Obiter Dicta Part 8

But all this time I hear Professor Seeley whispering in my ear, 'What is this but the old literary groove leading to no trustworthy knowledge?' If by trustworthy knowledge is meant demonstrable conclusions, capable of being expressed in terms at once exact and final, trustworthy knowledge is not to be gained from the witness of history, whose testimony none the less must be received, weighed, and taken into account. Truly observes Carlyle: 'If history is philosophy teaching by examples, the writer fitted to compose history is. .h.i.therto an unknown man. Better were it that mere earthly historians should lower such pretensions, and, aiming only at some picture of the thing acted, which picture itself will be but a poor approximation, leave the inscrutable purport of them an acknowledged secret.' 'Some picture of the thing acted.' Here we behold the task of the historian; nor is it an idle, fruitless task. Science is not the only, or the chief source of knowledge. The _Iliad_, Shakspeare's plays, have taught the world more than the _Politics_ of Aristotle or the _Novum Organum_ of Bacon.

Facts are not the dross of history, but the true metal, and the historian is a worker in that metal. He has nothing to do with abstract truth, or with practical politics, or with forecasts of the future. A worker in metal he is, and has certainly plenty of what Lord Bacon used to call 'stuff' to work upon; but if he is to be a great historian, and not a mere chronicler, he must be an artist as well as an artisan, and have something of the spirit which animated such a man as Francesco Francia of Bologna, now only famous as a painter, but in his own day equally celebrated as a worker in gold, and whose practice it was to sign his pictures with the word Goldsmith after his name, whilst he engraved Painter on his golden crucifixes.

The true historian, therefore, seeking to compose a true picture of the thing acted, must collect facts, select facts, and combine facts. Methods will differ, styles will differ. n.o.body ever does anything exactly like anybody else; but the end in view is generally the same, and the historian's end is truthful narration. Maxims he will have, if he is wise, never a one; and as for a moral, if he tell his story well, it will need none; if he tell it ill, it will deserve none.

The stream of narrative flowing swiftly, as it does, over the jagged rocks of human destiny, must often be turbulent and tossed; it is, therefore, all the more the duty of every good citizen to keep it as undefiled as possible, and to do what in him lies to prevent peripatetic philosophers on the banks from throwing their theories into it, either dead ones to decay, or living ones to drown. Let the philosophers ventilate their theories, construct their blow-holes, extract their essences, discuss their maxims, and point their morals as much as they will; but let them do so apart. History must not lose her Muse, or 'take to her bosom doubts, queries, essays, dissertations, some of which ought to go before her, some to follow, and all to stand apart.' Let us at all events secure our narrative first--sermons and philosophy the day after.

CHARLES LAMB. {204}

Mr. Walter Bagehot preferred Hazlitt to Lamb, reckoning the former much the greater writer. The preferences of such a man as Bagehot are not to be lightly disregarded, least of all when their sincerity is vouched for, as in the present case, by half a hundred quotations from the favoured author. Certainly no writer repays a literary man's devotion better than Hazlitt, of whose twenty seldom read volumes hardly a page but glitters with quotable matter; the true ore, to be had for the cost of cartage.

You may live like a gentleman for a twelvemonth on Hazlitt's ideas.

Opinions, no doubt, differ as to how many quotations a writer is ent.i.tled to; but, for my part, I like to see an author leap-frog into his subject over the back of a brother.

I do not remember whether Bagehot has anywhere given his reasons for his preference--the open avowal whereof drove Crabb Robinson well-nigh distracted; and it is always rash to find reasons for a faith you do not share; but probably they partook of the nature of a complaint that Elia's treatment of men and things (meaning by things, books) is often fantastical, unreal, even a shade insincere; whilst Hazlitt always at least aims at the centre, whether he hits it or not. Lamb dances round a subject; Hazlitt grapples with it. So far as Hazlitt is concerned, doubtless this is so; his literary method seems to realize the agreeable aspiration of Mr. Browning's _Italian in England_:--

'I would grasp Metternich until I felt his wet red throat distil In blood thro' these two hands.'

Hazlitt is always grasping some Metternich. He said himself that Lamb's talk was like snap-dragon, and his own not very much 'unlike a game of nine-pins.' Lamb, writing to him on one occasion about his son, wishes the little fellow a 'smoother head of hair and somewhat of a better temper than his father;' and the pleasant words seem to call back from the past the stormy figure of the man who loved art, literature, and the drama with a consuming pa.s.sion, who has described books and plays, authors and actors, with a fiery enthusiasm and reality quite unsurpa.s.sable, and who yet, neither living nor dead, has received his due meed of praise. Men still continue to hold aloof from Hazlitt; his s.h.a.ggy head and fierce scowling temper still seem to terrorize; and his very books, telling us though they do about all things most delightful--poems, pictures, and the cheerful playhouse--frown upon us from their upper shelf. From this it appears that would a genius ensure for himself immortality, he must brush his hair and keep his temper; but, alas! how seldom can he be persuaded to do either. Charles Lamb did both; and the years as they roll do but swell the rich revenues of his praise. Lamb's popularity shows no sign of waning. Even that most extraordinary compound, the rising generation of readers, whose taste in literature is as erratic as it is p.r.o.nounced; who have never heard of James Thomson who sang _The Seasons_ (including the pleasant episode of Musidora bathing), but understand by any reference to that name only the striking author of _The City of Dreadful Night_; even these wayward folk--the dogs of whose criticism, not yet full grown, will, when let loose, as some day they must be, cry 'havoc' amongst established reputations--read their Lamb, letters as well as essays, with laughter and with love.

If it be really seriously urged against Lamb as an author that he is fantastical and artistically artificial, it must be owned he is so. His humour, exquisite as it is, is modish. It may not be for all markets.

How it affected the Scottish Thersites we know only too well--that dour spirit required more potent draughts to make him forget his misery and laugh. It took Swift or Smollett to move his mirth, which was always, three parts of it, derision. Lamb's elaborateness, what he himself calls his affected array of antique modes and phrases, is sometimes overlooked in these strange days, when it is thought better to read about an author than to read him. To read aloud the _Praise of Chimney Sweepers_ without stumbling, or halting, not to say misp.r.o.nouncing, and to set in motion every one of its carefully-swung sentences, is a very pretty feat in elocution, for there is not what can be called a natural sentence in it from beginning to end. Many people have not patience for this sort of thing; they like to laugh and move on. Other people, again, like an essay to be about something really important, and to conduct them to conclusions they deem worth carrying away. Lamb's views about indiscriminate almsgiving, so far as these can be extracted from his paper _On the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis_, are unsound, whilst there are at least three ladies still living (in Brighton) quite respectably on their means, who consider the essay ent.i.tled _A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People_ improper. But, as a rule, Lamb's essays are neither unsound nor improper; none the less they are, in the judgment of some, things of naught--not only lacking, as Southey complained they did, 'sound religious feeling,' but everything else really worthy of attention.

To discuss such congenital differences of taste is idle; but it is not idle to observe that when Lamb is read, as he surely deserves to be, as a whole--letters and poems no less than essays--these notes of fantasy and artificiality no longer dominate. The man Charles Lamb was far more real, far more serious, despite his jesting, more self-contained and self- restrained, than Hazlitt, who wasted his life in the pursuit of the veriest will-o'-the-wisps that ever danced over the most miasmatic of swamps, who was never his own man, and who died, like Brian de Bois Gilbert, 'the victim of contending pa.s.sions.' It should never be forgotten that Lamb's vocation was his life. Literature was but his byplay, his avocation in the true sense of that much-abused word. He was not a fisherman, but an angler in the lake of letters; an author by chance and on the sly. He had a right to disport himself on paper, to play the frolic with his own fancies, to give the decalogue the slip, whose life was made up of the sternest stuff, of self-sacrifice, devotion, honesty, and good sense.

Lamb's letters from first to last are full of the philosophy of life; he was as sensible a man as Dr. Johnson. One grows sick of the expressions, 'poor Charles Lamb,' 'gentle Charles 'Lamb,' as if he were one of those grown-up children of the Leigh Hunt type, who are perpetually begging and borrowing through the round of every man's acquaintance. Charles Lamb earned his own living, paid his own way, was the helper, not the helped; a man who was beholden to no one, who always came with gifts in his hand, a shrewd man, capable of advice, strong in council. Poor Lamb, indeed!

Poor Coleridge, robbed of his will; poor Wordsworth, devoured by his own _ego_; poor Southey, writing his tomes and deeming himself a cla.s.sic; poor Carlyle, with his nine volumes of memoirs, where he

'Lies like a hedgehog rolled up the wrong way, Tormenting himself with his p.r.i.c.kles'--

call these men poor, if you feel it decent to do so, but not Lamb, who was rich in all that makes life valuable or memory sweet. But he used to get drunk. This explains all. Be untruthful, unfaithful, unkind; darken the lives of all who have to live under your shadow, rob youth of joy, take peace from age, live unsought for, die unmourned--and remaining sober you will escape the curse of men's pity, and be spoken of as a worthy person. But if ever, amidst what Burns called 'social noise,' you so far forget yourself as to get drunk, think not to plead a spotless life spent with those for whom you have laboured and saved; talk not of the love of friends or of help given to the needy; least of all make reference to a n.o.ble self-sacrifice pa.s.sing the love of women, for all will avail you nothing. You get drunk--and the heartless and the selfish and the lewd crave the privilege of pitying you, and receiving your name with an odious smile. It is really too bad.

The completion of Mr. Ainger's edition of Lamb's works deserves a word of commemoration. In our judgment it is all an edition of Lamb's works should be. Upon the vexed question, nowadays so much agitated, whether an editor is to be allowed any discretion in the exclusion from his edition of the rinsings of his author's desk, we side with Mr. Ainger, and think more n.o.bly of the editor than to deny him such a discretion. An editor is not a sweep, and, by the love he bears the author whose fame he seeks to spread abroad, it is his duty to exclude what he believes does not bear the due impress of the author's mind. No doubt as a rule editors have no discretion to be trusted; but happily Mr. Ainger has plenty, and most sincerely do we thank him for withholding from us _A Vision of Horns_ and _The p.a.w.nbroker's Daughter_. Boldly to a.s.sert, as some are found to do, that the editor of a master of style has no choice but to reprint the sc.r.a.ps or notelets that a misdirected energy may succeed in disinterring from the grave the writer had dug for them, is to fail to grasp the distinction between a collector of _curios_ and a lover of books. But this policy of exclusion is no doubt a perilous one. Like the Irish members, or Mark Antony's wife--the 'shrill-toned Fulvia'--the missing essays are 'good, being gone.' Surely, so we are inclined to grumble, the taste was severe that led Mr. Ainger to dismiss _Juke Judkins_. We are not, indeed, prepared to say that Judkins has been wrongfully dismissed, or that he has any right of action against Mr.

Ainger, but we could have put up better with his presence than his absence.

Mr. Ainger's introduction to the _Essays of Elia_ is admirable; here is a bit of it:

'Another feature of Lamb's style is its allusiveness. He is rich in quotations, and in my notes I have succeeded in tracing most of them to their source, a matter of some difficulty in Lamb's case, for his inaccuracy is all but perverse. But besides those avowedly introduced as such, his style is full of quotations held, if the expression may be allowed, in solution. One feels, rather than recognises, that a phrase or idiom or turn of expression is an echo of something that one has heard or read before. Yet such is the use made of the material, that a charm is added by the very fact that we are thus continually renewing our experience of an older day. This style becomes aromatic, like the perfume of faded rose-leaves in a china jar. With such allusiveness as this I need not say that I have not meddled in my notes; its whole charm lies in recognising it for ourselves. The "prosperity" of an allusion, as of a jest, "lies in the ear of him that hears it," and it were doing a poor service to Lamb or his readers to draw out and arrange in order the threads he has wrought into the very fabric of his English.'

Then Mr. Ainger's notes are not meddlesome notes, but truly explanatory ones, genuine aids to enjoyment. Lamb needs notes, and yet the task of adding them to a structure so fine and of such nicely studied proportions is a difficult one; it is like building a tool-house against La Sainte Chapelle. Deftly has Mr. Ainger inserted his notes, and capital reading do they make; they tell us all we ought to want to know. He is no true lover of Elia who does not care to know who the 'Distant Correspondent'

was. And Barbara S---. 'It was not much that Barbara had to claim.' No, dear child! it was not--'a bare half-guinea'; but you are surely also ent.i.tled to be known to us by your real name. When Lamb tells us Barbara's maiden name was Street, and that she was three times married--first to a Mr. Dancer, then to a Mr. Barry, and finally to a Mr.

Crawford, whose widow she was when he first knew her--he is telling us things that were not, for the true Barbara died a spinster, and was born a Kelly.

Mr. Ainger, as was to be expected, has a full, instructive note anent the Old Benchers of the Inner Temple. Some hasty editors, with a sorrowfully large experience of Lamb's unblushing fictions and Defoe-like falsehoods, and who, perhaps, have wasted good hours trying to find out all about Miss Barbara's third husband, have sometimes a.s.sumed that at all events most of the names mentioned by Lamb in his immortal essay on the Benchers are fict.i.tious. Mr. Ainger, however, a.s.sures us that the fact is otherwise. Jekyl, Coventry, Pierson, Parton, Read, Wharry, Jackson, and Mingay, no less than 'unruffled Samuel Salt,' were all real persons, and were called to the Bench of the Honourable Society by those very names.

One mistake, indeed, Lamb makes--he writes of Mr. Twopenny as if he had been a Bencher. Now, there never yet was a Bencher of the name of Twopenny; though the mistake is easily accounted for. There was a Mr.

Twopenny, a very thin man too, just as Lamb described him, who lived in the Temple; but he was not a Bencher, he was not even a barrister; he was a much better thing, namely, stockbroker to the Bank of England. The holding of this office, which Mr. Ainger rightly calls important, doubtless accounts for Twopenny's constant good-humour and felicitous jesting about his own person. A man who has a snug berth other people want feels free to crack such jokes.

Of the contents of these three volumes we can say deliberately what Dr.

Johnson said, surely in his haste, of Baxter's three hundred works, 'Read them all, they are all good.' Do not be content with the essays alone.

It is shabby treatment of an author who has given you pleasure to leave him half unread; it is nearly as bad as keeping a friend waiting. Anyhow, read _Mrs. Leicester's School_; it is nearly all Mary Lamb's, but the more you like it on that account the better pleased her brother would have been.

We are especially glad to notice that Mr. Ainger holds us out hopes of an edition, uniform with the works, of the letters of Charles Lamb. Until he has given us these, also with notes, his pious labours are incomplete.

Lamb's letters are not only the best text of his life, but the best comment upon it. They reveal all the heroism of the man and all the cunning of the author; they do the reader good by stealth. Let us have them speedily, so that honest men may have in their houses a complete edition of at least one author of whom they can truthfully say, that they never know whether they most admire the writer or love the man.

EMERSON.

There are men whose charm is in their entirety. Their words occasionally utter what their looks invariably express. We read their thoughts by the light of their smiles. Not to see and hear these men is not to know them, and criticism without personal knowledge is in their case mutilation. Those who did know them listen in despair to the half-hearted praise and clumsy disparagement of critical strangers, and are apt to exclaim, as did the younger Pitt, when some extraneous person was expressing wonder at the enormous reputation of Fox, 'Ah! you have never been under the wand of the magician.'

Of such was Ralph Waldo Emerson. When we find so cool-brained a critic as Mr. Lowell writing and quoting thus of Emerson:

'Those who heard him while their natures were yet plastic, and their mental nerves trembled under the slightest breath of divine air, will never cease to feel and say:

'"Was never eye did see that face Was never ear did hear that tongue, Was never mind did mind his grace That ever thought the travail long; But eyes, and ears, and every thought Were with his sweet perfections caught;"'

we recognise at once that the sooner we take off our shoes the better, for that the ground upon which we are standing is holy. How can we sufficiently honour the men who, in this secular, work-a-day world, habitually breathe

'An ampler ether, a diviner air,'

than ours!

But testimony of this kind, conclusive as it is upon the question of Emerson's personal influence, will not always be admissible in support of his claims as an author. In the long-run an author's only witnesses are his own books.

In Dr. Holmes's estimate of Emerson's books everyone must wish to concur.

{218} These are not the days, nor is this dry and thirsty land of ours the place, when or where we can afford to pa.s.s by any well of spiritual influence. It is matter, therefore, for rejoicing that, in the opinion of so many good judges, Emerson's well can never be choked up. His essays, so at least we are told by no less a critic than Mr. Arnold, are the most valuable prose contributions to English literature of the century; his letters to Mr. Carlyle carried into all our homes the charm of a most delightful personality; the quaint melody of his poems abides in many ears. He would, indeed, be a churl who grudged Emerson his fame.

But when we are considering a writer so full of intelligence as Emerson--one so remote and detached from the world's bl.u.s.ter and brag--it is especially inc.u.mbent upon us to charge our own language with intelligence, and to make sure that what we say is at least truth for us.

Were we at liberty to agree with Dr. Holmes in his unmeasured praise--did we, in short, find Emerson full of inspiration--our task would be as easy as it would be pleasant; but not entirely agreeing with Dr. Holmes, and somehow missing the inspiration, the difficulty we began by mentioning presses heavily upon us.

Pleasant reading as the introductory thirty-five pages of Dr. Holmes's book make, we doubt the wisdom of so very sketchy an account of Emerson's lineage and intellectual environment. Attracted towards Emerson everybody must be; but there are many who have never been able to get quit of an uneasy fear as to his 'staying power.' He has seemed to some of us a little thin and vague. A really great author dissipates all such fears. Read a page and they are gone. To inquire after the intellectual health of such a one would be an impertinence. Emerson hardly succeeds in inspiring this confidence, but is more like a clever invalid who says, and is encouraged by his friends to say, brilliant things, but of whom it would be cruel to expect prolonged mental exertion. A man, he himself has said, 'should give us a sense of ma.s.s.' He perhaps does not do so.

This gloomy and possibly distorted view is fostered rather than discouraged by Dr. Holmes's introductory pages about Boston life and intellect. It does not seem to have been a very strong place. We lack performance. It is of small avail to write, as Dr. Holmes does, about 'brilliant circles,' and 'literary luminaries,' and then to pa.s.s on, and leave the circles circulating and the luminaries shining _in vacuo_. We want to know how they were brilliant, and what they illuminated. If you wish me to believe that you are witty I must really trouble you to make a joke. Dr. Holmes's own wit, for example, is as certain as the law of gravitation, but over all these pages of his hangs vagueness, and we scan them in vain for rea.s.suring details.

'Mild orthodoxy, ripened in Unitarian sunshine,' does not sound very appetising, though we are a.s.sured by Dr. Holmes that it is 'a very agreeable aspect of Christianity.' Emerson himself does not seem to have found it very lively, for in 1832, after three years' experience of the ministry of the 'Second Church' of Boston, he retires from it, not tumultuously or with any deep feeling, but with something very like a yawn. He concludes his farewell sermon to his people as follows:

'Having said this I have said all. I have no hostility to this inst.i.tution. {221} I am only stating my want of sympathy with it.'

Dr. Holmes makes short work of Emerson's childhood. He was born in Boston on the 25th May, 1803, and used to sit upon a wall and drive his mother's cow to pasture. In fact, Dr. Holmes adds nothing to what we already knew of the quiet and blameless life that came to its appointed end on the 27th April, 1882. On the completion of his college education, Emerson became a student of theology, and after a turn at teaching, was ordained, in March, 1829, minister of the 'Second Church' in Boston. In September of the same year he married; and the death of his young wife, in February, 1832, perhaps quickened the doubts and disinclinations which severed his connection with his 'Church' on the 9th September, 1832. The following year he visited Europe for the first time, and made his celebrated call upon Carlyle at Craigenputtock, and laid the keel of a famous friendship. In the summer of 1834 he settled at Concord. He married again, visited England again, wrote essays, delivered lectures, made orations, published poems, carried on a long and most remarkable correspondence with Carlyle, enjoyed after the most temperate and serene of fashions many things and much happiness. And then he died.

'Can you emit sparks?' said the cat to the ugly duckling in the fairy tale, and the poor abashed creature had to admit that it could not.

Emerson could emit sparks with the most electrical of cats. He is all sparks and shocks. If one were required to name the most non-sequacious author one had ever read, I do not see how one could help nominating Emerson. But, say some of his warmest admirers, 'What then? It does not matter!' It appears to me to matter a great deal.

A wise author never allows his reader's mind to be at large, but casts about from the very first how to secure it all for himself. He takes you (seemingly) into his confidence, perhaps pretends to consult you as to the best route, but at all events points out to you the road, lying far ahead, which you are to travel in his company. How carefully does a really great writer, like Dr. Newman or M. Renan, explain to you what he is going to do and how he is going to do it! His humour, wit, and fancy, however abundant they may be, spring up like wayside flowers, and do but adorn and render more attractive the path along which it is his object to conduct you. The reader's mind, interested from the beginning, and desirous of ascertaining whether the author keeps his word and adheres to his plan, feels the glow of healthy exercise, and pays a real though unconscious attention. But Emerson makes no terms with his readers--he gives them neither thread nor clue, and thus robs them of one of the keenest pleasures of reading--the being beforehand with your author, and going shares with him in his own thoughts.