The "sacred name" of Lansdowne imparted genius to verse which would have been "woful stuff" in Dennis or Welsted. When Pope, in later years, called him "Granville the polite" he characterised him correctly; when, in Windsor Forest, he exalted him to the rank of a transcendent poet, he said what he could not believe. He outraged candour in prose as well as in verse. He wrote a sycophantic letter to Lord Lansdowne, boasting his freedom from the insincerity of his "fellow scribblers" who composed panegyrics "at random, and persuaded the next vain creature they could find that it was his own likeness." Pope vowed he had erred in the opposite direction, and had forborne to praise Lord Lansdowne up to the height of his deserts out of deference to his modesty. "Whereas others are offended if they have not more than justice done them, you would be displeased if you had so much. Therefore I may safely do you as much injury in my word as you do yourself in your own thoughts. I am so vain as to think I have shown you a favour in sparing your modesty, and you cannot but make me some return for prejudicing the truth to gratify you."[26] Here was triple incense,—the original adulation, the protestation that it was inadequate, and the pretence that Lord Lansdowne, a man noted for vanity, was too modest to endure merited praise. Pope spoke more truth than he intended when he said that he had "prejudiced truth to gratify him."
"Who now reads Cowley?" asked Pope in 1737.[27] The panegyric in Windsor Forest was an anachronism, and he might have asked the same question in 1713. Never was an equal reputation more ephemeral. While Cowley lived, and for a few years afterwards, the most cultivated minds in the kingdom called him the "great Cowley," the "incomparable Cowley," the "divine Cowley." When he died, Denham said that Death had
Plucked the fairest, sweetest flow'r
That in the Muses' garden grew.
The herd of readers vied with men of letters in applauding him, as was shown by the sale of his works, and is implied in the couplet of Oldham:
One likes my verses, and commends each line,
And swears that Cowley's are but dull to mine.[28]
The wonder is not that he lost his pre-eminence, but that he ever obtained it. His poetry is a puzzle from its contradictory qualities. Some of his pieces have a gay facility which had not hitherto been rivalled, and the greater part are harsh, heavy and obscure. He loved to search for remote analogies, and his profusion of far-fetched similes are constantly of a kind which debase the subject they are intended to elevate and adorn. His language is incessantly pitched in a high, heroic key, and then sinks in the same, or the succeeding sentence, into the tamest, meanest phrases of colloquial prose. His verse in entire poems, as well as in single lilies and occasional passages, is remarkable for its tripping ease, and is more often rugged to such a degree that it is incredible how it could pass with him for verse at all. The faulty side in him predominates, and the general impression he leaves is that of dullness, laboured and negligent by turns. He did not owe the whole of his popularity to his real abilities, and the bad taste of his age. He was a conspicuous adherent of the Stuarts, and the cavaliers adopted his works out of compliment to his politics. The grand funeral procession, commemorated in Windsor Forest, was a tribute paid to him by a party, because he united the fame of a forward royalist to the celebrity of an author. In a generation when authors and royalists were both dissolute, his writings had at least the merit of being untainted by the prevailing vice. Pope, describing the infidelity and debauchery of the Restoration era, exclaims,
Unhappy Dryden! in all Charles's days,
Roscommon only boasts unspotted bays.[29]
He might have remembered Milton if he overlooked Cowley, who was nevertheless a far greater poet than Roscommon. The one had gleams of genius, and the other had none. The contemporaries of Cowley had not been blind to the moral merits of his productions. "I cannot," says Sir John Denham, "but mention with honour my friend Mr. Cowley, who was the first who of late offered to redeem poesy from that slavery wherein this depraved age has prostituted her to all imaginable uncleanness."[30] His request in his will, that his compositions, printed and manuscript, should be collected by Dr. Sprat, was accompanied by a clause "beseeching him not to let any pass (if anything of that kind has escaped my pen) which may give the least offence in point of religion and good manners." His life was in keeping with his writings. Evelyn calls him that "incomparable poet, and virtuous man;" and Pepys heard Dr. Ward, the bishop of Winchester, and Dr. Bates, the well-known puritan, "mightily lamenting his death, as the best poet of our nation and as good a man."[31] The king was pleased to add his testimony, worthless if it had stood alone, and declared "that Mr. Cowley had not left a better man behind him in England."[32]
"In Windsor Forest," says Bowles, "there is description, incident, and history." A few remarks may still be made on it under each of these heads. Wordsworth assigned to it the distinction, in conjunction with Lady Winchelsea's Nocturnal Reverie, of containing the only "new images of external nature" to be found "in the poetry of the period intervening between Paradise Lost and the Seasons."[33] He limited the praise to "a passage or two," and does not particularise the passages to which he alluded. He must chiefly have referred to the lines from ver. 111 to ver. 146; for the other happy "images of external nature" are borrowed. Pope had but a faint perception of latent and subtle beauties, and he usually kept to those general appearances which are obvious to all the world. His trees cast a shade, his streams murmur, his heath is purple, his harvests are yellow, and his skies blue. Living in the midst of English peasants he shows less familiarity with rural character than with rural scenes. Neither in his verse, nor his letters, is there anything to indicate that he had mixed, like Thomson, Cowper, and Wordsworth, with the cottagers around him, or had divined the noble qualities which are masked by a rustic exterior. His sympathies were contracted, and strange to say there is not one word in his voluminous writings on human kind which denotes that he had felt in the smallest degree the loveliness of children. His main interest was in men and women, whose names, for good or evil, were before the world, and in speaking of them he dwelt principally upon their foibles and misdeeds.
The censure of Warton is valid when he complains that Pope's account of field sports is deficient in characteristic details. He found a stag-chase in Cooper's Hill, which determined him to extend, while ho imitated, the plan of his original, and introduce hunting, fishing, shooting, and netting into Windsor Forest, though he was not a sportsman. The objection that his stag-chase is not as circumstantial as that of Somerville, is fairly answered by Johnson's remark, that the chase was the main subject of Somerville, and is only subsidiary with Pope. More, nevertheless, was required than a description of the impatience and galloping of the horses, and of the eagerness of the riders. Of this single topic one half was a translation from Statius. The fishing and shooting are superior to the hunt. The particulars are meagre, but there is mastery in the mode of representing them. The dying pheasant is painted in language as rich as its plumage, and the doves, the lapwing, the lark, and the wintry landscape, could not have been brought more vividly before the mind, or in fewer words. A gentle pathos intermingles with the whole. The portrait of the angler would have been perfect, in the single circumstance to which it is confined, if Pope had not said of him, "he hopes the scaly breed." Wakefield observed that "hope," used as an active verb, was intolerably affected, and he might have extended the remark to the use of "scaly breed" for fish.