The Best Letters of Charles Lamb Part 11

x.x.xIII.

TO COLERIDGE.

(End of 1800)

I send you, in this parcel, my play, which I beg you to present in my name, with my respect and love, to Wordsworth and his sister. You blame us for giving your direction to Miss Wesley; the woman has been ten times after us about it, and we gave it her at last, under the idea that no further harm would ensue, but she would _once_ write to you, and you would bite your lips and forget to answer it, and so it would end. You read us a dismal homily upon "Realities." We know quite as well as you do what are shadows and what are realities. You, for instance, when you are over your fourth or fifth jorum, chirping about old school occurrences, are the best of realities. Shadows are cold, thin things, that have no warmth or grasp in them. Miss Wesley and her friend, and a tribe of auth.o.r.esses, that come after you here daily, and, in defect of you, hive and cl.u.s.ter upon us, are the shadows. You encouraged that mopsey, Miss Wesley, to dance after you, in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical Anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off, by that simple expedient of referring her to you; but there are more burrs in the wind. I came home t'other day from business, hungry as a hunter, to dinner, with nothing, I am sure, of _the author but hunger_ about me, and whom found I closeted with Mary but a friend of this Miss Wesley, one Miss Benje, or Bengey, [1]--I don't know how she spells her name, I just came is time enough, I believe, luckily, to prevent them from exchanging vows of eternal friendship. It seems she is one of your auth.o.r.esses, that you first foster, and then upbraid us with. But I forgive you. "The rogue has given me potions to make me love him." Well; go she would not, nor step a step over our threshold, till we had promised to come and drink tea with her next night, I had never seen her before, and could not tell who the devil it was that was so familiar. We went, however, not to be impolite. Her lodgings are up two pairs of stairs in East Street, Tea and coffee and macaroons--a kind of cake--I much love. We sat down. Presently Miss Benje broke the silence by declaring herself quite of a different opinion from D'lsraeli, who supposes the differences of human intellect to be the mere effect of organization. She begged to know my opinion. I attempted to carry it off with a pun upon organ; but that went off very flat. She immediately conceived a very low opinion of my metaphysics; and turning round to Mary, put some question to her in French,--possibly having heard that neither Mary nor I understood French. The explanation that took place occasioned some embarra.s.sment and much wondering. She then fell into an insulting conversation about the comparative genius and merits of all modern languages, and concluded with a.s.serting that the Saxon was esteemed the purest dialect in Germany. From thence she pa.s.sed into the subject of poetry, where I, who had hitherto sat mute and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner. But I was stopped by a round a.s.sertion that no good poetry had appeared since Dr. Johnson's time. It seems the Doctor had suppressed many hopeful geniuses that way by the severity of his critical strictures in his "Lives of the Poets." I here ventured to question the fact, and was beginning to appeal to _names_; but I was a.s.sured "it was certainly the case." Then we discussed Miss More's book on education, which I had never read. It seems Dr. Gregory, another of Miss Bengey's friends, has found fault with one of Miss More's metaphors. Miss More has been at some pains to vindicate herself,--in the opinion of Miss Bengey, not without success. It seems the Doctor is invariably against the use of broken or mixed metaphor, which he reprobates against the authority of Shakspeare himself. We next discussed the question whether Pope was a poet. I find Dr. Gregory is of opinion he was not, though Miss Seward does not at all concur with him in this. We then sat upon the comparative merits of the ten translations of "Pizarro," and Miss Bengey, or Benje, advised Mary to take two of them home; she thought it might afford her some pleasure to compare them _verbatim_; which we declined. It being now nine o'clock, wine and macaroons were again served round, and we parted, with a promise to go again next week, and meet the Miss Porters, who, it seems, have heard much of Mr. Coleridge, and wish to meet _us_, because we are _his_ friends. I have been preparing for the occasion. I crowd cotton in my ears. I read all the reviews and magazines of the past month against the dreadful meeting, and I hope by these means to cut a tolerable second-rate figure.

Pray let us have no more complaints about shadows. We are in a fair way, _through you_, to surfeit sick upon them.

Our loves and respects to your host and hostess. Our dearest love to Coleridge.

Take no thought about your proof-sheets; they shall be done as if Woodfall himself did them. Pray send us word of Mrs. Coleridge and little David Hartley, your little reality.

Farewell, dear Substance. Take no umbrage at anything I have written.

C. LAMB, _Umbra_.

[1] Miss Elizabeth Benger. See "Dictionary of Nationai Biography,"

iv. 221.

x.x.xIV.

TO WORDSWORTH.

_January_, 1801.

Thanks for your letter and present. I had already borrowed your second volume. [1] What pleases one most is "The Song of Lucy.". _Simon's sickly Daughter_, in "The s.e.xton," made me _cry_. Next to these are the description of these continuous echoes in the story of "Joanna's Laugh,"

where the mountains and all the scenery absolutely seem alive; and that fine Shakspearian character of the "happy man" in the "Brothers,"--

"That creeps about the fields, Following his fancies by the hour, to bring Tears down his cheek, or solitary smiles Into his face, until the setting sun Write Fool upon his forehead!"

I will mention one more,--the delicate and curious feeling in the wish for the "c.u.mberland Beggar" that he may have about him the melody of birds, although he hear them not. Here the mind knowingly pa.s.ses a fiction upon herself, first subst.i.tuting her own feeling for the Beggar's, and in the same breath detecting the fallacy, will not part with the wish. The "Poet's Epitaph" is disfigured, to my taste, by the common satire upon parsons and lawyers in the beginning, and the coa.r.s.e epithet of "pin-point," in the sixth stanza. All the rest is eminently good, and your own. I will just add that it appears to me a fault in the "Beggar" that the instructions conveyed in it are too direct, and like a lecture: they don't slide into the mind of the reader while he is imagining no such matter. An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult in being told, "I will teach you how to think upon this subject." This fault, if I am right, is in a ten-thousandth worse degree to be found in Sterne, and in many novelists and modern poets, who continually put a sign-post up to show where you are to feel. They set out with a.s.suming their readers to be stupid,--very different from "Robinson Crusoe," the "Vicar of Wakefield," "Roderick Random," and other beautiful, bare narratives. There is implied, an unwritten compact between author and reader: "I will tell you a story, and I suppose you will understand it."

Modern novels, "St. Leons" and the like, are full of such flowers as these,--"Let not my reader suppose;" "Imagine, if you can, modest," etc, I will here have done with praise and blame, I have written so much only that you may not think I have pa.s.sed over your book without observation.... I am sorry that Coleridge has christened his "Ancient Marinere," a "Poet's Reverie;" it is as bad as Bottom the Weaver's declaration that he is not a lion, but only the scenical representation of a lion. What new idea is gained by this t.i.tle but one subversive of all credit--which the tale should force upon us--of its truth!

For me, I was never so affected with any human tale. After first reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days. I dislike all the miraculous part of it; but the feelings of the man under the operation of such scenery, dragged me along like Tom Pipe's magic whistle. I totally differ from your idea that the "Marinere" should have had a character and a profession. This is a beauty in "Gulliver's Travels,"

where the mind is kept in a placid state of little wonderments; but the "Ancient Marinere" undergoes such trials as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory of what he was,--like the state of a man in a bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is, that all consciousness of personality is gone. Your other observation is, I think as well, a little unfounded: the "Marinere," from being conversant in supernatural events, _has_ acquired a supernatural and strange cast of _phrase_, eye, appearance, etc., which frighten the "wedding guest." You will excuse my remarks, because I am hurt and vexed that you should think it necessary, with a prose apology, to open the eyes of dead men that cannot see.

To sum up a general opinion of the second volume, I do not feel any one poem in it so forcibly as the "Ancient Marinere" and "The Mad Mother,"

and the "Lines at Tintern Abbey" in the first.

C. L.

[1] Of the "Lyrical Ballads" then just published. For certain results of Lamb's strictures in this letter, see Letter x.x.xvii.

x.x.xV.

TO WORDSWORTH.

_January_ 30, 1801.

I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into c.u.mberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey.

Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have pa.s.sed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers; coaches, wagons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements; the print-shops, the old-book stalls, parsons cheapening books; coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens; the pantomimes, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade,--all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?

My attachments are all local, purely local,--I have no pa.s.sion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry and books) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was bom, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a bookcase which has followed me about like a faithful dog (only exceeding him in knowledge), wherever I have moved; old chairs, old tables; streets, squares, where I have sunned myself; my old school,--these are my mistresses. Have I not enough without your mountains? I do not envy you.

I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends with anything. Your sun and moon, and skies and hills and lakes, affect me no more or scarcely come to be in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind, and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have been confidently called; so ever fresh and green and warm are all the inventions of men and a.s.semblies of men In this great city. I should certainly have laughed with dear Joanna.

Give my kindest love _and my sister's_ to D. and yourself. And a kiss from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite. [1] Thank you for liking my play!

C.L.

x.x.xVI.

TO MANNING.

_February_, 1801.

I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be agreeable, at our Lady's next feast. I have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms, which look out (when you stand a-tiptoe) over the Thames and Surrey Hills, at the upper end of King's Bench Walks, in the Temple. There I shall have all the privacy of a house without the enc.u.mbrance; and shall be able to lock my friends out as often as I desire to hold free converse with my immortal mind; for my present lodgings resemble a minister's levee, I have so increased my acquaintance (as they call 'em), since I have resided in town. Like the country mouse, that had tasted a little of urban manners, I long to be nibbling my own cheese by my dear self without mousetraps and time-traps. By my new plan, I shall be as airy, up four pair of stairs, as in the country; and in a garden, in the midst of enchanting, more than Mahometan paradise, London, whose dirtiest drab-frequented alley, and her lowest-bowing tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn, James, Walter, and the parson into the bargain. Oh, her lamps of a night; her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardwaremen, pastrycooks; St. Paul's Churchyard; the Strand; Exeter 'Change; Charing Cross, with a man _upon_ a black horse! These are thy G.o.ds, O London! Ain't you mightily moped on the banks of the Cam? Had not you better come and set up here? You can't think what a difference.

All the streets and pavements are pure gold, I warrant you,--at least, I know an alchemy that turns her mud into that metal: a mind that loves to be at home in crowds.

'Tis half-past twelve o'clock, and all sober people ought to be a-bed.

Between you and me, the L. Ballads are but drowsy performances.

C. LAMB (as you may guess).

[1] The child in Wordsworth's "The Pet Lamb."

x.x.xVII.

TO MANNING.

_February_ 15, 1801.

I had need be cautious henceforward what opinion I give of the "Lyrical Ballads." All the North of England are in a turmoil. c.u.mberland and Westmoreland have already declared a state of war. I lately received from Wordsworth a copy of the second volume, accompanied by an acknowledgment of having received from me many months since a copy of a certain tragedy, with excuses for not having made any acknowledgment sooner, it being owing to an "almost insurmountable aversion from letter-writing." This letter I answered in due form and time, and enumerated several of the pa.s.sages which had most affected me, adding, unfortunately, that no single piece had moved me so forcibly as the "Ancient Mariner," "The Mad Mother," or the "Lines at Tintern Abbey."

The Post did not sleep a moment. I received almost instantaneously a long letter of four sweating pages from my Reluctant Letter-Writer, the purport of which was that he was sorry his second volume had not given me more pleasure (Devil a hint did I give that it had _not pleased me_), and "was compelled to wish that my range of sensibility was more extended, being obliged to believe that I should receive large influxes of happiness and happy thoughts" (I suppose from the L. B.),--with a deal of stuff about a certain Union of Tenderness and Imagination, which, in the sense he used Imagination, was not the characteristic of Shakspeare, but which Milton possessed in a degree far exceeding other Poets; which union, as the highest species of poetry, and chiefly deserving that name, "he was most proud to aspire to;" then ill.u.s.trating the said union by two quotations from his own second volume (which I had been so unfortunate as to miss.) First specimen; A father addresses his son:--

"When thou First camest into the World, as it befalls To new-born infants, thou didst sleep away Two days; _and blessings from thy father's tongue Then fell upon thee_."