"Prosperity (with harlot's smiles,
Most pleasing when she most beguiles),
How soon, sweet foe, can all thy train
Of false, gay, frantic, loud, and vain,
Enter the unprovided mind,
And memory in fetters bind?
Load faith and love with golden chain,
And sprinkle Lethe o'er the brain!
Pleasure, on her silver throne,
Smiling comes, nor comes alone;
Venus comes with her along,
And smooth Lyæus, ever young;
And in their train, to fill the press,
Come apish Dance, and swoln Excess,
Mechanic Honour, vicious Taste,
And Fashion in her changing vest."
--HOADLEY.
[Illustration: THE RAKE'S PROGRESS, PLATE II.]
The sordid avarice of the wretched miser is in this print contrasted
by the giddy profusion of his prodigal heir. The old man pined in
the midst of plenty, starved while surrounded by abundance, and
refused himself enjoyment of the absolute necessaries of life from an
apprehension of future poverty.
"Not so his son; he mark'd this oversight,
And quite mistook reverse of wrong for right."
Three years have elapsed, and our giddy spendthrift, throwing of the
awkwardness of a rustic, assumes the character and apes the manners
of a modern fine gentleman. To qualify himself for performing the
part, he is attended by a French tailor, a milliner, a Parisian
dancing-master,[67] a Gallic fencing-master,[68] an English
prize-fighter,[69] and a teacher of music.[70] Besides this crowd
of masters of arts, he has at his levee a blower of the French horn,
an improver of gardens,[71] a bravo,[72] a jockey,[73] and a poet!
the latter having written a panegyric in honour of this exalted
character, already anticipates approbation and reward. Surrounded
by such a multitude of attentive friends and warm admirers, the
dissolution of his fortune is inevitable; it must melt like snow
beneath the solar beam.
How exactly does Bramston describe the character in his _Man of
Taste_:
"Without Italian, and without an ear,
To Bononcini's music I adhere.
To boon companions I my time would give,
With players, pimps, and parasites I'd live;
I would with jockeys from Newmarket dine,
And to rough riders give my choicest wine.
My evenings all I would with sharpers spend,
And make the thief-taker my bosom friend;
In Figg the prize-fighter by day delight,
And sup with Colley Cibber every night."
On the back of the musician's chair hangs a list of presents which
Farinelli, an Italian singer, received the day after his performance
of a favourite character at the Opera House. Among others, a gold
snuff-box, chased with the story of Orpheus charming the brutes, from
T. Rakewell, Esq.
Another memento of musical extravagance is the frontispiece to a
poem lying on the floor, and dedicated to Esquire Rakewell, in which
the ladies of Great Britain are represented as sacrificing their
hearts to this idol of sound, and crying out with great earnestness,
One God, one Farinelli! This intimates the violent rage of the
fashionable world for that most frivolous of all amusements, the
Italian Opera. The taste which our prodigal has imbibed for the turf
is pointed out by the jockey presenting a silver punch-bowl, which
one of his horses is supposed to have won; his passion for another
royal amusement, by the portraits of two fighting-cocks, hung up as
the ornaments of his saloon. A picture which he has placed between
them bears a whimsical allusion; it is the "Judgment of Paris."[74]
The figures in the background consist of such persons as are general
attendants in the ante-chamber of a dissipated man of fashion. The
whole is a high-wrought satire on those men of rank and fortune whose
follies render them a prey to the artful and rapacious.
Of the expression in this print we cannot speak more highly
than it deserves. Every character is marked with its proper
and discriminative stamp. It has been said by a very judicious
critic,[75] from whom it is not easy to differ without being wrong,
that the hero of this history, in the first plate of the series, is
unmeaning; and in the second, ungraceful. The fact is admitted; but,
for so delineating him, the author is entitled to our praise rather
than our censure. Rakewell's whole conduct proves he was a fool,
and at that time he had not learned how to perform an artificial
character; he therefore looks as he is, unmeaning and uninformed.
But in the second plate he is ungraceful--granted. The ill-educated
son of so avaricious a father could not have been introduced into
very good company; and though, by the different teachers who surround
him, it evidently appears that he wishes to assume the character of
a gentleman, his internal feelings tell him he has not attained it.
Under that consciousness, he is properly and naturally represented as
ungraceful and embarrassed in his new situation.
The light, it must be acknowledged, is very ill distributed, and the
figures most inartificially grouped. To infer from hence, with Mr.
Gilpin, that the artist was at a loss how to group them, is not quite
fair: his others compositions prove that he was not ignorant of the
art, but in many of them he has been inattentive to it. In this he
may have introduced in his print figures which were not inserted in
the sketch, merely because they were appropriate to his story. The
expression of the actors in his drama was always his leading object;
composition he considered as secondary, and was little solicitous
about their situation on the stage.