The inestimable estimate of Brown
Rose like a paper kite, and charmed the town,
says Cowper; and he proceeds to show that, though Chatham's victorious administration had for a moment restored the self-respect of the country, the evils denounced by Brown were symptoms of a profound and lasting disease. The poems called the 'Progress of Error,' 'Expostulation,' 'Truth,' 'Hope,' 'Charity,' and 'Conversation,' all turn upon the same theme. Though Cowper is for brief spaces playful or simply satirical, he always falls back into his habitual vein of meditation. For the ferocious personalities of Churchill, the coarse-fibred friend of his youth, we have a sad strain of lamentation over the growing luxury and effeminacy of the age. It is a continued anticipation of the lines in the 'Task,' which seem to express his most serious and sincere conviction.
The course of human ills, from good to ill,
From ill to worse, is fatal, never fails.
Increase of power begets increase of wealth,
Wealth luxury, and luxury excess:
Excess the scrofulous and itchy plague,
That seizes first the opulent, descends
To the next rank contagious, and in time
Taints downwards all the graduated scale
Of order, from the chariot to the plough.
That is his one unvariable lesson, set in different lights, but associated more or less closely with every observation. The world is ripening or rotting; and, as with Rousseau, luxury is the most significant name of the absorbing evil. That such a view should commend itself to a mind so clouded with melancholy would not be at any time surprising, but it fell in with a widely spread conviction. Cowper had not, indeed, learnt the most effective mode of touching men's hearts. Separated by a retirement of twenty years from the world, with which he had never been very familiar, and at which he only 'peeped through the loopholes of retreat,' his satire wanted the brilliance, the quickness of illustration from actual life, which alone makes satire readable. His tone of feeling too frequently suggests that the critic represents the querulous comments of old ladies gossiping about the outside world over their tea-cups, easily scandalised by very simple things. Mrs. Unwin was an excellent old lady, and Newton a most zealous country clergyman. Probably they were intrinsically superior to the fine ladies and gentlemen who laughed at them. But a mind acclimatised to the atmosphere which they breathed inevitably lost its nervous tone. There was true masculine vigour underlying Cowper's jeremiads; but it was natural that many people should only see in him an amiable valetudinarian, not qualified for a censorship of statesmen and men of the world. The man who fights his way through London streets can't stop to lament over every splash and puddle which might shock poor Cowper's nervous sensibility.
The last poem of the series, however, 'Retirement,' showed that Cowper had a more characteristic and solacing message to mankind than a mere rehearsal of the threadbare denunciations of luxury. The 'Task' revealed his genuine power. There appeared those admirable delineations of country scenery and country thoughts which Sainte-Beuve detaches so lovingly from the mass of serious speculation in which they are embedded. What he, as a purely literary critic, passed over as comparatively uninteresting, gives the exposition of Cowper's intellectual position. The poem is in fact a political, moral, and religious disquisition interspersed with charming vignettes, which, though not obtrusively moralised, illustrate the general thesis. The poetical connoisseur may separate them from their environment, as a collector of engravings might cut out the illustrations from the now worthless letterpress. The poor author might complain that the most important moral was thus eliminated from his book. But the author is dead, and his opinions don't much matter. To understand Cowper's mind, however, we must take the now obsolete meditation with the permanently attractive pictures. To know why he so tenderly loved the slow windings of the sinuous Ouse, we must see what he thought of the great Babel beyond. It is the distant murmur of the great city that makes his little refuge so attractive. The general vein of thought which appears in every book of the poem is most characteristically expressed in the fifth, called 'A Winter Morning Walk.' Cowper strolls out at sunrise in his usual mood of tender playfulness, smiles at the vast shadow cast by the low winter sun, as he sees upon the cottage wall the
Preposterous sight! the legs without the man.
He remarks, with a passing recollection of his last sermon, that we are all shadows; but turns to note the cattle cowering behind the fences; the labourer carving the haystack; the woodman going to work, followed by his half-bred cur, and cheered by the fragrance of his short pipe. He watches the marauding sparrows, and thinks with tenderness of the fate of less audacious birds; and then pauses to examine the strange fretwork erected at the mill-dam by the capricious freaks of the frost. Art, it suggests to him, is often beaten by Nature; and his fancy goes off to the winter palace of ice erected by the Russian empress. His friend Newton makes use of the same easily allegorised object in one of his religious writings; though I know not whether the poet or the divine first turned it to account. Cowper, at any rate, is immediately diverted into a meditation on 'human grandeur and the courts of kings.' The selfishness and folly of the great give him an obvious theme for a dissertation in the true Rousseau style. He tells us how 'kings were first invented'—the ordinary theory of the time being that political—deists added religious—institutions were all somehow 'invented' by knaves to impose upon fools. 'War is a game,' he says, in the familiar phrase,
'Which were their subjects wise
Kings would not play at.'
But, unluckily, their subjects are fools. In England indeed—for Cowper, by virtue of his family traditions, was in theory a sound Whig—we know how far to trust our kings; and he rises into a warmth on behalf of liberty for which he thinks it right to make a simple-minded apology in a note. The sentiment suggests a vigorous and indeed prophetic denunciation of the terrors of the Bastille, and its 'horrid towers and dungeons.'
There's not an English heart that would not leap
To hear that ye were fallen at last!