Honorary Friend: Charles Lamb and the Quakers

Abstract

The BULLETIN of Friends Historical Association Vol. 43Autumn Number, 1954No. 2 HONORARY FRIEND Charles Lamb and the Quakers By Warren Beck* He was a spindle-legged little man and he stammered. His cranium, though, was nobly shaped, and it hatched some of the pleasantest fancies and most just and genial perceptions ever bequeathed to literature. From youth to retirement he labored as a clerk — until, he said, the wood of the desk had grown into his soul. But that was a characteristic verbal audacity for its own sake. No soul was ever less wooden, none more tempered year by year to a finer resilience. This was achieved by a quiet and cheerful courage; he bore severe adversity without taking any scar of bitterness . A measure of his virtue was that at the verge of manhood, though in love, he gave up marriage, fearing hereditary insanity; and then when soon thereafter his elder sister succumbed temporarily to the family taint and fatally stabbed their mother, he assumed lifelong responsibility for Mary rather than see her committed to an asylum. Years later, in "Dream Children," he was to write pensively of the wife and offspring he might have had; yet * Author of three novels and three volumes of short stories, Warren Beck is Professor of English at Lawrence College, Appleton, Wisconsin. This paper was read before the Library Associates at Haverford College, and in earlier form at an assembly at Earlham College. 67 68Bulletin of Friends Historical Association except for his sister's frequent lapses into mental illness and their dread of its recurrence their life together was companionable and not without happiness, as may be seen in "Old China," with the middle-aged man and his still older Cousin Bridget, so-called, conversing of earlier poverty and its enhanced appreciation of such small luxuries as a folio Beaumont and Fletcher or a pair of oneshilling gallery seats at the theatre. These are but two of more than three-score essays, first published in magazines under a pen name and then gathered into those collections {Elia, 1823, and Last Essays of Elia, 1833) of which Landor prophesied that the world would "never again see two such delightful volumes." However, Charles Lamb himself said he wrote not for the age but for antiquity. Behind that whimsical statement lies a main fact. Lamb had helped himself transcend his early manhood's frustrations, his prolonged domestic anxieties, and the monotonies of office work by turning to books, especially those of the Elizabethans and seventeenth-century Englishmen. Their intense dramatic works fed his starved sense of life, their humors gratified his persistent romantic individualism, and their opulently imaginative language beguiled him. With their sonorous voices echoing in his ear and with some infusion of their quaintly compounded moods — humanely speculative and liberally eccentric — he began in the ripeness of middle life to produce his famous essays. Yet under such a weight of antiquarian influence Lamb is never weakly imitative or derivative. His friend Hazlitt, the great familiar stylist and critic of styles, allowed Elia his "obsolete" way of writing because he was "imbued with the spirit" of it The least pretentious of fellows, Lamb nevertheless followed his bent with the assurance of the gifted, to become one of the most personally immediate and charmingly spontaneous of essayists. He achieved a humorous reflectiveness and an irony not just free from malice but indeed benign. He perfected an art which shares tête-k- tête the zest of what he called "excellent absurdities ." He is the truly facetious man; every plane of his mind flashes with apt perception. The page seems to have been smiled over by the writer, and something of that bland warmth lingers. His comment on old sundials, as he remembered them from his childhood, is typical in its quiet delight and imaginative diction: Honorary Friend: Charles Lamb and the Quakers 69 What an antique air had the now almost effaced sundials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light! . . . What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of...