One of us, however, made a smart onslaught about this time on Edmund Curll’s most rancorous foe, Alexander Pope. Many pages ago I hinted at this attack, as almost the only one that could be traced directly to Hogarth; although many claim to discern little portraits in disparagement of Pope Alexander in the print of the Lottery, in Rich’s Triumphal Entry to Covent Garden (in which a suppositious Pope beneath the piazza is maltreating a copy of the Beggars’ Opera—why? had he not a hand in it?), and in the Characters at Button’s Coffee-house. There can be no mistake, however, about the Pope in the print known as False Taste, or the second Burlington Gate. There is no need that I should trench on the province of Mr. Carruthers, who, in his edition of Pope, has so admirably narrated the ins and outs of the quarrel between the poet and the magnificent Duke of Chandos, further than to express an opinion that the duke had treated the little man of Twickenham with, at least, courtesy; and that Pope’s description of “Timon’s villa,” was at best somewhat lacking in courtesy. Hogarth took the Chandos side in the squabble—the malevolent still hint in deference to Sir James Thornhill and his old grudge against Kent, the Corinthian petticoat man, and protégé of Lord Burlington. In the print you see Pope perched on a scaffolding, and, as he whitewashes Burlington Gate, bespattering the passing coach of the Duke of Chandos. It would have been well for William to have avoided these partisan personalities. They never brought him anything but grief. He should have remembered Vinny Bourne’s allocution—
“Qui mores hominum improbos, ineptos,
Incidis....”
Rogues, and rakes, and misers, and fanatics, and quacks, were his quarry. It was his to scourge the vices of the great; aye, and to laugh at their foibles. He has, indeed, well generalized the mansion and villa building mania in the courtyard perspective of the Marriage à la Mode, but he should have had nothing directly to do with Burlington Gate or with Canons.
The real scope and bent of his genius were to be triumphantly manifested at this very period by his wonderful composition The Modern Midnight Conversation. I don’t think there is a single artistic design extant which exemplifies to the spectator so forcibly and so rapidly the vices of a coarse and sensual epoch. Most of us have seen that grand picture in the Luxembourg at Paris, the Décadence des Romains of Coutuse, with those stern citizens of the old Brutus stamp gazing in moody sorrow on the enervated patricians, crowned with flowers, golden-sandalled, purple-robed, rouged, and perfumed, lapped in feasting and luxury, and the false smiles of meretricious women; listening to dulcet music; sipping the Chian and the Falernian, babbling the scandal of the bath to their freedmen, or lisping sophisms in emasculated Greek to their hireling philosophers. One has but to glance at that picture to know that the empire is in a bad way; that certain Germanic barbarians are sharpening short swords or whittling clubs into shape far away, and that the Roman greatness is in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I remember once seeing in an old curiosity shop of the Rue Lafitte a water-colour drawing, probably limned by some rapin for some Sophie Arnould of the quarter, and sold at one of her periodical boudoir-and-alcove auctions—a drawing almost as eloquent and as suggestive as the Décadence. A group of ragged little boys, in the peasant costume of Louis the Well-Beloved’s time, have lifted up a heavy curtain. You see, beyond, the interior of a petite maison. Farmers general, marquises, abbés, are junketing with the Sophie Arnoulds of the epoch. The uplifted table-cloth shows the keys of a harpsichord beneath, on which one of the fair dames is tinkling. There are no servants to disturb the company; the dainty dishes rise through noiseless traps. Artificial flowers, champagne, wax candles, Sèvres china and vermeil plate, diamonds, and embroidery: of all these there is an abundance. Outside, where the little ragged hungry boys are, you see snow and naked trees, and a little dead baby in a dead mother’s arms. A fanciful performance, and too violently strained, perhaps; yet one that tells, undeniably, that the age is going wrong; that this champagne will one day turn red as blood; that these wax candles will light a flame not to be put out, but that will burn the petite maison about the ears of Farmers general, Sophie Arnoulds, and company; that the strumming of yonder harpsichord will be inaudible when the dreadful tocain begins to boom. I need but allude to the Dutch Kermesses of Teniers, and Ostade, and Jan Steen, and the camp-life pictures of Wouvermans and Dick Stoop, for those acquainted with those masters to understand the marvellous and instantaneous concentration of all the low, sordid, brutal passions and pastimes of the epoch; the daily life and sports and duties of the boor who swigs the beer and smokes the pipe; of the vraw, who peels the carrots, swaddles the child, and beats the servant maid with a broomstick; of the ruffian soldier, rubbing down his eternal white horse, braying away with his trumpet, gambling under the tilt of his tent, or brabbling with the baggage-waggon woman, who reclines yonder among her pots and kettles. These things come upon us at once; and we are seized and possessed with the life of the time; but the force and suggestiveness of the works I have named become weak and ambiguous when compared with this Modern Midnight Conversation, this picture paraphrase of the immortal “Prospos des Buveurs” of Francois Rabelais. You see an epoch of dull, brutish, besotted revelry: an epoch when my lord duke was taken home drunk in his sedan from the Rose to his mansion in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields; his chair-men and flambeau-men very probably as drunk as he; and his chaplain and groom of the chambers receiving him with bloodshot eyes and hiccuping speech;—when Jemmy Twitcher lay in the kennel as drunk as my lord duke; only, there was nobody to take him home; when there were four thousand ginshops in London; and a grave publicist issued a broadsheet, giving “two hundred and sixty plain and practical reasons” for the legislative suppression of the trade in “the dreadful liquor called Geneva.” I wish I could persuade the temperance societies that this is in comparison a sober age; and that 130 years ago, not only did wine and punch slay their thousands among the upper classes, but gin and brandy—both of which were horribly cheap—slew their tens of thousands among the populace. Wait till we come to the Hogarthian tableaux of Beer Street and Gin Lane. In this Modern Midnight Conversation, everybody is tipsy. The parson, the doctor, the soldier, the gambler, and the bully—the very drawer himself—are all intoxicated. Few of the company can see out of more than one eye. Pipes are lighted, and go out again for want of sober puffing. Songs are commenced, and the second couplet forgotten. Wigs are pushed awry, or quite fall off. The furniture is overturned; rivulets of punch flow over the table, and on to the puddled ground. Men, losing the reins of reason, not only see, but think double; take their own cracked voices for those of interlocutors; quarrel with themselves; give each other the lie, and vow they will draw upon themselves if they, themselves, say something—they know not what—again. This is the drunkenness that cankered, and bloated, and corrupted Church and State, in the debased reigns of the two first Brunswickers; that sent the king fuddled to Heidegger’s masquerade, and the minister reeling in his blue ribbon to the House, and made tavern roysterers of the young nobles of Britain. When one has had to wade through the minor chronicles of this time, it becomes distressingly easy to recognize the terrible truth of the Modern Midnight Conversation.[16]
Now, although William Hogarth, now in his thirty-fifth year, was passably virtuous, and I have heard no instance of his indulging in any modern conversation at midnight or other times, to the extent of becoming overtaken in strong drinks—there were plenty of cakes and ale in the Hogarthian philosophy. He was a brisk man, liberal and hospitable in his own house, and not averse from moderate conviviality abroad, sometimes partaking of the nature of the hilarious gambols known as “High Jinks.” Brother, we must die. It needs not the digging Trappist to tell us so. It needs not the moralist with “Disce mori!” It needs not the looking-glass that shows us the wrinkled brow and grizzled locks. We must die; and we are gravelled, and worn, and sick, and sorry; and in the night we pray for morning, and in the morning cry out that it were night. But they need not be grim ghosts, those memories of the old pleasant follies and “High Jinks.” They did not all belong to the folly and recklessness of wayward youth. They were jovial and exuberant, and merry and light-hearted; trivial, certainly, and, maybe, undignified as when you, John Kemble, rode the hippopotamus at early dawn among the cabbages in Covent Garden; as when you, grave senator and reverend seignior, danced the Irish jig over the crossed broomsticks; as when you, now stately dowager, then sprightly maid of honour, disguised yourself as a buy-a-broom girl; as when you, grave philosopher, condescended, “on that occasion only,” to lead the donkey that was the Rosinante of a fifth of November “Guy.” But you didn’t do any harm. You didn’t exactly bring your parents’ grey hair with sorrow to the grave when you broke the half-crown’s worth of crockeryware; nor were you ever brought to the pass of biting your mamma’s ear off on the Place de Grève, because she didn’t flay you alive for partaking of apples which you had not precisely acquired according to the “vendors and purchasers” doctrines of wise Lord St. Leonards. I say, that I hope we shall not all be brought to judgment for all the rejoicings of our youth; for the assize would surely be too black, and shuddering Mercy would tear the calendar.
In 1732 there must have been “high jinks” on foot from time to time at the Bedford Coffee House, Covent Garden. Now, where was the Bedford Coffee House? Was it at that Bedford Hotel, under the piazza, so unceremoniously elbowed by that monstrous glasshouse called the “Floral Hall”—the Bedford of which Mrs. Warner is so urbane a hostess? Or was it the “Bedford Head,” in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, a hostelry, where to this day a club of bookworm men meet to lay the dust of ancient lore with frugal libations, and talk about Hogarth, and Fielding, and Johnson, and the brave deeds and the brave men of the days that shall be no more? I confess that I incline to the “Bedford Head,” and that I have purposely avoided taking counsel of London antiquaries more learned than myself on the point, lest I should be undeceived. Moreover, Tothall lived at the corner of Tavistock Court, Tavistock Street, which, as everybody knows, is over against Maiden Lane. It was nearer to Leicester Fields, where Hogarth dwelt, than the Bedford under the piazza, and Hogarth and Tothall, with Thornhill, Forrest, and Scott, were the immortal Five who, on the morning of Saturday, the 27th of May, 1732, set out on a Kentish pilgrimage, of which the aim and end were “High Jinks.”
A word as to the Pilgrims. A famous English writer in some lectures on the “English Humourists,” familiar to us all, has described the pilgrimage as that of a “jolly party of tradesmen engaged at high jinks.” Now with the exception of Tothall, who had been pretty nearly everything, and a woollen draper, among multifarious other callings,[17] the party were all professional men. What Hogarth was, you know. He had come to the days when he could wear his sword and bag. Thornhill was Sir James’s son and heir. He was afterwards sergeant-painter to the navy, and preserved a good estate in the west. Scott was a marine painter, said by Lord Orford to be second only to Vandevelde; and Forrest’s poetic narrative of the Tour, in “Hudibrastic verse,” is so fluent, and often so witty, as to show a capacity and a facility very uncommon in those days among tradesmen. The curiosity is that these five accomplished men should have taken delight in diversions of the plainest and most inelegant kind. As my author quoted above justly remarks, this was indeed a “jolly party of tradesmen,” at least, of merrymakers who behaved as we should expect tradesmen to do; but I suspect that the real London tradesman of the time would have been frightened out of his life at such wild doings; and that these jovial Kentish jinks were engaged in by the five Bedfordians through sheer humorous eccentricity, tinged by that inherent coarseness and love of horseplay of the age, which we discover, not only in such holiday jaunts, but in such almost inconceivable frolics as that of George the Second, the Duke of Montague, with Heidegger at the masquerade; the escapade of Lord Middlesex and his friends of the Calves’ Head Club, and the hideous practical joke played off by Pope on Curll. Educated men seemed to share in those days the yearning of the French actress—the besoin de s’encanailler—the desire to disport themselves in a pigsty, more or less Epicurean; and but for the knowledge of this prevalent low tone in cultivated society it is difficult to realize the fact of Hogarth going back to his lady wife, and Thornhill to the powdered and bewigged grandee, his papa.
Forrest’s narrative of the tour, which began, as I have said, on the twenty-seventh, and finished on the thirty-first of May, is far too elaborate for me to give anything beyond a very brief reflex of it here. I will quote, however, the opening lines:—
“’Twas first of morn on Saturday