Essays of Elia ------- The Two Races of Men

                        Essays of Elia

The Two Races of Men            (Summary)

Mankind, according to LAMB, can basically be divided into two races in spite of the multiple differences of colour and nationality – the borrowers and the lenders. The superiority of the borrowers can easily be seen in their appearance, behaviour and sense of freedom and authoritative manner. The lenders look sad, lean and suspicious in contrast with the open, trusting and generous appearance of the borrowers.

The borrowers are all careless and emotionally balanced. They have a wonderful faith in God and attach no value to money. They are not possessive so far as money is concerned. Like the primitive men, they are indifferent to money.

Lamb was forced into such thoughts by the death of an old friend who was one such character. He came of a rich and noble family but he squandered all his wealth very soon after inheriting it like all men of this type. Thus he freed himself of the sense of honour and shame that prevent a virtuous man from borrowing. He began to borrow from everybody. He borrowed from more than one tenth of the population of England. One day, Lamb accompanied him in the city and was surprised by the respect with which a very large number of people greeted them.

One day, he told Lamb that those men were the people from whom he had been borrowing money and he took pride and pleasure in their large number instead of feeling any shame.

Even with such a large number of people to lend him money, he was always without money. The reason was that he did not believe in keeping money. He parted with the money he borrowed as soon as possible. He spent it on drinking or gave it away, or just threw it away or buried it in the earth. When he had exhausted it, he borrowed again from the first man he happened to come across, no matter whether he was a friend or a stranger. And he had such a charm that nobody had the power to deny him a loan. It made the author himself wish to save some money to lend it to him.

Although all the wealth that Lamb had were the books he owned, another class of borrowers deprived him of this wealth. They were the borrowers of books. S. T. Coleridge had no peer as a borrower of books. The vacant space on his book shelf reminds Lamb of a precious book on divinity and some others that Coleridge had borrowed saying that only the person who has the ability to read and understand a book has the right to have it. If he continued to act on his theory, no book owner would be safe.

The empty space on another shelf reminds him of another book that Coleridge had borrowed although he himself was the first to read it and appreciate its contents. In fact, it was he who had told Coleridge about the beauties of this book. Some other empty spaces remind him of some other books that other people had borrowed from him.

But Lamb also praises Coleridge saying that if he borrowed books from him, he also left with him an equally large number of books when he visited him out of forgetfulness. Lamb admits that he has a sizeable collection of such books. He is as happy to have them as the books he buys. These books have as respectable a place on his shelves as the books he has bought. The ones left by Coleridge do not ask how they came there. And Lamb has no intention of parting with them by depositing them somewhere or by selling them.

But there is one satisfaction that a man gets when one lends a book to Coleridge. It is that he will study it deeply although he may not return it. Therefore Lamb never minded lending him a book. There was a lady K. who had borrowed a book from him and he knew that she would never read a single page or be able to understand it.

Lamb therefore advises every person with even a moderate collection of books not to show it to anybody. But if you take pleasure in lending books, lend them to a person like Coleridge, who would return them at the expected time and with a huge amount of information scribbled in the margins, thus increasing their value manifold. Lamb knew it from his personal experience. What he wrote in the margins was as valuable as the contents of the original book.

The Two Races of Men   (Full Text of the Essay)

 The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races: the men who borrow, and the men who lend. To these two original diversities may be reduced all those impertinent classifications of Gothic and Celtic tribes, white men, black men, red men. All the dwellers upon earth, "Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites,"* flock hither, and do naturally fall in with one or other of these primary distinctions. The infinite superiority of the former, which I choose to designate as "the great race," is discernible in their figure, port, and a certain instinctive sovereignty. The latter are born degraded: "He shall serve his brethren."* There is something in the air of one of this cast, lean and suspicious, contrasting with the open, trusting, generous manners of the other. 

[2] Observe who have been the greatest borrowers of all ages -- Alcibiades, Falstaff, Sir Richard Steele, our late, incomparable Brinsley* -- what a family likeness in all four! What a careless, even deportment has your borrower! What rosy gills! What a beautiful reliance on Providence does he manifest, taking no more thought than lilies*. What contempt for money, accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better than dross. What a liberal confounding of those pedantic distinctions of meum and tuum*, or rather, what a noble simplification of language (beyond Tooke*), resolving these supposed opposites into one clear intelligible pronoun adjective! What near approaches does he make to the primitive community* -- to the extent of one half of the principle at least!

    [3] He is the true taxer who "calleth all the world up to be taxed"*; and the distance is as vast between him and one of us as subsisted betwixt the Augustan Majesty and the poorest obolary* Jew who paid it tribute-pittance at Jerusalem. His exactions, too, have such a cheerful voluntary air so far removed from your sour parochial or state gatherers, those ink-horn varlets who carry their want of welcome in their faces. He comes to you with a smile and troubles you with no receipt, confining himself to no set season. Every day is his Candlemas* or hisFeast of Holy Michael*. He applies the lene tormentum* of a pleasant look to your purse, which to that gentle warmth expands her silken leaves as naturally as the cloak of the traveler for which sun and wind contended*. He is the true Propontic*, which never ebbs, the sea which takes handsomely at each man's hand. In vain the victim, whom he delights to honor, struggles with destiny; he is in the net. Lend, therefore, cheerfully, O man ordained to lend, that you lose not in the end, with your worldly penny, the reversion promised*. Combine not preposterously in your own person the penalties of Lazarus and of Dives*, but when you see the proper authority coming, meet it smilingly, as it were half way. Come, [give] a handsome sacrifice. See how light he makes of it! Strain not courtesies with a noble enemy.

    [4] Reflections like the foregoing were forced upon my mind by the death of my old friend Ralph Bigod, Esquire, who departed this life on Wednesday evening, dying, as he had lived, without much trouble. He boasted himself a descendant from mighty ancestors of that name who heretofore held ducal dignities in this realm [England]. In his actions and sentiments, he belied not the stock to which he pretended. Early in life, he found himself invested with ample revenues, which, with that noble disinterestedness that I have noticed as inherent in men of the "great race," he took almost immediate measures entirely to dissipate and bring to nothing: for there is something revolting in the idea of a king holding a private purse, and the thoughts of Bigod were all regal. Thus furnished by the very act of disfurnishment, getting rid of the cumbersome luggage of riches, more apt (as one sings) "To slacken virtue and abate her edge,/ Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise,"* he set forth like some Alexander upon his great enterprise, "borrowing and to borrow"*!    

[5] In his periegesis* or triumphant progress throughout this island [Great Britain], it has been calculated that he laid a tithe* part of the inhabitants under contribution. I reject this estimate as greatly exaggerated, but having had the honor of accompanying my friend diverse times in his perambulations about this vast city [London], I own I was greatly struck at first with the prodigious number of faces we met who claimed a sort of respectful acquaintance with us. He was one day so obliging as to explain the phenomenon. It seems that these were his tributaries, feeders of his exchequer, gentlemen, his good friends (as he was pleased to express himself), to whom he had occasionally been beholden for a loan. Their multitudes did no way disconcert him. He rather took a pride in numbering them, and, with Comus, seemed pleased to be "stocked with so fair a herd."*

    [6] With such sources, it was a wonder how he contrived to keep his treasury always empty. He did it by force of an aphorism that he had often in his mouth that "money kept longer than three days stinks." So he made use of it while it was fresh. A good part he drank away (for he was an excellent tosspot); some he gave away; the rest he threw away, literally tossing and hurling it violently from him -- as boys do burrs, or as if it had been infectious -- into ponds or ditches or deep holes, inscrutable cavities of the earth; or he would bury it (where he would never see it again) by a river's side under some bank, which (he would facetiously observe) paid no interest; but out away from him it must go peremptorily, as Hagar's offspring into the wilderness*, while it was sweet. He never missed it. The streams were perennial which fed his fisc*. When new supplies became necessary, the first person who had the felicity to fall in with him, friend or stranger, was sure to contribute to the deficiency. For Bigod had an undeniable way with him. He had a cheerful, open exterior; a quick, jovial eye; a bald forehead, just touched with grey (cana fides*). He anticipated no excuse, and found none. And, waiving for a while my theory as to the "great race," I would put it to the most untheorizing reader, who may at times have disposable coin in his pocket, whether it is not more repugnant to the kindliness of his nature to refuse such a one as I am describing than to say no to a poor petitionary rogue (your bastard borrower) who, by his mumping visnomy*, tells you that he expects nothing better, and therefore whose preconceived notions and expectations you do in reality so much less shock in the refusal. When I think of this man -- his fiery glow of heart, his swell of feeling, how magnificent, how ideal he was, how great at the midnight hour -- and when I compare with him the companions with whom I have associated since, I grudge the saving of a few idle ducats and think that I am fallen into the society of lenders and little men. 

[7] To one like Elia [nom de plume of Lamb for himself in this and other essays], whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators more formidable than that which I have touched upon: I mean your borrowers of books -- those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. There is Comberbatch*, matchless in his depredations!

    

[8] That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye-tooth knocked out -- you are now with me in my little back study in Bloomsbury [section of London], reader -- with the huge Switzer-like* tomes on each side (like the Guildhall giants, in their reformed posture, guardant of nothing) once held the tallest of my folios, Opera Bonaventurae*, choice and massy divinity, to which its two supporters (school divinity also, but of a lesser caliber -- Bellarmine* and Holy Thomas*) showed but as dwarfs -- itself an Ascapart* -- that Comberbatch abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I confess, for me to suffer by than to refute, namely, that "the title to property in a book" -- my Bonaventure, for instance -- "is in exact ratio to the claimant's powers of understanding and appreciating the same." Should he go on acting upon this theory, which of our shelves is safe?

    [9] The slight vacuum in the left-hand [book]case -- two shelves from the ceiling -- scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser -- was whilom the commodious resting-place of [Sir Thomas] Browne on Urn Burial*. C[omberbatch] will hardly allege that he knows more about that treatise than I do, who introduced it to him and was indeed the first (of the moderns) to discover its beauties, but so have I known a foolish lover to praise his mistress in the presence of a rival more qualified to carry her off than himself. Just below, Dodsley's dramas* want their fourth volume, where Vittoria Corombona* is! The remainder nine are as distasteful as Priam's refuse sons, when the Fates "borrowed" Hector*. Here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy [by Robert Burton]*, in sober state. There loitered The Complete Angler [by Izaak Walton]*, quiet as in life by some stream side. In yonder nook, John Buncle, a widower-volume, with "eyes closed," mourns his ravished mate*.

[10] One justice I must do my friend: that if he sometimes, like the sea, sweeps away a treasure, at another time, sea-like, he throws up as rich an equivalent to match it. I have a small under-collection of this nature (my friend's gatherings in his various calls), picked up, he has forgotten at what odd places, and deposited with as little memory at mine. I take in these orphans, the twice-deserted. These proselytes of the gate* are welcome as the true Hebrews. There they stand in conjunction, natives and naturalized. The latter seem as little disposed to inquire out their true lineage as I am. I charge no warehouse-room for these deodands*, nor shall ever put myself to the ungentlemanly trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay expenses.

    [11] To lose a volume to C[omberbatch] carries some sense and meaning in it. You are sure that he will make one hearty meal on your viands, if he can give no account of the platter after it. But what moved you, wayward, spiteful K[enney]*, to be so importunate to carry off with you, in spite of tears and adjurations to you to forbear, the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice-noble Margaret Newcastle*, knowing at the time, and knowing that I knew also, you most assuredly would never turn over one leaf of the illustrious folio? -- what but the mere spirit of contradiction and childish love of getting the better of your friend? -- then, worst cut of all, to transport it with you to the Gallican land, "Unworthy land to harbor such a sweetness,/ A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwelt,/ Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, her sex's wonder!" Had you not your play-books and books of jests and fancies about you to keep you merry even as you keep all companies [merry] with your quips and mirthful tales? Child of the green room*, it was unkindly done by you. Your wife, too, that part-French, better-part Englishwoman! -- that she could fix upon no other treatise to bear away, in kindly token of remembering us, than the works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke*, of which no Frenchman, nor woman of France, Italy, or England, was ever by nature constituted to comprehend a tittle! Was there not Zimmerman on Solitude*?

   

 [12] Reader, if haply you are blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of showing it; or if your heart overflows to lend them, lend your books; but let it be to such a one as S[amuel] T[aylor] C[oleridge]: he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury, enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are those precious MSS of his -- in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not infrequently, vying with the originals -- in no very clerky hand -- legible in my [Samuel] Daniel, in old [Robert] Burton, in Sir Thomas Browne, and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas, wandering in Pagan lands. I counsel you, shut not your heart, nor your library, against S[amuel] T[aylor] C[oleridge].