Tardily, perhaps, I mention Mr. Austin Dobson’s name. In writing of Hogarth and the vigorous part he played in the art life of the “worst-mannered” century, as it has been called, Mr. Dobson is as indispensable as a Blue Book to a politician. But unlike Blue Books, his writings are delightful. He is the eighteenth century, and his volume on William Hogarth is definitive. Originally published, I believe, in 1879, it has passed through several editions, being continuously improved and enlarged. One of its avatars was the stately and sumptuous art monograph of 1902, with some prefatory pages by Sir Walter Armstrong on the painter’s technique. The volume has now reached a new, enlarged, and small edition, a combination of Hogarthian lore, apt gossip, and reference book.

The text—well, the text is by Mr. Dobson; just to say that suffices. And at the end are thirty-five pages of a Bibliography of Books, &c., relating to Hogarth; thirty pages of a Catalogue of Paintings by or attributed to Hogarth; and sixty-three pages of a Catalogue of the Principal Prints by or after Hogarth. As a postscript to the Catalogue of Prints is this note: “It has also been thought unnecessary to include several designs, the grossness of which neither the ingenuity of the artist nor the coarse taste of his time can now reasonably be held to excuse.” There you have the eighteenth century of which Hogarth was child and master.

In writing of him it would be agreeable to confine one’s remarks entirely to his paintings, but that must not be. And why should it be? The more one peers into that busy, brutal, bewildering eighteenth century, the more interesting it becomes. Names start out. You dip here and there, and the names become clothed with personality. Mr. Dandridge, for example, who painted William Kent. Of them more anon. The first entry in Mr. Dobson’s Bibliography contains a mention of Dandridge, under the date 1731, when Hogarth was thirty-four. I copy it. The extract opens a fuzzy window to the eighteenth century.

“Three Poetical Epistles. To Mr. Hogarth, Mr. Dandridge, and Mr. Lambert, Masters in the Art of Painting. Written by Mr. Mitchell. Dabimus, capimusque vicissim. London: Printed for John Watts, at the Printing Office in Wild-Court near Lincoln’s Inn Fields. MDCCXXXI. Price sixpence. 4to.

“The epistle to Hogarth, whom the poet styles his friend, and ‘Shakspeare in Painting,’ occupies pp. 1-5, and is dated ‘June 12th, 1730.’ Passages are quoted at p. 32. The following, from that to the ‘eminent Face Painter,’ Bartholomew Dandridge, p. 6, gives the names of Hogarth’s artistic contemporaries:—

‘Nor wou’d I, partial or audacious, strive

To show what artists most excel alive: ...

How Thornhill, Jervas, Richardson and Kent,

Lambert and Hogarth, Zinks (Zincke) and Aikman paint;

What Semblance in the Vanderbanks I see,

And wherein Dall (Dahl) and Highmore disagree;

How Wooten, Harvey, Tilliman and Wright,

To one great End, in diff’rent Roads delight,’ &c.”

The verse is sorry stuff, is it not? One might go on for pages quoting from this bovrilised Bibliography. Under the date 1753 is the announcement of Hogarth’s unfortunate experiment in Æsthetics—“The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of Taste.” It would be pleasant to contrast Lamb’s eulogy from the famous essay in “The Reflector” with Mrs. Oliphant’s sorrowful comments. Space permits a few words only. “I contend,” says Lamb, “that there is in most of his subjects that sprinkling of the better nature, which, like holy-water, chases away and disperses the contagion of the bad.” Says Mrs. Oliphant: “Before his pictures the vulgar laugh, and the serious spectator holds his peace, gazing, often with eyes awestricken, at the wonderful unimpassioned tragedy. But never a tear comes at Hogarth’s call. It is his sentence of everlasting expulsion from the highest heaven of art.”

The serious spectator may hold his peace before Hogarth’s pictures, and I am quite prepared to admit that never a tear comes at Hogarth’s call, or, for the matter of that, at the call of any other artist, great or small. Plays or books may make us cry, but pictures never. Alfred Stevens remarked that. The serious spectator, if he has been well brought up, certainly holds his peace before Hogarth’s pictures, that is his paintings, but if he be a connoisseur his peace passes into joy at the pure colour, the fresh technique, the impulse and the vision of this great painter, whose fate it was to be regarded for so long as a mere moralist, and to be refused “the highest heaven of art,” where Raphael and Correggio—yes! and the eclectics of Bologna—reigned. But the world has grown older and taste has improved, has changed very much since the day of the “notorious Mr. Trusler,” whose name appears, with two other eighteenth-century authors, on the title-page of another book on Hogarth that I possess.

I bought it years ago for a few pence at a second-hand book shop. It is a “popular” edition, undated, written and compiled by John Trusler, John Nichols, and John Ireland, and is no doubt based upon “The Works of Mr. Hogarth Moralised (1768), with Dedication by John Trusler.” It was Mrs. Hogarth herself who, after her husband’s death, “engaged a Gentleman to explain each Print and moralise on it in such a Manner as to make them as well instructive as entertaining.”

Many in their youth must have gained their knowledge of Hogarth from this curious, informing volume, or from one of the many other compilations based upon the 1768 edition. The title of my volume precisely describes it—“The Works of William Hogarth: One hundred and fifty plates with Explanations.” On each left-hand page is the picture, filling the page; on each right-hand page is the description and explanation, usually filling the page. The blocks are worn, travesties of the original prints; the letterpress is no doubt just what Mrs. Hogarth desired when she “engaged a Gentleman to explain each Print and moralise upon it.”

The book is a monument to Hogarth’s fecundity as draughtsman, observer, and satirist, but it gives no hint of his capacity as painter. Here is the dainty “Marriage À la Mode” pageant in a series of battered cliches; here is “The Shrimp Girl,” a mere dull illustration of a type in the same genre as “The Milk Maid” and “The Pie Man.” I knew them well as a youth under the moral guidance of the Rev. Dr. Trusler; knew them without love, without emotion. Then one day at the National Gallery I saw the paintings of the “Marriage,” “The Shrimp Girl,” and his “Sister,” saw “Polly Peachum” and “Peg Woffington,” and himself painting the Comic Muse, and lo! I discovered that Hogarth was a painter, here bold, there exquisite, according to the demands of the subject.

Something perilous was it for an imaginative boy to pore over the plates in the Trusler-Nichols-Ireland book, in the propriety of a well-ordered home. Had life ever been so odd, so ugly, so crowded, so forced? Did that terrible madhouse scene in “The Rake’s Progress” ever really happen? Did God permit such a travesty of love and life as the “Gin Lane” episode, or such ghastly horrors as “The Four Stages of Cruelty”? But there were some engravings that the boy thought infinitely amusing. One was “Time Smoking a Picture,” and another was the delightful “False Perspective.” The twelve plates of “Industry and Idleness” fascinated him (he was too young to understand the moral of “The Harlot’s Progress”), but “A Woman Swearing her Child to a Rich Citizen” seemed so enigmatically stupid that he never looked at it again. “The Altar-piece of St. Clement Danes Church” puzzled him. He knew enough of art to be aware that Hogarth was a strong and powerful draughtsman. Why, then, had he made and published this silly, weak illustration of angels and harps? The boy addressed the question to his uncle, and that gentleman, having perused the accompanying text, answered, “It was a burlesque of William Kent’s altar-piece.”

Whereupon the boy put the obvious question: “Who was William Kent?”

Uncle was silent, because, like the Master of Balliol on a certain occasion, he had nothing to say.