companion for a fortnight's holiday commend us to the admirable
selection recently made from his works, which are numerous--some twenty
volumes--by Mr. Ireland, and published at a cheap price by Messrs. F.
Warne and Co. The task of selection is usually a thankless one. It
involves of necessity omission and frequently curtailment. It is
annoying to look in vain for some favourite passage, and your annoyance
prompts the criticism that a really sound judgment would have made room
for what you miss. We lodge no complaint against Mr. Ireland. Like a
wise man, he has allowed to himself ample space, and he has compiled a
volume of 510 closely though well-printed pages, which has only to be
read in order to make the reader well acquainted with an author whom not
to know is a severe mental deprivation.
Mr. Ireland's book is a library in itself, and a marvellous tribute to
the genius of his author. It seems almost incredible that one man should
have said so many good things. It is true he does not go very deep as a
critic, he does not see into the soul of the matter as Lamb and
Coleridge occasionally do--but he holds you very tight--he grasps the
subject, he enjoys it himself and makes you do so. Perhaps he does say
too many good things. His sparkling sentences follow so quickly one upon
another that the reader's appreciation soon becomes a breathless
appreciation. There is something almost uncanny in such sustained
cleverness. This impression, however, must not be allowed to remain as a
final impression. In Hazlitt the reader will find trains of sober
thought pursued with deep feeling and melancholy. Turn to the essays,
_On Living to One's Self_, _On Going a Journey_, _On the Feeling of
Immortality in Youth_, and read them over again. When you have done so
you will be indisposed to consider their author as a mere sayer of good
things. He was much more than that. One smiles when, on reading the
first Lord Lytton's _Thoughts on the Genius of Hazlitt_, the author of
_Eugene Aram_, is found declaring that Hazlitt 'had a keen sense of the
Beautiful and the Subtle; and what is more, he was deeply imbued with
sympathies for the Humane'; but when Lord Lytton proceeds, 'Posterity
will do him justice,' we cease to smile, and handling Mr. Ireland's
book, observe with deep satisfaction, 'It has.'
THE LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB[7]
Four hundred and seventeen letters of Charles Lamb's, some of them never
before published, in two well-printed but handy volumes, edited, with
notes illustrative, explanatory, and biographical, by Canon Ainger, and
supplied with an admirable index, are surely things to be thankful for
and to be desired. No doubt the price is prohibitory. They will cost you
in cash, these two volumes, full as they are from title-page to colophon
with the sweetness and nobility, the mirth and the melancholy of their
author's life, touched as every page of them is with traces of a hard
fate bravely borne, seven shillings and sixpence. None but American
millionaires and foolish book-collectors can bear such a strain upon
their purses. It is the cab-fare to and from a couple of dull
dinner-parties. But Mudie is in our midst, ever ready to supply our very
modest intellectual wants at so much a quarter, and ward off the
catastrophe so dreaded by all dust-hating housewives, the accumulation
of those 'nasty books,' for which indeed but slender accommodation is
provided in our upholstered homes. Yet these volumes, however acquired,
whether by purchase, and therefore destined to remain by your side ready
to be handled whenever the mood seizes you, or borrowed from a library
to be returned at the week's end along with the last new novel people
are painfully talking about, cannot fail to excite the interest and stir
the emotions of all lovers of sound literature and true men.
But first of all, Canon Ainger is to be congratulated on the completion
of his task. He told us he was going to edit _Lamb's Works and Letters_,
and naturally one believed him; but in this world there is nothing so
satisfactory as performance. To see a good work well planned, well
executed, and entirely finished by the same hand that penned, and the
same mind that conceived the original scheme, has something about it
which is surprisingly gratifying to the soul of man, accustomed as he is
to the wreckage of projects and the failure of hopes.
Canon Ainger's edition of _Lamb's Works and Letters_ stands complete in
six volumes. Were one in search of sentiment, one might perhaps find it
in the intimate association existing between the editor and the old
church by the side of which Lamb was born, and which he ever loved and
accounted peculiarly his own. Elia was born a Templar.
'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.'
Thus begins the celebrated essay on 'The Old Benchers of the Inner
Temple.' As a humble member of that honourable Society, I rejoice that
its Reader should be the man who has, as a labour of love and by virtue
of qualifications which cannot be questioned, placed upon the library
shelf so complete and choice an edition of the works of one whose memory
is perhaps the pleasantest thing about the whole place.
So far as these two volumes of letters are concerned the course adopted
by the editor has been, if I may make bold to say so, the right one. He
has simply edited them carefully and added notes and an index. He has
not attempted to tell Lamb's life between times. He has already told the
story of that life in a separate volume. I wish the practice could be
revived of giving us a man's correspondence all by itself in consecutive
volumes, as we have the letters of Horace Walpole, of Burke, of
Richardson, of Cowper, and many others. It is astonishing what
interesting and varied reading such volumes make. They never tire you.
You do not stop to be tired. Something of interest is always occurring.
Some reference to a place you have visited; to a house you have stayed
at; to a book you have read; to a man or woman you wish to hear about.
As compared with the measured malice of a set biography, where you feel
yourself in the iron grasp, not of the man whose life is being
professedly written, but of the man (whom naturally you dislike) who has
taken upon himself to write the life, these volumes of correspondence
have all the ease and grace and truthfulness of nature. There is about
as much resemblance between reading them and your ordinary biography, as
between a turn on the treadmill and a saunter into Hertfordshire in
search of Mackery End. I hope when we get hold of the biographies of
Lord Beaconsfield, and Dean Stanley, we shall not find ourselves
defrauded of our dues. But it is of the essence of letters that we
should have the whole of each. I think it wrong to omit even the merely
formal parts. They all hang together. The method employed in the
biography of George Eliot was, in my opinion--I can but state it--a
vicious method. To serve up letters in solid slabs cut out of longer
letters is distressing. Every letter a man writes is an incriminating
document. It tells a tale about him. Let the whole be read or none.
Canon Ainger has adopted the right course. He has indeed omitted a few
oaths--on the principle that 'damns have had their day.' For my part, I
think I should have been disposed to leave them alone.
'The rough bur-thistle spreading wide
Amang the bearded bear,
I turn'd my weeding-clips aside
And spared the symbol dear.'
But this is not a question to discuss with a dignitary of the Church.
Leaving out the oaths and, it may perhaps be, here and there a passage
where the reckless humour of the writer led him to transcend the limits
of becoming mirth, and mere notelets, we have in these two volumes
Lamb's letters just as they were written, save in an instance or two
where the originals have been partially destroyed. The first is to
Coleridge, and is dated May 27, 1796; the last is to Mrs. Dyer, and was
written on December 22, 1834. Who, I wonder, ever managed to squeeze
into a correspondence of forty years truer humour, madder nonsense,
sounder sense, or more tender sympathy! They do not indeed (these
letters) prate about first principles, but they contain many things
conducive to a good life here below.
The earlier letters strike the more solemn notes. As a young man Lamb
was deeply religious, and for a time the appalling tragedy of his life,
the death of his mother by his sister's hand, deepened these feelings.
His letters to Coleridge in September and October, 1769, might very well
appear in the early chapters of a saint's life. They exhibit the rare
union of a colossal strength, entire truthfulness, (no single emotion
being ever exaggerated,) with the tenderest and most refined feelings.
Some of his sentences remind one of Johnson, others of Rousseau. How
people reading these letters can ever have the impudence to introduce
into the tones of their voices when they are referring to Lamb the
faintest suspicion of condescension, as if they were speaking of one
weaker than themselves, must always remain an unsolved problem of human
conceit.
These elevated feelings passed away. He refers to this in a letter
written in 1801 to Walter Wilson.
'I have had a time of seriousness, and I have known the importance and
reality of a religious belief. Latterly, I acknowledge, much of my
seriousness has gone off, whether from new company or some other new
associations, but I still retain at bottom a conviction of the truth and
a certainty of the usefulness of religion.'
The fact, I suspect, was that the strain of religious thoughts was
proving too great for a brain which had once succumbed to madness.
Religion sits very lightly on some minds. She could not have done so on
Lamb's. He took refuge in trivialities seriously, and played the fool in
order to remain sane.
These letters are of the same material as the _Essays of Elia_. The
germs, nay, the very phrases, of the latter are frequently to be found
in the former. This does not offend in Lamb's case, though as a rule a
good letter ought not forcibly to remind us of a good essay by the same
hand. Admirable as are Thackeray's lately published letters, the parts I
like best are those which remind me least of a _Roundabout Paper_. The
author is always apt to steal in, and the author is the very last person
you wish to see in a letter. But as you read Lamb's letters you never
think of the author: his personality carries you over everything. He
manages--I will not say skilfully, for it was the natural result of his
delightful character, always to address his letter to his
correspondent--to make it a thing which, apart from the correspondent,
his habits and idiosyncrasies, could not possibly have existed in the
shape it does. One sometimes comes across things called letters, which
might have been addressed to anybody. But these things are not letters:
they are extracts from journals or circulars, and are usually either
offensive or dull.
Lamb's letters are not indeed model letters like Cowper's. Though
natural to Lamb, they cannot be called easy. 'Divine chit-chat' is not
the epithet to describe them. His notes are all high. He is sublime,
heartrending, excruciatingly funny, outrageously ridiculous, sometimes
possibly an inch or two overdrawn. He carries the charm of incongruity
and total unexpectedness to the highest pitch imaginable. John Sterling
used to chuckle over the sudden way in which you turn up Adam in the
following passage from a letter to Bernard Barton:
'DEAR B. B.--You may know my letters by the paper and the folding. For
the former I live on scraps obtained in charity from an old friend,
whose stationery is a permanent perquisite; for folding I shall do it
neatly when I learn to tie my neckcloths. I surprise most of my friends
by writing to them on ruled paper, as if I had not got past pot-hooks
and hangers. Sealing-wax I have none in my establishment; wafers of the
coarsest bran supply its place. When my epistles come to be weighed with
Pliny's, however superior to them in Roman delicate irony, judicious
reflections, etc., his gilt post will bribe over the judges to him. All
the time I was at the E. I. H. I never mended a pen. I now cut 'em to
the stumps, marring rather than mending the primitive goose-quill. I
cannot bear to pay for articles I used to get for nothing. When Adam
laid out his first penny upon nonpareils at some stall in Mesopotamos, I
think it went hard with him, reflecting upon his old goodly orchard
where he had so many for nothing.'
There are not many better pastimes for a middle-aged man who does not
care for first principles or modern novels than to hunt George Dyer
up-and-down Charles Lamb. Lamb created Dyer as surely as did Cervantes
Don Quixote, Sterne Toby Shandy, or Charles Dickens Sam Weller. Outside
Lamb George Dyer is the deadest of dead authors. Inside Lamb he is one
of the quaintest, queerest, most humorously felicitous of living
characters. Pursue this sport through Canon Ainger's first volume and
you will have added to your gallery of whimsicalities the picture of
George Dyer by a master-hand.
Lamb's relations towards Coleridge and Wordsworth are exceedingly
interesting. He loved them both as only Lamb could love his friends. He
admired them both immensely as poets. He recognised what he considered
their great intellectual superiority over himself. He considered their
friendship the crowning glory of his life. For Coleridge his affection
reached devotion. The news of his death was a shock he never got over.
He would keep repeating to himself, 'Coleridge is dead!' But with what a
noble, independent, manly mind did he love his friends! How deep, how
shrewd was his insight into their manifold infirmities! His masculine
nature and absolute freedom from that curse of literature, coterieship,
stand revealed on every page of the history of Lamb's friendships.
On page 327 of Canon Ainger's first volume there is a letter of Lamb's,
never before printed, addressed to his friend Manning, which is
delightful reading. The editor did not get it in time to put it in the
text, so the careless reader might overlook it, lurking as it does
amongst the notes. It is too long for quotation, but a morsel must be
allowed me:
'I lately received from Wordsworth a copy of the second volume,
accompanied by an acknowledgment of having received from me many months
since a copy of a certain tragedy with excuses for not having made any
acknowledgment sooner, it being owing to an almost insurmountable
aversion from letter-writing. This letter I answered in due form and
time, and enumerated several of the passages which had most affected me,
adding, unfortunately, that no single piece had moved me so forcibly as
the _Ancient Mariner_, _The Mad Mother_, or the _Lines at Tintern
Abbey_. The Post did not sleep a moment. I received almost
instantaneously a long letter of four sweating pages from my Reluctant
Letter-Writer, the purport of which was, he was sorry his second volume
had not given me more pleasure (Devil a hint did I give that it had not
pleased me), and was compelled to wish that my range of sensibility was
more extended, being obliged to believe that I should receive large
influxes of happiness and happy thoughts (I suppose from the _Lyrical
Ballads_). With a deal of stuff about a certain union of Tenderness and
Imagination, which in the sense he used Imagination was not the
characteristic of Shakespeare, but which Milton possessed in a degree
far exceeding other Poets, which union, as the highest species of Poetry
and chiefly deserving that name "he was most proud to aspire to"; then
illustrating the said union by two quotations from his own second volume
which I had been so unfortunate as to miss.'
But my quotation must stop. It has been long enough to prove what I was
saying about the independence of Lamb's judgment even of his best
friends. No wonder such a man did not like being called 'gentle-hearted'
even by S. T. C, to whom he writes:
'In the next edition of the _Anthology_ (which Phoebus avert, those nine
other wandering maids also!) please to blot out "gentle-hearted," and
substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering,
or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman
in question.'
Of downright fun and fooling of the highest intellectual calibre fine
examples abound on all sides. The 'Dick Hopkins' letter ranks very
high. Manning had sent Lamb from Cambridge a piece of brawn, and Lamb
takes into his head, so teeming with whimsical fancies, to pretend that
it had been sent him by an imaginary Dick Hopkins, 'the swearing
scullion of Caius,' who 'by industry and agility has thrust himself into
the important situation (no sinecure, believe me) of cook to Trinity
Hall'; and accordingly he writes the real donor a long letter, singing
the praises of this figment of his fancy, and concludes:
'Do me the favour to leave off the business which you may be at present
upon, and go immediately to the kitchens of Trinity and Caius and make
my most respectful compliments to Mr. Richard Hopkins and assure him
that his brawn is most excellent: and that I am moreover obliged to him
for his innuendo about salt water and bran, which I shall not fail to
improve. I leave it to you whether you shall choose to pay him the
civility of asking him to dinner while you stay in Cambridge, or in
whatever other way you may best like to show your gratitude to _my
friend_. Richard Hopkins considered in many points of view is a very
extraordinary character. Adieu. I hope to see you to supper in London
soon, where we will taste Richard's brawn, and drink his health in a
cheerful but moderate cup. We have not many such men in any rank of life
as Mr. R. Hopkins. Crisp, the barber of St. Mary's, was just such
another. I wonder _he_ never sent me any little token, some chestnuts or
a puff, or two pound of hair; just to remember him by.'
We have little such elaborate jesting nowadays. I suppose we think it is
not worth the trouble. The Tartary letter to Manning and the rheumatism
letters to Crabb Robinson are almost distractingly provocative of deep
internal laughter. The letter to Cary apologising for the writer's
getting drunk in the British Museum has its sad side; but if one may
parody the remark, made by 'the young lady of quality,' to Dr. Johnson,
which he was so fond of getting Boswell to repeat, though it was to the
effect that had he (our great moralist) been born out of wedlock his
genius would have been his mother's excuse, it may be said that such a
letter as Lamb's was ample atonement for his single frailty.
Lamb does not greatly indulge in sarcasm, though nobody could say more
thoroughly ill-natured things than he if he chose to do so. George Dawe,
the Royal Academician, is roughly used by him. The account he gives of
Miss Berger--Benjay he calls her--is not lacking in spleen. But as a
rule if Lamb disliked a person he damned him and passed on. He did not
stop to elaborate his dislikes, or to toss his hatreds up and down, as
he does his loves and humorous fancies. He hated the second Mrs. Godwin
with an entire hatred. In a letter written to Manning when in China he
says:
'Mrs. Godwin grows every day in disfavour with me. I will be buried with
this inscription over me: "Here lies C. L., the woman hater": I mean
that hated one woman; for the rest God bless them! How do you like the
Mandarinesses? Are you on some little footing with any of them?'
Scattered up and down these letters are to be found golden sentences,
criticisms both of life and of books, to rival which one would have far
to go. He has not the glitter of Hazlitt--a writer whom it is a shame to
depreciate; nor does he ever make the least pretence of aspiring to the
chair of Coleridge. He lived all his life through conscious of a great
weakness, and therein indeed lay the foundation of the tower of his
strength. 'You do not know,' he writes to Godwin, 'how sore and weak a
brain I have, or you would allow for many things in me which you set
down for whims.' Lamb apologising for himself to Godwin is indeed a
thing at which the imagination boggles. But his humility must not blind
us to the fact that there are few men from whom we can learn more.
The most striking note of Lamb's literary criticism is its veracity. He
is perhaps never mistaken. His judgments are apt to be somewhat too much
coloured with his own idiosyncrasy to be what the judicious persons of
the period call final and classical, but when did he ever go utterly
wrong either in praise or in dispraise? When did he like a book which
was not a good book? When did either the glamour of antiquity or the
glare of novelty lead him astray? How free he was from that silly
chatter about books now so abundant! When did he ever pronounce
wire-drawn twaddle or sickly fancies, simply reeking of their impending
dissolution, to be enduring and noble workmanship?
But it must be owned Lamb was not a great reader of new books. That task
devolved upon his sister. He preferred Burnet's _History of his Own
Times_, to any novel, even to a 'Waverley.'
'Did you ever read,' he wrote to Manning, 'that garrulous, pleasant
history? He tells his story like an old man past political service,
bragging to his sons on winter evenings of the part he took in public
transactions, when his "old cap was new." Full of scandal, which all
true history is. No palliatives; but all the stark wickedness, that
actually gives the _momentum_ to national actors. Quite the prattle of
age and outlived importance. Truth and sincerity staring out upon you in
_alto relievo_. Himself a party man, he makes you a party man. None of
the cursed, philosophical, Humeian indifference, so cold and unnatural
and inhuman. None of the cursed Gibbonian fine writing so fine, and
composite! None of Dr. Robertson's periods with three members. None of
Mr. Roscoe's sage remarks, all so apposite and coming in so clever, lest
the reader should have had the trouble of drawing an inference.'
On the subject of children's books Lamb held strong opinions, as indeed
he was entitled to do. What married pair with their quiver full ever
wrote such tales for children as did this old bachelor and his maiden
sister?
'I am glad the snuff and Pipos books please. _Goody Two Shoes_ is almost
out of print. Mrs. Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics of
the nursery, and the shop-man at Newberry's hardly deigned to reach them
off an old exploded corner of a shelf when Mary asked for them. Mrs.
Barbauld's and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge
insignificant and vapid as Mrs. Barbauld's books convey, it seems must
come to a child in the _shape of knowledge_, and his empty noddle must
be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learnt that a horse
is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like--instead
of that beautiful interest in wild tales which made the child a man,
while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child.'
Canon Ainger's six volumes are not very big. They take up but little
room. They demand no great leisure. But they cannot fail to give immense
pleasure to generations to come, to purify tastes, to soften hearts, to
sweeten discourse.
AUTHORS IN COURT
There is always something a little ludicrous about the spectacle of an
author in pursuit of his legal remedies. It is hard to say why, but like
a sailor on horseback, or a Quaker at the play, it suggests that
incongruity which is the soul of things humorous. The courts are of
course as much open to authors as to the really deserving members of the
community; and, to do the writing fraternity justice, they have seldom
shown any indisposition to enter into them--though if they have done so
joyfully, it must be attributed to their natural temperament, which (so
we read) is easy, rather than to the mirthful character of legal
process.
To write a history of the litigations in which great authors have been
engaged would indeed be _renovare dolorem_, and is no intention of mine;
though the subject is not destitute of human interest--indeed, quite
the opposite.