that other poets might have equalled Shakespeare if they cared. “Oh,
here’s Wordsworth says he could have written ‘Hamlet’ _if he’d had the
mind_. It is clear that nothing is wanting but the mind!” Even the
Infallible One not only tolerated, but valued, the acute criticisms with
which Lamb leavened his discerning praise of all his friends’ work; but
when he, with kindly frankness, rated a little lower than did their
author the “Lyrical Ballads,” that author got into quite a state of
mind. He “wrote four sweating pages” to inspire Lamb with a “greater
range of sensibility;” and the tormented critic bursts out: “After one’s
been reading Shakespeare for twenty of the best years of one’s life, to
have a fellow start up and prate about some unknown quality possessed by
Shakespeare less than by Milton and William Wordsworth!... What am I to
do with such people? I shall certainly write ’em a very merry letter.” I
wish that letter had been saved for our delectation.
Then there was Manning, with his slight sense of humour, and to
him--then in China, to his friend’s loss--Lamb loved to write the
maddest inventions, and let loose his wildest whims about their friends.
To Coventry Patmore, on his way to Paris, he wrote, in an amazing
letter: “If you go through Boulogne, inquire if old Godfrey is living,
and how he got home from the Crusades. He must be a very old man now.”
Good, honest barrister Martin Burney--of the “If dirt were trumps”
story--gave infinite fun to Lamb by his oddities. Once he read aloud, in
their rooms, the whole Gospel of St. John, because biblical quotations
are very emphatic in a court of justice. At another time he insisted on
carving the fowl--and did it most ill-favouredly--because it was
indispensable for a barrister to do all such things well. “Those little
things were of more consequence than we thought!” Burney quite approved
of Shakespeare, “because he was so much of a gentleman;” and he said and
did so many queer things that Lamb wrote: “Why does not his guardian
angel look to him? He deserves one; _maybe he has tired him out_!”
It was George Dyer, above all, in whom Lamb revelled, and who was meat
and drink to him. Dyer was the son of a Wapping watchman and butcher,
had been a charity-school boy at Christ’s, and had become a publisher’s
harmless drudge. He was a true bookworm, eating his way through thick
tomes, but digesting little. He seemed to find all the nourishment he
needed in the husks of knowledge, while Lamb, in radical contrast, bit
to the kernel with his incisive teeth. As to Dyer’s heart, however, his
friend was sure that God never put a kinder into the flesh of man; and
his was a simple, unsuspecting soul. He was so absent-minded that he
would sometimes empty his snuff-box into his teapot, when making tea for
his guests; and so near-sighted that he once walked placidly into the
river, as I shall hereafter relate. He used to keep his “neat library”
in the seat of his easy-chair. Mary Lamb and Mrs. Hazlitt, going to his
chambers one day in his absence, “tidied-up” the rooms and sewed fast
that out-of-repair easy-chair, with his books within it: whereat, to use
his own violent language, he was greatly disconcerted!
Lamb gives a ludicrous description of his visit to these same chambers
in Clifford’s Inn, where he found Dyer, “in _mid-winter_, wearing
_nankeen_ pantaloons four times too big for him, which the said heathen
did pertinaciously affirm to be new. These were absolutely ingrained
with the accumulated dirt of ages, but he affirmed ’em to be clean. He
was going to visit a lady who was nice about those things, and that’s
the reason he wore nankeen that day!” It was to this credulous creature
that Lamb confided that the secret author of “Waverley” was Lord
Castlereagh! And once he sent the guileless one to Primrose Hill at
sunrise, to see the Persian Ambassador perform his orisons! No one but
Dyer could have said that the assassin of the Ratcliffe Highway--painted
so luridly by De Quincey in his “Three Memorable Murders”--“must have
been rather an eccentric character!”
Haydon, the painter, has told of one memorable evening in his own
studio, when Lamb was in marvellous vein, and met that immortal
Comptroller of Stamps who had begged to be introduced to Wordsworth, and
who insisted on having the latter’s opinion as to whether Milton and
Newton were not great geniuses. Lamb took a candle and walked over to
the poor man, saying, “Sir, will you allow me to look at your
phrenological development?” Haydon and Keats got him away, but he
persisted in bursting into the room, shouting, “Do let me have another
look at that gentleman’s organs.” Edgar Poe’s Imp of the Perverse took
entire possession of Lamb when thrown with uncongenial men, and forced
him to give the impression of “something between an imbecile, a brute,
and a buffoon.” Writing of himself after the imaginary death of Elia, he
says, truly: “He never greatly cared for the society of what are called
good people. If any of these were scandalized (and offences were sure to
arise) he could not help it.”
No, nor did he try to help it, and we love him all the more for this
antic disposition he was so fond of showing unshamed. And I think that
we need not grieve greatly because his vagaries were not kept always
“within the limits of becoming mirth,” when he had to deal with prigs,
pedants, or poseurs. Tom Moore, tiptoe with toadyism, tried to look
down on Lamb, doubtless feeling that he had accurately sounded the
shoals of his shallow insincerity. The portentous Macready has left on
record his unfavourable impression of the irreverent creature who stood
in no awe of superior persons on pasteboard pedestals. That impression
pains us no more than does the ungentle judgment of Thomas Carlyle. _He_
found Lamb’s talk to be but “a ghastly make-believe of wit,”
“contemptibly small;” and in all that was said and done he saw, from his
own humane point of view, nothing but “diluted insanity.” Curtly and
cruelly he labelled this brother and sister, “two very sorry phenomena.”
If our friend laughed at others, he was just as ready to laugh at
himself; and his hissing his own play is historic. It is strange that,
with his keen critical sense, he should have hoped for the success of
this “Mr. H., A Farce in Two Acts;” produced at Drury Lane, in 1806,
with the great Elliston in the title-rôle. Yet he had written to Manning
in boyish glee: “All China shall ring with it--by and by.” In the same
letter, he made fanciful designs for the orders he was to give for
admission, elate with anticipation of the long run his piece was to
have. He sat on the opening night with Mary and Crabb Robinson in the
front of the pit (his favourite place), and joined with the audience in
applauding his really witty prologue. Then, as the luckless farce fell
flat and flatter, he was louder than any of them in their hisses. “Damn
the word, I write it like kisses--how different!” he growled, in
grotesque wrath, in his letter announcing the failure to Wordsworth.
Hazlitt, who was present, dreamed of that dreadful damning every night
for a month, but Lamb only wrote to him: “I know you’ll be sorry, but
never mind. We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave
off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky
farces.” He and Mary were “pretty stout” about it, but, after all, they
would rather have had success, he had to own. For he not only longed for
the fame, but he needed the money, which that success in dramatic
authorship would have brought.
He delighted in playing all sorts of pranks on his sister, and was quick
to improve any occasion to tease her. Such a scene is described by N. P.
Willis, in his “Pencillings by the Way;” where he relates his meeting
and making acquaintance with them, at a friend’s rooms in London. He and
Lamb were chatting, and Mary, not quite catching all their words--she
was then slightly deaf--asked, “What are you saying of me, Charles?”
Instantly he answered: “Mr. Willis admires _your_ ‘Confessions of a
Drunkard’ very much, and I was saying that it was no merit of yours that
you understood that subject!” She took all his freaks in good part,
translating them in the light of her affection for him, and of her
fondness for his sweet and stingless banter.
His sense of fun bubbled up at most inapt times. He had been asked once
to stand as godfather for a friend’s child, and feared he would disgrace
himself at the very font. “I was at Hazlitt’s wedding and had like to
have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful
makes me laugh; I misbehaved once at a funeral.” In all this wayward
whimsicality, one can detect that same depth and intensity of feeling
which moved Abraham Lincoln to tell trivial stories at the most solemn
crises; which suggests a sob beneath the maddest mirth of Sterne,
Molière, Cervantes; which drove Charles Lamb to seize the kettle from
the hob and hold it on his sister’s head-dress, like the clown in a
pantomime, to hide the breaking of his great heart at the signs of the
coming mania he had detected in her. He accounted it an excellent thing
to play the buffoon sometimes, and was willing to seem supremely silly,
that he might save his own sanity.
Acting conversely, this trembling sensibility set the tears trickling
down his cheeks, while he was writing a playful paper; and made him even
“shed tears in the motley Strand, for fulness of joy of so much life.”
His largeness of soul was never shown in a grander way than in his
letter to, and his whole conduct toward, Robert Southey, when the latter
attacked, in the _Quarterly Review_, the first collected “Essays of
Elia”--“a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as
delightful as it is original.” In the same paper, he spoke arrogantly
and offensively of Leigh Hunt, his own political enemy, and Lamb’s most
dear and most unjustly persecuted friend. From so close a companion as
Southey had been, and one who knew him so thoroughly, this hurt Lamb
deeply, and he wrote to Bernard Barton: “But I love and respect Southey,
and will not retort. I hate his review and his being a reviewer.” And in
the _London Magazine_ he put forth the manly “Letter of Elia to Robert
Southey, Esq.;” of which the latter said that “no resentful letter was
ever written less offensively.” Then Southey--an exemplary if
over-righteous mortal--sent Lamb a line of regret and affection, and
Lamb wrote generously back, and the mists were melted away, and their
friendship shone more steadfastly than ever. Indeed, it seems to me that
Southey eclipsed Lamb in the spirit he showed in this reconciliation,
forasmuch as he proved himself fine enough to forgive the man whom he
had outraged. We may commend his conduct; “For right, too rigid, hardens
into wrong.”
It is no part of my plan to dwell on Lamb’s religious belief. Suffice it
to say that it was, like that of most Unbelievers, too large to be
labelled by a set of dogmas, too spacious to be packed within church or
cathedral walls. It is a stale truism that credence, less than
character, is the criterion of conviction; and all history shows that
the doubters are, in nearly all cases, the most deeply devout. “He
prayeth well who loveth well,” Coleridge had learned; and it is my fancy
that those lives, where love with voluntary humility waited on
self-sacrifice, had taught him the immanent truth--“He prayeth _best_,
who _loveth_ best.”
As to Lamb’s utterances about these mighty matters, we may be sure that
they took the tone of the man’s utterances concerning _all_ matters; and
to them we may apply Hazlitt’s phrase: “His jests scald like tears, and
he probes a question with a play upon words.” Or, as Haydon put it, “He
stuttered out his quaintness in snatches, like the fool in ‘Lear’.”
IV.
In the midst of the vast Covent Garden property of the Duke of Bedford
is wedged a small piece of alien land, on the corner of Bow and Russell
streets. It belongs to a certain Clayton estate, and is covered by three
houses, which are worth more to us than all the potentialities of
marketable wealth hereabout. These three houses formed but one building,
at the time of erection; which was late in the last or early in the
present century, as we may be convinced by every architectural point of
proof without and within. It was built on the site of that famous
ancient structure whose upper floor was occupied by Will’s Coffee-House;
its cellars and foundations still to be traced under the estimable Ham
and Beef Shop on that corner. To-day, this popular establishment is
thronged for us, not with its actual eager buyers of cold baked meats,
but with the shades of Addison, Swift, Smollett, Steele, Dryden, Cibber,
Gay,
[Illustration: NO. 20 RUSSELL STREET, COVENT GARDEN.]
Pepys, Johnson, revisiting their once favourite foregathering place.
Of the three houses into which this block of buildings has been divided,
the corner house remains entirely unaltered. Its neighbour, in Bow
Street--now a swarming tavern--has suffered somewhat at the hand of the
modern restorer. It retains, on its upper floor, a small barred cell,
formerly set apart for some exclusive or elusive prisoner from Bow
Street station, just at hand.
The house which chiefly concerns us, No. 20 Russell Street, has been
made higher by one story, re-roofed, and re-faced with stucco; but it
has not been distinctly disfeatured.
Such as it was, it became the next home of the Lambs, in 1817. At that
time they had lived for nine years in their chambers in Inner Temple
Lane, and it is strange that they should have been willing to leave
their beloved Temple, after having been born into it again, and after
having grown up in it again. For Lamb’s household gods planted a
terrible fixed foot, as he put it, and were not rooted up without blood.
“I thought we could never have been torn up from the Temple,” he wrote;
yet they did so tear themselves up, and we are left to conjecture, for
their reasons. Mary told Dorothy Wordsworth that the rooms had got dirty
and out of repair, and that the cares of living in chambers had grown
more irksome each year. More weighty among their motives, no doubt, was
the desire to escape the incessant invasion of their privacy by welcome,
and yet unwelcome, friends. From this wear and tear they were not freed
by their flight, however.
In November, 1817, Lamb wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth: “We are in the
individual spot I like best in all this great city. The theatres with
all their noises; Covent Garden, dearer to me than any gardens of
Alcinous, where we are morally sure of the earliest peas and ’sparagus;
Bow Street, where the thieves are examined, within a few yards of us.
Mary had not been here four-and-twenty hours before she saw a thief. She
sits at the window working; and, casually throwing out her eyes, she
sees a concourse of people coming this way, with a constable to conduct
the ceremony. These little incidents agreeably diversify a female
life.”
Besides these novel sights, they found strange sounds in their new
abode. A brazier’s hammers were rankling all day long within, and by
night without--but let Mary tell it, in her letter to Dorothy
Wordsworth: “Here we are living at a brazier’s shop, No. 20, in Russell
Street, Covent Garden--a place all alive with noise and bustle; Drury
Lane Theatre in sight from our front, and Covent Garden from our back
windows.... The hubbub of the carriages returning from the play doesn’t
annoy me in the least--strange that it doesn’t, for it is quite
tremendous. I quite enjoy looking out of the window, and listening to
the calling up of the carriages, and the squabbles of the coachmen and
link-boys.”
They squabble still of a foggy night--“a real London partic’ler”--and
the noise is even greater now than it was then, and Covent Garden is
filthier than ever, and the thieves go by escorted by a “bobby,” and
attended by a crowd; but the brazier no longer brazes, and his
discordant shop is now inoffensive with noiseless fruits.
Here they lived until 1823, these six years filled with increasing
prosperity, with comparative comfort, with happy friendships, with his
best work, with sudden fame. His income had slowly increased with each
added year of service in the East India House, and the earnings of his
literary work swelled it slightly. That work had never yet received its
recognition. It was collected and published in two handsome volumes in
1818, and the reading world of that day suddenly awakened to see in the
obscure clerk, plodding daily to his desk in Leadenhall Street, its most
delicate humourist, its most acute critic, its most perfect essayist. A
little later, inspired by this success, he set to work in these rooms in
Russell Street on his “Elia” papers, begun in the new _London Magazine_
for August, 1820.
So he outgrew his gloom and grew gayer, although he was never for one
hour out of the shadow of Mary’s constant imminent danger of a relapse.
He drew around him many new acquaintances, especially the theatrical
folk of this quarter, and more and more of the “friendly harpies” he
was fond of, on whom he spent his time and squandered his strength. He
needed all he could save of time and strength for his evening work on
his Essays, after his day’s work at his desk. Yet he not only was not
allowed to attend to literary labour, but he complained that he could
not even write letters at home, because he was never alone; and had to
seize odd moments for all such writing at his office and from his work
in East India House. Stationery, too, he seized there; and some of his
unapproachable letters were written on printed official forms concerning
“statements of the weights and amounts of the following lots”! His
task-masters there would have gone out of their mercantile minds could
they have made accurate estimates of the hard money value to be put by
posterity on those “following lots” which he thus unofficially filled
in!
Even there he was not unmolested, but was constantly “called off to do
the deposits on cotton wool,” he complained when writing to Wordsworth.
“But why do I relate this to you, who want faculties to comprehend the
great mystery of deposits, of interest, of warehouse rent, and of
contingent fund?”
So his growing need and his growing want to be alone were never
gratified. “Except my morning’s walk to the office, which is like
treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so--I cannot walk
home from office but some officious friend offers his unwelcome
courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered--evening
company I should always like, had I any mornings, but I am saturated
with human faces (_divine_, forsooth) and voices all the golden
morning.... I am never C. L., but always C. L. & Co. He who thought it
not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious
monstrosity of being never by myself.” He could not even eat in peace,
for his familiars were with him putting questions--presumably
inopportune questions--asking his opinions, and interrupting him in
every way. “Up I go, mutton on table, hungry as a hunter, hope to forget
my cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication.
Knock at the door; in comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Mr. Burney, or Morgan Demi
Gorgon, or my brother, or somebody to prevent my eating alone--a process
absolutely necessary to my poor, wretched digestion. Oh, the pleasure of
eating alone!--eating my dinner alone! let me think of it.”
He did think of it, but to no practicable remedial end; for, if he hated
to have the intruders come, he hated still more to have them go; and he
had to avow, “God bless ’em! I love some of ’em dearly!”
All this was a ceaseless drain on his vitality, and a ceaseless strain
on the nerves already so overstrung. He wondered how “some people keep
their nerves so nicely balanced as they do, or have they any? or are
they made of pack-thread? He” (I know not of whom he spoke) “is proof
against weather, ingratitude, meat underdone, every weapon of fate.”
Lamb was not proof against good friends, his sympathetic nature going
out perpetually to them to his own loss. Of Coleridge he said: “The
neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty
ordinary persons.... If I lived with him, or with the author of ‘The
Excursion,’ I should in a very little time lose my own identity.” Only
those of his susceptible temperament can comprehend this confession, or
his characteristic commendation of John Rickman, Clerk of the House of
Commons, a newly made and highly valued friend: “He understands you the
first time. _You need never twice speak to him._”
Such were the tremulous nerves which seemed to need the stimulus of
alcohol, and which were so easily swayed and upset by it. The lachrymose
and dolorous tones of Respectability are forever croaking loud in
lamentation that Lamb was a Drunkard. It is not true. He was no
drunkard. He could not have been a drunkard with his delicate
organization. I believe that he suffered, unknowingly withal, from the
malady now named nervous dyspepsia; to which he was a victim, partly by
inheritance, largely by his own indiscretions. He was careless in his
habits, in his diet, in his exercise--walking often at unfitting hours
and for excessive hours--and he had no regard at all for any sort of
proper precautions. Although habitually given to plain fare, and no
gormandizer, he was at times fond of outrageous dishes, and fearless in
his appalling experiments on his digestive machinery. He audaciously
claimed for himself the stomach of Heliogabalus! Like Thackeray, he had
the courage of his gastronomic convictions, and he has left an
imperishable record of his love for roast pig, cow-heel, and brawn. “I
am no Quaker at my food--I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of
it.... I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know what he is
eating; I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinctively
from one who professes to like minced veal”--admirable appreciation!
“C---- holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses
apple-dumplings--I am not sure but he is right.” And about a pig, just
then roasting, he wrote to Wordsworth: “How beautiful and strong those
buttered onions come to my nose!” He could snatch a fearful joy even
from that baleful refection, cold brawn; and only at the thought
thereof, as he is writing, he glows with esurient unction. “‘Tis, of all
my hobbies, the supreme in the eating way.... It is like a picture of
one of the old Italian masters; its gusto is of that hidden sort.”
Conscientious in his cultivation of these admirably abnormal appetites;
fond of heavy, late suppers; addicted to too much tobacco; with friends
forever to the fore to interest, stimulate, and thus unnerve him; and
with the unceasing terror that hung over their home and gave it its
profound depression, it is small wonder that he found in alcohol just
what he needed, and just what he should not have depended upon! He would
tipple at times, and now and then he did get drunk, I do not deny; but
never twice in the same house, as he truthfully assured a lady! That was
a redeeming habit, surely. The fact, put in a word, is that he was
affected by incredibly small quantities of stimulants, and as high as
they pulled up his spirits, even so correspondingly low did his spirits
sink afterward. His agonies of remorse, following a slight excess, were
morbid, fantastic, never to be taken as true to the letter. After a
trifling tipsy quarrel with Walter Wilson, he sent an apology, and
added: “You knew well enough before that a very little liquor will cause
a considerable alteration in me.” Mary wrote frequently: “He came home
very _smoky and drinky_ last night;” and then he would reproach himself
the day after for “wasting and teasing her life for five years past
incessantly with my cursed drinking and ways of going on.” His spasmodic
efforts at reform were born of these extravagant self-accusings, and
were equally needless and fruitless. “I am afraid I must leave off
drinking. I am a poor creature, but I am leaving off gin.” And he did
leave it off, with a moral certainty of his abstinence lasting until his
feeble stomach clamoured for so much porter in its place that Mary
herself had to beg him “to live like himself once more.”