ABSTRACT
Johnson and Cowper embodied their own age for many of their contemporaries, as certain writers do again and again in history. Of the two Johnson was decidedly the greater, and counts for more today; Cowper is often seen as a mere forerunner—though this is both to misinterpret him and to do him injustice—of the romantic writers, and particularly of Wordsworth. He was not merely their predecessor, but a man, like Johnson, very much of his period—the period not yet shaken by the French Revolution and by the Napoleonic convulsion. They both believed in a fundamental permanence of the human condition, and saw change as evidence of superficial decay and degeneration. The romantics—especially Wordsworth and Coleridge in the eighteenth century when they were young—also believed in fundamental permanences, in qualities that made for survival of what is best in humanity, but they were more inclined to see change as regenerative; the fundamentals, for them, were thickly obscured and in need of visionary insight for their recovery. Johnson and Cowper saw them as self-evident to the normal faculties, and even accorded recognition by society, however superficially, as requisite to its own secure basis. When Johnson told Boswell to clear his mind of cant, when he and Cowper condemned affectation and declared that the basis of all excellence is truth, they were appealing to an ultimate criterion available to all who were not blinded by dishonesty and selfishness. When Wordsworth explained in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800) that his poems mainly treated ‘humble and rustic life’ because ‘in that condition the passions of men were incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’, he was implying that urbanized men of all social levels were no longer in touch with the ‘inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind’ within themselves.
