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The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 by Various

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863



[Transcriber's Note: Footnotes moved to end of document.]




THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XII.--OCTOBER, 1863.--NO. LXXII.

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

* * * * *

CHARLES LAMB'S UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS.[1]

SECOND PAPER.


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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

"The conception was bold, and the _denouement_--the time and place in
which the hero of it existed considered--not much out of keeping; yet it
must be confessed that it required a delicacy of handling, both from the
author and the performer, so as not much to shock the prejudices of a
modern English audience. G., in my opinion, had done his part. John, who
was in familiar habits with the philosopher, had undertaken to play
Antonio. Great expectations were formed. A philosopher's first play was
a new era. The night arrived. I was favored with a seat in an
advantageous box, between the author and his friend M.G. sat cheerful
and confident. In his friend M.'s looks, who had perused the manuscript,
I read some terror. Antonio, in the person of John Philip Kemble, at
length appeared, starched out in a ruff which no one could dispute, and
in most irreproachable mustachios. John always dressed most provokingly
correct on these occasions. The first act swept by, solemn and silent.
It went off, as G. assured M., exactly as the opening act of a
piece--the _protasis_--should do. The cue of the spectators was to be
mute. The characters were but in their introduction. The passions and
the incidents would be developed hereafter. Applause hitherto would be
impertinent. Silent attention was the effect all-desirable. Poor M.
acquiesced,--but in his honest, friendly face I could discern a working
which told how much more acceptable the plaudit of a single hand
(however misplaced) would have been than all this reasoning. The second
act (as in duty bound) rose a little in interest; but still John kept
his forces under,--in policy, as G. would have it,--and the audience
were most complacently attentive. The _protasis_, in fact, was scarcely
unfolded. The interest would warm in the next act, against which a
special incident was provided. M. wiped his cheek, flushed with a
friendly perspiration,--'tis M.'s way of showing his zeal,--'from every
pore of him a perfume falls.' I honor it above Alexander's. He had once
or twice during this act joined his palms in a feeble endeavor to elicit
a sound; they emitted a solitary noise without an echo; there was no
deep to answer to his deep. G. repeatedly begged him to be quiet. The
third act at length brought on the scene which was to warm the piece
progressively to the final flaming forth of the catastrophe. A
philosophic calm settled upon the clear brow of G., as it approached.
The lips of M. quivered. A challenge was held forth upon the stage, and
there was promise of a fight. The pit roused themselves on this
extraordinary occasion, and, as their manner is, seemed disposed to make
a ring,--when suddenly Antonio, who was the challenged, turning the
tables upon the hot challenger, Don Gusman, (who, by the way, should
have had his sister,) balks his humor, and the pit's reasonable
expectation at the same time, with some speeches out of the new
philosophy against duelling. The audience were here fairly
caught,--their courage was up, and on the alert,--a few blows, _ding
dong_, as R----s the dramatist afterwards expressed it to me, might have
done the business,--when their most exquisite moral sense was suddenly
called in to assist in the mortifying negation of their own pleasure.
They could not applaud, for disappointment; they would not condemn, for
morality's sake. The interest stood stone-still; and John's manner was
not at all calculated to unpetrify it. It was Christmas time, and the
atmosphere furnished some pretext for asthmatic affections. One began to
cough, his neighbor sympathized with him, till a cough became
epidemical. But when, from being half artificial in the pit, the cough
got frightfully naturalized among the fictitious persons of the drama,
and Antonio himself (albeit it was not set down in the stage-directions)
seemed more intent upon relieving his own lungs than the distresses of
the author and his friends,--then G. 'first knew fear,' and, mildly
turning to M., intimated that he had not been aware that Mr. Kemble
labored under a cold, and that the performance might possibly have been
postponed with advantage for some nights further,--still keeping the
same serene countenance, while M. sweat like a bull.

"It would be invidious to pursue the fates of this ill-starred evening.
In vain did the plot thicken in the scenes that followed, in vain the
dialogue wax more passionate and stirring, and the progress of the
sentiment point more and more clearly to the arduous development which
impended. In vain the action was accelerated, while the acting stood
still. From the beginning, John had taken his stand,--had wound himself
up to an even tenor of stately declamation, from which no exigence of
dialogue or person could make him swerve for an instant. To dream of his
rising with the scene (the common trick of tragedians) was preposterous;
for from the onset he had planted himself, as upon a terrace, on an
eminence vastly above the audience, and he kept that sublime level to
the end. He looked from his throne of elevated sentiment upon the
under-world of spectators with a most sovran and becoming contempt.
There was excellent pathos delivered out to them: an they would receive
it, so; an they would not receive it, so. There was no offence against
decorum in all this; nothing to condemn, to damn. Not an irreverent
symptom of a sound was to be heard. The procession of verbiage stalked
on through four and five acts, no one venturing to predict what would
come of it, when, towards the winding-up of the latter, Antonio, with an
irrelevancy that seemed to stagger Elvira herself,--for she had been
coolly arguing the point of honor with him,--suddenly whips out a
poniard, and stabs his sister to the heart. The effect was as if a
murder had been committed in cold blood. The whole house rose up in
clamorous indignation, demanding justice. The feeling rose far above
hisses. I believe at that instant, if they could have got him, they
would have torn the unfortunate author to pieces. Not that the act
itself was so exorbitant, or of a complexion different from what they
themselves would have applauded upon another occasion in a Brutus or an
Appius,--but, for want of attending to Antonio's _words_, which palpably
led to the expectation of no less dire an event, instead of being
seduced by his _manner_, which seemed to promise a sleep of a less
alarming nature than it was his cue to inflict upon Elvira, they found
themselves betrayed into an accompliceship of murder, a perfect
misprision of parricide, while they dreamed of nothing less.

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

* * * * *

"The least shavings of gold are valuable, men say," says Archbishop
Leighton, in his masterly Commentary on Peter; and the veriest trifle
from the pen of such a writer as Charles Lamb should be highly prized by
all readers that are readers. Therefore I think it would be unwise in me
not to print Elia's Postscript to his "Chapter on Ears," and his
Answers to Correspondents. Indeed, I do not know but that they contain
some of the most racy sentences Lamb ever wrote. At any rate, they do
contain some delightful banter and "most ingenious nonsense." In their
pleasantry, archness, and good-natured raillery, these two little
articles of Elia's remind me of some of Addison's happiest papers in the
"Spectator."

Better than anything in Southey's "Doctor" concerning the authorship of
that queer, quaint, delightful book are Elia's affected anger and
indignation against the author of the "Indicator" for attributing the
essays of Elia to their right author. Leigh Hunt must have "laughed
consumedly," as he read the P.S. to the "Chapter on Ears." And in his
Answers to Correspondents how many delightful changes Elia rings upon
the name of the unlucky Peter Bell! How cavalierly he answers
"Indagator," and the others, who are so importunate about the true
locality of his birth,--"as if, forsooth, Elia were presently about to
be passed to his parish "!

* * * * *

P.S. TO THE "CHAPTER ON EARS."

"A writer, whose real name, it seems, is _Boldero_, but who has been
entertaining the town for the last twelve months with some very pleasant
lucubrations under the assumed signature of _Leigh Hunt_,[2] in his
'Indicator' of the 31st January last has thought fit to insinuate that
I, _Elia_, do not write the little sketches which bear my signature, in
this Magazine, but that the true author of them is a Mr. L----b. Observe
the critical period at which he has chosen to impute the calumny!--on
the very eve of the publication of our last number,--affording no scope
for explanation for a full month,--during which time I must needs lie
writhing and tossing under the cruel imputation of nonentity.--Good
heavens! that a plain man must not be allowed _to be!_

"They call this an age of personality: but surely this spirit of
anti-personality (if I may so express it) is something worse.

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

"Other murderers stab but at our existence, a frail and perishing trifle
at the best. But here is an assassin who aims at our very essence,--who
not only forbids us _to be_ any longer, but _to have been_ at all. Let
our ancestors look to it.

"Is the parish register nothing? Is the house in Princes Street,
Cavendish Square, where we saw the light six-and-forty years ago,
nothing? Were our progenitors from stately Genoa, where we flourished
four centuries back, before the barbarous name of Boldero[3] was known
to a European mouth, nothing? Was the goodly scion of our name,
transplanted into England in the reign of the seventh Henry, nothing?
Are the archives of the steelyard, in succeeding reigns, (if haply they
survive the fury of our envious enemies,) showing that we flourished in
prime repute, as merchants, down to the period of the Commonwealth,
nothing?

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

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

"ELIA."

* * * * *

"ELIA TO HIS CORRESPONDENTS.

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

"To a second correspondent, who signs himself 'A Wiltshire Man,' and
claims me for a countryman upon the strength of an equivocal phrase in
my 'Christ's Hospital,' a more mannerly reply is due. Passing over the
Genoese fable, which Bell makes such a ring about, he nicely detects a
more subtle discrepancy, which Bell was too obtuse to strike upon.
Referring to the passage, I must confess that the term 'native town,'
applied to Calne, _prima facie_ seems to bear out the construction which
my friendly correspondent is willing to put upon it. The context, too, I
am afraid, a little favors it. But where the words of an author, taken
literally, compared with some other passage in his writings, admitted to
be authentic, involve a palpable contradiction, it hath been the custom
of the ingenuous commentator to smooth the difficulty by the supposition
that in the one case an allegorical or tropical sense was chiefly
intended. So by the word 'native' I may be supposed to mean a town where
I might have been born,--or where it might be desirable that I should
have been born, as being situate in wholesome air, upon a dry, chalky
soil, in which I delight,--or a town with the inhabitants of which I
passed some weeks, a summer or two ago, so agreeably, that they and it
became in a manner native to me. Without some such latitude of
interpretation in the present case, I see not how we can avoid falling
into a gross error in physics, as to conceive that a gentleman may be
born in two places, from which all modern and ancient testimony is alike
abhorrent. Bacchus cometh the nearest to it, whom I remember Ovid to
have honored with the epithet 'twice-born.'[4] But not to mention that
he is so called (we conceive) in reference to the places _whence_ rather
than the places _where_ he was delivered,--for by either birth he may
probably be challenged for a Theban,--in a strict way of speaking, he
was a _filius femoris_ by no means in the same sense as he had been
before a _filius alvi_, for that latter was but a secondary and
tralatitious way of being born, and he but a denizen of the second house
of his geniture. Thus much by way of explanation was thought due to the
courteous 'Wiltshire Man.'

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

"'Modo me Thebis, modo Athenis.'

"ELIA."

* * * * *

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

Therefore I do not see what reason or excuse Talfourd could have for not
publishing the critical paper on De Foe's Secondary Novels, which Lamb
contributed to Walter Wilson's Life of De Foe. The author of "Robinson
Crusoe" was a great favorite with Lamb, and his criticism of "Colonel
Jack," "Moll Flanders," etc., was written _con amore_, and is, perhaps,
the very best thing ever said about those remarkable works. Those who
have read Lamb's letter to Wilson, dated December, 1822, and therefore
know how admirably he could write of the author of the best and most
popular book for boys ever written, will be right glad to read his

* * * * *

ESTIMATE OF DE FOE'S SECONDARY NOVELS.

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

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

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

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

"The narrative manner of De Foe has a naturalness about it beyond that
of any other novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of
true stories. It is impossible to believe, while you are reading them,
that a real person is not narrating to you everywhere nothing but what
really happened to himself. To this the extreme _homeliness_ of their
style mainly contributes. We use the word in its best and heartiest
sense,--that which comes _home_ to the reader. The narrators everywhere
are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in it; therefore they
tell their own tales, (Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us in this remark,)
as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repetition,
and an overacted exactness, lest the hearer should not have minded, or
have forgotten, some things that had been told before. Hence the
emphatic sentences marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type;
and hence, too, the frequent interposition of the reminding old
colloquial parenthesis, 'I say,' 'Mind,' and the like, when the
story-teller repeats what, to a practised reader, might appear to have
been sufficiently insisted upon before: which made an ingenious critic
observe, that his works, in this kind, were excellent reading for the
kitchen. And, in truth, the heroes and heroines of De Foe can never
again hope to be popular with a much higher class of readers than that
of the servant-maid or the sailor. Crusoe keeps its rank only by tough
prescription; Singleton, the pirate--Colonel Jack, the thief,--Moll
Flanders, both thief and harlot,--Roxana, harlot and something
worse,--would be startling ingredients in the bill-of-fare of modern
literary delicacies. But, then, what pirates, what thieves, and what
harlots is _the thief, the harlot_, and _the pirate_ of De Foe? We would
not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives
of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less
seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission,
or the penitence more earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening
flashes of religious visitation upon the rude and uninstructed soul more
meltingly and fearfully painted. They, in this, come near to the
tenderness of Bunyan; while the livelier pictures and incidents in them,
as in Hogarth or in Fielding, tend to diminish that fastidiousness to
the concerns and pursuits of common life which an unrestrained passion
for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of producing."

* * * * *

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

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