II.—Mr. Gamble’s Apprentice.
How often have I envied those who—were not my envy dead and buried—would now be sixty years old! I mean the persons who were born at the commencement of the present century, and who saw its glories evolved each year with a more astonishing grandeur and brilliance, till they culminated in that universal “transformation scene” of ’15. For the appreciation of things began to dawn on me only in an era of internecine frays and feuds:—theological controversies, reform agitations, corporation squabbles, boroughmongering debates, and the like: a time of sad seditions and unwholesome social misunderstandings; Captain Rock shooting tithe-proctors in Ireland yonder; Captain Swing burning hayricks here; Captains Ignorance and Starvation wandering up and down, smashing machinery, demolishing toll-bars, screeching out “Bread or blood!” at the carriage-windows of the nobility and gentry going to the drawing-room, and otherwise proceeding the wretchedest of ways for the redress of their grievances. Surely, I thought, when I began to think at all, I was born in the worst of times. Could that stern nobleman, whom the mob hated, and hooted, and pelted—could the detested “Nosey,” who was beset by a furious crowd in the Minories, and would have been torn off his horse, perchance slain, but for the timely aid of Chelsea Pensioners and City Marshalmen,—and who was compelled to screen his palace windows with iron shutters from onslaughts of Radical macadamites—could he be that grand Duke Arthur, Conqueror and Captain, who had lived through so much glory, and had been so much adored an idol? Oh, to have been born in 1800! At six, I might just have remembered the mingled exultation and passionate grief of Trafalgar; have seen the lying in state at Greenwich, the great procession, and the trophied car that bore the mighty admiral’s remains to his last home beneath the dome of Paul’s. I might have heard of the crowning of the great usurper of Gaul: of his putting away his Creole wife, and taking an emperor’s daughter; of his congress at Erfurt,—and Talma, his tragedian, playing to a pit full of kings, of his triumphal march to Moscow, and dismal melting away—he and his hosts—therefrom; of his last defeat and spectral appearance among us—a wan, fat, captive man, in a battered cocked hat, on the poop of an English war-ship in Plymouth Sound—just before his transportation to the rock appointed to him to eat his heart upon. I envied the nurse who told upon her fingers the names of the famous victories of the British army under Wellington in Spain; Vimieira, Talavera, Vittoria, Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos, Fuentes d’Onore,—mille e tre; in fine—at last, Waterloo. Why had I not lived in that grand time, when the very history itself was acting? Strong men there were who lived before Agamemnon; but for the accident of a few years, I might have seen, at least, Agamemnon in the flesh. ’Tis true, I knew then only about the rejoicings and fireworks, the bell-ringings, and thanksgiving sermons, the Extraordinary Gazettes, and peerages and ribbons bestowed in reward for those deeds of valour. I do not remember that I was told anything about Walcheren, or about New Orleans; about the trade driven by the cutters of gravestones, or the furnishers of funeral urns, broken columns, and extinguished torches; about the sore taxes, and the swollen national debt. So I envied; and much disdained the piping times of peace descended to me; and wondered if the same soldiers I saw or heard about, with scarcely anything more to do than lounge on Brighton Cliff, hunt up surreptitious whisky-stills, expectorate over bridges, and now and then be lapidated at a contested election, could be the descendants of the heroes who had swarmed into the bloody breach at Badajos, and died, shoulder to shoulder, on the plateau of Mont St. Jean.
MR. GAMBLE’S APPRENTICE.
Came 1848, with its revolutions, barricades, states of siege, movements of vast armies, great battles and victories, with their multiplied hecatombs of slain even; but they did not belong to us; victors and vanquished were aliens; and I went on envying the people who had heard the Tower guns fire, and joybells ring, who had seen the fireworks, and read the Extraordinary Gazettes during the first fifteen years of the century! Was I never to live in the history of England? Then, as you all remember, came the great millennium or peace year ’51. Did not sages deliberate as to whether it would not be better to exclude warlike weapons from the congress of industry in Hyde Park? By the side of Joseph Paxton with his crystal verge there seemed to stand a more angelic figure, waving wide her myrtle wand, and striking universal peace through sea and land. It was to be, we fondly imagined, as the immortal blind man of Cripplegate sang:—
“No war or battle’s sound
Was heard the world around:
The idle spear and shield were high uphung,
The hookèd chariot stood
Unstain’d with hostile blood,
The trumpet spake not to the armèd throng;
And kings sate still with awful eye,
As if they sorely knew their Sovereign Lord was by.”
O blind man! it was but for an instant. The trodden grass had scarcely begun to grow again where nave and transept had been, when the wicked world was all in a blaze; and then the very minstrels of peace began to sharpen swords and heat shot red-hot about the Holy Places; and then the Guards went to Gallipoli, and farther on to Bulgaria, and farther on to Old Fort; and the news of the Alma, Inkermann, Balaklava, the Redan, the Tchernaya, the Mamelon, the Malakhoff came to us, hot and hot, and we were all living in the history of England. And lo! it was very much like the history of any other day in the year—or in the years that had gone before. The movements of the allied forces were discussed at breakfast, over the sipping of coffee, the munching of muffins, and the chipping of eggs. Newspaper-writers, parliament-men, club-orators took official bungling or military mismanagement as their cue for the smart leader of the morrow, the stinging query to Mr. Secretary at the evening sitting, or the bow-window exordium in the afternoon; and then everything went on pretty much as usual. We had plenty of time and interest to spare for the petty police case, the silly scandal, the sniggering joke of the day. The cut of the coat and the roasting of the mutton, the non-adhesiveness of the postage-stamp, or the misdemeanors of the servant-maid, were matters of as relative importance to us as the great and gloomy news of battle and pestilence from beyond sea. At least I lived in actual history, and my envy was cured for ever.
I have often thought that next to Asclepiades, the comic cynic,[1] Buonaparte Smith was the greatest philosopher that ever existed. B. Smith was by some thought to have been the original of Jeremy Diddler. He was an inveterate borrower of small sums. On a certain Wednesday in 1821, un sien-ami accosted him. Says the friend: “Smith, have you heard that Buonaparte is dead?” To which retorts the philosopher: “Buonaparte be ——!” but I disdain to quote his irreverent expletive—“Buonaparte be somethinged. Can you lend me ninepence?” What was the history of Europe or its eventualities to Buonaparte Smith? The immediate possession of three-fourths of a shilling was of far more importance to him than the death of that tremendous exile in his eyrie in the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles away. Thus, too, I daresay it was with a certain small philosopher, who lived through a very exciting epoch of the history of England: I mean Little Boy Hogarth. It was his fortune to see the first famous fifteen years of the eighteenth century, when there were victories as immense as Salamanca or Waterloo; when there was a magnificent parallel to Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, existent, in the person of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. I once knew a man who had lived in Paris, and throughout the Reign of Terror, in a second floor of the Rue St. Honoré. “What did you do?” I asked, almost breathlessly, thinking to hear of tumbrils, Carmagnoles, gibbet-lanterns, conventions, poissarde-revolts, and the like. “Eh! parbleu,” he answered, “je m’occupais d’ornithologie.” This philosopher had been quietly birdstuffing while royalty’s head was rolling in the gutter, and Carrier was drowning his hundreds at Nantes. To this young Hogarth of mine, what may Marlborough and his great victories, Anne and her “silver age” of poets, statesmen, and essayists, have been? Would the War of the Succession assist young William in learning his accidence? Would their High Mightinesses of the States-General of the United Provinces supply him with that fourpence he required for purchases of marbles or sweetmeats? What had Marshal Tallard to do with his negotiations with the old woman who kept the apple-stall at the corner of Ship Court? What was the Marquis de Guiscard’s murderous penknife compared with that horn-handled, three-bladed one, which the Hebrew youth in Duke’s Place offered him at the price of twentypence, and which he could not purchase, faute de quoi? At most, the rejoicings consequent on the battles of Blenheim or Ramillies, or Oudenarde or Malplaquet, might have saved William from a whipping promised him for the morrow; yet, even under those circumstances, it is painful to reflect that staying out too late to see the fireworks, or singeing his clothes at some blazing fagot, might have brought upon him on that very morrow a castigation more unmerciful than the one from which he had been prospectively spared.
Every biographer of Hogarth that I have consulted—and I take this opportunity to return my warmest thanks to the courteous book distributor at the British Museum who, so soon as he sees me enter the Reading Room, proceeds, knowing my errand, to overwhelm me with folios, and heap up barricades of eighteenth century lore round me—every one of the biographers, Nichols, Steevens, Ireland, Trusler, Phillips, Cunningham, the author of the article “Thornhill,” in the Biographia Britannica—the rest are mainly copyists from one another, often handing down blunders and perpetuating errors—every Hogarthian Dryasdust makes a clean leap from the hero’s birth and little schoolboy noviciate to the period of his apprenticeship to Ellis Gamble the silversmith. Refined Mr. Walpole, otherwise very appreciative of Hogarth, flirting over the papers he got from Vertue’s widow, indites some delicate manuscript for the typographers of his private press at Strawberry Hill, and tells us that the artist, whom he condescends to introduce into his Anecdotes of Painting, was bound apprentice to a “mean engraver of arms upon plate.” I see nothing mean in the calling which Benvenuto Cellini (they say), and Marc Antonio Raimondi (it is certain), perhaps Albert Durer, too, followed for a time. I have heard of great artists who did not disdain to paint dinner plates, soup tureens, and apothecary’s jars. Not quite unknown to the world is one Rafaelle Sanzio d’Urbino, who designed tapestry for the Flemish weavers, or a certain Flaxman, who was of great service to Mr. Wedgwood, when he began to think that platters and pipkins might be brought to serve some very noble uses. Horace Walpole, cleverest and most refined of dilettanti—who could, and did say the coarsest of things in the most elegant of language—you were not fit to be an Englishman. Fribble, your place was in France. Putative son of Orford, there seems sad ground for the scandal that some of Lord Fanny’s blood flowed in your veins; and that Carr, Lord Hervey, was your real papa. You might have made a collection of the great King Louis’s shoes, the heels and soles of which were painted by Vandermeulen with pictures of Rhenish and Palatinate victories. Mignon of arts and letters, you should have had a petite maison at Monçeaux or at the Roule. Surrounded by your abbés au petit collet, teacups of pâte tendre, fans of chicken-skin painted by Leleux or Lantara, jewelled snuff-boxes, handsome chocolate girls, gems and intaglios, the brothers to those in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, che non si mostrano alle donne, you might have been happy. You were good enough to admire Hogarth, but you didn’t quite understand him. He was too vigorous, downright, virile for you; and upon my word, Horace Walpole, I don’t think you understood anything belonging to England—nor her customs, nor her character, nor her constitution, nor her laws. I don’t think that you would have been anywhere more in your element than in France, to make epigrams and orange-flower water, and to have your head cut off in that unsparing harvest of ’93, with many more noble heads of corn as clever and as worthless for any purpose of human beneficence as yours, Horace.
For you see, this poor Old Bailey schoolmaster’s son—this scion of a line of north-country peasants and swineherds, had in him pre-eminently that which scholiast Warton called the “ἩΘΟΣ,” the strong sledgehammer force of Morality, not given to Walpole—not given to you, fribbles of the present as of the past—to understand. He was scarcely aware of the possession of this quality himself, Hogarth; and when Warton talked pompously of the Ethos in his works, the painter went about with a blank, bewildered face, asking his friends what the doctor meant, and half-inclined to be angry lest the learned scholiast should be quizzing him. It is in the probabilities, however, that William had some little Latin. The dominie in Ship Court did manage to drum some of his grammar disputations into him, and to the end of his life William Hogarth preserved a seemly reverence for classical learning. Often has his etching-needle scratched out some old Roman motto or wise saw upon the gleaming copper. A man need not flout and sneer at the classics because he knows them not. He need not declare Parnassus to be a molehill, because he has lost his alpenstock and cannot pay guides to assist him in that tremendous ascent. There is no necessity to gird at Pyrrha, and declare her to be a worthless jade, because she has never braided her golden hair for you. Of Greek I imagine W. H. to have been destitute; unless, with that ingenious special pleading, which has been made use of to prove that Shakspeare was a lawyer, apothecary, Scotchman, conjuror, poacher, scrivener, courtier—what you please—we assume that Hogarth was a Hellenist because he once sent, as a dinner invite to a friend, a card on which he had sketched a knife, fork, and pasty, and these words, “Come and Eta Beta Pi.” No wonder the ἩΘΟΣ puzzled him. He was not deeply learned in anything save human nature, and of this knowledge even he may have been half unconscious, thinking himself to be more historical painter than philosopher. He never was a connoisseur. He was shamefully disrespectful to the darkened daubs which the picture-quacks palmed on the curious of the period as genuine works of the old masters. He painted “Time smoking a picture,” and did not think much of the collection of Sir Luke Schaub. His knowledge of books was defective; although another scholiast (not Warton) proved, in a most learned pamphlet, that he had illustrated, sans le savoir, above five hundred passages in Horace, Virgil, Juvenal, and Ovid. He had read Swift. He had illustrated and evidently understood Hudibras. He was afraid of Pope, and only made a timid, bird-like, solitary dash at him in one of his earliest charges; and, curiously, Alexander the Great of Twickenham seemed to be afraid of Hogarth, and shook not the slightest drop of his gall vial over him. What a quarrel it might have been between the acrimonious little scorpion of “Twitnam,” and the sturdy bluebottle of Leicester Fields! Imagine Pope versus Hogarth, pencil against pen; not when the painter was old and feeble, half but not quite doting indeed, as when he warred with Wilkes and Churchill, but in the strength and pride of his swingeing satire. Perhaps William and Alexander respected one another; but I think there must have been some tacit “hit me and I’ll hit you” kind of rivalry between them, as between two cocks of two different schools who meet now and then on the public promenades—meet with a significant half-smile and a clenching of the fist under the cuff of the jacket.
To the end of his life Hogarth could not spell; at least, his was not the orthography expected from educated persons in a polite age. In almost the last plate he engraved, the famous portrait of Churchill as a Bear, the “lies,” with which the knots of Bruin’s club are inscribed, are all “lyes.” This may be passed over, considering how very lax and vague were our orthographical canons not more than a century ago, and how many ministers, divines, poets—nay, princes, and crowned heads, and nabobs—permitted themselves greater liberties than “lye” for “lie” in the Georgian era. At this I have elsewhere hinted, and I think the biographers of Hogarth are somewhat harsh in accusing him of crass ignorance, when he only wrote as My Lord Keeper, or as Lady Betty, or as his grace the Archbishop was wont to write. Hogarth, too, was an author. He published a book—to say nothing of the manuscript notes of his life he left. The whole structure, soul, and strength of the Analysis of Beauty are undoubtedly his; although he very probably profited by the assistance—grammatical as well as critical—of some of the clerical dignitaries who loved the good man. That he did so has been positively asserted; but it is forestalling matters to trot out an old man’s hobby, when our beardless lad is not bound ’prentice yet. I cannot, however, defend him from the charges of writing “militia,” “milicia,” “Prussia,” “Prusia”—why didn’t he hazard “Prooshia” at once?[2]—“knuckles,” “nuckles”—oh, fie!—“Chalcedonians,” “Calcidonians;” “pity,” “pitty;” and “volumes,” “volumns.” It is somewhat strange that Hogarth himself tells us that his first graphic exercise was to “draw the alphabet with great correctness.” I am afraid that he never succeeded in writing it very correctly. He hated the French too sincerely to care to learn their language; and it is not surprising that in the first shop card he engraved for his master there should be in the French translation of Mr. Gamble’s style and titles a trifling pleonasm: “bijouxs,” instead of “bijoux.”
No date of the apprenticeship of Hogarth is anywhere given. We must fix it by internal evidence. He was out of his time in the South Sea Bubble year, 1720. On the 29th of April[3] in the same year, he started in business for himself. The neatness and dexterity of the shop card he executed for his master forbid us to assume that he was aught but the most industrious of apprentices. The freedom of handling, the bold sweep of line, the honest incisive play of the graver manifested in this performance could have been attained by no Thomas Idle; and we must, therefore, in justice grant him his full seven years of ’prentice servitude. Say then that William Hogarth was bound apprentice to Mr. Ellis Gamble,[4] at the Golden Angel, in Cranbourn Street, Leicester Fields, in the winter of the year of our Lord, Seventeen hundred and twelve. He began to engrave arms and cyphers on tankards, salvers, and spoons, at just about the time that it occurred to a sapient legislature to cause certain heraldic hieroglyphics surmounted by the Queen’s crown, and encircled by the words “One halfpenny,” to be engraven on a metal die, the which being the first newspaper stamp ever known to our grateful British nation, was forthwith impressed on every single half-sheet of printed matter issued as a newspaper or a periodical. “Have you seen the new red stamp?” writes his reverence Doctor Swift. Grub Street is forthwith laid desolate. Down go Observators, Examiners, Medleys, Flying Posts, and other diurnals, and the undertakers of the Spectator are compelled to raise the price of their entertaining miscellany.
One of the last head Assay Masters at Goldsmith Hall told one of Hogarth’s biographers, when a very—very old man, that he himself had been ’prentice in Cranbourn Street, and that he remembered very well William serving his time to Mr. Gamble. The register of the boy’s indenture should also surely be among the archives of that sumptuous structure behind the Post Office, where the worthy goldsmiths have such a sideboard of massy plate, and give such jovial banquets to ministers and city magnates. And, doubt it not, Ellis Gamble was a freeman, albeit, ultimately, a dweller at the West-end, and dined with his Company when the goldsmiths entertained the ministers and magnates of those days. Yes, gentles; ministers, magnates, kings, czars, and princes were their guests, and King Charles the Second did not disdain to get tipsy with Sir Robert Viner, Lord Mayor and Alderman, at Guildhall. The monarch’s boon companion got so fond of him as to lend him, dit-on, enormous sums of money. More than that, he set up a brazen statue of the royal toper in the Stocks flower-market at the meeting of Lombard Street and the Poultry. Although it must be confessed that the effigy had originally been cast for John Sobieski trampling on the Turk. The Polish hero had a Carlovingian periwig given to him, and the prostrate and miscreant Moslem was “improved” into Oliver Cromwell. [Mem.:—A pair of correctional stocks having given their name to the flower-market; on the other hand, may not the market have given its name to the pretty, pale, red flowers, very dear to Cockneys, and called “stocks?”]
How was William’s premium paid when he was bound ’prentice? Be it remembered that silver-plate engraving, albeit Mr. Walpole of Strawberry Hill calls it “mean,” was a great and cunning art and mystery. These engravers claimed to descend in right line from the old ciseleurs and workers in niello of the middle ages. Benvenuto, as I have hinted, graved as well as modelled. Marc Antonio flourished many a cardinal’s hat and tassels on a bicchiére before he began to cut from Rafaelle and Giulio Romano’s pictures. The engraver of arms on plate was the same artist who executed delightful arabesques and damascenings on suits of armour of silver and Milan steel. They had cabalistic secrets, these workers of the precious, these producers of the beautiful. With the smiths, “back-hammering” and “boss-beating” were secrets;—parcel-gilding an especial mystery; the bluish-black composition for niello a recipe only to be imparted to adepts. With the engravers, the “cross-hatch” and the “double cypher,” as I cursorily mentioned at the end of the last chapter, were secrets. A certain kind of cross-hatching went out with Albert Durer, and had since been as undiscoverable as the art of making the real ruby tint in glass. No beggar’s brat, no parish protégé, could be apprenticed to this delicate, artistic, and responsible calling. For in graving deep, tiny spirals of gold and silver curl away from the trenchant tool, and there is precious ullage in chasing and burnishing—spirals and ullage worth money in the market. Ask the Jews in Duke’s Place, who sweat the guineas in horsehair bags, and clip the Jacobuses, and rasp the new-milled money with tiny files, if there be not profit to be had from the minutest surplusage of gold and silver.
Goldsmiths and silversmiths were proud folk. They pointed to George Heriot, King James’s friend, and the great things he did. They pointed to the peerage. Did not a Duke of Beaufort, in 1683, marry a daughter of Sir Josiah Child, goldsmith and banker? Was not Earl Tylney, his son, half-brother to Dame Elizabeth Howland, mother of a Duchess of Bedford, one of whose daughters married the Duke of Bridgewater, another, the Earl of Essex? Was not Sir William Ward, goldsmith, father to Humble Ward, created Baron Ward by Charles I.? and from him springs there not the present Lord Dudley and Ward?[5] O you grand people who came over with the Conqueror, where would you be now without your snug city marriages, your comfortable alliances with Cornhill and Chepe? Leigh of Stoneleigh comes from a lord mayor of Queen Bess’s time. Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, married an alderman’s daughter two years ere Hogarth was apprenticed. The ancestor to the Lords Clifton was agent to the London Adventurers in Oliver’s time, and acquired his estate in their service. George the Second’s Earl of Rockingham married the daughter of Sir Henry Furnese, the money-lender and stock-jobber. The great Duke of Argyll and Greenwich married a lord mayor’s niece. The Earl of Denbigh’s ancestor married the daughter of Basil Firebrace, the wine merchant. Brewers, money-scriveners, Turkey merchants, Burgomasters of Utrecht’s daughters,—all these married blithely into the haute pairie. If I am wrong in my genealogies, ’tis Daniel Defoe who is to blame, not I; for that immortal drudge of literature is my informant. Of course such marriages never take place now. Alliances between the sacs et parchemins are never heard of. Mayfair never meets the Mansion House, nor Botolph Lane Belgravia, save at a Ninth of November banquet. I question if I am not inopportune, and impertinent even, in hinting at the dukes and belted earls who married the rich citizens’ daughters, were it not that by and by ’prentice Hogarth will paint some scenes from a great life drama full of Warton’s ἩΘΟΣ, called Marriage à la Mode. Ah! those two perspectives seen through the open windows! In the first, the courtyard of the proud noble’s mansion; in the last, busy, mercantile London Bridge: court and city, city and court, and which the saddest picture!
Dominie Hogarth had but a hard time of it, and must have been pinched in a gruesome manner to make both ends meet. That dictionary of his, painfully compiled, and at last with infinite care and labour completed, brought no grist to the mill in Ship Court. The manuscript was placed in the hands of a bookseller, who did what booksellers often do when one places manuscripts in their hands. He let it drop. “The booksellers,” writes Hogarth himself, “used my father with great cruelty.” In his loving simplicity he tells us that many of the most eminent and learned persons in England, Ireland, and Scotland, wrote encomiastic notices of the erudition and diligence displayed in the work, but all to no purpose. I suppose the bookseller’s final answer was similar to that Hogarth has scribbled in the Manager Rich’s reply to Tom Rakewell, in the prison scene:—“Sir, I have read your play, and it will not doo.” A dreadful, heartrending trade was average authorship, even in the “silver age” of Anna Augusta. A lottery, if you will: the prizeholders secretaries of state, ambassadors, hangers-on to dukes and duchesses, gentlemen ushers to baby princesses, commissioners of hackney coaches or plantations; but innumerable possessors of blanks. Walla Billa! they were in evil case. For them the garret in Grub or Monmouth Street, or in Moorfields; for them the Welshwoman dunning for the milkscore; for them the dirty bread flung disdainfully by bookselling wretches like Curll. For them the shrewish landlady, the broker’s man, the catchpole, the dedication addressed to my lord, and which seldom got beyond his lacquey;—hold! let me mind my Hogarth and his silver-plate engraving. Only a little may I touch on literary woes when I come to the picture of the Distressed Poet. For the rest, the calamities of authors have been food for the commentaries of the wisest and most eloquent of their more modern brethren, and my bald philosophizings thereupon can well be spared.
But this premium, this indenture money, this ’prentice fee for young William: unde derivatur? In the beginning, as you should know, this same ’prentice fee was but a sort of “sweetener,” peace-offering, or pot de vin to the tradesman’s wife. The ’prentice’s mother slipped a few pieces into madam’s hand when the boy put his finger on the blue seal. The money was given that mistresses should be kind to the little lads; that they should see that the trenchers they scraped were not quite bare, nor the blackjacks they licked quite empty; that they should give an eye to the due combing and soaping of those young heads, and now and then extend a matronly ægis, lest Tommy or Billy should have somewhat more cuffing and cudgelling than was quite good for them. By degree this gift money grew to be demanded as a right; and by-and-by comes thrifty Master Tradesman, and pops the broad pieces into his till, calling them premium. Poor little shopkeepers in this “silver age” will take a ’prentice from the parish for five pounds, or from an acquaintance that is broken, for nothing perhaps, and will teach him the great arts and mysteries of sweeping out the shop, sleeping under the counter, fetching his master from the tavern or the mughouse when a customer comes in, or waiting at table; but a rich silversmith or mercer will have as much as a thousand pounds with an apprentice. There is value received on either side. The master is, and generally feels, bound to teach his apprentice everything he knows, else, as worthy Master Defoe puts it, it is “somewhat like Laban’s usage to Jacob, viz. keeping back the beloved Rachel, whom he served seven years for, and putting him off with a blear-eyed Leah in her stead;” and again, it is “sending him into the world like a man out of a ship set ashore among savages, who, instead of feeding him, are indeed more ready to eat him up and devour him.” You have little idea of the state, pomp, and circumstance of a rich tradesman, when the eighteenth century was young. Now-a-days, when he becomes affluent, he sells his stock and good-will, emigrates from the shop-world, takes a palace in Tyburnia or a villa at Florence, and denies that he has ever been in trade at all. Retired tailors become country squires, living at “Places” and “Priories.” Enriched ironmongers and their families saunter about Pau, and Hombourg, and Nice, passing for British Brahmins, from whose foreheads the yellow streak has never been absent since the earth first stood on the elephant, and the elephant on the tortoise, and the tortoise on nothing that I am aware of, save the primeval mud from which you and I, and the Great Mogul, and the legless beggar trundling himself along in a gocart, and all humanity, sprang. But then, Anna D. G., it was different. The tradesman was nothing away from his shop. In it he was a hundred times more ostentatious. He may have had his country box at Hampstead, Highgate, Edmonton, Edgeware; but his home was in the city. Behind the hovel stuffed with rich merchandise, sheltered by a huge timber bulk, and heralded to passers by an enormous sheet of iron and painters’ work—his Sign—he built often a stately mansion, with painted ceilings, with carved wainscoting or rich tapestry and gilt leather-work, with cupboards full of rich plate, with wide staircases, and furniture of velvet and brocade. To the entrance of the noisome cul-de-sac, leading to the carved and panelled door (with its tall flight of steps) of the rich tradesman’s mansion, came his coach—yes, madam, his coach, with the Flanders mares, to take his wife and daughters for an airing. In that same mansion, behind the hovel of merchandise, uncompromising Daniel Defoe accuses the tradesman of keeping servants in blue liveries richly laced, like unto the nobility’s. In that same mansion the tradesman holds his Christmas and Shrovetide feasts, the anniversaries of his birthday and his wedding-day, all with much merrymaking and junketing, and an enormous amount of eating and drinking. In that same mansion, in the fulness of time and trade, he dies; and in that same mansion, upon my word, he lies in state,—yes, in state: on a lit de parade, under a plumed tester, with flambeaux and sconces, with blacks and weepers, with the walls hung with sable cloth, et cætera, et cætera, et cætera.[6] ’Tis not only “Vulture Hopkins” whom a “thousand lights attend” to the tomb, but very many wealthy tradesmen are so buried, and with such pomp and ceremony. Not till the mid-reign of George the Third did this custom expire.
[I should properly in a footnote, but prefer in brackets, to qualify the expression “hovel,” as applied to London tradesmen’s shops at this time, 1712-20. The majority, indeed, merit no better appellation: the windows oft-times are not glazed, albeit the sign may be an elaborate and even artistic performance, framed in curious scroll-work, and costing not unfrequently a hundred pounds. The exceptions to the structural poverty of the shops themselves are to be found in the toymen’s—mostly in Fleet Street,—and the pastrycooks’—mainly in Leadenhall. There is a mania for toys; and the toyshop people realize fortunes. Horace Walpole bought his toy-villa at Strawberry Hill—which he afterwards improved into a Gothic doll’s-house—of a retired Marchand de Joujoux. The toy-merchants dealt in other wares besides playthings. They dealt in cogged dice. They dealt in assignations and billet-doux. They dealt in masks and dominos. Counsellor Silvertongue may have called at the toyshop coming from the Temple, and have there learnt what hour the countess would be at Heidegger’s masquerade. Woe to the wicked city! Thank Heaven we can go and purchase Noah’s arks and flexible acrobats for our children now, without rubbing shoulders with Counsellor Silvertongue or Lord Fanny Sporus, on their bad errands. Frequented as they were by rank and fashion, the toyshops threw themselves into outward decoration. Many of these shops were kept by Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, and it has ever been the custom of that fantastic nation to gild the outside of pills, be the inside ever so nauseous. Next in splendour to the toyshops were the pastrycooks. Such a bill as can be seen of the charges for fresh furnishing one of these establishments about Twelfth Night time! “Sash windows, all of looking-glass plates; the walls of the shop lined up with galley-tiles in panels, finely painted in forest-work and figures; two large branches of candlesticks; three great glass lanterns; twenty-five sconces against the wall; fine large silver salvers to serve sweetmeats; large high stands of rings for jellies; painting the ceiling, and gilding the lanterns, the sashes, and the carved work!” Think of this, Master Brook! What be your Cafés des Mille Colonnes, your Véfours, your Vérys, your Maisons-dorées, after this magnificence? And at what sum, think you, does the stern censor, crying out against it meanwhile as wicked luxury and extravagance, estimate this Arabian Nights’ pastrycookery? At three hundred pounds sterling! Grant that the sum represents six hundred of our money. The Lorenzos the Magnificent, of Cornhill and Regent Street, would think little of as many thousands for the building and ornamentation of their palaces of trade. Not for selling tarts or toys though. The tide has taken a turn; yet some comfortable reminiscences of the old celebrity of the city toy and tart shops linger between Temple Bar and Leadenhall. Farley, you yet delight the young. Holt, Birch, Button, Purssell, at your sober warehouses the most urbane and beautiful young ladies—how pale the pasty exhalations make them!—yet dispense the most delightful of indigestions.]
So he must have scraped this apprenticeship money together, Dominie Hogarth: laid it by, by cheeseparing from his meagre school fees, borrowed it from some rich scholar who pitied his learning and his poverty, or perhaps become acquainted with Ellis Gamble, who may have frequented the club held at the “Eagle and Child,” in the little Old Bailey. “A wonderful turn for limning has my son,” I think I hear Dominie Hogarth cry, holding up some precocious cartoon of William’s. “I doubt not, sir, that were he to study the humanities of the Italian bustos, and the just rules of Jesuit’s perspective, and the anatomies of the learned Albinus, that he would paint as well as Signor Verrio, who hath lately done that noble piece in the new hall Sir Christopher hath built for the blue-coat children in Newgate Street.” “Plague on the Jesuits,” answers honest (and supposititious) Mr. Ellis Gamble. “Plague on all foreigners and papists, goodman Hogarth. If you will have your lad draw bustos and paint ceilings, forsooth, you must get one of the great court lords to be his patron, and send him to Italy, where he shall learn not only the cunningness of limning, but to dance, and to dice, and to break all the commandments, and to play on the viol-di-gamby. But if you want to make an honest man and a fair tradesman of him, Master Hogarth, and one who will be a loyal subject to the Queen, and hate the French, you shall e’en bind him ’prentice to me; and I will be answerable for all his concernments, and send him to church and catechize, and all at small charges to you.” Might not such a conversation have taken place? I think so. Is it not very probable that the lad Hogarth being then some fourteen years old, was forthwith combed his straightest, and brushed his neatest, and his bundle or his box of needments being made up by the hands of his loving mother and sisters, despatched westward, and with all due solemnity of parchment and blue seal, bound ’prentice to Mr. Ellis Gamble? I am sure, by the way in which he talks of the poor old Dominie and the dictionary, that he was a loving son. I know he was a tender brother. Good Ellis Gamble—the lad being industrious, quick, and dexterous of hand—must have allowed him to earn some journeyman’s wages during his ’prentice-time; for that probation being out, he set not only himself, but his two sisters, Mary and Ann, up in business. They were in some small hosiery line, and William engraved a shop-card for them, which did not, I am afraid, prosper with these unsubstantial spinsters any more than did the celebrated lollipop emporium established in The House with the Seven Gables. One sister survived him, and to her, by his will, he left an annuity of eighty pounds.
Already have I spoken of the Leicester Square gold and silver smith’s style and titles. It is meet that you should peruse them in full:—
So to Cranbourn Street, Leicester Fields, is William Hogarth bound for seven long years. Very curious is it to mark how old trades and old types of inhabitants linger about localities. They were obliged to pull old Cranbourn Street and Cranbourn Alley quite down before they could get rid of the silversmiths, and even now I see them sprouting forth again round about the familiar haunt; the latest ensample thereof being in the shop of a pawnbroker—of immense wealth, I presume, who, gorged and fevered by multitudes of unredeemed pledges, has suddenly astonished New Cranbourn Street with plate-glass windows, overflowing with plate, jewellery, and trinkets; buhl cabinets, gilt consoles, suits of armour, antique china, Pompadour clocks, bronze monsters, and other articles of virtù. But don’t you remember Hamlet’s in the dear old Dædalean, bonnet-building Cranbourn Alley days?—that long low shop whose windows seemed to have no end, and not to have been dusted for centuries; those dim vistas of dish-covers, coffee biggins and centre-pieces. You must think of Crœsus when you speak of the reputed wealth of Hamlet. His stock was said to be worth millions. Seven watchmen kept guard over it every night. Half the aristocracy were in his debt. Royalty itself had gone credit for plate and jewellery at Hamlet’s. Rest his bones, poor old gentleman, if he be departed. He took to building and came to grief. His shop is no more, and his name is but a noise.
In our time, Cranbourn Street and Cranbourn Alley were dingy labyrinths of dish-covers, bonnets, boots, coffee-shops, and cutlers; but what must the place have been like in Hogarth’s time? We can have no realizable conception; for late in George the Third’s reign, or early in George the Fourth’s, the whole pâté of lanes and courts between Leicester Square and St. Martin’s Lane had become so shamefully rotten and decayed, that they half tumbled, and were half pulled down. The labyrinth was rebuilt; but, to the shame of the surveyors and architects of the noble landlord, on the same labyrinthine principle of mean and shabby tenements. You see, rents are rents, little fishes eat sweet, and many a little makes a mickle. Since that period, however, better ideas of architectural economy have prevailed; and, although part of the labyrinth remains, there has still been erected a really handsome thoroughfare from Leicester Square to Long Acre. As a sad and natural consequence, the shops don’t let, while the little tenements in the alleys that remain are crowded; but let us hope that the example of the feverish pawnbroker who has burst out in an eruption of jewellery and art fabrics, may be speedily followed by other professors of bricabrac.
Gay’s Trivia, in miniature, must have been manifest every hour in the day in Hogarth’s Cranbourn Alley. Fights for the wall must have taken place between fops. Sweeps and small coalmen must have interfered with the “nice conduct of a clouded cane.” The beggars must have swarmed here: the blind beggar, and the lame beggar, the stump-in-the-bowl, and the woman bent double: the beggar who blew a trumpet—the impudent varlet!—to announce his destitution;—the beggar with a beard like unto Belisarius, the beggar who couldn’t eat cold meat, the beggar who had been to Ireland and the Seven United Provinces—was this “Philip in the tub” that W. H. afterwards drew?—the beggar in the blue apron, the leathern cap, and the wen on his forehead, who was supposed to be so like the late Monsieur de St. Evremonde, Governor of Duck Island; not forgetting the beggar in the ragged red coat and the black patch over his eye, who by his own showing had been one of the army that swore so terribly in Flanders, and howled Tom D’Urfey’s song, “The Queene’s old souldiers, and the ould souldiers of the Queene.” Then there was the day watchman, who cried the hour when nobody wanted to hear it, and to whose “half-past one,” the muddy goose that waddled after him, cried “quack.” And then there must have been the silent mendicant, of whom Mr. Spectator says (1712), “He has nothing to sell, but very gravely receives the bounty of the people for no other merit than the homage due to his manner of signifying to them that he wants a subsidy.”[7] Said I not truly that the old types will linger in the old localities? What is this silent mendicant but the “serious poor young man” we have all seen standing mute on the edge of the kerb, his head downcast, his hands meekly folded before him, himself attired in speckless but shabby black, and a spotless though frayed white neckerchief?
Mixed up among the beggars, among the costermongers and hucksters who lounge or brawl on the pavement, undeterred by fear of barrow-impounding policemen; among the varlets who have “young lambs to sell”—they have sold those sweet cakes since Elizabeth’s time;—among the descendants and progenitors of hundreds of “Tiddy Dolls,” and “Colly Molly Puffs;” among bailiffs prowling for their prey, and ruffian cheats and gamesters from the back-waters of Covent Garden; among the fellows with hares-and-tabors, the matchsellers, the masksellers—for in this inconceivable period ladies and gentlemen wanted vizors at twelve o’clock at noon—be it admitted, nevertheless, that the real “quality” ceased to wear them about the end of William’s reign—among the tradesmen, wigs awry, and apron-girt, darting out from their shops to swallow their matutinal pint of wine, or dram of strong waters; among all this tohu-bohu, this Galimatias of small industries and small vices, chairmen come swaggering and jolting along with the gilded sedans between poles; and lo! the periwigged, Mechlin-laced, gold-embroidered beau hands out Belinda, radiant, charming, powdered, patched, fanned, perfumed, who is come to Cranbourn Alley to choose new diamonds. And more beaux’ shins are wounded by more whalebone petticoats, and Sir Fopling Flutter treads on Aramanta’s brocaded queue; and the heavens above are almost shut out by the great projecting, clattering signs. Conspicuous among them is the “Golden Angel,” kept by Ellis Gamble.
Mark, too, that Leicester Fields were then as now the favourite resort of foreigners. Green Street, Bear Street, Castle Street, Panton Street, formed a district called, as was a purlieu in Westminster too, by the Sanctuary, “Petty France.” Theodore Gardelle, the murderer, lived about Leicester Fields. Legions of high-dried Mounseers, not so criminal as he, but peaceable, honest, industrious folk enough, peered out of the garret windows of Petty France with their blue, bristly gills, red nightcaps, and filthy indoor gear. They were always cooking hideous messes, and made the already unwholesome atmosphere intolerable with garlic. They wrought at water-gilding, clock-making, sign-painting, engraving for book illustrations—although in this department the Germans and Dutch were dangerous rivals. A very few offshoots from the great Huguenot colony in Spitalfields were silk-weavers. There were then as now many savoury, tasting and unsavoury-smelling French ordinaries; and again, then as now, some French washerwomen and clearstarchers. But the dwellers in Leicester Fields slums and in Soho were mainly Catholics frequenting the Sardinian ambassador’s chapel in Duke Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. French hairdressers and perfumers lived mostly under Covent Garden Piazza, in Bow Street and in Long Acre. Very few contrived to pass Temple Bar. The citizens appeared to have as great a horror of them as of the players, and so far as they could, by law, banished them their bounds, rigorously. French dancing, fencing, and posture masters, and quack doctors, lived at the court end of the town, and kept, many of them, their coaches. Not a few of the grinning, fantastic French community were spies of the magnificent King Louis. Sunday was the Frenchmen’s great day, and the Mall in St. James’s park their favourite resort and fashionable promenade. It answered for them all the purposes which the old colonnade of the Quadrant was wont to serve, and which the flags of Regent Street serve now. On Sunday the blue, bristly gills were clean shaven, the red nightcaps replaced by full-bottomed wigs, superlatively curled and powdered. The filthy indoor gear gave way to embroidered coats of gay colours, with prodigious cuffs, and the skirts stiffened with buckram. Lacquer-hilted swords stuck out behind them. Paste buckles glittered in their shoon. Glass rings bedecked their lean paws. They held their tricornes beneath their arms, flourished their canes and inhaled their snuff with the best beaux on town. We are apt to laugh at the popular old caricatures of the French Mounseer, and think those engravings unkind, unnatural, and overdrawn; but just shave me this bearded, moustached, braided and be-ringed Jules, Gustave, or Adolphe who comes swaggering to-day from the back of Sherrard Street or Marylebone Street, round by the County Fire Office into Regent Street; shave me the modern Mounseer quite clean, clap a periwig on his head, a chapeau bras beneath his arm, a sword by his side; clothe his shrunken limbs in eighteenth century costume; or better, see the French comedian in some old comedy at the Français or the Odéon, and you will cry out at once: “There is the Mounseer whom Hogarth, Gilray, Bunbury, and Rowlandson drew.” And yet I owe an apology, here, to the Mounseers; for it was very likely some courteous, albeit grimacing denizen of Petty France who supplied our Hogarth with the necessary French translation of the gold and silver smith’s style and titles to engrave on his shop-card.
I am to be pardoned, I hope, for lingering long in Leicester Fields. I shall have to return to the place often, for William Hogarth much affected it. In Leicester Fields he lived years afterwards when he was celebrated and prosperous. Where Pagliano’s Hotel is now, had he his house, the sign, the “Golden Head,” and not the “Painter’s Head,” as I have elsewhere put it. There he died. There his widow lived for many—many years afterwards, always loving and lamenting the great artist and good man, her husband. It was about Leicester Fields too—nay, unless I mistake, in Cranbourn Alley itself, that old nutcracker-faced Nollekens the sculptor pointed out William to Northcote the painter. “There,” he cried, “see, there’s Hogarth.” He pointed to where stood a little stout-faced sturdy man in a sky-blue coat, who was attentively watching a quarrel between two street boys. It was Mr. Mulready’s “Wolf and the Lamb” story a little before its time. The bigger boy oppressed the smaller; whereupon Hogarth patted the diminutive victim on the head, and gave him a coin, and said with something like a naughty word that he wouldn’t stand it, if he was the small boy: no, not he.
Seven years at cross-hatch and double cypher. Seven years turning and re-turning salvers and tankards on the leathern pad, and every month and every year wielding the graver and burnisher with greater strength and dexterity. What legions of alphabets, in double cypher, he must have “drawn with great correctness;” what dictionary loads of Latin and Norman-French mottoes he must have flourished beneath the coats of arms! Oh, the scutcheons he must have blazoned in the symbolism of lines! Blank for argent, dots for or, horizontal for azure, vertical for gules, close-chequer for sable. The griffins, the lions, the dragons, rampant, couchant, regardant, langued, gorged, he must have drawn! The chevrons, the fesses, the sinoples of the first! He himself confesses that his just notions of natural history were for a time vitiated by the constant contemplation and delineation of these fabulous monsters, and that when he was out of his time he was compelled to unlearn all his heraldic zoology. To the end his dogs were very much in the “supporter” style, and the horses in the illustrations in Hudibras strongly resemble hippogriffs.
He must have been studying, and studying hard, too, at drawing, from the round and plane during his ’prentice years. Sir Godfrey Kneller had a kind of academy at his own house in 1711; but Sir James Thornhill did not establish his till long after Hogarth had left the service of Ellis Gamble. Hogarth tells us that as a boy he had access to the studio of a neighbouring painter. Who may this have been? Francis Hoffmann; Hubertz; Hulzberg, the warden of the Lutheran Church in the Savoy; Samuel Moore of the Custom House? Perhaps his earliest instructor was some High Dutch etcher of illustrations living eastwards to be near the booksellers in Paternoster Row; or perhaps the “neighbouring painter” was an artist in tavern and shop signs. Men of no mean proficiency wrought in that humble but lucrative line of emblematic art in Anna’s “silver age.”
That Hogarth possessed considerable graphic powers when he engraved Ellis Gamble’s shop-card, you have only to glance at the angel holding the palm above the commercial announcement, to be at once convinced. This figure, however admirably posed and draped, may have been copied from some foreign frontispiece. The engraving, however, as an example of pure line, is excellent. We are left to wonder whether it was by accident or by design of quaint conceit that the right hand of the angel has a finger too many.
Of Hogarth’s adventures during his apprenticeship, with the single exception of his holiday excursion to Highgate, when there was a battle-royal in a suburban public-house, and when he drew a capital portrait of one of the enraged combatants, the Muse is dumb. He led, very probably, the life of nineteen-twentieths of the London ’prentices of that period: only he must have worked harder and more zealously than the majority of his fellows. Concerning the next epoch of his life the Muse deigns to be far more explicit, and, I trust, will prove more eloquent on your worships’ behalf. I have done with the mists and fogs that envelop the early part of my hero’s career, and shall be able to trace it now year by year until his death.