by Charles Lamb
With the essay ‘Imperfect Sympathies’, however, Lamb found an implicit rationale for the character of his work in the description of a certain kind of temperament. Though couched in terms of the traditional distrust between Englishmen and Scotsmen, it is a vital document in the tradition (which includes Hazlitt and Keats) of benign scepticism about and fear of, the mind’s finalities; a spirit of inquiry that can trust its pleasure in the anomalous and the unfinished:
The owners of the sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive, than comprehensive. They have no pretences to much clearness or precision in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them … Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost they pretend to … They will throw out a random word in or out of season, and be content to let it pass for what it is worth … They delight to impart their defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting for their full development.
It was most important to Lamb that people could be fools without being made fools of. Averse to knowingness and dogmatic assertion, dispirited by the way the decided view stifles the imagination, Lamb provides a celebration of the ordinary mind as reliably tentative, a new self-mocking egotism of whims and guesses, committed to a ‘messe of opinions’ rather than great explanations; an absolute belief, as he once wrote, that ‘it is good to love the unknown’.
Although he warned Bernard Barton to be ‘careless about the whimsies of such a half-baked notionalist’ as himself (Letter 53), Lamb’s letters and essays tend to have certain insistent preoccupations. There is an often erotic interest in food, and a fascination with the compulsive and the bizarre in people, and an abiding interest in eccentricity as a form of tact. There is a profound moral curiosity about generosity and indebtedness; about what people give to each other, and how gifts – whether of books, food or thoughts – can become thefts. Above all, there is a disarming robust and self-amused uncertainty about things; a sense of the impersonal in the personal, a sense of the unease between people.
His contemporary readers and acquaintances were never quite sure whether Lamb was evasive or not. De Quincey noted his ‘propensity to mystify a stranger’, but added that ‘the very foundation of Lamb’s peculiar character was laid in his absolute abhorrence of all affectation’. It is a compelling and curiously modern combination of qualities and is reflected in his writing. It was only at the end of his life that Lamb was described by his friends as mad. There is an evocative entry in Crabb Robinson’s diary for 28 May 1832:
I was reading Boccaccio when Lamb was again at my door. He however did not stay, but I made a cup of coffee for him. He had slept at Talfourd’s again with his clothes on. Yet in the midst of this half crazy irregularity he was so full of sensibility that speaking of his sister he had tears in his eyes. He talked about his favourite poems with his usual warmth, praising Andrew Marvell extravagantly.
EARLY ESSAYS AND SKETCHES
(1811–14)
1. On the Genius and Character of Hogarth
With Some Remarks on a Passage in the Writings of the Late Mr Barry
One of the earliest and noblest enjoyments I had when a boy was in the contemplation of those capital prints by Hogarth, the Harlot’s and Rake’s Progresses, which, along with some others, hung upon the walls of a great hall in an old-fashioned house1 in —shire, and seemed the solitary tenants (with myself) of that antiquated and life-deserted apartment.
Recollection of the manner in which those prints used to affect me, has often made me wonder, when I have heard Hogarth described as a mere comic painter, as one of those whose chief ambition was to raise a laugh. To deny that there are throughout the prints which I have mentioned circumstances introduced of a laughable tendency, would be to run counter to the common notions of mankind; but to suppose that in their ruling character they appeal chiefly to the risible faculty, and not first and foremost to the very heart of man, its best and most serious feelings, would be to mistake no less grossly their aim and purpose. A set of severer Satires (for they are not so much Comedies, which they have been likened to, as they are strong and masculine Satires) less mingled with any thing of mere fun, were never written upon paper, or graven upon copper. They resemble Juvenal, or the satiric touches in Timon of Athens.
I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who being asked which book he esteemed most in his library, answered, – ‘Shakspeare:’ being asked which he esteemed next best, replied, – ‘Hogarth.’ His graphic representations are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at, – his prints we read.
In pursuance of this parallel, I have sometimes entertained myself with comparing the Timon of Athens of Shakspeare (which I have just mentioned) and Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress together. The story, the moral, in both is nearly the same. The wild course of riot and extravagance, ending in the one with driving the Prodigal from the society of men into the solitude of the deserts, and in the other with conducting the Rake through his several stages of dissipation into the still more complete desolations of the mad-house, in the play and in the picture are described with almost equal force and nature. The levee of the Rake, which forms the subject of the second plate in the series, is almost a transcript of Timon’s levee in the opening scene of that play. We find a dedicating poet, and other similar characters, in both.
The concluding scene in the Rake’s Progress is perhaps superior to the last scenes of Timon. If we seek for something of kindred excellence in poetry, it must be in the scenes of Lear’s beginning madness, where the King and the Fool and the Tom-o’-Bedlam conspire to produce such a medley of mirth checked by misery, and misery rebuked by mirth; where the society of those ‘strange bed-fellows’ which misfortunes have brought Lear acquainted with, so finely sets forth the destitute state of the monarch, while the lunatic bans of the one, and the disjointed sayings and wild but pregnant allusions of the other, so wonderfully sympathize with that confusion, which they seem to assist in the production of, in the senses of that ‘child-changed father.’
In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the Rake’s Progress, we find the same assortment of the ludicrous with the terrible. Here is desperate madness, the overturning of originally strong thinking faculties, at which we shudder, as we contemplate the duration and pressure of affliction which it must have asked to destroy such a building; – and here is the gradual hurtless lapse into idiocy, of faculties, which at their best of times never having been strong, we look upon the consummation of their decay with no more pity than is consistent with a smile. The mad taylor, the poor driveller that has gone out of his wits (and truly he appears to have had no great journey to go to get past their confines) for the love of Charming Betty Careless, – these half-laughable, scarce-pitiable objects take off from the horror which the principal figure would of itself raise, at the same time that they assist the feeling of the scene by contributing to the general notion of its subject: –
Madness, thou chaos of the brain,
What art, that pleasure giv’st, and pain?
Tyranny of Fancy’s reign!
Mechanic Fancy, that can build
Vast labyrinths and mazes wild,
With rule disjointed, shapeless measure,
Fill’d with horror, fill’d with pleasure!
Shapes of horror, that would even
Cast doubts of mercy upon Heaven.
Shapes of pleasure, that, but seen,
Would split the shaking sides of Spleen.*
Is it carrying the spirit of comparison to excess to remark, that in the poor kneeling weeping female, who accompanies her seducer in his sad decay, there is something analogous to Kent, or Caius, as he delights rather to be called, in Lear, – the noblest pattern of virtue which even Shakspeare has conceived, – who follows his royal master in banishment, that had pronounced his banishment, and forgetful at once of his wrongs and dignities, taking on himself the disguise of a menial, retains his fidelity to the figure, his lo
yalty to the carcass, the shadow, the shell and empty husk of Lear?
In the perusal of a book, or of a picture, much of the impression which we receive depends upon the habit of mind which we bring with us to such perusal. The same circumstance may make one person laugh, which shall render another very serious; or in the same person the first impression may be corrected by after-thought. The misemployed incongruous characters at the Harlot’s Funeral, on a superficial inspection, provoke to laughter; but when we have sacrificed the first emotion to levity, a very different frame of mind succeeds, or the painter has lost half his purpose. I never look at that wonderful assemblage of depraved beings, who, without a grain of reverence or pity in their perverted minds, are performing the sacred exteriors of duty to the relics of their departed partner in folly, but I am as much moved to sympathy from the very want of it in them, as I should be by the finest representation of a virtuous death-bed surrounded by real mourners, pious children, weeping friends, – perhaps more by the very contrast. What reflexions does it not awake, of the dreadful heartless state in which the creature (a female too) must have lived, who in death wants the accompaniment of one genuine tear. That wretch who is removing the lid of the coffin to gaze upon the corpse with a face which indicates a perfect negation of all goodness or womanhood – the hypocrite parson and his demure partner – all the fiendish group – to a thoughtful mind present a moral emblem more affecting than if the poor friendless carcass had been depicted as thrown out to the woods, where wolves had assisted at its obsequies, itself furnishing forth its own funeral banquet.
It is easy to laugh at such incongruities as are met together in this picture, – incongruous objects being of the very essence of laughter, – but surely the laugh is far different in its kind from that thoughtless species to which we are moved by mere farce and grotesque. We laugh when Ferdinand Count Fathom,2 at the first sight of the white cliffs of Britain, feels his heart yearn with filial fondness towards the land of his progenitors, which he is coming to fleece and plunder, – we smile at the exquisite irony of the passage, – but if we are not led on by such passages to some more salutary feeling than laughter, we are very negligent perusers of them in book or picture.
It is the fashion with those who cry up the great Historical School in this country, at the head of which Sir Joshua Reynolds is placed, to exclude Hogarth from that school, as an artist of an inferior and vulgar class. Those persons seem to me to confound the painting of subjects in common or vulgar life with being a vulgar artist. The quantity of thought which Hogarth crowds into every picture would alone unvulgarize every subject which he might choose. Let us take the lowest of his subjects, the print called Gin Lane. Here is plenty of poverty and low stuff to disgust upon a superficial view; and accordingly, a cold spectator feels himself immediately disgusted and repelled. I have seen many turn away from it, not being able to bear it. The same persons would perhaps have looked with great complacency upon Poussin’s celebrated picture of the Plague at Athens.* Disease and Death and bewildering Terror, in Athenian garments are endurable, and come, as the delicate critics express it, within the ‘limits of pleasurable sensation.’ But the scenes of their own St Giles’s, delineated by their own countryman, are too shocking to think of. Yet if we could abstract our minds from the fascinating colours of the picture, and forget the coarse execution (in some respects) of the print, intended as it was to be a cheap plate, accessible to the poorer sort of people, for whose instruction it was done, I think we could have no hesitation in conferring the palm of superior genius upon Hogarth, comparing this work of his with Poussin’s picture. There is more of imagination in it – that power which draws all things to one, – which makes things animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects and their accessaries, take one colour, and serve to one effect. Every thing in the print, to use a vulgar expression, tells. Every part is full of ‘strange images of death.’ It is perfectly amazing and astounding to look at. Not only the two prominent figures, the woman and the half-dead man, which are as terrible as any thing which Michael Angelo ever drew, but every thing else in the print contributes to bewilder and stupefy, – the very houses, as I heard a friend of mine express it, tumbling all about in various directions, seem drunk – seem absolutely reeling from the effect of that diabolical spirit of phrenzy which goes forth over the whole composition. To show the poetical and almost prophetical conception in the artist, one little circumstance may serve. Not content with the dying and dead figures, which he has strewed in profusion over the proper scene of the action, he shows you what (of a kindred nature) is passing beyond it. Close by the shell, in which, by direction of the parish beadle, a man is depositing his wife, is an old wall, which, partaking of the universal decay around it, is tumbling to pieces. Through a gap in this wall are seen three figures, which appear to make a part in some funeral procession which is passing by on the other side of the wall, out of the sphere of the composition. This extending of the interest beyond the bounds of the subject could only have been conceived by a great genius. Shakspeare, in his description of the painting of the Trojan War, in his Tarquin and Lucrece, has introduced a similar device, where the painter made a part stand for the whole: –
For much imaginary work was there,
Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
That for Achilles’ image stood his spear,
Grip’d in an armed hand; himself behind
Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind:
A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head,
Stood for the whole to be imagined.
This he well calls imaginary work, where the spectator must meet the artist in his conceptions half way; and it is peculiar to the confidence of high genius alone to trust so much to spectators or readers. Lesser artists shew every thing distinct and full, as they require an object to be made out to themselves before they can comprehend it.
When I think of the power displayed in this (I will not hesitate to say) sublime print, it seems to me the extreme narrowness of system alone, and of that rage for classification, by which, in matters of taste at least, we are perpetually perplexing instead of arranging our ideas, that would make us concede to the work of Poussin above-mentioned, and deny to this of Hogarth, the name of a grand serious composition.
We are for ever deceiving ourselves with names and theories. We call one man a great historical painter, because he has taken for his subjects kings or great men, or transactions over which time has thrown a grandeur. We term another the painter of common life, and set him down in our minds for an artist of an inferior class, without reflecting whether the quantity of thought shewn by the latter may not much more than level the distinction which their mere choice of subjects may seem to place between them; or whether, in fact, from that very common life a great artist may not extract as deep an interest as another man from that which we are pleased to call history.
I entertain the highest respect for the talents and virtues of Reynolds, but I do not like that his reputation should overshadow and stifle the merits of such a man as Hogarth, nor that to mere names and classifications we should be content to sacrifice one of the greatest ornaments of England.
I would ask the most enthusiastic admirer of Reynolds, whether in the countenances of his Staring and Grinning Despair, which he has given us for the faces of Ugolino and dying Beaufort, there be any thing comparable to the expression which Hogarth has put into the face of his broken-down rake in the last plate but one of the Rake’s Progress,* where a letter from the manager is brought to him to say that his play ‘will not do’? Here all is easy, natural, undistorted, but withal what a mass of woe is here accumulated! – the long history of a mis-spent life is compressed into the countenance as plainly as the series of plates before had told it; here is no attempt at Gorgonian looks which are to freeze the beholder, no grinning at the antique bed-posts, no face-making, or consciousness of the presence of spectators in or out of the picture, but grief kept to a man’s self, a f
ace retiring from notice with the shame which great anguish sometimes brings with it, – a final leave taken of hope, – the coming on of vacancy and stupefaction, – a beginning alienation of mind looking like tranquillity. Here is matter for the mind of the beholder to feed on for the hour together, – matter to feed and fertilize the mind. It is too real to admit one thought about the power of the artist who did it. – When we compare the expression in subjects which so fairly admit of comparison, and find the superiority so clearly to remain with Hogarth, shall the mere contemptible difference of the scene of it being laid in the one case in our Fleet or King’s Bench Prison, and in the other in the State Prison of Pisa, or the bed-room of a cardinal, – or that the subject of the one has never been authenticated, and the other is matter of history, – so weigh down the real points of the comparison, as to induce us to rank the artist who has chosen the one scene or subject (though confessedly inferior in that which constitutes the soul of his art) in a class from which we exclude the better genius (who has happened to make choice of the other) with something like disgrace?*
The Boys under Demoniacal Possession of Raphael and Dominichino, by what law of classification are we bound to assign them to belong to the great style in painting, and to degrade into an inferior class the Rake of Hogarth when he is the Madman in the Bedlam scene? I am sure he is far more impressive than either. It is a face which no one that has seen can easily forget. There is the stretch of human suffering to the utmost endurance, severe bodily pain brought on by strong mental agony, the frightful obstinate laugh of madness, – yet all so unforced and natural, that those who never were witness to madness in real life, think they see nothing but what is familiar to them in this face. Here are no tricks of distortion, nothing but the natural face of agony. This is high tragic painting, and we might as well deny to Shakspeare the honours of a great tragedian, because he has interwoven scenes of mirth with the serious business of his plays, as refuse to Hogarth the same praise for the two concluding scenes of the Rake’s Progress, because of the Comic Lunatics* which he has thrown into the one, or the Alchymist that he has introduced in the other, who is paddling in the coals of his furnace, keeping alive the flames of vain hope within the very walls of the prison to which the vanity has conducted him, which have taught the darker lesson of extinguished hope to the desponding figure who is the principal person of the scene.
