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INTRODUCTION

[T is now more than a hundred years since Cowper died. A century is already a long lease of poetic fame, and it may very well be that there will be found those who will dispute his right to its renewal. Very few poets manage to remain in possession so long. For all but those who make a special study of our own poetic history, Beattie is gone, and Warton, and Mason; and men of greater fame than they-men once so popular as Butler, as Young, as Churchill,-who will now ask the great public to read any of these? And who was Cowper, it will be said, that he is to be one of the rare exceptions to the generally inexorable rule? His wit-indeed, his purely intellectual capacity altogether was far below that of some of these whom ultimate fame has already rejected. He, more than any of them, was the poet, not of the world, but of a particular sect, and one that has largely passed away. He lived in a dull and obscure country town, among old maids and dissenting clergymen, and knew nothing of the commanding minds of his day. And, it will be added, what originality he had was caught up by greater men, and is superseded by their works. It was against Cowper's final fame that he had Newton and Mrs. Unwin for the companions of his life: it may be thought to be fatal to it that he had Wordsworth for the heir of his poetic inheritance.

Yet the truth is still that he has not been superseded. After all that has been done by others, he remains himself a unique personality, a poetic presence not to be put by. The peculiar impression which he made in his own day on those who understand poetry, he still makes. We may not be able to feel it now with that freshness of contemporary enthusiasm which made even Burns break out, "Is not the "Task' a glorious poem?"-but it is still there. Time has not effaced it. Larger and brighter luminaries have appeared in the poetical heavens since Cowper first shone there: the places of some of them are not far from his; but not one is near enough to make his smaller light invisible. Johnson said that no man could be written down except by himself; and that is true in more ways than he meant. Not only is no man written down by his detractors, but, if he have any real vital

spark in him, it will not be snuffed out by his admirers, by his imitators, even by the disciples who surpass him. He will still have his own name and place. If Cowper disappears it will not be of the merits of others, but of his own faults, that he will die. If the fine things of the "Task are ever forgotten, it will not be because there are so many finer things in Wordsworth, but because there are so many less fine in Cowper. No one is more conscious of Cowper's faults than we who most admire and love him. No one is more aware that, if he is to be made secure of the place which really belongs to him, the very first work to be done is one of frank admission. He is being tried for his poetical life, and our first business is to win the confidence of the jury by admitting the minor charges at once. Cowper is often narrow, commonplace, dull, it is said. We fully admit it. He allows himself too often to preach, and his sermons are antiquated, unoriginal, and extremely long. We shall make no attempt to deny it. His criticism of life is too provincial, too sectarian, too entirely uninformed, to have any serious value for us to-day. To none of these counts in the indictment can we make any defence. But to the capital charge, which puts his poetry aside as merely Methodism in verse, an old woman's scolding of a world she knows nothing about, we confidently reply that to see only this in Cowper is to misunderstand him altogether. Methodism, Mrs. Unwin, Newton, Olney, all had their influence upon him, and for good as well as for evil. But the Cowper who lives the essential vital Cowper, was there before he saw Olney or knew a single Methodist. From the very first, as all who have read his early poems know, he had his own way of looking at things, the way which the "Task" was one day to make famous. Where others made their poetry out of passion, he was to make his out of a quiet affection, which is rather tenderness than love: where others looked to the grand or the sublime for inspiration, he turns always, from the beginning, to simple and humble things. It will be his to show that at a touch, the right touch, the destined touch, they too will turn to the gold of poetry. He will make the common hedgerow take its poetic place by the side of the oak and cedar, rose and lily; and in his hands the daily life of quiet places will bear fruits once demanded only of tragic stories. He will be the poet of the country and the home.

Yet he never had a home of his own, and few people have had a narrower acquaintance with the country. It is, in fact, all through, - by depth, not by breadth, by the intensity of his sympathies rather than by their extent or range, that he made his impression. Out of the memory of a mother whom he had hardly known, he created, forty years after her death, the tenderest tribute of filial love and regret any English mother has ever received. To a woman, who was never more to him than the most intimate of friends, he gave what hardly another poet has given to the woman who has borne

his name and been the mother of his children. The intimacy of his affection found as much to love in the quiet meadows that slope down to the Ouse as Scott found in the beauties of his romantic Borderland, or Wordsworth in the noblest scenery this island can boast. His touch was on humble things and humble people, and it gave immortality, as surely as that of greater men gave it to greater things. Of the universality of Wordsworth, making the bare facts of human life a kind of sacramental bond, he has nothing. But of those sympathies whose very life it is that they are a peculiar possession, our own and not another's, no one ever had more. He lives by the power with which he reveals the strength, the tenderness, the poetry that may be found in the commonest relations of life's every day, by the loving insight which discovered and so affectionately chronicled the charms that make the plainest English landscape a feast of beauty to those who see as he saw. His poetry is a kind of Divine accident. None of the obvious calls that make other men poets operated on him-no inspiration of surroundings, no spur of ambition, no inner sense of a poetic mission. In his early life, verse-writing was only an occasional amusement: in his later years it was only a partner with his spade, his walking-stick, and his box of tools, in the task of keeping the most terrible of diseases at bay. Yet even so, by simple effluence of the poet in him, what he wrote became the greatest poetry of that generation. He made no choice of subject, formed no poetic scheme or plan: one may often wish he had; but that was not the spirit in which he set to work. He made his poetry as he made his incomparable letters, out of anything and nothing, out of just what came into his head and, happily for us, what came into his head includes, with much that we could wish away, the "Royal George," the sonnet and lines "To Mary," and the great passages of the "Task.” He is, all through, an accidental, occasional, only halfconscious poet. For many years before the production of his greatest work, he possessed no library, and read no poetry. What can be more unlike the deliberate self-dedication of Virgil, or Milton, or Tennyson? His sensitive modesty would have shrunk, and no doubt rightly, from any mention of such names, even of the least of them and merely by way of contrast, in connection with his. Yet it is hard to feel sure that, if he could have known himself and his gifts for what they were, he could not have done more with them. As things are, he is a poet almost in spite of himself. And the explanation of that lies in the story of his life.

This is not the place to tell that story over again. But a brief out-line of facts and dates will help towards the full understanding and fair judgment of his poetry. He was born in 1731, at Great Berkhampstead Rectory, in Hertfordshire. His father was the Rev. John Cowper, rector of Berkhampstead, son of Spencer Cowper, a Judge of the Common Pleas, remembered chiefly for his having

gone through the curious experience of being tried for murder. The first Earl Cowper, the Lord Chancellor, was the judge's brother and the poet's great-uncle. Cowper's mother was the daughter of Roger Donne of Ludham, in Norfolk, a family which is believed to be that of the poet Donne, and which has received new literary associations in our own day from the affection felt for some of its members by the poet Edward Fitzgerald. Mrs. Cowper died in 1737; but, though the poet was little more than an infant when he lost her, she had made for herself such a place in his childish heart that he writes, fifty years afterwards, " Not a week passes (perhaps I might with equal veracity say a day) in which I do not think of her." He went first to a local school, where he was unhappy; and then to Westminster, where Lloyd, Churchill, and Colman were among his contemporaries, as were also Hastings and Impey. There seems no doubt that his poem "Tirocinium," which judges public schools so severely, was the product of reflection rather than of memory. On leaving Westminster he was placed with a solicitor, in whose house he lived, and where he had Thurlow, the future Chancellor, for a fellow-pupil. He says that he spent his days chiefly "in giggling and making giggle" with his cousins, the daughters of his uncle Ashley Cowper, to one of whom, Theodora, he soon became attached. Her father would not allow an engagement, objecting to their near relationship. Among the manuscripts of the poet preserved at Welborne Rectory is a curious relic of this disappointment. It is a Latin essay, arguing that marriage between cousins is lawful. The handwriting, it is true, is not the poet's, but that of John Johnson. That fact, however, is far from disproving the poet's authorship, for the box in which it has long been preserved is full of copies by Johnson of his cousin's poems and letters. Moreover, I found it in close company with another Latin essay which is in the hand of Cowper. This is a rough copy of a dissertation on the philosophic thesis of man's control over the forces of matter, and is apparently written as an exercise for the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Both treatises are cast in the form of a speech to a learned company, presided over by a person who is addressed as Vir doctissime in the one case, and doctissime Professor in the other, but the defence of the marriage of cousins contains no direct references to the Bachelor's degree. Cowper was not at a university. He must therefore have either written the philosophical treatise on behalf of a university friend, or merely have chosen this form as a convenient one for the purpose of his essay. The thesis on marriage, if his work, may have been cast in the same form for the same reason. In any case, whether he wrote it or not, here it is among his papers, and it is difficult not to connect it with this episode in his life. We cannot but be touched as we picture him, drawing up himself, or copying out from some one else, this learned Latin dissertation, full of classical and Biblical lore, and hoping so to

move his recalcitrant uncle and gain his Theodora. No arguments, however, convinced Ashley Cowper, and Theodora never became his wife; but she remained secretly faithful to him through her long life, and carefully preserved the verses he had addressed to her, though she never met or even corresponded with him after he left London. The Latin stanzas, "Heu quam remotus," which take their place here for the first time in a complete edition of his poems, almost certainly refer to her. If that be so, they afford striking proof of how passionately he clung to the memory of that first love, ten years after he had seen its object for the last time, after his life had been twice shattered by the most awful of human diseases, and even after he had so definitely realized that it could be nothing more than a memory as to have contemplated a union of a very different kind with one towards whom his feelings were - those of deep but very calm and quiet affection, entirely unlike the passionate ardour with which he had once thought of Theodora. It may be added that the suggestion* that Cowper soon forgot his affection for Theodora, and, for the time at any rate, set his affections elsewhere, seems quite superfluous. It is based on nothing but the jocose Latin letter to Clotworthy Rowley, August, 1758, and its enthusiastic allusion to a certain "puellula amabilis" at Greenwich. But, as the letter mentions that she was only sixteen, we need not take the poet's outburst very seriously. The other sister was Lady Hesketh, the intimate friend of the poet's latter years. 1752, he went to live in the Temple, and, in 1754, was called to the Bar. But he made no attempt to practise, and passed his time in literary and social amusements. He belonged to a club, called the Nonsense Club, which dined together on Thursdays, and of which Colman and Lloyd were members. It is evident that he lived in a more or less literary atmosphere, and we know that he kept up his classical studies, wrote occasional verses and some popular ballads, and contributed to the reviews as well as to translations of Horace and the "Henriade." Of this last, his great friend Joseph Hill says, in an unpublished letter to Hayley, preserved at Yaxham with Cowper's letters to Hill, that it was the only large work that he was engaged in during these years, and that he was induced to undertake it by his brother, John Cowper, "for a very small reward." Hill adds that he believes the part translated by William Cowper was the second and fourth books. Through Lloyd, Cowper must at this time have often heard of Churchill, of whose work he spoke with such admiration in later years. But though his first volume shows more of Churchill's influence than that of any one else, it does not

In

This suggestion has the support of Southey, Bell, and Cowper's most recent editor, Mr. Thomas Wright (Correspondence of William Cowper, i. 14). But I think few careful readers of the letter to Rowley will share it. Such phrases as "modestiâ et (quod mirum videtur in fæminâ) taciturnitate est maximâ; quando autem loquitur, crederes Musam loqui," are the language of the Latin exercise writer, not of the lover.

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