Chapter 3

We may note in all this the almost entire lack of indebtedness in Cowper to his predecessors. One of his most famous phrases, indeed, that on "the cup that cheers, but not inebriates," he borrowed from Berkeley; but his borrowings were few, far fewer than those of any other great poet, whereas mine would be a long essay were I to produce by the medium of parallel columns all that other poets have borrowed from him.

Lastly, among Cowper's many excellencies as a poet let me note his humour. His pathos, his humanity--many fine qualities he has in common with others; but what shall we say of his humour? If the ubiquitous Scot were present, so far from his native heath--and I daresay we have one or two with us--he might claim that humour was also the prerogative of Robert Burns. He might claim, also, that certain other great characteristics of Cowper were to be found almost simultaneously in Burns. There is virtue in the _almost_. Cowper was born in 1731, Burns in 1759. At any rate humour has been a rare product among the greater English poets. It was entirely absent in Wordsworth, in Shelley, in Keats. Byron possessed a gift of satire and wit, but no humour, Tennyson only a suspicion of it in "The Northern Farmer." From Cowper to Browning, who also had it at times, there has been little humour in the greatest English poetry, although plenty of it in the lesser poets--Hood and the rest. But there was in Cowper a great sense of humour, as there was also plenty of what Hazlitt, almost censoriously, calls "elegant trifling." Not only in the imperishable "John Gilpin," but in the "Case Between Nose and Eyes," "The Nightingale and Glow-worm," and other pieces you have examples of humorous verse which will live as long as our language endures.

Cowper's claims as a poet, then, may be emphasized under four heads:--

I. His enthusiasm for humanity.

II. His love of nature.

III. His love of animal life.

IV. His humour.

And in three of these, let it be said emphatically, he stands out as the creator of a new era.

There is another claim I make for him, and with this I close--his position as a master of prose, as well as of poetry. Cowper was the greatest letter-writer in a language which has produced many great letter- writers--Walpole, Gray, Byron, Scott, FitzGerald, and a long list. But nearly all these men were men of affairs, of action. Given a good literary style they could hardly have been other than interesting, they had so much to say that they gained from external sources. Even FitzGerald--the one recluse--had all the treasures of literature constantly passing into his study. Cowper had but eighteen books altogether during many of his years in Olney, and some of us who have lent our volumes in the past and are still sighing over gaps in our shelves find consolation in the fact that six of Cowper's books had been returned to him after a friend had borrowed for twenty years or so. Now, it is comparatively easy to write good letters with a library around you; it is marvellous that Cowper could have done this with so little material, and his letters are, from this point of view, the best of all--"divine chit-chat" Coleridge called them. His simple style captivates us. And here let me say--keeping to my text--that it is the _sanest_ of styles, a style with no redundancies, no rhetoric, no straining after effect. The outlook on life is sane--what could be finer than the chase for the lost hare, or the call of the Parliamentary candidate, or the flogging of the thief?--and the outlook on literature is particularly sane.

Cowper was well-nigh the only true poet in the first rank in English literature who was at the same time a true critic. Literary history affords a singular revelation of the wild and incoherent judgments of their fellows on the part of the poets. For praise or blame, there are few literary judgments of Byron, of Shelley, of Wordsworth that will stand. Coleridge was a critic first, and his poetry, though good, is small in quantity, and the same may be said of Matthew Arnold. Tennyson discreetly kept away from prose, and his letters, be it remembered, lack distinction as do most letters of the nineteenth century. If, however, as we are really to believe, he it was who really made the first edition of Palgrave's _Golden Treasury of Lyric Poetry_, he came near to Cowper in his sanity of judgment, and one delights to think that in that precious volume Cowper ranks third--that is, after Shakspere and Wordsworth--in the number of selections that are there given, and rightly given, as imperishable masterpieces of English poetry. Tennyson, also, was at one with Cowper in declaring that an appreciation of _Lycidas_ was a touchstone of taste for poetry. To Tennyson, as to Cowper, Milton was the one great English poet after Shakspere; and here, also, we revere the saneness of view. More sane too, was Cowper than any of the modern critics, in that he did not believe that mere technique was the standpoint from which all poetry must ultimately be judged.

"Give me," he says, "a manly rough line with a deal of meaning in it, rather than a whole poem full of musical periods, that have nothing in them, only smoothness to recommend them!"

And thus he justified Robert Browning and many another singer.

Let us then dismiss from our minds the one-sided picture of Cowper as a gloomy fanatic, who was always asking himself in Carlylian phrase, "Am I saved? Am I damned?" Let us remember him as staunch to the friends of his youth, sympathetic to his old schoolfellow, Warren Hastings, when the world would make him out too black. Opposed in theory to tobacco, how he delighted to welcome his good friend Mr. Bull. "My greenhouse," he says, "wants only the flavour of your pipe to make it perfectly delightful!" Naturally tolerant of total abstinence, he asks one friend to drink to the success of his Homer, and thanks another for a present of bottle-stands. From beginning to end, save in those periods of aberration, there is no more resemblance to Cowper in the picture that certain narrow-minded people have desired to portray than there is in these same people's conception of Martin Luther. The real Luther, who loved dancing and mirth and the joy of living as much as did any of the men he so courageously opposed, was not more remote from a conception of him once current in this country than was the real Cowper--the frank, genial humorist, who wrote "John Gilpin," who in his youth "giggled and made giggle" with his girl-cousins, and in his maturer years "laughed and made laugh" with Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh.

To all men there are periods of weariness and depression, side by side with periods of happiness and hopefulness. Cowper, alas! had more than his share of the tragedy of life, but let us not forget that he had some of its joy, and that joy is reflected for us in a substantial literary achievement, which has lived, and influenced the world, while his more tragic experiences may well be buried in oblivion. This, you may have noted, is not a criticism of Cowper, but an eulogy. I would wish to say, however, that the criticism of Cowper by living writers has been of surpassing excellence. For the first fifty or sixty years of the century that we are recalling Cowper was the most popular poet of our country, with Burns and Byron for rivals. He has been largely dethroned by Wordsworth and Shelley, and Tennyson, not one of whom has been praised too much. But if Cowper has sunk somewhat out of sight of late years, owing to inevitable circumstances, it is during these late years that he has secured the goodwill of the best living critics. Would that Mr. Leslie Stephen {56}--who wrote his life in the _Dictionary of National Biography_--would that Mr. Edmund Gosse--who has so recently published a great biography of Cowper's memorable ancestor, Dr. Donne--were, one or other of them, here to-day; or Mr. Austin Dobson, who has visited Olney, and described his impressions; or Dr. Jessopp, who lives near Cowper's tomb in East Dereham Church. These writers are, alas! not with us, and some presentment of a poet they love has fallen to less capable hands.

But not the most brilliant of speeches, not all the enthusiasm of all the critics, can ever restore Cowper to his former immense popularity. We do well, however, to celebrate his centenary, because it is good at certain periods to remember our indebtedness to the great men who have helped us in literature or in life. But that is not to say that we work for the dethronement of later favourites. "Each age must write its own books," says Emerson, and this is particularly the case with the great body of poetry. Cowper, however, will live to all time among students of literature by his longer poems; he will live to all time among the multitude by his ballads and certain of his lyrics. He will, assuredly, live by his letters, to study which will be a thousand times more helpful to the young writer than many volumes of Addison, to whom we were once advised to devote our days and our nights. Cowper will live, above all, as a profoundly interesting and beautiful personality, as a great and good Englishman--the greatest of all the sons of this his adopted town.

III. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF GEORGE BORROW

An Address delivered in Norwich on the Occasion of the Borrow Centenary, 1903.

One hundred years ago there was born some two miles from the pleasant little town of East Dereham, in this county, a child who was christened George Henry Borrow. That is why we are assembled here this evening. I count it one of the most interesting coincidences in literary history that only three years earlier there should have left the world in the same little town--a town only known perhaps to those of us who are Norfolk men--a poet who has always seemed to me to be one of the greatest glories of our literature: I mean William Cowper. Cowper died in April, 1800, and Borrow was born in July, 1803, in this same town of East Dereham: and there very much it might be thought, any point of likeness or of contrast must surely end.

Cowper and Borrow do, indeed, come into some trivial kind of kinship at one or two points. In reading Cowper's beautiful letters I have come across two addressed by him to one Richard Phillips, a bookseller of that day, who had been in prison for publishing some of Thomas Paine's works. Cowper had been asked by Phillips to write a sympathetic poem denunciatory of the political and religious tyranny that had sent Phillips to jail. Cowper had at first agreed, but was afterwards advised not to have anything more to do with Phillips. Judging by the after career of Phillips, Cowper did wisely; for Phillips was not a good man, although twenty years later he had become a sheriff of London and was knighted. As Sir Richard Phillips he was visited by George Borrow, then a youth at the beginning of his career. Borrow came to Phillips armed with an introduction from William Taylor of Norwich, and his reception is most dramatically recorded in the pages of _Lavengro_. This is, however, to anticipate. Then there is a poem by Cowper to Sir John Fenn {62} the antiquary, the first editor of the famous _Paston Letters_. In it there is a reference to Fenn's spouse, who, under the pseudonym of "Mrs. Teachwell," wrote many books for children in her day. Now Borrow could remember this lady--Dame Eleanor Fenn--when he was a boy. He recalled the "Lady Bountiful leaning on her gold-headed cane, while the sleek old footman followed at a respectful distance behind." Lady Fenn was forty- six years old when Cowper referred to her. She was sixty-six when the boy Borrow saw her in Dereham streets. At no other points do these great East Dereham writers come upon common ground: Cowper during the greater part of his life was a recluse. He practically fled from the world. In reading the many letters he wrote--and they are among the best letters in the English language--one is struck by the small number of his correspondents. He had few acquaintances and still fewer friends. He had never seen a hill until he was sixty, and then it was only the modest hills of Sussex that seemed to him so supremely glorious. He was never on the Continent. For half a lifetime he did not move out of one county, the least picturesque part of Buckinghamshire, the neighbourhood of Olney and of Weston. There he wrote the poems that have been a delight to several generations, poems which although they may have gone out of fashion with many are still very dear to some among us; and there, as I have said, he wrote the incomparable letters that have an equally permanent place in literature.

You could not conceive a more extraordinary contrast than the life of this other writer associated with East Dereham, whom we have met to celebrate this evening. George Borrow was the son of a soldier, who had risen from the ranks, and of a mother who had been an actress. Soldier and actress both imply to all of us a restless, wandering life. The soldier was a Cornishman by birth, the actress was of French origin, and so you have blended in this little Norfolk boy--who is a Norfolk boy in spite of it all--every kind of nomadic habit, every kind of fiery, imaginative enthusiasm, a temperament not usually characteristic of those of us who claim East Anglia as the land of our birth or of our progenitors. I wish it were possible for me to reconstruct that Norwich world into which young George Borrow entered at thirteen years of age. That it was a Norwich of great intellectual activity is indisputable. In the year of Borrow's birth John Gurney, who died six years later, first became a partner in the Norwich bank. His more famous son, Joseph John Gurney--aged fifteen--left the Earlham home in order to study at Oxford. His sister, the still more famous Elizabeth Fry, was now twenty-three. So that when Borrow, the thirteen year old son of the veteran soldier--who had already been in Ireland picking up scraps of Irish, and in Scotland adding to his knowledge of Gaelic--settled down for some of his most impressionable years in Norwich, Joseph John Gurney was a young man of twenty-eight and Elizabeth Fry was thirty-six. Dr. James Martineau was eleven years of age and his sister Harriet was fourteen. Another equally clever woman, not then married to Austin, the famous jurist, was Sarah Taylor, aged twenty-three. This is but to name a few of the crowd of Norwich worthies of that day. Would that some one could produce a picture of the literary life of Norwich of this time and of a quarter of a century onward--a period that includes the famous Bishop Stanley's {66} occupancy of the See of Norwich and the visits to this city from all parts of England of a great number of famous literary men. It is my pleasant occupation to-night to endeavour to show that Borrow, the very least of these men and women in public estimation for a good portion of his life, and perhaps the least in popular judgment even since his death, was really the greatest, was really the man of all others to whom this beautiful city should do honour if it asks for a name out of its nineteenth century history to crown with local recognition.

For whatever homage may have fallen to Borrow during the half-century or more since his name first came upon many tongues Norwich, it must be admitted, has given very little of it. No one associated with your city, I repeat, but has heard of the Gurneys and the Martineaus, of the Stanleys and the Austins, whose life stories have made so large a part of your literary and intellectual history during this very period. But I turn in vain to a number of books that I have in my library for any information concerning one who is indisputably the greatest among the intellectual children of Norwich. I turn to Mr. Prothero's _Life of Dean Stanley_--not one word about Borrow; to that pleasant _Memoir_ of Sarah Austin and her mother, Mrs. Taylor, called _Three Generations of a Norfolk Family_--again not one word. I turn to Mr. Braithwaite's biography of Joseph John Gurney, and to Mr. Augustus Hare's book _The Gurneys of Earlham_--upon these worthy biographers Borrow made no impression whatever, although Joseph John Gurney was personally helpful to him and we read in _Lavengro_ of that pleasant meeting between the pair on the river bank when Mr. Gurney chided the boy Borrow or Lavengro for angling. "From that day," he says, "I became less and less a practitioner of that cruel fishing." In Harriet Martineau's _Autobiography_, which enjoyed its hour of fame when it was published twenty-six years ago, there is a contemptuous reference to the disciple of William Taylor, "this polyglot gentleman, who went through Spain disseminating Bibles." If Miss Martineau were alive now she would hear the works of "this polyglot gentleman" praised on every hand, and would find that a cult had arisen which to her would certainly be quite incomprehensible. In that large, dismal book--the _Life of James Martineau_, again, there is but one mention of Dr. Martineau's famous schoolfellow whose name has been linked with him only by a silly story. Do not let it be thought that I am complaining of this neglect; the world will always treat its greatest writers in precisely this fashion. Borrow did not lack for fame of a kind, but he was, as I desire to show, praised in his lifetime for the wrong thing, where he was praised at all. Everyone in the fifties and sixties read _The Bible in Spain_, as they read a hundred other books of that period, now forgotten. Many read it who were deceived by its title. They expected a tract. Many read it as we to-day read the latest novel or biography of the hour. Then a new book arises and the momentary favourite is forgotten. We think for a whole week that we are in contact with a well-nigh immortal work. A little later we concern ourselves not at all whether the book is immortal or not. We go on to something else. The critic is as much to blame as the reader. Not one man in a hundred whose profession it is to come between the author and the public, and to guide the reader to the best in literature, has the least perception of what is good literature. It is easy when a writer has captured the suffrages of the crowd for the critic to tell the world that he is great. That happened to Carlyle, to Tennyson, to many a popular author whose earliest books commanded little attention: but, happily, these writers did not lose heart. They kept on writing. Borrow was otherwise made. He wrote _The Bible in Spain_--a book of travel of surprising merit. It sold largely on its title. Mr. Augustine Birrell has told us that he knew a boy in a very strict household who devoured the narrative on Sunday afternoons, the title being thought to cover a conventional missionary journey. Well, when I was a boy _The Bible in Spain_ had gone out of fashion and the public had not taken up with the author's greater work, _Lavengro_. Borrow was naturally disappointed. He abused the critics and the public. Perhaps he grew somewhat soured. He did not hesitate in _The Romany Rye_ to talk candidly about those "ill-favoured dogs . . . the newspaper editors," and he made the gentleman's gentleman of _Lavengro_ describe how he was excluded from the Servants' Club in Park Lane because his master followed a profession "so mean as literature." In fact as a reaction from the unfriendly reception accorded to the _Romany Rye_--now one of the most costly of his books in a first edition--he lost heart, and he grew to despise the whole literary and writing class. Hence the various stories presenting him in not very sympathetic guise, the story of Thackeray being snubbed on asking Borrow if he had read the _Snob Papers_, of Miss Agnes Strickland receiving an even more forcible rebuff when she offered to send him her _Queens of England_. "For God's sake don't Madame; I should not know where to put them or what to do with them." These stories are in Gordon Hake's _Memoirs of Eighty Years_, but Mr. Francis Hindes Groome has shown us the other side of the picture, and others also to whom I shall refer a little later have done the same. Perhaps the literary class is never the worse for a little plain speaking. The real secret of Borrow is this--that he was a man of action turned into a writer by force of circumstances.

The life of Borrow, unlike that of most famous men of letters, has not been overwritten. His death in 1881 caused little emotion and attracted but small attention in the newspapers. _The Times_, then as now so excellent in its biographies as a rule, devoted but twenty lines to him. Here I may be pardoned for being autobiographical. I was last in Norwich in the early eighties. I had a wild enthusiasm for literature so far as my taste had been directed--that is to say I read every book I came across and had been doing so from my earliest boyhood. But I had never heard of George Borrow or of his works. In my then not infrequent visits to Norwich I cannot recall that his name was ever mentioned, and in my life in London, among men who were, many of them, great readers, I never heard of Borrow or of his achievement. He died in 1881, and as I do not recall hearing his name at the time of his death or until long afterwards, I must have missed certain articles in the _Athenaeum_--two of them admirable "appreciations" by Mr. Watts-Dunton--and so my state of benightedness was as I have described. It may be that those who are a year or two older than I am and those who are younger may find this extraordinary. You have always heard of Borrow and of his works, but I think I am entitled to insist that when Borrow sank into his grave, an old, and to many an eccentric and bitter man, he had fallen into the most curious oblivion with the public that has ever come to a man, I will not say of equal distinction, but of any distinction whatever. Mr. Egmont Hake told the readers of the _Athenaeum_ in a biography that appeared at the time of Borrow's death that Borrow's works were "forgotten in England" and I find in turning to the biography of Borrow in _The Norvicensian_, for 1882--the organ of the Norwich Grammar School--that the writer of this obituary notice confessed that there were none of Borrow's works in the library of the school of which Borrow had been the most distinguished pupil.