That the artist demanded too high a price for his painting of "Sigismunda," I am free to acknowledge; but it has not been peculiar to Mr. Hogarth to mistake his talents, and overrate his worst performances. Mr. Wilkes must know that Milton, and many other great men, have erred in the same way. I do not think that "Sigismunda" was worth what he required; but that he has actually been paid the most astonishing sums for his other pictures, as the price, not of his merit, but of his unbounded vanity, I am yet to learn. The remuneration he received for many of his works is to be found in these volumes; it was seldom in any degree equal to their merits. The painter is no more, but several of his pictures remain; and were the "Marriage à la Mode," "Rake's Progress," etc., now upon sale, the present age would, I am persuaded, sanction my opinion, and the pictures produce much more astonishing sums than were originally paid to the artist.
"He has succeeded very happily in the way of humour, and has miscarried in every other attempt; this has arisen in some measure from his head, but much more from his heart. After 'Marriage à la Mode,' the public wished for a series of prints of a Happy Marriage. Hogarth made the attempt; but the rancour and malevolence of his mind made him soon turn away with envy and disgust from objects of so pleasing contemplation, to dwell, and feast a bad heart, on others of a hateful cast, which he pursued, for he found them congenial, with the most unabating zeal and unrelenting gall."
Should any one assert that the strength of colouring, and astonishing powers, which gave the name of Churchill so exalted a rank among satirists, originated in malevolence and rancour, and that he could not write a panegyric because he delighted in feasting a bad heart on a bad theme, Mr. Wilkes would, I am certain, be the first to defend him from such an aspersion.
That he did not succeed in an attempt to delineate a Happy Marriage, I can readily believe. Hogarth was a painter of manners as they were, not as they ought to be. He considered nature in the abstract, and usually adhered to what he saw. Among those friends with whom Hogarth lived in habits of intimacy, and whose domestic situations he had the best opportunity of studying,—though Mr. Churchill and the Colonel were of the number,—he might not know a family from whence such a scene could be copied.
"I have observed some time his setting sun. He has long been very dim, and almost shorn of his beams."
For a confirmation of the above assertion, see the print of "The Medley," published this very year. My opinion of it the reader is already in possession of, and that opinion corresponds with an authority which, I believe, even Mr. Wilkes will consider as very high:—"For useful and deep satire, 'The Medley' is the most sublime of all Hogarth's works."—Walpole.
"He seems so conscious of this (i.e. that his sun is setting, etc.) that he now glimmers with borrowed light. 'John Bull's house in flames' has been hackneyed in fifty different prints; and if there is any merit in the figure on stilts, and the mob prancing around, it is not to be ascribed to Hogarth, but to Callot."
Callot's was, I acknowledge, the first thought, but Sir Joshua Reynolds will tell Mr. Wilkes that happy appropriation is not plagiarism.
"I own, too, that I am grieved to see the genius of Hogarth, which should take in all ages and countries, sunk to a level with the miserable tribe of party-etchers, and now in his rapid decline entering into the poor politics of the faction of the day, and descending into low personal abuse, instead of instructing the world, as he could once, by manly moral satire."