27 December: Boreham on Charles Lamb

An Unspoiled Genius
Today marks the anniversary of the passing of one of the most whimsical and lovable figures in our literary history. The thing that everybody likes about Charles Lamb is just—Charles Lamb. He may not bestride the world like a colossus, but no man has a more enviable place. "His memory," Southey said, "will retain its fragrance as long as the best spice that ever was expended on any of the Pharaohs." With his dome-like forehead, his lustrous black hair, his huge and somewhat melancholy eyes, his sickly-looking frame set on spindly legs enfolded in the most ridiculous silk stockings, he possessed a personality that was vivid, odd and unforgettable. Although dogged all his days by the most desolating misfortunes and calamities, he pursued the even tenor of his way with exuberant spirits and an unconquerable smile. The twinkle in his eye was never extinguished; he saw fun in everything. Even his insanity amused him when he surveyed the cruel fits in quiet retrospect. "My life has been somewhat diversified of late," he writes to Coleridge. "The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don't bite anyone. But mad I was, and many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were told!"

He had just come of age when he wrote thus and had no inkling of the tragic development that, as a result of this sinister trait in his family record, was so soon to cast a gruesome shadow athwart his life. For, three months later, without the slightest warning, his sister's reason suddenly failed her, and, in a fit of ungovernable violence, she wounded her father, injured her aunt and murdered her mother. She was of course, placed under restraint, but after a while she was liberated, her brother solemnly undertaking that he would restore her to custody as soon as any symptoms of her malady reappeared. A friend of the Lambs has told us how, on one occasion, he met the brother and sister walking hand-in-hand across the fields to the asylum, carrying a strait-jacket between them, both bathed in tears. Happily, however, the worst was over. After the attack of which he tells Coleridge, Charles Lamb was never again taken to Hoxton: and, after the murder, Mary, so far from exhibiting further violence, earned for herself a reputation as a woman of sterling sense.


A Brilliant Sunrise Follows A Cloudy Sunset
The extraordinary thing about Charles Lamb is that it was not until he regarded his literary career as finished that he produced the work by which he will always be best remembered. In 1820, being then forty-five, he gravely announced to his friends that he had come to the end of himself; his mind was a blank; he had nothing more to say. At just about that time, however, John Scott took it into his head to launch the London Magazine. Hazlitt, who, alienating everybody else, clung desparately to Lamb and held him at his bedside to the last, hinted to Scott that Lamb would make an ideal contributor to the new journal. Lamb was invited to supply a monthly essay. Needing the money badly, he undertook the task, wondering as he did so what in the wide world he could write about. It would have to be something imaginative, something that spider-like, he could spin from his own inner consciousness, for he had nothing else at his commend. Of book-knowledge he was totally destitute. So, in a frenzy of determination, he spread out the sheet of paper, seized his quill, gave free rein to all the rollicking fancifulness of his effervescent genius, and, to his astonishment, the essays trickled as if by magic from beneath his hand.

Thus there came into existence The Essays of Elia. The very title was a kind of practical joke. Augustus Ellia (Lamb pronounced it Ellia to the last) was an Italian clerk at the South Sea House. Lamb thought that it would be a capital jest to write the essays over the name of his old assistant, and only learned long afterwards that Ellia, dying before the essays were published, knew nothing of it. The whole thing was an intellectual frolic. With a boisterous laugh he sent the papers to the editor and they were acclaimed as a flash of genuine inspiration.

Admiration That Is Not Merely A Tribute
After he had been writing these irresponsible folios for a couple of years, somebody suggested that they should be collected into a volume. Lamb at first treated the proposal as a rather ironical joke; he could still see nothing in them but, when he found that his friends were serious, he dubiously consented. And thus our literature was enriched by a volume that has stood for more than a century as a model of all that essay-writing should be. Mr. E. Y. Lucas would go even further. He salutes in Lamb, not only the perfect essayist but the perfect critic. Until Lamb's time, the art of literary criticism was the art of tearing everything to tatters. Lamb's criticism was imaginative and constructive.

We are all captivated by the personality of Charles Lamb for the simple but sufficient reason that he is an incorrigible human. He is so very much one of ourselves—a delightful companion, never aweing us by his greatness and never disgusting us by his coarseness. He is startlingly, though not embarrassingly, original, deliciously droll, charmingly hospitable and as tender-hearted as a girl. He had his frailties and he had his faults. He was pitifully lame: he stuttered horribly: he made some of the most atrocious puns that have ever been perpetrated; and, to some extent at least, he drank. We forgive and forget his weaknesses, however, when we reflect upon the really sublime way in which he triumphed over the most sordid and revolting conditions. His affliction filled every day as it dawned with a lowering uncertainty; it shattered all his hopes of domestic felicity. Twice he loved, tenderly, devotedly, purely. But how, remembering his malady, could any woman listen to his pleadings? He faced his loneliness, as he faced all his calamities, with a brave, invincible smile. He magnified all his joys and refused to bow his head to the bludgeonings of misfortune. For this reason the world will always cherish his memory.

F W Boreham

Image: Charles Lamb