Volume 8, Number 6 · April 6, 1967
The Horror in Hogarth
By Francis Haskell
Hogarth's Graphic Works
compiled and with a commentary by Ronald Paulson
Yale, 2 vols., 653 pp., $40.00
The World of Hogarth: Lichtenberg's Commentaries on Hogarth's Engravings
translated and with an Introduction by Innes Herdan, by Gustav Herdan
Houghton Mifflin, 297 pp., $12.50
The world engraved by Hogarth was horrible and bleak. Turning the pages of Professor Paulson's superb edition of his prints we come across little but exploitation and misery, ugliness, deceit, and greed. The lust is joyless, the much vaunted humor generally cruel. Or is this interpretation too colored by our own over-refined sensibilities, our unwillingness to appreciate the knock-about fun provided by a public execution or the funeral of a diseased whore? Professor Paulson, whose knowledge and tact are so evident on every page that one is reluctant to disagree with him, suggests that such an attitude may indeed be misguided when trying to come to terms with Hogarth; and many generations of commentators have persisted in seeing in him a satirist whose admitted insensitivity is more than compensated for by the infectious vitality of his response to what he depicts—'robust' is the word usually used to describe this.
Review, 2082 words
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