The Art Of Letters Part 5

"Strange as it may seem," he afterwards said of it, "the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all." "The grinners at _John Gilpin_," he said in another letter, "little dream what the author sometimes suffers. How I hated myself yesterday for having ever wrote it!"

It was the publication of _The Task_ and _John Gilpin_ that made Cowper famous. It is not _The Task_ that keeps him famous to-day. There is, it seems to me, more of the divine fire in any half-dozen of his good letters than there is in the entire six books of _The Task_. One has only to read the argument at the top of the third book, called _The Garden_, in order to see in what a dreary didactic spirit it is written. Here is the argument in full:

Self-recollection and reproof--Address to domestic happiness--Some account of myself--The vanity of many of the pursuits which are accounted wise--Justification of my censures--Divine illumination necessary to the most expert philosopher--The question, what is truth? answered by other questions--Domestic happiness addressed again--Few lovers of the country--My tame hare--Occupations of a retired gentleman in the garden--Pruning--Framing--Greenhouse--Sowing of flower-seeds--The country preferable to the town even in the winter--Reasons why it is deserted at that season--Ruinous effects of gaming and of expensive improvement--Book concludes with an apostrophe to the metropolis.

It is true that, in the intervals of addresses to domestic happiness and apostrophes to the metropolis, there is plenty of room here for Virgilian verse if Cowper had had the genius for it. Unfortunately, when he writes about his garden, he too often writes about it as prosaically as a contributor to a gardening paper. His description of the making of a hot frame is merely a blank-verse paraphrase of the commonest prose. First, he tells us:

The stable yields a stercoraceous heap, Impregnated with quick fermenting salts, And potent to resist the freezing blast; For, ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf, Deciduous, when now November dark Checks vegetation in the torpid plant, Expos'd to his cold breath, the task begins.

Warily therefore, and with prudent heed He seeks a favour'd spot; that where he builds Th' agglomerated pile his frame may front The sun's meridian disk, and at the back Enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedge Impervious to the wind.

Having further prepared the ground:

Th' uplifted frame, compact at every joint, And overlaid with clear translucent gla.s.s, He settles next upon the sloping mount, Whose sharp declivity shoots off secure From the dash'd pane the deluge as it falls.

The writing of blank verse puts the poet to the severest test, and Cowper does not survive the test. Had _The Task_ been written in couplets he might have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme. As it is, he is merely ponderous--a snail of imagination labouring under a heavy sh.e.l.l of eloquence. In the fragment called _Yardley Oak_ he undoubtedly achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton. But I do not think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good poet.

He had even ceased to read poetry by the time he began in earnest to write it. "I reckon it," he wrote in 1781, "among my princ.i.p.al advantages, as a composer of verses, that I have not read an English poet these thirteen years, and but one these thirteen years." So mild was his interest in his contemporaries that he had never heard Collins's name till he read about him in Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. Though descended from Donne--his mother was Anne Donne--he was apparently more interested in Churchill and Beattie than in him. His one great poetical master in English was Milton, Johnson's disparagement of whom he resented with amusing vehemence. He was probably the least bookish poet who had ever had a cla.s.sical education. He described himself in a letter to the Rev. Walter Bagot, in his later years, as "a poor man who has but twenty books in the world, and two of them are your brother Chester's." The pa.s.sages I have quoted give, no doubt, an exaggerated impression of Cowper's indifference to literature.

His relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in many of his letters.

But he was incapable of such enthusiasm for the great things in literature as Keats showed, for instance, in his sonnet on Chapman's Homer. Though Cowper, disgusted with Pope, took the extreme step of translating Homer into English verse, he enjoyed even Homer only with certain evangelical reservations. "I should not have chosen to have been the original author of such a business," he declared, while he was translating the nineteenth book of the _Iliad_, "even though all the Nine had stood at my elbow. Time has wonderful effects. We admire that in an ancient for which we should send a modern bard to Bedlam." It is hardly to be wondered at that his translation of Homer has not survived, while his delightful translation of Vincent Bourne's _Jackdaw_ has.

Cowper's poetry, however, is to be praised, if for nothing else, because it played so great a part in giving the world a letter-writer of genius.

It brought him one of the best of his correspondents, his cousin, Lady Hesketh, and it gave various other people a reason for keeping his letters. Had it not been for his fame as a poet his letters might never have been published, and we should have missed one of the most exquisite histories of small beer to be had outside the pages of Jane Austen. As a letter-writer he does not, I think, stand in the same rank as Horace Walpole and Charles Lamb. He has less wit and humour, and he mirrors less of the world. His letters, however, have an extraordinarily soothing charm. Cowper's occupations amuse one, while his nature delights one. His letters, like Lamb's, have a soul of goodness--not of mere virtue, but of goodness--and we know from his biography that in life he endured the severest test to which a good nature can be subjected. His treatment of Mrs. Unwin in the imbecile despotism of her old age was as fine in its way as Lamb's treatment of his sister. Mrs. Unwin, who had supported Cowper through so many dark and suicidal hours, afterwards became palsied and lost her mental faculties. "Her character," as Sir James Frazer writes in the introduction to his charming selection from the letters,[2] "underwent a great change, and she who for years had found all her happiness in ministering to her afflicted friend, and seemed to have no thought but for his welfare, now became querulous and exacting, forgetful of him and mindful, apparently, only of herself. Unable to move out of her chair without help, or to walk across the room unless supported by two people, her speech at times almost unintelligible, she deprived him of all his wonted exercises, both bodily and mental, as she did not choose that he should leave her for a moment, or even use a pen or a book, except when he read to her. To these demands he responded with all the devotion of grat.i.tude and affection; he was a.s.siduous in his attentions to her, but the strain told heavily on his strength." To know all this does not modify our opinion of Cowper's letters, except is so far as it strengthens it. It helps us, however, to explain to ourselves why we love them. We love them because, as surely as the writings of Shakespeare and Lamb, they are an expression of that sort of heroic gentleness which can endure the fires of the most devastating tragedy. Shakespeare finally revealed the strong sweetness of his nature in _The Tempest_. Many people are inclined to over-estimate _The Tempest_ as poetry simply because it gives them so precious a clue to the character of his genius, and makes clear once more that the grand source and material of poetry is the infinite tenderness of the human heart. Cowper's letters are a tiny thing beside Shakespeare's plays. But the same light falls on them. They have an eighteenth-century restraint, and freedom from emotionalism and gush. But behind their chronicle of trifles, their small fancies, their little vanities, one is aware of an intensely loving and lovable personality. Cowper's poem, _To Mary_, written to Mrs. Unwin in the days of her feebleness, is, to my mind, made commonplace by the odious reiteration of "my Mary!" at the end of every verse. Leave the "my Marys" out, however, and see how beautiful, as well as moving, a poem it becomes. Cowper was at one time on the point of marrying Mrs. Unwin, when an attack of madness prevented him. Later on Lady Austen apparently wished to marry him. He had an extraordinary gift for commanding the affections of those of both s.e.xes who knew him. His friendship with the poet Hayley, then a rocket fallen to earth, towards the close of his life, reveals the lovableness of both men.

[2] _Letters of William Cowper_. Chosen and edited by J.G. Frazer.

Two vols. Eversley Series. Macmillan. 12s. net.

If we love Cowper, then, it is not only because of his little world, but because of his greatness of soul that stands in contrast to it. He is like one of those tiny pools among the rocks, left behind by the deep waters of ocean and reflecting the blue height of the sky. His most trivial actions acquire a pathos from what we know of the _De Profundis_ that is behind them. When we read of the Olney household--"our snug parlour, one lady knitting, the other netting, and the gentleman winding worsted"--we feel that this marionette-show has some second and immortal significance. On another day, "one of the ladies has been playing a harpsichord, while I, with the other, have been playing at battledore and shuttlec.o.c.k." It is a game of cherubs, though of cherubs slightly unfeathered as a result of belonging to the pious English upper-middle cla.s.ses. The poet, inclined to be fat, whose chief occupation in winter is "to walk ten times in a day from the fireside to his cuc.u.mber frame and back again," is busy enough on a heavenly errand. With his pet hares, his goldfinches, his dog, his carpentry, his greenhouse--"Is not our greenhouse a cabinet of perfumes?"--his clergymen, his ladies, and his tasks, he is not only constantly amusing himself, but carrying on a secret battle, with all the terrors of h.e.l.l. He is, indeed, a pilgrim who struggles out of one slough of despond only to fall waist-deep into another. This strange creature who pa.s.sed so much of his time writing such things as _Verses written at Bath on Finding the Heel of a Shoe, Ode to Apollo on an Ink-gla.s.s almost dried in the Sun, Lines sent with Two c.o.c.ks...o...b.. to Miss Green_, and _On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bullfinch_, stumbled along under a load of woe and repentance as terrible as any of the sorrows that we read of in the great tragedies. The last of his original poems, _The Castaway_, is an image of his utter hopelessness. As he lay dying in 1880 he was asked how he felt. He replied, "I feel unutterable despair." To face d.a.m.nation with the sweet unselfishness of William Cowper is a rare and saintly accomplishment. It gives him a place in the company of the beloved authors with men of far greater genius than himself--with Shakespeare and Lamb and d.i.c.kens.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has, in one of his essays, expressed the opinion that of all the English poets "the one who, but for a stroke of madness, would have become our English Horace was William Cowper. He had the wit,"

he added, "with the underlying moral seriousness." As for the wit, I doubt it. Cowper had not the wit that inevitably hardens into "jewels five words long." Laboriously as he sought after perfection in his verse, he was never a master of the Horatian phrase. Such phrases of his--and there are not many of them--as have pa.s.sed into the common speech flash neither with wit nor with wisdom. Take the best-known of them:

"The cups That cheer but not inebriate;"

"G.o.d made the country and man made the town;"

"I am monarch of all I survey;"

"Regions Caesar never knew;" and

"England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!"

This is lead for gold. Horace, it is true, must be judged as something more than an inventor of golden tags. But no man can hope to succeed Horace unless his lines and phrases are of the kind that naturally pa.s.s into golden tags. This, I know, is a matter not only of style but of temper. But it is in temper as much as in style that Cowper differs from Horace. Horace mixed on easy terms with the world. He enjoyed the same pleasures; he paid his respects to the same duties. He was a man of the world above all other poets. Cowper was in comparison a man of the parlour. His sensibilities would, I fancy, have driven him into retreat, even if he had been neither mad nor pious. He was the very opposite of a worldling. He was, as he said of himself in his early thirties, "of a very singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed with." While claiming that he was not an absolute fool, he added: "If I was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this--and G.o.d forbid I should speak it in vanity--I would not change conditions with any saint in Christendom." Had Horace lived in the eighteenth century he would almost certainly have been a Deist. Cowper was very nearly a Methodist. The difference, indeed, between them is fundamental. Horace was a pig, though a charming one; Cowper was a pigeon.

This being so, it seems to me a mistake to regard Cowper as a Horace _manque_, instead of being content with his miraculous achievement as a letter-writer. It may well be that his sufferings, so far from destroying his real genius, harrowed and fertilized the soil in which it grew. He unquestionably was more ambitious for his verse than for his prose. He wrote his letters without labour, while he was never weary of using the file on his poems. "To touch and retouch," he once wrote to the Rev.

William Unwin, "is, though some writers boast of negligence, and others would be ashamed to show their foul copies, the secret of almost all good writing, especially in verse. I am never weary of it myself." Even if we count him only a middling poet, however, this does not mean that all his fastidiousness of composition was wasted. He acquired in the workshop of verse the style that stood him in such good stead in the field of familiar prose. It is because of this hard-won ease of style that readers of English will never grow weary of that epistolary autobiography in which he recounts his maniacal fear that his food has been poisoned; his open-eyed wonder at balloons; the story of his mouse; the cure of the distention of his stomach by Lady Hesketh's gingerbread; the pulling out of a tooth at the dinner-table unperceived by the other guests; his desire to thrash Dr.

Johnson till his pension jingled in his pocket; and the mildly fascinated tastes to which he confesses in such a paragraph as:

I know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musical save and except always the braying of an a.s.s. The notes of all our birds and fowls please me without one exception. I should not indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a farm-yard, is no bad performer.

Here he is no missfire rival of Horace or Milton or Prior, or any of the other poets. Here he has arrived at the perfection for which he was born.

How much better he was fitted to be a letter-writer than a poet may be seen by anyone who compares his treatment of the same incidents in verse and in prose. There is, for instance, that charming letter about the escaped goldfinch, which is not spoiled for us even though we may take Blake's view of caged birds:

I have two goldfinches, which in the summer occupy the greenhouse.

A few days since, being employed in cleaning out their cages, I placed that which I had in hand upon the table, while the other hung against the wall; the windows and the doors stood wide open. I went to fill the fountain at the pump, and on my return was not a little surprised to find a goldfinch sitting on the top of the cage I had been cleaning, and singing to and kissing the goldfinch within. I approached him, and he discovered no fear; still nearer, and he discovered none. I advanced my hand towards him, and he took no notice of it. I seized him, and supposed I had caught a new bird, but casting my eye upon the other cage perceived my mistake. Its inhabitant, during my absence, had contrived to find an opening, where the wire had been a little bent, and made no other use of the escape it afforded him, than to salute his friend, and to converse with him more intimately than he had done before. I returned him to his proper mansion, but in vain. In less than a minute he had thrust his little person through the aperture again, and again perched upon his neighbour's cage, kissing him, as at the first, and singing, as if transported with the fortunate adventure.

I could not but respect such friendship, as for the sake of its gratification had twice declined an opportunity to be free, and consenting to their union, resolved that for the future one cage should hold them both. I am glad of such incidents; for at a pinch, and when I need entertainment, the versification of them serves to divert me....

Cowper's "versification" of the incident is vapid compared to this. The incident of the viper and the kittens again, which he "versified" in _The Colubriad_, is chronicled far more charmingly in the letters. His quiet prose gave him a vehicle for that intimacy of the heart and fancy which was the deepest need of his nature. He made a full confession of himself only to his friends. In one of his letters he compares himself, as he rises in the morning to "an infernal frog out of Acheron, covered with the ooze and mud of melancholy." In his most ambitious verse he is a frog trying to blow himself out into a bull. It is the frog in him, not the intended bull, that makes friends with us to-day.

VII.--A NOTE ON ELIZABETHAN PLAYS

Voltaire's criticism of Shakespeare as rude and barbarous has only one fault. It does not fit Shakespeare. Shakespeare, however, is the single dramatist of his age to whom it is not in a measure applicable. "He was a savage," said Voltaire, "who had imagination. He has written many happy lines; but his pieces can please only in London and in Canada." Had this been said of Marlowe, or Chapman, or Jonson (despite his learning), or Cyril Tourneur, one might differ, but one would admit that perhaps there was something in it. Again, Voltaire's boast that he had been the first to show the French "some pearls which I had found" in the "enormous dunghill"

of Shakespeare's plays was the sort of thing that might reasonably have been said by an anthologist who had made selections from Dekker or Beaumont and Fletcher or any dramatist writing under Elizabeth and James except William Shakespeare. One reads the average Elizabethan play in the certainty that the pearls will be few and the rubbish-heap practically five acts high. There are, perhaps, a dozen Elizabethan plays apart from Shakespeare's that are as great as his third-best work. But there are no _Hamlets_ or _Lears_ among them. There are no _Midsummer Night's Dreams_.

There is not even a _Winter's Tale_.

If Lamb, then, had boasted about what he had done for the Elizabethans in general in the terms used by Voltaire concerning himself and Shakespeare his claim would have been just. Lamb, however, was free from Voltaire's vanity. He did not feel that he was shedding l.u.s.tre on the Elizabethans as a patron: he regarded himself as a follower. Voltaire was infuriated by the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than himself; Lamb probably looked on even Cyril Tourneur as his superior. Lamb was in this as wide of the mark as Voltaire had been. His reverent praise has made famous among virgins and boys many an old dramatist who but for him would long ago have been thrown to the antiquaries, and have deserved it. Everyone goes to the Elizabethans at some time or another in the hope of coming on a long succession of sleeping beauties. The average man retires disappointed from the quest. He would have to be unusually open to suggestion not to be disappointed at the first reading of most of the plays. Many a man can read the Elizabethans with Charles Lamb's enthusiasm, however, who never could have read them with his own.

One day, when Swinburne was looking over Mr. Gosse's books, he took down Lamb's _Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets_, and, turning to Mr.

Gosse, said, "That book taught me more than any other book in the world--that and the Bible." Swinburne was a notorious borrower of other men's enthusiasms. He borrowed republicanism from Landor and Mazzini, the Devil from Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans from Lamb. He had not, as Lamb had, Elizabethan blood in his veins. Lamb had the Elizabethan love of phrases that have cost a voyage of fancies discovered in a cave. Swinburne had none of this rich taste in speech. He used words riotously, but he did not use great words riotously. He was excitedly extravagant where Lamb was carefully extravagant. He often seemed to be bent chiefly on making a beautiful noise. Nor was this the only point on which he was opposed to Lamb and the Elizabethans. He differed fundamentally from them in his att.i.tude to the spectacle of life. His mood was the mood not of a spectator but of a revivalist. He lectured his generation on the deadly virtues. He was far more anxious to shock the drawing-room than to entertain the bar-parlour. Lamb himself was little enough of a formal Puritan. He felt that the wings both of the virtues and the vices had been clipped by the descendants of the Puritans. He did not scold, however, but retired into the spectacle of another century. He wandered among old plays like an exile returning with devouring eyes to a dusty ancestral castle.

Swinburne, for his part, cared little for seeing things and much for saying things. As a result, a great deal of his verse--and still more of his prose--has the heat of an argument rather than the warmth of life.

His posthumous book on the Elizabethans is liveliest when it is most argumentative. Swinburne is less amusing when he is exalting the Elizabethans than when he is cleaving the skull of a pet aversion. His style is an admirable one for faction-fighting, but is less suitable for intimate conversation. He writes in superlatives that give one the impression that he is furious about something or other even when he is being fairly sensible. His criticism has thus an air of being much more insane than it is. His estimates of Chapman and Richard Brome are both far more moderate and reasonable than appears at first reading. He out-Lambs Lamb in his appreciativeness; but one cannot accuse him of injudicious excess when he says of Brome:

Were he now alive, he would be a brilliant and able compet.i.tor in their own field of work and study with such admirable writers as Mrs. Oliphant and Mr. Norris.

Brome, I think, is better than this implies. Swinburne is not going many miles too far when he calls _The Antipodes_ "one of the most fanciful and delightful farces in the world." It is a piece of poetic low comedy that will almost certainly entertain and delight any reader who goes to it expecting to be bored.

It is safe to say of most of the Elizabethan dramatists that the average reader must fulfil one of two conditions if he is not to be disappointed in them. He must not expect to find them giants on the Shakespeare scale.

Better still, he must turn to them as to a continent or age of poetry rather than for the genius of separate plays. Of most of them it may be said that their age is greater than they--that they are glorified by their period rather than glorify it. They are figures in a golden and teeming landscape, and one moves among them under the spell of their n.o.ble circ.u.mstances.

They are less great individually than in the ma.s.s. If they are giants, few of them are giants who can stand on their own legs. They prop one another up. There are not more than a dozen Elizabethan plays that are individually worth a superlative, as a novel by Jane Austen or a sonnet by Wordsworth is. The Elizabethan lyrics are an immensely more precious possession than the plays. The best of the dramatists, indeed, were poets by destiny and dramatists by accident. It is conceivable that the greatest of them apart from Shakespeare--Marlowe and Jonson and Webster and Dekker--might have been greater writers if the English theatre had never existed. Shakespeare alone was as great in the theatre as in poetry.

Jonson, perhaps, also came near being so. _The Alchemist_ is a brilliant heavy-weight comedy, which one would hardly sacrifice even for another of Jonson's songs. As for Dekker, on the other hand, much as one admires the excellent style in which he writes as well as the fine poetry and comedy which survive in his dialogue, his _Sweet Content_ is worth all the purely dramatic work he ever wrote.

One thing that differentiates the other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists from Shakespeare is their comparative indifference to human nature. There is too much mechanical malice in their tragedies and too little of the pa.s.sion that every man recognizes in his own breast. Even so good a play as _The d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi_ is marred by inadequacy of motive on the part of the d.u.c.h.ess's persecutors. Similarly, in Chapman's _Bussy d'Ambois_, the villains are simply a dramatist's infernal machines.

Shakespeare's own plays contain numerous examples of inadequacy of motive--the casting-off of Cordelia by her father, for instance, and in part the revenge of Iago. But, if we accept the first act of _King Lear_ as an incident in a fairy-tale, the motive of the Pa.s.sion of Lear in the other four acts is not only adequate out overwhelming. _Oth.e.l.lo_ breaks free from mechanism of Plot in a similar way. Shakespeare as a writer of the fiction of human nature was as supreme among his contemporaries as was Gulliver among the Lilliputians.

Having recognized this, one can begin to enjoy the Elizabethan dramatists again. Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt found them lying flat, and it was natural that they should raise them up and set them affectionately on pedestals for the gaze of a too indifferent world. The modern reader, accustomed to seeing them on their pedestals, however, is tempted to wish that they were lying flat again. Most of the Elizabethans deserve neither fate. They should be left neither flat nor standing on separate pedestals, but leaning at an angle of about forty-five degrees--resting against the base of Shakespeare's colossal statue.

Had Swinburne written of them all as imaginatively as he has written of Chapman, his interpretations, excessive though they often are, would have added to one's enjoyment of them. His _Chapman_ gives us a portrait of a character. Several of the chapters in _Contemporaries of Shakespeare_, however, are, apart from the strong language, little more inspiring than the summaries of novels and plays in a school history of literature. Even Mr. Gosse himself, if I remember right, in his _Life of Swinburne_, described one of the chapters as "unreadable." The book as a whole is not that. But it unquestionably shows us some of the minor Elizabethans by fog rather than by the full light of day.

VIII.--THE OFFICE OF THE POETS

There is--at least, there seems to be--more cant talked about poetry just now than at any previous time. Tartuffe is to-day not a priest but a poet--or a critic. Or, perhaps, Tartuffe is too lively a prototype for the curates of poetry who swarm in the world's capitals at the present hour.

There is a tendency in the followers of every art or craft to impose it on the world as a mystery of which the vulgar can know nothing. In medicine, as in bricklaying, there is a powerful trade union into which the members can retire as into a sanctuary of the initiate. In the same way, the theologians took possession of the temple of religion and refused admittance to laymen, except as a meek and awe-struck audience. This largely resulted from the Pharisaic instinct that a.s.sumes superiority over other men. Pharisaism is simply an Imperialism of the spirit--joyless and domineering. Religion is a communion of immortal souls. Pharisaism is a denial of this and an attempt to set up an oligarchy of superior persons.