Carlyle, “a strong and noble man, one of our great English souls.” I love him best in his book called Prayers and Meditations, where we know him as we know scarcely any other Englishman, for the good, upright fighter in this by no means easy battle of life. It is as such a fighter that we think of him to-night. Reading the account of his battles may help us to fight ours.
Gentlemen, I give you the toast of the evening. Let us drink in solemn silence, upstanding, “The Immortal Memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson.”
II. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF WILLIAM COWPER
An address entitled ‘The Sanity of Cowper,’ delivered at the Centenary Celebration at Olney, Bucks, on the occasion of the Hundredth Anniversary of the Death of the poet William Cowper, April 25, 1900.
I owe some apology for coming down to Olney to take part in what I believe is a purely local celebration, in which no other Londoner, as far as I know, has been asked to take part. I am here not because I profess any special qualification to speak about Cowper, in the town with which his name is so pleasantly associated, but because Mr. Mackay, [31] the son-in-law of your Vicar, has written a book about the Brontës, and I have done likewise, and he asked me to come.
This common interest has little, you will say, to do with the Poet of Olney. Between Cowper and Charlotte Brontë there were, however, not a few points of likeness or at least of contrast. Both were the children of country clergymen; both lived lives of singular and, indeed, unusual strenuousness; both were the very epitome of a strong Protestantism; and yet both—such is the inevitable toleration of genius—were drawn in an unusual manner to attachment to friends of the Roman Catholic Church—Cowper to Lady Throckmorton, who copied out some of his translations from Homer for him, assisted by her father-confessor, Dr. Gregson, and Miss Brontë to her Professor, M. Héger, the man in the whole world whom she most revered. Under circumstances of peculiar depression both these great Protestant writers went further on occasion than their Protestant friends would have approved, Cowper to contemplate—so he assures us in one of his letters—the entering a French monastery, and Miss Brontë actually to kneel in the Confessional in a Brussels church. Further, let me remind you that there were moments in the lives of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters, when Cowper’s
poem, The Castaway, was their most soul-stirring reading. Then, again, Mary Unwin’s only daughter became the wife of a Vicar of Dewsbury, and it was at Dewsbury and to the very next vicar, that Mr. Brontë, the father of Charlotte, was curate when he first went into Yorkshire. Finally, let it be recalled that Cowper and Charlotte Brontë have attracted as much attention by the pathos of their lives as by anything that they wrote. Thus far, and no further, can a strained analogy carry us. The most enthusiastic admirers of the Brontës can only claim for them that they permanently added certain artistic treasures to our literature. Cowper did incomparably more than this. His work marked an epoch.
But first let me say how interested we who are strangers naturally feel in being in Olney. To every lover of literature Olney is made classic ground by the fact that Cowper spent some twenty years of his life in it—not always with too genial a contemplation of the place and its inhabitants. “The genius of Cowper throws a halo of glory over all the surroundings of Olney and Weston,” says Dean Burgon. But Olney
has claims apart from Cowper. John Newton [34] presents himself to me as an impressive personality. There was a time, indeed, of youthful impetuosity when I positively hated him, for Southey, whose biography I read very early in life, certainly endeavours to assist the view that Newton was largely responsible for the poet’s periodical attacks of insanity.
But a careful survey of the facts modifies any such impression. Newton was narrow at times, he was over-concerned as to the letter, often ignoring the spirit of true piety, but the student of the two volumes of his Life and Correspondence that we owe to Josiah Bull, will be compelled to look at “the old African blasphemer” as he called himself, with much of sympathy. That he had a note of tolerance, with which he is not usually credited, we learn from one of his letters, where he says: