works of Charles Lamb
after I had been reading those of our Henry Thoreau. Lamb cared nothing
for nature, Thoreau for little else. One was as attached to the city and
the life of the street and tavern as the other to the country and the
life of animals and plants. Yet they are close akin. They give out the
same tone and are pitched in about the same key. Their methods are the
same; so are their quaintness and scorn of rhetoric. Thoreau has the
drier humor, as might be expected, and is less stomachic. There is more
juice and unction in Lamb, but this he owes to his nationality. Both are
essayists who in a less reflective age would have been poets pure and
simple. Both were spare, high-nosed men, and I fancy a resemblance even
in their portraits. Thoreau is the Lamb of New England fields and
woods, and Lamb is the Thoreau of London streets and clubs. There was a
willfulness and perversity about Thoreau, behind which he concealed his
shyness and his thin skin, and there was a similar foil in Lamb, though
less marked, on account of his good-nature; that was a part of his
armor, too.

VI

Speaking of Thoreau's dry humor reminds me how surely the old English
unctuous and sympathetic humor is dying out or has died out of our
literature. Our first notable crop of authors had it,--Paulding, Cooper,
Irving, and in a measure Hawthorne,--but our later humorists have it not
at all, but in its stead an intellectual quickness and perception of the
ludicrous that is not unmixed with scorn.

One of the marks of the great humorist, like Cervantes, or Sterne, or
Scott, is that he approaches his subject, not through his head merely,
but through his heart, his love, his humanity. His humor is full of
compassion, full of the milk of human kindness, and does not separate
him from his subject, but unites him to it by vital ties. How Sterne
loved Uncle Toby and sympathized with him, and Cervantes his luckless
knight! I fear our humorists would have made fun of them, would have
shown them up and stood aloof superior, and "laughed a laugh of merry
scorn." Whatever else the great humorist or poet, or any artist, may be
or do, there is no contempt in his laughter. And this point cannot
be too strongly insisted on in view of the fact that nearly all our
humorous writers seem impressed with the conviction that their own
dignity and self-respect require them to _look down_ upon what they
portray. But it is only little men who look down upon any