Immortal Memories. Clement King Shorter
those of any other Englishman, but he was also a great moralist—a superb inspiration to a better life. We should not love Johnson so much were he not presented to us as a man of many weaknesses and faults akin to our own, not a saint by any means, and therefore not so far removed from us as some more ethereal characters of whom we may read. Johnson striving to methodize his life, to fight against sloth and all the minor vices to which he was prone, is the Johnson whom some of us prefer to keep ever in mind. “Here was,” I quote Carlyle, “a strong and noble man, one of our great English souls.” I love him best in his book called Prayers and Meditations, where we know him as we know scarcely any other Englishman, for the good, upright fighter in this by no means easy battle of life. It is as such a fighter that we think of him to-night. Reading the account of his battles may help us to fight ours.
Gentlemen, I give you the toast of the evening. Let us drink in solemn silence, upstanding, “The Immortal Memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson.”
II. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF WILLIAM COWPER
An address entitled ‘The Sanity of Cowper,’ delivered at the Centenary Celebration at Olney, Bucks, on the occasion of the Hundredth Anniversary of the Death of the poet William Cowper, April 25, 1900.
I owe some apology for coming down to Olney to take part in what I believe is a purely local celebration, in which no other Londoner, as far as I know, has been asked to take part. I am here not because I profess any special qualification to speak about Cowper, in the town with which his name is so pleasantly associated, but because Mr. Mackay, [31] the son-in-law of your Vicar, has written a book about the Brontës, and I have done likewise, and he asked me to come. This common interest has little, you will say, to do with the Poet of Olney. Between Cowper and Charlotte Brontë there were, however, not a few points of likeness or at least of contrast. Both were the children of country clergymen; both lived lives of singular and, indeed, unusual strenuousness; both were the very epitome of a strong Protestantism; and yet both—such is the inevitable toleration of genius—were drawn in an unusual manner to attachment to friends of the Roman Catholic Church—Cowper to Lady Throckmorton, who copied out some of his translations from Homer for him, assisted by her father-confessor, Dr. Gregson, and Miss Brontë to her Professor, M. Héger, the man in the whole world whom she most revered. Under circumstances of peculiar depression both these great Protestant writers went further on occasion than their Protestant friends would have approved, Cowper to contemplate—so he assures us in one of his letters—the entering a French monastery, and Miss Brontë actually to kneel in the Confessional in a Brussels church. Further, let me remind you that there were moments in the lives of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters, when Cowper’s poem, The Castaway, was their most soul-stirring reading. Then, again, Mary Unwin’s only daughter became the wife of a Vicar of Dewsbury, and it was at Dewsbury and to the very next vicar, that Mr. Brontë, the father of Charlotte, was curate when he first went into Yorkshire. Finally, let it be recalled that Cowper and Charlotte Brontë have attracted as much attention by the pathos of their lives as by anything that they wrote. Thus far, and no further, can a strained analogy carry us. The most enthusiastic admirers of the Brontës can only claim for them that they permanently added certain artistic treasures to our literature. Cowper did incomparably more than this. His work marked an epoch.
But first let me say how interested we who are strangers naturally feel in being in Olney. To every lover of literature Olney is made classic ground by the fact that Cowper spent some twenty years of his life in it—not always with too genial a contemplation of the place and its inhabitants. “The genius of Cowper throws a halo of glory over all the surroundings of Olney and Weston,” says Dean Burgon. But Olney has claims apart from Cowper. John Newton [34] presents himself to me as an impressive personality. There was a time, indeed, of youthful impetuosity when I positively hated him, for Southey, whose biography I read very early in life, certainly endeavours to assist the view that Newton was largely responsible for the poet’s periodical attacks of insanity.
But a careful survey of the facts modifies any such impression. Newton was narrow at times, he was over-concerned as to the letter, often ignoring the spirit of true piety, but the student of the two volumes of his Life and Correspondence that we owe to Josiah Bull, will be compelled to look at “the old African blasphemer” as he called himself, with much of sympathy. That he had a note of tolerance, with which he is not usually credited, we learn from one of his letters, where he says:
I am willing to be a debtor to the wise and to the unwise, to doctors and shoemakers, if I can get a hint from any one without respect of parties. When a house is on fire Churchmen and Dissenters, Methodists and Papists, Moravians and Mystics are all welcome to bring water. At such times nobody asks, “Pray, friend, whom do you hear?” or “What do you think of the five points?”
Even my good friend Canon Benham, who has done so much to sustain the honourable fame of Cowper, and who would have been here to-day but for a long-standing engagement, is scarcely fair to Newton. [35] It is not true, as has been suggested, that Cowper always changed his manner into one of painful sobriety when he wrote to Newton. One of his most humorous letters—a rhyming epistle—was addressed to that divine.
I have writ (he says) in a rhyming fit, what will make you dance, and as you advance, will keep you still, though against your will, dancing away, alert and gay, till you come to an end of what I have penned; which you may do ere Madam and you are quite worn out with jigging about, I take my leave, and here you receive a bow profound, down to the ground, from your humble me, W. C.
Now, I quote this very familiar passage from the correspondence to remind you that Cowper could only have written it to a man possessed of considerable healthy geniality.
At any rate, alike as a divine and as the author of the Olney Hymns, Newton holds an important place in the history of theology, and Olney has a right to be proud of him. An even more important place is held by Thomas Scott, [36] and it seems to me quite a wonderful thing that Olney should sometimes have held at one and the same moment three such remarkable men as Cowper, Newton, and Scott.
In my boyhood Scott’s name was a household word, and many a time have I thumbed the volumes of his Commentaries, those Commentaries which Sir James Stephen declared to be “the greatest theological performance of our age and country.” Of Scott Cardinal Newman in his Apologia said, it will be remembered, that “to him, humanly speaking, I almost owe my soul.” Even here our literary associations with Olney and its neighbourhood are not ended, for, it was within five miles of this town—at Easton Maudit—that Bishop Percy [37] lived and prepared those Reliques which have inspired a century of ballad literature. Here the future Bishop of Dromore was visited by Dr. Johnson and others. What a pity that with only five miles separating them Cowper and Johnson should never have met! Would Cowper have reconsidered the wish made when he read Johnson’s biography of Milton in the Lives of the Poets: “Oh! I could thresh his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his pocket!”?
But it is with Cowper only that we have here to do, and when we are talking of Cowper the difficulty is solely one of compression. So much has been written about him and his work. The Lives of him form of themselves a most substantial library. He has been made the subject of what is surely the very worst biography in the language and of one that is among the very best. The well-meaning Hayley [38a] wrote the one, in which the word “tenderness” appears at least twice on every page, and Southey [38b] the other. Not less fortunate has the poet been in his critics. Walter Bagehot, James Russell Lowell, Mrs. Oliphant, George Eliot [38c]—these are but a few of the names that occur to me as having said something wise and to the point concerning the Poet of Olney.
I somehow feel that it is safer for me to refer to the Poet of Olney than to speak of William Cowper, because I am not quite sure how you would wish me to pronounce his name. Cooper, he himself pronounced it, as his family are in the habit of doing. The present Lord Cowper is known to all the world as Lord Cooper. The derivation of the name and the family coat-of-arms justify that pronunciation, and it might be said that a man