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.