The eighteenth century, which was to witness the magnificent and, in its own way, unequalled achievement of English art in the paintings of Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough, Hoppner; in the engravings of Bartolozzi, Dalton, John Raphael Smith, and William Henry Ryland; in the caricatures, which we have just noted, of Bunbury, Rowlandson, and Gillray, was to open, not inappropriately, with the appearance and speedy recognition of a very individual and very characteristic genius with the pictured comedies of William Hogarth.

A first survey of my subject led me for a moment to doubt how far my title would cover the creations of that incomparable humourist. He is, indeed, more than caricaturist in the sense in which we shall use this term of his artistic successors. His pictured moralities teem with portraits drawn from the very life. He is a satirist, as mordant and merciless as Juvenal, or, in his own day, the terrible Dean of St. Patrick’s; from his house in Leicester Fields he looks out upon the London of his day, and probes with his remorseless brush or graver to the hidden roots of its follies, its vices, and crimes. “He may be said to have created,” says one of his early biographers, “a new species of painting, which may be termed the moral comic;” meaning, thereby, that the instinctive humour of the man’s art is generally (not, as we shall see, always) directed to some moral purpose, some lesson of conduct to be thence derived. That is just where Hogarth connects himself, inevitably and intimately, with the Puritan England which had preceded him. Not for nothing had that century, into whose last years he was born, seen the great uprising of Puritan England, the struggle for civil and political liberty, and its achievement, the Ironsides of Cromwell with Bible and uplifted sword. That intensity of moral and spiritual conviction, that earnestness about life and its issues was yet in the nation’s blood, and must find some outlet in the returning world of art, which its own austerity had banished; but, in another sense, mark how truly Hogarth connects himself with the later caricaturists of the coming age.

Beauty does not enter into his art, most of all in that highest sense of plastic beauty of form, which the great Italians had so intensely felt, which the great English school, uprising in his own day, was in some measure to recover. At most a comely buxom wench steals sometimes slyly into his canvas or copper-plate the two servant-maids in his print of “Morning” at Covent Garden, whom the roysterers turning out from Tom King’s coffee-house are kissing in the Piazza; the demure and pretty Miss West, looking over a joint hymn book with the amorous but industrious apprentice; or that coy minx most delicious of them all who has just dozed off amid “The Sleeping Congregation,” with her prayer-book opened at the fascinating page of Matrimony, and to whose luxuriant charms of face and form the eyes of the fat old clerk are stealthily directed. To Hogarth these are the incidents, not the inspiration, of his art. Lavater, that keen observer, aimed near to the mark when he wrote: “Il ne faut pas attendre beaucoup de noblesse de Hogarth. Le vrai beau n’etoit guère a la portee de ce peintre.” It is, indeed, one of the unconscious ironies of art history that the artist, whose work shows least of its influence or attraction, should have devoted the one offspring of his pen to an Analysis of Beauty.

But it is when we turn to the humour of life, even in its most sordid tragedies, that his real strength appears. “Quelle richesse inexprimable” says Lavater again, and no less justly “dans les scenes comiques où morales de la vie.” None like Hogarth has characterised “the lowest types of modern humanity, has better depicted the drunken habits of the dregs of the people, the follies of life, and the horrors of vice.” And it is just here, as I have hinted, that Hogarth connects himself with the later caricaturists.

It were quite possible to treat a purely moral story, such as that of “The Industrious and the Idle Apprentice,” in a purely moral sentiment; but this is just what our artist cannot bring himself to do. He must have that touch of nature, and of humour, which makes the whole world kin. He must introduce the quarrelling cat and dog into the office scene between West and Goodchild, or the feline visitant whose apparition through the chimney disturbs Thomas Idle’s unhallowed slumbers; he must accentuate the gormandising guests in the Sheriff’s banquet, and the humours of the crowd even in a Tyburn execution. And in other subjects where the moral lesson is either absent or less intrusive the man’s fancy runs absolutely riot in humorous observation. “The Distressed Poet,” with the baby squalling in his bed, the poor wife stitching at his solitary pair of breeches, and a strapping milkmaid clamouring for payment of her account; “The Enraged Musician,” with every conceivable pandemonium of noise congregated beneath his window; above all, “The Sleeping Congregation,” collected in a conventicle of very early Georgian design, and unanimously occupied in carrying out the precept of their reverend pastor’s text, “Come unto me ... and I will give Rest” save only those two vigilant old ladies, perhaps pillars of the edifice, and the clerk to whose interest in the sleeping nymph of the next pew I have already alluded are studies in pure humour.

But to multiply examples of Hogarth’s humour would come very near to cataloguing his every work. Let us turn now from that work to the man himself, and study something of those conditions of life of which his genius gives us our most vivid impress.

William Hogarth was born in 1697 or 1698, in London, but of a Westmorland family (Hoggard would seem to have been the earlier spelling), one member of which, the artist’s father, after working as a schoolmaster in Westmorland, had settled in London as corrector of the Press.

He must have been a man of some education, since we hear of a Latin-English Dictionary of his composition, though there seems some uncertainty as to whether it ever got beyond the initial stage of MS.; and his son William was early in life bound ’prentice to a silversmith named Gamble, his business being to learn the graving of arms and ciphers upon plate. His marvellous gift for caricature soon showed itself; and a tavern quarrel at Highgate seems to have afforded subject for an early manifestation of his talent in this direction. As the period of his ’prenticeship came to its close he entered an Academy of drawing in St. Martin’s Lane, where he may have come under Sir James Thornhill’s notice; but seems to have failed to show any exceptional proficiency in his life studies. Form, we have seen already, lay outside in certain manifestations entirely outside the peculiar limits of his temperament. Shop-bills and coats-of-arms were probably the mainstay of his livelihood at this period, though plates for books were beginning, little by little, to come in his way; but when in 1730 he clandestinely married the daughter of Sir James Thornhill, the Court painter was so incensed at this mésalliance that he refused the young couple any acknowledgment. It was at this very time that Hogarth created his first work of individual genius in that superb series of plates to which he gave the name of “The Harlot’s Progress”; and it is said that Lady Thornhill designedly placed one of the plates in her husband’s way, only to elicit the grudging praise of: “The man who can produce these can also maintain a wife without a portion.”

But the ice was broken, and the ensuing thaw led to a complete reconciliation. Sir James Thornhill treated his daughter and son-in-law more generously, and lived with them in future till his death in 1733.

At the same time the Series which had brought about domestic reconciliation, had also brought fame and fortune to the artist. The third scene of the Progress, in which the erring girl is arrested, contained, it would seem, a clever portrait of Sir James Gonson, a magistrate whose energies were famous in this direction. The print is passed around at a meeting of the Board of Treasury, at which Sir James is present; every Lord must repair to the print-shop, to obtain for himself a copy; the vogue was started, and twelve hundred subscribers entered their names for the Series, the price of each set being one guinea.

William Hogarth was now well started in his career of fame; and deservedly so, for in some respects “The Harlot’s Progress” is one of the most characteristic and the most brilliant of his creations. Its popularity was immense and instantaneous; it was played in pantomime, and reproduced on ladies’ fans. But if he did not surpass the genius of his first invention he certainly came very close to it, both in the “Rake’s Progress” and in his “Marriage a la Mode.”

Each of these Series, as well as that of the “Industrious and Idle ’Prentices” are complete stories, worked out to their denoument tragedies, one might say, written with a burlesque pencil, of eighteenth-century life. And if the note struck seem sometimes too insistent, if the Industrious one be too sleek, too self-complacent, the prodigal too immersed in sensual folly and indulgence; if the blacks seem too black, and the whites too white, and those half-tones which accord the values of life be generally missing; if a more refined age demands a subtler analysis, a more artistic treatment, can we yet deny the truth and necessity of the eternal lesson? Have we yet reached, or shall we ever reach, an age in which ineptitude, insolence, idleness, fail to work out their inevitable resultant? Or is it less true for us than for those earlier ages the message which the writer of that magnificent thirty-eighth Psalm reiterates, as though he would drive deep into our souls its lasting verity. “Put thou thy trust in the Lord and be doing good; dwell in the land and verily thou shall be fed. Delight thou in the Lord; and he shall give thee thy heart’s desire.... Yet a little while and the ungodly shall be clean gone ... the Lord shall laugh him to scorn, for he hath seen that his day is coming.”

Just as insistent, just as certain of his concluding verdict as the Psalmist is the eighteenth-century engraver and humorist. Even his own day may already have seen “the ungodly” set high above men in social position, quoted with respect in financial circles, perhaps even a regular attendant at the local conventicle, “flourishing,” in short, to quote that inimitable phrase of the same Psalmist, “like a green bay-tree”; but he, at least will admit no doubt of the ultimate conclusion. “In all his delineation,” says Mr. Austin Dobson, with fine insight, “as in that famous design of Prudhon, we see Justice and Vengeance following hard upon the criminal. He knew, no doubt, as well as we, that not seldom (humanly speaking) the innocent are punished and the guilty go at large. What matter! that message should not be preached by him at any rate. So he drew his ‘Bogey’ bigger ... and drove his graver deeper in the copper.”

Yet it is to be noted that from the first his genius is attracted to social satire. The Masquerades and Operas, Burlington Gate, 1724 (which he calls in his own notes The Taste of the Times) the first plate which he published on his own account, was popular enough to be freely pirated. “The Wanstead Assembly” brings him close to the later caricaturists; “The Burning of Rumps” shows us a London crowd beside old Temple Bar, with its ghastly trophies of Jacobite relics; and all these lead up to his later success in the two Progresses and the Marriage Series. In 1733 he had settled in his house in Leicester Fields, with its gilt sign of the Golden Head the sign which he had fashioned and gilded himself, in the similitude of the painter Van Dyck; and here the most of his life was to be spent, varied by visits in later years to the villa which he then acquired at Chiswick. He is now fairly facing his life work, and a brief survey of this is all we can hope to attempt in the limits of this chapter.

I have already mentioned “The Harlot’s Progress,” and its immediate successor, “The Rake’s Progress,” the subjects of which speak for themselves. The country maiden’s arrival in London, the breakfast scene with her Jewish admirer, and the scene in Bridewell are to be noted among the prints of the first Series; but all are full of character and interest. In “The Rake’s Progress” the second plate introduces us to a side of Hogarth’s talent which he was to develop later on more fully in his “Marriage a la Mode” namely, his satire of eighteenth-century life of fashion.

The awkward youth who in the plate before had come into his fortune is now in the full of its enjoyment: become a fine gentleman, he holds his morning levee of those numerous parasites who minister to his vanity or pleasure. The foreign element (which Hogarth in his heart detested) is here to the front in the figure of the French dancing-master, trying a new step, with the fiddle in his hand; behind him the maitre d’armes, Dubois, is making a lunge with his épée de combat, while Figg, a noted English prize-fighter, watches his movements with an expression of contempt. Another portrait is Bridgman, a well-known landscape gardener of the time, who is proposing to our young hero some scheme for his estate; while the seated and periwigged figure who runs his fingers over the harpsichord has been suggested as that of the great composer Handel. But when we start forth to knock down the watch, “beat the rounds,” intrigue with the fair, and generally keep up the character of a young blood or “macaroni,” a little timely assistance is often welcome; and is here proffered (with hope of due remuneration) by the villainous-looking figure on the prodigal’s left, whose recommendation is seen in the letter he presents: “The Capt. is a man of honour, his sword may serve you.” Meanwhile, a jockey holds before his master the cup he has won; and a tame poet in the corner seems to be invoking the Muses in unmerited praise of the same patron.

In his next plate Hogarth passes to a scene of indescribable orgy; but all this satire on fashionable extravagance, which we have just noted in detail, is still more fully developed in his masterly Series of “Marriage a la Mode.” Hogarth’s oil paintings of this complete Series are in the London National Gallery, and it is instructive to compare these with the prints, the two first pictures of the Series being especially attractive in treatment. The second of these, representing the morning, when husband and wife awake to ennui from a night of dissipation, is peculiarly happy in spacing and composition, as my illustration may show; while Plate IV. of this Series, showing a reception of the Countess while at her toilet, gives an opening for a clever satire by our artist of the fashionable society of his day, which is as brilliant as any Venetian scene by Longhi, and the ensuing plates point the sequel to a life of folly. Nor has the artist forgotten here to give a side blow to the foreign element which aroused his hostility, from the French dancing-master or perruquier to the great Italian Masters Correggio’s “Jupiter and Io” finding a place on the walls of her ladyship’s bedroom, just as the “Choice of Paris” had been included in the Rake’s levee; and we shall note very soon that these allusions were not incidental, but far more probably intended.

For Hogarth had now in these three series attained a reputation which he probably increased by his delightful studies of pure humour, among which “Modern Midnight Conversation,” “The Sleeping Congregation,” “Strolling Players in a Barn,” “The Laughing Audience,” “The Enraged Musician,” and “The Distressed Poet” are to be especially commended, as well as that fine series of “The Four Times of the Day,” in which last “Morning” (of which I am able to give an illustration) is certainly a masterpiece. His estimate of his own powers had increased, and now led him to leave that path in which his genius had already found its intimate expression, and to seek to become that which he was not and never could be a great imaginative and historical painter. Without ever having really studied the great Masters of the past, without comprehending either their merits or demerits, he declared that it were an easy task for him to surpass even Correggio on his own ground: the result was, if not disaster, at least something very near to it. The “Sigismunda,” which he had painted with the above object, was returned on his hands by the purchaser. It hangs now, indeed, in the National Gallery, but I do not imagine many serious critics will prefer it to the marvellous chiaroscuro, the refined ideal beauty of the Master of Parma. Yet that delicious “Shrimp Girl” which hangs near it, painted with almost a Fragonard’s gaiety of palette, shows what our artist might have achieved had he gone, like Morland, for his subjects to the common life of his own country. The staircase paintings of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital are not likely, I think, to induce us to revise the above opinion; and Sir Joshua’s criticism is here so apposite and so just that I need no excuse for quoting it in some detail. “After this admirable artist had spent the greater part of his life in an active, busy, and, we may add, successful attention to the ridicule of life; after he had invented a new species of dramatic painting in which probably he will never be equalled; and had stored his mind with infinite materials to explain and illustrate the domestic and familiar scenes of common life which were generally, and ought to have been always, the subject of his pencil, he very imprudently, or rather presumptuously, attempted the great historical style, for which his previous habits had by no means prepared him: he was indeed so unacquainted with the principles of this style that he was not even aware that any artificial preparation was necessary. It is to be regretted that any part of the life of such a genius should be fruitlessly employed.”

This criticism, which is all the more telling from its reticence, was keenly felt, and probably never forgiven, by our artist; to us it is of value critically as marking the cleavage between himself and the great English school of the eighteenth century, which sought its inspiration otherwise than in his comedy of life. But with a tenacity, with a stubborn faith in his genius which we cannot but admire, he holds firm to his own view of art. That is in the character of the man sound, honest, sincere even where he is mistaken or narrow just as we see him in his self-portrait of the London Gallery, with his faithful “Trump” sitting in front, as who should say, “This is my master, Hogarth and let me just see the dog who will dare bark at him.” And so when his critics barked or railed he held but the more stubbornly to his opinion; he rated the more mercilessly those “black masters,” whose faults or whose supreme genius it needed a deeper study than he had given them to understand; and when “Sigismunda,” that was to rival Allegri, comes back upon his hands he prices it obstinately at L400, even in his will insisting that it should not be sold below that sum.

But now, not content with attempting to eclipse the great Italian masters, not content with quarrelling with the critics, in the same reckless confidence, with the same bull-dog courage and tenacity he will descend from his artistic charger to meet these last upon their own ground, and armed only with those weapons so dear to them, but new to his untried hands the goose quill and the ink bottle will tear down the veil that conceals Beauty, and teach them what in future to write, what to select, what to admire!

I am treating in this chapter William Hogarth as a delineator of the comedy of life, not as an art critic, nor as a philosopher; and it is not my painful duty to drag the gentle reader through the verbose Preface to a no less verbose Introduction, to find ourselves at the end of these still in front of the author’s main problem of the “Analysis of Beauty.” The work probably suffered from the presence of more than one obliging literary or would-be literary friend. We hear of a Mr. Ralph, from Chiswick, volunteering his services in this direction, of a Mr. Nichols following him; and of the Rev. Mr. Townley being much busied on that Preface, wherein Lomazzo rubs shoulders with Michelangelo and Protogenes, and where the modern mortal hears with astonishment of “the sublime part which is a real je ne scai quoi,” and which, “being the most important part to all connoisseurs, I shall call a harmonious propriety, which is a touching or moving unity, or a pathetic agreement, &c.”

But it would be unfair to judge the Analysis by this preface, which admittedly befogged even poor Hogarth himself. Suffice to say here that he seeks to divide his elusive element, which might have defied even the dialectic of Socrates, into its “principles of Fullness, Variety, Uniformity, Simplicity, Intricacy, and Quantity; all which co-operate in the production of beauty, mutually correcting, and restraining each other occasionally”; and that the essay, even if entirely inadequate as a philosophical treatment of the subject, contains many useful suggestions and shrewd observations.

It had been enough surely for one short life-time to have been the greatest pictorial humorist of his age, to have tried to climb above Allegri and Titian, and to have traced in thought Beauty’s self to her hidden source; but behold our ill-judged artist plunging now, with equal assurance and courage, into that tumultuous sea of English eighteenth-century political strife. The result was this time fatal to his peace, and probably even to his life. John Wilkes was not a very safe man to attack carelessly, nor yet likely to remain quiescent under this treatment; and Hogarth’s print of the “Times,” published in September of 1762, provoked a very savage rejoinder in N of the North Briton. Hogarth’s reply was a caricature of the popular leader; who then engaged one of his supporters, named Churchill, to retaliate in an angry epistle to the artist. Hogarth again replies with the graver that terrible weapon in his practised hands and draws a portrait of “The Bruiser, once the Reverend Churchill,” shown in the form of a dancing bear, with club plastered with lies, and a tankard of porter at his side.

“Never,” says one of his earlier critics, “did two angry men with their abilities throw mud with less dexterity; but during this period of pictorial and poetic warfare (so virulent and disgraceful to all the parties) Hogarth’s health declined visibly.” A presentiment of his end seems to have come to him at his own table among his friends, and he said to them: “My next undertaking shall be the ‘End of all things.’” The next day his graver was already busy with the strange plate which he called “The Bathos,” where Father Time is seen dying, his broken scythe and hour-glass beside him, amid a chaos of ruin all around.

This was actually his last work, for a month later, on the 28th of October, 1764, having returned in weak health from Chiswick to his house in Leicester Fields, he died suddenly of an aneurysm on his chest. His tomb at Chiswick, where his widow came to join him twenty-five years later (in 1789), was adorned in relief with the mask of Comedy, the wreath of laurel, the palette and the book on Beauty; and it was his friend Garrick who is said to have composed those lines of his epitaph, with which we too may take our farewell of the great artist of comedy:

“... Whose pictur’d morals charm the mind, And through the eye correct the heart. If genius fire thee, reader, stay; If nature touch thee, drop a tear; If neither move thee, turn away, For Hogarth’s honoured dust lies here.”