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The Best Letters of Charles Lamb, a non-fiction book by Charles Lamb |
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_ LETTER LXXXI TO LETTER XC LETTER LXXXI. TO BERNARD BARTON _April_, 1824. Dear B.B.,--I am sure I cannot fill a letter, though I should disfurnish my skull to fill it; but you expect something, and shall have a notelet. Is Sunday, not divinely speaking, but humanly and holiday-sically, a blessing? Without its institution, would our rugged taskmasters have given us a leisure day so often, think you, as once in a month? or, if it had not been instituted, might they not have given us every sixth day? Solve me this problem. If we are to go three times a-day to church, why has Sunday slipped into the notion of a _holi_day? A HOLY-day, I grant it. The Puritans, I have read in Southey's book, knew the distinction. They made people observe Sunday rigorously, would not let a nurserymaid walk out in the fields with children for recreation on that day. But _then_ they gave the people a holiday from all sorts of work every second Tuesday. This was giving to the two Caesars that which was _his_ respective. Wise, beautiful, thoughtful, generous legislators! Would Wilberforce give us our Tuesdays? No; he would turn the six days into sevenths,--
A hasty farewell, C. LAMB. [1] Lamb had confessed, in a previous letter to Barton, to having once wantonly set a dog upon a cray-fish.
LETTER LXXXII. TO BERNARD BARTON. _May_ 15, 1824. Dear B. B.,--I am oppressed with business all day, and company all night. But I will snatch a quarter of an hour. Your recent acquisitions of the picture and the letter are greatly to be congratulated. I too have a picture of my father and the copy of his first love-verses; but they have been mine long. Blake is a real name, I assure you, and a most extraordinary man, if he is still living. He is the Robert [William] Blake whose wild designs accompany a splendid folio edition of the "Night Thoughts," which you may have seen, in one of which he pictures the parting of soul and body by a solid mass of human form floating off, God knows how, from a lumpish mass (fac-simile to itself) left behind on the dying bed. He paints in water-colors marvellous strange pictures, visions of his brain, which he asserts that he has seen; they have great merit. He has _seen_ the old Welsh bards on Snowdon,--he has seen the beautifullest, the strongest, and the ugliest man, left alone from the massacre of the Britons by the Romans, and has painted them from memory (I have seen his paintings), and asserts them to be as good as the figures of Raphael and Angelo, but not better, as they had precisely the same retro-visions and prophetic visions with themself [himself]. The painters in oil (which he will have it that neither of them practised) he affirms to have been the ruin of art, and affirms that all the while he was engaged in his Welsh paintings, Titian was disturbing him,-- Titian the Ill Genius of Oil Painting. His pictures--one in particular, the Canterbury Pilgrims, far above Stothard--have great merit, but hard, dry, yet with grace. He has written a Catalogue of them, with a most spirited criticism on Chaucer, but mystical and full of vision. His poems have been sold hitherto only in manuscript. I never read them; but a friend at my desire procured the "Sweep Song." There is one to a tiger, which I have heard recited, beginning,--
With the exception of an Epilogue for a Private Theatrical, I have written nothing new for near six months. It is in vain to spur me on. I must wait. I cannot write without a genial impulse, and I have none. 'T is barren all and dearth. No matter; life is something without scribbling. I have got rid of my bad spirits, and hold up pretty well this rain-damned May. So we have lost another poet. [3] I never much relished his Lordship's mind, and shall be sorry if the Greeks have cause to miss him. He was to me offensive, and I never can make out his real _power_, which his admirers talk of. Why, a, line of Wordsworth's is a lever to lift the immortal spirit; Byron can only move the spleen. He was at best a satirist. In any other way, he was mean enough. I daresay I do him injustice; but I cannot love him, nor squeeze a tear to his memory. He did not like the world, and he has left it, as Alderman Curtis advised the Radicals, "if they don't like their country, damn 'em, let 'em leave it," they possessing no rood of ground in England, and he ten thousand acres. Byron was better than many Curtises. Farewell, and accept this apology for a letter from one who owes you so much in that kind. Yours ever truly, C. L. [1] "The Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, and Climbing-Boy's Album,"--a book, by James Montgomery, setting forth the wrongs of the little chimney-sweepers, for whose relief a society had been started. [2] The Society for Ameliorating the Condition of Infant Chimney-Sweepers. [3] Byron had died on April 19.
LETTER LXXXIII. TO BERNARD BARTON. _August_, 1824. I can no more understand Shelley than you can; his poetry is "thin sown with profit or delight." Yet I must point to your notice a sonnet conceived and expressed with a witty delicacy. It is that addressed to one who hated him, but who could not persuade him to hate _him_ again. His coyness to the other's passion--for hate demands a return as much as love, and starves without it--is most arch and pleasant. Pray, like it very much. For his theories and nostrums, they are oracular enough, but I either comprehend 'em not, or there is "miching malice" and mischief in 'em, but, for the most part, ringing with their own emptiness. Hazlitt said well of 'em: "Many are the wiser and better for reading Shakspeare, but nobody was ever wiser or better for reading Shelley." I wonder you will sow your correspondence on so barren a ground as I am, that make such poor returns. But my head aches at the bare thought of letter-writing. I wish all the ink in the ocean dried up, and would listen to the quills shivering up in the candle flame, like parching martyrs. The same indisposition to write it is has stopped my "Elias;" but you will see a futile effort in the next number, [1] "wrung from me with slow pain." The fact is, my head is seldom cool enough. I am dreadfully indolent. To have to do anything--to order me a new coat, for instance, though my old buttons are shelled like beans--is an effort. My pen stammers like my tongue. What cool craniums those old inditers of folios must have had, what a mortified pulse! Well, once more I throw myself on your mercy. Wishing peace in thy new dwelling, C. LAMB. [1] The essay "Blakesmoor in Hertfordshire," in the "London Magazine" for September, 1824.
LETTER LXXXIV. TO BERNARD BARTON. _December_ 1, 1824. Taylor and Hessey, finding their magazine [1] goes off very heavily at 2_s_. 6_d_., are prudently going to raise their price another shilling; and having already more authors than they want, intend to increase the number of them. If they set up against the "New Monthly," they must change their present hands. It is not tying the dead carcase of a review to a half-dead magazine will do their business. It is like George Dyer multiplying his volumes to make 'em sell better. When he finds one will not go off, he publishes two; two stick, he tries three; three hang fire, he is confident that four will have a better chance. And now, my dear sir, trifling apart, the gloomy catastrophe of yesterday morning prompts a sadder vein. The fate of the unfortunate Fauntleroy [2] makes me, whether I will or no, to cast reflecting eyes around on such of my friends as, by a parity of situation, are exposed to a similarity of temptation. My very style seems to myself to become more impressive than usual, with the change of theme. Who, that standeth, knoweth but he may yet fall? Your hands as yet, I am most willing to believe, have never deviated, into others' property; you think it impossible that you could ever commit so heinous an offence. But so thought Fauntleroy once; so have thought many besides him, who at last have expiated as he hath done. You are as yet upright; but you are a banker,--at least, the next thing to it. I feel the delicacy of the subject; but cash must pass through your hands, sometimes to a great amount. If in an unguarded hour--But I will hope better. Consider the scandal it will bring upon those of your persuasion. Thousands would go to see a Quaker hanged, that would be indifferent to the fate of a Presbyterian or an Anabaptist. Think of the effect it would have on the sale of your poems alone, not to mention higher considerations! I tremble, I am sure, at myself, when I think that so many poor victims of the law, at one time of their life, made as sure of never being hanged as I, in my presumption, am too ready to do myself. What are we better than they? Do we come into the world with different necks? Is there any distinctive mark under our left ears? Are we unstrangulable, I ask you? Think of these things. I am shocked sometimes at the shape of my own fingers, not for their resemblance to the ape tribe (which is something), but for the exquisite adaptation of them to the purposes of picking fingering, etc. No one that is so framed, I maintain it, but should tremble. C. L. [1] Taylor and Hessey succeeded John Scott as editors of the "London Magazine" (of which they were also publishers), and it was to this periodical that most of Lamb's Elia Essays were contributed. [2] The forger, hanged Nov. 30, 1824. This was the last execution for this offence.
LETTER LXXXV. TO BERNARD BARTON. _March_ 23, 1825. Dear B. B.,--I have had no impulse to write, or attend to any single object but myself for weeks past,--my single self, I by myself, I. I am sick of hope deferred. The grand wheel is in agitation that is to turn up my fortune; but round it rolls, and will turn up nothing. I have a glimpse of freedom, of becoming a gentleman at large; but I am put off from day to day. I have offered my resignation, and it is neither accepted nor rejected. Eight weeks am I kept in this fearful suspense. Guess what an absorbing stake I feel it. I am not conscious of the existence of friends present or absent. The East India Directors alone can be that thing to me or not. I have just learned that nothing will be decided this week. Why the next? Why any week? It has fretted me into an itch of the fingers; I rub 'em against paper, and write to you, rather than not allay this scorbuta. While I can write, let me adjure you to have no doubts of Irving. Let Mr. Mitford drop his disrespect. Irving has prefixed a dedication (of a missionary subject, first part) to Coleridge, the most beautiful, cordial, and sincere. He there acknowledges his obligation to S. T. C. for his knowledge of Gospel truths, the nature of a Christian Church, etc.,--to the talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (at whose Gamaliel feet he sits weekly), rather than to that of all the men living. This from him, the great dandled and petted sectarian, to a religious character so equivocal in the world's eye as that of S. T. C., so foreign to the Kirk's estimate,--can this man be a quack? The language is as affecting as the spirit of the dedication. Some friend told him, "This dedication will do you no good,"--_i. e._, not in the world's repute, or with your own people. "That is a reason for doing it," quoth Irving. I am thoroughly pleased with him. He is firm, out-speaking, intrepid, and docile as a pupil of Pythagoras. You must like him. Yours, in tremors of painful hope, C. LAMB.
LETTER LXXXVI. TO WORDSWORTH _April_ 6, 1825 Dear Wordsworth,--I have been several times meditating a letter to you concerning the good thing which has befallen me; but the thought of poor Monkhouse [1] came across me. He was one that I had exulted in the prospect of congratulating me. He and you were to have been the first participators; for indeed it has been ten weeks since the first motion of it. Here am I then, after thirty-three years' slavery, sitting in my own room at eleven o'clock this finest of all April mornings, a freed man, with L441 a year for the remainder of my life, live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at ninety: L441; _i.e., L450_, with a deduction of L9 for a provision secured to my sister, she being survivor, the pension guaranteed by Act Georgii Tertii, etc. I came home FOREVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me; it was like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long as three, _i.e._, to have three times as much real time--time that is my own--in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I was not. But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift. Holidays, even the annual month, were always uneasy joys,--their conscious fugitiveness; the craving after making the most of them. Now, when all is holiday, there are no holidays. I can sit at home, in rain or shine, without a restless impulse for walkings. I am daily steadying, and shall soon find it as natural to me to be my own master as it has been irksome to have had a master. Mary wakes every morning with an obscure feeling that some good has happened to us. Leigh Hunt and Montgomery, after their releasements, describe the shock of their emancipation much as I feel mine. But it hurt their frames. I eat, drink, and sleep sound as ever, I lay no anxious schemes for going hither and thither, but take things as they occur. Yesterday I excursioned twenty miles; to-day I write a few letters. Pleasuring was for fugitive play-days: mine are fugitive only in the sense that life is fugitive. Freedom and life co-existent! At the foot of such a call upon you for gratulation, I am ashamed to advert to that melancholy event. Monkhouse was a character I learned to love slowly; but it grew upon me yearly, monthly, daily. What a chasm has it made in our pleasant parties! His noble, friendly face was always coming before me, till this hurrying event in my life came, and for the time has absorbed all interest; in fact, it has shaken me a little. My old desk companions, with whom I have had such merry hours, seem to reproach me for removing my lot from among them. They were pleasant creatures; but to the anxieties of business, and a weight of possible worse ever impending, I was not equal. Tuthill and Gilman gave me my certificates; I laughed at the friendly lie implied in them. But my sister shook her head, and said it was all true. Indeed, this last winter I was jaded out; winters were always worse than other parts of the year, because the spirits are worse, and I had no daylight. In summer I had daylight evenings. The relief was hinted to me from a superior power when I, poor slave, had not a hope but that I must wait another seven years with Jacob; and lo! the Rachel which I coveted is brought to me. [1] Wordsworth's cousin, who was ill of consumption in Devonshire. He died the following year.
LETTER LXXXVII. TO BERNARD BARTON. _April_ 6, 1825. Dear B.B.,--My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my recent emancipation that I have scarce steadiness of hand, much more mind, to compose a letter. I am free, B.B.,--free as air!
B.B., I would not serve another seven years for seven hundred thousand pounds! I have got L441 net for life, sanctioned by Act of Parliament, with a provision for Mary if she survives me. I will live another fifty years; or if I live but ten, they will be thirty, reckoning the quantity of real time in them,--_i.e._, the time that is a man's own, Tell me how you like "Barbara S.;" [2] will it be received in atonement for the foolish "Vision"--I mean by the lady? _A propos_, I never saw Mrs. Crawford in my life; nevertheless, it's all true of somebody. Address me, in future, Colebrooke Cottage, Islington, I am really nervous (but that will wear off), so take this brief announcement. C.L. [1] "The birds that wanton in the air [2] The Elia essay. Fanny Kelly was the original of "Barbara S."
LETTER LXXXVIII. TO BERNARD BARTON. _July_ 2, 1825. I am hardly able to appreciate your volume now; [1] but I liked the dedication much, and the apology for your bald burying grounds. To Shelley--but _that_ is not new, To the young Vesper-singer, Great Bealings, Playford, and what not. If there be a cavil, it is that the topics of religious consolation, however beautiful, are repeated till a sort of triteness attends them. It seems as if you were forever losing Friends' children by death, and reminding their parents of the Resurrection. Do children die so often and so good in your parts? The topic taken from the consideration that they are snatched away from _possible vanities_ seems hardly sound; for to an Omniscient eye their conditional failings must be one with their actual. But I am too unwell for theology. Such as I am, I am yours and A.K.'s truly, C. LAMB. [1] "Barton's volume of Poems."
LETTER LXXXIX. TO BERNARD BARTON. _August_ 10, 1825. We shall be soon again at Colebrooke. Dear B.B.,--You must excuse my not writing before, when I tell you we are on a visit at Enfield, where I do not feel it natural to sit down to a letter. It is at all times an exertion. I had rather talk with you and Anne Knight quietly at Colebrooke Lodge over the matter of your last. You mistake me when you express misgivings about my relishing a series of Scriptural poems. I wrote confusedly; what I meant to say was, that one or two consolatory poems on deaths would have had a more condensed effect than many. Scriptural, devotional topics, admit of infinite variety. So far from poetry tiring me because religious, I can read, and I say it seriously, the homely old version of the Psalms in our Prayer-books for an hour or two together sometimes, without sense of weariness. I did not express myself clearly about what I think a false topic, insisted on so frequently in consolatory addresses on the death of infants. I know something like it is in Scripture, but I think humanly spoken. It is a natural thought, a sweet fallacy, to the survivors, but still a fallacy. If it stands on the doctrine of this being a probationary state, it is liable to this dilemma. Omniscience, to whom possibility must be clear as act, must know of the child what it would hereafter turn out: if good, then the topic is false to say it is secured from falling into future wilfulness, vice, etc. If bad, I do not see how its exemption from certain future overt acts by being snatched away at all tells in its favor. You stop the arm of a murderer, or arrest the finger of a pickpurse; but is not the guilt incurred as much by the intent as if never so much acted? Why children are hurried off, and old reprobates of a hundred left, whose trial humanly we may think was complete at fifty, is among the obscurities of providence, The very notion of a state of probation has darkness in it. The All-knower has no need of satisfying his eyes by seeing what we will do, when he knows before what we will do. Methinks we might be condemned before commission. In these things we grope and flounder; and if we can pick up a little human comfort that the child taken is snatched from vice (no great compliment to it, by the by), let us take it. And as to where an untried child goes, whether to join the assembly of its elders who have borne the heat of the day,--fire-purified martyrs and torment-sifted confessors,--what know we? We promise heaven, methinks, too cheaply, and assign large revenues to minors incompetent to manage them. Epitaphs run upon this topic of consolation till the very frequency induces a cheapness. Tickets for admission into paradise are sculptured out a penny a letter, twopence a syllable, etc. It is all a mystery; and the more I try to express my meaning (having none that is clear), the more I flounder. Finally, write what your own conscience, which to you is the unerring judge, deems best, and be careless about the whimsies of such a half-baked notionist as I am. We are here in a most pleasant country, full of walks, and idle to our heart's desire. Taylor has dropped the "London." It was indeed a dead weight. It had got in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand, like Christian, with light and merry shoulders. It had got silly, indecorous, pert, and everything that is bad. Both our kind _remembrances_ to Mrs. K. and yourself, and strangers'-greeting to Lucy,--is it Lucy, or Ruth?--that gathers wise sayings in a Book. C. LAMB.
LETTER XC. TO SOUTHEY. _August_ 19, 1825. Dear Southey,--You'll know whom this letter comes from by opening slap-dash upon the text, as in the good old times. I never could come into the custom of envelopes,--'tis a modern foppery; the Plinian correspondence gives no hint of such. In singleness of sheet and meaning, then, I thank you for your little book. I am ashamed to add a codicil of thanks for your "Book of the Church." I scarce feel competent to give an opinion of the latter; I have not reading enough of that kind to venture at it. I can only say the fact, that I have read it with attention and interest. Being, as you know, not quite a Churchman, I felt a jealousy at the Church taking to herself the whole deserts of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, from Druid extirpation downwards. I call all good Christians the Church. Capillarians and all. But I am in too light a humor to touch these matters. May all our churches flourish! Two things staggered me in the poem (and one of them staggered both of as): I cannot away with a beautiful series of verses, as I protest they are, commencing "Jenner," 'Tis like a choice banquet opened with a pill or an electuary,--physic stuff. T'other is, we cannot make out how Edith should be no more than ten years old. By 'r Lady, we had taken her to be some sixteen or upwards. We suppose you have only chosen the round number for the metre. Or poem and dedication may be both older than they pretend to,--but then some hint might have been given; for, as it stands, it may only serve some day to puzzle the parish reckoning. But without inquiring further (for 'tis ungracious to look into a lady's years), the dedication is eminently pleasing and tender, and we wish Edith May Southey joy of it. Something, too, struck us as if we had heard of the death of John May. A John May's death was a few years since in the papers. We think the tale one of the quietest, prettiest things we have seen. You have been temperate in the use of localities, which generally spoil poems laid in exotic regions. You mostly cannot stir out (in such things) for humming-birds and fireflies. A tree is a Magnolia, etc.--Can I but like the truly Catholic spirit? "Blame as thou mayest the Papist's erring creed,"--which and other passages brought me back to the old Anthology days and the admonitory lesson to "Dear George" on "The Vesper Bell," a little poem which retains its first hold upon me strangely. The compliment to the translatress is daintily conceived. Nothing is choicer in that sort of writing than to bring in some remote, impossible parallel,--as between a great empress and the inobtrusive, quiet soul who digged her noiseless way so perseveringly through that rugged Paraguay mine. How she Dobrizhoffered it all out, it puzzles my slender Latinity to conjecture. Why do you seem to sanction Landor's unfeeling allegorizing away of honest Quixote? He may as well say Strap is meant to symbolize the Scottish nation before the Union, and Random since that Act of dubious issue; or that Partridge means the Mystical Man, and Lady Bellaston typifies the Woman upon Many Waters. Gebir, indeed, may mean the state of the hop markets last month, for anything I know to the contrary. That all Spain overflowed with romancical books (as Madge Newcastle calls them) was no reason that Cervantes should not smile at the matter of them; nor even a reason that, in another mood, he might not multiply them, deeply as he was tinctured with the essence of them. Quixote is the father of gentle ridicule, and at the same time the very depository and treasury of chivalry and highest notions. Marry, when somebody persuaded Cervantes that he meant only fun, and put him upon writing that unfortunate Second Part, with the confederacies of that unworthy duke and most contemptible duchess, Cervantes sacrificed his instinct to his understanding. We got your little book but last night, being at Enfield, to which place we came about a month since, and are having quiet holidays. Mary walks her twelve miles a day some days, and I my twenty on others. 'T is all holiday with me now, you know; the change works admirably. For literary news, in my poor way, I have a one-act farce [1] going to be acted at Haymarket; but when? is the question, 'Tis an extravaganza, and like enough to follow "Mr. H." "The London Magazine" has shifted its publishers once more, and I shall shift myself out of it. It is fallen. My ambition is not at present higher than to write nonsense for the playhouses, to eke out a something contracted income. _Tempus erat_. There was a time, my dear Cornwallis, when the muse, etc. But I am now in Mac Flecknoe's predicament,-- "Promised a play, and dwindled to a farce." Coleridge is better (was, at least, a few weeks since) than he has been for years. His accomplishing his book at last has been a source of vigor to him. We are on a half visit to his friend Allsop, at a Mrs. Leishman's, Enfield, but expect to be at Colebrooke Cottage in a week or so, where, or anywhere, I shall be always most happy to receive tidings from you. G. Dyer is in the height of an uxorious paradise. His honeymoon will not wane till he wax cold. Never was a more happy pair, since Acme and Septimius, and longer. Farewell, with many thanks, dear S. Our loves to all round your Wrekin. Your old friend, C. LAMB. [1] Probably "The Pawnbroker's Daughter," which happily was not destined to be performed.--AINGER. _ |
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