LECTURE III, COWPER. I TRACED in my first lecture the growth of the Poetry of Man from the critical school to Cowper. In Cowper's hands, it took a much wider development. I only laid down the larger lines of its growth, omitting for the sake of clearness a number of branch lines, such as that of the new interest taken in the romantic past, which, touched by Macpherson in his "Ossian," and by Chatterton in his forgeries, was afterwards fully worked out in narrative poetry by Sir Walter Scott: such as the ballad, which chose a short narrative of human passion and related it with simplicity and intensity-or the shorter lyric, which in its treatment of a passing phase of meditative or violent passion of the heart, and in its strict limitation of itself within that phase, so as to preserve what is called lyrical unity, is strictly analogous to the hymn in its treatment of a sudden and transient phase of the life of spiritual feeling. These and others I pass by-though one sees how largely they entered the work of the pocts on Manbecause theology of any kind would not be likely to intrude into them. I remain close then to the large lines I have spoken of; and my object in the first part of this lecture is, to show how largely Cowper extended the poetry of Man, and how it was influenced, and in him indeed drenched with theology. I approach the subject by asking where we find him writing, and the question has its meaning. We find him retired in the heart of a very quiet country. eddying Ouse flowed close to his dwelling through its willow-haunted meadows; it accompanied his walks, and its quiet movement seems to flow through his poetry. Day after day, Yardley Wood and the park of the Throckmortons saw the silent poet-face moving amidst their trees. But little society disturbed that sequestered life; few were the men and fewer the women whom he met; he companied with sheep and birds, with his hares and his spaniel, till he grew to know them as his friends; and one would say that in such a life the poetry of Man was not likely to flourish, nor was a wide view of mankind possible. Was it probable that this lawyer's clerk, who had made a hopeless failure of his public life, should say more of human nature and strike deeper into the world of men than the brilliant Londoner, Pope, or the courtly scholar, Gray-that the voice which spoke of Man from the solitude of the country should say more. than the voice which spoke of him from the crowded society of the city? In one point certainly this rural retirement spoiled the largeness of Cowper's view. He saw cities and their evils through the exaggeration of distance, and in that glare of morality in which sin is so magnified that the good which balances it is lost. His doctrinal views had also power over him and he saw the curse which rested on man and nothing else, when he looked upon the city. It was different when he turned his eyes upon the village and the country poor. Seeing clearly their evil he also saw their good, and it is with some naïveté that he imputes more than half the evil in the country to the influence of those who drift thither from the town. But whether in the country or the town, Cowper's religion led him to trace all moral guilt and folly to the world's rejection of Christ. But the point I wish to draw your attention to is, that unlike the town poet of the past to whom the dwellers in the country are nothing, we have now the country poet deeply interested in the life of towns as well as in the life around him. It is no longer classes of men which awake sympathy, nor special societies; it is no longer the passionate or the moral or the intellectual side of human nature, each alone, on which the poet dwells,-it is the whole of mankind, it is the whole of human nature. The truth is, the first swell of the great wave which put Man in the foremost place and interest, Man independent of rank and caste and convention and education, Man in his simple elements, was now flowing over Europe. Poets are quick to feel, and it reached the quiet Cowper in his hermitage, as it reached the lowland lad who, in his glory and his joy, Followed his plough along the mountain side, and for the first time, as one smells the brine before one sees the ocean, we scent in English poetry, too distinctly to be explained away, the air of those ideas of which the French Revolution was the most local and the most violent outburst. For the first time an attempt is made in poetry to cover the whole range of Man, to think of Man as one people; to spread poetical interest over all who wear a human face. And it was done, as is commonly the case when the impulse is received from an idea which has not yet taken any political form, quite unconsciously. Cowper talked as naturally of all men as Pope did of one of two classes of men: he asks how he and any man that lives could be strangers to each other; he conceives of his poetic work as for the service of mankind; and such an aim was now for the first time possible. universal idea of Man had passed from political Philosophers to the people, and the undefined emotion it stirred in the people was felt and thrown into form by the poets. A But the revolutionary idea of the unity of Man was in Cowper's mind grounded on a theological one, on God as the common Maker of Man. He speaks of "the link of brotherhood, by which one common Maker bound him to the Kind." And his work for men was to make them out of sin and death into life with God, for they are Bone of my bone, and kindred souls to mine. To this religious element of an universal brotherhood in God is to be traced the large range of his human view. He looked abroad and saw all men related to God, it mattered not of what nation, caste, or colour. As such they had equal rights and equal duties in a spiritual country of which all were citizens; for as he writes, the limiting power of his doctrinal theology departs and the individual theology of the poet who sympathizes with all men, takes the upper hand. East, west, north, and south, his interest flew. In his satires he touches, not with savage bitterness, but with a gentleness which healed while it lashed, on nearly every phase of human life in England; on the Universities and the Schools, the Hospitals and the Prisons; on cities and villages; on the statesman, the clergyman, the lawyer, the soldier, the man of science, the critic, the writer for the press, the pleasure - seeker, the hunter, the musician, the epicure, the card-player, the ploughman, the cottager, and fifty others. Their good side, their follies, their vices, are sketched and ridiculed and praised. The range of his interest was as wide as human life, and as he sketched, he saw as the one ideal and the one remedy for all-the Cross of Christ. Whatever we may think of his religion or the manner of it, there is no doubt but that it indefinitely extended his poetic sympathy, and that in this extension of sympathy we find ourselves in another world altogether than that of Dryden, Pope, or Gray. It is no longer intellectual interest in man, or sentimental interest; it is vivid, personal, passionate. It went beyond classes of men, it was an interest in his nation; but he derived his patriotism and drew the passion with which he informed it from the connection of his country with God. It was God who was the King of England, and was educating the nation; and this conception bound all citizens together into mutual love of one another and the whole. On this ground he made his impassioned appeal to his countrymen to throw off their vices and follies and to be worthy of their high vocation; would they not, he asked, be true to Him who had wrought so gloriously among them? This is the note |