If there is a tender and touching story in all the annals of genius, it
is surely the life-history of Charles Lamb. Search where we will, there
is nothing to equal the pathos of this gentle and lovable life. Nowhere
else can we find a record of such deep devotion, such heroic endurance,
such uncomplaining suffering, such geniality and cheerfulness under
almost unbearable burdens. The world admires many of its men of
letters,--it loves Charles Lamb. Save Carlyle's, no voice among all his
literary brethren has ever said a bitter or an unkind word of the gentle
humorist. And when we compare the lives of the two men, how brightly
glows the page whereon is written the record of Lamb's untiring and
unselfish love, exacting nothing for himself, but giving all with lavish
prodigality, compared with the pages given to the account of the selfish
and exacting life which Carlyle lived with the woman who was his wife,
and whom he really loved, but over whom he tyrannized in so petty a
manner! Carlyle's characterization of Lamb is really the most damaging
thing to himself of the many bitter and biting sarcasms which he has
left in regard to the men and women of his day. That he did not know
Lamb--had not the slightest appreciation of the man--is evident at a
glance. And perhaps this is not to be so much wondered at, for there was
very little in common between the two; but it does seem that some hint
of the heroism of Lamb's apparently commonplace and perhaps vulgar life
might have penetrated even to the heart of the crusty Scotchman, for he
could not have been ignorant of the tragic life-story of gentle Elia.
They were very humble people, the Lambs,--poor and obscure, and
unfortunate to a degree. No pretensions to gentility had ever been in
the family, but an acceptance of their commonplace lot, with little
striving for higher things. There was something more, too, than poverty
and obscurity and vulgarity in their antecedents; a fearful curse was in
the family, the heritage of almost every generation,--the curse of
madness. What the contemplation of this frightful inheritance must have
been to a youth like Charles Lamb, gifted with the fatal sensibility of
genius, and endowed with that imagination which can conceive of a horror
before it falls, we can form some sort of conception, but probably a
very vague and inadequate one indeed.
The family were very poor, living in humble lodgings. The father was in
his dotage, the mother was a paralytic, and Charles with his pen, and
his sister Mary with her needle, worked to support the family. They both
overworked themselves fearfully, and lived in apprehension of the doom
which hung over them. They were very fondly attached to each other, and
the only pleasure they had in their cheerless youth was their
intercourse. They were both gifted, and of gentle and kind disposition,
and their affection for each other was more sympathetic and filled with
a deeper insight into each other's characters and feelings than is
common between brothers and sisters. In little intervals between their
varied labors they wrote and read to each other many things which would
have a rare value in these days had they been preserved; and this, with
wandering together through the streets in the evenings and looking at
the outside of the theatres, seems to have constituted their only
youthful pleasure. At the age of twenty-one Charles showed symptoms of
the family curse, and his sister herself almost lost her reason in
unavailing sorrow over his condition. So young, so gifted, and
threatened with such dread disaster,--his loving Mary could not have it
so. She even rebelled against Heaven in the extreme of her agony, and
called upon God to relieve them both from such ill-fated life. But all
her prayers and tears and rebellious risings up against destiny did not
avail, and Charles was placed in a mad-house, where he passed a portion
of the year 1796. In one of his lucid intervals he wrote a sonnet,
"Mary, to thee, my sister, and my friend," which is a touching and
tender tribute to her love. Long afterward he was able to write of the
experience quite cheerfully:--
"I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy; for while
it lasted I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not,
Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy
till you have gone mad!"
But there is a painful commentary upon the bitterness of after-life to
him in the thought that he could look back upon this dreadful season as
a period when he had some happiness. The attack in his case was of brief
duration, and it never recurred, which, considering all the sorrows and
all the irregularities of his life, seems remarkable. He had not been
long in a condition to be responsible when the tragedy took place which
cast its blight upon his life. In September of the year 1796 Mary Lamb,
"worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to
needle-work all day and by watching with her mother at night, broke into
uncontrollable insanity, and seizing a knife from the table spread for
dinner, stabbed her mother to the heart. The coroner's jury brought in a
verdict of lunacy." Charles writes to Coleridge:--
"With me the former things are passed away, and I have something
more to do than to feel. God Almighty has us well in his keeping."
The horror of the event made so deep an impression upon his mind that he
thought he never fully recovered from it. For many, many years it hung
over him like a pall, casting a sort of despairing darkness over all
that might have been bright in life. Think of that tender and sensitive
soul in the awful solitude of the nights which followed the tragedy: the
sister he loved removed from him to an asylum; the mother sleeping in
her unhonored grave; the father, worse than dead, in almost drivelling
idiocy, to be cared for at his hands; the awful doom of the family ever
hanging over his own head,--what depths of passionate sorrow must he
have waded through in those bitter hours, what unavailing tears he must
have shed, what rebellious thoughts may there not have been in his
heart!
But he kept a cheerful front, and went about his daily toil, as he needs
must, with as little outward show of pain as possible.
Mary soon grew better, and he exerted himself to have her released from
confinement. He succeeded in doing so by entering into a solemn
agreement to make her his charge for life, and to watch over her that
she should do no harm. When she was returned to him he was almost happy
again, in spite of the shadow caused by the memory of what had happened,
as well as by the uncertainty of the future. He had but one hundred
pounds a year from his clerkship, and there was a maiden aunt as well as
the father to be cared for. But he says cheerfully:--
"If my father, my aunt, my sister, and an old maid servant cannot
live comfortably on one hundred and twenty or one hundred and
thirty pounds a year, we ought to burn by slow fires; and I almost
would, that Mary might not go to a hospital."
And he hoped to earn the twenty or thirty pounds by literature. His
father had to be amused by cribbage; and many were the weary hours that
Charles would sit playing with him, to the neglect of his
correspondence, his friends, the thousand-and-one private interests
which filled up his little leisure. Sometimes he would try to be let
off, but the old man would say, reproachfully, "If you won't play with
me, you might as well not come home at all;" and the dutiful son set to
afresh. There is a sort of heroism in this which only those people can
appreciate who really value their time. These people will give all else
cheerfully,--money, strength, the heart's deep devotion,--but they give
very grudgingly their precious moments; they feel as though they were
being robbed in every hour thus lost. Oh, the agony of impatience! oh,
the restlessness of the fever which consumes them when they feel the
moments fleeing away, and the unconscious thief perhaps deriving little
pleasure or profit from the loss! Rebellion against fate is often a
virtue under such circumstances; and we are inclined to think it would
have been so in the case of poor Elia, even though the poor old man
should have gone to his grave with a few less games of cribbage recorded
against him.
Think of the delicious essays which might have been written in those
misspent hours, in those days of youth when Elia was at his best, before
the sorrowful touches of Time had been left upon his genius; think of
the exquisite letters his friends might have received, and which would
have enriched all the coming time; think of the inimitable drolleries
which would have sent a smile over the face of the world; think of the
little pathetic touches he would have given in sketches of
characteristic humor, all with the freshness of his dawn upon them,--and
mourn, O world of letters, for your loss! But the old man,--he for whom
the light had gone out in darkness; over whose brain the cobwebs had
been woven; who had no joy in the great things of this life; who saw no
beauty or splendor in the outer world; who had no treasure in the world
of thought; who could not be stirred again by any of the absorbing
passions of life; who knew no love, no hate, no ambition, no great
impulse to do or to dare; who could not enter into the realm of books or
art or music; who had not even a friend in all the universe of God;
think of the old man who had only this one thing,--cards,--and pause a
moment before you say that gentle Elia did not well.
Finally the old man, too, went his way, and there were only Charles and
Mary left. He had long since given up the hope of there being a third in
their life-drama, although there had been one to whom his heart was
given, and whose presence had been with him always, even in his days of
madness,--sweet Alice W., as he always called her, but of whom the world
has lost all trace save this, that she was Charles Lamb's early and only
love, and that he treasured her memory until all were gone, "the old
familiar faces." Long after she was married to another, Lamb used to be
seen at evening pacing up and down in front of her house, hoping to
catch a glimpse of her through the windows. But after he had taken Mary
to be his charge it was impossible to think of marriage. He could not
ask another to share his sad vigils with the afflicted sister, nor hope
that another would look upon her with his eyes; so he buried his romance
out of sight, and never turned to that phase of a man's life again. At
twenty-two one does not easily give up the thoughts of love, or the
hopes of home with wife and children,--and Charles had his struggle, as
any strong man would have had; but he conquered himself once again, and
went bravely on. Day by day he toiled at the India House, never losing
time, never taking a vacation, ever at his post till he was fifty years
old, when he "came home forever."
During those thirty years of steady toil he went through many sad
experiences with Mary; but he must earn their daily bread, and he never
left his post. Many were the nights he spent in anxious watchings with
her,--for she had periodical returns of her insanity during all this
time,--when, sleepless and harassed to the point of exhaustion with her
dangerous vagaries, he must still rise in the morning and go to his
desk. Many were the days when he ran in hot haste the moment he was
released, to see that she was still safe; even many hand-to-hand
encounters he had with her in her dangerous hours,--but no murmur ever
escaped his lips at all this. When she became very bad he took her back
to the asylum, and she remained sometimes for weeks, sometimes for
months; but he always eagerly reclaimed her the moment she was better.
He took her with him on little journeys,--a strait-jacket always safely
packed in her portmanteau by herself,--and one time she went mad while
they were travelling in the diligence and far from home. Often he wrote
to their friends in the later days, when he had become somewhat famous
and friends had grown plenty, to apologize for not keeping engagements
or accepting invitations, "My sister is taken ill." As George W. Curtis
once wrote,--
"In those few words how much tragedy lies hidden! What a life of
patient heroism do they suggest!--in comparison with which the
career of Lamb's huge contemporary, Bonaparte, shrinks into the
meanest melodrama; while the misanthropic mouthings of Lord Byron
become maudlin when we recall the sweet, life-long, heroic silence
of Charles Lamb."
"What sad, large pieces it cuts out of life," Lamb writes in 1809,--"out
of _her_ life, who is getting rather old; and we may not have many years
to live together." Once again when she was in confinement he writes:--
"It cuts out great slices of the time--the little time--we shall
have to live together. But I won't talk of death; I will imagine us
immortal, or forget that we are otherwise. By God's blessing, in a
few weeks we may be taking our meal together, or sitting in the
front row of the pit at Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past
the theatres, to look at the outside of them at least, if not to be
tempted in. Then we forget that we are assailable; we are strong
for the time as rocks,--the wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs."