Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

verses underneath, surrounding his figures with frames containing symbolic
cornucopias and skeletons, coronets with maces and whips with fetters. The
simple yet extraordinarily expressive style of the engraving was patently re-
moved from the French style of Marriage a la Mode, and proclaimed the absence
of preliminary paintings.
By introducing two protagonists, each representing a distinct pattern of be-
havior, Hogarth made the reader choose in a much more active, and "popular,"
sense than in Marriage a la Mode. If the earlier prints offered the audience a
choice that was often problematical, here it is ostensibly an easy one. One might
almost define the popular prints, beginning with Simon Lord Lovat, as designs
in which the choice is obvious. There is no doubt about the choice between
Beer Street and Gin Lane, or between the good boy and the bad in the first plate
of The Four Stages of Cruelty, or between England and France in the Invasion
prints of 1756. In The Gate of Calais, or The Roast Beef of Old England, not
itself in the style of the popular prints but of the same period, the reader is
shown only one alternative, the bad one, and of course chooses England (im-
plied) over France (shown). Beginning with Industry and Idleness, the contrast
is starkly depicted, and strengthened by the blacks and whites of the design. The
folly is much the same as the Harlot's, but now it is called idleness; and, in the
manner of a morality play, its opposite—industry—is also presented. To Ho-
garth, the essence of a popular print was apparently simpler forms and choices,
fewer allusions and less "reading." Behind the story of the apprentices are the
old apprentice manuals, the stories of good and bad apprentices in Eastward
Hoe and The London Merchant, and the whole tradition of Mr. Goodman vs.
Mr. Badman. Whereas Marriage a la Mode illustrates primarily the punishment
for evil, in Industry and Idleness rewards and punishments are precisely bal-
anced one against the other: the industrious apprentice becomes Lord Mayor of
London and the idle one dies on the gallows.
Having acknowledged the primary effect of Industry and Idleness as the
reader's active participation in a morality, condemning the idle and admiring
the industrious and presumably learning from their examples, one may pause to
admire its simple and strikingly monumental forms. Using the excuse of his
popular mode, Hogarth simplified forms, reactions, emotions, characters into
a kind of heroic opposition that is closer to sublime history painting, where gods
or saints opposed devils, than to the complex world of his comic histories. In a
real sense, these prints beginning with the story of Idle and Goodchild and end-
ing with the death of Tom Nero are Hogarth's most bold, original, and power-
ful modern equivalents to history.
Hogarth exploits the popular print and the expectations of the readers of
pious tracts, drawing much of his strength from this simple but powerful source.
However, one must not lose sight of his tendency, since the late 1730s, to move
to the juxtaposition of contrasting values: the pious vs. the profane in the first
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