Massinger, Walton, and Browne was later to be reflected in the quaintness of his own constructions and diction. Yet was he not disdainful of the authors of his own day. Anything that was a book, he said, he could read. And so we find him actually enjoying Southey's juvenile attempt, Joan of Arc, even while he is leading the van in admiration of Burns and Wordsworth. His next venture in authorship was a contribution of poems to a second volume of Coleridge's, published under the title of Poems by S. T. Coleridge, to which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd. A review of the day characterized Lamb's contributions as "plaintive," and well they might be, dealing entirely with his own sad past. They brought their author little profit; and because of his anxiety to add to his scanty salary, he wrote, in 1798, the story called The Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret. This little romance is almost as well worth reading as the Earliest Writings essays, delightfully delicate, and weaving in many characteristic allusions to all Lamb's old favorites from Walton to Burns. To this year also belong the exquisite lines on The Old Familiar Faces. Coleridge, Lloyd, and Southey were now his closest friends, and, as Canon Ainger points out in his biography of Lamb, it was through these friendships, more than through his own early writings, that Lamb was feeling his way to his place in literature. Lamb's Home After the death of his father in 1799, and the return of Mary from the hospital, Lamb, feeling that he and his sister were "marked" in their old home, takes lodgings again in the Temple, close to the home of his boyhood. "By my new plan," he writes, "I shall be as airy up four pairs of stairs as in the country, and in a garden Lamb's in the midst of enchanting (more than Mahom- Settled edan paradise) London, whose dirtiest Arab- in the frequented alley and her lowest-bowing trades- Temple man I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn, James, Walter, and the parson into the bargain. O! her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print shops, toy shops, mercers, hardware men, pastry cooks, St. Paul's churchyard, the Strand, Exeter Change, Charing Cross with the man upon the black horse! . . . All the streets and pavements are pure gold, I warrant you. At least, I know an alchemy that turns her mud into that metal- a mind that loves to be at home in crowds." In the heart of all this that he loved, he lived, with occasional changes of lodgings, for the next eighteen years. Failure of The few years following saw many experiments in writing. For a short time Lamb played the rôle of joke-contributor to several daily papers. Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago tells us of the agony of concocting these quips two hours before breakfast each day. "Half a dozen jests in a day," he says, "why, it seems nothing; we make twice the number every day in our lives as a matter of course. . . But then they come into our heads. But when the head has to go out to them, when the mountain must go to Mahomet!" Later he is busy putting into verse prose versions of German poems furnished him by Coleridge; in this way he hoped to make £50 First Plays extra a year, and so "live in affluence." To prove, however, that he meant finally to devote himself to more serious work, Lamb submitted to Coleridge, in 1799, a drama entitled at first Pride's Cure, afterwards John Woodvil. Contrary to the advice of both Coleridge and Southey, he sent the play to John Kemble, manager of Drury Lane Theatre, only to receive word nearly a year later that the manuscript had been lost. He furnished a second copy, but a personal interview with Kemble ended in its being refused. Lamb published it, nevertheless, in 1802. The play is chiefly interesting to us now as evidence of the abandon with which the author yielded himself to the influence of the Elizabethan dramatists. In 1806 the proprietor of Drury Lane accepted Lamb's farce, Mr. H. When acted, it was a complete failure. At the first and only performance the curtain fell amid hisses, in which Lamb himself is said to have joined. But his courage in the face of these failures seems indomitable. He writes to Hazlitt, "Mary is a little cut at the ill success of Mr. H., which came out last night and failed. I know you'll be very sorry, too, but never mind. We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces." Tales from 1807 In his next undertaking Lamb was more fortunate. This was doing, for William Godwin, twenty of Shakespeare's plays into stories for children. ShakeHis sister helped him in this work, writing her- speare, self the comedies and leaving to her brother the tragedies. In a letter of hers we read: "Charles has written Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and has begun Hamlet. You would like to see us as we often sit writing on one table, but not on one cushion like Hermia and Helena in Midsummer Night's Dream; rather like an old literary Darby and Joan, I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while and saying that he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out that he has made something of it." The Tales from Shakespeare came out in January, 1807, and were a success at once. No one probably knew the plays better than these two joint-authors, and to their accuracy of detail they added that simple, narrative style which has made their version beloved by young and old. The Tales still hold their own as the most sympathetic introduction young people can have to the reading of Shakespeare. Godwin next asked Lamb to translate for children the story of the Odyssey; and this was quickly followed, in 1808, by a more scholarly work for which Lamb was eminently fitted, - Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Contemporary with Shakespeare. In this labor Lamb struck a new Specimens note in criticism; for his comments concerned of English themselves little with antiquarianism and philo- Poets, logy, and became rather studies of human life 1808 as reflected in these early dramas. His preface says: "The plays which I have made choice of have been with few exceptions those which treat of human life and manners. Dramatic My leading design has been to illustrate what may be called the moral sense of our ancestors." If Lamb's notes pass over rather indifferently the points of construction and characterization in the drama, they are, on the other hand, a long leap ahead toward genuine appreciation of the knowledge of human life which is the foundation of all dramatic power; more than that, they were a powerful factor in reviving the works of the older dramatists, which English readers at that time had well nigh forgotten. "He flashed a light from himself upon them." During the next few years Lamb wrote but little,one collection of stories, one of poetry for children, and one or two pieces of criticism published in Leigh Hunt's Reflector. In 1817 he had left the old home in the Temple for lodgings in Great Russell Street, on the site where once stood Will's Coffee-House. His worldly fortunes were now looking upward. His salary at the East India House was constantly increasing. The friends who invaded his home became so numerous that he says in his whimsical way, "I am never C. L. but always C. L. and Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself." This round of First Edition of conviviality was doubtless the reason why eight years showed so little literary work accomplished. In 1818 a complete collection of his writings was brought out. Writing to Coleridge, Lamb laughs at the "slender labours" dignified by the title of "Works," and says, "You will find your old associate in his second volume dwindled into prose and criticism!" Not yet did he know that the world was in the end to love him best as an essayist. Lamb's admiration for the gifted comedian, Fannie Kelly, brings us in 1819 to an episode whose history, read in detail, contributes much to our affection for him. In 1818 he had written to her a sonnet in whose last lines genius nobly celebrated genius : — Fannie Your tears have passion in them, and a grace And please the better from a pensive face In the Examiner Lamb was writing frequent criticisms of her acting, and a fortnight after his praise of her perform ance of Rachel in The Jovial Crew, in which Miss Kelly's wit must have detected more warmth than belongs to even the most enthusiastic appreciation, he sent her his formal proposal of marriage. "As plainly and frankly as I have seen you give or refuse assent in some feigned scene, so frankly do me the justice to answer me," he wrote. Her sincerity met his; and with her kind, firm refusal and Lamb's brave reception of her decision, the romance ended. But the old friendship remained unmarred as long as Lamb lived. Nothing is more lovable or noble in him than the habitual quietness with which he accepted such defeats. Of the suffering which they meant to him we can only catch glimpses here and there in the reveries and retrospects of his essays, or the confidences of his letters. In Dream Children we may read a memory of his love for the "fair-haired maid" of the early sonnets; and in Barbara S. we have an affectionate portrayal of one of the pathetic instances in the childhood of Fannie Kelly. In August, 1820, Lamb contributed to the London Magazine an essay entitled Recollections of the South-Sea House, and signed the article Elia. This pen name he borrowed from an Italian fellow-clerk in the South-Sea House, one Elia. Possibly the name has never been pronounced as Lamb expected, for in a letter to J. Taylor, dated July 30, 1821, he says, referring to himself as Elia, "call him Ellia." In 1823 the Essays of Elia, which had appeared in the magazine at the rate of one almost every month from August, 1820, to December, Essays of 1822, were collected into a single volume. They Elia, 1823 were twenty-five in all, showing, a variety of theme and mood, and an apparently careless grace that has been the admiration and despair of all who have tried since to imitate them. No one has ever been able to write like Elia simply because there has been but one Charles Lamb; and as we read we become unconsciously more interested in the essayist than in the essays. They have been aptly described as an "incomparable, amphibian result, which is half a Single Personality and half a Unique Literature, Elia and the Essays of Elia." |