eager to listen, the life-story of Joseph Mazzini ?

' Of God nor man was ever this thing said,

That he could give
Life back to her who gave him, whence his dead

Mother might live.
But this man found his mother dead and slain,

With fast sealed eyes,
And bade the dead rise up and live again,

And she did rise.'

Nor will our imaginary historian be unmindful
of Cavour, or fail to thrill his readers by telling
them how, when the great Italian statesman,
with many sins upon his conscience, lay in the
very grasp of death, he interrupted the priests,
busy at their work of intercession, almost



200 THE MUSE OF HISTORY.

roughly, with the exclamation, 'Pray not for me.'
1 Pray for Italy !' whilst if he be one who has a
turn for that ironical pastime, the dissection of
a king, the curious character, and muddle of
motives, calling itself Carlo Alberto, will afford
him material for at least two paragraphs of
subtle interest. Lastly, if our historian is
ambitious of a larger canvas and of deeper
colours, what is there to prevent him, bracing
himself to the task, —

'As when some mighty painter dips
His pencil in the hues of earthquake and eclipse,'

from writing the epitaph of the Napoleonic
legend ?

But all this time I hear Professor Seeley
whispering in my ear, ' What is this but the old
1 literary groove leading to no trustworthy know-
1 ledge ?' If by trustworthy knowledge is meant
demonstrable conclusions, capable of being
expressed in terms at once exact and final,
trustworthy knowledge is not to be gained from
the witness of history, whose testimony none
the less must be received, weighed, and taken
into account. Truly observes Carlyle : ' If
1 history is philosophy teaching by examples, the
1 writer fitted to compose history is hitherto an



THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 201

unknown man. Better were it that mere
'earthly historians should lower such preten-
' sions, and, aiming only at some picture of the
* thing acted, which picture itself will be but a
'poor approximation, leave the inscrutable
'purport of them an acknowledged secret.'
'Some picture of the thing acted.' Here we
behold the task of the historian ; nor is it an
idle, fruitless task. Science is not the only, or
the chief source of knowledge. The Iliad,
Shakspeare's plays, have taught the world more
than the Politics of Aristotle or the Novum
Organum of Bacon.

Facts are not the dross of history, but the
true metal, and the historian is a worker in that
metal. He has nothing to do with abstract
truth, or with practical politics, or with forecasts
of the future. A worker in metal he is, and has
certainly plenty of what Lord Bacon used to call
1 stuff' to work upon ; but if he is to be a great
historian, and not a mere chronicler, he must be
an artist as well as an artisan, and have something
of the spirit which animated such a man as
Francesco Francia of Bologna, now only famous
as a painter, but in his own day equally cele-
brated as a worker in gold, and whose practice
it was to sign his pictures with the word Gold-



202 THE MUSE OF HISTORY.

smith after his name, whilst he engraved Painter
on his golden crucifixes.

The true historian, therefore, seeking to
compose a true picture of the thing acted, must
collect facts, select facts, and combine facts.
Methods will differ, styles will differ. Nobody
ever does anything exactly like anybody else;
but the end in view is generally the same, and
the historian's end is truthful narration. Maxims
he will have, if he is wise, never a one ; and as
for a moral, if he tell his story well, it will need
none ; if he tell it ill, it will deserve none.

The stream of narrative flowing swiftly, as it
does, over the jagged rocks of human destiny,
must often be turbulent and tossed ; it is, there-
fore, all the more the duty of every good citizen
to keep it as undefined as possible, and to do
what in him lies to prevent peripatetic philoso-
phers on the banks from throwing their theories
into it, either dead ones to decay, or living ones
to drown. Let the philosophers ventilate their
theories, construct their blow-holes, extract their
essences, discuss their maxims, and point their
morals as much as they will ; but let them do so
apart. History must not lose her Muse, or 'take
'to her bosom doubts, queries, essays, disserta-



THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 203

' tions, some of which ought to go before her,
'some to follow, and all to stand apart.' Let us
at all events secure our narrative first — sermons
and philosophy the day after.






'/



CHARLES LAMB.*

Mr. Walter Bagehot preferred Hazlitt to
Lamb, reckoning the former much the greater
writer. The preferences of such a man as
Bagehot are not to be lightly disregarded, least
of all when their sincerity is vouched for, as in
the present case, by half a hundred quotations
from the favoured author. Certainly no writer
repays a literary man's devotion better than
Hazlitt, of whose twenty seldom read volumes
hardly a page but glitters with quotable matter ;
the true ore, to be had for the cost of cartage.
You may live like a gentleman for a twelvemonth
on Hazlitt's ideas. Opinions, no doubt, differ
as to how many quotations a writer is entitled
to ; but, for my part, I like to see an author
leap-frog into his subject over the back of a
brother.

* The Works of Charles Lamb. Edited, with notes
and introduction, by the Rev. Alfred Ainger. Three
volumes. London : 1883-5.



CHARLES LAMB. 205

I do not remember whether Bagehot has any-
where given his reasons for his preference — the
open avowal whereof drove Crabb Robinson
well-nigh distracted ; and it is always rash to
find reasons for a faith you do not share ; but
probably they partook of the nature of a com-
plaint that Elia's treatment of men and things
(meaning by things, books) is often fantastical,
unreal, even a shade insincere ; whilst Hazlitt
always at least aims at the centre, whether he
hits it or not. Lamb dances round a subject ;
Hazlitt grapples with it. So far as Hazlitt is
concerned, doubtless this is so; his literary
method seems to realize the agreeable aspiration
of Mr. Browning's Italian in E?igland : —

' I would grasp Metternich until
I felt his wet red throat distil
In blood thro' these two hands.'

Hazlitt is always grasping some Metternich.
He 'said himself that Lamb's talk was like
snap-dragon, and his own 'not very much
'unlike a game of nine-pins.' Lamb, writing
to him on one occasion about his son, wishes
the little fellow a ' smoother head of hair and
somewhat of a better temper than his father ;'
and the pleasant words seem to call back from
the past the stormy figure of the man who loved



206 CHARLES LAMB.

art, literature, and the drama with a consuming
passion, who has described books and plays,
authors and actors, with a fiery enthusiasm and
reality quite unsurpassable, and who yet, neither
living nor dead, has received his due meed of
praise. Men still continue to hold aloof from
Hazlitt ; his shaggy head and fierce scowling
temper still seem to terrorize ; and his very
books, telling us though they do about all things
most delightful — poems, pictures, and the
cheerful playhouse — frown upon us from their
upper shelf. From this it appears that would a
genius ensure for himself immortality, he must
brush his hair and keep his temper ; but, alas !
how seldom can he be persuaded to do either.
Charles Lamb did both ; and the years as they
roll do but swell the rich revenues of his praise.
Lamb's popularity shows no sign of waning.
Even that most extraordinary compound, the
rising generation of readers, whose taste in litera-
ture is as erratic as it is pronounced ; who have
never heard of James Thomson who sang The
Seasons (including the pleasant episode of Musi-
dora bathing), but understand by any reference
to that name only the striking author of The
City of Dreadful Night ; even these wayward
folk — the dogs of whose criticism, not yet full



CHARLES LAMB. 207

grown, will, when let loose, as some day they
must be, cry ' havoc ' amongst established repu-
tations — read their Lamb, letters as well as
essays, with laughter and with love.

If it be really seriously urged against Lamb
as an author that he is fantastical and artistically
artificial, it must be owned he is so. His
humour, exquisite as it is, is modish. It may
not be for all markets. How it affected the
Scottish Thersites we know only too well — that
dour spirit required more potent draughts to
make him forget his misery and laugh. It took
Swift or Smollett to move his mirth, which was
always, three parts of it, derision. Lamb's
elaborateness, what he himself calls his affected
array of antique modes and phrases, is some-
times overlooked in these strange days, when it
is thought better to read about an author than
to read him. To read aloud the Praise of
Chimney Sweepers without stumbling, or halting,
not to say mispronouncing, and to set in motion
every one of its carefully-swung sentences, is a
very pretty feat in elocution, for there is not
what can be called a natural sentence in it from
beginning to end. Many people have not
patience for this sort of thing; they like to
laugh and move on. Other people, again, like



2oS CHARLES LAMB.

an essay to be about something really important,
and to conduct them to conclusions they deem
worth carrying away. Lamb's views about
indiscriminate almsgiving, so far as these can
be extracted from his paper On the Decay of
Beggars in the Metropolis, are unsound, whilst
there are at least three ladies still living (in
Brighton) quite respectably on their means, who
consider the essay entitled A Bachelor's Com-
plaint of the Behaviour cf Married People im-
proper. But, as a rule, Lamb's essays are
neither unsound nor improper ; none the less
they are, in the judgment of some, things of
naught — not only lacking, as Southey com-
plained they did, ' sound religious feeling,' but
everything else really worthy of attention.

To discuss such congenital differences of
taste is idle ; but it is not idle to observe that
when Lamb is read, as he surely deserves to be,
as a whole — letters and poems no less than
essays — these notes of fantasy and artificiality
no longer dominate. The man Charles Lamb
was far more real, far more serious, despite his
jesting, more self-contained and self-restrained,
than Hazlitt, who wasted his life in the pursuit
of the veriest will-o'-the-wisps that ever danced
S7er the most miasmatic of swamps, who was



CHARLES LAMB: 209

never his own man, and who died, like Brian de
Bois Gilbert, 'the victim of contending passions.'
It should never be forgotten that Lamb's voca-
tion was his life. Literature was but his by-
play, his avocation in the true sense of that
much-abused word. He was not a fisherman,
but an angler in the lake of letters ; an author
by chance and on the sly. He had a right to
disport himself on paper, to play the frolic with
his own fancies, to give the decalogue the slip,
whose life was made up of the sternest stuff, of
self-sacrifice, devotion, honesty, and good sense.
Lamb's letters from first to last are full of the
philosophy of life ; he was as sensible a man as
Dr. Johnson. One grows sick of the expres-
sions, 'poor Charles Lamb,' ' gentle Charles
* Lamb,' as if he were one of those grown-up
children of the Leigh Hunt type, who are per-
petually begging and borrowing through the
round of every man's acquaintance. Charles
Lamb earned his own living, paid his own way,
was the helper, not the helped ; a man who was
beholden to no one, who always came with gifts
in his hand, a shrewd man, capable of advice,
strong in council. Poor Lamb, indeed ! Poor
Coleridge, robbed of his will ; poor Wordsworth,
devoured by his own ego ; poor Southey, writing



210 CHARLES LAMB.

his tomes and deeming himself a classic ; pocrr
Carlyle, with his nine volumes of memoirs,
where he

' Lies like a hedgehog rolled up the wrong way,
Tormenting himself with his prickles ' —

call these men poor, if you feel it decent to do
so, but not Lamb, who was rich in all that
makes life valuable or memory sweet. But he
used to get drunk. This explains all. Be un-
truthful, unfaithful, unkind ; darken the lives of
all who have to live under your shadow, rob
youth of joy, take peace from age, live unsought
for, die unmourned — and remaining sober you
will escape the curse of men's pity, and be
spoken of as a worthy person. But if ever,
amidst what Burns called ' social noise,' you so
far forget yourself as to get drunk, think not to
plead a spotless life spent with those for whom
you have laboured and saved ; talk not of the
love of friends or of help given to the needy ;
least of all make reference to a noble self-
sacrifice passing the love of women, for all will
avail you nothing. You get drunk — and the
heartless and the selfish and the lewd crave the
privilege of pitying you, and receiving your
name with an odious smile. It is really too
bad.



CHARLES LAMB. 21 1

The completion of Mr. Ainger's edition of
I^amb's works deserves a word of commemora-
tion. In our judgment it is all an edition of
Lamb's works should be. Upon the vexed
question, nowadays so much agitated, whether
an editor is to be allowed any discretion in the
exclusion from his edition of the rinsings of his
author's desk, we side with Mr. Ainger, and
think more nobly of the editor than to deny
him such a discretion. An editor is not a
sweep, and, by the love he bears the author
whose fame he seeks to spread abroad, it is
his duty to exclude what he believes does not
bear the due impress of the author's mind.
No doubt as a rule editors have no discretion
to be trusted ; but happily Mr. x\inger has
plenty, and most sincerely do we thank him
for withholding from us A Vision of Horns and
The Pawnbroker 's Daughter. Boldly to assert,
as some are found to do, that the editor of a
master of style has no choice but to reprint the
scraps or notelets that a misdirected energy
may succeed in disinterring from the grave the
writer had dug for them, is to fail to grasp the
distinction between a collector of curios and a
lover of books. But this policy of exclusion is
no doubt a perilous one- Like the Irish

14—2



212 CHARLES LAMB.

members, or Mark Antony's wife — the ' shrill-
1 toned Fulvia ' — the missing essays are * good,
'being gone.' Surely, so we are inclined to
grumble, the taste was severe that led Mr.
Ainger to dismiss Juke Judkins. We are not,
indeed, prepared to say that Judkins has been
wrongfully dismissed, or that he has any right
of action against Mr. Ainger, but we could have
put up better with his presence than his
absence.

Mr. Ainger's introduction to the Essays of
Elia is admirable ; here is a bit of it :

1 Another feature of Lamb's style is its
1 allusiveness. He is rich in quotations, and
' in my notes I have succeeded in tracing most
of them to their source, a matter of some
'difficulty in Lamb's case, for his inaccuracy
' is all but perverse. But besides those avowedly
' introduced as such, his style is full of quota-
'tions held, if the expression may be allowed,
' in solution. One feels, rather than recognises,
' that a phrase or idiom or turn of expression
' is an echo of something that one has heard
' or read before. Yet such is the use made
' of the material, that a charm is added by the
' very fact that we are thus continually renewing
' our experience of an older day. This style



CHARLES LAMB. 213

'becomes aromatic, like the perfume of faded
' rose-leaves in a china jar. With such allusive -
' ness as this I need not say that I have not
' meddled in my notes ; its whole charm lies in
' recognising it for ourselves. The " prosperity "
' of an allusion, as of a jest, " lies~in the ear of
' " him that hears it," and it were doing a poor
' service to Lamb or his readers to draw out
' and arrange in order the threads he has
'wrought into the very fabric of his English/'

Then Mr. Ainger's notes are not meddle-
some notes, but truly explanatory ones, genuine
aids to enjoyment. Lamb needs notes, and
yet the task of adding them to a structure
so fine and of such nicely studied proportions
is a difficult one ; it is like building a tool-
house against La Sainte Chapelle. Deftly has
Mr. Ainger inserted his notes, and capital
reading do they make; they tell us all we
ought to want to know. He is no true lover
of Elia who does not care to know who the
1 Distant Correspondent ' was. And Barbara

S . ' It was not much that Barbara had

1 to claim.' No, dear child ! it was not — 'a bare
1 half-guinea' ; but you are surely also entitled to
be known to us by your real name. When
Lamb tells us Barbara's maiden name was



2i 4 CHARLES LAMB.

Street, and that she was three times married —
first to a Mr. Dancer, then to a Mr. Barry, and
finally to a Mr. Crawford, whose widow she
was when he first knew her — he is telling us
things that were not, for the true Barbara died
a spinster, and was born a Kelly.

Mr. Ainger, as was to be expected, has a
full, instructive note anent the Old Benchers
of the Inner Temple. Some hasty editors, with
a sorrowfully large experience of Lamb's
unblushing fictions and Defoe-like falsehoods,
and who, perhaps, have wasted good hours
trying to find out all about Miss Barbara's third
husband, have sometimes assumed that at all
events most of the names mentioned by Lamb
in his immortal essay on t'he Benchers are
fictitious. Mr. Ainger, however, assures us that
the fact is otherwise. Jekyl, Coventry, Pierson,
Parton, Read, Wharry, Jackson, and Mingay,
no less than 'unruffled Samuel Salt,' were all
real persons, and were called to the Bench of
the Honourable Society by those very names.
One mistake, indeed, Lamb makes — he writes
of Mr. Twopenny as if he had been a Bencher.
Now, there never yet was a Bencher of the
name of Twopenny; though the mistake is
easily accounted for. There was a Mr. Two-



CHARLES LAMB. 215

penny, a very thin man too, just as Lamb
described him, who lived in the Temple ; but
he was not a Bencher, he was not even a
barrister • he was a much better thing, namely,
stockbroker to the Bank of England. The
holding of this office, which Mr. Ainger rightly
calls important, doubtless accounts for Two-
penny's constant good-humour and felicitous
jesting about his own person. A man who
has a snug berth other people want feels free
to crack such jokes.

Of the contents of these three volumes we
can say deliberately what Dr. Johnson said,
surely in his haste, of Baxter's three hundred
works, 'Read them all, they are all good.' Do
not be content with the essays alone. It is
shabby treatment of an author who has given
you pleasure to leave him half unread ; it is
nearly as bad as keeping a friend waiting.
Anyhow, read Mrs. Leicester's School ; it is
nearly all Mary Lamb's, but the more you like
it on that account the better pleased her brother
would have been.

We are especially glad to notice that Mr.
Ainger holds us out hopes of an edition,
uniform with the works, of the letters of Charles
Lamb. Until he has given us these, also with



216 CHARLES LAMB.

notes, his pious labours are incomplete. Lamb's
letters are not only the best text of his life,
but the best comment upon it. They reveal
all the heroism of the man and all the cunning
of the author; they do the reader good by
stealth. Let us have them speedily, so that
honest men may have in their houses a com-
plete edition of at least one author of whom
they can truthfully say, that they never know
whether they most admire the writer or love
the man.



!



< \ ■



//.*»









1 1 1






EMERSON.

There are men whose charm is in their
entirety. Their words occasionally utter what
their looks invariably express. We read their
thoughts by the light of their smiles. Not to
see and hear these men is not to know them,
and criticism without personal knowledge is in
rheir case mutilation. Those who did know
them listen in despair to the half-hearted praise
and clumsy disparagement of critical strangers,
and are apt to exclaim, as did the younger Pitt,
when some extraneous person was expressing
wonder at the enormous reputation of Fox,
1 Ah ! you have never been under the wand of
'the magician.'

Of such was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
'When we find so cool-brained a critic as
Mr. Lowell writing and quoting thus cf
Emerson :

* Those who heard him while their natures



218 EMERSON.

'were yet plastic, and their mental nerves
'trembled under the slightest breath of divine
' air, will never cease to feel and say :

• " Was never eye did see that face

Was never ear did hear that tongue,
Was never mind did mind his grace

That ever thought the travail long ;
But eyes, and ears, and every thought
Were with his sweet perfections caught ;" '

we recognise at once that the sooner we take
off our shoes the better, for that the ground
upon which we are standing is holy. How can
we sufficiently honour the men who, in this
secular, work-a-day world, habitually breathe

* An ampler ether, a diviner air,'

than ours !

But testimony of this kind, conclusive as
it is upon the question of Emerson's personal
influence, will not always be admissible in sup-
port of his claims as an author. In the long-
run an author's only witnesses are his own books.

In Dr. Holmes's estimate of Emerson's books

everyone must wish to concur.* These are not

the days, nor is this dry and thirsty land of

ours the place, when or where we can afford

* See Life of Emerson, by O. W. Holmes.



EMERSON. 219

to pass by any well of spiritual influence. It
is matter, therefore, for rejoicing that, in the
opinion of so many good judges, Emerson's
well can never be choked up. His essays, so at
least we are told by no less a critic than Mr.
Arnold, are the most valuable prose contribu-
tions to English literature of the century ; his
letters to Mr. Carlyle carried into all our homes
the charm of a most delightful personality ; the
quaint melody of his poems abides in many
ears. He would, indeed, be a churl who grudged
Emerson his fame.

But when we are considering a writer so full
of intelligence as Emerson — one so remote and
detached from the world's bluster and brag —
it is especially incumbent upon us to charge
our own language with intelligence, and to
make sure that what we say is at least truth
for us.

Were we at liberty to agree with Dr. Holmes
in his unmeasured praise — did we, in short, find
Emerson full of inspiration — our task would
be as easy as it would be pleasant ; but not
entirely agreeing with Dr. Holmes, and some-
how missing the inspiration, the difficulty we
began by mentioning presses heavily upon us.

Pleasant reading as the introductory thirty-



220 EMERSON.

five pages of Dr. Holmes's book make, we
doubt the wisdom of so very sketchy an account
of Emerson's lineage and intellectual environ-
ment. Attracted towards Emerson everybody
must be ; but there are many who have never
been able to get quit of an uneasy fear as to
his 'staying power.' He has seemed to some
of us a little thin and vague. A really great
author dissipates all such fears. Read a page
and they are gone. To inquire after the intel-
lectual health of such a one would be an im-
pertinence. Emerson hardly succeeds in inspiring
this confidence, but is more like a clever invalid
who says, and is encouraged by his friends to
say, brilliant things, but of whom it would be
cruel to expect prolonged mental exertion. A
man, he himself has said, ' should give us a
' sense of mass.' He perhaps does not do so.
This gloomy and possibly distorted view is
fostered rather than discouraged by Dr. Holmes's
introductory pages about Boston life and intel-
lect. It does not seem to have been a very
strong place. We lack performance. It is ol
small avail to write, as Dr. Holmes does, about
'brilliant circles,' and * literary luminaries,' and
then to pass on, and leave the circles circulating
and the luminaries shining in vacuo. We want



EMERSON. 221

to know how they were brilliant, and what they
illuminated. If you wish me to believe that
you are witty I must really trouble you to make
a joke. Dr. Holmes's own wit, for example, is
as certain as the law of gravitation, but over all
these pages of his hangs vagueness, and we scan
them in vain for reassuring details.

'Mild orthodoxy, ripened in Unitarian sun-

* shine,' does not sound very appetising, though
we are assured by Dr. Holmes that it is 'a very