William Cowper- Collected Poetical Works

by William Cowper

  In urging her companion to write poetry, Mrs. Unwin was on the right path, her puritanism led her astray in the choice of a theme. She suggested The Progress of Error as a subject for a “Moral Satire.” It was unhappily adopted, and The Progress of Error was followed by Truth, Table Talk, Expostulation, Hope, Charity, Conversation, and Retirement. When the series was published, Table Talk was put first, being supposed to be the lightest and the most attractive to an unregenerate world. The judgment passed upon this set of poems at the time by the Critical Review seems blasphemous to the fond biographer, and is so devoid of modern smartness as to be almost interesting as a literary fossil. But it must be deemed essentially just, though the reviewer errs, as many reviewers have erred, in measuring the writer’s capacity by the standard of his first performance. “These poems,” said the Critical Review, “are written, as we learn from the title-page, by Mr. Cowper of the Inner Temple, who seems to be a man of a sober and religious turn of mind, with a benevolent heart, and a serious wish to inculcate the precepts of morality; he is not, however, possessed of any superior abilities or the power of genius requisite for so arduous an undertaking. . . . . He says what is incontrovertible and what has been said over and over again with much gravity, but says nothing new, sprightly or entertaining; travelling on a plain level flat road, with great composure almost through the whole long and tedious volume, which is little better than a dull sermon in very indifferent verse on Truth, the Progress of Error, Charity, and some other grave subjects. If this author had followed the advice given by Caraccioli, and which he has chosen for one of the mottoes prefixed to these poems, he would have clothed his indisputable truths in some more becoming disguise, and rendered his work much more agreeable. In its present shape we cannot compliment him on its beauty; for as this bard himself sweetly sings: —

  ”The clear harangue, and cold as it is clear,

  Falls soporific on the listless ear.”

  In justice to the bard it ought to be said that he wrote under the eye of the Rev. John Newton, to whom the design had been duly submitted, and who had given his imprimatur in the shape of a preface which took Johnson the publisher aback by its gravity. Newton would not have sanctioned any poetry which had not a distinctly religious object, and he received an assurance from the poet that the lively passages were introduced only as honey on the rim of the medicinal cup, to commend its healing contents to the lips of a giddy world. The Rev. John Newton must have been exceedingly austere if he thought that the quantity of honey used was excessive.

  A genuine desire to make society better is always present in these poems, and its presence lends them the only interest which they possess except as historical monuments of a religious movement. Of satirical vigour they have scarcely a semblance. There are three kinds of satire, corresponding to as many different views of humanity and life, the Stoical, the Cynical, and the Epicurean. Of Stoical satire, with its strenuous hatred of vice and wrong, the type is Juvenal. Of Cynical satire, springing from bitter contempt of humanity, the type is Swift’s Gulliver, while its quintessence is embodied in his lines on the Day of Judgment. Of Epicurean satire, flowing from a contempt of humanity which is not bitter, and lightly playing with the weakness and vanities of mankind, Horace is the classical example. To the first two kinds, Cowper’s nature was totally alien, and when he attempts anything in either of those lines, the only result is a querulous and censorious acerbity, in which his real feelings had no part, and which on mature reflection offended his own better taste. In the Horatian kind he might have excelled, as the episode of the Retired Statesman in one of these poems shows. He might have excelled, that is, if like Horace he had known the world. But he did not know the world. He saw the “great Babel” only “through the loopholes of retreat,” and in the columns of his weekly newspaper. Even during the years, long past, which he spent in the world, his experience had been confined to a small literary circle. Society was to him an abstraction on which he discoursed like a pulpiteer. His satiric whip not only has no lash, it is brandished in the air.

  No man was ever less qualified for the office of a censor; his judgment is at once disarmed, and a breach in his principles is at once made by the slightest personal influence. Bishops are bad, they are like the Cretans, evil beasts and slow bellies; but the bishop whose brother Cowper knows is a blessing to the Church. Deans and Canons are lazy sinecurists, but there is a bright exception in the case of the Cowper who held a golden stall at Durham. Grinding India is criminal, but Warren Hastings is acquitted, because he was with Cowper at Westminster. Discipline was deplorably relaxed in all colleges except that of which Cowper’s brother was a fellow. Pluralities and resignation bonds, the grossest abuses of the Church, were perfectly defensible in the case of any friend or acquaintance of this Church Reformer. Bitter lines against Popery inserted in The Task were struck out, because the writer had made the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. Throckmorton, who were Roman Catholics. Smoking was detestable, except when practised by dear Mr. Bull. Even gambling, the blackest sin of fashionable society, is not to prevent Fox, the great Whig, from being a ruler in Israel. Besides, in all his social judgments, Cowper is at a wrong point of view. He is always deluded by the idol of his cave. He writes perpetually on the twofold assumption that a life of retirement is more favourable to virtue than a life of action, and that “God made the country, while man made the town.” Both parts of the assumption are untrue. A life of action is more favourable to virtue, as a rule, than a life of retirement, and the development of humanity is higher and richer, as a rule, in the town than in the country. If Cowper’s retirement was virtuous, it was so because he was actively employed in the exercise of his highest faculties: had he been a mere idler, secluded from his kind, his retirement would not have been virtuous at all. His flight from the world was rendered necessary by his malady, and respectable by his literary work; but it was a flight and not a victory. His misconception was fostered and partly produced by a religion which was essentially ascetic, and which, while it gave birth to characters of the highest and most energetic beneficence, represented salvation too little as the reward of effort, too much as the reward of passive belief and of spiritual emotion.

  The most readable of the Moral Satires is Retirement, in which the writer is on his own ground expressing his genuine feelings, and which is, in fact, a foretaste of The Task. Expostulation, a warning to England from the example of the Jews, is the best constructed: the rest are totally wanting in unity, and even in connexion. In all there are flashes of epigrammatic smartness.

  How shall I speak thee, or thy power address,

  Thou God of our idolatry, the press?

  By thee, religion, liberty, and laws

  Exert their influence, and advance their cause;

  By thee, worse plagues than Pharaoh’s land befel,

  Diffused, make earth the vestibule of hell:

  Thou fountain, at which drink the good and wise,

  Thou ever-bubbling spring of endless lies,

  Like Eden’s dread probationary tree,

  Knowledge of good and evil is from thee.

  Occasionally there are passages of higher merit. The episode of statesmen in Retirement has been already mentioned. The lines on the two disciples going to Emmaus in Conversation, though little more than a paraphrase of the Gospel narrative, convey pleasantly the Evangelical idea of the Divine Friend. Cowper says in one of his letters that he had been intimate with a man of fine taste who had confessed to him that though he could not subscribe to the truth of Christianity itself, he could never read this passage of St. Luke without being deeply affected by it, and feeling that if the stamp of divinity was impressed upon anything in the Scriptures, it was upon that passage.

  It happen’d on a solemn eventide,

  Soon after He that was our surety died,

  Two bosom friends, each pensively inclined,

  The scene of all those sorrows left behind,

  Sought their own village, busied as they we
nt

  In musings worthy of the great event:

  They spake of him they loved, of him whose life,

  Though blameless, had incurr’d perpetual strife,

  Whose deeds had left, in spite of hostile arts,

  A deep memorial graven on their hearts.

  The recollection, like a vein of ore,

  The farther traced enrich’d them still the more;

  They thought him, and they justly thought him, one

  Sent to do more than he appear’d to have done,

  To exalt a people, and to place them high

  Above all else, and wonder’d he should die.

  Ere yet they brought their journey to an end,

  A stranger join’d them, courteous as a friend,

  And ask’d them with a kind engaging air

  What their affliction was, and begg’d a share.

  Inform’d, he gathered up the broken thread,

  And truth and wisdom gracing all he said,

  Explain’d, illustrated, and search’d so well

  The tender theme on which they chose to dwell,

  That reaching home, the night, they said is near,

  We must not now be parted, sojourn here. —

  The new acquaintance soon became a guest,

  And made so welcome at their simple feast,

  He bless’d the bread, but vanish’d at the word,

  And left them both exclaiming, ’Twas the Lord!

  Did not our hearts feel all he deign’d to say,

  Did they not burn within us by the way?

  The prude going to morning church in Truth is a good rendering of

  Hogarth’s picture: —

  Yon ancient prude, whose wither’d features show

  She might, be young some forty years ago,

  Her elbows pinion’d close upon her hips,

  Her head erect, her fan upon her lips,

  Her eyebrows arch’d, her eyes both gone astray

  To watch yon amorous couple in their play,

  With bony and unkerchief’d neck defies

  The rude inclemency of wintry skies,

  And sails with lappet-head and mincing airs

  Daily at clink of hell, to morning prayers.

  To thrift and parsimony much inclined,

  She yet allows herself that boy behind;

  The shivering urchin, bending as he goes,

  With slipshod heels, and dew-drop at his nose,

  His predecessor’s coat advanced to wear,

  Which future pages are yet doom’d to share,

  Carries her Bible tuck’d beneath his arm,

  And hides his hands to keep his fingers warm.

  Of personal allusions there are a few; if the satirist had not been prevented from indulging in them by his taste, he would have been debarred by his ignorance. Lord Chesterfield, as the incarnation of the world and the most brilliant servant of the arch-enemy, comes in for a lashing under the name of Petronius.

  Petronius! all the muses weep for thee,

  But every tear shall scald thy memory.

  The graces too, while virtue at their shrine

  Lay bleeding under that soft hand of thine,

  Felt each a mortal stab in her own breast,

  Abhorr’d the sacrifice, and cursed the priest.

  Thou polish’d and high-finish’d foe to truth,

  Gray-beard corruptor of our listening youth,

  To purge and skim away the filth of vice,

  That so refined it might the more entice,

  Then pour it on the morals of thy son

  To taint his heart, was worthy of thine own.

  This is about the nearest approach to Juvenal that the Evangelical satirist ever makes. In Hope there is a vehement vindication of the memory of Whitefield. It is rather remarkable that there is no mention of Wesley. But Cowper belonged to the Evangelical rather than to the Methodist section. It may be doubted whether the living Whitefield would have been much to his taste.

  In the versification of the moral satires there are frequent faults, especially in the earlier poems of the series, though Cowper’s power of writing musical verse is attested both by the occasional poems and by The Task.

  With the Moral Satires may be coupled, though written later, Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools. Here Cowper has the advantage of treating a subject which he understood, about which he felt strongly, and desired for a practical purpose to stir the feelings of his readers. He set to work in bitter earnest. “There is a sting,” he says, “in verse that prose neither has nor can have; and I do not know that schools in the gross, and especially public schools, have ever been so pointedly condemned before. But they are become a nuisance, a pest, an abomination, and it is fit that the eyes and noses of mankind should be opened if possible to perceive it.” His descriptions of the miseries which children in his day endured, and, in spite of all our improvements, must still to some extent endure in boarding schools, and of the effects of the system in estranging boys from their parents and deadening home affections, are vivid and true. Of course the Public School system was not to be overturned by rhyming, but the author of Tirocinium awakened attention to its faults, and probably did something towards amending them. The best lines, perhaps, have been already quoted in connexion with the history of the writer’s boyhood. There are, however, other telling passages such as that on the indiscriminate use of emulation as a stimulus: —

  Our public hives of puerile resort

  That are of chief and most approved report,

  To such base hopes in many a sordid soul

  Owe their repute in part, but not the whole.

  A principle, whose proud pretensions pass

  Unquestion’d, though the jewel be but glass,

  That with a world not often over-nice

  Ranks as a virtue, and is yet a vice,

  Or rather a gross compound, justly tried,

  Of envy, hatred, jealousy, and pride,

  Contributes moat perhaps to enhance their fame,

  And Emulation is its precious name.

  Boys once on fire with that contentious zeal

  Feel all the rage that female rivals feel;

  The prize of beauty in a woman’s eyes

  Not brighter than in theirs the scholar’s prize.

  The spirit of that competition burns

  With all varieties of ill by turns,

  Each vainly magnifies his own success,

  Resents his fellow’s, wishes it were less,

  Exults in his miscarriage if he fail,

  Deems his reward too great if he prevail,

  And labours to surpass him day and night,

  Less for improvement, than to tickle spite.

  The spur is powerful, and I grant its force;

  It pricks the genius forward in its course,

  Allows short time for play, and none for sloth,

  And felt alike by each, advances both,

  But judge where so much evil intervenes,

  The end, though plausible, not worth the means.

  Weigh, for a moment, classical desert

  Against a heart depraved, and temper hurt,

  Hurt, too, perhaps for life, for early wrong

  Done to the nobler part, affects it long,

  And you are staunch indeed in learning’s cause,

  If you can crown a discipline that draws

  Such mischiefs after it, with much applause.

  He might have done more, if he had been able to point to the alternative of a good day school, as a combination of home affections with the superior teaching hardly to be found, except in a large school, and which Cowper, in drawing his comparison between the two systems, fails to take into account.

  To the same general class of poems belongs Anti-Thelypthora, which it is due to Cowper’s memory to say was not published in his lifetime. It is an angry pasquinade on an absurd book advocating polygamy on Biblical grounds, by the Rev. Martin Madan, Cowper’s quondam spiritual counsellor.
Alone among Cowper’s works it has a taint of coarseness.

  The Moral Satires pleased Franklin, to whom their social philosophy was congenial, as at a later day, in common with all Cowper’s works, they pleased Cobden, who no doubt specially relished the passage in Charity, embodying the philanthropic sentiment of Free Trade. There was a trembling consultation as to the expediency of bringing the volume under the notice of Johnson. “One of his pointed sarcasms, if he should happen to be displeased, would soon find its way into all companies and spoil the sale.” “I think it would be well to send in our joint names, accompanied with a handsome card, such an one as you will know how to fabricate, and such as may predispose him to a favourable perusal of the book, by coaxing him into a good temper, for he is a great bear, with all his learning and penetration.” Fear prevailed; but it seems that the book found its way into the dictator’s hands, that his judgment on it was kind, and that he even did something to temper the wind of adverse criticism to the shorn lamb. Yet parts of it were likely to incur his displeasure as a Tory, as a Churchman, and as one who greatly preferred Fleet Street to the beauties of nature; while with the sentimental misery of the writer, he could have had no sympathy whatever. Of the incompleteness of Johnson’s view of character there could be no better instance than the charming weakness of Cowper. Thurlow and Colman did not even acknowledge their copies, and were lashed for their breach of friendship with rather more vigour than the Moral Satires display, in The Valedictory, which unluckily survived for posthumous publication, when the culprits had made their peace.