Chapter 7

Mary soon grew better, and he exerted himself to have her released from confinement. He succeeded in doing so by entering into a solemn agreement to make her his charge for life, and to watch over her that she should do no harm. When she was returned to him he was almost happy again, in spite of the shadow caused by the memory of what had happened, as well as by the uncertainty of the future. He had but one hundred pounds a year from his clerkship, and there was a maiden aunt as well as the father to be cared for. But he says cheerfully:--

"If my father, my aunt, my sister, and an old maid servant cannot live comfortably on one hundred and twenty or one hundred and thirty pounds a year, we ought to burn by slow fires; and I almost would, that Mary might not go to a hospital."

And he hoped to earn the twenty or thirty pounds by literature. His father had to be amused by cribbage; and many were the weary hours that Charles would sit playing with him, to the neglect of his correspondence, his friends, the thousand-and-one private interests which filled up his little leisure. Sometimes he would try to be let off, but the old man would say, reproachfully, "If you won't play with me, you might as well not come home at all;" and the dutiful son set to afresh. There is a sort of heroism in this which only those people can appreciate who really value their time. These people will give all else cheerfully,--money, strength, the heart's deep devotion,--but they give very grudgingly their precious moments; they feel as though they were being robbed in every hour thus lost. Oh, the agony of impatience! oh, the restlessness of the fever which consumes them when they feel the moments fleeing away, and the unconscious thief perhaps deriving little pleasure or profit from the loss! Rebellion against fate is often a virtue under such circumstances; and we are inclined to think it would have been so in the case of poor Elia, even though the poor old man should have gone to his grave with a few less games of cribbage recorded against him.

Think of the delicious essays which might have been written in those misspent hours, in those days of youth when Elia was at his best, before the sorrowful touches of Time had been left upon his genius; think of the exquisite letters his friends might have received, and which would have enriched all the coming time; think of the inimitable drolleries which would have sent a smile over the face of the world; think of the little pathetic touches he would have given in sketches of characteristic humor, all with the freshness of his dawn upon them,--and mourn, O world of letters, for your loss! But the old man,--he for whom the light had gone out in darkness; over whose brain the cobwebs had been woven; who had no joy in the great things of this life; who saw no beauty or splendor in the outer world; who had no treasure in the world of thought; who could not be stirred again by any of the absorbing passions of life; who knew no love, no hate, no ambition, no great impulse to do or to dare; who could not enter into the realm of books or art or music; who had not even a friend in all the universe of God; think of the old man who had only this one thing,--cards,--and pause a moment before you say that gentle Elia did not well.

Finally the old man, too, went his way, and there were only Charles and Mary left. He had long since given up the hope of there being a third in their life-drama, although there had been one to whom his heart was given, and whose presence had been with him always, even in his days of madness,--sweet Alice W., as he always called her, but of whom the world has lost all trace save this, that she was Charles Lamb's early and only love, and that he treasured her memory until all were gone, "the old familiar faces." Long after she was married to another, Lamb used to be seen at evening pacing up and down in front of her house, hoping to catch a glimpse of her through the windows. But after he had taken Mary to be his charge it was impossible to think of marriage. He could not ask another to share his sad vigils with the afflicted sister, nor hope that another would look upon her with his eyes; so he buried his romance out of sight, and never turned to that phase of a man's life again. At twenty-two one does not easily give up the thoughts of love, or the hopes of home with wife and children,--and Charles had his struggle, as any strong man would have had; but he conquered himself once again, and went bravely on. Day by day he toiled at the India House, never losing time, never taking a vacation, ever at his post till he was fifty years old, when he "came home forever."

During those thirty years of steady toil he went through many sad experiences with Mary; but he must earn their daily bread, and he never left his post. Many were the nights he spent in anxious watchings with her,--for she had periodical returns of her insanity during all this time,--when, sleepless and harassed to the point of exhaustion with her dangerous vagaries, he must still rise in the morning and go to his desk. Many were the days when he ran in hot haste the moment he was released, to see that she was still safe; even many hand-to-hand encounters he had with her in her dangerous hours,--but no murmur ever escaped his lips at all this. When she became very bad he took her back to the asylum, and she remained sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months; but he always eagerly reclaimed her the moment she was better. He took her with him on little journeys,--a strait-jacket always safely packed in her portmanteau by herself,--and one time she went mad while they were travelling in the diligence and far from home. Often he wrote to their friends in the later days, when he had become somewhat famous and friends had grown plenty, to apologize for not keeping engagements or accepting invitations, "My sister is taken ill." As George W. Curtis once wrote,--

"In those few words how much tragedy lies hidden! What a life of patient heroism do they suggest!--in comparison with which the career of Lamb's huge contemporary, Bonaparte, shrinks into the meanest melodrama; while the misanthropic mouthings of Lord Byron become maudlin when we recall the sweet, life-long, heroic silence of Charles Lamb."

"What sad, large pieces it cuts out of life," Lamb writes in 1809,--"out of _her_ life, who is getting rather old; and we may not have many years to live together." Once again when she was in confinement he writes:--

"It cuts out great slices of the time--the little time--we shall have to live together. But I won't talk of death; I will imagine us immortal, or forget that we are otherwise. By God's blessing, in a few weeks we may be taking our meal together, or sitting in the front row of the pit at Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look at the outside of them at least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget that we are assailable; we are strong for the time as rocks,--the wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs."

Then away on in 1833 he writes to Wordsworth:--

"Mary is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three months, followed by two of depression most dreadful. . . . I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing,--nice little durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration,--shocking as they were to me then."

This sister was a woman quite worthy of his devotion. Possessed of genius somewhat akin to that of her brother, she also handled a delicate pen, and but for her misfortune would have been well known in the world of books. She was in complete sympathy with her brother, in heart as well as in mind. And the record of their lives is one of the most beautiful pictures of brotherly and sisterly affection in all literature.

Let us turn from the dark picture, and see some of the brighter sides of this life, sketched so far in Rembrandt-like color. Throughout all this darkness and dread, he had joked and jested his way on, amusing his friends in private, and entertaining the world of letters by his genial humor. It welled up as from a hidden fountain, and that fountain never failed but with life. So easily and spontaneously did it flow, that if he wanted an order to see the play, for some friends, he would scribble something like this to Ayrton:--

"I would go to the play In a very economical sort of a way, Rather to see Than be seen; Though I'm no ill sight Neither-- By candle-light, And in some kinds of weather, You might pit me for height Against Kean; But in a grand tragic scene I'm nothing. It would create a kind of loathing To see me act Hamlet; There'd be many a damn let Fly At my presumption, If I should try,-- Being a fellow of no gumption."

And so on through half a dozen verses of exquisite nonsense. And in every little note to his many friends there was always some characteristic touch to excite their ready smiles; as in the note to Coleridge, who had carried off some of his books:--"There is a devilish gap in my shelf where you have knocked out the two eye-teeth," and where he goes on to beg him in a whimsical way to return them--because, although he had himself borrowed them of somebody else, they had long adorned his shelf. Truly, most people who own books at all can sympathize with Lamb in this, though they may think he got off lightly to have only the two eye-teeth knocked out. We have known of cases where cuspids, bicuspids, and molars have all been extracted. These letters are all exquisitely droll, the most of them containing a gentle oath or two, as where he wrote "Some d----d people have come in, and I must stop;" and then recollecting that he was writing to a "proper" person, making a postscript which says, "when I wrote d----d I only meant deuced." But one would as soon think of dropping out Shakspeare's adjective, and saying (as a very prim lady we once knew did in reading Lady Macbeth's soliloquy), "Out, spot!" as to drop out any of Lamb's qualifying words. He was sometimes accused of being irreverent, as in his article upon "Saying Graces," where he affirms that he is more disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day than before his dinner, and inquires why not say them over books, those spiritual repasts. But he was very far indeed from being irreverent, and had much of genuine religious feeling.

His hospitality was unbounded, and the evenings at his home have become as well known in literature as the grand evenings at Holland House.

His friends were the first literary men of the day,--Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Barry Cornwall, Talfourd, Hazlitt, Southey, Coleridge,--all the giants of that day and generation, and he was loved by them all. Not that they did not know and deplore his faults,--or his one fault; for if he could have conquered his fondness for wine he would have had none of much moment left. But even this was overlooked by his friends at the time, and has not been considered as entirely inexcusable by posterity. That he smoked much and drank hard, even for that day, may be true; but it can scarcely justify the bitter sneers of Carlyle, or the holding of him up as an awful warning without putting in any plea in mitigation, as is sometimes done by severe moralists in our own day. He abased himself in awful shame over it many a time in life, and suffered in his own person all the fearful retribution which such habits bring in their train. Let this be sufficient for us, and let us but pity and pass on. One of the most beautiful things in his later life was his fatherly tenderness toward a friendless young girl whom he and Mary had befriended and finally adopted,--Emma Isola, who was afterwards married to Moxon, the publisher. He was extremely fond of her, and she brightened his home much in the later years, although she married before his death. It is sad to think that he should have died before his sister. He had often prayed that this might not be. But he provided for her tenderly, and gave her to the care of his friends.

Lamb is described as having a face of "quivering sweetness, nervous, tremulous, and so slight of frame that he looked only fit for the most placid fortune."

Fit or not, he had to contend with the hardest thing a man can have in life,--he had to live a life-long witness of the sufferings of one he dearly loved, and whom he was entirely powerless to help, the daily and hourly pathos of whose sufferings he was fitted to appreciate keenly, and for whom in all this wide weltering chaos of a world there was no hope. He renounced everything else in life to try to mitigate this dreadful lot. His kindness was unceasing, his pity was both fatherly and motherly; it was more,--Godlike; and yet it was of small avail. He toiled physically that she might live at ease. He exerted his mind constantly when in her presence, that she might be cheerful. He watched over her with the tenderness of both brother and lover; and this shall be his justification, if he needs one: he loved much.

CHRISTOPHER NORTH.

Hazlitt has a long paper "On Persons One would Wish to have Seen." And surely, if he had lived at this time, he would have added genial and lovable Kit North to the list of those thus honored. There are few of those who belonged to his day and generation to whom we should have a stronger wish to be presented, than to Wilson,--the student, the Bohemian, the bookworm, the sportsman, the professor, the kindliest, merriest, and most entertaining of genial companions,--the great hero of the "Noctes Ambrosianæ."

Not even Lamb--the quaint and merry companion, so full of quips and puns that laughter lingered with any company he graced with his pathetic little body and quizzical countenance--could rival Christopher as a fountain of merriment and eternal good-cheer. His humor was not quiet and subtle like Lamb's, but broad, rich, bordering on farce, and of "imagination all compact." And Lamb could by no means rival him in splendor of description, vivacity of retort, energy of criticism, or in riotous and uproarious mirth. De Quincey alone could match the splendor of his diction when describing outward sights and sounds, and De Quincey had not a tithe of his intense love of Nature, and appreciation of her glory and magnificence. Ruskin alone equals him in this, and he scarcely reaches the height of rhetorical eloquence to which Wilson soars so easily.

In these same "Noctes" we have descriptions of some of those nights when, as Carlyle would have said, "there was much good talk." And Wilson was mainly the talker. The chief characteristic of his discourse was its prodigality of humor and its infinite variety. His imagination too ran riot, and his wit sparkled ever and anon with a radiance all its own.

His memory was prodigious, and in his conversation he taxed it for anecdotes and illustrations drawn from the four quarters of the globe, and from the most remote and unusual stores of literary hoarding. His mind was many-sided as well as keen, and he kept all his faculties in full play, not excepting his sympathies, which were as broad as the world of men.

Can we wonder that those who crowded the table where he sat, lingered on till the daylight drove them from the board? or that no man who had had him for a boon companion could ever be satisfied with another? Can we wonder that the students who crowded his lecture-room after he became a professor thought every other lecturer commonplace and dull? Not that he gave them more information than others--perhaps he did not give them as much; but he excited and inspired them. He quickened their minds, and wakened their dormant faculties. Some of the white heat of his own enthusiasm he communicated to their colder natures, and they enjoyed the unusual warmth. Those who listened to those wonderful discourses can never be persuaded that eloquence did not die with Christopher North. They were all addressed to the hearts of his listeners, and thrills, and tears, and laughter that was not loud but deep, accompanied his speech from the beginning to the very end. Let one who thus listened to him speak:--

"We have heard him in the assembly-rooms, speaking on the genius of Scott, a little after the death of the Wizard, and in the tremble of his deep voice could read his sorrow for the personal loss, as well as his enthusiasm for the universal genius. We have heard him in his class-room, in those wild and wailing cadences, which no description can adequately re-echo, in those long, deep-drawn, slowly expiring sounds, which now resembled the moanings of a forsaken cataract, and now seemed to come hoarse and hollow from the chambers of the thunder, advocating the immortality of the soul, describing Cæsar weeping at the grave of Alexander, repeating, with an energy which might have raised the dead, Scott's lines on the landing of the British in Portugal, and discovering the secret springs of laughter, beauty, sublimity, and terror, to audiences whom he melted, electrified, subdued, solemnized, exploded into mirth, or awed into silence, at his pleasure."

His eloquence gained little from his personal appearance, about which there was something savage, leonine, massive, but little that was refined or attractive in the usual sense of that word. Still his face is described by some as magnificent, and his gray, flashing eyes, as being remarkably expressive. In his dress he was exceedingly slovenly except upon state occasions. His professor's gown, as he stalked along the college-terraces, flew in tattered stripes behind him, his shirts were usually buttonless, and his hat like a reminiscence of a pre-historic age. His yellow hair always floated over his shoulders, in confusion worse confounded, and he wore immense unkempt whiskers hanging upon his breast. Dickens thus describes him:--

"At his heels followed a wiry, sharp-eyed shaggy devil of a terrier, dogging his steps as he went slashing up and down, now with one man beside him, now with another, and now quite alone, but always at a fast rolling pace, with his head in the air, and his eyes as wide open as he could get them. A bright, clear-complexioned, mountain-looking fellow, he looks as if he had just come down from the Highlands, and had never taken a pen in hand."

His carelessness of appearances extended to his rooms, which looked like small sections from the primeval chaos. The book-shelves were of unpainted wood, knocked together in the rudest fashion, and the books were many of them tattered and without backs. A case containing foreign birds was used also as a wardrobe, and all of his rare possessions in natural history were mixed up with a most motley collection of books and papers,--these latter consisting of all sorts of scraps, of which no one else could have made anything. He always seemed to be able to find them when wanted, even in the worst confusion; but how he did it was a mystery to his friends. "Here and there, in the interstices between books, were stuffed what appeared to be dingy, crumpled bits of paper, but they were in reality bank-notes, his class fees; which he never carried in a purse, but stuffed away wherever it seemed most convenient at the moment." He never, even in the coldest weather, had a fire in his room.

No account of Kit North would be complete that left out entirely the convivialities of the table, though we should make a great mistake if we took the humorous caricatures of the "Noctes Ambrosianæ" for accounts of literal feats in that line. This has sometimes been done, and he is frequently represented as a glutton and a drunkard. He was neither, although he did perform some remarkable feats both of eating and drinking in his day. His life of constant out-of-door exercise gave him a keen appetite, and a perfect digestion, and he loved the hilarity of the table as well as any man of his day. But in his later life he became a _teetotaller_. Even in his earlier days it was often the excitement of company which quickened all of his powers to their utmost tension, when the effect was attributed to wine. So fond was he of all sorts and kinds of out-of-the-way company, that he was at one time in the habit of going at midnight to the Angel Inn, where many of the up and down London coaches met, and there to preside at the passengers' supper, carving for them, inquiring all about their respective journeys, and astonishing them with his wit and pleasantry. He would also linger about with coachmen and guards, and was present at, and took a hand in, many a street row, unknown by those with whom he mingled.

He is said to have remained for three months in the back room of a Highland blacksmith, strolling daily about the hills, and performing some of his prodigious pedestrian feats, to the great surprise of the rustics. He is also said to have followed the lady who became his wife all over the lake country of Scotland in the disguise of a waiter, serving her at table wherever the party happened to be, until the suspicions of her father were aroused by seeing the same waiter at every inn. Wilson then made himself known, declared his admiration for the lady, and finally became her accepted suitor. After their marriage he took her with him all over the Highlands on foot, assuring her that only so could she become really acquainted with their beauties. No man perhaps ever loved the Highlands as Christopher North loved them,--with the possible exception of Walter Scott.--and we can truly envy his young bride to be thus escorted through their deepest labyrinths, and introduced to their most delicate and hidden beauties. Here he introduced his beloved also to the cottages of the peasants, and made her acquainted with the poetry of that life which has inspired some of the finest of modern literature. He knew as well as Hogg, or Scott, or Lockhart, that the characteristic romance of a people like the Scotch is to be sought chiefly in the cottages of the poor, and that the finest poetry of such a people has for the most part a like inspiration. And these same peasants showed to their best advantage always when Christopher was around. They loved him instinctively, although they knew him only as a sportsman, or in some cases, perhaps, as a naturalist. But his large heart always shone forth in his intercourse with the poor, and he seemed conscious of no superiority to them, meeting them always on the common ground of humanity, and sympathizing, in his hearty and genial way, in all their joys and sorrows. They _took to him_ just as dogs and children did.

And his descriptions of their cramped and narrow lives, enlivened by his characteristic humor, are among the best pictures the world has cherished of Scottish rural life. He did not spare their vices, but gave many dramatic pictures of the darker sides of peasant life, with which he gained a close acquaintance during those long foot-journeys which he was so fond of making, living really what we would call the life of a tramp, for long periods. Sometimes he camped with gypsies for weeks, and at all times was intimate with all of the so-called lower classes. Tinkers, cairds, poachers, were his familiar roadside acquaintances, and he extracted great amusement from their peculiarities. Sometimes he had to win the respect of these worthies by knocking them down in the beginning of the acquaintance, but after that they usually stood by him to the end. He usually figured as the champion of the weak in these games at fisticuffs, but sometimes he managed things on his own account.