I am disposed to think that Sir William made a fair copy of this letter and of others like it, and laid them aside as models of parental exhortation. Whether young Pepys was a little prig, or a particularly accomplished little scamp (and both possibilities are open to consideration), it seems equally unlikely that an Eton boy’s desk would have proved a safe repository for such ample and admirable discourses.
The publication of Cowper’s letters in 1803 and 1804 struck a chill into the hearts of accomplished and erudite correspondents. Poor Miss Seward never rallied from the shock of their “commonness,” and of their popularity. Here was a man who wrote about beggars and postmen, about cats and kittens, about buttered toast and the kitchen table. Here was a man who actually looked at things before he described them (which was a startling innovation); who called the wind the wind, and buttercups buttercups, and a hedgehog a hedgehog. Miss Seward honestly despised Cowper’s letters. She said they were without “imagination or eloquence,” without “discriminative criticism,” without “characteristic investigation.” Investigating the relations between the family cat and an intrusive viper was, from her point of view, unworthy the dignity of an author. Cowper’s love of detail, his terrestrial turn of mind, his humour, and his veracity were disconcerting in an artificial age. When Miss Carter took a country walk, she did not stoop to observe the trivial things she saw. Apparently she never saw anything. What she described were the sentiments and emotions awakened in her by a featureless principle called Nature. Even the ocean—which is too big to be overlooked—started her on a train of moral reflections, in which she passed easily from the grandeur of the elements to the brevity of life, and the paltriness of earthly ambitions. “How vast are the capacities of the soul, and how little and contemptible its aims and pursuits.” With this original remark, the editor of the letters (a nephew and a clergyman) was so delighted that he added a pious comment of his own.
“If such be the case, how strong and conclusive is the argument deduced from it, that the soul must be destined to another state more suitable to its views and powers. It is much to be lamented that Mrs. Carter did not pursue this line of thought any further.”
People who bought nine volumes of a correspondence like this were expected, as the editor warns them, to derive from it “moral, literary, and religious improvement.” It was in every way worthy of a lady who had translated Epictetus, and who had the “great” Mrs. Montagu for a friend. But, as Miss Seward pathetically remarked, “any well-educated person, with talents not above the common level, produces every day letters as well worth attention as most of Cowper’s, especially as to diction.” The perverseness of the public in buying, in reading, in praising these letters, filled her with pained bewilderment. Not even the writer’s sincere and sad piety, his tendency to moralize, and the transparent innocence of his life could reconcile her to plain transcripts from nature, or to such an unaffecting incident as this:—
“A neighbour of mine in Silver End keeps an ass; the ass lives on the other side of the garden wall, and I am writing in the greenhouse. It happens that he is this morning most musically disposed; either cheered by the fine weather, or by some new tune which he has just acquired, or by finding his voice more harmonious than usual. It would be cruel to mortify so fine a singer, therefore I do not tell him that he interrupts and hinders me; but I venture to tell you so, and to plead his performance in excuse of my abrupt conclusion.”
Here is not only the “common” diction which Miss Seward condemned, but a very common casualty, which she would have naturally deemed beneath notice. Cowper wrote a great deal about animals, and always with fine and humorous appreciation. He sought relief from the hidden torment of his soul in the contemplation of creatures who fill their place in life without morals, and without misgivings. We know what safe companions they were for him when we read his account of his hares, of his kitten dancing on her hind legs,—“an exercise which she performs with all the grace imaginable,”—and of his goldfinches amorously kissing each other between the cage wires. When Miss Seward bent her mind to “the lower orders of creation,” she did not describe them at all; she gave them the benefit of that “discriminative criticism” which she felt that Cowper lacked. Here, for example, is her thoughtful analysis of man’s loyal servitor, the dog:—
“That a dog is a noble, grateful, faithful animal we must all be conscious, and deserves a portion of man’s tenderness and care;—yet, from its utter incapacity of more than glimpses of rationality, there is a degree of insanity, as well as of impoliteness to his acquaintance, and of unkindness to his friends, in lavishing so much more of his attention in the first instance, and of affection in the latter, upon it than upon them.”
It sounds like a parody on a great living master of complex prose. By its side, Cowper’s description of Beau is certainly open to the reproach of plainness.
“My dog is a spaniel. Till Miss Gunning begged him, he was the property of a farmer, and had been accustomed to lie in the chimney corner among the embers till the hair was singed from his back, and nothing was left of his tail but the gristle. Allowing for these disadvantages, he is really handsome; and when nature shall have furnished him with a new coat, a gift which, in consideration of the ragged condition of his old one, it is hoped she will not long delay, he will then be unrivalled in personal endowments by any dog in this country.”
No wonder the Lichfield Swan was daunted by the inconceivable popularity of such letters. No wonder Miss Hannah More preferred Akenside to Cowper. What had these eloquent ladies to do with quiet observation, with sober felicity of phrase, with “the style of honest men”!