Caricature and Other Comic Art Part 13

Nor was he too nice in his choice of subjects for way-side treatment.

One of his fellow-apprentices used to relate an anecdote of the time when they were accustomed to make the usual Sunday excursion into the country, Hogarth being fifteen years of age. In a tap-room row a man received a severe cut upon the forehead with a quart beer-pot, which brought blood, and caused him to "distort his features into a most hideous grin." Hogarth produced his pencil and instantly drew a caricature of the scene, including a most ludicrous and striking likeness of the wounded man. There was of necessity a good deal of _tap-room_ in all humorous art and literature of that century, and he was perfectly at home in scenes of a beery cast.

The "Five Days' Peregrination" of Hogarth and his friends, of which Thackeray discoursed to us so agreeably in one of his lectures, occurred when the artist was thirty-four years of age. But it shows us the same jovial Londoner, whose manners and pleasures, as Mr. Thackeray remarked, though honest and innocent, were "not very refined." Five friends set out on foot early in the morning from their tavern haunt in Covent Garden, gayly singing the old song, "Why should we quarrel for riches?"

Billingsgate was their first halting-place, where, as the appointed historian of the jaunt records, "Hogarth made the caricature of a porter, who called himself the Duke of Puddle Dock," which "drawing was by his grace pasted on the cellar door." At Rochester, "Hogarth and Scott stopped and played at hop-scotch in the colonnade under the Town-hall." The Nag's Head at the village of Stock sheltered them one night, when, after supper, "we adjourned to the door, drank punch, stood and sat for our pictures drawn by Hogarth." In another village the merry blades "got a wooden chair, and placed Hogarth in it in the street, where he made the drawing, and gathered a great many men, women, and children about him to see his performance." The same evening, over their flip, they were entertaining the tap-room with their best songs, when some Harwich lobster-men came in and sung several sea-songs so agreeably that the Londoners were "quite put out of countenance." "Our _St.

John_," records the scribe of the adventure, "would not come in compet.i.tion, nor could _Pishoken_ save us from disgrace." Here, too, is a Hogarthian incident: "Hogarth called me up and told me the good-woman insisted on being paid for her bed, or having Scott before the mayor, _which last we did all in our power to promote_." And so they merrily tramped the country round, singing, drawing, copying comic epitaphs, and pelting one another with dirt, returning to London at the end of the five days, having expended just six guineas--five shillings a day each man.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Time Smoking a Picture.]

His sense of humor appears in his serious writings. One ill.u.s.tration which he gives in his "a.n.a.lysis of Beauty," to show the essential and exhaustless charm of the waving line, is in the highest degree comic: "I once heard an eminent dancing-master say that the minuet had been the study of his whole life, and that he had been indefatigable in the pursuit of its beauties, yet at last could only say, with Socrates, _he knew nothing_, adding that I was happy in my profession as a painter, in that some bounds might be set to the study of it."

In his long warfare with the picture-dealers, who starved living art in England by the manufacture of "old masters," he employed ridicule and caricature with powerful effect. His masterly caricature of "Time smoking a Picture" was well seconded by humorous letters to the press, and by many a pa.s.sing hit in his more elaborate writings. He maintained that a painting is never so good as at the moment it leaves the artist's hands, time having no possible effect upon it except to impair its beauty and diminish its truth. There was penned at this period a burlesque "Bill of Monsieur Varnish to Benjamin Bister," which is certainly Hogarthian, if it is not Hogarth's, and might well serve as a companion piece to the engraving. Among the items are these:

_ s. d._ To painting and canvas for a naked Mary Magdalen, in the undoubted style of Paul Veronese 2 2 0

To brimstone, for smoking ditto 0 2 0

Paid Mrs. W---- for a live model to sit for Diana bathing, by Tintoretto 0 16 0

Paid for the hire of a layman, to copy the robes of a Cardinal, for a Vandyck 0 5 0

Paid the female figure for sitting thirty minutes in a wet sheet, that I might give the dry manner of that master 0 10 6

The Tribute-money Rendered, with all the exactness of Quintin Metsius, the famed blacksmith of Antwerp 2 12 6

The Martyrdom of St. Winifred, with a view of Holywell Bath, by old Frank 1 11 6

To a large allegorical altarpiece, consisting of men and angels, horses and river G.o.ds; 'tis thought most happily hit off for a Rubens 5 5 0

Paid for admission into the House of Peers, to take a sketch of a great character, for a picture of Moses breaking the Tables of the Law, in the darkest manner of Rembrandt, not yet finished 0 2 6

The idea of a wet sheet imparting the effect of dryness was taken from a treatise on painting, which stated that "some of the ancient masters acquired a dry manner of painting from studying after wet drapery."

This robust and downright Briton, strong in the consciousness of original and native genius, did not object merely to the manufacture of old masters, but also to the excessive value placed upon the genuine productions of the great men of old. He could not feel it to be just or favorable to the progress of art that works representing a state of feeling long ago outgrown in England should take precedence of paintings instinct with the life of the present hour. In other words, he did not enjoy seeing one of his own paintings sell at auction for fourteen guineas, and an Old Master bring a thousand. He grew warm when he denounced "the picture-jobbers from abroad," who imported continually "ship-loads of dead Christs, Holy Families, Madonnas, and other dismal, dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental, on which they scrawl the terrible cramp names of some Italian masters, and fix upon us Englishmen the name of universal dupes." He imagines a scene between one of those old-master mongers and his customer. The victim says:

"'Mr. Bubbleman, that grand Venus, as you are pleased to call it, has not beauty enough for the character of an English cook-maid.' Upon which the quack answers, with a confident air: 'Sir, I find that you are no _connoisseur_; the picture, I a.s.sure you, is in Ales...o...b..ldminetto's second and best manner, boldly painted, and truly sublime: the contour gracious; the air of the head in high Greek taste; and a most divine idea it is.' Then spitting in an obscure place, and rubbing it with a dirty handkerchief, takes a skip to t'other end of the room, and screams out in raptures, 'There's an amazing touch! A man should have this picture a twelvemonth in his collection before he can discover half its beauties!' The gentleman (though naturally a judge of what is beautiful, yet ashamed to be out of the fashion by judging for himself) with this cant is struck dumb, gives a vast sum for the picture, very modestly confesses he is indeed quite ignorant of painting, and bestows a frame worth fifty pounds on a frightful thing, which, without the hard name, is not worth so many farthings."

[Ill.u.s.tration:

The no Dedication

Not Dedicated to any Prince in Christendom for fear it might be thought an Idle piece of Arrogance.

Nor Dedicated to any man of quality for fear it might be thought too a.s.suming.

Nor Dedicated to any learned body of Men, as either of the universities or the Royal Society, for fear it might be thought an uncommon piece of Vanity.

Nor Dedicated to any one particular Friend for fear of offending another.

Therefore Dedicated to n.o.body.

But if for once we may suppose n.o.body to be every body, as Every body is often said to be n.o.body, then is this work Dedicated to every body.

by their most humble and devoted W. Hogarth

Dedication of a Proposed History of the Arts. (From Hogarth's Ma.n.u.script.[20])]

[Footnote 20: "Hogarth's Works," frontispiece to vol. iii., by Ireland and Nichols.]

He gives picture-buyers a piece of advice which many of them have since taken, to the sore distress of their guests: Use your own eyes, and buy the pictures which _they_ dwell upon with delight.

In the heat of controversy, Hogarth, as usual, went too far; but he stood manfully by his order, and defended resolutely their rights and his own. Artists owe him undying grat.i.tude for two great services: he showed them a way to independence by setting up in business on his own account, becoming his own engraver and publisher, and retaining always the ownership of his own plates, which, indeed, const.i.tuted his estate, and supported creditably his family as long as any of them lived. He served all artists, too, by defending himself against the pirates who flooded the market with meanly executed copies of his own engravings. It was William Hogarth who obtained from Parliament the first act which secured to artists the sole right to multiply and sell copies of their works; and this right is the very corner-stone of a great national painter's independence. That act made genuine art a possible profession in England.

Such was Hogarth, the original artist of his country, an honest, valiant citizen, who stood his ground, paid his way, cheered and admonished his generation. He had the faults which belong to a positive character, trod on many toes, was often misunderstood, and had his ample share of trouble and contention. All that is now forgotten; and he was never so much valued, so frequently reproduced, so generally possessed, or so carefully studied as at the present time.

The generation that forms great satirists shines in the history of literature, but not in that of morals; for to supply with objects of satire such masters of the satiric arts as Hogarth, Swift, Pope, Gay, Steele, Arbuthnot, and Foote, there must be deep corruption in the State and radical folly in conspicuous persons. The process which has since been named "secularization" had then fairly set in. The brilliant men of the time had learned to deride the faith which had been a restraining force upon the propensities of man for fifteen centuries, but were very far from having learned to be continent, temperate, and just without its aid. "Four treatises against the miracles" Voltaire boasted of having seen during his residence in England in 1727 and 1728; but these treatises did not moderate the warmth of human pa.s.sions, nor change any other element in the difficult problem of existence. Walpole bribed, Swift maligned, Bolingbroke intrigued, Charteris seduced, and Marlborough peculated just as if the New Light had not dawned and the miracles had remained intact. Do we not, even in our own time, see inquiring youth, bred in strait-laced homes, a.s.suming that since there are now two opinions as to the origin of things, it is no longer necessary to comply with the moral laws? The splendid personages of that period seem to have been in a moral condition similar to that of such a youth. It was the fashion to be dissolute; it was "provincial" to obey those laws of our being from compliance with which all human welfare and all honest joy have come.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sir Robert Walpole paring the Nails of the British Lion.]

Politics were still most rudimentary. The English people were fully resolved on keeping out the dull and deadly Stuarts; but the price they had to pay for this was to submit to the rule of the dull and difficult Georges, whose bodies were in England and their hearts in Hanover.

Between the king and the people stood Sir Robert Walpole--as good a man as could have held the place--who went directly to the point with members and writers, ascertained their price, and paid it. According to one of Pope's bitter notes on the "Dunciad," where he quotes a Parliamentary report, this minister in ten years paid to writers and publishers of newspapers "fifty thousand pounds eighteen shillings!" How much he paid to members of Parliament was a secret known only to himself and the king. The venality of the press was frequently burlesqued, as well as the fulsome pomp of its purchased eulogies. A very good specimen is that which appeared in 1735, during a ministerial crisis, when the opposition had high hopes of ousting the tenacious Walpoles. An "Advertis.e.m.e.nt" was published, in which was offered for sale a "neat and curious collection of well-chosen similes, allusions, metaphors, and allegories from the best plays and romances, modern and ancient, proper to adorn a panegyric on the glorious patriots designed to succeed the present ministry." The author gave notice that "all sublunary metaphors of a new minister, being a Rock, a Pillar, a Bulwark, a Strong Tower, or a Spire Steeple, will be allowed very cheap;" but celestial ones, being brought from the other world at a great expense, must be held at a higher rate. The author announced that he had prepared a collection of State satires, which would serve, with little variation, to libel a judge, a bishop, or a prime minister. "N.B.--The same satirist has collections of reasons ready by him against the ensuing peace, though he has not yet read the preliminaries or seen one article of the pacification."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Dutch Neutrality, 1745.]

There was also a burlesque "Bill of Costs for a late Tory Election in the West," in which we find such items as "bespeaking and collecting a mob," "a set of No-Roundhead roarers," "a set of coffee-house praters,"

"Dissenter d.a.m.ners," "demolishing two houses," "committing two riots,"

"breaking windows," "roarers of the word CHURCH," "several gallons of Tory punch on church tombstones." It is questionable, however, if in all the burlesques of the period there was one more ridiculous than the narrative of an actual occurrence in April, 1715, when the footmen of members of the House of Commons met outside of the House, according to established custom, to elect a Speaker. The Tory footmen cast their votes for "Sir Thomas Morgan's servant," and the Whigs for "Mr.

Strickland's man." A dispute arising, a fight ensued between the two parties, in the midst of which the House broke up, and the footmen were obliged to attend their masters. The next day, as soon as the House was in session, the fight was renewed, and, after a desperate struggle, the victorious Whigs carried their man three times in triumph round Westminster Hall, and then adjourned to a Whig ale-house, the landlord of which gave them a dinner, the footmen paying only for their drink.

[Ill.u.s.tration: British Idolatry of the Opera-Singer Mingotti, 1756.

"Ra, ra, ra, rot ye, My name is Mingotti.

If you worship me notti, You shall all go to potti."]

The caricatures of the Walpole period preserve the record of the first attempt to lessen by law the intemperate drinking of gin--the most pernicious of the spirituous liquors. A law was pa.s.sed imposing upon this article a very heavy excise, and prohibiting its sale in small quant.i.ties. But in 1736 England had not reached, by a century and a half, the development of civilization which admits of the adequate consideration of such a measure; nor can the poor man's gin _ever_ be limited by law while the rich man's wine flows free. This gin law appears to have been killed by ridicule. Ballads lamenting the near decease of "Mother Gin" were sung in the streets; the gin-shop signs were hung with black, and there were mock ceremonies of "Madame Geneva's Lying in State," "Mother Gin's Wake," and "Madame Gin's Funeral."

Paragraphs notified the public that the funeral of Madame Gin was celebrated with great merriment, many of both s.e.xes "getting soundly drunk," and a mob following her remains with torches. The night before the measure went into operation was one of universal revel among the gin-drinkers, and every one, we are a.s.sured, carried off as much of the popular liquor, for future consumption, as he could pay for. The law was evaded by the expedients long afterward employed in Maine, when first a serious attempt was made to enforce the "Maine Law." Apothecaries and others colored their gin, put it into phials, and labeled it "Colic Water," "Make-shift," "The Ladies' Delight," with printed "Directions"

to take two or three spoonfuls three or four times a day, "or as often as the fit takes you." Informers sprung into an importance never before known, and many of them invented snares to decoy men into violations of the law. So odious did they become that if one of them fell into the hands of the mob, he was lucky to escape with only a ducking in the Thames or a horse-trough. In short, the attempt was ill-considered and premature, and after an experiment of two or three years it was given up, having contributed something toward the growing unpopularity of the ministry.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Motion (for the Removal of Sir Robert Walpole).]

The downfall of Sir Robert Walpole, after holding office for twenty years, was preceded by an animated fire of caricature, in which the adherents of Walpole held their own. The specimen given above, ent.i.tled "The Motion," was reduced from one of the most famous caricatures of the reign of George II., and one of the most finely wrought of the century.[21] Horace Walpole, son of the great minister, wrote from Florence that the picture had "diverted him extremely," and that the likenesses were "admirable." To us the picture says nothing until it is explained; but every London apprentice of the period recognized Whitehall and the Treasury, toward which the Opposition was driving with such furious haste, and could distinguish most of the personages exhibited. A few days before this caricature appeared, Sandys, who was styled the motion-maker, from the frequency of his attempts to array the House of Commons against the Walpole ministry, moved once more an address to the king, that he would be pleased to remove Sir Robert Walpole from his presence and councils forever. The debate upon this motion was long and most vehement, and though the ministry triumphed, it was one of those b.l.o.o.d.y victories which presage overthrow. On the same day a similar "motion" was made in the House of Lords by Lord Carteret, where an equally violent discussion was followed by a vote sustaining the ministry. The exultation of the Walpole party inspired this famous caricature, in which we see the Opposition peers trying to reach office in a lordly coach and six, and the Commons trudging toward the same goal on foot, their leader, Pulteney, wheeling a load of Opposition newspapers, and leading his followers by the nose. Every politician of note on the side of the Opposition is in the picture: Lord Chesterfield is the postilion; the Duke of Argyll the coachman; Lord Carteret the gentleman inside the coach, who, becoming conscious of the breakdown, cries, "Let me get out!" Bubb Dodington is the spaniel between the coachman's legs; the footman behind the coach is Lord Cobham, and the outrider Lord Lyttelton. On the side of the Commons there is Sandys, dropping in despair his favorite, often-defeated "Place Bill," and exclaiming, "I thought what would come of putting _him_ on the box?"

Much of the humor and point of the picture is lost to us, because the peculiar relations of the persons portrayed to the public, to their party, and to one another can not now be perfectly recalled.

[Footnote 21: Thomas Wright, "Caricature History of the Georges," p.

128.]

Edition after edition of "The Motion" appeared, one of which was so arranged that it could be fitted to the frame of a lady's fan, a common device at the time. The Opposition retorted with a parody of the picture, which they styled "The Reason," in which Walpole figures as the coachman, driving the coach of state to destruction. Another parody was called "The Motive," in which the king was the pa.s.senger and Walpole the driver. Then followed "A Consequence of the Motion," "Motion upon Motion," "The Grounds," and others. The Walpole party surpa.s.sed their opponents in caricature; but caricature is powerless to turn back a genuine tide of public feeling, and a year later Sir Robert was honorably shelved in the House of Lords.

From this time forward the history of Europe is recorded or burlesqued in the comic pictures of the shop-window; not merely the conspicuous part played in it by ministers and kings, but the foibles, the fashions, the pa.s.sions, the vices, the credulities, the whims, of each generation.

The British rage for the Italian opera, the enormous sums paid to the singers, the bearish manners of Handel, the mania for gaming, the audacity of highwaymen, and the impositions upon popular credulity no more escape the satirist's pencil than Braddock's defeat, the Queen of Hungary's loss of Silesia, or William Pitt's timely, and also his ill-timed, fits of the gout. Nor were the abuses of the Church overlooked. One picture, ent.i.tled "The Fat Pluralist and his Lean Curates," published in 1733, exhibited a corpulent dignitary of the Church in a chariot drawn by six meagre and wretched curates. The portly priest carries under one arm a large church, and a cathedral under the other, while at his feet are two sucking pigs, a hen, and a goose, which he has taken as t.i.the from a farmyard in the distance. "The Church,"