[105] THOSE English critics who at the beginning of the present century
introduced from Germany, together with some other subtleties of thought
transplanted hither not without advantage, the distinction between the
Fancy and the Imagination, made much also of the cognate distinction
between Wit and Humour, between that unreal and transitory mirth, which
is as the crackling of thorns under the pot, and the laughter which
blends with tears and even with the sublimities of the imagination, and
which, in its most exquisite motives, is one with pity--the laughter of
the comedies of Shakespeare, hardly less expressive than his moods of
seriousness or solemnity, of that deeply stirred soul of sympathy in
him, as flowing from which both tears and laughter are alike genuine
and contagious.
This distinction between wit and humour, Coleridge and other kindred
critics applied, with much effect, in their studies of some of our
older English writers. And as the distinction between imagination and
fancy, made popular by Wordsworth, [106] found its best justification
in certain essential differences of stuff in Wordsworth's own writings,
so this other critical distinction, between wit and humour, finds a
sort of visible interpretation and instance in the character and
writings of Charles Lamb;--one who lived more consistently than most
writers among subtle literary theories, and whose remains are still
full of curious interest for the student of literature as a fine art.
The author of the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, coming
to the humourists of the nineteenth, would have found, as is true
preeminently of Thackeray himself, the springs of pity in them deepened
by the deeper subjectivity, the intenser and closer living with itself,
which is characteristic of the temper of the later generation; and
therewith, the mirth also, from the amalgam of which with pity humour
proceeds, has become, in Charles Dickens, for example, freer and more
boisterous.
To this more high-pitched feeling, since predominant in our literature,
the writings of Charles Lamb, whose life occupies the last quarter of
the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, are a
transition; and such union of grave, of terrible even, with gay, we may
note in the circumstances of his life, as reflected thence into his
work. We catch the aroma of a singular, homely sweetness about his
first years, spent on Thames' side, amid the red [107] bricks and
terraced gardens, with their rich historical memories of old-fashioned
legal London. Just above the poorer class, deprived, as he says, of
the "sweet food of academic institution," he is fortunate enough to be
reared in the classical languages at an ancient school, where he
becomes the companion of Coleridge, as at a later period he was his
enthusiastic disciple. So far, the years go by with less than the
usual share of boyish difficulties; protected, one fancies, seeing what
he was afterwards, by some attraction of temper in the quaint child,
small and delicate, with a certain Jewish expression in his clear,
brown complexion, eyes not precisely of the same colour, and a slow
walk adding to the staidness of his figure; and whose infirmity of
speech, increased by agitation, is partly engaging.
And the cheerfulness of all this, of the mere aspect of Lamb's quiet
subsequent life also, might make the more superficial reader think of
him as in himself something slight, and of his mirth as cheaply bought.
Yet we know that beneath this blithe surface there was something of the
fateful domestic horror, of the beautiful heroism and devotedness too,
of old Greek tragedy. His sister Mary, ten years his senior, in a
sudden paroxysm of madness, caused the death of her mother, and was
brought to trial for what an overstrained justice might have construed
as the greatest of crimes. She was [108] released on the brother's
pledging himself to watch over her; and to this sister, from the age of
twenty-one, Charles Lamb sacrificed himself, "seeking thenceforth,"
says his earliest biographer, "no connexion which could interfere with
her supremacy in his affections, or impair his ability to sustain and
comfort her." The "feverish, romantic tie of love," he cast away in
exchange for the "charities of home." Only, from time to time, the
madness returned, affecting him too, once; and we see the brother and
sister voluntarily yielding to restraint. In estimating the humour of
Elia, we must no more forget the strong undercurrent of this great
misfortune and pity, than one could forget it in his actual story. So
he becomes the best critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, a
dramatist of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre.
Rosamund Grey, written in his twenty-third year, a story with something
bitter and exaggerated, an almost insane fixedness of gloom perceptible
in it, strikes clearly this note in his work.
For himself, and from his own point of view, the exercise of his gift,
of his literary art, came to gild or sweeten a life of monotonous
labour, and seemed, as far as regarded others, no very important thing;
availing to give them a little pleasure, and inform them a little,
chiefly in a retrospective manner, but in no way concerned with the
turning of the tides of the great world. And yet this very modesty,
this unambitious [109] way of conceiving his work, has impressed upon
it a certain exceptional enduringness. For of the remarkable English
writers contemporary with Lamb, many were greatly preoccupied with
ideas of practice--religious, moral, political--ideas which have since,
in some sense or other, entered permanently into the general
consciousness; and, these having no longer any stimulus for a
generation provided with a different stock of ideas, the writings of
those who spent so much of themselves in their propagation have lost,
with posterity, something of what they gained by them in immediate
influence. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley even--sharing so largely in
the unrest of their own age, and made personally more interesting
thereby, yet, of their actual work, surrender more to the mere course
of time than some of those who may have seemed to exercise themselves
hardly at all in great matters, to have been little serious, or a
little indifferent, regarding them.
Of this number of the disinterested servants of literature, smaller in
England than in France, Charles Lamb is one. In the making of prose he
realises the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats
in the making of verse. And, working ever close to the concrete, to
the details, great or small, of actual things, books, persons, and with
no part of them blurred to his vision by the intervention of mere
abstract theories, he has reached an enduring moral effect [110] also,
in a sort of boundless sympathy. Unoccupied, as he might seem, with
great matters, he is in immediate contact with what is real, especially
in its caressing littleness, that littleness in which there is much of
the whole woeful heart of things, and meets it more than half-way with
a perfect understanding of it. What sudden, unexpected touches of
pathos in him!--bearing witness how the sorrow of humanity, the
Weltschmerz, the constant aching of its wounds, is ever present with
him: but what a gift also for the enjoyment of life in its subtleties,
of enjoyment actually refined by the need of some thoughtful economies
and making the most of things! Little arts of happiness he is ready to
teach to others. The quaint remarks of children which another would
scarcely have heard, he preserves--little flies in the priceless amber
of his Attic wit--and has his "Praise of chimney-sweepers" (as William
Blake has written, with so much natural pathos, the Chimney-sweeper's
Song) valuing carefully their white teeth, and fine enjoyment of white
sheets in stolen sleep at Arundel Castle, as he tells the story,
anticipating something of the mood of our deep humourists of the last
generation. His simple mother-pity for those who suffer by accident,
or unkindness of nature, blindness for instance, or fateful disease of
mind like his sister's, has something primitive in its largeness; and
on behalf of ill-used animals he is early in composing a Pity's Gift.
[111] And if, in deeper or more superficial sense, the dead do care at
all for their name and fame, then how must the souls of Shakespeare and
Webster have been stirred, after so long converse with things that
stopped their ears, whether above or below the soil, at his exquisite
appreciations of them; the souls of Titian and of Hogarth too; for,
what has not been observed so generally as the excellence of his
literary criticism, Charles Lamb is a fine critic of painting also. It
was as loyal, self-forgetful work for others, for Shakespeare's self
first, for instance, and then for Shakespeare's readers, that that too
was done: he has the true scholar's way of forgetting himself in his
subject. For though "defrauded," as we saw, in his young years, "of
the sweet food of academic institution," he is yet essentially a
scholar, and all his work mainly retrospective, as I said; his own
sorrows, affections, perceptions, being alone real to him of the
present. "I cannot make these present times," he says once, "present
to me."
Above all, he becomes not merely an expositor, permanently valuable,
but for Englishmen almost the discoverer of the old English drama. "The
book is such as I am glad there should be," he modestly says of the
Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of
Shakespeare; to which, however, he adds in a series of notes the very
quintessence of criticism, the choicest savour and perfume of
Elizabethan poetry being [112] sorted, and stored here, with a sort of
delicate intellectual epicureanism, which has had the effect of winning
for these, then almost forgotten, poets, one generation after another
of enthusiastic students. Could he but have known how fresh a source
of culture he was evoking there for other generations, through all
those years in which, a little wistfully, he would harp on the
limitation of his time by business, and sigh for a better fortune in
regard to literary opportunities!
To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist, the literary
charm of Burton, for instance, or Quarles, or The Duchess of Newcastle;
and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others--he seeming to
himself but to hand on to others, in mere humble ministration, that of
which for them he is really the creator--this is the way of his
criticism; cast off in a stray letter often, or passing note, or
lightest essay or conversation. It is in such a letter, for instance,
that we come upon a singularly penetrative estimate of the genius and
writings of Defoe.
Tracking, with an attention always alert, the whole process of their
production to its starting-point in the deep places of the mind, he
seems to realise the but half-conscious intuitions of Hogarth or
Shakespeare, and develops the great ruling unities which have swayed
their actual work; or "puts up," and takes, the one morsel of good
stuff in an old, forgotten writer. Even [113] in what he says casually
there comes an aroma of old English; noticeable echoes, in chance turn
and phrase, of the great masters of style, the old masters. Godwin,
seeing in quotation a passage from John Woodvil, takes it for a choice
fragment of an old dramatist, and goes to Lamb to assist him in finding
the author. His power of delicate imitation in prose and verse reaches
the length of a fine mimicry even, as in those last essays of Elia on
Popular Fallacies, with their gentle reproduction or caricature of Sir
Thomas Browne, showing, the more completely, his mastery, by
disinterested study, of those elements of the man which were the real
source of style in that great, solemn master of old English, who, ready
to say what he has to say with fearless homeliness, yet continually
overawes one with touches of a strange utterance from worlds afar. For
it is with the delicacies of fine literature especially, its gradations
of expression, its fine judgment, its pure sense of words, of
vocabulary--things, alas! dying out in the English literature of the
present, together with the appreciation of them in our literature of
the past--that his literary mission is chiefly concerned. And yet,
delicate, refining, daintily epicurean, as he may seem, when he writes
of giants, such as Hogarth or Shakespeare, though often but in a stray
note, you catch the sense of veneration with which those great names in
past literature and art brooded over his intelligence, his undiminished
[114] impressibility by the great effects in them. Reading, commenting
on Shakespeare, he is like a man who walks alone under a grand stormy
sky, and among unwonted tricks of light, when powerful spirits might
seem to be abroad upon the air; and the grim humour of Hogarth, as he
analyses it, rises into a kind of spectral grotesque; while he too
knows the secret of fine, significant touches like theirs.
There are traits, customs, characteristics of houses and dress,
surviving morsels of old life, such as Hogarth has transferred so
vividly into The Rake's Progress, or Marriage à la Mode, concerning
which we well understand how, common, uninteresting, or even worthless
in themselves, they have come to please us at last as things
picturesque, being set in relief against the modes of our different
age. Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture--types of
cast-off fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever meant to
preserve--we contemplate with more than good-nature, as having in them
the veritable accent of a time, not altogether to be replaced by its
more solemn and self-conscious deposits; like those tricks of
individuality which we find quite tolerable in persons, because they
convey to us the secret of lifelike expression, and with regard to
which we are all to some extent humourists. But it is part of the
privilege of the genuine humourist to anticipate this pensive mood with
regard to the ways and things [115] of his own day; to look upon the
tricks in manner of the life about him with that same refined, purged
sort of vision, which will come naturally to those of a later
generation, in observing whatever may have survived by chance of its
mere external habit. Seeing things always by the light of an
understanding more entire than is possible for ordinary minds, of the
whole mechanism of humanity, and seeing also the manner, the outward
mode or fashion, always in strict connexion with the spiritual
condition which determined it, a humourist such as Charles Lamb
anticipates the enchantment of distance; and the characteristics of
places, ranks, habits of life, are transfigured for him, even now and
in advance of time, by poetic light; justifying what some might condemn
as mere sentimentality, in the effort to hand on unbroken the tradition
of such fashion or accent. "The praise of beggars," "the cries of
London," the traits of actors just grown "old," the spots in "town"
where the country, its fresh green and fresh water, still lingered on,
one after another, amidst the bustle; the quaint, dimmed, just
played-out farces, he had relished so much, coming partly through them
to understand the earlier English theatre as a thing once really alive;
those fountains and sun-dials of old gardens, of which he entertains
such dainty discourse:--he feels the poetry of these things, as the
poetry of things old indeed, but surviving [116] as an actual part of
the life of the present; and as something quite different from the
poetry of things flatly gone from us and antique, which come back to
us, if at all, as entire strangers, like Scott's old Scotch-border
personages, their oaths and armour. Such gift of appreciation depends,
as I said, on the habitual apprehension of men's life as a whole--its
organic wholeness, as extending even to the least things in it--of its
outward manner in connexion with its inward temper; and it involves a
fine perception of the congruities, the musical accordance between
humanity and its environment of custom, society, personal intercourse;
as if all this, with its meetings, partings, ceremonies, gesture, tones
of speech, were some delicate instrument on which an expert performer
is playing.
These are some of the characteristics of Elia, one essentially an
essayist, and of the true family of Montaigne, "never judging," as he
says, "system-wise of things, but fastening on particulars;" saying all
things as it were on chance occasion only, and by way of pastime, yet
succeeding thus, "glimpse-wise," in catching and recording more
frequently than others "the gayest, happiest attitude of things;" a
casual writer for dreamy readers, yet always giving the reader so much
more than he seemed to propose. There is something of the follower of
George Fox about him, and the Quaker's belief in the inward light
coming to one passive, [117] to the mere wayfarer, who will be sure at
all events to lose no light which falls by the way--glimpses,
suggestions, delightful half-apprehensions, profound thoughts of old
philosophers, hints of the innermost reason in things, the full
knowledge of which is held in reserve; all the varied stuff, that is,
of which genuine essays are made.
And with him, as with Montaigne, the desire of self-portraiture is,
below all more superficial tendencies, the real motive in writing at
all--a desire closely connected with that intimacy, that modern
subjectivity, which may be called the Montaignesque element in
literature. What he designs is to give you himself, to acquaint you
with his likeness; but must do this, if at all, indirectly, being
indeed always more or less reserved, for himself and his friends;
friendship counting for so much in his life, that he is jealous of
anything that might jar or disturb it, even to the length of a sort of
insincerity, to which he assigns its quaint "praise"; this lover of
stage plays significantly welcoming a little touch of the artificiality
of play to sweeten the intercourse of actual life.
And, in effect, a very delicate and expressive portrait of him does put
itself together for the duly meditative reader. In indirect touches of
his own work, scraps of faded old letters, what others remembered of
his talk, the man's likeness emerges; what he laughed and wept at,
[118] his sudden elevations, and longings after absent friends, his
fine casuistries of affection and devices to jog sometimes, as he says,
the lazy happiness of perfect love, his solemn moments of higher
discourse with the young, as they came across him on occasion, and went
along a little way with him, the sudden, surprised apprehension of
beauties in old literature, revealing anew the deep soul of poetry in
things, and withal the pure spirit of fun, having its way again;
laughter, that most short-lived of all things (some of Shakespeare's
even being grown hollow) wearing well with him. Much of all this comes
out through his letters, which may be regarded as a department of his
essays. He is an old-fashioned letter-writer, the essence of the old
fashion of letter-writing lying, as with true essay-writing, in the
dexterous availing oneself of accident and circumstance, in the
prosecution of deeper lines of observation; although, just as with the
record of his conversation, one loses something, in losing the actual
tones of the stammerer, still graceful in his halting, as he halted
also in composition, composing slowly and by fits, "like a Flemish
painter," as he tells us, so "it is to be regretted," says the editor
of his letters, "that in the printed letters the reader will lose the
curious varieties of writing with which the originals abound, and which
are scrupulously adapted to the subject."
Also, he was a true "collector," delighting [119] in the personal
finding of a thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him by
the little accidents which attest previous ownership. Wither's
Emblems, "that old book and quaint," long-desired, when he finds it at
last, he values none the less because a child had coloured the plates
with his paints. A lover of household warmth everywhere, of that
tempered atmosphere which our various habitations get by men's living
within them, he "sticks to his favourite books as he did to his
friends," and loved the "town," with a jealous eye for all its
characteristics, "old houses" coming to have souls for him. The
yearning for mere warmth against him in another, makes him content, all
through life, with pure brotherliness, "the most kindly and natural
species of love," as he says, in place of the passion of love. Brother
and sister, sitting thus side by side, have, of course, their
anticipations how one of them must sit at last in the faint sun alone,
and set us speculating, as we read, as to precisely what amount of
melancholy really accompanied for him the approach of old age, so
steadily foreseen; make us note also, with pleasure, his successive
wakings up to cheerful realities, out of a too curious musing over what
is gone and what remains, of life. In his subtle capacity for enjoying
the more refined points of earth, of human relationship, he could throw
the gleam of poetry or humour on what seemed common or threadbare; has
a care for the [120] sighs, and the weary, humdrum preoccupations of
very weak people, down to their little pathetic "gentilities," even;
while, in the purely human temper, he can write of death, almost like
Shakespeare.
And that care, through all his enthusiasm of discovery, for what is
accustomed, in literature, connected thus with his close clinging to
home and the earth, was congruous also with that love for the
accustomed in religion, which we may notice in him. He is one of the
last votaries of that old-world sentiment, based on the feelings of
hope and awe, which may be described as the religion of men of letters
(as Sir Thomas Browne has his Religion of the Physician) religion as
understood by the soberer men of letters in the last century, Addison,
Gray, and Johnson; by Jane Austen and Thackeray, later. A high way of
feeling developed largely by constant intercourse with the great things
of literature, and extended in its turn to those matters greater still,
this religion lives, in the main retrospectively, in a system of
received sentiments and beliefs; received, like those great things of
literature and art, in the first instance, on the authority of a long
tradition, in the course of which they have linked themselves in a
thousand complex ways to the conditions of human life, and no more
questioned now than the feeling one keeps by one of the greatness--say!
of Shakespeare. For Charles Lamb, such form of religion becomes [121]
the solemn background on which the nearer and more exciting objects of
his immediate experience relieve themselves, borrowing from it an
expression of calm; its necessary atmosphere being indeed a profound
quiet, that quiet which has in it a kind of sacramental efficacy,
working, we might say, on the principle of the opus operatum, almost
without any co-operation of one's own, towards the assertion of the
higher self. And, in truth, to men of Lamb's delicately attuned
temperament mere physical stillness has its full value; such natures
seeming to long for it sometimes, as for no merely negative thing, with
a sort of mystical sensuality.
The writings of Charles Lamb are an excellent illustration of the value
of reserve in literature. Below his quiet, his quaintness, his humour,
and what may seem the slightness, the occasional or accidental
character of his work, there lies, as I said at starting, as in his
life, a genuinely tragic element. The gloom, reflected at its darkest
in those hard shadows of Rosamund Grey, is always there, though not
always realised either for himself or his readers, and restrained
always in utterance. It gives to those lighter matters on the surface
of life and literature among which he for the most part moved, a
wonderful force of expression, as if at any moment these slight words
and fancies might pierce very far into the deeper soul of things. In
his writing, as in his [122] life, that quiet is not the low-flying of
one from the first drowsy by choice, and needing the prick of some
strong passion or worldly ambition, to stimulate him into all the
energy of which he is capable; but rather the reaction of nature, after
an escape from fate, dark and insane as in old Greek tragedy, following
upon which the sense of mere relief becomes a kind of passion, as with
one who, having narrowly escaped earthquake or shipwreck, finds a thing
for grateful tears in just sitting quiet at home, under the wall, till
the end of days.
He felt the genius of places; and I sometimes think he resembles the
places he knew and liked best, and where his lot fell--London,
sixty-five years ago, with Covent Garden and the old theatres, and the
Temple gardens still unspoiled, Thames gliding down, and beyond to
north and south the fields at Enfield or Hampton, to which, "with their
living trees," the thoughts wander "from the hard wood of the
desk"--fields fresher, and coming nearer to town then, but in one of
which the present writer remembers, on a brooding early summer's day,
to have heard the cuckoo for the first time. Here, the surface of
things is certainly humdrum, the streets dingy, the green places, where
the child goes a-maying, tame enough. But nowhere are things more apt
to respond to the brighter weather, nowhere is there so much difference
between rain and sunshine, nowhere do the [123] clouds roll together
more grandly; those quaint suburban pastorals gathering a certain
quality of grandeur from the background of the great city, with its
weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid light on dome and
bleached stone steeples.
1878.