Charles Lamb Part 4

Then follows a quaint Elian touch of humour in the application of a line of Wordsworth's far from that poet's intention: "Their garb and stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil and herd-like--as in the pasture--'forty feeding like one.'"

An encounter in a coach with a loquacious gentleman whom he took to be a school-master set Lamb musing on the differences between "The Old and the New School-Master," on the way in which the pedagogue is differentiated by the very conditions of his labours not only from his boys but from his fellows generally; he is a man for whom life is in a measure poisoned, "nothing comes to him not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses." Incidentally too, Elia informs us that the school-master

is so used to teaching that he wants to be teaching you. One of these professors, upon my complaining that these little sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes. The jests of a school-master are coa.r.s.e or thin.

The next essay--the only one in "The Essays of Elia" volume which had not appeared in the "London Magazine"--is a pretty bit about "Valentine's Day." This is followed by an inquiry into the existence of "Imperfect Sympathies," the writer declaring that he had been trying all his life--without success--to like Scotsmen, and that he had the same imperfect sympathy with Jews. The Scotsmen are too precise, too matter of fact at once in their own statements and those to which alone they will attend. This would of itself be sufficient to establish the "imperfect sympathy," for in another connection Lamb had declared his preference for "a matter of lie man."

"Witches and Other Night Fears" is an examination, in which whimsicality is blent with deep seriousness, of the night terrors of imaginative childhood; Elia showed how a picture in an old time Bible history had shaped his fears and made his nights hideous for several years of his early childhood, though he holds that "It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them direction." He suggests that the kind of fear is purely spiritual, and incidentally gives a characteristically quaint turn in "My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional nightmare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them."

In "My Relations" we have an excellent instance of Lamb's veiled autobiography; he begins by saying that he has no brother or sister and at once proceeds to a close and a.n.a.lytical portrait of his "cousin," James Elia, that supposed personage being Charles Lamb's own brother John, who died in November, 1821, a few months after the original appearance of this essay. "Mackery End in Hertfordshire,"

continues the theme of relations with another striking piece of portraiture in another supposed cousin of Elia's, Bridget (really Mary Lamb). In limning his sister he was of course hampered somewhat by her terrible affliction, but wonderfully has he surmounted it, and delightful indeed it is to follow the narrative of the "cousins'"

visit to unknown cousins at the old place in "the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire."

Dealing with the subject of "Modern Gallantry" Elia shows how it is wanting in the true spirit of gallantry which should consist not in compliments to youth and beauty but in reverence to s.e.x.

"The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple" is one of the essays richest at once in personal recollections, in wonderful portraiture, and in those subtle literary touches which impart their peculiar flavour to the whole. A sketch of the author's father as Lovel was quoted from this essay in the opening chapter. Elia's observation, his felicity of expression, his originality of thought, a hint of his playfulness, may all be recognized in the very commencement of this delicious essay:

I was born, and pa.s.sed the first seven years of my life in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said--for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?--these are my oldest recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot:

"There when they came, whereas those bricky towers, The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride, Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, There whylome wont the Templar knights to bide, Till they decayd through pride."

Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a transition for a countryman visiting London for the first time--the pa.s.sing from the crowded Strand or Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its cla.s.sic green recesses! what a cheerful, liberal look hath that portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden, that goodly pile

"Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,"

confronting, with ma.s.sy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantastically shrouded one named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure) right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twickenham Naiades! a man would give something to have been born in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times! to the astoundment of the young urchins, my contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials with their moral inscriptions, seeming co-evals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light!

How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep!

"Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!"

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and bra.s.s, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old dial! It stood as the garden G.o.d of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished?

In this essay, too, we have a happy sentence where, noting an error into which his memory had betrayed him, Elia wrote of his own narratives: "They are, in truth, but shadows of fact--verisimilitudes, not verities--or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history."

Dealing with "Grace Before Meat" Elia takes up an unconventional position and defends it with spirit. It is something of an impertinence to offer up thanks before an orgy of superfluous luxuries, a "grace" is only fitting for a poor man sitting down before the necessaries for which he may well feel thankful. Even such a theme Lamb finds a fruitful occasion for pertinent literary ill.u.s.tration and criticism, contrasting--from Milton's "Paradise Lost"--the feast proffered by the Tempter to Christ in the wilderness with "the temperate dreams of the divine Hungerer."

With "My First Play" Elia returned to one of those autobiographic themes in which he is so often at his happiest. He represents the emotions of the child of six or seven at the theatre and contrasts them with those that follow when the child has reached his teens. "At school all play-going was inhibited." He concludes, and, most readers will agree, concludes with justice, that "we differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from six."

"Dream Children," again, has much in it of the story of the writer's childhood, blent with sorrow over his brother's recent death and interwoven with a fanciful imagining of what might have been. Elia pictures himself talking to his two children of his own childhood's days when visiting grandmother Field:

When suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech: "We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious sh.o.r.es of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name"--and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side--but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever.

This little essay, the most beautiful of the series, is as essentially pathetic as anything in our literature, bringing tears to the eyes at every reading though known almost by heart.

The essay on "Distant Correspondents," in the form of a playful epistle to a friend, B. F. (_i.e._, Barron Field, also a contributor to the "London Magazine") has much that is characteristic of the writer. In it he plays--as he does in other letters to distant friends--on the way in which "this confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of two presents" renders writing difficult; in it he airs his fondness for a pun and enlarges upon the fugacity of that form of fun, its inherent incapacity for travel; and in it, too, he gives some indication--we have several such indications in his letters--of his fondness for hoaxing his friends with invented news about other friends, or with questions on supposit.i.tious problems set forth as actualities.

The next essay, "The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers," might be cited as one of those most fully representing the characteristics of Lamb's work as essayist. It has its touches of personal reminiscences, it deals with an out-of-the-way subject in a surprisingly engaging manner, and it is full of those quaint turns of expression, those more or less recondite words which Elia re-introduced from the older writers, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, etc., as he had re-introduced the dramatic writings of the seventeenth century. Here is a pa.s.sage which may be said to be thoroughly representative at once of Elia's manner of looking at things, as well as his own manner of describing them. Elia is discussing "Saloop."

I know not by what particular conformation of the organ it happens, but I have always found that this composition is surprisingly gratifying to the palate of a young chimney-sweeper--whether the oily particles (sa.s.safras is slightly oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous concretions, which are sometimes found (in dissections) to adhere to the roof of the mouth in these unfledged pract.i.tioners; or whether Nature, sensible that she had mingled too much of bitter wood in the lot of these raw victims, caused to grow out of the earth her sa.s.safras for a sweet lenitive; but so it is, that no possible taste or odour to the senses of a young chimney-sweeper can convey a delicate excitement comparable to this mixture. Being penniless, they will yet hang their black heads over the ascending steam, to gratify one sense if possible, seemingly no less pleased than those domestic animals--cats--when they purr over a new-found sprig of valerian. There is something more in these sympathies than philosophy can inculcate.

In this essay also we have an example--one of how many!--of Lamb's happiness in hitting upon an ill.u.s.tration, even though it be of the ludicrous; mentioning the wonderful white of the sweep-boy's teeth he adds, "It is, as when

'A sable cloud Turns forth her silver lining on the night.'"

"A Dissertation upon Roast Pig" is perhaps the most widely known of all the essays of Elia. Its delightful drollery, its very revelling in the daintiness of sucking-pig, its wonderfully rich literary presentation, its deliberate acceptance of wild improbability as historic basis, all unite to give it special place in the regard of readers. The theme is of course familiar. It is that of a small Chinese boy playing with fire who burnt down his father's flimsy hut so that a whole litter of piglings was roasted in the conflagration.

The boy touched one of the incinerated little ones to feel if it were alive; burnt his fingers and applied them to his mouth. His father returned and did the same, and thus roast sucking-pig became a new dish. Lamb plays with his subject with an inimitable mock earnestness.

Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto.

The subject Charles Lamb professed to take from a Chinese ma.n.u.script of his friend Manning's, and there have not been wanting critics who have sought for literary germs from which this essay might have sprung. Such will find in the seventeenth-century "Letters writ by a Turkish Spy" the origin of roasted meat referred to the days of sacrifice when one of the priests touching a burning beast hurt his fingers and applied them to his mouth--with precisely the same sequel which followed on Bo-bo's escapade.

"A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People" is a delicate--perhaps partly ironical--description of a bachelor's objections to his married friends flaunting their happiness in his face. In the last three of the essays we have Lamb as critic of the stage--partly, as in the Dramatic Specimens, of its literature, "On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century;" and partly on its actors, "On some of the Old Actors" and "On the Acting of Munden." Here again we have proofs of his instinctive critical power, his finely perfected method of expressing his appreciation of men and books.

The "Last Essays of Elia," published the year before Lamb's death, open with a "Character of the late Elia"--an admirable piece of self-portraiture in which Lamb hit off with great felicity some of his own characteristics, physical and intellectual. In the first of the essays, "Blakesmoor in H----shire," the author let his memory and fancy play about the old house, lately razed, in which his grandmother Field had held sway as housekeeper, in which as child he had pa.s.sed many happy holidays. Its tapestries, its haunted room, its "tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon," its Justice Hall, its "costly fruit garden, with its sun-baked southern wall," its "n.o.ble Marble Hall, with its Mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars--stately busts in marble--ranged round," each of these recalled by memory suggests some deep thought or some pleasant turn. The opening pa.s.sage at once sets the note of the whole, and may be taken as a representation of Lamb's contemplative mood:

I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better pa.s.sion than envy; and contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us between entering an empty and a crowded church.

In the latter it is chance but some present human frailty--an act of inattention on the part of some of the auditory--or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory on that of the preacher--puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonizing the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness? go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master s.e.xton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church: think of the piety that has kneeled there--the congregations, old and young, that have found consolation there--the meek pastor, the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee.

"Poor Relations" is a beautiful example of humour--provoking to smiles while touching to tears--with a wonderful introductory piling up of definitions: "A Poor Relation--is the most irrelevant thing in nature,--a piece of impertinent correspondency,--a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity,--an unwelcome remembrancer," and so on. "This theme of poor relations is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic a.s.sociations that it is difficult to keep the account distinct without blending." The essay includes three or four admirable examples of Elia's felicity in drawing typical characters with just that touch of oddity that makes them live as individuals. The theatre which we have seen always made its triple appeal to Lamb--from the study, from the front, and from the boards--inspired the next three essays, "Stage Illusions," "To the Shade of Elliston," and "Ellistoniana." The first is an example of subtle criticism showing how it is that we get enjoyment out of unlovely attributes on the stage, thanks to the "exquisite art of the actor in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us," that things are not altogether what they seem to be. In the two essays on Elliston we have at once an eloquent tribute to a stage-magnate of his day and a fine character portrait.

"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading," might be cited as one of the most characteristic of the essays of Elia. It ill.u.s.trates the writer's happiest style, and indicates his taste. In its opening pa.s.sages are words and phrases which have become quotations "familiar in the mouth as household words" to all book-lovers. Lamb takes as his text a remark made by Lord Foppington in Vanbrugh's "Relapse": "To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced products of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own."

An ingenious acquaintance was so much struck with this bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in others'

speculations. I love to lose myself in other men's minds.

When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think.

Books think for me.

I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything which I call a _book_. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.

In this catalogue of _books which are no books_--_biblia a-biblia_--I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards, bound and lettered on the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes which "no gentleman's library should be without"; the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's "Moral Philosophy."

With these exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding.

I confess that it moves my spleen to see these _things in books' clothing_ perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted playbook; then, opening what "seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Population Essay. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find--Adam Smith; to view a well-arranged a.s.sortment of block-headed Encyclopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a t.i.the of that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios; would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look himself again in the world. I never see these impostors, but I long to strip them to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils.

He pa.s.ses on to a consideration of the fitting habiliments of books; the sizes which appealed to him; the where and when to read: "I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone and reading 'Candide'!"--"The Old Margate Hoy" gives reminiscences of a visit to the popular resort--with some uncomplimentary asides at Hastings--in the days of the boy, "ill-exchanged for the foppery and freshwater niceness of the modern steampacket," the boy that asked "no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cauldrons." "The Convalescent" expatiates upon the allowable egoism of the occupant of a sick bed, upon his "regal solitude," and goes on to show "how convalescence shrinks a man back to his primitive state." The essay was inspired by that ill-health which led to Lamb's retirement from the India House in 1825. At the close he indulged his pen in his conversational fondness for a pun:

In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet far enough removed from the terra firma of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting--an article. _In articulo mortis_, thought I; but it is something hard--and the quibble, wretched as it was, relieved me.

In the "Sanity of True Genius" Elia set out to controvert the idea expressed by Dryden in his best remembered line--

"Great wits to madness nearly are allied,"

and does so in a most convincing manner if, with him, we understand by the greatness of wit poetic talent. As he says: "It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare."

The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without dismay; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos "and old night." Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a "human mind untuned," he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of madness) with Timon; neither is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that--never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so--he has his better genius whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels; or with the honest steward Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to recede from humanity, he will be found the truest to it.

"Captain Jackson" is an unforgettable picture of a poor man who would _not_ be poor; his manners made a plated spoon appear as silver sugar-tongs, a homely bench a sofa, and so on. As Elia concludes: