SOURCE: Natarajan, Uttara. “‘A Soul Set Apart’: Lamb and the Border-Land of Imaginative Experience.” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, no. 75 (July 1991): 85-92.

[In the following essay, Natarajan emphasizes Lamb's use of the outsider's perspective in his essays.]

On the 27th September, 1796, Lamb wrote to Coleridge to tell him that

my poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp.¹

Coleridge responds with suitably solemn and exalted religious consolation, offering, among other sentiments, the following observation upon his friend's condition following the catastrophe:

I look upon you as a man called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God.²

Coleridge is quick to predict a familiar tragic pattern for Lamb's story—it is the classical pattern of an Oedipus or an Orestes estranged by catastrophe, i.e. condemned by the awfulness of an experience so far beyond the ordinary that they must henceforth remain permanently outside it. In this way, the tragic protagonist becomes the inhabitant of a limbo or twilight world, irrevocably removed from the mainstream social community, even while he seems to remain nominally attached to it. In the Greek tragic drama, there is a peculiar sense of power, often supernatural, attached to these figures, isolated by crime and the process of expiation, yet achieving thereby a sanctity which seems to redeem, or perhaps even grow out of, the very heinousness of the original act. Hence Coleridge's perception, similar to that which informs the character of his own Ancient Mariner, of “a soul set apart and made peculiar to God.” It is this kind of sanctity that we recognise even in Cain:

And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

(Genesis IV, 15)

It is an interesting common element in all of these stories that the particular horror of the catastrophe usually arises from its attachment to a crime against a near relation—in Lamb's case, the deed was not his own, but his sister's, yet, as from the closeness of association between an Electra and an Orestes, it becomes surprisingly easy to blur the distinction, and there is certainly an impression gathered from the letters, that Lamb, at any rate, seems very much to take the consequences of the act upon himself. ‘We are in a manner marked’, he writes to Coleridge in May 1800.³ The Biblical resonances of that ‘marked’ would carry inevitable associations for both writer and recipient of the letter, and although the parallel with Cain breaks down upon the consideration of moral culpability, would still suggest an irrevocable, divinely decreed separation from the run of humanity. Lamb's overwhelming sense of the isolation or apartness brought on by catastrophe is frequently and strongly expressed:

I see nobody, and sit, and read or walk, alone, and hear nothing. I am quite lost to conversation from disuse; … worldly hopes are at a low ebb with me, and unworldly thoughts are not yet familiarised to me. …

(letter to Coleridge 24th June 1797)⁴

It is dangerous of course to go too far in the imposition of a set dramatic pattern upon the incidents of a life; still, the dramatic elements in this case are almost too strong to be ignored, and it is tempting to read the following few sentences in the essay ‘New Year's Eve’ as an explicit invitation:

I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel.⁵

That the novel of the essayist's life could be viewed as well-contrived must suggest that its incidents or events have been attended with significant or productive consequences. Given the fact that the essays—which, according to Lamb himself, do nothing else but ‘talk with the reader’⁶—are full of oblique hints about how to approach the writings in the context of the ‘writer-persona’ character, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to accept the above extract as an invitation to trace this created character back into the much earlier events of actual biography. Certainly, there is a recurrent image of the outsider, a denizen of a betwixt and between region, to be found in Lamb's writing, which alerts us to the biographical connection, and even discarding this connection as incidental merely, the image proves to be a valuable way into the processes of his thought.

A quality of apartness or outside-ness can be identified in the border states and half and half conditions of various kinds that proliferate in the essays of Elia. The figures exemplifying these conditions are invariably treated with a sympathetic understanding of the sensitivity, and frequently painfulness, of the limbo situation. In this understanding, we can locate, for instance, the emotional impulse of that strangely mystical piece of writing, ‘The Child Angel’, the fiction of a ‘glorious Amphibium’.⁷

Border-persons can be identified, too, in Lamb's account of the infirm youth in ‘The Old Margate Hoy’—‘He was as one, being with us, but not of us’⁸—in the Convalescent and in the Poor Relation:

He is a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious, or not civil enough, to him … He is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had less diffidence. With half the familiarity he might pass for a casual dependent; with more boldness he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. He is too humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more state than befits a client.⁹

The consciousness of an almost inevitable painfulness attached to the border-condition lends a poignancy to this otherwise playful discussion:

… this theme of poor relationship is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic associations, that it is difficult to keep the account distinct without blending.¹⁰

In fact, the blending of comic and tragic associations, a characteristic fundamental to the half-serious, half-humorous tone that Lamb adopts most frequently, is itself a border-condition, typifying the style of his writing. Hence it is entirely appropriate that the stylistic mode which Elia claims as peculiarly his own, is the ironic. The claim is implicit, for example, in the admission of his anti-‘Caledonian’ qualities in the essay ‘Imperfect Sympathies’:

Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it.¹¹

Again, in the Preface to the Last Essays, it is claimed of Elia that

He too much affected that dangerous figure—irony.¹²

The view of irony as an intrinsic condition of the essayist's very being is revealed in the terms in which he speaks of the fear of death:

innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?

(‘New Year's Eve’)¹³

In essays such as ‘The Old and New Schoolmaster’ and ‘Imperfect Sympathies’, the irony is contained in the way in which the writer readily admits his own condition as inferior or aberrant, yet discusses the standard in terms so unflattering as to carry out, as far as the reader is concerned, an indictment of the subjects of his discussion, in the terms of that very aberrancy.

My companion … with great good-nature and dexterity shifted his conversation to the subject of public charities; which led to the comparative merits of provision for the poor in past and present times, with observations on the old monastic institutions, and charitable orders;—but, finding me rather dimly impressed with some glimmering notions from old poetic association, than strongly fortified with any speculations reducible to calculation on the subject, he gave the matter up; ….¹⁴

Here, while appearing to defer to his ‘companion’ and to deprecate himself, the language in which the essayist portrays their respective attitudes, by assuming a complicity with the reader which upholds the merits of the poetic as opposed to the mundane, actually achieves exactly the reverse effect.

Thus ironic effect, for Lamb, is often a matter of perspective—the removed or border perspective which the essayist adopts upon the assumptions and rituals of everyday life, thereby achieving a kind of ludicrous transformation of the ordinary, which is often a cover for making serious moral or social criticisms upon it. This is the spirit, for instance, in which the writer reveals the inherent hypocrisy in the ritual of grace before meat at a rich man's table, or concludes an apparently frivolous account of the spectacular quality of London's beggars with an attack upon the vagrancy laws, and a plea for charity:

When they come with their counterfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things, which concerning these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell whether they are feigned or not.

(‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’)¹⁵

The border perspective that Lamb adopts in the essays, as well as the frequency with which he refers to border conditions of different kinds, invite a view of the writer himself as borderer. The original Preface to the Last Essays of Elia, as published in 1823 in the London Magazine, declares that Janus wept at the passing of Elia,¹⁶ thereby confirming the border-character of Elia through the empathy with a border-god. The edited 1833 text still explicitly calls the reader's attention to the border-state of the essayist, and asks that his reading be governed by this knowledge:

… while he pretended to cling to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to bind him. … He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sat gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood. These were weaknesses; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings.¹⁷

The representation of Elia as boy-man points the reader to the significance attached in the essays to the vestiges of childhood retained in adult nature, a key state of border-hood to which Lamb frequently reverts, and which he usually describes as manifested in dream—very much a half and half, or to borrow a currently fashionable term, liminal condition of being:

While childhood, and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.

(‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’)¹⁸

The innocence of childhood reproduced in the dreams of adult experience, is associated with a kind of prelapsarian facility of the imagination. Hence Lamb's memory of his first play:

It was all enchantment and a dream. No such pleasure has since visited me but in dreams—

(‘My First Play’)¹⁹

The reiterated connection made between childhood and dream enables us to recognise, when he writes in the essay ‘Sanity of True Genius’, that ‘the true poet dreams of being awake’,²⁰ he is referring to the adult poetic imagination as reproducing a childlike depth of instinctive apprehension, close to that which Wordsworth describes in the ‘infant Babe’ passage, in the second Book of the Prelude.²¹ Indeed, in his comments upon Wordsworth's reverence for childhood, Lamb observes of the childhood period, ‘how apprehensive! how imaginative! how religious!’ (‘The Excursion: A Poem’).²²

The reproduction of childhood in the dream-state of adult experience is not the only border condition which Lamb associates with the imaginative function. In the essay on ‘Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art’, the portrayal of half-and-half conditions in general is offered as the test of the artistic imagination:

The world has nothing to show of the preternatural in painting, transcending the figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes, in the great picture at Angerstein's. It seems a thing between two beings. A ghastly horror at itself struggles with newly-apprehending gratitude at second life bestowed. It cannot forget that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt that it is a body.²³

Again, in the description of a Dryad of Julio Romano, Lamb writes:

Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her own, beautiful in convolution and distortion, linked to her connatural tree, co-twisting with its limbs her own, till both seemed either—these, animated branches, those, disanimated members—yet the animal and vegetable lives sufficiently kept distinct—his Dryad lay, an approximation of two natures, which to conceive, it must be seen; …²⁴

The connection suggested in this essay, between the portrayal of border conditions in art, and the fertility of the artistic imagination, indicates that the image of the borderer in Lamb's writing must not be dismissed as a purely whimsical or idiosyncratic peculiarity, but rather considered in the larger context of the writer's critical position. It will be found that it is possible to link the border conditions in Lamb's writing, with unrepresentability and abstraction, two crucial terms in his discussions of the imaginative and the sublime, and it is Hazlitt's remarks upon Elia which provide the insight by which we are enabled to make this link.

Hazlitt's portrait of Elia, as one who ‘occupies that nice point between egotism and disinterested humanity’,²⁵ is very much the portrait of a figure in limbo, a ghost. In the Spirit of the Age, he writes:

Death has in this sense the spirit of life in it; and the shadowy has to our author something substantial in it. Ideas savour most of reality in his mind; or rather his imagination loiters on the edge of each; …²⁶

Here, Hazlitt is associating the border quality to which Lamb himself refers in the Preface to the Last Essays (‘while he pretended to cling to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to bind him’) with his tendency towards abstraction, a consciousness of reality in the form of ideas, which last word carries in Hazlitt's writing, as with Coleridge and Lamb, the Platonic meaning of ‘ideal’.

Roy Park, in his introduction to a selection of Lamb's critical writings,²⁷ appropriates Lamb's theory of the imagination into a wider contemporary stance against abstraction which constitutes Park's central thesis of the Romantic condition. In support of this view, he argues, using the essay ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, that Lamb

is contending against the conversion of the poetic into the abstract²⁸

This is demonstrably untrue. When Lamb asserts, in the essay on Shakespeare, ‘that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses over seeing’,²⁹ or when he declares that ‘the reading of tragedy is a fine abstraction’,³⁰ it is clear that he is actually equating the poetic with the abstract, which is also the ideal, both by common,³¹ as well as by Lamb's particular usage. Park's argument of Lamb's rejection of the abstract will hold together only if we accept his arbitrary identification of the abstract with the everyday (‘familiar or mundane, as opposed to scientific abstraction … characterises the process whereby we become habituated to our daily world’,³²) surely a muddled, indeed perverse, confusion of opposite categories. A more straightforward reading of the essays in fact reveals Lamb's profound reverence for the way in which the poetic imagination relates to the abstract as opposed to the everyday. This can be confirmed in the manner in which he discusses the banquet scene in Paradise Regained:

The whole banquet is too civic and culinary, and the accompaniments altogether a profanation of that deep, abstracted, holy scene.

(‘Grace before Meat’)³³

For Lamb, the sublimest working of the Imagination must be evidenced in the abstraction, which is synonymous with the idealism, of its effects. Thus he writes of the acting of Munden:

So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity.³⁴

In spite of the flippancy of its tone, the passage expresses an assumption fundamental to Lamb's theory of the imagination, viz., that the forms which it evokes are ideal—they are, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, the ideas of things rather than the things themselves.³⁵ According to Lamb, reality, or actual things, never measures up to the imaginative conception of these things. Hence the disappointment at his first sight of the sea, comparable to Wordsworth's reaction to Mont Blanc:³⁶

The things do not fill up that space, which the idea of them seemed to take up in the mind … the sea remains a disappointment.—Is it not, that in the latter we had expected to behold (absurdly, I grant, but, I am afraid, by the law of imagination unavoidably) not a definite object, as those wild beasts, or that mountain compassable by the eye, but all the sea at once, the Commensurate Antagonist of the Earth!

(‘The Old Margate Hoy’)³⁷

Lamb exalts the imaginative or ideal over the actual; this is the same assumption by which he declares the tragedies of Shakespeare unfit for stage representation, because the ideality of the dramatist's conception can only be diminished when presented as actual, however skilful the presentation. Again, the useful word ‘abstraction’ takes on an additional significance, as that which has only intrinsic form, with no element of pictorial representation. It is in keeping with his reverence for the abstract, therefore, that Lamb writes, discussing a particularly fine performance of one of the tragedies:

It seemed to embody and realise conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape. But dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realising an idea, we have only materialised and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.³⁸

This is because on the stage, according to Lamb, ‘the imagination is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor unassisted senses.’³⁹ It is the imaginative alone which engages which the sublime, and the sublime, by virtue of its limitlessness, can only be dimly or partially apprehended. This explains Lamb's clinging to the indistinct in the above passage, as a larger or nobler quality than the clearly defined. Similarly, in the essay ‘Witches, and other Night Fears’, he describes the depth of feeling awakened by the disembodied, quoting a passage from Coleridge's Ancient Mariner⁴⁰ in illustration:

All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dante—tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons—are they one half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following him—… the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual—… it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth. …⁴¹

The exaltation of the disembodied over the defined, which amounts to the exaltation of the imaginative over the sensual world, is, as Hazlitt implies in his comments upon Elia, the natural tendency of a limbo person, to whom the life of the mind is the more habitual activity than the participation in the common pursuit. Further, if by its nature, the unrepresentable can only be dimly conceived or apprehended, then the capacity for such apprehension becomes the attribute of the essayist's particular type of outsideness. In the essay on ‘Imperfect Sympathies’, discussing the differences between his own mind and the Caledonian's, Lamb says of the latter:

He has no falterings of self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place in his brain, or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. … Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with him.⁴²

Such a border-land, occupied, by implication, by the essayist himself, is the dim or twilight zone, in which is enabled the apprehension of the unrepresentable, that constitutes genius, or the sublime. In this way, a chain of associations can be established which ultimately connects the imaginative faculty with twilight or border perspectives, through the intermediary links of dim perception, unrepresentability, and the abstraction or the ideal.

The consciousness of border-areas in the essays, awakens, then, the reader's understanding of the essayist himself as ‘a soul set apart and made peculiar to God’. The sanctity attached to this figure arises from his participation in an ideal or imaginative world that is outside the everyday world of common experience. In this context, by recalling the connotations of ‘detached’, or ‘separated’ or ‘removed’ attached to the term ‘abstract’, the far-reaching significance of this key word for Lamb, stands fully confirmed. Through his exploration of the abstract, Lamb translates the claim made in one of his letters

I know, I am no ways better in practice than my neighbours—but I have … an occasional earnest aspiration after perfection, which they have not.

(7th to 10th January 1797 letter to Coleridge)⁴³

into the creation of a persona in the essays, who is put forward as partaking of the profounder liberated understanding, which biographical knowledge enables us, like Coleridge, to perceive as granted by the experience of catastrophe.

Notes

1. Marrs, Jr., Edwin W. (ed.): The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, Ithaca and London, 1975, Vol 1 (hereafter referred to as Letters), p.44.

2. Quoted in Letters, p. 46.

3. Letters, p. 202.

4. Ibid., p. 113.

5. Hutchinson, Thomas (ed.): The Works in Prose and Verse of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, London, 1908, Vol 1 (hereafter referred to as Works), p. 565.

6. Ibid., p. 472.

7. Ibid., p. 777.

8. Ibid., p. 695.

9. Ibid., p. 668.

10. Ibid., p. 672.

11. Ibid., p. 547.

12. Ibid., p. 660.

13. Ibid., p. 508.

14. Ibid., p. 534.

15. Ibid., p. 621.

16. See “A Character of the Late Elia”, in Works, p. 853.

17. Ibid., pp. 661-62.

18. Ibid., p. 584.

19. Ibid., p. 595.

20. Ibid., p. 705.

21. 1805 Prelude, Book II 11 237-280.

22. Works, p. 216.

23. Ibid., p. 760.

24. Ibid., p. 761.

25. Howe, P.P. (ed.): The Complete Works of William Hazlitt in Twenty-one Volumes, London and Toronto, 1932, Vol II, p. 180.

26. Ibid., p. 180.

27. Park, Roy (ed): Lamb as Critic, London and Henley, 1980.

28. Ibid., p. 13.

29. Works, p. 136.

30. Ibid., p. 141.

31. See OED

32. Lamb as Critic, pp. 7-8.

33. Works, p. 588.

34. Ibid., p. 658.

35. See Poem: “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself”.

36. 1805 Prelude, Book VI 11 452-456.

37. Works, p. 696.

38. Ibid., p. 126.

39. Ibid., p. 138.

40. ‘Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk with fear and dread, And having once turn'd round, walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread’.—Works, p. 557.

41. Ibid., p. 557.

42. Ibid., p. 546.

43. Letters, p. 89.