Cowper, Hayley, and Samuel Johnson's "Republican" Milton: For Louis A. Landa

Cowper, Hayley, and Samuel Johnson'szyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedc “Republican” Milton For Louis A. Landa J A M E S K IN G [William Cowper] was not British or enlightened or far-sighted or adapt­ able. He was English, and most so when he forgot his nationality and took a country walk. He had his conscious patriotic gestures, and some of them were effective; but there is a stay-at-home air about them which makes them rather ludicrous in our eyes.. . ? So E. M. Forster claimed in 1932. In some ways, he is right, but there was an adventuresome side to Cowper’s political beliefs. To use Forster’s terminology, Cowper was “British” as well as “English” in his “patriotic gestures” — his beliefs went beyond the boundaries of narrow political is­ sues to more universal sentiments of concern for the plight of the poor, the oppressed, and the disenfranchised. Nevertheless, it must be ac­ knowledged that Cowper and radicalism seem at first a strange congruence, especially when one remembers that William Copwer was a life-long Whig, who only occasionally quarreled with his cousin, Lady Hesketh, an ar­ dent Tory. Indeed, his most unabashed statement on freedom and its use is contained in a letter to her of 23 March 1793: You are as well convinced as any body, even as my patriotic self, that the people have certain rights and privileges which cannot be denied them but by an usurpation. But then I observe you think them always in the wrong when they demand them. Here seems to lie the difference between us. You approve all the measures of the Court, or of the Minister, and I am pleased with every struggle that is made against them when they 229 230 / KING infringe the birthright of the Commons. We both love the King, but I the King and every tittle of true and rational liberty... .2 Although, as this passage shows, Cowper’s Whiggism was obviously one which was never narrow and bigoted, it did include admiration for monar­ chy and Parliament. John Milton, on the other hand, was, as Christopher Hill has asserted, fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA “a propagandist of revolution, a defender of regicide and of the English republic.”3 At first glance, then, it would seem impos­ sible that these two men could have similar political values. However, in order to come to a precise understanding of Milton’s influence on Cow­ per in this matter, we must consider Cowper’s relationship to two other men: Samuel Johnson and William Hayley. Cowper hated Johnson’s Life of M ilton and in 1792 he became a close friend of William Hayley, an advocate of many of Milton’s republican sentiments. The influence of these two intermediary figures ultimately nudged Cowper in a more radical direc­ tion, and I shall show this by using Cowper’s pencil annotations to his copy of Johnson’s Life of M ilton, by discussing his outrage at the sup­ pression of William Hayley’s Life of M ilton, and, finally, by citing his eagerness to defend Richard Phillips, a publisher of seditious material. I begin with a sketch of the place of Milton in Cowper’s life and poetry. At the age of fourteen Cowper first encountered Milton’s poetry. At that time he admired Lycidas, being especially taken with its “Liveliness of... Description ... Sweetness of... Numbers” and the “Classical Spirit of Antiquity that prevailed] in it.”4 As an older man in the late 1770s and early 1780s, he saw Milton as the poet through whom he could es­ cape the emasculating spectre of Alexander Pope, whose “oily smoothness”5 he despised. Indeed, Cowper came to realize more and more as work progressed in 1781 on his first independent volume of verse, Poems by William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esqr. (1782), that he lacked Pope’s aphoristic complexity and delicacy in the couplet form. Sub­ sequently, in his attempt to forge a literary career as if Pope had not ex­ isted, Cowper used Miltonic blank verse in The Task (1785) to write a late eighteenth century Paradise Lost. Cowper continued in much the same manner from 1786 to 1791 when he translated Homer into blank...