The Best Letters of Charles Lamb eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 323 pages of information about The Best Letters of Charles Lamb.

The Best Letters of Charles Lamb eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 323 pages of information about The Best Letters of Charles Lamb.

It is not intended here to re-thresh the straw left by Talfourd, Fitzgerald, Canon Ainger, and others, in the hope of discovering something new about Charles Lamb.  In this quarter, at least, the wind shall be tempered to the reader,—­shorn as he is by these pages of a charming letter or two.  So far as fresh facts are concerned, the theme may fairly be considered exhausted.  Numberless writers, too, have rung the changes upon “poor Charles Lamb,” “dear Charles Lamb,” “gentle Charles Lamb,” and the rest,—­the final epithet, by the way being one that Elia, living, specially resented: 

“For God’s sake,” he wrote to Coleridge. “don’t make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses.  It did well enough five years ago, when I came to see you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines to feed upon such epithets; but besides that the meaning of ‘gentle’ is equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited, the very quality of gentleness is abhorrent to such vile trumpetings.  My sentiment is long since vanished.  I hope my virtues have done sucking.  I can scarce think but you meant it in joke.  I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to believe that you could think to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a cordial to some green-sick sonneteer.”

The indulgent pity conventionally bestowed upon Charles Lamb—­one of the most manly, self-reliant of characters, to say nothing of his genius—­is absurdly’ misplaced.

Still farther be it from us to blunt the edge of appetite by sapiently essaying to “analyze” and account for Lamb’s special zest and flavor, as though his writings, or any others worth the reading, were put together upon principles of clockwork.  We are perhaps over-fond of these arid pastimes nowadays.  It is not the “sweet musk-roses,” the “apricocks and dewberries” of literature that please us best; like Bottom the Weaver, we prefer the “bottle of hay.”  What a mockery of right enjoyment our endless prying and sifting, our hunting of riddles in metaphors, innuendoes in tropes, ciphers in Shakspeare!  Literature exhausted, we may turn to art, and resolve, say, the Sistine Madonna (I deprecate the Manes of the “Divine Painter”) into some ingenious and recondite rebus.  For such critical chopped-hay—­sweeter to the modern taste than honey of Hybla—­Charles Lamb had little relish.  “I am, sir,” he once boasted to an analytical, unimaginative proser who had insisted upon explaining some quaint passage in Marvell or Wither, “I am, sir, a matter-of-lie man.”  It was his best warrant to sit at the Muses’ banquet.  Charles Lamb was blessed with an intellectual palate as fine as Keats’s, and could enjoy the savor of a book (or of that dainty, “in the whole mundus edibilis the most delicate,” Roast Pig, for that matter) without pragmatically asking, as the king did of the apple in the dumpling, “how the devil it got there.”  His value as a critic is grounded in this capacity of naive enjoyment (not of pig, but of literature), of discerning beauty and making us discern it,—­thus adding to the known treasures and pleasures of mankind.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Best Letters of Charles Lamb from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.