[In the following essay, Williamson contends that many of Hogarth's scenes of disorder and degradation are both enticing and repulsive at the same time.]

In Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963), directed by Stanley Kubrick, a mad USAF general orders a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union with apocalyptic consequences. When all recall mechanisms fail, the Superpowers are spurred into cooperation. The Soviets, forewarned of the approaching American B-52s, set about shooting them down, but one of the planes evades Soviet defenses. Badly damaged and leaking fuel, its wacky pilot diverts the attack to the nearest possible target, a Soviet missile base. As the crippled plane maneuvers over the earth in a desperate attempt to drop its load of nuclear bombs on the enemy installation, the film activates a familiar rhetoric. The crew of the B-52, on what is now virtually a suicide mission, are shown to be individuals of heroic coolness and efficiency, motivated by a patriotism of refined emotional purity. The inside of the plane is metamorphosed into the abstract space of the action film, in which friends take on foes and where cinematic suspense, assisted by the soundtrack, persistently invites the viewer to empathize with the crew and so to hope that they will survive. Cinematic techniques help the viewer learn to stop worrying and love the bomb. If the heroes succeed, however, the Soviet counterattack (the Doomsday Machine) will be triggered and the world will be destroyed. This plot development remorselessly underlines the fascinating absurdity of the response to the cinematic artistry, which generates an emotional power that can undermine a rational response to the horror of the events. The madness of this Strangelove Effect is personified by the weirdly hawkish General Turgidson (George C. Scott) who simultaneously squeals with childish excitement and covers his mouth in horror when he speaks of the crew's certain success; by the naïve pilot of the plane who opens the failed bomb doors manually and rides down to earth on an H-bomb waving his cowboy hat; and most importantly by Dr. Strangelove himself (Peter Sellers) whose body, erupting periodically in uncontrollable Nazi salutes, refuses to be restrained by his mind. The film closes with scene after scene of mushroom clouds accompanied by Vera Lynn singing We'll Meet Again.

Hogarth is a master of the Strangelove Effect. In the ironically entitled Midnight Modern Conversation (1730-31, Yale Center for British Art), for example, the scene is a riot of drunkenness. The circular table in the center of the room barely holds the party of drinkers together, and the social grouping alluded to in the title has fragmented into atomistic chaos. A man in the foreground of the engraved version published in March 1733 has fallen off his chair and broken a cup, shards of which are shown flying past his head while his pointing finger directs our attention to the empty bottles on the floor. Above him, a blind-drunk man staggers forward, his wig askew, his body needing the support of the back of a chair. An upturned bottle in his left hand empties itself onto the head of the man below. To the right of the plate, by the table, a man has fallen asleep while lighting his pipe, and the flaming candle is now dangerously close to his lace cuffs. In the painting a member of the group stares in horrified anticipation of the imminent conflagration but does not do anything about it; the engraving leaves all sense of anticipation to the viewer as the equivalent figure is obliviously drunk. At the back of the engraving two subgroups achieve limited social interaction, centered ironically on the brimming punchbowl, while to the left, in the far corner, a man smoking a pipe with his back to the room is oddly mirrored by a man smoking a pipe who faces the viewer, perhaps to indicate a quarrel. On the extreme left another drinker has fallen asleep, precariously balanced against the wall on the back two legs of his chair, his mouth and nostrils open, his wig falling back to reveal a bald pate.

The dominant impression of disorder reflects the state of inebriation and may, in turn, suggest moral condemnation. Yet the image also invites a different viewing characterized by the man who excitedly raises his glass as if to toast the occasion. The scene may be one of moral degradation, but the viewer is encouraged to see it with a glee that is emphasized by the exuberance captured in the dishevelment of the figures, the disarray of the myriad objects, the breaking glass, the cascading wine, and most impressively in the hats that seem to float in a kind of fairy ring against the back and side walls. As Ronald Paulson remarks, Hogarth's image is “no more a denunciation” than, say, Jacob Jordaens' mid-seventeenth-century Feast of the Bean King (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), and one may add that the peculiarly durable air of celebration with which Hogarth invests the scene is inseparable from the basic topos of Bacchic revelry.¹

A Midnight Modern Conversation demonstrates the important sense in which the product that emerges when life is turned into art is like drunkenness. In the Analysis of Beauty (1753), a document avowedly based on principles observed in art and to that extent a summary of the precepts that had governed Hogarth's own art long before the treatise was published, Hogarth states at the outset that “grace and beauty” are the characteristics of “those compositions in nature and art, which seem most to please and entertain the eye.”² The equation between beauty and pleasure is explicit, and when the theoretical background to the lines of beauty and grace is given in the section on intricacy Hogarth includes hunting, reading, playgoing, and thinking itself in a divinely sanctioned urge to mix business and pleasure:

The active mind is ever bent to be employ'd. Pursuing is the business of our lives; and even abstracted from any other view, gives pleasure. Every arising difficulty, that for a while attends and interrupts the pursuit, gives a sort of spring to the mind, enhances the pleasure, and makes what would else be toil and labour, become sport and recreation. … This love of pursuit, merely as pursuit, is implanted in our natures, and design'd, no doubt, for necessary, and useful purposes. Animals have it evidently by instinct. The hound dislikes the game he so eagerly pursues; and even cats will risk the losing of their prey to chase it over again. It is a pleasing labour of the mind to solve the most difficult problems; allegories and riddles, trifling as they are, afford the mind amusement: and with what delight does it follow the well-connected thread of a play, or novel, which ever increases as the plot thickens, and ends most pleas'd, when that is most distinctly unravell'd?

(pp. 41-42)

Hogarth clarifies the connection between beauty, artistic lines, and intricacy: “Intricacy in form, therefore, I shall define to be that peculiarity in the lines, which compose it, that leads the eye a wanton kind of chace, and from the pleasure that gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful” (pp. 42-43).

In A Midnight Modern Conversation, the representation of profound disorder invites the viewer to follow the kinds of visual paths that were later schematized in The Analysis of Beauty and so to engage in that playful pursuit essential to art. Delight meets disorder when conviviality meets alcohol because this is the point where, for Hogarth, “our natures” reveal themselves. The same juxtaposition is the subject of the print, A Chorus of Singers, Hogarth's subscription ticket for the engraved A Midnight Modern Conversation. Here a jumble of heads, arms, torsos, and sheet music is overlooked by a bald-headed music master whose raised arm and open-mouthed intensity invite a comparison with the posture of the toasting reveller at the back of the group of drinkers. Although musically united in a performance of Judith, an oratorio by William Huggins and William Defesch, the arrangement of the singers is disorderly; they form six disconnected clusters facing in six different directions, and most cannot see the conductor. The disorder is underlined by the distorted caricature quality of the pompous central chorister (bewigged and bespectacled) and by one singer's need of a magnifying glass.³ Such tendencies to entropy are set in counterpoint with the ghostly but binding presence of the oratorio, whose enactment is as important in this scene as the punchbowl that provides a center of gravity in A Midnight Modern Conversation.

In these pictures art does not resolve chaos into order, but rather holds disorder in tension with creative exuberance on the basis that both are signs of the same urge, “implanted in our natures.” The implication is that they are more concerned with the juxtapositions inherent in human nature than—to use a favorite Hogarthian term—moral progress. Another argument might suggest that disorder and creativity both imply another kind of order, one that is signalled (in the engraving of A Midnight Modern Conversation) by the geometry of the round table and the square room. Such geometrical forms appear elsewhere, partially in the triangles and circles of the hats, and most importantly in the circular clock face set in its square frame. In this progression from geometrical shape to stock motif a moral imperative emerges that might formulate itself as memento mori or tempus fugit. Yet even the process of discovering such a relationship depends on the picture's stimulating the kind of boisterous energy the image celebrates and so reemphasizes the concern with pleasure—as in Dr. Strangelove, memento mori is here twinned with carpe diem.

Concerned with juxtaposition rather than progression, A Midnight Modern Conversation resists being turned into a moral tag by asserting the absolute value of the visible. Being a picture (as opposed to being a picture that can be reduced to a proposition) is an end in itself because, for Hogarth, looking at pictures—like reading, going to the theatre, and fishing—engages an instinct that insists on being satisfied. But if moralizing and visualizing are at odds in this picture, so are reading and looking. The case for Hogarth's overwhelming readability has recently been restated with succinct force by Norman Bryson with reference to the engraved series, Industry and Idleness (October 1747):

In Hogarth there is always that second level of reading—if there were not, we would find the series lacking in interest. At this second, darker level the antitheses of the official text [industry rewarded, idleness punished] are turned upside-down: the virtuous apprentice … becomes insufferable, and the idle apprentice … emerges as an anti-hero. Between these two signifying levels, of official morality and its unofficial counterpoint, the Hogarth image is entirely exhausted: what cannot fit the first level drops to the second is processed there, and as we gaze at the series we are asked to perform, repeatedly, and in two different registers, an act of extraction which is always the same and ends by finally emptying the image of all its content. Irony in Hogarth—the interplay between the two textual levels—works as an instrument for subjecting the image to an absolute control by text: despite its apparent playfulness it is authoritarian, expropriative, and entirely anti-figural.⁴

Working on a “discursive” or textual principle rather than a “figural” or visual one, Hogarth apparently displays a “commitment to the textuality of the image over its figurality” (Bryson, p. 36) comparable in its ferocity with that of Charles LeBrun. LeBrun's Cartesian study of physiognomies, for example, locates the meeting point of soul and body in the center of the brain at the pineal gland. When the soul feels attracted to or repulsed by something in the physical world, the pineal gland is stimulated and corresponding facial expressions are mechanically produced. The result, chez LeBrun, is a vocabulary of expressions codified with reference to the two poles of attraction and repulsion that makes facial imagery definitively legible.⁵ For LeBrun this philosophical substructure finds a practical application in the context provided by the Court of Louis XIV where the personal is fused so totally with the political that life and art are “only at the same degree of semantic pressure” (Bryson, p. 41). The totally readable image is, at the same time, a totally political one.

In The Analysis of Beauty Hogarth is pragmatic about the value of LeBrun's schematic facial lines; and, although he speaks of expressions as a “language,” he is doubtful about their transparency as signifiers:

But least I should be thought to lay too great a stress on outward shew, like a physiognomist, take this with you, that it is acknowledg'd there are so many different causes which produce the same kind of movements and appearances of the features, and so many thwartings by accidental shapes in the make of faces, that the old adage, fronti nulla fides, will ever stand its ground upon the whole; and for very wise reasons nature hath thought fit it should.

(pp. 137-38)

Hogarth's brilliantly vernacular “take this with you” represents the usual elevation of experience over theory. Comparably, his frontispiece to John Clubbe's Physiognomy replaces LeBrun's Cartesian scheme with a parodic Newtonian one in which, with the help of a steel belt around the waist and a magnet, “the solid contents of every man's head” are ascertained, and the “Gravity” of a man's character scientifically determined. The same abiding skepticism, authorized by nature as Hogarth says, can also be seen in Industry and Idleness. The progress to riches successfully undertaken by the industrious apprentice, Francis Goodchild, is also a progress from performing his duties as an apprentice to accepting civic responsibility and the honors that go with it—imagery and politics apparently working in tandem. With the antihero, Tom Idle, Hogarth invokes a Strangelove Effect that tends to make Idle's demise more fascinating than his counterpart's success, undercutting the expected social moral. But in the final two scenes of the series, it is not the viewer's sympathy for Idleness that undermines Industry's triumph in order to make a point about social structures. It is rather the mob, whose deluge-like incursion precludes the possibility of a simple binary opposition between Industry and order on the one hand and Idle in association with a lamentably uncontrolled populace on the other.⁶ Visually, the presence of the mob makes the pictures homomorphic; thematically, both characters are included in a doomsday vision that swallows up industry and idleness alike. Looking back over the series it becomes clear that such a “free chaotic mingling of forms” works throughout to equalize industry and idleness.⁷ The viewer, moreover, indulges in the kind of idleness that is a prerequisite for looking at pictures. As in Dr. Strangelove, while art supplants ethics, human nature works out the logic of its own destruction. The final appeal is neither to text nor subtext but to a belief about human nature, and the medium of that appeal is essentially pictorial.

The Analysis is overwhelmingly concerned with the organization of visual material, not with reference to a controlling text but as a distinct species. Although Joseph Burke calls it “the first work in European literature to make formal values both the starting-point and basis of a whole aesthetic theory,”⁸ Hogarth states at the outset that it is in part a corrective to the earlier work advocating the purely visual qualities of painting done by Roger de Piles.⁹ De Piles countered the textual bias of the French Academy, manifested in LeBrun's readable body, in the elevation of history painting, and in the doctrine of ut pictura poesis based on Aristotle's Poetics, with his views on the paramount importance of color as the medium of vision and his championing of Rubens.¹⁰ For de Piles the primary aim of painting is to seduce the eye by marshalling visual forces into an affecting tout-ensemble. Where de Piles distinguished between grace and beauty by arguing that “beauty pleases by the rules, and grace without them,” however, Hogarth demystifies this Je ne sais quoi, an obscurantist connoisseur's dream, by clarifying that there are definite correspondences between beauty, grace, and particular visual forms—hence, the “waving line, or line of beauty” and the serpentine line or “line of grace” which, “by its waving and winding at the same time different ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety.”¹¹

The importance of lines in the Analysis is indicative of the way visual qualities operate in engravings and paintings alike.¹² Paulson notes that when confronted with Hogarth's use of color in, for example, the painted version of Marriage à la Mode (1743, National Gallery, London), “the viewer finds that the colour actively prevents him from getting down to the reading structure” (Art of Hogarth, p. 46). Yet the prints of the series, published in June 1745, are equally concerned with the kind of visual bustle that first grabs the viewer's attention and then invites the eye not simply to decode but to explore the visual properties of the picture as picture. Hogarth employed French engravers, announcing his wish to avoid “the least Objection to the Decency or Elegancy of the whole Work,”¹³ and so signalling a concern to attract the eye of the purchaser. Similarly, in the tavern scene of the Rake's Progress details may well combine to suggest a straightforward, legible morality; but in both cases, as in the Midnight Modern Conversation, “moralizing realism”¹⁴ does not dictate the mere reduction of image to word.

At first glance this view may seem to conflict with Hogarth's own definition of his narrative progresses in terms of what he calls “moder[n] (?) moral Subject a Field unbroke up in any Country or any age”; and despite the inherent uncertainty of the transcription, it would be churlish to quarrel with a phrase that has proved so universally acceptable as this.¹⁵ The epithet has gained powerfully from a fertile relationship with Henry Fielding's celebrated allusion to Hogarth in the Preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), where Fielding allies his newborn “comic epic in prose” with comic history painting, invoking Hogarth as his example.¹⁶ The essentially moral nature of the shared attitude that Fielding perceives seems confirmed by an earlier reference to Hogarth as “one of the most useful Satyrists any Age hath produced,” and to the Harlot's Progress (engravings published April 1732) and Rake's Progress (engravings published June 1735) as “calculated more to serve the Cause of Virtue, and for the Preservation of Mankind, than all the Folios of Morality which have been ever written.”¹⁷ As Paulson remarks, however, in the Preface to Joseph Andrews, “Fielding is trying, as Hogarth had done since Boys Peeping at Nature [1730-31], to secure a place in the classical (and contemporary) hierarchy of genres higher than satire, the grotesque, or the comic” (Hogarth, 2:195). On this level, Fielding's inflationary mock-epic style rapidly takes on a life independent of its moral force, resolving into a highly entertaining play of form.¹⁸ This is most apparent in Tom Jones (1749), where, despite the illuminating arguments of William Empson and Bernard Harrison, almost all readers in almost all periods have almost always seen the stylistic flights of the epideictic narrative voice as separable from the book's action.¹⁹ Indeed, readers tend to subdivide not on the issue of the separability of style and moral content, but on the nature of the achievement that the process represents.²⁰ Comparably, it is the stylistic texture that provides the primary inspiration for John Osborne's and Tony Richardson's acclaimed film, Tom Jones (1963), in which the camera work, narrative voice-overs, musical effects, and several direct addresses to the audience all suggest an anarchic, farcical, and festive bestiality—a vision that replaces moral discriminations with the entertaining exaggerations characteristic of pantomime.

Harrison has described Fielding's irony in Tom Jones as subtly “reconstitutive” in the sense that it works to purify a set of primary moral qualities—prudence, generosity, honor, love, for example—by drawing the reader,

as spectator and judge, into a complex imagined world in which he must actually exercise moral judgement in circumstances which force him to reflect upon what he is doing in making such judgements, and upon the difference between making such judgements in a full consciousness of what the words employed in them really mean, and making them with the kind of inattention to meaning which can spring equally from vulgar self-deceit or from the arrogance of an over-theoretical mind, or from both combined.²¹

This exercise of judgement relies on an appeal to intuition, to the felt values characteristic of the Good Heart. In practice, however, the moral force of the procedure tends to dissolve into a conviviality that is facilitated by the pleasurable sensations induced by the narrative texture. The ironies of Hogarth's progresses are similarly problematic. Paulson has recently accounted for Hogarth's development from the progresses of the 1730s to later works in terms of a shift from Augustan irony to Shandean playfulness.²² Yet the problem with the irony of the Harlot's Progress, as of the Rake's, is the tenuousness of its hold on what Henry James terms the “possible other case,” the positive value against which the delusions subjected to the “operative irony” of the fictional work are to be judged.²³ Is one really to assume that the visual abundance of these progresses is satisfactorily contained by a proverbial caution—rakishness or prostitution with health warnings? As regards the latter, John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure; or Fanny Hill (1748-49) plainly showed how harlotry could also be fun or even routinely mundane, while Hogarth's repeated invocation of Swift reinforces a vision of human nature that undermines irony to the point of nihilism. In the progresses as elsewhere, that is, Hogarth continues to place the readable in a state of creative tension with the visual pleasures afforded by the image in a manner that, as it were, confronts LeBrunian legibility with a de Pilesian emphasis on vision.

From Paulson's many indispensable volumes on Hogarth one might cull an overview of the relative readability of Hogarth's chief works. This Paulson balance (to borrow a word from de Piles),²⁴ would show the way in which the paintings, always more concerned with visibility, break their attachment to the “reading structure” to gain visual independence as Hogarth's mind develops from that of an engraver to that of a painter. The engravings, by contrast, remain more readable throughout, though formally the rococo line gives way to blocks of light and shade.²⁵ In a dominant eighteenth-century sense, such a balance would not chart Hogarth's progression from the status of mere mechanic to that of liberal artist. When Reynolds, for example, talks of the “mechanical part of the art” he means the artist's facility with purely visual qualities, the aspect of art to which Titian, Rubens, the Dutch School, and Gainsborough all paid too much attention.²⁶ The mechanics of art, according to Reynolds, should be subordinated to a governing idea, a devaluation of the pure visibility of art that is indicative of the way Reynolds judged artistic achievement according to his interpretation of ut pictura poesis.²⁷

The visible and empirical here equate with the mechanical and formal, and it is against this background that Hogarth's Analysis is so resolutely “anti-academic.”²⁸ This is also the point at which the modern fondness for pictorial form—the “figural,” painterly trace as seen in Hogarth's mid-1750s Shrimp Girl (National Gallery, London) or the play of line and shape in the engraved Rake's Progress—shares common ground with eighteenth-century aesthetics. When Gainsborough argued that a supposed Poussin was false because it lacked Poussin's “sweet simplicity” of “effect” and “elegance” of “drawing” and so “produced no emotion,” his evaluation was based on an equation between visual and emotional qualities that, in his own painting, he exploited to the full.²⁹ The emphasis on the emotional effect of painterly qualities is central in de Piles and is present in Hogarth's opinion that visual experience can be pleasurable. Despite his academic disapproval, it is also an informing principle in Reynolds' consideration of Rubens, who “executed with a facility that is astonishing: and let me add, this facility is to a painter, when he closely examines a picture, a source of great pleasure.”³⁰ Pictorial style—“effect” or “facility,” to use eighteenth-century terms—is emotionally expressive.

When theorists and practitioners of other arts found inspiration in Hogarth's championing of the visible it was not necessarily, as has been assumed, because the immediacy of vision represented a natural alternative to the artifice of language, “a fortunate regression into primitivism prior to language, or a leap forward to the ineffable beyond language.”³¹ Early in the century Joseph Addison allowed for the easy primacy of vision—“It is but opening the Eye, and the scene enters”³²—and the Abbé du Bos developed the premise to assert that painting is more powerful than poetry because it employs “natural” rather than “artificial” “signs.”³³ As Bishop Berkeley argued with irresistible power, however, and as William Cheselden's much-publicized operation to restore the sight of a man blind from birth dramatically confirmed, visual sensations must be interpreted before they can be seen as objects: seeing is an acquired, not an innate, skill.³⁴ Berkeley's theory that the language of vision is a language that must be learned like any other quickly gained currency. Its influence is felt in the Analysis when Hogarth notes that the eye “gives its assent to such space and distances as have been first measured by the feeling, or otherwise calculated in the mind.” He also wishes to “teach us to see with our own eyes,” and elsewhere remarks with some pleasure that the Analysis was “honord” [sic] by those with “[great] abilities in the knowledge of optics.”³⁵ The analogy between seeing and reading is a central principle of this new theory of vision and may perhaps imply the kind of reading structure that has so often been discovered in Hogarth's pictures. It also suggests the possibility of a more abstract or “figural” concept of form that precedes the word/image level of signification; for when seeing itself becomes a matter of interpreting or composing visual traces, then, as the Analysis is so keen to demonstrate, a primary stage in the image-making process is the organizing of the image as a purely visual experience.³⁶

It is this formal rationale that Sterne conjures up when Hogarth is alluded to in Tristram Shandy (1760-67).³⁷ Throughout the novel the pleasures of narrative closure are displaced by the pleasures of form as the narrative line dissolves into a play of style. Thus, in the scene illustrated by Hogarth in which Corporal Trim is about to begin reading the sermon “bespeaking attention with a slight movement of his right hand,” the progress of the narrative is interrupted by a description of Trim's posture that closes in on the lines of the left knee:

—his knee bent, but that not violently,—but so as to fall within the limits of the line of beauty;—and I add, of the line of science too;—for consider, it had one eighth part of his body to bear up;—so that in this case the position of the leg is determined,—because the foot could be no further advanced, or the knee more bent, than what would allow him, mechanically, to receive an eighth part of his whole weight under it,—and to carry it too.

This I recommend to painters;—need I add,—to orators?—I think not; for unless they practise it,—they must fall upon their noses.³⁸

The introduction of the line of beauty places the focus on manner rather than matter; and when Tristram, echoing Trim, bespeaks attention with a stylized right hand, the fictional situation erupts momentarily into a gambol of verbal and visual signs that are “artificial” to the point of absurdity. Similarly, Tristram's page of diagrams showing the course of the book so far—and clearly recalling Hogarth's remark about the “delight” offered by “the well-connected thread of a play, or novel”—is hardly a recourse to pictorial transparency. The humor of these narrative lines depends on the threefold suggestion: a) that they are unexpected; b) that they are indecipherable; and c) that their unexpectedness and indecipherability are—surprisingly—an accurate account of what has been happening in the novel because the leap they enact is from fictional situation to a play of effects located in the opacity of narrative manner. This, to adopt Hazlitt's phrase, is the “truth of absurdity to itself”;³⁹ and it works on the assumption, shared with Hogarth, that the purely formal qualities of the artifact can be a source of affective energy.

In Tristram Shandy the degree of abstraction entailed by this formalist impulse is controlled by the mimetic appeal to a self-conscious narrator. Still greater abstraction was discovered elsewhere, and here, too, Hogarth was an important model. Eighteenth-century music theory faced a crisis when an older doctrine of music as imitation came into conflict with the idea that the imitative powers of music are limited.⁴⁰ With vocal music, the text may guide the listener's response and so allow music to mimic the sounds of nature or evoke feelings of anger or love, whereas in instrumental music the absence of a text means the listener's emotional response must be stimulated by abstract patterns of sound. As Adam Smith put it,

The melody and harmony of instrumental Music … do not distinctly and clearly suggest any thing that is different from that melody and harmony. Whatever effect it produces is the immediate effect of that melody and harmony, and not of something else which is signified and suggested by them: they in fact signify and suggest nothing.⁴¹

Musical form is not imitative but structural, an “agreeable,” “great,” “various,” and “interesting” play of artistic signs whose effect is “not only a very great sensual, but a very high intellectual, pleasure” (p. 172). Elsewhere, the inherent link between such ideas and Hogarth's Analysis was made explicit. James Beattie, for example, denied that music was imitative and invoked the line of beauty as a structural principle:

Equable sounds, like smooth and level surfaces, are in general more pleasing than such as are rough, uneven, or interrupted; yet, as the flowing curve, so essential to elegance of figure, and so conspicuous in the outlines of beautiful animals, is delightful to the eye; so notes gradually swelling, and gradually decaying, have an agreeable effect on the ear, and on the mind.⁴²

Similarly, in the Preface to his popular Elegies, William Jackson makes verbal and visual reference to the Analysis to support a point about the progress of music from Guido of Arezzo to Handel and its subsequent deterioration to “our present crooked Deviation from the true Line of Beauty.”⁴³

In these examples the interest in pure form is at least as important as the concern with morality or mimesis, and Hogarth provides an important model. In an article entitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cinema,” Stanley Kubrick remarked that Dr. Strangelove's apocalyptic subject made it “eminently a problem to be dealt with dramatically” because “it's the only social problem where there's absolutely no chance for people to learn anything from experience.”⁴⁴ The result is a pursuit of form that invites the film's viewers to partake in a vision of human nature in which loving the bomb and loving the cinema amount to much the same thing. The view of human nature that informs Hogarth's separation of style and subject allows for a comparable formal logic. Sterne's formalism has been sanctioned by modernist interpretations of enormous authority: “Did you ever read Laurence Sterne?,” asked James Joyce when searching for a way of shedding light on Finnegans Wake. The suggestion is clearly of a mode of reading and a sort of text quite different from those usually associated with Hogarth.⁴⁵ Comparable modern interpretations of Hogarth exist—one thinks of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hoffmansthal; Stravinsky, Auden, and Chester Kallman; David Hockney⁴⁶—and it may well be that such readings as these have an unexpected historical power.

Notes

1. See Paulson, The Art of Hogarth (London: Phaidon, 1975), note to pls. 16-18. Frederick Antal also compares Jan Steen; see Hogarth and His Place in European Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 95-96.

2. The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1955), p. 31.

3. Ronald Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, rev. edn., 2 vols. (New Haven & London: Yale Univ., 1970), 1:149, quotes a pirated copy of the print on which the words “Sicilian Sisters tuneful Nine” have been added to suggest “the sexual status of the singers.”

4. Word and Image (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1981), pp. 149-50.

5. For a full account of LeBrun's theory, see Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions (New Haven & London: Yale Univ., 1994), pp. 9-30.

6. Cf. Barry Wind, “Hogarth's Industry and Idleness Reconsidered,” Print Quarterly 14 (1997): 235-51.

7. The quote is from Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), p. 76. Cf. Peter Wagner's poststructuralist reading of the series, which reveals “a kind of tragedy for Goodchild” (Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution [London: Reaktion, 1995], pp. 113-17).

8. See Burke's intro. to Hogarth, Analysis, p. xlvii (Burke's emphasis).

9. The Principles of Painting, an English trans. of De Piles' Cours de Peinture (1708), was published in London in 1743.

10. See Thomas Puttfarken, Roger de Piles' Theory of Art (New Haven & London: Yale Univ., 1985).

11. Analysis, pp. 56-57. Hogarth quotes De Piles on p. 7. Cf. S. H. Monk, “A Grace Beyond the Reach of Art,” Journal of the History of Ideas 5 (1944): 131-50.

12. Cf. Joseph Burke, Hogarth and Reynolds: A Contrast in English Art Theory (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1943).

13. Quoted from Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, 1:268.

14. F. Antal, “The Moral Purpose of Hogarth's Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 15 (1952): 181.

15. See Hogarth's “Autobiographical Notes,” appended to Burke's edn. of the Analysis, p. 216. Cf. Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, 3 vols. (New Brunswick & Cambridge: Rutgers Univ., 1991-93), vol. 1: The “Modern Moral Subject” 1697-1732.

16. Ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), pp. 3-11. Cf. Paulson, Hogarth, 2:194-95.

17. Henry Fielding, The Champion, 10 June 1740, qtd. in Paulson, Hogarth, 2: 194.

18. For Fielding's reversal of the “mock-heroic policy of deflation,” see Frank Kermode, “Richardson and Fielding,” Cambridge Journal 4 (1950): 106.

19. See William Empson, “Tom Jones,” The Kenyon Review 20 (1958): 217-49, repr. in Martin C. Battestin, ed., Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Tom Jones (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 33-55, and Bernard Harrison, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (London: Sussex Univ., 1975).

20. A survey of the debate is provided by Harrison, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, pp. 11-27. Harrison's chief anti-Fielding witness is Kermode (“Richardson and Fielding,” p. 110), who argues that “Fielding the moralist completely evades the only genuinely crucial test that confronts his hero as a moral being, in the whole course of his adventures,” namely the charge of incest.

21. Pp. 56-57 (Harrison's emphasis).

22. The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ., 1996), pp. 251-60.

23. See Richard Blackmur, ed., The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James (N.Y. & London: Charles Scribner's, 1934), p. 222 (from the Preface to The Lesson of the Master).

24. Cf. de Piles' Balance des Peintres, appended to the Cours de Peinture (1708).

25. Cf. Paulson, Art of Hogarth, p. 66: “Throughout his career Hogarth developed in the engravings his interest in the meaning of objects and actions and in the paintings his interest in their essential shapes.”

26. See, for example, Discourse IV; cf. Amal Asfour and Paul Williamson, “On Reynolds's Use of De Piles, Locke, and Hume in his Essays on Rubens and Gainsborough,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 60 (1997): 215-29.

27. Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis (N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1967), and J. H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1958).

28. Michael Kitson, ed., “Hogarth's ‘Apology for Painters’,” The Walpole Society 56 (1966-68): 65. Cf. Burke, Hogarth and Reynolds, p. 9.

29. For Gainsborough's comment see W. T. Whitley, Thomas Gainsborough (London: John Murray, 1915), p. 279. Cf. Amal Asfour and Paul Williamson, “Gainsborough's Wit,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (1997): 479-501.

30. Joshua Reynolds, A Journey to Flanders and Holland, ed. Harry Mount (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1996), p. 147.

31. Paulson, Emblem and Expression, pp. 52-53. William V. Holtz's comparison of Hogarth and Sterne in Image and Immortality (Providence, R.I.: Brown Univ., 1970) starts from the same premise.

32. The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 3, no. 411.

33. Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, trans. Thomas Nugent, 3 vols. (London, 1748), 1:321 and passim. See Victor Anthony Rudowski, “The Theory of Signs in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1974): 683-90.

34. Cf. Berkeley, Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) and Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained (1733). Cheselden's account was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 405 (1728). See Nicholas Pastore, Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception: 1650-1950 (London & N.Y.: Oxford Univ., 1971), pp. 71-99. For Hogarth's acquaintance with Cheselden see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 2 vols. (New Haven & London: Yale Univ., 1971), 1:100.

35. See Hogarth, Analysis, pp. 119, 22, and Kitson, ed., “Hogarth's ‘Apology’,” p. 109.

36. See Amal Asfour and Paul Williamson, “Splendid Impositions: Gainsborough, Berkeley, Hume,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31 (1998): 403-32.

37. Cf. R. F. Brissenden, “Sterne and Painting,” in Of Books and Humankind, ed. John Butt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 93-108, and Holtz, Image and Immortality, pp. 116-19. For Lichtenberg's “Shandean Hogarth,” see Paulson, Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, pp. 251-56.

38. Quoted from Tristram Shandy, vol. 2, 2nd edn. (London, 1760), pp. 99-100. Cf. Lewis Perry Curtis, ed., Letters of Laurence Sterne (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), no. 50A, Mar. 1760.

39. From Lectures on the English Comic Writers, Lecture I, “On Wit and Humour,” qtd. from Alan B. Howes, ed., Sterne: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 359.

40. See H. M. Schueller, “‘Imitation’ and ‘Expression’ in British Music Criticism in the Eighteenth Century,” Musical Quarterly 34 (1948): 544-66, and Kevin Barry, Language, Music and the Sign (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1987), pp. 1-25. A full discussion of the relations between theories of painting and music in the 18th century is contained in Amal Asfour and Paul Williamson, Gainsborough's Vision (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ., forthcoming 1999), chap. 5.

41. Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. Joseph Black & James Hutton (London, 1795), pp. 173-74.

42. “On Poetry and Music, as they affect the Mind,” in Essays (Edinburgh, 1776), p. 458. The comparison between music and painting is found in De Piles (see Principles of Painting, pp. 5-6) and developed in some detail by Charles Avison. See An Essay on Musical Expression, 2nd edn. (London, 1753), Section II.

43. Elegies, 2nd edn. (London [1770]), pp. iv-v.

44. Films and Filming 9 (June 1963): 12-13.

45. Quoted in Melvyn New, Tristram Shandy: A Book for Free Spirits (N.Y.: Twayne 1994), p. 21.

46. Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, with a libretto by Hugo von Hoffmansthal, was partly inspired by Hogarth's Marriage à la Mode. The opera opened in Dresden in Jan. 1911. The libretto for Stravinski's opera, The Rake's Progress, based on Hogarth, was written by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. The work was first performed in Venice in Sept. 1951; British and American premieres followed in 1953. David Hockney's set designs for the piece were first used at Glyndebourne in 1975.