SOURCE: Blair, Joel. “Hogarth's Comic History-Paintings and the Satiric Spectrum.” Genre 9, no. 1 (spring 1976): 103-19.

[In the following essay, Blair explores Hogarth's redefinition of history painting as a means of representing middle-class subjects.]

Even though the twentieth-century public has finally acknowledged the virtues of Hogarth's portraits and traditional history-paintings, his reputation still rests, as it should, on his great cycles, beginning with A Harlot's Progress (1732) and ending with An Election (1758). Frederick Antal calls them “the very beginning of a purely English art”; their author, he says, created a “genre unique in Europe.”¹ While the style of the series is anticipated in the large Hudibras illustrations (1728) and reappears in later paintings, appreciation of Hogarth's genius depends on an understanding and response to this mature work produced during the fruitful years between 1731 and 1758—before this he was discovering his genius; afterwards he was defending it.

Both Hogarth and his public realized that he was creating something new in his cycles, and they attempted to define and give value to what they saw. Fielding saw Hogarth as a “comic history-painter” and drew parallels between the painter's work and his own new form, the “comic epic in Prose.” Late in his life, Hogarth calls his work “Modern Moral Subjects”; in his distinctions between character and caricature he is in fact denying that his major work is burlesque and low and asking that it be seen as serious art. Ronald Paulson interprets certain manuscript fragments to show that Hogarth distinguishes between burlesque (or grotesque) art, tragic or sublime painting, and comedy, which Hogarth claims “represents Nature truely in the most familiar manner”—it pictures “what might very likely have so happened.”² In the general statements by Hogarth and Fielding and the analyses by Paulson and Antal, a consistent view of Hogarth's comic work emerges. What Hogarth saw as his invention was to redefine history painting and to treat, in Paulson's words, “the contemporary, local, and commonplace as history rather than genre” (I, 279).

These modern histories possess a particular style, called by Antal “agitated baroque,” separate from Dutch realism on the one hand and classicism on the other (pp. 22-31). Its subjects are middle-class people, who are neither burlesqued nor idealized; its scene is recognizable, contemporary eighteenth-century England; its “action” is similar to that of its corresponding genre in literature, the modern novel as practiced by Defoe and Fielding. Paulson summarizes this achievement: “Hogarth had replaced the exaggeration of traditional history painting on one side and grotesque emblematic satire on the other with a more restrained delineation, closer to experience, and reliant on ‘character’ rather than ‘caricature,’ on the variety rather than the exaggeration of expression” (I, 469).

While such analysis helpfully distinguishes Hogarth's art from other types of European art, it misleadingly lumps together very disparate works. Underlying these generalizations about the comic history-paintings are assumptions that the style and purpose of the histories are similar and that they can be read in more or less the same way. Comparisons of individual works within this apparently coherent body of work call such assumptions into question. Both Marriage à la Mode and the two Before and After series are painted in a lushly colored baroque-rococo manner with contemporary middle or upper-middle class characters, and yet the viewer knows instinctively that he is facing very different phenomena, which possess different moral values and purposes. The differences in style between Marriage à la Mode and The Four Stages of Cruelty are more apparent than any similarities, and the audience intuitively reads the series in different ways. If the issue is raised generically, isn't An Election or The Four Stages of Cruelty a panoramic social satire similar to The Dunciad or Gulliver's Travels in structure and composition, whereas A Rake's Progress and Marriage à la Mode are much closer to the personal, domestic comedy (or tragedy) of Moll Flanders or even a Dickens narrative? And what features of Industry and Idleness relate it to or separate it from the broad satire of An Election or the domestic melodrama of the two progresses? Hogarth's greater works allow an exploration of the relationship between style and subject; they illustrate different types of satiric methods; they raise questions about the relation of satire to comedy (or other modes), and help answer questions about the “form” of satire, of the resulting shape of a work infused with satiric intent.

The metaphor of the satiric spectrum provides a useful framework to explore the variety of Hogarth's comic and satiric methods. The earliest use of the metaphor, as far as I know, was in David Worcester's The Art of Satire: “The spectrum-analysis of satire moves from the red of invective at one end to the violet of the most delicate irony at the other.” “The content of satire is criticism, and criticism may be uttered as direct rebuke or as impersonal logic.”³ Alvin Kernan employs the terms used by Dryden and Northrop Frye—morality and wit—to establish the two poles of satire.⁴ These correspond to the extremes suggested by critics using the spectrum metaphor: on one hand is morality with its related technique, invective; on the other, wit or fantasy, a fable presented realistically which is at times difficult to distinguish from comedy or—Frye would add, significantly—from tragedy.

The principal statements by Hogarth on his work, the comments on it by Fielding, and the analyses of it by twentieth-century commentators would seem to locate the work on the part of the spectrum most distant from invective and rhetoric, on the borderline between satire and some other mode; fantasy and wit seem to predominate over morality and rhetoric. But this in fact is not the case. Hogarth employs very different techniques in the series; each cycle requires a different kind of reading and each elicits differing aesthetic responses. Four of the series—The Four Stages of Cruelty, Industry and Idleness, An Election, and Marriage a la Mode—illustrate the range of Hogarth's modern history-paintings. They show that his major work covers the entire spectrum possible for satire, and it can be argued that some of the series should not be considered satire. His single prints illustrating modern history have affinities with one or the other of these cycles.

I

In relation to verbal satire, Four Stages of Cruelty is a curse or denunciation in pictures. It virtually says, “The wages of sin is death.” (The chalk drawing of Tom's hanging in the first foretells his actual death in the last.) The last print pictures the spiritual meaning of death; the dissecting room becomes a hell with doctors as tormenting devils and the president an aloft Satan, unwittingly carrying out God's judgment. These prints arise from the most basic, primitive—in the sense of original—impulse towards satire, that of direct attack, and employ techniques that approach direct statement. The distinctive feature of such satire is the closeness between statement and object—or in terms of modern poetics, between the tenor and vehicle of the satiric metaphor.

Both Hogarth and his critics have noted the difference in style between Four Stages of Cruelty and the other series. Intending it for a large, popular audience, Hogarth wanted these prints to be reproduced by woodcut. The simplicity in style aids in direct and immediate understanding of the satiric statement. But the style also conforms to that of the other modern history-paintings in that they employ neither caricature nor emblems. While Hogarth draws life-like, contemporary figures in Four Stages of Cruelty, he nevertheless produces the kind of satire—direct didactic statement—that he did in such prints as The South-Sea Scheme or Masquerades and Operas, which use allegory and emblematic figures to make their direct statements.

There are many satires drawn by Hogarth during his middle years that employ the same techniques as Four Stages of Cruelty. The satires on professions attack their subjects directly, while retaining those characteristics which link them to other modern history-paintings. The stupidity of scholars, the vanity of physicians, the indolence of lawyers, the fantasy-world of the poet, the dullness of preachers—these qualities mark the faces of the professionals and are objectified in the material objects and physical scenes of the prints. Certain prints that satirize manners also approach rhetorical statement—The Charmers of the Age, A Midnight Modern Conversation, The Laughing Audience, and The Sleeping Conversation. While these individual satires lack the horror of Four Stages of Cruelty (the horror results from its subject, rather than from its techniques), they allow the viewer no alternative but rejection of the objects of attack because of Hogarth's rhetorical method.

Industry and Idleness illustrates a second method of satire, one moving away from statement. Basically, the method is contrast; instead of making a direct statement, Hogarth pictures the alternatives of good and evil—here, specifically, work and sloth. Tom Idle and Francis Goodchild appear together in only two of the twelve prints: in the first, which contrasts their degree of industry, and the tenth, in which Goodchild rejects Tom's pleas for mercy; but the other prints picture their contrasting lives as one moves from work to its rewards and the other from idleness to the gallows. This type of satire at first seems to be as direct in its statements of blame as the first; the morality of Industry and Idleness seemingly strikes with the same immediacy and obviousness as that of Four Stages of Cruelty. Yet the satiric methods of the two series are sharply different and result in different kinds of satiric statement. The addition of a contrasting good to the immediately visible evil enlarges the range of human experience in the prints, which expands the reference of the satire. This results in more complicated effects. The good is sometimes harmed by the evil, but more frequently the good (pictured in the same style and existing in the same world as the evil) is compromised and shown to be human—and therefore subject to error—just as the evil is. This enlargement of reference is caused by the greater objectivity of the art; whatever the author's intention, this technique seems to demand that the characters be at a greater distance from the meaning they exemplify.

The apparent simple-mindedness of Industry and Idleness repels most admirers of Hogarth as it did Horace Walpole. One has to be either a company boss, it seems, or a Trusler (Hogarth's Bowdler) to admire the series. When Hogarth's commentators notice strengths in the series, they point to the prints featuring Tom Idle or to the near-caricatures of common people in the other prints. Both the discomfort with the cycle and the appeal of several of its prints have been explained, I think, by Paulson's reading. On one level is the popular middle-class narrative. Yet the series, he notes, “hails the industrious hero but casts doubts upon the value of his reward, and perhaps even on his kind of success.” “Idle's is an open, unprotected world full of freedom, temptations, and dangers, with the threat of some sort of retribution always hanging over him. Goodchild never ventures out of a safe enclosure, remaining careful, comfortable, and protected.” Paulson then makes extremely interesting connections between certain traits in Hogarth's character that are visible in Tom and suggests the exorcising of these traits by Hogarth in his series of wicked or foolish men and women. Such a reading reveals an implied, and probably unintentional, criticism of the middle-class world that serves as the norm and alternative to Tom's criminal world, and acknowledges the vitality of the world specifically condemned in the series.⁵

The other prints that use contrast as the principal satiric method further illustrate the different effects achieved by this structural technique from those of other methods. The Lottery, an early print employing emblems and allegorical figures—quite unlike the modern history satires—uses contrast, and like Industry and Idleness requires a different kind of reading from its companion piece, The South-Sea Scheme, which approaches direct statement. The South-Sea Scheme pointedly attacks the South Sea Company and the people's desire for speculation by presenting a crowded, randomly structured scene with Self-Interest beating Honesty, Villainy flogging Honor, South-Sea directors turning a wooden merry-go-round, Trade dying in the right foreground, and Churchmen gambling in the left foreground. The Lottery on the other hand has a schematized structure with a more or less static center; Good Luck is on the right; Misfortune, on the left. The print seems to be an attack on lotteries and has consistently been so read; and the fact that Wantonness and blind-folded Fortune are the drawers of the lots certainly exposes the dangers of lotteries. But the print mainly illustrates the choices men have at a particular moment in their lives—at the getting or losing of riches.

The allegorical figures on the central stage seem actually to support rather than oppose state lotteries. The caption reads: “1. Upon the Pedestal National Credit leaning on a Pillar supported by Justice. 2. Apollo shewing Britannia a Picture representing the Earth receiving enriching Showers drawn from her self (an Emblem of State Lottery's).” Directly below this, Suspense on a turnstile is moved alternatively by Hope and Fear, the general condition of man in all of his activities. On the floor below this group are Industry and Philosophy. Minerva points to Industry as the proper choice for Misfortune, who has drawn a blank in the lottery; his false alternatives are Sloth and Despair. Fame directs Good Luck to Philosophy; his alternative choices are Folly and Pleasure. (It is significant, however, that the floor under Philosophy is cracking under her weight, suggesting an ambiguous good.) So while lotteries provide the occasion for the print, they are not its principal subject. That is the choice man has when good or bad fortune befalls him. The print makes clear the proper choice for man in each case, and baldly exposes the dangers of the alternatives, but the construction of the figures into contrasting alternatives dissipates the satire against lotteries. The print raises general questions about the possible ways man can conduct his life, rather than denigrating the particular practice that occasioned it. As in Industry and Idleness, the use of contrast as the major satiric method enlarges the reference of the satire and complicates its meaning. The print has two meanings: it is a satire on lotteries and a commentary on human choice. Both meanings are present while not being inconsistent, just as it is not inconsistent for Hogarth to favor hard work and conventional success in Industry and Idleness while illustrating the value of freedom, even though men too often abuse it.

Three other sets of prints that contrast a good and a bad are also instructive. The Invasion prints are the closest to rhetorical statement of any in which the method is used. In those two prints Hogarth is a propagandist, using his art for the government to arouse the public when the French were threatening the nation. Yet even here the sign-board, picturing the Duke of Cumberland—extremely controversial at this time—and its caption, “Roast and boil'd every day,” are ambiguous politically in that the Duke is either the savior who is rejected or he is the “Butcher” who ought to be repudiated. Gin Lane has the directness of Four Stages of Cruelty, but its companion, Beer Street, does not just present a prosperous England. There is the ragged sign-painter, a persecuted Frenchman (in an early state), and an affected highhooped lady in a drawn chair. The deformity and diversity of the actual world invade the safe street of the beer drinkers just as the pain and suffering of the lower orders blur the moralistic message in the print of Goodchild refusing Tom Idle's pleas for mercy. In The Times, Pl. II, Hogarth is unable to make a strict contrast to The Times, Pl. I. The political references are ambiguous and conflicting; unsatisfied, Hogarth did not publish the print. The satiric method, I think, led him as an artist into the inconsistent political statements in that print, and those—counter to his intentions—forced him to reject the print. The method causes distortions of the good because the good must be shown operating in the same world with evil, and that corrupting force automatically complicates and compromises the good. Artistically, this is not to be regretted: the art that results is richer and more disturbing than the simple good-bad dichotomy that was probably intended by the artist.

The two methods described above appear in literature also as general types of satire. Perhaps the most frequent use of direct attack is in prose and verse characters, so prominent in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satire. Butler's prose characters are bald derogatory analyses of general types; Dryden's imagery reduces Og and Doeg to mindless, vulgar, dirty animals. The literary form that corresponds most directly to the second method is formal verse satire. In her classic study of the genre, Mary Claire Randolph points out its A:B structure—A the vice or folly attacked and B the corresponding virtue. In this form as in Hogarth's contrast-satire A “outweights” B, with B at times only implied.⁶ In Juvenal's tenth satire and in Johnson's imitation of it the appeals of the satirists either for good sense or Christian stoicism are strongly felt conclusions to the poems, but somehow they are inadequate to balance and correct the rampant evils or delusions explored in the bodies of the poems. Two centuries of readers have rejected Pope's presentation of the virtues of himself and his friends in his imitations of Horace, and have read those sections as blatant fictions and smug elitism. While twentieth-century critics have properly modified such readings, they illustrate the difficulties of maintaining pure distinctions between vice and the virtue that condemns it. In analyzing the complicated relationship of fool and knave in the verse satires of Juvenal and Horace, Paulson notes that “a satiric relationship tends to diffuse guilt.”⁷ In attempting to embody a convincing virtue corresponding to the vice attacked, this method of satire must necessarily incorporate additional aspects of contemporary society into the work of art; and while not dissipating the attack on vice, the method involves the good in the world of evil or shows the good as incapable of controlling the vice or folly. National Credit uses the Lottery which results in loss as well as gain to individual Englishmen; the crowd around Goodchild as he becomes Lord Mayor is as violent and uncontrolled as that which surrounds Tom Idle as he is carted to Tyburn.

“Irony” is perhaps the most appropriate term for the third type of satire in Hogarth's work. This type pictures a comic scene, but there is an unemphasized element in the scene that turns the comedy into satire. Criticism or attack is the suppressed element. In contrast with the first type where the norm or the good is not pictured and must be surmised, here the evil or folly in the scene is the suppressed part of the satiric metaphor. In the first, there is little distance between the statement of the satire and the specific object that makes it; the general term, the tenor, is obvious: “this” we see immediately “is wrong”; here, the object, the vehicle of the metaphor, dominates and the satiric statement is only implied. Since in ironic satire the example rather than the precept predominates, it is much more difficult to state exactly the norm or the good that would oppose or correct the implied vice or folly. The artist is further removed from the pictured scene than in the other types.

The major prints in which this method predominates are March to Finchley, Southwark Fair, The Cockpit, Strolling Actresses, the two Before and After prints and paintings, The Four Times of the Day, and An Election. What immediately differentiates these prints from the others is their greater topicality and contemporaneity; these are at first sight modern history-paintings. The places were immediately identifiable to eighteenth-century Englishmen; the people in them were often recognizable contemporaries (there are five or six portraits in An Election Entertainment); and the topics were current: An Election alludes to the Excise Bill, the “Jew Bill,” Newcastle's bribery, the change to the Gregorian calender, the Militia Bill, and the Jacobite interest, among other current political topics. What turns these pictures of eighteenth-century England into satire is the persistent use of irony. The events are historically accurate and at first glance are matter-of-factly pictured, but elements in each print direct the viewer to see the implied attack or satiric exposure.

Three of the Election pictures allude to other paintings: the first to The Last Supper, the second to Hercules at the Crossroads, and in the fourth commentators have found several allusions to other paintings.⁸ These larger structural references establish an implied mock-heroic contrast. In Strolling Actresses the juxtaposition of heroic garb and common actresses makes the mock-heroic obvious; that contrast is the principal statement made by the print. (The actors in Southwark Fair provide reference to the heroic in a less obvious way than the costumes do in Strolling Actresses.) In An Election the mock-heroic is less pervasive, but nevertheless operates by contrasting contemporary reality to the heroic ideals represented by the allusions to serious history paintings.

Irony also results in the contrast between a realistically pictured scene and the inappropriate title given to it. This kind of irony is the dominant technique in The Four Times of the Day where the actual events in the prints are parodies of the ideas suggested by the titles: morning, noon, evening, and night; the tension is between a pastoral ideal the titles allude to and the everyday reality of the scene.⁹ The most obvious discrepancy between name and scene in An Election is in the last picture, The Chairing of the Member, where the member is actually being unchaired, but irony exists in the others also—Entertainment, Canvassing, and Polling. The title specifies a norm of ideal while the picture illustrates a debased reality.

The presence of emblems or allegories in some of the prints immediately forces a satiric reading of the entire print in which they appear. Instead of an ideal reducing the actual by ironic contrast, an allegorical figure in the midst of a realistic scene ironically comments on the pictured “history.” The technique is more direct than mock-heroic, but both are ironic; the actual, the historical scene dominates, but is commented on by another level of reference. The most obvious use of this technique is the allegory in The Polling of Britannia's coach going out of control. The device is repeated when in the later states of the prints of Canvassing for Votes Hogarth removes the teeth of the British Lion. And the signboard in this picture contains two satiric illustrations which, satirizing governmental bribery, comment on the scene. A less direct but related means of forcing a satiric reading than random emblems and signs is the introduction of violence that is at a distance but comments on the actions in the foreground. There is a disorderly mob in each of the first three pictures of An Election; fighting dominates the last. The violence that first only threatened the scene finally erupts and overtakes the participants. In a comic plot the impending disaster is controlled; misrule is banished as the procreative forces dominate at the end and promise a rejuvenated society. In satire the disruptive forces triumph, with chaos actually pictured or at least suggested as a final stage in the downward spiral.

II

The three series The Four Stages of Cruelty, Industry and Idleness, and An Election, then, illustrate three basic methods of exposure Hogarth uses in his satires—direct statement, contrast, and irony; and these correspond to methods used in literary satires. But what of his most famous cycles, the two progresses and Marriage à la Mode? Here we are dealing with the series most justifying the term “modern history-paintings.” Are these satires? I think one should be decisive and say, yes and no. There is certainly satire in the series; they contain many “satiric moments,” to use Rosenheim's phrase. There is satire on art, customs, professions, religion; satire against affectation, social manners, hypocrisy. The subjects of the series, manners and morals, are proper concerns of satire, and the essential feature of satire, criticism or exposure, is present. And the ironic distance between the names, A Harlot's Progress and A Rake's Progress, and the actual action recalls that between the names and scenes of The Four Times of the Day and An Election. Yet these series place the audience in a position similar to that experienced by a reader of The Rape of the Lock. Important social structures and mores are exposed and ridiculed, but the reader has ambivalent, not primarily negative, responses to the principal actor; he senses value in the characters and propriety in the movement of the action not usually experienced in basically satiric works. So the series can be placed at the extreme edge of satire and be called dramatic satire; the author has now removed himself from the scene and allows his characters to expose themselves and their actions to make the satiric statement. Yet there are techniques uncharacteristic of most satire, which lead to ambivalence in the response of the audience to the characters and action.

Hazlitt called Marriage à la Mode “domestic tragedy”; Herbert Read used the same term for A Harlot's Progress. There is much to recommend that designation in that the series explore private experiences that lead to disaster—individuals make wrong decisions that result in their destruction. But the term has associations with a minor dramatic genre that limit its usefulness. Returning to Fielding's identification of what he and Hogarth were doing places us on firmer ground. The tension in the series is between satire and the impulse that led to the modern novel, between exposure of fools and knaves and understanding of character and exploration of the results of action.

If Hogarth's progresses and Marriage à la Mode are both satiric and novelistic, the critical reader should be able to define the essential features of the series that move them outside the realm of satire. A writer unsympathetic to satire is helpful here. After noting the limitations of the mode and its distortions of the real world, Basil Willey goes on to point out that the satirist “must ignore the explanation of the thing satirized—how it came to be, its history.” “It is a fact of experience,” he continues, “that tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner and the satirist ex offficio cannot pardon, so he must decline to understand all and explore all. Satire is by nature nonconstructive, since to construct effectively—to educate, for example, to reform, to evangelize—one must study actual situations and actual persons in their historical setting, and this kind of study destroys the satiric approach.”¹⁰ The last sentence suggests Willey's lack of sympathy for satire, but the passage as a whole—although too dogmatic about what satire cannot do—suggests one element lacking in most satire: causality. Transferred into terms of plot, the concept would mean that a work which possesses an action with a causal sequence—a beginning, middle, and end—is not satire; or stated in terms of character, when the motivations of characters are presented (and those motivations are not simply reflections of humors), then the work is not satire but some other form of art.

While Willey's analysis is certainly too narrow and restrictive, it does suggest what is true of a great deal of satire and helps define the features of Hogarth's three series that move them away from satire. The explanation of character in most satire is circular—the reason the miles gloriosus acts the way he does is because he is a braggart; Mr. Booby of Shamela is the way he is because he is lustful. And the action in satire is fragmented; one event follows the other but with little or no causal relationship—the lives of Tristram Shandy or of Encolpius in The Satyricon or of Lucius in The Golden Ass could go on forever since no central action shapes the narrative and no personality develops from one stage of experience to another. Dramatic comedy allows a testing of the above generalizations. If the three plays The Clouds, The Alchemist, and The Misanthrope were placed alongside Lysistrata, Volpone, and Tartuffe, I think most readers would say that the former group is more satiric than the latter. The former are more fragmented in structure and explore character more superficially; they are also more concerned with ideas and abstraction than the latter. The latter plays, while certainly satiric, conform more clearly to a comic structure; the restoration of order at their conclusions is more convincing than is so in the others. In general, then, satire tends in its structure to be fragmented; its basic unit is the episode. The presentation of character in satire is at best skimpy; the “hero” of satire is a flat character.

With the idea of causality as the general boundary between satire and comedy or tragedy, we can identify the techniques of the three series under consideration that move away from satire towards another mode. The first print of each suggests the past life of the participants in the drama; it contains exposition while beginning the major action of the cycle. Such presentation of extensive exposition occurs in these series only—not in the other series or individual satires; through this exposition the audience is aware of the forces that help determine character and motivate action. Plate 1 of Marriage à la Mode pictures the reasons why the fathers want this particular marriage; the Earl wants money to complete the vast building project, seen through the open window, which has been halted. The merchant's gold chain wrapped around his handkerchief shows him to be an alderman; this is as high socially as he himself can go, and he is now using his daughter to further advance his family.

The first prints also effectively establish the character of the major actors. Hogarth is of course famous for revealing a person's essential personality in his face. But the features he draws of his hero-villains in these series do not reveal a fixed character, as do the portraits in the satires. The faces here show the fluidity of personality that makes what happens to them understandable, although not inevitable. The catastrophe that befalls each results from the expression of character in action, and the weaknesses and strengths of that character are evident in the initial prints. As in literary drama, the series dramatize the interrelation of character and plot and the dependence of each on the other. F. G. Stephens says of Moll in the first plate of A Harlot's Progress: “With much simplicity of expression, there is a voluptuous character in her features, and a certain frivolity appears in her face which Hogarth probably intended should suggest the nature of a woman whom he proposed to depict in the career of a meretrix.”¹¹ The same combination of diverse traits that nevertheless tend towards a particular fate appears in the rake and the young couple in Marriage à la Mode. The sensuality and vanity of the young heir of the latter series shows in his face, and the sullen dissatisfaction of the girl about to be sacrificed promises that she will not suffer her future abandonment but will respond in kind to the fashionable vices of her husband.

And the separate scenes of these three series are interlocked far more tightly and purposefully than in the others. The incidents in Industry and Idleness, for example, are simply stages in a rambling allegorical story; the middle plates could be reordered and scenes could be added or removed without injuring the effect of the whole. (Hogarth in fact sketched three drawings for Industry and Idleness that he did not use: one of Goodchild and his wife with decorators, and a pair showing Goodchild helping his poor parents and Idle stealing from his mother. With or without them the series would be essentially the same as it is now.) While there is some looseness in the action of A Rake's Progress, that series, A Harlot's Progress, and Marriage à la Mode have plots that move naturally and inevitably to their conclusions, satisfying to a considerable degree the need for unity of action. After the first print of Marriage à la Mode establishes the incompatibility of the couple, the next two prints show the husband as the initial offender, but Plate 2 also reveals the beginning of dissipation in the wife. The lawyer who converses with the girl in Plate 1 points in Plate 4 to a masquerade scene on a screen; Plate 5 occurs after a masquerade (there are masks on the floor) doubtless similar to the one on the screen in Plate 4. The lawyer is present in the last scene in that his execution speech lies on the floor. His hanging and the death of her husband are the causes of the Countess's suicide.

Not just characters working out their destinies, but objects associated with them help unify the series. The cap in the husband's pocket, which the dog sniffs at, Plate 2, reappears on the head of his young mistress in Plate 3. The ring dangling on the young girl's handkerchief in Plate 1 is removed from her hand by her father in the last scene. The appearance of the crippled child in Plate 6 is prepared for by the coral hanging from the Countess's chair in Plate 4; the wife may have been pregnant in Plate 2. The separate prints of the series are not, then, independent fragments aimed at satiric exposure but are sequences in which the characters and scenes are interrelated and by means of which a more or less unified action unfolds.

The role of art here is significantly different from its function in other prints. The pictures on the walls do not establish a mock-heroic contrast as do the allusions in An Election or the heroic trappings of Strolling Actresses or Southwark Fair; rather, they comment on the action they overlook. There is no separation between a real and an ideal. The incident itself is what must be understood rather than its departure from the heroic or good. In Plate 1 of Marriage à la Mode, besides illustrating the derivative taste of the Earl, the pictures have suffering and violence as their subject, making general statements about the action occurring in the print. In Plate 4, the Countess's levee, the paintings are of perverted sexuality: Jupiter and Io, the rape of Ganymede, Lot and his daughters, and the portrait of Silvertongue, the seducer of the Countess. Not a means of satirizing the action in the prints, the pictures explain the meaning of the action or comment on the character of the participants in the action.

The fact that the action of these series occurs almost exclusively indoors suggests that they are different in important ways from Hogarth's satires. Even though Hogarth often uses buildings as structural frameworks in his satires, as in Southwark Fair or The Polling, the action is nevertheless free spiraling, moving in all directions. This is also true of An Election Entertainment; even though it pictures a room, the guests spill out of the frame. Of the twenty prints in the two progresses and Marriage à la Mode, only two are out of doors. Seven of the twelve plates of Industry and Idleness are indoors, one in An Election, none in The Four Times of the Day. I think these facts suggest that rather than being concerned with abstract, social issues—cruelty, idleness, corruption, quackery—Hogarth in these domestic dramas is exploring the lives of individual members of society who act and suffer primarily within parlors and bedrooms.

One of the most convincing ways to see the difference between these three series and Hogarth's other satires is to compare the imitations of Hogarth's series with the originals. The imitators see primarily the social satire and miss the character study and the interrelation of the scenes. One imitation in particular illustrates the contrast in method. The Rake's Levee, “S. Mosley Sculp. Sept. 7, 1751,”¹² imitates Plate 2 of A Rake's Progress. The Rake's clothes are disheveled; a servant drinks behind his back. In his bed is a bare-breasted woman; various merchants are in the room; on a chair are clothes taken off after a masquerade. While Plate 2 of Hogarth's series is not a particularly unified picture, the print as a whole makes a single statement about Rakewell's profligacy and vanity. The imitation, however, jumbles together characters and incidents from several of Hogarth's prints: Plate 1 of A Rake's Progress, Plate 3 of A Harlot's Progress, several scenes from Marriage à la Mode, as well as the print principally imitated. Here is the kind of multiple attack that occurs in such satiric pieces as Southwark Fair, not in A Rake's Progress itself. The minor figures satirized in the three cycles under discussion serve a function similar to that of the pictures on the walls; they exist as commentary on the character and lives of the main actors in the drama. The imitator of A Rake's Progress, Plate 2, saw only the satire; comparison of the imitation with the original reveals that Hogarth is merging satire and another genre.

III

It is altogether proper to see Hogarth's major work as possessing a distinctive style and imitating a neglected area of human experience that is as appropriate for art as any other. But the viewer should be as aware of the multiplicity of narrative techniques as of the consistency in Hogarth's artistic style and subject. The diversity results, not just from the creative genius of the artist, but from the necessities of art as well. While Hogarth sought to paint people as he saw them and to paint them in an unidealized manner, the ways that contemporary history could be presented varied, and Hogarth uses a variety of methods throughout his mature career. The four series principally considered in this paper show a gradual, but marked, removal of an authorial presence. Hogarth moves from the role of a rhetorician stating his moral, to a contraster of vice and virtue, to an ironist painting a seemingly objective scene while subtly forcing a satiric reading. Finally, (finally, not in terms of the chronology of Hogarth's development as an artist, but in terms of the satiric spectrum), the scene is objectively dramatized; the audience can properly view the action both as satire and as a skeletal, pictorial novel. The idea or impulse from which the work sprang determined the particular method of presentation, the length and sequence of the series, the use of particular kinds of detail (profusion of detail dominates ironic satire, whereas it is less evident in the other types), and the presence or lack of development of plot or character. And while Hogarth's work is unique, it possesses qualities and employs methods similar to those of other genres in art and literature and can be categorized according to generic definitions. The major cycles show Hogarth as a modern history-painter, but they also show him to be using three very different, but traditional, methods of satire. And in his most famous series he illustrates stories with developing characters and unity of action similar to drama or the novel and with effects not altogether satiric.

Notes

1. Frederick Antal, William Hogarth, His Place in European Art (London, 1962), pp. 23, 27.

2. Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times (New Haven and London, 1971), II, 408. Hereafter cited as Paulson. The fullest exploration of Hogarth as painter of modern histories appears in this biography and in the introduction to Paulson's Hogarth's Graphic Works (New Haven and London, 1970), I, 23-53, hereafter cited as HGW.

3. David Worcester, The Art of Satire (Cambridge, Mass., 1940), p. 16. See also Arthur Melvill Clark, “The Art of Satire and the Satiric Spectrum,” Studies in Literary Modes (Edinburgh, 1946), pp. 31-49, which charts the movement from invective to wit. The most elaborate use of the metaphor is by Edward W. Rosenheim, Swift and the Satirist's Art (Chicago, 1963), who separates nonsatiric from satiric rhetoric by noting the use in the latter of a fiction which the audience recognizes as a departure from truth. Within the mode of satire, he argues, is persuasive satire, close to rhetoric, and punitive satire, which approaches comedy but is separated from it by always relying upon “discernible, historically authentic particulars.”

4. Alvin B. Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven and London, 1965), pp. 3-18.

5. Paulson, II, 73-74. Accepting such a reading of the series does not mean that one must accept Paulson's argument that there is a chronological movement in Hogarth's satires from telling the reader what to think to allowing the reader the choice between alternatives, which is at least partly the case here. The reader is certainly more actively involved in Industry and Idleness and in The Four Stages of Cruelty (significantly, published after Industry and Idleness), but the involvement results from the satiric method which pictures two worlds simultaneously rather than from a change in Hogarth's attitudes towards his subject or his audience, as Paulson suggests.

6. Mary Claire Randolph, “The Structural Design of the Formal Verse Satire,” PQ [Philological Quarterly], 21 (1942), 368-84.

7. Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore, 1967), pp. 27-28. He then continues: “Horace too is a fool in his satires; in Juvenal's the guilt extends to the persecuted fool as well as to the knave.”

8. For contemporary references in An Election and allusions to other paintings, see HGW, I, 226-35.

9. Paulson, I, 403, notes the parallels between days, seasons, and ages of man suggested by the series.

10. Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background (London, 1940), p. 107.

11. F. G. Stephens, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Division I. Political and Personal Satires (London, 1873-83), No. 2031.

12. Catalogue of Prints and Drawings, Satires, No. 2185.