Selected Prose

by Charles Lamb

  He thus describes (con amore) his first visit to the Louvre, at its golden period before Taste had cause to lament the interposition of ruthless Destiny.

  I had made some progress in painting when I went to the Louvre to study, and I never did anything afterwards. I never shall forget conning over the Catalogue which a friend lent me just before I set out. The pictures, the names of the painters, seemed to relish in the mouth. There was one of Titian’s Mistress at her toilette. Even the colours with which the painter had adorned her hair were not more golden, more amiable to sight, than those which played round and tantalised my fancy ere I saw the picture. There were two portraits by the same hand – ‘A young Nobleman with a glove’ – Another, ‘a companion to it’ – I read the description over and over with fond expectancy, and filled up the imaginary outline with whatever I could conceive of grace, and dignity, and an antique gusto – all but equal to the original. There was the Transfiguration too. With what awe I saw it in my mind’s eye, and was overshadowed with the spirit of the artist! Not to have been disappointed with these works afterwards, was the highest compliment I can pay to their transcendent merits. Indeed, it was from seeing other works of the same great masters that I had formed a vague, but no disparaging idea of these. The first day I got there, I was kept for some time in the French Exhibition-room, and thought I should not be able to get a sight of the old masters. I just caught a peep at them through the door (vile hindrance!) like looking out of purgatory into paradise – from Poussin’s noble mellow-looking landscapes to where Rubens hung out his gaudy banner, and down the glimmering vista to the rich jewels of Titian and the Italian school. At last, by much importunity, I was admitted, and lost not an instant in making use of my new privilege. – It was un beau jour to me. I marched delighted through a quarter of a mile of the proudest efforts of the mind of man, a whole creation of genius, a universe of art! I ran the gauntlet of all the schools from the bottom to the top; and in the end got admitted into the inner room, where they had been repairing some of their greatest works. Here the Transfiguration, the St Peter Martyr, and the St Jerome of Domenichino stood on the floor, as if they had bent their knees, like camels stooping, to unlade their riches to the spectator. On one side, on an easel, stood Hippolito de Medici (a portrait by Titian), with a boar-spear in his hand, looking through those he saw, till you turned away from the keen glance; and thrown together in heaps were landscapes of the same hand, green pastoral hills and vales, and shepherds piping to their mild mistresses underneath the flowering shade. Reader, ‘if thou hast not seen the Louvre, thou are damned!’ – for thou hast not seen the choicest remains of the works of art; or thou hast not seen all these together, with their mutually reflected glories. I say nothing of the statues; for I know but little of sculpture, and never liked any till I saw the Elgin Marbles … Here, for four months together, I strolled and studied, and daily heard the warning sound – ‘Quatres heures passées, il faut fermer, Citoyens’ – (Ah! why did they ever change their style?) muttered in coarse provincial French; and brought away with me some loose draughts and fragments, which I have been forced to part with, like drops of life-blood, for ‘hard money.’ How often, thou tenantless mansion of godlike magnificence – how often has my heart since gone a pilgrimage to thee!

  (From The Pleasures of Painting)

  With all this enthusiasm for the Art, and the intense application which at one time he seems to have been disposed to give to it, the wonder is, that Mr Hazlitt did not turn out a fine painter, rather than writer. Did he lack encouragement? or did his powers of application fail him from some doubt of ultimate success?

  One of my first attempts was a picture of my father, who was then in a green old age, with strong-marked features, and scarred with the small-pox. I drew it out with a broad light crossing the face, looking down, with spectacles on, reading. The book was Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, in a fine old binding, with Gribelin’s etchings. My father would as lieve it had been any other book; but for him to read was to be content, was ‘riches fineless.’ The sketch promised well; and I set to work to finish it, determined to spare no time nor pains. My father was willing to sit as long as I pleased; for there is a natural desire in the mind of man to sit for one’s picture, to be the object of continued attention, to have one’s likeness multiplied; and besides his satisfaction in the picture, he had some pride in the artist, though he would rather I should have written a sermon than painted like Rembrandt or like Raphael. Those winter days, with the gleams of sunshine coming through the chapel-windows, and cheered by the notes of the robin-redbreast in our garden (that ‘ever in the haunch of winter sings’), – as my afternoon’s work drew to a close, – were among the happiest of my life. When I gave the effect I intended to any part of the picture for which I had prepared my colours; when I imitated the roughness of the skin by a lucky stroke of the pencil; when I hit the clear pearly tone of a vein; when I gave the ruddy complexion of health, the blood circulating under the broad shadows of one side of the face, I thought my fortune made; or rather it was already more than made, in my fancying that I might one day be able to say with Correggio, ‘I also am a painter!’ It was an idle thought, a boy’s conceit; but it did not make me less happy at the time. I used regularly to set my work in the chair to look at it through the long evenings; and many a time did I return to take leave of it before I could go to bed at night. I remember sending it with a throbbing heart to the Exhibition, and seeing it hung up there by the side of one of the Honourable Mr Skeffington (now Sir George). There was nothing in common between them, but that they were the portraits of two very good-natured men. I think, but am not sure, that I finished this portrait (or another afterwards) on the same day that the news of the battle of Austerlitz came; I walked out in the afternoon, and, as I returned, saw the evening star set over a poor man’s cottage with other thoughts and feelings than I shall ever have again. Oh for the revolution of the great Platonic year, that those times might come over again! I could sleep out the three hundred and sixty-five thousand intervening years very contentedly! – The picture is left: the table, the chair, the window where I learned to construe Livy, the chapel where my father preached, remain where they were; but he himself is gone to rest, full of years, of faith, of hope, and charity!

  (From The Pleasures of Painting)

  There is a naivete commingled with pathos in this little scene, which cannot be enough admired. The old dissenting clergyman’s pride at his son’s getting on in his profession as an artist, still with a wish rather that he had taken to his own calling; and then an under-vanity of his own in ‘having his picture drawn’ coming in to comfort him; the preference he would have given to some more orthodox book, with some sort of satisfaction still that he was drawn with a book – above all, the tenderness in the close – make us almost think we are perusing some strain of Mackenzie; or some of the better (because the more pathetic) parts of the Tatler. Indeed such passages are not unfrequent in this writer; and break in upon us, amidst the spleen and severity of his commoner tone, like springs bursting out in the desart. The author’s wayward humour, turning inwards from the contemplation of real or imagined grievances – or exhausting itself in gall and bitterness at the things that be – reverts for its solace, with a mournfully contrasting spirit of satisfaction, to the past. The corruption of Hope quickens into life again the perishing flowers of the Memory. – In this spirit, in the third, and the most valuable of his Essays, that ‘On the past and future’, – in which he maintains the reality of the former as a possession in hand, against those who pretend that the future is every thing and the past nothing – after some reasoning, rather too subtle and metaphysical for the general reader – he exclaims with an eloquence that approximates to the finest poetry –

  Is it nothing to have been, and to have been happy or miserable? Or is it a matter of no moment to think whether I have been one or the other? Do I delude myself, do I build upon a shadow or a dream, do I dress up in the gaudy garb of i
dleness and folly a pure fiction, with nothing answering to it in the universe of things and the records of truth, when I look back with fond delight or with tender regret to that which was at one time to me my all, when I revive the glowing image of some bright reality,

  ‘The thoughts of which can never from my heart?’

  Do I then muse on nothing, do I bend my eyes on nothing, when I turn back in fancy to ‘those suns and skies so pure’ that lighted up my early path? Is it to think of nothing, to set an idle value upon nothing, to think of all that has happened to me, and of all that can ever interest me? Or, to use the language of a fine poet (who is himself among my earliest and not least painful recollections) –

  ‘What though the radiance which was once so bright

  Be now for ever vanish’d from my sight,

  Though nothing can bring back the hour

  Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flow’r’ –

  yet am I mocked with a lie, when I venture to think of it? Or do I not drink in and breathe again the air of heavenly truth, when I but ‘retrace its footsteps, and its skirts far off adore?’ I cannot say with the same poet –

  ‘And see how dark the backward stream,

  A little moment past so smiling’ –

  for it is the past that gives me most delight and most assurance of reality. What to me constitutes the great charm of the Confessions of Rousseau is their turning so much upon this feeling. He seems to gather up the past moments of his being like drops of honey-dew to distil a precious liquor from them; his alternate pleasures and pains are the bead-roll that he tells over, and piously worships; he makes a rosary of the flowers of hope and fancy that strewed his earliest years. When he begins the last of the Reveries of a Solitary Walker, ‘Il y a aujourd’hui, jour des Pâques Fleuris, cinquante ans depuis que j’ai premier vu Madame Warens,’ what a yearning of the soul is implied in that short sentence! Was all that had happened to him, all that he had thought and felt in that sad interval of time, to be accounted nothing? Was that long, dim, faded retrospect of years happy or miserable – a blank that was not to make his eyes fail and his heart faint within him in trying to grasp all that had once filled it and that had since vanished, because it was not a prospect into futurity? Was he wrong in finding more to interest him in it than in the next fifty years – which he did not live to see; or if he had, what then? Would they have been worth thinking of, compared with the times of his youth, of his first meeting with Madame Warens, with those times which he has traced with such truth and pure delight ‘in our heart’s tables?’ When ‘all the life of life was flown,’ was he not to live the first and best part of it over again, and once more be all that he then was? – Ye woods that crown the clear lone brow of Norman Court, why do I revisit ye so oft, and feel a soothing consciousness of your presence, but that your high tops waving in the wind recal to me the hours and years that are for ever fled; that ye renew in ceaseless murmurs the story of long-cherished hopes and bitter disappointment; that in your solitudes and tangled wilds I can wander and lose myself as I wander on and am lost in the solitude of my own heart; and that as your rustling branches give the loud blast to the waste below – borne on the thoughts of other years, I can look down with patient anguish at the cheerless desolation which I feel within! Without that face pale as the primrose with hyacinthine locks, for ever shunning and for ever haunting me, mocking my waking thoughts as in a dream; without that smile which my heart could never turn to scorn; without those eyes dark with their own lustre, still bent on mine, and drawing the soul into their liquid mazes like a sea of love; without that name trembling in fancy’s ear; without that form gliding before me like Oread or Dryad in fabled groves, what should I do? how pass away the listless leaden-footed hours? Then wave, wave on, ye woods of Tuderley, and loft your high tops in the air; my sighs and vows uttered by your mystic voice breathe into me my former being, and enable me to bear the thing I am!

  The Tenth Essay, ‘On Living to One’s-self’, has this singular passage.

  Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others! Most of the friends I have seen have turned out the bitterest enemies or cold, uncomfortable acquaintance. Old companions are like meats served up too often, that lose their relish and their wholesomeness.

  We hope that this is more dramatically than truly written. We recognize nothing like it in our own circle. We had always thought that Old Friends, and Old Wine were the best. – We should conjecture that Mr Hazlitt has been singularly unfortunate, or injudicious, in the choice of his acquaintance, did not one phenomenon stagger us. We every now & then encounter in his Essays with a character, apparently from the life, too mildly drawn for an enemy, too sharply for a friend. We suspect that Mr Hazlitt does not always play quite fairly with his associates. There is a class of critics – and he may be of them – who pry into men with ‘too respective eyes.’5 They will ‘anatomize Regan’,6 when Cordelia would hardly bear such dissection. We are not acquainted with Mr Hazlitt’s ‘familiar faces’,7 but when we see certain Characters exposed & hung up, not in Satire – for the exaggerations of that cure themselves by their excess, as we make allowance for the over-charged features in a caricature – but certain poor whole-length figures dangling with all the best & worst of humanity about them displayed with cool and unsparing impartiality – Mr Hazlitt must excuse us if we cannot help suspecting some of them to be the shadows of defunct Friendships. – This would be a recipe indeed, a pretty sure one, for converting friends ‘into bitterest enemies or cold, uncomfortable acquaintance’. – The most expert at drawing Characters, are the very persons most likely to be deceived in individual & home instances. They will seize an infirmity, which irritates them deservedly in a companion, and go on piling up every kindred weakness they have found by experience apt to coalesce with that failing (gathered from a thousand instances) till they have built up in their fancies an Abstract, widely differing indeed from their poor concrete friend! What blunders Steele, or Sterne, may not in this way have made at home! – But we forget. Our business is with books. We profess not, with Mr Hazlitt, to be Reviewers of Men. – We are willing to give our readers a specimen of what this writer can do, when the moody fit is off him. One of the pleasantest and lightest of his Essays is ‘On People with one Idea’. We quote his first instance.

  There is Major Cartwright: he has but one idea or subject of discourse, Parliamentary Reform. Now Parliamentary Reform is (as far as I know) a very good thing, a very good idea, and a very good subject to talk about; but why should it be the only one? To hear the worthy and gallant Major resume his favourite topic, is like law-business, or a person who has a suit in Chancery going on. Nothing can be attended to, nothing can be talked of but that. Now it is getting on, now again it is standing still; at one time the Master has promised to pass judgment by a certain day, at another he has put it off again and called for more papers, and both are equally reasons for speaking of it. Like the piece of packthread in the barrister’s hands, he turns and twists it all ways, and cannot proceed a step without it. Some school-boys cannot read but in their own book: and the man of one idea cannot converse out of his own subject. Conversation it is not; but a sort of recital of the preamble of a bill, or a collection of grave arguments for a man’s being of opinion with himself. It would be well if there was anything of character, of eccentricity in all this; but that is not the case. It is a political homily personified, a walking commonplace we have to encounter and listen to. It is just as if a man was to insist on your hearing him go through the fifth chapter of the Book of Judges every time you meet, or like the story of the Cosmogony in the Vicar of Wakefield. It is a tune played on a barrel-organ. It is a common vehicle of discourse into which they get and are set down when they please, without any pains or trouble to themselves. Neither is it professional pedantry or trading quackery: it has no excuse. The man has no more to do with the question which he sad
dles on all his hearers than you have. This is what makes the matter hopeless. If a farmer talks to you about his pigs or his poultry, or a physician about his patients, or a lawyer about his briefs, or a merchant about stock, or an author about himself, you know how to account for this, it is a common infirmity, you have a laugh at his expense, and there is no more to be said. But here is a man who goes out of his way to be absurd, and is troublesome by a romantic effort of generosity. You cannot say to him, ‘All this may be interesting to you, but I have no concern in it:’ you cannot put him off in that way. He retorts the Latin adage upon you – Nihil humani a me alienum puto. He has got possession of a subject which is of universal and paramount interest (not ‘a fee-grief, due to some single breast’) – and on that plea may hold you by the button as long as he chooses. His delight is to harangue on what nowise regards himself: how then can you refuse to listen to what as little amuses you? Time and tide wait for no man. The business of the state admits of no delay. The question of Universal Suffrage and Annual Parliaments stands first on the order of the day – takes precedence in its own right of every other question. Any other topic, grave or gay, is looked upon in the light of impertinence, and sent to Coventry. Business is an interruption; pleasure a digression from it. It is the question before every company where the Major comes, which immediately resolves itself into a committee of the whole world upon it, is carried on by means of a perpetual virtual adjournment, and it is presumed that no other is entertained while this is pending – a determination which gives its persevering advocate a fair prospect of expatiating on it to his dying day. As Cicero says of study, it follows him into the country, it stays with him at home: it sits with him at breakfast, and goes out with him to dinner. It is like a part of his dress, of the costume of his person, without which he would be at a loss what to do. If he meets you in the street, he accosts you with it as a form of salutation: if you see him at his own house, it is supposed you come upon that. If you happen to remark, ‘It is a fine day, or the town is full,’ it is considered as a temporary compromise of the question; you are suspected of not going the whole length of the principle. As Sancho, when reprimanded for mentioning his homely favourite in the Duke’s kitchen, defended himself by saying – ‘There I thought of Dapple, and there I spoke of him’ – so the true stickler for Reform neglects no opportunity of introducing the subject wherever he is. Place its veteran champion under the frozen north, and he will celebrate sweet smiling Reform: place him under the mid-day Afric suns, and he will talk of nothing but Reform – Reform so sweetly smiling and so sweetly promising for the last forty years –