UNA FRUITY CAL FO CHARLES LAMB 161 ROBERT TANNAHILL (1774-1810) 1 ROBERT TANNAHILL was born at Paisley in 1774, and worked at the loom all his life, making up his songs as he worked, and fitting new words to old tunes. Ill-health and disappointment seem to have turned him melancholy-mad, and after burning all his manuscripts he drowned himself in the river in the year 1810. He left a local fame which has spread, although the editor of his poems says naïvely: 'They do not interest the readers so much as he seems to have expected.' His own attitude was unnecessarily humble, and he apologised for his work as 'the effusions of an unlettered mechanic, whose hopes, as a poet, extend no further than to be reckoned respectable among the minor bards of his country.' His songs are written spontaneously, often with real felicities of phrase, and almost always with a natural knack for that almost inarticulate jingle and twinkle which goes with the genuine gallop of the Scottish tongue. Like all writers who are neither lettered nor unlettered he is not always sure of his own limits, and does not realise what he loses by leaving his 'bonnie woods and braes' for an unrealised world where 'Vengeance drives his crimson car.' The sentimentality of the moment, sad or joyous, rarely goes deep enough to retain any permanent heat in songs, improvised with natural skill, and never better than when they are savoured with petulance or homely humour. CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834) 'I RECKON myself a dab at prose-verse I leave to my betters,? Lamb once wrote to Wordsworth; and, in a letter to Charles 1 (1) Poems, 1807. (2) Works, 1838, 1873. 1 (1) Blank Verse, by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, 1798. (2) John Woodvil, 1802. (3) Works, 2 vols., the first containing collected poems, 1818. (4) Album Verses, 1830. (5) Poetical Works, 1836. Lloyd, he tells him, by way of praise, 'your verses are as good and as wholesome as prose.' 'Those cursed Dryads and Pagan trumperies of modern verse have put me out of conceit of the very name of poetry,' he has just said. At the age of twentyone he talks of giving up the writing of poetry. 'At present,' he writes to Coleridge, 'I have not leisure to write verses, nor anything approaching to a fondness for the exercise. The music of poesy may charm for awhile the importunate teasing cares of life; but the teased and troubled man is not in a disposition to make that music.' Yet, as we know, Lamb, who had begun with poetry, returned to the writing of poetry at longer or shorter intervals throughout his whole life: was this prose-writer, in whom prose partook so much of the essence of poetry, in any real or considerable sense a poet? The name of Lamb as a poet is known to most people as the writer of one poem. 'The Old Familiar Faces' is scarcely a poem at all; the metre halts, stumbles, there is no touch of magic in it; but it is speech, naked human speech, such as rarely gets through the lovely disguise of verse. It has the raw humanity of Walt Whitman, and almost hurts us by a kind of dumb helplessness in it. A really articulate poet could never have written it; here, the emotion of the poet masters him as he speaks; and you feel, with a strange thrill, that catch in his breath which he cannot help betraying. There are few such poems in literature, and no other in the work of Lamb. For Lamb, with his perfect sincerity, his deliberate and quite natural simplicity, and with all that strange tragic material within and about him (already coming significantly into the naïve prose tale of 'Rosamund Gray'), was unable to work directly upon that material in the imaginative way of the poet, unable to transform its substance into a creation in the form of verse. He could write about it, touchingly sometimes, more or less tamely for the most part, in a way that seems either too downright or too deliberate. 'Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge,' he wrote, with his unerring tact of advice, 'or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries into daylight its own modest buds and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of expression. I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.' This simplicity, which was afterwards to illuminate his prose, is seen in his verse almost too nakedly, or as if it were an end rather than a means. Lamb's first master was Cowper, and the method of Cowper was not a method that could ever help him to be himself. But, above all, verse itself was never as much of a help to him as it was a hindrance. Requiring always, as he did, to apprehend reality indirectly, and with an elaborately prepared ceremony, he found himself in verse trying to be exactly truthful to emotions too subtle and complex for his skill. He could but set them down as if describing them, as in most of that early work in which he took himself and his poetry most seriously. What was afterwards to penetrate his prose, giving it that savour which it has, unlike any other, is absent from his almost saltless verse. There is the one inarticulate cry, 'The Old Familiar Faces,' and then, for twenty years and more, only one or two wonderful literary exercises, like the mad verses called 'A Conceipt of Diabolical Possession,' and the more intimate fantasy of the 'Farewell to Tobacco' ('a little in the way of Withers'), with one love-song, in passing, to a dead woman whom he had never spoken to. The Elizabethan experiments, 'John Woodvil,' and, much later, 'The Wife's Trial,' intervene, and we see Lamb under a new aspect, working at poetry with real ambition. His most considerable attempt, the work of his in verse which he would most have liked to be remembered, was the play of 'John Woodvil.' 'My tragedy,' he wrote to Southey, at the time when he was finishing it, 'will be a medley (as I intend it to be a medley) of laughter and tears, prose and verse, and in some places rhyme, songs, wit, pathos, humour, and, if possible, sublimity; at least, it is not a fault in my intention if it does not comprehend most of these discordant colours.' It was meant, in short, to be an Elizabethan play, done, not in the form of a remote imitation, but with 'a colloquial ease and spirit, something like' Shakespeare, as he says. As a play, it is the dream of a shadow. Reading it as poetry, it has a strange combination of personal quality with literary experiment: an echo, and yet so intimate; real feelings in old clothes. The subject probably meant more to Lamb than people have usually realised. I do not doubt that he wrote it with a full consciousness of its application to the tragic story which had desolated his own household, with a kind of generous casuistry, to ease a somewhat uneasy mind, and to be a sort of solace and defence for Mary. The moral of it is: - 'And not for one misfortune, child of chance, And when John Woodvil, after his trial, begins 'to understand what kind of creature Hope is,' and bids Margaret 'tell me if I over-act my mirth,' is there not a remembrance of that mood which Lamb had confessed to Coleridge, just after his mother's funeral, when he says, 'I was in danger of making myself too happy?' Some touch of this poignant feeling comes into the play here and there, but not vividly enough to waken it wholly out of what Southey called its 'lukewarm' state. The writing has less of the Elizabethan rhetoric and more of the quaint directness, the kindly nature, the eager interest in the mind, which those great writers whom Lamb discovered for the modern world had to teach him, than any play written on similar models. I am reminded sometimes of Heywood, sometimes of Middleton; and even when I find him in his play 'imitating the defects of the old writers,' I cannot but confess with Hazlitt that 'its beauties are his own, though in their manner. Others have written more splendidly in the Eliza bethan manner, but no one has ever thought and felt so like an Elizabethan. After one much later and slighter experiment in writing plays 'for antiquity,' Lamb went back to occasional writing, and the personal note returns with the 'Album Verses' of 1830. Lamb's album verses are a kind of amiable task-work, done easily, he tells us, but at the same time with something painfully industrious, not only in the careful kindness of the acrostic. The man of many friends forgets that he is a man of letters, and turns amateur out of mere geniality. To realise how much he lost by writing in verse rather than in prose, we have only to compare these careful trifles with the less cared for and infinitely more exquisite triflings of the letters. The difference is that between things made to please and things made for pleasure. In the prose he is himself, and his own master; in the verse he is never far enough away from his subject to do it or himself justice; and, tied by the metre, has rarely any fine freak or whimsical felicity such as came to him by the way in the mere turn of a sentence in prose. More than of any poet we might say that a large part of his poems were recreations. We might indeed, but with a different meaning, say as much of Herrick. To Herrick his art was his recreation, but then his recreation was his art. He has absolute skill in the game, and plays it with easy success. Lamb seems to find playing a task, or allows himself to come but indifferently through it. His admiration for 'Rose Aylmer' was not surprising, for there, in that perfectly achieved accident, was what he was forever trying to do. Yet, at times, the imprisoned elf within him breaks forth, and we get a bubble of grotesque rhymes, as cleverly done as Butler would have done them, and with a sad, pungent jollity of his own; or, once at least, some inspired nonsense, in parody of himself, the 'Angel-duck, Angel-duck, winged and silly, |