SOURCE: William Cowper, Jonathan Cape, 1928, pp. 135-171.

[In the following excerpt, Fausset explores the nuances of Cowper's letters.]

Letter-writing, as an art, is subject to the same conditions as any other art. Ideally a letter must in every phrase and sentence express a personality: it must convey an illusion of spontaneity, but it must not reflect an unorganized impulse. Its language must be conversational (as Cowper wrote to Lady Hesketh—‘When I read your letters I hear you talk, and I love talking letters dearly’), but its conversation must be so choice as to be keyed up above the level of the accidental. It must speak directly and even casually to its reader, but with a distinction which is at once personal and memorable. And finally it must be a unity, the expression through all its parts, however delicately interlinked or unconsciously associated, of a single mood.

The best of Cowper's letters satisfy all these conditions. ‘I do not write,’ he remarked, ‘without thinking, but always without premeditation,’ And this distinction goes to the root of the matter. Premeditation would have stemmed the flow of impulse, but by thinking he imposed form on it and made it completely his own.

Cowper was not consciously practising an art when he wrote, but he was artist enough to guard against artifice. Sensible people, as he of all men was of a nature to know, ‘are best pleased with what is natural and unaffected,’ and when Unwin praised his gifts as a letter-writer he was concerned lest it should make him self-conscious and so tempt him into artifice.

‘Now this foolish vanity,’ he wrote, ‘would have spoiled me quite, and would have made me as disgusting a letter-writer as Pope, who seems to have thought that unless a sentence was well turned, and every period pointed with some conceit, it was not worth the carriage. Accordingly he is to me, except in very few instances, the most disagreeable maker of epistles that ever I met with. I was willing, therefore, to wait till the impression your commendation had made upon the foolish part of me was worn off, that I might scribble away as usual, and write my uppermost thoughts, and those only.’

But although it was essential to him, both as an artist and as a man, to write self-forgetfully, although to begin a letter might seem always ‘a sort of forlorn hope,’ so undetermined was he of what, if anything, he was going to communicate, his very expectant passivity brought his faculties into perfect fusion. He opened himself, ‘gently and gradually as men of polite behaviour do,’ and gathered with an elegance in which was no mannerism because it expressed inevitably his own innate cultivation—

                              all the floating thoughts we find
Upon the surface of the mind.

Cowper was fortunate in having the leisure to cultivate the art of letter-writing, but no amount of leisure would have enabled him to distil his personality in his letters, to squeeze out the humorous essence of a situation, to develop an idea or an argument with an inevitable and wholly individual propriety, if he had not found in this activity an ideal means of harmonizing all his faculties.

He lived in his letters as the being, at once sympathetic and self-possessed, which he wished to be. He obeyed an impulse that life itself seemed to dictate, and he ordered it as an individual. The experience was not profound, but it was organic. His letters at once satisfied the literary craftsman in him and grew by the law of their own being. Although never aiming ‘at anything above the pitch of every day's scribble,’ it was a scrupulous pitch. ‘I did not perceive till this moment,’ he wrote for example in one letter, ‘that I had tacked two similes together; a practice which, though warranted by the example of Homer, and allowable in an epic poem, is rather luxurious and licentious in a letter.’

But his literary conscience never stayed his easy advance. His style was implicit, and the fact that his letters were uniformly written in a beautiful hand and almost without an erasure is an additional proof of the equable manner in which he exemplified his own dictum that ‘a letter is written as a conversation is maintained, or a journey performed; not by preconcerted or premeditated means … but merely by maintaining a progress.’

The fact throws further light on his nervous constitution. ‘When I am in the best health,’ he wrote, ‘my tide of animal sprightliness flows with great equality, so that I am never, at any time, exalted in proportion as I am sometimes depressed.’ That he was never troubled by an excess of animal energy even in his most vigorous moments saved him from that struggle to master a chaos of ideas which is the agonizing lot of most creative writers, but it also meant that he had little reserve of energy to draw upon, so that when, for any reason, his energy sank below the normal level, he experienced what seemed to him a cessation of life or, as he now interpreted it, a desertion by God.

His equableness was, however, the quality from which all his virtues as a letter-writer derived. It dictated not only his style but his perspective. ‘Every scene of life,’ he wrote to Bull, ‘has two sides, a dark and a bright one, and the mind which has an equal mixture of melancholy and vivacity is best of all qualified for the contemplation of either; it can be lively without levity and pensive without dejection.’

Both his humour and his moralizing or the blend of the two which was most typical of him were conditioned by his sensitiveness to the equal mixture in the world of the lementable and the ridiculous, a sensitiveness which corresponded superficially with what in natures more passionate and penetrating than his was to become a dual vision of the positive and negative forces in life so hard to reconcile.

In profound insight his letters were as deficient as his poetry. He viewed what was uppermost, but with an exquisite appreciation of its contrasted aspects, truly comparing his mind to ‘a board that is under the carpenter's plane … the shavings are my uppermost thoughts; after a few strokes of the tool, it acquires a new surface; this again, upon a repetition of the task, he takes off, and a new surface still succeeds.’

What he wrote was thus always fresh and always consistent. His personality pervaded every sentence, but he was never tediously self-engrossed, never over-subtle or picturesque. He unfolded his impressions or described his own moods with the same unassertive but perceptive naturalness, in which thought and illustrative simile reinforced each other, not merely aptly and ingeniously, but by an inevitable association.

For example he wrote—‘I have heard (for I never made the experiment) that if a man grasp a red-hot iron with his naked hand, it will stick to him, so that he cannot presently disengage himself from it. Such are the [American] Colonies in the hands of administration. While they hold them they burn their fingers, and yet they must not quit them.’ Or again—‘But you think Margate more lively. So is a Cheshire cheese full of mites more lively than a sound one; but that very liveliness only proves its rottenness.’ Or—‘Whatever is short, should be nervous, masculine and compact. Little men are so; and little poems should be so.’ Or—‘A critic of the present day serves a poem as a cook does a dead turkey, when she fastens the legs of it to a post and draws out all the sinews.’

Or he began a letter to Unwin thus—‘My dear Friend—‘As two men sit silent, after having exhausted all their topics of conversation, one says, “It is very fine weather”; and the other says, “Yes;”—one blows his nose and the other rubs his eyebrows (by the way, this is very much in Homer's manner); such seems to be the case between you and me.’

Or, for a final example, he wrote thus of the slow labour and delay of correcting proofs—‘So the wild goose in the meadow flaps her wings and flaps them, but yet she mounts not; she stands on tiptoe on the banks of Ouse, she meditates an ascent, she stretches her long neck, she flaps her wings again; the successful repetition of her efforts at last bears her above the ground; she mounts into the heavenly regions exulting, and who then shall describe her song?—to herself at least it makes ample recompense for her laborious exertions.’

His similes, as these examples show, were taken directly from his own experience, and because that experience was restricted he disdained nothing as being too lowly to be interesting. ‘The mind,’ he wrote, ‘long wearied with the sameness of a dull dreary prospect, will gladly fix its eye on anything that may make a little variety in its contemplations, though it were but a kitten playing with her tail.’

And how interesting he could make such an incident, how completely he could concentrate his being on it, at once dispassionately observing and humorously commenting, is proved by his description of his own kitten—‘I have a kitten, my dear, the drollest of all creatures that ever wore a cat's skin. Her gambols are not to be described, and would be incredible if they could. She tumbles head over heels several times together, she lays her cheek to the ground and presents her rump at you with an air of most supreme disdain; from this posture she rises to dance on her hind feet, an exercise that she performs with all the grace imaginable, and she closes these various exhibitions with a loud smack of her lips, which, for want of greater propriety of expression, we call spitting. But though all cats spit, no cat ever produced such a sound as she does … no wisdom that she may gain hereafter, will compensate the loss of her present hilarity.’

This devotion to small details was to be one of the chief characteristics of his poetry, and we may compare the manner in which he was to trace, at the beginning of The Task, the stages of transition from the stool to the arm-chair and from the settee to the couch with the account, that filled nearly half of one of his letters, of the card-table at which he was writing for the first time. The reason for the change, the condition of the round-table which had been superseded, the inadequacy of the fly-table, the too ponderous dimensions of the dining-table, and finally the humble virtues of the card-table and its one flaw—a sharp splinter that tore Mrs. Unwin's dress—are all described with such an engrossed fidelity to detail that the humble card-table acquires something of the personal significance which Van Gogh gives to a kitchen chair.

And with the abstract no less than the concrete he achieved a personal relation. With the latter it was a relation of loving fidelity, with the former of whimsical reflection. One of the excitements which Olney provided was exhibition ascents in a balloon. And upon this early effort of science to master the elements his wit played in this manner,—‘How happy in comparison with myself, does the sagacious investigator of nature seem, whose fancy is ever employed in the invention of hypotheses, and his reason in the support of them. While he is accounting for the origin of the winds, he has no leisure to attend to their influence upon himself; and while he considers what the sun is made of, forgets that he has not shone for a month. … One generation blows bubbles, and the next breaks them. But in the meantime your philosopher is a happy man.’

These views are not original, but how well they are put and from what a personal angle! And from the reflective he rose with quickening pulse and fancy to the droll. ‘By the way,’ he continued, ‘what is your opinion of these air-balloons? I am quite charmed with the discovery. Is it not possible (do you suppose) to convey such a quantity of inflammable air into the stomach and abdomen, that the philosopher, no longer gravitating to a centre, shall ascend by his own comparative levity, and never stop till he has reached the medium exactly in equilibrio with himself? May he not by the help of a pasteboard rudder, attached to his posteriors, steer himself in that purer element with ease; and again by slow and gradual discharge of his aerial contents, recover his former tendency to the earth, and descend without the smallest danger or inconvenience? These things are worth enquiry.’

So beautifully mock-solemn is his tone throughout, that a humorless person might almost take his speculations seriously. The degree of humour and seriousness in his reflections depended entirely on his mood. He accepted everything which entered his mind and played upon it according to the mood of the moment. Unlike Newton he did not complain ‘of that crowd of trifling thoughts that pesters you without ceasing,’ nor did he have ‘a serious thought standing at the door of his imagination, like a justice of peace, with the riot-act in his hand, ready to read it, and disperse the mob.’ On the contrary, trifling thoughts or incidents were to him unexacting enough to allow of an attitude of fertile self-possession. He was at his ease with them, while ‘the serious thought’ of a Newton would have destroyed the free-play of his nature.

That free-play was as often serious as sportive. But the moralizing which occurred so frequently in his letters was itself a kind of humour, the whimsical comment of a sensitive sanity upon the follies and extravagances of the world rather than the scolding of a partisan piety.

In this his letters differed for the most part from his poetry, in which, to justify himself in the eyes of his Evangelical friends who could not conceive of poetry as a disinterested activity, he too often adopted the preacher's tone. He did not scold the young, however, when he wrote—‘I am an old fellow, but I had once my dancing days, as you have now; yet I could never find that I had learned half so much of a woman's real character by dancing with her, as by conversing with her at home, where I could observe her behaviour at the table, at the fireside, and in all the trying circumstances of domestic life. We are all good when we are pleased; but she is the good woman, who wants not a fiddle to sweeten her. If I am wrong, the young ladies will set me right. …’

No uncle could reprove youth's frivolity more endearingly, and the same persuasive good-sense is well illustrated elsewhere in his reflections upon ‘fashion’—‘While the world lasts, fashion will continue to lead it by the nose. And, after all, what can fashion do for its most obsequious followers? It can ring the changes upon the same things, and it can do no more. Whether our hats be white or black, our caps high or low—whether we wear two watches or one, is of little consequence. There is indeed an appearance of variety; but the folly and vanity that dictates and adopts the change, are invariably the same. When the fashions of a particular period appear more reasonable than those of the preceding, it is not because the world is grown more reasonable than it was; but because in a course of perpetual changes, some of them must sometimes happen to be for the better. Neither do I suppose the preposterous customs that prevail at present, a proof of its greater folly. In a few years, perhaps next year, the fine gentleman will shut up his umbrella, and give it to his sister, filling his hand with a crab-tree cudgel instead of it: and when he has done so, will he be wiser than now? By no means. The love of change will have betrayed him into a propriety, which, in reality, he has no taste for, all his merit on the occasion amounting to no more than this,—that, being weary of one plaything, he has taken up another.’

That he himself was capable of agreeable little vanities, as when he asked Unwin to buy him a more fashionable stock than he possessed, and a handsome stock-buckle ‘that will make a figure at Olney,’ qualified him to be particularly disinterested on the subject of ‘fashions.’ But a humorous common sense was typical of all his moralizing, apart from that contained in letters to Newton. His comment upon the text, ‘If a man smite one cheek, turn the other,’ that ‘though a Christian is not to be quarrelsome, he is not to be crushed,’ was characteristic of the equal appeal which generosity and justice made to his temperament.

He revealed the same blend of sanity and sympathy in his literary judgments, considering perspicacity in writing as ‘always more than half the battle’ and the want of it as ‘the ruin of more than half the poetry that is published,’ but elsewhere criticizing Blair for being ‘a critic very little animated by what he reads, who rather reasons about the beauties of an author, than really tastes them; and who finds that a passage is praiseworthy, not because it charms him, but because it is accommodated to the laws of criticism in that case made and provided.’

It was, however, in his accounts of local incidents that he most delightfully combined a judicial detachment with a self-forgetful response to the humours of a situation. We cannot forbear to quote two of these. In the first he was writing of a youth who had committed a theft during one of the local fires. ‘Being convicted, he was ordered to be whipt, which operation he underwent at the cart's tail, from the stone house to the high arch, and back again. He seemed to show great fortitude, but it was all a great imposition upon the public. The beadle, who performed it, had filled his left hand with red ochre, through which, after every stroke, he drew the lash of his whip, leaving the appearance of a wound upon the skin, but in reality not hurting him at all. This being perceived by Mr. Constable Handscomb, who followed the beadle, he applied his cane, without any such management or precaution, to the shoulders of the too merciful executioner. The scene immediately became more interesting. The beadle could by no means be prevailed upon to strike hard, which provoked the constable to strike harder; and this double flogging continued, till a lass of Silver-end, pitying the pitiful beadle thus suffering under the hands of the pitiless constable, joined the procession, and placing herself immediately behind the latter, seized him by his capillary club, and pulling him backwards by the same, slapt his face with a most Amazonian fury. This concatenation of events has taken up more of my paper than I intended it should, but I could not forbear to inform you how the beadle threshed the thief, the constable the beadle, and the lady the constable, and how the thief was the only person concerned who suffered nothing.’

This description is not only exquisitely ridiculous, but exquisitely composed. It has both a logical continuity and an admirably controlled dramatic movement. And the style of mock-gravity concentrated in the phrase—‘the scene immediately became more interesting’—which may be compared with a similar phrase in his account of the vocal contest between a loud-voiced visitor and the birds in the parlour—heightens our appreciation of the actual absurdity.

The second example is even more Dickensian, but it, too, has a classical quality in its composition. It describes a candidate's visit during a Parliamentary election. ‘We were sitting yesterday after dinner, the two ladies and myself, very composedly, and without the least apprehension of any such intrusion in our snug parlour, one lady knitting, the other netting, and the gentleman winding worsted, when, to our unspeakable surprise, a mob appeared before the window; a smart rap was heard at the door, the boys hallooed, and the maid announced Mr. Grenville. Puss was unfortunately let out of her box, so that the candidate, with all his good friends at his back, was refused admittance at the grand entry, and referred to the back door as the only possible way of approach. Candidates are creatures not very susceptible of affronts, and would rather, I suppose, climb in at a window than be absolutely excluded. In a minute the yard, the kitchen, and the parlour were filled. Mr. Grenville, advancing towards me, shook me by the hand with a degree of cordiality that was extremely seducing. As soon as he and as many more as could find chairs were seated, he began to open the intent of his visit. I told him I had no vote, for which he readily gave me credit. I assured him I had no influence, which he was not equally inclined to believe, and the less, no doubt, because Mr. Ashburner, addressing himself to me at that moment, informed me that I had a great deal. Supposing I could not be possessed of such a treasure without knowing it, I ventured to confirm the assertion by saying that if I had any, I was utterly at a loss to imagine where it could be or wherein it consisted. Mr. Grenville squeezed me by the hand again, kissed the ladies and withdrew. He kissed likewise the maid in the kitchen, and seemed on the whole a most loving, kissing, kind-hearted gentleman. He is very young, genteel, and handsome. He has a pair of very good eyes in his head, which not being sufficient, as it should seem, for the many nice and difficult purposes of a senator, he has a third also, which he wore suspended by a riband from his button-hole. The boys hallooed, the dogs barked, Puss scampered, the hero, with his long train of obsequious followers, withdrew.’

Here again the composition is perfect, both in phrasing and in its inward pulse. The candidate with his motley supporters rolls like a wave upon the calm sea of domestic industry, breaks in a foam of flattery and kisses, and ebbs with as inevitable a rhythm. And within this tidal movement are the cross-currents and ripples of comic comment. And Cowper's after-comment was equally characteristic. ‘It is comfortable,’ he wrote, ‘to be of no consequence in a world where one cannot exercise any without disobliging somebody. … Mr. Ashburner, perhaps was a little mortified, because it was evident that I owed the honour of the visit to his misrepresentation of my importance. But had he thought proper to assure Mr. Grenville that I had three heads, I should not, I suppose, have been bound to produce them.’

The self-depreciation which had such disastrous consequences in his religious experience was indeed one of the most fertile elements in his humour, because here it was balanced by the self-content which he derived from exercising his own admirable judgment. His very modesty enabled him to turn the tables more effectively upon pretentiousness of all sorts, to emphasize his own worth by pretending to deny it.

Often, indeed, his humility was not assumed, but even then it was self-respecting. He wrote, for example, much as Wordsworth was to write, on the irregularities of genius—‘I never knew a poet, except myself, who was punctual in anything, or to be depended on for the due discharge of any duty, except what he thought he owed to the Muses. The moment a man takes it into his foolish head that he has what the world calls Genius, he gives himself a discharge from the servile drudgery of all friendly offices, and becomes good for nothing. But I am not yet vain enough to think myself entitled to such self-conferred honours.’

Occasionally in his later letters him humility deepened into despair. But to reflect upon your own sadness and express your reflections is a sure way of relieving it, and in this, too, letter-writing served Cowper well. ‘A yellow shower of leaves,’ he wrote in a passage typical of his musing in a minor key, ‘is falling continually from all the trees in the country. A few moments only seem to have passed since they were buds; and in a few moments more, they will have disappeared. It is one advantage of a rural situation, that it affords many hints of the rapidity with which life flies, that do not occur in towns and cities. It is impossible for a man, conversant with such scenes as surround me, not to advert daily to the shortness of his existence here, admonished of it, as he must be, by ten thousand objects. There was a time when I could contemplate my present state, and consider myself as a thing of a day with pleasure; when I numbered the seasons as they passed in swift rotation, as a schoolboy numbers the days that interpose between the next vacation, when he shall see his parents and enjoy his home again. But to make so just an estimate of a life like this, is no longer in my power. The consideration of my short continuance here, which was once grateful to me, now fills me with regret.’

The very sobriety of such writing was an antidote to morbid excess and a confirmation of self-respect.

The charm, however, of Cowper's letters can be but imperfectly conveyed by isolated passages. He revealed himself in a continual interplay of fancy, sentiment, humour, and good sense. Never assertive, he was yet always wholly and distinctively himself; never excited, he wrote always with a gentle animation which was sober in its sprightliness and sprightly in its sobriety. And he affords us the continual satisfaction of an elegance which is native to himself. With what tact, for example, did he reprove by condoning an impoliteness, when he wrote to Newton—‘About three weeks since Mrs. Unwin sent you a couple of fowls, and about ten days since a spare rib from her own pig. We do not wish you to thank us for such matters, nor do we even imagine that any are due; every idea of that sort vanishes before the recollection of the many obligations under which you have laid us; but it is always satisfactory to us to know that they have reached you.’

But it was in the pointing of humble comedy by a gravity and rotundity of speech that he excelled. ‘We hope,’ he wrote, ‘that Patty has been falsely accused. But, however that may be, we see great cause to admire either the cogency of her arguments, or her husband's openness to conviction, who, by a single box on the ear, was so effectively assured of the innocence of his wife, as to become more attached to her than ever.’ Or he wrote of Bull's attempts to combat melancholy—‘He showed me a nook, in which he had placed a bench, and where he said he found it very refreshing to smoke his pipe and meditate. Here he sits with his back against one brick wall and his big nose against another, which must, you know, be very refreshing and greatly assist meditation.’

Or again, he described thus Mr. Ashburner in his rôle of undertaker—‘He might be truly said to march; for his step was heroic, his figure athletic, and his countenance as firm and confident as if he had been born to bury others, and was sure never to be buried himself.’ That the majestic undertaker was dead within a week of the writing of this letter was an apt demonstration of the tragi-comedy in life to which Cowper was so finely sensitive.

The same association of grave logic with the ridiculous is illustrated in the passage—‘I thank you for the snip of cloth, commonly called a pattern. At present I have two coats, and but one back. If at any time hereafter I should find myself possessed of fewer coats, or more backs, it will be of use to me.’ Or again, in a letter urging Unwin to let nothing prevent a promised visit—‘As to the masons you expect, bring them with you; bring brick, bring mortar, bring everything that would oppose itself to your journey; all shall be welcome. I have a greenhouse that is too small, come and enlarge it; build me a pinery; repair the garden wall, that has great need of your assistance; do anything; you cannot do too much. …’

The essence of all such humour lies in its blend of a gay impulse with logical solemnity. And it was because Cowper satisfied in letter-writing both his heart and his head, his classical temper and his human sympathy, each correcting any tendency to excess in the other, that he derived such comfort from it. In this activity he possessed his world and so possessed himself.

His letters, however, must be read in their continuity to be properly appreciated. They are a mirror of his life from day to day, and they offer us an unconditional intimacy with one of the most amiable and cultivated of men. Grounded in good-sense, they abound in constant drolleries and endearing idiosyncracies. Wise or wistful, mildly malicious or humorously affectionate, they always breathe a perfect sincerity, if we except the ‘perfectly scriptural’ passages, usually addressed to Newton, on Christian hope and Christian consolation.

Yet even these passages have their pathos, in so far as they are attempts at self-delusion. For it is against a remembered background of despair that his letters should be read, as they were written. Beneath all their sallies and whimsies is a moral valiancy, that ‘heroism of a passive kind’ which is perhaps the hardest of all to sustain. Every moment of gaiety in them is a triumph of faith, or at least forgetfulness, over experience, a challenge to the dread sense of personal nullity which gnawed at his heart.

‘We are strange creatures,’ he wrote, ‘everything that we do is in reality important, though half that we do seems to be push-pin.’ In his letters he did but play at push-pin, but he played on the edge of an abyss. The game so engrossed him that he often forgot the hazard of his position. He looked out from himself at life, and his heart that felt so sensitively and his head that appraised so justly no longer distorted each other. ‘Human affairs,’ he remarked in a phrase which was the forerunner of a more famous one of Horace Walpole's, ‘are a tragedy seen on one side, and a comedy on the other.’ And he relieved his own melancholy by sympathizing with both aspects. For the tragic in human affairs, no less than the comic, is an expression of life, and to appreciate either is to partake of life.

Letter-writing was to Cowper a means of such vital association, a precarious defence against that loss of personal identity which was his haunting disability.