Homer, why should he not, for veracity and universality, last like them?
He is _sincere_ as they; reaches deep down like them, to the universal
and perennial. But as for Mahomet, I think it had been better for him
_not_ to be so conscious! Alas, poor Mahomet; all that he was
_conscious_ of was a mere error; a futility and triviality--as indeed
such ever is. The truly great in him too was the unconscious: that he
was a wild Arab lion of the desert, and did speak-out with that great
thunder-voice of his, not by words which he _thought_ to be great, but
by actions, by feelings, by a history which _were_ great! His Koran has
become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity; we do not believe, like him
that God wrote that! The Great Man here too, as always' is a Force of
Nature: whatsoever is truly great in him springs-up from the
_in_articulate deeps.
Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of a
Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of
Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks
to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account him a god,
like Odin, while he dwelt with us;--on which point there were much to be
said. But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite of the sad state
Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this Shakespeare has actually
become among us. Which Englishman we ever made, in this land of ours,
which million of Englishmen, would we not give-up rather than the
Stratford Peasant? There is no regiment of highest Dignitaries that we
would sell him for. He is the grandest thing we have yet done. For our
honour among foreign nations, as an ornament to our English Household,
what item is there that we would not surrender rather than him? Consider
now, if they asked us, Will you give-up your Indian Empire or your
Shakespeare, you English; never have had any Indian Empire, or never
have had any Shakespeare? Really it were a grave question. Official
persons would answer doubtless in official language; but we, for our
part too, should not we be forced to answer: Indian Empire, or no Indian
Empire; we cannot do without Shakespeare! Indian Empire will go, at any
rate, some day; but this Shakespeare does not go, he lasts forever with
us; we cannot give-up our Shakespeare!
Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely as a real,
marketable, tangibly-useful possession. England, before long, this
Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in
America, in New Holland,[85] east and west to the very Antipodes, there
will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what is
it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so that
they do not fall-out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike
intercourse, helping one another? This is justly regarded as the
greatest practical problem, the thing all manner of sovereignties and
governments are here to accomplish: what is it that will accomplish
this? Acts of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot. America
is parted from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call it not
fantastic, for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is an English
King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of Parliaments,
can dethrone! This King Shakespeare, does not he shine, in crowned
sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of
rallying-signs; _in_destructible; really more valuable in that point of
view than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We can fancy him as
radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years
hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever, under what sort of
Parish-Constable soever, English men and women are, they will say to one
another: "Yes, this Shakespeare is ours; we produced him, we speak and
think by him; we are of one blood and kind with him." The most
common-sense politician, too, if he pleases, may think of that.
Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate
voice; that it produce a man who will speak-forth melodiously what the
heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered,
scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity at
all; yet the noble Italy is actually _one_: Italy produced its Dante;
Italy can speak! The Czar of all the Russias, he is strong, with so many
bayonets, Cossacks and cannons; and does a great feat in keeping such a
tract of Earth politically together; but he cannot yet speak. Something
great in him, but it is a dumb greatness. He has had no voice of genius,
to be heard of all men and times. He must learn to speak. He is a great
dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and Cossacks will all have rusted
into nonentity, while that Dante's voice is still audible. The Nation
that has a Dante is bound together as no dumb Russia can be.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 81: From Lecture III, "The Hero as Poet," in "Heroes and
Hero-Worship," 1841.]
[Footnote 82: St. Stephen's: House of Commons.]
[Footnote 83: Scattered pieces.]
[Footnote 84: The passage in Shakespeare's "Tempest" from which the
words quoted in the preceding sentence are taken, is inscribed on the
scroll in the hand of Shakespeare's statue in Westminster Abbey.]
[Footnote 85: New Holland: Australia.]
CHARLES LAMB[86]
WALTER PATER
Those English critics who at the beginning of the present century
introduced from Germany, together with some other subtleties of thought
transplanted hither not without advantage, the distinction between the
_Fancy_ and the _Imagination_, made much also of the cognate distinction
between _Wit_ and _Humour_, between that unreal and transitory mirth,
which is as the crackling of thorns under the pot, and the laughter
which blends with tears and even with the sublimities of the
imagination, and which, in its most exquisite motives, is one with
pity--the laughter of the comedies of Shakespeare, hardly less
expressive than his moods of seriousness or solemnity, of that deeply
stirred soul of sympathy in him, as flowing from which both tears and
laughter are alike genuine and contagious.
This distinction between wit and humour, Coleridge and other kindred
critics applied, with much effect, in their studies of some of our older
English writers. And as the distinction between imagination and fancy,
made popular by Wordsworth, found its best justification in certain
essential differences of stuff in Wordsworth's own writings, so this
other critical distinction, between wit and humour, finds a sort of
visible interpretation and instance in the character and writings of
Charles Lamb;--one who lived more consistently than most writers among
subtle literary theories, and whose remains are still full of curious
interest for the student of literature as a fine art.
The author of the _English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century,_
coming to the humourists of the nineteenth, would have found, as is true
pre-eminently of Thackeray himself, the springs of pity in them deepened
by the deeper subjectivity, the intenser and closer living with itself,
which is characteristic of the temper of the later generation; and
therewith, the mirth also, from the amalgam of which with pity humour
proceeds, has become, in Charles Dickens, for example, freer and more
boisterous.
To this more high-pitched feeling, since predominant in our literature,
the writings of Charles Lamb, whose life occupies the last quarter of
the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, are a
transition; and such union of grave, of terrible even, with gay, we may
note in the circumstances of his life, as reflected thence into his
work. We catch the aroma of a singular, homely sweetness about his first
years, spent on Thames' side, amid the red bricks and terraced gardens,
with their rich historical memories of old-fashioned legal London. Just
above the poorer class, deprived, as he says, of the "sweet food of
academic institution," he is fortunate enough to be reared in the
classical languages at an ancient school, where he becomes the companion
of Coleridge, as at a later period he was his enthusiastic disciple. So
far, the years go by with less than the usual share of boyish
difficulties; protected, one fancies, seeing what he was afterwards, by
some attraction of temper in the quaint child, small and delicate, with
a certain Jewish expression in his clear, brown complexion, eyes not
precisely of the same colour, and a slow walk adding to the staidness of
his figure; and whose infirmity of speech, increased by agitation, is
partly engaging.
And the cheerfulness of all this, of the mere aspect of Lamb's quiet
subsequent life also, might make the more superficial reader think of
him as in himself something slight, and of his mirth as cheaply bought.
Yet we know that beneath this blithe surface there was something of the
fateful domestic horror, of the beautiful heroism and devotedness too,
of old Greek tragedy. His sister Mary, ten years his senior, in a sudden
paroxysm of madness, caused the death of her mother, and was brought to
trial for what an overstrained justice might have construed as the
greatest of crimes. She was released on the brother's pledging himself
to watch over her; and to this sister, from the age of twenty-one,
Charles Lamb sacrificed himself, "seeking thenceforth," says his
earliest biographer, "no connection which could interfere with her
supremacy in his affections, or impair his ability to sustain and
comfort her." The "feverish, romantic tie of love" he cast away in
exchange for the "charities of home." Only, from time to time, the
madness returned, affecting him too, once; and we see the brother and
sister voluntarily yielding to restraint. In estimating the humour of
_Elia_, we must no more forget the strong undercurrent of this great
misfortune and pity, than one could forget it in his actual story. So he
becomes the best critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, a dramatist
of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so _macabre._[87] _Rosamund
Grey_ written in his twenty-third year, a story with something bitter
and exaggerated, an almost insane fixedness of gloom perceptible in it,
strikes clearly this note in his work.
For himself, and from his own point of view, the exercise of his gift,
of his literary art, came to gild or sweeten a life of monotonous
labour, and seemed, as far as regarded others, no very important thing;
availing to give them a little pleasure, and inform them a little,
chiefly in a retrospective manner, but in no way concerned with the
turning of the tides of the great world. And yet this very modesty, this
unambitious way of conceiving his work, has impressed upon it a certain
exceptional enduringness. For of the remarkable English writers
contemporary with Lamb, many were greatly preoccupied with ideas of
practice--religious, moral, political--ideas which have since, in some
sense or other, entered permanently into the general consciousness;
and, these having no longer any stimulus for a generation provided with
a different stock of ideas, the writings of those who spent so much of
themselves in their propagation have lost, with posterity, something of
what they gained by them in immediate influence. Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Shelley even--sharing so largely in the unrest of their own age, and
made personally more interesting thereby, yet, of their actual work,
surrender more to the mere course of time than some of those who may
have seemed to exercise themselves hardly at all in great matters, to
have been little serious, or a little indifferent, regarding them.
Of this number of the disinterested servants of literature, smaller in
England than in France, Charles Lamb is one. In the making of prose he
realises the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats
in the making of verse. And, working ever close to the concrete, to the
details, great or small, of actual things, books, persons, and with no
part of them blurred to his vision by the intervention of mere abstract
theories, he has reached an enduring moral effect also, in a sort of
boundless sympathy. Unoccupied, as he might seem, with great matters, he
is in immediate contact with what is real, especially in its caressing
littleness, that littleness in which there is much of the whole woeful
heart of things, and meets it more than half-way with a perfect
understanding of it. What sudden, unexpected touches of pathos in
him!--bearing witness how the sorrow of humanity, the _Weltschmerz_, the
constant aching of its wounds, is ever present with him: but what a gift
also for the enjoyment of life in its subtleties, of enjoyment actually
refined by the need of some thoughtful economies and making the most of
things! Little arts of happiness he is ready to teach to others. The
quaint remarks of children which another would scarcely have heard, he
preserves--little flies in the priceless amber of his Attic wit--and has
his "Praise of chimney-sweepers" (as William Blake has written, with so
much natural pathos, the Chimney-sweeper's Song), valuing carefully
their white teeth, and fine enjoyment of white sheets in stolen sleep
at Arundel Castle, as he tells the story, anticipating something of the
mood of our deep humourists of the last generation. His simple
mother-pity for those who suffer by accident, or unkindness of nature,
blindness for instance, or fateful disease of mind like his sister's,
has something primitive in its largeness; and on behalf of ill-used
animals he is early in composing a _Pity's Gift._
And if, in deeper or more superficial sense, the dead _do_ care at all
for their name and fame, then how must the souls of Shakespeare and
Webster have been stirred, after so long converse with things that
stopped their ears, whether above or below the soil, at his exquisite
appreciations of them; the souls of Titian and of Hogarth too; for, what
has not been observed so generally as the excellence of his literary
criticism, Charles Lamb is a fine critic of painting also. It was as
loyal, self-forgetful work for others, for Shakespeare's self first, for
instance, and then for Shakespeare's readers, that that too was done: he
has the true scholar's way of forgetting himself in his subject. For
though "defrauded," as we saw, in his young years, "of the sweet food of
academic institution," he is yet essentially a scholar, and all his work
mainly retrospective, as I said; his own sorrows, affections,
perceptions, being alone real to him of the present. "I cannot make
these present times," he says once, "present to _me_."
Above all, he becomes not merely an expositor, permanently valuable, but
for Englishmen almost the discoverer of the old English drama. "The book
is such as I am glad there should be," he modestly says of the
_Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of
Shakespeare_; to which, however, he adds in a series of notes the very
quintessence of criticism, the choicest savour and perfume of
Elizabethan poetry being sorted, and stored here, with a sort of
delicate intellectual epicureanism, which has had the effect of winning
for these, then almost forgotten, poets, one generation after another of
enthusiastic students. Could he but have known how fresh a source of
culture he was evoking there for other generations, through all those
years in which, a little wistfully, he would harp on the limitation of
his time by business, and sigh for a better fortune in regard to
literary opportunities!
To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist, the literary
charm of Burton, for instance, or Quarles, or The Duchess of Newcastle;
and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others--he seeming to
himself but to hand on to others, in mere humble ministration, that of
which for them he is really the creator--this is the way of his
criticism; cast off in a stray letter often, or passing note, or
lightest essay or conversation. It is in such a letter, for instance,
that we come upon a singularly penetrative estimate of the genius and
writings of Defoe.
Tracking, with an attention always alert, the whole process of their
production to its starting-point in the deep places of the mind, he
seems to realise the but half-conscious intuitions of Hogarth or
Shakespeare, and develops the great ruling unities which have swayed
their actual work; or "puts up," and takes, the one morsel of good stuff
in an old, forgotten writer. Even in what he says casually there comes
an aroma of old English; noticeable echoes, in chance turn and phrase,
of the great masters of style, the old masters. Godwin, seeing in
quotation a passage from _John Woodvil_, takes it for a choice fragment
of an old dramatist, and goes to Lamb to assist him in finding the
author. His power of delicate imitation in prose and verse reaches the
length of a fine mimicry even, as in those last essays of Elia on
Popular Fallacies, with their gentle reproduction or caricature of Sir
Thomas Browne, showing, the more completely, his mastery, by
disinterested study, of those elements of the man which were the real
source of style in that great, solemn master of old English, who, ready
to say what he has to say with fearless homeliness, yet continually
overawes one with touches of a strange utterance from worlds afar. For
it is with the delicacies of fine literature especially, its gradations
of expression, its fine judgment, its pure sense of words, of
vocabulary--things, alas! dying out in the English literature of the
present, together with the appreciation of them in our literature of the
past--that his literary mission is chiefly concerned. And yet, delicate,
refining, daintily epicurean, as he may seem, when he writes of giants
such as Hogarth or Shakespeare, though often but in a stray note, you
catch the sense of veneration with which those great names in past
literature and art brooded over his intelligence, his undiminished
impressibility by the great effects in them. Reading, commenting on
Shakespeare, he is like a man who walks alone under a grand stormy sky,
and among unwonted tricks of light, when powerful spirits might seem to
be abroad upon the air; and the grim humour of Hogarth, as he analyses
it, rises into a kind of spectral grotesque; while he too knows the
secret of fine, significant touches like theirs.
There are traits, customs, characteristics of houses and dress,
surviving morsels of old life, such as Hogarth has transferred so
vividly into _The Rake's Progress_, or _Marriage a la Mode_, concerning
which we well understand how, common, uninteresting, or even worthless
in themselves, they have come to please us at last as things
picturesque, being set in relief against the modes of our different age.
Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture--types of cast-off
fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever meant to preserve--we
contemplate with more than good-nature, as having in them the veritable
accent of a time, not altogether to be replaced by its more solemn and
self-conscious deposits; like those tricks of individuality which we
find quite tolerable in persons, because they convey to us the secret of
lifelike expression, and with regard to which we are all to some extent
humourists. But it is part of the privilege of the genuine humourists to
anticipate this pensive mood with regard to the ways and things of his
own day; to look upon the tricks in manner of the life about him with
that same refined, purged sort of vision, which will come naturally to
those of a later generation, in observing whatever may have survived by
chance of its mere external habit. Seeing things always by the light of
an understanding more entire than is possible for ordinary minds, of the
whole mechanism of humanity, and seeing also the manner, the outward
mode or fashion, always in strict connection with the spiritual
condition which determined it, a humourist such as Charles Lamb
anticipates the enchantment of distance; and the characteristics of
places, ranks, habits of life, are transfigured for him, even now and in
advance of time, by poetic light; justifying what some might condemn as
mere sentimentality, in the effort to hand on unbroken the tradition of
such fashion or accent. "The praise of beggars," "the cries of London,"
the traits of actors just grown "old," the spots in "town" where the
country, its fresh green and fresh water, still lingered on, one after
another, amidst the bustle; the quaint, dimmed, just played-out farces,
he had relished so much, coming partly through them to understand the
earlier English theatre as a thing once really alive; those fountains
and sundials of old gardens, of which he entertains such dainty
discourse:--he feels the poetry of these things, as the poetry of things
old indeed, but surviving as an actual part of the life of the present,
and as something quite different from the poetry of things flatly gone
from us and antique, which come back to us, if at all, as entire
strangers, like Scott's old Scotch-border personages, their oaths and
armour. Such gift of appreciation depends, as I said, on the habitual
apprehension of men's life as a whole--its organic wholeness, as
extending even to the least things in it--of its outward manner in
connection with its inward temper; and it involves a fine perception of
the congruities, the musical accordance between humanity and its
environment of custom, society, personal intercourse; as if all this,
with its meetings, partings, ceremonies, gesture, tones of speech, were
some delicate instrument on which an expert performer is playing.
These are some of the characteristics of Elia, one essentially an
essayist, and of the true family of Montaigne, "never judging," as he
says, "system-wise of things, but fastening on particulars;" saying all
things as it were on chance occasion only, and by way of pastime, yet
succeeding thus, "glimpse-wise," in catching and recording more
frequently than others "the gayest, happiest attitude of things;" a
casual writer for dreamy readers, yet always giving the reader so much
more than he seemed to propose. There is something of the follower of
George Fox about him, and the Quaker's belief in the inward light coming
to one passive, to the mere wayfarer, who will be sure at all events to
lose no light which falls by the way--glimpses, suggestions, delightful
half-apprehensions, profound thoughts of old philosophers, hints of the
innermost reason in things, the full knowledge of which is held in
reserve; all the varied stuff, that is, of which genuine essays are
made.
And with him, as with Montaigne, the desire of self-portraiture is,
below all more superficial tendencies, the real motive in writing at
all--a desire closely connected with that intimacy, that modern
subjectivity, which may be called the _Montaignesque_ element in
literature. What he designs is to give you himself, to acquaint you with
his likeness; but must do this, if at all, indirectly, being indeed
always more or less reserved, for himself and his friends; friendship
counting for so much in his life, that he is jealous of anything that
might jar or disturb it, even to the length of a sort of insincerity, to
which he assigns its quaint "praise;" this lover of stage plays
significantly welcoming a little touch of the artificiality of play to
sweeten the intercourse of actual life.