with brilliant imagery and wild preaching people mad." Half paradox. He was content to a dozen of his flock he admitted be sincere, and to set down to be disordered in their minds, upon paper the thoughts and with the complete unconwhich flitted through through his sciousness which allowed the mind, the simple sights which tired slaver to turn clergyman, confronted his eyes. He "he wondered whether the had no traveller's tales to tell, cause was the sedentary lives no marvels of experience to the women led over their laceunfold. Yet he was not un- pillows, or the crowded little conscious that the soul also rooms in which they lived." has its adventures, and following the example of Erasmus and Sir Thomas Browne, he could still speak with a certain pride of his "extraordinary life." It was extraordinary in a sense which perhaps he did not comprehend. If the seeds of madness were planted in his mind, some at least of his friends were as little sane as himself. He was fated to be surrounded by those whose hold upon the realities of life was none of the firmest. The poor Mrs Unwin was not the lady best suited to be the lifelong companion of a melancholy poet, not always master of himself and of his intentions. Yet he watched over her, and sacrificed other affections to her caprice, with a firm and touching loyalty. It was unfortunate for him that Olney and Weston Underwood should have been infested at the same time by pietists of every complexion and every sect. The grim John Newton, a kind of Admiral Guinea, who had been deeply engaged in the slavetrade before he became a minister of the Gospel, was not the best friend that a sensitive poet could have found. He confessed that his name was "up about the country for He need not have wondered. A little candour might have persuaded him that his own ministrations were the deadly foes of sanity. Cowper, never far from the verge of madness, needed a delicate and sympathetic treatment, and this Newton could not possibly give him. He left the poet with his mind unhinged by melancholy, and he had no better comfort to offer than an invitation to consider the case of the Rev. Simon Browne. Now, the Rev. Simon was a respectable dissenting minister who had plumbed the very depths of dejection. The cause of his affliction was not clear. Some said it came from domestic bereavement; others thought its cause was the remorse which the Rev. Simon felt for having knocked a highwayman on the head. Whatever cause, the result was certain and deplorable. The poor gentleman persuaded himself that "he had fallen under the sensible displeasure of God, who had caused his rational soul gradually to perish, and left him only an animal life in common with brutes; so that, though he retained the faculty of speaking in a manner which appeared rational to others, he had no more notion of what he said than a parrot, being utterly divested of consciousness." In these sorry straits he made up his mind to apply to Queen Caroline for the restitution of his soul, and, being dissuaded from this extravagance, he fell to making a dictionary-a work for which, said he in a lucid interval, "the possession of a rational soul is wholly unnecessary." The mere fact that such a man should be held up as an example to Cowper proves at once the callousness of Newton's temper and the depth of the pit of melancholy into which Cowper had fallen. And then, as though Newton and the Rev. Simon were not sufficiently disconcerted, the ineffable Teedon came upon the scene. The influence which Samuel Teedon exercised over the sensitive intelligence of Cowper is more profoundly tragic because Cowper had no illusions about him. He knew perfectly well that he was clumsy, boorish, ignorant, obsequious. He marks the man's first appearance upon the scene with a gentle irony which did not conceal his contempt. "Mr Teedon has been here," he wrote, "but is gone again. He came to thank me for an old pair of breeches. In answer to our inquiries after his health he replied that he had a slow fever which made him take all possible care not to inflame his blood. I admitted his prudence, but in his particular instance could not very clearly discern the need of it. Pump water will not heat him much; and to speak a little in his own style, more inebriating fluids are to him, I fancy, not very attainable." Such was Samuel Teedon, the man whose coarse familiarity Cowper tolerated, whom he thanked for "spiritual aids," and whom he permitted to point out to him the beauties of his book, "as if fearful that I had overlooked some of them myself." his Biography cannot show a sadder overthrow of a noble mind. And the overthrow is all the sadder because Cowper, destined for a grave comedy, was forced all his life to play a part in grim melodrama. Had it been his good fortune to enjoy always the society of such women as Lady Hesketh and Lady Austen, he would never have fallen, one is sure, into the slough of misery which engulfed him. Until some intrigue separated him from Lady Austen, he was happy in her converse. He addresses no line to Lady Hesketh that is not instinct with a cheerful gaiety. Unhappily he fell into the wrong corner of England. He became the prey of pietists, though none ever needed their ministrations less than he, and we cannot think of Olney to-day save as a place haunted by the ravening ghosts of ignorant preachers and converted slave-dealers. However, we have said so much about Cowper and his environment because his art of letter-writing was hardly affected at all by the sinister influences around him. It was natural for him to express himself upon paper, and like a sundial he marked only sunny days. Nor was he dependent upon events for his inspiration. Like a spider, he span out of himself the web of his fancy. Again and again he begins a letter by confessing that he has nothing to say, and instantly he follows a quiet train of thought wherever it leads him. Which is merely another way of saying that he was by nature as well as by habit a writer of letters. The only purposes he knew were to express himself and to amuse his friend. It was not for him to vaunt his prowess or to extol his talent. He was wholly incapable of writing for any other than his chosen audience, and his letters never irk you by such tricks and antics as they employ who keep their eye upon a larger public and upon posthumous fame. The material of Cowper's letters is the mere tittle-tattle of a country village. His motto was, Bene vixit qui bene latuit. He tells his friends how he mends the kitchen windows, and he takes pride in his early salads. His chief occupation in January is to walk ten times in a day from his fireside to his cucumber-frame. In the summer a promenade with Mrs. Unwin or a picnic in the open air are his wildest pleasures. The story of an escaped hare, touched by his magician's wand, thrills the reader. A lion at the fair, seventy years of age, and tame as a goose, arouses his curiosity, as well it might. Under his pen, a visit of the candidate, Mr Grenville, "a most loving, kissing, kind hearted gentleman," becomes a veritable scene from a comedy. His joys are simple, and, after friendship, are chiefly of the earth and sky. "O! I could spend whole days and moonlight nights," says he, "in feeding upon a lovely prospect! My eyes drink the rivers as they flow." On another day, in the heat of June, he writes with the classic touch which is habitual to him, "My garden languishes, and what is worse the fields too languish, and the upland grass is burnt." As for politics, he read the news, and saw that things went wrong in every quarter. He could not, if he would, be an unconcerned spectator. True patriot as he was, he saw no opportunity in the course of public events to arouse his patriotism. He could but expend his enthusiasm upon the past. "When poor Bob White brought in the news of Boscawen's success off the coast of Portugal," he writes, "how did I leap for joy! When Hawke demolished Conflans, I was more transported. But nothing could express my rapture when Wolfe made the conquest of Quebec." As in prose, so in verse the poet rejoiced "That Chatham's language was his mother tongue, And Wolfe's great name compatriot with his own.' These grave thoughts were but interludes. He recognised the perfect simplicity of his life, and rejoiced. The symbol which he found for it will be intelligible to all. "Your mother and I walked yester day in the Wilderness," he wrote to William Unwin. "As we entered the gate, a glimpse of something white, contained in a little hole in the gate-post, caught my eye. I looked again, and discovered a bird's nest, with two tiny eggs in it. Byand-by they will be fledged, and tailed, and get wing-feathers, and fly. My case is somewhat similar to that of the parent bird. My nest is in a little nook. Here I brood and hatch, and in due time my progeny takes wing and whistles." For it must not be forgotten that he was always a poet and man of letters. His judgments are sometimes unsound. It is a grotesque perversion to say that Gray is "the only poet since Shakespeare entitled to the character of sublime." Though he perceived the genius of Burns, he made a monstrous comment upon it. "I have read Burns's poems," he says, "and have read them twice; and though they be written in a language that is new to me, and many of them on subjects much inferior to the author's ability, I think them on the whole a very extraordinary production.... It will be a pity if he should not hereafter divest himself of barbarism, and content himself with writing pure English, in which he appears perfectly qualified to excel. He who can command admiration dishonours himself if he aims no higher than to raise a laugh." To-day criticism has set in the opposite direction. No man of sense or man of letters would dare to prefer Burns's English verse to his incomparable poems in the vernacular, or to pretend that his masterpieces aimed no higher than a laugh. Cowper, however, was a man of his time, while Burns, a free spirit, unfettered by the years, did and thought what seemed good in his own eyes. For the rest, Cowper displayed an admirable appreciation of Milton, and Homer, and Virgil. He lived on familiar terms with the greatest. The page in which he contrasts Pope and Dryden is a page of pure insight. And by a strange paradox, the literary figure which stalks in the background of Cowper's thought is Samuel Johnson. He was not often in sympathy with him. He deplored bitterly, as he might, the gross injustice which Johnson did to Milton. He finds many passages in the 'Lives of the Poets' of which he disapproves. Yet fear and respect mingle in his mind when it turns to Johnson. The two men never met, perhaps happily. Johnson might not have understood the shy merits of Cowper. Cowper would certainly have shown himself at his worst in the presence of the literary autocrat. Yet it was for Johnson's approval that Cowper sighed. "It is possible he may be pleased," he said, when he hoped his book was in Johnson's hands, "and if he should, I shall have engaged on my side one of the best trumpeters in the Kingdom." Alas! Johnson refused to be engaged, though there is no reason to think that he would not have appreciated the tranquil merit of the "Task." But wherever Cowper's enthusiasm was aroused he wrote with ardour and sensibility. If he over-praised Vincent Browne, who will regret it? At any rate, he proved how warmly he admired his Muse by the tribute of translation. "I love the memory of Vinny Browne," he wrote; "I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to him. I love him, too, with a love of partiality, because he was usher of the fifth form at Westminster when I passed through it. He was so goodnatured, and so indolent, that I lost more than I got by him, for he made me as idle as himself." An amiable eulogy, in truth, and made real by a reminiscence. "I remember," adds Cowper, "seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy locks, and box his ears to put it out again." Such are some of the observations wherewith Cowper beguiled the leisure of his friends. And his observations beguile our leisure too, because they are perfect in style and manner. Cowper's ear was equally attuned to verse and prose, and it is impossible to read his letters without finding a pleasure in their various cadences. He rings the changes on his vowels like the unconscious master that he was. He separates harsh consonants from one another by discreet intervals. His style is perfectly adapted to its subjects and to his temperament. Discreetly gay or doucely melancholy, it admirably serves the purpose of a writer who would rather hide than reveal the sorrows of his heart. He was a natural artist, who obtained his effects without thinking too deeply of them. The sincerity of his mind dictated what he should say; and he said it well, because he could not do otherwise. In conclusion, it may be said of him what he said with truthfulness of Lady Hesketh. He had assured her that her letters were the best in the world, and thus he imagined her reply. "You will say," he wrote, "That is impossible, for I always write what comes uppermost, and never trouble myself either about method or expression.' And for that very reason, my dear, they are what they are, so good that they could not be better. As to expression, you have no need to study it; yours is sure to be such as it ought; and as to method, you know as well as I that it is never more out of place than in a letter." But, to end on a paradox, there was method in Cowper's very absence of method, there was art in his artlessness, or we should not be reading his letters with pleasure more than a century after they were written. never |