LETTER 246

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

[_This letter is written in black and red ink, changing with each line._]

[P.M. April 26, 1819.]

Dear Wordsworth, I received a copy of Peter Bell a week ago, and I hope the author will not be offended if I say I do not much relish it. The humour, if it is meant for humour, is forced, and then the price.

Sixpence would have been dear for it. Mind, I do not mean _your_ Peter Bell, but _a_ Peter Bell which preceded it about a week, and is in every bookseller's shop window in London, the type and paper nothing differing from the true one, the preface signed W.W., and the supplementary preface quoting as the author's words an extract from supplementary preface to the Lyrical Balads. Is there no law against these rascals? I would have this Lambert Simnel whipt at the cart's tail. Then there is Rogers! he has been re-writing your Poem of the Stride, and publishing it at the end of his "Human Life." Tie him up to the Cart, hangman, while you are about it. Who started the spurious P.B. I have not heard.

I should guess, one of the sneering brothers--the vile Smiths--but I have heard no name mentioned. Peter Bell (not the mock one) is excellent. For its matter, I mean. I cannot say that the style of it quite satisfies me. It is too lyrical. The auditors to whom it is feigned to be told, do not _arride me_. I had rather it had been told me, the reader, at once. Heartleap Well is the tale for me, in matter as good as this, in manner infinitely before it, in my poor judgment. Why did you not add the Waggoner? Have I thanked you, though, yet, for Peter Bell? I would not _not have it_ for a good deal of money. C---- is very foolish to scribble about books. Neither his tongue nor fingers are very retentive. But I shall not say any thing to him about it. He would only begin a very long story, with a very long face, and I see him far too seldom to teaze him with affairs of business or conscience when I do see him. He never comes near our house, and when we go to see him, he is generally writing, or thinking he is writing, in his study till the dinner comes, and that is scarce over before the stage summons us away.

The mock P. B. had only this effect on me, that after twice reading it over in hopes to find _some_thing diverting in it, I reach'd your two books off the shelf and set into a steady reading of them, till I had nearly finished both before I went to bed. The two of your last edition, of course, I mean. And in the morning I awoke determining to take down the Excursion. I wish the scoundrel imitator could know this. But why waste a wish on him? I do not believe that paddling about with a stick in a pond and fishing up a dead author whom _his_ intolerable wrongs had driven to that deed of desperation, would turn the heart of one of these obtuse literary Bells. There is no c.o.c.k for such Peters. d.a.m.n 'em. I am glad this aspiration came upon the red ink line. It is more of a b.l.o.o.d.y curse. I have delivered over your other presents to Alsager and G.

D.--A. I am sure will value it and be proud of the hand from which it came. To G. D. a poem is a poem. His own as good as any bodie's, and G.o.d bless him, any bodie's as good as his own, for I do not think he has the most distant guess of the possibility of one poem being better than another. The G.o.ds by denying him the very faculty itself of discrimination have effectually cut off every seed of envy in his bosom.

But with envy, they excided Curiosity also, and if you wish the copy again, which you destined for him, I think I shall be able to find it again for you--on his third shelf, where he stuffs his presentation copies, uncut, in shape and matter resembling a lump of dry dust, but on carefully removing that stratum, a thing like a Pamphlet will emerge. I have tried this with fifty different Poetical Works that have been given G. D. in return for as many of his own performances, and I confess I never had any scruple in taking _my own_ again wherever I found it, shaking the adherencies off--and by this means one Copy of "my Works"

served for G.D. and with a little dusting was made over to my good friend Dr. Stoddart, who little thought whose leavings he was taking when he made me that graceful bow. By the way, the Doctor is the only one of my acquaintance who bows gracefully, my Town acquaintance I mean.

How do you like my way of writing with two Inks? I think it is pretty and mottley. Suppose Mrs. W. adopts it, the next time she holds the pen for you.

[_The ink differs with every word of the following paragraph_:--]

My dinner waits. I have no time to indulge any longer in these laborious curiosities. G.o.d bless you and cause to thrive and to burgeon whatsoever you write, and fear no inks of miserable poetasters.

Yours truly CHARLES LAMB.

Mary's love.

[The _Peter Bell_ to which Lamb refers was written by John Hamilton Reynolds (1796-1852), the friend of Keats, and later Hood's brother-in-law. The parody is a travesty of Wordsworth generally rather than of _Peter Bell_, which had not then been published.

James and Horace Smith, of the _Rejected Addresses_, which contained a parody of Wordsworth under the t.i.tle "The Baby's Debut," had nothing to do with it. Lamb's indignation was shared by Coleridge, who wrote as follows to Taylor and Hessey, the publishers, on April 16, 1819, on the announcement of Reynolds' work:--

Dear Sirs, I hope, nay I feel confident, that you will interpret this note in th' real sense--namely, as a proof of the esteem and respect which I entertain toward you both. Looking in the Times this morning I was startled by an advertis.e.m.e.nt of PETER BELL--a Lyrical Ballad--with a very significant motto from one of our Comedies of Charles the IInd's reign, tho' what it signifies I wish to ascertain. Peter Bell is a Poem of Mr. Wordsworth's--and I have not heard, that it has been published by him.--If it have, and with his name (I have reason to believe, that he never published anonymously) and this now advertised be a ridicule on it--I have nothing to say--But if it have not, I have ventured to pledge myself for you, that you would not wittingly give the high respectability of your names to an attack on a _Ma.n.u.script_ work, which no man could a.s.sail but by a base breach of trust.

It is stated in the article on Reynolds in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ that Coleridge a.s.serted positively that Lamb was the objectionable parodist; but this letter suggests that that was not so.

"_Peter Bell_ (not the mock one)." Crabb Robinson's _Diary_, in the original MS., for June 6, 1812, contains this pa.s.sage:--

With C. Lamb. Lent him Peter Bell. To my surprise he finds nothing in it good. He complains of the slowness of the narrative, as if that were not the _art_ of the Poet. W. he says has great thoughts, but here are none of them. He has no interest in the a.s.s. These are to me inconceivable judgments from C. L. whose taste in general I acquiesce in and who is certainly an enthusiast for W.

Again, on May 11, 1819, after the poem was published, Robinson says:--

L. spoke of Peter Bell which he considers as one of the worst of Wordsworth's works. The lyric narrative L. has no taste for. He is disgusted by the introduction, which he deems puerile and the story he thinks ill told, though he allows the idea to be good.

"Rogers." At the end of Samuel Rogers' poem, _Human Life_, 1819, is a ballad, ent.i.tled "The Boy of Egremond," which has for subject the same incident as that in Wordsworth's "Force of Prayer"--beginning

What is good for a bootless bene?

--the death of the Young Romilly as he leapt across the Strid. In Wordsworth the answer to the question is "Endless sorrow." Rogers' poem begins:--

"Say what remains when hope is fled?"

She answered "Endless weeping."

Wordsworth's _Peter Bell_ was published a week after the mock one. To _The Waggoner_ we shall come shortly.

The significance of the allusion to Coleridge is not perfectly clear; but I imagine it to refer to the elaborate examination of Wordsworth's poetry in the _Biographia Literaria_.

"These obtuse literary Bells." Peter Bell, in the poem, sounds the river with his staff, and draws forth the dead body of the a.s.s's master. Lamb pa.s.ses, in his curse, to a reference to St. Peter.

"Taking my own again." This, if, as one may suppose, adapted from Moliere's "Je reprendre mon bien partout ou je le trouve," is an indication that Lamb knew the Frenchman's comedies.

Here should come a business note to John Rickman dated May 21, 1819, given in the Boston Bibliophile edition.]

LETTER 247

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING

May 28, 1819.

My dear M.,--I want to know how your brother is, if you have heard lately. I want to know about you. I wish you were nearer. How are my cousins, the Gladmans of Wheathamstead, and farmer Bruton? Mrs. Bruton is a glorious woman.

Hail, Mackeray End--

This is a fragment of a blank verse poem which I once meditated, but got no further. The E.I.H. has been thrown into a quandary by the strange phenomenon of poor Tommy Bye, whom I have known man and mad-man twenty-seven years, he being elder here than myself by nine years and more. He was always a pleasant, gossiping, half-headed, muzzy, dozing, dreaming, walk-about, inoffensive chap; a little too fond of the creature--who isn't at times? but Tommy had not brains to work off an over-night's surfeit by ten o'clock next morning, and unfortunately, in he wandered the other morning drunk with last night, and with a superfoetation of drink taken in since he set out from bed. He came staggering under his double burthen, like trees in Java, bearing at once blossom, fruit, and falling fruit, as I have heard you or some other traveller tell, with his face literally as blue as the bluest firmament; some wretched calico that he had mopped his poor oozy front with had rendered up its native dye, and the devil a bit would he consent to wash it, but swore it was characteristic, for he was going to the sale of indigo, and set up a laugh which I did not think the lungs of mortal man were competent to. It was like a thousand people laughing, or the Goblin Page. He imagined afterwards that the whole office had been laughing at him, so strange did his own sounds strike upon his _non_sensorium. But Tommy has laughed his last laugh, and awoke the next day to find himself reduced from an abused income of 600 per annum to one-sixth of the sum, after thirty-six years' tolerably good service. The quality of mercy was not strained in his behalf; the gentle dews dropt not on him from heaven. It just came across me that I was writing to Canton. How is Ball? "Mr. B. is a P----." Will you drop in to-morrow night? f.a.n.n.y Kelly is coming, if she does not cheat us. Mrs. _Gold_ is well, but proves "uncoined," as the lovers about Wheathampstead would say.

O hard hearted Burrell With teeth like a squirrel--

I have not had such a quiet half hour to sit down to a quiet letter for many years. I have not been interrupted above four times. I wrote a letter the other day in alternate lines, black ink and red, and you cannot think how it chilled the flow of ideas. Next Monday is Whit-Monday. What a reflection! Twelve years ago, and I should have kept that and the following holiday in the fields a-Maying. All of those pretty pastoral delights are over. This dead, everlasting dead desk--how it weighs the spirit of a gentleman down! This dead wood of the desk instead of your living trees! But then, again, I hate the Joskins, _a name for Hertfordshire b.u.mpkins_. Each state of life has its inconvenience; but then, again, mine has more than one. Not that I repine, or grudge, or murmur at my destiny. I have meat and drink, and decent apparel; I shall, at least, when I get a new hat.

A red-haired man has just interrupted me. He has broke the current of my thoughts. I haven't a word to add. I don't know why I send this letter, but I have had a hankering to hear about you some days. Perhaps it will go off, before your reply comes. If it don't, I a.s.sure you no letter was ever welcomer from you, from Paris or Macao. C. LAMB.

[At the beginning of this letter is an unprinted pa.s.sage saying that Charles Lloyd and his wife are in London and that such proximity is not too comfortable. "Would you like to see him?" or "isn't it better to lean over a stile in a sort of careless easy half astronomical position eyeing the blue expanse?"

Manning, who had now settled in England, but in retirement, was living in Hertfordshire, at Totteridge. The Gladmans and Brutons are mentioned in the _Elia_ essay "Mackery End in Hertfordshire":--

"The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it is spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire; a farm-house,--delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. I can just remember having been there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child, under the care of Bridget; who, as I have said, is older than myself by some ten years. I wish that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joint existences, that we might share them in equal division. But that is impossible. The house was at that time in the occupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married my grandmother's sister. His name was Gladman. My grandmother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are still flourishing in that part of the country, but the Fields are almost extinct."

The Goblin Page is in Scott's _Lay of the Last Minstrel_.

"Mrs. _Gold_ is well"--_nee_ f.a.n.n.y Burrell.

"This dead wood of the desk." Lamb used this figure more than once, in his letters and elsewhere. In the _Elia_ essay "The Superannuated Man"

he says: "I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul."]