“When all can read, and books are plentiful, lectures are unnecessary,” says Dr. Johnson, who hated “by-roads in education,” and novel devices—or devices which were novel a hundred and thirty years ago—for softening and abridging hard study. He hated also to be asked the kind of questions which we are now so fond of answering in the columns of our journals and magazines. What should a child learn first? How should a boy be taught? What course of study would he recommend an intelligent youth to pursue? “Let him take a course of chemistry, or a course of rope-dancing, or a course of anything to which he is inclined,” was the great scholar’s petulant reply to one of these repeated inquiries; and, though it sounds ill-natured, we have some human sympathy for the pardonable irritation which prompted it. Dr. Johnson, I am well aware, is not a popular authority to quote in behalf of any cause one wishes to advance; but his heterodoxy in the matter of lectures is supported openly by Charles Lamb, and furtively by some living men of letters, who strive, though with no great show of temerity, to stem the ever-increasing current of popular instruction. One eminent scholar, being entreated to deliver a course of lectures on a somewhat abstruse theme, replied that if people really desired information on that subject, and if they could read, he begged to refer them to two books he had written several years before. By perusing these volumes, which were easy of access, they would know all that he once knew, and a great deal more than he knew at the present time, as he had unhappily forgotten much that was in them. It would be simpler, he deemed, and it would be cheaper, than bringing him across the ocean to repeat the same matter in lectures.
As for Lamb, we have not only his frankly stated opinion, but—what is much more diverting—we have also the unconscious confession of a purely human weakness with which it is pleasant to sympathize. Like all the rest of us, this charming and fallible genius found that heroic efforts in the future cost less than very moderate exertions in the present. He was warmly attached to Coleridge, and he held him in sincere veneration. When the poet came to London in 1816, we find Lamb writing to Wordsworth very enthusiastically, and yet with a vague undercurrent of apprehension:—
“Coleridge is absent but four miles, and the neighborhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons. ’Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet. If I lived with him, or with the author of ‘The Excursion,’ I should in a very little time lose my own identity, and be dragged along in the currents of other people’s thoughts, hampered in a net.”
This is well enough by way of anticipation; but later on, when Coleridge is a fixed star in the London skies, and is preparing to give his lectures on Shakespeare and English poetry, Lamb’s kind heart warms to his perpetually impecunious friend. He writes now to Payne Collier, with little enthusiasm, but with great earnestness, bespeaking his interest and assistance. He reminds Collier of his friendship and admiration for Coleridge, and bids him remember that he and all his family attended the poet’s lectures five years before. He tells him alluringly that this is a brand-new course, with nothing metaphysical about it, and adds: “There are particular reasons just now, and have been for the last twenty years, why he [Coleridge] should succeed. He will do so with a little encouragement.”
Doubtless; but it is worthy of note that the next time the subject is mentioned is in a letter to Mrs. Wordsworth, written more than two months later. The lectures are now in progress; very successful, we hear; but—Lamb has been to none of them. He intends to go soon, of course,—so do we always; but, in the mean while, he is treating resolution with a good deal of zest, and making the best plea he can for his defalcation. With desperate candor he writes:—
“I mean to hear some of the course, but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the lecturer may be. If read, they are dismal flat, and you can’t think why you are brought together to hear a man read his works, which you could read so much better at leisure yourself. If delivered extempore, I am always in pain lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honor of me at the London Tavern. ‘Gentlemen,’ said I, and there I stopped; the rest my feelings were under the necessity of supplying.”
We can judge pretty well from this letter just how many of those lectures on Shakespeare Lamb was likely to hear; and all doubts are set at rest when we find Coleridge, the following winter, endeavoring to lure his reluctant friend to another course by the presentation of a complimentary ticket. Even this device fails of its wonted success. Lamb is eloquent in thanks, and lame in excuses. He has been in an “incessant hurry.” He was unable to go on the evening he was expected because it was the night of Kenney’s new comedy, “which has utterly failed,”—this is mentioned as soothing to Coleridge’s wounded feelings. He has mistaken his dates, and supposed there would be no lectures in Christmas week. He is as eager to vindicate himself as Miss Edgeworth’s Rosamond, and he is as sanguine as ever about the future. “I trust,” he writes, “to hear many a course yet;” and with this splendid resolution, which is made without a pang, he wanders brightly off to a more engaging topic.
It is a charming little bit of comedy, and has, withal, such a distinctly modern touch, that we might fancy it enacted in this year of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-four by any of our weak and erring friends.
REVIEWERS AND REVIEWED.
In these days of grace when all manner of evil-doers have their apologists; when we are bidden to admire the artistic spirit of Nero and the warm-hearted integrity of Henry the Eighth; when a “cult for Domitian” and a taste for Nihilists contend with each other in our estimation; it may not be ill-timed nor unduly venturesome to offer a few modest arguments in behalf of those Pariahs of modern literature, the anonymous reviewers of the press. They have been harshly abused for so many years. They have been targets for the wrath of authors, the scorn of satirists, the biting comments of injured genius. And now, when milder manners and gentler modes of speech are replacing the vigorous Billingsgate of our ancestors; when theologians and politicians make war upon one another with some show of charity and discretion, the reviewer alone is excluded from this semblance of goodwill, the reviewer alone—a thing apart from brotherhood—is pelted as openly as ever. The stones that are cast at him are so big and so hard that if he still lives, and, in a mild way, even flourishes, it must be because of his own irritating obtusiveness, because of his unpardonable reluctance to come forward decently and be killed.