CHARLES LAMB

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22006, 12 January 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

CHARLES LAMB

THE ARTIST

BY KOTABE

Whatever theme Lamb se;t himself to expound and elucidate, his ultimate and most interesting subject was always himself. In everything he wrote ho revealed himself. Not in the fashion of your egotist, who thinks his own concerns the chief matter in the universe and assumes that everybody else is eager above all things to know what he thinks and feels and has experienced. There was not a trace of that in Lamb. Ho had far too much humour and selfknowledge to fall into that error. But ho was supremely interested iu life, life as he knew it in his own heart, and in the fate destiny had assigned him, life as he saw it around him in his beloved London. " A highly seusitivo disposition lays him open to all the tremors of the heart, and his work is a varied meditation on the sad mystery of time and change." He looked back on his childhood almost with reverence. "If 1 know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective—and mine is painfully so —can have a less respect for his present identity than I have for the man Elia. 1 know him to be light and vain, and humorous; a notorious . . . ; addicted to ... ; averse from counsel, neither taking it nor offering it; . . . besides; a stammering buffoon; what j'ou will; lay on and spare not—l subscribe to it all. But for the child Elia —that other me—l must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master, with as little reference, I protest, to that stupid changeling of five and forty as if it had been a child of some other house." Children He always loved children for the sake of the shy and lonely little boy he saw away back through the years, and remembering, loved. The sweetest sound in all London, the one that in the evening inspired him to his best work, was the shouting and laughter of the children of the streets as they played under his window. His words fell into the cadences of their merry games. " It is like writing to music," he says; " thoy seem to modulate my periods." Yet it was Lamb who, when asked to give a toast in a company annoyed by children in another mood, proposed the memory of the good King Herod." Very often it seemed to him that life had nothing to give worthy of the childhood it took away. That was probably a conviction that deepened with the years. He expressed it in his most famous poem, written when his friendship with Coleridge was under a cloud. I have had playmates, I have had companions In my days of childhood, in my joyful schooldays. All, all. are gone, the old familiar faces. For some they have died, and some they have left me. And some are taken from me, all ar® departed: All, all. are gone, the old familiar faces.

But though that vein of melancholy ran deep in him he was too sensible a man to let it dominate him. It might colour his attitude to life, but he fronted life boldly, and took what came, whether of good or evil, with the samo whimsical humour and ironical detachment. That is one of the biggest mysteries in his personality, and one of the chief elements in his genius. He was able to feel and react to every impact of life as only the s£ul of finest temper can. Yet he could stand asido. too, and watch' himself. Every essay he ever wrote bears witness to that dual nature of his. He lived in an age when the free expression of emotion was accounted the highest function of literary art. Every tide of passion pulsing through the heart of that Romantic Age touched him, and touched him profoundly. But that power of detachment kept him from surrendering to the feeling of the moment. He was at once in all the swirling crosscurrents of his age and yet above them. He was both a man of his time and a man of all time His Detachment

That is equivalent to saying that ho was essentially an artist. His end in writing is to create beauty as hia temperament sees and feels it, and aa the special medium he has chosen makes it possible for him. He does not wish to instruct or to edify. Bo is anxious to satisfy himself as an artist and to give pleasure to other«. The only essay I £an think of that had an ulterior purpose is his " Confessions of a Drunkard," which he wroto originally for a friend who was publishing some temperance tracts. Carried away for once by his theme, he enlarged with vivid imagination on the consequences of over-indulgence on a man's mental powers. Lamb, in other directions, combined opposite qualities. He is one of tho most original of our s men of letters, yet manages to fill his pages with echoes of previous writers. No man is more expert in weaving into the tissues of his own work the phrases and the cadences of other men. He can be as simple and direct as a rapier blade, or he can invest his ideas in swelling folds of genial und whimsical decoration. He can treat serious matters with an airy, debonair touch, or he can work out a trivial comic theme with every appurtenance of learned philosophical disquisition. And whatever his mood, tender, whimsical, seriocomic or comic-serious, you can be sure of one thing—his taste is infallible. He will not stop too soon, nor go too far His Humour When you penetrate to the ultimate elements 111 Lamb you ( will almost certainly assign the first place to his humour. His kindly playfulness, his unfailing sense of proportion, his perception of the ridiculous in human pretensions, arc evident in almost everything be wrote. The more boisterous side of his' humour, to which lie gave free play in the company of his friends, is chastened and disciplined to the demands of his art when he writes. He was the supreme punster in an age when that out-dated form of mental agility v\as accounted the highest form of wit. liut his sense of values makes him refrain in his essays. And anyway the tender, ironic playfulness that permeates bo much of his work comes from deeper levels within him than thfi superficial smartness of tho accomplished punster The opening paragraph ot " Mrs. Battle's ' Opinions of Whist " will serve to show Lamb's highest qualities in their highest form. 1 can think of no other essay in our literature with a more completely satisfying introduction. "' A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game.' This was£ the celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle (now with God), who, next to her devotions, loved a good game of whist. She was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half-in-half players, who have no objection to take a hand if you want one to make up a rubber; who affirm that they have no pleasure in winning; that they like to win one game and lose another; that they can while away an hour very agreeably at a card-table, but are indifferent whether they plav or no; and will desire an adversary who has slipped a wrong card to take it up and play another. These insufferable triflers are the curse of a table. One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing them."