History of English Humour, Vol. 2

by A. G. K. L'Estrange

These were weaker points in Lamb, but we must also look at the other side. Those who have read his celebrated essay on Hogarth will find that he possesses no great appreciation for that humour which is only intended to raise a laugh, and might conclude that he was more of a moralist than a humorist. He admires the great artist as an instructor, but admits that "he owes his immortality to his touches of humour, to his mingling the comic with the terrible." Those, he continues, are to be blamed who overlook the moral in his pictures, and are merely taken with the humour or disgusted by the vulgarity. Moreover, there is a propriety in the details; he notices the meaning in the tumbledown houses "the dumb rhetoric," in which "tables, chairs, and joint stools are living, and significant things." In these passages Lamb seems to regard the comic merely as a means to an end;—"Who sees not," he asks, "that the grave-digger in Hamlet, the fool in Lear have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt; while the comic stuff in 'Venice Preserved,' and the doggrel nonsense of the cook and his poisoning associates in the Rollo of Beaumont and Fletcher are pure irrelevant, impertinent discords—as bad as the quarreling dog and cat under the table of our Lord and the Disciples at Emmaus, of Titian."

Lamb's interpretation of Hogarth's works is that of a superior and thoughtful mind: but we cannot help thinking that the humour in them was not so entirely subordinate to the moral. One conclusion we may incidentally deduce from his remarks—that the meaning in pictorial illustrations, either as regards humour or sentiment, is not so appreciable as it would be in words, and consequently that caricatures labour under considerable disadvantages. "Much," he says, "depends upon the habits of mind we bring with us." And he continues—"It is peculiar to the confidence of high genius alone to trust much to spectators or readers," he might have added that in painting, this confidence is often misplaced, especially as regards the less imaginative part of the public. We owe him a debt, however, for a true observation with regard to the general uses of caricatures, that "it prevents that disgust at common life which an unrestricted passion for ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing."

But leaving passages in which Lamb approves of absurd jesting, and those in which he commends humour for pointing a moral, we come to consider the largest and most characteristic part of his writings, his pleasant essays, in which he has neither shown himself a moralist or a mountebank.

The following is from an Essay "On the Melancholy of Tailors."

"Observe the suspicious gravity of their gait. The peacock is not more tender, from a consciousness of his peculiar infirmity, than a gentleman of this profession is of being known by the same infallible testimonies of his occupation, 'Walk that I may know thee.'

"Whoever saw the wedding of a tailor announced in the newspapers, or the birth of his eldest son?

"When was a tailor known to give a dance, or to be himself a good dancer, or to perform exquisitely upon the tight rope, or to shine in any such light or airy pastimes? To sing, or play on the violin? Do they much care for public rejoicings, lightings up, ringing of bells, firing of cannons, &c.

"Valiant I know they be, but I appeal to those who were witnesses to the exploits of Eliot's famous troop whether in their fiercest charges they betrayed anything of that thoughtless oblivion to death with which a Frenchman jigs into battle, or, whether they did not show more of the melancholy valour of the Spaniard upon whom they charged that deliberate courage which contemplation and sedentary habits breathe."

Lamb accounts for this melancholy of tailors in several ingenious ways.

"May it not be that the custom of wearing apparel, being derived to us from the fall, and one of the most mortifying products of that unhappy event, a certain seriousness (to say no more of it) may in the order of things have been intended to have been impressed upon the minds of that race of men to whom in all ages the care of contriving the human apparel has been entrusted."