The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 written by Charles Lamb

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[Footnote 1: _The Friend_, No. XVI.]

I had written thus far, when I met with a passage 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 entitle him
to an honorable place among the artists, and that his little
compositions, considered as so many dramatic representations,
abounding with humor, 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 noble inventions of Raphael 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 unformed, 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
jonctures, and other difficulties of drawing that might occur
in their limbs, are artfully concealed with their clothes,
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 humor 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 about the amiable and the admirable, as it
is more likely to be attended with better and nobler
consequences to ourselves. These two pursuits in art may be
compared with two sets of people with whom we might associate;
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
Boom 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 pass 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 Antinoues 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 passage was an
eager desire to know who this Mr. Penny was. This great surpasser 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 show? In
vain I tried to recollect, till by happily putting the question to a
friend who is more conversant in the works of the illustrious obscure
than myself, I learnt 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 God! 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 showing 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--refreshing admonitions, to
which we turn for shelter from the too great heat and asperity of the
general satire.

And is there nothing analogous 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
assertion; if the sad endings of the Harlot and the Rake, the
passionate heart-bleeding entreaties for forgiveness which the
adulterous wife is pouring forth to her assassinated 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 ship 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 "humor 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 palette, 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 stigmatized would be apt to
imagine that in Hogarth there was nothing else to be found but
subjects of the coarsest 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 caricatures, foreign to his general habits, the
offspring of his fancy in some wayward humor), there is scarce one of
his pieces where vice is most strongly satirized, in which some
figure is not introduced upon which the moral eye may rest satisfied;
a face that indicates goodness, or perhaps mere good-humoredness 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 pawnbroker 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 putrefying breathings of a
hypocrite Blifil. One homely expostulating shrug from Strap warms the
whole air which the suggestions of a gentlemanly ingratitude 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
mass of iniquity which the world-knowledge of even a Fielding could
cull out and rake together. But of the severer class of Hogarth's
performances, enough, I trust, has been said to show 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 everybody 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
humorous scenes,--are they such as merely to disgust and set us
against our species?

The confident assertions 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 passion 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 parlor, 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 classes 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 assembled them;
having no central figure or principal 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 passing 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 it felt 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 endeavored 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 chokes
up the doorway, 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 it not the general feeling which remains, after the individual
faces have ceased to act sensibly on his mind, a _kindly one in favor
of his species?_ was not the general air of the 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 neighbor 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 sympathize with him in the seldom-heard joke which has
unbent his careworn, hard-working visage, and drawn iron smiles from
it? or with that full-hearted cobbler, who is honoring 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 humors, 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 Assyrian
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-humor and self-complacency of the fellow? would
we willingly wake him from his dream?

I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth have,
necessarily, something in them to make us like them; some are
indifferent to us, some in their natures repulsive, and only made
interesting by the wonderful skill and truth to nature in the
painter; but I contend that there is in most of them that sprinkling
of the better nature, which, like holy water, chases away and
disperses the contagion of the bad. They have this in them, besides,
that they bring us acquainted with the every-day human face,--they
give us skill to detect those gradations of sense and virtue (which
escape the careless or fastidious observer) in the countenances of
the world about us; and prevent that disgust at common life, that
_taedium quotidianarum formarum_, which an unrestricted passion for
ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing. In this, as in
many other things, they are analogous to the best novels of Smollett
or Fielding.

* * * * *

ON THE
POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER

The poems of G. Wither are distinguished by a hearty homeliness of
manner, and a plain moral speaking. He seems to have passed his life
in one continued act of an innocent self-pleasing. That which he
calls his _Motto_ is a continued self-eulogy of two thousand lines,
yet we read it to the end without any feeling of distaste, almost
without a consciousness that we have been listening all the while to
a man praising himself. There are none of the cold particles in it,
the hardness and self-ends, which render vanity and egotism hateful.
He seems to be praising another person, under the mask of self: or
rather, we feel that it was indifferent to him where he found the
virtue which he celebrates; whether another's bosom or his own were
its chosen receptacle. His poems are full, and this in particular is
one downright confession, of a generous self-seeking. But by self he
sometimes means a great deal,--his friends, his principles, his
country, the human race.

Whoever expects to find in the satirical pieces of this writer any of
those peculiarities which pleased him in the satires of Dryden or
Pope, will be grievously disappointed. Here are no high-finished
characters, no nice traits of individual nature, few or no
personalities. The game run down is coarse general vice, or folly as
it appears in classes. A liar, a drunkard, a coxcomb, is _stript and
whipt;_ no Shaftesbury, no Villiers, or Wharton, is curiously
anatomized, and read upon. But to a well-natured mind there is a
charm of moral sensibility running through them, which amply
compensates the want of those luxuries. Wither seems everywhere
bursting with a love of goodness, and a hatred of all low and base
actions. At this day it is hard to discover what parts of the poem
here particularly alluded to, _Abuses Stript and Whipt_, could have
occasioned the imprisonment of the author. Was Vice in High Places
more suspicious than now? had she more power; or more leisure to
listen after ill reports? That a man should be convicted of a libel
when he named no names but Hate, and Envy, and Lust, and Avarice, is
like one of the indictments in the Pilgrim's Progress, where Faithful
is arraigned for having "railed on our noble Prince Beelzebub, and
spoken contemptibly of his honorable friends, the Lord Old Man, the
Lord Carnal Delight, and the Lord Luxurious." What unlucky jealousy
could have tempted the great men of those days to appropriate such
innocent abstractions to themselves?

Wither seems to have contemplated to a degree of idolatry his own
possible virtue. He is forever anticipating persecution and
martyrdom; fingering, as it were, the flames, to try how he can bear
them. Perhaps his premature defiance sometimes made him obnoxious to
censures which he would otherwise have slipped by.

The homely versification of these Satires is not likely to attract in
the present day. It is certainly not such as we should expect from a
poet "soaring in the high region of his fancies, with his garland and
his singing robes about him;"[1] nor is it such as
he has shown in his _Philarete_, and in some parts of his _Shepherds
Hunting_. He seems to have adopted this dress with voluntary
humility, as fittest for a moral teacher, as our divines choose sober
gray or black; but in their humility consists their sweetness. The
deepest tone of moral feeling in them (though all throughout is
weighty, earnest, and passionate) is in those pathetic injunctions
against shedding of blood in quarrels, in the chapter entitled
_Revenge_. The story of his own forbearance, which follows, is highly
interesting. While the Christian sings his own victory over Anger,
the Man of Courage cannot help peeping out to let you know, that it
was some higher principle than _fear_ which counselled this
forbearance.

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