Assemblies rise at your command.”
It was William’s frequent fortune during life to be much celebrated in verse. Swift, you know, apostrophized him as “hum’rous Hogart;” Mitchell, as we have seen, lauds his “families” and “assemblies.” Shortly afterwards, the tender and graceful Vincent Bourne, who wrote the Jackdaw, and whose innocent memory as “Vinny Bourne” is yet cherished in Westminster School, where he was junior master, addressed the painter in Latin “hendecasyllables.” Hoadley, chancellor and bishop, spurred a clumsy Pegasus to paraphrase his pictures in verse. Churchill, when he was old, tried to stab him with an epistle; David Garrick and Samuel Johnson competed for the honour of writing his epitaph.
Between 1727 and 1730, Hogarth appears to have painted dozens of single portraits, “conversations,” and “assemblies.” In the list he himself scheduled are to be noticed “four figures for Mr. Wood” (1728); “six figures for Mr. Cock” (1728); “an assembly of twenty-five figures for my Lord Castlemaine” (1729); “five for the Duke of Montagu;” nine for Mr. Vernon, four for Mr. Wood, and so forth. The prices paid for “Assemblies” appear to have fluctuated between ten and thirty guineas. The oddest, and nearly the earliest commission he received for a portrait was in 1726, when several of the eminent surgeons of the day subscribed their guinea a-piece for him to compose a burlesque “conversation” of Mary Tofts, the infamous rabbit-breeding impostor of Godalming; and St. André, chirurgeon to the King’s household, a highly successful and most impudent quack, who had made himself very busy in the scandalous hoax, and pretended to believe in Tofts. For the story that Hogarth made a drawing of Jack Sheppard in Newgate (1724), at the time when Sir James painted the robber’s half-length in oils—the imaginary scene is admirably etched by George Cruikshank in one of his illustrations to Mr. Ainsworth’s strange novel—there does not seem any foundation. W. H. certainly painted Sarah Malcolm, the murderess, in her cell, in 1733; and from that well-known and authenticated fact some persons may have jumped at the conclusion that he was limner in ordinary to the Old Bailey.
I dwelt persistently in the preceding section of these essays upon the scenes and characters, the vices and follies, the humours and eccentricities, the beauties and uglinesses, that Hogarth must have seen in his young manhood, and asked and thought about, and which must have sunk into his mind and taken root there. Satirists can owe but little to inspiration. They can move the world with the lever of wit, but they must have a fulcrum of fact. Their philosophy is properly of the inductive order. Without facts, facts to reason upon, their arguments would be tedious and pointless. Wherein lies the force or direction of satirizing that Chinese mandarin whom you never saw—that Zulu Kaffir who never came out of his kraal but once, and then to steal a cow? It was Hogarth’s faculty to catch the manners living as they rose; it was his province to watch their rising, and to walk abroad, an early bird, to pick up the worms of knavery and vice, to range the ample field, and see what the open and what the covert yielded. From twenty to thirty the social philosopher must observe. If he grovel in the mud even, he must observe and take stock of the humane passer-by who stoops to pick him up. After thirty he had better go into his study, turn on his lamp, and turn out the contents of his mind’s commonplace book upon paper. This is the only valid excuse for what is termed, after a Frenchman’s Quartier-Latin-argot phrase “Bohemianism:” the only excuse for Fielding’s Covent Garden escapades, for Callot’s gipsy flights, for Shakspeare’s deer-stealing. Young Diogenes the cynic is offensive and reprehensible, but he is no monstrosity. He is going to the deuce, but he may come back again. I will pardon him his tub, his dingy body-linen, his nails bordered sable; but the tub-career should have its term, and Diogenes should go and wash, and if he can afford it, wear fine linen with a purple hem thereunto, as Plato did. It is pleasanter to walk in the groves of Academe, than to skulk about the purlieus of the Mint. Besides, Bohemianism has its pains as well as its pleasures, and Fortune delights in disciplining with a scourge of scorpions those whom she destines to be great men: Alla gioventù molto si perdona. Cæsar was snatched from the stews of Rome to conquer the world. But for the middle-aged Bohemian—the old, ragged, uncleanly, shameful Diogenes—there is no hope and no excuse.
In that which I daresay you thought a mere digression, I strove my best to guide you through the labyrinthine London, which Hogarth must have threaded time after time before he could sit down, pencil or graver in hand, and say, “This is ‘Tom King’s coffee-house,’ this is a ‘modern midnight conversation,’ this is the ‘progress of a rake,’ and this the ‘career of a courtesan.’ I have seen these things, and I know them to be true.”[2] Nor in the least do I wish to convey that in ranging the streets and beating the town Hogarth had any fixed notions of collecting materials for future melodramas and satires. Eminently to be distrusted are those persons who prowl about the tents of Kedar, and pry into the cave of Adullam, when they should be better employed, pleading their desire to “see life,” and to “pick up character.” They are generally blind as bats to all living, breathing life; and the only character they pick up is a bad one for themselves. I apprehend that Hogarth just took life as it came; only the Light was in him to see and to comprehend. A right moral feeling, an intuitive hatred of all wicked and cruel things, guided and strengthened him. Amid the loose life of a loose age the orgies at Moll King’s and Mother Douglass’s might have been frolics at the time to him, and only frolics. A fight in a night-cellar was to him precisely as the yellow primrose was to Peter Bell: a yellow primrose, and nothing more. He was to be afterwards empowered and commanded to turn his youthful follies to wise ends, and to lash the vices which he had once tolerated by his presence.
The philosophic prelude to his work was undoubtedly his town wanderings, 1720-30. The great manipulative skill, the grace of drawing visible when taken in comparison with the comic excrescences in the Hudibras—the brilliance and harmony of colour he manifested in the Progresses and the Marriage à la Mode—have yet to be accounted for. A lad does not step at once from the engraving bench to the easel, and handle the hog’s hair brush with the same skill as he wields the burin and the etching point. The Hogarthian transition from the first to the second of these stages is the more remarkable when it is remembered that, although bred an engraver, and although always quick, dexterous, and vigorous with the sharp needle and the trenchant blade, he could never thoroughly master that clear, harmonious, full-bodied stroke in which the French engravers excelled, in which Hogarth’s own assistants in after life (Ravenet, Scotin, and Grignion) surpassed him, but which was afterwards, to the pride and glory of English chalcography, to be brought to perfection by Woollett and Strange. Yet Hogarth the engraver seemed in 1730 to change with pantomimic rapidity into Hogarth the painter. The matter of his pictures may often be questionable: the manner leaves scarcely anything for exceptional criticism. His colour is deliciously pure and fresh; he never loads, never spatters paint about with his palette knife; never lays tint over tint till a figure has as many vests as the gravedigger in Hamlet. Whites, grays, carnations stand in his pictures and defy time; no uncertain glazings have changed his foregrounds into smears and streaks and stains. He was great at Manchester in 1857; great at the British Institution in 1814, when not less than fifty of his works were exhibited, great in body, richness, transparency; he is great, nay prodigious, in the English section of the National Gallery, where gorgeous Sir Joshua, alas! runs and welters and turns into adipocere; and Gainsborough (in his portraits—his landscapes are as rich as ever)—grows pallid and threadbare, and Turner’s suns are grimed, and even Wilkie cracks and tesselates. I think Hogarth came fresh, assured and decided, to his picture-painting work, from a kind of second apprenticeship under Thornhill, and from compassing the “conversations” and “assemblies.” The historico-allegorico-mural decorations were a species of scene-painting; they involved broad and decisive treatment. The hand learnt perforce to strike lines and mark-in muscles at once. The maul-stick could seldom be used, the fluttering wrist, the nerveless grasp were fatal, the eye could not be performing a perpetual goose-step between canvas and model. Look at Salvator, at Loutherbourg, at Stanfield, and Roberts, to show what good a scene-painting noviciate can do in teaching an artist to paint in one handling, à la brochette as it were. Who can relish a Madonna when one fancies half-a-dozen other Madonnas simpering beneath the built-up tints? Next, Hogarth went to his portraits. They were a course of physiognomy invaluable to him—of fair faces, stern faces, sensual, stupid, hideous and pretty little baby faces. From the exigencies of the “conversations” and “assemblies” he learnt composition, and the treatment of accessories; learnt to paint four-and-twenty fiddlers, not “all of a row,” but disposed in ellipse or in pyramid-form. The perception of female beauty and the power of expressing it were his by birthright, by heaven’s kindness; I am despondent only at his animals, which are almost invariably impossible deformities.[3]
The Duke of Montagu and my Lord Castlemaine having ordered “conversations” from Hogarth, there was of course but one thing necessary to put the seal to his artistic reputation. That thing, so at least the patron may have thought, was the patronage of the eminent Morris. Morris is quite snuffed out now—evaporated even as the carbonic acid gas from yesterday’s flask of champagne; but in 1727, he was a somewhat notable person. He was a fashionable upholsterer in Pall Mall, and not only sold, but manufactured, those tapestry arras hangings which, paper-staining being in embryo, were still conspicuous ornaments of the walls of palaces, the nobility’s saloons. Morris kept a shop much frequented by the noble tribes, at the sign of the “Golden Ball,” in Pall Mall. There seems to have been a plethora of Golden Balls in London about this time, just as though all the Lombards had quarrelled among themselves, and set up in business each man for himself, with no connection with the golden ball over the way. In 1727, and, for a century and a half before, the best and most celebrated painters were employed to execute designs for tapestry. You know who drew for the Flemish weavers that immortal dozen of cartoons, seven of which are at Hampton Court, and which have been recently so wonderfully photographed. Rubens and Vandyke, the stately Lebrun, and the meek Lesueur, made designs also for these woven pictures. There are penitent thieves and jesting Pilates from Hans Holbein’s inspiration in many faded hangings. Thornhill had been himself commissioned by Queen Anne to make sketches for a set of tapestry hangings emblematic of the union between England and Scotland. And does not the fabric of the Gobelins yet flourish? Did not Napoleon the Third vouchsafe the gift of a magnificent piece of tapisserie to one of our West-end clubs? Morris, the upholsterer, had many of the “first foreign hands” in his employ; but, being a Briton, bethought himself magnanimously to encourage real native British talent. My lord duke had employed Hogarth; Morris likewise determined on giving a commission to the rising artist. He sought out William, conferred with him, explained his wishes, and a solemn contract was entered into between William Hogarth for the first part, and Joshua Morris for the second, in which the former covenanted to furnish the latter with a design on canvas of the Element of Earth, to be afterwards worked in tapestry. The painter squared his canvas and set to work; but when the design was completed Morris flatly refused to pay the thirty pounds agreed upon as remuneration. It seems that the timorous tradesman, who must clearly have possessed a large admixture of the “element of earth” in his composition, had been informed by some good-natured friend of Hogarth that the tapestry-designer was no painter, but a “low engraver.” Horror! To think of a mean wretch who had earned his livelihood by flourishing initials on flagons and cutting plates in taille douce for the booksellers, presuming to compete with the flourishing foreigners employed by the eminent and ineffable Morris! ’Twas as though some destitute index-maker of the Hop Gardens, some starved ballad-monger of Lewkner’s Lane, had seduced Mr. Jacob Tonson into giving him an order for a translation of the Æneid into heroic verse. Amazed and terrified, the deceived Joshua Morris rushed to Hogarth’s painting-room and accused him of misrepresentation, fraud, covin, and other crimes. How would ever my lord duke and her ladyship—perhaps Madam Schuylenburg-Kendal herself—tolerate tapestry in their apartments designed by a base churl, the quondam apprentice of a silversmith in Cranbourn Alley, the brother of two misguided young women who kept a slop-shop? Hogarth coolly stated that he should hold the upholsterer to his bargain. He admitted that the Element of Earth was “a bold undertaking,” but expressed an opinion that he should “get through it well enough.” He brought the thing to a termination; and it was, I daresay, sufficiently of the earth earthy. Joshua resolutely withheld payment. No copper-scratcher should defraud him of thirty pounds. The young man, formerly of Little Cranbourn Alley, was not to be trifled with. If Morris had been a lord and had refused (as one of Hogarth’s sitters absolutely did) to pay for his portrait, on the ground that it wasn’t like him, the artist might have taken a satirical revenge, and threatened to add tails to all the figures in the Element of Earth, and send the canvas to Mr. Hare, the wild-beast-man, as a showcloth. But the Pall Mall upholsterer was a tradesman, and Hogarth, all artist as he knew himself to be, was a tradesman, too. So he went to his lawyer’s, and sued Morris for the thirty pounds, “painter’s work done.” Bail was given and justified, and on the 28th of May, 1728, the great case of Hogarth against Morris came on in communi banco, before the chief justice in Eyre. The defendant pleaded non assumpsit. Issue was joined, and the gentlemen of the long-robe went to work. For the defendant, the alleged fraudulent substitution of an engraver for a painter was urged. The eminence of Morris’s tapestry and upholstery was adduced. It was sworn to that he employed “some of the finest hands in Europe.” Bernard Dorridor, De Friend, Phillips, Danten, and Pajou, “some of the finest hands,” appeared in the witness-box and deposed to what first-rate fellows they all were, and to William Hogarth being a mere mechanic, the last of the lowest, so to speak. But the ready painter was not without friends. He subpœnaed more of the “finest hands.” Up came King, Vanderbank, the opera scene-painter, Laguerre, son and successor to Charles the Second’s Laguerre, and Verrio’s partner, and the serene Thornhill himself, who, I doubt it not, was bidden by my Lord to sit on the bench, was oracular in his evidence as to the young man’s competency, smiled on the chief justice, and revolved in his majestic mind the possibility of the lords of the Treasury giving him a commission (had they the power) to paint the walls and ceilings of all the courts of justice with allegories of Themis, Draco, Solon, Justinian, and Coke upon Lyttleton, to be paid for out of the suitors’ fee fund. We know now how tawdry and trashy these painted allegories were; but Thornhill and Laguerre were really the most reliable authorities to be consulted as to the standard of excellence then accepted in such performances. The verdict very righteously went against the defendant, whose plea was manifestly bad, and Joshua Morris was cast in thirty pounds. I delight to fancy that the successful party straightway adjourned to the Philazers’ Coffee-house, in Old Palace Yard, and there, after a slight refection of hung beef and Burton ale, betook themselves to steady potations of Lisbon wine in magnums—there were prohibitive duties on claret—until each man began to see allegories of his own, in which Bacchus was the capital figure. I delight to fancy that the Anglo-Frenchman Laguerre clapped Hogarth on the back, and told him that he was “von clevare fellow,” and that Sir James shook his young friend by the hand, enjoined him to cultivate a true and proper gusto, and bade him Godspeed. Majestic man! he little thought that when his own celebrity had vanished, or was but as the shadow of the shadow of smoke, his young friend was to be famous to the nations and the glory of his countrymen.[4]
For all the handshakings and libations of Lisbon, Sir James was to live to be very angry with his young friend, although the quarrel was to last but a little while. Hogarth had looked upon Thornhill’s daughter Jane, and she was fair, and regarded him, too, with not unfavourable eyes. He who has gained a lawsuit should surely be successful in love. Meanwhile—I don’t think he was much given to sighing or dying—he went on painting, in spite of all the Morrises in upholsterydom. Poor Joshua himself came to grief. He seems to have been bankrupt; and on the 15 th of May, 1729, the auctioneer knocked down to the highest bidder all the choice stock of tapestry in Pall Mall. Hogarth’s Element of Earth may have been “Lot 90;” but one rather inclines to surmise that Morris slashed the fatal canvas with vindictive peissors to shreds and mippets the day his lawyer’s bill came in.
To record the tremendous success of that Newgate Pastoral, the suggestion of the first idea of which lies between Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Gay, does not come within my province. The history of the Beggar’s Opera, that made “Rich Gay and Gay Rich,” is too well known to bear repetition. Hogarth, however, has left his mark on the famous operatic score. For Rich, the Covent Garden manager, he painted (1729) a picture of the prison scene in which Lucy and Polly are wrangling over Macheath, of which several replicas in oil, some slightly varied, as well as engravings, were afterwards executed. Portraits of many of the great personages of the day are introduced in open boxes on the stage. Macheath was a portrait of the comedian Walker; and the Polly was the beauteous Lavinia Fenton, the handsome, kindly, true-hearted actress with whom the Duke of Bolton, to the amusement and amazement of the town, fell in love, and fairly ran away. The Duchess of Bolton was then still alive, and lived for many years afterwards; and poor Polly had to suffer some part of the penalty which falls on those with whom dukes elope; but at the duchess’s death, her lord showed that he was not of Mrs. Peachum’s opinion, that “’tis marriage makes the blemish,” and right nobly elevated Polly to the peerage. She lived long and happily with him, survived him, and died late in the last century, very old, and beloved, and honoured for her modesty, charity, and piety. “The lovely young Lavinia once had friends,” writes Thomson in the Seasons; but our Lavinia lost not her friends to her dying day. If Tenison, and Atterbury, and Sherlock, had nothing to say against Eleanor Gwyn, let us trust that the severest moralist could find charitable words wherewith to speak of Lavinia, Duchess of Bolton.[5]