WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS
This is a reflec ve essays, the major por on of which is personal and autobiographical. Lamb regrets
the fact that we o en accuse our ancestors of believing in some of the most absurd supers ons.
When people were supers ous, they could not dis nguish between supers ons that were less
absurd and those that were most absurd. Living in the mes of witchcra our ancestors were naturally
inclined to believe in supers ons of all kinds, even the most irra onal and fantas c. Thus they
believed most maidens pined away, and died slowly as their waxen images melted before a fire. They
believed that corn was beaten down or laid flat, and ca le lamed by evil spirits. They believed that
witches in a whirlwind uprooted oak trees in a forest. Having no laws or standards by which to test the
truth of such beliefs, they simply accepted that tradi on handed down to them.
Certain things connected with witchcra , says Lamb, cannot be explained. For instance, it was believed
that certain old women, whom our ancestors called witches, were in alliance with the devil and could
cast magic spells. If this belief was correct, one fails to understand why these witches could not protect
themselves against the law when they were taken into custody and tried on charges of witchcra . We
should have expected Prospero to defend himself against his enemies by means of his magic when he
was being transported by them to a distant island; but he did not do so.
Lamb then recalls some experiences of his own childhood. As a child he was extremely inquisi ve
about witches and witch-stories. In this respect he was encouraged by his aunt and by his nurse who
told him many such stories. But his curiosity about these ma ers was aroused originally by a copy of
Stackhouse's Bible. This Bible contained many pictures, one of them being that of the witch raising up
Samuel*. This par cular picture produced a deep effect upon Lamb's mind.
Stackhouse's Bible contained also the objec ons that could be raised against the Old Testament
stories, and answers to those objec ons. The objec ons made Lamb doubt the genuineness of the
stories, and he became somewhat of a scep c regarding those Biblical stories. In fact he began to
invent objec ons of his own and to discover new grounds for disbelieving those stories. He would in
this way have got lost amid his doubts and perplexi es had not the Bible been taken away from him
when he accidentally damaged it.
Between the ages of four and eight years, Lamb was extremely sensi ve to the terrors of the darkness,
night, and solitude. Whenever he was alone at night, he used to see upon his pillow the dreadful figure
of the witch raising up Samuel. He had seen this witch in Stackhouse's Bible, and his nightly fears
always took the shape of that witch. Even if he had never seen that picture in the Bible, he would have
experienced his nightly terrors, but in that case his terrors would have taken some other shape. Stories
of frigh ul supernatural monsters merely represent in a symbolic form the innate terrors of the human
mind. The terrors existed before the stories were invented. The stories of Gorgons, Hydras, and
Chimaeras simply give a concrete shape to the terrors which already existed in men's minds. Terrors
which human beings experience are inborn and ins nc ve.
With maturity, Lamb goes on to tell us, his night fancies have ceased to be terrifying. He now has only
an occasional nightmare. Even his dreams have become rather tame. He now dreams of architecture
and of buildings in foreign ci es which he has never actually seen. In his dreams he has visited Rome,
Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon-their churches, palaces, squares, market- places, shops, suburbs, ruins, etc.
But he has not been able to see high mountains in his dreams. The poverty of his dreams fills him with
a sense of shame, says Lamb. He envies Coleridge who could dream of icy domes and luxury-palaces
for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids and songs of Abora. He also envies Barry Cornwall who could
visualize tritons and nereids and sons of Neptune. One night, a er reading a poem by Barry Cornwall,
Lamb did dream of a sea-wedding which he a ended, but soon in his dream he found himself over the
river Thames and landed somewhere at the foot of Lambeth Palace. In other words, even his most
poe c dreams now have a prosaic ending. A man may see poe cal dreams in his sleep and yet may
not give much evidence of a poe cal temperament in his waking moments. Lamb, knowing himself to
be prosaic by nature, never a empts the wri ng of poetry even when a poe cal mood comes upon
him.
The two closing paragraphs amuse us by Lamb's disparagement of himself, "I am almost ashamed to
say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown," he writes and goes on to say us a humorous account
of a dream at the end of which he found himself over the familiar river Thames instead of on the sea
in the company of nereids (or sea-nymphs). The essay which began on a serious note ends light-
heartedly, with Lamb providing some humour at his own-cost.
The essay abounds in allusion-to the Bible, to classical mythology, to Shakespeare, Spenser, Coleridge,
Dante, and so on. These allusions, none of them obscure, enhance the interest of Lamb's medita ons
and observa ons. Many of his views tally with our own and so we are enabled partly to iden fy
ourselves with the author. The essay is free, too, from the obscuri es of style which are found in some
of Lamb's other essays.
BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY IN THE PRODUCTION OF MODERN ART
Lamb’s Elia essay “Barrenness of the Imagina ve Faculty in the Produc on of Modern Art, ” intended
originally for The Englishman’ s Magazine, was partly printed by Forster in The Reflector and finally
printed in full in The Athenæum in January and February, 1833
“Barrenness of the Imagina ve Faculty in the Produc ons of Modern Art” is a cri cism of the prevailing
taste in ma ers of art, inspired by Mar n’ s “Belshazzar's Feast, ” and contrasts the modern methods
of pain ng as a Dryad, “a beau ful naked figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks” where a figure
that with a different background would do just as well as a Naiad. Lamb takes recourse to the argument
that the older method illustrated by Julio Romano’ s dryad, in which was “ an approxima on of two
natures.” .
Lamb’s usual prac ce is to interweave with his tapestry of illusion a thread of reality. By this technique
he creates the typically Elian point of view, in which the wonder and faith of a child interact with the
awareness an adult. Underlying this procedure is Lamb’ s abiding convic on that there is more than
one side to every ques on. At mes, no doubt, it was the conflict between his personal predilec ons
and the reigning philosophy of life which led to assert that beauty is as important as u lity, that there
is poe c knowledge as well as scien fic. But we find him reminding his readers of less congenial truths
as well: imagina ve free will is hedged by realis c necessity, me, which brings the charm of an quity,
is also the agent death and decay. At mes, Lamb seems intent on adjus ng an imbalance in his own
pronouncements. “Barrenness of the Imagina ve Faculty in the Produc ons of Modern Art” reasserts
rights of his subject. Like the elements of illusion and reality elsewhere, these two essays modify rather
than contradict other. Nevertheless, Lamb a empts no explicit synthesis of their arguments –perhaps
doubts whether a perfectly sa sfactory one is possible.
f Lamb usually generates affect by juxtaposing the fanciful and the literal, ironically undercu ng the
former with the la er, he will also recognize the danger of too oppressive a literalizing move, one
which does not subsume literalness to the ironic and so affec ve func on it serves. In “Barrenness of
the Imagina ve Faculty in the Produc ons of Modern Art, ” he protests against the minute par culars
which realis c pain ng seems to entail: “Not all that is op cally possible to be seen, is to be shown in
every picture. . . . By a wise falsifica on, the great masters of pain ng got at their true conclusions; by
not showing the actual appearances, that is, all that was to be seen at any given moment by an
indifferent eye, but only what the eye might be supposed to see in the doing or suffering of some
portentous ac on.” When it is a ques on of subjects like Lamb, Elia, in a beau fully economic move,
follows the standard programme of an affec ng defla on (through the two idle boasters who are his
stand-ins), but at the same me guards against the severe demys fica on of too literal a view, the
view of the realis c picture. Here there is evidence that “the case of Elia” may not be en rely
invulnerable to the impingements of the perverse literalists
In his essay “ Barrenness of the Imagina ve Faculty in the Produc ons of Modern Art, ” Charles Lamb
laments the lack of deep imagina on in the art of his day when compared to the works of the great
masters. Lamb begins his essay with a series of ques ons that bring out his main point. Modern ar sts
lack the imagina on to go deeply into a situa on or scene or character and cannot, therefore, truly
bring it to life on the canvas. The art they produce is superficial compared with older pieces that
capture the deepest emo ons and the intricate rela onships of their scenes.
The author provides several examples to illustrate the contrast between modern artworks and their
greater predecessors. The modern pieces simply do not compare, for they lack the details and the
emo ons of the older works. Lamb actually calls modern ar sts cowardly. They are shallow. They do
not want to give themselves to a scene and explore every detail of it with their imagina ons. They are
content to skim the surface, and this makes for dull art that lacks the deep meanings of older pieces.
Lamb knew the Authorized Version of the Bible well. There is plenty of evidence that he knew its
phrases by heart, and loved them. He writes in the essay “Barrenness of the Imagina ve Faculty in the
Produc ons of Modern art” of what he calls “the magnificent Hebraism” of “Sun, stand thou s ll upon
Gibeah, and thou Moon, in the valley of Ajalon, ” quo ng Joshua 10:12. “ The magnificent Hebraism”
raises the interes ng ques on about what languages Lamb knew.
During Lamb’ s me history pain ng was fast sinking under the burden of its esoteric rhetoric; its
limited canons of extrinsic form seemed quaint and pallid alongside the subjec ve power of a sublime
landscape. And the stage picture had already so completely arrogated the discourse of the picturesque
landscape that few 4 patrons shared Charles Lamb’ s disgust with a stage that was the enemy of poe c
imagina on because it was – even more than the “ material sublime” it emulated, “deeply
corporealised, and enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fe ers of externality.”