Visit to Coleridge at Greta Hall.--Wordsworth and his Sister in
London.--Letters to Miss Stoddart.--Coleridge goes to Malta.--Letter
to Dorothy Wordsworth on the Death of her Brother John.
1802-1805.--Æt. 38-41.
In the summer of 1802, when holiday time came round Charles was seized
with 'a strong desire of visiting remote regions;' and after some
whimsical deliberations his final resolve was to go with Mary to see
Coleridge at the Lakes.
"I set out with Mary to Keswick," he tells Manning, "without giving
any notice to Coleridge [who was now living at Greta Hall, soon to
become Southey's home for the rest of his life] for my time being
precious did not admit of it. We got in in the evening, travelling in
a post-chaise from Penrith, in the midst of a gorgeous sunset which
transmuted the mountains into all colours, purple, &c. We thought we
had got into fairy-land; but that went off (and it never came again
while we stayed we had no more fine sunsets) and we entered
Coleridge's comfortable study just in the dusk when the mountains were
all dark with clouds upon their heads. Such an impression I never
received from objects of sight before nor do I suppose I ever can
again. Glorious creatures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, &c., I shall
never forget ye, how ye lay about that night like an intrenchment;
gone to bed, as it seemed, for the night but promising that ye were to
be seen in the morning. Coleridge had got a blazing fire in his study
which is a large antique, ill-shaped room with an old-fashioned organ,
never played upon, big enough for a church; shelves of scattered
folios, an Æolian harp and an old sofa half-bed, &c. And all looking
out upon the last fading view of Skiddaw and his broad-breasted
brethren. What a night!"
The Poet had now a second son, or rather a third (for the second had
died in infancy), Derwent, a fine bright, fair, broad-chested little
fellow not quite two years old, with whom Charles and Mary were
delighted. A merry sprite he was, in a yellow frock which obtained for
him the nick-name of Stumpy Canary, who loved to race from kitchen to
parlour and from parlour to kitchen just putting in his head at the
door with roguish smile to catch notice, then off again, shaking his
little sides with laughter. He fairly won their hearts and long after
figures in their letters as Pi-pos Pot-pos, his own way of pronouncing
striped opossum and spotted opossum, which he would point out
triumphantly in his picture book. Hartley, now six, was a prematurely
grave and thoughtful child who had already, as a curious anecdote told
by Crabb Robinson shows, begun to take surprising plunges into "the
metaphysic well without a bottom"; for once when asked something about
himself and called by name he said, "Which Hartley?" "Why, is there
more than one Hartley?" "Yes, there's a deal of Hartleys; there's
Picture Hartley [Hazlitt had painted his portrait] and Shadow Hartley
and there's Echo Hartley and there's Catch-me-fast Hartley," seizing
his own arm with the other hand; thereby showing, said his father,
that "he had begun to reflect on what Kant calls the great and
inexplicable mystery that man should be both his own subject and
object and that these should yet be one!"
Three delightful weeks they stayed. "So we have seen," continues Lamb
to Manning, "Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater (where the
Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater; I forget
the name [Patterdale] to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over
the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw
and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. Mary was excessively tired when
she got about half-way up Skiddaw but we came to a cold rill (than
which nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones)
and, with the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted
it most manfully. Oh its fine black head! and the bleak air atop of it
with the prospect of mountains all about and about making you giddy;
and then Scotland afar off and the border countries so famous in song
and ballad! It was a day that will stand out like a mountain, I am
sure, in my life."
Wordsworth was away at Calais but the Lambs stayed a day or so in his
cottage with the Clarksons (he of slavery abolition fame and she "one
of the friendliest, comfortablest women we know who made the little
stay one of the pleasantest times we ever passed"); saw Lloyd again
but remained distrustful of him on account of the seeds of bitterness
he had once sown between the friends, and finally got home very
pleasantly: Mary a good deal fatigued, finding the difference between
going to a place and coming from it, but not otherwise the worse.
"Lloyd has written me a fine letter of friendship," says Lamb, soon
after his return, "all about himself and Sophia and love and cant
which I have not answered. I have not given up the idea of writing to
him but it will be done very plainly and sincerely, without acrimony."
They found the Wordsworths (the poet and his sister, that is, for he
was not yet married though just about to be) lodging near their own
quarters, saw much of them, pioneered them through Bartlemy Fair; and
now, on Mary's part, was formed that intimacy with Dorothy which led
to her being their constant visitor and sometimes their house-guest
when she was in London.
As great a contrast in most respects, to Dorothy Wordsworth as the
whole range of womankind could have furnished was Mary's other friend
and correspondent, Sarah Stoddart, afterwards Mrs. Hazlitt. Sarah was
the only daughter of a retired lieutenant in the navy, a Scotchman who
had settled down on a little property at Winterslow near Salisbury
which she ultimately inherited. She was a young lady with a
business-like determination to marry and with many suitors; but, far
from following the old injunction to be off with the old love before
being on with the new, she always cautiously kept the old love
dangling till she was quite sure the new was the more eligible. Mary's
letters to her have happily been preserved and published by Miss
Stoddart's grandson, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, in his _Mary and Charles
Lamb_. The first, dated September 21, 1803, was written after Miss
Stoddart had been staying with the Lambs and when a decision had been
arrived at that she should accompany her only brother, Dr. Stoddart,
to Malta where he had just been appointed King's Advocate. Mary's
spelling and here and there even a little slip in the matter of
grammar have been retained as seeming part of the individuality of the
letters:--
"I returned from my visit yesterday and was very much pleased to find
your letter; for I have been very anxious to hear how you are going
on. I could hardly help expecting to see you when I came in; yet
though I should have rejoiced to have seen your merry face again, I
believe it was better as it was, upon the whole; and all things
considered, it is certainly better you should go to Malta. The terms
you are upon with your lover [a Mr. Turner to whom she was engaged]
does (as you say it will) appear wondrous strange to me; however, as I
cannot enter into your feelings I certainly can have nothing to say to
it, only that I sincerely wish you happy in your own way however odd
that way may appear to me to be. I would begin now to advise you to
drop all correspondence with William [not William Hazlitt but an
earlier admirer]; but, as I said before, as I cannot enter into your
feelings and views of things, _your ways not being my ways_, why
should I tell you what I would do in your situation? So, child, take
thy own ways and God prosper thee in them!
"One thing my advising spirit must say; use as little secresy as
possible, make a friend of your sister-in-law; you know I was not
struck with her at first sight but, upon your account, I have watched
and marked her very attentively and while she was eating a bit of cold
mutton in our kitchen we had a serious conversation. From the
frankness of her manner I am convinced she is a person I could make a
friend of; why should not you? We talked freely about you; she seems
to have a just notion of your character and will be fond of you if you
will let her."
After instancing the misunderstandings between her own mother and aunt
already quoted, Mary continues:--
"My aunt and my mother were wholly unlike you and your sister yet, in
some degree, theirs is the secret history, I believe, of all
sisters-in-law and you will smile when I tell you I think myself the
only woman in the world who could live with a brother's wife and make
a real friend of her, partly from early observation of the unhappy
example I have just given you and partly from a knack I know I have of
looking into people's real characters and never expecting them to act
out of it--never expecting another to do as I would in the same case.
When you leave your mother and say if you never see her again you
shall feel no remorse and when you make a _jewish_ bargain with your
_lover_, all this gives me no offence because it is your nature and
your temper and I do not expect or want you to be otherwise than you
are. I love you for the good that is in you and look for no change.
"_But_ certainly you ought to struggle with the evil that does most
easily beset you--a total want of politeness in behaviour, I would say
modesty of behaviour but that I should not convey to you my idea of
the word modesty; for I certainly do not mean that you want _real
modesty_ and what is usually called false or mock modesty I certainly
do not wish you to possess; yet I trust you know what I mean well
enough. _Secresy_, though you appear all frankness, is certainly a
grand failing of yours; it is likewise your _brother's_ and,
therefore, a family failing. By secresy I mean you both want the habit
of telling each other, at the moment, everything that happens, where
you go and what you do--that free communication of letters and
opinions just as they arrive as Charles and I do--and which is, after
all, the only ground-work of friendship. Your brother, I will answer
for it, will never tell his wife or his sister all that is in his
mind; he will receive letters and not [mention it]. This is a fault
Mrs. Stoddart can never [tell him of] but she can and will feel it
though on the whole and in every other respect she is happy with him.
Begin, for God's sake, at the first and tell her everything that
passes. At first she may hear you with indifference, but in time this
will gain her affection and confidence; show her all your letters (no
matter if she does not show hers). It is a pleasant thing for a friend
to put into one's hand a letter just fresh from the post. I would even
say, begin with showing her this but that it is freely written and
loosely and some apology ought to be made for it which I know not how
to make, for I must write freely or not at all.
"If you do this she will tell your brother, you will say; and what
then, quotha? It will beget a freer communication amongst you which is
a thing devoutly to be wished.
"God bless you and grant you may preserve your integrity and remain
unmarried and penniless, and make William a good and a happy wife."
No wonder Mary's friendships were so stable and so various with this
knack of hers of looking into another's real character and never
expecting him or her to act out of it or to do as she would in the
same case; taking no offence, looking for no change and asking for no
other explanation than that it was her friend's nature. It is an
epitome of social wisdom and of generous sentiment.
Coleridge had long been in bad health and worse spirits; and what he had
first ignorantly used as a remedy was now become his tyrant--opium; for
a time the curse of his life and the blight of his splendid powers.
Sometimes--
Adown Lethean streams his spirit drifted;
sometimes he was stranded "in a howling wilderness of ghastly dreams"
waking and sleeping, followed by deadly languors which opium caused
and cured and caused again, driving him round in an accursed circle.
He came up to London at the beginning of 1804, was much with the Lambs
if not actually their guest, and finally decided to try change and
join his friend Dr. Stoddart in Malta where he landed April 18th.
Mary, full of earnest and affectionate solicitude, sent a letter by
him to Sarah Stoddart who had already arrived, bespeaking a warm and
indulgent welcome for her suffering friend:--
"I will just write a few hasty lines to say Coleridge is setting off
sooner than we expected and I every moment expect him to call in one
of his great hurrys for this. We rejoiced with exceeding great joy to
hear of your safe arrival. I hope your brother will return home in a
few years a very rich man. Seventy pounds in one fortnight is a pretty
beginning.
"I envy your brother the pleasure of seeing Coleridge drop in
unexpectedly upon him; we talk--but it is but wild and idle talk--of
following him. He is to get my brother some snug little place of a
thousand a year and we are to leave all and come and live among ye. What
a pretty dream.
"Coleridge is very ill. I dread the thoughts of his long voyage. Write
as soon as he arrives whether _he_ does or not, and tell me how he
is....
"He has got letters of recommendation to Governor Ball and God knows
who; and he will talk and talk and be universally admired. But I wish
to write for him a _letter of recommendation_ to Mrs. Stoddart and to
yourself to take upon ye, on his first arrival, to be kind
affectionate nurses; and mind, now, that you perform this duty
faithfully and write me a good account of yourself. Behave to him as
you would to me or to Charles if we came sick and unhappy to you.
"I have no news to send you; Coleridge will tell you how we are going
on. Charles has lost the newspaper [an engagement on the _Morning
Post_, which Coleridge had procured for him] but what we dreaded as an
evil has proved a great blessing, for we have both strangely recovered
our health and spirits since this has happened; and I hope, when I
write next, I shall be able to tell you Charles has begun something
which will produce a little money for it is not well to be _very poor_
which we certainly are at this present writing.
"I sit writing here and thinking almost you will see it to-morrow; and
what a long, long time it will be ere you receive this. When I saw
your letter I fancy'd you were even just then in the first bustle of a
new reception, every moment seeing new faces and staring at new
objects when, at that time, everything had become familiar to you; and
the strangers, your new dancing partners, had perhaps become gossiping
fireside friends. You tell me of your gay, splendid doings; tell me,
likewise, what manner of home-life you lead. Is a quiet evening in a
Maltese drawing-room as pleasant as those we have passed in Mitre
Court and Bell Yard? Tell me all about it, everything pleasant and
everything unpleasant that befalls you.
"I want you to say a great deal about yourself. _Are you happy? and do
you not repent going out?_ I wish I could see you for one hour only.
"Remember me affectionately to your sister and brother, and tell me
when you write if Mrs. Stoddart likes Malta and how the climate agrees
with her and with thee.
"We heard you were taken prisoners, and for several days believed the
tale.
"How did the pearls and the fine court finery bear the fatigues of the
voyage and how often have they been worn and admired?
"Rickman wants to know if you are going to be married yet. Satisfy him
in that little particular when you write.
"The Fenwicks send their love and Mrs. Reynolds her love and the little
old lady her best respects.
"Mrs. Jeffries, who I see now and then, talks of you with tears in her
eyes and when she heard you was taken prisoner, Lord! how frightened she
was. She has heard, she tells me, that Mr. Stoddart is to have a pension
of two thousand a year whenever he chooses to return to England.
"God bless you and send you all manner of comforts and happinesses."
Mrs. Reynolds was another 'little old lady,' a familiar figure at the
Lambs' table. She had once been Charles's schoolmistress; had made an
unfortunate marriage and would have gone under in the social stream but
for his kindly hand. Out of their slender means he allowed her thirty
pounds a year. She tickled Hood's fancy when he too became a frequent
guest there; and he has described her as formal, fair and flaxen-wigged
like an elderly wax doll, speaking as if by an artificial apparatus,
through some defect in the palate and with a slight limp and a twist
occasioned by running too precipitately down Greenwich hill in her
youth! She remembered Goldsmith who had once lent her his _Deserted
Village_.
In those days of universal warfare and privateering it was an anxious
matter to have a friend tossing in the Bay of Biscay, gales and storms
apart; so that tidings from Sarah had been eagerly watched for:--
"Your letter," writes Mary, "which contained the news of Coleridge's
arrival was a most welcome one; for we had begun to entertain very
unpleasant apprehensions for his safety; and your kind reception of
the forlorn wanderer gave me the greatest pleasure and I thank you for
it in my own and my brother's name. I shall depend upon you for
hearing of his welfare for he does not write himself; but as long as
we know he is safe and in such kind friends' hands we do not mind.
Your letters, my dear Sarah, are to me very, very precious ones. They
are the kindest, best, most natural ones I ever received. The one
containing the news of the arrival of Coleridge is, perhaps, the best
I ever saw; and your old friend Charles is of my opinion. We sent it
off to Mrs. Coleridge and the Wordsworths--as well because we thought
it our duty to give them the first notice we had of our dear friend's
safety as that we were proud of showing our Sarah's pretty letter.
"The letters we received a few days after from you and your brother
were far less welcome ones. I rejoiced to hear your sister is well but
I grieved for the loss of the dear baby and I am sorry to find your
brother is not so successful as he expected to be; and yet I am almost
tempted to wish his ill-fortune may send him over to us again. He has
a friend, I understand, who is now at the head of the Admiralty; why
may he not return and make a fortune here?
"I cannot condole with you very sincerely upon your little failure in
the fortune-making way. If you regret it, so do I. But I hope to see
you a comfortable English wife; and the forsaken, forgotten William,
of English-partridge memory I have still a hankering after. However, I
thank you for your frank communication and I beg you will continue it
in future; and if I do not agree with a good grace to your having a
Maltese husband, I will wish you happy, provided you make it a part of
your marriage articles that your husband shall allow you to come over
sea and make me one visit; else may neglect and overlookedness be your
portion while you stay there.
"I would condole with you when the misfortune has befallen your poor
leg; but such is the blessed distance we are at from each other that I
hope, before you receive this, you have forgot it ever happened.
"Our compliments to the high ton at the Maltese court. Your brother is
so profuse of them to me that, being, as you know, so unused to them,
they perplex me sadly; in future I beg they may be discontinued. They
always remind me of the free, and I believe very improper letter I
wrote to you while you were at the Isle of Wight [that already given
advising frankness]. The more kindly you and your brother and sister
took the impertinent advice contained in it the more certain I feel
that it was unnecessary and, therefore, highly improper. Do not let
your brother compliment me into the memory of it again.
"My brother has had a letter from your mother which has distressed him
sadly--about the postage of some letters being paid by my brother.
Your silly brother, it seems, has informed your mother (I did not
think your brother could have been so silly) that Charles had grumbled
at paying the said postage. The fact was just at that time we were
very poor having lost the _Morning Post_ and we were beginning to
practise a strict economy. My brother, who never makes up his mind
whether he will be a miser or a spendthrift, is at all times a strange
mixture of both" [rigid in those small economies which enabled him to
be not only just but generous on small means]. "Of this failing the
even economy of your correct brother's temper makes him an ill judge.
The miserly part of Charles, at that time smarting under his recent
loss, then happened to reign triumphant; and he would not write or let
me write so often as he wished because the postage cost two and
fourpence. Then came two or three of your poor mother's letters nearly
together; and the two and fourpences he wished but grudged to pay for
his own he was forced to pay for hers. In this dismal distress he
applied to Fenwick to get his friend Motley to send them free from
Portsmouth. This Mr. Fenwick could have done for half a word's
speaking; but this he did not do! Then Charles foolishly and
unthinkingly complained to your brother in a half-serious, half-joking
way; and your brother has wickedly and with malice aforethought told
your mother. O fye upon him! what will your mother think of us?
"I, too, feel my share of blame in this vexatious business; for I saw
the unlucky paragraph in my brother's letter; and I had a kind of
foreboding that it would come to your mother's ears--although I had a
higher idea of your brother's good sense than I find he deserved. By
entreaties and prayer I might have prevailed on my brother to say
nothing about it. But I make a point of conscience never to interfere
or cross my brother in the humour he happens to be in. It always
appears to me to be a vexatious kind of tyranny that women have no
business to exercise over men, which, merely because _they having a
better judgment_, they have power to do. Let _men_ alone and at last
we find they come round 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.
"Charles is sadly fretted now, I know, at what to say to your mother.
I have made this long preamble about it to induce you, if possible, to
re-instate us in your mother's good graces. Say to her it was a jest
misunderstood; tell her Charles Lamb is not the shabby fellow she and
her son took him for but that he is, now and then, a trifle whimsical
or so. I do not ask your brother to do this for I am offended with him
for the mischief he has made.
"I feel that I have too lightly passed over the interesting account
you sent me of your late disappointment. It was not because I did not
feel and completely enter into the affair with you. You surprise and
please me with the frank and generous way in which you deal with your
lovers, taking a refusal from their so prudential hearts with a better
grace and more good humour than other women accept a suitor's service.
Continue this open artless conduct and I trust you will at last find
some man who has sense enough to know you are well worth risking a
peaceable life of poverty for. I shall yet live to see you a poor but
happy English wife.
"Remember me most affectionately to Coleridge, and I thank you again
and again for all your kindness to him. To dear Mrs. Stoddart and your
brother I beg my best love; and to you all I wish health and happiness
and a _soon_ return to old England.
"I have sent to Mr. Burrel's for your kind present, but unfortunately
he is not in town. I am impatient to see my fine silk handkerchiefs
and I thank you for them not as a present, for I do not love presents,
but as a remembrance of your old friend. Farewell.
"I am, my best Sarah,
"Your most affectionate Friend,
"MARY LAMB."
"Good wishes and all proper remembrances from old nurse, Mrs. Jeffries,
Mrs. Reynolds, Mrs. Rickman, &c. Long live Queen Hoop-oop-oop-oo and all
the old merry phantoms."
Sarah Stoddart returned to England before the year was out. Coleridge
remained in Malta, filling temporarily, at the request of Sir
Alexander Ball, governor of the island, the post of public secretary
till the end of September, 1805 when his friends lost track of him
altogether for nearly a year; during which he visited Paris, wandered
through Italy, Sicily, Cairo, and saw Vesuvius in December when "the
air was so consolidated with a massy cloud-curtain that it appeared
like a mountain in basso-relievo in an interminable wall of some
pantheon"; and after narrowly escaping imprisonment at the hands of
Napoleon, suddenly reappeared amongst his friends in the autumn of
1806.
To the Wordsworths, brother and sister and young wife, for the three
were one in heart, this year of 1805 had been one of overwhelming
sorrow. Their brother John, the brave and able ship's captain who yet
loved "all quiet things" as dearly as William "although he loved more
silently," and was wont to carry that beloved brother's poems to sea
and con them to the music of the winds and waves; whose cherished
scheme, so near fulfilment, it was to realise enough to settle in a
cottage at Grasmere and devote his earnings to the poet's use so that
he might pursue his way unharassed by a thought of money,--this
brother was shipwrecked on the Bill of Portland just as he was
starting, and whilst the ship was yet in the pilot's hands, on what
was to have been, in how different a sense, his last voyage.
Six weeks beneath the moving sea
He lay in slumber quietly;
Unforced by wind or wave
To quit the ship for which he died
(All claims of duty satisfied);
And there they found him at her side,
And bore him to the grave.
After waiting awhile in silence before a grief of such magnitude Mary
wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth. She speaks as one acquainted with a
life-long sorrow yet who has learned to find its companionship not
bitter:--
"I thank you, my kind friend, for your most comfortable letter; till I
saw your own handwriting I could not persuade myself that I should do
well to write to you though I have often attempted it; but I always
left off dissatisfied with what I had written, and feeling that I was
doing an improper thing to intrude upon your sorrow. I wished to tell
you that you would one day feel the kind of peaceful state of mind and
sweet memory of the dead which you so happily describe as now almost
begun; but I felt that it was improper and most grating to the
feelings of the afflicted to say to them that the memory of their
affliction would in time become a constant part, not only of their
dream, but of their most wakeful sense of happiness. That you would
see every object with and through your lost brother and that that
would at last become a real and everlasting source of comfort to you I
felt and well knew from my own experience in sorrow; but till you
yourself began to feel this I didn't dare tell you so; but I send you
some poor lines which I wrote under this conviction of mind and before
I heard Coleridge was returning home. I will transcribe them now,
before I finish my letter, lest a false shame prevent me then for I
know they are much worse than they ought to be, written as they were
with strong feeling and on such a subject; every line seems to me to
be borrowed: but I had no better way of expressing my thoughts and I
never have the power of altering or amending anything I have once laid
aside with dissatisfaction:--
Why is he wandering on the sea?
Coleridge should now with Wordsworth be.
By slow degrees he'd steal away
Their woe and gently bring a ray
(So happily he'd time relief)
Of comfort from their very grief.
He'd tell them that their brother dead,
When years have passed o'er their head,
Will be remembered with such holy,
True, and perfect melancholy,
That ever this lost brother John
Will be their heart's companion.
His voice they'll always hear,
His face they'll always see:
There's nought in life so sweet
As such a memory.
Thus for a moment are we permitted to see that, next to love for her
brother, the memory of her dead mother and friendship for Coleridge
were the deep and sacred influences of Mary's life.