London sights could ‘feed me without a power of satiating me’. Hogarth’s paintings provided ‘matter to feed and fertilise the mind’. The solitude of childhood was the ‘feeder of love, and silence, and admiration’. Food, for Lamb, was a medium of thought, a master metaphor. He could not ‘digest’ death, but he gorged on life. Every deadman must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that “Such as he now is I must shortly be.” Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. Writing as a friend of Elia, he said that ‘he did not conform to the march of time … The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood.’ Yet he was also disgusted by the ‘impertinent … familiarities inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it.’ Lamb made an art of recollection, describing and redescribing the personages and events of his childhood with a Proustian assiduousness. And by practising his Romantic ideal of the imagination, imposing unity and relation on disintegrating human experience: ‘the true poet dreams being awake. In his reading: ‘I love to lose myself in other men’s minds.’ In his ability, as the character ‘Elia’, to enlarge himself without egotism: ‘to imply and twine with his own identity the griefs and affections of another – making himself many, or reducing many unto himself’. In the theatre: ‘the escape from life, the oblivion of consequences, the holiday … those Saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the world’. I am in love with this green earth, – the face of town and country, – the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets … Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and Summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?įaced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could. ‘The fine ladies, or fine gentlemen, who show me their teeth,’ he wrote, ‘show me bones.’ He cared not ‘to be carried with the tide that smoothly bears human life to eternity’. E ven a smile could put Charles Lamb in mind of death.
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