by Charles Lamb
By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting got at their true conclusions; by not showing the actual appearances, that is, all that was to be seen at any given moment by an indifferent eye, but only what the eye might be supposed to see in the doing or suffering of some portentous action. Suppose the moment of the swallowing up of Pompeii.12 There they were to be seen – houses, columns, architectural proportions, differences of public and private buildings, men and women at their standing occupations, the diversified thousand postures, attitudes, dresses, in some confusion truly, but physically they were visible. But what eye saw them at that eclipsing moment, which reduces confusion to a kind of unity, and when the senses are upturned from their proprieties, when sight and hearing are a feeling only? A thousand years have passed, and we are at leisure to contemplate the weaver fixed standing at his shuttle, the baker at his oven, and to turn over with antiquarian coolness the pots and pans of Pompeii.
‘Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.’13 Who, in reading this magnificent Hebraism, in his conception, sees aught but the heroic son of Nun, with the outstretched arm, and the greater and lesser light obsequious? Doubtless there were to be seen hill and dale, and chariots and horsemen, on open plain, or winding by secret defiles, and all the circumstances and stratagems of war. But whose eyes would have been conscious of this array at the interposition of the synchronic miracle? Yet in the picture of this subject by the artist of the ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ – no ignoble work either – the marshalling and landscape of the war is everything, the miracle sinks into an anecdote of the day; and the eye may ‘dart though rank and file traverse’ for some minutes, before it shall discover, among his armed followers, which is Joshua! Not modern art alone, but ancient, where only it is to be found if anywhere, can be detected erring, from defect of this imaginative faculty. The world has nothing to show of the preternatural in painting, transcending the figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes, in the great picture at Angerstein’s.14 It seems a thing between two beings. A ghastly horror at itself struggles with newly-apprehending gratitude at second life bestowed. It cannot forget that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt that it is a body. It has to tell of the world of spirits. – Was it from a feeling, that the crowd of half-impassioned by-standers, and the still more irrelevant herd of passers-by at a distance, who have not heard or but faintly have been told of the passing miracle, admirable as they are in design and hue – for it is a glorified work – do not respond adequately to the action – that the single figure of the Lazarus has been attributed to Michael Angelo, and the mighty Sebastian unfairly robbed of the fame of the greater half of the interest? Now that there were not indifferent passers-by, within actual scope of the eyes of those present at the miracle, to whom the sound of it had but faintly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood to deny; but would they see them? or can the mind in the conception of it admit of such unconcerning objects? can it think of them at all? or what associating league to the imagination can there be between the seers, and the seers not, of a presential miracle?
Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a Dryad, we will ask whether, in the present low state of expectation, the patron would not, or ought not be fully satisfied with a beautiful naked figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks? Disseat those woods, and place the same figure among fountains, and a fall of pellucid water, and you have a – Naiad! Not so in a rough print we have seen after Julio Romano, we think – for it is long since – there, by no process, with mere change of scene, could the figure have reciprocated characters. Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her own, beautiful in convolution and distortion, linked to her connatural tree, co-twisting with its limbs her own, till both seemed either – these, animated branches; those, disanimated members – yet the animal and vegetable lives sufficiently kept distinct – his Dryad lay – an approximation of two natures, which to conceive, it must be seen; analogous to, not the same with, the delicacies of Ovidian transformations.
To the lowest subjects, and, to a superficial comprehension, the most barren, the Great Masters gave loftiness and fruitfulness. The large eye of genius saw in the meanness of present objects their capabilities of treatment from their relations to some grand Past or Future. How has Raphael – we must still linger about the Vatican – treated the humble craft of the ship-builder, in his ‘Building of the Ark’? It is in that scriptural series, to which we have referred, and which, judging from some fine rough old graphic sketches of them which we possess, seem to be of a higher and more poetic grade than even the Cartoons. The dim of sight are the timid and the shrinking. There is a cowardice in modern art. As the Frenchmen, of whom Coleridge’s friend made the prophetic guess at Rome, from the beard and horns of the Moses of Michael Angelo collected no inferences beyond that of a He Goat and a Cornuto;15 so from this subject, of mere mechanic promise, it would instinctively turn away, as from one incapable of investiture with any grandeur. The dock-yards at Woolwich would object derogatory associations. The depôt at Chatham would be the mote and the beam in its intellectual eye. But not to the nautical preparations in the shipyards of Civita Vecchia did Raphael look for instructions, when he imagined the Building of the Vessel that was to be conservatory of the wrecks of the species of drowned mankind. In the intensity of the action, he keeps ever out of sight the meanness of the operation. There is the Patriarch, in calm forethought, and with holy prescience, giving directions. And there are his agents – the solitary but sufficient Three16 – hewing, sawing, every one with the might and earnestness of a Demiurgus;17 under some instinctive rather than technical guidance! giant-muscled; every one a Hercules, or liker to those Vulcanian Three, that in sounding caverns under Mongibello wrought in fire – Brontes, and black Steropes, and Pyracmon.18 So work the workmen that should repair a world!
Artists again err in the confounding of poetic with pictorial subjects. In the latter, the exterior accidents are nearly everything, the unseen qualities as nothing. Othello’s colour – the infirmities and corpulence of a Sir John Falstaff – do they haunt us perpetually in the reading? or are they obtruded upon our conceptions one time for ninety-nine that we are lost in admiration at the respective moral or intellectual attributes of the character? But in a picture Othello is always a Blackamoor; and the other only Plump Jack. Deeply corporealised, and enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of externality, must be the mind, to which, in its better moments, the image of the high-souled, high-intelligenced Quixote – the errant Star of Knighthood, made more tender by eclipse – has never presented itself, divested from the unhallowed accompaniments of a Sancho, or a rabblement at the heels of Rosinante. That man has read his book by halves; he has laughed, mistaking his author’s purport, which was – tears. The artist that pictures Quixote – (and it is in this degrading point that he is every season held up at our Exhibitions) in the shallow hope of exciting mirth, would have joined the rabble at the heels of his starved steed. We wish not to see that counterfeited, which we would not have wished to see in the reality. Conscious of the heroic inside of the noble Quixote, who, on hearing that his withered person was passing, would have stepped over his threshold to gaze upon his forlorn habiliments, and the ‘strange bed-fellows which misery brings a man acquainted with’? Shade of Cervantes! who in thy Second Part could put into the mouth of thy Quixote those high aspirations of a super-chivalrous gallantry, where he replies to one of the shepherdesses, apprehensive that he would spoil their pretty net-works, and inviting him to be a guest with them, in accents like these: ‘Truly, fairest Lady, Actæon was not more astonished when he saw Diana bathing herself at the fountain, than I have been in beholding your beauty: I commend the manner of your pastime, and thank you for your kind offers; and, if I may serve you, so I may be sure you will be obeyed, you may command me: for my profession is this, To show myself thankful, and a doer of good to all sorts of people, especially of the rank that your person shows you to be; and if thos
e nets, as they take up but a little piece of ground, should take up the whole world, I would seek out new worlds to pass through, rather than break them: and (he adds) that you may give credit to this my exaggeration, behold at least he that promiseth you this, is Don Quixote de la Mancha, if haply this name hath come to your hearing.’ Illustrious Romancer! were the ‘fine frenzies,’ which possessed the brain of thy own Quixote, a fit subject, as in this Second Part, to be exposed to the jeers of Duennas and Serving Men? to be monstered, and shown up at the heartless banquets of great men? Was that pitiable infirmity, which in thy First Part misleads him, always from within, into half-ludicrous, but more than half-compassionable and admirable errors, not infliction enough from heaven, that men by studied artifices must devise and practise upon the humour, to inflame where they should soothe it? Why, Goneril would have blushed to practise upon the abdicated king at this rate, and the she-wolf Regan not have endured to play the pranks upon his fled wits, which thou hast made thy Quixote suffer in Duchesses’ halls, and at the hands of that unworthy nobleman.*
In the First Adventures, even, it needed all the art of the most consummate artist in the Book way that the world hath yet seen, to keep up in the mind of the reader the heroic attributes of the character without relaxing; so as absolutely that they shall suffer no alloy from the debasing fellowship of the clown. If it ever obtrudes itself as a disharmony, are we inclined to laugh; or not, rather, to indulge a contrary emotion? – Cervantes, stung, perhance, by the relish with which his Reading Public had received the fooleries of the man, more to their palates than the generosities of the master, in the sequel let his pen run riot, lost the harmony and the balance, and sacrificed a great idea to the taste of his contemporaries. We know that in the present day the Knight has fewer admirers than the Squire. Anticipating, what did actually happen to him – as afterwards it did to his scarce inferior follower, the Author of ‘Guzman de Alfarache’19 – that some less knowing hand would prevent him by a spurious Second Part; and judging, that it would be easier for his competitor to out-bid him in the comicalities, than in the romance, of his work, he abandoned his Knight, and has fairly set up the Squire for his Hero. For what else has he unsealed the eyes of Sancho; and instead of that twilight state of semi-insanity – the madness at second-hand – the contagion, caught from a stronger mind infected – that war between native cunning, and hereditary deference, with which he has hitherto accompanied his master – two for a pair almost – does he substitute a downright Knave, with open eyes, for his own ends only following a confessed Madman; and offering at one time to lay, if not actually laying, hands upon him! From the moment that Sancho loses his reverence, Don Quixote is become – a treatable lunatic. Our artists handle him accordingly.
(Athenaeum, 12, 19, 26 January and 2 February 1833)
ESSAYS AND SKETCHES
(1821–7)
27. Review of the First Volume of Hazlitt’s Table-Talk, 1821
(unpublished)
A series of Miscellaneous Essays, however well executed in the parts, if it have not some pervading character to give a unity to it, is ordinarily as tormenting to get through as a set of aphorisms, or a jest-book. – The fathers of Essay writing in ancient and modern times – Plutarch in a measure, and Montaigne without mercy or measure – imparted their own personal peculiarities to their themes. By this balm are they preserved. The Author of the Rambler in a less direct way has attained the same effect. Without professing egotism, his work is as essentially egotistical as theirs. He deals out opinion, which he would have you take for argument; and is perpetually obtruding his own particular views of life for universal truths. This is the charm which binds us to his writings, and not any steady conviction we have of the solidity of his thinking. Possibly some of those Papers, which are generally understood to be failures in the Rambler – its ponderous levities for instance, and unwieldy efforts at being sprightly – may detract less from the general effect, than if something better in kind, but less in keeping, had been substituted in place of them. If the author had taken his friend Goldsmith into partnership, and they had furnished their quotas for alternate days, the world had been gainer by the arrangement, but what a heterogeneous mass the work itself would have presented!
Another class of Essayists, equally impressed with the advantages of this sort of appeal to the reader, but more dextrous at shifting off the invidiousness of a perpetual self-reference, substituted for themselves an ideal character; which left them a still fuller licence in the delivery of their peculiar humours and opinions, under the masqued battery of a fictitious appellation. Truths, which the world would have startled at from the lips of the gay Captain Steele, it readily accepted from the pen of old Isaac Bickerstaff. But the breed of the Bickerstaffs, as it began, so alas! it expired with him. It shewed indeed a few feeble sparks of revival in Nestor Ironside,1 but soon went out. Addison had stepped in with his wit, his criticism, his morality – the cold generalities which extinguish humour – and the Spectator, and its Successor, were little more than bundles of Essays (valuable indeed, and elegant reading above our praise) but hanging together with very slender principles of bond or union. In fact we use the word Spectator, and mean a Book. At mention of the Tatler we sigh, and think of Isaac Bickerstaff. Sir Roger de Coverly, Will Wimble, Will Honeycomb, live for ever in memory – but who is their silent Friend? – Except that he never opens his mouth, we know nothing about him. He writes finely upon all subjects – but himself. He sets every thing in a proper light – but we do not see through his spectacles. He colours nothing with his own hues. The Lucubrations2 come as from an old man, an old bachelor to boot, and a humourist. The Spectator too, we are told, is all this. But a young man, a young married man moreover, or any description of man, or woman, with no sort of character beyond general shrewdness, and a power of observation, might have strung together all that discordant assemblage of Papers, which call the Spectator father. They describe indeed with the utmost felicity all ages & conditions of men, but they themselves smack of no peculiar age or condition. He writes, we are told, because he cannot bring himself to speak, but why he cannot bring himself to speak is the riddle. He is used to good company. Why he should conceal his name, while he lavishly proclaims that of his companions, is equally a secret. Was it to remove him still further from any possibility of our sympathies? – or wherein, we would be informed, lurks the mystery of his short chin? – As a visitor at the Club (a sort of umbra) he might have shewn to advantage among those short but masterly sketches – but the mass of matter, spread through eight volumes, is really somewhat too miscellaneous and diffuse, to hang together for identity upon such a shade, such a tenuity!
Since the days of the Spectator and Guardian, Essayists, who have appeared under a fictitious appellation, have for the most part contented themselves with a brief description of their character and story in the opening Paper; after which they dismiss the Phantom of an Editor, and let the work shift for itself, as wisely and wittily as it is able, unsupported by any characteristic pretences, or individual colouring. – In one particular indeed the followers of Addison were long and grievously misled. For many years after the publication of his celebrated ‘Vision of Mirza’,3 no book of Essays was thought complete without a Vision. It set the world dreaming. Take up any one of the volumes of this description, published in the last century; – you will possibly alight upon two or three successive papers, depicting, with more or less gravity, sober views of life as it is – when – pop – you come upon a Vision, which you trembled at beforehand from a glimpse you caught at certain abstractions in Capitals, Fame, Riches, Long Life, Loss of Friends, Punishment by Exile – a set of denominations part simple, part compounded – existing in single, double, and triple hypostases. – You cannot think on their fantastic essences without giddiness, or describe them short of a solecism. – These authors seem not to have been content to entertain you with their day-light fancies, but you must share their vacant slumbers & common-place reveries. The hum
our, thank Heaven, is pretty well past. These Visions, any thing but visionary – (for who ever dreamt of Fame, but by metaphor, some mad Orientalist perhaps excepted?) – so tamely extravagant, so gothically classical – these inspirations by downright malice aforethought – these heartless, bloodless literalities – these ‘thin consistencies’,4 dependent for their personality upon Great Letters – for write them small, and the tender essences fade into abstractions – have at length happily melted away before the progress of good sense; or the absurdity has worn itself out. We might else have still to lament, that the purer taste of their inventor should have so often wandered aside into these caprices; or to wish, if he had chosen to indulge in an imitation of Eastern extravagance, that he had confined himself to that least obnoxious specimen of his skill, the Allegory of Mirza. –
The Author before us is, in this respect at least, no visionary. He talks to you in broad day-light. He comes in no imaginary character. He is of the class of Essayists first mentioned. He attracts, or repels, by strong realities of individual observation, humour, and feeling.
The title, which Mr Hazlitt has chosen, is characteristic enough of his Essays. The tone of them is uniformly conversational; and they are not the less entertaining, that they resemble occasionally the talk of a very clever person, when he begins to be animated in a convivial party. You fancy that a disputant is always present, and feel a disposition to take up the cudgels yourself [o]n behalf of the other side of the question. Table-Talk is not calculated for cold or squeamish readers. The average thinker will find his common notions a little too roughly disturbed. He must brace up his ears to the reception of some novelties. Strong traits of character stand out in the work; and it is not so much a series of well argued treatises, as a bold confession, or exposition, of Mr Hazlitt’s own ways of feeling upon the subjects treated of. It is in fact a piece of Autobiography; and, in our minds, a vigorous & well-executed one. The Writer almost every where adopts the style of a discontented man. This assumption of a character, if it be not truly (as we are inclined to believe) his own, is that which gives force & life to his writing. He murmurs most musically through fourteen ample Essays. He quarrels with People that have but one idea, and with the Learned that are oppressed with many; with the man of Paradox, and the man of Common-Place; with the Fashionable, and with the Vulgar; with Dying Men that make a Will, and those who die & leave none behind them; with Sir Joshua Reynolds for setting up study above genius, and with the same person for disparaging study in respect of genius; lastly, he quarrels with himself, with book-making, with his friends, with the present time, and future – (the last he has an especial grudge to, and strives hard to prove that it has no existence) – in short, with every thing in the world, except what he likes – his past recollections which he describes in a way to make every one else like them too; the Indian Jugglers; Cavanagh, the Fives-Player; the noble art and practice of Painting, which he contends will make men both healthy and wise; and the Old Masters. –