William Hogarth:
PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER.
Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time.
III.—A long Ladder, and Hard to Climb.
When a cathedral chapter have received their congé d’élire—so runs the popular and perfectly erroneous tradition—and have made choice of a Bishop, the pastor elect simpers, blushes, and says that really he is much obliged, but that he would rather not accept the proffered dignity. “Nolo episcopari,” he urges in graceful deprecation. Nobody in or out of the chapter believes in his reluctance, and nobody now-a-days believes in the harmless legend. Thus, too, when the Commons elect a Speaker, a tradition with little more foundation assumes that the right honourable gentleman approaches the foot of the Throne, hints in the most delicate manner that he, the chosen of the Commons, is a blockhead and an impostor, declares that he shall make but an indifferent Speaker, and seeks to be relieved from his onerous charge. At that same moment, perhaps, Messrs. Adams and Ede are embroidering Mr. Speaker’s gold robe; and experienced tonsors near Lincoln’s Inn are finishing the last row of curls on the ambrosial horse-hair which to-morrow will be a wig. When you ask a young lady to take a little more Mayonnaise de homard, or entreat her to oblige the company with “Entends tu les gondoles?”—that charming Venetian barcarole—does she not ordinarily, and up to a certain degree of pressure, refuse—say that she would rather not, or that she has a cold? Whose health is proposed and drunk amid repeated cheers, but he rises, and assures the assembled guests that he is about the last person in the world who should have been toasted; that he never felt so embarrassed in his life—he leads at the common law bar, and on breaches of promise is immense—and that he wants words to, &c. &c.? At the bar mess he is known as “Talking Smith,” and at school his comrades used to call him “Captain Jaw.” My friends, we do not place any faith in these denials; and forthwith clap the mitre on the Prelate’s head, bow to the Speaker, help the young lady to arrange the music stool, and intone nine times nine with one cheer more.
It is strange—it is vexatious; but I cannot persuade the ladies and gentlemen who peruse these papers to believe that I am not writing the Life of William Hogarth, and that these are merely discursive Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time. People persist in thinking that it is with him who is now writing a case of nolo episcopari. Indeed it is no such thing. I should dearly wish to write myself Biographer. “Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall.” I told you in the outset that this Endeavour was no Life. I disclaimed any possession of exclusive information. I claimed a liberal benefit-of-clergy as to names and dates. I have had no access to muniment rooms. I have explored the contents of no charter chests. I have disentombed no dusty records, and rescued no parish registers from the degrading fate of serving to singe a goose. I am timorous, and seek not to be heard as one speaking with authority. I am anonymous, and risk no fame. But the north country won’t believe me, and the south and the midland shake their heads incredulously when I say this is not Hogarth’s Life, but only so much gossip about him and his pictures and times. I say so again; and if the public won’t be enlightened—si vult decipi—all I can add is, Decipiatur.
Now as to the exact date of the expiration of Hogarth’s apprenticeship—when was it? I have but an impression. I cannot speak from any certain knowledge, and assume, therefore, that the expiry was circa 1720. Ireland opines that it was in 1718, William having then attained his twenty-first year. The registers of the Goldsmiths’ Company might be more explicit, or, better still, Mr. Scott, the chamberlain of London, might enlighten us all, to a month, and to a day. For of old the chamberlain was the official Nemesis to the ofttimes unruly ’prentices of London. The idle, or rebellious, or truant novice, was arraigned before this dread functionary. He had power to relegate the offender to the carcere duro of Bridewell, there to suffer the penance of stripes and a bread-and-water diet. For aught I know, the ministrations of the chamberlain may to this day be occasionally invoked; but it is in his capacity of a recording official, and as having formerly drawn some fees from the attestation and registration of indentures, that his assistance would be useful to me. William Hogarth’s art-and-mystery-parchment may be in the city archives. What other strange and curiously quaint things those archives contain we had an inkling the other day, when the Liber Albus was published. But I have not the pleasure of Mr. Scott’s acquaintance, and he might say me nay.
Hogarth, I presume, was released from silver servitude in 1718-20. April 29th, 1720, is, as I have elsewhere noted, the date affixed to the shop-card he executed for himself, setting up in business, I hope in friendly rivalry to Ellis Gamble in Little Cranbourn Alley, hard by the “Golden Angel.” I stood and mused in Little Cranbourn Alley lately, and tried to conjure up Hogarthian recollections from that well-nigh blind passage. But no ghosts rose from a coffee-shop and a French barber’s, and a murky little den full of tobacco-pipes and penny valentines; so, taking nothing by my motion, I sped my slowest to the Sablonière in Leicester Square. Here even my senses became troubled with the odours of French soups, and I could make nothing Hogarthian out of the hostelry, a wing of which was once Hogarth’s house.
It is my wish to tell as succinctly as is feasible the story of seven years in Hogarth’s progress; seven years during which he was slowly, painfully, but always steadily and courageously, climbing that precipitous ladder which we have all in some sort or another striven to climb. At the top sits Fame kicking her heels, carrying her trumpet mincingly, making sometimes a feint to put it to her lips and sound it, more frequently looking down superciliously with eyes half closed, and pretending to be unaware of the panting wretch toiling up the weary rungs beneath. Some swarm up this ladder as boys up a pole, hand over hand, a good grip with the knees, a confident, saucy, upward look. Others stop in medio, look round, sigh, or are satisfied, and gravely descend to refresh themselves with bread and cheese for life. Some stagger up, wildly, and tumbling off, are borne, mutilated, to the hospital accident-ward to die. Others there are who indeed obtain the ladder’s summit, but are doomed to crawl perpetually up and down the degrees. These are the unfortunates who carry hods to those master bricklayers who have bounded up the ladder with airy strides, or better still, have been born at the top of the ladder. Poor hodmen! they make dictionaries, draw acts of parliament, cram the boy-senator for his maiden speech, form Phidias’ rough clay-sketch into a shapely, polished marble bust, shade with Indian ink Archimedes’ rough draught for the new pump or the tubular bridge, and fill in Sir Joshua’s backgrounds. Some there are who go to sleep at the ladder’s foot, and some, the few, the felicitous, who reach the summit, breathless but triumphant, boldly bidding Fame blow her loudest blast. Forthwith the venal quean makes the clarion to sound, and all the world is amazed. Lowliness, our Shakspeare says, is “young ambition’s ladder:”
“Whereto the climber upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round,