Charles Lamb Part 3

Holcroft had finished his life when I wrote to you, and Hazlitt has since finished his life--I do not mean his own life, but he has finished a life of Holcroft, which is going to press. Tuthill is Dr. Tuthill. I continue Mr. Lamb. I have published a little book for children on t.i.tles of honour: and to give them some idea of the difference of rank and gradual rising, I have made a little scale, supposing myself to receive the following various accessions of dignity from the king, who is the fountain of honour.--As at first, 1, Mr. C. Lamb; 2, C. Lamb, Esq.; 3, Sir C. Lamb, Bart,; 4, Baron Lamb of Stamford; 5, Viscount Lamb; 6, Earl Lamb; 7, Marquis Lamb; 8, Duke Lamb. It would look like quibbling to carry it on further, and especially as it is not necessary for children to go beyond the ordinary t.i.tles of sub-regal dignity in our own country, otherwise I have sometimes in my dreams imagined myself still advancing, as 9th, King Lamb; 10th, Emperor Lamb; 11th, Pope Innocent, higher than which is nothing but the Lamb of G.o.d. Puns I have not made many (nor punch much), since the day of my last; one I cannot help relating. A constable in Salisbury Cathedral was telling me that eight people dined at the top of the spire of the cathedral, upon which I remarked that they must be very sharp set. But in general I cultivate the reasoning part of my mind more than the imaginative. Do you know Kate * * *. I am so stuffed out with eating turkey for dinner, and another turkey for supper yesterday (turkey in Europe and turkey in Asia), that I can't jog on. It is New Year here. That is, it was New Year half a year back, when I was writing this. Nothing puzzles me more than time and s.p.a.ce, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them. The Persian amba.s.sador is the princ.i.p.al thing talked of now. I sent some people to see him worship the sun on Primrose Hill at half past six in the morning 28th November; but he did not come, which makes me think the old fire-worshippers are a sect almost extinct in Persia. Have you trampled on the Cross yet? The Persian amba.s.sador's name is Shaw Ali Mirza. The common people call him Shaw Nonsense.

While I think of it, I have put three letters besides my own three into the India post for you, from your brother, sister, and some gentleman whose name I forget. Will they, have they, did they, come safe? The distance you are at cuts up tenses by the root.

DEAR HOOD,--If I have anything in my head I will send it to Mr. Watts. Strictly speaking he should have had my Alb.u.m verses, but a very intimate friend importuned me for the trifles, and I believe I forgot Mr. Watts, or lost sight at the time of his similar Souvenir. Jamieson conveyed the farce from me to Mrs. C. Kemble, _he_ will not be in town before the 27th. Give our kind loves to all at Highgate, and tell them that we have finally torn ourselves out right away from Colebrooke, where I had _no_ health, and are about to domiciliate for good at Enfield, where I have experienced _good_.

"Lord what good hours do we keep!

How quietly we sleep!"

See the rest in the Complete Angler. We have got our books into our new house. I am a drayhorse if I was not asham'd of the indigested dirty lumber as I toppled 'em out of the cart, and blest Becky that came with 'em for her having an unstuff'd brain with such rubbish. We shall get in by Michael's ma.s.s. 'Twas with some pain we were evuls'd from Colebrook. You may find some of our flesh sticking to the door posts. To change habitations is to die to them, and in my time I have died seven deaths. But I don't know whether every such change does not bring with it a rejuvenescence.

'Tis an enterprise, and shoves back the sense of death's approximating, which tho' not terrible to me, is at all times particular distasteful. My house-deaths have generally been periodical, recurring after seven years, but this last is premature by half that time. Cut off in the flower of Colebrook. The Middletonian stream and all its echoes mourn.

Even minnows dwindle. _A parvis fiunt MINIMI._ I fear to invite Mrs. Hood to our new mansion, lest she envy it and rote us. But when we are fairly in, I hope she will come and try it. I heard she and you were made uncomfortable by some unworthy to be cared for attacks, and have tried to set up a feeble counter-action through the Table Book of last Sat.u.r.day. Has it not reach'd you, that you are silent about it? Our new domicile is no manor house, but new, and externally not inviting, but furnish'd within with every convenience. Capital new locks to every door, capital grates in every room, with nothing to pay for incoming and the rent 10 less than the Islington one. It was built a few years since at 1,100 expense, they tell me, and I perfectly believe it. And I get it for 35 exclusive of moderate taxes. We think ourselves most lucky. It is not our intention to abandon Regent Street, and West End perambulations (monastic and terrible thought!) but occasionally to breathe the FRESHER AIR of the metropolis. We shall put up a bedroom or two (all we want) for occasional ex-rustication, where we shall visit, not be visited. Plays too we'll see--perhaps our own. Urbani Sylvani, and Sylvan Urba.n.u.ses in turns. Courtiers for a spurt, then philosophers. Old homely tell-truths and learn-truths in the virtuous shades of Enfield. Liars again and mocking gibers in the coffee-houses and resorts of London. What can a mortal desire more for his bi-parted nature?

O the curds and cream you shall eat with us here!

O the turtle soup and lobster sallads we shall devour with you there!

O the old books we shall peruse here!

O the new nonsense we shall trifle with over there!

O Sir T. Browne!--here.

O Mr. Hood and Mr. Jerdan there! thine, C(urba.n.u.s) L(sylva.n.u.s) (ELIA ambo)--

Inclos'd are verses which Emma sat down to write, her first, on the eve after your departure. Of course they are only for Mrs. H.'s perusal. They will shew you at least that one of our party is not willing to cut old friends. What to call 'em I don't know. Blank verse they are not, because of the rhymes.--Rhimes they are not, because of the blank verse.

Heroics they are not, because they are lyric, lyric they are not, because of the Heroic measure. They must be called EMMAICS.--

The full charm of the long early letters, with their pleasant expatiations on literary themes can scarcely be sampled without doing violence. The various editions in which the letters are obtainable will be found referred to in the bibliographical list at the end of this little book. In ill.u.s.tration of their continued appreciation it may be mentioned that three editions have been published during the past year or so, each of which contains letters denied to the others.

The latest edition--that of Mr. E. V. Lucas--is also the fullest, both in the number of letters included and in the elaboration of its annotatory matter.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Holograph letter to John Clare, "the Peasant Poet."

Reduced facsimile from the original in the British Museum.]

[Transcript of the Handwritten Letter To John Clare.]

India house 31 Aug 1822

Dear Clare, I thank you heartily for your present. I am an inveterate old Londoner, but while I am among your choice collections, I seem to be native to them, and free of the country. The quant.i.ty of your observation has astonished me.

What have most pleased me have been Recollections after a Ramble, and those Grongar Hill kind of pieces in eight syllable lines, my favourite measure, such as Cowper Hill and Solitude. In some of your story telling Ballads the provincial phrases sometimes startle me. I think you are too profuse with them. In poetry slang [underlined] of every kind is to be avoided. There is a rustick c.o.c.kneyism as little pleasing as ours of London. Transplant Arcadia to Helpstone. The true rustic style, the Arcadian English, I think is to be found in Shenstones. Would his Schoolmistress, the prettiest of poems, have been better, if he had used quite the Goody's own language? Now and then a home rusticism is fresh & startling, but where nothing is gained in expression, it is out of tenor. It may make people [crossed out] folks smile and stare, but the ungenial coalition of barbarous with refined phrases will prevent you in the end from being so generally tasted, as you deserve to be. Excuse my freedom, and take the same liberty with my puns [underlined].

I send you two little volumes of my spare hours. They are of all sorts, there is a methodist hymn for Sundays, and a farce for Sat.u.r.day night. Pray give them a place on your shelf. Pray accept a little volume, of which I have duplicate, that I may return in an equal number to your welcome presents--

I think I am indebted to you for a sonnet in the London for August.

Since I saw you I have been in France, and have eaten frogs.

The nicest little rabbity things you ever tasted. Do look about for them. Make Mrs. Clare pick off the hind quarters, boil them plain, with parsley and b.u.t.ter. The four [crossed out] fore quarters are not so good. She may let them hop off by themselves. Yours sincerely, Cha^s Lamb.

THE ESSAYS OF ELIA

"Shakespeare himself might have read them and Hamlet have acted them; for truly was our excellent friend of the genuine line of Yorick."

Thus it was that Leigh Hunt referred to the essays which without doubt stand as the most characteristic of Charles Lamb's contributions to literature. His reputation, as was recognized and acknowledged within a few years of his death, "will ultimately rest on the Essays of Elia, than which our literature rejoices in few things finer."

The intimate footing upon which he puts himself and his reader, is perhaps not so much a peculiarity of his own as it is the dominant note always in the work of your born essayist. He discourses high truth or fresh philosophy, truest poetry, richest wit, or the most delicate humour, he presents personal experiences with that simplicity of pure camaraderie which a.s.sumes that the reader could do the same--if he had the mind, as Lamb himself put it when wittily snubbing Wordsworth. In most books, as De Quincey has pointed out, the author figures as a mere abstraction, "without s.e.x or age or local station,"

whom the reader banishes from his thoughts, but in the case of Lamb and that brilliant line of authors to which he belongs, we must know something of the man himself, and as I have said earlier, we get it abundantly scattered up and down his writings. Even if we do not happen to be acquainted with the actual biography, we can build up in our minds on reading the essays of Elia a life story not far removed from actuality, though it would be wanting in any hint of tragedy. It is this intimacy which at once attracts and repels readers, attracts all those who are, in however small a degree, kindred spirits, and repels, perhaps, others. The quaintness, oddity, flippancy, are wrought together with deep thought, poetry, and feeling to a wonderful degree. The very diversity of theme and manner--this varying change from grave to gay, from lively to severe--is indeed but a reflection of life itself, which with the most fortunate of us dashes our smiles with tears, and even to the most unfortunate imparts something of pleasure and delight.

The "Essays of Elia" may fittingly be dealt with as at once the most representative and the finest of his writings. Great as is the range of their subjects, it will be found that they are more or less unified by the author's individuality both in point of view and in treatment, that they are all informed with what has been termed Lamb's calm and self-reposing spirit, that they are all more or less strongly marked by that style which, based upon a loving study of the Elizabethan and seventeenth-century writers, was yet for the most part distinguished by concision and ease. He took from his models their richness of language without their prolixity, their felicity of expression without their tendency to the elaboration of conceits; he unconsciously employed their varied styles, to form an individual style of his own.

It is only possible in one small section of a small volume such as this to indicate a portion of the wealth in the Elia series, so varied are the themes which inspired the essayist: the delicious drollery of the "Dissertation upon Roast Pig"; the immortal characterization of "Mrs. Battle's Opinions upon Whist"; the pleasant personal touches in a score of the essays; the cry of stifled affection in "Dream Children"; the whimsicality of "Popular Fallacies"; each of these, and as many again unspecified might be made the subject of separate comment. Indeed, for variety in unity there are few books to compare with our Elia. In the opening essay--the first of the series to appear in the "London Magazine," the one to stand in the forefront of the volume--Lamb blends reminiscences with fancy, as he continued to do frequently throughout the series, in a way that is as suggestive to the seeker after autobiographical data as it is engaging to the reader in search of nothing further than the rich delight which comes of pa.s.sing time with a literary gem. Lamb pictures "The South Sea House"

as it was when he knew it thirty years earlier--he speaks of it as forty years. There is a presentation of the old place, fallen more or less completely upon days of desuetude, with some wonderfully-limned portraits of the officials. Here is the deputy-cashier, Thomas Tame:

He had the air and stoop of a n.o.bleman. You would have taken him for one, had you met him in one of the pa.s.sages leading to Westminster Hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the body forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed to be the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the applications of their inferiors. While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy.

The conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its original state of white paper. A sucking babe might have posed him. What was it then? Was he rich! Alas, no! Thomas Tame was very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentle folks, when I fear all was not well at all times within. She had a neat meagre person, which it was evident she had not sinned in over-pampering; but in its veins was n.o.ble blood. She traced her descent, by some labyrinth of relationship, which I never thoroughly understood--much less can explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of day--to the ill.u.s.trious but unfortunate house of Derwent.w.a.ter. This was the secret of Thomas's stoop. This was the thought, the sentiment, the bright solitary star of your lives, ye mild and happy pair, which cheered you in the night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station!

This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of glittering attainments, and it was worth them all together. You insulted none with it; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through it. _Decus et solamen._

Then at the close Elia says, "Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while--peradventure the very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastic--insubstantial--like Henry Pimpernel and old John Naps of Greece; be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being. Their importance is from the past."

The names may have been mostly fantastic--in one case we know that it was not, for "Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters" is known to delvers among dead books--the types are immortal. In this first essay we find in such sentences as "their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal superfluity of cyphers," an ill.u.s.tration of Lamb's wonderful use of what an antipathetic critic might term an informal superfluity of syllables.

The next essay, reflecting the atmosphere of "Oxford in the Vacation,"

was written presumably during a holiday visit to the University of Cambridge, though Elia touching upon matters concerning church holidays breaks off with--

... but I am wading out of my depths. I am not the man to decide the limits of civil and ecclesiastical authority--I am plain Elia--no Selden, nor Archbishop Usher--though at present in the thick of their books here in the heart of learning, under the shadow of mighty Bodley.

Then follows a pa.s.sage eminently characteristic of Elia's happy manner of playing with a theme:

I can here play the gentleman, enact the student To such a one as myself, who has been defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic inst.i.tution, nowhere is so pleasant to while away a few idle weeks at one or other of the universities. Their vacation, too, at this time of the year, falls in pat with _ours_. Here I can take my walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree of standing I please. I seem admitted _ad eundem_. I fetch up past opportunities. I can rise at the chapel-bell, and dream that it rings for _me_. In moods of humility I can be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When the peac.o.c.k vein rises, I strut a Gentleman Commoner. In graver moments, I proceed Master of Arts.

Indeed I do not think I am much unlike that respectable character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed-makers in spectacles drop a bow or curtsey as I pa.s.s, wisely mistaking me for something of the sort. I go about in black, which favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend quadrangle I can be content to pa.s.s for nothing short of a Seraphic doctor.

The walks at these times are so much one's own--the tall trees of Christ's, the groves of Magdalen! The halls deserted, and with open doors inviting one to slip in unperceived, and pay a devoir to some Founder or n.o.ble or royal Benefactress (that should have been ours), whose portrait seems to smile upon their over-looked beadsman, and to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a peep in by the way at the b.u.t.teries, and sculleries, redolent of antique hospitality: the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fire-places, cordial recesses; ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago; and spits which have cooked for Chaucer! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes forth a Manciple.

The next essay, "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," should be read along with an earlier one, which does not belong actually to the Elia series, "Recollections of Christ's Hospital." In the later essay Lamb affected to look at the school as it might have been to a scholar less fortunately circ.u.mstanced than himself, a boy far from his family and friends, and the boy whom he selected was that one of his school companions whom he knew best and with whom in manhood he had sustained the closest friendship--S. T. Coleridge. That friend he thus apostrophizes in a pa.s.sage which has frequently been quoted:

Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee--the dark pillar not yet turned--Samuel Taylor Coleridge--Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen the casual pa.s.ser through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the _speech_ and the _garb_ of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy!

"The Two Races of Men," divides men into those who borrow and those who lend, the theme being followed out with great humour, and going on to those "whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers," and then giving pleasant bits about Coleridge--under his _nomme de guerre_ of Comberbatch--and his theory that "the t.i.tle to property in a book ... is in exact ratio to the claimant's powers of understanding and appreciating the same." "Should he go on acting upon this theory," adds Elia, "which of our shelves is safe?"

"New Year's Eve" suggests a train of reflections--not, in the plat.i.tudinous manner of looking back over the errors of the past year and making good resolutions for the coming one--but on mortality generally, and on the pa.s.sing of time and the pa.s.sing of life:

I am not content to pa.s.s away like a weaver's shuttle! These metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitude, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I and my friends; to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave.

Next comes the immortal "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist,"--Mrs.

Battle, whose wish for "a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game" has become almost proverbial so commonly is it repeated, whose heart-whole devotion to her game will make true Elians whist players when bridge is forgotten. In "A Chapter on Ears," Elia expatiates upon his insensibility to music; in "All Fool's Day" he puts wisdom under motley in a truly Shakespearian fashion, with the fine conclusion, "and take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition."

"The Quakers' Meeting" is a delicate and impressive verbal representation of the spirit of Quakerdom as revealed to one not a Quaker but ready to appreciate the quietist spirit. Those who have never attended a meeting of the kind feel that they have realized its significance when they come across a pa.s.sage such as this:

More frequently the meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon, not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue, that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive.

You have bathed with stillness--O, when the spirit is sore fettered, even tired to sickness of the janglings and nonsense noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers!