Hogarth

“ Hogarth never stayed his hand. The details are innumerable, amusing, italicised. What could be more exquisite than the characterisation of the lady, her pretty, dissolute, provocative face, and the abandon of the peer, too bored and tired, after his night’s debauch, even to think of remorse. ”

“ But Hogarth was the greatest inventor,—the greatest discoverer of character,—in the English or any other school. As a painter of manners he is unapproached. In a kindred walk, he traversed all the passions from the lowest mirth to the profoundest melancholy, possessing the tragic element in the most eminent degree. And if grandeur can exist— as I presume it can—in beings who have neither costume nor rank to set off their qualities, then some of the characters of Hogarth in essential grandeur are far beyond the conventional figures of many other artists. ”

“ With his short-cropped grey hair he looks like a pugilist, and a pugilist he might have been had not Nature, so casual, so inexplicable in her gifts, chosen to plant the seeds of real artistic genius in the soul of belligerent, brave, preposterously British William Hogarth. ”

“ William Hogarth out of his apprenticeship is, I take it, a sturdy, ruddy-complexioned, clear-eyed, rather round-shouldered young fellow, who as yet wears his own hair, but has that sword at home—a silver-hilted or a prince’s metal one—and is not averse to giving his hat a smart cock, ay, and bordering it with a narrow rim of orrice when Fortune smiles on him. ”

“ Mrs. Sturgess served him well that day with a pang of expectancy at her heart! Always, she remembered, Richard Hogarth had been strange—uplifted and apart—a man incalculable, winged, unknown, though walking the common ways. He might be a “very rich man”...
His meal over, Hogarth threw himself upon a bed, to dream another trouble of bubbles and burden of purples; woke at four; and, with a procured cold-chisel, hammer, and a calico bag, went to the fowl-house where he had left the meteorite, shut himself in. ”

“ As Hogarth descended into it, harp and dance ceased; some leapt to their feet: but O'Hara sat still, gazing in a dead silence through glairy eyes, while Hogarth, looking about, spied an electric button in a couch, touched it, and soon a man in uniform stood at a door above. ”

“ And Hogarth in the midst of the jubilee saw the man who jammed his left shoulder, a broker in spectacles, grip the hand of the man on his right, a ragamuffin, to cry out: “That scoundrel Hogarth! Isn't there good in the damned thief, after all?” ”

“ Hogarth's back was toward him, the iron leg lying near a box in which was a sitting hen, on its top a candlestick, the calico bag, and a lot of the gems: at which the priest's palm covered his awed mouth, and with a fleet thievishness, like a cat on hot bricks, he trotted back to the cottage.
Ten minutes later Hogarth entered, nodding: “Ah, O'Hara...”; and he called down: “Mrs. Sturgess! pen, ink, and paper!”
When these came, he sat and wrote:
“I have escaped from prison, and come into great power. I summon you to meet me at the elm in the beech-wood to-night at nine. ”

“ He looks pompous; Hogarth looks pugnacious; so they remain in death as in life; but their rivalry is over. Everybody recognises Hogarth as the “father of English painting”; let us be kind to Kent, and cherish him as the “father of modern gardening.” Walpole called him that. The ascription will offend nobody, not even Hogarth. To that magnificent Londoner gardens were nought except perhaps the garden of his villa at Chiswick.
V
HOGARTH AS PAINTER
The versatility of Hogarth’s genius is a recurring surprise. ”

“ They exhibit the most uncommon features, with the most uncommon expressions: but which yet are as familiar and intelligible as possible, because with all the boldness, they have all the truth of nature. Hogarth has left behind him as many of these memorable faces, in their memorable moments, as, perhaps, most of us remember in the course of our lives, and has thus doubled the quantity of our experience. ”

“ From such records of him as survive, Hogarth appears to have been much what from his portrait one might suppose him to have been—a blue-eyed, honest, combative little man, thoroughly insular in his prejudices and antipathies, fond of flattery, sensitive like most satirists, a good friend, an intractable enemy, ambitious, as he somewhere says, in all things to be singular, and not always accurately estimating the extent of his powers. With the art connoisseurship of his day he was wholly at war, because, as he believed, it favoured foreign mediocrity at the expense of native talent ”

“ Moses Max was leaning wildly, gesticulating, with shouts; while Loveday, who had turned pale on Hogarth's rising, touched Hogarth's coat-tail, whereupon Hogarth, stooping to his ear, shouted: “We will have some fun...” ”

“ The ambition of indigence is ever productive of distress. So it fared with Hogarth, who, while he was furnishing himself with materials for subsequent perfection, felt all the contempt which penury could produce. Being one day distressed to raise so trifling a sum as twenty shillings, in order to be revenged of his landlady, who strove to compel him to payment, he drew her as ugly as possible, and in that single portrait gave marks of the dawn of superior genius. ”

“ Ah! there was that rendering, one of the most delightful of his portraits, of “Peg Woffington,” lent by Sir Edward Tennant, not “dallying and dangerous” on a couch as in the version at the Garrick Club, but very charming, with a touch of primness that suits her. Here is Hogarth as true artist, the vision clear, the treatment direct. Note the daintiness of the flower in her bosom, the delicious colour of the dress, and the importance of the accent of the knot of black ribbon against the gleaming pearls. Oh yes! Hogarth knew his business! ”

“ It was essentially an outspoken age, robust and rather gross; a red-blooded age, nurtured on English beef and beer; a jovial age that shook its sides over many a broad jest, and saw no shame in open allusion to the obvious and elemental facts of physical life. Judged by the standards of his day, there is little offense in Hogarth's work; even when measured by our own, he is not deliberately licentious. ”

“ The oath which shocked the ear, the act which shocked the eye, the scurrilous language of the boy ripe in mature iniquity, the scream of the child dragged from its rest, to mingle in scenes it could not comprehend, formed a pictorial group which Hogarth alone could have given to posterity, as an evidence of civilization in the nineteenth century. ”

“ Hogarth, whose mind was in weathercock state, rolled the barrow to the hill, left it, went stealing fleetly up, and gripped the man's collar, to whisper: “In the King's name I arrest you”.
The man's hand clapped his heart, as he turned a face of terror.
“There is—some mistake—My God! Are you—?”
“Yes”.
“Hogarth?”
“Who else?”
“But you have killed me! My heart—”
“Serves you right. Why didn't you give your right name to Loveday? And what are you doing here?” ”

“ Hogarth had heard of Mr. Pitt's being above all his fellow-citizens, and of his superior virtue having raised him to an envied and dangerous height of grandeur. Now this he has taken literally, and, with the kind aid of Callot, has put Mr. Pitt on stilts, and made the people look up to him; which, after all this insipid ridicule, they will continue to do, as a kind of tutelar deity, from whom they expect that security and those blessings they despair of from others. ”

“ Hogarth, that such a proceeding would not only be unfriendly in the highest degree, but extremely injudicious; for such a pencil ought to be universal and moral, to speak to all ages, and to all nations, not to be dipt in the dirt of the faction of a day, of an insignificant part of the country, when it might command the admiration of the whole. An answer was sent, that neither Mr. Wilkes nor Mr. Churchill were attacked in The Times, though Lord Temple and Mr. Pitt were, and that the print should soon appear. ”

“ The Master of the House, in the absence of others, being always ready to entertain gentlemen in that language.’ It was in the above Queen’s reign that Hogarth went, bundle in hand, hope in his heart, and a good deal of sense and nonsense in his head, to Cranbourne Alley, Leicester Fields, where he was ’prentice bound to Ellis Gamble, the silver-plate engraver. ”

“ IX. — HOGARTH'S GUNS
At the moment when Hogarth was peering through the telescope, a man was loitering before his cottage—one of the Hall's park-keepers; and when Margaret put out her head to look for Richard's coming, the man whistled. ”

“ What amusement would a collection of this kind afford, drawn from every period of the history of Britain!—How far the works of Hogarth will bear a critical examination, may be the subject of a little more enquiry. In design Hogarth was seldom at a loss. His invention was fertile, and his judgement accurate. An improper incident is rarely introduced; a proper one rarely omitted. No one could tell a story better; or make it, in all its circumstances, more intelligible. His genius, however, it must be owned, was suited only to low, or familiar subjects. ”

“ Analysis of Beauty. Two plates. Mr. Walpole observes, that Hogarth's "samples of grace in a young lord and lady are strikingly stiff and affected. They are a Bath beau and a county beauty." The print is found in three different states. "In the original plate the principal figure represented the present king, then prince, but Hogarth was desired to alter it. ”

“ He had now drawn the warder over him, holding up his chest with one arm, had also poured chloroform upon the rag, and when the convict-orderly came, Hogarth, by means of a short struggle, had him asleep, then seized the warder's truncheon and keys, and ran out in his stockinged feet.
At that sight, the sick, the dying, the two rows of stretchers, were up on elbow, gazing with grins. To the second convict-orderly who came running to meet him Hogarth hissed: “Not a word—or I brain you with this! If I tie your feet, you won't have to answer for anything. Come along....” ”

“ It is an unfinished sketch, made when Hogarth was Sergeant Painter. Looking at it, again we wonder what heights this man might have reached had he received the encouragement that is given to eminent painters of our day. But, as it was, in spite of everything, Hogarth boxed the compass, and when he wrote “genius is nothing but labour and diligence,” the “ingenious Mr. Hogarth,” as Fielding called him, did not take into account that something else (which is genius) that was born in him, and that he struggled to express, and succeeded in expressing so triumphantly. ”

“ If Genius fire thee, Reader, stay:
If Nature touch thee, drop a Tear;
If neither move thee, turn away,
For Hogarth’s honour’d dust lies here.”
I do not think you will drop a tear. I do not think Hogarth’s “pictur’d morals” will ever correct your heart; but you may in passing meditate upon the differences in epitaphs throughout the world—this on Hogarth’s tomb, for example, and that in a German churchyard copied by a chance pilgrim:—
“I will awake, O Christ, when Thou callest me, but let me sleep a little, for I am very tired.” ”

“ Walpole. Let us now try how far some of the compositions of Hogarth have befriended the cause of modesty. In the Harlot's Progress, Plate VI. we meet with a hand by no means busied in manner suitable to the purity of its owner's function. Hogarth indeed, in three different works, has delineated three clergymen; the one as a drunkard; the second as a glutton; and the third as a whoremaster, who (I borrow Rouquet's words) "est plus occupé de sa voisine que de son vin, qu'il repand par une distraction qu'elle lui cause." ”

“ But to multiply examples of Hogarth's humour [Pg 13] would come very near to cataloguing his every work. Let us turn now from that work to the man himself, and study something of those conditions of life of which his genius gives us our most vivid impress.
William Hogarth was born in 1697 or 1698, in London, but of a Westmorland family (Hoggard would seem to have been the earlier spelling) , one member of which, the artist's father, after working as a schoolmaster in Westmorland, had settled in London as corrector of the Press. ”

“ Hogarth might have introduced a degree of it in the female figure: at least he might have contrived to vary the heavy and unpleasing form of her drapery.—The perspective is good, and makes an agreeable shape.—I cannot leave this print without remarking the falling band-box. Such representations of quick motion are absurd; and every moment the absurdity grows stronger. You cannot deceive the eye. The falling body must appear not to fall. Objects of that kind are beyond the power of representation. ”

“ The post of portrait-painter is given to a Scotsman, one Ramsay. Mr. Hogarth is only to paint the wainscot of the rooms, or, in the phrase of the art, may be called their pannel-painter. But how have the Guards offended Mr. Hogarth, for he is again attacking them in The Times? Lord Harrington's second troop of grenadier guards is allowed to be very perfect in every part of military discipline; and Hogarth's friend, the king of Prussia, could have shewn him the real importance of it. ”