ornia lal Y The Popular Library of Art The Popular Library of Art ALBRECHT DXIRER (37 Illustrations). By LiNA ECKENSTEIN. ROSSETTI (53 Illustrations). By Ford Madox Hueffer. REMBRANDT (61 Illustrations). By Augusts Br6al. FRED. WALKER (32 Illustrations and Photogravure). By Clementina Black. MILLET (32 Illustrations). By ROMAIN ROLLAND. LEONARDO DA VINCI (44 Illustrations). By Dr Georg Gronau. GAINSBOROUGH (55 Illustrations). By Arthur B. Chamberlain. THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS (50 Illustrations). By Camille Mauclair. BOTTICELLI (37 Illustrations). By Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady). VELAZQUEZ (51 Illustrations). By Auguste Br6al. WATTS (33 Illustrations). By G. K. Chesterton. RAPHAEL (50 Illustrations). By Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady). HOLBEIN (50 Illustrations). By Ford Madox Hueffer. ENGLISH WATER COLOUR PAINTERS (42 Illustrations). By A. J. Finberg. WATTEAU (35 Illustrations). By Camille Mauclair. PERUGINO (50 Illustrations). By Edward Hutton. THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD (38 Illustrations). By Ford Madox Hueffer. CRUIKSHANK (55 Illustrations). By W. H. Chesson. WHISTLER (26 Illustrations). By Bernhard Sickert. HOGARTH (48 Illustrations). By Edward Garnett. WILLIAM BLAKE (33 Illustrations). By G. K. Chesterton. HOGARTH BY EDWARD GARNETT ^ LONDON: DUCKWORTH & CO. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. TURNBCLL AND STKAHS, miNTERS, EDINRCRGH AUTHOE'S NOTE For most of the biographical matter in the present volume I have drawn on Nichols' and Steevens' " The Genuine Works of William Hogarth : Illustrated with Biographical Anec- dotes/' 3 vols., 1808-10-17, the chief storehouse of Hogarthiana. Mr Austin Dobson's classic Life, ^'^ William Hogarth," which will never be superseded, I have consulted in the folio edition, Heinemann, 1902. My grateful acknowledgments to Mr Dobson are made in the text ; I have also to thank my friend Mr Muirhead Bone and Mr Francis Dodd for some kind suggestions. vu f^.^ "^ '^ ■'^ -f Q CONTENTS PAGE I Hogarth's Place and Popularity . . 1 II HoGARTH^s Family, Youth and First Steps 12 III The Conversation Pieces .... 27 IV A Harlot's Progress. The " Grand His- torical Style" ..... -13 V The ^^ Dramatic Paintings" (1738-1742) . 74 VI The '' Dramatic Paintings " (174.5-17o9) . 107 VII Some Portraits and Oil Sketches . . 160 VIII The Last Years 190 IX LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE The Shrimp Girl (National Gallery) Frontispiece William Hogarth. From tlie Original Painting (National Gallery) ... 15 Hogarth's Sister. From the Original Painting (National Gallery) ... 19 The Com.mittee of the House of Commons examining Bambridge. From the Original Painting (Fitzwilliam Museum) 31 A Music Party. From the Original Painting (F'itzwilliam Museum) .... 35 A Harlot's Progress, (Plate 1.) From Hogarth's Original Engraving . . 30 A Harlot's Progress. (Plate II.) From Hogarth^s Original Engraving . . 45 A Harlot's Progress. (Plate III.) From Hogarth's Original Engraving . . 49 A Harixjt's Progress. (Plate IV.) From Hogarth's Original Engraving . . 53 xi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE A Harlot's Progress. (Plate V.) From Hogarth's Original Engraving . . 57 A Harlot's Progress. (Plate VI.) From Hogarth^s Original Engraving . . 61 Breakfast Scene from ^*^The Five Days' Tour.'' From the Original Drawing (British Museum) 05 The Pool of Bethseda. From the Original Engraving ...... 71 The Distressed Poet. From Hogarth's Original Engraving .... 75 A Midnight Modern Conversation. From Hogarth's Original Engraving . . 79 The Rake's Progress. Detail. Scene I. From the Original Painting (Soane Museum) 83 The Rake's Progress. Scene II. From the Original Painting (Soane Museum) . 87 The Rake's Progress. Scene III. From the Original Painting (Soane Museum) . 01 The Rake's Progress. Scene V. From the Original Painting (Soane Museum) . 95 The Rake's Progress. Scene VI. From the Original Painting (Soane Museum) . 99 xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE The Four Times of the Day. Noon. From Hogarth's Original Engraving . . 103 Marriage A-la-Mode. Scene II. From the Original Painting (National Gallery) 100 Marriage A-la-Mode. Scene III. From the Original Painting (National Gallery) 113 Marriage A-la-Mode. Scene IV. From the Original Painting (National Gallery) 117 Marriage A-la-Mode. Scene V. From the Original Painting (National Gallery) . 121 Marriage A-la-Mode. Scene VI. From the Original Painting (National Gallery) 125 The Gate of Calais. From the Original Painting (National Gallery) . . .129 Simon Lord Lovat. From the Original Drawing (British Museum) . . .131 Sketch for "Industry and Idleness." Plate IX. From the Original Drawing (British Museum) ...... 133 Sketch for "Industry and Idleness." Plate IV. From the Original Drawing (British Museum) ...... 137 Sketch for "Industry and Idleness." Plate X. From the Original Drawing (British Museum) 130 xiii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE " Industry AND Idleness." Plate XI. From Hoj^arth's Original Engraving . . 141 Beer Street. From the Original Engraving 145 Gin Lane. From the Original Engraving . 149 The Election Series. Scene IV. From the Original Painting (Soane Museum) . 151 The Bench. Third State. From Hogarth's Original Engraving . . . .155 The Cockpit. From Hogarth's Original Engraving . . . . . .157 George Arnold, Esq. From the Original Painting (Fitzwilliam Museum) . . 161 A Dead Baby. From the Original Drawing (British Museum) 165 Orator Henley christening a Child. From the Original Drawing (British Museum) 169 Miss Arnold. From the Original Painting (Fitzwilliam Museum) .... 173 Hogarth's Six Servants. From the Original Painting (National Gallery) . . .177 Portrait of a Lady. From the Original Painting (Sir Frederick Cook) . . 181 xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PACK The Staysiaker. From the Orig-inal Painting (By permission of Edmund Davis, Esq.) 185 A IIkputed Hogarth. From tlie Original Painting (Besancon Museum) . . 187 The Ele( tion Series. Scene I. From the Original Painting (Soane Museum) . 195 SiGiSMUNDA. From tlie ( )riginal Painting (National Gallery) . . . .199 Henry Fielding. From Basire's Engraving (First State) 205 NOTE. — Mr W. Heinenunm haa kindly granted J'acilitie.'i in the use of negatives of pictures reproduced in Mr Austin Dohsons " William Hogarth." 1902. XV I Hogarth's Place and Poihlaiutv Hogarth, in point of creative force, imagina- tion and range the greatest of the British masters, holds an ill-defined place in the ranks of our artists. The favourite of our eighteenth century public, his engravings were prized by European collectors, and his vogue at home was greater than that of all the English artists of his period put together. Yet the connoisseurs who posed as the patrons of " the Arts " and the guardians of " Taste " refused to admit that "the matchless Mr Hogarth," universally cried up as a rare genius, was a great painter. His style was what was then termed " the Low," a branch of art admittedly secondary to "the Sublime," or the "grand historical style," which he had once essayed and failed in.i He was "the ingenious and * " His genius, however, it must be owned, was h\ I HOGARTH ingenuous Mr Hogarth/' a man unsound and illiterate in his views, who decried the Old Masters, and even had pretensions to rival the great Vandyke and the ^^ divine Correggio." ^ Hogarth had warm patrons among the aristo- cracy and received private commissions from a wide circle, 1730-1760, but the virtuosi wagged their heads knowingly, subscribed for the artist's engravings, and refused to buy his pictures.-^ With few exceptions, his famous suited only to low or familiar subjects. It never soared above common life : to subjects naturally sublime, or which from antiquity or other accidents borrowed dignity, be could not rise."— Gilpin. ^ Provoked at this language, I, one day, at the Academy in St Martin's Lane, put the following question : " Supposing any man at this time were to paint pictures as well as Vandyke, would it be seen or acknowledged, and could the artist enjoy the benefit or acquire the reputation due to his performance ? " They asked me in reply, " if I could paint one as well '' ; and I frankly answered, " I believed I could." 2 For the four series, The Harlot's Progress, The Rake's Progress, the Marriage A -la-Mode, the Four Parts of the Day, and t\\Q Strolling Actresses, twenty- five pictures in all, Hogarth received £'553, 7s. 2 HOGARTH " Dramatic Paintings/' the engraved versions of which had delighted the town, sold for small sums, and in his last years, when the bad reception accorded to " The Analysis of Beauty," the scurrilous attacks on his Sigis- munda, and the rise of a new school, all had affected his position, Wilkes could aver with impunity " his historical or portrait pieces are now considered as almost beneath criticism." Even so, his claim to rank as a great painter as well as a great genius must have been acceded after his death, had not the aesthetic revolu- tion brought about by Sir Joshua Reynolds and his school accentuated this misunderstanding.^ When one school of poetry drives out another, 1 The rise of Hogarth's reputation as painter may be illustrated by the following table of prices fetched : — [Mr Austin Uobson^s Cata/ogue.] ISOl. 1832. 1S84. Laiinia Fenton as Polbi Peadium . . ^£576 £52 10 £840 1790. 1S32. 1884. T/ic Shrimp Girl . . £4 10 £44 2 £262 10 1790. Ilofjarth's Six Sermnis . £d 15 6 1891. The Gate of Calais . ... ... £2752 10 HOGARTH the erst fashionable classic sinks for a time neglected, but Hogarth's paintings had never been acclaimed. The brilliant achievements of Gainsborough, Reynolds and other English masters dazzled English society, and even the critics who professed high admiration for Hogarth's genius echoed the old fallacy.^ In ^ " His works are his history ; as a painter he had but slender merit." — Horace Walpole. " \n composition we see little in him to admire. ... Of the distribution of light Hogarth had as little knowledge as of composition. . . . Neither was Hogarth a master of rfrawm^r. . . . Wehavev^ery few examples of graceful attitudes. With instances of picturesque grace his works abound. Of his expres- sion in which the force of his genius lay we cannot speak in terms too high.^' — Gilpin. " It is the Satirist, not the Artist, we admire in Hogarth." — Bartsch. "^ On canvas he was not so successful as on copper." — John Ireland. " It cannot indeed be truly said of Hogarth that he improved the practice of the arts of Painting and Engraving which he professed." — John Phillips, B.A. "^ Elegance of composition and picturesque effect were but secondary considerations with one whose principal object was not so much to flatter the eye with forms of majesty and beauty, or the splendour HOGARTH successive generations Ho5). Sir Walter Armstrong, in discussing this struggle between the fashionable foreigner and the native-born artists, has well said, " It was not a healthy struggle. It was between men patronized for their foreign birth — as artists of all kinds have ever been in England — and Winter Exhibition of 1908, we were appalled by their woodenness. It seemed in no way less than that observable in Hogarth's confessed failures in the Grand Style ; the drama at which the artist aimed came perilously near to the burlesque that liis enemies taunted him with ; tbe movement of the figures was tbe arrested movement of tbe jointed doll.'' — The Natioi} , Feb. o, li)10. 28 HOGARTH men wlio tliought their only cliance of success lay in imitating the methods of their rivals. Thus we always had mediocrity on one hand and insincerity on the other." ^ Hogarth, how- ever, from the very first wars on convention, as we see in his first original painting, The IVanstead Assembly (1728). Here one finds an engaging naivete born of the painter's uncom- promising honesty and inexperience. In this ornate, chandeliered Georgian saloon, with its stiff little groups of card players, tea drinkers, and children playing with a dog, we have a document of upper-middle-class life that is highly amusing. The plebeian faces of the relatives and friends of Richard Child, first Earl of Tylney, the rich banker's ennobled son, are caught with an unflattering humour almost cruel. Despite its dry rigidity and lack of atmos})here, the painter's awkward realism affects us, for he is both critical and intent on setting down exactly what he sees. Certain details of drawing, such as the card players absorbed in their game, and the character of the standing group of the girl and her father ' ^^ Art ill Great Hritaiii and Ireland." Jiy Sir >\'alter Armstrong, p. 17J). 29 HOGARTH and mother, betray the born psychologist. The Committee of the House of Commons Examining Bambridge (1729) (National Portrait Gallery) is elementary in technique, but it has individu- ality, and the feeling of the prison's gloomy walls is rendered skilfully. For the stiffness of the grouping Hogarth, however, is not respon- sible, as there is luckily extant the original oil sketch (Fitzwilliam Museum), which is full of nervous movement, the line of the com- missioners seated in chairs at the table balancing admirably the heads of those opposite which are eagerly turned towards Bambridge. The commissioners, however, no doubt were not satisfied with portraits of their backs, and the official " full face " version is accordingly cumbrous and mediocre in its grouping. In how many Conversation Pieces must the painter not have struggled over a like difficulty with his sitters ! Far more resourceful in execution is the Scene from the Beggars Opera (1728-9.'*) (National Gallery), which shows admirable ease and feeling for movement. In judging the Conversation Pieces, we have to remember that Hogarth looked upon them as pot-boilers — "still but a less kind of drudgery," he com- 3° HOGARTH plains. Wliat his patrons required, no doubt, were simply passable likenesses of a group of people ; but Hogarth himself is struggling to make a real picture of the scene, and often the onerous conditions of lighting, the disposition of the furniture, the perspective, etc., prove too much for the painter working against time. " I could not bring myself to act like some of my brethren and make it a sort of manufactory, to be carried on by the help of background and drapery painters," he expressly states. More- over, various of these Conversation Pieces have the air of being eked out from memory and from insufficient memoranda, the wooden " set- ness " of the figures being thus accounted for, as in the case of the weak and frigid Shellei/ Family, a pure pot-boiler. Little better is The Walpole Family, a group of five people, in which the presentment of Horace Walpole standing by a tea-table does not flatter that lover of the arts. A stronger, but dry and harsh canvas, signed 1730, is Dudley JVoodbridge, Esq., and Captain Holland (G. Harland Peck, Esq.), an interior which is redeemed by the clever study of the face of a hard drinker. In all these early pieces lurks, indeed, the satirist, he 33 HOGARTH who with one touch of the brush humorously comments on human foibles. The Wollaston Family (1730), for example, with its dry emphasis on the unbecoming caps and coiffure of the women, is a most malicious testimony to the abiding and unbecoming virtues of British family life. In The Wedding oj Stephen Beckingham mid Mary Cox (1729), the acute observer has given himself more liberty, the bridegroom's self- consciousness and the appropriate bearing of the clergyman and the parents being hit off with gusto. Sometimes we are faced by a deliciously quaint domestic study, as in The Misses Cotto7i and their Niece (Rev. W. J. Stracey Clitheroe), absolutely Hogarthian in its blend of truth and caricature. The homeliness of these excellent spinsters, gowned in green, blue and puce silk, redolent of all the careful domesticities, points the moral to the shy niece, whose frightened air and stiff backbone speak of the infinite care bestowed on her upbringing. A Mnsic Party (Fitzwilliam Museum), which has more charm than many, has the happy, fortuitous air of life, the musicians and the 'cello introducing a rich note in contrast with the pettiness and rigidity 34 HOGARTH of the Georgian ladies^ and the standing figure breaking up the composition artfully. The difference in quality between Hogarth's hack commissions and work done con amore may be judged from the engraving of the panel of The Politician (1730)^ a most firm and highly- wrought character study, and those given in S. Ireland's " Graphic Illustrations" of The Rich Family (17!28), and Governor Rogers and Family (1729), with theirartificial formality and strained poses. And yet in these first three years of painting, Hogarth must have won no slight reputation, for, according to Mr Austin Dobson, Mrs Pendarves writes to Mrs Anne Granville, July 13, 1731 : "I have released Lady Sunder- land from her promise of giving me her picture by Zinck, to have it done by Hogarth. I think he takes a much greater likeness." This testimony is supported by the fact that in this year Hogarth was given a commission of some importance by Mr Conduitt, the Master of the Mint, viz., to paint a representation of private theatricals in which the children of the Royal Family performed before a small, aris- tocratic audience. This picture. The Conquest of Mexico, which has been warmly praised 37 HOGARTH by Leslie and Sir Walter Armstrong for its ingenious composition ^ and pleasing colouring is, in a lesser degree, marked by the same stiffness and by the flatness of tone of all the early paintings. We must grant that many of these Conversation Pieces, painted from nature, have neither the spontaneous charm of a free sketch nor the fulness and force of a finished picture. Hogarth is always at his best in catching characteristic movement and gesture, and at his worst in portraying set postures. The Conquest of Me.vico, however, marks a turning-point in Hogarth's art. Up to this date his pictures give the impression of a painter who is oppressed by his subject, and by his own literalness and sincerity. It was no doubt his dissatisfaction with this class of ^ Sir Walter Armstrong singles out for praise " the lady in white in the audience, who stoops and busies herself with the children sitting on the floor before her. Nothing could be more real, more probable, more inevitable, I might say, than her action and the way in which it knits the vague interests of the small people and the complacency of their elders, and yet as a detail of the pattern it is exactly what is required both in line and tone." — Essay on '' The Art of Hogarth." 38 HOGARTH work rather than the difficulty of pleasing his patrons that determined him to strike out in the new, original style of his 'dramatic paintings"; whereby, while relying on his observation of nature, he could select for treatment any scene or subject that called forth his creative imagination. No English |)ainter had ever attempted this style before, and no one has signally succeeded in it since, though \\ ilkie is a fair second. Hogarth con- tinued to j)aint large Conversation Pieces, at intervals, during his lifetime, though these have never been classified or their dates determined. As an example we may mention A Family Parti/ (Sir Frederick Cook), a painting which is maturer and more natural in air and arrangement than several mentioned above. In this the perspective of the chamber — always a strength with Hogarth — is most skil- fully treated, and the walls and furniture are in his favourite, characteristic key of greyish green and mellow browns. The thoughtful, placid face of the gentleman in the chair is a masterly character study, and the table and tea-things are touched in with the lightest of hands. Considerably later, when the painter 41 HOGARTH was in command of all his resources, must be A Family Group (National Gallery). Here the soft, dusky atmosphere of the room and the receding shadowy walls and ceiling are beautiful in their restraint. The cool, dainty table linen, the tones of the flesh tints, the natural gesture of the man who is busy at the tea-table, and the charming relation of the lady's dress to the yellow chair beside her, all are perfect. But one defect is striking. Hogarth never attained the art of putting his sitters quite at their ease. The two elder men and the lady have a constrained air; obviously they are waiting, there, and are afraid to move, and the painter, with his in- tense sincerity, hastens to record the fact, thus robbing his scene of the charm of spontaneity which the Dutch genre painters knew so well how to secure. 42 IV' A Harlot's Progress. The Grand Historical Style The influences — French^ Italian^ Dutch — that affected Hogarth's artistic development are a subject that is terra incognita in criticism. ^ The ' ^^It seems to be uncertain where Hogarth got his pecuhar dehcacies of colour and handling from, but his execution, when it is most disinterested, bears a remarkable likeness to the execution of his V'enetian contemporary Longhi. I am not aware tbat there is any reason to suppose that either ])ainter was influenced by tbe other, but Hogarth may have learnt something of the Venetian tradi- tion of Ricci, wlio was in England in his youth ^' — says Mr Clutton Brock. " Later, it would seem as if Hogarth had felt the influence of the popular mannerisms of Canaletto and his followers : in pictures like the Approach to Ranelagh it is quite discernible," says Mr Laurence Binyon. Mr Frederick AN'edinore asks, "How are we to escape 43 HOGARTH conjectures cited below all agree in this, that Hogarth did not remain so unaffected by the example of foreign masters as he would have us believe. Many critics have singled out Jan Steen for comparison with the English master, but in subject not in treatment. It seems probable enough that the immediate inspiration of the "Dramatic Paintings" came from the theatre. ^ Hogarth, from early days, seems to have been on an intimate footing with managers and actors.^ The stage doubtless attracted him as an admirable school for the study of facial emotion. Before his eyes was the recognition of it [French influence] in the Marriage A-la-ModeV and speaks, in this connection, of Watteau, and of Gravelot, the French engraver. ^ '' I have endeavoured to treat my subject as a dramatic writer : my picture is my stage, and men and women my players, who by means of certain actions and gestures are to exhibit a dumb show. ... This I find was most likely to answer my purpose, provided I could strike the passions." 2 The scene in The Beggar s Opera, Act III. (Nov. .5, 1729), contains portraits of Miss Fenton, the Duke of Bolton, Mr Rich the Manager, Mr Cock the Auctioneer, all of whom became patrons of the painter. 44 HOGARTH the scene, the story, the dramatic moral ! Why not, then, " compose paintings on canvas similar to representations on the stage " ? and so '^entertain and improve the mind." The success of his picture, the Scene in the Beggar s Opera, of which Hogarth painted at least two re})licas, may have fired him with the ambition of composing his own '' dramatic stories," and his familiarity with the stage would help him to escape didacticism. His '^pictured morals," indeed, are a compromise between his sound moral sense, hearty in fibre but lacking in fineness, and the most delicate perception of the most complex shades of human passion. His disinterested, aesthetic enjoyment of the human comedy blends with his humour and a grimly moral sense of tragic issues to stamp his vision with a peculiar objective coolness. Often the moral direction of his aim is at war with the irony of his perceptions, as we note in the drawing of the gluttony at A Cifi/ Banquet, which celebrates the Industrious 'Prentice's virtuous ending. This conjunction of moralist, satirist and impartial observer is not uncommon in eighteenth century genius. Defoe, Addison, Swift, Pope, Fielding, Smollett, 47 HOGARTH all are rich in didactic veins running through the body of their art. Hogarth's first essay in dramatic painting seems to have been Before and After, two designs which satirize the appetite of concupiscence in a humorous and most impartial style. These "two little pictures, unfinished for Mr Thomson, Dec. 1730/' are over-vigorous in gesture, but the woman's melting happiness and tender revul- sion of feeling in the After betray the born physiognomist. The commentators, gratuitously shocked by their "broad " truth, have failed to notice that these designs pave the way for a series of delineations of kindred passions, and may well have suggested the treatment of A Harlot^s Progress. Materials for a study of vice were at every Londoner's door in days when men and women were pilloried and hanged publicly at the street corners. " Yester- day the noted Mother Needham stood in the pillory in Park Place near St James's-street and was severely handled by the populace." "She was so very ill that she lay along under the pillory, notwithstanding which she was severely pelted, and it is thought she will die in a day or two," says the Grub Street Joimial of May 6, 48 //I) HOGARTH 17'U, from which sheet Hogarth no doubt took the name of his wanton heroine, " Kate Hackabout, a woman noted in and about the hundreds of Drury, whose brother was lately hanged at Tyburn/' Aug. 6, 1730. The curious reader should peruse the " Life of Colonel Charteris " for a very intimate record of Georgian vice. Both Mother Need- ham, and Charteris the letcher, who had been tried, convicted, and mobbed for a lengthy series of seductions of country girls, figure in Picture I. of .-^ Harlot's P;'oo-/y'*.9, an illustration of Hogarth's practice of introducing portraits of a great variety of public characters into his paintings. We are told that it was the painter's practice to make a thumbnail sketch of any face that struck him in the street, and his power of " retaining in his mind's eye " " whatever he wished to imitate," explains how his memory became a vast storehouse of psychological im- pressions of faces, figures, gestures, attitudes, etc. The direction the great Realist was to take was thus determined. The pictur- esque material of eighteenth century London life, unabashed and unself-conscious, lay all round him, and his task was to show the beauty 51 HOGARTH of the familiar everyday realities^ and so to select and combine the details that the character of his scenes should strike deep by their aesthetic power. It is by this passing of the life of Georgian London through the crucible of his imagination that Hogarth attains the rank of the great creative spirits, and may be classified with Moliere. It is tempt- ing but useless to discuss whether he would have stood higher as a painter pure and simple had this peculiar creative imagination been lacking, for his genius itself may be defined as the power of constructing and handling a scene or subject charged with meaning, in a purely painter-like way. Sometimes the beauty ot his treatment suffers from the emphasis of his humorous insight, e.g. Southivark Fair : some- times it is inspired by his satiric force, e.g. The Botch. His genius is composed of distinct layers of mental gifts, and the latter are dis- played in changing measure according to his momentary mood and inspiration. The first three scenes in A Harlot's Progress, perfectly natural as they are, might almost be scenes on the stage, five minutes after the curtain has gone up. There is a certain heaviness almost 52 HOGARTH germanic, both in the grouping of the figures and in the naive direction of the satire, but how masterly (Scene l)is the demure suggestiveness of this country girl^ ripe for seduction, and the side glance of Charteris waiting till the waddling procuress has lodged the prey within his doors. The faces of all three figures reveal Hogarth's astounding power of indicating the most subtle shades of feeling by a broad and simple touch. Compare in Scene .S the ripe charms of the heroine with the prim starched air of Sir John Gonson, entering in the background, a justice famed for his zeal in hunting down prostitutes, and thieves such as James Dalton, the audacious Street-robber, House-breaker, Foot-pad and Pick-pocket, whose '^ wigg box '' we see on the bed tester. Hogarth, in his psychological im- partiality, is as severe on his grave people of consequence as on the vicious and depraved. His wool-gathering parson in Scene 1 is frankly a little ridiculous ; so is the good Sir John, whose weakness it was to make " most incomparable, learned, and fine charges to the Grand Jury," while his quarrelling physicians and amorous parson and undertaker in Scenes 4 and 6 are more repellent than the ladies 55 HOGARTH of pleasure. Scenes 2 and 5 are the weakest of the series^ the gesture of the harlot and the lines of the table legs, in the former, forming an ungraceful pattern, while there is caricature in the figures of the physicians, though their rage contrasts admirably with the immobility of the dying patient, whose last breath is escaping wdth the ghost of a sigh. Scene 4, Bridewell, with its sinuous line of the prisoners beating hemp, is the artistic gem ^ of the set, preserving th e spontaneity of nature, if we except the labour-master, who is pointing the moral with his rattan. The harlot, with her air of exhausted voluptuousness and languid grip of the heavy mallet, and the frail figure of the gambler next her, in bag wig and laced coat, are exquisite in drawing. Hogarth, we may ^ Five of the six original pictures perished in the Fonthill fire. Two replicas of Pictures II. and IV. (Lord Rosebery) testify to the painter's early command of warm and glowing colour. The scheme of rich browns in Picture IV. is perfect in tone, a little marre -- ■- ■--.- ■■ w ^*^^' 1 1 ^^ ,• .. .; ■■/■ ' .-<»■. - ^^^/^ ; • wi*iiw^^m ^ ^ '(jM ■ i^^ #*"• ■irlr^^**^iiP'' T^lT^^^H ^^^^Bk^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H o CO CO -O ^-^ HOGARTH The Prison, and Plate VI 11.^ The Madhouse, the painter's literary, moral, and psychological genius places his itsthetic appeal in the shade. Charles Lamb has expounded the first in such final terms 1 that we will only refer to the Rake's beggared old wife, in whose face is the glare of speechless reproach so wrought up with trembling rage at the depths of their ruin as to be terrible in its accusing hatred. It is by the contrast between the haggard glare of the woman's eye and the settled stupefaction of ^ "Is there anything comparable in Reynolds," Lamb asks, " to the expression which Hogarth has put into the face of his broken-down rake . . . where a letter from the manager is brought to him to say that his play ' will not do?^ Here all is easy, natural, undistorted, but, withal, what a mass of woe is here accumulated ! the long history of a misspent life is compressed into tlie countenance . . . here is no attempt at Gorgonian looks which are to freeze the beholder, no grinning at the antique bed-posts, no face-making or consciousness of the presence of spectators in or out of the picture, but grief kept to a man's self, a face retiring from notice with the shame which great anguish sometimes brings with it — a final leave taken of hope, the coming on of vacancy and stupefaction," etc. ho 97 HOGARTH the man that Hogarth, here, may be said to vie with Shakespeare. In pure aesthetic beauty both Pictures VH. and VHI. are perhaps the least satisfying of the series, and the student will note with almost a shock of surprise how the exquisite delicacy and charm of the painting of the lady holding up her fan introduces the feeling of sunhght and fresh air into the gloomy corridor in Bedlam. We may freely grant that the last three scenes in A Rakes Progress, despite many ex- quisite particulars, rank rather as social docu- ments of their day than as supreme pieces of art. Hogarth's aim — ^^to compose paintings on canvas similar to representations on the stage . . . my picture is my stage and men and women my players " — sometimes brought to birth pictures of high literary felicity, as The Distressed Poet (1736), which, with kindly humour, illustrates the lighter side of the afflictions of Grub Street's victims, from the days of the Dunciad to the days of Chatterton. The Skeping Congregation (1736) (Sir Frederick Cook, Bart.), on the other hand, is a most delicious piece of satiric genre painting, in a 98 HOGARTH style that has no English forbears and no heirs. A direct satire on the Georgian Church, it plays on the morals of the age with a caustic lightness that is almost Voltairean. Far beneath the divine, lost in his discourse, which only reaches the painted angel on the chancel wall, slumbers the heavy-witted, animal-minded congregation. The picture, which is most original in its key of sombre browns and blacks, is handled with a quick nervous quality of style that proves how perfectly the painter's eye and his satiric humour could fuse in a creation. That some- times a rage for humorous anecdote could get the upper hand is evidenced by The Strolling Actresses (1738), a design which Charles Lamb rightly declares " in living character and expression is (for Hogarth) lamentably poor and wanting." Here (the engraving alone surviving) the design seems little but a collection of broad humours, forcible enough, but choked and congested with a superfluity of details. From The Four Times of the Day (1738), a series of four designs, we may judge what Antaean labours were undertaken by the lOl HOGARTH prolific genius who, on canvas, set down the Human Comedy of his day with a sharpness of vision that even Balzac in his own art has not equalled. These four designs are most unequal in aesthetic power, the Evening, and more especially the Night, being very curious docu- ments of Georgian manners. It may be re- peated here that until a representative Hogarth Exhibition has been held, it is impossible to settle the relative value of many of the minor Dramatic Paintings. The Noo?i is, however, one of the most perfect compositions that Hogarth ever achieved. In the congregation which is filing from the French chapel in Hog Lane the painter has caught marvellously the people's satisfied and relieved air of duty per- formed, and the bubbling over of their spirits on emerging from their pent-up pews into the fresh air. Every detail, the self-congratulatory air of the clergyman in the doorway, the study of the hats and backs of the retreating file of people, the parody of fashionable folk in the figure of the toddler of five, the smell of Sunday dinner floating out from the houses to meet the worshippers' nostrils, all this is rendered with an inimitable joyous stroke. Note the Hogarthian I02 THE FOUR riMES OF 1 HE DAY. Noon From Hogarth's Original Engraving HOGARTH "aside" of the child's kite, entangled and hangino; down from the eaves of the chapel. The more the fjices in Noofi are studied the more the secret of Hogarth's genius appears inseparable from his f^iculty of "retaining in his mind's eye, without coldly copying it on the spot, whatever he intended to imitate." Any expression of feeling or passion, in its subtlest shade, that has caught his eye is reproduced by him with a sharp fidelity and a breathing force that are truly magical. We have had various artists, such as Wilkie and Mulready, who show considerable talent in reproducing the spirit of a scene by a study of facial gesture, but in psychological fineness, as well as depth and range, they are but children in comparison with Hogarth. When the latter is captured by a mere satiric generalization, as in The Enraged Musician (1738), the painter at once descends in the artistic scale, and for this same reason Taste in High Life (1742), which is superior to it in grace of line, borders on caricature. We have, perhaps, said enough here to show that Hogarth's original genius consists of a perfect orchestra of faculties which produce surpassing results so long as each obeys HOGARTH the ruling of the painter-conductor. Occa- sionally the moral, the satiric, or the intellectual impulse gets a little out of hand. But how admirably they can join in unison to execute a most exacting and complicated symphony is demonstrated by Marriage A-la-Mode. A word may here be said on Hogarth's engravings. Hogarth himself tells us that he had not the patience to acquire a fine technique, and it is ironical that his art should have been so long judged through a medium that was adopted by him purely for reasons of popularity. " Hogarth had a competent, if somewhat heavy, hand, and his prints are interesting, indeed absorbing, as compositions cram full of thought ; but he achieved no beauty in the medium, and their quality as engraving is commonplace," says a modern master of the art. 1 06 VI The "Dramatic Paintings/' 174-5-1759 We liave said that Hogarth's besetting sin in his compositions lies in putting in too much, and the censure of a recent French critic^ goes ^ "In Shortly after Marriage, the gaming-tables, thecards littering the floor, the musical instruments, the burnt-out candles, the account-books in the arms of the steward, the pen behind his ear, and the bills in his hand, tell us about a multitude of things wherein neither correctness of form nor brilliance of colour are of any consequence. All this is very ingenious, very complete, very telling. It is even too much so ; for it is disagreeable, it is provoking to find everything written down for one when one is seeking a sensation. . . . Hogarth leaves nothing for the imagination to do. His pictures do not suggest a drama : they point it out. There is a thousand times more feeling, more drama, more humanity in some enigmatical figures of ^^'atts or Burne-Joncs." — " Tlie Early British School," by Robert de la JSizeranne, p. xix. 107 HOGARTH far to counteract the eulogistic chorus ot literary appreciations. Pictorially the whole often suffers by the superabundance of detail, and this is the logical result of trying to tell a stoiy in paint — we are driven to admire the speaking details, at the loss of harmony and unity. Nevertheless Marriage A - la- Mode (1745) not only retains its hold on the world's imagination as strongly as ever, but in this genre Hogarth's beauties are so surpassing as to leave his successors' over-shadowed. Let us admit the justice of the Frenchman's com- plaint that there is " the duality of com- position " in many of his pictures, with two scenes and several groups, each complete in itself, which are not related pictojialli/ to each other,! as in Shortly after Marriage and The Death of the Countess. This defect, character- istic of the English school, springs from an over- ^ " A dealer . . . cuts the picture in two, thus making it into two perfectly distinct scenes . . . without anyone perceiving anything lacking in either. That has been the history of numerous English pictures, from the Mou.sehold Heath of old Crome to the Hadrian in England of Alma Tadema.^' —"The Early British School," by Robert de la Sizeranne, p. 17- 108 HOGARTH scrupulous adherence to nature which is offered us in place of the Latin feeling for design. We find that character, resting on the artist's psychological disinterestedness, is seized with such intensity as to make the design^ ipia design, subordinate to its detailed revelations. All is character in the Marriage A-/a-Mode, whether it be of faces, walls, clothes or ceilings, and the extraordinary thing is that the char- acteristics of such multitudinous details should ever have been blended by the painter's skill into relatively so pleasing a pattern. There is too much, not too little, "drama, feeling, and humanity " in The Marriage Contract, in which Hogarth has laid bare the outrage against morals in this mating of an innocent girl with a weak and vicious fop. The tragedy imminent is disclosed not merely by the gesture of the man who turns from her to admire his own reflection in the pier-glass, but in every line of the drooping figure of the bride. Supreme in its sublety is the face of this girl in whose tremulous mouth and half- closed eyes the world of soft feminine awaken- ings is already sealed up by the chill of aversion to her husband. And each figure in III HOGARTH the room has also its speaking life story. The complaint is just that each figure^ group or portion calls for too individual^ separate atten- tion. It is so even with The Coimtesss Dressing-room, which is extremely happy in its skilful and natural grouping. The admirable parts are too often the enemy of the whole. Examine the drawing of the further room in Shortly after Marriage, where the yawning manservant is shifting back the chairs from the card tables after the night's dissipation. There is a dream-like atmospheric charm here, the very poetry of a chamber deserted breathes from the scattered cards on the floor and the chandelier with its candles flaring in the morning light, and every detail is beautiful because it is in just relation to the whole, because the solidity of life is rendered with surpassing fineness by the painter who shirks no problem. The painting of the fore room, in which the dissipated earl and his yawning wife sit, inevitably suffers in comparison by reason of the multitudinous pictorial problems to be solved — the steward with his bills, the overturned chair, the dog sniffing, the musical instruments, etc. Techni- 1 12 CO z o HOGARTH cally it is an impossibility to introduce all these story-telling details, and yet reject everything that the painter's eye recognizes is not essential to its pure pictorial unity. Hogarth has two schemes, beauty and narra- tive interest, each clamouring for atten- tion, and however clever his compromise, we realize that the latter will not be allowed to suffer. Picture HI., The Visit to the Quack Doctor, aptly illustrates the painter's problem. This beautiful interior, with its subdued atmosphere and restful mellowness, has every air of being painted from an exact study made on the spot of just such a Georgian apartment. Just so the bow-legged empiric must have stood, eyeing some inter- locutor ; the tones of his face and dress are in perfect relation to the background. But that the figures of the earl, his girl mistress, and the virago have been painted in afterwards from separate studio studies is evident from their being in a different key. Their faces and dresses, beautifully painted in themselves, are much too bright for the sober tone of the apartment. The gradations of tone are arbitrary, though the eye, fascinated by the HOGARTH revelation of character in the virago's fierce gesture and the earl's mocking air and laugh, may not at first detect the cause. The spectator's compensation for defects of this nature lies elsewhere, in the " clear tonalities, free tints and distinct touches " of the painter's method. The beauty of Hogarth's pure and lively colouring can best be appreciated on a sunlit day, when many of Hogarth's canvases, in their ill-lit gallery, sparkle like jewels. But even on a dull November day the exquisite minor beauties that Hogarth bestows with a lavish hand — such as the delicate sunny vista seen through the archway of The Gate of Calais — arrest the most careless eye. In the psy- chology of gesture expressing the momentary impulse, the birth and change of passions, ideas, and sentiment by the movements of the limbs and body, Hogarth is above all unsurpassable. The Visit to the Quack Doctor as a subject is out of date, but its characteristic manifestation of human appetite and passion is, as art, inde- structible. The depth and fulness of the lusty flowing main stream of the human tide is felt in the free and natural gestures of the earl and the virago, and, indeed, of all the characters intro- ll6 HOGARTH duced in other canvases of the Marriage A-la- Mode. By the end of the eighteenth century this robust whole-heartedness of artistic vision had passed away, and in the Mctorian age the broadly human acceptation of Hfe and nature of Hogarth's world was replaced by moral timidity and intellectual evasion. Life was no longer suffered to speak for itself, and the Victorian painters were earnestly engaged in idealizing or sentimentalizing the fundamental facts of human passion. Does anyone believe that the Victorian genre painters — Webster, Mulready, Leslie, Collins, etc.— really represent the human tragedy or comedy of their age in the sense that Hogarth represents it? While Hogarth's vision of life is more universal than Fielding's, the Mctorian painters, without real depth or sin- cerity, are immeasurably inferior to Thackeray and Dickens, and their chief success lay in covering up the hard dough cake of reality with pretty romantic sugar. It is the fashion to speak of Georgian robustness apologetically ; but when intellectual sincerity is no longer welcomed, art itself tends to become artificial, and ceases to be a broad impartial mirror of national life and character. In 77/ 1' I'isit to the 119 HOGARTH Quack Doctor vice is not driven underground, but is given its due in the characters of the sad- eyed, deflowered child, the enraged procuress and the effeminate nobleman. The Countess s Dressing-rootn, again, is an exquisite piece of comedy that equals anything in Congreve or Sheridan, so natural, lively, and richly diversi- fied is it in satiric force. The fat-jowled, pig- eyed opera-singer, Carestini, a mountain of pampered flesh, his neighbour the cross-legged gentleman with vacant eyes, the Swiss valet, who is curling her ladyship's hair with profes- sional absorption, the rapprochement between the Countess, this fresh and flattered girl, and the sleek Counsellor Silvertongue, all these eleven figures, in fact, are painted with such absolute felicity of touch that one can scarcely believe it can be an imaginary composition, one built up from hasty notes, memories, and studies from the life. The creative fecundity is matched by the certainty with which the technical problems are solved, such as the lighting of the scene, which is both natural and happy. For pure beauty of colour the dress of the cross-legged gentleman would be difficult to match in the English school. I20 HOGARTH It is in the range of his painter's knowledge and feeling, above all, that Hogarth surpasses all his successors. Examine, for example, the face of the dying Countess, of her deformed child, and of the toothless old servant, in The Death of the Countess ; they are not merely studies from nature, they are divinations of a great creative mind. Hogarth must have watched in life the facial expression of some such emotions ; he may have posed the models for this little group, as we know that he posed a friend of his in the character of Viscount Squanderfield. But it is clear that Hogarth also enacted within himself the tragedy he paints, that he could visualize at will the change of face of his characters, just as Shakespeare could create a thousand fleeting shades of mood. Hogarth can stamp an in- dividuality, moreover, with the decisive mark- ings of a generic species : the faces of the angry apothecary and the half-witted servant are ex- amples of this rare gift. Proof of the artist's mysterious insight into the finest recesses of feeling is shown by the spectator's inability to criticize adversely a single face in the whole gallery of Marriage A-la-Mode. The idea of 123 HOGARTH the avaricious alderman drawing a ring from off his daughter's finger before it stiffens in death is trite ; but watch the man's depreca- tory care expressed in his opening mouth and his soft gesture. Who can say what is exactly in this man's mind? or what promptings of self inspire a stealthy duty to himself ? The tragedy within the death cliamber is subtly accented by the tranquil view of old London Bridge, with its crazy houses seen through the open window, and by the restful- ness of the still life of the tobacco pipes and spirit jars standing in the cupboard, which suggest other scenes in the tragi comedy of life which the old house has witnessed. Hogarth's irresistible temptation to overdo his own effects by superfluous comic strokes here finds vent in the gaunt dog seizing the pig's head, but apart from this The Death of the Countess is one of our great classics in ease, breadth, and inevitability. The Stage Coach (1747) is another of those representations of contemporary manners in which Hogarth successfully solved the problem which is puzzling our young school of painters to-day. A critic, Mr Aitken, rightly declares 124 HOGARTH that the details are ugly, yet the whole is most beautiful. " He makes a beautiful picture by means of the exquisite play of light and the rich refined colour, softened by the atmosphere." . . . "He even exaggerates the ugliness of figure and detail with a certain savage anger at the hideousness of things." But are they hideous ? Is not this " savage anger" merely his temperamental joy in grasp- ing men's idiosyncrasies and laying bare the nucleus and structure of their characters } The portrait of Simon Lord Lovat (1747) (National Portrait Gallery), for instance, hypno- tizes one by the canny craftiness of the old Jacobite, and every line of the clumsy, bulky figure is instinct with this force. In The Gale of Calais (1749) this piercing intensity conjoins with a John Bullish contemptuous distaste for the foreigner. It is instructive to compare this painting with Hogarth's account of his visit to France,^ where he was arrested 1 " The first time an Englishman goes from Dover to Calais, he must be struck with the different face of things at so little a distance. A farcical pomp of war, pompous parade of religion, and much bustle with very little business. To sum up all, poverty, 127 HOGARTH as a spy, but sent back to England after his sketches were found " to be merely those of a painter for his private use." To this incident we owe the beautiful composition, Calais Gate (National Gallery), perfect in grouping, movement, atmospheric richness, and in depth and glow of colour. The figure of the tall French sentry on the left, in its supple vigour, beats even those named in the note, and this humorous creation, built up out of a mere itnpressioti dc voyage, is a good instance of Hogarth's amazing fecundity.^ The force of Hogarth's intellect has been slavery, and innate insolence, covered with au affectation of politeness, g-ive you even here a true picture of the manners of the whole nation ; nor are the priests less opposite to those of Dover than the two shores.'^ — '^' Hogarth Illustrated,'^ by John Ireland, vol. iii. 1 " The lean French cook in Calais Gate, stagger- ing under the lordly beef, with tlie gloating, lascivious-iingered friar beside him, and the hungry soldier at his back, make up a trio that not only pulses with vitality, but in pure design, in intrinsic fitness for its place upon the canvas, excels anything you will find in the work of such a man, let us say, as Jan Steen, who was, nevertheless, a master of painted drama." — Sir Walter Armstrong 128 In SIMON LORD LOVAT From the Original Drawing (British Museum) HOGARTH under-estimated, through his own blunt avowal of his likings and dislikings, and through the patronizing gossi}) on his tastes and limitations retailed by Steevens. But Hogarth's acute and daring mind is always consciously at work, criticizing men and manners, even when masked happily in the felicitous flow of line and colour. Turning to the engravings, take the Idle Apprentice Executed at Tyhuni, Plate XL, where we have not merely an impression of a crowd's flux and attitude, but a psychological study of its behaviour of a deliberate kind. The original sketches for the series. Industry and Idleness (1747), in the British Museum, throw interest- ing light on the struggle between Hogarth the artist versus Hogarth the moralist. Take, for example, the first sketch for Plate IX., The Night Cellar, which surpasses the finished design. There is no literary meaning here. The grouping is more natural, the menacing proprietress is spontaneous in force, unlike the over-deliberate pose of the whore in the plate. Or take the first sketch for Plate IV., The Industrious 'Prentice a Favourite. Here there is delicious spirit in the rough sketch of the Quaker prototype, which in the engraving is 135 HOGARTH lost, giving place to an over-benevolent smug- ness in the Master's feature and pose. The same is true, more or less, of the other prelimin- ary sketches, which are, later on, modified "to point the moral and adorn the tale." W e know, however, that Hogarth set out with the moral in- tention of "exemplifying Industry and Idleness in the conduct of two Fellow-prentices," ^ and by a study of the steps he took to that end we can see how the pure artist was compelled to compromise and come to terms with the man of ideas. Undoubtedly to modern taste Hogarth suffers in proportion as his "meaning," humorous or moral, becomes accentuated, but as a genius who makes a representative appeal to the nation his work reflects and is inspired by the whole contem- porary spectacle. The March of the Guards to Finchley (1751) (Foundling Hospital) combines pure pictorial claims with the historical interest of a great document of social manners. As a realist Hogarth gets into this single canvas as much national feeling, humour, and picturesque incident as all Smollett's novels contain, put 1 " The Genuine \Vorks of \Villiam Hogarth," 1808, vol. ii., pp. 134-6. ■36 HOGARTH together. The bare description alone of the figures and their actions, given by Stephens and Hawkins/ would fill fifteen of our pages The picture, a Cieorgian epic of the period 1745, demonstrates beyond question that the riotous play of Hogarth's humour is always con- trolled and guided by his marvellous fidelity to social types and manners. Here he is a man of the people, and the satirist of our national habit of "muddling through," The March of the Guards towards Scotland being planned and executed in practically the same spirit, in 1745, as The Guards' Despatch to S. Africa in 1900. The background of this picture, with its vista of marching ranks defiling from the inextricable confusion of the village street, is most beautiful in its arrangement, and in all the groups of the jostling crowds that blend and flow into one another in the haphazard tumult, are innumerable delicacies of gesture, movement, and facial play. Hogarth's management of crowds is always extraordinarily fine, the most notable, perhaps, being that in The Idle ^Prentice Executed at Tyburn ^ Plate XI., where ^" Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the Hritisli Museum," vol. iii.. Part I. 143 HOGARTH the careless jollity of a popular holiday is blent with a sinister feeling of the spectacle of the hanging being the poor felon's discharge of his last debt to society. Another remarkable psychological study of a crowd is in Plate XH., of Industry and Idleness, where the press and swaying rush of the people round the Lord Mayor's coach is felt even in the coachman's handling of the reins. The most interesting plates of this series (1747) are those least adul- terated with a moral aim, viz., VI., XI., XII., as the two sketches here reproduced from the British Museum collection show. We need not speak here of The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), prints specially executed with a didactic aim, "engraved with the hope of in some degree correcting the barbarous treatment of Animals." They are part of the social history of the time, but have scant artistic interest. On quite another plane is Beer Street (1751), an engraving where the artist's creative imagination triumphs in a pure lyrical outburst. Here the happy humours of the design find expression in exuberant curves of beauty. Note how the sedan-bearers advancing down the sun-lit city street are treading a triumphal stately measure 144 ^£rA«s?%il? — ' BEER Sl'REET From the Original Engkaving //K HOGARTH to John Barleycorn^ and how from the tankards, ii})lifted tenderly over the glorious stomachs of the drinkerS; flows the foaming benison of peace and plenty. The sinuous line of the lean sign-painter dreamily regarding his handi- work, the buxom charm of the fishwives, and the meaning play of shadow on the Frenchman and the pawnbroker's house, all are as point and counterpoint in this mellow October fugue. Beer Street should hang on eveiy Englishman's walls, a corrective to the fin-de- siecle aestheticism of his daughters' preference for Burne Jones or Rossetti. The true con- noisseur will admire no less the companion print Gin Lane {\1 d\), am astounding product of imaginative genius. The drunken harridan with the falling child, in the foreground, is perhaps a trifle over gaunt and bare, but what psychological breadth of vision has inspired this saturnalia of death, disease, and drink in the London streets.^ The feeling of the crazyhouses ^ "^ Should the drinking this poison [ gin ] be continued in its present height during the next twenty years, there will, by that time, be very few of tlie common people left to drink it." — Fielding's " Enquiry," etc. 147 HOGARTH toppling upon the heads of the brawlers and funeral mourners alike, at one stroke conveys the incorrigibleness of vile human nature, while the shored-up walls of the untenanted rookery suggest that the empty quarter is given over to the plague. It is of interest to note that some of the finest strokes both in Bee?- Street and Gin Lane are wanting in the original chalk drawings (Fairfax Murray, Esq.), which proves that many of Hogarth's effects are second thoughts, while his worst are third thoughts, as in the second state of Bee?' Street. In The FJection Series (Soane Museum) (1756) Hogarth's satiric powers reached their fullest and maturest development. He was now a man of sixty, and while his ridicule of party politics, of the electorate and of electioneering, loses nothing in keenness, his spirit is so whole- some, sane, and hearty as to stamp his scenes with truly national breadth. The pictures, painted in a mellow, easy style of masterly resource, contain scores of fascinating studies of the Georgian populace. The whole effect of these great compositions in calm breadth and richness of detail is of Chaucerian mellow amplitude. English painting has never sur- 148 GIN LANE From the Original Engraving HOGARTH passed Picture I\'., for examj)le, with its exquisite little group of spectators on the wall, the ecst^itic fiddler, and the three cooks filing solemnly into the house of "the yellows.'' The sunlit calm of the architecture alone would create any modern painter's reputation. Picture HI., The Polling, contains matchless gems of satiric portraiture, leaving the twofold impression that Hogarth is both of his age and superior to his age, the true sign of creative greatness. Note in particular, for consummate felicity of expression and gesture, the burly lawyer in the full-bottomed wig, the man who is lifting the dying freeholder, the face of the palsied epileptic, and the clerk who is handing him the pen. wSatire so trenchant as this in any other man's hands would degenerate into caricature, but Hogarth never caricatures, his teeming mind has absorbed and reproduces all these faces and attitudes direct from nature, and it is only when he forces too many humours upon us that his art suffers, or when, as in the engraving, The Invasion (1756), his boisterous and chauvinistic patriotism chances to draw its nutriment largely from the sjiirit of prejudice, and less from life. The Beueh (1758), on the 153 HOGARTH other hand^ is one of the most impressive of his small canvases. The rubicund Lord Chief- Justice, swollen with self-importance, and the attenuated figure of the sleeping Judge on the left, against the ominous dark background, hint a most sinister meaning. Let us trust that this merciless picture, unique in English art, may come, some day, into the possession of the nation. Another engraving. The Cock P^7 (1 759),is full of astounding brilliance and verve. The nervous excitement of these clustering gamesters' heads, aristocrats cheek by jowl with plebeians, pick- pockets, bookmakers, jockeys, tipsters, and the rabble, is felt in the staccato breaks in the pattern, which last is subtly blended with the swelling contours and curves of the pit. The pure artist here asserts himself, without a trace of any feeling but disinterested joy in the spec- tacle of the gamblers' lust for sport. The Ladys Last Stake (1759) may close our rapid survey of the Dramatic Paintings and Engravings. Here all the painter's psychological skill is shown in the struggle in the tempted woman's face, between the call of duty, inclination, and temper. While the walls and mantelpiece, the clock and table, and the light night sky are "54 C3 z 2U < HOGARTH handled with flowing ease, the values of the picture are lacking in delicacy and the colour- ing is harsh. It was the success of this paint- ing which, unfortunately, brought Hogarth his commission to paint the Sigi.wumda, a subject to which we shall recur in our last chapter. 59 VII Some Portraits and Sketches Hogarth's portraiture has remained in the shade ever since the sun of Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Hoppner dazzled l^nglish society. The revolution in style introduced by Reynolds, about 1755, substituted glowing Venetian colouring, blended and diffused in harmonious masses, for the quiet and dryer style of a defined contrast of colours. The charm, grace, and distinction in the air and pose of the sitter, the soft or mellow atmo- sphere bathing the canvas with a brilliant or luscious colour scheme, which were soon to become fashionable, were undreamed of by Hogarth, who " followed the convention of his day," Sir William Armstrong tells us, " in placing his sitter against a dark background." And yet, according to the same authority, Hogarth, in his Portrait of His Sister, evolved a 1 60 GEORGE ARNOLD, ESQ. From the Original P.mntino FiT/.\vii.i.iam Museum) hL HOGARTH system whicli was " followed a century later by Eugene Delacroix, who was under the impression that he was its inventor." ^ What is the date of this portrait ? The sister must be Ann, who was born in 1701, and she cannot be more than thirty-six to judge by her look, and this would give us the date approximately of 1737, when Hogarth was a man of forty. When we examine the magnificent technique of this j)ainting, and of the Quin the Actor that hangs near it, it is, at first, hard to say what is the factor that diminishes their power over us. The flesh painting of Quin's full-blooded cheeks, as well of the healthy, clear-skinned, buxom complexion of Hogarth's Sister, beats the flesh-painting of Sir Joshua right out of the field ; but there is a certain hidden discord and ^ " . . . for beauty of execution, for the skill with which light and colour are substituted for paint, Hogarth'ti Sister beats them all. . . . The high liglits and the deep sliadons are in each case two primaries, wliich unite to form the half-toue. The dress which produces the effect of yellow is yellow in the high lights, red in the deepest shadows, and orange in the transitions ; so with the scarf, the three tints of which are orange, green and blue.'' — '' The Art of Hogarth'^ p. 14. 163 HOGARTH even a lack of joyousness in Hogarth's Sister, Miss Fenton, and in the painter's Portrait hy Himself. It must be that the wrong relation in tone between the dark background and these admirable heads is the treacherous factor, secretly handicapping the painter's felicitous touch. It must be this and not the darkness of the background in itself, as Sir William Armstrong seems to imply, that is the discord. 1 That this damaging arrangement was a studio convention for highly finished portraits alone seems certain from the fact that Hogarth disregards it altogether in his "oil sketches." Let us turn to the celebrated Captain Coram. This portrait, which Hogarth tells us is that " which I painted with most pleasure and in which I particularly wished to excel," lacks only one quality — unity — to be a masterpiece. The breadth and force of the handling are superb, and the beaming humanity 1 '^ If the fashion of the day had not led him to put his sitter against a dark background, the picture might have been more beautiful still. Imagine such powers employed in making the figure appear round and moving in an enveloppc of light." — Essay on " The Art of Hogarth," p. 14. 164 HOGARTH of the warm-hearted founder of The FoundHng Hospital is seized with such buoyancy as to leave the rival portraits hanging near — an early Reynolds, a Ramsay, a Shackleton, a Hudson, etc, —dry and lifeless ghosts. The details (note the painting of the glove) are brilliantly rendered, but the a?sthetic appeal of the whole is damaged seriously by the disharmony in tone between the figure and the accessories, the conventional pilaster, curtain, the globe, seal, books, and Royal Charter, which material symbols Hogarth, as a man of ideas, was no doubt delighted to introduce into his picture. Xo doubt Hogarth was so intent on personality and character that he considered as secondary the arrangement of colours and lines in a beautiful pattern. Often the pure painter pre- vails, as in the Peg Woffington (The Marquis of Landsdowne), and yet here again the beautiful handling of the mouth and eyes, the exquisite contrast in tone of the curls and lace, and the soft and delicate colouring, are wronged by the conventional lighting. Sometimes the ])sychologist is foremost, as in the Sir Ccesar Ilairlxins (Royal College of Surgeons), where the surgeon's alert glance and concealed 167 HOGARTH hands reveal the operator who is eyeing the patient and summing up his case. In others, such as the Lord Boyne (H. M. Colnaghi, Esq.), and the Portrait of a Gentlemcm, and the Portrait of a Lady (C. Fairfax Murray, Esq.), a stoHdity and emptiness of expression seem to struggle with a masterly reading of character, as though both the artist and the sitter were refrigerated by their Georgian atmosphere. In the Mrs Desaguliei's (1745) the matter-of-factness and tastelessness of the pose, which at first impress one, yield, at a further scrutiny, and the face of this sensible country girl begins to glow with life. Hogarth, as a realist, reverses the procedure of Reynolds and Gainsborough : he eagerly sacrifices charm to character, and even seems to welcome an awkward or ugly fact as a precious part of the psychological scheme. In the portrait of The Painter s Wife (L. H. M^Cormick, Esq.), the cap that Jane Hogarth wears, and the arrangement of the easel near at hand, are most uncompromising. "I will paint just what I see before me," the painter seems to say ; '' this cap interests me no less than the flesh of this bosom, neck and shoulders, and the blue dress. My wife has 1 68 w ^ s HOGARTH an air of posing for me, well, I will paint that too." Despite this literalness, and, indeed, because of it, Hogarth's face-painting in many respects is superior to that of his great successors. He is truly objective, a quality which we prize when we compare the canvases of Reynolds, in all their ripe charm and grace, betraying, each, a soupi^on of that sentimental sweetness which always delights our English public. Again, Hogarth, because he is downright and homely in his realism, because he paints every- thing that he sees in a face, goes deeper to the roots of character and of a family stock than Reynolds or Gainsborough. Possessed of nothing of the hitter's exquisite distinction, tenderness, and grace of style, he does not invest his sitters with that air of high birth and aristocratic breeding, with those beautiful and sensitive features which we find in almost all but Gainsborough's early portraits. Where Reynolds and Gainsborough paint a class Hogarth paints a man or woman, without the faintest trace of flattery. ^ The George Arnold, ^ ^^^alpole's testimony conceruing Hogarth's difficulties with his patrons is that '^ a satirist was 171 HOGARTH Esq. (Fitzwilliam Museum), is certainly one of the portraits "said to be nature itself." The honest heartiness of this sanguine, masterful man speaks in his resolute eyes and mouth. In the Miss Arnold, here is the same family type, the same characteristics, in milder feminine form, the man's flesh and blood transmuted in his daughter's personality. And neither Reynolds nor Gainsborough could have recorded with the same strong solidity the actual body of the woman, the way the neck rises out of the healthy bosom, the arms out of the shoulders, the hair unadorned, and the large, capable hands. They were in search of too formidable a confessor for the devotees of self- love.^' Hogarth's own account is to the same effect. ''I found by mortifying experience that whoever would succeed in this branch must . . . make divinities of all who sit to liim.^^ In another passage he tells us, " . . . my Portraitures met with a fate somewhat similar to those of Rembrandt. By some they were said to be nature itself— hy others, declared most execrable ; so that Time can only decide whether I was the best or the worst Face- painter of my day ; for a medium was never so much as suggested." 172 MISS ARNOLD Fkom the Originai. Paintino (Fitzwh.liam Museum) HOGARTH beauty, distinction, refinement, and the presen- tation of a healthy young woman, just as she is, is a subject alien to their art. Even if we leave Hogarth's great successors out of the argument, it may be urged that Hogarth's honesty is exceedingly refreshing, when compared with the art of the nineteenth century English portrait painters. Examine the unpreten- tious Hogarth painting the Comic Muse (I76i2) (National Portrait Gallery), and this prosaic sketch of the sturdy little figure with shaven head and worsted stockings may seem dull and lustreless, but the vast majority of the portraits of hundreds of Victorian celebrities in the galleries beneath will soon convince you that theatricality and false emphasis, and a smooth and shiny idealism, are as common, with us, as reticence and modesty in the art are rare. And this sincere realism can blossom forth, when Hogarth is at his finest, with all the freshness and magic of Nature. Examine The Shrimp Girl (National Gallery). The bloom of this saucy face, the ingenuous freshness of the girl's glance are rendered with a flying lightness, an unerring delicacy of touch that are magical, that are matched by nothing in the 175 HOGARTH English School. A learned critic, indeed, goes further. 1 But what is to be remarked is that the subtlety of this harmony of reddish-browns and greens is as just as the spontaneity of the handling. It must be recognized that this oil sketch is superior in its fresh charm to the highly-finished portrait of Hogarth's Sister (National Gallery), and the reason is simply that Hogarth followed his pure instinct in this sketch and not the studio recipe of "a con- ventional background." The marvellous Six .Serr^w/* (National Gallery) seems to justify him in his boast that he '^ could paint a portrait as well as Vandyke." The dewy freshness and in- genuousness of the little boy's spirit shining in his clear eyes and candid mouth and fore- head are perhaps the most beautiful thing in the whole of the British galleries. What could the creator of this masterpiece of The Shrimp Girl, hanging beside it, not have achieved if he willed } Of equal beauty and force is the Portrait of a Lady (Sir Frederick 1 " Tlw Shrimp Girl, for instance, is a masterpiece to whicli the nineteenth century can hardly pro- duce a rival. ^'— "The History of Painting,'' by Richard Muther, vol. i. 176 //M HOGARTH Cook), in which the mouth and eyes are painted with the most sensitive, consum- mate touch. The firm, haunting glance and bloodless face of this elderly woman are in true relation to the background, and, with its simple colour scheme of browns and whites, dominate any other portrait hung near. The history of this portrait would seem to be obscure. 1 In touch the painting is as direct, simple and unfaltering as The Six Servants, but it suggests a debt to Dutch influence. We know too little of Hogarth's essays in this or that direction to pro- nounce, but the handling of the white head- dress and the discoloured tone of the same support the attribution to Hogarth. Another ^ Mr H. O. AVheatley has recently pointed out {" Hogarth's London,^' p. 396) '^ that this portrait of a comely middle-aged woman, '^ catalogued in recent exliibitions as "^ Sarah Malcolm," " cannot be a por- trait of the murderess," who was only twenty-three wlien executed. By the kindness of the owner, 1 have examined the various inscriptions on the back of the portrait, and I can only suggest that the successive owners of the picture have been misled by some enterprising individual who has been at pains to make out for it a false genealogical table. 179 HOGARTH picture without a pedigree is The Green Room, Drury Lane^ (Sir Edward Tennant), an astonishingly brilHant piece of work, but surely belonging to a school later than Hogarth's ? One wishes to credit Hogarth with this wonderful harmony of rich colours, this luminous background, this audacious modelling of the actor who is standing up ; but is not the lighting, the colouring, the bravura of the whole quite unlike Hogarth? We confess that we cannot reconcile the vision or manner of this brilliant masterpiece with the work of the painter who, at a later date, is known to have executed the Lady's Last Stake, totally opposed to it in style, school, and tradition. Who, then, could have painted it ? And on this subject we may add, that the owners of any unpleasingly hard, crude, or wooden Georgian portrait find it convenient, nowadays, to label it a Hogarth. Who can contest the attribution ? since 1 Mr Wheatley points out, in his '' Hogarth's London,^' that of the seven people, six— Mrs and Miss Pritchard, Barry, Fielding, Quin — could not possibly have come together at Drury Lane. We suspect that the dealers had once a clue to the authorship of the work. 1 80 PORTRAIT OF A LADY From the Original Painting (Sir Frederick Cook) HOGARTH Hogarth^ who is so varied in his styles, so unequal in his quality, remains an unknown territory in criticism. The portrait, styled Ann Hogarth (Miss Reid), a hard, pale spinster, with lace cap and skinny arm and hand holding a stiff flower, and pervaded with an old-maid- ish frigidity that is })ositively cruel, may or may not be genuine. Till a Hogarth Exhibition has been held, and many portraits hung side by side, it would be premature to speak. The spirited sketch of Queen Charlotte (Corporation of York), in a vein of comedy of a most delicious order, shows that Hogarth came to his work in most varying moods. In our judgment the most interesting Hogarth exhibited of late years is The Staymaker (Edmund Davis, Esq.), an unfinished oil sketch, which in its subtle scheme of greens, blues and pale browns shows almost a VVhistlerian delicacy of "values." The pure artist triumphs here. Yet, as Mr Clutten Brock points out, the picture is " full of undeveloped humours. If he had finished it Hogarth would probably have developed these humours rather than the pictorial beauties of the work, and perhaps he left it unfinished because he did not think the humours worth developing." Or perhaps the 183 HOGARTH artist recognized that its freshness and charm would have been dulled by another touch. The professional care of the male stay- maker in fitting the woman, who is screwing her head round to see her own back in the glass held up by the anxious abigail, the feel of the baby's plump flesh against the puffy face of the father, the strut of the small boy who is playing at being a grown-up, with what vivacity these things are dashed in ! Another exquisite thing, supremely delicate in touch, is the oil sketch of Orator Henley Christening a Child (British Museum). Delicious is the broad-featured old nurse in her professional wisdom, the young mother exhausted and nervous after child-bed, and the parson in whose face the world and the flesh are paramount. The chalk drawing of A Dead Bahy (British Museum), again, shows Hogarth's wonderful sensitiveness, the details having no separate existence, but flowing out of the whole as water brims over a dish. By the kindness of M. Simon Bussy, the distinguished French painter, we are enabled here to call attention to the subject of an unknown, reputed Hogarth in the Museum at 184 < w o ^ <: I HOGARTH Besan^on. The subject is obviously a visit paid to a watchmaker's shop by a party of distinguished foreigners. The atmosphere and the faces both seem foreign (French ?) in the photograph from which our ilhistration is made. It is to be hoped that some competent critic may soon examine the painting and report on its qualities. 189 VIII The Last Years In a letter of May 5, 17 6l, Horace Walpole records a conversation that had passed ^'t'other morning" between Hogarth and himself^ re- lative to " a critical work ... or apology for painters" which the painter was then preparing. " I don't know if I shall ever publish it/' Hogarth added. This MS., which includes autobiographical fragments, notes, and letters on the Sigisiminda controversy, a supplement to the Analysis of Beauty, etc., which was pub- lished by John Ireland in " A Supplement to Hogarth Illustrated" (1798), contains by far the most interesting data that exist on Hogarth's life and character. They give an invaluable though sketchy account of Hogarth's activities till his marriage in 1729, and a very good idea of his position, opinions, and controversies with his enemies from 1754-1764. How little is 190 HOGARTH known of the middle^, most creative period, 1729-1750, may be learnt from the scanty pages devoted to it by Nicholls and Steevens in "The Genuine Works." Mr Austin Dobson has since collected every contemporary refer- ence that scholarship and ardour can disinter, but the main facts can be put in a few lines. We know that Hogarth's reputation and pros- perity steadily increased ; that his marriage was a happy one, though childless ; that he was a kind master, with whom his servants stayed ; that he was esteemed by Fielding, Garrick, and Richardson ; that he was acquainted with Dr Johnson, Wilkes and Churchill. We know^ that he took a warm interest in and was active in the founding and management of the Foundling Hospital, 1739, till his death. We know that nineteen of his most famous pictures fetched about £23 apiece in 1745; that the six pictures of Marriage d-la-MocIe realized <£100, 15s., exclusive of the frames, whereas for the stagey portrait of Mr Garrick as Richard III., and the mediocre Paul before Felix, together, he received ^^OO. We know that in 174-8 he paid a brief visit to France. There is ample evidence to show that he was 191 HOGARTH brusque^ opinionated, hospitable, kind-hearted, and generous ; that " his conversation was Hvely and cheerful," and that "he had an eye peculiarly bright and piercing and an air of spirit and vivacity." There are, of course, other particulars of interest for which we will refer the reader to Mr Austin Dobson's pages, adding that every other sentence written by Steevens is tinged with such sneering malig- nancy that it is impossible not to distrust every comment he makes. We pass, then, to the subject of Hogarth's last years. Nothing excites the malice of small minds more than the independence of the genius who goes his own way and relies on himself. Should he slip or appear to stumble, in a flash the tribe of criticasters, " fall on him, eager to avenge their own mediocrity." In an ill hour Hogarth turned author, and this gave the opportunity to "that worthless crew profess- ing vertu and connoisseurship." "In 1745, Hogarth," says John Ireland, "introduced a painter's palette [into his own portrait] on which was a waving line inscribed The Line of Beauty. This crooked line drew upon him a numerous band of opponents, and involved 192 HOGARTH him in so many disputes, that he at length determined to write a book, explain his system, and silence his adversaries." "The Analysis of Beauty," published in 1753, is both a daring and laborious attempt to supply scientific ex- planations of the pleasing or displeasing effect lines, movements, attitudes, gestures, and pro- portions in art and nature make upon the beholder. Hogarth's chapters on " the funda- mental principles of Beauty, as he understood them, viz. Fitness, Variety, Uniformity, Sim- pHcity, Intricacy, and Quantity," are full of acute observations, and far richer in practical illustrations than the majority of modern works on .Esthetics. Barring a little conceit in the Introduction, there is nothing to criticize, though no such Analysis can, naturally, be carried much beyond abstract laws and generalities. Hogarth, however, seems to have reaped little but mortification from its publication.^ "^Numerous prints were ^ For this I have heen assailed by every profligate scribbler in town. . . . By those of my own profession I am treated with still more severity. Pestered witli caricature drawings, and hung up in effigy in prints; accused of vanity, ignorance, and envy ; called a /in 1 93 HOGARTH published in ridicule of his system and himself," says Ireland, and the inscription of one puts Hogarth's offence, his life-offence, in a nut- shell. He is depicted with ass's ears, stripped, and lashed at the cart's tail for '' fiying in the face of all regular bred gentlemen, painters, sculp- tors, architects — in Jine, arts and sciences.''^ In a sense this is true. Hogarth, in his essential genius, always was and remained a man of the people, and his work, in less than fifty years, was to be indicted on this very ground, by Mr Barry, the Professor of Painting to the Royal Academy, viz., " examples of the naked and of elevated nature but rarely occur in his subjects, which are for the most part filled with characters mean and contemptible dauber . . . represented under the hieroglyphical semblance of a satyr, and under tlie still more ingenious one of an ass. ^ Hogarth thy fate is fix'd ; the Critic Crew, The Connoisseurs and dabblers in rertii, Club their united Wit, in every Look, Hint, Shrug, and Whisper, they condemn thy Book, Their guiltless Minds will ne'er forgive the Deed ; What Devil prompted thee to write and read .'' — Grays Inn Journal^ 15th Dec. 1753. [Mr Austin Dobson's Quotation.] 194 HOGARTH that in their nature tend to deformity." Barry in turn was ridiculed by Charles Lamb, following Ireland, but it is strange that the Professor did not point his academical moral by adding that " High Art " paid better than "■ Low," Hogarth receiving 500 guineas for an indifferent altar-piece at St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, and 50 guineas each for the immortal four pictures of The Election Series ! In June 1757 Hogarth was appointed Serjeant- painter to the King, an appointment worth £200. In 1759, at the earnest request of Lord Grosvenor, who, later on, backed out of his bargain, Hogarth undertook the subject of Sigisinumla Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo, in emulation, says Horace Walpole, " of one of the finest pictures in England, the celebrated Sigi.smunda of Sir Luke Schaub . . . said to be painted by Correggio, probably by Furino. . . . After many essays Hogarth at last produced his Sigisimmda — but no more like Sigis- munda than I to Hercules. Not to mention the wretchedness of the colouring, it was the re- presentation of a maudlin strumpet just turned out of keeping, and with eyes red with rage and usquebaugh, tearing off the ornaments her 197 HOGARTH keeper had given her. . . . None of the sober grief, no dignity of settled anguish, no in- vokintary tear, no settled meditation on the fate she meant to meet, no amorous warmth turned holy by despair ; . . . Hogarth's per- formance was more ridiculous than anything he had ever ridiculed." This ill-natured criticism (written many years later) reflects the spiteful attacks of malice triumphant which again assailed Hogarth. That he suffered acutely is shown by his own words ^ ; but worse was to follow. In September 176'1 Hogarth issued a satiric print (of no artistic value) in support of Lord Bute's foreign policy, directed 1 '^ As the most violent and virulent abuse thrown on Sigismunda was from a set of miscreants with whom I am proud of having been ever at war, I mean the expounders of the mysteries of old pictures, 1 have been sometimes told they were beneath my notice. . . . However mean tlie vendor of poisons, the mineral is destructive : to me its operation was troublesome enough. Ill-nature spreads so fast, that now was the time for every little dog in the profession to bark and revive the old spleen which appeared at the time of the ' Analysis.' The anxiety . . . brought on an illness which continued twelve months." — lloyai'th. 198 HOGARTH against Pitt and Lord Temple, disregarding two messages sent him by Wilkes and Churchill, the henchmen of the Opposi- tion, that should this print. The Times, appear, they would " revenge their friends' cause." Wilkes, the popular hero of the hour and editor of the Xorik Britain, immediately retaliated by a most bitterly vindictive attack on Hogarth.^ A peculiarly venomous reference to Mrs Hogarth is reported to have cut Hogarth to the heart. "He was so thoroughly wounded . . . especially with regard to what related to domestic happiness, that he lay nowhere ^ " The humorous MrHogarth, ihesupposed author of the ' Analysis of Beauty.' . . . We all titter the instant he takes up a pen, but we tremble when we see the pencil in his hand. ... I need only make my appeal to any one of his historical or portrait pieces, which are now considered as almost beneath all criticism. He never caught a single idea of beauty, grace or elegance. . . . The rancour and malevolence of his mind made him very soon turn with envy and disgust from objects of so pleasing contemplation, to dwell and feast a bad heart on others. . . . Gain and vanity have steered his little bark quite througli life," etc. — The Xorth Briton, No. 17. 201 HOGARTH open to a fresh stroke/' says George Steevens. " Being at that tmie very weak, and in a kind of slow fever, it could not but seize on a feeling mind," Hogarth himself admits, quoting the famous line, " Who steals my gold, steals trash," etc. Within eight months, however (May l6, 1763), Hogarth responded with his masterly etching, John Wilkes, Esq., which is only less noteworthy than the Simon Lord Lovat. The impudent and ferocious leer on " the patriot's " face was not unflattering to Wilkes' vanity, who " frequently observed that he was every day growing more and more like his portrait by Hogarth." Four thousand copies were speedily sold. But Churchill, the satirist, ^'^was exas- perated at this jjersonal attack on his friend," and replied by the "Epistle to William Hogarth," a very heavy performance, which the town, of course, took very seriously.^ ^ ^'^ Never did Hogarth scourge Vice and Folly more severely than the tremendous Drawcansir Churchill has in this Epistle scourged the unfortunate Hogarth. All that the bitterness of resentment could dictate, or the malevolence of keenest satire inspire, is poured forth on the devoted victim." — Critical Review, vol. xvi., p. 13Jr. 202 HOGARTH Hogarth retaliated shortly afterwards with his plate^ " The Bruiser, C. Churchill " : — " Having an old })late by me, with some parts ready, such as the background and a dog, I . . . patched up a print of Master Churchill in the character of a Bear. The pleasure and j)ecuniary ad- vantage which I derived from these two engravings, together with occasional riding on horseback, restored me to so much health as can be expected at my time of life." "It is generally believed that the stinging and pointed attacks that followed this [portrait of Wilkes] and others of his political works, so sensibly affected his mind, as to tend, in no small degree, to shorten the period of his existence," says Samuel Ireland. But we cannot be sufficiently grateful that this plunge into personal and party polemics came only towards the close of his life. Had Hogarth yielded to solicitations, " after the publication of The Rakes Progress, to design another series against Sir Robert Walpole, to be entitled The Statesmans Progress," he might have been seriously deflected from or hindered in his artistic career. The man of ideas and controversialist, always strong in him, would have been nourished 203 HOGARTH at the artist's expense, and the Marriage A-la-Mode never have been brought to birth. The Sigismunda (National Gallery) suffers from the accessories, the jewels, drapery, casket, etc., being a little florid. The idea of a woman weeping over a bleeding heart is a purely poetic one, and Hogarth's aim " to draw tears from the spectator" is defeated by Sigismunda's pose being consciously tragic, and not subtle in its betrayal of grief. Her expression, however, is psychologically true to the violent sorrow which must express itself in sudden and irrational action. The head has true nobility, and gives the lie to the words of Dr Morell,^ the candid friend, whose remarks may, however, have been distorted by George Steevens. The whole episode of the uproar over the Sigismunda is a melancholy instance of critical spite on the part of petty and envious minds. Hogarth's literary tendencies were strong to ^ ^' . . . It was so altered upon the criticism of one connoisseur or another . . . that when it appeared at Exhibition, I scarcely knew it again myself, and from a passable picture it became little better than tlie wretched figure here represented," etc. 204 mmmm ■n Henry Fielding, .Etatis xlmii HENRY FIELDING From Basire's Engravino. First Statk HOGARTH the last. Time Smoking a Picture (17()1), the subscription ticket for the Sigismunda print, which hist was not issued till thirty years later, is full of Hogarthian conceits, without any beauty of form. In Credulity, Super dition and Fmudicism (1762), which Horace Walpole, with his usual bad judgment, styles " For deep and useful satire the most sublime of all his works," the student will find the best example of Hogarth's teeming ideas, annihilating the fundamental laws of aesthetics. Pages of eulogy have been written on the recondite symbols of this confused and involved satire on Methodism and Popery, of which our quotation is a sample.^ It is a relief to turn to the exquisite drawing of Ilenrif Fielding (1762)^ engraved by Basire, a sketch from memory. The Bathos (ll 6 if) is again a jumble of literary conceits, deriving interest from the fact that it was Hogarth's ^^^The figure of a pigeon impressed on the Methodist's brain is intended to intimate that if the Holy Spirit gets into the head instead of the heart, it will create that confusion of intellect described in the mental thermometer which rises out of it, and which is crowned by a dove on tlie point of a triangle." — John Ireland. 207 HOGARTH farewell to art and life. True to his flag to the endj he entitled the print, " Finis, or the Tail-piece, the Bathos or manner of sinking in sublime Painting inscribed to the Dealers in Dark Pictures." Hogarth died 25th October 1764, of an aneurism, and was buried in Chiswick Church- yard. The verses inscribed on his tomb are by Garrick, but Dr Johnson's emendation contains the happiest definition of Hogarth's genius.^ Hayley's platitudinous " Epistle to an Eminent Painter " (Mr Romney) contains lines on Hogarth and Churchill, which show how a mediocrity may class great genius and facile talent together." - ^ The Hand of Art here torpid lies That traced the essential form of Grace ; Here Death has closed the curious eyes That saw the manners in the face. 2 Science with grief beheld thy drooping age Fall the sad victim of a Poet's rage ; But Wit's vindictive spleen, that mocks controul, Nature's high tax on luxury of soul : This, both in Bards and Painters, Fame forgives ; Their Frailty's buried, but their Genius lives. 2o8 University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. 000 002 446 3 'm:mm Unh S