“Stat magni nominis umbra” is Lucan’s stately phrase, to be aptly applied, in its best and original sense, to almost every one of this illustrious group. Yet, lofty as they loom in the distance, far above our power as well as our desire to belittle them, it may be not beyond belief that too close and too constant contact with some of them might have brought at the last a certain satiety. It may even be breathed, without irreverence and therefore without offence, that we might have been just a bit bored if allowed to listen without rest to Coleridge, with his rhetorical preachments and his melancholy, both born of rheumatism, rum, and opium; or to Hazlitt, with his ingrained selfishness, his petulance, his tea-inspired turgidity; or to Wordsworth, solemnly weighted with the colossal conviction of his own mission, and tireless in his tenacity to attest the truth thereof to all listeners. These, and all those lesser ones, seem to me petty and tiresome beside this spare, silent, stammering little fellow, who loved them all and laughed at them all; who gave them fitting reverence, and yet, with affectionate adroitness, found fun in their foibles!
How direct and delicate was his gibe when Coleridge had been longer even than usual in his endless endeavours to spin serviceable ropes with his metaphysical sands: “Oh, you mustn’t mind what Coleridge says; he’s so full of his fun.” I can see his twinkling eyes—those wonderfully sparkling eyes—as he answered Coleridge’s question, “Charles, did you ever hear me preach?” “I never heard you do anything else!” Coleridge was, indeed, quite capable, in Hazlitt’s sarcastic phrase, of taking up the deep pauses of conversation between seraphs and cardinals; and could have argued—with the same ready confidence with which, according to mocking Sydney Smith, Lord John Russell would have assumed command, at half an hour’s notice, of the channel fleet—on either side of the theses sent him by Lamb just before he went to Germany. These questions—“to be defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or Göttingen,” by Coleridge—are deliciously sly and sharp in their stab at the complacent superiority over lesser gifted mortals felt and shown by that “archangel a little damaged.” I can hear the falsetto tone of his moralities growing shriller before these two questions, especially, among the others: “Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?” “Whether the higher order of seraphim illuminati ever sneer?”
How deftly he punctured Wordsworth’s sublime conceit, on his hinting that other poets might have equalled Shakespeare if they cared. “Oh, here’s Wordsworth says he could have written ‘Hamlet’ if he’d had the mind. It is clear that nothing is wanting but the mind!” Even the Infallible One not only tolerated, but valued, the acute criticisms with which Lamb leavened his discerning praise of all his friends’ work; but when he, with kindly frankness, rated a little lower than did their author the “Lyrical Ballads,” that author got into quite a state of mind. He “wrote four sweating pages” to inspire Lamb with a “greater range of sensibility;” and the tormented critic bursts out: “After one’s been reading Shakespeare for twenty of the best years of one’s life, to have a fellow start up and prate about some unknown quality possessed by Shakespeare less than by Milton and William Wordsworth!... What am I to do with such people? I shall certainly write ’em a very merry letter.” I wish that letter had been saved for our delectation.
Then there was Manning, with his slight sense of humour, and to him—then in China, to his friend’s loss—Lamb loved to write the maddest inventions, and let loose his wildest whims about their friends. To Coventry Patmore, on his way to Paris, he wrote, in an amazing letter: “If you go through Boulogne, inquire if old Godfrey is living, and how he got home from the Crusades. He must be a very old man now.”
Good, honest barrister Martin Burney—of the “If dirt were trumps” story—gave infinite fun to Lamb by his oddities. Once he read aloud, in their rooms, the whole Gospel of St. John, because biblical quotations are very emphatic in a court of justice. At another time he insisted on carving the fowl—and did it most ill-favouredly—because it was indispensable for a barrister to do all such things well. “Those little things were of more consequence than we thought!” Burney quite approved of Shakespeare, “because he was so much of a gentleman;” and he said and did so many queer things that Lamb wrote: “Why does not his guardian angel look to him? He deserves one; maybe he has tired him out!”
It was George Dyer, above all, in whom Lamb revelled, and who was meat and drink to him. Dyer was the son of a Wapping watchman and butcher, had been a charity-school boy at Christ’s, and had become a publisher’s harmless drudge. He was a true bookworm, eating his way through thick tomes, but digesting little. He seemed to find all the nourishment he needed in the husks of knowledge, while Lamb, in radical contrast, bit to the kernel with his incisive teeth. As to Dyer’s heart, however, his friend was sure that God never put a kinder into the flesh of man; and his was a simple, unsuspecting soul. He was so absent-minded that he would sometimes empty his snuff-box into his teapot, when making tea for his guests; and so near-sighted that he once walked placidly into the river, as I shall hereafter relate. He used to keep his “neat library” in the seat of his easy-chair. Mary Lamb and Mrs. Hazlitt, going to his chambers one day in his absence, “tidied-up” the rooms and sewed fast that out-of-repair easy-chair, with his books within it: whereat, to use his own violent language, he was greatly disconcerted!
Lamb gives a ludicrous description of his visit to these same chambers in Clifford’s Inn, where he found Dyer, “in mid-winter, wearing nankeen pantaloons four times too big for him, which the said heathen did pertinaciously affirm to be new. These were absolutely ingrained with the accumulated dirt of ages, but he affirmed ’em to be clean. He was going to visit a lady who was nice about those things, and that’s the reason he wore nankeen that day!” It was to this credulous creature that Lamb confided that the secret author of “Waverley” was Lord Castlereagh! And once he sent the guileless one to Primrose Hill at sunrise, to see the Persian Ambassador perform his orisons! No one but Dyer could have said that the assassin of the Ratcliffe Highway—painted so luridly by De Quincey in his “Three Memorable Murders”—“must have been rather an eccentric character!”
Haydon, the painter, has told of one memorable evening in his own studio, when Lamb was in marvellous vein, and met that immortal Comptroller of Stamps who had begged to be introduced to Wordsworth, and who insisted on having the latter’s opinion as to whether Milton and Newton were not great geniuses. Lamb took a candle and walked over to the poor man, saying, “Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?” Haydon and Keats got him away, but he persisted in bursting into the room, shouting, “Do let me have another look at that gentleman’s organs.” Edgar Poe’s Imp of the Perverse took entire possession of Lamb when thrown with uncongenial men, and forced him to give the impression of “something between an imbecile, a brute, and a buffoon.” Writing of himself after the imaginary death of Elia, he says, truly: “He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were scandalized (and offences were sure to arise) he could not help it.”
No, nor did he try to help it, and we love him all the more for this antic disposition he was so fond of showing unshamed. And I think that we need not grieve greatly because his vagaries were not kept always “within the limits of becoming mirth,” when he had to deal with prigs, pedants, or poseurs. Tom Moore, tiptoe with toadyism, tried to look down on Lamb, doubtless feeling that he had accurately sounded the shoals of his shallow insincerity. The portentous Macready has left on record his unfavourable impression of the irreverent creature who stood in no awe of superior persons on pasteboard pedestals. That impression pains us no more than does the ungentle judgment of Thomas Carlyle. He found Lamb’s talk to be but “a ghastly make-believe of wit,” “contemptibly small;” and in all that was said and done he saw, from his own humane point of view, nothing but “diluted insanity.” Curtly and cruelly he labelled this brother and sister, “two very sorry phenomena.”
If our friend laughed at others, he was just as ready to laugh at himself; and his hissing his own play is historic. It is strange that, with his keen critical sense, he should have hoped for the success of this “Mr. H., A Farce in Two Acts;” produced at Drury Lane, in 1806, with the great Elliston in the title-rôle. Yet he had written to Manning in boyish glee: “All China shall ring with it—by and by.” In the same letter, he made fanciful designs for the orders he was to give for admission, elate with anticipation of the long run his piece was to have. He sat on the opening night with Mary and Crabb Robinson in the front of the pit (his favourite place), and joined with the audience in applauding his really witty prologue. Then, as the luckless farce fell flat and flatter, he was louder than any of them in their hisses. “Damn the word, I write it like kisses—how different!” he growled, in grotesque wrath, in his letter announcing the failure to Wordsworth. Hazlitt, who was present, dreamed of that dreadful damning every night for a month, but Lamb only wrote to him: “I know you’ll be sorry, but never mind. We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces.” He and Mary were “pretty stout” about it, but, after all, they would rather have had success, he had to own. For he not only longed for the fame, but he needed the money, which that success in dramatic authorship would have brought.