Art of Letters — William Cowper Part I from beginning through "the creature he describes.”

VI. --WILLIAM COWPER

Cowper has the charm of littleness.

His life and genius were on the miniature scale, though his tragedy was a burden for Atlas.

He left several pictures of himself in his letters, all of which make one see him as a veritable Tom Thumb among Christians.

He wrote, he tells us, at Olney, in "a summerhouse not much bigger than a sedan-chair."

At an earlier date, when he was living at Huntingdon, he compared himself to "a Thames wherry in a world full of tempest and commotion," and congratulated himself on "the creek I have put into and the snugness it affords me."

His very clothes suggested that he was the inhabitant of a plaything world.

"Green and buff," he declared, "are colours in which I am oftener seen than in any others, and are become almost as natural to me as a parrot."

"My thoughts," he informed the Rev. John Newton, "are clad in a sober livery, for the most part as grave as that of a bishop's servants"; but his body was dressed in parrot's colours, and his bald head was bagged or in a white cap.

If he requested one of his friends to send him anything from town, it was usually some little thing, such as a "genteelish toothpick case," a handsome stock-buckle, a new hat--"not a round slouch, which I abhor, but a smart well-cocked fashionable affair"--or a cuckoo-clock.

He seems to have shared Wordsworth's taste for the last of these.

Are we not told that Wordsworth died as his favourite cuckoo-clock was striking noon?

Cowper may almost be said, so far as his tastes and travels are concerned, to have lived in a cage.

He never ventured outside England, and even of England he knew only a few of the southern counties.

"I have lived much at Southampton," boasted at the age of sixty, "have slept and caught a sore throat at Lyndhurst, and have swum in the Bay of Weymouth."

That was his grand tour.

He made a journey to Eastham, near Chichester, about the time of this boast, and confessed that, as he drove with Mrs. Unwin over the downs by moonlight, "I indeed myself was a little daunted by the tremendous height of the Sussex hills in comparison of which all I had seen elsewhere are dwarfs."

He went on a visit to some relations on the coast of Norfolk a few years later, and, writing to Lady Hesketh, lamented: "I shall never see Weston more.

I have been tossed like a ball into a far country, from which there is no rebound for me."

Who but the little recluse of a little world could think of Norfolk as a far country and shake with alarm before the "tremendous height" of the Sussex downs?

"We are strange creatures, my little friend," Cowper once wrote to Christopher Rowley; "everything that we do is in reality important, though half that we do seems to be push-pin."

Here we see one of the main reasons of Cowper's eternal attractiveness.

He played at push-pin during most of his life, but he did so in full consciousness of the background of doom.

He trifled because he knew, if he did not trifle, he would go mad with thinking about Heaven and Hell.

He sought in the infinitesimal a cure for the disease of brooding on the infinite.

His distractions were those not of too light, but of too grave, a mind.

If he picnicked with the ladies, it was in order to divert his thoughts from the wrath to come.

He was gay, but on the edge of the precipice.

I do not mean to suggest that he had no natural inclination to trifling.

Even in the days when he was studying law in the Temple he dined every Thursday with six of his old school-fellows at the Nonsense Club.

His essays in Bonnell Thornton and Coleman's paper, _The Connoisseur_, written some time before he went mad and tried to hang himself in a garter, lead one to believe that, if it had not been for his breakdown, he might have equalled or surpassed Addison as a master of light prose.

He was something of the traditional idle apprentice, indeed, during his first years in a solicitor's office, as we gather from the letter in which he reminds Lady Hesketh how he and Thurlow used to pass the time with her and her sister, Theodora, the object of his fruitless love.

"There was I, and the future Lord Chancellor," he wrote, "constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and making giggle, instead of studying the law."

Such was his life till the first attack of madness came at the age of thirty-two.

He had already, it is true, on one occasion, felt an ominous shock as a schoolboy at Westminster, when a skull thrown up by a gravedigger at St. Margaret's rolled towards him and struck him on the leg.

Again, in his chambers in the Middle Temple, he suffered for a time from religious melancholy, which he did his best to combat with the aid of the poems of George Herbert.

Even at the age of twenty-three he told Robert Lloyd in a rhymed epistle that he "addressed the muse," not in order to show his genius or his wit, But to divert a fierce banditti (Sworn foe to everything that's witty) That, in a black infernal train, Make cruel inroads in my brain, And daily threaten to drive thence My little garrison of sense.

It was not till after his release from the St. Alban's madhouse in his thirties, however, that he began to build a little new world of pleasures on the ruins of the old.

He now set himself of necessity to the task of creating a refuge within sight of the Cross, where he could live, in his brighter moments, a sort of Epicurean of evangelical piety.

He was a damned soul that must occupy itself at all costs and not damn itself still deeper in the process.

His round of recreation, it must be admitted, was for the most part such as would make the average modern pleasure-seeker quail worse than any inferno of miseries.

Only a nature of peculiar sweetness could charm us from the atmosphere of endless sermons and hymns in which Cowper learned to be happy in the Unwins' Huntingdon home.

Breakfast, he tells us, was between eight and nine.

Then, "till eleven, we read either the Scripture, or the sermons of some faithful preacher of those holy mysteries."

Church was at eleven.

After that he was at liberty to read, walk, ride, or work in the garden till the three o'clock dinner.

Then to the garden, "where with Mrs. Unwin and her son I have generally the pleasure of religious conversation till tea-time."

After tea came a four-mile walk, and "at night we read and converse, as before, till supper, and commonly finish the evening either with hymns or a sermon; and last of all the family are called to prayers."

In those days, it may be, evangelical religion had some of the attractions of a new discovery.

Theories of religion were probably as exciting a theme of discussion in the age of Wesley as theories of art and literature in the age of cubism and _vers libre_.

One has to remember this in order to be able to realize that, as Cowper said, "such a life as this is consistent with the utmost cheerfulness."

He unquestionably found it so, and, when the Rev. Morley Unwin was killed as the result of a fall from his horse, Cowper and Mrs. Unwin moved to Olney in order to enjoy further evangelical companionship in the neighbourhood of the Rev. John Newton, the converted slave-trader, who was curate in that town.

At Olney Cowper added at once to his terrors of Hell and to his amusements.

For the terrors, Newton, who seems to have wielded the Gospel as fiercely as a slaver's whip, was largely responsible.

He had earned a reputation for "preaching people mad," and Cowper, tortured with shyness, was even subjected to the ordeal of leading in prayer at gatherings of the faithful.

Newton, however, was a man of tenderness, humour, and literary tastes, as well as of a somewhat savage piety.

He was not only Cowper's tyrant, but Cowper's nurse, and, in setting Cowper to write the Olney Hymns, he gave a powerful impulse to a talent hitherto all but hidden.

At the same time, when, as a result of the too merciless flagellation of his parishioners on the occasion of some Fifth of November revels, Newton was attacked by a mob and driven out of Olney, Cowper undoubtedly began to breathe more freely.

Even under the eye of Newton, however, Cowper could enjoy his small pleasures, and we have an attractive picture of him feeding his eight pair of tame pigeons every morning on the gravel walk in the garden.

He shared with Newton his amusements as well as his miseries.

We find him in 1780 writing to the departed Newton to tell him of his recreations as an artist and gardener.

"I draw," he said, "mountains, valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks, and dab-chicks."

He represents himself in this lively letter as a Christian lover of baubles, rather to the disadvantage of lovers of baubles who are not Christians: I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the earth--what are the planets--what is the sun itself but a bauble?

Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, "The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!"

Their eyes have never been opened to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever.

They think a fine estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse upon them with ten times more.

I am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be worth a farthing; amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord Bute's gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when I have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it air, I say to myself: "This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me for the present; I must leave it soon."

In this and the following year we find him turning his thoughts more and more frequently to writing as a means of forgetting himself.

"The necessity of amusement," he wrote to Mrs. Unwin's clergyman son, "makes me sometimes write verses; it made me a carpenter, a birdcage maker, a gardener; and has lately taught me to draw, and to draw too with ...

surprising proficiency in the art, considering my total ignorance of it two months ago."

His impulse towards writing verses, however, was an impulse of a playful fancy rather than of a burning imagination.

"I have no more right to the name of poet," he once said, "than a maker of mouse-traps has to that of an engineer....

Such a talent in verse as mine is like a child's rattle--very entertaining to the trifler that uses it, and very disagreeable to all beside."

"Alas," he wrote in another letter, "what can I do with my wit?

I have not enough to do great things with, and these little things are so fugitive that, while a man catches at the subject, he is only filling his hand with smoke.

I must do with it as I do with my linnet; I keep him for the most part in a cage, but now and then set open the door, that he may whisk about the room a little, and then shut him up again."

It may be doubted whether, if subjects had not been imposed on him from without, he would have written much save in the vein of "dear Mat Prior's easy jingle" or the Latin trifles of Vincent Bourne, of whom Cowper said: "He can speak of a magpie or a cat in terms so exquisitely appropriated to the character he draws that one would suppose him animated by the spirit of the creature he describes."