The Art of Letters

by Robert Lynd

(Sworn foe to everything that’s witty)

That, in a black infernal train,

Make cruel inroads in my brain,

And daily threaten to drive thence

My little garrison of sense.

It was not till after his release from the St. Alban’s madhouse in his thirties, however, that he began to build a little new world of pleasures on the ruins of the old. He now set himself of necessity to the task of creating a refuge within sight of the Cross, where he could live, in his brighter moments, a sort of Epicurean of evangelical piety. He was a damned soul that must occupy itself at all costs and not damn itself still deeper in the process. His round of recreation, it must be admitted, was for the most part such as would make the average modern pleasure-seeker quail worse than any inferno of miseries. Only a nature of peculiar sweetness could charm us from the atmosphere of endless sermons and hymns in which Cowper learned to be happy in the Unwins’ Huntingdon home. Breakfast, he tells us, was between eight and nine. Then, “till eleven, we read either the Scripture, or the sermons of some faithful preacher of those holy mysteries.” Church was at eleven. After that he was at liberty to read, walk, ride, or work in the garden till the three o’clock dinner. Then to the garden, “where with Mrs. Unwin and her son I have generally the pleasure of religious conversation till tea-time.” After tea came a four-mile walk, and “at night we read and converse, as before, till supper, and commonly finish the evening either with hymns or a sermon; and last of all the family are called to prayers.” In those days, it may be, evangelical religion had some of the attractions of a new discovery. Theories of religion were probably as exciting a theme of discussion in the age of Wesley as theories of art and literature in the age of cubism and vers libre. One has to remember this in order to be able to realize that, as Cowper said, “such a life as this is consistent with the utmost cheerfulness.” He unquestionably found it so, and, when the Rev. Morley Unwin was killed as the result of a fall from his horse, Cowper and Mrs. Unwin moved to Olney in order to enjoy further evangelical companionship in the neighbourhood of the Rev. John Newton, the converted slave-trader, who was curate in that town. At Olney Cowper added at once to his terrors of Hell and to his amusements. For the terrors, Newton, who seems to have wielded the Gospel as fiercely as a slaver’s whip, was largely responsible. He had earned a reputation for “preaching people mad,” and Cowper, tortured with shyness, was even subjected to the ordeal of leading in prayer at gatherings of the faithful. Newton, however, was a man of tenderness, humour, and literary tastes, as well as of a somewhat savage piety. He was not only Cowper’s tyrant, but Cowper’s nurse, and, in setting Cowper to write the Olney Hymns, he gave a powerful impulse to a talent hitherto all but hidden. At the same time, when, as a result of the too merciless flagellation of his parishioners on the occasion of some Fifth of November revels, Newton was attacked by a mob and driven out of Olney, Cowper undoubtedly began to breathe more freely. Even under the eye of Newton, however, Cowper could enjoy his small pleasures, and we have an attractive picture of him feeding his eight pair of tame pigeons every morning on the gravel walk in the garden. He shared with Newton his amusements as well as his miseries. We find him in 1780 writing to the departed Newton to tell him of his recreations as an artist and gardener. “I draw,” he said, “mountains, valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks, and dab-chicks.” He represents himself in this lively letter as a Christian lover of baubles, rather to the disadvantage of lovers of baubles who are not Christians:

I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the earth—what are the planets—what is the sun itself but a bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, “The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!” Their eyes have never been opened to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever. They think a fine estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse upon them with ten times more. I am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be worth a farthing; amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord Bute’s gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when I have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it air, I say to myself: “This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me for the present; I must leave it soon.”

In this and the following year we find him turning his thoughts more and more frequently to writing as a means of forgetting himself. “The necessity of amusement,” he wrote to Mrs. Unwin’s clergyman son, “makes me sometimes write verses; it made me a carpenter, a birdcage maker, a gardener; and has lately taught me to draw, and to draw too with … surprising proficiency in the art, considering my total ignorance of it two months ago.” His impulse towards writing verses, however, was an impulse of a playful fancy rather than of a burning imagination. “I have no more right to the name of poet,” he once said, “than a maker of mouse-traps has to that of an engineer…. Such a talent in verse as mine is like a child’s rattle—very entertaining to the trifler that uses it, and very disagreeable to all beside.” “Alas,” he wrote in another letter, “what can I do with my wit? I have not enough to do great things with, and these little things are so fugitive that, while a man catches at the subject, he is only filling his hand with smoke. I must do with it as I do with my linnet; I keep him for the most part in a cage, but now and then set open the door, that he may whisk about the room a little, and then shut him up again.” It may be doubted whether, if subjects had not been imposed on him from without, he would have written much save in the vein of “dear Mat Prior’s easy jingle” or the Latin trifles of Vincent Bourne, of whom Cowper said: “He can speak of a magpie or a cat in terms so exquisitely appropriated to the character he draws that one would suppose him animated by the spirit of the creature he describes.”

Cowper was not to be allowed to write, except occasionally, on magpies and cats. Mrs. Unwin, who took a serious view of the poet’s art, gave him as a subject The Progress of Error, and is thus mainly responsible for the now little-read volume of moral satires, with which he began his career as a poet at the age of fifty in 1782. It is not a book that can be read with unmixed, or even with much, delight. It seldom rises above a good man’s rhetoric. Cowper, instead of writing about himself and his pets, and his cucumber-frames, wrote of the wicked world from which he had retired, and the vices of which he could not attack with that particularity that makes satire interesting. The satires are not exactly dull, but they are lacking in force, either of wit or of passion. They are hardly more than an expression of sentiment and opinion. The sentiments are usually sound—for Cowper was an honest lover of liberty and goodness—but even the cause of liberty is not likely to gain much from such a couplet as:

Man made for kings! those optics are but dim