The Best Letters of Charles Lamb. Charles Lamb

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ this point it will be well to insert a prefatory word or two as to the character of Mary Lamb; and here the witnesses are in accord. There is no jarring of opinion, as in her brother's case; for Charles Lamb has been sorely misjudged—often, it must be admitted, with ground of reason; sometimes by persons who might and should have looked deeper. In a notable instance, the heroism of his life has been meanly overlooked by one who preached to mankind with the eloquence of the Prophets the prime need and virtue of recognizing the hero. If self-abnegation lies at the root of true heroism, Charles Lamb—that "sorry phenomenon" with an "insuperable proclivity to gin" [6]—was a greater hero than was covered by the shield of Achilles. The character of Mary Lamb is quickly summed Up. She was one of the most womanly of women. "In all its essential sweetness," says Talfourd, "her character was like her brother's; while, by a temper more placid, a spirit of enjoyment more serene, she was enabled to guide, to counsel, to cheer him, and to protect him on the verge of the mysterious calamity, from the depths of which she rose so often unruffled to his side. To a friend in any difficulty she was the most comfortable of advisers, the wisest of consolers." Hazlitt said that "he never met with a woman who could reason, and had met with only one thoroughly reasonable—Mary Lamb." The writings of Elia are strewn, as we know, with the tenderest tributes to her worth. "I wish," he says, "that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joint existences, that we might share them in equal division."

      The psychology of madness is a most subtle inquiry. How slight the mysterious touch that throws the smooth-running human mechanism into a chaos of jarring elements, that transforms, in the turn of an eyelash, the mild humanity of the gentlest of beings into the unreasoning ferocity of the tiger.

      The London "Times" of September 26, 1796, contained the following paragraph:—

      "On Friday afternoon the coroner and a jury sat on the body of a lady in the neighborhood of Holborn, who died in consequence of a wound from her daughter the preceding day. It appeared by the evidence adduced that while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case-knife lying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her apprentice, round the room. On the calls of her infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and with loud shrieks approached her parent. The child, by her cries, quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too late. [7] The dreadful scene presented him the mother lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing over her with the fatal knife, and the old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a severe blow he received from one of the forks she had been madly hurling about the room.

      "For a few days prior to this, the family had observed some symptoms of insanity in her, which had so much increased on the Wednesday evening that her brother, early the next morning, went to Dr. Pitcairn; but that gentleman was not at home.

      "The jury of course brought in their verdict—Lunacy."

      I need not supply the omitted names of the actors in this harrowing scene. Mary Lamb was at once placed in the Asylum at Hoxton, and the victim of her frenzy was laid to rest in the churchyard of St. Andrew's, Holborn. It became necessary for Charles and his father to make an immediate change of residence, and they took lodgings at Pentonville. There is a pregnant sentence in one of Lamb's letters that flashes with the vividness of lightning into the darkest recesses of those early troubles and embarrassments. "We are," he wrote to Coleridge, "in a manner marked."

      Charles Lamb after some weeks obtained the release of his sister from the Hoxton Asylum by formally undertaking her future guardianship—a charge which was borne, until Death released the compact, with a steadfastness, a cheerful renunciation of what men regard as the crowning blessings of manhood, [8] that has shed a halo more radiant even than that of his genius about the figure—it was "small and mean," said sprightly Mrs. Mathews—of the India House clerk.

      As already stated, the mania that had once attacked Charles never returned; but from the side of Mary Lamb this grimmest of spectres never departed. "Mary A is again from home;" "Mary is fallen ill again:" how often do such tear-fraught phrases—tenderly veiled, lest! some chance might bring them to the eye of the blameless sufferer—recur in the Letters! Brother and sister were ever on the watch for the symptoms premonitory of the return of this "their sorrow's crown of sorrows." Upon their little holiday excursions, says Talfourd, a strait-waistcoat, carefully packed by Miss Lamb herself, was their constant companion. Charles Lloyd relates that he once met them slowly pacing together a little footpath in Hoxton fields, both weeping bitterly, and found on joining them that they were taking their solemn way to the old asylum. Thus, upon this guiltless pair were visited the sins of their fathers.

      With the tragical events just narrated, the storm of calamity seemed to have spent its force, and there were thenceforth plenty of days of calm and of sunshine for Charles Lamb. The stress of poverty was lightened and finally removed by successive increases of salary at the India House; the introductions of Coleridge and his own growing repute in the world of letters gathered about him a circle of friends—Southey, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Manning, Barton, and the rest—more congenial, and certainly more profitable, than the vagrant intimados, "to the world's eye a ragged regiment," who had wasted his substance and his leisure in the early Temple days.

      Lamb's earliest avowed appearance as an author was in Coleridge's first volume of poems, published by Cottle, of Bristol, in 1796. "The effusions signed C.L.," says Coleridge in the preface, "were written by Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House. Independently of the signature, their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them." The "effusions" were four sonnets, two of them—the most noteworthy—touching upon the one love-romance of Lamb's life, [9]—his early attachment to the "fair-haired" Hertfordshire girl, the "Anna" of the Sonnets, the "Alice W—n" of the Essays. We remember that Ella in describing the gallery of old family portraits, in the essay, "Blakesmoor in H—shire," dwells upon "that beauty with the cool, blue, pastoral drapery, and a lamb, that hung next the great bay window, with the bright yellow Hertfordshire hair, so like my Alice."

      In 1797 Cottle issued a second edition of Coleridge's poems, this time with eleven additional pieces by Lamb—making fifteen of his in all—and containing verses by their friend Charles Lloyd. "It is unlikely," observes Canon Ainger, "that this little venture brought any profit to its authors, or that a subsequent volume of blank verse by Lamb and Lloyd in the following year proved more remunerative." In 1798 Lamb, anxious for his sister's sake to add to his slender income, composed his "miniature romance," as Talfourd calls it, "Rosamund Gray;" and this little volume, which has not yet lost its charm, proved a moderate success. Shelley, writing from Italy to Leigh Hunt in 1819, said of it: "What a lovely thing is his 'Rosamund Gray'! How much knowledge of the sweetest and deepest part of our nature in it! When I think of such a mind as Lamb's, when I see how unnoticed remain things of such exquisite and complete perfection, what should I hope for myself if I had not higher objects in view than fame?"

      It is rather unpleasant, in view of this generous—if overstrained—tribute, to find the object of it referring later to the works of his encomiast as "thin sown with profit or delight." [10]

      In 1802 Lamb published in a small duodecimo his blank-verse tragedy, "John Woodvil,"—it had previously been declined by John Kemble as unsuited to the stage—and in 1806 was produced at the Drury Lane Theatre his farce "Mr. H.," the summary failure of which is chronicled with much humor in the Letters. [11]

      The "Tales from Shakspeare," by Charles and Mary Lamb, were published by Godwin in 1807, and a second edition was called for in the following year. Lamb was now getting on surer—and more remunerative—ground; and in 1808 he prepared for the firm of Longmans his masterly "Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets contemporary with Shakspeare." Concerning this work he wrote to Manning:—

      "Specimens are becoming fashionable. We have Specimens of Ancient English Poets, Specimens of Modern English Poets, Specimens СКАЧАТЬ