History of English Humour, Vol. 2

CHAPTER XII.

Lamb—His Farewell to Tobacco—Pink Hose—On the Melancholy of Tailors—Roast Pig.

No one ever so finely commingled poetry and humour as Charles Lamb. In his transparent crystal you are always seeing one colour through another, and he was conscious of the charm of such combinations, for he commends Andrew Marvell for such refinement. His early poems printed with those of Coleridge, his schoolfellow at Christ's Hospital, abounded with pure and tender sentiment, but never arrested the attention of the public. We can find in them no promise of the brilliancy for which he was afterwards so distinguished, except perhaps in his "Farewell to Tobacco," where for a moment he allowed his Pegasus to take a more fantastic flight.

"Scent, to match thy rich perfume,
Chemic art did ne'er presume,
Through her quaint alembic strain,
None so sovereign to the brain;
Nature that did in thee excel,
Framed again no second smell,
Roses, violets, but toys
For the smaller sort of boys,
Or for greener damsels meant,
Thou art the only manly scent."

But although forbidden to smoke, he still hopes he may be allowed to enjoy a little of the delicious fragrance at a respectful distance—

"And a seat too 'mongst the joys
Of the blest Tobacco Boys;
Where though I, by sour physician,
Am debarred the full fruition
Of thy favours, I may catch
Some collateral sweets, and snatch
Sidelong odours that give life-
Like glances from a neighbour's wife,
And still live in thee by places
And the suburbs of thy graces;
And in thy borders take delight,
An unconquered Canaanite."

His early years brought forth another kind of humour which led to his being appointed jester to the "Morning Post." He was paid at the rate of sixpence a joke, furnished six a day, and depended upon this remuneration for his supplementary livelihood—everything beyond mere bread and cheese. As humour, like wisdom, is found of those who seek her not, we may suppose the quality of these productions was not very good. He thus bemoans his irksome task, which he performed generally before breakfast—

"No Egyptian task-master ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery. No fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny, which this necessity exercised upon us. Half-a-dozen jests in a day, (bating Sundays too,) why, it seems nothing! We make twice the number every day in our lives as a matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But then they come into our head. But when the head has to go out to them—when the mountain must go to Mahomet. Readers, try it for once, only for some short twelvemonth."

Lamb, however, only obtained this undesirable appointment by a coincidence he thus relates,—

"A fashion of flesh—or rather pink-coloured hose for the ladies luckily coming up when we were on our probation for the place of Chief Jester to Stuart's Paper, established our reputation. We were pronounced a 'capital hand.' O! the conceits that we varied upon red in all its prismatic differences!... Then there was the collateral topic of ankles, what an occasion to a truly chaste writer like ourself of touching that nice brink and yet never tumbling over it, of a seemingly ever approximating something 'not quite proper,' while like a skilful posture master, balancing between decorums and their opposites, he keeps the line from which a hair's breadth deviation is destruction.... That conceit arrided us most at that time, and still tickles our midriff to remember where allusively to the flight of Astroea we pronounced—in reference to the stockings still—that 'Modesty, taking her final leave of mortals, her last blush was visible in her ascent to the Heavens by the track of the glowing instep.'"

References of a somewhat amatory character often make sayings acceptable, which for their intrinsic merit would scarcely raise a smile, and Lamb soon seriously deplored the loss of this serviceable assistance. He continues:—

"The fashion of jokes, with all other things, passes away as did the transient mode which had so favoured us. The ankles of our fair friends in a few weeks began to reassume their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to stand upon. Other female whims followed, but none methought so pregnant, so invitatory of shrewd conceits, and more than single meanings."

He tells us that Parson Este and Topham brought up the custom of witty paragraphs first in the "World," a doubtful statement—and that even in his day the leading papers began to give up employing permanent wits. Many of our provincial papers still regale us with a column of facetiÆ, but machine-made humour is not now much appreciated. We require something more natural, and the jests in these papers now consist mostly of extracts from the works, or anecdotes from the lives of celebrated men. The pressure thus brought to bear upon Lamb for the production of jests in a given time led him to indulge in very bad puns, and to try to justify them as pleasant eccentricities. What can be expected from a man who tells us that "the worst puns are the best," or who can applaud Swift for having asked, on accidentally meeting a young student carrying a hare; "Prithee, friend, is that your own hair or a wig?" He finds the charm in such hazards in their utter irrelevancy, and truly they can only be excused as flowing from a wild and unchastened fancy. It must require great joviality or eccentricity to find any humour in caricaturing a pun.

Speaking of the prospectus of a certain Burial Society, who promised a handsome plate with an angel above and a flower below, Lamb ventures—"Many a poor fellow, I dare swear, has that Angel and Flower kept from the Angel and Punchbowl, while to provide himself a bier he has curtailed himself of beer." But to record all Lamb's bad puns would be a dull and thankless task. We will finish the review of his verbal humour by quoting a passage out of an indifferent farce he wrote entitled, "Mr. H——."

(The hero cannot on account of his patronymic get any girl to marry him.)

"My plaguy ancestors, if they had left me but a Van, or a Mac, or an Irish O', it had been something to qualify it—Mynheer Van Hogsflesh, or Sawney Mac Hogsflesh, or Sir Phelim O'Hogsflesh, but downright blunt—— If it had been any other name in the world I could have borne it. If it had been the name of a beast, as Bull, Fox, Kid, Lamb, Wolf, Lion; or of a bird, as Sparrow, Hawk, Buzzard, Daw, Finch, Nightingale; or of a fish, as Sprat, Herring, Salmon; or the name of a thing, as Ginger, Hay, Wood; or of a colour, as Black, Gray, White, Green; or of a sound, as Bray; or the name of a month, as March, May; or of a place, as Barnet, Baldock, Hitchen; or the name of a coin, as Farthing, Penny, Twopenny; or of a profession, as Butcher, Baker, Carpenter, Piper, Fisher, Fletcher, Fowler, Glover; or a Jew's name, as Solomons, Isaacs, Jacobs; or a personal name, as Foot, Leg, Crookshanks, Heaviside, Sidebottom, Ramsbottom, Winterbottom; or a long name, as Blanchenhagen or Blanchhausen; or a short name as Crib, Crisp, Crips, Tag, Trot, Tub, Phips, Padge, Papps, or Prig, or Wig, or Pip, or Trip; Trip had been something, but Ho—!"

(Walks about in great agitation; recovering his coolness a little, sits down.)

These were weaker points in Lamb, but we must also look at the other side. Those who have read his celebrated essay on Hogarth will find that he possesses no great appreciation for that humour which is only intended to raise a laugh, and might conclude that he was more of a moralist than a humorist. He admires the great artist as an instructor, but admits that "he owes his immortality to his touches of humour, to his mingling the comic with the terrible." Those, he continues, are to be blamed who overlook the moral in his pictures, and are merely taken with the humour or disgusted by the vulgarity. Moreover, there is a propriety in the details; he notices the meaning in the tumbledown houses "the dumb rhetoric," in which "tables, chairs, and joint stools are living, and significant things." In these passages Lamb seems to regard the comic merely as a means to an end;—"Who sees not," he asks, "that the grave-digger in Hamlet, the fool in Lear have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt; while the comic stuff in 'Venice Preserved,' and the doggrel nonsense of the cook and his poisoning associates in the Rollo of Beaumont and Fletcher are pure irrelevant, impertinent discords—as bad as the quarreling dog and cat under the table of our Lord and the Disciples at Emmaus, of Titian."

Lamb's interpretation of Hogarth's works is that of a superior and thoughtful mind: but we cannot help thinking that the humour in them was not so entirely subordinate to the moral. One conclusion we may incidentally deduce from his remarks—that the meaning in pictorial illustrations, either as regards humour or sentiment, is not so appreciable as it would be in words, and consequently that caricatures labour under considerable disadvantages. "Much," he says, "depends upon the habits of mind we bring with us." And he continues—"It is peculiar to the confidence of high genius alone to trust much to spectators or readers," he might have added that in painting, this confidence is often misplaced, especially as regards the less imaginative part of the public. We owe him a debt, however, for a true observation with regard to the general uses of caricatures, that "it prevents that disgust at common life which an unrestricted passion for ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing."

But leaving passages in which Lamb approves of absurd jesting, and those in which he commends humour for pointing a moral, we come to consider the largest and most characteristic part of his writings, his pleasant essays, in which he has neither shown himself a moralist or a mountebank.

The following is from an Essay "On the Melancholy of Tailors."

"Observe the suspicious gravity of their gait. The peacock is not more tender, from a consciousness of his peculiar infirmity, than a gentleman of this profession is of being known by the same infallible testimonies of his occupation, 'Walk that I may know thee.'

"Whoever saw the wedding of a tailor announced in the newspapers, or the birth of his eldest son?

"When was a tailor known to give a dance, or to be himself a good dancer, or to perform exquisitely upon the tight rope, or to shine in any such light or airy pastimes? To sing, or play on the violin? Do they much care for public rejoicings, lightings up, ringing of bells, firing of cannons, &c.

"Valiant I know they be, but I appeal to those who were witnesses to the exploits of Eliot's famous troop whether in their fiercest charges they betrayed anything of that thoughtless oblivion to death with which a Frenchman jigs into battle, or, whether they did not show more of the melancholy valour of the Spaniard upon whom they charged that deliberate courage which contemplation and sedentary habits breathe."

Lamb accounts for this melancholy of tailors in several ingenious ways.

"May it not be that the custom of wearing apparel, being derived to us from the fall, and one of the most mortifying products of that unhappy event, a certain seriousness (to say no more of it) may in the order of things have been intended to have been impressed upon the minds of that race of men to whom in all ages the care of contriving the human apparel has been entrusted."

He makes further comments upon their habits and diet, observing that both Burton and Galen especially disapprove of cabbage.

In "Roast Pig" we have one of those homely subjects which were congenial to Lamb.

"There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over roasted crackling—as it is well called—the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance—with the adhesive oleaginous—O call it not fat—but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it—the tender blossoming of fat—fat cropped in the bud—taken in the shoot in the first innocence—the cream and quintessence of the child pig's yet pure food—the lean—no lean, but a kind of animal manna—or rather fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result, or common substance.

"Behold him, while he is doing—it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth than a scorching heat, that he is passive to. How equably he twirleth round the string! Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age; he hath wept out his pretty eyes—radiant jellies—shooting stars....

"His sauce should be considered. Decidedly a few bread crumbs done up with his liver and brains, and a dish of mild sage. But banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank and guilty garlic, you cannot poison them or make them sharper than they are—but consider he is a weakling—a flower."

Lamb gives his opinion that you can no more improve sucking pig than you can refine a violet.

Thus he proceeds along his sparkling road—his humour and poetry gleaming one through the other, and often leaving us in pleasant uncertainty whether he is in jest or earnest. Though not gifted with the strength and suppleness of a great humorist, he had an intermingled sweetness and brightness beyond even the alchemy of Addison. We regret to see his old-fashioned figure receding from our view—but he will ever live in remembrance as the most joyous and affectionate of friends.

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