ONE OF LAMB’S CREDITORS
There are writers upon the roll of whom nobody demands, “How begot, how nourishéd”—not many, but one or two. Milton, for instance: does anyone try to derive Milton? Or Cowper? Or Wordsworth? Others, nearly all the others, abide our question, and no wonder. Is not all creative effort the agony of recalling? Is not the brain a sponge? Is there anything new except arrangement? Very well—then Defoe must have been a borrower, though he seems stark new. We know that Charles Lamb picked up words, phrases, cadences as a magnet steel-filings; but his latest and best biographer now goes further and seeks to lay his mental habit to somebody. He has devoted an essay to deriving his whimsicality, as he calls it, for want of a more comprehensive term, which shall include the freakish humour which is peculiarly Lamb’s, and the “unreluctant egoism” which he thinks Lamb was the first of us to signalise. I could quarrel with him there, “if I had the mind,” being very sure that Lamb was not the first egoist in English Literature by a very long way. If he was, then Mr. Lucas must devote another essay dealing with the claims of Sterne, Colley Cibber, Sir Thomas Browne, Cowley, Pepys, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, to name no more. However, let that go. Lamb’s cast of humour, a glancing, many-faceted thing, as wayward as the wind, but like the wind, from whatever airt it blow, bringing upon it the scent of what garden plots, hedgerows, beanfields and thymy uplands it may have crossed—that Mr. Lucas has been driven, seeing that he must needs buckle it to his egoism, to obtain from the mild mock-epic of Cowper, which does seem to me a wide cast to have made, with a small fry netted for his pains. When I came upon and had read that essay, in Mr. Lucas’s Giving and Receiving, I gazed for a few minutes thoughtfully into the fire, then got up and took down from the shelf the second volume of the Life of Charles by the same hand. In a useful Appendix III, upon “Charles Lamb’s Books,” I found what I wanted.
Before I say what it was I wanted, and what found, I ought to acknowledge that Mr. Lucas draws a proper distinction between the Essays of Elia and the Letters of Charles Lamb, one, however, which he might not have drawn if the Letters of Cowper had not been published long after Lamb began to write letters. That being the fact, he has to derive Lamb’s Letters from Cowper’s Poems, and Elia’s Essays from Cowper’s Letters, rather a chassez-croisez piece of work. Except for that necessity I think he might have gone as near as Mr. Saintsbury does (in A Letter Book) to fining the difference between Essays and Letters to one of “full dress” and “undress.” To me the difference is much greater, is precisely, indeed, the difference between Charles Lamb and Elia. Lamb’s alias was not (like Sterne’s) a stalking-horse; it was a mask and domino. With the name he put on the thing signified, or as much of it as he cared for, gave himself Lincolnshire ancestry, shifted at ease his own relatives, his early loves, the haunts of his youth, and used them the more freely for his occasions. Yet he treated his form with respect, neither let it run down, nor stepped out of character. Elia sometimes borrowed from Lamb. The “Convict” letter to Barron Field yielded its bitter-sweet to an essay, but was transformed in the taking. Not to speak profanely, there was an Assumption of the Lamb. In the Letters whim is master: Lamb is Will o’ the Wisp. From essay to essay Elia may change like Harlequin, but each single essay is ruled by one mood. Elia was evidently, if not avowedly, a debtor. Whiffs of Sir Thomas Browne, of Addison, Burton, Shakespeare, Montaigne (or Florio) float up from the page as you read. So they do in Lamb’s Letters. But there is one very signally in Lamb, not so evident in Elia, and it was that which I looked for in Mr. Lucas’s Appendix III, where, sure enough, among Lamb’s books I found:
Howell (James), Epistolae Ho-Elianae, 1645-55.
There, beyond doubt, is the source of more than a little of Lamb’s whimsicality.
James Howell, who was born in 1593, third of the many children of the Reverend Thomas Howell, curate of Llangammarch and other places in Brecknockshire, was a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, a good deal of a scholar (able, as he boasted, to say his prayers in a different language on every day of the week and in all of them on Sundays), something of an adventurer, much of a traveller, and a man who never lost a job for lack of asking for it. He was variously employed, commercially in France and Italy, diplomatically in Spain (where he was when Prince Charles would, and did, a-wooing go), in Germany also, and the North of England: a traveller to better purpose than Coryat, who slightly preceded him. He returned from each country he visited set up in its language, and able to discourse reasonably upon its politics, religion and economics. None the less, as I suppose, he was idle, for he never made money or kept an employment. He was perpetually scribbling, if you can call that an employment; the bibliographical list of his “Works” contains something like seventy numbers. Many of them are pamphlets, political, controversial, allegorical and what not. If there had been any journals he would have been a journalist—for that, out of due time, was he born. He wrote much on philology, and pretty well; he wrote a deal of poetry too, and very badly. I shall only inflict two specimens upon the reader. This is the opening of a “small hymn” for Christmas Day:
“Hail holy Tyde
Wherein a Bride,
A Virgin (which is more)
Brought forth a Son,
The lyke was done
Ne’er in this world before—;”
and this is the beginning of an elegy upon the Earl of Dorset,
“But is great Sackville dead? Do we him lack,
And will not all the Elements wear black?”
and this the middle,
“Thus have I blubber’d out some tears and verse
On this renownéd heroe and his herse,”
and this the end,
“In the meantime this Epitaph shall shut,
And to my Elegy a period put—”
on which the only commentary I feel able to make is, Oh!
He wrote in all the languages he had. “I would have you know,” he writes to his friend Young, “that I have, though never married, divers children already, some French, some Latin, one Italian, and many English; and though they be but poor brats of the brain, yet are they legitimate, and Apollo himself vouchsafed to co-operate in their production.” It may be doubted whether any of them survived their father except his Familiar Letters, those Epistolae Ho-Elianae which were published and republished in his lifetime, and many times afterwards, have survived even to this day, been favourites with Thackeray as well as Charles Lamb; and are in fact the first of our private letters to each other to enter an admitted chapter of our Literature. If we could hope to see ourselves abreast of France it would be by means of Howell that we should get there. Exactly at the time when Guy Patin was writing his vivacious, very modern letters to his confrère in Lyons, here was our man, quite as brisk and even more modern in tone. Unfortunately for us, France had her Balzac, well under way, and writing in a prose as easy and reasonable as Renan’s. But Howell is strikingly modern compared, say, with Donne or Milton. He reports, for example, that the Prince Palatine has got together “a jolly considerable army”; and to a poetical friend he avows his ambition (on what pretence we have seen) to become a “Lord of Parnassus,” and to be the choice of “those nice girls,” the Muses! It has been said by more than one critic, that not all Howell’s bullets found, or were intended to find, their billets, that in fact letters addressed to Sir K. D., to the Lord Sa., and more explicitly to the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Clare and so on, were really addressed to the air, or the public. It may be so. Others were certainly real enough. There is little doubt, though, that he wrote with an eye to publication. Some of the longest of them are less letters than treatises, and good as they are of their kind, contain none of the additaments which make a letter a much better thing than a library of treatises. By far the greater part are real letters, and excellent letters too. Howell was something of a pedant, something perhaps of a coxcomb. Thackeray called him a prig. Certainly, to address a long letter containing many anecdotes ad hoc and a “Gradual Hymn tending to the honour of the holy name of God” to a ship’s captain upon his “frailty” of “swearing in all his discourses deep and far-fetched oaths,” is the act of prig or coxcomb—but I think Howell was the latter. A prig believes that he can do you good, and the coxcomb desires to air his talents. That was Howell’s simple design, and so I am sure the captain took it. But I should like to know how Ben Jonson, of whose tribe at the Devil Tavern Howell professed himself, took a similar reproof. The burly poet had hurt the feelings of Inigo Jones by putting him in a play as Vitruvius Hoop: whereupon Howell addressed his “Father Ben” as follows:
“You know,
Anser, apis, vitulus, populos et regna gubernant ... but of the three the pen is the most predominant. I know you have a commanding one, but you must not let it tyrannise in that manner, as you have done lately. Some give it out that there was a hair in it, or that your ink was too thick with gall, else it would not have so bespattered and shaken the reputation of a royal architect.”
Of his whimsicality I find examples enough to drown in. There is his pleasant tale to a cousin just off to the Dutch wars, of the soldier who had been there and returned, and being asked what exploits he had done, answered, That he had cut off a Spaniard’s legs. “Reply being made that that was no great matter, it had been something if he had cut off his head; O, said he, you must consider his head was off before.” And the other, truly excellent, of that Earl of Kildare who, arraigned before the Lord-Deputy for having set fire to, and burned down, the Church of Cashel, excused himself by saying that he would never have done such a thing had he not understood that the Bishop was inside. But here is from a letter a piece so exactly in Lamb’s vein when he is turning a whimsical notion about and about, and at each turn enhancing it, that I feel sure Howell aut diabolus must have taught it him:
First, the theme—“I was according to your desire to visit the late new-married couple more than once, and to tell you true, I never saw such a disparity between two that were made one flesh in all my life; he handsome outwardly, but of odd conditions; she excellently qualified, but hard-favoured; so that the one may be compared to a cloth of tissue doublet cut upon coarse canvas, the other to a buckram petticoat lined with satin.”
Then, like Lamb, he begins to hang up his conceits:
“I think Clotho had her fingers smutted in snuffing the candle when she began to spin the thread of her life.... A blind man is fittest to hear her sing; one would take delight to see her dance if masked, and it would please you to discourse with her in the dark, for then she is best company. When you marry, I wish you such an inside of a wife, but from such an outward phisnomy the Lord deliver you.”
Phisnomy, or visnomy, is a word which Lamb has made his own.
How often has Lamb held this vein too. “The French are a free and debonair, accostable people, both men and women.... Whereas the old rule was that there could be no true friendship without comessation of a bushel of salt, one may have enough there before he eat a spoonful with them. I like that Friendship which by soft gentle passes steals upon the affection and grows mellow with time by reciprocal offices and trials of love.” And here is an example of pictorial quality which I must not leave out. In the stress of Civil War he writes to a friend in Amsterdam, “While you adorn your churches, we destroy them here. Among others, poor Paul’s looks like a great skeleton, so pitifully handled that you may tell her ribs through her skin. Her body looks like the hulk of some huge Portugal Carake that having crossed the line twelve times and made three voyages to the East Indies, lies rotting upon the Strand.... You know that once a stable was made a temple, but now a temple is become a stable.”
Lamb, we all know, had a love of tags and proverbs, and could string them with anyone. Not more surely than Howell could, who has a long letter of advice to a friend, upon marriage, consisting entirely of them. As thus:
“Sir, although I am none of those that love to have an oar in everyone’s boat, or such a busybody as deserves to be hit in the teeth, yet you and I having eaten a peck of salt together, and having a hint that you are upon a business that will make or mar you, for a man’s best fortune or his worst’s a wife, I would wish you to look before you leap, and make more than two words to a bargain.”
He keeps it up with immense zest for two full sheets, and ends all with “yours to the altar.” If Lamb knew that, he would never have forgotten it—and I believe he never did.