"And then arrives a lull in the hot race Wherein he doth for ever chase That flying and illusive shadow Rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face, And an unwonted calm pervades his breast, And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose And the sea where it goes."
WILLIAM HAZLITT
For an author to fare better dead than alive is good proof of his literary vivacity and charm. The rare merit of Hazlitt"s writing was recognised in his lifetime by good judges, but his fame was obscured by the unpopularity of many of his opinions, and the venom he was too apt to instil into his personal reminiscences. He was not a safe man to confide in. He had a forked crest which he sometimes lifted. Because they both wrote essays and were fond of the Elizabethans, it became the fashion to link Hazlitt"s name with Lamb"s. To be compared with the incomparable is hard fortune. Hazlitt suffered by the comparison, and consequently his admirers, usually in those early days men of keen wits and sharp tongues, grew angry, and infused into their just eulogiums too much of Hazlitt"s personal bitterness, and too little of his wide literary sympathies.
But this period of obscurity is now over. No really good thing once come into existence and remaining so is ever lost to the world. This is most comfortable doctrine, and true, besides. In the long run the world"s taste is infallible. All it requires is time. How easy it is to give it that! Is substantial injustice at this moment done to a single English writer of prose or verse who died prior to the 1st of January, 1801? Is there a single bad author of this same cla.s.s who is now read? Both questions may be truthfully answered by a joyful shout of, No! This fact ought to make the most unpopular of living authors the sweetest-tempered of men. The sight of your rival clinging to the cob he has purchased and maintains out of the profits of the trashiest of novels should be pleasant owing to the reflection that both rival and cob are trotting to the same pit of oblivion.
But humorous as is the prospect of the coming occultation of personally disagreeable authors, the final establishment of the fame of a dead one is a n.o.bler spectacle.
William Hazlitt had to take a thrashing from life. He took it standing up like a man, not lying down like a cur; but take it he had to do. He died on September 18, 1830, tired out, discomfited, defeated. n.o.body reviewing the facts of his life can say that it was well spent. There is nothing in it of encouragement. He reaped what he sowed, and it proved a sorry harvest. When he lay dying he wanted his mother brought to his side, but she was at a great distance, and eighty-four years of age, and could not come. Carlyle in his old age, grim, worn, and scornful, said once, sorrowfully enough, "What I want is a mother." It is indeed an excellent relationship.
But though Hazlitt got the worst of it in his personal encounter with the universe, he nevertheless managed to fling down before he died what will suffice to keep his name alive. You cannot kill merit. We are all too busily engaged struggling with dulness, our own and other people"s, and with ennui; we are far too much surrounded by would-be wits and abortive thinkers, ever to forget what a weapon against weariness lies to our hand in the works of Hazlitt, who is as refreshing as cold water, as grateful as shade.
His great charm consists in his hearty reality. Life may be a game, and all its enjoyments counters, but Hazlitt, as we find him in his writings--and there is now no need to look for him anywhere else--played the game and dealt out the counters like a man bent on winning. He cared greatly about many things. His admiration was not extravagant, but his force is great; in fact, one may say of him as he said of John Cavanagh, the famous fives player, "His service was tremendous." Indeed, Hazlitt"s whole description of Cavanagh"s play reminds one of his own literary method:
"His style of play was as remarkable as his power of execution. He had no affectation, no trifling. He did not throw away the game to show off an att.i.tude or try an experiment. He was a fine, sensible, manly player, who did what he could, but that was more than anyone else could even affect to do. His blows were not undecided and ineffectual, lumbering like Mr. Wordsworth"s epic poetry, nor wavering like Mr. Coleridge"s lyric prose, nor short of the mark like Mr. Brougham"s speeches, nor wide of it like Mr. Canning"s wit, nor foul like the _Quarterly_, nor _let_ b.a.l.l.s like the _Edinburgh Review_."
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Brougham, Canning! was ever a fives player so described before? What splendid reading it makes! but we quote it for the purpose of applying its sense to Hazlitt himself. As Cavanagh played, so Hazlitt wrote.
He is always interesting, and always writes about really interesting things. His talk is of poets and players, of Shakespeare and Kean, of Fielding and Scott, of Burke and Cobbett, of prize fights and Indian jugglers. When he condescends to the abstract, his subjects bring an appet.i.te with them. The Shyness of Scholars, the Fear of Death, the Ident.i.ty of an Author with his Books, Effeminacy of Character, the Conversation of Lords, On Reading New Books: the very t.i.tles make you lick your lips.
Hazlitt may have been an unhappy man, but he was above the vile affectation of pretending to see nothing in life. Had he not seen Mrs.
Siddons, had he not read Rousseau, had he not worshipped t.i.tian in the Louvre?
No English writer better pays the debt of grat.i.tude always owing to great poets, painters, and authors than Hazlitt; but his is a manly, not a maudlin, grat.i.tude. No other writer has such gusto as he. The glowing pa.s.sage in which he describes t.i.tian"s St. Peter Martyr almost recalls the canvas uninjured from the flames which have since destroyed it. We seem to see the landscape background, "with that cold convent spire rising in the distance amidst the blue sapphire mountains and the golden sky." His essay on Sir Walter Scott and the _Waverley Novels_ is the very best that has ever been written on that magnificent subject.
As a companion at the Feast of Wits commend us to Hazlitt, and as a companion for a fortnight"s holiday commend us to the admirable selection recently made from his works, which are numerous--some twenty volumes--by Mr. Ireland, and published at a cheap price by Messrs. F.
Warne and Co. The task of selection is usually a thankless one. It involves of necessity omission and frequently curtailment. It is annoying to look in vain for some favourite pa.s.sage, and your annoyance prompts the criticism that a really sound judgment would have made room for what you miss. We lodge no complaint against Mr. Ireland. Like a wise man, he has allowed to himself ample s.p.a.ce, and he has compiled a volume of 510 closely though well-printed pages, which has only to be read in order to make the reader well acquainted with an author whom not to know is a severe mental deprivation.
Mr. Ireland"s book is a library in itself, and a marvellous tribute to the genius of his author. It seems almost incredible that one man should have said so many good things. It is true he does not go very deep as a critic, he does not see into the soul of the matter as Lamb and Coleridge occasionally do--but he holds you very tight--he grasps the subject, he enjoys it himself and makes you do so. Perhaps he does say too many good things. His sparkling sentences follow so quickly one upon another that the reader"s appreciation soon becomes a breathless appreciation. There is something almost uncanny in such sustained cleverness. This impression, however, must not be allowed to remain as a final impression. In Hazlitt the reader will find trains of sober thought pursued with deep feeling and melancholy. Turn to the essays, _On Living to One"s Self_, _On Going a Journey_, _On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth_, and read them over again. When you have done so you will be indisposed to consider their author as a mere sayer of good things. He was much more than that. One smiles when, on reading the first Lord Lytton"s _Thoughts on the Genius of Hazlitt_, the author of _Eugene Aram_, is found declaring that Hazlitt "had a keen sense of the Beautiful and the Subtle; and what is more, he was deeply imbued with sympathies for the Humane"; but when Lord Lytton proceeds, "Posterity will do him justice," we cease to smile, and handling Mr. Ireland"s book, observe with deep satisfaction, "It has."
THE LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB[7]
Four hundred and seventeen letters of Charles Lamb"s, some of them never before published, in two well-printed but handy volumes, edited, with notes ill.u.s.trative, explanatory, and biographical, by Canon Ainger, and supplied with an admirable index, are surely things to be thankful for and to be desired. No doubt the price is prohibitory. They will cost you in cash, these two volumes, full as they are from t.i.tle-page to colophon with the sweetness and n.o.bility, the mirth and the melancholy of their author"s life, touched as every page of them is with traces of a hard fate bravely borne, seven shillings and sixpence. None but American millionaires and foolish book-collectors can bear such a strain upon their purses. It is the cab-fare to and from a couple of dull dinner-parties. But Mudie is in our midst, ever ready to supply our very modest intellectual wants at so much a quarter, and ward off the catastrophe so dreaded by all dust-hating housewives, the acc.u.mulation of those "nasty books," for which indeed but slender accommodation is provided in our upholstered homes. Yet these volumes, however acquired, whether by purchase, and therefore destined to remain by your side ready to be handled whenever the mood seizes you, or borrowed from a library to be returned at the week"s end along with the last new novel people are painfully talking about, cannot fail to excite the interest and stir the emotions of all lovers of sound literature and true men.
But first of all, Canon Ainger is to be congratulated on the completion of his task. He told us he was going to edit _Lamb"s Works and Letters_, and naturally one believed him; but in this world there is nothing so satisfactory as performance. To see a good work well planned, well executed, and entirely finished by the same hand that penned, and the same mind that conceived the original scheme, has something about it which is surprisingly gratifying to the soul of man, accustomed as he is to the wreckage of projects and the failure of hopes.
Canon Ainger"s edition of _Lamb"s Works and Letters_ stands complete in six volumes. Were one in search of sentiment, one might perhaps find it in the intimate a.s.sociation existing between the editor and the old church by the side of which Lamb was born, and which he ever loved and accounted peculiarly his own. Elia was born a Templar.
"I was born and pa.s.sed the first seven years of my life in the Temple.
Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said--for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?--these are my oldest recollections."
Thus begins the celebrated essay on "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple." As a humble member of that honourable Society, I rejoice that its Reader should be the man who has, as a labour of love and by virtue of qualifications which cannot be questioned, placed upon the library shelf so complete and choice an edition of the works of one whose memory is perhaps the pleasantest thing about the whole place.
So far as these two volumes of letters are concerned the course adopted by the editor has been, if I may make bold to say so, the right one. He has simply edited them carefully and added notes and an index. He has not attempted to tell Lamb"s life between times. He has already told the story of that life in a separate volume. I wish the practice could be revived of giving us a man"s correspondence all by itself in consecutive volumes, as we have the letters of Horace Walpole, of Burke, of Richardson, of Cowper, and many others. It is astonishing what interesting and varied reading such volumes make. They never tire you.
You do not stop to be tired. Something of interest is always occurring.
Some reference to a place you have visited; to a house you have stayed at; to a book you have read; to a man or woman you wish to hear about.
As compared with the measured malice of a set biography, where you feel yourself in the iron grasp, not of the man whose life is being professedly written, but of the man (whom naturally you dislike) who has taken upon himself to write the life, these volumes of correspondence have all the ease and grace and truthfulness of nature. There is about as much resemblance between reading them and your ordinary biography, as between a turn on the treadmill and a saunter into Hertfordshire in search of Mackery End. I hope when we get hold of the biographies of Lord Beaconsfield, and Dean Stanley, we shall not find ourselves defrauded of our dues. But it is of the essence of letters that we should have the whole of each. I think it wrong to omit even the merely formal parts. They all hang together. The method employed in the biography of George Eliot was, in my opinion--I can but state it--a vicious method. To serve up letters in solid slabs cut out of longer letters is distressing. Every letter a man writes is an incriminating doc.u.ment. It tells a tale about him. Let the whole be read or none.
Canon Ainger has adopted the right course. He has indeed omitted a few oaths--on the principle that "d.a.m.ns have had their day." For my part, I think I should have been disposed to leave them alone.
"The rough bur-thistle spreading wide Amang the bearded bear, I turn"d my weeding-clips aside And spared the symbol dear."
But this is not a question to discuss with a dignitary of the Church.
Leaving out the oaths and, it may perhaps be, here and there a pa.s.sage where the reckless humour of the writer led him to transcend the limits of becoming mirth, and mere notelets, we have in these two volumes Lamb"s letters just as they were written, save in an instance or two where the originals have been partially destroyed. The first is to Coleridge, and is dated May 27, 1796; the last is to Mrs. Dyer, and was written on December 22, 1834. Who, I wonder, ever managed to squeeze into a correspondence of forty years truer humour, madder nonsense, sounder sense, or more tender sympathy! They do not indeed (these letters) prate about first principles, but they contain many things conducive to a good life here below.
The earlier letters strike the more solemn notes. As a young man Lamb was deeply religious, and for a time the appalling tragedy of his life, the death of his mother by his sister"s hand, deepened these feelings.
His letters to Coleridge in September and October, 1769, might very well appear in the early chapters of a saint"s life. They exhibit the rare union of a colossal strength, entire truthfulness, (no single emotion being ever exaggerated,) with the tenderest and most refined feelings.
Some of his sentences remind one of Johnson, others of Rousseau. How people reading these letters can ever have the impudence to introduce into the tones of their voices when they are referring to Lamb the faintest suspicion of condescension, as if they were speaking of one weaker than themselves, must always remain an unsolved problem of human conceit.
These elevated feelings pa.s.sed away. He refers to this in a letter written in 1801 to Walter Wilson.
"I have had a time of seriousness, and I have known the importance and reality of a religious belief. Latterly, I acknowledge, much of my seriousness has gone off, whether from new company or some other new a.s.sociations, but I still retain at bottom a conviction of the truth and a certainty of the usefulness of religion."
The fact, I suspect, was that the strain of religious thoughts was proving too great for a brain which had once succ.u.mbed to madness.
Religion sits very lightly on some minds. She could not have done so on Lamb"s. He took refuge in trivialities seriously, and played the fool in order to remain sane.
These letters are of the same material as the _Essays of Elia_. The germs, nay, the very phrases, of the latter are frequently to be found in the former. This does not offend in Lamb"s case, though as a rule a good letter ought not forcibly to remind us of a good essay by the same hand. Admirable as are Thackeray"s lately published letters, the parts I like best are those which remind me least of a _Roundabout Paper_. The author is always apt to steal in, and the author is the very last person you wish to see in a letter. But as you read Lamb"s letters you never think of the author: his personality carries you over everything. He manages--I will not say skilfully, for it was the natural result of his delightful character, always to address his letter to his correspondent--to make it a thing which, apart from the correspondent, his habits and idiosyncrasies, could not possibly have existed in the shape it does. One sometimes comes across things called letters, which might have been addressed to anybody. But these things are not letters: they are extracts from journals or circulars, and are usually either offensive or dull.
Lamb"s letters are not indeed model letters like Cowper"s. Though natural to Lamb, they cannot be called easy. "Divine chit-chat" is not the epithet to describe them. His notes are all high. He is sublime, heartrending, excruciatingly funny, outrageously ridiculous, sometimes possibly an inch or two overdrawn. He carries the charm of incongruity and total unexpectedness to the highest pitch imaginable. John Sterling used to chuckle over the sudden way in which you turn up Adam in the following pa.s.sage from a letter to Bernard Barton:
"DEAR B. B.--You may know my letters by the paper and the folding. For the former I live on sc.r.a.ps obtained in charity from an old friend, whose stationery is a permanent perquisite; for folding I shall do it neatly when I learn to tie my neckcloths. I surprise most of my friends by writing to them on ruled paper, as if I had not got past pot-hooks and hangers. Sealing-wax I have none in my establishment; wafers of the coa.r.s.est bran supply its place. When my epistles come to be weighed with Pliny"s, however superior to them in Roman delicate irony, judicious reflections, etc., his gilt post will bribe over the judges to him. All the time I was at the E. I. H. I never mended a pen. I now cut "em to the stumps, marring rather than mending the primitive goose-quill. I cannot bear to pay for articles I used to get for nothing. When Adam laid out his first penny upon nonpareils at some stall in Mesopotamos, I think it went hard with him, reflecting upon his old goodly orchard where he had so many for nothing."
There are not many better pastimes for a middle-aged man who does not care for first principles or modern novels than to hunt George Dyer up-and-down Charles Lamb. Lamb created Dyer as surely as did Cervantes Don Quixote, Sterne Toby Shandy, or Charles d.i.c.kens Sam Weller. Outside Lamb George Dyer is the deadest of dead authors. Inside Lamb he is one of the quaintest, queerest, most humorously felicitous of living characters. Pursue this sport through Canon Ainger"s first volume and you will have added to your gallery of whimsicalities the picture of George Dyer by a master-hand.
Lamb"s relations towards Coleridge and Wordsworth are exceedingly interesting. He loved them both as only Lamb could love his friends. He admired them both immensely as poets. He recognised what he considered their great intellectual superiority over himself. He considered their friendship the crowning glory of his life. For Coleridge his affection reached devotion. The news of his death was a shock he never got over.
He would keep repeating to himself, "Coleridge is dead!" But with what a n.o.ble, independent, manly mind did he love his friends! How deep, how shrewd was his insight into their manifold infirmities! His masculine nature and absolute freedom from that curse of literature, coterieship, stand revealed on every page of the history of Lamb"s friendships.
On page 327 of Canon Ainger"s first volume there is a letter of Lamb"s, never before printed, addressed to his friend Manning, which is delightful reading. The editor did not get it in time to put it in the text, so the careless reader might overlook it, lurking as it does amongst the notes. It is too long for quotation, but a morsel must be allowed me:
"I lately received from Wordsworth a copy of the second volume, accompanied by an acknowledgment of having received from me many months since a copy of a certain tragedy with excuses for not having made any acknowledgment 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, he was sorry his second volume 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 _Lyrical Ballads_). 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 Shakespeare, 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 second volume which I had been so unfortunate as to miss."
But my quotation must stop. It has been long enough to prove what I was saying about the independence of Lamb"s judgment even of his best friends. No wonder such a man did not like being called "gentle-hearted"
even by S. T. C, to whom he writes:
"In the next edition of the _Anthology_ (which Phbus avert, those nine other wandering maids also!) please to blot out "gentle-hearted," and subst.i.tute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question."
Of downright fun and fooling of the highest intellectual calibre fine examples abound on all sides. The "d.i.c.k Hopkins" letter ranks very high. Manning had sent Lamb from Cambridge a piece of brawn, and Lamb takes into his head, so teeming with whimsical fancies, to pretend that it had been sent him by an imaginary d.i.c.k Hopkins, "the swearing scullion of Caius," who "by industry and agility has thrust himself into the important situation (no sinecure, believe me) of cook to Trinity Hall"; and accordingly he writes the real donor a long letter, singing the praises of this figment of his fancy, and concludes:
"Do me the favour to leave off the business which you may be at present upon, and go immediately to the kitchens of Trinity and Caius and make my most respectful compliments to Mr. Richard Hopkins and a.s.sure him that his brawn is most excellent: and that I am moreover obliged to him for his innuendo about salt water and bran, which I shall not fail to improve. I leave it to you whether you shall choose to pay him the civility of asking him to dinner while you stay in Cambridge, or in whatever other way you may best like to show your grat.i.tude to _my friend_. Richard Hopkins considered in many points of view is a very extraordinary character. Adieu. I hope to see you to supper in London soon, where we will taste Richard"s brawn, and drink his health in a cheerful but moderate cup. We have not many such men in any rank of life as Mr. R. Hopkins. Crisp, the barber of St. Mary"s, was just such another. I wonder _he_ never sent me any little token, some chestnuts or a puff, or two pound of hair; just to remember him by."