Chapter IV: A Black Sheep (4)

In 1726, Hogarth executed a series of plates for _Blackwell’s Military Figures_, representing the drill and manœuvres of the Honourable Artillery Company. The pike and half-pike exercise are very carefully and curiously illustrated; the figures evidently drawn from life; the attitudes very easy. The young man was improving in his drawing; for in 1724, Thornhill had started an academy for studying from the round and from life at his own house, in Covent Garden Piazza; and Hogarth—who himself tells us that his head was filled with the paintings at Greenwich and St. Paul’s, and to whose utmost ambition of scratching copper, there was now probably added the secret longing to be a historico-allegorico-scriptural painter I have hinted at, and who hoped some day to make Angels sprawl on coved ceilings, and Fames blast their trumpets on grand staircases—was one of the earliest students at the academy of the king’s sergeant painter, and member of parliament for Weymouth. Already William had ventured an opinion, _bien tranchée_, on high art. In those days there flourished—yes, flourished is the word—a now forgotten celebrity, Kent the architect, gardener, painter, decorator, upholsterer, friend of the great, and a hundred things besides. This artistic jack-of-all-trades became so outrageously popular, and gained such a reputation for taste—if a man have strong lungs, and persists in crying out that he is a genius, the public are sure to believe him at last—that he was consulted on almost every tasteful topic, and was teased to furnish designs for the most incongruous objects. He was consulted for picture-frames, drinking-glasses, barges, dining-room tables, garden-chairs, cradles, and birth-day gowns. One lady he dressed in a petticoat ornamented with columns of the five orders; to another he prescribed a copper-coloured skirt, with gold ornaments. The man was at best but a wretched sciolist; but he for a long period directed the “taste of the town.” He had at last the presumption to paint an altar-piece for the church of St. Clement Danes. The worthy parishioners, men of no taste at all, burst into a yell of derision and horror at this astounding _croûte_. Forthwith, irreverent young Mr. Hogarth lunged full butt with his graver at the daub. He produced an engraving of _Kent’s Masterpiece_, which was generally considered to be an unmerciful caricature; but which he himself declared to be an accurate representation of the picture. ’Twas the first declaration of his _guerra al cuchillo_ against the connoisseurs. The caricature, or copy, whichever it was, made a noise; the tasteless parishioners grew more vehement, and, at last, Gibson, Bishop of London (whose brother, by the way, had paid his first visit to London in the company of Dominie Hogarth), interfered, and ordered the removal of the obnoxious canvas. “Kent’s masterpiece” subsided into an ornament for a tavern-room. For many years it was to be seen (together with the landlord’s portrait, I presume) at the “Crown and Anchor,” in the Strand. Then it disappeared, and faded away from the visible things extant.

With another bookseller’s commission, I arrive at another halting-place in the career of William Hogarth. In 1726-7 appeared his eighteen illustrations to Butler’s _Hudibras_. They are of considerable size, broadly and vigorously executed, and display a liberal instalment of the _vis comica_, of which William was subsequently to be so lavish. Ralpho is smug and sanctified to a nicety. Hudibras is a marvellously droll-looking figure, but he is not human, is generally execrably drawn, and has a head preternaturally small, and so pressed down between the clavicles, that you might imagine him to be of the family of the anthropophagi, whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. There is a rare constable, the perfection of Dogberryism-_cum_-Bumbledom, in the tableau of Hudibras in the stocks. The widow is graceful and beautiful to look at. Unlike Wilkie, Hogarth _could_ draw pretty women;[9] the rogue who chucks the widow’s attendant under the chin is incomparable, and Trulla is a most truculent brimstone. The “committee” is a character full study of sour faces. The procession of the “Skimmington” is full of life and animation; and the concluding tableau, “Burning rumps at Temple Bar,” is a wondrous street-scene, worthy of the ripe Hogarthian epoch of _The Progresses_, _The Election_, _Beer Street_ and _Gin Lane_. This edition of Butler’s immortal satire had a great run; and the artist often regretted that he had parted absolutely, and at once, with his property in the plates.

So now then, William Hogarth, we part once more, but soon to meet again. Next shall the moderns know thee—student at Thornhill’s Academy—as a painter as well as an engraver. A philosopher—_quoique tu n’en doutais guère_—thou hast been all along.

FOOTNOTES

[2] To me there is something candid, naïve, and often something noble in this personal consciousness and confidence, this moderate self-trumpeting. “_Questi sono miri!_” cried Napoleon, when, at the sack of Milan, the MS. treatises of Leonardo da Vinci were discovered; and he bore them in triumph to his hotel, suffering no meaner hand to touch them. _He_ knew—the Conquering Thinker—that he alone was worthy to possess those priceless papers. So too, Honoré de Balzac calmly remarking that there were only three men in France who could speak French correctly: himself, Victor Hugo, and “Théophile” (T. Gautier). So, too, Elliston, when the little ballet-girl complained of having been hissed: “They have hissed _me_,” said the awful manager, and the dancing girl was dumb. Who can forget the words that Milton wrote concerning things of his “that posteritie would not willingly let die?” and that Bacon left, commending his fame to “foreign nations and to the next age?” And Turner, simply directing in his will that he should be buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral? That sepulchre, the painter knew, was his of right. And innocent Gainsborough, dying: “We are all going to heaven, and Vandyke is of the company.” And Fontenelle, calmly expiring at a hundred years of age: “_Je n’ai jamais dit la moindre chose centre la plus petite vertu._” ’Tis true, that my specious little argument falls dolefully to the ground when I remember that which the wisest man who ever lived said concerning a child gathering shells and pebbles on the sea-shore, when the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him.

[3] The bezant (from Byzantium) was a round knob on the scutcheon, blazoned yellow. “Golp” was purple, _the colour of an old black eye_, so defined by the heralds. “Sanguine” or “guzes” were to be congested red, like bloodshot eyes; “torteaux” were of another kind of red, like “Simnel cakes.” “Pomeis” were to be green like apples. “Tawny” was orange. There were also “hurts” to be blazoned blue, as bruises are.—_New View of London_, 1712.

[4] I believe Pope’s sneer against poor Elkanah Settle (who died very comfortably in the Charterhouse, 1724, ætat. 76: he was alive in 1720, and succeeded Rowe as laureate), that he was reduced in his latter days to compass a motion of St. George and the Dragon at Bartholomew fair, and himself enacted the dragon in a peculiar suit of green leather, his own invention, to have been a purely malicious and mendacious bit of spite. Moreover, Settle died years after Pope assumed him to have expired.

[5] 1720. The horrible room in Newgate Prison where in cauldrons of boiling pitch the hangman seethed the dissevered limbs of those executed for high treason, and whose quarters were to be exposed, was called “Jack Ketch’s kitchen.”

[6] Compare these voluntary torments with the description of the _Dosèh_, or horse-trampling ceremonial of the Sheik El Bekree, over the bodies of the faithful, in Lane’s _Modern Egyptians_.

[7] Daniel Button’s well-known coffee-house was on the south side of Russell Street, Covent Garden, nearly opposite Tom’s. Button had been a servant of the Countess of Warwick, and so was patronized by her spouse, the Right Hon. Joseph Addison. Sir Robert Walpole’s creature, Giles Earl, a trading justice of the peace (compare Fielding and “300_l._ a year of the dirtiest money in the world”) used to examine criminals, for the amusement of the company, in the public room at Button’s. Here, too, was a lion’s head letter-box, into which communications for the _Guardian_ were dropped. At Button’s, Pope is reported to have said of Patrick, the lexicographer, who made pretensions to criticism, that “a dictionary-maker might know the meaning of one word, but not of two put together.”

[8] Not, however, to forget that another Duchess, Marlborough’s daughter, who loved Congreve so, had after his death a waxen image made in his effigy, and used to weep over it, and anoint the gouty feet.

[9] “They said he could not colour,” said old Mrs. Hogarth one day to John Thomas Smith, showing him a sketch of a girl’s head. “It’s a lie; look there: there’s flesh and blood for you, my man.”

Studies in Animal Life.

“Authentic tidings of invisible things;—
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power,
And central peace subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation.”—THE EXCURSION.