was not only “his sweet enemy,” but really his worst enemy. “Liquor and
company and wicked tobacco, o’ nights, have quite dis-pericraniated me,
as one may say;” and of these three delights wicked tobacco was to him
the most delightful, and withal the most dangerous. And so we must not
consider too curiously his famous “Confessions of a Drunkard,” with its
terrible, eloquent passage, beginning with this unfair and unfounded
introspection: “To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to
foes; to be suspected by strangers, stared at by fools.” We are glad and
proud to take him as we find him--full of frailties, just as we poorer
mortals are; it is not for us to sit in judgment on him; we say to the
Philistines, in Wordsworth’s benignant words, “Love him or leave him
alone.”
It was during the latter period of their residence in the Temple, and
during their six years in Russell Street, that Lamb produced the greater
part of the work he has left--small in sum but great in achievement. It
is not the province of this study to dwell on his various literary
performances, but it comes within my scope to speak of his sister’s
assistance in that literary labour. In _all_ matters he depended greatly
upon 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.”
During each frequent recurrence of her pitiful craze--when she was
forced to be “from home,” as he lovingly and tenderly phrased it--he was
lost and helpless. “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 as in the
biggest perplexity.”
He did not overrate her. She was no commonplace creature, and she
impressed all who knew her well as a woman of fine judgment, of
noteworthy good sense, full of womanly sympathies, sweet and serene.
Hazlitt commended her as the wisest and most rational woman he had ever
known. With strangers she was unpretentious, mild of manner, reticent
rather than loquacious. In her bearing towards her brother she was
gentle and gracious always, and she had a way of letting her eyes follow
him everywhere about the room, in company. When looking directly at him
she had often an upward, pleading, peculiar regard. Mrs. Anne Gilchrist,
in her admirable monograph, has called attention to the rare
tact--excellent thing in woman!--shown by Mary in dealing with her
brother’s caprices and foibles, all through his life. Indeed, there was
absolute inspiration in her way of looking at, and acting upon, these
matters. It seemed to her to be a vexatious kind of tyranny, which women
use towards men, just because the women _have better judgment_--the
italics are her own! She pours forth profuse strains of unpremeditated
wisdom, in this same letter to Sarah Stoddart: “Let _men_ alone, and at
last we find they come around to the right way, which _we_, by a kind of
intuition, perceive at once. But better, far better that we should let
them often do wrong, than that they should have the torment of a monitor
always at their elbows.” Guided by such priceless principles, it is no
wonder that she succeeded in never crossing that thin line which divides
the domain of the judicious adviser, the opportune helper, from that of
the untimely, incessant, ineffective Nagger. She once said, “Our love
for each other has been the torment of our lives”--torment and
assuagement together, as _we_ know, and made sweet mainly by her simple
sagacity.
Regarding her personal appearance, Barry Cornwall has told us that “her
face was pale, and somewhat square, very placid, with gray intelligent
eyes;” and De Quincey called her “that Madonna-like lady.” Her smile was
as winning as Charles’s own, and when she spoke, there came a slight
catch in her soft voice, unconscious sisterly reflex of his stammer. She
was below the medium stature, strongly and somewhat squarely built.
To this slight sketch of her looks and bearing may be added these, not
too trivial fond records, of her manner of dressing. Her gown was
usually plain, of black stuff or silk; but, on festive occasions, she
came out in a dove-coloured silk, with a kerchief of snow-white muslin
folded across her bosom. She wore a cap of the kind in fashion in her
youth, its border deeply frilled, and a bow on the top.
I cannot finish more fitly than with Barry Cornwall’s dainty touch,
about her habit of snuff-taking, in common with Charles: “She had a
small, white, delicately formed hand, and, as it hovered above the
tortoise-shell snuff-box, the act seemed another link of association
between the brother and sister, as they sat over their favourite
books.”
These favourite books were almost all the same, chiefly the Elizabethan
dramatists, notably Shakespeare; but, unlike Charles--“narrative teases
_me_,” he owned--she was fond of modern romance and read many novels.
“She must have a story--well, ill, or indifferently told--so there be
life stirring in it,” Elia wrote of Bridget, in his subtle portraiture
of her in “Mackery End.” Otherwise their intellectual tastes were in
entire accord; and she was but a little behind him in having almost a
tinge of genius in her keen critical faculty. She came naturally to a
happy command of pure limpid English, which gave to her style the charm
of her own personal flavour. This flavour was made the more racy by a
delicate humour, exceptional in her sex.
These genuine literary qualities first had a chance to show themselves
in the year 1806, while they were living in the Temple. Charles writes:
“Mary is doing for Godwin’s book-seller twenty of Shakspeare’s plays, to
be made into children’s tales.... I have done ‘Othello’ and ‘Macbeth,’
and mean to do all the tragedies. I think it will be popular among the
little people, besides money. It’s to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has
done them capitally, I think you’d think.” And again: “Mary is just
stuck fast in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well.’ She complains of having to
set forth so many female characters in boy’s clothes. She begins to
think Shakspeare must have wanted--imagination!” And she, too, has left
a pretty picture of their common work: “You would like to see us, as we
often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like
Hermia and Helena, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ or, rather, like an
old literary Darby and Joan, I taking snuff, and he groaning all the
while, and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till
he has finished, and then he finds out he has made something of it.”
She certainly had the more difficult task in dealing with the comedies,
and it was she who wrote the greater part of the preface, an admirable
piece of musical English, ending thus: “ ... pretending to no other
merit than as faint and imperfect stamps of Shakespear’s matchless
imagination, whose plays are strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing
from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all honourable
thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity,
humanity.” The little book--“Tales from Shakespear, Designed for the Use
of Young Persons, Embellished with Copper-plates,” (by Mulready)--came
out in 1807, and was such a sudden and assured success with older
persons as well, that a second edition was soon called for. Frequent
editions are still in demand. The new preface stated that, though the
tales had been meant for children, “they were found adapted better for
an acceptable and improving present to young ladies advancing to the
state of womanhood.”
She also did the larger share of “Mrs. Leicester’s School”--a collection
of charming tales for children, over some of which Coleridge used to
gush, and Landor roar in admiration, in his best Boythorn manner. A
volume of “Poetry for Children, by the Author of ‘Mrs. Leicester’s
School,’” was published later. After this her literary productions
consisted only of occasional magazine articles, to one of which, “On
Needle-Work,” I have already referred.
[Illustration: THE COTTAGE IN COLEBROOK ROW.]
For the stories in prose, their authoress found the local scenery and
colour in her memories of her youthful visits to Mackery End and to
Blakesware. Indeed, the stories are supposed to be told to each other by
the young ladies in a school at Amwell--the rural village which slopes
up from the Lea and the New River, only one mile from Ware.
At intervals during these years, there had been short excursions out of
town, longer country trips, and journeys to visit friends far from
London. Charles had spent a fortnight at Nether Stowey with Coleridge,
in the summer of 1797, and there had made the acquaintance of William
Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. She was, of all women he had known,
Coleridge said, “the truest, most inevitable and, at the same time, the
quickest and readiest in sympathy with either joy or sorrow, with
laughter or with tears, with the realities of life, or the larger
realities of the poets.” She formed a warm friendship for Mary, and,
like her, she had clouds come over her reason, though not till very late
in life.
During another vacation, Lamb spent a few days with Hazlitt in
Wiltshire, and in other summer holidays he visited Oxford and Cambridge.
He bore the country always very bravely for the sake of the friends with
whom he was staying.
He had taken Mary to Margate in early years--or, maybe, she took him,
for she was then twenty-six and he only fifteen--and he has told us, in
“The Old Margate Hoy,” of this their first seaside experience, and how
many things combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of his life.
Neither of them had ever seen the sea, then, and had never been so long
together alone and from home. Many years after, during his holidays,
they went together again to the seaside at Brighton and at Hastings. In
1802, he was seized with a strong desire to go to remote regions, and
hurried Mary off for a stay with Coleridge at the Lakes. There they
passed three delightful weeks, although not in the fairy-land which
their first sunset made them think they had come into.
Then they had a “dear, quiet, lazy, delicious month” with the Hazlitts,
at Winterslow, near Salisbury, in 1809. This visit, but not its
pleasure, they repeated in the following year; and journeyed from there
to Oxford, Hazlitt accompanying them, and adding to their delight in the
noble university town, and in the Blenheim pictures.
This trip, like most of their trips, was dearly paid for by Mary’s
illness. The fatigues, the changes, and the reaction after the
excitement of society, disturbed her accustomed balance, nearly always;
sometimes even before they reached home. So surely was this foreseen
that she used to pack a strait waistcoat among her effects, on starting
on any journey, however short. Her most distressing attack occurred on
their way to Paris; a tour taken with needless rashness in the summer of
1822. She was seized with her mania in the diligence, not far from
Amiens, and had to be left there in charge of the nurse, whom they had
taken with them for just this emergency. It pleases us to learn that the
friend who met and helped them there was an American, John Howard Payne.
He escorted Mary to Paris, when she was fit to travel, two months later.
There Crabb Robinson met them, and says: “Her only male friend is a Mr.
Payne, whom she praises exceedingly for his kindness and attention to
Charles. He is the author of ‘Brutus,’ and has a good face.”
In the following year, the Lambs were able to make partial requital for
Payne’s good services then, by helping him in his attempts to produce
his plays and adaptations on the London and Paris boards.
With but a short holiday before him, and friends awaiting him at
Versailles, Charles had gone on from Amiens as soon as he could be
spared; and had to leave Paris before Mary’s arrival. She found there a
characteristic note from him for her guidance. After pointing out a few
pictures in the Louvre for her scrutiny--he had a pretty taste in
painting as well as in engraving--he told her: “You must walk all along
the borough side of the Seine, facing the Tuileries. There is a mile and
a half of print-shops and book-stalls. If the latter were but English!
Then there is a place where Paris people put all their dead people, and
bring them flowers and dolls and gingerbread nuts and sonnets, and such
trifles. And that is all, I think, worth seeing as sights, except that
the streets and shops of Paris are themselves the best sight.” This was
about all--these sights, the folios he loved, the fricasseed frogs he
learned to love, and his meeting with Talma--that he brought away from
Paris. Nor has he left any record of his visit, or of its impressions on
him, such as we should have cherished.
V.
“When you come Londonward you will find me no longer in Covent Garden; I
have a cottage in Colebrook Row, Islington; a cottage, for it is
detached; a white house with six 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.” Thus Lamb wrote on
September 2, 1823, to Bernard Barton.
As early as in 1806, while living in Mitre Court Buildings, and anxious
to finish his farce, Lamb had hired a room outside the Temple. Here he
could work in quiet, free from his nocturnal visitors--knock-eternal, he
called them, in one of his poorest puns. He had tried the same
experiment in Russell Street, and when that refuge failed to secure
privacy, he and
[Illustration: LAMB’S TWO HOUSES AT ENFIELD.]
Mary used to slip away for a few days at a time to furnished lodgings at
Dalston. But all these strategic devices brought only double discomfort,
and they finally resolved to go away from town altogether. Also they
thought that they would like to have a whole house of their own, all to
themselves. Thus it came that the letter quoted above was written. To
that new home I now invite you to go with me.
As we turn from the City Road into Colebrook Row, we find an almost
country road to-day, broad, tree-lined, a strip of grass running down
its middle, and bordered by large, old-fashioned houses. Beneath it
flows that same New River to its reservoir near Sadler’s Wells, hard by.
From the top of the hill we catch a glimpse on either hand of the
Regent’s Canal, as it comes out from the tunnel underneath; through the
mouth of which wheezes and jangles laboriously the round-topped tug,
with its chain of canal-boats. It is a pleasant approach to “Elia”--as
the present owner has re-christened No. 19 Colebrook Row--for the many
pilgrims from all over the English-speaking world to whom it has become
a shrine. For these walls hold more memories of the brother and sister
than do any of the spots we have yet seen. It stands nearly as when they
lived in and left it, though no longer detached; a simple cottage of two
stories and an attic, with stone steps mounting sideways. Its tiny front
garden, flagged and flower-filled, is fenced off discreetly from the
road, a Virginia creeper climbing over the railings.
The New River before it has been sodded over, and even the
wool-gathering George Dyer, with his head in the clouds, could not
tumble into it now. That was one of the most madly ludicrous scenes ever
conceived, and was thus described by Lamb: “I do not know when I have
experienced a stranger sensation than on seeing my old friend G. D., who
had been paying me a morning visit, a few Sundays back, at my cottage at
Islington, upon taking leave, instead of turning down the right-hand
path, by which he had entered, with staff in hand and at noon-day,
deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs
by us, and totally disappear.” B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall) happened
to call soon after and “met Miss Lamb in the passage, in a state of
great alarm--she was whimpering, and could only utter, ‘Poor Mr. Dyer!
poor Mr. Dyer!’ in tremulous tones. I went upstairs aghast, and found
that the involuntary diver had been placed in bed, and that Miss Lamb
had administered brandy and water as a well-established preventive
against cold. Dyer, unaccustomed to anything stronger than the ‘crystal
spring,’ was sitting upright in bed, perfectly delirious. His hair had
been rubbed up, and stood up like so many needles of iron-gray. He did
not (like Falstaff) ‘babble o’ green fields,’ but of the ‘watery
Neptune.’ ‘I soon found out where I was,’ he cried to me, laughing; and
then he went wandering on, his words taking flight into regions where no
one could follow.”
The “cheerful dining-room, all studded over, and rough, with old books,”
is level with the front garden, and unchanged except that its several
windows have now been cut into one large one: as also has been done
above, in the “lightsome drawing-room, three windows, full of choice
prints.” The prints and the old books are gone, and rigid rows of
decorous volumes stare stonily from their shelves; grim horsehair chairs
refuse the aforetime free and unforced invitation; and the stuffed
corpses of dead birds, and other framed horrors of the period all about,
strike terror to our souls. Against the wall, rears itself rigourously a
prim piano, from which _he_ would have fled aghast; for, in her
goodness, nature had given him no taste for music, and he never had to
pretend to care for it. He was constitutionally susceptible of noises,
and a carpenter’s hammer, in a warm summer noon, would fret him into
more than midsummer madness; but these single strokes brought no such
anguish to his ear as did the “measured malice of music.” He affirmed
that he had been goaded to rush out from the Opera, in sheer pain,
seeking solace in street sounds!
However disfurnished may be this interior, its tiny hall, its narrow
stairway, its walls--on which the Lambs may have put this very same
queer marbled paper--all are in the same state as then, when they lived
within and loved them. The most marked alteration has been in his once
“spacious garden”--around which he challenged that professional jester,
the obese, red-nosed Theodore Hook, to race him for a wager. That
diminutive domain has dwindled now to an exiguous back yard, and a
soda-water factory is built over its vines and vegetables.
Here the little household was enlarged and enlivened by the presence of
Emma Isola, the orphaned grandchild of an Italian exile, who taught his
own tongue in Cambridge, and who had been the Italian teacher of Gray
and of Wordsworth. To her the Lambs, then visiting Cambridge, took a
strong fancy; Mary especially pouring out on her the bounteous sympathy
with which she flowed over for young people, and which won from all of
them an equal fondness. They invited the lonely girl to visit them
during her holidays, and finally they made her their adopted daughter,
and their home her own. Mary helped her with French, Charles taught her
Latin, that she might become a governess. Lamb was always quick to serve
those who were poorer than himself, and, _giving greatly_ all his life
long, in Procter’s words, he always had protégés and pensioners on his
bounty. Yet he was curiously provident, and never lived beyond his
simple income, never ran into debt. He could and did practise economy
with himself, but he was incapable of parsimony in his dealings with
others.
These are De Quincey’s words about this side of the man: “Many liberal
people I have known in this world ... many munificent people, but never
any one upon whom, for bounty, for indulgence and forgiveness, for
charitable construction of doubtful or mixed actions, and for regal
munificence, you might have thrown yourself with so absolute a reliance
as upon this comparatively poor Charles Lamb.”
But of all this the subject of this fervent, true tribute tells us no
word. He prattled in print as freely and as frankly as Montaigne, though
with none of the sentimental shamelessness of Jean Jacques Rousseau; and
his delightful egotism has made plain to us his foibles and his follies.
Yet, with all the rest of his life in evidence, we know nothing from
_him_ of
“That best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.”
They had need, just then, of the brightness of the young girl’s
presence, for they were saddened--albeit needlessly so for all the
comfort he had brought to them--by the death of their brother John.
Mary’s illnesses were growing more frequent and more prolonged; and
Charles was chafing more and more under his unending drudgery at the
desk. In 1822 he had already written to Wordsworth: “I grow ominously
tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the
Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don’t know how
wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls, without relief,
day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four,
without ease or interposition.” And once he gave irate vent to a great
outburst, dear to all but to the shop-keeping soul: “Confusion blast all
mercantile transactions, all traffic, exchange of commodities,
intercourse between nations, all the consequent civilization, and
wealth, and amity, and links of society, and getting rid of prejudices,
and getting a knowledge of the face of the globe; and rotting the very
firs of the forest that look so romantic alive, and die into desks!
Vale.” And again: “Oh, that I were kicked out of Leadenhall, with every
mark of indignity, and a competence in my fob! The birds of the air
would not be so free as I should. How I would prance and curvet it, and
pick up cowslips and ramble about purposeless as an idiot!”
It was in April, 1825, that his wish was gratified, and his waiting
brought to an end, in this very Colebrook cottage. He had nerved himself
at length to offer his resignation to the Directors of the East India
Company, and was surprised and delighted--having been kept a few weeks
in suspense--by the proposal “that I should accept from the house, which
I had served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of
my accustomed salary--a magnificent offer. I do not know what I answered
between surprise and gratitude, but it was understood that I accepted
their proposal, and I was told that I was free from that hour to leave
their service. I stammered out a bow, and at just ten minutes after
eight I went home--forever.” To Wordsworth he wrote, on April 6, 1825:
“I came home FOREVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness
of my condition overwhelmed me; it was like passing from life into
eternity. Every year to be as long as three--to have three times as much
real time--time that is my own--in it!”
He compared his sensations to those of Leigh Hunt on being released from
prison. Indeed, the change proved to be too sudden and too great for his
happiness, and he yearned for the “pestilential clerk-faces” which had
so long bored him: so one day, soon after, he went back to the office,
and sat amid “the old desk companions, with whom I have had such merry
hours,” and tried to feel really sorry that he had left them in the
lurch! He has told us of all his feelings, good and bad, at this period,
in “The Superannuated Man.” He could not quite thoroughly enjoy his
freedom, and was put to all sorts of devices to waste his cherished
time! He re-hung his Titians, his Da Vincis, his Hogarths, and his other
beloved prints. He marshalled his Chelsea China shepherds and
shepherdesses in groups and singly all about the rooms. He rearranged
the ragged veterans of his library; not longing overmuch for the good
leather that would comfortably clothe his shivering folios. Few of them
were lettered on the back, and his reply to a silly somebody, who asked
how he knew them, was: “How does a shepherd know his sheep?” It was his
fantastic humour that, the better a book is the less it demands from
binding!