Not So Dumb Show

Visitors to Washington's National Gallery last week found themselves on a rubberneck tour of 18th-Century London. They peered into brawling alleys and elegant, candlelit drawing rooms; into prisons where the whipping posts were "the reward of idleness" and cockpits where the gamblers seemed more ferocious than the cocks. The tour conductors: blunt, biting William Hogarth, ribald Thomas Rowlandson.

Rowlandson's raffish lampoons showed a corrupt but essentially comic world in which everyone was either too fat or too thin. Plump, pug-faced William Hogarth was perhaps harder to take. With less wit, he had gone deeper into the cynical, sensual, swaggering spirit of his time, and used his engraving tools, like a moral surgeon, to lay bare the malignant tumors of cruelty, ignorance and greed.

Britannia's Progress. Said Hogarth: "My picture is my stage, and men and women my players, who, by means of certain actions and gestures, are to exhibit a dumb show." His two greatest "dumb shows," Harlot's Progress and Rake's Progress, sold like fish & chips but, in an age when only portraits or "historical" paintings in the grand manner were considered Art, the connoisseurs ignored them. And because the characters were real enough to recognize, no one thought of comparing either series of engravings with Bunyan's great book.

The comparison was obvious and presumably intended. Just as Bunyan's "Christian" wound up in the City of God, so Hogarth's "Tom Rakewell" awoke from the happy madness of Drury Lane's Rose Tavern to the chains of the miserably insane in Bedlam. The year he died (1763), Hogarth added a final bitter detail to this engraving: a ha'penny stuck against the wall to indicate that Britannia was also an inmate.

Dedicated to Hard Hearts. Although as a popular printmaker he had earned enough money for the comfortable, quiet family life he wanted, only a few friends (Henry Fielding, David Garrick, Samuel Johnson) had recognized his genius. "The picture dealers, picture cleaners, picture-frame makers and other connoisseurs"-- as he contemptuously called his critics-- thought Hogarth's work could never compare with what he dubbed "the old black masters." Said Hogarth: "They think I hate Titian, and let them!"

When the critics called Hogarth's engravings "crude," he replied, with 18th-Century involution, that the passions may be more forcibly expressed by a strong, bold stroke than by the most delicate engraving. To expressing them as I felt them, I have paid the utmost attention and, as they were addressed to hard hearts, have rather preferred leaving them hard, and giving the effect, by a quick touch, to rendering them languid and feeble by fine strokes and soft engraving, which require more care and practice than can often be attained, except by a man of a very quiet turn of mind."

Technically, Hogarth's etchings were sometimes on the sloppy side, but today's critics were more than happy to settle for what they got. Looking at his prints was like seeing a strange world through the wrong end of a telescope. It took a long time to see any of the pictures; each one was loaded with details. Said Charles Lamb: "Other prints we look at, his prints we read."

Hogarth had an explanation of his own. In one of the neatest esthetic credos in English, he described what he was trying for: "variety without confusion, simplicity without nakedness, richness without tawdriness, distinctness without hardness, quantity without excess."

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