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Updated: May 5, 2025
As a matter of fact, there were some extremely daring and modern spirits in Elia's "entourage," spirits who went further in an antinomian direction than I devoutly pray my friends are ever likely to go, and these scandalous ones adored him. And for his part, he seems to have liked them more than he ought. It is, indeed, very curious and interesting, the literary fate of Charles Lamb.
Pater, as usual, hits the mark with an infallible hand when he speaks of that overhanging Sophoclean tragedy which darkened Lamb's earlier days and never quite left him. It is, of course, this, the sense of one living always on the edge of a precipice, that gives such piquancy and charm to Elia's mania for "little things."
Like Elia's old lady, the "rigour of game" is all she cares for. She gives Tom Hescott one or two little turns. "'Then turn about, and turn about," says she, suiting the action to the word, "'And you don't catch me till May-day." With this, she gives him a delicate little shove, and, picking up the train of her gown, springs lightly backwards to the wall behind her.
He almost reminds one of Elia's inexplicable cousin. He has a special fondness for architecture; plans, specifications, &c., have a charm for him; he is a sort of clerical Inigo Jones; and ought to have been an architect. He is a rather polished reader; but he holds his teeth too tightly together, and there is a tremulousness in his voice which makes the utterances thereof rather too unctuous.
He looked round at the fallen man with blazing eyes, as the thought flashed through his mind. But suddenly he felt Elia's body writhe, and he turned to him again with eager words of encouragement. "Buck up, laddie," he said, without much conviction. "Guess you aren't smashed as bad as you think. It's Jim. I'll look after you. He won't hit you again. I've fixed him."
Elia's staring eyes suddenly lost their tension. He moved his head and tried to free his arms. Jim picked him up and set him on his feet, and noted that he breathed more freely. Yes, he had been in time. Elia steadied himself for a moment against his arm. He was silent, and still breathing hard. His body was racked with fierce pain, but his poor distorted mind was suffering greater.
Everybody is acquainted with Lamb's essay, with what one may call "Elia's" paradox, on Shakespeare, the vigorous truth of which is partly counterbalanced by the fact that few play readers have anything like his powers of imagination, and that he probably underrated the knowledge of Shakespeare possessed by playgoers, or at least by West End first-nighters.
Payn, on the other hand, was infinitely better in talk than in writing. He has written some essays which will hold their own side by side with some of Elia's, but no essay that he ever wrote had the delightful fascination that, to the very last, attached to his conversation. Sala talked almost as much as Payn, but in a very different fashion.
Arnold complains of his want of concreteness. The essay was his chosen medium, well-nigh the least concrete, the least literary of forms. And it was not even the personal essay, like Elia's, that he practised, but an abstract variety, a lyceum lecture, a moralizing discourse or sermon.
And therefore, partly to please myself, and partly to please the admirers of Charles Lamb, I herewith publish a part of Elia's uncollected essays and sketches. To ninety-nine hundredths of their author's readers they will be as good as MSS. And not only will they be new to most readers, but they will be found to be not wholly unworthy of him who wrote the immortal dissertation on "Roast Pig."
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