Selected Prose
Page 53
THE BEGINNING
Let the conversation begin...
Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinukbooks
Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinbooks
Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest
Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/penguinbooks
Find out more about the author and
discover more stories like this at Penguin.co.uk
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, Block D, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North, Gauteng 2193, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
This edition first published in Penguin Classics 1985
Published in Penguin Classics 2013
Introduction and Notes © Adam Phillips, 1985
Cover detail from A Lawyer and a Sawyer by Thomas Rowlandson. Dickson Q. Brown Collection of Thomas Rowlandson. Graphic Arts. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library.
All rights reserved
For permission to reprint Charles Lamb’s letters, thanks are due to the following: Dent/Methuen, for material from The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by E. V. Lucas (1935); Cornell University Press, for material from The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, edited by E. W. Marrs (1975). Charles Lamb’s unpublished review of the first volume of Hazlitt’s Table Talk is reproduced by permission of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection (manuscript no. 220284B), the New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations.
Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes
ISBN: 978-0-141-39292-9
* Lines inscribed under the plate.
* At the late Mr Hope’s, in Cavendish Square.
* The first perhaps in all Hogarth for serious expression. That which comes next to it, I think, is the jaded morning countenance of the debauchée in the second plate of the Marriage Alamode, which lectures on the vanity of pleasure as audibly as any thing in Ecclesiastes.
* Sir Joshua Reynolds, somewhere in his lectures,3 speaks of the presumption of Hogarth in attempting the grand style in painting, by which he means his choice of certain Scripture subjects. Hogarth’s excursions into Holy Land were not very numerous, but what he has left us in this kind have at least this merit, that they have expression of some sort or other in them, – the Child Moses before Pharaoh’s Daughter, for instance: which is more than can be said of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Repose in Egypt, printed for Macklin’s Bible, where for a Madonna he has substituted a sleepy, insensible, unmotherly girl, one so little worthy to have been selected as the Mother of the Saviour, that she seems to have neither heart nor feeling to entitle her to become a mother at all. But indeed the race of Virgin Mary painters seems to have been cut up, root and branch, at the Reformation. Our artists are too good Protestants to give life to that admirable commixture of maternal tenderness with reverential awe and wonder approaching to worship, with which the Virgin Mothers of L. da Vinci and Raphael (themselves by their divine countenances inviting men to worship) contemplate the union of the two natures in the person of their Heaven-born Infant.
* There are of madmen, as there are of tame,
All humour’d not alike. We have here some
So apish and fantastic, play with a feather;
And though ’twould grieve a soul to see God’s image
So blemish’d and defac’d, yet do they act
Such antick and such pretty lunacies,
That, spite of sorrow, they will make you smile.
Others again we have, like angry lions,
Fierce as wild bulls, untameable as flies.
Honest Whore.4
* If there are any of that description, they are in his Strolling Players, a print which has been cried up by Lord Orford as the richest of his productions, and it may be, for what I know, in the mere lumber, the properties, and dead furniture of the scene, but in living character and expression it is (for Hogarth) lamentably poor and wanting; it is perhaps the only one of his performances at which we have a right to feel disgusted.
* The Friend, No. XVI.
* It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in dramatic recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who reads Lucretius in public with great applause is therefore a great poet and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davies, the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the Paradise Lost better than any man in England in his day (though I cannot help thinking there must be some mistake in this tradition), was therefore, by his intimate friends, set upon a level with Milton.
* If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the Managers, I would intreat and beg of them, in the name of both the Galleries, that this insult upon the morality of the common people of London should cease to be eternally repeated in the holiday weeks. Why are the ’Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead of an amusement, to be treated over and over again with a nauseous sermon of George Barnwell? Why at the end of their vistoes are we to place the gallows? Were I an uncle, I should not much like a nephew of mine to have such an example placed before his eyes. It is really making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it as done upon such slight motives; – it is attributing too much to such characters as Millwood; – it is putting things into the heads of good young men, which they would never otherwise have dreamed of. Uncles that think any thing of their lives, should fairly petition the Chamberlain against it.
* The error of supposing that because Othello’s colour does not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do in the poem. But in the poem we for a while have Paradisaical senses given us, which vanish when we see a man and his wife without clothes in the picture. The painters themselves feel this, as is apparent by the awkward shifts they have recourse to, to make them look not quite naked; by a sort of prophetic anachronism, antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So in the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona’s eyes; in the seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own.
* It will be said these things are done in pictures. But pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a world of itself, but in scene-painting there is the attempt to deceive; and there is the discordancy, never to be got over, between painted scenes and real people.
* This term designated a larger class of young men than that to which it is now confined; it took in the articled Clerks of Merchants and Bankers, the George Barnwells of the day.2
* As no qualification accompanies this maxim, it must be understood as the genuine sentiment of the author!
* With party-coloured plumes, and purple bill,
A wondrous bird among the rest there flew,
That in plain speech sung love-lays loud and shrill;
Her leden was like human language true;
So much she talk’d, and with such wit and skill,
That strange it seemèd how much good she knew.
Fairfax’s Translation.5
* Her husband had enlisted for a soldier.
* John Fenwick, edito
r of the ‘Albion.’6
* From ‘Poems of all sorts,’ by Richard Fleckno, 1653.
* Urn Burial.
* I would be understood as confining myself to the subject of imperfect sympathies. To nations or classes of men there can be no direct antipathy. There may be individuals born and constellated so opposite to another individual nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them. I have met with my moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two persons meeting (who never saw one another before in their lives) and instantly fighting.
– We by proof find there should be
’Twixt man and man such an antipathy.
That though he can show no just reason why
For any former wrong or injury,
Can neither find a blemish in his fame,
Nor aught in face or feature justly blame.
Can challenge or accuse him of no evil,
Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil.
The lines are from old Heywood’s ‘Hierarchie of Angels,’ and he subjoins a curious story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who attempted to assassinate a King Ferdinand of Spain, and being put to the rack could give no other reason for the deed but an inveterate antipathy which he had taken to the first sight of the King.
– The cause which to that act compell’d him
Was, he ne’er loved him since he first beheld him.
* There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit themselves and entertain their company, with relating facts of no consequence, not at all out of the road of such common incidents as happen every day; and this I have observed more frequently among the Scots than any other nation, who are very careful not to omit the minutest circumstances of time or place; which kind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved by the uncouth terms and phrases, as well as accent and gesture peculiar to that country, would be hardly tolerable. – Hints towards an Essay on Conversation.
* Mr Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.
* When poor M— painted his last picture, with a pencil in one trembling hand and a glass of brandy and water in the other, his fingers owed the comparative steadiness, with which they were enabled to go through their task in an imperfect manner, to a temporary firmness derived from a repetition of practices, the general effect of which had shaken both them and him so terribly.
* Yet from this Second Part, our cried-up pictures are mostly selected, the waiting women with beards, &c.
* Since writing this article, we have been informed that the object of our funeral-oration is not definitively dead, but only moribund.1 So much the better; we shall have an opportunity of granting the request made to Walter by one of the children in the wood, and ‘kill him two times.’ The Abbé de Vertot having a siege to write, and not receiving the materials in time, composed the whole from his invention. Shortly after its completion, the expected documents arrived, when he threw them aside, exclaiming – ‘You are of no use to me now; I have carried the town.’
* To anybody. – Please to fill up these dates.
* Where my family come from. I have chosen that if ever I should have my choice.
* A capital book, by the bye, but not over saleable. – C. L.
1 Guzman de Alfarache, in that good old book ‘The Spanish Rogue,’ has summed up a few of the properties of poverty: – ‘That poverty, which is not the daughter of the spirit, is but the mother of shame and reproach; it is a disreputation that drowns all the other good parts that are in man; it is a disposition to all kind of evil; it is man’s most foe; it is a leprosy full of anguish; it is a way that leads unto hell; it is a sea wherein our patience is overwhelmed, our honour is consumed, our lives are ended, and our souls are utterly lost and cast away for ever. The poor man is a kind of money that is not current; the subject of every idle housewife’s chat; the offscum of the people; the dust of the street, first trampled under foot and then thrown on the dunghill; in conclusion, the poor man is the rich man’s ass; he dineth with the last, fareth of the worst, and payeth dearest: his sixpence will not go so far as a rich man’s three-pence; his opinion is ignorance; his discretion, foolishness; his suffrage, scorn; his stock upon the common, abused by many and abhorred of all. If he come in company, he is not heard; if any chance to meet him, they seek to shun him; if he advise, though never so wisely, they grudge and murmur at him; if he work miracles, they say he is a witch; if virtuous, that he goeth about to deceive; his venial sin is a blasphemy; his thought is made treason; his cause, be it never so just, it is not regarded; and, to have his wrongs righted, he must appeal to that other life. All men crush him; no man favoureth him; there is no man that will relieve his wants; no man that will comfort him in his miseries; nor no man that will bear him company, when he is all alone, and oppressed with grief. None help him; all hinder him; none give him, all take from him; he is debtor to none, and yet must make payment to all. O, the unfortunate and poor condition of him that is poor, to whom even the very hours are sold, which the clock striketh, and pays custom for the sunshine in August!’