And if we recur to the Letters we shall find the most abundant proof of this quality. How admirable are those criticisms[[459]] of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads which, because they are not “neat” praise, roused the poetic irritability, not merely of Wordsworth, whose views respecting the reception of his own verse were always Athanasian, but of Coleridge, who had, at any rate, intervals of self-perception! How sound the judgment of Mrs Barbauld and of Chapman (a pleasing pair) to Coleridge himself on Oct. 23, 1802![[460]] How sure the touch of the finger on that absurdity in Godwin’s Chaucer which has been so frequently copied since, “the fondness for filling out the picture by supposing what Chaucer did and how he felt”![[461]] The choicest of his observations are naturally those to Coleridge, almost passim: but the vein is so irrepressible that he indulges it even in writing to Wordsworth, though he knew perfectly well that the most favourable reception could only be a mild wonder that people could think or talk of any literature, and especially any poetry, other than “W. W.’s” own. Even his experiences in 1800 could not prevent him from handling[[462]] the Poems of 1815 with the same “irreverent parrhesia” which he uses immediately after[[463]] also to Southey on Roderick as compared with Kehama and Madoc. His famous appreciation of Blake[[464]] (of whom 'tis pity that he knew no more) is one of the capital examples of pre-established harmony between subject and critic. That he could not, on the other hand, like Shelley, is not unsusceptible of explanations by no means wholly identical, though partly, with those which account for Hazlitt’s error. Lamb did not like the word “unearthly” (he somewhere objects to its use) and he did not like the thing unearthliness. The regions where, as Mr Arnold has it, “thin, thin, the pleasant human noises sound,” were not his haunt. Now Blake always has a homely domestic everyday side close to his wildest prophetisings,[[465]] and Shelley has not. On the other hand, how completely does he grasp even Cervantes in the few obiter dicta to Southey on Aug. 19, 1825,[[466]] and how instantly he seizes the “charm one cannot explain” in Rose Aylmer.[[467]] And his very last letter concerns a book, and a book on poetry, Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum.

Uniqueness of Lamb’s critical style

His love was, as we said, “of the book,” perhaps, rather than, as in Hazlitt’s case, “of literature.” The Advocatus Diaboli may once more suggest that to Lamb the book was a very little too much on a level with the tea-pot and the engraving—that he had a shade in excess of the collector’s feeling about him. But the Court will not call upon the learned gentleman to say anything more on that head. It is time to acknowledge, without reservations or provisos, the unique quality of “Elia’s” critical appreciation. Very much of this quality—if a quality be separable into parts—arises from his extraordinary command of phrase,—the phrase elaborate without affectation, borrowed yet absolutely individual and idiosyncratic, mannered to the nth, but never mannerised, in which, though he might not have attained to it without his great seventeenth-century masters, he stands original and alone. In no critic perhaps—not even in Mr Pater—does style count for so much as in Lamb; in none certainly is it more distinctive, and, while never monotonous, more homogeneous, uniform, instantly recognisable and self-bewrayed. The simulative power—almost as of the leaf-insect and suchlike creatures—with which he could imitate styles, is of course most obvious in the tour de force of the Burton counterfeits. But in his best and most characteristic work it is not this which we see, but something much nobler, though closely allied to it. It is not Browne, or Fuller, or Burton, or Glanvill, but something like them, yet different. And though it has more outré presentation in some of his miscellaneous writing than in his criticism, yet it is never absent in the most striking pieces of this, and gives them much of their hold on us.

and thought.

Still, those who, however unnecessarily (for no one surely is going to deny it save in a mood of paradox or of monomania), insist that style must be the body of thought—nay, that this body itself must think (in Donne’s phrase), and not merely live, will find no difficulty in claiming Lamb as theirs. Nothing of the kind is more curious than the fact that, strongly marked as are his peculiarities and much as he may himself have imitated, he is not imitable; nobody has ever, except in the minutest shreds—rather actually torn off from his motley than reproducing it—written in Lamb’s style save Lamb. And accordingly no one (though not a few have tried) has ever criticised like Lamb. It is very easy to be capricious, fantastic, fastidious—as easy as to wear yellow stockings and go cross-gartered, and as effective. To Lamb’s critical attitude there go in the first place that love for the book which has been spoken of; then that faculty of sound, almost common-sense, “taste” which is shown in the early letters to Coleridge and Southey; then the reading of years and decades; and, lastly, the je ne sais quoi that “fondoos” the other things, as the old Oxford story has it—a story to be constantly borne in mind by the critic and the historian of criticism.[[468]] Even the other ingredients are not too common, especially in conjunction: the je ne sais quoi itself is here, and nowhere else.

Leigh Hunt: his somewhat inferior position.

Leigh Hunt[[469]] claims less space from us than either of his friends Hazlitt and Lamb. This is not because he is an inconsiderable critic, for he is by no means this. As has been said, he has the immense and surprising credit of having first discovered the greatness of the tragic part of Middleton’s Changeling, as an individual exploit, and in more general ways he has that, which Macaulay duly recognised in a well-known passage,[[470]] of being perhaps more catholic in his tastes as regards English Literature than any critic up to his time. He has left a very large range of critical performance, which is very rarely without taste, acuteness, and felicity of expression; and he has, as against both the greater critics just named, the very great advantage of possessing a competent knowledge of at least one modern literature[[471]] besides his own, and some glimmerings of others. He has the further deserts of being almost always readable, of diffusing a pleasant sunny atmosphere, and of doing very much to keep up the literary side of that periodical production which, for good or for evil, was, with the novel, the great literary feature of the nineteenth century. These are not small merits: and while they might seem greater if they were not thrown somewhat into the shade by the superior eminence of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and the superior attractiveness of Lamb, they retain, even in the vicinity of these, claims to full acknowledgment.