Selected Prose

by Charles Lamb

  I have nothing of Defoe’s2 but two or three Novels, and the Plague History. I can give you no information about him. As a slight general character of what I remember of them (for I have not look’d into them latterly) I would say that ‘in the appearance of truth in all the incidents and conversations that occur in them they exceed any works of fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. The Author never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to be called or rather Autobiographies) but the narrator chains us down to an implicit belief in every thing he says. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are painfully pressed upon the memory. Facts are repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot chuse but believe them. It is like reading Evidence given in a Court of Justice. So anxious the story-teller seems, that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when he has told us a matter of fact, or a motive, in a line or two farther down he repeats it with his favorite figure of speech, “I say” so and so, – though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is in imitation of the common people’s way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by a master or mistress, who wishes to impress something upon their memories; and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers. Indeed it is to such principally that he writes. His style is elsewhere beautiful, but plain & homely. Robinson Crusoe is delightful to all ranks and classes, but it is easy to see that it is written in phraseology peculiarly adapted to the lower conditions of readers: hence it is an especial favorite with seafaring men, poor boys, servant maids &c. His novels are capital kitchen-reading, while they are worthy from their deep interest to find a shelf in the Libraries of the wealthiest, and the most learned. His passion for matter of fact narrative sometimes betrayed him into a long relation of common incidents which might happen to any man, and have no interest but the intense appearance of truth in them, to recommend them. The whole latter half, or two thirds, of Colonel Jack is of this description. The beginning of Colonel Jack is the most affecting natural picture of a young thief that was ever drawn. His losing the stolen money in the hollow of a tree, and finding it again when he was in despair, and then being in equal distress at not knowing how to dispose of it, and several similar touches in the early history of the Colonel, evince a deep knowledge of human nature; and, putting out of question the superior romantic interest of the latter, in my mind very much exceed Crusoe. Roxana (1st Edition) is the next in Interest, though he left out the best part of it [in] subsequent Editions from a foolish hypercriticism of his friend, Southerne. But Moll Flanders, the account of the Plague &c. &c. are all of one family, and have the same stamp of character.’ –

  [At the top of the first page is added:]

  Omitted at the end … believe me with friendly recollections, Brother (as I used to call you) Yours

  C. LAMB.

  [Below the ‘Dear Wilson’ is added in smaller writing:]

  The review was not mine, nor have I seen it.

  44. To Bernard Barton

  9 Jan., 1823.

  ‘Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support, beyond what the chance employ of Booksellers would afford you’!!!

  Throw yourself rather, my dear Sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock,1 slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes. If you had but five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the Booksellers. They are Turks and Tartars, when they have poor Authors at their beck. Hitherto you have been at arm’s length from them. Come not within their grasp. I have known many authors for bread, some repining, others envying the blessed security of a Counting House, all agreeing they had rather have been Taylors, Weavers, what not? rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some to go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a workhouse. You know not what a rapacious, dishonest set these booksellers are. Ask even Southey who (a single case almost) has made a fortune by book drudgery, what he has found them. O you know not, may you never know! the miseries of subsisting by authorship. ’Tis a pretty appendage to a situation like yours or mine, but a slavery worse than all slavery to be a bookseller’s dependent, to drudge your brains for pots of ale and breasts of mutton, to change your free thoughts and voluntary numbers for ungracious TASk-WORK. Those fellows hate us. The reason I take to be, that, contrary to other trades, in which the Master gets all the credit (a Jeweller or Silversmith for instance), and the Journeyman, who really does the fine work, is in the background: in our work the world gives all the credit to Us, whom they consider as their Journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, and cheat us, and oppress us, and would wring the blood of us out, to put another sixpence in their mechanic pouches. I contend, that a Bookseller has a relative honesty towards Authors, not like his honesty to the rest of the world. B[aldwin],2 who first engag’d me as Elia, has not paid me up yet (nor any of us without repeated mortifying applials), yet how the Knave fawned while I was of service to him! Yet I dare say the fellow is punctual in settling his milk-score, &c. Keep to your Bank, and the Bank will keep you. Trust not to the Public, you may hang, starve, drown yourself, for anything that worthy Personage cares. I bless every star, that Providence, not seeing good to make me independent, has seen it next good to settle me upon the stable foundation of Leadenhall. Sit down, good B. B., in the Banking Office; what, is there not from six to Eleven P.M. 6 days in the week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie, what a superfluity of man’s time if you could think so! Enough for relaxation, mirth, converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. Of the corroding torturing tormenting thoughts, that disturb the Brain of the unlucky wight, who must draw upon it for daily sustenance. Henceforth I retract all my fond complaints of mercantile employment, look upon them as Lovers’ quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome, dead timber of a desk, that makes me live. A little grumbling is a wholesome medicine for the spleen, but in my inner heart do I approve and embrace this our close but unharassing way of life. I am quite serious. If you can send me Fox, I will not keep it six weeks, and will return it, with warm thanks to yourself and friend, without blot or dog’s ear. You much oblige me by this kindness.

  Yours truly,

  C. LAMB.

  Please to direct to me at India Ho. in future. [? I am] not always at Russell St.

  45. To Bernard Barton

  [Dated at end: 2 September (1823)]

  Dear B. B.,

  What will you say to my not writing? You cannot say I do not write now. Hessey1 has not used your kind sonnet, nor have I seen it. Pray send me a Copy. Neither have I heard any more of your Friend’s MS., which I will reclaim, whenever you please. When you come Londonward you will find me no longer in Covt Gard. I have a Cottage, in Colebrook row, Islington. A cottage, for it is detach’d; a white house, with 6 good rooms; the New River (rather elderly by this time) runs (if a moderate walking pace can be so termed) close to the foot of the house; and behind is a spacious garden, with vines (I assure you), pears, strawberries, parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to delight the heart of old Alcinous.2 You enter without passage into a cheerful dining room, all studded over and rough with old Books, and above is a lightsome Drawing room, 3 windows, full of choice prints. I feel like a great Lord, never having had a house before.

  The London I fear falls off. – I linger among its creaking rafters, like the last rat. It will topple down, if they don’t get some Buttresses. They have pull’d down three, W. Hazlitt, Proctor,3 and their best stay, kind light hearted Wainwright4 – their Janus. The best is, neither of our fortunes is concern’d in it.

  I heard of you from Mr Pulham5 this morning, and that gave a fillip to my Laziness, which has been intolerable. But I am so taken up with pruning and gardening, quite a new sort of occupation to me. I have gather’d my Jargonels, but my Windsor Pears are backward. The former were of exquisite raciness. I do now sit under my own vine, and contemplate the growth of vegetable nature. I can now understand in what sense they speak of FATHER ADAM. I recognize the pa
ternity, while I watch my tulips. I almost FELL with him, for the first day I turned a drunken gard’ner (as he let in the serpent) into my Eden, and he laid about him, lopping off some choice boughs, etc., which hung over from a neighbor’s garden, and in his blind zeal laid waste a shade, which had sheltered their window from the gaze of passers by. The old gentle-woman (fury made her not handsome) could scarcely be reconciled by all my fine words. There was no buttering her parsnips. She talk’d of the Law. What a lapse to commit on the first day of my happy ‘garden-state.’

  I hope you transmitted the Fox-Journal to its Owner with suitable thanks.

  Mr Cary,6 the Dante-man, dines with me to-day. He is a model of a country Parson, lean (as a Curate ought to be), modest, sensible, no obtruder of church dogmas, quite a different man from Southey, you would like him.

  Pray accept this for a Letter, and believe me with sincere regards

  Yours

  C. L.

  2 Sept.

  46. To Bernard Barton

  [9 January 1824]

  Dear B. B.,

  Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable day mare – a whoreson lethargy, Falstaff calls it – an indisposition to do any thing, or to be any thing – a total deadness and distaste – a suspension of vitality – an indifference to locality – a numb soporifical goodfornothingness – an ossification all over – an oyster-like insensibility to the passing events – a mind-stupor, – a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience – did you ever have a very bad cold with a total irresolution to submit to water gruel processes? – this has been for many weeks my lot, and my excuse – my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it is three and twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet – I have not a thing to say – nothing is of more importance than another – I am flatter than a denial or a pancake – emptier than Judge Park’s1 wig when the head is in it – duller than a country stage when the actors are off it – a cypher – an O – I acknowledge life at all, only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest – I am weary of the world – Life is weary of me – My day is gone into Twilight and I don’t think it worth the expence of candles – my wick hath a thief in it, but I can’t muster courage to snuff it – I inhale suffocation – I can’t distinguish veal from mutton – nothing interests me – tis 12 o’clock and Thurtell is just now coming out upon the New Drop – Jack Ketch1 alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves to do the last office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or a moral reflection – if you told me the world will be at end tomorrow, I should just say, ‘will it?’ – I have not volition enough to dot my i’s – much less to comb my EYEBROWS – my eyes are set in my head – my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in Moorfields, and they did not say when they’d come back again – my scull is a Grub street Attic, to let – not so much as a joint stool or a crackd jordan left in it – my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a little when their heads are off – O for a vigorous fit of gout, cholic, tooth ache – an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs – pain is life – the sharper, the more evidence of life – but this apathy, this death – did you ever have an obstinate cold, a six or seven weeks’ unintermitting chill and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and every thing – yet do I try all I can to cure it, I try wine, and spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quantities, but they all only seem to make me worse, instead of better – I sleep in a damp room, but it does me no good; I come home late o’ nights, but do not find any visible amendment.

  Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

  It is just 15 minutes after 12. Thurtell is by this time a good way on his journey, baiting at Scorpion2 perhaps, Ketch is bargaining for his cast coat and waistcoat, the Jew demurs at first at three half crowns, but on consideration that he may get somewhat by showing ’em in the Town, finally closes. –

  C. L.

  47. To Bernard Barton

  [P.M. 25 February 1824]

  My Dear Sir,

  Your title of Poetic Vigils1 arrides me much more than A Volume of Verse, which is no meaning. The motto says nothing, but I cannot suggest a better. I do not like mottoes but where they are singularly felicitous; there is foppery in them. They are unplain, un-Quakerish. They are good only where they flow from the Title, and are a kind of justification of it. There is nothing about watchings or lucubrations in the one you suggest, no commentary on Vigils. By the way, a wag would recommend you to the Line of Pope

  Sleepless himself – to give his readers sleep –

  I by no means wish it. But it may explain what I mean, that a neat motto is child of the Title. I think Poetic Vigils, as short and sweet as can be desired, only have an eye on the Proof, that the Printer do not substitute Virgils, which would ill accord with modesty or meaning. Your suggested motto is antique enough in spelling, and modern enough in phrases; a good modern antique: but the matter of it is germane to the purpose only supposing the title proposed a vindication of yourself from the presumption of authorship. The 1st title was liable to this objection, that if you were disposed to enlarge it, and the bookseller insisted on its appearance in Two Tomes, how oddly it would sound –

  A Volume of Verse

  in Two Volumes

  2d edition &c –

  You see thro’ my wicked intention of curtailing this Epistolet by the above device of large margin. But in truth the idea of letterising has been oppressive to me of late above your candour to give me credit for. There is Southey, whom I ought to have thank’d a fortnight ago for a present of the Church Book. I have never had courage to buckle myself in earnest even to acknowledge it by six words. And yet I am accounted by some people a good man. How cheap that character is acquired! Pay your debts, don’t borrow money, nor twist your kittens neck off, or disturb a congregation, &c. – your business is done. I know things (thoughts or things – thoughts are things) of myself which would make every friend I have fly me as a plague patient. I once***, and set a dog upon a crab’s leg that was shoved out under a moss of sea weeds, a pretty little feeler. – Oh! pah! how sick I am of that; and a lie, a mean one, I once told! –

  I stink in the midst of respect.

  I am much hypt; the fact is, my head is heavy, but there is hope, or if not, I am better than a poor shell fish – not morally when I set the whelp upon it, but have more blood and spirits; things may turn up, and I may creep again into a decent opinion of myself. Vanity will return with sunshine. Till when, pardon my neglects and impute it to the wintry solstice.

  C. LAMB.

  48. To Bernard Barton

  [(Early spring), 1824]

  I am sure I cannot fill a letter, though I should disfurnish my scull to fill it. But you expect something, and shall have a Note-let. Is Sunday, not divinely speaking, but humanly and holydaysically, a blessing? Without its institution, would our rugged taskmasters have given us a leisure day, so often, think you, as once in a month? – or, if it had not been instituted, might they not have given us every 6th day? Solve me this problem. If we are to go 3 times a day to church, why has Sunday slipped into the notion of a Holliday? A Holyday I grant it. The puritans, I have read in Southey’s Book,1 knew the distinction. They made people observe Sunday rigorously, would not let a nursery maid walk out in the fields with children for recreation on that day. But then – they gave the people a holliday from all sorts of work every second Tuesday. This was giving to the Two Cæsars that which was his respective. Wise, beautiful, thoughtful, generous Legislators! Would Wilberforce2 give us our Tuesdays? No, d—n him. He would turn the six days into sevenths,

  And those 3 smiling seasons of the year

  Into a Russian winter.

  Old Play.

  I am sitting opposite a person who is making strange distortions with the gout, which is not unpleasant – to me at least. What is the reason we do not sympathise with pain, short of some terrible Surgical operation? Hazlitt, who boldly sa
ys all he feels, avows that not only he does not pity sick people, but he hates them. I obscurely recognize his meaning. Pain is probably too selfish a consideration, too simply a consideration of self-attention. We pity poverty, loss of friends etc. more complex things, in which the Sufferers feelings are associated with others. This is a rough thought suggested by the presence of gout; I want head to extricate it and plane it. What is all this to your Letter? I felt it to be a good one, but my turn, when I write at all, is perversely to travel out of the record, so that my letters are any thing but answers. So you still want a motto? You must not take my ironical one, because your book, I take it, is too serious for it. Bickerstaff might have used it for his lucubrations. What do you think of (for a Title)

  RELIGIO TREMULI OR TREMEBUNDI3

  There is Religio-Medici and Laici. – But perhaps the volume is not quite Quakerish enough or exclusively for it – but your own VIGILS is perhaps the Best. While I have space, let me congratulate with you the return of Spring, what a Summery Spring too! all those qualms about the dog and cray-fish melt before it. I am going to be happy and vain again.

  A hasty farewell

  C. LAMB

  49. To Bernard Barton

  May 15, 1824.

  Dear B. B.,

  I am oppressed with business all day, and Company all night. But I will snatch a quarter of an hour. Your recent acquisitions of the Picture and the Letter are greatly to be congratulated. I too have a picture of my father and the copy of his first love verses; but they have been mine long. Blake is a real name, I assure you, and a most extraordinary man, if he be still living. He is the Robert [William] Blake, whose wild designs accompany a splendid folio edition of the ‘Night Thoughts,’ which you may have seen, in one of which he pictures the parting of soul and body by a solid mass of human form floating off, God knows how, from a lumpish mass (fac Simile to itself) left behind on the dying bed. He paints in water colours marvellous strange pictures, visions of his brain, which he asserts that he has seen. They have great merit. He has seen the old Welsh bards on Snowdon – he had seen the Beautifullest, the strongest, and the Ugliest Man, left alone from the Massacre of the Britons by the Romans, and has painted them from memory (I have seen his paintings), and asserts them to be as good as the figures of Raphael and Angelo, but not better, as they had precisely the same retro-visions and prophetic visions with themself [himself]. The painters in oil (which he will have it that neither of them practised) he affirms to have been the ruin of art, and affirms that all the while he was engaged in his Water paintings, Titian was disturbing him, Titian the Ill Genius of Oil Painting. His Pictures – one in particular, the Canterbury Pilgrims (far above Stothard’s) – have great merit, but hard, dry, yet with grace. He has written a Catalogue of them with a most spirited criticism on Chaucer, but mystical and full of Vision. His poems have been sold hitherto only in Manuscript. I never read them; but a friend at my desire procured the ‘Sweep Song.’ There is one to a tiger, which I have heard recited, beginning: