SHE. "Oh, then you ought to come down to our Neighborhood in the
Winter. It would just suit you, there are such a lot of Geese about--
a--a--I mean _Wild_ Geese of course!"--_Punch_, November 21, 1891.]
Hogarth seems to have come nearer to this ideal pictorial satirist
than any of his successors in _Punch_ and elsewhere. For he was not
merely a light humorist and a genial caricaturist; he dealt also in
pathos and terror, in tragic passion and sorrow and crime; he often
strikes chords of too deep a tone for the pages of a comic periodical.
But the extent of his productiveness was limited by the method of his
production; he was a great painter in oils, and each of his life
scenes is an important and elaborate picture, which, moreover, he
engraved himself at great cost of time and labour, after the original
time and labour spent in painting it. It is by these engravings, far
more than by his pictures, that he is so widely known.
It is quite possible to conceive a little sketchy woodcut no larger
than a cut in _Punch_, and drawn by a master like Charles Keene, or
the German Adolf Menzel, giving us all the essence of any picture by
Hogarth even more effectively, more agreeably, than any of Hogarth's
most finished engravings. And if this had been Hogarth's method of
work, instead of some fifty or sixty of those immortal designs we
should have had some five or six thousand! Almost a library!
So much for the great pictorial satirist of the future--of the near
future, let us hope--that I have been trying to evolve from my inner
consciousness. May some of us live to see him!