'With a Vein of Tipsy Jocularity'

“There are critics who dismiss Lamb as a maudlin sentimentalist with a vein of tipsy jocularity, implying that he was a man of shallow nature and of equally shallow mind.”

Who among writers has been more consistently misunderstood than Charles Lamb, who spoke for all of us when he proclaimed: “Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!” There are times when I read Lamb’s essays and letters and think not of another writer – say, his literary cousin, Laurence Sterne – but of a notably manic comedian like Robin Williams. There’s the same sense of pressurized comic gas spewing through a leak. One gag dissolves into the next. You worry about the welfare of someone so obsessively gifted.    

The sentence at the top was written by the critic and Sinn Féin member Robert Lynd, who was born in Belfast in 1879, within a decade of Joyce, Pound and Eliot, but was no Modernist or even Victorian. His sensibility teeters somewhere late in the eighteenth century, in the Age of Johnson but on the cusp of Romanticism (again, like Sterne). Lynd writes about Lamb in English Wits, edited by Leonard Russell and published in 1940, when the English needed all the wit they could muster. The book’s premise is simple – contemporary wits (Dilys Powell, Ernest Newman) write about their favorite wits of the past (Pope, Sydney Smith). Monsignor Ronald Knox writes wittily about Dr. Johnson. Lynd takes on Lamb, the wittiest of all, except perhaps for Sydney Smith:

“Some critics have called Lamb an affected writer, but we have only to read his life to see that his freakish humour was no superficial acquirement, but was as much a part of his nature as his breath and blood. His essays, the golden harvest of three years, are merely the perfect self-expression of the Lamb we find in the life and letters.”

Seasoned readers of Lamb know he frequently celebrates food and drink. Lynd retells a favorite anecdote: “His nonsense must sometimes have appeared rude to his listeners, as when a lady asked him, ‘Mr. Lamb, how do you like babies?’ and he replied: ‘B-b-boiled, ma’am.’” [Lamb was a stutterer.] And then Lynd shares a passage from one of the Elia essays, “Grace Before Meat”:

“I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer’s flesh were not made to be received with dispassionate services. I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like minced veal. There is a physiognomical character in the tastes for food. C——holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings. I am not certain but he is right. With the decay of my first innocence, I confess a less and less relish daily for those innocuous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have lost their gust with me. Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts.”

About “cates,” from the OED: “Provisions or victuals bought (as distinguished from, and usually more delicate or dainty than, those of home production); in later use, sometimes merely = victuals, food.”