He admires the great artist as an instructor,
but admits that "he owes his immortality to his touches of humour, to
his mingling the comic with the terrible." Those, he continues, are to
be blamed who overlook the moral in his pictures, and are merely taken
with the humour or disgusted by the vulgarity. Moreover, there is a
propriety in the details; he notices the meaning in the tumbledown
houses "the dumb rhetoric," in which "tables, chairs, and joint stools
are living, and significant things." In these passages Lamb seems to
regard the comic merely as a means to an end;--"Who sees not," he asks,
"that the grave-digger in Hamlet, the fool in Lear have a kind of
correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to
interrupt; while the comic stuff in 'Venice Preserved,' and the doggrel
nonsense of the cook and his poisoning associates in the Rollo of
Beaumont and Fletcher are pure irrelevant, impertinent discords--as bad
as the quarreling dog and cat under the table of our Lord and the
Disciples at Emmaus, of Titian."
Lamb's interpretation of Hogarth's works is that of a superior and
thoughtful mind: but we cannot help thinking that the humour in them
was not so entirely subordinate to the moral. One conclusion we may
incidentally deduce from his remarks--that the meaning in pictorial
illustrations, either as regards humour or sentiment, is not so
appreciable as it would be in words, and consequently that caricatures
labour under considerable disadvantages.
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