I have often thought that next to Asclepiades, the comic cynic,[1] Buonaparte Smith was the greatest philosopher that ever existed. B. Smith was by some thought to have been the original of Jeremy Diddler. He was an inveterate borrower of small sums. On a certain Wednesday in 1821, un sien-ami accosted him. Says the friend: “Smith, have you heard that Buonaparte is dead?” To which retorts the philosopher: “Buonaparte be ——!” but I disdain to quote his irreverent expletive—“Buonaparte be somethinged. Can you lend me ninepence?” What was the history of Europe or its eventualities to Buonaparte Smith? The immediate possession of three-fourths of a shilling was of far more importance to him than the death of that tremendous exile in his eyrie in the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles away. Thus, too, I daresay it was with a certain small philosopher, who lived through a very exciting epoch of the history of England: I mean Little Boy Hogarth. It was his fortune to see the first famous fifteen years of the eighteenth century, when there were victories as immense as Salamanca or Waterloo; when there was a magnificent parallel to Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, existent, in the person of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. I once knew a man who had lived in Paris, and throughout the Reign of Terror, in a second floor of the Rue St. Honoré. “What did you do?” I asked, almost breathlessly, thinking to hear of tumbrils, Carmagnoles, gibbet-lanterns, conventions, poissarde-revolts, and the like. “Eh! parbleu,” he answered, “je m’occupais d’ornithologie.” This philosopher had been quietly birdstuffing while royalty’s head was rolling in the gutter, and Carrier was drowning his hundreds at Nantes. To this young Hogarth of mine, what may Marlborough and his great victories, Anne and her “silver age” of poets, statesmen, and essayists, have been? Would the War of the Succession assist young William in learning his accidence? Would their High Mightinesses of the States-General of the United Provinces supply him with that fourpence he required for purchases of marbles or sweetmeats? What had Marshal Tallard to do with his negotiations with the old woman who kept the apple-stall at the corner of Ship Court? What was the Marquis de Guiscard’s murderous penknife compared with that horn-handled, three-bladed one, which the Hebrew youth in Duke’s Place offered him at the price of twentypence, and which he could not purchase, faute de quoi? At most, the rejoicings consequent on the battles of Blenheim or Ramillies, or Oudenarde or Malplaquet, might have saved William from a whipping promised him for the morrow; yet, even under those circumstances, it is painful to reflect that staying out too late to see the fireworks, or singeing his clothes at some blazing fagot, might have brought upon him on that very morrow a castigation more unmerciful than the one from which he had been prospectively spared.
Every biographer of Hogarth that I have consulted—and I take this opportunity to return my warmest thanks to the courteous book distributor at the British Museum who, so soon as he sees me enter the Reading Room, proceeds, knowing my errand, to overwhelm me with folios, and heap up barricades of eighteenth century lore round me—every one of the biographers, Nichols, Steevens, Ireland, Trusler, Phillips, Cunningham, the author of the article “Thornhill,” in the Biographia Britannica—the rest are mainly copyists from one another, often handing down blunders and perpetuating errors—every Hogarthian Dryasdust makes a clean leap from the hero’s birth and little schoolboy noviciate to the period of his apprenticeship to Ellis Gamble the silversmith. Refined Mr. Walpole, otherwise very appreciative of Hogarth, flirting over the papers he got from Vertue’s widow, indites some delicate manuscript for the typographers of his private press at Strawberry Hill, and tells us that the artist, whom he condescends to introduce into his Anecdotes of Painting, was bound apprentice to a “mean engraver of arms upon plate.” I see nothing mean in the calling which Benvenuto Cellini (they say), and Marc Antonio Raimondi (it is certain), perhaps Albert Durer, too, followed for a time. I have heard of great artists who did not disdain to paint dinner plates, soup tureens, and apothecary’s jars. Not quite unknown to the world is one Rafaelle Sanzio d’Urbino, who designed tapestry for the Flemish weavers, or a certain Flaxman, who was of great service to Mr. Wedgwood, when he began to think that platters and pipkins might be brought to serve some very noble uses. Horace Walpole, cleverest and most refined of dilettanti—who could, and did say the coarsest of things in the most elegant of language—you were not fit to be an Englishman. Fribble, your place was in France. Putative son of Orford, there seems sad ground for the scandal that some of Lord Fanny’s blood flowed in your veins; and that Carr, Lord Hervey, was your real papa. You might have made a collection of the great King Louis’s shoes, the heels and soles of which were painted by Vandermeulen with pictures of Rhenish and Palatinate victories. Mignon of arts and letters, you should have had a petite maison at Monçeaux or at the Roule. Surrounded by your abbés au petit collet, teacups of pâte tendre, fans of chicken-skin painted by Leleux or Lantara, jewelled snuff-boxes, handsome chocolate girls, gems and intaglios, the brothers to those in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, che non si mostrano alle donne, you might have been happy. You were good enough to admire Hogarth, but you didn’t quite understand him. He was too vigorous, downright, virile for you; and upon my word, Horace Walpole, I don’t think you understood anything belonging to England—nor her customs, nor her character, nor her constitution, nor her laws. I don’t think that you would have been anywhere more in your element than in France, to make epigrams and orange-flower water, and to have your head cut off in that unsparing harvest of ’93, with many more noble heads of corn as clever and as worthless for any purpose of human beneficence as yours, Horace.
For you see, this poor Old Bailey schoolmaster’s son—this scion of a line of north-country peasants and swineherds, had in him pre-eminently that which scholiast Warton called the “ἩΘΟΣ,” the strong sledgehammer force of Morality, not given to Walpole—not given to you, fribbles of the present as of the past—to understand. He was scarcely aware of the possession of this quality himself, Hogarth; and when Warton talked pompously of the Ethos in his works, the painter went about with a blank, bewildered face, asking his friends what the doctor meant, and half-inclined to be angry lest the learned scholiast should be quizzing him. It is in the probabilities, however, that William had some little Latin. The dominie in Ship Court did manage to drum some of his grammar disputations into him, and to the end of his life William Hogarth preserved a seemly reverence for classical learning. Often has his etching-needle scratched out some old Roman motto or wise saw upon the gleaming copper. A man need not flout and sneer at the classics because he knows them not. He need not declare Parnassus to be a molehill, because he has lost his alpenstock and cannot pay guides to assist him in that tremendous ascent. There is no necessity to gird at Pyrrha, and declare her to be a worthless jade, because she has never braided her golden hair for you. Of Greek I imagine W. H. to have been destitute; unless, with that ingenious special pleading, which has been made use of to prove that Shakspeare was a lawyer, apothecary, Scotchman, conjuror, poacher, scrivener, courtier—what you please—we assume that Hogarth was a Hellenist because he once sent, as a dinner invite to a friend, a card on which he had sketched a knife, fork, and pasty, and these words, “Come and Eta Beta Pi.” No wonder the ἩΘΟΣ puzzled him. He was not deeply learned in anything save human nature, and of this knowledge even he may have been half unconscious, thinking himself to be more historical painter than philosopher. He never was a connoisseur. He was shamefully disrespectful to the darkened daubs which the picture-quacks palmed on the curious of the period as genuine works of the old masters. He painted “Time smoking a picture,” and did not think much of the collection of Sir Luke Schaub. His knowledge of books was defective; although another scholiast (not Warton) proved, in a most learned pamphlet, that he had illustrated, sans le savoir, above five hundred passages in Horace, Virgil, Juvenal, and Ovid. He had read Swift. He had illustrated and evidently understood Hudibras. He was afraid of Pope, and only made a timid, bird-like, solitary dash at him in one of his earliest charges; and, curiously, Alexander the Great of Twickenham seemed to be afraid of Hogarth, and shook not the slightest drop of his gall vial over him. What a quarrel it might have been between the acrimonious little scorpion of “Twitnam,” and the sturdy bluebottle of Leicester Fields! Imagine Pope versus Hogarth, pencil against pen; not when the painter was old and feeble, half but not quite doting indeed, as when he warred with Wilkes and Churchill, but in the strength and pride of his swingeing satire. Perhaps William and Alexander respected one another; but I think there must have been some tacit “hit me and I’ll hit you” kind of rivalry between them, as between two cocks of two different schools who meet now and then on the public promenades—meet with a significant half-smile and a clenching of the fist under the cuff of the jacket.
To the end of his life Hogarth could not spell; at least, his was not the orthography expected from educated persons in a polite age. In almost the last plate he engraved, the famous portrait of Churchill as a Bear, the “lies,” with which the knots of Bruin’s club are inscribed, are all “lyes.” This may be passed over, considering how very lax and vague were our orthographical canons not more than a century ago, and how many ministers, divines, poets—nay, princes, and crowned heads, and nabobs—permitted themselves greater liberties than “lye” for “lie” in the Georgian era. At this I have elsewhere hinted, and I think the biographers of Hogarth are somewhat harsh in accusing him of crass ignorance, when he only wrote as My Lord Keeper, or as Lady Betty, or as his grace the Archbishop was wont to write. Hogarth, too, was an author. He published a book—to say nothing of the manuscript notes of his life he left. The whole structure, soul, and strength of the Analysis of Beauty are undoubtedly his; although he very probably profited by the assistance—grammatical as well as critical—of some of the clerical dignitaries who loved the good man. That he did so has been positively asserted; but it is forestalling matters to trot out an old man’s hobby, when our beardless lad is not bound ’prentice yet. I cannot, however, defend him from the charges of writing “militia,” “milicia,” “Prussia,” “Prusia”—why didn’t he hazard “Prooshia” at once?[2]—“knuckles,” “nuckles”—oh, fie!—“Chalcedonians,” “Calcidonians;” “pity,” “pitty;” and “volumes,” “volumns.” It is somewhat strange that Hogarth himself tells us that his first graphic exercise was to “draw the alphabet with great correctness.” I am afraid that he never succeeded in writing it very correctly. He hated the French too sincerely to care to learn their language; and it is not surprising that in the first shop card he engraved for his master there should be in the French translation of Mr. Gamble’s style and titles a trifling pleonasm: “bijouxs,” instead of “bijoux.”
No date of the apprenticeship of Hogarth is anywhere given. We must fix it by internal evidence. He was out of his time in the South Sea Bubble year, 1720. On the 29th of April[3] in the same year, he started in business for himself. The neatness and dexterity of the shop card he executed for his master forbid us to assume that he was aught but the most industrious of apprentices. The freedom of handling, the bold sweep of line, the honest incisive play of the graver manifested in this performance could have been attained by no Thomas Idle; and we must, therefore, in justice grant him his full seven years of ’prentice servitude. Say then that William Hogarth was bound apprentice to Mr. Ellis Gamble,[4] at the Golden Angel, in Cranbourn Street, Leicester Fields, in the winter of the year of our Lord, Seventeen hundred and twelve. He began to engrave arms and cyphers on tankards, salvers, and spoons, at just about the time that it occurred to a sapient legislature to cause certain heraldic hieroglyphics surmounted by the Queen’s crown, and encircled by the words “One halfpenny,” to be engraven on a metal die, the which being the first newspaper stamp ever known to our grateful British nation, was forthwith impressed on every single half-sheet of printed matter issued as a newspaper or a periodical. “Have you seen the new red stamp?” writes his reverence Doctor Swift. Grub Street is forthwith laid desolate. Down go Observators, Examiners, Medleys, Flying Posts, and other diurnals, and the undertakers of the Spectator are compelled to raise the price of their entertaining miscellany.
One of the last head Assay Masters at Goldsmith Hall told one of Hogarth’s biographers, when a very—very old man, that he himself had been ’prentice in Cranbourn Street, and that he remembered very well William serving his time to Mr. Gamble. The register of the boy’s indenture should also surely be among the archives of that sumptuous structure behind the Post Office, where the worthy goldsmiths have such a sideboard of massy plate, and give such jovial banquets to ministers and city magnates. And, doubt it not, Ellis Gamble was a freeman, albeit, ultimately, a dweller at the West-end, and dined with his Company when the goldsmiths entertained the ministers and magnates of those days. Yes, gentles; ministers, magnates, kings, czars, and princes were their guests, and King Charles the Second did not disdain to get tipsy with Sir Robert Viner, Lord Mayor and Alderman, at Guildhall. The monarch’s boon companion got so fond of him as to lend him, dit-on, enormous sums of money. More than that, he set up a brazen statue of the royal toper in the Stocks flower-market at the meeting of Lombard Street and the Poultry. Although it must be confessed that the effigy had originally been cast for John Sobieski trampling on the Turk. The Polish hero had a Carlovingian periwig given to him, and the prostrate and miscreant Moslem was “improved” into Oliver Cromwell. [Mem.:—A pair of correctional stocks having given their name to the flower-market; on the other hand, may not the market have given its name to the pretty, pale, red flowers, very dear to Cockneys, and called “stocks?”]
How was William’s premium paid when he was bound ’prentice? Be it remembered that silver-plate engraving, albeit Mr. Walpole of Strawberry Hill calls it “mean,” was a great and cunning art and mystery. These engravers claimed to descend in right line from the old ciseleurs and workers in niello of the middle ages. Benvenuto, as I have hinted, graved as well as modelled. Marc Antonio flourished many a cardinal’s hat and tassels on a bicchiére before he began to cut from Rafaelle and Giulio Romano’s pictures. The engraver of arms on plate was the same artist who executed delightful arabesques and damascenings on suits of armour of silver and Milan steel. They had cabalistic secrets, these workers of the precious, these producers of the beautiful. With the smiths, “back-hammering” and “boss-beating” were secrets;—parcel-gilding an especial mystery; the bluish-black composition for niello a recipe only to be imparted to adepts. With the engravers, the “cross-hatch” and the “double cypher,” as I cursorily mentioned at the end of the last chapter, were secrets. A certain kind of cross-hatching went out with Albert Durer, and had since been as undiscoverable as the art of making the real ruby tint in glass. No beggar’s brat, no parish protégé, could be apprenticed to this delicate, artistic, and responsible calling. For in graving deep, tiny spirals of gold and silver curl away from the trenchant tool, and there is precious ullage in chasing and burnishing—spirals and ullage worth money in the market. Ask the Jews in Duke’s Place, who sweat the guineas in horsehair bags, and clip the Jacobuses, and rasp the new-milled money with tiny files, if there be not profit to be had from the minutest surplusage of gold and silver.
Goldsmiths and silversmiths were proud folk. They pointed to George Heriot, King James’s friend, and the great things he did. They pointed to the peerage. Did not a Duke of Beaufort, in 1683, marry a daughter of Sir Josiah Child, goldsmith and banker? Was not Earl Tylney, his son, half-brother to Dame Elizabeth Howland, mother of a Duchess of Bedford, one of whose daughters married the Duke of Bridgewater, another, the Earl of Essex? Was not Sir William Ward, goldsmith, father to Humble Ward, created Baron Ward by Charles I.? and from him springs there not the present Lord Dudley and Ward?[5] O you grand people who came over with the Conqueror, where would you be now without your snug city marriages, your comfortable alliances with Cornhill and Chepe? Leigh of Stoneleigh comes from a lord mayor of Queen Bess’s time. Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, married an alderman’s daughter two years ere Hogarth was apprenticed. The ancestor to the Lords Clifton was agent to the London Adventurers in Oliver’s time, and acquired his estate in their service. George the Second’s Earl of Rockingham married the daughter of Sir Henry Furnese, the money-lender and stock-jobber. The great Duke of Argyll and Greenwich married a lord mayor’s niece. The Earl of Denbigh’s ancestor married the daughter of Basil Firebrace, the wine merchant. Brewers, money-scriveners, Turkey merchants, Burgomasters of Utrecht’s daughters,—all these married blithely into the haute pairie. If I am wrong in my genealogies, ’tis Daniel Defoe who is to blame, not I; for that immortal drudge of literature is my informant. Of course such marriages never take place now. Alliances between the sacs et parchemins are never heard of. Mayfair never meets the Mansion House, nor Botolph Lane Belgravia, save at a Ninth of November banquet. I question if I am not inopportune, and impertinent even, in hinting at the dukes and belted earls who married the rich citizens’ daughters, were it not that by and by ’prentice Hogarth will paint some scenes from a great life drama full of Warton’s ἩΘΟΣ, called Marriage à la Mode. Ah! those two perspectives seen through the open windows! In the first, the courtyard of the proud noble’s mansion; in the last, busy, mercantile London Bridge: court and city, city and court, and which the saddest picture!
Dominie Hogarth had but a hard time of it, and must have been pinched in a gruesome manner to make both ends meet. That dictionary of his, painfully compiled, and at last with infinite care and labour completed, brought no grist to the mill in Ship Court. The manuscript was placed in the hands of a bookseller, who did what booksellers often do when one places manuscripts in their hands. He let it drop. “The booksellers,” writes Hogarth himself, “used my father with great cruelty.” In his loving simplicity he tells us that many of the most eminent and learned persons in England, Ireland, and Scotland, wrote encomiastic notices of the erudition and diligence displayed in the work, but all to no purpose. I suppose the bookseller’s final answer was similar to that Hogarth has scribbled in the Manager Rich’s reply to Tom Rakewell, in the prison scene:—“Sir, I have read your play, and it will not doo.” A dreadful, heartrending trade was average authorship, even in the “silver age” of Anna Augusta. A lottery, if you will: the prizeholders secretaries of state, ambassadors, hangers-on to dukes and duchesses, gentlemen ushers to baby princesses, commissioners of hackney coaches or plantations; but innumerable possessors of blanks. Walla Billa! they were in evil case. For them the garret in Grub or Monmouth Street, or in Moorfields; for them the Welshwoman dunning for the milkscore; for them the dirty bread flung disdainfully by bookselling wretches like Curll. For them the shrewish landlady, the broker’s man, the catchpole, the dedication addressed to my lord, and which seldom got beyond his lacquey;—hold! let me mind my Hogarth and his silver-plate engraving. Only a little may I touch on literary woes when I come to the picture of the Distressed Poet. For the rest, the calamities of authors have been food for the commentaries of the wisest and most eloquent of their more modern brethren, and my bald philosophizings thereupon can well be spared.
But this premium, this indenture money, this ’prentice fee for young William: unde derivatur? In the beginning, as you should know, this same ’prentice fee was but a sort of “sweetener,” peace-offering, or pot de vin to the tradesman’s wife. The ’prentice’s mother slipped a few pieces into madam’s hand when the boy put his finger on the blue seal. The money was given that mistresses should be kind to the little lads; that they should see that the trenchers they scraped were not quite bare, nor the blackjacks they licked quite empty; that they should give an eye to the due combing and soaping of those young heads, and now and then extend a matronly ægis, lest Tommy or Billy should have somewhat more cuffing and cudgelling than was quite good for them. By degree this gift money grew to be demanded as a right; and by-and-by comes thrifty Master Tradesman, and pops the broad pieces into his till, calling them premium. Poor little shopkeepers in this “silver age” will take a ’prentice from the parish for five pounds, or from an acquaintance that is broken, for nothing perhaps, and will teach him the great arts and mysteries of sweeping out the shop, sleeping under the counter, fetching his master from the tavern or the mughouse when a customer comes in, or waiting at table; but a rich silversmith or mercer will have as much as a thousand pounds with an apprentice. There is value received on either side. The master is, and generally feels, bound to teach his apprentice everything he knows, else, as worthy Master Defoe puts it, it is “somewhat like Laban’s usage to Jacob, viz. keeping back the beloved Rachel, whom he served seven years for, and putting him off with a blear-eyed Leah in her stead;” and again, it is “sending him into the world like a man out of a ship set ashore among savages, who, instead of feeding him, are indeed more ready to eat him up and devour him.” You have little idea of the state, pomp, and circumstance of a rich tradesman, when the eighteenth century was young. Now-a-days, when he becomes affluent, he sells his stock and good-will, emigrates from the shop-world, takes a palace in Tyburnia or a villa at Florence, and denies that he has ever been in trade at all. Retired tailors become country squires, living at “Places” and “Priories.” Enriched ironmongers and their families saunter about Pau, and Hombourg, and Nice, passing for British Brahmins, from whose foreheads the yellow streak has never been absent since the earth first stood on the elephant, and the elephant on the tortoise, and the tortoise on nothing that I am aware of, save the primeval mud from which you and I, and the Great Mogul, and the legless beggar trundling himself along in a gocart, and all humanity, sprang. But then, Anna D. G., it was different. The tradesman was nothing away from his shop. In it he was a hundred times more ostentatious. He may have had his country box at Hampstead, Highgate, Edmonton, Edgeware; but his home was in the city. Behind the hovel stuffed with rich merchandise, sheltered by a huge timber bulk, and heralded to passers by an enormous sheet of iron and painters’ work—his Sign—he built often a stately mansion, with painted ceilings, with carved wainscoting or rich tapestry and gilt leather-work, with cupboards full of rich plate, with wide staircases, and furniture of velvet and brocade. To the entrance of the noisome cul-de-sac, leading to the carved and panelled door (with its tall flight of steps) of the rich tradesman’s mansion, came his coach—yes, madam, his coach, with the Flanders mares, to take his wife and daughters for an airing. In that same mansion, behind the hovel of merchandise, uncompromising Daniel Defoe accuses the tradesman of keeping servants in blue liveries richly laced, like unto the nobility’s. In that same mansion the tradesman holds his Christmas and Shrovetide feasts, the anniversaries of his birthday and his wedding-day, all with much merrymaking and junketing, and an enormous amount of eating and drinking. In that same mansion, in the fulness of time and trade, he dies; and in that same mansion, upon my word, he lies in state,—yes, in state: on a lit de parade, under a plumed tester, with flambeaux and sconces, with blacks and weepers, with the walls hung with sable cloth, et cætera, et cætera, et cætera.[6] ’Tis not only “Vulture Hopkins” whom a “thousand lights attend” to the tomb, but very many wealthy tradesmen are so buried, and with such pomp and ceremony. Not till the mid-reign of George the Third did this custom expire.