Books

Damned true poet

Peter Quennell

The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper Vol III: 1787-1791 Ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (Clarendon Press £45) In February 1773, when William Cowper was middle-aged, some 13 years before the present volume of his letters and prose- writings opens, he had experienced and luckily survived an appalling inward crisis — as he lay asleep, he had heard a terrible voice that assured him of his own damna- tion. It confirmed his gloomiest beliefs. Already he had attempted to commit suicide; and, during the course of his life, he suffered five attacks of painfully acute de- pression, from the last of which, in 1794, though he clung to life until 2 May 1800, he would never quite emerge.

Volume Ill of this admirable series, however, records a relatively tranquil stage of his personal and literary existence. Bet- ween 1787 and 1791, he had only one seriously disabling attack, and was often busily engaged. Having, in 1785, published his highly popular poem The Task, in 1788 he started his blank verse rendering of The Odyssey. Meanwhile, his domestic background was particularly harmonious. Cowper, an invalidish celibate who needed mothering, seldom lacked a female guar- dian prepared to play the parts of affec- tionate fireside companion and devoted daily nurse.

Such, at a slightly earlier period, had been the well-bred, vivacious Lady Austen, a 'great thinker', he informed his private cir- cle, but also glad to 'laugh and make laugh', and able, 'without seeming to labour at it', to keep a conversation flow- ing. She soon joined his pleasant household at Olney, where his established companion Mrs Unwin had long attended to his wishes, and would have remained there had she been older and less volatile, and had not thought of marrying the virgin poet. Cowper was profoundly shocked by her change of attitude and quickly broke off their relationship.

Thus, Mary Unwin was left in command of the field, to brighten his placid, unevent- ful days. They were days 'shod with felt', Cowper had once said; Olney was an unex- citing place. But the quiet pair had a number of excellent friends who visited and entertained them. Mr and Mrs Throckmor- ton, for example, nicknamed `Mr and Mrs Frog', though a Catholic family and par- tisans of the Whig faction — Mr Thockmorton was a crony of Charles James Fox — proved extremely good neighbours, and brought with them a fragrant whiff of the fashionable London world. Another staunch supporter was the widowed Lady Hesketh. Cowper's first cousin, whom he addressed as 'Dearest Coz', she had made him her especial charge, and received in ex- change some of his finest letters.

Of all his women friends she appears the most unexpected, to judge at least from Mrs Thrale's description. 'Dear Lady Hesketh!' scribbled that extraordinary

woman in her commonplace book, . . how like a Naples Washball she is; so round, so sweet, so.plump, so polished, so red, so white... with more Beauty than almost any body, as much Wit as many a body; and six times the quantity of polite Literature... I never can find out what that woman does to keep the people from ador- ing her.'

By Cowper; on a safe platonic level, she was certainly adored; for, besides being physically decorative, she was sensitive and worldly-wise, and often came close to penetrating the dense veil in which he usual- ly wrapped his doubts and fears. It was to Lady Hesketh that, in January 1787, when a new fit of depression was fast ap- proaching, he wrote at length about his dreams: Some very sensible persons... will acknowledge that in old times God spoke by dreams, but affirm with much boldness that he has since ceased to do so. If you ask them 'Why?', they answer because he has now revealed his Will in the Scripture... But has he thereby precluded himself in any of the opera- tions of Providence?... As to my own peculiar experience in the dreaming way I have only this to observe. I have not believed that I, shall perish because in dreams I have been told it, but because I have had hardly any but terrible dreams for 13 years... They have either tinged my mind with melancholy or filled it with terrour... If we swallow arsenic we must be poison'd...

From mid-January until the last week of July, Cowper wrote no more letters; but as soon as the storm had passed, he pretended to attribute his miseries to some freakish physical mishap — a mere 'twirl in the head' — that a celebrated patent medicine, the Revd Daffy's Elixir, or 'the Bark', was perfectly capable of putting right. 'Those jarrings,' he told Lady Hesketh, 'that made my skull feel like a broken egg-shell and those twirls that I spoke of have been removed by an infusion of the bark, which I have of late constantly applied to.' And, characteristically, he prefaces his next paragraph with a homely bit of news: `Thanks to your choice, I wear the most elegant buttons in all this country... When my waistcoat is made I shall be quite ac- complished.' Cowper's letters have therefore a double appeal; and their fascination lies not only in what he says and in the charm with which he says it — they build up into a wonderful- ly vivid picture of late-18th-century country-life — but in what he doesn't say and lets us guess ourselves. He had a timid and reticent nature; yet there seems no doubt that he possessed a considerable degree of courage, shown by his determina- tion to remain on the surface of life, and, so far as his spiritual malady allowed, forget its subterranean terrors.

The small pleasures of his daily existence he always chronicles with keen enjoyment. He has just been watching a kitten: Her gambols are not to be described...

She tumbles head over heels several times together; she lays her cheek to the ground and presents her rump at you with an air of most supreme disdain; from this posture she rises to dance upon her hind feet, an exercise that she per- forms with all the grace imaginable...

she is dress'd in a tortoise-shell suit, and I know that you will delight in her.

Similarly delightful, after the disap- pearance of his three pet hares, was his beloved spaniel Beau, an ingenious animal, who, when, 'with Cane extended', he had failed to scoop a lily from the waters of the Ouse, plunged in, dragged it towards the shore and laid it at the poet's feet. 'A vacant hour,' he confessed, 'is my abhor- rence'; for, if he were not occupied, 'I suf- fer under the whole influence of my unhap- py temperament'; and these minor diver- sions, accompanied by writing and, of course, perpetual reading, helped him, throughout the period these letters cover, to maintain a fairly steady course.

Then, on 21 December 1791, where the present volume closes, he reports that Mrs Unwin, 'my faithful and affectionate nurse for many years', has suffered a paralytic stroke. She recovered temporarily; but in the autumn of 1792 Cowper again suc- cumbed to deep depression; and, although, a year later, Lady Hesketh decided she would take charge of the Olney household, nothing could now arrest his slow decline.

Yet his breakdown was not complete; in March 1799 the author of John Gilpin and the amiably pedestrian Task began to write his greatest poem. He had read a newspaper story of how an ill-starred sailor — 'such a destined wretch as I' — swept from the deck of a storm-tossed ship, had been left behind to face a solitary death; and The Castaway gradually acquires a fierce momentum, until it reaches the final stan- za, and the desperate poet becomes himself the drowning man:

No voice divine the storm allayed, No light propitious shone; When, snatched from all effectual aid, We perished, each alone: But 1 beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

Byron denied that Cowper was a true poet. The tremendous last six lines of The Castaway should be enough, I think, to prove him wrong.