Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900

Essays in Honour of Vincent Newey

Michael Davies, Ashley Chantler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317104490
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Individually and collectively, these essays establish a new direction for scholarship that examines the crucial activities of reading and writing about literature and how they relate to 'authenticity'. Though authenticity is a term deep in literary resonance and rich in philosophical complexity, its connotations relative to the study of literature have rarely been explored or exploited through detailed, critical examination of individual writers and their works. Here the notion of the authentic is recognised first and foremost as central to a range of literary and philosophical ways of thinking, particularly for nineteenth-century poets and novelists. Distinct from studies of literary fakes and forgeries, this collection focuses on authenticity as a central paradigm for approaching literature and its formation that bears on issues of authority, self-reliance, truth, originality, the valid and the real, and the genuine and inauthentic, whether applied to the self or others. Topics and authors include: the spiritual autobiographies of William Cowper and John Newton; Ruskin and travel writing; British Romantic women poets; William Wordsworth and P.B. Shelley; Robert Southey and Anna Seward; John Keats; Lord Byron; Elizabeth Gaskell; Henry David Thoreau; Henry Irving; and Joseph Conrad. The volume also includes a note on Professor Vincent Newey with a bibliography of his critical writings.

Chapter 1 Authentic Narratives: Cowper and Conversion

Michael Davies

DOI: 10.4324/9781315592619-2

Extreme distress of spirit at last drove me […] to lay Homer before me and to translate for amusement. Why it pleased God that I should be hunted into such a business, of such enormous length and labour, by miseries for which he did not see good to afford me any other remedy, I know not. And […] yet a thousand times have I been glad of it, for a thousand times it has served at least to divert my attention in some degree from such terrible tempests as I believe have seldom been permitted to beat upon a human mind. Let my friends therefore who wish me some little measure of tranquillity in the performance of the most turbulent voyage that ever Christian mariner made, be contented that having Homer's mountains and forests to windward, I escape under their shelter from the force of many a gust that would almost overset me; especially when they consider that not by choice but by necessity I makethem my refuge.¹

¹ William Cowper, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–1986), III, 10–11.

Anyone familiar with the life and poetry of William Cowper will be struck by the authenticity of this passage, taken from a letter sent to his friend, John Newton, on 13 January 1787. While the provenance of this letter is not in doubt – it is no inauthentic ‘fake’ or ‘forgery’ – nevertheless it announces something of Cowper's particular ‘Way of thinking and expressing his Thoughts’, which may be considered ‘authentic’ in another sense: to borrow one eighteenth-century formula for individual originality, its ‘Style’ remains ‘peculiar’ to him in the same way that ‘every Man has his peculiar Air in moving, speaking, […] and many other Things by which he is distinguishable from all others’.² In this instance, it is the image of the ‘Christian mariner’ beset by ‘terrible tempests’ that many would recognise as key to Cowper's authentic literary signature here, variants of which can be seen in so many of the poems he produced throughout the latter half of his life, from the ‘tempest-toss’d […] half a wreck’³ found among Olney Hymns to the altogether much ‘deeper gulphs’ encountered amid the waves of Cowper's last English poem, ‘The Cast-Away’.⁴

² Jeremiah Jones, New and Full Method of Settling the Canonical Authority of the New Testament, 3 vols (London, 1726–1727), I, 93–4, cited in Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 33–4. See also Margaret Russett, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 21. ³ William Cowper, ‘Temptation’, l. 17; The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1995), I, 178. ⁴ Ibid., III, 216. On Cowper's use of such imagery elsewhere, see Conrad Brunström, William Cowper: Religion, Satire, Society (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004), pp. 128–32, 138–66; Maurice J. Quinlan, William Cowper: A Critical Life (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 194–9, 230–32; Vincent Newey,Cowper's Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982), pp. 271–313; James King,William Cowper: A Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), pp. 84–6, 111–12, 279–81.

Yet this passage also presents us with problems of ‘authenticity’, albeit to do with ingenuousness rather than genuineness, and with subtleties of sincerity rather than any outright imposture. The project to which Cowper refers in this letter as his sole ‘refuge’ from ‘the force of many a gust that would almost overset me’ is his new translation of Homer, begun around 1784–1785. Having ‘proceeded’ as far as he could ‘in the way of Original poetry’ – by this point he had published Poems (1782) andThe Task (1785), as well as Olney Hymns (1779, co-authored with Newton) – Cowper's Homer would become the most ambitious literary undertaking of his career, yet one rooted first and foremost in a question of authenticity: how could Homeric verse be rendered more properly, more authentically, into English?⁵ Alexander Pope's translations ofThe Iliad and The Odyssey certainly lacked authenticity for Cowper: ‘there is not to be found in them the least portion of Homer's spirit’, he wrote to Newton in December 1785, ‘nor the least resemblance of his manner’.⁶ Cowper's aim, then, would be to ‘produce a translation of the Old Bard that the Literati shall prefer to Pope's’, which – composed in heroic couplets – he considered simply ‘inadequate’. Success in this endeavour, he envisaged, would ‘do me more honour than any thing I have performed hitherto’.⁷ Nearing its completion, Cowper would remain confident ‘about the success of my translation’, having discovered ‘the stile […] in which Homer ought to be render’d and which alone would suit him’: that of Miltonic blank verse, Milton being ‘every where grand and elegant’, Cowper avowed, as his language ‘anticipated the expression of a century to come’.⁸

⁵ Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, II, 409–10. ⁶ Ibid., p. 411. ⁷ Ibid., p. 400. ⁸ Ibid., III, 362–3.

What is puzzling about Cowper's letter to Newton in January 1787, however, is the absence of any such talk of literary ‘success’. Rather than grappling with the ‘Herculean labour’ of translation or extolling the virtues of being ‘still at the old sport; Homer all the morning and Homer all the Evening’, as Cowper would put it to Joseph Hill in May 1790, when addressing Newton he unveils a rather different set of concerns about a different kind of authenticity: that of his personal and indeed spiritual reasons for producing his translation.⁹ The language Cowper uses is, in fact, one of evangelical conversion: of the ‘Christian mariner’ battling against fearsome inward ‘tempests’. It is in these terms that Cowper offers himself to Newton as having had no option but ‘to lay Homer before me and to translate’ in order to distract him from despair, though he is equally at pains to state that it is not he, Cowper, who chose to translate the ancient Bard but God, whose ‘Providence […] governs all my thoughts and directs my intentions as he pleases’. Indeed, Cowper claims to have been ‘hunted’ into this ‘business’ by divine ‘force’, with no prospect of achieving any ‘fame and honour and glory’.¹⁰ The Cowper of this letter is stamped with a very specific mark of authenticity as a result: not a poet aspiring to impress the literati but one inspired – or rather instructed – to translate Homer by ‘Providence’ and ‘distress’ in equal measure.¹¹

⁹ Ibid., II, 395; III, 374. ¹⁰ Ibid., III, 9–11. ¹¹ For similar statements, see ibid., II, 410–13; III, 531–3.

This disparity, between Cowper the master translator of the Classics, the champion of Milton and the challenger of Pope, and Cowper the ever-suffering and passively accepting vessel of divine ‘Providence’, can be unsettling. Which, we might wonder, is the ‘true’ or ‘real’ William Cowper? Which has more ‘authenticity’ for us? If ‘the basic assumption built into the ideal of authenticity’, at least as it might be understood from an early twenty-first-century perspective, is that ‘lying within each individual, there is a deep, “true self” – the “Real Me” – in distinction from all that is not really me’, an ‘inner self […] that makes the person a unique individual’ and which constitutes a stable and self-possessed identity, then we can see how Cowper's letter to Newton disrupts this concept.¹² Such ‘authenticity’ falters at the fault lines we encounter in Cowper's dichotomous presentation of himself. Either we assume that Cowper is not being entirely honest or sincere with Newton, covering poetic ambition with the stormy rhetoric of the ‘spirit’, or his true motivation for translating Homer is altogether too dark to be articulated to anyone other than his friend and former pastor. Perhaps, though, we must navigate carefully around an idea of authenticity that assumes an unequivocally centred and univocal self when it comes to reading someone like Cowper. After all, the same letter which voices such an impassioned plea about the ‘tempests’ of his despair concludes with Cowper's equally sincere appreciation of the ‘Cocoa nut’ and ‘Oysters’ he had just been sent. Does such a remark invalidate the remarkable confession that comes before it? Or does it render it all the more ‘authentic’?

¹² Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 6–7. See also Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus (London: Routledge, 1995); Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Bernard Williams,Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 172–205.

The purpose of this essay is to examine, albeit briefly, the two versions of William Cowper that this letter to John Newton reveals – if not exactly of Parnassus and of the conventicle, then certainly of the literati and of the evangelical Church of England – in order to negotiate similar problems of ‘authenticity’ elsewhere in Cowper's writings, especially when it comes to religious experience. The focus will remain, then, on the language that Cowper adopts in this letter: that of the evangelical conversion narrative or spiritual autobiography, a mode of writing which, as many commentators have noted, occupies an important place in the emergence of modern ideas of selfhood and of what might be termed ‘authentic’ individualism.¹³ As the letter to Newton indicates quite clearly, it is in his relationship to the forms of spiritual autobiography, and to the literary shaping of conversion in particular, that key questions arise about Cowper and ‘authenticity’. ‘Those who run out of the holy spirit’, Theodor Adorno observes, in an unmistakeable echo of 1 Corinthians 13.1, ‘must speak with mechanical tongues’, turning ‘words that are sacred’ into nothing more than ‘frozen emanations’.¹⁴ Is this the case with Cowper, we might wonder: a poet convinced of his own damnation yet somehow able to write through and within a language otherwise entirely authentic to Christian salvation.

¹³ See, for example, Guignon, On Authentic Being, pp. 14–24, 26–9; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 184, 286–9; Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 23–5; Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). ¹⁴ Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 6.

* * *

Why Cowper, when writing to Newton, would seek to authenticate his Homeric task through the religious language of spiritual seafaring – as a ‘Christian mariner’, that is – can be explained in a number of ways. It may anticipate, for example, some unspoken disapproval from Newton about Cowper's latest poetic project. Newton had, after all, abandoned the Classics when he underwent his conversion in 1748, despite having taught himself Latin with ‘classical enthusiasm’ as a young seaman.¹⁵ Indeed, Newton surrendered such ‘newly acquired riches’ for ‘the inestimable treasure hid in the field of holy scripture’: ‘life was too short’, he came to believe, ‘to admit of leisure for such elaborate trifling’, Classical literature being full of ‘false models and false maxims’ by contrast to the eternal truths of the Word.¹⁶ We can see why Cowper – who knew the story of John Newton's spiritual past intimately – would be sensitive to any criticism in this respect and why he would go on to defend his translation of Homer as advantageous to ‘any person of a spiritual turn’ and as instructive to those ‘who will not learn from Scripture’ piety and prayerfulness: ‘if they please’, he wrote to Newton, they can learn them instead from Homer.¹⁷ Yet we can also begin to see why Cowper, whose earlier poem The Task had troubled Newton by taking a direction very different from his more straightforwardly Christian ‘Moral Satires’, is so careful to frame his role as a translator of the pagan Bard in the most Christian terms possible when justifying his Homeric labours to Newton in 1787.¹⁸

¹⁵ John Newton, An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of *********, 9th edn (London, 1799), p. 91. ^16...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Authentic Narratives: Cowper and Conversion
• 2 Is He ‘Well-Authenticated’? Robert Southey and Anna Seward
• 3 Undefinitive Keats
• 4 ‘A Kind of an Excuse’: Shelley and Wordsworth Revisited
• 5 Authenticity Projected: Alexander Pope, Lord Byron and Cardinal Newman
• 6 Byron, Candour and the Fear of Lying
• 7 A ‘Gorgeous Fabric’: Authentic Images of India and the Orient in the Works of British Romantic Women Poets
• 8 Becoming Ruskin: Travel Writing and Self-Representation in Praeterita
• 9 Authorial, Antiquarian and Acting Authenticity in Henry Irving’s King Lear
• 10 The Authentic Voice of Elizabeth Gaskell
• 11 Anthropology, Bestial Humour and the Communal Authentic in Cranford
• 12 Thoreau and Creeley: American Words and Things
• 13 The Robust Way: ‘The Man Said, No’
• 14 From Cowper to Conrad: Authenticity at the End of the Century
• Afterword: The Authentic Vincent Newey
• A Vincent Newey Bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index