A sense of humour might not be one of the first qualities that readers associate with Pater. Frequently described as shy, reticent, and reserved in his personal manner, in his writings he maintains a degree of reserve through the careful measure and polish of his style. ‘Yet he was instinct with veritable fun, and wrote with quiet mirth’, Lionel Johnson insists. Reviewing his Essays from ‘The Guardian’, Johnson urges us to ‘have done with the fabled Mr Pater of a strict and strait solemnity’ and to recognise instead ‘the wise laughter rippling so pleasantly beneath the studied phrases’.¹ If there is fun beneath Pater’s reserve, then his essay on Charles Lamb in Appreciations asks us to see the reserve beneath the fun, or rather to see Lamb’s fun as its own form of reserve. First published in the Fortnightly Review in October 1878, the essay begins by praising Lamb’s humour, yet concludes: ‘The writings of Charles Lamb are an excellent illustration of the value of reserve in literature’ (App., 121). The remark is surprising. Lamb is said to be so well loved precisely because of his lack of reserve, his easy familiarity, and open and laughing gregariousness. But Pater sees that Lamb’s humour is concealing something, and that it does so through a kind of stylistic flourish, rather than the buttoned-up withholding normally associated with reserve.

Lamb’s way of seeming so familiar while keeping something back raises questions about the place of the critic’s self within critical prose. His essays have an unassuming quality, Pater notes; more suggestive than assertive, they seem merely casual, accidental, and slight, while holding a deeper knowledge in reserve. In the background of Pater’s remarks is the new meaning that reserve had taken on within the context of Tractarian doctrine, which placed an emphasis on indirectness and a certain degree of withholding in matters of religious exegesis. When reserve is thought of as a principle of critical exegesis and as an element of essayistic style, then it begins to seem like something Lamb and Pater might have in common. The two writers can otherwise seem an unlikely pair. ‘A more charming essay on Lamb could hardly be written by a completely un-Lamb-like man’, writes Edward Thomas. A review of Appreciations from December 1889 notes that ‘Mr Pater’s habitual pensiveness as a critic, and the autumnal tone of his work, make this tribute to Charles Lamb all the more remarkable’.² Pater’s essay shows a side of Lamb’s humour in keeping with reserve, while also bringing out a side of Pater, which, if not exactly laugh-a-minute funny, answers to his description of the critic as humourist. By bringing together two seemingly contradictory qualities in Lamb, the essay helps us to understand what seems so paradoxical about Pater: his famed reserve versus the flair and personal distinctiveness of his style.

Robert Southey was dismayed by Lamb’s attempt to laugh off his heartbreak after he found out that the woman he had loved unrequitedly and penned devoted sonnets to had married someone else. ‘There is something quite unnatural in Lamb’s levity’, Southey wrote:

All Lamb’s talk and bravado shocks Southey’s guarded sense of privacy. Yet what Southey does not see is how such bravado works as a form of reserve, its flaunting display concealing the true nature of Lamb’s feelings. If a manner of talk that seems so exposing could keep Southey guessing, then the side of Lamb that is so open and laughing need not be seen as at odds with the quality of reserve. What Pater sees is that in the defences and feints of Lamb’s humour lies a trick of style that reveals as much as it conceals.

It has become common in Lamb criticism to suspect something darker is lurking beneath the humour, but Pater was the first to identify this as a characteristic undertone: ‘Below his quiet, his quaintness, his humour, and what may seem the slightness, the occasional or accidental character of his work, there lies … a genuinely tragic element’ (121).⁴ When Lamb was twenty-one, his sister Mary killed their mother in a fit of madness and Lamb, to save her from being shut up in an asylum, devoted the rest of his life to looking after her. This was the tragedy lying always beneath the ‘blithe surface’ (107). Then there were the lower-pitched miseries of Lamb’s life: an early disappointment in love, the drudgery of his job as a clerk at the East India Company, the ever-present threat of returning madness – not just for Mary but for Lamb, too, after his own past spell in an asylum. His humour in the face of all this Pater saw not as incongruous but of a piece. If your understanding of comedy appreciated how closely bound it is with tragedy, then Lamb’s humour could be understood not simply as a form of denial or defiance but as an abreactive form of release. In Lamb, Pater identified the ‘union of grave, of terrible even, with gay’ (106).

Lamb’s humour has otherwise been regarded as merely charming, quaint or whimsical, with a fondness that might be dismissive or else working hard to keep something at bay. ‘What is so unsettling about Lamb’, asks David Russell, ‘that he has been so often quarantined by means of an aggressive sentimentality?’⁵ Pater draws out the edgier side of Lamb’s humour by focusing not only on the pseudonymous Essays of Elia for which he is most famous and best loved, but also on his letters and criticism, and on the grave facts of his life. ‘In estimating the humour of Elia’, Pater says, ‘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’ (108). This reflects Pater’s principle of viewing a writer within the context of his or her life, while the causal link signalled by that ‘so’ recognises the autobiographical element also involved in writing literary criticism. Lamb’s first-hand knowledge of tragedy is what makes him so responsive to it in the works of others. His Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare (1808) helped to rescue Webster, and early modern drama more generally, from neglect. These works, with their dark morality and violence, had fallen out of fashion in the period surrounding the French Revolution. But they held a fascination for Lamb, whose own life story was, in Pater’s words, ‘dark and insane as in old Greek tragedy’ (122). The insights that appear scattered in the footnotes of his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets are for Pater ‘the very quintessence of criticism’ (111). Lamb’s note on the Duchess of Malfi, for example, begins, ‘She has lived among horrors till she is become “native and endowed unto that element”’, which seems to be echoed faintly in Pater’s description of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.⁶

What Pater observes of the function of humour in Lamb, Lamb had similarly noted in his own critical writings. Discussing John Kemble’s performances of Shakespeare, Lamb praises the actor for being particularly alive to ‘the relaxing levities of tragedy’ and for ‘the sportive relief which he threw into the darker shades of Richard’.⁷ This coincides with Pater’s view that Lamb’s humour works both to relieve and set in relief the tragedy of his life. Pater similarly invokes Shakespeare when drawing a distinction between ‘Wit and Humour’, between ‘that unreal and transitory mirth’ 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’ (105). Although the essay begins with this conceptual differentiation, the terms ‘wit’, ‘humour’, ‘comedy’, and ‘mirth’ are often so variously used by both writers that it is difficult to keep hold of any firm distinctions. Still, Lamb, like Pater, is keen to elevate a particular kind of humour, one bound up with tragedy and feelings of sympathy or pity. Defending William Hogarth from the imputation that he is a ‘mere comic painter’ preoccupied solely with ‘shaking the sides’, Lamb identifies a ‘tragic cast of expression and incident, blended in some instances with a greater alloy of comedy’ (i. 82, 95, 89–90). His essay ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’ involves an extended discussion of humour as a blended alloy, and Pater singles out Lamb’s criticism of Hogarth when noting that his talent as a critic of art is rarely discussed (which continues to be the case). Shakespeare again provides a touchstone. Comparing the final madhouse scene in The Rake’s Progress to King Lear, Lamb discerns ‘a medley of mirth checked by misery, and misery rebuked by mirth’ (i. 83). Alliteration and chiasmus suggest connection while also asking us to notice that ‘checked’ and ‘rebuked’ are not quite the same thing.

That mirth is not to be rebuked in the face of the misery it can help to assuage is something Lamb firmly believed, even if it occasionally got him into trouble. ‘Any thing awful makes me laugh’, he reports in a letter, ‘I misbehaved once at a funeral. Yet I can read about these ceremonies with pious & proper feelings—. The realities of life only seem the mockeries’.⁸ He had misbehaved by making a pun. Clowning, cracking jokes, nervous laughter: humour is a common, if precarious, form of defence. ‘Charles who like an undermined river bank leans carlessly [sic] over his jollity’, was John Clare’s impression on first meeting Lamb.⁹ His famed gregariousness and drinking and fooling in company sometimes seem like the forced sociability of the constitutionally shy man. Writing as Elia, he boasts of his ‘foolish talent’, in moments of awkwardness or ‘in any emergency, of thinking and giving vent to all manner of strange nonsense’ (ii. 275). Making a pun at a funeral is part of this, while doing so also bears out Lamb’s conviction in ‘the compatibility of the serious pun with the expression of the profoundest sorrows’.¹⁰ Lamb knows the pun’s best defence is to have none: ‘a man might blur ten sides of paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who should be laughter-proof’ (ii. 293). Pater, allegedly, did not like puns (although as Lene Østermark-Johansen notes, he employs them often enough in his own writings, and anyone with such a keen interest in words and their shifting usage might be expected to particularly appreciate a pun).¹¹ Pater is not the po-faced, ‘laughter-proof’ kind of critic. His liking for Lamb suggests as much – at least according to the commonly held belief that liking Lamb is proof of the reader’s own good humour.

‘People have come to talk as if a sense of humour were one of the cardinal virtues’, Leslie Stephen gruffly complained in his 1881 article on ‘The Essayists’. He was objecting more to an insiders’ club superiority that he perceived among Lamb ‘worshippers’ than to anything about humour itself.¹² The tendency to valorise Lamb is epitomised by the ‘Saint Charles’ epithet, coined by William Makepeace Thackeray, that gained currency in the Victorian period.¹³ Although Pater does not go this far, his essay on Lamb forms part of a broader claim about the moral value of that particular type of humour that for him defines the humourist. The essay on Lamb, when initially published in the Fortnightly Review, carried the subtitle: ‘The Character of the Humourist’. In his essay on Thomas Browne, Pater makes a case for ‘the literary purpose of the humourist, in the old-fashioned sense of the term’, defined as one ‘who has hardly a sense of the distinction between great and little among things that are at all, and whose half-pitying, half-amused sympathy is called out especially by the seemingly small interests and traits of character in the things or the people around him’ (App., 128). Lamb answers to this description. The words ‘little’ and ‘small’ crop up again and again as Pater notes Lamb’s sympathy for children and animals and sundry things (tatty books, old sundials, china teacups). ‘[H]e could throw the gleam of poetry or humour on what seemed common or threadbare; has a care for the sighs, and the weary, humdrum preoccupations of very weak people, down to their little pathetic “gentilities”’, Pater writes, his finicky adjectives suggesting something of the weary and wearying manner that Lamb observes in such people (he is very good on how annoying ill people can be, for example, or on the gentilities and vain affectations with which individuals attempt to mask insecurity) (119–20). Throwing a gleam of humour over things does not just gloss over them, since what is also acknowledged here is the generosity or fond indulgence such care requires. What makes for the ‘boundless sympathy’ of the humourist is Lamb’s way of being ‘in immediate contact with what is real, especially in its caressing littleness, that littleness in which there is much of the whole woeful heart of things’ (110).

‘What sudden, unexpected touches of pathos in him!’ Pater adds, and there are occasionally such touches in his own writing, too (110). Towards the end of Marius the Epicurean, Marius seems likewise struck:

The opening exclamation seems as much surprised as reassured by this readiness to be touched, before there comes a scene which, in all its humdrum, caressing littleness, cuts to the woeful heart of things and offers an instance of that ‘half-pitying, half-amused sympathy’ by which Pater defines the humourist. It might as easily come from Victorian England as Marius’s Rome. The jibe about fashionable philanthropy serving as a personal tribute gives way to a worldly perspective. The need to outsource care to institutions is not cause for outrage but accepted as a sad matter of fact. Pater does not judge the couple for sending the old woman away. The situation demands kindness but also a degree of detachment, as he says plainly: ‘They are fairly affectionate, but anxious how the thing they have to do may go.’ There is humour in the way the children triumphantly go about their counting, before the old woman’s mimicry and the couple’s playing along bring home the pathos of the scene. The incidents, if not precisely the treatment, are such as might be found in Lamb. Pater may even have had Lamb in mind, since in the preceding paragraph Marius’s pity for an old horse is like the pity for animals Pater associated with Lamb, and the horse is then worked up into a symbol of the ‘imperfect sympathies’ between men, which is the title of Lamb’s essay on that same topic (ME, ii. 175, ch. 25).

If a sense of humour has been raised to a cardinal virtue, as Stephen complained, then taking things, or oneself, too seriously has come to be seen as one of the cardinal sins in literary criticism. It is a sin Lamb sometimes seems too fearful of committing in his quickness to puncture anything in his writing where he might come across as too worthy, too full of himself or highfalutin. In a letter full of brilliant insights about a performance he had just seen of Richard III, Lamb, after running on for several pages, suddenly pulls himself up short: ‘Are you not tired with this ingenious criticism? I am.’¹⁴ The bathetic jolt threatens to rebound on the reader (‘have you really been swallowing all this?’). Pater, by contrast, might be accused of taking himself too seriously. A contemporary reviewer of Appreciations owned that ‘one feels now and then an impish longing to play some practical joke on this bland imperturbability, in the hope of extorting from it either a smile or a frown’.¹⁵ But Pater’s keen enjoyment of Lamb’s humour rescues him from this caricature.

In outlining ‘the value of reserve’ Pater does not argue for a sense of humility or neutrality regarding the status of criticism; instead he raises questions about where to locate the critic’s self, how obtrusive or personal to be. Lionel Johnson’s review of Appreciations picks up on the title of Pater’s volume, noting its French provenance and suggesting the new twist that Pater gives to the term: ‘we may fancy in it a meaning something more delicate and subtile [sic]; it would seem to promise a quality of reserve, a judgment very personal, a fine tolerance towards the reader’.¹⁶ Reserved even about its quality of reserve (here only the conditional hint of a promise), such critical appreciation is of an unassuming, unobtrusive type. For as Lamb complained on being urged to admire some poems: ‘one does not like to have ’em ramm’d down one’s throat— “Pray take it—its very good—let me help you—eat faster”’.¹⁷ Pater’s criticism does not assert the self, and yet at the same time still manages to feel like ‘a judgment very personal’.

His comments on the critical writings of others provide a useful guide to what he values in his own. In discussing Lamb’s ‘exquisite appreciations’, he identifies a comparable mix of self-effacement and self-assertion: ‘It was as loyal, self-forgetful work for others, for Shakespeare’s self first, for instance, and then for Shakespeare’s readers, that that too was done: he has the true scholar’s way of forgetting himself in his subject’ (111). That self-forgetfulness, a badge of scholarly distinction, comes to seem like an excessive modesty that does not fully recognise one’s own hand in the process. Lamb’s skill lies first in his ability to ‘feel strongly’ the charm of a given writer, ‘and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others—he seeming to himself but to hand on to others, in mere humble ministration, that of which for them he is really the creator’ (112). This is the remark that so bothered Christopher Ricks, who complains that ‘the wistful note—“he seeming to himself but to hand on to others, in mere humble ministration”—is a consequence of Pater’s proud, self-conscious longing for Lamb’s humble unselfconsciousness’.¹⁸ There is a kind of self-forgetfulness here that equates to a lack of self-awareness, a blind spot when it comes to the critic’s own sense of what they are about: on Lamb’s part, a failure to be conscious of the shaping influence he actually exerts; on Pater’s, a pride that wants to win for himself the quality he extols in another (on Ricks’s too, perhaps, about whatever is driving such indignation in this essay).

The impression Lamb gives of downplaying his criticism also has to do with the form in which it appears. Aside from some review essays published in periodicals, Lamb wrote little formal criticism. Thrown out as a passing remark in a letter or scattered through the footnotes of his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, his critical insights accordingly strike Pater as ‘casual’, ‘slight’, ‘accidental’ (121). His subjects were the literature and art that happened to please him best: the more obscure works of out-of-fashion seventeenth-century dramatists, or the poetry of George Wither. Pater also wrote according to personal preference, and on a yet more varied and cosmopolitan range of literature and art. Similarly, some of Pater’s sharpest criticism does not announce itself as such, but is woven in with anecdote, disguised autobiography, fiction, and historical study.

Pater saw the ‘slight’, ‘accidental’ quality of Lamb’s writings as an intrinsic feature of the essay. He compares this to Montaigne’s habit of never judging ‘system-wise of things’ but proceeding ‘glimpse-wise’ (116). ‘A casual writer for dreamy readers, yet always giving the reader so much more than he seemed to propose’ (116). Where art comes ‘proposing frankly’, promising ‘to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments’ (Ren., 190), Lamb’s writings keep in reserve more than they seem to propose, giving nothing but ‘glimpses, suggestions, delightful half-apprehensions, profound thoughts of old philosophers, hints of the innermost reason in things, the full knowledge of which is held in reserve; all the varied stuff, that is, of which genuine essays are made’ (App., 117). The list echoes Lamb’s own description, in his essay ‘Imperfect Sympathies’, of individuals who have an unassuming sort of style: ‘hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost they pretend to’ (ii. 68). The essay reels off stereotypes of different kinds of people (in an ironic example of the systematising Lamb derides). The Caledonian is said to have an unyielding need for certainty: ‘surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place in his brain, or vocabulary’ (ii. 69). Pater reads the remark as a self-appraisal of Lamb’s own style, which delights in all that the Caledonian will not brook, but it could also stand as a comment on Pater’s own. Though scrupulously exacting in his vocabulary, Pater’s brain is one that readily admits of half-intuitions and partial illuminations, of misgivings and second thoughts. ‘Half’ often forms a qualifying compound in his writings: ‘half-apprehensions’, ‘half-developed imaginings’, ‘half-conscious intuitions’, ‘a sort of half-playful mysticism’, ‘regrets for a half-ideal’, ‘half-known’ (117, 173, 112, 58, 55, 71). He frequently employs the formulation, ‘sort of’, ‘kind of’, ‘a kind of x y’, or refers only to what ‘may be’ or ‘may seem’.¹⁹ All this could look like tentativeness or vagueness; but by working thus ‘glimpse-wise’, through hint and gesture, Pater allows for the kind of intuitiveness and suggestiveness that he admires in Lamb.

Given that Pater discerned ‘something of the follower of George Fox about him’ (116), what Lamb has to say about Quakers in ‘Imperfect Sympathies’ is also worth noting:

Though more famous for their silence, the Quakers follow a set of rules about the need to speak with truthfulness and simplicity handed down in the teachings of Fox and the early Friends.²⁰ Lamb explains that what looks like evasiveness may be down to a carefulness about words and their significance. Indirection paradoxically arises from a concern for directness, a respect for the committed word. Pater’s carefulness about words may be a cause, rather than a symptom, of the evasiveness or vagueness critics have often detected in him. Edward Thomas notes the impression of ‘detachment’ or remoteness this evasiveness could nonetheless produce: ‘Pater cannot wind into our confidence. He is a shy man, full of “it may be” and “we may think”.’²¹ This studied manner may be like that of the Quaker who, Lamb says, ‘knows that his syllables are weighed’ and so comes to speak with a sense of ‘imposed self-watchfulness’ (ii. 73). But it is also a mark of care – of the kind that Flavian in Marius the Epicurean describes in setting out his plans for an ambitious study of literary art that will consist in ‘weighing the precise power of every phrase and word’ (ME, i. 96, ch. 6). So a style of hints, suggestions, and glimpses that in Lamb can look like casualness and in Pater like studiedness may be a sign of just how much weight each ascribes to their words.

That Pater associates reserve with Quakerism is telling, because the more immediate religious context that the term was associated with at the time was the Tractarian doctrine of reserve. It might be an easy assumption to make, that Lamb should be aligned with the demotic Quakers and Pater the rarefied Oxford Movement. The particular meaning the term had taken on in Tractarian thought offers insight into what Pater means by reserve and what kind of alternative model he might have found in Lamb. Pater writes that Lamb shared ‘the Quaker’s belief in the inward light coming to one passive, to the mere wayfarer’, one who is quick to recognise in the slightest glimpse or suggestion ‘hints of the innermost reason in things, the full knowledge of which is held in reserve’ (116–17). For the Tractarians, reserve was similarly a means of veiling full knowledge in hints, but as a way of preserving the mystery of God and making it accessible only to the initiated believer. In matters of religious exegesis, God’s word should not be made too explicit but discussed only indirectly. The principle was also linked to poetry, since the figurative mode of poetic expression was able to render religious truth in subtle ways. ‘[O]ne most essential feature of all poetry is a due reserve, which always shrinks from pouring forth everything’, John Keble argued in his Lectures on Poetry (Praelectiones Academicae), delivered in Oxford between 1832 and 1841. Part of the appeal for Pater may have been this extension of reserve from a form of exegesis that preserved the mystery of its subject to a mode of self-expression that, while shying away from spilling all, still allows for veiled disclosure. As Keble went on to say: poetry gives vent to feeling only by hints, granting ‘healing relief to secret mental emotion, yet without detriment to modest reserve’.²² Pater’s insight in the Lamb essay is to apply this principle to prose, and, more unexpectedly, to humour, which gave vent and brought healing relief to the tragedy it also concealed.

Just as Tractarian reserve sought to restrict understanding to only the initiated, Lamb’s humour may have the equivalent exclusivity of the ‘in joke’. The fake obituary Lamb wrote for Elia recalls how ‘he would interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest; and yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand it’ (ii. 172). In the Bible, only ‘those that hath ears to hear’ receive the prophecy about the coming of Elijah.²³ Incidentally, Isaac Williams later cited this passage in his essay, ‘On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge’.²⁴ As Emma Mason notes, ‘the reserve which Keble and his supporters pushed towards was as marked by elitism as it was by modesty’.²⁵ The aspect which Lamb helped to draw out was not just about withholding knowledge or concealing the self, but also about a quality of fine discernment that could appreciate, even see through, the reserve in people as well as art. In a letter thanking a friend for a gift of roast brawn, Lamb parodies the way that such discernment risks tipping over into an elitist principle of knowledge restricted only to those in the know:

Hiddenness, modesty, a taste of the kind only the true adept can feel out: Lamb applies to critical appreciation the same principle of reserve that the Tractarians would apply to religious interpretation. While mimicking the diction of the rarefied gourmand, he upends the standards of aesthetic taste by celebrating brawn, that coarser kind of meat – unlike ‘ham-essence, lobsters, turtle’ which ‘lay themselves out to strike you at first smack, like one of David’s pictures (they call him Darveed), compared with the plain russet-coated wealth of a Titian or a Corregio [sic]’.²⁷ Lamb wants to distinguish between an affected connoisseurship and a genuinely refined sensitivity, able to appreciate what is plain or vulgar, undervalued or obscure. His relish for a meal whose gusto is ‘of that hidden sort’ offers an equivalent to what Pater sees as his ability to discover in mere ‘glimpses, suggestions, delightful half-apprehensions’ those hints of a deeper knowledge held in reserve.

It seems like a surprising turn in Pater’s essay when, having just outlined Lamb’s manner of writing by glimpses and holding things in reserve, he goes on to claim that ‘the desire of self-portraiture is, below all more superficial tendencies, the real motive in writing at all’ (117). This desire ‘is closely connected with that intimacy, that modern subjectivity, which may be called the Montaignesque element in literature’ (117). Such intimacy would seem to rely on a willingness to offer up the revelations of self-portraiture. But Pater suggests that rather than relinquishing reserve, Lamb’s essayistic intimacy is made possible only through a degree of withholding: ‘What he designs is to give you himself, to acquaint you with his likeness; but must do this, if at all, indirectly, being indeed always more or less reserved, for himself and his friends’ (117). The qualifying phrase, ‘if at all’, whenever it appears in Pater’s writings, seems just on the point of whisking away whatever it is barely conceding. Virginia Woolf similarly linked the essays of Montaigne and Lamb, observing in both ‘the reticence which springs from composure, for with all their familiarity they never tell us what they wish to keep hidden’.²⁸ Lamb’s famed familiarity represents a warmer kind of reserve than the chilling effect such withholding might otherwise produce. What Woolf calls composure Pater sees as a kind of suspension, whereby Lamb balances between the competing impulse to ‘give you himself’ and to remain ‘reserved, for himself’. ‘This lover of stage plays significantly welcoming a little touch of the artificiality of play’, Pater adds, in a seemingly offhand comment that offers a hint about how to pull off this balance (117).

The remark implies that Lamb is able to bring to his writings something of the same element of performance that he outlined in his Elia essays on ‘Stage Illusion’ and ‘The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’. Lamb describes a ‘perpetual sub-insinuation’, ‘a sort of sub-reference’ by which an audience can at once see the performance of character, and see through it (ii. 185, 186). To those who object that ‘there is something not natural in this everlasting acting; we want the real man’, Lamb replies: ‘what if it is the nature of some men to be highly artificial?’ (ii. 192). A similar account of his own writing persona appears in his fake obituary for Elia, where he says of the essays:

This offers a gloss on the maxim, ‘the style is the man’, cited in Pater’s essay on ‘Style’ (App., 35). Both Lamb and Pater highlight the paradoxical way in which style can seem so impersonal in its assumed manner, and at the same time so distinctive a mark of the individual.

‘In no critic perhaps—not even in Mr Pater—does style count for so much as in Lamb’, George Saintsbury writes in his History of English Criticism (1911).²⁹ For Thomas De Quincey, the secret of Lamb’s style also reveals, in its ‘coyest and most wayward features’, the secret of his character: ‘the syllables lurk up and down the writings of Lamb which decipher his eccentric nature’.³⁰ Pater does not suggest anything quite so cryptic, or at least he does not go in for any syllable-by-syllable deciphering (in fact he quotes directly from Lamb’s writings only rarely, and is more interested in drawing attention to the stylistic effect of reserve than in exposing what is lying behind it). By contrast, De Quincey’s unshrinking exposure of self in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) begins with an apology (really a boast) for the necessity of ‘breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve, which, for the most part, restrains us’.³¹ In a later autobiographical sketch he links such freedom from restraint with freedom of motion:

Reserve here is like the feeling of self-consciousness that causes the dancer to stumble. With Lamb and Pater, however, it seems that reserve is kept up by, and inheres within, the maintained fluency of their prose. It is just when their writing is at its most nimble that the writers manage to elude with a flourish. James Eli Adams describes ‘a peculiarly theatrical reticence and ostentatious reserve’ operating in Pater’s prose as a conspicuous mask.³³ This helps to account for the apparent incongruity between the distinctiveness of his style, so unmistakeably ‘Pateresque’, and the famed elusiveness summed up by Henry James’s description of him as ‘the mask without the face’.³⁴

An idea of reserve as an achieved performance of style also places it in a different relationship to the forms of shyness and self-effacement with which the term is normally associated. A. C. Benson suggested that, in social settings, keeping up a steady flow of speech was a way for Pater to uphold reserve: ‘he was shy in large mixed assemblies, but his shyness did not make him silent’, writes Benson; rather ‘he was apt to talk, gently and persistently, of trivial topics, using his conversation rather as a shield against undue intimacy’.³⁵ Reserve can be a form of defence, and various critics and biographers have sought to uncover what Pater’s written and public persona may have been shielding: his sexuality, the trauma of childhood bereavement and displacement, an inner turmoil over religion, thwarted ambition, sensitivity to hostile reviews after the backlash against The Renaissance. When the word reserve is used in a military or financial context, it refers to a system of defence that operates by holding back certain powers or resources. Personal reserve, rather than marking a desire for concealment and self-effacement, may convey a self-possession or composure that comes from a quiet confidence in one’s inner resource.

Denis Donoghue suggests that James ‘regarded Pater as one of those who take undue pride in their reserve’.³⁶ Shyness can often be mistaken for haughtiness, its aloofness taken as a sign not of low self-worth but superiority. Pater is alert to this in Marius when describing a stoical composure, which, he is careful to stipulate, is ‘very far from being pride—nay, a sort of humility rather’ (ME, i. 192, ch. 12). Lamb draws a similar distinction when, recalling his schooldays at Christ’s Hospital, he describes the distinctive character of the pupils: ‘there is pride in it … and there is a restraining modesty’. The Christ’s Hospital boy displays ‘silence and a reserve before strangers, yet not that cowardly shyness’, Lamb writes: ‘within his bounds he is all fire and play’ (i. 164). The security of being within one’s own bounds brings a paradoxical sense of release, so Lamb finds release by upholding the reserve of a humour that is all fire and play.

Pater’s recollection of his schooldays at the King’s School in Canterbury, given in the short fictional work ‘Emerald Uthwart’, explores how the bounded refuge of an academic institution instils a self-restraining modesty that is also the basis for scholarly pride. ‘Submissiveness!—It had the force of genius with Emerald Uthwart’ (MS, 217; CW, iii. 185). Pater reiterates: ‘His submissiveness, you see, was a kind of genius; made him therefore, of course, unlike those around him’ (MS, 219; CW, iii. 185). He approaches scholarship with a reverential awe, ‘would scarcely have proposed to “enter into” such matters; was constitutionally shy of them’ (MS, 218–19; CW, iii. 185). Emerald’s earnest scholarliness is questioned, and at times seems not far from parody. ‘He holds his book in a peculiar way’, one of his tutors remarks, ‘holds on to it with both hands; clings as if from below’ (MS, 227; CW, iii. 189). Yet Pater wants to take seriously the sense of awe whereby, ‘just at those points, scholarship attains something of a religious colour’ (MS, 218; CW, iii. 185). This idea of scholarship as religion is one of the touching points with the essay on Lamb, whom Pater describes as ‘one of the last votaries of that old-world sentiment, based on the feelings of hope and awe, which may be described as the religion of men of letters’ (120). Lamb, who for Pater epitomises the value of reserve, also presents a model of scholarship in which reserve is not just a mark of disciplined self-restraint but amounts also to a readiness to be awed.

Pater concludes the essay on Lamb with one of his most personal responses, which suggests the sense of affinity he felt with him. This was partly to do with place: Enfield is where Lamb had moved with his sister in search of quiet refuge, and it is where Pater and his family moved in his infancy following his father’s death. Pater rounds off with a fond recollection of the fields of Enfield, ‘in one of which the present writer remembers, on a brooding early summer’s day, to have heard the cuckoo for the first time’ (122). It is hardly the most revealing disclosure, and yet in another sense it is surprisingly revealing, given that Pater so rarely introduces into his writings any first-person reflections. He might be at his least ‘Pateresque’ just when he is owning to be the ‘present writer’. The cuckoo story has the whimsical, occasional, or accidental character Pater associated with the essayistic style, Lamb’s especially. Having spent the essay explaining how Lamb employs that style as a means of disguise, Pater ends by just briefly dropping his own habitual reserve.