In estimating the humour of
_Elia_, we must no more forget the strong undercurrent of this great
misfortune and pity, than one could forget it in his actual story. So he
becomes the best critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, a dramatist
of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so _macabre._[87] _Rosamund
Grey_ written in his twenty-third year, a story with something bitter
and exaggerated, an almost insane fixedness of gloom perceptible in it,
strikes clearly this note in his work.
For himself, and from his own point of view, the exercise of his gift,
of his literary art, came to gild or sweeten a life of monotonous
labour, and seemed, as far as regarded others, no very important thing;
availing to give them a little pleasure, and inform them a little,
chiefly in a retrospective manner, but in no way concerned with the
turning of the tides of the great world. And yet this very modesty, this
unambitious way of conceiving his work, has impressed upon it a certain
exceptional enduringness. For of the remarkable English writers
contemporary with Lamb, many were greatly preoccupied with ideas of
practice--religious, moral, political--ideas which have since, in some
sense or other, entered permanently into the general consciousness;
and, these having no longer any stimulus for a generation provided with
a different stock of ideas, the writings of those who spent so much of
themselves in their propagation have lost, with posterity, something of
what they gained by them in immediate influence.
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