Biographical Essays Part 8

Accordingly Lamb paid him a great deal of attention, and continued to speak of him for years with an interest that seemed disproportioned to his pretensions. This might be owing in part to an indirect compliment paid to Miss Lamb in one of W--'s papers; else his appearance would rather have repelled Lamb; it was commonplace, and better suited to express the dandyism which overspread the surface of his manner, than the unaffected sensibility which apparently lay in his nature. Dandy or not, however, this man, on account of the schism in his papers, so much amiable puppyism on one side, so much deep feeling on the other, (feeling, applied to some of the grandest objects that earth has to show,) did really move a trifle of interest in me, on a day when I hated the face of man and woman. Yet again, if I had known this man for the murderer that even then he was, what sudden loss of interest, what sudden growth of another interest, would have changed the face of that party! Trivial creature, that didst carry thy dreadful eye kindling with perpetual treasons! Dreadful creature, that didst carry thy trivial eye, mantling with eternal levity, over the sleeping surfaces of confiding household life--oh, what a revolution for man wouldst thou have accomplished had thy deep wickedness prospered! What _was_ that wickedness? In a few words I will say.

At this time (October, 1848) the whole British island is appalled by a new chapter in the history of poisoning. Locusta in ancient Rome, Madame Brinvilliers in Paris, were people of original genius: not in any new artifice of toxicology, not in the mere management of poisons, was the audacity of their genius displayed. No; but in profiting by domestic openings for murder, unsuspected through their very atrocity. Such an opening was made some years ago by those who saw the possibility of founding purses for parents upon the murder of their children. This was done upon a larger scale than had been suspected, and upon a plausible pretence. To bury a corpse is costly; but of a hundred children only a few, in the ordinary course of mortality, will die within a given time. Five shillings a-piece will produce 25L annually, and _that_ will bury a considerable number. On this principle arose Infant Burial Societies. For a few shillings annually, a parent could secure a funeral for every child. If the child died, a few guineas fell due to the parent, and the funeral was accomplished without cost of _his_. But on this arose the suggestion--Why not execute an insurance of this nature twenty times over? One single insurance pays for the funeral--the other nineteen are so much clear gain, a _lucro ponatur_, for the parents. Yes; but on the supposition that the child died! twenty are no better than one, unless they are gathered into the garner. Now, if the child died naturally, all was right; but how, if the child did _not_ die? Why, clearly this, --the child that _can_ die, and won't die, may be made to die.

There are many ways of doing that; and it is shocking to know, that, according to recent discoveries, poison is comparatively a very merciful mode of murder. Six years ago a dreadful communication was made to the public by a medical man, viz., that three thousand children were annually burned to death under circ.u.mstances showing too clearly that they had been left by their mothers with the means and the temptations to set themselves on fire in her absence. But more shocking, because more lingering, are the deaths by artificial appliances of wet, cold, hunger, bad diet, and disturbed sleep, to the frail const.i.tutions of children. By that machinery it is, and not by poison, that the majority qualify themselves for claiming the funeral allowances. Here, however, there occur to any man, on reflection, two eventual restraints on the extension of this domestic curse:--1st, as there is no pretext for wanting more than one funeral on account of one child, any insurances beyond one are in themselves a ground of suspicion. Now, if any plan were devised for securing the _publication_ of such insurances, the suspicions would travel as fast as the grounds for them. 2dly, it occurs, that eventually the evil checks itself, since a society established on the ordinary rates of mortality would be ruined when a murderous stimulation was applied to that rate too extensively. Still it is certain that, for a season, this atrocity _has_ prospered in manufacturing districts for some years, and more recently, as judicial investigations have shown, in one agricultural district of Ess.e.x. Now, Mr. W--'s scheme of murder was, in its outline, the very same, but not applied to the narrow purpose of obtaining burials from a public fund He persuaded, for instance, two beautiful young ladies, visitors in his family, to insure their lives for a short period of two years. This insurance was repeated in several different offices, until a sum of 18,000 pounds had been secured in the event of their deaths within the two years. Mr. W--took care that they _should_ die, and very suddenly, within that period; and then, having previously secured from his victims an a.s.signment to himself of this claim, he endeavored to make this a.s.signment available. But the offices, which had vainly endeavored to extract from the young ladies any satisfactory account of the reasons for this limited insurance, had their suspicions at last strongly roused. One office had recently experienced a case of the same nature, in which also the young lady had been poisoned by the man in whose behalf she had effected the insurance; all the offices declined to pay; actions at law arose; in the course of the investigation which followed, Mr. W--'s character was fully exposed. Finally, in the midst of the embarra.s.sments which ensued, he committed forgery, and was transported.

From this Mr. W--, some few days afterwards, I received an invitation to a dinner party, expressed in terms that were obligingly earnest. He mentioned the names of his princ.i.p.al guests, and amongst them rested most upon those of Lamb and Sir David Wilkie. From an accident I was unable to attend, and greatly regretted it. Sir David one might rarely happen to see, except at a crowded party. But as regarded Lamb, I was sure to see him or to hear of him again in some way or other within a short time. This opportunity, in fact, offered itself within a month through the kindness of the Lambs themselves. They had heard of my being in solitary lodgings, and insisted on my coming to dine with them, which more than once I did in the winter of 1821-22.

The mere reception by the Lambs was so full of goodness and hospitable feeling, that it kindled animation in the most cheerless or torpid of invalids. I cannot imagine that any _memorabilia_ occurred during the visit; but I will use the time that would else be lost upon the settling of that point, in putting down any triviality that occurs to my recollection. Both Lamb and myself had a furious love for nonsense, headlong nonsense. Excepting Professor Wilson, I have known n.o.body who had the same pa.s.sion to the same extent. And things of that nature better ill.u.s.trate the _realities_ of Lamb's social life than the gravities, which weighing so sadly on his solitary hours he sought to banish from his moments of relaxation.

There were no strangers; Charles Lamb, his sister, and myself made up the party. Even this was done in kindness. They knew that I should have been oppressed by an effort such as must be made in the society of strangers; and they placed me by their own fireside, where I could say as little or as much as I pleased.

We dined about five o'clock, and it was one of the hospitalities inevitable to the Lambs, that any game which they might receive from rural friends in the course of the week, was reserved for the day of a friend's dining with them.

In regard to wine, Lamb and myself had the same habit--perhaps it rose to the dignity of a principle--viz., to take a great deal _during_ dinner--none _after_ it. Consequently, as Miss Lamb (who drank only water) retired almost with the dinner itself, nothing remained for men of our principles, the rigor of which we had ill.u.s.trated by taking rather too much of old port before the cloth was drawn, except talking; amoebaean colloquy, or, in Dr.

Johnson's phrase, a dialogue of "brisk reciprocation." But this was impossible; over Lamb, at this period of his life, there pa.s.sed regularly, after taking wine, a brief eclipse of sleep. It descended upon him as softly as a shadow. In a gross person, laden with superfluous flesh, and sleeping heavily, this would have been disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagreness, spare and wiry as an Arab of the desert, or as Thomas Aquinas, wasted by scholastic vigils, the affection of sleep seemed rather a network of aerial gossamer than of earthly cobweb--more like a golden haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than a cloud exhaling upwards from the flesh. Motionless in his chair as a bust, breathing so gently as scarcely to seem certainly alive, he presented the image of repose midway between life and death, like the repose of sculpture; and to one who knew his history a repose affectingly contrasting with the calamities and internal storms of his life. I have heard more persons than I can now distinctly recall, observe of Lamb when sleeping, that his countenance in that state a.s.sumed an expression almost seraphic, from its intellectual beauty of outline, its childlike simplicity, and its benignity. It could not be called a transfiguration that sleep had worked in his face; for the features wore essentially the same expression when waking; but sleep spiritualized that expression, exalted it, and also harmonized it. Much of the change lay in that last process.

The eyes it was that disturbed the unity of effect in Lamb's waking face. They gave a restlessness to the character of his intellect, shifting, like northern lights, through every mode of combination with fantastic playfulness, and sometimes by fiery gleams obliterating for the moment that pure light of benignity which was the predominant reading on his features. Some people have supposed that Lamb had Jewish blood in his veins, which seemed to account for his gleaming eyes. It might be so; but this notion found little countenance in Lamb's own way of treating the gloomy medieval traditions propagated throughout Europe about the Jews, and their secret enmity to Christian races. Lamb, indeed, might not be more serious than Shakspeare is supposed to have been in his Shylock; yet he spoke at times as from a station of wilful bigotry, and seemed (whether laughingly or not) to sympathize with the barbarous Christian superst.i.tions upon the pretended b.l.o.o.d.y practices of the Jews, and of the early Jewish physicians. Being himself a Lincoln man, he treated Sir Hugh [Endnote: 4] of Lincoln, the young child that suffered death by secret a.s.sa.s.sination in the Jewish quarter rather than suppress his daily anthems to the Virgin, as a true historical personage on the rolls of martyrdom; careless that this fable, like that of the apprentice murdered out of jealousy by his master, the architect, had destroyed its own authority by ubiquitous diffusion. All over Europe the same legend of the murdered apprentice and the martyred child reappears under different names--so that in effect the verification of the tale is none at all, because it is unanimous; is too narrow, because it is too impossibly broad. Lamb, however, though it was often hard to say whether he were not secretly laughing, swore to the truth of all these old fables, and treated the liberalities of the present generation on such points as mere fantastic and effeminate affectations, which, no doubt, they often are as regards the sincerity of those who profess them. The bigotry, which it pleased his fancy to a.s.sume, he used like a sword against the Jew, as the official weapon of the Christian, upon the same principle that a Capulet would have drawn upon a Montague, without conceiving it any duty of _his_ to rip up the grounds of so ancient a quarrel; it was a feud handed down to him by his ancestors, and it was _their_ business to see that originally it had been an honest feud. I cannot yet believe that Lamb, if seriously aware of any family interconnection with Jewish blood, would, even in jest, have held that one-sided language. More probable it is, that the fiery eye recorded not any alliance with Jewish blood, but that disastrous alliance with insanity which tainted his own life, and laid desolate his sister's.

On awakening from his brief slumber, Lamb sat for some time in profound silence, and then, with the most startling rapidity, sang out--"Diddle, diddle, dumpkins;" not looking at me, but as if soliloquizing. For five minutes he relapsed into the same deep silence; from which again he started up into the same abrupt utterance of--"Diddle, diddle, dumpkins." I could not help laughing aloud at the extreme energy of this sudden communication, contrasted with the deep silence that went before and followed.

Lamb smilingly begged to know what I was laughing at, and with a look of as much surprise as if it were I that had done something unaccountable, and not himself. I told him (as was the truth) that there had suddenly occurred to me the possibility of my being in some future period or other called on to give an account of this very evening before some literary committee. The committee might say to me--(supposing the case that I outlived him)--"You dined with Mr. Lamb in January, 1822; now, can you remember any remark or memorable observation which that celebrated man made before or after dinner?"

I as _respondent_. "Oh yes, I can."

_Com_. "What was it?"

_Resp_. "Diddle, diddle, dumpkins."

_Com_. "And was this his only observation? Did Mr. Lamb not strengthen this remark by some other of the same nature?"

_Resp_. "Yes, he did."

_Com_. "And what was it?"

_Resp_. "Diddle, diddle, dumpkins."

_Com_. "What is your secret opinion of Dumpkins?"

_Com_. "Do you conceive Dumpkins to have been a thing or a person?"

_Resp_. "I conceive Dumpkins to have been a person, having the rights of a person."

_Com_. "Capable, for instance, of suing and being sued?"

_Resp_. "Yes, capable of both; though I have reason to think there would have been very little use in suing Dumpkins."

_Com_. "How so? Are the committee to understand that you, the respondent, in your own case, have found it a vain speculation, countenanced only by visionary lawyers, to sue Dumpkins?"

_Resp_. "No; I never lost a shilling by Dumpkins, the reason for which may be that Dumpkins never owed me a shilling; but from his _p.r.o.nomen_ of 'diddle,' I apprehend that he was too well acquainted with joint-stock companies!"

_Com_. "And your opinion is, that he may have diddled Mr.

Lamb?"

_Resp_. "I conceive it to be not unlikely."

_Com_. "And, perhaps, from Mr. Lamb's pathetic reiteration of his name, 'Diddle, diddle,' you would be disposed to infer that Dumpkins had practised his diddling talents upon Mr. L. more than once?"

_Resp_. "I think it probable."

Lamb laughed, and brightened up; tea was announced; Miss Lamb returned. The cloud had pa.s.sed away from Lamb's spirits, and again he realized the pleasure of evening, which, in _his_ apprehension, was so essential to the pleasure of literature.

On the table lay a copy of Wordsworth, in two volumes; it was the edition of Longman, printed about the time of Waterloo. Wordsworth was held in little consideration, I believe, amongst the house of Longman; at any rate, _their_ editions of his works were got up in the most slovenly manner. In particular, the table of contents was drawn up like a short-hand bill of parcels. By accident the book lay open at a part of this table, where the sonnet beginning--

"Alas! what boots the long laborious quest"--

had been entered with mercantile speed, as--

"Alas! what boots,"----

"Yes," said Lamb, reading this entry in a dolorous tone of voice, "he may well say _that_. I paid Hoby three guineas for a pair that tore like blotting paper, when I was leaping a ditch to escape a farmer that pursued me with a pitch-fork for trespa.s.sing. But why should W. wear boots in Westmoreland? Pray, advise him to patronize shoes."

The mercurialities of Lamb were infinite, and always uttered in a spirit of absolute recklessness for the quality or the prosperity of the sally. It seemed to liberate his spirits from some burthen of blackest melancholy which oppressed it, when he had thrown off a jest: he would not stop one instant to improve it; nor did he care the value of a straw whether it were good enough to be remembered, or so mediocre as to extort high moral indignation from a collector who refused to receive into his collection of jests and puns any that were not felicitously good or revoltingly bad.

After tea, Lamb read to me a number of beautiful compositions, which he had himself taken the trouble to copy out into a blank paper folio from unsuccessful authors. Neglected people in every cla.s.s won the sympathy of Lamb. One of the poems, I remember, was a very beautiful sonnet from a volume recently published by Lord Thurlow--which, and Lamb's just remarks upon it, I could almost repeat _verbatim_ at this moment, nearly twenty-seven years later, if your limits would allow me. But these, you tell me, allow of no such thing; at the utmost they allow only twelve lines more.

Now all the world knows that the sonnet itself would require fourteen lines; but take fourteen from twelve, and there remains very little, I fear; besides which, I am afraid two of my twelve are already exhausted. This forces me to interrupt my account of Lamb's reading, by reporting the very accident that _did_ interrupt it in fact; since that no less characteristically expressed Lamb's peculiar spirit of kindness, (always quickening itself towards the ill-used or the down-trodden,) than it had previously expressed itself in his choice of obscure readings. Two ladies came in, one of whom at least had sunk in the scale of worldly consideration. They were ladies who would not have found much recreation in literary discussions; elderly, and habitually depressed. On _their_ account, Lamb proposed whist, and in that kind effort to amuse them, which naturally drew forth some momentary gayeties from himself, but not of a kind to impress themselves on the recollection, the evening terminated.

We have left ourselves no room for a special examination of Lamb's writings, some of which were failures, and some were so memorably beautiful as to be unique in their cla.s.s. The character of Lamb it is, and the life-struggle of Lamb, that must fix the attention of many, even amongst those wanting in sensibility to his intellectual merits. This character and this struggle, as we have already observed, impress many traces of themselves upon Lamb's writings.

Even in that view, therefore, they have a ministerial value; but separately, for themselves, they have an independent value of the highest order. Upon this point we gladly adopt the eloquent words of Sergeant Talfourd:--

"The sweetness of Lamb's character, breathed through his writings, was felt even by strangers; but its heroic aspect was unguessed even by many of his friends. Let them now consider it, and ask if the annals of self-sacrifice can show anything in human action and endurance more lovely than its self-devotion exhibits? It was not merely that he saw, through the ensanguined cloud of misfortune which had fallen upon his family, the unstained excellence of his sister, whose madness had caused it; that he was ready to take her to his own home with reverential affection, and cherish her through life; and he gave up, for _her_ sake, all meaner and more selfish love, and all the hopes which youth blends with the pa.s.sion which disturbs and enn.o.bles it; not even that he did all this cheerfully, without pluming himself upon his brotherly n.o.bleness as a virtue, or seeking to repay himself (as some uneasy martyrs do) by small instalments of long repining; but that he carried the spirit of the hour in which he first knew and took his course to his last. So far from thinking that his sacrifice of youth and love to his sister gave him a license to follow his own caprice at the expense of her feelings, even in the lightest matters, he always wrote and spoke of her as his wiser self, his generous benefactress, of whose protecting care he was scarcely worthy."

It must be remembered, also, which the Sergeant does not overlook, that Lamb's efforts for the becoming support of his sister lasted through a period of forty years. Twelve years before his death, the munificence of the India House, by granting him a liberal retiring allowance, had placed his own support under shelter from accidents of any kind. But this died with himself; and he could not venture to suppose that, in the event of his own death, the India House would grant to his sister the same allowance as by custom is granted to a wife. This they did; but not venturing to calculate upon such n.o.bility of patronage, Lamb had applied himself through life to the saving of a provision for his sister under any accident to himself. And this he did with a persevering prudence, so little known in the literary cla.s.s, amongst a continued tenor of generosities, often so princely as to be scarcely known in any cla.s.s.

Was this man, so memorably good by life-long sacrifice of himself, in any profound sense a Christian? The impression is, that he was _not_. We, from private communications with him, can undertake to say that, according to his knowledge and opportunities for the study of Christianity, he _was_. What has injured Lamb on this point is, that his early opinions (which, however, from the first were united with the deepest piety) are read by the inattentive, as if they had been the opinions of his mature days; secondly, that he had few religious persons amongst his friends, which made him reserved in the expression of his own views; thirdly, that in any case where he altered opinions for the better, the credit of the improvement is a.s.signed to Coleridge. Lamb, for example, beginning life as a Unitarian, in not many years became a Trinitarian.

Coleridge pa.s.sed through the same changes in the same order; and, here, at least, Lamb is supposed simply to have obeyed the influence, confessedly great, of Coleridge. This, on our own knowledge of Lamb's views, we p.r.o.nounce to be an error. And the following extracts from Lamb's letters will show, not only that he was religiously disposed on impulses self-derived, but that, so far from obeying the bias of Coleridge, he ventured, on this one subject, firmly as regarded the matter, though humbly as regarded the manner, affectionately to reprove Coleridge.

In a letter to Coleridge, written in 1797, the year after his first great affliction, he says:

"Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated character among my acquaintance; not one Christian; not one but undervalues Christianity. Singly, what am I to do? Wesley--[have you read his life?]--was not he an elevated character? Wesley has said religion was not a solitary thing. Alas! it is necessarily so with me, or next to solitary. 'Tis true you write to me; but correspondence by letter and personal intimacy are widely different. Do, do write to me; and do some good to my mind--already how much 'warped and relaxed' by the world!"

In a letter written about three months previously, he had not scrupled to blame Coleridge at some length for audacities of religious speculation, which seemed to him at war with the simplicities of pure religion. He says:

"Do continue to write to me. I read your letters with my sister, and they give us both abundance of delight. Especially they please us two when you talk in a religious strain. Not but we are offended occasionally with a certain freedom of expression, a certain air of mysticism, more consonant to the conceits of pagan philosophy than consistent with the humility of genuine piety."

Then, after some instances of what he blames, he says:

"Be not angry with me, Coleridge. I wish not to cavil; I know I cannot instruct you; I only wish to remind you of that humility which best becometh the Christian character. G.o.d, in the New Testament, our best guide, is represented to us in the kind, condescending, amiable, familiar light of a parent; and, in my poor mind, 'tis best for us so to consider him as our heavenly Father, and our best friend, without indulging too bold conceptions of his character."

About a month later, he says:

"Few but laugh at me for reading my Testament. They talk a language I understand not; I conceal sentiments that would be a puzzle to _them_."