The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  There was a basis in fact for this caricature: it was the custom in Italy for a woman in her own home to dress in loose and careless comfort; and doubtless Mary’s face was badly pocked, but not certainly with syphilis. 139 It was quite usual for authors to lend their manuscripts to friends. Lady Mary had earned young Walpole’s displeasure by befriending Molly Skerrett, who had earned his displeasure by becoming the second wife of his father. Probably Lady Mary was more than usually careless of her appearance now that Algarotti seemed hopelessly lost to her.

  Then, learning that Algarotti was in Turin, she hurried thither, joined him (March, 1741), and lived with him for two months. But he treated her with coarseness and indifference; soon they quarreled and parted, he to Berlin, she to Genoa. There Walpole saw her again, enjoyed her hospitality, and addressed to her coach some venomous lines:

  O chaise, who art condemned to carry

  The rotten hide of Lady Mary,

  To Italy’s last corner drive,

  And prithee set her down alive;

  Nor jumble off with jolts and blows

  The half she yet retains of nose. 140

  In 1760 she rejoiced to learn that her son-in-law had become a member of George Ill’s Privy Council. On January 21, 1761, her husband died, leaving the bulk of his estate to his daughter, and £1,200 a year to his widow. Whether because his death removed some mysterious obstacle to her return, or her son-in-law’s political prominence attracted her, Lady Mary, after twenty-one years of absence, returned to England (January, 1762).

  She had only seven more months to live, and they were not happy. Her pursuit of Algarotti, and such reports as Horace Walpole’s, had given her a bad name; and her daughter, though solicitous for her mother’s health and comfort, did not enjoy her company. In June Lady Mary began to Suffer from a tumor on the breast. She took calmly her doctor’s confession that she had cancer; she said she had lived long enough. She died after months of pain (August 21, 1762).

  One of her last requests was that her letters should be published to give her side of her story, and establish her title to remembrance. But she had entrusted her manuscripts to her daughter, and Lady Bute, now wife of the Prime Minister, did all she could to prevent their publication. However, the letters written from Turkey were clandestinely copied before being delivered to the daughter, and they were issued in 1763. Several editions were soon sold out. Johnson and Gibbon were among the delighted readers. The critics, who had been unmerciful to the author during her lifetime, were now extravagant in praising her correspondence. Smollett wrote that the letters were “never equaled by any letter-writer of any sex, age, or nation”; and Voltaire rated them as superior to Sévigné’s. 141 Lady Bute, before she died in 1794, burned her mother’s voluminous diary, but left the letters to the discretion of her eldest son. He allowed some of them to be printed in 1803; those to Algarotti remained secret until Byron persuaded John Murray to buy them from their Italian owner (1817). Not till 1861 was publication complete; and Lady Mary was recognized as sharing with Pope, Gray, Gay, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Hume in making the literature of England the most varied, vibrant and influential of that virile age.

  * * *

  I. This act, as modified in 1843, is still British law, but is very leniently enforced.

  CHAPTER VI

  Art and Music

  1714–56

  I. THE ARTISTS

  SHINING brilliantly with its own light in literature and statesmanship, England was a humble satellite in music and art. The retardation in art had many causes. The gloomy skies could hardly be one of them, for skies gloomed in the Netherlands too, and yet Holland had as many artists as windmills. The Channel may have been a cause, shielding England from the arts as well as the wars of the Continent. Perhaps English talent was too absorbed in commerce and (after Walpole) in war. Protestantism might be blamed for the becalming of English art, for art grows on imagination, and Protestantism had banished imagination from art and dedicated it to literature and theology; but, again, Holland was Protestant. Probably the chief factor was the Puritan revolt and legacy: the execution of the art-loving Charles I, the dispersion of his art collection, and the recession of the English mind—barring Milton—during the chaotic Commonwealth. The Puritan influence bowed its head during the Restoration, but it returned with William III and the Hanoverians, and in Methodism it took a reinvigorated form. Beauty was again a sin.

  There were some minor achievements in the minor arts. Fine soft-paste porcelain was produced in Chelsea (1755), imitating Meissen and Sèvres. Birmingham japanners made fortunes in lacquered ware; one of them, John Baskerville, grew rich enough to indulge in printing fine editions of English bards. Rococo curves in riotous fancy decorated books, fabrics, furniture, vessels, Sheffield silver, the Rotunda at Vauxhall Gardens, and some rooms in Chesterfield House and Strawberry Hill.

  Sculptors were just beginning to be distinguished from masons. The leading sculptors in England were of foreign birth, though they usually became British citizens. Peter Schaemaekers came from Antwerp and joined Laurent Delvaux in carving the statue of the Duke of Buckingham and Normanby in Westminster Abbey. Greatest of these aliens was Louis Roubillac, son of a Lyonese banker. Coming to England in 1744, he was rapidly advanced as a protégé of the Walpoles. He executed the bust of Shakespeare now in the British Museum, and that of Handel now in the National Portrait Gallery. Queen Caroline favored him, sat for him, commissioned him to make busts of Boyle, Newton, Locke, and other English worthies for her grotto at Richmond. Chesterfield, a man of taste, called Roubillac “the Pheidias of his day.”1 Roubillac died a bankrupt in 1762, after a life of devotion to his art.

  Architecture was in a Palladian ecstasy. The rising wealth of upper classes prospering discontentedly under the Walpolian peace financed a thousand grand tours, during which British gentlemen imbibed a liking for Roman temples and Renaissance palaces. Venice was always on the itinerary; on the way the traveler stopped at Vicenza to admire Palladio’s façades; and on their return they littered England with classical columns, architraves, and pediments. In 1715–25 Colin Campbell issued his Vitruvius Britannicus, which became the bible of the Palladians; William Kent (1727) and James Gibbs (1728) furthered the style with their architectural manuals. In 1716 Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, printed a sumptuous edition of Palladio’s texts, and in 1730 he published Palladio’s restorations of ancient edifices. His own country house at Chiswick included a replica of Palladio’s Villa Rotonda at Vicenza, with columned portico and central dome. Burlington was an openhanded patron of literature, music and art, friend of Berkeley and Handel, of Pope and Gay.

  In 1719 he brought back with him from Rome a young architect, William Kent, who had won a papal prize for his paintings and was also an enthusiast for everything classical. Housed till his death in Burlington House (still, in its second incarnation, a center of English art), Kent became the most popular and versatile artist in England. He painted ceilings at Houghton, Stowe, and Kensington Palace; he designed furniture, dinner plate, mirrors, glass, a barge, and costumes for fashionable ladies; he carved the statue of Shakespeare in the Abbey; he was a leader in promoting the “natural” English garden; as an architect he built the Temple of Ancient Virtue in the Stowe gardens, Devonshire House in Piccadilly, the Horse Guards House in Whitehall, and the prodigious Holkham Hall in Norfolk.

  In 1738 Lord Burlington submitted to the London City Council Kent’s Palladian plan for Mansion House, residence of the lord mayor; a member objected that Palladio was a papist; Kent’s design was rejected; George Dance the Elder, a Protestant, received the commission and acquitted himself well. But in that year the excavations began at Herculaneum; the discoveries there led to the unearthing of Pompeii (1748 f.); in 1753 Robert Wood published The Ruins of Palmyra, and in 1757 The Ruins of Baalbek; these revelations gave the classical campaign in England an irresistible verve, and put an end to the baroque exuberance that had flowered in Vanbrugh’s palace for th
e Churchills, Blenheim. In 1748 Isaac Ware, another protégé of Burlington, built Chesterfield House in Curzon Street.

  In their enthusiasm the Palladians forgot that classical architecture had been designed for Mediterranean skies, not for English winds and clouds. Colin Campbell was a special sinner in adopting Italian models without adapting them to English winters; his Mereworth Castle gave scant entry to the sun, and the Houghton Hall that he built for Robert Walpole sacrificed living space to majestic halls inviting icy drafts. James Gibbs, a disciple of Christopher Wren, used the classic style to fine effect in the Church of St. Mary-le-Strand in London (1714–17); its steeple is a lyric in stone. To the Church of St. Clement Dane, built by Wren, Gibbs added (1719) a steeple too lofty for its base, but still precariously beautiful. He capped his work in 1721 with the classic portico and Corinthian columns of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, at Trafalgar Square, Finally in the Radcliffe Library (1737–47) he created a perfect harmony of columns and dome at Oxford.

  The architectural splendor of Bath was due principally to John Wood. His dominating conception was to bind individual dwellings into a single mass; so he designed and began, and his son John ably completed, the massive “Royal Crescent”—thirty houses behind a united front of 114 Corinthian columns—severely but not irreparably damaged in the Second World War. Nearby Wood Senior and Junior built the “Circus” (1754–64), a handsome circle of residences faced by a continuous frieze and a three-tiered colonnade; here once lived the elder Pitt, Thomas Gainsborough, and Clive of India. For three sides of “Queen Square” Wood designed but never completed another series of homes united behind a palatial Renaissance façade. Much of this town-planning and -building program was financed by Ralph Allen, whom Fielding took as model for Squire Allworthy. For Allen the elder Wood raised a magnificent Palladian palace at Prior Park (1735–43), two miles outside Bath.

  The poverty of Britain’s masses was equaled by the splendor of her palaces. Allen’s temple at Prior Park cost £240,000. A competitive craze inspired nobles and merchants to raise immense mansions for hospitality and display. According to Hervey, Robert Walpole earned the lasting enmity of Lord Townshend by building Houghton Hall on a still more lavish scale than Townshend’s neighboring Raynham Park. Lord Lyttleton denounced this “epidemical madness” of palatial building; his wife, however, demanded a new palace, in Italian style; he yielded to her at the point of repetition and to the point of bankruptcy; when the palace was finished she left him for an Italian opera singer of uncertain sex. Soon England and even English Ireland were dotted with such show houses of the rich. Tours were organized, guidebooks were published, for visiting these lordly dwellings, their gardens, and their picture galleries. The fame of these edifices reached as far as Russia; Catherine the Great asked Josiah Wedgwood to make her an imperial table service decorated with views of English country seats.2

  Most of the paintings in England were housed, and for the most part concealed, in these aristocratic homes; there were as yet no museums where pictures could be viewed by the general public. Patronage went chiefly to foreign artists, and almost entirely for portraits of notables who hoped to live on canvas while rotting in wood; there was no market for landscapes or “histories.” When Carle Vanloo came to England in 1737 so many pedigreed faces clamored to be pictured that for several weeks after his arrival the train of carriages approaching his home rivaled that before a theater. Large sums were given to the man who kept the register of his engagements, as bribes to advance their appointments; else one might have to wait six weeks.3

  The “Royal Society of Arts,” founded in 1754, tried to stimulate native talent with competitions and exhibitions, but the demand for English art dallied for another generation. Joseph Highmore, a pupil of Kneller, secured a few purchasers by picturing scenes from Pamela,4 and Thomas Hudson caught a fraction of Handel’s vitality in the portrait that he painted in 1749.5 Among Hudson’s pupils was young Joshua Reynolds, “who,” he predicted, “will never distinguish himself.”6 Sir James Thornhill had more foresight. He won success with portraits of Newton, Bentley, and Steele; he painted the inner cupola of St. Paul’s, and ceilings at Greenwich Hospital and Blenheim Palace; and he achieved vicarious immortality by surrendering his daughter in marriage to the greatest English artist of the age.

  II. WILLIAM HOGARTH: 1697–1764

  His father was a schoolteacher plus literary hack, who apprenticed him in early youth to an engraver of arms. From this he passed to engraving on copper, and from this to making illustrations for books. In 1726 he prepared twelve large engravings for Butler’s Hudibras. He joined Thornhill’s art class, learned oil painting, and eloped with the master’s daughter; Thornhill forgave him and engaged him as aide.

  The illustrations that Hogarth made for The Tempest, 2 Henry IV, and The Beggar’s Opera were vivid images: Miranda tender, Caliban coarse, Prospero kindly, Ariel strumming a lute in the air; Sir John Falstaff pontificating from his paunch; Captain Macheath in his irons and arias, still a hero to his wives. The coming satirist struck his distinctive vein in The Sleeping Congregation, for Hogarth hated all homilies except his own; while in A Children’s Party he relished the fairest phase of English life. These pictures please us now, but drew no plaudits then.

  He tried his hand at portrait painting, to indifferent results. The competition was severe. A dozen artists were making minor fortunes by flattering their sitters and dividing their tasks; they painted the head but delegated backgrounds and draperies to underpaid subordinates; “all this,” said Hogarth, “is done at so easy a rate as enables the principal to get more money in a week than a man of the first professional talents can in three months.”7 He denounced the “phiz-mongers” who prettified the faces of their clients to feed their vanity and open their purses. As for himself he would portray his sitters with all their carbuncles, or not at all. When a distinctively simian noble sat for his picture Hogarth painted him with offensive honesty. The lord, never having seen himself as others saw him, refused to take the portrait. The artist sent him a message:

  Mr. Hogarth’s dutiful respects to Lord ———. Finding that he does not mean to have the picture which was drawn for him, is informed again of Mr. Hogarth’s need for the money. If, therefore, his Lordship does not send for it in three days, it will be disposed of, with the addition of a tail and some other little appendages, to Mr. Hare, the famous wild-beast man; Mr. Hogarth having given that gentleman a conditional promise of it for an exhibition picture …8

  His Lordship paid.

  Hogarth was confident that he could paint portraits as well as any man. When he was portraying Henry Fox (later Baron Holland) he told Horace Walpole that he had promised Fox, if he would sit as instructed, that he, Hogarth, would make as good a portrait of him as Rubens or Vandyck could have done;9 which shocked Horace to the very core of his conventions. Many of Hogarth’s male portraits may justify the distaste that Walpole expressed for them; the faces are too stereotyped, and some deserve his own scornful labeling of certain English portraits as “still life.” We must except Sir Thomas Coram, already noted in commemorating the Foundling Hospital, which Coram founded and where he hangs; Hogarth caught the philanthropic nature in the smiling face, and the firm character in the closed hands. Generally the artist’s brush was kinder to women than to men. The Portrait of a Lady10 rivals Gainsborough; A Lady in Brown11 has the strong features of a woman who has successfully mothered many children; and if Miss Mary Edwards12 is slightly dead, it is brought to life by the—in Hogarth always present—dog. Finer are the group portraits, like The Price Family13 and The Graham Children;14 and better still Hogarth’s Servants,15 where every face is fondly limned in all its unduplicable character. Finest of all, of course, is The Shrimp Girl16—not a portrait but a hale man’s memory of the young woman he had seen peddling shrimp from a basket balanced on her head; a girl free from all frills, not ashamed of the rags that robe her, looking out upon the world with the health of action ruddying her cheeks and b
rightening her eyes.

  Hogarth left at least four portraits of himself. In 1745 he painted himself with his fat dog Trump.17 In 1758 he showed himself at his easel: short, stout body, round and pudgy face, broad pug nose, blue eyes tired with fighting, lips tight with readiness to fight again. He was “a jovial, honest London citizen,” in Thackeray’s view, “a hearty, plain-spoken man, loving his laugh, his friends, his glass, his roast-beef of Old England.”18 He was hardly five feet tall, but he wore a sword19 and took no nonsense from any man. Behind his defensive pugnacity was a warm heart, sometimes sentimental, forever pledged to war against hypocrisy and cruelty. He despised the lords whom he painted, he liked the simple Londoner who put on no airs. He brought the English masses into art; he pictured them in their sins and sufferings, in Bedlam, prison, debt, and heavy toil. He disliked the French as having corrupted England with finicky finery and aristocratic airs. He never forgot his being arrested for making sketches of Calais Gate; he took revenge by picturing the French as he had seen them there: rugged workmen, superstitious populace, and fat monk gazing in ecstasy upon a shoulder of beef.20

  In his Anecdotes Hogarth told how the unprofitableness of his portraits turned him into the line that made his fame:

  I was unwilling to sink into a portrait manufacturer; and still ambitious of being singular [working independently], dropped all expectations of advantage from that source … As I could not bring myself to act like some of my brethren, and make it a sort of manufactory to be carried on by the help of background and drapery painters, it was not sufficiently profitable to pay the expenses my family required. I therefore turned my thoughts to painting and engraving modern moral subjects, a field not broken up in any country or any age.21