to put forth his full strength in this direction when he wrote with an unconverted public before his eye. It is significant that his one undisputed triumph in this sort was won as a distraction from his own sad delusions, and, "but for that sadness, had never been written." John Gilpin is one of the gayest poems in the language. It is conceived in something of the same vein as Goldsmith's Mad Dog. But the "linen-draper bold" and the lady of the "frugal mind" have won, and deserved to win, more friends than the man who ran a godly race" and the dog who, "to win his private ends, went mad" and bit him. Yet there is nothing in Cowper which can for a moment be put in the scales against the Parson and Schoolmaster of the Deserted Village, or the gallery of portraits enshrined in Retaliation. With the Letters the case is different. Here humour, and humour of a peculiarly human strain, is the first thing to strike us. And it strikes us the more by contrast with the other great collection of the time, that of Horace Walpole (1717-1797). There is no need to put the two collections in the balance against each other. And he would be a rash man who should undertake to say which is the more delightful. But it will hardly be denied that, if he lacks the wit and sparkle of Walpole, Cowper has a humour both more delicate. and more human than his brilliant rival. The visit of a candidate, the escape of a pet hare, a walk to the next village, the present of a fish, the tremors of an author, the pranks of a youthful friend-such is the staple of his " divine chit-chat"; which, however, does not always refrain from playing even with his own gloomiest convictions. None of his works is better known to the present day; and none is more calculated to win him love. Cowper restored to English poetry the power of expressing the religious instincts of man; he strengthened its hold on the world of outward The personal strain in his nature; he was a keen satirist and, within poetry. certain limits, a born humourist. In all these things his work is distinctive; in most of them it creates a precedent. But there is one quality in which he not only had no forerunner, but in which he can hardly be said to have left successors. In his genius for uttering with absolute directness, and in the simplest possible language, his own personal feelings, the most intimate experience of his heart, he stands to this day without a rival. In the lines of The Task where he speaks of his own affliction - "I was a stricken deer that left the herd,"-in The Castaway and in the two poems to Mary Unwin, he reached the highest point which it was given him to attain; and he opened a path in which no subsequent poet has been able to follow him. But though, in the strict sense, such poems stand alone, it is easy to see their affinity with much that is most characteristic of the romantic era. Their literary form, not to speak of their moral outlook, is strangely different. But in the last resort they are of the same stock as the self- revelations of Rousseau and his literary descendants, as the Ode 1 See his letter to Bull, July 27, 1791. on Dejection, as much of the most notable poetry of Matthew Arnold. This, indeed, is the one point when Cowper stands in direct relation to the romantic movement in the narrow sense. In his love of nature, in his religious bent, even in his humour, he was touched by the vaguer tendencies of that movement, and his work certainly went to swell its force. Yet, the humour excepted, there is not one of them which does not betray the workings of an influence which is most decisively opposed to all that we understand by Romance the influence of Pope and the Augustans. Both in his religious poetry and in his poetry of nature there is commonly a sediment of discursiveness, of argumentation, which makes it impossible for the stream to run absolutely clear. It is only in such poems as those to Mary Unwin that he works off this disturbing element. It is just where he approaches most nearly to the inmost spirit of romance that he comes most completely to himself. The only other work of Cowper which need here be mentioned is the translation of Homer into blank verse, which occupied him from 1784 to 1791, and which he continued to revise until just before his death. It was avowedly undertaken as a counterblast to Pope, whom Cowper accused of "making Homer strut in buckram," and whose translation was certainly the chief source of the "glossy, unfeeling diction" which was the bane of English poetry for the two next generations, and which Wordsworth denounced in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. As a protest against this, Cowper's venture had its importance. It serves to accentuate the instinctive reaction against Pope, which, as we have seen, was his starting-point. But, on the whole, it is lacking in the first essential of a translation: spirit and go. It has been necessary to dwell at some length on Cowper. For he stands, so to speak, at the parting of the ways: half a disciple of the old order, half, indeed more than half, a standard-bearer of the new. His successors are more whole-hearted. And, for our purpose, it will suffice to speak of them more briefly. Burns. The year after the issue of The Task, the first edition of Burns' early poems was published at Kilmarnock (1786); it was republished, with additions, in the following year at Edinburgh. Some score of further poems were added in the edition of 1793. Many more were published in two serial miscellanies, The Scots' Musical Museum, edited by Johnson between 1787 and 1803, and The Melodies of Scotland, issued by George Thomson, to whom some of the most interesting letters of Burns are addressed, from 1793 onwards. The first collected edition was published four years after the poet's death, in 1800. The greatest of the love-songs belong to the later years of Burns' short life (1759-1796). So do the finest poems inspired by the love of country and of freedom.2 But, even without these and certain 1 E.g., O, my love's like a red, red rose (1794); Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast (1796). 2 E.g., Scots, wha hae (1793); Is there for honest poverty? (1794-95). poems already written but suppressed for the moment out of prudence,1 the Kilmarnock volume offered ample proof of the marvellous genius of the new writer and of his extraordinary range. Love and hate, pathos and scorn, a quick eye for nature, and a deep hold on all that stirs the heart of man-these were manifest from the first. And from the first they were welcomed in Scotland, though not unnaturally they were more slow to win their way across the Border. It is significant that Cowper, while he lamented the "barbarism" of the peasant poet, was among the first to recognise his greatness. His relation to Outward influence, the influence of individual writers or of literary fashion, counts for little in the case of Burns. Something he may Scottish writers have owed to Beattie; something more to and to Percy. Allan Ramsay and to Fergusson. But his only serious debt is to the floating tradition, the popular poetry, of his own country. And this is a debt which increased, rather than diminished, as time went on. It appears in the defiant humour, as well as in the characteristic metre,2 of his earlier poems. It appears still more strongly, and under a form yet nobler, in the songs of later years. Here therefore we stand face to face with the true meaning of the work initiated by Percy. The Reliques were not merely a voice from the past. Their task was not merely to open a mine of striking 1 E.g., The Unco Guid and Holy Willie's Prayer, or, to take an example of a very different style, The Jolly Beggars. The metre, e.g., of the Field-mouse and the Mountain Daisy. |