The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous ProseLamb, Charles
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The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous Prose
Lamb, Charles
English literature
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-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 _her_ province better than by disturbing her husband at his pallet
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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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