.jpg) |
| William Hazlitt |
William Hazlitt, Of
Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen
Vol. 27, pp. 270-283 of
The Harvard Classics
Once Hazlitt and his
friends took to discussing the famous people they would like to meet
- Guy Fawkes, Sir Isaac Newton, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Cromwell,
Garrick, and Judas.
“Come
like shadows—so depart.”
LAMB 1 it was, I think, who suggested this subject, as well as the defence of Guy Fawkes, which I urged him to execute. As, however, he would undertake neither, I suppose I must do both, a task for which he would have been much fitter, no less from the temerity than the felicity of his pen—
LAMB 1 it was, I think, who suggested this subject, as well as the defence of Guy Fawkes, which I urged him to execute. As, however, he would undertake neither, I suppose I must do both, a task for which he would have been much fitter, no less from the temerity than the felicity of his pen—
“Never so sure our
rapture to create
As when it touch’d
the brink of all we hate.” 2
Compared with him, I shall, I fear, make but a
commonplace piece of business of it; but I should be loth the idea
was entirely lost, and, besides, I may avail myself of some hints of
his in the progress of it. I am sometimes, I suspect, a better
reporter of the ideas of other people than expounder of my own. I
pursue the one too far into paradox or mysticism; the others I am not
bound to follow farther than I like, or than seems fair and
reasonable.
On the question
being started, Ayrton 3 said, “I suppose the
two first persons you would choose to see would be the two greatest
names in English literature, Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Locke?” In
this Ayrton, as usual, reckoned without his host. Everyone burst out
a-laughing at the expression on Lamb’s face, in which impatience
was restrained by courtesy. “Yes, the greatest names,” he
stammered out hastily; “but they were not persons—not persons.”
“Not persons,” said Ayrton, looking wise and foolish at the same
time, afraid his triumph might be premature. “That is,” rejoined
Lamb, “not characters, you know. By Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton,
you mean the ‘Essay on the Human Understanding,’ and the
‘Principia,’ which we have to this day. Beyond their contents
there is nothing personally interesting in the men. But what we want
to see anyone bodilyfor, is when there is something
peculiar, striking in the individuals, more than we can learn from
their writings, and yet are curious to know. I dare say Locke and
Newton were very like Kneller’s portraits of them. But who could
paint Shakespeare?” “Ay,” retorted Ayrton, “there it is,;
then I suppose you would prefer seeing him and Milton instead?”
“No,” said Lamb, “neither. I have seen so much of Shakespeare
on the stage and on book-stalls, in frontispieces and on
mantelpieces, that I am quite tired of the everlasting repetition:
and as to Milton’s face, the impressions that have come down to us
of it I do not like; it is too starched and puritanical; and I should
be afraid of losing some of the manna of his poetry in the leaven of
his countenance and the precisian’s band and gown.” “I shall
guess no more,” said Ayrton. “Who is it, then, you would like to
see ‘in his habit as he lived,’ if you had your choice of the
whole range of English literature?” Lamb then named Sir Thomas
Browne and Fulke Greville, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, as the
two worthies whom he should feel the greatest pleasure to encounter
on the floor of his apartment in their nightgowns and slippers and to
exchange friendly greeting with them. At this Ayrton laughed
outright, and conceived Lamb was jesting with him; but as no one
followed his example, he thought there might be something in it, and
waited for an explanation in a state of whimsical suspense. Lamb then
(as well as I can remember a conversation that passed twenty years
ago—how time slips!) went on as follows: “The reason why I pitch
upon these two authors is, that their writings are riddles, and they
themselves the most mysterious of personages. They resemble the
soothsayers of old, who dealt in dark hints and doubtful oracles; and
I should like to ask them the meaning of what no mortal but
themselves, I should suppose, can fathom. There is Dr. Johnson: I
have no curiosity, no strange uncertainty about him; he and Boswell
together have pretty well let me into the secret of what passed
through his mind. He and other writers like him are sufficiently
explicit; my friends, whose repose I should be tempted to disturb
(were it in my power), are implicit, inextricable, inscrutable.
“‘And call up him
who left half-told
The story of Cambuscan
bold.’ 4
“When I look at
that obscure but gorgeous prose composition, the ‘Urn-burial,’ I
seem to myself to look into a deep abyss, at the bottom of which are
hid pearls and rich treasure; or it is like a stately labyrinth of
doubt and withering speculation, and I would invoke the spirit of the
author to lead me through it. Besides, who would not be curious to
see the lineaments of a man who, having himself been twice married,
wished that mankind were propagated like trees! 5 As
to Fulke Greville, he is like nothing but one of his own ‘Prologues
spoken by the ghost of an old king of Ormus,’ a truly formidable
and inviting personage: his style is apocalyptical, cabalistical, a
knot worthy of such an apparition to untie; and for the unravelling a
passage or two, I would stand the brunt of an encounter with so
portentous a commentator!” “I am afraid, in that case,” said
Ayrton, “that if the mystery were once cleared up, the merit might
be lost;” and turning to me, whispered a friendly apprehension,
that while Lamb continued to admire these old crabbed authors, he
would never become a popular writer. Dr. Donne was mentioned as a
writer of the same period, with a very interesting countenance, whose
history was singular, and whose meaning was often quite as
“uncomeatable,” without a personal citation from the dead, as
that of any of his contemporaries. The volume was produced; and while
someone was expatiating on the exquisite simplicity and beauty of the
portrait prefixed to the old edition, Ayrton got hold of the poetry,
and exclaiming “What have we here?” read the following:
“‘Here lies a
She-Sun and a He-Moon there,
She gives the best
light to his sphere
Or each is both and
all, and so
They unto one another
nothing owe.’” 6
There was no resisting this, till
Lamb, seizing the volume, turned to the beautiful “Lines to His
Mistress,” dissuading her from accompanying him abroad, and read
them with suffused features and a faltering tongue:
“‘By our first
strange and fatal interview,
By all desires which
thereof did ensue,
By our long starving
hopes, by that remorse
Which my words’
masculine perswasive force
Begot in thee, and by
the memory
Of hurts, which spies
and rivals threatened me,
I calmely beg. But by
thy father’s wrath,
By all paines which
want and divorcement hath,
I conjure thee; and
all the oathes which I
And thou have sworne
to seale joynt constancy
Here I unsweare, and
overswear them thus—
Thou shalt not love by
ways so dangerous.
Temper, O fair love!
love’s impetuous rage,
Be my true mistris
still, not my faign’d Page;
I’ll goe, and, by
thy kinde leave, leave behinde
Thee! onely worthy to
nurse it in my minde.
Thirst to come backe;
O, if thou die before,
My soule, from other
lands to thee shall soare.
Thy (else almighty)
beautie cannot move
Rage from the seas,
nor thy love teach them love,
Nor tame wild Boreas’
harshnesse: thou hast reade
How roughly hee in
peeces shivered
Fair Orithea, whom he
swore he lov’d.
Fair ill or good, ’tis
madness to have prov’d
Dangers unurg’d:
Feed on this flattery,
That absent lovers one
in th’ other be.
Dissemble nothing, not
a boy; nor change
Thy bodie’s habite,
not minde; be not strange
To thyeselfe onely.
All will spie in thy face
A blushing, womanly,
discovering grace.
Richly-cloath’d apes
are call’d apes, and as soon
Eclips’d as bright,
we call the moone the moon.
Men of France,
changeable camelions,
Spittles of diseases,
shops of fashions,
Love’s fuellers, and
the rightest company
Of players, which upon
the world’s stage be,
Will quickly know thee
… O stay here! for thee
England is onely a
worthy gallerie,
To walke in
expectation; till from thence
Our greatest King call
thee to his presence.
When I am gone, dreame
me some happinesse,
Nor let thy lookes our
long-hid love confesse,
Nor praise, nor
dispraise me; nor blesse, nor curse
Openly love’s force,
nor in bed fright thy nurse
With midnight’s
starting, crying out, Oh, oh,
Nurse, oh my love is
slaine, I saw him goe
O’er the white Alpes
alone! I saw him, I,
Assail’d, fight,
taken, stabb’d, bleed, fall, and die.
Augure me better
change, except dread Jove
Thinke it enough for
me to have had thy love.’”
Someone then inquired of Lamb if we
could not see from the window the Temple-walk in which Chaucer used
to take his exercise; and on his name being put to the vote, I was
pleased to find that there was a general sensation in his favor in
all but Ayrton, who said something about the ruggedness of the metre,
and even objected to the quaintness of the orthography. I was vexed
at this superficial gloss, pertinaciously reducing everything to its
own trite level, and asked, “If he did not think it would be worth
while to scan the eye that had first greeted the Muse in that dim
twilight and early dawn of English literature; to see the head round
which the visions of fancy must have played like gleams of
inspiration or a sudden glory; to watch those lips that “lisped in
numbers, for the numbers came’—as by a miracle, or as if the dumb
should speak? Nor was it alone that he had been the first to tune his
native tongue (however imperfectly to modern ears); but he was
himself a noble, manly character, standing before his age and
striving to advance it; a pleasant humorist withal, who has not only
handed down to us the living manners of his time, but had, no doubt,
store of curious and quaint devices, and would make as hearty a
companion as mine host of the Tabard. His interview with Petrarch is
fraught with interest. Yet I would rather have seen Chaucer in
company with the author of the ‘Decameron,’ and have heard them
exchange their best stories together—the ‘Squire’s Tale’
against the story of the “Falcon,’ the ‘Wife of Bath’s
Prologue’ against the ‘Adventures of Friar Albert.’ How fine to
see the high mysterious brow which learning then wore, relieved by
the gay, familiar tone of men of the world, and by the courtesies of
genius! Surely, the thoughts and feelings which passed through the
minds of these great revivers of learning, these Cadmuses who sowed
the teeth of letters, must have stamped an expression on their
features as different from the moderns as their books, and well worth
the perusal. Dante,” I continued, “is as interesting a person as
his own Ugolino, one whose lineaments curiosity would as eagerly
devour in order to penetrate his spirit, and the only one of the
Italian poets I should care much to see. There is a fine portrait of
Ariosto by no less a hand than Titian’s; light, Moorish, spirited,
but not answering our idea. The same artist’s large colossal
profile of Peter Aretine is the only likeness of the kind that has
the effect of conversing with ‘the mighty dead’; and this is
truly spectral, ghastly, necromantic.” Lamb put it to me if I
should like to see Spenser as well as Chaucer; and I answered,
without hesitation, “No; for that his beauties were ideal,
visionary, not palpable or personal, and therefore connected with
less curiosity about the man. His poetry was the essence of romance,
a very halo round the bright orb of fancy; and the bringing in the
individual might dissolve the charm. No tones of voice could come up
to the mellifluous cadence of his verse; no form but of a winged
angel could vie with the airy shapes he has described. He was (to our
apprehensions) rather a ‘creature of the element, that lived in the
rainbow and played in the plighted clouds,’ than an ordinary
mortal. Or if he appear, I should wish it to be as a mere vision,
like one of his own pageants, and that he should pass by unquestioned
like a dream or sound—
“‘——That was
Arion crown’d:
So went he playing on
the wat’ry plain.’” 7
Captain Burney muttered something
about Columbus, and Martin Burney hinted at the Wandering Jew; but
the last was set aside as spurious, and the first made over to the
New World.
“I should like,” said Mrs.
Reynolds, “to have seen Pope talk with Patty Blount; and Ihave seen
Goldsmith.” Everyone turned round to look at Mrs. Reynolds, as if
by so doing they could get a sight at Goldsmith.
“Where,” asked a harsh, croaking
voice, “was Dr. Johnson in the years 1745–46? He did not write
anything that we know of, nor is there any account of him in Boswell
during those two years. Was he in Scotland with the Pretender? He
seems to have passed through the scenes in the Highlands in company
with Boswell, many years after, ‘with lack-lustre eye,’ yet as if
they were familiar to him, or associated in his mind with interests
that he durst not explain. If so, it would be an additional reason
for my liking him; and I would give something to have seen him seated
in the tent with the youthful Majesty of Britain, and penning the
Proclamation to all true subjects and adherents of the legitimate
government.”
“I thought,” said Ayrton, turning
short round upon Lamb, “that you of the Lake School did not like
Pope?” “Not like Pope! My dear sir, you must be under a mistake—I
can read him over and over forever!” “Why, certainly, the ‘Essay
on Man’ must be allowed to be a masterpiece.” “It may be so,
but I seldom look into it.” “Oh! then it’s his satires you
admire?” “No, not his satires, but his friendly epistles and his
compliments.” “Compliments! I did not know he ever made any.”
“The finest,” said Lamb, “that were ever paid by the wit of
man. Each of them is worth an estate for life—nay, is an
immortality. There is that superb one to Lord Cornbury:
“‘Despise low
joys, low gains;
Disdain whatever
Cornbury disdains;
Be virtuous, and be
happy for your pains.’ 8
Was there ever more artful insinuation of
idolatrous praise? And then that noble apotheosis of his friend Lord
Mansfield (however little deserved), when, speaking of the House of
Lords, he adds:
“‘Conspicuous
scene! another yet is nigh,
(More silent far)
where kings and poets lie;
Where Murray (long
enough his country’s pride)
Shall be no more than
Tully or than Hyde!’ 9
And with what a fine turn of indignant flattery he
addresses Lord Bolingbroke:
“‘Why rail they
then, if but one wreath of mine,
O all-accomplish’d
St. John, deck thy shrine?’ 10
Or turn,” continued Lamb, with a slight hectic
on his cheek and his eyes glistening, “to his list of early
friends:
“‘But why then
publish? Granville the polite,
And knowing Walsh,
would tell me I could write;
Well-natured Garth
inflamed with early praise,
And Congreve loved,
and Swift endured my lays:
The courtly Talbot,
Somers, Sheffield read,
Ev’n mitred
Rochester would nod the head;
And St. John’s self
(great Dryden’s friend before)
Received with open
arms one poet more.
Happy my studies, if
by these approved!
Happier their author,
if by these beloved!
From these the world
will judge of men and books,
Not from the Burnets,
Oldmixons, and Cooks.’” 11
Here his voice totally failed him, and throwing
down the book, he said, “Do you think I would not wish to have been
friends with such a man as this?”
“What say you to Dryden?” “He
rather made a show of himself, and courted popularity in that lowest
temple of fame, a coffee-shop, so as in some measure to vulgarize
one’s idea of him. Pope, on the contrary, reached the very beau
ideal of what a poet’s life should be; and his fame while living
seemed to be an emanation from that which was to circle his name
after death. He was so far enviable (and one would feel proud to have
witnessed the rare spectacle in him) that he was almost the only poet
and man of genius who met with his reward on this side of the tomb,
who realized in friends, fortune, the esteem of the world, the most
sanguine hopes of a youthful ambition, and who found that sort of
patronage from the great during his lifetime which they would be
thought anxious to bestow upon him after his death. Read Gay’s
verses to him on his supposed return from Greece, after his
translation of Homer was finished, and say if you would not gladly
join the bright procession that welcomed him home, or see it once
more land at Whitehall stairs.” “Still,” said Mrs. Reynolds, “I
would rather have seen him talking with Patty Blount, or riding by in
a coronet-coach with Lady Mary Wortley Montague!”
Erasmus Phillips, who was deep in a
game of piquet at the other end of the room, whispered to Martin
Burney to ask if “Junius” would not be a fit person to invoke
from the dead. “Yes,” said Lamb, “provided he would agree to
lay aside his mask.”
We were now at a stand for a short
time, when Fielding was mentioned as a candidate; only one, however,
seconded the proposition. “Richardson?” “By all means, but only
to look at him through the glass door of his back shop, hard at work
upon one of his novels (the most extraordinary contrast that ever was
presented between an author and his works); not to let him come
behind his counter, lest he should want you to turn customer, or to
go upstairs with him, lest he should offer to read the first
manuscript of ‘Sir Charles Grandison,’ which was originally
written in eight-and-twenty volumes octavo, or get out the letters of
his female correspondents, to prove that Joseph Andrews was low.”
There was but one statesman in the
whole of English history that anyone expressed the least desire to
see—Oliver Cromwell, with his fine, frank, rough, pimply face and
wily policy; and one enthusiast, John Bunyan, the immortal author of
the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” It seemed that if he came into the
room, dreams would follow him, and that each person would nod under
his golden cloud, “nigh-sphered in heaven,” a canopy as strange
and stately as any in Homer.
Of all persons near our own time,
Garrick’s name was received with the greatest enthusiasm, who was
proposed by Barron Field. He presently superseded both Hogarth and
Handel, who had been talked of, but then it was on condition that he
should act in tragedy and comedy, in the play and the farce, Lear and
Wildair and Abel Drugger. What a “sight for sore eyes” that would
be! Who would not part with a year’s income at least, almost with a
year of his natural life, to be present at it? Besides, as he could
not act alone, and recitations are unsatisfactory things, what a
troop he must bring with him—the silver-tongued Barry, and Quin,
and Shuter and Weston, and Mrs. Clive and Mrs. Pritchard, of whom I
have heard my father speak as so great a favorite when he was young.
This would indeed be a revival of the dead, the restoring of art; and
so much the more desirable, as such is the lurking scepticism mingled
with our overstrained admiration of past excellence, that though we
have the speeches of Burke, the portraits of Reynolds, the writings
of Goldsmith, and the conversation of Johnson, to show what people
could do at that period, and to confirm the universal testimony to
the merits of Garrick; yet, as it was before our time, we have our
misgivings, as if he was probably, after all, little better than a
Bartlemy—fair actor, dressed out to play Macbeth in a scarlet coat
and laced cocked-hat. For one, I should like to have seen and heard
with my own eyes and ears. Certainly, by all accounts, if anyone was
ever moved by the true histrionic æstus, it was
Garrick. When he followed the Ghost in “Hamlet,” he did not drop
the sword, as most actors do, behind the scenes, but kept the point
raised the whole way round, so fully was he possessed with the idea,
or so anxious not to lose sight of his part for a moment. Once at a
splendid dinner-party at Lord ——’s, they suddenly missed
Garrick, and could not imagine what was become of him, till they were
drawn to the window by the convulsive screams and peals of laughter
of a young negro boy, who was rolling on the ground in an ecstasy of
delight to see Garrick mimicking a turkey-cock in the courtyard, with
his coat-tail stuck out behind, and in a seeming flutter of feathered
rage and pride. Of our party only two persons present had seen the
British Roscius; and they seemed as willing as the rest to renew
their acquaintance with their old favorite.
We were interrupted in the hey-day and
mid-career of this fanciful speculation, by a grumbler in a corner,
who declared it was a shame to make all this rout about a mere player
and farce-writer, to the neglect and exclusion of the fine old
dramatists, the contemporaries and rivals of Shakespeare. Lamb said
he had anticipated this objection when he had named the author of
“Mustapha” and “Alaham”; and, out of caprice, insisted upon
keeping him to represent the set, in preference to the wild,
hare-brained enthusiast, Kit Marlowe; to the sexton of St. Ann’s,
Webster, with his melancholy yew-trees and death’s-heads; to
Decker, who was but a garrulous proser; to the voluminous Heywood;
and even to Beaumont and Fletcher, whom we might offend by
complimenting the wrong author on their joint productions. Lord
Brooke, on the contrary, stood quite by himself, or, in Cowley’s
words, was “a vast species alone.” Someone hinted at the
circumstance of his being a lord, which rather startled Lamb, but he
said a ghost would perhaps dispense with strict etiquette, on being
regularly addressed by his title. Ben Jonson divided our suffrages
pretty equally. Some were afraid he would begin to traduce
Shakespeare, who was not present to defend himself. “If he grows
disagreeable,” it was whispered aloud, “there is Godwin can match
him.” At length, his romantic visit to Drummond of Hawthornden was
mentioned, and turned the scale in his favor.
Lamb inquired if
there was anyone that was hanged that I would choose to mention? And
I answered, Eugene Aram. 12 The name of the
“Admirable Crichton” was suddenly started as a splendid example
of waste talents, so different from the generality of his countrymen.
This choice was mightily approved by a North-Briton present, who
declared himself descended from that prodigy of learning and
accomplishment, and said he had family plate in his possession as
vouchers for the fact, with the initials A. C.—“Admirable
Crichton”! Hunt laughed, or rather roared, as heartily at this as I
should think he has done for many years.
The
last-named Mitre-courtier 13 then wished to know
whether there were any metaphysicians to whom one might be tempted to
apply the wizard spell? I replied, there were only six in modern
times deserving the name—Hobbes, Berkeley, Butler, Hartley, Hume,
Leibnitz; and perhaps Jonathan Edwards, a Massachusetts man. 14 As
to the French, who talked fluently of having created this science,
there was not a tittle in any of their writings that was not to be
found literally in the authors I had mentioned. [Horne Tooke, who
might have a claim to come in under the head of grammar, was still
living.] None of these names seemed to excite much interest, and I
did not plead for the reappearance of those who might be thought best
fitted by the abstracted nature of their studies for the present
spiritual and disembodied state, and who, even while on this living
stage, were nearly divested of common flesh and blood. As Ayrton,
with an uneasy, fidgety face, was about to put some question about
Mr. Locke and Dugald Stewart, he was prevented by Martin Burney, who
observed, “If J—— was here, he would undoubtedly be for having
up those profound and redoubted socialists, Thomas Aquinas and Duns
Scotus.” I said this might be fair enough in him who had read, or
fancied he had read, the original works, but I did not see how we
could have any right to call up these authors to give an account of
themselves in person till we had looked into their writings.
By this time it should seem that some
rumor of our whimsical deliberation had got wind, and had disturbed
the irritable genus in their shadowy abodes, for we
received messages from several candidates that we had just been
thinking of. Gray declined our invitation, though he had not yet been
asked; Gay offered to come, and bring in his hand the Duchess of
Bolton, the original Polly; Steele and Addison left their cards as
Captain Sentry and Sir Roger de Coverley; Swift came in and sat down
without speaking a word, and quitted the room as abruptly; Otway and
Chatterton were seen lingering on the opposite side of the Styx, but
could not muster enough between them to pay Charon his fare; Thomson
fell asleep in the boat, and was rowed back again; and Burns sent a
low fellow, one John Barleycorn, an old companion of his, who had
conducted him to the other world, to say that he had during his
lifetime been drawn out of his retirement as a show, only to be made
an exciseman of, and that he would rather remain where he was. He
desired, however, to shake hands by his representative—the hand,
thus held out, was in a burning fever, and shook prodigiously.
The room was hung round with several
portraits of eminent painters. While we were debating whether we
should demand speech with these masters of mute eloquence, whose
features were so familiar to us, it seemed that all at once they
glided from their frames, and seated themselves at some little
distance from us. There was Leonardo, with his majestic beard and
watchful eye, having a bust of Archimedes before him; next him was
Raphael’s graceful head turned round to the Fornarina; and on his
other side was Lucretia Borgia, with calm, golden locks; Michael
Angelo had placed the model of St. Peter’s on the table before him;
Correggio had an angel at his side; Titian was seated with his
mistress between himself and Giorgione; Guido was accompanied by his
own Aurora, who took a dice-box from him; Claude held a mirror in his
hand; Rubens patted a beautiful panther (led in by a satyr) on the
head; Vandyke appeared as his own Paris, and Rembrandt was hid under
furs, gold chains, and jewels, which Sir Joshua eyed closely, holding
his hand so as to shade his forehead. Not a word was spoken; and as
we rose to do them homage, they still presented the same surface to
the view. Not being bona-fide representations of
living people, we got rid of the splendid apparitions by signs and
dumb show. As soon as they had melted into thin air, there was a loud
noise at the outer door, and we found it was Giotto, Cimabue, and
Ghirlandajo, who had been raised from the dead by their earnest
desire to see their illustrious successors—
“Whose
names on earth
In Fame’s eternal
record live for aye!”
Finding them gone, they had no ambition to be seen
after them, and mournfully withdrew. “Egad!” said Lamb, “these
are the very fellows I should like to have had some talk with, to
know how they could see to paint when all was dark around them.”
“But shall we have nothing to say,”
interrogated G. J——, “to the ‘Legend of Good Women’?”
“Name, name, Mr. J——,” cried Hunt in a boisterous tone of
friendly exultation, “name as many as you please, without reserve
or fear of molestation!” J—— was perplexed between so many
amiable recollections, that the name of the lady of his choice
expired in a pensive whiff of his pipe; and Lamb impatiently declared
for the Duchess of Newcastle. Mrs. Hutchinson was no sooner
mentioned, than she carried the day from the Duchess. We were the
less solicitous on this subject of filling up the posthumous lists of
good women, as there was already one in the room as good, as
sensible, and in all respects as exemplary, as the best of them could
be for their lives! “I should like vastly to have seen Ninon de
l’Enclos,” said that incomparable person; and this immediately
put us in mind that we had neglected to pay honor due to our friends
on the other side of the Channel: Voltaire, the patriarch of levity,
and Rousseau, the father of sentiment; Montaigne and Rabelais (great
in wisdom and in wit); Molière and that illustrious group that are
collected round him (in the print of that subject) to hear him read
his comedy of the “Tartuffe” at the house of Ninon; Racine, La
Fontaine, Rochefoucauld, St. Evremont, etc.
“There is one person,” said a
shrill, querulous voice, “I would rather see than all these—Don
Quixote!”
“Come, come!” said Hunt; “I
thought we should have no heroes, real or fabulous. What say you, Mr.
Lamb? Are you for eking out your shadowy list with such names as
Alexander, Julius Caesar, Tamerlane, or Genghis Khan?” “Excuse
me,” said Lamb; “on the subject of characters in active life,
plotters and disturbers of the world, I have a crotchet of my own,
which I beg leave to reserve.” “No, no! come out with your
worthies!” “What do you think of Guy Fawkes and Judas Iscariot?”
Hunt turned an eye upon him like a wild Indian, but cordial and full
of smothered glee. “Your most exquisite reason!” was echoed on
all sides; and Ayrton thought that Lamb had now fairly entangled
himself. “Why, I cannot but think,” retorted he of the wistful
countenance, “that Guy Fawkes, that poor, fluttering, annual
scarecrow of straw and rags, is an ill-used gentleman. I would give
something to see him sitting pale and emaciated, surrounded by his
matches and his barrels of gunpowder, and expecting the moment that
was to transport him to Paradise for his heroic self-devotion; but if
I say any more, there is that fellow Godwin will make something of
it. And as to Judas Iscariot, my reason is different. I would fain
see the face of him who, having dipped his hand in the same dish with
the Son of Man, could afterwards betray him. I have no conception of
such a thing; nor have I ever seen any picture (not even Leonardo’s
very fine one) that gave me the least idea of it.” “You have said
enough, Mr. Lamb, to justify your choice.”
“Oh! ever right, Menenius—ever
right!”
“There is only
one other person I can ever think of after this,” continued
Lamb; 15 but without mentioning a name that once
put on a semblance of mortality. “If Shakespeare was to come into
the room, we should all rise up to meet him; but if that person was
to come into it, we should all fall down and try to kiss the hem of
his garment!”
As a lady present seemed now to get
uneasy at the turn the conversation had taken, we rose up to go. The
morning broke with that dim, dubious light by which Giotto, Cimabue,
and Ghirlandajo must have seen to paint their earliest works; and we
parted to meet again and renew similar topics at night, the next
night, and the night after that, till that night overspread Europe
which saw no dawn. The same event, in truth, broke up our little
congress that broke up the great one. But that was to meet again: our
deliberations have never been resumed.
Note
1. Originally published in the “New Monthly Magazine,”
January, 1826. The conversation described is supposed to take place
at one of Charles Lamb’s “Wednesdays,” at 16 Mitre Court
Buildings, London.
Note
14. Bacon is not included in this list, nor do I know where
he should come in. It is not easy to make room for him and his
reputation together. This great and celebrated man in some of his
works recommends it to pour a bottle of claret into the ground of a
morning, and to stand over it, inhaling the perfumes. So he sometimes
enriched the dry and barren soil of speculation with the fine
aromatic spirit of his genius. His essays and his “Advancement of
Learning” are works of vast depth and scope of observation. The
last, though it contains no positive discoveries, is a noble chart of
the human intellect, and a guide to all future inquirers.—H.
Note 15. In
the original form of the essay, this speech is given to Hunt.
Comments
Post a Comment