The Atlantic Monthly Part 6
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 a.s.signed 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 a.s.s 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 Linnaeus perchance, or Buffon"--of being a timid animal, indited an essay on the same long-eared and loud-voiced quadruped.
THE a.s.s.
Mr. Collier, in his "Poetical Decameron," (Third Conversation,) notices a tract printed in 1595, with the author's initials only, A. B., ent.i.tled, "The n.o.bleness of the a.s.se: a work rare, learned, and excellent." He has selected the following pretty pa.s.sage from it:--"He [the a.s.s] 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.'"[B]
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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 carca.s.s 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 trans.m.u.ted 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 s.h.a.ggy 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."[C]
The modern poet quoted by A. B. proceeds to celebrate a virtue for which no one to this day had been aware that the a.s.s was remarkable:--
"One other gift this beast hath as his owne, Wherewith the rest could not be furnished; On man himselfe the same was not bestowne: To wit, on him is ne'er engendered The hatefull vermine that doth teare the skin, And to the bode [body] doth make his pa.s.sage 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 a.s.s, 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 compa.s.se, 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 a.s.ses 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 a.s.s of Silenus, who, if we may trust to cla.s.sic 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 pa.s.sed the _Pons Asinorum_, and will desist, remembering the old pedantic pun of Jem Boyer, my schoolmaster:--
"a.s.s _in praesenti_ seldom makes a WISE MAN _in futuro_."
Lamb not only had a pa.s.sionate fondness for old books and old friends, but he loved the old a.s.sociations. 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 pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s without emotion the place where Exeter Change once stood. The removal had spoiled a reality in Gay. 'The pa.s.ser-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.
IN RE SQUIRRELS.
What is gone with the cages, with the climbing squirrel and bells to them, which were formerly the indispensable appendage to the outside of a tinman's shop, and were, in fact, the only live signs? One, we believe, still hangs out on Holborn; but they are fast vanishing with the good old modes of our ancestors. They seem to have been superseded by that still more ingenious refinement of modern humanity, the tread-mill, in which _human_ squirrels still perform a similar round of ceaseless, improgressive clambering, which must be nuts to them.
We almost doubt the fact of the teeth of this creature being so purely orange-colored as Mr. Urban's correspondent gives out. One of our old poets--and they were pretty sharp observers of Nature--describes them as brown. But perhaps the naturalist referred to meant "of the color of a Maltese orange,"[D] which is rather more obfuscated than your fruit of Seville or St. Michael's, and may help to reconcile the difference. We cannot speak from observation; but we remember at school getting our fingers into the orangery of one of these little gentry, (not having a due caution of the traps set there,) and the result proved sourer than lemons. The author of the "Task" somewhere speaks of their anger as being "insignificantly fierce"; but we found the demonstration of it on this occasion quite as significant as we desired, and have not been disposed since to look any of these "gift horses" in the mouth. Maiden aunts keep these "small deer," as they do parrots, to bite people's fingers, on purpose to give them good advice "not to venture so near the cage another time." As for their "six quavers divided into three quavers and a dotted crotchet," I suppose they may go into Jeremy Bentham's next budget of Fallacies, along with the "melodious and proportionable kinde of musicke," recorded in your last number, of another highly gifted animal.
Although Lamb took little, if any, interest in public affairs, and, indeed, knew about as much of the events and occurrences of the day as the sublime, abstracted dancing-master immortalized in one of the letters to Manning, he appears to have been profoundly and painfully impressed by the fate of Fauntleroy, the forger. He thought and talked of Fauntleroy by day, and dreamed of Fauntleroy at night. And on the day after the execution of that unfortunate man, Lamb, thus solemnly, yet humorously withal, writes to his good friend Bernard Barton, poet and bank-officer:--
"And now, my dear Sir, trifling apart, the gloomy catastrophe of yesterday morning prompts a sadder vein. The fate of the unfortunate Fauntleroy makes me, whether I will or no, to cast reflecting eyes around on such of my friends as, by a parity of situation, are exposed to a similarity of temptation. My very style seems to myself to become more impressive than usual with the charge of them. Who that standeth knoweth but he may yet fall? Your hands as yet, I am most willing to believe, have never deviated into others' property. You think it impossible that you could ever commit so heinous an offence; but so thought Fauntleroy once; so have thought many besides him, who at last have expiated as he hath done. You are as yet upright; but you are a banker, or, at least, the next thing to it. I feel the delicacy of the subject; but cash must pa.s.s through your hands, sometimes to a great amount. If, in an unguarded hour----But I will hope better. Consider the scandal it will bring upon those of your persuasion. Thousands would go to see a Quaker hanged that would be indifferent to the fate of a Presbyterian or an Anabaptist. Think of the effect it would have on the sale of your poems alone, not to mention higher considerations! I tremble, I am sure, at myself, when I think that so many poor victims of the law, at one time of their life, made as sure of never being hanged as I, in my own presumption, am ready, too ready, to do myself. What are we better than they? Do we come into the world with different necks? Is there any distinctive mark under our left ears? Are we unstrangulable, I ask you? Think on these things. I am shocked sometimes at the shape of my own fingers,--not for their resemblance to the ape tribe, (which is something,) but for the exquisite adaptation of them to the purposes of picking, fingering, etc."
And a few months after writing the above letter, Lamb contributed to "The London Magazine,"--then in its decadence, but among whose "creaking rafters" Elia fondly lingered, "like the last rat,"--to this (his favorite periodical) he contributed a brief, but beautiful paper, suggested by Fauntleroy's sad story. The article is ent.i.tled "The Last Peach," and purports to be written by a bank-officer (possibly the author had Barton in his mind while writing it) who fears he may become a second Fauntleroy. The piece contains one or two delightful pa.s.sages, and is, in fact, full of happy touches and felicitous bits of description. Very charming (to me, at least) is the account of the plucking of the last peach, and very touching is the allusion to the babe Fauntleroy. But good wine (or a good peach) needs no bush; and therefore, without further comment or commendation, I present "The Last Peach" to the appreciative reader. He will find it to be, unless I am a very poor judge of the article, a peach of excellent quality and of a peculiarly fine flavor.
The garden in which grew the tree on which "lingered the one last peach"
belonged to "Blakesmoor," the fine old family-mansion of the Plummers of Hertfordshire, in whose family Lamb's maternal grandmother--"the grandame" of his poem of that name, and the "great-grandmother Field" of Elia's "Dream-Children"--was housekeeper for many years.
THE LAST PEACH.
I am the miserablest man living. Give me counsel, dear Editor. I was bred up in the strictest principles of honesty, and have pa.s.sed my life in punctual adherence to them. Integrity might be said to be ingrained in our family. Yet I live in constant fear of one day coming to the gallows.
Till the latter end of last autumn, I never experienced these feelings of self-mistrust, which ever since have embittered my existence. From the apprehension of that unfortunate man[E] whose story began to make so great an impression upon the public about that time, I date my horrors.
I never can get it out of my head that I shall some time or other commit a forgery, or do some equally vile thing. To make matters worse, I am in a banking-house. I sit surrounded with a cl.u.s.ter of bank-notes. These were formerly no more to me than meat to a butcher's dog. They are now as toads and aspics. I feel all day like one situated amidst gins and pitfalls. Sovereigns, which I once took such pleasure in counting out, and sc.r.a.ping up with my little tin shovel, (at which I was the most expert in the banking-house,) now scald my hands. When I go to sign my name, I set down that of another person, or write my own in a counterfeit character. I am beset with temptations without motive. I want no more wealth than I possess. A more contented being than myself, as to money-matters, exists not. What should I fear?
When a child, I was once let loose, by favor of a n.o.bleman's gardener, into his Lordship's magnificent fruit-garden, with full leave to pull the currants and the gooseberries; only I was interdicted from touching the wall-fruit. Indeed, at that season (it was the end of autumn) there was little left. Only on the south wall (can I forget the hot feel of the brick-work?) lingered the one last peach. Now peaches are a fruit which I always had, and still have, an almost utter aversion to. There is something to my palate singularly harsh and repulsive in the flavor of them. I know not by what demon of contradiction inspired, but I was haunted with an irresistible desire to pluck it. Tear myself as often as I would from the spot, I found myself still recurring to it, till, maddening with desire, (desire I cannot call it,) with wilfulness rather,--without appet.i.te, (against appet.i.te, I may call it,) in an evil hour I reached out my hand, and plucked it. Some few rain-drops just then fell; the sky, from a bright day, became overcast; and I was a type of our first parents, after eating of that fatal fruit. I felt myself naked and ashamed, stripped of my virtue, spiritless. The downy fruit, whose sight rather than savor had tempted me, dropped from my hand, never to be tasted. All the commentators in the world cannot persuade me but that the Hebrew word, in the second chapter of Genesis, translated apple, should be rendered peach. Only this way can I reconcile that mysterious story.
Just such a child at thirty am I among the cash and valuables, longing to pluck, without an idea of enjoyment further. I cannot reason myself out of these fears: I dare not laugh at them. I was tenderly and lovingly brought up. What then? Who that in life's entrance had seen the babe F----, from the lap stretching out his little fond mouth to catch the maternal kiss, could have predicted, or as much as imagined, that life's very different exit? The sight of my own fingers torments me, they seem so admirably constructed for--pilfering. Then that jugular vein, which I have in common----; in an emphatic sense may I say with David, I am "fearfully made." All my mirth is poisoned by these unhappy suggestions. If, to dissipate reflection, I hum a tune, it changes to the "Lamentations of a Sinner." My very dreams are tainted. I awake with a shocking feeling of my hand in some pocket.
Advise me, dear Editor, on this painful heart-malady. Tell me, do you feel anything allied to it in yourself? Do you never feel an itching, as it were,--a _dactylomania_,--or am I alone? You have my honest confession. My next may appear from Bow Street.
SUSPENSURUS.
Delightful as the essays of Elia are, Lamb did not spend all the "riches of his wit" in their production. His letters--so full are they of "the salt and fineness of wit,"--so richly humorous and so deliciously droll,--so rammed and crammed with the oddest conceits and the wildest fancies, and the quaintest, queerest thoughts, ideas, and speculations--are scarcely inferior to his essays. Indeed, some of the best and most admired of the essays are but extended letters. The germ of the immortal dissertation on "Roast Pig" is contained in a letter to Coleridge; the essay ent.i.tled "Distant Correspondents" is hardly more than a transcript of a private letter to Barron Field; and the original sketch of "The Gentle Giantess" was given in a letter to Miss Wordsworth.
In the following letter--which is not included in Talfourd's "Life and Letters of Charles Lamb," and will therefore be new to most readers--Lamb writes very much in the manner in which Shakspeare's fools and jesters--in some respects the wisest and thoughtfullest characters in his works--talk. If his words be "light as air," they vent "truths deep as the centre." If the Fool in "Lear" had written letters to his friends and acquaintances, I think they would have marvellously resembled this epistle to Patmore; and if, in saying this, I compliment the Fool, I hope I do not derogate from the genius of Elia. Jaques, it will be remembered, after hearing the "motley fool" moral on the time, declared that "motley's the only wear"; and I opine that Lamb would consider it no small praise to be likened, in wit, wisdom, and eloquence, to Touchstone, or to the Clown in "Twelfth Night."
TO P. G. PATMORE.
DEAR P.,--I am poorly. I have been to a funeral, where I made a pun, to the consternation of the rest of the mourners; and we had wine. I can't describe to you the howl which the widow set up at proper intervals.
Dash could; for it was not unlike what he makes.
The letter I sent you was directed to the care of E. White, India House, for Mrs. Hazlitt: _which_ Mrs. Hazlitt I don't yet know; but A. has taken it to France on speculation. Really it is embarra.s.sing. There is Mrs. present H., Mrs. late H., and Mrs. John H.; and to which of the three Mrs. Wigginses it appertains I don't know. I wanted to open it; but it's transportation.
I am sorry you are plagued about your book. I would strongly recommend you to take for one story Ma.s.singer's "Old Law." It is exquisite. I can think of no other.
Dash is frightful this morning. He whines and stands up on his hind-legs. He misses Beckey, who is gone to town. I took him to Barnet the other day; and he couldn't eat his victuals after it. Pray G.o.d his intellects be not slipping.
Mary is gone out for some soles. I suppose it's no use to ask you to come and partake of 'em, else there's a steam-vessel.
I am doing a tragi-comedy in two acts, and have got on tolerably; but it will be refused, or worse. I never had luck with anything my name was put to.
Oh, I am so poorly! I _waked_ it at my cousin's the bookbinder's, who is now with G.o.d; or, if he is not, it's no fault of mine.
We hope the frank wines do not disagree with Mrs. Patmore. By the way, I like her.