Part 15 (2/2)
Plates I and VI were engraved by Scotin, Plates II and III by Baron, and Plates IV and V by Ravenet Exactly two years earlier, Hogarth had heralded the notification in the _London Daily Post, and General Advertiser_ of April 2nd, 1743:
”Mr HOGARTH intends to publish by Subscription, SIX PRINTS frorav'd by the best Masters in Paris, after his own Paintings; representing a Variety of _Modern Occurrences in High-Life_, and called MARRIAGE A-LA-MODE Particular Care will be taken, that there ancy of the whole Work, and that none of the Characters represented shall be personal”
Then follow the terms of subscription The last quoted lines are probably a bark at sootten detraction, and if not actually ironical, doubtless about as sincere as Fielding's proue to his first coancy and indecency in the previous productions of the painter, would still discover the same defects in the h it may be said that the ”characters” represented are not ”personal” in a satirical sense, his precautions, as he hi found for each head, for a general character will always bear some resemblance to a particular one”
But what, no doubt, interested his critical contemporaries even more than these preliminary protestations, was the painter's promise to represent, in his neork, ”a variety of h-life” Here, it may be admitted, was a proposition which certainly savoured of temerity What could one whose pencil had scarcely travelled beyond the limits of St Giles's, know of the inner secrets of St
Jaht have sufficed; but a Hogarth of Leicester Fields, whose only pretence to distinction (as High Life conceives it) was that he had run aith Thornhill's handsohter,--what special title had he to depict that char knockers, and flaenius, which over-leaps loftier barriers than these It is true that the English Novel of Manners, which has since stimulated so many artists, had only just made its appearance; and _Paly foreshadowed _Clarissa_ and _Toe A-la-Mode_ which was beyond the powers of a _spectator ab extra_, always provided he were fairly acquainted with the Modelys and Wildairs of the stage, and the satires of Johnson and Pope The plot, like that of all masterpieces, is extremely simple An impoverished noblehter; a husband who, pursuing his own equivocal pleasures, resigns his wife to the teic issue:--this material is of the oldest, and could inality Submitted to Colman or Garrick as the _scenario_ of a play for Yates and Mrs Woffington, it would probably have been rejected as pitifully threadbare Yet coarth, set in an atmosphere thatfidelity, and enlivened by all the resources of the keenest humour, it passes out of the line ofthe merits of the specific and particular, becomes a representative and typical work, as articulate to-day, as direct and unhesitating in its teaching, as it hen it was first offered to the world
Hoell-preserved, even now, these wonderful pictures are! It would aler, had deternore in every way the audacious artist who treated hinity Look at them in the National Gallery Look, too, at the cracks and fissures in the Wilkies, the soiled rainbows of Turner,--the bitu-habit of Lady Douro in Sir Edwin's _Story of Waterloo_ But these paintings of Williah as fresh to-day as when, new from the easel, they found their fortunate purchaser in Mr Lane of Hillingdon They are not worked like a Denner, it is true, and the artist is often less solicitous about his method than about the result of it; yet they are soundly, straight-forwardly, and skilfully executed Lady Bingley's red hair, Carestini's nostril, are shown in the simplest and directest manner Everywhere the desired effect is exactly produced, and without effort Take, as an illustration, the inkstand in the first scene, with its bell and sand-caster In these days it would be a patient _tro it Here it is merely indicated, not elaborated; it holds its exact place as a piece of furniture, and nothing more And at this point itdescriptions we should speak of colour, the reader will re, not the perforinal pictures at Trafalgar Square It is thereversed, the paintings frequently differ in detail fros
The first of the series represents the signing of the nify by the ostentatious coronets on the furniture and accessories (they are to be discerned even on the crutches), is laid in the house of an earl, ith his gouty foot swathed in flannels, seenity to be addressing certain po froe opposite, who, horn-spectacles on nose, is peering at the endorsee Settlemt of the Rt Honble Lord Vincent [Squanderfield]”[24] This second figure, which is that of a London merchant, with its turned-in toes, the point of the sword-sheath between the legs, and the aard constraint of its attitude, forold chain denotes the wearer to be an alderman Between the two is a third person, perhaps the merchant's confidential clerk or cashi+er, who holds out a ”Mortgage” to the Earl Gold and notes lie upon the table, where are also an inkstand, sealing-wax, and a lighted candle in which a ”thief” is conspicuous At the back of this trio is the betrothed couple--the earl's son and the alderhter It is, in fact, an alliance of _sacs et parche people are involved rather than interested The lady, who looks young and pretty in her bridal-dress, wears a led expression of _mauvaise honte_ and distaste for her position, and trifles with the ring, which she has strung upon her handkerchief, while a brisk and well-built young lawyer, who trims a pen, bends towards her with a whispered co figure, holding an open snuff-box, from which he affectedly lifts a pinch--turns from his _fiancee_ with a slass at his side His wide-cuffed coat is light blue, his vest is loaded with eh red heels to his shoes Before his in coupling-links:--the bitch sits up, alert and curious, her coure is that of an old lawyer, ith a plan in his hand, and a gesture of contened and partly-erected building, in front of which several idle servants are lounging or sitting Like Pope's ”Visto,” the Earl has ”a taste,” and his taste, interrupted for the moment by lack of funds, is the ruinous one of bricks and mortar
The pictures on the wall exemplify and satirize the fashi+on of the tiest is a portrait in the French style of one of the earl's ancestors, who traverses the canvas triumphantly A cannon explodes below hiht hand, notwithstanding his cuirass and voluminous Queen-Anne peruke, he brandishes the thunderbolt of Jupiter _Judith and Holofernes_, _St Sebastian_, _The Murder of Abel_, _David and Goliath_, _The Martyrdom of St Laurence_, are some of the rest, all of which, it is perhaps needless to note, belong to those ”disainst which we have already heard the painter inveigh
Upon the ceiling, with a nice sense of decorative fitness, is _Pharaoh in the Red Sea_ Fros with astonish Actresses_, where the sahtly-clad lady who there enacts the part of Diana
In the picture of the _Contract_, the young people and ”Counsellor Silvertongue,” as he has been christened by the artist, are placed in close proxi _immemor sepulcri_, the old earl had but few years to live Henceforth he is seen no more; and the alderman reappears only at the end of the story
We have only dealt briefly with these concluding pictures, the decorations and accessories of which are to the full as minute and effective as those of the one that precede thenio, with its portrait of Moll Flanders hus of a Jewish soldier in the tapestry _Judg in the draught of the open door and , the reflection of the lantern on the ceiling and the shadow of the tongs on the floor, the horror-stricken look on the rin on that of her paraross Dutch pictures in the alderman's house, the sordid pewter plates and the su in rice, and the pig's head which the half-starved and ravenous dog is stealing There is no defect of invention, no superfluity of detail, no purposeless stroke in this ”owre true tale” Froresses steadily to its catastrophe by a forward march of skilfully linked and fully developed incidents It is like a novel of Fielding on canvas; and it seenificent work _en evidence_, the critics of that age should have been contented to re-echo the opinion of Walpole that ”as a painter Hogarth had but slender merit,” and to cackle the foot-rule criticisnorance of composition But so it was
Not until that exhibition of his works at the British Institution in 1814, was it thoroughly understood how excellent and individual both as a designer and a colourist was this native artist, whom ”Picture-dealers, Picture-cleaners, Picture-fraraphically ironical words--had been allowed to rank below the third-rate copyists of third-rate foreigners
Beyond the re countenance” of the Viscount in Scene II ”lectures on the vanity of pleasure as audibly as anything in Ecclesiastics,” Lamb's incomparable essay in _The Reflector_ e A-la-Mode_ His cos But Hazlitt, who saw the pictures in the above-mentioned exhibition in 1814, devotes edy of the Squanderfields, chiefly, it would seem, because Lamb had left the subject untouched Hazlitt's own studies as an artist, his keen insight and his quick enthusiaseneral characteristics he defines with admirable exactitude Much quotation hasLord and Counsellor Silvertongue sufficiently faer woman in the episode at the Quack Doctor's, a creation which he rightly regards as one of Hogarth's ,” he says, ”can bethan the contrast between the extreme softness of her person and the hardened indifference of her character The vacant stillness, the docility to vice, the premature suppression of youthful sensibility, the doll-like ure, which see but a sickly sense of pain--show the deepest insight into human nature, and into the effects of those refineood-naturedly asserted that 'vice loses half its evil in losing all its grossness'” In the death of the Countess, again, he speaks thus of two of the subordinate characters:--”We would particularly refer to the captious, petulant self-sufficiency of the apothecary, whose face and figure are constructed on exact physiognomical principles, and to the fine example of passive obedience, and non-resistance in the servant, whoreen and yellow livery is as long and ard eyes, the open apped teeth, which, as it were, hitch in an answer--everything about him denotes the utmost perplexity and dismay” Some other of Hazlitt's comments are more fanciful, as, for example, when he compares Lady Squanderfield's curl papers (in the ”Toilet Scene”) to a ”wreath of half-blown flowers,” and those of the macaroni-amateur to ”a _chevaux-de-frise_ of horns, which adorn and fortify the lack-lustre expression and nation of the face beneath” With his condemnation of the attitude of the husband, in the scene at the ”Turk's Head Bagnio,” as ”one in which it would be impossible for him to stand, or even fall,” it is difficult to coincide; and it is an illustration of the contradictions of criticisure should have been selected for especial praise, with particular reference to the charges , by another critic as not only as keenly sympathetic as Hazlitt, but was probably a better anatomist--the author of _Rab and his Friends_
To Hazlitt's general estiarth we shall not now refer But his coarth and Wilkie may fairly be summarized in this place, because it contains so much excellent discrimination of the forarth is a comic painter While one is a ”serious, prosaic, literal narrator of facts,”
the other is avice and folly in their ht into the weak sides of character and manners in all their tendencies, combinations, and contrasts He is carried away by a passion for the _ridiculous_
His object is not so much 'to hold the mirror up to nature' as 'to show vice her own feature, scorn her own i hie of caricature, though without ever falling into it He does not represent folly or vice in its incipient, or dors, pampered into all sorts of affectation, airy, ostentatious, and extravagant There is a perpetual collision of eccentricities--a tilt and tournament of absurdities; the prejudices and caprices of ether by the ears, as in a bear-garden
Hogarth paints nothing but coi-coarth never looks at any object but to find out a moral or a ludicrous effect Wilkie never looks at any object but to see that it is there In looking at Hogarth, you are ready to burst your sides with laughing at the unaccountable juether; you look at Wilkie's pictures with aof curiosity and admiration at the accuracy of the representation” The distinction thus drawn is, in the main, a just one Yet, at certain points, Wilkie colish artist; and that elegant ahtly when he judged the painter of _The Village Politicians_ to be, in his day, the only fit recipient of Hogarth's e A-la-Mode_ Notwithstanding that the pictures were, as stated at the beginning of this chapter, announced for sale in 1745, it was five years before they actually found a purchaser, although, in the interval, they seem to have been freely exhibited both at the ”Golden Head” and at cock's Auction Rooms In 1750, however, they were at last disposed of by another of those unfortunate sche, said the announcement in the _Daily Advertiser_, was to be by written notes; no dealers in pictures were to be adhest bidder at noon on the 6th June was to be the purchaser
Whether this mode of sale, coupled with the characteristic ed the Town” or not, it is impossible to say; but it is certain that when Mr Lane, ”of Hillingdon, near Uxbridge,” as to become the lucky proprietor of the pictures, arrived on the date appointed at the ”Golden Head,” he found he was the only bidder who had put in an appearance[25] In fact, there was no one in the room but the painter himself and his friend Dr Parsons, Secretary to the Royal Society The highest written offer having been declared to be 120, Mr
Lane, shortly before twelve, said he would ”uineas,”
but subsequently much to his credit, offered the artist a delay of some hours to find a better purchaser An hour passed, and as, up to that tiarth, much mortified, surrendered the pictures to Mr Lane, who thus became the owner of the artist's best work, and the finest pictorial satire of the century, for the modest sum of 126, which included Carlo Marratti frauineas a-piece Mr Lane, who readily proe of the painter, left them at his death to his nephew, Colonel JF Cawthorne, by whoht in again for 910 guineas In 1797 they were sold at Christie's for 1,381 to Mr John Julius Angerstein, with the rest of whose collection they were acquired in 1824 for the National Gallery
_Williaarth_ (New York and London, 1891)
FOOTNOTES:
[23] ”It was reserved to Hogarth to write a scene of furniture The rake's levee-roo-rooe A-la-Mode_, the alderman's parlour, the poet's bed-chamber, and e” So says Horace Walpole (_Anecdotes_, etc, 1771, p 74), and in this, at least, he was an unimpeachable authority
[24] The name is added in the print