The style is the man. The rule was thus confined within the compass of
a brief sentence by a distinguished French naturalist, and if there be
examples which form exceptions to that rule, Charles Lamb is certainly
not one of them. Markedly individual himself he reveals that
individuality in his writings so strongly that there are not wanting
critics who consider themselves able to decide from the turn of a
phrase or the use of a word whether Lamb did or did not write any
particular piece of work which it may have been sought to father on
him. In the manner of presentation of his writings we have at once the
revelation of catholic literary taste and wide reading combined with
the deep seriousness and the almost irresponsible whimsicality of the
man himself. The man who was loved by all who knew him in the
flesh--so true is it that _le style c'est l'homme_--reveals himself as
a man to be loved by those who can only know him through the medium of
the written word. Where he has given rein to his fancy or his
imagination, he is humorous, whimsical, inventive; where he is dealing
with matters of serious fact or criticism he is simple, clear, and to
the point. Quotations already given would go to illustrate this, but
two further contrasting passages may be added. The first is from
"Table Talk," the second from a critical essay on the acting of
Shakespeare's tragedies.
It is a desideratum in works that treat _de re culinaria_,
that we have no rationale of sauces, or theory of mixed
flavours; as to show why cabbage is reprehensible with roast
beef, laudable with bacon; why the haunch of mutton seeks
the alliance of currant jelly, the shoulder civilly
declineth it; why a loin of veal (a pretty problem), being
itself unctuous, seeketh the adventitious lubricity of
melted butter; and why the same part in pork, not more
oleaginous, abhorreth it; why the French bean sympathizes
with the flesh of deer; why salt fish points to parsnip,
brawn makes a dead set at mustard; why cats prefer valerian
to heartsease, old ladies _vice versa_--though this is
rather travelling out of the road of the dietetics, and may
be thought a question more curious than relevant; why salmon
(a strong sapor _per se_) fortifieth its condition with the
mighty lobster sauce, whose embraces are fatal to the
delicater relish of the turbot; why oysters in death rise up
against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are
posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the
sweet jam, by turns, court and are accepted by the
compilable mutton hash--she not yet decidedly declaring for
either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery.
* * * * *
So to see Lear acted--to see an old man tottering about the
stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his
daughters on a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is
painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and
relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of
Lear ever produced on me. But the Lear of Shakespeare
cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they
mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate
to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any
actor can be to represent Lear: they might more easily
propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or
one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of
Lear is not in corporal dimension but in intellectual: the
explosions of his passions are terrible as a volcano; they
are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea,
his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is
laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too
insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects
it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and
weakness, the impotence of rage: while we read it, we see
not Lear, but we are Lear--we are in his mind, we are
sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of
daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we
discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized
from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers,
as the wind bloweth where it listeth, at will upon the
corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones
to do with that sublime identification of his age with that
of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them
for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds
them that "they themselves are old"? What gesture shall we
appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do
with such things?
From the olden time
Of Authorship thy Patent should be dated,
And thou with Marvell, Browne, and Burton mated.
Thus did Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, close a sonnet which he
addressed to Elia, and there is keen criticism in the few words. With
the three writers mentioned Lamb was in rarest sympathy; many are the
references to them in his books and in his letters. With Andrew
Marvell he shows his kinship in his verse, with the authors of "The
Religio Medici" and of "The Anatomy of Melancholy," in diverse ways in
his prose. Now fanciful and euphemistic with these, he is, as soon as
occasion calls for plainer statement, clear and simple in expression.
As one critic has put it, he was so steeped in the literature of the
past that it became natural for him to deal with a theme more or less
in the manner in which that theme would have been dealt with by that
writer in the past most likely to have made it his own. This is
perhaps slightly exaggerated, but it has something of truth in it.
"For with all his marked individuality of manner there are perhaps few
English writers who have written so differently on different themes."
Placing special emphasis on his favourites--which besides the three
named included Jeremy Taylor, Chapman, and Wither, to say nothing of
the whole body of the dramatists of our literary renaissance--it may
be said that his wide reading, his loving study, among the authors of
our richest literary periods went far towards forming his style,
though it must be remembered--it cannot be forgotten with a volume of
his essays or letters in hand--that there is always that marked but
indescribable "individuality of manner" which pervades the varied
whole.
Hazlitt, touching upon the characteristics of Charles Lamb, in the
essay in which he--not very felicitously--brackets Elia and Geoffrey
Crayon in the "Spirit of the Age," says:
He is borne along with no pompous paradoxes, shines in no
glittering tinsel of a fashionable phraseology; is neither
fop nor sophist. He has none of the turbulence or froth of
new-fangled opinions. His style runs pure and clear, though
it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed
through old-fashioned conduit pipes. Mr. Lamb does not court
popularity, nor strut in gaudy plumes, but shrinks from
every kind of ostentatious and obvious pretension into the
retirement of his own mind.
That mind was, as has been said, stored with a wealth from among the
best of English literature, and when Lamb expressed himself it was
always in pure literary fashion. He was a bookman writing for those
who love things of the mind which can only be passed from generation
to generation by means of books. In this we may recognize the
reason--wholly unconscious to the writer--for the allusiveness of his
style: it is often that subtle allusiveness which takes for granted as
much knowledge in the reader as in the writer of the thing or passage
to which allusion is made. In the sixteenth century such allusiveness
was generally fruit of an extensive knowledge of the ancient classics;
but though the references differ, the manner is much the same in
Charles Lamb as in Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne.
Less confident critics than those mentioned at the beginning of this
section may yet readily recognize the general individuality of the
style in which Elia revealed himself through the medium of his pen. To
his lifelong habit of browsing among old books, his especial fondness
for the writers of the sixteenth century, he owed no small part of the
richness of his vocabulary, which enabled him frequently to use with
fine effect happy old words in place of current makeshifts. In one of
his early letters to Coleridge where he mentions having just finished
reading Chapman's Homer, Lamb, seizing upon a phrase in that
translation, says with gusto, "what _endless egression of phrases_ the
dog commands." The word arrided him (to employ another, the use of
which he recovered for us), and he could not forbear making a note of
it. He had, indeed, something of an instinctive genius for finding
words that had passed more or less into desuetude, and a happy way of
re-introducing them to enrich the plainer prose of his day. He did it
naturally, even as though inevitably, and without any such air of
coxcombical affectation as would have destroyed the flavour of the
whole. Lamb was so thoroughly imbued with the thought and modes of
expression of the rich Elizabethan and Stuart periods that his use of
obsolescent words was probably more often than not quite unconscious.
The egotism of Elia's style in addressing his readers has been said to
be founded on that of Sir Thomas Browne, and in a measure there can be
little doubt that it was so--but only in a measure, for it is
something the same egotism as that of Montaigne, is, indeed, the
natural attitude of the familiar essayist who must be egotistic, not
from self-consciousness but from the lack of it. In putting his
opinions and experiences in the first person, we feel that Lamb did so
almost unconsciously, because it was for him the easiest way of
expressing himself. It was not, in fact, egotism at all in the
commonly accepted sense of meaning, too frequent or self-laudatory use
of the personal pronoun.