Pictures_, where the second scene, still inoffensively reposing upon the
easel, is wantonly assaulted by a copy of the _Aldobrandini Marriage_.
In April following the set of engravings was issued, the subscription
ticket being the etching of heads known as _Characters and Caricaturas_.
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 them by the following notification in the _London Daily Post,
and General Advertiser_ of April 2nd, 1743:
"Mr. HOGARTH intends to publish by Subscription, SIX PRINTS from
Copper-Plates, engrav'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
may not be the least Objection to the Decency or Elegancy 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 some forgotten detraction, and if not actually
ironical, doubtless about as sincere as Fielding's promise, in the
Prologue to his first comedy, not to offend the ladies. Those who had
found inelegancy and indecency in the previous productions of the
painter, would still discover the same defects in the masterpiece he now
submitted to the public. And although it may be said that the
"characters" represented are not "personal" in a satirical sense, his
precautions, as he himself tells us, "did not prevent a likeness being
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 new work, "a variety of modern occurrences in
high-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.
James's? A Hervey or a Beauclerk, or even a Fielding, might have
sufficed; but a Hogarth of Leicester Fields, whose only pretence to
distinction (as High Life conceives it) was that he had run away with
Thornhill's handsome daughter,--what special title had he to depict that
charmed region of cards and folly, ringed with its long-resounding
knockers, and flambeau-carrying footmen! This was, however, to reckon
without genius, 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 _Pamela_ and _Joseph
Andrews_ but falteringly foreshadowed _Clarissa_ and _Tom Jones_. Yet
there is nothing in the story of _Marriage 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 nobleman who marries his son to a rich
citizen's daughter; a husband who, pursuing his own equivocal pleasures,
resigns his wife to the temptations of opportunity; a foregone sequel
and a tragic issue:--this material is of the oldest, and could make but
slender claim to originality. 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 combined and developed
under the brush of Hogarth, set in an atmosphere that makes it as vivid
as nature itself, decorated with surprising fidelity, and enlivened by
all the resources of the keenest humour, it passes out of the line of
mere transcripts of life, and, retaining the 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 was when it
was first offered to the world.
How well-preserved, even now, these wonderful pictures are! It would
almost seem as if Time, unreasoning in his anger, had determined to
ignore in every way the audacious artist who treated him with such
persistent indignity. Look at them in the National Gallery. Look, too,
at the cracks and fissures in the Wilkies, the soiled rainbows of
Turner,--the bituminous riding-habit of Lady Douro in Sir Edwin's _Story
of Waterloo_. But these paintings of William Hogarth are well-nigh 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 _trompe-l'oeil_,
probably better done than the figures using 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 it may be observed that
if in the ensuing descriptions we should speak of colour, the reader
will remember we are describing, not the performances of Messrs. Ravenet
and the rest, but Hogarth's original pictures at Trafalgar Square. It is
the more necessary to bear this in mind, because, besides being
reversed, the paintings frequently differ in detail from the engravings.
The first of the series represents the signing of the marriage
contract. The scene, as the artist is careful to signify 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, who,
with his gouty foot swathed in flannels, seems with a superb--if
somewhat stiff-jointed--dignity to be addressing certain pompous
observations respecting himself and his pedigree (dating from William
the Conqueror) to a sober-looking personage opposite, who,
horn-spectacles on nose, is peering at the endorsement of the "Marriage
Settlem^t of the R^t Hon^ble. 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 awkward
constraint of its attitude, forms an admirable contrast to the other. A
massive gold chain denotes the wearer to be an alderman. Between the two
is a third person, perhaps the merchant's confidential clerk or cashier,
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 alderman's daughter. It is, in
fact, an alliance of _sacs et parchemins_, in which the young people are
involved rather than interested. The lady, who looks young and pretty in
her bridal-dress, wears a mingled 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 compliment. Meantime
the Viscount--a frail, effeminate-looking figure, holding an open
snuff-box, from which he affectedly lifts a pinch--turns from his
_fiancée_ with a smirk of complacent foppery towards a pier-glass at his
side. His wide-cuffed coat is light blue, his vest is loaded with
embroidery. He wears an enormous _solitaire_, and has high red heels to
his shoes. Before him, in happy parody of the ill-matched pair, are two
dogs in coupling-links:--the bitch sits up, alert and curious, her
companion is lying down. The only other figure is that of an old lawyer,
who, with a plan in his hand, and a gesture of contempt or wonder, looks
through an open window at an ill-designed 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 fashion of the time.
The largest is a portrait in the French style of one of the earl's
ancestors, who traverses the canvas triumphantly. A cannon explodes
below him, a comet is seen above; and in his right 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 "dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining nor
ornamental," against which we have already heard the painter inveigh.
Upon the ceiling, with a nice sense of decorative fitness, is _Pharaoh
in the Red Sea_. From a sconce at the side, a Gorgon surveys the
proceedings with astonishment. Hogarth has used a similar idea in the
_Strolling Actresses_, where the same mask seems horrified at the airy
freedom of the lightly-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 proximity. These are the real actors in the drama. Building
_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 them. The furniture of the
bagnio, with its portrait of Moll Flanders humorously continued by the
sturdy legs of a Jewish soldier in the tapestry _Judgment of Solomon_
behind, the half-burned candle flaring in the draught of the open door
and window, the reflection of the lantern on the ceiling and the shadow
of the tongs on the floor, the horror-stricken look on the mask of the
lady and the satanic grin on that of her paramour, all deserve notice.
So do the gross Dutch pictures in the alderman's house, the sordid
pewter plates and the sumptuous silver goblet, the stained table-cloth,
the egg 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." From first to
last it progresses 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 seems inconceivable that, with this
magnificent work _en évidence_, 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 criticisms of the
Rev. William Gilpin as to his ignorance 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-frame-makers, and other
Connoisseurs"--to use his own graphically ironical words--had been
allowed to rank below the third-rate copyists of third-rate foreigners.
Beyond the remark that the "jaded morning 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_ makes no
material reference to _Marriage A-la-Mode_. His comments, besides, are
confined to the engravings. But Hazlitt, who saw the pictures in the
above-mentioned exhibition in 1814, devotes much of his criticism to the
tragedy 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 enthusiasm, made him a memorable critic of
Hogarth, whose general characteristics he defines with admirable
exactitude. Much quotation has made his description of the young Lord
and Counsellor Silvertongue sufficiently familiar. But he is equally
good in his vignette of the younger woman in the episode at the Quack
Doctor's, a creation which he rightly regards as one of Hogarth's most
successful efforts. "Nothing," he says, "can be more striking than 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
mechanism of the whole figure, which seems to have no other feeling but
a sickly sense of pain--show the deepest insight into human nature, and
into the effects of those refinements in depravity, by which it has been
good-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,
whom he is taking to task, and whose coat of green and yellow livery is
as long and melancholy as his face. The disconsolate look, the haggard
eyes, the open mouth, the comb sticking in the hair, the broken gapped
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 mild resignation 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 criticism that this very figure should have been
selected for especial praise, with particular reference to the charges
made against the painter of defective drawing, by another critic who was
not only as keenly sympathetic as Hazlitt, but was probably a better
anatomist--the author of _Rab and his Friends_.
To Hazlitt's general estimate of Hogarth we shall not now refer. But his
comparison of Hogarth and Wilkie may fairly be summarized in this place,
because it contains so much excellent discrimination of the former.
Wilkie, Hazlitt contends, is a simple realist; Hogarth is a comic
painter. While one is a "serious, prosaic, literal narrator of facts,"
the other is a moral satirist, "exposing vice and folly in their most
ludicrous points of view, and, with a profound insight 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 image.' He is so far from contenting
himself with still-life that he is always on the verge of caricature,
though without ever falling into it. He does not represent folly or vice
in its incipient, or dormant, or _grub_ state; but full-grown, with
wings, 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 mankind
are let loose, and set together by the ears, as in a bear-garden.
Hogarth paints nothing but comedy or tragi-comedy. Wilkie paints neither
one nor the other. Hogarth 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 jumble of odd things which are
brought together; you look at Wilkie's pictures with a mingled feeling
of 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 comes nearer to Hogarth than any other English artist;
and that elegant amateur, Sir George Howland Beaumont, reasoned rightly
when he judged the painter of _The Village Politicians_ to be, in his
day, the only fit recipient of Hogarth's mahl-stick.
To return to _Marriage 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 schemes devised
by Hogarth for disposing of his works. The bidding, said the
announcement in the _Daily Advertiser_, was to be by written notes; no
dealers in pictures were to be admitted as bidders; and the highest
bidder at noon on the 6th June was to be the purchaser.
Whether this mode of sale, coupled with the characteristic manner of its
notification, "disobliged the Town" or not, it is impossible to say; but
it is certain that when Mr. Lane, "of Hillingdon, near Uxbridge," who
was 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 "make the pounds guineas,"
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
time, no one had appeared, Hogarth, 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 frames that had cost Hogarth four
guineas a-piece. Mr. Lane, who readily promised not to sell or clean the
pictures without the knowledge of the painter, left them at his death
to his nephew, Colonel J.F. Cawthorne, by whom they were put up to
auction in March, 1792, but were bought 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.
_William Hogarth_ (New York and London, 1891).
FOOTNOTES:
[23] "It was reserved to Hogarth to write a scene of furniture. The
rake's levee-room, the nobleman's dining-room, the apartments of the
husband and wife in _Marriage A-la-Mode_, the alderman's parlour, the
poet's bed-chamber, and many others, are the history of the manners of
the age." 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.
[25] Not the "sole bidder," as Allan Cunningham and others have
inferred. If this were so, in "making the pounds guineas," Mr. Lane
would be bidding against himself, a thing which occasionally occurs at
auctions, but is not recommended. We have failed to find any other
account of this transaction than that supplied to Nichols for his second
edition of 1782, pp. 225-7, by Mr. Lane himself, which is summarized
above. Cunningham seems to have derived his information from the same
source; but he strangely transforms it. We can but surmise that he
followed Ireland's transcript, in which the highest bid is given as
£110, instead of £120--a rather unfortunate mistake, for it appears to
have misled a good many people.
THE MADONNA OF THE ROCKS
(_LEONARDO DA VINCI_)
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
The engraving has popularized the _Vierge aux Rochers_,[26] that
composition that exhales the strange and mysterious grace of the master.
In a strange spot, a kind of grotto bristling with stalactites and
sharply pointed rocks, the holy Virgin presents the little Saint John to
the Infant Jesus, who blesses him with uplifted finger. An angel with a
proud and charming face,--a celestial hermaphrodite having something of
the young maiden and the youth but superior to either in his ideal
beauty,--accompanies and supports the little Jesus like a page of the
great household who watches over the child of the king with mingled
respect and protection. Hair of a thousand crisp curls frames that face
so aristocratic and distinguished. Certainly this angel occupies a
very high rank in the hierarchy of the sky; he should, at least, possess
a throne, a dominion, or a principality. The Infant Jesus draws himself
up in a pose that shows great knowledge of foreshortening, and is a
marvel of roundness and fine modelling. The Virgin is of that charming
Lombard type in which under chaste innocence appears that malicious
playfulness which da Vinci excels in rendering. The colour of this
majestic picture has blackened, particularly in the shadows, but it has
lost nothing of its harmony, and perhaps it is more ideally poetic than
if it had kept its original freshness and the natural tones of life.
Doubts have been raised regarding this picture. Some critics have wished
to see here merely a composition by Leonardo executed by a strange hand,
or even simply the copy of another canvas painted for the chapel of the
Conception of the church of the Franciscans in Milan. But none other
than Leonardo could have drawn such firm and pure contours or carried
this model through those learned grades that give to the body the
roundness of sculpture with all the softness of skin, or rendered his
favourite types so superbly and delicately....
[Illustration: THE MADONNA OF THE ROCKS.
_L. da Vinci._]
_The Madonna of the Rocks_, the engraving of which is so well known,
belongs to and may be considered the type of Leonardo's second manner.
The modelling is pursued with a care not found in those painters who are
not familiar with the engraving chisel. The roundness of the bodies
obtained by gradation of tints, the exactness of the shadows and the
parsimonious reserve in the light in this unparalleled picture betray
the habits of a sculptor. We know that Leonardo was one, and he often
said: "It is only in modelling that the painter can find the science of
shadow." For a long time earthen figures which he made use of in his
work were preserved.
The appearance of the _Madonna of the Rocks_ is singular, mysterious,
and charming. A kind of basaltic grotto shelters the divine group placed
on the bank of a spring which shows the stones of its bed through its
limpid waters. Through the arched grotto we see a rocky landscape dotted
with slender trees and traversed by a stream, on the banks of which is a
village; the colour of all this is as indefinable as those chimerical
countries that we pass through in dreams and is marvellously appropriate
to set off the figures.