Biographical Essays

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Not, however, to conceal any part of the truth, we are bound to
acknowledge that Lamb thought otherwise on this point, manifesting
what seemed to us an extravagant admiration of Hazlitt, and perhaps
even in part for that very glitter which we are denouncing--at
least he did so in a conversation with ourselves. But, on the other
hand, as this conversation travelled a little into the tone of a
disputation, and _our_ frost on this point might seem to
justify some undue fervor by way of balance, it is very possible
that Lamb did not speak his absolute and most dispassionate
judgment. And yet again, if he _did_, may we, with all
reverence for Lamb's exquisite genius, have permission to say--that
his own constitution of intellect sinned by this very habit of
discontinuity. It was a habit of mind not unlikely to be cherished
by his habits of life. Amongst these habits was the excess of his
social kindness. He scorned so much to deny his company and his
redundant hospitality to any man who manifested a wish for either
by calling upon him, that he almost seemed to think it a
criminality in himself if, by accident, he really _was_ from
home on your visit, rather than by possibility a negligence in you,
that had not forewarned him of your intention. All his life, from
this and other causes, he must have read in the spirit of one
liable to sudden interruption; like a dragoon, in fact, reading
with one foot in the stirrup, when expecting momentarily a summons
to mount for action. In such situations, reading by snatches, and
by intervals of precarious leisure, people form the habit of
seeking and unduly valuing condensations of the meaning, where in
reality the truth suffers by this short-hand exhibition, or else
they demand too vivid illustrations of the meaning. Lord
Chesterfield himself, so brilliant a man by nature, already
therefore making a morbid estimate of brilliancy, and so hurried
throughout his life as a public man, read under this double
coercion for craving instantaneous effects. At one period, his only
time for reading was in the morning, whilst under the hands of his
hair-dresser; compelled to take the hastiest of flying shots at his
author, naturally he demanded a very conspicuous mark to fire at.
But the author could not, in so brief a space, be always sure to
crowd any very prominent objects on the eye, unless by being
audaciously oracular and peremptory as regarded the sentiment, or
flashy in excess as regarded its expression. "Come now, my friend,"
was Lord Chesterfield's morning adjuration to his author;" come
now, cut it short--don't prose--don't hum and haw. "The author had
doubtless no ambition to enter his name on the honorable and
ancient roll of gentlemen prosers; probably he conceived himself
not at all tainted with the asthmatic infirmity of humming and
hawing; but, as to "cutting it short," how could he be sure of
meeting his lordship's expectations in that point, unless by
dismissing the limitations that might be requisite to fit the idea
for use, or the adjuncts that might be requisite to integrate its
truth, or the final consequences that might involve some deep
_arriere pensee_, which, coming last in the succession, might
oftentimes be calculated to lie deepest on the mind. To be lawfully
and usefully brilliant after this rapid fashion, a man must come
forward as a refresher of old truths, where _his_ suppressions
are supplied by the reader's memory; not as an expounder of new
truths, where oftentimes a dislocated fraction of the true is more
dangerous than the false itself.

To read therefore habitually, by hurried instalments, has this bad
tendency--that it is likely to found a taste for modes of
composition too artificially irritating, and to disturb the
equilibrium of the judgment in relation to the colorings of style.
Lamb, however, whose constitution of mind was even ideally sound in
reference to the natural, the simple, the genuine, might seem of
all men least liable to a taint in this direction. And undoubtedly
he _was_ so, as regarded those modes of beauty which nature
had specially qualified him for apprehending. Else, and in relation
to other modes of beauty, where his sense of the true, and of its
distinction from the spurious, had been an acquired sense, it is
impossible for us to hide from ourselves--that not through habits
only, not through stress of injurious accidents only, but by
original structure and temperament of mind, Lamb had a bias towards
those very defects on which rested the startling characteristics of
style which we have been noticing. He himself, we fear, not bribed
by indulgent feelings to another, not moved by friendship, but by
native tendency, shrank from the continuous, from the sustained,
from the elaborate.

The elaborate, indeed, without which much truth and beauty must
perish in germ, was by name the object of his invectives. The
instances are many, in his own beautiful essays, where he literally
collapses, literally sinks away from openings suddenly offering
themselves to flights of pathos or solemnity in direct prosecution
of his own theme. On any such summons, where an ascending impulse,
and an untired pinion were required, he _refuses_ himself (to
use military language) invariably. The least observing reader of
_Elia_ cannot have failed to notice that the most felicitous
passages always accomplish their circuit in a few sentences. The
gyration within which his sentiment wheels, no matter of what kind
it may be, is always the shortest possible. It does not prolong
itself, and it does not repeat itself. But in fact, other features
in Lamb's mind would have argued this feature by analogy, had we by
accident been left unaware of it directly. It is not by chance, or
without a deep ground in his nature, _common_ to all his
qualities, both affirmative and negative, that Lamb had an
insensibility to music more absolute than can have been often
shared by any human creature, or perhaps than was ever before
acknowledged so candidly. The sense of music,--as a pleasurable
sense, or as any sense at all other than of certain unmeaning and
impertinent differences in respect to high and low, sharp or flat,
--was utterly obliterated as with a sponge by nature herself from
Lamb's organization. It was a corollary, from the same large
_substratum_ in his nature, that Lamb had no sense of the
rhythmical in prose composition. Rhythmus, or pomp of cadence, or
sonorous ascent of clauses, in the structure of sentences, were
effects of art as much thrown away upon him as the voice of the
charmer upon the deaf adder. We ourselves, occupying the very
station of polar opposition to that of Lamb, being as morbidly,
perhaps, in the one excess as he in the other, naturally detected
this omission in Lamb's nature at an early stage of our
acquaintance. Not the fabled Regulus, with his eyelids torn away,
and his uncurtained eye-balls exposed to the noon-tide glare of a
Carthaginian sun, could have shrieked with more anguish of recoil
from torture than we from certain sentences and periods in which
Lamb perceived no fault at all. _Pomp_, in our apprehension,
was an idea of two categories; the pompous might be spurious, but
it might also be genuine. It is well to love the simple--_we_
love it; nor is there any opposition at all between _that_ and
the very glory of pomp. But, as we once put the case to Lamb, if,
as a musician, as the leader of a mighty orchestra, you had this
theme offered to you--"Belshazzar the king gave a great feast to a
thousand of his lords"--or this," And on a certain day, Marcus
Cicero stood up, and in a set speech rendered solemn thanks to
Caius Caesar for Quintus Ligarius pardoned, and for Marcus
Marcellus restored "--surely no man would deny that, in such a
case, simplicity, though in a passive sense not lawfully absent,
must stand aside as totally insufficient for the positive part.
Simplicity might guide, even here, but could not furnish the power;
a rudder it might be, but not an oar or a sail. This, Lamb was
ready to allow; as an intellectual _quiddity_, he recognized
pomp in the character of a privileged thing; he was obliged to do
so; for take away from great ceremonial festivals, such as the
solemn rendering of thanks, the celebration of national
anniversaries, the commemoration of public benefactors, &c., the
element of pomp, and you take away their very meaning and life;
but, whilst allowing a place for it in the rubric of the logician,
it is certain that, _sensuously_, Lamb would not have
sympathized with it, nor have _felt_ its justification in any
concrete instance. We find a difficulty in pursuing this subject,
without greatly exceeding our limits. We pause, therefore, and add
only this one suggestion as partly explanatory of the case. Lamb
had the dramatic intellect and taste, perhaps in perfection; of the
Epic, he had none at all. Here, as happens sometimes to men of
genius preternaturally endowed in one direction, he might be
considered as almost starved. A favorite of nature, so eminent in
some directions, by what right could he complain that her bounties
were not indiscriminate? From this defect in his nature it arose,
that, except by culture and by reflection, Lamb had no genial
appreciation of Milton. The solemn planetary wheelings of the
Paradise Lost were not to his taste. What he _did_ comprehend,
were the motions like those of lightning, the fierce angular
coruscations of that wild agency which comes forward so vividly in
the sudden _peripetteia_, in the revolutionary catastrophe,
and in the tumultuous conflicts, through persons or through
situations, of the tragic drama.

There is another vice in Mr. Hazlitt's mode of composition, viz.,
the habit of trite quotation, too common to have challenged much
notice, were it not for these reasons: 1st, That Sergeant Talfourd
speaks of it in equivocal terms, as a fault perhaps, but as a
"felicitous" fault, "trailing after it a line of golden
associations;" 2dly, because the practice involves a dishonesty. On
occasion of No. 1, we must profess our belief that a more ample
explanation from the Sergeant would have left him in substantial
harmony with ourselves. We cannot conceive the author of Ion, and
the friend of Wordsworth, seriously to countenance that paralytic
"mouth-diarrhoea," (to borrow a phrase of Coleridge's)--that
_fluxe de bouche_(to borrow an earlier phrase of Archbishop
Huet's) which places the reader at the mercy of a man's tritest
remembrances from his most school-boy reading. To have the verbal
memory infested with tags of verse and "cues" of rhyme is in
itself an infirmity as vulgar and as morbid as the stableboy's
habit of whistling slang airs upon the mere mechanical excitement
of a bar or two whistled by some other blockhead in some other
stable. The very stage has grown weary of ridiculing a folly, that
having been long since expelled from decent society has taken
refuge amongst the most imbecile of authors. Was Mr. Hazlitt then
of that class? No; he was a man of great talents, and of capacity
for greater things than he ever attempted, though without any
pretensions of the philosophic kind ascribed to him by the
Sergeant. Meantime the reason for resisting the example and
practice of Hazlitt lies in this--that essentially it is at war
with sincerity, the foundation of all good writing, to express
one's own thoughts by another man's words. This dilemma arises. The
thought is, or it is not, worthy of that emphasis which belongs to
a metrical expression of it. If it is _not_, then we shall be
guilty of a mere folly in pushing into strong relief that which
confessedly cannot support it. If it _is_, then how incredible
that a thought strongly conceived, and bearing about it the impress
of one's own individuality, should naturally, and without
dissimulation or falsehood, bend to another man's expression of it!
Simply to back one's own view by a similar view derived from
another, may be useful; a quotation that repeats one's own
sentiment, but in a varied form, has the grace which belongs to the
_idem in alio_, the same radical idea expressed with a
difference--similarity in dissimilarity; but to throw one's own
thoughts, matter, and form, through alien organs so absolutely as
to make another man one's interpreter for evil and good, is either
to confess a singular laxity of thinking that can so flexibly adapt
itself to any casual form of words, or else to confess that sort of
carelessness about the expression which draws its real origin from
a sense of indifference about the things to be expressed. Utterly
at war this distressing practice is with all simplicity and
earnestness of writing; it argues a state of indolent ease
inconsistent with the pressure and coercion of strong fermenting
thoughts, before we can be at leisure for idle or chance
quotations. But lastly, in reference to No. 2, we must add that the
practice is signally dishonest. It "trails after it a line of
golden associations." Yes, and the burglar, who leaves an
army-tailor's after a midnight visit, trails after him perhaps a
long roll of gold bullion epaulettes which may look pretty by
lamplight. But _that_, in the present condition of moral
philosophy amongst the police, is accounted robbery; and to benefit
too much by quotations is little less. At this moment we have in
our eye a work, at one time not without celebrity, which is one
continued _cento_ of splendid passages from other people. The
natural effect from so much fine writing is, that the reader rises
with the impression of having been engaged upon a most eloquent
work. Meantime the whole is a series of mosaics; a tessellation
made up from borrowed fragments: and first, when the reader's
attention is expressly directed upon the fact, he becomes aware
that the nominal author has contributed nothing more to the book
than a few passages of transition or brief clauses of connection.

In the year 1796, the main incident occurring of any importance for
English literature was the publication by Southey of an epic poem.
This poem, the _Joan of Arc_, was the earliest work of much
pretension amongst all that Southey wrote; and by many degrees it
was the worst. In the four great narrative poems of his later
years, there is a combination of two striking qualities, viz., a
peculiar command over the _visually_ splendid, connected with
a deep-toned grandeur of moral pathos. Especially we find this
union in the _Thalaba_ and the _Roderick_; but in the
_Joan of Arc_ we miss it. What splendor there is for the fancy
and the eye belongs chiefly to the Vision, contributed by
Coleridge, and this was subsequently withdrawn. The fault lay in
Southey's political relations at that era; his sympathy with the
French Revolution in its earlier stages had been boundless; in all
respects it was a noble sympathy, fading only as the gorgeous
coloring faded from the emblazonries of that awful event, drooping
only when the promises of that golden dawn sickened under
stationary eclipse. In 1796, Southey was yet under the tyranny of
his own earliest fascination: in _his_ eyes the Revolution had
suffered a momentary blight from refluxes of panic; but blight of
some kind is incident to every harvest on which human hopes are
suspended. Bad auguries were also ascending from the unchaining of
martial instincts. But that the Revolution, having ploughed its way
through unparalleled storms, was preparing to face other storms,
did but quicken the apprehensiveness of his love--did but quicken
the duty of giving utterance to this love. Hence came the rapid
composition of the poem, which cost less time in writing than in
printing. Hence, also, came the choice of his heroine. What he
needed in his central character was, a heart with a capacity for
the wrath of Hebrew prophets applied to ancient abuses, and for
evangelic pity applied to the sufferings of nations. This heart,
with this double capacity--where should he seek it? A French heart
it must be, or how should it follow with its sympathies a French
movement? _There_ lay Southey's reason for adopting the Maid
of Orleans as the depositary of hopes and aspirations on behalf of
France as fervid as his own. In choosing this heroine, so
inadequately known at that time, Southey testified at least his own
nobility of feeling; [Endnote: 3] but in executing his choice, he
and his friends overlooked two faults fatal to his purpose. One was
this: sympathy with the French Revolution meant sympathy with the
opening prospects of man--meant sympathy with the Pariah of every
clime--with all that suffered social wrong, or saddened in hopeless
bondage.

That was the movement at work in the French Revolution. But the
movement of Joanne d'Arc took a different direction. In her day
also, it is true, the human heart had yearned after the same vast
enfranchisement for the children of labor as afterwards worked in
the great vision of the French Revolution. In her days also, and
shortly before them, the human hand had sought by bloody acts to
realize this dream of the heart. And in her childhood, Joanna had
not been insensible to these premature motions upon a path too
bloody and too dark to be safe. But this view of human misery had
been utterly absorbed to _her_ by the special misery then
desolating France. The lilies of France had been trampled under
foot by the conquering stranger. Within fifty years, in three
pitched battles that resounded to the ends of the earth, the
chivalry of France had been exterminated. Her oriflamme had been
dragged through the dust. The eldest son of Baptism had been
prostrated. The daughter of France had been surrendered on coercion
as a bride to her English conqueror. The child of that marriage, so
ignominious to the land, was King of France by the consent of
Christendom; that child's uncle domineered as regent of France; and
that child's armies were in military possession of the land. But
were they undisputed masters? No; and there precisely lay the
sorrow of the time. Under a perfect conquest there would have been
repose; whereas the presence of the English armies did but furnish
a plea, masking itself in patriotism, for gatherings everywhere of
lawless marauders; of soldiers that had deserted their banners; and
of robbers by profession. This was the woe of France more even than
the military dishonor. That dishonor had been palliated from the
first by the genealogical pretensions of the English royal family
to the French throne, and these pretensions were strengthened in
the person of the present claimant. But the military desolation of
France, this it was that woke the faith of Joanna in her own
heavenly mission of deliverance. It was the attitude of her
prostrate country, crying night and day for purification from
blood, and not from feudal oppression, that swallowed up the
thoughts of the impassioned girl. But _that_ was not the cry
that uttered itself afterwards in the French Revolution. In
Joanna's days, the first step towards rest for France was by
expulsion of the foreigner. Independence of a foreign yoke,
liberation as between people and people, was the one ransom to be
paid for French honor and peace. _That_ debt settled, there
might come a time for thinking of civil liberties. But this time
was not within the prospects of the poor shepherdess The field--the
area of her sympathies never coincided with that of the
Revolutionary period. It followed therefore, that Southey
_could_ not have raided Joanna (with her condition of feeling)
by any management, into the interpreter of his own. That was the
first error in his poem, and it was irremediable. The second
was--and strangely enough this also escaped notice--that the
heroine of Southey is made to close her career precisely at the
point when its grandeur commences. She believed herself to have a
mission for the deliverance of France; and the great instrument
which she was authorized to use towards this end, was the king,
Charles VII. Him she was to crown. With this coronation, her
triumph, in the plain historical sense, ended. And _there_
ends Southey's poem. But exactly at this point, the grander stage
of her mission commences, viz., the ransom which she, a solitary
girl, paid in her own person for the national deliverance. The
grander half of the story was thus sacrificed, as being irrelevant
to Southey's political object; and yet, after all, the half which
he retained did not at all symbolize that object. It is singular,
indeed, to find a long poem, on an ancient subject, adapting itself
hieroglyphically to a modern purpose; 2dly, to find it failing of
this purpose; and 3dly, if it had not failed, so planned that it
could have succeeded only by a sacrifice of all that was grandest
in the theme.

To these capital oversights, Southey, Coleridge, and Lamb, were all
joint parties; the two first as concerned in the composition, the
last as a frank though friendly reviewer of it in his private
correspondence with Coleridge. It is, however, some palliation of
these oversights, and a very singular fact in itself, that neither
from English authorities nor from French, though the two nations
were equally brought into close connection with the career of that
extraordinary girl, could any adequate view be obtained of her
character and acts. The official records of her trial, apart from
which nothing can be depended upon, were first in the course of
publication from the Paris press during the currency of last year.
First in 1847, about four hundred and sixteen years after her ashes
had been dispersed to the winds, could it be seen distinctly,
through the clouds of fierce partisanships and national prejudices,
what had been the frenzy of the persecution against her, and the
utter desolation of her position; what had been the grandeur of her
conscientious resistance.

Anxious that our readers should see Lamb from as many angles as
possible, we have obtained from an old friend of his a
memorial--slight, but such as the circumstances allowed--of an
evening spent with Charles and Mary Lamb, in the winter of 1821-22.
The record is of the most unambitious character; it pretends to
nothing, as the reader will see, not so much as to a pun, which it
really required some singularity of luck to have missed from
Charles Lamb, who often continued to fire puns, as minute guns, all
through the evening. But the more unpretending this record is, the
more appropriate it becomes by that very fact to the memory of
_him_ who, amongst all authors, was the humblest and least
pretending. We have often thought that the famous epitaph written
for his grave by Piron, the cynical author of _La Metromanie_,
might have come from Lamb, were it not for one objection; Lamb's
benign heart would have recoiled from a sarcasm, however effective,
inscribed upon a grave-stone; or from a jest, however playful, that
tended to a vindictive sneer amongst his own farewell words. We
once translated this Piron epitaph into a kind of rambling Drayton
couplet; and the only point needing explanation is, that, from the
accident of scientific men, Fellows of the Royal Society being
usually very solemn men, with an extra chance, therefore, for being
dull men in conversation, naturally it arose that some wit amongst
our great-grandfathers translated F. R. S. into a short-hand
expression for a Fellow Remarkably Stupid; to which version of the
three letters our English epitaph alludes. The French original of
Piron is this:

"Ci git Piron; qui ne fut rien;
Pas meme acadamicien."

The bitter arrow of the second line was feathered to hit the French
Acadamie, who had declined to elect him a member. Our translation
is this:

"Here lies Piron; who was--nothing; or, if _that_ could be,
was less:
How!--nothing? Yes, nothing; not so much as F. R. S."

But now to our friend's memorandum:

October 6, 1848.

MY DEAR X.--You ask me for some memorial, however trivial, of any
dinner party, supper party, water party, no matter what, that I can
circumstantially recall to recollection, by any features whatever,
puns or repartees, wisdom or wit, connecting it with Charles Lamb.
I grieve to say that my meetings of any sort with Lamb were few,
though spread through a score of years. That sounds odd for one
that loved Lamb so entirely, and so much venerated his character.
But the reason was, that I so seldom visited London, and Lamb so
seldom quitted it. Somewhere about 1810 and 1812 I must have met
Lamb repeatedly at the _Courier Office_ in the Strand; that
is, at Coleridge's, to whom, as an intimate friend, Mr. Stuart (a
proprietor of the paper) gave up for a time the use of some rooms
in the office. Thither, in the London season, (May especially and
June,) resorted Lamb, Godwin, Sir H. Davy, and, once or twice,
Wordsworth, who visited Sir George Beaumont's Leicestershire
residence of Coleorton early in the spring, and then travelled up
to Grosvenor Square with Sir George and Lady Beaumont; _spectatum
veniens, veniens spectetur ut ipse_.

But in these miscellaneous gatherings, Lamb said little, except
when an opening arose for a pun. And how effectual that sort of
small shot was from _him_, I need not say to anybody who
remembers his infirmity of stammering, and his dexterous management
of it for purposes of light and shade. He was often able to train
the roll of stammers into settling upon the words immediately
preceding the effective one; by which means the key-note of the
jest or sarcasm, benefiting by the sudden liberation of his
embargoed voice, was delivered with the force of a pistol shot.
That stammer was worth an annuity to him as an ally of his wit.
Firing under cover of that advantage, he did triple execution; for,
in the first place, the distressing sympathy of the hearers with
_his_ distress of utterance won for him unavoidably the
silence of deep attention; and then, whilst he had us all hoaxed
into this attitude of mute suspense by an appearance of distress
that he perhaps did not really feel, down came a plunging shot into
the very thick of us, with ten times the effect it would else have
had. If his stammering, however, often did him true "yeoman's
service," sometimes it led him into scrapes. Coleridge told me of a
ludicrous embarrassment which it caused him at Hastings. Lamb had
been medically advised to a course of sea-bathing; and accordingly
at the door of his bathing machine, whilst he stood shivering with
cold, two stout fellows laid hold of him, one at each shoulder,
like heraldic supporters; they waited for the word of command from
their principal, who began the following oration to them: "Hear me,
men! Take notice of this--I am to be dipped." What more he would
have said is unknown to land or sea or bathing machines; for having
reached the word dipped, he commenced such a rolling fire of
Di--di--di--di, that when at length he descended _a plomb_
upon the full word _dipped_, the two men, rather tired of the
long suspense, became satisfied that they had reached what lawyers
call the "operative" clause of the sentence; and both exclaiming at
once, "Oh yes, Sir, we're quite aware of _that_," down they
plunged him into the sea. On emerging, Lamb sobbed so much from the
cold, that he found no voice suitable to his indignation; from
necessity he seemed tranquil; and again addressing the men, who
stood respectfully listening, he began thus: "Men! is it possible
to obtain your attention?" "Oh surely, Sir, by all means." "Then
listen: once more I tell you, I am to be di--di--di--"--and then,
with a burst of indignation," dipped, I tell you,"--"Oh decidedly,
Sir," rejoined the men, "decidedly," and down the stammerer went
for the second time. Petrified with cold and wrath, once more Lamb
made a feeble attempt at explanation--" Grant me pa--pa--patience;
is it mum--um--murder you me--me--mean? Again and a--ga--ga--gain,
I tell you, I'm to be di--di--di--dipped," now speaking furiously,
with the voice of an injured man. "Oh yes, Sir," the men replied,
"we know that, we fully understood it," and for the third time down
went Lamb into the sea." Oh limbs of Satan!" he said, on coming up
for the third time, "it's now too late; I tell you that I am--no,
that I _was_--to be di--di--di--dipped only _once_."

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