Eighteenth Century Vignettes

It was in the backroom of its first floor that, on Monday, the 13th December in the latter year, at about seven o'clock in the evening, his black servant Francis Barber and his friend Mrs. Desmoulins, who watched in the sick-chamber, 'observing that the noise he made in breathing had ceased, went to the bed, and found that he was dead.'

Standing in Bolt Court to-day, before the unimposing façade of the school which now occupies the spot, it is not easy to reconstruct that quiet parting-scene; nor is it easy to realize the old book-burdened upper floors, or the lower reception chamber, where, according to Sir John Hawkins, were given those 'not inelegant dinners' of the good Doctor's more opulent later years. Least of all is it possible to conceive that, somewhere in this pell-mell of bricks and mortar, was once a garden which the famous Lexicographer took pleasure in watering; and where, moreover, grew a vine from which, only a few months before he died, he gathered 'three bunches of grapes.' But if Bolt Court prove unstimulating, you have only to take a few steps to the right, and you arrive, somewhat unexpectedly, in a little parallelogram at the back, known as Gough Square. Here, in the north-west corner, still stands one of the last of those sixteen residences in which Johnson lived in London. It is at present a place of business; but the tenants make no difficulty about your examination of it, and when you inquire for the well-known garret you are at once invited to inspect it. The interior of the house, of course, is much altered, but there is still a huge chain at the front door, which dates from Johnson's day, and the old oak-balustraded staircase remains intact. As you climb its narrow stages, you remember that, sixty years since, Thomas Carlyle must have made that ascent before you; 16 and you wonder how Johnson, with his bad sight and his rolling gait, managed to steer up it at all.

The flight ends in the garret itself, upon which you emerge at present, as in a hay-loft. But it is not in the least such a 'sky-parlour' as Hogarth assigns to his 'Distressed Poet.' It occupies the whole width and breadth of the building; it is sufficiently lighted by three windows in front, and two dormers at the sides; and the pitch of the roof is by no means low. Here you are actually in Johnson's house; and as you turn to look at the stairway you have just quitted, it is odds if you do not expect to see the shrivelled wig, the seared, blinking face, and the heavy shoulders of the Doctor himself rising slowly above the aperture with a huge volume under his arm. For it was in this very garret in Gough Square, within sound of the hammers of that famous clock of St. Dunstan's, to which Cowper refers in the 'Connoisseur,' 17 that the great Dictionary was compiled.

Here laboured Shiels, the amanuensis, and his five companions, ceaselessly transcribing the passages which had been marked for them to copy, and probably going 'odd man or plain Newmarket' for beer as soon as ever their employer's back was turned; here, also, at the little fire-place in the corner, must often have sat Johnson himself, peering closely (much as Reynolds shows him in the portrait of 1778) at the proofs that were going to long-suffering Andrew Millar. It was in this identical garret that Joseph Warton once visited him to pay a subscription; here came Roubiliac and Sir Joshua; and here, when the room had grown to be dignified by the title of the 'library,' Johnson received Dr. Burney, who found in it 'five or six Greek folios, a deal writing-desk, and a chair and a half.' The half-chair must have been that mentioned by Miss Reynolds; and it is evident that long experience or repeated misadventure had made Johnson both skilful and cautious in manipulating it. 'A gentleman,' she says, 'who frequently visited him whilst writing his "Idlers" [the 'Idler' was partly composed in Gough Square in 1758] constantly found him at his desk, sitting on a chair with three legs; and on rising from it, he remarked that Dr. Johnson never forgot its defect, but would either hold it in his hand or place it with great composure against some support, taking no notice of its imperfection to his visitor.' 'It was remarkable in Dr. Johnson,' she goes on, 'that no external circumstances ever prompted him to make any apology, or to seem even sensible of their existence.'

In Gough Square Johnson lived from 1749 to 1759. 'I have this day moved my things,' he writes to his step-daughter, Miss Porter, on the 23rd of March in the latter year, 'and you are now to direct to me at Staple Inn.' These ten years were among the busiest and most productive of his life. No pension had as yet made existence easier to him; no Boswell was at hand to seduce him to port and the Mitre; and the Literary Club, as yet unborn, existed only in embryo at a beefsteak shop in Ivy Lane. Besides the 'Idler' and the Dictionary, which latter was published in the middle of his sojourn at Gough Square, he sent forth from his garret 'Irene' and the 'Vanity of Human Wishes,' the 'Rambler,' and the essays in Hawkesworth's 'Adventurer.' It was here that he drew up those proposals for that belated edition of Shakespeare of which Churchill said:

He for Subscribers baits his hook,And takes their cash – but where's the Book?

and here, early in 1759, he wrote his 'Rasselas.' It was in Gough Square, on the 16th of March, 1756, that he was arrested for £5 18s., and only released by a prompt loan from Samuel Richardson; it was while living in Gough Scpiare that he penned that noble letter to Chesterfield, of which Time seems to intensify rather than to attenuate the manly dignity and the independent accent. 'Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.'

'Till I am solitary, and cannot impart it.'

The same thought recurs in the closing words of the preface to his magnum opus, which, little more than two months after the date of the above letter, appeared in a pair of folio volumes.

'I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave; and success and miscarriage are empty sounds.' It needs no Boswell to tell us that the reference here is to the death, three years before, of his wife, – that fantastic 'Tetty,' to himself so beautiful, to his friends so unattractive, whom he loved so ardently and so faithfully, and whose name, coupled with so many 'pious breathings,' is so frequently to be found in his 'Prayers and Meditations.' 'This is the day,' he wrote, thirty years afterwards, 'on which, in 1752, dear Tetty died. I have now uttered a prayer of repentance and contrition; perhaps Tetty knows that I prayed for her. Perhaps Tetty is now praying for me. God help me.' In her epitaph at Bromley he styles her 'formosa, culta, ingeniosa, pia.' In a recently discovered letter she is his 'charming Love,' his 'most amiable woman in the world,' and (even at fifty) his 'dear Girl.' He preserved her wedding ring, says Boswell, 'as long as he lived, with an affectionate care, in a little round wooden box, in the inside of which he pasted a slip of paper, thus inscribed by him in fair characters, as follows: 'Eheu! Eliz. Johnson, Nuptay Jul. 9° 1736, Mortua, eheu! Mart. 17° 1752.' 18

Her loss was not the only bereavement he suffered in Gough Square. Two months before he left it, in 1759, his mother died at Lichfield, – 'one of the few calamities,' he had told Lucy Porter, 'on which he thought with terror.' Confined to London by his work, he was not able to close her eyes; but he wrote to her a last letter almost too sacred in its wording for the profanation of type, and he consecrated an 'Idler' to her memory. 'The last year, the last day, must come,' he says mournfully. 'It has come, and is past. The life which made my own life pleasant is at an end, and the gates of death are shut upon my prospects.' To pay his mother's modest debts, and to cover the expenses of her funeral, he penned his sole approach to a work of fiction, – the story of 'Rasselas.'

Who now reads Johnson? If he pleases still,'Tis most for Dormitive or Sleeping Pill, —

one might say, in not inappropriate parody of Pope. His strong individuality, his intellectual authority, his conversational power, must live for ever; but his books! – who, outside the fanatics of literature, – who reads them now? Macaulay, we are told by Lord Houghton, once quoted 'London' at a dinner-table, but then he was talking to Dean Milman; and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his novel of 'A Mortal Antipathy,' refers to the Prince of Abyssinia.

Browning, says Mrs. Sutherland Orr, qualified himself for poetry in his youth by a diligent perusal of the Dictionary; and it may perhaps be said of him, in those words of Horace which Johnson himself applied to Prior, that 'the vessel long retained the scent which it first received.' But who now, among the supporters of the circulating libraries, ever gets out the 'Rambler,' or 'Irene,' or the 'Vanity of Human Wishes' (beloved of Scott and Byron), or 'Rasselas,' – 'Rasselas,' once more popular than the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' 19 – 'Rasselas,' which despite such truisms as 'What cannot be repaired is not to be regretted,' is full of sagacious 'criticism of life'!

The honest answer must be, 'Very few.' Yet a day may come when the Johnsonese of Johnson's imitators will be forgotten, and people will turn once more to the fountain-head to find, with surprise, that it is not so polluted with Latinisms after all, and that it abounds in passages direct and forcible. 'Of all the writings which are models,' says Professor Earle, 'models I mean in the highest sense of the word, models from which the spirit of genuine true and wholesome diction is to be imbibed (not models of mannerism of which the trick or fashion is to be caught), I have no hesitation in saying that there is one author unapproachably and incomparably the best, and that is Samuel Johnson.' And this is the 'deliberate conclusion' of an expert who has given almost a lifetime to the comparative study of English prose.

IX. HOGARTH'S SIGISMUNDA

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

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

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

'In walks of Humour, in that cast of Style,Which, probing to the quick, yet makes us smile;In Comedy, thy nat'ral road to fame,Nor let me call it by a meaner name,Where a beginning, middle, and an endAre aptly joined; where parts on parts depend,Each made for each, as bodies for their soul,So as to form one true and perfect whole,Where a plain story to the eye is told,Which we conceive the moment we behold,Hogarth unrivall'd stands, and shall engageUnrivall'd praise to the most distant age.'

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

'Nay;'tis so moving that the KnightCan't even bear it in his sight;Then who would tears so dearly buy,As give four hundred pounds to cry?I own, he chose the prudent part,Rather to break his word than heart;And yet, methinks,'tis ticklish dealingWith one so delicate – in feeling.'

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

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

'Let the picture rust.Perhaps Time's price-enhancing dust,As statues moulder into earth,When I'm no more, may mark its worth,And future connoisseurs may rise,Honest as ours, and full as wise,To puff the piece and painter too,And make me then what Guido's now.'

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

X. 'THE CITIZEN OF THE WORLD.'

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