The palm, the lily, and the spear,
The symbols that of yore
Saint Filomena bore.
IX
MARY LAMB
The name of Mary Lamb can never be mentioned without recalling that of her brother Charles, and the devoted, self-sacrificing love that existed between the two. It was one of Harriet Martineau’s sayings, that of all relations that between brother and sister was apt to be the least satisfactory. There have been some notable examples to the contrary, and perhaps the most notable is that given by Charles and Mary Lamb. When a brother and sister are linked together by an unusually strong bond of affection and admiration, it is generally the sister who, by inclination and natural selection, sacrifices all individual and personal objects for the sake of the brother. For instance, she frequently remains unmarried in order to be able to devote herself to his pursuits and further his interests. There is no more devotedly unselfish love than that of a sister and brother when it is at its best. The love of a wife for a husband, or a parent for a child, has something in it more of the element of self. In both these relationships, the husband and wife and the parent and child are so closely and indissolubly identified with one another that it is comparatively easy to merge the love between them into self-love. But between a brother and sister this is not the case. The bond that unites the two can be set aside by either of them at will. It is partly voluntary in its character, and, as previously remarked, in the give and take of this affection, it is, speaking generally, the brother who takes and the sister who gives. The contrary, however, was the case with Charles and Mary Lamb. Between these two, it was the brother who laid down his life for his sister, sacrificing for her sake, at the outset of his own career, his prospects of love and marriage, the ease and comfort of his life, and his opportunities of devoting himself exclusively to his darling studies.
The story of these two beautiful lives is worth more than even their contributions to English literature, and makes us love Lamb and his sister quite independently of the Essays of Elia, and the Tales from Shakespeare. Mary Lamb was born in 1764, eleven years before her brother Charles. Her childhood, till the birth of this precious brother, seems to have had little brightness in it. There was a tendency to insanity in the Lamb family, and this tendency was probably intensified in Mary’s case by the harshness and want of sympathy with which it was then the fashion to treat children. “Polly, what are those poor crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking, always?” was a speech of her grandmother’s that made a lasting impression on the sensitive child. The love of her parents, her mother especially, seems to have been centred on her brother John, older than herself by two years. “‘Dear little selfish, craving John,’ he was in childhood, and dear big selfish John he remained in manhood” (Mrs. Gilchrist’s Life of Mary Lamb, p. 4).
The first creature upon whom the wealth of affection in Mary’s nature could be freely bestowed was, therefore, the baby brother. She spoke in after years of the curative influence on her mind of the almost maternal affection which she lavished on the boy who was, to a great extent, committed to her care. Henceforward she was no longer lonely, but had gained a companion and object in life. Her education consisted mainly in having been “tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and she browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage.” This was the library of Mr. Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple, to whom her father was clerk. In 1782, when Charles was seven and Mary eighteen, he became a scholar of the Blue Coat School, where he formed a lifelong friendship with the poet Coleridge. The circumstances of the Lambs gradually narrowed. The father was superannuated, and his income was consequently reduced. The elder brother, John, held a good appointment in the South Sea House, but he was much more intent on enjoying himself and surrounding himself with luxuries than upon providing for the wants of his family. For eleven years, from the age of twenty-one to thirty-two, Mary supported herself by her needle.
The father’s mental faculties gradually gave way more and more. By the time Charles was fifteen he left school, and the care and maintenance of his family in a short time devolved mainly on him. He first obtained a clerkship in the same establishment where his brother was employed, and two years later he received a better paid appointment, with a salary of £70 a year, in the India House. Domestic troubles, however, thickened upon the family; the mother became a confirmed invalid, and in 1795 Charles was seized by an attack of the madness hereditary in the family. This affliction must have weighed terribly upon Mary, who thus saw her one prop and solace taken from her. She was left alone, with her father in his second childhood, her mother an exacting and imperious invalid, and an old Aunt Hetty, who was for ever poring over devotional books, without apparently the capacity of sharing any of the household burdens. No sooner was Charles restored to reason than a new trouble began. John met with a serious accident, and, though in his days of prosperity his family saw little or nothing of him, he now returned home to be nursed. This seems to have been the last straw that broke poor Mary down. In September 1796 the mania, with which she had been often threatened, broke out; she seized a knife from the table and stabbed her mother to the heart. The poor old father was almost unconscious of what had taken place; Aunt Hetty fainted. It was Charles who seized the knife from his sister’s grasp, but not before she had, in her frenzy, inflicted a slight wound on her father. The horror of the whole scene can be with difficulty pictured. Yet Charles, who had only lately been released from an asylum, had the power to cope with it, to maintain his calmness and courage, and above all to resolve that the terrible calamity which had overtaken them should not be allowed to enshroud the whole of his dear sister’s life in the gloom of a madhouse. He wrote to his friend Coleridge five days after the tragedy, and his letter speaks nothing but tender fortitude. “God has preserved to me my senses,” he writes. “I eat, and drink, and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and of my aunt.... With me ‘the former things are passed away,’ and I have something more to do than to feel.”
Severe self-mastery is perceived in every word of this letter. Lamb was evidently sensible that his own reason would totter if it were not controlled by a strong effort of will. In another letter written a week later to the same friend, the same spirit is shown; he had already formed the determination not to allow his sister to remain in a madhouse; he resolved to devote his life to her, and to give up all thought of other happiness for himself than what was consistent with his being her constant companion and guardian—“Your letter was an inestimable treasure to me. It will be a comfort to you, I know, to know that my prospects are somewhat brighter. My poor dear, dearest sister—the unhappy and unconscious instrument of the Almighty’s judgments on our house—is restored to her senses, to a dreadful sense and recollection of what has past, awful to her mind, and impressive (as it must be to the end of life), but tempered with religious resignation and the reasonings of a sound judgment, which in this early stage knows how to distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother’s murder. I have seen her. I found her this morning calm and serene, far, very far, from an indecent, forgetful serenity; she has a most affectionate and tender concern for what has happened. Indeed from the beginning, frightful and hopeless as her disorder seemed, I had confidence enough in her strength of mind and religious principle to look forward to a time when even she might recover tranquillity. God be praised, Coleridge, wonderful as it is to tell, I have never once been otherwise than collected and calm; even on the dreadful day, and in the midst of the terrible scene, I preserved a tranquillity which bystanders may have construed into indifference—a tranquillity not of despair. Is it folly or sin in me to say that it was a religious principle that most supported me?... I felt I had something else to do than to regret. On that first evening, my aunt was lying insensible, to all appearance like one dying,—my father with his poor forehead plastered over from a wound he had received from a daughter dearly loved by him, who loved him no less dearly,—my mother, a dead and murdered corpse in the next room,—yet was I wonderfully supported. I closed not my eyes that night, but lay without terrors and without despair. I have lost no sleep since. I had been long used not to rest in things of sense, had endeavoured after a comprehension of mind unsatisfied with the ignorant present time; and this kept me up. I had the whole weight of the family thrown on me, for my brother, little disposed (I speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take care of old age and infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an exemption from such duties; and I was now left alone.” He then speaks of the kindness of various friends, and reckons up the resources of the family, resolving to spare £50 or £60 a year to keep Mary at a private asylum at Islington. “I know John will make speeches about it, but she shall not go into an hospital.... If my father, and old maid-servant, and I, can’t live, and live comfortably, on £130 or £120 a year, we ought to burn by slow fires; and I almost would, that Mary might not go into an hospital. Let me not leave an unfavourable impression on your mind respecting my brother. Since this has happened, he has been very kind and brotherly, but I fear for his mind. He has taken his ease in the world, and is not fit to struggle with difficulties, nor has much accustomed himself to throw himself into their way; and I know his language is already, ‘Charles, you must take care of yourself, you must not abridge yourself of a single pleasure you have been used to,’ etc.; and in that style of talking.” Charles goes on to explain that his sister would form one of the family she had been placed with rather than a patient. “They, as the saying is, take to her extraordinarily, if it is extraordinary that people who see my sister should love her. Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister was most thoroughly devoid of the quality of selfishness. I will enlarge upon her qualities, dearest soul, in a future letter for my own comfort, for I understand her thoroughly; and if I mistake not, in the most trying situation that a human being can be found in, she will be found ... uniformly great and amiable. God keep her in her present mind, to whom be thanks and praise for all His dispensations to mankind.”
The whole of the rest of Lamb’s life was a fulfilment of the loving resolutions which had sustained him in the terrible hour of his mother’s death. His love for the beautiful Alice W——n was relinquished as one of the “tender fond records” for ever blotted out by a sterner, more imperative claim of affection and duty. As soon as the old father died, Mary and Charles were reunited in one home, and her brother’s guardianship was accepted by the authorities as a sufficient guarantee that any future return of her malady should not be accompanied by danger to the lives of others. He was faithful to his self-imposed task. He himself was never again attacked by the cruel malady, but his sister to the end of her life was subject to recurring periods of insanity, which latterly isolated her from her friends for months in every year. Through their joint care and caution no fatal results again attended these attacks of mania. There is something inexpressibly touching in the fact that on their holiday excursions together, Mary invariably, with her own hands, packed a strait-waistcoat for herself. She was able to foretell, by premonitory symptoms, when she was likely to be attacked; and a friend of the Lambs has related how he had met them walking together, hand in hand, towards the asylum, both weeping bitterly.