sed as if they were
living people's features. And they are living. They are as living as
those Japanese Prints so maddening to some among us, or as the
drawings of Lionardo. They also--in their place--are "pure line" to
use the ardent modern slang, and unpolluted "imaginative
suggestion."

The mistake our "aesthetes" made, these lovers of Egyptian dancers
and Babylonian masks, is that they suppose the simplicity of Lamb's
subjects debar him from the rare effects. Ah! They little know! He
can take the wistfulness of children, and the quaint gestures of dead
Comedians, and the fantasies of old worm-eated folios, and the
shadows of sundials upon cloistered lawns, and the heartbreaking
evasions of such as "can never know love" and out of these things he
can make a music as piteous and lovely as Ophelia's songs. It is a
curious indication of the lack of real poetic feeling in the feverish
art-neophytes of our age that they should miss these things in Elia.
One wonders if they have ever felt the remote translunar beauty that
common faces and old, dim, pitiful things can wear sometimes. It
would seem not. Like Herod the Tetrarch, they must have "Peacocks
whose crying calls the rain, and the spreading of their tails brings
down the Moon;" they must have "opals that burn with flame as cold
as ice" and onyxes and amber and the tapestries of Tyre, The pansies
that "are for thoughts" touch them not and the voices of the
street-singers leave them cold.

It is precisely the lack of natural kindly humour in these people, who
must always be clutching "cameos from Syracuse" between their
fingers, which leads them, when the tension of the "gem-like flame"
can be borne no more, into sheer garishness and brutality. One
knows it so well, that particular tone; the tone of the jaded amorist,
for whom "the unspeakable rural solitudes" and "the sweet security
of streets" mean, both of them, boredom and desolation.

It is not their subtlety that makes them thus suffer; it is their lack of
it. What? Is the poignant world-old play of poor mortal men and
women, with their absurdities and excesses, their grotesque reserves
and fantastic confessions, their advances and withdrawals, not
_interesting_ enough to serve? It serves sufficiently; it serves well
enough, when genius takes it in hand. Perhaps, after all, it is _that_
which is lacking.

Charles Lamb went through the world with many avoidances, but
one thing he did not avoid--the innocence