The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Chapter 42 : Witness his hand, CHARLES LAMB.10th Apr 1827.[59] To any Body--Please to fill up these

Witness his hand, CHARLES LAMB.

10th Apr 1827.

[59] To any Body--Please to fill up these blanks.

SHAKSPEARE'S IMPROVERS

(1828)

_To the Editor of The Spectator_

Sir,--Partaking in your indignation at the sickly stuff interpolated by Tate in the genuine play of _King Lear_, I beg to lay before you certain kindred enormities that you may be less aware of, which that co-dilutor of Sternhold and Hopkins,[60] with his compeers, were suffered--nay, encouraged--by an English public of a century and a half ago, to perpetrate upon the dramas of Shakspeare. I speak from imperfect recollection of one of these _new versions_ which I have seen, namely, _Coriola.n.u.s_--by the same hand which touched up _King Lear_; in which he, the said Nahum, not deeming his author's catastrophe enough striking, makes _Aufidius_ (if my memory fail me not) violate the person of the wife, and mangle the body of the little son, of his Roman rival! Shadwell, another improver, in _his_ version of _Timon of Athens_, a copy of which (167-7/8) is lying before me, omits the character of _Flavius_, the kind-hearted Steward--that fine exception to the air of general perfidy in the play, which would else be too oppressive to reader or spectator; and subst.i.tutes for it a _kind female_, who is supposed to be attached to _Timon_ to the last: thus making the moral of the piece to consist in showing--not the hollowness of friends.h.i.+ps conciliated by a mere undistinguis.h.i.+ng prodigality, but--the superiority of woman's love to the friends.h.i.+ps of men.

_Evandra_ too has a rival in the affections of the n.o.ble Athenian. So impossible did these blockheads imagine it to be, to interest the feelings of an audience without an _intrigue_, that the misanthrope _Timon_ must whine, and the daughterly _Cordelia_ must whimper, their love affections, before they could hope to touch the gentle hearts in the boxes! Had one of these gentry taken in hand to improve the fine Scriptural story of Joseph and his Brethren, we should have had a love pa.s.sion introduced, to make the mere _fraternal interest_ of the piece go down--an episode of the amours of Reuben, or Issachar, with the fair Mizraim of Egypt.--Thus _Evandra_ closes the eyes of Shadwell's dying _Timon_; who, it seems, has poisoned himself.

[60] New Version of the Singing Psalms, by Nahum Tate, and Nicholas Brady.

_Evan._ Oh my dear Lord! why do you stoop and bend Like flowers o'ercharged with dew, whose yielding stalks Cannot support them?

_Timon._ So now my weary pilgrimage on earth Is almost finish'd! Now, my best Evandra, I charge thee by our loves, our mutual loves, Live, and live happy after me; and if A thought of Timon comes into thy mind, And brings a tear from thee-- (_What then? why then_) --let some diversion Banish it.--

And so, after some more drivel of the same stamp, the n.o.ble _Timon_ dies. And was not this a dainty dish to set before an audience of the Duke's Theatre in the year 167-7/8? Yet Betterton then acted _Timon_, and his wife _Evandra_.

I now come to the London acting edition of _Macbeth_ of the same date, 1678 (played, if I remember, by the same players, at the same house); from which I made a few rough extracts, when I visited the British Museum for the sake of selecting from the "Garrick Plays." As I can scarcely expect to be believed upon my own word, as to what our ancestors at that time were willing to accept for Shakspeare, I refer the reader to that collection to verify my report. Who the improver was in this instance, we are left to guess, for the t.i.tle-page leaves us to conjecture. Possibly the players, each one separately, contributed his new reading, which was silently adopted. Flesh and blood could not at this time of day submit to a thorough perusal of the thing; but, from a glance or two of casual inspection, I am enabled to lay before the reader a few flowers. In one of the lyric parts, _Hecate_ is made to say--

----on a corner of the moon A drop my _spectacles_ have found.

I'll catch it.

_Hecate_, the solemn president of cla.s.sic enchantments, thence adopted into the romantic--the tri-form Hecate--wearing spectacles to a.s.sist old sight!--(No. 4 or No. 5, as the opticians cla.s.s them, is not said)--one may as well fancy Cerberus in a bran new collar, or the "dreaded name of Demogorgon" in jack-boots. Among the "ingredients of the caldron," is enumerated, not a tiger's, but--what reader?--

----a _Dutchman's_ chawdron!

We were about that time engaged in a war with Holland.--Again, _Macduff_ being about to journey across the heath--the "blasted heath"--answers his lady, who courteously demands of him, "Are you a-foot?"--

Knowing the way to be both short and easy, And that the _chariot_ did attend me here, I have adventured----

From which we may infer, that the Thane of Fife lived as a n.o.bleman ought to do, and--kept a carriage. Again, the same n.o.bleman, on the morning after _Duncan's_ murder, says:--"Rising this morning early, I went to look out of my window. I could scarce see further than my breath." And indeed the original author informs us, that it had been a "rough night;" so that the improver does not wander far from his text.

The exquisite familiarity of this prose patch was doubtlessly intended by the improver to break the tiresome monotony of Shakspeare's blank verse. In conclusion, _Lady Macbeth_ is brought in _repentant_, and counselling her husband to give up the crown for conscience sake!--_Item_, she sees a ghost, which is all the time invisible to him.

Such was the _Macbeth_ which Betterton acted, and a contemporary audience took on trust for Shakspeare's.

C. L.

SAt.u.r.dAY NIGHT

(1829)

There is a Sat.u.r.day Night--I speak not to the admirers of Burns--erotically or theologically considered; HIS of the "Cotter's" may be a very charming picture, granting it to be but half true. Nor speak I now of the Sat.u.r.day Night at Sea, which Dibdin hath dressed up with a gusto more poignant to the mere nautical palate of un-Calvanized South Britons. Nor that it is marketing night with the pretty tripping Servant-maids all over London, who, with judicious and economic eye, select the white and well-blown fillet, that the blue-ap.r.o.ned contunder of the calf can safely recommend as "prime veal," and which they are to be sure not to over-brown on the morrow. Nor speak I of the hard-handed Artisan, who on this night receives the pittance which is to furnish the neat Sabbatical dinner--not always reserved with Judaical rigor for that laudable purpose, but broken in upon, perchance, by inviting pot of ale, satisfactory to the present orifice. These are alleviatory, care-consoling. But the Hebdomadal Finale which I contemplate hath neither comfort nor alleviation in it; I p.r.o.nounce it, from memory, altogether punitive, and to be abhorred. It is--Sat.u.r.day Night to the School-boy!

Cleanliness, saith some sage man, is next to G.o.dliness. It may be; but how it came to sit so very near, is the marvel. Methinks some of the more human virtues might have put in for a place before it.

Justice--Humanity--Temperance--are positive qualities; the courtesies and little civil offices of life, had I been Master of the Ceremonies to that Court, should have sate above the salt in preference to a mere negation. I confess there is something wonderfully refres.h.i.+ng, in warm countries, in the act of ablution. Those Mahometan was.h.i.+ngs--how cool to the imagination! but in all these superst.i.tions, the action itself, if not the duty, is voluntary. But to be washed perforce; to have a detestable flannel rag soaked in hot water, and redolent of the very coa.r.s.est coa.r.s.e soap, ingrained with hard beads for torment, thrust into your mouth, eyes, nostrils--positively Burking you, under pretence of cleansing--subst.i.tuting soap for dirt, the worst dirt of the two--making your poor red eyes smart all night, that they might look out brighter on the Sabbath morn, for their clearness was the effect of pain more than cleanliness.--Could this be true religion?

The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. I am always disposed to add, so are those of Grandmothers. _Mine_--the Print has made her look rather too young--had never-failing pretexts of tormenting children for their good. I was a chit then; and I well remember when a fly had got into a corner of my eye, and I was complaining of it to her, the old Lady deliberately pounded two ounces or more of the finest loaf sugar that could be got, and making me hold open the eye as wide as I could--all innocent of her purpose--she blew from delicate white paper, with a full breath, the whole saccharine contents into the part afflicted, saying, "There, now the fly is out." 'Twas most true--a legion of blue-bottles, with the prince of flies at their head, must have dislodged with the torrent and deluge of tears which followed. I kept my own counsel, and my fly in my eye when I had got one, in future, without troubling her dulcet applications for the remedy. Then her medicine-case was a perfect magazine of tortures for infants. She seemed to have no notion of the comparatively tender drenches which young internals require--her potions were any thing but milk for babes. Then her sewing up of a cut finger--p.r.i.c.king a whitloe before it was ripe, because she could not see well,--with the aggravation of the pitying tone she did it in.

But of all her nostrums--rest her soul--nothing came up to the Sat.u.r.day Night's flannel--that rude fragment of a Witney blanket--Wales spins none so coa.r.s.e--thrust into the corners of a weak child's eye with soap that might have absterged an Ethiop, whitened the hands of Duncan's She-murderer, and scowered away Original Sin itself. A faint image of my penance you see in the Print--but the Artist has sunk the flannel--the Age, I suppose, is too nice to bear it: and he has faintly shadowed the expostulatory suspension of the razor-strap in the hand of my Grandfather, when my pains and clamours had waxed intolerable. Peace to the Shades of them both! and if their well-meaning souls had need of cleansing when they quitted earth, may the process of it have been milder than that of my old Purgatorial Sat.u.r.day Night's path to the Sabbatical rest of the morrow!

NEPOS.

ESTIMATE OF DE FOE'S SECONDARY NOVELS

(1829)

It has happened not seldom that one work of some author has so transcendantly surpa.s.sed in execution the rest of his compositions, that the world has agreed to pa.s.s a sentence of dismissal upon the latter, and to consign them to total neglect and oblivion. It has done wisely in this, not to suffer the contemplation of excellencies of a lower standard to abate, or stand in the way of the pleasure it has agreed to receive from the master-piece.

Again it has happened, that from no inferior merit of execution in the rest, but from superior good fortune in the choice of its subject, some single work shall have been suffered to eclipse, and cast into shade the deserts of its less fortunate brethren. This has been done with more or less injustice in the case of the popular allegory of Bunyan, in which the beautiful and scriptural image of a pilgrim or wayfarer (we are all such upon earth), addressing itself intelligibly and feelingly to the bosoms of all, has silenced, and made almost to be forgotten, the more awful and scarcely less tender beauties of the "Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus," of the same author; a romance less happy in its subject, but surely well worthy of a secondary immortality. But in no instance has this excluding partiality been exerted with more unfairness than against what may be termed the secondary novels or romances of De Foe.

While all ages and descriptions of people hang delighted over the "Adventures of Robinson Crusoe," and shall continue to do so we trust while the world lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told, that there exist other fict.i.tious narratives by the same writer--four of them at least of no inferior interest, except what results from a less felicitous choice of situation. Roxana--Singleton--Moll Flanders--Colonel Jack--are all genuine offspring of the same father.

They bear the veritable impress of De Foe. An unpractised midwife that would not swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye, of every one of them! They are in their way as full of incident, and some of them every bit as romantic; only they want the uninhabited Island, and the charm that has bewitched the world, of the striking solitary situation.

But are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert? or cannot the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone? Singleton, on the world of waters, prowling about with pirates less merciful than the creatures of any howling wilderness; is he not alone, with the faces of men about him, but without a guide that can conduct him through the mists of educational and habitual ignorance; or a fellow-heart that can interpret to him the new-born yearnings and aspirations of unpractised penitence? Or when the boy Colonel Jack, in the loneliness of the heart (the worst solitude), goes to hide his ill-purchased treasure in the hollow tree by night, and miraculously loses, and miraculously finds it again--whom hath he there to sympathise with him? or of what sort are his a.s.sociates?

The narrative manner of De Foe has a naturalness about it, beyond that of any other novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of true stories. It is impossible to believe, while you are reading them, that a real person is not narrating to you every where nothing but what really happened to himself. To this, the extreme _homeliness_ of their style mainly contributes. We use the word in its best and heartiest sense--that which comes _home_ to the reader. The narrators everywhere are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in it; therefore they tell their own tales, (Mr. Coleridge has antic.i.p.ated us in this remark,) as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repet.i.tion, and an overacted exactness, lest the hearer should not have minded, or have forgotten, some things that had been told before. Hence the emphatic sentences marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type; and hence, too, the frequent interposition of the reminding old colloquial parenthesis, "I say"--"mind"--and the like, when the story-teller repeats what, to a practised reader, might appear to have been sufficiently insisted upon before: which made an ingenious critic observe, that his works, in this kind, were excellent reading for the kitchen. And, in truth, the heroes and heroines of De Foe, can never again hope to be popular with a much higher cla.s.s of readers, than that of the servant-maid or the sailor. Crusoe keeps its rank only by tough prescription; Singleton, the pirate--Colonel Jack, the thief--Moll Flanders, both thief and harlot--Roxana, harlot and something worse--would be startling ingredients in the bill of fare of modern literary delicacies. But, then, what pirates, what thieves, and what harlots is _the thief_, _the harlot_, and _the pirate_ of De Foe? We would not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission, or the penitence more earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening flashes of religious visitation, upon the rude and uninstructed soul, more meltingly and fearfully painted. They, in this, come near to the tenderness of Bunyan; while the livelier pictures and incidents in them, as in Hogarth or in Fielding, tend to diminish that "fastidiousness to the concerns and pursuits of common life, which an unrestrained pa.s.sion for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of producing."

CLARENCE SONGS

(1830)

_To the Editor of The Spectator_

Sir,--You have a question in your paper, what songs, and whether any of any value, were written upon Prince WILLIAM, our present Sovereign. Can it have escaped you, that the very popular song and tune of "Sweet la.s.s of Richmond Hill" had reference to a supposed partiality of that Prince for a la.s.s of Richmond? I have heard who she was, but now forget. I think it was a damsel of quality. I remember, when I was a schoolboy at Christ's Hospital, about eight-and-forty years since, having had my hearing stunned with the burthen (which alone I retain) of some ballad in praise and augury of the Princely Mids.h.i.+pman:--

"He's royal, he's n.o.ble, he's chosen by _me_,[61]

Britain's Isle to protect, and reign Lord of the Sea!"

and my old ears yet ring with it.