* Wright's 'Cowper,' 1892, pp. 311, 312. Wilson was a man of
considerable intelligence, and a local 'character.' When in
1781 he joined the Baptists, he declined to dress Lady
Austen's hair on Sundays. Consequently she was obliged to
call him in on Saturday evenings, and more than once had to
sit up all night to prevent the disarrangement of her
'head.'
Cowper has been styled by a recent editor the best of English letter-writers, a term which Scott applied to Walpole, and it has been applied to others. Criticism loses its balance in these superlatives. To be the best—to use a schoolboy illustration—is to have the highest marks all round. For epistolary vigour, for vivacity, for wit, for humour, for ease, for simplicity, for subject—can you give Cowper the highest marks? The answer obviously must be 'no.' Other writers excel him in subject, in wit, in vigour. But you can certainly give him high marks for humour; and you can give him very high marks for simplicity and unaffectedness. He is one of the most unfeigned, most easy, most natural of English letter-writers. In the art of shedding a sedate playfulness over the least promising themes, in magnifying the incidents of his 'set gray life' into occurrences worthy of record, in communicating to his page all the variations of mood that sweep across him as he writes, he is unrivalled. Mandeville christened Addison a parson in a tye-wig; Cowper (at his best) is a humourist in a nightcap. It would be easy to select from his correspondence passages that show him in all these aspects—morbid and gloomy to Newton, genial and friendly to Hill and Unwin, confidential and caressing to Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh. But it is not uncommon for him to vary his tone to each of these, for which reason we close with an epistle to that austere friend and monitor who has perhaps been credited with a more baleful influence over his hypochondriac correspondent than is strictly borne out by the evidence. The reader may be told, since he must speedily discover it, that the following letter from Cowper to John Newton, like the title-page of Lowell's 'Fable for Critics,' is in rhymed prose:
My very dear Friend,—I am going to send, what when you have read, you may scratch your head, and say, I suppose, there's nobody knows whether what I have got be verse or not;—by the tune and the time, it ought to be rhyme, but if it be, did you ever see, of late or of yore, such a ditty before?
I have writ 'Charity,' not for popularity, but as well as I could, in hopes to do good; and if the Reviewer should say 'to be sure the gentleman's Muse wears Methodist shoes, you may know by her pace and talk about grace, that she and her bard have little regard for the taste and fashions, and ruling passions, and hoidening play, of the modern day; and though she assume a borrowed plume, and now and then wear a tittering air,'tis only her plan to catch, if she can, the giddy and gay, as they go that way, by a production on a new construction: she has baited her trap, and hopes to snap all that may come with a sugar plum.'—His opinion in this will not be amiss;'tis what I intend, my principal end, and, if I succeed, and folks should read, till a few are brought to a serious thought, I shall think I am paid for all I have said and all I have done, though I have run many a time, after a rhyme, as far as from hence to the end of my sense, and by hook or crook, write another book, if I live and am here, another year.
I have heard before of a room with a floor laid upon springs, and such like things, with so much art in every part, that when you went in you was forced to begin a minuet pace, with an air and a grace, swimming about, now in and now out, with a deal of state, in a figure of eight, without pipe, or string, or any such thing; and now I have writ, in a rhyming fit, what will make you dance, and, as you advance, will keep you still, though against your will, dancing away, alert and gay, till you come to an end of what I have penn'd, which that you may do, ere Madam and you are quite worn out with jigging about, I take my leave, and here you receive a bow profound, down to the ground, from your humble me.—W. C.
XVII. THE QUAKER OF ART.
ABOVE the chimney-piece in the Study at Abbotsford, and therefore on Sir Walter's right-hand as he wrote, hung—nay, hangs, if we may trust the evidence of a photograph before us—a copy of the Schiavonetti-cum-Heath engraving of Thomas Stothard's once-popular 'Canterbury Pilgrims.' With its dark oblong frame and gold corner-ornaments, it must still look much as it did on that rainy August morning described in Lockhart, when one of Scott's guests, occupied ostensibly with the last issues of the Bannatyne Club, sat listening in turn to the patter of the drops on the pane, and the 'dashing trot' of his host's pen across the paper to which he was then committing the first series of the 'Tales of a Grandfather.' The visitor (it was that acute and ingenious John Leycester Adolphus whose close-reasoned 'Letters to Richard Heber' had practically penetreated the mystery of the 'Waverley Novels') specially noticed the picture; and he also afterwards recalled and repeated a characteristic comment made upon it by Scott, with whom it was evidently a favourite, in one of those brief dialogues which generally took place when it became necessary to consult a book upon the shelves. Were the procession to move, remarked Sir Walter, the prancing young 'Squire in the foreground would be over his horse's head in a minute. The criticism was more of the riding-school than the studio; and too much might easily be inferred from it as to the speaker's equipments as an Art-critic. For Art itself, we are told, notwithstanding his genuine love of landscape and natural objects, Scott cared nothing; and Abbotsford was rich rather in works suggestive and commemorative, than in masterpieces of composition and colour. 'He talked of scenery as he wrote of it,' says Leslie in his 'Recollections,' 'like a painter; and yet for pictures, as works of art, he had little or no taste, nor did he pretend to any. To him they were interesting merely as representing some particular scene, person, or event, and very moderate merit in their execution contented him.' Stothard's cavalcade, progressing along the pleasantly undulated background of the Surrey Hills, with its drunken Miller droning on his bagpipes at the head, with its bibulous Cook at the tail, and between these, all that moving, many-coloured pageant of Middle-Age society upon which Geoffrey Chaucer looked five hundred years ago, must have been thoroughly to his liking, besides reaching to a higher artistic standard than he required. To one whose feeling for the past has never yet been rivalled, such a picture would serve as a perpetual fount of memory and association. He must besides have thoroughly appreciated its admitted accuracy of costume, and it would not have materially affected his enjoyment if the Dick Tintos or Dick Minims of his day had assured him that, as a composition, it was deficient in 'heroic grasp,' or had reiterated the stereotyped objection that the Wife of Bath was far too young-looking to have buried five lawful husbands.
The original oil-sketch from which the 'Canterbury Pilgrims' was engraved, is now in the National Gallery, having been bought some years ago, with Hogarth's 'Polly Peachum,' at the dispersal of the Leigh Court Collection. It is not, however, by his more ambitious efforts that Stothard is most regarded in our day. Now and then, it may be, the Abbotsford engraving, or 'The Flitch of Bacon,' or 'John Gilpin,' makes fitful apparition in the print-shop windows; now and then again, in some culbute générale of the bric-à-brac merchant, there comes forlornly to the front a card-cable contrived adroitly from the once famous Waterloo Shield. But it is not by these, or by the huge designs on the staircase at Burleigh ('Burleigh-house by Stamford-town'), or by any of the efforts which his pious biographer and daughter-in-law fondly ranked with Raphael and Rubens, that he best deserves remembrance. Time, dealing summarily with an unmanageable inheritance, has a trick of making rough and ready distinctions; and Time has decided, not that he did these things ill, but that he did other things better—for instance, book illustrations. And the modern collector is on the side of Time. Stothard as a colourist (and here perhaps is some injustice) he disregards: Stothard as a history-painter he disavows. But for Stothard as the pictorial interpreter of 'David Simple' and 'Betsy Thoughtless,' of 'The Virtuous Orphan' and the 'Tales of the Genii,' of 'Clarissa' and 'Sir Charles Grandison,' or (to cite another admirer, Charles Lamb) of that 'romantic tale'