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. 66 never 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,* from whom I have borrowed this observation, speaking of a scene which took place at Ratzeburg, 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 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 unpretending insensibility in the The Friend, No. XVI. 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. 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. entitle him to an honourable place among the artists, "Notwithstanding Hogarth's merit does undoubtedly 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 of the elevated and more noble inventions of Raphael own story with more facility than is often found in many 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 satyr, 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 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 in his humorous: but very few have attempted to rival search after satyr 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 NN better and nobler consequences to ourselves. These two pursuits in art may be compared with two sets of people merce, 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. This great know who this Mr. Penny was. with whom we might associate; if we give ourselves up surpasser of Hogarth in the "delicacy of his to the Footes, the Kenricks, &c. we shall be continually relish," and the "line which he pursued,” busied and paddling in whatever is ridiculous, faulty, where is he, what are his works, what has and vicious in life; whereas there are those to be found with whom we should be in the constant pursuit and he to show? In vain I tried to recollect, study of all that gives a value and a dignity to human till by happily putting the question to a nature." [Account of a Series of Pictures in the Great friend who is more conversant in the works Room of the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Comof 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 It is a secret well known to the professors a Sick Soldier; moreover, that he was the of the art and mystery of criticism, to insist inventor of two pictures of Suspended and upon what they do not find in a man's works, Restored Animation, which I now remember and to pass over in silence what they do. to have seen in the Exhibition some years That Hogarth did not draw the naked figure since, and the prints from which are still so well as Michael Angelo might be allowed, extant in good men's houses. This then, I especially as "examples of the naked," as suppose, is the line of subjects in which Mr. Barry acknowledges, "rarely (he might Mr. Penny was so much superior to Hogarth. almost have said never) occur in his sub- I confess I am not of that opinion. The jects;" and that his figures under their relieving of poverty by the purse, and the draperies do not discover all the fine graces restoring a young man to his parents by of an Antinous or an Apollo, may be con- using the methods prescribed by the Humane ceded likewise; perhaps it was more suitable Society, are doubtless very amiable subjects, to his purpose to represent the average forms pretty things to teach the first rudiments of of mankind in the mediocrity (as Mr. Burke humanity; they amount to about as much expresses it) of the age in which he lived: instruction as the stories of good boys that but that his figures in general, and in his give away their custards to poor beggar-boys best subjects, are so glaringly incorrect as is in children's books. But, good God! is this here insinuated, I dare trust my own eye so milk for babes to be set up in opposition to far as positively to deny the fact. And there Hogarth's moral scenes, his strong meat for is one part of the figure in which Hogarth men ? As well might we prefer the fulsome is allowed to have excelled, which these verses upon their own goodness to which foreigners seem to have overlooked, or the gentlemen of the Literary Fund annually perhaps calculating from its proportion to sit still with such shameless patience to the whole (a seventh or an eighth, I forget listen, to the satires of Juvenal and Persius; which,) deemed it of trifling importance; I because the former are full of tender images mean the human face; a small part, reckon- of Worth relieved by Charity, and Charity ing by geographical inches, in the map of stretching out her hand to rescue sinking man's body, but here it is that the painter Genius, and the theme of the latter is men's of expression must condense the wonders of crimes and follies with their black conhis skill, even at the expense of neglecting sequences - forgetful meanwhile of those the "jonctures and other difficulties of strains of moral pathos, those sublime heartdrawing in the limbs," which it must be a touches, which these poets (in them chiefly cold eye that, in the interest so strongly showing themselves poets) are perpetually demanded by Hogarth's countenances, has darting across the otherwise appalling gloom leisure to survey and censure. of their subject-consolatory remembrancers, "The line of art pursued by my very ingenious prede- made us even to despair for our species, when their pictures of guilty mankind have cessor and brother Academician, Mr. Penny." The first impression caused in me by reading this passage was an eager desire to 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. 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 stigmatised 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 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 intro 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-duced upon which the moral eye may rest 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 "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 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 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 putrifying 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 "lacrymæ 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 :" 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, figures brought in to fill up the scene like stage choruses, but all dramatis personæ : when he shall have done wondering at all these faces so strongly charactered, yet finished with the accuracy of the finest 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 miniature; when he shall have done adhumorous 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 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 miring 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 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 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 favour 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 by a perception of the amiable? That riotous spirit to be sure is there, some tumultuous harmony of singers that are worldly-mindedness in some of the faces, a roaring out the words, "The world shall Doddingtonian smoothness which does not bow to the Assyrian throne," from the opera promise any superfluous degree of sincerity of Judith, in the third plate of the series in the fine gentleman who has been the called the Four Groups of Heads; which the occasion of calling so much good company quick eye of Hogarth must have struck off together; but is not the general cast of in the very infancy of the rage for sacred expression in the faces of the good sort? do oratorios in this country, while "Music yet they not seem cut out of the good old rock, was young ;" when we have done smiling at substantial English honesty? would one fear the deafening distortions, which these treachery among characters of their expres-tearers of devotion to rags and tatters, these sion? or shall we call their honest mirth and takers of heaven by storm, in their boisterous seldom-returning relaxation by the hard mimicry of the occupation of angels, are names of vice and profligacy? That poor making,-what unkindly impression is left country fellow, that is grasping his staff behind, or what more of harsh or con(which, from that difficulty of feeling them- temptuous feeling, than when we quietly selves at home which poor men experience leave Uncle Toby and Mr. Shandy riding 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 ringsdoes 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 licence of the time has seated next him? 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? I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth have, necessarily, something in them to make us like them; some are I can see nothing "dangerous" in the indifferent to us, some in their natures contemplation of such scenes as this, or the repulsive, and only made interesting by the Enraged Musician, or the Southwark Fair, or wonderful skill and truth to nature in the twenty other pleasant prints which come painter; but I contend that there is in most crowding in upon my recollection, in which of them that sprinkling of the better nature, the restless activities, the diversified bents which, like holy water, chases away and and humours, the blameless peculiarities of disperses the contagion of the bad. They men, as they deserve to be called, rather have this in them, besides, that they bring than their “vices and follies," are held up in us acquainted with the every-day human a laughable point of view. All laughter is face, they give us skill to detect those not of a dangerous or soul-hardening ten-gradations of sense and virtue (which escape dency. There is the petrifying sneer of a the careless or fastidious observer) in the demon which excludes and kills Love, and countenances of the world about us; 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 prevent that disgust at common life, that tadium 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. |