Art. VIII.-HAZLITT AND LAMB.

1. The Collected Works of William Hazlitt.

Edited by

A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover. Twelve vols. London: Dent, 1902-4.

2. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Edited by E. V. Lucas. Seven vols. London: Methuen, 1903-5. 3. The Life of Charles Lamb. By E. V. Lucas. Two vols. London: Methuen, 1905.

HUMANITY is not the same thing as humane letters, though usage, ancient and modern, has often chosen to identify them. Hazlitt and Lamb took the same interest in letters, but their interest in humanity was widely different. To overlook this fact is to miss the explanation of Lamb's secure niche in the temple of fame and Hazlitt's late and grudging recognition. About Hazlitt's genius, about his intense belief in letters, about his saying things on almost every subject under the sun 'as only the man of letters says them,' there is no manner of doubt. Literary experts have been unanimous on this point for the best part of a century; and we have only to open at random any one of the twelve volumes before us to confirm this verdict. Yet the fact remains that he has never had the vogue that has been secured by men much his inferiors, to say nothing of Lamb.

That Hazlitt was intensely disliked by most of his contemporaries is beyond question, as also that he had the greatest difficulty in keeping his friends. He humorously compared his own talk to a game of ninepins, and certainly had a glee anything but holy in demolishing opponents. His political animus was of the bitterest. When a man deals as largely in contempt as Hazlitt did, we cannot be surprised at any and every form of retaliation. His opinions were his most precious possessions; and, where they were concerned, he would give no quarter to friends or foes. Lamb was his most loyal admirer ; but Lamb, who never hated a man he had seen, could not understand this malevolence, this indifference to humanity. It produced a legacy of ill-will which has dogged Hazlitt's name ever since. Other things may be pardoned; but to set yourself against humanity is to set the human race against you.

When we read the story of some old gentleman, a few years ago, running after a Blue-coat boy to give him a crown-piece, and saying, 'That's for Charles Lamb,' or of the little girl (a daughter of one of Lamb's acquaintances) stopping strangers in the street to tell them that Mr Lamb was coming to see her,' we know why the world is still so full of Lamb's personality and so empty of Hazlitt's, and why sympathy is an author's best policy, even if nothing else could be said for it.

It is nearly seventy years since Bulwer Lytton said of Hazlitt, 'A complete edition of his works is all the monument he demands'; and that monument is now before us. Stray papers may have escaped the editors; they have wisely and deliberately declined to reprint 'The Life of Napoleon'; but it is unlikely that their pious diligence will be emulated or challenged for another century. Hazlitt was never known to the many, nor even to the few, as he deserves to be; but, with a real library edition' of him, his fame should grow. How well he has earned this monument the late W. E. Henley has told us in a characteristic introduction; and, whether we find ourselves in absolute agreement with it or not, no one will deny that it is a tribute to a great man of letters by a true brother of the craft.

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The tenth volume of this edition is of special interest, as it contains Hazlitt's articles in the Edinburgh Review,' and in particular that paper on the novelists which he used again in one of his best books, most inadequately described by its title, 'Lectures on the English Comic Writers.' The original form of the article was a notice of Madame d'Arblay's 'Wanderer'; and it is an exciting discovery to find that Hazlitt, if nobody else, had read that much despised work. In the same volume there is printed (in an appendix) a savage review of Christabel ' and Kubla Khan,' which one might boldly refuse to call Hazlitt's were it not that the editors, apparently only half convinced, quote high authority for ascribing it to him. Hazlitt has, in several other cases, given varying judgments of the same person; but there is a vulgar violence in this review which is at least rare with him.

An editor of Lamb's letters is denied those solacing reflections which may reasonably reward the editors of Hazlitt. There can be no finality about an edition of

Lamb for many years; that is, till the law of copyright has spent its malice on the 'Letters.' Even then other editors may find, as Mr Lucas did, that the New World grudges the Old such fragmenta aurea as it possesses. Meantime, however, Mr Lucas' industry has secured various things besides letters to enrich a new edition, a review of Keats' 'St Agnes' Eve' being of the number. This last is all but authenticated as Lamb's; and, if so, Lamb's generous praise is no small proof of his sympathy with the Romantic movement. Hazlitt, too, praises Keats, though the praise is fainter, and the desire to disparage Shelley by comparison may have had something to do with it. One would be glad to think that their supposed indifference to some of their great contemporaries has been overrated, even if their depreciation of Byron and Shelley admits of no denial.

One of Mr Lucas' interesting discoveries is a paper on 'Readers against the Grain,' a delightful piece of edification which is even more 'a sermon for the times' to-day than when it was written. Two of the slighter papers are social sketches, 'Tom Pry' and 'Tom Pry's Wife.' The first has something of Lamb's true manner; but the second is unworthy of him, and it does not make it more tolerable to learn that Mrs Godwin sat unconsciously for the picture. It has something of the tone of what is now called the new humour; but nowhere else has Lamb ever descended to such a tone, and he is doubtless repenting of it in the shades. Another paper illustrates afresh Lamb's partiality for 'Richard the Third,' and his noble protests against the misconceptions of actors; and a fourth, a Memoir of Robert Lloyd,' exhibits all Lamb's affectionate insight and subtle tenderness.

Of the new letters, an early one to Coleridge deserves special mention, for in it Cowper's 'Royal George' gets an uncommon tribute: 'I did not know Cowper was up to that.' Lamb always had a high opinion of Cowper; he even liked his Homer. But he knew that the Royal George' was not an achievement merely, but an inspiration; and his startled recognition conveys to us all that the best critics, notably Sir Leslie Stephen, have said of it since.

Lamb's proposal of marriage to Miss Kelly, the lady of whose acting he wrote so beautifully and sympatheti

cally-'What a lass to go a-gipseying thro' the world with!'-is now, what it never was before, an established fact; and the occasion produced two noble letters, Lamb's punning resignation to the inevitable being a characteristic feature. The lady whose acting deserved this sentence must have been a wonder to behold.

'Her's is the joy of a freed spirit escaping from care like a bird that had been limed. Her smiles, if I may use the expression, seem saved out of the fire, relics which a good spirit had snatched up as most portable; her discontents are visitors, and not inmates. She can lay them by altogether, and, when she does, I am not sure that she is not greatest.'

The 'Memoir of Robert Lloyd' has a sentence with the same delicate balance in it, as satisfying to the ear as to the heart.

'He oftentimes let fall in his familiar letters bright and original illustrations of feeling, which might have been mistaken for genius if his own watchful modest spirit had not constantly interposed to recall and substitute for them some of the ordinary forms of observation which lay less out of that circle of common sympathy within which his kind nature delighted to move.'

As one reads a sentence like this, one easily understands Thackeray's reverence, and why he was moved to speak of him as 'Saint Charles.'

Every one must be grateful to Mr Lucas for letting us see and hear so much of Mary Lamb, and helping us to understand better than ever that extraordinary friendship -for friendship it must be called-between brother and sister, a friendship less common than other friendships, but not less capable of emulating Damon and Pythias, Orestes and Pylades, and the other heroical examples.' It is not all a matter of piety, nor of intellect, nor of 'that custom sweet of living side by side.' It is rather the old Sallustian ideal—in great things, not in small'Idem velle atque nolle, ea demum firma amicitia.'

Mary Lamb's wit and wisdom were quite equal to her affection, as is proved by the testimony, not only of her brother and his friends, but of her own letters. 'I think of him and his sister every day of my life,' writes Dorothy Wordsworth; and Coleridge's words about them are too

familiar to quote. If Landor's praise-' the finest genius that ever descended on the heart of woman'-seems extravagant, Wordsworth's tribute is sufficiently arresting: 'Were I to give my own feelings, I should dwell not only on her genius and intellectual powers, but upon the delicacy and refinement of manner which she retained inviolable under most trying circumstances.'

It is at least evident that she was not early 'tumbled into' Samuel Salt's library for nothing. Her fondness for pictures was at least as great as her fondness for books; and the letter which records her visit to Cambridge is as humane and humorous a piece of enthusiasm as ever was written. She liked all the colleges best-the little gloomy ones because they were little gloomy ones.' She wishes her correspondent had heard Charles talk his nonsense' (about an earlier visit to Cambridge), ‘and how he then first felt himself " commencing gentleman," and had eggs for his breakfast.' The skill and sympathy with which she studied Charles' humours were admirable; but it did not forbid entertainment at his expense, as this sentence from another letter shows: This is no particular day-not a birthday, nor a give-up-smoking day!' Even the length of the letter gives occasion to her humour. She copies it for a second correspondent to save herself trouble; and a friend (she says) tells her it recalls a first love-letter, which her husband had since admitted was a copy of one used on a previous occasion.

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If it is necessary to speak of her graver moods, what she wrote of Coleridge's absence at the time of the Wordsworths' trouble, and the tender hand she laid on that trouble, are moving examples of all she stood for to her brother's famous friends. The little couplet in her poem with its seventeenth century rhythm—

'Ever this lost brother John

Will be their heart's companion'—

is enough to show how well she could strike the only note that should be struck at such times.

It has been carelessly said in reminiscences that Lamb undervalued Coleridge's poetry, and that he did not greatly care for Christabel.' It is hardly worth while to take these things seriously, or to remind such writers that he did actually hoax the young De Quincey into