Shelburne Essays Part 1

Shelburne Essays, Third Series.

by Paul Elmer More.

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER

If, as I sometimes think, a man's interest in letters is almost the surest measure of his love for Letters in the larger sense of the word, the busy schoolmaster of Olney ought to stand high in favour for the labour he has bestowed on completing and rearranging the _Correspondence of William Cowper_.[1] It may be that Mr. Wright's competence as an editor still leaves something to be desired. Certainly, if I may speak for my own taste, he has in one respect failed to profit by a golden opportunity; it needed only to print the more intimate poems of Cowper in their proper place among the letters to have produced a work doubly interesting and perfectly unique. The correspondence itself would have been shot through by a new light, and the poetry might have been restored once more to its rightful seat in our affections. The fact is that not many readers to-day can approach the verse of the eighteenth century in a mood to enjoy or even to understand it. We have grown so accustomed to over-emphasis in style and wasteful effusion in sentiment that the clarity and self-restraint of that age repel us as ungenuine; we are warned by a certain _frigus_ at the heart to seek our comfort elsewhere. And just here was the chance for an enlightened editor. So much of Cowper's poetry is the record of his own simple life and of the little adventures that befell him in the valley of the Ouse, that it would have lost its seeming artificiality and would have gained a fresh appeal by a.s.sociation with the letters that relate the same events and emotions. How, for example, the quiet grace of the fables (and good fables are so rare in Englis.h.!.+) would be brought back to us again if we could read them side by side with the actual stories out of which they grew. There is a whole charming natural history here of beast and bird and insect and flower. The nightingale which Cowper heard on New Year's Day sings in a letter as well as in the poem; and here, to name no others, are the incidents of the serpent and the kittens, and of that walk by the Ouse when the poet's dog Beau brought him the water lily.

Or, to turn to more serious things, how much the pathetic stanzas _To Mary_ would gain in poignant realism if we came upon them immediately after reading the letters in which Cowper lays bare his remorse for the strain his malady had imposed upon her.

A still more striking example would be the lines written _On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture_. By a literary tradition these are reckoned among the most perfect examples of pathos in the language, and yet how often to-day are they read with any deep emotion? I suspect no tears have fallen on that page for many a long year.

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, 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!"

Short-lived possession! but the record fair, That memory keeps of all thy kindness there, Still outlives many a storm that has effaced A thousand other themes less deeply traced.

Thy nightly visits to my chamber made, That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid; Thy morning bounties as I left my home, The biscuit or confectionary plum: The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed: All this, and more enduring still than all, Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall,--

do you not feel the expression here, the very balance of the rhymes, to stand like a barrier between the poet's emotion and your own susceptibility? And that _confectionary plum_--somehow the savour of it has long ago evaporated. Even the closing lines--

Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-tost, Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compa.s.s lost--

need some allowance to cover their artificial mode. And it is just this allowance that a.s.sociation with the letters would afford; the mind would pa.s.s without a shock from the simple recital in prose of Cowper's ruined days to these phrases at once so metaphorical and so conventional, and would find in them a new power to move the heart. Or compare with the sentiment of the poem this paragraph from the letter to his cousin, Mrs.

Bodham--all of it a model of simple beauty:

The world could not have furnished you with a present so acceptable to me, as the picture you have so kindly sent me.

I received it the night before last, and viewed it with a trepidation of nerves and spirits somewhat akin to what I should have felt, had the dear original presented herself to my embraces.

I kissed it and hung it where it is the last object that I see at night, and, of course, the first on which I open my eyes in the morning. She died when I completed my sixth year; yet I remember her well, and am an ocular witness of the great fidelity of the copy. I remember, too, a mult.i.tude of the maternal tendernesses which I received from her, and which have endeared her memory to me beyond expression.

To read together the whole of this letter and of the poem is something more than a demonstration of what might be accomplished by a skilful editor; it is a lesson, too, in that quality of restrained dignity, I had almost said of self-respect, which we find it so difficult to impress on our broken modern style.

Some day, no doubt, we shall have such an interwoven edition of Cowper's prose and verse, to obtain which we would willingly sacrifice a full third of the letters if this were necessary. Meanwhile, let us be thankful for whatever fresh light our Olney editor has thrown on the correspondence, and take the occasion to look a little more closely into one of the strangest and most tragic of literary lives. William Cowper was born at Great Berkhampstead in 1731. His father, who was rector of the parish, belonged to a family of high connections, and his mother, Anne Donne, was also of n.o.ble lineage, claiming descent through four different lines from Henry III. The fact is of some importance, for the son was very much the traditional gentleman, and showed the pride of race both in his language and manners. He himself affected to think more of his kins.h.i.+p to John Donne, of poetical memory, than of his other forefathers, and, half in play, traced the irritability of his temper and his verse-mongering back to that "venerable ancestor, the Dean of St. Paul's."[2] It is fanciful, but one is tempted to lay upon the old poet's meddling with coffins and ghastly thoughts some of the responsibility for the younger man's nightly terrors. "That which we call life is but _Hebdomada mortium_, a week of death, seven days, seven periods of life spent in dying," preached Donne in his last sermon, and an awful echo of the words might seem to have troubled his descendant's nerves. But that is not yet. As a boy and young man Cowper appears to have been high-spirited and natural. At Westminster School he pa.s.sed under the instruction of Vincent Bourne, so many of whose fables he was to translate in after years, and who, with Milton and Prior, was most influential in forming his poetical manner.

I love the memory of Vinny Bourne [he wrote in one of his letters]. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid.... He was so good-natured, and so indolent, that I lost more than I got by him; for he made me as idle as himself. He was such a sloven, as if he had trusted to his genius as a cloak for everything that could disgust you in his person.... I remember seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy locks and box his ears to put it out again.

After leaving Westminster he spent a few months at Berkhampstead, and then came to London under the pretext of studying law, living first with an attorney in Southampton Row and afterwards taking chambers in the Middle Temple. Life went merrily for a while. He was a fellow student with Thurlow, and there he was, he "and the future Lord Chancellor, constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and making giggle, instead of studying the law. Oh, fie, cousin!" he adds, "how could you do so?" This pretty "Oh fie!" introduces us to one who was to be his best and dearest correspondent, his cousin Harriet Cowper, afterwards Lady Hesketh, and who was to befriend him and cheer him in a thousand ways. It may introduce us also to Harriet's sister, Theodora, with whom Cowper, after the fas.h.i.+on of idle students, fell thoughtlessly in love. He would have married her, too, bringing an incalculable element into his writing which I do not like to contemplate; for it is the way of poets to describe most ideally what fortune has denied them in reality, and Cowper's task, we know, was to portray in prose and verse the quiet charms of the family. But the lady's father, for reasons very common in such cases, put an end to that danger. Cowper took the separation easily enough, if we may judge from the letters of the period; but to Theodora, one fancies, it meant a life of sad memories.

They never exchanged letters, but in after years, when Lady Hesketh renewed correspondence with Cowper and brought him into connection with his kinsfolk, Theodora, as "Anonymous," sent money and other gifts to eke out his slender living. It is generally a.s.sumed that the recipient never guessed the name of his retiring benefactress, but I prefer to regard it rather as a part of his delicacy and taste to affect ignorance where the donor did not wish to be revealed, and think that his penetration of the secret added a kind of wistful regret to his grat.i.tude. "On Friday I received a letter from dear Anonymous," he writes to Lady Hesketh, "apprising me of a parcel that the coach would bring me on Sat.u.r.day. Who is there in the world that has, or thinks he has, reason to love me to the degree that he does? But it is no matter.

He chooses to be unknown, and his choice is, and ever shall be, so sacred to me, that if his name lay on the table before me reversed, I would not turn the paper about that I might read it. Much as it would gratify me to thank him, I would turn my eyes away from the forbidden discovery." Could there be a more tactful way of conveying his thanks and insinuating his knowledge while respecting Theodora's reserve?

But all this was to come after the great change in Cowper's life. As with Charles Lamb, a name one likes to link with his, the terrible shadow of madness fell upon him one day, never wholly to rise. The story of that calamity is too well known to need retelling in detail. A first stroke seized him in his London days, but seems not to have been serious. He recovered, and took up again the easy life that was in retrospect to appear to him so criminally careless. In order to establish him in the world, his cousin, Major Cowper, offered him the office of Clerk of the Journals to the House of Lords. There was, however, some dispute as to the validity of the donor's powers, and it became necessary for Cowper to prove his competency at the bar of the House. The result was pitiable. Anxiety and nervous dread completely prostrated him. After trying futilely to take his own life, he was placed by his family in a private asylum at St. Albans, where he remained about a year and a half. His recovery took the form of religious conversion and a rapturous belief in his eternal salvation.

Instead of returning to London, he went to live in the town of Huntingdon, drawn thither both by the retirement of the place and its nearness to Cambridge, where his brother John resided. Here he became acquainted with the Unwins:

... the most agreeable people imaginable; quite sociable, and as free from the ceremonious civility of country gentlefolks as any I ever met with. They treat me more like a near relation than a stranger, and their house is always open to me. The old gentleman carries me to Cambridge in his chaise. He is a man of learning and good sense, and as simple as Parson Adams. His wife has a very uncommon understanding, has read much to excellent purpose, and is more polite than a d.u.c.h.ess. The son, who belongs to Cambridge, is a most amiable young man, and the daughter quite of a piece with the rest of the family. They see but little company, which suits me exactly; go when I will, I find a house full of peace and cordiality in all its parts.

The intimacy ripened and Cowper was taken into the family almost as one of its members. But trouble and change soon broke into this idyllic home. Mr. Unwin was thrown from his horse and killed; the son was called away to a charge; the daughter married. Meanwhile, Mrs. Unwin and Cowper had gone to live at Olney, a dull town on the Ouse, where they might enjoy the evangelical preaching of that reformed sea-captain and slave-dealer, the Rev. John Newton.

The letters of this period are filled with a tremulous joy; it was as if one of the timid animals he loved so well had found concealment in the rocks and heard the baying of the hounds, thrown from the scent and far off. "For my own part," he writes to Lady Hesketh, "who am but as a Thames wherry, in a world full of tempest and commotion, I know so well the value of the creek I have put into, and the snugness it affords me, that I have a sensible sympathy with you in the pleasure you find in being once more blown to Droxford." Books he has in abundance, and happy country walks; friends that are more than friends to occupy his heart, and quaint characters to engage his wit. He finds an image of his days in Rousseau's description of an English morning, and his evenings differ from them in nothing except that they are still more snug and quieter.

His talk is of the mercies and deliverance of G.o.d; he is eager to convert the little world of his correspondents to his own exultant peace; and, it must be confessed, only the charm and breeding of his language save a number of these letters from the wearisomeness of misplaced preaching.

Cowper removed with Mrs. Unwin to Olney in 1767. Six years later came the miraculous event which changed the whole tenor of his life and which gave the unique character to all the letters he was to write thereafter.

He was seized one night with a frantic despondency, and again for a year and a half, during all which time Mr. Newton cared for him as for a brother, suffered acute melancholia. He recovered his sanity in ordinary matters, but the spring of joy and peace had been dried up within him.

Thenceforth he never, save for brief intervals, could shake off the conviction that he had been abandoned by G.o.d--rather that for some inscrutable reason G.o.d had deliberately singled him out as a victim of omnipotent wrath and eternal d.a.m.nation. No doubt there was some physical origin, some lesion of the nerves, at the bottom of this disease, but the peculiar form of his mania and its virulence can be traced to causes quite within the range of literary explanation. He was a scapegoat of his age; he accepted with perfect faith what other men talked about, and it darkened his reason. Those were the days when a sharp and unwholesome opposition had arisen between the compromise of the Church with worldly forms and the evangelical absolutism of Wesley and Whitefield and John Newton. Cowper himself, on emerging from his melancholia at St. Albans, had adopted the extreme Calvinistic tenets in regard to the divine omnipotence. Man was but a toy in the hands of an arbitrary Providence; conversion was first a recognition of the utter nullity of the human will; and there was no true religion, no salvation, until Grace had descended freely like a fire from heaven and devoured this offering of a man's soul. To understand Cowper's faith one should read his letter of March 31, 1770, in which he relates the death-bed conversion of his brother at Cambridge. Now John was a clergyman in good standing, a man apparently of blameless life and Christian faith, yet to himself and to William he was without hope until the miracle of regeneration had been wrought upon him. After reading Cowper's letter one should turn to Jonathan Edwards's treatise on _The Freedom of the Will_, and follow the inexorable logic by which the New England divine proves that G.o.d must be the source of all good and evil, of this man's salvation and that man's loss: "If once it should be allowed that things may come to pa.s.s without a Cause, we should not only have no proof of the Being of G.o.d, but we should be without evidence of anything whatsoever but our own immediately present ideas and consciousness. For we have no way to prove anything else but by arguing from effects to causes." Yet the responsibility of a man abides through all his helplessness: "The Case of such as are given up of G.o.d to Sin and of fallen Man in general, proves moral Necessity and Inability to be consistent with blameworthiness." Good Dr. Holmes has said somewhere in his jaunty way that it was only decent for a man who believed in this doctrine to go mad. Well, Cowper believed in it; there was no insulating pad of worldly indifference between his faith and his nerves, and he went mad.

And he was in another way the victim of his age. We have heard him comparing his days at Huntingdon with _Rousseau's description of an English morning_. Unfortunately, the malady also which came into the world with Rousseau, the morbid exaggeration of personal consciousness, had laid hold of Cowper. Even when suffering from the earlier stroke he had written these words to his cousin: "I am of a very singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed with"; and this sense of his singularity follows him through life. During the Huntingdon days it takes the form of a magnified confidence that Heaven is peculiarly concerned in his rescue from the fires of affliction; after the overthrow at Olney it is reversed, and fills him with the certainty that G.o.d has marked him out among all mankind for the special display of vengeance:

This all-too humble soul would arrogate Unto itself some signalising hate From the supreme indifference of Fate!

Writing to his mentor, John Newton (who had left Olney), he declares that there is a mystery in his destruction; and again to Lady Hesketh: "Mine has been a life of wonders for many years, and a life of wonders I in my heart believe it will be to the end." More than once in reply to those who would console him he avers that there is a singularity in his case which marks it off from that of all other men, that Providence has chosen him as a special object of its hostility. In Rousseau, whose mission was to preach the essential goodness of mankind, the union of aggravated egotism with his humanitarian doctrine brought about the conviction that the whole human race was plotting his ruin. In Cowper, whose mind dwelt on the power and mercies of Providence, this self-consciousness united with his Calvinism to produce the belief that G.o.d had determined to ensnare and destroy his soul. Such was the strange twist that accompanied the birth of romanticism in France and in England.

The conviction came upon Cowper through the agency of dreams and imaginary voices. The depression first seized him on the 24th of January, 1773. About a month later a vision of the night troubled his sleep, so distinct and terrible that the effect on his brain could never be wholly dispelled. Years afterwards he wrote to a friend:

My thoughts are clad in a sober livery, for the most part as grave as that of a bishop's servants. They turn upon spiritual subjects; but the tallest fellow and the loudest among them all is he who is continually crying with a loud voice, _Actum est de te; periisti!_ You wish for more attention, I for less. Dissipation [distraction] itself would be welcome to me, so it were not a vicious one; but however earnestly invited, is coy, and keeps at a distance. Yet with all this distressing gloom upon my mind, I experience, as you do, the slipperiness of the present hour, and the rapidity with which time escapes me. Every thing around us, and every thing that befalls us, const.i.tutes a variety, which, whether agreeable or otherwise, has still a thievish propensity, and steals from us days, months, and years, with such unparalleled address, that even while we say they are here, they are gone.

That apparently was the sentence which sounded his doom on the night of dreams: _Actum est de te; periisti_--it is done with thee, thou hast perished! and no domestic happiness, or worldly success, or wise counsel could ever, save for a little while, lull him to forgetfulness. He might have said to his friends, as Socrates replied to one who came to offer him deliverance from jail: "Such words I seem to hear, as the mystic wors.h.i.+ppers seem to hear the piping of flutes; and the sound of this voice so murmurs in my ears that I can hear no other."

But it must not be supposed from all this that Cowper's letters are morbid in tone or filled with the dejection of melancholia. Their merit, on the contrary, lies primarily in their dignity and restraint, in a certain high-bred ease, which is equally manifest in the language and the thought. Curiously enough, after the fatal visitation religion becomes entirely subordinate in his correspondence, and only at rare intervals does he allude to his peculiar experience. He writes for the most part like a man of the world who has seen the fas.h.i.+ons of life and has sought refuge from their vanity. If I were seeking for a comparison to relieve the quality of these Olney letters (and it is these that form the real charm of Cowper's correspondence), I would turn to Charles Lamb. The fact that both men wrote under the shadow of insanity brings them together immediately, and there are other points of resemblance.

Both are notable among English letter-writers for the exquisite grace of their language, but if I had to choose between the two the one whose style possessed the most enduring charm, a charm that appealed to the heart most equally at all seasons and left the reader always in that state of quiet satisfaction which is the office of the purest taste, I should name Cowper. The wit is keener in Lamb and above all more artful; there is a certain petulance of humour in him which surprises us oftener into laughter, the pathos at times is more poignant; but the effort to be entertaining is also more apparent, and the continual holding up of the mind by the unexpected word or phrase becomes a little wearisome in the end. The attraction of Cowper's style is in the perfect balance of the members, an art which has become almost lost since the eighteenth century, and in the spirit of repose which awakens in the reader such a feeling of easy elevation as remains for a while after the book is laid down. Lamb is of the city, Cowper of the fields. Both were admirers of Vincent Bourne; Lamb chose naturally for translation the poems of city life--_The Ballad Singers_, _The Rival Bells_, the _Epitaph on a Dog_:

Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie, That wont to tend my old blind master's steps, His guide and guard; nor, while my service lasted, Had he occasion for that staff, with which He now goes picking out his path in fear Over the highways and crossings, but would plant Safe in the conduct of my friendly string, A firm foot forward still, till he had reached His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide Of pa.s.sers-by in thickest confluence flowed: To whom with loud and pa.s.sionate laments From morn to eve his dark estate he wailed.

Cowper just as inevitably selected the fables and country-pieces--_The Glowworm_, _The Jackdaw_, _The Cricket:_

Little inmate, full of mirth, Chirping on my kitchen hearth, Wheresoe'er be thine abode, Always harbinger of good, Pay me for thy warm retreat, With a song more soft and sweet; In return thou shalt receive Such a strain as I can give.

Though in voice and shape they be Formed as if akin to thee, Thou surpa.s.sest, happier far, Happiest gra.s.shoppers that are; Theirs is but a summer song, Thine endures the winter long, Unimpaired, and shrill, and clear, Melody throughout the year.

Neither night nor dawn of day Puts a period to thy play: Sing, then--and extend thy span Far beyond the date of man; Wretched man, whose years are spent In repining discontent, Lives not, aged though he be, Half a span, compared with thee.

There is in the blind beggar something of the quality of Lamb's own life, with its inherent loneliness imposed by an ever-present grief in the midst of London's noisy streets; and in the verses to the cricket it is scarcely fanciful to find an image of Cowper's "domestic life in rural leisure pa.s.sed." Lamb was twenty-five when Cowper died, in the year 1800. One is tempted to continue in the language of fable and ask what would have happened had the city mouse allured the country mouse to visit his chambers in Holborn or Southampton buildings. To be sure there was no luxury of purple robe and mighty feast in that abode; but I think the revelry and the wit, and that hound of intemperance which always pursued poor Lamb, would have frightened his guest back to his hiding-place in the wilderness:

... me silva cavusque Tutus ab insidiis tenui solabitur ervo!

Cowper, in fact, was the first writer to introduce that intimate union of the home affections with the love of country which, in the works of Miss Austen and a host of others, was to become one of the unique charms and consolations of English literature. And the element of austere gloom in his character, rarely exposed, but always, we know, in the background, is what most of all relieves his letters from insipidity.

Lamb strove deliberately by a kind of crackling mirth to drown the sound of the grave inner voice; Cowper listened reverently to its admonitions, even to its threatenings; he spoke little of what he heard, but it tempered his wit and the snug comfort of his life with that profounder consciousness of what, disguise it as we will, lies at the bottom of the world's experience. We call him mad because he believed himself abandoned of G.o.d, and shuddered with remorseless conviction. Put aside for a moment the language of the market place, and be honest with ourselves: is there not a little of our fate, of the fate of mankind, in Cowper's desolation? After all, was his melancholy radically different from the state of that great Frenchman, a lover of his letters withal, Sainte-Beuve, who dared not for a day rest from benumbing labour lest the questionings of his own heart should make themselves heard, and who wrote to a friend that no consolation could reach that settled sadness which was rooted in _la grande absence de Dieu?_

It is not strange that the society from which Cowper fled should have seemed to him whimsical and a little mad. "A line of Bourne's," he says, "is very expressive of the spectacle which this world exhibits, tragi-comical as the incidents of it are, absurd in themselves, but terrible in their consequences:

Sunt res humanae flebile ludibrium."

Nor is it strange that he wondered sometimes at the gayety of his own letters: "It is as if Harlequin should intrude himself into the gloomy chamber, where a corpse is deposited in state. His antic gesticulations would be unseasonable, at any rate, but more especially so if they should distort the features of the mournful attendants into laughter."

But it is not the humour of the letters that attracts us so much as their picture of quiet home delights in the midst of a stormy world. We linger most over the account of those still evenings by the fireside, while Mrs. Unwin, and perhaps their friend Lady Austen, was busy with her needles--

Thy needles, once a s.h.i.+ning store, For my sake restless heretofore, Now rust disused, and s.h.i.+ne no more, My Mary!--