which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his
reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from
the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it Iisteth,8 at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. * * * Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how many dramatic personages are there in Shakespeare, which, though more tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be shewn to our bodily eye. Othello
for instance. Nothing can be more soothing, more flattering to the nobler parts
of our natures, than to read of a young Venetian lady of highest extraction,
through the force of love and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved,
laying aside every consideration of kindred, and country, and colour, and wed
ding with a coal-black Moor?(for such he is represented, in the imperfect
state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those days, compared with
our own, or in compliance with popular notions, though the Moors are now
well enough known to be by many shades less unworthy of a white woman's
fancy)?it is the perfect triumph of virtue over accidents,9 of the imagination
over the senses. She sees Othello's colour in his mind.1 But upon the stage,
when the imagination is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our
poor unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello played,
whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in his colour; whether
he did not find something extremely revolting in the courtship and wedded
caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and whether the actual sight of the thing
8. Echo of Christ's discussion of the mysteries of qualities that are extraneous to?i.e., not of the spiritual rebirth in John 3.8. essence of?an object.
9. 'Accidents' in the sense used for properties or I. Othello 1.3.247.
.
496 / CHARLES LAMB
did not over-weigh all that beautiful compromise which we make in reading.
And the reason it should do so is obvious, because there is just so much reality
presented to our senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with not
enough of belief in the internal motives,?all that which is unseen,?to over
power and reconcile the first and obvious prejudices. What we see upon a
stage is body and bodily action; what we are conscious of in reading is almost
exclusively the mind, and its movements: and this I think may sufficiently
account for the very different sort of delight with which the same play so often
affects us in the reading and the seeing.
1811 1811
Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago'
In Mr. Lamb's Works, published a year or two since, I find a magnificent
eulogy on my old school, such as it was, or now appears to him to have been,
between the years 1782 and 1789. It happens very oddly that my own standing
at Christ's was nearly corresponding with his; and, with all gratitude to him
for his enthusiasm for the cloisters, I think he has contrived to bring together
whatever can be said in praise of them, dropping all the other side of the
argument most ingeniously. I remember L. at school, and can well recollect that he had some peculiar
advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived
in town, and were near at hand; and he had the privilege of going to see them
almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction, which was
denied to us. The present worthy subtreasurer to the Inner Temple2 can
explain how that happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, while
we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf?our crug?moistened
with attenuated small beer, in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leath
