He lay awake at night
laughing
over it, and made of
it a ballad in a style of fun peculiarly his own, but not to be
found elsewhere outside his letters.
it a ballad in a style of fun peculiarly his own, but not to be
found elsewhere outside his letters.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v11
To mention but
two poets, Gray and Collins poured their tribute of clear water into
the stream. But, with Cowper, we come to the upper reaches, and
are able to trace thence, with unbroken continuity, the course of
the main stream.
Reformers in poetry probably seldom work with a conscious
aim, like social and political reformers. A poet writes in a certain
manner because that is the only way in which he can write, or
wishes to write, and without foreseeing or calculating the effect
of his work. This is especially true of Cowper, who owed more,
perhaps, than any English poet to what may be called accident, as
distinguished from poetic purpose. He did not, like Milton or
Tennyson, dedicate himself to poetry. He did not even write
poetry primarily for the sake of writing poetry, but to ward off
melancholy by keeping his mind occupied. He liked Milton
better than Pope, and was careful to show this preference in
his versification ; but accident—the bent of his mind and the
circumstances of his life—made him the forerunner of a great
poetic revival.
He drew poetry back to the simple truths of
ordinary human nature and the English countryside, because, in
the limited outlook on the world which his life allowed him, these
were the things that touched him and interested him. Being a
man of fine taste, tender feelings and a plain sincerity, he opened
the road of truth for the nobler poetic pageants that were to
pass along it.
B
## p. 78 (#100) #############################################
78
[CH.
William Cowper
>
Born in the rectory of Great Berkhampstead, Herts, in
November 1731, and becoming poet in earnest nearly fifty years
later, he had, meanwhile, fallen under the influence of thought
and sentiment which were beginning to break up the old, rigid
and, frequently, brutal order. His family, on the father's side, had
given distinguished men to the law and the church ; and, in
his boyhood and youth, it seemed not wholly unlikely that he
would follow in his ancestors' paths and take an active part in
life. That he was affectionate and tenderhearted we know from
the lines he wrote many years later, On the receipt of my Mother's
Picture out of Norfolk. How far the bullying which he suffered
at his first school may have twisted the development of his nature,
it is impossible to say. He was not unhappy at Westminster,
where he numbered among his schoolfellows Edward Lloyd,
Charles Churchill, George Colman the elder, Warren Hastings and
Elijah Impey. True, in after years, he attacked English public
schools in Tirocinium; but it is not certain that, in this matter,
his boyish feelings tallied with his riper judgment. From
Westminster, he went to the office of a solicitor, to be trained for
the law. Thurlow was a student in the same office ; and the two
young men used to spend much of their time at the house of
Cowper's uncle Ashley Cowper, where the chief attraction lay in
the daughters, Theodora and Harriet. So far, there is not any
trace of the Cowper of later years, though there are already traces
of the poet. He fell in love with his cousin Theodora, and wrote
verses to her which are far above the average of young men's
love-poems. The poems to Delia show, already, the directness,
the sincerity and the simplicity which were to be the keynotes of
his later work, together with the tenderness which has won him
admirers among hundreds to whom most poetry seems unreal.
In one of these poems, On her endeavouring to conceal her Grief
at Parting, occurs the famous verse :
Oh! then indulge thy grief, nor fear to tell
The gentle source from whence thy sorrows flow;
Nor think it weakness when we love to feel,
Nor think it weakness what we feel to show.
The stanza is completely characteristic of Cowper's mind and
manner. The proposed match with Theodora was forbidden by
her father, on the ground of consanguinity. To Cowper, the blow,
evidently, was severe. In Absence and Bereavement, he bewails
his fate. The concluding lines of this poem :
Why all that soothes a heart from anguish free,
All that delights the happy, palls with me!
>
>
## p. 79 (#101) #############################################
IV]
Effect of his Melancholy
79
suggest strongly the sentiment of a later and finer poem, The
Shrubbery :
This glassy stream, that spreading pine,
Those alders quivering to the breeze,
Might soothe a soul less hurt than mine,
And please, if anything could please.
But fixed unalterable care
Forgoes not what she feels within,
Shows the same sadness everywhere,
And slights the season and the scene.
The earlier poem thus seems to foreshadow the melancholy that,
afterwards, was to claim the poet. Externally, it is true, there did
not appear to be any immediate sign of that melancholy. Cowper
bought chambers in the Temple and was called to the bar.
Without attempting to practise, he lived the life of a cultivated
young man about town, reading Homer and marking the
differences between Homer and Pope, writing articles and verses
(one or two very popular ballads were among the early works
of the author of John Gilpin) and helping his brother John with
a translation of Voltaire's Henriade. Yet, meanwhile, the mis-
chief was growing. He suffered from fits of depression, which, in
later life, he believed to have been of religious origin. He found
what alleviation he could in the poems of George Herbert ; but,
when, in bis thirty-second year, he was nominated by his uncle
major Cowper to a clerkship in the House of Lords, his depression
and his shyness broke into mania, and he tried to kill himself.
Thereafter, he was out of the race, but, on that very account, was
left the more open to the influences, religious and humane, to
which his gentle nature, even in active life, must have been sensible.
These were the days of Wesley and Whitefield, of widening hope
and freedom in religion ; they were, also, the days of Rousseau and
his creed of love and brotherhood. Slaves, animals and common
wretches' were perceived to have their rights. Cowper was to
become the poet of a religious sect, which, though doubtless
narrow and unattractive in itself, had its share in breaking up
the spiritual ice of the age. He was to sing with power in the
cause of slaves, to make his pet hares and his dog famous and
to find in rustics some of his best material for poetry. His
sympathies were not wide; but they were on the side of kindness.
In politics, he remained 'an old whig’; but the French revolution
was, to him, 'a noble cause, though made 'ridiculous' by the
excesses of a ‘madcap' people.
6
>
## p. 80 (#102) #############################################
80
(CH.
William Cowper
a
Thus, though living remote from the world, he breathed into
the world a spirit of love and freedom. Before that time came,
however, he had much to bear. Cured of his mania by a doctor
at St Albans, whose religion was of the hopeful kind, he was
settled by his brother and friends at Huntingdon ; and, here, he
maintained his cheerfulness and formed the friendship which
proved the most important influence on his life. Morley Unwin
was a retired clergyman who taught private pupils. With Unwin,
his wife and his son and daughter, Cowper became so intimate
that he went to live in their house. Their simple, cheerful, re-
ligious life exactly suited his needs. When Unwin was killed by
a fall from his horse, Cowper and Mrs Unwin continued to reside
together. Theirs is one of the famous friendships of literary
history. Henceforth, they never separated; and, in Cowper's
letters, in the sonnet, To Mrs Unwin, and in the poem, To Mary,
the woman who devoted her life to Cowper received her reward.
Soon after Unwin's death, the family moved from Huntingdon to
Olney, in order to be near the curate in charge of that place, John
Newton. The house that Newton chose for them was damp and
gloomy; Olney was a poor and rather brutal place. Newton,
formerly the captain of a slaver, was an evangelist of tremendous
power and small tact. More than one of his parishioners (not,
perhaps, very delicately organised people) had been thrown off their
balance by his 'enthusiasm. ' With the best intentions, he did the
timid and sensitive Cowper much harm. He forced him to hold
forth in public; he robbed him of exercise and gentle pleasures.
The result was a severe return of his melancholy. In order to
dissipate it, Newton laid upon him the task of writing hymns for
a hymn-book which he was compiling.
The collection entitled Olney Hymns was published in London
in 1779. Cowper's contributions to the volume were initialled 'C. ,'
and among them occur several hymns still in use, together with
three or four which are among the best known of English hymns,
to whatever extent people may differ as to their morality. Oh for
a closer walk with God; There is a fountain filled with blood ;
Hark, my soul ! it is the Lord ; Jesus! where'er thy people meet;
God moves in a mysterious way—these are among the hymns by
Cowper in this collection. The salient quality of them all is
their sincerity and directness. The poet's actual experiences in
the spiritual life are expressed with the simplicity generally
characteristic of his work. Their weakness is a lack of profundity,
and the absence of that suggestion of the infinite and the awful,
a
## p. 81 (#103) #############################################
IV]
The Satires
81
which, as in Crashaw or Newman, sometimes informs religious
poetry less carefully dogmatic than Cowper's. His mind, indeed, was
too precisely made up on matters of doctrine to be fruitful either
of lofty religious passion or of religious mystery; and, instead of
being great sacred poetry, his hymns are a stay and comfort
souls experiencing what might be called the practical difficulties
of certain phases of spiritual life. Most of them are hopeful
in tone; for, though the book was not published till 1779, the
hymns were written by Cowper before 1773. In that year, he had
another outbreak of mania. He imagined himself not only con-
demned to hell, but bidden by God to make a sacrifice of his own
life. Mrs Unwin nursed him devotedly ; but, more than a year
passed before he began to recover. By 1776, he had resumed, in
part, his correspondence with his friends. In 1779, Newton left
Olney for a London living; and, the influence of his overbearing
friend being withdrawn, Cowper entered upon what was probably
the happiest period of his life. Carpentering, gardening, horse
exercise, walking and other simple pleasures kept him cheerful ;
and he began again to write poetry. His kinsman Martin Madan
having published a book advocating polygamy, Cowper, in 1781,
printed anonymously a reply to it in the form of a fantastic tale.
Anti-Thelyphthora is not among Cowper's best works ; but it
has a pointed neatness of diction and a descriptive touch which
foretell The Task. Mrs Unwin, always anxious to keep him
occupied and to make the best of him, set him to work on a long
poem. She gave him the not very promising subject of the
progress of error; and, going eagerly to work, he wrote eight
satires : Table Talk, The Progress of Error, Truth, Expostula-
tion, Hope, Charity, Conversation and Retirement.
Most of Cowper's critics have been unduly severe upon these
moral satires. Doubtless, they are not so good as The Task
or many of the shorter poems. Their weakness is obvious.
A satirist, whether he be of the indignant order, like Juvenal, or
the bitter, like Swift, or the genial, like Horace, must begin by
knowing the world that he intends to attack; and Cowper, who
had been cut off from the world, did not know it. When he
attacks bishops and other clergy who were not of his own
evangelical cast, or newspapers, or town life, it is difficult not to
resent his easy smartness at the expense of things which his
narrowness of outlook prevented him from understanding. Again,
writing, as it seems, with an eye seeking for the approval
of John Newton, Cowper gives too much space to good advice,
E. L, XL.
CH. IV.
6
## p. 82 (#104) #############################################
82
[CH.
William Cowper
1
and too little to the allurements which should distinguish the
satirist from the preacher.
The clear harangue, and cold as it is clear,
Falls soporific on the listless ear
are lines from The Progress of Error which have been quoted
against their author ever since the satires first appeared. And it
may be said in general that, fine as is the famous passage on
Petronius (Lord Chesterfield) in The Progress of Error
Thou polished and high-finished foe to truth,
Grey-beard corrupter of our listening youth;
1
Cowper's poetry is not at its best when he is attacking or scolding;
and, writing primarily to distract his mind and to benefit humanity,
only secondarily to produce works of polished art, he is weak in the
construction and arrangement of his poems. These objections,
however, cannot outweigh the many merits of Cowper's moral
satires. Their diction is precise and epigrammatic, not so much
because Cowper polished his work minutely, as because his mind
was exact and clear. Several of his couplets have become familiar
.
as household words; and one of them,
How much a dunce that has been sent to roam
Excells a dunce that has been kept at home,
achieved the honour of quotation by Bulwer Lytton in his play
Money. On a higher level is his criticism of Pope :
But he (his musical finesse was such,
So nice his ear, so delicate his touch)
Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
And every warbler has his tune by heart.
Cowper himself had the tune by heart, no doubt; but he did not
sing it.
Using the heroic couplet throughout these satires, he
contrives to write quite unlike Pope. His versification is already
unlike anything to be found in English literature, unless it be the
verse of his former schoolfellow, Churchill, whose work he greatly
admired. But Cowper's mind was so different from Churchill's
that the resemblance does not go very deep. In the most successful
portions of these satires-especially in the immortal picture of
the statesman out of office, in Retirement-Cowper, both in
matter and in manner, resembles Horace more than he resembles
any other poet. He shows the same shrewd wisdom, the same
precision and refinement, the same delicate playfulness. Retire-
ment, which is the latest of these satires, is, undoubtedly, the
2
}
## p. 83 (#105) #############################################
83
IV]
Poems of 1782
best ; and the perspicacious suggestion has been madel that it
was written under the influence of Cowper's friend, Lady Austen,
to whom we shall return. At any rate, in Retirement, as in The
Task, he is talking of things which he understood and liked for
their own sake ; and, since his tender and genial spirit was more
responsive to the stimulus of what he liked than of what he
disliked, was better, in short, at loving than at hating, in the
positive than in the negative, Retirement shows him well suited by
his subject and happy in its treatment.
The volume was published in 1782 under the title Poems by
William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq. Besides the satires,
it contained thirty-five shorter poems, of which three were in
Latin. Those in English include one or two pieces of note :
Boadicea: an Ode, which has well earned its place in the litera-
ture of the schoolroom and its reputation in the world as a fine
example of great power and weight attained by perfectly simple
means; the pretty Invitation into the Country, addressed to
Newton; some very graceful and delicate translations from the
Latin poems of Cowper's Westminster schoolmaster Vincent
Bourne; the powerful Verses supposed to be written by Alexander
Selkirk; and two poems showing Cowper's possession of a gift
for writing delicate and suggestive lyric poetry-lyric poetry with
the indefinable touch of magic in it—which he did not thoroughly
cultivate. One is the poem entitled The Shrubbery, to which
reference was made above; the other, the lines 'addressed to a
young lady' beginning
Sweet stream, that winds through yonder glade,
Apt emblem of a virtuous maid!
a poem which equals the best achievements of Wordsworth or
Byron in the same field.
In connection with the satire Retirement, the name of Lady
Austen was mentioned above. This charming and intelligent
widow came into Cowper's life in the year 1781 and touched his
spirits and his poetry to fine issues. Unlike Mrs Unwin, she
belonged to the world and had a proper appreciation of the
external things of life. In suggesting to Cowper a subject for
his pen, she gave him not a moral topic but a simple object-
the sofa in his room. The idea was very likely thrown off
without full prevision of its far-reaching effect; but, in encourag-
ing Cowper to write about something that he knew, in checking,
1 By Bailey, J. C. , The Poems of William Cowper, p. xxxvi,
6-2
## p. 84 (#106) #############################################
84
[CH.
William Cowper
so far as might be, his tendency to moralise and to preach by
fixing his attention on the simple facts of his daily life, she gave
him an impulse which was what his own poetry, and English
poetry at that moment, most needed. The result of her suggestion
was The Task, a blank-verse poem in six books, of which The
Sofa formed the first. Cowper starts playfully, with a touch of
the gallantry that was always his. He shows his humour by
dealing with the ordained subject in the style of Milton. Milton
was his favourite poet; Johnson's life of Milton one of the writings
he most disliked. Nevertheless, with his gentle gaiety, he begins
his work with a parody of Milton.
No want of timber then was felt or feared
In Albion's happy isle. The lumber stood
Ponderous, and fixed by its own massy weight.
But elbows still were wanting; these, some say,
An alderman of Cripplegate contrived,
And some ascribe the invention to a priest
Burly and big, and studious of his ease.
Thus, for a hundred lines or so, he plays with his subject. Then,
breaking away from it by an ingenious twist, he speaks for himself;
and, for the first time, we have a new voice, the voice of William
Cowper :
For I have loved the rural walk through lanes
Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep
And skirted thick with intertexture firm
Of thorny boughs; have loved the rural walk
O’er hills, through valleys, and by rivers' brink,
E’er since a truant boy I passed my bounds
To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames;
And still remember, nor without regret
Of hours that sorrow since has much endeared,
How oft, my slice of pocket store consumed,
Still hungering, penniless and far from home,
I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws,
Or blushing crabs, or berries that emboss
The bramble, black as jet, or sloes austere.
It is, perhaps, difficult to realise nowadays how new such writing
as this was when The Task was published. Assuredly, these are
not ‘raptures'
conjured up
To serve occasions of poetic pomp.
The truant boy, his pocket store, the berries he ate—there is
something in these which his century might have called 'low. '
But the berries are exactly described; we feel sure that the boy
ate them. , The poet who describes them was, himself, that boy;
## p. 85 (#107) #############################################
IV]
The Task
85
and, looking back, he sees his boyhood through the intervening
sorrow which we know that he suffered. In every line, there is
actuality and personality. The diction is still a little Miltonic, for
Cowper's blank verse never moved far from his master ; but, all
the preceding nature poetry might be searched in vain for this
note of simple truth-the record of actual experience which
the poet perceives to have poetic value and beauty. A little
later, he addresses Mrs Unwin in a famous passage, beginning :
How oft upon yon eminence our pace
Has slackened to a pause, and we have borne
The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
While admiration feeding at the eye,
And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene.
Hitherto, there had been nothing in English poetry quite like the
passage that begins with the lines here quoted. The nearest
parallel is, probably, Collins's Ode to Evening, though that lovely
poem wraps its subject in a glow of romance which is absent
from Cowper's description. But, when Cowper wrote The Sofa,
he bad never even heard of Collins 1. He owed as little to
Gray's Elegy, where the scene is far more ‘sentimentalised'; and
nothing can deprive him of the title to originality. Here is a very
commonplace English landscape, minutely described. The poet
does nothing to lend it dignity or significance other than its own.
But he has seen for himself its beauty, and its interest; little
details, like the straightness of the furrow, the smallness of the
distant ploughman, please him. And, because he has himself
derived pleasure and consolation from the scene and its details,
his poetry communicates that pleasure and that consolation.
Familiar scenes, simple things, prove, in his lines, their importance,
their beauty and their healing influence on the soul of man.
Nature need not any longer be ‘dressed up' to win a place in
poetry. And, if The Task be the forerunner of Wordsworth, its
manner of accepting facts as they are, and at their own value,
contains, also, the germ of something very unlike Cowper, some-
thing that may be found in The Woods of Westermain.
The nature poetry in The Task is, doubtless, of a humbler
order than that of Tintern Abbey or The Excursion, though, in
many passages of simple description, the similarity between
Wordsworth and Cowper is striking. Cowper would have been
unable to compose the books of The Prelude : On Imagination
and Taste, how impaired and how restored. He would even
1 Letters, ed. Frazer, J. G. , 1912, vol. 1, p. 282.
## p. 86 (#108) #############################################
86
[CH.
William Cowper
have thought them unChristian and reprehensible. Where
the great soul of Wordsworth broods over the world of sense,
conscious of how it opens and affects the world of the spirit,
Cowper hardly even asks how it is that these loved scenes
console and enlarge the mind. He is not a philosopher, and he
is not a mystic. For him, it is enough that the things he sees are
beautiful and dear; he does not ask for anything more. But the
nearness of his object, his familiarity with it and his fine taste
in expression result in poetry which, if not, in itself, great, is
wonderfully pure and sweet, and prepared the way for pro-
founder work by others. While his simplicity and exactness
in description mark him off from all preceding nature poets, even
from Thomson, the spirit of his poetry differentiates him equally
from Crabbe, who, though even more minute and faithful in detail,
always regarded nature as a setting for the emotions of man.
There are passages in The Task which sound a nobler music than
that quoted above. One is the invocation to evening in The
Winter Evening, beginning :
Come, Evening, once again, season of peace;
Return, sweet Evening, and continue long!
The earlier part of this passage is very like Collins. The whole of it,
in spite of certain characteristic words—'ostentatious,''modest'--
is a little too fanciful and a little too elaborate to be entirely in
Cowper's peculiar manner. He is most himself when he is most
closely concerned with the scenes and people that, in his restricted
life, he had come to know and love. The six books of The Task
(entitled The Sofa, The Time-piece, The Garden, The Winter
Evening, The Winter Morning Walk and The Winter Walk at
Noon) contain many passages of sympathetic description that have
become classical. Such are the lines on the rural sounds' and
those on hay-carting in The Sofa ; the man cutting hay from the
stack, the woodman and his dog in The Winter Morning Walk ;
the postman and the waggoner in The Winter Evening; the fall
of snow, in the same book. Each is the product of the poet's own
observation ; each helped to prove, in an age which needed the
lesson, that simplicity and truth have their place in poetry, and
that commonplace things are fit subjects for the poet. Cowper's
simplicity is not the simplicity of Lyrical Ballads, any more than it
is the glittering artifice of Pope. He is Miltonic throughout; but
he speaks with perfect sincerity, keeping ‘his eye on the object. '
There are, no doubt, stretches of didactic verse in The
## p. 87 (#109) #############################################
IV]
Nature Poetry
87
Task. That was almost necessary to Cowper in a poem of this
length. But it is more important to observe how, in this poem,
one quality, that has endeared Cowper to thousands of readers and
was by no means without its effect on public opinion, finds its chief
expression in his works. After concluding The Sofa with the
famous and beautiful passage beginning :
God made the country, and man made the town;
be opens The Time-piece with a cry for some refuge where the
news of man's oppression, deceit and cruelty might never reach
him. The love of man for man, the love of man for animals, for the
meanest thing that lives—this is the principal moral message of
The Task. Doubtless, this kind of 'sentimentalism' was in the
air,' at the time. It belonged, to some extent, to Cowper's section
of the church ; it was spread far and wide by Rousseau. Yet it
was inborn in Cowper's tender, joyful nature--a nature that was
playfully serene when free from its tyrant melancholy; and Cowper
remains the chief exponent of it in English poetry.
When originally published in 1785, The Task was followed in
the same volume by three shorter poems, an epistle to Cowper's
friend, Joseph Hill, Tirocinium, to which reference was made
above, and The Diverting History of John Gilpin. In Tirocinium,
the attack on the brutality and immorality of public schools may
have been just and is certainly vigorous ; but this is not the kind
of poetical composition in which Cowper excelled. Of John Gilpin,
there is little need to speak at length. Lady Austen told Cowper
the story.
He lay awake at night laughing over it, and made of
it a ballad in a style of fun peculiarly his own, but not to be
found elsewhere outside his letters. The more closely one looks
into the poem, the finer seems the characterisation, and the more
delicate and artful the precise simplicity of its manner. Subse-
quent editions included twelve more short poems in the volume,
among them The Rose, admired by Sainte-Beuve, and the lines
On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture out of Norfolk Cowper's
mother had died when he was six years old. As he tells us in this
poem, nearly half a century afterwards he remembered distinctly
and minutely the event and his feelings, and the poem is one of
the most pathetic and moving in any language. Thanks to the
poet's use of detail, the woman and her little son live again before
us, and the tenderness of the whole is unsurpassed. One other of
the shorter poems, The Dog and the Water-lily, deserves mention
for the light it throws on Cowper's gentle, animal-loving life ;
## p. 88 (#110) #############################################
88
[CH.
William Cowper
and the collection included, also, one or two fables that link him
with Prior, Gay and Northcote.
In 1786, Cowper and Mrs Unwin had moved from dreary
Olney to a cheerful house and neighbourhood at Weston, not
far off, and had enlarged their circle of acquaintances, thanks,
partly, to his cousin Harriet (the sister of Theodora), now Lady
Hesketh. Cowper's life continued to be happy; and, during these
pleasant years, he wrote a number of short poems, which were
not published till after his death. Among them were several
playful or serious personal addresses, much in the tone of the
letters. Others were little narratives or expressions of everyday
experience, like The Colubriad, an account of a viper which
threatened the poet's cat and her kittens, and the epitaph on the
poet's hare, Old Tiney, surliest of his kind. The remainder
included a few religious poems, several epigrams and translations,
one or two tales and some poems on the slave trade, written to
order and not showing Cowper at his best. Among these posthu-
mous works four stand prominent: the stanzas On the Loss of
the Royal George, the sonnet To Mrs Unwin, the poem To Mary
and The Poplar Field. The sonnet is one of Cowper's finest
achievements; the poem To Mary is redeemed by its tenderness
from a certain monotony in the form. The Poplar Field
contains the famous and exquisite second line of the couplet
a
The poplars are felled; farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade
which shows Cowper to have had possibilities in lyric poetry
never fulfilled by him. Yet, it seems almost unjust to say this
in view of On the Loss of the Royal George. Written to oblige
Lady Austen, who wanted words set to the march in Scipio, this
poem is one of the noblest dirges ever composed. By the directest,
simplest means imaginable, Cowper attains an effect of noble
grandeur. The plain statement reaches the sublime.
Cowper was not content to write short poems. In order to
stave off its besetting depression, his mind needed regular occupa-
tion; and, in 1785, soon after he had finished correcting the proofs
of The Task, he began,'merely to divert attention,' turning Homer's
Tiad into blank verse. The diversion grew into a plan to trans-
late the whole of Homer and publish the work by subscription.
Cowper came to his task well equipped. He had known his Homer
from boyhood ; and how well he knew and appreciated him may
be learned from two letters to Lady Hesketh, written in December
## p. 89 (#111) #############################################
IV]
Translations
89
1785 and January 1786, which are worth quoting as examples of
judicious and penetrating criticism.
Except the Bible, there never was in the world a book so remarkable for
that species of the sublime that owes its very existence to simplicity, as
the works of Homer. He is always nervous, plain, natural. . . Homer is,
on occasions that call for such a style, the easiest and most familiar of all
writers. . . Homer's accuracy of description, and his exquisite judgement never,
never failed him. He never, I believe, in a single instance sacrificed beauty
to embellishment. He does not deal in hyperbole . . . accordingly, when he
describes nature, whether in man or in animal, or whether nature inanimate,
you may always trust him for the most consummate fidelity. It is his great
glory that he omits no striking part of his subject, and that he never inserts
a tittle that does not belong to it. Oh! how unlike some describers that I
have met with, of modern days, who smother you with words, words, words,
and then think that they have copied nature; when all the while nature was
an object either not looked at, or not sufficiently.
>
Much of this is applicable to Cowper himself; and the writer of
the passage might be held to have been peculiarly well fitted to
translate Homer. Moreover, Cowper not only knew and loved
Homer (though, indeed, he regretted that this most blameless
writer' was 'not an enlightened man'), but he knew Pope's
translation, which he had compared word for word with the original.
To him, Pope's 'faults and failings' were like so many buoys
upon a dangerous coast”; and, side by side with his appreciation
of Homer, there runs, in these letters to Lady Hesketh, some
very penetrating examination of the difference between Homer
and the ‘two pretty poems under Homer's titles' written by Pope.
So far as criticism goes, therefore, Cowper promised well as a
translator of Homer. He knew what to aim at, and what to avoid.
The work was finished, well subscribed and published in 1791 ;
and, today, no one need read it except those who have to write
about it.
The reasons of Cowper's failure are two. In the first place
though precision and truth of detail are characteristics of both
poets, Cowper's tender, shrinking mind was separated by centuries
and leagues from Homer's. It was not his to understand the joy
of battle, the fascination of wounds, the fierce, raw passions, still
largely animal, of primitive heroes and heroines, nor to surrender
his convictions to the turbulent folk whom Homer regarded as
gods and goddesses. In the second place, it is one thing to
realise that Homer is 'nervous, plain, natural, and another to
achieve those qualities, in learned and sonorous blank verse.
Cowper's Miltonic measures are hardly less unlike Homer than is
Pope's riming jingle. The movement is completely altered.
.
It
## p. 90 (#112) #############################################
90
[ch.
William Cowper
is ample and stately; it has all the nobility which was one of the
qualities demanded by Matthew Arnold in his lectures On Trans-
lating Homer. It is, also, faithful. Pope had perverted his
original in order to find occasion for the brilliant effects of anti-
thesis and epigram in which he excelled. Chapman, an Elizabethan
brimful of ideas and curiosity and a spirit of literary adventure,
had perverted his original through ebullience of sentiment and
fancy. Cowper, priding himself on adhering closely to his original,
adhered only in part. He knew exactly what Homer meant to
say; he appreciated, in a great measure, Homer's manner of saying
it; but his head was full of Milton. He believed Milton's style to
resemble Homer's; and, by modelling his blank verse on Milton's,
he achieves inversions, pauses and pomposities which are wholly
unlike the smooth and simple rapidity of Homer. This is not
to say that there are not excellent passages in Cowper's Homer,
nor that the whole work is not a lofty achievement in scholarship
and poetry. But, in avoiding the cleverness of Pope, Cowper fell
into the opposite extreme. Homer is grand and lively, Cowper's
Homer is grand and dull. As translator of the hymns of Mme
Guyon, of certain odes and satires of Horace, of Greek songs and
the Latin poems of his admired Milton, Cowper was more suc-
cessful, especially in the case of Horace, with whom, despite the
difference between a genial pagan and an evangelical Christian,
he had much in common. Perhaps the least disputable title to
remembrance which Cowper's Homer possesses is that it kept the
poet busy and happy, staving off, for a while, his persistent foe,
despair.
Despair was to have him in the end. Mrs Unwin sickened and
died. The strain of attendance upon her proved too much for
Cowper's mental and physical strength ; and one of the saddest
stories in the world is that of Cowper at and after the death of his
heroic friend. Popularity, success, affection, royal favour (in the
form of a pension acquired for him partly by the eager, blundering
,
pertinacity of his friend, Hayley 1)-nothing could relieve him. His
last original work was a powerful but ghastly poem called The
Castaway. He died on 25 April 1800.
Cowper, though not among the great poets of England, holds
a unique place, partly by virtue of the personality which shines in
every line of his poetry, partly by virtue of the sincerity and
simplicity which, 'keeping its eye on the object,' saw beauty and
i Caldicott, H. Rowlands S. , "How Cowper got his pension, The Cornhill Maga-
zine, no. 202, April 1913, p. 493.
## p. 91 (#113) #############################################
IV]
Letters
91
consolation in common things, till then neglected, but eagerly
seized upon by his successors and transformed into material for
their profoundest and noblest art. There is another field in which he
holds still a unique position—the field of letter-writing. It seems
an error to speak, in connection with Cowper, of the art of letter-
writing. If art implies the consideration of their effect upon the
public, no letters were ever written with less art. In a letter to
William Unwin, Cowper says
a
It is possible I might have indulged myself in the pleasure of writing to
you, without waiting for a letter from you, but for a reason which you will not
easily guess. Your mother communicated to me the satisfaction you expressed
in my correspondence, that you thought me entertaining and clever, and so
forth:-now you must know, I love praise dearly, especially from the judicious,
and those who have so much delicacy themselves as not to offend mine in
giving it. But then, I found this consequence attending, or likely to attend
the eulogium you bestowed ;-if my friend thought me witty before, he shall
think me ten times more witty hereafter;-where I joked once, I will joke
five times, and for one sensible remark I will send him a dozen. Now this
foolish vanity would have spoiled me quite, and would have made me as dis-
gusting a letter-writer as Pope, who seems to have thought that unless a
sentence was well turned, and every period pointed with some conceit, it was
not worth the carriage. Accordingly he is to me, except in very few instances,
the most disagreeable maker of epistles that ever I met with. I was willing,
therefore, to wait till the impression your commendation had made upon the
foolish part of me was worn off, that I might scribble away as usual, and
write my uppermost thoughts, and those only.
With the exception of Charles Lamb, all the other great English
letter-writers_Gray, Walpole, Pope, Byron—wrote with an eye to
the printed collection. Cowper wrote partly for his correspondent,
chiefly for himself. His are, in his own phrase, 'talking letters. '
He chats about anything that happens to be in his mind. If he
is suffering from his mental complaint, he writes a letter un-
matched for gloom, a letter that envelopes even a modern reader
in a black mist of misery. A few pages later, and he is playful,
gay, almost jaunty. His mind was so sweet, and his interest
in the little details of life so keen, that the most trivial occur-
rence—a feat in carpentering, a bed of tulips, the visit of a
parliamentary candidate-can interest his reader still. Acute
reasoning, sound sense, fine judgment fall into their places with
whimsical nonsense, hearty laughter and almost boyish affection.
He will break off a criticism on Homer to bid Lady Hesketh
'give me a great corking pin that I may stick your faith upon my
sleeve. There-it is done. ' The whole of his nature, gay and
gloomy, narrow in opinion and wide in sympathy, ever fixed on
## p. 92 (#114) #############################################
92
[CH. IV
William Cowper
heavenly things and ever keenly alive to mundane things, is pre-
served for us in these inimitably vivid letters; and the same
taste and scholarship which give point and permanence even to
his least elaborated poems have won for these naïve examples
of transparent self-revelation an undying value. The more they
are read, the better will Cowper be understood and loved.
## p. 93 (#115) #############################################
CHAPTER V
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
WORDSWORTH's surprise and resentment would surely have
been provoked had he been told that, at half a century's distance
and from an European point of view, his work would seem, on
the whole, though with several omissions and additions, to be
a continuation of the movement initiated by Rousseau. It is,
nevertheless, certain that it might be described as an English
variety of Rousseauism, revised and corrected, in some parts,
by the opposite influence of Edmund Burke. In Wordsworth, we
find Rousseau's wellknown fundamental tenets : he has the same
semi-mystical faith in the goodness of nature as well as in the
excellence of the child; his ideas on education are almost
identical; there are apparent a similar diffidence in respect of the
merely intellectual processes of the mind, and an equal trust in
the good that may accrue to man from the cultivation of his
senses and feelings. The differences between the two, mainly
occasional and of a political nature, seem secondary by the side
of these profound analogies. For this reason, Wordsworth must
be placed by the general historian among the numerous ósons of
Rousseau,' who form the main battalion of romanticism ; though,
if we merely regard the ideas he expressed and propagated, his per-
sonality may, thereby, lose some of its originality and distinctness.
But, resemblance does not necessarily mean repetition and imi-
tation. Moreover, men's ideas are their least individual possessions.
The manner in which a man, and, above all, a poet, becomes
possessed of his creed, the stamp he puts upon it, are the things
that really matter. Now, Wordsworth formed his thoughts and
convictions in the light of the circumstances of his own life,
whereby they assumed a reality wanting in those of many of his
contemporaries. If he thought like others, he always thought by
himself. He gives us the impression that, had he lived alone on a
## p. 94 (#116) #############################################
94
William Wordsworth
[CH.
bookless earth, he would have reached the same conclusions. His
deep influence on a limited, but incomparably loyal, number of
readers owes less to his beliefs than to his minute, persevering
analysis of every step he made towards them. He appeals to our
confidence by his constant recourse to his personal experience.
He prides himself on being the least inventive of great poets.
He belittles fancy. It is true that he claimed imagination as his
supreme gift, but, at the same time, he bestowed on the word
imagination a new meaning, almost entirely opposed to the ordinary
one. He gave the name to his accurate, faithful and loving observa-
tion of nature. In his loftier moods, he used 'imagination as a
synonym of 'intuition,' of seeing into, and even through, reality,
but he never admitted a divorce between it and reality. The
gift of feigning, of arbitrarily combining the features of a legend
or story, which had long been held to be the first poetical pre-
rogative, was almost entirely denied him, and he thanked God for
its absence. His hold over many thoughtful and, generally, mature
minds is due to his having avowedly, and often, also, practically,
made truth his primary object, beauty being only second. Those
who had ingenuously turned to his poems for the mere charm
of verse were grateful to him inasmuch as they had received, in
addition, their first lessons in philosophy. They had gone to him
for pleasure and they came back with a train of reflection that
followed them through the round of their daily tasks. They
were taught by him a new way of looking at men and nature.
Wordsworth achieved this result by dint of one-sided pressure,
by tenaciousness of aim. Not that his ideas remained the same
from beginning to end. Few men, on the contrary, changed more
thoroughly. His mind may be represented as continuously shifting
along a half circle, so that, finally, he stood at the opposite end
of the diameter. The young revolutionist evolved into a grey-
haired conservative, the semi-atheist and pantheist into a pattern
of conformity. But, all the time, he kept true to his fixed centre,
the search for the greatest good. His very contradictions point
to one engrossing pursuit. His life was an unbroken series of
slow movements which brought him from one extreme to the
other, though his eyes were ever bent in the same direction.
Because he never ceased to have the same object in view, he was
himself imperfectly conscious of the change in his position.
Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cockermouth, in the north
of the lake country, the second child of a fairly prosperous
## p. 95 (#117) #############################################
v]
Childhood
95
6
attorney-at-law and of Anne Cookson, daughter of a Penrith
mercer. Seen from the outside, without the optimistic prism of
The Prelude, his childhood does not seem to have been any
more privileged, while his youth appears decidedly more vexed
and troubled, than those of the common run of men. The child,
surely, had pleasant hours with his brothers and sister while
playing about the terrace of the family garden which overlooked
the Derwent, or when bathing in the river. There were bitter
hours, however, when he was taken to his mother's family at
Penrith, where harsh grandparents often treated the little ones
with reproach and insult. ' William was particularly unruly and,
in consequence, had most to bear from the Cooksons. Hence, we
hear of acts of defiance and even of a childish attempt at suicide.
When he was eight years old, his mother died, and, parting
from his father, who never recovered his cheerfulness after his
bereavement, Wordsworth was sent to Hawkshead grammar school.
A very homely one-room house in a very poor village is the place
where he was taught. He lodged with one of the old village dames,
who, however kind they might be to boys, could only give them
coarse and scanty fare. For his companions, he chiefly had
farmers' sons, destined for the church, who brought with them
the rough manners of their home life. In spite of the delight
he found in games, open air life and rambles about hill and lake,
it must be admitted that Hawkshead was a very mixed paradise.
Then came his father's death, when the boy was thirteen. The
orphan's condition was precarious. Almost all the money left by
his father was in the hands of Sir James Lowther, to whom Words-
worth's father had been steward, and Sir James would never
hear of paying it back so long as he lived, nor could he be
compelled to reimburse. It is true that enough remained to
allow William to pursue his studies, and a boy does not take money
questions much to heart. But there were wretched holidays at
Penrith, in his grandparents' sullen home. Of the frequent dis-
tress of the children in that house, we have a vivid picture in
the earliest letters of little Dorothy, the poet's only sister, written
in the last year spent by William at Hawkshead. Dorothy, whose
sweet, affectionate nature cannot be suspected of unjustified
complaints, could scarcely bear the loveless constraint she had
to undergo. No more could her brothers : ‘Many a time have
William, John, Christopher and myself shed tears together of the
bitterest sorrow. We have no father to protect, no mother to
guide us,' and so forth.
## p. 96 (#118) #############################################
96
[CH.
William Wordsworth
From Hawkshead, Wordsworth went to Cambridge in October
1787 and remained there at St John's college till the beginning
of 1791. He took little interest either in the intellectual or
social life of the university. He never opened a mathematical
book and thus lost all chance of obtaining a fellowship. Even his
literary studies were pursued irregularly, without any attention
being paid to the prescribed course. He did not feel any abhor-
rence of the students' life, which, at that time, consisted of
alternate sloth and wildness. He first shared in it, but soon grew
weary of it and lived more or less by himself. In his university
years, his only deep enjoyments were the long rambles in which
he indulged during vacations. Meanwhile, discussions with his
uncles must, at times, have made life rather distasteful to him.
He had no money in prospect. All his small patrimony had been
spent on his university education ; yet he showed himself vacil-
lating and reluctant when required to make choice of a career.
None was to his taste. The army, the church, the law, tutorial
work, were all contemplated and discarded in turn. He showed
no strong bent except for wandering and writing poetry. He was,
indeed, a young man likely to make his elders anxious. In July
1790, just at the time when he ought to have been working
hard for his approaching examinations, he took it into his head
to start for the Alps with a fellow student, on foot, equipped
much like a pedlar—an escapade without precedent. As soon
as he had taken his B. A. , without distinction, he set fortune at
defiance, and settled in London for a season, doing nothing in
particular, 'pitching a vagrant tent among the unfenced regions
of society. After this, other wanderings and abortive schemes
of regular work followed for more than three years, till he threw
aside all idea of a fixed career and settled down to resolute poverty.
Such apparent restlessness and indolence could not but be
attended by many a pang of remorse. He suffered from his
growing estrangement from his relations. He was ill satisfied
with himself and uneasy about the future, and these feelings
(perhaps darkened by some passages of vexed love) found an
outlet in his juvenile poems, all of which are tinged with
melancholy.
It seems strange that such a childhood and youth should,
afterwards, have furnished him with the optimistic basis of The
Prelude. Beyond doubt, this poem was meant to be a selection
of all the circumstances in his early life that told for joy and hope.
Hence, a heightening of bright colours, and a voluntary omission
## p. 97 (#119) #############################################
v]
The French Revolution
97
of more sombre hues, in the picture he made of his youth. But
the contrast between the dry facts of his early life and his rapture
over the same period is, also, owing to a deeper truth. The joy
he celebrates in The Prelude springs from sources hidden from
all eyes, scarcely suspected by the child himself. Whatever
shadows might pass over his days, abundant strength and happi-
ness lay beneath the surface. He was not callous to grief, but,
somehow, felt all the time that grief was transient, hope permanent,
in his breast. His enjoyment of nature gave him those intense
delights which are usually unnoticed in the tale of a life. So did
his already passionate love of verse. Thus, The Prelude is all
true, though it does not present us with the whole truth.
Of the young man's passion for nature, his early poems, both
published in 1793, furnish direct proof. They are the most minute
and copious inventories of the aspects he saw, of the noises he
heard, in his native lakes (An Evening Walk) or in his wanderings
through Switzerland (Descriptive Sketches). Such acuteness and
copiousness of observation were only possible in the case of a
devotee. However contorted and knotty the verse may be, however
artificial the diction, the poet's fervour is as manifest here as in
the most eloquent of his subsequent effusions. Though he follows
in the train of a succession of descriptive poets, he outdoes them
all in abundance of precise touches.
two poets, Gray and Collins poured their tribute of clear water into
the stream. But, with Cowper, we come to the upper reaches, and
are able to trace thence, with unbroken continuity, the course of
the main stream.
Reformers in poetry probably seldom work with a conscious
aim, like social and political reformers. A poet writes in a certain
manner because that is the only way in which he can write, or
wishes to write, and without foreseeing or calculating the effect
of his work. This is especially true of Cowper, who owed more,
perhaps, than any English poet to what may be called accident, as
distinguished from poetic purpose. He did not, like Milton or
Tennyson, dedicate himself to poetry. He did not even write
poetry primarily for the sake of writing poetry, but to ward off
melancholy by keeping his mind occupied. He liked Milton
better than Pope, and was careful to show this preference in
his versification ; but accident—the bent of his mind and the
circumstances of his life—made him the forerunner of a great
poetic revival.
He drew poetry back to the simple truths of
ordinary human nature and the English countryside, because, in
the limited outlook on the world which his life allowed him, these
were the things that touched him and interested him. Being a
man of fine taste, tender feelings and a plain sincerity, he opened
the road of truth for the nobler poetic pageants that were to
pass along it.
B
## p. 78 (#100) #############################################
78
[CH.
William Cowper
>
Born in the rectory of Great Berkhampstead, Herts, in
November 1731, and becoming poet in earnest nearly fifty years
later, he had, meanwhile, fallen under the influence of thought
and sentiment which were beginning to break up the old, rigid
and, frequently, brutal order. His family, on the father's side, had
given distinguished men to the law and the church ; and, in
his boyhood and youth, it seemed not wholly unlikely that he
would follow in his ancestors' paths and take an active part in
life. That he was affectionate and tenderhearted we know from
the lines he wrote many years later, On the receipt of my Mother's
Picture out of Norfolk. How far the bullying which he suffered
at his first school may have twisted the development of his nature,
it is impossible to say. He was not unhappy at Westminster,
where he numbered among his schoolfellows Edward Lloyd,
Charles Churchill, George Colman the elder, Warren Hastings and
Elijah Impey. True, in after years, he attacked English public
schools in Tirocinium; but it is not certain that, in this matter,
his boyish feelings tallied with his riper judgment. From
Westminster, he went to the office of a solicitor, to be trained for
the law. Thurlow was a student in the same office ; and the two
young men used to spend much of their time at the house of
Cowper's uncle Ashley Cowper, where the chief attraction lay in
the daughters, Theodora and Harriet. So far, there is not any
trace of the Cowper of later years, though there are already traces
of the poet. He fell in love with his cousin Theodora, and wrote
verses to her which are far above the average of young men's
love-poems. The poems to Delia show, already, the directness,
the sincerity and the simplicity which were to be the keynotes of
his later work, together with the tenderness which has won him
admirers among hundreds to whom most poetry seems unreal.
In one of these poems, On her endeavouring to conceal her Grief
at Parting, occurs the famous verse :
Oh! then indulge thy grief, nor fear to tell
The gentle source from whence thy sorrows flow;
Nor think it weakness when we love to feel,
Nor think it weakness what we feel to show.
The stanza is completely characteristic of Cowper's mind and
manner. The proposed match with Theodora was forbidden by
her father, on the ground of consanguinity. To Cowper, the blow,
evidently, was severe. In Absence and Bereavement, he bewails
his fate. The concluding lines of this poem :
Why all that soothes a heart from anguish free,
All that delights the happy, palls with me!
>
>
## p. 79 (#101) #############################################
IV]
Effect of his Melancholy
79
suggest strongly the sentiment of a later and finer poem, The
Shrubbery :
This glassy stream, that spreading pine,
Those alders quivering to the breeze,
Might soothe a soul less hurt than mine,
And please, if anything could please.
But fixed unalterable care
Forgoes not what she feels within,
Shows the same sadness everywhere,
And slights the season and the scene.
The earlier poem thus seems to foreshadow the melancholy that,
afterwards, was to claim the poet. Externally, it is true, there did
not appear to be any immediate sign of that melancholy. Cowper
bought chambers in the Temple and was called to the bar.
Without attempting to practise, he lived the life of a cultivated
young man about town, reading Homer and marking the
differences between Homer and Pope, writing articles and verses
(one or two very popular ballads were among the early works
of the author of John Gilpin) and helping his brother John with
a translation of Voltaire's Henriade. Yet, meanwhile, the mis-
chief was growing. He suffered from fits of depression, which, in
later life, he believed to have been of religious origin. He found
what alleviation he could in the poems of George Herbert ; but,
when, in bis thirty-second year, he was nominated by his uncle
major Cowper to a clerkship in the House of Lords, his depression
and his shyness broke into mania, and he tried to kill himself.
Thereafter, he was out of the race, but, on that very account, was
left the more open to the influences, religious and humane, to
which his gentle nature, even in active life, must have been sensible.
These were the days of Wesley and Whitefield, of widening hope
and freedom in religion ; they were, also, the days of Rousseau and
his creed of love and brotherhood. Slaves, animals and common
wretches' were perceived to have their rights. Cowper was to
become the poet of a religious sect, which, though doubtless
narrow and unattractive in itself, had its share in breaking up
the spiritual ice of the age. He was to sing with power in the
cause of slaves, to make his pet hares and his dog famous and
to find in rustics some of his best material for poetry. His
sympathies were not wide; but they were on the side of kindness.
In politics, he remained 'an old whig’; but the French revolution
was, to him, 'a noble cause, though made 'ridiculous' by the
excesses of a ‘madcap' people.
6
>
## p. 80 (#102) #############################################
80
(CH.
William Cowper
a
Thus, though living remote from the world, he breathed into
the world a spirit of love and freedom. Before that time came,
however, he had much to bear. Cured of his mania by a doctor
at St Albans, whose religion was of the hopeful kind, he was
settled by his brother and friends at Huntingdon ; and, here, he
maintained his cheerfulness and formed the friendship which
proved the most important influence on his life. Morley Unwin
was a retired clergyman who taught private pupils. With Unwin,
his wife and his son and daughter, Cowper became so intimate
that he went to live in their house. Their simple, cheerful, re-
ligious life exactly suited his needs. When Unwin was killed by
a fall from his horse, Cowper and Mrs Unwin continued to reside
together. Theirs is one of the famous friendships of literary
history. Henceforth, they never separated; and, in Cowper's
letters, in the sonnet, To Mrs Unwin, and in the poem, To Mary,
the woman who devoted her life to Cowper received her reward.
Soon after Unwin's death, the family moved from Huntingdon to
Olney, in order to be near the curate in charge of that place, John
Newton. The house that Newton chose for them was damp and
gloomy; Olney was a poor and rather brutal place. Newton,
formerly the captain of a slaver, was an evangelist of tremendous
power and small tact. More than one of his parishioners (not,
perhaps, very delicately organised people) had been thrown off their
balance by his 'enthusiasm. ' With the best intentions, he did the
timid and sensitive Cowper much harm. He forced him to hold
forth in public; he robbed him of exercise and gentle pleasures.
The result was a severe return of his melancholy. In order to
dissipate it, Newton laid upon him the task of writing hymns for
a hymn-book which he was compiling.
The collection entitled Olney Hymns was published in London
in 1779. Cowper's contributions to the volume were initialled 'C. ,'
and among them occur several hymns still in use, together with
three or four which are among the best known of English hymns,
to whatever extent people may differ as to their morality. Oh for
a closer walk with God; There is a fountain filled with blood ;
Hark, my soul ! it is the Lord ; Jesus! where'er thy people meet;
God moves in a mysterious way—these are among the hymns by
Cowper in this collection. The salient quality of them all is
their sincerity and directness. The poet's actual experiences in
the spiritual life are expressed with the simplicity generally
characteristic of his work. Their weakness is a lack of profundity,
and the absence of that suggestion of the infinite and the awful,
a
## p. 81 (#103) #############################################
IV]
The Satires
81
which, as in Crashaw or Newman, sometimes informs religious
poetry less carefully dogmatic than Cowper's. His mind, indeed, was
too precisely made up on matters of doctrine to be fruitful either
of lofty religious passion or of religious mystery; and, instead of
being great sacred poetry, his hymns are a stay and comfort
souls experiencing what might be called the practical difficulties
of certain phases of spiritual life. Most of them are hopeful
in tone; for, though the book was not published till 1779, the
hymns were written by Cowper before 1773. In that year, he had
another outbreak of mania. He imagined himself not only con-
demned to hell, but bidden by God to make a sacrifice of his own
life. Mrs Unwin nursed him devotedly ; but, more than a year
passed before he began to recover. By 1776, he had resumed, in
part, his correspondence with his friends. In 1779, Newton left
Olney for a London living; and, the influence of his overbearing
friend being withdrawn, Cowper entered upon what was probably
the happiest period of his life. Carpentering, gardening, horse
exercise, walking and other simple pleasures kept him cheerful ;
and he began again to write poetry. His kinsman Martin Madan
having published a book advocating polygamy, Cowper, in 1781,
printed anonymously a reply to it in the form of a fantastic tale.
Anti-Thelyphthora is not among Cowper's best works ; but it
has a pointed neatness of diction and a descriptive touch which
foretell The Task. Mrs Unwin, always anxious to keep him
occupied and to make the best of him, set him to work on a long
poem. She gave him the not very promising subject of the
progress of error; and, going eagerly to work, he wrote eight
satires : Table Talk, The Progress of Error, Truth, Expostula-
tion, Hope, Charity, Conversation and Retirement.
Most of Cowper's critics have been unduly severe upon these
moral satires. Doubtless, they are not so good as The Task
or many of the shorter poems. Their weakness is obvious.
A satirist, whether he be of the indignant order, like Juvenal, or
the bitter, like Swift, or the genial, like Horace, must begin by
knowing the world that he intends to attack; and Cowper, who
had been cut off from the world, did not know it. When he
attacks bishops and other clergy who were not of his own
evangelical cast, or newspapers, or town life, it is difficult not to
resent his easy smartness at the expense of things which his
narrowness of outlook prevented him from understanding. Again,
writing, as it seems, with an eye seeking for the approval
of John Newton, Cowper gives too much space to good advice,
E. L, XL.
CH. IV.
6
## p. 82 (#104) #############################################
82
[CH.
William Cowper
1
and too little to the allurements which should distinguish the
satirist from the preacher.
The clear harangue, and cold as it is clear,
Falls soporific on the listless ear
are lines from The Progress of Error which have been quoted
against their author ever since the satires first appeared. And it
may be said in general that, fine as is the famous passage on
Petronius (Lord Chesterfield) in The Progress of Error
Thou polished and high-finished foe to truth,
Grey-beard corrupter of our listening youth;
1
Cowper's poetry is not at its best when he is attacking or scolding;
and, writing primarily to distract his mind and to benefit humanity,
only secondarily to produce works of polished art, he is weak in the
construction and arrangement of his poems. These objections,
however, cannot outweigh the many merits of Cowper's moral
satires. Their diction is precise and epigrammatic, not so much
because Cowper polished his work minutely, as because his mind
was exact and clear. Several of his couplets have become familiar
.
as household words; and one of them,
How much a dunce that has been sent to roam
Excells a dunce that has been kept at home,
achieved the honour of quotation by Bulwer Lytton in his play
Money. On a higher level is his criticism of Pope :
But he (his musical finesse was such,
So nice his ear, so delicate his touch)
Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
And every warbler has his tune by heart.
Cowper himself had the tune by heart, no doubt; but he did not
sing it.
Using the heroic couplet throughout these satires, he
contrives to write quite unlike Pope. His versification is already
unlike anything to be found in English literature, unless it be the
verse of his former schoolfellow, Churchill, whose work he greatly
admired. But Cowper's mind was so different from Churchill's
that the resemblance does not go very deep. In the most successful
portions of these satires-especially in the immortal picture of
the statesman out of office, in Retirement-Cowper, both in
matter and in manner, resembles Horace more than he resembles
any other poet. He shows the same shrewd wisdom, the same
precision and refinement, the same delicate playfulness. Retire-
ment, which is the latest of these satires, is, undoubtedly, the
2
}
## p. 83 (#105) #############################################
83
IV]
Poems of 1782
best ; and the perspicacious suggestion has been madel that it
was written under the influence of Cowper's friend, Lady Austen,
to whom we shall return. At any rate, in Retirement, as in The
Task, he is talking of things which he understood and liked for
their own sake ; and, since his tender and genial spirit was more
responsive to the stimulus of what he liked than of what he
disliked, was better, in short, at loving than at hating, in the
positive than in the negative, Retirement shows him well suited by
his subject and happy in its treatment.
The volume was published in 1782 under the title Poems by
William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq. Besides the satires,
it contained thirty-five shorter poems, of which three were in
Latin. Those in English include one or two pieces of note :
Boadicea: an Ode, which has well earned its place in the litera-
ture of the schoolroom and its reputation in the world as a fine
example of great power and weight attained by perfectly simple
means; the pretty Invitation into the Country, addressed to
Newton; some very graceful and delicate translations from the
Latin poems of Cowper's Westminster schoolmaster Vincent
Bourne; the powerful Verses supposed to be written by Alexander
Selkirk; and two poems showing Cowper's possession of a gift
for writing delicate and suggestive lyric poetry-lyric poetry with
the indefinable touch of magic in it—which he did not thoroughly
cultivate. One is the poem entitled The Shrubbery, to which
reference was made above; the other, the lines 'addressed to a
young lady' beginning
Sweet stream, that winds through yonder glade,
Apt emblem of a virtuous maid!
a poem which equals the best achievements of Wordsworth or
Byron in the same field.
In connection with the satire Retirement, the name of Lady
Austen was mentioned above. This charming and intelligent
widow came into Cowper's life in the year 1781 and touched his
spirits and his poetry to fine issues. Unlike Mrs Unwin, she
belonged to the world and had a proper appreciation of the
external things of life. In suggesting to Cowper a subject for
his pen, she gave him not a moral topic but a simple object-
the sofa in his room. The idea was very likely thrown off
without full prevision of its far-reaching effect; but, in encourag-
ing Cowper to write about something that he knew, in checking,
1 By Bailey, J. C. , The Poems of William Cowper, p. xxxvi,
6-2
## p. 84 (#106) #############################################
84
[CH.
William Cowper
so far as might be, his tendency to moralise and to preach by
fixing his attention on the simple facts of his daily life, she gave
him an impulse which was what his own poetry, and English
poetry at that moment, most needed. The result of her suggestion
was The Task, a blank-verse poem in six books, of which The
Sofa formed the first. Cowper starts playfully, with a touch of
the gallantry that was always his. He shows his humour by
dealing with the ordained subject in the style of Milton. Milton
was his favourite poet; Johnson's life of Milton one of the writings
he most disliked. Nevertheless, with his gentle gaiety, he begins
his work with a parody of Milton.
No want of timber then was felt or feared
In Albion's happy isle. The lumber stood
Ponderous, and fixed by its own massy weight.
But elbows still were wanting; these, some say,
An alderman of Cripplegate contrived,
And some ascribe the invention to a priest
Burly and big, and studious of his ease.
Thus, for a hundred lines or so, he plays with his subject. Then,
breaking away from it by an ingenious twist, he speaks for himself;
and, for the first time, we have a new voice, the voice of William
Cowper :
For I have loved the rural walk through lanes
Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep
And skirted thick with intertexture firm
Of thorny boughs; have loved the rural walk
O’er hills, through valleys, and by rivers' brink,
E’er since a truant boy I passed my bounds
To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames;
And still remember, nor without regret
Of hours that sorrow since has much endeared,
How oft, my slice of pocket store consumed,
Still hungering, penniless and far from home,
I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws,
Or blushing crabs, or berries that emboss
The bramble, black as jet, or sloes austere.
It is, perhaps, difficult to realise nowadays how new such writing
as this was when The Task was published. Assuredly, these are
not ‘raptures'
conjured up
To serve occasions of poetic pomp.
The truant boy, his pocket store, the berries he ate—there is
something in these which his century might have called 'low. '
But the berries are exactly described; we feel sure that the boy
ate them. , The poet who describes them was, himself, that boy;
## p. 85 (#107) #############################################
IV]
The Task
85
and, looking back, he sees his boyhood through the intervening
sorrow which we know that he suffered. In every line, there is
actuality and personality. The diction is still a little Miltonic, for
Cowper's blank verse never moved far from his master ; but, all
the preceding nature poetry might be searched in vain for this
note of simple truth-the record of actual experience which
the poet perceives to have poetic value and beauty. A little
later, he addresses Mrs Unwin in a famous passage, beginning :
How oft upon yon eminence our pace
Has slackened to a pause, and we have borne
The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
While admiration feeding at the eye,
And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene.
Hitherto, there had been nothing in English poetry quite like the
passage that begins with the lines here quoted. The nearest
parallel is, probably, Collins's Ode to Evening, though that lovely
poem wraps its subject in a glow of romance which is absent
from Cowper's description. But, when Cowper wrote The Sofa,
he bad never even heard of Collins 1. He owed as little to
Gray's Elegy, where the scene is far more ‘sentimentalised'; and
nothing can deprive him of the title to originality. Here is a very
commonplace English landscape, minutely described. The poet
does nothing to lend it dignity or significance other than its own.
But he has seen for himself its beauty, and its interest; little
details, like the straightness of the furrow, the smallness of the
distant ploughman, please him. And, because he has himself
derived pleasure and consolation from the scene and its details,
his poetry communicates that pleasure and that consolation.
Familiar scenes, simple things, prove, in his lines, their importance,
their beauty and their healing influence on the soul of man.
Nature need not any longer be ‘dressed up' to win a place in
poetry. And, if The Task be the forerunner of Wordsworth, its
manner of accepting facts as they are, and at their own value,
contains, also, the germ of something very unlike Cowper, some-
thing that may be found in The Woods of Westermain.
The nature poetry in The Task is, doubtless, of a humbler
order than that of Tintern Abbey or The Excursion, though, in
many passages of simple description, the similarity between
Wordsworth and Cowper is striking. Cowper would have been
unable to compose the books of The Prelude : On Imagination
and Taste, how impaired and how restored. He would even
1 Letters, ed. Frazer, J. G. , 1912, vol. 1, p. 282.
## p. 86 (#108) #############################################
86
[CH.
William Cowper
have thought them unChristian and reprehensible. Where
the great soul of Wordsworth broods over the world of sense,
conscious of how it opens and affects the world of the spirit,
Cowper hardly even asks how it is that these loved scenes
console and enlarge the mind. He is not a philosopher, and he
is not a mystic. For him, it is enough that the things he sees are
beautiful and dear; he does not ask for anything more. But the
nearness of his object, his familiarity with it and his fine taste
in expression result in poetry which, if not, in itself, great, is
wonderfully pure and sweet, and prepared the way for pro-
founder work by others. While his simplicity and exactness
in description mark him off from all preceding nature poets, even
from Thomson, the spirit of his poetry differentiates him equally
from Crabbe, who, though even more minute and faithful in detail,
always regarded nature as a setting for the emotions of man.
There are passages in The Task which sound a nobler music than
that quoted above. One is the invocation to evening in The
Winter Evening, beginning :
Come, Evening, once again, season of peace;
Return, sweet Evening, and continue long!
The earlier part of this passage is very like Collins. The whole of it,
in spite of certain characteristic words—'ostentatious,''modest'--
is a little too fanciful and a little too elaborate to be entirely in
Cowper's peculiar manner. He is most himself when he is most
closely concerned with the scenes and people that, in his restricted
life, he had come to know and love. The six books of The Task
(entitled The Sofa, The Time-piece, The Garden, The Winter
Evening, The Winter Morning Walk and The Winter Walk at
Noon) contain many passages of sympathetic description that have
become classical. Such are the lines on the rural sounds' and
those on hay-carting in The Sofa ; the man cutting hay from the
stack, the woodman and his dog in The Winter Morning Walk ;
the postman and the waggoner in The Winter Evening; the fall
of snow, in the same book. Each is the product of the poet's own
observation ; each helped to prove, in an age which needed the
lesson, that simplicity and truth have their place in poetry, and
that commonplace things are fit subjects for the poet. Cowper's
simplicity is not the simplicity of Lyrical Ballads, any more than it
is the glittering artifice of Pope. He is Miltonic throughout; but
he speaks with perfect sincerity, keeping ‘his eye on the object. '
There are, no doubt, stretches of didactic verse in The
## p. 87 (#109) #############################################
IV]
Nature Poetry
87
Task. That was almost necessary to Cowper in a poem of this
length. But it is more important to observe how, in this poem,
one quality, that has endeared Cowper to thousands of readers and
was by no means without its effect on public opinion, finds its chief
expression in his works. After concluding The Sofa with the
famous and beautiful passage beginning :
God made the country, and man made the town;
be opens The Time-piece with a cry for some refuge where the
news of man's oppression, deceit and cruelty might never reach
him. The love of man for man, the love of man for animals, for the
meanest thing that lives—this is the principal moral message of
The Task. Doubtless, this kind of 'sentimentalism' was in the
air,' at the time. It belonged, to some extent, to Cowper's section
of the church ; it was spread far and wide by Rousseau. Yet it
was inborn in Cowper's tender, joyful nature--a nature that was
playfully serene when free from its tyrant melancholy; and Cowper
remains the chief exponent of it in English poetry.
When originally published in 1785, The Task was followed in
the same volume by three shorter poems, an epistle to Cowper's
friend, Joseph Hill, Tirocinium, to which reference was made
above, and The Diverting History of John Gilpin. In Tirocinium,
the attack on the brutality and immorality of public schools may
have been just and is certainly vigorous ; but this is not the kind
of poetical composition in which Cowper excelled. Of John Gilpin,
there is little need to speak at length. Lady Austen told Cowper
the story.
He lay awake at night laughing over it, and made of
it a ballad in a style of fun peculiarly his own, but not to be
found elsewhere outside his letters. The more closely one looks
into the poem, the finer seems the characterisation, and the more
delicate and artful the precise simplicity of its manner. Subse-
quent editions included twelve more short poems in the volume,
among them The Rose, admired by Sainte-Beuve, and the lines
On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture out of Norfolk Cowper's
mother had died when he was six years old. As he tells us in this
poem, nearly half a century afterwards he remembered distinctly
and minutely the event and his feelings, and the poem is one of
the most pathetic and moving in any language. Thanks to the
poet's use of detail, the woman and her little son live again before
us, and the tenderness of the whole is unsurpassed. One other of
the shorter poems, The Dog and the Water-lily, deserves mention
for the light it throws on Cowper's gentle, animal-loving life ;
## p. 88 (#110) #############################################
88
[CH.
William Cowper
and the collection included, also, one or two fables that link him
with Prior, Gay and Northcote.
In 1786, Cowper and Mrs Unwin had moved from dreary
Olney to a cheerful house and neighbourhood at Weston, not
far off, and had enlarged their circle of acquaintances, thanks,
partly, to his cousin Harriet (the sister of Theodora), now Lady
Hesketh. Cowper's life continued to be happy; and, during these
pleasant years, he wrote a number of short poems, which were
not published till after his death. Among them were several
playful or serious personal addresses, much in the tone of the
letters. Others were little narratives or expressions of everyday
experience, like The Colubriad, an account of a viper which
threatened the poet's cat and her kittens, and the epitaph on the
poet's hare, Old Tiney, surliest of his kind. The remainder
included a few religious poems, several epigrams and translations,
one or two tales and some poems on the slave trade, written to
order and not showing Cowper at his best. Among these posthu-
mous works four stand prominent: the stanzas On the Loss of
the Royal George, the sonnet To Mrs Unwin, the poem To Mary
and The Poplar Field. The sonnet is one of Cowper's finest
achievements; the poem To Mary is redeemed by its tenderness
from a certain monotony in the form. The Poplar Field
contains the famous and exquisite second line of the couplet
a
The poplars are felled; farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade
which shows Cowper to have had possibilities in lyric poetry
never fulfilled by him. Yet, it seems almost unjust to say this
in view of On the Loss of the Royal George. Written to oblige
Lady Austen, who wanted words set to the march in Scipio, this
poem is one of the noblest dirges ever composed. By the directest,
simplest means imaginable, Cowper attains an effect of noble
grandeur. The plain statement reaches the sublime.
Cowper was not content to write short poems. In order to
stave off its besetting depression, his mind needed regular occupa-
tion; and, in 1785, soon after he had finished correcting the proofs
of The Task, he began,'merely to divert attention,' turning Homer's
Tiad into blank verse. The diversion grew into a plan to trans-
late the whole of Homer and publish the work by subscription.
Cowper came to his task well equipped. He had known his Homer
from boyhood ; and how well he knew and appreciated him may
be learned from two letters to Lady Hesketh, written in December
## p. 89 (#111) #############################################
IV]
Translations
89
1785 and January 1786, which are worth quoting as examples of
judicious and penetrating criticism.
Except the Bible, there never was in the world a book so remarkable for
that species of the sublime that owes its very existence to simplicity, as
the works of Homer. He is always nervous, plain, natural. . . Homer is,
on occasions that call for such a style, the easiest and most familiar of all
writers. . . Homer's accuracy of description, and his exquisite judgement never,
never failed him. He never, I believe, in a single instance sacrificed beauty
to embellishment. He does not deal in hyperbole . . . accordingly, when he
describes nature, whether in man or in animal, or whether nature inanimate,
you may always trust him for the most consummate fidelity. It is his great
glory that he omits no striking part of his subject, and that he never inserts
a tittle that does not belong to it. Oh! how unlike some describers that I
have met with, of modern days, who smother you with words, words, words,
and then think that they have copied nature; when all the while nature was
an object either not looked at, or not sufficiently.
>
Much of this is applicable to Cowper himself; and the writer of
the passage might be held to have been peculiarly well fitted to
translate Homer. Moreover, Cowper not only knew and loved
Homer (though, indeed, he regretted that this most blameless
writer' was 'not an enlightened man'), but he knew Pope's
translation, which he had compared word for word with the original.
To him, Pope's 'faults and failings' were like so many buoys
upon a dangerous coast”; and, side by side with his appreciation
of Homer, there runs, in these letters to Lady Hesketh, some
very penetrating examination of the difference between Homer
and the ‘two pretty poems under Homer's titles' written by Pope.
So far as criticism goes, therefore, Cowper promised well as a
translator of Homer. He knew what to aim at, and what to avoid.
The work was finished, well subscribed and published in 1791 ;
and, today, no one need read it except those who have to write
about it.
The reasons of Cowper's failure are two. In the first place
though precision and truth of detail are characteristics of both
poets, Cowper's tender, shrinking mind was separated by centuries
and leagues from Homer's. It was not his to understand the joy
of battle, the fascination of wounds, the fierce, raw passions, still
largely animal, of primitive heroes and heroines, nor to surrender
his convictions to the turbulent folk whom Homer regarded as
gods and goddesses. In the second place, it is one thing to
realise that Homer is 'nervous, plain, natural, and another to
achieve those qualities, in learned and sonorous blank verse.
Cowper's Miltonic measures are hardly less unlike Homer than is
Pope's riming jingle. The movement is completely altered.
.
It
## p. 90 (#112) #############################################
90
[ch.
William Cowper
is ample and stately; it has all the nobility which was one of the
qualities demanded by Matthew Arnold in his lectures On Trans-
lating Homer. It is, also, faithful. Pope had perverted his
original in order to find occasion for the brilliant effects of anti-
thesis and epigram in which he excelled. Chapman, an Elizabethan
brimful of ideas and curiosity and a spirit of literary adventure,
had perverted his original through ebullience of sentiment and
fancy. Cowper, priding himself on adhering closely to his original,
adhered only in part. He knew exactly what Homer meant to
say; he appreciated, in a great measure, Homer's manner of saying
it; but his head was full of Milton. He believed Milton's style to
resemble Homer's; and, by modelling his blank verse on Milton's,
he achieves inversions, pauses and pomposities which are wholly
unlike the smooth and simple rapidity of Homer. This is not
to say that there are not excellent passages in Cowper's Homer,
nor that the whole work is not a lofty achievement in scholarship
and poetry. But, in avoiding the cleverness of Pope, Cowper fell
into the opposite extreme. Homer is grand and lively, Cowper's
Homer is grand and dull. As translator of the hymns of Mme
Guyon, of certain odes and satires of Horace, of Greek songs and
the Latin poems of his admired Milton, Cowper was more suc-
cessful, especially in the case of Horace, with whom, despite the
difference between a genial pagan and an evangelical Christian,
he had much in common. Perhaps the least disputable title to
remembrance which Cowper's Homer possesses is that it kept the
poet busy and happy, staving off, for a while, his persistent foe,
despair.
Despair was to have him in the end. Mrs Unwin sickened and
died. The strain of attendance upon her proved too much for
Cowper's mental and physical strength ; and one of the saddest
stories in the world is that of Cowper at and after the death of his
heroic friend. Popularity, success, affection, royal favour (in the
form of a pension acquired for him partly by the eager, blundering
,
pertinacity of his friend, Hayley 1)-nothing could relieve him. His
last original work was a powerful but ghastly poem called The
Castaway. He died on 25 April 1800.
Cowper, though not among the great poets of England, holds
a unique place, partly by virtue of the personality which shines in
every line of his poetry, partly by virtue of the sincerity and
simplicity which, 'keeping its eye on the object,' saw beauty and
i Caldicott, H. Rowlands S. , "How Cowper got his pension, The Cornhill Maga-
zine, no. 202, April 1913, p. 493.
## p. 91 (#113) #############################################
IV]
Letters
91
consolation in common things, till then neglected, but eagerly
seized upon by his successors and transformed into material for
their profoundest and noblest art. There is another field in which he
holds still a unique position—the field of letter-writing. It seems
an error to speak, in connection with Cowper, of the art of letter-
writing. If art implies the consideration of their effect upon the
public, no letters were ever written with less art. In a letter to
William Unwin, Cowper says
a
It is possible I might have indulged myself in the pleasure of writing to
you, without waiting for a letter from you, but for a reason which you will not
easily guess. Your mother communicated to me the satisfaction you expressed
in my correspondence, that you thought me entertaining and clever, and so
forth:-now you must know, I love praise dearly, especially from the judicious,
and those who have so much delicacy themselves as not to offend mine in
giving it. But then, I found this consequence attending, or likely to attend
the eulogium you bestowed ;-if my friend thought me witty before, he shall
think me ten times more witty hereafter;-where I joked once, I will joke
five times, and for one sensible remark I will send him a dozen. Now this
foolish vanity would have spoiled me quite, and would have made me as dis-
gusting a letter-writer as Pope, who seems to have thought that unless a
sentence was well turned, and every period pointed with some conceit, it was
not worth the carriage. Accordingly he is to me, except in very few instances,
the most disagreeable maker of epistles that ever I met with. I was willing,
therefore, to wait till the impression your commendation had made upon the
foolish part of me was worn off, that I might scribble away as usual, and
write my uppermost thoughts, and those only.
With the exception of Charles Lamb, all the other great English
letter-writers_Gray, Walpole, Pope, Byron—wrote with an eye to
the printed collection. Cowper wrote partly for his correspondent,
chiefly for himself. His are, in his own phrase, 'talking letters. '
He chats about anything that happens to be in his mind. If he
is suffering from his mental complaint, he writes a letter un-
matched for gloom, a letter that envelopes even a modern reader
in a black mist of misery. A few pages later, and he is playful,
gay, almost jaunty. His mind was so sweet, and his interest
in the little details of life so keen, that the most trivial occur-
rence—a feat in carpentering, a bed of tulips, the visit of a
parliamentary candidate-can interest his reader still. Acute
reasoning, sound sense, fine judgment fall into their places with
whimsical nonsense, hearty laughter and almost boyish affection.
He will break off a criticism on Homer to bid Lady Hesketh
'give me a great corking pin that I may stick your faith upon my
sleeve. There-it is done. ' The whole of his nature, gay and
gloomy, narrow in opinion and wide in sympathy, ever fixed on
## p. 92 (#114) #############################################
92
[CH. IV
William Cowper
heavenly things and ever keenly alive to mundane things, is pre-
served for us in these inimitably vivid letters; and the same
taste and scholarship which give point and permanence even to
his least elaborated poems have won for these naïve examples
of transparent self-revelation an undying value. The more they
are read, the better will Cowper be understood and loved.
## p. 93 (#115) #############################################
CHAPTER V
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
WORDSWORTH's surprise and resentment would surely have
been provoked had he been told that, at half a century's distance
and from an European point of view, his work would seem, on
the whole, though with several omissions and additions, to be
a continuation of the movement initiated by Rousseau. It is,
nevertheless, certain that it might be described as an English
variety of Rousseauism, revised and corrected, in some parts,
by the opposite influence of Edmund Burke. In Wordsworth, we
find Rousseau's wellknown fundamental tenets : he has the same
semi-mystical faith in the goodness of nature as well as in the
excellence of the child; his ideas on education are almost
identical; there are apparent a similar diffidence in respect of the
merely intellectual processes of the mind, and an equal trust in
the good that may accrue to man from the cultivation of his
senses and feelings. The differences between the two, mainly
occasional and of a political nature, seem secondary by the side
of these profound analogies. For this reason, Wordsworth must
be placed by the general historian among the numerous ósons of
Rousseau,' who form the main battalion of romanticism ; though,
if we merely regard the ideas he expressed and propagated, his per-
sonality may, thereby, lose some of its originality and distinctness.
But, resemblance does not necessarily mean repetition and imi-
tation. Moreover, men's ideas are their least individual possessions.
The manner in which a man, and, above all, a poet, becomes
possessed of his creed, the stamp he puts upon it, are the things
that really matter. Now, Wordsworth formed his thoughts and
convictions in the light of the circumstances of his own life,
whereby they assumed a reality wanting in those of many of his
contemporaries. If he thought like others, he always thought by
himself. He gives us the impression that, had he lived alone on a
## p. 94 (#116) #############################################
94
William Wordsworth
[CH.
bookless earth, he would have reached the same conclusions. His
deep influence on a limited, but incomparably loyal, number of
readers owes less to his beliefs than to his minute, persevering
analysis of every step he made towards them. He appeals to our
confidence by his constant recourse to his personal experience.
He prides himself on being the least inventive of great poets.
He belittles fancy. It is true that he claimed imagination as his
supreme gift, but, at the same time, he bestowed on the word
imagination a new meaning, almost entirely opposed to the ordinary
one. He gave the name to his accurate, faithful and loving observa-
tion of nature. In his loftier moods, he used 'imagination as a
synonym of 'intuition,' of seeing into, and even through, reality,
but he never admitted a divorce between it and reality. The
gift of feigning, of arbitrarily combining the features of a legend
or story, which had long been held to be the first poetical pre-
rogative, was almost entirely denied him, and he thanked God for
its absence. His hold over many thoughtful and, generally, mature
minds is due to his having avowedly, and often, also, practically,
made truth his primary object, beauty being only second. Those
who had ingenuously turned to his poems for the mere charm
of verse were grateful to him inasmuch as they had received, in
addition, their first lessons in philosophy. They had gone to him
for pleasure and they came back with a train of reflection that
followed them through the round of their daily tasks. They
were taught by him a new way of looking at men and nature.
Wordsworth achieved this result by dint of one-sided pressure,
by tenaciousness of aim. Not that his ideas remained the same
from beginning to end. Few men, on the contrary, changed more
thoroughly. His mind may be represented as continuously shifting
along a half circle, so that, finally, he stood at the opposite end
of the diameter. The young revolutionist evolved into a grey-
haired conservative, the semi-atheist and pantheist into a pattern
of conformity. But, all the time, he kept true to his fixed centre,
the search for the greatest good. His very contradictions point
to one engrossing pursuit. His life was an unbroken series of
slow movements which brought him from one extreme to the
other, though his eyes were ever bent in the same direction.
Because he never ceased to have the same object in view, he was
himself imperfectly conscious of the change in his position.
Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cockermouth, in the north
of the lake country, the second child of a fairly prosperous
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Childhood
95
6
attorney-at-law and of Anne Cookson, daughter of a Penrith
mercer. Seen from the outside, without the optimistic prism of
The Prelude, his childhood does not seem to have been any
more privileged, while his youth appears decidedly more vexed
and troubled, than those of the common run of men. The child,
surely, had pleasant hours with his brothers and sister while
playing about the terrace of the family garden which overlooked
the Derwent, or when bathing in the river. There were bitter
hours, however, when he was taken to his mother's family at
Penrith, where harsh grandparents often treated the little ones
with reproach and insult. ' William was particularly unruly and,
in consequence, had most to bear from the Cooksons. Hence, we
hear of acts of defiance and even of a childish attempt at suicide.
When he was eight years old, his mother died, and, parting
from his father, who never recovered his cheerfulness after his
bereavement, Wordsworth was sent to Hawkshead grammar school.
A very homely one-room house in a very poor village is the place
where he was taught. He lodged with one of the old village dames,
who, however kind they might be to boys, could only give them
coarse and scanty fare. For his companions, he chiefly had
farmers' sons, destined for the church, who brought with them
the rough manners of their home life. In spite of the delight
he found in games, open air life and rambles about hill and lake,
it must be admitted that Hawkshead was a very mixed paradise.
Then came his father's death, when the boy was thirteen. The
orphan's condition was precarious. Almost all the money left by
his father was in the hands of Sir James Lowther, to whom Words-
worth's father had been steward, and Sir James would never
hear of paying it back so long as he lived, nor could he be
compelled to reimburse. It is true that enough remained to
allow William to pursue his studies, and a boy does not take money
questions much to heart. But there were wretched holidays at
Penrith, in his grandparents' sullen home. Of the frequent dis-
tress of the children in that house, we have a vivid picture in
the earliest letters of little Dorothy, the poet's only sister, written
in the last year spent by William at Hawkshead. Dorothy, whose
sweet, affectionate nature cannot be suspected of unjustified
complaints, could scarcely bear the loveless constraint she had
to undergo. No more could her brothers : ‘Many a time have
William, John, Christopher and myself shed tears together of the
bitterest sorrow. We have no father to protect, no mother to
guide us,' and so forth.
## p. 96 (#118) #############################################
96
[CH.
William Wordsworth
From Hawkshead, Wordsworth went to Cambridge in October
1787 and remained there at St John's college till the beginning
of 1791. He took little interest either in the intellectual or
social life of the university. He never opened a mathematical
book and thus lost all chance of obtaining a fellowship. Even his
literary studies were pursued irregularly, without any attention
being paid to the prescribed course. He did not feel any abhor-
rence of the students' life, which, at that time, consisted of
alternate sloth and wildness. He first shared in it, but soon grew
weary of it and lived more or less by himself. In his university
years, his only deep enjoyments were the long rambles in which
he indulged during vacations. Meanwhile, discussions with his
uncles must, at times, have made life rather distasteful to him.
He had no money in prospect. All his small patrimony had been
spent on his university education ; yet he showed himself vacil-
lating and reluctant when required to make choice of a career.
None was to his taste. The army, the church, the law, tutorial
work, were all contemplated and discarded in turn. He showed
no strong bent except for wandering and writing poetry. He was,
indeed, a young man likely to make his elders anxious. In July
1790, just at the time when he ought to have been working
hard for his approaching examinations, he took it into his head
to start for the Alps with a fellow student, on foot, equipped
much like a pedlar—an escapade without precedent. As soon
as he had taken his B. A. , without distinction, he set fortune at
defiance, and settled in London for a season, doing nothing in
particular, 'pitching a vagrant tent among the unfenced regions
of society. After this, other wanderings and abortive schemes
of regular work followed for more than three years, till he threw
aside all idea of a fixed career and settled down to resolute poverty.
Such apparent restlessness and indolence could not but be
attended by many a pang of remorse. He suffered from his
growing estrangement from his relations. He was ill satisfied
with himself and uneasy about the future, and these feelings
(perhaps darkened by some passages of vexed love) found an
outlet in his juvenile poems, all of which are tinged with
melancholy.
It seems strange that such a childhood and youth should,
afterwards, have furnished him with the optimistic basis of The
Prelude. Beyond doubt, this poem was meant to be a selection
of all the circumstances in his early life that told for joy and hope.
Hence, a heightening of bright colours, and a voluntary omission
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The French Revolution
97
of more sombre hues, in the picture he made of his youth. But
the contrast between the dry facts of his early life and his rapture
over the same period is, also, owing to a deeper truth. The joy
he celebrates in The Prelude springs from sources hidden from
all eyes, scarcely suspected by the child himself. Whatever
shadows might pass over his days, abundant strength and happi-
ness lay beneath the surface. He was not callous to grief, but,
somehow, felt all the time that grief was transient, hope permanent,
in his breast. His enjoyment of nature gave him those intense
delights which are usually unnoticed in the tale of a life. So did
his already passionate love of verse. Thus, The Prelude is all
true, though it does not present us with the whole truth.
Of the young man's passion for nature, his early poems, both
published in 1793, furnish direct proof. They are the most minute
and copious inventories of the aspects he saw, of the noises he
heard, in his native lakes (An Evening Walk) or in his wanderings
through Switzerland (Descriptive Sketches). Such acuteness and
copiousness of observation were only possible in the case of a
devotee. However contorted and knotty the verse may be, however
artificial the diction, the poet's fervour is as manifest here as in
the most eloquent of his subsequent effusions. Though he follows
in the train of a succession of descriptive poets, he outdoes them
all in abundance of precise touches.
