by Charles Lamb
As for the other Professor,1 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!2
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,3 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, muffins 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 assortment of teals, ortolans,4 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.
21. To William Wordsworth
[P.M. 30 January 1801]
Thanks for your Letter and Present.1 I had already borrowed your second volume. What most please me are, the Song of Lucy. … Simon’s sickly daughter in the Sexton 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 Cumberland Beggar, that he may have about him the melody of Birds, altho’ he hear them not. Here the mind knowingly passes a fiction upon herself, first substituting 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 coarse 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 assuming 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’2 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 passed 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 Title, 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 associate a diminishing 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 circumstances. – 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 Cumberland. 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 passed 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 shining 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 passion (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 ro
om 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 assemblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have laughed with dear Joanna.
Give my kindest love, and my sister’s, to D. & yourself and a kiss from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite.3
C. LAMB
Thank you for Liking my Play!!4
22. To Robert Lloyd
February 7, 1801.
Dear Robert,
I shall expect you to bring me a brimful account of the pleasure which Walton1 has given you, when you come to town. It must square with your mind. The delightful innocence and healthfulness of the Angler’s mind will have blown upon yours like a Zephyr. Don’t you already feel your spirit filled with the scenes? – the banks of rivers – the cowslip beds – the pastoral scenes – the neat alehouses – and hostesses and milkmaids, as far exceeding Virgil and Pope, as the ‘Holy Living’ is beyond Thomas à Kempis.2 Are not the eating and drinking joys painted to the Life? Do they not inspire you with an immortal hunger? Are not you ambitious of being made an Angler? What edition have you got? is it Hawkins’s, with plates of Piscator, &c.? That sells very dear. I have only been able to purchase the last edition without the old Plates which pleased my childhood; the plates being worn out, and the old Edition difficult and expensive to procure. The ‘Complete Angler’ is the only Treatise written in Dialogues that is worth a halfpenny. Many elegant dialogues have been written (such as Bishop Berkeley’s ‘Minute Philosopher’), but in all of them the Interlocutors are merely abstract arguments personify’d; not living dramatic characters, as in Walton, where every thing is alive; the fishes are absolutely charactered; and birds and animals are as interesting as men and women.
I need not be at much pains to get the ‘Holy Livings.’ We can procure them in ten minutes’ search at any stall or shop in London. By your engaging one for Priscilla,3 it should seem she will be in Town – is that the case? I thought she was fix’d at the Lakes.
I perfectly understand the nature of your solitariness at Birm., and wish I could divide myself, ‘like a bribed haunch’4 between London and it. But courage! you will soon be emancipated, and (it may be) have a frequent power of visiting this great place. Let them talk of lakes and mountains and romantic dales – all that fantastic stuff; give me a ramble by night, in the winter nights in London – the Lamps lit – the pavements of the motley Strand crowded with to and fro passengers – the shops all brilliant, and stuffed with obliging customers and obliged tradesmen – give me the old bookstalls of London – a walk in the bright Piazzas of Covent Garden. I defy a man to be dull in such places – perfect Mahometan paradises upon earth! I have lent out my heart with usury to such scenes from my childhood up, and have cried with fulness of joy at the multitudinous scenes of Life in the crowded streets of ever dear London. I wish you could fix here. I don’t know if you quite comprehend my low Urban Taste; but depend upon it that a man of any feeling will have given his heart and his love in childhood and in boyhood to any scenes where he has been bred, as well to dirty streets (and smoky walls as they are called) as to green lanes, ‘where live nibbling sheep,’ and to the everlasting hills and the Lakes and ocean. A mob of men is better than a flock of sheep, and a crowd of happy faces justling into the playhouse at the hour of six is a more beautiful spectacle to man than the shepherd driving his ‘silly’ sheep to fold. Come to London and learn to sympathise with my unrural notions.
Wordsworth has published a second vol. – ‘Lyrical Ballads.’ Most of them very good, but not so good as first vol. What more can I tell you? I believe I told you I have been to see Manning. He is a dainty chiel. – A man of great Power – an enchanter almost. – Far beyond Coleridge or any man in power of impressing – when he gets you alone, he can act the wonders of Egypt. Only he is lazy, and does not always put forth all his strength; if he did, I know no man of genius at all comparable to him.
Yours as ever,
C. L.
23. 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. Cumberland 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 passages 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 illustrating the said Union by two quotations1 from his own 2d vol. (which I had been so unfortunate as to miss). 1st Specimen – a father addresses his son:
When thou
First camest into the World, as it befalls
To new-born Infants, thou didst sleep away
Two days: and Blessings from Thy father’s Tongue
Then fell upon thee.
The lines were thus undermarked, and then followed ‘This Passage, as combining in an extraordinary degree that Union of Imagination and Tenderness which I am speaking of, I consider as one of the Best I ever wrote!’
2d Specimen. – A youth, after years of absence, revisits his native place, and thinks (as most people do) that there has been strange alteration in his absence: –
And that the rocks
And everlasting Hills themselves were changed.
You see both these are good Poetry: but after one has been reading Shakspeare twenty of the best years of one’s life, to have a fellow start up, and prate about some unknown quality, which Shakspeare possessed in a degree inferior to Milton and somebody else!! This was not to be all my castigation. Coleridge, who had not written to me some months before, starts up from his bed of sickness to reprove me for my hardy presumption: four long pages, equally sweaty and more tedious, came from him; assuring me that, when the works of a man of true genius such as W. undoubtedly was, do not please me at first sight, I should suspect the fault to lie ‘in me and not in them,’ etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. What am I to do with such people? I certainly shall write them a very merry Letter. Writing to you, I may say that the 2d vol. has no such pieces as the three I enumerated. It is full of original thinking and an observing mind, but it does not often make you laugh or cry. – It too artfully aims at simplicity of expression. And you sometimes doubt if Simplicity be not a cover for Poverty. The best Piece in it I will send you, being short. I have grievously offended my friends in the North by declaring my undue preference; but I need not fear you: –
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the Springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were few [none] to praise
And very few to love.
A violet, by a mossy stone,
Hal
f hidden from the eye.
Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown; and few could know,
When Lucy ceased to be.
But she is in the [her] grave, and oh!
The difference to me.
This is choice and genuine, and so are many, many more. But one does not like to have ’em rammed down one’s throat. ‘Pray, take it – it’s very good – let me help you – eat faster.’
At length George Dyer’s first volume is come to a birth. One volume of three – subscribers being allowed by the prospectus to pay for all at once (tho’ it’s very doubtful if the rest ever come to anything, this having been already some years getting out). I paid two guineas for you and myself, which entitle us to the whole. I will send you your copy, if you are in a great hurry. Meantime you owe me a guinea.
George skipped about like a scorched pea at the receipt of so much cash. To give you a specimen of the beautiful absurdity of the notes, which defy imitation, take one: ‘Discrimination is not the aim of the present volume. It will be more strictly attended to in the next.’ One of the sonnets purports to have been written in Bedlam! This for a man to own!