THERE is an old-fashioned sound about the very name of
Cowper, especially when it is pronounced like a derivative of • The Correspondence of William Cowper. Arranged in Chronological Order, with Annotations, by Thomas Wright, Principal of Cowper School, Olney. 4 rob. London Hodder and Stoughton. [53 3s. net.]
editor that anybody who commits it from now forward will deserve no mercy. Our grandfathers, and still more our grandmothers, read him devoutly ; but for more than a genera- tion he may be said to have been entirely neglected except by Professors of Literature, editors, and students. John Gilpin, of course, never dies. He rides perpetually between Edmonton and Ware ; but more people at the present day connect him with Caldecott than with Cowper. None the less, there is such an immense amount of good stuff stored conveniently in the compact verse of the recluse of Olney, and such excellent entertainment as well as good English in his voluminous letters, that we may safely predict that sooner or later he will have a large audience again. How soon, however, is a question not to be answered. The " day of small things," the beauty of which he did so much to illuminate and illustrate, is out of favour for the present. So is the village life. So is that " degree of poverty in which a man enjoys clean linen and good company," and cares not if he have anything else, though Cowper protested even before his troubles that it had "no disgrace belonging to it." But the revolution which shall put all these things at the top of our ladder of admiration, instead of the bottom of it, is precisely the change that all the wise people tell us must come unless the country is to go to ruin.
And so perhaps it will come sooner than now seems probable, and once again the villages will be full of unambitious people with good hearts and cultivated intelligences, and family parties will gather in comfortable circles on winter evenings• and listen without thought of revolt while some one reads aloud the admirable sense and sound morality of " The Task." For certain it is that whatever—having serious worth—has once been in fashion is capable of coming into fashion again, pro- vided only its form be not archaic to the point of obscurity. The form of Cowper is of course perfect, and though we feel him to be a little flat and matter-of-fact to-day, yet it was he who quarrelled with Johnson's unimaginative estimate of Milton, he who translated the poetic aspirations of Madame Guyon, and he who held the faith of the Evangelicals with- out their narrowness. Yet most true it is that there is felt a, "limitation" in his genius. The limitation of Cowper is part of his mystery,—of that tragic mystery of insanity and despair which makes the dark background of his life : which he never forgot, and which the most penetrating research into his character, his letters, his works, can never satisfactorily explain. One almost envies the brutal simplicity of fifty years ago that made it possible for Mrs. Browning to write of him :-
" 0 poets ! from a maniac's tongue, was poured the deathless singing !
0 Christians ! at your cross of hope, a hopeless hand was clinging !
O men ! this man, in brotherhood, your weary paths beguiling, Groaned inly while he taught you peace, and died while ye were smiling !"
We do not call a man like Cowper a " maniac " in our more subtle day. And we want to know why, being so entirely—so exceptionally—sane as he was in his whole outlook upon life, even for the most part in his attitude towards his miserable obsession, he could not shake himself free from it altogether, or learn to regard it as a physical trouble not touching the realities of his character. The commonest explanation is, of course, that he fell under the influence of John Newton and Calvinism when mind and body were not yet recovered from the weakness consequent upon the first attack of mad- ness. And a truer one might perhaps be found in the miseries of his motherless childhood. Of a gentle, sensitive disposition, be wanted affection, and could not develop wholesomely without sympathy. Nothing can be more pathetic than the account he gives in his fragment of autobiography of the
occasion when—a mere child quivering under the pain inflicted by the bully of his school, and fearing a repetition of the torture—he tried to rise above his miseries by an act of faith "One day as I was sitting alone upon a bench in the school- room, melancholy and almost ready to weep at the recollection of what I had already suffered, and expecting at the same time my tormentor every moment, the words of the Psalmist came into my mind,—' I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.' I applied them to my own case with a degree of trust and confidence in God. that would have been no disgrace to a much more experienced Christian. I instantly perceived in myself a brightness of spirits, and a cheerfulness I had never before experienced, and took several paces up and down the room with joyful alacrity—His gift in whom I trusted. Happy had it been for me, if this early effort towards a dependence upon the Blessed God had been frequently repeated by me. But alas ! it was the first and last instance of this kind between infancy and manhood. The cruelty of this boy, which he had long practised in so secret a manner that no creature suspected it, was at length discovered; he was expelled the school and I was taken from it."
When he was ten years old his father gave him an essay in favour of suicide to read, and asked his opinion of the matter. Later in life Cowper found out that just about this time a friend of his father had killed himself, and he supposed that his father was trying to justify the deed, and had used his fresh, unbiassed mind as a sort of test of the case. The action may be taken as an indication of the measure of tact used in the boy's upbringing. Yet when all these things are remembered, we are really no nearer to the solution of any of the problems involved in Cowper's very peculiar mental experiences than if we knew nothing of them. He was sane enough to defend himself against Newton's Puritanism when his innocent pleasures were condemned by his friend's fanaticism as sinful worldliness. And having found a sympathetic environment, first in the house of Dr. Cotton, the doctor to whose care he was committed after his first derangement, and afterwards with Mrs. Unwin, the guardian angel of the most important years of his life, he was happy in all respects except in so far
as he was haunted by the despairing thought that was a. legacy of his madness,—the recollection of a voice once heard calling to him out of the Unseen : " Action est de te ;
periisti." To distract his attention from this thought, not to hear this voice, was his aim in all that he did. He learned carpentering, he built himself a greenhouse, he kept tame hares, he read, he wrote, he welcomed frivolous thoughts, and courted the society of his kind,—all in order to escape from the thoughts in the background, among whom " the tallest fellow and the loudest is he who is continually crying with a loud voice " the words of perdition given above. So he writes to John Newton, contrasting his friend's impatience of distraction with his own craving for it. " Dissipation itself would be welcome to me, so it were not a vicious one ; but however earnestly invited, is coy and keeps at a distance."
Again, one says, if there had been any undue levity, any touch of exaltation about his letters and his published works, one could have understood the position better. But there was none. He could say most truly that his "thoughts were clad in a sober livery." No man could have lived a wiser, gentler, more reasonable life than Cowper did. He has indeed set the pattern of the quiet life for all who have the wisdom to renounce the dreams of ambition, and find their pleasure in simple everyday realities. And it is in the " Letters " even more than in the " Works " that the pattern is best preserved and most attractive.
Mr. Wright, who edits these four handsome volumes of Cowper's letters, drew attention lately in his Lzfe of Edward FitzGerald to some resemblances between Cowper and the translator of the Rubaiyat. Both were men of genius who
were somehow disqualified for great careers, and to both the world owes the same kind of debt. They have enriched the book of friendship, and they have left behind them perfect letters.
With regard to Cowper's letters, the reviewer is placed in a difficulty, because they have so long been acknowledged as classics that to give extracts from the most striking is out of the question. They are considered " known," though most of us have forgotten them, and many have never looked into them. But Mr. Wright has very considerately given a special list of the letters which have achieved individual fame, so that the laziest reader can look up quickly the " Runaway Hare " letter, the " Thresh-his-old-jacket" letter, the " Hop-o'-my- thumb" letter, and feel a little au fait before plunging into the general correspondence. It is when we come to the general correspondence that another difficulty presents itself, the difficulty of selecting special bits for quotation where everything is so good. With Cowper it is always the form and the mood that are so charming. He ap- proaches life—the actual life of daily affairs and daily intercourse—in a temper so benign, so playful, so frank and unaffected. Everything interests him. He is so fond of his friends, and is such a master of that excellent social art of "letting one's friends know how much one likes them." His letters seem to hold out hands of affection; they are rich in genial beginnings and warm conclusions. They are intimate, witty, serious, kind. And the style is precisely what the style of letters should be,—neat and pointed, but never artificial ; observant of the conventions in so far as the conventions are pleasant and helpful to the essential business of making the intention understood, but rising above them in all sorts of original and independent ways the moment they are found in- adequate. " What shall I write about ? " he said to Lady Hesketh. And her answer was : " You can write about any- thing,—this sofa." And so "The Sofa" was written. It was Lady Austen who told him the story on which "John Gilpin" was founded. And it was the fame of " John Gilpin " that brought Lady Hesketh back into his ken after long years of separation. He had loved her sister, and been all but engaged to her before his madness. Then came separation and " shipwreck of all the friendships of his early life," the care of Dr. Cotton, and the friendship of the Unwins. To Mrs. Unwin has extended, for the public of to-day, the suspicion of dulness that attaches to Cowper in the minds of those who do not know him. Nothing could be more unjust. She has been truly and pleasantly summed up by one of Cowper's numerous editors as "one of those rare women who, though endowed with intellectual gifts and social powers far above the average of women, deliberately prefer the seclusion of domestic life in order to devote themselves to the happiness of others." She made her " sunshine in a shady place," but there was nothing shady about the sunshine that she made. Lady Austen found her delightful when she strayed into her neighbourhood, and was so captivated by the cultivated atmosphere of the poet's home that she settled at Olney and stayed there until her feeling for Cowper grew warmer than she could control or he under- stand. Lady Hesketh liked her also, and got on happily with her as well as with Cowper to the end. Altogether, it is a remarkable group of characters to which this correspondence introduces us. And whatever be the ultimate psychological truth about Cowper's madness—inasmuch as it was the acci- dent that kept him in retirement—we may regard it, from the point of view of literature and its benefits to the world, as a disaster by no means uncompensated.
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