Charles Lamb occupies a very curious position in English literature
and a very enviable one. He is, perhaps, the most widely known, and
widely spoken of, of any stylist we possess, and the least understood.
It was his humour, while living, to create misunderstanding, and he
creates it still. And yet he is recognized on all sides as a Classic of
the unapproachable breed. Charles Lamb has among his admirers
more uninteresting people than any great artist has ever had except
Thackeray. He has more academic people in his train than anyone
has ever had except Shakespeare. And more severe, elderly, pedantic
persons profess to love him than love any other mortal writer.
These people all read Lamb, talk Lamb, quote Lamb, but they do not
_suggest_ Lamb; they do not "smack," as our ancestors used to say,
of the true Elia vein.
But the immense humour of the situation does not stop here. Not
only has this evasive City Clerk succeeded in fooling the "good
people;" he has fooled the "wicked ones." I have myself in the circle
of my acquaintance more than half a dozen charming people, of the
type who enjoy Aubrey Beardsley, and have a mania for Oscar
Wilde, and sometimes dip into Remy de Gourmont, and not one of
them "can read" Charles Lamb. He has succeeded in fooling them;
in making them suppose he is something quite different from what
he is. He used to tell his friends that every day he felt himself
growing more "official" and "moral." He even swore he had been
taken for a Verger or a Church warden. Well, our friends of the
"enclosed gardens" still take him for a Verger. But he is a more
remarkable Verger than they dream. As a matter of fact, there were
some extremely daring and modern spirits in Elia's "entourage,"
spirits who went further in an antinomian direction than--I devoutly
pray--my friends are ever likely to go, and these scandalous ones
adored him. And for his part, he seems to have liked them--more
than he ought.
It is, indeed, very curious and interesting, the literary fate of Charles
Lamb. Jocular Bishops, archly toying Rural Deans, Rectors with a
"penchant" for anecdote, scholarly Canons with a weakness for Rum
Punch, are all inclined to speak as if in some odd way he was of
their own very tribe. He had absolutely nothing in common with
them, except a talent for giving false impressions! With regard to the
devotion to him which certain gentle and old-fashioned ladies
have--one's great-aunts, for instance--I am inclined to think that much
more might be said. There is a quality, a super-refined, exquisite
quality, and one with a pinch of true ironic salt in it, which the more
thick-skinned among us sensationalists may easily miss.
It is all very well for us to talk of "burning with a hard gem-like
flame," when, as a matter of fact, we move along, dull as cave-men,
to some of the finest aesthetic effects in the world. Not to appreciate
the humour of that rarest and sweetest of all human types, the
mischievous-tongued Great-Aunt, is to be nothing short of a profane
fool.
But Charles Lamb is a very different person from our Goldsmiths
and Cowpers and Austens, and their modern representatives. It
needs something else in a Great-Aunt than old-fashioned irony to
appreciate _him._ It needs an imagination that is very nearly
"Shakespearean" and it needs a passion for beautiful style of which a
Flaubert or an Anatole France might be proud.
So here we have the old sly Elia, fooling people now as he fooled
them in his lifetime, and a riddle both to the godly and the ungodly.
The great Goethe, whose Walpurgis Night "He-Apes" made Elia put
out his tongue, read, we learn, with no little pleasure some fantastic
skit of this incorrigible one. Did he discern--the sublime Olympian--what
a cunning flute player lurked under the queer mask? "Something
between a Jew, a Gentleman and an Angel" he liked to fancy
he looked; and one must confess that in the subtlest of all
senses of that word, a gentleman he was.
Lamb's "essays" were written at off hours, when he could escape
from his office. Once completely freed from the necessity of office
work, his writing lost its magic. His genius was of that peculiarly
delicate texture which requires the stimulus of reaction. One cannot
be too grateful that the incomparable Pater, after Lamb himself,
perhaps, the greatest master of English prose, found it necessary to
utter his appreciation. Pater, as usual, hits the mark with an infallible
hand when he speaks of that overhanging Sophoclean tragedy which
darkened Lamb's earlier days and never quite left him.
It is, of course, this, the sense of one living always on the edge of a
precipice, that gives such piquancy and charm to Elia's mania for
"little things." Well might he turn to "little things," when great
things--his Sun and his Moon--had been turned for him to Blood!
But, as Pater suggests, there is "Philosophy" in all this, and more
Philosophy than many suppose. It is unfortunate that the unworldly
Coleridge and the worldly Thackeray should have both pitched upon
Lamb's "saintliness" to make copy of. Nothing infuriated him more
than such a tone towards himself. And he was right to be infuriated.
His "unselfishness," his "sweetness," of which these good men make
so much, were only one aspect of the Philosophy of his whole life.
Lamb was, in his life, a great epicurean philosopher, as, in all
probability, many other "saints" have been. The things in him that
fretted Carlyle, his fits of intoxication, his outbursts of capricious
impishness, his perversity and his irony, were just as much part of
the whole scheme as were his celibacy and his relation to his sister.
What one can really gather from Lamb is nothing less than a very
wise and very subtle "way of life," a way that, amid many
outrageous experiences, will be found singularly lucky.
In the first place, let it be noted, Lamb deliberately cultivates the art
of "transforming the commonplace." It is as absurd to deny the
existence of this element--from which we all suffer--as it is to
maintain that it cannot be changed. It _can_ be changed. That is
precisely what this kind of rare genius does. It is a miracle, of course,
but everything in art is a miracle.
Nature tosses out indiscriminately her motley productions, and if
you are born for such "universalism," you may swallow them
wholesale. The danger of such a downright manner of going to work
is that it blunts one's critical sense. If you swallow everything just as
it is, you _taste_ very little. But Charles Lamb is nothing if not
"critical," nothing if not an Epicure, and his manner of dealing with
the "commonplace" sharpens rather than blunts the edge of one's
taste.
And what is this manner? It is nothing less than an indescribable
blending of Christianity and Paganism. Heine, another of Carlyle's
"blackguards," achieves the same synthesis. It is this spiritual
achievement--at once a religious and an aesthetic triumph--that
makes Elia, for all his weaknesses, such a really great man.
The Wordsworths and Coleridges who patronized him were too
self-opiniated and individualistic to be able to enter into either
tradition.
Wordsworth is neither a Christian or a Pagan. He is a moral
philosopher. Elia is an artist, who understands the _importance of
ritual_ in life--but of naturalness in ritual.
How difficult, whether as a thinker or a man, is it to be natural in
one's loves and hates! How many quite authoritative Philistines
never really let the world know how Bohemian at heart they are!
And how much of our modern "artistic feeling" is a pure affectation!
Now, whatever Elia was not, he was wantonly, wickedly, whimsically
natural.
He never concealed his religious feelings, his superstitious feelings.
He never concealed his fancies, his fads, his manias, his vices. He
never concealed his emotion when he felt a thrill of passionate faith.
He never concealed it when he felt a thrill of blasphemous doubt.
He accepted life's little pleasures as they appeared, and did not
hesitate to make "cults" of the ones that appeared most appealing. If
he had Philistine feelings, he indulged them without shame. If he
had recondite and "artistic" feelings, he indulged them also without
shame. He is one of the few great men not afraid to be un-original,
and hence he is the most original of all. "I cannot," says he, "sit and
think. Books think for me." Well, books did "think for him," for he
managed to press the books of the great poets into his service, as no
mortal writer has ever dared to do before. And he could do it
without impairing his originality, because he was as original as the
great poets he used. We say deliberately "poets," for, as Pater points
out, to find Lamb's rivals in sheer imaginative genius, we have to
leave the company of those who write prose.
Do the humorous ecclesiastics and scholarly tutors who profess to
understand Elia ever peep into that Essay called "Witches," or that
other Essay called "A Child-Angel"? There are things here that are
written for a very different circle. Certain sentences in
"Dream-children," too, have a beauty that takes a natural man's breath
completely away. Touches of far-off romance, terrible and wistful as
"anonymous ballads," alternate with gestures of Rabelaisian humour,
such as generous souls love. Elia's style is the only thing in English
prose that can be called absolutely perfect. Compared with the rich,
capricious, wilful, lingering by the way of Lamb's manner, Pater's is
precise, demure and over-grave, Wilde's fantastic and over-provocative,
Ruskin's intolerably rhetorical.
Into what other prose style could the magic of Shakespeare's "little
touches" be drawn, or the high melancholy of Milton's imagery be
led, without producing a frightful sense of the incongruous? He can
quote them both--or any other great old master--and if it were not
for the "inverted commas" we should not be aware of the insertion.
Elia cannot say anything, not the simplest thing, without giving it a
turn, a twist, a lift, a lightness, a grace, that would redeem the very
grease-spots on a scullion's apron!
There is no style in the world like it. Germany, France, Italy, Russia
have no Charles Lamb. Their Flauberts and D'Annunzios belong to a
different tribe. Even Turgenieff, just because he has to "get on with
his story" cannot do precisely this.
Every single one of the "essays" and most of the "letters" can be
read over and over again, and their cadences caressed as if they were
living people's features. And they are living. They are as living as
those Japanese Prints so maddening to some among us, or as the
drawings of Lionardo. They also--in their place--are "pure line" to
use the ardent modern slang, and unpolluted "imaginative
suggestion."
The mistake our "aesthetes" made, these lovers of Egyptian dancers
and Babylonian masks, is that they suppose the simplicity of Lamb's
subjects debar him from the rare effects. Ah! They little know! He
can take the wistfulness of children, and the quaint gestures of dead
Comedians, and the fantasies of old worm-eated folios, and the
shadows of sundials upon cloistered lawns, and the heartbreaking
evasions of such as "can never know love" and out of these things he
can make a music as piteous and lovely as Ophelia's songs. It is a
curious indication of the lack of real poetic feeling in the feverish
art-neophytes of our age that they should miss these things in Elia.
One wonders if they have ever felt the remote translunar beauty that
common faces and old, dim, pitiful things can wear sometimes. It
would seem not. Like Herod the Tetrarch, they must have "Peacocks
whose crying calls the rain, and the spreading of their tails brings
down the Moon;" they must have "opals that burn with flame as cold
as ice" and onyxes and amber and the tapestries of Tyre, The pansies
that "are for thoughts" touch them not and the voices of the
street-singers leave them cold.
It is precisely the lack of natural kindly humour in these people, who
must always be clutching "cameos from Syracuse" between their
fingers, which leads them, when the tension of the "gem-like flame"
can be borne no more, into sheer garishness and brutality. One
knows it so well, that particular tone; the tone of the jaded amorist,
for whom "the unspeakable rural solitudes" and "the sweet security
of streets" mean, both of them, boredom and desolation.
It is not their subtlety that makes them thus suffer; it is their lack of
it. What? Is the poignant world-old play of poor mortal men and
women, with their absurdities and excesses, their grotesque reserves
and fantastic confessions, their advances and withdrawals, not
_interesting_ enough to serve? It serves sufficiently; it serves well
enough, when genius takes it in hand. Perhaps, after all, it is _that_
which is lacking.
Charles Lamb went through the world with many avoidances, but
one thing he did not avoid--the innocence of unmitigated foolishness!
He was able to give to the Simple Simons of this life that
Rabelaisian touch of magnanimous understanding which makes
even the leanest wits among us glow. He went through the world
with strange timidities and no daring stride. He loitered in its
by-alleys. He drifted through its Bazaars. He sat with the crowd in its
Circuses. He lingered outside its churches. He ate his "pot of honey"
among its graves. And as he went his way, irritable and freakish,
wayward and arbitrary, he came, by chance, upon just those
side-lights and intimations, those rumours and whispers, those figures
traced on sand and dust and water, which, more than all the Law and
the Prophets, draw near to the unuttered word.