Essays of Elia / Charles Lamb
Question:- Evaluate Charles Lamb as an essayist. Or Comment on Lamb’s style.
Not only in his diction, but also in his mode of thinking, Charles Lamb is Elizabethan. He has all the prejudices as well as the greatness of that age. He imitates Elizabethan writers in number of ways. He is fond of coining new words, he likes alliteration in prose, he uses compound words extensively, he forms adjectives from proper nouns and he introduces many words which have become obsolete now.
When Lamb is reflective as in ‘New Year’s Eve’ and ‘the Popular Fallacies’, his style resembles the style of Sir Thomas Browne. Following passage from ‘New Year’s Eve’ is very reflective:
Of all sounds of all bells – (bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven)- most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the old year. I never hear it without gathering –up my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelve months; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected, in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies.
Some times we find the style of Lamb becoming fantastic like
Significantly, I could never be made to understand (yet have I taken some pains) what a note of music is; or how one note should differ from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a tenor.
The way in which Lamb starts the essay talking about ears and then says, he has no ears and quickly adds, ‘for music’ is humorous. Lamb talks about the sounds of carpenter’s hammer in a warm summer noon and then talks about ‘the measured malice of music’ to indicate his inaptness at understanding music.
One of the reasons for the popularity of Lamb’s essays is his witty style. In ‘My Relations’, he amusingly talks about his age and about his relatives: “I am arrived at that point of life at which a man may account it a blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have (sic) either of his parents surviving.” Charles Lamb picked up the terminology and style of the writers he read with much enthusiasm. Sometimes this style creates problems also. In ‘All Fool’s Day’, Lamb uses antique style where the subject is not capable of the deep thought and fine observation with which we are accustomed to associate it. In this essay, even the powerful fancy of Lamb fails to make it pleasing.
When Lamb picks up the modern theme, he adopts modern style also. In ‘Newspapers Thirty – five Years Ago’ his style is very much different from other essays. When Lamb describes rural beauty, he assumes almost Wordsworthian style. Whatever his style many be, Lamb’s thoughts are his own, fresh and original.
Generally, the use of quotation in an essay marks the weakness of the writer. Quotations are justifiable only if they are fit to the context and do not make any sense of incongruity.
Sometimes he would combine two quotations from two different writers. His essay, ‘Ellistoniana’ has a quotation which is taken from two different sources. His line, ‘The last retreat and recess’ is taken from Swift’s ‘my late, my last retreat’ and Pope’s ‘the temple’s last recess’.
One of the essential qualities of an essay is humour. People often confuse the terms like wit, humour and fun. The first is based on intellect, the second on insight and sympathy and the third on vigour and freshness of mind and body. Lamb has all these three qualities. In ‘Poor Relations’, the opening is sheer wit, but when we read the story of Favel’s flight from the university, we feel like crying rather than laughing. Humour might be defined as extreme sensitiveness to the true proportions of things. We are so used to exaggerate one or other side of a fact that the true proportion when strikes us with a sense of incongruity excites laughter. However, what is more interesting is that we would be unknowingly laughing at our own previous misconceptions. Wit can be defined as an intellectual triumph and brings a sense of self satisfaction. Fun is the creation of animal spirits and health. In ‘All Fool’s Day’ Lamb creates fun with the description of pleasant nonsense like the idle talk when the wine is going round after dinner. The essay ‘Dissertation upon a Roasted Pig’ is full of sheer absurdities.
Pig – let me speak his praise- is no less provocative of the appetite than he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices… no part is better or worse than other.
Lamb invents details sometimes. His discussion at St. Omer’s, when he was a student there, of the lawfulness of beating pigs to death and the story of the little chimney sweep found sleeping on the state bed in Arundel Castle. The thorough paced liar in ‘The Old
Mystification is another characteristic of his essays. In ‘Dream Children’, he talks about his children, but the fact is that Lamb never married and towards the end of the essay, the children vanish. In ‘
There is a mixture of Fun and Wit in his metaphors and comparisons. The clerks of the South-Sea House remind him of the animals in a Noah’s Ark; the sage who invented a less expensive way of roasting pigs than that which required burning down of a house is compared to ‘Our Locke’. The cook in ‘The Old
Lamb has a special liking for a reversed irony. He makes a statement or uses a phrase which at first is unpleasing, but becomes pleasing when considered carefully. About his sister, he writes, “We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings, as it should be among near relations.”
Lamb also has a special liking for Paradoxes and Oxymoron. We find sentences like, “Awoke in to sleep and found the vision true.” He coins phrases like, “Fortunate piece of ill- fortune.”
Our smiles and our tears are alike limited by our powers of sympathy and insight. Lamb’s Humour is largely the effect of a sane and healthy protest against the melancholy induced by the morbid taint in his mind. He laughs to save himself from weeping, but every now and then his mind passes on to the sadder aspects of life. Description of his dead brother in ‘Dream Children’, the flight of Favel from the university in ‘Poor Relations’, the story of the sick boy in ‘The Old Margate Hoy’ and at number of other instances, we find pathos.
Lamb’s essays “are almost wholly autobiographical (though often he appropriated to himself the experiences of others.) The persona of Elia predominates in nearly all of the essays. Lamb’s style, therefore, is highly personal and mannered, its function being to create and delineate this persona with humour and sometimes pathos.” (Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia, Massachusetts, 1995, p.656)
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Sources:-
(1) Lamb, Charles. Essays of Elia,
(2) Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia,
(3) < http://www.enotes.com/nineteenth-century-criticism/lamb-charles> September 16, 2007
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