Caricature and Other Comic Art Part 12

"A rare invention to destroy the crowd Of fools at home instead of foes abroad.

Fear not, my friends, this terrible machine-- They're only wounded that have shares therein."

On the Saltpetre Company (two and sixpence a share):

"Buy petre stock, let me be your adviser; 'Twill make you, though not richer, much the wiser."

On the German Timber Company:

"You that are rich and hasty to be poor, Buy timber export from the German sh.o.r.e; For gallowses built up of foreign wood, If rightly used, will do Change Alley good."

On the Pennsylvania Company:

"Come all ye saints that would for little buy Great tracts of land, and care not where they lie; Deal with your Quaking Friends; they're men of light; Their spirit hates deceit and scorns to bite."

On the s.h.i.+p-building Company:

"To raise fresh barks must surely be amusing, When hundreds rot in docks for want of using."

On Settling the Bahamas:

"Rare, fruitful isles, where not an a.s.s can find A verdant tuft or thistle to his mind.

How, then, must those poor silly a.s.ses fare That leave their native land to settle there?"

On a South Sea Speculator imploring Alms through his Prison Bars:

"Behold a poor dejected wretch, Who kept a S---- Sea coach of late, But now is glad to humbly catch A penny at the prison grate.

"What ruined numbers daily mourn Their groundless hopes and follies past, Yet see not how the tables turn, Or where their money flies at last!

"Fools lost when the directors won, But now the poor directors lose; And where the S---- Sea stock will run, Old Nick, the first projector, knows."

On a Picture of Change Alley:

"Five hundred millions, notes and bonds, Our stocks are worth in value; But neither lie in goods, or lands, Or money, let me tell ye.

Yet though our foreign trade is lost, Of mighty wealth we vapor, When all the riches that we boast Consist in sc.r.a.ps of paper."

On a "Permit:"

"You that have money and have lost your wits, If you'd be poor, buy National Permits; Their stock's in fish, the fish are still in water, And for your coin you may go fish hereafter."

On a Roomful of Ladies buying Stocks of a Jew and a Gentile:

"With Jews and Gentiles, undismayed, Young tender virgins mix; Of whiskers nor of beards afraid, Nor all their cozening tricks.

"Bright jewels, polished once to deck The fair one's rising breast, Or sparkle round her ivory neck, Lie p.a.w.ned in iron chest.

"The gentle pa.s.sions of the mind How avarice controls!

E'en love does now no longer find A place in female souls."

On a Picture of a Man laughing at an a.s.s browsing:

"A wise man laughed to see an a.s.s Eat thistles and neglect good gra.s.s.

But had the sage beheld the folly Of late transacted in Change Alley, He might have seen worse a.s.ses there Give solid gold for empty air, And sell estates in hopes to double Their fortunes by some worthless bubble, Till of a sudden all was lost That had so many millions cost.

Yet ruined fools are highly pleased To see the knaves that bit 'em squeezed, Forgetting where the money flies That cost so many tears and sighs."

On the Silk Stocking Company:

"Deal not in stocking shares, because, I doubt, Those that buy most will ere long go without."

CHAPTER XII.

HOGARTH AND HIS TIME.

These Dutch-English pictures William Hogarth, we may be sure, often inspected as they successively courted public notice in the shops of London, as we see in his early works a character evidently derived from them. During the bubble period of 1720, he was an ambitious young engraver and sign-painter (at least willing to paint signs if a job offered),[19] much given to penciling likenesses and strange att.i.tudes upon his thumb-nail, to be transferred, on reaching home, to paper, and stored away for future use. He was one of those quick draughtsmen who will sketch you upon the spot a rough caricature of any odd person, group, or event that may have excited the mirth of the company; a young fellow somewhat undersized, with an alert, vigorous frame, a bright, speaking eye, a too quick tongue and temper, self-confident, but honest, st.u.r.dy, and downright in all his words and ways. "But I was a good paymaster even _then_" he once said, with just pride, after speaking of the days when he sometimes walked London streets without a s.h.i.+lling in his pocket.

[Footnote 19: "Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum,"

Division I., vol. ii., p. 566.]

_Hogherd_ was the original name of the family, which was first humanized into Hogert and Hogart, and then softened into its present form. In Westmoreland, where Hogarth's grandfather cultivated a farm--small, but his own--the first syllable of the name was p.r.o.nounced like that of the domestic animals which his remote ancestors may have herded. There was a vein of talent in the family, an uncle of Hogarth's having been the song-writer and satirist of his village, and his own father emerging from remote and most rustic Westmoreland to settle in London as a poor school-master and laborious, ill-requited compiler of school-books and proof-reader. A Latin dictionary of his making existed in ma.n.u.script after the death of the artist, and a Latin letter written by him is one of the curiosities in the British Museum. But he remained always a poor man, and could apprentice his boy only to an engraver of the lowest grade known to the art. But this sufficed for a lad who could scarcely touch paper with a pencil without betraying his gift, who drew capital burlesques upon his nail when he was fifteen, and entertained Addison's coffee-house with a caricature of its landlord when he was twenty-two.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Sleeping Congregation. (Hogarth.)]

The earliest work by this greatest English artist of his century, which has been preserved in the British Museum (1720), shows the bent of his genius as plainly as the first sketch by Boz betrays the quality of d.i.c.kens. It is called "Design for a Shop-bill," and was probably Hogarth's own shop-bill, his advertis.e.m.e.nt to the public that he was able and willing to paint signs. In those days, the school-master not having yet gone "abroad," signs were usually pictorial, and sometimes consisted of the popular representation of the saint having special charge of the business to be recommended. In Hogarth's shop-bill we see a tall man holding up a newly painted sign of St. Luke with his ox and book, at which a group of persons are looking, while Hogarth himself appears to be showing the sign to them as possible customers. Along the bottom of the sign is engraved W. HOGARTH, PAINTER. In the background is seen an artist painting at an easel and a boy grinding colors. He could not even in this first homely essay avoid giving his work something of a narrative character. He must exhibit a story with humorous details. So in his caricature of Daniel b.u.t.ton, drawn to ridicule the Tory frequenters of b.u.t.ton's coffee-house, he relates an incident as well as burlesques individuals. There stands Master b.u.t.ton in his professional ap.r.o.n, with powdered wig and frilled s.h.i.+rt; and opposite to him a tall, seedy, stooping scholar or poet is storming at the landlord with clinched fists, because he will not let him have a cup of coffee without the money. There is also the truly Hogarthian incident of a dog smelling suspiciously the poet's coat tail. Standing about the room are persons whom tradition reports to have been intended as portraits of Pope, Steele, Addison, Arbuthnot, and others of b.u.t.ton's famous customers.

This drawing, executed with a brush, is also preserved in the British Museum. Daniel b.u.t.ton, as Dr. Johnson reports, had once been a servant in the family of the Countess of Warwick, and was placed in the coffee-house by Addison. A writer in the _Spectator_ alludes to this haunt of the Tories: "I was a Tory at b.u.t.ton's and a Whig at Child's."

The South Sea delusion drew from Hogarth his first engraved caricature.

Among the Dutch engravings of 1720, called forth by the schemes of John Law, there was one in which the victims were represented in a merry-go-round, riding in revolving cars or upon wooden horses, the whole kept in motion by a horse ridden by the devil. The picture presents also the usual mult.i.tude of confusing details, such as the Dutch mad-house in the distance, with a long train of vehicles going toward it. In availing himself of this device the young Londoner showed much of that skill in the arrangement of groups, and that fertility in the invention of details, which marked his later works. His whirligig revolves higher in the air than in the Dutch picture, enabling him to show his figures clear of the crowd below, and instead of the devil on horseback giving the motion, he a.s.signs that work more justly to the directors of the South Sea Company. Thus he has room and opportunity to impart a distinct character to most of his figures. We see perched aloft on the wooden horses about to be whirled around, a n.o.bleman with his broad ribbon, a shoe-black, an old woman, a wigged clergyman, and a woman of the town. With his usual uncompromising humor, Hogarth places these last two characters next to one another, and while the clergyman ogles the woman, she chucks him under the chin. There is a world of accessories: a devil exhaling fire, standing behind a counter and cutting pieces of flesh from the body of Fortune and casting them to a hustling crowd of Catholic, Puritan, and Jew; Self-Interest breaking Honesty upon a wheel; a crowd of women rus.h.i.+ng pell-mell into an edifice gabled with horns, and bearing the words, "Raffling for Husbands with Lottery Fortunes in here;" Honor in the pillory flogged by Villainy; an ape wearing a sword and cap. The scene chosen by the artist for these remarkable events is the open s.p.a.ce in which the monument stands, then fresh and new, which commemorates the Great Fire; but he slyly changes the inscription thus: "This Monument was erected in Memory of the Destruction of this City by the South Sea in 1720."

Hogarth, engraver and sign-painter though he may have been, was all himself in this amusing and effective piece. If the Dutch picture and Hogarth's could be placed here side by side, the reader would have before him an interesting example of the honest plagiarism of genius, which does not borrow gold and merely alter the stamp, but converts a piece of crude ore into a Toledo blade. Unfortunately, both pictures are too large and crowded to admit of effective reduction.

In this, his first published work, the audacious artist availed himself of an expedient which heightened the effect of most of his later pictures. He introduced portraits of living persons. Conspicuous in the foreground of the South Sea caricature, among other personages now unknown, is the diminutive figure of Alexander Pope, who was one of the few lucky speculators of the year 1720. At least, he withdrew in time to save half the sum which he once thought he had made. The gloating rake in the first picture of the "Harlot's Progress" is that typical reprobate of eighteenth-century romances, Colonel Francis Charteris, upon whom Arbuthnot wrote the celebrated epitaph, which, it is to be hoped, is itself a caricature:

"Here continueth to rot the body of FRANCIS CHARTERIS, who, with an INFLEXIBLE CONSTANCY and INIMITABLE UNIFORMITY of life, PERSISTED, in spite of AGE and INFIRMITIES, in the practice of EVERY HUMAN VICE, excepting PRODIGALITY and HYPOCRISY.

His insatiable AVARICE exempted him from the first; his matchless IMPUDENCE from the second.

Oh, indignant reader!

think not his life useless to mankind; Providence connived at his execrable designs to give to after-ages a conspicuous proof and example of how small estimation is EXORBITANT WEALTH in the sight of G.o.d, by His bestowing it on the most UNWORTHY OF ALL MORTALS."

Hogarth was as much a humorist in his life as he was in his works. The invitation to Mr. King to _eta beta py_, given on the next page, was one of many similar sportive efforts of his pencil. He once boasted that he could draw a sergeant carrying his pike, entering an ale-house, followed by his dog, all in three strokes. He produced the following, also given on next page:

He explained the drawing thus: A is the perspective line of the door; B, the end of the sergeant's pike, who has gone in; C, the end of the dog's tail.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Hogarth's Invitation Card.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Diagram.]