Dalrymple | Gillray's Ungloomy Morality (2002)

(Theodore Dalrymple, Gillray’s Ungloomy Morality, 2002) “…. As soon as you entered the Tate's rooms whose walls were covered with Gillray's astonishing output of work, you realized - however much you thought you already knew about Gillray - that he did not so much depict or satirize as create and people a world. It is the same kind of achievement as Dickens's, fecund, imaginative,  and throbbing with life. Gillray's work, like that of Dickens,  uplifts even as it pours scorn on what it criticizes or derides. It is the expression of an uninhibited and fearless freedom of spirit such as one rarely encounters anywhere today and that is possible only in a free society that contests neither individuality nor individualism. You left the exhibition thinking not that human weakness, folly, and vice were any the less weakness, folly, and vice-on the contrary, you left with a heightened awareness of them all around you-but that life is a rich and splendid experience, if only you viewed it aright. You can have both fun and a moral standpoint: they are not mutually exclusive. Gillray, like Swift before him and Dickens after him, saw everything through a lens that clarified even as it distorted. It highlighted and distilled the salient moral characteristics of everyone and everything upon whom and upon which he turned it, and left the inessential out. This way of seeing is a mark (not the mark, of course) of original genius. It became second nature to Gillray, just as it was to Dickens, who, answering the accusation that his characters were mere caricatures, wrote in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit that what were caricatures to his critics were to him straightforward representations of people who were easily to be found by those with eyes to see and ears to hear: the fault was not in his writing but in his critics' restricted and unimaginative powers of perception. ....” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture What’s Left of it: The Mandarins & The Masses, Ivan R D, 2005)