Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

86
Responding to a typically ungenerous and vague description by Steevens of Ho-
garth's childless marriage, Thomas Morell, who knew the Hogarths well, wrote
to Nichols:
I knew little of Mr. Hogarth before he came to Chiswick, not long after his
marriage; but from that time was intimate with him to his death, and very
happy in his acquaintance. His excellencies, as well as his foibles, are so
universally known, that I cannot add to the former, nor shall I attempt to
palliate the latter. To assert, however, that he had little nor no acquaint-
ance with domestic happiness, is unjust. I cannot say, I have seen much
fondling between Jenny and Billy (the common appellation of each other);
but I have been almost a daily witness of sufficient endearments to conclude
them a happy couple. 39
Although the popular prints are obviously concerned more with morality and
society than with art and the artist, their underlying subject matter should be
understood in relation to the prints that began with The Distressed Poet and
ran from Marriage a la Mode, with its indirect emphasis on the artist, to the self-
portrait with Trump and even Garrick as Richard III (to the extent that Ho-
garth uses Garrick as an analogue for himself as artist). The Gate of Calais, of
course, includes Hogarth himself in the act of sketching the Gate, and Industry
and Idleness is in its way as much about Hogarth as this or as the self-portrait.
Two contrary aspects emerge: the respectable and the unrespectable, the astute
businessman and the naif, the orderly and the disorderly, and, not least impor-
tant, the admired and the suspect. One side is constantly striving for union with
the master by succeeding to his business, marrying his daughter, winning his
honors, buying a house in the country; this side seeks governorships of prestig-
ious institutions and the friendship of Lord Mayors. The other side includes the
artist of the grotesque and caricature (which is called "comic history painting"
and "character" by Side One): this side is constantly tending toward his "pleas-
ures," toward entropy and, in the major prints and paintings of these years, bal-
ances this disorder, almost equating it with Nature, against various kinds of
excessive and meaningless order. In short, in these years of his middle age Ho-
garth was beginning to look back, take account, study himself, and wonder
where to go from here: he was attempting new forms, vacillating from sublime
history to a "comic history" of high life to the most popular blockprint sort of
broadsides—which, moreover, were increasingly focused on himself or (what
amounted to almost the same thing) his art.
The great synthetic work of this period, before he settles down to art as his
subject on the one hand and purely popular prints on the other, is The March
to Finchley (pl. 224a), and here, though Hogarth does not appear as one of the
dramatis personae, there is a direct confrontation of opposites: order, in the lines