SOURCE: Wilson, D. G. “How Green Was My Elia?” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s., 78 (April 1992): 185-92.

[In the following essay, Wilson documents Lamb's literary responses to nature and the natural world.]

I want to share with you some ideas about Lamb's character relating to his experience of nature and natural things, and the ways in which he wrote about them.

A love of the country is taken, I know not why, to indicate the presence of all the cardinal virtues. It is one of those outlying qualities which are not exactly meritorious, but which, for that very reason, are the more provocative of a pleasing self-complacency. People pride themselves upon it as upon early rising, or upon answering letters by return of post … To say that we love the country is to make a claim to a similar excellence. We assert a taste for sweet and innocent pleasures, and an indifference to the feverish excitements of artificial society. I, too, love the country … but I confess … that I love it best in books. In real life I have remarked that it is frequently damp and rheumatic, and most hated by those who know it best … [we] can share the worthy Johnson's remark when enticed into the Highlands by his bear-leader that it is easy ‘to sit at home and conceive rocks, heaths and waterfalls’. Some slight basis of experience must doubtless be provided on which to rear any imaginary fabric.

Such were the views of Leslie Stephen and his essay is an extended reverie on the authors whom he considers to be the ‘most potent weavers of that delightful magic’. If I now leap a century, we come to Jonathan Bate and his recent marvellous ‘Romantic Ecology’, which I was sorely tempted simply to re-review for the Society. He quotes Hazlitt on The Excursion, but limits himself to 5 lines from a 13 page essay (admittedly this includes extensive quotations from Wordsworth!). Hazlitt says that The Excursion is ‘not so much a description of natural objects as of the feelings associated with them’ [we find here, obviously, a resonance with Hazlitt's remarks on Turner—‘representations not so properly of the objects of nature as of the medium through which they are seen’. As you will all know, Hazlitt ended that comment with the immortal phrase ‘Pictures of nothing, and very like’.] Bate ends his few sentences on this essay with ‘the image is lost in the sentiment’. Hazlitt's marvellous critique of that poem, printed in The Examiner in 1814, and reprinted by him in The Round Table three years later, could also easily be the main material and substance of this lecture—it is sufficient to note the general statement—and to compare it with Leslie Stephen's sentiments already mentioned. It seems rather obvious that whatever the quality of anyone's experience of nature, that experience could only be passed on to one's contemporaries and to posterity through the medium of words and still (that is, drawn and painted) images—until the invention of cine-photography and television, that is!

How then should we examine Lamb's experience of the countryside and ‘natural objects’, and the ways in which he chose to give expression to that experience? Everyone knows that he chose to present the public image of a city man, averse to mountains. For example: ‘Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see another mountain in my life’—this to Wordsworth in 1801. And to Manning a year later ‘I was born … bred, and have past most of my time in a crowd. This has begot in me an entire affection for that way of life, amounting to an almost insurmountable aversion from solitude and rural scenes. … A mob of happy faces … give me ten thousand[d] finer pleasures than I ever received from all the flocks of silly sheep … Nursed amid [London's] noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes’.

Received ideas are not always correct, nor do they always stand the tests of time—as an erstwhile medical pratitioner, I should know! As I said, I had wanted, for a long time, to share with you some of the fruits ripening from repeated readings of Lamb's works, fertilised by the hypothesis that ‘a close examination of Lamb's writings would reveal that his use of language reflected a townsman's perceptions, not those of a man schooled in the observation of natural phenomena’.

You will have noticed that I have, in the preceding sentence, employed what I will call a ‘green’ metaphor based on the idea of verbal fruits. As I closely read all Lamb's work, using for convenience, Lucas' edition—5 volumes 1905 for the main works [ref. ME, Misc. Essays; E Elia; PCh, Poetry for Children; PP Poems and Plays; DS Dramatic Specimens] but his 1935 3 volume edition for the Letters [ref. L I-III], I noted all the language, from single words to extended passages, which include imagery related to natural objects and natural scenes. You will appreciate that this is rather a rough and ready approach; it is subjective, it is fallible, nor is it linked with comparable studies of other authors, nor with studies of different imagery in Lamb. This methodology has one very great advantage—it makes it impossible for me to indulge in the stupidity of statistics, and so you here and now are spared the labour of attempting scientifically to assess the significance of what I am presenting. Furthermore, since I shall have to try to illustrate the results of my researches by examples, you will have the comfortable pleasures of hearing some familiar and also, I hope, some unfamiliar lines from the man without whom our Society would be nothing!

Let us start with an example of Lamb both closely observing and exactly remembering; ‘When a child I was once let loose … into his Lordship's magnificent garden … can I forget the hot feel of the brickwork? In an evil hour, I reached out my hand and plucked [the last peach]. Some few rain drops just then fell; the sky from a bright day became overcast … the downy fruit, whose sight rather than savour had tempted me, dropt from my hand, never to be tasted’. At this point he cannot, of course, resist the temptation of elaborating those simple observations, and he goes on ‘All the commentators in the world cannot persuade me but that the Hebrew word in the second chapter of Genesis, translated apple, should be rendered peach. Only in that way can I reconcile that mysterious story’.

Then he can get into a correspondence about ‘cages [containing] climbing squirrels and bells, formerly the indispensable appendage to the outside of a Tinman's shop’; the crux is the colour of the squirrels' teeth; whether they are brown. Lamb thinks the observer may have meant more ‘the colour of the Maltese orange, which is rather more obfuscated than your fruit of Seville, or St Michael's’—is this the first literary reference to Marks and Spencers? He returns to this exact topic in an essay [strangely prefiguring Mr Pooter with his useless complimentary theatre tickets] in ‘Reminiscences of Jude Judkins …’ where his simulated persona is rather mean in haggling too much over the provision of oranges for his fictive partner Cleora. The officious cousin ‘laid out a matter of two shillings in some of the best St Michael's, I think, I ever tasted’. Such oranges were ‘esteemed for their cooling property’ at the theatre, and Lamb, that proto-Pooter, carefully computes that surely his Cleora would not have jilted him for that ‘paltry sum of two shillings’ when she knew that he had already ‘incurred an expense of more than four times that amount’ on the tickets. Lamb can show a nice discrimination—nicer than he would admit in such passages of disclaimer as ‘I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers’? Many of his recollections are mere signposts, it is true; indicators of a rich past; but to the attentive reader rich with colour, shape, scent and sound. He can recall the ‘wood-house, the orchard, the place where the pigeon-house had stood … [amongst] the pretty, pastoral walks, long ago, about Mackery End’. Or what about the garden of the Inner Temple, with its ‘stately stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters’. Of course, being Lamb, when he reaches the sun-dial, his musings on its ‘moral uses’ rapidly fly off into realms of past poetic fantasy, the sun-dial's ‘measures [being] appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by’. This chimes with an unidentified quotation in an earlier letter ‘When time drives flocks from field to fold’. There are, too, times [during his own retirement] when he is ‘to be met with in trim gardens’ that is, he is influenced by the trimness or otherwise of his surroundings; or when a schoolboy, he notices the ‘flowery spots, and verdant lanes, skirting Hornsey’ on the way to the ‘meadows by fair Amwell’.

You can also recognise your man by his easy progression into culinary reminiscence. Starting from a ‘dash of mild sage’ he is soon abjuring the ‘whole onion tribe … [including] the rank and guilty garlic’ and a few pages later, regretting that his hostess ‘sent away [from him] a dish of fine Morellas … [recommending] a plate of less extraordinary gooseberries … in their stead’. He does not neglect the ‘sprigs of garnishing parsley’, and in a less direct way, can pretend to be a vegetarian refusing to eat until the dishes have ‘undergone the operation of fire [to remove] those numberless little living creatures … in every fibre of the plant or root’. We do not often think of Lamb as a sanitary hygienist! But he is serious about food—his housekeepers must have needed to be wary of his tastes; thus ‘cabbage is reprehensible with roast beef, laudable with bacon … the French bean sympathizes with the flesh of deer … salt fish points to parsnip … cats prefer valerian to heart's-ease, old ladies vice-versa … the sour mango and the sweet yam court and are accepted by the compliable mutton hash’.

Metaphorically, and keeping to eating and drinking, Lamb can talk of ‘graduating in nuts and oranges’; ‘superannuated chaff and dry husks of repentance’. Perhaps best of all, is his extravagant punnetful of puns from a letter to Bernard Barton ‘There—a fuller plumper juiceier date never dropt from Idumean palm [Virgil, Georgics]. Am I in the dateive case now? if not, a fig for dates, which is more than a date is worth’. The date, in case you wondered, was Saturday 25 July A.D. 1829,—11 a.m.

Lamb clearly enjoyed his own patch when such a private spot was available [perhaps the Lake District was simply too open, too much no-one's territory—don't we all feel that sometimes when the rain and mist loom around and seep in?] He certainly went back to first origins when writing to Bernard Barton as I will show later, but his pride in his Colebrook Cottage garden was particular to a fault; ‘the most original thing of the sort you ever saw, with a garden larger than yours, a genuine pot-herb garden … cabbages, leeks, parsnips, carrots etc. … I am Lord of … a dunghill, with wasps, cats, spiders and ten thousand little creatures … Arachne weaves her fine silks from gooseberry tree to currant … vines and little grapes, and six fine garden glasses for cauliflowers’. Pride goeth they say, as Lamb must have found (don't we all in the garden?) and to Barton quite soon he admits ‘My garden thrives (I am told) tho' I have yet reaped nothing but some tiny sallad, and withered carrots’. Reality has indeed crept in, but he still maintains ‘But a garden's a garden anywhere, and twice a garden in London’.

You begin to see my problem; I want to show you the variety of Lamb's response to the natural world, and yet at the same time, get so easily seduced into the presentation of select bouquets of his cultivation—this green imagery is itself very addictive! Although as you can see from my handout, the range of authors from whom Lamb quotes is remarkably eclectic, I will restrict my selection now to some of those from Wordsworth. In the famous review of The Excursion, I count 25 direct quotations, some part of a line, some lengthy passages of 50 lines or so. In addition, there are paraphrases and many indirect, allusive bendings of his own language in Wordsworth's direction. Of this large mass of his subject's writing, Lamb has chosen 13 quotations with an expressly ‘green’ use of words and imagery [I cannot say what proportion of Wordsworth's own language is green-related; very high one would assume]; Lamb can himself choose a metaphor ‘a branch … prematurely plucked from the parent tree’ in this essay, and immediately note Wordsworth's ‘devotedness to nature’ before picking lines which remark the notes which ‘the wind draws forth from rocks, woods, caverns, heaths and dashing shores’. He lets himself comment that to Wordsworth ‘nothing in Nature is dead. Motion is synonymous with life’, suggesting that to Lamb there are indeed dead, dull lumps of matter—mountains, perhaps? And yet, I cannot resist the feeling that to Lamb, Wordsworth's attraction as a poet was not his observation of, and transmission of love for nature and natural objects, but rather that Wordsworth ‘thinks and feels deeply’. The whole publishing history of this review, Lamb's initial reluctance down to his anger with ‘Shoemaker Gifford’, though not directly relevant to my tale, certainly reveals Lamb as one who, if not ‘in love’ with nature, found it hard to resist its charms in literature—as Leslie Stephen put it, it is less ‘damp and rheumatic’ that way.

Lamb's total oeuvre in Lucas' edition amounts to 3,000 pp+; I do not pretend to have counted exactly, but that excludes Lucas' own notes, and about 500 pp of direct quotation in the various Specimens and Extracts. So if I now try to present to you an assessment of Lamb's use of ‘green’ language in his word-play, metaphor, simile, pun etc. you must yourselves try to put that into the total context—I shall leave it to ‘real’ scholars to identify and classify his use of other areas of language. I start with Rosamund Gray, and here Lamb has quite a flight of fancy with ‘shall the good housewife take such pains in pickling and preserving her worthless fruits, her apricots and quinces and is there not much spiritual housewifery in treasuring up our minds best fruits … ?’ The table also includes such common phrases as ‘cut up, root and branch’, which Lamb surprisingly uses in an erudite discussion of painting [probably pinched from Reynolds in fact]. He does not wish to drop ‘like mellow fruit’ into the grave—this in a passage wherein he asserts that he is ‘in love with this green earth … the unspeakable rural solitudes’. And always something to pause and to consider in Lamb—his household Gods ‘plant a terrible fixed foot … and do not willingly seek Lavinian shores’ [Aeneas after the sack of Troy settled in Italy ‘the Lavinian land’; Lucas]

Then, damning ‘instrumental music’ which is like ‘reading a book, all stops, being obliged to supply the verbal matter’ Lamb also compares it to being stretched ‘upon a rack of roses’. But he forgets that painful aspect of his roses when he writes to George Dyer in 1831 ‘You mistake your heart if you think you can write a lampoon. Your whips are rods of roses—spare me from such whips, I say’. He is fond of the metaphor of the hot-bed for forcing growth—I noted three instances. He does, too, use some rather odd ideas, for instance ‘the flat swamp of convalescence’, ‘that stubborn corn the human will’ and ‘they lime-twig up my soul and body’.

Or he can say, of the Old Schoolmasters, ‘those fine old Pedagogues … always in their first garden, reaping harvests of their golden time, among their Flori and their Spici-legia’. In passing, I note that these two titles quoted by Lamb are themselves ‘green’ metaphors. The sources of Lamb's ideas, and the shape into which he put them, have generated plenty of ‘on-going’ literary matter; my object today is, at least in part, to get you to consider this question ‘When Lamb uses a phrase such as “a child tearing herself from the parental stock, and committing herself to strange graftings” is this his own pattern of thought, or is it mediated only through the writings of others?’

I would like to suggest, and I shall now advance some passages which I believe support my thesis, that in some areas of observation and comment on natural topics, Lamb's stock of knowledge and experience was more than sufficient to furnish the matter of his writings—it is his own crop, not the gleanings from others' sowings.

We could all accept the reality, I think, of some recollections disguised as fiction, taken from both poetry and prose, and exemplified by the following. ‘Many a lonely glade’ and the ‘fancied wanderings’; ‘vast out-stretching branches high of some old wood’ even if we see that standing ‘wet and chilly on thy deck [gazing] upon the flood’ resolves itself into an extended metaphor of danger, loss and loneliness. Lamb knew of weeping willows, wide-branching trees ‘with dark green leaf rich clad’ [even if only within the gardens of the Inner Temple!] and when suitably involved emotionally, could weave such images into dreams and visions, whether of repentance, of loss or of consolation. He knew of ‘thick shadows of oak and beech’, and prototypically perhaps, ‘the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire’. This must greatly have pleased him, and he quotes himself in this phrase more than once.

There are, of course, many less ambiguous recollections, chiefly to be found in the letters; in 1823 he is telling Hazlitt's niece about his new ‘large garden, having pears, gooseberries, grapes (these latter ripen once in three years) cabbages (they are always bearing and good for nothing) carrots etc’. This all sounds like the agent's sales-spiel, but a month or so later, the idea has become reality, and in the process taken wings; the garden is ‘spacious, with vines (I assure you), pears, strawberries, parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to delight the heart of old Alcinous’. He immediately, however, ‘enters without passage into a cheerful dining room, all studded over and rough with old books’. He then asserts that he is ‘taken up with pruning and gardening, quite a new sort of occupation for me … I contemplate the growth of vegetable nature … and watch my tulips’. This paradise is slightly marred, he says when his neighbour ‘talked of the Law’ after a ‘drunken gardener’ had lopped off a sheltering bough! As he says, ‘What a lapse to commit on the first day of my happy “garden-state”’. He had indeed compared himself with Adam, and his language cannot evade the Biblical—possibly the recipient [Bernard Barton] was partly responsible for this train of thought. It is interesting that Lamb, even at his most practical, is still thinking of his books, and turning that experience into something specially manufactured and purposeful. Five years later, to the Cowden Clarkes, Lamb enthused at length on the walks around Enfield. He notes the ‘unfrequentedest blackberry paths … the fine back woods … the willow and lavender plantations … clumps of finest moss … the knee-deep clover … the clump meadows’. Yet he still weaves into this idyll a ‘ruined convent … where some of the painted glass is yet whole and fresh’, a disquisition on St Claridge and the Black Book of St Albans—as well as telling us that he hurt his leg by ‘skipping a skipping-rope at 53—heu mihi non sum qualis’.

I would suppose that it is in ‘throw-away lines’ that the inner cast of a man's mind would most easily be recognised; more or less at random, here are some examples of the phrases that Lamb uses—‘flos rarus—such weeds … kill flowers—sports of nature—under the rose—that wretched reed, her lover—those arid beech nuts—ever-blooming elysium of delight—sad worldly thorns—the very flower of her citizens—shoots of generosity—martyrs' palms and saintly garlands—in the flower of his popularity—natural sprouts of his own wit—every Quakeress is a lily—roses still bloomed … in those withered and yellow cheeks—what flesh, like loving grass (? meaning)—the burrs stuck to him, but they were good and loving burrs for all that [he was also addicted to this image of the sticky burr, or bur!]—Actæon in mid-sprout—orchard pranks, and snapping twigs—covered with flowers of so cunning a periphrasis [the cover was to conceal the lurking snakes!]—patience, it's c-cumin’. Then of Captain Starkey ‘he lived, and died, a broken bulrush’. This, surely, is a highly original remark—ambiguously suggestive, but obviously Lamb had seen plenty of broken bulrushes in his walks by ‘sweet Amwell’.

Of course, Lamb is always well aware of what he is doing, and after referring to gift-horses he is then careful ‘not to ride a metaphor to death’ but cannot resist ‘the flower and bran of modern poetry’; he drifts into grouse and woodcock, brawn [naturally!], hare and eventually ‘indigestible trifles’. All these kinds of things are, he says, ‘the seeds of harmony’. The last act, as we know, was rather sad; in May 1834, to Manning ‘I walk 9 or 10 miles a day alway up the road, dear London-wards. Fields, flowers, birds and green lanes I have no heart for’. But note that he had already told Manning in that same letter ‘I have had a scurvy nine years of it, and am now in the sorry fifth act. Twenty weeks nigh she has been now violent …’ I hope that I have suggested to you, even if not fully demonstrated, that Lamb was capable of observing and appreciating natural beauty, natural objects. The conditions are clear, I believe—only when duty and self-constraint does not overwhelm and override his ‘normal’ capacity to reach out and to react. In other words, before his life-long responsibility to Mary had weighed him down, during the alternating intervals of hope and disappointment in his other personal relationships, I see evidence of a sensibility about nature equal to that of many of the other ‘Romantics’.

This sensibility, shown by some of the ‘green’ language I have shared with you, is, I submit, a reflection of the ‘real’ Lamb, not merely Lamb reflecting that other world of books. True, he does get carried away by the intoxication of the words and the associations which they evoke; what about this final bravura passage ‘We are at Cowes, the whole flock, Sheep and Lambs—and in good pasturage’.

To me, then, the message is clear. In his ‘natural and healthy state’ [as he said himself of Hazlitt], he did ‘have a heart for’ these green things, and it was only the steady drip of anguish and helplessness that took him to ‘The Red Lion, and the Ware Road, almost as good as a street’. Perhaps the crowds, the busy Strand, the shop windows were a drug, an anodyne for that inner loneliness, that gap in his heart, no less than the demon drink served that same purpose. Moreover, Lamb understood his own nature as well and as clearly as we can now analyse it nearly two hundred years later, and as sadly and as steadfastly and as unselfishly as any hero in more public worlds of battle and strife. I believe that if Lamb had found those human fulfilments which Wordsworth found, his legacy would have proved equally compelling as a fore-runner and emotional touchstone for our own anxieties and insights about the world around us, our responsibilities to it and the manifold delights which it offers to the human soul. I propose to you ‘The Immortal Memory of Charles Lamb, lover of nature, the countryside and of all that therein is’. One of the first members of the Green Party, worthy colleague of Wordsworth et al!

Works Cited

Direct Quotations from Lucas's edition of the Works (5 vols, 1905) and Letters (3 vols, 1935)

[context: ME = misc. essays; E = Elia; PP = poems & plays; L = letters]

Bible [PP 1]; Beaumont/Fletcher [L 2]; Bowles [L 2]; Burton [ME 1]; [from the Classics ME 1, E 1, L 1]; Coleridge [1 5]; Cotton [L 1]; Daniel [Ros, Gray 1]; Dodd [E 1] Field, Barron [E 1]; Fields [ME 4]; Fuller [ME 2]; Goldsmith [ME 1]; Hamilton [L 1]; Hazlitt [L 1]; Homer [L 1]; Hone [L 1]; Hood [ME 1]; Keats [ME 5]; [C.L. himself—E 1, L 10]; Liston [ME 2]; Mandeville [ME 1]; Marlowe [L 1]; Marvell [E 2, L 1]; Massinger [L 1]; Middleton [E 1]; Milton [ME 2, E 2, L 1]; More [ME 1]; Moxon [ME 1]; Priestley [L 1]; Prior [ME 3]; Ritson [PP 1]; Shakespeare [ME 3, E 2, L 1]; Southey [L 1]; Spenser [ME 1, E 1]; Taylor (Jeremy) [ME 2]; Temple [E 1]; Thomson [ME 2]; Vanburgh [E 1]; Webster [ME 1, E 1]; Wilks [ME 1]; Woolly [ME 2]; Wordsworth [ME 13, L 1]; [unidentified—L 5]

Indirect Quotations

In misc. essays 11; Elia 4; Letters 19; Mrs Leicester's School 1; dram. spec. (notes) 2; poems 6; plays 1; Tales 24 & Adventures of Ulysses 25.

Recollections

In misc. essays 16 (2 extended); Elia 19 (4 extended); Letters 6; Mrs L's School 5; poems 6 & plays 2.

Direct Observations

In misc. essays 4; Elia 10; Letters 49 (7 extended); Mrs L's School 3; poems 10 & plays 1.

Fictional Observations

In misc. essays 14; Elia 10; Letters 37 (2 extended); Mrs L's School 8; poems 11; plays 28 (2 extended); Tales 2; Prince Dorus & Beauty and Beast 8.

Metaphors

In misc. essays 21; Elia 15 (1 extended); Letters 43 (2 extended); Mrs L's School 2; dram. spec. 3; poems 20 (8 extended); plays 5; Tales/Adv. Ulysses 5.

Other classifications

Similes 1 [ME]; 1 [MLS]; 1 [DS]; 9 [L].

Puns 1 [ME]; 2 [E]; 1 [L].

Cliché/sayings 3 [E]; 3 [L].

Apostrophes 1 [P]; 1 [P1]; 3[L].

Paraphrases 2 [ME]; 2 [E].

Translations (by STC) 3 [P]; name 1 [P1]; comment 2 [E]; belief 1 [P]; speculation 1 [L] & nonsense 1 [L].