HOW TO READ A CLASSIC
Let us begin experimental reading with Charles Lamb. I choose Lamb for
various reasons: He is a great writer, wide in his appeal, of a highly
sympathetic temperament; and his finest achievements are simple and
very short. Moreover, he may usefully lead to other and more complex
matters, as will appear later. Now, your natural tendency will be to
think of Charles Lamb as a book, because he has arrived at the
stage of being a classic. Charles Lamb was a man, not a book. It is
extremely important that the beginner in literary study should always
form an idea of the man behind the book. The book is nothing but the
expression of the man. The book is nothing but the man trying to talk
to you, trying to impart to you some of his feelings. An experienced
student will divine the man from the book, will understand the man by
the book, as is, of course, logically proper. But the beginner will do
well to aid himself in understanding the book by means of independent
information about the man. He will thus at once relate the book to
something human, and strengthen in his mind the essential notion of
the connection between literature and life. The earliest literature
was delivered orally direct by the artist to the recipient. In some
respects this arrangement was ideal. Changes in the constitution of
society have rendered it impossible. Nevertheless, we can still, by
the exercise of the imagination, hear mentally the accents of the
artist speaking to us. We must so exercise our imagination as to feel
the man behind the book.
Some biographical information about Lamb should be acquired. There are
excellent short biographies of him by Canon Ainger in the _Dictionary
of National Biography_, in Chambers's _Encyclopædia_, and in
Chambers's _Cyclopædia of English Literature_. If you have none of
these (but you ought to have the last), there are Mr. E.V. Lucas's
exhaustive _Life_ (Methuen, 7s. 6d.), and, cheaper, Mr. Walter
Jerrold's _Lamb_ (Bell and Sons, 1s.); also introductory studies
prefixed to various editions of Lamb's works. Indeed, the facilities
for collecting materials for a picture of Charles Lamb as a human
being are prodigious. When you have made for yourself such a picture,
read the _Essays of Elia_ the light of it. I will choose one of the
most celebrated, _Dream Children: A Reverie_. At this point, kindly
put my book down, and read _Dream Children_. Do not say to yourself
that you will read it later, but read it now. When you have read it,
you may proceed to my next paragraph.
You are to consider _Dream Children_ as a human document. Lamb was
nearing fifty when he wrote it. You can see, especially from the last
line, that the death of his elder brother, John Lamb, was fresh and
heavy on his mind. You will recollect that in youth he had had
a disappointing love-affair with a girl named Ann Simmons, who
afterwards married a man named Bartrum. You will know that one of the
influences of his childhood was his grandmother Field, housekeeper
of Blakesware House, in Hertfordshire, at which mansion he sometimes
spent his holidays. You will know that he was a bachelor, living with
his sister Mary, who was subject to homicidal mania. And you will
see in this essay, primarily, a supreme expression of the increasing
loneliness of his life. He constructed all that preliminary tableau of
paternal pleasure in order to bring home to you in the most poignant
way his feeling of the solitude of his existence, his sense of all
that he had missed and lost in the world. The key of the essay is one
of profound sadness. But note that he makes his sadness beautiful;
or, rather, he shows the beauty that resides in sadness. You watch him
sitting there in his "bachelor arm-chair," and you say to yourself:
"Yes, it was sad, but it was somehow beautiful." When you have said
that to yourself, Charles Lamb, so far as you are concerned, has
accomplished his chief aim in writing the essay. How exactly he
produces his effect can never be fully explained. But one reason of
his success is certainly his regard for truth. He does not falsely
idealise his brother, nor the relations between them. He does not say,
as a sentimentalist would have said, "Not the slightest cloud ever
darkened our relations;" nor does he exaggerate his solitude. Being
a sane man, he has too much common-sense to assemble all his woes at
once. He might have told you that Bridget was a homicidal maniac;
what he does tell you is that she was faithful. Another reason of his
success is his continual regard for beautiful things and fine actions,
as illustrated in the major characteristics of his grandmother and his
brother, and in the detailed description of Blakesware House and the
gardens thereof.
Then, subordinate to the main purpose, part of the machinery of the
main purpose, is the picture of the children--real children until the
moment when they fade away. The traits of childhood are accurately and
humorously put in again and again: "Here John smiled, as much as to
say, 'That would be foolish indeed.'" "Here little Alice spread
her hands." "Here Alice's little right foot played an involuntary
movement, till, upon my looking grave, it desisted." "Here John
expanded all his eyebrows, and tried to look courageous." "Here John
slily deposited back upon the plate a bunch of grapes." "Here the
children fell a-crying ... and prayed me to tell them some stories
about their pretty dead mother." And the exquisite: "Here Alice put
out one of her dear mother's looks, too tender to be upbraiding."
Incidentally, while preparing his ultimate solemn effect, Lamb has
inspired you with a new, intensified vision of the wistful beauty of
children--their imitativeness, their facile and generous emotions,
their anxiety to be correct, their ingenuous haste to escape from
grief into joy. You can see these children almost as clearly and as
tenderly as Lamb saw them. For days afterwards you will not be able to
look upon a child without recalling Lamb's portrayal of the grace of
childhood. He will have shared with you his perception of beauty. If
you possess children, he will have renewed for you the charm which
custom does very decidedly stale. It is further to be noticed that the
measure of his success in picturing the children is the measure of his
success in his main effect. The more real they seem, the more touching
is the revelation of the fact that they do not exist, and never have
existed. And if you were moved by the reference to their "pretty dead
mother," you will be still more moved when you learn that the girl who
would have been their mother is not dead and is not Lamb's.
As, having read the essay, you reflect upon it, you will see how its
emotional power over you has sprung from the sincere and unexaggerated
expression of actual emotions exactly remembered by someone who had an
eye always open for beauty, who was, indeed, obsessed by beauty. The
beauty of old houses and gardens and aged virtuous characters, the
beauty of children, the beauty of companionships, the softening beauty
of dreams in an arm-chair--all these are brought together and mingled
with the grief and regret which were the origin of the mood. Why is
_Dream Children_ a classic? It is a classic because it transmits to
you, as to generations before you, distinguished emotion, because it
makes you respond to the throb of life more intensely, more justly,
and more nobly. And it is capable of doing this because Charles Lamb
had a very distinguished, a very sensitive, and a very honest mind.
His emotions were noble. He felt so keenly that he was obliged to find
relief in imparting his emotions. And his mental processes were so
sincere that he could neither exaggerate nor diminish the truth. If
he had lacked any one of these three qualities, his appeal would have
been narrowed and weakened, and he would not have become a classic.
Either his feelings would have been deficient in supreme beauty,
and therefore less worthy to be imparted, or he would not have had
sufficient force to impart them; or his honesty would not have been
equal to the strain of imparting them accurately. In any case, he
would not have set up in you that vibration which we call pleasure,
and which is super-eminently caused by vitalising participation in
high emotion. As Lamb sat in his bachelor arm-chair, with his brother
in the grave, and the faithful homicidal maniac by his side, he
really did think to himself, "This is beautiful. Sorrow is beautiful.
Disappointment is beautiful. Life is beautiful. _I must tell them_. I
must make them understand." Because he still makes you understand he
is a classic. And now I seem to hear you say, "But what about Lamb's
famous literary style? Where does that come in?"