Art of Letters — William Cowper Part III from "If we love Cowper" to end

[2] _Letters of William Cowper_.

Chosen and edited by J. G.

Frazer.

Two vols.

Eversley Series.

Macmillan.

12s.

net.

If we love Cowper, then, it is not only because of his little world, but because of his greatness of soul that stands in contrast to it.

He is like one of those tiny pools among the rocks, left behind by the deep waters of ocean and reflecting the blue height of the sky.

His most trivial actions acquire a pathos from what we know of the _De Profundis_ that is behind them.

When we read of the Olney household--"our snug parlour, one lady knitting, the other netting, and the gentleman winding worsted"--we feel that this marionette-show has some second and immortal significance.

On another day, "one of the ladies has been playing a harpsichord, while I, with the other, have been playing at battledore and shuttlecock."

It is a game of cherubs, though of cherubs slightly unfeathered as a result of belonging to the pious English upper-middle classes.

The poet, inclined to be fat, whose chief occupation in winter is "to walk ten times in a day from the fireside to his cucumber frame and back again," is busy enough on a heavenly errand.

With his pet hares, his goldfinches, his dog, his carpentry, his greenhouse--"Is not our greenhouse a cabinet of perfumes?"

--his clergymen, his ladies, and his tasks, he is not only constantly amusing himself, but carrying on a secret battle, with all the terrors of Hell.

He is, indeed, a pilgrim who struggles out of one slough of despond only to fall waist-deep into another.

This strange creature who passed so much of his time writing such things as _Verses written at Bath on Finding the Heel of a Shoe, Ode to Apollo on an Ink-glass almost dried in the Sun, Lines sent with Two Cockscombs to Miss Green_, and _On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bullfinch_, stumbled along under a load of woe and repentance as terrible as any of the sorrows that we read of in the great tragedies.

The last of his original poems, _The Castaway_, is an image of his utter hopelessness.

As he lay dying in 1880 he was asked how he felt.

He replied, "I feel unutterable despair."

To face damnation with the sweet unselfishness of William Cowper is a rare and saintly accomplishment.

It gives him a place in the company of the beloved authors with men of far greater genius than himself--with Shakespeare and Lamb and Dickens.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has, in one of his essays, expressed the opinion that of all the English poets "the one who, but for a stroke of madness, would have become our English Horace was William Cowper.

He had the wit," he added, "with the underlying moral seriousness."

As for the wit, I doubt it.

Cowper had not the wit that inevitably hardens into "jewels five words long."

Laboriously as he sought after perfection in his verse, he was never a master of the Horatian phrase.

Such phrases of his--and there are not many of them--as have passed into the common speech flash neither with wit nor with wisdom.

Take the best-known of them: "The cups That cheer but not inebriate;"

"God made the country and man made the town;"

"I am monarch of all I survey;"

"Regions Cæsar never knew;" and "England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!"

This is lead for gold.

Horace, it is true, must be judged as something more than an inventor of golden tags.

But no man can hope to succeed Horace unless his lines and phrases are of the kind that naturally pass into golden tags.

This, I know, is a matter not only of style but of temper.

But it is in temper as much as in style that Cowper differs from Horace.

Horace mixed on easy terms with the world.

He enjoyed the same pleasures; he paid his respects to the same duties.

He was a man of the world above all other poets.

Cowper was in comparison a man of the parlour.

His sensibilities would, I fancy, have driven him into retreat, even if he had been neither mad nor pious.

He was the very opposite of a worldling.

He was, as he said of himself in his early thirties, "of a very singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed with."

While claiming that he was not an absolute fool, he added: "If I was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this--and God forbid I should speak it in vanity--I would not change conditions with any saint in Christendom."

Had Horace lived in the eighteenth century he would almost certainly have been a Deist.

Cowper was very nearly a Methodist.

The difference, indeed, between them is fundamental.

Horace was a pig, though a charming one; Cowper was a pigeon.

This being so, it seems to me a mistake to regard Cowper as a Horace _manqué_, instead of being content with his miraculous achievement as a letter-writer.

It may well be that his sufferings, so far from destroying his real genius, harrowed and fertilized the soil in which it grew.

He unquestionably was more ambitious for his verse than for his prose.

He wrote his letters without labour, while he was never weary of using the file on his poems.

"To touch and retouch," he once wrote to the Rev. William Unwin, "is, though some writers boast of negligence, and others would be ashamed to show their foul copies, the secret of almost all good writing, especially in verse.

I am never weary of it myself."

Even if we count him only a middling poet, however, this does not mean that all his fastidiousness of composition was wasted.

He acquired in the workshop of verse the style that stood him in such good stead in the field of familiar prose.

It is because of this hard-won ease of style that readers of English will never grow weary of that epistolary autobiography in which he recounts his maniacal fear that his food has been poisoned; his open-eyed wonder at balloons; the story of his mouse; the cure of the distention of his stomach by Lady Hesketh's gingerbread; the pulling out of a tooth at the dinner-table unperceived by the other guests; his desire to thrash Dr. Johnson till his pension jingled in his pocket; and the mildly fascinated tastes to which he confesses in such a paragraph as: I know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musical save and except always the braying of an ass.

The notes of all our birds and fowls please me without one exception.

I should not indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a farm-yard, is no bad performer.

Here he is no missfire rival of Horace or Milton or Prior, or any of the other poets.

Here he has arrived at the perfection for which he was born.

How much better he was fitted to be a letter-writer than a poet may be seen by anyone who compares his treatment of the same incidents in verse and in prose.

There is, for instance, that charming letter about the escaped goldfinch, which is not spoiled for us even though we may take Blake's view of caged birds: I have two goldfinches, which in the summer occupy the greenhouse.

A few days since, being employed in cleaning out their cages, I placed that which I had in hand upon the table, while the other hung against the wall; the windows and the doors stood wide open.

I

went to fill the fountain at the pump, and on my return was not a little surprised to find a goldfinch sitting on the top of the cage I had been cleaning, and singing to and kissing the goldfinch within.

I approached him, and he discovered no fear; still nearer, and he discovered none.

I advanced my hand towards him, and he took no notice of it.

I seized him, and supposed I had caught a new bird, but casting my eye upon the other cage perceived my mistake.

Its inhabitant, during my absence, had contrived to find an opening, where the wire had been a little bent, and made no other use of the escape it afforded him, than to salute his friend, and to converse with him more intimately than he had done before.

I

returned him to his proper mansion, but in vain.

In less than a minute he had thrust his little person through the aperture again, and again perched upon his neighbour's cage, kissing him, as at the first, and singing, as if transported with the fortunate adventure.

I could not but respect such friendship, as for the sake of its gratification had twice declined an opportunity to be free, and consenting to their union, resolved that for the future one cage should hold them both.

I am glad of such incidents; for at a pinch, and when I need entertainment, the versification of them serves to divert me....

Cowper's "versification" of the incident is vapid compared to this.

The incident of the viper and the kittens again, which he "versified" in _The Colubriad_, is chronicled far more charmingly in the letters.

His quiet prose gave him a vehicle for that intimacy of the heart and fancy which was the deepest need of his nature.

He made a full confession of himself only to his friends.

In one of his letters he compares himself, as he rises in the morning to "an infernal frog out of Acheron, covered with the ooze and mud of melancholy."

In his most ambitious verse he is a frog trying to blow himself out into a bull.

It is the frog in him, not the intended bull, that makes friends with us to-day.