Art of Letters — William Cowper Part II from "Cowper was not to be" through  "both men.."

Cowper was not to be allowed to write, except occasionally, on magpies and cats.

Mrs. Unwin, who took a serious view of the poet's art, gave him as a subject _The Progress of Error_, and is thus mainly responsible for the now little-read volume of moral satires, with which he began his career as a poet at the age of fifty in 1782. It is not a book that can be read with unmixed, or even with much, delight.

It seldom rises above a good man's rhetoric.

Cowper, instead of writing about himself and his pets, and his cucumber-frames, wrote of the wicked world from which he had retired, and the vices of which he could not attack with that particularity that makes satire interesting.

The satires are not exactly dull, but they are lacking in force, either of wit or of passion.

They are hardly more than an expression of sentiment and opinion.

The sentiments are usually sound--for Cowper was an honest lover of liberty and goodness--but even the cause of liberty is not likely to gain much from such a couplet as: Man made for kings!

those optics are but dim That tell you so--say, rather, they for him.

Nor will the manners of the clergy benefit much as the result of such an attack on the "pleasant-Sunday-afternoon" kind of pastor as is contained in the lines: If apostolic gravity be free To play the fool on Sundays, why not we?

If he the tinkling harpsichord regards As inoffensive, what offence in cards?

These, it must in fairness be said, are not examples of the best in the moral satires; but the latter is worth quoting as evidence of the way in which Cowper tried to use verse as the pulpit of a rather narrow creed.

The satires are hardly more than denominational in their interest.

They belong to the religious fashion of their time, and are interesting to us now only as the old clothes of eighteenth-century evangelicalism.

The subject-matter is secular as well as religious, but the atmosphere almost always remains evangelical.

The Rev. John Newton wrote a preface for the volume, suggesting this and claiming that the author "aims to communicate his own perceptions of the truth, beauty and influence of the religion of the Bible."

The publisher became so alarmed at this advertisement of the piety of the book that he succeeded in suppressing it in the first edition.

Cowper himself had enough worldly wisdom to wish to conceal his pious intentions from the first glance of the reader, and for this reason opened the book, not with _The Progress of Error_, but with the more attractively-named _Table Talk_.

"My sole drift is to be useful," he told a relation, however.

"...

My readers will hardly have begun to laugh before they will be called upon to correct that levity, and peruse me with a more serious air."

He informed Newton at the same time: "Thinking myself in a measure obliged to tickle, if I meant to please, I therefore affected a jocularity I did not feel."

He also told Newton: "I am merry that I may decoy people into my company."

On the other hand, Cowper did not write _John Gilpin_ which is certainly his masterpiece, in the mood of a man using wit as a decoy.

He wrote it because it irresistibly demanded to be written.

"I wonder," he once wrote to Newton, "that a sportive thought should ever knock at the door of my intellects, and still more that it should gain admittance.

It is as if harlequin should intrude himself into the gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state."

Harlequin, luckily for us, took hold of his pen in _John Gilpin_ and in many of the letters.

In the moral satires, harlequin is dressed in a sober suit and sent to a theological seminary.

One cannot but feel that there is something incongruous in the boast of a wit and a poet that he had "found occasion towards the close of my last poem, called _Retirement_, to take some notice of the modern passion for seaside entertainments, and to direct the means by which they might be made useful as well as agreeable."

This might serve well enough as a theme for a "letter to the editor" of _The Baptist Eye-opener_.

One cannot imagine, however, its causing a flutter in the breast of even the meekest of the nine muses.

Cowper, to say truth, had the genius not of a poet but of a letter-writer.

The interest of his verse is chiefly historical.

He was a poet of the transition to Wordsworth and the revolutionists, and was a mouthpiece of his time.

But he has left only a tiny quantity of memorable verse.

Lamb has often been quoted in his favour.

"I have," he wrote to Coleridge in 1796, "been reading _The Task_ with fresh delight.

I am glad you love Cowper.

I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not call that man my friend who should be offended with the 'divine chit-chat of Cowper.'

" Lamb, it should be remembered, was a youth of twenty-one when he wrote this, and Cowper's verse had still the attractions of early blossoms that herald the coming of spring.

There is little in _The Task_ to make it worth reading to-day, except to the student of literary history.

Like the Olney Hymns and the moral satires it was a poem written to order.

Lady Austen, the vivacious widow who had meanwhile joined the Olney group, was anxious that Cowper should show what he could do in blank verse.

He undertook to humour her if she would give him a subject.

"Oh," she said, "you can never be in want of a subject; you can write upon any;

write upon this sofa!"

Cowper, in his more ambitious verse, seems seldom to have written under the compulsion of the subject as the great poets do.

Even the noble lines _On the Loss of the Royal George_ were written, as he confessed, "by desire of Lady Austen, who wanted words to the March in _Scipio_."

For this Lady Austen deserves the world's thanks, as she does for cheering him up in his low spirits with the story of John Gilpin.

He did not write _John Gilpin_ by request, however.

He was so delighted on hearing the story that he lay awake half the night laughing at it, and the next day he felt compelled to sit down and write it out as a ballad.

"Strange as it may seem," he afterwards said of it, "the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all."

"The grinners at _John Gilpin_," he said in another letter, "little dream what the author sometimes suffers.

How I hated myself yesterday for having ever wrote it!"

It was the publication of _The Task_ and _John Gilpin_ that made Cowper famous.

It is not _The Task_ that keeps him famous to-day.

There is, it seems to me, more of the divine fire in any half-dozen of his good letters than there is in the entire six books of _The Task_.

One has only to read the argument at the top of the third book, called _The Garden_, in order to see in what a dreary didactic spirit it is written.

Here is the argument in full: Self-recollection and reproof--Address to domestic happiness--Some account of myself--The vanity of many of the pursuits which are accounted wise--Justification of my censures--Divine illumination necessary to the most expert philosopher--The question, what is truth?

answered by other questions--Domestic happiness addressed again--Few lovers of the country--My tame hare--Occupations of a retired gentleman in the garden--Pruning--Framing--Greenhouse--Sowing of flower-seeds--The country preferable to the town even in the winter--Reasons why it is deserted at that season--Ruinous effects of gaming and of expensive improvement--Book concludes with an apostrophe to the metropolis.

It is true that, in the intervals of addresses to domestic happiness and apostrophes to the metropolis, there is plenty of room here for Virgilian verse if Cowper had had the genius for it.

Unfortunately, when he writes about his garden, he too often writes about it as prosaically as a contributor to a gardening paper.

His description of the making of a hot frame is merely a blank-verse paraphrase of the commonest prose.

First, he tells us: The stable yields a stercoraceous heap, Impregnated with quick fermenting salts, And potent to resist the freezing blast;

For, ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf, Deciduous, when now November dark Checks vegetation in the torpid plant, Expos'd to his cold breath, the task begins.

Warily therefore, and with prudent heed He seeks a favour'd spot; that where he builds Th' agglomerated pile his frame may front The sun's meridian disk, and at the back Enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedge Impervious to the wind.

Having further prepared the ground: Th' uplifted frame, compact at every joint, And overlaid with clear translucent glass, He settles next upon the sloping mount, Whose sharp declivity shoots off secure From the dash'd pane the deluge as it falls.

The writing of blank verse puts the poet to the severest test, and Cowper does not survive the test.

Had _The Task_ been written in couplets he might have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme.

As it is, he is merely ponderous--a snail of imagination labouring under a heavy shell of eloquence.

In the fragment called _Yardley Oak_ he undoubtedly achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton.

But I do not think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good poet.

He had even ceased to read poetry by the time he began in earnest to write it.

"I reckon it," he wrote in 1781, "among my principal advantages, as a composer of verses, that I have not read an English poet these thirteen years, and but one these thirteen years."

So mild was his interest in his contemporaries that he had never heard Collins's name till he read about him in Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_.

Though descended from Donne--his mother was Anne Donne--he was apparently more interested in Churchill and Beattie than in him.

His one great poetical master in English was Milton, Johnson's disparagement of whom he resented with amusing vehemence.

He was probably the least bookish poet who had ever had a classical education.

He described himself in a letter to the Rev. Walter Bagot, in his later years, as "a poor man who has but twenty books in the world, and two of them are your brother Chester's." The passages I have quoted give, no doubt, an exaggerated impression of Cowper's indifference to literature.

His relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in many of his letters.

But he was incapable of such enthusiasm for the great things in literature as Keats showed, for instance, in his sonnet on Chapman's Homer.

Though Cowper, disgusted with Pope, took the extreme step of translating Homer into English verse, he enjoyed even Homer only with certain evangelical reservations.

"I should not have chosen to have been the original author of such a business," he declared, while he was translating the nineteenth book of the _Iliad_, "even though all the Nine had stood at my elbow.

Time has wonderful effects.

We admire that in an ancient for which we should send a modern bard to Bedlam."

It is hardly to be wondered at that his translation of Homer has not survived, while his delightful translation of Vincent Bourne's _Jackdaw_ has.

Cowper's poetry, however, is to be praised, if for nothing else, because it played so great a part in giving the world a letter-writer of genius.

It brought him one of the best of his correspondents, his cousin, Lady Hesketh, and it gave various other people a reason for keeping his letters.

Had it not been for his fame as a poet his letters might never have been published, and we should have missed one of the most exquisite histories of small beer to be had outside the pages of Jane Austen.

As a letter-writer he does not, I think, stand in the same rank as Horace Walpole and Charles Lamb.

He has less wit and humour, and he mirrors less of the world.

His letters, however, have an extraordinarily soothing charm.

Cowper's occupations amuse one, while his nature delights one.

His letters, like Lamb's, have a soul of goodness--not of mere virtue, but of goodness--and we know from his biography that in life he endured the severest test to which a good nature can be subjected.

His treatment of Mrs. Unwin in the imbecile despotism of her old age was as fine in its way as Lamb's treatment of his sister.

Mrs. Unwin, who had supported Cowper through so many dark and suicidal hours, afterwards became palsied and lost her mental faculties.

"Her character," as Sir James Frazer writes in the introduction to his charming selection from the letters,[2] "underwent a great change, and she who for years had found all her happiness in ministering to her afflicted friend, and seemed to have no thought but for his welfare, now became querulous and exacting, forgetful of him and mindful, apparently, only of herself.

Unable to move out of her chair without help, or to walk across the room unless supported by two people, her speech at times almost unintelligible, she deprived him of all his wonted exercises, both bodily and mental, as she did not choose that he should leave her for a moment, or even use a pen or a book, except when he read to her.

To these demands he responded with all the devotion of gratitude and affection; he was assiduous in his attentions to her, but the strain told heavily on his strength."

To know all this does not modify our opinion of Cowper's letters, except is so far as it strengthens it.

It helps us, however, to explain to ourselves why we love them.

We love them because, as surely as the writings of Shakespeare and Lamb, they are an expression of that sort of heroic gentleness which can endure the fires of the most devastating tragedy.

Shakespeare finally revealed the strong sweetness of his nature in _The Tempest_.

Many people are inclined to over-estimate _The Tempest_ as poetry simply because it gives them so precious a clue to the character of his genius, and makes clear once more that the grand source and material of poetry is the infinite tenderness of the human heart.

Cowper's letters are a tiny thing beside Shakespeare's plays.

But the same light falls on them.

They have an eighteenth-century restraint, and freedom from emotionalism and gush.

But behind their chronicle of trifles, their small fancies, their little vanities, one is aware of an intensely loving and lovable personality.

Cowper's poem, _To Mary_, written to Mrs. Unwin in the days of her feebleness, is, to my mind, made commonplace by the odious reiteration of "my Mary!"

at the end of every verse.

Leave the "my Marys" out, however, and see how beautiful, as well as moving, a poem it becomes.

Cowper was at one time on the point of marrying Mrs. Unwin, when an attack of madness prevented him.

Later on Lady Austen apparently wished to marry him.

He had an extraordinary gift for commanding the affections of those of both sexes who knew him.

His friendship with the poet Hayley, then a rocket fallen to earth, towards the close of his life, reveals the lovableness of both men.