26 November: Boreham on William Cowper

The Herald of the Dawn
William Cowper, whose birthday this is, represents in his own person the resurrection from the dead of English literature. In him, it threw off the grave clothes that had enfolded it for a couple of centuries and rose, transfigured, to live a richer life, radiate a nobler spirit and sing a sweeter song. Goldwin Smith opens his biography of the poet by declaring that he was the most important minstrel between the time of Pope and the time of Wordsworth; whilst Arnold of Rugby used to tell his boys that Cowper was essentially the singer of the dawn. He it was who, after a period of silence that made men fear that English melody was dead, again turned the thoughts of his countrymen to song. Time was when it was the fashion to pooh-pooh the claims of Cowper. "Did he not," it was contemptuously asked, "on several occasions attempt suicide and did he not spend much of his time in a madhouse?" This, of course, is indisputable; but it is also true that almost any young fellow of nervous temperament and frail constitution would lose his reason and seek some means of escape from the horrors of life if his malady were treated as it was customary to treat such cases two hundred years ago.

Let us take a good look at him, this shy, shuddering, shrinking little fellow of six, before rough hands hustle him on to the stage coach and pack him off to a distant boarding-school! He is a quivering little bundle of nerves, slight of figure, feeble of frame, with pale, pinched face and eyes swollen with chronic inflammation. He starts at every sound in the daytime, and throws the bedclothes over his head at night that he may not be scared to death by the ghostly shadows that flit across the wall. His mother, his sole source of comfort, has just died: that is why he is being sent to boarding-school. His father can make nothing of the boy's odd fancies and outlandish ways and thinks this the best way out of his embarrassment.

At the boarding-school he was badgered and bullied and beaten without respite and without mercy, and to the last day of his life he never thought of the horrid place without a shudder. The diffidence and self-contempt born of these conditions never left him. He studied law, and, at the age of 23, was called to the Bar. Nine years later, through the influence of a relative, he received the offer of an easy and highly remunerative position as clerk to the journals of the House of Lords. He accepted the appointment with the utmost gratitude, but then the trouble began. The dread of having to make a formal appearance before a House of Parliament so preyed upon his mind that his health collapsed and he had perforce to abandon the post.

A Study In Light And Shade
Let no one suppose, however, that Cowper was a morbid, much less a miserable man. Even during his occasional fits of insanity he was often overtaken by the merriest moods. Those who were admitted to his more intimate friendship were ceaselessly charmed by his sunny disposition, his whimsical sallies, his unfailing courtesy and his sheer goodness of heart. He revelled in gay, vivacious and light-hearted society: this is the only explanation of the influence upon him of Lady Austen, who inspired "The Task." He was passionately devoted to his garden, taking inordinate pride in the cauliflowers and cucumbers that he was able to bring to his table. Animals and birds had an extraordinary fascination for him, as he also had for them. His tame hares would do at his behest what those timid creatures have seldom been coaxed into doing for anybody else, whilst his pigeons, his goldfinches, his robins, his canaries, his linnet, his jay, his magpie and his starling would at any moment answer to their names and eat from their master's hand.

Cowper represents, therefore, a coy, reserved and somewhat pensive figure in our national gallery. Yet he holds, and holds for all time, a place of singular honour and distinction. A feeble, sensitive and highly-strung physique: a mental wreck: a would-be suicide: a passionate lover of the out-of-doors and of everything that moved there: the author of some of our quaintest humour and of some of our most sacred hymns: his life was, as Byron expressively said, a singular pendulum, swinging ever between a smile and a tear.

The Frail Leader Of A Noble Choir
Yet, for all this, Cowper ushered in a new day. As, in the forest, bird answers to bird, so, as soon as Cowper's note was heard, Burns and Scott replied from Scotland, Moore from Ireland, and then all the choristers awoke. Cowper figures in history as the herald of an age that gave us Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and Charles Lamb, Walter Scott and Thomas Moore, James Hogg and Lord Byron, George Crabbe and Percy Shelley, Thomas Campbell and Savage Landor, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, and Robert Burns.

Few poets are more human, more simple, more unaffected, more restful than he: few are more easy to read. His "John Gilpin," his "Alexander Selkirk," his "Boadicea" and "My Mother's Picture" were among the first poems that we learned in our school-books: some of his verses will be among the last that we shall care to remember. Perhaps his most forceful and most pathetic epitaph was written by Mrs. Browning in words as true as they are sorrowful—

O poets, from a maniac's tongue was poured the deathless singing!
O
Christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging!
O men, this
man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling,
Groaned inly while he taught
you peace and died while you were smiling!

Under the magic of Cowper's leadership, England passed at one amazing bound from a condition of poetic poverty to a condition of poetic affluence such as no nation had ever before known. The spacious days of great Elizabeth did, it is true, convert the British Isles into a nest of singing birds; but even the inspired bards of that wealthy period lacked a certain indefinable sweetness; and it was reserved for Cowper to supply that aching deficiency by suffusing into our minstrelsy a mellow note that it never afterwards lost.

F W Boreham

Image: William Cowper