reflected by the national representatives. Nobody could be less of a
revolutionist than Cowper. His whiggism was little more than a
tradition. Though he felt bound to denounce kings, to talk about Hampden
and Sidney, and to sympathise with Mrs. Macaulay's old-fashioned
republicanism, there was not a more loyal subject of George III., or one
more disposed, when he could turn his mind from his pet hares to the
concerns of the empire, to lament the revolt of the American colonies.
The awakening of England from the pleasant slumbers of the eighteenth
century--for it seems pleasant in these more restless times--took place
in a curiously sporadic and heterogeneous fashion. In France the
spiritual and temporal were so intricately welded together, the
interests of the State were so deeply involved in maintaining the faith
of the Church, that conservatism and orthodoxy naturally went together.
Philosophers rejected with equal fervour the established religious and
the political creed. The new volume of passionate feeling, no longer
satisfied with the ancient barriers, poured itself in both cases into
the revolutionary channel. In England no such plain and simple issue
existed. We had our usual system of compromises in practice, and hybrid
combinations of theory. There were infidel conservatives and radical
believers. The man who more than any other influenced English history
during that century was John Wesley. Wesley was to the full as deeply
impressed as Rousseau with the moral and social evils of the time. We
may doubt whether Cowper's denunciations of luxury owed most to
Rousseau's sentimental eloquence or to the matter-of-fact vigour of
Wesley's 'Appeals.' Cowper's portrait of Whitefield--'Leuconomus,' as he
calls him, to evade the sneers of the cultivated--and his frequent
references to the despised sect of Methodists reveal the immediate
source of much of his indignation. So far as those evils were caused by
the intellectual and moral conditions common to Europe at large, Wesley
and Rousseau might be called allies. Both of them gave satisfaction to
the need for a free play of unsatisfied emotions. Their solutions of the
problem were of course radically different; and Cowper only speaks the
familiar language of his sect when he taunts the philosopher with his
incapacity to free man from his bondage:
Spend all the powers
Of rant and rhapsody in virtue's praise,
Be most sublimely good, verbosely grand,
And with poetic trappings grace thy prose
Till it outmantle all the pride of verse;
where he was possibly, as Sainte-Beuve suggests, thinking of Rousseau,
though Shaftesbury was the more frequent butt of such denunciations. The
difference in the solution of the great problem of moral regeneration
was facilitated by the difference of the environment. Rousseau, though
he shows a sentimental tenderness for Christianity, could not be
orthodox without putting himself on the side of the oppressors. Wesley,
though feeling profoundly the social discords of the time, could take
the side of the poor without the need of breaking in pieces a rigid
system of class-privilege. The evil which he had to encounter did not
present itself as tyranny oppressing helplessness, but as a general
neglect of reciprocal duties verging upon license. On the whole,
therefore, he took the conservative side of political questions. When
the American war gave the first signal of coming troubles, the
combinations of opinion were significant of the general state of mind.
Wesley and Johnson denounced the rebels from the orthodox point of view
with curious coincidence of language. The only man of equal intellectual
calibre who took the same side unequivocally was the arch-infidel
Gibbon. The then sleepy Established Church was too tolerant or too
indifferent to trouble him: why should he ally himself with Puritans and
enthusiasts to attack the Government which at once supported and tied
its hands? On the other side, we find such lovers of the established
religious order as Burke associated with free-thinkers like Tom Paine
and Horne Tooke. Tooke might agree with Voltaire in private, but he
could not air his opinions to a party which relied in no small measure
on the political zeal of sound dissenters. Dissent, in fact, meant
something like atheism combined with radicalism in France; in England it
meant desire for the traditional liberties of Englishmen, combined with
an often fanatical theological creed.
Cowper, brought up amidst such surroundings, had no temptation to adopt
Rousseau's sweeping revolutionary fervour. His nominal whiggism was not
warmed into any subversive tendency. The labourers with whose sorrows he
sympathised might be ignorant, coarse, and drunken; he saw their faults
too clearly to believe in Rousseau's idyllic conventionalities, and
painted the truth as realistically as Crabbe: they required to be kept
out of the public-house, not to be liberated from obsolete feudal
disqualifications; a poacher, such as he described, was not the victim
of a brutal aristocracy, but simply a commonplace variety of thief. And,
on the other hand, when he denounces the laziness and selfishness of the
Establishment, the luxurious bishops, the sycophantic curates, the
sporting and the fiddling and the card-playing parson, he has no thought
of the enmity to Christianity which such satire would have suggested to
a French reformer, but is mentally contrasting the sleepiness of the
bishops with the virtues of Newton or Whitefield.
'Where dwell these matchless saints?' old Curio cries.
'Even at your side, sir, and before your eyes,
The favour'd few, the enthusiasts you despise.'
And whatever be thought of Cowper's general estimate of the needs of his
race, it must be granted that in one respect his philosophy was more
consequent than Rousseau's. Rousseau, though a deist in theory, rejected
the deist conclusion, that whatever is, is right; and consequently the
problem of how it can be that men, who are naturally so good, are in
fact so vile, remained a difficulty, only slurred over by his fluent
metaphysics about freewill. Cowper's belief in the profound corruption
of human nature supplied him with a doctrine less at variance with his
view of facts. He has no illusions about the man of nature. The savage,
he tells us, was a drunken beast till rescued from his bondage by the
zeal of the Moravian missionaries; and the poor are to be envied, not
because their lives are actually much better, but because they escape
the temptations and sophistries of the rich and learned.
But how should this sentiment fit in with Cowper's love of nature? In
the language of his sect, nature is generally opposed to grace. It is
applied to a world in which not only the human inhabitants, but the
whole creation, is tainted with a mysterious evil. Why should Cowper
find relief in contemplating a system in which waste and carnage play so
conspicuous a part? Why, when he rescued his pet hares from the general
fate of their race, did he not think of the innumerable hares who
suffered not only from guns and greyhounds, but from the general
annoyances incident to the struggle for existence? Would it not have
been more logical if he had placed his happiness altogether in another
world, where the struggles and torments of our everyday life are
unknown? Indeed, though Cowper, as an orthodox Protestant, held that
ascetic practices ministered simply to spiritual conceit, was he not
bound to a sufficiently galling form of asceticism? His friends
habitually looked askance upon all those pleasures of the intellect and
the imagination which are not directly subservient to the religious
emotions. They had grave doubts of the expediency of his studies of the
pagan Homer. They looked with suspicion upon the slightest indulgence in
social amusements. And Cowper fully shared their sentiments. A taste for
music, for example, generally suggests to him a parson fiddling when he
ought to be praying; and following once more the lead of Newton, he
remarks upon the Handel celebration as a piece of grotesque profanity.
The name of science calls up to him a pert geologist, declaring after an
examination of the earth
That He who made it, and revealed its date
To Moses, was mistaken in its age.
Not only is the great bulk of his poetry directly religious or
devotional, but on publishing the 'Task' he assures Newton that he has
admitted none but Scriptural images, and kept as closely as possible to
Scriptural language. Elsewhere he quotes Swift's motto, _Vive la
bagatelle!_ as a justification of 'John Gilpin.' Fox is recorded to have
said that Swift must have been fundamentally a good-natured man because
he wrote so much nonsense. To me the explanation seems to be very
different. Nothing is more melancholy than Swift's elaborate triflings,
because they represent the efforts of a powerful intellect passing into
madness under enforced inaction, to kill time by childish occupation.
And the diagnosis of Cowper's case is similar. He trifles, he says,
because he is reduced to it by necessity. His most ludicrous verses have
been written in his saddest mood. It would be, he adds, 'but a shocking
vagary' if the sailors on a ship in danger relieved themselves 'by
fiddling and dancing; yet sometimes much such a part act I.' His love of
country sights and pleasures is so intense because it is the most
effectual relief. 'Oh!' he exclaims, 'I could spend whole days and
nights in gazing upon a lovely prospect! My eyes drink the rivers as
they flow.' And he adds, in his characteristic vein of thought, 'if
every human being upon earth could feel as I have done for many years,
there might perhaps be many miserable men among them, but not an
unawakened one could be found from the Arctic to the Antarctic circle.'
The earth and the sun itself are, he says, but 'baubles;' but they are
the baubles which alone can distract his attention from more awful
prospects. His little garden and greenhouse are playthings lent to him
for a time, and soon to be left. He 'never framed a wish or formed a
plan,' as he says in the 'Task,' of which the scene was not laid in the
country; and when the gloomiest forebodings unhinged his mind, his love
became a passion. He is like his own prisoner in the Bastille playing
with spiders. All other avenues of delight are closed to him; he
believes, whenever his dark hour of serious thought returns, that he is
soon to be carried off to unspeakable torments; all ordinary methods of
human pleasure seem to be tainted with some corrupting influence; but
whilst playing with his spaniel, or watching his cucumbers, or walking
with Mrs. Unwin in the fields, he can for a moment distract his mind
with purely innocent pleasures. The awful background of his visions,
never quite absent, though often, we may hope, far removed from actual
consciousness, throws out these hours of delight into more prominent
relief. The sternest of his monitors, John Newton himself, could hardly
grudge this cup of cold water presented, as it were, to the lips of a
man in a self-made purgatory.
This is the peculiar turn which gives so characteristic a tone to
Cowper's loving portraits of scenery. He is like the Judas seen by St.
Brandan on the iceberg; he is enjoying a momentary relaxation between
the past of misery and the future of anticipated torment. Such a
sentiment must, fortunately, be in some sense exceptional and
idiosyncratic. And yet, once more, it fell in with the prevailing
current of thought. Cowper agrees with Rousseau in finding that the
contemplation of scenery, unpolluted by human passion, and the enjoyment
of a calm domestic life is the best anodyne for a spirit wearied with
the perpetual disorders of a corrupt social order. He differs from him,
as we have seen, in the conviction that a deeper remedy is wanting than
any mere political change; in a more profound sense of human wickedness,
and, on the other hand, in a narrower estimate of the conditions of
human life. His definition of Nature, to put it logically, would exclude
that natural man in whose potential existence Rousseau more or less
believed. The passionate love of scenery was enough to distinguish him
from the poets of the preceding school, whose supposed hatred of Nature
meant simply that they were thoroughly immersed in the pleasures of a
society then first developed in its modern form, and not yet undermined
by the approach of a new revolution. The men of Pope and Addison's time
looked upon country squires as bores incapable of intellectual pleasure,
and, therefore, upon country life as a topic for gentle ridicule, or
more frequently as an unmitigated nuisance. Probably their estimate was
a very sound one. When a true poet like Thomson really enjoyed the fresh
air, his taste did not become a passion, and the scenery appeared to him
as a pleasant background to his Castle of Indolence. Cowper's peculiar
religious views prevented him again from anticipating the wider and more
philosophical sentiment of Wordsworth. Like Pope and Wordsworth, indeed,
he occasionally uses language which has a pantheistic sound. He
expresses his belief that
There lives and works
A soul in all things, and that soul is God.
But when Pope uses a similar phrase, it is the expression of a decaying
philosophy which never had much vitality, or passed from the sphere of
intellectual speculation to affect the imagination and the emotions. It
is a dogma which he holds sincerely, it may be, but not firmly enough to
colour his habitual sentiments. With Wordsworth, whatever its precise
meaning, it is an expression of an habitual and abiding sentiment, which
rises naturally to his lips whenever he abandons himself to his
spontaneous impulses. With Cowper, as is the case with all Cowper's
utterances, it is absolutely sincere for the time; but it is a doctrine
not very easily adapted to his habitual creed, and which drops out of
his mind whenever he passes from external nature to himself or his
fellows. The indwelling divinity whom he recognises in every 'freckle,
streak, or stain' on his favourite flowers, seems to be hopelessly
removed from his own personal interests. An awful and mysterious decree
has separated him for ever from the sole source of consolation.
This is not the place to hint at any judgment upon Cowper's theology, or
to inquire how far a love of nature, in his sense of the words, can be
logically combined with a system based upon the fundamental dogma of the
corruption of man. Certainly a similar anticipation of the poetical
pantheism of Wordsworth may be found in that most logical of Calvinists,
Jonathan Edwards. Cowper, too, could be at no loss for scriptural
precedents, when recognising the immediate voice of God in thunder and
earthquakes, or in the calmer voices of the waterbrooks and the meadows.
His love of nature, at any rate, is at once of a narrower and sincerer
kind than that which Rousseau first made fashionable. He has no tendency
to the misanthropic or cynical view which induces men of morbid or
affected minds to profess a love of savage scenery simply because it is
savage. Neither does he rise to the more philosophical view which sees
in the seas and the mountains the most striking symbols of the great
forces of the universe to which we must accommodate ourselves, and which
might therefore rightfully be associated by a Wordsworth with the
deepest emotions of reverential awe. Nature is to him but a collection
of 'baubles,' soon to be taken away, and he seeks in its contemplation
a temporary relief from anguish, not a permanent object of worship. He
would dread that sentiment as a deistical form of idolatry; and he is
equally far from thinking that the natural man, wherever that vague
person might be found, could possibly be a desirable object of
imitation. His love of nature, in short, keen as it might be, was not
the reflection of any philosophical, religious, or political theory. But
it was genuine enough to charm many who might regard his theological
sentiments as a mere recrudescence of an obsolete form of belief. Mr.
Mill tells us how Wordsworth's poetry, little as he sympathised with
Wordsworth's opinions, solaced an intellect wearied with premature Greek
and over-doses of Benthamism. Such a relief must have come to many
readers of Cowper, who would put down his religion as rank fanaticism,
and his satire as anile declamation. Men suffered even then--though
Cowper was a predecessor of Miss Austen--from existing forms of 'life at
high pressure.' If life was not then so overcrowded, the evils under
which men were suffering appeared to be even more hopeless. The great
lesson of the value of intervals of calm retreat, of silence and
meditation, was already needed, if it is now still more pressing. Cowper
said, substantially, Leave the world, as Rousseau said, Upset the world.
The reformer, to say nothing of his greater intellectual power,
naturally interested the world which he threatened more than the recluse
whom it frightened. Limited within a narrower circle of ideas, and
living in a society where the great issues of the time were not
presented in so naked a form, Cowper's influence ran in a more confined
channel. He felt the incapacity of the old order to satisfy the
emotional wants of mankind, but was content to revive the old forms of
belief instead of seeking a more radical remedy in some subversive or
reconstructive system of thought. But the depth and sincerity of feeling
which explains his marvellous intensity of pathos is sometimes a
pleasant relief to the sentimentalism of his greater predecessor. Nor is
it hard to understand why his passages of sweet and melancholy musing by
the quiet Ouse should have come like a breath of fresh air to the jaded
generation waiting for the fall of the Bastille--and of other things.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Rousseau himself seems to refer to Clarke, the leader of the
English rationalising school, as the best expounder of his theory, and
defended Pope's Essay against the criticisms of Voltaire.
[19] A phrase by the way, which Cowper, though little given to
borrowing, took straight from Berkeley's 'Siris.'
[20] Lord Tennyson suggests the same consolation in the lines ending--
Yet waft me from the harbour-mouth,
Wild winds, I seek a warmer sky;
And I will see before I die
The palms and temples of the South.
_THE FIRST EDINBURGH REVIEWERS_
When browsing at random in a respectable library, one is pretty sure to
hit upon the early numbers of the 'Edinburgh Review,' and prompted in
consequence to ask oneself the question, What are the intrinsic merits
of writing which produced so great an effect upon our grandfathers? The
'Review,' we may say, has lived into a third generation. The last
survivor of the original set has passed away; and there are but few
relics even of that second galaxy of authors amongst whom Macaulay was
the most brilliant star. One may speak, therefore, without shocking
existing susceptibilities, of the 'Review' in its first period, when
Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, and Brougham were the most prominent names. A man
may still call himself middle-aged and yet have a distinct memory of
Brougham courting, rather too eagerly, the applause of the Social
Science Association; or Jeffrey, as he appeared in his kindly old age,
when he could hardly have spoken sharply of a Lake poet; and even of the
last outpourings of the irrepressible gaiety of Sydney Smith. But the
period of their literary activity is already so distant as to have
passed into the domain of history. It is the same thing to say that it
already belongs in some degree to the neighbouring or overlapping domain
of fiction.
There is, in fact, already a conventional history of the early
'Edinburgh Review,' repeated without hesitation in all literary
histories and assumed in a thousand allusions, which becomes a little
incredible when we take down the dusty old volumes, where dingy calf has
replaced the original splendours of the blue and yellow, and which have
inevitably lost much of their savour during more than half a century's
repose. The story of the original publication has been given by the
chief founders. Edinburgh, at the beginning of the century, was one of
those provincial centres of intellectual activity which have an
increasing difficulty in maintaining themselves against metropolitan
attractions. In the last half of the eighteenth century, such
philosophical activity as existed in the country seemed to have taken
refuge in the northern half of the island. A set of brilliant young men,
living in a society still proud of the reputation of Hume, Adam Smith,
Reid, Robertson, Dugald Stewart, and other northern luminaries, might
naturally be susceptible to the stimulus of literary ambition. In
politics the most rampant Conservatism, rendered bitter by the recent
experience of the French Revolution, exercised a sway in Scotland more
undisputed and vigorous than it is now easy to understand. The younger
men who inclined to Liberalism were naturally prepared to welcome an
organ for the expression of their views. Accordingly a knot of clever
lads (Smith was 31, Jeffrey 29, Brown 24, Horner 24, and Brougham 23)
met in the third (not, as Smith afterwards said, the 'eighth or ninth')
story of a house in Edinburgh and started the journal by acclamation.
The first number appeared in October 1802, and produced, we are told, an
'electrical' effect. Its old humdrum rivals collapsed before it. Its
science, its philosophy, its literature were equally admired. Its
politics excited the wrath and dread of Tories and the exultant delight
of Whigs. It was, says Cockburn, a 'pillar of fire,' a far-seen beacon,
suddenly lighted in a dark place. Its able advocacy of political
principles was as striking as its judicial air of criticism,
unprecedented in periodical literature. To appreciate its influence, we
must remember, says Sydney Smith, that in those days a number of
reforms, now familiar to us all, were still regarded as startling
innovations. The Catholics were not emancipated, nor the game-laws
softened, nor the Court of Chancery reformed, nor the slave-trade
abolished. Cruel punishment still disgraced the criminal code, libel was
put down with vindictive severity, prisoners were not allowed counsel in
capital cases, and many other grievances now wholly or partially
redressed were still flourishing in full force.
Were they put down solely by the 'Edinburgh Review?' That, of course,
would not be alleged by its most ardent admirers; though Sydney Smith
certainly holds that the attacks of the 'Edinburgh' were amongst the
most efficient causes of the many victories which followed. I am not
concerned to dispute the statement; nor in fact do I doubt that it
contains much truth. But if we look at the 'Review' simply as literary
connoisseurs, and examine its volumes expecting to be edified by such
critical vigour and such a plentiful outpouring of righteous indignation
in burning language as might correspond to this picture of a great organ
of liberal opinion, we shall, I fear, be cruelly disappointed. Let us
speak the plain truth at once. Everyone who turns from the periodical
literature of the present day to the original 'Edinburgh Review' will be
amazed at its inferiority. It is generally dull, and, when not dull,
flimsy. The vigour has departed; the fire is extinct. To some extent, of
course, this is inevitable. Even the magnificent eloquence of Burke has
lost some of its early gloss. We can read, comparatively unmoved,
passages that would have once carried us off our legs in the exuberant
torrent of passionate invective. But, making all possible allowance for
the fading of all things human, I think that every reader who is frank
will admit his disappointment. Here and there, of course, amusing
passages illuminated by Sydney Smith's humour or Jeffrey's slashing and
swaggering retain a few sparks of fire. The pertness and petulance of
the youthful critics are amusing, though hardly in the way intended by
themselves. But, as a rule, one may most easily characterise the
contents by saying that few of the articles would have a chance of
acceptance by the editor of a first-rate periodical to-day; and that the
majority belong to an inferior variety of what is now called
'padding'--mere perfunctory bits of work, obviously manufactured by the
critic out of the book before him.