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Mary Lamb
On Lamb's return, he wrote in the same modest vein as before —
"I am scarcely yet so reconciled to the loss of you or so subsided into my wonted uniformity of feeling as to sit calmly down to think of you and write… Is the patriot [Thelwall] come? Are Wordsworth and his sister gone yet? I was looking out for John Thelwall all the way from Bridgewater and had I met him I think it would have moved me almost to tears. You will oblige me, too, by sending me my great-coat which I left behind in the oblivious state the mind is thrown into at parting. Is it not ridiculous that I sometimes envy that great-coat lingering so cunningly behind! At present I have none; so send it me by a Stowey waggon if there be such a thing, directing it for C. L., No. 45, Chapel Street, Pentonville, near London. But above all, that inscription [of Wordsworth's]. It will recall to me the tones of all your voices, and with them many a remembered kindness to one who could and can repay you all only by the silence of a grateful heart. I could not talk much while I was with you but my silence was not sullenness nor I hope from any bad motive; but in truth, disuse has made me awkward at it. I know I behaved myself, particularly at Tom Poole's and at Cruikshank's most like a sulky child; but company and converse are strange to me. It was kind in you all to endure me as you did.
"Are you and your dear Sara – to me also very dear because very kind – agreed yet about the management of little Hartley? And how go on the little rogue's teeth?"
The mention of his address in the foregoing letter, shows that Lamb and his father had already quitted Little Queen Street. It is probable that they did so, indeed, immediately after the great tragedy; to escape, not only from the painful associations of the spot but also from the cruel curiosity which its terrible notoriety must have drawn upon them. The season was coming round which could not but renew his and Mary's grief and anguish in the recollection of that "day of horrors." "Friday next, Coleridge," he writes, "is the day (September 22nd) on which my mother died;" and in the letter is enclosed that beautiful and affecting poem beginning: —
Alas! how am I changed? Where be the tears,The sobs, and forced suspensions of the breath,And all the dull desertions of the heart,With which I hung o'er my dead mother's corse?Where be the blest subsidings of the stormWithin? The sweet resignedness of hopeDrawn heavenward, and strength of filial loveIn which I bowed me to my Father's will?*****Mary's was a silent grief. But those few casual pathetic words written years afterwards speak her life-long sorrow, – "my dear mother who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart." She continued quiet in her lodgings, free from relapse till toward the end of the year.
On the 10th December Charles wrote in bad spirits, – "My teasing lot makes me too confused for a clear judgment of things; too selfish for sympathy… My sister is pretty well, thank God. We think of you very often. God bless you. Continue to be my correspondent, and I will strive to fancy that this world is not 'all barrenness.'"
But by Christmas Day she was once more in the asylum. In sad solitude he gave utterance, again in verse form, to his overflowing grief and love: —
I am a widow'd thing now thou art gone!Now thou art gone, my own familiar friend,Companion, sister, helpmate, counsellor!Alas! that honour'd mind whose sweet reproofAnd meekest wisdom in times past have smooth'dThe unfilial harshness of my foolish speech,And made me loving to my parents old(Why is this so, ah God! why is this so?)That honour'd mind become a fearful blank,Her senses lock'd up, and herself kept outFrom human sight or converse, while so manyOf the foolish sort are left to roam at large,Doing all acts of folly and sin and shame?Thy paths are mystery!Yet I will not thinkSweet friend, but we shall one day meet and liveIn quietness and die so, fearing God.Or if not, and these false suggestions beA fit of the weak nature, loth to partWith what it loved so long and held so dear;If thou art to be taken and I left(More sinning, yet unpunish'd save in thee,)It is the will of God, and we are clayIn the potter's hand; and at the worst are madeFrom absolute nothing, vessels of disgrace,Till His most righteous purpose wrought in us,Our purified spirits find their perfect rest.To add to these sorrows Coleridge had, for some time, been growing negligent as a correspondent. So early as April Lamb had written, after affectionate enquiries for Hartley "the minute philosopher" and Hartley's mother, – "Coleridge, I am not trifling, nor are these matter-of-fact questions only. You are all very dear and precious to me. Do what you will, Coleridge, you may hurt and vex me by your silence but you cannot estrange my heart from you all. I cannot scatter friendships like chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine hand like hour-glass sand. I have but two or three people in the world to whom I am more than indifferent and I can't afford to whistle them off to the winds."
And again, three months after his return from Stowey, he wrote sorrowfully almost plaintively, remonstrating for Lloyd's sake and his own: —
"You use Lloyd very ill, never writing to him. I tell you again that his is not a mind with which you should play tricks. He deserves more tenderness from you. For myself, I must spoil a little passage of Beaumont and Fletcher's to adapt it to my feelings:
I am prouderThat I was once your friend, tho' now forgot,Than to have had another true to me.If you don't write to me now, as I told Lloyd, I shall get angry and call you hard names – 'Manchineel'" (alluding to a passage in a poem of Coleridge's, where he compares a false friend to the treacherous manchineel tree1 which mingles its own venom with the rain and poisons him who rests beneath its shade) "and I don't know what else. I wish you would send me my great-coat. The snow and the rain season is at hand and I have but a wretched old coat, once my father's, to keep 'em off and that is transitory.
When time drives flocks from field to fold,When ways grow foul and blood gets cold,I shall remember where I left my coat. Meet emblem wilt thou be, old Winter, of a friend's neglect – cold, cold, cold!"
But this fresh stroke of adversity, sweeping away the fond hope Charles had begun to cherish that "Mary would never be so ill again," roused his friend's sometimes torpid but deep and enduring affection for him into action. "You have writ me many kind letters, and I have answered none of them," says Lamb, on the 28th of January 1798. "I don't deserve your attentions. An unnatural indifference has been creeping on me since my last misfortunes or I should have seized the first opening of a correspondence with you. These last afflictions, Coleridge, have failed to soften and bend my will. They found me unprepared… I have been very querulous, impatient under the rod – full of little jealousies and heart-burnings. I had well-nigh quarrelled with Charles Lloyd; and for no other reason, I believe, than that the good creature did all he could to make me happy. The truth is I thought he tried to force my mind from its natural and proper bent. He continually wished me to be from home; he was drawing me from the consideration of my poor dear Mary's situation rather than assisting me to gain a proper view of it with religious consolations. I wanted to be left to the tendency of my own mind in a solitary state which in times past, I knew, had led to quietness and a patient bearing of the yoke. He was hurt that I was not more constantly with him; but he was living with White (Jem White, an old school-fellow, author of Falstaff's Letters), a man to whom I had never been accustomed to impart my dearest feelings though, from long habits of friendliness and many a social and good quality, I loved him very much. I met company there sometimes, indiscriminate company. Any society almost, when I am in affliction, is sorely painful to me. I seem to breathe more freely, to think more collectedly, to feel more properly and calmly when alone. All these things the good creature did with the kindest intentions in the world but they produced in me nothing but soreness and discontent. I became, as he complained, 'jaundiced' towards him … but he has forgiven me; and his smile, I hope, will draw all such humours from me. I am recovering, God be praised for it, a healthiness of mind, something like calmness; but I want more religion… Mary is recovering; but I see no opening yet of a situation for her. Your invitation went to my very heart; but you have a power of exciting interest, of leading all hearts captive, too forcible to admit of Mary's being with you. I consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness. I think you would almost make her dance within an inch of the precipice: she must be with duller fancies and cooler intellects. I know a young man of this description, who has suited her these twenty years, and may live to do so still, if we are one day restored to each other."
But the clouds gathered up again between the friends, generated partly by a kind of intellectual arrogance whereof Coleridge afterwards accused himself (he was often but too self-depreciatory in after life) which, in spite of Lamb's generous and unbounded admiration for his friend, did at last both irritate and hurt him; still more by the influence of Lloyd who, himself slighted as he fancied, and full of a morbid sensitiveness "bordering on derangement," sometimes indeed overleaping that border, worked upon Lamb's soreness of feeling till a brief estrangement ensued. Lamb had not yet learned to be on his guard with Lloyd. Years afterwards he wrote of him to Coleridge: "He is a sad tattler; but this is under the rose. Twenty years ago he estranged one friend from me quite, whom I have been regretting, but never could regain since. He almost alienated you also from me or me from you, I don't know which: but that breach is closed. The 'dreary sea' is filled up. He has lately been at work 'telling again,' as they call it, a most gratuitous piece of mischief, and has caused a coolness betwixt me and (not a friend but) an intimate acquaintance. I suspect, also, he saps Manning's faith in me who am to Manning more than an acquaintance."
The breach was closed, indeed, almost as soon as opened. But Coleridge went away to Germany for fourteen months and the correspondence was meanwhile suspended. When it was resumed Lamb was, in some respects, an altered man; he was passing from youth to maturity, enlarging the circle of his acquaintance and entering on more or less continuous literary work; whilst, on the other hand, the weaknesses which accompanied the splendid endowments of his friend were becoming but too plainly apparent; and though they never for a moment lessened Lamb's affection, nay, with his fine humanity seemed to give rather an added tenderness to it, there was inevitably a less deferential, a more humorous and playful tone on his side in their intercourse. "Bless you, old sophist who, next to human nature, taught me all the corruption I was capable of knowing," says he to the poet-philosopher by-and-by. And the weak side of his friend's style, too, received an occasional sly thrust; as for instance when on forwarding him some books he writes in 1800 "I detained Statius wilfully, out of a reverent regard to your style. Statius they tell me is turgid."
CHAPTER IV
Death of the Father. – Mary comes Home to live. – A Removal. – First Verses. – A Literary Tea-Party. – Another Move. – Friends increase1799-1800. – Æt. 35-36The feeble flame of life in Lamb's father flickered on for two years and a half after his wife's death. He was laid to rest at last beside her and his sister Hetty in the churchyard of St. Andrew's, Holborn (now swept away in the building of the Holborn Viaduct), on the 13th of April 1799, and Mary came home once more. There is no mention of either fact in Lamb's letters; for Coleridge was away in Germany; and with Southey, who was almost the sole correspondent of this year, the tie was purely intellectual and never even in that kind a close one. A significant allusion to Mary there is, however, in a letter to him dated May 20: "Mary was never in better health or spirits than now." But neither the happiness of sharing Charles's home again nor anything else could save her from the constant recurrence of her malady; nor, in these early days, from the painful notoriety of what had befallen her; and they were soon regarded as unwelcome inmates in the Chapel Street lodgings.
Early in 1800 be tells Coleridge: "Soon after I wrote to you last an offer was made me by Gutch (you must remember him at Christ's) to come and lodge with him at his house in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. This was a very comfortable offer to me, the rooms being at a reasonable rent and including the use of an old servant, besides being infinitely preferable to ordinary lodgings in our case as you must perceive. As Gutch knew all our story and the perpetual liability to a recurrence in my sister's disorder, probably to the end of her life, I certainly think the offer very generous and very friendly. I have got three rooms (including servant) under £34 a year. Here I soon found myself at home, and here, in six weeks after, Mary was well enough to join me. So we are once more settled. I am afraid we are not placed out of the reach of future interruptions; but I am determined to take what snatches of pleasure we can, between the acts of our distressful drama. I have passed two days at Oxford, on a visit, which I have long put off, to Gutch's family. The sight of the Bodleian Library and, above all, a fine bust of Bishop Taylor at All Souls' were particularly gratifying to me. Unluckily it was not a family where I could take Mary with me, and I am afraid there is something of dishonesty in any pleasure I take without her. She never goes anywhere." And to Manning: "It is a great object to me to live in town." [Pentonville then too much of a gossiping country suburb!] "We can be nowhere private except in the midst of London."
By the summer Mary was not only quite well but making a first essay in verse – the theme, a playful mockery of her brother's boyish love for a pictured beauty at Blakesware described in his essay, – "that Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery and a lamb, that hung next the great bay window, with the bright yellow H – shire hair, and eye of watchet hue – so like my Alice! I am persuaded she was a true Elia – Mildred Elia, I take it. From her and from my passion for her – for I first learned love from a picture – Bridget took the hint of those pretty whimsical lines which thou mayest see if haply thou hast never seen them, reader, in the margin. But my Mildred grew not old like the imaginary Helen."
With brotherly pride he sends them to Coleridge: "How do you like this little epigram? It is not my writing, nor had I any finger in it. If you concur with me in thinking it very elegant and very original, I shall be tempted to name the author to you. I will just hint that it is almost or quite a first attempt: —
HELENHigh-born Helen, round your dwellingThese twenty years I've paced in vain;Haughty beauty, thy lover's dutyHath been to glory in his pain.High-born Helen, proudly tellingStories of thy cold disdain;I starve, I die, now you comply,And I no longer can complain.These twenty years I've lived on tears,Dwelling forever on a frown;On sighs I've fed, your scorn my bread;I perish now you kind are grown.Can I who loved my beloved,But for the scorn "was in her eye";Can I be moved for my beloved,When she "returns me sigh for sigh"?In stately pride, by my bed-sideHigh-born Helen's portrait's hung;Deaf to my praise, my mournful laysAre nightly to the portrait sung.To that I weep, nor ever sleep,Complaining all night long to her.Helen grown old, no longer cold.Said, "You to all men I prefer."Lamb inserted this and another by Mary, a serious and tender little poem, the Dialogue between a Mother and Child beginning
O lady, lay your costly robes aside,No longer may you glory in your pride,in the first collected edition of his works.
Mary now began also to go out with her brother, and the last record of this year in the Coleridge correspondence discloses them at a literary tea-party, not in the character of lions but only as friends of a lion – Coleridge – who had already become, in his frequent visits to town, the prey of some third-rate admiring literary ladies, notably of a certain Miss Wesley (niece of John Wesley) and of her friend Miss Benger, authoress of a Life of Tobin, &c.
"You blame us for giving your direction to Miss Wesley," says the letter; "the woman has been ten times after us about it and we gave it her at last, under the idea that no further harm would ensue, but that she would once write to you, and you would bite your lips and forget to answer it, and so it would end. You read us a dismal homily upon 'Realities.' We know quite as well as you do what are shadows and what are realities. You, for instance, when you are over your fourth or fifth jorum, chirping about old school occurrences, are the best of realities. Shadows are cold, thin things that have no warmth or grasp in them. Miss Wesley and her friend and a tribe of authoresses that come after you here daily and, in defect of you, hive and cluster upon us, are the shadows. You encouraged that mopsey Miss Wesley to dance after you in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off by that simple expedient of referring her to you, but there are more burs in the wind. I came home t'other day from business, hungry as a hunter, to dinner, with nothing, I am sure, of the author but hunger about me; and whom found I closeted with Mary but a friend of this Miss Wesley, one Miss Benjay or Benje … I just came in time enough, I believe, luckily to prevent them from exchanging vows of eternal friendship. It seems she is one of your authoresses that you first foster and then upbraid us with. But I forgive you. 'The rogue has given me potions to make me love him.' Well, go she would not nor step a step over our threshold till we had promised to come to drink tea with her next night. I had never seen her before and could not tell who the devil it was that was so familiar. We went, however, not to be impolite. Her lodgings are up two pair of stairs in East Street. Tea and coffee and macaroons – a kind of cake – much love. We sat down. Presently Miss Benjay broke the silence by declaring herself quite of a different opinion from D'Israeli, who supposes the differences of human intellect to be the mere effect of organization. She begged to know my opinion. I attempted to carry it off with a pun upon organ, but that went off very flat. She immediately conceived a very low opinion of my metaphysics; and turning round to Mary, put some question to her in French, possibly having heard that neither Mary nor I understood French. The explanation that took place occasioned some embarrassment and much wondering. She then fell into an insulting conversation about the comparative genius and merits of all modern languages and concluded with asserting that the Saxon was esteemed the purest dialect in Germany. From thence she passed into the subject of poetry where I, who had hitherto sat mute and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner. But I was stopped by a round assertion that no good poetry had appeared since Dr. Johnson's time. It seems the doctor has suppressed many hopeful geniuses that way, by the severity of his critical strictures in his Lives of the Poets. I here ventured to question the fact and was beginning to appeal to names but I was assured 'it was certainly the case.' Then we discussed Miss More's [Hannah] book on education, which I had never read. It seems Dr. Gregory, another of Miss Benjay's friends, had found fault with one of Miss More's metaphors. Miss More has been at some pains to vindicate herself, in the opinion of Miss Benjay not without success. It seems the Doctor is invariably against the use of broken or mixed metaphor which he reprobates, against the authority of Shakspeare himself. We next discussed the question whether Pope was a poet? I find Dr. Gregory is of opinion he was not, though Miss Seward does not at all concur with him in this. We then sat upon the comparative merits of the ten translations of Pizarro and Miss Benjay or Benje advised Mary to take two of them home (she thought it might afford her some pleasure to compare them verbatim), which we declined. It being now nine o'clock, wine and macaroons were again served round, and we parted with a promise to go again next week and meet the Miss Porters who, it seems, have heard much of Mr. Coleridge and wish to see us because we are his friends. I have been preparing for the occasion. I crowd cotton in my ears. I read all the reviews and magazines of the past month against the dreadful meeting, and I hope by these means to cut a tolerable second-rate figure.
"… Take no thought about your proof-sheets; they shall be done as if Woodfall himself did them. Pray send us word of Mrs. Coleridge and little David Hartley, your little reality. Farewell, dear Substance. Take no umbrage at anything I have written.
"I am, and will be,"Yours ever in sober sadness,"Land of Shadows, C. Lamb. Umbra"Shadow month 16th or 17th, 1800"Write your German as plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know I am homo unius linguæ: in English – illiterate, a dunce, a ninny."
Mr. Gutch seems to have soon repented him of his friendly deed: —
"I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be agreeable at Our Lady's next feast," writes Lamb to Manning. "I have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms which look out (when you stand a-tip-toe) over the Thames and Surrey hills… My bed faces the river so as by perking up on my haunches and supporting my carcase with my elbows, without much wrying my neck I can see the white sails glide by the bottom of the King's Bench Walk as I lie in my bed … casement windows with small panes to look more like a cottage… There I shall have all the privacy of a house without the encumbrance and shall be able to lock my friends out as often as I desire to hold free converse with my immortal mind, for my present lodgings resemble a minister's levée, I have so increased my acquaintance (as they call 'em) since I have resided in town. Like the country mouse that had tasted a little of urbane manners, I long to be nibbling my own cheese by my dear self, without mouse-traps and time-traps."
