The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2: Elia and The Last Essays of EliaLamb, Charles
General
The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2: Elia and The Last Essays of Elia
Lamb, Charles
English essays
"Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeah, and thou, Moon, in the valley of
Ajalon." Who, in reading this magnificent Hebraism, in his conception,
sees aught but the heroic son of Nun, with the out-stretched arm,
and the greater and lesser light obsequious? Doubtless there were to
be seen hill and dale, and chariots and horsemen, on open plain, or
winding by secret defiles, and all the circumstances and stratagems
of war. But whose eyes would have been conscious of this array at the
interposition of the synchronic miracle? Yet in the picture of this
subject by the artist of the "Belshazzar's Feast"--no ignoble work
either--the marshalling and landscape of the war is everything, the
miracle sinks into an anecdote of the day; and the eye may "dart
through rank and file traverse" for some minutes, before it shall
discover, among his armed followers, _which is Joshua_! Not modern art
alone, but ancient, where only it is to be found if anywhere, can be
detected erring, from defect of this imaginative faculty. The world
has nothing to show of the preternatural in painting, transcending the
figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes, in the great picture at
Angerstein's. It seems a thing between two beings. A ghastly horror
at itself struggles with newly-apprehending gratitude at second life
bestowed. It cannot forget that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt
that it is a body. It has to tell of the world of spirits.--Was it
from a feeling, that the crowd of half-impassioned by-standers, and
the still more irrelevant herd of passers-by at a distance, who have
not heard or but faintly have been told of the passing miracle,
admirable as they are in design and hue--for it is a glorified
work--do not respond adequately to the action--that the single figure
of the Lazarus has been attributed to Michael Angelo, and the mighty
Sebastian unfairly robbed of the fame of the greater half of the
interest? Now that there were not indifferent passers-by within actual
scope of the eyes of those present at the miracle, to whom the sound
of it had but faintly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood
to deny; but would they see them? or can the mind in the conception of
it admit of such unconcerning objects? can it think of them at all? or
what associating league to the imagination can there be between the
seers, and the seers not, of a presential miracle?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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