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.”