No More Learning

Ever
since the wonderful day when he acted as guide to Charles and Mary
Lamb through the gallery of Blenheim, he has been an inspiration
to the layman who has wished to cultivate a liking for good
pictures. At a time when few people were allowed to see famous
paintings in English galleries, Hazlitt described these pictures
for his readers vividly and rapturously, before Ruskin's sympa-
thetic criticism, with its imaginative descriptions of pictures and
buildings, made people see more in the world that lay about them.
That his work had a serious result is attested by Gosse, who, in
the introduction to his edition of Hazlitt's Conversations of James
Northcote, says: ‘he claimed for painting the identity of a branch


## p. 174 (#198) ############################################

174
[CH.
Hazlitt
of literature and expended on it the wealth of his ever-fervid and
impassioned imagination. '
For the majority of readers, the most interesting part of
Hazlitt's work is to be found in his miscellaneous essays.
.
Like his most worthy contemporaries, Lamb, De Quincey, Words-
worth, Byron, Shelley, he set forth his personal experiences
and his personal prejudices. Here, then, we come nearest to the
real man Hazlitt. To repeat the lines which he frequently quoted,
he liked
To pour out all as plain
As downright Shippen or as old Montaigne.
The best of Hazlitt, then, is to be found in such essays as
My First Acquaintance with Poets, On Going a Journey, The
Feeling of Immortality in Youth, On Reading Old Books, On
Reading New Books, Of Persons One Would Wish to have seen,
On the Fear of Death, On Disagreeable People, On Taste, On
Familiar Style, The Sick Chamber, The Fight. After everything
has been sifted, Hazlitt is to be judged by these essays, and, doubt-
less, he would be willing to have it so.
On one occasion, he wrote, “I have not written a line that licks
the dust. Incidents of his early life had kept burning the fires
of independence and courageous expression. Born in a family
known for its hearty acceptance of the views of dissent, he had
grown up in close association with his father, with whom he
enjoyed discussion upon the most abstract subjects. To the ideals
of his youth he had clung tenaciously and he had shunned the
appearance of deserting the cause of republicanism or liberty in
any form. His first published composition was a letter to The
Shrewsbury Chronicle (1791), in which he stood out for fair treat-
ment of Priestley, whose house had been burned by a mob in
Birmingham. He did not follow the judgments of English critics,
neither was he held in thrall by the thought of Germany or
France. He wished to see and feel things for himself. This spirit
of independence, sometimes blinded by ill-temper or bitter re-
sentment, was always asserting itself, whether in championing the
cause of a new actor, in praising an aspiring young painter, in
giving a new turn to an old definition or in holding at bay the pack
of reviewers whose numbers made them bold to attack a superior
antagonist. He was born not to be a coward. He was a good
fighter. Although he often found himself in a minority of one,
he
found enjoyment in the feeling that he was right according to
his abstract principles.


## p. 175 (#199) ############################################

VII]
His Models
175
For us, the most interesting result of this independence is his
resolution not to be satisfied with anything short of his best in
writing. Two fine examples always stood before him-Montaigne,
who may be said to have been the first to say as an author what
he felt as a man,' and Burke, who ‘poured out his mind on paper. '
He has told us, in many places, of his difficulty in learning how
to write.
6
Oh, how little do they know who have never done anything but repeat
after others by rote, the labor, the yearnings and misgivings of mind it costs
to get the germ of an original idea, to dig it out of the hidden recesses of
thought and nature and to bring it half-ashamed, struggling, and deformed
into the day-to give words and intelligible symbols to that which was never
imagined or expressed before.
That he succeeded to an unusual degree in his ambition is now
a matter of record. Coleridge wrote of him that he said things
in his own way. His vigorous mind, seriously given to thinking,
would not be satisfied with expression that fell short of his con-
ception of clearness. He was not content with the homely
simplicity of Defoe, or the intellectual force of Swift: he aspired to
succeed, as Burke had succeeded, in conveying something of the
beauty and eloquence of truth and nature. What he wrote must
express all the shades of his sensitive imagination. It is not strange,
then, that he knew the meaning of words and strove unceasingly
to get the proper word for the proper place. The ephemeral
word or phrase found no place in his style, nor was he given to
coining words or to transplanting foreign words. Conse-
quently, his diction is remarkable for its purity. How well
he made the standard English vocabulary serve his purpose may
be found in his description of The Fight, where he does not feel
the need of adopting the slang of the ring to give a thrilling
account of an exciting contest. It is interesting to contrast this
passage with De Quincey's Murder as one of the Fine Arts. Not
only did he search for the right word but he strove for conciseness
in so far as the language would convey all that he wished to say.
'I hate to see a load of band-boxes go along the street, and I hate
to see a parcel of big words without anything in them. '
Hazlitt seems never to have been without the word which
would express with directness and vividness what was in his mind.
That he could parry as with a rapier, William Gifford must have
learned to his discomfort while he read the celebrated Letter.
De Quincey called his style 'abrupt, insulated, capricious, and
. . . non-sequacious. ' There is a sense in which this is true. For
-


## p. 176 (#200) ############################################

176
[CH.
Hazlitt
a time, the thought seems not to move. It is thrown into the
air like balls by a juggler, and we catch reflections of it, and
are thrilled and excited to pleasure in watching. One happy
phrase after another-an old quotation in a new setting, a
flash of sentiment, a bit of keen perceiving, a wise observation
on life—all thrown together, carry us on with a rapidity and a
stateliness that are not excelled in English literature.
The opening passage of his essay on poetry illustrates the
movement of his expository writing. Here, we have Hazlitt
thinking with overflowing zest upon a subject which was life to
him. Because he is trying to write something on a subject
which every critic or poet has discussed does not embarrass him.
As a man of feeling, who cannot reduce poetry to mere formal
words, he pours himself out with the richness and seriousness of
the most unabashed romanticist.
Or we may turn to his essay, The Feeling of Immortality
in Youth, to the passage beginning 'To see the golden sun, and
the azure sky. Observe the gusto with which he follows the
'
thought until he is actually out of breath. Here is the elaborate
stateliness of Sir Thomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor without the
quaintness of the seventeenth century which allured Charles
Lamb. In outline, it is formal and imposing; in meaning, it is
concrete, vivid and personal.
The virility of his enthusiasm is best shown in his delight in
outdoor life. No writer of today, after a century given to the
study and enjoyment of open air life, writes of it with greater zest
and more consistent inspiration. His essay, On Going a Journey,
is a pleasure to all lovers of Stevenson and Thoreau.
In many respects, the most memorable piece of writing of
William Hazlitt is the essay to which he has given the attractive
title, My First Acquaintance with Poets, one of the fine, immortal
essays in our language. The young man of twenty meets in
1798 the philosopher Coleridge and the poet Wordsworth. The
man of forty looks back through the glamour of the intervening
years and breaks forth with lyric enthusiasm at the thought of
these rich experiences.
In these essays, we have some of the best of Hazlitt-an
expression which is concrete, vivid, personal, vigorous ; the voice
of a manly and courageous seeker after truth, who sees nothing
inconsistent in the combination of truth and sentiment, truth and
beauty.
Hazlitt's habit of repeated quotation has caused irritation to


## p. 177 (#201) ############################################

VII]
His Quotations
177
>
6
6
6
6
>
6
many readers. He used innumerable quotations, consisting of a
mere phrase or of many lines, whenever he desired. If they do not
serve him as they stand, he does not hesitate to change a word or
phrase or to join two or more quotations together. He took supreme
pleasure in an apt phrase, whether of his own coinage or whether
he had picked it up long before in some source which he had taken
no pains to remember. He sought justification in the manner in
which he made his quotations convey his own ideas. Some of the
lines which he liked best to quote are here given as he wrote
them. Our life is of mingled yarn, good and ill together,' 'holds
the mirror up to nature,' 'web of our life,' 'too much i’ the sun,'
comes home to the business of men,' 'the stuff of which our life
is made,' sees into the life of things,' ever in the haunch of
winter sings,' 'fate, fore-will, foreknowledge absolute,’ ‘come like
shadows, so depart,' 'at one proud swoop,' with all its giddy
raptures,' 'the witchery of the soft blue sky,' 'it smiled and it
was cold,' sounding on his way,''men's minds are parcel of their
fortunes. ' A glance at this list will show the preponderance of
.
quotations from Shakespeare. These he applied everywhere and
in every possible connection. Next after Shakespeare, as sources,
come Milton, the Bible, Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Cowper,
Rousseau, Sterne, Fielding, Wordsworth. He had not the slightest
reluctance to appropriate a phrase that he liked in any book
which he read.
One characteristic marks his style especially, his use of the
parallel construction and contrast. He liked to join his subjects
in pairs; for example, Cant and Hypocrisy, Wit and Humour,
Past and Future, Thought and Action, Genius and Common
Sense, Patronage and Puffing, Writing and Speaking and so on
ad infinitum. So, he was much accustomed to discussing his
subject with the aid of contrast, as Wilkie and Hogarth, Shake-
speare and Jonson, Chaucer and Spenser, Voltaire and Swift,
Thomson and Cowper, Addison and Steele, Gray and Collins,
Dryden and Pope. In this particular, he had an influence upon
modern literary criticism, which has often used this means of
defining the relative importance of English writers.
Some readers, nourished on the fare of the Victorians, have
objected to Hazlitt on the ground that his writing shows mere
feeling and no moral purpose. Certainly, one does not think of
him as a inoralist with a message like Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, or
Browning, yet he, like all great English writers, was guided by
certain principles and was consistently true to certain ideals.
12
E. L. XII.
CH. VII.


## p. 178 (#202) ############################################

178
[CH.
Hazlitt
-
Hazlitt was as bitter against affectation and insipidity as Carlyle
or Thackeray. Not more insistently than he, did Carlyle try to get
beneath mere clothes and separate the symbol from the thing.
Ruskin had no more genuine love of nature and saw not more clearly
than Hazlitt the relation between life and the beauty of nature.
In his efforts to think clearly upon life and to express himself with
classic simplicity, there is a suggestion of Matthew Arnold. In
his virility of expression and the hopefulness with which he wrote
in continued adversity, we find something that suggests the
optimism of Browning and Stevenson. Though he was not a
moralist according to the general meaning of that word, he never
turned from the serious problem of life. He was no shallow
optimist or railing pessimist. There is, throughout his writing, an
abiding faith in human nature, a devotion to beauty and an
allegiance to ideals of square-dealing, honesty and truthfulness,
that made his life happy when those who looked on-all save one-
called him of all men most lonely and miserable.
The influence of Hazlitt has been pervasive through the nine-
teenth century. Among his contemporaries, there were those who
would have nothing to do with his idols, Rousseau and Napoleon,
who did not share his radical views on politics, who despised his
enthusiastic style as mere sentimental twaddle. On the other
hand, there were those who, like Leigh Hunt, Lamb, Coleridge and
De Quincey, recognised, in some measure, the worth of the man.
Certain of the reviewers in the magazines, though they took delight
in abusing him personally, had good cause for admiring his literary
skill when they were the objects of his invective. Among the
great writers of English since his day, he has found many admirers
and imitators, many who have followed his lead in his appreciation
of art and of literature. Macaulay had a fondness for the same
balanced structure, the same tendency toward epigrammatic ex-
pression, the same persistent determination to write with unmis-
takable clearness. Newman's style bore ample testimony to the
eloquence which Hazlitt displayed in his most stately writing.
Thackeray wrote heartily in admiration :
1
Hazlitt was one of the keenest and brightest critics that ever lived.
With partialities and prejudices innumerable, he had a wit so keen, a
sensibility so exquisite, an appreciation of humour or pathos or even of the
greatest act so lively, quick and cultivated, that it was always good to know
what were the impressions made by books or men or pictures on such a
inind; and that, as there were not probably a dozen men in England with
powers so varied, all the rest of the world might be rejoiced to listen to the
opinions of this accomplished critic.


## p. 179 (#203) ############################################

vii]
179
Henley on Hazlitt
In similar vein wrote Froude, Bagehot, Lowell, Stevenson
and many other worthy judges of our best literature. Perhaps
the surest comment which indicates the estimate of today is by
William Ernest Henley in the concluding paragraph of his in-
troduction to the complete edition of Hazlitt's works, already
cited:
:
As a writer, therefore, it is with Lamb that I would bracket him: they
are dissimilars, but they go gallantly and naturally together-par nobile
fratrum. Give us these two, with some ripe Cobbett, a volume of Southey,
some Wordsworth, certain pages of Shelley, a great deal of the Byron who
wrote letters, and we get the right prose of the time. The best of it all,
perhaps, is the best of Lamb. But Hazlitt's, for different qualities, is so
imminent and shining a second that I hesitate as to the pre-eminency.
Probably the race is Lamb's. But Hazlitt is ever Hazlitt; and at his
highest moments Hazlitt is hard to beat, and has not these many years
been beaten.
1242


## p. 180 (#204) ############################################

CHAPTER VIII
LAMB
By reason of its intimate nature and the colour which it took
from the personal events of his life, the work of Charles Lamb is
inseparable from the circumstances in which it came into being.
This is peculiarly true of more than one of the great writers of
the early nineteenth century. The biographies of Byron, Shelley
,
and Coleridge are necessary complements to the understanding
of their poetry. But, in none of these three cases is a succession
of incidents so closely interwoven in prose and poetry as is the
more peaceful life of Lamb in his writings. Those writings, inspired
by the influence of the moment and by a lively remembrance of
the past, take their place in the course of a story on which they
form a running comment; and it is this story, chequered by the
presence of sorrow and tragedy and beautified by the endurance
of high human affection, which has given Lamb a special place
in literary history. His genius matured in submission to its
.
influence: the experience of daily life was the source of the
sympathy with humanity which pervades his style and lends to it
an abiding charm.
Lamb's statement that his father came from Lincoln has never
been proved positively, but is probably an exception to his usual
habit of embroidering fiction upon fact. John Lamb, whose
characteristics are known to us from his son's affectionate portrait
of Lovel, 'a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty,' with
'a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to resemble,
was clerk and general factotum to Samuel Salt of the Inner
Temple. The father, 'as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you
could desire,' gave some proof of literary talent in a small volume
entitled Poetical Pieces on Several Occasions, the best of which,
an amusing description of the daily routine of a lady's footman,
was probably drawn from his own early experience. He married
Elizabeth Field, a member of a family of Hertfordshire farmers.
1


## p. 181 (#205) ############################################

CH. VIII]
School-days
181
They lived in Salt's house at 2 Crown office row, in the Inner
Temple, Mrs Lamb acting as housekeeper. Their eldest son,
John, described by Lamb as James Elia, was born in June 1763.
Mary Lamb was the second child, born in December 1764.
Charles, the youngest, was born on 10 February 1775. Four other
children, two boys and two girls, died in infancy.
Salt's house in the Temple was Lamb's home for the first
seventeen years of his life. Here, Mary Lamb, ten years his
senior,
1764. serviving
was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old
English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will
upon that fair and wholesome pasturage.
>
In the quiet courts and ‘bricky towres' of the Temple, close to,
yet aloof from, streaming London's central roar,' Lamb learned
to survey the ways of the world about him with sympathetic
observation, and to interpret them in their true proportions with
an amused delight at their variety and movement. London,
‘itself a pantomime and masquerade,' early enveloped him with
its attraction. 'I often shed tears in the motley Strand,' he wrote
to Wordsworth in 1801, ‘from fulness of joy at so much life. ' To
Manning and to Robert Lloyd, his praise of his native city is
equally lyric, and, throughout life, London continued to supply
his imagination with material upon which it readily worked its
fantasies.
Lamb learned reading and writing at a day-school in Fetter
lane, kept by one William Bird, which he attended with his sister
and afterwards described in Captain Starkey, one of the essays
contributed to Hone's Every-Day Book. In October 1782, he
entered Christ's hospital, having been presented to the foundation
by one of the governors, a friend of Samuel Salt. His recollections
of the seven years spent here are embodied in an essay printed in
The Gentleman's Magazine for June 1813, and in the more famous
essay in which he blended his own experiences with the less happy
memories of his contemporary Coleridge. The friendship with
Coleridge, begun at Christ's hospital, lasted, with one short break,
throughout their lives. In a famous apostrophe, touched with
that sense of regret for wasted energy and unfulfilled hope which
Coleridge's later career naturally inspired, Lamb has recorded his
admiration for the precocious genius of his friend. Coleridge,
equally affectionate but less alive to reality, has characterised
Lamb as the 'gentle-hearted Charles' Gentle-hearted as he was


## p. 182 (#206) ############################################

182
[ch.
Lamb
a
in the best sense of the word, Lamb resented the epithet, and,
in fact, he was made of sterner stuff than Coleridge and proved
his capacity to face the facts of a world which, to the poet and
philosopher, was an unsubstantial vision.
In estimating the influence of early memories and friendships
upon Lamb's work, it is impossible to overlook his connection
with his mother's native county Hertford. His grandmother,
Mrs Field, was housekeeper at Blakesware, a large country house
in the parish of Widford, four miles east of Ware. The Plumers,
its owners, lived principally at Gilston, some miles away, and left
Blakesware in charge of Mrs Field. Charles and Mary Lamb
spent many holidays here, roaming freely through the deserted
mansion. In the autumn of 1799, Lamb revisited the place and
wrote to Southey of the tapestried bedroom and the old 'marble
hall, with Hogarth’s prints, and the Roman Caesars in marble
hung round,' of the wilderness and the village churchyard by
the park gates, 'where the bones of my honoured grandam lie. '
Mary Lamb described the house and recalled a childish experience
of her own in The Young Mahometan, one of the tales in
Mrs Leicester's School. The power of Blakesware upon Lamb's
growing imagination is drawn in Blakesmoor in H-shire,
where we see him sitting in the window-seat of the store-room,
reading Cowley, wandering through the house and creeping into
the haunted room, “but always in the daytime, with a passion
of fear,' so fascinated by the boundaries of his Eden,' that he
was ignorant of what lay beyond, and fancied the brook which ran
outside the park, ‘half hid by trees,' to be a romantic lake. In
Dream-Children, Blakesware is again described, with its empty
rooms, gardens, orangery and fish-pond ; his grandmother, bowed
down physically with wasting disease but unbowed in spirit, rises
before his memory; he recalls her special affection for his elder
brother John, ‘so handsome and spirited a youth, and a king to
the rest of us. A more shadowy reminiscence is the fair-haired
Alice, who lies buried in Widford churchyard, connected in
thought with the portrait of the Hertfordshire beauty which ‘hung
next the great bay-window' and was the subject of Mary Lamb's
stanzas to 'High-born Helen. ' "The green plains of pleasant
Hertfordshire' supplied a life-long attraction to Lamb, from the
days when, a boy at school, he attempted to trace the New River
to its source, to the long walks of later years, when he roamed
about Enfield or, with Mary Lamb and Barron Field, made his
pilgrimage from St Albans to the home of his relations at


## p. 183 (#207) ############################################

VII] Early Friendships, Mary Lamb 183
9
Mackery End. It was in these quiet byways that he found his
true point of contact with nature; and the placid grace which
dispenses its charm amid the parks and woods, grass-bordered
lanes and open greens, of Hertfordshire is not unlike the tranquil
beauty, never far from poetry, of his prose.
Lamb left Christ's hospital in 1789, and, two years later,
obtained a temporary appointment in the examiner's office in
the South-Sea house, which he held from September 1791 to
February 1792. This dignified establishment, in the unexacting
service of which his brother John spent his life, is described in
the first essay of Elia. In April 1792, he entered a scene of
greater activity in the East India house in Leadenhall street,
where, for thirty-three years, he performed his daily duties. In
this year, Samuel Salt died and the Lamb family left the Temple,
to settle eventually at 7 Little Queen street, Holborn. Between
1792 and 1796, the friendship with Coleridge continued, and
Coleridge fathered Lamb's earliest sonnet, which was printed
under the initials S. T. C. in The Morning Chronicle of 29 December
1794. Bowles, 'genius of the sacred fountain of tears,' was the
inspirer of this and other sonnets, which, by May 1796, had
reached the number of nine. Four of these were published in
Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects in 1796, and another,
addressed to Mary Lamb, is contained in the earliest of the letters
to Coleridge which has been preserved. This sonnet was written
in a lunatic asylum at Hoxton, where Lamb spent the six weeks
at the end of 1795 and the beginning of 1796. There was insanity
in his family, which was soon to declare itself tragically; but
this was the only occasion on which Lamb himself was affected by
it, and the cause which disturbed him so seriously can only be
conjectured. The correspondence with Coleridge, extending from
May 1796 to June 1798, has its moments of playfulness, but is
overcast by the melancholy of one who feels himself solitary.
Old schoolfellows, however, occasionally came to see him, among
them James White, whom he assisted in the authorship of The
Falstaff Letters; and he improved his acquaintance with the
scholarly and unpractical George Dyer, twenty years his elder.
The letters are full of allusions to his reading, chiefly among old
English authors, and contain much criticism of Coleridge's early
verse, especially of Religious Musings, to the fineness, and to the in-
equality, of which Lamb showed himself fully alive. He advocated
unitarianism and expressed admiration for Priestley with a fervour
which, although it declined in later years, gave permanent colour
a


## p. 184 (#208) ############################################

184
[CH.
Lamb
to his religious convictions, so far as we can gain any glimpse
of them.
For a time, however, the consolations of religion were foremost
in his mind. His mother had, for some time, been helpless and
dependent upon the care of her daughter. On 22 September
1796, Mary had a sudden fit of insanity, in which she killed her
mother. She was removed to a private asylum at Islington, and
Charles and his father went to 45 Chapel street, Pentonville.
Sarah Lamb, an aunt who lived with the family, was taken into
the house of a rich relation, but soon returned to her brother and
nephew, dying early in 1797. Lamb, thus, in his twenty-third
year, had 'the whole weight of the family' thrown on him-a
father in his second childhood, a dying aunt and a sister whose
returning reason was liable to fail again at any moment. John, the
elder brother, though possessed of many good qualities, was wrapped
up in his own affairs. It would have been easy to have taken his
advice and consigned Mary permanently to a madhouse; but Charles
preferred to make a home for his sister. During her father's life-
time, rooms were found for her at Hackney. Here, Charles spent his
Sundays and holidays, and, when their father died in 1799, she took
up her abode permanently with her brother, leaving him only
when the threatenings of recurrent attacks of insanity made it
necessary.
In 1796 began the association between Coleridge and Charles
Lloyd, a sensitive young Birmingham quaker; and, in January 1797,
Lloyd unexpectedly sought Lamb out in London. Lamb, still suffer-
ing from a sense of loneliness and neglect, conceived a strong
attachment for his friend's disciple. To the second edition of
Coleridge's Poems (October 1797) were added poems by Lamb
and Lloyd; and in 1798 appeared a small volume of Blank Verse,
by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, to which Lamb contributed
seven poems, including The Old Familiar Faces, one of the most
perfect expressions in English of infinite regret tempered by re-
signation. Friendship with Lloyd meant much pleasant literary
intercourse, and from one particular branch of literature to which
Lloyd introduced him Lamb learned a sympathy with quakerism
and its staid reliance upon 'the inward light' as the source of
intellectual peace, a sympathy which never left him. Lloyd,
however, was not the best companion for a man in need of
bracing society. Lamb early discovered in him ‘an exquisite-
ness of feeling' which 'must border on derangement,' and, a
year after his first visit, found himself on the brink of a


## p. 185 (#209) ############################################

VIII]
185
Charles and Robert Lloyd
I
2
quarrel, for which, however, he blamed his own impatience at
Lloyd's well-meant devotion. Coleridge, meanwhile, had some-
what tired of Lloyd, and a growing coolness developed into open
rupture.
In Edmund Oliver, a novel published in 1798, Lloyd
vented some of his feeling against Coleridge, and by this time his
wounded vanity had effected a breach between Coleridge and
Lamb. He told Lamb—inexcusably, even if it were true—that
Coleridge had said, “Poor Lamb! if he wants any knowledge, he
may apply to me. ' Lamb's retort to this was Theses quaedam
theologicae, enclosed in a letter written in June 1798. For once
in their friendship, Lamb showed himself the weaker man of the
two. His Theses, clever as they are, might have led to the
permanent sundering of a friendship as salutary to Coleridge as it
was inspiring to Lamb, had not Coleridge magnanimously over-
looked the affront. Within little more than a year, they were
again friends. In the interval, Lamb had probably seen more
than enough of Charles Lloyd. In January 1799, a younger
brother, Robert, who had rebelled against the quaker traditions of
his family, sought refuge with Lamb from his father's supposed
persecution. To this amiable youth, whose chief fault was a
readiness to manufacture his own troubles, Lamb addressed a
number of letters, one or two of them among the best that he
wrote. Lamb recognised him as 'the flower of his family, and
his early death was a source of deep grief to a household which,
in spite of disagreements, was united by close bonds of affection.
In later years, Lamb sent criticisms to the father of the Lloyds
upon his verse translations of classical authors; but the friendship
with Charles Lloyd gradually ceased. Lloyd's sensitiveness grew
upon him with years : he became a prey to nervous melancholy
and died near Versailles in 1839, with his reason hopelessly
overclouded.
Lamb's first independent work in prose, A Tale of Rosamund
Gray and Old Blind Margaret, was published in the summer of
1798. Already, as we have seen, he had had some share in
White's Original Letters, etc. , of Sir John Falstaff in July 1796.
Rosamund Gray, told in simple prose interwoven with literary
phrase, remembered and appropriated from his reading, is a
sombre and tragic narrative. In its theme of undeserved mis-
fortune overtaking the young and innocent, Lamb had his own
experiences in mind. The resignation of Allan Clare, the sur-
vivor of his elder sister and his dead love, is uttered by Lamb
himself.
6


## p. 186 (#210) ############################################

186
[CH.
Lamb
I gave my heart to the Purifier, and my will to the Sovereign Will of the
Universe. The irresistible wheels of destiny passed on in their everlasting
rotation,-and I suffered myself to be carried along with them without
complaining.
6
The scene of the story is Widford; Blakesware, the home of Allan
and Elinor Clare, is visited in memory by the narrator ; and in
the ill-fated Rosamund is bodied forth the Alice of Elia. In
Elinor, whose relation to Allan resembles that of Mary Lamb to
Charles, there is a reminiscence of 'high-born Helen'; and it is
at her grave, not at that of Rosamund, that Allan and his friend
meet again. Thus, Lamb showed his capacity of transmuting his
pleasures and sorrows into forms of imagination and of treading
the border-line between truth and fiction with an unmatched
delicacy. Even in bis melancholy, he could not fail to reproduce
something of the double aspect of life; and occasional gentle
touches of amused observation prove his power of balancing and
reconciling the comic and tragic elements in human nature.
To Southey, Lamb's principal correspondent at this period, he
wrote, on 29 October 1798, in a letter which throws some light
upon the composition of Rosamund Gray, that he was at work
' upon something, which, if I were to cut away and garble, perhaps
I might send you an extract or two that might not displease you. '
This was the tragedy first called Pride's Cure, but, in its revised
form, John Woodvil. Although without great original merit or
dramatic interest, it bears witness to Lamb's faithful study of the
early Elizabethan drama, in its phraseology, in the varying length
and broken rhythm of its lines and in the alternation of verse with
prose. Lamb showed two fragments, one of which was afterwards
published separately, to George Dyer, whose classical taste could
not comprehend how that could be poetry which did not go upon
ten feet. ' 'I go,' he wrote again to Southey (20 May 1799), ‘upon
the model of Shakspeare in my Play, and endeavour after a
colloquial ease and spirit, something like him. ' The style, while
frequently recalling that of Shakespeare's historical plays, is
closely akin to that of such dramas as Arden of Feversham,
founded on English subjects and preserving, with occasional
exaltation of phrase, a general homeliness of diction.
In these pursuits, Lamb gradually shook off his melancholy.
To his life with Mary in Pentonville belong those reminiscences
afterwards recorded in Old China—the little luxuries permitted
by a scanty income, the holiday walks to Potter's bar, Waltham
and Enfield, the folio Beaumont and Fletcher carried home one
>


## p. 187 (#211) ############################################

VIII]
187
Contributions to Newspapers
Saturday night from Covent garden, the purchase of the print
from Leonardo which Lamb called 'Lady Blanch,' the visits to
the shilling gallery of the theatre. The play, pictures and old
English literature above all, became the three objects of Lamb's
enthusiasm, relieving his mind after his daily routine and
alleviating the anxiety inseparable from his affection for Mary.
In December 1799, he made a new and valuable friend. On a
visit to Charles Lloyd at Cambridge, he met Thomas Manning,
a mathematician of Caius, versatile and laughter-loving. Their
correspondence produced a series of letters full of Lamb's peculiar
humour. Cambridge also held George Dyer of Emmanuel, whose
oddity and touching simplicity were a microcosm of the eternal
contradictions of life in which Lamb delighted. Into Oxford in
the Vacation, with its disclosure of his attraction towards the
universities whose privileges he had been unable to share, Lamb
interwove memories of Cambridge and introduced the portrait of
Dyer in the library of his college. His first visit to Oxford took
place in the summer of 1800, when he passed two days with the
family of Matthew Gutch, a law-stationer in London. Gutch had
offered him a lodging at 34 Southampton buildings, Chancery lane,
and here he settled with Mary in the late summer of 1800.
His literary work during the next few years was desultory.
In March 1800, Coleridge had spent some weeks with him in
Pentonville and suggested to him to contribute to a newspaper
an imitation of Burton's Anatomy, which bore fruit in the three
Curious Fragments printed with John Woodvil in 1802. In the
same volume were also printed the lines called Hypochondriacus,
composed about this time, which show an appreciation of Burton's
melancholy not less remarkable than the prose fragments in
reproduction of his style. These first attempts at writing for
newspapers were not accepted, which is hardly surprising. Lamb,
meanwhile, was increasing his acquaintance. His lodgings in
Southampton buildings were so crowded by visitors that they
resembled a 'minister's levee,' and, at Lady day 1801, he found
it convenient to seek new quarters in the attic story of 16 Mitre
court buildings, in the Temple. He obtained a footing on
The Albion, which ended in August 1801, and then, after a short
connection with The Morning Chronicle, worked for The Morning
Post from 1802 to 1804. His contributions to these journals were,
for the most part, ephemeral ; his most remarkable feat was an
epigram upon the apostasy of Sir James Mackintosh from
radicalism, which proved the death-blow of The Albion.


## p. 188 (#212) ############################################

188
[CH.
Lamb
1
6
Newspapers Thirty-five years ago contains a record, with some
confusion of facts and dates, of this period, and an amusing
specimen of the consciously laboured humour with which Lamb
sought to enliven The Morning Post. His journalistic life
brought him into contact with a somewhat different order of
friends, 'men of boisterous spirits, sitters up a-nights, disputants,
drunken,' who 'yet seemed to have something noble about them. '
One of them, John Fenwick, the editor of The Albion, lives in
Elia as Ralph Bigod, the representative of the great race' of
men who borrow. In their society, figuring as “a profest joker,'
Lamb certainly confirmed a taste for 'tipple and tobacco,' and
a habit of sitting up into the small hours, which were a dis-
advantage to his nervous temperament; but he also widened his
views of human nature and learned to forget his troubles, or, at
any rate, to see them in their true proportions.
John Woodvil was published early in 1802 with the com-
plement of Curious Fragments from Burton, Mary Lamb's
‘High-born Helen' and a few other pieces. In the summer of the
same year, the Lambs visited Coleridge at Greta hall. The sunset
as they drove from Penrith and the view from Skiddaw, with
other pleasant experiences, satisfied Lamb ‘that there is such a
thing as that which tourists call romantic, which I very much
suspected before’; but he came to the sensible conclusion that
'Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to live in for good
and all than amidst Skiddaw. The landmarks of the next few
years are scanty-a visit to the isle of Wight in 1803, an attack of
depression early in 1805 and a return of Mary's illness in the
following summer. With her recovery, Lamb's spirits rose, and,
early in 1806, he submitted his farce Mr H- for production
on the stage. In May 1806, he suffered a serious loss in the
departure of Manning for China. But, new work and interests
helped to atone for the withdrawal of Manning's 'steadiness and
quiet, which used to infuse something like itself into our nervous
minds. ' The friendship of Wordsworth and his sister afforded
that calm sympathy of which the Lambs stood much in need ; the
society of John Rickman, whose accomplishments, as 'a pleasant
hand,' Lamb had discovered in 1800, of Martin Burney and others,
was near at hand; and Hazlitt, the future husband of Mary
Lamb's friend, Sarah Stoddart, quickened his love of art. In
a farewell letter to Manning (10 May 1806), he described the
beginning of Tales from Shakespear, undertaken at the recom-
mendation of William Godwin, whom Lamb liked as cordially as
6


## p. 189 (#213) ############################################

VIII)
189
Tales from Shakespear
he detested Godwin's second wife. Mary charged herself with the
adaptation of twenty plays of Shakespeare ‘for the Use of Young
Persons': Lamb himself had finished Othello and Macbeth when he
wrote to Manning, and contributed four more tales to the ultimate
collection, of which the remaining fourteen were by Mary.
Before the appearance of this classic in January 1807, Lamb's
venture in farce was tried publicly and failed. It was accepted
in June 1806 at Drury lane, and was produced on 10 December,
with Elliston in the title rôle. Its point is the preservation by
Mr H— of his anonymity, in order to secure a bride whom
his real name Hogsflesh will disgust. By a slip of the tongue,
he discloses his name prematurely; but, the danger to his happi-
ness is removed by the timely arrival of a licence empowering him
to change his name to Bacon. The thinness of the subject is ill
disguised by Lamb's gift of punning, to which it gave some
opportunity. The author, a just critic of his own work, joined in
hissing it and bore his mortification stoically. Although he now
and then returned to dramatic writing, he never produced another
play on the boards.
Tales from Shakespear have had a very different fate. They
belong to a type of literature requiring gifts which are seldom
found in perfect proportion. The tale must attract the reader
for its own sake; but its object is missed unless it attracts him
further to study its source. In this case, the task was all the
more difficult because the originals are the highest achievements
of dramatic poetry. Shakespeare's language had to be interwoven
with the story and demanded a selection of phrase which would
arrest a young reader's attention without overtaxing his intelli-
gence. The familiarity with old literature which Mary had acquired
in Samuel Salt's book-closet and Charles had improved in the
library at Blakesware stood them in good stead. They were still
able to bring to the plays the impressions of childhood, to re-
produce in simple prose the phrases that had awakened their
imaginations and to supply that commentary upon characters and
incidents which a child needs, without over-burdening the easy
narrative. It is not too much to say that the collection forms one
of the most conspicuous landmarks in the history of the romantic
movement. It is the first book which, appealing to a general
audience and to a rising generation, made Shakespeare a familiar
and popular author and, in so doing, asserted the claims of the
older literature which, to English people at large, was little more
than a name. The Adventures of Ulysses, written by Lamb alone


## p. 190 (#214) ############################################

190
Lamb
[ch.
and published by Godwin in 1808, was a further experiment in
the same direction, founded upon Chapman's translation of the
Odyssey, and suggested by the popularity of Fénelon's Aventures
de Télémaque. In the qualities of simple style and narrative, it is
a worthy successor to Tales from Shakespear. It has not achieved,
however, an equal reputation. While Tales from Shakespear is
drawn directly from an original source abounding in human interest,
The Adventures of Ulysses is an attempt to familiarise readers with
a poem which, with all its beauty and vigour, is merely a reflection,
often disturbed and imperfect, of the special qualities of the Odyssey.
Apart from purely literary considerations, both books are a valuable
testimony to the purity and simplicity of Lamb's character. The
bright visions of youth were still strong enough to chase the shades
of the prison-house which had threatened Lamb's early manhood.
Further, Mary Lamb's contributions to Tales from Shakespear
prove that her sound judgment, in the normal state of her reason,
was not a mere figment of an affectionate brother's imagination.
At the close of 1808, Lamb conferred a remarkable boon upon
students of our older authors by the publication of Specimens
of English Dramatic Poets, who lived About the time of
Shakspeare. The selections, covering the whole field of the
English drama from Gorboduc to Shirley, discharge the proper
office of selections in that, chosen, as they were, with the fullest
discrimination, they whet the appetite for more of the same dish.
Lamb's judiciously brief comments are among the classics of
English criticism. He had the enthusiasm of the discoverer and,
here and there, allowed it to obscure his critical faculty.
Admiration of the scene in which Calantha, in Ford's Broken
Heart, 'with holy violence against her nature,' continues to dance
while news of successive tragedies are whispered into her ear,
tempted him into a comparison out of all proportion to the
actual merits of the episode. Yet, the self-sacrifice of Ordella,
in Fletcher's Thierry and Theodoret, that “piece of sainted
nature’ whom, next to Calantha, he reckoned “the most perfect
notion of the female heroic character,' seemed to him 'faint and
languid' as compared with Shakespeare at his best, and formed
the basis for just remarks upon Fletcher's fondness for ‘unnatural
and violent situations' and the artificiality of his versification and
wit. Equally just are the sparing praise of Middleton's over-
lauded drama, The Witch, and the intuitive recognition of the
passion which finds an imperfectly articulate outlet in the plays
and translations of Chapman. The thought of Shakespeare is


## p. 191 (#215) ############################################

VIII)
191
Mrs Leicester's School
always present. Heywood is a sort of prose Shakspeare,' with
his feeling, but without his command of expression ; Chapman
'perhaps approaches nearest to Shakspeare in the descriptive and
didactic, in passages which are less purely dramatic. The funeral
dirge in Webster's White Devil challenges comparison with 'Full
fathom five' in The Tempest : 'as that is of the water, watery ; so
this is of the earth, earthy. Shakespearean reminiscence pervades
the style of these notes; Lamb constantly seeks comparisons from the
greatest of dramatists and finds in his words a never-failing source
of apt expression. At its best, as in the notes on Webster, his prose
becomes lyric, with a pregnancy of phrase that leaves a peculiarly
vivid impression of the characteristics which it illustrates.
In Mrs Leicester's School, which was nearly contemporary with
Specimens, Mary Lamb had the principal share. Lamb himself
contributed three of the ten stories, anecdotes of childhood sup-
posed to be related by the pupils of a ladies' school at Amwell
in Hertfordshire and reduced to writing by one of their teachers.
Autobiography enters largely into these charming stories : in The
Young Mahometan, Mary wrote down her memories of Blakesware
and recorded her own childish perversion to Mohammedanism,
caused by one of Samuel Salt's miscellaneous collection of
books, while, in the Visit to the Cousins, she recalled a child's
first impressions of the play and its interest in the figures which
struck the quarters upon the clock of St Dunstan's, and introduced
her young heroine to the Juvenile library in Skinner street,
paying, with sly humour, an incidental tribute to the persuasive
powers of Mrs Godwin. The Witch Aunt was founded by Lamb
upon a reminiscence to which he referred later in Witches and
other Night Fears, and First Going to Church blends memories
of the Temple church with Coleridge's youth at Ottery St Mary.
The bells of Ottery, whose identity Lamb veiled later under the
disguise of 'sweet Calne in Wiltshire,' had already made their
music heard in John Woodvil. With Mrs Leicester's School and
the artless rimes of Poetry for Children, tales and apologues in
which the moral element, sugared with humour and softened by
pathos, plays a large part, the joint work of the brother and sister
came to an end. Prince Dorus, a fairy-tale in decasyllabic
couplets, published by Mrs Godwin in 1811, was Lamb's last work
for children.
On 27 May 1809, the Lambs moved into new quarters at
4 Inner Temple lane, after a short return to Southampton buildings.
The anxiety of the move brought on one of Mary's attacks, and,
a


## p. 192 (#216) ############################################

192
[CH.
Lamb
in the autumn, he took her to visit the Hazlitts at Winterslow,
where she recovered health, and they had long walks to Wilton,
Salisbury and Stonehenge-Wilton, with its treasures of painting
and sculpture, characteristically taking the first place in Lamb's
enumeration of these excursions. The visit was renewed in the
following summer, but with less satisfaction; the return journey
was made by way of Oxford and Blenheim, and thence to Bury
St Edmunds, and ended in Mary's serious relapse, which clouded
the early autumn of 1810. Meanwhile, Lamb found pleasure in
his two sitting-rooms on the third floor of the house in Inner
Temple lane, the print-room hung with the works of Hogarth and
the book-room with its 'small but well-chosen library. In these
rooms, the resort of Martin Burney and the 'card-boys' and of
other friends who gathered round him in the evenings when his
work at the India house was over, he spent some eight years.
His letters during this period include a number addressed to
Wordsworth, crowded with critical and humourous obiter dicta
and appreciation of his correspondent's poems.
His life was
chequered by moments of sadness, but his earlier depression
vanished; he could even speak lightly of the trouble which
brooded over his house and say that 'the wind is tempered to the
shorn Lambs. ' Outer events touched him but little : there are
allusions in his letters to the Napoleonic catastrophe in 1814 and
1815, but they are those of a mere spectator of the drama. His
catholicity of temperament allowed him to preserve his friendship
with the poets whose revolutionary sympathies had been trans-
formed into conservatism, while he was able to extend it to
Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt at the opposite pole of radicalism.
What any man can write,' he wrote to Wordsworth in 1815,
‘surely I may read. ' This principle, mutatis mutandis, applies
to his choice of friends.
Small in volume as his work was between 1810 and 1820, it is
the work of one whose power of conversation and faculty of
criticism were felt by all who came into contact with him. His
natural shyness and an impediment in his speech prevented him,
even if he had wished it, from dominating a literary circle; but,
his sound good sense, abundant sympathy and whimsical gaiety
of utterance gave him peculiar influence with his friends. His
own highest achievements were yet to come. When he began
to write for Leigh Hunt in The Reflector in 1810, he had had
comparatively little experience in essay-writing. Casual criticism
in letter-writing is another thing; and the masterly estimate of
6


## p. 193 (#217) ############################################

VIN]
Lamb's Humour
193
Jeremy Taylor, in one of his letters to Robert Lloyd, is marked
by considerably more freedom and liveliness than are the valuable,
but somewhat laboured, articles in The Reflector upon The Genius
and Character of Hogarth and The Tragedies of Shakespeare.
His genius, however, for apt illustration of his favourite authors,
was again proved in Specimens from the Writings of Fuller
printed in the same periodical at the end of 1811; and the
passages of Table-Talk contributed to The Examiner in 1813
have the same brief and pregnant character. The review of
Wordsworth’s Excursion in The Quarterly for October 1814 was
mangled by Gifford to the injury of what, in Lamb's own and
Mary's opinions, was 'the prettiest piece of prose I ever writ. '
Distinct from his critical essays at this time are the humourous
letters, modelled upon the pattern of The Tatler and The
Spectator, which Lamb wrote for The Reflector in 1810 and 1811.
Such essays as that on the Inconveniences Resulting from being
Hanged are specimens of a humour which, amusing enough in
the warmth of conversation, sparkles less brightly in print. His
humour needed the touch of personal reminiscence, the softening
of laughter by the wistful memory of the past. This vein is
hardly touched in Recollections of Christ's Hospital, printed in
The Gentleman's Magazine for June 1813, which, with a foretaste
of that gift of portraiture which enlivens many pages of Elia, is
serious and matter-of-fact. For the present, his written humour
took a serio-comic direction, playing with grim subjects and
identifying itself with imaginary topics. There is, however, one
notorious exception which, founded, to some extent, upon his own
experience, has had a baneful effect upon estimates of his character.
Confessions of a Drunkard, printed in The Philanthropist for
June 1813, pictures, in moving terms, the misery of a slave to
drink and tobacco. Its object was, undoubtedly, serious, and it is
equally certain that Lamb traced in it the progress of his own
undeniable affection for these accompaniments of his evenings, with
some genuine regret, corroborated by his letters, that he was not
superior to their seductions. But he was capable, even for a
serious purpose, of using his imagination to describe sensations
and sentiments which, as a matter of fact, were an exaggeration of
his own.
At all times, the incidents of his life became stories in
which he played at will with his own personality. Confessions of a
Drunkard was reprinted in The London Magazine for August
1822, when Elia was at the height of his magic powers, and was
able to jest ruefully to Dorothy Wordsworth upon the warnings of
13
funerary
E. L. XII.
CH. VIII.


## p. 194 (#218) ############################################

194
Lamb
[CH.
rheumatism against his favourite beverages. In 1821, De Quincey
had published Confessions of an Opium Eater in the same
magazine, embroidering fancy upon fact with portentous serious-
ness; and it is in keeping with Lamb's spirit of mischief that he
should have furbished up his old essay in the following year to
mystify his readers with an avowal in marked contrast to the tone
of those impenitent disclosures. His annoyance at the gratuitous
assumption of The Quarterly that the essay was 'a genuine
description of the state of the writer' amounts to a denial.
At the end of 1817, the Lambs, as Mary wrote to Dorothy
Wordsworth, 'mustered up resolution enough' to leave their
chambers in the Temple for lodgings over a brazier's shop at
20 Russell street, Covent garden, ‘a place all alive with noise and
bustle ; Drury Lane Theatre in sight from our front, and Covent
Garden from our back windows. This congenial position atoned
for the final severance of their connection with their earliest home.
The divine plain face' of the actress Fanny Kelly began to fill
Lamb's thoughts. Apart from the romance of his boyhood, and an
attraction, commemorated in the touching lyric Hester, to the
unknown quakeress Hester Savory, during his life at Pentonville,
his mind had been singularly free from thoughts of love. In July
1819, he proposed marriage to Miss Kelly in a letter of great
beauty and dignity of feeling ; she refused him with equal candour
and respect, and he bore his disappointment with exemplary
fortitude.
The collected Works of Charles Lamb, dedicated to Coleridge
and containing John Woodvil, Mr H- Rosamund Gray, a
collection of poems and sonnets and such essays as he thought
worthy of republication, was published in two volumes by the
brothers Ollier in 18181. From the date of the publication of these
volumes until August 1820, Lamb wrote with some regularity for
The Examiner and, after its decease, for The Indicator, also edited
by Leigh Hunt. To this same period belong kindly reviews of two
books of verse by friends, the Nugae Canorae of Charles Lloyd and
Barron Field's First Fruits of Australian Poetry, both in The
Examiner, and a review of Keats's Lamia and its companion pieces.
Barron Field, the companion of the Lambs in their excursion to
Mackery End, had gone to New South Wales as chief judge of
the supreme court. Of the two poems which Field printed for
private circulation, the first was characterised by Lamb as con-
taining too much evidence of the unlicensed borrowing which had
1 An analysis of their contents will be found in the bibliography to the present chapter.
>
a
목
​1


## p. 195 (#219) ############################################

VIII]
The Essays of Elia
195
helped to colonise Botany bay. To the second, The Kangaroo,
which he quoted at length, he gave more praise: he was
‘mistaken, if it does not relish of the graceful hyperboles of the
elder writers'-a perhaps excessive compliment, which might be
suspected of having a double edge if it had not been repeated
less ambiguously at a later date.
The London Magazine of August 1820 contained Recollections
of the South-Sea House, the first of the miscellaneous essays
which bore the signature Elia. From October 1820 to the end
of 1823, Elia was a regular contributor to this brilliant but short-
lived journal. It was a happy thought which led him to seek
material for his first essay in his own reminiscences; for it was in
the contemplation of these and the weaving of romance into their
fabric that he found his true style. He told his publisher, John
Taylor, that he adopted the sobriquet Elia out of regard for the
feelings of his brother John, still a clerk in the South-Sea house
and readily annoyed by trifles. The original Elia was an Italian
with literary tastes whom Lamb remembered as a clerk in the
service of the company; his death was almost contemporaneous
with the borrowing of his name for these essays. Their success
was immediate. Lamb was no new writer, and the authorship
soon became an open secret; but the charm of the anonymous
writer who lavished the treasures of his humour and sympathy
easily and confidentially, talking with his readers from a stand-
point entirely free from condescension, won its way for its own
sake. At the end of 1822, the larger number of the essays were
collected for publication in a separate volume. The second series
of essays did not appear until 1833, long after Lamb's connection
with The London had ceased.
From what has been said in the course of this chapter it will
be seen that a large portion of Lamb's biography can be written
from the essays. His subject was humanity at large, but, in him-
self, he saw its microcosm. Using his own impressions and recol-
lections as a text for his work, he wrote without a trace of egotism
or self-assertion. To himself, he was one of a crowd, sympathis-
ing with its most ordinary pleasures and sorrows. His natural
humility precluded any consciousness of a mission to teach ; he
had not even the ambition to formulate a philosophy of life.
Among his friends were reckoned many whose example might
have fostered this ambition; but, in dedicating himself to the
common duties of daily life, he had learned the lesson of self-
effacement and that sanity of outlook which defends its possessor
13-2


## p. 196 (#220) ############################################

196
Lamb
[CH.
1
0
from the misfortune of taking himself too seriously. Subjective
though his essays are in the sense that they deal largely with
himself and his doings, his personality did not project itself so as
to bend everything within its reach into the shape of its idiosyn-
crasies: it was a receptive surface which reflected the ordinary
life of the world, with added light and colour.
Quickly sensitive to the cloud and sunshine of the moods that
chased each other across it, Lamb's mind identified itself com-
pletely with its subject, and his style is tremulously alive to the
smallest variations of the chequered pageant of life. Its prevailing
intellectual quality is humour. Few writers, since Shakespeare
gave life with equal sympathy to Hamlet and to Falstaff, have
understood so fully as Lamb the intertwining of the ludicrous and
pathetic elements in human nature. Their apparent opposition
was not merely reconciled by him into a complementary relation.
He wedded them into close identity; apprehension and sorrow
were familiar elements of his own life, but the cheerful genius of
laughter was ever ready to recall him to his sense of proportion.
His nervous tendency to laugh at a funeral was, in no small degree,
the result of his innate sense of contrast. The extravagant side of
his humour appears in his inveterate love of punning and in some
incidents of his life in which a fastidious critic might hold him
guilty of a leaning to horse-play. But he himself disclaimed the
reputation of a profest joker'; and the humour of Elia is an
even mixture of tenderness and playfulness. His lighter moods
are subdued by an undertone of pathos; where he writes in
sadness, a sudden thought sheds a transfiguring gaiety upon his
work. "The tender grace of a day that is dead' fills the essays
which deal with his early recollections and suffuses the portraits
which they contain. Yet, the lighter side of the subject is not
forgotten; his portraits are lively representations of their sub-
jects, as the world, and not only the son, brother, or friend saw
them. The mingled affection and amusement with which Lamb
regarded George Dyer, and described his misadventure in the
canal at Islington, is a conspicuous example of the inseparable
union of laughter and pathos in his nature and style.
If, however, tender sentiment plays a large part in his humour,
the reputation of the 'gentle Charles' was not to his liking. Pure
mischief was as strong in him as sympathy, and, like Ariel, he
found pleasure in dazzling his spectators with illusions. It was
quite compatible with his genuine respect for Dyer's unworldliness
to poke fun at it.