Immortal Memories. Clement King Shorter
Be most sublimely good, verbosely grand,
and it profiteth nothing, he said in effect.
That was not his only service as a citizen. He struck the note of honest patriotism as it had not been struck before since Milton, by the familiar lines commencing:
England, with all thy faults, I love thee still,
My country!
As also in that stirring ballad “On the Loss of the Royal George:”
Her timbers yet are sound,
And she may float again,
Full charged with England’s thunder,
And plough the distant main.
There are two other great claims that might here be made for Cowper did time allow, that he anticipated Wordsworth alike as a lover of nature, as one who had more than a superficial affection for it—the superficial affection of Thomson and Gray—and that he anticipated Wordsworth also as a lover of animal life. Cowper’s love of nature was the less effective than Wordsworth’s only, surely, in that he had not had Wordsworth’s advantage of living amid impressive scenery. His love of animal life was far less platonic than Wordsworth’s. To his hares and his pigeons and all dumb creatures he was genuinely devoted. Perhaps it was because he had in him the blood of kings—for, curiously enough, it is no more difficult to trace the genealogical tree of both Cowper and Byron down to William the Conqueror than it is to trace the genealogical tree of Queen Victoria—it was perhaps, I say, this descent from kings which led him to be more tolerant of “sport” than was Wordsworth. At any rate, Cowper’s vigorous description of being in at the death of a fox may be contrasted with Wordsworth’s “Heart Leap Well,” and you will prefer Cowper or Wordsworth, as your tastes are for or against our old-fashioned English sports. But even then, as often, Cowper in his poetry was less tolerant than in his prose, for he writes in The Task of:
detested sport
That owes its pleasures to another’s pain,
We may note in all this the almost entire lack of indebtedness in Cowper to his predecessors. One of his most famous phrases, indeed, that on “the cup that cheers, but not inebriates,” he borrowed from Berkeley; but his borrowings were few, far fewer than those of any other great poet, whereas mine would be a long essay were I to produce by the medium of parallel columns all that other poets have borrowed from him.
Lastly, among Cowper’s many excellencies as a poet let me note his humour. His pathos, his humanity—many fine qualities he has in common with others; but what shall we say of his humour? If the ubiquitous Scot were present, so far from his native heath—and I daresay we have one or two with us—he might claim that humour was also the prerogative of Robert Burns. He might claim, also, that certain other great characteristics of Cowper were to be found almost simultaneously in Burns. There is virtue in the almost. Cowper was born in 1731, Burns in 1759. At any rate humour has been a rare product among the greater English poets. It was entirely absent in Wordsworth, in Shelley, in Keats. Byron possessed a gift of satire and wit, but no humour, Tennyson only a suspicion of it in “The Northern Farmer.” From Cowper to Browning, who also had it at times, there has been little humour in the greatest English poetry, although plenty of it in the lesser poets—Hood and the rest. But there was in Cowper a great sense of humour, as there was also plenty of what Hazlitt, almost censoriously, calls “elegant trifling.” Not only in the imperishable “John Gilpin,” but in the “Case Between Nose and Eyes,” “The Nightingale and Glow-worm,” and other pieces you have examples of humorous verse which will live as long as our language endures.
Cowper’s claims as a poet, then, may be emphasized under four heads:—
I. His enthusiasm for humanity.
II. His love of nature.
III. His love of animal life.
IV. His humour.
And in three of these, let it be said emphatically, he stands out as the creator of a new era.
There is another claim I make for him, and with this I close—his position as a master of prose, as well as of poetry. Cowper was the greatest letter-writer in a language which has produced many great letter-writers—Walpole, Gray, Byron, Scott, FitzGerald, and a long list. But nearly all these men were men of affairs, of action. Given a good literary style they could hardly have been other than interesting, they had so much to say that they gained from external sources. Even FitzGerald—the one recluse—had all the treasures of literature constantly passing into his study. Cowper had but eighteen books altogether during many of his years in Olney, and some of us who have lent our volumes in the past and are still sighing over gaps in our shelves find consolation in the fact that six of Cowper’s books had been returned to him after a friend had borrowed for twenty years or so. Now, it is comparatively easy to write good letters with a library around you; it is marvellous that Cowper could have done this with so little material, and his letters are, from this point of view, the best of all—“divine chit-chat” Coleridge called them. His simple style captivates us. And here let me say—keeping to my text—that it is the sanest of styles, a style with no redundancies, no rhetoric, no straining after effect. The outlook on life is sane—what could be finer than the chase for the lost hare, or the call of the Parliamentary candidate, or the flogging of the thief?—and the outlook on literature is particularly sane.
Cowper was well-nigh the only true poet in the first rank in English literature who was at the same time a true critic. Literary history affords a singular revelation of the wild and incoherent judgments of their fellows on the part of the poets. For praise or blame, there are few literary judgments of Byron, of Shelley, of Wordsworth that will stand. Coleridge was a critic first, and his poetry, though good, is small in quantity, and the same may be said of Matthew Arnold. Tennyson discreetly kept away from prose, and his letters, be it remembered, lack distinction as do most letters of the nineteenth century. If, however, as we are really to believe, he it was who really made the first edition of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Lyric Poetry, he came near to Cowper in his sanity of judgment, and one delights to think that in that precious volume Cowper ranks third—that is, after Shakspere and Wordsworth—in the number of selections that are there given, and rightly given, as imperishable masterpieces of English poetry. Tennyson, also, was at one with Cowper in declaring that an appreciation of Lycidas was a touchstone of taste for poetry. To Tennyson, as to Cowper, Milton was the one great English poet after Shakspere; and here, also, we revere the saneness of view. More sane too, was Cowper than any of the modern critics, in that he did not believe that mere technique was the standpoint from which all poetry must ultimately be judged.
“Give me,” he says, “a manly rough line with a deal of meaning in it, rather than a whole poem full of musical periods, that have nothing in them, only smoothness to recommend them!”
And thus he justified Robert Browning and many another singer.
Let us then dismiss from our minds the one-sided picture of Cowper as a gloomy fanatic, who was always asking himself in Carlylian phrase, “Am I saved? Am I damned?” Let us remember him as staunch to the friends of his youth, sympathetic to his old schoolfellow, Warren Hastings, when the world would make him out too black. Opposed in theory to tobacco, how he delighted to welcome his good friend Mr. Bull. “My greenhouse,” he says, “wants only the flavour of your pipe to make it perfectly delightful!” Naturally tolerant of total abstinence, he asks one friend to drink to the success of his Homer, and thanks another for a present of bottle-stands. From beginning to end, save in those periods of aberration, there is no more resemblance to Cowper in the picture that certain narrow-minded people have desired to portray than there is in these same people’s conception of Martin Luther. The real Luther, who loved dancing and mirth and the joy of living as much as did any of the men he so courageously opposed, was not more remote from a conception of him once current in this country than was the real Cowper—the frank, genial humorist, who wrote “John Gilpin,” who in his youth “giggled and made giggle” with his girl-cousins, and in his maturer years “laughed and made laugh” with Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh.