William Hogarth:
PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER. Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time.
I.—Little Boy Hogarth.
“The Life and Adventures of William Hogarth,”—that would be a taking title, indeed! To do for the great painter of manners that which Mr. Forster has done for their great describer, would be a captivating task; and, successfully accomplished, might entitle a man to wear some little sprig of laurel in his cap, and rest, thenceforth, on his oars. It is not my fortune to have the means of writing such a book; and, for many reasons, this performance must be limited to a series of Essays upon the genius and character of the Man Hogarth; upon the Work he was permitted, by a healthful, sanguine constitution and by great powers of will and self-reliance backboning an unflagging industry, to get through in his appointed span here below; and upon the curious quaint Time in which he lived and did his work. Hogarth’s life, away from his works and times, would be but a barren theme. Those old Italian painting men had strange adventures and vicissitudes. Rafaelle’s life was one brief glorious romance. Leonardo had a king’s arms to die in. Buonarotti lived amidst battles and sieges, and held flouting matches with popes. Titian’s pencil was picked up by an emperor. The Germans and Dutchmen, even, were picturesque and eventful in their careers. Was not Rubens an ambassador? Are there not mysterious dealings between Rembrandt and the Jews that have not yet been fathomed? Did not Peter de Laar kill a monk? But in what manner is the historian to extract exciting elements from the history of a chubby little man in a cocked hat and scarlet roque-laure, who lived at the sign of the “Painter’s Head” in Leicester Fields, and died in his bed there in competence and honour; who was the son of a schoolmaster in the Old Bailey, and the descendant of a long line of north country yeomen, of whom the prime progenitor is presumed to have kept pigs and to have gone by the rude name of “Hogherd”—whence Hogard and Hogart, at last liquefied into Hogarth? Benvenuto Cellini worked for the silversmiths, but at least he had poniarded his man and lain for his sins in the dungeons of St. Angelo; our Hogarth was a plain silversmith’s apprentice, in Cranbourn Alley. He kept a shop afterwards, and engraved tankards and salvers, and never committed a graver act of violence than to throw a pewter pot at the head of a ruffian who had insulted him during an outing to Highgate. Honest man! they never sent him to Newgate or the Tower. Only once he was clapped up for an hour or so in a Calais guardhouse, and, coming home by the next packet-boat, took a stout revenge on the frog-eaters with his etching needle upon copper. He was no great traveller; and beyond the Calais ship just spoken of, does not appear to have undertaken any journeys more important than the immortal excursion to Rochester, of which the chronicle, illustrated by his own sketches, is still extant, (those doughty setters-forth from the Bedford Head were decidedly the first Pickwickians,) and a jaunt to St. Alban’s after Culloden, to sketch the trapped fox Simon Fraser Lord Lovat, as he sate in the inn-room under the barber’s hands, counting the dispersed Highland clans and their available forces of caterans and brae-men on his half-palsied, crooked, picking and stealing fingers.
William Hogarth did but one romantic thing in his life, and that was, to run away with Sir James Thornhill’s pretty daughter; and even that escapade soon resolved itself into a cheery, English, business-like, house-keeping union. Papa-in-law—who painted cathedral cupolas at forty shillings a yard—forgave William and Jane. William loved his wife dearly—she had her tempers, and he was not a man of snow—took a country house for her, and set up a coach when things were going prosperously and he was Sergeant Painter to King George; and when William (not quite a dotard, as the twin-scamps Wilkes and Churchill called him) died, Jane made a comfortable living by selling impressions of the plates he had engraved. These and the writing of the Analysis of Beauty, the dispute concerning Sigismunda, the interest taken in the welfare of the Foundling Hospital, the dedication [in a pique against the king who hated “boets and bainters,”] of the March to Finchley to Frederick the Great, and the abortive picture auction scheme, are very nearly all the notable events in the life of William Hogarth. And yet the man left a name remembered now with affection and applause, and which will be remembered, and honoured, and glorified when, to quote the self-conscious Unknown who used the Public Advertiser as a fulcrum for that terrible lever of his, “kings and ministers are forgotten, the force and direction of personal satire are no longer understood, and measures are felt only in their remotest consequences.”
By the announcement, then, that I do not contemplate, here, a complete biography of Hogarth: that I do not know enough to complete a reliable and authentic life: “nec, si sciam, dicere ausim:” these papers are to be considered but as “Mémoires pour servir;” little photographs and chalk studies of drapery, furniture, accessories of costume and snuff-box, cocked hat and silver buckle detail, all useful enough in their place and way, but quite subordinate and inferior to the grand design and complete picture of the hero. I am aware that high critical authorities have been inveighing lately against the employment of the costumiers and bric a brac shop-keepers and inventory takers’ attributes in biography; and writers are enjoined, under heavy penalties, to be, all of them, Plutarchs, and limn their characters in half a dozen broad vigorous dashes. It can conduce little, it has been argued, towards our knowledge of the Seven Years’ War to be told that Frederick the Great wore a pigtail, and that to his jackboots “Day and Martin with their soot-pots were forbidden to approach;” and it has been asked whether any likelihood exists of our knowing more of the character of Napoleon Bonaparte from the sight of his cocked hat and toothbrush at Madame Tussaud’s. Presuming to run counter to the opinion of the high critical authorities, I would point out that the very best biographies that have ever been written—those of Samuel Johnson, Samuel Pepys [his diary being eminently biographical], Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Jean Jacques Rousseau [in the Confessions, and bating the lies and madnesses with which that poor crazed wanderer disfigures an otherwise limpid narrative]—are full of those little scraps and fragments of minute cross-hatching, chronicles of “seven livres three sols, parisis,” lamentable records of unpaid-for hose, histories of joyous carouses, anecdotes of men and women’s meannesses and generosities, and the like. On the other hand, how cold, pallid, unhuman, is the half-dozen-line character, with all its broad vigorous dashes! Certain Roman emperors might have come out far better fellows from the historian’s alembic if their togas and sandals had been more scrupulously dwelt upon. Is our awful veneration for St. Augustine one whit diminished by the small deer he condescends to hunt in the history of his youth? The heaviest blow and greatest discouragement to the composition of admirable biographies, are in the fact that strength and delicacy, vigour and finish, are seldom combined; and that a Milton with a dash of the macaroni in him is a rara avis indeed. Now and then we find an elephant that can dance on the tight-rope without being either awkward or grotesque; now and then we find a man with a mind like a Nasmyth’s steam hammer, that can roll out huge bars of iron, and anon knock a tin-tack into a deal board with gentle accurate taps. These are the men who can describe a Revolution, and by its side the corned beef and carrots which country parsons were once glad to eat; who can tell us how the Bastille was stormed, and, a few pages on, what manner of coat and small clothes wore Philip Egalité at his guillotining. When we find such men we christen them Macaulay or Carlyle.
The latitude, therefore, I take through incapacity for accuracy, saves me from inflicting on you a long prolegomena; saves me from scoring the basement of this page with foot-notes, or its margins with references; saves me from denouncing the “British Dryasdust,” from whom I have culled the scanty dates and facts, the mile and year stones in William Hogarth’s life. Indeed, he has been very useful to me, this British Dryasdust, and I should have made but a sorry figure without him. He or they—Nichols, Steevens, Trusler, Rouquet, Ireland, Ducarel, Burn—have but little to tell; but that which they know, they declare in a frank, straightforward manner. Among commentators on Hogarth, Ireland is the best; Trusler, the worst. T. Clerk and T. H. Horne also edited (1810) a voluminous edition of Hogarth’s works, accompanied by a sufficiently jejune Life. Allan Cunningham, in the British Painters, has given a lively, agreeable adaptation of all who have come before him, spiced and brightened by his own clear appreciation of, and love for, art and its professors. Half a day’s reading, however, will tell you all that these writers know. Horace Walpole for criticism on Hogarth is admirable; lucid, elegant, and—a wonder with the dilettante friend of Madame du Deffand—generous. The mere explicatory testimony as to the principal Hogarthian series or engraved dramas by the Sire Rouquet [he was a Swiss] cited above, is valuable; the more so, that he was a friend of the painter, and, it is conjectured, took many of his instructions viva voce from William Hogarth himself. The Germans have not been indifferent to the merits of the great humoristic painter; and a certain Herr Von Fürstenburg has found out some odd things connected with suggestive objects in one of the most famous scenes of the first series—the Kate Hackabout, Mother Needham, and Colonel Charteris epopœiœ—never dreamt of previously in the good people of England’s philosophy. Occasionally, too, in a French Revue, you meet with an Etude on La vie et les ouvrages de Hogarth, giving us little beyond a fresh opportunity to be convinced that, if there exist on earth a people of whose manners and customs the French know considerably less than about those of the man in the moon, that people are the English.
By his own countrymen, William Hogarth has ever been justly and honourably treated. He was an outspoken man, and his pencil and graver were as unbridled as his tongue. His works have a taint of the coarseness, but not of the vice of his age. Most at home would be many of his works, perhaps, in low tap-rooms and skittle-alleys; but he was no Boucher or Fragonard to paint alcoves or dessus de portes for the contemporary Cotillons I. and Cotillons II., for the Pompadours and Dubarrys of Louis the well-beloved. He was vulgar and ignoble frequently, but the next generation of his countrymen forgave him these faults—forgave him for the sake of his honesty, his stern justice, his unbending defence of right and denunciation of wrong. This philosopher ever preached the sturdy English virtues that have made us what we are. He taught us to fear God and honour the King; to shun idleness, extravagance, and dissipation; to go to church, help the poor, and treat dumb animals with kindness; to abhor knavery, hypocrisy, and avarice. For this reason is it that Sectarianism itself (though he was hard against tub-thumping) has raised but a very weak and bleating voice against Hogarth’s “improprieties;” that cheap and popular editions of his works have been multiplied, even in this fastidious nineteenth century; that in hundreds of decorous family libraries a plump copy of Hogarth complete may be found [yes: I have heard the stateliest old ladies chat about the history of Kate Hackabout, and I have seen age explaining to youth and beauty—that came in a carriage to Marlborough House—the marvellous Marriage à la Mode in the Vernon collections]; that, finally—and which may be regarded as a good and gratifying stamp of the man’s excellence and moral worth—the Church of England have always been favourable to William Hogarth. An Anglican bishop wrote the poetic legends to the Rake’s Progress; and Hogarth has been patronized by the beneficed and dignified clergy ever since.
So come, then, William Hogarth, and let me in these essays strive to glorify thy painting, thy engraving, and thy philosophy. Let me stand over against thee, and walk round thee—yea, and sometimes wander for a little while quite away from thee, endeavouring to explore the timeous world as thou knew it. But be thou always near: the statue on the pedestal, the picture on the wall, the genius of the place, to recall me when I stray, to remind me when I am forgetful, to reprove me when I err!
Born in the Old Bailey, and the ninth year of William the Dutchman, that should properly be my starting point; but the reader must first come away with me to Westmoreland, and into the Vale of Bampton—to a village sixteen miles north of Kendal and Windermere Lake. In this district had lived for centuries a family of yeomen, called Hogart or Hogard: the founder of the family, as I have hinted, may have been Hogherd, from his vocation—a guardian of swine. His father, perchance, was that Gurth, the son of Beowulph, erst thrall to Cedric the Saxon, and who, after his emancipation by the worthy but irascible Franklin for good suit and service rendered in the merry greenwood, gave himself, or had given to him in pride and joy, that which he had never had before—a surname; and so, emigrating northwards, became progenitor of a free race of Hogherds. In this same Bampton Vale, the Hogarts possessed a small freehold; and of this tenement, the other rude elders being beyond my ken, the grandfather of the painter was holder in the middle of the seventeenth century. To him were three sons. The eldest succeeded to the freehold, and was no more heard of, his name being written in clods. He tilled the earth, ate of its fruits, and, his time being come, died. The two remaining sons, as the custom of Borough English did not prevail in Bampton, had to provide for themselves. Son intermediate—my William’s uncle—was a genius. Adam Walker, writer on natural philosophy, and who was the friend and correspondent of Nicholls of the Anecdotes, called him a “mountain Theocritus;” his contemporaries, with less elegance but more enthusiasm, dubbed him “Auld Hogart.” He was a poet, humorist, satirist, and especially a dramatist; and coarse plays of his, full of coarse fun, rough and ready action, and sarcastic hard hitting, yet linger, more by oral tradition than by any manuscript remains of his, among the Westmoreland fells. These were all written, too, in the very hardest, thickest, and broadest Westmoreland dialect; a patois to which Tim Bobbin’s Lancashire dialect is as mellifluous as the langue d’oc; a patois which has been compared to the speech of Demosthenes before his course of pebbles, but which, to my ears, offers more analogy to that which may have proceeded from the famous Anti-Philippian orator during the pebble probation; and in order to speak which patois fluently (after the pebbles), an admirable apprenticeship is to fill your mouth as full as possible of the gritty oatcake, or “clapt bread,” which is kept in the “cratch,” or rack suspended from the ceiling in Westmoreland farmhouses. In this Scythian speech, however, “auld Hogart” concocted a famous drama, quite in the Lope de Vega’s manner, called Troy Taken. I do not compare the play unadvisedly with those of the prolific Spanish playwright. You know how artfully Lope’s plays begin: with what immediate action and seduction of its audience to a foregone conclusion. The curtain draws up. A man in a cloak crosses the stage. A masked cavalier rushes after him with a drawn sword. There is a rixe at once established; the audience begin to imagine all sorts of terrible things, and the success of the piece is half assured. So “auld Hogart’s” play of Troy Taken, begins with a rixe. Paris is seen in the very act of running away with Helen; and Menelaus runs after them, calling “Stop thief!” With such an auspicious commencement, and plenty of good boisterous episodes throughout: Hector dragged about by the heels; Thersites cudgelled within an inch of his life; Achilles storming for half an hour at the loss of Patrocles, and a real wooden horse to finish up with: the whole spiced with “auld Hogart’s” broadest jokes: who can wonder that Troy Taken achieved immense popularity, and that years after the death of the facetious author, natural philosopher Adam Walker saw the piece performed from recollection by the Troutbeck rustics, the stage a greensward, the auditorium a grassy knoll, the canopy, Heaven? The proceedings were inaugurated by a grand cavalcade, headed by the minstrels of five parishes, and a lusty yeoman mounted on a bull’s back and playing on the fiddle; and as a prologue to Troy Taken, there was a pilgrimage of the visitors to a stone dropped by the enemy of mankind in an unsuccessful attempt to build a bridge across Windermere!
The brother of the “auld” dramatist of the Iliad, and third son of the Bampton yeoman, was Richard Hogart. Without being dogmatical, I trust that I am justified in the assumption that the “liquefaction” of the patronymic into Hogarth was due partly to the more elegant education of this yeoman’s son, partly to our painter’s formation of a “genteel” connection, when he married Jane Thornhill. I have not seen his indentures; and take the authority of Ireland for the registry of his birth; but it is certain that he was at one period called,—ay, and pretty well known—as Hogart: witness Swift, in his hideously clever satire of the Legion Club:—