moralities. Pah!” He shook himself, emitted an exclamation of disgust that made the auctioneer glance quickly in his direction, and then said brusquely, “What do you think of Matisse?”

PLATE II.—HOGARTH’S SISTER
(In the National Gallery, London)

This dashing and brilliant portrait probably represents Ann Hogarth, the artist’s younger sister, who died, unmarried, in 1771. Note the vivacious and original way in which Hogarth has handled this sympathetic subject, and the skill with which he has, as it were, “substituted light and colour for paint.”

I was not going to be drawn into that. I knew that Matisse was le dernier cri, the newest “master,” the idol of the moment among the “advanced,” who had passed beyond the re-discovery of Cézanne and Van Gogh. Hogarth, the painter Hogarth, not the “pictur’d moralities” Hogarth, had also had his period of re-discovery. Perhaps it began that day in the eighties when Whistler was admiring, “almost smelling,” the Canalettos in the National Gallery, while his companion, Mr. Pennington, was seeing for the first time Hogarth’s “Marriage à la Mode” series, “fairly gasping for breath,” to quote his own words.

“Come over here, quickly,” cried Pennington. “What’s the matter?” said Whistler, turning round. “Why! Hogarth! He was a great[Pg 15]
[Pg 16] painter!” “Sh—sh,” said Whistler (pretending he was afraid that some one would overhear), “Sh—sh. Yes! I know it.... But don’t you tell ’em.”

Whistler had known that Hogarth was a great painter for years. His appreciation of the pugnacious little man of genius, with “a sort of knowing jockey look,” to quote Leigh Hunt, dated from his boyhood. “From then until his death,” says Mr. Pennell, “Whistler always believed Hogarth to be the greatest English artist who ever lived, and he seldom lost an opportunity of saying so.”

Well, it is a long time since the eighties, and to-day the fame of Hogarth as a painter is as great as was his fame as a moralist and satirist in the eighteenth century. Indeed I observe that some writers are beginning to resent praise of Hogarth as a painter, considering that the incident is closed, that all are agreed. That is not so. My friend, the connoisseur, who sat by my side at the auction sale, dissents. When he asked me fiercely what I thought of Matisse, I countered with the question—“What do you think of Hogarth?”

His answer was short and to the point. “There are only two of his things that interest me. They’re great. I mean, of course, ‘The Shrimp Girl,’ and ‘The Stay Maker.’ No! I don’t care about his moralities, and satires, and progresses. Single figures and incidental passages are charming, as good as the best episodes in Frith, but as a whole they’re dowdy, and every one of them shouts. I object to shouts and screams in art. Exaggeratedly exact and humorous records of eighteenth-century life and topography they may be, but I don’t want to be reminded of the eighteenth century. Give me the present or the real past, not the past of yesterday. It’s too near, too like us in our Bank Holiday moods, to be pleasant. Whistler called him the greatest English artist, did he? Merely another example of Whistler’s extravagance. Hogarth has his place. Let us keep cool and keep him there.”

“But consider his portraits,” said I, “and the charm and skill of his oil paintings. Consider them apart altogether from the engravings, which do not do the pictures any sort of justice. ‘The Stay Maker,’ I remember, was hung at the Old Masters in 1908 with twenty-eight other Hogarths. What a display that was. Consider ‘Garrick and his Wife,’ ‘Mary Hogarth,’ ‘Miss Lavinia Fenton,’ ‘The Servants,’ the superb ‘Marriage à la Mode,’ ‘Captain Coram,’ ‘Peg Woffington,’ ‘The Fishing Party,’ ‘Pall Mall,’ ‘George II. and his Family,’ at Dublin, the water piece from the ‘Idle Apprentice’ series. And above all consider the time when he lived—you must consider that. He was born in 1697. Like Giotto and Watteau, he was a pioneer.”

“I don’t take the slightest account of an artist’s period,” said my companion, as we moved away from the auction room. “The date of his birth doesn’t interest me in the least. I ask myself only, Was he a great artist? Call Hogarth the Father of English Painting if you like, say that he set the ball rolling, that he gave life to dry bones, then recall his achievement, and where does he stand? What are his six best works against Gainsborough’s best six? What is his ‘Captain Coram’ to Reynolds’s ‘Lord Heathfield,’ and much as I admire his ‘Stay Maker,’ what is it to Watteau’s ‘Gersaint’s Sign’? Compliment Hogarth as much as you like, say that he was half-a-dozen men in one—satirist, publicist, draughtsman, engraver, moralist, caricaturist, painter—but keep him in his place. I admit that he had an extraordinary gift for putting on the colour clean, swift, and straight, but don’t magnify his gifts. Hogarth was a fighting preacher, an eighteenth-century Dr. Clifford with a natural aptitude for drawing and painting. He was half publicist, half artist. Now Matisse was artist all through. Maurice Denis understands him perfectly, and that article of Denis’s in ‘L’Occident’ was—But you haven’t told me what you think of Matisse?”

II
HOGARTH AS DELIVERER

I refused absolutely to consider Matisse. Let all thought of Matisse be banished. The subject of this little book is Hogarth, and in studying him or any other artist, I entirely disagree with my friend, the connoisseur, that one must disregard his period, ignore his birth-date, and consider only his achievement. Hogarth was born in 1697, and being an original he turned his back upon convention and faced realities. But although he reproduced, with consistent forcefulness, the life of his day, now and again he suffered himself to be influenced by convention. Did not he write: “I entertained some hopes of succeeding in what the puffers in books call the first style of history painting: so that without having a stroke of this grand business before, I quitted small portraits and familiar conversations, and with a smile at my own temerity commenced history painting, and on a great staircase at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital painted the Scripture stories, ‘The Pool of Bethesda’ and ‘The Good Samaritan,’ with figures seven feet high.” These are his failures, because he was looking not at life, but at picture-land. A failure, too, was the altar-piece for St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol, painted as late as 1756, when he was fifty-nine. For this huge altar-piece, in three compartments, he received five hundred and twenty-five pounds. Removed in 1858 to the Bristol Fine Arts Academy, this immense triptych was last year sent to London for sale, which seems unkind, if not cruel, to the memory of Hogarth. He painted these “grand manner” canvases because, as he says, “I was unwilling to sink into a portrait manufacturer.” Had Hogarth succeeded in “the first style of history painting,” had he continued in that facile convention, he would never have been hailed as the Father of English Painting, and Sir Walter Armstrong would assuredly never have written in his survey of “Art in Great