"Shakespeare himself might have read them and Hamlet have acted them;
for truly was our excellent friend of the genuine line of Yorick."
Thus it was that Leigh Hunt referred to the essays which without doubt
stand as the most characteristic of Charles Lamb's contributions to
literature. His reputation, as was recognized and acknowledged within
a few years of his death, "will ultimately rest on the Essays of Elia,
than which our literature rejoices in few things finer."
The intimate footing upon which he puts himself and his reader, is
perhaps not so much a peculiarity of his own as it is the dominant
note always in the work of your born essayist. He discourses high
truth or fresh philosophy, truest poetry, richest wit, or the most
delicate humour, he presents personal experiences with that simplicity
of pure camaraderie which assumes that the reader could do the
same--if he had the mind, as Lamb himself put it when wittily snubbing
Wordsworth. In most books, as De Quincey has pointed out, the author
figures as a mere abstraction, "without sex or age or local station,"
whom the reader banishes from his thoughts, but in the case of Lamb
and that brilliant line of authors to which he belongs, we must know
something of the man himself, and as I have said earlier, we get it
abundantly scattered up and down his writings. Even if we do not
happen to be acquainted with the actual biography, we can build up in
our minds on reading the essays of Elia a life story not far removed
from actuality, though it would be wanting in any hint of tragedy. It
is this intimacy which at once attracts and repels readers, attracts
all those who are, in however small a degree, kindred spirits, and
repels, perhaps, others. The quaintness, oddity, flippancy, are
wrought together with deep thought, poetry, and feeling to a wonderful
degree. The very diversity of theme and manner--this varying change
from grave to gay, from lively to severe--is indeed but a reflection
of life itself, which with the most fortunate of us dashes our smiles
with tears, and even to the most unfortunate imparts something of
pleasure and delight.
The "Essays of Elia" may fittingly be dealt with as at once the most
representative and the finest of his writings. Great as is the range
of their subjects, it will be found that they are more or less unified
by the author's individuality both in point of view and in treatment,
that they are all informed with what has been termed Lamb's calm and
self-reposing spirit, that they are all more or less strongly marked
by that style which, based upon a loving study of the Elizabethan and
seventeenth-century writers, was yet for the most part distinguished
by concision and ease. He took from his models their richness of
language without their prolixity, their felicity of expression without
their tendency to the elaboration of conceits; he unconsciously
employed their varied styles, to form an individual style of his own.
It is only possible in one small section of a small volume such as
this to indicate a portion of the wealth in the Elia series, so varied
are the themes which inspired the essayist: the delicious drollery of
the "Dissertation upon Roast Pig"; the immortal characterization of
"Mrs. Battle's Opinions upon Whist"; the pleasant personal touches in
a score of the essays; the cry of stifled affection in "Dream
Children"; the whimsicality of "Popular Fallacies"; each of these, and
as many again unspecified might be made the subject of separate
comment. Indeed, for variety in unity there are few books to compare
with our Elia. In the opening essay--the first of the series to appear
in the "London Magazine," the one to stand in the forefront of the
volume--Lamb blends reminiscences with fancy, as he continued to do
frequently throughout the series, in a way that is as suggestive to
the seeker after autobiographical data as it is engaging to the reader
in search of nothing further than the rich delight which comes of
passing time with a literary gem. Lamb pictures "The South Sea House"
as it was when he knew it thirty years earlier--he speaks of it as
forty years. There is a presentation of the old place, fallen more or
less completely upon days of desuetude, with some wonderfully-limned
portraits of the officials. Here is the deputy-cashier, Thomas Tame:
He had the air and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken
him for one, had you met him in one of the passages leading
to Westminster Hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of
the body forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed to
be the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the
applications of their inferiors. While he held you in
converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy.
The conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the
comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had just
awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did
not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its
original state of white paper. A sucking babe might have
posed him. What was it then? Was he rich! Alas, no! Thomas
Tame was very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly
gentle folks, when I fear all was not well at all times
within. She had a neat meagre person, which it was evident
she had not sinned in over-pampering; but in its veins was
noble blood. She traced her descent, by some labyrinth of
relationship, which I never thoroughly understood--much less
can explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of
day--to the illustrious but unfortunate house of
Derwentwater. This was the secret of Thomas's stoop. This
was the thought, the sentiment, the bright solitary star of
your lives, ye mild and happy pair, which cheered you in the
night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station!
This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead
of glittering attainments, and it was worth them all
together. You insulted none with it; but, while you wore it
as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise
could reach you through it. _Decus et solamen._
Then at the close Elia says, "Reader, what if I have been playing with
thee all this while--peradventure the very names, which I have
summoned up before thee, are fantastic--insubstantial--like Henry
Pimpernel and old John Naps of Greece; be satisfied that something
answering to them has had a being. Their importance is from the past."
The names may have been mostly fantastic--in one case we know that it
was not, for "Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters" is
known to delvers among dead books--the types are immortal. In this
first essay we find in such sentences as "their sums in triple
columniations, set down with formal superfluity of cyphers," an
illustration of Lamb's wonderful use of what an antipathetic critic
might term an informal superfluity of syllables.
The next essay, reflecting the atmosphere of "Oxford in the Vacation,"
was written presumably during a holiday visit to the University of
Cambridge, though Elia touching upon matters concerning church
holidays breaks off with--
... but I am wading out of my depths. I am not the man to
decide the limits of civil and ecclesiastical authority--I
am plain Elia--no Selden, nor Archbishop Usher--though at
present in the thick of their books here in the heart of
learning, under the shadow of mighty Bodley.
Then follows a passage eminently characteristic of Elia's happy manner
of playing with a theme:
I can here play the gentleman, enact the student To such a
one as myself, who has been defrauded in his young years of
the sweet food of academic institution, nowhere is so
pleasant to while away a few idle weeks at one or other
of the universities. Their vacation, too, at this time of
the year, falls in pat with _ours_. Here I can take my walks
unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree of standing I
please. I seem admitted _ad eundem_. I fetch up past
opportunities. I can rise at the chapel-bell, and dream that
it rings for _me_. In moods of humility I can be a Sizar, or
a Servitor. When the peacock vein rises, I strut a Gentleman
Commoner. In graver moments, I proceed Master of Arts.
Indeed I do not think I am much unlike that respectable
character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed-makers
in spectacles drop a bow or curtsey as I pass, wisely
mistaking me for something of the sort. I go about in black,
which favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend
quadrangle I can be content to pass for nothing short of a
Seraphic doctor.
The walks at these times are so much one's own--the tall
trees of Christ's, the groves of Magdalen! The halls
deserted, and with open doors inviting one to slip in
unperceived, and pay a devoir to some Founder or noble or
royal Benefactress (that should have been ours), whose
portrait seems to smile upon their over-looked beadsman, and
to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a peep in by the
way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique
hospitality: the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen
fire-places, cordial recesses; ovens whose first pies were
baked four centuries ago; and spits which have cooked for
Chaucer! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is
hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes
forth a Manciple.
The next essay, "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," should
be read along with an earlier one, which does not belong actually to
the Elia series, "Recollections of Christ's Hospital." In the later
essay Lamb affected to look at the school as it might have been to a
scholar less fortunately circumstanced than himself, a boy far from
his family and friends, and the boy whom he selected was that one of
his school companions whom he knew best and with whom in manhood he
had sustained the closest friendship--S. T. Coleridge. That friend he
thus apostrophizes in a passage which has frequently been quoted:
Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring
of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before
thee--the dark pillar not yet turned--Samuel Taylor
Coleridge--Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen
the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still,
entranced with admiration (while he weighed the
disproportion between the _speech_ and the _garb_ of the
young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet
intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus or Plotinus (for
even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such
philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or
Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to
the accents of the inspired charity-boy!
"The Two Races of Men," divides men into those who borrow and those
who lend, the theme being followed out with great humour, and going on
to those "whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than
closed in iron coffers," and then giving pleasant bits about
Coleridge--under his _nomme de guerre_ of Comberbatch--and his theory
that "the title to property in a book ... is in exact ratio to the
claimant's powers of understanding and appreciating the same." "Should
he go on acting upon this theory," adds Elia, "which of our shelves is
safe?"
"New Year's Eve" suggests a train of reflections--not, in the
platitudinous manner of looking back over the errors of the past year
and making good resolutions for the coming one--but on mortality
generally, and on the passing of time and the passing of life:
I am not content to pass away like a weaver's shuttle! These
metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught
of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that
smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the
inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green
earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural
solitude, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up
my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age
to which I am arrived; I and my friends; to be no younger,
no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age;
or drop like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave.
Next comes the immortal "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist,"--Mrs.
Battle, whose wish for "a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour
of the game" has become almost proverbial so commonly is it repeated,
whose heart-whole devotion to her game will make true Elians whist
players when bridge is forgotten. In "A Chapter on Ears," Elia
expatiates upon his insensibility to music; in "All Fool's Day" he
puts wisdom under motley in a truly Shakespearian fashion, with the
fine conclusion, "and take my word for this, reader, and say a fool
told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in
his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition."
"The Quakers' Meeting" is a delicate and impressive verbal
representation of the spirit of Quakerdom as revealed to one not a
Quaker but ready to appreciate the quietist spirit. Those who have
never attended a meeting of the kind feel that they have realized its
significance when they come across a passage such as this:
More frequently the meeting is broken up without a word
having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away
with a sermon, not made with hands. You have been in the
milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that
fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue,
that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive.
You have bathed with stillness--O, when the spirit is sore
fettered, even tired to sickness of the janglings and
nonsense noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it
is, to go and seat yourself for a quiet half hour, upon some
undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers!
Then follows a quaint Elian touch of humour in the application of a
line of Wordsworth's far from that poet's intention: "Their garb and
stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil and
herd-like--as in the pasture--'forty feeding like one.'"
An encounter in a coach with a loquacious gentleman whom he took to be
a school-master set Lamb musing on the differences between "The Old
and the New School-Master," on the way in which the pedagogue is
differentiated by the very conditions of his labours not only from his
boys but from his fellows generally; he is a man for whom life is in a
measure poisoned, "nothing comes to him not spoiled by the
sophisticating medium of moral uses." Incidentally too, Elia informs
us that the school-master
is so used to teaching that he wants to be teaching you. One
of these professors, upon my complaining that these little
sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I
was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to
instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his
seminary were taught to compose English themes. The jests of
a school-master are coarse or thin.
The next essay--the only one in "The Essays of Elia" volume which had
not appeared in the "London Magazine"--is a pretty bit about
"Valentine's Day." This is followed by an inquiry into the existence
of "Imperfect Sympathies," the writer declaring that he had been
trying all his life--without success--to like Scotsmen, and that he
had the same imperfect sympathy with Jews. The Scotsmen are too
precise, too matter of fact at once in their own statements and those
to which alone they will attend. This would of itself be sufficient
to establish the "imperfect sympathy," for in another connection Lamb
had declared his preference for "a matter of lie man."
"Witches and Other Night Fears" is an examination, in which
whimsicality is blent with deep seriousness, of the night terrors of
imaginative childhood; Elia showed how a picture in an old time Bible
history had shaped his fears and made his nights hideous for several
years of his early childhood, though he holds that "It is not book, or
picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these
terrors in children. They can at most but give them direction." He
suggests that the kind of fear is purely spiritual, and incidentally
gives a characteristically quaint turn in "My night-fancies have long
ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional nightmare; but I do
not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them."
In "My Relations" we have an excellent instance of Lamb's veiled
autobiography; he begins by saying that he has no brother or sister
and at once proceeds to a close and analytical portrait of his
"cousin," James Elia, that supposed personage being Charles Lamb's own
brother John, who died in November, 1821, a few months after the
original appearance of this essay. "Mackery End in Hertfordshire,"
continues the theme of relations with another striking piece of
portraiture in another supposed cousin of Elia's, Bridget (really Mary
Lamb). In limning his sister he was of course hampered somewhat by her
terrible affliction, but wonderfully has he surmounted it, and
delightful indeed it is to follow the narrative of the "cousins'"
visit to unknown cousins at the old place in "the green plains of
pleasant Hertfordshire."
Dealing with the subject of "Modern Gallantry" Elia shows how it is
wanting in the true spirit of gallantry which should consist not in
compliments to youth and beauty but in reverence to sex.
"The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple" is one of the essays richest at
once in personal recollections, in wonderful portraiture, and in those
subtle literary touches which impart their peculiar flavour to the
whole. A sketch of the author's father as Lovel was quoted from this
essay in the opening chapter. Elia's observation, his felicity of
expression, his originality of thought, a hint of his playfulness, may
all be recognized in the very commencement of this delicious essay:
I was born, and passed the first seven years of my life in
the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its
fountain, its river, I had almost said--for in those young
years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that
watered our pleasant places?--these are my oldest
recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself
more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of
Spenser, where he speaks of this spot:
"There when they came, whereas those bricky towers,
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whylome wont the Templar knights to bide,
Till they decayd through pride."
Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What
a transition for a countryman visiting London for the first
time--the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet Street,
by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares,
its classic green recesses! what a cheerful, liberal look
hath that portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks
the greater garden, that goodly pile
"Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,"
confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more
fantastically shrouded one named of Harcourt, with the
cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure)
right opposite the stately stream, which washes the
garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and
seems but just weaned from her Twickenham Naiades! a man
would give something to have been born in such places. What
a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where
the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how
many times! to the astoundment of the young urchins, my
contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its
recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the
wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had the now
almost effaced sun-dials with their moral inscriptions,
seeming co-evals with that Time which they measured, and to
take their revelations of its flight immediately from
heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light!
How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by
the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never
catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests
of sleep!
"Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!"
What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous
embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness
of communication, compared with the simple altar-like
structure and silent heart-language of the old dial! It
stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it
almost everywhere vanished?
In this essay, too, we have a happy sentence where, noting an error
into which his memory had betrayed him, Elia wrote of his own
narratives: "They are, in truth, but shadows of fact--verisimilitudes,
not verities--or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of
history."
Dealing with "Grace Before Meat" Elia takes up an unconventional
position and defends it with spirit. It is something of an
impertinence to offer up thanks before an orgy of superfluous
luxuries, a "grace" is only fitting for a poor man sitting down before
the necessaries for which he may well feel thankful. Even such a theme
Lamb finds a fruitful occasion for pertinent literary illustration and
criticism, contrasting--from Milton's "Paradise Lost"--the feast
proffered by the Tempter to Christ in the wilderness with "the
temperate dreams of the divine Hungerer."
With "My First Play" Elia returned to one of those autobiographic
themes in which he is so often at his happiest. He represents the
emotions of the child of six or seven at the theatre and contrasts
them with those that follow when the child has reached his teens. "At
school all play-going was inhibited." He concludes, and, most readers
will agree, concludes with justice, that "we differ from ourselves
less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from six."
"Dream Children," again, has much in it of the story of the writer's
childhood, blent with sorrow over his brother's recent death and
interwoven with a fanciful imagining of what might have been. Elia
pictures himself talking to his two children of his own childhood's
days when visiting grandmother Field:
When suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice
looked out at her eyes with such a reality of
re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood
there 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, and must wait upon the
tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have
existence, and a name"--and immediately awaking, I found
myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had
fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my
side--but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever.
This little essay, the most beautiful of the series, is as essentially
pathetic as anything in our literature, bringing tears to the eyes at
every reading though known almost by heart.
The essay on "Distant Correspondents," in the form of a playful
epistle to a friend, B. F. (_i.e._, Barron Field, also a contributor
to the "London Magazine") has much that is characteristic of the
writer. In it he plays--as he does in other letters to distant
friends--on the way in which "this confusion of tenses, this grand
solecism of two presents" renders writing difficult; in it he airs his
fondness for a pun and enlarges upon the fugacity of that form of fun,
its inherent incapacity for travel; and in it, too, he gives some
indication--we have several such indications in his letters--of his
fondness for hoaxing his friends with invented news about other
friends, or with questions on supposititious problems set forth as
actualities.
The next essay, "The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers," might be cited as
one of those most fully representing the characteristics of Lamb's
work as essayist. It has its touches of personal reminiscences, it
deals with an out-of-the-way subject in a surprisingly engaging
manner, and it is full of those quaint turns of expression, those more
or less recondite words which Elia re-introduced from the older
writers, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, etc., as he had
re-introduced the dramatic writings of the seventeenth century. Here
is a passage which may be said to be thoroughly representative at once
of Elia's manner of looking at things, as well as his own manner of
describing them. Elia is discussing "Saloop."
I know not by what particular conformation of the organ it
happens, but I have always found that this composition is
surprisingly gratifying to the palate of a young
chimney-sweeper--whether the oily particles (sassafras is
slightly oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous
concretions, which are sometimes found (in dissections) to
adhere to the roof of the mouth in these unfledged
practitioners; or whether Nature, sensible that she had
mingled too much of bitter wood in the lot of these raw
victims, caused to grow out of the earth her sassafras for a
sweet lenitive; but so it is, that no possible taste or
odour to the senses of a young chimney-sweeper can convey a
delicate excitement comparable to this mixture. Being
penniless, they will yet hang their black heads over the
ascending steam, to gratify one sense if possible, seemingly
no less pleased than those domestic animals--cats--when they
purr over a new-found sprig of valerian. There is something
more in these sympathies than philosophy can inculcate.
In this essay also we have an example--one of how many!--of Lamb's
happiness in hitting upon an illustration, even though it be of the
ludicrous; mentioning the wonderful white of the sweep-boy's teeth he
adds, "It is, as when
'A sable cloud
Turns forth her silver lining on the night.'"
"A Dissertation upon Roast Pig" is perhaps the most widely known of
all the essays of Elia. Its delightful drollery, its very revelling in
the daintiness of sucking-pig, its wonderfully rich literary
presentation, its deliberate acceptance of wild improbability as
historic basis, all unite to give it special place in the regard of
readers. The theme is of course familiar. It is that of a small
Chinese boy playing with fire who burnt down his father's flimsy hut
so that a whole litter of piglings was roasted in the conflagration.
The boy touched one of the incinerated little ones to feel if it were
alive; burnt his fingers and applied them to his mouth. His father
returned and did the same, and thus roast sucking-pig became a new
dish. Lamb plays with his subject with an inimitable mock earnestness.
Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these
tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with
something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete
custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be
curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what
effect this process might have towards intenerating and
dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the
flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we
should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we
censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto.
The subject Charles Lamb professed to take from a Chinese manuscript
of his friend Manning's, and there have not been wanting critics who
have sought for literary germs from which this essay might have
sprung. Such will find in the seventeenth-century "Letters writ by a
Turkish Spy" the origin of roasted meat referred to the days of
sacrifice when one of the priests touching a burning beast hurt his
fingers and applied them to his mouth--with precisely the same sequel
which followed on Bo-bo's escapade.
"A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People" is a
delicate--perhaps partly ironical--description of a bachelor's
objections to his married friends flaunting their happiness in his
face. In the last three of the essays we have Lamb as critic of the
stage--partly, as in the Dramatic Specimens, of its literature, "On
the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century;" and partly on its actors,
"On some of the Old Actors" and "On the Acting of Munden." Here again
we have proofs of his instinctive critical power, his finely perfected
method of expressing his appreciation of men and books.
The "Last Essays of Elia," published the year before Lamb's death,
open with a "Character of the late Elia"--an admirable piece of
self-portraiture in which Lamb hit off with great felicity some of his
own characteristics, physical and intellectual. In the first of the
essays, "Blakesmoor in H----shire," the author let his memory and
fancy play about the old house, lately razed, in which his grandmother
Field had held sway as housekeeper, in which as child he had passed
many happy holidays. Its tapestries, its haunted room, its "tattered
and diminished 'Scutcheon," its Justice Hall, its "costly fruit
garden, with its sun-baked southern wall," its "noble Marble Hall,
with its Mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Cæsars--stately busts in
marble--ranged round," each of these recalled by memory suggests some
deep thought or some pleasant turn. The opening passage at once sets
the note of the whole, and may be taken as a representation of Lamb's
contemplative mood:
I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at
will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family
mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better
passion than envy; and contemplations on the great and good,
whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants,
weave for us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of
modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present
aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think,
attends us between entering an empty and a crowded church.
In the latter it is chance but some present human
frailty--an act of inattention on the part of some of the
auditory--or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory on
that of the preacher--puts us by our best thoughts,
disharmonizing the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou
know the beauty of holiness? go alone on some week-day,
borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool
aisles of some country church: think of the piety that has
kneeled there--the congregations, old and young, that have
found consolation there--the meek pastor, the docile
parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross
conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the
place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as
the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee.
"Poor Relations" is a beautiful example of humour--provoking to smiles
while touching to tears--with a wonderful introductory piling up of
definitions: "A Poor Relation--is the most irrelevant thing in
nature,--a piece of impertinent correspondency,--a preposterous
shadow, lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity,--an unwelcome
remembrancer," and so on. "This theme of poor relations is replete
with so much matter for tragic as well as comic associations that it
is difficult to keep the account distinct without blending." The essay
includes three or four admirable examples of Elia's felicity in
drawing typical characters with just that touch of oddity that makes
them live as individuals. The theatre which we have seen always made
its triple appeal to Lamb--from the study, from the front, and from
the boards--inspired the next three essays, "Stage Illusions," "To the
Shade of Elliston," and "Ellistoniana." The first is an example of
subtle criticism showing how it is that we get enjoyment out of
unlovely attributes on the stage, thanks to the "exquisite art of the
actor in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us," that things are not
altogether what they seem to be. In the two essays on Elliston we have
at once an eloquent tribute to a stage-magnate of his day and a fine
character portrait.
"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading," might be cited as one of the
most characteristic of the essays of Elia. It illustrates the writer's
happiest style, and indicates his taste. In its opening passages are
words and phrases which have become quotations "familiar in the mouth
as household words" to all book-lovers. Lamb takes as his text a
remark made by Lord Foppington in Vanbrugh's "Relapse": "To mind the
inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced products
of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may
be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own."
An ingenious acquaintance was so much struck with this
bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading
altogether, to the great improvement of his originality. At
the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must
confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time
to other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in others'
speculations. I love to lose myself in other men's minds.
When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think.
Books think for me.
I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for
me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything which I
call a _book_. There are things in that shape which I cannot
allow for such.
In this catalogue of _books which are no books_--_biblia
a-biblia_--I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket
Books, Draught Boards, bound and lettered on the back,
Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the
works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns,
and, generally, all those volumes which "no gentleman's
library should be without"; the Histories of Flavius
Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's "Moral Philosophy."
With these exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless
my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding.
I confess that it moves my spleen to see these _things in
books' clothing_ perched upon shelves, like false saints,
usurpers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary,
thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a
well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some
kind-hearted playbook; then, opening what "seem its
leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Population Essay. To
expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find--Adam Smith; to
view a well-arranged assortment of block-headed
Encyclopædias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an
array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of that good
leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios;
would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund
Lully to look himself again in the world. I never see these
impostors, but I long to strip them to warm my ragged
veterans in their spoils.
He passes on to a consideration of the fitting habiliments of books;
the sizes which appealed to him; the where and when to read: "I should
not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone
and reading 'Candide'!"--"The Old Margate Hoy" gives reminiscences of
a visit to the popular resort--with some uncomplimentary asides at
Hastings--in the days of the boy, "ill-exchanged for the foppery and
freshwater niceness of the modern steampacket," the boy that asked "no
aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cauldrons." "The
Convalescent" expatiates upon the allowable egoism of the occupant of
a sick bed, upon his "regal solitude," and goes on to show "how
convalescence shrinks a man back to his primitive state." The essay
was inspired by that ill-health which led to Lamb's retirement from
the India House in 1825. At the close he indulged his pen in his
conversational fondness for a pun:
In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of
sickness, yet far enough removed from the terra firma of
established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me,
requesting--an article. _In articulo mortis_, thought I; but
it is something hard--and the quibble, wretched as it was,
relieved me.
In the "Sanity of True Genius" Elia set out to controvert the idea
expressed by Dryden in his best remembered line--
"Great wits to madness nearly are allied,"
and does so in a most convincing manner if, with him, we understand by
the greatness of wit poetic talent. As he says: "It is impossible for
the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare."
The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the
raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to
which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides
the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute
a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true
poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject
but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden he walks
familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the empyrean
heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl
without dismay; he wins his flight without self-loss through
realms of chaos "and old night." Or if, abandoning himself
to that severer chaos of a "human mind untuned," he is
content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a
sort of madness) with Timon; neither is that madness, nor
this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that--never letting the
reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so--he
has his better genius whispering at his ear, with the good
servant Kent suggesting saner counsels; or with the honest
steward Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions. Where he
seems most to recede from humanity, he will be found the
truest to it.
"Captain Jackson" is an unforgettable picture of a poor man who would
_not_ be poor; his manners made a plated spoon appear as silver
sugar-tongs, a homely bench a sofa, and so on. As Elia concludes:
There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent
circumstances. To bully and swagger away the sense of them
before strangers, may not always be discommendable. Tibbs
and Bobadil, even when detected, have more of our admiration
than contempt. But for a man to put the cheat upon himself;
to play the Bobadil at home; and, steeped in poverty up to
the lips, to fancy himself all the while chin-deep in
riches, is a strain of constitutional philosophy, and a
mastery over fortune, which was reserved for my old friend
Captain Jackson.
With the next essay of this collection, that on "The Superannuated
Man," we come to one of the most notable of the series of Elia's
transmutations of matters of private experience into precious
literature. The paper is as autobiographic as any of his letters: some
slight changes--as of the East India House to the name of a city
firm--are made, but for the rest it is a record of his retirement with
a revelation of the feelings attendant upon the change from having to
go daily to an office for thirty-six years to being suddenly free:
For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I
could only apprehend my felicity; I was too confused to
taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was happy
and knowing that I was not. I was in the condition of a
prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a
forty years' confinement. I could scarce trust myself with
myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity--for
it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have all his Time to
himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands
than I could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I
was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no
end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious
bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me. And here let
me caution persons grown old in active business, not
lightly, nor without weighing their own resources, to forego
their customary employment all at once, for there may be
danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know that my
resources are sufficient; and now that those first giddy
raptures have subsided, I have a quiet home-feeling of the
blessedness of my condition. I am in no hurry. Having all
holidays, I am as though I had none. If Time hung heavy upon
me I could walk it away; but I do not walk all day long, as
I used to do in those old transient holidays, thirty miles a
day, to make the most of them. If Time were troublesome, I
could read it away, but I do not read in that violent
measure, with which, having no Time my own but candlelight
Time, I used to weary out my head and eyesight in bygone
winters. I walk, read, or scribble (as now) just when the
fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after pleasure; I let it
come to me. I am like the man
"---- that's born, and has his years come to him,
In some green desert."
"The Genteel Style in Writing" is a delightful enforcement of the
"ordinary criticism" that "my Lord Shaftesbury, and Sir William
Temple, are models of the genteel style in writing," though Elia
prefers to differentiate them as "the lordly and the gentlemanly." The
essay is, for the most part, a plea, with illustrations, for a
consideration of Sir William Temple as an easy and engaging writer.
"Barbara S----" is a slight anecdote expanded into a sympathetic
little story of a child-actress who, instead of her half-guinea
salary, being once handed a guinea in error, virtuously took it back
and received the moiety.
"The Tombs in the Abbey" is an indignant protest--in the form of a
letter to Southey--against the closing of Westminster Abbey and St.
Paul's Cathedral, except during service times, to all but those who
could afford to pay for admission; it closes with a touch of humour
where Elia suggests that the Abbey had been closed because the statue
of Major André had been disfigured, and adds: "The mischief was done
about the time that you were a scholar there. Do you know anything
about the unfortunate relic?" Then, in "Amicus Redivivus," we have an
accident to a friend, George Dyer, who had walked absent-mindedly into
the New River opposite Lamb's very door, made to supply matter for
treatment in Elia's pleasantest vein.
"Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney" gives a dozen of Sidney's sonnets
with appreciatory comment. "Newspapers Thirty Years Ago" is
particularly interesting for its reminiscences of the days when Lamb
wrote half a dozen daily jests for "The Morning Post" at sixpence per
jest, and for its sketches of Daniel Stuart and Fenwick, two diversely
typical journalists of a century since. "Barrenness of the Imaginative
Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art" is a criticism of the
prevailing taste in art matters, inspired by Martin's "Belshazzar's
Feast," and contrasts the modern methods of painting as--a Dryad, "a
beautiful naked figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks" (a figure
that with a different background would do just as well as a Naiad),
with the older method illustrated by Julio Romano's dryad, in which
was "an approximation of two natures." "Rejoicings Upon the New Year's
Coming of Age" is a graceful, sparkling piece of humorous fancy:
I should have told you, that cards of invitation had been
issued. The carriers were the _Hours_; twelve little, merry
whirligig foot-pages, as you should desire to see, that went
all round, and found out the persons invited well enough,
with the exception of _Easter Day_, _Shrove Tuesday_, and a
few such _Moveables_, who had lately shifted their quarters.
Well, they all met at last, foul _Days_, fine _Days_, all
sorts of _Days_, and a rare din they made of it. There was
nothing but, Hail! fellow _Day_,--well met--brother
_Day_--sister _Day_,--only _Lady Day_ kept a little on the
aloof, and seemed somewhat scornful. Yet some said _Twelfth
Day_ cut her out and out, for she came in a tiffany suit,
all white and gold, like a queen on a frost-cake--all royal,
glittering, and _Epiphanous_. The rest came--some in green,
some in white--but old _Lent and his family_ were not yet
out of mourning. Rainy _Days_ came in, dripping; and
sun-shiny _Days_ helped them to change their stockings.
_Wedding Day_ was there in his marriage finery, a little the
worse for wear. _Pay Day_ came late, as he always does; and
_Doomsday_ sent word--he might be expected.
"The Wedding" describes such a ceremony at which Elia had assisted,
and illustrates at once his sympathy with the young people and with
their parents--"is there not something untender, to say no more of it,
in the hurry which a beloved child is in to tear herself from the
paternal stock and commit herself to strange graftings." "The Child
Angel" is a beautiful poetic apologue in the form of a dream.
In "Old China," one of the most attractive of this varied series, Elia
is ready with reminiscences of the days when the purchase of the
books, pictures, or old china that they loved, meant a real sacrifice,
and the things purchased were therefore the more deeply prized.
Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon
you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so
threadbare--and all because of that folio Beaumont and
Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Barker's
in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks
before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had
not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of
the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing
you should be too late--and when the old bookseller, with
some grumbling, opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper
(for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from
his dusty treasures--and when you lugged it home wishing it
were twice as cumbersome--and when you presented it to me;
and when we were exploring the perfectness of it
(_collating_ you called it)--and while I was repairing some
of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would
not suffer to be left till daybreak--was there no pleasure
in being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes you
wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have
become rich and finical, give you half the honest vanity,
with which you flaunted it about in that overworn suit--your
old corbeau--for four or five weeks longer than you should
have done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of
fifteen--or sixteen shillings, was it?--a great affair we
thought it then--which you had lavished on the old folio.
Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I
do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old
purchases now.
When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a
less number of shillings upon that print after Lionardo,
which we christened the "Lady Blanch"; when you looked at
the purchase, and thought of the money,--and thought of the
money, and looked again at the picture--was there no
pleasure in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing to do
but walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos.
Yet do you?
"Confessions of a Drunkard" and "Popular Fallacies" complete the tale
of the "Essays of Elia" that were collected into volume form as such.
The first-named essay had been issued originally in 1813. It is an
attempt to set forth from a drunkard's point of view the evils of
drunkenness, and was first published in a periodical with a purpose
over twenty years before its inclusion in the second edition of the
"Last Essays of Elia." To accentuate the fact that it was purely a
literary performance--an attempt to project himself into the mind of a
drunkard willing to allow others to profit by his example--Lamb
reprinted it in the "London Magazine" as one of his ordinary
contributions. There have not been wanting matter-of-fact people (with
whom our Elia has recorded his imperfect sympathy) who have accepted
this essay as pure biography; because details tally with the author's
life they think the whole must do so. We have but to follow the story
of Lamb's life with understanding to realize how wrong is this
impression. The closing dozen of essays in brief, grouped under the
title of "Popular Fallacies," discuss certain familiar axioms and show
them--in the light of fun and fancy--to be wholly fallacious.
Such is the variety of those two volumes which by common consent--by
popular appreciation and by critical judgement--have their place as
Lamb's most characteristic work. Throughout both series we find
delicate unconventionality, the same choice of subjects from among the
simplest suggestions of everyday life, lifted by his method of
treatment, his manner of looking at and treating things, out of the
sphere of every day into that of all days. However simple may be the
subject chosen it is always made peculiarly his own.