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Daniel Macklin, Hedges - Alexandra Harris on William Cowper

The Abyss Beyond the Orchard

For about a hundred and thirty years after his death in 1800, William Cowper was one of those figures about whom every keen reader had something to say. He was up there with Milton and Johnson, though people felt more intimately connected with Cowper than they were ever likely to feel with Milton. His long poem The Task (1785) seemed to articulate all the longed-for goodness of familiar, homely things; it was a tribute to ‘Domestic Happiness, thou only bliss of paradise that has survived the fall!’ Yet here, and in hundreds of the letters that began to be published from 1804 onwards, things of joy were surrounded by gulfs of loss and desolation.

Anne Brontë remembered the silent tears she wept during her childhood reading of Cowper. She cried with him, and for him, and with a sense of recognition: ‘The language of my inmost heart’, she wrote, ‘I traced in every line.’ Jane Austen defined her heroines partly by showing us the spirit in which they read Cowper: Marianne Dashwood cannot bear to hear Edward’s calm rehearsal of ‘those beautiful lines which have so frequently driven me wild’, though it’s clear that her passionate enthusiasm may not be the only way of appreciating them.

Many young readers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century worked out what they felt about life in relation to Cowper, but you’d be hard pressed to find an 18-year-old driven wild by him today. Millions now read Austen and the Brontës, but they stop short of the poet and letter-writer who was so important to those novelists.

Discovering the letters for the first time, four years ago, at the ripe age of 31, I felt the full force of a literary revelation. Why had no one urged them on me before? The book I had in my hand as I sat in a blue cane chair at the end of the garden (I remember it vividly, as you do when you read things that matter) was a small collection of the letters, edited very helpfully and lucidly by the Romantic scholar Sim

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For about a hundred and thirty years after his death in 1800, William Cowper was one of those figures about whom every keen reader had something to say. He was up there with Milton and Johnson, though people felt more intimately connected with Cowper than they were ever likely to feel with Milton. His long poem The Task (1785) seemed to articulate all the longed-for goodness of familiar, homely things; it was a tribute to ‘Domestic Happiness, thou only bliss of paradise that has survived the fall!’ Yet here, and in hundreds of the letters that began to be published from 1804 onwards, things of joy were surrounded by gulfs of loss and desolation.

Anne Brontë remembered the silent tears she wept during her childhood reading of Cowper. She cried with him, and for him, and with a sense of recognition: ‘The language of my inmost heart’, she wrote, ‘I traced in every line.’ Jane Austen defined her heroines partly by showing us the spirit in which they read Cowper: Marianne Dashwood cannot bear to hear Edward’s calm rehearsal of ‘those beautiful lines which have so frequently driven me wild’, though it’s clear that her passionate enthusiasm may not be the only way of appreciating them. Many young readers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century worked out what they felt about life in relation to Cowper, but you’d be hard pressed to find an 18-year-old driven wild by him today. Millions now read Austen and the Brontës, but they stop short of the poet and letter-writer who was so important to those novelists. Discovering the letters for the first time, four years ago, at the ripe age of 31, I felt the full force of a literary revelation. Why had no one urged them on me before? The book I had in my hand as I sat in a blue cane chair at the end of the garden (I remember it vividly, as you do when you read things that matter) was a small collection of the letters, edited very helpfully and lucidly by the Romantic scholar Simon Malpas. The prose struck me immediately as gloriously elastic. Long sentences unfurl themselves, clause after clause, stretching an arm here and there to pull in some extra detail surely not planned at the outset and yet effortlessly incorporated into a perfectly grammatical and balanced whole. Effortless: was it? I couldn’t tell. I paused over sentences like this one, in which Cowper ponders – with such apparently spontaneous extravagance – the gap between his own generation and his forefathers’. We look back, he says, ‘almost upon creatures of another species’:

Their vast rambling mansions, spacious halls, and painted casements, the gothic porch smothered with honeysuckles, their little gardens and high walls, their box-edgings, balls of holly, and yew-tree statues, are become so entirely unfashionable now, that we can hardly believe it possible, that a people who resembled us so little in their taste, should resemble us in any thing else.

He was expatiating, in fact, on the difference between his own writing and that of a century or half-century before, when prose – like topiary – was clipped into shape. Cowper’s heel-kicking, free-reeling elegance, by contrast, felt modern. It reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s letters. Then I realized that of course she had read the eighteenth-century letter-writers as a girl, when her own prose style was forming. She borrowed Cowper’s letters from her father’s library (and went back, she remembered, eager for the next volume). These, then, were rhythms she knew well. I read on. I felt I was listening, as much as reading, since the writing had the qualities of talk. This was certainly what Cowper aimed for: his highest ambition for a letter was that it should be like conversation. He wanted intimacy and spontaneity. He wanted both the rapidity and the luxurious lengthiness of relaxed exchange between friends. Writing to Joseph Hill one morning in December 1781, he imagined it to be late afternoon, his favourite time in winter, when the fire could be lit. Such convenient adjustments were a letter-writer’s prerogative. ‘I will suppose it afternoon, that you and I dined together, are comfortably situated by a good fire, and just entering on a sociable conversation. You speak first, because I am a man of few words.’ He proceeded with a dialogue, which is of course an uninterrupted monologue. Cowper, a man of many words, as well as wide learning and political interests, wrote on through the morning, despairing of the continued war in America, recommending withdrawal, but seeing this defeat as the ruin of England. Cowper often wanted to discuss politics and he wanted to discuss religion (which he saved for his evangelical correspondents, knowing how others tired of it). But many of his epistolary friendships were founded on a desire to talk, with sympathetic people, about not very much at all. He reasoned that since friends often talk just for the pleasure of being in each other’s company, letter-writers are quite justified in doing the same. ‘A letter may be written upon any thing or nothing just as that any thing or nothing happens to occur.’ Cowper had a gift for writing about nothing, which was fortunate, since nothing happened often to occur in the course of the quiet life he lived in the Buckinghamshire market town of Olney. This was how he liked it, or rather this was how he needed things to be. Since leaving London in the throes of a suicidal breakdown in his early thirties, he had lived as quietly as he could, dependent on the kindness of friends, keeping up the routines of walking, writing and gardening that helped to soothe his hourly dread of damnation. While he did ‘nothing’, while he tended his cucumbers, for example, he was often in excruciating mental pain. He appreciated his surroundings intensely, but complete happiness was impossible because he believed himself to be shut out from God’s love. He had no business with pleasurable things, though they might be lent to him for brief enjoyment. Coming in from his greenhouse in May 1780 he said to himself what he was always saying, ‘This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me for the present; I must leave it soon.’ This is the desperate fact that lies behind even his most delightful letters. To write about oysters was to fend off the devil for an hour. His correspondents could not always keep up. ‘When I write to you, you answer me in fish,’ he chided one friend on receipt of mackerel and lobster. What good was fish as a letter? Nevertheless: ‘though they never spoke in their lives’ (the mackerel and lobster, that is) ‘and it was still less to be expected from them that they should speak, being dead, they gave us an assurance of your affection.’ Often he wrote in extended anticipation – for example of a visit from his beloved cousin Harriet Hesketh. For months in advance of her proposed arrival he would lay out the scenes that would meet her. For months afterwards he would recall them to her. Rarely can a single modest house and a few square miles of English countryside have been so feelingly described. Astonishingly, it’s all still there. Olney is on the A509 between Northampton and Milton Keynes. The traffic races past, but Cowper’s house, Orchardside, is stopped in time, its sash windows facing on to the market place. It is now the Cowper and Newton Museum – the Newton being John Newton, the evangelical curate and abolitionist who first brought Cowper to Olney and with whom he wrote the Olney Hymns. There were only two other visitors to the museum on the afternoon I went there with my friend Felicity James, a Romanticist who had long ago understood the line of intimate connection from Coleridge’s conversation poems back to Cowper’s talkative writing. Our reading paths had crossed at Cowper; and when we looked on the map to find a meeting-point between her home in Leicester and mine in Oxford, Olney was the place we found. The house looks large from the street, but it’s unaccountably dark and cramped inside. Tripping over a wooden hutch in the hall – could it really be one of the hutches Cowper made himself for his pet hares? – we understood that this wasn’t a pastoral idyll. In this rather unhomely-feeling house, we saw why Cowper valued each item of crockery and piece of furniture. Here they all were, straight out of the poems and letters, each simply labelled: ‘Cowper’s Moveable Bookshelves’, ‘Cowper’s Coffee Pot’, ‘Cowper’s Lavender Water’. As we arrived upstairs to find ‘Cowper’s Razor’ (once owned by John Betjeman, who reread The Task each year) and a lovingly reproduced pair of ‘Cowper’s Stockings’, we could hardly believe the completeness with which a personal world had been reassembled. Here, among these things, Cowper talked on and on, imagining his correspondent across the room. In the huge Oxford edition of the Letters, edited by James King and Charles Ryscamp, the conjuring from nothing goes on through five volumes. It’s oddly gripping. After several hours you look up and find that all you have to report to an enquiring friend is that Lady Hesketh, having postponed her visit to Olney so repeatedly that it seemed doubtful she had any intention of coming, has at last sent her bedstead on ahead of her, but the bedstead, so Cowper reports, has not arrived at Orchardside and is deemed lost. For the lengthy pursuit of beds (this one turns up at the inn), for the twists and turns of Cowper’s mental agonies, for the development of his political thinking, and for the week-by-week commentary on his progress in the translation of Homer, one needs the Oxford volumes. Never before have I spent so much on a set of books, but these I wanted by my bed, since Cowper is hard to read in libraries. In libraries one wants to be getting on with things, making a great many notes before the bell rings, whereas Cowper (who in fact kept his working hours punctiliously) requires that you put the notebook away and read as if there were no pressure of time at all. What’s so finely judged about Simon Malpas’s selection is that it honours the expansiveness of the letters, their supernumerary arabesques and reiterations, while also pressing on through the years. There are the mackerels and the coffee pots, and there are the nights of screaming in terror. ‘I am hunted by spiritual hounds in the night season,’ Cowper told William Hayley, unable to keep up a pretence of cheerfulness. Through the 1790s he was hounded beyond all comfort and security. Pleasure was now, he wrote, ‘a faint recollection’. The scenes he once loved were powerless to soothe him. Looking up from my blue cane chair on that summer day four years ago, I thought this little volume of Cowper’s letters was perhaps the saddest book I had ever read. Leafing back through its pages of courtesies and cameos, books and fish, political justice and religious madness, fond jokes and sentimental gifts, I realized how strenuously Cowper’s artful talk was holding back the real nothing: the abyss that he saw, day by day, just beyond the orchard.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 53 © Alexandra Harris 2017


About the contributor

Alexandra Harris is the author of Romantic Moderns and Weatherland, which she adapted in ten parts for BBC Radio 4. She is Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. Having started out as a modernist, she is currently reading her way around the eighteenth century.

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