Readings of Hogarth

READINGS OF HOGARTH 293 A chapter on minor satirists - Lady Marty Wortley Montagu is especially interesting here -leads to the problematic figure of Pope, who both 'exploits the antifeminist tradition' and offers 'a new myth of the angelic ideal' (pp 158, 160). This 'unresolved contradiction' combines different types of woman that had traditionally inhabited different kinds ofpoems or, uneasily, a few plays like those of Pope's old friend Wycherley. Nussbaum writes perceptively about Belinda, Martha Blount, and Pope's careful balancing of hope with uncertainty; but her discussion of the traditional proclivities of lapdogs has disturbed forever one reader's innocent picture of Shock. Readings of Hogarth PATRICIA BRUCKMANN Robert L.S. Cowley. Hogarth's Marriage A-La-Mode Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press 1983. 177. illus. $48.50 Sean Shesgreen. Hogarth and the Times-of-the-Day Tradition Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983. 144· illus. $24.95 Charles Lamb's observation long ago in his essay 'On the Genius and Character of Hogarth,' 'Other pictures we look at - his prints we read,' has been amply documented by the work of later commentators, so that the artist often regarded by some ofhis contemporaries as low because of his interest in the sordid details of city life is now thought of as one of the age's learned satirists, ranked with literary figures like the Scriblerians. He is, in fact, one of the chief examples of the co-operation ofthe sister arts, so that there are instances in which one cannot fully read, say, Fielding, without recourse to a Hogarth print, as for the description of Miss Bridget in Tom Jones, Lxi, amplified by a close look at the shrunken Aurora in the morning scene of the Times-of-the-Day. The relation of these two artists is perhaps best shown in Fielding's preface to Joseph Andrews, where we are sent to Hogarth's Characters and Caricatures, to be told that we ought to go back to the preface to Joseph Andrews. We have a better sense of Gay's intentions in The Beggar's Opera if we read Hogarth's drawings for the series, for Hogarth draws in the spectators so that the relation between some of these and the actions of the play are made specific - reader-involvement of the kind Gay often demands, not just in the Opera. Cowley's and Shesgreen's studies add to the now considerable body of literature on Hogarth as a literate painter and commentator on his art and on the canons of painting in general. Cowley describes his work as a re-view, mainly for his argument, but also, I assume, because he is, as are all who write on Hogarth now, aware of Paulson's monumental two-volume study and of other annotative UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1985 294 PATRICIA BROCKMANN essays. His own study is a careful analysis of Marriage-A-La-mode, scene by scene. He insists on the first page that Hogarth's commentators have ... been uncritical in their use of terms. He has been called a writer of comedy, a dramatic and an epic painter and a visual biographer. He has been said to use colours instead of language and his prints have been called graphic journalism. The series have been called novels and romans muets. Marriage-A-La-mode has been identified as a poetic tragedy and as having the feeling of theatrical tableaux vivants. There is truth in all these claims because one form of narrative is bound to have affinities with the others, but the associations in common have obscured the fact that Hogarth's picture series belong to a narrative mode which is essentially independent of other forms. (P 1) Cowley invokes the cartoon strip as his paradigm. There are 'looser, multilinear patterns' which 'allow a viewer more freedom to varyhis approach than a reader (a special kind of viewer).' 'Hogarth's narrative mode itself encourages a viewer to adopt a retrospective, meditative approach: he is are-viewer' (p 2). Cowley emphasizes in special the intervals between the prints in the series. The viewer-reader is drawn into these spaces to make up...