MR. HAROLD SMITH’S LECTURE.
On the whole the party at Chaldicotes was very pleasant and the
time passed away quickly enough. Mr. Robarts’s chief friend there,
independently of Mr. Sowerby, was Miss Dunstable, who seemed to take
a great fancy to him, whereas she was not very accessible to the
blandishments of Mr. Supplehouse, nor more specially courteous even to
her host than good manners required of her. But then Mr. Supplehouse
and Mr. Sowerby were both bachelors, while Mark Robarts was a married
man.
With Mr. Sowerby Robarts had more than one communication respecting
Lord Lufton and his affairs, which he would willingly have avoided had
it been possible. Sowerby was one of those men who are always mixing up
business with pleasure, and who have usually some scheme in their mind
which requires forwarding. Men of this class have, as a rule, no daily
work, no regular routine of labour; but it may be doubted whether they
do not toil much more incessantly than those who have.
“Lufton is so dilatory,” Mr. Sowerby said. “Why did he not arrange this
at once, when he promised it? And then he is so afraid of that old
woman at Framley Court. Well, my dear fellow, say what you will; she is
an old woman and she’ll never be younger. But do write to Lufton and
tell him that this delay is inconvenient to me; he’ll do anything for
you, I know.”
Mark said that he would write, and, indeed, did do so; but he did not
at first like the tone of the conversation into which he was dragged.
It was very painful to him to hear Lady Lufton called an old woman, and
hardly less so to discuss the propriety of Lord Lufton’s parting with
his property. This was irksome to him, till habit made it easy. But by
degrees his feelings became less acute and he accustomed himself to his
friend Sowerby’s mode of talking.
And then on the Saturday afternoon they all went over to Barchester.
Harold Smith during the last forty-eight hours had become crammed to
overflowing with Sarawak, Labuan, New Guinea, and the Salomon Islands.
As is the case with all men labouring under temporary specialities,
he for the time had faith in nothing else, and was not content that
any one near him should have any other faith. They called him Viscount
Papua and Baron Borneo; and his wife, who headed the joke against him,
insisted on having her title. Miss Dunstable swore that she would wed
none but a South Sea islander; and to Mark was offered the income and
duties of Bishop of Spices. Nor did the Proudie family set themselves
against these little sarcastic quips with any overwhelming severity.
It is sweet to unbend oneself at the proper opportunity, and this was
the proper opportunity for Mrs. Proudie’s unbending. No mortal can be
seriously wise at all hours; and in these happy hours did that usually
wise mortal, the bishop, lay aside for awhile his serious wisdom.
“We think of dining at five to-morrow, my Lady Papua,” said the
facetious bishop; “will that suit his lordship and the affairs of
State? he! he! he!” And the good prelate laughed at the fun.
How pleasantly young men and women of fifty or thereabouts can joke
and flirt and poke their fun about, laughing and holding their sides,
dealing in little innuendoes and rejoicing in nicknames when they have
no Mentors of twenty-five or thirty near them to keep them in order.
The vicar of Framley might perhaps have been regarded as such a Mentor,
were it not for that capability of adapting himself to the company
immediately around him on which he so much piqued himself. He therefore
also talked to my Lady Papua, and was jocose about the Baron,--not
altogether to the satisfaction of Mr. Harold Smith himself.
For Mr. Harold Smith was in earnest and did not quite relish these
jocundities. He had an idea that he could in about three months talk
the British world into civilizing New Guinea, and that the world of
Barsetshire would be made to go with him by one night’s efforts. He did
not understand why others should be less serious, and was inclined to
resent somewhat stiffly the amenities of our friend Mark.
“We must not keep the Baron waiting,” said Mark, as they were preparing
to start for Barchester.
“I don’t know what you mean by the Baron, sir,” said Harold Smith. “But
perhaps the joke will be against you, when you are getting up into your
pulpit to-morrow and sending the hat round among the clodhoppers of
Chaldicotes.”
“Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones; eh, Baron?”
said Miss Dunstable. “Mr. Robarts’s sermon will be too near akin to
your lecture to allow of his laughing.”
“If we can do nothing towards instructing the outer world till it’s
done by the parsons,” said Harold Smith, “the outer world will have to
wait a long time, I fear.”
“Nobody can do anything of that kind short of a member of parliament
and a would-be minister,” whispered Mrs. Harold.
And so they were all very pleasant together, in spite of a little
fencing with edge tools; and at three o’clock the _cortége_ of
carriages started for Barchester, that of the bishop, of course,
leading the way. His lordship, however, was not in it.
“Mrs. Proudie, I’m sure you’ll let me go with you,” said Miss
Dunstable, at the last moment, as she came down the big stone steps. “I
want to hear the rest of that story about Mr. Slope.”
Now this upset everything. The bishop was to have gone with his wife,
Mrs. Smith, and Mark Robarts; and Mr. Sowerby had so arranged matters
that he could have accompanied Miss Dunstable in his phaeton. But no
one ever dreamed of denying Miss Dunstable anything. Of course Mark
gave way; but it ended in the bishop declaring that he had no special
predilection for his own carriage, which he did in compliance with a
glance from his wife’s eye. Then other changes of course followed, and,
at last, Mr. Sowerby and Harold Smith were the joint occupants of the
phaeton.
The poor lecturer, as he seated himself, made some remark such as those
he had been making for the last two days--for out of a full heart the
mouth speaketh. But he spoke to an impatient listener. “D---- the South
Sea islanders,” said Mr. Sowerby. “You’ll have it all your own way in
a few minutes, like a bull in a china-shop; but for Heaven’s sake let
us have a little peace till that time comes.” It appeared that Mr.
Sowerby’s little plan of having Miss Dunstable for his companion was
not quite insignificant; and, indeed, it may be said that but few of
his little plans were so. At the present moment he flung himself back
in the carriage and prepared for sleep. He could further no plan of his
by a _tête-à-tête_ conversation with his brother-in-law.
And then Mrs. Proudie began her story about Mr. Slope, or rather
recommenced it. She was very fond of talking about this gentleman, who
had once been her pet chaplain but was now her bitterest foe; and in
telling the story, she had sometimes to whisper to Miss Dunstable, for
there were one or two fie-fie little anecdotes about a married lady,
not altogether fit for young Mr. Robarts’s ears. But Mrs. Harold Smith
insisted on having them out loud, and Miss Dunstable would gratify that
lady in spite of Mrs. Proudie’s winks.
“What, kissing her hand, and he a clergyman!” said Miss Dunstable. “I
did not think they ever did such things, Mr. Robarts.”
“Still waters run deepest,” said Mrs. Harold Smith.
“Hush-h-h,” looked, rather than spoke, Mrs. Proudie. “The grief of
spirit which that bad man caused me nearly broke my heart, and all the
while, you know, he was courting--” and then Mrs. Proudie whispered a
name.
“What, the dean’s wife!” shouted Miss Dunstable, in a voice which made
the coachman of the next carriage give a chuck to his horses as he
overheard her.
“The archdeacon’s sister-in-law!” screamed Mrs. Harold Smith.
“What might he not have attempted next?” said Miss Dunstable.
“She wasn’t the dean’s wife then, you know,” said Mrs. Proudie,
explaining.
“Well, you’ve a gay set in the chapter, I must say,” said Miss
Dunstable. “You ought to make one of them in Barchester, Mr. Robarts.”
“Only perhaps Mrs. Robarts might not like it,” said Mrs. Harold Smith.
“And then the schemes which he tried on with the bishop!” said Mrs.
Proudie.
“It’s all fair in love and war, you know,” said Miss Dunstable.
“But he little knew whom he had to deal with when he began that,” said
Mrs. Proudie.
“The bishop was too many for him,” suggested Mrs. Harold Smith, very
maliciously.
“If the bishop was not, somebody else was; and he was obliged to leave
Barchester in utter disgrace. He has since married the wife of some
tallow chandler.”
“The wife!” said Miss Dunstable. “What a man!”
“Widow, I mean; but it’s all one to him.”
“The gentleman was clearly born when Venus was in the ascendant,”
said Mrs. Smith. “You clergymen usually are, I believe, Mr. Robarts.”
So that Mrs. Proudie’s carriage was by no means the dullest as they
drove into Barchester that day; and by degrees our friend Mark became
accustomed to his companions, and before they reached the palace he
acknowledged to himself that Miss Dunstable was very good fun.
We cannot linger over the bishop’s dinner, though it was very good of
its kind; and as Mr. Sowerby contrived to sit next to Miss Dunstable,
thereby overturning a little scheme made by Mr. Supplehouse, he again
shone forth in unclouded good humour. But Mr. Harold Smith became
impatient immediately on the withdrawal of the cloth. The lecture was
to begin at seven, and according to his watch that hour had already
come. He declared that Sowerby and Supplehouse were endeavouring to
delay matters in order that the Barchesterians might become vexed
and impatient; and so the bishop was not allowed to exercise his
hospitality in true episcopal fashion.
“You forget, Sowerby,” said Supplehouse, “that the world here for the
last fortnight has been looking forward to nothing else.”
“The world shall be gratified at once,” said Mrs. Harold, obeying a
little nod from Mrs. Proudie. “Come, my dear,” and she took hold of
Miss Dunstable’s arm, “don’t let us keep Barchester waiting. We shall
be ready in a quarter-of-an-hour, shall we not, Mrs. Proudie?” and so
they sailed off.
“And we shall have time for one glass of claret,” said the bishop.
“There; that’s seven by the cathedral,” said Harold Smith, jumping up
from his chair as he heard the clock. “If the people have come it would
not be right in me to keep them waiting, and I shall go.”
“Just one glass of claret, Mr. Smith; and we’ll be off,” said the
bishop.
“Those women will keep me an hour,” said Harold, filling his glass, and
drinking it standing. “They do it on purpose.” He was thinking of his
wife, but it seemed to the bishop as though his guest were actually
speaking of Mrs. Proudie!
It was rather late when they all found themselves in the big room
of the Mechanics’ Institute; but I do not know whether this on the
whole did them any harm. Most of Mr. Smith’s hearers, excepting the
party from the palace, were Barchester tradesmen with their wives and
families; and they waited, not impatiently, for the big people. And
then the lecture was gratis, a fact which is always borne in mind by an
Englishman when he comes to reckon up and calculate the way in which he
is treated. When he pays his money, then he takes his choice; he may be
impatient or not as he likes. His sense of justice teaches him so much,
and in accordance with that sense he usually acts.
So the people on the benches rose graciously when the palace party
entered the room. Seats for them had been kept in the front. There were
three arm-chairs, which were filled, after some little hesitation, by
the bishop, Mrs. Proudie, and Miss Dunstable--Mrs. Smith positively
declining to take one of them; though, as she admitted, her rank as
Lady Papua of the islands did give her some claim. And this remark, as
it was made quite out loud, reached Mr. Smith’s ears as he stood behind
a little table on a small raised dais, holding his white kid gloves;
and it annoyed him and rather put him out. He did not like that joke
about Lady Papua.
And then the others of the party sat upon a front bench covered
with red cloth. “We shall find this very hard and very narrow about
the second hour,” said Mr. Sowerby, and Mr. Smith on his dais again
overheard the words, and dashed his gloves down to the table. He felt
that all the room would hear it.
And there were one or two gentlemen on the second seat who shook
hands with some of our party. There was Mr. Thorne of Ullathorne,
a good-natured old bachelor, whose residence was near enough
to Barchester to allow of his coming in without much personal
inconvenience; and next to him was Mr. Harding, an old clergyman of the
chapter, with whom Mrs. Proudie shook hands very graciously, making way
for him to seat himself close behind her if he would so please. But
Mr. Harding did not so please. Having paid his respects to the bishop
he returned quietly to the side of his old friend Mr. Thorne, thereby
angering Mrs. Proudie, as might easily be seen by her face. And Mr.
Chadwick also was there, the episcopal man of business for the diocese;
but he also adhered to the two gentlemen above named.
And now that the bishop and the ladies had taken their places, Mr.
Harold Smith relifted his gloves and again laid them down, hummed three
times distinctly, and then began.
“It was,” he said, “the most peculiar characteristic of the present era
in the British islands that those who were high placed before the world
in rank, wealth, and education were willing to come forward and give
their time and knowledge without fee or reward, for the advantage and
amelioration of those who did not stand so high in the social scale.”
And then he paused for a moment, during which Mrs. Smith remarked to
Miss Dunstable that that was pretty well for a beginning; and Miss
Dunstable replied, “that as for herself she felt very grateful to
rank, wealth, and education.” Mr. Sowerby winked to Mr. Supplehouse,
who opened his eyes very wide and shrugged his shoulders. But the
Barchesterians took it all in good part and gave the lecturer the
applause of their hands and feet.
And then, well pleased, he recommenced--“I do not make these remarks
with reference to myself----”
“I hope he’s not going to be modest,” said Miss Dunstable.
“It will be quite new if he is,” replied Mrs. Smith.
“----so much as to many noble and talented lords and members of the
lower house who have lately from time to time devoted themselves to
this good work.” And then he went through a long list of peers and
members of parliament, beginning, of course, with Lord Boanerges, and
ending with Mr. Green Walker, a young gentleman who had lately been
returned by his uncle’s interest for the borough of Crew Junction, and
had immediately made his entrance into public life by giving a lecture
on the grammarians of the Latin language as exemplified at Eton school.
“On the present occasion,” Mr. Smith continued, “our object is to learn
something as to those grand and magnificent islands which lie far away,
beyond the Indies, in the Southern Ocean; the lands of which produce
rich spices and glorious fruits, and whose seas are imbedded with
pearls and corals, Papua and the Philippines, Borneo and the Moluccas.
My friends, you are familiar with your maps, and you know the track
which the equator makes for itself through those distant oceans.” And
then many heads were turned down, and there was a rustle of leaves;
for not a few of those “who stood not so high in the social scale” had
brought their maps with them, and refreshed their memories as to the
whereabouts of these wondrous islands.
And then Mr. Smith also, with a map in his hand, and pointing
occasionally to another large map which hung against the wall, went
into the geography of the matter. “We might have found that out from
our atlases, I think, without coming all the way to Barchester,”
said that unsympathizing helpmate Mrs. Harold, very cruelly--most
illogically too, for there be so many things which we could find out
ourselves by search, but which we never do find out unless they be
specially told us; and why should not the latitude and longitude of
Labuan be one--or rather two of these things?
And then, when he had duly marked the path of the line through Borneo,
Celebes, and Gilolo, through the Macassar strait and the Molucca
passage, Mr. Harold Smith rose to a higher flight. “But what,” said he,
“avails all that God can give to man, unless man will open his hand to
receive the gift? And what is this opening of the hand but the process
of civilization--yes, my friends, the process of civilization? These
South Sea islanders have all that a kind Providence can bestow on
them; but that all is as nothing without education. That education and
that civilization it is for you to bestow upon them--yes, my friends,
for you; for you, citizens of Barchester as you are.” And then he
paused again, in order that the feet and hands might go to work. The
feet and hands did go to work, during which Mr. Smith took a slight
drink of water.
He was now quite in his element and had got into the proper way of
punching the table with his fists. A few words dropping from Mr.
Sowerby did now and again find their way to his ears, but the sound of
his own voice had brought with it the accustomed charm, and he ran on
from platitude to truism, and from truism back to platitude, with an
eloquence that was charming to himself.
“Civilization,” he exclaimed, lifting up his eyes and hands to the
ceiling. “Oh, civilization----”
“There will not be a chance for us now for the next hour and a half,”
said Mr. Supplehouse groaning.
Harold Smith cast one eye down at him, but it immediately flew back to
the ceiling.
“Oh, civilization! thou that ennoblest mankind and makest him equal to
the gods, what is like unto thee?” Here Mrs. Proudie showed evident
signs of disapprobation, which no doubt would have been shared by
the bishop, had not that worthy prelate been asleep. But Mr. Smith
continued unobservant; or, at any rate, regardless.
“What is like unto thee? Thou art the irrigating stream which makest
fertile the barren plain. Till thou comest all is dark and dreary; but
at thy advent the noontide sun shines out, the earth gives forth her
increase; the deep bowels of the rocks render up their tribute. Forms
which were dull and hideous become endowed with grace and beauty, and
vegetable existence rises to the scale of celestial life. Then, too,
genius appears clad in a panoply of translucent armour, grasping in
his hand the whole terrestrial surface, and making every rood of earth
subservient to his purposes;--Genius, the child of civilization, the
mother of the Arts!”
The last little bit, taken from the Pedigree of Progress, had a great
success and all Barchester went to work with its hands and feet;--all
Barchester, except that ill-natured aristocratic front-row together
with the three arm-chairs at the corner of it. The aristocratic
front-row felt itself to be too intimate with civilization to care
much about it; and the three arm-chairs, or rather that special one
which contained Mrs. Proudie, considered that there was a certain
heathenness, a pagan sentimentality almost amounting to infidelity,
contained in the lecturer’s remarks, with which she, a pillar of the
church, could not put up, seated as she was now in public conclave.
“It is to civilization that we must look,” continued Mr. Harold Smith,
descending from poetry to prose as a lecturer well knows how, and
thereby showing the value of both--“for any material progress in these
islands; and----”
“And to Christianity,” shouted Mrs. Proudie, to the great amazement
of the assembled people and to the thorough wakening of the bishop,
who, jumping up in his chair at the sound of the well-known voice,
exclaimed, “Certainly, certainly.”
“Hear, hear, hear,” said those on the benches who particularly belonged
to Mrs. Proudie’s school of divinity in the city, and among the voices
was distinctly heard that of a new verger in whose behalf she had
greatly interested herself.
“Oh, yes, Christianity of course,” said Harold Smith, upon whom the
interruption did not seem to operate favourably.
“Christianity and Sabbath-day observance,” exclaimed Mrs. Proudie, who
now that she had obtained the ear of the public seemed well inclined to
keep it. “Let us never forget that these islanders can never prosper
unless they keep the Sabbath holy.”
Poor Mr. Smith, having been so rudely dragged from his high horse, was
never able to mount it again, and completed the lecture in a manner
not at all comfortable to himself. He had there, on the table before
him, a huge bundle of statistics with which he had meant to convince
the reason of his hearers after he had taken full possession of their
feelings. But they fell very dull and flat. And at the moment when he
was interrupted he was about to explain that that material progress to
which he had alluded could not be attained without money; and that it
behoved them, the people of Barchester before him, to come forward with
their purses like men and brothers. He did also attempt this; but from
the moment of that fatal onslaught from the arm-chair, it was clear to
him and to every one else, that Mrs. Proudie was now the hero of the
hour. His time had gone by, and the people of Barchester did not care a
straw for his appeal.
From these causes the lecture was over full twenty minutes earlier
than any one had expected, to the great delight of Messrs. Sowerby and
Supplehouse, who, on that evening, moved and carried a vote of thanks
to Mrs. Proudie. For they had gay doings yet before they went to their
beds.
“Robarts, here one moment,” Mr. Sowerby said, as they were standing
at the door of the Mechanics’ Institute. “Don’t you go off with Mr.
and Mrs. Bishop. We are going to have a little supper at the Dragon of
Wantly, and after what we have gone through upon my word we want it.
You can tell one of the palace servants to let you in.”
Mark considered the proposal wistfully. He would fain have joined the
supper-party had he dared; but he, like many others of his cloth, had
the fear of Mrs. Proudie before his eyes.
And a very merry supper they had; but poor Mr. Harold Smith was not the
merriest of the party.
Tithonus.
Ay me! ay me! the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the earth and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream
The ever silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man--
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem’d
To his great heart none other than a God!
I ask’d thee, “Give me immortality.”
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
Like wealthy men who care not how they give.
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,
And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love,
Thy beauty, make amends, tho’ even now,
Close over us, the silver star, thy guide,
Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears
To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift:
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?
A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renew’d.
Thy cheek begins to redden thro’ the gloom,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, and that wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
And shake the darkness from their loosen’d manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.
Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
In silence, then before thine answer given
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
“The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.”
Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch--if I be he that watch’d--
The lucid outline forming round thee, saw
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings,
Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood
Glow with the glow that slowly crimson’d all
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss’d
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground;
Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
ALFRED TENNYSON.
William Hogarth:
PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER.
_Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time._
I.--LITTLE BOY HOGARTH.
“The Life and Adventures of William Hogarth,”--that would be a taking
title, indeed! To do for the great painter of manners that which Mr.
Forster has done for their great describer, would be a captivating
task; and, successfully accomplished, might entitle a man to wear some
little sprig of laurel in his cap, and rest, thenceforth, on his oars.
It is not my fortune to have the means of writing such a book; and, for
many reasons, this performance must be limited to a series of Essays
upon the genius and character of the MAN Hogarth; upon the WORK he was
permitted, by a healthful, sanguine constitution and by great powers
of will and self-reliance backboning an unflagging industry, to get
through in his appointed span here below; and upon the curious quaint
TIME in which he lived and did his work. Hogarth’s life, away from
his works and times, would be but a barren theme. Those old Italian
painting men had strange adventures and vicissitudes. Rafaelle’s life
was one brief glorious romance. Leonardo had a king’s arms to die in.
Buonarotti lived amidst battles and sieges, and held flouting matches
with popes. Titian’s pencil was picked up by an emperor. The Germans
and Dutchmen, even, were picturesque and eventful in their careers. Was
not Rubens an ambassador? Are there not mysterious dealings between
Rembrandt and the Jews that have not yet been fathomed? Did not Peter
de Laar kill a monk? But in what manner is the historian to extract
exciting elements from the history of a chubby little man in a cocked
hat and scarlet roque-laure, who lived at the sign of the “Painter’s
Head” in Leicester Fields, and died in his bed there in competence and
honour; who was the son of a schoolmaster in the Old Bailey, and the
descendant of a long line of north country yeomen, of whom the prime
progenitor is presumed to have kept pigs and to have gone by the rude
name of “Hogherd”--whence Hogard and Hogart, at last liquefied into
Hogarth? Benvenuto Cellini worked for the silversmiths, but at least
he had poniarded his man and lain for his sins in the dungeons of St.
Angelo; our Hogarth was a plain silversmith’s apprentice, in Cranbourn
Alley. He kept a shop afterwards, and engraved tankards and salvers,
and never committed a graver act of violence than to throw a pewter
pot at the head of a ruffian who had insulted him during an outing to
Highgate. Honest man! they never sent him to Newgate or the Tower.
Only once he was clapped up for an hour or so in a Calais guardhouse,
and, coming home by the next packet-boat, took a stout revenge on the
frog-eaters with his etching needle upon copper. He was no great
traveller; and beyond the Calais ship just spoken of, does not appear
to have undertaken any journeys more important than the immortal
excursion to Rochester, of which the chronicle, illustrated by his
own sketches, is still extant, (those doughty setters-forth from the
Bedford Head were decidedly the first Pickwickians,) and a jaunt to St.
Alban’s after Culloden, to sketch the trapped fox Simon Fraser Lord
Lovat, as he sate in the inn-room under the barber’s hands, counting
the dispersed Highland clans and their available forces of caterans and
brae-men on his half-palsied, crooked, picking and stealing fingers.
William Hogarth did but one romantic thing in his life, and that was,
to run away with Sir James Thornhill’s pretty daughter; and even that
escapade soon resolved itself into a cheery, English, business-like,
house-keeping union. Papa-in-law--who painted cathedral cupolas at
forty shillings a yard--forgave William and Jane. William loved his
wife dearly--she had her tempers, and he was not a man of snow--took
a country house for her, and set up a coach when things were going
prosperously and he was Sergeant Painter to King George; and when
William (not quite a dotard, as the twin-scamps Wilkes and Churchill
called him) died, Jane made a comfortable living by selling impressions
of the plates he had engraved. These and the writing of the _Analysis
of Beauty_, the dispute concerning Sigismunda, the interest taken in
the welfare of the Foundling Hospital, the dedication [in a pique
against the king who hated “boets and bainters,”] of the _March to
Finchley_ to Frederick the Great, and the abortive picture auction
scheme, are very nearly all the notable events in the life of William
Hogarth. And yet the man left a name remembered now with affection and
applause, and which will be remembered, and honoured, and glorified
when, to quote the self-conscious Unknown who used the _Public
Advertiser_ as a fulcrum for that terrible lever of his, “kings and
ministers are forgotten, the force and direction of personal satire
are no longer understood, and measures are felt only in their remotest
consequences.”
By the announcement, then, that I do not contemplate, here, a complete
biography of Hogarth: that I do not know enough to complete a reliable
and authentic life: “_nec, si sciam, dicere ausim_:” these papers are
to be considered but as “_Mémoires pour servir_;” little photographs
and chalk studies of drapery, furniture, accessories of costume and
snuff-box, cocked hat and silver buckle detail, all useful enough in
their place and way, but quite subordinate and inferior to the grand
design and complete picture of the hero. I am aware that high critical
authorities have been inveighing lately against the employment of
the costumiers and _bric a brac_ shop-keepers and inventory takers’
attributes in biography; and writers are enjoined, under heavy
penalties, to be, all of them, Plutarchs, and limn their characters
in half a dozen broad vigorous dashes. It can conduce little, it has
been argued, towards our knowledge of the Seven Years’ War to be told
that Frederick the Great wore a pigtail, and that to his jackboots “Day
and Martin with their soot-pots were forbidden to approach;” and it
has been asked whether any likelihood exists of our knowing more of
the character of Napoleon Bonaparte from the sight of his cocked hat
and toothbrush at Madame Tussaud’s. Presuming to run counter to the
opinion of the high critical authorities, I would point out that the
very best biographies that have ever been written--those of Samuel
Johnson, Samuel Pepys [his diary being eminently biographical], Lord
Herbert of Cherbury, and Jean Jacques Rousseau [in the _Confessions_,
and bating the lies and madnesses with which that poor crazed wanderer
disfigures an otherwise limpid narrative]--are full of those little
scraps and fragments of minute cross-hatching, chronicles of “seven
livres three sols, parisis,” lamentable records of unpaid-for hose,
histories of joyous carouses, anecdotes of men and women’s meannesses
and generosities, and the like. On the other hand, how cold, pallid,
unhuman, is the half-dozen-line character, with all its broad vigorous
dashes! Certain Roman emperors might have come out far better fellows
from the historian’s alembic if their togas and sandals had been more
scrupulously dwelt upon. Is our awful veneration for St. Augustine
one whit diminished by the small deer he condescends to hunt in the
history of his youth? The heaviest blow and greatest discouragement
to the composition of admirable biographies, are in the fact that
strength and delicacy, vigour and finish, are seldom combined; and that
a Milton with a dash of the macaroni in him is a _rara avis_ indeed.
Now and then we find an elephant that can dance on the tight-rope
without being either awkward or grotesque; now and then we find a man
with a mind like a Nasmyth’s steam hammer, that can roll out huge
bars of iron, and anon knock a tin-tack into a deal board with gentle
accurate taps. These are the men who can describe a Revolution, and by
its side the corned beef and carrots which country parsons were once
glad to eat; who can tell us how the Bastille was stormed, and, a few
pages on, what manner of coat and small clothes wore Philip Egalité at
his guillotining. When we find such men we christen them Macaulay or
Carlyle.
The latitude, therefore, I take through incapacity for accuracy, saves
me from inflicting on you a long prolegomena; saves me from scoring the
basement of this page with foot-notes, or its margins with references;
saves me from denouncing the “British Dryasdust,” from whom I have
culled the scanty dates and facts, the mile and year stones in William
Hogarth’s life. Indeed, he has been very useful to me, this British
Dryasdust, and I should have made but a sorry figure without him. He or
they--Nichols, Steevens, Trusler, Rouquet, Ireland, Ducarel, Burn--have
but little to tell; but that which they know, they declare in a frank,
straightforward manner. Among commentators on Hogarth, Ireland is the
best; Trusler, the worst. T. Clerk and T. H. Horne also edited (1810)
a voluminous edition of Hogarth’s works, accompanied by a sufficiently
jejune _Life_. Allan Cunningham, in the _British Painters_, has given
a lively, agreeable adaptation of all who have come before him, spiced
and brightened by his own clear appreciation of, and love for, art
and its professors. Half a day’s reading, however, will tell you all
that these writers know. Horace Walpole for criticism on Hogarth is
admirable; lucid, elegant, and--a wonder with the dilettante friend
of Madame du Deffand--generous. The mere explicatory testimony as to
the principal Hogarthian series or engraved dramas by the Sire Rouquet
[he was a Swiss] cited above, is valuable; the more so, that he was
a friend of the painter, and, it is conjectured, took many of his
instructions viva voce from William Hogarth himself. The Germans have
not been indifferent to the merits of the great humoristic painter; and
a certain Herr Von Fürstenburg has found out some odd things connected
with suggestive objects in one of the most famous scenes of the first
series--the _Kate Hackabout_, _Mother Needham_, and _Colonel Charteris
epopœiœ_--never dreamt of previously in the good people of England’s
philosophy. Occasionally, too, in a French _Revue_, you meet with an
_Etude_ on _La vie et les ouvrages de Hogarth_, giving us little beyond
a fresh opportunity to be convinced that, if there exist on earth a
people of whose manners and customs the French know considerably less
than about those of the man in the moon, that people are the English.
By his own countrymen, William Hogarth has ever been justly and
honourably treated. He was an outspoken man, and his pencil and
graver were as unbridled as his tongue. His works have a taint of the
coarseness, but not of the vice of his age. Most at home would be many
of his works, perhaps, in low tap-rooms and skittle-alleys; but he was
no Boucher or Fragonard to paint alcoves or _dessus de portes_ for
the contemporary Cotillons I. and Cotillons II., for the Pompadours
and Dubarrys of Louis the well-beloved. He was vulgar and ignoble
frequently, but the next generation of his countrymen forgave him these
faults--forgave him for the sake of his honesty, his stern justice, his
unbending defence of right and denunciation of wrong. This philosopher
ever preached the sturdy English virtues that have made us what we
are. He taught us to fear God and honour the King; to shun idleness,
extravagance, and dissipation; to go to church, help the poor, and
treat dumb animals with kindness; to abhor knavery, hypocrisy, and
avarice. For this reason is it that Sectarianism itself (though he was
hard against tub-thumping) has raised but a very weak and bleating
voice against Hogarth’s “improprieties;” that cheap and popular
editions of his works have been multiplied, even in this fastidious
nineteenth century; that in hundreds of decorous family libraries a
plump copy of Hogarth complete may be found [yes: I have heard the
stateliest old ladies chat about the history of _Kate Hackabout_, and I
have seen age explaining to youth and beauty--that came in a carriage
to Marlborough House--the marvellous _Marriage à la Mode_ in the Vernon
collections]; that, finally--and which may be regarded as a good and
gratifying stamp of the man’s excellence and moral worth--the Church
of England have always been favourable to William Hogarth. An Anglican
bishop wrote the poetic legends to the _Rake’s Progress_; and Hogarth
has been patronized by the beneficed and dignified clergy ever since.
So come, then, William Hogarth, and let me in these essays strive to
glorify thy painting, thy engraving, and thy philosophy. Let me stand
over against thee, and walk round thee--yea, and sometimes wander for a
little while quite away from thee, endeavouring to explore the timeous
world as thou knew it. But be thou always near: the statue on the
pedestal, the picture on the wall, the genius of the place, to recall
me when I stray, to remind me when I am forgetful, to reprove me when I
err!
Born in the Old Bailey, and the ninth year of William the Dutchman,
that should properly be my starting point; but the reader must first
come away with me to Westmoreland, and into the Vale of Bampton--to
a village sixteen miles north of Kendal and Windermere Lake. In this
district had lived for centuries a family of yeomen, called Hogart
or Hogard: the founder of the family, as I have hinted, may have
been Hogherd, from his vocation--a guardian of swine. _His_ father,
perchance, was that Gurth, the son of Beowulph, erst thrall to Cedric
the Saxon, and who, after his emancipation by the worthy but irascible
Franklin for good suit and service rendered in the merry greenwood,
gave himself, or had given to him in pride and joy, that which he had
never had before--a surname; and so, emigrating northwards, became
progenitor of a free race of Hogherds. In this same Bampton Vale, the
Hogarts possessed a small freehold; and of this tenement, the other
rude elders being beyond my ken, the grandfather of the painter was
holder in the middle of the seventeenth century. To him were three
sons. The eldest succeeded to the freehold, and was no more heard
of, his name being written in clods. He tilled the earth, ate of
its fruits, and, his time being come, died. The two remaining sons,
as the custom of Borough English did not prevail in Bampton, had to
provide for themselves. Son intermediate--my William’s uncle--was a
genius. Adam Walker, writer on natural philosophy, and who was the
friend and correspondent of Nicholls of the _Anecdotes_, called him
a “mountain Theocritus;” his contemporaries, with less elegance but
more enthusiasm, dubbed him “Auld Hogart.” He was a poet, humorist,
satirist, and especially a dramatist; and coarse plays of his, full of
coarse fun, rough and ready action, and sarcastic hard hitting, yet
linger, more by oral tradition than by any manuscript remains of his,
among the Westmoreland fells. These were all written, too, in the very
hardest, thickest, and broadest Westmoreland dialect; a patois to which
Tim Bobbin’s Lancashire dialect is as mellifluous as the _langue d’oc_;
a patois which has been compared to the speech of Demosthenes before
his course of pebbles, but which, to my ears, offers more analogy to
that which may have proceeded from the famous Anti-Philippian orator
_during_ the pebble probation; and in order to speak which patois
fluently (after the pebbles), an admirable apprenticeship is to fill
your mouth as full as possible of the gritty oatcake, or “clapt bread,”
which is kept in the “cratch,” or rack suspended from the ceiling
in Westmoreland farmhouses. In this Scythian speech, however, “auld
Hogart” concocted a famous drama, quite in the Lope de Vega’s manner,
called _Troy Taken_. I do not compare the play unadvisedly with those
of the prolific Spanish playwright. You know how artfully Lope’s plays
begin: with what immediate action and seduction of its audience to a
foregone conclusion. The curtain draws up. A man in a cloak crosses the
stage. A masked cavalier rushes after him with a drawn sword. There is
a _rixe_ at once established; the audience begin to imagine all sorts
of terrible things, and the success of the piece is half assured. So
“auld Hogart’s” play of _Troy Taken_, begins with a _rixe_. Paris is
seen in the very act of running away with Helen; and Menelaus runs
after them, calling “Stop thief!” With such an auspicious commencement,
and plenty of good boisterous episodes throughout: Hector dragged about
by the heels; Thersites cudgelled within an inch of his life; Achilles
storming for half an hour at the loss of Patrocles, and a real wooden
horse to finish up with: the whole spiced with “auld Hogart’s” broadest
jokes: who can wonder that _Troy Taken_ achieved immense popularity,
and that years after the death of the facetious author, natural
philosopher Adam Walker saw the piece performed from recollection by
the Troutbeck rustics, the stage a greensward, the auditorium a grassy
knoll, the canopy, Heaven? The proceedings were inaugurated by a grand
cavalcade, headed by the minstrels of five parishes, and a lusty yeoman
mounted on a bull’s back and playing on the fiddle; and as a prologue
to _Troy Taken_, there was a pilgrimage of the visitors to a stone
dropped by the enemy of mankind in an unsuccessful attempt to build a
bridge across Windermere!
The brother of the “auld” dramatist of the _Iliad_, and third son of
the Bampton yeoman, was Richard Hogart. Without being dogmatical, I
trust that I am justified in the assumption that the “liquefaction”
of the patronymic into Hogarth was due partly to the more elegant
education of this yeoman’s son, partly to our painter’s formation of a
“genteel” connection, when he married Jane Thornhill. I have not seen
his indentures; and take the authority of Ireland for the registry of
his birth; but it is certain that he was at one period called,--ay, and
pretty well known--as Hogart: witness Swift, in his hideously clever
satire of the _Legion Club_:--
“How I want thee, hum’rous Hogart,
Thou, I hear, a pleasant rogue art”--
Now Swift wrote this in Ireland, at a distance from means of accuracy,
and the “pleasant rogue’s” name was not likely to be found in a
calendar of the nobility and gentry. If Bolingbroke or Pope had written
to the dean about the rogue and his pleasantries, it is very probable
that they might have spelt his name “Hogart,” “Hogard,” “Hoggert,” or
“Hogarth.” You must remember that scores of the most distinguished
characters of the eighteenth century were of my Lord Malmesbury’s
opinion concerning orthography, that neither the great Duke of
Marlborough, nay, nor his duchess, the terrible “old Sarah,” nay, nor
Mrs. Masham, nay, nor Queen Anne herself, could spell, and that the
young Pretender (in the Stuart papers) writes his father’s name thus:
“Gems” for “James.” Again, Swift may have suppressed the “_th_” for
mere rhythmical reasons; just as Pope, _aux abois_ between dactyls and
spondees, barbarized a name which undeniably before had been pronounced
“Saint John” into “Sinjin.” But, on the other hand, Jonathan Swift was
not so dizzy when he wrote the _Legion Club_ to have lost one pin’s
point of his marvellous memory; and he was too rich in rhymes to have
resorted to the pusillanimous expedient of cutting off a letter. If
ever a man lived who could have found an easy rhyme to “Hippopotamus,”
it was the Dean of St. Patrick’s. I opine, therefore, that when Swift
first heard of Hogarth--in the early days of George I.--he was really
called “Hogart;” that such a name was carried by the dean with him to
Dublin, and that the change to “Hogart” only took place when the great
Drapier was dying “in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.”
Richard Hogart--whatever he called himself in the scholastic Latinity
that converted “Saumaise” into “Salmasius,” and a Dutch logician,
“Smygel” into “Smeglesius,”--was educated at St. Bees’ College, in
Westmoreland; was too poor, it is thought, after his college course
to take orders, and kept school for a time in his native county.
His classical accomplishments were considerable. In the manuscript
department of the British Museum are preserved some Latin letters by
him; and he wrote besides a Latin-English dictionary, and a school-book
entitled _Grammar Disputatations_, which has not attained the fame or
immortality of the works of Cocker and Walkingame. It is stated that
Richard Hogart was occasionally employed as a corrector of the press;
an office then frequently discharged by trustworthy scholars quite
extraneous to the recognized staff of the printing-office.
It is certain that, William and Mary reigning, Dominic Hogart came
to London, and established himself as a schoolmaster, in Ship Court,
Old Bailey. He had married, as it is the wont of poor schoolmasters
to do, and his wife bare him two daughters and one son. The girls
were Mary and Anne; and have only to be mentioned to pass out of this
record:--Who cares about Joseph Mallard Turner’s nephews and nieces?
The boy, WILLIAM HOGARTH, was born on the 10th of November, 1697, and
stands in the parish register of St. Bartholomew the Great, as having
been baptized, November the 28th.
You do not expect me to tell who nursed little chubby-baby Hogarth,
whether he took to his pap kindly, and at what age he first evinced an
affection for sweet-stuff? Making, however, a very early halt in his
nonage, I am compelled to shake my head at a very pretty legend about
him, and as prettily made into a picture, some years ago. According to
this, little boy Hogarth was sent to a dame’s school, where he much
vexed the good woman who boasted “unruly brats with birch to tame,”
by a persistence in drawing caricatures on his slate. The picture
represents him in sore disgrace, mounted on the stool of repentance,
crowned with the asinine tiara of tribulation, holding in one hand the
virgal rod of anguish, and in the other the slate which has brought
him to this evil estate: a slate much bechalked with libellous
representations of his dame. In the background is that Nemesis in a
mob-cap, inflexible; around, an amphitheatre of children-spectators;
the boys, as suits their boisterous character, jeering and exultant;
the girls, as beseems their softer nature, scared and terrified. A very
pretty, naïve picture, but apocryphal, I fear. There were no slates in
dame-schools in those days. The hornbook, _Pellucid_, with its Christ
Cross Row, was the beginning of knowledge, as the “baleful twig” that
“frayed” the brats was the end thereof. If little boy Hogarth had been
born at Kirby Thore, I would have admitted the dame-school theory in an
instant; but it is far more feasible that he learnt his hornbook at his
mother’s knee, and in due time was promoted to a bench in the school
his father taught, and an impartial share in the stripes which the good
pedagogue distributed. Nor need Dominie Hogart have been by any means
a cruel pedagogue. In none of his pictures does Hogarth display any
rancour against scholastic discipline (what school-scenes that pencil
might have drawn!), and it generally happens that he who has suffered
much in the flesh as a boy, will have a fling at the rod and the ferule
when he is a man; even if he have had Orbilius for his father. And
be it kept in mind, that, although the awful Busby, who called the
birch “his sieve,” through which the cleverest boys must pass, and
who of the Bench of Bishops taught sixteen mitred ones, was but just
dead. Mr. John Locke was then also publishing his admirable treatise
on _Education_, a treatise that enjoins and inculcates tenderness and
mercy to children.
Ship Court, Old Bailey, is on the west side of that ominous
thoroughfare, and a few doors from Ludgate Hill. By a very curious
coincidence, the house No. 67, Old Bailey, corner of Ship Court,
was occupied, about forty years ago, by a certain William Hone, an
odd, quaint, restless man, but marvellously bustling and energetic:
a man not to be “put down” by any magnates, civic, Westmonasterian,
or otherwise; and who, at 67, had a little shop, where he sold
prints and pamphlets, so very radical in their tendencies as to be
occasionally seditious, and open to some slight accusation of ribaldry
and scurrility. Here did Hone publish, in 1817, those ribald parodies
of the Litany and Catechism for which he stood three trials before
the then Lord Ellenborough, who vehemently assumed the part of public
prosecutor (staining his ermine by that act), and tried his utmost to
have Hone cast, but in vain. As to William Hone, the man drifted at
last, tired, and I hope ashamed, out of sedition and sculduddry, and,
so far as his literary undertakings went, made a good end of it. To
him we owe those capital table-books, every-day books, and year-books,
full of anecdote, quaint research, and folk-lore, which have amused
and instructed so many thousands, and have done such excellent service
to the book-making craft. Be you sure that I have Mr. Hone’s books for
the table, day and year, before me, as I write, and shall have them
these few months to come. Without such aids; without Mr. Cunningham’s
_Handbook_ and Mr. Timbs’ _Curiosities of London_; without Walpole,
Cibber, and “Rainy-day Smith;” without Ned Ward and Tom Brown;
without the Somers Tracts and the Sessions Papers; without King and
Nicholls’ anecdotes and the lives of Nollekens and Northcote; without
a set of the _British Essayists_, from Addison to Hawkesworth; without
the great _Grub-street Journal_ and the _Daily Courant_; without
Gay’s _Trivia_ and Garth’s _Dispensary_; without Aubrey, Evelyn, and
Luttrell’s diaries; without the _London Gazette_ and Defoe’s _Complete
English Tradesman_; without Swift’s _Journal to Stella_, and Vertue
and Faithorne’s maps, and Wilkinson, Strype, Maitland, Malcolm, Gwynn,
and the great Crowle Pennant; with plenty of small deer in the way
of tracts, broadsides, and selections from the bookstall-keepers’
sweepings and the cheesemongers’ rejected addresses; without these
modest materials, how is this humble picture to be painted?
After this little glance behind the scenes of a book-maker’s workshop,
you will be wondering, I dare say, as to what was the curious
coincidence I spoke of in connection with William Hone’s sojourn in
Ship Court, Old Bailey. Simply this. Three years after his Litany
escapades, the restless man went tooth and nail into the crapulous
controversy between George IV. and his unhappy wife; who, though
undoubtedly no better than she should be, was undoubtedly used much
worse than she or any other woman, not a Messalina or a Frédégonde,
should have been. From Hone’s shop issued those merry, rascally libels
against the fat potentate late of Carlton House, and which, under
the titles of “The Green Bag,” “Doctor Slop,” the “House that Jack
built,” and the like, brought such shame and ridicule upon the vain,
gross old man, that all Mr. Theodore Hook’s counter-scurrilities in
the high Tory _John Bull_ could not alleviate or wipe away the stains
thereof. Ah! it was a nice time--a jocund, Christian time. Reformers
calling their king “knave, tyrant, and debauchee;” loyalists screaming
“hussey,” and worse names, after their queen. That was in the time
of the Consul _Un_manlius I should think. Hone’s clever rascalities
sold enormously, especially among the aristocracy of the “Opposition.”
But Mr. Hone’s disloyal facetiæ from Ship Court were relieved and
atoned for by the illustrations, engraved from drawings executed
with quite an astonishing power of graphic delineation and acuteness
of humour, by a then very young artist named GEORGE CRUIKSHANK: a
gentleman whose earliest toys, I believe, had been a strip of copper
and an etching-needle; who has, since those wild days of ’21, achieved
hundreds of successes more brilliant, but not more notorious, than
those he won by working for restless Mr. Hone; and whom I am proud to
speak of here, with Hogarth’s name at the head of my sheet, now that
he, our George, is old, and honoured, and famous. Do I attach too much
importance to the works of these twin geniuses, I wonder, because I
love the style of art in which they have excelled with a secret craving
devotion, and because I have vainly striven to excel in it myself?
Am I stilted or turgid when I paraphrase that which Johnson said of
Homer and Milton _in re_ the _Iliad_ and the _Paradise Lost_, and say
of Hogarth and Cruikshank that George is not the greatest pictorial
humorist our country has seen only because he is not the first? At
any rate, you will grant the coincidence--won’t you?--between the lad
George Cruikshank and little boy Hogarth, toddling about Ship Court
and perchance scrawling caricatures on the walls, exaggerating in
rollicking chalk (I allow him as many brick walls as you like, but no
slates) the Slawkenbergian nose of William the Deliverer, or adding
abnormal curls to the vast wig of the detested clerical statesman,
Burnet.
Little boy Hogarth is yet too young to see these things; but he may be
at Gilbert Burnet’s turbulent funeral yet. First, we must get him out
of the Old Bailey, where he dwells for a good dozen years at least.
Dominie Hogarth has the school upstairs, where he drums _Lilly’s
Accidence_, or perhaps his own _Grammatical Disputations_ into his
scholars. Of what order may these scholars have been? The gentry had
long since left the Bailey; and you may start, perhaps, to be told
that British Brahmins had ever inhabited that lowering precinct of
the gallows, and parvyse of the press-room. Yet, in the Old Bailey
stood Sydney House, a stately mansion built for the Sydneys, Earls of
Leicester, and which they abandoned [circa 1660] for the genteeler
locality of Leicester Fields. I don’t know what Sydney House could have
been like, or by whom it was inhabited when Hogarth was a little boy;
but it was to all likelihood in a tumbledown, desolate condition. In
Pennant’s time it was a coachmaker’s shop. The keeper of Newgate may
have had children, too, for schooling, but his corporation connections
would probably have insured his boy’s admission to Christ’s Hospital,
or to Paul’s, or Merchant Taylors’ School, for the keeper of Newgate
was then a somebody; and it was by times his privilege to entertain
the sheriffs with sack and sugar. Dominie Hogarth’s pupils must have
been sons of substantial traders in the Bailey itself--where were
many noted booksellers’ shops--or from the adjacent Ludgate, whilom
Bowyers Hill, and from Fleet Street, or, perchance, Aldersgate Street;
which, not then purely commercial or shopkeeping, was the site of many
imposing mansions superbly decorated within, formerly the property of
the nobility, but then (1697) occupied by stately Turkey and Levant
merchants. And to the dominie’s may have come the offspring of the
wealthy butchers of Newgate Market, whose rubicund meat-wives are
libellously declared to have been in the habit of getting “over-taken
by burnt sherry” by eight o’clock in the morning; and while in that
jovial but prematurely matutinal condition, rivalling the flat-caps
of the Dark House, Billingsgate, and the pease-pottage sellers of
Baldwin’s Gardens--to say nothing of the cake and comfit purveyors to
the Finsbury archers--in voluble and abusive eloquence. Bonny dames
were these butchers’ wives; lusty, rotund, generous to the poor,
loud, but cheery with their apprentices and journeymen, great (as
now) in making fortunes for their beast-buying-and-killing husbands;
radiant in gold-chains, earrings, and laced aprons, and tremendous at
trades-feasts and civic junketings.
And I am yet in the year 1697, and in the Old Bailey with a child
in my arms. Were this an honest plain-sailing biography, now, what
would be easier for me than to skip the first twelve or thirteen
years of the boy’s life, assume that he got satisfactorily through
his teething, thrush, measles, and chicken-pox perils, and launch him
comfortably, a chubby lad, in the midst of the period of which the
ruthless Doctor Swift will write a history--the last four years of
the reign of Queen Anne--and make up his little bundle for him, ready
for his apprenticeship to Mr. Ellis Gamble, silver-plate engraver of
Cranbourne Alley, Leicester Fields. He may have been sent out to nurse
at Tottenham or Edmonton, or, may be, distant Ware, as children of his
degree were wont to be sent out (Mr. John Locke’s _Education_, and Mr.
Daniel Defoe’s _Family Instructor, passim_). But, in good sooth, I am
loth to turn over my William to the tender mercies of the eighteenth
century and the Augustan age. I fear great “Anna” and her era, and
for a double reason: first, that people know already so much about
the reign of Queen Anne. No kindly book a’ bosom but can follow Sir
Roger de Coverley and his tall silent friend the _Spectator_ in their
rambles; but has seen Swift walking across the park in mighty fear of
the Mohocks; but has taken a dish of coffee at Miss Vanhomrigh’s; but
has lounged in the elegant saloon, among the China monsters and the
black boys, with Belinda or Sir Plume; but has accompanied Steele from
coffee-house to coffee-house, and peeped over his shoulder while he
scribbled those charming little billets to his wife; but has seen Queen
Anne herself, the “stately lady in black velvet and diamonds,” who
touched little Sam Johnson for the evil, and hung round his neck that
broad piece of angel gold, which in its more earthly form of a guinea
the poor doctor wanted so often and so badly at a subsequent stage of
his career. The humorists and essayists of Queen Anne’s days have made
them as crystal-clear to us as Grammont and Pepys made those of the
Second Charles; and--there! bah! it is mock modesty to blink the truth
because my pen happens to be enlisted under such a banner. I could
have gone swaggeringly enough into all the minutiæ of Anne’s days, all
the glories and meannesses of John Churchill, all the humours, and
tyrannies, and quarrels of Pope, and Gay, and Harley, and St. John,
if a book called _Esmond_ had never been written. Yet finding myself
in this cleft stick, between the historian who wrote of the state of
manners at the close of the reign of Charles II., and the novelist,
who has made the men and women of Queen Anne’s court and city and army
live again, I feel slightly relieved. There is just one little niche
left for me. Just three years to dwell upon, while little boy Hogarth
is in his swaddling clothes, or is consorting with divers other little
brats as diminutive as he, on the doorsteps or the pavement of Ship
Court. Three years,--’97, ’98, ’99. _Ah! laissez-moi pleurer ces années
mortes._ Let me linger over these three ignored years. They were a
transition time. They are lost in the deeper shadow cast by the vicious
bonfire that Charles’s _roués_ and beauties lighted up--a shadow
shortly to be dispelled by the purer radiance of an Augustan era of
literature. Pepys and Evelyn are so minute, so lifelike, that between
their word-paintings, and those of the _Spectator_ and _Tatler_, there
seems a great black blank.
No seven-league boots are necessary for me to stride back to my
subject, and to the time when my little-boy-hero is forming his
earliest acquaintance with the Old Bailey stones. I said that I wanted
those last three dying years of the seventeenth century. Let me take
them, and endeavour to make the best of them, even when I compress some
of their characteristics within the compass of a single London day.
The century, then, is on its last legs. The town seems to have quite
done with the Stuarts, socially speaking, although politically another
Stuart will reign: a dethroned Stuart is actually at St. Germains,
maundering with his confessors, and conspiring with his shabby refugee
courtiers; thinking half of assassinating the abhorred Dutchman, and
making Père la Chaise Archbishop of Canterbury _in partibus_, and
half of slinking away to La Trappe, wearing a hair shirt, and doing
grave-digging on his own account for good and all. Politically, too,
this crooked-wayed, impracticable Stuart’s son and grandson will give
the world some trouble till the year 1788, when, a hundred years after
the Revolution, a worn-out, _blasé_ sensualist, called the Young
Pretender, dies at Rome, leaving a brother, the Cardinal of York,
who survived to be a pensioner of George the Third, and bequeathed
to him those Stuart papers, which, had their contents been known at
the Cockpit, Westminster, half a century before, would have caused
the fall of many a head as noble as Derwentwater’s, as chivalrous as
Charles Ratcliffe’s, and broken many a heart as loving and true as
Flora Macdonald’s or Lady Nithisdale’s. But with the Restoration-Stuart
period, London town has quite done. Rochester has died penitent,
Buckingham bankrupt and forlorn. Archbishop Tenison has preached Nelly
Gwynn’s funeral sermon; Portsmouth, Davies, are no more heard of; Will
Chiffinch can procure for kings no more: the rigid Dutchman scorns such
painted children of dirt; Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, has married
one Fielding, a swindling caricature of a “beau;” Wycherly is old and
broken, and the iron of the Fleet has entered into his soul; and poor
noble old John Dryden, twitted as a renegade, neglected, unpensioned,
and maligned, is savagely writing the finest “copy” that has issued
yet from that grand fertile brain, writing it with a Spartan fortitude
and persistence, and ever and anon giving left-legged Jacob Tonson
a sound verbal trouncing, when the publisher would palm on the poet
clipped moidores for milled Jacobuses. Ah, little boy Hogarth, you
will see Johnson fifty years hence, listen to him behind the curtain
in the twilight room, as the Jacobite schoolman raves against the
cruelty of government in hanging Doctor Cameron; but you will never
behold John Dryden in the flesh, little boy, or hear him at Wills’s on
golden summer afternoons, the undisputed oracle of wits, and critics,
and poets. The horrible Chancellor Jeffries (however could the ruffian
have found patience and temper to deliver a decree in Chancery!) is
dead, but he has a son alive, a rake-hell, Mohock Lord Jeffries, who,
four years hence, will be implicated in a scandalous disturbance at
Dryden’s house, in Gerrard Street; the poet’s corpse lying there. There
are brave men hard at work for the nineteenth century. Isaac Newton is
working; in ’95 he was appointed Master of the Mint. Pope is beginning
to feel his poetic feet. Mr. Joseph Addison is at college. Swift has
had the run of Temple’s library. Lely has thrown down the pencil;
Knelier has taken it up; and James Thornhill is preparing for vast
sprawlings on ceilings, after the model of Verrio and Laguerre.
Away with Restoration reminiscences, for the more decent century that
is to come. By 8th and 9th William III., Alsatia is ruined, and its
privileges of sanctuary wholly taken away. A dreadful outpouring and
scattering of ragged rogues and ruffians, crying out in what huff-cap
cant and crambo they can command, that _delenda est Carthago_,
takes place. Foul reeking taverns disgorge knavish tatterdemalions,
soddened with usquebaugh and spiced Hollands, querulous or lachrymose
with potations of “mad dog,” “angel’s food,” “dragon’s milk,” and
“go-by-the-wall.” Stern catchpoles seize these inebriated and indebted
maltbugs, and drag them off to the Compters, or to Ludgate, “where
citizens lie in durance, surrounded by copies of their freedom.”
Alewives accustomed to mix beer with rosin and salt deplore the loss
of their best customers; for their creed was Pistol’s advice to Dame
Quickly, “Trust none;” and the debased vagabonds who crowded the
drinking-shops--if they drank till they were as red as cocks and little
wiser than their combs, if they occasionally cut one another’s throats
in front of the bar, or stabbed the drawer for refusing to deliver
strong waters without cash--could sometimes borrow, and sometimes
beg, and sometimes steal money, and then they drank and paid. No use
was there in passing bad money in Alsatia, when every sanctuary man
and woman knew how to coin and to clip it. You couldn’t run away from
your lodgings in Alsatia, for so soon as you showed your nose at the
Whitefriars’ gate, in Fleet Street, the Philistines were upon you.
Oh! for the ruffianly soldados, the copper captains, the curl’d-pate
braggarts, the poltroons who had lost their ears in the pillory,
and swore they had been carried off by the wind of a cannon-shot at
Sedgemoor! Oh! for the beauteous slatterns, the Phrynes and Aspasias
of this Fleet Street Athens, with their paint and their black visor
masques; their organ-pipe head-dresses, their low stomachers, and
their high-heeled shoes; the tresses of dead men’s hair they thatched
their poor bald crowns withal; the live fools’ rings and necklaces
they sported between taking out and pawning in! Beggars, cut-purses,
swindlers, tavern-bilks, broken life-guardsmen, foreign counts,
native highwaymen, and some poor honest unfortunates, the victims of
a Draconic law of debtor and creditor, all found their Patmos turn
out to be a mere shifting quicksand. The town does not long remain
troubled with these broken spars and timbers of the wrecked ship--once
a tall caravel--Humanity. Don’t you remember when the “Holy Land” of
St. Giles’s was pulled down to build New Oxford Street, what an outcry
arose as to where the dispossessed Gilesians were to find shelter? and
don’t you remember how quickly they found congenial holes and corners
into which to subside--dirt to dirt, disease to disease, squalor to
squalor, rags to rags? So with the Alsatians. A miserable compensation
is made to them for their lost sanctuary by the statute which quashes
all foregone executions for debts under fifty pounds; but they soon
get arrested again--often for sums not much more than fifty pence--and,
being laid up in hold, starve and rot miserably. There are debtors
in Newgate, there are debtors in Ludgate; in the Clink, the Borough,
Poultry, and Wood Street Compters, the Marshalsea, the King’s Bench,
and at Westminster Gate houses, besides innumerable spunging houses, or
“spider’s webs,” with signs like inns, such as the “Pied Bull” in the
Borough, and the “Angel” in Cursitor Street. Little boy Hogarth will
have much to observe about prisons and prisoners when he is grown to
be a man. Many Alsatians take refuge in the Southwark Mint, likewise,
and by the same statute deprived of its sanctuary; but which, in
some underhand manner--perhaps from there being only one bridge into
Southwark, and that rotten--contrives to evade it till late in the
reign of George I. Coining flourishes thenceforth more than ever in the
Mint; the science of Water Lane being added to the experience of St.
Mary Overy, and both being aided, perhaps, by the ancient numismatic
traditions of the place. More of the Alsatians are caught up by
alguazils of the criminal law, and, after a brief sojourn at Newgate,
“patibulate” at Justice Hall, and eventually make that sad journey up
Holborn Hill in a cart, stopping for a refresher at the Bowl House,
St. Giles’s Pound--alas! it is not always staying for his liquor that
will save the saddler of Bawtree from hanging--and so end at Tyburn.
Some, too, go a-begging in Lincoln’s Inn, and manufacture some highly
remunerative mutilations and ulcers. And some, a very few, tired of the
draff and husks in Alsatia, go back to their fathers, and are forgiven.
In this hard world, whose members only see the application of parables
that teach us love and mercy on Sundays, it is easier to find prodigals
to repent than fathers to forgive. But for our hope and comfort, _that_
parable has another and a higher meaning.
Alsatia was linked hand in glove with the Court of the Restoration.
’Twas often but a chapel of ease to the backstairs of Whitehall,
and many a great courtier, ruined at basset with the king and his
beauties the night before, found his level on the morrow in this vile
slum-playing butt, playing cards on a broken pair of bellows. But now,
1697, Whitehall itself is gone. The major part of the enormous pile
went by fire in ’91; now the rest, or all but Holbein’s Gate, and the
blood-stained Banqueting-house, has fallen a prey to the “devouring
element.”
Whitehall, then, has gone by the board. In vain now to look for Horn
Chamber, or Cabinet Room, or the stone gallery that flanked Privy
Garden, where the imperious, depraved Louise de la Quérouaille, Duchess
of Portsmouth, lived amid “French tapestry, Japan cabinets, screens,
pendule clocks, great vases of wrought plate, table stands, chimney
furniture, sconces, branches, braseners, all of massive silver, and out
of number.” All these things, worthy Master Evelyn, of Sayes Court,
Deptford (who about this time has let his said mansion and ground to
Peter Velikè, czar of Muscovy, and thinks him but an evil tenant, with
his uncouth, uncleanly Russian fashions, his driving of wheelbarrows
through neatly-trimmed hedges, and spitting over polished andirons,
and gorging himself with raw turnips sliced in brandy)--worthy,
sententious Evelyn shall see these things no more. Nay, nor that
“glorious gallery,” quoted from his description innumerable times,
where was the dissolute king “sitting toying with his concubines,
Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarine, &c.; a French boy singing
love-songs, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and others were
at basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2,000_l._ in gold
before them. Six days after, all was in the dust.” And worse.
Little boy Hogarth, you shall often pass by the banqueting-house--ay,
and admire Hans Holbein’s wondrous gate of red brick, tesselated in
quaint and beauteous design; of which the fragments, when the gate
was pulled down in 1760, were begged by William, Duke of Cumberland,
and the pieces numbered, with the project of having them transferred
to Windsor park and there re-erected as a royal ducal lodge. But
the project was never carried out, and the duke probably forgot all
about it, or found something more worth begging for than a lot of old
building materials. So exit Whitehall palace: buttery, bakehouse, wood
and coal yards, spicery, charcoal-house, king’s privy cellar, council
chamber, hearth-money office, and other fripperies in stone. It must
have been a grand place, even as the heterogeneous pile that existed
in William Dutchman’s time; but if James or Charles had possessed
the funds to rebuild it according to Inigo Jones’s magnificent plan,
of which the banqueting-house is but an instalment, the palace of
Whitehall would have put to the blush the Baths of Diocletian, the
golden house of Nero--yea, and the temple which Erostratus burnt, to
prove that all things were vanity, even to incendiarism.
Will it please you to walk into the city, now that we have done with
Westminster, any day in these three years of the moribund seventeenth
century. London is busy enough, noisy enough, dirty enough; but not so
smoky. There is little or no foot pavement; but there are plenty of
posts and plenty of kennels--three hundred and eleven, I think, between
Newgate and Charing Cross. When the humorous operation, resorted to
with ugly frequency about this time, of whipping a man at the cart’s
tail, takes place, the hangman gives the poor wretch a lash at every
kennel the near wheel of the cart grates against. Newgate to Ludgate,
Charing Cross to the “Cockpit” at Westminster, are considered the
mildest pilgrimages to be undergone by these poor flagellated knaves;
but Charing to Newgate is the real _via dolorosa_ of stripes. That
pilgrimage was reserved for the great objects of political hatred and
vengeance in James II.’s reign--for Titus Oates and Thomas Dangerfield.
The former abominable liar and perjurer, stripped of his ambrosial
periwig and rustling silk canonicals, turned out of his lodgings in
Whitehall, and reduced to the very last of the last, is tried and
sentenced, and is very nearly scourged to death. He is to pay an
enormous fine besides, and is to lie in Newgate for the remainder of
his life. I wonder that like “flagrant Tutchin,” when shuddering under
a sentence almost as frightful, he did not petition to be hanged:
yet there seems to be an indomitable bull-headed, bull-backed power
of endurance about this man Oates--this sham doctor of divinity, this
Judas spy of Douai and St. Omer, this broken chaplain of a man-of-war,
this living, breathing, incarnate Lie--that enables him to undergo
his punishment, and to get over its effects somehow. He has not lain
long in Newgate, getting his seared back healed as best he may, when
haply, in “pudding-time,” comes Dutch William the Deliverer. Oates’s
scourging was evidently alluded to when provision was made in the Bill
of Rights against “cruel and unusual punishments.” The heavy doors of
Newgate open wide for Titus, who once more dons his wig and canonicals.
Reflective persons do not believe in the perjured scoundrel any more,
and he is seldom sworn, I should opine, of the common jury or the
crowner’s quest. He has “taken the book in his right hand,” and kissed
it once too often. By a section of the serious world, who yet place
implicit faith in all Sir Edmondbury Godfrey’s wounds, and take the
inscription on the Monument of Fish Street Hill as law and gospel,
Titus Oates is regarded as a species of Protestant martyr--of a sorry,
slippery kind, may be, but, at all events, as one who has suffered
sorely for the good cause. The government repension him; he grows fat
and bloated, and if Tom Brown is to be believed (_Miscellanies_, 1697),
Doctor Oates, about the time of Hogarth’s birth, marries a rich city
widow of Jewin Street.
Different, and not so prosperous, is the end of the assistant
villain, Dangerfield. He, too, is whipped nearly out of his skin, and
within a tattered inch of his miserable life; but his sentence ends
before Newgate is reached, and he is being taken to that prison in a
hackney-coach, when the hangman’s assistants stop the vehicle at the
Gray’s Inn Coffee-house, to give the poor, tired, mangled wretch a
drink. Steps out of the coffee-house one Mr. Francis, a counsel learned
in the law of Gray’s Inn aforesaid, and who has probably been taking
a flask too much at the coffee-house. He is an ardent anti-plot man,
and in a railing tone and Newmarket phrase asks Dangerfield whether
he has “run his heat and how he likes it.” The bleeding object in the
coach, revived to pristine ruffianism by the liquor his gaolers have
given him, answers with a flood of ribald execrations--bad language
could surely be tolerated in one so evilly intreated as he had been
that morning--whereupon the barrister in a rage makes a lunge at
Dangerfield’s face, with a bamboo cane, and strikes one of his eyes
out. In the fevered state of the man’s blood, erysipelas sets in, and
Dangerfield shortly afterwards gives the world a good riddance (though
it were better the hangman had done it outright with a halter) and
dies. The most curious thing is, that Francis was tried and executed at
Tyburn for the murder of this wretched, scourged, blinded perjurer. He
was most likely tried by a strong Protestant jury, who (very justly)
found him guilty on the facts, but would very probably have found him
guilty against the facts, to show their Protestant feeling and belief
in the Popish plot; but I say the thing is curious, seeing that the
Crown did not exercise its prerogative of mercy and pardon to Francis,
who was a gentleman of good family, and manifestly of the court way
of thinking. The conclusion is: either that there was more impartial
justice in the reign of James II. than we have given that bad time
credit for, or that the court let Francis swing through fear of the
mob. You see that the mob in those days did not like to be baulked of
a show, and that the mob derived equal pleasure from seeing Francis
hanged as from seeing Dangerfield whipped. The moral of this apologue
is, that Oates and Dangerfield being very much alike in roguery,
especially Oates, one got not quite so much as he deserved, and the
other not quite enough; which has been the case in many other instances
that have occurred in society, both vulgar and polite, since the days
of William III.
There, I land you at Temple Bar, on whose gory spikes are the heads of
the last conspirators against William the Dutchman’s life. “_Forsitan
et nobis_,” whispered Goldsmith slyly to Johnson as they gazed up at
the heads which, late in the reign of George III., yet rotted on those
fatal spikes. We will not linger at Temple Bar now. Little boy Hogarth,
years hence, will take us backwards and forwards through it hundreds
of times. The three last years of century seventeen glide away from
me. Plumed hats, ye are henceforth to be cocked. Swords, ye shall be
worn diagonally, not horizontally. Puffed sleeves, ye must give place
to ruffles. Knickerbocker breeches, with rosettes at the knees, ye
must be superseded by smalls and rolled stockings. Shoe-bows, the
era of buckles is coming. Justaucorps, flapped waistcoats will drive
you from the field. Falling bands, your rivals are to be cravats of
Mechlin lace. Carlovingian periwigs, the Ramillies’ wig is imminent.
Elkanah Settles, greater city poets are to sing the praise of city
custards. Claude du Val and Colonel Jack, greater thieves will swing
in the greater reign that is to come. And wake up, little boy Hogarth,
for William the Dutchman has broken his collar-bone, and lies sick to
death at Kensington. The seventeenth century is gone and passed. In
1703 William dies, and the Princess of Denmark reigns in his stead. Up,
little boy Hogarth! grow stout and tall--you have to be bound ’prentice
and learn the mystery of the cross-hatch and the double cypher. Up,
baby Hogarth, there is glorious work for you to do!
Unspoken Dialogue.
Above the trailing mignonette
That deck’d the window-sill,
A lady sat, with lips firm-set,
And looks of earnest will:
Four decades o’er her life had met,
And left her lovely still.
Not to the radiant firmament,
Not to the garden’s grace,
The courses of her mind were bent,
But where, with sweetest face,
Forth from the other window leant
The daughter of the place.
Thus ran her thoughts: “O wretched day!
When She was born so fair:
Well could I let my charms decay,
If she were not their heir;
I loathe the sunbeams as they play
About her golden hair.
“Yet why? she is too good, too mild,
So madly to aspire;
_He_ is no boy to be beguil’d
By sparks of colour’d fire:
I will not dream a pretty child
Can mar my deep desire.
“Her fatherless and lonely days
Are sere before their time:
In scenes of gaiety and praise
She will regain her prime,
And cease to haunt these wooded ways
With sentimental rhyme.”
[Illustration:
“Dear child! he comes.--Nay, blush not so
To have your secret known:”]
On to the conscious maiden pass’d
Those words without the tongue;
Half petulantly back she cast
The glist’ning curls that hung
About her neck, and answer’d fast:
“Yes, I am young--too young:
“Yet am I graver than my wont,
Gravest when he is here;
Beneath the glory of his front
I tremble--not with fear:
But as I read, Bethesda’s font
Felt with the Angel near.
“Must I mate only with my kind,
With something as unwise
As my poor self; and never find
Affection I can prize
At once with an adoring mind,
And with admiring eyes?”
“My mother trusts to drag me down
To some low range of life,
By pleasures of the clam’rous town,
And vanity’s mean strife;
And in such selfish tumult drown
My hope to be _his_ wife.”
Then darker round the lady grew
The meditative cloud,--
And stormy thoughts began to brew
She dar’d not speak aloud;
For then without disguise she knew
That rivalry avow’d.
“What is my being if I lose
My love’s last stake? while she
Has the fair future where to choose
Her woman’s destiny--
Free scope those means and powers to use,
Which time denies to me.
“Was it for this her baby arms
About my neck were flung?
Was it for this I found such charms
In her uncertain tongue?
Was it for this those vain alarms
My mother-soul unstrung?
“Oh, horrible! to wish my child--
My sole one left--unborn,
And, seeing her so meek and mild,
To hold such gifts in scorn;
My nature is grown waste and wild,
My heart with fury torn!”
Speechless--enchanted to the spot--
The girl could scarce divine
The whole disaster of her lot,--
But without sound or sign
She cried, “O Mother! love him not;--
Oh! let his love be mine!
“You have had years of full delight,
Your girlhood’s passion-dream
Was realized to touch and sight
As bright as it could seem;--
And now you interpose, like Night,
Before my life’s first gleam.
“Yet you were once what I am now,--
You wore your maiden prize;
You told me of my Father, how
You lived but in his eyes;--
You spoke of the perpetual vow,
The troth that never dies.
“Dear Mother! dearer, kinder far,
If by my childhood’s bed
Your care had never stood to bar
Misfortune from my head;--
But laid me where my brothers are,
Among the quiet dead.
“Ah! why not die? This cruel strife,
Can thus--thus only--cease?
Dear God! take home this erring life--
This struggling soul release:
From Heaven, perchance, upon _his_ wife
I might look down in peace.”
That prayer--like some electric flame,
Struck with resistless force
The lady’s agitated frame,--
Nor halted in its course,
Till her hard pride was turn’d to shame,
Her passion to remorse.
She spoke--her words were very low,
But resolute in tone--
“Dear child! he comes.--Nay, blush not so
To have your secret known:
’Tis best, ’tis best, that I should go--
And leave you here alone.”
Then, as his steps grew near and fast,
Her hand was on the door,
Her heart by holy grace had cast
The demon from its core,--
And on the threshold calm she pass’d
The man she loved no more.
R. MONCKTON MILNES.