Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. VI-VII. Letters
Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth [30 January 1801]
THANKS for your Letter and Present. I had already
borrowed your second volume. What most please me are, the Song of Lucy. . . . Simon’s sickly daughter
in the Sexton made me cry.
Next to these are the description of the continuous Echoes in the story of Joanna’s
laugh, where the mountains and all the scenery absolutely seem
alive—and that fine Shakesperian character of the Happy Man, in the Brothers,
—that creeps about the fields, Following his fancies by the hour, to bring Tears down his cheek, or solitary smiles Into his face, until the Setting Sun
Write Fool upon his forehead. |
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| 1801 | THE LYRICAL BALLADS | 209 |
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I will mention one more: the
delicate and curious feeling in the wish for the Cumberland Beggar, that he may have about
him the melody of Birds, altho’ he hear them not. Here the mind knowingly
passes a fiction upon herself, first substituting her own feelings for the
Beggar’s, and, in the same breath detecting the fallacy, will not part
with the wish.—The Poet’s
Epitaph is disfigured, to my taste by the vulgar satire upon parsons
and lawyers in the beginning, and the coarse epithet of pin point in the 6th
stanza. All the rest is eminently good, and your own. I will just add that it
appears to me a fault in the Beggar, that the instructions conveyed in it are
too direct and like a lecture: they don’t slide into the mind of the
reader, while he is imagining no such matter. An intelligent reader finds a
sort of insult in being told, I will teach you how to think upon this subject.
This fault, if I am right, is in a ten-thousandth worse degree to be found in
Sterne and many many novelists &
modern poets, who continually put a sign post up to shew where you are to feel.
They set out with assuming their readers to be stupid. Very different from
Robinson Crusoe, the
Vicar of Wakefield, Roderick Random, and other
beautiful bare narratives. There is implied an unwritten compact between Author
and reader; I will tell you a story, and I suppose you will understand it
Modern novels “St.
Leons” and the like are full of such flowers as these
“Let not my reader suppose,” “Imagine, if you can”—modest!—&c,—I will here
have done with praise and blame. I have written so much, only that you may not
think I have passed over your book without observation.—I am sorry that
Coleridge has christened his Ancient Marinere “a
poet’s Reverie”—it is as bad as Bottom the Weaver’s declaration that he is not a Lion but
only the scenical representation of a Lion. What new idea is gained by this
Title, but one subversive of all credit which the tale should force upon us, of
its truth? For me, I was never so affected with any human Tale. After first
reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days—I dislike all the
miraculous part of it, but the feelings of the man under the operation of such
scenery dragged me along like Tom
Piper’s magic whistle. I totally differ from your idea
that the Marinere should have had a character and profession. This is a Beauty
in Gulliver’s
Travels, where the mind is kept in a placid state of little
wonderments; but the Ancient Marinere
undergoes such Trials, as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory of
what he was, like the state of a man in a Bad dream, one terrible peculiarity
of which is: that all consciousness of personality is gone. Your other
observation is I think as well a little unfounded: the Marinere from being
conversant in supernatural events has acquired a supernatural and strange cast
of phrase, ![]()
| 210 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | Jan. |
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eye,
appearance, &c. which frighten the wedding guest. You will excuse my
remarks, because I am hurt and vexed that you should think it necessary, with a
prose apology, to open the eyes of dead men that cannot see. To sum up a
general opinion of the second vol.—I do not feel any one poem in it so forcibly
as the Ancient Marinere, the Mad
Mother, and the Lines at Tintern Abbey in the first.—I could, too, have wished the
Critical preface had appeared in a separate treatise. All its dogmas are true
and just, and most of them new, as criticism. But they associate a diminishing idea with the Poems which follow, as having
been written for Experiment on the public taste, more
than having sprung (as they must have done) from living and daily
circumstances.—I am prolix, because I am gratifyed in the opportunity of
writing to you, and I don’t well know when to leave off. I ought before
this to have reply’d to your very kind invitation into Cumberland. With
you and your Sister I could gang any where. But I am afraid whether I shall
ever be able to afford so desperate a Journey. Separate from the pleasure of
your company, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I
have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense
local attachments, as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature.
The Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades,
tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses, all the bustle and
wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the Town, the Watchmen,
drunken scenes, rattles,—life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night,
the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt
& mud, the Sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old
book stalls, parsons cheap’ning books, coffee houses, steams of soups
from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade,—all
these things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of
satiating me. The wonder of these sights impells me into night-walks about her
crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of
joy at so much Life.—All these emotions must be strange to you. So are your
rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life,
not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?——
My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no
passion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious
engendering of poetry & books) to groves and vallies. The rooms where I was
born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book case
which has followed me about (like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in
knowledge) wherever I have moved—old chairs, old tables, streets, squares,
where I have sunned myself, ![]()
| 1801 | “THE ANCIENT MARINER” | 211 |
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my old school,—these are my
mistresses. Have I not enough, without your mountains? I do not envy you. I
should pity you, did I not know, that the Mind will make friends of any thing.
Your sun & moon and skys and hills & lakes affect me no more, or
scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with
tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I
consider the clouds above me but as a roof, beautifully painted but unable to
satisfy the mind, and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a
connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me,
from disuse, have been the Beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly
called; so ever fresh & green and warm are all the inventions of men and
assemblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have laughed with dear
Joanna.
Give my kindest love, and my
sister’s, to D. &
yourself and a kiss from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite.
Thank you for Liking my Play!!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
English poet and philosopher who projected
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
with William Wordsworth; author of
Biographia Literaria (1817),
On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and other
works.
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)
Clergyman and novelist; author of
The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy (1759-67) and
A Sentimental Journey through France and
Italy (1768).
Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855)
The sister of William Wordsworth who transcribed his poems and kept his house; her
journals and letters were belatedly published after her death.
