These Dutch-English pictures William Hogarth, we may be sure, often inspected as they successively courted public notice in the shops of London, as we see in his early works a character evidently derived from them. During the bubble period of 1720, he was an ambitious young engraver and sign-painter (at least willing to paint signs if a job offered),[19] much given to penciling likenesses and strange attitudes upon his thumb-nail, to be transferred, on reaching home, to paper, and stored away for future use. He was one of those quick draughtsmen who will sketch you upon the spot a rough caricature of any odd person, group, or event that may have excited the mirth of the company; a young fellow somewhat undersized, with an alert, vigorous frame, a bright, speaking eye, a too quick tongue and temper, self-confident, but honest, sturdy, and downright in all his words and ways. "But I was a good paymaster even then" he once said, with just pride, after speaking of the days when he sometimes walked London streets without a shilling in his pocket.
Hogherd was the original name of the family, which was first humanized into Hogert and Hogart, and then softened into its present form. In Westmoreland, where Hogarth's grandfather cultivated a farm—small, but his own—the first syllable of the name was pronounced like that of the domestic animals which his remote ancestors may have herded. There was a vein of talent in the family, an uncle of Hogarth's having been the song-writer and satirist of his village, and his own father emerging from remote and most rustic Westmoreland to settle in London as a poor school-master and laborious, ill-requited compiler of school-books and proof-reader. A Latin dictionary of his making existed in manuscript after the death of the artist, and a Latin letter written by him is one of the curiosities in the British Museum. But he remained always a poor man, and could apprentice his boy only to an engraver of the lowest grade known to the art. But this sufficed for a lad who could scarcely touch paper with a pencil without betraying his gift, who drew capital burlesques upon his nail when he was fifteen, and entertained Addison's coffee-house with a caricature of its landlord when he was twenty-two.
The Sleeping Congregation. (Hogarth.)
The earliest work by this greatest English artist of his century, which has been preserved in the British Museum (1720), shows the bent of his genius as plainly as the first sketch by Boz betrays the quality of Dickens. It is called "Design for a Shop-bill," and was probably Hogarth's own shop-bill, his advertisement to the public that he was able and willing to paint signs. In those days, the school-master not having yet gone "abroad," signs were usually pictorial, and sometimes consisted of the popular representation of the saint having special charge of the business to be recommended. In Hogarth's shop-bill we see a tall man holding up a newly painted sign of St. Luke with his ox and book, at which a group of persons are looking, while Hogarth himself appears to be showing the sign to them as possible customers. Along the bottom of the sign is engraved W. Hogarth, Painter. In the background is seen an artist painting at an easel and a boy grinding colors. He could not even in this first homely essay avoid giving his work something of a narrative character. He must exhibit a story with humorous details. So in his caricature of Daniel Button, drawn to ridicule the Tory frequenters of Button's coffee-house, he relates an incident as well as burlesques individuals. There stands Master Button in his professional apron, with powdered wig and frilled shirt; and opposite to him a tall, seedy, stooping scholar or poet is storming at the landlord with clinched fists, because he will not let him have a cup of coffee without the money. There is also the truly Hogarthian incident of a dog smelling suspiciously the poet's coat tail. Standing about the room are persons whom tradition reports to have been intended as portraits of Pope, Steele, Addison, Arbuthnot, and others of Button's famous customers. This drawing, executed with a brush, is also preserved in the British Museum. Daniel Button, as Dr. Johnson reports, had once been a servant in the family of the Countess of Warwick, and was placed in the coffee-house by Addison. A writer in the Spectator alludes to this haunt of the Tories: "I was a Tory at Button's and a Whig at Child's."
The South Sea delusion drew from Hogarth his first engraved caricature. Among the Dutch engravings of 1720, called forth by the schemes of John Law, there was one in which the victims were represented in a merry-go-round, riding in revolving cars or upon wooden horses, the whole kept in motion by a horse ridden by the devil. The picture presents also the usual multitude of confusing details, such as the Dutch mad-house in the distance, with a long train of vehicles going toward it. In availing himself of this device the young Londoner showed much of that skill in the arrangement of groups, and that fertility in the invention of details, which marked his later works. His whirligig revolves higher in the air than in the Dutch picture, enabling him to show his figures clear of the crowd below, and instead of the devil on horseback giving the motion, he assigns that work more justly to the directors of the South Sea Company. Thus he has room and opportunity to impart a distinct character to most of his figures. We see perched aloft on the wooden horses about to be whirled around, a nobleman with his broad ribbon, a shoe-black, an old woman, a wigged clergyman, and a woman of the town. With his usual uncompromising humor, Hogarth places these last two characters next to one another, and while the clergyman ogles the woman, she chucks him under the chin. There is a world of accessories: a devil exhaling fire, standing behind a counter and cutting pieces of flesh from the body of Fortune and casting them to a hustling crowd of Catholic, Puritan, and Jew; Self-Interest breaking Honesty upon a wheel; a crowd of women rushing pell-mell into an edifice gabled with horns, and bearing the words, "Raffling for Husbands with Lottery Fortunes in here;" Honor in the pillory flogged by Villainy; an ape wearing a sword and cap. The scene chosen by the artist for these remarkable events is the open space in which the monument stands, then fresh and new, which commemorates the Great Fire; but he slyly changes the inscription thus: "This Monument was erected in Memory of the Destruction of this City by the South Sea in 1720."
Hogarth, engraver and sign-painter though he may have been, was all himself in this amusing and effective piece. If the Dutch picture and Hogarth's could be placed here side by side, the reader would have before him an interesting example of the honest plagiarism of genius, which does not borrow gold and merely alter the stamp, but converts a piece of crude ore into a Toledo blade. Unfortunately, both pictures are too large and crowded to admit of effective reduction.
In this, his first published work, the audacious artist availed himself of an expedient which heightened the effect of most of his later pictures. He introduced portraits of living persons. Conspicuous in the foreground of the South Sea caricature, among other personages now unknown, is the diminutive figure of Alexander Pope, who was one of the few lucky speculators of the year 1720. At least, he withdrew in time to save half the sum which he once thought he had made. The gloating rake in the first picture of the "Harlot's Progress" is that typical reprobate of eighteenth-century romances, Colonel Francis Charteris, upon whom Arbuthnot wrote the celebrated epitaph, which, it is to be hoped, is itself a caricature:
"Here continueth to rot
the body of Francis Charteris,
who, with an INFLEXIBLE CONSTANCY and
INIMITABLE UNIFORMITY of life,
PERSISTED,
in spite of AGE and INFIRMITIES,
in the practice of EVERY HUMAN VICE,
excepting PRODIGALITY and HYPOCRISY.
His insatiable AVARICE exempted him from the first;
his matchless IMPUDENCE from the second.