'To Be With Men More Excellent Than Myself'

As an occasional reviewer, the novelist William Maxwell preferred not fiction but “diaries, memoirs, published correspondence, biography and autobiography” – preferences I have come to share as a reader as I’ve gotten older. “They tell what happened,” Maxwell writes, “what people said and did and wore and ate and hoped for and were afraid of, and in detail after often unimaginable detail they refresh our idea of existence and hold oblivion at arm’s length.” And all of that seems newly important.

For almost forty years, Charles Greville (1794-1865) served as Clerk of the Privy Council in the UK under three successive sovereigns -- George IV, William IV and Victoria. He was also a cricket player and persevering diarist. I learned his name from an offhand mention by Cyril Connolly and borrowed from the library Leaves from the Greville Diary, an abridgement published in 1929. I’m skimming. If he’s read at all, I suspect Greville is most often read by historians of nineteenth-century English politics. It’s the personal observations, the gossip, complaints and minor revelations that hold my interest. His prose is serviceable. Here is a passage dated October 31,1843:

 

“I was laid up for two or three days in London, and then went to Riddlesworth for two or three more. I arrived at night, and on going into the drawing-room I found four people playing at whist, eight others at a round game, and one asleep in an armchair. And this is called society; and amongst such people I have lived, do live, and shall live—I who have seen, known, and had the choice of better things. Eating, drinking, and amusement is the occupation of these people's lives, and I am ashamed to say such has been mine.”

 

Greville comes off as a self-righteous prig until he looks at himself, but neither does he wallow in self-loathing. He’s no hypocrite. Greville continues:

 

 “I was reading Charles Lamb's letters in the carriage, and very remarkable they are, among the very best I think I ever read. I was struck by one passage, which I applied to myself: ‘I gain nothing by being with such as myself; we encourage one another in mediocrity.’ This is it. We go on herding with inferior companions, till we are really unfit for better company. However, this is a sore subject, and I will say no more on it here and now. On Sunday week I went to Newmarket, where there was an unusual quantity of racing. The Queen took it into her head to come to Cambridge that week, but this made no difference to us.”

 

The Lamb line surprised me. This is the serious Lamb, the psychologist/moralist Lamb, not the goofball. The sentence is from the letter he wrote to Coleridge on January 10, 1797. Here it is in context:  

 

"I know I am no ways better in practice than my neighbours—but I have a taste for religion, an occasional earnest aspiration after perfection, which they have not. I gain nothing by being with such as myself—we encourage one another in mediocrity—I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.”

 

That strikes me as one of the reasons we read, and read broadly.