It sounds paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say that in
every literature of large compass some authors will be found to rest
much of the interest which surrounds them on their essential
non-popularity. They are good for the very reason that they are not in
conformity to the current taste. They interest because to the world
they are not interesting. They attract by means of their repulsion.
Not as tho it could separately furnish a reason for loving a book,
that the majority of men had found it repulsive. _Prima facie_, it
must suggest some presumption _against_ a book that it has failed to
gain public attention. To have roused hostility indeed, to have
kindled a feud against its own principles or its temper, may happen to
be a good sign. That argues power. Hatred may be promising. The
deepest revolutions of minds sometimes begin in hatred. But simply to
have left a reader unimprest is in itself a neutral result, from which
the inference is doubtful. Yet even that, even simple failure to
impress, may happen at times to be a result from positive powers in a
writer, from special originalities such as rarely reflect themselves
in the mirror of the ordinary understanding. It seems little to be
perceived, how much the great Scriptural idea of the worldly and the
unworldly is found to emerge in literature as well as in life.
In reality, the very same combinations of moral qualities, infinitely
varied, which compose the harsh physiognomy of what we call
worldliness in the living groups of life, must unavoidably present
themselves in books. A library divides into sections of worldly and
unworldly, even as a crowd of men divides into that same majority and
minority. The world has an instinct for recognizing its own, and
recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books with the same
disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life.
From qualities, for instance, of childlike simplicity, of shy
profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must
turn away its face toward grosser, bolder, more determined, or more
intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise
in literature, nor at all less in literature, than it does in the
realities of life.
Charles Lamb, if any ever was, is amongst the class here contemplated;
he, if any ever has, ranks amongst writers whose works are destined to
be forever unpopular, and yet forever interesting; interesting
moreover by means of those very qualities which guarantee their
non-popularity. The same qualities which will be found forbidding to
the worldly and the thoughtless, which will be found insipid to many
even amongst robust and powerful minds, are exactly those which will
continue to command a select audience in every generation. The prose
essays, under the signature of "Elia," form the most delightful
section amongst Lamb's works. They traverse a peculiar field of
observation, sequestered from general interest; and they are composed
in a spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the ear of the noisy
crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But this retiring delicacy
itself, the pensiveness checkered by gleams of the fanciful, and the
humor that is touched with cross-lights of pathos, together with the
picturesque quaintness of the objects casually described, whether men,
or things, or usages; and in the rear of all this, the constant
recurrence to ancient recollections and to decaying forms of household
life, as things retiring before the tumult of new and revolutionary
generations; these traits in combination communicate to the papers a
grace and strength of originality which nothing in any literature
approaches, whether for degree or kind of excellence, except the most
felicitous papers of Addison, such as those on Sir Roger de Coverley,
and some others in the same vein of composition. They resemble
Addison's papers also in the diction, which is natural and idiomatic
even to carelessness. They are equally faithful to the truth of
nature; and in this only they differ remarkably--that the sketches of
Elia reflect the stamp and impress of the writer's own character,
whereas in all those of Addison the personal peculiarities of the
delineator (tho known to the reader from the beginning through the
account of the club) are nearly quiescent. Now and then they are
recalled into a momentary notice, but they do not act, or at all
modify his pictures of Sir Roger or Will Wimble. They are amiably
eccentric; but the Spectator in describing them, takes the station of
an ordinary observer.
Everywhere, indeed, in the writings of Lamb, and not merely in his
"Elia," the character of the writer cooperates in an undercurrent to
make the effect of the thing written. To understand in the fullest
sense either the gaiety or the tenderness of a particular passage, you
must have some insight into the peculiar bias of the writer's mind,
whether native and original, or imprest gradually by the accidents of
situation; whether simply developed out of predispositions by the
action of life, or violently scorched into the constitution by some
fierce fever of calamity. There is in modern literature a whole class
of writers, tho not a large one, standing within the same category;
some marked originality of character in the writer becomes a
coefficient with what he says to a common result; you must sympathize
with this personality in the author before you can appreciate the most
significant parts of his views. In most books the writer figures as a
mere abstraction, without sex or age or local station, whom the reader
banishes from his thoughts. What is written seems to proceed from a
blank intellect, not from a man clothed with fleshly peculiarities and
differences. These peculiarities and differences neither do, nor
(generally speaking) could intermingle with the texture of the
thoughts so as to modify their force or their direction. In such
books--and they form the vast majority--there is nothing to be found
or to be looked for beyond the direct objective. (_Sit venia verbo!_)
But in a small section of books, the objective in the thought becomes
confluent with the subjective in the thinker--the two forces unite
for a joint product; and fully to enjoy the product, or fully to
apprehend either element, both must be known. It is singular and worth
inquiring into, for the reason that the Greek and Roman literature had
no such books. Timon of Athens, or Diogenes, one may conceive
qualified for this mode of authorship, had journalism existed to rouse
them in those days; their "articles" would no doubt have been
fearfully caustic. But as they failed to produce anything, and Lucian
in an after age is scarcely characteristic enough for the purpose,
perhaps we may pronounce Rabelais and Montaigne the earliest of
writers in the class described. In the century following theirs came
Sir Thomas Browne, and immediately after him La Fontaine. Then came
Swift, Sterne, with others less distinguished; in Germany, Hippel the
friend of Kant, Harmann the obscure, and the greatest of the whole
body--Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. In him, from the strength and
determinateness of his nature as well as from the great extent of his
writing, the philosophy of this interaction between the author as a
human agency and his theme as an intellectual reagency might best be
studied. From him might be derived the largest number of cases,
illustrating boldly this absorption of the universal into the
concrete--of the pure intellect into the human nature of the author.
But nowhere could illustrations be found more interesting--shy,
delicate, evanescent--shy as lightning, delicate and evanescent as the
colored pencilings on a frosty night from the Northern Lights, than in
the better parts of Lamb.
To appreciate Lamb, therefore, it is requisite that his character and
temperament should be understood in their coyest and most wayward
features. A capital defect it would be if these could not be gathered
silently from Lamb's works themselves. It would be a fatal mode of
dependency upon an alien and separable accident if they needed an
external commentary. But they do not. The syllables lurk up and down
the writings of Lamb, which decipher his eccentric nature. His
character lies there dispersed in anagram; and to any attentive reader
the regathering and restoration of the total word from its scattered
parts is inevitable without an effort. Still it is always a
satisfaction in knowing a result, to know also its why and how; and in
so far as every character is likely to be modified by the particular
experience, sad or joyous, through which the life has traveled, it is
a good contribution toward the knowledge of that resulting character
as a whole to have a sketch of that particular experience. What trials
did it impose? What energies did it task? What temptations did it
unfold? These calls upon the moral powers, which in music so stormy
many a life is doomed to hear--how were they faced? The character in a
capital degree molds often-times the life, but the life always in a
subordinate degree molds the character. And the character being in
this case of Lamb so much of a key to the writings, it becomes
important that the life should be traced, however briefly, as a key to
the character.