The Best Letters of Charles Lamb Part 23

Yours truly,

C. L.

[1] Letter LXXIX.

Lx.x.xI.

TO BERNARD BARTON

_April_, 1824.

Dear B.B.,--I am sure I cannot fill a letter, though I should disfurnish my skull to fill it; but you expect something, and shall have a notelet.

Is Sunday, not divinely speaking, but humanly and holiday-sically, a blessing? Without its inst.i.tution, would our rugged taskmasters have given us a leisure day so often, think you, as once in a month? or, if it had not been inst.i.tuted, might they not have given us every sixth day? Solve me this problem. If we are to go three times a-day to church, why has Sunday slipped into the notion of a _holi_day? A HOLY-day, I grant it. The Puritans, I have read in Southey's book, knew the distinction. They made people observe Sunday rigorously, would not let a nurserymaid walk out in the fields with children for recreation on that day. But _then_ they gave the people a holiday from all sorts of work every second Tuesday. This was giving to the two Caesars that which was _his_ respective. Wise, beautiful, thoughtful, generous legislators!

Would Wilberforce give us our Tuesdays? No; he would turn the six days into sevenths,--

"And those three smiling seasons of the year Into a Russian winter."

OLD PLAY.

I am sitting opposite a person who is making strange distortions with the gout, which is not unpleasant pleasant,--to me, at least. What is the reason we do not sympathize with pain, short of some terrible surgical operation? Hazlitt, who boldly says all he feels, avows that not only he does not pity sick people, but he hates them. I obscurely recognize his meaning. Pain is probably too selfish a consideration, too simply a consideration of self-attention. We pity poverty, loss of friends, etc.,--more complex things, in which the sufferer's feelings are a.s.sociated with others. This is a rough thought suggested by the presence of gout; I want head to extricate it and plane it. What is all this to your letter? I felt it to be a good one, but my turn, when I write at all, is perversely to travel out of the record, so that my letters are anything but answers. So you still want a motto? You must not take my ironical one, because your book, I take it, is too serious for it. Bickerstaff might have used it for _his_ lucubrations. What do you think of (for a t.i.tle) Religio Tremuli? or Tremebundi? There is Religio Medici and Laici. But perhaps the volume is not quite Quakerish enough, or exclusively so, for it. Your own "Vigils" is perhaps the best. While I have s.p.a.ce, let me congratulate with you the return of spring,--what a summery spring too! All those qualms about the dog and cray-fish [1] melt before it. I am going to be happy and _vain_ again.

A hasty farewell,

C. LAMB.

[1] Lamb had confessed, in a previous letter to Barton, to having once wantonly set a dog upon a cray-fish.

Lx.x.xII.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

_May_ 15, 1824.

Dear B. B.,--I am oppressed with business all day, and company all night. But I will s.n.a.t.c.h a quarter of an hour. Your recent acquisitions of the picture and the letter are greatly to be congratulated. I too have a picture of my father and the copy of his first love-verses; but they have been mine long. Blake is a real name, I a.s.sure you, and a most extraordinary man, if he is still living. He is the Robert [William]

Blake whose wild designs accompany a splendid folio edition of the "Night Thoughts," which you may have seen, in one of which he pictures the parting of soul and body by a solid ma.s.s of human form floating off, G.o.d knows how, from a lumpish ma.s.s (fac-simile to itself) left behind on the dying bed. He paints in water-colors marvellous strange pictures, visions of his brain, which he a.s.serts that he has seen; they have great merit. He has _seen_ the old Welsh bards on Snowdon,--he has seen the beautifullest, the strongest, and the ugliest man, left alone from the ma.s.sacre of the Britons by the Romans, and has painted them from memory (I have seen his paintings), and a.s.serts them to be as good as the figures of Raphael and Angelo, but not better, as they had precisely the same retro-visions and prophetic visions with themself [himself]. The painters in oil (which he will have it that neither of them practised) he affirms to have been the ruin of art, and affirms that all the while he was engaged in his Welsh paintings, t.i.tian was disturbing him,-- t.i.tian the Ill Genius of Oil Painting. His pictures--one in particular, the Canterbury Pilgrims, far above Stothard--have great merit, but hard, dry, yet with grace. He has written a Catalogue of them, with a most spirited criticism on Chaucer, but mystical and full of vision. His poems have been sold hitherto only in ma.n.u.script. I never read them; but a friend at my desire procured the "Sweep Song." There is one to a tiger, which I have heard recited, beginning,--

"Tiger, Tiger, burning bright, Thro' the deserts of the night,"

which is glorious, but, alas! I have not the book; for the man is flown, whither I know not,--to Hades or a madhouse. But I must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age. Montgomery's book [1] I have not much hope from, and the society with the affected name [2] has been laboring at it for these twenty years, and made few converts. I think it was injudicious to mix stories, avowedly colored by fiction, with the sad, true statements from the parliamentary records, etc. But I wish the little negroes all the good that can come from it. I battered my brains (not b.u.t.tered them,--but it is a bad _a_) for a few verses for them, but I could make nothing of it. You have been luckier. But Blake's are the flower of the set, you will, I am sure, agree; though some of Montgomery's at the end are pretty, but the Dream awkwardly paraphrased from B.

With the exception of an Epilogue for a Private Theatrical, I have written nothing new for near six months. It is in vain to spur me on. I must wait. I cannot write without a genial impulse, and I have none. 'T is barren all and dearth. No matter; life is something without scribbling. I have got rid of my bad spirits, and hold up pretty well this rain-d.a.m.ned May.

So we have lost another poet. [3] I never much relished his Lordship's mind, and shall be sorry if the Greeks have cause to miss him. He was to me offensive, and I never can make out his real _power_, which his admirers talk of. Why, a, line of Wordsworth's is a lever to lift the immortal spirit; Byron can only move the spleen. He was at best a satirist. In any other way, he was mean enough. I daresay I do him injustice; but I cannot love him, nor squeeze a tear to his memory. He did not like the world, and he has left it, as Alderman Curtis advised the Radicals, "if they don't like their country, d.a.m.n 'em, let 'em leave it," they possessing no rood of ground in England, and he ten thousand acres. Byron was better than many Curtises.

Farewell, and accept this apology for a letter from one who owes you so much in that kind.

Yours ever truly, C. L.

[1] "The Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, and Climbing-Boy's Alb.u.m,"--a book, by James Montgomery, setting forth the wrongs of the little chimney-sweepers, for whose relief a society had been started.

[2] The Society for Ameliorating the Condition of Infant Chimney-Sweepers.

[3] Byron had died on April 19.

Lx.x.xIII.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

_August_, 1824.

I can no more understand Sh.e.l.ley than you can; his poetry is "thin sown with profit or delight." Yet I must point to your notice a sonnet conceived and expressed with a witty delicacy. It is that addressed to one who hated him, but who could not persuade him to hate _him_ again.

His coyness to the other's pa.s.sion--for hate demands a return as much as love, and starves without it--is most arch and pleasant. Pray, like it very much. For his theories and nostrums, they are oracular enough, but I either comprehend 'em not, or there is "miching malice" and mischief in 'em, but, for the most part, ringing with their own emptiness.

Hazlitt said well of 'em: "Many are the wiser and better for reading Shakspeare, but n.o.body was ever wiser or better for reading Sh.e.l.ley." I wonder you will sow your correspondence on so barren a ground as I am, that make such poor returns. But my head aches at the bare thought of letter-writing. I wish all the ink in the ocean dried up, and would listen to the quills shivering up in the candle flame, like parching martyrs. The same indisposition to write it is has stopped my "Elias;"

but you will see a futile effort in the next number, [1] "wrung from me with slow pain." The fact is, my head is seldom cool enough. I am dreadfully indolent. To have to do anything--to order me a new coat, for instance, though my old b.u.t.tons are sh.e.l.led like beans--is an effort. My pen stammers like my tongue. What cool craniums those old inditers of folios must have had, what a mortified pulse! Well, once more I throw myself on your mercy. Wishing peace in thy new dwelling,

C. LAMB.

[1] The essay "Blakesmoor in Hertfordshire," in the "London Magazine"

for September, 1824.

Lx.x.xIV.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

_December_ 1, 1824.

Taylor and Hessey, finding their magazine [1] goes off very heavily at 2_s_. 6_d_., are prudently going to raise their price another shilling; and having already more authors than they want, intend to increase the number of them. If they set up against the "New Monthly," they must change their present hands. It is not tying the dead carcase of a review to a half-dead magazine will do their business. It is like George Dyer multiplying his volumes to make 'em sell better. When he finds one will not go off, he publishes two; two stick, he tries three; three hang fire, he is confident that four will have a better chance.

And now, my dear sir, trifling apart, the gloomy catastrophe of yesterday morning prompts a sadder vein. The fate of the unfortunate Fauntleroy [2] makes me, whether I will or no, to cast reflecting eyes around on such of my friends as, by a parity of situation, are exposed to a similarity of temptation. My very style seems to myself to become more impressive than usual, with the change of theme. Who, that standeth, knoweth but he may yet fall? Your hands as yet, I am most willing to believe, have never deviated, into others' property; you think it impossible that you could ever commit so heinous an offence.

But so thought Fauntleroy once; so have thought many besides him, who at last have expiated as he hath done. You are as yet upright; but you are a banker,--at least, the next thing to it. I feel the delicacy of the subject; but cash must pa.s.s through your hands, sometimes to a great amount. If in an unguarded hour--But I will hope better. Consider the scandal it will bring upon those of your persuasion. Thousands would go to see a Quaker hanged, that would be indifferent to the fate of a Presbyterian or an Anabaptist. Think of the effect it would have on the sale of your poems alone, not to mention higher considerations! I tremble, I am sure, at myself, when I think that so many poor victims of the law, at one time of their life, made as sure of never being hanged as I, in my presumption, am too ready to do myself. What are we better than they? Do we come into the world with different necks? Is there any distinctive mark under our left ears? Are we unstrangulable, I ask you?

Think of these things. I am shocked sometimes at the shape of my own fingers, not for their resemblance to the ape tribe (which is something), but for the exquisite adaptation of them to the purposes of picking fingering, etc. No one that is so framed, I maintain it, but should tremble.

C. L.

[1] Taylor and Hessey succeeded John Scott as editors of the "London Magazine" (of which they were also publishers), and it was to this periodical that most of Lamb's Elia Essays were contributed.

[2] The forger, hanged Nov. 30, 1824. This was the last execution for this offence.