Charles
Lamb is writing about himself in this passage from “Imperfect Sympathies,” one
of the Elia essays. Its gentle, faintly comic self-deprecation nicely positions
Lamb as a literary critic. He has no pretentions to science or scholarship. It
should be squarely acknowledged that later in the essay Lamb indulges in a defect
of character, a moral taint, hardly rare in English and American letters – anti-Semitism,
expressed with various degrees of loathsomeness by other writers whose work is
important to me (Santayana, Chesterton, Henry Adams, T.S. Eliot). Lamb always
wins me over with his charm and wit, and with his essential goodness, but I can
never forget his odious weakness.
We
can easily forget that Lamb, still safely pigeonholed as “one of the English
humorists,” issued a sizeable inventory of critical judgments. E.M.W. Tillyard
collects some of them in Lamb's Criticism:
A Selection from the Literary Criticism of Charles Lamb (Cambridge
University Press, 1923). The book is slender and Tillyard makes no claims to
being comprehensive. After much qualifying, he says of his likely reader: “…if
he goes to [criticism] for something that by some subtle means brings him
closer to certain works of art than he has been unable to get unaided, for
something that creates in his mind the right receptive mood, then he will put
Lamb among the very greatest of critics.” Lamb, in other words, is no Johnson
or Winters, and never claims to be. Here he is, in a letter to Walter Wilson, written
on Dec. 16, 1822, and excerpted by Tillyard, on the novels of Daniel Defoe:
“In
the appearance of truth, in all the
incidents and conversations that occur in them, they exceed any works of
fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. The author never appears
in these self-narratives, (for so they ought to be called, or rather
autobiographies,) but the narrator chains us down to an implicit belief in
every thing he says. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it…It is
like reading evidence given in a court of justice.”
Let’s
remember that Defoe’s A Journal of the
Plague Year (1722) was mistaken by many among his contemporaries for
reportage. It purports to be an eyewitness account of the last outbreak of
bubonic plague in England, the Great Plague of 1655-66 that claimed more than
100,000 lives. Defoe was born in 1660 and was five years old when Londoners
started dying. Two of our best journalists, A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell,
were great admirers of the novel, and Lamb ranks it among Defoe’s best work,
with Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), Colonel
Jack (1722) and Roxana: The Fortunate
Mistress (1724).
The
affinity I feel for Lamb as a critic is our shared status as amateurs, in the etymological
sense. We love to write about the things we love. Those who confuse criticism with
forensic science will find us laughably lacking in what it takes. Here,
Tillyard quotes a Dec. 5, 1796, letter to his childhood friend Coleridge:
“I
have been reading `The Task’ with fresh delight. I am glad you love Cowper. I
could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton; but I would not call that man my
friend who should be offended with the dive chit-chat of Cowper.”
Here,
from an August 1824 letter to C.A. Elton, is Lamb on Hesiod: “To read the Days and
Works is like eating nice brown bread, homely sweet and nutritive.”
And
here, in a more condemnatory mood, is Lamb rightly savaging Shelley in an
August 1824 letter to Bernard Barton:
“For
his theories and nostrums, they are oracular enough, but I either comprehend ’em
not, or there is miching [OED: “skulking,
lurking”] malice and mischief in ’em. But, for the most part, ringing with
their own emptiness. Hazlitt said well of ’em—Many are the wiser and better for
reading Shakespeare, but nobody was ever wiser or better for reading Shelley.”
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