The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Chapter 428 : She'd make a good match for anybody (by she, I mean the widow)."If he bring

She'd make a good match for anybody (by she, I mean the widow).

"If he bring but a _relict_ away, He is happy, nor heard to complain."

SHENSTONE.

Procter has got a wen growing out at the nape of his neck, which his wife wants him to have cut off; but I think it rather an agreeable excrescence--like his poetry--redundant. Hone has hanged himself for debt. G.o.dwin was taken up for picking pockets.... Beckey takes to bad courses. Her father was blown up in a steam machine. The coroner found it Insanity. I should not like him to sit on my letter.

Do you observe my direction? Is it Gallic?--Cla.s.sical?

Do try and get some frogs. You must ask for "grenouilles" (green-eels).

They don't understand "frogs," though it's a common phrase with us.

If you go through Bulloign (Boulogne) enquire if old G.o.dfrey is living, and how he got home from the Crusades. He must be a very old man now.

If there is anything new in politics or literature in France, keep it till I see you again, for I'm in no hurry. Chatty-Briant is well I hope.

I think I have no more news; only give both our loves ("all three," says Dash) to Mrs. Patmore, and bid her get quite well, as I am at present, bating qualms, and the grief incident to losing a valuable relation.

C.L.

Londres, July 19, 1827.

[This is from Patmore's _My Friends and Acquaintances_, 1854; but I have no confidence in Patmore's transcription. After "picking pockets" should come, for example, according to other editors, the sentence, "Moxon has fallen in love with Emma, our nut-brown maid." This is the first we hear of the circ.u.mstance and quite probably Lamb was then exaggerating. As it happened, however, Moxon and Miss Isola, as we shall see, were married in 1833.

We do not know the name of the widow; but her husband was Lamb's cousin, the bookbinder.

The doubt about the Hazlitts refers chiefly to William Hazlitt's divorce from his first wife in 1822, and his remarriage in 1824 with a Mrs.

Bridgewater.

"Your book." Patmore, in _My Friends and Acquaintances_, writes:--

This refers to a series of tales that I was writing, (since published under the t.i.tle of _Chatsworth, or the Romance of a Week_.) for the subject of one of which he had recommended me to take "The Old Law." As Lamb's critical faculties (as displayed in the celebrated "specimens"

which created an era in the dramatic taste of England) were not surpa.s.sed by those of any writer of his day, the reader may like to see a few "specimens" of some notes which Lamb took the pains to make on two of the tales that were shown to him. I give these the rather that there is occasionally blended with their critical nicety of tact, a drollery that is very characteristic of the writer. I shall leave these notes and verbal criticisms to speak for themselves, after merely explaining that they are written on separate bits of paper, each note having a numerical reference to that page of the MS. in which occurs the pa.s.sage commented on.

"Besides the words 'riant' and 'Euphrosyne,' the sentence is senseless.

'A sweet sadness' capable of inspiring 'a more _grave joy_'--than what?--than demonstrations of _mirth_? Odd if it had not been. I had once a _wry aunt_, which may make me dislike the phrase.

"'Pleasurable:'--no word is good that is awkward to spell. (Query.) Welcome or Joyous.

"'_Steady self-possession_ rather than _undaunted courage_,' etc. The two things are not opposed enough. You mean, rather than rash fire of valour in action.

"'Looking like a heifer,' I fear wont do in prose. (Qy.) 'Like to some spotless heifer,'--or,'that you might have compared her to some spotless heifer,' etc.--or 'Like to some sacrificial heifer of old.' I should prefer, 'garlanded with flowers as for a sacrifice '--and cut the cow altogether.

"(Say) 'Like the muttering of some strange spell,'--omitting the demon,--they are _subject_ to spells, they don't use them.

"'Feud' here (and before and after) is wrong. (Say) old malice, or, difference. _Feud_ is of clans. It might be applied to family quarrels, but is quite improper to individuals falling out.

"'Apathetic.' Vile word.

"'Mechanically,' faugh!--insensibly--involuntarily--in-any-thing-ly but mechanically.

"Calianax's character should be somewhere briefly _drawn_, not left to be dramatically inferred.

"'Surprised and almost vexed while it troubled her.' (Awkward.) Better, 'in a way that while it deeply troubled her, could not but surprise and vex her to think it should be a source of trouble at all.'

"'Reaction' is vile slang. 'Physical'--vile word.

"Decidedly, Dorigen should simply propose to him to remove the rocks as _ugly_ or _dangerous_, not as affecting her with fears for her husband.

The idea of her husband should be excluded from a promise which is meant to be _frank_ upon impossible conditions. She cannot promise in one breath infidelity to him, and make the conditions a good to him. Her reason for hating the rocks is good, but not to be expressed here.

"Insert after 'to whatever consequences it might lead,'--'Neither had Arviragus been disposed to interpose a husband's authority to prevent the execution of this rash vow, was he unmindful of that older and more solemn vow which, in the days of their marriage, he had imposed upon himself, in no instance to control the settled purpose or determination of his wedded wife;--so that by the chains of a double contract he seemed bound to abide by her decision in this instance, whatever it might be.'"

"A tragi-comedy"--Lamb's dramatic version of Crabbe's "Confidante,"

which he called "The Wife's Trial" (see Vol. IV. of this edition).

"Procter has got a wen." This paragraph must be taken with salt. Poor Hone, however, had the rules of the King's Bench at the time. Beckey was the Lambs' servant and tyrant; she had been Hazlitt's. Patmore described her at some length in his reminiscences of Lamb.

"Chatty-Briant"--Chateaubriand.]

LETTER 420

CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. PERCY BYSSHE Sh.e.l.lEY

Enfield, July 26th, 1827.

Dear Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley,--At the risk of throwing away some fine thoughts, I must write to say how pleased we were with your very kind remembering of us (who have unkindly run away from all our friends) before you go.

Perhaps you are gone, and then my tropes are wasted. If any piece of better fortune has lighted upon you than you expected, but less than we wish you, we are rejoiced. We are here trying to like solitude, but have scarce enough to justify the experiment. We get some, however. The six days are our Sabbath; the seventh--why, c.o.c.kneys will come for a little fresh air, and so--

But by _your month_, or October at furthest, we hope to see Islington: I like a giant refreshed with the leaving off of wine, and Mary, pining for Mr. Moxon's books and Mr. Moxon's society. Then we shall meet.

I am busy with a farce in two acts, the incidents tragi-comic. I can do the dialogue _commey fo_: but the d.a.m.ned plot--I believe I must omit it altogether. The scenes come after one another like geese, not marshalling like cranes or a Hyde Park review. The story is as simple as G[eorge] D[yer], and the language plain as his spouse. The characters are three women to one man; which is one more than laid hold on him in the "Evangely." I think that prophecy squinted towards my drama.

I want some Howard Paine to sketch a skeleton of artfully succeeding scenes through a whole play, as the courses are arranged in a cookery book: I to find wit, pa.s.sion, sentiment, character, and the like trifles: to lay in the dead colours,--I'd t.i.tianesque 'em up: to mark the channel in a cheek (smooth or furrowed, yours or mine), and where tears should course I'd draw the waters down: to say where a joke should come in or a pun be left out: to bring my _personae_ on and off like a Beau Nash; and I'd Frankenstein them there: to bring three together on the stage at once; they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and there they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdraw them.

I am teaching Emma Latin to qualify her for a superior governess-s.h.i.+p; which we see no prospect of her getting. 'Tis like feeding a child with chopped hay from a spoon. Sisyphus--his labours were as nothing to it.

Actives and pa.s.sives jostle in her nonsense, till a deponent enters, like Chaos, more to embroil the fray. Her prepositions are suppositions; her conjunctions copulative have no connection in them; her concords disagree; her interjections are purely English "Ah!" and "Oh!" with a yawn and a gape in the same tongue; and she herself is a lazy, block-headly supine. As I say to her, a.s.s _in praesenti_ rarely makes a wise man _in futuro_.

But I daresay it was so with you when you began Latin, and a good while after.

Good-by! Mary's love.

Yours truly, C. LAMB.

[This is the second letter to Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley, _nee_ Mary Wollstonecraft G.o.dwin, the widow of the poet and the author of _Frankenstein_. She had been living in England since 1823; and in 1826 had issued anonymously _The Last Man_. That she kept much in touch with the Lambs' affairs we know by her letters to Leigh Hunt.