Home Life of Great Authors Part 5

"A kind of cloud of stupidity hangs about me, as if all were unreal that men seem to be doing and talking about."

After the burial he writes:--

"The whole scene floats as a sort of dream before me,--the beautiful day, the gray ruins covered and hidden among clouds of foliage, where the grave even in the lap of beauty lay lurking and gaping for its prey. Then the grave looks, the hasty, important bustle of the men with spades and mattocks, the train of carriages, the coffin containing the creature that was so long the dearest on earth to me, and whom I was to consign to the very spot which in pleasure parties we so frequently visited. It seems still as if it could not be really so. But it is so, and duty to G.o.d and to my children must teach me patience."

His pecuniary troubles were greeted with the liveliest sympathy from all quarters. The Earl of Dudley but voiced the general thought when he exclaimed, on first hearing of them: "Scott ruined! the author of 'Waverley' ruined! Good G.o.d! Let every man to whom he has given months of delight give him a sixpence, and he will rise to-morrow morning richer than Rothschild." When, after a time, he rallied and went on a journey to London, the deep sympathy with which he was received, and the kindness of all with whom he a.s.sociated, cheered his heart a great deal, and he went back to his unparalleled labors quite refreshed. But he had set himself a task which it was impossible that any man could do, and although he worked himself mercilessly to the end, he failed of accomplishing it. His nervous system became completely shattered, and he had several strokes of paralysis; but it was not until his mind also began to fail in serious fashion that he would give over his work. He seemed determined to die a free man, but the task was too prodigious. He labored like a giant, but he failed.

The record of those closing days is very sad. The pity they excite is too deep even for tears. One turns from them with a heavy burden at the heart, which nothing can for a time relieve. The only comfort is that he was surrounded by the kindest and tenderest friends, and that he bore everything which came to him with unflinching fort.i.tude and the kindliest spirit. His last words spoken to Lockhart are characteristic of the man: "Be a good man, my dear; be virtuous, be religious, be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here." There is nothing in the record of Sir Walter's life which any friend would wish to blot. One can but be pained to excess by the record of his business troubles, so hopeless in their entanglements, but through all these even, his character glows with undiminished brightness, and we love him ever more and more. He was a man built on a large scale, both in intellect and heart, and, although he doubtless had his failings, there is little that is recorded of him that detracts in any way from his innate n.o.bility. Such a funeral as his has seldom been witnessed.

"The court-yard and all the precincts of Abbotsford were crowded with uncovered spectators as the procession was arranged; and as it advanced through Darnick and Melrose, and the adjacent villages, the whole population appeared at their doors in like manner,--almost all in black. The train of carriages extended more than a mile; the yeomanry followed in great numbers on horseback, and it was late in the day ere we reached Dryburg. Some accident, it was observed, had caused the hea.r.s.e to halt for several minutes on the summit of the hill at Bemerside,--exactly where a prospect of remarkable richness opens, and where Sir Walter had always been accustomed to rein up his horse. The day was dark and lowering, and the wind high. The wide enclosure at the Abbey of Dryburg was thronged with old and young; and when the coffin was taken from the hea.r.s.e and again laid on the shoulders of the afflicted serving-men, one deep sob burst from a thousand lips."

The heart of Scotland was broken at her great loss. And well might she mourn. The sceptre which the great Wizard of the North had so long held was broken, and no successor has yet risen to uphold the fame of Auld Scotia. Nor will a successor arise. No hand like his will ever touch the harp of his native land; no strains such as he evoked ever again sound through the rocky glens and pa.s.ses, and echo from the mountain-heights of Scotland.

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CHARLES LAMB.

If there is a tender and touching story in all the annals of genius, it is surely the life-history of Charles Lamb. Search where we will, there is nothing to equal the pathos of this gentle and lovable life. Nowhere else can we find a record of such deep devotion, such heroic endurance, such uncomplaining suffering, such geniality and cheerfulness under almost unbearable burdens. The world admires many of its men of letters,--it loves Charles Lamb. Save Carlyle's, no voice among all his literary brethren has ever said a bitter or an unkind word of the gentle humorist. And when we compare the lives of the two men, how brightly glows the page whereon is written the record of Lamb's untiring and unselfish love, exacting nothing for himself, but giving all with lavish prodigality, compared with the pages given to the account of the selfish and exacting life which Carlyle lived with the woman who was his wife, and whom he really loved, but over whom he tyrannized in so petty a manner! Carlyle's characterization of Lamb is really the most damaging thing to himself of the many bitter and biting sarcasms which he has left in regard to the men and women of his day. That he did not know Lamb--had not the slightest appreciation of the man--is evident at a glance. And perhaps this is not to be so much wondered at, for there was very little in common between the two; but it does seem that some hint of the heroism of Lamb's apparently commonplace and perhaps vulgar life might have penetrated even to the heart of the crusty Scotchman, for he could not have been ignorant of the tragic life-story of gentle Elia.

They were very humble people, the Lambs,--poor and obscure, and unfortunate to a degree. No pretensions to gentility had ever been in the family, but an acceptance of their commonplace lot, with little striving for higher things. There was something more, too, than poverty and obscurity and vulgarity in their antecedents; a fearful curse was in the family, the heritage of almost every generation,--the curse of madness. What the contemplation of this frightful inheritance must have been to a youth like Charles Lamb, gifted with the fatal sensibility of genius, and endowed with that imagination which can conceive of a horror before it falls, we can form some sort of conception, but probably a very vague and inadequate one indeed.

The family were very poor, living in humble lodgings. The father was in his dotage, the mother was a paralytic, and Charles with his pen, and his sister Mary with her needle, worked to support the family. They both overworked themselves fearfully, and lived in apprehension of the doom which hung over them. They were very fondly attached to each other, and the only pleasure they had in their cheerless youth was their intercourse. They were both gifted, and of gentle and kind disposition, and their affection for each other was more sympathetic and filled with a deeper insight into each other's characters and feelings than is common between brothers and sisters. In little intervals between their varied labors they wrote and read to each other many things which would have a rare value in these days had they been preserved; and this, with wandering together through the streets in the evenings and looking at the outside of the theatres, seems to have const.i.tuted their only youthful pleasure. At the age of twenty-one Charles showed symptoms of the family curse, and his sister herself almost lost her reason in unavailing sorrow over his condition. So young, so gifted, and threatened with such dread disaster,--his loving Mary could not have it so. She even rebelled against Heaven in the extreme of her agony, and called upon G.o.d to relieve them both from such ill-fated life. But all her prayers and tears and rebellious risings up against destiny did not avail, and Charles was placed in a mad-house, where he pa.s.sed a portion of the year 1796. In one of his lucid intervals he wrote a sonnet, "Mary, to thee, my sister, and my friend," which is a touching and tender tribute to her love. Long afterward he was able to write of the experience quite cheerfully:--

"I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy; for while it lasted I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad!"

But there is a painful commentary upon the bitterness of after-life to him in the thought that he could look back upon this dreadful season as a period when he had some happiness. The attack in his case was of brief duration, and it never recurred, which, considering all the sorrows and all the irregularities of his life, seems remarkable. He had not been long in a condition to be responsible when the tragedy took place which cast its blight upon his life. In September of the year 1796 Mary Lamb, "worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needle-work all day and by watching with her mother at night, broke into uncontrollable insanity, and seizing a knife from the table spread for dinner, stabbed her mother to the heart. The coroner's jury brought in a verdict of lunacy." Charles writes to Coleridge:--

"With me the former things are pa.s.sed away, and I have something more to do than to feel. G.o.d Almighty has us well in his keeping."

The horror of the event made so deep an impression upon his mind that he thought he never fully recovered from it. For many, many years it hung over him like a pall, casting a sort of despairing darkness over all that might have been bright in life. Think of that tender and sensitive soul in the awful solitude of the nights which followed the tragedy: the sister he loved removed from him to an asylum; the mother sleeping in her unhonored grave; the father, worse than dead, in almost drivelling idiocy, to be cared for at his hands; the awful doom of the family ever hanging over his own head,--what depths of pa.s.sionate sorrow must he have waded through in those bitter hours, what unavailing tears he must have shed, what rebellious thoughts may there not have been in his heart!

But he kept a cheerful front, and went about his daily toil, as he needs must, with as little outward show of pain as possible.

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 circ.u.mstances; 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 pa.s.sions 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 G.o.d; 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 hara.s.sed 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 G.o.d'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 a.s.sailable; 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 d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.s 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,--G.o.dlike; 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.

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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 Ambrosianae."

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 t.i.the 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 ill.u.s.trations drawn from the four quarters of the globe, and from the most remote and unusual stores of literary h.o.a.rding. 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.