BOOKS AND WRITERS
COWPER could discover in Johnson's Lives only one poet "whose mind seemed to have the slightest tincture of .religion." His name was Collins ; Cowper had never heard of him before. "He was barely in his senses," he writes. But he had religion ; and "there are some hopes for him" therefore.
Housman could discover in the poetry of the eighteenth century only four poets in whom "the true accent of poetry" "emerged clearly from the contemporary dialect ": Collins and Cowper, Christopher Smart and Blake. "And what other characteristic," he asks, "had these four in common ? " None, except that they were mad. Commort to all of them, in fact, though Housman does not say so—esteeming it, I should suppose, a part of their madness—is that they had religion. Collins, alone of the four, manages to keep his religion out of his poetry ; to find that he had any, you must go to Johnson's life of him. Cowper does not keep his religion out. But no poetry that ever was is so little mad. The miracle is that poetry could be so ordinary. In Cowper, if anywhere, we have la poesie domestique made perfect. "The Christian Horace" Sir Herbert Gricrson calls him—having in mind the Horace of the Satires and Epistles. Not Prior nor Pope, but Cowper, he thinks to be "the finest product of the spirit and art of Horace In our poetry."
I think that a little too good to be true. But it is pleasant to hear Cowper praised for his poetry. It has become the fashion to love him for his letters and his lovableness, but to be lukewarm about his poetry. It did not begin with Lord David Cecil, but he has helped, perhaps, to keep it going. "The letters," he says, "are the best thing (Cowper) ever wrote. . . . The poems are not so good as the letters." It is refreshing to have a new book about Cowper in which the poetry takes first place. Mr. Nicholson's William Cowper* is about Cowper the poet. If it is not an impor- tant book, it is timely ; and I find it everywhere interesting and well written. At least it serves to remind us how considerable a place In our poetry Cowper once held. We forget, or, if we remember, we find it difficult to believe, that in the last years of the eighteenth century he was, of living poets, the most widely read, and the best loved. Lamb, in a sonnet written in 1796, goes so far as to call him "of England's Bards the wisest and the best." But "I do love him so," he writes to Coleridge ; and perhaps, with Cowper, the only good criticism is the affectionate. With "The Task," in 1785, Cowper captured decisively the affections of a vast public.
Mr. Nicholson is a good deal occupied in exploring what the Evangelical Revival did for the poetry of Cowper. One thing I can tell him ; it helped to sell it. "Without the Revival," Mr. Nicholson says, "(Cowper) would never have become a poet." Certainly without the Revival he would never have had a public. The Revival was "an essentially romantic movement," and as such more catholic than the creeds. Except for the Olney Hymns, most of Cowper's poetry was written when he had shed his Revivalism. One of the best chapters in Mr. Nicholson's book is the chapter on the Olney Hymns (and on hymns). I cannot think him happy, certainly, in his defence of "the most criticised and even ridiculed" of Cowper's hymns—" There is a fountain. . . ." " It is thought to be in bad taste," he writes. But "if this hymit is in bad taste, then Christianity itself is in bad taste." In general, however, Mr. Nichol- son judges Cowper's hymnody justly. Cowper fails here because "he was shy and diffident, and even when he joined in what one might call the mass enthusiasms of the Evangelicals, he never quite merged his emotions with those of the others."
But the Revival made Cow per a poet, Mr. Nicholson thinks, because it drove him to Nature. He saw Nature first as a kind of appendix to the Bible. The purpose of Nature was to show forth the glory of God. Its scenes were "an elaborate missionary pageant." But once Evangelicalism had directed him to Nature, he became gradually more and more aware of an objective existence which it had, not explicable in evangelical terms. "His religion," Mr. Nicholson says prettily, "commanded him to love, not only his • William Cowper. By Norman Nicholson. (John Lehmann. lOs. 6d.) neighbour, but his neighbourhood." But to love it in rather prac- tical fashion. In Cowper's love of Nature there is, in fact, a good deal of the farmer and gardener, of the aesthete nothing, of the Wordsworthian less than we would like to believe. The poet of the countryside, Cowper belongs, Mr. Nicholson usefully reminds us, to country about as ordinary as you can find—" the country, not of mountains and lakes and wild sea shore, but of fields, hedges, haystacks, pigsties, duckponds, quarries, roads, railings and rubbish. tips." Mr. Nicholson, indeed, calls Olney—the Olney of Cowper's time—" suburban."
With what Mr. Nicholson says about Cowper's temper towards Nature I agree. But that Cowper was drawn to Nature and to poetry by the Revival I am not persuaded. Rather, I believe, he conceived both Nature and poetry as a means of escape from Revivalism, from what survived in him of Revivalism after the Olney Hymns. The country gave him something to do; poetry gave him something to do. Both helped him to forget that he was damned. Act= est de te ; periisti. He had learned that from Revivalism. In all his thinking, from 1780 onwards, this was the " loudest " of his thoughts. He could quiet the clamour of it only by doing something, by writing something, by a succession of ordi. nary behaviours. He had got to be ordinary. Nature—fields, that is hedges, haystacks, pigsties, duck-ponds, rubbish-tips and the like —gave him something to do. Poetry gave him something to do. Both brought him to the ordinary ; he shields himself so from everlasting Perlisti. The half of his letters cries it to us. He is the only poet, perhaps, who ever set out to be ordinary. He must be ordinary, he must write poetry, or be damned ; only so, at any rate, can he save himself from the daylong consciousness of damnation.
With the publication of "The Task" in 1785 he ceased, in effect, to be a poet. But he saved himself from a relapse upon Revivalism by becoming a translator. For half a hundred reasons—Matthew Arnold among them—nobody now reads Cowper's Homer, Mr. Nicholson excepted. For Mr. Nicholson it is still "a readable and enjoyable piece of narrative verse." But if you prefer Pope, he can forgive you. "Pope's artificialities," he writes, "might b: unlike Homer, but they were at least like Pope ; whereas Cowper, in turning to Milton for a model, lost his own voice and found no other." He does not quote Southey's criticism, which annoyed Lamb, but which has force: "Pope has disguised (Homer) in top- finery, and Cowper has stripped him naked." Mr. Nicholson' excerpts from Cowper's Homer certainly have a winning quality. Nor must we forget that the book was influential. Cowper Wai the first of living poets; he could not be put by. His publisher cheerfully gave him /1,000 for his Homer, and was ready for a second edition. In 1799 the same publisher published James Beresford's Aeneid ; for no better reason, I fancy, than that it was studied on Cowper. For translators, and for poets, Pope and Dryden no longer furnished the pattern.
Mr. Nicholson cannot bear "John Gilpin," and says so like a man. And he does not think much of "The Loss of the Royal .George." Nor do I: but I think he over-praises some of Cowper's occasional pieces. I like nearly all that he has to say of I he Task." The best of "The Task" is to be found, no doubt, in contexts that may be styled domestic. But some of Cowper's lottier effects are memorable: "All has its date below, the fatal hour Was registered in heaven efe time began. We turn to dust, and all our mighty works Die too ; the deep foundations that we lay Time ploughs them up, and not a trace remains. We build with what we deem eternal rock ; A distant age asks where the fabric stood ; And in the dust, sifted and searched in vain, The undiscoverable secret sleeps." It is easy to call that commonplace moralising. But it is difficult to refuse a place in poetry to truisms made beautiful. After all, beauty is truism, or something very like it. H. W. GARROn.
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