'The Inner-Most Passages of the Human Heart'

“I am out of the world of readers. I hate all that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather myself up unto the old things.”

It’s a familiar theme with Charles Lamb, part of the evolving Elia persona who authored the later essays. Here he is writing to Coleridge, his friend since childhood, on this date, October 30, in 1809. The first Elia essay was not published until 1820 in The London Magazine. In his letter, Lamb goes on to describe for Coleridge the bookshelves he has just cobbled together:    

 

“You never saw a book-case in more true harmony with the contents, than what I’ve nailed up in a room, which, though new, has more aptitudes for growing old than you shall often see—as one sometimes gets a friend in the middle of life, who becomes an old friend in a short time.”

 

Lamb was a lifelong advocate of old things and pastism, the temperamental opposite of presentism, a plague that rages today. The present is a benighted backwater, a provincial remnant of the past disguised as the most important thing in the world. I’ve heard of people who won’t watch silent films or those shot in black and white. The same perverse impulse is alive in those who won’t read fiction published before, say, 2000 or some other arbitrary date. Half a century ago, one of my English professors confided to me that most of her students weren’t able to read anything written before Hemingway. Today, such people sound almost literate. Turning our gaze in the other direction, the future, of course, doesn’t exist and perhaps never will. In his essay “My Books” (1823), Leigh Hunt writes of Lamb’s personal library:

 

“I believe I did mention his book-room to C. L., and I think he told me that he often sat there when alone. It would be hard not to believe him. His library, though not abounding in Greek or Latin (which are the only things to help some persons to an idea of literature), is anything but superficial. The depth of philosophy and poetry are there, the inner-most passages of the human heart. It has some Latin too.”

 

Hunt informally catalogs the contents of Lamb’s shelves. He notes the presence of a volume by Robert Southey – the only writer he mentions who was alive in 1823:

 

“It has also a handsome contempt for appearance. It looks like what it is, a selection made at precious intervals from the book-stalls,—now a Chaucer at nine and twopence, now a Montaigne or a Sir Thomas Browne at two shillings, now a Jeremy Taylor, a Spinoza, an old English Dramatist, Prior, and Sir Philip Sidney, and the books are ‘neat as imported.’ The very perusal of the backs is a ‘discipline of humanity.’”

 

Lamb’s tastes in books, obviously, was nearly flawless. In his preface to The Charles Lamb Day Book (1925), E.V. Lucas writes: “Lamb belonged externally very little to his own time. He cared nothing for politics or public events, although he was not sorry when the death of a royal personage gave him a holiday. He preferred, as he put it, to `write for Antiquity.’”

 

When an editor had rejected one of his sonnets, Lamb declared to Bryan Waller Procter in an 1829 letter: “Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!”

[After writing this I happened on “Remember Books—Reading On-Screen Is Not the Same,” an essay by Richard Brookhiser in National Review:

“What would I have been doing instead once upon a time? Reading an article about a medieval heresy. Reading a sonnet, a 14-line packet of pain and beauty. Reading a chapter about a battle, a hopeless love, my youth, his old age. Read­ing is always listening, to a voice. The bards never died, they got fonts. And if there was a voice, then you had one too. A listener is an observing soul.”]