CHARLES LAMB

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22000, 5 January 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

CHARLES LAMB

THE TWO MEN

BY KOTARTS

If Charles Lamb had no pity to spare for his own tragic lot, indiscriminate and sentimental admirers of later generations have more than made up for it. We have had so much of " poor Lamb " and the " gentle Elia " that even his robust common-sense personality has found difficult} 7 in reaching us through the vast accumulations of slush and mush and gush with which emotional worshippers have seen fit to smother him. Shy he was, certainly, full of kindness, too, for all sorts and conditions of men. But he was a man in every fibre of him, doing a man's work in a man's way through all his mature years. Wordsworth summed up the friend of many years in his memorial verses:

To a good man of most dear memory This stone is sacred. Here he lies apart Krom the great city where he first drew

breath. Was reared and taught; and humbly earned

his bread, To the strict labours of the merchant's desk By duty chained.

But ho notes that this discipline brought a high recompense. Through his daily work he won independence. He provided for his own, and always had something over to help others. "0, he was good, if ever good man lived," is Wordsworth's final tribute. Other men saw other qualities in him. Hazlitt, after many years of intimate association, describes him as " the most delightful, the most provoking, the most witty and sensible of men. He always made the best pun and the best remark in the course of the evening. No one ever stammered out such line, piquant, deep, eloquent things in half-a-dozen sentences as he docs. His jests scald like tears; and he' probes a question with a play upon words. What a keen, laughing, hare-brained vein of home-felt truth! What choice venom! " What of ".poor " Lamb and the " gentle " Elia there? If that does not mean that Lamb was the life and soul of any jovial gathering, then words have no meaning. There is plenty of testimony to corroborate Hazlitt's "view of the essential virility and drive of Lamb's personality. Poor and Gentle? , It was the realisation of the injustice done to Lamb's memory by the sentimentalising of his admirers that led Augustine Birrell to make his emphatic protest. " Lamb," he wrote, " was as sensible a man as Dr. Johnson. One grows sick of the expressions ' poor ' and ' gentle ' as if he wore one of those grown-up children. Charles Lamb earned his own living, paid his own way, was the helper, not the helped; -a man who was beholden to no one, who came always with gifts in his hand, a shrewd man, capable of advice, strong in counsel." In fact, all his friends came to him for advice. Coleridge and Wordsworth submitted their poems to him for his criticism. When Hazlitt came to die it was Lamb he wanted at his bedside. Hazlitt died in poverty. It was freely reported that his last days found him in such abject need that he could not procure the simplest necessaries. Nobody that knew Lamb ever believed that for a minute. No friend of his was ever in want while there was money in Lamb's purse. Not only did he freely share what he had, but ho bestowed his gifts with a grace that took away all sting of charity. It was noticed time and again that if any of his friends was in need of money Lamb would get from the bank a note for fifty or a hundred pounds, carry it about with him till he could find an opportunity of handing it over; then, when the chance came, would produce the note and inform his friend that he had this sum lying idle and did not know what on earth to do with it.. He was a shrewd business man, but when he wanted to give it away he always pretended that money worried him. In the end he /would request the needy one to do him the favour of taking the note and using it, so that he could get it off his mind and get back to the work that really interested him. Another Side There was in Lamb a curious perversity that cropped up in the most unexpected situations. He was deeply attached to Hazlitt, and fully appreciated that strange genius. But he resolutely refused to praise Hazlitt's work in his writings. There seems to have been no reason for it. But here he was adamant. In the end Hazlitt broke off his relations with Lamb. Hazlitt was angular and combative; Lamb very graciously made it possible for Hazlitt to come l}ack. Southey had written in the Quarterly that the only thing wrong with Lamb was the company he kept. Lamb wrote a reply in defence of his friends. Of Hazlitt he said: " What hath soured him, and made him suspect his friends of infidelity, I know not. I stood well with him for fifteen years (the proudest of my life). I never swerved in thought from him; I never betrayed him; I never slackened in my admiration of him. I wish he would not quarrel with the world at the rate he does; but the reconciliation must be effected by himself, and I despair of living to see the day. I think I shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion." Hazlitt was engaged in writing an essay with the Whistlerian title " On the Pleasure of Hating " when Lamb's letter came into his hands. " I think I must be friends with Lamb again." he declared, and it was so. Carlyle

But this perversity was much more in evidence when Lamb was dealing with strangers. His shyness had something to do with it. Among the people he knew he was witty and wise and sensible. When strangers were present he made a point of being foolish and ■inane, deliberately trying to create a wrong impression. He was very often, at any sort of social gathering, in the condition described by Burns, another man of genius with the same " strong weakness " —" I wasna fou but just had plenty." The result was that many people meeting him for the first time received the impression of a tipsy, stammering buffoon. Carlyle, grimly bent on his mission of shattering nil human complacency and making a new world, was invited to meet Lamb. Lamb was in one of his most perverse moods. This is Carlyle's description of the meeting: " Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, ricketty, gasping, staggering, stammering Tomfool I do not know. Poor Lamb, poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius."

Carlyle's bitter judgment was not published till after his death in 1881. The public affection for Lamb was greater than its reverence for the philosopher and historian. Swinburne embodied in two sonnets much of what the public felt about this savage attack on Lamb's memory.

But the astonishing thing about all this pother is that there were two men in Lamb, and the man Carlyle saw was actually one of them. He never met the Laijib we know; it was Lamb's perversity that saw to that.