CHARLES LAMB.*
"ST. CHARLES!" said Thackeray once, as he pressed a letter of Charles Lamb's to his forehead. In common with other saints, Lamb has had to endure the assaults of the advocates diaboli : the malicious obloquy of Gifford, the contemptuous misunderstanding of Carlyle, and a score of similar instances occur to the mind. But his reputation has come triumphantly through all attacks made upon it, all the flinging of mud and the casting of critical stones. Lamb remains, in the common judgment, much what Mr. Lucas calls him in the prospectus of his new edition, " the most fasci- nating and lovable figure in English literature." Some men charm us by their writings, others as having been goodly and pleasant in their lives. Too often the one characteristic has to be set off against the other, as in the notorious cases of Carlyle on the one hand, and of Southey on the other. We are invited to excuse Carlyle's scolding tongue and sordid domestic squabbles on the ground that he • (1) The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Edited by E. V. Lucas. 7 vols. Vol. r.. Miscellaneous Prose ; Vol. V., Poems and Plays. London : Methuen and Co. Us. 6d. per vol.)---(2) The Works of Charles Lamb. Edited by William Macdonald. 12 vols. Vols. IL and II., Essays and Last Essays of Elia. VoL VI., Tales front Shakespeare. Vol. VII., Stories for Children. London : J. M. Dent sad Co. [33. 6d. net per vol.)
was a great writer and a prophet. Southey has hitherto escaped the oblivion to which the general mediocrity of his
literary work would have consigned him on the score of his
private virtues, and the number of families that he benevolently maintained out of a single ink-pot. In Lamb's case—as in Thackeray's or Fielding's—the two sources of interest agree :
we have a double reason for loving to hear his name, because he not only enriched our literature with some of its most rare and humorous pages, but also lived a life of quiet self-sacrifice and sunny benevolence which would entitle him to our respect even had his contributions to the London. Magazine deserved the fate of dusty oblivion that has long since overtaken the writings of Allan Cunningham and Janus Weathercock.
As is usually the case with an author whose work has mostly been of the occasional order, Lamb stands in peculiar need of an ideal editor. Hitherto he has not been so lucky as to find one; but happily that reproach to our literature is now in a fair way to be removed. In the able and interesting, though somewhat intemperate, essay on " Editions Past and Present," which Mr. William Macdonald contributes as a preface to the first volume of his forthcoming edition of Lamb, he points out the reasons which prevent any edition now on the market from being entirely satisfactory. The early editors Talfourd and his contemporaries — failed because they did not realise with what avidity a coming
generation would demand every scrap of Lamb's published writing that could be identified. They were placed in a
peculiarly favourable position for gratifying that appetite had they only had the courage and foresight to perceive its inevitable development. Much of Lamb's ephemeral work
that is now vanished past recalling, or may possibly be identified by such lucky hits as the recent discovery of " The Kiug and Queen of Hearts," or of those " Lepus Papers " which Mr. Lucas now prints for the first time amongst Lamb's works, might have been rescued without any trouble by these early editors had they but recognised with how great and interesting a name they were dealing. It is a pity that they contented themselves with Lamb's own canon, which, as Mr. Macdonald shows, was very inadequate. " They re-issued as Complete Works' the things which Lamb had himself first published in book form, or had lived long enough to reclaim from maga- zine obscurity, and give to the world with his final corrections, and with his name, or his pseudonym, on a title-page. But out in the world, astray in the magazine wilderness, there were wandering children of his brain not yet reclaimed by him. These wanderers—these lost Lambs—Talfourd and the rest gave hardly a thought to, still less did they see that it was their duty to search for them, and bring them into the kindly fold among their kindred pieces in a piously elaborated Com. plete Edition." The task of later editors has, or should have, consisted in the business of resurrecting, arranging in the best possible order, and printing with the most accurate text, every line that Lamb gave to the printer, whether he himself took the trouble to save it from " the periodical dust-heap " or not. Un- fortunately, this task has never been seriously attempted?... perhaps we should rather say fortunately, since it has left the way clear for so admirable and definitive an edition as that of which Mr. E. V. Lucas has now issued two volumes, or even for so handy and faithfully prepared an edition as the more modest one which Mr. Macdonald promises. If Mr. Macdonald carries out the principles laid down in his general preface—as there is no reason to doubt that he will—his edition will be a more desirable possession than any now on the market, and only second in the estimation of the scholar to that which Mr. Lucas is now preparing, to whose thorough- ness of annotation it deliberately makes no pretence. The format of Mr. Macdonald's edition is sufficiently different from that of Mr. Lucas to give them both a claim to existence ; the one is a book for the library, the other for the drawing-room ; the student of literature will find Mr. Lucas an indispensable guide, but the mere reader may prefer Mr. Macdonald's pocketable volumes, with the delightful illustrations of Mr. C. E. Brock. In any case, it is a cheering sign of the times that two editors should inde:. pendently have set out to reprint every extant or discoverable line that Charles Lamb ever published.
The edition of which Mr. Lucas has now issued two volumes —Nos. I. and V. in the final order—represents a very high order of scholarship and the loving labour of years. Mr.
Lucas has long been known as a faithful and enthusiastic student • of Lamb, something of whose quaint and delicate humour survives in his kindred soul. It is impossible to over-estimate the debt which all lovers of Lamb owe him for the conscientious and artistic work apparent in these two handsome volumes, beside which the work of all previous editors appears casual and perfunctory. Mr. Lucas has undertaken, in the first place, to grapple with the task of collecting and arranging everything printed by Lamb or his editors which can possibly be traced; and in the second place, to supply such a critical apparatus as befits an acknowledged classic, and is especially needed in the case of so allusive and suggestive a writer as Lamb. In both respects we have only praise and thanks for the skill and enthusiasm which he has brought to bear upon the so far successful completion of his task.
The business of arranging Lamb's work, and deciding upon a definitive text and canon, is no easy one ; only those who have made even an experimental attempt to grapple with it for them- selves can tell quite how difficult it is. Mr. Lucas, as far as his opening volumes are concerned—and they deal with the really crucial part of the matter—has been remarkably success- ful. The trouble is that Lamb was a keen artist in words, who carved and hewed his work at first, but was never tired of applying the subtle labour of the file in later years : that he pub- lished much of his writings more than once, and twisted them about on each occasion. The editor who desires to present a final and satisfactory collection of all his work is bound to choose between a good deal of repetition and an almost excessive amount of annotation on the one hand, and incompleteness on the other. Mr. Lucas seems to us to have been wise in choosing the former system, although it compels him at times to repeat whole pages,—the fragments from Burton, in Vols. I. and V., afford a good case in point. Similarly, in the " Poems," he has very wisely chosen to present a chrono- logical arrangement of all Lamb's writings in verse, whereby great light is thrown upon the evolution of Lamb's mind ; but he has carefully indicated, at the same time, the arrange. ment which Lamb himself made in the " Works" of 1818. In his notes he has undertaken a threefold task: first, to dis- ' play any change in Lamb's text from edition to edition, from commonplace book to magazine, or from magazine to the dignity of the magnum opus ; secondly, to trace all Lamb's frequent and usually inaccurate quotations to their source, so that the reader can have a fair notion of the bookish visions which illuminated and inspired that shabby desk at the India -House where it is whispered by the profane that the greater part of the Elia essays were penned ; thirdly, to provide so much information about the historical and other persons and things mentioned by Lamb as is needful for the full enjoy- ment of the reader, or to guide the student to fuller sources of information. This triple aim he has achieved with great success, on the whole. Occasionally we seem to detect him— or his collaborating friends—in a slip, as when Mr. Lucas thinks that Lamb claimed to have read Boccaccio in Italian (1,471), where, as it seems to us, the text warrants no such assertion ; or when Mr. W. J. Craig fails to recognise in ." Corderiu.e " the name of a familiar mediaeval school-book (1,396) ; or when we read that Major Andre was shot (1,485). But these are only trifling slips of the pen ; the wonder is that they are so few in such a mass of illuminative, erudite, and helpful annotation. Of Mr. Lucas's labours for the text of Lamb's "Poems and Plays" it is enough to say that, not so long ago, similar labour and acumen devoted to a Greek classic would have been ample warrant for a bishopric,—or at the least a golden stall.
Lastly, we must note with pleasure that Mr. Lucas has made no inconsiderable addition to our knowledge of Lamb's writings. As at golf, luck and skill seem to go hand-in-hand in this game of editing ; and Mr. Lucas has had the good fortune to trace, and the intelligence to establish the authenticity of, nine hitherto unknown poems and twice as many prose pieces by Lamb. The poems, indeed, are like the early achievements of the Greeks in the opinion of Thucydides,—" no very great things "; but some of the prose pieces are extremely interesting and characteristic. Notably is this so with the papers which Lamb, under the canting signature of "Lepus"—tbe hare with "many friends—contributed in 1825 to the New Times. These form one of the most interesting literary discoveries made for
some years, being quite in the Elia vein. We congratulate Mr. Lucas on this crown to his enduring work, and equally congratulate all lovers of Lamb on the possession of the seven volumes, which promise to form, if not the ideal edition of Lamb, at least the best which is likely to be produced for very many years,—it may well be for ever.
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