The Embarrassed Eliminators
We were talking about Lamb.
Some one suddenly asked: “Supposing that by some incredible chance all the Essays except one were to be demolished, which one would you keep?”
This kind of question is always interesting, no matter to what author’s work or to what picture gallery it is applied. But for the best resulting literary talk it must be applied to Shakespeare, Dickens or Elia.
“Why, of course,” at once said H., whose pleasant habit it is to rush in with a final opinion on everything at a moment’s notice, with no shame whatever in changing it immediately afterwards, “there’s no doubt about it at all—Mrs. Battle. Absolutely impossible to give up Mrs. Battle. Or, wait a minute, I’d forgotten Bo-Bo,—‘The Dissertation on Roast Pig,’ you know. Either Mrs. Battle or that.”
The man who had propounded the question laughed. “I saw that second string coming,” he said. “That’s what every one wants: one or another. But the whole point of the thing is that one essay and one only is to remain: everything else goes by the board. Now? Let’s leave H. to wrestle it out with himself. What do you say, James?”
“It’s too difficult,” said James. “I was going to say ‘The Old Actors’ until I remembered several others. But I’m not sure that that is not my choice. It stands alone in literature: it is Lamb inimitable. His literary descendants have done their best and worst with most of his methods, but here, where knowledge of the world, knowledge of the stage, love of mankind, gusto, humour, style and imaginative understanding unite, the mimics, the assiduous apes, are left behind. Miles. Yes, I vote for ‘The Old Actors.’”
“But, my dear James,” said L., “think a moment. Remember James Elia in ‘My Relations’; remember Cousin Bridget in ‘Mackery End.’ You are prepared deliberately to have these forever blotted out of your consciousness? Because, as I understand it, that is what the question means: utter elimination.”
James groaned. “It’s too serious,” he said. “It’s not to be thought of really. It reminds me of terrible nights at school when I lay awake trying to understand eternity—complete negation—until I turned giddy with the immensity of dark nothingness.”
Our host laughed. “You were very positive just now,” he said. “But have you forgotten a wistful little trifle called ‘Old China?’”
“Or, more on your own lines,” said W., who hates actors and acting, “the ‘South-Sea House’ or the ‘Old Benchers’? I will grant you the perfection—there is no other word—of the full-lengths of Dicky Suett and Bannister and Bensley’s Malvolio. There is nothing like it—you are quite right. Not even Hazlitt comes near it. One can see oneself with a great effort doing something passably Hazlittian in dramatic criticism, if one were put to it; but Lamb, Lamb reconstructs life and dignifies and enriches it as he does so. That essay in my opinion is the justification of footlights, grease-paint and all the tawdry business. And yet,”—W.’s face glowed with his eloquence, as it always does sooner or later every evening—“and yet if I were restricted to one Elia essay—dreadful thought!—it would not be ‘The Old Actors’ that I should choose, but—I can’t help it—‘Captain Jackson.’ I know there are far more beautiful things in Elia; deeper, sweeter, rarer. But the Captain and I are such old friends that it comes to this, I couldn’t now do without him.”
“Of course,” cried H. “I had forgotten. You remind me of something I simply must keep—the Elliston.” He snatched the “Essays” from our host’s hands and read the following passage, while we all laughed—a double laughter—overtly with him, and covertly at him, for if there is one man living who might be the hero to-day of a similar story, it is H. himself, who has a capriciousness, an impulsiveness, a forgetfulness, and a grandiosity that are Ellistonian or nothing.
“‘Those who knew Elliston,’” he read, “‘will know the manner in which he pronounced the latter sentence of the few words I am about to record. One proud day to me he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which I had superadded a haddock. After a rather plentiful partaking of the meagre banquet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sorts of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare, observing that for my own part I never ate but of one dish at dinner. “I too never eat but one thing at dinner,”—was his reply—then after a pause—“reckoning fish as nothing.” The manner was all. It was as if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all the savoury esculents which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom. This was greatness, tempered with considerate tenderness to the feelings of his scanty but welcoming entertainer.’”
“Well,” said our host, reclaiming the book, “my vote if I had one would be for ‘Mackery End in Hertfordshire’; and I make the declaration quite calmly, knowing that we are all safe to retain what we will. James will of course disagree with the choice; but then you see I am a sentimentalist, and when Lamb writes about his sister and his childhood I am lost. And ‘Mackery End’ delights me in two ways, for it not only has the wonderful picture of Bridget Elia in it, but we see Lamb also on one of his rapturous walks in his own county. I never see a field of wheat without recalling his phrase of Hertfordshire as ‘that fine corn country.’”
“All very well,” said James, “but if you talk like this how are you going to let ‘Dream Children’ go?”
“Ah, yes,” sighed our host, “‘Dream Children’—of course! How could I let that go? No, it’s too difficult.”
“What about this?” said the grave incisive voice of K., who had not yet spoken, and he began to read:—
“In proportion as the years both lessen, and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away ‘like a weaver’s shuttle.’ Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets.’
“Who is going to foreswear that passage?” K. asked sternly, fixing his eyes on us as if we were one and all guilty of damnable heresy.
We all sighed.
K. searched the book again, and again began to read:—
“‘In sober verity I will confess a truth to thee, reader. I love a Fool—as naturally as if I were of kith and kin to him. When a child, with child-like apprehensions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I read those Parables—not guessing at the involved wisdom—I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, than I entertained for his more cautious neighbor: I grudged at the hard censure pronounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent; and—prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine wariness of their competitors—I felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a tendre, for those five thoughtless virgins.’
“Who is going to turn his back for ever on that passage? No,” K. went on, “it won’t do. It is not possible to name one essay and one only. But I have an amendment to propose. Instead of being permitted to retain only one essay, why should we not be allowed a series of passages equal in length to the longest essay—say ‘The Old Actors’? Then we should not be quite so hopeless. That, for example, would enable one to keep the page on Bensley’s Malvolio, the description of Bridget Elia, a portion of the ‘Mrs. Battle,’ Ralph Bigod, a portion of ‘Captain Jackson,’ the passages I have read, and—what I personally should insist upon including, earlier almost than anything—the Fallacies on rising with the Lark and retiring with the Lamb.”
“Well,” said the suggester of the original problem, “it’s a compromise and therefore no fun. But you may play with it if you like. The sweepingness of the first question was of course its merit. James is the only one of you with the courage really to make a choice.”
“Oh, no,” said our host. “I chose one and one only instantly—‘Old China.’”
“Nonsense!” said James; “you chose ‘Mackery End.’”
“There you are,” said K. “That shows.”
“Well, I refuse to be deprived of ‘Old China’ anyway,” said our host, “even if I named ‘Mackery End.’ How could one live without ‘Old China’? Our discussion reminds me,” he added, “of a very pretty poem—a kind of poem that is no longer written. It is by an American who came nearer Lamb in humour and ‘the tact of humanity’ than perhaps any writer—the Autocrat. Let me read it to you.”
He reached for a volume and read as follows:—
Oh for one hour of youthful joy!
Give back my twentieth spring!
I’d rather laugh, a bright-haired boy,
Than reign, a gray-beard king.
Off with the spoils of wrinkled age!
Away with Learning’s crown!
Tear out Life’s Wisdom-written page,
And dash its trophies down!
One moment let my life-blood stream
From boyhood’s fount of flame!
Give me one giddy, reeling dream
Of life all love and fame!
* * * * *
My listening angel heard the prayer,
And, calmly smiling, said,
“If I but touch thy silvered hair
Thy hasty wish hath sped.
“But is there nothing in thy track,
To bid thee fondly stay,
While the swift seasons hurry back
To find the wished-for day?”
“Ah, truest soul of womankind!
Without thee what were life?
One bliss I cannot leave behind:
I’ll take—my—precious—wife!”
The angel took a sapphire pen
And wrote in rainbow dew,
The man would be a boy again,
And be a husband too!
“And is there nothing yet unsaid,
Before the change appears?
Remember, all their gifts have fled
With those dissolving years.”
“Why, yes;” for memory would recall
My fond paternal joys;
“I could not bear to leave them all—
I’ll take—my—girl—and—boys.”
The smiling angel dropped his pen,—
“Why, this will never do;
The man would be a boy again,
And be a father too!”
* * * * *
And so I laughed,—my laughter woke
The household with its noise,—
And wrote my dream, when morning broke,
To please the grey-haired boys.
—“We,” said our host, as he closed the book and laid it aside, “are like that: we would eliminate most of Elia and have our Elia too.”
“Yes,” said W. “Exactly. We want them all and we value them the more as we grow older and they grow truer and better. For that is Lamb’s way. He sat down—often in his employers’ time—to amuse the readers of a new magazine and earn a few of those extra guineas which made it possible to write ‘Old China,’ and behold he was shedding radiance on almost every fact of life, no matter how spiritually recondite or remote from his own practical experience. No one can rise from Elia without being deepened and enriched; and no one having read Elia can ever say either off-hand or after a year’s thought which one essay he would retain to the loss of all the others.”
B. hitherto had been a silent listener. Here he spoke, and, as so often, said the final thing. “Yes,” he said, “it is vain (but good sport) to take any one of the essays and argue that it is the best. Just as the best thing in a garden is not any particular flower but the scent of all the flowers that are there, so the best of Lamb is not any single essay but the fragrance of them all. It is for this that those gentle paths have been trodden by so much good company.
“Yes,” he added meditatively. “‘The scent of Elia’s garden’! That is the best essay, if you like, and ‘Charles (and Mary) Lamb’ its title.”