Mary Lamb. Gilchrist Anne Burrows

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СКАЧАТЬ brought with it. And as he grew older rich was her reward; for he repaid the debt with a love half filial, half fraternal, than which no human tie was ever stronger or more sublimely adequate to the strain of a terrible emergency. As his young mind unfolded he found in her intelligence and love the same genial fostering influences that had cherished his feeble frame into health and strength. It was with his little hand in hers that he first trod the Temple gardens, and spelled out the inscriptions on the sun-dials and on the tombstones in the old burying-ground and wondered, finding only lists of the virtues "where all the naughty people were buried?" Like Mary, his disposition was so different from that of his gay, pleasure-loving parents that they but ill understood "and gave themselves little trouble about him," which also tended to draw brother and sister closer together. There are no other records of Mary's girlhood than such as may be gathered from the story of her brother's early life; of how when he was five and she was fifteen she came near to losing him from small-pox, Aunt Hetty grieving over him "the only thing in the world she loved" as she was wont to say, with a mother's tears. And how, three years later (in 1782), she had to give up his daily companionship and see him, now grown a handsome boy with "crisply curling black hair, clear brown complexion, aquiline, slightly Jewish cast of features, winning smile, and glittering, restless eyes," equipped as a Christ's Hospital boy and, with Aunt Hetty, to

      … peruse him round and round,

       And hardly know him in his yellow coats,

       Red leathern belt and gown of russet blue.

      Coleridge was already a Blue Coat boy but older and too high above Charles in the school for comradeship then. To Lamb, with home close at hand, it was a happy time; but Coleridge, homeless and friendless in the great city, had no mitigations of the rough Spartan discipline which prevailed; and the weekly whole holidays when, turned adrift in the streets from morn till night, he had nothing but a crust of bread in his pockets and no resource but to beguile the pangs of hunger in summer with hours of bathing in the New River and in winter with furtive hanging round book-stalls wrought permanent harm to his fine-strung organisation. Nor did the gentleness of his disposition, or the brilliancy of his powers, save him from the birch-loving brutalities of old Boyer, who was wont to add an extra stripe "because he was so ugly."

      In the Lamb household the domestic outlook grew dark as soon as Mary was grown up, for her father's faculties and her mother's health failed early; and when, in his fifteenth year, Charles left Christ's Hospital it was already needful for him to take up the burthens of a man on his young shoulders; and for Mary not only to make head against sickness, helplessness, old age with its attendant exigencies but to add to the now straitened means by taking in millinery work.

      For eleven years, as she has told us, she maintained herself by the needle; from the age of twenty-one to thirty-two, that is. It was not in poor old Aunt Hetty's nature to be helpful either. "She was from morning till night poring over good books and devotional exercises. … The only secular employment I remember to have seen her engaged in was the splitting of French beans and dropping them into a basin of fair water," says Elia. Happily, a clerkship in the South Sea House, where his brother already was, enabled Charles to maintain his parents and a better post in the India House was obtained two years afterwards. Nor were there wanting snatches of pleasant holiday sometimes shared by Mary. Of one, a visit to the sea, there is a beautiful reminiscence in The Old Margate Hoy, written more than thirty years afterwards. "It was our first sea-side experiment," he says, "and many circumstances combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of my life. We had neither of us seen the sea" (he was fifteen and Mary twenty-six), "and we had never been from home so long together in company." The disappointment they both felt at the first sight of the sea he explains with one of his subtle and profound suggestions. "Is it not" … says he, "that we had expected to behold (absurdly I grant, but by the law of imagination inevitably) not a definite object compassable by the eye, but all the sea at once, the commensurate antagonist of the earth? Whereas the eye can but take in a 'slip of salt water.'" The whole passage is one of Elia's finest.

      Then Coleridge too, who had remained two years longer at Christ's Hospital than Lamb and after he went up to Cambridge in 1791 continued to pay frequent visits to London, spent many a glorious evening, not only those memorable ones with Charles in the parlour of the "Salutation and Cat," but in his home; and was not slow to discover Mary's fine qualities and to take her into his brotherly heart as a little poem, written so early as 1794, to cheer his friend during a serious illness of hers testifies:—

      Cheerily, dear Charles!

       Thou thy best friend shalt cherish many a year

       Such warm presages feel I of high hope.

       For not uninterested the dear maid

       I've viewed—her soul affectionate yet wise,

       Her polished wit as mild as lambent glories

       That play around a sainted infant's head.

      The year 1795 witnessed changes for all. The father, now wholly in his dotage, was pensioned off by Mr. Salt and the family had to exchange their old home in the Temple for straitened lodgings in Little Queen Street, Holborn (the site of which and of the adjoining houses is now occupied by Trinity Church). Coleridge, too, had left Cambridge and was at Bristol, drawn thither by his newly formed friendship with Southey, lecturing, writing, dreaming of his ideal Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehannah and love-making. The love-making ended in marriage the autumn of that same year. Meanwhile Lamb, too, was first tasting the joys and sorrows of love. Alice W—— lingers but as a shadow in the records of his life: the passion, however, was real enough and took deep hold of him, conspiring with the cares and trials of home life unrelieved now by the solace of Coleridge's society to give a fatal stimulus to the germs of brain-disease, which were part of the family heritage and for six weeks he was in a mad-house. "In your absence," he tells his friend afterwards, "the tide of melancholy rushed in, and did its worst mischief by overwhelming my reason." Who can doubt the memory of this attack strengthened the bond of sympathy between Mary and himself and gave him a fellow-feeling for her no amount of affection alone could have realised? As in her case, too, the disorder took the form of a great heightening and intensifying of the imaginative faculty. "I look back on it, at times," wrote he after his recovery, "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. … The sonnet I send you has small merit as poetry, but you will be curious to read it when I tell you it was written in my prison-house in one of my lucid intervals:—

      TO MY SISTER.

       If from my lips some angry accents fell,

       Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind,

       'Twas but the error of a sickly mind

       And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well,

       And waters clear of Reason; and for me

       Let this my verse the poor atonement be—

       My verse, which thou to praise wert e'er inclined

       Too highly, and with a partial eye to see

       No blemish. Thou to me didst ever show

       Kindest affection; and would oft-times lend

       An ear to the desponding love-sick lay,

       Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay

       But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,

       Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.

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