Write a note on pathos and humour of charles lamb essay.
Answers
Explanation:
Charles Lamb is a great artist in showing humour and pathos in a single row. He had as keen a perception of the funny side of life as he had of the tragic. The funny side and the sense of humour never desert him. And we find a curious mingling of there two (humour and pathos) ingredients in his works. Laughter is followed by tears of sympathy in many of his essays. Moreover, humour may be described as an extreme sensitiveness to the true proportion of things and pathos that appeals to our feelings of compassion and evokes sympathy. In some essays, we have Pathos and Humour alternating each other, in others we have the two elements coexisting in the same passion that we see pathos and humour as facts of the same thing.
In the essays "South Sea House", we see humour and pathos existing side by side. Here we find the touch of humour and pathos at the same time. Here we have a melancholy note in his wistful description of the decaying building. We, the readers, feel sorry for its decadence. But the clerks of this company are masterpieces in comic characterization, where the groups of the clerks are described as "a sort of Noah's Ark" and "odd fishes". We laugh at John Tipp for making horrible sound while singing. Here Lamb says that John Tipp sang certainly, but "with other notes than to the Orphean lyre." What can e more effective way of saying that he did not sing well. The characterization of each clerk cannot fail to amuse but even while we laugh at the aristocratic pretensions of Thomas Tame. Lamb says, "He had the air and stoop of a nobleman." By stoop the author means "that gentle bending of the body forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed to be the effect of an habitual codescending attention to the applications of their inferiors."