Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

In this, as we have already intimated, lies the difference between the crowd of jesters and Charles Lamb. We quit their uproarious laughter for his more quiet and pensive humour with somewhat the same feeling that we leave the noisy, though amusing, highway, for the cool landscape and the soft greensward. We reflect as we smile; the malice of our nature is rather laid to rest than called forth; a kindly and forgiving temper is excited. We rise from his works, if not with any general truth more vividly impressed, yet prepared, by gentle and almost imperceptible touches, to be more social in our companionships, and warmer in our friendships.

Whether from mental indolence, or from that strong partiality he contracted towards familiar things, he lived, for a man of education and intelligence, in a singularly limited circle of thought. In the stirring times of the first French Revolution, we find him abstracting himself from the great drama before him, to bury himself in the gossip of _Burnet's History_. He writes to Manning--"I am reading _Burnet's own Times_. Quite the prattle of age, and outlived importance.... Burnet's good old prattle I can bring present to my mind; I can make the Revolution present to me--the French Revolution, by a converse perversity in my nature, I fling as far _from_ me." Science appears never to have interested him, and such topics as political economy may well be supposed to have been quite foreign to his nature. But even as a reader of poetry, his taste, or his partialities in his range of thought, limited him within a narrow circuit. He could make nothing of Goethe's _Faust_; Shelley was an unknown region to him, and the best of his productions never excited his attention. To Byron he was almost equally indifferent. From these he could turn to study George Withers! and find matter for applause in lines which needed, indeed, the recommendation of age to give them the least interest. His personal friendship for Wordsworth and Coleridge led him here out of that circle of old writers he delighted to dwell amongst; otherwise, we verily believe, he would have deserted them for Daniell and Quarles. But perhaps, to one of his mental constitution, it required a certain concentration to bring his powers into play; and we may owe to this exclusiveness of taste the admirable fragments of criticism he has given us on Shakspeare and the elder dramatists.

In forming our opinion, however, of the tastes and acquirements of Lamb, we must not forget that we are dealing with a humorist, and that his testimony against himself cannot be always taken literally. On some occasions we shall find that he amused himself and his friends by a merry vein of self-disparagement; he would delight to exaggerate some deficiency, or perhaps some Cockney taste, in which, perhaps, he differed from others only in his boldness of avowal. He had not, by all accounts, what is called an ear for music; but we are not to put faith in certain witty descriptions he has given of his own obtuseness to all melodious sounds. We find him, in some of his letters, speaking of Braham with all the enthusiasm of a young haunter of operas. "I follow him about," he says, "like a dog." Nothing has given more scandal to some of the gentle admirers of Lamb, than to find him boldly avowing his preference of Fleet Street to the mountains of Cumberland. He claimed no love for the picturesque. Shops, and the throng of men, were not to be deserted for lakes and waterfalls. It was his to live in London, and, as a place to _live in_, there was no peculiarity of taste in preferring it to Cumberland; but when he really paid his visit to Coleridge at Keswick, he felt the charm fully as much as tourists who are accustomed to dwell, rather too loudly, upon their raptures. The letters he wrote, after this visit, from some of which we will quote, if our space permits us, describe very naturally, unaffectedly, and vividly, the impressions which are produced on a first acquaintance with mountainous scenery.

Indeed we may remark, that no man can properly enter into the character or the writings of a humorist, who is not prepared both to permit and to understand certain little departures from truth. We mean, that playing with the subject where our _convictions_ are not intended to be seriously affected. Those who must see everything as true or false, and immediately approve or reject accordingly, who know nothing of that _punctum indifferens_ on which the humorist, for a moment, takes his stand, had better leave him and his writings entirely alone. "I like a smuggler," says Charles Lamb, in one of his essays. Do you, thereupon, gravely object that a smuggler, living in constant violation of the laws of the land, ought by no means to be an object of partiality with any respectable order-loving gentleman? Or do you nod assent and acquiesce in this approbation of the smuggler? You do neither one nor the other. You smile and read on. You know very well that Lamb has no design upon your serious convictions, has no wish whatever that _you_ should like a smuggler; he merely gives expression to a partiality of his own, unreasonable if you will, but arising from certain elements in the smuggler's character, which just then are uppermost in his mind. A great deal of the art and tact of the humorist lies in bringing out little truths, and making them stand in the foreground, where greater truths usually take up their position. Thus, in one of Lamb's papers, he would prove that a convalescent was in a less enviable condition than a man downright ill. This is done by heightening the effect of a subordinate set of circumstances, and losing sight of facts of greater importance. No error of judgment can really be introduced by this sportive ratiocination, this mock logic, while it perhaps may be the means of disclosing many ingenious and subtle observations, to which, afterwards, you may, if you will, assign their just relative importance.

It would be a work of supererogation, even if space allowed us, to go critically over the whole writings of Lamb--his poems, his essays, and his letters. It is the last alone that we shall venture to pause upon, or from which we may hope to make any extract not already familiar to the reader. His poetry, indeed, cannot claim much critical attention. It is possible, here and there, to find an elegant verse, or a beautiful expression; there is a gentle, amiable, pleasing tone throughout it; but, upon the whole, it is without force, has nothing to recommend it of deep thought or strong passion. His tragedy of _John Woodville_ is a tame imitation of the manner of the old dramatists--of their manner when engaged in their subordinate and preparatory scenes. For there is no attempt at tragic passion. We read the piece asking ourselves when the play is to begin, and while still asking the question, find ourselves brought to its conclusion. If the poems are read by few, the _Essays of Elia_ have been perused by all. Who is not familiar with what is now a historic fact--the discovery of roast pig in China? This, and many other touches of humour, it would be useless here to repeat. His letters, as being latest published, seem alone to call for any especial observations, and from these we shall cull a few extracts to enliven our own critical labours.

What first strikes a reader, on the perusal of the letters, is their remarkable similarity in style to the essays. Some of them, indeed, were afterwards converted into essays, and that more by adding to them than altering their structure. That style, which at first seems extremely artificial, was, in fact, natural in Lamb. He had formed for himself a manner, chiefly by the study of our classical essayists, and of still older writers, from which it would have been an effort in him to depart. With whatever ease, therefore, or rapidity, he may have written his letters, it was impossible that they should bear the impress of freedom. His style was essentially a lettered style, partaking little of the conversational tone of his own day. They could obtain the case of finished compositions, not of genuine letters. For this, if for no other reason, they can never be brought into comparison with those charming spontaneous effusions of humour which flowed from Cowper, in his letters to his old friend Hill, and his cousin, Lady Hesketh. They are charming productions, however, and the best of his letters will take rank, we think, with the best of his essays, in the public estimation.

We must first quote from a letter to Manning, after his visits to the lakes, to rescue his character in the eyes of the lovers of the picturesque from the imputation of being utterly indifferent to the higher beauties of nature.

"Coleridge received us with all the hospitality in the world. He
dwells upon a small hill by the side of Keswick, in a comfortable
house, quite enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains: great
floundering bears and monsters they seemed, all couchant and
asleep. We got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from
Penrith, in the midst of a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all
the mountains into colours, purple, &c., &c. We thought we had
got into fairyland. But that went off (and it never came again;
while we stayed we had no more fine sunsets), and we entered
Coleridge's comfortable study just in the dusk, when the mountains
were all dark with clouds on their heads. Such an impression I
never received from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose that
I can ever again. Glorious creatures, fine old fellows--Skiddaw,
&c.--I never shall forget ye, how ye lay about that night like
an entrenchment--gone to bed, as it seemed for the night, but
promising that ye were to be seen in the morning.... We have
clambered up to the top of Skiddaw; and I have waded up the bed
of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a
thing as tourists call _romantic_, which I very much suspected
before; they make such a sputtering about it.... Oh! its fine
black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with the prospects of
mountains about and about, making you giddy. It was a day that
will stand out like a mountain, I am sure, in my life."

Of Mr Manning we are told little or nothing, though he seems to have been one of the very dearest friends of Lamb. His best letters are written to Manning--the drollest, and some of the most affecting. The following was written to dissuade him from some scheme of oriental travel. Manning was, at the time, at Paris:--

"_Feb. 19, 1803._

"MY DEAR MANNING,--The general scope of your letter afforded no
indications of insanity; but some particular points raised a
scruple. For God's sake, don't think any more of 'Independent
Tartary.' What are you to do among such Ethiopians? Read Sir John
Mandeville's travels to cure you, or come over to England. There
is a Tartar-man now exhibiting at Exeter Change. Come and talk
with him, and hear what he says first. Indeed, he is no favourable
specimen of his countrymen! Some say they are cannibals; and then
conceive a Tartar fellow _eating_ my friend, and adding the _cool
malignity_ of mustard and vinegar! I am afraid 'tis the reading
of Chaucer has misled you; his foolish stories about Cambuscan,
and the ring and the horse of brass. Believe me, there are no such
things. These are all tales--a horse of brass never flew, and a
king's daughter never talked with birds. The Tartars really are
a cold, insipid, smoutchy set. You'll be sadly moped (if you
are not eaten) amongst them. Pray try and cure yourself. Shave
yourself oftener. Eat no saffron; for saffron eaters contract a
terrible Tartar-like yellow. Shave _the upper lip_. Go about like
a European. Read no books of voyages, (they are nothing but lies;)
only now and then a romance, to keep the fancy _under_. Above
all, don't go to any sights of _wild beasts_. _That has been your
ruin._"

And when Manning really departed on his voyage to China, he writes to him in the following mingled strains of humour and of feeling. Being obliged to omit a great deal, it would only be unsightly to mark every instance where a sentence has been dropt. The italics, we must remark, are not ours. If Lamb's, they show how naturally, even in writing to his most intimate friend, he fell into the feelings of the author:--

"_May 10, 1806._

"... Be sure, if you see any of those people whose heads do
grow beneath their shoulders, that you make a draught of them.
It will be very curious. Oh! Manning, I am serious to sinking
almost, when I think that all those evenings which you have made
so pleasant are gone, perhaps for ever. Four years, you talk of,
may be ten--and you may come back and find such alterations! Some
circumstance may grow up to you or to me, that may be a bar to the
return of any such intimacy. I dare say all this is hum! and that
all will come back; but, indeed, we die many deaths before we die,
and I am almost sick to think that such a hold I had of you is
gone."

"_Dec. 5, 1806._

"Manning, your letter dated Hottentots, August the--what was it?
came to hand. I can scarce hope that mine will have the same
luck. China--Canton--bless us! how it strains the imagination,
and makes it ache. It will be a point of conscience to send you
none but bran-new news (the latest edition), which will but grow
the better, like oranges, for a sea voyage. Oh that you should be
so many hemispheres off--if I speak incorrectly you can correct
me--why, the simplest death or marriage that takes place here must
be important to you as news in the old Bastile."

He then tells him of the acceptance of his farce--_Mr H._; which farce, by the way, was produced, and failed, Lamb turning against his own production, and joining the audience in hissing it off the stage. It certainly deserved its fate.

"Now, you'd like to know the subject. The title is, 'Mr H.'
No more; how simple, how taking! A great H sprawling over the
play-bill, and attracting eyes at every corner. The story is, a
coxcomb appearing at Bath, vastly rich--all the ladies dying for
him--all bursting to know who he is; but he goes by no other name
than Mr H.--a curiosity like that of the dames of Strasburg about
the man with the great nose. But I won't tell you any more about
it. Yes, I will; but I can't give you any idea how I have done it.
I'll just tell you that, after much vehement admiration, when his
true name comes out, 'Hogsflesh,' all the women shun him, avoid
him, and not one can be found to change her name for him; that's
the idea--how flat it is here--but how whimsical in the farce! And
only think how hard upon me it is, that the ship is despatched
to-morrow, and my triumph cannot be ascertained till the Wednesday
after. But all China will ring of it by-and-by. Do you find, in
all this stuff I have written, anything like those feelings which
one should send my old adventuring friend that is gone to wander
among Tartars, and may never come again? I don't; but your going
away, and all about you, is a threadbare topic. I have worn it
out with thinking. It has come to me when I have been dull with
anything, till my sadness has seemed more to have come from it
than to have introduced it. I want you, you don't know how much;
but if I had you here, in my European garret, we should but talk
over such stuff as I have written.

"Good Heavens! what a bit only I've got left! How shall I squeeze
all I know into this morsel! Coleridge is come home, and is going
to turn lecturer on taste at the Royal Institution. How the paper
grows less and less! In less than two minutes I shall cease to
talk to you, and you may rave to the great Wall of China.--N.B. Is
there such a wall? Is it as big as Old London Wall by Bedlam? Have
you met with a friend of mine, named Ball, at Canton? If you are
acquainted, remember me kindly to him."

But we should be driven into as hard straits as Lamb, at the close of his epistle, if we, should attempt, in the small space that remains to us, to give any fair idea of the various "humours" and interests, of many kinds, of these letters. We pass at once to those that illustrate the last important incident of his life, his retirement from office. It is thus he describes his manumission, and the sort of troubled delight it brought with it, to Wordsworth:--

"_6th April, 1825._

"Here am I then, after thirty-three years' slavery, sitting in my
own room, at eleven o'clock this finest of all April mornings, a
freed man, with £441 a-year for the remainder of my life, live I
as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at
ninety.

"I came home FOR EVER on Tuesday of last week. The
incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was
like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long
as three; _i. e._, to have three times as much real time--time
that is my own in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but
feeling I was not. But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I
begin to understand the nature of the gift."

And to Bernard Barton he writes:

"My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my recent
emancipation, that I have scarce steadiness of hand, much more of
mind, to compose a letter. I am free, Bernard Barton--free as air!

'The little bird, that wings the sky,
Knows no such liberty.'

I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o'clock. I came
home for ever!

"I have been describing my feelings, as well as I can, to
Wordsworth, and care not to repeat. Take it briefly, that for a
few days I was painfully oppressed by so mighty a change, but it
is becoming daily more natural to me. I went and sat among them
all, at my old thirty-three years' desk yester morning; and deuce
take me, if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink
fellows, merry sociable lads, at leaving them in the lurch--fag,
fag, fag! The comparison of my own superior felicity gave me
anything but pleasure.

"B. B., I would not serve another seven years for seven hundred
thousand pounds! I have got £440 net for life, with a provision
for Mary if she survives me. I will live another fifty years."

But to live without any steady compulsory occupation requires an apprenticeship as much as any other mode of life. An idle man ought to be born and bred to the profession. With Lamb, literature could be nothing but an amusement, and for a mere amusement literature is far too laborious. It cannot, indeed, serve long as an amusement except when it is adopted also as a labour. He was destined, therefore, to make the humiliating discovery, which so many have made before him, that one may have too much time, as well as too little, at one's own disposal. Writing to the same Bernard Barton, a year or two afterwards, he says:--

"What I can do, and over-do, is to walk; but deadly long are
the days, these summer all-day days, with but a half-hour's
candle-light and no fire-light. I do not write, tell your kind
inquisitive Eliza, and can hardly read. 'Tis cold work authorship,
without something to puff one into fashion.... I assure you _no
work_ is worse than _over-work_. The mind preys on itself, the
most unwholesome food. I bragged, formerly, that I could not have
too much time. I have a surfeit; with few years to come, the days
are wearisome. But weariness is not eternal. Something will shine
out to take the load off that crushes me, which is at present
intolerable. I have killed an hour or two in this poor scrawl.
Well; I shall write merrier anon. 'Tis the present copy of my
countenance I send, and to complain is a little to alleviate."

He had taken a house at Enfield, but the cares of housekeeping were found to be burdensome to Miss Lamb, and they took up their abode as boarders in the house of a neighbour. To this circumstance he alludes in the following extract from a letter to Wordsworth, which is the last we shall make, and with which we shall bid farewell to our subject. It will be found to be not the least remarkable amongst the letters of Lamb, and contains one passage, we think, the boldest piece of extravagance that ever humorist ventured upon with success. It just escapes!--and, indeed, it rather takes away our breath at its boldness than prompts to merriment.

"_January 2, 1831._

"And is it a year since we parted from you at the steps of
Edmonton stage? There are not now the years that there used to
be. The tale of the dwindled age of men, reported of successional
mankind, is true of the same man only. We do not live a year
in a year now. 'Tis a _punctum stans_. The seasons pass with
indifference. Spring cheers not, nor winter heightens our gloom;
autumn hath foregone its moralities. Let the sullen nothing
pass. Suffice it, that after sad spirits, prolonged through many
of its months, we have cast our skins; have taken a farewell of
the pompous, troublesome trifle, called housekeeping, and are
settled down into poor boarders and lodgers at next door, the
Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield. Here we have nothing to do
with our victuals but to eat them; with the garden but to see it
grow; with the tax-gatherer but to hear him knock; with the maid
but to hear her scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are things
unknown to us, save as spectators of the pageant. We are fed we
know not how; quieted--confiding ravens. Yet in the self-condemned
obliviousness, in the stagnation, some molesting yearnings of
life, not quite killed, rise, prompting me that there was a
London, and that I was of that old Jerusalem. In dreams I am in
Fleet Market, but I wake and cry to sleep again. I die hard, a
stubborn Eloisa in this detestable Paraclete. What have I gained
by health? Intolerable dulness. What by early hours and moderate
meals? A total blank. Oh! let no native Londoner imagine that
health, and rest, and innocent occupation, interchange of converse
sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything better
than altogether odious and detestable. _A garden was the primitive
prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily
sinned himself out of it._"

Any further summary than what we have already given, of the literary character of Lamb, would be only tedious. He is one who will be generally _liked_, who with a smaller class will be greatly admired, and who will never excite hostile criticism, unless his injudicious friends shall elevate him to a higher pedestal than is due to him, or than he is manifestly fit to occupy. Such is the cold and calm verdict with which criticism must dismiss him. But those who have thoroughly enjoyed the essays of Elia and the letters of Lamb, will feel a warmer, a more partial affection than Criticism knows well how to express: she becomes somewhat impatient of her own enforced gravity; she would willingly throw away those scales with which, like Justice, we suppose, she is symbolically supplied, and, embracing the man as he is, laugh and be pleased with the rest of the world, without further thought of the matter.

THE CAXTONS.--PART XV.