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 hapqpiness 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. titmice 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
picture 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

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