scenes the larger part of the "Task" was written in winter, and we know of nothing that resembles their excellence except the admirable descriptions of winter by the Scottish fifteenth-century poets Henryson 2 and Gavin Douglas.3 It is, however, a notable feature of Cowper's pictured landscape that it everywhere contains human or animal life. He paints delightful vignettes of the driver of the hay wain, the ploughman, the thresher, the carter, the woodman; gipsies fill the scene at times, and animals innumerable occupy prominent places. Dogs, horses, hares, squirrels, and birds of all sorts animate his country-side. Cowper points out that cruelty to animals was unknown before the Fall; since that period, however, man has not hesitated to persecute animals to make him sport, or to gratify his angry passions or his gluttony, or to save him labour. The heart which finds no pleasure in the sight of animals enjoying life is, according to Cowper, hard, unfit for human fellowship, void of sympathy, and dead alike to love and friendship. His interest in his pet hares, his description of the woodman's dog "Shaggy and lean and shrewd, with pointed ears And tail cropped short, half lurcher and half cur". in the fifth book of the "Task," his denunciation of sport in the third, point to an affection for, and a knowledge of dumb beasts of which there is scarcely any earlier example. In his patient observation of the varying aspects of nature and of the habits of animals, 1 Cf. "Task," IV. ll. 311-332; V. ll. 1-126; VI. II. 57-84. 2 Cf. the opening stanzas of the "Testament of Cressida.' 3 Cf. Prologue to the seventh book of his translation of the "Æneid." Cowper bears perhaps some affinity to Gilbert White, the author of the 'Natural History of Selborne,' one of the best "country books" in our literature. Cowper, it must be confessed, only knew the poor from outside. He describes their sufferings eloquently enough, but with a certain personal aloofness; he utters the conventional truths that the deserving, who shyly ask relief, are often refused, while clamorous importunity in rags is generally liberally rewarded, and that poverty is, in many cases, self-inflicted woe. Now, although Crabbe dwelt chiefly on the tragic and sordid sides of poverty, he recognised the common brotherhood of men and the need for improvement in the lives and circumstances of the lowest classes of society. a truer painter of his poorer brethren. Crabbe and Cowper failed to discern, that there was joy as well as sorrow in their lives. They had a pride in their faithful wives and prattling children, and were so accustomed to poverty that even when "Sair disasters, But Burns was Like loss o' health or want o' masters," caused cold and hunger to stare them in the face, they were scarcely frightened. Burns writes— "But how it comes I never kent yet, They're maistly wonderfu' contented." He undoubtedly comes nearest the reality of poverty, and his point of view is one which modern philanthropists might consider with profit. Although Cowper has told us that he liked to look on the world through loopholes of retreat, his sense of 1 Cf. "The Twa Dogs." patriotism and his pride in his native land was very strong, and his interest in the vital questions that concerned his country and humanity very keen. While deploring the loss of the American colonies, inveighing against the indifference of the clergy, against the evils of the slave-trade, against the follies, extravagances, and pretences of society, against the lax discipline of the Universities, he gloried in the freedom that reigned in England, and acknowledged "England, with all thy faults, I love thee still, Where English minds and manners may be found, In his strictures on slavery he was voicing the wave of humanitarian feeling that was passing over the land: it was the time of Humanity Martin, of Howard the prison reformer, of Raikes and Sunday - schools, and of the beginning of the movement for the mitigation of the penal laws which culminated in Romilly. Cowper's utterances on the slave-trade may be found in "Charity," a poem published in 1782,1 in the second. book of the "Task" (1785),2 and in some lyrics written in 1788, but not published until 1803. He argues that it is a disgrace to inflict on a human being, though he may not be white in colour, indignities that we should weep to see inflicted on a beast. Of the last poems, which do not rank among the best Cowper wrote, he said himself: "I shall now probably cease to sing of tortured negroes- -a theme which never pleased me, but which, in the hope of doing them some little service, I was not unwilling to handle." When we remember that the Society for the Suppression of the Slave 2 Cf. 11. 8-47. 1 Cf. ll. 137-243. Trade was only founded in 1787, and that the bill for its abolition did not come into force until January 1, 1808, Cowper's verses on the subject, small though their literary merit may be, become of importance. He kept sufficiently in contact with the world to sympathise with the troubles of Warren Hastings, to turn a newspaper account of the wreck of the Royal George into one of the finest lyrics of the kind in our language, and to praise the unselfishness of men like Whitefield and Howard. Cowper's religious opinions are more difficult to indicate. He has been called a self-accusing Calvinist. He held views of an Evangelical character, but sterner, more rigid than is usually found within the Church of England. With him everything was fixed and irrevocable; the Almighty was a God of Wrath, dealing out rewards and punishments with unerring justice, but without mercy. Consequently mortals lived in constant dread of the fires of hell. It is a gloomy religion, and those poems that deal exclusively with it are not his most successful efforts. Happily it does not intrude on his best work. The morbid thoughts and feelings, however, that were always in some degree in the back of his mind, tinged his more serious verse with a tender melancholy that rather enhances the charm of certain of his pictures. That side by side with the morbid conditions that finally plunged Cowper's mind in darkness there should exist a vein of humour and playfulness almost unique in our literature, is one of those psychological phenomena for which it is hopeless to try to account. It breaks out in his familiar letters, in his reported conversations, in his occasional verse-which ranks beside that of Prior and Gay, of Praed and Thackeray 1—and in his delightful fables. In all these he betrays a humorous appreciation of the lighter and more trifling aspects of human affairs that has scarcely been surpassed. This side of him is well illustrated in his letters. The spontaneity of their humour is so unmistakable that it has been said of him that he was born a letterwriter and made a poet. No study of Cowper, the man and poet, can be complete without a careful reading of his familiar correspondence. To But it is, perhaps, as the poet of the simple human affections that Cowper will chiefly live. He was the first of our poets to consider the records of domestic life and love and happiness a worthy subject for verse. Cowper, the most delightful life was one spent in the country, in the congenial society of the friends he loved, surrounded by his books and his pets, and the pleasures afforded by a garden and greenhouse close at hand. There is nothing in the whole of English poetry to compare with the description of domestic happiness in the winter evening scene of the fourth book of the “Task.” He glorifies the joys of tea-drinking round the fire with pleasant companions, of needlework, of reading aloud, of such music as the domestic circle afforded, of frugal suppers and quiet talk. But Cowper's conception of such an existence had its limitations. Although every nation owes its greatness more or less to the stability and purity of its family life, it must be conceded that the kind of domesticity in which Cowper delighted would not satisfy all temperaments. He knew nothing in his own person of the feelings of a husband or a father, little from observation of those of a wife or 1 Cf. section 4 (Playful Poems) in this volume, pp. 201-226. |