Mr. Walter Bagehot preferred Hazlitt to Lamb, reckoning the former much
the greater writer. The preferences of such a man as Bagehot are not to
be lightly disregarded, least of all when their sincerity is vouched for,
as in the present case, by half a hundred quotations from the favoured
author. Certainly no writer repays a literary man's devotion better than
Hazlitt, of whose twenty seldom read volumes hardly a page but glitters
with quotable matter; the true ore, to be had for the cost of cartage.
You may live like a gentleman for a twelvemonth on Hazlitt's ideas.
Opinions, no doubt, differ as to how many quotations a writer is entitled
to; but, for my part, I like to see an author leap-frog into his subject
over the back of a brother.
I do not remember whether Bagehot has anywhere given his reasons for his
preference--the open avowal whereof drove Crabb Robinson well-nigh
distracted; and it is always rash to find reasons for a faith you do not
share; but probably they partook of the nature of a complaint that Elia's
treatment of men and things (meaning by things, books) is often
fantastical, unreal, even a shade insincere; whilst Hazlitt always at
least aims at the centre, whether he hits it or not. Lamb dances round a
subject; Hazlitt grapples with it. So far as Hazlitt is concerned,
doubtless this is so; his literary method seems to realize the agreeable
aspiration of Mr. Browning's _Italian in England_:--
'I would grasp Metternich until
I felt his wet red throat distil
In blood thro' these two hands.'
Hazlitt is always grasping some Metternich. He said himself that Lamb's
talk was like snap-dragon, and his own not very much 'unlike a game of
nine-pins.' Lamb, writing to him on one occasion about his son, wishes
the little fellow a 'smoother head of hair and somewhat of a better
temper than his father;' and the pleasant words seem to call back from
the past the stormy figure of the man who loved art, literature, and the
drama with a consuming passion, who has described books and plays,
authors and actors, with a fiery enthusiasm and reality quite
unsurpassable, and who yet, neither living nor dead, has received his due
meed of praise. Men still continue to hold aloof from Hazlitt; his
shaggy head and fierce scowling temper still seem to terrorize; and his
very books, telling us though they do about all things most
delightful--poems, pictures, and the cheerful playhouse--frown upon us
from their upper shelf. From this it appears that would a genius ensure
for himself immortality, he must brush his hair and keep his temper; but,
alas! how seldom can he be persuaded to do either. Charles Lamb did
both; and the years as they roll do but swell the rich revenues of his
praise. Lamb's popularity shows no sign of waning. Even that most
extraordinary compound, the rising generation of readers, whose taste in
literature is as erratic as it is pronounced; who have never heard of
James Thomson who sang _The Seasons_ (including the pleasant episode of
Musidora bathing), but understand by any reference to that name only the
striking author of _The City of Dreadful Night_; even these wayward
folk--the dogs of whose criticism, not yet full grown, will, when let
loose, as some day they must be, cry 'havoc' amongst established
reputations--read their Lamb, letters as well as essays, with laughter
and with love.
If it be really seriously urged against Lamb as an author that he is
fantastical and artistically artificial, it must be owned he is so. His
humour, exquisite as it is, is modish. It may not be for all markets.
How it affected the Scottish Thersites we know only too well--that dour
spirit required more potent draughts to make him forget his misery and
laugh. It took Swift or Smollett to move his mirth, which was always,
three parts of it, derision. Lamb's elaborateness, what he himself calls
his affected array of antique modes and phrases, is sometimes overlooked
in these strange days, when it is thought better to read about an author
than to read him. To read aloud the _Praise of Chimney Sweepers_ without
stumbling, or halting, not to say mispronouncing, and to set in motion
every one of its carefully-swung sentences, is a very pretty feat in
elocution, for there is not what can be called a natural sentence in it
from beginning to end. Many people have not patience for this sort of
thing; they like to laugh and move on. Other people, again, like an
essay to be about something really important, and to conduct them to
conclusions they deem worth carrying away. Lamb's views about
indiscriminate almsgiving, so far as these can be extracted from his
paper _On the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis_, are unsound, whilst
there are at least three ladies still living (in Brighton) quite
respectably on their means, who consider the essay entitled _A Bachelor's
Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People_ improper. But, as a rule,
Lamb's essays are neither unsound nor improper; none the less they are,
in the judgment of some, things of naught--not only lacking, as Southey
complained they did, 'sound religious feeling,' but everything else
really worthy of attention.
To discuss such congenital differences of taste is idle; but it is not
idle to observe that when Lamb is read, as he surely deserves to be, as a
whole--letters and poems no less than essays--these notes of fantasy and
artificiality no longer dominate. The man Charles Lamb was far more
real, far more serious, despite his jesting, more self-contained and self-
restrained, than Hazlitt, who wasted his life in the pursuit of the
veriest will-o'-the-wisps that ever danced over the most miasmatic of
swamps, who was never his own man, and who died, like Brian de Bois
Gilbert, 'the victim of contending passions.' It should never be
forgotten that Lamb's vocation was his life. Literature was but his
byplay, his avocation in the true sense of that much-abused word. He was
not a fisherman, but an angler in the lake of letters; an author by
chance and on the sly. He had a right to disport himself on paper, to
play the frolic with his own fancies, to give the decalogue the slip,
whose life was made up of the sternest stuff, of self-sacrifice,
devotion, honesty, and good sense.
Lamb's letters from first to last are full of the philosophy of life; he
was as sensible a man as Dr. Johnson. One grows sick of the expressions,
'poor Charles Lamb,' 'gentle Charles 'Lamb,' as if he were one of those
grown-up children of the Leigh Hunt type, who are perpetually begging and
borrowing through the round of every man's acquaintance. Charles Lamb
earned his own living, paid his own way, was the helper, not the helped;
a man who was beholden to no one, who always came with gifts in his hand,
a shrewd man, capable of advice, strong in council. Poor Lamb, indeed!
Poor Coleridge, robbed of his will; poor Wordsworth, devoured by his own
_ego_; poor Southey, writing his tomes and deeming himself a classic;
poor Carlyle, with his nine volumes of memoirs, where he
'Lies like a hedgehog rolled up the wrong way,
Tormenting himself with his prickles'--
call these men poor, if you feel it decent to do so, but not Lamb, who
was rich in all that makes life valuable or memory sweet. But he used to
get drunk. This explains all. Be untruthful, unfaithful, unkind; darken
the lives of all who have to live under your shadow, rob youth of joy,
take peace from age, live unsought for, die unmourned--and remaining
sober you will escape the curse of men's pity, and be spoken of as a
worthy person. But if ever, amidst what Burns called 'social noise,' you
so far forget yourself as to get drunk, think not to plead a spotless
life spent with those for whom you have laboured and saved; talk not of
the love of friends or of help given to the needy; least of all make
reference to a noble self-sacrifice passing the love of women, for all
will avail you nothing. You get drunk--and the heartless and the selfish
and the lewd crave the privilege of pitying you, and receiving your name
with an odious smile. It is really too bad.
The completion of Mr. Ainger's edition of Lamb's works deserves a word of
commemoration. In our judgment it is all an edition of Lamb's works
should be. Upon the vexed question, nowadays so much agitated, whether
an editor is to be allowed any discretion in the exclusion from his
edition of the rinsings of his author's desk, we side with Mr. Ainger,
and think more nobly of the editor than to deny him such a discretion. An
editor is not a sweep, and, by the love he bears the author whose fame he
seeks to spread abroad, it is his duty to exclude what he believes does
not bear the due impress of the author's mind. No doubt as a rule
editors have no discretion to be trusted; but happily Mr. Ainger has
plenty, and most sincerely do we thank him for withholding from us _A
Vision of Horns_ and _The Pawnbroker's Daughter_. Boldly to assert, as
some are found to do, that the editor of a master of style has no choice
but to reprint the scraps or notelets that a misdirected energy may
succeed in disinterring from the grave the writer had dug for them, is to
fail to grasp the distinction between a collector of _curios_ and a lover
of books. But this policy of exclusion is no doubt a perilous one. Like
the Irish members, or Mark Antony's wife--the 'shrill-toned Fulvia'--the
missing essays are 'good, being gone.' Surely, so we are inclined to
grumble, the taste was severe that led Mr. Ainger to dismiss _Juke
Judkins_. We are not, indeed, prepared to say that Judkins has been
wrongfully dismissed, or that he has any right of action against Mr.
Ainger, but we could have put up better with his presence than his
absence.
Mr. Ainger's introduction to the _Essays of Elia_ is admirable; here is a
bit of it:
'Another feature of Lamb's style is its allusiveness. He is rich in
quotations, and in my notes I have succeeded in tracing most of them
to their source, a matter of some difficulty in Lamb's case, for his
inaccuracy is all but perverse. But besides those avowedly introduced
as such, his style is full of quotations held, if the expression may
be allowed, in solution. One feels, rather than recognises, that a
phrase or idiom or turn of expression is an echo of something that one
has heard or read before. Yet such is the use made of the material,
that a charm is added by the very fact that we are thus continually
renewing our experience of an older day. This style becomes aromatic,
like the perfume of faded rose-leaves in a china jar. With such
allusiveness as this I need not say that I have not meddled in my
notes; its whole charm lies in recognising it for ourselves. The
"prosperity" of an allusion, as of a jest, "lies in the ear of him
that hears it," and it were doing a poor service to Lamb or his
readers to draw out and arrange in order the threads he has wrought
into the very fabric of his English.'
Then Mr. Ainger's notes are not meddlesome notes, but truly explanatory
ones, genuine aids to enjoyment. Lamb needs notes, and yet the task of
adding them to a structure so fine and of such nicely studied proportions
is a difficult one; it is like building a tool-house against La Sainte
Chapelle. Deftly has Mr. Ainger inserted his notes, and capital reading
do they make; they tell us all we ought to want to know. He is no true
lover of Elia who does not care to know who the 'Distant Correspondent'
was. And Barbara S---. 'It was not much that Barbara had to claim.' No,
dear child! it was not--'a bare half-guinea'; but you are surely also
entitled to be known to us by your real name. When Lamb tells us
Barbara's maiden name was Street, and that she was three times
married--first to a Mr. Dancer, then to a Mr. Barry, and finally to a Mr.
Crawford, whose widow she was when he first knew her--he is telling us
things that were not, for the true Barbara died a spinster, and was born
a Kelly.
Mr. Ainger, as was to be expected, has a full, instructive note anent the
Old Benchers of the Inner Temple. Some hasty editors, with a sorrowfully
large experience of Lamb's unblushing fictions and Defoe-like falsehoods,
and who, perhaps, have wasted good hours trying to find out all about
Miss Barbara's third husband, have sometimes assumed that at all events
most of the names mentioned by Lamb in his immortal essay on the Benchers
are fictitious. Mr. Ainger, however, assures us that the fact is
otherwise. Jekyl, Coventry, Pierson, Parton, Read, Wharry, Jackson, and
Mingay, no less than 'unruffled Samuel Salt,' were all real persons, and
were called to the Bench of the Honourable Society by those very names.
One mistake, indeed, Lamb makes--he writes of Mr. Twopenny as if he had
been a Bencher. Now, there never yet was a Bencher of the name of
Twopenny; though the mistake is easily accounted for. There was a Mr.
Twopenny, a very thin man too, just as Lamb described him, who lived in
the Temple; but he was not a Bencher, he was not even a barrister; he was
a much better thing, namely, stockbroker to the Bank of England. The
holding of this office, which Mr. Ainger rightly calls important,
doubtless accounts for Twopenny's constant good-humour and felicitous
jesting about his own person. A man who has a snug berth other people
want feels free to crack such jokes.
Of the contents of these three volumes we can say deliberately what Dr.
Johnson said, surely in his haste, of Baxter's three hundred works, 'Read
them all, they are all good.' Do not be content with the essays alone.
It is shabby treatment of an author who has given you pleasure to leave
him half unread; it is nearly as bad as keeping a friend waiting. Anyhow,
read _Mrs. Leicester's School_; it is nearly all Mary Lamb's, but the
more you like it on that account the better pleased her brother would
have been.
We are especially glad to notice that Mr. Ainger holds us out hopes of an
edition, uniform with the works, of the letters of Charles Lamb. Until
he has given us these, also with notes, his pious labours are incomplete.
Lamb's letters are not only the best text of his life, but the best
comment upon it. They reveal all the heroism of the man and all the
cunning of the author; they do the reader good by stealth. Let us have
them speedily, so that honest men may have in their houses a complete
edition of at least one author of whom they can truthfully say, that they
never know whether they most admire the writer or love the man.