This being so, it seems to me a mistake to regard Cowper as a Horace manqué, instead of being content with his miraculous achievement as a letter-writer. It may well be that his sufferings, so far from destroying his real genius, harrowed and fertilized the soil in which it grew. He unquestionably was more ambitious for his verse than for his prose. He wrote his letters without labour, while he was never weary of using the file on his poems. “To touch and retouch,” he once wrote to the Rev. William Unwin, “is, though some writers boast of negligence, and others would be ashamed to show their foul copies, the secret of almost all good writing, especially in verse. I am never weary of it myself.” Even if we count him only a middling poet, however, this does not mean that all his fastidiousness of composition was wasted. He acquired in the workshop of verse the style that stood him in such good stead in the field of familiar prose. It is because of this hard-won ease of style that readers of English will never grow weary of that epistolary autobiography in which he recounts his maniacal fear that his food has been poisoned; his open-eyed wonder at balloons; the story of his mouse; the cure of the distention of his stomach by Lady Hesketh’s gingerbread; the pulling out of a tooth at the dinner-table unperceived by the other guests; his desire to thrash Dr. Johnson till his pension jingled in his pocket; and the mildly fascinated tastes to which he confesses in such a paragraph as:
I know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musical save and except always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our birds and fowls please me without one exception. I should not indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a farm-yard, is no bad performer.
Here he is no missfire rival of Horace or Milton or Prior, or any of the other poets. Here he has arrived at the perfection for which he was born. How much better he was fitted to be a letter-writer than a poet may be seen by anyone who compares his treatment of the same incidents in verse and in prose. There is, for instance, that charming letter about the escaped goldfinch, which is not spoiled for us even though we may take Blake’s view of caged birds:
I have two goldfinches, which in the summer occupy the greenhouse. A few days since, being employed in cleaning out their cages, I placed that which I had in hand upon the table, while the other hung against the wall; the windows and the doors stood wide open. I went to fill the fountain at the pump, and on my return was not a little surprised to find a goldfinch sitting on the top of the cage I had been cleaning, and singing to and kissing the goldfinch within. I approached him, and he discovered no fear; still nearer, and he discovered none. I advanced my hand towards him, and he took no notice of it. I seized him, and supposed I had caught a new bird, but casting my eye upon the other cage perceived my mistake. Its inhabitant, during my absence, had contrived to find an opening, where the wire had been a little bent, and made no other use of the escape it afforded him, than to salute his friend, and to converse with him more intimately than he had done before. I returned him to his proper mansion, but in vain. In less than a minute he had thrust his little person through the aperture again, and again perched upon his neighbour’s cage, kissing him, as at the first, and singing, as if transported with the fortunate adventure. I could not but respect such friendship, as for the sake of its gratification had twice declined an opportunity to be free, and consenting to their union, resolved that for the future one cage should hold them both. I am glad of such incidents; for at a pinch, and when I need entertainment, the versification of them serves to divert me….
Cowper’s “versification” of the incident is vapid compared to this. The incident of the viper and the kittens again, which he “versified” in The Colubriad, is chronicled far more charmingly in the letters. His quiet prose gave him a vehicle for that intimacy of the heart and fancy which was the deepest need of his nature. He made a full confession of himself only to his friends. In one of his letters he compares himself, as he rises in the morning to “an infernal frog out of Acheron, covered with the ooze and mud of melancholy.” In his most ambitious verse he is a frog trying to blow himself out into a bull. It is the frog in him, not the intended bull, that makes friends with us to-day.
[VII.—A Note on Elizabethan Plays]
Voltaire’s criticism of Shakespeare as rude and barbarous has only one fault. It does not fit Shakespeare. Shakespeare, however, is the single dramatist of his age to whom it is not in a measure applicable. “He was a savage,” said Voltaire, “who had imagination. He has written many happy lines; but his pieces can please only in London and in Canada.” Had this been said of Marlowe, or Chapman, or Jonson (despite his learning), or Cyril Tourneur, one might differ, but one would admit that perhaps there was something in it. Again, Voltaire’s boast that he had been the first to show the French “some pearls which I had found” in the “enormous dunghill” of Shakespeare’s plays was the sort of thing that might reasonably have been said by an anthologist who had made selections from Dekker or Beaumont and Fletcher or any dramatist writing under Elizabeth and James except William Shakespeare. One reads the average Elizabethan play in the certainty that the pearls will be few and the rubbish-heap practically five acts high. There are, perhaps, a dozen Elizabethan plays apart from Shakespeare’s that are as great as his third-best work. But there are no Hamlets or Lears among them. There are no Midsummer Night’s Dreams. There is not even a Winter’s Tale.
If Lamb, then, had boasted about what he had done for the Elizabethans in general in the terms used by Voltaire concerning himself and Shakespeare his claim would have been just. Lamb, however, was free from Voltaire’s vanity. He did not feel that he was shedding lustre on the Elizabethans as a patron: he regarded himself as a follower. Voltaire was infuriated by the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than himself; Lamb probably looked on even Cyril Tourneur as his superior. Lamb was in this as wide of the mark as Voltaire had been. His reverent praise has made famous among virgins and boys many an old dramatist who but for him would long ago have been thrown to the antiquaries, and have deserved it. Everyone goes to the Elizabethans at some time or another in the hope of coming on a long succession of sleeping beauties. The average man retires disappointed from the quest. He would have to be unusually open to suggestion not to be disappointed at the first reading of most of the plays. Many a man can read the Elizabethans with Charles Lamb’s enthusiasm, however, who never could have read them with his own.