dreary days, in the _Morning Chronicle_, and consisted of a sonnet to
Mrs. Siddons, whom he had seen for the first time, and who had
profoundly impressed him. This sonnet and three others formed his share
of a small volume of “Poems on Various Subjects,” mainly by Coleridge,
issued under the latter’s name in the spring of 1796. His preface says:
“The effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb of the
India House. Independently of the signature, their superior merit would
have sufficiently distinguished them.” In the summer of 1797 appeared a
second edition, “to which are now added poems by Charles Lamb and
Charles Lloyd”--the former contributing about fifteen short poems. This
Lloyd was the son of a Birmingham banker, a morbid young man addicted to
rhyme and to melancholy--a recent acquaintance of Lamb’s, and one who
could not have been a cheerful comrade for him, just then.
In 1798 appeared “A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret,” as
its original title ran. It is the best known of his works after his
essays, and we all echo Shelley’s words to Leigh Hunt: “What a lovely
thing is ‘Rosamund Gray’! How much knowledge of the sweetest and deepest
part of our nature in it!” And yet this “miniature romance,” as Talfourd
well named it, surely seems somewhat unreal and artificial, for all its
charm!
Lamb found constant comfort, too, during these dark years, in his only
two intimate friends: Coleridge, with whom he had renewed his
companionship, broken by Coleridge’s visit to Germany, and by his six
months’ service in the Light Dragoons; and Southey, whose healthy and
wholesome common-sense was just then a timely tonic for Lamb. These
three youthful dreamers used to sit and smoke and speculate of nights in
a little den at the back of the _Salutation and Cat_--a tavern at No. 17
Newgate Street, nearly opposite the old School. Two of them may haply
have learned their way there while still scholars! “I image to myself
that little smoky room at the _Salutation and Cat_, where we have sat
together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with
poesy,” Lamb wrote, later; and he refers more than once to “that nice
little smoky room at the _Salutation_, which is even now continually
presenting itself to my recollection, with all its associated train of
pipes, tobacco, egg-hot, welsh-rabbit, metaphysics, and poetry.” They
say that the wary landlord, to whom Coleridge’s rhapsodies were quite
unintelligible, yet who fully understood their value in drawing a knot
of thirsty listeners, offered the Talker free quarters for life, if he
would stay and talk!
The men who sit and smoke and soak in tap-rooms, and who never know when
they are full in any sense, are just the sort to find copious
refreshment in such eternal monologue. Carlyle’s concise dictum
thereanent would have fallen flat on their pendulous ears: “To sit as a
passive bucket and be pumped into, whether one like it or not, can in
the end be exhilarating to no creature!”
The old tavern--so old, that within its walls Sir Christopher Wren used
to sit often with his pipe, coming in tired from the rebuilding of St.
Paul’s, just around the corner--has itself been rebuilt, the little
smoky room is wiped out, the _Cat_ has vanished, and the _Salutation_
greets us as a slap-bang City eating-house and bar. Before the
destruction of the original inn, an old fellow, who had been a Grecian
in Lamb’s time, used to hobble up the entrance-way, once a year, when he
came to some great function of the Blue-Coats, and look longingly into
that once “murmurous haunt” through the glass door. Invited to enter one
day, he stood in the smoking-room for a while, his eyes wet and his
voice husky; then he went away, never to reappear. Doubtless he had
drunk and smoked through many of those “O noctes cœnœque Deûm!
Anglice--Welsh rabbit, punch, and poesy,” in Lamb’s words.
Another favourite resort of the three cronies was _The Feathers_, a
dirty, dingy, delightful tavern, as I have seen it, in Hand Court,
Holborn, nearly opposite the Great Turnstile leading into Lincoln’s Inn
Fields. It was only two minutes’ walk from the lodgings in Little Queen
Street, and but a few houses distant from the oil-shop of Charles’s
godfather, at the corner of Featherstone Buildings and Holborn. _The
Feathers_ has gone to its own place, a modern something maddens me on
its site, and all that I have been able to rescue is the quaint sign
which hung until lately above the entrance of the court in Holborn, and
looked down on the frequent goings in and out of our friends.
It was while living in Pentonville that Lamb passed through his second,
and his final, love-sickness. His first attack had been caused by undue
exposure, when a guileless youth, unprotected by proper prophylactics,
to the provocative charms of the “Alice Winterton” of his later
writings. It is believed that her real name was Ann Simmons, and that he
used to meet
[Illustration: THE FEATHERS TAVERN.]
her during his holidays at his grandmother’s place. For, with all his
delightful egoistic frankness in prattling about himself, _this_ was the
one point too tender to be touched on, seriously or jocularly, ever to
any one. It is of her, surely, that he is thinking in two of his four
sonnets in the Coleridge collection, wherein he speaks of his “fancied
wanderings with a fair-haired maid.” He placed the scene of “Rosamund
Gray” in the cottage where lived Ann Simmons, near Widford, not far from
Blakesware; and they show to sentimental strangers that portion of the
cluster of cottages still left. They claim that it is her portrait which
he drew for that of his heroine, even as he is the Allan Clare of the
little story. He certainly hints, just for once, at this love scrape in
that letter to Coleridge in which he speaks of his six weeks’ stay in
the Hoxton Asylum: “It may convince you of my regard for you when I tell
you that my head ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another
person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my
temporary frenzy.” But his recovery from both derangements was radical
and permanent, and he was able to say, only a little later: “I am
pleased and satisfied with myself that this weakness troubles me no
longer. I am wedded, Coleridge, to the fortunes of my sister and my poor
old father.” That wedding to the fortunes of his sister _was_ his
life-long union, and haply saved him from any other, which would have
harmed, rather than have helped, this man; and would have sacrificed
deplorably _this_ vivid personality on the altar of the
greatly-glorified god, the infestive Humdrum.
His serene good sense asserted its strength, at no time and in no way,
so signally as in his absolute emancipation from this transient
enslavement; and in his sedate statement of the fact--true in so many
cases where the victim is too stupid to know it or too timorous to own
it--that, “if it drew me out of some vices, it also prevented the growth
of many virtues.”
As is usual, however, with the amatory infirmity, he suffered from that
slight and superficial relapse, later in life, to which I have already
referred. In his daily goings to and fro in Islington, he used to meet
the lovely Quakeress, to whom he never spoke, and whom he adored
silently and from afar. He only knew that she was named Hester, and it
is her name which he has made immortal and her sweet memory which he has
embalmed imperishably in his exquisite verses:
“When maidens such as Hester die.”
And his first, his serious, affair may have justified its existence by
recalling to us his well-known wish that no incident, no untoward
accident even, of his life might have been reversed. So it is, that in
his “New Year’s Eve” he avers that “it is better that I should have
pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair
hair and fairer eyes of Alice W----n, than that so passionate a
love-adventure should be lost.”
III.
“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-tiptoe) over the
Thames and Surrey Hills, at the upper end of King’s Bench Walk, 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 any immortal mind--for my present
lodgings resemble a minister’s levée, I have so increased my
acquaintance (as they call ’em) since I have resided in town.” In this
letter, written to Manning early in 1801, three significant points call
for comment. The phrase “in town,” referring to his residence in
Southampton Buildings, shows how his previous abode in Islington was
then in the country, and how the squalid houses of the foul Chapel
Street of to-day have supplanted those pleasant cottages set in
gardens, with rural lanes cutting the fields between. His curt reference
to their “having received a hint” to move, proves how pitifully they
were “marked,” as he had already put it, and how soon even the kindly
Gutch withdrew his offer of shelter. The few words, “I have so increased
my acquaintance” give a wide suggestion of the already growing
attraction of this odd, original young character to all bright minds and
sweet natures with whom he came in contact.
And so, on Lady Day, March 25, 1801, he and Mary moved into the Temple,
there to begin, near their childhood home, that life of “dual
loneliness,” never again broken in upon: consoled by their mutual
affection, cheered by their common tastes, brightened by the
companionship of congenial beings. In the Temple they remained for
seventeen years, living in two sets of chambers during that period.
After eight years’ abode at No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, they were
compelled to quit, their landlord wanting the rooms for himself. Towards
the end of March, 1809, in a letter to Manning, then in China, Lamb
wrote as if he were in the next street: “While I think of it, let me
tell you we are moved. Don’t come any more to Mitre Court Buildings. We
are at 34 Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, and shall be here till
about the end of May, when we remove to No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, where I
mean to live and die.”
Their home in Southampton Buildings during these few months while
changing chambers still stands intact; a delightful old square, solid,
brick house, just in front of the tiny garden of Staple Inn. But both
blocks of buildings in which he lived during those seventeen years in
the Temple have been torn down and replaced by modern structures.
Although he disliked leaving the old chambers, he found the new set, on
the third and fourth floors of No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, “far more
commodious and roomy.... The rooms are delicious, and the best look back
into Hare Court, where there is a pump always going. Just now it is dry.
Hare Court trees come in at the window, so that it is like living in a
garden!” This was written to Coleridge, in June, 1809; and to Manning,
in letters during this period, Lamb spoke of the churchyard-like court
having “three trees and a pump in it. Do you know it? I was born near
it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years
old ... the water of which is excellent cold, with brandy, and not very
insipid without. Here I hope to set up my rest and not quit till Mr.
Powell, the undertaker, gives me notice that I may have possession of my
last lodging. He lets lodgings for single gentlemen.... I should be
happy to see you any evening. Bring any of your friends, the Mandarins,
with you.”
He did, indeed, as he often complained, hate and dread unaccustomed
places, but he was well content to discover that this new habitation had
“more aptitudes for growing old than you shall often see.”
It was here that Mary made the memorable find of an empty adjoining
garret of four untenanted, unowned rooms; of which they took possession
by degrees, and to which Charles could escape from his too frequent
friends, who had more leisure than himself. Here he did his literary
work in secrecy and silence, “as much alone as if he were in a lodging
in the midst of Salisbury Plain.” They never knew to whom these chambers
rightly belonged, and they were never dispossessed. So all was well with
him, and even in his whimsical perversity he was able to complain only
that there was another “Mr. Lamb” not far from him; “his duns and his
girls frequently stumble up to me, and I am obliged to satisfy both in
the best way I am able.”
The staircase of the new building is still stumbled up by duns and
girls, you may drink from that same pump to-day, you may see those trees
still in that court, but _his_ windows no longer look out on trees and
pump and court.
Talfourd and Procter have left vivid pictures of the memorable Wednesday
evenings in the Temple, the former contrasting them with the stately
assemblages of Holland House. “Like other great men, I have a public
day,” Lamb wrote. He loved men, and he had a rare capacity for getting
at the best they had in them, a real reverence for their abilities, a
kindly sympathy with their diverse tastes, and a most friendly frankness
as to all their foibles. “How _could_ I hate him?” he asked of some
one: “Don’t I know him? I never could hate any one I knew.” He looked so
constantly and so closely into the strange faces of calamity, that he
yearned always for the nearness of friendly features. Above all, he
understood, as Goethe did, “how mighty is the goddess of propinquity;”
and although he was so untiring and prolific and delightful in his
letters to absent friends, he insisted that “one glimpse of the human
face and one shake of the human hand is better than whole reams of this
thin, cold correspondence; yea, of more worth than all the letters that
have sweated the fingers of sensibility from Madame Sévigné and Balzac
to Sterne and Shenstone.”
So it came to pass that his little rooms in the Temple held a motley
crowd. Low-browed rooms they were, set about with worn, homely,
home-like furniture; his favourite books--his sole extravagance--in
their shelves all about. His ragged veterans, he called them; “the
finest collection of shabby books I ever saw; such a number of
first-rate works in very bad condition is, I think, nowhere to be
found,” is Crabb Robinson’s caustic comment on them. In narrow black
frames, on the walls of his best room, hung “a choice collection of the
works of Hogarth, an English painter of some humour.” The sideboard was
already spread by Mary with cold beef, porter, punch; tobacco and pipes
were at hand, and tables made ready for whist. This is Charles’s
invitation: “Swipes exactly at nine, punch to commence at ten, _with
argument_; difference of opinion expected to take place about eleven;
perfect unanimity with some haziness and dimness before twelve!” He used
to play right through his programme. His old cronies came, “friendly
harpies,” he named many of them: for, as he said of the pretended dead
Elia, his intimados were, to confess a truth, in the world’s eye, a
ragged regiment. He never forsook a friend, ragged or rich in raiment or
in repute, and “the burrs stuck to him; but they were good and loving
burrs for all that.” It was the simple statement of a truth which he had
made, long before this: “I cannot scatter friendships like
chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine hand, like hour-glass
sand.”
New acquaintances came, too; never men of fame or fortune or fashion,
but men of mark, you may be sure. And many among them notable only for
some tincture of the absurd in their characters: for “I love a _Fool_,”
he said, “as naturally as if I were of kith and kin to him.” Crabb
Robinson has left us his reminiscence of this place and these people,
when speaking of his first acquaintance with the Lambs: “They were then
living in a garret in Inner Temple Lane. In that humble apartment I
spent many happy hours, and saw a greater number of excellent persons
than I had ever seen collected together in one room.” Thus has he summed
up, in his sedate way, all that need be said on that score.
The capricious Coleridge had once more become constant, after his
refusal for two years to write, and his needless estrangement, which had
called forth Lamb’s lines, “I had a friend, a kinder friend had no man;”
and of whom, after many years, he yet was able to say: “The more I see
of him in the quotidian undress and relaxation of his mind, the more
cause I see to love him and believe him a very good man.” There was
Hazlitt--trying to paint when Lamb first met him, finding later his true
calling as art critic and essayist; easily first of all in that field,
before or after him, in insight, breadth, and vigour; arrogant, intense,
bitter, brooding forever over the fall of Napoleon: the only male
creature he reverenced except Coleridge. He must needs respect, in
Coleridge, the one man known to him who alone could surpass him in
untiring fluency, even under the influence of strongest tea--sole
stimulus allowed himself by Hazlitt at that time. Him, Lamb finds to be,
“in his natural state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing.”
And he, too, had tried to quarrel with the Lambs, and had failed, as did
all who made the sorry attempt! There was William Wordsworth, ascetic,
self-centred, quite sure of himself; whose true powers, and all that was
genuine in his genius, Lamb was one of the first to recognize and to
celebrate. There was Godwin, so bold in his speculations, so daring with
his pen, so placid in person, and so mild of voice. This terrifying
radical used to prattle on trivial topics till after supper, and then
invariably fall fast asleep. “A very well-behaved decent man, ... quite
a tame creature, I assure you; a middle-sized man, both in stature and
understanding,” wrote his keen-eyed host. There was old Captain Burney,
afterward admiral, son of the famous organist, brother of the more
famous writing-woman, Fanny, Madame d’Arblay. He had been taught by
Eugene Aram, he had sailed all around the globe with Captain Cook, and
was still young and tender in heart under his rough exterior. There was
his son, Martin, of whom Lamb said, “I have not found a whiter soul than
thine;” Leigh Hunt, airy, sprightly, full of fine fancies; Charles
Lloyd, poetic and intense; Tom Hood, slight of figure, feeble of voice,
face of a Methodist parson, silent save for his sudden puns; Thomas
Manning, the Cambridge mathematical tutor, “a man of a thousand;” Basil
Montagu, the philanthropized courtier; stalwart Allan Cunningham;
Haydon, the painter, eager everywhere for controversy; the preacher,
Edward Irving, content to listen, there; Bernard Barton, Quaker poet,
bank drudge; gentle and genial Barry Cornwall; Talfourd, the
sympathetic chronicler of these scenes; constant and trusty Crabb
Robinson; De Quincey, self-involved and sometimes spiteful, yet not
behind any one of that brilliant band in his love for Lamb, whom he
earnestly attests to be “the noblest of human beings.”
There appeared sometimes at these gatherings a most curious character,
hardly known now as one of this group, but remembered rather from the
parts he plays in the pages of Bulwer and of Dickens. This was Thomas
Wainewright, the “Janus Weathercock” of the _London Magazine_; a flimsy,
plausible, conceited scoundrel, in whom Lamb good-naturedly found
something to like. It was after our friend’s death that Wainewright’s
thefts and poisonings brought him to trial, and sent him to Van Diemen’s
land, where the dandy convict died in madness, raving and unrepentant.
And Charles Lamb, the central and dominating personality of all these
strong characters, towers above them all, not only and not so much by
the greatness of his gifts as by that of his character. For simplicity,
sincerity, singleness of soul--all that is childlike in genius--all
those qualities which go to make up greatness of character--these were
his. He was always young. To that scoffer who, sneering at Lamb’s
habits, said that no man ought to be a Bohemian after the age of thirty,
as to all the scoffers since, there is only the one old answer--Lamb
never got to be thirty.
“Of all men of genius I ever knew,” said Crabb Robinson--and he knew all
that were going in his day!--“Charles Lamb was the one most intensely
and universally to be loved.” Among them all, he alone was known by his
first name; just as, at school, he had been, as he always best liked to
be, “Charles” to the other boys: “so Christians should call one
another,” he used to say. Reason revolts and imagination cowers appalled
before the forlorn and hopeless conception of Wordsworth addressed as
“Willie,” or Coleridge as “Sam”! For, you see, _this_ man never posed,
never paraded himself, had no jealousy, nor petulance, nor pettiness. He
never lied for effect, nor harboured hypocrisies, big or little. He was
lucky in possessing that supreme antidote to the pernicious poison of
conceit--an abiding sense of humour--“a genius in itself, and so defends
from the insanities,” in Emerson’s wise words. Your solemn ass must
needs take himself seriously; the man of deep, keen, quick perception of
the ludicrous can never do so. When Coleridge, during a visit of the
brother and sister to him at Nether Stowey, addressed to Lamb his
maudlin lines, entitled “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,” in which he
gushes over “my gentle-hearted Charles,” the victim of these verses
rebelled. “For God’s sake, don’t make me ridiculous by terming me
gentle-hearted in print, _or do it in better verse_! Substitute drunken
dog, ragged-head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, and any other
epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question.”
“_Stat magni nominis umbra_” is Lucan’s stately phrase, to be aptly
applied, in its best and original sense, to almost every one of this
illustrious group. Yet, lofty as they loom in the distance, far above
our power as well as our desire to belittle them, it may be not beyond
belief that too close and too constant contact with some of them might
have brought at the last a certain satiety. It may even be breathed,
without irreverence and therefore without offence, that we might have
been just a bit bored if allowed to listen without rest to Coleridge,
with his rhetorical preachments and his melancholy, both born of
rheumatism, rum, and opium; or to Hazlitt, with his ingrained
selfishness, his petulance, his tea-inspired turgidity; or to
Wordsworth, solemnly weighted with the colossal conviction of his own
mission, and tireless in his tenacity to attest the truth thereof to all
listeners. These, and all those lesser ones, seem to me petty and
tiresome beside this spare, silent, stammering little fellow, who loved
them all and laughed at them all; who gave them fitting reverence, and
yet, with affectionate adroitness, found fun in their foibles!
How direct and delicate was his gibe when Coleridge had been longer even
than usual in his endless endeavours to spin serviceable ropes with his
metaphysical sands: “Oh, you mustn’t mind what Coleridge says; he’s _so_
full of his fun.” I can see his twinkling eyes--those wonderfully
sparkling eyes--as he answered Coleridge’s question, “Charles, did you
ever hear me preach?” “I never heard you do anything else!” Coleridge
was, indeed, quite capable, in Hazlitt’s sarcastic phrase, of taking up
the deep pauses of conversation between seraphs and cardinals; and could
have argued--with the same ready confidence with which, according to
mocking Sydney Smith, Lord John Russell would have assumed command, at
half an hour’s notice, of the channel fleet--on either side of the
theses sent him by Lamb just before he went to Germany. These
questions--“to be defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or
Göttingen,” by Coleridge--are deliciously sly and sharp in their stab at
the complacent superiority over lesser gifted mortals felt and shown by
that “archangel a little damaged.” I can hear the falsetto tone of his
moralities growing shriller before these two questions, especially,
among the others: “Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true
man?” “Whether the higher order of seraphim illuminati ever _sneer_?”