CONVERSATIONS AS GOOD AS REAL (1)
The Atlas.] [September 20, 1829.
T.—Windham was very intimate with Gilray afterwards—or perhaps before; for he also had been on both sides.
J.—What I object to in Hogarth is, that he was not accomplished enough even for the task he undertook. An instance occurred the other day. A servant-girl had been decoyed from her situation, and on complaint being made before the magistrate, the officers traced her to Duke’s-place, and brought her back to her friends in Wardour-Street. She was dressed up quite in the height of the fashion; and every one that went to see her, came away astonished at her perfect beauty. Could Hogarth have painted this? Yet here was a scene quite in his way. He selects what is bad in St. Giles’s, not what is best in nature. That old Mother W—— lives for ever. It was she who decoyed away Emily Coventry that sat to Sir Joshua for his Thais. She was a chimney-sweeper’s daughter, or something of that kind; but she was a vast beauty, and Mother W—— found her out in spite of her rags and dirt. She had a hawk’s eye for anything of this sort. I sat facing her once in an upper box at the Opera. I never saw such an expression—her look went through you.
T.—But I suppose you looked at her again.
J.—Fielding has tried to describe Sophia as a beauty, but makes a wretched hand of it. He says first she was a beauty; and then to let you know what sort of a beauty she was, that she was like the Venus of Medici; then that her nose inclined to be Roman, which the Venus de Medici’s does not; then that she resembled Kneller’s portrait of Lady Ranelagh, which is like neither. The truth is, he did not know what she was like; nor that he could not in words give a description of beauty, which is the painter’s province.
T.—Coleridge used to remark that description was the vice of poetry, and allegory of painting.
J.—Nothing can be better said. Since you told me that remark of his about Paul and Virginia, he has risen vastly in my estimation. Again, why does the correspondent in the Atlas take me up short for saying that ‘we laugh at a person who is rolled in the gutter?’ He observes on this, ‘if it is an accident, the laughter is silly, and not a case in point; if inflicted as a punishment for some petty injustice, we do not laugh, but rub our hands.’ So that we are to laugh in neither case. Is the ridicule merited where the cobbler, in the ‘Election Dinner,’ has smutted the face of his next neighbour? Or does the cobbler laugh the less, or will he not laugh on for ever, on this account? Has not Hogarth immortalised this piece of silliness in this disgraceful scene? Who will set limits (by the author’s crambo) to the length to which he lolls out his tongue, or to the portentous rolling of his eyes in a squint of ecstasy? Is the sly leer and drooping of the widow’s eyelids, or the position of the parson’s hands in the ‘Harlot’s Funeral,’ drawing as well as character and invention? Or is the fighting of the dog and the man for the bone on a perfect footing of equality (to show that hunger levels all distinctions), or the mother letting the child fall over the wall in the ‘Gin-lane,’ or the girl in the ‘Noon,’ ‘with her pie-dish tottering like her virtue, and the contents running over,’ (as I have seen it somewhere expressed,) an example of skill in drawing? It is easy to paint a face without a nose, or with a wry one; the difficulty is to make it straight. Few persons can draw a circle; any one may draw a crooked line.
T.—But has not Hogarth hit off the exact character and expression; and is not that a proof of the painter’s hand and eye?
J.—It may be so; but you cannot be sure of it. The correspondent of the paper laughs at the idea of Hogarth’s coming under the article of writing. He has come under the article of writing. Does not the critic speak of his ‘immortal tales?’ Does Mr. Lamb expatiate on the drawing, colour, and effects of light and shade, or only on the moral and story? He has left out one half of the language of painting in the prints; and they are the better for it. Nor do I see what objection there is to the comparison of Hogarth to buffoons on the stage. For my part, I think Liston comes much nearer to Hogarth than Emery’s Tyke; and I am sure his Lord Grizzle is just as good in its way as anything can possibly be. Why then does the critic scout the comparison? Because it would be ridiculous to say, that Liston’s Lord Grizzle is as fine as Mrs. Siddons’s Lady Macbeth; that both fulfilled their parts equally, and that neither could do more without infringing on the integrity of their characters. Yet if the dignity of the subject is to be left out of the question, Liston may be put into the scale with Mrs. Siddons just as well as Emery; but if not, then neither one nor the other can. Any one for me may say he likes Punch and the puppet-show as well as the finest tragedy—I should think it honest and natural enough—but I hate putting up at a half-way house between farce and tragedy, and pretending that there is no difference in the case. Persons who have no taste for, but an aversion to whatever is great and elevated, are ashamed openly to patronise farce, lest they should be laughed at; and they, therefore, get something intermediate between that and tragedy, and set it up as the finest thing in the world, to escape ridicule and satisfy their own perverse inclination. It is necessary to set one’s face against such vulgar critics; for, like other vulgar people, if you do not keep them quite out, they will constantly encroach and turn you out of your most settled convictions with their mongrel theories.
T.—What is the aim of all high tragedy? It is to resolve the sense of pain or suffering into the sense of power by the aid of imagination, and by grandeur of conception and character. What is the object of Hogarth’s tragicomedy? To reverse this order: that is, he gives us the extremest distress in the most revolting circumstances and in connection with the most unfeeling and weakest characters, so as either to produce the utmost disgust or excite as little sympathy as possible. Why must maternal affection be displayed, and, as it were, outraged in the strength of attachment to a most brutish and worthless moon-calf of a son? The moral may be strictly true, but the mode of conveying it is no less a penance. Why must the feeling of love be exemplified in the persevering attachment of the victim of seduction to her profligate and contemptible seducer? This is essential to Hogarth’s conception of passion, that it should be at variance with its object, incongruous, and bordering on the absurd and ludicrous. Why must a fine feeling or sentiment be dragged through the kennel or stuck in the pillory before it can be tolerated in his graphic designs? There is neither unity nor grandeur. Mr. Lamb admires the expression of the losing gamester in the ‘Rake’s Progress:’ it is exactly what Liston would give in attempting such a part, and not unlike him. Why show the extreme of passion in faces unsusceptible of it, or kill the sympathy by the meanness and poverty of the associations? Mr. Lamb despises Kean’s face in Othello: I prefer it to any of Hogarth’s tragic faces, which are generally of the mock-heroic class.[[59]] The Methodist preacher in the cart with the Idle Apprentice is another Mawworm, a fantastic figure, tossed about by the wind or the spirit, though the conception would be fine for a novel or written story: the apprentice himself is a scare-crow, the sport of the mob, with whose indifference you take part, not with the sufferings of the hero, if he is supposed to have any. The whole is a game at tragic cross-purposes. The sublimity (such as it is) rests on a foundation of the squalid and scurrilous. The incongruous was Hogarth’s element, and he could not get out of his own or (what is I fear) the national character, which delights in laughing at and exulting over the defects and mishaps of others, not from any concern for them, but as a foil to its own discontented humour and conscious want of higher resources. Defoe, who was in the same age and class, had more imagination. His Robinson Crusoe is in perfect keeping. He is not solitary, but solitude: from being shut out from the world, he fills the universe with himself, and his being expands to the circumference of the ocean and sky. Hogarth would have shut him up in a workhouse or a gaol, with boys hooting at him through the bars, and no escape left on the wings of the imagination or the strength of will. This may be very intense, but it is not to my taste. A disciple of this school should not go to see Madame Pasta act. He would like Madame Pesaroni better, for she is ugly, squat, and her voice is masculine and loud. The other, who is all harmony, would oppress and make him uneasy for want of some salvo to his self-love. Would a critic of this order like to see a tragic actress with a wooden leg? For this is Hogarth. Mr. Lamb admires Moll Flanders; would he marry Moll Flanders? There ought to be something in common in our regard for the original and the copy. A taste for the odd and eccentric eats like a canker into the mind; and if not checked, drives out all relish for the noble and consistent as stiff and pedantic. The drollery is certainly less; and if there is not some set-off in earnestness and dignity, the serious must be at a low ebb indeed, and Hudibras is finer than Paradise Lost. It would be a proof of bad taste to like to look at a mean or ill-formed face, for the sake of laughing at it, rather than at a fine one. And so in art: the representation of brutality, coarseness, and want of capacity and feeling is surely less desirable than the representation of the opposite qualities; or it is saying that you laugh at and despise a thing for falling short of a certain excellence and perfection, and when it gains that excellence and perfection, it is no better than it was before.
J.—You remember the drawing I showed you by Lane, after the ‘Possessed Boy’ of Domenichino? There was there infinite sensibility, infinite delicacy, agony with sweetness, beauty in the midst of distortion. You saw there that every fine feeling had passed through the painter’s mind, or he could not have expressed them; you were made to sympathise with them, and to understand and revere them as a part of your own nature. Compared with works like this, which are the pure mirrors of truth and beauty, Hogarth’s subjects are the very ‘measles’ of art—the scum and offal—it is like going on a voyage in a convict-ship, with an alternation of the same humours and the same horrors—it is a bad prospect for life.
T.—There is some limit. The late Edinburgh murders would not bear being transferred to the canvass, though the group at Ambrose’s would make a subject for a sketch, so nice are the distinctions of taste.
J.—The comic sets off the serious by contrast, and is a necessary relief; but how little a way does the sense of defect go towards a conception of, or power to embody the reverse! Look at Hogarth’s attempts at dignified subjects, and see how poor and feeble they are. His ‘Pool of Bethesda’ is pitiable; but in the burlesque composition, where he introduces the devil cutting away the leg of the stool on which St. Paul is preaching, he is himself again, and worthy of all imitation. The critic in the Atlas asks what I mean by originality, as if I thought it independent of any prototypes in nature? No, originality consists in seeing nature for yourself; but it does not follow that everyone can do this or is to see nature alike, or there would be nothing remarkable in it.
T.—Crabbe is an original writer; but it is to be hoped he will have few followers. Mr. Lamb, by softening the disagreeableness of one of his tales, has taken out the sting.
J.—Hogarth is an exception to general rules; I said so before. He is the only great comic painter; and he is so for this reason—that painting is not the mother-tongue of comedy. Would not this be allowed of sculpture? I have not seen the ‘Tam O’Shanter’; but some Scotch critics are already, I hear, for exploding the antique. Painting is a dry, plodding art; a bottle-nose, if you come to examine it closely, becomes a very dull affair. We talk of a hump-back or a sore leg, which is enough of a good thing; the painter is obliged to give them entire, which is too much. Neither can he carry off this grossness by brilliancy of illustration, or rapidity of narrative. The eye and the mind take in a group or a succession of incidents in an instant; the hand follows lamely and slowly after, and naturally loses, in the mechanical details of each object, the surprise, odd starts, and contrasts, which are the life of comedy. Hogarth alone, by his double allusions, and by his giving motion (which is time) overcame this difficulty, or painted as if he were no painter, but set down each figure by a stroke of the pencil, or in a kind of short-hand of the art, being obliged to run neither into caricature nor still-life. This extreme facility or tenaciousness (amounting to a two-fold language) was his peculiar forte, and that in which he was, and will remain, unrivalled. Ducrow acts romances on horseback; but it is not the best way of acting them; and few will imitate him without breaking their necks.
T.—Do not the same remarks apply in some measure to painting history?
J.—In some measure, they do; and therefore grand and dignified subjects are in general to be preferred to the more violent and distressing ones. Therefore Titian’s portraits are on a par with history. You who admire Titian, how you must look at Hogarth! You see they avoid the sight of blood even on the stage. In short, it is a question, whether low and disagreeable subjects are fit to be painted; and Sir Joshua, among others, did not much approve of them. It is not a question whether grace and grandeur are fit subjects for painting—this alone settles the preference, and is some excuse for the author of the Discourses in perhaps making it a little too exclusive. If it were true that Hogarth is universal, or contains the highest kind of excellence, no one would dispute about him. After all, a hurdygurdy is neither a lute nor an organ.