The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume V Part 38

LETTER 89

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING

[P.M. August 31, 1801.]

I heard that you were going to China, with a commission from the Wedgwoods to collect hints for their pottery, and to teach the Chinese _perspective_. But I did not know that London lay in your way to Pekin.

I am seriously glad of it, for I shall trouble you with a small present for the Emperor of Usbeck Tartary, as you go by his territories: it is a fragment of a "Dissertation on the state of political parties in England at the end of the eighteenth century," which will no doubt be very interesting to his Imperial Majesty. It was written originally in English for the use of the _two_ and _twenty_ readers of "The Albion"

(this _calculation_ includes a printer, four pressmen, and a devil); but becoming of no use when "The Albion" stopped, I got it translated into Usbeck Tartar by my good friend Tibet Kulm, who is come to London with a _civil_ invitation from the Cham to the English nation to go over to the worship of the Lama.

"The Albion" is dead--dead as nail in door--and my revenues have died with it; but I am not as a man without hope. I have got a sort of opening to the "Morning Chronicle," !!! Mister Manning, by means of that common dispenser of benevolence, Mister Dyer. I have not seen Perry the editor yet: but I am preparing a specimen. I shall have a difficult job to manage, for you must know that Mister Perry, in common with the great body of the Whigs, thinks "The Albion" _very low_. I find I must rise a peg or so, be a little more decent and less abusive; for, to confess the truth, I had arrived to an abominable pitch; I spared neither age nor s.e.x when my cue was given me. _N'importe_ (as they say in French): any climate will suit me. So you are about to bring your old face-making face to London. You could not come in a better time for my purposes; for I have just lost Rickman, a faint idea of whose character I sent you. He is gone to Ireland for a year or two, to make his fortune; and I have lost by his going, what [it] seems to me I can never recover--_a finished man_. His memory will be to me as the brazen serpent to the Israelites,--I shall look up to it, to keep me upright and honest. But he may yet bring back his honest face to England one day. I wish your affairs with the Emperor of China had not been _so urgent_, that you might have stayed in Great Britain a year or two longer, to have seen him; for, judging from _my own_ experience, I almost dare p.r.o.nounce you never saw his equal. I never saw a man that could be at all a second or subst.i.tute for him in any sort.

Imagine that what is here erased was an apology and explanation, perfectly satisfactory you may be sure! for rating this man so highly at the expense of ----, and ----, and ----, and M----, and ----, and ----, and ----. But Mister Burke has explained this phenomenon of our nature very prettily in his letter to a Member of the National a.s.sembly, or else in his Appeal to the old Whigs, I forget which. Do you remember an instance, from Homer (who understood these matters tolerably well) of Priam driving away his other sons with expressions of wrath and bitter reproach, when Hector was just dead.

I live where I did, in a _private_ manner, because I don't like _state_.

Nothing is so disagreeable to me as the clamours and applauses of the mob. For this reason I live in an _obscure_ situation in one of the courts of the Temple.

C. L.

[Manning had taken up Chinese at Cambridge, and in 1800 he had moved to Paris to study the language under Dr. Hagan. He did not, however, go to China until 1806. The Wedgwoods were Coleridge's patrons. Lamb's reference to them is, of course, a joke.

The _Morning Chronicle_ was then the chief Whig paper, the princ.i.p.al opponent of the _Morning Post_. I have, I think, traced two or three of Lamb's contributions to the _Chronicle_ at this period, but they are not of his best. He quickly moved on to the _Post_, but, as we shall see, only for a short period.

Rickman went to Dublin in 1801 with Abbot, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, and was appointed Deputy-Keeper of the Privy Seal. He returned in February, 1802.

The reference to Burke is to his justification of his particular solicitude for the Crown, as the part of the British Const.i.tution then in danger, though not in itself more important than the other parts, in the "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs." The Priam-Hector ill.u.s.tration is there employed.

"Homer." See _The Iliad_, Book 24, lines 311-316. Pope translates thus:--

Next on his sons his erring fury falls, Polites, Paris, Agathon, he calls; His threats Dphobus and Dius hear, Hippothous, Pammon, Helenus the seer, And generous Antiphon: for yet these nine Survived, sad relics of his numerous line.

Following this letter should come one from Lamb to John Rickman, dated September 16, 1801 (the first of a valuable series printed in Canon Ainger's latest edition), saying that he and his sister are at Margate.

He has been trying to write for the _Morning Chronicle_ but with little success. Is now meditating a book: "Why should every creature make books but I?" After a pa.s.sage concerning George Burnett, Lamb describes G.o.dwin and his courtship of his second wife--"a very disgusting woman." "You never saw such a philosophic c.o.xcomb, nor any one play the Romeo so unnaturally."

Here should come a mutilated letter, not yet printed, I believe, shown to me by Mr. Bertram Dobell, from Lamb to Manning, written probably at Margate, where this year's holidays were spent. It is deeply interesting and I wish 1 could print it even with its imperfections. There are references to White, Dyer, Coleridge ("Pity that such human frailties should perch upon the margin of Ulswater Lake") and the Lloyds. Also to politics and the riddle of life. "What we came here for I know no more than [an] Ideot."]

LETTER 90

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM G.o.dWIN Sept. 9, 1801.

Dear Sir,--Nothing runs in my head when I think of your story, but that you should make it as like the life of Savage as possible. That is a known and familiar tale, and its effect on the public mind has been very great. Many of the incidents in the true history are readily made dramatical. For instance, Savage used to walk backwards and forwards o'

nights to his mother's window, to catch a glimpse of her, as she pa.s.sed with a candle. With some such situation the play might happily open. I would plunge my Hero, exactly like Savage, into difficulties and embarra.s.sments, the consequences of an unsettled mind: out of which he may be extricated by the unknown interference of his mother. He should be attended from the beginning by a friend, who should stand in much the same relation towards him as Horatio to Altamont in the play of the Fair Penitent. A character of this sort seems indispensable. This friend might gain interviews with the mother, when the son was refused sight of her. Like Horatio with Calista, he might wring his [her?] soul. Like Horatio, he might learn the secret _first_. He might be exactly in the same perplexing situation, when he had learned it, whether to tell it or conceal it from the Son (I have still Savage in my head) might _kill_ a man (as he did) in an affray--he should receive a pardon, as Savage did--and the mother might interfere to have him _banished_. This should provoke the Friend to demand an interview with her husband, and disclose the whole secret. The husband, refusing to believe anything to her dishonour, should fight with him. The husband repents before he dies.

The mother explains and confesses everything in his presence. The son is admitted to an interview with his now acknowledged mother. Instead of embraces, she resolves to abstract herself from all pleasure, even from his sight, in voluntary penance all her days after. This is crude indeed!! but I am totally unable to suggest a better. I am the worst hand in the world at a plot. But I understand enough of pa.s.sion to predict that your story, with some of Savage's, which has no repugnance, but a natural alliance with it, cannot fail. The mystery of the suspected relationship--the suspicion, generated from slight and forgotten circ.u.mstances, coming at last to act as Instinct, and so to be mistaken for Instinct--the son's unceasing pursuit and throwing of himself in his mother's way, something like Falkland's eternal persecution of Williams--the high and intricate pa.s.sion in the mother, the being obliged to shun and keep at a distance the thing nearest to her heart--to be cruel, where her heart yearns to be kind, without a possibility of explanation. You have the power of life and death and the hearts of your auditors in your hands; still Harris will want a skeleton, and he must have it. I can only put in some sorry hints. The discovery to the son's friend may take place not before the 3d act--in some such way as this. The mother may cross the street--he may point her out to some gay companion of his as the Beauty of Leghorn--the pattern for wives, &c. &c. His companion, who is an Englishman, laughs at his mistake, and knows her to have been the famous Nancy Dawson, or any one else, who captivated the English king. Some such way seems dramatic, and speaks to the Eye. The audience will enter into the Friend's surprise, and into the perplexity of his situation. These Ocular Scenes are so many great landmarks, rememberable headlands and lighthouses in the voyage. Macbeth's witch has a good advice to a magic [? tragic] writer, what to do with his spectator.

"_Show_ his _eyes_, and grieve his heart."

The most difficult thing seems to be, What to do with the husband? You will not make him jealous of his own son? that is a stale and an unpleasant trick in Douglas, etc. Can't you keep him out of the way till you want him, as the husband of Isabella is conveniently sent off till his cue comes? There will be story enough without him, and he will only puzzle all. Catastrophes are worst of all. Mine is most stupid. I only propose it to fulfil my engagement, not in hopes to convert you.

It is always difficult to get rid of a woman at the end of a tragedy.

_Men_ may fight and die. A woman must either take poison, _which is a nasty trick_, or go mad, which is not fit to be shown, or retire, which is poor, only retiring is most reputable.

I am sorry I can furnish you no better: but I find it extremely difficult to settle my thoughts upon anything but the scene before me, when I am from home, I am from home so seldom. If any, the least hint crosses me, I will write again, and I very much wish to read your plan, if you could abridge and send it. In this little scrawl you must take the will for the deed, for I most sincerely wish success to your play.--Farewell,

C. L.

[This and the letter that follows it contain Lamb's suggestions for G.o.dwin's play "Faulkener," upon which he was now meditating, but which was not performed until 1807. Lamb wrote the prologue, a poem in praise of Defoe, since it was in _Roxana_, or at least in one edition of it, that the counterpart to, or portion of, G.o.dwin's plot is found. There, however, the central figure is a daughter, not a son. See the letters to Walter Wilson.

Mr. Swinburne, in the little article to which I have already alluded, says of this and the following letter: "Several of Lamb's suggestions, in spite of his own modest disclaimer ('I am the worst hand in the world at a plot'), seem to me, especially as coming from the author of a tragedy memorable alike for sweetness of moral emotion and emptiness of theatrical subject, worthy of note for the instinctive intuition of high dramatic effect implied in their rough and rapid outlines."

Richard Savage, the poet, whose life Johnson wrote, claimed to be the illegitimate son of Lady Macclesfield by Lord Rivers. Savage killed Sinclair in a tavern quarrel in 1727, and was condemned to death. His pardon was obtained by the Countess of Hertford.

"The Fair Penitent" is by Nicholas Rowe.

Falkland and Williams are in G.o.dwin's novel _Caleb Williams_, dramatised by Colman as "The Iron Chest."

"Harris will want a skeleton." Thomas Harris, stage manager of Covent Garden Theatre.

Nancy Dawson (1730?-1767), the famous dancer and _bona roba_.

"Douglas"--Home's tragedy.

"The husband of Isabella." In Southern's "Fatal Marriage."]

LETTER 91

(_Fragment_)

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM G.o.dWIN

Margate, Sep. 17, 1801.

I shall be glad to come home and talk these matters over with you. I have read your scheme very attentively. That Arabella has been mistress to King Charles is sufficient to all the purposes of the story. It can only diminish that respect we feel for her to make her turn wh.o.r.e to one of the Lords of his Bed-chamber. Her son must not know that she has been a wh.o.r.e: it matters not that she has been wh.o.r.e to a _King_: equally in both cases it is against decorum and against the delicacy of a son's respect that he should be privy to it. No doubt, many sons might feel a wayward pleasure in the honourable guilt of their mothers; but is it a true feeling? Is it the best sort of feeling? Is it a feeling to be exposed on theatres to mothers and daughters? Your conclusion (or rather Defoe's) comes far short of the tragic ending, which is always expected; and it is not safe to disappoint. A tragic auditory wants _blood_. They care but little about a man and his wife parting. Besides, what will you do with the son, after all his pursuits and adventures? Even quietly leave him to take guinea-and-a-half lodgings with mamma in Leghorn! O impotent and pacific measures!... I am certain that you must mix up some strong ingredients of distress to give a savour to your pottage. I still think that you may, and must, graft the story of Savage upon Defoe. Your hero must _kill a man or do some thing_. Can't you bring him to the gallows or some great mischief, out of which she _must_ have recourse to an explanation with her husband to save him. Think on this. The husband, for instance, has great friends in Court at Leghorn. The son is condemned to death. She cannot teaze him for a stranger. She must tell the whole truth. Or she _may_ tease him, as for a stranger, till (like Oth.e.l.lo in Ca.s.sio's case) he begins to suspect her for her importunity.

Or, being pardoned, can she not teaze her husband to get him banished?

Something of this I suggested before. _Both_ is best. The murder and the pardon will make business for the fourth act, and the banishment and explanation (by means of the _Friend_ I want you to draw) the fifth. You must not open any of the truth to Dawley by means of a letter. A letter is a feeble messenger on the stage. Somebody, the son or his friend, must, as a _coup de main_, be exasperated, and obliged to tell the husband. d.a.m.n the husband and his "gentlemanlike qualities." Keep him out of sight, or he will trouble all. Let him be in England on trade, and come home, as Biron does in Isabella, in the fourth act, when he is wanted. I am for introducing situations, sort of counterparts to situations, which have been tried in other plays--_like_ but not the _same_. On this principle I recommended a friend like Horatio in the "Fair Penitent," and on this principle I recommend a situation like Oth.e.l.lo, with relation to Desdemona's intercession for Ca.s.sio. By-scenes may likewise receive hints. The son may see his mother at a mask or feast, as Romeo, Juliet. The festivity of the company contrasts with the strong perturbations of the individuals. Dawley may be told his wife's past unchast.i.ty at a mask by some witch-character--as Macbeth upon the heath, in dark sentences. This may stir his brain, and be forgot, but come in aid of stronger proof hereafter. From this, what you will perhaps call whimsical way of counterparting, this honest stealing, and original mode of plagiarism, much yet, I think, remains to be sucked.

Excuse these abortions. I thought you would want the draught soon again, and I would not send it empty away.--Yours truly,

WILLIAM G.o.dWIN!!!

Somers Town, 17th Sept., 1801.