SOURCE: Perry, Seamus. “Charles Lamb and the Cost of Seriousness.” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, no. 83 (July 1993): 78-89.

[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture, Perry evaluates Lamb's ironic and idiosyncratic approach to comedy and seriousness in his Elian essays.]

It is a great honour and pleasure to address the Charles Lamb Society; and I am both pleased and surprised by my invitation. Pleased, because it finally forced me to fulfil a promise I had made myself repeatedly for a long time, which was attentively to read again the Elia essays; and surprised, because, as that self-made promise will indicate, I am not a Lambian—Lamb is not, in the brutal terminology of the young aspirant academic, my ‘specialty’. I hardly have the gall to advertise myself to you as a ‘fresh pair of eyes’, for that would carry the quite unwarranted implication that yours are jaded: and your excellent Bulletin provides quarterly evidence that such an implication would be very wide of the mark. But my comparative innocence does lead me to ask myself a question which to the life-long aficionado perhaps is less pressing: what precisely is going on in the Elia essays?

Lamb's essay style and procedure have been frequently, and latterly belittlingly, described as ‘charming’, ‘beguiling’: hardly concepts likely to appeal to the Scrutineer or the cultural materialist. Now, he is certainly fascinated by the ideas of charm and enchantment, and I shall return to these later, for they are present in the Elia essays in ways more interesting than the dismissive critic, or simply charmed admirer, might imply. Crucially, charm for Lamb is closely associated with familiarity, an association which may remind us that prolonged familiarity with a literary work, may come to beguile the reader with a sense of the sheer ‘given-ness’ of a literary style and consciousness. This, I think, is a kind of bad charm: a complete enchantment, one might say, a thing, incidentally, which we rarely find in Elia. One reason why teaching is so fruitful for the literary critic is that it really is salutory to have an undergraduate student produce a confused essay saying how very odd Wordsworth is: because it is an important fact about his imagination, and living too long with him can obscure the fact. From her journals one gets the impression that Dorothy thought her brother not only the best but the most natural of men: it takes the visit of a young De Quincey or Hazlitt to see his strangeness—as Hazlitt, years later, still recalling his response, ‘With what eyes these poets see nature!’¹ In a similar spirit, then, somewhere (I hope) between the befuddled undergraduate and Hazlitt, I am intent on exploring the strangeness of Elia, its capacity to unsettle and perplex, its tendency to disconcert while it beguiles: the limits of its enchantment and of our charmed acceptance of its voice. It is, after all, a response which Lamb anticipates in the second of the essays to be published under the pseudonym: ‘methinks I hear you exclaim, Reader, Who is Elia?’² More to the point perhaps, Why is ‘Elia’?

In his unpublished review of Hazlitt's Table Talk, Lamb distinguished between those essayists who ‘imparted their own personal peculiarities to their themes’ (like Montaigne, Johnson and Hazlitt), and those who ‘substituted for themselves an ideal character’ (like Steele's persona Bickerstaff).³ At once we come across a feature of the Lambian mind which will prove strikingly recurrent: the positing of two, antagonistic, absolute positions, which Lamb himself does not fit into. For while, as Jonathan Bate has argued, Lamb would seem very much to be working with the ‘Bickerstaff principle’ when he invents Elia, it is equally clear that this principle is invoked in so weak a form as to hardly matter. Thus, Jonathan Wordsworth in his introduction to the recent Woodstock facsimile of Elia rejects the notion of ‘twentieth-century criticism’ that Lamb has created a Bickerstaff-like ‘fictional character’ in favour of the ‘simpler and more elegant’ explanation that ‘Lamb marketed himself as a fiction’ (my italics), ‘presenting as fiction experiences and opinions that in no important way deviate from his own’.⁴ And detective work, the monument of which must be Prance's Companion, and the spur to which must be the ‘key’ Lamb prepared for his friend Pitman, only tends to show how close were the ‘real’ Lamb and the ‘ideal’ Elia. In a headnote in the Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Bloom and Trilling remark, rather warily perhaps, of ‘Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’, that ‘Lamb plays a curious game of identities’, before going on, with what seems like some relief, to notice that ‘as the essay proceeds, the “I” becomes Lamb himself’.⁵ Lamb is himself again. It is, at best, a moot point about the ‘Christ's Hospital’ essay (for where precisely does he become himself again?); but when the ‘ideal character’ is so nearly at one with the ‘real’, effectively so to deny the importance of the ‘ideal’ self altogether is always a tempting solution, if one is impatient of that Elian ‘curious game of identities’.

But I do not want to dwell on the long over-chewed question of ‘Elia’ versus ‘Lamb’: I am rather more interested in the portrayal of self-hood and consciousness in the essays, of which the puzzles of Elia versus Lamb are an expression, but not the most interesting or subtle. Here that word ‘game’, used by Bloom and Trilling, leads me toward my title. For another way of thinking about the distinctly odd way Lamb writes himself an identity and a self-hood—and the way I want to approach the subject today—is to ask if it is ‘serious’.

The question looks at once slightly forbidding (for what on earth does ‘serious’ mean?) and more than somewhat absurd. One of the complaints often made about modern ‘lit. crit.’ is its blithe capacity to ignore a thing so simply vulgar and archaic as one's ‘enjoyment’ of an author; and if the reader enjoys the essays of Elia, then my question will seem, and quite rightly, the sort of thing practitioners of ‘lit. crit.’ do too often: invoking criteria at once heavy-handed and quite beside the point. Yet, for all that, the idea of ‘seriousness’ certainly plays an important role in the literary tradition which we usually think of as extending from the ‘romantics’—Lamb's lifetime, and indeed to a large extent his circle—down to the present day. So the equivocal, and even marginalised, presence of Lamb in the literary thinking of this tradition might invite us to look more closely at the relationship between the Elian literary consciousness and what we might go so far as to call the modern ‘tradition of seriousness’—for it is, generally speaking, the odd figures who don't easily fit in which often give us the best chance of understanding the unstated assumptions behind a kind of thinking.

But I should begin by offering some illustrations of literary life within what I have called the ‘tradition of seriousness’. We are all over-familiar with the reviewer's praise for a new novel or play, that it is ‘profoundly serious’: and ‘seriousness’ often comes to the rescue of an old work which we might have thought of, wrongly, as comic or frivolous. Peter Brook's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, say, would leave its audience in no doubt that an intrinsic ‘seriousness’ had finally been brought to the surface; and F. R. Leavis, famously, excepted Hard Times from his general (early) disapproval of Dickens, on the grounds that it was the single novel to achieve the ‘seriousness’ of morally intelligent art. The Leavisite benchmark is, of course, inherited from Arnold's criterion for literary evaluation, ‘high seriousness’; but the post-structuralist critic Paul de Man, otherwise a million miles from Arnold and Leavis, invokes his own version of the idea when he discriminates between works and readings on the basis of their ‘rigour’. In what we are told is a post-modern age, it might be said, critics have a professional interest in works which exemplify the supposedly authenticating merits of arbitrariness and play: but there is rarely any doubt that the ‘play’ is in deadly earnest. Comedy can be its own, often rather grim, version of profound seriousness: and when a new introduction tell us that Crime and Punishment is a richly comic novel, we are in little doubt about the precise kind of comedy which the critic has in mind.

If Lamb has fallen foul of what I have called the ‘tradition of seriousness’, this is due in no small part to Lamb himself: as Edmund Blunden said in his Clark Lectures of 1932, ‘nobody has been more ingenious in professing unimportance than Lamb, except Lear's Fool’.⁶ Blunden's comparison is probably prompted by a memory of the likeness drawn by Haydon in his account of the ‘immortal dinner’, where the ‘exceedingly merry’ Lamb's ‘fun in the midst of Wordsworth's solemn intonations of oratory was like the sarcasm and wit of the fool in the intervals of Lear's passion’.⁷ And it would not be so unfair to say more generally that, like Lear's fool, Lamb himself mysteriously disappears from the plot of English romanticism in our critical accounts, centred as they are about the towering, tragic heroism of Wordsworth.

But the role of a fool in a tragedy is not simply a light relief and a structural irrelevance: a perception for which we are largely indebted to Lamb himself, who was keenly alert to those odd hybrids of genre which lent to Malvolio ‘a kind of tragic interest’ (p. 155) and who lamented the disappearance with Kemble of tragedy's incongruous but vital ‘relaxing levities’ (p. 168). The Shakespearean fool Elia is most closely associated with is not Lear's nameless attendant, but Hamlet's Yorick—specifically, the garrulously sentimental and covertly self-portraying Yorick created by Sterne.⁸ Elia laments that it would need the ‘pen of Yorick’ to draw his cousin ‘par excellence’ James ‘entire’ (p. 81). For Yorick's pen, as imagined by Sterne, has its own kind of licensed foolery, which is a license to speak with a kind of comprehensive freedom, even an endlessly digressive one: and it is a license that comes from being thought a fool, from not being ‘serious’. Jonathan Bate has ingeniously ventured that ‘Lamb himself might be seen as Yorick, jester to the arch-Romantic Coleridge and Hazlitt, who self-consciously identified themselves as Hamlet-figures’ (p. xv). And the implications of this happy formulation might be pressed further, even if their direction seems initially odd. One might, for instance, point out the odd fact that the Hamlet Coleridge and Hazlitt identify themselves with is, obviously enough, the play's introspective, meditative, doomed hero, by which stage, notoriously, Yorick is dead, long dead, his only presence being the unearthing of the rather gruesomely literal memento mori of his disembodied skull. I shall leave this with you for the moment as a riddle to be cleared up: which I shall at once compound by suggesting that perhaps it is better to think, not of Lamb as Yorick to Coleridge's Hamlet, but of Elia as Yorick to Lamb's.

Before returning to Elia and the elucidation of this currently cryptic suggestion, I want to make a short detour into an apparently quite dissimilar area, so as to provide some kind of context for this idea of ‘seriousness’ which I have introduced. As I have said, it is the figures who do not easefully fit into our critical categories who offer the best opportunity of questioning those categories, and upon the issue of literary ‘seriousness’ a number of modern writers might be chosen. Betjeman would be one; but I want briefly to invoke W. H. Auden. There is, as far as I know, no evidence of much enthusiasm on Auden's part for Lamb; indeed, bearing in mind his nominal anti-romanticism, it should be surprising if there were. Nevertheless, there are, I think, genuine points of kinship between Lamb and Auden, not of ‘influence’ perhaps, but of analogy, which derive from their shared resistance to the tradition of seriousness. Auden's progress from early ‘committed’, theoretically informed poetry to his late belief in the gratuity and ultimate frivolity of art led to his marginalisation, wrought, revealingly, by the same kind of critics who were displeased by Lamb: Scrutiny, the champions of high-modernism, and those critics who might be best characterised by their insistence on the importance of the artist's engagement with ‘reality’.

The great charge to be made against Auden, as against Lamb, is one of a kind of aestheticism, a romantic ‘escapism’: lack of seriousness means being too much ‘imaginative’, too much ‘literature’: while, in the words of Lionel Trilling's mythical realist, ‘in a time like this what we need is reality in large doses’⁹—as Elia acknowledges tragedy to need ‘the absolute sense of reality’ (p. 160). Thus Arnold approves of Wordsworth on the grounds that his poetry is so ‘real’ that it is written by nature itself, and becomes replete with all the substantial, existential concreteness of a stone, a ‘touchstone’. For ‘reality’, idol of the tradition of seriousness, is, like a stone, obdurate and hard and external. Since Peacock, the complaint that literature ‘internalises’, that it represents a kind of retreat into a state of spurious archaic innocence, has been a leading weapon of attack. It has recently received a fresh sharpening in the arsenals of the New Historicists who identify this fake resolution of the problems of reality on the level of the ideal and internal as the ‘romantic ideology’, the result being the charge that the romantics wrote the wrong kind of poetry. So, instead of writing about the destitute poor who inhabited the ruins of Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth wrote about ideal images and memory: the point being that the destitute poor are ‘real’, and so a proper subject, while the ideal spaces of memory and consciousness are ‘literary’. A common accusation is that a critic has ‘privileged literature’: an odd remark, as Jonathan Culler has said,¹⁰ for one cannot imagine a physicist being accused of ‘privileging physics’, but clearly this anxious scruple about ‘reality’ is responsible. Auden's characterisation of poetry as a pure ‘verbal contraption’, as a matter of ‘halcyon structures’ which ‘make nothing happen’, happily summarises the realist's objection. The ‘purity’ of the verbalism is accompanied by a ‘purity’ of effect, as Auden likens the poem, or the art world, to a kind of Utopia or Eden, a pre-lapsarian innocence which has its ancestor in Elia's characterisation of the artificial comedy as an ‘impertient Goshen’ (p. 164)—Goshen, you will recall, being ‘the enclosed garden left to fallen man by a compassionate God’.¹¹ Pater's praise for Lamb's awareness of the ‘pure sense of words’ suggests the critical opinion which, inherited by the modern period, marked down Elia. To write of dreams, apparently to align oneself with a later aestheticism which held that ‘words alone are certain good’, to be praised by Swinburne and Pater and—the kiss of death—Arthur Symons, put Lamb too clearly on the wrong side. The innocence of the aesthetic is a kind of wishful-thinking, a bad enchantment: it is a form of consolation, and to the modern realist mind, as Iris Murdoch memorably remarked, ‘all consolation is fake’. And while Wordsworth and others have had their protracted rehabilitation, usually on the grounds that read rightly they too manifest the fakeness of consolation, I sense that Lamb as yet has not: witness the relief of the Oxford Anthology editors when (supposedly) he at last becomes a chronicler of actual times again—times with the additional virtue of including Coleridge.

Stephen Spender, like most of Auden's Oxford contemporaries, tended to take Auden very seriously indeed. One incident, recounted in Spender's autobiography,¹² features Auden exasperated at Spender's eagerness to reform his character in line with Auden's typically categorical criticisms of it: ‘Why do you take me seriously?’ asks Auden, ‘What's so awful in this country is that people will take one seriously’. This, Spender continues, very seriously, is typical of what he calls Auden's ‘serious-non-seriousness’, a puzzling but useful formulation which might imply the friction created by Auden and, in an analogous way, Lamb, within the tradition of seriousness. For it is not that they are relentlessly frivolous, nor empty-headedly trivial, but that they occupy a kind of borderland between the light- hearted (the ephemeral essay, ‘light verse’) and what Stephen Dedalus calls the ‘deeply deep’. It is such a borderland, of course, which the ‘true Caledonian’ cannot grasp: ‘He cannot compromise, or understand middle actions’ (p. 69), while ‘middle emotions’ (p. 161) are the stuff of the kind of artificial comedy Elia celebrates, and the spirit of which he emulates.

On the face of it, nothing should be easier than to import into Elia an interpretative theory, which would stiffen its exiguous fancy into that cogent deployment of material in the service of a prevailing ‘view of life’ which we expect of the ‘serious’ artist who has a line on ‘reality’. It is not as if there aren't many possibilities: myths of the fall, testaments to the Imagination, the dark workings of the Electra complex. But such interpretations, by treating the essays as ingenious codes to be ‘cracked’, inevitably miss the full subtlety of the equivocations of identity which Lamb's imagination thrives upon, and which we are highlighted for us by his half-creation, the ‘half-reality’ (p. 166), ‘Elia’. In an influential and meticulously argued essay, Donald Reiman offers the suggestion that by creating Elia, and thus ‘ironically understating his conclusions’, Lamb could avoid ‘all trace of the “mental bombast” that, according to Coleridge, occasionally marred Wordsworth's poems of high seriousness’ as he moved from ‘everyday events and trivial opinions’ to ‘larger philosophical issues’.¹³ Reiman makes his case with exemplary clarity; but one wonders whether the essay encouraged less subtle critics to take Lamb's ‘irony’ too much as simply a piece of persuasive rhetorical strategy—achieving ‘high seriousness’ without the embarassments of their solemnly excessive statements—which seems a rather Caledonian kind of irony, making of it a singularly (I use the word advisedly) undangerous figure; and moreover, it asks us to take Lamb's ‘philosophy’, his ‘view of reality’, as the message which this ironic technique is going to carry across. Of course, one may point out Lamb's anti-mechanism, his hatred of excessive rationalism, all the uncontentious bogeymen of what Leavis called Benthamo-technologism, but it hardly amounts, to my mind, to much in the way of an interesting or particularly novel ‘philosophy’.

At points in his essay, perhaps, Reiman might be misinterpreted as taking Lamb with an almost Spenderian seriousness. His case is characteristically rigorous and water-tight; but to redeem Lamb by reclaiming him as part, albeit a paradoxical part, of the good old tradition of seriousness is to risk a certain incongruity when faced with the reality of Elia. Reiman himself is far too sharp a critic not to anticipate this danger, and registers his own scrupulous qualifications to this approach: for the good critic must recognise some sense of its misfitting, which is, I think, an indication of a tonal equivocation at work in the essays. Like Auden's poems, they operate a ‘serious non-seriousness’, which is difficult to conceptualise, but which, as this Society and its young sister The W. H. Auden Society exemplifies, exerts a curious fascination—a fascination (and this might give us a clue) which is as much with the ‘personality’ as with the work. (Alone amongst the moderns Auden has had a number of volumes of his ‘table talk’ published.)

If, for the modern realist, the opposite of ‘reality’ is at once ‘literature’ and the ‘internal’, it is to the twin matters of language and the literary consciousness that we might turn to explore the ‘serious non-seriousness’ of Elia. Like Auden, Elia speaks in absolutes. Both Bridget and Elia are ‘inclined to be a little too positive’ (p. 87); ‘I like fish or flesh,’ he tells us, expressing his dislike of ‘half-convertites’ (p. 71); similarly of people who ‘meet Time half-way’ (p. 83); ‘I love town, or country; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither’ (p. 206). The delightfulness of beggars is that they represent a pure, incomparable absolute, ‘not in the scale of comparison’ (p. 132), entirely themselves. Yet at the same time, his defence of the artificial comedy is based upon an account of their characters' ‘half-reality’ (p. 164); his taxonomy of mankind into borrowers and lenders is soon mixed up by the emotive subject of books; and Elia is even placed in the position of moderating the formidable Mrs Battle's absolutism, which has led to a hatred of ‘half and half players’ (p. 37). So, like Auden also, his categorical temper not only contradicts itself in its statements from time to time, but isn't even consistently absolute. ‘Imperfect Sympathies’ is a fine example of the extraordinary, comic oddity of Elian logic: an essay which categorically assigns to racial types their prevailing faults, includes at greatest length the Caledonian, whose faults amount to precisely the categorical absolutism which Elia's own essay exemplifies. Elia is, in the phrase he uses of himself when wandering by Shandyan mischance into a discussion of ecclesiastical policy, (deliberately) ‘wading out of my depths’ (p. 10). One form being out of his depths takes is his confession that his own mind or behaviour utterly disproves the absolute categories which he has just established. This is a very common form of the essays, and often a very funny one: a hard rule is proposed which Elia promptly exempts himself from, the humour of this forming a kind of running implicit parody of the ‘confessions’ genre. ‘Grace Before Meat’ establishes with almost Ruskinian emphasis a chastening philosophy:

I hear somebody exclaim,—Would you have Christians sit down at table, like hogs at their troughs, without remembering the Giver?—no—I would have them sit down as Christians, remembering the Giver, and less like hogs.

(p. 106)

But, after praising what seems set to be the exemplary moderation of Quakers at dinner, we find: ‘I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it’ (p. 108), a wonderful euphemistic phrase since we learn from a further confession that even badly melted butter (‘that commonest of kitchen failures’, p. 108) drives our narrator into a rage.

On the subject of appetite, the eulogy of the roast pig contains a fine example of this technique in miniature: Elia is celebrating his own sympathetic generosity, as a general principle of his character, before the typical last-minute qualification is registered:

Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chickens (those ‘tame villatic fowl’), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, ‘give everything’. I make my stand upon pig.

(p. 142)

Elia, you notice, turns to Lear's exemplary folly, and draws the same moral from it as Lear's Fool. King Lear is a play about absolutes, the absolutes of ‘nothing’ (‘Nothing will come of nothing’) and of ‘everything’ (‘give everything’)—indeed, a play of such extremism, that Lamb famously judged it impossible to play, not just because of its enormously demanding emotional range, but for the interesting reason that the drama is, really, an internal one: ‘It is his mind which is laid bare’.¹⁴

The fascination of King Lear, then, is its portrayal of absolute states of mind and experience, which, in their joking way, is what the Essays of Elia are also about. But where King Lear is ‘hard and stony’,¹⁵ and has, we might say, the full ‘absolute sense of reality’, feels the full ‘pressure of reality’ (p. 162), Elia exemplifies the device which its author finds in artificial comedy: a ‘perpetual sub-insinuation’ (p. 185), ‘a sort of sub-reference’ (p. 186) alerting us to the work of an artificer. We experience not the stony stuff of reality, as in Lear or in Arnold's Wordsworth, but the performance of its dramatic representation: in Elia's words, which are almost Wallace Stevens's, ‘a likeness only is going on, and not the thing itself’ (p. 186). This kind of device we might call ‘ironic’: but we see that it is not being used as an ingenious cover under which the message of an Elian ethos is smuggled; rather more interestingly, it gives Lamb a kind of figurative mask, or a necessary psychological conviction of artifice and ‘literariness’, within which a deep and often tragic sense of the individual, isolated consciousness in time can feel excused and unembarrassed in expressing itself. By setting Elia playing at confessing trivialities, Lamb covertly confesses, by creating in writing, a deeply elegiac, poignant and solitary selfhood; it is a kind of presentation of the self under the guise of dramatic representation. Shakespeare's inspired brilliance in Lear's Fool is that he never stops acting as a Fool: it has been his life-long idiom; yet it is one which allows him to ‘tell truth’ as no-one else in the play can so persistingly. As another Fool says (a phrase which Auden took for a poem title), ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’. Hamlet himself, in some ways, occupies the place of the fool in Elsinore, and embodies the principle that by indirections one may find directions out; and so Lamb, with his Yorick, Elia, who is, as Yoricks are, dead¹⁶—like Hamlet, Lamb elegises his dead Fool. Elia, we recall, praised fools for what he calls their ‘honest obliquity’—a phrase which, as I take it, could serve as the imaginative motto for the whole volume.

Let me now say what I think Lamb is confessing: not, I hasten to add, a body in the library, some hidden, all-informing secret, like matricide, but what we might call an unhappy consciousness. Several critics have encouraged us to look at the Elia essays as prose versions of the Coleridgean conversation poem; this is a great insight into their manifest structure; but also, I think, to their internal, or dramatic structure. For Coleridge's conversational poems, while preoccupied with the inclusiveness of the Unitarian One Life, in fact dramatise his own exclusion from that Life, an exclusion and solitariness which is heightened to the nightmare of the Ancient Mariner, and leads to the full confessional mode of the Dejection Ode. Lamb has some claim to have at least half-invented the conversation poems, in that his advice to Coleridge to keep the language simple was crucial. The tradition of late eighteenth-century verse of sensibility, of gentle moralisings of the landscape such as we find in Bowles's sonnets, is where both Coleridge and Lamb himself start as writers; but the mode is perfected by Coleridge, and it is not until Elia that Lamb finds his alternative, very far from an aesthetic of sincere simplicity, in a kind of defensively ironised confessional mode, while Coleridge moves on to his extraordinary career of metaphysician and aesthetician, systemising structures of inclusion and completeness from which he is left out.

To set up absolute categories from which you are excluded, even if the categories are funny and the exclusion delightfully whimsical—to deal in absolutes while characterising yourself as a half-creature—to create your own double-self—to be a writer in the double mode of irony, a practitioner of serious non-seriousness—all this is to re-enact a kind of Coleridgean solitariness, to be (as Lamb writes in a letter) ‘in a manner marked’, to be, as Coleridge recognised, ‘a soul set apart’. Wordsworth can see himself set apart to be a chosen son; but such sanguine optimism is hardly available for Coleridge, nor Lamb.

Coleridge, we might say, generalising wildly, displaces his desires for unity and completeness into an idea of poetry, which he expects from Wordsworth, but never sees realised. Lamb's myths of belonging are more mundane; and might be represented by the picture at the end of ‘Mrs Battle's Opinions on Whist’, where Elia and Bridget sit playing an endless game of cards. Enchantment comes with familiarity, the power of charm exerted by familiar things, old familiar faces; and for Lamb, as ‘Dream Children’ makes poignantly clear, the self-consoling enchantment of repeating the familiar has its existence in the context of ‘family’. One needn't restrictively interpret the essays as endless variations on Mary's matricide to grasp that family, for Lamb, is a site at once of enchantment and of catastrophe; and that enchantment is characterised by its doom, and has the taste of its morbidity. This is what I mean by saying, earlier, that enchantment in Elia is never simply the piling of ‘honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness’ (p. 46): Bridget and Elia play a game that ‘means nothing’, boasts merely ‘shadows of winning’, where the players gain ‘nothing’ and lose ‘nothing’ in ‘a mere shade of play’ (p. 43); just as, in the reverence-inspiring ‘cessation’ offered by the South Sea House, Elia paced the rooms to meet ‘the shade of some dead accountant’ (p. 2). And, similarly, the admirable, Quixotic librarian, R——, wanders among customers, ‘extinct, bed-rid, [who] have ceased to read long ago’ (p. 50).

We realise, with some more than mild surprise, that intwined in the description of the card game's enchanted stasis is the language of a much less obviously charming stasis: the stasis of death. The quiet household of the familiar charm, Lamb's mild version of Keats's rather more frenetic ‘Temple of Delight’, at once contains the shrine of her darker sister, melancholy: but the cohabitation is much less difficult than the rather crowded homelife of Keats's temple, for death itself comes to figure as the agent and guarantor of the romance of stasis. ‘James White is extinct’ (p. 130) is poignant, but also a mark of his true wonder: ‘He carried away with him half the fun of the world when he died—of my world at least … the glory of Smithfield departed for ever’ (p. 130). This is a Shakespearean nostalgia: of Lafew in All's Well, an old man lamenting a modern world where ‘They say miracles are past’, or, indeed, the end of Lear, but with the experiences of the past turned from explicit tragedy to a more involuted and internalised sense of the sheer charm of pastness: ‘we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long’. In a sense, then, far from immortalising the forgettable, as he might be claimed to do, Lamb could be said to cherish a transformation into immortal ideal already effected by their various kinds of death. The problem with children, as Elia engagingly argues, is that they are so recalcitrantly alive: they ‘have a real character and an essential being of themselves: they are amiable or unamiable per se’, and in this differ from the inanimate, which can ‘receive whatever hue fancy can give it’. And amongst the list of inanimate objects, that queer, characteristic, strange variation in tone: ‘a watch or a ring, a tree, or the place where we last parted when my friend went away upon a long absence’ (p. 147).

For Coleridge, the possibility of belonging, to the One Life, to the Utopian Pantisocracy, to the Wordsworth household, is associated with his capacity to be a poet; and having been a poet, but now finding one's ‘proper element is prose’ (p. 80), is important for Lamb too, though in a different way. For I think we might see the Elia essays as themselves written in a kind of equivocal mode: not the brilliantly familiar essay-style of Hazlitt, yet not the mind-baring mode of the personal lyric. They are, if you like, wonderful ‘poems manqué’, a point made with beautifully self-deprecating comedy in the failed poetic vision he details in ‘Witches, and other Night Fears’. Yet, in this comedy of misfitting, of being ‘out of my depths’, they are far from the settled verbalism of that always slightly precious genre, the ‘prose-poem’, for the poetic mode they invoke but decline in the courage of their whimsy is elegy. ‘Elia’, to my ear at least, carries the echo of ‘elegist’.

The very first essay, ‘The South-Sea House’, is an elegy to ‘the dusty dead, in whom common qualities become uncommon’ (p. 6), and which ends with Elia reflecting, as a lyricist, that ‘Much remains to sing’ (p. 7). The last, and saddest portrait is of poor ‘M—’, ‘mild, child-like, pastoral M—’, singing ‘Arcadian melodies’ worthy of Shakespeare. The song Elia singles out is from As You Like It: and its citation carries, in miniature, the full, allusive drama of Lamb's covert confession. ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind, / Thou art not so unkind, As man's ingratitude’ is sung, by a Fool, to a Duke who has been exiled; it is one of many striking and unexpected parallels that persist between the comedy and King Lear; and Elia, singing of ‘M—’, alludes to the greatest of all elegies in English, with that characteristic, and for Lamb enabling, mixture of poignancy and incongruity, the common made uncommon: ‘Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew / Himself to sing’. At the end of ‘Ellistoniana’, Elia notes that ‘For thee the Pauline muses weep. In elegies, that shall silence this crude prose, they shall celebrate thy praise’ (p. 195). It is a device of reticence, perfected in Gray's ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat’, and Cowper's animal elegies (it is also, by the way, used memorably by Auden in his elegy to ‘Lucina, / Blue-eyed Queen of white cats’): it is to be slightly ridiculous about the paraphernalia of elegiac convention as a way of obliquely expressing, and persuading us of, genuine feeling. It is, in fact, a marvellous example of how ‘mental bombast’, which is defined by Coleridge as ‘thoughts and images too great for the subject’, can in fact be a device of great subtlety and tact: indeed, one might venture, reconceived in this way, it might be seen as Lamb's principal method.

It is also, one might add, itself a device of acute, if odd, realism, for it is closely associated with normal social embarassment, the ‘honest obliquity’ of ordinary language, memorably exemplified by Lamb's extravagant praise for Cottle's much-abused epic, Alfred, in an attempt to console the poet upon the death of his brother. He writes to Coleridge, ‘Was I a Candied Greyhound now for all this? or did I do right? I believe I did’.¹⁷ In ‘candied’, reproof for telling a sugary lie, lurks ‘candid’, praise for the decency of a kind of honest rightness. Just so with Elia's ‘candied’ prose.

Elia gives us his own version of Lycidas, with a suitably jokey comic resolution, in ‘Amicus Redivivus’: yet even here, with elegy invoked and deferred, the essay ends with an image of the anticipated pleasure of the Elysian company, old Askew expecting the arrival of G.D. at any moment: ‘to welcome into that happy company the matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself upon earth had so prophetically fed and watered’ (p. 242). To have the word ‘watered’ at the end of an account of a near-drowning is ingenious and funny: ‘water’, one could say, is conceptually transformed in tune with the comedy from danger to nurturer; but more than this, to mention the fatal element is also a priceless piece of Elia's carefully dramatised wrongness, saying words ‘out of season’. The incompetence of Elia's prose stabs at elegy masquerades Lamb's abiding sense of loss. And loss is mysteriously equivocal: perhaps we could say that, in a sense, for Elia it is the best of things—his native ground is the old places of friends ‘away upon a long absence’, and if they live on, they tend to be, like dear G.D., ‘the most absent of men’ (p. 12). (One hesitates to make too much of the fact that the exemplary G.D.'s name is ‘Dyer’, but it surely couldn't have escaped Lamb's eye for puns. He is a dier who doesn't die, who gives the opportunity for elegy, while having the goodness to live on, unchanged.) Pater's praise for Lamb, that he works ‘ever close to the concrete’,¹⁸ seems to me, then, quite spectacularly wide of the mark, despite Elia's own declaration of love for this ‘green earth’ (p. 34). For while he delights in idiosyncrasy, and chastises the author of Religio Medici for preferring ‘notional and conjectural essences’ to the ‘poor concretions of mankind’ (p. 67), Lamb's own imagination tends in something like the same direction. The essays are full of celebrated absences: it is awful to see Lear's ‘concretion’ on stage, or Othello's in a print (p. 264); and the singular absence of being dead is something like the very mark of wonder and worth. Being absent can seem more real than being present; and the child's mind, for whom a fear is strong ‘in proportion as it is objectless upon earth’ (p. 78), shows absence to be the very stuff (if ‘stuff’ is the right word) of the poetic imagination.

I find a deep covert elegy on Lamb's part in Elia's delight in such whimsical transformations, such fanciful making-the-best of death: most poignantly, Elizabeth, Elia's sister, dies in infancy, to be replaced by the faithful stasis of Bridget; but, more mysteriously affecting, Lamb's elegy for his father, disguised amongst other recollections, as Elia's lament for Lovel: ‘I knew this Lovel’ (p. 100), an affect which seems only partially accounted for by its allusion: ‘I knew him, Horatio’. To grieve in a persona has a curious, self-protectively duplicitous poignancy, and a kind of honest humanness.

For feeling in the Elia essays is a more intricate and human mixture of playfulness and hurt than might appear. ‘The Bachelor's Complaint’, delightfully funny, is underwritten by a real sense of awful, mundane social agony and a kind of self-hatred at ‘the absurd attempt to visit at their houses’ (p. 149); as ‘Valentine's Day’, out of nowhere, moves its tone strikingly from the fancy of the girl receiving a fairy present of a card, to the curt assertion, ‘It would do her no harm’ (p. 66). For there is, I think, a permanent, if covert, sense that harm may indeed always be done, a sense which is marked by these marvellous swerves in tone. At the end of ‘Distant Correspondents’, following a quotation from Lycidas, Elia writes, simply, ‘Come back’ (p. 123); which I can best gloss by what might be thought of as Auden's re-write of that essay, ‘Night-Mail’, which, after a wonderfully playful and enchanting portrait of the mail train, ends, quite incongruously, ‘For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?’¹⁹

When the Elysian company prepares to welcome G.D., it is his old teacher who Elia singles out; when Elliston lies dying, he reverts to his classical education, ‘connecting the man with the boy’ (p. 195); and this connection of the elegiac with the theme of childhood reminds us of that other great English elegy (a paradoxical one, for it doesn't present itself as an elegy at all), Wordsworth's Immortality Ode; and it is with some remarks on this matter that I wish to come towards my end. There are some comic allusions: of the dire Scotsman, pedantically unpacking his treasured opinions, says Elia, ‘His riches are always about him’ (p. 68), a witty parody of Wordsworthian boyhood, when treasure of a quite different ‘heaven lies about us’, only to disappear with age; and, Elia's delightfully improbable theory that the sweep who fell asleep in the grand house's bed carried some vestigial memory of an intrinsic nobility is a jokey version of the Wordsworthian child's pre-natal knowledge, which is also offered with some irreverence as an explanation for the power of insubstantial childhood dreams: ‘a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence’ (p. 78).

But more serious work is done with the Ode. So great is the charm of pastness, almost pastness per se, that of Elia's life, although marked by his defrauding of a rightful inheritance (the theme of ancestry and the proper inheritances of the past recurs in Elia), he says, ‘I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel’ (p. 32). The tragic analogy to Elia's belief in the diverting plot of his life, is Wordsworth's insistence in the Ode that everything is for the best, despite the palpable tonal commitment of the poem towards self-elegy. Elia's Valentines may bring the modest consolation of being remembered, ‘eternal common-places, which “having been will always be”’ (p. 65): it is a delicately secularised version of Wordsworth's more religious experience of ‘primal sympathy / Which having been must ever be’, but one which carries the same, anxious equivocation between trust and need in ‘must’. The Inner Temple has become ‘common and profane’ (p. 97), where once, as for Wordsworth, ‘every common sight / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light’. For both, growth has become a kind of decline, though, characteristically, Elia's mocks his own change by echoing Snout's cry to Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream (‘O Bottom, thou art chang'd!’): ‘God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed!’ (p. 33). Elia, however, has no illusions about the merits of the ‘philosophic mind’: returning to the theatre after the enchantment of his first play, he remarks, ‘I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist’ (p. 114). Elia is ‘a stupid changeling of five-and-forty’ (p. 33), an ‘other me’ (p. 32); one who, like Wordsworth, adopts his own childhood self, ‘my own early idea, as my heir and favourite’ (p. 33), because adult Elia has become a kind of ‘nothing’, a bundle of recollected absences. Elia, then, has his own, important, uniquely serio-comic, place amongst a tradition of romantic autobiographers, for whom self-examination is tantamount to self-elegising; and with the additional richness that it is precisely the ‘common place’, the domestic situation in which a life of social community prevails and includes, a ‘common place’ which one might have expected to inherit, which has been denied.

Finally, what of my title, which your Bulletin advertised, quite properly, as ‘slightly mystifying’? Admirers of the Anglo-Australian poet Peter Porter would not, maybe, have been so mystified, for it is the title of one of his most striking and moving of poems, a poem incidentally greatly influenced by the later Auden's voice, in which he ponders the possibilities of writing elegy, and the idea of seriousness with which I have tried to bring Lamb into genuine if ironic relationship.²⁰ ‘The cost of seriousness will be death’, Porter writes—a kind of death, that is, to the writer; and this is because the ‘words can't help’, they ‘self-destruct’. And this is why, instead of such earnest pursuit, ‘the artist must play’. The writer cannot by any other means come ‘closer to my goal / of doing without words, that / pain may be notated some real way’. Doubtless not; and perhaps elegies, like Porter's poem, can only ever talk of the impossibility of being a full elegy. You would need the pen of Yorick to give the portrait entire. But Lamb shows us, I think, as does the Auden whom Porter follows, the dramatic and human possibilities of an ‘honest obliquity’. Without making a Beckettian self-destructive commitment to the stony realities of death, a writer can find himself able, and his reader moved, to bestow on the airy nothings of absence a local habitation and a name; and this is, I think, what the Elia essays so subtly do, thus registering, in the last words of Porter's elegy-which-cannot-be-an-elegy, that ‘The dead may pass / their serious burdens to the living’, even—perhaps especially—when, the dead ancestors include among their number oneself. Lamb's achievement is to show that those serious burdens, of love and delight, may be best assumed by a voice apparently disavowing seriousness altogether.

Notes

1. ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’; in Romantic Poetry and Prose [The Oxford Anthology of English Literature] ed. Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling (New York, 1973) (hereafter Bloom and Trilling), p. 703.

2. Elia and The Last Essays of Elia ed. Jonathan Bate (Oxford, 1987), p. 8. References to this text are hereafter incorporated in parentheses.

3. Lamb as Critic ed. Roy Park (London, 1980) (hereafter Park), p. 300.

4. Jonathan Wordsworth, Introduction to Charles Lamb, Elia 1823 (Spelsbury, 1991).

5. Bloom and Trilling 659.

6. Charles Lamb and his Contemporaries (Cambridge, 1933), p. 4.

7. David Cecil, A Portrait of Charles Lamb (London, 1983), p. 138.

8. Petrie notes that ‘the character of Parson Yorick is an idealized portrait of Sterne himself’ (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Gentleman ed. Graham Petrie, introduction by Christopher Ricks (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 617n47.7. Elia, in a much more intricately self-protective and teasingly ironical way, has something of the same relationship to Lamb. (I am grateful to Duncan Wu, of St Catherine's College, Oxford, for drawing my attention to this illuminating parallel.)

9. The Liberal Imagination (Oxford, 1981), p. 202.

10. Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Oxford, 1988), p. 57.

11. James Scoggins, ‘Images of Eden in the Essays of Elia’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 71 (1972) 198-210, p. 202.

12. World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender (London, 1951), pp. 299-300.

13. ‘Thematic Unity in Lamb's Familiar Essays’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64 (1965) 470-8, p. 471.

14. Park 96.

15. Park 96-7.

16. Sterne's version of himself in the figure of Yorick, too, is barely mentioned before being killed off and elegised in the device of a black memorial page (Tristram Shandy, pp. 61-2).

17. To Coleridge, 9 October 1800; The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb ed. Edwin J. Marrs, Jr. (3 vols., Ithaca, NY, 1975-8), i. 240.

18. ‘Charles Lamb’, Walter Pater: Selected Works ed. Richard Aldington (London, 1948), p. 69.

19. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems ed. Edward Mendelson (London, 1976), p. 114.

20. Peter Porter, The Cost of Seriousness (Oxford, 1978), pp. 30-1.