SOURCE: Mulvihill, James. “‘Essence’ and ‘Accident’ in Lamb's Elia Essays.” Clio 24, no. 1 (fall 1994): 37-54.

[In the following essay, Mulvihill traces affinities between Lamb's essays and Enlightenment moral philosophy, illustrated by the “dialectic of essence and accident” in Elia and The Last Essays of Elia.]

Essayists, according to William Hazlitt, are, “if not moral philosophers, moral historians, and that's better: or they are both, they found the one character upon the other; their premises precede their conclusions.”¹ In this lecture “On the Periodical Essayists,” in Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), Hazlitt praises the essayist's art as “the best and most natural course of study. It is in morals and manners what the experimental is in natural philosophy” (6:91). The influence of eighteenth-century moral philosophy on the English Romantics has most recently been explored by Alan Bewell in Wordsworth and the Enlightenment. Bewell convincingly argues that William Wordsworth's entire corpus, the individual lyrics as much as the long poems, comprises “poetic ‘essays’ on specific moral subjects, not only on the faculties of the mind (as in the 1815 classification of Poems), but also on the origin and progress of social institutions such as the family, property, religion, myth, poetry, and language.” Thus, when the author of the Prelude states that “‘with my best conjectures I would trace / The progress of our being’ … he is stressing that autobiography is the key to the conjectural history of the species in general.”²

Bewell's thesis has broad implications for our concept of English Romanticism. At first glance, the author of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb (1775-1834), would appear to be at odds with anything so systematic as eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Enlightenment rationalism is surely dismissed out of hand in his essay on “Imperfect Sympathies” where he rejects “Caledonian” rationalists in favor of their immethodical opposites. The latter, indeed, “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.”³ Elia's putatively “crude essays at a system” notwithstanding, however, there is nothing crude about Lamb's essays or the construction of the persona who speaks for Lamb in them. Elia, of course, is that persona, a pseudonymous stand-in for the playful Lamb who, despite his arch, self-concealing authorial shifts, is remarkably candid about his opinions and prejudices in the fifty or so essays he originally published in the London Magazine through the 1820s. An author by avocation, he wrote with whatever time he could spare from his duties as a clerk for the East India Company in London and the care of his sister Mary who, in a fit of insanity, had fatally stabbed their mother in 1796. With their anachronistic and bookish air, Lamb's essays have traditionally been viewed as quaint, somewhat quirky exercises in valetudinarian impressionism, retrospective and inward-turning, celebrating the past, especially the past of childhood. While the way we look at Lamb has been changed considerably by recent critics, who posit a darker, more conflicted personality behind the eternally boyish Elian persona, such revisions have focused mainly on what Thomas McFarland terms the essays' “subtext of desperation.” According to Gerald Monsman, for instance, these writings reveal a high degree of “self-consciousness, imagistic complexity, and stylistic premeditation—the product of their structure of deception,” this “deception” referring to the complicated sublimation of Lamb's life in the figure of Elia. Even so, Monsman can still leave essentially unchallenged the traditional estimate of Lamb, for the essays' depth exists despite “Lamb's baffling lack of logical system or methodical presentation.” In them Lamb moves “beyond a mere literature of knowledge and toward, to borrow De Quincey's distinction, a literature of power, although questioning with ironic intent the pretensions of the author to ideal visions of beauty.” (3)

This reading stems from a tendency to view Enlightenment and Romantic modes of inquiry as categorically distinct. In the first sentence of his study, Monsman makes Enlightenment thought, with its “absolutist system of valuation,” a virtual straw-man to Romanticism's tendency “to locate the productive force for the creation of values, ideals, and purposes within the temporal and historical structure of human life” (3). Its rationalism notwithstanding, however, the Enlightenment method is empirical and speculative, intellectual traits that, as Bewell argues, are part of the eighteenth century's legacy to the Romantic search for identity through origins. Lamb's Elia essays, I suggest, similarly approach their fundamental subject—namely, man in society—by means of the recovery of original identity, employing what Bewell calls the “totalizing vision of late eighteenth-century moral philosophy” to discover the historical immanence of the self. To state that Lamb's historical bent is conditioned by Enlightenment methods of inquiry is not to assert that his essays are miniature Enlightenment treatises. Lamb is primarily an artist, and none of the qualities Monsman claims for him—“self-consciousness, imagistic complexity, and stylistic premeditation”—is under dispute here. On the contrary, just as Bewell's Wordsworth ultimately displaces the textual paradigm of Enlightenment cultural inquiry in his poems (17), so Lamb's essays wryly subsume, even as they proceed from, Enlightenment epistemological and cultural assumptions. My point is that their surface drollness is as capable of masking a seriously-held intellectual premise as it is of sublimating emotional trauma⁴—and that premise concerns the historical construction of the self.

The object of eighteenth-century speculative history, according to Francis Jeffrey, is “to trace back the history of society to its most simple and universal elements.”⁵ In the great histories of civil society written by Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and others, human nature is assumed to be constituted of consistent principles producing diverse but theoretically predictable effects in different historical circumstances. Thus Hume: “The philosopher, if he be consistent, must apply the same reasonings to the actions and volitions of intelligent agents. The most irregular and unexpected resolutions of men may frequently be accounted for by those who know the particular circumstance of their character and situation.”⁶ Two contemporary verse tributes to Charles Lamb are conditioned by the fact, if not an awareness, of this problematic relation of identity and circumstances. In “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge refers to the “strange calamity” of Lamb's life—namely, Mary Lamb's insanity—while in lines “Written After the Death of Charles Lamb,” William Wordsworth speaks similarly of “troubles strange, / Many and strange, that hung about his life.”⁷ The strangeness of this life seems to consist in its adventitious nature—the accidents, “many and strange,” that have shaped it, “troubles strange” apparently distinct from Lamb himself. This premise has continued to condition our view of Lamb, as, for example, Thomas McFarland reveals in his remark that “Mary Lamb's homely proximity to Charles Lamb and his charm symbolizes the truth that madness and suicide lay all around” (31). To be sure, these passages merely reflect how we conventionally conceive of the self in its relation to circumstance. But there is surely a fallacy involved in the notion that what we are is somehow separate from what happens to us, that misery has merely “hung” about us or existed in “proximity” to us or lain “all around” us, for what do we mean by “us” if not at least in part the contingencies that have made us what we are? Are Charles Lamb and his charm finally distinguishable from the “troubles strange” that coincided with them? For that matter, is Lamb distinguishable from his charm—or from the “subtext of desperation” McFarland shrewdly reads beneath that charm (47)? Yet it is precisely this sense that being and the accidents of being are distinct, co-existing in a circumstantially tragic entanglement, from which Lamb's special poignancy arises. No less problematic is the relation between Lamb's persona Elia and his various selves—the “man Elia” and the “child Elia” in “New Year's Eve,” for example, or the India House clerk and the pensioner in “The Superannuated Man.” If by some process of fictional essentializing Elia is Lamb, then the same question is begged: which Lamb? Is it Mary Lamb's solicitous brother or the drink-besotted wit of Carlyle's description?⁸ Assuming any of these is the true self, what makes it so?—some irreducible core of identity or contingent circumstance?

Who is Elia? The essay in which Elia anticipates this query, “Oxford in the Vacation,” presents two Elias, the India House clerk and the after-hours scholar. In his concern that the reader not assume he is wholly defined by his clerkly function, Elia wryly asserts “that it is my humour, my fancy … to while away some good hours of my time in the contemplation of indigos, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise.” Perhaps there is a half-submerged anger in the blitheness with which he purports to sacrifice his “better hours” to this strange whim: here, as elsewhere, he betrays his desperate hunger for leisure. But his remark that “the very parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author” points beyond the “outside sheets” and “waste-wrappers of foolscap” brought home to feed an authorial avocation. The “flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation” stealthily emerges from the day's more prosaic commerce in “indigos, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise,” for what Elia dismisses as “the many commodities incidental to the life of a public office” have, through habit and usage, insinuated themselves into the imaginative life of the author (just as in “The Superannuated Man” Elia acknowledges the intertwining of his identity with his job: “I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul” [221]). Who is Elia, then? He is neither wholly clerk nor scholar, his writings constituting a “Joseph's vest” of contingent detail. His claim that “the literary dignity of Elia is very little, if at all, compromised in the condescension” implicitly acknowledges the fallacy of positing an essential ideal of selfhood, for without those “outside sheets” and “waste-wrappers of foolscap,” Elia's writings would be stripped of their peculiar, and necessary, context (8-9).⁹

“Oxford in the Vacation” turns on Lamb's dialectic of essence and accident. By this I mean the constant interplay in the essays of a normative, unitary nature and contingent circumstance. The problem lies in distinguishing this nature from the accidents of its historical occurrence. In “My Relations,” Elia is not content to characterize his “inexplicable cousin” James as merely “inexplicable,” for “nature hath her unities, which not every critic can penetrate.” He “seemeth made up of contradictory principles” only to the common observer for whom “those fine Shandian lights and shades, which make up his story” suggest contradiction rather than the diverse effects of a principle anterior to that which they appear to violate (81-82). The question remains, though, whether it is a primary nature, reflecting normative, fundamental “unities,” or the “inexplicable” nature peculiar to James that constitutes his essential nature. Hume offers a possible explanation when he allows for factors like “character and situation” in his model of character. But are “particular” circumstances merely accidental to what we are or essential to it? In “New Year's Eve,” Elia reflects on what he is and offers these hypotheses:

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my early idea, as my heir and favorite? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader—(a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly-conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia.

(33)

Thus, even as he despairs of being “beyond a hope of sympathy,” Elia assumes a normative character prior to the secondary effects of circumstance (i.e., his “sickly idiosyncrasy”). The inference tacitly encouraged is that his “singularly-conceited” character is ultimately reducible to a common nature that has been refracted by the peculiar circumstances of his life.

This retrospective bent is more than a “sickly idiosyncrasy,” however, for throughout the essays historical speculation supplements memory as Elia seeks the “primary” in the “original.” As Geraldine Pelles points out, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the newly-developed concept of “originality” referred to “that which ‘distinguishes’” and was a key term in the moral/philosophical concept of “natural man,” expressing the sub specie aeternitatis, the characteristic essence, of humanity. Hence Rochefoucauld's maxim that “we should strive to discover what is natural to ourselves, and not depart from the area of personal authenticity.” The term's specialized critical adaptation may be seen in William Hazlitt's terse dictum that “originality is the seeing of nature differently than others, and yet as it is in itself.”¹⁰ In “New Year's Eve,” Elia takes January 1, “the nativity” of “our common Adam,” as the starting point for a series of meditations on the self, his emotions registering contempt for his “present identity” as “the man Elia” and regret for “the child Elia—that ‘other me,’ there, in the background.” If the “man Elia” is Lamb's fictional persona, this fictional past self, “the child Elia,” is the fiction of a fiction and thus a doubly speculative construct—“my own early idea,” as Elia calls his earlier self. In such instances, Elia posits a distant primordial self that has been obscured or distorted by the circumstances of adult life:

God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated.—I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was—how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful! From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself,—and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being!

(31-33)

Epistemologically, Elia is simply pondering the elusive nature of identity from the skeptical, nominalistic perspective of empirical psychology. Never the same from one moment to the next, corporeally or mentally, how can we assume identity to be something fixed and absolute? It is from this vantage that Wordsworth regards his childhood in Book Second of the Prelude and notes that “so wide appears / The vacancy between me and those days / Which yet have such a self-presence in my mind, / That musing on them, often do I seem / Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself / And of some other being” (ll.28-33).

This retrospective meditation on the self also has a cultural dimension, as Bewell has shown. If eighteenth-century speculative history traced the origins of civil society to its “infancy”—the phrase “infancy of society” is a cliché of Enlightenment history—so the Romantic chronicler of the self could find in civil history an analogue to the growth of an individual mind. “Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood,” states Adam Ferguson in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), “but the species itself from rudeness to civilization.”¹¹ In both cases, origins are posited to explain the cultural/psychological development that has led up to the present stage of progression. In both cases, too, these origins are a largely conjectural reconstruction of a natural state antedating individual or historical memory. They are an “early idea,” in Elia's phrase, and, since they have been traced to a state anterior to the various accretions of education and civilization, common to all humankind. Both hypotheses point to “our common Adam,” assuming an essential nature prior to the collateral effects of convention. “God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated”: behind Elia's plaintive cry is the dualistic assumption of a primary nature and a secondary nature in the constitution of identity. For Elia his primary nature often seems to serve as a norm against which he measures his subsequent progress (or regress). In “Distant Correspondents,” then, writing to a friend in New South Wales, he says: “Yet for aught I know, you may be some parasangs nigher that primitive idea—Plato's man—than we in England here have the honour to reckon ourselves” (119). Once a simple creature—“From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself”—Elia is now the sophisticated product of polished society. Due to his distance from this earlier self, he can speak of “it” as if it were another, and indeed he even wonders if this vital, pristine forebear was ever really him and not “some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being,” suggesting that, among other things, this epitome of primitivistic virtue is a cultural model developed to explain what Elia is—what he was, what he has become.

Elia's nostalgia in this and other essays often seems primitivistic in its moral bent. The unsophisticated being he looks back to was, among other things, “courageous,” “religious,” “imaginative” (33)—qualities in which polished man is surpassed by his ruder antecedents in Enlightenment histories of civil society. But to acknowledge that we have lost, or suffered a diminishing of, certain moral and emotional qualities in our progress to civility, even to lament this loss, is not necessarily to assert the superiority of earlier states of society, much less of the so-called natural state—only to acknowledge losses inevitably incurred in our necessary socialization. Thus is Adam Ferguson critical of the primitivistic tendency “to reject every circumstance of our present condition and frame, as adventitious, and foreign to our nature” (5). Nevertheless, assumptions favoring primary and secondary nature respectively underlie much of the period's intellectual exchange, as James Chandler has recently shown.¹² In the Rights of Man, Thomas Paine premises his theory of inalienable universal rights on the concept of a natural state when man was in his original condition: “What was he then? Man. Man was his high and only title, and a higher cannot be given him.” Paine views reform as a means of stripping away the artificial distinctions and conventions that have distorted human nature, predicting that “the present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of reason, and the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world.” By contrast, his conservative opponent, Edmund Burke, is reluctant to prescribe nature as norm, mindful as he is of “those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil life,” namely, the operation of a “second nature” from which arises “many diversities amongst men, according to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods of their lives, their residence in towns or in the country.” While Burke does not question the premise of an original nature common to all humanity, he rejects the assumption that this primary nature is our only nature—that it alone is “natural.”¹³

Elia knows himself to be a creature of second nature, though he vacillates between this knowledge and a primitivistic regret for lost simplicity. While he does not envy Thomas Tame of the South-Sea House his pristine mind (still “in its original state of white paper” [4]), he admires Quakers for the primitive austerity of their devotions in “A Quaker's Meeting” and “Imperfect Sympathies.” Elia, however, is no Quaker: “I am all over sophisticated—with humours, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim-whams, which their simpler taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive banquet” (72). These various appetites are the cumulative layerings of convention and habit that form Elia's identity. As self-disgusted as Elia may often be, he can be none other than what he is, and to a very great degree he is the “thousand whim-whams” he cannot do without. While he often complains that “old prejudices cling about me” (70), at other times he displays a Burkean resistance to stripping himself of them, for disentangling the essential from the accidental is no easy matter.

In “Witches, and Other Night-Fears,” he circumnavigates primitive superstition and his own dreams in a slippery search for material bearings. The caveat, “We do not know the laws of that country” (75), is as far as he is prepared to go in explaining our ancestors' belief in witchcraft before attempting to locate the origins of his own superstitions:

From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch-stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with good store. But I shall mention the accident which directed my curiosity originally into this channel. In my father's book-closet, the History of the Bible, by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds—one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon's temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot—attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish I had never seen.

(75)

The laws of this country have arisen from the “accident” of a book's placement on a shelf. But while Elia claims it was this circumstance that “originally” determined his superstitious bent, he later credits Stackhouse not with “my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy—but the shape and manner of their visitation” (77). The fear itself, he argues, is “purely spiritual” and thus “objectless upon earth”:

Gorgons, and Hydras and Chimæras—dire stories of Celæno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us and eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to be false, come to affect us at all? … Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury?—O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body—or, without the body, they would have been the same.

(78)

Elia side-steps one potential fallacy, the hedonistic argument that we fear only what can cause us pain, to fall prey to another, that such fears are extra-mundane, “beyond body.” From here it is only a step to speculations about a “shadow-land of pre-existence” (78). If Stackhouse merely “gave the fashion” to Elia's dreams, the essence of these dreams is distinct from the circumstances bodied forth in them—“unborrowed of tradition” (77, 78). In positing this dualism of a primary fear and the secondary form it takes from circumstances, Elia misguidedly attempts to locate the original in the purely essential, thus denying the historical immanence of identity. Yet elsewhere he balks at transcendence, ante- or post-mundane. In “New Year's Eve,” following his lament for “the child Elia,” Elia nevertheless clings to a corporeally-circumstanced self and its rootedness in “this green earth,” as, with a nod at Wordsworth, he terms the constitutive here-and-now. Death for him represents not a transcendence of the bodily but its mere deprivation. What, “wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here” (34), of friendships in the afterlife?—or books? “Must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward process of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?” (34). Perhaps the “familiar” is the essential. In “Witches, and other Night-Fears,” Elia traces the decay of his genial spirits in a dream vision experienced after reading Barry Cornwall's Dramatic Scenes (1819):

Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the customary train sounding their conches before me, (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god,) and jollily we went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothea should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a sea-roughness to a sea-calm, and thence to a river-motion, and that river (as happens in the familiarization of dreams) was no other than the gentle Thames, which landed me, in the wafture of a placid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace.

(80)

The joke here, of course, is that Elia's dream draws its other-worldly inspiration from Cornwall's earth-bound verse. Even in the midst of all these “marine spectra,” moreover, Elia employs a rhetoric of familiarity (“you may be sure,” “just where”), which suggests that from the beginning he has remained in his “proper element of prose” (80). His “inauspicious inland landing” is the consummation of a process of “familiarization” by which the marvelous and the mundane alike supplement, even as they are assimilated to, his nature. Three decades before, in this same Lambeth, Blake had produced his early prophecies.

Judged by conventional Romantic criteria, Elia's imagination comes up short. The Westmoreland Fells “are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition” (79), he complains, indicating that his urban element—his dreams are of buildings and cities—has cut him off from “the beautiful and permanent forms of nature” prescribed as norm by his friend Wordsworth.¹⁴ But in “The Old Margate Hoy,” an essay on sea-side vacations, he acknowledges squarely the primacy of his “inland nurture” (202). Under the novel circumstances of a short coastal voyage, he and a group of fellow Londoners are reduced (or elevated?) to a state of credulity that makes them the avid dupes of a prodigious liar on board: “Had the confident fellow told us half the legends on land, which he favoured us with on the other element, I flatter myself the good sense of most of us would have revolted. But we were in a new world, with everything unfamiliar about us, and the time and place disposed us to the reception of any prodigious marvel whatsoever” (203). Unsophisticated in the “wild usages” of the sea, these disoriented town-dwellers are in a state comparable to that enjoyed by “the child Elia” as their urban wariness falls from them in this “unfamiliar” marine element and they revert to an original simplicity (much as Joseph Munden the actor, in Elia's tribute to him, “stands wondering, amid the common-place materials of life, like primæval man with the sun and stars about him” [170]). But it is a relative simplicity, contingent upon time and circumstance. When Elia invites us to imagine the tables turned, the maritimers become “the unsophisticated aborigines” pictured amid London's streets “with their fishing tackle on their back, as we carry our own town necessaries” (208), and we must conclude with him “that no town-bred, or inlandborn subjects, can feel their natural nourishment at these sea-places. Nature, where she does not mean us for mariners and vagabonds, bids us stay at home” (208).

The “home” to which we are directed is in fact a construction not of “Nature” but of convention, second nature. As Adam Ferguson replies to the question of where man's natural state is to be found: “It is here; and it matters not whether we are understood to speak in the island of Great Britain, at the Cape of Good Hope, or the Straits of Magellan. While this active being is in the train of employing his talents, and of operating on the subjects around him, all situations are equally natural” (8). By “natural” Ferguson means habitual, as Elia, too, means when he speaks of “natural nourishment.” Maritimers and Londoners alike are distinguished by traits that, like Lamb's “troubles strange,” seem to hang about them. “Their fishing tackle” and “our own town necessaries” are accidents of circumstance, to be sure, but stripped away, along with the innumerable other such accouterments of material being, would they reveal a “common Adam” beneath? The essentialist thesis leaves too much out of account in its reductive model of human nature. “Imperfect Sympathies” is prefaced by a passage from Sir Thomas Browne, of whom Elia observes that, “mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and conjectural essences,” he “over looked the impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as mankind” (66-67). What is left if we divest ourselves of these “impertinent individualities”? Elia's debate with his card-playing friend in “Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist” concerns just this question. While Elia is captivated by what he terms “the imagery of the board” (42), Mrs. Battle despises accidental accouterments. With her “quaker spirit of unsensualizing” (39), she would strip games down to their abstract essence, free of such superfluities as quaint terminology and ornament. Favoring whist for its “grave simplicity,” she would even “have stript it of some appendages, which, in the state of human frailty, may be venially, and even commendably allowed of”—allowed of because, as Elia argues, “Man is not a creature of pure reason” (39). What for Mrs. Battle is simplicity is for Elia brute poverty; stripped of appendages, whist would no longer be whist in his view. Like Burke, he rejects as too reductive “a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction” (89-90). Indeed, Burke's “topos of veils,” as Chandler terms it (xxii), figures significantly in Elian speculations on man and society. “Lear, thrown from his palace, must divest him of his garments, till he answer ‘mere nature’” (131), Elia observes, and yet this same essentializing process in “To the Shade of Elliston” evokes only the dread of insubstantiality underlying Elia's reflections on death in “New Year's Eve”: “But mercy! what strippings, what tearing off of histrionic robes, and private vanities! what denudations to the bone” (189). An absolute concept like “‘mere nature’” makes Elia dizzy as he tries to imagine what cannot be grasped by anything that is not necessarily accidental to its essential being. Whatever our primary nature may be in itself, it cannot even be posited except from the concrete vantage of “this green earth,” clothed in the contingent apparel of its historical emergence. In the “Sanity of True Genius” he argues that while the artist may summon “possible existences” from beyond the scope of nature, “he tames, and he clothes them with attributes of flesh and blood, till they wonder at themselves, like Indian islanders forced to submit to European vesture” (213). But if “Nature” is normative how can these “possible existences” exist beyond its scope, unless it is itself an anterior layer of convention to which further layers are applied by the artist? In effect, these figments of imagination are naturalized to the second nature of the artist's humanity, draped in the accidental “vesture” of convention.

This is not to reject the essential in favor of the accidental, but merely to acknowledge an epistemological/cultural teleology whereby human nature is defined as a process of becoming rather than as a fixed a priori ideal. In “A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis,” Elia observes of the beggars who formerly populated London's streets that “there was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation; as to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man, than to go in livery” (131). While these exemplary figures appeal to “our common nature” (130), however, they do so by defining themselves through the medium of convention—namely, “the Beggar's robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public” (132). In the same way, Elia defines his primary nature from the vantage of a conventional perspective:

The Mendicants of this great city were so many of her sights, her lions. I can no more spare them than I could the Cries of London. No corner of a street is complete without them. They are as indispensable as the Ballad Singer; and in their picturesque attire as ornamental as the Signs of old London. They were the standing morals, emblems, mementos, dial-mottos, the spital sermons, the books for children, the salutary checks and pauses to the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry.

(133)

As callous as this may sound, Elia is merely describing the London beggars in their secondary, conventional aspect. Both aspects, primary and secondary, are “equally natural.” Elia's objection to the “modern fastidiousness” that has swept away these specimens of mendicant pathos is premised on his view of the inextricable relation of the accidental and the essential in human nature—for where are the beggars now? “Were they tied up in sacks, and dropt into the Thames, at the suggestion of B——, the mild Rector of——?” (133). The essential, in its “nakedness and solitude,” can be grasped only from the perspective of the accidental; to treat it reductively is to imperil its very existence (as Burke had more alarmingly warned in his famous counterrevolutionary tract.)

From its penultimate position in Last Essays, “Old China” brings this Elian dialectic into focus. Elia's partiality for old china is long-standing, “of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one” (281). So early an acquisition as to seem innate, indeed, it is a primordial taste amounting almost to an original affinity for “my old friends,” as Elia terms the tiny figures who adorn his china: “I had no repugnance then—why should I now have?—to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that under the notion of men and women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world before perspective—a china cup” (281). In a physical sense, the world of a china cup is indeed “lawless,” as the principles of gravity and optics are not operative here. And yet it is “lawless” in a moral sense as well, for this “world before perspective” is one in which convention and association, bias and habit, all the acquired assumptions by which experience supplements perception, are absent. Like the laws of physics, the laws of mind are null in this sphere, for if these china figures appear to float in the air and step across impossible distances at impossible angles of incidence, they are also uncircumscribed by the historically unfolded distinctions of selfhood: “And here the same lady, or another—for likeness is identity on tea-cups …” (281).¹⁵ But all the while these observations are being made from the perspective of a particular historical condition.

Framed by Elia's meditations on the cold pastoral of antique china is a conversation over tea between Elia and his cousin Bridget about “how favourable circumstances had been to us of late years” (282). Immediately, we move from a “world before perspective” to one in which perspective is the necessary consequence of “circumstances.” As Elia admires the “little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques” on their tea-cups, Bridget yearns for a past when, though poorer, they took more pleasure in infrequent small luxuries, such as a holiday at Enfield or an old folio Elia had sacrificed for—“and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (collating you called it)—and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your patience would not suffer to be left till day-break—was there no pleasure in being a poor man?” (282). In her nostalgia, Bridget would divest Elia and herself of the trappings of their prosperity, the “thousand whim-whams” Elia knows he cannot do without, and return to a state of youthful simplicity. Bridget is not so naive as to yearn for the brute state; her state of nature, like Rousseau's,¹⁶ is a “middle state” between poverty and affluence “in which I am sure we were a great deal happier” (282). Her fallacy lies in thinking that the unconscious, innocent pleasures of this state may be recovered or returned to, that she and Elia are still the simple creatures who once enjoyed such pleasures. She assumes they can shed their present circumstances as if the latter were superfluous to their being, rather than an essential part of what they are. Elia, however, realizes that “we must put up with the excess, for if we were to shake the superflux into the sea, we should not much mend ourselves” (285). Though the past “strengthened, and knit our compact closer” (285), it is from the vantage of the present that this domestic social compact can be accepted as the second nature it has become, much like Elia's ancient affinity for old china. (“I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory,” Elia says in another essay. “We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness” [86]). A necessary precondition for the “perfectness” of an old folio or of the simple pleasures of impecunious youth is the perspective supplied by circumstance—a vantage from which to realize this retrospective “perfectness” in the contextual terms of historical experience.¹⁷ Unlike those “lawless,” absolute entities on tea-cups who exist relative to nothing, Elia and Bridget are the “poor concretions” of contingent circumstance.

“Oxford in the Vacation” opens with a comparison between the suspicious art connoisseur who consults the “quis sculpsit” in the corner to confirm authenticity, and Elia's reader who glances at the bottom of an article and asks: “Who is Elia?” (8). He is a mere “phantom,” according to the Preface to Last Essays, whose “half existence” is the figment of a prose style. While conceding the preciosity of Elia's writings, however—“villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases”—Lamb points out that “they had not been his, if they had been other than such; and better it is, that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him” (171). In one of his Round Table essays, “On Milton's Lycidas,” Hazlitt similarly refutes the charge of artificiality leveled at Milton's classical allusions:

In fact, it is the common cant of criticism to consider every allusion to the classics, and particularly in a mind like Milton's, as pedantry and affectation. Habit is a second nature; and, in this sense, the pedantry (if it is to be called so) of the scholastic enthusiast, who is constantly referring to images of which his mind is full, is as graceful as it is natural. It is not affectation in him to recur to ideas and modes of expression, with which he has the strongest associations, and in which he takes greatest delight.

(4:33)

As Hazlitt recognizes in his portrait of Lamb in The Spirit of the Age, Elia's prose, too, naturally defines itself through “a certain mannerism” (11:182). To affect a “so-called” naturalness would merely be to efface the self, that “second nature” of which Elia himself is a fictional extrapolation. In his tribute to the actor Elliston, then, Elia himself takes to task those who demand to know “‘the real man’”: “Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, whom you cannot, or will not see, under some adventitious trappings, which, nevertheless, sit not at all inconsistently upon him? What if it is the nature of some men to be highly artificial?” (192). Elliston's essential character is “of a piece” insofar as the man cannot be distinguished from the actor, the actor from the part. “With his blended and professional habits alone I have to do,” says Elia; “that harmonious fusion of the manners of the player into those of every day life” (191).

Acting and writing (and reading, for does not Elia claim that “books think for me”?) are among the secondary activities by which we naturalize ourselves to this world. In his preface to The Last Essays of Elia, Lamb suggests that it is not mere egotism “to imply and twine with his own identity the griefs of another—making himself many, or reducing many unto himself” (171): like the “double singleness” he shares with Bridget, Elia and these “many” written expressions of himself are “of a piece” because they represent the disparate appearances of an immanent identity, “adventitious trappings” that constitute, rather than refracting, character. What Elia terms “the goodly ornature of well-apparelled speech” (50) is in fact the constitutive expression of an incrementally-constructed self, a self that, like Sidney's sonnets in Elia's description of them, is “full, material, and circumstantiated” (248). Thus, in his tribute to the old South-Sea House, it is the complicated “interlacings” of entries in obsolete ledgers, “their sums in triple columniation, set down with formal superfluity of cyphers” (3), along with time's further depredations—“layers of dust have accumulated (a superfoetation of dirt!) upon the old layers” (2)—that constitute the being of this venerable institution. Curious visitors who leaf through these ledgers “seeking to unveil some of the mysteries of that tremendous Hoax” (2), the South-Sea Bubble, would denude this aggregate reality of its paradoxically essential “superfluity,” of the “superfoetation” of accidental circumstance that composes it, in pursuit of naked truths assumed to be somehow detachable from their originary context. On the contrary, truth emerges here as an immanent complexity rather than a transcendental simple. “As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can be but truth,” Elia argues elsewhere, “so in the common affirmations of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected. … and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth—oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances, is not required” (72). These circumstances, “many and strange,” which hang about our lives, constitute a historically-emergent medium in which the accidental is constantly qualified into the essential. It was surely this humane nominalism that Coleridge acknowledged in his tribute to Lamb, in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” as one “to whom / No sound is dissonant which tells of Life” (1:181).

Notes

1. William Hazlitt, “On the Periodical Essayists,” The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1932), 6:92.

2. Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989), 17, 46.

3. Thomas McFarland, Romantic Cruxes: The English Essayists and the Spirit of the Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 47; Gerald Monsman, Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer: Charles Lamb's Art of Autobiography (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1984), 17, 16, 56.

4. See in this connection: Bertram Jessup, “The Mind of Elia,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954):246-59; and Joel Haefner, “‘Incondite Things’: Experimentation and the Romantic Essay,” Prose Studies 10 (1987):196-206.

5. Cited in Peter D. Garside, “Scott and the ‘Philosophical’ Historians,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975):508.

6. Cited in S. K. Wertz, “Hume, History, and Human Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975):486.

7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), 403; William Wordsworth, “Written After the Death of Charles Lamb,” The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940-49), 4:273.

8. For two such portraits of Lamb by Carlyle see: Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, ed. C. R. Sanders and K. J. Fielding (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1970), 3:139; Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. C. E. Norton (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1972), 65.

9. While he acknowledges that the “parings” of the clerk's pen are “the beginnings of the author's art,” Monsman argues that “equally, as a verb form, ‘parings’ are the daytime shavings-down of the quill in anticipation of midnight creation” (40), thus implying that the author is finally the true Elia, the quill serving in this reading as a synecdoche for the essential self after the merely adventitious aspects of Elia's life and circumstances have been pared away.

10. Geraldine Pelles, Art, Artists, and Society: Origin of a Modern Dilemma; Painting in England and France, 1750-1850 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 53; Hazlitt, “On Genius and Common Sense,” (8:46). The continuing relevance of this cultural dichotomy has been treated recently by Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Among much else, Herrnstein considers the contradictions inherent in the primitivistic privileging of the “noble savage in terms of putatively natural, universal (‘fundamental’ and ‘endemic’) economic psychology” while at the same time representing “the ugly bourgeois in terms of a local and historically emergent pathology”: Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988), 140-41.

11. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1966), 1.

12. See James Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984).

13. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, ed. Eric Foner and Henry Collins (Markham, Ont.: Penguin, 1984), 65, 268; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (Markham, Ont.: Penguin, 1988), 299.

14. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800),” The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 1:124.

15. In this connection, Jane Aaron draws attention to the china figures' freedom from “conventional frames of representation” such as gender identity, though while her argument emphasizes the subversive aspects of this tendency, it neglects the essay's constructivist counter-argument: A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 186-88.

16. See A. O. Lovejoy, “The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality,” Modern Philology 21 (1923): 165-86.

17. In a chapter entitled “Of Cards and China,” Monsman states that “if in ‘Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist’ Elia argues the need for a process of figuration that frees the mind from the tyranny of external objects and limiting structures, in ‘Old China’ he denies the validity of the opposite process that creates imaginative patterns without any reference to external reality” (99). What Monsman fails to consider, however, is how far the “process of figuration” rejected by Mrs. Battle is a product of the same contingent historical factors that have formed Elia's and Bridget's life together. The ahistorical, flat planes of the world depicted in a china pattern, on the other hand, seem more compatible with the stripped-down essences of Mrs. Battle's reductive philosophy.