Hazlitt's Divorce.—Emma Isola.—Mrs. Cowden Clarke's Recollections of Mary.—The Visit to France.—Removal to Colebrook Cottage.—A Dialogue of Reminiscences.
1822-3.—Æt. 58-59.
For some years matters had not gone smoothly between Sarah Hazlitt and her husband. He was hard to live with, and she seems to have given up the attempt to make the best of things, and to have sunk into a kind of apathy in which even the duties of a housewife were ill-performed; but his chief complaint was that "she despised him and his abilities." In this Hazlitt was, probably, unjust to Sarah; for she was neither stupid nor unamiable. From 1819 onwards he had absented himself from home continually, living either at the Huts, a small inn on the edge of Salisbury Plain, or in London lodgings. But in this year of 1822 his unhappy passion for Sarah Walker brought about a crisis; and what had been only a negative kind of evil became unendurable. He prevailed upon Sarah to consent to a divorce. It was obtained, in Edinburgh, by Mrs. Hazlitt taking what, in Scotch law, is called "the oath of calumny" which,—the suit being undefended,—entitled her to a dissolution of the marriage tie. They then returned singly to Winterslow, he to the Huts and she to her cottage. If they married with but little love, they seem to have parted without any hate. One tie remained—the strong affection each had for their son, who was sometimes with one, sometimes with the other. Hazlitt's wholly unrequited passion for Sarah Walker soon burned itself to ashes; and in two years time he tried another experiment in marriage which was even less successful than the first; for his bride, like Milton's, declined to return home with him after the wedding tour, and he saw her face no more. But, unlike Milton, he was little discomposed at the circumstance. Sarah, grown a wiser if not a more dignified woman, did not renew the scheming ways of her youth. She continued to stand high in the esteem of Hazlitt's mother and sister, and often stayed with them. The Lambs abated none of their old cordiality; Mary wrote few letters now, but Charles sent her a friendly one sometimes. It was to her he gave the first account of absent-minded George Dyer's feat of walking straight into the New River, in broad daylight, on leaving their door in Colebrook Row. Towards Hazlitt, also, their friendship seemed substantially unchanged let him be as splenetic and wayward as he might. "We cannot afford to cast off our friends because they are not all we could wish," said Mary Lamb once when he had written some criticisms on Wordsworth and Coleridge, in which glowing admiration was mixed with savage ridicule in such a way that, as Lamb said, it was "like saluting a man,—'Sir, you are the greatest man I ever saw,' and then pulling him by the nose." But it needed only for Hazlitt himself to be traduced and vilified, as he so often was, by the political adversaries and critics of those days, for Lamb to rally to his side and fearlessly pronounce him to be, "in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing."
As a set-off against the already mentioned sorrows of this time, a new element of cheerfulness was introduced into the Lamb household; for it was in the course of the summer of 1823 that, during a visit to Cambridge, they first saw Emma Isola, a little orphan child of whom they soon grew so fond that eventually she became their adopted daughter, their solace and comfort. To Mary especially was this a happy incident. "For," says Mrs. Cowden Clarke in the Recollections already alluded to, "she had a most tender sympathy with the young,"—as the readers of Mrs. Leicester's School will hardly need telling. "She was encouraging and affectionate towards them, and won them to regard her with a familiarity and fondness rarely felt by them for grown people who are not their relations. She threw herself so entirely into their way of thinking and contrived to take an estimate of things so completely from their point of view, that she made them rejoice to have her for their co-mate in affairs that interested them. While thus lending herself to their notions she, with a judiciousness peculiar to her, imbued her words with the wisdom and experience that belonged to her maturer years; so that while she seemed but the listening, concurring friend, she was also the helping, guiding friend. Her monitions never took the form of reproof, but were always dropped in with the air of agreed propositions, as if they grew out of the subject in question, and presented themselves as matters of course to both her young companions and herself." The following is a life-like picture, from the same hand, of Mary among the children she gathered round her in these Russell Street days,—Hazlitt's little son William, Victoria Novello (Mrs. Clarke herself), and Emma Isola. Victoria used "to come to her on certain mornings, when Miss Lamb promised to hear her repeat her Latin grammar, and hear her read poetry with the due musically rhythmical intonation. Even now the breathing murmur of the voice in which Mary Lamb gave low but melodious utterance to those opening lines of the Paradise Lost:—
Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,—
sounding full and rounded and harmonious, though so subdued in tone, rings clear and distinct in the memory of her who heard the reader. The echo of that gentle voice vibrates, through the lapse of many a revolving year, true and unbroken in the heart where the low-breathed sound first awoke response, teaching together with the fine appreciation of verse music the finer love of intellect conjoined with goodness and kindness…. "One morning, just as Victoria was about to repeat her allotted task, in rushed a young boy who, like herself, enjoyed the privilege of Miss Lamb's instruction in the Latin language. His mode of entrance—hasty and abrupt—sufficiently denoted his eagerness to have his lesson heard at once and done with, that he might be gone again; accordingly Miss Lamb, asking Victoria to give up her turn, desired the youth—Hazlitt's son—to repeat his pages of grammar first. Off he set, rattled through the first conjugation post-haste; darted through the second without drawing breath; and so on right through in no time. The rapidity, the volubility, the triumphant slap-dash of the feat perfectly dazzled the imagination of poor Victoria, who stood admiring by, an amazed witness of the boy's proficiency. She herself, a quiet plodding little girl, had only by dint of diligent study and patient, persevering poring been able to achieve a slow learning and as slow a repetition of her lessons. This brilliant, off-hand method of despatching the Latin grammar was a glory she had never dreamed of. Her ambition was fired, and the next time she presented herself book in hand before Miss Lamb, she had no sooner delivered it into her hearer's than she attempted to scour through her verb at the same rattling pace which had so excited her admiration. Scarce a moment and her stumbling scamper was checked. 'Stay, stay! how's this? What are you about, little Vicky?' asked the laughing voice of Mary Lamb. 'Oh, I see. Well, go on; but gently, gently; no need of hurry.' She heard to an end and then said, 'I see what we have been doing—trying to be as quick and clever as William, fancying it vastly grand to get on at a great rate as he does. But there's this difference: it's natural in him while it's imitation in you. Now, far better go on in your old staid way—which is your own way—than try to take up a way that may become him, but can never become you, even were you to succeed in acquiring it. We'll each of us keep to our own natural ways, and then we shall be sure to do our best.'" And when Victoria and Emma Isola met there, Mary entered into their girlish friendship, let them have their gossip out in her own room if tired of the restraint of grown-up company and once, before Emma's return to school, took them to Dulwich and gave them "a charming little dinner of roast fowl and custard pudding." … "Pleasant above all," says the surviving guest and narrator, "is the memory of the cordial voice which said in a way to put the little party at its fullest ease, 'Now, remember, we all pick our bones. It isn't considered vulgar here to pick bones.'
"Once, when some visitors chanced to drop in unexpectedly upon her and her brother," continues Mrs. Clarke, "just as they were sitting down to their plain dinner of a bit of roast mutton, with her usual frank hospitality she pressed them to stay and partake, cutting up the small joint into five equal portions, and saying in her simple, easy way, so truly her own, 'There's a chop apiece for us, and we can make up with bread and cheese if we want more.'"
The more serious demands upon her sympathy and judgment made, after childhood was left behind, by the young, whether man or woman, she met with no less tenderness, tact, and wisdom. Once, for instance, when she thought she perceived symptoms of an unexplained dejection in her young friend Victoria, "how gentle was her sedate mode of reasoning the matter, after delicately touching upon the subject and endeavouring to draw forth its avowal! More as if mutually discussing and consulting than as if questioning, she endeavoured to ascertain whether uncertainties or scruples of faith had arisen in the young girl's mind and had caused her preoccupied abstracted manner. If it were any such source of disturbance, how wisely and feelingly she suggested reading, reflecting, weighing; if but a less deeply-seated depression, how sensibly she advised adopting some object to rouse energy and interest! She pointed out the efficacy of studying a language (she herself at upwards of fifty years of age began the acquirement of French and Italian) as a remedial measure, and advised Victoria to devote herself to a younger brother she had, in the same way that she had attended to her own brother Charles in his infancy, as the wholesomest and surest means of all for cure."
Allsop, Coleridge's friend, speaks in the same strain of how when a young man overwhelmed with what then seemed the hopeless ruin of his prospects, he found Charles and Mary Lamb not wanting in the hour of need. "I have a clear recollection," says he, "of Miss Lamb's addressing me in a tone which acted at once as a solace and support, and after as a stimulus, to which I owe more perhaps than to the more extended arguments of all others."