1709-1742.] PAINTING. 463 process of decline. Charles I. invited Rubens to adorn the ceilings of the palaces of Whitehall and Greenwich, with gorgeous allegories. Charles II. employed Verrio to cover those of Windsor with similar productions. But the Neapolitan had none of the genius which enabled the brilliant Fleming to fascinate the observer, in spite of the coarseness of his forms and the extravagance of his inventions. The paintings of Rubens remain the delight of the connoisseur and the artist. The cold voluptuous allegories of Verrio have become a bye-word and a laughing-stock. Yet his pencil was sought after for similar works as long as he could wield it, and through the reign of William he continued to cover the saloons of the nobility with his prodigious compositions. Laguerre exceeded him in folly, and rivalled him in coarseness. Thornhill, who followed in the same line, and in whom it came to an end, was of a colder temperament; but if his works are more decent, they are also more dull. The best of Laguerre's productions are at Blenheim; the best of Thornhill's on the dome of St. Paul's, and the hall of Greenwich Hospital. Henry Cooke, who painted the choir of New College Chapel, deserves a word of praise in passing for not having quite ruined the cartoons of Raffaelle, which he was directed by William to repaint and restore. Other of these ceiling-painters were Antonio Pellegrini; Sebastian Ricci, a Venetian of real ability, who seemed inclined to make England his home, but left it in dudgeon on Thornhill being appointed to paint St. Paul's; and his nephew, Marco Ricci. In other branches of painting we might mention as practising with success in this country, the names of the Vandeveldes, the famous sea-paintersthe founders of a school which has never wanted followers; Hemskerk, patronised by William for his Dutch drinking pieces; Dirk Maas, the Dutch battle-painter; Godfrey Schalken, whose candle-light subjects are still eagerly purchased; Boit, the enamel painter; Monnoyer, the flower painter; Louis Cradock, who painted birds and animals; and many more of unquestionable ability. But it would be idle to dwell on them. The story would be merely a repetition of what has already been related. There was throughout a certain encouragement of painters, with little knowledge of painting. England possessed neither a school of painting, nor galleries of pictures, nor writers on art. There were no means of instruction for patrons or for students. The demand for pictures was supplied almost wholly by foreign painters of second-rate ability, who found here an amount of patronage they could not hope for in their native places. Art was almost necessarily therefore at the mercy of Fashion. The leading connoisseur or the court painter set the mode, and all of inferior rank hastened to conform to it. The true regenerator of painting in England was William Hogarth, the sturdy asserter of truth and matter of fact in painting. His merit as a satirist, a painter of manners, and a moralist have to be spoken of in another chapter. Even his contemporaries admitted his ability in these respects, though they hardly perhaps took the full measure of his genius. But Walpole only gave utterance to the common belief when he said that Hogarth was no painter. When Hogarth lived and Walpole wrote, the worship of the "Old Masters" of painting had seized hold of those whose talk was of pictures. Walpole meant that Hogarth did not imitate the composition, and copy the chiaroscuro, and borrow the colours, of the painters of 464 PAINTING. [1709-1742. the Netherlands or Italy. But though Hogarth looked out on nature for himself, and painted what he saw in the manner it appeared to his own eyes, he always placed his figures so that they would tell the story in the clearest way; drew them with skill; gave to them a truth and force of characteristic expression such as few painters of any other school ever equalled; arranged the light and shadow so as that every object should have just that measure of each which belonged to it, yet every figure and every part of the composition should hold its true place in respect of all the rest, and of the picture as a whole; coloured truly and forcibly, and in harmony with the serious purpose of his pictures, although not in accordance with the traditions of painting-rooms and picture galleries; and finally in the manipulation showed an amount of dexterity in the handling of his tools such as many a painter, who is known only as a painter, might well have envied. With the mention of Hogarth we close this sketch. He forms the link which unites this period with that in which the English school sprang into a sturdy existence, and therefore claimed notice here; but his proper place as a painter undoubtedly is at the head of the school of which he was the founder. Hogarth as the historian of manners in the transition-time between Anne and George III.-His art essentially dramatic-Society, in Hogarth's pictures, appears a sort of chaos-The life of the streets-The anarchy out-doors a type of the disorder in houses of public resortGenteel debauchery-Low profligacy and crime-The Cockpit -The Gaming-House-The Prison-Bedlam-The Rake's Levee-The lady's public toilette-Marriage à-la-mode-The Election Prints-The Sleeping Congregation-Fanaticism. WHEN Defoe, in 1724, had given to the world three novels, in which the incidents in the various fortunes of a low abandoned woman, of a more refined courtesan, and of a young thief, are related with a circumstantiality that is "like reading evidence in a court of justice,"* there was an artist engraving shop-bills and silver plate for a livelihood,-who was also looking with a curious eye upon the world around him. As he walked about London, all its strange exhibitions of pomp and misery, its habitual contrasts of velvet and rags, its eccentric characters, its grotesque faces, were to him materials for artistical study and for moral reflection. Did the genius of Hogarth take any direction from the genius of Defoe? Had he read "Moll Flanders," when he painted his first great fiction of the "Harlot's Progress ?" Had he read " Colonel Jack" when he painted that never-to be forgotten figure in "Industry and Idleness" of the young black guard who is gambling on a grave-stone with Tom Idle-some such as Defoe described as "brutish, bloody, and cruel in his disposition; sharp as a streetCharles Lamb, in a contribution to Wilson's "Life of Defoe." VOL V. HH 466 HOGARTH AS THE HISTORIAN OF MANNERS. [1709-1742. bred boy must be, but ignorant and unteachable from a child." Charles Lamb said that Defoe's novels " are capital kitchen-reading, while they are worthy, from their interest, to find a shelf in the libraries of the wealthiest and the most learned."* Hogarth's first set of prints, in which he might originally have had the adornment of the kitchen-wall chiefly in view, became the subjects of fan-mounts, which ladies of quality displayed at the opera. The graphic representations of Hogarth have been truly termed "books." We look upon them as presenting the best materials for the history of manners in the transition time from Anne to George III. We regard Hogarth as the legitimate successor of Steele and Addison, as presenting a mirror of some portion of the higher and middle classes, and of Defoe in exploring the depths of ignorance and vice. The works of Hogarth range over a period of nearly thirty years; from the days of Walpole and the Excise Law to the days of Wilkes and Liberty. He was the engraver as well as the painter of these representations," which have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words." He got small prices for his pictures. He made a fortune by his prints. Every one could read his prints; and his art went direct to the popular comprehension. His was essentially a dramatic art. But he was bound by no pedantic rules about the unities of time and place, in opposing which law of the critics Dr. Johnson was "almost frighted at his own temerity." On the other hand, he had an absolute reverence for that "poetical justice," the occasional absence of which in Shakspere Johnson thinks a great demerit. With Hogarth, it is always Vice punished, Virtue rewarded. The limitations of his art might have something to do with this great object of Hogarth as a moralist. Defoe very considerably departed from such an overstrained view of the results of human conduct. Defoe does not, as a matter of course, hang the thief, and make the respectable apprentice Lord Mayor of London. His notion is that "the best and only good end of an impious misspent life 18 repentance: "-and so, Colonel Jack, the pickpocket, becomes a decent member of society; and Moll Flanders ends as a respectable wife and mother after she is transported. Hogarth could not very well paint repentance, so as not to be mistaken for hypocrisy. In his pictorial stories, we are taken through all the transitions of guilt and extravagance ;-to Bridewell, to the gaol, to the madhouse, to the gallows. Society, in Hogarth's pictures, is a sort of chaos, in which filth jostles finery; grossness makes decorum blush; and drunken frenzy is well-nigh involving all things in a general conflagration, typified by the revellers at the "Rose" setting fire to the map of the world. Many of the indications of this chaotic state of life in England may be worth a transient notice. Let us glance first at the out-door life-the life of the London streets. By day, as by night, disorder seems to reign. By day there is not the slightest appearance of authority to repress outrage or robbery; to enforce decency; or to save from accident. The brewer's carman falls asleep upon his shaft, and the child driving his hoop across the road is crushed under the wheels of the dray. St. James's-street is crowded with sedan chairs bearing lords and * Essay on Hogarth, in "Reflector." + Stages of Cruelty. 1709-1742] THE LIFE OF THE STREETS. 467 ladies to queen Caroline's drawing-room; whilst a group of shoeblacks, chimney-sweepers, and half-naked vagabonds are playing at cups and balls, dice, cards, and prick-in-the-garter, on the pavement. In the city, close by the Monument, the great thoroughfare to London Bridge is choked by a mob of butchers with marrowbones and cleavers, of drummers and fiddlers, of beggars relieved with broken meat,-all assembled to greet with their din the marriage of Mr. Francis Goodchild. Before the window of the Enraged Musician in St. Martin's Lane, the blind haut-boy player, the balladsinger, the boy with the drum, and other gentry that the policeman now |