THE BEST BELOVED OF ALL THE ENGLISH WRITERS--QUAINTEST AND
TENDEREST ESSAYIST WHOSE WORK APPEALS TO ALL HEARTS.
Of all the English writers of the last century none is so well beloved
as Charles Lamb. Thirty years ago his _Essays of Elia_ was a book
which every one with any claim to culture had not only read, but read
many times. It was the traveling companion and the familiar friend,
the unfailing resource in periods of depression, the comforter in time
of trouble. It touched many experiences of life, and it ranged from
sunny, spontaneous humor to that pathos which is too deep for tears.
Into it Lamb put all that was rarest and best in his nature, all that
he had gleaned from a life of self-sacrifice and spiritual culture.
[Illustration: CHARLES LAMB FROM THE PORTRAIT BY WILLIAM
HAZLITT]
Such men as he were rare in his day, and not understood by the
literary men of harder nature who criticised his peculiarities and
failed to appreciate the delicacy of his genius. Only one such has
appeared in our time--he who has given us a look into his heart in _A
Window in Thrums_ and in that beautiful tribute to his mother,
_Margaret Ogilvie_. Barrie, in his insight into the mind of a child
and in his freakish fancy that seems brought over from the world of
fairyland to lend its glamour to prosaic life, is the only successor
to Lamb.
Lamb can endure this neglect, for were he able to revisit this earth
no one would touch more whimsically than he upon the fads and the
foibles of contemporary life; but it's a great pity that in the
popular craze about the new writers, all redolent with the varnish of
novelty, we should consign to the dust of unused shelves the works of
Charles Lamb. All that he wrote which the world remembers is in Elia
and his many letters--those incomparable epistles in which he quizzed
his friends and revealed the tenderness of his nature and the delicacy
of his fancy.
Robert Louis Stevenson is justly regarded as the greatest essayist of
our time, but I would not exchange the _Essays of Elia_ for the best
things of the author of _Virginibus Puerisque_. Stevenson always,
except in his familiar early letters, suggests the literary artist who
has revised his first draft, with an eye fixed on the world of readers
who will follow him when he is gone. But Lamb always wrote with that
charming spontaneous grace that comes from a mind saturated with the
best reading and mellow with much thought. You fancy him jotting down
his thoughts, with his quizzical smile at the effect of his quips and
cranks. You cannot figure him as laboriously searching for the right
word or painfully recasting the same sentence many times until he
reached the form which suited his finical taste. This was Stevenson's
method, and it leaves much of his work with the smell of the lamp upon
it. Lamb apparently wrote for the mere pleasure of putting his
thoughts in form, just as he talked when his stammering tongue had
been eased with a little good old wine.
It is idle to expect another Lamb in our strenuous modern life, so we
should make the most of this quaint Englishman of the early part of
the last century, who seemed to bring over into an artificial age all
the dewy freshness of fancy of the old Elizabethan worthies. Can
anything be more perfect in its pathos than his essay on "Dream
Children," the tender fancy of a bachelor whom hard fate robbed of the
domestic joys that would have made life beautiful for him? Can
anything be more full of fun than his "Dissertation on Roast Pig," or
his "Mrs. Battle's Opinion on Whist"? His style fitted his thought
like a glove; about it is the aroma of an earlier age when men and
women opened their hearts like children. Lamb lays a spell upon us
such as no other writer can work; he plays upon the strings of our
hearts, now surprising us into wholesome laughter, now melting us to
tears. You may know his essays by heart, but you can't define their
elusive charm.
Lamb had one of the saddest of lives, yet he remained sweet and
wholesome through trials that would have embittered a nature less fine
and noble. He came of poor people and he and his sister Mary inherited
from their mother a strain of mental unsoundness. Lamb spent seven
years in Christ's Hospital as a "Blue Coat" boy, and the chief result,
aside from the foundations of a good classical scholarship, was a
friendship for Coleridge which endured through life. From this school
he was forced to go into a clerkship in the South Sea house, but after
three years he secured a desk in the East India house, where he
remained for thirty years.
Four years later his first great sorrow fell upon Lamb. His sister
Mary suddenly developed insanity, attacked a maid servant, and when
the mother interfered the insane girl fatally wounded her with a
knife. In this crisis Lamb showed the fineness of his nature. Instead
of permitting poor Mary to be consigned to a public insane asylum, he
gave bonds that he would care for her, and he did care for her during
the remainder of her life. Although in love with a girl, he resolutely
put aside all thoughts of marriage and domestic happiness and devoted
himself to his unfortunate sister, who in her lucid periods repaid his
devotion with the tenderest affection.
Lamb's letters to Coleridge in those trying days are among the most
pathetic in the language. To Coleridge he turned for stimulus in his
reading and study, and he never failed to get help and comfort from
this great, ill-balanced man of genius. Later he began a
correspondence with Southey, in which he betrayed much humor and great
fancy. In his leisure he saturated his mind with the Elizabethan poets
and dramatists; practically he lived in the sixteenth century, for his
only real life was a student's dream life. He contributed to the
London newspapers, but his first published work to score any success
was his _Tales From Shakespeare_, in which his sister aided him. Then
followed _Poets Contemporary With Shakespeare_, selections with
critical comment, which at once gave Lamb rank among the best critics
of his time. He wrote, when the mood seized him, recollections of his
youth, essays and criticisms which he afterward issued in two volumes.
Twenty-five essays that he contributed to the LONDON MAGAZINE over the
signature of Elia were reprinted in a book, the _Essays of Elia_, and
established Lamb's reputation as one of the great masters of English.
Another volume of _Essays of Elia_ was published in 1833. In 1834 Lamb
sorrowed over the death of Coleridge, and in November of the same year
death came to him. Of all English critics Carlyle is the only one who
had hard words for Lamb, and the Sage of Chelsea probably wrote his
scornful comment because of some playful jest of Elia.
Charles Lamb's taste was for the writers of the Elizabethan age, and
even in his time he found that this taste had become old-fashioned. He
complained, when only twenty-one years old, in a letter to Coleridge,
that all his friends "read nothing but reviews and new books." His
letters, like his essays, reflect the reading of little-known books;
they show abundant traces of his loiterings in the byways of
literature.
Here there is space only to dwell on some of the best of the _Essays
of Elia_. In these we find the most pathetic deal with the sufferings
of children. Lamb himself had known loneliness and suffering and lack
of appreciation when a boy in the great Blue Coat School. Far more
vividly than Dickens he brings before us his neglected childhood and
all that it represented in lonely helplessness. Then he deals with
later things, with his love of old books, his passion for the play,
his delight in London and its various aspects, his joy in all strange
characters like the old benchers of the Inner Temple.
[Illustration: MARY AND CHARLES LAMB FROM THE PAINTING BY F.S.
CARY MADE IN 1834]
The essay opens with that alluring picture of the South Sea house, and
is followed by the reminiscences of Christ's Hospital, where Lamb
was a schoolboy for seven years. These show one side of Lamb's
nature--the quaintly reminiscent. Another side is revealed in "Mrs.
Battle's Opinions on Whist," with its delicate irony and its playful
humor, while still another phase is seen in the exquisite phantasy of
"Dream Children," with its tender pathos and its revelation of a heart
that never knew the joys of domestic love and care. Yet close after
this beautiful reverie comes "A Dissertation On Roast Pig," in which
Lamb develops the theory that the Chinese first discovered the virtues
of roast suckling pig after a fire which destroyed the house of Ho-ti,
and that with the fatuousness of the race they regularly burned down
their houses to enjoy this succulent delicacy.
_The Last Essays of Elia_, a second series which Lamb brought out with
a curious preface "by a friend of the late Elia," do not differ from
the earlier series, save that they are shorter and are more devoted to
literary themes. Perfect in its pathos is "The Superannuated Man,"
while "The Child Angel" is a dream which appeals to the reader more
than any of the splendid dreams that De Quincey immortalized in his
florid prose. Lamb in these essays gives some wise counsel on books
and reading, urging with a whimsical earnestness the claims of the
good old books which had been his comfort in many dark hours. It is in
such confidences that we come very close to this man, so richly
endowed with all endearing qualities that the world will never forget
Elia and his exquisite essays.