THE GLOBE EDITION OF COWPER.*
IT is fitting that one of the most familiar of English poets should be included in the beautiful " Globe " series. Cowper's poetry lacks colour, and music, and wealth of thought, when compared with that of Keats, and Shelley, and Wordsworth ; but its admirable truth- fulness, its correctness, and almost pre-Raphaelite minuteness of description ; its pathos, which has been rarely excelled ; its humour, which is always genuine, and the manly tone which marks the best of his verse, will secure to it, there can be little doubt, a per- manent place in literature. Moreover, Cowper has especial claims upon the student of English poetry. He stands between Pope, who died when he was a schoolboy, and Wordsworth, who was a young man when Cowper himself died in 1800. The consummate genius of Pope has secured for him a high, and despite temporary depreciation, a growing reputation as the satirist and poet of society, but of external nature Pope knew nothing. When he attempts to describe it, he invariably blunders ; and if ho could not transfer to his page the natural objects which passed before his eyes, still less was he able, like Wordsworth, to see into the life of them, and to appre- ciate their spiritual meaning. Cowper, on the other hand, loved Nature with the simplicity of a child, and studied her with the calm perseverance which is the gift of mature age. Thomson was perhaps as loving, if not as careful an observer of the aspects of nature ; but in "The Seasons" there is so much that is false in sentiment and diction, that the influence of the poem for good has been slight when compared with that exercised by "The Task ;" and it would be easy to show, did space permit, that Thomson's position in the line of our poets—an honourable one, doubtless—is not by any means so distinctly marked as that occupied by Cowper.
Mr. Benham's biographical introduction to the volume before us is distinguished by judgment and good feeling with regard to all that forms the personal history of the poet, and be has apparently deemed it best to abstain as much as possible from critical com- ment on the works. The little he does say will not perhaps strike the admirer of Cowper as sufficiently appreciative, but he is no doubt correct in the assertions that Cowper's rhymes are more frequently inexact than those of any English poet ; that his reflections in ‘"The Task" upon the world without are of the poorest kind ; that "the hard and revolting view of religion which he took from his theological friends, was not corrected by any ex- perience of those at whom he railed ; " and that" his indiscriminate abuse of pursuits that did not interest him might just as fairly be applied to his own." Of the translation of Homer there may be more room for disagreement. Mr. Benham writes :—" I do not feel competent to criticize it. It seems to me dreary and dull, but not more so than other translations of Homer. Ile was qualified by his scholarship, which Pope was not. The translation therefore is probably as accurate as any translation can be. But he had no sympathy for the wars and battles. Arthur Clough's commentary on it is, after all, the most exhaustive : 'Where is the man who has ever read it ? ' His undertaking it at all seems to me one of • The Globe Edition. The Poetical Worke of William Cowper. Edited, with Notes and Biographical Introduction, by William Benham. London : Macmillan and Co 1870.
the misfortunes arising from the breach with Lady Austen. She might have suggested something better than the wasting of five years in such profitless labour." To which verdict we have two objections to make. The one is that Clough's commentary might be exhaustive if it were true, but as Cowper's Homer has been read by many readers with pleasure (and, as far as the Odyssey is concerned, we include ourselves among the number), the state- ment will not hold water. The second is that the labour, even if unappreciated by the public, cannot justly be called" profitless," since, for the time, it relieved the poet from the fearful weight of misery that oppressed him. "I am the busiest man," he wrote, "that ever lived sequestered as I do, and am never idle. My days accordingly roll away with a most tremendous rapidity."
Mr. Benham's memoir, though slight in texture, has more of biographical than of critical interest. He tells us little that is new, but he takes, upon the whole, a wise and generous view of much that is already known and that has caused consider- able differences of opinion. With regard to Cowper's insanity, he writes :—" I do not believe certainly that religious opinions were the original cause of the madness. When I began the study of this life, I believed that I should find that the views were merely the form which the madness happened to take. But this belief I cannot now hold. It became as clear to me as any demonstration could make it, that the Calvinistic doctrine and religious excite- ments threw an already trembling mind off its balance, and aggravated a malady which but for them might probably have been cured." We think that Mr. Benham is right, and that the poor mad poet was unfortunate in his religious advisers. One of the earliest of them, the Rev. Martin Madan, who made himself notorious long afterwards as the advocate of polygamy, fretted the tender spirit of Cowper in the first dreadful days of his suffering by theological quibbles ; and John Newton, warm-hearted, faithful, unselfish though he was, could not have understood his friend's malady, since he encouraged him to pray in public, although to do so was an agony to him, and told him afterwards, at the time when Cowper was hopeless of God's love, that he could not expect the restoration of his Christian privileges while he visited his Roman Catholic friends the Throckmortons, and while he indulged in a country walk on the evenings of the Lord's Day. Cowper was unfor- tunate, too—can it be doubted ?—in the neighbourhood which he selected for a residence. For nineteen years he and Mrs. Unwin lived together at Olney, one of the dampest, dullest, dreariest of towns, so badly drained, or so utterly without drainage, that in the wet weather Mr. Newton went to his church in pattens ; and Cowper writes, no doubt with playful exaggeration, that the pleasant walks in the vicinity were only for fine weather, and that a gravel walk thirty yards long was all they had to move on for eight months in the year. As far as concerns health, both bodily and mental, Cowper probably suffered considerably from the situation he had chosen. But Mr. Benham hints, and we have read the remark elsewhere, that the comparatively tame beauty of Buckingham- shire scenery suited him admirably as a rural poet. What he might have accomplished had he lived, like his biographer Southey, in the presence of mountains, it is impossible to say. Cowper never travelled, and never saw a mountain in his life. He even speaks of being oppressed by the tremendous height of the Sussex hills. The circle of his knowledge, too, was equally limited. He was a sound classic, and he was a devout admirer of Milton and of Churchill (" the great Churchill," he calls him) ; but he knew little of any modern literature, nothing of science, nothing of philosophy, very little of history, and blundered woefully when he attempted to write about politics. It may be even asserted that he was a better carpenter than theologian, and that the boxes he made for his hares, his rabbit-hutches, his bird-cages, and his summer-house did him more credit than the harsh and narrow Calvinism which he:mistook for Christianity. But no system of theology could sour a:nature so sweet and so tender as that of Cowper. His charity was broad, his love for mankind was great, his sympathy with human sorrow resembled that of the Master whose love for others he:never doubted ; but who, he believed as surely, had left him never to return. If it be true of any poet, it is true of Cowper, that he learnt in suffering what he taught in song.
The Globe memoir has the merit of condensing our latest know- ledge of the poet, and the edition contains also a few verses hitherto unpublished. The late Mr. Bruce, in his interesting biography prefixed to the beautiful Aldine edition, after observing that one story related to account for Cowper's second attack of insanity has no evidence to support it, adds, "Equally without foundation is the story that he had offered marriage to Mrs. Un win, and had been accepted ; but that excitement consequent upon such an engagement, or anxieties connected with interposed doubts, overthrew his mind. It seems a great pity that they did not. marry, but there were, no doubt, reasons against it with which we are not acquainted. There are none for believing the story of the offer and its consequences."
This was written five years ago. In 1869, however, the Rev. William Bull published his Memorials of John Newton, in which he gives an extract, hitherto unpublished, from his diary, which states. that an offer had been made, and that marriage was anticipated.
"They were congenial spirits," Newton writes, "united in the. faith and hope of the Gospel, and their intimate and growing friendship led them in the course of four or five years to an en- gagement of marriage which was well known to me and to most of their and my friends, and was to have taken place in a few months,. but was prevented by the terrible malady which seized him about that time." Mr. Benham observes that this settles the question,. but it is remarkable that Southey, an accurate and conscientious writer, who is rarely wrong in his facts, remarks in his Life of Cowper, "That no such engagement was either known or suspected by Mr. Newton, I am enabled to assert, and who can suppose- that it would have been concealed from him ?" Mr. Benham, by the way, is incorrect in saying that Mary Ernwin was only four- or five years Cowper's senior, for according to the tablet in. Dereham Church, she was born in 1724, whereas the birth-year of the poet was 1731. And we can find no ground whatever for the editor's very decisive statement that Lady Austen would gladly have married Cowper. The probabilities, on the con- trary, are (for we have no facts to guide us) that though Lady Austen had undoubtedly a warm affection for the poet, his circuna- stances forbade all thoughts of any closer tie than that of friend- ship. For when at the age of fifty (a mature age truly for a. lover) Lady Austen and Cowper met for the first time, he had passed through the second attack of insanity, from the delusions- of which be never wholly recovered. That there was some senti- ment on Cowper's side is probable enough, and we agree with. Mr. Benham that a woman who was not a sister could only put. one interpretation upon the following verses, printed for the first- time in the Globe Cowper :— "To A LADY WHO WORE A LOCK OF HIS HAIR SET wan Duster:Ds.
"The star that beams on Anna's breast Conceals her William's hair,
'Twas lately severed from the rest
To be promoted there.
The heart that beats beneath that breast
Is William's well I know, A nobler prize and richer far Than India could bestow.
She thus his favoured lot* prefers, To make her William shine ; The ornament indeed is hers, But all the honour mine."
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