Part 4

“_Stat magni nominis umbra_” is Lucan’s stately phrase, to be aptly applied, in its best and original sense, to almost every one of this illustrious group. Yet, lofty as they loom in the distance, far above our power as well as our desire to belittle them, it may be not beyond belief that too close and too constant contact with some of them might have brought at the last a certain satiety. It may even be breathed, without irreverence and therefore without offence, that we might have been just a bit bored if allowed to listen without rest to Coleridge, with his rhetorical preachments and his melancholy, both born of rheumatism, rum, and opium; or to Hazlitt, with his ingrained selfishness, his petulance, his tea-inspired turgidity; or to Wordsworth, solemnly weighted with the colossal conviction of his own mission, and tireless in his tenacity to attest the truth thereof to all listeners. These, and all those lesser ones, seem to me petty and tiresome beside this spare, silent, stammering little fellow, who loved them all and laughed at them all; who gave them fitting reverence, and yet, with affectionate adroitness, found fun in their foibles!

How direct and delicate was his gibe when Coleridge had been longer even than usual in his endless endeavours to spin serviceable ropes with his metaphysical sands: “Oh, you mustn’t mind what Coleridge says; he’s _so_ full of his fun.” I can see his twinkling eyes--those wonderfully sparkling eyes--as he answered Coleridge’s question, “Charles, did you ever hear me preach?” “I never heard you do anything else!” Coleridge was, indeed, quite capable, in Hazlitt’s sarcastic phrase, of taking up the deep pauses of conversation between seraphs and cardinals; and could have argued--with the same ready confidence with which, according to mocking Sydney Smith, Lord John Russell would have assumed command, at half an hour’s notice, of the channel fleet--on either side of the theses sent him by Lamb just before he went to Germany. These questions--“to be defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or Göttingen,” by Coleridge--are deliciously sly and sharp in their stab at the complacent superiority over lesser gifted mortals felt and shown by that “archangel a little damaged.” I can hear the falsetto tone of his moralities growing shriller before these two questions, especially, among the others: “Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?” “Whether the higher order of seraphim illuminati ever _sneer_?”

How deftly he punctured Wordsworth’s sublime conceit, on his hinting that other poets might have equalled Shakespeare if they cared. “Oh, here’s Wordsworth says he could have written ‘Hamlet’ _if he’d had the mind_. It is clear that nothing is wanting but the mind!” Even the Infallible One not only tolerated, but valued, the acute criticisms with which Lamb leavened his discerning praise of all his friends’ work; but when he, with kindly frankness, rated a little lower than did their author the “Lyrical Ballads,” that author got into quite a state of mind. He “wrote four sweating pages” to inspire Lamb with a “greater range of sensibility;” and the tormented critic bursts out: “After one’s been reading Shakespeare for twenty of the best years of one’s life, to have a fellow start up and prate about some unknown quality possessed by Shakespeare less than by Milton and William Wordsworth!... What am I to do with such people? I shall certainly write ’em a very merry letter.” I wish that letter had been saved for our delectation.

Then there was Manning, with his slight sense of humour, and to him--then in China, to his friend’s loss--Lamb loved to write the maddest inventions, and let loose his wildest whims about their friends. To Coventry Patmore, on his way to Paris, he wrote, in an amazing letter: “If you go through Boulogne, inquire if old Godfrey is living, and how he got home from the Crusades. He must be a very old man now.”

Good, honest barrister Martin Burney--of the “If dirt were trumps” story--gave infinite fun to Lamb by his oddities. Once he read aloud, in their rooms, the whole Gospel of St. John, because biblical quotations are very emphatic in a court of justice. At another time he insisted on carving the fowl--and did it most ill-favouredly--because it was indispensable for a barrister to do all such things well. “Those little things were of more consequence than we thought!” Burney quite approved of Shakespeare, “because he was so much of a gentleman;” and he said and did so many queer things that Lamb wrote: “Why does not his guardian angel look to him? He deserves one; _maybe he has tired him out_!”

It was George Dyer, above all, in whom Lamb revelled, and who was meat and drink to him. Dyer was the son of a Wapping watchman and butcher, had been a charity-school boy at Christ’s, and had become a publisher’s harmless drudge. He was a true bookworm, eating his way through thick tomes, but digesting little. He seemed to find all the nourishment he needed in the husks of knowledge, while Lamb, in radical contrast, bit to the kernel with his incisive teeth. As to Dyer’s heart, however, his friend was sure that God never put a kinder into the flesh of man; and his was a simple, unsuspecting soul. He was so absent-minded that he would sometimes empty his snuff-box into his teapot, when making tea for his guests; and so near-sighted that he once walked placidly into the river, as I shall hereafter relate. He used to keep his “neat library” in the seat of his easy-chair. Mary Lamb and Mrs. Hazlitt, going to his chambers one day in his absence, “tidied-up” the rooms and sewed fast that out-of-repair easy-chair, with his books within it: whereat, to use his own violent language, he was greatly disconcerted!

Lamb gives a ludicrous description of his visit to these same chambers in Clifford’s Inn, where he found Dyer, “in _mid-winter_, wearing _nankeen_ pantaloons four times too big for him, which the said heathen did pertinaciously affirm to be new. These were absolutely ingrained with the accumulated dirt of ages, but he affirmed ’em to be clean. He was going to visit a lady who was nice about those things, and that’s the reason he wore nankeen that day!” It was to this credulous creature that Lamb confided that the secret author of “Waverley” was Lord Castlereagh! And once he sent the guileless one to Primrose Hill at sunrise, to see the Persian Ambassador perform his orisons! No one but Dyer could have said that the assassin of the Ratcliffe Highway--painted so luridly by De Quincey in his “Three Memorable Murders”--“must have been rather an eccentric character!”

Haydon, the painter, has told of one memorable evening in his own studio, when Lamb was in marvellous vein, and met that immortal Comptroller of Stamps who had begged to be introduced to Wordsworth, and who insisted on having the latter’s opinion as to whether Milton and Newton were not great geniuses. Lamb took a candle and walked over to the poor man, saying, “Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?” Haydon and Keats got him away, but he persisted in bursting into the room, shouting, “Do let me have another look at that gentleman’s organs.” Edgar Poe’s Imp of the Perverse took entire possession of Lamb when thrown with uncongenial men, and forced him to give the impression of “something between an imbecile, a brute, and a buffoon.” Writing of himself after the imaginary death of Elia, he says, truly: “He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were scandalized (and offences were sure to arise) he could not help it.”

No, nor did he try to help it, and we love him all the more for this antic disposition he was so fond of showing unshamed. And I think that we need not grieve greatly because his vagaries were not kept always “within the limits of becoming mirth,” when he had to deal with prigs, pedants, or poseurs. Tom Moore, tiptoe with toadyism, tried to look down on Lamb, doubtless feeling that he had accurately sounded the shoals of his shallow insincerity. The portentous Macready has left on record his unfavourable impression of the irreverent creature who stood in no awe of superior persons on pasteboard pedestals. That impression pains us no more than does the ungentle judgment of Thomas Carlyle. _He_ found Lamb’s talk to be but “a ghastly make-believe of wit,” “contemptibly small;” and in all that was said and done he saw, from his own humane point of view, nothing but “diluted insanity.” Curtly and cruelly he labelled this brother and sister, “two very sorry phenomena.”

If our friend laughed at others, he was just as ready to laugh at himself; and his hissing his own play is historic. It is strange that, with his keen critical sense, he should have hoped for the success of this “Mr. H., A Farce in Two Acts;” produced at Drury Lane, in 1806, with the great Elliston in the title-rôle. Yet he had written to Manning in boyish glee: “All China shall ring with it--by and by.” In the same letter, he made fanciful designs for the orders he was to give for admission, elate with anticipation of the long run his piece was to have. He sat on the opening night with Mary and Crabb Robinson in the front of the pit (his favourite place), and joined with the audience in applauding his really witty prologue. Then, as the luckless farce fell flat and flatter, he was louder than any of them in their hisses. “Damn the word, I write it like kisses--how different!” he growled, in grotesque wrath, in his letter announcing the failure to Wordsworth. Hazlitt, who was present, dreamed of that dreadful damning every night for a month, but Lamb only wrote to him: “I know you’ll be sorry, but never mind. We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces.” He and Mary were “pretty stout” about it, but, after all, they would rather have had success, he had to own. For he not only longed for the fame, but he needed the money, which that success in dramatic authorship would have brought.

He delighted in playing all sorts of pranks on his sister, and was quick to improve any occasion to tease her. Such a scene is described by N. P. Willis, in his “Pencillings by the Way;” where he relates his meeting and making acquaintance with them, at a friend’s rooms in London. He and Lamb were chatting, and Mary, not quite catching all their words--she was then slightly deaf--asked, “What are you saying of me, Charles?” Instantly he answered: “Mr. Willis admires _your_ ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ very much, and I was saying that it was no merit of yours that you understood that subject!” She took all his freaks in good part, translating them in the light of her affection for him, and of her fondness for his sweet and stingless banter.

His sense of fun bubbled up at most inapt times. He had been asked once to stand as godfather for a friend’s child, and feared he would disgrace himself at the very font. “I was at Hazlitt’s wedding and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh; I misbehaved once at a funeral.” In all this wayward whimsicality, one can detect that same depth and intensity of feeling which moved Abraham Lincoln to tell trivial stories at the most solemn crises; which suggests a sob beneath the maddest mirth of Sterne, Molière, Cervantes; which drove Charles Lamb to seize the kettle from the hob and hold it on his sister’s head-dress, like the clown in a pantomime, to hide the breaking of his great heart at the signs of the coming mania he had detected in her. He accounted it an excellent thing to play the buffoon sometimes, and was willing to seem supremely silly, that he might save his own sanity.

Acting conversely, this trembling sensibility set the tears trickling down his cheeks, while he was writing a playful paper; and made him even “shed tears in the motley Strand, for fulness of joy of so much life.”

His largeness of soul was never shown in a grander way than in his letter to, and his whole conduct toward, Robert Southey, when the latter attacked, in the _Quarterly Review_, the first collected “Essays of Elia”--“a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it is original.” In the same paper, he spoke arrogantly and offensively of Leigh Hunt, his own political enemy, and Lamb’s most dear and most unjustly persecuted friend. From so close a companion as Southey had been, and one who knew him so thoroughly, this hurt Lamb deeply, and he wrote to Bernard Barton: “But I love and respect Southey, and will not retort. I hate his review and his being a reviewer.” And in the _London Magazine_ he put forth the manly “Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esq.;” of which the latter said that “no resentful letter was ever written less offensively.” Then Southey--an exemplary if over-righteous mortal--sent Lamb a line of regret and affection, and Lamb wrote generously back, and the mists were melted away, and their friendship shone more steadfastly than ever. Indeed, it seems to me that Southey eclipsed Lamb in the spirit he showed in this reconciliation, forasmuch as he proved himself fine enough to forgive the man whom he had outraged. We may commend his conduct; “For right, too rigid, hardens into wrong.”

It is no part of my plan to dwell on Lamb’s religious belief. Suffice it to say that it was, like that of most Unbelievers, too large to be labelled by a set of dogmas, too spacious to be packed within church or cathedral walls. It is a stale truism that credence, less than character, is the criterion of conviction; and all history shows that the doubters are, in nearly all cases, the most deeply devout. “He prayeth well who loveth well,” Coleridge had learned; and it is my fancy that those lives, where love with voluntary humility waited on self-sacrifice, had taught him the immanent truth--“He prayeth _best_, who _loveth_ best.”

As to Lamb’s utterances about these mighty matters, we may be sure that they took the tone of the man’s utterances concerning _all_ matters; and to them we may apply Hazlitt’s phrase: “His jests scald like tears, and he probes a question with a play upon words.” Or, as Haydon put it, “He stuttered out his quaintness in snatches, like the fool in ‘Lear’.”

IV.

In the midst of the vast Covent Garden property of the Duke of Bedford is wedged a small piece of alien land, on the corner of Bow and Russell streets. It belongs to a certain Clayton estate, and is covered by three houses, which are worth more to us than all the potentialities of marketable wealth hereabout. These three houses formed but one building, at the time of erection; which was late in the last or early in the present century, as we may be convinced by every architectural point of proof without and within. It was built on the site of that famous ancient structure whose upper floor was occupied by Will’s Coffee-House; its cellars and foundations still to be traced under the estimable Ham and Beef Shop on that corner. To-day, this popular establishment is thronged for us, not with its actual eager buyers of cold baked meats, but with the shades of Addison, Swift, Smollett, Steele, Dryden, Cibber, Gay,

Pepys, Johnson, revisiting their once favourite foregathering place.

Of the three houses into which this block of buildings has been divided, the corner house remains entirely unaltered. Its neighbour, in Bow Street--now a swarming tavern--has suffered somewhat at the hand of the modern restorer. It retains, on its upper floor, a small barred cell, formerly set apart for some exclusive or elusive prisoner from Bow Street station, just at hand.

The house which chiefly concerns us, No. 20 Russell Street, has been made higher by one story, re-roofed, and re-faced with stucco; but it has not been distinctly disfeatured.

Such as it was, it became the next home of the Lambs, in 1817. At that time they had lived for nine years in their chambers in Inner Temple Lane, and it is strange that they should have been willing to leave their beloved Temple, after having been born into it again, and after having grown up in it again. For Lamb’s household gods planted a terrible fixed foot, as he put it, and were not rooted up without blood. “I thought we could never have been torn up from the Temple,” he wrote; yet they did so tear themselves up, and we are left to conjecture, for their reasons. Mary told Dorothy Wordsworth that the rooms had got dirty and out of repair, and that the cares of living in chambers had grown more irksome each year. More weighty among their motives, no doubt, was the desire to escape the incessant invasion of their privacy by welcome, and yet unwelcome, friends. From this wear and tear they were not freed by their flight, however.

In November, 1817, Lamb wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth: “We are in the individual spot I like best in all this great city. The theatres with all their noises; Covent Garden, dearer to me than any gardens of Alcinous, where we are morally sure of the earliest peas and ’sparagus; Bow Street, where the thieves are examined, within a few yards of us. Mary had not been here four-and-twenty hours before she saw a thief. She sits at the window working; and, casually throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people coming this way, with a constable to conduct the ceremony. These little incidents agreeably diversify a female life.”

Besides these novel sights, they found strange sounds in their new abode. A brazier’s hammers were rankling all day long within, and by night without--but let Mary tell it, in her letter to Dorothy Wordsworth: “Here we are living at a brazier’s shop, No. 20, in Russell Street, Covent Garden--a place all alive with noise and bustle; Drury Lane Theatre in sight from our front, and Covent Garden from our back windows.... The hubbub of the carriages returning from the play doesn’t annoy me in the least--strange that it doesn’t, for it is quite tremendous. I quite enjoy looking out of the window, and listening to the calling up of the carriages, and the squabbles of the coachmen and link-boys.”

They squabble still of a foggy night--“a real London partic’ler”--and the noise is even greater now than it was then, and Covent Garden is filthier than ever, and the thieves go by escorted by a “bobby,” and attended by a crowd; but the brazier no longer brazes, and his discordant shop is now inoffensive with noiseless fruits.

Here they lived until 1823, these six years filled with increasing prosperity, with comparative comfort, with happy friendships, with his best work, with sudden fame. His income had slowly increased with each added year of service in the East India House, and the earnings of his literary work swelled it slightly. That work had never yet received its recognition. It was collected and published in two handsome volumes in 1818, and the reading world of that day suddenly awakened to see in the obscure clerk, plodding daily to his desk in Leadenhall Street, its most delicate humourist, its most acute critic, its most perfect essayist. A little later, inspired by this success, he set to work in these rooms in Russell Street on his “Elia” papers, begun in the new _London Magazine_ for August, 1820.

So he outgrew his gloom and grew gayer, although he was never for one hour out of the shadow of Mary’s constant imminent danger of a relapse. He drew around him many new acquaintances, especially the theatrical folk of this quarter, and more and more of the “friendly harpies” he was fond of, on whom he spent his time and squandered his strength. He needed all he could save of time and strength for his evening work on his Essays, after his day’s work at his desk. Yet he not only was not allowed to attend to literary labour, but he complained that he could not even write letters at home, because he was never alone; and had to seize odd moments for all such writing at his office and from his work in East India House. Stationery, too, he seized there; and some of his unapproachable letters were written on printed official forms concerning “statements of the weights and amounts of the following lots”! His task-masters there would have gone out of their mercantile minds could they have made accurate estimates of the hard money value to be put by posterity on those “following lots” which he thus unofficially filled in!

Even there he was not unmolested, but was constantly “called off to do the deposits on cotton wool,” he complained when writing to Wordsworth. “But why do I relate this to you, who want faculties to comprehend the great mystery of deposits, of interest, of warehouse rent, and of contingent fund?”

So his growing need and his growing want to be alone were never gratified. “Except my morning’s walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so--I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered--evening company I should always like, had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (_divine_, forsooth) and voices all the golden morning.... I am never C. L., but always C. L. & Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself.” He could not even eat in peace, for his familiars were with him putting questions--presumably inopportune questions--asking his opinions, and interrupting him in every way. “Up I go, mutton on table, hungry as a hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication. Knock at the door; in comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Mr. Burney, or Morgan Demi Gorgon, or my brother, or somebody to prevent my eating alone--a process absolutely necessary to my poor, wretched digestion. Oh, the pleasure of eating alone!--eating my dinner alone! let me think of it.”

He did think of it, but to no practicable remedial end; for, if he hated to have the intruders come, he hated still more to have them go; and he had to avow, “God bless ’em! I love some of ’em dearly!”

All this was a ceaseless drain on his vitality, and a ceaseless strain on the nerves already so overstrung. He wondered how “some people keep their nerves so nicely balanced as they do, or have they any? or are they made of pack-thread? He” (I know not of whom he spoke) “is proof against weather, ingratitude, meat underdone, every weapon of fate.” Lamb was not proof against good friends, his sympathetic nature going out perpetually to them to his own loss. Of Coleridge he said: “The neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons.... If I lived with him, or with the author of ‘The Excursion,’ I should in a very little time lose my own identity.” Only those of his susceptible temperament can comprehend this confession, or his characteristic commendation of John Rickman, Clerk of the House of Commons, a newly made and highly valued friend: “He understands you the first time. _You need never twice speak to him._”