Buch lesen: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864», Seite 5

CHARLES LAMB'S UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS

FOURTH PAPER

Lamb's time, after his manumission from India-House, seems to have hung rather heavily upon his hands. Though the "birds of the air" were not so free as he was then, I fear they were a great deal happier and vastly more contented than our liberated and idle old clerk. Though in the first flush and excitement of his freedom from his six-and-thirty years' confinement in a counting-house,—(he entered the office a dark-haired, bright-eyed, light-hearted boy; he left it a decrepit, silver-haired, rather melancholy, somewhat disappointed man, whose spirits, as he himself confesseth, had grown gray before his hair,)—though, when in the dizzy and happy early hours of his freedom, Elia exultingly wrote (and felt) that "a man can never have too much time to himself," the honeymoon (if I may so express it) of his emancipation from the

 
"Dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood"
 

was not fairly over before he felt that man's true element is labor,—that occupation, which in his younger days he had called a "fiend," was in very truth an angel,—the angel of contentment and joy. Doctor Johnson stoutly maintained by both tongue and pen, that, in general, no one could be virtuous or happy who was not completely employed. Not only the bread we eat, but the true pleasures and real enjoyments of life, must be earned by the sweat of the brow. The poor old mill-horse, turned loose in the pasture on Sundays, seems sadly to miss his accustomed daily round of weary labor; the retired tallow-chandler, whose story has pointed so many morals and adorned so many tales, would have died of inertia and ennui in less than six months after his retirement from business, had not his successor kindly allowed him to help on melting-days; and methinks the very ghosts of certain busy and energetic men must fret and fume at the idle and inactive state of their shadowy and incorporal selves; nor, unless—as some hope and believe—we are to have our familiar and customary tasks and duties to perform in heaven, could their souls be happy and contented in Paradise.

But—after this rather foolish and wholly unnecessary digression—to return to Lamb. Elia, who had while a toil-worn clerk so carefully and frugally husbanded every odd moment and spare hour of time,—who, after his day's labor at India-House was over, had read so many massive old folios, and written so many pleasant pages for the pleasure and solacement of himself, and a choice and select number of men and women,—now that he had the whole long day to himself, read but little, and wrote but seldom.

And as for those long walks in the country, which he talked of so fondly in some of his letters to his friends,—those walks to Hoddesdon, to Amwell, to Windsor, and other towns and villages in the near vicinity of London, which he had enjoyed in anticipation a few years before he had the leisure actually to take them,—those long walks on "fine Isaac-Walton mornings," were found to be, it must be confessed, rather tiresome and unsatisfactory. They were most melancholy failures, when compared—as Elia could not help comparing them—with the pleasant walks he and Mary had taken years before to Enfield, and Potter's-Bar, and Waltham. Nay, even the "saunterings in Bond Street," the "digressions into Soho," to explore book-stalls, the visits to print-shops and picture-galleries, soon ceased to afford Lamb much real pleasure or enjoyment. Yea, London itself, with all its wonders and marvels, with all its (to him) memories and associations, he found to be, to one who had nothing to do but wander idly and purposeless through her thronged and busy streets and thoroughfares,—a mere looker-on in Vienna,—a somewhat dreary and melancholy place. Indeed, the London of 1825-30 was a far different place to Elia from the London of twenty years before, when he resided at No. 4, Inner-Temple Lane, (near the place of his "kindly engendure,") and gave his famous Wednesday-evening parties, ("Oh!" exclaims Hazlitt, "for the pen of John Buncle to consecrate a petit souvenir to their memory!") and when Jem White, and Ned P–, and Holcroft, and Captain Burney, and other of his old friends and jovial companions were alive and merry.

And now, in these later years and altered times, when even the old memories and the old associations seemed to have lost their power over him, and gone were most of "the old familiar faces," and when he felt as if the game of life were scarcely worth the candle, our melancholy and forlorn old humorist thus sadly and pathetically writes to the Quaker poet:—"But town, with all my native hankering after it, is not what it was. The streets, the shops, are left, but all old friends are gone. And in London I was frightfully convinced of this, as I passed houses and places, empty caskets now. I have ceased to care almost about anybody. The bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old chums, that lived so long and flourished so steadily, are crumbled away. When I took leave of our adopted young friend at Charing Cross, 'twas a heavy unfeeling rain, and I had nowhere to go. Home have I none, and not a sympathizing house to turn to in the great city. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of friend's house, but it was large and straggling,—one of the individuals of my old long knot of friends, card-players, pleasant companions, that have tumbled to pieces, into dust and other things; and I got home on Thursday, convinced that it was better to get home to my hole at Enfield, and hide like a sick cat in my corner." And at Enfield Elia was far from being happy or contented. Winter, however,—"confining, room-keeping winter," with its short days and long evenings, and cozy, comfortable fireside and cheerful candle-light,—he succeeded in passing tolerably pleasantly there; but the "deadly long days" of summer—"all-day days," he called them, "with but a half-hour's candle-light, and no fire-light"—were fearfully dull, wearisome, and unprofitable to him, "a scorner of the fields," an exile from London. And he thought, as he strolled through the green lanes and along the pleasant country-roads in the vicinity of Enfield, of the days when he was

 
"A clerk in London gay,"
 

and sighed for the drudgery and confinement of the counting-house, and longed to take his seat again at his old desk at India-House. In brief, Lamb felt that he should be happier and better, if he had something to do. And partly to amuse himself, and partly to assist a friend, he employed himself for a few months in a pleasant and congenial task. "I am going through a course of reading at the Museum," he writes to Bernard Barton,—"the Garrick plays, out of part of which I formed my Specimens. I have two thousand to go through; and in a few weeks have despatched the tithe of 'em. It is a sort of office-work to me; hours, ten to four, the same. It does me good. Men must have regular occupation that have been used to it." And in another (later) letter to Barton he says, "I am giving the fruit of my old play-reading to Hone, who sets forth a portion weekly in the 'Table-Book.'" And he not only furnished the "Table-Book" with specimens of the Garrick plays, but he wrote for that work, and the "Every-Day Book," a number of pleasant, characteristic little sketches and essays. We herewith present the reader with one of the best and most remarkable of these articles. Of course all will observe, and admire, the humorous, yet very gentle, loving, almost pathetic manner in which Elia describes the person and character of Mary's old usher,—

CAPTAIN STARKEY

To the Editor of the "Every-Day Book":—

Dear Sir,—I read your account of this unfortunate being, and his forlorn piece of self-history, with that smile of half-interest which the annals of insignificance excite, till I came to where he says, "I was bound apprentice to Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathematics," etc.; when I started as one does on the recognition of an old acquaintance in a supposed stranger. This, then, was that Starkey of whom I have heard my sister relate so many pleasant anecdotes, and whom, never having seen, I yet seem almost to remember. For nearly fifty years she had lost all sight of him; and, behold! the gentle usher of her youth, grown into an aged beggar, dubbed with an opprobrious title to which he had no pretensions, an object and a May-game! To what base purposes may we not return! What may not have been the meek creature's sufferings, what his wanderings, before he finally settled down in the comparative comfort of an old hospitaller of the almonry of Newcastle? And is poor Starkey dead?

I was a scholar of that "eminent writer" that he speaks of; but Starkey had quitted the school about a year before I came to it. Still the odor of his merits had left a fragrancy upon the recollection of the elder pupils. The school-room stands where it did, looking into a discolored, dingy garden, in the passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings. It is still a school,—though the main prop, alas! has fallen so ingloriously,—and bears a Latin inscription over the entrance in the lane, which was unknown in our humbler times. Heaven knows what "languages" were taught in it then! I am sure that neither my sister nor myself brought any out of it but a little of our native English. By "mathematics," reader, must be understood "cyphering." It was, in fact, a humble day-school, at which reading and writing were taught to us boys in the morning, and the same slender erudition was communicated to the girls, our sisters, etc., in the evening. Now Starkey presided, under Bird, over both establishments. In my time, Mr. Cook, now or lately a respectable singer and performer at Drury-Lane Theatre, and nephew to Mr. Bird, had succeeded to him. I well remember Bird. He was a squat, corpulent, middle-sized man, with something of the gentleman about him, and that peculiar mild tone—especially while he was inflicting punishment—which is so much more terrible to children than the angriest looks and gestures. Whippings were not frequent; but when they took place, the correction was performed in a private room adjoining, where we could only hear the plaints, but saw nothing. This heightened the decorum and the solemnity. But the ordinary public chastisement was the bastinado, a stroke or two on the palm with that almost obsolete weapon now, the ferule. A ferule was a sort of flat ruler, widened at the inflicting end into a shape resembling a pear,—but nothing like so sweet,—with a delectable hole in the middle to raise blisters, like a cupping-glass. I have an intense recollection of that disused instrument of torture, and the malignancy, in proportion to the apparent mildness, with which its strokes were applied. The idea of a rod is accompanied with something ludicrous; but by no process can I look back upon this blister-raiser with anything but unmingled horror. To make him look more formidable,—if a pedagogue had need of these heightenings,—Bird wore one of those flowered Indian gowns formerly in use with schoolmasters, the strange figures upon which we used to interpret into hieroglyphics of pain and suffering. But, boyish fears apart, Bird, I believe, was, in the main, a humane and judicious master.

Oh, how I remember our legs wedged into those uncomfortable sloping desks, where we sat elbowing each other; and the injunctions to attain a free hand, unattainable in that position; the first copy I wrote after, with its moral lesson, "Art improves Nature"; the still earlier pot-hooks and the hangers, some traces of which I fear may yet be apparent in this manuscript; the truant looks sidelong to the garden, which seemed a mockery of our imprisonment; the prize for best spelling, which had almost turned my head, and which to this day I cannot reflect upon without a vanity which I ought to be ashamed of; our little leaden inkstands, not separately subsisting, but sunk into the desks; the bright, punctually washed morning fingers, darkening gradually with another and another ink-spot! What a world of little associated circumstances, pains, and pleasures, mingling their quotas of pleasure, arise at the reading of those few simple words,—"Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathematics, in Fetter Lane, Holborn"!

Poor Starkey, when young, had that peculiar stamp of old-fashionedness in his face which makes it impossible for a beholder to predicate any particular age in the object. You can scarce make a guess between seventeen and seven-and-thirty. This antique cast always seems to promise ill-luck and penury. Yet it seems he was not always the abject thing he came to. My sister, who well remembers him, can hardly forgive Mr. Thomas Ranson for making an etching so unlike her idea of him when he was a youthful teacher at Mr. Bird's school. Old age and poverty—a life-long poverty, she thinks—could at no time have so effaced the marks of native gentility which were once so visible in a face otherwise strikingly ugly, thin, and care-worn. From her recollections of him, she thinks that he would have wanted bread before he would have begged or borrowed a half-penny. "If any of the girls," she says, "who were my school-fellows, should be reading, through their aged spectacles, tidings from the dead of their youthful friend Starkey, they will feel a pang, as I do, at ever having teased his gentle spirit." They were big girls, it seems, too old to attend his instructions with the silence necessary; and however old age and a long state of beggary seem to have reduced his writing faculties to a state of imbecility, in those days his language occasionally rose to the bold and figurative: for, when he was in despair to stop their chattering, his ordinary phrase was, "Ladies, if you will not hold your peace, not all the powers in heaven can make you!" Once he was missing for a day or two: he had run away. A little, old, unhappy-looking man brought him back,—it was his father,—and he did no business in the school that day, but sat moping in a corner, with his hands before his face; and the girls, his tormentors, in pity for his case, for the rest of that day forbore to annoy him. "I had been there but a few months," adds she, "when Starkey, who was the chief instructor of us girls, communicated to us, as a profound secret, that the tragedy of 'Cato' was shortly to be acted by the elder boys, and that we were to be invited to the representation." That Starkey lent a helping hand in fashioning the actors, she remembers; and but for his unfortunate person, he might have had some distinguished part in the scene to enact. As it was, he had the arduous task of prompter assigned to him; and his feeble voice was heard clear and distinct, repeating the text during the whole performance. She describes her recollection of the cast of characters, even now, with a relish. Martia, by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who afterwards went to Africa, and of whom she never afterwards heard tidings; Lucia, by Master Walker, whose sister was her particular friend; Cato, by John Hunter, a masterly declaimer, but a plain boy, and shorter by the head than his two sons in the scene, etc. In conclusion, Starkey appears to have been one of those mild spirits, which, not originally deficient in understanding, are crushed by penury into dejection and feebleness. He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society, if Fortune had taken him into a very little fostering; but wanting that, he became a Captain,—a by-word,—and lived and died a broken bulrush.

Perhaps the reader would be pleased to see another of Elia's contributions to Hone's "Every-Day Book." For, though Lamb's articles in that amusing and very entertaining miscellany are not very highly finished or very carefully elaborated, they contain many touches of his delicious humor and exquisite pathos, and are, indeed, replete with the quaint beauties and beautiful oddities of his very original and very delightful genius.

Sterne's sentimental description of the Dead Ass is immortal; but few of the readers and admirers of Charles Lamb know that he, who wrote so eloquently and pathetically in defence of Beggars and of Chimney-Sweepers, and who so ably and successfully vindicated the little innocent hare from the charge—made "by Linnæus perchance, or Buffon"—of being a timid animal, indited an essay on the same long-eared and loud-voiced quadruped.

THE ASS

Mr. Collier, in his "Poetical Decameron," (Third Conversation,) notices a tract printed in 1595, with the author's initials only, A. B., entitled, "The Nobleness of the Asse: a work rare, learned, and excellent." He has selected the following pretty passage from it:—"He [the ass] refuseth no burthen; he goes whither he is sent, without any contradiction. He lifts not his foote against any one; he bytes not; he is no fugitive, nor malicious affected. He doth all things in good sort, and to his liking that hath cause to employ him. If strokes be given him, he cares not for them; and, as out modern poet singeth,—

 
'Thou wouldst (perhaps) he should become thy foe,
And to that end dost beat him many times:
He cares not for himselfe, much lesse thy blow.'"²
 

Certainly Nature, foreseeing the cruel usage which this useful servant to man should receive at man's hand, did prudently in furnishing him with a tegument impervious to ordinary stripes. The malice of a child or a weak hand can make feeble impressions on him. His back offers no mark to a puny foeman. To a common whip or switch his hide presents an absolute insensibility. You might as well pretend to scourge a school-boy with a tough pair of leather breeches on. His jerkin is well fortified; and therefore the costermongers "between the years 1790 and 1800" did more politicly than piously in lifting up a part of his upper garment. I well remember that beastly and bloody custom. I have often longed to see one of those refiners in discipline himself at the cart's tail, with just such a convenient spot laid bare to the tender mercies of the whipster. But, since Nature has resumed her rights, it is to be hoped that this patient creature does not suffer to extremities,—and that to the savages who still belabor his poor carcass with their blows (considering the sort of anvil they are laid upon,) he might in some sort, if he could speak, exclaim, with the philosopher, "Lay on! you beat but upon the case of Anaxarchus."

Contemplating this natural safeguard, this fortified exterior, it is with pain I view the sleek, foppish, combed, and curried person of this animal as he is transmuted and disnaturalized at watering-places, etc., where they affect to make a palfrey of him. Fie on all such sophistications! It will never do, Master Groom! Something of his honest shaggy exterior will still peep up in spite of you,—his good, rough, native, pine-apple coating. You cannot "refine a scorpion into a fish, though you rinse it and scour it with ever so cleanly cookery."³

The modern poet quoted by A. B. proceeds to celebrate a virtue for which no one to this day had been aware that the ass was remarkable:—

 
"One other gift this beast hath as his owne,
Wherewith the rest could not be furnishèd;
On man himselfe the same was not bestowne:
To wit, on him is ne'er engenderèd
The hatefull vermine that doth teare the skin,
And to the bode [body] doth make his passage in."
 

And truly, when one thinks on the suit of impenetrable armor with which Nature (like Vulcan to another Achilles) has provided him, these subtle enemies to our repose would have shown some dexterity in getting into his quarters. As the bogs of Ireland by tradition expel toads and reptiles, he may well defy these small deer in his fastnesses. It seems the latter had not arrived at the exquisite policy adopted by the human vermin "between 1790 and 1800."

But the most singular and delightful gift of the ass, according to the writer of this pamphlet, is his voice, the "goodly, sweet, and continual brayings" of which, "whereof they forme a melodious and proportionable kinde of musicke," seem to have affected him with no ordinary pleasure. "Nor thinke I," he adds, "that any of our immoderate musitians can deny but that their song is full of exceeding pleasure to be heard; because therein is to be discerned both concord, discord, singing in the meane, the beginning to sing in large compasse, then following on to rise and fall, the halfe note, whole note, musicke of five voices, firme singing by four voices, three together, or one voice and a halfe. Then their variable contrarieties amongst them, when one delivers forth a long tenor or a short, the pausing for time, breathing in measure, breaking the minim or very least moment of time. Last of all, to heare the musicke of five or six voices chaunged to so many of asses is amongst them to heare a song of world without end."

There is no accounting for ears, or for that laudable enthusiasm with which an author is tempted to invest a favorite subject with the most incompatible perfections. I should otherwise, for my own taste, have been inclined rather to have given a place to these extraordinary musicians at that banquet of nothing-less-than-sweet sounds, imagined by old Jeremy Collier, (Essays, 1698, part ii., On Music,) where, after describing the inspiriting effects of martial music in a battle, he hazards an ingenious conjecture, whether a sort of anti-music might not be invented, which should have quite the contrary effect of "sinking the spirits, shaking the nerves, curdling the blood, and inspiring despair and cowardice and consternation." "'T is probable," he says, "the roaring of lions, the warbling of cats and screech-owls, together with a mixture of the howling of dogs, judiciously imitated and compounded, might go a great way in this invention." The dose, we confess, is pretty potent, and skilfully enough prepared. But what shall we say to the ass of Silenus, who, if we may trust to classic lore, by his own proper sounds, without thanks to cat or screech-owl, dismayed and put to rout a whole army of giants? Here was anti-music with a vengeance,—a whole Pan-Dis-Harmonicon in a single lungs of leather!

But I keep you trifling too long on this asinine subject. I have already passed the Pons Asinorum, and will desist, remembering the old pedantic pun of Jem Boyer, my schoolmaster:—

"Ass in præsenti seldom makes a wise man in futuro."

Lamb not only had a passionate fondness for old books and old friends, but he loved the old associations. He was no admirer of your modern improvements. Unlike Dr. Johnson, he did not go into the "most stately shops," but purchased his books and engravings at the stalls and from second-hand dealers. In his eyes, the old Inner-Temple Church was a handsomer and statelier structure than the finest Cathedral in England; and to his ear, as well as to the ear of Will Honeycomb, the old familiar cries of the peripatetic London merchants were more musical than the songs of larks and nightingales. It grieved him sorely to see an old building demolished which he had passed and repassed for years, in his daily walks to and from his business,—or an old custom abolished, whose observance he had witnessed when a child. "The disappearance of the old clock from St. Dunstan's Church," says Mr. Moxon, in his pleasant tribute to Lamb's memory in Leigh Hunt's Journal, "drew tears from his eyes; nor could he ever pass without emotion the place where Exeter Change once stood. The removal had spoiled a reality in Gay. 'The passer-by,' he said, 'no longer saw the combs dangle in his face.' This almost broke his heart." And he begins the following little "essaykin" with a lamentation over the disappearance from the streets of London of the tinman's old original sign, and a sigh for "the good old modes of our ancestors."

What he says of maiden aunts and their pets is delightful, and pleasantly reminds the reader of Addison's account of Sam Trusty's visit to the Widow Feeble.