Biographical Essays

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Rich, indeed, in moral instruction was the life of Charles Lamb;
and perhaps in one chief result it offers to the thoughtful
observer a lesson of consolation that is awful, and of hope that
ought to be immortal, viz., in the record which it furnishes, that
by meekness of submission, and by earnest conflict with evil, in
the spirit of cheerfulness, it is possible ultimately to disarm or
to blunt the very heaviest of curses--even the curse of lunacy. Had
it been whispered, in hours of infancy, to Lamb, by the angel who
stood by his cradle--"Thou, and the sister that walks by ten years
before thee, shall be through life, each to each, the solitary
fountain of comfort; and except it be from this fountain of mutual
love, except it be as brother and sister, ye shall not taste the
cup of peace on earth!"--here, if there was sorrow in reversion,
there was also consolation.

But what funeral swamps would have instantly ingulfed this
consolation, had some meddling fiend prolonged the revelation, and,
holding up the curtain from the sad future a little longer, had
said scornfully--"Peace on earth! Peace for you two, Charles and
Mary Lamb! What peace is possible under the curse which even now
is gathering against your heads? Is there peace on earth for the
lunatic--peace for the parenticide--peace for the girl that,
without warning, and without time granted for a penitential cry to
heaven, sends her mother to the last audit?" And then, without
treachery, speaking bare truth, this prophet of woe might have
added--"Thou also, thyself, Charles Lamb, thou in thy proper
person, shalt enter the skirts of this dreadful hail-storm; even
thou shalt taste the secrets of lunacy, and enter as a captive its
house of bondage; whilst over thy sister the accursed scorpion
shall hang suspended through life, like Death hanging over the beds
of hospitals, striking at times, but more often threatening to
strike; or withdrawing its instant menaces only to lay bare her
mind more bitterly to the persecutions of a haunted memory!"
Considering the nature of the calamity, in the first place;
considering, in the second place, its life-long duration; and, in
the last place, considering the quality of the resistance by which
it was met, and under what circumstances of humble resources in
money or friends--we have come to the deliberate judgment, that the
whole range of history scarcely presents a more affecting spectacle
of perpetual sorrow, humiliation, or conflict, and that was
supported to the end, (that is, through forty years,) with more
resignation, or with more absolute victory.

Charles Lamb was born in February of the year 1775. His immediate
descent was humble; for his father, though on one particular
occasion civilly described as a "scrivener," was in reality a
domestic servant to Mr. Salt--a bencher (and therefore a barrister
of some standing) in the Inner Temple. John Lamb the father
belonged by birth to Lincoln; from which city, being transferred to
London whilst yet a boy, he entered the service of Mr. Salt without
delay; and apparently from this period throughout his life
continued in this good man's household to support the honorable
relation of a Roman client to his _patronus_, much more than
that of a mercenary servant to a transient and capricious master.
The terms on which he seems to live with the family of the Lambs,
argue a kindness and a liberality of nature on both sides. John
Lamb recommended himself as an attendant by the versatility of his
accomplishments; and Mr. Salt, being a widower without children,
which means in effect an old bachelor, naturally valued that
encyclopaedic range of dexterity which made his house independent
of external aid for every mode of service. To kill one's own mutton
is but an operose way of arriving at a dinner, and often a more
costly way; whereas to combine one's own carpenter, locksmith,
hair-dresser, groom, &c., all in one man's person,--to have a
Robinson Crusoe, up to all emergencies of life, always in waiting,
--is a luxury of the highest class for one who values his ease.

A consultation is held more freely with a man familiar to one's
eye, and more profitably with a man aware of one's peculiar habits.
And another advantage from such an arrangement is, that one gets
any little alteration or repair executed on the spot. To hear is to
obey, and by an inversion of Pope's rule--

"One always _is_, and never _to be_, blest."

People of one sole accomplishment, like the _homo unius libri,
_ are usually within that narrow circle disagreeably perfect,
and therefore apt to be arrogant. People who can do all things,
usually do every one of them ill; and living in a constant effort
to deny this too palpable fact, they become irritably vain. But Mr.
Lamb the elder seems to have been bent on perfection. He did all
things; he did them all well; and yet was neither gloomily
arrogant, nor testily vain. And being conscious apparently that all
mechanic excellencies tend to illiberal results, unless
counteracted by perpetual sacrifices to the muses, he went so far
as to cultivate poetry; he even printed his poems, and were we
possessed of a copy, (which we are _not_, nor probably is the
Vatican,) it would give us pleasure at this point to digress for a
moment, and to cut them up, purely on considerations of respect to
the author's memory. It is hardly to be supposed that they did not
really merit castigation; and we should best show the sincerity of
our respect for Mr. Lamb, senior, in all those cases where we
_could_ conscientiously profess respect by an unlimited
application of the knout in the cases where we could _not_.

The whole family of the Lambs seem to have won from Mr. Salt the
consideration which is granted to humble friends; and from
acquaintances nearer to their own standing, to have won a
tenderness of esteem such as is granted to decayed gentry. Yet
naturally, the social rank of the parents, as people still living,
must have operated disadvantageously for the children. It is hard,
even for the practised philosopher, to distinguish aristocratic
graces of manner, and capacities of delicate feeling, in people
whose very hearth and dress bear witness to the servile humility of
their station. Yet such distinctions as wild gifts of nature,
timidly and half-unconsciously asserted themselves in the
unpretending Lambs. Already in _their_ favor there existed a
silent privilege analogous to the famous one of Lord Kinsale. He,
by special grant from the crown, is allowed, when standing before
the king, to forget that he is not himself a king; the bearer of
that peerage, through all generations, has the privilege of wearing
his hat in the royal presence. By a general though tacit concession
of the same nature, the rising generation of the Lambs, John and
Charles, the two sons, and Mary Lamb, the only daughter, were
permitted to forget that their grandmother had been a housekeeper
for sixty years, and that their father had worn a livery. Charles
Lamb, individually, was so entirely humble, and so careless of
social distinctions, that he has taken pleasure in recurring to
these very facts in the family records amongst the most genial of
his Elia recollections. He only continued to remember, without
shame, and with a peculiar tenderness, these badges of plebeian
rank, when everybody else, amongst the few survivors that could
have known of their existence, had long dismissed them from their
thoughts.

Probably, through Mr. Salt's interest, Charles Lamb, in the autumn
of 1782, when he wanted something more than four months of
completing his eighth year, received a presentation to the
magnificent school of Christ's Hospital. The late Dr. Arnold, when
contrasting the school of his own boyish experience, Winchester,
with Rugby, the school confided to his management, found nothing so
much to regret in the circumstances of the latter as its forlorn
condition with respect to historical traditions. Wherever these
were wanting, and supposing the school of sufficient magnitude, it
occurred to Dr. Arnold that something of a compensatory effect for
impressing the imagination might be obtained by connecting the
school with the nation through the link of annual prizes issuing
from the exchequer. An official basis of national patronage might
prove a substitute for an antiquarian or ancestral basis. Happily
for the great educational foundations of London, none of them is in
the naked condition of Rugby. Westminster, St. Paul's, Merchant
Tailors', the Charter-House, &c., are all crowned with historical
recollections; and Christ's Hospital, besides the original honors
of its foundation, so fitted to a consecrated place in a youthful
imagination--an asylum for boy-students, provided by a
boy-king--innocent, religious, prematurely wise, and prematurely
called away from earth--has also a mode of perpetual connection
with the state. It enjoys, therefore, _both_ of Dr. Arnold's
advantages. Indeed, all the great foundation schools of London,
bearing in their very codes of organization the impress of a double
function--viz., the conservation of sound learning and of pure
religion--wear something of a monastic or cloisteral character in
their aspect and usages, which is peculiarly impressive, and even
pathetic, amidst the uproars of a capital the most colossal and
tumultuous upon earth.

Here Lamb remained until his fifteenth year, which year threw him
on the world, and brought him alongside the golden dawn of the
French Revolution. Here he learned a little elementary Greek, and
of Latin more than a little; for the Latin notes to Mr. Cary (of
Dante celebrity) though brief, are sufficient to reveal a true
sense of what is graceful and idiomatic in Latinity. _We_ say
this, who have studied that subject more than most men. It is not
that Lamb would have found it an easy task to compose a long paper
in Latin--nobody _can,_ find it easy to do what he has no
motive for habitually practising; but a single sentence of Latin
wearing the secret countersign of the "sweet Roman hand,"
ascertains sufficiently that, in reading Latin classics, a man
feels and comprehends their peculiar force or beauty. That is
enough. It is requisite to a man's expansion of mind that he should
make acquaintance with a literature so radically differing from all
modern literatures as is the Latin. It is _not_ requisite that
he should practise Latin composition. Here, therefore, Lamb
obtained in sufficient perfection one priceless accomplishment,
which even singly throws a graceful air of liberality over all the
rest of a man's attainments: having rarely any pecuniary value, it
challenges the more attention to its intellectual value. Here also
Lamb commenced the friendships of his life; and, of all which he
formed, he lost none. Here it was, as the consummation and crown of
his advantages from the time-honored hospital, that he came to know
"Poor S. T. C." [Greek text: ton thaumasiotaton.]

Until 1796, it is probable that he lost sight of Coleridge, who was
then occupied with Cambridge, having been transferred thither as a
"Grecian" from the house of Christ Church. That year, 1796, was a
year of change and fearful calamity for Charles Lamb. On that year
revolved the wheels of his after-life. During the three years
succeeding to his school days, he had held a clerkship in the South
Sea House. In 1795, he was transferred to the India House. As a
junior clerk, he could not receive more than a slender salary; but
even this was important to the support of his parents and sister.
They lived together in lodgings near Holborn; and in the spring of
1796, Miss Lamb, (having previously shown signs of lunacy at
intervals,) in a sudden paroxysm of her disease, seized a knife
from the dinner table, and stabbed her mother, who died upon the
spot. A coroner's inquest easily ascertained the nature of a case
which was transparent in all its circumstances, and never for a
moment indecisive as regarded the medical symptoms. The poor young
lady was transferred to the establishment for lunatics at Hoxton.
She soon recovered, we believe; but her relapses were as sudden as
her recoveries, and she continued through life to revisit, for
periods of uncertain seclusion, this house of woe. This calamity of
his fireside, followed soon after by the death of his father, who
had for some time been in a state of imbecility, determined the
future destiny of Lamb. Apprehending, with the perfect grief of
perfect love, that his sister's fate was sealed for life--viewing
her as his own greatest benefactress, which she really _had_
been through her advantage by ten years of age--yielding with
impassioned readiness to the depth of his fraternal affection, what
at any rate he would have yielded to the sanctities of duty as
interpreted by his own conscience--he resolved forever to resign
all thoughts of marriage with a young lady whom he loved, forever
to abandon all ambitious prospects that might have tempted him into
uncertainties, humbly to content himself with the
_certainties_ of his Indian clerkship, to dedicate himself for
the future to the care of his desolate and prostrate sister, and to
leave the rest to God. These sacrifices he made in no hurry or
tumult, but deliberately, and in religious tranquillity. These
sacrifices were accepted in heaven--and even on this earth they
_had_ their reward. She, for whom he gave up all, in turn gave
up all for _him_. She devoted herself to his comfort. Many
times she returned to the lunatic establishment, but many times she
was restored to illuminate the household hearth for _him_; and
of the happiness which for forty years and more he had, no hour
seemed true that was not derived from her. Hence forwards,
therefore, until he was emancipated by the noble generosity of the
East India Directors, Lamb's time, for nine-and-twenty years, was
given to the India House.

"_O fortunati nimium, sua si bona narint,_" is applicable to
more people than "_agricolae_." Clerks of the India House are
as blind to their own advantages as the blindest of ploughmen. Lamb
was summoned, it is true, through the larger and more genial
section of his life, to the drudgery of a copying clerk--making
confidential entries into mighty folios, on the subject of calicoes
and muslins. By this means, whether he would or not, he became
gradually the author of a great "serial" work, in a frightful
number of volumes, on as dry a department of literature as the
children of the great desert could have suggested. Nobody, he must
have felt, was ever likely to study this great work of his, not
even Dr. Dryasdust. He had written in vain, which is not pleasant
to know. There would be no second edition called for by a
discerning public in Leadenhall Street; not a chance of that. And
consequently the _opera omnia_ of Lamb, drawn up in a hideous
battalion, at the cost of labor so enormous, would be known only to
certain families of spiders in one generation, and of rats in the
next. Such a labor of Sysyphus,--the rolling up a ponderous stone
to the summit of a hill only that it might roll back again by the
gravitation of its own dulness,--seems a bad employment for a man
of genius in his meridian energies. And yet, perhaps not. Perhaps
the collective wisdom of Europe could not have devised for Lamb a
more favorable condition of toil than this very India House
clerkship. His works (his Leadenhall street works) were certainly
not read; popular they _could_ not be, for they were not read
by anybody; but then, to balance _that,_ they were not
reviewed. His folios were of that order, which (in Cowper's words)
"not even critics criticise." Is _that_ nothing? Is it no
happiness to escape the hands of scoundrel reviewers? Many of us
escape being _read;_ the worshipful reviewer does not find
time to read a line of us; but we do not for that reason escape
being criticised, "shown up," and martyred. The list of
_errata_ again, committed by Lamb, was probably of a magnitude
to alarm any possible compositor; and yet these _errata_ will
never be known to mankind. They are dead and buried. They have been
cut off prematurely; and for any effect upon their generation,
might as well never have existed. Then the returns, in a pecuniary
sense, from these folios--how important were _they!_ It is not
common, certainly, to write folios; but neither is it common to
draw a steady income of from 300 _l._ to 400 _l._ per
annum from volumes of any size. This will be admitted; but would it
not have been better to draw the income without the toil? Doubtless
it would always be more agreeable to have the rose without the
thorn. But in the case before us, taken with all its circumstances,
we deny that the toil is truly typified as a thorn; so far from
being a thorn in Lamb's daily life, on the contrary, it was a
second rose ingrafted upon the original rose of the income, that he
had to earn it by a moderate but continued exertion. Holidays, in a
national establishment so great as the India House, and in our too
fervid period, naturally could not be frequent; yet all great
English corporations are gracious masters, and indulgences of this
nature could be obtained on a special application. Not to count
upon these accidents of favor, we find that the regular toil of
those in Lamb's situation, began at ten in the morning and ended as
the clock struck four in the afternoon. Six hours composed the
daily contribution of labor, that is precisely one fourth part of
the total day. Only that, as Sunday was exempted, the rigorous
expression of the quota was one fourth of six-sevenths, which makes
sixty twenty-eighths and not six twenty-fourths of the total time.
Less toil than this would hardly have availed to deepen the sense
of value in that large part of the time still remaining disposable.
Had there been any resumption whatever of labor in the evening,
though but for half an hour, that one encroachment upon the broad
continuous area of the eighteen free hours would have killed the
tranquillity of the whole day, by _sowing_ it (so to speak)
with intermitting anxieties--anxieties that, like tides, would
still be rising and falling. Whereas now, at the early hour of
four, when daylight is yet lingering in the air, even at the dead
of winter, in the latitude of London, and when the _enjoying_
section of the day is barely commencing, everything is left which a
man would care to retain. A mere dilettante or amateur student,
having no mercenary interest concerned, would, upon a refinement of
luxury--would, upon choice, give up so much time to study, were it
only to sharpen the value of what remained for pleasure. And thus
the only difference between the scheme of the India House
distributing his time for Lamb, and the scheme of a wise voluptuary
distributing his time for himself, lay, not in the _amount_ of
time deducted from enjoyment, but in the particular mode of
appropriating that deduction. An _intellectual_ appropriation
of the time, though casually fatiguing, must have pleasures of its
own; pleasures denied to a task so mechanic and so monotonous as
that of reiterating endless records of sales or consignments not
_essentially_ varying from each other. True; it is pleasanter
to pursue an intellectual study than to make entries in a ledger.
But even an intellectual toil is toil; few people can support it
for more than six hours in a day. And the only question, therefore,
after all, is, at what period of the day a man would prefer taking
this pleasure of study. Now, upon that point, as regards the case
of Lamb, there is no opening for doubt. He, amongst his _Popular
Fallacies_, admirably illustrates the necessity of evening and
artificial lights to the prosperity of studies. After exposing,
with the perfection of fun, the savage unsociality of those elder
ancestors who lived (if life it was) before lamp-light was
invented, showing that "jokes came in with candles," since "what
repartees could have passed" when people were "grumbling at one
another in the dark," and "when you must have felt about for a
smile, and handled a neighbor's cheek to be sure that he understood
it?"--he goes on to say," This accounts for the seriousness of the
elder poetry, "viz., because they had no candle-light. Even eating
he objects to as a very imperfect thing in the dark; you are not
convinced that a dish tastes as it should do by the promise of its
name, if you dine in the twilight without candles. Seeing is
believing." The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally. "The
sight guarantees the taste. For instance," Can you tell pork from
veal in the dark, or distinguish Sherries from pure Malaga? "To all
enjoyments whatsoever candles are indispensable as an adjunct; but,
as to _reading_," there is, "says Lamb," absolutely no such
thing but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at
noon-day in gardens, but it was labor thrown away. It is a mockery,
all that is reported of the influential Phoebus. No true poem ever
owed its birth to the sun's light. The mild internal light, that
reveals the fine shapings of poetry, like fires on the domestic
hearth, goes out in the sunshine. Milton's morning hymn in
Paradise, we would hold a good wager, was penned at midnight; and
Taylor's rich description of a sunrise smells decidedly of the
taper. "This view of evening and candle-light as involved in
literature may seem no more than a pleasant extravaganza; and no
doubt it is in the nature of such gayeties to travel a little into
exaggeration, but substantially it is certain that Lamb's feelings
pointed habitually in the direction here indicated. His literary
studies, whether taking the color of tasks or diversions, courted
the aid of evening, which, by means of physical weariness, produces
a more luxurious state of repose than belong to the labor hours of
day, and courted the aid of lamp-light, which, as Lord Bacon
remarked, gives a gorgeousness to human pomps and pleasures, such
as would be vainly sought from the homeliness of day-light. The
hours, therefore, which were withdrawn from his own control by the
India House, happened to be exactly that part of the day which Lamb
least valued, and could least have turned to account.

The account given of Lamb's friends, of those whom he endeavored to
love because he admired them, or to esteem intellectually because
he loved them personally, is too much colored for general
acquiescence by Sergeant Talfourd's own early prepossessions. It is
natural that an intellectual man like the Sergeant, personally made
known in youth to people, whom from childhood he had regarded as
powers in the ideal world, and in some instances as representing
the eternities of human speculation, since their names had perhaps
dawned upon his mind in concurrence with the very earliest
suggestion of topics which they had treated, should overrate their
intrinsic grandeur. Hazlitt accordingly is styled "The great
thinker." But had he been such potentially, there was an absolute
bar to his achievement of that station in act and consummation. No
man _can_ be a great thinker in our days upon large and
elaborate questions without being also a great student. To think
profoundly, it is indispensable that a man should have read down to
his own starting point, and have read as a collating student to the
particular stage at which he himself takes up the subject. At this
moment, for instance, how could geology be treated otherwise than
childishly by one who should rely upon the encyclopaedias of 1800?
or comparative physiology by the most ingenious of men unacquainted
with Marshall Hall, and with the apocalyptic glimpses of secrets
unfolding under the hands of Professor Owen? In such a condition of
undisciplined thinking, the ablest man thinks to no purpose. He
lingers upon parts of the inquiry that have lost the importance
which once they had, under imperfect charts of the subject; he
wastes his strength upon problems that have become obsolete; he
loses his way in paths that are not in the line of direction upon
which the improved speculation is moving; or he gives narrow
conjectural solutions of difficulties that have long since received
sure and comprehensive ones. It is as if a man should in these days
attempt to colonize, and yet, through inertia or through ignorance,
should leave behind him all modern resources of chemistry, of
chemical agriculture, or of steam-power. Hazlitt had read nothing.
Unacquainted with Grecian philosophy, with Scholastic philosophy,
and with the recomposition of these philosophies in the looms of
Germany during the last sixty and odd years, trusting merely to the
unrestrained instincts of keen mother-wit--whence should Hazlitt
have had the materials for great thinking? It is through the
collation of many abortive voyages to polar regions that a man
gains his first chance of entering the polar basin, or of running
ahead on the true line of approach to it. The very reason for
Hazlitt's defect in eloquence as a lecturer, is sufficient also as
a reason why he could not have been a comprehensive thinker. "He
was not eloquent," says the Sergeant, "in the true sense of the
term." But why? Because it seems "his thoughts were too weighty to
be moved along by the shallow stream of feeling which an evening's
excitement can rouse,"--an explanation which leaves us in doubt
whether Hazlitt forfeited his chance of eloquence by accommodating
himself to this evening's excitement, or by gloomily resisting it.
Our own explanation is different, Hazlitt was not eloquent, because
he was discontinuous. No man can he eloquent whose thoughts are
abrupt, insulated, capricious, and (to borrow an impressive word
from Coleridge) non-sequacious. Eloquence resides not in separate
or fractional ideas, but in the relations of manifold ideas, and in
the mode of their evolution from each other. It is not indeed
enough that the ideas should be many, and their relations coherent;
the main condition lies in the key of the evolution, in the
_law_ of the succession. The elements are nothing without the
atmosphere that moulds, and the dynamic forces that combine. Now
Hazlitt's brilliancy is seen chiefly in separate splinterings of
phrase or image which throw upon the eye a vitreous scintillation
for a moment, but spread no deep suffusions of color, and
distribute no masses of mighty shadow. A flash, a solitary flash,
and all is gone. Rhetoric, according to its quality, stands in many
degrees of relation to the permanencies of truth; and all rhetoric,
like all flesh, is partly unreal, and the glory of both is
fleeting. Even the mighty rhetoric of Sir Thomas Brown, or Jeremy
Taylor, to whom only it has been granted to open the trumpet-stop
on that great organ of passion, oftentimes leaves behind it the
sense of sadness which belongs to beautiful apparitions starting
out of darkness upon the morbid eye, only to be reclaimed by
darkness in the instant of their birth, or which belongs to
pageantries in the clouds. But if all rhetoric is a mode of
pyrotechny, and all pyrotechnics are by necessity fugacious, yet
even in these frail pomps, there are many degrees of frailty. Some
fireworks require an hour's duration for the expansion of their
glory; others, as if formed from fulminating powder, expire in the
very act of birth. Precisely on that scale of duration and of power
stand the glitterings of rhetoric that are not worked into the
texture, but washed on from the outside. Hazlitt's thoughts were of
the same fractured and discontinuous order as his illustrative
images--seldom or never self-diffusive; and _that_ is a
sufficient argument that he had never cultivated philosophic
thinking.

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