Personal Appearance and Manners.--Health.--Influence of Mary's
Illnesses upon Her Brother.
No description of Mary Lamb's person in youth is to be found; but hers
was a kind of face which time treats gently, adding with one hand
while he takes away with the other; compensating by deepened traces of
thought and kindliness the loss of youthful freshness. Like her
brother, her features were well formed. "Her face was pale and
somewhat square, very placid, with grey, intelligent eyes" says
Proctor who first saw her when she was about fifty-three. "Eyes brown,
soft and penetrating" says another friend, Mrs. Cowden Clarke,
confirming the observation that it is difficult to judge of the colour
of expressive eyes. She, too, lays stress upon the strong resemblance
to Charles and especially on a smile like his, "winning in the
extreme." De Quincey speaks of her as "that Madonna-like lady."
The only original portrait of her in existence, I believe, is that by
the late Mr. Cary (son of Lamb's old friend), now in the possession of
Mr. Edward Hughes, and engraved in the _Memoir_ of Lamb by Barry
Cornwall; also in _Scribner's Magazine_ for March 1881 where it is
accompanied by a letter from Mr. Cary which states that it was painted
in 1834 when Mary was seventy. She stands a little behind her brother,
resting one hand on him and one on the back of his chair. There is a
characteristic sweetness in her attitude and the countenance is full
of goodness and intelligence; whilst the finer modelling of Charles'
features and the intellectual beauty of his head are rendered with
considerable success,--Crabb Robinson's strictures notwithstanding
who, it appears, saw not the original, but a poor copy of the figure
of Charles. It was from Cary's picture that Mr. Armitage, R.A.
executed the portraits of the Lambs in the large fresco on the walls
of University College Hall. Among its many groups (of which Crabb
Robinson, who commissioned the fresco, is the central figure), that
containing the Lambs includes also Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, and
Southey, By an unfortunate clause in the deed of gift the fresco,
which is painted in monochrome, is forbidden to be cleaned, even with
bread-crumb; it is therefore already very dingy.
In stature, Mary was under the middle size and her bodily frame was
strong. She could walk fifteen miles with ease; her brother speaks of
their having walked thirty miles together and, even at sixty years of
age, she was capable of twelve miles "most days." Regardless of
weather, too, as Leigh Hunt pleasantly tells in his _Familiar Epistle
in Verse_ to Lamb:--
You'll guess why I can't see the snow-covered streets,
Without thinking of you and your visiting feats,
When you call to remembrance how you and one more,
When I wanted it most, used to knock at my door;
For when the sad winds told us rain would come down,
Or when snow upon snow fairly clogg'd up the town,
And dun-yellow fogs brooded over its white,
So that scarcely a being was seen towards night,
Then--then said the lady yclept near and dear:
Now, mind what I tell you--the Lambs will be here.
So I poked up the flame, and she got out the tea,
And down we both sat as prepared as could be;
And then, sure as fate came the knock of you two,
Then the lanthorn, the laugh, and the "Well, how d'ye do?"
Mary's manners were easy, quiet, unpretending; to her brother gentle
and tender always, says Mrs. Cowden-Clarke. She had often an upward
look of peculiar meaning when directed towards him, as though to give
him an assurance that all was well with her; and away of repeating his
words assentingly when he spoke to her. "He once said, with his
peculiar mode of tenderness beneath blunt, abrupt speech, 'You must
die first, Mary.' She nodded with her little quiet nod and sweet
smile, 'Yes, I must die first, Charles,'" When they were in company
together her eyes followed him everywhere; and even when he was
talking at the other end of the room, she would supply some word he
wanted. 'Her voice was soft and persuasive, with at times a certain
catch, a kind of emotional stress in breathing, which gave a charm to
her reading of poetry and a captivating earnestness to her mode of
speech when addressing those she liked. It was a slight check that had
an eager yearning effect in her voice, creating a softened resemblance
to her brother's stammer'--that "pleasant little stammer," as Barry
Cornwall called it, "just enough to prevent his making speeches; just
enough to make you listen eagerly for his words." Like him, too, she
took snuff. "She had a small, white, delicately-formed hand; and as it
hovered above the tortoise-shell snuff-box, the act seemed yet another
link of association between the brother and sister as they sat
together over their favourite books."
Mary's dress was always plain and neat; not changing much with
changing fashions; yet, with no unfeminine affectation of complete
indifference. "I do dearly love worked muslin," says she, in one of
her letters and the "Manning silks" were worn with no little
satisfaction. As she advanced in years she usually wore black stuff or
silk; or, on great occasions, a "dove-coloured silk, with a kerchief
of snow-white muslin folded across her bosom," with a cap of the kind
in fashion in her youth, a deep-frilled border, and a bow on the top.
Mary's severe nurture, though undoubtedly it bore with too heavy a
strain on her physical and mental constitution, fitted her morally and
practically for the task which she and her brother fulfilled to
admiration--that of making an income which, for two-thirds of their
joint lives, could not have exceeded two or three hundreds a year,
suffice for the heavy expense of her yearly illnesses, for an
open-handed hospitality and for the wherewithal to help a friend in
need, not to speak of their extensive acquaintance among "the great
race of borrowers." He was, says de Quincey, "_princely_--nothing
short of that in his beneficence.... Never anyone have I known in this
world 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." There was a
certain old-world fashion in Mary's speech corresponding to her
appearance, which was quaint and pleasant; "yet she was oftener a
listener than a speaker, and beneath her sparing talk and retiring
manner few would have suspected the ample information and large
intelligence that lay concealed."
But for her portrait sweetly touched in with subtle tender strokes,
such as he who knew and loved her best could alone give, we must turn
to Elia's _Mackery End:_--"... I have obligations to Bridget extending
beyond the period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid,
in a sort of double singleness, with such tolerable comfort, upon the
whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go
out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my
celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits, yet so as
'with a difference.' We are generally in harmony, with occasional
bickerings, as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are
rather understood than expressed; and once, upon my dissembling a tone
in my voice more kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and
complained that I was altered. We are both great readers, in different
directions. While I am hanging over, for the thousandth time, some
passage in old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is
abstracted in some modern tale or adventure, whereof our common
reading table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative
teases me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must
have a story--well, ill, or indifferently told--so there be life
stirring in it and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations
of fortune in fiction--and almost in real life--have ceased to
interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and
opinions--heads with some diverting twist in them--the oddities of
authorship, please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of
anything that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes down with her that
is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy. She holds
nature more clever.... We are both of us inclined to be a little too
positive; and I have observed the result of our disputes to be almost
uniformly this: that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it
turns out that I was in the right and my cousin in the wrong. But
where we have differed upon moral points, upon something proper to be
done or let alone, whatever heat of opposition or steadiness of
conviction I set out with, I am sure always, in the long run, to be
brought over to her way of thinking. I must touch upon the foibles of
my kinswoman with a gentle hand, for Bridget does not like to be told
of her faults. She hath an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of
reading in company; at which times she will answer _yes_ or _no_ to a
question without fully understanding its purport, which is provoking
and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of
the said question. Her presence of mind is equal to the most pressing
trials of life, but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions.
When the purpose requires it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak
to it greatly; but in matters which are not stuff of the conscience
she hath been known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonably....
"In seasons of distress she is the truest comforter, but in the
teasing accidents and minor perplexities which do not call out the
_will_ to meet them, she sometimes maketh matters worse by an excess
of participation. If she does not always divide your trouble, upon the
pleasanter occasions of life she is sure always to treble your
satisfaction. She is excellent to be at a play with, or upon a visit;
but best when she goes a journey with you."
"Little could anyone observing Miss Lamb in the habitual serenity of
her demeanour," writes Talfourd, "guess the calamity in which she had
partaken, or the malady which frightfully chequered her life. From Mr.
Lloyd who, although saddened by impending delusion, was always found
accurate in his recollection of long past events and conversations, I
learned that she had described herself, on her recovery from the fatal
attack, as having experienced while it was subsiding such a conviction
that she was absolved in heaven from all taint of the deed in which
she had been the agent--such an assurance that it was a dispensation
of Providence for good, though so terrible--such a sense that her
mother knew her entire innocence and shed down blessings upon her, as
though she had seen the reconcilement in solemn vision--that she was
not sorely afflicted by the recollection. It was as if the old Greek
notion of the necessity for the unconscious shedder of blood, else
polluted though guiltless, to pass through a religious purification,
had, in her case, been happily accomplished; so that not only was she
without remorse, but without other sorrow than attends on the death of
an infirm parent in a good old age. She never shrank from alluding to
her mother when any topic connected with her own youth made such a
reference, in ordinary respects, natural; but spoke of her as though
no fearful remembrance was associated with the image; so that some of
her most intimate friends who knew of the disaster believed that she
had never become aware of her own share in its horrors. It is still
more singular that in the wanderings of her insanity, amidst all the
vast throngs of imagery she presented of her early days, this picture
never recurred or, if ever it did, not associated with shapes of
terror."
Perhaps this was not so surprising as at first sight it appears; for
the deed was done in a state of frenzy, in which the brain could no
more have received a definite impression of the scene than waves
lashed by storm can reflect an image. Her knowledge of the facts was
never coloured by consciousness but came to her from without "as a
tale that is told." The statement, also, that Mary could always speak
calmly of her mother, seems to require some qualification. Emma Isola,
Lamb's adopted daughter, afterwards Mrs. Moxon, once asked her,
ignorant of the facts, why she never spoke of her mother and was
answered only with a cry of distress; probably the question coming
abruptly and from a child confronted her in a new, sudden and
peculiarly painful way with the tragedy of her youth.
"Miss Lamb would have been remarkable for the sweetness of her
disposition, the clearness of her understanding, and the gentle wisdom
of all her acts and words," continues Talfourd, "even if these
qualities had not been presented in marvellous contrast with the
distractions under which she suffered for weeks, latterly for months
in every year. There was no tinge of insanity discernible in her
manner to the most observant eye; not even in those distressful
periods when the premonitory symptoms had apprised her of its
approach, and she was making preparations for seclusion." This, too,
must be taken with some qualification. In a letter from Coleridge to
Matilda Betham, he mentions that Mary had been to call on the Godwins
"and that her manner of conversation had greatly alarmed them (dear
excellent creature! such is the restraining power of her love for
Charles Lamb over her mind, that he is always the last person in whose
presence any alienation of her understanding betrays itself); that she
talked far more, and with more agitation concerning me than about G.
Burnet [the too abrupt mention of whose death had upset her; he was an
old friend and one of the original Pantisocratic group] and told Mrs.
Godwin that she herself had written to William Wordsworth exhorting
him to come to town immediately, for that my mind was seriously
unhinged." To resume. "Her character," wrote Talfourd, "in all its
essential sweetness, was like her brother's; while, by a temper more
placid, a spirit of enjoyment more serene, she was enabled to guide,
to counsel, to cheer him and to protect him on the verge of the
mysterious calamity from the depths of which she rose so often
unruffled to his side. To a friend in any difficulty she was the most
comfortable of advisers, the wisest of consolers. Hazlitt used to say
that he never met with a woman who could reason and had met with only
one thoroughly reasonable--the sole exception being Mary Lamb. She did
not wish, however, to be made an exception, to the general
disparagement of her sex; for in all her thoughts and feelings she was
most womanly--keeping under even undue subordination to her notion of
a woman's province, an intellect of rare excellence which flashed out
when the restraints of gentle habit and humble manner were withdrawn
by the terrible force of disease. Though her conversation in sanity
was never marked by smartness or repartee, seldom rising beyond that
of a sensible quiet gentlewoman appreciating and enjoying the talents
of her friends, it was otherwise in her madness. Lamb in his letter to
Miss Fryer announcing his determination to be entirely with her,
speaks of her pouring out memories of all the events and persons of
her younger days; but he does not mention what I am able from repeated
experiences to add, that her ramblings often sparkled with brilliant
description and shattered beauty. She would fancy herself in the days
of Queen Anne or George the First; and describe the brocaded dames and
courtly manners as though she had been bred among them, in the best
style of the old comedy. It was all broken and disjointed, so that the
hearer could remember little of her discourse; but the fragments were
like the jewelled speeches of Congreve, only shaken from their
settings. There was sometimes even a vein of crazy logic running
through them, associating things essentially most dissimilar, but
connecting them by a verbal association in strange order. As a mere
physical instance of deranged intellect, her condition was, I believe,
extraordinary; it was as if the finest elements of the mind had been
shaken into fantastic combinations, like those of a kaleidoscope."
The immediate cause of her attacks would generally seem to have been
excitement or over-fatigue causing, in the first instance, loss of
sleep, a feverish restlessness and ending in the complete overthrow of
reason. "Her relapses," says Proctor, "were not dependent on the
seasons; they came in hot summer and with the freezing winters. The
only remedy seems to have been extreme quiet when any slight symptom
of uneasiness was apparent. If any exciting talk occurred Charles had
to dismiss his friend with a whisper. If any stupor or extraordinary
silence was observed then he had to rouse her instantly. He has been
seen to take the kettle from the fire and place it for a moment on her
headdress, in order to startle her into recollection." Once the sudden
announcement of the marriage of a young friend--whose welfare she had
at heart--restored her, in a moment, after a protracted illness, "as
if by an electrical stroke, to the entire possession of her senses."
But if no precautions availed to remove the premonitory symptom, then
would Mary "as gently as possible prepare her brother for the duty he
must perform; and thus, unless he could stave off the terrible
separation till Sunday, oblige him to ask leave of absence from the
office, as if for a day's pleasure--a bitter mockery! On one occasion
Mr. Charles Lloyd met them slowly pacing together a little foot-path
in Hoxton fields, both weeping bitterly and found, on joining them,
that they were taking their solemn way to the accustomed asylum."
Holiday trips were almost always followed by a seizure; and never did
Mary set out on one but with her own hands she packed a
strait-waistcoat.
The attacks were commonly followed by a period of extreme depression,
a sense of being shattered, and by a painful loss of self-reliance.
These were but temporary states, however. Mary's habitual frame of
mind was, as Talfourd says, serene and capable of placid enjoyment. In
her letters to Sarah Stoddart there are some affecting and probably
unique disclosures of how one who is suffering from madness feels; and
what, taught by her own experience, Mary regarded as the most
important points in the management of the insane. In reference to her
friend's mother who was thus afflicted, she writes:--
"Do not, I conjure you, let her unhappy malady afflict you too deeply.
I speak _from experience_ and from the opportunity I have had of much
observation in such cases that insane people, in the fancies they take
into their heads, do not feel as one in a sane state of mind does
under the real evil of poverty, the perception of having done wrong,
or of any such thing that runs in their heads.
"Think as little as you can, and let your whole care be to be certain
that she is treated with _tenderness_. I lay a stress upon this
because it is a thing of which people in her state are uncommonly
susceptible, and which hardly anyone is at all aware of; a hired nurse
_never_, even though in all other respects they are good kind of
people. I do not think your own presence necessary, unless she _takes
to you very much_, except for the purpose of seeing with your own eyes
that she is very kindly treated.
"I do long to see you! God bless and comfort you."
And again, a few weeks later:--
"After a very feverish night I writ a letter to you and I have been
distressed about it ever since. That which gives me most concern is
the way in which I talked about your mother's illness, and which I
have since feared you might construe into my having a doubt of your
showing her proper attention without my impertinent interference. God
knows, nothing of this kind was ever in my thoughts, but I have
entered very deeply into your affliction with regard to your mother;
and while I was writing, the many poor souls in the kind of desponding
way she is whom I have seen came fresh into my mind, and all the
mismanagement with which I have seen them treated was strong in my
mind, and I wrote under a forcible impulse which I could not at the
time resist, but I have fretted so much about it since that I think it
is the last time I will ever let my pen run away with me.
"Your kind heart will, I know, even if you have been a little
displeased, forgive me when I assure you my spirits have been so much
hurt by my last illness, that, at times, I hardly know what I do. I do
not mean to alarm you about myself, or to plead an excuse; but I am
very much otherwise than you have always known me. I do not think
anyone perceives me altered, but I have lost all self-confidence in my
own actions, and one cause of my low spirits is that I never feel
satisfied with anything I do--a perception of not being in a sane
state perpetually haunts me. I am ashamed to confess this weakness to
you; which, as I am so sensible of, I ought to strive to conquer. But
I tell you, that you may excuse any part of my letter that has given
offence; for your not answering it, when you are such a punctual
correspondent, has made me very uneasy.
"Write immediately, my dear Sarah, but do not notice this letter, nor
do not mention anything I said relative to your poor mother. Your
handwriting will convince me you are friends with me; and if Charles,
who must see my letter, was to know I had first written foolishly and
then fretted about the event of my folly, he would both ways be angry
with me.
"I would desire you to direct to me at home, but your hand is so well
known to Charles that that would not do. Therefore, take no notice of
my megrims till we meet, which I most ardently long to do. An hour
spent in your company would be a cordial to my drooping heart.
"Write, I beg, by the return of post; and as I am very anxious to hear
whether you are, as I fear, dissatisfied with me, you shall, if you
please, direct my letter to nurse. I do not mean to continue a secret
correspondence, but you must oblige me with this one letter. In future
I will always show my letters before they go, which will be a proper
check upon my wayward pen."
But it was upon her brother that the burthen lay heaviest. It was on
his brain that the cruel image of the mother's death-scene was burnt
in, and that the grief and loneliness consequent on Mary's ever
recurring attacks pressed sorest.
"His anxiety for her health, even in his most convivial moments, was
unceasing. If, in company, he perceived she looked languid, he would
repeatedly ask her, 'Mary, does your head ache?' Don't you feel
unwell? and would be satisfied by none of her gentle assurances that
his fears were groundless. He was always fearful of her sensibilities
being too deeply engaged and if, in her presence, any painful accident
or history was discussed, he would turn the conversation with some
desperate joke." Miss Betham related to Talfourd that, once when she
was speaking to Miss Lamb of her brother and in her earnestness Mary
had laid her hand kindly on the eulogist's shoulder, he came up
hastily and interrupted them saying, 'Come, come, we must not talk
sentimentally' and took up the conversation in his gayest strain.
The constant anxiety, the forebodings, the unremitting watchful
scrutiny of his sister's state, produced a nervous tension and
irritability that pervaded his whole life and manifested themselves in
many different ways.
"When she discovers symptoms of approaching illness," he once wrote to
Dorothy Wordsworth, "it is not easy to say what is best to do. Being
by ourselves is bad, and going out is bad. I get so irritable and
wretched with fear, that I constantly hasten on the disorder. You
cannot conceive the misery of such a foresight. I am sure that for the
week before she left me I was little better than light-headed. I now
am calm, but sadly, taken down and flat." Well might he say, "my
waking life has much of the confusion, the trouble and obscure
perplexity of an ill dream." For he, too, had to wrestle in his own
person with the same foe, the same hereditary tendency; though, after
one overthrow of reason in his youth, he wrestled successfully. But
the frequent allusions in his letters, especially in later years, to
attacks of nervous fever, sleeplessness, and depression "black as a
smith's beard, Vulcanic, Stygian" show how near to the brink he was
sometimes dragged. "You do not know how sore and weak a brain I have,
or you would allow for many things which you set down to whim," he
wrote to Godwin. And again, when there had been some coolness between
them: "... did the black Hypochondria never gripe _thy_ heart till
thou hast taken a friend for an enemy? The foul fiend, Flibbertigibbet
leads me over four-inched bridges to course my own shadow for a
traitor...."
"Yet, nervous, tremulous as he seemed," writes Talfourd, 'so slight of
frame that he looked only fit for the most placid fortune, when the
dismal emergencies which chequered his life arose, he acted with as
much promptitude and vigour as if he were strung with Herculean
sinews.' 'Such fortitude in his manners, and such a ravage of
suffering in his countenance did he display,' said Coleridge, 'as went
to the hearts of his friends,' It was rather by the violence of the
reaction that a keen observer might have estimated the extent of these
sufferings; by that 'escape from the pressure of agony, into a
fantastic,' sometimes almost a demoniac 'mirth which made Lamb a
problem to strangers while it endeared him thousandfold to those who
really knew him.'
The child of impulse ever to appear
And yet through duty's path strictly to steer,
O Lamb, thou art a mystery to me!
Thou art so prudent, and so mad with wildness--
wrote Charles Lloyd.
Sweet and strong must have been the nature upon which the crush of so
severe a destiny produced no soreness, no bitterness, no violence but
only the rebound of a wild fantastic gaiety. In his writings not only
is there an entire absence of the morbid, the querulous, I can find
but one expression that breathes of what his sombre experiences were.
It is in that most masterly of all his criticisms (unless it be the
one on _Lear_), the _Genius and Character of Hogarth_, where, in the
sublime description of the Bedlam scene in the _Rake's Progress_, he
tells of "the frightful, obstinate laugh of madness." In one apparent
way only did the calamity which overshadowed his life, exert an
influence on his genius. It turned him, as Talfourd finely suggests,
"to seek a kindred interest in the sterner stuff of old tragedy--to
catastrophes more fearful even than his own--to the aspects of pale
passion, to shapes of heroic daring and more heroic suffering, to the
agonising contests of opposing affections and the victories of the
soul over calamity and death which the old English drama discloses,
and in the contemplation of which he saw his own suffering nature at
once mirrored and exalted." In short, no man ever stood more nobly the
test of life-long affliction: 'a deep distress had harmonised his
soul.'
Only on one point did the stress of his difficult lot find him
vulnerable, one flaw bring to light--a tendency to counteract his
depression and take the edge off his poignant anxieties by a too free
use of stimulants. The manners of his day, the custom of producing
wine and strong drinks on every possible occasion, bore hard on such a
craving and fostered a man's weakness. But Lamb maintained to the end
a good standing fight with the enemy and, if not wholly victorious,
still less was he wholly defeated. So much on account of certain home
anxieties to which Mary's letters to Sarah Stoddart make undisguised
allusion.