Write a short note on Lamb as an essayist.

What is the secret of Lamb’s enduring popularity as an essayist?

“Charles Lamb is the Prince of English essayists.” Discuss.

What do you consider are the salient features of Lamb’s essays?

Ans.

Introduction: Lamb occupies a unique place in the history of English Essay. He has rightly been called ‘the prince of English essayists’. He is entitled to a place as an essayist beside Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, Steele and Addison. He unites many of the characteristics of each of these writers-refined and exquisite humour, a genuine and cordial vein of pleasantry and heart-touching pathos. Lamb was a pure artist for whom like Keats ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’. Lamb’s finest essays are the nearest of all to poetry, not only because they often touch the height where prose eloquence passes into poetry, but because, whether grave or gay reminiscent or personal, they have in some degree the creative imagination which it is the privilege of poetry to possess in full. The essays are intimate revelation of their author and his prejudices and opinions, likes and dislikes. his relations and friends. Like Montaigne his essays are strictly personal and egotistical. His essays are full of fun and frolic, smiles and tears as well as wisdom, sane philosophy and sweet humanity. He takes his reader into confidence and talks to him like dear friend. Lamb had a wide study of the Elizabethans and the 17th century prose-writers Browne, Burton and Fuller. His style consciously or unconsciously has many reminiscences of the styles of those early masters of poetic prose.

Autobiographical Elements: The chief quality of Lamb’s essays is the egotistical element. His egotism has no touch of vanity of self-assertion. His egotism is tempered with some kind of sweetness which is derived from his manner of taking the reader into his confidence and talking to him like a friend. He admits the reader into his confidence and reveals to him his personal secrets, memories, likes and dislikes, habits and hobbies. deficiencies and idiosyncrasies. He makes his own personality the ground work of his essays and weaves a fine web of fancy round his memories past and present. We may learn of the boyish Charles in Night Fears, and in Christ’s Hospital. We are introduced to his family in the Old Benchers of the Inner Temple and in My Relations. We read his youthful experience in Mockery End. We get a vivid glimpse of his long intimacy with Mary in Mrs. Battle’s Opinions. We learn of his official work in the South-Sea House. Dream Children contains his sentimental memories. Imperfect Sympathies and Confessions of a Drunkard give us his prejudices and temptations.

A Fine Blending of Fact and Fiction: Lamb had a mischievous tendency to play with the reader and to mystify him. He does this by blending the factual with the fanciful or fictional elements, so much so that there has to be careful shifting to separate the two elements. Names are changed-Ann Simmons becomes Alice W-n; relationships are changed he talks of his brother and sister as his cousins, Bridget and James. Often, the references to places and times are deliberately wrong. His own faults and foibles receive an exaggerated treatment. While trying to extract the autobiographical elements from his essays, it should be remembered that Lamb was essentially an imaginative artist.

An Exquisite Blending of Humour and Pathos: A sombre atmosphere of the vanishing past envelops a number of his essays, but the pathos is blended with humour, showing the author’s sense of the right proportion of life and its events. Laughter and tears often mingle in Lamb’s essays. Laughter is quickly followed by tears of sympathy in many of his essays. Actually Lamb’s life was so full of disappointments and miseries that it became a tale of sorrow. He grew up with tears and sighs as his companions. But he was kind-hearted and generous and indulged a little too much in fun and frolic, practical jokes and absurdities to forget his inner sadness and grief. His humour is most striking when it is allied with pathos. In Dream Children, Poor Relations, Confessions of a Drunkard, Christ’s Hospital, All Fool’s Day, A Chapter on Ears, New Year’s Eve, The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers and in many other essays pity is mixed with humour in rainbow colours.

Wit and Humour: Another striking feature about Lamb’s essays is their wit and humour. Wit and humour are all pervasive in his essays. He had a keen sense of fun and humour, but his humour has different facets and appears in his essays in the form of boisterous fun, kindly jest, pungent humour, irony, satire, and witty and sly remarks. In the essay. Oxford in the Vacation, Lamb makes an ironical remark about the heads of colleges. In Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago, there is the funny story of a boarder, but we have a witty description of the two wigs of James Boyer, one wig “betokening a mild day’, and other wig forewarning the students to be prepared for flogging. There is a plenty of humour in A Chapter On Ears. The opening paragraph shows Lamb’s genius for witty metaphors. A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig is replete with wit, humour and fun. In the essay Poor Relations, the opening paragraph contains a large number of witty metaphors to describe a poor relation.

Humanity: Lamb’s laughter and sense of humour is never bitter or hurtful. He makes fun of people, laughs and creates laughter against certain eccentricities, he never does so with the intention to hurt anybody. His humour is essentially tolerant, accepting the drawbacks and foibles of men. But this very humanity makes Lamb speak out sharply against the so called ‘gallant’ men of the modern age. This very humanity makes him plead for charitable behaviour and kindness towards the poor little chimney-sweeper of London. His tenderness for women and children, and indeed for all human beings, finds expression in his essays and lends a beautiful colour to his wit and humour.

Interesting Anecdotes: Lamb’s essays are copiously interspersed with anecdotes. They serve as illustrations of the author’s points or arguments. They add a vivid charm to the work and increase its liveliness. They certainly enhance the interest of the essays in which they appear, and lend a narrative quality to them. In Poor Relations, there are two anecdotes. One relates to W-(Favell) who was Lamb’s school-mate, and the other pertains to Mr. Billet, a poor relation of Lamb’s father. These two anecdotes comprise almost half of the essay. In Imperfect Sympathies, there is an anecdote about two Quakers and the manner in which they dealt with the landlady at the inn where they took refreshments. In The Old and the New Schoolmaster, there is an anecdote about the schoolmaster who complains of having lost the love of his wife.

Character-Sketches: The essays of Lamb are interspersed with brief character sketches. He shows a gift of characterization. His character-sketches are brief, but vivid. We find portraits of his relatives, friends and the old familiar faces from his past. We get a vivid picture of the clerks at South Sea House, of the schoolmasters at Christ’s Hospital, and various other personalities. In The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple, the portraits of Thomas Coventry. Samuel Salt, and Lovel (a fictitious name which Lamb gives to his own father) are admirably drawn. In My Relations, the characters of Lamb’s aunt and of his brother are skillfully portrayed

His Style: Lamb had an extreme, an almost exclusive partiality for earlier prose writers, especially for Fuller, Browne and Burton. The influence of these writers shines out conspicuously in his style. His style is certainly compounded of elements borrowed from older writers. But in passing through Lamb’s temperament these elements are fused into a style wholly new and individual, betraying its remote origin only by quaintness of phrase and verbal oddities. His love for word-coining, fondness for alliteration, use of compound words, formation of adjectives from proper nouns and frequent use of Latin words and phrases show that he is sufficiently associated with the Elizabethans and Browne, Burton and Fuller.

There is also something of the poetic in Lamb. He was not much of a poet in verse. but there is a definite element of poetry in his more serious prose. His gloomy temper appears in many of his essays and he gives them a romantic and poetic flavour. It is particularly noticeable in New Year’s Eve, Witches and Other Night Fears and The Confessions of a Drunkard. Dream Children is probably the best illustration of Lamb’s poetic genius. It is a lyric in prose.