Part 2 (1/2)
Not many; some few, as thus:-- To see the sun to bed, and to arise, Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes, Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him, With all his fires and travelling glories round him.
Sometimes the moon on soft night clouds to rest, Like beauty nestling in a young man's breast, And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep Admiring silence, while those lovers sleep.
Sometimes outstretcht, in very idleness, Nought doing, saying little, thinking less, To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air, Go eddying round; and small birds, how they fare, When mother Autumn fills their beaks with corn, Filch'd from the careless Amalthea's horn; And how the woods berries and worms provide Without their pains, when earth has nought beside To answer their small wants.
To view the graceful deer come tripping by, Then stop, and gaze, then turn, they know not why, Like bashful younkers in society.
To mark the structure of a plant or tree, And all fair things of earth, how fair they be.
Lamb's next attempt on the theatre was the prose farce of ”Mr. H----,”
in which a wholly inadequate motif was made to supply material for two acts. The piece was played once (Drury Lane, 10th December, 1806) and d.a.m.ned. The eponymous hero, who chooses to be known merely by his initial, creates quite a sensation at Bath, as he is believed to be a n.o.bleman travelling incognito. Hitherto always rejected by the ladies on account of his unfortunate patronym, he has wooed successfully under an initial, when he nearly spoils all by betraying that his name is--Hogsfles.h.!.+ He is forthwith shunned, but his ladylove remains faithful to him on his making the very natural change of Hogsflesh into Bacon. In his method and atmosphere, Lamb had pa.s.sed from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century; he got a hearing, but he did not get--and it must be admitted that he did not deserve--success.
The farce is interesting as containing in an inquisitive landlord, Jeremiah Pry, the original, it may be a.s.sumed, of a whole family of Paul Prys, of which to-day John Poole's is the best remembered.
Two other dramatic pieces were written by Lamb in his later years: ”The Wife's Trial, or, The Intruding Widow” (founded upon Crabbe's ”The Confidant”), in blank verse, and a second farce, ”The p.a.w.nbroker's Daughter,” in prose. In these two pieces he had made distinct advances, yet neither was perhaps suited for stage representation. In ”The Wife's Trial” we have a couple--Mr. and Mrs.
Selby--five years married, on whose hospitality a widow forces herself owing to some mysterious hold which she has over the wife. Mrs. Selby had been secretly married as a schoolgirl, though her husband left her at the church door and had died abroad. The widow striving to use this knowledge for purposes not far removed from blackmail, is neatly hoist with her own petard, and the slight play ends with the cordial reconciliation of the Selbys. In ”The p.a.w.nbroker's Daughter” once more the story is of the slightest, though the farce seems more fitted for the stage than ”Mr. H----.” Marion, the daughter of a p.a.w.nbroker, is, against her father's wishes, wooed by a gentleman, and, thanks to the trick of a maid, goes off with her lover while carrying some valuable jewels with which her father has entrusted her. There are two other lovers, Pendulous--who has been unjustly hanged and only reprieved just in time to save his life--and Marian Flyn, and out of their by-play comes the reconciliation of all. The feelings of the half-hanged man had earlier been dealt with by Lamb in a letter ”On the Inconveniences Resulting from being Hanged,” which he contributed (as ”Pensilis”) to ”The Reflector” in 1811.
STORIES
After essaying poetry and the drama (for both of which he maintained a lifelong liking, writing in each form during his latest years), the next kind of literary expression on which Lamb ventured was that of stories and verses for children. In ”Rosamund Gray,” which is scarcely a tale for children but rather a cla.s.sic novelette, he gives the story of a young orphan girl living at Widford in Hertfords.h.i.+re with her blind grandmother. The girl is beloved by young Allan Clare, and one evening, wandering in sheer joy over the scenes of past delightful rambles, she is a.s.sailed by a villain. Her blind grandmother finding her gone from the cottage dies of a broken heart, and poor Rosamund, disgraced and terrified, seeks the home of Allan and his sister and there dies. It is a terrible story told with a beautiful simplicity.
Of how far it may have been founded on fact we do not know, but in Rosamund, Lamb seems to have depicted something of a likeness of the ”fair-haired maid” with whom he had been in love, and in Elinor Clare there can be no doubt that he portrayed much of the character of his own loved sister.
The first of Lamb's known publications professedly for children was ”The King and Queen of Hearts: showing how notably the Queen made her Tarts, and how scurvily the Knave stole them away: with other particulars pertaining thereto,” and this was only recovered about ten years since after having been forgotten for the best part of a century. The booklet, which was issued anonymously, consists of a number of rough pictures, each accompanied by half a dozen lines of Hudibrastic verse; the inspiration being of course the old nursery rhyme about the tarts made by the Queen of Hearts and their subsequent fate.
The ”Tales from Shakspeare,” which followed, were written by both Charles Lamb and his sister: indeed the work seems at first to have been intended for Mary's hand alone, but her brother undertook the telling of the stories of the tragedies, and to use his own words, out of the twenty tales he was ”responsible for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Oth.e.l.lo, for occasionally a tail-piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts, and for all of the spelling.” When the work was originally produced it had ill.u.s.trations to which Lamb objected. His reference to tail-pieces is possibly an indication that he sometimes rounded off the stories for his sister, just as he certainly completed the preface for her. Though the dual authors.h.i.+p of the volume is referred to in the preface the publisher put Charles Lamb's name as author of the whole on the t.i.tle-page of the book. The ”Tales” are of course designed for young readers--they are told, as it has been recognized, with a kind of Wordsworthian simplicity--as an introduction to ”the rich treasures from which the small and valueless coins are extracted.” How admirably they have served their purpose for generations of readers is to be seen in the long succession of editions in which the work has been issued.
Again did brother and sister collaborate in the next of the children's books a.s.sociated with the name of Lamb, and again Charles was responsible for but about a third of the whole. Of the ten tales in ”Mrs. Leicester's School” he wrote but three. These stories, which are supposed to be told by young girls to their school-mates, are simple records of childish experiences recounted with childish navete. They met with some success during the lifetime of their authors--ten editions being disposed of in something under twenty years--and still hold their own, both as gift books for the young and as parts of that wonderfully varied, yet almost wholly delightful body of literature, a.s.sociated with the name of Lamb. Here, as later in the ”Essays of Elia,” we have recollections of the actual events of their own childhood permeating the invented narratives and imparting a new interest to the whole. Coleridge prophesied remarkably about this little book, when in talking to a friend he said:
It at once soothes and amuses me to think--nay, to know--that the time will come when this little volume of my dear and well-nigh oldest friend, Mary Lamb, will be not only enjoyed but acknowledged as a rich jewel in the treasury of our permanent English literature; and I cannot help running over in my mind the long list of celebrated writers, astonis.h.i.+ng geniuses, Novels, Romances, Poems, Histories, and dense Political Economy quartos, which, compared with ”Mrs. Leicester's School,” will be remembered as often and praised as highly as Wilkie's and Glover's Epics and Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophies compared with ”Robinson Crusoe!”
In the ”Adventures of Ulysses” Lamb sought to provide what he termed a supplement to Fenelon's long-popular ”Adventures of Telemachus.” He took the story from Chapman's translation of Homer's ”Odyssey,” that translation which a few years later was to inspire John Keats with one of his finest sonnets. In a preface, a model of concise expression, the author of the tale explained:
By avoiding the prolixity which marks the speeches and the descriptions in Homer, I have gained a rapidity to the narration which I hope will make it more attractive, and give it more the air of a romance, to young readers; though I am sensible that, by the curtailment, I have sacrificed in many places the manners to the pa.s.sion, the subordinate characteristics to the essential interests of the story. The attempt is not to be considered as seeking a comparison with any of the direct translations of the ”Odyssey,” either in prose or verse; though if I were to state the obligations which I have had to one obsolete version, I should run the hazard of depriving myself of the very slender degree of reputation which I could hope to acquire from a trifle like the present undertaking.
If Chapman's translation of Homer was ”obsolete” in 1808, it was yet to be restored to the favour of readers, thanks to the loving homage of Lamb and Keats. ”Chapman is divine,” wrote the author of the ”Adventures of Ulysses” to a friend, ”and my abridgement has not quite emptied him of his divinity.” In his story Lamb shows how he had recognized the moral value of the story of Ulysses, of ”a brave man struggling with adversity,” but wisely leaves that moral to be insensibly impressed upon the reader, for he not only refrained from formulating a definite ”moral” in such a case, but has explicitly recorded his repugnance from the method.
VERSES
In ”Poetry for Children” we have again a work for which brother and sister were jointly responsible, and again--though we cannot exactly allot the parts--Charles, as we learn from his letters, wrote but about one third of the whole. Three years after publication the two small volumes in which this work had been issued were out of print, though a number of the pieces were included by the publisher in a ”Poetry Book” compilation. In 1827 Lamb wanted a copy and could not get it, indeed the little work had disappeared in the most complete fas.h.i.+on, and another half century was to pa.s.s before a copy was to be recovered, and then it came from Australia, closely followed by one of an American edition, ”pirated” in 1812. It is strange that Charles and Mary Lamb, ”an old bachelor and an old maid,” as he put it, should have been so successful as caterers for children. That they were successful there is no doubt, and there is no reason why this ”Poetry for Children” of theirs should not--now happily recovered in its entirety--go on pleasing and influencing many generations of young readers; that they _do_ please the little ones of to-day I have readily proved. The verses are on the simplest themes, set forth in varied metres, but chiefly such metres as children can most readily remember, and though they are for the most part didactic, they are didactic in a way which the child does not resent. There is no telling a tale and then trying to enforce a moral from its consideration, but the moral is a natural part of the whole, and doubtless has its healthy effect.
”Prince Dorus” is a pleasant little story in easy verse, telling of a king who fell in love with a great Princess, but was in despair because his love was not requited:
”This to the King a courteous Fairy told And bade the Monarch in his suit be bold; For he that would the charming Princess wed, Had only on her cat's black tail to tread, When straight the Spell would vanish into air, And he enjoy for life the yielding fair.”
At length he succeeds in this seemingly simple exploit, and in place of the cat there springs up a huge man who foretells that when married the King shall have a son afflicted with a huge nose, a son who shall never be happy in his love:
Till he with tears his blemish shall confess Discern its odious length and wish it less.
It is a pleasant little story marked with Lamb's keen sense of humour.
”Beauty and the Beast” is a booklet in verse for young readers. It was published shortly after ”Prince Dorus,” and is believed--though the evidence as to authors.h.i.+p is inconclusive--to have been written by Charles or Mary Lamb. It is a simple rendering in Hudibrastic verse of a familiar nursery story. Perhaps a very slight piece of evidence in favour of the Lamb authors.h.i.+p may be found in the fact that it shares with ”Prince Dorus” the sub-t.i.tle, ”A Poetical Version of an Ancient Tale.”