William Hogarth: Painter, Engraver, and Philosopher. Essays on The
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THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE WILLIAM HOGARTH Painter, Engraver, and Philosopher. a a MK. CAMBI.k's Al'PKENTICK. WILLIAM HOGARTH Painter, Engraver, and Philosopher. RSSAYS ON The Mail, the IVork, and the Time. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA. V// WITH ILl.USlKAl IONS. LONDON: SMITH, ELDER & CO.. 65, CORNHILL. 1866. LONDON : VKINTEIJ BY SMITH, ELDER AND CO., OLD BAILEY, E.C. CONTENTS. PACK I. LiTTi.E Boy Hogarth i ' II. Mr. Gamble's Apprentice 34 III. A Long Ladder, and Hard to Clime 68 IV. The Painter's Progress 109 V. Between London and Sheerness 14S VI. The Rake's Progress: a Drama in Eight Acts 184 VII. A History of Hard Work 213 VIII. The Shadow of the Forty-five 245 IX. Tail-Piece 276 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE Mr. Gamble's Apprentice {to face Title). Taste of the Tow.n loo Shaving in the Isle of Sheppey 179 Laughing Audience ....... '. 225 " Taste in High Life '. 272 Finis; or, The Bathos 318 WILLIAM HOGARTH PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER. Little Boy Hogarth. " The Life and Adventures of William Hogarth,"—that would be a taking title, indeed ! To do for the great painter of manners that which Mr. Forster has done for would be a task their great describer, captivating ; and, successfully accomplished, might entitle a man to wear some little sprig of laurel in his cap, and rest, thence- forth, on his oars. It is not my fortune to have the of such a book for means writing ; and, many reasons, this performance must be limited to a series of Essays character of the upon the genius and MAN Hogarth ; upon the WORK he was permitted, by a healthful, sanguine constitution, and by great powers of will and self-reliance backboning an unflagging industry, to get in his here below and the through appointed span ; upon curious quaint Time in which he lived and did his work. I 2 WILLIAM HOGARTH. his would be Hogarth's life, away from works and times, but a barren theme. Those old Italian painting men had strange adventures and vicissitudes. Rafaelle's life was one brief glorious romance. Leonardo had a king's arms to die in. Buonarotti lived amidst battles and sieges, and held flouting matches with popes. Titian's pencil was picked up by an emperor. The Germans and Dutchmen, even, w^ere picturesque and eventful in their careers. Was not Rubens an ambassador .-• Are there not mysterious dealings between Rembrandt and the Jews that have not yet been fathomed .-• Did not Peter de Laar kill a monk ? But in what manner is the historian to extract exciting elements from the history of a chubby little man in a cocked hat and scarlet roque- " " laure, who lived at the sign of the Painter's Head in Leicester Fields, and died in his bed there in competence and honour who was the son of a schoolmaster in ; the Old Bailey, and the descendant of a long line of north- country yeomen, of whom the prime progenitor is pre- sumed to have kept pigs and to have gone by the rude " " name of Hogherd —whence Hogard and Hogart, at last liquefied into Hogarth ? Benvenuto Cellini worked for the silversmiths, but at least he had poniarded his man and lain for his sins in the of St. dungeons Angelo ; our Hogarth was a plain silversmith's apprentice, in Cranbourn Alley. He kept a shop aftenvards, and engraved tankards and salvers, and never committed a graver act of violence than to throw a pewter pot at the head of a ruffian who had insulted him during an outino- to Highgate. Honest man ! they never sent him to Newgate or the Tower. Only once he was clapped up for an hour or so in a Calais guardhouse, and, coming LITTLE BOY HOGARTH. 3 home by the next packet-boat, took a stout revenge on the frog-eaters with his etching needle upon copper. He was no traveller and the Calais great ; beyond ship just spoken of, does not appear to have undertaken any journeys more important than the immortal excursion to Rochester, of which the chronicle, illustrated by his own sketches, is still extant (those doughty setters-forth from the Bedford Head were decidedly the first Pickwickians), and a jaunt to St. Alban's after Culloden, to sketch the trapped fox Simon Fraser Lord Lovat, as he sate in the inn-room under the barber's hands, counting the dis- persed Highland clans and their available forces of caterans and brae-men on his half-palsied, crooked, pick- ing and stealing fingers. William Hogarth did but one romantic thing in his life, and that was, to run away with Sir James Thorn- hill's and even that soon pretty daughter ; escapade resolved itself into a cheery, English, business-like, housekeeping union. Papa-in-law—who painted cathe- dral cupolas at forty shillings a yard—forgave William and Jane. William loved his wife dearly—she had her tempers, and he was not a man of snow—took a country house for her, and set up a coach when things were going prosperously and he was Sergeant Painter to King William a as the George ; and when (not quite dotard, twin-scamps Wilkes and Churchill called him) died, Jane made a comfortable living by selling impressions of the plates he had engraved. These and the writing of the Analysis of Beauty, the dispute concerning Sigis- munda, the interest taken in the welfare of the Foundling Hospital, the dedication [in a pique against the king who " hated boets and bainters,"] of the Mardi to FincJilcy to I —2 4 WILLIAM HOGARTH. Frederick the Great, and the abortive picture auction scheme, are very nearly all the notable events in the life of William Hogarth. And yet the man left a name remembered now with affection and applause, and which will be remembered, and honoured, and glorified when who used the (to quote the self-conscious Unknown Public Advertiser as a fulcrum for that terrible lever of " are the force and his,) kings and ministers forgotten, direction of personal satire are no longer understood, and measures are felt only in their remotest consequences." By the announcement, then, that I do not contem- plate, here, a complete biography of Hogarth : that I do not know enough to complete a reliable and authentic " " : to life : ncc, si sciam, diccrc ausini these papers are be '^ " considered but as Memoircs pour scrvir ; little photo- graphs and chalk studies of drapery, furniture, acces- sories of costume and snuff-box, cocked hat and silver buckle detail, all useful enough in their place and way, but quite subordinate and inferior to the grand design and complete picture of the hero. I am aware that high critical authorities have been inveighing lately against the employment of the costumiers and brie a brae shop- and takers' attributes in keepers inventory biography ; and writers are enjoined, under heavy penalties, to be, all of them, Plutarchs, and limn their characters in half a dozen broad vigorous dashes. It can conduce little, it has been argued, towards our knowledge of the Seven Years' War to be told that Frederick the Great wore a " pigtail, and that to his jackboots Day and Martin with " their were forbidden to it has soot-pots approach ; and been asked whether any likelihood exists of our knowing more of the character of Napoleon Bonaparte from the LITTLE BOY HOGARTH. 5 sight of his cocked hat and tooth-brush at Madame Tussaud's. Presuming to run counter to the opinion of the high critical authorities, I would point out that the very best biographies that have ever been written—those of Samuel Johnson, Samuel Pepys [his diary being eminently biographical], Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Jean Jacques Rousseau [in the Confessions, and bating the lies and madnesses with which that poor crazed wanderer disfigures an otherwise limpid narrative]—are full of those little scraps and fragments of minute cross- " hatching, chronicles of seven livres three sols, parisis," lamentable records of unpaid-for hose, histories of joyous carouses, anecdotes of men and women's meannesses and generosities, and the like. On the other hand, how cold, pallid, unhuman, is the half-dozen-line character, with all its broad vigorous dashes ! Certain Roman emperors might have come out far better fellows from the historian's alembic if their togas and sandals had been more scrupulously dwelt upon. Is our awful vene- ration for St. Augustine one whit diminished by the small deer he condescends to hunt in the history of his youth .'' The heaviest blow and greatest discouragement to the composition of admirable biographies, are in the fact that strength and delicacy, vigour and finish, are seldom combined and that a Milton with a dash of the ; macaroni in him is a vara avis indeed. Now and then we find an elephant that can dance on the tight-rope without either or now and being awkward grotesque ; then we find a man with a mind like a Nasmyth's steam hammer, that can roll out huge bars of iron, and anon knock a tin-tack into a deal board with gentle accurate taps. These are the men who can describe a Revolu- 6 WILLIAM HOGARTH. which tion, and by its side the corned beef and carrots once to eat who can tell us country parsons were glad ; how the Bastile was stormed, and, a few pages on, what manner of coat and small-clothes wore Philip Egalite at christen his guillotining. When we find such men we them Macaulay or Carlyle.