Immortal Memories. Clement King Shorter
for what I am quite willing to allow is the incorrect pronunciation. All pronunciation, even of the simplest words, is settled finally by a consensus of custom. Throughout the English-speaking world the name is now constantly pronounced Cowper, as if that most useful and ornamental animal the cow had given it its origin. Well-read Scotland is peculiarly unanimous in the custom, and well-read America follows suit. William Shakspere, I doubt not, called himself Shaxspere, and we decline to imitate him, and so probably many of us will with a light heart go on speaking of William Cowper to the end of the chapter. At any rate Shakspere and Cowper, divergent as were their lives and their work—and one readily recognizes the incomparably greater position of the former—had alike a keen sense of humour, rare among poets it would seem, and hugely would they both have enjoyed such a controversy as this.
This suggestion of the humour of Cowper brings me to my main point. Humour is so essentially a note of sanity, and it is the sanity of Cowper that I desire to emphasize here. We have heard too much of the insanity of Cowper, of the “maniac’s tongue” to which Mrs. Browning referred, of the “maniacal Calvinist” of whom Byron wrote somewhat scornfully. Only a day or two ago I read in a high-class journal that “one fears that Cowper’s despondency and madness are better known to-day than his poetry.” That is not to know the secret of Cowper. It is true that there were periods of maniacal depression, and these were not always religious ones. Now, it was from sheer nervousness at the prospect of meeting his fellows, now it was from a too logical acceptance of the doctrine of eternal punishment. Had it not been these, it would have been something else. It might have been politics, or a hundred things that now and again give a twist to the mind of the wisest. With Cowper it was generally religion. I am not here to promote a paradox. I accept the only too well-known story of Cowper’s many visitations, but, looking back a century, for the purpose of asking what was Cowper’s contribution to the world’s happiness and why we meet to speak of our love for him to-day, I insist that these visitations are not essential to our memory of him as a great figure in our literature—the maker of an epoch.
Cowper lived for some seventy years—sixty-nine, to be exact. Of these years there was a period longer than the full term of Byron’s life, of Shelley’s or of Keats’s, of perfect sanity, and it was in this period that he gave us what is one of the sanest achievements in our literature, view it as we may.
Let us look backwards over the century—a century which has seen many changes of which Cowper had scarcely any vision—the wonders of machinery and of electricity, of commercial enterprise, of the newspaper press, of book production. The galloping postboy is the most persistent figure in Cowper’s landscape. He has been replaced by the motor car. Nations have arisen and fallen; a thousand writers have become popular and have ceased to be remembered. Other writers have sprung up who have made themselves immortal. Burns and Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Scott and Shelley among the poets.
We ask ourselves, then, what distinctly differentiates Cowper’s life from that of his brothers in poetry, and I reply—his sanity. He did not indulge in vulgar amours, as did Burns and Byron; he did not ruin his moral fibre by opium, as did Coleridge; he did not shock his best friends by an over-weening egotism, as did Wordsworth; he did not spoil his life by reckless financial complications, as did Scott; or by too great an enthusiasm to beat down the world’s conventions, as did Shelley. I do not here condemn any one or other of these later poets. Their lives cannot be summed up in the mistakes they made. I only urge that, as it is not good to be at warfare with your fellows, to be burdened with debts that you have to kill yourself to pay, to alienate your friends by distressing mannerisms, to cease to be on speaking terms with your family—therefore Cowper, who avoided these things, and, out of threescore years and more allotted to him, lived for some forty or fifty years at least a quiet, idyllic life, surrounded by loyal and loving friends, had chosen the saner and safer path. That, it may be granted, was very much a matter of temperament, and for it one does not need to praise him. The appeal to us of Robert Burns to gently scan our brother man will necessarily find a ready acceptance to-day, and a plea on behalf of kindly toleration for any great writer who has inspired his fellows is natural and honourable. But Cowper does not require any such kindly toleration. His temperament led him to a placid life, where there were few temptations, and that life with its quiet walks, its occasional drives, its simple recreations, has stood for a whole century as our English ideal. It is what, amid the strain of the severest commercialism in our great cities, we look forward to for our declining years as a haven on this side of the grave.
But I have undertaken to plead for Cowper’s sanity. I desire, therefore, to beg you to look not at this or that episode in his life, when, as we know, Cowper was in the clutches of evil spirits, but at his life as a whole—a life of serene contentment in the company of his friends, his hares Puss, Tiny and Bess, his “eight pair of tame pigeons,” his correspondents; and then I ask you to turn to his work, and to note the essential sanity of that work also.
First there is his poetry. When after the Bastille had fallen Charles James Fox quoted in one of his speeches Cowper’s lines—written long years before—praying that that event might occur, he paid an unconscious tribute to the sanity of Cowper’s genius. [44] Few poets who have let their convictions and aspirations find expression in verse have come so near the mark.
Wordsworth’s verse—that which was written at the same age—is studded with prophecy of evils that never occurred. It was not because of any supermundane intelligence, such as latter-day poets have been pleased to affect and latter-day critics to assume for them, that Cowper wrote in anticipation of the fall of the Bastille in those thrilling lines, but because his exceedingly sane outlook upon the world showed him that France was riding fast towards revolution.
We have been told that Cowper’s poetry lacked the true note of passion, that there was an absence of the “lyric cry.” I protest that I find the note of passion in the “Lines on the Receipt of my Mother’s Picture,” in his two sets of verses to Mrs. Unwin, in his sonnet to Wilberforce not less marked than I find it in other great poets. I find in The Task and elsewhere in Cowper’s works a note of enthusiasm for human brotherhood, for man’s responsibility for man, for universal kinship, that had scarcely any place in literature before he wrote quietly here at Olney thoughts wiser and saner than he knew. To-day we call ourselves by many names, Conservatives or Liberals, Radicals, or Socialists; we differ widely as to ways and means; but we are all practically agreed about one thing—that the art of politics is the art of making the world happier. Each politician who has any aspirations beyond mere ambition desires to leave the world a little better than he found it. This is a commonplace of to-day. It was not a commonplace of Cowper’s day. Even the great-hearted, lovable Dr. Johnson was only concerned with the passing act of kindliness to his fellows; patriotism he declared to be the last refuge of a scoundrel; collective aspiration was mere charlatanry in his eyes, and when some one said that he had lost his appetite because of a British defeat, Johnson thought him an impostor, in which Johnson was probably right. There have been plenty of so-called patriots who were scoundrels, there has been plenty of affectation of sentiment which is little better than charlatanry, but we do not consider when we weigh the influence of men whether Rousseau was morally far inferior to Johnson. We know that he was. But Rousseau, poor an instrument as he may have been, helped to break many a chain, to relieve many a weary heart, to bring to whole peoples a new era in which the horrors of the past became as a nightmare, and in which ideals were destined to reign for ever. Cowper, an incomparably better man than Rousseau, helped to permeate England with that collective sentiment, which, while it does not excuse us for neglecting our neighbour, is a good thing for preserving for nations a healthy natural life, a more and more difficult task with the growing complications of commercialism. Cowper here, as I say, unconsciously performed his greatest service to humanity; and it was performed, be it remembered, at Olney. It has been truly said that in Cowper:—
The poetry of human wrong begins, that long, long cry against oppression and evil done by man to man, against the political, moral, or priestly tyrant, which rings louder and louder through Burns, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron, ever impassioned, ever longing, ever prophetic—never, in the darkest time, quite despairing. [47]
And Cowper achieved this without losing sight for one moment of the essential necessity for personal worth:
Spend