_Com_. "What was it?"
_Resp_. "Diddle, diddle, dumpkins."
_Com_. "And was this his only observation? Did Mr. Lamb not
strengthen this remark by some other of the same nature?"
_Resp_. "Yes, he did."
_Com_. "And what was it?"
_Resp_. "Diddle, diddle, dumpkins."
_Com_. "What is your secret opinion of Dumpkins?"
_Com_. "Do you conceive Dumpkins to have been a thing or a
person?"
_Resp_. "I conceive Dumpkins to have been a person, having the
rights of a person."
_Com_. "Capable, for instance, of suing and being sued?"
_Resp_. "Yes, capable of both; though I have reason to think
there would have been very little use in suing Dumpkins."
_Com_. "How so? Are the committee to understand that you, the
respondent, in your own case, have found it a vain speculation,
countenanced only by visionary lawyers, to sue Dumpkins?"
_Resp_. "No; I never lost a shilling by Dumpkins, the reason
for which may be that Dumpkins never owed me a shilling; but from
his _pronomen_ of 'diddle,' I apprehend that he was too well
acquainted with joint-stock companies!"
_Com_. "And your opinion is, that he may have diddled Mr.
Lamb?"
_Resp_. "I conceive it to be not unlikely."
_Com_. "And, perhaps, from Mr. Lamb's pathetic reiteration of
his name, 'Diddle, diddle,' you would be disposed to infer that
Dumpkins had practised his diddling talents upon Mr. L. more than
once?"
_Resp_. "I think it probable."
Lamb laughed, and brightened up; tea was announced; Miss Lamb
returned. The cloud had passed away from Lamb's spirits, and again
he realized the pleasure of evening, which, in _his_
apprehension, was so essential to the pleasure of literature.
On the table lay a copy of Wordsworth, in two volumes; it was the
edition of Longman, printed about the time of Waterloo. Wordsworth
was held in little consideration, I believe, amongst the house of
Longman; at any rate, _their_ editions of his works were got
up in the most slovenly manner. In particular, the table of
contents was drawn up like a short-hand bill of parcels. By
accident the book lay open at a part of this table, where the
sonnet beginning--
"Alas! what boots the long laborious quest"--
had been entered with mercantile speed, as--
"Alas! what boots,"----
"Yes," said Lamb, reading this entry in a dolorous tone of voice, "he
may well say _that_. I paid Hoby three guineas for a pair that
tore like blotting paper, when I was leaping a ditch to escape a
farmer that pursued me with a pitch-fork for trespassing. But why
should W. wear boots in Westmoreland? Pray, advise him to patronize
shoes."
The mercurialities of Lamb were infinite, and always uttered in a
spirit of absolute recklessness for the quality or the prosperity
of the sally. It seemed to liberate his spirits from some burthen
of blackest melancholy which oppressed it, when he had thrown off a
jest: he would not stop one instant to improve it; nor did he care
the value of a straw whether it were good enough to be remembered,
or so mediocre as to extort high moral indignation from a collector
who refused to receive into his collection of jests and puns any
that were not felicitously good or revoltingly bad.
After tea, Lamb read to me a number of beautiful compositions,
which he had himself taken the trouble to copy out into a blank
paper folio from unsuccessful authors. Neglected people in every
class won the sympathy of Lamb. One of the poems, I remember, was a
very beautiful sonnet from a volume recently published by Lord
Thurlow--which, and Lamb's just remarks upon it, I could almost
repeat _verbatim_ at this moment, nearly twenty-seven years
later, if your limits would allow me. But these, you tell me, allow
of no such thing; at the utmost they allow only twelve lines more.
Now all the world knows that the sonnet itself would require
fourteen lines; but take fourteen from twelve, and there remains
very little, I fear; besides which, I am afraid two of my twelve
are already exhausted. This forces me to interrupt my account of
Lamb's reading, by reporting the very accident that _did_
interrupt it in fact; since that no less characteristically
expressed Lamb's peculiar spirit of kindness, (always quickening
itself towards the ill-used or the down-trodden,) than it had
previously expressed itself in his choice of obscure readings. Two
ladies came in, one of whom at least had sunk in the scale of
worldly consideration. They were ladies who would not have found
much recreation in literary discussions; elderly, and habitually
depressed. On _their_ account, Lamb proposed whist, and in
that kind effort to amuse them, which naturally drew forth some
momentary gayeties from himself, but not of a kind to impress
themselves on the recollection, the evening terminated.
We have left ourselves no room for a special examination of Lamb's
writings, some of which were failures, and some were so memorably
beautiful as to be unique in their class. The character of Lamb it
is, and the life-struggle of Lamb, that must fix the attention of
many, even amongst those wanting in sensibility to his intellectual
merits. This character and this struggle, as we have already
observed, impress many traces of themselves upon Lamb's writings.
Even in that view, therefore, they have a ministerial value; but
separately, for themselves, they have an independent value of the
highest order. Upon this point we gladly adopt the eloquent words
of Sergeant Talfourd:--
"The sweetness of Lamb's character, breathed through his writings,
was felt even by strangers; but its heroic aspect was unguessed
even by many of his friends. Let them now consider it, and ask if
the annals of self-sacrifice can show anything in human action and
endurance more lovely than its self-devotion exhibits? It was not
merely that he saw, through the ensanguined cloud of misfortune
which had fallen upon his family, the unstained excellence of his
sister, whose madness had caused it; that he was ready to take her
to his own home with reverential affection, and cherish her through
life; and he gave up, for _her_ sake, all meaner and more
selfish love, and all the hopes which youth blends with the passion
which disturbs and ennobles it; not even that he did all this
cheerfully, without pluming himself upon his brotherly nobleness as
a virtue, or seeking to repay himself (as some uneasy martyrs do)
by small instalments of long repining; but that he carried the
spirit of the hour in which he first knew and took his course to
his last. So far from thinking that his sacrifice of youth and love
to his sister gave him a license to follow his own caprice at the
expense of her feelings, even in the lightest matters, he always
wrote and spoke of her as his wiser self, his generous
benefactress, of whose protecting care he was scarcely worthy."
It must be remembered, also, which the Sergeant does not overlook,
that Lamb's efforts for the becoming support of his sister lasted
through a period of forty years. Twelve years before his death, the
munificence of the India House, by granting him a liberal retiring
allowance, had placed his own support under shelter from accidents
of any kind. But this died with himself; and he could not venture
to suppose that, in the event of his own death, the India House
would grant to his sister the same allowance as by custom is
granted to a wife. This they did; but not venturing to calculate
upon such nobility of patronage, Lamb had applied himself through
life to the saving of a provision for his sister under any accident
to himself. And this he did with a persevering prudence, so little
known in the literary class, amongst a continued tenor of
generosities, often so princely as to be scarcely known in any
class.
Was this man, so memorably good by life-long sacrifice of himself,
in any profound sense a Christian? The impression is, that he was
_not_. We, from private communications with him, can undertake
to say that, according to his knowledge and opportunities for the
study of Christianity, he _was_. What has injured Lamb on this
point is, that his early opinions (which, however, from the first
were united with the deepest piety) are read by the inattentive, as
if they had been the opinions of his mature days; secondly, that he
had few religious persons amongst his friends, which made him
reserved in the expression of his own views; thirdly, that in any
case where he altered opinions for the better, the credit of the
improvement is assigned to Coleridge. Lamb, for example, beginning
life as a Unitarian, in not many years became a Trinitarian.
Coleridge passed through the same changes in the same order; and,
here, at least, Lamb is supposed simply to have obeyed the
influence, confessedly great, of Coleridge. This, on our own
knowledge of Lamb's views, we pronounce to be an error. And the
following extracts from Lamb's letters will show, not only that he
was religiously disposed on impulses self-derived, but that, so far
from obeying the bias of Coleridge, he ventured, on this one
subject, firmly as regarded the matter, though humbly as regarded
the manner, affectionately to reprove Coleridge.
In a letter to Coleridge, written in 1797, the year after his first
great affliction, he says:
"Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated character among my
acquaintance; not one Christian; not one but undervalues
Christianity. Singly, what am I to do? Wesley--[have you read his
life?]--was not he an elevated character? Wesley has said religion
was not a solitary thing. Alas! it is necessarily so with me, or
next to solitary. 'Tis true you write to me; but correspondence by
letter and personal intimacy are widely different. Do, do write to
me; and do some good to my mind--already how much 'warped and
relaxed' by the world!"
In a letter written about three months previously, he had not
scrupled to blame Coleridge at some length for audacities of
religious speculation, which seemed to him at war with the
simplicities of pure religion. He says:
"Do continue to write to me. I read your letters with my sister,
and they give us both abundance of delight. Especially they please
us two when you talk in a religious strain. Not but we are offended
occasionally with a certain freedom of expression, a certain air of
mysticism, more consonant to the conceits of pagan philosophy than
consistent with the humility of genuine piety."
Then, after some instances of what he blames, he says:
"Be not angry with me, Coleridge. I wish not to cavil; I know I
cannot instruct you; I only wish to remind you of that humility
which best becometh the Christian character. God, in the New
Testament, our best guide, is represented to us in the kind,
condescending, amiable, familiar light of a parent; and, in my poor
mind, 'tis best for us so to consider him as our heavenly Father,
and our best friend, without indulging too bold conceptions of his
character."
About a month later, he says:
"Few but laugh at me for reading my Testament. They talk a language
I understand not; I conceal sentiments that would be a puzzle to
_them_."
We see by this last quotation _where_ it was that Lamb
originally sought for consolation. We personally can vouch that, at
a maturer period, when he was approaching his fiftieth year, no
change had affected his opinions upon that point; and, on the other
hand, that no changes had occurred in his needs for consolation, we
see, alas! in the records of his life. Whither, indeed, could he
fly for comfort, if not to his Bible? And to whom was the Bible an
indispensable resource, if not to Lamb? We do not undertake to say,
that in his knowledge of Christianity he was everywhere profound or
consistent, but he was always earnest in his aspirations after its
spiritualities, and had an apprehensive sense of its power.
Charles Lamb is gone; his life was a continued struggle in the
service of love the purest, and within a sphere visited by little
of contemporary applause. Even his intellectual displays won but a
narrow sympathy at any time, and in his earlier period were saluted
with positive derision and contumely on the few occasions when they
were not oppressed by entire neglect. But slowly all things right
themselves. All merit, which is founded in truth, and is strong
enough, reaches by sweet exhalations in the end a higher sensory;
reaches higher organs of discernment, lodged in a selecter
audience. But the original obtuseness or vulgarity of feeling that
thwarted Lamb's just estimation in life, will continue to thwart
its popular diffusion. There are even some that continue to regard
him with the old hostility. And we, therefore, standing by the side
of Lamb's grave, seemed to hear, on one side, (but in abated tones,
) strains of the ancient malice--"This man, that thought himself to
be somebody, is dead--is buried--is forgotten!" and, on the other
side, seemed to hear ascending, as with the solemnity of an
anthem--"This man, that thought himself to be nobody, is dead--is
buried; his life has been searched; and his memory is hallowed
forever!"