The Lambs Together
The Lambs. By Katherine Anthony. (Hammond and Hammond. 15s.)
ONE evening in the autumn of 1796, Mary Lamb, then working as a seamstress, quarrelled with her apprentice. Old Mrs. Lamb in her invalid's chair intervened, and Mary stabbed her to death with a kitchen knife. In the spring of the same year Charles had spent six weeks in a madhouse. He suffered only this one attack, but Mary's madness recurred at intervals during the rest of her life. The traditional idea of the Lambs, to which Miss Anthony is partially faithful, contrasts strangely with this sombre and anarchic prelude. The picture is simple, charming, popular and untrue. The quaint little brother and sister were supposedly united by their affection in a relationship that was almost a marriage. Together they shared the burden of their tragedy, and helped each other with their writings. Charles denied himself a wife to give Mary his protection, and Mary made him a home in gratitude for his sacrifice. It was a life of small differences and great happiness.
If we loqk at some facts picked at random from Miss Anthony's pages, they will show the discordant effects produced by a biographer who, not using art to reconcile the contradictorS, elements in her material, fails to give it meaning or intelligibility. Far from abandoning the idea of marriage, Charles entertained it on two occasions ; once when he proposed to the actress Fanny Kelly, and once again over a long period when Emma Moxon was growing up in his house as his adopted daughter. Can one of the more delicate sensibilities in English literature not have known that his sister was jealous ? He showed a similar insensitivity in other matters. Whenever they moved house Mary went mad, yet they moved house with inexplicable frequency. Charles, who on one occasion called himself " the Lamb of God," always spoke with contempt of female authors. Mary was capable, creative and intelli- gent, and she had well-formed views about women's rights. Two- thirds of the Tales from Shakespeare were written by Mary, but when they were published Charles allowed his name alone to appear on the book.
A deep conflict existed between them, of opinion with prejudice, of jealousy and literary rivalry. That Mary, continually exposed to Charles's contempt for authoresses, wrote so little is a sign of his victory ; a psychiatrist could perhaps estimate the damage it caused her. Their tastes were as divergent as their ideas. Charles could not stand novels, and Mary read them all the time. As they grew older they wanted each other's company less and less. On their journey to France Mary went mad, and Charles visited Paris by himself. One is hardly surprised to read that when Mary recovered she continued her journey alone and enjoyed herself unexpectedly. Towards the end of their lives, though they lived in the same house, they were estranged, and Mary to the surprise of her friends sur- vived her brother's death for many years. Charles has the last word. "Our life for each other," he wrote, "has been a torment."
Miss Anthony, under her determination to be polite, has stifled in herself an original biographer,-who with a full use of the present-day knowledge of mental diseases, might have written an important study instead of one that is merely agreeable. Her book is not uninteresting ; she includes six books on insanity in her biblio- graphy, and she makes a number of good observations about the Lambs' madness ; but these observations are so out of harmony with her general picture that they seem to have been put in after- wards by another writer, a writer who understood how guilt-ridden and bitter the Lambs' relationship really was. Miss Anthony seems for a moment to have looked into the abyss ; she drew back, but not without noticing that the fire was brimstone. PHILIP TROWER. PHILIP TROWER.
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