Mary Lamb
by Anne Gilchrist · English · Gutenberg #47643 · 446,905 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Mary Lamb
Author: Anne Gilchrist
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARY LAMB ***
MARY LAMB
BY
MRS. GILCHRIST
_Eminent Women Series_
EDITED BY JOHN H. INGRAM
LONDON:
W. H. ALLEN & CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE. S.W.
1883.
PREFACE.
I am indebted to Mrs. Henry Watson, a granddaughter of Mr. Gillman,
for one or two interesting reminiscences, and for a hitherto
unpublished "notelet" by Lamb (p. 248), together with an omitted
paragraph from a published letter (p. 84), which confirms what other
letters also show,--that the temporary estrangement between Lamb and
Coleridge was mainly due to the influence of the morbid condition of
mind of their common friend, Charles Lloyd.
My thanks are also due to Mr. Potts for some bibliographic details
respecting the various editions of the _Tales from Shakespeare_.
Reprinted here, for the first time, is a little essay on _Needle-work_
(regarded from an industrial, not an "art" point of view), by Mary Lamb
(p. 186), unearthed from an obscure and long-deceased periodical--_The
British Lady's Magazine_--for which I have to thank Mr. Edward Solly,
F.R.S.
The reader will find, also, the only letter that has been preserved
from Coleridge to Lamb, who destroyed all the rest in a moment of
depression (pp. 24-6). This letter is given, without exact date or name
of the person to whom it was addressed, in Gillman's unfinished _Life
of Coleridge_, as having been written "to a friend in great anguish of
mind on the sudden death of his mother," and has, I believe, never
before been identified. But the internal evidence that it was to Lamb
is decisive.
In taking Mary as the central figure in the following narrative, woven
mainly from her own and her brother's letters and writings, it is to
that least explored time, from 1796 to 1815--before they had made the
acquaintance of Judge Talfourd, Proctor, Patmore, De Quincey, and other
friends, who have left written memorials of them--that we are brought
nearest; the period, that is, of Charles' youth and early manhood. For
Mary was the elder by ten years; and there is but little to tell of the
last twenty of her eighty-three years of life, when the burthen of age
was added to that of her sad malady.
The burial-register of St. Andrew's, Holborn, in which church-yard
Lamb's father, mother and aunt Hetty were buried, shows that the father
survived his wife's tragic death nearly three years instead of only a
few months as Talfourd, and others following him, have supposed. It is
a date of some interest because not till then did brother and sister
begin together their life of "double singleness" and entire mutual
devotion. Also, in sifting the letters for facts and dates, I find that
Lamb lived in Chapel Street, Pentonville not, as Talfourd and Proctor
thought, a few months, but three years, removing thither almost
immediately after the mother's death. It is a trifle, yet not without
interest to the lovers of Lamb, for these were the years in which he
met in his daily walks, and loved but never accosted, the beautiful
Quakeress "Hester," whose memory is enshrined in the poem beginning
"When Maidens such as Hester die."
ANNE GILCHRIST.
Keats Corner, Hampstead.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. PAGE
Parentage and Childhood. 1
CHAPTER II.
Birth of Charles.--Coleridge.--Domestic Toils and Trials.--Their
Tragic Culmination.--Letters to and from Coleridge. 18
CHAPTER III.
Death of Aunt Hetty.--Mary removed from the Asylum.--Charles
Lloyd.--A Visit to Nether Stowey, and Introduction to Wordsworth
and his Sister.--Anniversary of the Mother's Death.--Mary ill
again.--Estrangement between Lamb and Coleridge.--Speedy
Reconcilement. 36
CHAPTER IV.
Death of the Father.--Mary comes Home to live.--A Removal.--First
Verses.--A Literary Tea-Party.--Another Move.--Friends increase. 55
CHAPTER V.
Personal Appearance and Manners.--Health.--Influence of Mary's
Illnesses upon her Brother. 64
CHAPTER VI.
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. 81
CHAPTER VII.
Mary in the Asylum again.--Lamb's Letter with a Poem of hers.--Her
slow Recovery.--Letters to Sarah Stoddart.--The _Tales from
Shakespeare_ begun.--Hazlitt's Portrait of Lamb.--Sarah's
Lovers.--The Farce of _Mr. H._ 99
CHAPTER VIII.
The _Tales from Shakespeare_.--Letters to Sarah Stoddart. 118
CHAPTER IX.
Correspondence with Sarah Stoddart.--Hazlitt.--A Courtship and
Wedding at which Mary is Bridesmaid. 129
CHAPTER X.
_Mrs. Leicester's School_.--A Removal.--_Poetry for Children._ 158
CHAPTER XI.
The Hazlitts again.--Letters to Mrs. Hazlitt.--Two Visits to
Winterslow.--Mr. Dawe, R.A.--Birth of Hazlitt's Son.--Death of
Holcroft. 170
CHAPTER XII.
An Essay on Needle-work. 185
CHAPTER XIII.
Letters to Miss Betham and her little Sister.--To Wordsworth.
--Manning's Return.--Coleridge goes to Highgate.--Letter to Miss
Hutchinson on Mary's state.--Removal to Russell Street.--Mary's
Letter to Dorothy Wordsworth.--Lodgings at Dalston.--Death of John
Lamb and Captain Burney. 195
CHAPTER XIV.
Hazlitt's Divorce.--Emma Isola.--Mrs. Cowden Clarke's _Recollections_
of Mary.--The Visit to France.--Removal to Colebrook Cottage.--A
Dialogue of Reminiscences. 217
CHAPTER XV.
Lamb's Ill-health.--Retirement from the India House, and subsequent
Illness.--Letter from Mary to Lady Stoddart.--Colebrook Cottage
quitted.--Mary's constant Attacks.--A Home given up.--Board with the
Westwoods.--Death of Hazlitt.--Removal to Edmonton.--Marriage of
Emma Isola.--Mary's sudden Recovery.--Ill again.--Death of
Coleridge.--Death of Charles.--Mary's Last Days and Death. 235
CHAPTER I.
Parentage and Childhood.
1764-1775.--Æt. 1-10.
The story of Mary Lamb's life is mainly the story of a brother and
sister's love; of how it sustained them under the shock of a terrible
calamity and made beautiful and even happy a life which must else have
sunk into desolation and despair.
It is a record, too, of many friendships. Round the biographer of Mary
as of Charles, the blended stream of whose lives cannot be divided
into two distinct currents, there gathers a throng of faces--radiant
immortal faces some, many homely every-day faces, a few almost
grotesque--whom he can no more shut out of his pages, if he would give
a faithful picture of life and character, than Charles or Mary could
have shut their humanity-loving hearts or hospitable doors against
them. First comes Coleridge, earliest and best beloved friend of all,
to whom Mary was "a most dear heart's sister"; Wordsworth and his
sister Dorothy; Southey; Hazlitt who, quarrel with whom he might,
could not effectually quarrel with the Lambs; his wife, also, without
whom Mary would have been a comparatively silent figure to us, a
presence rather than a voice. But all kinds were welcome so there were
but character; the more variety the better. "I am made up of queer
points," wrote Lamb, "and I want so many answering needles." And of
both brother and sister it may be said that their likes wore as well
as most people's loves.
Mary Anne Lamb was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, on the 3rd
of December 1764--year of Hogarth's death. She was the third, as
Charles was the youngest, of seven children all of whom died in
infancy save these two and an elder brother John, her senior by two
years. One little sister Elizabeth, who came when Mary was four years
old, lived long enough to imprint an image on the child's memory
which, helped by a few relics, remained for life. "The little cap with
white satin ribbon grown yellow with long keeping and a lock of light
hair," wrote Mary when she was near sixty, "always brought her pretty
fair face to my view so that to this day I seem to have a perfect
recollection of her features."
The family of the Lambs came originally from Stamford in Lincolnshire,
as Charles himself once told a correspondent. Nothing else is known of
Mary's ancestry; nor yet even the birth-place or earliest
circumstances of John Lamb the father. If, however, we may accept on
Mr. Cowden Clarke's authority, corroborated by internal evidence, the
little story of _Susan Yates_, contributed by Charles to _Mrs.
Leicester's School_, as embodying some of his father's earliest
recollections, he was born of parents "in no very affluent
circumstances" in a lonely part of the Fen country, seven miles from
the nearest church an occasional visit to which, "just to see how
_goodness thrived_," was a feat to be remembered, such bad and
dangerous walking was it in the fens in those days, "a mile as good as
four." What is quite certain is that while John Lamb was still a child
his family removed to Lincoln, with means so straitened that he was
sent to service in London. Whether his father were dead or, sadder
still, in a lunatic asylum--since we are told with emphasis that the
hereditary seeds of madness in the Lamb family came from the father's
side--it is beyond doubt that misfortune of some kind must have been
the cause of the child's being sent thus prematurely to earn his bread
in service. His subsequently becoming a barrister's clerk seems to
indicate that his early nurture and education had been of a gentler
kind than this rough thrusting out into the world of a mere child
would otherwise imply: in confirmation of which it is to be noted that
afterwards, in the dark crisis of family misfortune, an "old
gentlewoman of fortune" appears on the scene as a relative.
In spite of early struggles John Lamb grew up
A merry cheerful man. A merrier man,
A man more apt to frame matter for mirth,
Mad jokes and antics for a Christmas-eve,
Making life social and the laggard time
To move on nimbly, never yet did cheer
The little circle of domestic friends.
Inflexibly honest and upright too, with a dash of chivalry in his
nature; who is not familiar with his portrait as "Lovel" in _The
Benchers of the Inner Temple_? Elizabeth his wife, a native of Ware,
whose maiden name was Field, was many years younger than himself. She
was a handsome, dignified-looking woman; like her husband fond of
pleasure; a good and affectionate mother, also, in the main, yet
lacking insight into the characters of her children--into Mary's at
any rate, towards whom she never manifested that maternal tenderness
which makes the heart wise whatever the head may be. Mary, a shy,
sensitive, nervous, affectionate child, who early showed signs of a
liability to brain disorder, above all things needed tender and
judicious care. "Her mother loved her," wrote Charles in after years,
"as she loved us all, with a mother's love; but in opinion, in feeling
and sentiment and disposition bore so distant a resemblance to her
daughter that she never understood her right--never could believe how
much _she_ loved her--but met her caresses, her protestations of
filial affection too frequently with coldness and repulse. Still she
was a good mother. God forbid I should think of her but most
respectfully, most affectionately. Yet she would always love my
brother above Mary, who was not worthy of one-tenth of that affection
which Mary had a right to claim."
John, the eldest, a handsome, lively, active boy, was just what his
good looks and his being the favourite were likely to make of a not
very happily endowed nature. "Dear little selfish craving John" he was
in childhood, and dear big selfish John he remained in manhood;
treated with tender indulgence by his brother and sister who
cheerfully exonerated him from taking up any share of the burthen of
sorrow and privation which became the portion of his family by the
time he was grown up and prosperously afloat.
A maiden aunt, a worthy but uncanny old soul whose odd silent ways and
odder witch-like mutterings and mumblings coupled with a wild look in
her eyes as she peered out from under her spectacles, made her an
object of dread rather than love to Mary as afterwards to Charles in
whom she garnered up her heart, completed the family group but did not
add to its harmony for she and her sister-in-law ill agreed. They were
in "their different ways," wrote Mary, looking back on childhood from
middle-life, "the best creatures in the world; but they set out wrong
at first. They made each other miserable for full twenty years of
their lives. My mother was a perfect gentlewoman; my aunty as unlike a
gentlewoman as you can possibly imagine a good old woman to be; so
that my dear mother (who, though you do not know it, is always in my
poor head and heart), used to distress and weary her with incessant
and unceasing attention and politeness to gain her affection. The old
woman could not return this in kind and did not know what to make of
it--thought it all deceit, and used to hate my mother with a bitter
hatred; which, of course, was soon returned with interest. A little
frankness and looking into each other's characters at first would have
spared all this, and they would have lived as they died, fond of each
other for the last ten years of their lives. When we grew up and
harmonised them a little, they sincerely loved each other."
In these early days Mary's was a comfortable though a very modest
home; a place of "snug fire-sides, the low-built roof, parlours ten
feet by ten, frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home"; a
wholesome soil to be planted in which permitted no helplessness in the
practical details of domestic life; above poverty in the actual though
not in the conventional sense of the word. Such book-learning as fell
to her lot was obtained at a day-school in Fetter Lane, Holborn,
where, notwithstanding the inscription over the door, "Mr. William
Bird, Teacher of Mathematics and Languages," reading in the
mother-tongue, writing and "ciphering" were all that was learned. The
school-room looked into a dingy, discoloured garden, in the passage
leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings; and there boys
were taught in the morning and their sisters in the afternoon by "a
gentle usher" named Starkey, whose subsequent misfortunes have rescued
him and Mary's school-days from oblivion. For, having in his old age
drifted into an almshouse at Newcastle, the tale of his wanderings and
his woes found its way into print and finally into Hone's _Every Day
Book_, where, meeting the eyes of Charles and Mary Lamb, it awakened
in both old memories which took shape in the sketch called _Captain
Starkey_.
"Poor Starkey, when young, had that peculiar stamp of old-fashionedness
in his face which makes it impossible for a beholder to predict any
particular age in the object. You can scarce make a guess between
seventeen and seven-and-thirty. This antique caste always seems to
promise ill-luck and penury. Yet it seems he was not always the abject
thing he came to. My sister, who well remembers him, can hardly forgive
Mr. Thomas Ranson for making an etching so unlike her idea of him when
he was at Mr. Bird's school. Old age and poverty, a life-long poverty
she thinks, could at no time have effaced the marks of native gentility
which were once so visible in a face otherwise strikingly ugly, thin,
and careworn. From her recollections of him, she thinks that he would
have wanted bread before he would have begged or borrowed a halfpenny.
'If any of the girls,' she says, 'who were my school-fellows should be
reading through their aged spectacles tidings from the dead of their
youthful friend Starkey, they will feel a pang as I do at having teased
his gentle spirit.'
"They were big girls, it seems, too old to attend his instructions
with the silence necessary; and, however old age and a long state of
beggary seems to have reduced his writing faculties to a state of
imbecility, in those days his language occasionally rose to the bold
and figurative, for, when he was in despair to stop their chattering,
his ordinary phrase was, 'Ladies, if you will not hold your peace, not
all the powers in heaven can make you.' Once he was missing for a day
or two; he had run away. A little, old, unhappy-looking man brought
him back--it was his father, and he did no business in the school that
day but sat moping in a corner with his hands before his face; the
girls, his tormentors, in pity for his case, for the rest of the day
forbore to annoy him.
"'I had been there but a few months,' adds she, 'when Starkey, who was
the chief instructor of us girls, communicated to us a profound
secret, that the tragedy of Cato was shortly to be acted by the elder
boys, and that we were to be invited to the representation.' That
Starkey lent a helping hand in fashioning the actors she remembers;
and, but for his unfortunate person, he might have had some
distinguished part in the scene to enact. As it was he had the arduous
task of prompter assigned to him and his feeble voice was heard clear
and distinct repeating the text during the whole performance. She
describes her recollection of the caste of characters even now with a
relish:--Martia, by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who afterwards went to
Africa, and of whom she never afterwards heard tidings; Lucia, by
Master Walker, whose sister was her particular friend; Cato, by John
Hunter, a masterly declaimer but a plain boy, and shorter by a head
than his two sons in the scene, &c. In conclusion, Starkey appears to
have been one of those mild spirits which, not originally deficient in
understanding, are crushed by penury into dejection and feebleness. He
might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society, if
fortune had taken him into a very little fostering; but wanting that
he became a captain--a by-word--and lived and died a broken bulrush."
But the chief and best part of Mary's education was due to the fact
that her father's employer, Mr. Salt, had a good library "into which
she was tumbled early" and suffered to "browse there without much
selection or prohibition." A little selection, however, would have
made the pasturage all the wholesomer to a child of Mary's sensitive
brooding nature; for the witch-stories and cruel tales of the
sufferings of the martyrs on which she pored all alone, as her brother
did after her, wrought upon her tender brain and lent their baleful
aid to nourish those seeds of madness which she inherited; as may be
inferred from a subsequent adventure.
When tripping to and from school or playing in the Temple Gardens Mary
must sometimes, though we have no record of the fact, have set eyes on
Oliver Goldsmith: for the first ten years of her life were the last of
his; spent, though with frequent sojourns elsewhere, in the Temple.
And in the Temple churchyard he was buried, just ten months before the
birth of Charles.
The London born and bred child had occasional tastes of joyous,
healthful life in the country, for her mother had hospitable relatives
in her native county, pleasant Hertfordshire. Specially was there a
great-aunt married to a substantial yeoman named Gladman living at
Mackery End within a gentle walk of Wheathampstead, the visits to whom
remained in Mary's memory as the most delightful recollections of her
childhood. In after life she embodied them, mingling fiction with
fact, in a story called _Louisa Manners or the Farm House_ where she
tells in sweet and child-like words of the ecstasy of a little
four-year-old girl on finding herself for the first time in the midst
of fields quite full of bright shining yellow flowers with sheep and
young lambs feeding; of the inexhaustible interest of the farm-yard,
the thresher in the barn with his terrifying flail and black beard,
the collecting of eggs and searching for scarce violets ("if we could
find eggs and violets too, what happy children we were"); of the
hay-making and the sheep-shearing, the great wood fires and the
farm-house suppers.
This will recall to the reader Elia's _Mackery End_; how, forty years
afterwards, brother and sister revisited the old farm-house one day in
the midst of June and how Bridget (so he always called Mary in print)
"remembered her old acquaintance again; some altered features, of
course, a little grudged at. At first, indeed, she was ready to
disbelieve for joy; but the scene soon re-confirmed itself in her
affections, and she traversed every out-post of the old mansion, to
the wood-house, the orchard, the place where the pigeon-house had
stood (house and birds were alike flown), with a breathless impatience
of recognition which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the
age of fifty odd. But Bridget in some things is behind her years."
"... The only thing left was to get into the house, and that was a
difficulty which to me singly would have been insurmountable, for I am
terribly shy in making myself known to strangers and out-of-date
kinsfolk. Love, stronger than scruple, winged my cousin in without me;
but she soon returned with a creature that might have sat to a sculptor
for the image of Welcome.... To have seen Bridget and her,--it was like
the meeting of the two scriptural cousins! There was a grace and
dignity, an amplitude of form and stature answering to her mind in this
farmer's wife, which would have shined in a palace...."
To return to the days of childhood, Mary also paid visits to her
maternal grandmother Field, housekeeper to the Plumers at their
stately but forsaken mansion of Blakesware; but here the pleasure was
mingled with a kind of weird solemnity. Mary has left on record her
experiences in a tale which forms a sort of pendant to _Blakesmoor in
H----shire_ by Elia. Her story is called _Margaret Green, the Young
Mahometan_, also from _Mrs. Leicester's School_ and, apart from a
slight framework of invention ("Mrs. Beresford," her grandmother,
being represented as the owner instead of housekeeper of the mansion),
is minutely autobiographical. "Every morning when she (Mrs. Beresford)
saw me she used to nod her head very kindly and say 'How do you do,
little Margaret?' But I do not recollect that she ever spoke to me
during the remainder of the day, except indeed after I had read the
psalms and the chapters which was my daily task; then she used
constantly to observe that I improved in my reading and frequently
added, 'I never heard a child read so distinctly.' When my daily
portion of reading was over I had a taste of needle-work, which
generally lasted half an hour. I was not allowed to pass more time in
reading or work, because my eyes were very weak, for which reason I
was always set to read in the large-print family Bible. I was very
fond of reading, and when I could, unobserved, steal a few minutes as
they were intent on their work, I used to delight to read in the
historical part of the Bible; but this, because of my eyes, was a
forbidden pleasure, and the Bible being never removed out of the room,
it was only for a short time together that I dared softly to lift up
the leaves and peep into it. As I was permitted to walk in the garden
or wander about the house whenever I pleased, I used to leave the
parlour for hours together, and make out my own solitary amusement as
well as I could. My first visit was always to a very large hall,
which, from being paved with marble, was called the Marble Hall. The
heads of the twelve Cæsars were hung round the hall. Every day I
mounted on the chairs to look at them and to read the inscriptions
underneath, till I became perfectly familiar with their names and
features. Hogarth's prints were below the Cæsars. I was very fond of
looking at them and endeavouring to make out their meaning. An old
broken battledore and some shuttle-cocks with most of the feathers
missing were on a marble slab in one corner of the hall, which
constantly reminded me that there had once been younger inhabitants
here than the old lady and her grey-headed servants. In another corner
stood a marble figure of a satyr; every day I laid my hand on his
shoulder to feel how cold he was. This hall opened into a room full of
family portraits. They were all in dresses of former times; some were
old men and women, and some were children. I used to long to have a
fairy's power to call the children down from their frames to play with
me. One little girl in particular, who hung by the side of the glass
door which opened into the garden, I often invited to walk there with
me; but she still kept her station, one arm round a little lamb's neck
and in her hand a large bunch of roses. From this room I usually
proceeded to the garden. When I was weary of the garden I wandered
over the rest of the house. The best suite of rooms I never saw by any
other light than what glimmered through the tops of the window-shutters,
which, however, served to show the carved chimney-pieces and the curious
old ornaments about the rooms; but the worked furniture and carpets of
which I heard such constant praises I could have but an imperfect sight
of, peeping under the covers which were kept over them by the dim light;
for I constantly lifted up a corner of the envious cloth that hid these
highly praised rareties from my view.
"The bedrooms were also regularly explored by me, as well to admire
the antique furniture as for the sake of contemplating the tapestry
hangings which were full of Bible history. The subject of the one
which chiefly attracted my attention was Hagar and her son Ishmael.
Every day I admired the beauty of the youth, and pitied the forlorn
state of him and his mother in the wilderness. At the end of the
gallery into which these tapestry rooms opened was one door which,
having often in vain attempted to open, I concluded to be locked;
and finding myself shut out, I was very desirous of seeing what
it contained and, though still foiled in the attempt, I every day
endeavoured to turn the lock, which, whether by constantly trying I
loosened, being probably a very old one, or that the door was not
locked but fastened tight by time, I know not; to my great joy, as I
was one day trying the lock as usual, it gave way, and I found myself
in this so long desired room.
"It proved to be a very large library. This was indeed a precious
discovery. I looked round on the books with the greatest delight: I
thought I would read them every one. I now forsook all my favourite
haunts and passed all my time here. I took down first one book, then
another. If you never spent whole mornings alone in a large library,
you cannot conceive the pleasure of taking down books in the constant
hope of finding an entertaining book among them; yet, after many days,
meeting with nothing but disappointment, it became less pleasant. All
the books within my reach were folios of the gravest cast. I could
understand very little that I read in them, and the old dark print and
the length of the lines made my eyes ache.
"When I had almost resolved to give up the search as fruitless, I
perceived a volume lying in an obscure corner of the room. I opened
it; it was a charming print, the letters were almost as large as the
type of the family Bible. In the first page I looked into I saw the
name of my favourite Ishmael, whose face I knew so well from the
tapestry, and whose history I had often read in the Bible. I sat
myself down to read this book with the greatest eagerness. The title
of it was _Mahometanism Explained_.... A great many of the leaves were
torn out, but enough remained to make me imagine that Ishmael was the
true son of Abraham. I read here that the true descendants of Abraham
were known by a light which streamed from the middle of their
foreheads. It said that Ishmael's father and mother first saw this
light streaming from his forehead as he was lying asleep in the
cradle. I was very sorry so many of the leaves were torn out, for it
was as entertaining as a fairy tale. I used to read the history of
Ishmael and then go and look at him in the tapestry, and then read his
history again. When I had almost learned the history of Ishmael by
heart, I read the rest of the book, and then I came to the history of
Mahomet who was there said to be the last descendant of Abraham.
"If Ishmael had engaged so much of my thoughts, how much more so must
Mahomet? His history was full of nothing but wonders from the
beginning to the end. The book said that those who believed all the
wonderful stories which were related of Mahomet were called Mahometans
and True Believers; I concluded that I must be a Mahometan, for I
believed every word I read.
"At length I met with something which I also believed, though I
trembled as I read it. This was, that after we are dead we are to pass
over a narrow bridge which crosses a bottomless gulf. The bridge was
described to be no wider than a silken thread, and it is said that all
who were not Mahometans would slip on one side of this bridge and drop
into the tremendous gulf that had no bottom. I considered myself as a
Mahometan, yet I was perfectly giddy whenever I thought of passing
over this bridge. One day, seeing the old lady totter across the room,
a sudden terror seized me for I thought how would she ever be able to
get over the bridge? Then, too, it was that I first recollected that
my mother would also be in imminent danger; for I imagined she had
never heard the name of Mahomet, because I foolishly conjectured this
book had been locked up for ages in the library and was utterly
unknown to the rest of the world.
"All my desire was now to tell them the discovery I had made; for, I
thought, when they knew of the existence of _Mahometanism Explained_
they would read it and become Mahometans to ensure themselves a safe
passage over the silken bridge. But it wanted more courage than I
possessed to break the matter to my intended converts; I must
acknowledge that I had been reading without leave; and the habit
of never speaking or being spoken to considerably increased the
difficulty.
"My anxiety on this subject threw me into a fever. I was so ill that
my mother thought it necessary to sleep in the same room with me. In
the middle of the night I could not resist the strong desire I felt to
tell her what preyed so much on my mind.
"I awoke her out of a sound sleep and begged she would be so kind as
to be a Mahometan. She was very much alarmed, for she thought I was
delirious, which I believe I was; for I tried to explain the reason of
my request, but it was in such an incoherent manner that she could not
at all comprehend what I was talking about. The next day a physician
was sent for and he discovered, by several questions that he put to
me, that I had read myself into a fever. He gave me medicines and
ordered me to be kept very quiet and said he hoped in a few days I
should be very well; but as it was a new case to him, he never having
attended a little Mahometan before, if any lowness continued after he
had removed the fever he would, with my mother's permission, take me
home with him to study this extraordinary case at his leisure; and
added that he could then hold a consultation with his wife who was
often very useful to him in prescribing remedies for the maladies of
his younger patients."
In the sequel, this sensible and kindly doctor takes his little
patient home, and restores her by giving her child-like wholesome
pleasures and rational sympathy. I fear that this only shadowed forth
the wise tenderness with which Mary Lamb would have treated such a
child rather than what befell herself; and that with the cruelty of
ignorance Mary's mother and grandmother suffered her young spirit to
do battle still, in silence and inward solitariness, with the phantoms
imagination conjured up in her too-sensitive brain. "Polly, what are
those poor crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking always?" was
worthy Mrs. Field's way of endeavouring to win the confidence of the
thoughtful suffering child. The words in the story, "my mother almost
wholly discontinued talking to me," "I scarcely ever heard a word
addressed to me from morning to night" have a ring of truth, of
bitter experience in them, which makes the heart ache. Yet it was no
result of sullenness on either side, least of all did it breed any
ill-feeling on Mary's. It was simple stupidity, lack of insight or
sympathy in the elders; and on hers was repaid by the sweetest
affection and, in after years, by a self-sacrificing devotion which,
carried at last far beyond her strength, led to the great calamity of
her life. Grandmother Field was a fine old character, however, as the
reader of _Elia_ well knows. She had
A mounting spirit, one that entertained
Scorn of base action, deed dishonourable
Or aught unseemly.
Like her daughter, Mrs. Lamb, she had been a handsome stately woman in
her prime and when bent with age and pain, for she suffered from a
cruel malady, cheerful patience and fortitude gave her dignity of
another and a higher kind. But, like her daughter, she seems to have
been wanting in those finer elements of tenderness and sympathy which
were of vital consequence in the rearing up of a child smitten like
Mary with a hereditary tendency to madness.
CHAPTER II.
Birth of Charles.--Coleridge.--Domestic Toils and Trials.--Their
Tragic Culmination.--Letters to and from Coleridge.
1775-1796.--Æt. 11-32.
On the 10th of February 1775 arrived a new member into the household
group in Crown Office Row--Charles, the child of his father's old age,
the "weakly but very pretty babe," who was to prove their strong
support. And now Mary was no longer a lonely girl. She was just old
enough to be trusted to nurse and tend the baby and she became a
mother to it. In after life she spoke of the comfort, the wholesome
curative influence upon her young troubled mind, which this devotion
to Charles in his infancy brought with it. And as he grew older rich
was her reward; for he repaid the debt with a love half filial, half
fraternal, than which no human tie was ever stronger or more sublimely
adequate to the strain of a terrible emergency. As his young mind
unfolded he found in her intelligence and love the same genial
fostering influences that had cherished his feeble frame into health
and strength. It was with his little hand in hers that he first trod
the Temple gardens, and spelled out the inscriptions on the sun-dials
and on the tombstones in the old burying-ground and wondered, finding
only lists of the virtues "where all the naughty people were buried?"
Like Mary, his disposition was so different from that of his gay,
pleasure-loving parents that they but ill understood "and gave
themselves little trouble about him," which also tended to draw
brother and sister closer together. There are no other records of
Mary's girlhood than such as may be gathered from the story of her
brother's early life; of how when he was five and she was fifteen she
came near to losing him from small-pox, Aunt Hetty grieving over him
"the only thing in the world she loved" as she was wont to say, with a
mother's tears. And how, three years later (in 1782), she had to give
up his daily companionship and see him, now grown a handsome boy with
"crisply curling black hair, clear brown complexion, aquiline,
slightly Jewish cast of features, winning smile, and glittering,
restless eyes," equipped as a Christ's Hospital boy and, with Aunt
Hetty, to
... peruse him round and round,
And hardly know him in his yellow coats,
Red leathern belt and gown of russet blue.
Coleridge was already a Blue Coat boy but older and too high above
Charles in the school for comradeship then. To Lamb, with home close
at hand, it was a happy time; but Coleridge, homeless and friendless
in the great city, had no mitigations of the rough Spartan discipline
which prevailed; and the weekly whole holidays when, turned adrift in
the streets from morn till night, he had nothing but a crust of bread
in his pockets and no resource but to beguile the pangs of hunger in
summer with hours of bathing in the New River and in winter with
furtive hanging round book-stalls wrought permanent harm to his
fine-strung organisation. Nor did the gentleness of his disposition,
or the brilliancy of his powers, save him from the birch-loving
brutalities of old Boyer, who was wont to add an extra stripe "because
he was so ugly."
In the Lamb household the domestic outlook grew dark as soon as Mary
was grown up, for her father's faculties and her mother's health
failed early; and when, in his fifteenth year, Charles left Christ's
Hospital it was already needful for him to take up the burthens of a
man on his young shoulders; and for Mary not only to make head against
sickness, helplessness, old age with its attendant exigencies but to
add to the now straitened means by taking in millinery work.
For eleven years, as she has told us, she maintained herself by the
needle; from the age of twenty-one to thirty-two, that is. It was not
in poor old Aunt Hetty's nature to be helpful either. "She was from
morning till night poring over good books and devotional exercises....
The only secular employment I remember to have seen her engaged in was
the splitting of French beans and dropping them into a basin of fair
water," says Elia. Happily, a clerkship in the South Sea House, where
his brother already was, enabled Charles to maintain his parents and a
better post in the India House was obtained two years afterwards. Nor
were there wanting snatches of pleasant holiday sometimes shared by
Mary. Of one, a visit to the sea, there is a beautiful reminiscence in
_The Old Margate Hoy_, written more than thirty years afterwards. "It
was our first sea-side experiment," he says, "and many circumstances
combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of my life. We had
neither of us seen the sea" (he was fifteen and Mary twenty-six), "and
we had never been from home so long together in company." The
disappointment they both felt at the first sight of the sea he explains
with one of his subtle and profound suggestions. "Is it not" ... says
he, "that we had expected to behold (absurdly I grant, but by the law
of imagination inevitably) not a definite object compassable by the
eye, but _all the sea at once, the commensurate antagonist of the
earth_? Whereas the eye can but take in a 'slip of salt water.'" The
whole passage is one of Elia's finest.
Then Coleridge too, who had remained two years longer at Christ's
Hospital than Lamb and after he went up to Cambridge in 1791 continued
to pay frequent visits to London, spent many a glorious evening, not
only those memorable ones with Charles in the parlour of the
"Salutation and Cat," but in his home; and was not slow to discover
Mary's fine qualities and to take her into his brotherly heart as a
little poem, written so early as 1794, to cheer his friend during a
serious illness of hers testifies:--
Cheerily, dear Charles!
Thou thy best friend shalt cherish many a year
Such warm presages feel I of high hope.
For not uninterested the dear maid
I've viewed--her soul affectionate yet wise,
Her polished wit as mild as lambent glories
That play around a sainted infant's head.
The year 1795 witnessed changes for all. The father, now wholly in his
dotage, was pensioned off by Mr. Salt and the family had to exchange
their old home in the Temple for straitened lodgings in Little Queen
Street, Holborn (the site of which and of the adjoining houses is now
occupied by Trinity Church). Coleridge, too, had left Cambridge and
was at Bristol, drawn thither by his newly formed friendship with
Southey, lecturing, writing, dreaming of his ideal Pantisocracy on the
banks of the Susquehannah and love-making. The love-making ended in
marriage the autumn of that same year. Meanwhile Lamb, too, was first
tasting the joys and sorrows of love. Alice W---- lingers but as a
shadow in the records of his life: the passion, however, was real
enough and took deep hold of him, conspiring with the cares and trials
of home life unrelieved now by the solace of Coleridge's society to
give a fatal stimulus to the germs of brain-disease, which were part
of the family heritage and for six weeks he was in a mad-house. "In
your absence," he tells his friend afterwards, "the tide of melancholy
rushed in, and did its worst mischief by overwhelming my reason." Who
can doubt the memory of this attack strengthened the bond of sympathy
between Mary and himself and gave him a fellow-feeling for her no
amount of affection alone could have realised? As in her case, too,
the disorder took the form of a great heightening and intensifying of
the imaginative faculty. "I look back on it, at times," wrote he after
his recovery, "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.... The sonnet I send you has small merit as poetry, but you will
be curious to read it when I tell you it was written in my
prison-house in one of my lucid intervals:--
TO MY SISTER.
If from my lips some angry accents fell,
Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind,
'Twas but the error of a sickly mind
And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well,
And waters clear of Reason; and for me
Let this my verse the poor atonement be--
My verse, which thou to praise wert e'er inclined
Too highly, and with a partial eye to see
No blemish. Thou to me didst ever show
Kindest affection; and would oft-times lend
An ear to the desponding love-sick lay,
Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay
But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,
Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.
No sooner was Charles restored to himself than the elder brother John
met with a serious accident; and though whilst in health he had
carried himself and his earnings to more comfortable quarters, he did
not now fail to return and be nursed with anxious solicitude by his
brother and sister. This was the last ounce. Mary, worn out with years
of nightly as well as daily attendance upon her mother who was now
wholly deprived of the use of her limbs, and harassed by a close
application to needle-work to help her in which she had been obliged to
take a young apprentice, was at last strained beyond the utmost pitch
of physical endurance, "worn down to a state of extreme nervous
misery." About the middle of September, she being then thirty-two
years old, her family observed some symptoms of insanity in her which
had so much increased by the 21st that her brother early in the
morning went to Dr. Pitcairn who unhappily was out. On the afternoon
of that day, seized with a sudden attack of frenzy, she snatched a
knife from the table and pursued the young apprentice round the room
when her mother interposing received a fatal stab and died instantly.
Mary was totally unconscious of what she had done, Aunt Hetty fainted
with terror, the father was too feeble in mind for any but a confused
and transient impression; it was Charles alone who confronted all the
anguish and horror of the scene. With the stern brevity of deep
emotion he wrote to Coleridge five days afterwards:--
"My poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the
death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the
knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a mad-house, from whence
I fear she must be moved to a hospital. God has preserved to me my
senses; I eat, and drink, and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe,
very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take
care of him and my aunt. Mr. Norris of the Blue Coat School has been
very kind to us, and we have no other friend; but, thank God, I am
very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do.
Write as religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what is
gone and done with. With me 'the former things are passed away,' and I
have something more to do than to feel. God Almighty have us all in
His keeping! Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige
of past vanities of that kind.... Your own judgment will convince you
not to take any notice of this yet to your dear wife. You look after
your family; I have my reason and strength left to take care of mine.
I charge you, don't think of coming to see me. Write. I will not see
you if you come. God Almighty love you and all of us!"
Coleridge responded to this appeal for sympathy and comfort by the
following,--the only letter of his to Lamb which has been preserved:--
"Your letter, my friend, struck me with a mighty horror. It rushed upon
me and stupified my feelings. You bid me write you a religious letter;
I am not a man who would attempt to insult the greatness of your
anguish by any other consolation. Heaven knows that in the easiest
fortunes there is much dissatisfaction and weariness of spirit; much
that calls for the exercise of patience and resignation; but in storms
like these that shake the dwelling and make the heart tremble, there is
no middle way between despair and the yielding up of the whole spirit
to the guidance of faith. And surely it is a matter of joy that your
faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that should relieve
you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the name of
that Saviour who was filled with bitterness and made drunken with
wormwood, I conjure you to have recourse in frequent prayer to 'his God
and your God,' the God of mercies and Father of all comfort. Your poor
father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious
instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in
Heaven. It is sweet to be roused from a frightful dream by the song of
birds, and the gladsome rays of the morning. Ah, how infinitely more
sweet to be awakened from the blackness and amazement of a sudden
horror by the glories of God manifest, and the hallelujahs of angels.
"As to what regards yourself, I approve altogether of your abandoning
what you justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man called by
sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness,
and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God; we cannot arrive at any
portion of heavenly bliss without, in some measure, imitating Christ.
And they arrive at the largest inheritance who imitate the most
difficult parts of his character, and, bowed down and crushed under
foot, cry, in fulness of faith, 'Father, Thy will be done.'
"I wish above measure to have you for a little while here; no
visitants shall blow on the nakedness of your feelings; you shall be
quiet, that your spirit may be healed. I see no possible objection,
unless your father's helplessness prevent you, and unless you are
necessary to him. If this be not the case, I charge you write me that
you will come.
"I charge you, my dearest friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or
despair; you are a temporary sharer in human miseries, that you may be
an eternal partaker of the Divine nature. I charge you, if by any
means it be possible, come to me."
How the storm was weathered, with what mingled fortitude and sweetness
Lamb sustained the wrecked household and rescued his sister, when
reason returned, from the living death of perpetual confinement in a
mad-house must be read in the answer to Coleridge:--
"Your letter was an inestimable treasure to me. It will be a comfort
to you, I know, to know that our prospects are somewhat brighter. My
poor dear, dearest sister, the unhappy and unconscious instrument of
the Almighty's judgment on our house, is restored to her senses; to a
dreadful sense and recollection of what has passed, awful to her mind,
and impressive (as it must be to the end of life), but tempered with
religious resignation and the reasonings of a sound judgment, which in
this early stage knows how to distinguish between a deed committed in
a transient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother's murder.
I have seen her. I found her this morning, calm and serene; far, very
far from an indecent forgetful serenity. She has a most affectionate
and tender concern for what has happened. Indeed, from the
beginning--frightful and hopeless as her disorder seemed--I had
confidence enough in her strength of mind and religious principle, to
look forward to a time when even she might recover tranquillity. God
be praised, Coleridge! wonderful as it is to tell, I have never once
been otherwise than collected and calm; even on the dreadful day, and
in the midst of the terrible scene, I preserved a tranquillity which
bystanders may have construed into indifference; a tranquillity not of
despair. Is it folly or sin in me to say that it was a religious
principle that most supported me? I allow much to other favourable
circumstances. I felt that I had something else to do than to regret.
On that first evening my aunt was lying insensible--to all appearance
like one dying; my father, with his poor forehead plaistered over from
a wound he had received from a daughter, dearly loved by him and who
loved him no less dearly; my mother a dead and murdered corpse in the
next room; yet was I wonderfully supported. I closed not my eyes in
sleep that night, but lay without terrors and without despair. I have
lost no sleep since. I had been long used not to rest in things of
sense; had endeavoured after a comprehension of mind unsatisfied with
the 'ignorant present time,' and this kept me up. I had the whole
weight of the family thrown on me; for my brother, little disposed (I
speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take care of old
age and infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an exemption from such
duties, and I was left alone. One little incident may serve to make
you understand my way of managing my mind. Within a day or two after
the fatal one, we dressed for dinner a tongue, which we had had salted
for some weeks in the house. As I sat down a feeling like remorse
struck me: this tongue poor Mary got for me, and can I partake of it
now when she is far away? A thought occurred and relieved me: if I
give in to this way of feeling, there is not a chair, a room, an
object in our rooms that will not awaken the keenest griefs. I must
rise above such weaknesses. I hope this was not want of true feeling.
I did not let this carry me, though, too far. On the very second day
(I date from the day of horrors) as is usual in such cases there were
a matter of twenty people, I do think, supping in our room; they
prevailed on me to eat _with them_ (for to eat I never refused). They
were all making merry in the room! Some had come from friendship, some
from busy curiosity and some from interest. I was going to partake
with them when my recollection came that my poor dead mother was lying
in the next room--the very next room; a mother who, through life,
wished nothing but her children's welfare. Indignation, the rage of
grief, something like remorse, rushed upon my mind. In an agony of
emotion I found my way mechanically to the adjoining room and fell on
my knees by the side of her coffin, asking forgiveness of Heaven and
sometimes of her for forgetting her so soon. Tranquillity returned and
it was the only violent emotion that mastered me. I think it did me
good.
"I mention these things because I hate concealment and love to give a
faithful journal of what passes within me. Our friends have been very
good. Sam Le Grice [an old schoolfellow well known to the readers of
Lamb], who was then in town, was with me the first three or four days
and was as a brother to me; gave up every hour of his time, to the
very hurting of his health and spirits, in constant attendance and
humouring my poor father, talked with him, read to him, played at
cribbage with him (for so short is the old man's recollection that he
was playing at cards as though nothing had happened while the
coroner's inquest was sitting over the way!). Samuel wept tenderly
when he went away, for his mother wrote him a very severe letter on
his loitering so long in town and he was forced to go. Mr. Norris of
Christ's Hospital has been as a father to me; Mrs. Norris as a mother;
though we had few claims on them. A gentleman, brother to my
godmother, from whom we never had right or reason to expect any such
assistance, sent my father twenty pounds; and to crown all these God's
blessings to our family at such a time, an old lady, a cousin of my
father and aunt, a gentlewoman of fortune, is to take my aunt and make
her comfortable for the short remainder of her days. My aunt is
recovered and as well as ever and highly pleased at the thought of
going, and has generously given up the interest of her little money
(which was formerly paid my father for her board) wholly and solely to
my sister's use. Reckoning this we have, Daddy and I, for our two
selves and an old maid-servant to look after him when I am out which
will be necessary, £170 (or £180 rather) a year, out of which we can
spare £50 or £60, at least, for Mary while she stays at Islington
where she must and shall stay during her father's life, for his and
her comfort. I know John will make speeches about it, but she shall
not go into an hospital. The good lady of the mad-house and her
daughter, an elegant, sweet-behaved young lady, love her and are taken
with her amazingly; and I know, from her own mouth, she loves them and
longs to be with them as much. Poor thing, they say she was but the
other morning saying she knew she must go to Bethlem for life; that
one of her brothers would have it so, but the other would wish it not,
but be obliged to go with the stream; that she had often, as she
passed Bethlem, thought it likely 'Here it may be my fate to end my
days,' conscious of a certain flightiness in her poor head often-times
and mindful of more than one severe illness of that nature before. A
legacy of £100 which my father will have at Christmas and this £20 I
mentioned before with what is in the house will much more than set us
clear. If my father, an old servant-maid and I can't live and live
comfortably on £130 or £120 a year, we ought to burn by slow fires,
and I almost would that Mary might not go into an hospital. Let me not
leave one unfavourable impression on your mind respecting my brother.
Since this has happened he has been very kind and brotherly; but I
fear for his mind: he has taken his ease in the world and is not fit
to struggle with difficulties, nor has he much accustomed himself to
throw himself into their way and I know his language is already,
'Charles you must take care of yourself, you must not abridge yourself
of a single pleasure you have been used to,' &c. &c, and in that style
of talking. But you, a necessarian, can respect a difference of mind
and love what is amiable in a character not perfect. He has been very
good but I fear for his mind. Thank God I can unconnect myself with
him and shall manage all my father's moneys in future myself if I take
charge of Daddy, which poor John has not even hinted a wish at any
future time even to share with me. The lady at this mad-house assures
me that I may dismiss immediately both doctor and apothecary,
retaining occasionally a composing draught or so for a while; and
there is a less expensive establishment in her house, where she will
only not have a room and nurse to herself for £50 or guineas a
year--the outside would be £60. You know by economy how much more even
I shall be able to spare for her comforts. She will, I fancy, if she
stays, make one of the family rather than of the patients; and the old
and young ladies I like exceedingly and she loves them dearly; and
they, as the saying is, take to her very extraordinarily if it is
extraordinary that people who see my sister should love her. Of all
the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister was most and
thoroughly devoid of the least tincture of selfishness. I will enlarge
upon her qualities, poor dear, dearest soul, in a future letter for my
own comfort, for I understand her thoroughly; and, if I mistake not,
in the most trying situation that a human being can be found in, she
will be found (I speak not with sufficient humility, I fear), but
humanly and foolishly speaking, she will be found, I trust, uniformly
great and amiable...."
The depth and tenderness of Mary's but half requited love for her
mother and the long years of daily and nightly devotion to her which
had borne witness to it and been the immediate cause of the
catastrophe, took the sting out of her grief and gave her an
unfaltering sense of innocence. They even shed round her a peaceful
atmosphere which veiled from her mind's eye the dread scene in all its
naked horror, as it would seem from Lamb's next letter:--
"Mary continues serene and cheerful. I have not by me a little letter
she wrote to me; for though I see her almost every day yet we delight
to write to one another, for we can scarce see each other but in
company with some of the people of the house. I have not the letter by
me but will quote from memory what she wrote in it: 'I have no bad,
terrifying dreams. At midnight, when I happen to awake, the nurse
sleeping by the side of me, with the noise of the poor mad people
around me, I have no fear. The spirit of my mother seems to descend
and smile upon me and bid me live to enjoy the life and reason which
the Almighty has given me. I shall see her again in heaven; she will
then understand me better. My grandmother, too, will understand me
better, and will then say no more as she used to do, 'Polly, what are
those poor, crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking of always?'"
And again, in another of her little letters, not itself preserved, but
which Charles translated "almost literally," he tells us, into verse,
she said:--
Thou and I, dear friend,
With filial recognition sweet, shall know
One day the face of our dear mother in heaven;
And her remembered looks of love shall greet
With answering looks of love, her placid smiles
Meet with a smile as placid, and her hand
With drops of fondness wet, nor fear repulse.
And after speaking, in words already quoted, of how his mother "had
never understood Mary right," Lamb continues:--
"Every act of duty and of love she could pay, every kindness (and I
speak true when I say to the hurting of her health, and most probably
in great part to the derangement of her senses), through a long course
of infirmities and sickness, she could show her she ever did." "I
will, some day as I promised, enlarge to you upon my sister's
excellences; 'twill seem like exaggeration, but I will do it."
Although Mary's recovery had been rapid, to be permitted to return
home was, for the present, out of the question; so cheered by constant
intercourse with Charles she set herself, with characteristic
sweetness, to make the best of life in a private lunatic asylum. "I
have satisfaction," Charles tells his unfailing sympathiser Coleridge,
"in being able to bid you rejoice with me in my sister's continued
reason and composedness of mind. Let us both be thankful for it. I
continue to visit her very frequently and the people of the house are
vastly indulgent to her. She is likely to be as comfortably situated
in all respects as those who pay twice or thrice the sum. They love
her and she loves them and makes herself very useful to them.
Benevolence sets out on her journey with a good heart and puts a good
face on it, but is apt to limp and grow feeble unless she calls in the
aid of self-interest by way of crutch. In Mary's case, as far as
respects those she is with, 'tis well that these principles are so
likely to co-operate. I am rather at a loss sometimes for books for
her, our reading is somewhat confined and we have nearly exhausted our
London library. She has her hands too full of work to read much, but a
little she must read for reading was her daily bread."
So wore away the remaining months of this dark year. Perhaps they were
loneliest and saddest for Charles. There was no one now to share with
him the care of his old father; and second childhood draws unsparingly
on the debt of filial affection and gratitude. Cheerfully and
ungrudgingly did he pay it. His chief solace was the correspondence
with Coleridge; and, as his spirits recovered their tone, the mutual
discussion of the poems which the two friends were about to publish
conjointly with some of Charles Lloyd's, was resumed. The little
volume was to be issued by Cottle of Bristol, early in the coming
year, 1797; and Lamb was desirous to seize the occasion of giving his
sister an unlooked-for pleasure and of consecrating his verses by a
renouncement and a dedication.
"I have a dedication in my head," he writes, "for my few things, which
I want to know if you approve of and can insert. I mean to inscribe
them to my sister. It will be unexpected, and it will give her
pleasure; or do you think it will look whimsical at all? As I have not
spoken to her about it, I can easily reject the idea. But there is a
monotony in the affections which people living together, or, as we do
now, very frequently seeing each other, are apt to get into; a sort of
indifference in the expression of kindness for each other, which
demands that we should sometimes call to our aid the trickery of
surprise. The title page to stand thus:--
POEMS
BY
CHARLES LAMB, OF THE INDIA HOUSE.
Motto:--
This beauty, in the blossom of my youth,
When my first fire knew no adulterate incense,
Nor I no way to flatter but my fondness,
In the best language my true tongue could tell me,
And all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me,
I sued and served. Long did I love this lady.--MASSINGER.
The Dedication:--
THE FEW FOLLOWING POEMS,
CREATURES OF THE FANCY AND THE FEELING,
IN LIFE'S MORE VACANT HOURS,
PRODUCED, FOR THE MOST PART, BY
LOVE IN IDLENESS,
ARE,
WITH ALL A BROTHER'S FONDNESS,
INSCRIBED TO
MARY ANNE LAMB,
THE AUTHOR'S BEST FRIEND AND SISTER.
"This is the pomp and paraphernalia of parting, with which I take my
leave of a passion which has reigned so royally, so long, within me.
Thus, with its trappings of laureateship, I fling it off, pleased and
satisfied with myself that the weakness troubles me no longer. I am
wedded, Coleridge, to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father.
Oh, my friend! I think, sometimes, could I recall the days that are
past, which among them should I choose? Not those merrier days, not the
pleasant days of hope, not those wanderings with a fair-haired maid
which I have so often and so feelingly regretted, but the days,
Coleridge, of a _mother's_ fondness for her _school-boy_. What would I
give to call her back to earth for _one_ day!--on my knees to ask her
pardon for all those little asperities of temper which, from time to
time, have given her gentle spirit pain!--and the day, my friend, I
trust will come. There will be 'time enough' for kind offices of love,
if Heaven's 'eternal year' be ours. Hereafter, her meek spirit shall
not reproach me. Oh! my friend, cultivate the filial feelings! and let
no man think himself released from the kind 'charities' of
relationship: these shall give him peace at the last; these are the
best foundation for every species of benevolence. I rejoice to hear by
certain channels, that you, my friend, are reconciled with all your
relations. 'Tis the most kindly and natural species of love, and we
have all the associated train of early feelings to secure its strength
and perpetuity."
CHAPTER III.
Death of Aunt Hetty.--Mary removed from the Asylum.--Charles
Lloyd.--A Visit to Nether Stowey, and Introduction to Wordsworth
and his Sister.--Anniversary of the Mother's Death.--Mary ill
again.--Estrangement between Lamb and Coleridge.--Speedy
Reconcilement.
1797-1801.--Æt. 33-37.
Aunt Hetty did not find her expectations of a comfortable home
realised under the roof of the wealthy gentlewoman, who proved herself
a typical rich relation and wrote to Charles at the beginning of the
new year that she found her aged cousin indolent and mulish, "and that
her attachment to us" (he is telling Coleridge the tale, to whom he
could unburthen his heart on all subjects, sure of sympathy) "is so
strong that she can never be happy apart. The lady with delicate irony
remarks that if I am not an hypocrite I shall rejoice to receive her
again; and that it will be a means of making me more fond of home to
have so dear a friend to come home to! The fact is, she is jealous of
my aunt's bestowing any kind recollections on us while she enjoys the
patronage of her roof. She says she finds it inconsistent with her own
'ease and tranquillity' to keep her any longer; and, in fine, summons
me to fetch her home. Now, much as I should rejoice to transplant the
poor old creature from the chilling air of such patronage, yet I know
how straitened we are already, how unable already to answer any demand
which sickness or any extraordinary expense may make. I know this; and
all unused as I am to struggle with perplexities, I am somewhat
nonplussed, to say no worse."
Hetty Lamb found a refuge and a welcome in the old humble home again.
But she returned only to die; and Mary was not there to nurse her. She
was still in the asylum at Islington; and was indeed herself at this
time recovering from an attack of scarlet fever, or something akin to
it.
Early in January 1797 Lamb wrote to Coleridge:--"You and Sara are very
good to think so kindly and so favourably of poor Mary. I would to God
all did so too. But I very much fear she must not think of coming home
in my father's lifetime. It is very hard upon her, but our
circumstances are peculiar and we must submit to them. God be praised
she is so well as she is. She bears her situation as one who has no
right to complain. My poor old aunt, whom you have seen, the kindest
goodest creature to me when I was at school, who used to toddle there
to bring me good things when I, school-boy like, only despised her for
it, and used to be ashamed to see her come and sit herself down on the
old coal-hole steps as you went into the old Grammar School and open
her apron and bring out her basin with some nice thing she had caused
to be saved for me,--the good old creature is now lying on her
death-bed. I cannot bear to think on her deplorable state. To the
shock she received on that our evil day from which she never
completely recovered, I impute her illness. She says, poor thing, she
is glad she is come home to die with me, I was always her favourite."
She lingered a month, and then went to occupy
"... the same grave bed
Where the dead mother lies.
Oh, my dear mother! oh, thou dear dead saint!
Where's now that placid face, where oft hath sat
A mother's smile to think her son should thrive
In this bad world when she was dead and gone;
And where a tear hath sat (take shame, O son!)
When that same child has proved himself unkind.
One parent yet is left--a wretched thing,
A sad survivor of his buried wife,
A palsy-smitten childish old, old man,
A semblance most forlorn of what he was."
"I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended her days of
suffering and infirmity," says Lamb to Coleridge. "Good God! who could
have foreseen all this but four months back! I had reckoned, in
particular, on my aunt's living many years; she was a very hearty old
woman.... But she was a mere skeleton before she died; looked more
like a corpse that had lain weeks in the grave than one fresh dead."
"I thank you; from my heart, I thank you," Charles again wrote to
Coleridge, "for your solicitude about my sister. She is quite well,
but must not, I fear, come to live with us yet a good while. In the
first place, because it would hurt her and hurt my father for them to
be together; secondly, from a regard to the world's good report; for I
fear tongues will be busy whenever that event takes place. Some have
hinted, one man has pressed it on me, that she should be in perpetual
confinement. What she hath done to deserve, or the necessity of such
an hardship I see not; do you?"
At length Lamb determined to grapple, on Mary's behalf, with the
difficulties and embarrassments of the situation. "Painful doubts were
suggested," says Talfourd, "by the authorities of the parish where the
terrible occurrence happened, whether they were not bound to institute
proceedings which must have placed her for life at the disposition of
the Crown, especially as no medical assurance could be given against
the probable recurrence of dangerous frenzy. But Charles came to her
deliverance; he satisfied all the parties who had power to oppose her
release, by his solemn engagement that he would take her under his
care for life; and he kept his word. Whether any communication with
the Home Secretary occurred before her release I have been unable to
ascertain. It was the impression of Mr. Lloyd, from whom my own
knowledge of the circumstances, which the letters do not contain was
derived, that a communication took place, on which a similar pledge
was given. At all events the result was that she left the asylum and
took up her abode," not with her brother yet, but in lodgings near him
and her father.
He writes to Coleridge, April 7th, 1797: "Lloyd may have told you
about my sister.... If not, I have taken her out of her confinement,
and taken a room for her at Hackney, and spend my Sundays, holidays,
&c., with her. She boards herself. In a little half year's illness and
in such an illness, of such a nature and of such consequences, to get
her out into the world again, with a prospect of her never being so
ill again, this is to be ranked not among the common blessings of
Providence. May that merciful God make tender my heart and make me as
thankful as, in my distress, I was earnest in my prayers. Congratulate
me on an ever-present and never alienable friend like her, and do, do
insert, if you have not _lost_, my dedication [to Mary]. It will have
lost half its value by coming so late." And of another sonnet to her,
which he desires to have inserted, he says: "I wish to accumulate
perpetuating tokens of my affection to poor Mary."
Two events which brightened this sad year must not be passed over
though Mary, the sharer of all her brother's joys and sorrows, had but
an indirect participation in them. Just when he was most lonely and
desolate at the close of the fatal year he had written to Coleridge:
"I can only converse with you by letter, and with the dead in their
books. My sister, indeed, is all I can wish in a companion; but our
spirits are alike poorly, our reading and knowledge from the self-same
sources, our communication with the scenes of the world alike narrow.
Never having kept separate company or any 'company' _together_--never
having read separate books and few books _together_, what knowledge
have we to convey to each other? In our little range of duties and
connections how few sentiments can take place without friends, with
few books, with a taste for religion rather than a strong religious
habit! We need some support, some leading-strings to cheer and direct
us. You talk very wisely and be not sparing of _your advice_; continue
to remember us and to show us you do remember; we will take as lively
an interest in what concerns you and yours. All I can add to your
happiness will be sympathy; you can add to mine _more_, you can teach
me wisdom."
Quite suddenly, at the beginning of the new year, there came to break
this solitude Charles Lloyd, whose poems were to company Lamb's own
and Coleridge's in the forthcoming volume: a young man of quaker
family who was living in close fellowship with that group of poets
down in Somersetshire towards whom Lamb's eyes and heart were
wistfully turned as afterwards were to be those of all lovers of
literature. How deeply he was moved by this spontaneous seeking for
his friendship on Lloyd's part, let a few lines from one of those
early poems which, in their earnest simplicity and sincerity, are
precious autobiographic fragments tell:--
Alone, obscure, without a friend,
A cheerless, solitary thing,
Why seeks my Lloyd the stranger out?
What offering can the stranger bring
Of social scenes, home-bred delights,
That him in aught compensate may
For Stowey's pleasant winter nights,
For loves and friendships far away?
* * * * *
For this a gleam of random joy,
Hath flush'd my unaccustom'd cheek,
And with an o'ercharged bursting heart
I feel the thanks I cannot speak.
O sweet are all the Muses' lays,
And sweet the charm of matin bird--
'Twas long since these estranged ears
The sweeter voice of friend had heard.
The next was a yet brighter gleam--a fortnight with Coleridge at
Nether Stowey and an introduction to Wordsworth and his sister
Dorothy, forerunner of a life-long friendship in which Mary was soon to
share. The visit took place in the July of this same year 1797. The
prospect of it had dangled tantalizingly before Charles' eyes for a
year or more; and now at last his chiefs at the India House were
propitious and he wrote: "May I, can I, shall I come so soon?... I
long, I yearn, with all the longings of a child do I desire to see
you, to come among you, to see the young philosopher [Hartley, the
poet's first child] to thank Sara for her last year's invitation in
person, to read your tragedy, to read over together our little book,
to breathe fresh air, to revive in me vivid images of '_Salutation
scenery_.' There is a sort of sacrilege in my letting such ideas slip
out of my mind and memory.... Here I will leave off, for I dislike to
fill up this paper (which involves a question so connected with my
heart and soul) with meaner matter, or subjects to me less
interesting. I can talk as I can think, nothing else."
Seldom has fate been kind enough to bring together, in those years of
early manhood when friendships strike their deepest roots, just the
very men who could give the best help, the warmest encouragement to
each other's genius, whilst they were girding themselves for that
warfare with the ignorance and dulness of the public which every
original man has to wage for a longer or shorter time. Wordsworth was
twenty-seven, Coleridge twenty-five, Lamb twenty-two. For Wordsworth
was to come the longest, stiffest battle--fought, however, from the
vantage ground of pecuniary independence, thanks to his simple frugal
habits and to a few strokes of good fortune. His aspect in age is
familiar to the readers of this generation, but less so the Wordsworth
of the days when the _Lyrical Ballads_ were just taking final shape.
There was already a severe worn pressure of thought about the temples
of his high yet somewhat narrow forehead and 'his eyes were fires,
half smouldering, half burning, inspired, supernatural, with a fixed
acrid gaze' as if he saw something in objects more than the outward
appearance. 'His cheeks were furrowed by strong purpose and feeling,
and there was a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a
good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest
of his face.' Dressed in a brown fustian jacket and striped
pantaloons, adds Hazlitt, who first saw him a few months later, he had
something of a roll and lounge in his gait not unlike his own Peter
Bell. He talked freely and naturally, with a mixture of clear gushing
accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation and a strong tincture
of the northern burr, and when he recited one of his poems his voice
lingered on the ear "like the roll of spent thunder."
But who could dazzle and win like Coleridge? Who could travel so far
and wide through all the realms of thought and imagination, and pour
out the riches he brought back in such free, full, melodious speech
with that spontaneous "utterancy of heart and soul," which was his
unique gift, in a voice whose tones were so sweet, ear and soul were
alike ravished? For him the fight was not so much with the public
which, Orpheus that he was, he could so easily have led captive, as
with the flesh--weak health, a nerveless languor, a feeble will that
never could combine and concentrate his forces for any sustained or
methodical effort. Dorothy Wordsworth has described him as he looked
in these days: "At first I thought him very plain--that is, for about
three minutes--he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not
very good teeth, longish loose-growing, half-curling, rough black hair
(in both these respects a contrast to Wordsworth, who had, in his
youth, beautiful teeth and light brown hair); but if you hear him
speak for five minutes, you think no more of them. His eye is large
and full and not very dark, but grey, such an eye as would receive
from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion
of his animated mind; it has more of the 'poet's eye in a fine frenzy
rolling' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eye-brows and an
overhanging forehead." This was the very year that produced _The
Ancient Mariner_, the first part of _Christabel_, and _Kubla Khan_.
To Charles Lamb the change from his restricted over-shadowed life in
London--all day at a clerk's desk and in the evening a return to the
Pentonville lodging with no other inmate than his poor old father,
Sundays and holidays only spent with his sister--to such companionship
amid such scenes, almost dazed him, like stepping from a darkened room
into the brilliant sunshine. Before he went he had written:--"I see
nobody. I sit and read, or walk alone and hear nothing. I am quite
lost to conversation from disuse; and out of the sphere of my little
family (who, I am thankful, are dearer and dearer to me every day), I
see no face that brightens up at my approach. My friends are at a
distance. Worldly hopes are at a low ebb with me, and unworldly
thoughts are unfamiliar to me, though I occasionally indulge in them.
Still I feel a calm not unlike content. I fear it is sometimes more
akin to physical stupidity than to a heaven-flowing serenity and
peace. If I come to Stowey, what conversation can I furnish to
compensate my friend for those stores of knowledge and of fancy, those
delightful treasures of wisdom, which I know he will open to me? But
it is better to give than to receive; and I was a very patient hearer
and docile scholar in our winter evening meetings at Mr. May's, was I
not Coleridge? What I have owed to thee my heart can ne'er forget."
Perhaps his friends, even Coleridge who knew him so well, realised as
little as himself what was the true mental stature of the "gentle-hearted",
and "wild-eyed boy" as they called him; whose opportunities and
experience, save in the matter of strange calamity, had been so narrow
compared to their own. The keen edge of his discernment as a critic,
quick and piercing as those quick, piercing, restless eyes of his, they
knew and prized yet could hardly, perhaps, divine that there were
qualities in him which would freight his prose for a long voyage down
the stream of time. But already they knew that within that small spare
frame, "thin and wiry as an Arab of the desert," there beat a heroic
heart, fit to meet the stern and painful exigencies of his lot; and that
his love for his sister was of the same fibre as conscience--"a supreme
embracer of consequences."
Dorothy Wordsworth was just such a friend and comrade to the poet as
Mary was to Charles, sharing his passionate devotion to nature as Mary
shared her brother's loves, whether for men or books or for the stir
and throng of life in the great city. Alike were these two women in
being as De Quincey said of Dorothy "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." But unlike in
temperament; Dorothy ardent, fiery, trembling with eager impetuosity
that embarrassed her utterance; Mary gentle, silent, or deliberate in
speech. In after life, there was another sad similarity for Dorothy's
reason, too, was in the end over-clouded. Coleridge has described her
as she then was: "She is a woman indeed," said he, "in mind, I mean,
and in heart; for her person is such that if you expected to see a
pretty woman, you would think her ordinary; if you expected to see an
ordinary woman, you would think her pretty; but her manners are
simple, ardent, and impressive. In every motion her innocent soul
outbeams so brightly, that who saw her would say 'guilt was a thing
impossible with her.' Her information various, her eye watchful in
minute observation of nature, and her taste a perfect electrometer."
An accident had lamed Coleridge the very morning after Lamb's arrival,
so that he was unable to share his friends' walks. He turned his
imprisonment to golden account by writing a poem which mirrors for us,
as in a still lake, the beauty of the Quantock hills and vales where
they were roaming, the scenes amid which these great and happy days of
youth and poetry and friendship were passed. It is the very poem in
the margin of which, eight and thirty years afterwards, Coleridge on
his death-bed wrote down the sum of his love for Charles and Mary
Lamb.
THIS LIME-TREE BOWER MY PRISON.
Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends whom I never more may meet again
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge
Wander in gladness and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell of which I told;
The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash, from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge;--that branchless ash,
Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fanned by the water-fall! and there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long, lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.
Now, my friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide heaven--and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hungered after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue ocean! So my Friend,
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive His presence....
* * * * *
On Lamb's return, he wrote in the same modest vein as before--
"I am scarcely yet so reconciled to the loss of you or so subsided
into my wonted uniformity of feeling as to sit calmly down to think of
you and write.... Is the patriot [Thelwall] come? Are Wordsworth and
his sister gone yet? I was looking out for John Thelwall all the way
from Bridgewater and had I met him I think it would have moved me
almost to tears. You will oblige me, too, by sending me my great-coat
which I left behind in the oblivious state the mind is thrown into at
parting. Is it not ridiculous that I sometimes envy that great-coat
lingering so cunningly behind! At present I have none; so send it me
by a Stowey waggon if there be such a thing, directing it for C. L.,
No. 45, Chapel Street, Pentonville, near London. But above all, _that
inscription_ [of Wordsworth's]. It will recall to me the tones of all
your voices, and with them many a remembered kindness to one who could
and can repay you all only by the silence of a grateful heart. I could
not talk much while I was with you but my silence was not sullenness
nor I hope from any bad motive; but in truth, disuse has made me
awkward at it. I know I behaved myself, particularly at Tom Poole's
and at Cruikshank's most like a sulky child; but company and converse
are strange to me. It was kind in you all to endure me as you did.
"Are you and your dear Sara--to me also very dear because very
kind--agreed yet about the management of little Hartley? And how go on
the little rogue's teeth?"
The mention of his address in the foregoing letter, shows that Lamb
and his father had already quitted Little Queen Street. It is probable
that they did so, indeed, immediately after the great tragedy; to
escape, not only from the painful associations of the spot but also
from the cruel curiosity which its terrible notoriety must have drawn
upon them. The season was coming round which could not but renew his
and Mary's grief and anguish in the recollection of that "day of
horrors." "Friday next, Coleridge," he writes, "is the day (September
22nd) on which my mother died;" and in the letter is enclosed that
beautiful and affecting poem beginning:--
Alas! how am I changed? Where be the tears,
The sobs, and forced suspensions of the breath,
And all the dull desertions of the heart,
With which I hung o'er my dead mother's corse?
Where be the blest subsidings of the storm
Within? The sweet resignedness of hope
Drawn heavenward, and strength of filial love
In which I bowed me to my Father's will?
* * * * *
Mary's was a silent grief. But those few casual pathetic words written
years afterwards speak her life-long sorrow,--"my dear mother who,
though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart." She
continued quiet in her lodgings, free from relapse till toward the end
of the year.
On the 10th December Charles wrote in bad spirits,--"My teasing lot
makes me too confused for a clear judgment of things; too selfish for
sympathy.... My sister is pretty well, thank God. We think of you very
often. God bless you. Continue to be my correspondent, and I will
strive to fancy that this world is _not_ 'all barrenness.'"
But by Christmas Day she was once more in the asylum. In sad solitude
he gave utterance, again in verse form, to his overflowing grief and
love:--
I am a widow'd thing now thou art gone!
Now thou art gone, my own familiar friend,
Companion, sister, helpmate, counsellor!
Alas! that honour'd mind whose sweet reproof
And meekest wisdom in times past have smooth'd
The unfilial harshness of my foolish speech,
And made me loving to my parents old
(Why is this so, ah God! why is this so?)
That honour'd mind become a fearful blank,
Her senses lock'd up, and herself kept out
From human sight or converse, while so many
Of the foolish sort are left to roam at large,
Doing all acts of folly and sin and shame?
Thy paths are mystery!
Yet I will not think
Sweet friend, but we shall one day meet and live
In quietness and die so, fearing God.
Or if _not_, and these false suggestions be
A fit of the weak nature, loth to part
With what it loved so long and held so dear;
If thou art to be taken and I left
(More sinning, yet unpunish'd save in thee,)
It is the will of God, and we are clay
In the potter's hand; and at the worst are made
From absolute nothing, vessels of disgrace,
Till His most righteous purpose wrought in us,
Our purified spirits find their perfect rest.
To add to these sorrows Coleridge had, for some time, been growing
negligent as a correspondent. So early as April Lamb had written,
after affectionate enquiries for Hartley "the minute philosopher" and
Hartley's mother,--"Coleridge, I am not trifling, nor are these
matter-of-fact questions only. You are all very dear and precious to
me. Do what you will, Coleridge, you may hurt and vex me by your
silence but you cannot estrange my heart from you all. I cannot
scatter friendships like chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine
hand like hour-glass sand. I have but two or three people in the world
to whom I am more than indifferent and I can't afford to whistle them
off to the winds."
And again, three months after his return from Stowey, he wrote
sorrowfully almost plaintively, remonstrating for Lloyd's sake and his
own:--
"You use Lloyd very ill, never writing to him. I tell you again that
his is not a mind with which you should play tricks. He deserves more
tenderness from you. For myself, I must spoil a little passage of
Beaumont and Fletcher's to adapt it to my feelings:
I am prouder
That I was once your friend, tho' now forgot,
Than to have had another true to me.
If you don't write to me now, as I told Lloyd, I shall get angry and
call you hard names--'Manchineel'" (alluding to a passage in a poem of
Coleridge's, where he compares a false friend to the treacherous
manchineel tree[1] which mingles its own venom with the rain and
poisons him who rests beneath its shade) "and I don't know what else.
I wish you would send me my great-coat. The snow and the rain season
is at hand and I have but a wretched old coat, once my father's, to
keep 'em off and that is transitory.
When time drives flocks from field to fold,
When ways grow foul and blood gets cold,
I shall remember where I left my coat. Meet emblem wilt thou be, old
Winter, of a friend's neglect--cold, cold, cold!"
But this fresh stroke of adversity, sweeping away the fond hope
Charles had begun to cherish that "Mary would never be so ill again,"
roused his friend's sometimes torpid but deep and enduring affection
for him into action. "You have writ me many kind letters, and I have
answered none of them," says Lamb, on the 28th of January 1798. "I
don't deserve your attentions. An unnatural indifference has been
creeping on me since my last misfortunes or I should have seized the
first opening of a correspondence with you. These last afflictions,
Coleridge, have failed to soften and bend my will. They found me
unprepared.... I have been very querulous, impatient under the
rod--full of little jealousies and heart-burnings. I had well-nigh
quarrelled with Charles Lloyd; and for no other reason, I believe,
than that the good creature did all he could to make me happy. The
truth is I thought he tried to force my mind from its natural and
proper bent. He continually wished me to be from home; he was drawing
me _from_ the consideration of my poor dear Mary's situation rather
than assisting me to gain a proper view of it with religious
consolations. I wanted to be left to the tendency of my own mind in a
solitary state which in times past, I knew, had led to quietness and a
patient bearing of the yoke. He was hurt that I was not more
constantly with him; but he was living with White (Jem White, an old
school-fellow, author of _Falstaff's Letters_), a man to whom I had
never been accustomed to impart my _dearest feelings_ though, from
long habits of friendliness and many a social and good quality, I
loved him very much. I met company there sometimes, indiscriminate
company. Any society almost, when I am in affliction, is sorely
painful to me. I seem to breathe more freely, to think more
collectedly, to feel more properly and calmly when alone. All these
things the good creature did with the kindest intentions in the world
but they produced in me nothing but soreness and discontent. I became,
as he complained, 'jaundiced' towards him ... but he has forgiven me;
and his smile, I hope, will draw all such humours from me. I am
recovering, God be praised for it, a healthiness of mind, something
like calmness; but I want more religion.... Mary is recovering; but I
see no opening yet of a situation for her. Your invitation went to my
very heart; but you have a power of exciting interest, of leading all
hearts captive, too forcible to admit of Mary's being with you. I
consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness. I think you would
almost make her dance within an inch of the precipice: she must be
with duller fancies and cooler intellects. I know a young man of this
description, who has suited her these twenty years, and may live to do
so still, if we are one day restored to each other."
But the clouds gathered up again between the friends, generated partly
by a kind of intellectual arrogance whereof Coleridge afterwards
accused himself (he was often but too self-depreciatory in after life)
which, in spite of Lamb's generous and unbounded admiration for his
friend, did at last both irritate and hurt him; still more by the
influence of Lloyd who, himself slighted as he fancied, and full of a
morbid sensitiveness "bordering on derangement," sometimes indeed
overleaping that border, worked upon Lamb's soreness of feeling till a
brief estrangement ensued. Lamb had not yet learned to be on his guard
with Lloyd. Years afterwards he wrote of him to Coleridge: "He is a
sad tattler; but this is under the rose. Twenty years ago he estranged
one friend from me quite, whom I have been regretting, but never could
regain since. He almost alienated you also from me or me from you, I
don't know which: but that breach is closed. The 'dreary sea' is
filled up. He has lately been at work 'telling again,' as they call
it, a most gratuitous piece of mischief, and has caused a coolness
betwixt me and (not a friend but) an intimate acquaintance. I suspect,
also, he saps Manning's faith in me who am to Manning more than an
acquaintance."
The breach was closed, indeed, almost as soon as opened. But Coleridge
went away to Germany for fourteen months and the correspondence was
meanwhile suspended. When it was resumed Lamb was, in some respects,
an altered man; he was passing from youth to maturity, enlarging the
circle of his acquaintance and entering on more or less continuous
literary work; whilst, on the other hand, the weaknesses which
accompanied the splendid endowments of his friend were becoming but
too plainly apparent; and though they never for a moment lessened
Lamb's affection, nay, with his fine humanity seemed to give rather an
added tenderness to it, there was inevitably a less deferential, a
more humorous and playful tone on his side in their intercourse.
"Bless you, old sophist who, next to human nature, taught me all the
corruption I was capable of knowing," says he to the poet-philosopher
by-and-by. And the weak side of his friend's style, too, received an
occasional sly thrust; as for instance when on forwarding him some
books he writes in 1800 "I detained _Statius_ wilfully, out of a
reverent regard to your style. _Statius_ they tell me is turgid."
Footnote 1: _Hippomane Mancinella_, one of the _Euphorbiaceæ_, a
native of South America.
CHAPTER IV.
Death of the Father.--Mary comes Home to live.--A Removal.--First
Verses.--A Literary Tea-Party.--Another Move.--Friends increase.
1799-1800.--Æt. 35-36.
The feeble flame of life in Lamb's father flickered on for two years
and a half after his wife's death. He was laid to rest at last beside
her and his sister Hetty in the churchyard of St. Andrew's, Holborn
(now swept away in the building of the Holborn Viaduct), on the 13th
of April 1799, and Mary came home once more. There is no mention of
either fact in Lamb's letters; for Coleridge was away in Germany; and
with Southey, who was almost the sole correspondent of this year, the
tie was purely intellectual and never even in that kind a close one. A
significant allusion to Mary there is, however, in a letter to him
dated May 20: "Mary was never in better health or spirits than now."
But neither the happiness of sharing Charles's home again nor anything
else could save her from the constant recurrence of her malady; nor,
in these early days, from the painful notoriety of what had befallen
her; and they were soon regarded as unwelcome inmates in the Chapel
Street lodgings.
Early in 1800 be tells Coleridge: "Soon after I wrote to you last an
offer was made me by Gutch (you must remember him at Christ's) to come
and lodge with him at his house in Southampton Buildings, Chancery
Lane. This was a very comfortable offer to me, the rooms being at a
reasonable rent and including the use of an old servant, besides being
infinitely preferable to ordinary lodgings _in our case_ as you must
perceive. As Gutch knew all our story and the perpetual liability to a
recurrence in my sister's disorder, probably to the end of her life, I
certainly think the offer very generous and very friendly. I have got
three rooms (including servant) under £34 a year. Here I soon found
myself at home, and here, in six weeks after, Mary was well enough to
join me. So we are once more settled. I am afraid we are not placed
out of the reach of future interruptions; but I am determined to take
what snatches of pleasure we can, between the acts of our distressful
drama. I have passed two days at Oxford, on a visit, which I have long
put off, to Gutch's family. The sight of the Bodleian Library and,
above all, a fine bust of Bishop Taylor at All Souls' were
particularly gratifying to me. Unluckily it was not a family where I
could take Mary with me, and I am afraid there is something of
dishonesty in any pleasure I take without _her_. She never goes
anywhere." And to Manning: "It is a great object to me to live in
town." [Pentonville then too much of a gossiping country suburb!] "We
can be nowhere private except in the midst of London."
By the summer Mary was not only quite well but making a first essay in
verse--the theme, a playful mockery of her brother's boyish love for a
pictured beauty at Blakesware described in his essay,--"that Beauty
with the cool blue pastoral drapery and a lamb, that hung next the
great bay window, with the bright yellow H----shire hair, and eye of
watchet hue--so like my Alice! I am persuaded she was a true
Elia--Mildred Elia, I take it. From her and from my passion for
her--for I first learned love from a picture--Bridget took the hint of
those pretty whimsical lines which thou mayest see if haply thou hast
never seen them, reader, in the margin. But my Mildred grew not old
like the imaginary Helen."
With brotherly pride he sends them to Coleridge: "How do you like this
little epigram? It is not my writing, nor had I any finger in it. If
you concur with me in thinking it very elegant and very original, I
shall be tempted to name the author to you. I will just hint that it
is almost or quite a first attempt:--
HELEN.
High-born Helen, round your dwelling
These twenty years I've paced in vain;
Haughty beauty, thy lover's duty
Hath been to glory in his pain.
High-born Helen, proudly telling
Stories of thy cold disdain;
I starve, I die, now you comply,
And I no longer can complain.
These twenty years I've lived on tears,
Dwelling forever on a frown;
On sighs I've fed, your scorn my bread;
I perish now you kind are grown.
Can I who loved my beloved,
But for the scorn "was in her eye";
Can I be moved for my beloved,
When she "returns me sigh for sigh"?
In stately pride, by my bed-side
High-born Helen's portrait's hung;
Deaf to my praise, my mournful lays
Are nightly to the portrait sung.
To that I weep, nor ever sleep,
Complaining all night long to her.
_Helen grown old, no longer cold.
Said_, "You to all men I prefer."
Lamb inserted this and another by Mary, a serious and tender little
poem, the _Dialogue between a Mother and Child_ beginning
O lady, lay your costly robes aside,
No longer may you glory in your pride,
in the first collected edition of his works.
Mary now began also to go out with her brother, and the last record of
this year in the Coleridge correspondence discloses them at a literary
tea-party, not in the character of lions but only as friends of a
lion--Coleridge--who had already become, in his frequent visits to
town, the prey of some third-rate admiring literary ladies, notably of
a certain Miss Wesley (niece of John Wesley) and of her friend Miss
Benger, authoress of a _Life of Tobin_, &c.
"You blame us for giving your direction to Miss Wesley," says the
letter; "the woman has been ten times after us about it and we gave it
her at last, under the idea that no further harm would ensue, but that
she would _once_ write to you, and you would bite your lips and forget
to answer it, and so it would end. You read us a dismal homily upon
'Realities.' We know quite as well as you do what are shadows and what
are realities. You, for instance, when you are over your fourth or
fifth jorum, chirping about old school occurrences, are the best of
realities. Shadows are cold, thin things that have no warmth or grasp
in them. Miss Wesley and her friend and a tribe of authoresses that
come after you here daily and, in defect of you, hive and cluster upon
us, are the shadows. You encouraged that mopsey Miss Wesley to dance
after you in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical
anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off by that simple expedient
of referring her to you, but there are more burs in the wind. I came
home t'other day from business, hungry as a hunter, to dinner, with
nothing, I am sure, of the author but _hunger_ about me; and whom
found I closeted with Mary but a friend of this Miss Wesley, one Miss
Benjay or Benje ... I just came in time enough, I believe, luckily to
prevent them from exchanging vows of eternal friendship. It seems she
is one of your authoresses that you first foster and then upbraid us
with. But I forgive you. 'The rogue has given me potions to make me
love him.' Well, go she would not nor step a step over our threshold
till we had promised to come to drink tea with her next night. I had
never seen her before and could not tell who the devil it was that was
so familiar. We went, however, not to be impolite. Her lodgings are up
two pair of stairs in East Street. Tea and coffee and macaroons--a
kind of cake--much love. We sat down. Presently Miss Benjay broke the
silence by declaring herself quite of a different opinion from
_D'Israeli_, who supposes the differences of human intellect to be the
mere effect of organization. She begged to know my opinion. I
attempted to carry it off with a pun upon organ, but that went off
very flat. She immediately conceived a very low opinion of my
metaphysics; and turning round to Mary, put some question to her in
French, possibly having heard that neither Mary nor I understood
French. The explanation that took place occasioned some embarrassment
and much wondering. She then fell into an insulting conversation about
the comparative genius and merits of all modern languages and
concluded with asserting that the Saxon was esteemed the purest
dialect in Germany. From thence she passed into the subject of poetry
where I, who had hitherto sat mute and a hearer only, humbly hoped I
might now put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own
trade in a manner. But I was stopped by a round assertion that no good
poetry had appeared since Dr. Johnson's time. It seems the doctor has
suppressed many hopeful geniuses that way, by the severity of his
critical strictures in his _Lives of the Poets_. I here ventured to
question the fact and was beginning to appeal to _names_ but I was
assured 'it was certainly the case.' Then we discussed Miss More's
[Hannah] book on education, which I had never read. It seems Dr.
Gregory, another of Miss Benjay's friends, had found fault with one of
Miss More's metaphors. Miss More has been at some pains to vindicate
herself, in the opinion of Miss Benjay not without success. It seems
the Doctor is invariably against the use of broken or mixed metaphor
which he reprobates, against the authority of Shakspeare himself. We
next discussed the question whether Pope was a poet? I find Dr.
Gregory is of opinion he was not, though Miss Seward does not at all
concur with him in this. We then sat upon the comparative merits of
the ten translations of Pizarro and Miss Benjay or Benje advised Mary
to take two of them home (she thought it might afford her some
pleasure to compare them _verbatim_), which we declined. It being now
nine o'clock, wine and macaroons were again served round, and we
parted with a promise to go again next week and meet the Miss Porters
who, it seems, have heard much of Mr. Coleridge and wish to see _us_
because we are _his_ friends. I have been preparing for the occasion.
I crowd cotton in my ears. I read all the reviews and magazines of the
past month against the dreadful meeting, and I hope by these means to
cut a tolerable second-rate figure.
"... Take no thought about your proof-sheets; they shall be done as if
Woodfall himself did them. Pray send us word of Mrs. Coleridge and
little David Hartley, your little reality. Farewell, dear Substance.
Take no umbrage at anything I have written.
"I am, and will be,
"Yours ever in sober sadness,
"Land of Shadows, C. LAMB. _Umbra._
"Shadow month 16th or 17th, 1800.
"Write your German as plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself.
You know I am _homo unius linguæ_: in English--illiterate, a dunce, a
ninny."
* * * * *
Mr. Gutch seems to have soon repented him of his friendly deed:--
"I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it
would be agreeable at Our Lady's next feast," writes Lamb to Manning.
"I have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms which look out (when
you stand a-tip-toe) over the Thames and Surrey hills.... My bed faces
the river so as by perking up on my haunches and supporting my carcase
with my elbows, without much wrying my neck I can see the white sails
glide by the bottom of the King's Bench Walk as I lie in my bed ...
casement windows with small panes to look more like a cottage....
There I shall have all the privacy of a house without the encumbrance
and shall be able to lock my friends out as often as I desire to hold
free converse with my immortal mind, for my present lodgings resemble
a minister's levée, I have so increased my acquaintance (as they call
'em) since I have resided in town. Like the country mouse that had
tasted a little of urbane manners, I long to be nibbling my own cheese
by my dear self, without mouse-traps and time-traps."
These rooms were at No. 16, Mitre Court Buildings, and here Lamb and
his sister lived for nine years. But far from "nibbling his own
cheese" by himself, there for nine years he and Mary gathered round
their hearth and homely, hospitable supper-table with its bread and
cheese in these early days and by-and-by its round of beef or "winter
hand of pork," an ever lengthening succession of friends, cronies and
acquaintance. There came Manning with his "fine, sceptical, dogmatical
face"; and George Dyer, with his head full of innutritious learning
and his heart of the milk of kindness. And Godwin the man of strange
contrasts, a bold thinker yet ignorant as a child of human nature and
weakly vain; with such a "noisy fame," for a time, as if he were
"Briareus Centimanus or a Tityus tall enough to pull Jupiter from his
heavens," and then soon forgotten, or remembered only to be denounced;
for a year the loving husband of one of the sweetest and noblest of
women and after her death led captive by the coarse flatteries and
vulgar pretensions of one of the commonest. "Is it possible that I
behold the immortal Godwin?" said, from a neighbouring balcony, she
who in a few months became his second wife and in a few more had
alienated some of his oldest friends and earned the cordial dislike of
all, even of Lamb. "I will be buried with this inscription over me,
'Here lies C. L., the woman-hater,' I mean that hated one woman; for
the rest, God bless 'em," was his whimsical way of venting his
feelings towards her; and Shelley experienced the like though he
expressed them less pungently. Then there was Holcroft who had fought
his way up from grimmest poverty, misery and ignorance to the position
of an accomplished literary man; and fine old Captain Burney who had
been taught his accidence by Eugene Aram and had sailed round the
world with Captain Cook. And his son, 'noisy Martin' with the
'spotless soul,' for forty years boy and man, Mary's favourite; and
Phillips of the Marines who was with Captain Cook at his death and
shot the savage that killed him; and Rickman "the finest fellow to
drop in a' nights," Southey's great friend, though he 'never read his
poetry,' as Lamb tells; staunch Crabb Robinson; Fanny Kelly, with her
"divine plain face" who died but the other day at the age of ninety
odd; and Mr. Dawe, R.A., a figure of nature's own purest comedy. All
these and many more frequented the home of Charles and Mary Lamb in
these years and live in their letters.
CHAPTER V.
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.
CHAPTER VI.
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.
CHAPTER VII.
Mary in the Asylum again.--Lamb's Letter with a Poem of hers.--Her slow
Recovery.--Letters to Sarah Stoddart.--The _Tales from Shakespeare_
begun.--Hazlitt's Portrait of Lamb.--Sarah's Lovers.--The Farce of
_Mr. H._
1805-6.--Æt. 41-2.
The letter to Miss Wordsworth called forth a response; but, alas! Mary
was in sad exile when it arrived and Charles, with a heart full of
grief, wrote for her:--
"14th June 1805.
"Your long kind letter has not been thrown away (for it has given me
great pleasure to find you are all resuming your old occupations and
are better); but poor Mary, to whom it is addressed, cannot yet relish
it. She has been attacked by one of her severe illnesses and is at
present _from home_. Last Monday week was the day she left me and I
hope I may calculate upon having her again in a month or little more.
I am rather afraid late hours have, in this case, contributed to her
indisposition.... I have every reason to suppose that this illness,
like all the former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always
feel so. Meantime she is dead to me, and 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. To say all that I know
of her would be more than I think anybody could believe or even
understand; and when I hope to have her well again with me it would be
sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her, for I can
conceal nothing that I do from 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. She would share life and death,
heaven and hell with me. She lives but for me; and I know I have been
wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly with my
cursed drinking and ways of going on. But even in this upbraiding of
myself I am offending against her for I know that she has clung to me
for better for worse; and if the balance has been against her hitherto
it was a noble trade....
"I cannot resist transcribing three or four lines which poor Mary made
upon a picture (a 'Holy Family') which we saw at an auction only one
week before she left home. She was then beginning to show signs of
ill-boding. They are sweet lines, and upon a sweet picture; but I send
them only as the last memorial of her:--
VIRGIN AND CHILD, L. da Vinci.
Maternal lady, with thy virgin grace,
Heaven-born thy Jesus seemeth sure,
And thou a virgin pure.
Lady most perfect, when thy angel face
Men look upon, they wish to be
A Catholic, Madonna fair, to worship thee.
"You had her lines about the 'Lady Blanch.' You have not had some
which she wrote upon a copy of a girl from Titian which I had hung up
where that print of Blanch and the Abbess (as she beautifully
interpreted two female figures from L. da Vinci) had hung in our room.
'Tis light and pretty:--
Who art thou, fair one, who usurp'st the place
Of Blanch, the lady of the matchless grace?
Come, fair and pretty tell to me
Who in thy life-time thou might'st be?
Thou pretty art and fair,
But with the Lady Blanch thou never must compare.
No need for Blanch her history to tell,
Whoever saw her face, they there did read it well;
But when I look on thee, I only know
There lived a pretty maid some hundred years ago.
"This is a little unfair, to tell so much about ourselves and to
advert so little to your letter, so full of comfortable tidings of you
all. But my own cares press pretty close upon me and you can make
allowances. That you may go on gathering strength and peace is my next
wish to Mary's recovery.
"I had almost forgot your repeated invitation. Supposing that Mary
will be well and able there is another _ability_ which you may guess
at which I cannot promise myself. In prudence we ought not to come.
This illness will make it still more prudential to wait. It is not a
balance of this way of spending our money against another way but an
absolute question of whether we shall stop now or go on wasting away
the little we have got beforehand which my wise conduct has already
encroached upon one half."
Pity it is that the little poem on the 'Lady Blanch' should have
perished, as I fear it has, if it contained as 'sweet lines' as the
foregoing.
Little more than a month after this (July 27), Charles writes cheerfully
to Manning:--
"My old housekeeper has shown signs of convalescence and will shortly
resume the power of the keys, so I shan't be cheated of my tea and
liquors. Wind in the West which promotes tranquillity. Have leisure
now to anticipate seeing thee again. Have been taking leave [it was a
very short leave] of tobacco in a rhyming address. Had thought _that
vein_ had long since closed up. Find I can rhyme and reason too. Think
of studying mathematics to restrain the fire of my genius which George
Dyer recommends. Have frequent bleedings at the nose which shows
plethoric. Maybe shall try the sea myself, that great scene of
wonders. Got incredibly sober and regular; shave oftener and hum a
tune to signify cheerfulness and gallantry.
"Suddenly disposed to sleep, having taken a quart of pease with bacon
and stout. Will not refuse nature who has done such things for me!
"Nurse! don't call me unless Mr. Manning comes.--What! the gentleman
in spectacles?--Yes.
_Dormit_. C. L.
"Saturday, Hot noon."
But although Mary was sufficiently recovered to return home at the end
of the summer she continued much shaken by the severity of this attack
and so also did her brother all through the autumn; as the following
letters to Sarah Stoddart and still more one already quoted (pp. 75-6)
show:--
"September 1805.
"Certainly you are the best letter-writer (besides writing the best
hand) in the world. I have just been reading over again your two long
letters and I perceive they make me very envious. I have taken a bran
new pen and put on my _spectacles_ and am peering with all my might to
see the lines in the paper which the sight of your even lines had
well-nigh tempted me to rule; and I have moreover taken two pinches of
snuff extraordinary to clear my head which feels more cloudy than
common this fine cheerful morning.
"All I can gather from your clear and, I have no doubt, faithful
history of Maltese politics is that the good doctor, though a firm
friend, an excellent fancier of brooches, a good husband, an upright
advocate and, in short, all that they say upon tombstones (for I do
not recollect that they celebrate any fraternal virtues there)--yet is
he but a _moody_ brother; that your sister-in-law is pretty much like
what all sisters-in-law have been since the first happy invention of
the marriage state; that friend Coleridge has undergone no alteration
by crossing the Atlantic [geography was evidently no part of Captain
Starkey's curriculum] for his friendliness to you as well as the
oddities you mention are just what one ought to look for from him; and
that you, my dear Sarah, have proved yourself just as unfit to
flourish in a little proud garrison town as I did shrewdly suspect you
were before you went there.
"If I possibly can I will prevail upon Charles to write to your brother
by the conveyance you mention; but he is so unwell I almost fear the
fortnight will slip away before I can get him in the right vein. Indeed,
it has been sad and heavy times with us lately. When I am pretty well
his low spirits throw me back again; and when he begins to get a little
cheerful then I do the same kind office for him. I heartily wish for the
arrival of Coleridge; a few such evenings as we have sometimes passed
with him would wind us up and set us going again.
"Do not say anything when you write of our low spirits; it will vex
Charles. You would laugh or you would cry, perhaps both, to see us sit
together looking at each other with long and rueful faces and saying
'How do you do?' and 'How do you do?' and then we fall a crying and say
we will be better on the morrow. He says we are like tooth-ache and his
friend gum-boil which, though a kind of ease, is but an uneasy kind of
ease, a comfort of rather an uncomfortable sort.
"I rejoice to hear of your mother's amendment; when you can leave her
with any satisfaction to yourself--which, as her sister, I think I
understand by your letter, is with her, I hope you may soon be able to
do--let me know upon what plan you mean to come to town. Your brother
proposed your being six months in town and six with your mother; but
he did not then know of your poor mother's illness. By his desire I
enquired for a respectable family for you to board with and from
Captain Burney I heard of one I thought would suit you at that time.
He particularly desires I would not think of your being with us, not
thinking, I conjecture, the house of a single man _respectable_
enough. Your brother gave me most unlimited orders to domineer over
you, to be the inspector of all your actions and to direct and govern
you with a stern voice and a high hand; to be, in short, a very elder
brother over you. Does the hearing of this, my meek pupil, make you
long to come to London? I am making all the proper enquiries, against
the time, of the newest and most approved modes (being myself mainly
ignorant in these points) of etiquette and nicely correct maidenly
manners.
"But to speak seriously. I mean, when we meet, that we will lay our
heads together and consult and contrive the best way of making the
best girl in the world the fine lady her brother wishes to see her and
believe me, Sarah, it is not so difficult a matter as one is apt to
imagine. I have observed many a demure lady who passes muster
admirably well who, I think, we could easily learn to imitate in a
week or two. We will talk of these things when we meet. In the
meantime I give you free leave to be happy and merry at Salisbury in
any way you can. Has the partridge season opened any communication
between you and William? As I allow you to be imprudent till I see
you, I shall expect to hear you have invited him to taste his own
birds. Have you scratched him out of your will yet? Rickman is married
and that is all the news I have to send you. I seem, upon looking over
my letter again, to have written too lightly of your distresses at
Malta; but, however I may have written, believe me I enter very
feelingly into all your troubles. I love you and I love your brother;
and between you, both of whom, I think, have been to blame, I know not
what to say--only this I say,--try to think as little as possible of
past miscarriages; it was perhaps so ordered by Providence that you
might return home to be a comfort to your mother."
No long holiday trip was to be ventured on while Mary continued thus
shaken and depressed. "We have been two tiny excursions this summer,
for three or four days each, to a place near Harrow and to Egham where
Cooper's Hill is and that is the total history of our rustication this
year", Charles tells Wordsworth. In October Mary gives a slightly
better account of herself:--
"I have made many attempts at writing to you, but it has always
brought your troubles and my own so strongly into my mind, that I have
been obliged to leave off and make Charles write for me. I am resolved
now, however few lines I write, this shall go; for I know, my kind
friend, you will like once more to see my own handwriting.
"I have been for these few days past in rather better spirits, so that
I begin almost to feel myself once more a living creature and to hope
for happier times; and in that hope I include the prospect of once
more seeing my dear Sarah in peace and comfort in our old garret. How
did I wish for your presence to cheer my drooping heart when I
returned home from banishment.
"Is your being with or near your poor dear mother necessary to her
comfort? Does she take any notice of you? And is there any prospect of
her recovery? How I grieve for her, for you....
"I went to the Admiralty, about your mother's pension; from thence I
was directed to an office in Lincoln's Inn.... They informed me it
could not be paid to any person but Mr. Wray without a letter of
attorney.... Do not let us neglect this business and make use of me in
any way you can.
"I have much to thank you and your kind brother for. I kept the dark
silk, as you may suppose. You have made me very fine; the brooch is
very beautiful. Mrs. Jeffries wept for gratitude when she saw your
present; she desires all manner of thanks and good wishes. Your maid's
sister has gone to live a few miles from town. Charles, however, found
her out and gave her the handkerchief.
"I want to know if you have seen William and if there is any prospect
in future there. All you said in your letter from Portsmouth that
related to him was so burnt in the fumigating that we could only make
out that it was unfavourable but not the particulars; tell us again
how you go on or if you have seen him. I conceit affairs will somehow
be made up between you at last.
"I want to know how your brother goes on. Is he likely to make a very
good fortune and in how long a time? And how is he in the way of home
comforts--I mean is he very happy with Mrs. Stoddart? This was a
question I could not ask while you were there and perhaps is not a
fair one now; but I want to know how you all went on and, in short,
twenty little foolish questions that one ought, perhaps, rather to ask
when we meet than to write about. But do make me a little acquainted
with the inside of the good doctor's house and what passes therein.
"Was Coleridge often with you? or did your brother and Col. argue long
arguments till between the two great argue-ers there grew a little
coolness; or perchance the mighty friendship between Coleridge and
your Sovereign governor, Sir Alexander Ball, might create a kind of
jealousy; for we fancy something of a coolness did exist from the
little mention of C. ever made in your brother's letters.
"Write us, my good girl, a long gossiping letter answering all these
foolish questions--and tell me any silly thing you can recollect--any,
the least particular, will be interesting to us and we will never tell
tales out of school; but we used to wonder and wonder how you all went
on; and when you was coming home we said 'Now we shall hear all from
Sarah.'
"God bless you, my dear friend.... If you have sent Charles any
commissions he has not executed write me word--he says he has lost or
mislaid a letter desiring him to inquire about a wig. Write two
letters--one of business and pensions and one all about Sarah Stoddart
and Malta.
"We have got a picture of Charles; do you think your brother would
like to have it? If you do, can you put us in a way how to send it?"
Mary's interest in her friend and her friend's affairs is so hearty
one cannot choose but share it and would gladly see what "the best
letter-writer in the world" had to tell of Coleridge and Stoddart and
the long arguments and little jealousies; and whether 'William' had
continued to dangle on, spite of distance and discouragement; and even
to learn that the old lady received her pension and her wig in safety.
But curiosity must remain unsatisfied for none of Miss Stoddart's
letters have been preserved.
"The picture of Charles" was, we may feel pretty sure, one which
William Hazlitt painted this year of Lamb 'in the costume of a
Venetian senator.' It is, on all accounts, a peculiarly interesting
portrait. Lamb was just thirty; and it gives, on the whole, a striking
impression of the nobility and beauty of form and feature which
characterised his head and partly realises Proctor's description--"a
countenance so full of sensibility that it came upon you like a new
thought which you could not help dwelling upon afterwards"; though the
subtle lines which gave that wondrous sweetness of expression to the
mouth are not fully rendered. Compared with the drawing by Hancock,
done when Lamb was twenty-three, engraved in Cottle's _Early
Recollections of Coleridge_, each may be said to corroborate the truth
of the other, allowing for difference of age and aspect,--Hancock's
being in profile, Hazlitt's (of which there is a good lithograph in
Barry Cornwall's _Memoir_) nearly full face. The print from it
prefixed to Fitzgerald's _Lamb_ is almost unrecognisable. It was the
last time Hazlitt took brush in hand, his grandson tells us; and it
comes as a pleasant surprise--an indication that he was too modest in
estimating his own gifts as a painter; and that the freshness of
feeling and insight he displayed as an art critic were backed by some
capacity for good workmanship.
It was whilst this portrait was being painted that the acquaintance
between Lamb and Hazlitt ripened into an intimacy which, with one or
two brief interruptions, was to be fruitful, invigorating on both
sides and life-long. Hazlitt was at this time staying with his brother
John, a successful miniature-painter and a member of the Godwin circle
much frequented by the Lambs.
"It is not well to be very poor which we certainly are at this
present," Mary had lately written. This it was which spurred her on to
undertake her first literary venture, the _Tales from Shakespeare_.
The nature of the malady from which she suffered made continuous
mental exertion distressing and probably injurious; so that without
this spur she would never, we may be sure, have dug and planted her
little plot in the field of literature and made of it a sweet and
pleasant place for the young where they may play and be nourished,
regardless of time and change. The first hint of any such scheme
occurs in a letter to Sarah Stoddart dated April 22, 1806, written the
very day she had left the Lambs:--
"I have heard that Coleridge was lately going through Sicily to Rome
with a party; but that, being unwell, he returned back to Naples. We
think there is some mistake in this account and that his intended
journey to Rome was in his former jaunt to Naples. If you know that at
that time he had any such intention will you write instantly? for I do
not know whether I ought to write to Mrs. Coleridge or not.
"I am going to make a sort of promise to myself and to you that I will
write you kind of journal-like letters of the daily what-we-do
matters, as they occur. This day seems to me a kind of new era in our
time. It is not a birthday, nor a new year's day, nor a leave-off
smoking day; but it is about an hour after the time of leaving you,
our poor Phoenix, in the Salisbury stage and Charles has just left me
to go to his lodgings [a room to work in free from the distraction of
constant visitors just hired experimentally] and I am holding a
solitary consultation with myself as to how I shall employ myself.
"Writing plays, novels, poems and all manner of such like vapouring
and vapourish schemes are floating in my head which, at the same time,
aches with the thought of parting from you and is perplext at the idea
of I cannot tell what-about-notion that I have not made you half so
comfortable as I ought to have done and a melancholy sense of the dull
prospect you have before you on your return home. Then I think I will
make my new gown; and now I consider the white petticoat will be
better candle-light work; and then I look at the fire and think if the
irons was but down I would iron my gowns--you having put me out of
conceit of mangling.
"So much for an account of my own confused head; and now for yours.
Returning home from the inn we took that to pieces and canvassed you,
as you know is our usual custom. We agreed we should miss you sadly,
and that you had been what you yourself discovered, _not at all in our
way_; and although, if the postmaster should happen to open this, it
would appear to him to be no great compliment yet you, who enter so
warmly into the interior of our affairs, will understand and value it
as well as what we likewise asserted that since you have been with us
you have done but one foolish thing, _vide_ Pinckhorn (excuse my bad
Latin, if it should chance to mean exactly contrary to what I intend).
We praised you for the very friendly way in which you regarded all our
whimsies and, to use a phrase of Coleridge, _understood us_. We had,
in short, no drawback on our eulogy on your merit except lamenting the
want of respect you have to yourself, the want of a certain dignity of
action, you know what I mean, which--though it only broke out in the
acceptance of the old justice's book and was, as it were, smothered
and almost extinct while you were here--yet is it so native a feeling
in your mind that you will do whatever the present moment prompts you
to do, that I wish you would take that one slight offence seriously to
heart and make it a part of your daily consideration to drive this
unlucky propensity, root and branch, out of your character. Then,
mercy on us, what a perfect little gentlewoman you will be!!!
"You are not yet arrived at the first stage of your journey; yet have
I the sense of your absence so strong upon me that I was really
thinking what news I had to send you, and what had happened since you
had left us. Truly nothing, except that Martin Burney met us in
Lincoln's Inn Fields and borrowed fourpence, of the repayment of which
sum I will send you due notice.
"_Friday._--Last night I told Charles of your matrimonial overtures
from Mr. White and of the cause of that business being at a
_standstill_. Your generous conduct in acquainting Mr. White with the
vexatious affair at Malta highly pleased him. He entirely approves of
it. You would be quite comforted to hear what he said on the subject.
"He wishes you success; and when Coleridge comes will consult with him
about what is best to be done. But I charge you be most strictly
cautious how you proceed yourself. Do not give Mr. W. any reason to
think you indiscreet; let him return of his own accord and keep the
probability of his doing so full in your mind; so, I mean, as to
regulate your whole conduct by that expectation. Do not allow yourself
to see, or in any way renew your acquaintance with William nor do any
other silly thing of that kind; for you may depend upon it he will be
a kind of spy upon you and, if he observes nothing that he disapproves
of you will certainly hear of him again in time.
"Charles is gone to finish the farce [_Mr. H._] and I am to hear it
read this night. I am so uneasy between my hopes and fears of how I
shall like it that I do not know what I am doing. I need not tell you
so for before I send this I shall be able to tell you all about it. If
I think it will amuse you I will send you a copy. _The bed was very
cold last night._
"I have received your letter and am happy to hear that your mother has
been so well in your absence, which I wish had been prolonged a
little, for you have been wanted to copy out the Farce, in the writing
of which I made many an unlucky blunder.
"The said Farce I carried (after many consultations of who was the
most proper person to perform so important an office) to Wroughton,
the manager of Drury Lane. He was very civil to me; said it did not
depend upon himself, but that he would put it into the proprietor's
hands, and that we should certainly have an answer from them.
"I have been unable to finish this sheet before, for Charles has taken
a week's holliday from his lodging to rest himself after his labour,
and we have talked of nothing but the Farce night and day; but
yesterday I carried it to Wroughton, and since it has been out of the
way our minds have been a little easier. I wish you had been with us
to have given your opinion. I have half a mind to scribble another
copy and send it you. I like it very much, and cannot help having
great hopes of its success.
"I would say I was very sorry for the death of Mr. White's father, but
not knowing the good old gentleman, I cannot help being as well
satisfied that he is gone, for his son will feel rather lonely, and
so, perhaps, he may chance to visit again Winterslow. You so well
describe your brother's grave lecturing letter, that you make me
ashamed of part of mine. I would fain re-write it, leaving out my
'_sage advice_'; but if I begin another letter something may fall out
to prevent me from finishing it, and, therefore, skip over it as well
as you can; it shall be the last I ever send you.
"It is well enough when one is talking to a friend to hedge in an odd
word by way of counsel now and then; but there is something mighty
irksome in its staring upon one in a letter, where one ought only to
see kind words and friendly remembrances.
"I have heard a vague report from the Dawes (the pleasant-looking
young lady we called upon was Miss Dawe) that Coleridge returned back
to Naples; they are to make further inquiries and let me know the
particulars. We have seen little or nothing of Manning since you went.
Your friend George Burnett calls as usual for Charles _to point out
something for him_. I miss you sadly, and but for the fidget I have
been in about the Farce, I should have missed you still more. I am
sorry you cannot get your money; continue to tell us all your
perplexities, and do not mind being called Widow Blackacre.
"Say all in your mind about your _Lover_; now Charles knows of it, he
will be as anxious to hear as me. All the time we can spare from
talking of the characters and plot of the Farce, we talk of you. I
have got a fresh bottle of brandy to-day; if you were here you should
have a glass, _three parts brandy_, so you should. I bought a pound of
bacon to-day, not so good as yours. I wish the little caps were
finished. I am glad the medicines and the cordials bore the fatigue of
their journey so well. I promise you I will write often, and _not mind
the postage_. God bless you. Charles does _not_ send his love because
he is not here. _Write as often as ever you can._ Do not work too
hard."
There is a little anecdote of Sarah Stoddart, told by her grandson,
which helps to mitigate our astonishment at Mary's too hospitable
suggestion in regard to the brandy. Lieutenant Stoddart would
sometimes, while sipping his grog, say to his children, "John, will
you have some?" "No thank you, father." "Sarah, will you?" "Yes,
please, father." "Not," adds Mr. Hazlitt, "that she ever indulged to
excess; but she was that sort of woman." Very far, certainly, from
"the perfect little gentlewoman" Mary hoped one day to see her; but
friendly, not without brains, with a kindly heart, and her worst
qualities such, surely, as spread themselves freely on the surface,
but strike no deep or poisonous roots. "Do not mind being called Widow
Blackacre," says Mary, alluding to one of the characters in
Wycherley's _Plain Dealer_. It certainly was not gratifying to be
likened to that "perverse, bustling, masculine, pettifogging, and
litigious" lady, albeit Macaulay speaks of her as Wycherley's happiest
creation.
When Hazlitt returned to Wem, Lamb sent him his first letter full of
friendly gossip:--
"... We miss you, as we foretold we should. One or two things have
happened which are beneath the dignity of epistolary communication,
but which, seated about our fireside at night (the winter hands of
pork have begun), gesture and emphasis might have talked into some
importance. Something about Rickman's wife, for instance; how tall she
is, and that she visits pranked up like a Queen of the May with green
streamers; a good-natured woman though, which is as much as you can
expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor.
Something, too, about Monkey [Louisa Martin], which can't so well be
written; how it set up for a fine lady, and thought it had got lovers
and was obliged to be convinced of its age from the parish register,
where it was proved to be only twelve, and an edict issued that it
should not give itself airs yet this four years; and how it got leave
to be called Miss by grace. These, and such like hows were in my head
to tell you, but who can write? Also how Manning is come to town in
spectacles, and studies physic; is melancholy, and seems to have
something in his head which he don't impart. Then, how I am going to
leave off smoking.... You disappoint me in passing over in absolute
silence the Blenheim Leonardo. Didn't you see it? Excuse a lover's
curiosity. I have seen no pictures of note since, except Mr. Dawe's
gallery. It is curious to see how differently two great men treat the
same subject, yet both excellent in their way. For instance, Milton
and Mr. Dawe. Mr. D. has chosen to illustrate the story of Samson
exactly in the point of view in which Milton has been most happy; the
interview between the Jewish hero, blind and captive, and Dalilah.
Milton has imagined his locks grown again, strong as horsehair or
porcupine's bristles; doubtless shaggy and black, as being hairs
'which of a nation armed contained the strength.' I don't remember he
_says_ black; but could Milton imagine them to be yellow? Do you? Mr.
Dawe, with striking originality of conception, has crowned him with a
thin yellow wig; in colour precisely like Dyson's, in curl and
quantity resembling Mrs. Professor's (Godwin's wife); his limbs rather
stout, about such a man as my brother or Rickman, but no Atlas, nor
Hercules, nor yet so long as Dubois, the clown of Sadler's Wells. This
was judicious, taking the spirit of the story rather than the fact;
for doubtless God could communicate national salvation to the trust of
flax and tow as well as hemp and cordage, and could draw down a temple
with a golden tress, as soon as with all the cables of the British
navy....
"Wasn't you sorry for Lord Nelson? I have followed him in fancy ever
since I saw him in Pall Mall (I was prejudiced against him before),
looking just as a hero should look, and I have been very much cut
about it indeed. He was the only pretence of a great man we had.
Nobody is left of any name at all. His secretary died by his side. I
imagined him a Mr. Scott, to be the man you met at Hume's, but I learn
from Mrs. Hume it is not the same.... What other news is there, Mary?
What puns have I made in the last fortnight? You never remember them.
You have no relish for the comic. 'Oh, tell Hazlitt not to forget to
send the _American Farmer_. I daresay it's not as good as he fancies;
but a book's a book.'..."
Mary was no exclusive lover of her brother's old folios, his "ragged
veterans" and "midnight darlings," but a miscellaneous reader with a
decided leaning to modern tales and adventures--to "a story, well,
ill, or indifferently told, so there be life stirring in it," as Elia
has told.
It may be worth noting here that the Mr. Scott mentioned above, who
was not the secretary killed by Nelson's side, was his chaplain and,
though not killed, he received a wound in the skull of so curious a
nature as to cause occasionally a sudden suspension of memory. In the
midst of a sentence he would stop abruptly, losing, apparently, all
mental consciousness; and after a lapse of time, would resume at the
very word with which he had left off, wholly unaware of any breach of
continuity; as one who knew him has often related to me.
CHAPTER VIII.
The _Tales from Shakespeare_.--Letters to Sarah Stoddart.
1806.--Æt. 42.
Once begun, the _Tales from Shakespeare_ were worked at with spirit
and rapidity. By May 10th Charles writes to Manning:--
"[Mary] says you saw her writings about the other day, and she wishes
you should know what they are. She is doing for Godwin's bookseller
twenty of Shakespeare's plays, to be made into children's tales. Six
are already done by her; to wit, _The Tempest_, _A Winter's Tale_,
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, _Much Ado about Nothing_, _The Two
Gentlemen of Verona_, and _Cymbeline_. The _Merchant of Venice_ is in
forwardness. 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 is to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done them
capitally I think you'd think."
"Godwin's bookseller" was really Godwin himself, who at his wife's
urgent entreaty had just started a "Magazine" of children's books in
Hanway Street, hoping thus to add to his precarious earnings as an
author. His own name was in such ill odour with the orthodox that he
used his foreman's--Thomas Hodgkins--over the shop door and on the
title pages, whilst the juvenile books which he himself wrote were
published u
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