“When the
discourse grew tiresome, and some loquacious Coryphaeus of common-place who had
yet to learn silence in the probationary school of Pythagoras, and whose
imagination was too scanty for his vocabulary, with self-satisfied effrontery,
was monotonously mouthing, he would play the ‘logical contradictory,’ or
‘matter-of-lie man’ with some grotesque locution, transparent solecism or
incongruous theory . . .”
And so on,
for another sixty-four words before the period permits the reader to breathe
again. This is what happens when the apprentice imitates the master before he
has mastered the medium. The author is the antiquarian George Daniel
(1789-1864), and his subject in Love’s
Last Labour Not Lost (1863) is Charles Lamb. To his credit, Daniel gets
Lamb right. On the most solemn occasion, some pun or deflationary jest is on
Lamb’s tongue. In person, this might have grown tiresome with time, especially
if Lamb was deeper than usual in his cups. But most often, in his letters and Essays of Elia, Lamb is the great comic
writer of England’s Romantic era, the polar opposite of humorless Wordsworth who
was, nevertheless, a somewhat baffled friend of Lamb. Here, chosen at random
from the third volume of The Letters of
Charles and Mary Lamb (ed. E.V. Lucas, 1935) is part of a letter written on
Feb. 27, 1829 to Henry Crabb Robinson. Lucas tells us Robinson had mailed Lamb
a copy of Richardson’s steroidal novel Pamela
in the mistaken belief that Lamb had loaned it to him:
“Expectation
was alert on the receit [sic] of your
strange-shaped present, while yet undisclosed from its fusc [dark brown]
envelope. Some said, ’tis a viol da Gamba, others pronounced it a fiddle. I
myself hoped it a Liquer [sic] case pregnant
with Eau de Vie and such odd Nectar. When midwifed into daylight, the gossips
were at a loss to pronounce upon its species. Most took it for a marrow spoon,
an apple scoop, a banker’s guinea shovel. At length its true scope appeared,
its drift--to save the back-bone of my sister stooping to scuttles. A
philanthropic intent, borrowed no doubt from some of the Colliers. . . Two
Pamelas in a house is too much without two Mr. B.’s to reward ’em.”
Think of
Lamb’s collected letters as an accessible, less pretentious edition of Finnegans Wake. Lamb died on this date,
Dec. 27, in 1834.
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