¹ T. S. Grimshawe, The Work of William Cowper (New York, 1851), p. 504.

² Hugh Fausset, William Cowper (London, 1928), p. 207.

³ Goldwin Smith, William Cowper (New York, n.d.), p. 20.

⁴ David Cecil, The Stricken Deer (Indianapolis, 1930), p. 69. Mr. F. L. Lucas, in his latest book, The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (p. 98) finds the explanation of Cowper's madness surprisingly simple: “To escape from the … tyranny of the realityprinciple, a number of eighteenth-century poets … found it necessary … to run mad … Cowper went mad, poor domestic tea-kettle singing thrust upon Hell-fire.”

⁵ Thomas Wright, The Life of William Cowper (London, 1921), p. 176.

⁶ Thomas Taylor, The Life of William Cowper (Philadelphia, 1833), p. 74. But he adds, “The result was beneficial.”

⁷ Op. cit., pp. 46–47.

⁸ Thomas Wright, The Correspondence of William Cowper (London, 1904), ii, 89. Cowper's “amused,” however, may be the well-nigh perfect tribute. “Despair,” he once wrote “made amusement necessary, and I found poetry the most agreeable amusement”; (Wright, op. cit., p. 343). And elsewhere, explaining how it was that he could treat upon subjects in verse which he trembled to approach in prose, Cowper had written: “There is a difference. The search after poetical expression, the rhyme, and the numbers, are all affairs of some difficulty; they amuse, indeed, but are not to be attained without study, and engross, perhaps, a larger share of the attention than the subject itself. Persons fond of music will sometimes find pleasure in the tune when the words afford them none” (Wright, op. cit., p. 177). If, then, the poet found “amusement” in original composition, it would appear that he found also an even more powerful mental cathartic in translation; and though the following lines were not written till 1791, in the Preface to his translation of The Iliad, we may feel certain that they are fairly applicable to the poet's state ten years previously: “There is indisputably a wide difference between the case of an original writer in rhime and a translator. In an original work the author is free; if the rhime be of difficult attainment and he cannot find it in one direction, he is at liberty to seek it in another; the matter that will not accommodate itself to his occasions he may discard, adopting such as will. But in a translation no such option is allowable; the sense of the author is required, and we do not surrender it willingly even to the plea of necessity. Fidelity is indeed of the very essence of translation, and the term itself implies it. For which reason, if we suppress the sense of our original, and force into its place our own, we may call our work an imitation, if we please, or perhaps a paraphrase, but it is no longer the same author only in a different dress, and therefore it is not translation.” There is something pathetic, recalling that the date of the poet's death was April 25, 1800, about the entries in the diary of his cousin, the Rev. J. Johnson, with whom the poet spent the closing years of his life. They reveal his sustained interest both in translation and in French: “Dec. 18, 1799; Mr. C. translating the Miser and Plutus at this time. January 9, 1800 Mr. C. pretty well at this time, translating from Gay. January 20, reading La Vie De Marianne”: and then again, on the twenty-seventh; “This evening after supper I began to read the corrected copy of The Iliad to Mr. C.” Mr. Paul Elmer More refers to Cowper's translation of Homer as “a translation which the world did not want” (Shelburne Essays, third series, p. 25)—but which, we are suggesting, may, with all of his other translation, have been indispensable to the poet's greater work. The diary referred to is that described by Robert E. Spiller in PMLA, xlii (1927), 946–962.

⁹ Wright, op. cit., ¶ 5. The comparison is generous, particularly in view of the very high opinion Cowper held of the English poet. See “Table Talk,” l. 764, and letter cited in James Robert Boyd's edition of Task, Table Talk (New York, 1868), pp. 81–82.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 20.—The quality of piety as understood by Cowper seems always to have had a beneficial effect upon his finely balanced mentality. Long before this time (about 1752) it had served him well: “At length I met with Herbert's Poems; and, gothic and uncouth as they were, I yet found in them a strain of piety which I could not but admire. This was the only author I had any delight in reading… it |his malady] never seemed so much alleviated as while I was reading him.” Southey, The Works of William Cowper (London, 1836), i, 26.

¹¹ Goldwin Smith, op. cit., p. 46.

¹² Fausset, op. tit., p. 206.

¹³ W. J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry (London, 1926), v, 346.

¹⁴ Thomas Wright, op. cit., ii, 5–6.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 8.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 15.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 89.

¹⁸ Southey says: “A month's leisure was devoted to them, and they were presented to Mr. Bull” (The Works of William Cowper, edited by Southey, ii, 64). But this cannot mean that Cowper completed the task in that amount of time. The letter just cited began with the words: “I have but little leisure … that little I devoted for a month after your departure to the translation of Madame Guyon.” This is evidently the source of Southey's opinion. And Bull himself cites the same words in his Preface to the 1801 edition, adding, “On my return, Mr. Cowper presented me with these translations.” But “these translations” were the “fair copies of all the pieces I have produced upon this last occasion” (Ref., n. 17). That Cowper had already given the Rev. William Bull certain of the translations is evident from the letter dated between Nov. 5 and Nov. 11, 1782, and addressed to the Rev. William Unwin (Wright, p. 20.): “I told you that I had translated several of the poems of Madame Guyon. I told you too, or I am mistaken, that Mr. Bull designed to print them. That gentleman is gone to the seaside. … My intention is to surprise him at his return with the addition of as much more translation as I have already given him.” In other words, the pieces “produced upon this last occasion,” plus the pieces “already given him,” make the total. But there is exactly a year's interval between the first and last letters cited in the body of our article. The problem is further complicated by the fact that the date written by Cowper on the Dedication of the translations to the Rev. William Bull is none other than July, 1782, which would certainly have been prior to the completion of the work—indeed, prior to its inception!

¹⁹ Here too there is a slight discrepancy. Mr. Bull, in his Preface (reproduced with the Dedication in Southey's edition of Cowper, Vol. ix), states that “The idea of printing them was afterwards suggested to Mr. Cowper.” The “afterwards” here refers to the time of Mr. Bull's return from the trip to the seaside, mentioned in the previous footnote. But, as we gather from the same letter, Mr. Cowper, prior to Mr. Bull's departure, understood that the latter “designed to print them.” It is quite possible that the Rev. William Bull, writing of these events twenty years later, had forgotten their exact sequence.

²⁰ In Mr. J. C. Bailey's edition of The Poems of William Cowper (London, 1905), may be found a list of the variant readings of the so-called Ash Manuscript, a manuscript in the poet's handwriting. It is Mr. Bailey's opinion that “there is no evidence that Cowper ever returned to the work of translating Madame Guyon after he had once handed over his fair copies to Bull. … It must therefore be assumed that the MSS in the possession of Mr. Ash give us the translations as they stood before the poet made the fair copy of which he speaks in the letter of August 3, 1783” (Bailey, op. cit., p. 717). Cowper's own manuscript translation, which he did for Mr. Bull, was sold at Sotheby's a few years ago.

²¹ These citations are from Mr. Bull's own preface to the 1801 edition.

²² “My brother had twenty guineas for eight books of English Henriade, and I furnished him with four of them”. (Letter to Lady Hesketh, Jan. 16, 1786, in Wright, op. cit., ii, 448). [The translation of the Henriade] “was the only large work that he was engaged in during these years.” (J. C. Bailey, op. cit., p. xiii, citing an unpublished letter of Joseph Hill, the poet's intimate friend, to Hayley) “These years” refers to the London years, i.e., 1752–63.

²³ Out of 845. Mr. Bull had given the poet Vol. ii, from which 19 poems were selected; Vol. iii, from which 11 poems were selected; and Vol. iv. Of these, Vols ii and iii are divided into three categories, viz: Première Partie—Instructions pour les âmes qui aspirent à un Interiéur solide. Seconde Partie—Dispositions d'une âme intérieure selon ses différens états. Troisième Partie—Sentimens et transports d'une âme perdue en Dieu et appellée par lui à aider le prochain. Vol. iv was divided into five sections, from the first of which Cowper selected for translation the “Cantique de Noël”; from the fourth a single poem, “Dieu cache ses amants,” while the remaining five chosen from this volume were found in the second section, Courtes réflexions … propres pour les âmes attirées à la Vie Intérieure.

²⁴ A select clientele. Cowper himself wrote: “This … is still less likely to be a popular work than my former”—referring to the rather coolly received volume of 1782, Cowper's first publication, including. “Table Talk,” “Truth,” “Progress of Error,” and “Expostulation”; prior to this there had been the Olney Hymns, of which Cowper had been co-author with the Rev. John Newton. “Men that have no religion would despise it; and men that have no religious experience would not understand it” (Wright, op. cit., p. 20). Yet it is interesting and amusing to note that in selecting the airs to which the hymns were to be sung, Madame Guyon herself had been influenced by a legitimate desire for “popularity,” for her Cantiques Spirituels were set to certain airs “la plupart profânes … pour inviter tant de beaux esprits qui se laissent corrompre par la mollesse des chansons mondaines à tourner les choses au profit de la piété et à chanter les vérités et les louanges de Dieu sur les mêmes airs que tant d'autres emploient à l'offenser” (Préface, i, viii–ix.). Hence, tunes such as “Buvons, chers amis, buvons,” which under Madame Guyon's dispensation become “Mourons, chers amis, mourons; or ”à moi, Bachus,“ becoming ”à moi Seigneur; or “Bouteille, mes amours,” to “Jésus, mon seul amour”; great favorites, apparently, were “Je ne veux de Tirsis entendre les raisons” and “La jeune Iris me fait porter ses chaînes,” these popular tunes having been used for some hundred of the spiritual hymns. Yet interestingly enough David Cecil pointed out (The Stricken Deer, pp. 97–98), referring to English evangelical hymnology, that “In their hymns the mysterious doctrines of atonement and redemption are incongruously packed into the mild dactylic meters of eighteenth-century pastoral and set to the matter-of-fact melodies of eighteenth-century ballads.”

²⁵ Op. cit., p. 46.

²⁶ Cowper lends to his conservative friend one of the most common epithets applied to this remarkable woman; “the great mystic of modern France,” says C. H. C. Wright (History of French Literature, p. 401); but “a semi-hysterical mystic,” according to Nitze and Dargan (History of French Literature p. 357). It is not necessary or timely to recall her career (1648–1717), which had excited such violent opposition on the part of Bossuet. Certain it is, however, that her influence had spread, especially in England, and largely through the influence of the Quaker scholar, Josiah Martin (1683–1747). For an interesting but too brief account of this energetic translator's life, see Stephen Hobhouse, William Law and Eighteenth Century Quakerism, pp. 137; 155–157. Madame Guyon's Life, written by herself, had originally appeared in 1720, thanks to the efforts of “an English gentleman of rank”; see T. C. Upham's Life of Madame Guyon (New York, 1854, ii, 364). The second edition (1905), contains many of Cowper's translations. Her forty volumes were in a continual state of publication between 1767 and 1791, in Paris. At London (1768) appeared her Lettres Chrétiennes et spirituelles, while the spiritual songs, Poésies et Cantiques Spirituels, had been published as early as 1722, at Cologne.

²⁷ Wright, op. cit., ii, 5.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 6.

²⁹ So referred to by the translator in his Dedication.

³⁰ Wright, op. cit., ii, 94–96.

³¹ The total number of lines in the original is 1435; in the translation, 1398.

³² The ten omissions referred to are found in the following ten poems: (1) L'Hirondelle (The Swallow); (2) Aspiration de l‘âme languissante d'amour (Aspirations of the Soul after God); (3) Ne s'appuyer sur soi-même (Self-Diffidence); (4) Eau de Source (Living Water); (5) Veiller à Dieu de cceur pendant la nuit (II); (6) Merveilleuses contrariétés qu'on expérimente dans l'amour (Scenes favorable to meditation); (7) Ne pas déouvrir les secrets de l'amour (The Secrets of Divine Love are to be Kept); (8) Nécessité du dépouillement (The Necessity of Self-Abasement); (9) Goût et amour de la croix (The Joy of the Cross); (10) Sur le même sujet (III) (Veiller à Dieu). Nos. 1–6 contain the omissions referred to as omissions of form only; Nos. 7 and 8, the references to the lion and the jay. It may not be amiss at this point to note two errors in the Southey edition (Vol. ix). The poem, “The Soul that Loves God finds Him Everywhere,” (L‘âme amante trouve Dieu par-tout) is listed as Tom. ii, Cant 118; it should be 108; “Scenes favourable to Meditation” (Merveilleuses contrariétés qu'on expérimente dans l'amour), listed in Contents as Tom iv. Cant. 83, should be Tom. iii.

³³ Wright, op. cit., ii, 95.

³⁴ Ibid., p. 95.

³⁵ Op. cit., p. 207; and see n. 39 below.

³⁶ For a most sympathetic presentation of this subject see Henry Osbom Taylor's The Mediaeval Mind, i, Ch. xx.

³⁷ A thought most beautifully expressed by Henry Osborn Taylor in The Mediaeval Mind i, 349: “The first to construe it as the bridal of the Soul was one who, by an act more irrevocable than a monastic vow, put from him mortal bridals—Origen, the greatest thinker of the Eastern Church. Thus the passion of the Hebrew woman for the lover that was to her as a bundle of myrrh lying between her breasts, was lifted, still full of desire, to the love of the God-man, by those of sterile flesh and fruitful souls.”

³⁸ “That God should deal familiarly with man, or, which is the same thing, that He should permit man to deal familiarly with Him, seems not very difficult to conceive, or presumptuous to suppose, when some things are taken into consideration” (Wright, ii, p. 95).

³⁹ This represented something certainly, even though it was more sober; the eighteenth century was not “enthusiastic,”and England is not the Continent; to have voiced mysticism at all was great. It is quite difficult to accept Mr. Fausset's statements: “he deprived her verse of much of the naïveté which proved the reality and intimacy of her faith. In the process he also proved once again the demoralizing unreality of his own” (op. cit., p. 207). David Cecil sees the matter, we believe, in better perspective: “For, excluded from other systems of thought, there poured into the narrow channel of Evangelicalism all the mystical and transcendental emotion of the period” (Op. cit., p. 93).

⁴⁰ Souhaits pour le règne de l'amour (The Triumph of Heavenly Love Desired), ll. 1, 2.

⁴¹ Aspiration de l'âme languissante d'amour (Aspirations of the Soul after God) ll. 1–4.

⁴² Ne pas découvrir les secrets de l'amour (The Secrets of Divine Love are to be Kept) Stanza 8.

⁴³ Whether because of its connotations or of the exigencies of prosody, may be debatable. The poet is not always “logical”; his “shadings” fall from the cumulative spiritual mood he would impart.

⁴⁴ Amour de reconnaissance et pur (Gratitude and Love to God), ll. 5–6.

⁴⁵ Fidelité d'amour dans l'absence du Bien-Aimé (Love faithful in the absence of the Beloved), ll. 10–11. This paraphrase is rather striking, although commonplace. The translator, as we have seen, has no objections to the word epoux; but to carry the simile on, attaching to it the possibility of infidelity, is going too far. It is the connotations that guide. Note for instance how in the poem “Merveilleuses contrariétés” (Scenes favorable to meditation, l. 8) the French word objet (here given literally as the English of “époux”) is there translated as “My Lover and Lord.”

⁴⁶ Veiller à Dieu (iii) (Watching unto God in the Night Season), Stanza 7.

⁴⁷ Ibid., Stanza 10.

⁴⁸ Se plaire dans le martyre (Joy in Martyrdom), Stanza 2.

⁴⁹ Amour pur et fort (Love pure and fervent), ll. 9–11.

⁵⁰ L'amour s'accroît par la souffrance (Love Increased by Suffering), ll. 23–24.

⁵¹ Wright, op. cit., ii, 95–96.

⁵² Ne pas découvrir les secrets de l'amour (The Secrets of Divine Love are to be Kept), Stanza, 6.

⁵³ L'amour-propre et la vérité incompatibles (Self Love and Truth Incompatible), Stanza 7.

⁵⁴ See n. 59, below.

⁵⁵ See n. 26, above.

⁵⁶ This translation is interesting, and acquiescence for indifference, most suggestive: “Madame Guyon,” says A. B. Sharpe, “is never tired of declaring that ‘her soul has no inclination or tendency for anything whatsoever’; she is ‘in such an abandonment’ that she is obliged to reflect in order to know' if she has a being and subsistence.” …'I have to made an effort to think if I am and what I am; if there are in God creatures and anything subsisting“ (Mysticism: Its True Nature and Value, pp. 171–172). This certainly does not describe Cowper. How human he is! And his Letters—how earthly compared to those of Madame Guyon's! She lapses into an almost oriental quietism (see Caroline Spurgeon's Mysticism in English Literature, pp. 21–22), whereas the mundane Cowper rejoices exceedingly over barrels of fresh oysters and wine.

⁵⁷ Sacrifice dans les vicissitudes du divin Amour (The Vicissitudes experienced in the Christian Life), Stanza 15.

⁵⁸ This line is certainly challenging. May “le Rien” and “mon Époux” be one and the same? Not for Cowper! It is true that the “nothingness” of certain mystics is a “divine dark” in which the Soul apprehends the ineffable light, but this is scarcely its favored meaning in Molinos or his descendants.

⁵⁹ Toute gloire à Dieu seul (Glory to God Alone), Stanza 5.—The substitution of his aweful face for ce grand Tout in this translation is highly suggestive. Cowper was not “at home” in abstractions. “No one was ever less abstract” says Bailey (op. cit., p. xlvii). “II a l'exactitude presque minutieuse,” wrote Sainte-Beuve in his second essay (Nov. 27, 1854) on William Cowper (Lundi, xi, 177). Madame Guyon was certainly more diffuse. Even the admiring Mrs. Upham admits that “Her style … is somewhat diffuse” (Preface to Letters of Madame Guyon, Boston, 1858). Her emotions too were perhaps more sublimated; his more real. He is sincere and devout in contemplation of heaven, but the “aweful face” and the movement of His lips as He passed judgment were all too vividly seen and heard. A perplexing position for a Quietistl And yet “normal” perhaps for an eighteenth-century English Evangelical, The great Revival had sharpened to an acute conviction of utter “creature miserabilism” that vaguer mystical expression of the doctrine of total depravity, which was the essence of seventeenth-century Quietism—its via negativa; see the article by E. Herman on “Quietism,” Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (New York, 1920), x, 534.

There is a challenging passage in Caroline Spurgeon's Introduction (pp. 27–28) to Mysticism in English Literature; she says, writing of Bunyan: [he] “might at first sight appear to have many of the characteristics of the mystic, for he had certain very intense psychic experiences which are of the nature of a direct revelation of God to the soul … But although psychically akin, he is in truth widely separated from the mystics in spirit and temperament and belief. He is a Puritan, overwhelmed with a sense of sin, the horrors of punishment in hell, and the wrath of an outside Creator and Judge, and his desire is aimed at escape from this wrath through ”election“ and God's grace. But he is a Puritan endowed with a psychopathic temperament, sensitive to the point of disease and gifted with an abnormally high visualising power. Hence his resemblance to the mystics, which is a resemblance of psychical temperament and not of spiritual attitude.”

⁶⁰ L'amour tout seul (Divine Love Endures no Rival), l. 4.

⁶¹ Dieu cache ses Amans (God Hides His People), l. 5.

⁶² Ibid., Stanza 6.

⁶³ Ne s'appuyer sur soi-même (Self-Diffidence), l. 30.

⁶⁴ Sacrifice dans les Vicissitudes du Divin Amour (The Vicissitudes Experienced in the Christian Life), Stanza 23.

⁶⁵ Veiller à Dieu de cœur pendant la Nuit (iii) (Watching unto God in the Night Season); Stanza 8.

⁶⁶ L'amour s'accrôit par la souffrance (Love Increased by Suffering), ll, 1 and 24; (Cowper, 27).

⁶⁷ Goût et amour de la croix (The Joy of the Cross), l. 17.—But this is not to say that Madame Guyon eschews the conventional designations, for in this same hymn (l. 24) we find, “Jesus Christ en jugea de même”; and elsewhere, in “Témoignage de l'adoption Divine” (The Testimony of Divine Adoption), for example, she had written “notre Sauveur”; “nous sommes Chrétiens” (ll. 4 and 8). “Quietists” rarely, if ever, consider themselves as “heretics.” Even Madame Guyon died in the faith. As for Cowper, there was never any question of his orthodoxy; and surely, if judged by M. Lanson's definition, he was a poor Quietist: “Le quiétisme est une erreur de certains mystiques qui prétendent s'élever à un état de perfection indéfectible, dans lequel leur âme, unie à Dieu, ne fait plus d'actes distincts de foi ou d'amour, ne connaît plus les dogmes définis, n'emploie plus les prières formelles, ne désire plus le salut éternel, s'abandonne passivement à la volonté divine, à toutes les inspirations et suggestions de cette volonté” (G. Lanson, Histoire de la Littérature Française, 23rd edition, p. 573).

⁶⁸ Cecil, op. cit., p. 102.

⁶⁹ Aimer la Divine Justice (Divine Justice Amiable), ll. 1–4.

⁷⁰ L'ame amante trouve Dieu par-tout (The Soul that loves God finds Him Everywhere), Stanza 3.

⁷¹ Préface to Poésies et Cantiques Spirituels par Madame J. M. B. de Mothe-Guyon, pp. iv–v.

⁷² Ne pas découvrir les secrets de l'amour (The Secrets of Divine Love are to be Kept) Stanza 17.

⁷³ Ibid., Stanza 19.

⁷⁴ Paul Elmer More, op. cit., p. 10.