So his growing need and his growing want to be alone were never gratified. “Except my morning’s walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so—I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered—evening company I should always like, had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (divine, forsooth) and voices all the golden morning.... I am never C. L., but always C. L. & Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself.” He could not even eat in peace, for his familiars were with him putting questions—presumably inopportune questions—asking his opinions, and interrupting him in every way. “Up I go, mutton on table, hungry as a hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication. Knock at the door; in comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Mr. Burney, or Morgan Demi Gorgon, or my brother, or somebody to prevent my eating alone—a process absolutely necessary to my poor, wretched digestion. Oh, the pleasure of eating alone!—eating my dinner alone! let me think of it.”
He did think of it, but to no practicable remedial end; for, if he hated to have the intruders come, he hated still more to have them go; and he had to avow, “God bless ’em! I love some of ’em dearly!”
All this was a ceaseless drain on his vitality, and a ceaseless strain on the nerves already so overstrung. He wondered how “some people keep their nerves so nicely balanced as they do, or have they any? or are they made of pack-thread? He” (I know not of whom he spoke) “is proof against weather, ingratitude, meat underdone, every weapon of fate.” Lamb was not proof against good friends, his sympathetic nature going out perpetually to them to his own loss. Of Coleridge he said: “The neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons.... If I lived with him, or with the author of ‘The Excursion,’ I should in a very little time lose my own identity.” Only those of his susceptible temperament can comprehend this confession, or his characteristic commendation of John Rickman, Clerk of the House of Commons, a newly made and highly valued friend: “He understands you the first time. You need never twice speak to him.”
Such were the tremulous nerves which seemed to need the stimulus of alcohol, and which were so easily swayed and upset by it. The lachrymose and dolorous tones of Respectability are forever croaking loud in lamentation that Lamb was a Drunkard. It is not true. He was no drunkard. He could not have been a drunkard with his delicate organization. I believe that he suffered, unknowingly withal, from the malady now named nervous dyspepsia; to which he was a victim, partly by inheritance, largely by his own indiscretions. He was careless in his habits, in his diet, in his exercise—walking often at unfitting hours and for excessive hours—and he had no regard at all for any sort of proper precautions. Although habitually given to plain fare, and no gormandizer, he was at times fond of outrageous dishes, and fearless in his appalling experiments on his digestive machinery. He audaciously claimed for himself the stomach of Heliogabalus! Like Thackeray, he had the courage of his gastronomic convictions, and he has left an imperishable record of his love for roast pig, cow-heel, and brawn. “I am no Quaker at my food—I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it.... I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know what he is eating; I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like minced veal”—admirable appreciation! “C—— holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings—I am not sure but he is right.” And about a pig, just then roasting, he wrote to Wordsworth: “How beautiful and strong those buttered onions come to my nose!” He could snatch a fearful joy even from that baleful refection, cold brawn; and only at the thought thereof, as he is writing, he glows with esurient unction. “’Tis, of all my hobbies, the supreme in the eating way.... It is like a picture of one of the old Italian masters; its gusto is of that hidden sort.”
Conscientious in his cultivation of these admirably abnormal appetites; fond of heavy, late suppers; addicted to too much tobacco; with friends forever to the fore to interest, stimulate, and thus unnerve him; and with the unceasing terror that hung over their home and gave it its profound depression, it is small wonder that he found in alcohol just what he needed, and just what he should not have depended upon! He would tipple at times, and now and then he did get drunk, I do not deny; but never twice in the same house, as he truthfully assured a lady! That was a redeeming habit, surely. The fact, put in a word, is that he was affected by incredibly small quantities of stimulants, and as high as they pulled up his spirits, even so correspondingly low did his spirits sink afterward. His agonies of remorse, following a slight excess, were morbid, fantastic, never to be taken as true to the letter. After a trifling tipsy quarrel with Walter Wilson, he sent an apology, and added: “You knew well enough before that a very little liquor will cause a considerable alteration in me.” Mary wrote frequently: “He came home very smoky and drinky last night;” and then he would reproach himself the day after for “wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly with my cursed drinking and ways of going on.” His spasmodic efforts at reform were born of these extravagant self-accusings, and were equally needless and fruitless. “I am afraid I must leave off drinking. I am a poor creature, but I am leaving off gin.” And he did leave it off, with a moral certainty of his abstinence lasting until his feeble stomach clamoured for so much porter in its place that Mary herself had to beg him “to live like himself once more.”
His “Farewell to Tobacco” was more successful, and more permanent; it was not only “his sweet enemy,” but really his worst enemy. “Liquor and company and wicked tobacco, o’ nights, have quite dis-pericraniated me, as one may say;” and of these three delights wicked tobacco was to him the most delightful, and withal the most dangerous. And so we must not consider too curiously his famous “Confessions of a Drunkard,” with its terrible, eloquent passage, beginning with this unfair and unfounded introspection: “To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to foes; to be suspected by strangers, stared at by fools.” We are glad and proud to take him as we find him—full of frailties, just as we poorer mortals are; it is not for us to sit in judgment on him; we say to the Philistines, in Wordsworth’s benignant words, “Love him or leave him alone.”
It was during the latter period of their residence in the Temple, and during their six years in Russell Street, that Lamb produced the greater part of the work he has left—small in sum but great in achievement. It is not the province of this study to dwell on his various literary performances, but it comes within my scope to speak of his sister’s assistance in that literary labour. In all matters he depended greatly upon her. “She is older and wiser and better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness.” During each frequent recurrence of her pitiful craze—when she was forced to be “from home,” as he lovingly and tenderly phrased it—he was lost and helpless. “I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think, lest I should think wrong, so used am I to look up to her in the least as in the biggest perplexity.”
He did not overrate her. She was no commonplace creature, and she impressed all who knew her well as a woman of fine judgment, of noteworthy good sense, full of womanly sympathies, sweet and serene. Hazlitt commended her as the wisest and most rational woman he had ever known. With strangers she was unpretentious, mild of manner, reticent rather than loquacious. In her bearing towards her brother she was gentle and gracious always, and she had a way of letting her eyes follow him everywhere about the room, in company. When looking directly at him she had often an upward, pleading, peculiar regard. Mrs. Anne Gilchrist, in her admirable monograph, has called attention to the rare tact—excellent thing in woman!—shown by Mary in dealing with her brother’s caprices and foibles, all through his life. Indeed, there was absolute inspiration in her way of looking at, and acting upon, these matters. It seemed to her to be a vexatious kind of tyranny, which women use towards men, just because the women have better judgment—the italics are her own! She pours forth profuse strains of unpremeditated wisdom, in this same letter to Sarah Stoddart: “Let men alone, and at last we find they come around to the right way, which we, by a kind of intuition, perceive at once. But better, far better that we should let them often do wrong, than that they should have the torment of a monitor always at their elbows.” Guided by such priceless principles, it is no wonder that she succeeded in never crossing that thin line which divides the domain of the judicious adviser, the opportune helper, from that of the untimely, incessant, ineffective Nagger. She once said, “Our love for each other has been the torment of our lives”—torment and assuagement together, as we know, and made sweet mainly by her simple sagacity.
Regarding her personal appearance, Barry Cornwall has told us that “her face was pale, and somewhat square, very placid, with gray intelligent eyes;” and De Quincey called her “that Madonna-like lady.” Her smile was as winning as Charles’s own, and when she spoke, there came a slight catch in her soft voice, unconscious sisterly reflex of his stammer. She was below the medium stature, strongly and somewhat squarely built.
To this slight sketch of her looks and bearing may be added these, not too trivial fond records, of her manner of dressing. Her gown was usually plain, of black stuff or silk; but, on festive occasions, she came out in a dove-coloured silk, with a kerchief of snow-white muslin folded across her bosom. She wore a cap of the kind in fashion in her youth, its border deeply frilled, and a bow on the top.