William Cowper, An Englishman
By E. M. FORSTER.
THE bicentenary of Cowper's birth was celebrated last
November with befitting mildness. Perhaps there have been too many anniversaries lately, perhaps the autumn of 1931 was an unfortunate period. At any rate, Cowper attracted little attention, as he himself would have expected. The professional men of letters made no noise, for the reason that their paeans had been antici- pated by a perfect biography, Lord David Cecil's The Stricken Deer. And even if the men of letters had piped up, the public at large would have declined to listen. For who reads Cowper to-day ? This is surely his last appearance upon the general stage. Wordsworth (to mention a spiritual kinsman) still keeps his place ; in the great holocaust of literature that is approaching he will survive for a little. Cowper perishes. His magic is too flimsy to preserve him, and his knowledge of human nature is too much overshadowed by fears of personal damnation to radiate far down the centuries :
" Those twinkling tiny lustre, of the land Drop one by one from Fame's neglecting hand,"
he wrote, " on observing some names of little note re. corded in the Biographic Britannica," and the epitaph might be his own. The London booksellers, who should know, say that the demand for his poems has not been stimulated by the recent modest ceremonies. There has been a slight increase of sales for his Letters. That is all.
It is not an unsuitable moment for him to perish, for• England is perishing, and he was English. He was not British or enlightened or far-sighted or adaptable. He was English, and most so when he forgot his nationality and took a country walk. He had his conscious patriotic gestures, and some of them were effective ; but there is a stay-at-home air about them which makes them rather ludicrous in our eyes : the poet defies or depreciates the foreigner from his study-chair, as did most patriotic poets before Rupert Brooke. It is only when he forgets his high mission that he touches our blood and speaks for our land. Out he steps—not forgetting an umbrella, for he understands the climate. Out he steps, accom- panied by a lady when the clay is not too tenacious, and he walks over the weeds and under the elms, or across the empty hayfields, or, puffing healthily, he climbs a gentle ascent, from the top of which he can look back upon the River Ouse. None of the walks are very long ; the scenery is neither flat nor hilly, the river is always the Ouse. Had it been the Severn or Thames the view would have been grander but less typical. The Ouse is the water of England. It belongs to our soil. We can scarcely imagine it ever leaving us to enter the sea. It is as near as could be a horizontal stream. And Cowper— who found in the placid trinity of Bucks, Beds and Hunts, such respite as the Furies allowed—is linked with their unostentatious river and with the fields that edge it. He saw the Ouse first at Huntingdon, when the clouds of his preliminary illness were lifting, and the Unwins received him into their affection. He dwelt by it at Olney and Weston Underwood, scenes of his happiness, tragedies and triumphs. And he bade farewell to it at St. Neots, when all was lost, and he and Mrs. Unwin, both of them insane, were carried away to end their days by the sea. How he mistrusted the sea ! He could note its beauties, but it was too restless for him, and too large. And he was equally suspicious of mountains : " I was a little daunted by the tremendous height of the Sussex hills," and he compares himself to the athlete who could " leap nowhere well except at Rhodes," since he cannot write well, or even write at all, unless he is at Weston Underwood. As illness increases, the terror of exile from the Ouse grows more acute, and we find him crying from Norfolk as if it was Siberia : " I shall never see Weston Again. I have been tossed like a ball into a far country from which there is no rebound for Inc."
Of course he was an invalid, and his attachment to local scenes can be discounted on that account. He had not enough vitality to seek new experiences, and never felt safe until habits had formed their cocoon round his sensitive mind. But inside the cocoon his life is genuine. He might dread the unknown, but he also loved what he knew ; he felt steadily about familiar objects, and they have in his work something of the permanence they get in a sitting-room or in the kitchen garden. He does not greet them with surprise nor with any felicitous phrase. It is rather the instinctive acceptance which is part of rural life. Consequently, to read him is really to be in England, and the very triteness of his moralizing keeps us planted there. Brilliant descriptions and profound thoughts entail disadvantages when they are applied to scenery ; they act too much as spot lights ; they break the landscape up ; they drill through it and come out at the antipodes ; they focus too much upon what lies exactly in front. Cowper never does this. He knows that the country doesn't lie in front of us but all around. In front is an elm tree, but behind our backs there is probably another elm tree, and out of the corner of each eye we can see blurs that may represent a third elm and a fourth. And so with the country people, the ploughman or the postman, we may or may not meet them on our walk, but in either ease they were somewhere. All this conies out in his work, and we get from it the conviction that we have a humble and inalienable heritage, country England, which no one covets, and which nothing can take away.
Alas, it is a conviction which finds no support whatever in facts. The country Cowper loved is precisely what is going to disappear. The grander scenery of England will probably be saved, owing to its importance in the tourist industry, but it will pay no one to preserve a stray elm, puddles full of ranunculus, or mole hills covered with thyme ; and they, not the grandeur, are England. They will be swept aside by pylons and arterial roads, just as Cowper himself is being trodden underfoot by the gangs of modern writers who have been produced by universal education. Excellent writers, many of them. Writers of genius, some of them. But they leave no room for poor Cowper. He has no further part in our destinies. He belongs to the unadvertised, the unorganized, the un- scheduled. He has no part in the enormous structure of steel girders and trade upon which Great Britain, like all other Powers, will have to base her culture in the future. That is why his bicentenary fell flat.
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