At the inquest the only possible verdict was returned, that of
homicide during temporary insanity, against the young woman who, in
her frenzy, had killed her own mother and destroyed a home which she
had been working hard, as a mantua maker, to help support. The awful
shock had, perhaps, a steadying effect on Charles Lamb. Here he was at
the age of one-and-twenty suddenly placed in a position that might
have tried a strong-minded man in his prime; his brother, a dozen
years his senior, so far as we are aware mixed himself as little as
might be with the family tragedy; poor Mary had to be placed in an
asylum and supported there, and a pledge taken for her future
safe-guarding, while in the home a physically feeble old aunt and a
mentally feeble old father had to be looked after and companioned.
Humbly and unhesitatingly he who was but little more than a youth in
years took up a task which it is painful even to contemplate; the
simple spirit in which he did so may be realized from a noble letter
which he sent to his friend at the time. The shattered family removed
from Little Queen Street to 45, Chapel Street, Pentonville, and there
in the following year Aunt Hetty died. In the spring of 1799 old John
Lamb also passed away, and Mary returned to share her brother's home,
to be tended always with loving solicitude, though ever and again she
had to be removed during recurring attacks of her mental malady. In
this brief summary of the story of Charles Lamb's life it is not
necessary to keep referring to this fact, though it should be borne in
mind that from time to time throughout their lives, Mary, affected now
by solitariness and now by the over-excitement of seeing many friends,
had to be placed under restraint for periods varying from a few weeks
to several months. In this spring of 1799, too, with Mary's return to
share her brother's life, began a new trouble. They were, as Lamb put
it, "in a manner marked," and had frequently to change their lodgings
until they were once more domiciled in the sanctuary of the Temple,
where they had been born and where they had passed their childhood and
youth.
[Illustration: CHRIST'S HOSPITAL: THE DINING HALL.]
In the first feeling of his horror after his mother's death, and with
a sense of all the responsibility that had fallen upon his shoulders
Lamb had disclaimed any further interest in literature, had asked
Coleridge not to mention it, not to include his name in a projected
volume. Yet he was to find in reading and in writing--and in the
friendship of those who cared for reading and writing--at once a
solace and a joy in his own life and a passport to the affections of
generations of readers. In 1797 there was published a new edition of
Coleridge's Poems, "to which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and
Charles Lloyd." In the summer of the same year he spent a week at
Nether Stowey with Coleridge,[2] and in the autumn he and Lloyd passed
a fortnight with Southey in Hampshire. He was consolidating the
friendships which were to bind him ever closer to letters. With
Coleridge, as we have seen, he was on terms of intimacy, and when that
poet went abroad for a while Southey became Lamb's most intimate
correspondent. The keenly sensitive young man later resented being
dubbed "gentle-hearted," and an apparent assumption of lofty
superiority on the part of his friend, stung him to a memorable
retort. We may take the story from one of Lamb's own letters to
Southey:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to the eternal regret of his native
Devonshire, emigrates to Westphalia: "poor Lamb" (these were
his last words), if he wants any knowledge, he may apply to
me. In ordinary cases I thank him. I have an "Encyclopaedia"
at hand; but on such an occasion as going over to a German
University, I could not refrain from sending him the
following proposition to be by him defended or oppugned (or
both) at Leipsic or Gottingen.
[Footnote 2: Coleridge, disabled by some slight accident, was unable
to accompany his friends on their walks during this visit of the
Lambs, and once when they had left him he wrote the beautiful poem,
"This Lime Tree Bower My Prison," which he "addressed to Charles Lamb,
of the India House, London." In it that friend was referred to in this
passage:
Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hungered after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity!
]
The Theses, as given in the letter to Coleridge, are as follows:
Theses Quædam Theologicæ.
First, Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true
man?
Second, Whether the Archangel Uriel could affirm an untruth?
and if he could, whether he would?
Third, Whether honesty be an angelic virtue, or not rather
to be reckoned among those qualities which the school men
term _virtutes minus splendidæ_?
Fourth, Whether the higher order of Seraphim illuminati ever
sneer?
Fifth, Whether pure intelligences can love?
Sixth, Whether the Seraphim ardentes do not manifest their
virtues by the way of vision and theory; and whether
practice be not a sub-celestial and merely human virtue?
Seventh, Whether the vision beatific be anything more or
less than a perpetual re-presentment to each individual angel
of his own present attainments and future capabilities,
somehow in the manner of mortal looking-glasses, reflecting
a perpetual complacency and self-satisfaction?
Eighth, and last. Whether an immortal and amenable soul may
not come to be condemned at last, and the man never suspect
it before hand?
The poet did not reply, and the misunderstanding between the two was
happily not long continued. I have sometimes doubted whether Coleridge
ever knew Lamb so well as Lamb knew Coleridge, though of his affection
for the brother and sister there can be no doubt; of them he wrote at
the end of his life:
Dear to my heart, yea as it were my heart.
In his "Sidelights on Charles Lamb," too, Mr. Bertram Dobell rescued a
remarkably interesting testimony "minuted down from the lips of
Coleridge," which shows that the poet came to know Lamb better than
when he sent his provocative message:
Charles Lamb has more totality and individuality of
character than any other man I know, or have ever known in
all my life. In most men we distinguish between the
different powers of their intellect as one being predominant
over the other. The genius of Wordsworth is greater than his
talent, though considerable. The talent of Southey is
greater than his genius, though respectable; and so on. But
in Charles Lamb it is altogether one; his genius is talent,
and his talent is genius, and his heart is as whole and one
as his head. The wild words that come from him sometimes on
religious subjects would shock you from the mouth of any
other man, but from him they seem mere flashes of fireworks.
If an argument seem to his reason not fully true, he bursts
out in that odd desecrating way; yet his will, the inward
man, is, I well know, profoundly religious. Watch him, when
alone, and you will find him with either a Bible or an old
divine, or an old English poet; in such is his pleasure.
In 1798 was published "A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Poor Blind
Margaret," a story of which Lamb wrote in the following year:
"Rosamund sells well in London, malgré the non-reviewal of it," and in
1798 also, Lloyd and Lamb published a joint volume of "Blank Verse."
It was in the spring of 1801--a pleasant beginning of the new century
for them--that the Lambs, after having had all too frequently to
change their lodgings owing to the "rarity of Christian charity,"
which objected to housing a quiet couple because of their affliction,
at length found pleasant residence in 16, Mitre Court Buildings.
Writing to his friend, Thomas Manning--one of the correspondents with
whom he was ever in the happiest vein--Lamb expatiated upon the moving
very much in the style of his later essays:
I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint
that it would be agreeable, at our Lady's next feast. I
have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms, which look out
(when you stand a tip-toe) over the Thames and Surrey Hills,
at the upper end of King's Bench walks in the Temple. There
I shall have all the privacy of a house without the
encumbrance, and shall be able to lock my friends out as
often as I desire to hold free converse with my immortal
mind; for my present lodgings resemble a minister's levee, I
have so increased my acquaintance (as they call 'em), since
I have resided in town. Like the country mouse, that had
tasted a little of urban manners, I long to be nibbling my
own cheese by my dear self without mouse-traps and
time-traps. By my new plan, I shall be as airy, up four pair
of stairs, as in the country; and in a garden, in the midst
of enchanting, more than Mahometan paradise, London, whose
dirtiest, drab-frequented alley, and her lowest-bowing
tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn
James, Walter, and the parson into the bargain. O! her lamps
of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops,
mercers, hardwaremen, pastry-cooks! St. Paul's churchyard!
the Strand! Exeter Change! Charing Cross, with the man
_upon_ a black horse! These are thy gods, O London! Ain't
you mightily moped on the banks of the Cam? Had you not
better come and set up here? You can't think what a
difference. All the streets and pavements are pure gold, I
warrant you. At least I know an alchemy that turns her mud
into that metal,--a mind that loves to be at home in crowds.
Here we have the voice of the best of London-lovers, and here we have
also a hint of the way in which he was finding himself too much
"accompanied"--to use a phrase from one of his unpublished letters. He
frequently chafed against the number of visitors who ate up his day,
and at times had even to resent the way in which an intimate friend
would be over-zealous in entertaining him, when for his own part he
would rather have been alone. One special evening in each week was set
apart for cards and conversation, and those occasions are perhaps
among the best remembered features of early nineteenth-century
literary life. Representative evenings will be found described in
various works.[3] The company was not limited to literary folk, though
many notable men of letters were to be met there, along with humbler
friends, for the Lambs were catholic in their friendships, and had
nothing of the exclusiveness of more pretentious salons. "We play at
whist, eat cold meat and hot potatoes, and any gentleman that chooses
smokes." At these gatherings Mary Lamb moved about observantly looking
after her diverse guests, while Lamb himself, it has been said, might
be depended upon for at once the wisest and the wittiest utterance of
the evening. Here it was that he made his whimsical reproach to a
player with dirty hands: "I say, Martin, if dirt were trumps what a
hand you'd have." And it was on some such occasion, too, that he
retorted on Wordsworth, who had said that the writing of "Hamlet" was
not so very wonderful: "Here's Wordsworth says he could have written
'Hamlet'--_if he had the mind_."
[Footnote 3: In Talfourd's "Memorials" of Lamb; in Hazlitt's essay "Of
Persons One would wish to have Seen."]
In the opening years of the century Lamb contributed epigrams and
paragraphs to "The Albion," "The Morning Chronicle," and "The Morning
Post" (thanks to Coleridge's introduction). His latest contribution to
the first-named journal helped to bring about its sudden demise. One
of the latest which was pointed at Sir James Mackintosh (author of
"Vindicæ Gallicæ") may serve as a specimen of the personal epigram in
which Lamb considered himself happiest:
Though thou'rt like Judas an apostate black,
In the resemblance one thing thou dost lack,
When he had gotten his ill-purchased pelf,
He went away and wisely hanged himself;
This thou may'st do at last; yet much I doubt,
If thou hast any bowels to gush out.
Lamb's position after ten years at the India House had no doubt
considerably improved, but he was glad of the opportunity of making an
additional couple of guineas a week as epigrammatist to "The Morning
Post." He did not, however, continue long at the work; it was too
severe a tax to be ever wondering how this, that, or the other person
or event could be hit off in a few lines of copy, and the irksomeness
he felt, combined with the editorial exactions, caused him to give it
up. In 1802 came a memorable visit by the Lambs to Coleridge at
Keswick, a visit which resulted in Charles Lamb's thinking kindlier of
mountains than he had hitherto done, without in any way lessening his
strong local attachment to the metropolis. Of the day in which he
climbed Skiddaw he said: "It was a day that will stand out, like a
mountain, I am sure, in my life"; a happy simile which would not have
occurred to one who stood, so to speak, on a familiar footing with
mountains.
The life in the Temple was roughly divided into two portions: the
first, at Mitre Court Buildings, extended from the spring of 1801 to
that of 1809; then there seems to have been a brief stay of a few
weeks at 34, Southampton Buildings, Holborn, and at the end of the
following May or beginning of June, the Lambs moved into 4, Inner
Temple Lane, which "looks out upon a gloomy churchyard-like court,
called Hare Court, with thin trees and a pump in it.... I was born
near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six
years old." Here Lamb and his sister lived until 1817, continuing in
their pleasant weekly evenings to afford a memorable centre for the
meeting of memorable men. At one of these meetings when it was being
debated, whom it was the different members of the company would like
best to meet from among the notable men of letters of the past, Lamb
promptly fixed upon Sir Thomas Browne and Fulke Greville. How many of
us in such a debate to-day would as promptly name Charles Lamb!
During the first half of these years in the Temple, Charles Lamb had
written much that now endears him to us; but little, it is to be
feared, that made the great body of contemporary readers aware of his
existence. In 1806 he essayed dramatic authorship, had had his farce,
"Mr. H.," performed at Drury Lane, had been present on the occasion of
its solitary appearance when it was incontinently damned, and had
himself taken part in the damnatory hissing. At the beginning of 1807
was published the "Tales from Shakspeare," for which he and his sister
were jointly responsible, and for which they received a sum of sixty
guineas; in 1808 came another book for children in "The Adventures of
Ulysses," and in the same year the "Specimens of English Dramatic
Poets Contemporary with Shakspeare."
During the second half of the stay in the Temple--the years at 4,
Inner Temple Lane, which have been regarded as the happiest portion of
his life--Lamb made but slight advance in literary reputation, but he
was already firmly established in the favour of the few who had been
privileged to know him, to hear his stammered wit, his spoken wisdom.
Though this period from 1809 to 1817 is not marked by the production
of notable books, it was during this time that he contributed to Leigh
Hunt's "Reflector," wrote his "Recollections of Christ's Hospital" for
the "Gentleman's Magazine," and his "Confessions of a Drunkard" for a
friend's publication. Here were most Elia-like precursors of the
famous "Essays."
In the autumn of 1817 the Lambs removed from the Temple in which they
had passed the greater part of their lives, taking rooms over a
brazier's shop at 20, Russell Street, Covent Garden, at the corner of
Bow Street, where, as Mary Lamb put it, they had "Drury Lane Theatre
in sight of our front, and Covent Garden from our back windows."
Covent Garden, as Charles said, "dearer to me than any garden of
Alcinous, where we are morally sure of the earliest peas and
'sparagus." One of the first letters from the new lodgings Lamb
whimsically addressed as from "The Garden of England." The half dozen
years during which he lived here forms from a literary point of view
the most memorable period of Lamb's life. Here he arranged for the
publication of the two precious little volumes of his "Works" which
were issued in the summer of 1818--volumes which he found "admirably
adapted for giving away," having no exaggerated idea of the sensation
which the publication was likely to make. That publication was
arranged, apparently, at the request of the publishers, the brothers
Ollier, whom he now numbered among his friends. Writing to Southey of
the venture he said: "I do not know whether I have done a silly thing
or a wise one, but it is of no great consequence. I run no risk and
care for no censure." Here in Russell Street Lamb continued his
sociable weekly evenings--changed from Wednesdays to Thursdays--here,
indeed, he had to chafe anew at the difficulty of having himself to
himself; he was never C. L., he declared, but always C. L. and Co. He
had, indeed, something of a genius for friendship; however much he
might wish to be alone, he was, there can be little doubt, ever
genial, ever his wise and whimsical self, even when suffering under
the untimely advent of "Mr. Hazlitt, Mr. Martin Burney, or Morgan
Demigorgon"; he had to suffer--or imagine that he suffered--from the
effects of a personal charm of which he was wholly unaware; but if he
had not been so friendlily accessible the world would probably have
lacked record of many of the delightful hints which help towards our
realization of one of the most attractive personalities in our
literary history.
[Illustration: SKETCH OF CHARLES LAMB AT THE AGE OF FORTY-FOUR.
BY G. F. JOSEPH, A.R.A.
From the original in the Print Room of the British Museum.]
Lamb was already in middle age--in his forty-sixth year--when there
came to him an opportunity of expressing himself in the way best
suited to his genius. Early in 1820 there was started a new periodical
under the simple title of "The London Magazine." Several of Lamb's
friends were among the contributors, and he also was probably invited
to write for it at an early date. His first contribution appeared in
the number for August signed "Elia" (call it "Ellia," said he), the
name having occurred to Lamb's memory as that of a whilom fellow-clerk
of his thirty years earlier at the South Sea House; for several years
he continued his contributions to this remarkable miscellany, finding
in the personal informal essay the most congenial medium for
expressing his mature wisdom, his whimsical humour, his radiant wit.
By the close of 1822 there were essays enough to make a volume, and in
1823, such duly appeared. Even with this Lamb was not to touch
popularity--it may be doubted whether he ever did that in his
lifetime. He was known, admired, loved by a large circle of friends
and acquaintances, but his work made little impression, we may
believe, upon the wider reading public; it was, however, fully
appreciated by those of his contemporaries best able to judge, and
"Elia" came to be recognized as one of the literary mainstays of a
magazine which counted among its contributors, De Quincey, Allan
Cunningham, B. W. Procter, William Hazlitt, Hartley Coleridge, Horace
Smith, and many more writers of note in their day.
Little more than six months after Lamb's first essay signed "Elia" had
appeared in the "London," the editor of that magazine was wounded in a
duel and died, and in the summer of 1821 the periodical changed hands,
but retained its brilliant staff of contributors, and acquired the
services of Thomas Hood, then a young man of two-and-twenty, as a
"sort of sub-editor." The new proprietors gave monthly dinners to
their writers, and here Lamb would meet some of his old friends and
many new. Hood has recorded his first meeting with Elia in the offices
of the magazine, and his account may be quoted, affording as it does
something like a glimpse of Lamb in his habit as he lived at the time
of the full maturity of his powers:
I was sitting one morning beside our Editor, busily
correcting proofs, when a visitor was announced, whose name,
grumbled by a low ventriloquial voice, like Tom Pipes
calling from the hold through the hatchway, did not resound
distinctly on my tympanum. However, the door opened, and in
came a stranger,--a figure remarkable at a glance, with a
fine head, on a small spare body, supported by two almost
immaterial legs. He was clothed in sables, of a bygone
fashion, but there was something wanting, or something
present about him, that certified he was neither a divine,
nor a physician, nor a school master: from a certain
neatness and sobriety in his dress, coupled with his sedate
bearing, he might have been taken, but that such a costume
would be anomalous, for a _Quaker_ in black. He looked still
more like (what he really was) a literary Modern Antique, a
New-Old Author, a living anachronism, contemporary at once
with Burton the Elder, and Colman the Younger. Meanwhile he
advanced with rather a peculiar gait, his walk was
plantigrade, and with a cheerful "How d'ye do," and one of
the blandest, sweetest smiles that ever brightened a manly
countenance, held out two fingers to the Editor. The two
gentlemen in black soon fell into discourse; and whilst they
conferred the Lavater principle within me set to work upon
the interesting specimen thus presented to its speculations.
It was a striking intellectual face, full of wiry lines,
physiognomical quips and cranks, that gave it great
character. There was much earnestness about the brows, and a
deal of speculation in the eyes, which were brown and
bright, and "quick in turning"; the nose, a decided one,
though of no established order; and there was a handsome
smartness about the mouth. Altogether it was no common
face--none of those _willow-pattern_ ones, which Nature
turns out by thousands at her potteries;--but more like a
chance specimen of the Chinese ware, one to the set--unique,
antique, quaint. No one who had once seen it, could pretend
not to know it again. It was no face to lend its
countenance to any confusion of persons in a Comedy of
Errors. You might have sworn to it piecemeal,--a separate
affidavit for every feature. In short his face was as
original as his figure; his figure as his character; his
character as his writings; his writings the most original of
the age. After the literary business had been settled, the
Editor invited his contributor to dinner, adding "we shall
have a hare"--
"And--and--and--and many friends?"
The hesitation in the speech, and the readiness of the
allusion were alike characteristic of the individual, who
his familiars will perchance have recognized already as the
delightful Essayist, the capital Critic, the pleasant Wit
and Humorist, the delicate-minded and large-hearted Charles
Lamb!
This gives us at once something of a glimpse of Lamb as he appeared to
the eyes of his contemporaries, and an indication of the impression
which his genius had made on another man of genius. With his Elia
essays he may be said to have crowned his achievements in the eyes of
those who knew him, and, in fact, his active work, or that part of it
which counts, may be said to have ended with the production of these
essays, which he wrote at first for the "London," and occasionally
later for other periodicals.
In 1823 came another removal. During the summer, or when busy over
some piece of writing, Lamb had stayed a while at Dalston or other
semi-rural place away from the time-wasting friends and fascinations
of town. Thus when it was decided to leave Russell Street the move
was made to semi-suburban quietude and retirement.
When you come London-ward you will find me no longer in Covt
Gard. I have a Cottage, in Colebrook row, Islington. A
cottage, for it is detach'd; a white house, with 6 good
rooms; the New River (rather elderly by this time) runs (if
a moderate walking pace can be so termed) close to the foot
of the house; and behind is a spacious garden, with vines (I
assure you), pears, strawberries, parsnips, leeks, carrots,
cabbages, to delight the heart of old Alcinous. You enter
without passage into a cheerful dining-room, all studded
over and rough with old Books, and above is a lightsome
Drawing-room 3 windows, full of choice prints. I feel like a
great Lord, never having had a house before....
I heard of you from Mr. Pulham this morning, and that gave a
fillip to my Laziness, which has been intolerable. But I am
so taken up with pruning and gardening, quite a new sort of
occupation to me. I have gather'd my Jargonels, but my
Windsor Pears are backward. The former were of exquisite
raciness. I do now sit under my own vine, and contemplate
the growth of vegetable nature. I can now understand in what
sense they speak of FATHER ADAM. I recognize the
paternity, while I watch my tulips.
Were Lamb a matter-of-fact correspondent it might be pointed out that
tulips are not much to watch in September. During the winter of 1824-5
he suffered from ill health, and in April, 1825, he was allowed to
retire from the East India House with a pension of two-thirds of his
salary, less a small sum to assure an annuity for his sister in the
event of his dying first. For thirty-three years had he continued in
his office, and his salary had gradually grown from the modest £70 of
the beginning to ten times that amount at his retirement, so that he
became a superannuated man with an income ample for the modest
requirements of himself and Mary. On the subject of his retirement he
wrote some touching letters to friends such as Wordsworth and Bernard
Barton, and also in his accustomed manner made the crucial event the
subject of a delightful "Elia" essay. He had before expatiated on the
excellent position of the authors who were not "authors for
bread"--men who like himself were employed in business during the day
and had to dally with literature in off hours. Certainly Lamb's "hack
work," the work done for the booksellers during the early part of the
century, was his least memorable achievement, and we cannot help
feeling what a boon it was to Lamb himself and to Letters that he was
chained so long to the desk's dead wood, instead of being dependent on
the favour of the booksellers for his livelihood, and upon the popular
taste of the moment for his themes.
In 1820, during a summer holiday at Cambridge, Lamb met an orphan
girl, Emma Isola, then eleven years of age, whom he and Mary later
adopted, and the letters have many references to the welcome
companionship of Emma, who gave something of a new interest in life to
the brother and sister.[4] In 1827 the household removed again, this
time to the Chase, Enfield. Two years later they gave up the house of
their own and boarded with a Mr. and Mrs. Westwood, their next-door
neighbours. In 1833 Mary, who had had frequently to be "from home," as
it has been euphemistically put, was under the charge of Mr. and Mrs.
Walden at Bay Tree Cottage, Edmonton, when Charles decided to live
under the same roof with her, even during her periods of mental
derangement, and followed her thither, in
The not unpeaceful evening of a day
Made black by morning storms.
[Footnote 4: Emma Isola married Edward Moxon, the publisher.]
How much Mary's companionship meant to him may be gathered from an
open-hearted letter which he had written in 1805 to Dorothy
Wordsworth--and it meant no less in the years that followed:
I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all
her former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always
feel so. Meantime she is dead to me and I miss a prop. All
my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her
co-operation. I dare not think, lest I should think wrong;
so used am I to look up to her in the least and the biggest
perplexity. To say all that I know of her would be more than
I think anybody could believe, or even understand; and when
I hope to have her well again with me, it would be sinning
against her feelings to go about to praise her; for I can
conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older and wiser
and better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I cover
to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would
share life and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives
but for me.
On 25th July, 1834, Coleridge died, and the blow was a terrible one to
Charles Lamb; "we die many deaths before we die," he had said of the
departure of friends; and the passing of Coleridge may be said to have
come as a fatal shock, for he survived him but five months, and during
that time was heard to say again and again, as though the fact were
too stupendous to believe, not to be realized, "Coleridge is dead!"
Taking his usual morning walk in the fourth week of December, Lamb
stumbled and fell, bruising his face; the bruise did not seem serious,
but erysipelas supervened, and on 27th December, 1834, the beloved
friend, the noble man, passed into the great silence. He was buried in
Edmonton Churchyard, and there, nearly thirteen years later, was laid
by him the dear sister who had so long watched over him, whom he had
so long guarded.
* * * * *
"'Saint Charles,' said Thackeray to me, thirty years ago, putting one
of Charles Lamb's letters to his forehead."[5]
[Footnote 5: Edward FitzGerald's "Letters."]