Dedication of a Proposed History of the Arts. (From Hogarth's Manuscript.[20])
He gives picture-buyers a piece of advice which many of them have since taken, to the sore distress of their guests: Use your own eyes, and buy the pictures which they dwell upon with delight.
In the heat of controversy, Hogarth, as usual, went too far; but he stood manfully by his order, and defended resolutely their rights and his own. Artists owe him undying gratitude for two great services: he showed them a way to independence by setting up in business on his own account, becoming his own engraver and publisher, and retaining always the ownership of his own plates, which, indeed, constituted his estate, and supported creditably his family as long as any of them lived. He served all artists, too, by defending himself against the pirates who flooded the market with meanly executed copies of his own engravings. It was William Hogarth who obtained from Parliament the first act which secured to artists the sole right to multiply and sell copies of their works; and this right is the very corner-stone of a great national painter's independence. That act made genuine art a possible profession in England.
Such was Hogarth, the original artist of his country, an honest, valiant citizen, who stood his ground, paid his way, cheered and admonished his generation. He had the faults which belong to a positive character, trod on many toes, was often misunderstood, and had his ample share of trouble and contention. All that is now forgotten; and he was never so much valued, so frequently reproduced, so generally possessed, or so carefully studied as at the present time.
The generation that forms great satirists shines in the history of literature, but not in that of morals; for to supply with objects of satire such masters of the satiric arts as Hogarth, Swift, Pope, Gay, Steele, Arbuthnot, and Foote, there must be deep corruption in the State and radical folly in conspicuous persons. The process which has since been named "secularization" had then fairly set in. The brilliant men of the time had learned to deride the faith which had been a restraining force upon the propensities of man for fifteen centuries, but were very far from having learned to be continent, temperate, and just without its aid. "Four treatises against the miracles" Voltaire boasted of having seen during his residence in England in 1727 and 1728; but these treatises did not moderate the warmth of human passions, nor change any other element in the difficult problem of existence. Walpole bribed, Swift maligned, Bolingbroke intrigued, Charteris seduced, and Marlborough peculated just as if the New Light had not dawned and the miracles had remained intact. Do we not, even in our own time, see inquiring youth, bred in strait-laced homes, assuming that since there are now two opinions as to the origin of things, it is no longer necessary to comply with the moral laws? The splendid personages of that period seem to have been in a moral condition similar to that of such a youth. It was the fashion to be dissolute; it was "provincial" to obey those laws of our being from compliance with which all human welfare and all honest joy have come.
Sir Robert Walpole paring the Nails of the British Lion.
Politics were still most rudimentary. The English people were fully resolved on keeping out the dull and deadly Stuarts; but the price they had to pay for this was to submit to the rule of the dull and difficult Georges, whose bodies were in England and their hearts in Hanover. Between the king and the people stood Sir Robert Walpole—as good a man as could have held the place—who went directly to the point with members and writers, ascertained their price, and paid it. According to one of Pope's bitter notes on the "Dunciad," where he quotes a Parliamentary report, this minister in ten years paid to writers and publishers of newspapers "fifty thousand pounds eighteen shillings!" How much he paid to members of Parliament was a secret known only to himself and the king. The venality of the press was frequently burlesqued, as well as the fulsome pomp of its purchased eulogies. A very good specimen is that which appeared in 1735, during a ministerial crisis, when the opposition had high hopes of ousting the tenacious Walpoles. An "Advertisement" was published, in which was offered for sale a "neat and curious collection of well-chosen similes, allusions, metaphors, and allegories from the best plays and romances, modern and ancient, proper to adorn a panegyric on the glorious patriots designed to succeed the present ministry." The author gave notice that "all sublunary metaphors of a new minister, being a Rock, a Pillar, a Bulwark, a Strong Tower, or a Spire Steeple, will be allowed very cheap;" but celestial ones, being brought from the other world at a great expense, must be held at a higher rate. The author announced that he had prepared a collection of State satires, which would serve, with little variation, to libel a judge, a bishop, or a prime minister. "N.B.—The same satirist has collections of reasons ready by him against the ensuing peace, though he has not yet read the preliminaries or seen one article of the pacification."