COWPER.
Though Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith, each in his own way, turned their eye on rural scenery, and took beautiful pictures and images from it into their poetry, yet it was none of these, but a later poet, Cowper, who, as the true successor of Thomson, carried on the descriptive work which he began. It was in 1730 that the first complete edition of the “Seasons” appeared. “The Task” was published in 1785. This is the poem in which Cowper most fully put forth his power as a rural poet. In the first book, “The Sofa,” he thus quaintly makes the first plunge from indoor to outdoor life, to which many a time ere the long poem is ended he returns:—
“The Sofa suits
The gouty limb, ’tis true; but gouty limb,
Though on a sofa, may I never feel:
For I have loved the rural walk through lanes
Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep,
And skirted thick with intertexture firm
Of thorny boughs; have loved the rural walk
O’er hills, through valleys, and by river’s brink,
E’er since, a truant boy, I passed my bounds,
To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames;
And still remember, nor without regret,
Of hours that sorrow since has much endeared,
How oft, my slice of pocket-store consumed,
Still hungering, penniless, and far from home,
I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws,
Or blushing crabs, and berries that emboss
The bramble, black as jet, or sloes austere.”
This, the first rural passage in the “Task,” strikes the note of difference between Cowper’s way of describing Nature and Thomson’s; Cowper unhesitatingly introduces the personal element, describes actual and individual scenes as he himself saw them in his morning or evening walk. Or when rural scenes are not thus personally introduced, they everywhere come in as interludes in the midst of the poet’s keen interest in human affairs, his quiet and delicate humor, his tender sympathy with the poor and the suffering, his indignation against human wrong, his earnest brooding over human destiny, and his forward glances to a time when visible things will give place to a higher and brighter order. Thomson, on the other hand, describes Nature as seen by itself, separate and apart from human passion, or relieved only by some vapid episodes of a false Arcadianism. Hence, great as is Thomson’s merit for having, first of his age, gone back to Nature, the interest he awakes in it is feeble, because with him Nature is so divorced from individuality and from man. It is Nature in the general rather than the individual scene which he describes—Nature aloof from rather than combined with man. But her full depth and tenderness she never reveals except to the heart that throbs with human interest.
But though Cowper sees the outer world as set off against his own personal moods and the interests of man, yet he does not allow these to discolor his scenes or to blur the exactness of their outlines. Fidelity, absolute veracity, characterize his descriptions. He himself says that he took nothing at second-hand, and all his pictures bear witness to this. Homely, of course, flat, tame, was the country he dwelt in and described. But to this day that Huntingdonshire landscape, and the flats by the sluggish Ouse, in themselves so unbeautiful, acquire a charm to the eye of the traveler from the remembered poetry of the “Task” and for the sake of him who wrote it. By that poetry it may be said that he
“For scenes not beautiful did more
Than beauty for the fairest scenes can do.”
As one out of many landscapes described, take this:—
“How oft upon yon eminence our pace
Has slackened to a pause, and we have borne
The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
While admiration, feeding at the eye,
And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene.
Thence with what pleasure have we just discerned,
The distant plow slow-moving, and beside
His laboring team, that swerved not from the track,
The sturdy swain diminished to a boy!
Here Ouse, slow-winding through a level plain
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o’er,
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course
Delighted. There, fast rooted in their bank,
Stand, never overlooked, our favorite elms,
That screen the herdsman’s solitary hut;
While far beyond, and overthwart the stream,
That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale,
The sloping land recedes into the clouds;
Displaying, on its varied side, the grace
Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tower,
Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells
Just undulates upon the listening ear,
Groves, heaths, and smoking villages, remote.
Scenes must be beautiful which, daily viewed,
Please daily, and whose novelty survives
Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years.
Praise justly due to those that I describe.”
An ordinary prospect, you say, described in very ordinary poetry. Yes, but the scene is a real scene, one of England’s veritable landscapes, and the lines which describe it are genuine poetry,—exact, transparent, lingering lovingly over the scene which the eye rests on. And for its being ordinary description, no doubt it flows easily and naturally along, but let any one try to describe as common a prospect in verse, and he will find that this is not ordinary verse, but instinct with that unobtrusive grace which only true poets attain.
Then how frequently the commonest country sights awaken Cowper’s touch of native humor. Here is what he says of the mole and his work: we—
“Feel at every step
Our foot half sunk in hillocks green and soft,
Raised by the mole, the miner of the soil.
He, not unlike the great ones of mankind,
Disfigures earth, and, plotting in the dark,
Toils much to earn a monumental pile
That may record the mischiefs he has done.”
In Keble’s “Essay on Sacred Poetry” I lately read the following comparison between Cowper and Burns as descriptive poets. “Compare,” he says, “the landscapes of Cowper with those of Burns. There is, if we mistake not, the same sort of difference between them, as in the conversation of two persons on scenery, the one originally an enthusiast in his love of the works of Nature, the other, driven by disappointment or weariness to solace himself with them as he might.... The one all-overflowing with the love of Nature, and indicating at every turn, that whatever his lot in life, he could not have been happy without her; the other visibly and wisely soothing himself, but not without effort, by attending to rural objects in default of some more congenial happiness, of which he had almost come to despair. The latter, in consequence, laboriously sketching every object that came in his way; the other, in one or two rapid lines which operate, as it were, like a magician’s spell, presenting to the fancy just that picture which was wanted to put the reader’s mind in unison with the writer’s.” And then Keble quotes, in illustration of the difference, the description of Evening in the fourth book of the “Task,” set over against the truly pastoral chant of “Dainty Davie.” I cannot regard this estimate of the two poets as altogether true. The passage which Keble quotes from Cowper is not one of his happiest. “Evening” is there personified in conventional fashion, as “with matron-step slow moving,” with night treading “on her sweeping train.” If the two poets are to be compared at all, let it be when both are at their best. Again, is it quite fair to contrast poetry of description with the poetry of lyric passion, and to reject the former because it does not possess the vivid glow that belongs to the latter? Moreover, the country which Cowper had before him suited better a sober and meditative than an impassioned strain. There can be no doubt that Cowper turned to Nature as a relief and solace from too sad thoughts rather than with the rapture of a fresh heart and a youthful love. But Keble surely would have been the last to deny that this is a legitimate use to make of Nature. He, before most men, would have felt that that is one of the finest ministries of Nature which Cowper thus expresses:—
“Our groves were planted to console at noon
The pensive wanderer in their shades, at eve
The moonbeam, sliding softly in between
The sleeping leaves is all the light they wish,
Birds warbling all the music.”
If it be one of Nature’s offices to make the young and the happy happier, it is her no less genuine and beneficent work to lighten, by her glad or reposeful looks, aged hearts that may be world-weary or desponding.
How exact, faithful, and literally true in his record of the appearances of Nature Cowper is, we have seen. It remains to ask whether he had any philosophy of Nature, and if so, what it was. It could not be that one so devout could look habitually on the face of Nature without asking himself how all this visible vastness stands related to the Invisible One whom his heart held commune with. All remember his well-known line,—
“God made the country, but man made the town,”
and this thought echoes through all his praises of the country, and enhances his pleasure in it. But it is not only by incidental allusion that Cowper lets us know his thoughts on these things. The “Task” contains two long passages, one in the “Winter Morning Walk,” from line 733 to 906, and another in “The Winter Walk at Noon,” from line 181 to 254, in which his feelings on this subject find full utterance, opening with the noble words,—
“He is the freeman whom the Truth makes free,
And all are slaves beside.”
In the former passage, of the man whose heart is set free with this heavenly freedom he says, in words well known,
“He looks abroad into the varied field
Of Nature, and ...
Calls the delightful scenery all his own.
His are the mountains, and the valleys his,
And the resplendent rivers. His to enjoy
With a propriety that none can feel,
But who, with filial confidence inspired,
Can lift to Heaven an unpresumptuous eye,
And smiling say, ‘My Father made them all.’”
And so throughout this whole passage he continues in a strain akin to that of Thomson’s Hymn, but more intimate and devout, his acknowledgment of Him whom he calls “The only just Proprietor” of Nature. It is He who alike
“Gives its lustre to an insect’s wing,
And wheels his throne upon the rolling worlds.”
When He has enlightened the eye and touched the mortal ear—
“In that blest moment, Nature throwing wide
Her veil opaque, discloses with a smile
The Author of her beauties, who, retired
Behind his own creation, works unseen
By the impure, and hears his word denied.
...
“But, O thou bounteous Giver of all good,
Thou art of all thy gifts thyself the crown!
Give what thou canst, without thee we are poor,
And with thee rich, take what thou wilt away.”
A finer strain of rapturous piety could not be, but yet in it all there is no advance beyond the old conception of a dead mechanical world, which God, himself removed aloof, moves entirely from without. There is no hint that Nature is alive with a life received from God himself, and mysteriously connected with Him.
But in the second passage alluded to his thought about Nature takes a higher reach. Speaking of the revival of the earth under the touch of spring, he teaches that
“There lives and moves
A soul in all things, and that soul is God.”
Then, alluding to the view, entertained by many, then as now, that what we call Nature’s operations are upheld and carried forward by fixed laws, which spare the Maker all further trouble, he asserts that all things are impelled
“To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force,
And under pressure of some conscious cause.
The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused,
Sustains, and is the life of all that lives.
Nature is but a name for an effect
Whose cause is God.”
Nor does he step at this merely theistic view. He goes on to the distinctly Christian teaching of St. John and St. Paul, so easy to assert, so hard to take home to the feelings and imagination, that it is the Eternal and Incarnate Word who is the Creator and Sustainer of this visible universe.
“All are under One. One Spirit—his
Who wore the platted thorns with bleeding brows—
Rules universal Nature. Not a flower
But shows some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain,
Of his unrivaled pencil.”
No doubt Cowper held and believed this firmly, and it may be at times had keen intuition of its truth. But it cannot be said that he attained to make it felt in his ordinary descriptions of the every-day landscape. He does not describe Nature as if he habitually saw it as a living being plastic to an overruling and informing spirit. Rather he beheld her more as common eyes behold her, as a mechanism, with fixed features and a definite outline, which do not spontaneously, and without an exertion of thought, lend themselves as vehicles of spiritual reality. If he had been more possessed with the mystical vision he might have been a higher poet for the few. He would not have been what he has been called, the best of our descriptive poets for every-day wear, the familiar companion of every quiet English household. But though Cowper’s “Task” is full of scenery, it is not purely, or even mainly, descriptive poetry. More than its rural character is its deep, tender, universal human-heartedness. Man and his interests are paramount, as paramount as in Pope or any other city poet. Only it is not the conventional, not the surface part of man, but that which is permanent in him and universal. In his indignation against injustice and oppression, his hatred of slavery, his large sense of universal brotherhood, and his revolt against all that hinders it, we already hear in his poetry the not far-off murmur of the Revolution, and of the new era it was bringing in. His denunciation of the Bastile but four years before it fell—
“Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts,
Ye dungeons, and ye cages of despair,
There’s not an English heart that would not leap
To hear that ye were fallen at last,”—
is a fitting prelude to that prayer of thanksgiving which Wordsworth raised a few years afterward from Morecombe Sands when he first heard of the fall of Robespierre. It is because Cowper’s poetry throbs with this deep and universal human sympathy that its background of landscape, plain as it is, and untransfigured by passion, comes in with such graceful and refreshing relief. Of Cowper’s descriptions may be said what Wordsworth says of his own, there is always
“Some happy tone
Of meditation slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone.”
And this it is that gives them their peculiar charm.