Appreciations, With An Essay on Style

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For himself, and from his own point of view, the exercise of his
gift, of his literary art, came to gild or sweeten a life of
monotonous labour, and seemed, as far as regarded others, no very
important thing; availing to give them a little pleasure, and inform
them a little, chiefly in a retrospective manner, but in no way
concerned with the turning of the tides of the great world. And yet
this very modesty, this unambitious [109] way of conceiving his work,
has impressed upon it a certain exceptional enduringness. For of the
remarkable English writers contemporary with Lamb, many were greatly
preoccupied with ideas of practice--religious, moral, political--
ideas which have since, in some sense or other, entered permanently
into the general consciousness; and, these having no longer any
stimulus for a generation provided with a different stock of ideas,
the writings of those who spent so much of themselves in their
propagation have lost, with posterity, something of what they gained
by them in immediate influence. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley even-
-sharing so largely in the unrest of their own age, and made
personally more interesting thereby, yet, of their actual work,
surrender more to the mere course of time than some of those who may
have seemed to exercise themselves hardly at all in great matters, to
have been little serious, or a little indifferent, regarding them.

Of this number of the disinterested servants of literature, smaller
in England than in France, Charles Lamb is one. In the making of
prose he realises the principle of art for its own sake, as
completely as Keats in the making of verse. And, working ever close
to the concrete, to the details, great or small, of actual things,
books, persons, and with no part of them blurred to his vision by the
intervention of mere abstract theories, he has reached an enduring
moral effect [l10] also, in a sort of boundless sympathy.
Unoccupied, as he might seem, with great matters, he is in immediate
contact with what is real, especially in its caressing littleness,
that littleness in which there is much of the whole woeful heart of
things, and meets it more than half-way with a perfect understanding
of it. What sudden, unexpected touches of pathos in him!--bearing
witness how the sorrow of humanity, the Weltschmerz, the constant
aching of its wounds, is ever present with him: but what a gift also
for the enjoyment of life in its subtleties, of enjoyment actually
refined by the need of some thoughtful economies and making the most
of things! Little arts of happiness he is ready to teach to others.
The quaint remarks of children which another would scarcely have
heard, he preserves--little flies in the priceless amber of his Attic
wit--and has his "Praise of chimney-sweepers" (as William Blake has
written, with so much natural pathos, the Chimney-sweeper's Song)
valuing carefully their white teeth, and fine enjoyment of white
sheets in stolen sleep at Arundel Castle, as he tells the story,
anticipating something of the mood of our deep humourists of the last
generation. His simple mother-pity for those who suffer by accident,
or unkindness of nature, blindness for instance, or fateful disease
of mind like his sister's, has something primitive in its largeness;
and on behalf of ill-used animals he is early in composing a Pity's
Gift.

[111] And if, in deeper or more superficial sense, the dead do care
at all for their name and fame, then how must the souls of
Shakespeare and Webster have been stirred, after so long converse
with things that stopped their ears, whether above or below the soil,
at his exquisite appreciations of them; the souls of Titian and of
Hogarth too; for, what has not been observed so generally as the
excellence of his literary criticism, Charles Lamb is a fine critic
of painting also. It was as loyal, self-forgetful work for others,
for Shakespeare's self first, for instance, and then for
Shakespeare's readers, that that too was done: he has the true
scholar's way of forgetting himself in his subject. For though
"defrauded," as we saw, in his young years, "of the sweet food of
academic institution," he is yet essentially a scholar, and all his
work mainly retrospective, as I said; his own sorrows, affections,
perceptions, being alone real to him of the present. "I cannot make
these present times," he says once, "present to me."

Above all, he becomes not merely an expositor, permanently valuable,
but for Englishmen almost the discoverer of the old English drama.
"The book is such as I am glad there should be," he modestly says of
the Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of
Shakespeare; to which, however, he adds in a series of notes the very
quintessence of criticism, the choicest savour and perfume of
Elizabethan poetry being [112] sorted, and stored here, with a sort
of delicate intellectual epicureanism, which has had the effect of
winning for these, then almost forgotten, poets, one generation after
another of enthusiastic students. Could he but have known how fresh
a source of culture he was evoking there for other generations,
through all those years in which, a little wistfully, he would harp
on the limitation of his time by business, and sigh for a better
fortune in regard to literary opportunities!

To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist, the literary
charm of Burton, for instance, or Quarles, or The Duchess of
Newcastle; and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others--
he seeming to himself but to hand on to others, in mere humble
ministration, that of which for them he is really the creator--this
is the way of his criticism; cast off in a stray letter often, or
passing note, or lightest essay or conversation. It is in such a
letter, for instance, that we come upon a singularly penetrative
estimate of the genius and writings of Defoe.

Tracking, with an attention always alert, the whole process of their
production to its starting-point in the deep places of the mind, he
seems to realise the but half-conscious intuitions of Hogarth or
Shakespeare, and develops the great ruling unities which have swayed
their actual work; or "puts up," and takes, the one morsel of good
stuff in an old, forgotten writer. Even [113] in what he says
casually there comes an aroma of old English; noticeable echoes, in
chance turn and phrase, of the great masters of style, the old
masters. Godwin, seeing in quotation a passage from John Woodvil,
takes it for a choice fragment of an old dramatist, and goes to Lamb
to assist him in finding the author. His power of delicate imitation
in prose and verse reaches the length of a fine mimicry even, as in
those last essays of Elia on Popular Fallacies, with their gentle
reproduction or caricature of Sir Thomas Browne, showing, the more
completely, his mastery, by disinterested study, of those elements of
the man which were the real source of style in that great, solemn
master of old English, who, ready to say what he has to say with
fearless homeliness, yet continually overawes one with touches of a
strange utterance from worlds afar. For it is with the delicacies of
fine literature especially, its gradations of expression, its fine
judgment, its pure sense of words, of vocabulary--things, alas! dying
out in the English literature of the present, together with the
appreciation of them in our literature of the past--that his literary
mission is chiefly concerned. And yet, delicate, refining, daintily
epicurean, as he may seem, when he writes of giants, such as Hogarth
or Shakespeare, though often but in a stray note, you catch the sense
of veneration with which those great names in past literature and art
brooded over his intelligence, his undiminished [114] impressibility
by the great effects in them. Reading, commenting on Shakespeare, he
is like a man who walks alone under a grand stormy sky, and among
unwonted tricks of light, when powerful spirits might seem to be
abroad upon the air; and the grim humour of Hogarth, as he analyses
it, rises into a kind of spectral grotesque; while he too knows the
secret of fine, significant touches like theirs.

There are traits, customs, characteristics of houses and dress,
surviving morsels of old life, such as Hogarth has transferred so
vividly into The Rake's Progress, or Marriage a la Mode, concerning
which we well understand how, common, uninteresting, or even
worthless in themselves, they have come to please us at last as
things picturesque, being set in relief against the modes of our
different age. Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture-
-types of cast-off fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever
meant to preserve--we contemplate with more than good-nature, as
having in them the veritable accent of a time, not altogether to be
replaced by its more solemn and self-conscious deposits; like those
tricks of individuality which we find quite tolerable in persons,
because they convey to us the secret of lifelike expression, and with
regard to which we are all to some extent humourists. But it is part
of the privilege of the genuine humourist to anticipate this pensive
mood with regard to the ways and things [115] of his own day; to look
upon the tricks in manner of the life about him with that same
refined, purged sort of vision, which will come naturally to those of
a later generation, in observing whatever may have survived by chance
of its mere external habit. Seeing things always by the light of an
understanding more entire than is possible for ordinary minds, of the
whole mechanism of humanity, and seeing also the manner, the outward
mode or fashion, always in strict connexion with the spiritual
condition which determined it, a humourist such as Charles Lamb
anticipates the enchantment of distance; and the characteristics of
places, ranks, habits of life, are transfigured for him, even now and
in advance of time, by poetic light; justifying what some might
condemn as mere sentimentality, in the effort to hand on unbroken the
tradition of such fashion or accent. "The praise of beggars," "the
cries of London," the traits of actors just grown "old," the spots in
"town" where the country, its fresh green and fresh water, still
lingered on, one after another, amidst the bustle; the quaint,
dimmed, just played-out farces, he had relished so much, coming
partly through them to understand the earlier English theatre as a
thing once really alive; those fountains and sun-dials of old
gardens, of which he entertains such dainty discourse:--he feels the
poetry of these things, as the poetry of things old indeed, but
surviving [116] as an actual part of the life of the present; and as
something quite different from the poetry of things flatly gone from
us and antique, which come back to us, if at all, as entire
strangers, like Scott's old Scotch-border personages, their oaths and
armour. Such gift of appreciation depends, as I said, on the
habitual apprehension of men's life as a whole--its organic
wholeness, as extending even to the least things in it--of its
outward manner in connexion with its inward temper; and it involves a
fine perception of the congruities, the musical accordance between
humanity and its environment of custom, society, personal
intercourse; as if all this, with its meetings, partings, ceremonies,
gesture, tones of speech, were some delicate instrument on which an
expert performer is playing.

These are some of the characteristics of Elia, one essentially an
essayist, and of the true family of Montaigne, "never judging," as he
says, "system-wise of things, but fastening on particulars;" saying
all things as it were on chance occasion only, and by way of pastime,
yet succeeding thus, "glimpse-wise," in catching and recording more
frequently than others "the gayest, happiest attitude of things;" a
casual writer for dreamy readers, yet always giving the reader so
much more than he seemed to propose. There is something of the
follower of George Fox about him, and the Quaker's belief in the
inward light coming to one passive, [117] to the mere wayfarer, who
will be sure at all events to lose no light which falls by the way--
glimpses, suggestions, delightful half-apprehensions, profound
thoughts of old philosophers, hints of the innermost reason in
things, the full knowledge of which is held in reserve; all the
varied stuff, that is, of which genuine essays are made.

And with him, as with Montaigne, the desire of self-portraiture is,
below all more superficial tendencies, the real motive in writing at
all--a desire closely connected with that intimacy, that modern
subjectivity, which may be called the Montaignesque element in
literature. What he designs is to give you himself, to acquaint you
with his likeness; but must do this, if at all, indirectly, being
indeed always more or less reserved, for himself and his friends;
friendship counting for so much in his life, that he is jealous of
anything that might jar or disturb it, even to the length of a sort
of insincerity, to which he assigns its quaint "praise"; this lover
of stage plays significantly welcoming a little touch of the
artificiality of play to sweeten the intercourse of actual life.

And, in effect, a very delicate and expressive portrait of him does
put itself together for the duly meditative reader. In indirect
touches of his own work, scraps of faded old letters, what others
remembered of his talk, the man's likeness emerges; what he laughed
and wept at, [118] his sudden elevations, and longings after absent
friends, his fine casuistries of affection and devices to jog
sometimes, as he says, the lazy happiness of perfect love, his solemn
moments of higher discourse with the young, as they came across him
on occasion, and went along a little way with him, the sudden,
surprised apprehension of beauties in old literature, revealing anew
the deep soul of poetry in things, and withal the pure spirit of fun,
having its way again; laughter, that most short-lived of all things
(some of Shakespeare's even being grown hollow) wearing well with
him. Much of all this comes out through his letters, which may be
regarded as a department of his essays. He is an old-fashioned
letter-writer, the essence of the old fashion of letter-writing
lying, as with true essay-writing, in the dexterous availing oneself
of accident and circumstance, in the prosecution of deeper lines of
observation; although, just as with the record of his conversation,
one loses something, in losing the actual tones of the stammerer,
still graceful in his halting, as he halted also in composition,
composing slowly and by fits, "like a Flemish painter," as he tells
us, so "it is to be regretted," says the editor of his letters, "that
in the printed letters the reader will lose the curious varieties of
writing with which the originals abound, and which are scrupulously
adapted to the subject."

Also, he was a true "collector," delighting [119] in the personal
finding of a thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him
by the little accidents which attest previous ownership. Wither's
Emblems, "that old book and quaint," long-desired, when he finds it
at last, he values none the less because a child had coloured the
plates with his paints. A lover of household warmth everywhere, of
that tempered atmosphere which our various habitations get by men's
living within them, he "sticks to his favourite books as he did to
his friends," and loved the "town," with a jealous eye for all its
characteristics, "old houses" coming to have souls for him. The
yearning for mere warmth against him in another, makes him content,
all through life, with pure brotherliness, "the most kindly and
natural species of love," as he says, in place of the passion of
love. Brother and sister, sitting thus side by side, have, of
course, their anticipations how one of them must sit at last in the
faint sun alone, and set us speculating, as we read, as to precisely
what amount of melancholy really accompanied for him the approach of
old age, so steadily foreseen; make us note also, with pleasure, his
successive wakings up to cheerful realities, out of a too curious
musing over what is gone and what remains, of life. In his subtle
capacity for enjoying the more refined points of earth, of human
relationship, he could throw the gleam of poetry or humour on what
seemed common or threadbare; has a care for the [120] sighs, and the
weary, humdrum preoccupations of very weak people, down to their
little pathetic "gentilities," even; while, in the purely human
temper, he can write of death, almost like Shakespeare.

And that care, through all his enthusiasm of discovery, for what is
accustomed, in literature, connected thus with his close clinging to
home and the earth, was congruous also with that love for the
accustomed in religion, which we may notice in him. He is one of the
last votaries of that old-world sentiment, based on the feelings of
hope and awe, which may be described as the religion of men of
letters (as Sir Thomas Browne has his Religion of the Physician)
religion as understood by the soberer men of letters in the last
century, Addison, Gray, and Johnson; by Jane Austen and Thackeray,
later. A high way of feeling developed largely by constant
intercourse with the great things of literature, and extended in its
turn to those matters greater still, this religion lives, in the main
retrospectively, in a system of received sentiments and beliefs;
received, like those great things of literature and art, in the first
instance, on the authority of a long tradition, in the course of
which they have linked themselves in a thousand complex ways to the
conditions of human life, and no more questioned now than the feeling
one keeps by one of the greatness--say! of Shakespeare. For Charles
Lamb, such form of religion becomes [121] the solemn background on
which the nearer and more exciting objects of his immediate
experience relieve themselves, borrowing from it an expression of
calm; its necessary atmosphere being indeed a profound quiet, that
quiet which has in it a kind of sacramental efficacy, working, we
might say, on the principle of the opus operatum, almost without any
co-operation of one's own, towards the assertion of the higher self.
And, in truth, to men of Lamb's delicately attuned temperament mere
physical stillness has its full value; such natures seeming to long
for it sometimes, as for no merely negative thing, with a sort of
mystical sensuality.

The writings of Charles Lamb are an excellent illustration of the
value of reserve in literature. Below his quiet, his quaintness, his
humour, and what may seem the slightness, the occasional or
accidental character of his work, there lies, as I said at starting,
as in his life, a genuinely tragic element. The gloom, reflected at
its darkest in those hard shadows of Rosamund Grey, is always there,
though not always realised either for himself or his readers, and
restrained always in utterance. It gives to those lighter matters on
the surface of life and literature among which he for the most part
moved, a wonderful force of expression, as if at any moment these
slight words and fancies might pierce very far into the deeper soul
of things. In his writing, as in his [122] life, that quiet is not
the low-flying of one from the first drowsy by choice, and needing
the prick of some strong passion or worldly ambition, to stimulate
him into all the energy of which he is capable; but rather the
reaction of nature, after an escape from fate, dark and insane as in
old Greek tragedy, following upon which the sense of mere relief
becomes a kind of passion, as with one who, having narrowly escaped
earthquake or shipwreck, finds a thing for grateful tears in just
sitting quiet at home, under the wall, till the end of days.

He felt the genius of places; and I sometimes think he resembles the
places he knew and liked best, and where his lot fell--London, sixty-
five years ago, with Covent Garden and the old theatres, and the
Temple gardens still unspoiled, Thames gliding down, and beyond to
north and south the fields at Enfield or Hampton, to which, "with
their living trees," the thoughts wander "from the hard wood of the
desk"--fields fresher, and coming nearer to town then, but in one of
which the present writer remembers, on a brooding early summer's day,
to have heard the cuckoo for the first time. Here, the surface of
things is certainly humdrum, the streets dingy, the green places,
where the child goes a-maying, tame enough. But nowhere are things
more apt to respond to the brighter weather, nowhere is there so much
difference between rain and sunshine, nowhere do the [123] clouds
roll together more grandly; those quaint suburban pastorals gathering
a certain quality of grandeur from the background of the great city,
with its weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid light
on dome and bleached stone steeples.

1878.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

[124] ENGLISH prose literature towards the end of the seventeenth
century, in the hands of Dryden and Locke, was becoming, as that of
France had become at an earlier date, a matter of design and skilled
practice, highly conscious of itself as an art, and, above all,
correct. Up to that time it had been, on the whole, singularly
informal and unprofessional, and by no means the literature of the
"man of letters," as we understand him. Certain great instances
there had been of literary structure or architecture--The
Ecclesiastical Polity, The Leviathan--but for the most part that
earlier prose literature is eminently occasional, closely determined
by the eager practical aims of contemporary politics and theology, or
else due to a man's own native instinct to speak because he cannot
help speaking. Hardly aware of the habit, he likes talking to
himself; and when he writes (still in undress) he does but take the
"friendly reader" into his confidence. The type of this literature,
obviously, is not Locke or Gibbon, but, above all others, Sir Thomas
[125] Browne; as Jean Paul is a good instance of it in German
literature, always in its developments so much later than the
English; and as the best instance of it in French literature, in the
century preceding Browne, is Montaigne, from whom indeed, in a great
measure, all those tentative writers, or essayists, derive.

It was a result, perhaps, of the individualism and liberty of
personal development, which, even for a Roman Catholic, were effects
of the Reformation, that there was so much in Montaigne of the
"subjective," as people say, of the singularities of personal
character. Browne, too, bookish as he really is claims to give his
readers a matter, "not picked from the leaves of any author, but bred
amongst the weeds and tares" of his own brain. The faults of such
literature are what we all recognise in it: unevenness, alike in
thought and style; lack of design; and caprice--the lack of
authority; after the full play of which, there is so much to refresh
one in the reasonable transparency of Hooker, representing thus early
the tradition of a classical clearness in English literature,
anticipated by Latimer and More, and to be fulfilled afterwards in
Butler and Hume. But then, in recompense for that looseness and
whim, in Sir Thomas Browne for instance, we have in those "quaint"
writers, as they themselves understood the term (coint, adorned, but
adorned with all the curious ornaments of their own predilection,
provincial [126] or archaic, certainly unfamiliar, and selected
without reference to the taste or usages of other people) the charm
of an absolute sincerity, with all the ingenuous and racy effect of
what is circumstantial and peculiar in their growth.

The whole creation is a mystery and particularly that of man.
At the blast of His mouth were the rest of the creatures made,
and at His bare word they started out of nothing. But in the
frame of man He played the sensible operator, and seemed not
so much to create as to make him. When He had separated the
materials of other creatures, there consequently resulted a
form and soul: but having raised the walls of man, He was
driven to a second and harder creation--of a substance like
Himself, an incorruptible and immortal soul.

There, we have the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, in exact expression
of his mind!--minute and curious in its thinking; but with an effect,
on the sudden, of a real sublimity or depth. His style is certainly
an unequal one. It has the monumental aim which charmed, and perhaps
influenced, Johnson--a dignity that can be attained only in such
mental calm as follows long and learned pondering on the high
subjects Browne loves to deal with. It has its garrulity, its
various levels of painstaking, its mannerism, pleasant of its kind or
tolerable, together with much, to us intolerable, but of which he was
capable on a lazy summer afternoon down at Norwich. And all is so
oddly mixed, showing, in its entire ignorance of self, how much he,
and the sort of literature he represents, really stood in need of
technique, [127] of a formed taste in literature, of a literary
architecture.

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