The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Part 12

[7] Lines inscribed under the plate.

Is it carrying the spirit of comparison to excess to remark, that in the poor kneeling weeping female, who accompanies her seducer in his sad decay, there is something a.n.a.logous to Kent, or Caius, as he delights rather to be called, in _Lear_,--the n.o.blest pattern of virtue which even Shakspeare has conceived,--who follows his royal master in banishment, that had p.r.o.nounced _his_ banishment, and forgetful at once of his wrongs and dignities, taking on himself the disguise of a menial, retains his fidelity to the figure, his loyalty to the carca.s.s, the shadow, the sh.e.l.l and empty husk of Lear?

In the perusal of a book, or of a picture, much of the impression which we receive depends upon the habit of mind which we bring with us to such perusal. The same circ.u.mstance may make one person laugh, which shall render another very serious; or in the same person the first impression may be corrected by after-thought. The misemployed incongruous characters at the _Harlot's Funeral_, on a superficial inspection, provoke to laughter; but when we have sacrificed the first emotion to levity, a very different frame of mind succeeds, or the painter has lost half his purpose. I never look at that wonderful a.s.semblage of depraved beings, who, without a grain of reverence or pity in their perverted minds, are performing the sacred exteriors of duty to the relics of their departed partner in folly, but I am as much moved to sympathy from the very want of it in them, as I should be by the finest representation of a virtuous death-bed surrounded by real mourners, pious children, weeping friends,--perhaps more by the very contrast. What reflexions does it not awake, of the dreadful heartless state in which the creature (a female too) must have lived, who in death wants the accompaniment of one genuine tear. That wretch who is removing the lid of the coffin to gaze upon the corpse with a face which indicates a perfect negation of all goodness or womanhood--the hypocrite parson and his demure partner--all the fiendish group--to a thoughtful mind present a moral emblem more affecting than if the poor friendless carca.s.s had been depicted as thrown out to the woods, where wolves had a.s.sisted at its obsequies, itself furnis.h.i.+ng forth its own funeral banquet.

It is easy to laugh at such incongruities as are met together in this picture,--incongruous objects being of the very essence of laughter,--but surely the laugh is far different in its kind from that thoughtless species to which we are moved by mere farce and grotesque.

We laugh when Ferdinand Count Fathom, at the first sight of the white cliffs of Britain, feels his heart yearn with filial fondness towards the land of his progenitors, which he is coming to fleece and plunder,--we smile at the exquisite irony of the pa.s.sage,--but if we are not led on by such pa.s.sages to some more salutary feeling than laughter, we are very negligent perusers of them in book or picture.

It is the fas.h.i.+on with those who cry up the great Historical School in this country, at the head of which Sir Joshua Reynolds is placed, to exclude Hogarth from that school, as an artist of an inferior and vulgar cla.s.s. Those persons seem to me to confound the painting of subjects in common or vulgar life with the being a vulgar artist. The quant.i.ty of thought which Hogarth crowds into every picture, would alone _unvulgarize_ every subject which he might choose. Let us take the lowest of his subjects, the print called _Gin Lane_. Here is plenty of poverty and low stuff to disgust upon a superficial view; and accordingly, a cold spectator feels himself immediately disgusted and repelled. I have seen many turn away from it, not being able to bear it.

The same persons would perhaps have looked with great complacency upon Poussin's celebrated picture of the _Plague of Athens_.[8] Disease and Death and bewildering Terror in _Athenian garments_ are endurable, and come, as the delicate critics express it, within the "limits of pleasurable sensation." But the scenes of their own St. Giles's, delineated by their own countryman, are too shocking to think of. Yet if we could abstract our minds from the fascinating colours of the picture, and forget the coa.r.s.e execution (in some respects) of the print, intended as it was to be a cheap plate, accessible to the poorer sort of people, for whose instruction it was done, I think we could have no hesitation in conferring the palm of superior genius upon Hogarth, comparing this work of his with Poussin's picture. There is more of imagination in it--that power which draws all things to one,--which makes things animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects and their accessories, take one colour, and serve to one effect. Every thing in the print, to use a vulgar expression, _tells_.

Every part is full of "strange images of death." It is perfectly amazing and astounding to look at. Not only the two prominent figures, the woman and the half-dead man, which are as terrible as any thing which Michael Angelo ever drew, but every thing else in the print contributes to bewilder and stupefy,--the very houses, as I heard a friend of mine express it, tumbling all about in various directions, seem drunk--seem absolutely reeling from the effect of that diabolical spirit of phrenzy which goes forth over the whole composition.--To shew the poetical and almost prophetical conception in the artist, one little circ.u.mstance may serve. Not content with the dying and dead figures, which he has strewed in profusion over the proper scene of the action, he shews you what (of a kindred nature) is pa.s.sing beyond it. Close by the sh.e.l.l, in which, by direction of the parish beadle, a man is depositing his wife, is an old wall, which, partaking of the universal decay around it, is tumbling to pieces. Through a gap in this wall are seen three figures, which appear to make a part in some funeral procession which is pa.s.sing by on the other side of the wall, out of the sphere of the composition. This extending of the interest beyond the bounds of the subject could only have been conceived by a great genius. Shakspeare, in his description of the painting of the Trojan War, in his _Tarquin and Lucrece_, has introduced a similar device, where the painter made a part stand for the whole:--

For much imaginary work was there, Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles' image stood his spear, Grip'd in an armed hand; himself behind Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind; A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head, Stood for the whole to be imagined.

[8] At the late Mr. Hope's, in Cavendish-square.

This he well calls _imaginary work_, where the spectator must meet the artist in his conceptions half way; and it is peculiar to the confidence of high genius alone to trust so much to spectators or readers. Lesser artists shew every thing distinct and full, as they require an object to be made out to themselves before they can comprehend it.

When I think of the power displayed in this (I will not hesitate to say) sublime print, it seems to me the extreme narrowness of system alone, and of that rage for cla.s.sification, by which, in matters of taste at least, we are perpetually perplexing instead of arranging our ideas, that would make us concede to the work of Poussin above-mentioned, and deny to this of Hogarth, the name of a grand serious composition.

We are for ever deceiving ourselves with names and theories. We call one man a great historical painter, because he has taken for his subjects kings or great men, or transactions over which time has thrown a grandeur. We term another the painter of common life, and set him down in our minds for an artist of an inferior cla.s.s, without reflecting whether the quant.i.ty of thought shewn by the latter may not much more than level the distinction which their mere choice of subjects may seem to place between them; or whether, in fact, from that very common life a great artist may not extract as deep an interest as another man from that which we are pleased to call history.

I entertain the highest respect for the talents and virtues of Reynolds, but I do not like that his reputation should overshadow and stifle the merits of such a man as Hogarth, nor that to mere names and cla.s.sifications we should be content to sacrifice one of the greatest ornaments of England.

I would ask the most enthusiastic admirer of Reynolds, whether in the countenances of his _Staring_ and _Grinning Despair_, which he has given us for the faces of Ugolino and dying Beaufort, there be any thing comparable to the expression which Hogarth has put into the face of his broken-down rake in the last plate but one of the _Rake's Progress_,[9]

where a letter from the manager is brought to him to say that his play "will not do?" Here all is easy, natural, undistorted, but withal what a ma.s.s of woe is here acc.u.mulated!--the long history of a mis-spent life is compressed into the countenance as plainly as the series of plates before had told it; here is no attempt at Gorgonian looks which are to freeze the beholder, no grinning at the antique bedposts, no face-making, or consciousness of the presence of spectators in or out of the picture, but grief kept to a man's self, a face retiring from notice with the shame which great anguish sometimes brings with it,--a final leave taken of hope,--the coming on of vacancy and stupefaction,--a beginning alienation of mind looking like tranquillity. Here is matter for the mind of the beholder to feed on for the hour together,--matter to feed and fertilize the mind. It is too real to admit one thought about the power of the artist who did it.--When we compare the expression in subjects which so fairly admit of comparison, and find the superiority so clearly to remain with Hogarth, shall the mere contemptible difference of the scene of it being laid in the one case in our Fleet or King's Bench Prison, and in the other in the State Prison of Pisa, or the bed-room of a cardinal,--or that the subject of the one has never been authenticated, and the other is matter of history,--so weigh down the real points of the comparison, as to induce us to rank the artist who has chosen the one scene or subject (though confessedly inferior in that which const.i.tutes the soul of his art) in a cla.s.s from which we exclude the better genius (who has happened to make choice of the other) with something like disgrace?[10]

[9] The first perhaps in all Hogarth for serious expression. That which comes next to it, I think, is the jaded morning countenance of the debauchee in the second plate of the _Marriage Alamode_, which lectures on the vanity of pleasure as audibly as any thing in Ecclesiastes.

[10] Sir Joshua Reynolds, somewhere in his lectures, speaks of the _presumption_ of Hogarth in attempting the grand style in painting, by which he means his choice of certain Scripture subjects.

Hogarth's excursions into Holy Land were not very numerous, but what he has left us in this kind have at least this merit, that they have expression of _some sort or other_ in them,--the _Child Moses before Pharaoh's Daughter_, for instance: which is more than can be said of Sir Joshua Reynolds's _Repose in Egypt_, painted for Macklin's Bible, where for a Madona he has subst.i.tuted a sleepy, insensible, unmotherly girl, one so little worthy to have been selected as the Mother of the Saviour, that she seems to have neither heart nor feeling to ent.i.tle her to become a mother at all. But indeed the race of Virgin Mary painters seems to have been cut up, root and branch, at the Reformation. Our artists are too good Protestants to give life to that admirable commixture of maternal tenderness with reverential awe and wonder approaching to wors.h.i.+p, with which the Virgin Mothers of L. da Vinci and Raphael (themselves by their divine countenances inviting men to wors.h.i.+p) contemplate the union of the two natures in the person of their Heaven-born Infant.

The _Boys under Demoniacal Possession_ of Raphael and Dominichino, by what law of cla.s.sification are we bound to a.s.sign them to belong to the great style in painting, and to degrade into an inferior cla.s.s the Rake of Hogarth when he is the Madman in the Bedlam scene? I am sure he is far more impressive than either. It is a face which no one that has seen can easily forget. There is the stretch of human suffering to the utmost endurance, severe bodily pain brought on by strong mental agony, the frightful obstinate laugh of madness,--yet all so unforced and natural, that those who never were witness to madness in real life, think they see nothing but what is familiar to them in this face. Here are no tricks of distortion, nothing but the natural face of agony. This is high tragic painting, and we might as well deny to Shakspeare the honours of a great tragedian, because he has interwoven scenes of mirth with the serious business of his plays, as refuse to Hogarth the same praise for the two concluding scenes of the _Rake's Progress_, because of the Comic Lunatics[11] which he has thrown into the one, or the Alchymist that he has introduced in the other, who is paddling in the coals of his furnace, keeping alive the flames of vain hope within the very walls of the prison to which the vanity has conducted him, which have taught the darker lesson of extinguished hope to the desponding figure who is the princ.i.p.al person of the scene.

[11]

There are of madmen, as there are of tame, All humour'd not alike. We have here some So apish and fantastic, play with a feather; And though 'twould grieve a soul to see G.o.d's image So blemish'd and defac'd, yet do they act Such antick and such pretty lunacies, That, spite of sorrow, they will make you smile.

Others again we have, like angry lions, Fierce as wild bulls, untameable as flies.

"Honest Wh.o.r.e."

It is the force of these kindly admixtures, which a.s.similates the scenes of Hogarth and of Shakspeare to the drama of real life, where no such thing as pure tragedy is to be found; but merriment and infelicity, ponderous crime and feather-light vanity, like twiformed births, disagreeing complexions of one intertexture, perpetually unite to shew forth motley spectacles to the world. Then it is that the poet or painter shews his art, when in the selection of these comic adjuncts he chooses such circ.u.mstances as shall relieve, contrast with, or fall into, without forming a violent opposition to, his princ.i.p.al object. Who sees not that the Grave-digger in _Hamlet_, the Fool in _Lear_, have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt, while the comic stuff in _Venice Preserved_, and the doggrel nonsense of the Cook and his poisoning a.s.sociates in the _Rollo_ of Beaumont and Fletcher, are pure, irrelevant, impertinent discords,--as bad as the quarrelling dog and cat under the table of the _Lord and the Disciples at Emmaus_ of t.i.tian?

Not to tire the reader with perpetual reference to prints which he may not be fortunate enough to possess, it may be sufficient to remark, that the same tragic cast of expression and incident, blended in some instances with a greater alloy of comedy, characterizes his other great work, the _Marriage Alamode_, as well as those less elaborate exertions of his genius, the prints called _Industry and Idleness_, the _Distrest Poet_, &c. forming, with the _Harlot's_ and _Rake's Progresses_, the most considerable if not the largest cla.s.s of his productions,--enough surely to rescue Hogarth from the imputation of being a mere buffoon, or one whose general aim was only to _shake the sides_.

There remains a very numerous cla.s.s of his performances, the object of which must be confessed to be princ.i.p.ally comic. But in all of them will be found something to distinguish them from the droll productions of Bunbury and others. They have this difference, that we do not merely laugh at, we are led into long trains of reflection by them. In this respect they resemble the characters of Chaucer's _Pilgrims_, which have strokes of humour in them enough to designate them for the most part as comic, but our strongest feeling still is wonder at the comprehensiveness of genius which could crowd, as poet and painter have done, into one small canvas so many diverse yet co-operating materials.

The faces of Hogarth have not a mere momentary interest, as in caricatures, or those grotesque physiognomies which we sometimes catch a glance of in the street, and, struck with their whimsicality, wish for a pencil and the power to sketch them down; and forget them again as rapidly,--but they are permanent abiding ideas. Not the sports of nature, but her necessary eternal cla.s.ses. We feel that we cannot part with any of them, lest a link should be broken.

It is worthy of observation, that he has seldom drawn a mean or insignificant countenance.[12] Hogarth's mind was eminently reflective; and, as it has been well observed of Shakspeare, that he has transfused his own poetical character into the persons of his drama (they are all more or less _poets_) Hogarth has impressed a _thinking character_ upon the persons of his canvas. This remark must not be taken universally.

The exquisite idiotism of the little gentleman in the bag and sword beating his drum in the print of the _Enraged Musician_, would of itself rise up against so sweeping an a.s.sertion. But I think it will be found to be true of the generality of his countenances. The knife-grinder and Jew flute-player in the plate just mentioned may serve as instances instead of a thousand. They have intense thinking faces, though the purpose to which they are subservient by no means required it; but indeed it seems as if it was painful to Hogarth to contemplate mere vacancy or insignificance.

[12] If there are any of that description, they are in his _Strolling Players_, a print which has been cried up by Lord Orford as the richest of his productions, and it may be, for what I know, in the mere lumber, the properties, and dead furniture of the scene, but in living character and expression it is (for Hogarth) lamentably poor and wanting; it is perhaps the only one of his performances at which we have a right to feel disgusted.

This reflection of the artist's own intellect from the faces of his characters, is one reason why the works of Hogarth, so much more than those of any other artist are objects of meditation. Our intellectual natures love the mirror which gives them back their own likenesses. The mental eye will not bend long with delight upon vacancy.

Another line of eternal separation between Hogarth and the common painters of droll or burlesque subjects, with whom he is often confounded, is the sense of beauty, which in the most unpromising subjects seems never wholly to have deserted him. "Hogarth himself,"

says Mr. Coleridge,[13] from whom I have borrowed this observation, speaking of a scene which took place at Ratzeburg, "never drew a more ludicrous distortion, both of att.i.tude and physiognomy, than this effect occasioned: nor was there wanting beside it one of those beautiful female faces which the same Hogarth, _in whom the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a poet_, so often and so gladly introduces as the central figure in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figure (such is the power of true genius) neither acts nor is meant to act as a contrast; but diffuses through all, and over each of the group, a spirit of reconciliation and human kindness; and even when the attention is no longer consciously directed to the cause of this feeling, still blends its tenderness with our laughter: and _thus prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of nature, or the foibles or humours of our fellow-men, from degenerating into the heart-poison of contempt or hatred_." To the beautiful females in Hogarth, which Mr. C. has pointed out, might be added, the frequent introduction of children (which Hogarth seems to have taken a particular delight in) into his pieces. They have a singular effect in giving tranquillity and a portion of their own innocence to the subject.

The baby riding in its mother's lap in the _March to Finchley_, (its careless innocent face placed directly behind the intriguing time-furrowed countenance of the treason-plotting French priest) perfectly sobers the whole of that tumultuous scene. The boy mourner winding up his top with so much unpretended insensibility in the plate of the _Harlot's Funeral_, (the only thing in that a.s.sembly that is not a hypocrite) quiets and soothes the mind that has been disturbed at the sight of so much depraved man and woman kind.

[13] _The Friend_, No. XVI.

I had written thus far, when I met with a pa.s.sage in the writings of the late Mr. Barry, which, as it falls in with the _vulgar notion_ respecting Hogarth, which this Essay has been employed in combating, I shall take the liberty to transcribe, with such remarks as may suggest themselves to me in the transcription; referring the reader for a full answer to that which has gone before.

"Notwithstanding Hogarth's merit does undoubtedly ent.i.tle him to an honourable place amongst the artists, and that his little compositions considered as so many dramatic representations, abounding with humour, character, and extensive observations on the various incidents of low, faulty, and vicious life, are very ingeniously brought together, and frequently tell their own story with more facility than is often found in many of the elevated and more n.o.ble inventions of Raffael, and other great men; yet it must be honestly confessed, that in what is called knowledge of the figure, foreigners have justly observed, that Hogarth is often so raw, and uninformed, as hardly to deserve the name of an artist. But this capital defect is not often perceivable, as examples of the naked and of elevated nature but rarely occur in his subjects, which are for the most part filled with characters, that in their nature tend to deformity; besides, his figures are small, and the junctures, and other difficulties of drawing that might occur in their limbs, are artfully concealed with their cloaths, rags, &c. But what would atone for all his defects, even if they were twice told, is his admirable fund of invention, ever inexhaustible in its resources; and his satire, which is always sharp and pertinent, and often highly moral, was (except in a few instances, where he weakly and meanly suffered his integrity to give way to his envy) seldom or never employed in a dishonest or unmanly way.

Hogarth has been often imitated in his satirical vein, sometimes in his humorous; but very few have attempted to rival him in his moral walk.

The line of art pursued by my very ingenious predecessor and brother academician, Mr. Penny, is quite distinct from that of Hogarth, and is of a much more delicate and superior relish; he attempts the heart, and reaches it, whilst Hogarth's general aim is only to shake the sides: in other respects no comparison can be thought of, as Mr. Penny has all that knowledge of the figure and academical skill which the other wanted. As to Mr. Bunbury, who had so happily succeeded in the vein of humour and caricatura, he has for some time past altogether relinquished it, for the more amiable pursuit of beautiful nature: this indeed is not to be wondered at, when we recollect that he has, in Mrs. Bunbury, so admirable an exemplar of the most finished grace and beauty, continually at his elbow. But (to say all that occurs to me on this subject) perhaps it may be reasonably doubted, whether the being much conversant with Hogarth's method of exposing meanness, deformity, and vice, in many of his works, is not rather a dangerous, or, at least, a worthless pursuit; which, if it does not find a false relish, and a love of, and search after satire and buffoonery in the spectator, is at least not unlikely to give him one. Life is short, and the little leisure of it is much better laid out upon that species of art, which is employed upon the amiable and the admirable, as it is more likely to be attended with better and n.o.bler consequences to ourselves. These two pursuits in art, may be compared with two sets of people with whom we might a.s.sociate; if we give ourselves up to the Footes, the Kenricks, &c. we shall be continually busied, and paddling in whatever is ridiculous, faulty, and vicious in life; whereas there are those to be found, with whom we should be in the constant pursuit and study of all that gives a value and a dignity to human nature." [Account of a Series of Pictures in the Great Room of the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, at the Adelphi, by James Barry, R.A., Professor of Painting to the Royal Academy; reprinted in the last quarto edition of his works.]

"----it must be honestly confessed, that in what is called knowledge of the figure, foreigners have justly observed," &c.

It is a secret well known to the professors of the art and mystery of criticism, to insist upon what they do not find in a man's works, and to pa.s.s over in silence what they do. That Hogarth did not draw the naked figure so well as Michael Angelo might be allowed, especially as "examples of the naked," as Mr. Barry acknowledges, "rarely (he might almost have said never) occur in his subjects;" and that his figures under their draperies do not discover all the fine graces of an Antinous or an Apollo, may be conceded likewise; perhaps it was more suitable to his purpose to represent the average forms of mankind in the mediocrity (as Mr. Burke expresses it) of the age in which he lived: but that his figures in general, and in his best subjects, are so glaringly incorrect as is here insinuated, I dare trust my own eye so far as positively to deny the fact. And there is one part of the figure in which Hogarth is allowed to have excelled, which these foreigners seem to have overlooked, or perhaps calculating from its proportion to the whole (a seventh or an eighth, I forget which) deemed it of trifling importance; I mean the human face; a small part, reckoning by geographical inches, in the map of man's body, but here it is that the painter of expression must condense the wonders of his skill, even at the expense of neglecting the "jonctures and other difficulties of drawing in the limbs," which it must be a cold eye that in the interest so strongly demanded by Hogarth's countenances has leisure to survey and censure.

"The line of art pursued by my very ingenious predecessor and brother academician, Mr. Penny."

The first impression caused in me by reading this pa.s.sage, was an eager desire to know who this Mr. Penny was. This great surpa.s.ser of Hogarth in the "delicacy of his relish," and the "line which he pursued," where is he, what are his works, what has he to shew? In vain I tried to recollect, till by happily putting the question to a friend who is more conversant in the works of the ill.u.s.trious obscure than myself, I learned that he was the painter of a _Death of Wolfe_ which missed the prize the year that the celebrated picture of West on the same subject obtained it; that he also made a picture of the _Marquis of Granby relieving a Sick Soldier_; moreover, that he was the inventor of two pictures of _Suspended and Restored Animation_, which I now remember to have seen in the Exhibition some years since, and the prints from which are still extant in good men's houses. This then I suppose is the line of subjects in which Mr. Penny was so much superior to Hogarth. I confess I am not of that opinion. The relieving of poverty by the purse, and the restoring a young man to his parents by using the methods prescribed by the Humane Society, are doubtless very amiable subjects, pretty things to teach the first rudiments of humanity; they amount to about as much instruction as the stories of good boys that give away their custards to poor beggar-boys in children's books. But, good G.o.d!

is this _milk for babes_ to be set up in opposition to Hogarth's moral scenes, his _strong meat for men_? As well might we prefer the fulsome verses upon their own goodness, to which the gentlemen of the Literary Fund annually sit still with such shameless patience to listen, to the satires of Juvenal and Persius; because the former are full of tender images of Worth relieved by Charity, and Charity stretching out her hand to rescue sinking Genius, and the theme of the latter is men's crimes and follies with their black consequences--forgetful meanwhile of those strains of moral pathos, those sublime heart-touches, which these poets (in _them_ chiefly shewing themselves poets) are perpetually darting across the otherwise appalling gloom of their subject--consolatory remembrancers, when their pictures of guilty mankind have made us even to despair for our species, that there is such a thing as virtue and moral dignity in the world, that her unquenchable spark is not utterly out--refres.h.i.+ng admonitions, to which we turn for shelter from the too great heat and asperity of the general satire.

And is there nothing a.n.a.logous to this in Hogarth? nothing which "attempts and reaches the heart?"--no aim beyond that of "shaking the sides?"--if the kneeling ministering female in the last scene of the _Rake's Progress_, the Bedlam scene, of which I have spoken before, and have dared almost to parallel it with the most absolute idea of Virtue which Shakspeare has left us, be not enough to disprove the a.s.sertion; if the sad endings of the Harlot and the Rake, the pa.s.sionate heart-bleeding entreaties for forgiveness which the adulterous wife is pouring forth to her a.s.sa.s.sinated and dying lord in the last scene but one of the _Marriage Alamode_,--if these be not things to touch the heart, and dispose the mind to a meditative tenderness: is there nothing sweetly conciliatory in the mild, patient face and gesture with which the wife seems to allay and ventilate the feverish irritated feelings of her poor poverty-distracted mate (the true copy of the _genus irritabile_) in the print of the _Distrest Poet_? or if an image of maternal love be required, where shall we find a sublimer view of it than in that aged woman in _Industry and Idleness_ (plate v.) who is clinging with the fondness of hope not quite extinguished to her brutal vice-hardened child, whom she is accompanying to the s.h.i.+p which is to bear him away from his native soil, of which he has been adjudged unworthy: in whose shocking face every trace of the human countenance seems obliterated, and a brute beast's to be left instead, shocking and repulsive to all but her who watched over it in its cradle before it was so sadly altered, and feels it must belong to her while a pulse by the vindictive laws of his country shall be suffered to continue to beat in it. Compared with such things, what is Mr. Penny's "knowledge of the figure and academical skill which Hogarth wanted?"

With respect to what follows concerning another gentleman, with the congratulations to him on his escape out of the regions of "humour and caricatura," in which it appears he was in danger of travelling side by side with Hogarth, I can only congratulate my country, that Mrs. Hogarth knew _her_ province better than by disturbing her husband at his pallet to divert him from that universality of subject, which has stamped him perhaps, next to Shakspeare, the most inventive genius which this island has produced, into the "amiable pursuit of beautiful nature," _i.e._ copying ad infinitum the individual charms and graces of Mrs. H----.

"Hogarth's method of exposing meanness, deformity, and vice, paddling in whatever is ridiculous, faulty, and vicious."

A person unacquainted with the works thus stigmatised, would be apt to imagine, that in Hogarth there was nothing else to be found but subjects of the coa.r.s.est and most repulsive nature. That his imagination was naturally unsweet, and that he delighted in raking into every species of moral filth. That he preyed upon sore places only, and took a pleasure in exposing the unsound and rotten parts of human nature;--whereas, with the exception of some of the plates of the _Harlot's Progress_, which are harder in their character than any of the rest of his productions, (the _Stages of Cruelty_ I omit as mere worthless caricaturas, foreign to his general habits, the offspring of his fancy in some wayward humour), there is scarce one of his pieces where vice is most strongly satirised, in which some figure is not introduced upon which the moral eye may rest satisfied; a face that indicates goodness, or perhaps mere good humouredness and carelessness of mind (negation of evil) only, yet enough to give a relaxation to the frowning brow of satire, and keep the general air from tainting. Take the mild, supplicating posture of patient Poverty in the poor woman that is persuading the p.a.w.nbroker to accept her clothes in pledge, in the plate of _Gin Lane_, for an instance. A little does it, a little of the _good_ nature overpowers a world of _bad_. One cordial honest laugh of a Tom Jones absolutely clears the atmosphere that was reeking with the black putrifying breathings of a hypocrite Blifil. One homely expostulating shrug from Strap, warms the whole air which the suggestions of a gentlemanly ingrat.i.tude from his friend Random had begun to freeze. One "Lord bless us!" of Parson Adams upon the wickedness of the times, exorcises and purges off the ma.s.s of iniquity which the world-knowledge of even a Fielding could cull out and rake together. But of the severer cla.s.s of Hogarth's performances, enough, I trust, has been said to shew that they do not merely shock and repulse; that there is in them the "scorn of vice" and the "pity" too; something to touch the heart, and keep alive the sense of moral beauty; the "lacrymae rerum," and the sorrowing by which the heart is made better. If they be bad things, then is satire and tragedy a bad thing; let us proclaim at once an age of gold, and sink the existence of vice and misery in our speculations; let us

----wink, and shut our apprehensions up From common sense of what men were and are:

let us _make believe_ with the children that every body is good and happy; and, with Dr. Swift, write panegyrics upon the world.

But that larger half of Hogarth's works which were painted more for entertainment than instruction (though such was the suggestiveness of his mind, that there is always something to be learnt from them) his humourous scenes,--are they such as merely to disgust and set us against our species?

The confident a.s.sertions of such a man as I consider the late Mr. Barry to have been, have that weight of authority in them which staggers, at first hearing, even a long preconceived opinion. When I read his pathetic admonition concerning the shortness of life, and how much better the little leisure of it were laid out upon "that species of art which is employed about the amiable and the admirable;" and Hogarth's "method" proscribed as a "dangerous or worthless pursuit," I began to think there was something in it; that I might have been indulging all my life a pa.s.sion for the works of this artist, to the utter prejudice of my taste and moral sense; but my first convictions gradually returned, a world of good-natured English faces came up one by one to my recollection, and a glance at the matchless _Election Entertainment_, which I have the happiness to have hanging up in my parlour, subverted Mr. Barry's whole theory in an instant.

In that inimitable print, (which in my judgment as far exceeds the more known and celebrated _March to Finchley_, as the best comedy exceeds the best farce that ever was written,) let a person look till he be saturated, and when he has done wondering at the inventiveness of genius which could bring so many characters (more than thirty distinct cla.s.ses of face) into a room, and set them down at table together, or otherwise dispose them about, in so natural a manner, engage them in so many easy sets and occupations, yet all partaking of the spirit of the occasion which brought them together, so that we feel that nothing but an election time could have a.s.sembled them; having no central figure or princ.i.p.al group, (for the hero of the piece, the Candidate, is properly set aside in the levelling indistinction of the day, one must look for him to find him) nothing to detain the eye from pa.s.sing from part to part, where every part is alike instinct with life,--for here are no furniture-faces, no figures brought in to fill up the scene like stage choruses, but all dramatis personae: when he shall have done wondering at all these faces so strongly charactered, yet finished with the accuracy of the finest miniature; when he shall have done admiring the numberless appendages of the scene, those gratuitous doles which rich genius flings into the heap when it has already done enough, the over-measure which it delights in giving, as if its stores were exhaustless; the dumb rhetoric of the scenery--for tables, and chairs, and joint-stools in Hogarth, are living and significant things; the witticisms that are expressed by words, (all artists but Hogarth have failed when they have endeavoured to combine two mediums of expression, and have introduced words into their pictures), and the unwritten numberless little allusive pleasantries that are scattered about; the work that is going on in the scene, and beyond it, as is made visible to the "eye of mind," by the mob which choaks up the door-way, and the sword that has forced an entrance before its master: when he shall have sufficiently admired this wealth of genius, let him fairly say what is the _result_ left on his mind. Is it an impression of the vileness and worthlessness of his species? or is not the general feeling which remains, after the individual faces have ceased to act sensibly on his mind, a _kindly one in favour of his species_? was not the general air of the whole scene wholesome? did it do the heart hurt to be among it? Something of a riotous spirit to be sure is there, some worldly-mindedness in some of the faces, a Doddingtonian smoothness which does not promise any superfluous degree of sincerity in the fine gentleman who has been the occasion of calling so much good company together: but is not the general cast of expression in the faces, of the good sort? do they not seem cut out of the _good old rock_, substantial English honesty? would one fear treachery among characters of their expression? or shall we call their honest mirth and seldom-returning relaxation by the hard names of vice and profligacy? That poor country fellow, that is grasping his staff (which, from that difficulty of feeling themselves at home which poor men experience at a feast, he has never parted with since he came into the room), and is enjoying with a relish that seems to fit all the capacities of his soul the slender joke, which that facetious wag his neighbour is practising upon the gouty gentleman, whose eyes the effort to suppress pain has made as round as rings--does it shock the "dignity of human nature" to look at that man, and to sympathise with him in the seldom-heard joke which has unbent his care-worn hard-working visage, and drawn iron smiles from it? or with that full-hearted cobbler who is honouring with the grasp of an honest fist the unused palm of that annoyed patrician, whom the license of the time has seated next him?

I can see nothing "dangerous" in the contemplation of such scenes as this, or the _Enraged Musician_, or the _Southwark Fair_, or twenty other pleasant prints which come crowding in upon my recollection, in which the restless activities, the diversified bents and humours, the blameless peculiarities of men, as they deserve to be called, rather than their "vices and follies," are held up in a laughable point of view. All laughter is not of a dangerous or soul-hardening tendency.

There is the petrifying sneer of a demon which excludes and kills Love, and there is the cordial laughter of a man which implies and cherishes it. What heart was ever made the worse by joining in a hearty laugh at the simplicities of Sir Hugh Evans or Parson Adams, where a sense of the ridiculous mutually kindles and is kindled by a perception of the amiable? That tumultuous harmony of singers that are roaring out the words, "The world shall bow to the a.s.syrian throne," from the opera of _Judith_, in the third plate of the series, called the _Four Groups of Heads_; which the quick eye of Hogarth must have struck off in the very infancy of the rage for sacred oratorios in this country, while "Music yet was young;" when we have done smiling at the deafening distortions, which these tearers of devotion to rags and tatters, these takers of Heaven by storm, in their boisterous mimicry of the occupation of angels, are making,--what unkindly impression is left behind, or what more of harsh or contemptuous feeling, than when we quietly leave Uncle Toby and Mr. Shandy riding their hobby-horses about the room? The conceited, long-backed Sign-painter, that with all the self-applause of a Raphael or Correggio (the twist of body which his conceit has thrown him into has something of the Correggiesque in it) is contemplating the picture of a bottle which he is drawing from an actual bottle that hangs beside him, in the print of _Beer Street_,--while we smile at the enormity of the self delusion, can we help loving the good humour and self-complacency of the fellow? would we willingly wake him from his dream?