Her words cannot but remind us of that touching and consolatory poem which Mrs. Browning wrote after visiting Cowper's grave; from which we may be allowed to quote, perhaps, the most touching and consolatory portion. The reader will see how it fits in with Cowper's hymn already cited. 'Like a sick child that knoweth not his mother when she blesses, As if such tender words and looks could come from any other ! Thus? O not thus ! no type of earth could image that awaking, But felt those Eyes alone, and knew, "My Saviour! not deserted!" Cowper's place as a poet is determined, says Mrs. Oliphant, not by his earlier compositions in rhyming heroic verse, which she estimates (rather too trenchantly) as made up of 'respectable platitudes,' and which conform to the type, or submit to the yoke, of the earlier poetical school, but by the Task, representing as it does a sudden and inexplicable rush into the new freedom and energetic life, the 'discursiveness,' the 'unvarnished nature and truth,' of 'poetry genuine, original, and often great,' whereby 'he broke the spell of Pope,' and emancipated his age, as well as himself, from all servile bonds. He had not, like Wordsworth, a scheme of poetic revolution, but, like Wordsworth, he threw aside conventions, and gave to his readers a series of pictures in which every feature had its distinct and delicate reality; in which also, we must add, still following Mrs. Oliphant, there was 'no wilful descent from the worthy to the mean, as in the case of' some Wordsworthian trivialities, which one would willingly forget to be Wordsworth's. The main charm of the Task for affectionate and home-loving readers is its glorification of the evening fireside; but the various scenes of outdoor country life-the aspects of a wintry or vernal landscape, the work in garden or in greenhouse, the woodman with his dog, the snow-clad fields, the ice-bound stream, 'the thresher at his task,' the postman 'dropping the expected bag'-are set before us with a vivid realism which that age must have wondered at while 9 it was learning to welcome and enjoy. Of course there are large masses of reflection, not unmingled with censure, on the pursuits and amusements of the world that stretched outside the poet's seclusion; censure which Mrs. Oliphant regards as excessive and ungenerous, and as 'a great drawback in point of art.' We have not time to dwell on the ample variety of subjects for which the Task finds room. The over-severity of the penal code, the disregard of Sunday in towns, military dandies, disorderly undergraduates, absentee landlords, daring burglars, constitutional as opposed to despotic kingship, the claims of animals to kindly treatment-such themes as these are combined with pictures of nature, and with earnest. utterances of devout faith, into one miscellaneous and curiously attractive whole. It may be added that the student of Cowper will not derive a very favourable impression of the clergy of his day; but the oft-recurring strictures dispose one to ask what amount of evidence on that subject was present to a recluse whose life as an author was spent at three places in Huntingdonshire, amid a narrow circle of intimates. Every one, we presume, would make some deductions from Cowper's judgment on classes and institutions, on the schools of the time, and generally on all non-rural life. The 'stricken deer' could hardly bear witness as to the herd. Mrs. Oliphant dwells on the contrast between Cowper and Burns; nevertheless,' she adds, 'their work had a similar influence. The one in his blue bonnet, the other in his invalid nightcap, they stand at the great gates which had been neatly barred and bolted by the last generation, and, pushing them back upon their unwilling hinges, made English poetry free as she had been before.' She traces the career of the great peasant poet with recurring thoughts of his elder English contemporary. 'His mission, like that of Cowper's, was more to reveal than to invent. . . . He was as little afraid of the homeliest facts of his landscape as Cowper was; . . . but the principle which Cowper applied only to the external country Burns employed for the inner man. ... And Burns was so much the greater poet... that his advent was far more startling and effective than that of his gentler fellow. They were both equally withdrawn, though in ways so different, from the excitements and emulations of literary coteries, were equal rebels to the world and all its conventional ways' (i. 113). Further on two interesting quotations show us that the two poets appreciated each other's writings, and Burns even carried the Task in his pocket. Burns, it is added, even surpassed Cowper in his tender sympathy for animals. Two stanzas indicating how, on a windy night, the young Ayrshire ploughman lay thinking of the creatures outside, exposed to the rough weather, suggest the remark— 'Cowper was the gentlest of men, making pets even of hares, and turning with loathing from him who would crush a worm; but it is not to his sensitive spirit that the darkness opens, and the silly sheep and the helpless birds show themselves in the dreary midnight, unfortunate brothers for whom his heart bleeds' (i. 119). The 'downward career' of Burns is all too dismal a subject. It began, our authoress points out, when he gained his 'first social elevation' by being admitted into a certain 'jovial coterie' at Mauchline. It was precipitated by his second visit to Edinburgh in 1787-8, when, in default of the higher society which was opened to him in his first, he fell back on men of coarse taste and low tone, who were only too ready to be his boon companions. But no man,' says Mrs. Oliphant-and it is a weighty ethical maxim-'no man is led away whose will is against going.' The difficulties of an ambiguous position, intensified by what he himself called the 'rebellious pride and agonizing sensibility' which, in a nature that never acquired self-control, were apt on the least provocation to start up in defiance, and disgust or grieve well-meaning friends, had doubtless much to do with a 'decline and fall' such as few men so richly gifted have left for a warning to posterity. Principal Shairp has told the unspeakably sad story of those last months and days at Dumfries. Mrs. Oliphant passes it over briefly, and recurs to her parallelism of Burns and Cowper as fellow-workers in the permanent enfranchisement of poetry. Neither of them, she says, 'knew how to rule his own spirit ; but Cowper had the excuse of mental disease, whereas no apology can be made for Burns except that which pity makes for the victim of a defective will in all circumstances.' 1 The chapter on Crabbe is an interesting exposition of his 'mission' as a 'completion' of the work of Cowper and Burns. Cowper had taken England 'back to the spontaneity and ease of nature,' and Burns had brought out the very sweetness of the natural heart. . . . These were the apostles of an equality. . . . which bound together the highest and the lowest, not by casting down one or raising up another, but by revealing each to each where each was most real.' Crabbe had to prove the Arcadian fields to be regions of labour, hard and bitter as any on earth;' to 'overthrow the last 1 'Burns, in English Men of Letters, ch. vii. delusion,' the last bit of 'artificial sentiment,' the fond idealism of peasant felicity.' In less than two lines he summarizes his resolution to strike at the root of those pretty conventionalities, to have done with Corydon and Tityrus, and make men look hard at 'the real picture of the poor.' 'I paint the cot, As truth will paint it, and as bards will not.' The Village, which opens with this uncompromising announcement, was published in 1783, a year before the readers of the Task were shown how hard life was in 'the peasant's nest,' that at first had seemed so attractive. But there was yet a harsher lesson for benevolent sentimentalists. Boswell reports that Johnson approved Mr. Crabbe's' exposure of 'the false notions of rustic happiness and rustic virtue;'1 it would serve, he might say, to 'clear the mind' of so much 'cant.' The Parish Register carries on the same theme: ugly facts must be confronted : 'The true physician walks the foulest ward.' The third part of this poem, on 'Burials,' is for the most part not only sombre, but disheartening. We know not why Mrs. Oliphant passes over the Borough and the Tales, which, apart from occasional manifestations of truest tragic power, are signally rich in knowledge of human nature, and especially of the involutions of self-deceit, as well as in the sweet sly humour which endeared this poet so much to Walter Scott, who, as our readers may recollect, after hearing a chapter of the 'One Book' read to him on his death-bed, asked in the next place for a bit of Crabbe.' Those who have to guide souls-yes, and those who have had reason to mistrust their own self-guidance-would do well to study the fourteenth Tale, on the 'Struggles of Conscience;' the seventeenth letter in the Borough, on what Butler calls 'compositions' with duty; or the nineteenth, on 'reasoning with temptation.' The gradual lapse of a sceptic from his nonreligious morality into a necessarianism which encouraged him to obey each passion's call, and use his reason to defend them all,' is wonderfully depicted in the eleventh Tale; and the inefficacy of mere feeling as a support of faith and a token of moral soundness is urged on us in the nineteenth, which might furnish a motto for the ninth of Newman's Parochial Sermons.2 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. Napier, iii. 286. 2 There is a fine illustration of Rom. i. 32 in Borough, xiv.; and the end of Borough, x., anticipates the Christian Year for the 24th Sunday after Trinity. Alike from the Tales and from the Borough we learn that unbelief in Crabbe's time was fluent, insolent, and bitter against priestcraft, among townsfolk and villagers, gentlemen farmers, attorneys, and office clerks; and agnostics who think it well to frequent public worship have in some sort a prototype in the 'Dr. Campbell' who could say 'A man may smile, but still he should attend His hour at church, and be the Church's friend,' &c. 2 Crabbe himself was a seriously religious man, and his piety was perhaps warmer than Mrs. Oliphant would represent it. The conclusion of the Hall of Justice, at any rate, shows true devotional feeling. To be sure, he had a dislike for whatever seemed like fanaticism. In the fourth letter of the Borough he speaks with some tenderness of the Church of Rome, which here is poor and old,' and reserves his shafts of sarcasm for the 'Calvinistic' and Arminian' Methodists, who teach what we should now call revivalist doctrines as to instantaneous conversion and sensible assurance. 'It is the Call! 3 till that proclaims us free, In darkness, doubt, and bondage we must be ; Then the clerical esprit de corps, as we suppose it would be called, gives a mischievous turn to this ardent Wesleyan's experience. 'Feel you a quickening? drops the subject deep? Stupid and stony, no! you're all asleep; Listless and lazy, waiting for a close, As if at church -Do I allow repose? Am I a legal minister? do I With form or rubric, rule or rite comply? Then whence this quiet, tell me, I beseech : One might believe you heard your Rector preach, Or his assistant dreamer,' &c. 1 Borough, iv. xx. xxi.; Tales, iii. xxi. 2 Tales, ix. 3 Crabbe was accused of caricaturing this doctrine of Calvinistic Methodists in his Abel Keene. He answered by referring to a book which taught an extreme form of 'Quietism.' |