Immortal Memories | Page 9

my main point. Humour is so essentially a note of sanity, and it is the sanity of Cowper that I desire to emphasize here. We have heard too much of the insanity of Cowper, of the "maniac's tongue" to which Mrs. Browning referred, of the "maniacal Calvinist" of whom Byron wrote somewhat scornfully. Only a day or two ago I read in a high-class journal that "one fears that Cowper's despondency and madness are better known to-day than his poetry." That is not to know the secret of Cowper. It is true that there were periods of maniacal depression, and these were not always religious ones. Now, it was from sheer nervousness at the prospect of meeting his fellows, now it was from a too logical acceptance of the doctrine of eternal punishment. Had it not been these, it would have been something else. It might have been politics, or a hundred things that now and again give a twist to the mind of the wisest. With Cowper it was generally religion. I am not here to promote a paradox. I accept the only too well-known story of Cowper's many visitations, but, looking back a century, for the purpose of asking what was Cowper's contribution to the world's happiness and why we meet to speak of our love for him to- day, I insist that these visitations are not essential to our memory of him as a great figure in our literature--the maker of an epoch.
Cowper lived for some seventy years--sixty-nine, to be exact. Of these years there was a period longer than the full term of Byron's life, of Shelley's or of Keats's, of perfect sanity, and it was in this period that he gave us what is one of the sanest achievements in our literature, view it as we may.
Let us look backwards over the century--a century which has seen many changes of which Cowper had scarcely any vision--the wonders of machinery and of electricity, of commercial enterprise, of the newspaper press, of book production. The galloping postboy is the most persistent figure in Cowper's landscape. He has been replaced by the motor car. Nations have arisen and fallen; a thousand writers have become popular and have ceased to be remembered. Other writers have sprung up who have made themselves immortal. Burns and Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Scott and Shelley among the poets.
We ask ourselves, then, what distinctly differentiates Cowper's life from that of his brothers in poetry, and I reply--his sanity. He did not indulge in vulgar amours, as did Burns and Byron; he did not ruin his moral fibre by opium, as did Coleridge; he did not shock his best friends by an over-weening egotism, as did Wordsworth; he did not spoil his life by reckless financial complications, as did Scott; or by too great an enthusiasm to beat down the world's conventions, as did Shelley. I do not here condemn any one or other of these later poets. Their lives cannot be summed up in the mistakes they made. I only urge that, as it is not good to be at warfare with your fellows, to be burdened with debts that you have to kill yourself to pay, to alienate your friends by distressing mannerisms, to cease to be on speaking terms with your family--therefore Cowper, who avoided these things, and, out of threescore years and more allotted to him, lived for some forty or fifty years at least a quiet, idyllic life, surrounded by loyal and loving friends, had chosen the saner and safer path. That, it may be granted, was very much a matter of temperament, and for it one does not need to praise him. The appeal to us of Robert Burns to gently scan our brother man will necessarily find a ready acceptance to-day, and a plea on behalf of kindly toleration for any great writer who has inspired his fellows is natural and honourable. But Cowper does not require any such kindly toleration. His temperament led him to a placid life, where there were few temptations, and that life with its quiet walks, its occasional drives, its simple recreations, has stood for a whole century as our English ideal. It is what, amid the strain of the severest commercialism in our great cities, we look forward to for our declining years as a haven on this side of the grave.
But I have undertaken to plead for Cowper's sanity. I desire, therefore, to beg you to look not at this or that episode in his life, when, as we know, Cowper was in the clutches of evil spirits, but at his life as a whole--a life of serene contentment in the company of his friends, his hares Puss, Tiny and Bess, his "eight pair of tame pigeons," his correspondents; and then