'An Almost Silly Gratitude'

One doesn’t expect maturity among the young and certainly not among the middle-aged and old, but finding it is always a happy revelation. Take Sarah Ruden. She is reported to be fifty-seven but her mingling of learning and joie de vivre, scholarship and celebratory sensibility, suggests a youthful but grownup prodigy. She has translated St. Augustine, Virgil, Homer and others among the ancients. She has published a poetry collection, two volumes of Scriptural commentary and now has a column at National Review. The title of her latest, “Living Virtuously and Writing Well,” might be autobiographical if she were less self-effacing. Her subject is Charles Lamb:

“A card-playing old lady, a spark of his own wit in literary society, an inanity of Fleet Street opportunism could each satisfy his pinched hunger for delight and become a generous gift to readers, a gift wrapped in the exquisite, playfully archaic Lamb style.”

Ruden doesn’t mention it but much of Lamb’s charm is rooted in his immunity to politics, unlike his hot-headed friend William Hazlitt who finished his career with an adulatory four-volume biography of Napoleon. Politics was hot stuff, very fashionable in Lamb’s post-French Revolution age, not unlike our own. The appeal of politics, of course, in addition to it being a convenient excuse for self-righteous rage, is the simplicity of its appeal: “I’m right. You’re wrong. Go to Hell.” Lamb could never take himself that seriously. I remember having a rare revelation when I was about thirteen and riding the bus to school: Everything, potentially, is laughable. Our vanity says otherwise but we too are jokes waiting to be told. Ruden writes:

“[I]nstead of outrage, Lamb deals in complex irony; instead of sentimentality, in — there is no better word for it — joy. Countless times, he shows the cause of the difference: an almost silly gratitude.”

Lamb was an extraordinary character but no saint. He was often drunk and occasionally indulged in anti-Semitism, the default mode of morons everywhere. But Ruden distills a tincture of Lamb when she observes his “silly gratitude.” Here he is in “Grace Before Meat”:

 “I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, these spiritual repasts—a grace before Milton—a grace before Shakspeare [sic]—a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy [sic] Queen?”