SOURCE: “A Short View of Education,” in William Cowper: Humanitarian, Chapel Hill, 1938, pp. 162-205.

[In the following essay, Hartley describes Cowper's view of education, arguing that although Cowper's ideas are based mainly on religion, they can still serve as general suggestions on the topic.]

1

Although in the eighteenth century continental Europe was the scene of much activity in the field of educational reform, England was notoriously backward in the development of her educational system.¹ One does not doubt that a great amount of the ignorance and depravity found in all levels of English society during the century is traceable to the inadequate instruction given in childhood and early youth. England had not lacked educational theorists or destructive critics of her deficient system. The preceding century had produced John Locke, whose influence on Rousseau was great, in spite of the fact that the French theorist discredited the disciplinary idea of education. Critics of the kind of education available in English public schools and universities were legion. It seems, however, to have been difficult for either destructive or constructive critics to stimulate action. One must wait for the Evangelical revival to see any very definite traces of interest in improving education. The work of John Wesley was revolutionary. However narrow the Evangelical ideas and ideals of education may seem to those who would discount the value of religious instruction, they proved a powerful force in sweeping out ignorance and slothfulness.

No one would want to call Cowper an important educational theorist. He was not capable of constructing a complete educational philosophy, and he wisely made no attempt to do so. However, as a critic of a deficient system, he occupies a distinguished place in the tradition of William Law, John Wesley, and Hannah More. This fact we may accept in spite of Professor Hartmann's conclusion that Cowper's Tirocinium represents an honest opinion but that it is worthless as reform literature. Such a conclusion happens to be consequent upon a laborious proof that “Cowper's Schilderungen aus seiner Schulzeit sind unzuverlässig und übertrieben, die vorgeschlagenen Gegenmittel nicht anwendbar”!² The non sequitur is easily apparent. One might almost as justifiably say that The Shortest Way With Dissenters and A Modest Proposal are ineffective reform literature because they do not portray existing conditions with literal accuracy and because the remedies they suggest are impracticable. We shall not be primarily concerned here with the accuracy or inaccuracy with which Cowper pictured the schools of his time, although the matter will naturally have to receive some consideration. In regard to Cowper's exaggeration Professor Hartmann has painstakingly proved the obvious; unfortunately, the German scholar placed inferior emphasis on a vastly more important matter, the relevancy of the criticism. It is significant that even today a critic like Mr. Hugh Fausset can write in the introduction to his volume of selections from Cowper: “I have excluded with some regret Tirocinium, or A Review of Schools because the protest which he made against the competitive system and other defects of the public schools is still unhappily relevant.”³

However, an attestation of the value of Tirocinium as reform literature should come from a period nearer Cowper's own. A striking refutation of Professor Hartmann's contention is inherent in the anonymous tract, “A Reply to the Most Popular Objections to Public Schools, with Particular Reference to the Tyrocinium of Cowper,” which appeared in The Pamphleteer in August, 1814. The author writes:

There is a magical power in the Tyrocinium of Cowper, which has awakened in the finest and purest bosoms a deep-rooted prejudice against Public Seminaries of Education; it abounds with so many sweet and natural images, it speaks so touchingly to the inmost sensibilities of the soul, it treats the subjects with so conversational a grace, and yet with a solemnity so awfully affecting, that even where it fails to dissuade the parents from the course they feel to be rational and expedient, it makes them tremble with anxiety, accuse themselves of a cruel policy, and regard their child almost as a victim and a sacrifice.⁴

The mere necessity of a public attack upon Cowper's educational ideas, together with those “promulgated in the Edinburgh Review,” argues fairly conclusively that Tirocinium was regarded as effective reform literature.

It is rarely easy to trace with certainty the sources of Cowper's ideas. However, a study of the background of his views on the purpose and ideals of education will serve at least to place him in the educational thought of his century. We should not expect Cowper to be highly original; but he can, as we have already seen, be credited with giving very effective poetic expression to ideas already current. If we must look to the Evangelical revival for the rebirth of interest in education, we shall have to consider that prodigious dynamo, John Wesley, one of the most important educational thinkers in the century. Wesley's influence on Cowper's educational thought cannot be estimated with exactness. There are fewer direct references to Wesley in Cowper than one would ordinarily suspect, even though Cowper and Wesley did belong to different schools of Evangelical thought.⁵ But since a great many of the ideas of the two men concur, it is reasonable to believe that the influence of the older man on the younger, whether direct or indirect, was important. Many of the educational ideas of both Wesley and Cowper are to be found in William Law, the saintly mystic whose general influence over the titan of the Evangelical revival is well established. Wesley's knowledge of Milton's Tractate of Education and Rousseau's Émile (which he found to be “the most empty, silly, injudicious thing that ever a self-conceited Infidel wrote”) we may also assume for Cowper, who by no means had Wesley's contempt for Rousseau's educational novel. Both men probably knew Locke's Thoughts on Education.⁶ Cowper's constant contention that the existing system of education produces effeminacy is directly traceable to John Brown's Estimate.

Unlike Milton, Cowper was not able to ground his observations on education on his experience both as student and tutor; but a letter to Joseph Hill, written on July 6, 1776, shows that Cowper was at that time considering taking “two, three, or four boys under my tuition, to instruction.”⁷ “One half laughs and half shudders,” wrote Professor Saintsbury, “to think what would have happened if the notion … had been carried out.”⁸ Cowper, it is true, was hardly fitted for managing an “academy.”

Just as Locke's immediate cause for writing his Thoughts on Education was a desire to advise a friend on the education of his children, Cowper was stimulated to educational thought by a desire to give advice to William Unwin on the education of his son, John. The letters that he wrote to Unwin in 1780 may be regarded as studies for Tirocinium. On September 7, 1780, the poet wrote to insist that students should not be given Latin and Greek too young lest they grow to dislike study: “The mind and the body have … a striking resemblance of each other. In childhood they are both nimble, but not strong: they can skip and frisk about with wonderful agility, but hard labour spoils them both.” The earliest training, Cowper felt, should be allotted to writing and arithmetic, together with geography, which was “imperfectly, if at all, inculcated in the schools.” (Lord Spencer's son, the poet suggests, got a fine grasp of geography through a puzzle map.) If the student begins Latin and Greek at eight or nine, it is soon enough. He should not go to the university until he is fifteen, “a period, in my mind, much too early for it, and when he can hardly be trusted there without the utmost danger to his morals.” This type of criticism with moral emphasis, rather than the preceding criticism on the student's curriculum, is to be most typical of Cowper's educational thought. Further on, Cowper maintains that one should “bridle in” rather than push a bright boy. In contending that the process of early education should be pleasurable, Cowper might have been on the side of either Locke or Rousseau, who concurred on this point. But the suggestion of bridling is definitely contrary to Rousseau's ideas. The fundamental disagreement of Locke and Rousseau is on the point made by Locke that the purpose of education is to thwart and thus through discipline to control the natural tendencies of the child.⁹ To this idea Wesley also subscribed; and one will notice that an insistence upon discipline is distinguishable in most of Cowper's educational thought.

A second letter written ten days later¹⁰ continues the subject. Here Cowper advances some of the arguments for education in the home that are later to appear in Tirocinium: in public schools morals and religion are too little attended to; a boy in public schools will come under the influence of evil companions; a child who is sent away from home at an early age will be weaned away from parental affection and authority.

A third letter of October 5, 1780, opens with a criticism of the neglect of instruction in English in favor of instruction in Latin, a deficiency which the poet maintains may be remedied by home instruction. Further, he denies that a public education is an effectual remedy for shyness. Rather, the poet contends, does it tend to produce shyness. He continues by attempting to refute the argument that friendships made at school are lasting and beneficial. In his own case, he asserts, not one friend has survived ten years' time.

Already the argument against the public school has assumed considerable proportions, but it has not taken on the religious fervor or the satirical sharpness that it is to acquire in Cowper's poetry.

2

In the year of the letters on the education of John Unwin, Cowper began The Progress of Error, in which a consideration of education in general is continued in verse. Before we treat the poem directly, it is necessary to consider briefly the type of educational theory against which Cowper reacted.

The Enlightenment of the early eighteenth century brought in a contempt of authority and an exaltation of reason that rapidly developed from a healthful reactionary sentiment to a narrow formalism.¹¹ It is this kind of formalism against which Rousseau reacted in insisting that the senses were not always to be depended upon and that reason was not always infallible. To Rousseau the emotions or inner sentiments were to be followed as the only true guides. Voltaire was, of course, the incarnation of all that Rousseau revolted against.

If the rationalistic movement had no influence upon schools in England, it did have important influence upon private education in the upper classes.¹² In spite of the fact that, as Sir Charles Strachey has insisted, the letters of Lord Chesterfield are written to one person for one purpose and should not be regarded as a kind of “Popular Educator,”¹³ they are still the best repository of those educational ideals that seem to characterize the Enlightenment. They advocate an education in worldly wisdom and one in which there is a higher appreciation of manners and courtliness than of virtue and seriousness. Lord Chesterfield's system seems to encourage a smattering of all kinds of knowledge, to be entirely materialistic, and to aim at the development of a nature capable of rendering all decisions in the light of reason. Good breeding, or decorum, is characteristically described by the noble lord as something “more than manners and less than morals, without which the most virtuous may often be detested, and with the aid of which the deformity of vice and falsehood may to some extent be softened.”

To the twentieth-century mind the immorality of Chesterfield's philosophy is not so monstrous as it was to Dr. Johnson and to Cowper. Dr. Johnson's statement that Chesterfield's letters taught “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master” is perhaps better explained on the basis of a personal prejudice than on that of the critic's sound judgment. He later saw fit to modify the opinion considerably. If Chesterfield admitted that dissimulation is allowable, and if he recommended flattery as a means of getting along in the world, we must not forget that he held essential truth in high esteem. “Do not mistake me,” he wrote on October 16, O. S. 1747, “and think that I mean to recommend to you abject and criminal flattery: no, flatter nobody's vices or crimes: on the contrary, abhor and discourage them. But there is no living in the world without a complaisant indulgence for people's weaknesses, and innocent, though ridiculous vanities.”¹⁴ It is quite true that Chesterfield recommended irregular attachments with married women as a part of a gentleman's education; but, although this advice may be inexcusable, it is to be found in only a few letters.¹⁵ In general, the moral laxities of Chesterfield's plan for educating his son are perhaps more fairly chargeable to the age than to the man. But the important consideration is that moral laxities, whatever the source, were easily apparent.

Along with Rousseau's revolt against rationalism came another revolt of a different sort, the Evangelical revival. Wesley was keenly aware of the pitfalls of Reason and felt it his Christian duty to quell the menace that was threatening the nation and its educational system, worming its deadly way into the universities.¹⁶ Milton's theory of education as a means of repairing the ruins of man's fall had been reflected in William Law's statement that “the only end of education is to restore our rational nature to its proper state.”¹⁷ “The grand end of education,” according to Wesley, is to cure the diseases of human nature.¹⁸ Wesley's theory of education is, of course, founded on the theological doctrine of man's depravity and is as far removed as the poles from the idea of the inherent goodness of man held by a rationalistic religion like deism. To Wesley a religion built upon rationalistic principles could lead only to pride and love of the world. The functions of true education should be vastly different: “The bias of nature is set the wrong way: Education is designed to set it right. This, by the grace of God is to turn the bias from self-will, pride, anger, revenge, and the love of the world, to resignation, lowliness, meekness, and the love of God.”¹⁹

Cowper has the same fear of the corrupting influence of Reason that Wesley has—a fear that at times seems to lead him into a narrow contempt for learning. But this contempt, viewed rightly, is not so damning an evidence of narrowness as it may at first appear. In Truth, as we have already seen briefly, the poet regards learning as a snare, and Voltaire looms large as an example of what learning without “grace” will do (ll. 301-30). The cottager in her ignorance of worldly learning is far happier, for she knows the truths of the Bible:

Oh, happy peasant! Oh, unhappy bard!
His the mere tinsel, her's the rich reward.

[Ll. 331-32.]

Voltaire, possessed with an infinity of worldly wisdom, is lost in error.

In Charity the poet clarifies his position. Philosophy, he feels, may lead man into the secrets of nature and enrich him. From philosophy man may get a “bosom charg’d with rich instruction, and a soul enlarg’d.” Knowledge in itself is not to be scorned, for “all truth is precious, if not divine.” But the danger lies in making knowledge an end in itself and in forgetting that

                                                  reason still, unless divinely taught,
What e’er she learns, learns nothing as she ought.

[Ll. 337-38.]

When knowledge is an end in itself, it can lead only to pride. Here is the real basis of Cowper's distrust of learning. The poet would agree with Francis Bacon, who in “Of Atheism” argues that those who have imperfectly mastered their fields are most likely to lose sight of the First Cause in a welter of second causes. “The lamp of revelation,” the poet continues, shows that whatever man has attained in knowledge, he is still the “progeny and heir of sin.” If he is thus taught, his pride vanishes and he is capable of attaining true philosophy. But if man does not rely upon an “unerring guide,”

Whether he measure earth, compute the sea,
Weigh sun-beams, carve a fly, or spit a flea—
The solemn trifler, with his boasted skill,
Toils much, and is a solemn trifler still.

[Ll. 353-56.]

In the second book of The Task we find that Cowper's belief in Providence leads him logically into contempt for “the spruce philosopher,” and for science and philosophy that discover causes but have no control over effects (ll. 189-97). In “The Garden” there is a passage in which the attack upon formal scholarship and scientific research is reminiscent of the Dunciad, although the basis of the attack is rather far removed from Pope's:

Some write a narrative of wars, and feats
Of heroes little known; and call the rant
An history: describe the man, of whom
His own coevals took but little note;
And paint his person, character, and views,
As they had known him from his mother's womb.

.....

… Some drill and bore
The solid earth, and from the strata there
Extract a register, by which we learn
That he who made it, and reveal’d its date
To Moses, was mistaken in its age.

.....

Great contest follows, and much learned dust
Involves the combatants; each claiming truth,
And truth disclaiming both. And thus they spend
The little wick of life's poor shallow lamp,
In playing tricks with nature, giving laws
To distant worlds, and trifling in their own.

[Ll. 139 ff.]

It is not surprising that Cowper should be out of sympathy with discoveries when they tend to discredit revelation. He is chiefly concerned, however, with the futility of such learning rather than with its vicious nature. If one accepts the premise that the salvation of the soul is the most important thing in life, it is easy to regard all knowledge that does not lead to the great end of existence as a matter

Of dropping buckets into empty wells,
And growing old in drawing nothing up.

[Ll. 189-90.]

Cowper's meaning should not be construed to be that man's study should be confined to matters of the soul. His concern is, after all, merely with the proper balance between one's learning and one's relationship with God.

If the poet is eager to insist that learning should not be a barrier to God, he is equally eager to insist that one should arrive at a conception of God through revelation rather than through Reason or Nature:

God never meant that man should scale the heav’ns
By strides of human wisdom.

[Ll. 221-22.]

These might almost have been the words of the “affable archangel” to Adam when the mortal pupil oversteps the bounds of proper inquiry. Cowper is in agreement with Milton's position in Paradise Lost on the point that one should seek God rather than learning; for too often, as Cowper puts it, the more one learns of Nature, the more one tends to overlook Nature's author. But if philosophy is “baptiz’d in the pure fountain of eternal love,” it “has eyes indeed.” With divine inspiration one may truly understand the phenomena of the universe, for “all truth is from the sempiternal source of light divine” (II, ll. 499-500).²⁰ Such, feels the poet, was the understanding of Newton and of Milton, both learned men whose immense knowledge did not prove a barrier between them and God. Cowper's position should now be clear: so long as one's learning does not keep one from God or prevent one from preserving humility before God it is not to be held in contempt.

There is a final word in the last book of The Task. Here Cowper makes his striking distinction between knowledge and wisdom:

                                                                      Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men;
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass,
The mere materials with which wisdom builds,
Till smooth’d and squar’d and fitted to its place
Does but encumber whom it seem’d t’enrich.
Knowledge is proud that he has learn’d so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.

[VI, ll. 89-97.]

3

It is rather significant that in The Progress of Error Cowper begins his disquisition on education with an attack on Lord Chesterfield. In the twenty-eighth chapter of A Serious Call William Law had closed his discussion of education with the delineation of an ideal father, Paternus, who educated his son in his own house, bringing him up in humility and in the love of God. The desire of Paternus to have “truth and plainness” as “the only ornament” of his son's language, and to have him modest in dress and temperate in appetite provides an interesting contrast to the educational ideas of Chesterfield. Cowper satirized the Earl under the name of Petronius. Although there is no proof that Cowper was consciously setting his portrait of Petronius over against Law's Paternus, the points of contrast in the two “characters” may not be entirely accidental.

Cowper plainly felt that Chesterfield represented the epitome of everything bad in a system of education based on a rationalistic philosophy. The personal attack is vigorous:

Thou polish’d and high-finish’d foe to truth,
Grey-beard corrupter of our list’ning youth,
To purge and skim away the filth of vice,
That, so refin’d, it might the more entice,
Then pour it on the morals of thy son,
To taint his heart, was worthy of thine own.

[Ll. 341-46.]

Chesterfield was, of course, dead when these lines were written; but to Cowper the sad fact was that his ideals of education were not interred with his bones. Cowper felt that he could complain, with the same justice with which Law had earlier complained, of an educational system that tended to develop the pride of the child, to encourage ideals of position, and to neglect the true Christian virtues.

The system of education that had already begun developing among the Evangelicals was designed to correct the evils of the rationalistic approach. Wesley held that the soul was sick by nature, having brought into the world with it such diseases as pride, atheism, love of the world, and self-will. Since children are not free from the penalty of Adam's disobedience, they are subject to diseases just as adults are. The sermon “On the Education of Children” includes several diseases not mentioned in the sermon on “Original Sin.” These include “anger, a deviation from truth, a proneness to speak or act contrary to justice, and unmercifulness.”²¹ We have already seen that Wesley's theory was that education should be a cure for the inbred diseases. He believed, citing youthful saints, that children are capable of developing a deeply religious life. He naturally insisted that everything in a child's education should be subordinated to those things that were directly connected with his religious development; and everything possible was to be done at home and in school to lead him to salvation. Wesley does not fail to indicate that responsibility rests on the parents for playing an active part in the religious education of their children.²² In his own school he sought not only to correct deficiencies in ordinary training but to give his students training in religion. He furthermore attempted to provide the rigid discipline that he deemed necessary for the proper upbringing of children, his theory being that if children were to submit to God when they grew older they must learn to submit to discipline in their youth.²³

To return to The Progress of Error, we find Cowper in complete agreement with Wesley in insisting that a child should be given the correct religious and moral training in his earliest years. It is this period in which the child is most impressionable and in which the mind falls into the mould of false or true education. The poet is also in agreement with Wesley in the matter of discipline. If a child is treated with too much tenderness, he will not be strong; and

                              without discipline, the fav’rite child,
Like a neglected forester, runs wild.

[Ll. 361-62.]

Cowper then turns to a criticism of the shallow educational ideals of his century. Far from giving a child training in discipline and morals,

We give him some Latin, and a smatch of Greek;
Teach him to fence and figure twice a week;
And, having done, we think, the best we can,
Praise his proficiency, and dub him man.

[Ll. 365-68.]

From the public school the young man goes to Oxford or Cambridge. After he has finished there, he is ready to embark with a tutor on a European tour. The Grand Tour as a means of putting polish on a youth's education had been attacked many times before Cowper. Ascham, Elyot, and Lyly, among others, had two centuries before warned of the debaucheries into which a student might fall in Italy. In the eighteenth century perhaps the most brilliant attack on the Grand Tour is that of Pope in the Dunciad. Abroad, Pope's youth

The stews and palace equally explored,
Intrigued with glory, and with spirit whored;
Tried all hors-d’œuvres, all liqueurs defined,
Judicious drank, and greatly-daring dined.

[IV, ll. 315-18.]

In Spectator No. 364 Addison attacked the practice of sending a youth “crying and snivelling into foreign countries,” accompanied by a tutor, to see things to no more advantage than a child gets from “staring and gaping at an amazing variety of strange things.” “Estimate” Brown also attacked travel as a means of education, feeling that “while Wisdom and Virtue can find no place” in the student on tour, “every Foreign Folly, Effeminacy, or Vice, meeting with a correspondent Soil, at once takes Root and flourish [sic].”²⁴ The opinion of Adam Smith is equally unequivocal.²⁵

It will be observed that Cowper does not here waste any time in attacking the universities. That attack he reserves for a later occasion. With Lord Chesterfield still uppermost in his mind, he is eager to pour his venom on the Grand Tour. No one seems to have observed the close relationship between Cowper's satire and Chesterfield's letters. It should be noticed that young Philip Stanhope, who was Cowper's junior by only one year, was a schoolmate of the poet at Westminster. Whether or not Cowper knew the boy, there seems to be no record. Stanhope left the school in 1746 (Cowper was in residence from 1741 to 1749) for Germany, Switzerland, and Italy in the company of a tutor, Walter Harte, the son of a former Canon of Bristol who lost all his preferments at the time of the Revolution.²⁶ The fact that Mr. Harte lacked the “Graces” that Lord Chesterfield was eager for his son to acquire has often been remarked upon. Young Stanhope's own “awkward bashfulness, shyness, and roughness” were apparent even to his father.²⁷ In Cowper's satire the youth sets out “with rev’rend tutor, clad in habit lay.” In the light of what we have just seen, it seems more than a mere coincidence that Cowper should have described his two travelers as “the gosling pair, with awkward gait, stretch’d neck, and silly stare.” (Progress of Error, ll. 379-80.) Cowper depicts his tutor as being used by the student “to tease for cash, and quarrel with all day.” Although Chesterfield's letters do not leave with us the impression that young Stanhope was a contentious lad, we do find evidences of Stanhope's borrowing from Harte. “Mr. Harte informs me,” wrote the Earl, “that he has reimbursed you part of your losses in Germany; and I consent to his reimbursing you of the whole, now that I know you deserve it.”²⁸ Cowper's satirical thrust at the

                                        memorandum-book for ev’ry town,
And ev’ry post, and where the chaise broke down,

[Ll. 373-74.]

was clearly inspired by the kind of advice to be found in the following passage from Chesterfield's letters:

To be serious; though I do not desire that you should immediately turn author, and oblige the world with your travels; yet, wherever you go, I would have you as curious and inquisitive as if you did intend to write them. I do not mean that you should give yourself so much trouble, to know the number of houses, inhabitants, signposts, and tomb-stones, of every town that you go through; but that you should inform yourself, as well as your stay will permit you, whether the town is free, or to whom it belongs, or in what manner: whether it has any peculiar privileges or customs; what trade or manufactures; and such other particulars as people of sense desire to know. And there would be no manner of harm, if you were to take memorandums of such things in a paper book to help your memory.²⁹

Continuing, the travelers

Discover huge cathedrals, built with stone,
And steeples tow’ring high, much like our own;
But show peculiar light by many a grin
At popish practices observ’d therein.

[Ll. 381-84.]

For this thrust the letters offer an interesting source. On September 21, O. S. 1747, Chesterfield wrote:

I received, by the last post, your letter of the 8th, N. S., and I do not wonder that you are surprised at the credulity and superstition of the Papists at Einsiedlen [sic], and at their absurd stories of their chapel. But remember, at the same time, that errors and mistakes, however gross, in matters of opinion, if they are sincere, are to be pitied, but not punished nor laughed at.

The “gosling pair” become typical sight-seers and buyers of souvenirs. Finally, the student comes home. For this event the poet has saved two of his most brilliant couplets:

Returning, he proclaims, by many a grace,
By shrugs, and strange contortions of his face,
How much a dunce that has been sent to roam
Excels a dunce that has been kept at home.

[Ll. 413-16.]

Before digressing Cowper fires a final broadside at Chesterfieldian ideals of education:

Accomplishments have taken virtue's place,
And wisdom falls before exterior grace;
We slight the precious kernel of the stone,
And toil to polish its rough coat alone.
A just deportment, manners grac’d with ease,
Elegant phrase, and figure form’d to please,
Are qualities that seem to comprehend
Whatever parents, guardians, schools intend.
Hence an unfurnish’d and a listless mind,
Though busy, trifling; empty, though refin’d;
Hence all that interferes, and dares to clash
With indolence and luxury, is trash;
While learning, once the man's exclusive pride,
Seems verging fast towards the female side.

[Ll. 417-30.]

4

No one can doubt that the great English universities were at a low moral and intellectual ebb in the eighteenth century. To this fact there are many testimonies. In his “Essay on Modern Education” Swift wrote that he had heard “more than one or two persons of high rank declare that they could learn nothing more at Oxford or Cambridge than to drink ale and smoke tobacco.”³⁰ Dr. Johnson reveals the laxity of discipline in the Oxford of his own day—a day when he could excuse his absence from a tutorial period by fearlessly telling his tutor that he had preferred to slide in Christchurch meadow!³¹ Adam Smith complained, “In the University of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years given up altogether even the pretense of teaching.”³² John Brown also attacked idleness among university professors. “They make their Court,” he wrote, “to idle Sons and weak Mothers, in Proportion as they suffer their wealthy Pupils to live, and return, laden with Ignorance and Vice.”³³ Brown urged more supervision of students and more earnestness in the colleges, making a plea for fewer teas and parties and less attention to cards. Gray, Gibbon, and later Southey all testified to the worthlessness of their university education. Cowper had his most direct contact with university life through his brother John, whom he at times visited at Cambridge. The poet had doubtless heard the kind of account that Wilberforce gave of his entrance into St. John's, Cambridge, in 1776, some years after John Cowper's death:

On the very first night of my arrival I was introduced to as licentious a set of men as can well be conceived. They were in the habit of drinking hard and their conversation was in perfect accord with their principles. Though often mingling in their parties I never relished their society—indeed, I was often horror-struck at their conduct and felt miserable.³⁴

In the second book of The Task Cowper turns to the lack of discipline in the universities. Discipline is personified as a kindly, paternal old man who once dwelt in “colleges and halls” and whose occupation was to encourage goodness. Learning grew under his care. As a master, he was severe only when one of his charges overleapt the limits of control. But, through neglect, Discipline had died, and the schools had become

                                                                                                    a scene
Of solemn farce, where Ignorance in stilts,
His cap well-lin’d with logic not his own,
With parrot tongue perform’d the scholar's part,
Proceeding soon a graduated dunce.
Then compromise had place, and scrutiny
Became stone blind; precedence went in truck,
And he was competent whose purse was so.

[Ll. 735-42.]

The kind of education provided by the universities was reflected in the students, whom Cowper pictures with grim earnestness as

                              gamesters, jockeys, brothellers impure,
Spendthrifts, and booted sportsmen, oft’ner seen
With belted waist and pointers at their heels
Than in the bounds of duty.

[Ll. 751-54.]

One need have no fear that the world will teach them vice when they leave the walls of the college; for in college, although the place masquerades as an abode of science and learning, they acquire all the evil to be acquired.

In the matter of fixing the blame, Cowper asserts that the students themselves are not so much at fault as the university. In a figure suggestive of Beowulf, the poet feels that he has “track’d the felon home, and found his birthplace and his dam.” Undoubtedly, the source of the nation's corruption is in its universities, which like “the muddy beds of Nile” spawn “a race obscene” to pollute all England—

                                                                                and the cause itself
Of that calamitous mischief has been found:
Found, too, where most offensive, in the skirts
Of the rob’d pedagogue.

[Ll. 820-23.]

Here again is the poison of rationalism that Wesley deprecated in the universities.

In the midst of his attack, Cowper finds need to pause for an exception. The sweeping condemnation of college men and colleges should not include his brother, John Cowper, who was uncorrupted at Cambridge; nor must it include John's college, Ben’et (Corpus Christi), “in which order yet was sacred.” The tribute is one of great dignity and is marked with none of the bad taste apparent in Cowper's account of John's conversion to the “true light” in Adelphi. It will be observed that the whole attack on the universities in The Task is on a plane of high moral indignation rather than on that of religious enthusiasm, which in Adelphi caused the poet to take this somewhat conflicting point of view: “He [John] lamented the dark and Christless condition of the place [Cambridge], where learning and morality were all in all, and where, if a man were possessed of all these qualifications, he neither doubted himself, nor did anybody else question the safety of his state.”³⁵ The difference between the point of view of Adelphi and that of The Task is characteristic of the poet's changed thought. In The Task, Cowper is more the Christian moralist than the Evangelical enthusiast. Certainly, the fact that almost every criticism of the universities made by Cowper is corroborated by contemporaries argues that the attack on the universities in The Task is not merely one of a religious zealot. In spite of some tendency toward exaggeration, it shows the sanity rather of a serious social critic who sees to what ends materialism or license can lead a university or a nation. The charges are not a good deal more severe than those of Brown's Estimate, from which Cowper may have got some inspiration for his satire. Both the attack on the Grand Tour and that on the universities are barbed enough to make one wonder why a critic like Goldwin Smith³⁶ should deny to Cowper his just due of satirical vigor.

5

Cowper's treatment of the various stages of the educational process does not seem to take those stages chronologically. Although there is an attack upon educational ideals and the Grand Tour in The Progress of Error, there is no extended attack on the public schools or the universities. The universities are reserved for The Task, and the public schools are finally “reviewed”—much to their discredit—in Tirocinium.

However, as it has already been hinted, the inception of Tirocinium came four years before its actual completion. The first letter written to Unwin on the education of his son is a rather practical one and barely mentions the moral and religious aspects of a child's training. In the ten days intervening between the first and second letters the ideas of the moral and religious hazards of a public school education seem to have taken shape in Cowper's mind. The link between the second letter and the attack on the educational ideals of the Enlightenment written in the following December (1780) as a part of The Progress of Error is clear. But it is difficult to determine exactly when the idea occurred to Cowper that he might make an extended attack upon the public schools. From December, 1780, to July, 1781, he was busily engaged in writing the first and more sober didactic poems. In July Lady Austen came to Olney, and a different note appears in his poetry. Conversation and Retirement are much lighter in tone than their predecessors. The fact that Cowper could write to Newton, toward whom he usually maintained marked soberness of style, the charming “Hop O’ My Thumb” letter is another evidence of the change that had come over the poet. When Lady Austen returned to London in October, a serious note is again perceptible in his correspondence.

On August 25 Cowper wrote to William Unwin congratulating him on the arrival of a second son—one of the “two sons” mentioned in the dedication of Tirocinium.³⁷Retirement was completed on October 2 with a sigh of relief from the author.³⁸ On November 7 Cowper wrote to Newton: “Having discontinued the practice of verse-making for some weeks, I now feel quite incapable of resuming it; and can only wonder at it, as one of the most extraordinary incidents in my life, that I should have composed a volume.”³⁹ But on November 27 he wrote again to Newton:

Mrs. Unwin having suggested the hint, I have added just as many lines to my poem lately mentioned as make up the whole number two hundred. I had no intention to write a round sum, but it happened so. She thought there was a fair opportunity to give the Bishops a slap; and as it would not have been civil to have denied a lady so reasonable a request, I have just made the powder fly out of their wigs a little.⁴⁰

That Tirocinium is here indicated there can be little doubt. On October 20, 1784, Cowper wrote in a letter to Unwin, informing him that Tirocinium was to be inscribed to him: “Two years since, I began a piece which grew to the length of two hundred lines, and there stopped. I have lately resumed it, and (I believe) shall finish it.”⁴¹ In spite of the discrepancy in time, the specific reference to the length serves as a reasonably safe index. The reference to the Bishops' wigs probably indicates Cowper's attack on rationalistic religion and “knavish priests” in the first two hundred lines of the poem. It does not seem likely that Tirocinium should have been begun before November 7, 1781. At any rate, two hundred lines of it seem to have been completed in some form by November 27. It is rather remarkable that the tone of the opening lines is closer to that of the earlier poems—especially the insistence upon early religious education in The Progress of Error and the attack upon deism in Truth—than it is to Conversation and Retirement.

Just why Cowper laid the poem aside is not apparent. At any rate, we hear no more about it until 1784. In this year it was completed between November 8 and 20,⁴² just in time for publication with The Task.

Adam Smith was not so much concerned about the public schools as he was about the universities. “In England,” he wrote, “the public schools are much less corrupted than the universities. In the schools the youth are taught, or at least may be taught, Greek and Latin; that is, everything which the masters pretend to teach, or which it is expected that they should teach.”⁴³ But other contemporary comments convince us that conditions in the public schools were by no means good. From the seventeenth century the schools had steadily lost their hold on the socially distinguished, and the nobility and gentry had increasingly educated their sons at home under private tutors. Fielding's comment on the public schools in Tom Jones is doubtless true, in spite of the fact that the novelist satirizes the tutorial system in Thwackum and Square. Mr. Allworthy, we are told,

… having observed the imperfect institution of our public schools, and the many vices which boys were there liable to learn, had resolved to educate his nephew, as well as the other lad, whom he had in a manner adopted, in his own house, where he thought their morals would escape all that danger of being corrupted to which they would be unavoidably exposed in any public school or university.

The great schools like Eton, Harrow, Winchester, and Westminster were charged with giving the student a mere trifle of classical learning at an enormous expense. Westminster, Cowper's own school, had a reputation for roughness. Chesterfield had a low opinion of the school as a place where one might acquire “the more decorative portion of a gentleman's education.” In one letter he speaks to his son of “that curious infelicity of diction, which you acquired at Westminster”;⁴⁴ and in another he states that “Westminster is undoubtedly the seat of illiberal manners and brutal behavior.”⁴⁵

If schools were intellectually and morally deficient, they naturally gave very little attention to religion. Wesley found the public schools to be “nurseries of all manners of wickedness”; consequently, he concerned himself with instructing parents about the kind of schools to which they should send their children. No schools, he insists, can be satisfactory except those in which the masters have for their goal the Christian ideal of education as a preparation for heaven.⁴⁶ These schools must, therefore, provide specific religious instruction. It is easy to believe that such schools were rarities. To meet the need Wesley founded the Kingwood School for Methodist boys. The objections raised by Wesley to existing boarding schools definitely anticipate Cowper's position: First, most boarding schools were in large towns, which offered too many distractions; moreover, the town children might corrupt the religion of the boarding students. Second, the schools were not sufficiently exclusive in admitting students; thus were chances of corrupt morals and religion increased. Third, in many schools the masters were not concerned about the religious welfare of their charges. Finally, many schools offered only the most superficial type of instruction. Arithmetic, writing, geography, and “chronology” were neglected; Greek and Latin were imperfectly taught.⁴⁷

Several explanations have been offered for Cowper's severe attitude toward public schools in Tirocinium. In telling of the poet's well-known experience with a boy-tyrant at Dr. Pitman's school in Market Street, Hertfordshire, Southey remarks: “The tyranny under which Cowper suffered there, made, as it well might, a deep and lasting impression on him; and to this it is that the strong dislike with which, in the latter part of his life, he regarded all schools, must be ascribed.”⁴⁸ The anonymous writer in The Pamphleteer, undoubtedly misled by Hayley's erroneous assignment of the “boy-tyrant” to Westminster, assumed that Cowper's “weak constitution” and his “hereditary derangement” made him unfit for the “agitation of Westminster School” and, consequently, that his years there “were filled with inexpressible bitterness. … He saw all objects relating to the scene of his internal miseries,” the writer concludes, “through a false and gloomy medium, and thus was wholly unfit for correctly portraying them.”⁴⁹

The second opinion is clearly erroneous. Southey exonerates Westminster of the blame for shaping Cowper's views on education. In spite of the school's reputation for roughness, Cowper's own testimony on the point of his happiness there seems sufficiently explicit. In a letter to Unwin written in 1786 he spoke of his school life as “a period of life in which, if I had never tasted true happiness, I was at least equally unacquainted with its contrary.”⁵⁰ Canon Benham remarks, “… his life at Westminster seems to have been a happy one. He not only became an excellent scholar, but was a good cricketer and football player; and was popular with both masters and boys.”⁵¹ His love for one of his teachers, Vinny Bourne, continued throughout his life, and he was able to praise Dr. Nichols for the care that he took in preparing students for confirmation. Although one may admit that the tyranny endured by Cowper at Market Street may have made an indelible impression on him, one would hardly like to attribute Tirocinium to such a circumstance. It is logical to believe that the years of relative happiness at Westminster might have tended to soften the impression.

In the light of what Cowper had to say about education in other places than in Tirocinium, the true explanation seems apparent. In a period in which the Evangelicals were vitally interested in improving education, it is almost impossible that Cowper, who was broadly interested in humanitarian endeavor, should not have been infected by the movement. No one need believe that in Tirocinium Cowper set out to reflect accurately his own school experience. The poem represents the attitude of a man who had developed a philosophy of religious and moral education, and who was eager to enter the crusade against corruptions in education that were obvious on every hand. Since he took a very serious view of the problem, it is not entirely unnatural that he should have reflected his own school experience “obliquely … in the mirror of an ideal.”⁵² We may agree with Southey that “when Cowper accused himself as a juvenile proficient in the ‘infernal art of lying,’ he imposed upon himself in a far greater degree than he ever imposed upon an usher, for lying is certainly not one of those vices which are either acquired or fostered at a public school.”⁵³ This self-accusation was made in a period when the poet's “enthusiasm” was considerably greater than it was when he wrote Tirocinium, but it is illustrative of the kind of unconscious exaggeration that is consequent upon the poet's high seriousness. There is no real reason why we should not expect a modicum of conscious exaggeration in Tirocinium, for exaggeration is, after all, a legitimate weapon of satire. The fact that Cowper was happy at Westminster should strengthen the effect of his sincerity.

On November 8, 1784, Cowper wrote to the Reverend William Bull:

The Task, as you know, is gone to the press: and since it went I have been employed in writing [i. e., completing and revising] another poem, which I am now transcribing, and which, in a short time, I design shall follow. It is intituled [sic] Tirocinium, or a Review of the Schools: the business and purpose of it are, to censure the want of discipline, and the scandalous inattention to morals, that obtain in them, especially the largest; and to recommend private tuition as a mode of education on all accounts; to call upon fathers to become tutors of their own sons, where that is practicable; to take home a domestic tutor where it is not; and if neither can be done, to place them under the care of such a man as he to whom I am writing; some rural parson, whose attention is limited to few.⁵⁴

The poem opens with a restatement of the ideals of Christian education in slightly different terms from those used by the poet elsewhere. It is man's soul, says Cowper, that gives him “his right of empire over all that lives.” This soul is possessed of three handmaidens: Memory, to amass wisdom for its benefit; Fancy, to delight it; and Judgment, to guide it. Man's majesty over all created things is proof of his immortality. If man has no soul, he is of all creatures of least worth. Proof enough of the existence of the Deity is found in Nature, which reflects the attributes of God. If all inanimate creation reflects the attributes of the Creator, how much more logical it is to expect man, the crown of creation, to live to God's praise:

This once believ’d, ’twere logic misapplied
To prove a consequence by none denied
That we are bound to cast the minds of youth
Betimes into the moulds of heav’nly truth,
That, taught of God, they may indeed be wise,
Nor ignorantly wand’ring miss the skies.

[Ll. 103-8.]

The poet next seeks to emphasize the importance of early religious education. Most children have for their earliest reading the hornbook (containing, of course, the Lord's Prayer), Bible stories, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. If such reading could be continued, all would be well. But the artless piety of youth is lost when the child is subjected to the snares and deceptions of the world. Taught by “babblers called Philosophers” the young student is induced to blaspheme the creed of his childhood. This kind of argument naturally sounds a little curious to the modern ear, but it will not sound curious if we remember that it is merely a sequel to the attacks on rationalism in The Progress of Error and Truth. Cowper sees quite logically that even the child is not immune to the dangers of a system of thought that can lead only to deism, if indeed it does not lead to out-and-out atheism. He sees the “young apostate” neglecting prayer, denying the inspiration of the scriptures, and learning to put his faith in Reason:

And thus, well-tutor’d only while we share
A mother's lecture and a nurse's care;
And taught at schools such mythologic stuff,
But sound religion sparingly enough;
Our early notices of truth, disgrac’d,
Soon lose their credit, and are all effac’d.

[Ll. 195-200.]⁵⁵

Thus end the first two hundred lines—doubtless the earlier section—of the poem.

The newer section begins with a vigorous attack upon the schools, with an emphasis upon the moral rather than the religious aspects of life in them. Unless one wishes his son to be “a sot or dunce, lascivious, headstrong; or all these at once”—the poet asserts—the son should be kept away from schools. In the schools boys are boys only in years; “in infidelity and lewdness” they are men. At a public school students learn before they are sixteen that “authors are most useful pawn’d or sold” and that the “knowledge of the heart” is best acquired in the taverns.

There waiter Dick, with Bacchanalian lays,
Shall win his heart, and have his drunken praise,
His counsellor and bosom-friend shall prove,
And some street-pacing harlot his first love.

[Ll. 214-17.]

Schools keep their students too long, especially when discipline is lax. The young boys are subjected to the bad influence of older boys over a long period of time and attempt to ape them in their wild escapades, their petty larceny, and their brawls. Colleges complete the miseducation.

As Cowper refused to place the burden of the blame for corruption in the universities on university students, he also refused to place the burden of blame on the public school students: “for public schools ’tis public folly feeds.” The moral and religious apathy or the uncritical attitude of the patrons, who prefer to follow the “establish’d mode” rather than to think, is the root of the trouble. At least for the purpose of stressing parental obligations, Cowper is willing to assert that the schoolmasters themselves are perhaps not entirely to blame for the evils; but he can have little respect for their enduring evils out of fear of losing what little power they have over the students. (“Ye connive at what ye cannot cure.”)

Since we know “that these menageries all fail their trust,” the poet asks, why do we still send our sons to them? If the reason is a sentimental attachment to “the play-place of our early days,” perhaps the weakness is forgivable. At this point the poet remembers with tenderness and warmth his own school days in perhaps the most famous passage in the poem:

The little ones, unbutton’d, glowing hot,
Playing our games, and on the very spot;
As happy as we once, to kneel and draw
The chalky ring, and knuckle down at taw.

[Ll. 304-7.]

But this sentimental attachment too often leads the father to set before the child all the follies of his school days, his petty larcenies and naughty pranks:

Retracing thus his frolics, (’tis a name
That palliates deeds of folly and of shame)
He gives the local bias all its sway;
Resolves that where he play’d his sons shall play.

[Ll. 332-35.]

His wish will be fulfilled to a degree that perhaps he does not anticipate. In the schools the pert will be “made perter, and the tame made wild.”

Having discarded sentimental attachment as an unsound basis for choosing a school, Cowper turns to a much more reprehensible motive—that of the forming of profitable social contacts for one's children. Samuel Foote in the first act of The Author⁵⁶ and Thomas Day in Sandford and Merton⁵⁷ satirized this frequently encountered type of social climbing. Cowper looks with contempt upon the same kind of practice. In the public schools, he finds, the rich learn the wastefulness that we condemn in the less fortunate. Public schools, he maintains ironically, are quite suitable for the rich. But why should modest families with high aspirations for their children send them to public schools? The trouble is that these high aspirations are too often of the wrong sort; they are material rather than spiritual:

The father, who designs his babe a priest,
Dreams him episcopally such at least;
And while the playful jockey scours the room
Briskly, astride upon the parlour broom,
In fancy sees him more superbly ride
In coach with purple lin’d, and mitres on its side.

[Ll. 364-69.]

It is true that if students are sent where they will have contacts with “peers and sons of peers” their chances for material success will be increased, but they will be increased at a cost of the loss of appetite for scholarship and true religious zeal. Cowper is particularly scornful of the use of contacts with the nobility as stepping stones to advancement in the church. To the parent who believes that “the parson knows enough who knows a duke,” the poet exclaims, “Egregious purpose! … barb’rous prostitution of your son.” Furthermore if one looks at the matter from a purely practical point of view, Cowper argues, one cannot ignore the fact that the friendships formed in the school may not be so profitable as they seem to promise. Therefore, it is in every way the better part of wisdom to teach children to abhor “connexions form’d for int’rest”—

Than set your son to work at a vile trade
For wages so unlikely to be paid.

[Ll. 456-57.]

From an attack on pride in parents the poet passes to a public-school evil that engenders pride and hatred in children. In Chapter XVIII of A Serious Call, Law writes as follows of the dangers of “emulation” in public schools:

How dry and poor must the doctrine of humility sound to a youth, that has been spurred up to all his industry by ambition, envy, emulation, and a desire of glory, and distinction! And if he is not to act by these principles when he is a man, why do we call him to act by them in his youth? … when children are taught to bear no rival, they are plainly and directly taught to be envious. For it is impossible for any one to have this scorn of being outdone, and this contention with rivals without burning with envy against all those that seem to excel him, or get any distinction from him. So that what children are taught is rank envy, and only covered with the name of a less odious sound. … I know it is said in defence of this method of education, that ambition and a desire of glory, are necessary to excite young people to industry; and that if we were to press upon them the doctrines of humility, we should deject their minds and sink them into dulness and idleness.⁵⁸

With the last contention Law states his grounds for disagreement. Cowper's attack on emulation is so similar as to suggest that the poet had Law's chapter in mind when he wrote. To the poet, emulation

Ranks as a virtue, and is yet a vice;
Or rather a gross compound, justly tried,
Of envy, hatred, jealousy, and pride—
Contributes most perhaps t’ enhance their fame;
And emulation is its specious name.
Boys, once on fire with that contentious zeal,
Feel all the rage that female rivals feel.
.....Each vainly magnifies his own success,
Resents his fellow's, wishes it were less,
Exults in his miscarriage if he fail,
Deems his reward too great if he prevail,
And labours to surpass him day and night,
Less for improvement than to tickle spite.

[Ll. 465 ff.]⁵⁹

Like Law, Cowper grants that the spur of emulation is powerful, but there are so many attendant evils that the end is vitiated by the means.

Large schools have been condemned. Are small schools better? For an answer Cowper falls back on Pope's dictum about government: “What’er is best administered is best.” After all, the question is not whether a school is large or small, but whether boys “may learn, while morals languish.” Cowper gave the same kind of advice that Wesley gave on the choice of schools. Both large and small schools, Cowper asserts, have the same faults. Again, the bête noire is the “rob’d pedagogue,” of whom the poet paints a picture that is indeed unflattering. He is little more than a cormorant, swayed “through motives of mere lucre,” taking credit for a student's success but assuming no responsibility for his failure.

The next division of the poem is devoted to more constructive criticism—the possible solutions open to parents who are concerned about the kind of education their children will have.

The important rôle of the father in the educational process has been emphasized by numerous educational theorists. Both Montaigne and Locke insisted upon the father's part in disciplining and moulding the child's early life, and both preached the advantages of a home education. Law embodied his idea of the father's part in the education of his children in the “character” of Paternus, and Wesley showed himself keenly aware of the responsibility resting on parents especially for religious education. Rousseau has much to say on the matter:

Comme la véritable nourrice est la mère, le véritable précepteur est le père. … Un père, quand il engendre et nourrut des enfants ne fait en cela que le tiers de sa tâche. Il doit des hommes à son espèce; il doit à la société des hommes sociables; il doit des citoyens à l’État. Tout homme qui peut payer cette triple dette et ne fait pas, est coupable, et plus coupable peut-être quand il la paye à demi. Celui qui ne peut remplir les devoirs de père n’a point droit de le devenir.⁶⁰

No doubt Cowper's reading of Émile, as well as his reading of A Serious Call, is reflected in his ideal of “father, and friend, and tutor all in one.” Why should one “resign into a stranger's hand,” asks the poet, a duty that “God and nature and your int’rest” delegate to one? (“Voilà la fonction,” exclaimed Rousseau, “que vous confiez tranquillement à des mercenaires.”)

In seeking to emphasize the necessity for the father's functioning as tutor, Cowper makes a digression which seems to have been suggested by the same section of Émile from which we have just been quoting. Rousseau wrote—

Les enfants, éloignés, dispersés dans des pensions, des couvents, dans des collèges, porteront ailleurs l’amour de la maison paternelle, ou, pour mieux dire, ils y rapporteront l’habitude de n’étre attachés à rien. Les frères et les sœurs se connaîtront à peine. Quand tous sont rassemblés en cérémonie, ils pourront être fort polis entre eux; il se traiteront en étrangers. Sitôt qu’il n’y plus d’intimité entre les parents, sitôt que la société de la famille ne fait plus la douceur de la vie, il faut bien recourir aux mauvaises mœurs pour y suppléer. Où est l’homme assez stupide pour ne pas voir la chaîne de tout cela?

Cowper dramatizes the idea in an appealing picture of a boy who has just returned from school:

Arriv’d, he feels an unexpected change;
He blushes, hangs his head, is shy and strange,
No longer takes, as once, his fearless ease,
His fav’rite stand between his father's knees,
But seeks the corner of some distant seat,
And eyes the door, and watches a retreat,
And, least familiar where he should be most,
Feels all his happiest privileges lost.

[Ll. 567-74.]

Putting the argument in a positive form, Cowper asserts that the “num’rous follies … in the mind and heart of every boy” require the admonition of a father for their correction. Even the boy's pastime requires supervision of an affectionate sort. The “public hacknies in the schooling trade” will give training in “conjugated verbs and nouns declin’d”; but the father who exercises any ingenuity will avoid the dry and unpleasant discipline of the schools, providing for his son the kind of education that Paternus gave to his son in A Serious Call, that Rousseau elaborates in Émile, and that Thomas Day, following Rousseau, champions in his highly sentimental Sandford and Merton:

To lead his son, for prospects of delight,
To some not steep, though philosophic, height,
Thence to exhibit to his wond’ring eyes
Yon circling worlds, their distance, and their size,
The moons of Jove, and Saturn's belted ball,
And the harmonious order of them all;
To show him in an insect or a flow’r,
Such microscopic proof of skill and pow’r,
As, hid from ages past, God now displays
To combat atheists with in modern days.

[Ll. 630-39.]

Furthermore, the heart of the youth is to be inspired by the example of the noble ancients or, better, by living worthies. We may thus see that Cowper accepts from Rousseau's educational theory one of the methods that we now look upon as being most characteristically Rousseauistic. The fact that Law had projected the same sort of plan with an intensified religious emphasis unknown to Rousseau may easily have influenced Cowper's acceptance of the idea. Certainly, the religious emphasis of Cowper's plan is on the side of Law. A relaxation of discipline is not implied. Instruction, the poet concludes, should be “solid” rather than “too weighty,” and “not forbidding sport.”

The ideal tutor is, then, the father; but if he is “professionally tied” and cannot be directly responsible for his son's education, the first alternative is the right sort of hired tutor. Locke wrote of the tutor or governor:

I would from their first beginning to talk, have some discreet, sober, nay wise person about children, whose care it should be to fashion them aright, and keep them from ill, especially the infection of bad company. I think this province requires great sobriety, temperance, tenderness, diligence, and discretion, qualities hardly to be found united in persons that are to be hired for ordinary salaries, nor easily to be found anywhere.⁶¹

No emphasis is placed here on Chesterfield's “Graces.” Cowper's delineation of the proper sort of tutor seems almost a verse rendering of Locke:

Behold that figure, neat, though plainly clad;
His sprightly mingled with a shade of sad;
Not of a nimble tongue, though now and then
Heard to articulate to other men.
.....Prepar’d by taste, by learning, and true worth
To form thy son, to strike his genius forth;
.....Safe under such a wing, the boy shall show
No spots contracted among grooms below.
Nor taint his speech with meannesses design’d
By footman Tom for witty and refin’d.
.....Are such men rare? perhaps they would abound
Were occupation easier to be found.

[Ll. 664 ff.]

When a good tutor is found, the poet recommends that he should be treated with great deference and consideration.

The final alternative is to place the child in the hands of a pious country clergyman who has not more than two students in this care. Here in quietness and in virtuous toil the boy may attain the “settled habit and decided taste” that a Christian gentleman should have. The conditions for such an alternative seem extraordinarily drastic: the household of the parents must be a very den of worldliness, unfit for student or tutor. One wonders whether Cowper knew Day's incomparable Mr. Barlow, a minister-tutor who succeeded admirably in making a prig of Tommy Merton by just such training as Cowper suggests. Fortunately, the poet's friend, the “smoke-inhaling” Bull—much less of a prig than Mr. Barlow—is suggested as the ideal clergyman-tutor.

In conclusion, Cowper states that he is under no illusions about the possible efficacy of his message. He expects his advice to fall on many deaf ears, but he has reason to hope that here and there it will prevent an erroneous choice. He calls upon those of “life's middle state,” where, he believes, resides “two thirds of all the virtue that remains,” to see the debauchery into which the age has fallen as a result of its faulty educational ideals. Milton in Of Education found the corrupt products of the educational system of his own age to be divines “ambitious and mercenary,” lawyers who had not been fed on “the prudent and heavenly contemplation of justice and equity,” “unprincipled statesmen, and others, lastly, of a more delicious and airy spirit,” who “retire themselves, knowing no better, to the enjoyments of ease and luxury, living out their days in feast and jollity.”⁶² Cowper finds

                    great commanders making war a trade,
Great lawyers, lawyers without study made;
Churchmen, in whose esteem their blest employ
Is odious, and their wages all their joy.
.....Fops at all corners, lady-like in mien,
Civeted fellows, smelt ere they are seen.

[Ll. 821 ff.]

The poet issues a final warning against taking such a risk as a public school involves. “Send him not to school,” he urges. “No—guard him better.” What then is to be done to public schools? Are they all to be leveled to the ground? The poet's answer is not quite so drastic:

                              though I would not advertise them yet,
Nor write on each—This Building to be Let,
Unless the world were all prepar’d t’ embrace
A plan well worthy to supply their place;
Yet, backward as they are, and long have been,
To cultivate and keep the Morals clean,
(Forgive the crime) I wish them, I confess,
Or better manag’d, or encourag’d less.

[Ll. 915-22.]

An extended analysis of the way in which Cowper's religious bias or moral earnestness caused him to exaggerate actual conditions or to argue somewhat illogically is really not necessary. After all, the exaggerations and inconsistencies are rather obvious. “It cannot be gainsaid,” commented Southey on Cowper's account of his “irreligious” school life in the Memoir, “that our boarding-schools are unfavorable to those devotional feelings, the seeds of which have been sown in early childhood, and destructive of those devotional habits which have been learned at home; that nothing which is not intentionally profane can be more irreligious than the forms of religion which are observed there, and that attendance of school boys in a pack at public worship, is worse than perfunctory.” Southey, however, pointed out that Cowper's accounting for the decay of the child's devotional habits by saying that the duties of a schoolboy precluded religious life is hardly good reasoning. A better explanation is that the school age is a time when the animal part of a boy's nature is in the ascendency over the intellectual and spiritual parts.⁶³ The eighteenth century had a way of regarding children as little men and women. Wesley has been accused of an almost complete misunderstanding of the meaning of childhood. Cowper, too, does not always have a full understanding of childhood when his thought is guided by religious enthusiasm or when he is engaged in impassioned dialectic. This observation is not negated by the fact that the poet was often able to recapture his own childhood days with remarkable tenderness and vividness for artistic purposes.

That the recapturing of a past experience and the evaluating of the same kind of experience for the purpose of dialectic are not always in agreement is beautifully attested by a seeming contradiction in Cowper's view on “emulation.” In Table Talk the poet remembered with naïve pride the very thing that he was to castigate in Tirocinium:

At Westminster, where little poets strive
To set a distich upon six and five,
Where discipline helps op’ning buds of sense,
And makes his pupils proud with silver pence,
I was a poet too.

[Ll. 506-10.]

This instance alone should suggest how his entire school experience underwent a transformation when placed under the microscope of his earnest inquiry. From one point of view, the whole attack upon emulation in Tirocinium is exaggerated. “That any advancement whatever can be made without emulation,” the anonymous critic of The Pamphleteer remarked with some justice, “will only be maintained in the wildest reveries of Madame de Staël, who actually fancies she has seen five hundred children never excited by either hope or fear, reward or punishment, making the most rapid advances in every kind of knowledge, from the influence of some inward and mysterious principle.”⁶⁴ But it must be seen that an argument for an education that would produce Christian humility and obliterate worldly pride would naturally fasten upon the principle of competition as a vital point of attack.

No one would be expected to believe that the products of the schools were quite so bad as Cowper said they were. Professor Hartmann takes some trouble to point out that among Cowper's schoolmates who attained fame and useful service were Robert Lloyd, Warren Hastings, Elijah Empey, George Colman the Elder, Charles Churchill, Bonnell Thornton, and George Cumberland.⁶⁵ (He might with a great deal more appropriateness have mentioned Lord Dartmouth, whose service to the Evangelical cause was outstanding.) The anonymous critic cites Leigh Hunt, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb of Christ's Hospital to prove that fine feelings may be nourished by the schools.⁶⁶ This kind of evidence Cowper himself would have admitted readily—but not as a refutation of his argument:

And, if it chance, as sometimes chance it will,
That, though school-bred, the boy be virtuous still;
Such rare exceptions, shining in the dark,
Prove, rather than impeach, the just remark.

[Ll. 839-42.]

Both the critic of The Pamphleteer and Professor Hartmann object to the remedies proposed by Cowper on the score of their impracticability. “The ability of maintaining a private tutor,” wrote the earlier critic, “is confined to a very limited circle, and all the middling orders of society … are compelled either to suffer their children to grow up without any learning at all, or to send them to school. …” Professor Hartmann repeats the criticism, adding that a home education would lack many things that a school education would afford and would limit the student's horizon.⁶⁶ These criticisms are not unjust. It should be remembered, however, that the inception of the idea in Cowper's mind was the desire to advise his friend Unwin, a minister who probably had the leisure to educate his sons. It is true that the whole poem cannot be regarded as addressed directly to Unwin—it is really advice for the world at large; but the original idea doubtless had much to do with suggesting the “remedies” that Cowper proposed. Perhaps Cowper's deep concern about existing conditions inclines him toward idealism, rather than realism; nevertheless, Cowper had distinguished precedent for advocating home education, whether by father or tutor. And if practicability is the sole criterion for reform literature, not only Tirocinium but Émile will have to be cast overboard. What Cowper, of course, did fail to do was to show how the schools themselves might be improved.

Mr. Gilbert Thomas has argued the very interesting thesis that the emphasis on paternal instruction in Tirocinium is in a sense the poet's indictment of his father's failure to give him the proper education. As Mr. Thomas observes, the Reverend John Cowper plays a very minor part in his son's letters and poetry. We are told that he was fond of poetry and that he “succeeded well in ballad writing.”⁶⁸ Cowper also describes him as “most indulgent.” The one allusion to him in the Memoir concerns the fact that he gave his son a “vindication of self-murder” to read. Since Cowper was sent away to boarding school at an early age, he had little contact with his father. What Cowper means by saying that his father was indulgent may be questioned. “‘Indulgence’ towards a child,” writes Mr. Thomas, “may imply anything from parental indifference that takes the line of least resistance to the positive spoiling that is hardly less dangerous than repression.” We have no proof of any sort of deep bond between father and son. We do know that, though Cowper constantly paid tribute in his verse to those whose friendship or memory he treasured, the only tribute to his father is in the closing lines of “On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture.” Although it does not seem possible to take Mr. Thomas's argument to demonstration, it is quite possible that Cowper's emphasis on the responsibility of father and his plea for home education were colored by his own experience.

In spite of some digressions and looseness of structure, Tirocinium is Cowper's most successful effort at sustained thought. It is blessed, as few of Cowper's long poems are, with a beginning, middle, and end. The poem represents the final and most complete statement of the poet's educational ideals, the growth of which we have traced through the years of his greatest creative activity. These ideals, reflecting a repugnance for rationalistic philosophy and a deep-seated conviction of the necessity for inculcating humility as a Christian virtue, are decidedly the educational ideals of the entire Evangelical movement. If Locke held that the end of education is the formation of character, Wesley and Cowper held that the end of education is the formation of Christian character. Although Cowper did not treat educational problems with the completeness with which Wesley treated them, he did give expression in his poetry to the most important principles that Wesley set forth in his sermons and put into practice in his schools. Tirocinium must, therefore, be regarded as an important monument in the Evangelical campaign for improved educational aims and methods. To continue the summary at the expense of some repetition, the poem is essentially one of protest; and its strength as such is not to be minimized by the fact that the remedies it suggests are open to criticism on the grounds of impracticability. The objection that it exaggerates actual conditions should also not be allowed to reflect seriously on its worth. It is true that there are exaggerations; but in every really important phase of the attack on the schools the poet's judgment is amply corroborated by contemporary records. The poem's efficacy as reform literature is to some extent attested by the necessity for a public attempt to refute its charges twenty-eight years after its first appearance.

6

Although Wesley was widely interested in the religious education of the young, one of the most important movements of the century grew up outside his immediate influence. The Sunday School movement was not entirely original with its founders, Robert Raikes and the Reverend Thomas Stock, but these men are responsible for its effective initiation. With the purpose of overcoming vice, ignorance, and squalor, Robert Raikes in 1780 set up a school in Sooty Alley in the manufacturing center of Gloucester. Six months later another school was established in Southgate Street. From this point expansion was rapid, and soon there were Sunday Schools throughout England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. The movement was attacked by some members of the upper classes, but it received the support of several noblemen and of Wesley. The Methodists were largely responsible for the rapid spread of the movement. The original schools proposed by Raikes were designed for the instruction of children and adults in religion and in the rudiments. Reading and the Catechism were taught, and teachers were paid a shilling a Sunday. The Methodists had voluntary teaching staffs, and seem to have been responsible for the gradual abandonment of the secular aspects of the instruction.⁶⁹ In 1785 a Sunday School Society was founded. Within a decade this organization distributed nearly one hundred thousand spellers, twenty-five thousand testaments, and over five thousand Bibles. Moreover, it trained some sixty-five thousand people in its thousand schools.⁷⁰

Lord David Cecil's statement that Cowper was one of the “prime movers” in establishing the Olney Sunday School in 1785 seems perhaps a trifle stronger than the recorded facts warrant.⁷¹ We do know, however, that the movement received Cowper's hearty moral support. He wrote to Newton on September 24, 1785, telling of a visit that he had had from the Reverend Thomas Scott, who as curate was interested in raising a fund for establishing a Sunday School in his Olney parish. Of the movement Cowper wrote:

It is a wholesome measure, that seems to bid fair to be pretty generally adopted, and for the good effects that it promises, deserves well to be so. I know not, indeed, while the spread of the gospel continues so limited as it is, how a reformation of manners, in the lower class of mankind, can be brought to pass; or by what other means the utter abolition of all principle among them, moral as well as religious, can possibly be prevented. Heathenish parents can only bring up heathenish children; an assertion no oftener or more clearly illustrated than at Olney; where children, seven years of age, infest the streets every evening with curses and with songs, to which it would be unseemly to give their proper epithet. Such urchins as these could not be so diabolically accomplished, unless by the connivance of their parents. It is well, indeed, if in some instances their parents be not themselves their instructors. … It is, therefore, doubtless an act of the greatest charity to snatch them out of such hands before the inveteracy of the evil shall have made it desperate.⁷²

The somewhat reluctant retraction of the theory of home education so dear to his heart in Tirocinium is quite typical of Cowper's habit of keeping his thinking for different levels of society in separate compartments. A theory of work absolutely essential to the welfare of the lower classes need not be applied to higher social strata; and a theory of home education designed for those of “middle estate” also has its own particular limits. In Tirocinium, as Professor Goldwin Smith pointed out, Cowper did not see as an alternative for home education a good day school, where superior instruction could be obtained with no sacrifice of home affections.⁷³ But it was not difficult for him to see how remarkable a force the Sunday School would be for those whose home environment was unhealthful.

Notes

1. Quotations from Cowper's letters are throughout from Correspondence, edited by Thomas Wright, London, 1904. All verse quotations unless otherwise indicated are from The Poetical Works, edited by H. S. Milford, London, 1926.

2. See [W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, New York, 1891] op. cit., VII, 355.

3. Herman Hartmann, “Uber William Cowpers Tirocinium,” Festschrift zum Siebzigsten Geburtstage Oskar Schades, Königsberg, 1896, pp. 375–397. It is easily apparent that this study is based on few authorities and that the author has no wide understanding of education theory and practice in eighteenth-century England. The influences on Cowper's educational thought are not considered.

4. Cowper, Poems, ed. by H. I'A. Fausset (Everyman edition), London, 1931, p. viii.

5. See The Pamphleteer, IV (August, 1814), 104–130.

6. See Willy Hoffmann, William Cowpers Belesenheit und Literarische Kritik, Berlin, 1908 (Inaugural-Dissertation, Friderich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin), p. 47. See also the derogatory reference to Wesley in Cowper's discussion of “Arminian errors.”—Correspondence, I, 416.

7. See John W. Prince, Wesley on Religious Education, New York and Cincinnati, 1926, passim.

8. Correspondence, I, 137.

9. [George Saintsbury, The Peace of the Augustans, London, 1916], op. cit., p. 249 n.

10. See “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. by J. W. Adamson, New York, 1912.

11. Correspondence, I, 237–239.

12. Paul Monroe, A Text-Book in the History of Education, New York, 1918, p. 542.

13. Ibid., p. 546.

14. The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son, ed. by Charles Strachey and Annette Calthrop, New York and London, 1927, I, lxxv.

15. Ibid., p. 183.

16. Ibid., pp. lxv ff.

17. [John Wesley, Works, London, 1829, V, 385], op. cit., IX, 193.

18. [William Law, A Serious Call to Holy and Devout Things, London, 1802], op. cit., p. 298.

19. Wesley, op. cit., VII, 90. (“On the Education of Children.”)

20. Ibid., XIII, 436–437. (“A Thought on the Manner of Educating Children,” printed 1783.)

21. Cf. Alexander Pope, Dunciad, IV, 453 ff.

22. Prince, op. cit., p. 5; also Wesley, op. cit., VII, 90.

23. Wesley, op. cit., VII, 76 ff. (“On Family Religion.”)

24. Ibid., pp. 92–93.

25. [John Brown, Estimate of the Principles and Manners of the Times, London, 1758], op. cit., I, 34.

26. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, London, 1843, p. 129.

27. Chesterfield, Letters, I, 153 n.

28. Ibid., p. 163.

29. Ibid., p. 169.

30. Ibid., p. 170.

31. Jonathan Swift, Works, ed. by Temple Scott, London, 1907, II. 55.

32. Boswell, [Life of Johnson, ed. by G. B. Hill, New York, 1891], op. cit., I, 59.

33. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, p. 112.

34. Brown, op. cit., II, 65.

35. As quoted by [R. Coupland, Wilberforce: A Narrative, Oxford, 1923], op. cit., pp. 5–6.

36. [Cowper, Works, ed. by Robert Southey, London, 1835–37, VII. Hereafter cited as] Southey, I, 237. The italics are mine.

37. Goldwin Smith, Cowper, New York, 1880, p. 50.

38. Correspondence, I, 348. Even when Tirocinium was completed, William, junior, was not old enough to begin his education. For Cowper's delightful comment on the anticipatory nature of the dedication, see Correspondence, II, 277.

39. Ibid., I, 362.

40. Ibid., p. 376.

41. Ibid., p. 395. The italics are mine.

42. Ibid., II, 253–254.

43. Ibid., p. 269.

44. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, p. 177.

45. Chesterfield, Letters, I, 400.

46. Ibid., II, 23.

47. Wesley, op. cit., VII, 83.

48. Ibid., XIII, 255–267.

49. Southey, I, 8.

50. Loc. cit.

51. Correspondence, III, 80.

52. Cowper, The Poetical Works, ed. by W. Benham, London, 1889, p. xxiv.

53. Gilbert Thomas, William Cowper and the Eighteenth Century, London, 1935, p. 72.

54. Southey, I, 11.

55. Correspondence, II, 264.

56. Cowper is eager to not have the reference to “mythologic stuff” misunderstood. He writes in a footnote that he “does not mean to censure the pains that are taken to instruct a schoolboy in the religion of the heathen, but merely that neglect of Christian culture which leaves him shamefully ignorant of his own.”

57. Samuel Foote, Works, London, 1799, I, 142–143.

58. Day, [Sandford and Merton, London, 1855]op. cit., pp. 257–258.

59. The italics are mine.

60. The italics are mine.

61. Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Émile, ou de l'Éducation, Paris, n.d. (Edition Lutetia), I, 47–48.

62. [John Locke, Works, London, 1812], op. cit., p. 71.

63. John Milton, Tractate of Education, ed. by E. E. Morris, London, 1918, pp. 7–8.

64. Southey, I, 12–13.

65. The Pamphleteer, IV, 113. See also Hartmann, op. cit., p. 388.

66. Hartmann, op. cit., p. 392.

67. The Pamphleteer, IV, 113–114.

68. Hartmann, op. cit., p. 396.

69. Thomas, op. cit., p. 68.

70. [W. J. Warner, The Wesleyan Movement in the Industrial Revolution, New York, 1930], op. cit., p. 234.

71. F. P. Graves, A Student's History of Education, New York, 1917, p. 237.

72. Lord David Cecil, [The Striken Deer, New York, 1929], op. cit., p. 164.

73. Correspondence, II, 358–359.

74. Goldwin Smith, op. cit., p. 57.