Hogarth Part 3

The Hogarth surfeit, a well-known ailment, always a.s.sails me in this lantern-lighted room of the Soane Museum. Perhaps it is the obsession of the "movable planes." Opening at a touch, the walls slide away and disclose more, more, and more works of art. But I do not suffer from Hogarth surfeit at the Foundling Hospital, over which his fatherly spirit ever seems to brood.

The eighteenth century and the twentieth meet at the Foundling Hospital; the art of Hogarth, the art of his contemporaries, of young Mr. Joshua Reynolds, and the artless lives of the foundlings who patter the note of a past day in revivified Bloomsbury.

You will seek in vain for modernity at the Foundling Hospital. A reproduction of a popular picture of our day called "For Ever and Ever, Amen," was the only example of a modern work of art in the playroom of the little girl foundlings at the Foundling Hospital where I found myself one Sunday.

Of course the little girls understood the picture. Their dawning minds can grasp a simple representation of the human gamut of love, loyalty, and grief from childhood to age. Not for them is Hogarth's forcible, chaotic, amazingly clever "March to Finchley," that hangs in one of the rooms.

But the little girls understand Hogarth's bold and picturesque "Captain Coram" displayed in the place of honour, even though the gallant and charitable seaman may frighten them on darkening evenings by his very life-likeness, Hogarth's great gift.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VIII.--PEG WOFFINGTON

(In Sir Edward Tennant's Collection)

Delightful Peg, actress, daughter of a Dublin bricklayer, known in staid biographies as Margaret Woffington. "Her beauty and grace, her pretty singing and vivacious coquetry, and the exquisite art, especially of her male characters, carried all hearts by storm." Here she is, not "dallying and dangerous" on a couch as in the version at the Garrick Club, but very charming, with a touch of primness that suits her. Note the daintiness of the flower in her bosom, the delicious colour of the dress, and the importance of the accent of the knot of black ribbon against the gleaming pearls. Oh yes! Hogarth knew his business.]

Captain Coram is very much alive, "all there." Another moment and he will start from his chair. But this founder of the hospital will not shout at the children. This big man had a big, kind heart. His life was a long whisper of love to the fatherless.

It was here, at the Foundling Hospital, that Hogarth was instrumental in forming the first public collection of pictures in this country.

Long before the National Gallery was thought of, before the Royal Academy was born, this Foundling Hospital collection was one of the sights of London. It was the fashionable lounge in the reign of George II.; here was held the first exhibition of contemporary portraits. And Hogarth, a governor and guardian of the Foundling Hospital, originated it.

He started the collection by presenting this portrait of Captain Coram in 1740, and he wrote, some years later, that it is "the best portrait in the place, notwithstanding the first painters in the kingdom exerted all their talents to vie with it." But "the first painters"

were not a very mighty lot; they were Allan Ramsay, Cotes, Hudson, Shackleton, Wilson, Highmore, and a young man called Reynolds, who twenty years after Hogarth had given his "Captain Coram" presented his "Lord Dartmouth." It is a pretty piece of delicate work, but Reynolds was not then in his prime, and I have a shrewd suspicion that when, in 1787, he produced his magnificent "Lord Heathfield," great Sir Joshua had cast many a glance at Hogarth's "Captain Coram," painted forty-seven years before.

This is a problem for the elder foundlings. The mites are content with "For Ever and Ever, Amen."

I watched them, after the long service in the chapel, silently and somewhat timorously enjoying their cold mutton and hot potatoes.

Sullen rows and rows of them, all stamped by that sad something that characterises the homeless waif, something of degradation and the menace of the fight to come all uphill.

But as I mused sadly on this spectacle my eyes caught sight of a tablet on the wall, a list of many names of foundlings who had died for their country in the Boer War.

Well, the tears do start still sometimes. Think of that leap! Here a foundling by chance, later a hero by choice, one of that great brotherhood, equal in death, equally adored, of the privileged and the brave. "_Dulce et decorum est_----"

I am sure that Hogarth, of whom Dr Trusler wrote, "Extreme partiality for his native country was the leading trait of his character," would approve that tablet, and so would Captain Coram.

VIII

THE "VILLAKIN" AT CHISWICK, AND THE END

The "villakin" at Chiswick where, from 1749, Hogarth spent the summers, is not very accessible. The most romantic, if the slummiest route, is to walk from Hammersmith Bridge through riverside alleys and by sedate Thames terraces to Chiswick Mall. Then turn up through the village, virtually unspoilt, a lane of old London still treated with respect. At the beginning of the village the churchyard flanks the street, and if you look through the gates you will see Hogarth's conspicuous, important, and ugly tomb. If you obtain admittance to the churchyard you will find carved upon the tomb a mask, a laurel wreath, maul-stick, palette, pencils, the t.i.tle of his unfortunate book, "The a.n.a.lysis of Beauty," and his epitaph, written by Garrick:--

"Farewell, great painter of Mankind!

Who reach'd the n.o.blest point of Art, Whose _pictur'd Morals_ charm the Mind, And through the Eye correct the Heart.

If Genius fire thee, Reader, stay: If _Nature_ touch thee, drop a Tear; If neither move thee, turn away, For Hogarth's honour'd dust lies here."

I do not think you will drop a tear. I do not think Hogarth's "pictur'd morals" will ever correct your heart; but you may in pa.s.sing meditate upon the differences in epitaphs throughout the world--this on Hogarth's tomb, for example, and that in a German churchyard copied by a chance pilgrim:--

"I will awake, O Christ, when Thou callest me, but let me sleep a little, for I am very tired."

Tearless, heart uncorrected, yet you will uncover before the "honour'd dust" of the Father of English Painting, forthright and forcible, who endured to the end, and whose name is imperishable. Then you pa.s.s on up Hogarth Lane to the "villakin," no longer in fields open to the country and the river, but amidst a mult.i.tude of little dwellings and little streets, noisy with children and the rumble of infrequent traffic. The narrow, Georgian, red-brick house, the "villakin," stands in a garden surrounded by a high wall. There, in the quiet, empty, memory-haunted house, the spirit of Hogarth may be truly evoked.

This place where the dead live is preserved, tended, and open to the public through the generosity of Colonel Shipway, who, in 1902, "presented it to the nation and to the Art World in memory of the Genius that once lived and worked within its walls." Happy work, for in Hogarth's time Chiswick was fresh and green, and the panelled rooms of his summer lodging were reposeful, and there was, and is, a hanging, projecting bay window on the first floor overlooking the garden, where he would sit and talk with his friends, with Garrick, and Fielding, and Townley, and plan and scheme diatribes in print and pencil, and invent pictorial chronicles. The green s.p.a.ce is smaller than it was, and the studio has been pulled down, but the garden is well tended and secluded. Four of the large trees, including the hawthorn where the nightingales sang, are gone, but the ancient mulberry still remains, with the fruit of which Hogarth was wont to regale the children of rural Chiswick. Gone is the tomb of Pompey the dog; and the stone with the carving recording the death of d.i.c.k the bullfinch, inscribed with his own hand, "Alas! poor d.i.c.k! 1760. Aged 11," has also disappeared.

The living rooms, one on the ground floor and three on the first floor, are now hung with engravings of his works--fine proofs, ranging from his first important essays, the unamusing "Burlington Gate" and the masterly "Hudibras" series, published before he was thirty, to the valedictory "Bathos." To those who know Hogarth only through the piracies of his engravings and the worn impressions that have been scattered through the land, these brilliant proofs are a revelation.

Rich, velvety, direct and accomplished in technique, the subjects have little of the amenities that moderns have been trained to expect in art-productions of a popular kind. Hogarth knew his own mind and his public. His moralities, he said, "were addrest to hard hearts. I have preferred leaving them _hard_, and giving the effect, by a quick touch, to rendering them languid and feeble by fine strokes and soft engraving, which require more care and practice than can often be attained, except by a man of a very quiet turn of mind."

He was not a man of a "quiet turn of mind." He was a fighter, and an artist who never spared himself, and who went straight to his goal without circ.u.mlocution. With a few strokes he could give lasciviousness to a lip, desire to an eye, scorn and contempt often, n.o.bility rarely. His Industrious Apprentice is merely bland, merely smug. But as a technician he was superb within his limits. The plates bearing the words, "Inscribed, Printed, Engraved and Published by William Hogarth," are magnificent. In them Hogarth the artist and Hogarth the fighter and scorner mingle. I turn from the sentiment of "The Distressed Poet," from the force of "The Enraged Musician," from the daintiness of the second scene of "Marriage a la Mode," to the contempt and scorn of "Portrait of John Wilkes," and to his amazing misunderstanding of Rembrandt expressed in his burlesque of his own "Paul Before Felix," with this legend: "Design'd and etch'd in the rediculous manner of Rembrant [the spelling is his own], by William Hogarth." But what a man he was! sure of himself, certain of his power. His original sketches, many of which are at the British Museum, antedate Rowlandson, whose manner may have been founded on Hogarth.

Enduring to the end, Hogarth busied himself towards the close of his life retouching and repairing his plates, one of which, "The Bench,"

he was working upon at Chiswick the day before his death. It is said that he had premonition of a coming breakdown. "Very weak, but remarkably cheerful," he was conveyed on October 25, 1764, from Chiswick to his town house in Leicester Fields, and if _in extremis_ we do see, as in a timeless vision, the run of our past lives, Hogarth in that jolting journey through eighteenth-century London, an ill man of sixty-seven, may have recalled the salient scenes of his rushing life.

There was the memory of his father, school-master and corrector for the press in Ship Court, Old Bailey, whose little son, great William, was born in Bartholomew Close and baptized at the church of Bartholomew the Great. There was his apprenticeship to the silver-plate engraver Ellis Gamble; the development of his technical memory for the forms of things; his growing power of swift drawing; his first prints; his lawsuit against Morris, which was practically to prove to the world that he was a painter as well as an engraver; his runaway marriage with the daughter of Sir James Thornhill; the success of the Progresses; his fight with the pirates; his scorn of conventional connoisseurship; the visit of this hardened Britisher to France, where "he pooh-poohed the houses, the furniture, the ornaments, and in the streets was often clamorously rude"; his serio-comic arrest at Calais; his progress in art and reputation; the house in Leicester Fields; his appointment as Sergeant Painter; his quarrel with Wilkes and Churchill--all the vicissitudes of that full, fighting, hard-working, outstanding life; and now--is this the last journey?

"What will be the subject of your next print?" a friend asked Hogarth.

"The End of All Things!" was his reply.

That "Bathos" plate was prophetical.

Well, the journey is over. He has arrived in Leicester Fields. That night, going to bed, "he was seized with a vomiting, upon which he rang his bell with such violence that he broke it [that was so like Hogarth], and expired about two hours afterwards."

His house, the last but two on the east side of Leicester Square, became later the smaller half of the Sabloniere, or Jaquier's Hotel.

It is now Archbishop Tenison's school. From the windows you look down upon the white bust by Joseph Durham, lean and watchful, that stands in a corner of modern, spruce Leicester Square.

I should like to see carved upon the bust the characteristic concluding pa.s.sage of Hogarth's disjointed autobiography:--

"This I can safely attest, I have invariably endeavoured to make those about me tolerably happy, and my greatest enemy cannot say I ever did an intentional injury: though, without ostentation, I could produce many instances of men that have been essentially benefited by me. What may follow, G.o.d knows."

We know what has followed in this world--acknowledgment, admiration, the t.i.tle of the Father of British Painting, and the example of a man who endured to the end, which is the most difficult of all the enterprises of life. For the end approaches to most of us when we are weakest. Hogarth broke the bell-rope.