Charles Lamb Part 5

There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent circ.u.mstances. To bully and swagger away the sense of them before strangers, may not always be discommendable. Tibbs and Bobadil, even when detected, have more of our admiration than contempt. But for a man to put the cheat upon himself; to play the Bobadil at home; and, steeped in poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself all the while chin-deep in riches, is a strain of const.i.tutional philosophy, and a mastery over fortune, which was reserved for my old friend Captain Jackson.

With the next essay of this collection, that on "The Superannuated Man," we come to one of the most notable of the series of Elia's trans.m.u.tations of matters of private experience into precious literature. The paper is as autobiographic as any of his letters: some slight changes--as of the East India House to the name of a city firm--are made, but for the rest it is a record of his retirement with a revelation of the feelings attendant upon the change from having to go daily to an office for thirty-six years to being suddenly free:

For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity; I was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was happy and knowing that I was not. I was in the condition of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' confinement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like pa.s.sing out of Time into Eternity--for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have all his Time to himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me. And here let me caution persons grown old in active business, not lightly, nor without weighing their own resources, to forego their customary employment all at once, for there may be danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know that my resources are sufficient; and now that those first giddy raptures have subsided, I have a quiet home-feeling of the blessedness of my condition. I am in no hurry. Having all holidays, I am as though I had none. If Time hung heavy upon me I could walk it away; but I do not walk all day long, as I used to do in those old transient holidays, thirty miles a day, to make the most of them. If Time were troublesome, I could read it away, but I do not read in that violent measure, with which, having no Time my own but candlelight Time, I used to weary out my head and eyesight in bygone winters. I walk, read, or scribble (as now) just when the fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after pleasure; I let it come to me. I am like the man

"---- that's born, and has his years come to him, In some green desert."

"The Genteel Style in Writing" is a delightful enforcement of the "ordinary criticism" that "my Lord Shaftesbury, and Sir William Temple, are models of the genteel style in writing," though Elia prefers to differentiate them as "the lordly and the gentlemanly." The essay is, for the most part, a plea, with ill.u.s.trations, for a consideration of Sir William Temple as an easy and engaging writer.

"Barbara S----" is a slight anecdote expanded into a sympathetic little story of a child-actress who, instead of her half-guinea salary, being once handed a guinea in error, virtuously took it back and received the moiety.

"The Tombs in the Abbey" is an indignant protest--in the form of a letter to Southey--against the closing of Westminster Abbey and St.

Paul's Cathedral, except during service times, to all but those who could afford to pay for admission; it closes with a touch of humour where Elia suggests that the Abbey had been closed because the statue of Major Andre had been disfigured, and adds: "The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there. Do you know anything about the unfortunate relic?" Then, in "Amicus Redivivus," we have an accident to a friend, George Dyer, who had walked absent-mindedly into the New River opposite Lamb's very door, made to supply matter for treatment in Elia's pleasantest vein.

"Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney" gives a dozen of Sidney's sonnets with appreciatory comment. "Newspapers Thirty Years Ago" is particularly interesting for its reminiscences of the days when Lamb wrote half a dozen daily jests for "The Morning Post" at sixpence per jest, and for its sketches of Daniel Stuart and Fenwick, two diversely typical journalists of a century since. "Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art" is a criticism of the prevailing taste in art matters, inspired by Martin's "Belshazzar's Feast," and contrasts the modern methods of painting as--a Dryad, "a beautiful naked figure rec.u.mbent under wide-stretched oaks" (a figure that with a different background would do just as well as a Naiad), with the older method ill.u.s.trated by Julio Romano's dryad, in which was "an approximation of two natures." "Rejoicings Upon the New Year's Coming of Age" is a graceful, sparkling piece of humorous fancy:

I should have told you, that cards of invitation had been issued. The carriers were the _Hours_; twelve little, merry whirligig foot-pages, as you should desire to see, that went all round, and found out the persons invited well enough, with the exception of _Easter Day_, _Shrove Tuesday_, and a few such _Moveables_, who had lately shifted their quarters.

Well, they all met at last, foul _Days_, fine _Days_, all sorts of _Days_, and a rare din they made of it. There was nothing but, Hail! fellow _Day_,--well met--brother _Day_--sister _Day_,--only _Lady Day_ kept a little on the aloof, and seemed somewhat scornful. Yet some said _Twelfth Day_ cut her out and out, for she came in a tiffany suit, all white and gold, like a queen on a frost-cake--all royal, glittering, and _Epiphanous_. The rest came--some in green, some in white--but old _Lent and his family_ were not yet out of mourning. Rainy _Days_ came in, dripping; and sun-shiny _Days_ helped them to change their stockings.

_Wedding Day_ was there in his marriage finery, a little the worse for wear. _Pay Day_ came late, as he always does; and _Doomsday_ sent word--he might be expected.

"The Wedding" describes such a ceremony at which Elia had a.s.sisted, and ill.u.s.trates at once his sympathy with the young people and with their parents--"is there not something untender, to say no more of it, in the hurry which a beloved child is in to tear herself from the paternal stock and commit herself to strange graftings." "The Child Angel" is a beautiful poetic apologue in the form of a dream.

In "Old China," one of the most attractive of this varied series, Elia is ready with reminiscences of the days when the purchase of the books, pictures, or old china that they loved, meant a real sacrifice, and the things purchased were therefore the more deeply prized.

Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare--and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Sat.u.r.day night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too late--and when the old bookseller, with some grumbling, opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures--and when you lugged it home wishing it were twice as c.u.mbersome--and when you presented it to me; and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (_collating_ you called it)--and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak--was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become rich and finical, give you half the honest vanity, with which you flaunted it about in that overworn suit--your old corbeau--for four or five weeks longer than you should have done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen--or sixteen shillings, was it?--a great affair we thought it then--which you had lavished on the old folio.

Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases now.

When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number of shillings upon that print after Lionardo, which we christened the "Lady Blanch"; when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the money,--and thought of the money, and looked again at the picture--was there no pleasure in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing to do but walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos.

Yet do you?

"Confessions of a Drunkard" and "Popular Fallacies" complete the tale of the "Essays of Elia" that were collected into volume form as such.

The first-named essay had been issued originally in 1813. It is an attempt to set forth from a drunkard's point of view the evils of drunkenness, and was first published in a periodical with a purpose over twenty years before its inclusion in the second edition of the "Last Essays of Elia." To accentuate the fact that it was purely a literary performance--an attempt to project himself into the mind of a drunkard willing to allow others to profit by his example--Lamb reprinted it in the "London Magazine" as one of his ordinary contributions. There have not been wanting matter-of-fact people (with whom our Elia has recorded his imperfect sympathy) who have accepted this essay as pure biography; because details tally with the author's life they think the whole must do so. We have but to follow the story of Lamb's life with understanding to realize how wrong is this impression. The closing dozen of essays in brief, grouped under the t.i.tle of "Popular Fallacies," discuss certain familiar axioms and show them--in the light of fun and fancy--to be wholly fallacious.

Such is the variety of those two volumes which by common consent--by popular appreciation and by critical judgement--have their place as Lamb's most characteristic work. Throughout both series we find delicate unconventionality, the same choice of subjects from among the simplest suggestions of everyday life, lifted by his method of treatment, his manner of looking at and treating things, out of the sphere of every day into that of all days. However simple may be the subject chosen it is always made peculiarly his own.

HIS STYLE

The style is the man. The rule was thus confined within the compa.s.s of a brief sentence by a distinguished French naturalist, and if there be examples which form exceptions to that rule, Charles Lamb is certainly not one of them. Markedly individual himself he reveals that individuality in his writings so strongly that there are not wanting critics who consider themselves able to decide from the turn of a phrase or the use of a word whether Lamb did or did not write any particular piece of work which it may have been sought to father on him. In the manner of presentation of his writings we have at once the revelation of catholic literary taste and wide reading combined with the deep seriousness and the almost irresponsible whimsicality of the man himself. The man who was loved by all who knew him in the flesh--so true is it that _le style c'est l'homme_--reveals himself as a man to be loved by those who can only know him through the medium of the written word. Where he has given rein to his fancy or his imagination, he is humorous, whimsical, inventive; where he is dealing with matters of serious fact or criticism he is simple, clear, and to the point. Quotations already given would go to ill.u.s.trate this, but two further contrasting pa.s.sages may be added. The first is from "Table Talk," the second from a critical essay on the acting of Shakespeare's tragedies.

It is a desideratum in works that treat _de re culinaria_, that we have no rationale of sauces, or theory of mixed flavours; as to show why cabbage is reprehensible with roast beef, laudable with bacon; why the haunch of mutton seeks the alliance of currant jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth it; why a loin of veal (a pretty problem), being itself unctuous, seeketh the advent.i.tious lubricity of melted b.u.t.ter; and why the same part in pork, not more oleaginous, abhorreth it; why the French bean sympathizes with the flesh of deer; why salt fish points to parsnip, brawn makes a dead set at mustard; why cats prefer valerian to heartsease, old ladies _vice versa_--though this is rather travelling out of the road of the dietetics, and may be thought a question more curious than relevant; why salmon (a strong sapor _per se_) fortifieth its condition with the mighty lobster sauce, whose embraces are fatal to the delicater relish of the turbot; why oysters in death rise up against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam, by turns, court and are accepted by the compilable mutton hash--she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery.

So to see Lear acted--to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters on a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced on me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension but in intellectual: the explosions of his pa.s.sions are terrible as a volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage: while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear--we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that "they themselves are old"? What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things?

From the olden time Of Authorship thy Patent should be dated, And thou with Marvell, Browne, and Burton mated.

Thus did Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, close a sonnet which he addressed to Elia, and there is keen criticism in the few words. With the three writers mentioned Lamb was in rarest sympathy; many are the references to them in his books and in his letters. With Andrew Marvell he shows his kinship in his verse, with the authors of "The Religio Medici" and of "The Anatomy of Melancholy," in diverse ways in his prose. Now fanciful and euphemistic with these, he is, as soon as occasion calls for plainer statement, clear and simple in expression.

As one critic has put it, he was so steeped in the literature of the past that it became natural for him to deal with a theme more or less in the manner in which that theme would have been dealt with by that writer in the past most likely to have made it his own. This is perhaps slightly exaggerated, but it has something of truth in it.

"For with all his marked individuality of manner there are perhaps few English writers who have written so differently on different themes."

Placing special emphasis on his favourites--which besides the three named included Jeremy Taylor, Chapman, and Wither, to say nothing of the whole body of the dramatists of our literary renaissance--it may be said that his wide reading, his loving study, among the authors of our richest literary periods went far towards forming his style, though it must be remembered--it cannot be forgotten with a volume of his essays or letters in hand--that there is always that marked but indescribable "individuality of manner" which pervades the varied whole.

Hazlitt, touching upon the characteristics of Charles Lamb, in the essay in which he--not very felicitously--brackets Elia and Geoffrey Crayon in the "Spirit of the Age," says:

He is borne along with no pompous paradoxes, shines in no glittering tinsel of a fashionable phraseology; is neither fop nor sophist. He has none of the turbulence or froth of new-fangled opinions. His style runs pure and clear, though it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed through old-fashioned conduit pipes. Mr. Lamb does not court popularity, nor strut in gaudy plumes, but shrinks from every kind of ostentatious and obvious pretension into the retirement of his own mind.

That mind was, as has been said, stored with a wealth from among the best of English literature, and when Lamb expressed himself it was always in pure literary fashion. He was a bookman writing for those who love things of the mind which can only be pa.s.sed from generation to generation by means of books. In this we may recognize the reason--wholly unconscious to the writer--for the allusiveness of his style: it is often that subtle allusiveness which takes for granted as much knowledge in the reader as in the writer of the thing or pa.s.sage to which allusion is made. In the sixteenth century such allusiveness was generally fruit of an extensive knowledge of the ancient cla.s.sics; but though the references differ, the manner is much the same in Charles Lamb as in Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne.

Less confident critics than those mentioned at the beginning of this section may yet readily recognize the general individuality of the style in which Elia revealed himself through the medium of his pen. To his lifelong habit of browsing among old books, his especial fondness for the writers of the sixteenth century, he owed no small part of the richness of his vocabulary, which enabled him frequently to use with fine effect happy old words in place of current makeshifts. In one of his early letters to Coleridge where he mentions having just finished reading Chapman's Homer, Lamb, seizing upon a phrase in that translation, says with gusto, "what _endless egression of phrases_ the dog commands." The word arrided him (to employ another, the use of which he recovered for us), and he could not forbear making a note of it. He had, indeed, something of an instinctive genius for finding words that had pa.s.sed more or less into desuetude, and a happy way of re-introducing them to enrich the plainer prose of his day. He did it naturally, even as though inevitably, and without any such air of c.o.xcombical affectation as would have destroyed the flavour of the whole. Lamb was so thoroughly imbued with the thought and modes of expression of the rich Elizabethan and Stuart periods that his use of obsolescent words was probably more often than not quite unconscious.

The egotism of Elia's style in addressing his readers has been said to be founded on that of Sir Thomas Browne, and in a measure there can be little doubt that it was so--but only in a measure, for it is something the same egotism as that of Montaigne, is, indeed, the natural att.i.tude of the familiar essayist who must be egotistic, not from self-consciousness but from the lack of it. In putting his opinions and experiences in the first person, we feel that Lamb did so almost unconsciously, because it was for him the easiest way of expressing himself. It was not, in fact, egotism at all in the commonly accepted sense of meaning, too frequent or self-laudatory use of the personal p.r.o.noun.

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS

Those books with an asterisk against their date were only in part the work of Charles Lamb.

*1796. Poems on Various Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge (included four sonnets signed C. L., described in the preface as by "Mr. Charles Lamb of the India House").

*1796. Poems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer, by her grandson, Charles Lloyd (included "The Grandame," by Lamb).

*1797. Poems by S. T. Coleridge, second edition, to which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd.

*1798. Blank Verse by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb.

1798. A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret (afterwards simply ent.i.tled "Rosamund Gray").

1802. John Woodvil, a Tragedy; with Fragments of Burton.

1805. The King and Queen of Hearts: Showing how notably the Queen made her Tarts and how scurvily the Knave stole them away with other particulars belonging thereunto.

*1807. Tales from Shakespear, designed for the use of young Persons. 2 vols. (By Charles and Mary Lamb, though only the name of the former appeared on the original t.i.tle-page.)

*1807 or 1808. Mrs. Leicester's School, or the History of several young Ladies related by themselves (by Charles and Mary Lamb).

1808. The Adventures of Ulysses.

1808. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the Time of Shakespeare.

*1809. Poetry for Children. Entirely original. By the author of "Mrs.

Leicester's School."