The Essays of Elia

Introduction

The two volumes of miscellaueous writings by Charles Lamb, published by the OUiers in 1818, contained a variety of prose sufficient to prove once more that the study and practice of verse is one of the best trainings for a prose style. In his dedication of the poetical volume to Coleridge, Lamb half apologises for having forsaken his old calling, and for having " dwindled into prose and criticism." The apology, as I have elsewhere remarked, was hardly needed. If we except the lines to Hester Savary and a few of the sonnets and shorter pieces, there was little in the volume to weigh against the two essays on Hogarth and the tragedies of Shakspeare. It was the result of the miscellaneous and yet thorough character of Lamb's reading from a -boy that the critical side of his mind was the first to mature. The shorter papers contributed by Lamb to Leigh Hunt's Reflector in 1811 — the year to which belong the two critical essays just mentioned — more or less framed on the model of the Tatler and its successors, give by comj^arison little promise of the richness and variety of the Ella series of ten years later. On the other hand, there are passages in the critical essays, such as that on Lear, as represented on the stage, and the vindication of Hogarth as a moral teacher, which represent Lamb at his highest.

On the republication of these miscellanies in 1818, it could not be overlooked that a prose writer of something like genius was coming to the front. One of the younger critics of the day, Henry Nelson Coleridge, reviewing the vi INTRODUCTION.

volumes in the fifth number of the Etonian, in 1821, does not hesitate to declare that " Charles Lamb writes the best, tlie purest, and most geniune English of any man living," and adds the following acute remark : — " For genuine Anglicism, which amongst all other essentials of excellence in our native literatiu-e, is now recovering itself from the leaden mace of the Bamhler, he is quite a study ; his prose is absolutely perfect, it conveys thought, without smothering it in blankets." Lamb was indeed to do more than any man of his time to remove the Johnsonian incubus from our periodical literature. But the full scope of the writer's powers was not known, perhaps even to himself, till the opportunity afforded him by the establishment of the London Magazine in 1820. It did credit to the discernment of the editors of that publication, that no control seems to have been exercised over the matter or manner of Lamb's contributions. The writer had not to see all that made the individuality of his style disappear under the editor's hand, as his review of theUxcursion in the Quarterly had suffered under Gifford's, To " wander at its own sweet wiU " was the first necessity of Lamb's genius. And this miscellaneousness of subject and treatment is the first surprise and delight felt by the reader of Lamb. It seems as if the choice of subject came to him almost at haphazard, — as if, like Shakspeare, he found the fia-st plot that came to hand svdtable, because the hand that was to deal with it was absolutely secure of its power to transmute the most unpromising material into gold. Roast Pig, The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers, A Bachelor'' s Complaint of the Cond%iet of Married People, Grace before Meat — the incongruity of the titles at once declares the humorist's confidence in the certainty of his touch. To have been commonplace on such topics would have been certain failiure.

In the Character of the late Elia, by a Friend, which Lamb wrote in the interval between the publication of the first and second series of essays, he hits off

INTRODUCTION. vn

the characteristics of his style in a tone half contemptuous, half apologetic, which yet contains a criticism of real value. " I am now at liberty to confess," he writes, " that much which I have heard objected to my late friend's writings was well foimded. Crude, they are, I grant you — a sort of unlicked, incondite things — villainously pranked in an affeclipd array of antique words and phrases. They had not been his, if they had been other than such ; and better it is that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him." No better text could be found from which to discourse on Charles Lamb's English. The plea put forth almost as a paradox is nevertheless a simple truth. What appears to the hasty reader artificial in Lamb's style was natural to him. For in this matter of style he was the product of his reading, and from a child his reading had lain in the dramatists, and generally in the great imaginative writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shakspeare and Milton he knew almost by heart : Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, and Webster, were hardly less familiar to him ; and next to these, the writers of the so-called metaphysical school, the later developments of the Euphuistic fashion, had the strongest fascination for him. Where the Fantastic vein, took the pedantic-humorous shape, as in Biu'ton ; or the metaiDhysical - humorous, as in Sir Thomas Browne ; or where it was combined with true poetic sensibility, as in Wither and Marvell, — of these springs Lamb had drimk so deeply that his mind was saturated with them. His own nature became "subdued to what it worked in." For him to bear, not only on his style, but on the cast of his mind and fancy, the mark of these writers, and many more in whom genius and eccentricity went together, was no matter of choice. It was this that constituted the " self-pleasing quaintness " of his literary manner. The phrase could not be improved. Affectation is a manner put on to impress others. Lamb's manner pleased himself — and vm INTRODUCTION.

that is why, to use a familiar phrase, he was "happy in it."

To one of the writers just named Lamb stands in a special relation. Sir Thomas Browne was at once a scholar, a mystic, and a humorist. His humour is so grave that, when he is enunciating one of those paradoxes he loves so well, it is often impossible to tell whether or not he wears a smile upon his face. To Lamb this combination of characters was irresistible, for in it he saw a reflection of himself He knew the writings of Browne so well that not only does he quote him more often than any other author, but whenever he has to confront the mysteries of life and death his mental attitude at once assimilates to Browne's, and his English begins to dilate and to become sombre. The dominant influence on Lamb in his reflective mood is Browne. His love of paradox, and the colour of his style, derived from the use of Latinised words never thoroughly acclimatised, is also from the same source — a use which, in the hands of a less skilful Latinist than Lamb, might have been hazardous. We do not resent his use of such words as agnize, arride, 7'ehict, reduce (in the sense of " bring back "), or even such portentous creations as sciential, cognition, intellectuals, and the like. Lamb could not have lived so long among the writers of the Renascence without sharing their fondness for word-coinage. And the flavour of the antique in style he felt to be an almost indispensable accompaniment to the antique in fancy.

Another feature of his style is its allusiveness. He is rich in quotations, and in my notes I have succeeded iu tracing most of them to their soiu'ce, a matter of some difiiculty 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 his material, that a charm is added by

INTRODUCTION. XI

the very fact that Ave are thus contmually renewing csexperience of an older day. His 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 our 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.

But although Lamb's style is essentially the product of the authors he had made his own, nothing would be more imtrue than to say of him that he read nature, or anything else, " through the spectacles of books." Wordsworth would never have called to him to leave his books that he might come forth, and bring with him a heart

"That watches and receives."

It is to his own keen insight and intense sympathy that we owe everything of value in his writing. His observation was his own, though when he gave it back into the world, the manner of it was the creation of his reading. Where, for instance, he describes (and it is seldom) the impression i^roduced on him by comitry sights and sounds, there is not a trace discoverable of that conventional treatment of nature which had been so common with mere book -men, before Burns and Wordsworth. Lamb did not care greatly for the country and its associations. Custom had made the presence of society, streets and crowds, the theatre and the pictm-e gallery, an absolute necessity. Yet if he has to reproduce a memory of nural life, it is with the precision and tenderness of a Wordsworth. Take, as an example, this exquisite glimpse of a summer afternoon at Blakesware : — -" The cheerful store-room, in whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plot before, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp xhat ever haunted it, about me — it is in mine ears now. as oft as summer reviii INTRODUCTION.

tba'ns:"or again, the sweet garden scene from Drecmi 'Children, where the spirit of Wordsworth seems to contend for mastery with the fancifulness of Marvell, " because I had more pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholy-looking yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries and the fix apples, which were good for nothing but to look at — or in lying about upon the fresh grass, with all the fine garden smells around me — or basking in the orangery, till I could almost fancy myself ripening too along with the oranges and limes in that grateful warmth — or in watching the dace that darted to and fro in the fish pond at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in silent state, as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings." It is hard to say whether the poet's eye or the painter's is more surely exhibited here. The " solitary wasp" and the " sulky pike" are master-touches ; and in the following passage it is perhaps as much of Cattermole as of Goldsmith or Gray, that we are reminded : — •" But would'st thou know the beauty of holiness 1 — go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church : think of the piety that has kneeled there — the meek pastor — the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, tiU thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee."

The idea that some readers might derive from the casual titles and subjects of these essays, and the discursiveness of their treatment, that they are hasty things thrown off in a moment of high spirits, is of course erroneous. Lamb somewhere writes of the essay just quoted, as a "futile effort wrung from him with slow pain." Perhaps this was an extreme case, but it is clear that most of the essays are the result of careful manipulation. They are elaliorate studies in style, and even in colour. Nothing is more remarkable about the essays

INTRODUCTION. XI

than the contrasts of colour they present — another illustration of Lamb's sympathy with the painter's art. The essay on the Chimney-Siveepers is a study in black : —

" I like to meet a sweep — understand me — not a grown sweeper — old chimney-sweepers are by no means attractive — but one of those tender novices, blooming through their first nigritude, the maternal washings not quite effaced from the cheek — such as come forth with the dawn, or somewhat earlier, with their little professional notes sounding like the peep peep of a young sparrow ; or liker to the matin lark, shall I pronoimce them, in their aerial ascents not seldom anticipating the sunrise"? I have a kindly yearning towards those dim specks — poor blots— innocent blacknesses — I reverence these young Africans of our own growth — these almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth without assumption."

And if one would understand Lamb's skill as a colourist, let him turn as a contrast to the essay on Quakers, which may be called a study in dove-colom- : — " The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily ; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones."

The essay on Cliimney-Siveepers is one blaze of wit, which yet may pass unobserved from the very richness of its setting. How surprising, and at the same time how picturesque, is the following: — "I seem to remember haviDg been told that a bad sweep was once left in the stack with his brush, to indicate which way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle, certainly, not much unlike the old stage dii'ection in Macbeth, where the 'apparition of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, rises.' " Lamb's wit, original as it is, shows often enough the influence of particular models. Of all old writers, none had a firmer hold on his affection than

Xll INTRODUCTION.

Fuller. Now and then he has passages in deliberate imitation of Fuller's manner. The descriptions, in detached sentences, of the Poor Relation and the Convalescent are Fuller all over. When Lamb writes of the Poor Relation — " He entereth smiling and embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and draweth it back again. He casually looketh in about dinner-time, when the table is full," — and so on, there can be no doubt that he had in mind such characterisation as Fuller's in the Good Yeoman, or the Degenerous Gentleman. The manner is due originally, of course, to Theophrastus, but it was from Fuller, I think, that Lamb derived his fondness for it. And throughout his writings the influence of this humorist is to be traced. How entirely in the vein of Fuller, for instance, is the following : — " They (the sweeps), from their little liulpits (the tops of chimneys), preach a lesson of patience to niankind ; " or this, again, from the essay Grace Before Meat: — " Gluttony and sui-feiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving. When Jeshurun waxed fat, we read that he kicked ;" or, once more, this fine comment on the stillness of the Quaker's worship : — -" For a man to refrain even from good words and to hold 'his peace, it is commendable ; but for a midtitude, it is great mastery." But Lamb's wit, like his English, is Protean, and just as we think we have fixed its character and source, it escapes into new forms. In simile he finds opportunity for it that is all his own. What, for instance, can be more surprising in its uiiexpectedness than the description in The Old Margate Hoy of the ubiquitous sailor on board : — " How busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, cook, mariner, attendant, chamberlain ; here, there, Wee another Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of the deck"? Again, what wit — or shall we call it humour — is there in the gravity of his detail, by which he touches springs of delight unreached even by Defoe or Swift ; as in Roast Pig, where he says that the " father and son were summoned to take theu' trial at Pekin, then

INTRODUCTION. xill

an inconsiderable assize town ;" or more delightful still, later on : — ■" Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, lihe OUT Locke, who made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they called it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it." Or, for another vein, take the account of the mendacious traveller he aff'ects to remember as a fellow-passenger on his early voyage in the old Margate Hoy, who assures his admiring listeners that, so far from the Phoenix being a unique bird, it was by no means imcommon "in some parts of Upper Egypt," where the whole episode is not one jot the less humorous because it is clear to the reader, not that the traveller invented his facts, but that Lamb invented the traveller. Or yet once more, how exquisitely unforeseen, and how rich in tenderness, is the following remark as to the domestic happiness of himself and his "cousin Bridget" in Mackery End: — "We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings — as it should be among near relations." What is the name for this antithesis of kony — this hiding of a sweet aftertaste in a bitter word 1 Whatever its name, it is a dominant flavour in Lamb's humour. There are two features, I think, of Lamb's method which distinguish him from so many humorists of to-day. He takes homely and familiar things, and makes them fresh and beautiful. The fashion of to-day is to vulgarise great and noble things by burlesque associations. The humorist's contrast is obtained in both cases ; only that in the one it elevates the commonplace, and in the other it r'^i^rades the excellent. And, secondly, in this generation, ^^Men what is meant to raise a laugh has, nine times out *^ten, its root in cynicism, it should be refreshing to turn ^\ia. and dwell in the humane atmosphere of these essays ne)Elia.

*^^ To many other qualities that go to make up that highly ^•^^nposite thing. Lamb's humour — to that feature of it '■^^lit consists in the unabashed display of his own uncon-

XIV INTRODUCTION.

ventionality — his diflference from other people, and to that "metaphysical" quality of his wit which belongs to him in a far truer sense than as applied to Cowley and his school, it is sufficient to make a passing reference. But the mention of Cowley, by whom with Fuller, Donne, and the rest, his imagination was assuredly shaped, reminds us once more of the charm that belongs to the " old and antique " strain heard through aU his more earnest utterances. As we listen to Elia the moralist, now with the terse yet stately egotism of one old master, now in the long-drawn-out harmonies of another, we live again with the thinkers and dreamers of two centuries ago. Sometimes he confides to us weaknesses that few men are bold enough to avow, as when he tells how he dreaded death and clung to life. " I am not content to pass away ' like a weaver's shuttle.' These metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth ; the face of toW and countrj^ ; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets." There is an essay by Lamb's friend Hazlitt on the Fear of Death, which it is interesting to compare with this. The one essay may have been possibly suggested by the other. Hazlitt is that one of Lamb's contemporaries with whom it is natural to compare him. There are, indeed, obvious points of resemblance between them. Hazlitt wrote a vigorous and flexible style ; he could quote Shakspeare and Milton as copiously as Lamb; he wrote on Lamb's class of subjects ; he shared his V>ve of paradoxes and his frank egotistical method, xt^'- 1 here all likeness ends. Hazlitt's essay is on the texwhp , since it does not pain us to reflect that there was of r' time when we did not exist, so it should be no agtP think that at some futiu-e time the same state c of t shall be. But this light-hearted attempt at co' r is found to be more depressing than the mela? coiT^ Lamb, for it lacks the two things needful, t' thi''

INTRODUCTION.

of absolute sincerity, and a nature unsoured by the world.

But Lamb had his serener moods, and in one of these let us part from him. The essay on the Old Benchers of the Inner Temple is one of the most varied and beautiful pieces of prose that English literature can boast. Eminently, moreover, does it show us Lamb as the product of twi) different ages — the child of the Renascence of the sixteenth century and of that of the nineteenth. It is as if both Spenser and Wordsworth had laid hands of blessing upon his head. This is how he writes of his childhood, when the old lawyers paced to and fro before him on the Terrace Walk, making up to his childish eyes " the mythology of the Temple : "- —

" In those days I saw Gods, as ' old men covered with a mantle,' walking upon the earth. Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish — extinct be the fairies and faiiy trumpery of legendary fabling — in the heart of childhood there will for ever spring up a well of innocent or wholesome superstitioL. — the seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, and vital, from everyday forms educing the unknown and the uncommon. In that little Goshen there will be light when the grown world flounders about in the darkness of sense and materiality. ' While childhood, and while dreams reducing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth."

It is in such passages as these that Lamb shows himself, what indeed he is, the last of the Elizabethans. . " He had " learned their great language," and yet he had early discovered, with the keen eye of a humorist, how effective for his pm-pose was the touch of the pedantic and the fantastical from which the noblest of them were not wholly free. He was thus able to make even their weaknesses a fresh source of delight, as he dealt with them from the vantage ground of two centuries. It may seem strange, on first thoughts, that the fashion of Lamb's style shoidd not have grown, in its turn, old-fashioned ;

XIV I INTRODUCTION.

that, on the contrary, no literary reputation of sixty years' standing should seem more certain of its continuance. But it is not the antique manner — the " self-pleasing quaintness " — that has embalmed the substance. Kather is there that in the substance which ensures immortality for the style. It is one of the rewards of purity of heart that, allied with humour, it has the promise of perennial charm. " Saint Charles !" exclaimed Thackeray one day, as he finished reading once more the original of one of Lamb's letters to Bernard Barton. There was much in Lamb's habits and manners that we do not associate with the saintly ideal ; but patience imder suffering and a boundless sympathy hold a large place in that ideal, and in Charles Lamb these were not found wanting.

I would add a few words on the kind of information I have sought to furnish in my Notes. The impertinence of criticism or comment, I hope has been almost entirely avoided. But there was a certain waywardness and love of practical joking in Charles Lamb that led him often to treat matters of fact with deliberate falsification. His essays are full of autobiography, but often purposely disguised, whether to amuse those who were in the secret, or to perplex those who were not, it is impossible to say. In his own day, therefore, corrections of fact would have been either superfluous, or woidd have spoiled the jest ; but now that Lamb's contemporaries are all but passed away, mu.ch of the hiunour of his method is lost without some clue to the many disguises and pei'versions of fact with which the essays abound. They are full, for instance, of references to actual persons, by means of initials or other devices. To readers fairly conversant with the literary history of Lamb's time, many of these disguises are transparent enough ; but for others, notes here and there are indispensable. We have an authentic clue to most of the initials or asterisks employed in the first series of Elia. There is in existence a list of these initials

INTRODUCTION.

drawn up by some unknown hand, and filled in with tht real names by Lamb himself. Through the kindness of its possessor, Mr. Alexander Ireland of Manchester, the original of this interesting relic has been in my hands, and I can vouch for the handwriting, phraseology, and (it may be added) the spelling, being indubitably Lamb's.

There is much information in these essays, more or less disguised, about Lamb's relatives, and I have tried to illustrate these points by details of his family history for which I had not space in my Memoir of Lamb. In a few instances I have permitted myself to repeat some sentences from that memoir, where the same set of circumstances had to be narrated again. But ajDart from changes of names and incidents in the essays, there is in Lamb's humour the constant element of a mischievous love of hoaxing. He loves nothing so much as to mingle romance with reality, so that it shall be difficult for the reader to disentangle them. Sometimes he deals with fiction as if it were fact ; and sometimes, after supplying literal facts, he ends with the insinuation that they are fictitious. And besides these deliberate mystifications, there is found also in Lamb a certain natm-al incapacity for being accm-ate — an inveterate turn for the opposite. " What does Elia care for dates 1 " he asks in one of his letters, and indeed about accm-acy in any such trifles he did not greatly care. In the matter of quotation, as already remarked, this is curiously shown. He seldom quotes even a hackneyed passage from Shakspeare or Milton correctly ; and sometimes he half- remembers a passage from some old author, and re-writes it, to suit the particular subject he wishes it to illustrate. I have succeeded in tracing all but two or three of the many quotations occurring in the essays, and they serve to show the remarkable range and variety of his reading.

It is generally known that when Lamb collected his essays, for publication in book form, from the pages of the London and other magazines, he omitted certain passages. These I have thought it light, as a rule, not xiv ' .'■ INTRODUCTION.

Ho restore. In most cases the reason for their omission y is obvious. They were excrescences or digressions, injur-

ing the effect of the essay as a whole. In the few instances in which I have retained a note, or other short passage, from the original versions of the essays, I have shown that this is the case by enclosing it in brackets.

I have to thank many friends, and many known to me only by their high literary reputation, for courteous and ready help in investigating points connected with Lamb's writings. Among these I would mention Mr. Alexander Ireland of Manchester ; Mr. Eichard Garnett of the British Museum ; and, as before, my friend Mr. J. E. Davis, counsel to the Commissioners of Police, who has given many valuable suggestions and constant assistance of other kinds. I must also express my acknowledgments to Mr. W. J. Jeaffreson, of Folkestone, and to the family of the late Mr. Arthur Loveday of Wardington, Banbury, for permission to make extracts from unpublished letters of Lamb's in their possession.

NOTE TO NEW EDITION.

Several corrections and additions have been made in the Notes to the present Edition.

Preface To The Last Essays

BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA.

This poor gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to nature.

To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour of the thing, if ever there was much in it, was pretty well exhausted ; and a two years' and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom.