Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

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cells to the court house of the Old Bailey in May 1750. The disease infected and killed the Lord Mayor, an alderman, a baron of the exchequer, a judge of the Court of Common Pleas, the under sheriff, most of the Middlesex jury, and some of the spectators. Whatever ultimately disruptive elements may lurk in these prints, Hogarth liked to maintain publicly the simple pose of the moralist. A Mr. Sewell, book- seller in Cornhill, used to go to the Golden Head for subscription prints, and once, around the time of the Wilkes-Churchill affair—when Hogarth would have been particularly anxious to appear the moralist—he told Hogarth it must have given him great pleasure to see his works so generally admired. "Sir," re- plied Hogarth, it gratifies me very highly, and there is no part of my works of which I am so proud, and in which I now feel so happy, as in the series of the Four Stages of Cruelty, because I believe the publication of them has checked the diabolical spirit of barbarity to the brute creation, which, I am sorry to say, was once so prevalent in this country. 62 If this was his aim it was, in a minimal way, rewarded. A new gin law was passed in 1751 reducing the number of gin shops, more than doubling the tax, increas- ing the police authority, and offering rewards to informers. However, the stories of the reform accomplished by Fielding and Hogarth are exaggerated. They both probably served as useful propagandists, but the old accounts that presented Fielding as a powerful influence for progressive reform on the Ministry and the Parliamentary Committee that was appointed in 1751 to investigate the problem of poverty, and as the probable author of the subsequent legislation, are unfounded. From the little evidence that exists, it appears that, being Bow Street Magistrate, he was doubtless consulted, and that his Enquiry was simply his independent publication outlining the views he had offered. Moreover, the opinions of the Enquiry and the Proposal that followed are relatively conserva- tive even by the standards of Fielding's day, as compared with contemporary pamphlets and even the legislation projected by the Committee itself. 63 Hogarth's own statement in his manuscript notes, written about the time of his interview with Mr. Sewell, was that he would rather have been the author of the Stages of Cruelty than the Raphael Cartoons, "unless I lived in a roman Catholic country"; and when he repeats the statement on another page he says he speaks as a man, not as an artist. 64 What he means, of course, is that his kind of Protestant country calls for a different kind of "history painting"—one with- out superstition, which must be based on the public's benevolence, charity, and the virtue of works. These prints must be regarded as another phase of his search for a kind of contemporary history, this time toward popular, almost folklore- istic roots, and toward a stark simplicity and monumentality that none of the earlier prints achieved. The third Stage of Cruelty, with the girl's wounds like 109
110 "poor, dumb mouthes" crying for justice, looks like an illustration for Fielding's Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder; and this is exactly the sort of primitive strength Hogarth was trying to draw upon. To understand the intention behind the "popular" prints, one must see them as part of Hogarth's reaction against the ultimate in complex reading structures, Marriage a la Mode. A sort of crisis, we have seen, followed that elaborate work, and he produced a series of pure oil sketches: which, as sketches, express formal structures not yet completely represented or finished, not yet clothed in meaning. These sketches did not lead into engravings. However, on the engraving front, with Industry and Idleness and the prints that followed, the reading struc- ture itself is radically simplified; while inscriptions are lengthened, the meaning is conveyed less through words or objects than through relationships of form. The juxtaposition of large shapes with the Idle 'Prentice, of crowds with isola- tion, of inside with outside—these represent another aspect of Hogarth's attempt to move away from verbal or emblematic structures toward a more expressive, more purely visual form, which reaches its climax in the powerful last plate of the Stages of Cruelty. The popular prints were also, in fact if not in Hogarth's recollections, related to his preoccupation with the subject of art, theory and practice, around 1750. In the earlier works, and continuing as late as The Election, he imitated the tradition of late baroque in order to identify it with the corruption of the insti- tutions he presented: in the climactic image, Chairing the Member (see pl. 251), subject and method are indeed one, in a decadent, overripe way. But beginning with Industry and Idleness, and most notably in the brutal prints of 1750/1, he produced "popular" prints in which the forms and subject matter were equally brutal, and the intention was at least partly an assault on the tender sensibilities of taste-hardened art fanciers. To this segment of Hogarth's audience these plates revealed a known area of life not generally portrayed in art (at least outside the popular print) except under the stylized guise of a saint's martyrdom. The Reward of Cruelty, for instance, is strongly reminiscent of Poussin's Mar- tyrdom of St. Erasmus with the long rope of intestine being drawn out. In the Stages of Cruelty, Hogarth was countering the tyranny of taste with apparent tastelessness. The subject, the method, underlined by the brutal woodcut effect, constituted an attack on the institution of art analogous to the attack on aca- demic art theory in The Analysis of Beauty a few years later. The advocacy of expressive form also stressed in the Analysis was the other prong of Hogarth's argument.
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Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

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