But, without going into the subject, we may give, as a good practical rule, let your moral sense be so clear and healthy as to discern at once the genuine objects of pity; and then, let them be fictitious or real, you may pity them safely with all your might. In either case you will get good, and the good will not end with yourself, even in the first case.
The story of Joseph, for instance, is to us fictitious, or rather, it is ideal; and in weeping over him, or over his heart-broken father, we know we can do them no good, or give them no sympathy; but where will you find a merely human story more salutary, more delightful, more appropriate, to every one of our intellectual, moral, and, let us add, our imaginative and æsthetical faculties?
We are inclined to rank Hogarth and Wilkie as the most thoughtful of British painters, and two of the greatest of all painters.
Some people, even now, speak of Hogarth as being at best a sort of miraculous caricaturist, and a shockingly faithful delineator of low vice, and misery, and mirth, but deficient in knowledge of the human figure, and in academical skill, and as having fallen short of the requirements of "high art."
We thought Charles Lamb had disposed of this untruth long ago; and so he did. But some folks don't know Charles Lamb, and we shall, for their sakes, give them a practical illustration of his meaning, and of ours. If Hogarth did not know the naked human figure (and we deny that he did not), he knew the human face and the naked human heart—he knew what of infinite good and evil, joy and sorrow, life and death, proceeded out of it. Look at the second last of the series of "Mariage à la Mode."
If you would see what are the wages of sin, and how, after being earned, they are beginning to be paid, look on that dying man,—his body dissolving, falling not like his sword, firm and entire, but as nothing but a dying thing could fall, his eyes dim with the shadow of death, in his ears the waters of that tremendous river, all its billows going over him, the life of his comely body flowing out like water, the life of his soul!—who knows what it is doing? Fleeing through the open window, undressed, see the murderer and adulterer vanish into the outer darkness of night, anywhere, rather than remain; and that guilty, beautiful, utterly miserable creature on her knee, her whole soul, her whole life, in her eyes, fixed on her dying husband, dying for and by her! What is in that poor desperate brain, who can tell! Mad desires for life, for death,—prayers, affections, infinite tears,—the past, the future,—her maiden innocence, her marriage, his love, her guilt,—the grim end of it all,—the night-watch with their professional faces,—the weary wind blowing Through the room, the prelude, as it were, of that whirlwind in which that lost soul is soon to pass away. The man who could paint so as to suggest all this, is a great man and a great painter.
Wilkie has, in like manner, been often misunderstood and misplaced. He is not of the Dutch school,—he is not a mere joker upon canvas,—he can move other things besides laughter; and he rises with the unconscious ease of greatness to what ever height he chooses. Look at John Knox's head in "The Administering the Sacrament in Calder House." Was the eye of faith ever so expressed, the seeing things that are invisible?
Hogarth was more akin to Michael Angelo: they both sounded the same depths, and walked the same terrible road. Wilkie has more of Raphael,—his affectionate sweetness, his pleasantness, his grouping, his love of the beautiful.