I have kept the most popular of the Hogarth National Gallery pictures to the last—the famous “Marriage à la Mode” series. The detail of this “pictur’d moral” is a source of unending interest and pleasure to an endless procession of visitors. The eighteenth century may have found in the series a “horrible warning” of the consequences that follow profligacy in high life, but I am perfectly sure that no one in the twentieth century deduces any moral from this melodrama in paint. It is more than that, it is a minute and craftsmanlike record of the rooms and decorative adjuncts of a wealthy and fashionable man’s house in Hogarth’s day, with his manner of living pushed almost to caricature, which was Hogarth’s method of satire and fierce moral rebuke.
The engravings tell the fatal, foolish story; but to connoisseurs the quality and clarity of the paint is the thing. What could be more exquisite than the characterisation of the lady in Scene II., “Shortly after Marriage,” her pretty, dissolute, provocative face, the abandon of her figure, and the haplessness of the peer, too bored and tired after his night’s debauch even to think of remorse. The clock marks twenty minutes after twelve in the morning, the candles beneath the portraits of the four saints on the wall of the inner room are guttering, a dog sniffs at a lady’s cap peeping from the husband’s pocket, and the book protruding from the coat of the old steward is titled “Regeneration.” Hogarth never stayed his hand. The details are innumerable, amusing, italicised. I look and smile quietly, returning always to the characterisation of those two figures, the husband and wife, so delicately observed, so exquisitely painted.
In the middle of the wall at the National Gallery, facing the “Marriage à la Mode” series, painted in the same year when he was forty-eight, is Hogarth’s own portrait with his dog Trump. Blue-eyed, watchful, sturdy, wearing a fur cap, with a scar over his left eye, he has, indeed, “a sort of knowing, jockey look.” He was not a modest man. Why should he have been? In this portrait he allows himself great company. The oval rests on three volumes labelled “Shakespeare,” “Milton,” and “Swift,” and in the lower left corner, drawn on a palette in the corner, is a serpentine curve with these lines under it, “The Line of Beauty,” the flaunting inscription which gave rise to his book, “The Analysis of Beauty.” “No Egyptian hieroglyphic ever amused more than it [the serpentine curve] did for a time,” he tells us. The requests for a solution of the enigma were so numerous that he wrote “The Analysis of Beauty” to explain the symbol. The book, although shrewd in parts, was a dire failure. “The world of professional scoffers and virtuosi fell joyously upon its obscurities and incoherencies.” The obscurities may be divined from the text of the book, which contains “the not very definite axiom,” as Mr. Dobson calls it, attributed to Michael Angelo—“that a figure should be always Pyramidal, Serpentine, and multiplied by one, two, and three.”
I pause to take breath, and refresh myself with an epigram that Hogarth wrote apropos this ill-starred “solution of the enigma.”
“What!—a book, and by Hogarth! then twenty to ten,
All he gain’d by the pencil, he’ll lose by the pen.”
“Perhaps it may be so—howe’er, miss or hit,
He will publish—here goes—it’s double or quit.”
It was an old plate of his Portrait with dog Trump, on which the “Line of Beauty” appears, that he converted into “The Bruiser Charles Churchill” design, his answer to Churchill’s “most virulent and vindictive satire,” called “An Epistle to William Hogarth.”
There are three works by him at the National Portrait Gallery—the early, unimportant “Committee of the House of Commons examining Bambridge”; the strong self-portrait, “Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse”; and that specimen of relentless and amusing characterisation, “Simon, Lord Lovat, painted by Hogarth before his Execution for High Treason.” Hogarth journeyed to St. Albans to get “a fair view of his Lordship before he was locked up.” Here is the chief of the Fraser clan to the life (patriot or traitor, which you like!), a study in reds, browns, corpulency, and craftiness, in the act of narrating some of his adventures, or perhaps detailing the various Highland clans on his fingers. This masterful, pawky Jacobite was tried before his peers in 1747, found guilty, and beheaded on Tower Hill. We know more of him from Hogarth’s picture than from a whole book of documents and descriptions.