I love Charles Lamb and his writings so much, that I think everybody else ought to love them. There is not great weight in those essays of his; you cannot learn from them what the capital of Hindostan is, or what Buddhism is, nor the date of the capture of Constantinople. Measured by the Dry-as-Dust standard, and there is scarce more in them than in a field of daisies, over which the sunshine and the summer breezes are at play. But what delicacy there is! what a tender humor; what gentle and regaling lapses of quaint thought that beguiles and invites and is soothing and never wearies.
Lamb's poems are not of the best; they have a haltingness—like that in his speech,—with none of Rogers's glibness and currency, and none of his shallowness either. Constraint of rhyme sat on Elia no easier than a dress-coat. But in prose he was all at home; it purled from his pen like a river. It was quaint, kindly, utterly true—with little yaws of humor in it, filling his sails of a sudden, and stirring you to smiling outbreak—then falling away and leaving him to a gently undulating forward movement which charms by its quietude, serenities, and cheerfulness.
There was not much in his life to tell you of; no cannon firing, no drum beats, no moving splendors. A thin, kindly face he had, and thin figure too; in dark or grayish clothes ordinarily, that a clerk might wear; threadbare perhaps at the elbows; not a presentable man amongst swell people; never aspiring to be;—as distinct indeed as a brown hermit-thrush amongst chattering parrots. He has a stammer, too, as I have hinted, in his voice, which may annoy but never makes this quiet man ashamed; in fact, he deploys that stammering habit so as to allow of coy advance, and opportunity for pouncing with tremulous iteration upon his little jokelets, in a way to double their execution; he put it to service, too, in some of his tenderer stories, so as to make, by his very hesitancies, an added and most touching pathos.
He was of humble origin, his father a servitor about Temple Courts—only long gunshot away from Newgate Street; and when the son—through with his Christ Hospital schooling—came to have a small stipend (first, from the South Sea House and later from the East India Company), he had his little family—the only one that ever belonged to Charles Lamb—all about him in his lodgings in Little Queen Street. There was Mary, his sister, ten years older; his poor, bedridden mother, and his father, lapsing into dotage and only happy with cribbage-board at his elbow, and Charles or other good friend to make count. It was this quiet household on which a thunderbolt fell one day. This is Lamb's mention of it in a letter to Coleridge:—
"My poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a mad-house, from whence I fear she must be moved to a hospital. My poor father was slightly wounded. God has preserved to me my senses. Write as religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with."
And only a day after this, the weak old father, with his plastered head, is playing cribbage; and again, on another day, friends having come in—very many for those small rooms—and the last ceremonies not yet over, and they all sitting down at some special repast—Lamb bethinks himself of all that has happened, of what lies in the next room (he tells this in a letter to Coleridge), and rushes thither to kiss once more the cold face and to pray forgiveness that he has forgotten her so soon.
Poor Mary recovers; she lives for years with her brother; the horror of the past staying like a black dream in their thought—of which they dare not speak. And when new visitations of estrangement threaten, they two, brother and sister, walk away out from the streets—on to Edmonton, through green fields, by hedges, under trees which they much enjoy, to the doctor's strong guardianship and ward, until repose comes again and a return. Lamb at last goes to live at Enfield, which is close by Edmonton, north of London, that he may be near her prison-house at all times and seasons.
Yet in all these days when the pains and fears of that distracting life are resting on him, he is putting those tender and playful touches into the pleasant essays we know so well; conjuring for himself and for thousands everywhere a world of sunshine that shall overlap the dreary one in which he lives, and spend its graces and cheeriness upon the mind of the poor forlorn one, who with sisterly affection cleaves there and journeys meekly and obediently and sadly beside him.
I do not know how to trust myself to make a citation from those essays which shall carry to those not over-familiar some good hint of their qualities; but I venture upon a bit from his Dream-Children:—
"Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W——; and as much as children could understand, I explained to them what coyness, and difficulty, and denial, meant in maidens—when suddenly, turning to little Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which—without speech—strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech:—We are not of Alice, not of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartram father, we are nothing—less than nothing and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe, millions of ages, before we have existence and a name; and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my arm-chair—where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side."