The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Chapter 89 : The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the feeder of

The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration, So strange a pa.s.sion for the place possessed me in those years, that, though there lay--I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion--half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pa.s.s its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me; and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive prospects--and those at no great distance from the house--I was told of such--what were they to me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden?--So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences of my chosen prison; and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture of those excluding garden walls. I could have exclaimed with that garden-loving poet--

Bind me, ye woodbines, in your 'twines, Curl me about, ye gadding vines; And oh so close your circles lace, That I may never leave this place; But, lest your fetters prove too weak, Ere I your silken bondage break, Do you, O brambles, chain me too, And, courteous briars, nail me through!

I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides--the low-built roof--parlours ten feet by ten--frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home--these were the condition of my birth--the wholesome soil which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond; and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrasting accidents of a great fortune.

To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors; and the coatless antiquary in his unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a Mowbray's or De Clifford's pedigree, at those sounding names may warm himself into as gay a vanity as those who do inherit them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to strip me of an idea? Is it trenchant to their swords? can it be hacked off as a spur can? or torn away like a tarnished garter?

What, else, were the families of the great to us? what pleasure should we take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory bra.s.s monuments? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not answer within us to a cognate and correspondent elevation?

Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, BLAKESMOOR! have I in childhood so oft stood poring upon thy mystic characters--thy emblematic supporters, with their prophetic "Resurgam"--till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Very Gentility?

Thou wert first in my morning eyes; and of nights, hast detained my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on thee.

This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable change of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion.

Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, I know not, I inquired not; but its fading rags, and colours cobweb-stained, told that its subject was of two centuries back.

And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoetas--feeding flocks, not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln--did I in less earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings of this once proud aegon?--repaying by a backward triumph the insults he might possibly have heaped in his life-time upon my poor pastoral progenitor.

If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the mansion had least reason to complain. They had long forsaken the old house of their fathers for a newer trifle; and I was left to appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my fancy, or to soothe my vanity.

I was the true descendant of those old W----s; and not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places.

Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I have gone over, giving them in fancy my own family name, one--and then another--would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to recognise the new relations.h.i.+p; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at the vacancy in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity.

That Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb--that hung next the great bay window--with the bright yellow H----s.h.i.+re hair, and eye of watchet hue--so like my Alice!--I am persuaded she was a true Elia--Mildred Elia, I take it.

Mine too, BLAKESMOOR, was thy n.o.ble Marble Hall, with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars--stately busts in marble--ranged round: of whose countenances, young reader of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder; but the mild Galba had my love. There they stood in the coldness of death, yet freshness of immortality.

Mine too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority, high-backed and wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher, or self-forgetful maiden--so common since, that bats have roosted in it.

Mine too--whose else?--thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun-baked southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespeak their pristine state to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring woodpigeon, with that antique image in the centre, G.o.d or G.o.ddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer wors.h.i.+p to Pan or to Sylva.n.u.s in their native groves, than I to that fragmental mystery.

Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in your idol wors.h.i.+p, walks and windings of BLAKESMOOR! for this, or what sin of mine, has the plough pa.s.sed over your pleasant places? I sometimes think that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations there may be a hope--a germ to be revivified.

POOR RELATIONS

A poor relation--is the most irrelevant thing in nature,--a piece of impertinent correspondency,--an odious approximation,--a haunting conscience,--a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity,--an unwelcome remembrancer,--a perpetually recurring mortification,--a drain on your purse,--a more intolerable dun upon your pride,--a drawback upon success,--a rebuke to your rising,--a stain in your blood,--a blot on your scutcheon,--a rent in your garment,--a death's head at your banquet,--Agathocles' pot,--a Mordecai in your gate,--a Lazarus at your door,--a lion in your path,--a frog in your chamber,--a fly in your ointment,--a mote in your eye,--a triumph to your enemy, an apology to your friends,--the one thing not needful,--the hail in harvest,--the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet.

He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you "That is Mr.

----." A rap, between familiarity and respect; that demands, and, at the same time, seems to despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiling, and--embarra.s.sed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and--draweth it back again. He casually looketh in about dinner time--when the table is full. He offereth to go away, seeing you have company--but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your visitor's two children are accommodated at a side table. He never cometh upon open days, when your wife says with some complacency, "My dear, perhaps Mr. ---- will drop in to-day." He remembereth birth-days--and professeth he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one.

He declareth against fish, the turbot being small--yet suffereth himself to be importuned into a slice against his first resolution.

He sticketh by the port--yet will be prevailed upon to empty the remainder gla.s.s of claret, if a stranger press it upon him. He is a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious, or not civil enough, to him. The guests think "they have seen him before." Every one speculateth upon his condition; and the most part take him to be--a tide-waiter. He calleth you by your Christian name, to imply that his other is the same with your own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had less diffidence. With half the familiarity he might pa.s.s for a casual dependent; with more boldness he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. He is too humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more state than befits a client. He is a worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent--yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanour, that your guests take him for one. He is asked to make one at the whist table; refuseth on the score of poverty, and--resents being left out. When the company break up, he proffereth to go for a coach--and lets the servant go. He recollects your grandfather; and will thrust in some mean, and quite unimportant anecdote of--the family. He knew it when it was not quite so flouris.h.i.+ng as "he is blest in seeing it now." He reviveth past situations, to inst.i.tute what he calleth--favourable comparisons. With a reflecting sort of congratulation, he will inquire the price of your furniture; and insults you with a special commendation of your window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant shape, but, after all, there was something more comfortable about the old tea-kettle--which you must remember. He dare say you must find a great convenience in having a carriage of your own, and appealeth to your lady if it is not so. Inquireth if you have had your arms done on vellum yet; and did not know till lately, that such-and-such had been the crest of the family. His memory is unseasonable; his compliments perverse; his talk a trouble; his stay pertinacious; and when he goeth away, you dismiss his chair into a corner, as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid of two nuisances.

There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is--a female Poor Relation. You may do something with the other; you may pa.s.s him off tolerably well; but your indigent she-relative is hopeless. "He is an old humourist," you may say, "and affects to go threadbare. His circ.u.mstances are better than folks would take them to be. You are fond of having a Character at your table, and truly he is one." But in the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice. The truth must out without shuffling. "She is plainly related to the L----s; or what does she at their house?" She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin. Nine times out of ten, at least, this is the case. Her garb is something between a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently predominates. She is most provokingly humble, and ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority. He may require to be repressed sometimes--_aliquando sufflaminandus erat_--but there is no raising her. You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped--after the gentlemen. Mr. ---- requests the honour of taking wine with her; she hesitates between Port and Madeira, and chooses the former--because he does. She calls the servant _Sir_; and insists on not troubling him to hold her plate. The housekeeper patronizes her. The children's governess takes upon her to correct her, when she has mistaken the piano for a harpsichord.

Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance of the disadvantages, to which this chimerical notion of _affinity const.i.tuting a claim to acquaintance_, may subject the spirit of a gentleman. A little foolish blood is all that is betwixt him and a lady of great estate. His stars are perpetually crossed by the malignant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling him "her son d.i.c.k." But she has wherewithal in the end to recompense his indignities, and float him again upon the brilliant surface, under which it had been her seeming business and pleasure all along to sink him. All men, besides, are not of d.i.c.k's temperament. I knew an Amlet in real life, who, wanting d.i.c.k's buoyancy, sank indeed. Poor W---- was of my own standing at Christ's, a fine cla.s.sic, and a youth of promise. If he had a blemish, it was too much pride; but its quality was inoffensive; it was not of that sort which hardens the heart, and serves to keep inferiors at a distance; it only sought to ward off derogation from itself. It was the principle of self-respect carried as far as it could go, without infringing upon that respect, which he would have every one else equally maintain for himself. He would have you to think alike with him on this topic. Many a quarrel have I had with him, when we were rather older boys, and our tallness made us more obnoxious to observation in the blue clothes, because I would not thread the alleys and blind ways of the town with him to elude notice, when we have been out together on a holiday in the streets of this sneering and prying metropolis. W---- went, sore with these notions, to Oxford, where the dignity and sweetness of a scholar's life, meeting with the alloy of a humble introduction, wrought in him a pa.s.sionate devotion to the place, with a profound aversion from the society. The servitor's gown (worse than his school array) clung to him with Nessian venom. He thought himself ridiculous in a garb, under which Latimer must have walked erect; and in which Hooker, in his young days, possibly flaunted in a vein of no discommendable vanity.

In the depth of college shades, or in his lonely chamber, the poor student shrunk from observation. He found shelter among books, which insult not; and studies, that ask no questions of a youth's finances.

He was lord of his library, and seldom cared for looking out beyond his domains. The healing influence of studious pursuits was upon him, to soothe and to abstract. He was almost a healthy man; when the waywardness of his fate broke out against him with a second and worse malignity. The father of W---- had hitherto exercised the humble profession of house-painter at N----, near Oxford. A supposed interest with some of the heads of the colleges had now induced him to take up his abode in that city, with the hope of being employed upon some public works which were talked of. From that moment I read in the countenance of the young man, the determination which at length tore him from academical pursuits for ever. To a person unacquainted with our Universities, the distance between the gownsmen and the townsmen, as they are called--the trading part of the latter especially--is carried to an excess that would appear harsh and incredible. The temperament of W----'s father was diametrically the reverse of his own. Old W---- was a little, busy, cringing tradesman, who, with his son upon his arm, would stand bowing and sc.r.a.ping, cap in hand, to any-thing that wore the semblance of a gown--insensible to the winks and opener remonstrances of the young man, to whose chamber-fellow, or equal in standing, perhaps, he was thus obsequiously and gratuitously ducking. Such a state of things could not last. W---- must change the air of Oxford or be suffocated. He chose the former; and let the st.u.r.dy moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties as high as they can bear, censure the dereliction; he cannot estimate the struggle. I stood with W----, the last afternoon I ever saw him, under the eaves of his paternal dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading from the High-street to the back of ***** college, where W---- kept his rooms. He seemed thoughtful, and more reconciled. I ventured to rally him--finding him in a better mood--upon a representation of the Artist Evangelist, which the old man, whose affairs were beginning to flourish, had caused to be set up in a splendid sort of frame over his really handsome shop, either as a token of prosperity, or badge of grat.i.tude to his saint. W---- looked up at the Luke, and, like Satan, "knew his mounted sign--and fled." A letter on his father's table the next morning, announced that he had accepted a commission in a regiment about to embark for Portugal. He was among the first who perished before the walls of St. Sebastian.

I do not know how, upon a subject which I began with treating half seriously, I should have fallen upon a recital so eminently painful; but this theme of poor relations.h.i.+p is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic a.s.sociations, that it is difficult to keep the account distinct without blending. The earliest impressions which I received on this matter, are certainly not attended with anything painful, or very humiliating, in the recalling. At my father's table (no very splendid one) was to be found, every Sat.u.r.day, the mysterious figure of an aged gentleman, clothed in neat black, of a sad yet comely appearance. His deportment was of the essence of gravity; his words few or none; and I was not to make a noise in his presence. I had little inclination to have done so--for my cue was to admire in silence. A particular elbow chair was appropriated to him, which was in no case to be violated. A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which appeared on no other occasion, distinguished the days of his coming.

I used to think him a prodigiously rich man. All I could make out of him was, that he and my father had been schoolfellows a world ago at Lincoln, and that he came from the Mint. The Mint I knew to be a place where all the money was coined--and I thought he was the owner of all that money. Awful ideas of the Tower twined themselves about his presence. He seemed above human infirmities and pa.s.sions. A sort of melancholy grandeur invested him. From some inexplicable doom I fancied him obliged to go about in an eternal suit of mourning; a captive--a stately being, let out of the Tower on Sat.u.r.days. Often have I wondered at the temerity of my father, who, in spite of an habitual general respect which we all in common manifested towards him, would venture now and then to stand up against him in some argument, touching their youthful days. The houses of the ancient city of Lincoln are divided (as most of my readers know) between the dwellers on the hill, and in the valley. This marked distinction formed an obvious division between the boys who lived above (however brought together in a common school) and the boys whose paternal residence was on the plain; a sufficient cause of hostility in the code of these young Grotiuses. My father had been a leading Mountaineer; and would still maintain the general superiority, in skill and hardihood, of the _Above Boys_ (his own faction) over the _Below Boys_ (so were they called), of which party his contemporary had been a chieftain. Many and hot were the skirmishes on this topic--the only one upon which the old gentleman was ever brought out--and bad blood bred; even sometimes almost to the recommencement (so I expected) of actual hostilities. But my father, who scorned to insist upon advantages, generally contrived to turn the conversation upon some adroit by-commendation of the old Minster; in the general preference of which, before all other cathedrals in the island, the dweller on the hill, and the plain-born, could meet on a conciliating level, and lay down their less important differences. Once only I saw the old gentleman really ruffled, and I remembered with anguish the thought that came over me: "Perhaps he will never come here again."

He had been pressed to take another plate of the viand, which I have already mentioned as the indispensable concomitant of his visits. He had refused, with a resistance amounting to rigour--when my aunt, an old Lincolnian, but who had something of this, in common with my cousin Bridget, that she would sometimes press civility out of season--uttered the following memorable application--"Do take another slice, Mr. Billet, for you do not get pudding every day." The old gentleman said nothing at the time--but he took occasion in the course of the evening, when some argument had intervened between them, to utter with an emphasis which chilled the company, and which chills me now as I write it--"Woman, you are superannuated." John Billet did not survive long, after the digesting of this affront; but he survived long enough to a.s.sure me that peace was actually restored! and, if I remember aright, another pudding was discreetly subst.i.tuted in the place of that which had occasioned the offence. He died at the Mint (Anno 1781) where he had long held, what he accounted, a comfortable independence; and with five pounds, fourteen s.h.i.+llings, and a penny, which were found in his escrutoire after his decease, left the world, blessing G.o.d that he had enough to bury him, and that he had never been obliged to any man for a sixpence. This was--a Poor Relation.

STAGE ILLUSION

A play is said to be well or ill acted in proportion to the scenical illusion produced. Whether such illusion can in any case be perfect, is not the question. The nearest approach to it, we are told, is, when the actor appears wholly unconscious of the presence of spectators.

In tragedy--in all which is to affect the feelings--this undivided attention to his stage business, seems indispensable. Yet it is, in fact, dispensed with every day by our cleverest tragedians; and while these references to an audience, in the shape of rant or sentiment, are not too frequent or palpable, a sufficient quant.i.ty of illusion for the purposes of dramatic interest may be said to be produced in spite of them. But, tragedy apart, it may be inquired whether, in certain characters in comedy, especially those which are a little extravagant, or which involve some notion repugnant to the moral sense, it is not a proof of the highest skill in the comedian when, without absolutely appealing to an audience, he keeps up a tacit understanding with them; and makes them, unconsciously to themselves, a party in the scene. The utmost nicety is required in the mode of doing this; but we speak only of the great artists in the profession.

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice. To see a coward _done to the life_ upon a stage would produce anything but mirth.

Yet we most of us remember Jack Bannister's cowards. Could any thing be more agreeable, more pleasant? We loved the rogues. How was this effected but by the exquisite art of the actor in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us, the spectators, even in the extremity of the shaking fit, that he was not half such a coward as we took him for? We saw all the common symptoms of the malady upon him; the quivering lip, the cowering knees, the teeth chattering; and could have sworn "that man was frightened." But we forgot all the while--or kept it almost a secret to ourselves--that he never once lost his self-possession; that he let out by a thousand droll looks and gestures--meant at _us_, and not at all supposed to be visible to his fellows in the scene, that his confidence in his own resources had never once deserted him. Was this a genuine picture of a coward? or not rather a likeness, which the clever artist contrived to palm upon us instead of an original; while we secretly connived at the delusion for the purpose of greater pleasure, than a more genuine counterfeiting of the imbecility, helplessness, and utter self-desertion, which we know to be concomitants of cowardice in real life, could have given us?

Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endurable on the stage, but because the skilful actor, by a sort of sub-reference, rather than direct appeal to us, disarms the character of a great deal of its odiousness, by seeming to engage _our_ compa.s.sion for the insecure tenure by which he holds his money bags and parchments? By this subtle vent half of the hatefulness of the character--the self-closeness with which in real life it coils itself up from the sympathies of men--evaporates. The miser becomes sympathetic; _i.e._ is no genuine miser. Here again a diverting likeness is subst.i.tuted for a very disagreeable reality.

Spleen, irritability--the pitiable infirmities of old men, which produce only pain to behold in the realities, counterfeited upon a stage, divert not altogether for the comic appendages to them, but in part from an inner conviction that they are _being acted_ before us; that a likeness only is going on, and not the thing itself. They please by being done under the life, or beside it; not _to the life_.

When Gatty acts an old man, is he angry indeed? or only a pleasant counterfeit, just enough of a likeness to recognise, without pressing upon us the uneasy sense of reality?

Comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be too natural. It was the case with a late actor. Nothing could be more earnest or true than the manner of Mr. Emery; this told excellently in his Tyke, and characters of a tragic cast. But when he carried the same rigid exclusiveness of attention to the stage business, and wilful blindness and oblivion of everything before the curtain into his comedy, it produced a harsh and dissonant effect. He was out of keeping with the rest of the _Personae Dramatis_. There was as little link between him and them as betwixt himself and the audience. He was a third estate, dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all. Individually considered, his execution was masterly.

But comedy is not this unbending thing; for this reason, that the same degree of credibility is not required of it as to serious scenes. The degrees of credibility demanded to the two things may be ill.u.s.trated by the different sort of truth which we expect when a man tells us a mournful or a merry story. If we suspect the former of falsehood in any one t.i.ttle, we reject it altogether. Our tears refuse to flow at a suspected imposition. But the teller of a mirthful tale has lat.i.tude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth. 'Tis the same with dramatic illusion. We confess we love in comedy to see an audience naturalised behind the scenes, taken in into the interest of the drama, welcomed as by-standers however. There is something ungracious in a comic actor holding himself aloof from all partic.i.p.ation or concern with those who are come to be diverted by him. Macbeth must see the dagger, and no ear but his own be told of it; but an old fool in farce may think he _sees something_, and by conscious words and looks express it, as plainly as he can speak, to pit, box, and gallery. When an impertinent in tragedy, an Osric, for instance, breaks in upon the serious pa.s.sions of the scene, we approve of the contempt with which he is treated. But when the pleasant impertinent of comedy, in a piece purely meant to give delight, and raise mirth out of whimsical perplexities, worries the studious man with taking up his leisure, or making his house his home, the same sort of contempt expressed (however _natural_) would destroy the balance of delight in the spectators. To make the intrusion comic, the actor who plays the annoyed man must a little desert nature; he must, in short, be thinking of the audience, and express only so much dissatisfaction and peevishness as is consistent with the pleasure of comedy. In other words, his perplexity must seem half put on. If he repel the intruder with the sober set face of a man in earnest, and more especially if he deliver his expostulations in a tone which in the world must necessarily provoke a duel; his real-life manner will destroy the whimsical and purely dramatic existence of the other character (which to render it comic demands an antagonist comicality on the part of the character opposed to it), and convert what was meant for mirth, rather than belief, into a downright piece of impertinence indeed, which would raise no diversion in us, but rather stir pain, to see inflicted in earnest upon any unworthy person. A very judicious actor (in most of his parts) seems to have fallen into an error of this sort in his playing with Mr. Wrench in the farce of Free and Easy.

Many instances would be tedious; these may suffice to show that comic acting at least does not always demand from the performer that strict abstraction from all reference to an audience, which is exacted of it; but that in some cases a sort of compromise may take place, and all the purposes of dramatic delight be attained by a judicious understanding, not too openly announced, between the ladies and gentlemen--on both sides of the curtain.

TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON

Joyousest of once embodied spirits, whither at length hast thou flown?

to what genial region are we permitted to conjecture that thou has flitted.

Art thou sowing thy WILD OATS yet (the harvest time was still to come with thee) upon casual sands of Avernus? or art thou enacting ROVER (as we would gladlier think) by wandering Elysian streams?

This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief antics amongst us, was in truth any thing but a prison to thee, as the vain Platonist dreams of this _body_ to be no better than a county gaol, forsooth, or some house of durance vile, whereof the five senses are the fetters.

Thou knewest better than to be in a hurry to cast off those gyves; and had notice to quit, I fear, before thou wert quite ready to abandon this fleshly tenement. It was thy Pleasure House, thy Palace of Dainty Devices; thy Louvre, or thy White Hall.

What new mysterious lodgings dost thou tenant now? or when may we expect thy aerial house-warming?

Tartarus we know, and we have read of the Blessed Shades; now cannot I intelligibly fancy thee in either.

Is it too much to hazard a conjecture, that (as the school-men admitted a receptacle apart for Patriarchs and un-chrisom Babes) there may exist--not far perchance from that storehouse of all vanities, which Milton saw in visions--a LIMBO somewhere for PLAYERS? and that