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

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I have seen this passage smiled at, and set down as a quaint conceit
of old Fuller. But what is not a conceit to those who read it in a
temper different from that in which the writer composed it? The most
pathetic parts of poetry to cold tempers seem and are nonsense, as
divinity was to the Greeks foolishness. When Richard II., meditating
on his own utter annihilation as to royalty, cries out,

"O that I were a mockery king of snow,
To melt before the sun of Bolingbroke,"

if we had been going on pace for pace with the passion before, this
sudden conversion of a strong-felt metaphor into something to be
actually realized in nature, like that of Jeremiah, "Oh! that my head
were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears," is strictly and
strikingly natural; but come unprepared upon it, and it is a conceit:
and so is a "head" turned into "waters."]

* * * * *

ON THE

GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH;

WITH SOME REMARKS ON A PASSAGE IN THE WRITINGS OF THE
LATE MR. BARRY.

* * * * *

One of the earliest and noblest enjoyments I had when a boy, was in
the contemplation of those capital prints by Hogarth, the _Harlot's_
and _Rake's Progresses_, which, along with some others, hung upon the
walls of a great hall in an old-fashioned house in ----shire, and
seemed the solitary tenants (with myself) of that antiquated and
life-deserted apartment.

Recollection of the manner in which those prints used to affect me
has often made me wonder, when I have heard Hogarth described as a
mere comic painter, as one of those whose chief ambition was to
_raise a laugh_. To deny that there are throughout the prints which I
have mentioned circumstances introduced of a laughable tendency,
would be to run counter to the common notions of mankind; but to
suppose that in their _ruling character_ they appeal chiefly to the
risible faculty, and not first and foremost to the very heart of man,
its best and most serious feelings, would be to mistake no less
grossly their aim and purpose. A set of severer Satires (for they are
not so much Comedies, which they have been likened to, as they are
strong and masculine Satires) less mingled with anything of mere fun,
were never written upon paper, or graven upon copper. They resemble
Juvenal, or the satiric touches in Timon of Athens.

I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who being asked which
book he esteemed most in his library, answered,--"Shakspeare:" being
asked which he esteemed next best, replied, "Hogarth." His graphic
representations are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful,
suggestive meaning of _words_. Other pictures we look at,--his prints
we read.

In pursuance of this parallel, I have sometimes entertained myself
with comparing the _Timon of Athens_ of Shakespeare (which I have
just mentioned) and Hogarth's _Rake's Progress_ together. The story,
the moral, in both is nearly the same. The wild course of riot and
extravagance, ending in the one with driving the Prodigal from the
society of men into the solitude of the deserts, and in the other
with conducting the Rake through his several stages of dissipation
into the still more complete desolations of the mad-house, in the
play and in the picture, are described with almost equal force and
nature. The levee of the Rake, which forms the subject of the second
plate in the series, is almost a transcript of Timon's levee in the
opening scene of that play. We find a dedicating poet, and other
similar characters, in both.

The concluding scene in the _Rake's Progress_ is perhaps superior to
the last scenes of _Timon_. If we seek for something of kindred
excellence in poetry, it must be in the scenes of Lear's beginning
madness, where the King and the Fool and the Tom-o'-Bedlam conspire
to produce such a medley of mirth checked by misery, and misery
rebuked by mirth; where the society of those "strange bedfellows"
which misfortunes have brought Lear acquainted with, so finely sets
forth the destitute state of the monarch; while the lunatic bans of
the one, and the disjointed sayings and wild but pregnant allusions
of the other, so wonderfully sympathize with that confusion, which
they seem to assist in the production of, in the senses of that
"child-changed father."

In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the _Rake's Progress_, we
find the same assortment of the ludicrous with the terrible. Here is
desperate madness, the overturning of originally strong thinking
faculties, at which we shudder, as we contemplate the duration and
pressure of affliction which it must have asked to destroy such a
building;--and here is the gradual hurtless lapse into idiocy, of
faculties, which at their best of times never having been strong, we
look upon the consummation of their decay with no more of pity than
is consistent with a smile. The mad tailor, the poor driveller that
has gone out of his wits (and truly he appears to have had no great
journey to go to get past their confines) for the love of _Charming
Betty Careless_,--. these half-laughable, scarce-pitiable objects,
take off from the horror which the principal figure would of itself
raise, at the same time that they assist the feeling of the scene by
contributing to the general notion of its subject:--

"Madness, thou chaos of the brain,
What art, that pleasure giv'st and pain?
Tyranny of Fancy's reign!
Mechanic Fancy, that can build
Vast labyrinths and mazes wild,
With rule disjointed, shapeless measure,
Fill'd with horror, fill'd with pleasure!
Shapes of horror, that would even
Cast doubts of mercy upon heaven;
Shapes of pleasure, that but seen,
Would split the shaking sides of Spleen."[1]

[Footnote 1: 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 analogous to Kent, or Caius, as he
delights rather to be called, in _Lear_,--the noblest pattern of
virtue which even Shakspeare has conceived,--who follows his royal
master in banishment, that had pronounced _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 carcass, the shadow, the shell, 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 circumstance 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
assemblage 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 reflections 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 carcass had been depicted as
thrown out to the woods, where wolves had assisted at its obsequies,
itself furnishing 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
passage,--but if we are not led on by such passages to some more
salutary feeling than laughter, we are very negligent perusers of
them in book or picture.

It is the fashion 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 class. Those persons seem to me to confound the painting of
subjects in common or vulgar life with the being a vulgar artist. The
quantity 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 at
Athens_[1] 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 colors of the picture, and forget the coarse 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 color and serve to one effect. Everything 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 anything which Michael Angelo
ever drew, but everything 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
frenzy which goes forth over the whole composition. To show the
poetical and almost prophetical conception in the artist, one little
circumstance may serve. Not content with the dying and dead figures,
which he has strewed in profusion over the proper scene of the
action, he shows you what (of a kindred nature) is passing beyond it.
Close by the shell, 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 passing 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."

[Footnote 1: 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 show everything 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 classification, 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 forever 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 class, without
reflecting whether the quantity of thought shown 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 classifications 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
anything 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_,[1] 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 mass of woe is here accumulated!--the
long history of a misspent 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 bedroom 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 constitutes the
soul of his art) in a class from which we exclude the better genius
(who has happened to make choice of the other) with something like
disgrace?[2]

[Footnote 1: 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 anything in Ecclesiastes.]

[Footnote 2: 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 Madonna he has substituted 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 entitle 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 worship, with which the Virgin Mothers
of L. da Vinci and Raphael (themselves by their divine countenances
inviting men to worship) contemplate the union of the two natures in
the person of their Heaven-born Infant.]

_The Boys under Demoniacal Possession_ of Raphael and Domenichino, by
what law of classification are we bound to assign them to belong to
the great style in painting, and to degrade into an inferior class
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 honors 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[1]
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 principal person of the scene.

[Footnote 1:
"There are of madmen, as there are of tame,
All humor'd not alike. We have here some
So apish and fantastic, play with a feather;
And though 'twould grieve a soul to see God'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 Whore_.]

It is the force of these kindly admixtures which assimilates 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 show forth motley spectacles to the world. Then it is that
the poet or painter shows his art, when in the selection of these
comic adjuncts he chooses such circumstances as shall relieve,
contrast with, or fall into, without forming a violent opposition to
his principal 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 doggerel nonsense of the Cook
and his poisoning associates 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 Titian?

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
class 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 class of his performances, the object
of which must be confessed to be principally 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 humor 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
cooperating 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 classes. 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.[1] 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
assertion. 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.

[Footnote 1: 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,[1] from whom I have borrowed this observation,
speaking of a scene which took place at Ratzeburg, "never drew a more
ludicrous distortion, both of attitude 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
humors 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 unpretending insensibility in the plate of the
_Harlot's Funeral_, (the only thing in that assembly 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.

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