English Lands Letters and Kings Part 16

There is not a more princely house among the baronial homes of England.

It sits among wooded hills--which to the eye of a Suffolk man would be mountains--where Lincolns.h.i.+re and Leicesters.h.i.+re join: the towers of Lincoln Cathedral are in sight at the north, and Nottingham Castle in the west: and there is a glitter in some near valley of an affluent of the Trent, s.h.i.+ning amid billows of foliage; while within the stately {236} home,[9] the Suffolk doctor could have regaled himself with examples of Rubens and of Murillo, of Teniers, Poussin, and Vand.y.k.e.

The Duke of Rutland was a kindly man, a sentimental lover of literature, enjoying the verse of Crabbe, and proud of patronizing him, but lacking the supreme art of putting him at ease among his t.i.tled visitors; perhaps enjoying from his high poise, the disturbing embarra.s.sments with which the good-natured poet was beset under the bewildering attentions of some butler, who outshone the host in his trappings, and in his lordly condescension to the level of an apothecary's apprentice.

It was not altogether pleasant for Crabbe; and when afterward he had married his old flame of Aldborough, and by invitation of the Duke (who was absent in Ireland) was allowed to partake of the hospitalities of the castle, the ironical obsequience of the flunkeys all, drove him away from the baronial roof. Through the influence of friends he secures livings,--first in Dorset, and afterward {237} in Leicesters.h.i.+re (1789), almost within sight of Belvoir towers.

Hereabout, or in near counties, where he has parochial duties, he vegetates slumberously, for twenty years or more. He preaches, practises his old apothecary craft, drives (his wife holding the reins), idles, writes books and burns them, grows old, has children, loves flowers, and on one occasion, mounts his horse and gallops sixty miles for a scent of the salt air which he had snuffed as a boy.

Meanwhile the old haunts in London, which he knew for so brief a day, know him no more; his old friends are dead, his hair is snowy, his purposes wavering.

But his children are of an age now to spur him to further literary effort; with the opening of the present century he rallies his power for new songs; and thereafter the slowly succeeding issues of the _Parish Register_, _The Borough_, and the _Tales of the Hall_, pave a new way for him into the courts of Fame. He secures another and more valuable living in the South of England (Wilts.h.i.+re), where the incense of London praises can reach him more directly. One day in 1819 he goes away from his publishers with bills for {238} 3,000[10] in his pocket; must take them home to show them to his boy, John; he loves that boy and other children over much--more, it is to be feared, than he had ever done that mother, the old flame of Aldborough, in respect of whom there had been intimations of incompatibility; hence, perhaps, the interjection of that sixty-mile ride for a snuff of the freedom of the waves. He died at last down in Trowbridge (his new living), a little way southward of Bradford in Wilts.h.i.+re; and his remains lie in the chancel of the pretty church there.

We must think of him, I believe, as a good, honest-minded, well-meaning man; dull, I dare say as a preacher; diffuse, meandering, homely and lumbering as a poet; yet touching with raw and lively colors the griefs of England's country-poor; and with a realism that is hard to match, painting the flight of petrels and of the curlew, {239} and the great sea waves that gather and roll and break along his lines.

William Cowper.

[Sidenote: Cowper.]

The other poet, to whom allusion has been made, living beside him, in that country of England, yet not near him nor known to him, was William Cowper. You know him better: you ought to know him better. Yet he would have managed a church--if a parish had been his--worse than Crabbe did. I fear he would not have managed children so prudently; and if he had ever married, I feel quite sure that his wife would have managed him.

Cowper was of an excellent family, being the son[11] of a church rector, and was born at the rectory (now destroyed), which once stood under the wing of the pretty church that, with its new decorations, still dominates the picturesque valley {240} town of Great-Berkhamsted, on the line of the London and Birmingham Railway. He studied at Westminster--being school-fellow with Churchill, the poet, and with Warren Hastings--of whose Trial we have had somewhat to say: afterward he entered a solicitor's office at the Temple, where Thurlow (later, Lord Chancellor) chanced to be clerk at the same time. He had fair amount of money, good prospect of a place under Government--his uncle, Ashley Cowper, being a man of position and influence.

This uncle had two daughters, to one of whom this young gentleman said tender things;--too tender to be altogether cousinly--in which regard she proved as over-cousinly as he. But the Papa stamped out that little fire of love before it had grown into great flame. There is reason, however, to believe that the smouldering of it had its influences upon Miss Theodora all through her life; and who shall say that it did not touch the great melancholy of the future poet with a sting of tenderness? There was, however, no outspoken lamentation; the feminine nature of the man accepted the decision of the uncle as a decree of fate; {241} there was never any great capacity in him for struggle or for controversy, either with men, or with untoward circ.u.mstance.

Meantime, the expected preferment came to young Cowper--a place, or places of value and of permanence, which he had need only to take with a bold hand and purpose; but the bold hand was lacking; and his hesitancy multiplied difficulties which could only be met by examination for fitness before the Lords; that examination stares him awfully in the face; he wilts under the bare prospect; is hedged by doubts; palters with his weakness; falls into a wretched state of melancholy, and--buys laudanum to make an end of it all;--then, he has flashes of light, and waves of a redeeming firmness chase over his mind; but finally, on the very day on which the examination was to take place, he makes a miserable effort at self-destruction. Was ever a man, before or since, who would commit suicide to avoid lucrative office? William Cowper, with only an ordinary share of average common sense, and unhampered by the trappings of genius that belonged to him, would have "gone on" for this place; secured it; {242} made his easy fortune; lived a good humdrum life; died lamented, and never heard of.

The poet's fine brain, however--which had been exercised already in musical verse--built up mountains of difficulty; he told in after years, with a curious sincerity, all the details of his struggle--how he held the phial of laudanum to his lips and how he flung it away; how he held a knife at his heart; and finally, how he threw his garter, which served for a gallows-rope, over the chamber door, and hung "till the bitterness of temporal death was past." Righteously enough, after all these weakly resolves, which a man of energy would have made strong, he falls into utter distraction; religious doubts and fears racking him, and lunacy throttling him; and so this young Templar of the bright prospects goes away to the care of a mad-doctor. But long curative processes are needful; and he emerges at last--the blush of his youth all gone, and he lighted up and a-flame with tempestuous religious exhilaration. He would go into orders, but he can never face a congregation; so he plants himself, by the advice of friends, who prop up his waning income, in the flats of Huntingdon, {243} where the river Ouse winds round and round amid the low lands, and sighs among its sedges. He seems like a castaway; what he has written has been little--a boy's pastime; what he has purposed has been weak; and I daresay that his uncle Ashley Cowper, and his cousin Theodora, and his fellow-clerk Thurlow, thought they would never hear of him more, until, on some far-off day, a funeral invitation might come.

But Cowper was presently domesticated in the home of a Rev. Mr.

Unwin--an old gentleman, who has a youngish wife (though eight or ten years Cowper's senior) and a son, who is also a preacher. These take kindly to the invalid; they relish his religious exuberance; they pity his frailties; and then and there begins an intimate friends.h.i.+p between Mrs. Unwin and our poet, which for its purity, its strength, its constancy, is without a parallel, I think, in English literary annals.

It was about the year 1765 that he first fell in with Mrs. Unwin, and he was never thereafter separated from her--for any considerable time, counting by days--up to the year of her death in 1796.

For the first sixteen years of this exile upon {244} the flats along the Ouse--whether at Huntingdon or at Olney (where they removed after the death of the elder Unwin) there must have been, what most men--whether poets or not--would count a weary and monotonous succession of weeks and days and months. There were few neighbors of culture; no village growth or stir; lands all tamely level; streams all sluggish; industries of the smallest; no shooting--no fis.h.i.+ng--no cards--no visitors--no driving; sermon reading in the morning; sermon reading in the evening; walks in the garden; digging in the garden (mild insanity intervening); petting the tame hares; feeding the doves; reading Mistress More; singing hymns; drinking tea; listening for the larks; listening to Mrs. Unwin; drowsing--sleeping--dreaming! Only contrast that dreary trail of days with those pa.s.sed by Goldsmith, or by Johnson, or by Hume!

But good Mrs. Unwin, who is not only kindly, but has some dormant literary tastes, does rouse him to some poetic labors; she does have faith in his talent; and it was in 1782, I think, that his book containing _Table-talk_ and other {245} verse, first appeared, and by its quiet graces and naturalness provoked inquiry in London, and amongst cultured readers everywhere--as to who this "William Cowper of the Inner Temple" might possibly be? The Rev. John Newton of Olney knew, for the poet had a.s.sisted him in the preparation of a certain _Olney Hymn Book_, published not long before: and then and thereafter this John Newton---a good-hearted, well-meaning divine of an old-fas.h.i.+oned stamp, was pounding, as occasion served, with the hard hammer of his unblinking Calvinism upon the quivering sensibilities of the distraught poet.

But on the breezes of this new reputation which Cowper had wrought came in these times (1782) a fresh bird, in fine feathers, floating into the domestic aviary of Olney. This was Lady Austen, the widow of a baronet--who planted herself there--not without due graces of previous introduction (1781)--between the Unwin and the Cowper for three years, giving a new stir to the poet's brain. Out of that quickening came, after a night of travail, that ever-fresh ballad of _John Gilpin's Ride_; it was popular from the first; and {246} some two years later--it was publicly recited by Henderson--a famous Falstaffian actor of that epoch, it ran like wild-fire through the journals of the day, while the shops along Fleet Street showed in their windows a great jolly picture of Gilpin and his intractable nag cantering past the Bell at Edmonton.

The shy poet, however, did not go to London to reap any honors which might have accrued; he stayed at Olney, working at a new _Task_, toward the conception and accomplishment of which he was led by the witty sallies and engaging devices of the new favorite--Lady Austen. This piquant woman, with her charming vivacities, her alluring airs, her dazzling chat, had wrapped the quiet, melancholy poet all around with a witchery to which he was unused and which tempted him to his best powers of song. He was proud of his fresh successes, and grateful to that new and fascinating member of their little household who had provoked and prompted them. What should disturb this cheery party of three--save the ever-lasting unfitness of the odd number? Perhaps the thought of this came first through some {247} tender reproachful look of good Mrs. Unwin; perhaps the poet, stirred to some new wrestle with his withered heart, found out its emptiness; perhaps the gay, enchanting new-comer grew weary of the song she had provoked--or weary of a welcome that stayed so calm. At any rate she took wing;[12] there was a little flurry of correspondence to mark the parting, which, I dare say, both may have wished should be forgotten.

Meanwhile the new, and much-loved poem which had grown out of this intimacy did worthily, and very largely, extend Cowper's fame. Miss Hannah More was enchanted by it; "such an original and philosophic thinker," she says; "such genuine Christianity, and such a divine simplicity!" Even Corsica Boswell calls him "a genius;" and Lord Thurlow (whose favors to the poet never went beyond words) says of his old chum, "If there is a good man on earth, it is William Cowper!"

But the waves of applause break only with a {248} low dolorous murmur upon the threshold of that Olney home. A cruel sense of his own undeservings weighs upon his spirits; he cannot ask a blessing at his meals, for who would listen? he cannot pray, for it would be mockery; and he consoles himself with the poor satisfaction of not being a mocker. He discusses village and public affairs with his barber, Wilson (who had conscientiously refused to dress Lady Austen's hair upon a Sunday). Alluding to American affairs, in that crisis when a treaty of peace was discussed at Versailles (1783) between France and America, he speaks of the "thirteen pitiful colonies which the king of England chose to keep and the king of France to obtain--if he could."

A little later, at the same crisis, he says:

"I may be prejudiced against these [Americans], but I do not think them equal to the task of establis.h.i.+ng an empire.... You will suppose me a politician; but, in truth, I am nothing less. These are the thoughts that occur to me while I read the newspaper; and when I have laid it down, I feel myself more interested in the success of my 'early cuc.u.mbers' than in any part of this important subject."[13]

{249}

_His Later Life._

It was only in the latter part of his career that the poet made the acquaintance of William Hayley,[14] his future biographer, who had been drawn toward Cowper by the charms of his verse and who came to visit him: this friend, through his wide familiarity with the outer world, had suborned bishops and clergy and public men to write to this melancholy exile of Olney and cheer him with their praises--all which praises fell like hail upon Cowper's window pane. And there had been a little trip devised, to divert that weakened and fatigued mind, down to Eartham in Suss.e.x, where his friend Hayley has a beautiful place, and where he brings the artist Romney, to paint the well-known portrait; but there is no long stay away from the old covert on the flats of Buckinghams.h.i.+re; indeed this covert had taken new life within a few years by the advent of a cousin, the Lady {250} Hesketh, the widowed sister of his old lost Theodora; she had come with her carriage and trappings, and taken a fine house, and sought to revive pleasantly all the mundane influences of Lady Austen.

From Olney there had come about in those times--at the wise suggestion of Lady Hesketh--a move over to the near village of Weston, which thereafter became the poet's home. [On an April day many years ago--moved by an old New England cleaving to the poems and the poet--I strolled down from Newport Pagnell--to which place I had taken coach from Northampton--following all the windings of the sluggish Ouse, to Weston; stopping at the "Cowper's Oak" inn, I found next door his old home--its front overgrown with roses--and strolled into his old garden; and thence, by a door the gardener unlocked, into the "Wilderness;" the usher regaling me with stories of the crazy poet whom he had seen in his boyhood, and who loved the birds, and who wore a white ta.s.selled night-cap as he wandered in the garden alleys at noon.]

It was at Weston, I think, that the translation of Homer was--if not undertaken--most largely {251} wrought upon. The regular occupation involved counted largely in the dispersion of those despondent mists that were gathering round him. He brought scholarly tastes and a quick conscience to the work; a boy would be helped more to the thieving of the proper English by Cowper's Homer, than by Pope's; but there was not "gallop" enough in his nature for a live rendering; and he was too far in-sh.o.r.e for the rhythmic beat of the mult.i.tudinous waves and too far from the "hollow" s.h.i.+ps.

In the intervals of this important labor--which was only fairly successful, and gave him no such clutch upon the publisher's guineas as Crabbe gained at a later day--only chance things were written. But some of these chances were brimful of suggestion and of most beautiful issues. That relating to his mother's picture--sent to him by some cousinly hand--a flas.h.i.+ng from the embers of his life, as it were, the reader must know; who knows it too well?

"Oh that those lips had language! Life has pa.s.sed With me but roughly since I heard thee last.

Those lips are thine--thy own sweet smile I see,

{252}

The same that oft in childhood solaced me.

Voice only fails, else how distinct they say, Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!"

But it is a poem from which quotation will no way serve. After the death of Warton, poet Laureate (1790), Lady Hesketh, and other friends were anxious that the Olney poet should succeed to that honor; Southey says, he might have secured it; but Cowper can never, never go up to court for a kissing of the king's hand.

And now there are coming fast drearier days and months to these good people of the Weston home. The poet's mind, staggered perhaps by those later Homeric labors, but more likely by the grievous religious doubts which overhang him, loses from time to time its poise; and he goes maundering, or silent, and with no smile for days, into the deserts of melancholy.

[Sidenote: Death of Cowper.]

Mrs. Unwin, worn down by long fatigues, is at last smitten by paralysis; and she whose life has been spent in serving must herself be served; the poor poet bringing to that service all the instincts of affection, and the wavering purpose of a shattered mind. Yet out of this new gloom and {253} these terrors of the home comes that faultless little poem inscribed to "My Mary."

"Thy silver locks, once auburn bright, Are still more lovely in my sight Than golden beams of Orient light, My Mary.

"For could I view--nor them--nor thee What sight worth seeing could I see?

The sun would rise in vain for me, My Mary.

"Partakers of thy sad decline Thy hands their little force resign, Yet gently prest, press gently mine, My Mary."

But here, as before, quotation counts for nothing; it cannot bring to mind the mellowness and the tenderness which lurk in so many of the lines and in all the flowing measure of the little poem. Mrs. Unwin has embalmment in it that will keep her memory alive, longer than would any tomb in Westminster.

Well, Mrs. Unwin dies at last in the town of East Dereham, Norfolk, where they had taken her for "diversion"; and the poor poet died there three years later and was buried beside her. {254} They were three dreary years--which followed upon her death--for him and for those about him. From time to time he touched a little bit of old work, but put no joy in it; distraught--weary--smileless--only waiting.

[Sidenote: Cowper's poetry.]

Critics are agreed that we shall not rank him among the great poets; but he comes nearer to their rank than anybody in his day believed possible. He is so true; he is so tender; he is so natural. If in his longer poems there is sometimes a lack of last finish, and an overplus of language--there is a frankness of utterance and a billowy undulation of movement that have compensating charms. He loves Nature as a boy loves his play; his humanities are wakened by all her voices. He not only seizes upon exterior effects with a painter's eye and hand, but he has a touch which steals deeper meanings and influences and transfers them into verse that flows softly and quietly as summer brooks. He cannot speak or rhyme but the odors of the country cling to his words.

There is no crazy whirl of expletives which would apply to a hundred scenes, but clear, forceful epithet, full of singleness of story:--

{255}

Far spires lifting over stretches of yellow gra.s.s-grown plain; marsh birds trailing their flight by sluggish rivers; boats dragged slumberously at noon-tide with seething bubbles in their wake; great banks of woodland, wading through snows, or throwing shadows by morning, and counter-shadows at evening, over the flanks of low hills on which they stand in leafy platoons. And for sounds--far off church-bells waking solitudes with their tremulous beat and jangle; birds chasing the echoes of their own songs; bees murmurous over banks of thyme; cattle lowing in the meadows; or the bay of some hound--breaking full and clear, and lost again--as he follows, far off, some cold trail amongst the hills.

Above all--he is English; the household has for him the sanct.i.ty of an altar; firesides are lighted and glow with a sacred warmth; home interests are always golden. p.r.o.ne to idleness he is perhaps--mental and physical; much femininity in him; his thought wavering and riding on his rhyme. But he is good, kind; crudest to himself--sticking the John Newton darts of Calvinism into his conscience, and loving the pain of them.