'He Belonged Essentially to the Order of Wags'

A gift I prize is seeing the humor in writers not taxonomically labeled “Humorists.” If you tell me a piece by S.J. Perelman has made you laugh my response is, “Enjoy yourself.” I don’t find Perelman as funny as I did when I was a kid, though I’m happy for you. But if you tell me you found a passage that made you laugh in a letter by Yvor Winters (as the late Helen Pinkerton, one of his former students, encouraged me to do), I'm delighted and both of us can laugh. Unexpectedness is a reliable goad to laughter. Here is the Irish essayist Augustine Birrell writing about William Cowper, most of whose reputation is rooted in his madness and religiosity, but whose work is laced with good humor: 

“To form anything like a fair estimate of Cowper, it is wise to ignore as much as possible his mental disease, and always to bear in mind the manner of man he naturally was. He belonged essentially to the order of wags. He was, it is easy to see, a lover of trifling things, elegantly finished. He hated noise, contention, and the public gaze . . .”

 

There’s a streak of Charles Lamb or Sydney Smith in Cowper, especially in his letters. He can be unexpectedly silly while sounding abjectly suicidal in the same letter. In the following passage, from a letter he wrote to his friend the Rev. William Unwin on October 31, 1779, Cowper could almost be goofing on social media and most digital communications:

 

“I wrote my last letter merely to inform you that I had nothing to say; in answer to which you have said nothing. I admire the propriety of your conduct though I am a loser by it. I will endeavour to say something now, and shall hope for something in return.”

 

Birrell composed what might serve as Cowper’s epitaph: “He loved a jest, a barrel of oysters, and a bottle of wine.”