Alfred Ainger
(1837-1904) is another name in that vast mausoleum of once-prominent critics,
editors and industrious readers remembered only by kindred spirits. Ainger was
a divine in the old-fashioned sense (OED: “any ecclesiastic, clergyman,
or priest”) and served as chaplain to Queen Victoria. He knew Hood and Crabbe
and wrote memoirs of them. He edited Lamb’s collected works in six volumes
(1883-88). The passage quoted above is from the brief life of the essayist (1882)
he wrote for the English Men of Letters series (in which Henry James wrote of
Hawthorne and George Saintsbury of Dryden). For the Dictionary of National
Biography he wrote the entries for, among others, Lamb and Tennyson. Clearly,
Ainger sensed a temperamental affinity, never explicitly stated, with Lamb. One
wonders if Ainger was a drinking man. His paragraph in the life continues:
“When he
chose to be fanciful, he could be as euphuistic as Donne or Burton—when he was
lead to be grave or didactic, he could write with the sententiousness of
Bacon,--when his imagination and feeling together lifted him above thoughts of
style, his English cleared and soared into regions not far below the noblest
flights of Milton and Jeremy Taylor. When on the other hand he was at home, on
homely themes, he wrote ‘like a man of the world,’ and of his own century and
year.”
Ainger is a
little off here. True, Lamb had different voices and tones for varying subjects,
but his default mode is a distinctly anarchic sense of humor. He puns and
free-associates across his essays and letters. Few first-rate writers could
carry off his love of pure, friendly silliness. I read him not for wisdom but
for a good laugh. His puns may be the best imposed on harmless readers between Shakespeare
and Joyce. In an Aug. 9, 1815 letter Lamb writes to Southey:
“. . . I am going
to stand godfather; I don’t like the business; I cannot muster up decorum for
these occasions; I shall certainly disgrace the font. I was at Hazlitt’s
marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the
ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”
Ainger describes
Lamb’s manner in such passages as a “peculiar playfulness.”
1 comment:
It's interesting that you mention Ainger. I have "The Letters of Charles Lamb Newly Arranged, with Additions," Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Alfred Ainger; 2nd edition; 2 volumes (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1904). The first edition had been published in 1888 and had been reprinted three times before the second edition of 1904. Ainger notes that, in the new edition, "I am now able to add about twenty, addressed to John Rickman, of the House of Commons, and now printed for the first time."
A handsome-looking set it is, too, which I picked up for $40 four years ago this month. Lamb is always interesting - and funny.
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