The Press. — London, England, 1853-06-18 00:00:00

162 Steele's peccadilloes and punishments itt the Charterhouse) betrays, in tact, the dexterity of an ingenious showman who makes the greatest display with a scanty stock. Nor, again, does Mr. Thackeray address us with any clear and consistent design as a moralist. We have often thought no small benefit would be con ferred on society by a faithful and impar tial critic who, in recounting the lives of men of genius, would not shrink from tracing their errors with a firm though gentle hand, and marking, for the benefit of their succes sors, the rocks on which they made shipwreck. The young student would not then be taught to resent (with a too ready application to his own case) the indignity which genius is sup posed to suffer when treated by ordinary men according to ordinary rules. He would not be led to infer that genius was an excuse for • waywardness, still less that waywardness was a proof of genius. He would learn that to possess (lad's choicest gift was no excuse for abusing it ; and that self-discipline, necessary for the happiness of all, is doubly necessary fur the hap q piness of a genius who, excelling other men in intellectual power, surpasses them also in the power pi' disgracing and tormenting himself. But this kind of moralising we tear Mr. Thackenty would discard an harsh and dull; he takes up his subject as "a man of feeling." Ibis sensibility is fist acute to be always true to reason. Ile claims indulgence for its ca prices, and writes with a warmth which we fancy may be intended as an answer to those of his former readers who, from the bitterness of his satire, have inferred that he is a cynic. To criticise in detail sketches so slight would till a volume in bulk at least equal to Mr. Thaelteray's own. We select two of his biographies as specimens—Swift Mot flogartil: the former, perhaps, the most elaborate, the latter among the least finished of his portraits. Mr. Thackeray seems to imply, if we under stand him rightly, that Swift was not at heart a believer, and certainly not a churehman. We think that his works prove that he was both. In spite of many seept lest struggles it seems elem. he ayeepted revelation, and as a churchman he carried his veal to intolerance, though he hated dissenters nailer ft or political than theo logies! reasons, perhaps because they dared to oppose a Chureh of which he was a dignitary. He took holy orders most unwillingly. because the niggard patronage of Sir W. Temple left him no other resonrCe. Ile sacrificed his am bitious dreams of the future to secure present independence ; and Swift loved independence beyond everything else in the world. except. per haps, tyrannising over the independence of others. He lived in an age in which there pre • vaned a vonstant but most superfluous dread of hypocrisy. ti t mice the seerecy of his family prayers (p. 111, his unbecoming bravadoes, and unelerical talk. It will be seen, however, by reference to his journal sent to Stella (the work in which most of the inward man is revealed), that in his finnihar intercourse with Harley and Bolingbroke. which Mr. Thackeray supposes to have !Well so unreserved. he was proud of the restraint which his presenee im posed on their levity, and that, if decorum was violated without his express permission (which, however, we regret he did sometimes grant), he was stern and even brutal in the energy of his rebukes. He was decorous in his life, and regular in his habits—punctual in his pay ments, and honest in his dealings. His works. though insulting to man, and exhibiting an tierty and revolting misanthropy, are not otherwise immoral. nor, although often coarse, are they ever voluptuous. The "'!'ale of at Tub" he never acknowledged, nor during the earlier part of his life wax the authorship clearly fixed upon him. We believe that he owed his exclusion from the bench not so much to the remonstrances of the biehops, as to the enmity of an offended woman. The Queen had yielded to the orgeney of her Ministers. and loot sanctioned Swift's ap pointment to at vacant bishopric. The secret was betrayed to the Duchess of Somerset, who immediately rushed into the royal closet. and. throwing into the Queen's lap a paper attri buted to Swift. and containing a coarse libel of which she was the object. she east herself at her mistress's feet, and vowed with tears and sobs THE PRESS. that if her insolent traducer were rewarded with at bishopric she must retire from a Court where she could no longer appear with honour. The Queen found it easier to withstand the importunities of her Ministers than the resent ment of her lady in waiting, and the ofiensive appointment was cancelled. Mr. Thackeray paints with a good deal of force the fierce struggle in Swift's mind be tween intellectual strength and moral weak ness ; but we do not agree with him in believing that he was borne down by the con sciousness of any one act of deep guilt (p. 41). It was the contrast rather of what he was and what he wished to be that tortured his self love, and made hint so keen an observer, so merciless a castigator of human weaknesses.. He scorned mankind for partaking of the weaknesses which he hated in himself. Ho knew the vanity of earthly goods, and, while he despised himself for the intensity with which he coveted them, he cherished an angry re sentment against mankind—the save indignant; which lie has attributed to another cause, and inscribed on his tombstone—because they did not fiarce upon him those rewards which it was his vanity to seem to despise. The key to his charateter is his pride, and his love of consi deration. Ever looking back with mingled fury and shame to the period of his humilia turn and dependence in the house of Sir W. Temple, he preferred the pleasure of treating statesmen and ministers with arrogance to the advantage of obtaining their patronage; and they on their part tolerated the caustic humour which exempted them from solicitations, and enabled them to bestow their favours out more importunate suitors. More than once he might have changed his deanery of St. Patrick for all equivalent preferment in England, but in ono of his familiar letters (we think to Pope) he observes that, " after a man has lived in a country, amd grown into considera tion in it. he cannot descend to a subordinate situation in another which might be more eon genial to him ; and 1 confess the idea of the insolence which a man of my level would be exposed to by all the petty squires around him angers me to the heart." Finding the door of promotion more sternly closed against hint in the new reign than be fore, and having given tm all hopes from the patronage of Queen Caroline on which he had counted, he retired for the remainder of his life to the country which (in Walpole's phrase) "he detested, but in which he was worshipped with little less than idolatry." In Mr. Thackeray's sketch of Hogarth we have to regret that, though he has caught and interpreted with characteristic vivacity the broader anal coarser features of the painter's satire, the darker shades and more tender touches have escaped his notice. He does not give Hogarth the credit he de serves for being the first to discover how great is the power of horror and of pathos which the poet (be his vehicle of expression verse or prose or the canvas) may obtain by a rigid ad herence to the naked truth in all its vulgarity and coarseness ; and how surely, in delineating low life, intensity of feeling gives to vulgar features and trivial circumstances at dignity fitr beyond any that the artist cant bestow by "idealising" his personages and his scenery, to raise them to the level of their tragic cha racter. To this discovery Crabbe's titles owe at great part of their merit. But its importance was first fully brought out by Walter Scott, some of whose most powerful scenes are in debted to it for their overwhelming effect. The same adherence to unadorned truth gave the chief charm to Gontier's acting, whose comic parts remain in our recollections as among the most truly pathetic performances we have ever witnessed. If we turn to " The Rake's Progress," with what at complicated expression of mingled dis dain anal disgust does the half-rnined hero regard his old anal wealthy bride ; what satire is there, in the accessories—the toothless apa thetic clergyman, the formal clerk, and a cob web stretching over the aperture of the poor box ! What master ►►f expre,sion ever reached the agonised disgust depicted in the face of Tom Nero, the chief actor of the progress of cruelty, as he turns in loathing from the mangled SATURDAY, corpse of his victim, yet his eyes involuntarily seeking to steal a look at the ghastly spectacle: In " The Progress of Industry and Idleness," the story of which Mr. Thackeray gives with more liveliness than good taste, we cannot un derstand why he bestows any sympathy on Torn Idle. We have always considered it a proof of the painter's art that he has avoided throwing interest on the hero whose punish ment conveys half the moral of his tale. Hardhearted and unnatural, incapable of repentance and amendment, his guilt unre deemed by one virtue, we can scarcely wish him to live ; yet, by the matchless skill of the painter, our intensest aversion is diverted towards another object. There is in the pi c ture one darker shadow —one character blacker still—there is the villain who tempts, betrays, and survives him. We wonder Mr. Thackeray has failed to observe in the affection of the mother for her hardened re probate the real interest, the softening few tures of this Tyburn epic. Dismissed from his apprenticeship and sent to sea, his indentures torn and scattered on the waves, his weeping mo ther accompanies the reprobate in the boat that conveys him to the vessel. Could any pen, could any pencil but that of Hogarth have presented us with such a contrast ? The deep soiTow of the mother, the insolenee of the son who mocks her agony, the touch of feeling shown by the sailor who reproves his brutality by taunt ingly showinghim how discipline is maintained on board, the careless indifference with which his comrade pulls the oar, with his pipe in his mouth, regardless of everything but the performance of his narrow round of duties ! What a picture of life ! We wonder that the text it illustrates —" A taolish son is the heaviness of his mother" — did not draw Mr. Thackeray's attention to the subject which was uppermost in the painter's mind. The mother still watches over her ungrate ful child at every crisis of his fitte. When he is brought to the bar of justice, the presiding magistrate (the good apprentice of former years) reeognises, with an emotion he cannot repress, the companion of his early career in the abject wretch who crouches before him, betrayed and ensnared, unconscious of every thing but his imminent danger and over whehning misery. In this harrowing scene the figure of interest is still the mother, who, rebuked and rebuffed by the cold-hearted bailiff, persists in opposing her prayers to official in solence, and struggles forward eager to own her connection with the wretch whom all else reject. In heaviness she brought up her pro • digal, and weeping she attends him to his shameful end. This pathetic tale is not the invention of the great moralist ; it is borrowed from an old play, the joint work of .lonson, Chapman, and Marston, entitled " Eastward Ho !"—a fact which refutes the remark so often made, that Hogarth was in of adopting the idea of another, or filling up a sketch outlined by another hand. When Mr. Thackeray complains that the moral of Hogarth is trite and commonplace, or. as he strangely expresses it (p. 225), " the " people are all naughty, and bogey carries them off," we really do not understand the criticism. The moral itself is simple and old enough—Culpom paled prevail comes. Guilt must bring its punishment even in this world. The theme admits but of little novelty, but the artist's illustrations of it are diversified with ex haustless fertility of fancy. One word more before we close our obser• vations on this great artist, which have already run to an unreasonable length. Even Lamb, who of modern writers has done fullest justice to Hogarth's tragic powers (vide Lamb's Essays) has tailed to point out the true reason why, in defiance of refined and fastidious critics. we air not revolted by his harTowing delineations of physical suffering and moral degradation. It is not, as Mr. lamb thinks, because these painful seems are relieved with figures and circumstances of a purer and more genial character —though this contrast iv doubt less necessary to their due effect—it is rather because we feel intuitively that the pain we suffer is for our good. It' an artist paints the plague of Athens as Poussin did, or any other infliction of Providence which man is powerless • I T tl • •