Not So Lamb-Like

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 395, 17 January 1947, Page 9

Not So Lamb-Like

T is perhaps as much as one can expect from a morning talk that it should be reasonably accurate and reasonably easy to listen to. Fred Usher’s talk "Charles Lamb-the Man" was both. It was not particularly stimulating and it was certainly not revolutionary, but then the morning air is not the medium for the airing of revolutionary opinions on establised literary reputations, which can more properly be done in the pages of a thesis to be safely stowed in the stack-room of an academic library. Mr. Usher eschewed imaginative reconstruction in favour of biographical and attested fact, and confined his literary judgments to such safe ground as "Lamb’s essays have mellowed with time." But when Mr. Usher began to

treat of "Lamb-the Man," he did at any rate avoid the temptation of making the gentle Elia all gentleness and light. Having sketched in his background of Lamb’s self-sacrificing devotion to his sister Mary he enlivened his talk with anecdotes illustrating Lamb’s puckish humour, and was not afraid to suggest that there were those who suffered from that engaging whimsicality. In the end a very human picture emerged from a talk which at the beginning had_ looked like being merely a collection of textbook facts.