CHAPTER VI HOGARTH’S “ENTHUSIASM DELINEATED,” “THE MAN OF TASTE,” AND “DON QUIXOTE”

IN Mr. Aus­tin Dob­son’s Hogarth, to which all stu­dents of that mas­ter are so deep­ly in­debt­ed, the fol­low­ing sen­tence con­cludes the list of “Prints of an Un­cer­tain Date”: “It has been thought un­neces­sary to in­clude two or three designs, the gross­ness of which neither the in­genuity of the artist nor the coarse taste of his time can reasonably be held to excuse.” And in this book I have made it a car­di­nal point to emulate Mr. Dobson’s excel­lent example.

We remember in one of Mr. G. Russell’s amusing books the story of the erstwhile Member of Parliament who had accepted a peerage, not­with­stand­ing his pro­fes­sion of dem­o­cratic sen­ti­ments. There­upon one of his late sup­porters, {83} with excellent, though somewhat brutal, metaphor, remarked, “Mr. —— says as how he’s going to the House of Lords to leaven it. I tell you he can’t no more leaven the House of Lords than you can sweeten a cart-load of muck with a pot of marmalade.” Per contra, let us always bear in mind, that were the cart full of marmalade, and the pot of muck, the latter would be fully sufficient to render the whole an abomination. Fortunately for us, the Hogarth “Suppressed Plates” which are befitting are of exceptional interest. And it may as well be pointed out here that those peculiarly gross ones which are often alluringly alluded to as “suppressed” are nothing of the sort. So far from being indeed effectively withdrawn from observation, they have had, as a matter of fact, particular attention drawn to them by the fussy ingenuity with which their concealment has been emphasised.

The first of the Hogarth plates which we here reproduce—“Enthusiasm Delineated”—is of far greater intrinsic importance than any of those with which we have already dealt in the preceding chapters. It differs essentially from them not {84} only in the fact that here the artist himself is the fount and origin of the sup­pres­sion but also in the fact that it is a fine example of those palimpsest plates of which more particular description will be found in later chapters of this book. Peculiar interest, too, attaches to the cir­cum­stance that, superb as it was in execution, and elaborate to a degree though it was in conception, it was no sooner finished than the artist deliberately decided against its pub­li­ca­tion, and destroyed the engraving after only two impressions had been taken from the copper. Fortunately for us, one of these is now in the possession of the British Museum.

It will be interesting to those who are the happy possessors of Hogarth Illustrated and the Anecdotes to compare this with the reduced copy (a very different matter) made by Mills and published in these volumes. For it must always be remembered that Hogarth’s autograph engravings are infinitely more interesting than the copies, however eminent the journeyman engraver may have been.

Enlarged detail of Hogarth’s “Enthusiasm Delineated”

Enlarged detail of Hogarth’s “Enthusiasm Delineated”

Another plate was engraved by Mills of the size of the original, and published separately by Ireland {86} in 1795. The date of the original plate is given in the British Museum Catalogue as 1739, but how that date is arrived at I am at a loss to understand.