Selected Prose

by Charles Lamb

  The gripple merchant, born to be the curse

  Of this brave Isle.

  I have now lying before me that curious book by Daniel Defoe, ‘The Complete English Tradesman.’4 The pompous detail, the studied analysis of every little mean art, every sneaking address, every trick and subterfuge (short of larceny) that is necessary to the tradesman’s occupation, with the hundreds of anecdotes, dialogues (in Defoe’s liveliest manner) interspersed, all tending to the same amiable purpose, namely, the sacrificing of every honest emotion of the soul to what he calls the main chance, – if you read it in an ironical sense, and as a piece of covered satire, – make it one of the most amusing books which Defoe ever writ, as much so as any of his best novels. It is difficult to say what his intention was in writing it. It is almost impossible to suppose him in earnest. Yet such is the bent of the book to narrow and to degrade the heart, that if such maxims were as catching and infectious as those of a licentious cast, which happily is not the case, had I been living at that time, I certainly should have recommended to the Grand Jury of Middlesex, who presented The Fable of the Bees,5 to have presented this book of Defoe’s in preference, as of a far more vile and debasing tendency. I will give one specimen of his advice to the young tradesman on the Government of his Temper. ‘The retail tradesman in especial, and even every tradesman in his station, must furnish himself with a competent stock of patience; I mean that sort of patience which is needful to bear with all sorts of impertinence, and the most provoking curiosity that it is impossible to imagine the buyers, even the worst of them, are or can be guilty of. A tradesman behind his counter must have no flesh and blood about him, no passions, no resentment; he must never be angry, no not so much as seem to be so, if a customer tumbles him five hundred pounds worth of goods, and scarce bids money for any thing; nay, though they really come to his shop with no intent to buy, as many do, only to see what is to be sold, and though he knows they cannot be better pleased, than they are, at some other shop where they intend to buy, ’tis all one, the tradesman must take it, he must place it to the account of his calling, that ’tis his business to be ill used, and resent nothing; and so must answer as obligingly to those that give him an hour or two’s trouble and buy nothing, as he does to those who in half the time lay out ten or twenty pounds. The case is plain, and if some do give him trouble and do not buy, others make amends and do buy; and as for the trouble, ’tis the business of the shop.’ Here follows a most admirable story of a mercer who, by his indefatigable meanness and more than Socratic patience under affronts, overcame and reconciled a lady, who upon the report of another lady that he had behaved saucily to some third lady, had determined to shun his shop, but by the over-persuasions of a fourth lady was induced to go to it; which she does, declaring before hand that she will buy nothing, but give him all the trouble she can. Her attack and his defence, her insolence and his persevering patience, are described in colours worthy of a Mandeville; but it is too long to recite. ‘The short inference from this long discourse’ (says he) ‘is this, that here you see, and I could give you many examples like this, how and in what manner a shop-keeper is to behave himself in the way of his business; what impertinences, what taunts, flouts, and ridiculous things, he must bear in his trade, and must not show the least return, or the least signal of disgust: he must have no passions, no fire in his temper; he must be all soft and smooth; nay, if his real temper be naturally fiery and hot, he must shew none of it in his shop; he must be a perfect complete hypocrite if he will be a complete tradesman.’* It is true, natural tempers are not to be always counterfeited; the man cannot easily be a lamb in his shop, and a lion in himself; but let it be easy or hard, it must be done, and is done: there are men who have by custom and usage brought themselves to it, that nothing could be meeker and milder than they, when behind the counter, and yet nothing be more furious and raging in every other part of life; nay the provocations they have met with in their shops have so irritated their rage, that they would go up stairs from their shop, and fall into frenzies, and a kind of madness, and beat their heads against the wall, and perhaps mischief themselves, if not prevented, till the violence of it had gotten vent, and the passions abate and cool. I heard once of a shop-keeper that behaved himself thus to such an extreme, that when he was provoked by the impertinence of the customers, beyond what his temper could bear, he would go up stairs and beat his wife, kick his children about like dogs, and be as furious for two or three minutes as a man chained down in Bedlam; and again, when that heat was over, would sit down, and cry faster than the children he had abused; and after the fit, he would go down into the shop again, and be as humble, courteous, and as calm as any man whatever; so absolute a government of his passions had he in the shop and so little out of it; in the shop, a soulless animal that would resent nothing; and in the family a madman: in the shop, meek like a lamb; but in the family, outrageous, like a Lybian lion. The sum of the matter is, it is necessary for a tradesman to subject himself by all the ways possible, to his business; his customers are to be his idols: so far as he may worship idols by allowance, he is to bow down to them, and worship them; at least, he is not in any way to displease them, or shew any disgust or distaste whatsoever they may say or do; the bottom of all is, that he is intending to get money by them, and it is not for him that gets money to offer the least inconvenience to them by whom he gets it; he is to consider that, as Solomon says,6 ‘the borrower is servant to the lender, so the seller is servant to the buyer.’ – What he says on the head of Pleasures and Recreations is not less amusing: – ‘The tradesman’s pleasure should be in his business; his companions should be his books, (he means his Ledger, Wastebook, &c.) and if he has a family, he makes his excursions up stairs and no further: – none of my cautions aim at restraining a tradesman from diverting himself, as we call it, with his fire-side, or keeping company with his wife and children.’ – Liberal allowance; nay, almost licentious and criminal indulgence! – but it is time to dismiss this Philosopher of Meanness. More of this stuff would illiberalize the pages of the Reflector. Was the man in earnest, when he could bring such powers of description, and all the charms of natural eloquence, in commendation of the meanest, vilest, wretchedest degradations of the human character? – Or did he not rather laugh in his sleeve at the doctrines which he inculcated, and retorting upon the grave citizens of London their own arts, palm upon them a sample of disguised Satire under the name of wholesome Instruction?

  (Reflector, No. IV, 1811)

  6. Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion’

  (A Review)

  The volume before us, as we learn from the Preface, is ‘a detached portion of an unfinished poem, containing views of man, nature, and society;’ to be called the Recluse,1 as having for its principal subject the ‘sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement;’ and to be preceded by a ‘record in verse of the origin and progress of the author’s own powers, with reference to the fitness which they may be supposed to have conferred for the task.’ To the completion of this plan we look forward with a confidence which the execution of the finished part is well calculated to inspire. – Meanwhile, in what is before us there is an ample matter for entertainment: for the ‘Excursion’ is not a branch (as might have been suspected) prematurely plucked from the parent tree to gratify an overhasty appetite for applause; but is, in itself, a complete and legitimate production.

  It opens with the meeting of the poet with an aged man whom he had known from his school-days; in plain words, a Scottish pedlar; a man who, though of low origin, had received good learning and impressions of the strictest piety from his stepfather, a minister and village schoolmaster. Among the hills of Athol, the child is described to have become familiar with the appearances of nature in his occupation as a feeder of sheep; and from her silent influences to have derived a character, meditative, tender, and poetical. With an imagination and feelings thus nourished – his intellect not unaided by books, but those, few, and chiefly of a religious cast – the ne
cessity of seeking a maintenance in riper years, had induced him to make choice of a profession, the appellation for which has been gradually declining into contempt, but which formerly designated a class of men, who, journeying in country places, when roads presented less facilities for travelling, and the intercourse between towns and villages was unfrequent and hazardous, became a sort of link of neighbourhood to distant habitations; resembling, in some small measure, in the effects of their periodical returns, the caravan which Thompson so feelingly describes2 as blessing the cheerless Siberian in its annual visitation, with ‘news of human kind.’

  In the solitude incident to this rambling life, power had been given him to keep alive that devotedness to nature which he had imbibed in his childhood, together with the opportunity of gaining such notices of persons and things from his intercourse with society, as qualified him to become a ‘teacher of moral wisdom.’ With this man, then, in a hale old age, released from the burthen of his occupation, yet retaining much of its active habits, the poet meets, and is by him introduced to a second character – a sceptic – one who had been partially roused from an overwhelming desolation, brought upon him by the loss of wife and children, by the powerful incitement of hope which the French Revolution in its commencement put forth, but who, disgusted with the failure of all its promises, had fallen back into a laxity of faith and conduct which induced at length a total despondence as to the dignity and final destination of his species. In the language of the poet, he

  – broke faith with those whom he had laid

  In earth’s dark chambers.

  Yet he describes himself as subject to compunctious visitations from that silent quarter.

  – Feebly must they have felt,

  Who, in old time, attired with snakes and whips

  The vengeful Furies. Beautiful regards

  Were turned on me – the face of her I loved;

  The wife and mother; pitifully fixing

  Tender reproaches, insupportable! – p. 153.

  The conversations with this person, in which the Wanderer asserts the consolatory side of the question against the darker views of human life maintained by his friend, and finally calls to his assistance the experience of a village priest, the third, or rather fourth interlocutor, (for the poet himself is one,) form the groundwork of the ‘Excursion.’

  It will be seen by this sketch that the poem is of a didactic nature, and not a fable or story; yet it is not wanting in stories of the most interesting kind, – such as the lovers of Cowper and Goldsmith will recognize as something familiar and congenial to them. We might instance the Ruined Cottage, and the Solitary’s own story, in the first half of the work; and the second half, as being almost a continued cluster of narration. But the prevailing charm of the poem is, perhaps, that, conversational as it is in its plan, the dialogue throughout is carried on in the very heart of the most romantic scenery which the poet’s native hills could supply; and which, by the perpetual references made to it either in the way of illustration or for variety and pleasurable description’s sake, is brought before us as we read. We breathe in the fresh air, as we do while reading Walton’s Complete Angler;3 only the country about us is as much bolder than Walton’s, as the thoughts and speculations, which form the matter of the poem, exceed the trifling pastime and low-pitched conversation of his humble fishermen. We give the description of the ‘two huge peaks,’ which from some other vale peered into that in which the Solitary is entertaining the poet and his companion. ‘Those,’ says their host,

  – if here you dwelt, would be

  Your prized companions. Many are the notes

  Which in his tuneful course the wind draws forth

  From rocks, woods, caverns, heaths, and dashing shores;

  And well those lofty brethren bear their part

  In the wild concert: chiefly when the storm

  Rides high; then all the upper air they fill

  With roaring sound, that ceases not to flow,

  Like smoke, along the level of the blast

  In mighty current; theirs, too, is the song

  Of stream and headlong flood that seldom fails;

  And in the grim and breathless hour of noon,

  Methinks that I have heard them echo back

  The thunder’s greeting: nor have Nature’s laws

  Left them ungifted with a power to yield

  Music of finer frame; a harmony,

  So do I call it, though it be the hand

  Of silence, though there be no voice; the clouds,

  The mist, the shadows, light of golden suns,

  Motions of moonlight, all come thither – touch,

  And have an answer – thither come, and shape

  A language not unwelcome to sick hearts,

  And idle spirits: there the sun himself

  At the calm close of summer’s longest day

  Rests his substantial orb; – between those heights,

  And on the top of either pinnacle,

  More keenly than elsewhere in night’s blue vault,

  Sparkle the stars as of their station proud.

  Thoughts are not busier in the mind of man,

  Than the mute agent stirring there: – alone

  Here do I sit and watch. – p. 84.

  To a mind constituted like that of Mr Wordsworth, the stream, the torrent, and the stirring leaf – seem not merely to suggest associations of deity, but to be a kind of speaking communication with it. He walks through every forest, as through some Dodona;4 and every bird that flits among the leaves, like that miraculous one* in Tasso, but in language more intelligent, reveals to him far higher love-lays. In his poetry nothing in Nature is dead. Motion is synonymous with life. ‘Beside yon spring,’ says the Wanderer, speaking of a deserted well, from which, in former times, a poor woman, who died heart-broken, had been used to dispense refreshment to the thirsty traveller,

  – beside yon spring I stood,

  And eyed its waters, till we seem’d to feel

  One sadness, they and I. For them a bond

  Of brotherhood is broken: time has been

  When every day the touch of human hand

  Dislodged the natural sleep that binds them up

  In mortal stillness. – p. 27.

  To such a mind, we say – call it strength or weakness – if weakness, assuredly a fortunate one – the visible and audible things of creation present, not dim symbols, or curious emblems, which they have done at all times to those who have been gifted with the poetical faculty; but revelations and quick insights into the life within us, the pledge of immortality: –

  – the whispering air

  Sends inspiration from her shadowy heights,

  And blind recesses of the cavern’d rocks:

  The little rills, and waters numberless,

  Inaudible by day-light.

  ‘I have seen,’ the poet says, and the illustration is an happy one:

  – I have seen

  A curious child, applying to his ear

  The convolutions of a smooth-lipp’d shell,

  To which, in silence hush’d, his very soul

  Listen’d intensely, and his countenance soon

  Brighten’d with joy; for murmurings from within

  Were heard – sonorous cadences! whereby,

  To his belief, the monitor express’d

  Mysterious union with its native sea.

  Even such a shell the universe itself

  Is to the ear of faith; and doth impart

  Authentic tidings of invisible things:

  Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power;

  And central peace subsisting at the heart

  Of endless agitation. – p. 191.

  Sometimes this harmony is imaged to us by an echo; and in one instance, it is with such transcendent beauty set forth by a shadow and its corresponding substance, that it would be a sin to cheat our readers at once of so happy an illustration of the poet’s system, and so fair a proof of his descriptive power
s.

  Thus having reach’d a bridge that over-arch’d

  The hasty rivulet where it lay becalmed

  In a deep pool, by happy chance we saw

  A two-fold image; on a grassy bank

  A snow-white ram, and in the chrystal flood

  Another and the same! most beautiful,

  On the green turf with his imperial front,

  Shaggy and bold, and wreathed horns superb,

  The breathing creature stood; as beautiful,

  Beneath him, show’d his shadowy counterpart.

  Each had his glowing mountains, each his sky,

  And each seem’d centre of his own fair world;

  Antipodes unconscious of each other,

  Yet, in partition, with their several spheres,

  Blended in perfect stillness, to our sight! – p. 407.

  Combinations, it is confessed, ‘like those reflected in that quiet pool,’ cannot be lasting: it is enough for the purpose of the poet, if they are felt. – They are at least his system; and his readers, if they reject them for their creed, may receive them merely as poetry. In him, faith, in friendly alliance and conjunction with the religion of his country, appears to have grown up, fostered by meditation and lonely communions with Nature – an internal principle of lofty consciousness, which stamps upon his opinions and sentiments (we were almost going to say) the character of an expanded and generous Quakerism.

  From such a creed we should expect unusual results; and, when applied to the purposes of consolation, more touching considerations than from the mouth of common teachers. The first speculation of this sort perhaps in the poem before us, is the notion of the thoughts which may sustain the spirit, while they crush the frame of the sufferer, who from loss of objects of love by death, is commonly supposed to pine away under a broken heart.

  – If there be, whose tender frames have drooped