Born at Great Yarmouth, England, May 15, 1804: died at London, Feb. 15, 1845. An English littérateur and journalist. He was acting editor of the “Monthly Magazine” (1831), editor of “The True Sun” (1832), of “The Constitutional” (1836), “The Court Journal” (1837), “The Courier” (1837–39), and other periodicals, and author of “Lyric Offerings,” “Sonnets,” etc.
Personal
It was impossible to help trusting a man so thoroughly generous and honest, and loving one who was so perfectly gay, gentle, and amiable…. On the night of the 14th February, in a gust of delirium, having his little boy in bed by his side, and having said the Lord’s Prayer but a short time before, he sprang out of bed in the absence of the nurse (whom he had besought not to leave him) and made away with himself with a razor. He was no more guilty in his death than a man who is murdered by a madman, or who dies of the rupture of a blood-vessel. In his last prayer he asked to be forgiven, as he in his whole heart forgave others; and not to be led into that irresistible temptation under which it pleased Heaven that the poor wandering spirit should succumb. At the very moment of his death his friends were making the kindest and most generous exertions in his behalf. Such a noble, loving, and generous creature, is never without such.
In person, Laman Blanchard was small and slight, though sufficiently well knit. His dark features, of rather an oriental cast, were prepossessing in themselves, and made still more so by their expression of intelligence and urbanity. His eyes and hair were beautiful. His manners were more than ordinarily attractive; quiet, but not reserved; and gentle, but never servile. His natural kindness was so great, so visible in the small details of life, that it imparted to him that high and delicate breeding which we are accustomed to consider the peculiar attribute of loftier birth and more tender nurturing…. When I asked a friend who saw him more frequently than myself what faults he possessed, as drawbacks to his apparent excellences; shadows that might enable me to show him, to use my own phrase “as flesh and blood;” the answer after a pause was, “Why, I know of no faults, unless it is that he was hardly even of flesh and blood.”
The beautiful mask which his mind almost always wore, and which was reflected in the set smile that always illumined his regular and finely moulded, but small and somewhat sharp features, was not a thing put on for the nonce, to serve a purpose; it was a natural endowment. The extreme sweetness, amounting to benignity, of his natural disposition, rendered him that anomaly in social life, a natural courtier—a courtier without knowing or intending it—above all, without thinking or hoping to get anything by it. But if this was one of the great charms of Blanchard’s mind and personal bearing, it was also their one besetting sin; for it made him equally beloved and popular with all manner of men; which an honest and delicately-minded man can scarcely permit himself to be.
As a poet, essayist, and editor he took prominent and honourable rank. A more estimable man I have rarely known. He died sadly; his mind had become gloomily o’ercast by the death of his admirable wife, to whom he was devotedly attached. He died in a moment of madness, brought on by despondency that had reached despair.
General
I question Sir Bulwer Lytton’s statement about Blanchard, viz. that he would have been likely to produce with leisure, and under favourable circumstances, a work of the highest class. I think his education and habits, his quick, easy manner, his sparkling, hidden fun, constant tenderness and brilliant good humour, were best employed as they were. At any rate he had a duty, much more imperative upon him than the preparation of questionable great works,—to get his family their dinner. A man must be a very great man, indeed, before he can neglect this precaution. His three volumes of essays, pleasant and often brilliant as they are, give no idea of the powers of the author, or even of his natural manner, which, as I think, was a thousand times more agreeable. He was like the good little child in the fairy tale, his mouth dropped out all sorts of diamonds and rubies. His wit, which was always playing and frisking about the company, had the wonderful knack of never hurting anybody. He had the most singular art of discovering good qualities in people; in discoursing of which the kindly little fellow used to glow and kindle up, and emphasize with the most charming energy.
His style and his conceptions were not marked by the vigor which comes partly from concentration of intellect, and partly from heat of passion; but they evince, on the other hand, a purity of taste, and propriety of feeling, which preserve him from the caricature and exaggeration that deface many compositions obtaining the praise of broad humor or intense purpose. His fancy did not soar high, but its play was sportive, and it sought its aliment with the grateful instincts of the poet. He certainly never fulfilled the great promise which his “Lyric Offerings” held forth. He never wrote up to the level of its source…. Born at an earlier day, Laman Blanchard would probably have known sharper trials of pecuniary circumstance; and instead of the sufficient, though precarious income, which his reputation as a periodical writer afforded him, he might have often slept in the garret, and been fortunate if he had dined often in the cellar. But then he would have been compelled to put forth all that was in him of mind and genius; to have written books, not papers; and books not intended for the week or the month, but for permanent effect upon the public.
This difference of mere manner between Blanchard and Lamb was perhaps to be accounted for by the habits and incidents of their early lives…. The moral and intellectual resemblances of these two men were equally striking, and were equally worn with marked and almost strange differences. There was a benign humanity, a truly Christian spirit and temper, about both, which I have never seen equalled or even approached, in any other men—a universal loving-kindness and toleration, which scarcely allowed them to see, and absolutely forbad them to feel, any essential difference, morally and humanly speaking, between the vilest of mankind and the purest, between the wisest and the weakest. And yet this universal and almost divine sympathy and toleration, so far from deadening their sense of superior moral claims and intellectual endowments in individual instances, seemed to act in precisely an opposite direction; and this was especially the case with Blanchard, who felt an almost worshipful and religious admiration for superiority of intellectual or moral pretensions, of whatever kind they might be.
Blanchard was in his own day a very popular writer of light literature, but he wrote nothing of lasting merit. His “Sonnets” and his “Lyric Offerings” show the influence of Wordsworth, but are commonplace in sentiment and versification. His vers de société run easily, but are less readable now than those of many of his contemporaries. His prose essays take an invariably cheerful view of life, but they are not to be classed in the same category as the “Essays of Elia,” which Blanchard clearly took as his model. Bulwer-Lytton warned Blanchard in early life that “periodical writing is the grave of true genius,” and Blanchard’s literary career proves the wisdom of the warning.
He is more forgotten and overlooked than he ought to be, considering the varied kinds of work he did, and that he did all with skill and individuality…. Laman Blanchard as a poet is marked at once by great tenderness and freshness of feeling, by flowing metres, and by very felicitous lines and touches. If not a great poet, he is everywhere an attractive and pleasing one. He touches a varied lyre too—always pure, elevated, and inclined to celebrate common incident and the domestic affections. As a humorous poet, he shares with Thomas Hood the power of punning with a kind of natural ease and grace; and sometimes in his case this is more effective than anywhere else we can recall save in the pages of “Hood’s Own.” Some of his parodies are exceedingly good. In one or two pieces there is a felicity and daintiness of touch to be surpassed only by the happiest efforts of Praed, Locker, or Austin Dobson.
He was an agreeable writer, but not, even at his best, a distinguished one.
