It is
the « voices » in literature that become classics.
the « voices » in literature that become classics.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v15 - Kab to Les
At the end of
this court-yard there were two gloomy archways that seemed to
lead into a cave. Above these great arches were two arcades,
low and rounded, with a terrace for a roof, the edges of which
were decorated with flower-pots of rosemary. Under the arcades
a rustic walk could be seen, in which hanging masses of maïs
glistened in the light of the moon like golden ornaments.
A door made of planks, rudely dovetailed, opened upon this
walk. At the right an inclined plane of ground, upon which a
little house was situated, gradually came up to the same level.
A great fig-tree and some tortuous vine stalks were bending over
the angle of the house, confusing their leaves and fruits at the
entrance of the walk, festooned and creeping over the wall that
supported the arcades above. Their branches had formed bars
to the two low windows that looked out upon this little garden
walk; and if there had been no window, the low, square, and
solid house might have been mistaken for one of the light-gray
rocks, peculiar to the coast, or for one of those blocks of petri-
fied lava (entwined in the branches of the chestnut, the ivy, and
the vine) out of which the grape cultivators of Castellamare and
## p. 8807 (#431) ###########################################
LAMARTINE
8807
Sorrento hew caves, close them with a door, and there preserve
the wine by the side of the stock that first bore it.
Out of breath from the long and steep ascent we had made,
and from the weight of the oars which we carried on our shoul-
ders, the old man, my companion, and I stopped in this court-
yard for a moment in order to rest. But the boy, tossing his
oar upon a pile of brushwood, ran lightly up the stairway; and
with his torch still lighted and in his hand, began knocking at
one of the windows and calling in glee for his grandmother and
sister.
« Mother! Sister! Madre! Sorrellina! Gaetano! Graziella!
Graziella! ” he shouted. “Wake up; open the door: it's father;
it's me; and we have strangers with us. "
We soon heard a voice, not more than half awake, yet clear
and soft, utter some exclamations of surprise from within the
house. Then the window was partly opened, pushed up by an
arm naked and white, that reached out from a flowing sleeve;
and we saw by the light of the torch which the boy, balancing
himself on tiptoe, raised toward the window, the lovely face of
a young girl appear between the shutters which were thrown
widely open.
Awakened from a sound sleep by the unexpected sound of
her brother's voice, Graziella did not think, nor had she time, to
arrange her dress.
She had hurried to the window in bare feet
and just as she had arisen from the bed. Her long black hair,
half of which fell down over one of her cheeks, the other half
curled around her neck, was swept from one side of her shoul-
der to the other by the wind; which still blew harshly, and kept
hitting the shutter and lashing her face like the wing of a raven
driven by the storm.
The young girl rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands,
raising her elbows and expanding her shoulders, with the first
natural gesture of a child on awakening, that wishes to drive
away sleep. Her night-robe, fastened lightly around her neck,
revealed only the outlines of a high and delicate waist, the
youthful rounding of which was scarcely perceptible under the
covering. Her eyes, large and oval in form, were of that un-
decided color between deep black and the blue of the sea, which
tones down the natural radiance by a certain softness of ex-
pression, and unites in the woman's eye the gentleness of her
soul and the force of her passion in about equal proportions:
## p. 8808 (#432) ###########################################
8808
LAMARTINE
a celestial color which the eyes of the Asiatic and Italian women
borrow from the brilliant light of their fiery days, and from the
serene blue of their heaven, their sea, and their night. Her
cheeks were full, round, plump, of a natural pale complexion,
but a little browned by the climate; not of the unnatural pallor
of the North, but of that pure whiteness of the South, which
resembles the color of marble exposed for centuries to the air
and sea. Her mouth, the lips of which were half opened and
very full, and heavier than those of our women, had the charac-
teristic lines of frankness and goodness. Her teeth, small but
shining, sparkled in the fluttering light of the torch like shells
of pearl glistening at the bottom of a wave under the rays of
the sun.
While she was talking to her little brother, half of her words
were carried to us by the wind; and though somewhat sharply
accentuated, they sounded like sweet music to our ears. Her
features, as changeable as the Aittering torch that lighted them
up, rapidly passed from surprise to alarm, from alarm to joy,
from sympathy to laughter. Then she saw us standing behind
the trunk of the great fig-tree, and retired in confusion from the
window. Her hand abandoned the shutter, which now began to
beat freely against the wall. She only took the time to awaken
her grandmother and half dress herself when she came to open
the door for us under the arcades, and tenderly kissed her grand-
father and her brother.
The old grandmother soon made her appearance, holding in
her hand a lamp of red earthenware, which cast its light upon
her thin pale face, and her hair as white as the skeins of wool
which were tossed over the table at the side of the spinning-
wheel. She kissed her husband's hand, and kissed the boy on
the forehead. The recital of what had occurred, which has
taken up so many of these pages, required only a few words and
gestures between the different members of this poor family.
We did not hear the whole of it: we stood apart from them that
we might not stop the natural outpourings of their hearts. They
were poor; we were strangers: and we owed them a certain
respect. The only way we had of showing it was by taking
the place nearest the door and keeping perfectly still.
Graziella looked at us in surprise from time to time, as if
she were in a dream. When the father had finished his story,
the grandmother fell on her knees by the fireside. Graziella,
## p. 8809 (#433) ###########################################
LAMARTINE
8809
stepping up to the terrace above, brought in a branch of rose-
mary, and some orange-blossoms like large white stars. She took
a chair, arranged her flowers into a bouquet, fastening them
with the long pins that she drew from her hair, and placed them
before a little plaster image of the Virgin, which stood above
the door, and before which a lamp was burning. We understood
that this was an offering of thanks to her divine protectress
for having saved her brother and her grandfather; and we shared
her expression of gratitude.
The inside of the house was bare, and in almost every way
as like to the outside as both inside and outside were like the
immense rocks that surrounded it. The walls were entirely with-
out plaster, and covered only with a thin coat of whitewash. Liz-
ards, aroused by the light, shone in the crevices of the rocks,
and crept under the fern leaves that served as the children's bed.
Nests of swallows, whose little black heads peeped out, and whose
restless eyes twinkled in surprise, hung down from the beams,
still covered with bark, which formed the roof. Graziella and
her grandmother slept in the second room on a curious bedstead,
covered with a piece of coarse linen. A few baskets of fruits
and a mule's pack-saddle lay on the shelf.
The fisherman turned toward us with a look of shame, as he
indicated by a sweep of his arm the poverty of his home; then
he led us up to the terrace, the place of honor both in the Orient
and in the south of Italy. With the assistance of Graziella and
the child Beppo, he made us a sort of shed, by placing one end
of our oars upon the wall surrounding the terrace and the other
end upon the ground, then covering these with a dozen or more
branches from a horse-chestnut tree, recently cut on the side of
the mountain. Under this shelter he spread a lot of fern leaves;
he then brought us two pieces of bread, some fresh water and
figs, and wished that we might sleep well.
The physical fatigue and the emotions of the day threw us
into a sudden and deep sleep. When we awoke, the swallows
were chirping around our bed and picking from the ground the
crumbs of our supper; and the sun, already high in the heaven,
heated the fagots of leaves over our heads as if they had been
in a furnace.
We lay a long time stretched upon our fern leaves, lost in
that peculiar state of half-sleep in which the mental faculties
## p. 8810 (#434) ###########################################
8810
LAMARTINE
perceive and think before the senses give one the courage to
get up or move. We exchanged a few inarticulate words, which
were interrupted by long pauses and were lost in our dreams.
The experiences of the previous day,—the boat rolling under
our feet, the angry sea, the unapproachable rocks of the coast,
the face of Graziella looking out between the two shutters and
in the light of the torch, — all these visions flitted before us con-
fusedly, and without connection or appreciation.
We were attracted from this drowsiness by the sobs and com-
plaints of the old grandmother, who was talking to her husband
inside of the house. The chimney, which ran through the ter-
race, brought us the sound of the voices, so that we could hear
some words of the conversation. The poor woman was lamenting
the loss of her jars, of the anchor, of the ropes that were almost
new, and above all, of the beautiful sails woven by her own
hands from her own hemp, all of which we had been cruel
enough to throw into the sea to save our own lives.
“What business had you,” she asked of the old man, who was
frightened into silence, "to take these two strangers, these two
Frenchmen, with you? Don't you know that they are pagans
(pagani), and that they always bring misfortune with their wicked-
ness? The saints have punished you for it. They have stripped
us of our riches, and you may still thank them that they have
not taken away our souls. ”
The poor man did not know what to say. But Graziella, with
the authority and impatience of a spoiled child, to whom the
grandmother always gives way, protested against these reproaches
as unjust, and taking the part of the old man, said to her grand-
mother:
«Who tells you that these strangers are pagans? Are pagans
ever so compassionate for the trials of poor people as these gen-
tlemen have shown themselves? Do pagans make the sign of
the cross like ourselves before the statues of the saints ? Now
let me tell you that yesterday evening, when you had fallen on
your knees to return thanks to God, and when I had adorned the
image of the Madonna with flowers, I saw them bow their heads
as if they were praying, make the sign of the cross upon their
breasts, and I even saw a tear glisten in the eye of the younger
and fall upon his hand. ”
"A tear, indeed! ” the old woman sharply exclaimed.
nothing but a drop of sea-water that fell from his hair. ”
»
~ It was
## p. 8811 (#435) ###########################################
LAMARTINE
8811
"I tell you it was a tear,” said Graziella angrily. ~ The wind
that was blowing so fiercely had plenty of time to dry his hair
from the time he left the beach until he had climbed to the top
of the cliff. But the wind cannot dry the heart, and I tell you
again that there was water in his eye. ”
We understood that we had an all-powerful friend in that
house, for the grandmother did not answer, nor did she complain
any more.
Translation of James B. Runnion.
TO MY LAMP
H*
AIL! sole companion of my lonely toil,
Dear witness once of dearer loves of mine!
My happiness is fled, — thy store of oil
Still with clear light doth shine!
Thou dost recall the bright days of my life,
When in Pompeii's streets I roamed along,
Evoking memories of her brilliant strife,
Half tearful, half in song.
The sun was finishing his mighty round;
I was alone among a buried host;
And in the dust my idle glances found
The name of some poor ghost.
And there I saw thee, 'neath the ashes piled;
And near thee, almost buried with the rest,
The impress left there by some lovely child,
The outline of a breast.
Perhaps by thy light did the virgin go
To pray within the fane, now desolate,
For happiness that she should never know,-
Love, ne'er to be her fate!
Within the tomb her perished beauty lies:
Youth, maiden modesty, the dawning love
A mother's tender glance could scarce surprise,
Fled to the heavens above!
She vanished like the lightning's sudden gleam,
As one wave by another swiftly borne;
## p. 8812 (#436) ###########################################
8812
LAMARTINE
Or as the last hope of some wretch's dream,
When he awakes at morn!
Beauty is not the idol of the best!
I was a fool before her feet to lie,
Forgetting that, a stranger like the rest,
She too must fade and die.
What matter, then, whether she smile or frown?
My soul would seek the worship that is sure!
It needs a god to triumph, be cast down,
And, after all, endure!
Yes, I would tear myself from vain desires,
From all that perishes and is forgot;
And I would seek, to start my altar fires,
A hope that dieth not !
The resting eagle is an eagle still:
Though 'neath his mighty wing he hides his head,
He sees his prey, he strikes it, takes his fill, -
Perchance you thought him dead ?
I pity those who thought one ivy-crowned,
Child of the lyre, born but to touch the string,
Would die inglorious, - yield the golden round,
Live like a banished king.
Never shall weariness make me abjure
The gifts once prized, and cherished still the same.
My dreams shall summon back the enchantress pure,
And whisper her dear name.
Her eyes shall watch over my soul at last;
And when, dear lamp, shall come that mournful night,
When weeping friends behold me fading fast,
Thy flame shall burn more bright!
That flame has often filled my wondering thought;
The sacred emblem of our transient breath,
Mysterious power, to man's dull uses brought,
Sister of life and death!
A breath creates it, at a breath it dies;
It blots in one brief day a city's name;
Like fate ignored, or held a peerless prize
Like beauty or like fame.
## p. 8813 (#437) ###########################################
LAMARTINE
8813
See how it leaps up with a quick desire!
A spirit from on high, to earth no friend;
It takes its flight as human souls aspire,
To seek the unknown end!
All nature slowly to this end is drawn!
'Tis but a sleep, the so-called death of men:
The fly shall have its day, the flower its dawn;
Our clay shall wake again.
Do we the secrets of all nature know?
The sounds of night that on the horizon fail,
The passing cloud that lays the flowers low,
The will-o'-the-wisp of the vale ?
Know we the secret of the nesting dove?
The cradle whence the tomb has snatched its prey ?
What is the mystery of grief, or love,
Or night that follows day?
Have not the murmuring winds a voice, a mood ?
Is not the leaf a book we cannot read ?
The stream that brings us harvest or a flood,
Has not it too its screed?
Let us not strive the kindly veils to raise
Till all that we should see, life's end shall show:
Better know naught than into mysteries gaze!
Better believe than know!
Farewell, my lamp! Blessings upon thy flame!
While I believe and hope, watch thou o'er me!
If ever prideful doubt my soul should claim,
May I go out with thee!
Translation of Katharine Hillard.
ODE TO THE LAKE OF B-
TH
VHUS sailing, sailing on forevermore,
Still borne along, to winds and waves a prey,
Can we not, on life's sea without a shore,
Cast anchor for a day?
Dear lake! one little year has scarcely flown,
And near thy waves she longed once more to see,
## p. 8814 (#438) ###########################################
8814
LAMARTINE
Behold I sit alone upon this stone,
Where once she sat with me.
As now, thy restless waves were moaning through
The creviced rocks, where they their death did ineet;
And flecks of foam from off thy billows blew
Over my dear one's feet.
One night we rowed in silence,- dost recall
That night ? When under all the starry sky
Was heard alone the beat of oars that fall
In cadenced harmony.
When suddenly, upon the startled ear
Accents unknown to earth melodious break;
And with these mournful words, a voice most dear
Charms all the listening lake:--
“ O Time, pause in thy flight! and you, propitious hours,
Pause on your rapid ways!
Let us enjoy the springtime of our powers,
The fairest of all days!
“So many wretched souls would speed your flight,
Urge on the lingering suns,
Take with their days the canker and the blight;
Forget the happy ones!
“But all in vain I try to stay its course:
Time slips away and flies.
I say to night, Pass slowly! and the dawn
Breaks on my startled eyes.
“Let us love, then, and love forevermore!
Enjoy life while we may;
Man has no port, nor has time any shore;
It flees, we pass away! ”
She paused : our hearts speak through our ardent eyes,
Half-uttered phrases tremble on the air;
And in that ecstasy our spirits rise
Up to a world more fair.
And now we cease to speak; in sweet eclipse
Our senses lie, weighed down with all love's store;
Our hearts are beating, and our clinging lips
Murmur, "Forevermore ! »
(C
## p. 8815 (#439) ###########################################
LAMARTINE
8815
Great Heaven! can then these moments of delight,
When love all happiness upon us showers,
Vanish away as swiftly in their flight
As our unhappy hours ?
Eternity, the Darkness, and the Past,
What have you done with all you've made your prey ?
Answer us! will you render back at last
What you have snatched away?
O lake, O silent rocks, O verdurous green! -
You that time spares, or knows how to renew,
Keep of this night, set in this lovely scene,
At least a memory true!
A memory in thy storms and thy repose,
O lake! and where thy smiling waters lave
The sunny shore, or where the dark fir grows,
And hangs above the wave.
In the soft breeze that sighs and then is gone,
In thy shores' song, by thy shores echoed still;
In the pale star whose silvery radiance shone
Above thy wooded hill!
That moaning winds, and reeds that clashing strike,
And perfumes that on balmy breezes moved,
With all we hear, we see, we breathe, alike
May say,
« They loved ! »
Translation of Katharine Hillard.
FAR FROM THE WORLD
F
AR from the faithless and the wicked world,
Fly, O my soul! to some deep solitude;
Fly, shaking from our feet the weary dust
Of love, desire, hope, and carking care
Upon the threshold of these deserts wild.
Behold the rocks, the forests, and the shores,
Nature has molded with her mighty hands:
The streams alone have hollowed out these paths;
Their foam alone has touched the river banks
Where never human foot has left a trace.
## p. 8816 (#440) ###########################################
8816
LAMARTINE
There seek at last for peace within thyself;
Thy dreams of happiness have been but brief!
Drive them forever far from this retreat;
Love nothing but the blue sky that loves thee,
And of the sun alone ask happy days!
To wounded hearts, nature is ever sweet,
And solitude belongs to wretchedness.
Already peace re-enters my sad heart;
Already life takes up, without a jar,
Its course suspended by th and of grief!
Translation of Katharine Hillard.
## p. 8817 (#441) ###########################################
8817
CHARLES LAMB
(1775-1834)
BY ALFRED AINGER
1
O Find anything new to write about Charles Lamb might tax
the ingenuity of the most versatile and resourceful critic in
the Old or New World. And yet experience shows that the
lovers of Elia are never weary of listening for something more about
him, and continue to welcome whatever crumbs of anecdote or frag-
ments of biographical fact may have yet escaped collection. And
this very circumstance shows that Lamb stands in a category of
English-speaking humorists which is not large. Of whom could be
said precisely the same thing, except such few as Shakespeare, Gold-
smith, Johnson, Scott, - writers, that is to say, in whom the human
personality is as interesting or even more so than anything they
have written ? We are interested in Shakespeare's personality, in-
deed, because of the very little we know about him. We are inter-
ested in Goldsmith or Lamb because we know so much, and feel
towards them more as personal friends than as authors.
The personality of Lamb, indeed, is so inwrought and intertwined
with the very fibre of his essays and letters that it is impossible to
separate criticism of the one fr tha of the other. His life is
written in the confidential utterances of his essays; and his occas-
ional verse embodies allusions, even more intimate and touching, to
the sadder epochs and incidents of that life. The saddest of all such
incidents was in the first instance recorded in the most famous of
all his lyrics — the Old Familiar Faces); though Lamb rightly and
wisely withdrew, when the first spasm of bitter emotion was past,
the stanza concerning his mother's death.
Egotism in a writer is either the most unattractive of qualities
or the most engaging. We either rejoice in it or resent it. There
is hardly a third course possible. We resent it when it is a mere
"trap for admiration, or a palpable desire to establish the writer's
importance. We welcome it when the heart is pure, when there is
the requisite genius and individuality to make it precious. But the
writer who indulges in perpetual confidences as to self must be like
Cæsar's wife, “beyond suspicion”: the faintest tinge of self-conscious-
ness is fatal to the charm of self-disclosure. Charles Lamb possesses
XV-552
## p. 8818 (#442) ###########################################
8818
CHARLES LAMB
ness.
this charm; and hence his extraordinary popularity with thousands
even of those whose acquaintance with his favorite authors would
not of itself suffice to make them appreciate his multifarious allusive-
Lamb was a man of widest reading; and in directions in which
the ordinary reader even now, after seventy years or so, is little
versed. But thus far back, it is not too much to say that the very
names of the old English writers on whom Lamb's love of poetry
had been chiefly fed, were unknown to the bulk of the magazine
readers whom in his essays he first addressed. It was not therefore
to exhibit his reading or his antiquarian research, that he interlarded
his discourse with the words of Massinger or Marlowe, Marvell or
Sidney, Fuller or Sir Thomas Browne. He did not even, for the
most part, introduce his quotations with any names attached. He
cited them usually without even inverted commas. He had himself
roamed at will in gardens and orchards of exquisite beauty and
flavor, and could not help pouring what he had gathered at the
feet of his readers. And his instinct did not fail him in taking this
course. It was a curiously bold step, that of daring, when invited to
contribute essays to the London Magazine, to depart from the famil-
iar didactic or allegorical type which had been set by the Spectator
or Rambler, and trust to the perennial attraction of the humblest
human experiences. The South Sea House' was not an alluring
title for the first essay he contributed. The (South Sea Bubble)
might have been; but all that remained of the once famous specu-
lation was a building and a staff of clerks. But yet every dingiest
and most old-fashioned institution in which men go to and fro about
their business has its human side; and wherever there were men,
or the traditions of men, Lamb could make their companionship full
of charm. And how exquisite a thing did he make out of the memo-
ries of that old building where only two years of his own boyish life
were spent:-
“This was once a house of trade, a centre of busy interests. The throng
of merchants was here, the quick pulse of gain; and here some forms of
business are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still
to be seen stately porticos; imposing staircases; offices roomy as the state
apartments in palaces, — deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling
clerks; the still more sacred interiors of court and committee rooms, with
venerable faces of beadles, doorkeepers — directors seated in form on solemn
days (to proclaim a dead dividend), at long worm-eaten tables that have been
mahogany, with tarnished gilt leather coverings, supporting many silver ink-
stands long since dry _ »
« There are many echoes,” Goethe said, “but few voices.
It is
the « voices » in literature that become classics. The echoes have
their short life and then die away. Lamb is one of such voices; and
»
))
(C
## p. 8819 (#443) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8819
(
thus he has lived, and will live. It was not a voice that protested or
proclaimed much, - and certainly never from the. housetops, — but it
was his own. Compounded of many simples,” like the melancholy
of Jaques in the forest, Lamb's humor was altogether free from the
self-assertion or the discontent of the exiled philosopher of Arden.
His sweet acquiescence in the burdens and sorrows of his life was
rather that of the laughing philosopher Touchstone, whom Shake-
speare has pitted against the more specious moralist. He would have
pleaded that if the manner he had adopted was strange or ill-favored,
it was at least his own. ”
It is remarkable that Lamb's most universally popular essay, that
on Roast Pig,' is by no means one of his most characteristic. It is
not too much to say that many inferior humorists could have made a
success almost as great out of the same material. For in this case
Lamb had a really humorous notion put into his head. Given the
accidental discovery of the gastronomic value of cooked meat, the
humorous possibilities are at once perceptible. It is where the raw
material of the essay is nothing and the treatment everything that
the real individuality of Lamb stands forth. It is in such essays as
the Praise of Chimney-Sweepers,' or (Mrs. Battle on Whist, or the
(Recollections of an old Manor-House in Hertfordshire,' that we are
to look for what gives Lamb his unique place in literature and in
the hearts of those who love him.
There is food, however, for many tastes in Charles Lamb. There
is the infinite pathos of such a revelation as that in Dream Child-
ren,' which for delicate beauty and tenderness has no rival in Eng-
lish literature; there is the consummate observation and criticism of
human character in Imperfect Sympathies’; there is the perfection
of narrative art in such an anecdote as that told in Barbara S. );
there is the supreme æsthetic quality, as where he descants on the
superiority of Shakespeare to any of his contemporaries, or where he
compels our admiration for the moral value of such a satirist as
Hogarth. We are always discovering some new faculty in Lamb, and
passing from one to another with astonishing suddenness,— from the
poet to the humorist, from the moral teacher to the æsthetic critic;
and all the while the manner is often so like that of the gossip and
j ester that the reader would undervalue it as very easy writing,”
did we not know by Lamb's own confessions that his most lucid and
a pparently facile confidences were often wrung from him with slow
pain. ” So certain is it always that “easy writing) makes “hard
reading, and that the most seeming-casual of essays, if it is to live,
must have something in it of the life-blood of the writer.
And beyond all question it is the personal experiences of Lamb
that generate the supreme quality of all he wrote. It is the beauty
»
## p. 8820 (#444) ###########################################
8820
CHARLES LAMB
-
of his character — its charity and tenderness, its capacity for lifelong
sacrifice and devotion, fruits of the discipline it had undergone - that
constitutes the soil which nourished even the lightest flowers and
graces of his style. Lamb had contemporaries and rivals in his own
walk, each with rare and attractive gifts of his own,- Hazlitt and
Leigh Hunt. We owe much to both of these. Each was endowed
with critical faculties of the highest order. Each in his own line has
done memorable service in establishing the true canons of literary
criticism. Each wrote a style of his own, as perfect for its purpose
as can be conceived. Yet neither of these is loved, and lives in
men's hearts, like Charles Lamb. The amiability of Leigh Hunt is
too merely amiable: it has not its roots in the deep and strengthen-
ing earth of human discipline. Hazlitt was altogether wanting in the
quality. He showed “light, but without (sweetness ): without the
latter grace no writer can make himself dear to his readers.
Moreover, no writer has ever attained this most enviable distinc-
tion except when his own life has been told in minutest detail, either
by himself or others. In the instance of Lamb, his writings are in
the main personal confidences; and in addition we possess his let-
ters,—the most complete as well as the most fascinating disclosure of
a personality in our literature,—as well as having the testimony of
troops of friends. ” There is something that wins and touches us all
in the frank disclosure of a private history. What would Goldsmith
have been to us but for Washington Irving and John Forster; or
Johnson without Boswell; or Scott without Lockhart, and the frank
and deeply pathetic admissions of his own Journal ? The sorrows
and the struggles of these widely different men draw us to them.
Our delight in all that they have written for us is heightened and
sanctified by our pity for the individual man. And this is the reward
of the true men, who live out their real selves before us, and there-
fore are a joy forever; while the men who only pose, live their brief
hour on the stage and then cease to be!
alped anger
## p. 8821 (#445) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8821
THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES
JANUARY 1798
1
HAVE had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days -
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies-
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I loved a love once, fairest among women:
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man:
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.
Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood :
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother!
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces.
For some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed:
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
HESTER
W"
'HEN maidens such as Hester die,
Their place ye may not well supply,
Though ye among a thousand try,
With vain endeavor.
A month or more hath she been dead,
Yet cannot I by force be led
To think upon the wormy bed
And her together.
A springy motion in her gait,
A rising step, did indicate
## p. 8822 (#446) ###########################################
882 2
CHARLES LAMB
Of pride and joy no common rate,
That flushed her spirit.
I know not by what name beside
I shall it call: if 'twas not pride,
It was a joy to that allied,
She did inherit.
Her parents held the Quaker rule,
Which doth the human feeling cool;
But she was trained in Nature's school -
Nature had blest her.
A waking eye, a prying mind,
A heart that stirs, is hard to bind;
A hawk's keen sight ye cannot blind,
Ye could not Hester.
ON AN INFANT DYING AS SOON AS BORN
I
SAW where in the shroud did lurk
A curious frame of Nature's work.
A floweret crushed in the bud,
A nameless piece of Babyhood,
Was in a cradle-coffin lying;
Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying;
So soon to exchange the imprisoning womb
For darker closets of the tomb!
She did but ope an eye, and put
A clear beam forth, then straight up shut
For the long dark: ne'er more to see
Through glasses of mortality.
Riddle of destiny, who can show
What thy short visit meant, or know
What thy errand here below ?
Shall we say that Nature blind
Checked her hand and changed her mind,
Just when she had exactly wrought
A finished pattern without fault ?
Could she flag, or could she tire,
Or lacked she the Promethean fire
(With her nine moons' long workings sickened)
That should thy little limbs have quickened ?
## p. 8823 (#447) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8823
Limbs so firm they seemed to assure
Life of health, and days mature:
Woman's self in miniature!
Limbs so fair they might supply
(Themselves now but cold imagery)
The sculptor to make Beauty by.
Or did the stern-eyed Fate descry
That babe or mother - one must die:
So in mercy left the stock,
And cut the branch, to save the shock
Of young years widowed; and the pain,
When single state comes back again
To the lone man who, 'reft of wife,
Thenceforwards drags a maimèd life?
The economy of Heaven is dark;
And wisest clerks have missed the mark,
Why Human Buds, like this, should fall,
More brief than fly ephemeral,
That has his day; while shriveled crones
Stiffen with age to stocks and stones,
And crabbed use the conscience sears
In sinners of an hundred years.
Mother's prattle, mother's kiss,
Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss.
Rites, which custom does impose,
Silver bells and baby clothes;
Coral redder than those lips,
Which pale death did late eclipse;
Music framed for infant's glee,
Whistle never tuned for thee:
Though thou want'st not, thou shalt have them,-
Loving hearts were they which gave them.
Let not one be missing; nurse,
See them laid upon the hearse
Of infant slain by doom perverse.
Why should kings and nobles have
Pictured trophies to their grave;
And we, churls, to thee deny
Thy pretty toys with thee to lie,
A more harmless vanity?
## p. 8824 (#448) ###########################################
8824
CHARLES LAMB
IN MY OWN ALBUM
F
RESH clad from heaven in robes of white,
A young probationer of light,
Thou wert my soul, an album bright,
A spotless leaf: but thought and care,
And friend and foe, in foul or fair,
Have “written strange defeatures there;
And Time with heaviest hand of all,
Like that fierce writing on the wall,
Hath stamped sad dates he can't recall;
And error gilding worst designs-
Like speckled snake that strays and shines-
Betrays his path by crooked lines;
And vice hath left his ugly blot;
And good resolves, a moment hot,
Fairly begun— but finished not;
And fruitless, late remorse doth trace -
Like Hebrew lore, a backward pace
Her irrecoverable race.
Disjointed numbers, sense unknit,
Huge reams of folly, shreds of wit,
Compose the mingled mass of it.
My scalded eyes no longer brook
Upon this ink-blurred thing to look:
Go, shut the leaves, and clasp the book.
IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES
From the Essays of Elia)
I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathizeth with
all things; I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in anything. Those
natural repugnances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the
French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch. — (RELIGIO MEDICI. )
WHAT the author of the Religio Medici,' mounted upon the
airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and con-
jectural essences, in whose categories of being the possible
took the upper hand of the actual, should have overlooked the
T"
## p. 8825 (#449) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8825
impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as mankind,
is not much to be admired. It is rather to be wondered at, that
in the genus of animals he should have condescended to distin-
guish that species at all. For myself,- earth-bound and fettered
to the scene of my activities,
-
I can
« Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky," —
I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or
individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indif.
ferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a
matter of taste or distaste; or when once it becomes indifferent,
it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of
prejudices — made up of likings and dislikings — the veriest thrall
to sympathies, apathies, antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope
it may be said of me that I am a lover of my species.
feel for all indifferently, but I cannot feel towards all equally.
The more purely English word that expresses sympathy will bet-
ter explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, who
upon another account cannot be my mate or fellow. I cannot
like all people alike.
I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am
obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot
like me — and in truth, I never knew one of that nation who
attempted to do it. There is something more plain and ingen-
uous in their mode of proceeding. We know one another at
first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects (under
which mine must be content to rank) which in its constitution is
essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the sort of faculties
I allude to have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive.
They have no pretenses to much clearness or precision in their
ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual
wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They
are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She
presents no full front to them a feature or side-face at the
most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system,
is the utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game per-
adventure, “and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitu-
tions, to run it down. The light that lights them is not steady
and polar, but mutable and shifting; waxing, and again waning.
Their conversation is accordingly. They will throw out a ran-
dom word in or out of season, and be content to let it pass for
## p. 8826 (#450) ###########################################
8826
CHARLES LAMB
what it is worth. They cannot speak always as if they were
upon their oath, but must be understood, speaking or writing,
with some abatement. They seldom wait to mature a proposi-
tion, but e'en bring it to market in the green ear. They delight
to impart their defective discoveries as they arise, without wait-
ing for their development. They are no systematizers, and
would but err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said
before, are suggestive merely.
The brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is
constituted upon quite a different plan. His Minerva is born
in panoply. You are never admitted to see his ideas in their
growth — if indeed they do grow, and are not rather put to-
gether upon principles of clockwork. You never catch his mind
in an undress. He never hints or suggests anything, but un-
lades his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness.
brings his total wealth into company, and gravely unpacks it.
His riches are always about him. He never stoops to catch a
glittering something in your presence to share it with you,
before he quite knows whether it be true touch or not. You
cannot cry halves to anything that he finds. He does not find,
but bring. You never witness his first apprehension of a thing.
His understanding is always at its meridian - you never see
the first dawn, the early streaks. He has no falterings of
self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-
consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo con-
ceptions, have no place in his brain or vocabulary. The twilight
of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox — he has no
doubts. Is he an infidel he has none either. Between the
affirmative and the negative there is no borderland with him.
You cannot hover with him upon the confines of truth, or wan-
der in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the
path. You cannot make excursions with him, for he sets you
right. His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates.
He cannot compromise or understand middle actions. There
can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book.
His affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. You must speak
upon the square with him. He stops a metaphor · like a sus-
pected person in an enemy's country. "A healthy book! ” said
one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give that
appellation to John Buncle,'"Did I catch rightly what you
said ? I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state
## p. 8827 (#451) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8827
>
of body; but I do not see how that epithet can be properly
applied to a book. ”
Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a
Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are
unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your
oath. I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da
Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr.
After he had
examined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked my
beauty (a foolish name it goes by among my friends); when he
very gravely assured me that he had considerable respect for
my character and talents” (so he was pleased to say), “but had
not given himself much thought about the degree of my per-
sonal pretensions. ” The misconception staggered me, but did not
seem much to disconcert him. Persons of this nation are par-
ticularly fond of affirming a truth which nobody doubts. They
do not so properly affirm as annunciate it. They do indeed
appear to have such a love of truth (as if like virtue it were
valuable for itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable,
whether the proposition that contains it be new or old, disputed
or such as is impossible to become a subject of disputation. I
was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a
son of Burns was expected, and happened to drop a silly expres-
sion (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father
instead of the son; when four of them started up at once to in-
form me that “that was impossible, because he was dead. ” An
impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive.
Swift has hit off this part of their character — namely, their
love of truth — in his biting way, but with an illiberality that
necessarily confines the passage to the margin. The tediousness
of these people is certainly provoking. I wonder if they ever
tire one another. In my early life I had a passionate fondness
for the poetry of Burns, I have sometimes foolishly hoped to
ingratiate myself with his countrymen by expressing it. But I
have always found that a true Scot resents your admiration of
his compatriot even more than he would your contempt of him.
The latter he imputes to your «imperfect acquaintance with
many of the words he uses”; and the same objection makes it
a presumption in you to suppose that you can admire him.
.
Thomson they seem to have forgotten. Smollett they have neither
forgotten nor forgiven for his delineation of Rory and his com-
panion upon their first introduction to our metropolis. Speak of
## p. 8828 (#452) ###########################################
8828
CHARLES LAMB
run
(
Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Hume's
History compared with his Continuation of it. What the his-
torian had continued 'Humphrey Clinker'?
I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They are a
piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is
in its nonage. They date beyond the Pyramids. But I should
not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that
nation. I confess that I have not the nerves to enter their syn-
agogues. Old prejudices cling about me. I cannot shake off the
story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and
hate on the one side, of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate
on the other, between our and their fathers, must and ought to
affect the blood of the children. I cannot believe it can
clear and kindly yet; or that a few fine words, such as “candor,"
"liberality,” the light of a nineteenth century,” can close up the
breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere con-
genial to me. He is least distasteful on 'Change; for the mercan-
tile spirit levels all distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark.
I boldly confess that I do not relish the approximation of Jew
and Christian, which has become so fashionable. The reciprocal
endearments have, to me, something hypocritical and unnatural
in them. I do not like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing
and congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civility. If
they are converted, why do they not come over to us altogether?
Why keep up a form of separation when the life of it is fled ?
If they can sit with us at table, why do they keck at our cook-
ery? I do not understand these half convertites. Jews Christian-
izing — Christians Judaizing — puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A
moderate Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a
wet Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is essentially separative.
Braham would have been more in keeping if he had abided by
the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face,
which nature meant to be of Christians. The Hebrew spirit is
strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer
the Shibboleth. How it breaks out when he sings, « The Child-
ren of Israel passed through the Red Sea! ” The auditors for
the moment are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our necks
in triumph. There is no mistaking him. Braham has a strong
expression of sense in his countenance, and it is confirmed by
his singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence is sense.
He sings with understanding, as Kemble delivered dialogue.
this court-yard there were two gloomy archways that seemed to
lead into a cave. Above these great arches were two arcades,
low and rounded, with a terrace for a roof, the edges of which
were decorated with flower-pots of rosemary. Under the arcades
a rustic walk could be seen, in which hanging masses of maïs
glistened in the light of the moon like golden ornaments.
A door made of planks, rudely dovetailed, opened upon this
walk. At the right an inclined plane of ground, upon which a
little house was situated, gradually came up to the same level.
A great fig-tree and some tortuous vine stalks were bending over
the angle of the house, confusing their leaves and fruits at the
entrance of the walk, festooned and creeping over the wall that
supported the arcades above. Their branches had formed bars
to the two low windows that looked out upon this little garden
walk; and if there had been no window, the low, square, and
solid house might have been mistaken for one of the light-gray
rocks, peculiar to the coast, or for one of those blocks of petri-
fied lava (entwined in the branches of the chestnut, the ivy, and
the vine) out of which the grape cultivators of Castellamare and
## p. 8807 (#431) ###########################################
LAMARTINE
8807
Sorrento hew caves, close them with a door, and there preserve
the wine by the side of the stock that first bore it.
Out of breath from the long and steep ascent we had made,
and from the weight of the oars which we carried on our shoul-
ders, the old man, my companion, and I stopped in this court-
yard for a moment in order to rest. But the boy, tossing his
oar upon a pile of brushwood, ran lightly up the stairway; and
with his torch still lighted and in his hand, began knocking at
one of the windows and calling in glee for his grandmother and
sister.
« Mother! Sister! Madre! Sorrellina! Gaetano! Graziella!
Graziella! ” he shouted. “Wake up; open the door: it's father;
it's me; and we have strangers with us. "
We soon heard a voice, not more than half awake, yet clear
and soft, utter some exclamations of surprise from within the
house. Then the window was partly opened, pushed up by an
arm naked and white, that reached out from a flowing sleeve;
and we saw by the light of the torch which the boy, balancing
himself on tiptoe, raised toward the window, the lovely face of
a young girl appear between the shutters which were thrown
widely open.
Awakened from a sound sleep by the unexpected sound of
her brother's voice, Graziella did not think, nor had she time, to
arrange her dress.
She had hurried to the window in bare feet
and just as she had arisen from the bed. Her long black hair,
half of which fell down over one of her cheeks, the other half
curled around her neck, was swept from one side of her shoul-
der to the other by the wind; which still blew harshly, and kept
hitting the shutter and lashing her face like the wing of a raven
driven by the storm.
The young girl rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands,
raising her elbows and expanding her shoulders, with the first
natural gesture of a child on awakening, that wishes to drive
away sleep. Her night-robe, fastened lightly around her neck,
revealed only the outlines of a high and delicate waist, the
youthful rounding of which was scarcely perceptible under the
covering. Her eyes, large and oval in form, were of that un-
decided color between deep black and the blue of the sea, which
tones down the natural radiance by a certain softness of ex-
pression, and unites in the woman's eye the gentleness of her
soul and the force of her passion in about equal proportions:
## p. 8808 (#432) ###########################################
8808
LAMARTINE
a celestial color which the eyes of the Asiatic and Italian women
borrow from the brilliant light of their fiery days, and from the
serene blue of their heaven, their sea, and their night. Her
cheeks were full, round, plump, of a natural pale complexion,
but a little browned by the climate; not of the unnatural pallor
of the North, but of that pure whiteness of the South, which
resembles the color of marble exposed for centuries to the air
and sea. Her mouth, the lips of which were half opened and
very full, and heavier than those of our women, had the charac-
teristic lines of frankness and goodness. Her teeth, small but
shining, sparkled in the fluttering light of the torch like shells
of pearl glistening at the bottom of a wave under the rays of
the sun.
While she was talking to her little brother, half of her words
were carried to us by the wind; and though somewhat sharply
accentuated, they sounded like sweet music to our ears. Her
features, as changeable as the Aittering torch that lighted them
up, rapidly passed from surprise to alarm, from alarm to joy,
from sympathy to laughter. Then she saw us standing behind
the trunk of the great fig-tree, and retired in confusion from the
window. Her hand abandoned the shutter, which now began to
beat freely against the wall. She only took the time to awaken
her grandmother and half dress herself when she came to open
the door for us under the arcades, and tenderly kissed her grand-
father and her brother.
The old grandmother soon made her appearance, holding in
her hand a lamp of red earthenware, which cast its light upon
her thin pale face, and her hair as white as the skeins of wool
which were tossed over the table at the side of the spinning-
wheel. She kissed her husband's hand, and kissed the boy on
the forehead. The recital of what had occurred, which has
taken up so many of these pages, required only a few words and
gestures between the different members of this poor family.
We did not hear the whole of it: we stood apart from them that
we might not stop the natural outpourings of their hearts. They
were poor; we were strangers: and we owed them a certain
respect. The only way we had of showing it was by taking
the place nearest the door and keeping perfectly still.
Graziella looked at us in surprise from time to time, as if
she were in a dream. When the father had finished his story,
the grandmother fell on her knees by the fireside. Graziella,
## p. 8809 (#433) ###########################################
LAMARTINE
8809
stepping up to the terrace above, brought in a branch of rose-
mary, and some orange-blossoms like large white stars. She took
a chair, arranged her flowers into a bouquet, fastening them
with the long pins that she drew from her hair, and placed them
before a little plaster image of the Virgin, which stood above
the door, and before which a lamp was burning. We understood
that this was an offering of thanks to her divine protectress
for having saved her brother and her grandfather; and we shared
her expression of gratitude.
The inside of the house was bare, and in almost every way
as like to the outside as both inside and outside were like the
immense rocks that surrounded it. The walls were entirely with-
out plaster, and covered only with a thin coat of whitewash. Liz-
ards, aroused by the light, shone in the crevices of the rocks,
and crept under the fern leaves that served as the children's bed.
Nests of swallows, whose little black heads peeped out, and whose
restless eyes twinkled in surprise, hung down from the beams,
still covered with bark, which formed the roof. Graziella and
her grandmother slept in the second room on a curious bedstead,
covered with a piece of coarse linen. A few baskets of fruits
and a mule's pack-saddle lay on the shelf.
The fisherman turned toward us with a look of shame, as he
indicated by a sweep of his arm the poverty of his home; then
he led us up to the terrace, the place of honor both in the Orient
and in the south of Italy. With the assistance of Graziella and
the child Beppo, he made us a sort of shed, by placing one end
of our oars upon the wall surrounding the terrace and the other
end upon the ground, then covering these with a dozen or more
branches from a horse-chestnut tree, recently cut on the side of
the mountain. Under this shelter he spread a lot of fern leaves;
he then brought us two pieces of bread, some fresh water and
figs, and wished that we might sleep well.
The physical fatigue and the emotions of the day threw us
into a sudden and deep sleep. When we awoke, the swallows
were chirping around our bed and picking from the ground the
crumbs of our supper; and the sun, already high in the heaven,
heated the fagots of leaves over our heads as if they had been
in a furnace.
We lay a long time stretched upon our fern leaves, lost in
that peculiar state of half-sleep in which the mental faculties
## p. 8810 (#434) ###########################################
8810
LAMARTINE
perceive and think before the senses give one the courage to
get up or move. We exchanged a few inarticulate words, which
were interrupted by long pauses and were lost in our dreams.
The experiences of the previous day,—the boat rolling under
our feet, the angry sea, the unapproachable rocks of the coast,
the face of Graziella looking out between the two shutters and
in the light of the torch, — all these visions flitted before us con-
fusedly, and without connection or appreciation.
We were attracted from this drowsiness by the sobs and com-
plaints of the old grandmother, who was talking to her husband
inside of the house. The chimney, which ran through the ter-
race, brought us the sound of the voices, so that we could hear
some words of the conversation. The poor woman was lamenting
the loss of her jars, of the anchor, of the ropes that were almost
new, and above all, of the beautiful sails woven by her own
hands from her own hemp, all of which we had been cruel
enough to throw into the sea to save our own lives.
“What business had you,” she asked of the old man, who was
frightened into silence, "to take these two strangers, these two
Frenchmen, with you? Don't you know that they are pagans
(pagani), and that they always bring misfortune with their wicked-
ness? The saints have punished you for it. They have stripped
us of our riches, and you may still thank them that they have
not taken away our souls. ”
The poor man did not know what to say. But Graziella, with
the authority and impatience of a spoiled child, to whom the
grandmother always gives way, protested against these reproaches
as unjust, and taking the part of the old man, said to her grand-
mother:
«Who tells you that these strangers are pagans? Are pagans
ever so compassionate for the trials of poor people as these gen-
tlemen have shown themselves? Do pagans make the sign of
the cross like ourselves before the statues of the saints ? Now
let me tell you that yesterday evening, when you had fallen on
your knees to return thanks to God, and when I had adorned the
image of the Madonna with flowers, I saw them bow their heads
as if they were praying, make the sign of the cross upon their
breasts, and I even saw a tear glisten in the eye of the younger
and fall upon his hand. ”
"A tear, indeed! ” the old woman sharply exclaimed.
nothing but a drop of sea-water that fell from his hair. ”
»
~ It was
## p. 8811 (#435) ###########################################
LAMARTINE
8811
"I tell you it was a tear,” said Graziella angrily. ~ The wind
that was blowing so fiercely had plenty of time to dry his hair
from the time he left the beach until he had climbed to the top
of the cliff. But the wind cannot dry the heart, and I tell you
again that there was water in his eye. ”
We understood that we had an all-powerful friend in that
house, for the grandmother did not answer, nor did she complain
any more.
Translation of James B. Runnion.
TO MY LAMP
H*
AIL! sole companion of my lonely toil,
Dear witness once of dearer loves of mine!
My happiness is fled, — thy store of oil
Still with clear light doth shine!
Thou dost recall the bright days of my life,
When in Pompeii's streets I roamed along,
Evoking memories of her brilliant strife,
Half tearful, half in song.
The sun was finishing his mighty round;
I was alone among a buried host;
And in the dust my idle glances found
The name of some poor ghost.
And there I saw thee, 'neath the ashes piled;
And near thee, almost buried with the rest,
The impress left there by some lovely child,
The outline of a breast.
Perhaps by thy light did the virgin go
To pray within the fane, now desolate,
For happiness that she should never know,-
Love, ne'er to be her fate!
Within the tomb her perished beauty lies:
Youth, maiden modesty, the dawning love
A mother's tender glance could scarce surprise,
Fled to the heavens above!
She vanished like the lightning's sudden gleam,
As one wave by another swiftly borne;
## p. 8812 (#436) ###########################################
8812
LAMARTINE
Or as the last hope of some wretch's dream,
When he awakes at morn!
Beauty is not the idol of the best!
I was a fool before her feet to lie,
Forgetting that, a stranger like the rest,
She too must fade and die.
What matter, then, whether she smile or frown?
My soul would seek the worship that is sure!
It needs a god to triumph, be cast down,
And, after all, endure!
Yes, I would tear myself from vain desires,
From all that perishes and is forgot;
And I would seek, to start my altar fires,
A hope that dieth not !
The resting eagle is an eagle still:
Though 'neath his mighty wing he hides his head,
He sees his prey, he strikes it, takes his fill, -
Perchance you thought him dead ?
I pity those who thought one ivy-crowned,
Child of the lyre, born but to touch the string,
Would die inglorious, - yield the golden round,
Live like a banished king.
Never shall weariness make me abjure
The gifts once prized, and cherished still the same.
My dreams shall summon back the enchantress pure,
And whisper her dear name.
Her eyes shall watch over my soul at last;
And when, dear lamp, shall come that mournful night,
When weeping friends behold me fading fast,
Thy flame shall burn more bright!
That flame has often filled my wondering thought;
The sacred emblem of our transient breath,
Mysterious power, to man's dull uses brought,
Sister of life and death!
A breath creates it, at a breath it dies;
It blots in one brief day a city's name;
Like fate ignored, or held a peerless prize
Like beauty or like fame.
## p. 8813 (#437) ###########################################
LAMARTINE
8813
See how it leaps up with a quick desire!
A spirit from on high, to earth no friend;
It takes its flight as human souls aspire,
To seek the unknown end!
All nature slowly to this end is drawn!
'Tis but a sleep, the so-called death of men:
The fly shall have its day, the flower its dawn;
Our clay shall wake again.
Do we the secrets of all nature know?
The sounds of night that on the horizon fail,
The passing cloud that lays the flowers low,
The will-o'-the-wisp of the vale ?
Know we the secret of the nesting dove?
The cradle whence the tomb has snatched its prey ?
What is the mystery of grief, or love,
Or night that follows day?
Have not the murmuring winds a voice, a mood ?
Is not the leaf a book we cannot read ?
The stream that brings us harvest or a flood,
Has not it too its screed?
Let us not strive the kindly veils to raise
Till all that we should see, life's end shall show:
Better know naught than into mysteries gaze!
Better believe than know!
Farewell, my lamp! Blessings upon thy flame!
While I believe and hope, watch thou o'er me!
If ever prideful doubt my soul should claim,
May I go out with thee!
Translation of Katharine Hillard.
ODE TO THE LAKE OF B-
TH
VHUS sailing, sailing on forevermore,
Still borne along, to winds and waves a prey,
Can we not, on life's sea without a shore,
Cast anchor for a day?
Dear lake! one little year has scarcely flown,
And near thy waves she longed once more to see,
## p. 8814 (#438) ###########################################
8814
LAMARTINE
Behold I sit alone upon this stone,
Where once she sat with me.
As now, thy restless waves were moaning through
The creviced rocks, where they their death did ineet;
And flecks of foam from off thy billows blew
Over my dear one's feet.
One night we rowed in silence,- dost recall
That night ? When under all the starry sky
Was heard alone the beat of oars that fall
In cadenced harmony.
When suddenly, upon the startled ear
Accents unknown to earth melodious break;
And with these mournful words, a voice most dear
Charms all the listening lake:--
“ O Time, pause in thy flight! and you, propitious hours,
Pause on your rapid ways!
Let us enjoy the springtime of our powers,
The fairest of all days!
“So many wretched souls would speed your flight,
Urge on the lingering suns,
Take with their days the canker and the blight;
Forget the happy ones!
“But all in vain I try to stay its course:
Time slips away and flies.
I say to night, Pass slowly! and the dawn
Breaks on my startled eyes.
“Let us love, then, and love forevermore!
Enjoy life while we may;
Man has no port, nor has time any shore;
It flees, we pass away! ”
She paused : our hearts speak through our ardent eyes,
Half-uttered phrases tremble on the air;
And in that ecstasy our spirits rise
Up to a world more fair.
And now we cease to speak; in sweet eclipse
Our senses lie, weighed down with all love's store;
Our hearts are beating, and our clinging lips
Murmur, "Forevermore ! »
(C
## p. 8815 (#439) ###########################################
LAMARTINE
8815
Great Heaven! can then these moments of delight,
When love all happiness upon us showers,
Vanish away as swiftly in their flight
As our unhappy hours ?
Eternity, the Darkness, and the Past,
What have you done with all you've made your prey ?
Answer us! will you render back at last
What you have snatched away?
O lake, O silent rocks, O verdurous green! -
You that time spares, or knows how to renew,
Keep of this night, set in this lovely scene,
At least a memory true!
A memory in thy storms and thy repose,
O lake! and where thy smiling waters lave
The sunny shore, or where the dark fir grows,
And hangs above the wave.
In the soft breeze that sighs and then is gone,
In thy shores' song, by thy shores echoed still;
In the pale star whose silvery radiance shone
Above thy wooded hill!
That moaning winds, and reeds that clashing strike,
And perfumes that on balmy breezes moved,
With all we hear, we see, we breathe, alike
May say,
« They loved ! »
Translation of Katharine Hillard.
FAR FROM THE WORLD
F
AR from the faithless and the wicked world,
Fly, O my soul! to some deep solitude;
Fly, shaking from our feet the weary dust
Of love, desire, hope, and carking care
Upon the threshold of these deserts wild.
Behold the rocks, the forests, and the shores,
Nature has molded with her mighty hands:
The streams alone have hollowed out these paths;
Their foam alone has touched the river banks
Where never human foot has left a trace.
## p. 8816 (#440) ###########################################
8816
LAMARTINE
There seek at last for peace within thyself;
Thy dreams of happiness have been but brief!
Drive them forever far from this retreat;
Love nothing but the blue sky that loves thee,
And of the sun alone ask happy days!
To wounded hearts, nature is ever sweet,
And solitude belongs to wretchedness.
Already peace re-enters my sad heart;
Already life takes up, without a jar,
Its course suspended by th and of grief!
Translation of Katharine Hillard.
## p. 8817 (#441) ###########################################
8817
CHARLES LAMB
(1775-1834)
BY ALFRED AINGER
1
O Find anything new to write about Charles Lamb might tax
the ingenuity of the most versatile and resourceful critic in
the Old or New World. And yet experience shows that the
lovers of Elia are never weary of listening for something more about
him, and continue to welcome whatever crumbs of anecdote or frag-
ments of biographical fact may have yet escaped collection. And
this very circumstance shows that Lamb stands in a category of
English-speaking humorists which is not large. Of whom could be
said precisely the same thing, except such few as Shakespeare, Gold-
smith, Johnson, Scott, - writers, that is to say, in whom the human
personality is as interesting or even more so than anything they
have written ? We are interested in Shakespeare's personality, in-
deed, because of the very little we know about him. We are inter-
ested in Goldsmith or Lamb because we know so much, and feel
towards them more as personal friends than as authors.
The personality of Lamb, indeed, is so inwrought and intertwined
with the very fibre of his essays and letters that it is impossible to
separate criticism of the one fr tha of the other. His life is
written in the confidential utterances of his essays; and his occas-
ional verse embodies allusions, even more intimate and touching, to
the sadder epochs and incidents of that life. The saddest of all such
incidents was in the first instance recorded in the most famous of
all his lyrics — the Old Familiar Faces); though Lamb rightly and
wisely withdrew, when the first spasm of bitter emotion was past,
the stanza concerning his mother's death.
Egotism in a writer is either the most unattractive of qualities
or the most engaging. We either rejoice in it or resent it. There
is hardly a third course possible. We resent it when it is a mere
"trap for admiration, or a palpable desire to establish the writer's
importance. We welcome it when the heart is pure, when there is
the requisite genius and individuality to make it precious. But the
writer who indulges in perpetual confidences as to self must be like
Cæsar's wife, “beyond suspicion”: the faintest tinge of self-conscious-
ness is fatal to the charm of self-disclosure. Charles Lamb possesses
XV-552
## p. 8818 (#442) ###########################################
8818
CHARLES LAMB
ness.
this charm; and hence his extraordinary popularity with thousands
even of those whose acquaintance with his favorite authors would
not of itself suffice to make them appreciate his multifarious allusive-
Lamb was a man of widest reading; and in directions in which
the ordinary reader even now, after seventy years or so, is little
versed. But thus far back, it is not too much to say that the very
names of the old English writers on whom Lamb's love of poetry
had been chiefly fed, were unknown to the bulk of the magazine
readers whom in his essays he first addressed. It was not therefore
to exhibit his reading or his antiquarian research, that he interlarded
his discourse with the words of Massinger or Marlowe, Marvell or
Sidney, Fuller or Sir Thomas Browne. He did not even, for the
most part, introduce his quotations with any names attached. He
cited them usually without even inverted commas. He had himself
roamed at will in gardens and orchards of exquisite beauty and
flavor, and could not help pouring what he had gathered at the
feet of his readers. And his instinct did not fail him in taking this
course. It was a curiously bold step, that of daring, when invited to
contribute essays to the London Magazine, to depart from the famil-
iar didactic or allegorical type which had been set by the Spectator
or Rambler, and trust to the perennial attraction of the humblest
human experiences. The South Sea House' was not an alluring
title for the first essay he contributed. The (South Sea Bubble)
might have been; but all that remained of the once famous specu-
lation was a building and a staff of clerks. But yet every dingiest
and most old-fashioned institution in which men go to and fro about
their business has its human side; and wherever there were men,
or the traditions of men, Lamb could make their companionship full
of charm. And how exquisite a thing did he make out of the memo-
ries of that old building where only two years of his own boyish life
were spent:-
“This was once a house of trade, a centre of busy interests. The throng
of merchants was here, the quick pulse of gain; and here some forms of
business are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still
to be seen stately porticos; imposing staircases; offices roomy as the state
apartments in palaces, — deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling
clerks; the still more sacred interiors of court and committee rooms, with
venerable faces of beadles, doorkeepers — directors seated in form on solemn
days (to proclaim a dead dividend), at long worm-eaten tables that have been
mahogany, with tarnished gilt leather coverings, supporting many silver ink-
stands long since dry _ »
« There are many echoes,” Goethe said, “but few voices.
It is
the « voices » in literature that become classics. The echoes have
their short life and then die away. Lamb is one of such voices; and
»
))
(C
## p. 8819 (#443) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8819
(
thus he has lived, and will live. It was not a voice that protested or
proclaimed much, - and certainly never from the. housetops, — but it
was his own. Compounded of many simples,” like the melancholy
of Jaques in the forest, Lamb's humor was altogether free from the
self-assertion or the discontent of the exiled philosopher of Arden.
His sweet acquiescence in the burdens and sorrows of his life was
rather that of the laughing philosopher Touchstone, whom Shake-
speare has pitted against the more specious moralist. He would have
pleaded that if the manner he had adopted was strange or ill-favored,
it was at least his own. ”
It is remarkable that Lamb's most universally popular essay, that
on Roast Pig,' is by no means one of his most characteristic. It is
not too much to say that many inferior humorists could have made a
success almost as great out of the same material. For in this case
Lamb had a really humorous notion put into his head. Given the
accidental discovery of the gastronomic value of cooked meat, the
humorous possibilities are at once perceptible. It is where the raw
material of the essay is nothing and the treatment everything that
the real individuality of Lamb stands forth. It is in such essays as
the Praise of Chimney-Sweepers,' or (Mrs. Battle on Whist, or the
(Recollections of an old Manor-House in Hertfordshire,' that we are
to look for what gives Lamb his unique place in literature and in
the hearts of those who love him.
There is food, however, for many tastes in Charles Lamb. There
is the infinite pathos of such a revelation as that in Dream Child-
ren,' which for delicate beauty and tenderness has no rival in Eng-
lish literature; there is the consummate observation and criticism of
human character in Imperfect Sympathies’; there is the perfection
of narrative art in such an anecdote as that told in Barbara S. );
there is the supreme æsthetic quality, as where he descants on the
superiority of Shakespeare to any of his contemporaries, or where he
compels our admiration for the moral value of such a satirist as
Hogarth. We are always discovering some new faculty in Lamb, and
passing from one to another with astonishing suddenness,— from the
poet to the humorist, from the moral teacher to the æsthetic critic;
and all the while the manner is often so like that of the gossip and
j ester that the reader would undervalue it as very easy writing,”
did we not know by Lamb's own confessions that his most lucid and
a pparently facile confidences were often wrung from him with slow
pain. ” So certain is it always that “easy writing) makes “hard
reading, and that the most seeming-casual of essays, if it is to live,
must have something in it of the life-blood of the writer.
And beyond all question it is the personal experiences of Lamb
that generate the supreme quality of all he wrote. It is the beauty
»
## p. 8820 (#444) ###########################################
8820
CHARLES LAMB
-
of his character — its charity and tenderness, its capacity for lifelong
sacrifice and devotion, fruits of the discipline it had undergone - that
constitutes the soil which nourished even the lightest flowers and
graces of his style. Lamb had contemporaries and rivals in his own
walk, each with rare and attractive gifts of his own,- Hazlitt and
Leigh Hunt. We owe much to both of these. Each was endowed
with critical faculties of the highest order. Each in his own line has
done memorable service in establishing the true canons of literary
criticism. Each wrote a style of his own, as perfect for its purpose
as can be conceived. Yet neither of these is loved, and lives in
men's hearts, like Charles Lamb. The amiability of Leigh Hunt is
too merely amiable: it has not its roots in the deep and strengthen-
ing earth of human discipline. Hazlitt was altogether wanting in the
quality. He showed “light, but without (sweetness ): without the
latter grace no writer can make himself dear to his readers.
Moreover, no writer has ever attained this most enviable distinc-
tion except when his own life has been told in minutest detail, either
by himself or others. In the instance of Lamb, his writings are in
the main personal confidences; and in addition we possess his let-
ters,—the most complete as well as the most fascinating disclosure of
a personality in our literature,—as well as having the testimony of
troops of friends. ” There is something that wins and touches us all
in the frank disclosure of a private history. What would Goldsmith
have been to us but for Washington Irving and John Forster; or
Johnson without Boswell; or Scott without Lockhart, and the frank
and deeply pathetic admissions of his own Journal ? The sorrows
and the struggles of these widely different men draw us to them.
Our delight in all that they have written for us is heightened and
sanctified by our pity for the individual man. And this is the reward
of the true men, who live out their real selves before us, and there-
fore are a joy forever; while the men who only pose, live their brief
hour on the stage and then cease to be!
alped anger
## p. 8821 (#445) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8821
THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES
JANUARY 1798
1
HAVE had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days -
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies-
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I loved a love once, fairest among women:
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man:
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.
Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood :
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother!
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces.
For some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed:
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
HESTER
W"
'HEN maidens such as Hester die,
Their place ye may not well supply,
Though ye among a thousand try,
With vain endeavor.
A month or more hath she been dead,
Yet cannot I by force be led
To think upon the wormy bed
And her together.
A springy motion in her gait,
A rising step, did indicate
## p. 8822 (#446) ###########################################
882 2
CHARLES LAMB
Of pride and joy no common rate,
That flushed her spirit.
I know not by what name beside
I shall it call: if 'twas not pride,
It was a joy to that allied,
She did inherit.
Her parents held the Quaker rule,
Which doth the human feeling cool;
But she was trained in Nature's school -
Nature had blest her.
A waking eye, a prying mind,
A heart that stirs, is hard to bind;
A hawk's keen sight ye cannot blind,
Ye could not Hester.
ON AN INFANT DYING AS SOON AS BORN
I
SAW where in the shroud did lurk
A curious frame of Nature's work.
A floweret crushed in the bud,
A nameless piece of Babyhood,
Was in a cradle-coffin lying;
Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying;
So soon to exchange the imprisoning womb
For darker closets of the tomb!
She did but ope an eye, and put
A clear beam forth, then straight up shut
For the long dark: ne'er more to see
Through glasses of mortality.
Riddle of destiny, who can show
What thy short visit meant, or know
What thy errand here below ?
Shall we say that Nature blind
Checked her hand and changed her mind,
Just when she had exactly wrought
A finished pattern without fault ?
Could she flag, or could she tire,
Or lacked she the Promethean fire
(With her nine moons' long workings sickened)
That should thy little limbs have quickened ?
## p. 8823 (#447) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8823
Limbs so firm they seemed to assure
Life of health, and days mature:
Woman's self in miniature!
Limbs so fair they might supply
(Themselves now but cold imagery)
The sculptor to make Beauty by.
Or did the stern-eyed Fate descry
That babe or mother - one must die:
So in mercy left the stock,
And cut the branch, to save the shock
Of young years widowed; and the pain,
When single state comes back again
To the lone man who, 'reft of wife,
Thenceforwards drags a maimèd life?
The economy of Heaven is dark;
And wisest clerks have missed the mark,
Why Human Buds, like this, should fall,
More brief than fly ephemeral,
That has his day; while shriveled crones
Stiffen with age to stocks and stones,
And crabbed use the conscience sears
In sinners of an hundred years.
Mother's prattle, mother's kiss,
Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss.
Rites, which custom does impose,
Silver bells and baby clothes;
Coral redder than those lips,
Which pale death did late eclipse;
Music framed for infant's glee,
Whistle never tuned for thee:
Though thou want'st not, thou shalt have them,-
Loving hearts were they which gave them.
Let not one be missing; nurse,
See them laid upon the hearse
Of infant slain by doom perverse.
Why should kings and nobles have
Pictured trophies to their grave;
And we, churls, to thee deny
Thy pretty toys with thee to lie,
A more harmless vanity?
## p. 8824 (#448) ###########################################
8824
CHARLES LAMB
IN MY OWN ALBUM
F
RESH clad from heaven in robes of white,
A young probationer of light,
Thou wert my soul, an album bright,
A spotless leaf: but thought and care,
And friend and foe, in foul or fair,
Have “written strange defeatures there;
And Time with heaviest hand of all,
Like that fierce writing on the wall,
Hath stamped sad dates he can't recall;
And error gilding worst designs-
Like speckled snake that strays and shines-
Betrays his path by crooked lines;
And vice hath left his ugly blot;
And good resolves, a moment hot,
Fairly begun— but finished not;
And fruitless, late remorse doth trace -
Like Hebrew lore, a backward pace
Her irrecoverable race.
Disjointed numbers, sense unknit,
Huge reams of folly, shreds of wit,
Compose the mingled mass of it.
My scalded eyes no longer brook
Upon this ink-blurred thing to look:
Go, shut the leaves, and clasp the book.
IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES
From the Essays of Elia)
I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathizeth with
all things; I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in anything. Those
natural repugnances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the
French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch. — (RELIGIO MEDICI. )
WHAT the author of the Religio Medici,' mounted upon the
airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and con-
jectural essences, in whose categories of being the possible
took the upper hand of the actual, should have overlooked the
T"
## p. 8825 (#449) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8825
impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as mankind,
is not much to be admired. It is rather to be wondered at, that
in the genus of animals he should have condescended to distin-
guish that species at all. For myself,- earth-bound and fettered
to the scene of my activities,
-
I can
« Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky," —
I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or
individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indif.
ferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a
matter of taste or distaste; or when once it becomes indifferent,
it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of
prejudices — made up of likings and dislikings — the veriest thrall
to sympathies, apathies, antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope
it may be said of me that I am a lover of my species.
feel for all indifferently, but I cannot feel towards all equally.
The more purely English word that expresses sympathy will bet-
ter explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, who
upon another account cannot be my mate or fellow. I cannot
like all people alike.
I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am
obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot
like me — and in truth, I never knew one of that nation who
attempted to do it. There is something more plain and ingen-
uous in their mode of proceeding. We know one another at
first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects (under
which mine must be content to rank) which in its constitution is
essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the sort of faculties
I allude to have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive.
They have no pretenses to much clearness or precision in their
ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual
wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They
are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She
presents no full front to them a feature or side-face at the
most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system,
is the utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game per-
adventure, “and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitu-
tions, to run it down. The light that lights them is not steady
and polar, but mutable and shifting; waxing, and again waning.
Their conversation is accordingly. They will throw out a ran-
dom word in or out of season, and be content to let it pass for
## p. 8826 (#450) ###########################################
8826
CHARLES LAMB
what it is worth. They cannot speak always as if they were
upon their oath, but must be understood, speaking or writing,
with some abatement. They seldom wait to mature a proposi-
tion, but e'en bring it to market in the green ear. They delight
to impart their defective discoveries as they arise, without wait-
ing for their development. They are no systematizers, and
would but err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said
before, are suggestive merely.
The brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is
constituted upon quite a different plan. His Minerva is born
in panoply. You are never admitted to see his ideas in their
growth — if indeed they do grow, and are not rather put to-
gether upon principles of clockwork. You never catch his mind
in an undress. He never hints or suggests anything, but un-
lades his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness.
brings his total wealth into company, and gravely unpacks it.
His riches are always about him. He never stoops to catch a
glittering something in your presence to share it with you,
before he quite knows whether it be true touch or not. You
cannot cry halves to anything that he finds. He does not find,
but bring. You never witness his first apprehension of a thing.
His understanding is always at its meridian - you never see
the first dawn, the early streaks. He has no falterings of
self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-
consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo con-
ceptions, have no place in his brain or vocabulary. The twilight
of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox — he has no
doubts. Is he an infidel he has none either. Between the
affirmative and the negative there is no borderland with him.
You cannot hover with him upon the confines of truth, or wan-
der in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the
path. You cannot make excursions with him, for he sets you
right. His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates.
He cannot compromise or understand middle actions. There
can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book.
His affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. You must speak
upon the square with him. He stops a metaphor · like a sus-
pected person in an enemy's country. "A healthy book! ” said
one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give that
appellation to John Buncle,'"Did I catch rightly what you
said ? I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state
## p. 8827 (#451) ###########################################
CHARLES LAMB
8827
>
of body; but I do not see how that epithet can be properly
applied to a book. ”
Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a
Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are
unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your
oath. I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da
Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr.
After he had
examined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked my
beauty (a foolish name it goes by among my friends); when he
very gravely assured me that he had considerable respect for
my character and talents” (so he was pleased to say), “but had
not given himself much thought about the degree of my per-
sonal pretensions. ” The misconception staggered me, but did not
seem much to disconcert him. Persons of this nation are par-
ticularly fond of affirming a truth which nobody doubts. They
do not so properly affirm as annunciate it. They do indeed
appear to have such a love of truth (as if like virtue it were
valuable for itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable,
whether the proposition that contains it be new or old, disputed
or such as is impossible to become a subject of disputation. I
was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a
son of Burns was expected, and happened to drop a silly expres-
sion (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father
instead of the son; when four of them started up at once to in-
form me that “that was impossible, because he was dead. ” An
impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive.
Swift has hit off this part of their character — namely, their
love of truth — in his biting way, but with an illiberality that
necessarily confines the passage to the margin. The tediousness
of these people is certainly provoking. I wonder if they ever
tire one another. In my early life I had a passionate fondness
for the poetry of Burns, I have sometimes foolishly hoped to
ingratiate myself with his countrymen by expressing it. But I
have always found that a true Scot resents your admiration of
his compatriot even more than he would your contempt of him.
The latter he imputes to your «imperfect acquaintance with
many of the words he uses”; and the same objection makes it
a presumption in you to suppose that you can admire him.
.
Thomson they seem to have forgotten. Smollett they have neither
forgotten nor forgiven for his delineation of Rory and his com-
panion upon their first introduction to our metropolis. Speak of
## p. 8828 (#452) ###########################################
8828
CHARLES LAMB
run
(
Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Hume's
History compared with his Continuation of it. What the his-
torian had continued 'Humphrey Clinker'?
I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They are a
piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is
in its nonage. They date beyond the Pyramids. But I should
not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that
nation. I confess that I have not the nerves to enter their syn-
agogues. Old prejudices cling about me. I cannot shake off the
story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and
hate on the one side, of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate
on the other, between our and their fathers, must and ought to
affect the blood of the children. I cannot believe it can
clear and kindly yet; or that a few fine words, such as “candor,"
"liberality,” the light of a nineteenth century,” can close up the
breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere con-
genial to me. He is least distasteful on 'Change; for the mercan-
tile spirit levels all distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark.
I boldly confess that I do not relish the approximation of Jew
and Christian, which has become so fashionable. The reciprocal
endearments have, to me, something hypocritical and unnatural
in them. I do not like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing
and congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civility. If
they are converted, why do they not come over to us altogether?
Why keep up a form of separation when the life of it is fled ?
If they can sit with us at table, why do they keck at our cook-
ery? I do not understand these half convertites. Jews Christian-
izing — Christians Judaizing — puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A
moderate Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a
wet Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is essentially separative.
Braham would have been more in keeping if he had abided by
the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face,
which nature meant to be of Christians. The Hebrew spirit is
strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer
the Shibboleth. How it breaks out when he sings, « The Child-
ren of Israel passed through the Red Sea! ” The auditors for
the moment are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our necks
in triumph. There is no mistaking him. Braham has a strong
expression of sense in his countenance, and it is confirmed by
his singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence is sense.
He sings with understanding, as Kemble delivered dialogue.
