That tell you so—say, rather, they for him.
Nor will the manners of the clergy benefit much as the result of such an attack on the “pleasant-Sunday-afternoon” kind of pastor as is contained in the lines:
If apostolic gravity be free
To play the fool on Sundays, why not we?
If he the tinkling harpsichord regards
As inoffensive, what offence in cards?
These, it must in fairness be said, are not examples of the best in the moral satires; but the latter is worth quoting as evidence of the way in which Cowper tried to use verse as the pulpit of a rather narrow creed. The satires are hardly more than denominational in their interest. They belong to the religious fashion of their time, and are interesting to us now only as the old clothes of eighteenth-century evangelicalism. The subject-matter is secular as well as religious, but the atmosphere almost always remains evangelical. The Rev. John Newton wrote a preface for the volume, suggesting this and claiming that the author “aims to communicate his own perceptions of the truth, beauty and influence of the religion of the Bible.” The publisher became so alarmed at this advertisement of the piety of the book that he succeeded in suppressing it in the first edition. Cowper himself had enough worldly wisdom to wish to conceal his pious intentions from the first glance of the reader, and for this reason opened the book, not with The Progress of Error, but with the more attractively-named Table Talk. “My sole drift is to be useful,” he told a relation, however. “… My readers will hardly have begun to laugh before they will be called upon to correct that levity, and peruse me with a more serious air.” He informed Newton at the same time: “Thinking myself in a measure obliged to tickle, if I meant to please, I therefore affected a jocularity I did not feel.” He also told Newton: “I am merry that I may decoy people into my company.” On the other hand, Cowper did not write John Gilpin which is certainly his masterpiece, in the mood of a man using wit as a decoy. He wrote it because it irresistibly demanded to be written. “I wonder,” he once wrote to Newton, “that a sportive thought should ever knock at the door of my intellects, and still more that it should gain admittance. It is as if harlequin should intrude himself into the gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state.” Harlequin, luckily for us, took hold of his pen in John Gilpin and in many of the letters. In the moral satires, harlequin is dressed in a sober suit and sent to a theological seminary. One cannot but feel that there is something incongruous in the boast of a wit and a poet that he had “found occasion towards the close of my last poem, called Retirement, to take some notice of the modern passion for seaside entertainments, and to direct the means by which they might be made useful as well as agreeable.” This might serve well enough as a theme for a “letter to the editor” of The Baptist Eye-opener. One cannot imagine, however, its causing a flutter in the breast of even the meekest of the nine muses.
Cowper, to say truth, had the genius not of a poet but of a letter-writer. The interest of his verse is chiefly historical. He was a poet of the transition to Wordsworth and the revolutionists, and was a mouthpiece of his time. But he has left only a tiny quantity of memorable verse. Lamb has often been quoted in his favour. “I have,” he wrote to Coleridge in 1796, “been reading The Task with fresh delight. I am glad you love Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not call that man my friend who should be offended with the ‘divine chit-chat of Cowper.’” Lamb, it should be remembered, was a youth of twenty-one when he wrote this, and Cowper’s verse had still the attractions of early blossoms that herald the coming of spring. There is little in The Task to make it worth reading to-day, except to the student of literary history. Like the Olney Hymns and the moral satires it was a poem written to order. Lady Austen, the vivacious widow who had meanwhile joined the Olney group, was anxious that Cowper should show what he could do in blank verse. He undertook to humour her if she would give him a subject. “Oh,” she said, “you can never be in want of a subject; you can write upon any; write upon this sofa!” Cowper, in his more ambitious verse, seems seldom to have written under the compulsion of the subject as the great poets do. Even the noble lines On the Loss of the Royal George were written, as he confessed, “by desire of Lady Austen, who wanted words to the March in Scipio.” For this Lady Austen deserves the world’s thanks, as she does for cheering him up in his low spirits with the story of John Gilpin. He did not write John Gilpin by request, however. He was so delighted on hearing the story that he lay awake half the night laughing at it, and the next day he felt compelled to sit down and write it out as a ballad. “Strange as it may seem,” he afterwards said of it, “the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all.” “The grinners at John Gilpin,” he said in another letter, “little dream what the author sometimes suffers. How I hated myself yesterday for having ever wrote it!” It was the publication of The Task and John Gilpin that made Cowper famous. It is not The Task that keeps him famous to-day. There is, it seems to me, more of the divine fire in any half-dozen of his good letters than there is in the entire six books of The Task. One has only to read the argument at the top of the third book, called The Garden, in order to see in what a dreary didactic spirit it is written. Here is the argument in full:
Self-recollection and reproof—Address to domestic happiness—Some account of myself—The vanity of many of the pursuits which are accounted wise—Justification of my censures—Divine illumination necessary to the most expert philosopher—The question, what is truth? answered by other questions—Domestic happiness addressed again—Few lovers of the country—My tame hare—Occupations of a retired gentleman in the garden—Pruning—Framing—Greenhouse—Sowing of flower-seeds—The country preferable to the town even in the winter—Reasons why it is deserted at that season—Ruinous effects of gaming and of expensive improvement—Book concludes with an apostrophe to the metropolis.
It is true that, in the intervals of addresses to domestic happiness and apostrophes to the metropolis, there is plenty of room here for Virgilian verse if Cowper had had the genius for it. Unfortunately, when he writes about his garden, he too often writes about it as prosaically as a contributor to a gardening paper. His description of the making of a hot frame is merely a blank-verse paraphrase of the commonest prose. First, he tells us: