My Friends and Acquaintance
Charles Lamb II
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II.
CHARLES LAMB AT HOME, ABROAD, AND AMONG HIS BOOKS.
I am bound to say that my
acquaintance with Charles Lamb, during his residence
at Islington, offered little to confirm the associations which Hazlitt has connected with those palmy days when his residence was the
resort of all those who “called Admiral
Burney friend.” When I knew him, his house had, for various
reasons wholly unconnected with any change in the Lambs themselves,
degenerated, for the most part, into the trysting place of a little anomalous coterie of
strenuous idlers and “Curious Impertinents,” who, without the smallest
power of appreciating the qualities of mind and character which nominally brought them
together, came there to pass the time under a species of excitement a little different from
their ordinary modes of social intercourse—alternating “an evening at the
Lambs’” with ![]()
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a half-price
to the play, or a visit to the wild beasts at Exeter ’Change. Certain it is, that not
one out of twenty ever came there with the remotest thought of enjoying the society of
Lamb and his sister, and quite as little for that of the
distinguished men who still occasionally sought the residence of Lamb
with that view. Still more certain is it that Lamb himself did not
shine in this sort of “mixed company”—this strange olla podrida of intellect,
oddity, and commonplace. It might be an “Entertaining Miscellany” to him, but
it was one in which he rarely or never published any of those exquisite Eliaisms of which
his mind and heart were made up. He was everything that was kind and cordial in his welcome
to all comers, and his sister used to bustle and potter about like a gentle housewife, to
make everybody comfortable; but you might almost as well have been in the apartments of any
other clerk of the India House, for anything you heard that was deserving of note or
recollection.
The fact is, that in ordinary society, if Lamb was not an ordinary man, he was only an odd and strange one—displaying
no ![]()
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superior knowledge or wit or wisdom or eloquence, but only that
invariable accompaniment of genius, a moral incapacity to subside into the conventional
cant or the flat commonplace of everyday life. He would do anything to gratify his guests
but that. He would joke, or mystify, or pun, or play the buffoon; but he could not bring
himself to prose, or preach, or play the philosopher. He could not be himself (for others, I mean) except when something out of himself made him so;
but he could not be anything at variance with himself to please a king.
The consequence was, that to those who did not know him, or, knowing, did
not or could not appreciate him, Lamb often passed
for something between an imbecile, a brute, and a buffoon; and the first impression he made
on ordinary people was always unfavourable—sometimes to a violent and repulsive degree.
Hazlitt has somewhere said of him in substance
(with about an equal portion of truth and exaggeration, but with an exact feeling of the truth in the very exaggeration) that Lamb was
always on a par with his company, however high or however low it ![]()
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might
be. But, somehow or other, silly or ridiculous people have an instinct that makes them feel
it as a sort of personal offence if you treat them as if you fancied yourself no better
than they. They know it to be a hoax upon them, manage it how you may, and they resent it
accordingly.
Now, Lamb was very apt to play fast
and loose with his literary reputation in this way, and would certainly rather have passed
with nine-tenths of the world for a fool than for a philosopher, a wit, or a man of
letters. And I cannot help thinking it was his deep sympathy with mankind, and especially
with the poor, whether in spirit or in purse, that was the cause of this. He did not like
to be thought different from his fellow-men, and he knew that, in the vocabulary of the
ordinary world, “a man of genius” seldom means anything better, and often
something worse, than an object of mingled fear, pity, and contempt.
The truth is, that the Elia of private
life could be known and appreciated only by his friends and intimates, and even by them
only at home. He shone, and was answerable to ![]()
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his literary and social
reputation, only in a tête-à-tête, or in those unpremeditated colloquies over his own
table, or by his own fireside, in which his sister and one or two more friends took part,
and in which every inanimate object about him was as familiar as the “household
words” in which he uttered his deep and subtle thoughts, his quaint and
strange fancies, and his sweet and humane philosophy. Under these circumstances, he was
perfectly and emphatically a natural person, and there was not a vestige of that startling
oddity and extravagance which subjected him to the charge of affecting to be
“singular” and “original” in his notions, feelings, and opinions.
In any other species of “company” than that to which I have just
referred, however cultivated or intellectual it might be, Lamb was unquestionably liable to the charge of seeming to court attention
by the strangeness and novelty of his opinions, rather than by their justness and truth—he
was liable and open to this charge, but as certainly he did not deserve it; for affectation
supposes a something assumed, put on, pretended—and ![]()
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of this,
Lamb was physically as well as morally incapable. His strangeness
and oddity under the one set of circumstances, was as natural to him as his naturalness and
simplicity under the other. In the former case, he was not at ease—not a free agent—not his
own man; but Cabin’d, cribbed, confined, Bound in by saucy doubts and fears |
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that were cast about him by his “reputation”—which trammelled and hampered
him by claims that he had neither the strength cordially to repudiate, nor the weakness
cordially to embrace; and in struggling between the two inclinations, he was able to
exhibit nothing but the salient and superficial points of his mind and character, as
moulded and modified by a state of society so utterly at variance with all his own
deliberate views and feelings, as to what it might be, or at least, might have been, that
he shrank from the contemplation of it with an almost convulsive movement of pain and
disgust, or sought refuge from it in the solitary places of his own thoughts and fancies.
When forced into contact with “the world’s true world-![]()
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lings,” being anything but one of themselves, he knew that he could not show like
them, and yet feared to pain or affront their feelings by seeming too widely different; and
between the two it was impossible to guess beforehand what he would do or be under any
given circumstances; he himself being the last person capable of predicating on the point.
The consequence was, that when the exigency arrived, he was anything or nothing, as the
turn of the case or the temper of the moment might impel him; he was equally likely to
outrage or to delight the persons in whose company he might fall, or else, to be regarded
by them as a mere piece of human still-life, claiming no more notice or remembrance than an
old-fashioned portrait, or a piece of odd-looking old china.
What an exquisite contrast to all this did Lamb’s intercourse with his friends present! Then, and then only, was
he himself; for assuredly he was not so when in the sole company of his own thoughts,
unless when they were communing with those of his dearest friends of all—his old books—his
“midnight darlings,” as he endearingly calls ![]()
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them somewhere, in a tone and spirit which prove that he loved them better than any of his
friends of the living world, and cared not if the latter knew it.
Yet I’m afraid it does not follow that Lamb was happier among his books than with his friends; he was only more
himself. In fact, there was a constitutional sadness about
Lamb’s mind, which nothing could overcome but an actual
personal interchange of thought and sentiment with those, whoever they might be, whose tone
and cast of intellect were in some sort correspondent with his own. And though in his
intercourse with his beloved old books, he found infinitely more of this correspondence
than the minds of his most choice living friends could furnish; yet in the former there was
wanting that reciprocal action which constitutes the soul of human intercourse.
Lamb could listen with delight to the talk of his books, but they
could not listen to him in return; and his spirit was so essentially and emphatically a human one, that it was only in the performance and interchange of
human offices and instincts it could exist in its happiest ![]()
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form and
aspect. Unlike his friends, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lamb was not a man whose
mind was sufficient to itself, and could dwell for ever, if need were, in the world of its
own thoughts, or that which the thoughts of others had created for it. He delighted to visit those worlds, and found there, it may be, his purest and
loftiest pleasures. But the home of his spirit was the face of the
common earth, and in the absence of human faces and sympathies, it longed and yearned for
them with a hunger that nothing else could satisfy.
James Burney (1750-1821)
The brother of Fanny Burney; he sailed with Captain Cook and wrote about his voyages, and
in later life was a friend of Charles Lamb and other literary people.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
English poet and philosopher who projected
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
with William Wordsworth; author of
Biographia Literaria (1817),
On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and other
works.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
English essayist and literary critic; author of
Characters of
Shakespeare's Plays (1817),
Lectures on the English Poets
(1818), and
The Spirit of the Age (1825).
Charles Lamb [Elia] (1775-1834)
English essayist and boyhood friend of Coleridge at Christ's Hospital; author of
Essays of Elia published in the
London
Magazine (collected 1823, 1833) and other works.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
With Coleridge, author of
Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth
survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.
