Lamb’s strong feeling against allowing his sister to be placed in an hospital for lunatics is more than justified by the accounts given, in the Life of Lord Shaftesbury, of the frightfully barbarous treatment to which insane people were subjected in the early part of the present century. Their keepers always visited them whip in hand. They were sometimes spun round on rotatory chairs at a tremendous speed; sometimes they were chained in wells, in which the water was made to rise till it reached their chins; sometimes they were left quite alone, chained to their beds, from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning, unable to rise, and with nothing but bread and water within their reach. No wonder that Charles Lamb said he would burn by slow fires rather than let his sister be treated like this.
The strong restorative of work done and duty fulfilled enabled Charles, within little more than a year of the dreadful calamity which had darkened his life, to make his first appearance as an author. These first poems were dedicated to “the author’s best friend and sister.” He wished to fence her round, as it were, by assurances of the high value he set on her, and of the depth of his love. “I wish,” he wrote to Coleridge, “to accumulate perpetuating tokens of my affection to poor Mary.” When she was restored to his daily companionship, there was nothing in her outward manner or appearance to indicate what a terrible cloud rested on her past life. Her manners were tranquil and composed. De Quincey speaks of her as that “Madonna-like lady.” There was no appearance of settled melancholy in consequence of the fatal deed she had been led to commit, but that it left a wound which was hidden rather than healed is indicated by the words written long years after the event: “My dear mother who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart.” On another occasion, a child Mary loved asked her why she never spoke of her mother. A cry of pain was the only response. Her dependence on her brother was an ever-visible presence in both their lives. Mrs. Cowden Clarke relates: “He once said, with his peculiar mode of tenderness beneath blunt, abrupt speech, ‘You must die first, Mary.’ She nodded, with her little quiet nod and sweet smile, ‘Yes, I must die first, Charles.’” The event was contrary to the wish and expectation thus expressed. Charles preceded Mary to the grave by thirteen years; but during the greater part of that time her intellect was so clouded as to deprive her of the power of the acute suffering the loss of her brother would otherwise have caused.
The literary fame of Mary Lamb rests chiefly on her Tales from Shakespeare, and a collection of beautiful little stories for children, called Mrs. Leicester’s School. The Tales from Shakespeare were written, as so much good work has been, under the stress of poverty. Six of the great tragedies were undertaken by Charles, and fourteen other plays by Mary. The scheme was to render each play into a prose story fit for the comprehension and capacity of children; and the work was done with inimitable felicity of diction, and critical insight into the situations and characters of the world of men and women who live in Shakespeare’s dramas. There is a letter of Mary’s describing herself and Charles at work: “Charles has written Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and has begun Hamlet. You would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting, like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Nights Dream); or rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan, I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out that he has made something of it” (Mrs. Gilchrist’s Life, p. 119). The Tales were written for William Godwin, whose first wife was Mary Wollstonecraft. His second wife helped him a great deal with his publishing business. She was a vulgar-minded woman, and a pet aversion of the Lambs, especially of Charles, who said, referring to her, “I will be buried with this inscription over me, ‘Here lies C. L., the woman-hater’—I mean, that hated one woman; for the rest, God bless ’em.” The success of the Tales could not, however, be marred by the unpopularity of the publisher and his wife. The book rapidly ran through several editions, and even now a year seldom passes without the Tales from Shakespeare being presented to the public in some new form.
A portrait of Mary Lamb has been drawn by the master hand of her brother. She is the Bridget of the Essays of Elia, as all lovers of the essays well know. The humour and delicate insight into character for which the writings of Charles Lamb are so distinguished, are also characteristic of Mary, though the humour in her case is less rollicking, and never breaks out in pure high spirits, as his often does. Some of the most charming of Mary’s writings are her letters, which have been published in Mrs. Gilchrist’s Life, especially those to a young friend, named Sarah Stoddart.
This young lady had a most “business-like determination to marry”; and as she generally had more than one string to her bow, as the saying is, it is no wonder that she sometimes needed the help of an older and wiser woman than herself, to get her out of the difficulties in which she found herself. Much of Mary’s own character comes out in the advice she gives her friend. She speaks in one place of her power of valuing people for what they are, without demanding or expecting perfection. It is a “knack I know I have, of looking into people’s real character, and never expecting them to act out of it—never expecting another to do as I would in the same case.” How much practical wisdom there is in this, and what misunderstandings and heart-burnings would be saved if it were more common not to expect people to act out of their own characters! There is a funny little bit in another letter to the effect that women should not be constantly admonishing men as to the right line of thought and conduct. “I make it a point of conscience never to interfere or cross my brother in the humour he happens to be in. It always appears to me a vexatious kind of tyranny, that women have no business to exercise over men, which merely because, they having a better judgment, they have power to do. Let men alone, and at last we find they come round 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.”
To begin quoting from the letters of Charles and Mary Lamb is such an enticing task that it would be easy to fill more pages than this little book contains. One more only shall be quoted from each. The most beautiful of Mary’s letters is perhaps that which she wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth, soon after the death by drowning of Wordsworth’s brother John. The beautiful poem by Wordsworth, “The Happy Warrior,” is supposed to have been written partly in reference to this brother, and partly in reference to Nelson, whose death took place the same year (1805). “I thank you,” Mary wrote, “my kind friend, for your most comfortable letter; till I saw your own handwriting I could not persuade myself that I should do well to write to you, though I have often attempted it.... I wished to tell you that you would one day feel the kind of peaceful state of mind and sweet memory of the dead which you so happily describe as now almost begun; but I felt that it was improper, and most grating to the feelings of the afflicted, to say to them that the memory of their affliction would in time become a constant part, not only of their dream, but of their most wakeful sense of happiness. That you would see every object with, and through, your lost brother, and that that would at last become a real and everlasting source of comfort to you, I felt and well knew from my own experience in sorrow; but till you yourself began to feel this I didn’t dare tell you so.”
How terrible that the mind and heart which could dictate such words as these were weighed down by the lifelong burden of insanity! Before Miss Wordsworth’s reply reached her, she was again attacked, and Charles wrote in her place: “I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all the former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me, and 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. To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe, or even understand; and when I hope to have her well again with me, it would be sinning against her feelings to go about praising her, for I can conceal nothing that I do from 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. She would share life and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but for me; and I know I have been wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly, with my cursed drinking and ways of going on. But even in thus upbraiding myself I am offending against her, for I know that she has clung to me for better, for worse; and if the balance has been against her hitherto it was a noble trade.”
Great, noble spirits they both were, even in their weaknesses and imperfections, showing an example of devoted unselfishness, tenderness, and generosity that many who “tithe mint and anise and cummin” might envy. Mary Lamb survived to old age, dying in May 1847, aged seventy-three. She was buried by her brother’s side in the churchyard at Edmonton.
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AGNES ELIZABETH JONES
“Count not that man’s life short who has had time to do noble deeds.”—From Cicero.