Charles Lamb and His Friends

THOUGH advertised as “a labor of love,” Charles Lamb and His Friends is a professorial product, didactic and pedestrian. Yet Will D. Howe himself is by no means your mere pedant. He made the dry bones of Transcendentalism live again in the graphic lectures I heard him in Indiana University in the midst of the hurly-burly of World War I. He is responsible for the Howe Readers of my first schooldays, as well as for the Rhetoric from which the fundamentals of the writing craft were taught to me. Yet the Lamb served up by the former Professor Howe needs to be vitamin-enriched for the modern taste.

It is hard to understand why so experienced a writer, critic, editor, and publisher has offered us adulterated scholarship geared to the general public, instead of evoking the spirit of “Elia” in the round. In spite of his declared intention “to see Charles Lamb as he was to himself, and to those who knew him,” he has failed by trying to make his book both scholarly in tone and popular in appeal. He accomplishes neither. He exposes himself in the ungrateful role of a researcher trying to masquerade as a vulgarisateur.

He has muffed the opportunity to create an integrated portrait combining humor and whimsy with the more profound appeals that make the stammering little scrivener of the East India Company an ideal subject for the modern biographer’s technique. Dignity and authenticity could have been attained without sacrificing the anecdotal element upon which the reputation of Lamb largely thrives.

As in the case of Boswell’s Johnson, the abundance of quotable stories and sayings keeps Lamb alive in common memory more than his actual literary accomplishments. This legitimate and irreplaceable quarry lies largely unworked until the scrapbook of quoted matter that forms the concluding chapter.

Among specific weaknesses, one is struck by flimsy plays to the public’s appetite for “love interest": “Dorothy [Wordsworth] came to have great admiration for Coleridge. Perhaps it might have developed into something more. . . . It is futile, but interesting, to conjecture what . . . might have been.”Or such maudlin twaddle as this: “Charles came under the spell of the ‘fair-hair’d maid.’ . . . The boy and the girl knew well ‘the winding wood-walks’ and the ‘shady pathways sweet.’ ... It was a lovely dream, but it was not to become reality.”

There are frequent digressions and distortions to relate the story to topics of today, such as paralleling the Napoleonic wars with the present war, and opening the book with a lead about “unbelievable atrocities of a vicious and determined enemy " in London in 1940, without any evident motivation. The illusion of Lamb’s living presence is sometimes created in spite of the clutter of scene-shifting, but it is almost invariably chased off the stage by irritating asides such as, “The most painstaking research has so far failed to reveal information.”Even William Lyon Phelps would hardly have pointed a moral to adorn the tale of mad sister Mary’s murder of her mother so unctuously as does Howe: “Most of us know a day when a decision is made by us that sets the direction for the rest of our lives. This was the day for Charles Lamb.”

What are the redeeming features? Sister Mary emerges a personality more vivid than Charles. We catch glimpses of irresistible eccentrics; such as John Rickman, whom Lamb cherishes because he “thoroughly penetrates into the ridiculous wherever found . . . up to anything, down to everything,” and Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet to whom Lamb wrote some of his best letters, revealing his sympathy with the Quaker “way of life.” Frequent quotations from Lamb, judiciously pointed up, are inevitably the chief source of pleasure in the book, especially in the chapters on “His Letters” and “The Theatre.” Nineteen unusual illustrations jog the interest. Finally, we have the satisfaction, rare in these days, of handling a book that is printed and bound with superior workmanship. Bobbs-Merrill, $3.50.

CLIFTON JOSEPH FURNESS