BOOKS.
MR. ATNGER'S " CHARLES LAMB."* 'imm will be few, if any, of the numbers of Mr. Morley's interesting series which will have a greater popularity than Kr. Ainger's study of Charles Lamb. It has almost in per- fection those characteristics of complete simplicity, thorough concentration on the subject of the picture, fullness of sym- pathy with all Charles Lamb's genius, quaintnesses, and -devotion of character, and intense enjoyment of his humour, which are the chief requisites for such a study as this. More- over, the style is pure and graceful, and there is none of that -disposition to patronise, which so many of Charles Lamb's friends were tempted to adopt towards him, and which ap- parently caused him more pain than harsher criticism ever gave (him.
The truth is that Mr. Ainger realises thoroughly that Lamb was a man of great genius, though that genius was curiously
short in its flights, and was combined with a whimsical and -capricious taste, which, while giving all the peculiar flavour to his wonderful humour, greatly limited his range and value as a -critic. Lamb himself has a fine essay, to which Mr. Ainger draws special attention, on the sanity of true genius; and no one can deny that whenever Lamb buckled to any consider- able effort of literary appreciation, such as the criticism of the greater poets, he showed this sanity in the highest degree. But though there was this depth of genius and this true sanity of genius in Charles Lamb, there was something in him which rebelled against anything hIge prolonged -tension, and drove his mind off at a tangent into other lines of thought; and this it was, no doubt, which, in conjunction with -the force of true genius, made his humour so delightful. He had in the highest form what the vulgar speech calls " contrairi- nese " of literary temper, so that it was by no means enough for a poem or a romance to be powerful, to ensure Lamb's ad- miration for it. If he did not take a fancy to a great writer or .a. great thinker, no matter how truly great or how much in Lamb's own way that writer or thinker might be, he was im- pervious to that writer's merits. There was an element of -chance in Lamb's negative judgments, though none in his posi- tive judgments of those writers whom he really loved. While his friend Hazlitt, for instance, was always-thinking and talking -of Sir Walter Scott, Lamb passed Sir Walter Scott's romances by with civil indifference. In the same way, Lamb could see nothing of weight in the poetry of Byron or Shelley, though he saw so much in that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. If Lamb once learned to love a great author, his judgment on that author's merits or demerits was almost unerring. But he was whimsical in giving his love,—probably matters of pure accident had much to do with it ; —and where he did not take a fancy, his indifference is no adequate test at all of any shortcoming in the object of that indifference. Indeed, to our mind, his whimsicalness, no less than his true genius, was of the essence of his extraordinary humour. With- -out the genius, his whimsicalness would have been what Carlyle, with his own strange limitation of mind, thought it," a varra sorry phenomenon." But without the whimsicalness,—without the hare-brained disposition to utter some wild shriek of liberty in The very heart of an avocation as distinct as possible from any thought of the kind,—he would never have had that delicate • Charles Lando. By Alfred diner. London : Macmillan and Co.
and unique humour by which, even more than by his critical genius, he will always be remembered.
Mr. Ainger has distinctly realised Lamb's genius, and has made his readers realise it too. Nobody could rise from this charming little volume without being fully aware that Lamb understood Shakespeare, for example, as hardly even Coleridge could boast of understanding Shakespeare. Such a passage as that which Mr. Ainger quotes from Lamb's criticism on Lear, shows beyond the possibility of question how much breadth, and depth, and power there was in Lamb's mind,—how little of the frivolity of mere jocosity there could have been in one capable as Lamb was of this splendid stroke of imaginative sympathy :—
" The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear; they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual ; the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano ; they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too in- significant to be thought on : even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the im- potence of rage ; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms ; in the aberrations of his reason we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, bat exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to do with that sublime identi- fication of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that they themselves are old ?' What gestures shall we appropriate to this ? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things ? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperinga with it show : it is too hard and stony ; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter ; she must shine as a hater too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showman of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily. A happy end- ing!—as if the living martyrdom that Lear bad gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pndder and preparation—why torment us with all this unneces- sary sympathy ? as if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station—as if, at his years, and with his experience, anything was loft but to die."
Now, it takes a genius of this genuine kind to give whimsical- ness so wide a swing as Lamb's ; for without that wide swing, it never could have been what it was. It takes the elan of genius such as is shown in the magnificent conception of Lear just quoted, to have conceived, for instance, of the following exquisite bit of whimsicality, related by Mrs. Shelley, of a con- versation with Lamb, soon after her return from Italy in 1828 : "One of the first questions he asked me was, whether they made puns in Italy. I said, ` Yes, now Hunt is there.' He said that Burney made a pun in Otaheite, the first that ever was made in that country. At first, the natives could not make out what he meant ; but all at once they discovered the pun, and danced round him in transports of joy." Or take this in- vective against albums, and notice the wide sweep of Lamb's imagination in denouncing them :—" We are in the last ages of the world, when St. Paul prophesied that women should be headstrong, lovers of their own wills, having albums.' I fled hither to escape the albumean persecution, and had not been in my new house twenty-four hours when the daughter of the next house came in with a friend's album to beg a contribution, and the following day intimated she had one of her own. Two more have sprung up since. If I take the wings of the morn- ing, and fly unto the uttermost parts of the earth, there will albums be. New Holland has albums. But the age is to be complied with." Or consider even the apparently very modest saying that Lamb had once known a young man " who wanted to be a tailor, but had not the spirit ;" and notice the extraordinary genius for unexpectedness, the infinitude of whimsicality, that it suggests in the man who could say it,—a whimsicality sur- passing in its width of range even that displayed in the much better-known story of the answer Lamb gave to the boring fellow-passenger who finally asked what prospect there was for the crop of turnips,—" It depended, he believed, upon boiled legs of mutton." No man not a man of rare force of imagination and rare perversity of whim, could have made either joke. It took force of imagination to give his mind the offing necessary to go so far from what the ordinary world was thinking of ; and it took the perversity of whim to make Lamb delight in absurd fancies so much more than even he delighted in familiar facts. And yet his delight in familiar facts was at the root of his delight in absurd fancies. But for his strong domestic feeling, his warm affectionateness, his devo- tion to habits, his attachment to old customs, these wild excur- sions of fancy would not have been half as whimsical and extrava- gant as they are. But in his case, as in most others, action and reaction were equal and opposite. His imagination carried him in the rebound to the very opposite pole to that in which his own habits and affections kept him true. This is half the secret of his most fascinating nonsense. if his pathos were not as deep and tender as it is, his humour would not have been half so charm- ing in its quaint escapades. It is the frolic of a mind chained by warm affections and strong attachments, to places as well as per- sons, when escaping into complete independence of them,which so rivets our fancy. This is what Lamb said of the necessity of changing homes :—" To change habitations is to die to them ; and in my time, I have died seven deaths. But I don't know whether such change does not bring with it a rejuvenescence. 'Tis an enterprise ; and shoves back the sense of death's approximating, which, though not terrible to me, is at all times particularly distasteful." And this is what he said of his beloved London : —" The wonder of these sights,' he says, impels me into night- walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you ; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes P' " In these passages, you have the real man, though not the -wayward fancy which transformed the real man into so exqui- site a humourist. But give to a man of this kind a great im- pelling force of imagination, a whimsical and wayward dislike to fetters of all kinds, and a good share of caprice, and you have the pathetic' essayist and humourist whom all English literature, with the rare exception of a few oddities like Car- lyle, consents to regard as her most petted if not her favourite child.
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