IV.—The Painter’s Progress.
About the year of grace 1727 the world began to hear of William Hogarth, not only as a designer and engraver of pasquinades and book-plates, but as a painter in oils. He had even begun to know what patronage was; and it was, doubtless, not without a reason that his Hudibras series was dedicated to “William Ward, Esquire, of Great Houghton, Northamptonshire.” In his early heraldic days, I find that he was once called upon to engrave an “Apollo in all his glory, azure.” He probably copied the figure from some French print; but in 1724 he was hard at work copying Apollo, and Marsyas to boot, at Thornhill’s Academy. Although he was sensible enough not to neglect the cultivation of the main chance, and with all convenient speed betook himself to the profitable vocation of portraiture or “face painting;” obtaining almost immediately, from his connection with the king’s sergeant painter, some aristocratic commissions—it is curious to observe that the young man’s bent lay in the direction of the historico-allegorical, then running neck-and-neck with the upholstery style of adornment. He had the epic-fever. Who among us has not suffered from that fièvre brulante—that generous malady of youth? How many contented sub-editors and quiet booksellers’ readers do we not know, who, in their hot adolescence, came to town, their portmanteaus bursting with the “Somethingiad,” in twenty-four cantos, or with blank-verse tragedies running to the orthodox five acts? Stipple, the charming domestic painter; Jonquil, who limns flowers and fruits so exquisitely, commenced with their enormous cartoons and show-clock oil-pictures: “Orestes pursued by the Eumenides,” “Departure of Regulus,”—la vieille patraque, in short—the old, heroic, impossible undertakings. And did not Liston imagine that he was born to play Macbeth? and did not Douglas Jerrold project a treatise on Natural Philosophy? and where is the little boarding-school miss that has not dreamt of riding in a carriage with a coronet on the panels, and being called her ladyship? Amina thinks the grandiloquent music of Norma would suit her; the maiden speech of young Quintus Briscus is a tremendous outburst against ministers. Quintus is going to shake the country, and cut the Gordian knot of red-tape. The session after next he will be a junior Lord of the Treasury, the demurest and most complacent of placemen. Peers, politicians, pamphleteers, and players: we all find our level. Rolling about the board is not to be tolerated for any length of time: we must peg in somewhere, and happy the man who finds himself in the right hole, and is satisfied with that state of life into which it has pleased heaven to call him!
Hogarth has his fièvre brulante; and, although he painted portraits, “conversations,” and “assemblies,” to eke out that livelihood of which the chief source was the employment given him by Philip Overton, Black-Horse Bowles, and the booksellers, he continued to hanker after torsos, and flying trumpets, and wide-waving wings, and flaunting drapery, and the other paraphernalia that went to furnish forth the apotheoses of monarchs and warriors in full-bottomed wigs. This preposterous school of art has long been in hopeless decay. You see the phantom caricature of it, only, in hair-dressers’ “toilette saloons” and provincial music-halls. Timon’s villa—the futile, costly caprice—has vanished. Old Montagu House is no more. Doctor Misaubin’s house, in St. Martin’s Lane, the staircase painted by Clermont (the Frenchman asked a thousand, and actually received five hundred guineas for his work), is not within my ken. Examples of this florid, truculent style, are becoming rarer and rarer every day. Painted ceilings and staircases yet linger in some grand old half-deserted country mansions, and in a few erst gorgeous merchants’ houses in Fenchurch and Leadenhall, now let out in flats as offices and chambers. If you have no objection to hazard a crick in your neck, you may crane it, and stare upwards at the ceil-paintings at Marlborough House, in Greenwich Hall, and on Hampton Court Palace staircase. The rest has ceded before stucco and stencilled paper-hangings; and even the French, who never neglect an opportunity or an excuse for ornamentation, and who still occasionally paint the ceilings of their palaces, seem to have quite lost the old Lebrun and Coypel traditions of perspective and foreshortening—overcharged and unnatural as they were (P. P. Rubens, in the Banqueting House, Whitehall, inventor)—and merely give you a picture stuck upon a rooftree, in which the figures are attenuated vertically, instead of sprawling down upon you, isometrically upside down.
Hogarth became useful to Sir James Thornhill. This last, a worthy, somewhat pompous, but industrious magnifico of the moment, a Covent Garden Caravaggio and cross between Raphael Mengs and the Groom-porter, had wit enough to discern the young designer and graver’s capacity, and condescended to patronize him. There is reason to believe that he employed William to assist in the production of his roomy works. When ceilings and domes were to be painted at two guineas the Flemish ell, it is not likely that Royal Sergeant painters and knights of the shire for Melcombe Regis could afford or would vouchsafe to cover with pigments and with their own courtly hands the whole of the required area. The vulgar, of course, imagined that the painter did all; that Thornhill lay for ever stretched on a mattress, swinging in a basket three hundred feet high in the empyrean of Wren’s dome, daubing away at his immense Peters and Pauls, or else stepping backwards to the edge of a crazy platform to contemplate the work he had done, and being within an ace of toppling over to inevitable crash of death beneath, when an astute colour-grinder saved his beloved master by flinging a brush at Paul’s great toe—cruel to be kind, and so causing the artist, in indignant apprehension of injury to his beloved saint, to rush forward, saving his own life and the toe likewise. A pretty parallel to this story is in that of the little boy in the Greek epigram who has crawled to the very edge of a precipice, and is attracted from his danger by the sight of his mother’s breast. A neat little anecdote, but—it is somewhat musty. It is a myth, I fear. The vulgar love such terse traditions. Zeuxis refusing to sell his pictures, because no sum of money was sufficient to buy them, and imitating fruit so nicely that the birds came and pecked at it; Parrhasius cozening Zeuxis into the belief that his simulated curtain was real, and crucifying a bondman (the wretch!) that he might transfer his contortions to canvas; Apelles inducing a horse to neigh in recognition of the steed he had drawn; Amurath teaching a French painter how properly to design the contracted muscles of the neck when the head is severed from the body by causing a slave to be decapitated in his presence: Correggio receiving the price of his master-work in farthings, or some vile copper Italian coinage, and dying under the weight of the sack in which he was carrying the sordid wage home; Cimabue ruddling the fleeces of his lambs with saintly triptichs, and the late Mr. Fuseli eating raw pork-chops for supper in order to design the “Nightmare,” more to the life: all these are ben trovati,—ma non son veri, I suspect.
Thornhill had not all his domes and ceilings and staircases to himself. When Augustus found Rome of brick and left it of marble, he did not execute all the quarrying and chiselling with his own imperial hands. In 1727, the painter M.P. for Melcombe Regis was at the high tide of celebrity. Many of the Flemish ells were covered by assistants. Here, I fancy, Van Shackaback of Little Britain, and sometime of Ghent in the Low Countries, was dexterous at war and art trophies, lyres, kettle-drums, laurel wreaths, bass-viols, and S. P. Q. R.’s, charmingly heaped up on a solid basis of cloud. Then little Vanderscamp, who had even been employed about the great king’s alcoves at Versailles, was wondrous cunning at the confection of those same purple and cream-coloured vapours. Lean Monsieur Carogne from Paris excelled in drapery; Gianbattista Ravioli, ex-history painter to the Seigniory of Venice, but vehemently suspected of having been a galley-slave in the Venetian arsenal, was unrivalled in flying Cupids. All these foreign aides-de-camp sprawled on their mattresses and made their fancy’s children to sprawl; goodman Thornhill superintending, touching up now and then, blaming, praising, pooh-poohing, talking of the gusto, taking snuff, then putting on his majestic wig and his grand laced hat, and departing in a serene manner in his coach to St. James’s or the House, thinking perhaps of one Rafaelle who painted the loggie and stanze of the Vatican, and of what a clever fellow he, James Thornhill, was.
To him presently entered young Hogarth. The indulgence of William’s own caustic whim had served an end he may not have recked of. He had contrived to pay Thornhill the most acceptable compliment that can be paid to a vain, shallow, pompous man. He had lampooned and degraded his rival. He had pilloried Kent in the parody of the wretched St. Clement Danes’ altar-piece, and had had a fling at him, besides, in Burlington Gate, where in sly ridicule of the earl’s infatuation for this Figaro of art, Kent’s effigy is placed on a pinnacle above the statues of Rafaelle and Michael Angelo. It is a capital thing to have a friend in court with a sharp tongue, or better still, with a sharp pen or pencil, who will defend you, and satirize your enemies. The watch-dog Tearem at home, to defend the treasure-chest, is all very well in his way; but the wealthy worldling should also entertain Snarler, the bull-terrier, to bite and snap at people’s heels. Not that for one moment I would insinuate that Hogarth strove at all unworthily to toady or to curry favour with Sir James Thornhill. The sturdiness and independence of the former are visible in his very first etching. The acorn does not grow up to be a parasite. But Hogarth’s poignant humour happened to tally with the knight’s little malices. Hogarth, there is reason to assume, believed in Thornhill more than he believed in Kent. The first, at least, could work, was a fair draughtsman, and a not contemptible painter, albeit his colour was garish, his conception preposterous, his execution loaded and heavy. He showed at all events a genuine interest in, and love for that art, in which he might not himself have excelled. Kent was a sheer meretricious impostor and art-manufacturing quack, and Hogarth was aware of him at once, and so scarified him. Moreover, a young man can scarcely—till his wisdom-teeth be cut—avoid drifting temporarily into some clique or another. Cibber must have had his admirers, who mauled Pope prettily among themselves; and moreover, Sir James Thornhill, knight, sergeant painter, and M.P., had a daughter—one mistress Jane—but I am forestalling matters again.
Although it is difficult to imagine anything more confused, misunderstood, and hampered with rags and tatters of ignorance, or—worse than ignorance-false taste, than was English Art in 1727, Cimmerian darkness did not wholly reign. There were men alive who had heard their fathers tell of the glories of Charles the First’s gallery at Whitehall; there were some princely English nobles, then as now patrons and collectors; there were treasures of art in England, although no Waagen, no Jameson, had arisen to describe them, and there were amateurs to appreciate those treasures. The young peer who went the grand tour took something else abroad with him besides a negro-boy, a tipsy chaplain, and a pug-dog. He brought other things home beyond a broken-nosed busto, a rusted medal, a receipt for cooking risotto and the portrait of a Roman beggar and a Venetian corteggiana. He frequently acquired exquisite gems of painting and statuary abroad, and on his return formed a noble gallery of art. It is unfortunately true that his lordship sometimes played deep at “White’s” or the “Young Man’s,” and, losing all, was compelled to send his pictures to the auction room; but even then his treasures were disseminated, and wise and tasteful men were the purchasers. To their credit, the few celebrated artists then possessed by our country were assiduous gatherers in this field. Sir Godfrey Kneller collected Vandykes. Richardson the elder, a pleasing painter, whose daughter married Hudson, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s master, left Rafaelle and Andrea del Sarto drawings, worth a large sum.[1] Jervas, Pope’s friend, and by that polished, partial man artistically much overrated, being at the best but a weak, diaphanous, grimacing enlarger of fans and firescreens, became rich enough to form a handsome cabinet of paintings, drawings, and engravings. We are apt to bear much too hardly on the patron-lords and gentlemen of the eighteenth century. Many were munificent, enlightened, and accomplished; but we devour the piquant satires on Timon and Curio and Bubo, and have patron and insolence, patron and ignorance, patron and neglect, patron and gaol, too glibly at our tongue’s end. Is it not to be wished that thinking people should bear this in mind: that not only were there strong men who lived before Agamemnon, but that there were strong men who lived besides Agamemnon—his contemporaries, in fine, to whom posterity has not been generous, not even just, and whose strength has been forgotten?
The earliest known picture of William Hogarth is one called the Wanstead Assembly, long, and by a ridiculous blunder, corrupted into “Wandsworth.” The term “Assembly” was a little bit of art-slang. A portrait being a portrait, and a “conversation” a group of persons generally belonging to one family; by an “assembly” was understood a kind of pictorial rent-roll, or domestic “achievement,” representing the lord, or the squire, the ladies and children, the secretaries, chaplains, pensioned poets, led-captains, body-flatterers, hangers-on, needy clients, lick-trenchers, and scrape-plates, the governesses and tutors, the tenants, the lacqueys, the black-boys, the monkeys, and the lapdogs: tutta la baracca, in fact. In the Wanstead Assembly was a portrait of the first Earl Tylney, and many of his vassals and dependants; and shortly after the completion of the picture, Mitchell, for whose opera of The Highland Clans Hogarth designed a frontispiece, complimented the artist on his performance in smooth couplets:—
“Large families obey your hand,
Assemblies rise at your command.”
It was William’s frequent fortune during life to be much celebrated in verse. Swift, you know, apostrophized him as “hum’rous Hogart;” Mitchell, as we have seen, lauds his “families” and “assemblies.” Shortly afterwards, the tender and graceful Vincent Bourne, who wrote the Jackdaw, and whose innocent memory as “Vinny Bourne” is yet cherished in Westminster School, where he was junior master, addressed the painter in Latin “hendecasyllables.” Hoadley, chancellor and bishop, spurred a clumsy Pegasus to paraphrase his pictures in verse. Churchill, when he was old, tried to stab him with an epistle; David Garrick and Samuel Johnson competed for the honour of writing his epitaph.
Between 1727 and 1730, Hogarth appears to have painted dozens of single portraits, “conversations,” and “assemblies.” In the list he himself scheduled are to be noticed “four figures for Mr. Wood” (1728); “six figures for Mr. Cock” (1728); “an assembly of twenty-five figures for my Lord Castlemaine” (1729); “five for the Duke of Montagu;” nine for Mr. Vernon, four for Mr. Wood, and so forth. The prices paid for “Assemblies” appear to have fluctuated between ten and thirty guineas. The oddest, and nearly the earliest commission he received for a portrait was in 1726, when several of the eminent surgeons of the day subscribed their guinea a-piece for him to compose a burlesque “conversation” of Mary Tofts, the infamous rabbit-breeding impostor of Godalming; and St. André, chirurgeon to the King’s household, a highly successful and most impudent quack, who had made himself very busy in the scandalous hoax, and pretended to believe in Tofts. For the story that Hogarth made a drawing of Jack Sheppard in Newgate (1724), at the time when Sir James painted the robber’s half-length in oils—the imaginary scene is admirably etched by George Cruikshank in one of his illustrations to Mr. Ainsworth’s strange novel—there does not seem any foundation. W. H. certainly painted Sarah Malcolm, the murderess, in her cell, in 1733; and from that well-known and authenticated fact some persons may have jumped at the conclusion that he was limner in ordinary to the Old Bailey.
I dwelt persistently in the preceding section of these essays upon the scenes and characters, the vices and follies, the humours and eccentricities, the beauties and uglinesses, that Hogarth must have seen in his young manhood, and asked and thought about, and which must have sunk into his mind and taken root there. Satirists can owe but little to inspiration. They can move the world with the lever of wit, but they must have a fulcrum of fact. Their philosophy is properly of the inductive order. Without facts, facts to reason upon, their arguments would be tedious and pointless. Wherein lies the force or direction of satirizing that Chinese mandarin whom you never saw—that Zulu Kaffir who never came out of his kraal but once, and then to steal a cow? It was Hogarth’s faculty to catch the manners living as they rose; it was his province to watch their rising, and to walk abroad, an early bird, to pick up the worms of knavery and vice, to range the ample field, and see what the open and what the covert yielded. From twenty to thirty the social philosopher must observe. If he grovel in the mud even, he must observe and take stock of the humane passer-by who stoops to pick him up. After thirty he had better go into his study, turn on his lamp, and turn out the contents of his mind’s commonplace book upon paper. This is the only valid excuse for what is termed, after a Frenchman’s Quartier-Latin-argot phrase “Bohemianism:” the only excuse for Fielding’s Covent Garden escapades, for Callot’s gipsy flights, for Shakspeare’s deer-stealing. Young Diogenes the cynic is offensive and reprehensible, but he is no monstrosity. He is going to the deuce, but he may come back again. I will pardon him his tub, his dingy body-linen, his nails bordered sable; but the tub-career should have its term, and Diogenes should go and wash, and if he can afford it, wear fine linen with a purple hem thereunto, as Plato did. It is pleasanter to walk in the groves of Academe, than to skulk about the purlieus of the Mint. Besides, Bohemianism has its pains as well as its pleasures, and Fortune delights in disciplining with a scourge of scorpions those whom she destines to be great men: Alla gioventù molto si perdona. Cæsar was snatched from the stews of Rome to conquer the world. But for the middle-aged Bohemian—the old, ragged, uncleanly, shameful Diogenes—there is no hope and no excuse.
In that which I daresay you thought a mere digression, I strove my best to guide you through the labyrinthine London, which Hogarth must have threaded time after time before he could sit down, pencil or graver in hand, and say, “This is ‘Tom King’s coffee-house,’ this is a ‘modern midnight conversation,’ this is the ‘progress of a rake,’ and this the ‘career of a courtesan.’ I have seen these things, and I know them to be true.”[2] Nor in the least do I wish to convey that in ranging the streets and beating the town Hogarth had any fixed notions of collecting materials for future melodramas and satires. Eminently to be distrusted are those persons who prowl about the tents of Kedar, and pry into the cave of Adullam, when they should be better employed, pleading their desire to “see life,” and to “pick up character.” They are generally blind as bats to all living, breathing life; and the only character they pick up is a bad one for themselves. I apprehend that Hogarth just took life as it came; only the Light was in him to see and to comprehend. A right moral feeling, an intuitive hatred of all wicked and cruel things, guided and strengthened him. Amid the loose life of a loose age the orgies at Moll King’s and Mother Douglass’s might have been frolics at the time to him, and only frolics. A fight in a night-cellar was to him precisely as the yellow primrose was to Peter Bell: a yellow primrose, and nothing more. He was to be afterwards empowered and commanded to turn his youthful follies to wise ends, and to lash the vices which he had once tolerated by his presence.
The philosophic prelude to his work was undoubtedly his town wanderings, 1720-30. The great manipulative skill, the grace of drawing visible when taken in comparison with the comic excrescences in the Hudibras—the brilliance and harmony of colour he manifested in the Progresses and the Marriage à la Mode—have yet to be accounted for. A lad does not step at once from the engraving bench to the easel, and handle the hog’s hair brush with the same skill as he wields the burin and the etching point. The Hogarthian transition from the first to the second of these stages is the more remarkable when it is remembered that, although bred an engraver, and although always quick, dexterous, and vigorous with the sharp needle and the trenchant blade, he could never thoroughly master that clear, harmonious, full-bodied stroke in which the French engravers excelled, in which Hogarth’s own assistants in after life (Ravenet, Scotin, and Grignion) surpassed him, but which was afterwards, to the pride and glory of English chalcography, to be brought to perfection by Woollett and Strange. Yet Hogarth the engraver seemed in 1730 to change with pantomimic rapidity into Hogarth the painter. The matter of his pictures may often be questionable: the manner leaves scarcely anything for exceptional criticism. His colour is deliciously pure and fresh; he never loads, never spatters paint about with his palette knife; never lays tint over tint till a figure has as many vests as the gravedigger in Hamlet. Whites, grays, carnations stand in his pictures and defy time; no uncertain glazings have changed his foregrounds into smears and streaks and stains. He was great at Manchester in 1857; great at the British Institution in 1814, when not less than fifty of his works were exhibited, great in body, richness, transparency; he is great, nay prodigious, in the English section of the National Gallery, where gorgeous Sir Joshua, alas! runs and welters and turns into adipocere; and Gainsborough (in his portraits—his landscapes are as rich as ever)—grows pallid and threadbare, and Turner’s suns are grimed, and even Wilkie cracks and tesselates. I think Hogarth came fresh, assured and decided, to his picture-painting work, from a kind of second apprenticeship under Thornhill, and from compassing the “conversations” and “assemblies.” The historico-allegorico-mural decorations were a species of scene-painting; they involved broad and decisive treatment. The hand learnt perforce to strike lines and mark-in muscles at once. The maul-stick could seldom be used, the fluttering wrist, the nerveless grasp were fatal, the eye could not be performing a perpetual goose-step between canvas and model. Look at Salvator, at Loutherbourg, at Stanfield, and Roberts, to show what good a scene-painting noviciate can do in teaching an artist to paint in one handling, à la brochette as it were. Who can relish a Madonna when one fancies half-a-dozen other Madonnas simpering beneath the built-up tints? Next, Hogarth went to his portraits. They were a course of physiognomy invaluable to him—of fair faces, stern faces, sensual, stupid, hideous and pretty little baby faces. From the exigencies of the “conversations” and “assemblies” he learnt composition, and the treatment of accessories; learnt to paint four-and-twenty fiddlers, not “all of a row,” but disposed in ellipse or in pyramid-form. The perception of female beauty and the power of expressing it were his by birthright, by heaven’s kindness; I am despondent only at his animals, which are almost invariably impossible deformities.[3]
The Duke of Montagu and my Lord Castlemaine having ordered “conversations” from Hogarth, there was of course but one thing necessary to put the seal to his artistic reputation. That thing, so at least the patron may have thought, was the patronage of the eminent Morris. Morris is quite snuffed out now—evaporated even as the carbonic acid gas from yesterday’s flask of champagne; but in 1727, he was a somewhat notable person. He was a fashionable upholsterer in Pall Mall, and not only sold, but manufactured, those tapestry arras hangings which, paper-staining being in embryo, were still conspicuous ornaments of the walls of palaces, the nobility’s saloons. Morris kept a shop much frequented by the noble tribes, at the sign of the “Golden Ball,” in Pall Mall. There seems to have been a plethora of Golden Balls in London about this time, just as though all the Lombards had quarrelled among themselves, and set up in business each man for himself, with no connection with the golden ball over the way. In 1727, and, for a century and a half before, the best and most celebrated painters were employed to execute designs for tapestry. You know who drew for the Flemish weavers that immortal dozen of cartoons, seven of which are at Hampton Court, and which have been recently so wonderfully photographed. Rubens and Vandyke, the stately Lebrun, and the meek Lesueur, made designs also for these woven pictures. There are penitent thieves and jesting Pilates from Hans Holbein’s inspiration in many faded hangings. Thornhill had been himself commissioned by Queen Anne to make sketches for a set of tapestry hangings emblematic of the union between England and Scotland. And does not the fabric of the Gobelins yet flourish? Did not Napoleon the Third vouchsafe the gift of a magnificent piece of tapisserie to one of our West-end clubs? Morris, the upholsterer, had many of the “first foreign hands” in his employ; but, being a Briton, bethought himself magnanimously to encourage real native British talent. My lord duke had employed Hogarth; Morris likewise determined on giving a commission to the rising artist. He sought out William, conferred with him, explained his wishes, and a solemn contract was entered into between William Hogarth for the first part, and Joshua Morris for the second, in which the former covenanted to furnish the latter with a design on canvas of the Element of Earth, to be afterwards worked in tapestry. The painter squared his canvas and set to work; but when the design was completed Morris flatly refused to pay the thirty pounds agreed upon as remuneration. It seems that the timorous tradesman, who must clearly have possessed a large admixture of the “element of earth” in his composition, had been informed by some good-natured friend of Hogarth that the tapestry-designer was no painter, but a “low engraver.” Horror! To think of a mean wretch who had earned his livelihood by flourishing initials on flagons and cutting plates in taille douce for the booksellers, presuming to compete with the flourishing foreigners employed by the eminent and ineffable Morris! ’Twas as though some destitute index-maker of the Hop Gardens, some starved ballad-monger of Lewkner’s Lane, had seduced Mr. Jacob Tonson into giving him an order for a translation of the Æneid into heroic verse. Amazed and terrified, the deceived Joshua Morris rushed to Hogarth’s painting-room and accused him of misrepresentation, fraud, covin, and other crimes. How would ever my lord duke and her ladyship—perhaps Madam Schuylenburg-Kendal herself—tolerate tapestry in their apartments designed by a base churl, the quondam apprentice of a silversmith in Cranbourn Alley, the brother of two misguided young women who kept a slop-shop? Hogarth coolly stated that he should hold the upholsterer to his bargain. He admitted that the Element of Earth was “a bold undertaking,” but expressed an opinion that he should “get through it well enough.” He brought the thing to a termination; and it was, I daresay, sufficiently of the earth earthy. Joshua resolutely withheld payment. No copper-scratcher should defraud him of thirty pounds. The young man, formerly of Little Cranbourn Alley, was not to be trifled with. If Morris had been a lord and had refused (as one of Hogarth’s sitters absolutely did) to pay for his portrait, on the ground that it wasn’t like him, the artist might have taken a satirical revenge, and threatened to add tails to all the figures in the Element of Earth, and send the canvas to Mr. Hare, the wild-beast-man, as a showcloth. But the Pall Mall upholsterer was a tradesman, and Hogarth, all artist as he knew himself to be, was a tradesman, too. So he went to his lawyer’s, and sued Morris for the thirty pounds, “painter’s work done.” Bail was given and justified, and on the 28th of May, 1728, the great case of Hogarth against Morris came on in communi banco, before the chief justice in Eyre. The defendant pleaded non assumpsit. Issue was joined, and the gentlemen of the long-robe went to work. For the defendant, the alleged fraudulent substitution of an engraver for a painter was urged. The eminence of Morris’s tapestry and upholstery was adduced. It was sworn to that he employed “some of the finest hands in Europe.” Bernard Dorridor, De Friend, Phillips, Danten, and Pajou, “some of the finest hands,” appeared in the witness-box and deposed to what first-rate fellows they all were, and to William Hogarth being a mere mechanic, the last of the lowest, so to speak. But the ready painter was not without friends. He subpœnaed more of the “finest hands.” Up came King, Vanderbank, the opera scene-painter, Laguerre, son and successor to Charles the Second’s Laguerre, and Verrio’s partner, and the serene Thornhill himself, who, I doubt it not, was bidden by my Lord to sit on the bench, was oracular in his evidence as to the young man’s competency, smiled on the chief justice, and revolved in his majestic mind the possibility of the lords of the Treasury giving him a commission (had they the power) to paint the walls and ceilings of all the courts of justice with allegories of Themis, Draco, Solon, Justinian, and Coke upon Lyttleton, to be paid for out of the suitors’ fee fund. We know now how tawdry and trashy these painted allegories were; but Thornhill and Laguerre were really the most reliable authorities to be consulted as to the standard of excellence then accepted in such performances. The verdict very righteously went against the defendant, whose plea was manifestly bad, and Joshua Morris was cast in thirty pounds. I delight to fancy that the successful party straightway adjourned to the Philazers’ Coffee-house, in Old Palace Yard, and there, after a slight refection of hung beef and Burton ale, betook themselves to steady potations of Lisbon wine in magnums—there were prohibitive duties on claret—until each man began to see allegories of his own, in which Bacchus was the capital figure. I delight to fancy that the Anglo-Frenchman Laguerre clapped Hogarth on the back, and told him that he was “von clevare fellow,” and that Sir James shook his young friend by the hand, enjoined him to cultivate a true and proper gusto, and bade him Godspeed. Majestic man! he little thought that when his own celebrity had vanished, or was but as the shadow of the shadow of smoke, his young friend was to be famous to the nations and the glory of his countrymen.[4]
For all the handshakings and libations of Lisbon, Sir James was to live to be very angry with his young friend, although the quarrel was to last but a little while. Hogarth had looked upon Thornhill’s daughter Jane, and she was fair, and regarded him, too, with not unfavourable eyes. He who has gained a lawsuit should surely be successful in love. Meanwhile—I don’t think he was much given to sighing or dying—he went on painting, in spite of all the Morrises in upholsterydom. Poor Joshua himself came to grief. He seems to have been bankrupt; and on the 15 th of May, 1729, the auctioneer knocked down to the highest bidder all the choice stock of tapestry in Pall Mall. Hogarth’s Element of Earth may have been “Lot 90;” but one rather inclines to surmise that Morris slashed the fatal canvas with vindictive peissors to shreds and mippets the day his lawyer’s bill came in.
To record the tremendous success of that Newgate Pastoral, the suggestion of the first idea of which lies between Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Gay, does not come within my province. The history of the Beggar’s Opera, that made “Rich Gay and Gay Rich,” is too well known to bear repetition. Hogarth, however, has left his mark on the famous operatic score. For Rich, the Covent Garden manager, he painted (1729) a picture of the prison scene in which Lucy and Polly are wrangling over Macheath, of which several replicas in oil, some slightly varied, as well as engravings, were afterwards executed. Portraits of many of the great personages of the day are introduced in open boxes on the stage. Macheath was a portrait of the comedian Walker; and the Polly was the beauteous Lavinia Fenton, the handsome, kindly, true-hearted actress with whom the Duke of Bolton, to the amusement and amazement of the town, fell in love, and fairly ran away. The Duchess of Bolton was then still alive, and lived for many years afterwards; and poor Polly had to suffer some part of the penalty which falls on those with whom dukes elope; but at the duchess’s death, her lord showed that he was not of Mrs. Peachum’s opinion, that “’tis marriage makes the blemish,” and right nobly elevated Polly to the peerage. She lived long and happily with him, survived him, and died late in the last century, very old, and beloved, and honoured for her modesty, charity, and piety. “The lovely young Lavinia once had friends,” writes Thomson in the Seasons; but our Lavinia lost not her friends to her dying day. If Tenison, and Atterbury, and Sherlock, had nothing to say against Eleanor Gwyn, let us trust that the severest moralist could find charitable words wherewith to speak of Lavinia, Duchess of Bolton.[5]
A sterner subject, the prologue to a dismal drama of human life, was now to engross the pencil of this painter, who was now making his presence known and felt among his contemporaries. I speak of the strange solemn picture of the Committee of the House of Commons taking evidence of the enormities wreaked on the wretched prisoners in the Fleet by Huggins and Bambridge. Let us drag these mouldering scoundrels from their dishonoured graves, and hang them up here on Cornhill, for all the world to gaze at, even as the government of the Restoration (but with less reason) hung the carcases of Cromwell and Bradshaw on Tyburn gibbet. Huggins—save the mark!—was of gentle birth, and wrote himself “Armiger.” He had bought the patent of the wardenship of the Fleet from a great court lord, and when the trade of torturing began, through usance, to tend towards satiety, he sold his right to one Bambridge, a twin demon. The atrocities committed by the pair may very rapidly be glanced at. Huggins’s chief delight was to starve his prisoners, unless they were rich enough to bribe him. Bambridge’s genius lay more towards confining his victims charged with fetters in underground dungeons, with the occasional recreation of attempting to pistol and stab them. The moneyed debtors both rascals smiled upon. Smugglers were let out through a yard in which dogs were kept; ran their cargoes; defrauded the revenue, and came back to “college.” One, who owed 10,000l. to the crown, was permitted to make his escape altogether. A certain T. Dumay went several times to France, being all the time in the “custody,” as the sham was facetiously termed, of the Warden of the Fleet. What was such a fraud in an age when the highest legal authorities (who would not take the fetters off Christopher Layer) gravely doubted whether the rules of the King’s Bench might not extend to Bombay, in the East Indies?[6] These surreptitiously enlarged prisoners were called “pigeons.” They had bill transactions with the tipstaves; they drew on Huggins, and then pleaded their insolvency. On the other hand, the poor debtors were very differently treated. A broken-down baronet, Sir William Rich, on refusing to pay the “baronet’s fee,” or “garnish,” of five pounds, was heavily fettered, kept for months in a species of subterranean dog-kennel; the vivacious Bambridge sometimes enlivening his captivity by threatening to run a red-hot poker through his body. This cheerful philanthropist, who was wont to range about the prison with a select gang of turnkeys, armed with halberts and firelocks, ordered one of his myrmidons to fire on “Captain Mackpheadris”—(what a name for a captain in difficulties! Lieutenant Lismahago is nothing to it). As, however, even these callous bravoes hesitated to obey so savage a behest, and as there was absolutely nothing to be squeezed in the way of garnish out of this lackpenny Captain Mackpheadris, Bambridge locked the poor wretch out of his room, and turned him out to starve in an open yard called the “Bare.” Here, Mack, who was seemingly an old campaigner, built himself out of broken tiles and other rubbish, a little hovel in an angle of the wall, just as the evicted Irish peasantry in famine and fever times were wont to build little kraals of turf-sods and wattles over dying men in ditches; but Bambridge soon heard of the bivouac, and ordered it to be pulled down. J. Mendez Sola, a Portuguese, was by the same kind guardian fettered with a hundredweight of iron, and incarcerated in a deadhouse, with dead people in it, moreover! Others languished in dens called “Julius Cæsar’s chapel,” the upper and lower “Ease,” and the “Lyon’s Den,” where they were stapled to the floor. Attached to the prison itself was an auxiliary inferno in the shape of a spunging-house kept by Corbett, a creature of Bambridge. The orthodox process seemed to be, first to fleece you in the spunging-house, and then to flay you alive in the gaol. Of course, Mr. Bambridge went snacks with Mr. Corbett. Very few scruples were felt in getting fish for this net. In one flagrant instance, a total stranger was seized as he was giving charity at the grate for poor prisoners, dragged into Corbett’s, and only released on paying “garnish,” and undertaking not to institute any proceedings against his kidnappers. When a prisoner had money to pay the debt for which he had been arrested, he often lay months longer in hold for his “fees.” The caption fee was 5l. 16s. 4d.; the “Philazer”—who ever that functionary may have been, but his was a patent place in the Exchequer—the judge’s clerk, the tipstaves, the warden, all claimed their fees. Fees had to be paid for the favour of lighter irons, and every fresh bird in the spunging-house cage paid his “footing,” in the shape of a six shilling bowl of punch. When, as from time to time, and to the credit of human nature, occurred, a person visited the gaol, “on behalf of an unknown lady,” to discharge all claims against persons who lay in prison for their fees only, Bambridge often sequestered his prisoners till the messenger of mercy had departed. But he was always open to pecuniary conviction, and from the wife of one prisoner he took, as a bribe, forty guineas and a “toy,” being the model of a “Chinese Jonque in amber set with silver,” for which the poor woman had been offered eighty broadpieces. In these our days, Bambridge would have discounted bills, and given one-fourth cash, one-fourth wine, one-fourth camels’ bridles, and one-fourth ivory frigates. When an Insolvent Act was passed, Bambridge demanded three guineas a piece from those desirous of availing themselves of the relief extended by the law: else he would not allow them to be “listed,” or inserted in the schedule of Insolvents. And by a stroke of perfectly infernal cunning this gaoler-devil hit upon a plan of preventing his victims from taking proceedings against him by taking proceedings against them. After some outrage of more than usual enormity, he would slip round to the Old Bailey and prefer a bill of indictment against the prisoners he had maltreated, for riot, or an attempt to break prison. He had always plenty of understrappers ready to swear for him; and the poor, penniless, friendless gaol-bird was glad to compromise with his tormentor by uncomplaining silence.[7]
Already had these things been censured by highest legal authorities; at least the judges had occasionally shaken their wise heads and declared the abuses in the Fleet to be highly improper: “You may raise your walls higher,” quoth Lord King; “but there must be no prison within a prison.” An excellent dictum if only acted upon. At last, the prisoners began to die of ill-usage, of starvation and disease, or rather, it began to be known, that they were so dying, and died every year of our Lord. A great public outcry arose. Humane men bestirred themselves. The legislature was besieged with petitions. Parliamentary commissioners visited the gaol, and a committee of the House of Commons sat to hear those harrowing details of evidence of which I have given you a summary. Bambridge was removed from his post, but the vindicte publique was not appeased. First, Huggins, the retired esquire, and Barnes, his assistant, were tried at the Old Bailey for the murder of Edward Arne, a prisoner. Page, the hanging judge, presided, but from that stern fount there flowed waters of mercy for the monster of the Fleet. Owing chiefly to his summing up, a special verdict was returned, and Huggins and the minor villain were acquitted. Huggins’s son was a well-to-do gentleman of Headley Park, Hants, had a taste for the fine arts, translated Ariosto, and collected Hogarthian drawings! It was as though Sanson should have collected miniatures of Louis the Sixteenth, or Simon the cobbler statuettes of the poor little captive Capet of the Temple.
Next, the coarser scoundrels, Bambridge and Corbett, were tried for the murder of a Mr. Castell, who had been thrust into Corbett’s spunging-house while the small-pox was raging there, and died. Bambridge, too, was acquitted through some legal quibble; but the widow of the murdered man had another quibble, by which she hoped to obtain redress. She retained the famous casuist Lee, the sage who in a single action once pleaded seventy-seven pleas. She sued out an appeal of murder against the warden and his man. This involved the “wager of battle,” which you remember in the strange Yorkshire case some forty years ago, and which was at last put an end to by statute. The appellee could either fight the appellant à la dog of Montargis, or throw himself on his country, i.e. submit to be tried again. Bambridge and Corbett chose the latter course, were again tried, and again escaped. They were, however, very near being torn to pieces by the populace. Lord Campbell says, I venture to think unjustly, that Mrs. Castell was incited to the appeal by a “mobbish confederation.”[8] Good heaven! was anything but a confederation of the feelings of common humanity necessary to incite all honest men to bring these wretches to justice? I suppose that it was by a “mobbish confederation” that the villanous Austin, of Birmingham gaol, was tried, and that after all his atrocities of gagging, “jacketing,” and cramming salt down his prisoners’ throats, he, too, escaped with an almost nominal punishment. Lee, the casuist (he was afterwards Chief Justice), was so disgusted with the result of the trial, that he vowed he would never have aught to do with facts again, but henceforth would stick to law alone. I am not lawyer enough to know why the case against Bambridge and Corbett broke down; I only know that these men were guilty of murder most foul and most unnatural, and that one of our most ancient legal maxims is explicit as to their culpability.[9]
A committee of gentlemen in large wigs, sitting round a table in a gloomy apartment, and examining witnesses likewise in wigs, is not a very inspiring theme for a painter; but I have always considered Hogarth’s rendering of the proceedings to be one of the most masterly of Hogarth’s tableaux. The plate was a great favourite with Horace Walpole, who described with much discrimination the various emotions of pity, horror, and indignation on the countenances of the spectators; the mutely eloquent testimony of the shackles and manacles on the table; the pitiable appearance of the half-starved prisoner who is giving evidence; and, especially, the Judas-like appearance of Bambridge (who was present), his yellow cheeks and livid lips, his fingers clutching at the button-holes in his coat, and his face advanced, “as if eager to lie.” There was a large sale for the engraving taken from this picture, and Hogarth gained largely in reputation from its production.
He had need of reputation, and of money too. A very serious crisis in his life was approaching. He had found more favour in the eyes of Jane Thornhill. “On n’épouse pas les filles de grande maison avec des coquilles de noix,” writes a wise Frenchman, and William Hogarth’s fortune might decidedly at this time have been comfortably “put into a wine-glass and covered over with a gooseberry leaf,” as was suggested of the immortal Mr. Bob Sawyer’s profits from his druggist’s shop. Sir James Thornhill was a greater don in art than Sir Godfrey, or than Richardson, or Jervas. He hated Sir Godfrey, and strove to outshine him. If extent of area is to be taken as a test of ability, Thornhill certainly beat Kneller hollow. To a Lombard Street of allegory and fable in halls and on staircases the German could only show a china orange of portraiture. Thornhill was a gentleman. His father was poor enough; but he was clearly descended from Ralph de Thornhill (12 Henry III. 1228).[10] When he became prosperous, he bought back the paternal acres, and built a grand house at Thornhill, hard by Weymouth. He had been a favourite with Queen Anne. He had succeeded Sir Christopher Wren in the representation of Melcombe Regis, his native place. His gains were enormous. Though he received but two guineas a yard for St. Paul’s, and twenty-five shillings a yard for painting the staircase of the South Sea House (with bubbles, or with an allegory of Mercury putting the world in his pocket?), instead of 1,500l. which he demanded, he had a magnificent wage for painting the hall at Blenheim, and from the noted Styles, who is said to have spent 150,000l. in the embellishments of Moor Park, he received, after a lawsuit and an arbitration, 4,000l. To be sure Lafosse got nearly 3,000l. for the staircase and saloons of Montagu House (the old British Museum). Look at the etching of Sir James Thornhill, by Worlidge. He is painting in an elaborately-laced coat with brocaded sleeves; and his wig is as so many curds in a whey of horsehair, and no one but a Don could have such a double chin.
With the daughter of this grandee of easeldom, this favourite of monarchs, this Greenwich and Hampton Court Velasquez, William Hogarth, painter, engraver, and philosopher, but as yet penniless, had the inconceivable impudence not only to fall in love, but to run away. I rather think that Lady Thornhill connived at the surreptitious courtship, and was not inexorably angry when the stolen match took place; but as for the knight, he would very probably just as soon have thought of Mars, Bacchus, Apollo and Virorum coming down from an allegorical staircase, and dancing a saraband to the tune of “Green Sleeves” on the north side of Covent Garden Piazza, as of his young protégé and humble friend Willy Hogarth presuming to court or to marry his daughter. Oh! it is terrible to think of this rich man, this father of a disobedient Dinah, walking his studio all round, vowing vengeance against that rascally Villikins, and declaring that of his large fortune she shan’t reap the benefit of one single pin! Oh! cruel “parient,” outraged papa, Lear of genteel life! He frets, he fumes, he dashes his wig to the ground. He remembers him, perchance, of sundry small moneys he has lent to Hogarth, and vows he will have him laid by the heels in a spunging-house ere the day be out. Send for a capias, send for a mittimus! Send for the foot-guards, the tipstaves, and the train-bands, for Jane Thornhill has levanted with William Hogarth!
They were married at old Paddington Church on the 23rd of March, 1729. Thus runs the parish register: “William Hogarth, Esq. and Jane Thornhill, of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden.” Marriage and hanging go together they say, and William and Jane went by Tyburn to have their noose adjusted. In the Historical Chronicle for 1729, the bridegroom is described as “an eminent designer and engraver;” but in Hogarth’s own family Bible, a worn, squat, red-ink-interlined little volume, printed early in the reign of Charles the First, and now reverentially preserved by Mr. Graves, the eminent print-publisher of Pall Mall, there is a certain flyleaf, which I have seen, and which to me is of infinitely greater value than Historical Chronicle or Paddington Parish Register, for there, in the painter’s own handwriting, I read—“W. Hogarth married Sir James Thornhill’s daughter, March 23rd, 1729.”
Papa-in-law was in a fury, set his face and wig against the young couple, would not see them, would not give them any money, cast them out of the grand piazza mansion to starve, if they so chose, among the cabbage-stumps of the adjacent market. It behoved William to work hard. I don’t think he ever resided with his wife in Cranbourn Alley. He had given that messuage up to his sisters. What agonies the member for Melcombe Regis, the scion of Henry the Third’s Thornhills, must have endured at the thought of that abhorred “old frock-shop!” There is reason to believe that for some time previous to his marriage Hogarth had resided in Thornhill’s own house, and had so found opportunities for his courtship of the knight’s daughter. Of young Thornhill, Sir James’s son, he was the intimate friend and comrade. Where he spent his honeymoon is doubtful; but it was either in 1729 or 1730 that he began to take lodgings at South Lambeth, and to form the acquaintance of Mr. Jonathan Tyers, the lessee of Vauxhall Gardens.
In the tranquillity and sobriety of a happy married life, Hogarth began for the first time deeply to philosophize. He had eaten his cake. He had sown his wild-oats. He was to beat the town no more in mere indifference of carousal; he was to pluck the moralist’s flower from the strange wild nettles he had handled. In this age have been found critics stupid and malevolent enough to accuse every author who writes with a purpose, and who endeavours to draw attention to social vices, of imposture and of hypocrisy. He should be content, these critics hold, to describe the things he sees; he is a humbug if he moralize upon them. It is not unlikely that the vicious Fribbles of Hogarth’s time held similar opinions, and took Hogarth to be a reckless painter of riotous scenes, and who just infused sufficient morality into them “to make the thing go off.” It was otherwise with him I hope and believe. I am firmly convinced that the sin and shame of the evils he depicted were as deeply as they were vividly impressed on Hogarth’s mind—that he was as zealous as any subscriber to a Refuge, a Reformatory, or a Home can be now, to abate a dreadful social evil; that his hatred for the wickedness of dissolute men, his sympathy for women fallen and betrayed; his utter loathing for those wretched scandals to their sex, the women whose trade it is to decoy women, was intense and sincere. I do not believe in the sincerity of Fielding, who could grin and chuckle over the orgies of the Hundreds of Drury and the humours of the bagnio. I find even the gentle and pure-minded Addison simpering in the Freeholder about certain frequenters of Somerset House masquerades. But Hogarth’s satire in the Harlot’s Progress never makes you laugh. It makes you rather shudder and stagger, and turn pale. The six pictures which form this tragedy were painted immediately after his marriage. They were painted in the presence of a young, beautiful, and virtuous woman, who read her Bible, and loved her husband with unceasing tenderness; and casting to the winds the mock morality and lip-virtue that fear to speak of the things depicted in this Progress, I say that no right-minded man or woman will be the worse for studying its phases.
Some time before Hogarth painted the Harlot’s Progress, a hundred and thirty years ago, Edward Ward and Tom Brown had described in coarse, untranscribable, but yet graphic terms, the career of these unfortunates. The former, although a low-lived pottlepot at the best of times, makes some honest remarks concerning the barbarous treatment of the women in Bridewell.[11] “It’s not the way to reform ’em,” he says, plainly. But Hogarth first told the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He first told the story of a courtesan without either ribald jesting or sickly sentimentality; and he much more than if he had been a royal duke mincingly handling trowel and mallet, laid the first stone of the Magdalen Hospital.
“Ora,” writes an appreciative Venetian biographer of Hogarth, “conduce una bella dalla barca in cui nacque ad un albergo di Londra, da un magnifico palazzo in un lupanare, dal lupanare in prigione, dalla prigione all’ ospitale, dall’ ospitale alla fossa.” This is the tersest summary I know. The Venetian loses not a word. From the cottage where she was born to an inn; from an inn to a palace; thence to a bagnio, thence to prison, thence to a sick-room, thence to the grave. This is the history of Kate Hackabout.
Each tableau in the Harlot’s Progress is complete in itself; but there is a “solution of continuity”—the progression is not consecutive. More than once a hiatus occurs. Thus, it is Mother Needham, the horrible procuress, who first accosts the innocent country girl in the inn-yard; and it is the infamous Colonel Charteris who is leering at her. The magnificent “palazzo” belongs, however, to a Jew financier; and after the disturbance of the table kicked over, and the gallant behind the door, we can understand how she sinks into the mistress of James Dalton the highwayman. But how comes she to be dressed in brocade and silver when she is beating hemp in Bridewell? The Grub Street Journal tells us that the real Hackabout was so attired when by the fiat of nine justices she was committed to penitential fibre-thumping; but the pictorial Kate in the preceding tableau, sitting under the bed-tester with the stolen watch in her hand, is in very mean and shabby attire. Do people put on their best clothes to go to the House of Correction in? or, again, when being captured—Sir John Gonson allowed her to dress herself, discreetly waiting outside the door meanwhile—did she don her last unpawned brocaded kirtle and her showiest lappets, in order to captivate the nine stern justices withal? The fall to the garret, after her release from prison, I can well understand. Some years have elapsed. She has a ragged little wretch of a boy who toasts a scrap of bacon before the fire, while the quacks squabble about the symptoms of her malady, and the attendant harridan rifles her trunk—it is the same old trunk with her initials in brass nails on it that we see in the yard of the Bell Inn, Wood Street, in Scene the First?—of its vestiges of finery. The ragged boy is, perchance, James Dalton, the highwayman’s son, long since translated to Tyburnia. The real Hackabout’s brother was indeed hanged with much completeness. But I can’t at all understand how in the next tableau this poor creature, when her woes are all ended, has a handsome and even pretentious funeral, moribund, as we saw her, in her dismal garret but just before. Had Fortune cast one fitful ray on her as she sank into the cold dark house? Had a bag of guineas been cast to jingle on her hearse? She was a clergyman’s daughter, it seems. Had the broken-hearted old curate in the country sent up sufficient money to bury his daughter with decency? Had the sisterhood of the Hundreds of Drury themselves subscribed for the enlargement of obsequies which might excuse an orgy? There is plenty of money from somewhere in this death-scene, to a certainty. The boy who sits at the coffin foot, winding the string round his top, has a new suit of mourning, and a laced hat. That glowering undertaker has been liberally paid to provide gloves and scarves; the clergyman—I hope he’s only a Fleet chaplain—has evidently been well entertained; there is a whole Jordan of gin flowing: gin on the coffin-lid; gin on the floor; and on the wall there is even an “achievement of arms,” the dead woman’s scutcheon.
On every scene in the Harlot’s Progress a lengthy essay might be written. Well, is not every stone in this city full of sermons? Are there no essays to be written on the Kate Hackabouts who are living, and who die around us every day? Better for the nonce to close that dreary coffin, wish that we were that unconscious child who is sitting at the feet of Death, and preparing to spin his pegtop amid the shadows of all this wretchedness and all this vice.