Читать книгу William Hogarth: The Cockney's Mirror - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 21

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This, in rough outline, was the world over which the first two Georges reigned, where the Wesleys and George Whitfield preached, where Lovelace pursued Clarissa, where Mr. B. pursued Pamela, where that damsel's mock brother, Joseph Andrews, came to seek his fortune, where William Collins wrote his odes and Swift his pamphlets, where Sterne (writing in 1740) first used the word 'sentimental,' where Gray composed his elegy, where Horace Walpole built the absurd Strawberry Hill and wrote some of the wisest, wittiest commentaries that have ever been made on the affairs of men. This London raved over the sublime nonsense of Ossian and enjoyed the neat couplets of Alexander Pope. From this London General Wolfe went to capture Quebec and to this London came Samuel Johnson and his pupil, David Garrick; here perished the grotesque Richard Savage and here Margaret Woffington delighted the town here the fashionable world languished and raved over the singing of Italian eunuchs and went into raptures over the painting on a porcelain tea-cup, and here the people rushed to pelt to death a wretch fastened in the pillory for a minor offence or to see a woman hanged for picking pockets.

It was the world of Gay's Beggars' Opera, of the Lorenzo who poured out his Night Thoughts to the profit of Dr. Edward Young, the world to which Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough came to make their fortunes.

For most of its inhabitants it was a sour, dreary world, hypocritical, brutal, becoming, as the century advanced, more and more laced with 'sensibility' and 'sentiment,' which took the place of nobility, heroism, serenity and true courage; in the same manner, 'enthusiasm,' often scarcely distinguishable from hysteria, took the place of genuine religious feeling.

It was a bitter age, coarse, heartless, tinged with despair; science was asleep, scepticism, bigotry and superstition went side by side, pleasures were mostly lewd and vulgar, idealism was almost eclipsed by materialism—only in music and (occasionally) in verse did the human spirit utter pure and lofty thoughts.

Taste was at a low ebb and expressed itself in a profusion of gaudy, senseless ornament; the filth amid which most men lived tainted their outlook, nothing pleased so much as the bawdy joke, the incessant turning over of the bestial and the indecent aspects of life.

Noblemen affected fine manners and a patronage of the arts, but the former were skin-deep and the latter founded on ignorance; nowhere was that truly civilized elegance which had flourished in Italy during the Renaissance, and which was being sedulously cultivated in eighteenth-century France—a country that the English nobleman unskilfully aped and at which the English commoner unskilfully mocked.

Such as this world was, it offered rich and varied material to a satirist, to a student of manners, to one sensible of the violent, horrible and moving drama of humanity.