TEARS AND SMILES IN CHARLES LAMB
K.
NAGARAJA RAO
Like
sunshine and shadow, humour and pathos are an
integral part of life. Many of the essays of Charles Lamb
contain humour, but the reader is missing the point,
if the undercurrent of pathos is ignored. The curious mixture of the opposites
makes a fascinating study of some of the essays of Elia.
Stopford A. Brooke writes, “It is said that humour and pathos are closely connected, that the humorist
is capable of the most pathetic expression.” (“Naturalism in
English Poetry.”)
Charles
Lamb wasted the golden years of his life in the irksome confinement of an
office. The prince of the essayists, Lamb, always felt that man should lead a
life of contemplation. But poor man, he had to write of tea and drugs and the
bales of indigo, instead of having a chance to scribble his own thoughts. He
used to work like a slave in the office, and even at
night he was deprived the gift of Nature, sound sleep. How humorous and at the
same time pathetic the following sentence is: “Besides my daylight servitude, I
served over again all night in my sleep and would awake with terrors of
imaginary false entries, errors in my accounts, and
the like.” This sentence clearly brings out the agony which the essayist had
undergone on account of the wretched life of a clerk. Again Lamb writes that,
if any one wants to go through his works, they can be found not at any
bookseller’s, but at the south sea house itself. One can only imagine what Lamb
would have written, had he completely left to the writer’s desk. Lamb’s true
works or the curious bibliophilies are safeguarded in
the ledger archives by the East India Company. Saxe Commins calls this “bantering humor.”
From
such a miserable life of a clerk he led in the south sea house, Charles Lamb
could create humorous characters of his colleagues. They included Tippi the accountant who “thought an accountant is the
greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it.” In
this context, Lamb seems to be writing humorously of the advantages of writing
under a pseudonym. Even if the readers
find him conceited, they can do nothing to him. They cannot find who Elia is, as Lamb is protected under the phantom cloud of Elia.
Another
essay “
But
the real purpose of Lamb in writing this essay is not as much to describe the
oddities of Dyer, as it is self-pity. Lamb feels sorry that he himself could
not have the benefit of university education, though that, in no way, could
diminish his faculties as a writer. And a note of disappointment to the effect
that he could not be a ‘M. A.’ is revealed in the following lines:
“To
such a one as myself, who has been defrauded in his younger years of the sweet
food of academic institution, nowhere is so pleasant, to while away a few idle
weeks, at as one or other of the universities.”
To
appreciate the essays like “Dream Children” it is worthwhile to bear in mind
certain incidents, connected with the not happy life of the essayist. Charles
Lamb fell in love with
In
“Dream Children”, Lamb the bachelor imagines that he is married and has
children who came to him, to hear stories about their elders. There is
poignancy of pathos in this essay towards the end of the essay. Lamb is unable
to say whether it is the little Alice or Alice w-n- that stands before him, the supposed children disappear, saying they are
dreams. It might be that Lamb should have brooded over the past, especially
with regard to his love affair. The presence of many a happy pair, with their
smiling children must have had its own impact on Lamb. It would not be doing
injustice to imagine Elia shedding tears thinking of
his
It
brings to the notice of the readers the perpetual mental agony the celibate
Lamb had felt time and again.
Similarly
“A New Year’s Eve” is considered to be “beautiful and melancholy and profoundly
human” (Hugh Walker: The English Essay and Essayists). Lamb is in a sort
of introspection and contrasts the religious and hopeful child Elia, with the stupid changeling of five-and-forty. Such a
thought may be “Owing to another cause; simply that being without wife or
family and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory,
and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite.”
Thus the recurring theme of Lamb’s bachelorhood is again noticed here. In the
essay entitled “Wedding”, Lamb refers to his acceptance to be present at the
wedding of a friend’s daughter because the occasion would help him to forget
his bachelorhood at least for a while.
Lamb
makes the readers laugh while narrating the way in which the art of cooking
meat was invented, rather accidentally, for the first time in the world. The
father and son become partners in burning the poor mansion and even his
lordship’s town is observed to be on fire. But towards the conclusion, the
author makes the reader feel pity for the tender innocent pig. He requests the
cook, while preparing the sauce, to banish the whole onion tribe or the guilty
garlic. The pig is “a weakling–a flower”. Here too, pathos is tinged with humour.
In
spite of the various shocks he received in life Lamb neither curses those
responsible for his disappointments, nor does he wish to paint the world black
and ugly. He wants the events of his past life to be retained as they were.
Old Dorrell cheated Lamb’s
family to the tune of two thousand pounds, but Lamb thinks but for this, he
would not have understood the nature of that specious old rogue. Similar is the
case with regard to