BOOKS.
HO GARTH.*
THE eighteenth century is undoubtedly much better under- stood and more justly appraised at this moment than was possible fifty years ago. In their different ways, Mr. Lecky, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. Courthope, Mr. Trail, and Mr. Austin Dobson himself may be cited as critics who appreciate the eighteenth century in a sense which was impossible while the reaction against its spirit was still in force. Nevertheless, we have to this day a certain self-complacent habit of treating the eighteenth century as lacking in seriousness and given over to superficiality. In literature and ethics, its note was certainly cynicism, and cynicism usually implies shallowness. The evolution of an age has many parallels with the history of an individual, and just as a career of dissolute pleasure begets a torpor of heart and atrophy of soul in the jaded debauchee, so the eighteenth century, coming after a period of wanton riot and indulgence, is distinctly the sated roue among the centuries, with the sated roué's disbelief in heroism or any lofty virtue, his politely contemptuous patronage of woman as a pretty plaything, and his superiority to any strong emotions such as might unpleasantly ruffle the repose of his egoistic materialism. At the same time, even though we may re- fuse to see much earnestness or profundity in the ethical temper of that age, as a whole, one thing is certain—a prevalent ethical bent, whether true or false, deep or shallow, serious or flippant, is one of its most marked characteristics from first to last. Take the great trio of writers who eclipse all others at its commencement. Addison, with his genial, urbane irony, and his graceful reconciliation of this world and the next, was quite as serious a moralist as the rules of elegant society per- mitted. Pope had his eye constantly upon the moral aspects of life, though the spectacle stirred in him no emotion other than contemptuous, and he regarded creation chiefly as material for epigram. Swift himself, to whom nothing was sacred, and for whom beauty existed only that he might bemire it, and goodness that he might sully it with shame, was still an inverted moralist, and outside the domain of morals has no definitive place. Young was a homilist in blank verse ; Thomson wrote with a certain artificial unction about nature, but only really rose into poetry in his beautiful moral allegory ; Gray's own apostrophe of himself as "poor moralist !" is sufficiently apposite ; Richardson, the only novelist who achieved something approaching cosmopolitan vogue, was didactic to the core ; Johnson was not less a moralist than a .scholar ; and Cowper, with whose death the century closed, was as edifying a teacher as he was a charming poet. Is it not appropriate and becoming, that the century should also have produced the satirist whose painted or en- graved sermons are the most powerfully impressive of all examples of moralised art?
Mr. Dobson has given us biographies of both Hogarth and Fielding, and one cannot but think of the curious contrast between the work of the two friends. It is true they both depicted the vices and follies of their age, and with equal masterliness, but in a spirit how profoundly diverse ! Fielding is the good-humoured, diverted spectator of the comedy of life, who declines to see in life anything but comedy. Without being an immoral writer, of malice aforethought, he is ready to acquiesce in any immorality to which a lenient tradition imputes a certain "manliness." Essentially kind-hearted, he is, of course, aware that self-indulgence always, in the long run, implies victims, and is, in the last resort, cruel ; but, in his easy affability, he simply begs to be excused from looking so far ahead. Vice in men never shocks him, and in women it amuses him. Lady Booby's frailties, Booth's conjugal dis- loyalties, even the unsavoury episode of Lady Bellaston, cannot move him to active disgust. His Rake's Progress is, on the whole, a triumphal march through a tolerant, and even admiring, world. When we pass to Hogarth, it is almost like turning from the full-blooded animalism of Rubens to the fantastic horror of the "Dance of Death." Even when it is the comedy of life that he, too, depicts, there is always a play within the play, and it is a tragedy. The larking terribleness beneath the sleek surface of things, the skeleton within the rosy flesh, is his theme. Although his works are full of ludicrous
* WitUCIIM &girth. By Austin Dobson. London Sampson Low, Blanton, and Co.
detail, it is the tragic and terrible ludicrousness of a world where men drink and make merry with the sexton who is digging their graves. It is this which gives to his conceptions, even when they are most prosaic in their realism, that spectral air upon which some of his critics have commented. And when his themes, and the treatment of them, are comically absurd, we have a feeling that he himself does not join in the laugh : we insensibly impute to him a certain vigilant aloof- ness, as of the chorus to a dramatic action. Nor are we sure that he himself has tears for his own tragedies : there is a kind of pitiless serenity in his tremendous emphasis and lurid literalness. He is, perhaps, morbid, somewhat as a dramatist like Webster is morbid, who stands too persistently and wil- fully in the gaunt shadow which lust and hatred throw across life—his vision is certainly, by preference, partial and frag- mentary—but he redresses the balance in an art-world com- posed of ideal Claudesque landscapes, Arcadian pastorals on porcelain, self-contented ladies and gentlemen by Sir Joshua, and humorously stupid Dutch boors. And in a degree implying the truest poetic temperament, he is of the symbol-loving order of minds who speak instinctively in parable. As truly as Spenser or Bunyan, Blake or Dtirer, Quarles or Swedenborg, he is impelled to utter himself by signs and metaphors. His works are crowded with concrete hints and allegorical suggestion. Mr. Dob- son speaks of his "detestation of indirectness and re- dundancy ; " but although he is never redundant, we think a certain magnificent indirectness is one of his salient traits. A notable example of it occurs in that wonderful print representing the Old Cock-Pit in St. James's Park, where the incident of the defaulter who, "in compliance with cock-pit law," is being drawn up to the ceiling in a basket, is told solely by the man's shadow being silhouetted on the floor, the outline exhibiting him in the attitude of offering his watch and chain to appease his creditors. The cobweb that covers the slot of the poor-box ; the crack that runs through the Ninth Commandment in Old Marylebone Church, where the ruined profligate is being married to the ugly and elderly heiress ; the houses in "Gin Lane," which, as Lamb says, seem "absolutely to reel" in sympathy with the inebriate spirit of the place ; the black boy, who "significantly touches the horns of an Actwon " in Plate IV. of "Marriage h la Mode "—together with innumerable other instances—might be adduced to illus- trate Hogarth's imaginative method of mingling oblique with direct narrative, and supplementing statement by allusion.
The present volume is, as its author tells us, an amplifica- tion of his memoir of Hogarth contributed to the "Great Artists" series, more than ten years ago. The materials available for biographers of Hogarth do not permit Mr. Dobson to draw a very detailed or realisable portrait of the man himself, as distinguished from the artist ; and a good deal of such direct personal knowledge of him as we do possess is due more or less to accidental circumstances, such as his quarrel with Wilkes and its tangible pictorial results, without which, as Mr. Dobson notices, we should not even have been aware of the existence of a previous friendship between the two men. What story there is to tell is told by the accomplished author of Proverbs in Porcelain with the sim- plicity, the lucid order, the absence of all pretentiousness, and the sympathetic yet critical temper, which we naturally expect in Mr. Austin Dobson. The bibliography and catalogue of prints form a most serviceable appendix, and the plates and pictures are reproduced with a fidelity and accuracy which the necessary reduction of scale renders all the more com- mendable.
Previous page
