Читать книгу William Hogarth: The Cockney's Mirror - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 6

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The opulent seats of the nobility, who were enriched by the Church spoils seized at the Reformation and consolidated in their wealth and splendour by the Revolution of 1688, broke at intervals the waste lands or the cultivated fields and pastures and dominated with accepted arrogance the little town or the humble village.

Between these great gentry and the peasants was the sturdy yeoman-farmer class, which usually supplied the artizan and the craftsman, the carpenter, the saddler, the farrier, the sign and coach painter, the little shopkeeper of the provincial towns—sometimes an apothecary's apprentice or a lawyer's clerk.

This class was seldom submerged into the peasantry, but even more rarely scrambled into the gentry; the country was intensely class-conscious, and only in those circles in London where the intellectuals had formed their own societies was there any manner of freedom of thought, liberty of speech or sense of true values.

Arrogance on the part of the moneyed Whig gentry (aristocrats many of them were not), servility on the part of the middle-class traders, who lived on them, fear and ignorance on the part of the peasantry, divided the population into distinct strata; only great talent or peculiar force of character enabled a man to rise from the station in which he was born.

The practice of the fine arts was regarded as the province of those below gentility; the nobleman was the patron of the artist in the same sense as he was the patron of the jockey or the prize-fighter.

The Church was in a stagnant state; the particular brand of Protestantism that resulted from the Revolution of 1688 was interpreted as a cosy materialism by some, as black Puritanism by others; all spirituality had left a creed that was too comfortably endowed with worldly goods, all vigour had left a movement that had achieved its purpose; neither saints nor scholars adorned a Church where the fat posts went to the younger sons of wealthy houses, and where the routine work was done by despised, underpaid curates.

The Roman Catholics were oppressed by gross penal laws, and the abortive rebellion of 1715 had rendered them subject to still further distress and persecution.

Nor, in the early years of the eighteenth century, had those scenes of 'enthusiasm' in which the starved instincts of the people found vent, that mixture of inspiration and charlatanism, which was directed by men like Whitfield and the Wesleys, begun to disturb the hard materialism of the age under which lay the deep wells of sentimentality soon to be tapped by the genius of Samuel Richardson and the school of 'sensibility.'

The Government was settled; that is, some sort of a compromise had been made between what the majority wanted and what they could with safety obtain; a corrupt and incompetent oligarchy ruled a people who revelled in their traditional 'freedom.'

A German Prince had reluctantly accepted the Crown of Great Britain and been as reluctantly endured; expediency and a common dislike were all that linked the first two Georges and their people. The arrangement, however, under the adroit management of Sir Robert Walpole, first 'Prime Minister,' worked well enough to satisfy those with money and influence—those without either were not considered by anyone.

The Lords and Commons, sitting with ancient ceremonial at Westminster under the beams that had been shaped by Richard II's carpenters, and that had roofed over the trial of Charles I, gave the nation that air of British liberty and independence which was popularly supposed to be the envy and despair of foreigners. In reality Parliament represented only a portion of the people, the wealthy landowners, who were elected by one system of bribery and held their seats and gave their votes by another.

Sir Robert was a realist and, as such, was able to handle very efficiently the complex organization of corruption on which the country was run.

When William Hogarth first surveyed the English scene, there had been peace, since the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) had clipped off the grandiose ambitions of Louis XIV and the fallacious hopes of the House of Stuart, but Great Britain maintained an efficient fleet, largely manned by outcasts, pressed men and those too desperate and wretched to object to what was considered the hardest life in the world, and a small regular army recruited from peasants, officered by aristocrats, freshly laurell'd from Marlborough's bloody victories.

It was understood that, at a crisis, these native forces would be assisted by such mercenaries as might be hired from one of His Majesty's fellow-Electors, several of whom paid for their pleasures by trafficking in the bodies of their subjects.

With this rough machinery of government, functioning fairly well, with what was regarded as 'peace and prosperity' ruling over the land, the average Englishman enjoyed himself as well as a poor human being might in an imperfect world.

He could not miss what he had never known, and custom made him oblivious of the horrors that surrounded him; only the very observant, the very sensitive, the highly intelligent, noticed the cruelty, the filth, the disease, the gross vices, the repulsive coarseness that disfigured almost every aspect of life.

The brutal crimes resultant from an unpoliced society, the brutal punishments meted out by old laws no one troubled to reform, the grotesque medley of Puritanical restraints and cynic licence in manners and morals, did not disturb those who, born into this scene, tried to find their place in it, and who tried, perhaps, to fish up some prize from these filthy waters. Here and there some moralist stood aside, shocked and dismayed, here and there some saintly soul retired unspotted from the world, some philosophers sighed, some reformers wept, the gentle, the tenderhearted suffered and did what they could—but none of these was heeded by the greedy, harassed press intent on profit or pleasure or the mere necessaries of existence.

The beginnings of great movements for the betterment of humanity were daily broadening, but were as yet unnoticeable to the casual eye.

The age was grossly brutal; the amusements of the average male consisted in watching or taking part in a display of ferocity, prize-fighting, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, combats with quarterstaffs, cudgels or broadswords. The lower classes settled trivial disputes by hand-to-hand fights, which there were no police to interrupt, the upper classes went armed with swords and pistols, which they were always ready to use, either in self-defence or in 'affairs of honour.' Honour among the gentlefolk became fair play among their social inferiors; it represented one of the most respected virtues of the age. Punishments were shockingly severe, the state of the hospitals, prisons, orphanages and lunatic asylums, was appalling; all this was regarded callously by everyone save a few humanitarians, like Captain Coram.

Flogging was universal; children, criminals, vagabonds, apprentices, soldiers, sailors, were flogged 'within an inch of their lives' upon the least pretext; a man might be pressed to death for refusing to plead, a woman burnt alive for murder of husband or employer (treason), a child hanged for theft, a debtor left to starve in prison; drinking was incessant among all classes; the taxed spirits and wines, the native beers, were sold freely at all hours; it was said that in the lower streets of London taverns were in the ratio of one to three houses; much of the foreign stuff was smuggled; a large portion of the general public connived at this.

The gentlemen and their women-folk saw no offence to manners in constant drunkenness, the middle classes consumed the strong English ale without stint, the poorest could afford gin, cheap enough and powerful enough for a man to be able to lay himself out unconscious for the expenditure of twopence.

Crude rum from Jamaica was supplied to the Navy in generous quantities and helped to destroy the health and morale of the pressed, flogged sailor.

All foreigners were struck by the drunkenness and brutality of the English people, their ferocious prejudice against all strangers, their lack of refinement. In the practice of hard drinking the English had no rivals, save possibly among the habitués of some of the small German Courts, and the ruffianly behaviour permitted in the London streets had no parallel in any other capital.

It was no individual person's fault that these streets were cobbled, with gutters full of filth in the centre, that springless carts and carriages jolted over them with harsh rattlings, that wandering hawkers kept up a continuous shouting, that fights were frequent, that a shower of rain sent spouts of water off the pipeless roofs, that unrepaired pavements caused puddles too wide to jump across, that at night the few oil lamps cast only sufficient light to throw misleading shadows; but the brutal licence permitted to the vagabond and the ruffian was a bitter commentary on the temper of the times.