Read Ebook: The Atlantic Monthly Volume 12 No. 72 October 1863 A Magazine of Literature Art and Politics by Various

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

CHARLES LAMB'S UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS.

SECOND PAPER.

Readers of Lamb's "Life and Letters" remember that before "Mr. H." was written, before Kemble had rejected "John Woodvil," Godwin's tragedy of "Antonio" had been produced at Drury-Lane Theatre, and that Elia was present at the performance thereof. But perhaps they do not know that Elia's essay on "The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century," as originally published in the "London Magazine," contained a full and circumstantial account of the cold and stately manner in which John Kemble performed the part of Antonio in Godwin's unfortunate play. For some reason or other, Lamb did not reprint this part of the article. Admirers of Charles Lamb and admirers of the drama will be pleased--for 'tis a very characteristic bit of writing--with what Elia says of

JOHN KEMBLE AND GODWIN'S TRAGEDY OF "ANTONIO."

"The story of his swallowing opium-pills to keep him lively upon the first night of a certain tragedy we may presume to be a piece of retaliatory pleasantry on the part of the suffering author. But, indeed, John had the art of diffusing a complacent equable dulness over a piece which he did not like, beyond any of his contemporaries. John Kemble had made up his mind early that all the good tragedies which could be written had been written, and he resented any new attempt. His shelves were full. The old standards were scope enough for his ambition. He ranged in them absolute, and 'fair in Otway, full in Shakspeare shone.' He succeeded to the old lawful thrones, and did not care to adventure bottomry with a Sir Edward Mortimer, or any casual speculator that offered.

"I remember, too acutely for my peace, the deadly extinguisher which he put upon my friend G.'s 'Antonio' G., satiate with visions of political justice, or willing to let the skeptical worldlings see that his anticipations of the future did not preclude a warm sympathy for men as they are and have been, wrote a tragedy. He chose a story, affecting, romantic, Spanish,--the plot simple, without being naked,--the incidents uncommon, without being overstrained. Antonio, who gives the name to the piece, is a sensitive young Castilian, who, in a fit of his country honor, immolates his sister--

"But I must not anticipate the catastrophe. The play, reader, is extant in choice English, and you will employ a spare half-crown not injudiciously in the quest of it.

"M., I believe, was the only person who suffered acutely from the failure; for G. thenceforward, with a serenity unattainable but by the true philosophy, abandoning a precarious popularity, retired into his fast hold of speculation,--the drama in which the world was to be his tiring-room, and remote posterity his applauding spectators, at once, and actors."

"They call this an age of personality: but surely this spirit of anti-personality is something worse.

"Take away my moral reputation,--I may live to discredit that calumny. Injure my literary fame,--I may write that up again. But when a gentleman is robbed of his identity, where is he?

"Is the parish register nothing? Is the house in Princes Street, Cavendish Square, where we saw the light six-and-forty years ago, nothing? Were our progenitors from stately Genoa, where we flourished four centuries back, before the barbarous name of Boldero was known to a European mouth, nothing? Was the goodly scion of our name, transplanted into England in the reign of the seventh Henry, nothing? Are the archives of the steelyard, in succeeding reigns, showing that we flourished in prime repute, as merchants, down to the period of the Commonwealth, nothing?

"'Why, then the world, and all that's in't is nothing, The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing.'

"I am ashamed that this trifling writer should have power to move me so.

"ELIA."

"ELIA TO HIS CORRESPONDENTS.

"A correspondent, who writes himself Peter Ball, or Bell,--for his hand-writing is as ragged as his manners,--admonishes me of the old saying, that some people had need have good memories. In my 'Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,' I have delivered myself, and truly, a Templar born. Bell clamors upon this, and thinketh that he hath caught a fox. It seems that in a former paper, retorting upon a weekly scribbler who had called my good identity in question, I profess myself a native of some spot near Cavendish Square, deducing my remoter origin from Italy. But who does not see, except this tinkling cymbal, that in that idle fiction of Genoese ancestry I was answering a fool according to his folly,--that Elia there expresseth himself ironically, as to an approved slanderer, who hath no right to the truth, and can be no fit recipient of it? Such a one it is usual to leave to his delusions,--or, leading him from error still to contradictory error, to plunge him deeper in the mire, and give him line till he suspend himself. No understanding reader could be imposed upon by such obvious rodomontade to suspect me for an alien, or believe me other than English.

"To 'Indagator,' 'Investigator, 'Incertus,' and the rest of the pack, that are so importunate about the true localities of his birth,--as if, forsooth, Elia were presently about to be passed to his parish,--to all such church-warden critics he answereth, that, any explanation here given notwithstanding, he hath not so fixed his nativity to one dull spot, but that, if he seeth occasion, or the argument shall demand it, he will be born again, in future papers, in whatever place, and at whatever period, shall seem good unto him,--

"'Mod? me Thebis, mod? Athenis.'

"ELIA."

Lamb excels as a critic. His article on Hogarth is a masterly specimen of acute and subtile criticism. Hazlitt says it ought to be read by every lover of Hogarth and English genius. His paper on "The Tragedies of Shakspeare, considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage-Representation," is, in the opinion of good judges, the noblest criticism ever written. The brief, "matterful" notes to his Specimens of the Old English Dramatists are the very quintessence of criticism,--the flower and fruit of years of thoughtful reading of the old English drama. Nay, even his incidental allusions to his favorite old poets and prose-writers are worth whole pages of ordinary criticism.

ESTIMATE OF DE FOE'S SECONDARY NOVELS.

"It has happened not seldom that one work of some author has so transcendently surpassed in execution the rest of his compositions, that the world has agreed to pass a sentence of dismissal upon the latter, and to consign them to total neglect and oblivion. It has done wisely in this, not to suffer the contemplation of excellencies of a lower standard to abate or stand in the way of the pleasure it has agreed to receive from the master-piece.

"Again, it has happened, that, from no inferior merit of execution in the rest, but from superior good fortune in the choice of its subject, some single work shall have been suffered to eclipse and cast into shade the deserts of its less fortunate brethren. This has been done with more or less injustice in the case of the popular allegory of Bunyan, in which the beautiful and Scriptural image of a pilgrim or wayfarer, addressing itself intelligibly and feelingly to the bosoms of all, has silenced, and made almost to be forgotten, the more awful and scarcely less tender beauties of the 'Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus,' of the same author,--a romance less happy in its subject, but surely well worthy of a secondary immortality. But in no instance has this excluding partiality been exerted with more unfairness than against what may be termed the secondary novels or romances of De Foe.

"While all ages and descriptions of people hang delighted over the 'Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,' and shall continue to do so, we trust, while the world lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told that there exist other fictitious narratives by the same writer,--four of them at least of no inferior interest, except what results from a less felicitous choice of situation! 'Roxana.' 'Singleton,' 'Moll Flanders,' 'Colonel Jack,' are all genuine offspring of the same father. They bear the veritable impress of De Foe. An unpractised midwife that would not swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye of every one of them! They are in their way as full of incident, and some of them every bit as romantic; only they want the uninhabited island, and the charm that has bewitched the world, of the striking solitary situation.

"But are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert? or cannot the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone? Singleton on the world of waters, prowling about with pirates less merciful than the creatures of any howling wilderness,--is he not alone, with the faces of men about him, but without a guide that can conduct him through the mists of educational and habitual ignorance, or a fellow-heart that can interpret to him the new-born yearnings and aspirations of unpractised penitence? Or when the boy Colonel Jack, in the loneliness of the heart, goes to hide his ill-purchased treasure in the hollow tree by night, and miraculously loses, and miraculously finds it again--whom hath he there to sympathize with him? or of what sort are his associates?

Lamb, in a letter to one of his correspondents, says, after speaking of his recent contributions to the "London Magazine,"--"In the next number I shall figure as a theologian, and have attacked my late brethren, the Unitarians. What Jack-Pudding tricks I shall play next I know not; I am almost at the end of my tether." Talfourd, of course, does not publish the article, or even give its title, which is, "Unitarian Protests." Those who would see how well or how ill Elia figures as a theologian should read

"UNITARIAN PROTESTS: IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND OF THAT PERSUASION NEWLY MARRIED.

"'As Unitarians, therefore, we' 'most solemnly protest against the service,' 'because we are thereby called upon, not only tacitly to acquiesce, but to profess a belief, in a doctrine which is a dogma, as we believe, totally unfounded.' But do you profess that belief during the ceremony? or are you only called upon for the profession, but do not make it? If the latter, then you fall in with the rest of your more consistent brethren, who waive the Protest; if the former, then, I fear, your Protest cannot save you.

"Hard and grievous it is, that, in any case, an institution so broad and general as the union of man and wife should be so cramped and straitened by the hands of an imposing hierarchy, that, to plight troth to a lovely woman, a man must be necessitated to compromise his truth and faith to Heaven; but so it must be, so long as you choose to marry by the forms of the church over which that hierarchy presides.

"'Therefore,' say you, 'we protest.' O poor and much fallen word, Protest! It was not so that the first heroic reformers protested. They departed out of Babylon once for good and all; they came not back for an occasional contact with her altars--a dallying, and then a protesting against dalliance; they stood not shuffling in the porch, with a Popish foot within, and its lame Lutheran fellow without, halting betwixt. These were the true Protestants. You are--Protesters.

"Besides the inconsistency of this proceeding, I must think it a piece of impertinence, unseasonable at least, and out of place, to obtrude these papers upon the officiating clergyman,--to offer to a public functionary an instrument which by the tenor of his function he is not obliged to accept, but, rather, he is called upon to reject. Is it done in his clerical capacity? He has no power of redressing the grievance. It is to take the benefit of his ministry, and then insult him. If in his capacity of fellow-Christian only, what are your scruples to him, so long as you yourselves are able to get over them, and do get over them by the very fact of coming to require his services? The thing you call a Protest might with just as good a reason be presented to the church-warden for the time being, to the parish-clerk, or the pew-opener.

"But, say you, we have hard measure: the Quakers are indulged with the liberty denied to us. They are; and dearly have they earned it. You have come in in the cool of the evening, at the eleventh hour. The Quaker character was hardened in the fires of persecution in the seventeenth century,--not quite to the stake and fagot, but little short of that: they grew up and thrived against noisome prisons, cruel beatings, whippings, stockings. They have since endured a century or two of scoffs, contempts; they have been a by-word, and a nay-word; they have stood unmoved: and the consequence of long conscientious resistance on one part is invariably, in the end, remission on the other. The legislature, that denied you the tolerance, which I do not know that at that time you even asked, gave them the liberty which, without granting, they would have assumed. No penalties could have driven them into the churches. This is the consequence of entire measures. Had the early Quakers consented to take oaths, leaving a Protest with the clerk of the court against them in the same breath with which they had taken them, do you in your conscience think that they would have been indulged at this day in their exclusive privilege of affirming? Let your people go on for a century or so, marrying in your own fashion, and I will warrant them, before the end of it, the legislature will be willing to concede to them more than they at present demand.

"I am, dear Sir,

"With much respect, yours, etc.,

"ELIA."

Lamb once said, of all the lies he ever put off,--and he put off a good many,--indeed, he valued himself on being "a matter-of-lie man," believing truth to be too precious to be wasted upon everybody,--of all the lies he ever put off, he valued his "Memoir of Liston" the most. "It is," he confessed to Miss Hutchinson, "from top to toe, every paragraph, pure invention, and has passed for gospel,--has been republished in the newspapers, and in the penny play-bills of the night, as an authentic account." And yet, notwithstanding its incidents are all imaginary, its facts all fictions, is not Lamb's "Memoir of Liston" a truer and more trustworthy work than any of the productions of those contemptible biographers--unfortunately not yet extinct--so admirably ridiculed in the thirty-fifth number of the "Freeholder"? In fact, is not this "lying Life of Liston" a very clever satire on those biographers who, like the monkish historians mentioned by Fuller, in his "Church History of Britain," swell the bowels of their books with empty wind, in default of sufficient solid food to fill them,--who, according to Addison, ascribe to the unfortunate persons whose lives they pretend to write works which they never wrote and actions which they never performed, celebrate virtues which they were never famous for and excuse faults which they were never guilty of? And does not Lamb, in this work, very happily ridicule the pedantry and conceit of certain grave and dignified biographers whose works are to be found in most gentlemen's libraries?

Therefore, as a piece of most admirable fooling, as a bit of harmless, good-natured pleasantry, as a specimen of pleasant satire, of subtile irony, this "Memoir of Listen" is well worthy of a place in all editions of Charles Lamb's writings.

"BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON.

"'Thinketh He,' 'with his costive countenances, to wry a sorrowing soul out of her anguish, or by defacing the divine denotement of destinate dignity to reinstamp the Paradice-plotted similitude with a novel and naughty approximation to those abhorred and ugly God-forbidden correspondences, with flouting Apes' jeering gibberings, and Babion babbling-like, to hoot out of countenance all modest measure, as if our sins were not sufficing to stoop our backs without He wresting and crooking his members to mistimed mirth in deformed fashion, leering when he should learn, prating for praying, goggling his eyes, whereas in Paradice that devilish Serpent appeareth his undoubted Predecessor, first induing a mask like some roguish roistering Roscius to beguile with Stage shows the gaping Woman, whose Sex hath still chiefly upheld these Mysteries, and are voiced to be the chief Stage-haunters, where, as I am told, the custom is commonly to mumble apples, not ambiguously derived from that pernicious Pippin, whereas sometimes the hissing sounds of displeasure, as I hear, do lively reintonate that snake-taking-leave, and diabolical goings off, in Paradice.'

"The Puritanic effervescence of the early Presbyterians appears to have abated with time, and the opinions of the more immediate ancestors of our subject to have subsided at length into a strain of moderate Calvinism. Still a tincture of the old leaven was to be expected among the posterity of A.L.

"At the age of nine we find our subject under the tuition of the Rev. Mr. Goodenough, by whom he was inducted into a competent portion of Latin and Greek, with some mathematics, till the death of Mr. Goodenough, in his own seventieth, and Master Liston's eleventh year, put a stop for the present to his classical progress.

"We have heard our hero, with emotions which do his heart honor, describe the awful circumstances attending the decease of this worthy old gentleman. It seems they had been walking out together, master and pupil, in a fine sunset, to the distance of three-quarters of a mile west of Lupton, when a sudden curiosity took Mr. Goodenough to look down upon a chasm, where a shaft had been lately sunk in a mining speculation . The old clergyman leaning over, either with incaution or sudden giddiness, suddenly lost his footing, and, to use Mr. Listen's phrase, disappeared, and was doubtless broken into a thousand pieces. The sound of his head, etc., dashing successively upon the projecting masses of the chasm, had such an effect upon the child that a serious sickness ensued, and even for many years after his recovery he was not once seen so much as to smile.

"The joint death of both his parents, which happened not many months after this disastrous accident, and were probably accelerated by it, threw our youth upon the protection of his maternal great-aunt, Mrs. Sittingbourn. Of this aunt we have never heard him speak but with expressions amounting almost to reverence. To the influence of her early counsels and manners he has always attributed the firmness with which, in maturer years, thrown upon a way of life commonly not the best adapted to gravity and self-retirement, he has been able to maintain a serious character, untinctured with the levities incident to his profession. Ann Sittingbourn was stately, stiff, tall, with a cast of features strikingly resembling the subject of this memoir. Her estate in Kent was spacious and well-wooded; the house, one of those venerable old mansions which are so impressive in childhood, and so hardly forgotten in succeeding years. In the venerable solitudes of Charnwood, among thick shades of the oak and beech, the young Listen cultivated those contemplative habits which have never entirely deserted him in after-years. Here he was commonly in the summer months to be met with, with a book in his hand,--not a play-book,--meditating. Boyle's 'Reflections' was at one time the darling volume, which in its turn was superseded by Young's 'Night Thoughts,' which has continued its hold upon him through life. He carries it always about him; and it is no uncommon thing for him to be seen, in the refreshing intervals of his occupation, leaning against a side-scene, in a sort of Herbert-of-Cherbury posture, turning over a pocket-edition of his favorite author.

"But the solitudes of Charnwood were not destined always to obscure the path of our young hero. The premature death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, at the age of seventy, occasioned by incautious burning of a pot of charcoal in her sleeping-chamber, left him in his nineteenth year nearly without resources. That the stage at all should have presented itself as an eligible scope for his talents, and, in particular, that he should have chosen a line so foreign to what appears to have been his turn of mind, may require some explanation.

"At Charnwood, then, we behold him thoughtful, grave, ascetic. From his cradle averse to flesh-meats and strong drink; abstemious even beyond the genius of the place, and almost in spite of the remonstrances of his great-aunt, who, though strict, was not rigid; water was his habitual drink, and his food little beyond the mast and beech-nuts of his favorite groves. It is a medical fact, that this kind of diet, however favorable to the contemplative powers of the primitive hermits, etc., is but ill adapted to the less robust minds and bodies of a later generation. Hypochondria almost constantly ensues. It was so in the case of the young Liston. He was subject to sights, and had visions. Those arid beech-nuts, distilled by a complexion naturally adust, mounted into an occiput already prepared to kindle by long seclusion and the fervor of strict Calvinistic notions. In the glooms of Charnwood he was assailed by illusions similar in kind to those which are related of the famous Anthony of Padua. Wild antic faces would ever and anon protrude themselves upon his sensorium. Whether he shut his eyes or kept them open, the same illusions operated. The darker and more profound were his cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions. They buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him, hooting in his ear, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his bane became at length his solace; and he desired no better society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon influenced his future destiny.

"On the death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, we find him received into the family of Mr. Willoughby, an eminent Turkey merchant, resident in Birchin Lane, London. We lose a little while here the chain of his history,--by what inducements this gentleman was determined to make him an inmate of his house. Probably he had had some personal kindness for Mrs. Sittingbourn formerly; but however it was, the young man was here treated more like a son than a clerk, though he was nominally but the latter. Different avocations, the change of scene, with that alternation of business and recreation which in its greatest perfection is to be had only in London, appear to have weaned him in a short time from the hypochondriacal affections which had beset him at Charnwood.

"In the three years which followed his removal to Birchin Lane, we find him making more than one voyage to the Levant, as chief factor for Mr. Willoughby at the Porte. We could easily fill our biography with the pleasant passages which we have heard him relate as having happened to him at Constantinople, such as his having been taken up on suspicion of a design of penetrating the seraglio, etc.; but, with the deepest convincement of this gentleman's own veracity, we think that some of the stories are of that whimsical, and others of that romantic nature, which, however diverting, would be out of place in a narrative of this kind, which aims not only at strict truth, but at avoiding the very appearance of the contrary.

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