“I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be agreeable, at Our Lady’s next feast. I have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms, which look out (when you stand a-tiptoe) over the Thames and Surrey Hills, at the upper end of King’s Bench Walk, in the Temple. 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 any 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.” In this letter, written to Manning early in 1801, three significant points call for comment. The phrase “in town,” referring to his residence in Southampton Buildings, shows how his previous abode in Islington was then in the country, and how the squalid houses of the foul Chapel Street of to-day have supplanted those pleasant cottages set in gardens, with rural lanes cutting the fields between. His curt reference to their “having received a hint” to move, proves how pitifully they were “marked,” as he had already put it, and how soon even the kindly Gutch withdrew his offer of shelter. The few words, “I have so increased my acquaintance” give a wide suggestion of the already growing attraction of this odd, original young character to all bright minds and sweet natures with whom he came in contact.
And so, on Lady Day, March 25, 1801, he and Mary moved into the Temple, there to begin, near their childhood home, that life of “dual loneliness,” never again broken in upon: consoled by their mutual affection, cheered by their common tastes, brightened by the companionship of congenial beings. In the Temple they remained for seventeen years, living in two sets of chambers during that period. After eight years’ abode at No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, they were compelled to quit, their landlord wanting the rooms for himself. Towards the end of March, 1809, in a letter to Manning, then in China, Lamb wrote as if he were in the next street: “While I think of it, let me tell you we are moved. Don’t come any more to Mitre Court Buildings. We are at 34 Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, and shall be here till about the end of May, when we remove to No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, where I mean to live and die.”
Their home in Southampton Buildings during these few months while changing chambers still stands intact; a delightful old square, solid, brick house, just in front of the tiny garden of Staple Inn. But both blocks of buildings in which he lived during those seventeen years in the Temple have been torn down and replaced by modern structures.
Although he disliked leaving the old chambers, he found the new set, on the third and fourth floors of No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, “far more commodious and roomy.... The rooms are delicious, and the best look back into Hare Court, where there is a pump always going. Just now it is dry. Hare Court trees come in at the window, so that it is like living in a garden!” This was written to Coleridge, in June, 1809; and to Manning, in letters during this period, Lamb spoke of the churchyard-like court having “three trees and a pump in it. Do you know it? I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years old ... the water of which is excellent cold, with brandy, and not very insipid without. Here I hope to set up my rest and not quit till Mr. Powell, the undertaker, gives me notice that I may have possession of my last lodging. He lets lodgings for single gentlemen.... I should be happy to see you any evening. Bring any of your friends, the Mandarins, with you.”
He did, indeed, as he often complained, hate and dread unaccustomed places, but he was well content to discover that this new habitation had “more aptitudes for growing old than you shall often see.”
It was here that Mary made the memorable find of an empty adjoining garret of four untenanted, unowned rooms; of which they took possession by degrees, and to which Charles could escape from his too frequent friends, who had more leisure than himself. Here he did his literary work in secrecy and silence, “as much alone as if he were in a lodging in the midst of Salisbury Plain.” They never knew to whom these chambers rightly belonged, and they were never dispossessed. So all was well with him, and even in his whimsical perversity he was able to complain only that there was another “Mr. Lamb” not far from him; “his duns and his girls frequently stumble up to me, and I am obliged to satisfy both in the best way I am able.”
The staircase of the new building is still stumbled up by duns and girls, you may drink from that same pump to-day, you may see those trees still in that court, but his windows no longer look out on trees and pump and court.
Talfourd and Procter have left vivid pictures of the memorable Wednesday evenings in the Temple, the former contrasting them with the stately assemblages of Holland House. “Like other great men, I have a public day,” Lamb wrote. He loved men, and he had a rare capacity for getting at the best they had in them, a real reverence for their abilities, a kindly sympathy with their diverse tastes, and a most friendly frankness as to all their foibles. “How could I hate him?” he asked of some one: “Don’t I know him? I never could hate any one I knew.” He looked so constantly and so closely into the strange faces of calamity, that he yearned always for the nearness of friendly features. Above all, he understood, as Goethe did, “how mighty is the goddess of propinquity;” and although he was so untiring and prolific and delightful in his letters to absent friends, he insisted that “one glimpse of the human face and one shake of the human hand is better than whole reams of this thin, cold correspondence; yea, of more worth than all the letters that have sweated the fingers of sensibility from Madame SÉvignÉ and Balzac to Sterne and Shenstone.”
So it came to pass that his little rooms in the Temple held a motley crowd. Low-browed rooms they were, set about with worn, homely, home-like furniture; his favourite books—his sole extravagance—in their shelves all about. His ragged veterans, he called them; “the finest collection of shabby books I ever saw; such a number of first-rate works in very bad condition is, I think, nowhere to be found,” is Crabb Robinson’s caustic comment on them. In narrow black frames, on the walls of his best room, hung “a choice collection of the works of Hogarth, an English painter of some humour.” The sideboard was already spread by Mary with cold beef, porter, punch; tobacco and pipes were at hand, and tables made ready for whist. This is Charles’s invitation: “Swipes exactly at nine, punch to commence at ten, with argument; difference of opinion expected to take place about eleven; perfect unanimity with some haziness and dimness before twelve!” He used to play right through his programme. His old cronies came, “friendly harpies,” he named many of them: for, as he said of the pretended dead Elia, his intimados were, to confess a truth, in the world’s eye, a ragged regiment. He never forsook a friend, ragged or rich in raiment or in repute, and “the burrs stuck to him; but they were good and loving burrs for all that.” It was the simple statement of a truth which he had made, long before this: “I cannot scatter friendships like chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine hand, like hour-glass sand.”
New acquaintances came, too; never men of fame or fortune or fashion, but men of mark, you may be sure. And many among them notable only for some tincture of the absurd in their characters: for “I love a Fool,” he said, “as naturally as if I were of kith and kin to him.” Crabb Robinson has left us his reminiscence of this place and these people, when speaking of his first acquaintance with the Lambs: “They were then living in a garret in Inner Temple Lane. In that humble apartment I spent many happy hours, and saw a greater number of excellent persons than I had ever seen collected together in one room.” Thus has he summed up, in his sedate way, all that need be said on that score.
The capricious Coleridge had once more become constant, after his refusal for two years to write, and his needless estrangement, which had called forth Lamb’s lines, “I had a friend, a kinder friend had no man;” and of whom, after many years, he yet was able to say: “The more I see of him in the quotidian undress and relaxation of his mind, the more cause I see to love him and believe him a very good man.” There was Hazlitt—trying to paint when Lamb first met him, finding later his true calling as art critic and essayist; easily first of all in that field, before or after him, in insight, breadth, and vigour; arrogant, intense, bitter, brooding forever over the fall of Napoleon: the only male creature he reverenced except Coleridge. He must needs respect, in Coleridge, the one man known to him who alone could surpass him in untiring fluency, even under the influence of strongest tea—sole stimulus allowed himself by Hazlitt at that time. Him, Lamb finds to be, “in his natural state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing.” And he, too, had tried to quarrel with the Lambs, and had failed, as did all who made the sorry attempt! There was William Wordsworth, ascetic, self-centred, quite sure of himself; whose true powers, and all that was genuine in his genius, Lamb was one of the first to recognize and to celebrate. There was Godwin, so bold in his speculations, so daring with his pen, so placid in person, and so mild of voice. This terrifying radical used to prattle on trivial topics till after supper, and then invariably fall fast asleep. “A very well-behaved decent man, ... quite a tame creature, I assure you; a middle-sized man, both in stature and understanding,” wrote his keen-eyed host. There was old Captain Burney, afterward admiral, son of the famous organist, brother of the more famous writing-woman, Fanny, Madame d’Arblay. He had been taught by Eugene Aram, he had sailed all around the globe with Captain Cook, and was still young and tender in heart under his rough exterior. There was his son, Martin, of whom Lamb said, “I have not found a whiter soul than thine;” Leigh Hunt, airy, sprightly, full of fine fancies; Charles Lloyd, poetic and intense; Tom Hood, slight of figure, feeble of voice, face of a Methodist parson, silent save for his sudden puns; Thomas Manning, the Cambridge mathematical tutor, “a man of a thousand;” Basil Montagu, the philanthropized courtier; stalwart Allan Cunningham; Haydon, the painter, eager everywhere for controversy; the preacher, Edward Irving, content to listen, there; Bernard Barton, Quaker poet, bank drudge; gentle and genial Barry Cornwall; Talfourd, the sympathetic chronicler of these scenes; constant and trusty Crabb Robinson; De Quincey, self-involved and sometimes spiteful, yet not behind any one of that brilliant band in his love for Lamb, whom he earnestly attests to be “the noblest of human beings.”
There appeared sometimes at these gatherings a most curious character, hardly known now as one of this group, but remembered rather from the parts he plays in the pages of Bulwer and of Dickens. This was Thomas Wainewright, the “Janus Weathercock” of the London Magazine; a flimsy, plausible, conceited scoundrel, in whom Lamb good-naturedly found something to like. It was after our friend’s death that Wainewright’s thefts and poisonings brought him to trial, and sent him to Van Diemen’s land, where the dandy convict died in madness, raving and unrepentant.
And Charles Lamb, the central and dominating personality of all these strong characters, towers above them all, not only and not so much by the greatness of his gifts as by that of his character. For simplicity, sincerity, singleness of soul—all that is childlike in genius—all those qualities which go to make up greatness of character—these were his. He was always young. To that scoffer who, sneering at Lamb’s habits, said that no man ought to be a Bohemian after the age of thirty, as to all the scoffers since, there is only the one old answer—Lamb never got to be thirty.
“Of all men of genius I ever knew,” said Crabb Robinson—and he knew all that were going in his day!—“Charles Lamb was the one most intensely and universally to be loved.” Among them all, he alone was known by his first name; just as, at school, he had been, as he always best liked to be, “Charles” to the other boys: “so Christians should call one another,” he used to say. Reason revolts and imagination cowers appalled before the forlorn and hopeless conception of Wordsworth addressed as “Willie,” or Coleridge as “Sam”! For, you see, this man never posed, never paraded himself, had no jealousy, nor petulance, nor pettiness. He never lied for effect, nor harboured hypocrisies, big or little. He was lucky in possessing that supreme antidote to the pernicious poison of conceit—an abiding sense of humour—“a genius in itself, and so defends from the insanities,” in Emerson’s wise words. Your solemn ass must needs take himself seriously; the man of deep, keen, quick perception of the ludicrous can never do so. When Coleridge, during a visit of the brother and sister to him at Nether Stowey, addressed to Lamb his maudlin lines, entitled “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,” in which he gushes over “my gentle-hearted Charles,” the victim of these verses rebelled. “For God’s sake, don’t make me ridiculous by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verse! Substitute drunken dog, ragged-head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, and any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question.”
“Stat magni nominis umbra” is Lucan’s stately phrase, to be aptly applied, in its best and original sense, to almost every one of this illustrious group. Yet, lofty as they loom in the distance, far above our power as well as our desire to belittle them, it may be not beyond belief that too close and too constant contact with some of them might have brought at the last a certain satiety. It may even be breathed, without irreverence and therefore without offence, that we might have been just a bit bored if allowed to listen without rest to Coleridge, with his rhetorical preachments and his melancholy, both born of rheumatism, rum, and opium; or to Hazlitt, with his ingrained selfishness, his petulance, his tea-inspired turgidity; or to Wordsworth, solemnly weighted with the colossal conviction of his own mission, and tireless in his tenacity to attest the truth thereof to all listeners. These, and all those lesser ones, seem to me petty and tiresome beside this spare, silent, stammering little fellow, who loved them all and laughed at them all; who gave them fitting reverence, and yet, with affectionate adroitness, found fun in their foibles!
How direct and delicate was his gibe when Coleridge had been longer even than usual in his endless endeavours to spin serviceable ropes with his metaphysical sands: “Oh, you mustn’t mind what Coleridge says; he’s so full of his fun.” I can see his twinkling eyes—those wonderfully sparkling eyes—as he answered Coleridge’s question, “Charles, did you ever hear me preach?” “I never heard you do anything else!” Coleridge was, indeed, quite capable, in Hazlitt’s sarcastic phrase, of taking up the deep pauses of conversation between seraphs and cardinals; and could have argued—with the same ready confidence with which, according to mocking Sydney Smith, Lord John Russell would have assumed command, at half an hour’s notice, of the channel fleet—on either side of the theses sent him by Lamb just before he went to Germany. These questions—“to be defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or GÖttingen,” by Coleridge—are deliciously sly and sharp in their stab at the complacent superiority over lesser gifted mortals felt and shown by that “archangel a little damaged.” I can hear the falsetto tone of his moralities growing shriller before these two questions, especially, among the others: “Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?” “Whether the higher order of seraphim illuminati ever sneer?”
How deftly he punctured Wordsworth’s sublime conceit, on his hinting that other poets might have equalled Shakespeare if they cared. “Oh, here’s Wordsworth says he could have written ‘Hamlet’ if he’d had the mind. It is clear that nothing is wanting but the mind!” Even the Infallible One not only tolerated, but valued, the acute criticisms with which Lamb leavened his discerning praise of all his friends’ work; but when he, with kindly frankness, rated a little lower than did their author the “Lyrical Ballads,” that author got into quite a state of mind. He “wrote four sweating pages” to inspire Lamb with a “greater range of sensibility;” and the tormented critic bursts out: “After one’s been reading Shakespeare for twenty of the best years of one’s life, to have a fellow start up and prate about some unknown quality possessed by Shakespeare less than by Milton and William Wordsworth!... What am I to do with such people? I shall certainly write ’em a very merry letter.” I wish that letter had been saved for our delectation.
Then there was Manning, with his slight sense of humour, and to him—then in China, to his friend’s loss—Lamb loved to write the maddest inventions, and let loose his wildest whims about their friends. To Coventry Patmore, on his way to Paris, he wrote, in an amazing letter: “If you go through Boulogne, inquire if old Godfrey is living, and how he got home from the Crusades. He must be a very old man now.”
Good, honest barrister Martin Burney—of the “If dirt were trumps” story—gave infinite fun to Lamb by his oddities. Once he read aloud, in their rooms, the whole Gospel of St. John, because biblical quotations are very emphatic in a court of justice. At another time he insisted on carving the fowl—and did it most ill-favouredly—because it was indispensable for a barrister to do all such things well. “Those little things were of more consequence than we thought!” Burney quite approved of Shakespeare, “because he was so much of a gentleman;” and he said and did so many queer things that Lamb wrote: “Why does not his guardian angel look to him? He deserves one; maybe he has tired him out!”
It was George Dyer, above all, in whom Lamb revelled, and who was meat and drink to him. Dyer was the son of a Wapping watchman and butcher, had been a charity-school boy at Christ’s, and had become a publisher’s harmless drudge. He was a true bookworm, eating his way through thick tomes, but digesting little. He seemed to find all the nourishment he needed in the husks of knowledge, while Lamb, in radical contrast, bit to the kernel with his incisive teeth. As to Dyer’s heart, however, his friend was sure that God never put a kinder into the flesh of man; and his was a simple, unsuspecting soul. He was so absent-minded that he would sometimes empty his snuff-box into his teapot, when making tea for his guests; and so near-sighted that he once walked placidly into the river, as I shall hereafter relate. He used to keep his “neat library” in the seat of his easy-chair. Mary Lamb and Mrs. Hazlitt, going to his chambers one day in his absence, “tidied-up” the rooms and sewed fast that out-of-repair easy-chair, with his books within it: whereat, to use his own violent language, he was greatly disconcerted!
Lamb gives a ludicrous description of his visit to these same chambers in Clifford’s Inn, where he found Dyer, “in mid-winter, wearing nankeen pantaloons four times too big for him, which the said heathen did pertinaciously affirm to be new. These were absolutely ingrained with the accumulated dirt of ages, but he affirmed ’em to be clean. He was going to visit a lady who was nice about those things, and that’s the reason he wore nankeen that day!” It was to this credulous creature that Lamb confided that the secret author of “Waverley” was Lord Castlereagh! And once he sent the guileless one to Primrose Hill at sunrise, to see the Persian Ambassador perform his orisons! No one but Dyer could have said that the assassin of the Ratcliffe Highway—painted so luridly by De Quincey in his “Three Memorable Murders”—“must have been rather an eccentric character!”
Haydon, the painter, has told of one memorable evening in his own studio, when Lamb was in marvellous vein, and met that immortal Comptroller of Stamps who had begged to be introduced to Wordsworth, and who insisted on having the latter’s opinion as to whether Milton and Newton were not great geniuses. Lamb took a candle and walked over to the poor man, saying, “Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?” Haydon and Keats got him away, but he persisted in bursting into the room, shouting, “Do let me have another look at that gentleman’s organs.” Edgar Poe’s Imp of the Perverse took entire possession of Lamb when thrown with uncongenial men, and forced him to give the impression of “something between an imbecile, a brute, and a buffoon.” Writing of himself after the imaginary death of Elia, he says, truly: “He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were scandalized (and offences were sure to arise) he could not help it.”
No, nor did he try to help it, and we love him all the more for this antic disposition he was so fond of showing unshamed. And I think that we need not grieve greatly because his vagaries were not kept always “within the limits of becoming mirth,” when he had to deal with prigs, pedants, or poseurs. Tom Moore, tiptoe with toadyism, tried to look down on Lamb, doubtless feeling that he had accurately sounded the shoals of his shallow insincerity. The portentous Macready has left on record his unfavourable impression of the irreverent creature who stood in no awe of superior persons on pasteboard pedestals. That impression pains us no more than does the ungentle judgment of Thomas Carlyle. He found Lamb’s talk to be but “a ghastly make-believe of wit,” “contemptibly small;” and in all that was said and done he saw, from his own humane point of view, nothing but “diluted insanity.” Curtly and cruelly he labelled this brother and sister, “two very sorry phenomena.”
If our friend laughed at others, he was just as ready to laugh at himself; and his hissing his own play is historic. It is strange that, with his keen critical sense, he should have hoped for the success of this “Mr. H., A Farce in Two Acts;” produced at Drury Lane, in 1806, with the great Elliston in the title-rÔle. Yet he had written to Manning in boyish glee: “All China shall ring with it—by and by.” In the same letter, he made fanciful designs for the orders he was to give for admission, elate with anticipation of the long run his piece was to have. He sat on the opening night with Mary and Crabb Robinson in the front of the pit (his favourite place), and joined with the audience in applauding his really witty prologue. Then, as the luckless farce fell flat and flatter, he was louder than any of them in their hisses. “Damn the word, I write it like kisses—how different!” he growled, in grotesque wrath, in his letter announcing the failure to Wordsworth. Hazlitt, who was present, dreamed of that dreadful damning every night for a month, but Lamb only wrote to him: “I know you’ll be sorry, but never mind. We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces.” He and Mary were “pretty stout” about it, but, after all, they would rather have had success, he had to own. For he not only longed for the fame, but he needed the money, which that success in dramatic authorship would have brought.
He delighted in playing all sorts of pranks on his sister, and was quick to improve any occasion to tease her. Such a scene is described by N. P. Willis, in his “Pencillings by the Way;” where he relates his meeting and making acquaintance with them, at a friend’s rooms in London. He and Lamb were chatting, and Mary, not quite catching all their words—she was then slightly deaf—asked, “What are you saying of me, Charles?” Instantly he answered: “Mr. Willis admires your ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ very much, and I was saying that it was no merit of yours that you understood that subject!” She took all his freaks in good part, translating them in the light of her affection for him, and of her fondness for his sweet and stingless banter.
His sense of fun bubbled up at most inapt times. He had been asked once to stand as godfather for a friend’s child, and feared he would disgrace himself at the very font. “I was at Hazlitt’s wedding and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh; I misbehaved once at a funeral.” In all this wayward whimsicality, one can detect that same depth and intensity of feeling which moved Abraham Lincoln to tell trivial stories at the most solemn crises; which suggests a sob beneath the maddest mirth of Sterne, MoliÈre, Cervantes; which drove Charles Lamb to seize the kettle from the hob and hold it on his sister’s head-dress, like the clown in a pantomime, to hide the breaking of his great heart at the signs of the coming mania he had detected in her. He accounted it an excellent thing to play the buffoon sometimes, and was willing to seem supremely silly, that he might save his own sanity.
Acting conversely, this trembling sensibility set the tears trickling down his cheeks, while he was writing a playful paper; and made him even “shed tears in the motley Strand, for fulness of joy of so much life.”
His largeness of soul was never shown in a grander way than in his letter to, and his whole conduct toward, Robert Southey, when the latter attacked, in the Quarterly Review, the first collected “Essays of Elia”—“a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it is original.” In the same paper, he spoke arrogantly and offensively of Leigh Hunt, his own political enemy, and Lamb’s most dear and most unjustly persecuted friend. From so close a companion as Southey had been, and one who knew him so thoroughly, this hurt Lamb deeply, and he wrote to Bernard Barton: “But I love and respect Southey, and will not retort. I hate his review and his being a reviewer.” And in the London Magazine he put forth the manly “Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esq.;” of which the latter said that “no resentful letter was ever written less offensively.” Then Southey—an exemplary if over-righteous mortal—sent Lamb a line of regret and affection, and Lamb wrote generously back, and the mists were melted away, and their friendship shone more steadfastly than ever. Indeed, it seems to me that Southey eclipsed Lamb in the spirit he showed in this reconciliation, forasmuch as he proved himself fine enough to forgive the man whom he had outraged. We may commend his conduct; “For right, too rigid, hardens into wrong.”
It is no part of my plan to dwell on Lamb’s religious belief. Suffice it to say that it was, like that of most Unbelievers, too large to be labelled by a set of dogmas, too spacious to be packed within church or cathedral walls. It is a stale truism that credence, less than character, is the criterion of conviction; and all history shows that the doubters are, in nearly all cases, the most deeply devout. “He prayeth well who loveth well,” Coleridge had learned; and it is my fancy that those lives, where love with voluntary humility waited on self-sacrifice, had taught him the immanent truth—“He prayeth best, who loveth best.”
As to Lamb’s utterances about these mighty matters, we may be sure that they took the tone of the man’s utterances concerning all matters; and to them we may apply Hazlitt’s phrase: “His jests scald like tears, and he probes a question with a play upon words.” Or, as Haydon put it, “He stuttered out his quaintness in snatches, like the fool in ‘Lear’.”
