Charles Lamb Part 1

Charles Lamb.

by Walter Jerrold.

THE STORY OF HIS LIFE

Charles Lamb's biography should be read at length in his essays and his letters--from them we get to know not only the facts of his life but almost insensibly we get a knowledge of the man himself such as cannot be conveyed in any brief summary. He is as a friend, a loved friend, whom it seems almost sacrilegious to summarize in the compact sentences of a biographical dictionary, of whom it would be a wrong to write if the writing were to be used instead of, rather than as an introduction to, a literary self-portrait, more striking it may be believed than any of the canvases in the Uffizi Gallery. When he was six-and-twenty Charles Lamb wrote thus in reply to an invitation from Wordsworth to visit him in c.u.mberland:

I have pa.s.sed all my days in London ... the lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes--London itself a pantomime and a masquerade--all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?

In whimsical exaggeration Lamb sometimes wrote of his aversion from country sights and sounds, adopting that method partly perhaps for the purpose of rallying his correspondents, and partly for the purpose of accentuating his own "unrural notions." He was a Londoner of Londoners. In London he was born and educated, and in London--with a few of his later years in what is now but an outer suburb--he pa.s.sed the fifty-nine years of his life. Beyond some childish holidays in pleasant Hertfordshire, a few brief trips into the country--to Coleridge at Stowey and at Keswick, to Oxford and Cambridge, and one short journey to Paris--he had no personal contact with the outer world. He delighted in his devotion to London, and stands pre-eminent as the Londoner in literature.

Charles Lamb was the son of John Lamb, who had left his native Lincolnshire--probably from the neighbourhood of Stamford--as a child, and who finally found himself attached to one Samuel Salt, a Bencher of the Inner Temple, in the capacity of "his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his 'flapper,' his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer." Salt's chambers were at 2, Crown Office Row, and there John Lamb lived with a family consisting of himself, his wife, an unmarried sister, Sarah Lamb ("Aunt Hetty"), a son John, aged twelve, and a daughter Mary, aged eleven, when on 10th February, 1775, there was born to him another son to whom was given the now familiar name. Seven children had been born from 1762 to 1775, but of them all these three alone survived. The father and his employer are sketched, unforgetably, in Lamb's essay on "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," Salt, under his own name, and Lamb under that of Lovel: "I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal and 'would strike.' In the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his opponents." The whole pa.s.sage must be read in the essay itself. From his father Charles Lamb inherited at once his literary leanings and his humour, both heightened to an incalculable degree. We have Elia's word for it that John Lamb the elder "was the liveliest little fellow breathing" with a face as gay as Garrick's, and we know further that he published a small volume of simple verse. From the father, too, the family derived a heavier inheritance, which was to cast its shadow over their lives from the day of Charles's early manhood to the day half a century later, when his sister Mary, the last survivor of the family circle, was laid to rest.

Lamb's mother, Elizabeth Field, is--for obvious reasons--the only member of the immediate family circle whom we do not meet in his writings. His maternal grandmother--the grandame who is to be met in his verses and in some of his essays--was for over half a century housekeeper at Blakesware in Hertfordshire, and with her, as a small boy, Charles spent pleasant holidays.

Little Charles Lamb was sent for a time to "a humble day-school, at which reading and writing were taught to us boys in the morning, and the same slender erudition was communicated to the girls, our sisters, etc., in the evening." In a letter to Coleridge (5th July, 1796) we have a hint that Lamb may have had yet earlier teaching in an infant school in the Temple for he writes: "Mr. Chambers lived in the Temple; Mrs. Reynolds, his daughter, was my schoolmistress"; though it may be that the lady referred to was employed in Mr. Bird's school. This school, kept by William Bird "in the pa.s.sage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings," was the one to which Mary Lamb appears to have owed her regular training; but Samuel Salt had a goodly collection of old books in his chambers, and among these the brother and sister browsed most profitably, to use his own expressive word, acquiring an early liking for good literature and learning to take their best recreation in things of the mind. But if from the "school room looking into a discoloured dingy garden" Mary Lamb was presumed to be able to acquire a sufficiency of knowledge, it was seen that her younger brother needed something more than Mr. Bird could give to fit him for a life in which he would have to take an early place as bread-winner. John Lamb's friendly employer--whom lovers of Lamb can never recall but to honour--secured a nomination for the boy to Christ's Hospital, and thither in his eighth year the little fellow was transferred from the home in the Temple.

Should a zealous compiler seek to arrange an autobiography of Charles Lamb from his writings he would not have a difficult task, and he would find two delightful essays devoted to the famous school--so long the distinguishing feature of Newgate Street--where "blue-coat boys"

pa.s.sed the most importantly formative period of their lives.

Handicapped somewhat by a stuttering speech Charles Lamb did not perhaps join in all the boyish sports of his fellows, though there are many testimonies to the regard in which he was held by his school-mates, and the fact is stressed that though the only one of his surname at Christ's Hospital, he was never "Lamb" but always "Charles Lamb," as though there were something of an endearment in the constant use of his Christian name. "The Christ's Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character of his own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common charity-boy as it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought up at some other of the public schools."

In the essay from which this is quoted, Charles Lamb, looking back a quarter of a century after leaving the old foundation, summed up the characteristics of his school as reflected in the character of its boys of whom he and the close friend he made there are the two whose names are the most commonly on the lips of men. It is, indeed, worthy of remark that from amid the countless boys educated at Christ's Hospital since it was founded three centuries and a half ago by "the flower of the Tudor name ... boy patron of boys," the names that stand out most prominently are those of the two who were at the school together--Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was at that old "Hospital," recently, alas, demolished, that these men, so different in genius, so similar in many of their intellectual tastes, began a memorable friendship that was only to be broken by death more than half a century later.

A schoolfellow's description of him may help us to visualize the elusive figure of which we have no early portraits, and the later portraits of which are understood to be wanting in one regard or another. His countenance, says this early observer, was mild; his complexion clear brown, with an expression that might lead you to think that he was of Jewish descent. His eyes were not each of the same colour: one was hazel, the other had specks of grey in the iris, mingled as we see red spots in the bloodstone. His step was plantigrade, which made his walk slow and peculiar, adding to the staid appearance of his figure.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.]

For seven years--from October 1782 until November 1789--Charles Lamb remained at Christ's Hospital, and then, close upon fifteen years of age, returned to his parents in the Temple. His brother John had obtained an appointment in the South Sea House, probably through the kindly offices of Samuel Salt, who was a Deputy-Governor, and at some unascertained date between 1789 and 1792, Charles found employment in the same office; not, however, for long, for in April of 1792 he was appointed clerk in the accountant's office of the East India House, at a commencing salary of 70 per annum. This same year which thus saw the founding of Charles Lamb's humble fortunes, saw also the beginning of the break-up of his home, for the immortal old Bencher, Samuel Salt, died, and the Lamb family was left without its mainstay. John Lamb the elder was past work, already, we may believe, pa.s.sing into senility; and John Lamb the younger, who appears to have been prospering in the South Sea House, had presumably set up his bachelor home elsewhere. Salt bequeathed to his clerk and factotum a pension of 10 a year, and various legacies amounting to about 700. The old home in the Temple had to be given up, but whither the family first removed is not known. Four years later they were living in Little Queen Street--now a portion of Kingsway--off Holborn, in a house on the west side, the site of which is now covered by a church.

At the end of 1794--though his first known verses are dated five years earlier--Charles Lamb had, so far as we are aware, the pleasure of seeing himself for the first time "in print," and curiously enough here at the earliest beginning of his life as author he was intimately a.s.sociated with Coleridge; indeed, his "effusion," a sonnet addressed to Mrs. Siddons, appeared in "The Morning Chronicle" on 29th December, with the signature "S. T. C." Coleridge, we learn from Lamb's letters, altered the sonnet and was welcome to do so, and the poem properly appears in both of their collected works; the recension is certainly not an improvement on the original. In the spring of 1796 a small volume of Coleridge's poems was published, four sonnets by Lamb being included in it; and in May, 1796, was written the earliest of the rich collection of Lamb's letters which have come down to us. In this letter we have the first mention of the shadow which overhung the Lamb family.

My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don't bite any one. But mad I was; and many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were told.... Coleridge, it may convince you of my regard for you when I tell you my head ran on you in my madness as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.

It is a.s.sumed that the closing reference here is to Lamb's romantic love for A---- W----; the "Anna" of some of his sonnets written about this time, the "Alice W----" of the later "Dream Children," and other of the essays, and that it was to the unhappy course of a deep love that Charles Lamb owed his brief period of mental aberration. This year, 1796, which was to close in tragic gloom, was indeed marked almost throughout by unhappiness, lightened only by the close and friendly correspondence with Coleridge. From these letters we learn that besides his own mental trouble, his sister had been very ill, his brother was laid up and demanded constant attention, having a leg so bad that for a time the necessity of amputation appeared to be probable.[1] Through it all Charles Lamb was conscious of being "sore galled with disappointed hope," and felt something of enforced loneliness, consequent upon his being, as he described himself, "slow of speech and reserved of manners"; he went nowhere, as he put it, had no acquaintance, and but one friend--Coleridge. It is difficult, in reading much in these letters, to realize that the writer was but just come of age in the previous February. The first twenty or so of the letters of Lamb which have come down to us are addressed to Coleridge (1796-1798). Between the seventh of the series (5th July, 1796) and the eighth (27th September, 1796) there is a gap of time at the close of which happened the tragedy that coloured the whole of Charles Lamb's subsequent life and caused him to give himself up to a life of devotion to which it would not be easy to find a parallel.

[Footnote 1: It is curious that a quarter of a century later, when writing of his brother in "Dream Children," Lamb speaks of his being lame-footed, and of having his limb actually taken off.]

The story is best told in the poignant simplicity of Lamb's first letter to Coleridge after the calamity:

MY DEAREST FRIEND,

White, or some of my friends, or the public papers, by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines: 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 s.n.a.t.c.h the knife out of her grasp.

She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I hear she must be moved to an hospital. G.o.d 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 friends; but, thank G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed away," and I have something more to do than to feel.

G.o.d Almighty have us all in His keeping!

C. LAMB.

Mention nothing of poetry, I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish mine (I give free leave) without name or initial, and never send me a book, I charge you.

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. G.o.d Almighty love you and all of us!

C. LAMB.

At the inquest the only possible verdict was returned, that of homicide during temporary insanity, against the young woman who, in her frenzy, had killed her own mother and destroyed a home which she had been working hard, as a mantua maker, to help support. The awful shock had, perhaps, a steadying effect on Charles Lamb. Here he was at the age of one-and-twenty suddenly placed in a position that might have tried a strong-minded man in his prime; his brother, a dozen years his senior, so far as we are aware mixed himself as little as might be with the family tragedy; poor Mary had to be placed in an asylum and supported there, and a pledge taken for her future safe-guarding, while in the home a physically feeble old aunt and a mentally feeble old father had to be looked after and companioned.

Humbly and unhesitatingly he who was but little more than a youth in years took up a task which it is painful even to contemplate; the simple spirit in which he did so may be realized from a n.o.ble letter which he sent to his friend at the time. The shattered family removed from Little Queen Street to 45, Chapel Street, Pentonville, and there in the following year Aunt Hetty died. In the spring of 1799 old John Lamb also pa.s.sed away, and Mary returned to share her brother's home, to be tended always with loving solicitude, though ever and again she had to be removed during recurring attacks of her mental malady. In this brief summary of the story of Charles Lamb's life it is not necessary to keep referring to this fact, though it should be borne in mind that from time to time throughout their lives, Mary, affected now by solitariness and now by the over-excitement of seeing many friends, had to be placed under restraint for periods varying from a few weeks to several months. In this spring of 1799, too, with Mary's return to share her brother's life, began a new trouble. They were, as Lamb put it, "in a manner marked," and had frequently to change their lodgings until they were once more domiciled in the sanctuary of the Temple, where they had been born and where they had pa.s.sed their childhood and youth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHRIST'S HOSPITAL: THE DINING HALL.]

In the first feeling of his horror after his mother's death, and with a sense of all the responsibility that had fallen upon his shoulders Lamb had disclaimed any further interest in literature, had asked Coleridge not to mention it, not to include his name in a projected volume. Yet he was to find in reading and in writing--and in the friendship of those who cared for reading and writing--at once a solace and a joy in his own life and a pa.s.sport to the affections of generations of readers. In 1797 there was published a new edition of Coleridge's Poems, "to which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd." In the summer of the same year he spent a week at Nether Stowey with Coleridge,[2] and in the autumn he and Lloyd pa.s.sed a fortnight with Southey in Hampshire. He was consolidating the friendships which were to bind him ever closer to letters. With Coleridge, as we have seen, he was on terms of intimacy, and when that poet went abroad for a while Southey became Lamb's most intimate correspondent. The keenly sensitive young man later resented being dubbed "gentle-hearted," and an apparent a.s.sumption of lofty superiority on the part of his friend, stung him to a memorable retort. We may take the story from one of Lamb's own letters to Southey:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to the eternal regret of his native Devonshire, emigrates to Westphalia: "poor Lamb" (these were his last words), if he wants any knowledge, he may apply to me. In ordinary cases I thank him. I have an "Encyclopaedia"

at hand; but on such an occasion as going over to a German University, I could not refrain from sending him the following proposition to be by him defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or Gottingen.

[Footnote 2: Coleridge, disabled by some slight accident, was unable to accompany his friends on their walks during this visit of the Lambs, and once when they had left him he wrote the beautiful poem, "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison," which he "addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London." In it that friend was referred to in this pa.s.sage:

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!

The Theses, as given in the letter to Coleridge, are as follows:

Theses Quaedam Theologicae.

First, Whether G.o.d loves a lying angel better than a true man?

Second, Whether the Archangel Uriel could affirm an untruth?

and if he could, whether he would?

Third, Whether honesty be an angelic virtue, or not rather to be reckoned among those qualities which the school men term _virtutes minus splendidae_?

Fourth, Whether the higher order of Seraphim illuminati ever sneer?

Fifth, Whether pure intelligences can love?

Sixth, Whether the Seraphim ardentes do not manifest their virtues by the way of vision and theory; and whether practice be not a sub-celestial and merely human virtue?

Seventh, Whether the vision beatific be anything more or less than a perpetual re-presentment to each individual angel of his own present attainments and future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal looking-gla.s.ses, reflecting a perpetual complacency and self-satisfaction?

Eighth, and last. Whether an immortal and amenable soul may not come to be condemned at last, and the man never suspect it before hand?

The poet did not reply, and the misunderstanding between the two was happily not long continued. I have sometimes doubted whether Coleridge ever knew Lamb so well as Lamb knew Coleridge, though of his affection for the brother and sister there can be no doubt; of them he wrote at the end of his life:

Dear to my heart, yea as it were my heart.

In his "Sidelights on Charles Lamb," too, Mr. Bertram Dobell rescued a remarkably interesting testimony "minuted down from the lips of Coleridge," which shows that the poet came to know Lamb better than when he sent his provocative message:

Charles Lamb has more totality and individuality of character than any other man I know, or have ever known in all my life. In most men we distinguish between the different powers of their intellect as one being predominant over the other. The genius of Wordsworth is greater than his talent, though considerable. The talent of Southey is greater than his genius, though respectable; and so on. But in Charles Lamb it is altogether one; his genius is talent, and his talent is genius, and his heart is as whole and one as his head. The wild words that come from him sometimes on religious subjects would shock you from the mouth of any other man, but from him they seem mere flashes of fireworks.

If an argument seem to his reason not fully true, he bursts out in that odd desecrating way; yet his will, the inward man, is, I well know, profoundly religious. Watch him, when alone, and you will find him with either a Bible or an old divine, or an old English poet; in such is his pleasure.