English Lands Letters and Kings Part 21

In those days, too, it was that the young Carlyle used to come to Highgate and watch those bulging eyes--pressed out with excess of brain substance behind them--and listen to his poetic convolutions of speech.

"The eyes," he says, "were as full of sorrow as of inspiration. I have heard him talk with eager, musical energy two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers, certain of whom--I for one--still kept eagerly listening in hope."

The very children of the neighborhood stood in awe of this wildish man--who seemed talking to the trees at times; and yet their awe was broken by fits of mocking courage, and they made faces at him across the high road. He died there at last--1834 was the year; within sight of the smoke of London and the dome of St. Paul's, toward which from Highgate there stretched in that day a long line of suburban houses, with scattered open fields, hedges, trees, flowers, and the hum of bees.

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_Charles Lamb._

[Sidenote: Essays of Elia.]

Among those who used to come somewhiles to follow that fine, confused stream of poetic talk which poured from Coleridge's lips, was Charles Lamb,[7] his old school-fellow and friend in the blue-coat days of Christ's Hospital. And what a strange, odd friendship it seems when we contrast the tender and delicious quietude of the Essays of Elia with the portentous flow of Coleridge's speech! A quiet little stream, purling with gentle bendings and doublings along its own meadows--mated against a river that whirls in mad career, flinging foam high into trees that border it, and only losing its turbidness when it is tided away into the sea, where both brook and river end.

[Sidenote: Charles Lamb.]

I love Charles Lamb and his writings so much, that I think everybody else ought to love them. There is not great weight in those essays of his; you cannot learn from them what the capital of Hindostan is, or what Buddhism is, nor the date of the capture of Constantinople.

Measured by {320} the Dry-as-Dust standard, and there is scarce more in them than in a field of daisies, over which the sunshine and the summer breezes are at play. But what delicacy there is! what a tender humor; what gentle and regaling lapses of quaint thought that beguiles and invites and is soothing and never wearies.

Lamb's poems are not of the best; they have a haltingness--like that in his speech,--with none of Rogers's glibness and currency, and none of his shallowness either. Constraint of rhyme sat on Elia no easier than a dress-coat. But in prose he was all at home; it purled from his pen like a river. It was quaint, kindly, utterly true--with little yaws of humor in it, filling his sails of a sudden, and stirring you to smiling outbreak--then falling away and leaving him to a gently undulating forward movement which charms by its quietude, serenities, and cheerfulness.

There was not much in his life to tell you of; no cannon firing, no drum beats, no moving splendors. A thin, kindly face he had, and thin figure too; in dark or grayish clothes ordinarily, that a clerk might wear; threadbare perhaps at the {321} elbows; not a presentable man amongst swell people; never aspiring to be;--as distinct indeed as a brown hermit-thrush amongst chattering parrots. He has a stammer, too, as I have hinted, in his voice, which may annoy but never makes this quiet man ashamed; in fact, he deploys that stammering habit so as to allow of coy advance, and opportunity for pouncing with tremulous iteration upon his little jokelets, in a way to double their execution; he put it to service, too, in some of his tenderer stories, so as to make, by his very hesitancies, an added and most touching pathos.

He was of humble origin, his father a servitor about Temple Courts--only long gunshot away from Newgate Street; and when the son--through with his Christ Hospital schooling--came to have a small stipend (first, from the South Sea House and later from the East India Company), he had his little family--the only one that ever belonged to Charles Lamb--all about him in his lodgings in Little Queen Street.

There was Mary, his sister, ten years older; his poor, bedridden mother, and his father, lapsing into dotage and only happy with cribbage-board at his elbow, and {322} Charles or other good friend to make count. It was this quiet household on which a thunderbolt fell one day. This is Lamb's mention of it in a letter to Coleridge:--

"My poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to s.n.a.t.c.h the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a mad-house, from whence I fear she must be moved to a hospital. My poor father was slightly wounded.

G.o.d has preserved to me my senses. Write as religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with."

And only a day after this, the weak old father, with his plastered head, is playing cribbage; and again, on another day, friends having come in--very many for those small rooms--and the last ceremonies not yet over, and they all sitting down at some special repast--Lamb bethinks himself of all that has happened, of what lies in the next room (he tells this in a letter to Coleridge), and rushes thither to kiss once more the cold face and to pray forgiveness that he has forgotten her so soon.

Poor Mary recovers; she lives for years with her brother; the horror of the past staying like a {323} black dream in their thought--of which they dare not speak. And when new visitations of estrangement threaten, they two, brother and sister, walk away out from the streets--on to Edmonton, through green fields, by hedges, under trees which they much enjoy, to the doctor's strong guardianship and ward, until repose comes again and a return. Lamb at last goes to live at Enfield, which is close by Edmonton, north of London, that he may be near her prison-house at all times and seasons.

Yet in all these days when the pains and fears of that distracting life are resting on him, he is putting those tender and playful touches into the pleasant essays we know so well; conjuring for himself and for thousands everywhere a world of sunshine that shall overlap the dreary one in which he lives, and spend its graces and cheeriness upon the mind of the poor forlorn one, who with sisterly affection cleaves there and journeys meekly and obediently and sadly beside him.

I do not know how to trust myself to make a citation from those essays which shall carry to those not over-familiar some good hint of their {324} qualities; but I venture upon a bit from his _Dream-Children_:--

"Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W----; and as much as children could understand, I explained to them what coyness, and difficulty, and denial, meant in maidens--when suddenly, turning to little 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, not of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartram 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 arm-chair--where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side."

Lamb was not deep-thoughted; he would have lost the trail in those meditations and searchings to which Coleridge in his cooler and clearer moments invited and led the way; but there was about him an individuality, a delicacy of thought, {325} a quaint play of airy fancies, a beguiling inconsequence, that have made his path in letters a delightful one for thousands to follow.

I cannot leave his name without calling attention to the charming little stories of Mrs. Leicester's School--written by Charles Lamb and his sister jointly. They are--or profess to be--the tales told by school children themselves of their memories--whether sorrows or joys; and are so artless in their narrative, so pathetic often, that you cannot help but follow the trend of their simple language as you would follow a story which an older sister might tell you about your own homes and your own father and mother.

Those essays of Lamb may sometimes show a liking for things we cannot like; in his dealings with the old dramatists he may pour chirrupy praises where we cannot follow with ours. We may not be won over, though we see Marston through those pitiful eyes and the lens of that always tender heart. And why should we? That criticism is not the best which serves to put us in agreeing herds, and to leash us in a bundled cohesion of opinion; but it is better worth if it {326} stimulate us by putting beside our individuality of outlook the warming or the chafing or the contesting individuality of another mind. There is never a time when Lamb's generous, kindly, witty opinions--whether about men or books, or every-day topics--will not find a great company of delighted readers, if not of ardent sponsors. Then, for style--what is to be said, except that it is so gracious, so winning, we are delighted with its flow, its cadences, its surprises, its charming lapses--like waves on summer beaches--or like an August brook, prattling, babbling, and finding spread and pause in some pellucid, overshadowed pool--where we rest in fulness of summery content.

He was never a strong man physically, and his poor thin form vanished from the sight of men in 1834, six months after Coleridge died; and the poor sister--unaware what helplessness and loneliness had fallen on her, lingered for years in blessed ignorance; she then died; and so we turn over that page of English letters on which are scored _Elia_ and the _Tales of Shakespeare_ and pa.s.s to others.

{327}

_Wordsworth._

[Sidenote: A lake poet.]

On the 29th day of June, just half a century ago, upon a beautiful sunny afternoon--most rare in the Lake Counties of England--I had one of the outside places upon an English coach, which was making its daily trip from Kendal, along the borders of Lake Windermere, and on by Grasmere and under the flank of Helvellyn, to Derwent-Water and Keswick. I stopped halfway at the good inn of the "Salutation" in Ambleside, with the blue of Windermere stretching before me; and in the twilight took a row upon the lake--the surface being scarce ruffled, and the sh.o.r.es, with their copses of wood, and their slopes of green lawn, as beautiful as a dream.

"I dipped my oars into the silent lake, And as I rose upon the stroke, my boat Went heaving thro' the water like a swan."

[Sidenote: Wordsworth.]

The words were Wordsworth's[8] own; and this was his country; and he who was counted the {328} King-poet in those College Days which were not then long behind me, was living only a little way off. From different points in the embowered roads I could catch a glimpse of the light in his window, at Rydal Mount. Stratford had been seen indeed, but there were only memories there; and Abbotsford, but Scott and the last of his family were gone; and Olney, but Cowper had been silent a matter of forty years; and here, at last, I was to come into near presence of one of the living magicians of English verse--in his own lair, with his mountains and his lakes around him. But I did not interview him: no thought of such audacity came nigh me: there was more modesty in those days than now. Yet it has occurred to me since--with some relentings--that I might have won a look of benediction from the old man of seventy-five, if I had sought his door, and told him--as I might truthfully have {329} done--that within a twelvemonth of their issue his beautiful s.e.xtette of "Moxon" volumes were lying, thumb-worn, on my desk, in a far-off New England college-room; and that within the month I had wandered up the Valley of the Wye, with his _Tintern Abbey_ pulsing in my thought more stirringly than the ivy-leaves that wrapped the ruin; and that only the week before I had followed lovingly his White Doe of Rylstone along the picturesque borders of Wharfdale, and across the gra.s.sy glades of Bolton Priory and among the splintered ledges

"Where Rylstone Brook with Wharf is blended."

Poets love to know that they have laid such trail for even the youngest of followers; and though the personal benedictions were missed, I did go around next morning--being Sunday--to the little chapel on the heights of Rydal, where he was to worship; and from my seat saw him enter; knowing him on the instant; tall (to my seeming), erect, yet with step somewhat shaky; his coat closely b.u.t.toned; his air serious, and self-possessed; his features large, mouth almost coa.r.s.e; {330} hair white as the driven snow, fringing a dome of baldness; an eye with a dreamy expression in it, and seeming to look--beyond, and still beyond.

He carried, too, his serious air into his share of the service, and made his successive responses of "Good Lord deliver us!" and "Amen!"

with an emphasis that rung throughout the little chapel.

I trust the reader will excuse these personal reminiscences, which I write down to fix in mind more distinctly the poet, whose work and life we have only s.p.a.ce to glance at now, and whose name will close the roll of poets for the present volume.

_His Poems._

There is, and always has been, on the part of too many admirers of Wordsworth a disposition to resent any depreciation or expression of dissent from fullest praise, which has counted against his reputation.

We do not like--any of us--to be forced into our admiration of this or that poet, and will not be, for long whiles together. There is no {331} bolstering of bad work that will make it permanently sound; so, too, what good things are done--whatever opposing sneers or silence may do--will surely, some day or other, be found out. A book or a poem that needs careful and insistent pilotage by critics, into the harbor of a great Fame, will not be so sure of safe anchorage and good holding-ground as one that drifts thither under stress of the unbroken, quiet, resistless tide of a cultivated popular judgment. Wordsworth's place is a very high one; some things he has done are incomparable; some alt.i.tudes of thought he has reached range among the Miltonic heights. But he has printed--as so many people have--too much. His vanities--which were excellently well developed--seem to have made him insensible to any demerits in his own work and incapable of believing that hand or brain of his could do aught that was not so far above common level as to warrant its acceptance by the world. I think he was conscientious in this; I do not believe that, like many an author, he put before us what he knew or suspected to be inferior, simply because he knew it would be devoured. There was {332} none of that dishonesty in Wordsworth. He religiously believed that even "Peter Bell" and the dreariest lines of the "Idiot Boy" had a mission.

If Wordsworth had possessed Browning's sense of humor, he would have withdrawn an eighth of his published works; if he had possessed Hood's sense of humor, I think he would have withdrawn a third. Humor is a great and good shortener. Humor seeks to provoke mirth and ripples of cheery satisfaction, so it shuns length and prosiness. Humor is a charming quality in either preacher or poet; and brevity is one of the best parts of humor; indeed brevity and humor always lock hands.

Unfortunately, Wordsworth had no humor. Again, that too free and lax play of language in Wordsworth--that told nothing vital, but only served to tie together, by loose and swaying looplets, the flashing jewels wherein his real genius coruscated and crystallized--not only fatigued us who followed and wanted to follow, but it filled the master's time and books and thought to the neglect of that large entertainment of some systematized purpose--some great, balanced, and concreted scheme of poetic story, {333} which he always hinted at, but never made good. Take that budget of verse which went toward the making of the "Recluse"--how incomplete; how unfinished even in detail; yet splashed up and down with brilliancies of thought and fancy; with here and there n.o.ble, statuesque, single figures; like a great antechamber, detaining us with its diverting objects, with interposed, wearisome, official talk--we all the while hoping to fare through to some point where we shall see the grandeur of the house and take in reverently its great proportions, and pay homage to the master. But we never come to those Arcana; we end in waiting; great, fine bursts of song, and of glowing narrative--sun, mountains, and clouds giving us august attendance--but no mapping of a whole, whose scheme is fitly balanced, and whose foundations bear up a completed body and dome, with cross and crown. But though his languors of language, his prosiness, his self-satisfaction do madden one to d.a.m.natory speech, yet when his song breaks out at its best--seeming to tie the upper mysterious world to this mundane level--to make steps of melody and of heavenly lift to {334} invite and charm as toward the Infinite, we are ashamed of our too easy discomfiture:--

"Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From G.o.d, who is our home:

"O joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That Nature yet remembers What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: nor indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest;

"But for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which be they what they may, Are yet a fountain light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing; Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the Eternal silence: truths that wake, To perish never; Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, Nor man, nor boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy.

Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

{335}

Which brought us. .h.i.ther, Can, in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the sh.o.r.e, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."

These verses belong to an ode that should never be forgotten when we reckon up the higher reaches of the poetic tides of this generation.