ote 85: New Holland: Australia.]

CHARLES LAMB[86]

WALTER PATER

Those English critics who at the beginning of the present century
introduced from Germany, together with some other subtleties of thought
transplanted hither not without advantage, the distinction between the
_Fancy_ and the _Imagination_, made much also of the cognate distinction
between _Wit_ and _Humour_, between that unreal and transitory mirth,
which is as the crackling of thorns under the pot, and the laughter
which blends with tears and even with the sublimities of the
imagination, and which, in its most exquisite motives, is one with
pity--the laughter of the comedies of Shakespeare, hardly less
expressive than his moods of seriousness or solemnity, of that deeply
stirred soul of sympathy in him, as flowing from which both tears and
laughter are alike genuine and contagious.

This distinction between wit and humour, Coleridge and other kindred
critics applied, with much effect, in their studies of some of our older
English writers. And as the distinction between imagination and fancy,
made popular by Wordsworth, found its best justification in certain
essential differences of stuff in Wordsworth's own writings, so this
other critical distinction, between wit and humour, finds a sort of
visible interpretation and instance in the character and writings of
Charles Lamb;--one who lived more consistently than most writers among
subtle literary theories, and whose remains are still full of curious
interest for the student of literature as a fine art.

The author of the _English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century,_
coming to the humourists of the nineteenth, would have found, as is true
pre-eminently of Thackeray himself, the springs of pity in them deepened
by the deeper subjectivity, the intenser and closer living with itself,
which is characteristic of the temper of the later generation; and
therewith, the mirth also, from the amalgam of which with pity humour
proceeds, has become, in Charles Dickens, for example, freer and more
boisterous.

To this more high-pitched feeling, since predominant in our literature,
the writings of Charles Lamb, whose life occupies the last quarter of
the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, are a
transition; and such union of grave, of terrible even, with gay, we may
note in the circumstances of his life, as reflected thence into his
work. We catch the aroma of a singular, homely s