Eighteenth Century Vignettes

IX. HOGARTH'S SIGISMUNDA

TOWARD the close of the last century, the regular attendants upon the ministrations of the Rev. James Trebeck in the picturesque old church at the end of Chiswick Mall, must often have witnessed the arrival of a well-known member of the congregation. Year after year had been wheeled, in a Bath chair, from a little villa under the wing of the Duke of Devonshire's mansion hard by, a stately old lady between seventy and eighty years of age, whose habitual costume was a silk sacque, a raised head-dress, and a black calash. Leaning heavily upon her crutched cane, and aided by the arm of a portly female relative in similar attire, she would make her way slowly and with much dignity up the nave, being generally preceded by a bent and white-haired man-servant, who, after carrying the prayer-books into the pew, and carefully closing the door upon his mistress and her companion, would himself retire to a remoter part of the building. From the frequenters of the place, the little procession attracted no more notice than any other recognized ceremonial, of which the intermission would alone have been remarkable; but it seldom failed to excite the curiosity of those wayfarers who, under the third George, already sought reverently, along the pleasant riverside, for that house in Mawson's Buildings where the great Mr. Pope wrote part of his 'Iliad,' or for the garden of Richard, Earl of Burlington, where idle John Gay gorged himself with apricots and peaches. They would be told that the elder lady was the widow of the famous painter, William Hogarth, who lay buried under the teacaddy-like tomb in the neighbouring churchyard; that her companion was her cousin, Mary Lewis, in whose arms he died; and that the old servant's name was Samuel. For five and twenty years Mrs. Hogarth survived her husband, during all of which time she faithfully cherished his memory. Those who visited her at her Chiswick home (for she had another in Leicester Fields) would recall with what tenacity she was wont to combat the view that he was a mere maker of caricatura, or, at best, 'a writer of comedy with the pencil,' as Mr. Horace Walpole (whose overcritical book she had not even condescended to acknowledge) had thought fit to designate him. It was as a painter pure and simple, as a rival of the Guidos and Correggios, that she mainly valued her William. 'They said he could not colour!' she would cry, pointing, it may be, as a protest against the words, to the brilliant sketch of the 'Shrimp Girl,' now in the National Gallery, but then upon her walls. Or, turning from his merits to his memory, she would throw a shawl about her handsome head and, stepping out under the over-hanging bay-window into the old three-cornered garden with its filbert avenue and its great mulberry tree, would exhibit the little mural tablet which Hogarth had himself scratched with a nail, in remembrance of a favourite bullfinch. 'Alass poor Dick,' ran the faint-lined inscription, not without characteristic revelation of the sculptor's faulty spelling. And if she happened to be in one of the more confidential moods of old age, she would perhaps take from a drawer that very No. 17 of the 'North Briton,' which she afterwards gave to Ireland, and which her husband, she would tell you, had carried about in his pocket for days to show to sympathetic friends. 'The supposed author of the Analysis of beauty!' – she would indignantly exclaim, quoting from the opening lines of Wilkes's nefarious print, headed with its rude woodcut parody of Hogarth's portrait in 'Calais Gate,' 20 and then, turning the blunt-lettered page, she would point silently to the passages relating to the much-abused 'Sigismunda,' concerning which, if her hearers were still judiciously inquisitive, they would, in all probability, receive a gracious invitation to test the truth of the libel by inspecting that masterpiece itself at its home in her London house.

In that month Mrs. Hogarth had been laid beside her mother and her husband under the tomb in Chiswick churchyard; the little 'country box' had passed to Mary Lewis; and – by direction of the same lady – the contents of the 'Golden Head' in Leicester Fields were shortly afterwards (April, 1790) announced for sale. In the Print Room at the British Museum (where is also the original manuscript of the famous 'Five Days' Tour' of 1732) is a copy of the auctioneer's catalogue, which once belonged to George Steevens. It is not a document of many pages. At Mrs. Hogarth's death, her income from the prints, exclusive property in which had been secured to her in 1767 by special Act of Parliament, had greatly fallen off; and though she had received the further aid of a small pension from the Royal Academy, it is to be presumed that her means were considerably straitened. It is known, too, that there had been lodgers at the 'Golden Head,' one being the engraver Richard Livesay, another the strange Ossianic enthusiast and friend of Fuseli, Alexander Runciman; and obviously nothing but 'strong necessity' could justify the reception of lodgers. These circumstances must explain the slender contents of Mr. Auctioneer Greenwood's little pamphlet. Many of the treasures of William Hogarth's household had already become the prey of the collector, or had passed to admiring friends; and what remained to be finally dispersed under the hammer practically consisted of family relics. There was Hogarth's own likeness of himself and his dog, soon to become the property of Mr. Angerstein, from whom it passed to the National Gallery; there was another whole-length of painting of him; there was Roubiliac's clever terra cotta; there was a cast of the faithful Trump, and one of Hogarth's hand; there were the portraits of his sisters Mary and Ann, which now belong to Mr. R. C. Nichols. Other items were a set of 'twelve Delft ware plates,' painted with the signs of the zodiac by Sir James Thornhill; portraits of Sir James and his wife; of Mrs. Hogarth herself; of Hogarth's six servants; and there were also numerous framed examples of his prints. 21 But the most important object in the sale was undoubtedly the famous 'Sigismunda.'

'Sigismunda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo' is the full title of the picture in the National Gallery catalogue. As one looks at it now, asylumed safely, post tot discrimina, in Trafalgar Square, it is not so much its qualities as its story that it recalls. How much heartburning, how much bitterness, would have been saved to its sturdy little 'Author,' as he loved to style himself, if it had never been projected! He was an unparalleled pictorial satirist; he was, and still is, an unsurpassed story-teller upon canvas.

Thus even his enemy and assailant, Charles Churchill. But Hogarth had the misfortune to live in an age when Art was given over to the bubblemongers and 'black masters;' when, to the suppression of native talent, sham chefs d'ouvre were praised extravagantly by sham connoisseurs; and the patriotic painter of 'Marriage À-la-Mode' justly resented the invasion of the country by the rubbish of the Roman art-factories. Had he confined himself to the forcible indignation of which, as an impenitent islander, he possessed unlimited command, it would have been better for his peace of mind. But, in an unpropitious hour, he undertook to prove his case by demonstration. Among the pictures from Sir Luke Schaub's collection, offered for sale in 1758, was a 'Sigismunda,' attributed to Correggio, but in reality from the brush of the far inferior artist, Furini. It was recklessly run up by the virtuosi, and was finally bought in for over £400. Hogarth, whose inimitable 'Marriage' had fetched only £126 (frames included), determined to paint the same subject. He had an open commission from Sir Richard Grosvenor, a wealthy art-collector, who had been one of the bidders for the Furini, and he set to work. He took unusual pains – a thing which, in his case, was of evil augury; and he modified the details of his design again and again, in obedience to the suggestions of friends. When at last the picture was completed, Sir Richard, who, perhaps not unreasonably, had looked for something more in the artist's individual manner, took advantage of Hogarth's conventional offer to release him from his bargain, and rather shabbily withdrew from it upon the specious ground 'that the constantly having it [the picture] before one's eyes would be too often occasioning melancholy ideas' – a sentiment which the irritated painter, calling verse to his relief, afterwards neatly paraphrased. Admitting its power to touch the heart to be the 'truest test' of a masterpiece, he says of 'Sigismunda':

As a result of Sir Richard Grosvenor's action, the picture remained on the artist's hands, – a source of continual mortification to himself, and a fruitful theme of discussion to both his friends and enemies. The political caricaturists got hold of it, and used it as a stick to beat the pensionary of Lord Bute; the critics employed it to continue their assaults on the precepts of the 'Analysis.' When Wilkes retorted to Hogarth's ill-advised print of the 'Times,' he openly described 'Sigismunda' as a portrait of Mrs. Hogarth 'in an agony of passion;' and the fact that she had served as her husband's model was not neglected by his meaner assailants. Finally, after various attempts had been made to engrave it, the picture was left by the artist to his widow with injunctions not to sell it for less than £500. After her death it was bought at the 'Golden Head' sale for £56 by Alderman Boydell. As already stated, it is now in the National Gallery, to which it was bequeathed by the late Mr. Anderdon in 1879.

In the couplets already quoted, Hogarth had ended by saying:

To some extent the reaction he hoped for has arrived. The latter-day student of 'Sigis-munda,' unblinded by political prejudice or private animosity, renders full justice to the soundness of its execution and the undoubted skill of its technique. Indeed, at the present moment, the tendency seems to be rather to overrate than to underrate its praiseworthy qualities. Yet, when all is said, the subject remains an unattractive and even a repulsive one. It must be admitted also that, in one respect, contemporary critics were right. They were wrong in their unreasoning preference for doubtful 'exotics,' but they were right in their contention that, upon this occasion, Hogarth had strayed perilously from his own peculiar walk, and that so-called 'history painting' was not his strongest point. Conscientious and painstaking, 'Sigismunda' is still a mistake, although it is the mistake of a great artist; and Hogarth's recorded partiality for it affords but one more example of that unaccountable blindness which led Addison to put his poems before the 'Spectator,' Prior to rank his 'Solomon' above the 'loose and hasty scribble' of 'Alma,' and Liston, whose nose alone was provocative of laughter, to cherish the extraordinary delusion that his true vocation was that of a tragic actor.

X. 'THE CITIZEN OF THE WORLD.'

WHAT was it that suggested to Goldsmith raphers and commentators have pointed to more than one plausible model, – the 'Lettres Persanes' of Montesquieu, the 'Lettres d'une Péruvienne' of Madame de Graffigny, the 'Lettres Chinoises' of the Marquis d'Argens, the 'Asiatic' of Voltaire's 'Lettres Philosophiques.' But it is sometimes wise, especially in such hand-to-mouth work as journalism, which was all Goldsmith at first intended, to seek for origins in the immediate neighbourhood rather than in remoter places. In 1757 Horace Walpole published anonymously, in pamphlet form, a clever little squib upon Admiral Byng's 'The Citizen of the World'? Biogtrial in particular and English inconstancy in general, which he entitled 'A Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his friend Lien Chi, at Peking.' This was briefly noticed in the May issue of the 'Monthly Review,' where Goldsmith was then acting as scribbler-general to Griffiths, the proprietor of the magazine (his reviews of Home's 'Douglas' and of Burke's 'Sublime and Beautiful' appeared in the same number), and it was described as in Montesquieu's manner. A year later Goldsmith is writing mysteriously to his friend Bob Bryan-ton, of Ballymulvey, in Ireland, about a 'Chinese whom he shall soon make talk like an Englishman;' and when at last his 'Chinese Letters,' as they were called at first, begin to appear in Newbury's 'Public Ledger,' he takes for the name of his Oriental, Lien Chi Altangi, one of Walpole's imaginary correspondents having been Lien Chi. This chain of association, if slight, is strong enough to justify some connection. The fundamental idea, no doubt, was far older than either Walpole or Goldsmith; but it is not too much to suppose that Walpole's jeu d'esprit supplied just that opportune suggestion which produced the remarkable and now too-much-neglected series of letters afterwards reprinted under the general title of 'The Citizen of the World.'