Charles Lamb: A Memoir

by Barry Cornwall

I could go on for many pages—to the poor relations, and the old books, and the old actors; to Dodd, who "dying put on the weeds of Dominic;" and to Mrs. Jordan and Dickey Suet (both whom I well remember); to Elliston, always on the stage; to Munden, with features ever changing; and to Liston, with only one face: "But what a face!" I forbear. I pass also over Comberbatch (Coleridge), borrower of books, and Captain Jackson, and Barbara S. (Miss Kelly), and go to the rest of my little history. The "Popular Fallacies," which in course of time followed, and were eventually added to the second series and re-published, are in manner essays also on a small scale, brief and dealing with abstract subjects more than the "Elia." It may be interesting to know that Lamb's two favorites were "That home is home, though it is never so homely," and "That we should rise with the lark." In the first of these he enters into all the discomforts and terrible distractions of a poor man's home; in the second he descants on the luxuries of bed, and the nutritious value of dreams: "The busy part of mankind," he says, "are content to swallow their sleep by wholesale: we choose to linger in bed and digest our dreams." The last "Fallacy" is remarkable for a sentence which seems to refer to Alice W.: "We were never much in the world," he says; "disappointment early struck a dark veil between us and its dazzling illusions:" he then concludes with, "We once thought life to be something; but it has unaccountably fallen from us before its time. The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we get up?"

It will be observed by the sagacious student of the entire Essays, that however quaint or familiar, or (rarely, however) sprinkled with classical allusions, they are never vulgar, nor commonplace, nor pedantic. They are "natural with a self-pleasing quaintness." The phrases are not affected, but are derived from our ancestors, now gone to another country; they are brought back from the land of shadows, and made denizens of England, in modern times. Lamb's studies were the lives and characters of men; his humors and tragic meditations were generally dug out of his own heart: there are in them earnestness, and pity, and generosity, and truth; and there is not a mean or base thought to be found throughout all.

In reading over these old essays, some of them affect me with a grave pleasure, amounting to pain. I seem to import into them the very feeling with which he wrote them; his looks and movements are transfigured, and communicated to me by the poor art of the printer. His voice, so sincere and earnest, rings in my ear again. He was no Feignwell: apart from his joke, never was a man so real, and free from pretence. No one, as I believe, will ever taste the flavor of certain writers as he has done. He was the last true lover of Antiquity. Although he admitted a few of the beauties of modern times, yet in his stronger love he soared backwards to old acclivities, and loved to rest there. His essays, like his sonnets, are (as I have said) reflections of his own feelings. And so, I think, should essays generally be. A history or sketch of science, or a logical effort, may help the reader some way up the ladder of learning; but they do not link themselves with his affections. I myself prefer the affections to the sciences. The story of the heart is the deepest of all histories; and Shakespeare is profounder and longer lived than Maclaurin, or Malthus, or Ricardo.

Lamb's career throughout his later years was marked by an enlarged intercourse with society (it had never been confined to persons of his own way of thinking), by more frequent absences in the country and elsewhere, and by the reception of a somewhat wider body of acquaintance into his own house. He visited the Universities, in which he much delighted: he fraternized with many of the contributors to the "London Magazine." He received the letters and calls of his admirers—strangers and others. These were now much extended in number, by the publication of the Essays of Elia. I was in the habit of seeing him very frequently at his home: I met him also at Mr. Cary's, at Leigh Hunt's, at Novello's, at Haydon's, once at Hazlitt's, and elsewhere. It must have been about this time that one of his visits (which always took place when the students were absent) was made to Oxford, where he met George Dyer, dreaming amongst the quadrangles, as he has described in his pleasant paper called "Oxford in the Vacation."

Lamb's letters to correspondents are perhaps not quite so frequent now as formerly. He writes occasionally to his old friends; to Wordsworth, and Southey, and Coleridge; also to Manning, who is still in China, and to whom in December, 1815, he had sent one of his best and most characteristic letters, describing the (imaginary) death and decrepitude of his correspondent's friends in England; although he takes care (the next day) to tell him that his first was a "lying letter." Indeed, that letter itself, humorous as it is, is so obviously manufactured in the fabulous district of hyperbole, that it requires no disavowal. Manning, however, returns to England not long afterwards; and then the correspondence, if less humorous, is also less built up of improbabilities. He corresponds also with Mr. Barron Field, who is relegated to the Judicial Bench in New South Wales. Of him he inquires about "The Land of Thieves;" he wants to know if their poets be not plagiarists; and suggests that half the truth which his letters contain "will be converted into lies" before they reach his correspondent. Mr. Field is the gentleman to whom the pleasant paper on "Distant Correspondents" is addressed.

In 1822 Charles Lamb and his sister travelled as far as Paris, neither of them understanding a word of the French language. What tempted them to undertake this expedition I never knew. Perhaps, as he formerly said, when journeying to the Lakes, it was merely a daring ambition to see "remote regions." The French journey seems to have been almost barren of good. He brought nothing back in his memory, and there is no account whatever of his adventures there. It has been stated that Mary Lamb was taken ill on the road; but I do not know this with certainty. From a short letter to Barron Field, it appears, indeed, that he thought Paris "a glorious picturesque old city," to which London looked "mean and new," although the former had "no Saint Paul's or Westminster Abbey." "I and sister," he writes, "are just returned from Paris. We have eaten frogs! It has been such a treat! Nicest little delicate things; like Lilliputian rabbits." But this is all. His Reminiscences, whatever they were, do not enrich his correspondence. In conversation he used to tell how he had once intended to ask the waiter for an egg (oeuf), but called, in his ignorance, for Eau de vie, and that the mistake produced so pleasant a result, that his inquiries afterwards for Eau de vie were very frequent.

In his travels to Cambridge, which began to be frequent about this time, his gains were greater. For there he first became acquainted with Miss Emma Isola, for whom, as I can testify, he at all times exhibited the greatest parental regard. When he and Mary Lamb first knew her, she was a little orphan girl, at school. They invited her to spend her holidays with them; and she went accordingly: the liking became mutual, and gradually deepened into great affection. The visit once made and so much relished, became habitual; and Miss Isola's holidays were afterwards regularly spent at the Lambs' house. She used to take long walks with Charles, when his sister was too old and infirm to accompany him. Ultimately she was looked upon in the light of a child; and Charles Lamb, when speaking of her (and he did this always tenderly), used invariably to call her "Our Emma." To show how deep his regard was, he at one time was invited to engage in some profitable engagement (1830) whilst Miss Isola was in bad health; but he at once replied, "Whilst she is in danger, and till she is out of it, I feel that I have no spirits for an engagement of any kind." Some years afterwards, when she became well, and was about to be married, Lamb writes, "I am about to lose my only walk companion," whose mirthful spirits (as he prettily terms it) were "the youth of our house." "With my perfect approval, and more than concurrence," as he states, she was to be married to Mr. Moxon. Miss Emma Isola, who was, in Charles Lamb's phrase, "a very dear friend of ours," remained his friend till death, and became eventually his principal legatee. After her marriage, Charles, writing to her husband (November, 1833), says, "Tell Emma I every day love her more, and miss her less. Tell her so, from her loving Uncle, as she has let me call myself." It was, as I believe, a very deep paternal affection.

The particulars disclosed by the letters of 1823 and 1824 are so generally unimportant, that it is unnecessary to refer to them. Lamb, indeed, became acquainted with the author of "Virginius" (Sheridan Knowles), with Mr. Macready, and with the writers in the "London Magazine" (which then had not been long established). And he appears gradually to discover that his work at the India House is wearisome, and complains of it in bitter terms: "Thirty years have I served the Philistines" (he writes to Wordsworth), "and my neck is not subdued to the yoke." He confesses that he had once hoped to have a pension on "this side of absolute incapacity and infirmity," and to have walked out in the "fine Isaac Walton mornings, careless as a beggar, and walking, walking, and dying walking;" but he says, "the hope is gone. I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing), with my breast against this thorn of a desk."

The character of his letters at this time is not generally lively; there is, he says, "a certain deadness to everything, which I think I may date from poor John's (his brother's) loss. Deaths overset one. Then there's Captain Burney gone. What fun has whist now?" He proceeds, "I am made up of queer points. My theory is to enjoy life; but my practice is against it." The only hope he has, he says, is, "that some pulmonary affection may relieve me." The success which attended the "Elia" Essays did not comfort him, nor the (pecuniary) temptations of the bookseller to renew them. "The spirit of the thing in my own mind is gone" (he writes). "Some brains," as Ben Jonson says, "will endure but one skimming." Notwithstanding his melancholy humor, however, there is Hope in the distance, which he does not see, and Freedom is not far off.

It was during this period of Lamb's life (1823) that the quarrel between him and his old friend Robert Southey took place. Southey had long been (as was well known) one of the most constant and efficient contributors to the "Quarterly Review;" and Lamb assigned to him the authorship of one of the Review articles, in which he himself was scantily complimented, and his friends Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt denounced. Sir T. Talfourd thinks that Mr. Southey was not the author of the offending essay. Be that as it may, Lamb was then of opinion that his old Tory friend was the enemy. In a letter to Bernard Barton (July, 1823) he writes, "Southey has attacked 'Elia' on the score of infidelity. He might have spared an old friend. I hate his Review, and his being a Reviewer;" but he adds, "I love and respect Southey, and will not retort." However, in the end, irritated by the calumny, or (which is more probable) resenting compliments bestowed on himself at the expense of his friends, he sat down and penned his famous "Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esq.," which appeared in the "London Magazine" for October, 1823, and which was afterwards published amongst his collected letters.