The Best Letters of Charles Lamb. Charles Lamb
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Wordsworth
LXIX. To John Clarke
LXX. To Mr. Barren Field
LXXI. To Walter Wilson
LXXII. To Bernard Barton
LXXIII. To Miss Wordsworth
LXXIV. To Mr. and Mrs. Bruton
LXXV. To Bernard Barton
LXXVI. To Miss Hutchinson
LXXVII. To Bernard Barton
LXXVIII. To Mrs. Hazlitt
LXXIX. To Bernard Barton
LXXX. To Bernard Barton
LXXXI. To Bernard Barton
LXXXII. To Bernard Barton
LXXXIII. To Bernard Barton
LXXXIV. To Bernard Barton
LXXXV. To Bernard Barton
LXXXVI. To Wordsworth
LXXXVII. To Bernard Barton
LXXXVIII. To Bernard Barton
LXXXIX. To Bernard Barton
XC. To Southey
XCI. To Bernard Barton
XCII. To J.B. Dibdin
XCIII. To Henry Crabb Robinson
XCIV. To Peter George Patmore
XCV. To Bernard Barton
XCVI. To Thomas Hood
XCVII. To P.G. Patmore
XCVIII. To Bernard Barton
XCIX. To Procter
C. To Bernard Barton
CI. To Mr. Gilman
CII. To Wordsworth
CIII. To Mrs. Hazlitt
CIV. To George Dyer
CV. To Dyer
CVI. To Mr. Moxon
CVII. To Mr. Moxon
INTRODUCTION.
No writer, perhaps, since the days of Dr. Johnson has been oftener brought before us in biographies, essays, letters, etc., than Charles Lamb. His stammering speech, his gaiter-clad legs—"almost immaterial legs," Hood called them—his frail wisp of a body, topped by a head "worthy of Aristotle," his love of punning, of the Indian weed, and, alas! of the kindly production of the juniper-berry (he was not, he owned, "constellated under Aquarius"), his antiquarianism of taste, and relish of the crotchets and whimsies of authorship, are as familiar to us almost as they were to the group he gathered round him Wednesdays at No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where "a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game" awaited them. Talfourd has unctuously celebrated Lamb's "Wednesday Nights." He has kindly left ajar a door through which posterity peeps in upon the company—Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, "Barry Cornwall," Godwin, Martin Burney, Crabb Robinson (a ubiquitous shade, dimly suggestive of that figment, "Mrs. Harris"), Charles Kemble, Fanny Kelly ("Barbara S."), on red-letter occasions Coleridge and Wordsworth—and sees them discharging the severer offices of the whist-table ("cards were cards" then), and, later, unbending their minds over poetry, criticism, and metaphysics. Elia was no Barmecide host, and the serjeant dwells not without regret upon the solider business of the evening—"the cold roast lamb or boiled beef, the heaps of smoking roasted potatoes, and the vast jug of porter, often replenished from the foaming pots which the best tap of Fleet Street supplied," hospitably presided over by "the most quiet, sensible, and kind of women," Mary Lamb.
The terati Talfourd's day were clearly hardier of digestion than their descendants are. Roast lamb, boiled beef, "heaps of smoking roasted potatoes," pots of porter—a noontide meal for a hodman—and the hour midnight! One is reminded, à propos of Miss Lamb's robust viands, that Elia somewhere confesses to "an occasional nightmare;" "but I do not," he adds, "keep a whole stud of them." To go deeper into this matter, to speculate upon the possible germs, the first vague intimations to the mind of Coleridge of the weird spectra of "The Ancient Mariner," the phantasmagoria of "Kubla Khan," would be, perhaps, over-refining. "Barry Cornwall," too, Lamb tells us, "had his tritons and his nereids gambolling before him in nocturnal visions." No wonder!
It is not intended here to re-thresh the straw left by Talfourd, Fitzgerald, Canon Ainger, and others, in the hope of discovering something new about Charles Lamb. In this quarter, at least, the wind shall be tempered to the reader—shorn as he is by these pages of a charming letter or two. So far as fresh facts are concerned, the theme may fairly be considered exhausted. Numberless writers, too, have rung the changes upon "poor Charles Lamb," "dear Charles Lamb," "gentle Charles Lamb," and the rest—the final epithet, by the way being one that Elia, living, specially resented:
"For God's sake," he wrote to Coleridge. "don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses. It did well enough five years ago, when I came to see you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines to feed upon such epithets; but besides that the meaning of 'gentle' is equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited, the very quality of gentleness is abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is long since vanished. I hope my virtues have done sucking. I can scarce think but you meant it in joke. I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to believe that you could think to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a cordial to some green-sick sonneteer."
The indulgent pity conventionally bestowed upon Charles Lamb—one of the most manly, self-reliant of characters, to say nothing of his genius—is absurdly' misplaced.
Still farther be it from us to blunt the edge of appetite by sapiently essaying to "analyze" and account for Lamb's special zest and flavor, as though his writings, or any others worth the reading, were put together upon principles of clockwork. We are perhaps over-fond of these arid pastimes nowadays. It is not the "sweet musk-roses," the "apricocks and dewberries" of literature that please us best; like Bottom the Weaver, we prefer the "bottle of hay." What a mockery of right enjoyment our endless prying and sifting, our hunting of riddles in metaphors, innuendoes in tropes, ciphers in Shakspeare! Literature exhausted, we may turn to art, and resolve, say, the Sistine Madonna (I deprecate the Manes of the "Divine Painter") into some ingenious and recondite rebus. For such critical chopped-hay—sweeter to the modern taste than honey of Hybla—Charles Lamb had little relish. "I am, sir," he once boasted to an analytical, unimaginative proser who had insisted upon explaining some quaint passage in Marvell or Wither, "I am, sir, a matter-of-lie man." It was his best warrant to sit at the Muses' banquet. Charles Lamb was blessed with an intellectual palate as fine as Keats's, and could enjoy the savor of a book (or of that dainty, "in the whole mundus edibilis the most delicate," Roast Pig, for that matter) without pragmatically asking, as the king did of the apple in the dumpling, "how the devil it got there." His value as a critic is grounded in this capacity of naïve enjoyment (not of pig, but of literature), of discerning beauty and making us discern it—thus adding to the known treasures and pleasures of mankind.
Suggestions not unprofitable for these later days lurk in these traits of Elia the student and critic. How worthy the imitation, for instance, of those disciples who band together to treat a fine poem (of Browning, say, or Shelley) as they might a chapter in the Revelation—speculating sagely upon the import of the seven seals and the horns of the great beast, instead of enjoying the obvious beauties of their author. To the schoolmaster—whose motto would seem too often to be the counsel of the irate old lady in Dickens, "Give him a meal of chaff!"—Charles Lamb's critical methods are rich in suggestion. How many ingenuous boys, lads in the very flush and hey-day of appreciativeness of the epic virtues, have been parsed, declined, and conjugated into an utter detestation of the melodious names of Homer and Virgil! Better far for such victims had they, instead of aspiring to the vanities of a "classical education," sat, like Keats, unlearnedly at the feet of quaint Chapman, or Dryden, or even of Mr. Pope.
Perhaps,