Lamb

How pleased I was to open the May 10-11 issue of the Wall Street Journal and find, of all unlikely things, a story by Thomas Mallon on the joys of reading Charles Lamb’s letters. The article is doubly unlikely because it is gratuitous in the best sense; that is, unpegged to the anniversary of a birth or death, or the publication of a new edition. The essay is available online only to subscribers, but try to find a copy of the newspaper (Page P12). Mallon’s enthusiastic love of Lamb is pure pleasure:

“If the letters of Keats, his younger contemporary, are prescriptions for living, tickets into the world, Lamb’s mood-driven miniatures are respites from it, little globes unto themselves, complete and welcoming and, for all that, still hard to bear:

“`The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book case which has followed me about (like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved – old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school, -- these are my mistresses.’”

We will never know Shakespeare the man. The evidence is too sparse, his genius too formidable and elusive. But even behind the single ramshackle, Sternean sentence quoted by Mallon shimmers a specific human being – playful, clever, strikingly modern, skirting self-pity but eluding it with the winning self-deprecation of that final phrase. I have pulled down the three volumes of The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by E.V. Lucas and published by Yale University Press in 1935, and identified the recipient of that letter as William Wordsworth. It was written on Jan. 30, 1801. The sentences preceding and following the one quoted by Mallon are instructive. Before:

“My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or I have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry & books) to groves and vallies.”

And after:

“Have I not enough without your mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know, that the Mind will make friends of any thing. Your sun & moon and skys and hills & lakes affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestries and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof, beautifully painted but unable to satisfy the mind, and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the Beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh & green and warm are all the inventions of men and assemblies of men in this great city.”

I say this as an admirer of Wordsworth at his best, but haven’t you been tempted, once or twice, perhaps when mired somewhere deep in The Prelude, to shout something like this at the old windbag? Lamb says it with infinitely more humor, charm and grace, and he doesn’t need to shout.