The comedy of artistic bathos. William Hazlitt’s familiarity with Hogarth

This essay assesses William Hazlitt’s appreciation of William Hogarth not only as painter and engraver but, in his wider influence, as a pioneer of the ‘familiar style’ which Hazlitt advocated as a standard and model for the essayistic prose of his times. &e ‘familiar style’ invoked in the seventh lecture Hazlitt delivered at the Surrey Institution in 1818 (‘On the Works of Hogarth:NOn the Grand and Familiar Style of Painting’) bears a close resemblanceto the poetics of the everyday discussed in the (I4D Plain Speaker essay (‘On the Familiar Style’). Hazlitt engages with Lamb’s seminal reappraisal of Hogarth as an artist whose works should not be merely seen, but actually read. His perspective, drawing on Lamb and evolving into his own ‘private’ musings on the art of prose, draws together a number of theoretical concepts, most notably that of bathos, which is intimately tied to the dichotomy between tragic and comic. Hazlitt employs this characteristic to discuss Hogarth’s remarkable ability to depict ‘actual life’. It can be argued that Hazlitt (like Lamb) saw Hogarth as a forerunner of a new aesthetic sensibility that embraced the chaotic, bathetic world of prose. He also believed it should be considered as equally At for literary expression as the more sublime heights of poetry.