CHARLES LAMB.
IT will be a hundred years next Thursday,—at least if the late Mr. Serjeant Talfourd may be trusted, though the bead master of Christ's Hospital maintains in Wednesday's Times, erroneously we believe, that it was a hundred years last Wednesday,—since the birth of Charles Lamb, at least fifty of which years have been rendered lighter and happier to Englishmen by the charm of his quaint humour, and by flitting memories of his wild and delightful extravagances. For it will be just fifty years on the 29th March next since the memorable Tuesday, in 1825, when Lamb got that release from his cares at the India Office which he commemor- ated in perhaps the best of all the results of that release,— we say the beat, because the pleasures of anticipation were certainly in his case by far the keenest of the pleasures which his new leisure brought him. During all those fifty years, he has been one of the most familiar and uniformly enjoyable of the lite rary friends of almost all reading Englishmen,—the most familiar, because it is impossible to enjoy Charles Lamb without feeling all the stiffness and harshness of one's nature dissolving away at the touch of that easy and genial humour ; and certainly the most enjoyable in all moods in which the mind is open to enjoyment at all, because there is a charm of artistic slipshodness about his writing which makes it delightful as well as possible to plunge into the very middle of his essays or letters, without the smallest pre- paration or gradual avenue of approach. Lamb is, indeed, by no means uniformly refined. He enjoyed the licence of the Bohemianism of his day as he enjoyed sucking-pig and toddy, with a keenness that had now and then in it the flavour of something coarse ; but the disagreeable effect occasionally produced by this vein in his character is almost altogether neutralised by the singular delicacy and fine poetic fancy and discrimination by which all that he writes is still more strongly marked. The curious blending of gentleness of disposition and wildness of humour, the exactness of his perceptions and the extravagance of his paradox, his ex- quisite tact and his keen hatred of restraints, his tender affections, which kept him devoted to the old-fashioned world he had learned to love, and his horror of formalism, which made him reject almost passionately the tyranny of mere conventionalities, are the chief sources of the literary charm in Lamb's writings. His sustained efforts are seldom very good. In easy letters and essays, when he can stop where he pleases, he is delicious. But in his attempts even at the shortest dramas, even at farces, for instance,
for which, as one might suppose, the character of his humour would especially fit him, he misses the effect he wishes to produce by too much aiming at it. The delightfulness of Charles Lamb is essentially negligent. When he sets out not knowing exactly where be is to go, and with the consciousness that he may follow his caprices whither he will, he is the most fascinating of hiunourists ; but the moment he sets himself to elaborate a joke, and set it in a regular framework of circumstance, he loses his charm. All his happiest humour has in it a subtle freakishness and delicate levity. Let us instance his way of silencing the stage- coach bore, who for twenty miles had discoursed to him solemnly about the properties of steam, and the chance of draw- ing carriages by that means, and who at last asked him, "What sort of a crop of turnips he thought we should have this year ?" on which Lamb replied, with imperturb- able gravity, that "it depended, he believed, upon boiled legs of mutton,"—a fanciful subtlety of topsyturviness which, of course, sent his companion into convulsive laughter, while it silenced completely his troublesome interlocutor. One never hears that story without another fit of laughter, often as one recalls it. It is better in its way, because more subtle, than Sydney Smith's grave interrogatory to the doctor who recom- mended him "to take a walk on an empty stomach,"—" On whose ?" Any true humourist might have struck out the latter, but only Charles Lamb in all the world could have conceived the former. His fancy had an ingrained quaintness in it like that of no other humourist we have ever had. Read the letter to Manning, for instance, in which he informs him that "the Persian Ambassador is the principal thing talked of now. I sent some people to see him worship the Sun on Primrose Hill at half-past six on the morning of the 28th November ; but he did not come, which makes me think the old fire-worshippers are a sect almost extinct. The Persian Ambassador's name is Shaw All Mirza,. The common people call him 'Shaw non- sense." The latter pun would not be good, if it did not some- how give an effect of pure frolic that enhances the delightful nonsense of the first statement. Indeed no one conveys the im- pression of wild spirits more charmingly than Lamb. Who, for in- stance, could have given so whimsical an account of an obstinate cold as he gave to Bernard Barton? "Did you ever have an obsti- nate cold,—a six or seven weeks' unintermitting chill and suspen- sion of hope, fear, conscience, and everything ? Yet do I try all I can to cure it ; I try wine, and spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quantities, but they all seem to make me worse instead of better. I sleep in a damp room, but it does me no good ; I come home late o' nights, but do not find any visible amendment." Other humourists, especially the American, are whimsical enough in their paradoxes, but no one of them embodies in his fancy the quizzical subtlety of Lamb. Consider, for in- stance, the whimsical refinement of his complaint to his friend at Sydney, in New South Wales, that his difficulty in conducting such a correspondence consisted in the fact that "news from me must become history to you, which I neither profess to write, nor, indeed, care much for reading. No person under a diviner, can, with any prospect of veracity, conduct a correspondence at such an arm's length. Two prophets, indeed, might thus interchange intelligence with effect, the epoch of the writer (Habakkuk) falling in with the true present time of the receiver (Daniel) ; but then we are no prophets."
Lamb's best humour is almost always personal. He could hardly have written the above if he had not had a real friend at the Anti- podes, and been meditating on the staleness which the news he was giving would have contracted, by the time it reached his friend. The gaiety in him is never really frolicsome till he can catch himself laughing with another. How amusingly he quizzed his sister for her cramped handwriting, for the essential "poverty and abjectness" in the formation of her letters, which made them look like "begging letters "! His sister's figures, he said, in a letter to Miss Hutchin- son, when she had occasion to UBC them, as in the date, were "not figures, but figurantes." "Her very blots are not bold, like this [here he makes a good solid blot], but poor smears, half left in and half scratched out, with another smear left in their place." And so he goes on panegyrising his own writing at the expense of his sis- ter's for half the letter, before he begins to address his correspond- ent. And, again, see him moralising to his Quaker friehd, Bernard Barton, on the forgery and capital punishment of Fontleroy with this most droll and whimsical solemnity :—‘, The fate of the un- fortunate Fontleroy makes me, whether I will or no, to cast reflecting eyes around on such of my friends as, by a parity of situation, are exposed to a similarity of temptation. My very style seems to myself to become more impressive than usual with the charge of them. Who that standeth knoweth but he may yet fall? Your hands as yet, I am willing to believe, have never deviated into another's property. You think it impossible you could ever commit so heinous an offence ; but so thought Fontleroy once, so have thought many besides him who at last have expiated as he hath done. You are as yet upright ; but you are a banker, or at least the next thing to it. I feel the delicacy of the subject, but cash must pass through your bands, sometimes to a great amount. If in an unguarded hour—but I will hope better. Consider the scandal it will bring upon those of your persua- sion. Thousands would go to see a Quaker hanged, that would be indifferent to the fate of a Presbyterian or an Ana- baptist ; think of the effect it would have on the sale of your poems, not to mention higher considerations." How felicitous is the quaintness here of the phrase, "Your hands have as yet never deviated into another's property." This quaintness of phrase gives half the effect to Lamb's humour. Just so, he said of his dog, Dash, which would never follow him when he called it, knowing, as it did, that he would wait for half an hour at any point where it had left him for an excursion, to await its return, "Fray Heaven his intellects be not slipping." So, again, in rallying Mr. Serjeant l'alfourd on the honours of his Serjeantship, he wrote :—" Should he ever visit us, (do you think he ever will, Mary?) what a distinction should I keep up between him and our less fortunate friend, Henry Crabh Robinson. Decent respect shall always be the Crabb's,—but, somehow, short of reverence." Once more, in laughing at Ilazlitt's horror of young girls, Lamb says, with his usual happy turn for grotesque expression :—" I took him to see a very pretty girl, professedly, where there were two young girls,—the very head and sum of the girlery was two young girls,—they neither laughed, nor sneered, nor giggled, nor whispered,—but he sat and frowned blacker and blacker, indignant that there should be such a thing as youth and beauty, till he tore me away before supper, in per- fect misery, and vowed he could not bear young girls, they drove him mad. So I took him home to my old nurse, when he re- covered perfect tranquillity."
This mixture of quaintness of expression, quaintness of thought, and frolicsome feeling is what gives the singularly characteristic stamp to the reckless vein there was in Lamb, a reckless vein which, when it happens to appear alone, is not always very pleasant. "Satan in Search of a Wife," for instance, has a recklessness, with- out either quaintness or gaiety in it; it has the coarseness of Lamb's less sane moods, and perhaps some of the force of those moods, but it has not the stamp on it of his true genius. Indeed, we should say that very few of his verses have that stamp. Lamb under any external shackles whatever, Lamb forbidden to follow implicitly the capricious beckoning,s of his own delicate and yet wild fancy, was robbed of all his characteristic power. Yet he was a critic too, and a fine critic, where his fancy was not cramped by a too clearly-defined intellectual subject. His best criticisms, for instance, are upon actors, for the simple reason that their performances quickened and excited his fancy, but did not in any way chain it, leaving him perfectly free to start from a dozen different points, and to illustrate the impression made on his own imagination in relation to all of them as he would. His essay on the acting of Munden, for instance, short as it is, is one of the most wonderfully graphic bits of portraiture in the lan- guage. Does not this, for instance, at once paint for us an actor whom hardly one of us can have seen ?—
4, Can any man wonder like him [Munden]? Can any man seeghostslike him? or fight with his own shadow= SESSA '—as he does in that strangely neglected thing, the 'Cobbler of Preston,'—where his alternations from the cobbler to the magnifica, and from the magnifico to the cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him. Who like him can throw, or even attempt to throw, a preternatural interest over the commoner daily-life objects ? A table or a joint-stool, in his conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It is invested with constellatory im- portance. You could not speak of it with more deference if it were mounted into the firmament. A beggar in the hands of Michael Angelo, says ruseli, rose the Patriarch of Poverty. So the gusto of Minden antiquates and ennobles what it touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and as primal as the seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic visions. A tab of butter contemplated by him amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering amid the common-place materials of life like primeval man with the sun and stars about him."
There is nothing in his criticism of Wordsworth to compare with that. Wordsworth Lamb could feel, but Wordsworth did not stir his excitable fancy into expression. It took something in the living world to do that. He was like a child in many things, in none more than in the remarkable conservatism of his affections and the great mobility of his nature to external influences. For instance, he ' was so carried away by the discontent of the audience at his own farce "Mr. H.," that he joined with genuine enthusiasm in the hissing and hooting which damned it, just as he had joined in the cheering with which the prologue was received. And he resembled children, too' in being unable to keep up any sustained flight even of humour or fancy. Yet he owes much of his freshness to the same cause. His odd fancies are always changing like the coloured glass in a kaleido- scope. He never wearies you in his essays with harping on a central idea. If he suggests one, he soon flies off at a tangent from it, as he did from the man in the stage-coach who bored him about steam and crops. And these centrifugal flights always embody his genius. But be pushes nothing too far. His extra- vagance never outlasts your laugh. Again, some touch of tenderness and sweetness is always at hand to relieve the perpetual sparkle which so often renders other humourists fatiguing. There are a great many Englishmen who will feel next Thursday that they individually would hive lost more if there had been no Charles Lamb born a hundred years ago, than they would, if some big event in the history of what is called " progress " had failed to happen, —say, for instance, if there had been no declaration of American Independence in the year fol- lowing that of Lamb's birth. Such a feeling may indicate a narrow-minded sort of life, no doubt, but the majority of men will be narrow-minded, and will nourish their imaginations on the rich fruits of individual genius, rather than on the great but com- paratively tasteless nutriment of political good. Indeed, philan- thropy is a rare virtue, and apt to be rather dim and vague when it exists. The love of individual genius is a far more potent ingredient in human character ; and there has been no individual genius of the brighter and lighter kind, which has more success- fully excited love and brightened heavy thought than the genius of Charles Lamb.
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