Is truth-hunting one of those active mental habits which, as Bishop
Butler tells us, intensify their effects by constant use; and are weak
convictions, paralyzed intellects, and laxity of opinions amongst the
effects of Truth-hunting on the majority of minds? These are not
unimportant questions.
Let us consider briefly the probable effects of speculative habits on
conduct.
The discussion of a question of conduct has the great charm of
justifying, if indeed not requiring, personal illustration; and this
particular question is well illustrated by instituting a comparison
between the life and character of Charles Lamb and those of some of his
distinguished friends.
Personal illustration, especially when it proceeds by way of comparison,
is always dangerous, and the dangers are doubled when the subjects
illustrated and compared are favorite authors. It behoves us to proceed
warily in this matter. A dispute as to the respective merits of Gray and
Collins has been known to result in a visit to an attorney and the
revocation of a will. An avowed inability to see anything in Miss
Austen's novels is reported to have proved destructive of an otherwise
good chance of an Indian judgeship. I believe, however, I run no great
risk in asserting that, of all English authors, Charles Lamb is the one
loved most warmly and emotionally by his admirers, amongst whom I reckon
only those who are as familiar with the four volumes of his 'Life and
Letters' as with 'Elia.'
But how does he illustrate the particular question now engaging our
attention?
Speaking of his sister Mary, who, as every one knows, throughout 'Elia'
is called his cousin Bridget, he says:--
"It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have
wished, to have had for her associates and mine free-thinkers, leaders
and disciples of novel philosophies and systems; but she neither
wrangles with nor accepts their opinions."
Nor did her brother. He lived his life cracking his little jokes and
reading his great folios, neither wrangling with nor accepting the
opinions of the friends he loved to see around him. To a contemporary
stranger it might well have appeared as if his life were a frivolous and
useless one as compared with those of these philosophers and thinkers.
_They_ discussed their great schemes and affected to prove deep
mysteries, and were constantly asking, "What is truth?" _He_ sipped his
glass, shuffled his cards, and was content with the humbler inquiry,
"What are trumps?" But to us, looking back upon that little group, and
knowing what we now do about each member of it, no such mistake is
possible. To us it is plain beyond all question that, judged by whatever
standard of excellence it is possible for any reasonable human being to
take, Lamb stands head and shoulders a better man than any of them. No
need to stop to compare him with Godwin, or Hazlitt, or Lloyd; let us
boldly put him in the scales with one whose fame is in all the
churches--with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "logician, metaphysician, bard."
There are some men whom to abuse is pleasant. Coleridge is not one of
them. How gladly we would love the author of 'Christabel' if we could!
But the thing is flatly impossible. His was an unlovely character. The
sentence passed upon him by Mr. Matthew Arnold (parenthetically, in one
of the 'Essays in Criticism')--"Coleridge had no morals"--is no less
just than pitiless. As we gather information about him from numerous
quarters, we find it impossible to resist the conclusion that he was a
man neglectful of restraint, irresponsive to the claims of those who had
every claim upon him, willing to receive, slow to give.
In early manhood Coleridge planned a Pantisocracy where all the virtues
were to thrive. Lamb did something far more difficult: he played
cribbage every night with his imbecile father, whose constant stream of
querulous talk and fault-finding might well have goaded a far stronger
man into practicing and justifying neglect.
That Lamb, with all his admiration for Coleridge, was well aware of
dangerous tendencies in his character, is made apparent by many letters,
notably by one written in 1796, in which he says:--
"O my friend, cultivate the filial feelings! and let no man think
himself released from the kind charities of relationship: these shall
give him peace at the last; these are the best foundation for every
species of benevolence. I rejoice to hear that you are reconciled with
all your relations."
This surely is as valuable an "aid to reflection" as any supplied by the
Highgate seer.
Lamb gave but little thought to the wonderful difference between the
"reason" and the "understanding." He preferred old plays--an odd diet,
some may think, on which to feed the virtues; but however that may be,
the noble fact remains, that he, poor, frail boy! (for he was no more,
when trouble first assailed him) stooped down, and without sigh or sign
took upon his own shoulders the whole burden of a lifelong sorrow.
Coleridge married. Lamb, at the bidding of duty, remained single,
wedding himself to the sad fortunes of his father and sister. Shall we
pity him? No; he had his reward--the surpassing reward that is only
within the power of literature to bestow. It was Lamb, and not
Coleridge, who wrote 'Dream-Children: a Reverie':--
"Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in
despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W---- n; and as
much as children could understand, I explained to them what coyness and
difficulty and denial meant in maidens--when, suddenly turning to Alice,
the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality
of representment that I became in doubt which of them stood before me,
or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the
children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding and still receding,
till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the
uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me
the effects of speech. 'We are not of Alice nor of thee, nor are we
children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are
nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We are only _what might
have been_.'"
Godwin! Hazlitt! Coleridge! Where now are their "novel philosophies and
systems"? Bottled moonshine, which does _not_ improve by keeping.
"Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust."
Were we disposed to admit that Lamb would in all probability have been
as good a man as every one agrees he was--as kind to his father, as full
of self-sacrifice for the sake of his sister, as loving and ready a
friend--even though he had paid more heed to current speculations, it is
yet not without use in a time like this, when so much stress is laid
upon anxious inquiry into the mysteries of soul and body, to point out
how this man attained to a moral excellence denied to his speculative
contemporaries; performed duties from which they, good men as they were,
would one and all have shrunk: how, in short, he contrived to achieve
what no one of his friends, not even the immaculate Wordsworth or the
precise Southey, achieved--the living of a life the records of which are
inspiriting to read, and are indeed "the presence of a good diffused";
and managed to do it all without either "wrangling with or accepting"
the opinions that "hurtled in the air" about him.