'The First Bloom of Those Sciential Apples'

For three years starting in 1924, Edmund Blunden lived in Japan, teaching English at the University of Tokyo. There he wrote much poetry and most of Undertones of War (1928). The British government sent him back to Japan in 1947 as a “cultural liaison officer” and he remained there for an additional three years. In 1952, he published a collection of lectures delivered to Japanese students during both visits, Lectures on English Literature (Kodokwan & Co., Tokyo). The subjects reflect Blunden’s familiar literary tastes, largely the poets and essayists of the Romantic period. 

An abiding favorite was Charles Lamb. Blunden devoted two books to him. I prize Lamb for his comic sense and wildly supple prose. Who else among the Romantics can routinely make you laugh? In his day, Lamb was a one-man salvage operation, absorbing and proselytizing for the minor Elizabethan dramatists and especially the great English prose writers of the seventeenth century: Burton, Browne, Bunyan and Taylor. For generations, Lamb has been safely patronized as quaint and eccentric. Blunden reminds us that Lamb had another side: “[P]hilanthropy was his creed, but there were occasions when he grew angry and formidable. None could ask more punishing questions, if they were wanted.”

   

Blunden’s Lamb lecture is built on a scaffolding of biography, and he highlights the annus mirabilis of 1820 when a new magazine, The London, began publishing Lamb’s Elia essays. “What he had written hitherto,” Blunden writes, “was distinct and individual in its serious whimsicality and beautiful play of ideas; but not till now did he achieve the complete recording of his rare and Shakespearean personality in a prose which has the grace, the forms, the music and the radiances of running water.” Blunden rightly emphasizes the beauty, charm and comedy of Lamb’s prose:

 

“Lamb possessed an inimitable sense of the exact value of words. His vocabulary is a combination of the choice and special terms which his reading of old authors had taught him, with the homely vigours of our daily speech, and characteristic inventions and novelties of his own. His sentences and paragraphs are composed with all the large effect and particular emphasis of a great sonata.”

 

One wonders what Blunden’s Japanese students made of this seemingly dogmatic statement: “There is no such thing as a satisfactory selection from the Essays of Elia. They are to be read in their entirety, each and all.” As an example of “the depth of his feeling, the play of his imagination, the maturity of the English,” Blunden selects this passage from Lamb’s “Oxford in the Vacation”:

 

“What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.”