The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume V Part 35

Manning's reply, dated December, 1800, gives a little information concerning the Edinburgh physician's letter--"that gentleman whose fertile brain can, at a moment's warning, furnish you with 10 Thousand models of a plot--'The greatest variety of Rapes, Murders, Deathsheads, &c., &c., sold here.'" Manning thinks that the Scotch doctor understands Lamb's tragedy better than Coleridge does. He adds: "P.S.--My verdict upon the Poet's epitaph is 'genuine.'" This probably applies to a question asked by Lamb concerning Wordsworth's poem of that name.]

LETTER 80

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING

December 27th, 1800.

At length George Dyer's phrenesis has come to a crisis; he is raging and furiously mad. I waited upon the heathen, Thursday was a se'nnight; the first symptom which struck my eye and gave me incontrovertible proof of the fatal truth was a pair of nankeen pantaloons four times too big for him, which the said Heathen did pertinaciously affirm to be new.

They were absolutely ingrained with the acc.u.mulated dirt of ages; but he affirmed them to be clean. He was going to visit a lady that was nice about those things, and that's the reason he wore nankeen that day. And then he danced, and capered, and fidgeted, and pulled up his pantaloons, and hugged his intolerable flannel vestment closer about his poetic loins; anon he gave it loose to the zephyrs which plentifully insinuate their tiny bodies through every crevice, door, window or wainscot, expressly formed for the exclusion of such impertinents. Then he caught at a proof sheet, and catched up a laundress's bill instead--made a dart at Blomfield's Poems, and threw them in agony aside. I could not bring him to one direct reply; he could not maintain his jumping mind in a right line for the t.i.the of a moment by Clifford's Inn clock. He must go to the printer's immediately--the most unlucky accident--he had struck off five hundred impressions of his Poems, which were ready for delivery to subscribers, and the Preface must all be expunged. There were eighty pages of Preface, and not till that morning had he discovered that in the very first page of said Preface he had set out with a principle of Criticism fundamentally-wrong, which vitiated all his following reasoning. The Preface must be expunged, although it cost him 30--the lowest calculation, taking in paper and printing! In vain have his real friends remonstrated against this Midsummer madness. George is as obstinate as a Primitive Christian--and wards and parries off all our thrusts with one unanswerable fence;--"Sir, it's of great consequence that the _world_ is not _misled_!"

As for the other Professor, he has actually begun to dive into Tavernier and Chardin's _Persian_ Travels for a story, to form a new drama for the sweet tooth of this fastidious age. Hath not Bethlehem College a fair action for non-residence against such professors? Are poets so _few_ in _this age_, that he must write poetry? Is _morals_ a subject so exhausted, that he must quit that line? Is the metaphysic well (without a bottom) drained dry?

If I can guess at the wicked pride of the Professor's heart, I would take a shrewd wager that he disdains ever again to dip his pen in _Prose_. Adieu, ye splendid theories! Farewell, dreams of political justice! Lawsuits, where I was counsel for Archbishop Fenelon _versus_ my own mother, in the famous fire cause!

Vanish from my mind, professors, one and all! I have metal more attractive on foot.

Man of many snipes, I will sup with thee, Deo volente et diabolo nolente, on Monday night the 5th of January, in the new year, and crush a cup to the infant century.

A word or two of my progress. Embark at six o'clock in the morning, with a fresh gale, on a Cambridge one-decker; very cold till eight at night; land at St. Mary's light-house, m.u.f.fins and coffee upon table (or any other curious production of Turkey or both Indies), snipes exactly at nine, punch to commence at ten, with _argument_; difference of opinion is expected to take place about eleven; perfect unanimity, with some haziness and dimness, before twelve.--N.B. My single affection is not so singly wedded to snipes; but the curious and epicurean eye would also take a pleasure in beholding a delicate and well-chosen a.s.sortment of teals, ortolans, the unctuous and palate-soothing flesh of geese wild and tame, nightingales' brains, the sensorium of a young sucking-pig, or any other Christmas dish, which I leave to the judgment of you and the cook of Gonville. C. LAMB.

[Lamb's copy of George Dyer's _Poems_ is in the British Museum. It has the original withdrawn 1800 t.i.tle-page and the cancelled preface bound up with it, and Lamb has written against the reference to the sacrifice, in the new 1801 preface: "One copy of this cancelled preface, s.n.a.t.c.h'd out of the fire, is prefaced to this volume." See Letter 93, page 234.

It runs to sixty-five pages, whereas the new one is but a few words.

Southey tells Grosvenor Bedford in one of his letters that Lamb gave Dyer the t.i.tle of Cancellarius Magnus. Dyer reprinted in the 1802 edition of his Poems the greater part of the cancelled preface and all of the first page--so that it is difficult to say what the fallacy was.

The original edition of his _Poems_, was to be in three large volumes.

In 1802 it had come down to two small ones.

G.o.dwin's Persian drama was "Abbas, King of Persia," but he could not get it acted. The reference to Fenelon is to G.o.dwin's _Political Justice_ (first edition, Vol. I., page 84) where he argues on the comparative worth of the persons of Fenelon, a chambermaid, and G.o.dwin's mother, supposing them to have been present at the famous fire at Cambrai and only one of them to be saved. (As a matter of fact Fenelon was not at the fire.)

We must suppose that Lamb carried out his intention of visiting Manning on January 5; but there is no confirmation.]

LETTER 81

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH [P.M. January 30, 1801.]

Thanks for your Letter and Present. I had already borrowed your second volume. What most please me are, the Song of Lucy.... _Simon's sickly daughter_ in the s.e.xton made me _cry_. Next to these are the description of the continuous Echoes in the story of Joanna's laugh, where the mountains and all the scenery absolutely seem alive--and that fine Shakesperian character of the Happy Man, in the Brothers,

--that creeps about the fields, Following his fancies by the hour, to bring Tears down his cheek, or solitary smiles Into his face, _until the Setting Sun_ Write Fool upon his forehead.

I will mention one more: the delicate and curious feeling in the wish for the c.u.mberland Beggar, that he may have about him the melody of Birds, altho' he hear them not. Here the mind knowingly pa.s.ses a fiction upon herself, first subst.i.tuting her own feelings for the Beggar's, and, in the same breath detecting the fallacy, will not part with the wish.--The Poet's Epitaph is disfigured, to my taste by the vulgar satire upon parsons and lawyers in the beginning, and the coa.r.s.e epithet of pin point in the 6th stanza. All the rest is eminently good, and your own. I will just add that it appears to me a fault in the Beggar, that the instructions conveyed in it are too direct and like a lecture: they don't slide into the mind of the reader, while he is imagining no such matter. An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult in being told, I will teach you how to think upon this subject. This fault, if I am right, is in a ten-thousandth worse degree to be found in Sterne and many many novelists & modern poets, who continually put a sign post up to shew where you are to feel. They set out with a.s.suming their readers to be stupid. Very different from Robinson Crusoe, the Vicar of Wakefield, Roderick Random, and other beautiful bare narratives. There is implied an unwritten compact between Author and reader; I will tell you a story, and I suppose you will understand it. Modern novels "St.

Leons" and the like are full of such flowers as these "Let not my reader suppose," "Imagine, _if you can_"--modest!--&c.--I will here have done with praise and blame. I have written so much, only that you may not think I have pa.s.sed over your book without observation,--I am sorry that Coleridge has christened his Ancient Marinere "a poet's Reverie"--it is as bad as Bottom the Weaver's declaration that he is not a Lion but only the scenical representation of a Lion. What new idea is gained by this t.i.tle, but one subversive of all credit, which the tale should force upon us, of its truth? For me, I was never so affected with any human Tale. After first reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days--I dislike all the miraculous part of it, but the feelings of the man under the operation of such scenery dragged me along like Tom Piper's magic whistle. I totally differ from your idea that the Marinere should have had a character and profession. This is a Beauty in Gulliver's Travels, where the mind is kept in a placid state of little wonderments; but the Ancient Marinere undergoes such Trials, as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory of what he was, like the state of a man in a Bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is: that all consciousness of personality is gone. Your other observation is I think as well a little unfounded: the Marinere from being conversant in supernatural events _has_ acquired a supernatural and strange cast of _phrase_, eye, appearance, &c. which frighten the wedding guest. You will excuse my remarks, because I am hurt and vexed that you should think it necessary, with a prose apology, to open the eyes of dead men that cannot see. To sum up a general opinion of the second vol.--I do not feel any one poem in it so forcibly as the Ancient Marinere, the Mad Mother, and the Lines at Tintern Abbey in the first.--I could, too, have wished the Critical preface had appeared in a separate treatise. All its dogmas are true and just, and most of them new, _as_ criticism. But they a.s.sociate a _diminis.h.i.+ng_ idea with the Poems which follow, as having been written for _Experiment_ on the public taste, more than having sprung (as they must have done) from living and daily circ.u.mstances.--I am prolix, because I am gratifyed in the opportunity of writing to you, and I don't well know when to leave off. I ought before this to have reply'd to your very kind invitation into c.u.mberland. With you and your Sister I could gang any where. But I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a Journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have pa.s.sed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the Town, the Watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles,--life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt & mud, the Sun s.h.i.+ning upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old book stalls, parsons cheap'ning books, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade,--all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impells me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much Life.--All these emotions must be strange to you. So are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?--

My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no pa.s.sion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry & books) to groves and vallies. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book case which has followed me about (like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved--old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school,--these are my mistresses. Have I not enough, without your mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know, that the Mind will make friends of any thing. Your sun & moon and skys and hills & lakes affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof, beautifully painted but unable to satisfy the mind, and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the Beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh & green and warm are all the inventions of men and a.s.semblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have laughed with dear Joanna.

Give my kindest love, _and my sister's_, to D. & your_self_ and a kiss from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite.

C. LAMB.

Thank you for Liking my Play!!

[This is the first--and perhaps the finest--letter from Lamb to Wordsworth that has been preserved. Wordsworth, then living with his sister Dorothy at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, was nearly thirty-one years of age; Lamb was nearly twenty-six. The work criticised is the second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_. The second and sixth stanzas of the "Poet's Epitaph" ran thus:--

A Lawyer art thou?--draw not nigh; Go, carry to some other place The hardness of thy coward eye, The falshood of thy sallow face.

Wrapp'd closely in thy sensual fleece O turn aside, and take, I pray, That he below may rest in peace, Thy pin-point of a soul away!

_St. Leon_ was by G.o.dwin.

Of "The Ancient Mariner, a Poet's Reverie," Wordsworth had said in a note to the first volume of _Lyrical Ballads_:--

"The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects; first, that the princ.i.p.al person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being who having been long under the controul of supernatural impressions might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that the events having no necessary connection do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat too laboriously acc.u.mulated."

"The Mad Mother." The poem beginning, "Her eyes are wild, her head is bare."

"I could, too, have wished." The pa.s.sage from these words to "don't well know when to leave off," used to be omitted in the editions of Lamb's Letters. When Wordsworth sent the correspondence to Moxon, for Talfourd's use, in 1835, he wrote:--

"There are, however, in them some parts which had better be kept back.... I have also thought it proper to suppress every word of criticism [Wordsworth meant adverse criticism] upon my own poems....

Those relating to my works are withheld, partly because I shrink from the thought of a.s.sisting in any way to spread my own praises, and still more I being convinced that the opinions or judgments of friends given in this way are of little value."

"Joanna." Joanna of the laugh. "Barbara Lewthwaite." See Wordsworth's "Pet Lamb."

"Thank you for Liking my Play!!" We must suppose this postscript to contain a touch of sarcasm. Lamb had sent "John Woodvil" to Grasmere and Keswick. Wordsworth apparently had been but politely interested in it.

Coleridge had written to G.o.dwin: "Talking of tragedies, at every perusal my love and admiration of his [Lamb's] play rises a peg."

Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, dated at end February 7, 1801, not available for this edition. It is one of the best letters written by Lamb to Robert Lloyd, or to any one. Lamb first praises Izaak Walton, whose _Compleat Angler_ he loved for two reasons: for itself and for its connection with his own Hertfords.h.i.+re country, Hoddesdon, Broxbourne, Amwell and the Ware neighbourhood. The letter pa.s.ses to a third eulogy of London. Lamb closes by remarking that Manning is "a dainty chiel, and a man of great power, an enchanter almost."]

LETTER 82

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING

Feb. 15, 1801.

I had need be cautious henceforward what opinion I give of the "Lyrical Ballads." All the North of England are in a turmoil. c.u.mberland and Westmoreland have already declared a state of war. I lately received from Wordsworth a copy of the second volume, accompanied by an acknowledgement of having received from me many months since a copy of a certain Tragedy, with excuses for not having made any acknowledgement sooner, it being owing to an "almost insurmountable aversion from Letter-writing." This letter I answered in due form and time, and enumerated several of the pa.s.sages which had most affected me, adding, unfortunately, that no single piece had moved me so forcibly as the "Ancient Mariner," "The Mad Mother," or the "Lines at Tintern Abbey."

The Post did not sleep a moment. I received almost instantaneously a long letter of four sweating pages from my Reluctant Letter-Writer, the purport of which was, that he was sorry his 2d vol. had not given me more pleasure (Devil a hint did I give that it had _not pleased me_), and "was compelled to wish that my range of sensibility was more extended, being obliged to believe that I should receive large influxes of happiness and happy Thoughts" (I suppose from the L.B.)--With a deal of stuff about a certain Union of Tenderness and Imagination, which in the sense he used Imagination was not the characteristic of Shakspeare, but which Milton possessed in a degree far exceeding other Poets: which Union, as the highest species of Poetry, and chiefly deserving that name, "He was most proud to aspire to;" then ill.u.s.trating the said Union by two quotations from his own 2d vol. (which I had been so unfortunate as to miss). 1st Specimen--a father addresses his son:--