SOURCE: Paulson, Ronald. “Politics and Aesthetics: Hogarth in 1759.” In British Art 1740-1820: Essays in Honor of Robert R. Wark, edited by Guilland Sutherland, pp. 25-56. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1992.

[In the following essay, Paulson examines Hogarth's work as a response to the changing aesthetic and political contexts of the 1750s.]

The 1750s marked a period of intense and varied activity in Hogarth's career. At the beginning of the decade he had gambled with high stakes when he wrote his Analysis of Beauty (published in 1753), and the response had been partisan, ad hominem, centered in the insurgents of the St. Martin's Lane Academy. Following this outburst, he had buried himself in the elaborate Four Prints of an Election, which were not completely published until 1758. By then the political issue of the general election, and the ministerial juggling of the Duke of Newcastle (the “great Electioneer”), had been superseded by the Seven Years' War and the rise of William Pitt. The Election prints linked the macrocosm of the British government with the microcosm of the artists' academy, the politicking of the election with the politicking for precedence among the artists, bringing together the notions of voting and judgment with the French threat from abroad, both military and aesthetic.

In 1757, the first important aesthetic statement after the Analysis of Beauty appeared: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, by a young Irishman named Edmund Burke. (It is useful to remember that at this time Burke was not yet an M.P., not yet a member of the Reynolds-Johnson circle, not yet a paradigm of joint aesthetic and political realms.) Although the Enquiry was allegedly well under way before Hogarth published his treatise, the timing of its publication made it appear a response to the Analysis. One can imagine Hogarth opening a copy of the Enquiry and seeing in Part I, section i, the reduction of his term “curiosity” (the motive of his Variety/Intricacy) to “the most superficial of all the affections” with “always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness and anxiety”; and in the following sections the replacement of “pleasure” with “delight” and indeed “pain,” because the latter are more powerful, “productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”: in short, the Sublime, based on terror and power.¹

At this point Hogarth would have regarded Burke's treatise on the Sublime as an answer to his own on the Beautiful; and Burke's Sublime represented everything Hogarth saw going wrong with politics as well as art in the 1750s, much of it immanent in his Election prints: Burke associates beauty and pleasure (as Hogarth had done) with love and “multiplication of the species”; with society, “Good company, lively conversations, and the endearments of friendship” (43). But he clearly prefers the Sublime, with its focus not only on self-preservation, solitude, and self-enclosure, but also on the destructive power which Hogarth had connected in Analysis Plate 1 with judgment, hangings, and ruined cities.

The affront, however, must have come when Hogarth turned to Part II and read Burke's sections ii and iii, on “Terror” and “Obscurity,” in which, without mentioning Hogarth's name, he argues for the superior sublimity of the poet's more suggestive (because vague) words over the painter's graphic image, which unfortunately must specify details that the poet can leave to the imagination. Burke specifically found the Sublime in words and the Beautiful in pictures; but at the same time that he devalued the Beautiful he devalued pictures. Hogarth (following Locke) habitually emphasized the primacy of sight and noted the social relationship in which a word can be misunderstood; Burke took up the term “obscurity” (the realm of Dulness and Bathos for Pope and Swift as well as Hogarth) and attempted to revalue it, indeed privilege it, by turning it into the Sublime. The particular subject he singled out as his example corresponded rather closely to a painting by Hogarth.

Hogarth's painting of Satan, Sin and Death, probably datable to the late 1730s (pl. IV), would have been a topic of conversation among the St. Martin's Lane artists. Hogarth talked about such projects and displayed them in his shop. Burke, who was in London from 1750 onward, would have heard reports of Hogarth's attempt to illustrate Milton even if he had not seen the painting itself.² Indeed, we can imagine that Hogarth assumed he had not actually seen the painting but was basing his judgment on hearsay, as, for example, George Turnbull had based his whole theory of antique painting on verbal descriptions of paintings that did not themselves exist.

The subject of Hogarth's “sublime” history paintings would have been especially warm as a consequence of the Academy controversy and his painting and engraving of biblical subjects in Paul before Felix and Moses brought to Pharaoh's Daughter. When he painted these histories he was implicitly honoring the sense of “great” or “sublime” applied in the first half of the century to the heightened idealization of Raphael's Cartoons and frescoes.³ This is why he employed the model of the Cartoons in almost all of his history paintings and why, in the engravings of Paul before Felix, he executed a spectrum of versions extending from a Rembrandt parody to a neoclassicized Raphael. “Sublime” may have been the wrong word for these un-comic histories; Hogarth—and probably Burke too, though derisively—would have regarded them as beautiful. But for his example of terror-as-obscurity Burke goes back to another, a peculiarly un-Raphaelesque composition, in Hogarth's Satan, Sin and Death.

Hogarth's painting, though unfinished and in places indistinct, could nevertheless have elicited the sort of response Charles Lamb later had to illustrations of Shakespeare in Boydell's Gallery: “To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! to have Imogen's portrait! to confine th'illimitable.”⁴ There is no doubt that Hogarth's figures, especially with their brightly colored garments, are slightly comic in their reach for the passions and may have elicited Burke's remark that in history painting “a gay or gaudy drapery, can never have a happy effect” (82). Hogarth's evident retreading of the basic composition he had used for his conversation pictures—making of this “sublime” subject virtually another Scene from “The Beggar's Opera”—might also have proved risible to the unsympathetic Burke, brought up on higher models of the graphic sublime than the group portrait.

Burke in fact adopts, or perhaps more precisely echoes, Hogarth's particular composition of Sin holding apart Satan and Death, for which there was no graphic precedent among Milton illustrations. He simulates it in his text by quoting first Milton's description of Death and second—a page later—of Satan rising up from the fiery lake. The verbal example Burke adduces for terror-as-obscurity is Milton's figure of Death in Paradise Lost, book 2: formless except for his crown, he cannot be grasped or comprehended, certainly not represented graphically by a painter. Then, by adding the passage in book 1 describing Satan rising to address his legions, Burke manufactures a confrontation of Satan and Death similar to Hogarth's. But he suppresses the third, and for Hogarth most important, element, Sin. Between Satan and Death in this scene is implicitly the female figure of Sin, the daughter-lover, mother-lover of the two contestants—whose positioning in Hogarth's painting is central.

In short, Burke shifts his emphasis from the Hogarthian woman (Hogarth's Beautiful) trying to reconcile Satan and Death (or in the Beggar's Opera painting, Polly Peachum between Macheath and Mr. Peachum) to the oedipal confrontation (Burke's Sublime) of two interchangeable males, father and son, king and subject, over a repressed mother-lover. For Hogarth, the female figure, Sin, represented the Beauty—in all of the Analysis of Beauty senses, of novelty, pleasure, sexuality, energy, and variety/intricacy—that was omitted or polarized by Burke's Sublime. For Hogarth, it was precisely the figure of the beautiful woman mediating between power and its antinomy chaos that was Beauty.

The Beautiful was also, of course, exemplified by a woman in Burke's system, but she is elsewhere subordinated to the sublime male.⁵ Like Hogarth's Beautiful she is associated with ordinary domestic, bourgeois values and objects such as the smokejacks, corsets, and candlesticks invoked in the Analysis. The features of this Beautiful are labor, utility, and repetition (literally epitomized for Hogarth in the repetition of his own engraving process), and so in a general way are therefore custom and constituted society. This sense of the Beautiful forms Hogarth's world, which he therefore saw threatened by the Burkean Sublime, embodied in the male who exerts power and represents an aristocratic, magisterial, warlike, and irrational ethos. He would have seen this confrontation as a corruption of his own formulation in his Enraged Musician and the other artist-satires of the 1730s and '40s, where the beautiful woman mediates between order and disorder, poet and chaos, musician and sheer noise. She had mediated between the authority of the poet or musician (or their texts, the bars of music, a rhyming dictionary) and the sheer unstructured underclass sounds of the street; and this situation was, in Hogarth's terms, the equivalent of the Sublime and the Picturesque mediated by “Beauty,” which led to the Serpentine Line of the Analysis that was intended to mediate between Carracci paintings and candlesticks or the curves of the human body.

But Hogarth himself had already, before 1757, begun to change the role or position of the beautiful woman. In the years following publication of the Analysis, this figure was distanced to the young women high above on a balcony, being courted by candidates; or to Britannia stranded in her broken-down coach (Election Plates 2 and 3); or—after he read Burke's Philosophical Enquiry—to Sigismunda, who, though she is alone and dominates the picture space, is taking poison; and even to the tempted young woman of The Lady's Last Stake. Beauty is under threat, absent except for the broken lines of beauty, until finally in Tailpiece; or The Bathos the Burkean Sublime is in complete control. The causes? Obviously not just the advent of Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, but also the reaction to the Analysis and the Academy quarrel, and especially the nature of Hogarth's disillusionment with politics and government in the mid-1750s. With the new political dimension of the Election prints, Burke's Sublime appeared in effect to be destroying Hogarth's Beautiful as the Pittites (and later Wilkites) were destroying England.

The Cockpit, published in December 1759, carries signs of the aesthetic controversy: Hogarth replaces his woman in the central position with the tall, imposing figure of a man, in fact a blind man. The Cockpit opens the last phase of Hogarth's engraved histories. This is basically a new composition for Hogarth, although it obviously owes something to the parodic Last Suppers of Election Plate 1 and Columbus breaking the Egg.

It is appropriate that he attended yet another performance of Gay's Beggar's Opera (with The Cheats of Scapin) on 21 November 1759;⁶ but it is also significant that, a year before, he had received sheets of William Huggins's translation of Dante's Inferno and promised to read it. Although he gently declined to furnish Huggins with illustrations, he evidently read the Inferno: he sighed that a few years before he might have undertaken such an ambitious project. Moreover, in 1756 in the Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, Joseph Warton singled out Dante's poem as an example of the Sublime: “perhaps the Inferno of Dante is the next composition to the Iliad, in point of originality and sublimity”; his example was the story of Ugolino, another lonely figure, surrounded by his “sons” (257).

The influence of Dante's Inferno is evident in The Cockpit, which conveys in the actions of people trapped in futile and repetitive actions a sense of “damnation,” which was not evident before in Hogarth's work. Even the circular structure—something required of a cockpit (and anticipated in the dissection theater of The Reward of Cruelty)—recalls the circles of Dante's hell.⁷

Once again literature has influenced Hogarth's art. But now it is no longer the Beggar's Opera, which imposed its pattern on Satan, Sin and Death; what followed Hogarth's encounter with Dante's hell was a series of prints that returns to the emblematic mode of his earliest efforts and in some sense portrays hell, whether in a cock match, a Methodist congregation, or a fire in a London street. Enthusiasm Delineated, of about the same time, recalls the Inferno, down to the Dantesque observer watching these damned souls with fascinated attention through a window. Huggins's Dante confirmed Hogarth's darker anxieties and the images (such as the Election's out-of-control crowd) he had already selected to express them. Dante provided a religious context, even one of apocalypse, and thus in both political and aesthetic terms a response to Burke.

Dante's hell furnished Hogarth with an idiom for an alternative to Milton's hell in the first two books of Paradise Lost and a response to Burke's criticism of Satan, Sin and Death. The Cockpit is certainly within the sublime range, with more terribilita than Satan, Sin and Death, as the print of The Reward of Cruelty is a more powerful expression of history painting than any of Hogarth's paintings; but its subject is not conflict, let alone mediation, so much as solitary obsession: the old Scriblerian interpretation of hupsous as bathous, of the “sublime” hero as self-deluded claimant to autonomous selfhood. The Cockpit produces an image of focused desire and self-enclosure that, in true Miltonic (rather than Burkean revisionist) terms, appears satanic. In terms of a Last Supper, the figure of Christ—in this context, anti-Christ—is a nobleman who gambles furiously among a crowd of equally obsessed plebeians (but including at least two other noblemen) who follow his lead. Even the man suspended in a basket for failure to pay his debts desperately tries to place another bet. The central figure imparts a kind of sanction to all the others, as Christ did to the disciples, as Satan did to the rebel angels, in this case with the implicit verbalization (of the sort employed in the Election prints) of “The Blind leading the Blind.”

One senses in the juxtaposition of the nobleman and the mixed orders grouped around him a residue of Hogarth's Election (certainly an echo of Plate 1) and the political situation of the late 1750s. For “the cockpit” was not only a place where cock matches were held; it was the name attached to a building opposite Whitehall Palace, erected on the site of Henry VIII's cockpit, used for government offices. It was a familiar designation for the “Treasury” and the “Privy Council chambers,” and so a word designating the reigning ministry, while at the same time suggesting the analogy between this government and the gamblers at a cockfight.⁸ In short, this is another print in the politico-allegorical mode of The Stage-Coach and Election Plates 3 and 4, anticipating The Times Plate 1: Pitt's ministry (and so England) is a “cockpit” (as later, in the revision of Rake 8, England is designated a madhouse), and the portrait of the nobleman, identified by early commentators as the blind Lord Albemarle Bertie,⁹ doubles as a reference to Pitt (at the same time activating another Hogarthian pun, Cock-Pitt) with the “blindness” and the Christological pose part of the satire. For Pitt was precisely seen by his enemies as “blind” and, they felt, by himself as “Christ.” The figure resembles Hogarth's versions of Pitt in The Times plates, especially his physique and wig. In the first state of The Times Plate 1 he also disguised Pitt, in that case as Henry VIII, an allusion to his absolute rule and his tyranny.¹⁰ In The Cockpit the disguise alludes to “blindness” and Pitt's slumming with the crowd—but also to gambling as a frenzy that must have been linked in Hogarth's mind with the religious frenzy of Enthusiasm Delineated, with which it has much in common.

It is at first difficult, looking back on the Pitt ministry and its peak in the “Year of Victories” (“this wonderful year,” as Garrick put it in his song “Heart of Oak”) of 1759, to understand how someone like Hogarth could have distrusted the “Great Commoner.” But we must recall one description of Pitt in 1757 as

a man who has not the command of his own passions, or resolutions; whose ambition is boundless and his pride without measure, and is intoxicated with the adulation of his followers, and the applause of corporations, coffee houses, etc.

(italics added)¹¹

There are also references to “Pitt's vanity,” “his ambition, his pride, or his resentment”; but the writer adds that he “was bold and resolute, above doing things by half; and if he once engaged, would go farther than any man in this country.”¹² It was in June 1757, as Hogarth was finishing his Election prints, that Henry Fox came within an inch of forming a government, but Pitt—and all he stood for (that is, mob, anti-Hanover, vanity and ambition, grandiloquence, demagoguery, let alone imperialism)—was in office with an ostensibly new kind of politics, based on the charismatic leader and wide popular support rather than the elitist oligarchic manipulations of a Newcastle.

What is particularly notable are those words applied to Pitt—“boundless,” “without measure,” and “go farther than any man”—words used in these years to describe the Sublime. Pitt's greatest fame was as an orator of unsurpassed eloquence, and with this went what has been called his “unique attempt to make ‘popularity’ a major continuing foundation of his political power.”¹³ Long before Burke, Longinus had associated the Sublime with the “power of the orator,” and his suggestion that the Sublime carries all before it, including the orator himself, was a notion Hogarth used in the Election in his imagery of the crowd that is created by the unscrupulous politician whom it may then destroy (as in Election Plate 4).

Of course, Pitt's oratorical powers and personality, which were (in Marie Peters's words in Pitt and Popularity) “much better suited to appeal from above to the adulation of the people than to co-operate with colleagues in the normal workings of political connections” (of the sort analyzed in the Election), should have appealed to Hogarth, whose aim was to circumvent the connoisseurs, dealers, and his fellow artists by appealing directly to the “public.” But, as Peters explains:

Opponents did not deny the claims to popularity and patriotism. Rather they sought to discredit them by suggesting that the popularity was unsoundly based, won by artifice from the giddy multitude who had no judgement in political affairs, that Pitt used it unscrupulously, and that the patriotic stands were insincere and inconsistent with previous or current actions.¹⁴

Pitt was a product of the forces unleashed by popular appeal—unchecked, Hogarth might have felt, by the subtle interplay of the popular and the polite, of the ironies that figure in his own rhetoric (and in his aesthetic theory in the Analysis). Hogarth may have shared Fielding's horror of the Penlez riots (going back to his childhood experience of the Sacheverell riots); certainly in the Election he shows distrust of the politically motivated, anti-Walpole riots of the excise crisis in 1733 (which was repeatedly resuscitated in the 1750s), of the Jew Bill riots in 1753, and of those riots associated with the fall of Minorca in 1756—the last of which contributed to Pitt's rise to power.

Pitt's oratory was regarded by his detractors as analogous to his ideology of aggressive commercial expansion—of imperialism—that was supported by the financial interests of the City (not the middling merchants with whom Hogarth associated himself). This had taken the form of huge and wasteful gambling by May 1759, the year of Pitt's greatest triumphs, when the London Chronicle calculated the cost of Britain's part in the German war as £3,289,954 (compared with £823,759 in 1757).¹⁵ The attacks on Pitt in June and July argued that he had been “blinded” by his military successes.¹⁶ By the end of the year he was thought to be “gambling” on war gains against peace. This had become an issue in 1759, when “popular” opinion was gambling on holding all gains and reducing France to nothing, and “ambitions were growing with victories,”¹⁷ while others, in view of the risks and the cost and burden of the German war, were arguing for cutting losses and agreeing to an early peace. Indeed, gambling could be read as a metaphor for trade: “Our dispute,” as Beckford's pro-Pitt Monitor said, “is about the extent of trade; whether the trading genius of britain or of france shall prevail” (15 September 1759).

The figure of the blind but magnetic Lord Albemarle Bertie is paralleled by the figure of the preacher in the two versions of the print variously called Enthusiasm Delineated and Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism, of about 1759. Both preachers are surrogate Pitt figures, as Macheath, Cardinal Wolsey, Sir John Falstaff were surrogate Walpole figures in the 1730s, but characterized now by demagoguery, megalomania, and obsession. If the politician Walpole dominated the first part of Hogarth's career and stimulated his (as well as Fielding's) imagination, the politician Pitt can be said in the same way, but as a totally different sort of image, to have dominated the last years and determined their basic narrative.

But, as I have suggested, an added element was the specific significance accorded to the Sublime in the late 1750s. It was discussed not just in Burke's Philosophical Enquiry but also in Alexander Gerard's Essay on Taste, published in 1759: in both, the Sublime was a subject of chief concern. In Hogarth's lifetime there were three translations published of Longinus' Peri Hupsous, in 1712, in 1724, and in 1739 the popular one by William Smith. The crucial Longinian sentence was: “The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport.” “Transport” meant the breaking of boundaries, an excess. But above all, as Burke showed, it meant replacing ethical and theological sublimity with a purely psychological effect.

From Hogarth's point of view, it was possible—indeed, necessary—to position the discourse of the Sublime (primarily Burke's) within the context of the great cataclysm of the Seven Years' War. But the “great” political force at the end of Hogarth's life was Pitt, who was in power, in total control, from 1757 to 1760, and continued to dominate the English imagination thereafter.¹⁸ And “great” now meant something very different from when Walpole—who had created the old oligarchic structure of power epitomized in the Election prints—was ironically, in a mock-heroic, bathetic way, referred to as the “Great Man” (as Fielding wrote of “Tom Thumb the Great”). Pitt, in the second half of the 1750s and especially in the context of the Seven Years' War, could be construed as a political equivalent of the Burkean Sublime; and the modification of those key words of the 1730s, great as well as popular, must have created for Hogarth a dismaying Other.

Thus emerged the association of destructive power, tyranny, war, and the rest. Pitt's constituency and Burke's Sublime both find their sublime effect in the “shouting of multitudes … [which] so amazes and confounds the imagination, that in this staggering, and hurry of the mind, the best established tempers can scarcely forbear being borne down, and joining in the common cry, and common resolution of the croud” (Philosophical Enquiry, II.vii.82). Indeed, in section vi Burke quotes from Pitt's 1740 translation of the scene “at the mouth of hell” in Aeneid, book 6, invoking the “solemn empire” of Chaos, which “stretches wide around,” with its “great tremendous powers.”

Peter de Bolla has argued in The Discourse of the Sublime that the idea of excess in Pitt's personality, oratory, actions, and deeds was confirmed by the monetary, to some minds criminal, increase in the national debt that followed from (and made possible) the Seven Years' War—including the radical increase of foreign subsidies.¹⁹ Foreign subsidies was an issue that would have interested Hogarth and reminded him of the influence of the foreign in art—and of the inconsistency and insincerity of Pitt, who, prior to being chief minister, had been the greatest opponent of foreign subsidies. And, of course, Pitt's dramatic about-faces, his inconsistencies, and his reputed unreliability and insincerity, as well as his gambling with fortune, introduced another dimension of the Sublime.²⁰ De Bolla's parallel between the Sublime and the national debt suggests why there was a shift from fear of sublime excess to absorption of it into an aesthetic system (as by Burke); why conservative contemporaries like Hogarth who feared the monetary consequences of the war would also fear the theory of the Sublime, the supposedly growing power of the crowd, of Pitt, and of his oratory, and the national mania for gambling that is embodied in the hoisted gambler who cannot pay his debt but continues desperately to gamble. From Hogarth's point of view, however, the situation took him all the way back to the 1720s, to his South Sea Scheme and Lottery and to Addison's figure of credit (one moment Brobdingnagian, the next Lilliputian) as a trope for chaos; the Sublime remained for Hogarth resolutely the bathetic, as it had for Pope.

The term “enthusiasm” established the “sublime” connection between art, religion (the upsurgence of Methodism, the resurgence of dissent), and politics. Enthusiasm Delineated, though undated and unpublished, can be placed near the end of 1759 or the beginning of 1760. Its conception is illuminated by another sequence of events that began in the first half of 1759 with Hogarth's painting Sigismunda for Sir Richard Grosvenor and Grosvenor's rejection of it; Warton's criticism of his history paintings; and Reynolds's Idler essays.

In the advertisement of 1-4 December 1759 for The Cockpit in the London Chronicle Hogarth says he is also republishing the engravings Paul before Felix and Moses brought to Pharaoh's Daughter, “with the Rev. Mr. Joseph Warton's curious Remarks on the Author's Manner of treating serious Subjects.” Warton's Essay upon the Genius and Writings of Pope, published in 1756, had also (besides arguing for Dante's sublimity) at one point argued that a writer or artist cannot excel in more than one line, with Shakespeare and Garrick two notable exceptions, equally good at comedy and tragedy. Hogarth would probably have agreed. After seeing Garrick one night as Richard III and the next as Abel Drugger, he said to his friend: “You are in your element, when you are begrimed with dirt, or up to your elbows in blood.”²¹ In Warton's essay, however, he found himself invoked, associated with Pope, who could not write Sublime and Pathetic poetry, only Ethical, which Warton regarded as poetry of the second rank:

some nicer virtuosi have remarked, that in the serious pieces, into which Hogarth has deviated from the natural bias of his genius, there are some strokes of the Ridiculous discernible, which suit not with the dignity of his subject. In his Preaching of St. Paul, a dog snarling at a cat; and in his Pharaoh's Daughter, the figure of the infant Moses, who expresses rather archness than timidity, are alleged as instances, that this artist, unrivalled in his own walk, could not resist the impulse of his imagination towards drolery. His picture, however, of Richard III. is pure and unmixed with any ridiculous circumstances, and strongly impresses terror and amazement.²²

If Hogarth was disturbed by the judgment of his art, he was doubly irritated by Warton's egregious error, which showed that he had not looked closely at the painting in question. While both The Pool of Bethesda and The Good Samaritan contain dogs—the Pool has one leaning over the architectural parapet, the Samaritan has one licking a wound it probably received defending the injured man from the thieves, and the bas-relief has a dog barking to awaken the sleeping Rahere—there are none in Paul before Felix. Warton may have been right as to the background spirit of Moses and Paul, but he was wrong as to the letter, perhaps having vaguely in mind the burlesque subscription ticket.²³

Apparently Warton, when shown his error, promised to correct it in the second edition, but this did not appear until 1762, and by 1759 Hogarth had painted his Sigismunda and been rebuffed; and with his reputation threatened (he feared) by Grosvenor's unflattering stories, his impatience got the better of him. At the end of 1759 he reissued Paul before Felix and Moses brought to Pharaoh's Daughter with copies of Warton's erroneous passages prominently displayed on both, as if to say Ecce Signum, behold the discrepancy between his words and the real image. In short, his feelings were so strong that he was willing to ruin the aesthetic effect of the prints in order to express them in this particular visual-verbal way—temporarily at least, since when Warton's second edition did appear in 1762 with an apology he burnished the passages out and reissued the plates as before (a technique that was one of the advantages enjoyed by the engraver).

Another reason that Hogarth added the inscriptions to these prints may have been to respond to the Idler papers written by Joshua Reynolds, presumably at the invitation of his friend Samuel Johnson, and published only a few months after the rejection of Sigismunda, just when they would have galled him most. (Reynolds also painted, around this time, his parody of Sigismunda, Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra, which was the more galling for its parallel between Kitty Fisher the courtesan and Jane Hogarth the painter's wife, the one as Cleopatra, the other as Sigismunda.) In Idler No. 76 (29 September 1759), Reynolds has a connoisseur, visiting Hogarth's beloved Raphael Cartoons, pause before Paul Preaching at Athens (recognized by contemporaries as an inspiration for Paul before Felix):

“This,” says he, “is esteemed the most excellent of all the cartoons: what nobleness, what dignity there is in that figure of St. Paul; and yet what an addition to that nobleness could Raffaelle have given, had the art of contrast been known in his time; but above all, the flowing line, which constitutes grace and beauty!”

(italics added)²⁴

In one blow Reynolds has caught Hogarth's theories of “contrast” and the Line of Beauty, as well as his application of them in Paul before Felix. Reynolds's criticism is of Hogarth's imposing a “principle” (a word Hogarth overuses in the Analysis) such as the Serpentine Line on the practice of old masters like Raphael. Not the “rule” but the actual, complex practice of the earlier artist should be studied, according to Reynolds. But his real point, as Hogarth knew, was the authority of “Raffaelle” (as in the model-oriented system of the French Academy) as opposed to the ad hoc practice of a “modern academy” like that upheld by Hogarth. That is, if Hogarth had sought political analogies, he would have seen Reynolds wishing to run the academy as Pitt was running the country and with the same imperialist ideology.

Hogarth's position in the academy controversy is caught by Reynolds's ironic reference to “this enlightened age” in which “the art has been reduced to principles” by an “education in one of the modern academies”: “modern” as opposed to the venerable French model. Hogarth had exposed himself to ridicule, when he put pen to paper, by reducing his pragmatic modernism to a “principle.” In the light of all the talk in the Analysis about the “precise” Line it was easy to forget that Hogarth's “principle,” taken from experience, distilled from observation of life, was far less authoritarian than Reynolds's model of “the blaze of expanded genius” of an old master, which (in Hogarth's opinion) came down to mere copying. The first involved utilization; the second emulation; the first a principle deduced from nature and the second from art. This opposition was at the heart of the controversy over academies.

Reynolds wrote two more Idler essays: No. 79, of 20 October 1759, was on “The Grand Style of Painting,” and No. 82, of 10 November, on “The True Idea of Beauty.” (The three essays were reprinted in 1761 as Three Letters to the Idler and also, with some omissions, in the London Chronicle, 14 May 1761, during the Society of Artists' exhibition when Hogarth's Sigismunda was being shown.) The last, No. 82, returns to Hogarth's “invariable” rule by arguing that beauty is only based on custom: a horse is beautiful to a horse, a Hottentot to a Hottentot, and an English woman to an English man.

No. 79, however, must have particularly irritated (and stimulated) Hogarth. This essay begins with a statement that the nature of great painting involves not mechanical imitation in the manner of the Dutch genre painters but the transformation of nature by the imagination in the Italian manner. Again Hogarth is Reynolds's quarry, and he pointedly excludes from consideration the Hogarthian experiment of the “modern moral subject.” First, he contrasts (as he does also in No. 82) the Italian attention to “the invariable, the great and general ideas which are fixed and inherent in universal nature” with the Dutch attention “to literal truth and a minute exactness in the detail, as I may say, of nature modified by accident” (italics added): precisely the “nature” of Hogarth's art, whether comic or “sublime.” Second, he criticizes the Hogarthian mixed mode: “To desire to see the excellencies of each style united, to mingle the Dutch with the Italian school, is to join contrarieties which cannot subsist together, and which destroy the efficacy of each other.” These words describe Hogarth's comic history painting, but they can also be taken more specifically as an unsympathetic view of his experiments in Paul and Felix and Moses brought to Pharaoh's Daughter, echoing the criticism of Warton. Reynolds, like Warton, calls for sublimity and in this Idler he connects the Sublime with “enthusiasm.”

For, praising the “genius and soul” of Michelangelo's painting (aside from what he considers faults in technique), Reynolds writes:

If this opinion should be thought one of the wild extravagancies of enthusiasm, I should only say, that those who censure it are not conversant in the works of the great masters. It is very difficult to determine the exact degree of enthusiasm that the arts of painting and poetry may admit.

He admits that too much as well as too little enthusiasm may be employed, and that even Michelangelo sometimes produced figures “of which it was very difficult to determine whether they were in the highest degree sublime or extremely ridiculous.” Nevertheless, “one may very safely recommend a little more enthusiasm to the modern painters; too much is certainly not the vice of the present age” (247-48).

If one of Hogarth's responses to Reynolds's Idler essays was to add the inscriptions to Paul and Moses to prove that Warton was wrong about the “Dutch part” of these paintings, a much more important response was his launching into the engraving of Enthusiasm Delineated, in which he replied to Reynolds's taunt. (Warton's dog, though removed from the published version, Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism, also makes his appearance: his howling is parallel to the clergyman's preaching; his collar, labeled “Whitefield,” suggests that he epitomizes the sound of Methodist oratory.) Enthusiasm Delineated shows that, Reynolds to the contrary, it is not “very difficult to determine the exact degree of enthusiasm that the arts of painting and poetry may admit,” and a thermometer is included for this purpose. What Hogarth does is to conflate with Reynolds's “sublime” enthusiasm the religio-sexual sense satirized by Shaftesbury in A Letter concerning Enthusiasm and by Swift in A Tale of a Tub.²⁵

Two impressions of the complete engraving with the inscriptions in ink have survived. The handwriting is very shaky, perhaps suggesting the sickness that seems to have overtaken Hogarth around this time. The conception is nevertheless vigorous, transforming the “enthusiasm” of the old masters into religious images that mingle with the sexual “enthusiasm” of religious fanatics. “The Intention of this print,” he wrote under the design, “is to give a lineal representation of the strange Effects of literal and low conceptions of Sacred Beings as also of the Idolatrous Tendency of Pictures in Churches and prints in Religious books &c.” His examples, clear enough in the design but enumerated beneath, are those Reynolds listed at the end of Idler No. 79 as the highest examples of “the majesty of heroic Poetry”: Raphael's ancient God supported by two angels, Rubens's muscular Devil holding a gridiron, and Rembrandt's roly-poly St. Peter. (He identifies only these three, but the puppet-like Adam and Eve probably allude to Durer.)²⁶

For an example we can focus on the figure of the woman in the foreground of Enthusiasm Delineated, cradling a Christ image in her left arm, her teeth and hands clenched, in a state of convulsion. John Ireland identified her as a likeness of Jenny Douglas, the most famous bawd of the 1750s, and the patch on her cheek may recall the face of Mother Needham in Harlot Plate 1. Mother Douglas appeared as Mrs. Cole in Samuel Foote's The Minor (July 1760), where she is portrayed as a fanatical follower of Whitefield. Her death in June 1761 may explain why Hogarth changed her face into that of Mary Toft, the “Rabbit Woman,” in the 1762 revision, but Mrs. Toft may also recall Mrs. Cole's “comforts of the new birth,” that is, the spiritual rebirth she has learned from Dr. Squintum:

So, in my last illness, I was wished to Mr. Squintum, who stepped in with his saving grace, got me with the new birth, and I became, as you see, regenerate, and another creature.

After these words, she is offered “another thimbleful” of gin—which a hand is offering the woman in Hogarth's print in both states.

The figure is based on Lanfranco's painting of St. Margaret of Cortona in ecstasy (Pitti Palace). History painting, as well as the equation of sexuality and religious enthusiasm, is the subject of Hogarth's print. On 2 December 1758 Robert Dodsley's Cleone had been produced at Covent Garden, supported by Johnson and condemned by Hogarth's friend Garrick, who refused to produce Cleone at Drury Lane, calling it “a cruel, bloody, and unnatural play.” The facts are that the heroine Cleone was played in contemporary dress, despite the protestations of Dodsley, and that in the climactic mad scene (“sitting by her dead child”) she cradles the body of her murdered son while uttering an Ophelia-like rant. Then she goes into convulsions and, after a final moment of lucidity, expires. It is possible that the woman's contemporary attire and the cradled Christ image, together with the memory of an ecstatic Roman Catholic saint by Lanfranco, may have overlaid the pious London bawd with another aspect of enthusiasm in art.

But St. Margaret is in ecstasy. The emphasis in terms of graphic art is on the Roman Catholics, whom Hogarth had recently shown carrying torture instruments of the Inquisition in the first Invasion print, 1756.²⁷ By “Roman Catholic” Hogarth now meant, in the context of the Idler papers, the ideas of art and academies associated with Paris and Rome. The Anglican clergyman's close sympathy with the Roman church (evident in his tonsure) is revealed in his assumptions about the religious art of Raphael, Rubens, and Rembrandt. The congregation as a whole is atavistic, reverting to the literal devouring of Christ's “body”—eucharistic figures whose phallic shape recalls the obscene pun of “Supper below” in Masquerade Ticket (1727). But many other sects, all enthusiast, are crowded into the church, itself a meeting house closely resembling Whitefield's in Tottenham Court Road. At the reader's desk, the Methodist (who eschews images) exhibits his enthusiasm by preaching, singing, and weeping, and his fervor is reflected in the antics of his audience. The howling dog labeled “Whitfield” may permit us to recall Pope's note in Dunciad, book 2 (1743 ed., line 258), that Whitefield “thought the only means of advancing Christianity was by the New-birth of religious madness.”²⁸ (In the revision the reader's face is changed to Whitefield's cross-eyed likeness.) A rabbi goes into ecstasy over a picture of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Only the Moslem, outside the window, is quietly watching, like one of those foreign observers popular in satires of the time.

Although Enthusiasm Delineated is about art, readers could be excused for seeing it as part of a continuum with the hostile references to clergymen in the Harlot, Rake, and the eleventh plate of Industry and Idleness. It is likely, judging by the general composition, the arrangement and facing of pulpit and reader's desk (though not the scale: 14 × 13 vs. 10 × 8 in.), that Hogarth intended an ironic contrast with the unenthusiastic Sleeping Congregation of 1736, already present on an earlier page of the Hogarth folio. But as if to underline the parallel, Hogarth reissued a “Retouched & Improved” state of The Sleeping Congregation in 1762, two weeks after Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (the published version of Enthusiasm Delineated), thus forcing the Hogarth collector to place the two prints on adjacent pages of the folio.

If Continental Roman Catholic art is the subject, the enabling (or activating) phenomenon—and the model in Hogarth's mind for the Pitt oration, carrying out the parallel between politics and religion—was the Methodist sermon, as delivered by George Whitefield and John Wesley. Their preaching, which began in 1739, was characterized by the violent response it elicited. Members of the audience would appear to be possessed, first by a spirit of terror and pain identified by Wesley with the Devil's last efforts to retain his hold: they would “roar for the disquietness of their heart,” would be “seized with a violent trembling all over,” and drop to the ground “as thunderstruck,” sometimes in convulsions. The phase of affliction was followed by relief, peace, and joy: they would “burst forth into praise to God their Saviour” and were “raised … up full of ‘peace and joy in the Holy Ghost,’” or had their “heaviness [turned] into joy.”²⁹ Although Wesley denied it, he and Whitefield were accused of having preached hell fire in order to elicit this violent response (thus the devil which the preacher holds in one hand).

The fear of the Methodists was based on fear of the vast crowds, subject to outbursts of religious fervor, that they attracted; the preaching itself, which insisted that master and man were equal in the eyes of God; the belief in faith over good works; and the organization of Methodism into “societies” that were presented as alternatives within the Church of England. It was easy to see Methodism as a reflection of political factionalism, the chaos of the election crowd, and the politics of a rabble-rousing Pitt. All of this is evident in Hogarth's print, but the basic equation is between politician and clergyman.

The puzzled Turk at the window is of course the virtuous pagan of deist mythology, who represented the true, non-Christian religion of nature—the love of God versus the sham intervention being perpetrated in various ways by the clergy—and who was invoked in more than one sermon by Bishop Hoadly. With the safe case of Methodism to hand, freethinkers of the 1750s carried Thomas Woolston's hermeneutical demystifying of the New Testament miracles (in his Discourses of the 1720s) into a historical, more scholarly exploration of the post-New Testament miracles reported by the clergy themselves (who had been such staunch upholders of Christ's miracles).³⁰ For Woolston the object of analysis had been the miracles of Christ, in effect the story of his life (the Conception, Birth, Marriage of Cana, Pool of Bethesda, Raising of Lazarus, and Resurrection). His method had been to discredit these miracles by testing the stories against contemporary empirical reality, reason, and sense, showing that by reasonable critics they could be interpreted only as allegory—an allegory of the clergy's self-serving hermeneutics which forced Christians to believe in the miracles. Hogarth had reflected the Woolstonian hermeneutics in his Harlot's Progress and in the history paintings from the New Testament he installed in St. Bartholomew's Hospital in the 1730s.³¹

The influential work for the 1750s, by contrast, was Conyers Middleton's Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers, which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church (1749), which quoted at great length the reports of miracles by the Ante-Nicene Fathers, a hundred or so years after the New Testament stories. With the evidence of innumerable quotations Middleton belabored the fact that Tertullian, Cyprian, Athanasius, and the rest were “constantly appealing to the testimony of heavenly visions and divine revelations,” and that “all things of great moment, which related to the public state of the Church, were foretold to him in visions” (101). Middleton's focus was therefore even more directly than Woolston's on the clergy itself and his argument was that they used these “miracles” to maintain their power over their congregations. (The examples of Wesley and Whitefield were implicit.) Although he hardly mentions the miracles of Christ, the implications are at least as damaging as Woolston's more direct attack.

Thus the Gadarene swine Hogarth introduced leading the election crowd in Election 4 can be seen in a different light if we suppose he had read Middleton, who focuses on possession and prophetic visions (the casting out of devils, the curing of daemonics) and on ecstatic trances (men filled with the Holy Ghost and speaking in tongues), all authenticated by the clergy for “political” purposes. Many examples are given by Middleton of seizures that were the result of taking the sacrament under false circumstances (113-15): Hogarth shows women devouring Eucharist Christs. In Enthusiasm Delineated and Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism he places the demystification of miracles in the Middletonian context, “that spirit of enthusiasm in the church,” the “feigned distortions and convulsive agitations of the body” (99); and by linking Catholics, Anglicans, and Methodists he makes the connection with “enthusiastic” art of the sort Reynolds (out of Burke) advocates. This is surely the context in which Hogarth would have seen his print—celebrating election crowds, wild Methodist congregations, and the Burkean Sublime.

It was at about the same time that Hogarth wrote in the manuscript “Apology for Painters” that religious art was out of the question for an English artist: “our religion forbids, nay doth not require, images for worship or pictures to work up enthusiasm.”³²Enthusiasm Delineated is dedicated to the archbishop of Canterbury, the patron of ecclesiastical art in England—reminiscent of the ironic dedication of The March to Finchley to “His Majesty the King of Prussia and Encourager of Arts and Sciences!” The archbishop at this time was Thomas Secker, who reappears in The Times Plate 2 labeled “Dr Cants ye Man Midwife.” Secker's connections were with Lord Hardwicke, who of course was a prime supporter of Pitt. Hardwicke had secured Secker the deanship of St. Paul's and, at Hutton's death in March 1758, the archbishopric of Canterbury. This made him, for Hogarth's purposes at least, a Pitt appointee and representative (an updating of Bishop Gibson, who filled a similar role in A Harlot's Progress).

But another event may still have been in Hogarth's mind. In the beginning of the earthquake scare of March 1749/50, Secker, at the parish church of St. James's, Westminster, preached a sermon declaring that the earthquake might portend apocalyptic disasters to punish the citizenry of London for immoral and licentious behavior. According to Horace Walpole, Secker, the “Jesuistical Bishop of Oxford,” had “heard the women were all going out of town to avoid the next shock; and so fear of losing his Easter offerings, he set himself to advise them to await God's good pleasure in fear and trembling” (20:133). There followed a flood of homilies and exhortations from other clergymen along the same line.³³

In the examples we have seen, the newly formulated Hogarthian aesthetic of the Beautiful came into conflict with Burke's aesthetic of the Sublime at just the moment when Pitt's kind of power seemed to be wiping clean the old board of comfortable political relationships. From Hogarth's point of view, the publication of Burke's Philosophical Enquiry seemed synchronized with the advent of the “great” Pitt ministry and the successful phase of the expansionist war. Together these epitomized an excess in theory, oratory, actions, and power, not to mention actual monetary expenditure. And so in Enthusiasm Delineated he is reacting to both the “Sublime” of Burke and the “enthusiasm” of Reynolds, the oratory of Pitt and the preaching of Whitefield. He shows ethics and theology, the traditional subject of the Sublime (as in the writings of Dennis, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson), replaced by sheer excess of feeling; the variety-in-unity of “Beauty” as presented in the Analysis replaced by variety out of control in divisive sects, every man his own church. He would have seen this evidenced in the strong moral context of his illustrative plates for the Analysis, where he problematized the simple equation made by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson of beauty-harmony-unity-virtue. So the shock he registers is at the shift from the norm of the Beautiful to the norm of the Sublime, and from the Sublime as an ethical or theological to a psychological phenomenon.

We have traced the aesthetic and the political contexts—in fact the intertwining lines of origin, the causal chain of events—of The Cockpit and Enthusiasm Delineated. At issue are the possible relations of these two areas of experience for one artist at the end of the 1750s, a decade of radical change in British politics and aesthetics: the way, as some might think, the political usurped the aesthetic. Certainly the evidence of 1762-64 would suggest that Hogarth had subsumed his aesthetics under politics.

But what this means is that he formulated a narrative, which was to sustain him until his death, in which Burke's Sublime tries to destroy his Beautiful, to which he assimilated the sense in which the “statesman's” politics of Pitt, associated with war, oratory, excess, unlimitedness, and other aspects of the Burkean Sublime, destroys the “beautiful” system of intricate variety known as Walpolian (or Namierite) politics. In his narrative there was only one hope—and this one hope bound the politics of the nation with that of the artists' academy: the new monarch, George III, and his unpolitical, nonpartisan minister, the Earl of Bute. To these two figures Hogarth attached himself in the crucial period of 1762-63, and they—and their solution—seem to have failed him too. That left nothing but the melodramatic withdrawal represented by his final revisions of his prints and his self-portraits and the ruins and funerary imagery in his final plate, Tailpiece: or The Bathos, which once again utilized the terms of Pope and Swift to label Burke's Sublime—not hupsous but bathous.³⁴

Notes

1. Philosophical Enquiry, ed. James T. Boulton (London, 1958), 31, 39. In the second edition Burke added a gracious reference to “the very ingenious Mr. Hogarth; whose idea of the line of beauty I take in general to be extremely just,” followed by a caveat on his discussion of variety (115).

2. By the 1750s the painting seems to have been in Garrick's collection, but we do not know that Burke and Garrick were acquainted before 1758. I first proposed this connection between Hogarth and Burke in Book and Painting (Knoxville, 1982), 104-15.

3. See Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1935), 164-202. Jonathan Richardson's sense of the great or sublime was simply “the most excellent of what is excellent, as the excellent is the best of what is good” (Theory of Painting, in The Works of … Jonathan Richardson [London, 1773], 124-25).

4. Quoted in W. Moelwyn Merchant, Shakespeare and the Artist (Oxford, 1959), 67.

5. Hogarth's monist conception of Beauty covers all of art, regarding the Sublime as outré when no longer subsumed under the Beautiful. Burke, following Addison, dichotomized the aesthetic experience into beautiful and sublime, neither signifying without the other, its opposite: by opposition, by agon.

6. Diary of John Baker, ed. Philip C. Yorke (London, 1931), 130. Baker went with John Wilson, Ralph Payne, and John Bannister “in hack to ‘Beggar's Opera’ and ‘Cheats of Scapin,’ Mr. Banister and I sat and chatted Hogarth.”

7. It may also have recalled Burke's words on the sublimity of circularity (the “rotond”). See Philosophical Enquiry, II.ix.75.

8. See Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, 3d ed. (London, 1989), cat. no. 206. For cockfighting, see Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1902), 348.

9. John Nichols and George Steevens, The Genuine Works of William Hogarth, 3 vols. (London, 1808-17), 2:241.

10. Cf. Analysis Plate 2.

11. John Campbell to his wife, 30 April 1757; quoted in Jonathan Clark, Dynamics of Change (Cambridge, 1982), 379.

12. Waldegrave, Memoirs, 129-32; quoted in Clark, Dynamics of Change, 424-25.

13. Marie Peters, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years' War (Oxford, 1980), 16.

14. Ibid., 27, 30.

15. London Chronicle, 29-31 May 1759.

16. Especially A Defence of the Letter [from the Duchess of M—r—gh] of July 1759.

17. Peters, Pitt and Popularity, 164.

18. I suppose we must add, in apparently total control. In a sense, as Jonathan Clark has shown in The Dynamics of Change, Newcastle and George II were still very much in control, and to some extent Pitt's control was illusory. Nevertheless, this was the public image of Pitt, almost universally accepted.

19. A war, de Bolla remarks, fought “less over specific land … than over the right to exploit various territories for reasons of trade” (Discourse of the Sublime [London, 1990], 106).

20. For an example of 1756, see [Anon.], A New System of Patriot Policy containing the Genuine Recantations of the British Cicero. Smollett's growing opposition to Pitt began with Pitt's about-face on the issue of foreign subsidies, but also included his fear of the growing national debt. See Robin Fabel, “The Patriotic Briton: Tobias Smollett and English Politics, 1756-1771,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 8 (1974): 100-114.

21. Arthur Murphy, Life of David Garrick, 2 vols. (London, 1801), 1:31.

22. Joseph Warton, Essay upon the Genius and Writings of Pope, vol. 1 (1756); 122, 123.

23. He was writing with the authority of Jonathan Richardson (Theory of Painting, in Works, 35).

24. My text is Samuel Johnson, Idler and Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell (New Haven, 1963), 255.

25. For the reference to Whitefield in this context, Hogarth could have drawn upon such recent works as William Mason's Methodism Displayed, and Enthusiasm Detected (1756) and Theophilus Evans's The History of Modern Enthusiasm (2d ed., 1757).

26. See Analysis, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford, 1955), 9.

27. Antal, Hogarth and His Place in European Art (London, 1962), 21.

28. Cited in Rupert E. Davis, Methodism (Harmondsworth, 1963), 69-70.

29. Ibid.

30. For an account of Woolston's role in Hogarth's Harlot's Progress, see Paulson, Hogarth I: The “Modern Moral Subject” (New Brunswick, 1991), 288-300.

31. See n. 30 and Paulson, Hogarth II: High Art and Low (New Brunswick, 1992), chap. 3.

32. Hogarth's “Apology for Painters,” ed. Michael Kitson, Walpole Society, 41 (Oxford, 1968): 89.

33. Gentleman's Magazine, 20:123-25, 169; London Magazine, 19:139, 177-78. The other thing contemporaries—or at least hostile ones like Horace Walpole—noted about Secker was his dissenter origins and tendencies.

34. The Tailpiece served as a mock illustration of Burke's words immediately following his juxtaposition of Death and Satan, describing the sublime effect as consisting “in images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists, or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs, and the revolutions of kingdoms, … a croud of great and confused images; which affect because they are crouded and confused” (Philosophical Enquiry, 62). The “dark, confused, uncertain images” Burke refers to, on the same page, may have served as part of the context of Hogarth's direct attack on the “dark pictures” of the Old Masters in Time Smoking a Picture of 1761.