The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Part 13

I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth have necessarily something in them to make us like them; some are indifferent to us, some in their natures repulsive, and only made interesting by the wonderful skill and truth to nature in the painter; but I contend that there is in most of them that sprinkling of the better nature, which, like holy water, chases away and disperses the contagion of the bad. They have this in them besides, that they bring us acquainted with the every-day human face,--they give us skill to detect those gradations of sense and virtue (which escape the careless or fastidious observer) in the countenances of the world about us; and prevent that disgust at common life, that _taedium quotidianarum formarum_, which an unrestricted pa.s.sion for ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing. In this, as in many other things, they are a.n.a.logous to the best novels of Smollett or Fielding.

ON THE CUSTOM OF HISSING AT THE THEATRES, WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF A CLUB OF d.a.m.nED AUTHORS

(1811)

Mr. Reflector, I am one of those persons whom the world has thought proper to designate by the t.i.tle of d.a.m.ned Authors. In that memorable season of dramatic failures, 1806-7, in which no fewer, I think, than two tragedies, four comedies, one opera, and three farces, suffered at Drury-lane theatre, I was found guilty of constructing an afterpiece, and was _d.a.m.ned_.

Against the decision of the public in such instances there can be no appeal. The Clerk of Chatham might as well have protested against the decision of Cade and his followers, who were then _the public_. Like him I was condemned, because I could write.

Not but it did appear to some of us, that the measures of the popular tribunal at that period savoured a little of harshness and of the _summum jus_. The public mouth was early in the season fleshed upon the _Vindictive Man_, and some pieces of that nature, and it retained through the remainder of it a relish of blood. As Dr. Johnson would have said; sir, there was a habit of sibilation in the house.

Still less am I disposed to inquire into the reason of the comparative lenity, on the other hand, with which some pieces were treated, which, to indifferent judges, seemed at least as much deserving of condemnation as some of those which met with it. I am willing to put a favourable construction upon the votes that were given against us; I believe that there was no bribery or designed partiality in the case;--only "our nonsense did not happen to suit their nonsense;" that was all.

But against the _manner_ in which the public on these occasions think fit to deliver their disapprobation, I must and ever will protest.

Sir, imagine----but you have been present at the d.a.m.ning of a piece----those who never had that felicity, I beg them to imagine--a vast theatre, like that which Drury-lane was, before it was a heap of dust and ashes (I insult not over its fallen greatness, let it recover itself when it can for me, let it lift up its towering head once more, and take in poor authors to write for it, hic cstus artemque repono)--a theatre like that, filled with all sorts of disgusting sounds,--shrieks, groans, hisses, but chiefly the last, like the noise of many waters, or that which Don Quixote heard from the fulling mills, or that wilder combination of devilish sounds which St. Anthony listened to in the wilderness.

O, Mr. Reflector, is it not a pity, that the sweet human voice, which was given man to speak with, to sing with, to whisper tones of love in, to express compliance, to convey a favour, or to grant a suit--that voice, which in a Siddons, or a Braham, rouses us, in a Syren Catalani charms and captivates us,--that the musical, expressive human voice should be converted into a rival of the noises of silly geese, and irrational venomous snakes!

I shall never forget the sounds on _my night_; I never before that time fully felt the reception which the Author of All Ill in the Paradise Lost meets with from the critics in the _pit_, at the final close of his Tragedy upon the Human Race--though that, alas! met with too much success--

----from innumerable tongues, A dismal universal _hiss_, the sound Of public scorn.--Dreadful was the din Of _hissing_ through the hall, thick swarming now With complicated monsters, head and tail, Scorpion and asp, and Amphisbna dire, Cerastes horn'd, Hydrus, and Elops drear, And Dipsas.

For hall subst.i.tute theatre, and you have the very image of what takes place at what is called the _d.a.m.nation_ of a piece,--and properly so called; for here you see its origin plainly, whence the custom was derived, and what the first piece was that so suffered. After this none can doubt the propriety of the appellation.

But, sir, as to the justice of bestowing such appalling, heart-withering denunciations of the popular obloquy, upon the venial mistake of a poor author, who thought to please us in the act of filling his pockets,--for the sum of his demerits amounts to no more than that,--it does, I own, seem to me a species of retributive justice, far too severe for the offence. A culprit in the pillory (bate the eggs) meets with no severer exprobation.

Indeed, I have often wondered that some modest critic has not proposed, that there should be a wooden machine to that effect erected in some convenient part of the proscenium, which an unsuccessful author should be required to mount, and stand his hour, exposed to the apples and oranges of the pit;--this amende honorable would well suit with the meanness of some authors, who in their prologues fairly prostrate their sculls to the Audience, and seem to invite a pelting.

Or why should they not have their pens publicly broke over their heads, as the swords of recreant knights in old times were, and an oath administered to them that they should never write again.

Seriously, _Messieurs the Public_, this outrageous way which you have got of expressing your displeasures, is too much for the occasion. When I was deafening under the effects of it, I could not help asking, what crime of great moral turpitude I had committed: for every man about me seemed to feel the offence as personal to himself, as something which public interest and private feelings alike called upon him in the strongest possible manner to stigmatise with infamy.

The Romans, it is well known to you, Mr. Reflector, took a gentler method of marking their disapprobation of an author's work. They were a humane and equitable nation.--They left the furca and the patibulum, the axe and the rods, to great offenders: for these minor, and (if I may so term them) extra-moral offences, the _bent thumb_ was considered as a sufficient sign of disapprobation, _vertere pollicem_; as the _pressed thumb_, _premere pollicem_, was a mark of approving.

And really there seems to have been a sort of fitness in this method, a correspondency of sign in the punishment to the offence; for as the action of _writing_ is performed by bending the thumb forward, the retroversion, or bending back of that joint, did not unaptly point to the _opposite of that action_, implying, that it was the will of the audience that the author should _write no more_. A much more significant, as well as more humane, way of expressing that desire, than our custom of hissing, which is altogether senseless and indefensible.

Nor do we find that the Roman audiences deprived themselves, by this lenity, of any t.i.ttle of that supremacy which audiences in all ages have thought themselves bound to maintain over such as have been candidates for their applause. On the contrary, by this method they seem to have had the author, as we should express it, completely _under finger and thumb_.

The provocations to which a dramatic genius is exposed from the public are so much the more vexatious, as they are removed from any possibility of retaliation, the hope of which sweetens most other injuries:--for the public _never writes itself_.--Not but something very like it took place at the time of the O.P. differences. The placards which were nightly exhibited, were, properly speaking, the composition of the public.--The public wrote them, the public applauded them, and precious morceaus of wit and eloquence they were; except some few, of a better quality, which it is well known were furnished by professed dramatic writers. After this specimen of what the public can do for itself, it should be a little slow in condemning what others do for it.

As the degrees of malignancy vary in people according as they have more or less of the Old Serpent (the father of hisses) in their composition, I have sometimes amused myself with a.n.a.lyzing this many-headed hydra, which calls itself the public, into the component parts of which it is "complicated, head and tail," and seeing how many varieties of the snake kind it can afford.

First, there is the Common English Snake.--This is that part of the auditory who are always the majority at d.a.m.nations, but who, having no critical venom in themselves to sting them on, stay till they hear others hiss, and then join in for company.

The Blind Worm is a species very nearly allied to the foregoing. Some naturalists have doubted whether they are not the same.

The Rattle Snake.--These are your obstreperous talking critics,--the impertinent guides of the pit,--who will not give a plain man leave to enjoy an evening's entertainment, but with their frothy jargon, and incessant finding of faults, either drown his pleasure quite, or force him in his own defence to join in their clamorous censure. The hiss always originates with these. When this creature springs his _rattle_, you would think, from the noise it makes, there was something in it; but you have only to examine the instrument from which the noise proceeds, and you will find it typical of a critic's tongue,--a shallow membrane, empty, voluble, and seated in the most contemptible part of the creature's body.

The Whip Snake.--This is he that lashes the poor author the next day in the newspapers.

The Deaf Adder, or Surda Echidna of Linnaeus.--Under this head may be cla.s.sed all that portion of the spectators (for audience they properly are not) who not finding the first act of a piece answer to their preconceived notions of what a first act should be, like _Obstinate_ in _John Bunyan_, positively thrust their fingers in their ears, that they may not hear a word of what is coming, though perhaps the very next act may be composed in a style as different as possible, and be written quite to their own tastes. These Adders refuse to hear the voice of the charmer, because the tuning of his instrument gave them offence.

I should weary you and myself too, if I were to go through all the cla.s.ses of the serpent kind. Two qualities are common to them all. They are creatures of remarkably cold digestions, and chiefly haunt _pits_ and low grounds.

I proceed with more pleasure to give you an account of a Club to which I have the honour to belong. There are fourteen of us, who are all authors that have been once in our lives what is called _d.a.m.ned_. We meet on the anniversaries of our respective nights, and make ourselves merry at the expence of the public. The chief tenets which distinguish our society, and which every man among us is bound to hold for gospel, are,--

That the public, or mob, in all ages, have been a set of blind, deaf, obstinate, senseless, illiterate savages. That no man of genius in his senses would be ambitious of pleasing such a capricious, ungrateful rabble. That the only legitimate end of writing for them is to pick their pockets, and, _that failing_, we are at full liberty to vilify and abuse them as much as ever we think fit.

That authors, by their affected pretences to humility, which they make use of as a cloak to insinuate their writings into the callous senses of the mult.i.tude, obtuse to every thing but the grossest flattery, have by degrees made that great beast their master; as we may act submission to children till we are obliged to practise it in earnest. That authors are and ought to be considered the masters and preceptors of the public, and not _vice versa_. That it was so in the days of Orpheus, Linus, and Musaeus, and would be so again, if it were not that writers prove traitors to themselves. That in particular, in the days of the first of those three great authors just mentioned, audiences appear to have been perfect models of what audiences should be; for though along with the trees and the rocks and the wild creatures, which he drew after him to listen to his strains, some serpents doubtless came to hear his music, it does not appear that any one among them ever lifted up a _dissentient voice_. They knew what was due to authors in those days. Now every stock and stone turns into a serpent, and has a voice.

That the terms "Courteous Reader" and "Candid Auditors," as having given rise to a false notion in those to whom they were applied, as if they conferred upon them some right, _which they cannot have_, of exercising their judgments, ought to be utterly banished and exploded.

These are our distinguis.h.i.+ng tenets. To keep up the memory of the cause in which we suffered, as the ancients sacrificed a goat, a supposed unhealthy animal, to aesculapius, on our feast-nights we cut up a goose, an animal typical of the _popular voice_, to the deities of Candour and Patient Hearing. A zealous member of the society once proposed that we should revive the obsolete luxury of viper-broth; but the stomachs of some of the company rising at the proposition, we lost the benefit of that highly salutary and _antidotal dish_.

The privilege of admission to our club is strictly limited to such as have been fairly _d.a.m.ned_. A piece that has met with ever so little applause, that has but languished its night or two, and then gone out, will never ent.i.tle its author to a seat among us. An exception to our usual readiness in conferring this privilege is, in the case of a writer, who having been once condemned, writes again, and becomes candidate for a second martyrdom. Simple d.a.m.nation we hold to be a merit, but to be twice-d.a.m.ned we adjudge infamous. Such a one we utterly reject, and black-ball without a hearing:--

_The common d.a.m.n'd shun his society._

Hoping that your publication of our Regulations may be a means of inviting some more members into our society, I conclude this long letter. I am, Sir, yours,

SEMEL-d.a.m.nATUS.

ON BURIAL SOCIETIES; AND THE CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER

(1811. TEXT OF 1818)

_To the Editor of the Reflector_

Mr. Reflector,--I was amused the other day with having the following notice thrust into my hand by a man who gives out bills at the corner of Fleet-market. Whether he saw any prognostics about me, that made him judge such notice seasonable, I cannot say; I might perhaps carry in a countenance (naturally not very florid) traces of a fever which had not long left me. Those fellows have a good instinctive way of guessing at the sort of people that are likeliest to pay attention to their papers.

"BURIAL SOCIETY

"A favourable opportunity now offers to any person, of either s.e.x, who would wish to be buried in a genteel manner, by paying one s.h.i.+lling entrance, and two-pence per week for the benefit of the stock. Members to be free in six months. The money to be paid at Mr.

Middleton's, at the sign of the _First_ and the _Last_, Stonecutter's street, Fleet-market. The deceased to be furnished as follows:--A strong elm coffin, covered with superfine black, and finished with two rows, all round, close drove, best j.a.panned nails, and adorned with ornamental drops, a handsome plate of inscription, Angel above, and Flower beneath, and four pair of handsome handles, with wrought grips; the coffin to be well pitched, lined, and ruffled with fine c.r.a.pe; a handsome c.r.a.pe shroud, cap, and pillow.

For use, a handsome velvet pall, three gentlemen's cloaks, three c.r.a.pe hatbands, three hoods and scarfs, and six pair of gloves; two porters equipped to attend the funeral, a man to attend the same with band and gloves; also, the burial fees paid, if not exceeding one guinea."

"Man," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is a n.o.ble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave." Whoever drew up this little advertis.e.m.e.nt, certainly understood this appet.i.te in the species, and has made abundant provision for it. It really almost induces a _taedium vitae_ upon one to read it. Methinks I could be willing to die, in death to be so attended.

The two rows all round close-drove best black j.a.panned nails,--how feelingly do they invite and almost irresistibly persuade us to come and be fastened down! what aching head can resist the temptation to repose, which the c.r.a.pe shroud, the cap, and the pillow present; what sting is there in death, which the handles with wrought gripes are not calculated to pluck away? what victory in the grave, which the drops and the velvet pall do not render at least extremely disputable; but above all, the pretty emblematic plate with the Angel above and the Flower beneath, takes me mightily.