The Best Letters of Charles Lamb Part 20

TO WORDSWORTH.

_March_ 20, 1822.

My Dear Wordsworth,--A letter from you is very grateful; I have not seen a Kendal postmark so long. We are pretty well, save colds and rheumatics, and a certain deadness to everything, which I think I may date from poor John's loss, and another accident or two at the same time, that has made me almost bury myself at Dalston, where yet I see more faces than I could wish. Deaths overset one and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three have died, within this last two twelvemonths, and so many parts of me have been numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other; the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. It won't do for another. Every departure destroys a cla.s.s of sympathies. There's Captain Burney gone!

What fun has whist now? What matters it what you lead, if you can no longer fancy him looking over you? [1] One never hears anything, but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone almost you would care to share the intelligence,--thus one distributes oneself about; and now for so many parts of me I have lost the market. Common natures do not suffice me. Good people, as they are called, won't serve; I want individuals. I am made up of queer points, and I want so many answering needles. The going-away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them, as there was a common link. A, B, and C make a party. A dies. B not only loses A, but all A's part in C. C loses A's part in B, and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables. I express myself muddily, _capite dolente_. I have a dulling cold. My theory is to enjoy life; but my practice is against it.

I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief, day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four, without ease or interposition. _Taedet me harum quotidianarum formarum_, these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. Oh for a few years between the grave and the desk! they are the same, save that at the latter you are the outside machine. The foul enchanter [Nick?], "letters four do form his name,"--Busirane [2] is his name in h.e.l.l,--that has curtailed you of some domestic comforts, hath laid a heavier hand on me, not in present infliction, but in the taking away the hope of enfranchis.e.m.e.nt. I dare not whisper to myself a pension on this side of absolute incapacitation and infirmity, till years have sucked me dry,--_Otium c.u.m indignitate_. I had thought in a green old age (oh, green thought!) to have retired to Ponder's End,--emblematic name, how beautiful!,--in the Ware Road, there to have made up my accounts with Heaven and the Company, toddling about between it and Cheshunt, anon stretching, on some fine Izaak Walton morning, to Hoddesdon or Amwell, careless as a beggar; but walking, walking ever, till I fairly walked myself off my legs,--dying walking! The hope is gone. I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing), with my breast against this thorn of a desk, with the only hope that some pulmonary affliction may relieve me. _Vide_ Lord Palmerston's report of the clerks in the War-office (Debates in this morning's "Times"), by which it appears, in twenty years as many clerks have been coughed and catarrhed out of it into their freer graves. Thank you for asking about the pictures. Milton hangs over my fire-side in Covent Garden (when I am there); the rest have been sold for an old song, wanting the eloquent tongue that should have set them off! You have gratified me with liking my meeting with Dodd. For the Malvolio story,--the thing is become in verity a sad task, and I eke it out with anything. If I could slip out of it I should be happy; but our chief-reputed a.s.sistants have forsaken us. The Opium-Eater crossed us once with a dazzling path, and hath as suddenly left us darkling; and, in short, I shall go on from dull to worse, because I cannot resist the booksellers' importunity,--the old plea, you know, of authors; but I believe on my part sincere. Hartley I do not so often see, but I never see him in unwelcome hour. I thoroughly love and honor him. I send you a frozen epistle; but it is winter and dead time of the year with me. May Heaven keep something like spring and summer up with you, strengthen your eyes, and make mine a little lighter to encounter with them, as I hope they shall yet and again, before all are closed!

Yours, with every kind remembrance,

C. L.

[1] Martin Burney was the grimy-fisted whist-player to whom Lamb once observed, "Martin, if dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!"

[2] The enchanter in "The Faerie Queene."

LXIX.

TO JOHN CLARE. [1]

_August_ 31, 1822.

Dear Clare,--I thank you heartily for your present. I am an inveterate old Londoner, but while I am among your choice collections I seem to be native to them and free of the country. The quality of your observation has astonished me. What have most pleased me have been "Recollections after a Ramble," and those "Grongar Hill" kind of pieces in eight-syllable lines, my favourite measure, such as "Cooper Hill" and "Solitude." In some of your story-telling Ballads the provincial phrases sometimes startle me. I think you are too profuse with them. In poetry _slang_ of every kind is to be avoided. There is a rustic c.o.c.kneyism, as little pleasing as ours of London. Transplant Arcadia to Helpstone. The true rustic style I think is to be found in Shenstone. Would his "School-mistress," the prettiest of poems, have been better if he had used quite the Goody's own language? Now and then a home rusticism is fresh and startling; but when nothing is gained in expression, it is out of tenor. It may make folks smile and stare; but the ungenial coalition of barbarous with refined phrases will prevent you in the end from being so generally tasted as you desire to be. Excuse my freedom, and take the same liberty with my _puns_.

I send you two little volumes of my spare hours. They are of all sorts; there is a Methodist hymn for Sundays, and a farce for Sat.u.r.day night.

Pray give them a place on your shelf. Pray accept a little volume, of which I have a duplicate, that I may return in equal number to your welcome presents. I think I am indebted to you for a sonnet in the "London" for August.

Since I saw you I have been in France, and have eaten frogs. The nicest little rabbity things you ever tasted. Do look about for them. Make Mrs.

Clare pick off the hind-quarters, boil them plain, with parsley and b.u.t.ter. The fore-quarters are not so good. She may let them hop off by themselves.

Yours sincerely,

CHAS. LAMB.

[1] The Northamptonshire peasant poet. He had sent Lamb his "The Village Minstrel, and other Poems."

LXX.

TO MR. BARRON FIELD.

_September_ 22, 1822.

My Dear F.,--I scribble hastily at office. Frank wants my letter presently. I and sister are just returned from Paris! [1] We have eaten frogs. It has been such a treat! You know our monotonous general tenor.

Frogs are the nicest little delicate things,--rabbity flavored. Imagine a Lilliputian rabbit! They frica.s.see them; but in my mind, dressed seethed, plain, with parsley and b.u.t.ter, would have been the decision of Apicius.... Paris is a glorious, picturesque old city. London looks mean and new to it, as the town of Washington would, seen after _it._ But they have no St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey. The Seine, so much despised by c.o.c.kneys, is exactly the size to run through a magnificent street; palaces a mile long on one side, lofty Edinburgh stone (oh, the glorious antiques!) houses on the other. The Thames disunites London and Southwark. I had Talma to supper with me. He has picked up, as I believe, an authentic portrait of Shakspeare. He paid a broker about 40 English for it. It is painted on the one half of a pair of bellows,--a lovely picture, corresponding with the Folio head. The bellows has old carved _wings_ round it and round the visnomy is inscribed, as near as I remember, not divided into rhyme,--I found out the rhyme,--

"Whom have we here Stuck on this bellows, But the Prince of good fellows, w.i.l.l.y Shakspere?"

At top,--

"O base and coward lack, To be here stuck!"

POINS.

At bottom,--

"Nay! rather a glorious lot is to him a.s.sign'd, Who, like the Almighty, rides upon the wind."

PISTOL,

This is all in old, carved wooden letters. The countenance smiling, sweet, and intellectual beyond measure, even as he was immeasurable. It may be a forgery. They laugh at me, and tell me Ireland is in Paris, and has been putting off a portrait of the Black Prince. How far old wood may be imitated I cannot say, Ireland was not found out by his parchments, but by his poetry. I am confident no painter on either side the Channel could have painted anything near like the face I saw. Again, would such a painter and forger have taken 40 for a thing, if authentic, worth 4000? Talma is not in the secret, for he had not even found out the rhymes in the first inscription. He is coming over with it, and my life to Southey's "Thalaba," it will gain universal faith.

The letter is wanted, and I am wanted. Imagine the blank filled up with all kind things.

Our joint, hearty remembrances to both of you. Yours as ever,

C. LAMB.

[1] The Lambs had visited Paris on the invitation of James Kenney, the dramatist, who had married a Frenchwoman, and was living at Versailles.

LXXI.

TO WALTER WILSON.

_December_ 16, 1822.

Dear Wilson,--_Lightning_ I was going to call you. You must have thought me negligent in not answering your letter sooner. But I have a habit of never writing letters but at the office; 'tis so much time cribbed out of the Company; and I am but just got out of the thick of a tea-sale, in which most of the entry of notes, deposits, etc., usually falls to my share.

I have nothing of De Foe's but two or three novels and the "Plague History." [1] I can give you no information about him. As a slight general character of what I remember of them (for I have not looked into them latterly), I would say that in the appearance of _truth,_ in all the incidents and conversations that occur in them, they exceed any works of fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. The _author_ never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to be called, or rather auto-biographies), but the _narrator_ chains us down to an implicit belief in everything he says. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are painfully pressed upon the memory.

Facts are repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot choose but believe them. It is like reading evidence given in a court of justice. So anxious the story-teller seems that the truth should be clearly comprehended that when he has told us a matter of fact or a motive, in a line or two farther down he _repeats_ it with his favorite figure of speech, "I say" so and so, though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is in imitation of the common people's way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by a master or mistress who wishes to impress something upon their memories, and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers. Indeed, it is to such princ.i.p.ally that he writes. His style is everywhere beautiful, but plain and _homely._ "Robinson Crusoe" is delightful to all ranks and cla.s.ses; but it is easy to see that it is written in phraseology peculiarly adapted to the lower conditions of readers,--hence it is an especial favorite with seafaring men, poor boys, servant-maids, etc. His novels are capital kitchen-reading, while they are worthy, from their deep interest, to find a shelf in the libraries of the wealthiest and the most learned. His pa.s.sion for _matter-of-fact narrative_ sometimes betrayed him into a long relation of common incidents, which might happen to any man, and have no interest but the intense appearance of truth in them, to recommend them. The whole latter half or two-thirds of "Colonel Jack" is of this description. The beginning of "Colonel Jack"

is the most affecting natural picture of a young thief that was ever drawn. His losing the stolen money in the hollow of a tree, and finding it again when he was in despair, and then being in equal distress at not knowing how to dispose of it, and several similar touches in the early history of the Colonel, evince a deep knowledge of human nature, and putting out of question the superior _romantic_ interest of the latter, in my mind very much exceed "Crusoe." "Roxana" (first edition) is the next in interest, though he left out the best part of it in subsequent editions from a foolish hypercriticism of his friend Southerne. But "Moll Flanders," the "Account of the Plague," etc., are all of one family, and have the same stamp of character. Believe me, with friendly recollections--Brother (as I used to call you), Yours,

C. LAMB.

[1] Wilson was preparing a Life of De Foe, and had written to Lamb for guidance.

LXXII.