known—so much better known even now than his paintings—that it sounds paradoxical to say that his work with the burin is less remarkable than are his efforts with the brush. And yet this is in reality a natural consequence of his peculiar qualities. His downright manner, his detestation of the indirect and the redundant, his very energy and vitality, all disqualified him from competing with the slow proficiency of such skilled craftsmen as Grignion and Basire. So much, indeed, he himself confesses. Beauty and elegance of execution, he plainly gives us to understand, demanded far more patience than he felt disposed to exercise, and he regarded the making of merely fine lines ‘as a barren and unprofitable study.’ ‘The fact is,’ he declares, ‘that the passions may be more forcibly exprest by a strong, bold stroke than by the most delicate engraving. To expressing them as I felt them, I have paid the utmost attention, and as they were addressed to hard hearts, have rather 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’ (John Ireland, iii. 355). This is a transparent apology for what he knew to be the weaker side of his work, its lack of finish and haste of execution, while at the same time it invites attention to what were undoubtedly its special merits—its spirit, its vigour, its intelligibility. And it must not be forgotten that his prints have one inalienable advantage—they are autographs. Hogarth engraved by Hogarth must always claim precedence over Hogarth engraved by any one else.
But it is neither by his achievements as an engraver nor his merits as a painter that he retains his unique position among English artists. It is as a pictorial chronicler of life and manners, as a satirist and humourist on canvas, that he makes his main demand upon posterity. His skill in seizing upon the ridiculous and the grotesque in life was only equalled by his power of rendering the tragic and the terrible. And it was not only given to him to see unerringly and to select unfalteringly, but he added to this a special gift of narrative by action, which, looking to the fact that he has had so few worthy rivals, must of necessity be rare. Other artists have succeeded in single scenes of humorous genre, or in depicting isolated effects of horror and passion, but none, like Hogarth, has combined both with such signal ability, and carried them from one scene to another with such supreme dexterity as this painter, whom Walpole felicitously styles ‘a writer of comedy with a pencil.’ ‘A Harlot's Progress,’ ‘A Rake's Progress,’ the ‘Marriage à-la-Mode,’ the ‘Good and Idle Apprentices,’ are picture-dramas, as skilful in construction and as perfect in development as any play that was ever played. And if they are admirable in plot and movement, they are equally irreproachable in scene and costume. There is no actor on his stage, either splendid or squalid, but wears his fitting habit as he lived when Hogarth lived; there is no background, either of cellar or salon, which had not its exact prototype in Georgian England. Moreover, much that on the boards of a theatre would be expressed by gesture or byplay is conveyed or suggested in Hogarth's compositions by the wonderful eloquence of detail and significance of accessory which make his work so inexhaustible a field of fresh discoveries. The chairs and tables, the masks and fans, the swords and cudgels, have all their articulate message in the story; there is a sermon in a dial, a moral in a cobweb, a text in a paper of tobacco. This it is that makes so true the admirable utterance of his most sympathetic critic, Charles Lamb. ‘Hogarth's graphic representations,’ he says, ‘are indeed books; they have the teeming fruitful suggestive meaning of words. Other prints we look at, his prints we read.’ Nor are his works less notable for that abounding energy of movement upon which Hazlitt lays stress. ‘Everything in his [Hogarth's] pictures has life and motion in it. Not only does the business of the scene never stand still, but every feature and muscle is put into full play; the exact feeling of the moment is brought out, and carried to its utmost height, and then instantly seized and stamped on the canvas for ever. … Besides the excellence of each individual face, the reflection of the expression from face to face, the contrast and struggle of particular motives and feelings in the different actors in the scene, as of anger, contempt, laughter, compassion, are conveyed in the happiest and most lively manner. … He gives the extremes of character and expression, but he gives them with perfect truth and accuracy.’ It only remains to add that Hogarth's intention, like that of many of his contemporaries, was genuinely didactic. ‘Amidst all his pleasantry,’ says Walpole, ‘he observes the true end of comedy—reformation: there is always a moral to his pictures.’ It is possible that the moral was sometimes trite and obvious—‘written in rather too large letters after the fable,’ as Thackeray says—but there can be no doubt that it was sincere.
Fortunately for Hogarth's admirers, few, if
