principles. Never mind,
was the English answer, they work very well in practice; let us leave
them alone. Down with them to the ground! was Rousseau's passionate
retort. Realise the ideal; force practice into conformity with theory;
the voice of the poor and the oppressed is crying aloud for vengeance;
the divergence of the actual from the theoretical is no mere trifle to
be left to the slow action of time; it means the misery of millions and
the corruption of their rulers. The doctrine which had amused
philosophers was to become the war-cry of the masses; the men of '89
were at no loss to translate into precepts suited for the immediate
wants of the day the doctrines which found their first utterance in the
glow of his voluminous eloquence; and the fall of the Bastille showed
the first vibrations of the earthquake which is still shaking the soil
of Europe.
It is easy, then, to give a logical meaning to Rousseau's return to
nature. The whole inanimate world, so ran his philosophy, is perfect,
and shows plainly the marks of the Divine workmanship. All evil really
comes from man's abuse of freewill. Mountains, and forests, and seas,
all objects which have not suffered from his polluting touch, are
perfect and admirable. Let us fall down and worship. Man, too, himself,
as he came from his Creator's hands, is perfect. His 'natural'--that is,
original--impulses are all good; and in all men, in all races and
regions of the earth, we find a conscience which unerringly
distinguishes good from evil, and a love of his fellows which causes man
to obey the dictates of his conscience. And yet the world, as we see it,
is a prison or a lazar-house. Disease and starvation make life a burden,
and poison the health of the coming generations; those whom fortune has
placed above the masses make use of their advantages to harden their
hearts, and extract means of selfish enjoyment from the sufferings of
their fellow-creatures. What is the source of this heartrending discord?
The abuse of men's freewill; that is, of the mysterious power which
enables us to act contrary to the dictates of nature. What is the best
name for the disease which it generates? Luxury and corruption--the two
cant objects of denunciations which were as popular in the
pre-revolutionary generation as attacks upon sensationalism and
over-excitement at the present day. And what, then, is the mode of
cure? The return to nature. We are to make history run backwards, to
raze to its foundations the whole social and intellectual structure that
has been erected by generations of corrupt and selfish men. Everything
by which the civilised man differs from some theoretical pretension is
tainted with a kind of original sin. Political institutions, as they
exist, are conveniences for enabling the rich to rob the poor, and
churches contrivances by which priests make ignorance and superstition
play into the hands of selfish authority. Level all the existing order,
and build up a new one on principles of pure reason; give up all the
philosophical and theological dogmas, which have been the work of
designing priests and bewildered speculators, and revert to that pure
and simple religion which is divinely implanted in the heart of every
uncorrupted human being. The Savoyard vicar, if you have any doubts,
will tell you what is the true creed; and if you don't believe it, is
Rousseau's rather startling corollary, you ought to be put to death.
That final touch shows the arbitrary and despotic spirit characteristic
of the relentless theorist. I need not here inquire what relation may be
borne by Rousseau's theories to any which could now be accepted by
intelligent thinkers. It is enough to say that there would be, to put it
gently, some slight difficulty in settling the details of this pure
creed common to all unsophisticated minds, and in seeing what would be
left when we had destroyed all institutions alloyed by sin and
selfishness. The meaning, however, in this connection of his love of
nature, taking the words in their mere common-sense, is in harmony with
his system. The mountains, whose worship he was the first to adumbrate,
if not actually to institute, were the symbols of the great natural
forces free from any stain of human interference. Greed and cruelty had
not stained the pure waters of his lovely lake, or dimmed the light to
which his vicar points as in the early morning it grazes the edges of
the mighty mountain buttresses. Whatever symbolism may be found in the
Alps, suggesting emotions of awe, wonder, and softened melancholy, came
unstained by the association with the vices of a complex civilisation.
If poets and critics have not quite analysed the precise nature of our
modern love of mountain scenery, the sentiment may at least be
illustrated by a modern parallel. The most eloquent writer who, in our
day, has transferred to his pages the charm of Alpine beauties, shares
in many ways Rousseau's antipathy for the social order. Mr. Ruskin would
explain better than anyone why the love of the sublimest scenery should
be associated with a profound conviction that all things are out of
joint, and that society can only be regenerated by rejecting all the
achievements upon which the ordinary optimist plumes himself. After all,
it is not surprising that those who are most sick of man as he is should
love the regions where man seems smallest. When Swift wished to express
his disgust for his race, he showed how absurd our passions appear in a
creature six inches high; and the mountains make us all Liliputians. In
other mouths Rousseau's sentiment, more fully interpreted, became
unequivocally misanthropical. Byron, if any definite logical theory were
to be fixed upon him, excluded the human race at large from his
conception of nature. He loved, or talked as though he loved, the
wilderness precisely because it was a wilderness; the sea because it
sent men 'shivering to their gods,' and the mountains because their
avalanches crush the petty works of human industry. Rousseau was less
anti-social than his disciple. The mountains with him were the great
barriers which kept civilisation and all its horrors at bay. They were
the asylums for liberty and simplicity. There the peasant, unspoilt as
yet by _trinkgelds_, not oppressed by the great, nor corrupted by the
rich, could lead that idyllic life upon which his fancy delighted. In a
passage quoted, as Sainte-Beuve notices, by Cowper, Rousseau describes,
with his usual warmth of sentiment, the delightful _matinée anglaise_
passed in sight of the Alps by the family which had learnt the charms of
simplicity, and regulated its manners and the education of its children
by the unsophisticated laws of nature. It is doubtless a charming
picture, though the virtuous persons concerned are a little
over-conscious of their virtue, and it indicates a point of coincidence
between the two men. Rousseau, as Mr. Morley says, could appreciate as
well as Cowper the charms of a simple and natural life. Nobody could be
more eloquent on the beauty of domesticity; no one could paint better
the happiness of family life, where the main occupation was the
primitive labour of cultivating the ground, where no breath of
unhallowed excitement penetrated from the restless turmoil of the
outside world, where the mother knew her place, and kept to her placid
round of womanly duties, and where the children were taught with a
gentle firmness which developed every germ of reason and affection,
without undue stimulus or undue repression. And yet one must doubt
whether Cowper would have felt himself quite at ease in the family of
the Wolmars. The circle which gathered round the hearth at Olney to
listen for the horn of the approaching postman, and solaced itself with
cups 'that cheer but not inebriate,'[19] would have been a little
scandalised by some of the sentiments current in the Vaudois paradise,
and certainly by some of the antecedents of the party assembled. Cowper
and Mrs. Unwin, and even their more fashionable friend, Lady Austen,
would have felt their respectable prejudices shocked by contact with the
new Héloïse; and the views of life taken by their teacher, the converted
slaveholder, John Newton, were as opposite as possible to those of
Rousseau's imaginary vicar. Indeed, Rousseau's ideal families have that
stain of affectation from which Cowper is so conspicuously free. The
rose-colour is laid on too thickly. They are too fond of taking credit
for universal admiration of the fine feelings which invariably animate
their breasts; their charitable sentiments are apt to take the form of
very easy condonation of vice; and if they repudiate the world, we
cannot believe that they are really unconscious of its existence.
Perhaps this dash of self-consciousness was useful in recommending them
to the taste of the jaded and weary society, sickening of a strange
disease which it could not interpret to itself, and finding for the
moment a new excitement in the charms of ancient simplicity. The real
thing might have palled upon it. But Rousseau's artificial and
self-conscious simplicity expressed that vague yearning and spirit of
unrest which could generate a half-sensual sentimentalism, but could be
repelled by genuine sentiment. Perhaps it not uncommonly happens that
those who are more or less tainted with a morbid tendency can denounce
it most effectually. The most effective satirist is the man who has
escaped with labour and pains, and not without some grievous stains,
from the slough in which others are still mired. The perfectly pure has
sometimes too little sympathy with his weaker brethren to place himself
at their point of view. Indeed, as we shall have occasion to remark,
Cowper is an instance of a thinker too far apart from the great world to
apply the lash effectually.
Rousseau's view of the world and its evils was thus coherent enough,
however unsatisfactory in its basis, and was a development of, not a
reaction against, the previously dominant philosophy; and, though using
a different dialect and confined by different conditions, Cowper's
attack upon the existing order harmonises with much of Rousseau's
language. The first volume of poems, in which he had not yet discovered
the secret of his own strength, is in form a continuation of the satires
of the Pope school, and in substance a religious version of Rousseau's
denunciations of luxury. Amongst the first symptoms of the growing
feeling of uneasy discontent had been the popularity of Brown's
now-forgotten 'Estimate.'
The inestimable estimate of Brown
Rose like a paper kite, and charmed the town,
says Cowper; and he proceeds to show that, though Chatham's victorious
administration had for a moment restored the self-respect of the
country, the evils denounced by Brown were symptoms of a profound and
lasting disease. The poems called the 'Progress of Error,'
'Expostulation,' 'Truth,' 'Hope,' 'Charity,' and 'Conversation,' all
turn upon the same theme. Though Cowper is for brief spaces playful or
simply satirical, he always falls back into his habitual vein of
meditation. For the ferocious personalities of Churchill, the
coarse-fibred friend of his youth, we have a sad strain of lamentation
over the growing luxury and effeminacy of the age. It is a continued
anticipation of the lines in the 'Task,' which seem to express his most
serious and sincere conviction.
The course of human ills, from good to ill,
From ill to worse, is fatal, never fails.
Increase of power begets increase of wealth,
Wealth luxury, and luxury excess:
Excess the scrofulous and itchy plague,
That seizes first the opulent, descends
To the next rank contagious, and in time
Taints downwards all the graduated scale
Of order, from the chariot to the plough.
That is his one unvariable lesson, set in different lights, but
associated more or less closely with every observation. The world is
ripening or rotting; and, as with Rousseau, luxury is the most
significant name of the absorbing evil. That such a view should commend
itself to a mind so clouded with melancholy would not be at any time
surprising, but it fell in with a widely spread conviction. Cowper had
not, indeed, learnt the most effective mode of touching men's hearts.
Separated by a retirement of twenty years from the world, with which he
had never been very familiar, and at which he only 'peeped through the
loopholes of retreat,' his satire wanted the brilliance, the quickness
of illustration from actual life, which alone makes satire readable. His
tone of feeling too frequently suggests that the critic represents the
querulous comments of old ladies gossiping about the outside world over
their tea-cups, easily scandalised by very simple things. Mrs. Unwin was
an excellent old lady, and Newton a most zealous country clergyman.
Probably they were intrinsically superior to the fine ladies and
gentlemen who laughed at them. But a mind acclimatised to the atmosphere
which they breathed inevitably lost its nervous tone. There was true
masculine vigour underlying Cowper's jeremiads; but it was natural that
many people should only see in him an amiable valetudinarian, not
qualified for a censorship of statesmen and men of the world. The man
who fights his way through London streets can't stop to lament over
every splash and puddle which might shock poor Cowper's nervous
sensibility.
The last poem of the series, however, 'Retirement,' showed that Cowper
had a more characteristic and solacing message to mankind than a mere
rehearsal of the threadbare denunciations of luxury. The 'Task' revealed
his genuine power. There appeared those admirable delineations of
country scenery and country thoughts which Sainte-Beuve detaches so
lovingly from the mass of serious speculation in which they are
embedded. What he, as a purely literary critic, passed over as
comparatively uninteresting, gives the exposition of Cowper's
intellectual position. The poem is in fact a political, moral, and
religious disquisition interspersed with charming vignettes, which,
though not obtrusively moralised, illustrate the general thesis. The
poetical connoisseur may separate them from their environment, as a
collector of engravings might cut out the illustrations from the now
worthless letterpress. The poor author might complain that the most
important moral was thus eliminated from his book. But the author is
dead, and his opinions don't much matter. To understand Cowper's mind,
however, we must take the now obsolete meditation with the permanently
attractive pictures. To know why he so tenderly loved the slow windings
of the sinuous Ouse, we must see what he thought of the great Babel
beyond. It is the distant murmur of the great city that makes his little
refuge so attractive. The general vein of thought which appears in every
book of the poem is most characteristically expressed in the fifth,
called 'A Winter Morning Walk.' Cowper strolls out at sunrise in his
usual mood of tender playfulness, smiles at the vast shadow cast by the
low winter sun, as he sees upon the cottage wall the
Preposterous sight! the legs without the man.
He remarks, with a passing recollection of his last sermon, that we are
all shadows; but turns to note the cattle cowering behind the fences;
the labourer carving the haystack; the woodman going to work, followed
by his half-bred cur, and cheered by the fragrance of his short pipe. He
watches the marauding sparrows, and thinks with tenderness of the fate
of less audacious birds; and then pauses to examine the strange fretwork
erected at the mill-dam by the capricious freaks of the frost. Art, it
suggests to him, is often beaten by Nature; and his fancy goes off to
the winter palace of ice erected by the Russian empress. His friend
Newton makes use of the same easily allegorised object in one of his
religious writings; though I know not whether the poet or the divine
first turned it to account. Cowper, at any rate, is immediately diverted
into a meditation on 'human grandeur and the courts of kings.' The
selfishness and folly of the great give him an obvious theme for a
dissertation in the true Rousseau style. He tells us how 'kings were
first invented'--the ordinary theory of the time being that
political--deists added religious--institutions were all somehow
'invented' by knaves to impose upon fools. 'War is a game,' he says, in
the familiar phrase,
'Which were their subjects wise
Kings would not play at.'
But, unluckily, their subjects are fools. In England indeed--for Cowper,
by virtue of his family traditions, was in theory a sound Whig--we know
how far to trust our kings; and he rises into a warmth on behalf of
liberty for which he thinks it right to make a simple-minded apology in
a note. The sentiment suggests a vigorous and indeed prophetic
denunciation of the terrors of the Bastille, and its 'horrid towers and
dungeons.'
There's not an English heart that would not leap
To hear that ye were fallen at last!
Within five or six years English hearts were indeed welcoming the event
thus foretold as the prospect of a new era of liberty. Liberty, says
Cowper, is the one thing which makes England dear. Were that boon lost,
I would at least bewail it under skies
Milder, amongst a people less austere;
In scenes which, having never known me free,
Would not reproach me with the loss I felt.[20]
So far Cowper was but expressing the sentiments of Rousseau, omitting,
of course, Rousseau's hearty dislike for England. But liberty suggests
to Cowper a different and more solemn vein of thought. There are worse
dungeons, he remembers, than the Bastille, and a slavery compared with
which that of the victims of French tyranny is a trifle--
There is yet a liberty unsung
By poets, and by senators unpraised,
Which monarchs cannot grant, nor all the power
Of earth and hell confederate take away.
The patriot is lower than the martyr, though more highly prized by the
world; and Cowper changes his strain of patriotic fervour into a
prolonged devotional comment upon the text,
He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves besides.
Who would have thought that we could glide so easily into so solemn a
topic from looking at the quaint freaks of morning shadows? But the
charm of the 'Task' is its sincerity; and in Cowper's mind the most
trivial objects really are connected by subtle threads of association
with the most solemn thoughts. He begins with mock heroics on the sofa,
and ends with a glowing vision of the millennium. No dream of human
perfectibility, but the expected advent of the true Ruler of the earth,
is the relief to the palpable darkness of the existing world. The
'Winter Walk' traces the circle of thought through which his mind
invariably revolves.
It would be a waste of labour to draw out in definite formula the
systems adopted, from emotional sympathy, rather than from any logical
speculation, by Cowper and Rousseau. Each in some degree owed his
power--though Rousseau in a far higher degree than Cowper--to his
profound sensitiveness to the heavy burden of the time. Each of them
felt like a personal grief, and exaggerated in a distempered
imagination, the weariness and the forebodings more dimly present to
contemporaries. In an age when old forms of government had grown rigid
and obsolete, when the stiffened crust of society was beginning to heave
with new throes, when ancient faiths had left mere husks of dead formulæ
to cramp the minds of men, when even superficial observers were startled
by vague omens of a coming crash, or expected some melodramatic
regeneration of the world, it was perhaps not strange that two men,
tottering on the verge of madness, should be amongst the most
impressive prophets. The truth of Butler's speculation, that nations,
like individuals, might go mad, was about to receive an apparent
confirmation. Cowper, like Rousseau, might see the world through the
distorting haze of a disordered fancy, but the world at large was itself
strangely disordered, and the smouldering discontent of the inarticulate
masses found an echo in their passionate utterances. Their voices were
like the moan of a coming earthquake.