B CHARLES LAMS (1775-1834) ETWEEN the ages of forty-five and fifty years,- having suf fered and renounced whatever was necessary to educate him for so high a mission,- Charles Lamb wrote the Essays of Elia." It is hard to think of an angel with a stoop and a sad habit of stuttering. We do not usually imagine that the garments of the Seraphim smell of stale tobacco smoke, or that the ministers of grace are liable to make puns without provocation. Still of such supernatural souls as Lamb it has been written: "Through all the world heaven's angels walk obscure, With radiance hidden from our darkened eyes By forms of humblest clay, whose mean disguise If there is anything in evidence, Lamb in a London tavern, stuttering out his jokes through thick clouds of tobacco smoke, was even then an inhabitant of the same heaven in which Thomas à Kempis wrote the "Imitatio Christi,». the heaven which belongs to the pure in heart. "St. Charles," Coleridge called him, after having known him from the time they were Blue-Coat boys together in Christ's Hospital School. Nothing short of saintliness would have made him the great humorist he is. His life was a long tragedy. Ar nocent victim of a hereditary taint, he was confined in a madhouse at twentyone. Only a few months after his release, his sister Mary, in a violent paroxysm of insanity, killed her mother and was committed to a lunatic asylum, with the prospect of life imprisonment among the insane. Her brother, scarcely more than a boy and with "the means of a day laborer," pledged himself to the authorities to nurse and care for her if they would make him her guardian, and it was to this martyrdom that he devoted himself, sacrificing his hopes of happiness with Alice Winterton, and remaining a bachelor all his life. He lived with his sister as her guardian and nurse, watching for the recurrence of the symptoms of her madness, and when they appeared, going with her to the asylum that she might be confined until restored to herself. Out of this touching love between the brother and sister came the "Tales from Shakespeare" and "Poetry for Children,” «bv Charles and Mary Lamb,"-joint productions which make it evident that Lamb sought to inspire his sister with his own spirit of hope and cheerfulness. That the "Tales from Shakespeare," which will be read with delight by children as long as the language in which they are written remains intelligible, could have been the result of the struggle for self-possession of two supersensitive minds under the constant dread of the recurrence of madness, is one of those miracles of contradiction which glorify human nature and human sanity in the teeth of Lombroso and all others who, having discovered that "genius is a neurosis,” imagine that it is nothing more. as this In Lamb it was the fruit of ripening manliness in that form which is called "Virtue,"— the quality of the "Vir," or fighting man, who can stand at the front in the first rank, stooped down behind his shield, but unyielding when the lines are broken and every one else is retreating. "Certa tanquam miles bonus!" writes Thomas à Kempis of such a one as Lamb. "Fight like a good soldier!" So does the metaphor of struggle endured and of blows taken without shrinking inhere in the meaning of such patient virtue virtue which makes manliness divine even in its weakness. Lamb's humor is clearly a result of consciousness of his own infirmities and of the clear perception such self-knowledge gives him of the infirmities of others. Grote, Gibbon, and Macaulay, Locke, Descartes, and Plato, the historians, and the philosophers know much and tell much of human nature, but those who know more than they care or dare to tell do not write history or philosophy. They write such fairy tales as those of De la Motte Fouqué, and Hans Christian Andersen, and such essays as those of Lamb. The tenderness of Andersen and the playfulness of Lamb are marks of the acute sensitiveness of physical organization which must accompany the responsiveness of the body to the control of mind. One of the marks of self-mastery in the physical suffering such responsiveness entails is humor. All humor is the result of a reaction. It may grow more and more brutal as the brutal nature is strengthened by reaction against the higher; but in Lamb it grows more and more tender and delicate as he ripens for translation to some heaven where-let us hope-reactions are no more; where there are no headaches in unlimited punches, and no dryness of tongue after such long nights of innumerable pipes as preceded the "Renunciation » in which Lamb wrote: "For thy sake, tobacco. I Would do anything but die!" Delightful as is the secret wisdom of Lamb's essays, it is said that his conversation was even more so. Never preaching and never S.LD. prosing himself, he is reputed to have furnished frequent texts to Coleridge - who did both. "I think, Charles," said Coleridge, "you never heard me preach." «İ ne-ne-never heard you do anything else, replied Lamb with severe gravity, and no doubt with a deliberately protracted stutter. Lamb's antecedents were anything but patrician. His father, who was engaged in his youth in domestic service," never rose higher than a clerkship for a bencher in the Inner Temple. Seven years in the Blue-Coat School of Christ's Hospital was all the scholastic education Charles ever had. In 1789 he became a clerk in the South Sea House, and in 1792 in the India House, where he worked until his fiftieth year. He was then retired on a pension of £400 a year, but he wrote little after this and lived to enjoy his moneyed ease for only nine years. He died December 27th, 1834, and when Professor Morley tells us that on that date he "entered into his heavenly rest," we will not think of questioning it. But as for the kind of a heaven it is he entered, we can only guess that there will be a London in it with no fogs, and many clubrooms, inhabited exclusively by people who are fit to associate with the author of The Complaint of the Decay of Beggars." W. V. B. THE A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS IN THE METROPOLIS HE all sweeping besom of societarian reformation-your only modern Alcides' club to rid the time of its abuses-is uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear mendicity from the metropolis. Scrips, wallets, bags-staves, dogs, and crutches-the whole mendicant fraternity with all their baggage, are fast posting out of the purlieus of this eleventh persecution. From the crowded crossing, from the corners of streets and turnings of alleys, the parting Genius of Beggary is "with sighing sent." I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this impertinent crusado, or bellum ad exterminationem, proclaimed against a species. Much good might be sucked from these Beggars. They were the oldest and the honorablest form of pauperism. Their appeals were to our common nature; less revolting to an ingenuous mind than to be a suppliant to the particular humors or caprice of any fellow-creature, or set of fellow creatures, parochial or societarian. Theirs were the only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the assessment. There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation; as to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man than to go in livery. The greatest spirits have felt this in their reverses; and when Dionysius from king turned schoolmaster, do we feel anything towards him but contempt? Could Vandyke have made a picture of him, swaying a ferula for a sceptre, which would have affected our minds with the same heroic pity, the same compassionate admiration, with which we regard his Belisarius begging for an obolus? Would the moral have been more graceful, more pathetic? The Blind Beggar in the legend,-the father of pretty Bessy, whose story doggerel rhymes and alehouse signs cannot so degrade or attenuate but that some sparks of a lustrous spirit will shine through the disguisements-this noble Earl of Cornwall (as indeed he was) and memorable sport of fortune, fleeing from the unjust sentence of his liege lord, stripped of all, and seated on the flowering green of Bethnal, with his more fresh and springing daughter by his side, illumining his rags and his beggary—would the child and parent have cut a better figure, doing the honors of a counter, or expiating their fallen condition upon the three-foot eminence of some sempstering shopboard? In tale or history your Beggar is ever the just antipode to your king. The poets and romancical writers (as dear Margaret Newcastle would call them) when they would most sharply and feelingly paint a reverse of fortune, never stop till they have brought down their hero in good earnest to rags and the wallet. The depth of the descent illustrates the height he falls from. There is no medium which can be presented to the imagination without offense. There is no breaking the fall. Lear, thrown from his palace, must divest him of his garments, till he answer mere nature"; and Cressid, fallen from a prince's love, must extend her pale arms, pale with other whiteness than of beauty, supplicating lazar alms with bell and clap-dish. The Lucian wits knew this very well; and, with a converse policy, when they would express scorn of greatness without the pity, they show us an Alexander in the shades cobbling shoes. or a Semiramis getting up foul linen. How would it sound in song, that a great monarch had declined his affections upon the daughter of a baker! yet do we feel the imagination at all violated when we read the "true ballad," where King Cophetua woos the beggar maid? «Pauperism," "pauper," "poor man," are expressions of pity, but pity alloyed with contempt. No one properly contemns a beggar. Poverty is a comparative thing, and each degree of it is mocked by its "neighbor grice." Its poor rents and comings-in are soon summed up and told. Its pretenses to property are almost ludicrous. Its pitiful attempts to save excite a smile. Every scornful companion can companion can weigh his trifle-bigger purse against it. Poor man reproaches poor man in the streets with. impolitic mention of his condition, his own being a shade better, while the rich pass by and jeer at both. No rascally comparative insults a Beggar, or thinks of weighing purses with him. He is not in the scale of comparison. He is not under the measure of property. He confessedly hath none, any more than a dog or a sheep. No one twitteth him with ostentation above his means. No one accuses him of pride, or unbraideth him with mock humility. None jostle with him for the wall, or pick quarrels for precedency. No wealthy neighbor seeketh to eject him from his tenement. No man sues him. No man goes to law with him. If I were not the independent gentleman that I am, rather than I would be a retainer to the great, a led captain, or a poor relation, I would choose, out of the delicacy and true greatness of my mind, to be a Beggar. Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the Beggar's robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public. He is never out of the fashion, or limpeth awkwardly behind it. He is not required to put on court mourning. He weareth all colors, fearing none. His costume hath undergone less change than the Quaker's. He is the only man in the universe who is not obliged to study appearances. The ups and downs of the world concern him no longer. He alone continueth in one stay. The price of stock or land affecteth him not. The fluctuations of agricultural or commercial prosperity touch him not, or at worst but change his customers. He is not expected to become bail No man troubleth him with questioning He is the only free man in the uni or surety for any one. his religion or politics. verse. |