In the six pictures in “The Harlot’s Progress,” with which he started in 1733, and which to-day, since the originals have perished, can be considered only in the copper engravings after them, all these attributes are recognisable. Mary Hackabout comes innocent from the country to the town with the intention of seeking a situation as a servant-girl. She speedily falls a victim to temptation, becomes the mistress of a Jewish banker, whom she soon loses by her infidelity, descends to be a thief, and comes to the work-house. Released from there, she becomes the companion of a highwayman, until she ends her pitiful life in a disorderly house, leaving behind her a poor crippled boy, who, at his mother’s funeral, is playing with a top. The conclusion of the paintings shows how the other women bid farewell to the corpse, and buoy themselves up for their coming pleasures by drinking from the spirit bottle, which stands on the coffin, while the priest, who is come to give the blessing, announces his visit for the evening.

The second series, which is to be seen to-day in the Soane Museum, describes in eight tableaux the somewhat similar life of a young man, the “Rake.” As an Oxford student he has promised marriage to a pretty but poor girl, when suddenly the death of a wealthy uncle throws him into the vortex of London life. He wishes to buy himself freedom from his sweetheart, but she disdainfully refuses the money and supports herself and her child honestly with the labour of her hands. The seducer, winning fame in the world of women and sport, rapidly paces the road to ruin; yet he repairs his finances once again by a marriage with a rich and one-eyed old lady. Once more on his feet, he flings himself into games of chance, and comes to the sponging-house, whither his better half follows him. It is the last straw when a play which he has offered to a manager is refused, and he can no longer buy himself a pint of ale; there remains only the final fall into the misery of frenzy, and in the last picture we find him amongst the lunatics bound in chains as a madman. Only his student love, Sarah Young, of Oxford, whom he had treated so scurvily, cannot forget him, and, with tears, seeks him out again in the madhouse.

HOGARTH.   THE RAKE’S PROGRESS, PLATE VII.

The third and most famous series was completed many years after the “Rake”—in 1745. Hogarth has admittedly taken particular pains with the six oil paintings of “Marriage à la Mode,” which have been placed in the National Gallery; and these painted novels reveal in strength and beauty of execution the high-water mark of his work as a painter. The whole is quieter, simpler, less overloaded with ingenious accessories. The impoverished lord has married his son, who is already worn out with excesses, to the strong and healthy daughter of a city alderman. A girl is born; then they go their separate ways. The husband surprises the wife with a lover, and is stabbed by him; the unfaithful wife, moved by this, begs her dying husband for forgiveness. As a young widow, deprived of her woman’s honour, she goes back to the bourgeois, Philistine ennui of her father’s house, and when she learns of her lover’s condemnation she escapes from the burden of her misery by means of poison. The father is sufficiently provident to take the wedding ring off her finger before the body is cold, lest it should be stolen from the corpse. In the last sequence Hogarth passed over completely to the moral sermon and the study of crime. The series “Industry and Idleness,” in 1747, was comprised in twelve sheets, which he produced only in rough engravings, as he wished exclusively to influence the masses. Two apprentices enter a cloth-weaving business at the same time, of whom one rises, through his zeal for the interests of the business, to a marriage with his master’s beautiful daughter, to the rank of alderman, and finally to be Lord Mayor of London. The idle apprentice grows, on the down grade, from a gambler into a vagabond. He is transported, comes back again, and ends on the scaffold. The two comrades meet for the last time when the honest man announces his death-warrant to the knave.

HOGARTH.THE RAKE’S PROGRESS, PLATE VIII.

Garrick, as we can see from his epitaph on Hogarth, has not unjustly characterised his art, in these words—

“Farewell, great painter of mankind! Who reached the noblest point of art, Whose pictured morals charm the mind, And through the eye correct the heart.”

HOGARTH.MARRIAGE À LA MODE, PLATE V.

Hogarth painted stirring and humorous scenes, full of effective morality, with which he sought to cheer, terrify, and improve humanity. His five-act tragedies end always with the triumph of Virtue and the punishment of Vice. As one of his contemporaries said, he exercised the art of “hanging in colours.” The twelve plates of the parallel biographies of “Industry and Idleness” he employed as an illustrated weekly sermon for the benefit of the working classes, and he was able to observe with satisfaction that they had an actual influence on the conduct of the people, as instanced in the diminution of gin shops. Yet for all that, in the elevation of public morality, the highest aim of art is not, as Garrick asserted, fulfilled. Who has ever seen such a painter? Would he be a painter? It is exactly by this moralising with the brush that Hogarth stands in such abrupt opposition to his predecessors, the Dutch. They were painters, nothing but painters, and in their painting reckoned on eyes which could appreciate their pictorial subtilty. Man was for them a patch of colour; the real delight of their eyes was the rich light that came mellowed through the shadows, and played upon the ruffed garments and the clumsy forms. With Hogarth, in the place of the idea of colour, the anecdote is brought in. He saw the world not so much with the eyes of the painter, as with those of the physician, the criminologist, the pastor. The familiar element, that serene and comfortable observation of an everyday occurrence upon which Dutch art was based, has altogether disappeared in his pictures. He did not paint because something pictorial urged him, but saw in men the actors of the parts which he had in his mind. This departure from the purely picturesque is in part explained by the predominance of literature in England at that time. In a country where the tragedy of familiar life as well as the domestic novel had arisen there was imminent peril that a young school of painting working without traditions should branch off also on to those lines. Hogarth desired to give painting a new manner; he seized upon what was epic or dramatic, and painted the pictorial counter parts to Smollett’s and Richardson’s novels. In the age of enlightenment the painter makes way for the writer. With this idea he himself wrote: “I have endeavoured to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer; my picture is my stage, my men and women my players, who, by means of certain actions and gestures, are to exhibit a dumb show.”