WILLIAM COWPER

It is not for nothing that William Cowper is so often associated in our memory with the particular animal which delighted him more than any other. From the day of his birth to the day of his death his plight was curiously similar to that of a hunted hare. In his case, however, the flight, the desperate agony, the tragic climax, was by no means contained in the brief hours of a mud-splashed January afternoon, for it was the awful destiny of this sensitive and polished gentleman, of this elegant partial hermaphrodite, to hear for no less than sixty-nine years, unmistakably upon the midnight wind, the sound of “The Hound of Heaven” following close at his heels.

He heard it as a schoolboy crossing the churchyard of St. Margaret’s; he heard it in his chambers at the Inner Temple above “the sound of waters passing only into pails and pitchers”; he heard it in the sweet seclusion of Olney “upon the southern side of the slant hills” and louder and even louder he heard it during the last terrible years of exile in East Anglia.

William Cowper was born at Great Berkamstead in Hertfordshire on Nov. 26, 1731. His father was the rector of the village and also chaplain to George II. His mother, whose maiden name had been Donne, belonged to the same family as the famous Dean of St. Paul’s. While still but a child Cowper was sent to a boarding school, where he fell under the evil persecution of an older boy. So deeply did the personality of this bully impress itself upon the nerves of the young poet that he never dared to look at him above the knees, and, as he himself tells us, “knew him by his shoe buckles better than by anything else.” From this school he went to Westminster. Was it, one wonders, some half-conscious premonition of the terrible fate that the future had in store for him which as a boy led him to pay a visit to Bedlam, whose ghastly chamber in those days stood open for the morbid curiosity of the public? The good Hanoverian chaplain appears to have entertained no suspicion of the nature of his son’s temperament, for we learn that he at this time gravely put into his hands a treatise on suicide for the purpose of receiving the opinion of his eldest son on that academic question.

Only a few years were to intervene before William Cowper, whatever his judgment may have been upon the philosophical aspects of this problem, was to make a serious attempt to put the precepts of the dissertation into practical use. Terrified beyond reason by certain contingencies which might require him to appear in public, he deliberately tried to kill himself by means of his garters and his chamber door.

Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horror and rising up in despair.

It was his first attack of actual madness, and he was taken to an asylum. Obsessed by the delusion that he was damned, he remained in this place for two years. His brother, John Cowper, came to visit him, but his sympathetic reasoning got for its pains only one answer: “O brother, I am damned—Think of eternity and then think what it is to be damned!”

On being released from confinement he went to live near Cambridge, and it was during this time that he attached himself to the household of a retired clergyman called Unwin. Shortly after this the good man, his host, was thrown from his horse and killed, and the haunted poet for the rest of his life continued to live under the same roof with the widow, Mary Unwin.

Under the influence of the Rev. John Newton, that “old African blasphemer,” as he loved to call himself, the family moved to Olney. There can be no doubt that close proximity to this converted ex-slave trader did William Cowper little good. They saw a great deal of each other. They attended prayer meetings, visited the sick, and collaborated in composing the Olney hymns. And what hymns those of William Cowper are! Some of them as liquid and beautiful as the songs heard from the lips of a shepherd boy in a shadowy fern-grown glade of the delectable mountains:

and others, alas! marred by the primordial savageries of a crude and debased theology:

John Newton had already earned a reputation for “preaching people mad!” And indeed it would seem that such achievements filled him with no slight complacence. “Near a dozen gracious people,” he tells us, “became disordered in their heads” after listening to his winged words. With such a man at his elbow, what chance, we may well ask, had William Cowper? In the year 1773 he was once more insane, and from then till the day of his death nothing was able to remove his fixed conviction that he had been utterly and finally abandoned by God to the irrevocable doom of eternal perdition.

So deep-set had this terrible delusion now become that he even denied himself the solace of prayer, deeming that to one in his extreme case it was useless, nay, blasphemous, to attend church or even so much as to say a grace over his daily bread.

And so we come to that long period of Cowper’s life which is so familiar to the literary world—the period when the strange, obsessed poet diverted himself “under the point of a sword suspended by a hair” by composing those verses which have made his name famous. Everything was done that could be done to draw his attention away from his sombre, spiritual preoccupations. His friends presented him with tame hares and he spent his hours in building hutches for these long-eared sensitive creatures, which in the evenings would gambol on the parlor carpet. But even as he watched them at their playful antics he would hear that pursuant voice, “Cowper, you are damned! Cowper, you are damned!” He walked abroad, he chatted, he laughed, he helped to wind Mary Unwin’s balls of thread; during the warmer months he would spend long hours in a summer-house, “not much bigger than a sedan chair,” and on mild Winter afternoons would take shelter in a greenhouse, the glass of which was covered with mats. But go where he might, hide where he might, those sensitive ears under the quaint cambric muslin cap were aware of sounds by no means easily to be confused with the murmur of bees in mignonette or the chirruping of birds in leafy trees.

There is in truth something almost ghastly in contemplating the spectacle of William Cowper playing spillikins or battledore and shuttlecock with Lady Austin in the face of such preoccupations. It is to Lady Austin, of course, that we owe some of his finest verse, and his talent for poetry at its best is a very high quality. In these long, rambling productions wherein, as Mr. Robert Lynd has so admirably said, Cowper’s music progresses “as a snail of imagination laboring under a heavy shell of eloquence,” one comes upon passages in which the poet in a manner quite peculiar to himself makes immortal certain scenes of nature. All that he looked upon in his afternoon walks by the side of Mrs. Unwin, all that he noticed as he drove abroad in Lady Hasketh’s carriage, found its place sooner or later in his poetry. And so close was his observation, and so genuine his power of appreciation, that something of the thrill that came to him upon those far-off excursions is still conveyed to us. Many of his country vignettes have in them the burden out of which unique and authentic poetry is made. With what consummate skill he can make us see those country roads about Olney, which to him had become so familiar! The very farm wains he etches in:

How by a few inimitable touches he can conjure up before our eyes the look of the Winter landscape, made strange by the first fall of snow, with its few single dead grasses or “bents” still showing above the white surface and indeed made “conspicuous” now by being “fledged with icy feathers.”

We follow his steps up a long arched avenue and share his pleasure in watching the quick movements of a Winter robin—

The reappearance of his cousin, Lady Hasketh, into his life was undoubtedly of the greatest advantage to Cowper. This excellent woman did all that was in her power to enliven the poet’s days. She persuaded the singular household to move from Olney to Weston Underwood and encouraged its two inmates to enjoy such harmless pleasures as were provided by the society of the neighborhood. William Cowper had inherited from his forefathers the manners and easy grace of a well-bred gentleman, and now that fame had come to him his cousin was evidently anxious that he should cut something of a figure in Olney. Commenting upon his clothes at this time, the poet says: “Green and buff are colors in which I am oftener seen than any others, and are become almost as natural to me as to a parrot.” The Rev. John Newton was not a little put out by this sudden change in his friend’s manner of life. “I find,” he wrote, “after all my supposed acquaintance with the human heart there are windings and depths in it of which I know no more than of the dark, unfathomable caves of the ocean,” and he never penned a truer word. One feels in entire sympathy with the good sense of Lady Hasketh when she declared, in explanation of her cousin’s sadness, “The eternal praying and preaching were too much.” As a matter of fact, the Rev. John Newton need have felt no misgiving. Cowper remained still the helpless quarry of the Hound of Heaven, though he disguised himself never so cleverly by “associating with gay people, wearing a green coat and becoming an archer.”

In 1787 he tried once more to commit suicide. In superstitious awe he would await the appearance of each new moon and the yearly return of his black month—the month of January. Little enough it availed him to write verses to a dead bullfinch when the following morning he would awake in tremulous apprehension with this line from Milton ringing in his ears:

In 1791 a fresh disaster overtook him. Mrs. Unwin had a paralytic stroke, “Oh, Mr. Cowper, don’t let me fall!” came the frightened cry as he stood one morning at his desk in his parlor. The seizure had an unexpected effect upon the behavior of this woman, “more polite than a Duchess.” From thenceforth, instead of feeling concern for the comfort of the aging and demented poet, Mary Unwin became more and more exacting in her querulous demands upon his attention. His work, his walks, his diversions had each in turn to be abandoned, until every hour of his day was occupied in looking after her slightest wish and whim.

The strain became too much. Again his hallucinations took audible form. He heard voices. With questionable veracity a stone in the wall called out, “I am God.” And once at midnight he listened to this mysterious and baleful utterance, “He shall eat eleven days longer or thereabout.”

At last he was persuaded by his kinsman, “Johnny of Norfolk,” to leave Weston and travel to East Anglia. John Baily alludes to this drastic change in the poet’s life as “a last heroic service rendered to him by his cousin.” The wisdom and kindness of the move have always seemed dubious. “Johnny of Norfolk” happened to be a progenitor of the present writer, and even as a child he remembers noting the strangely unimaginative look of the good man’s features as represented in a family portrait. It is incredible to believe that so spruce and bepowdered an individual should have been able to understand the difficult and delicate nature of the obligations he was undertaking. There is evidence that the ailing poet resented the change. A few days before he left he wrote on a window shutter of his home the following words:

Once in Norfolk, under the care of his energetic kinsman, things went from bad to worse. The few remaining letters penned by Cowper hit one to the heart. He recognized in the wayside grass of the Norfolk lanes the same herbs that he had so often gathered for his pet birds and is reminded of that long interim of years when he was at least half-happy. He writes to Lady Hasketh:

Oh, that there could be pity, or if not that, at least forbearance, for the most forlorn of all men! Such I am, and expect to be in a condition worse than such tomorrow. Farewell—W. C.

Mrs. Unwin was slowly dying and the poet knew it. “Sally, is there life above-stairs?” he asked the maidservant on the morning before the end came. When told of her death he persisted in declaring that she was not “actually dead,” but it was easy enough to dislodge any delusion upon that score by simply showing him the face of the woman who had been his constant companion for so many years. With one shrill, wild cry the nightcapped hermaphrodite turned from the bedside, never to mention her name again.

Slowly the years passed, with William Cowper sitting “still and silent as a stone.” Terrible indeed must have been the thoughts that passed through that diseased brain! Once more he heard voices; and to counteract their influence “Johnny of Norfolk,” a man of infinite resource, had tubes let into that silent chamber, little tin tubes, through which he caused to have piped words of comfort in attempted emulation of the awful voice of God!

The end approached. They asked him how he felt. “I feel,” answered William Cowper, “unutterable despair.” On his deathbed they brought him a cordial, but he waved it aside. “What can it signify?”

It is satisfactory to learn that in the opinion of my great-grandfather, when at length at liberty to scrutinize the corpse, there rested upon the dead poet’s face an expression of “holy surprise.”

Cowper was buried at East Dereham. A month before his death for one short interval his poetic genius returned to him and taking pen in hand he wrote “The Castaway.” Even to this day the terrible and tragic lines of this tremendous poem trouble our imaginations. What a cry is here! What an appalling cry!