Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1
1745
13 13/16” X 17 1/2" (H X W)
Engraved and etched from Hogarth's painting.
View the full resolution plate here.
View the painting here.
Marriage à la Mode is another extended treatment of the consequences of sexual abandon. Certainly, there is an indictment of parents who marry their children to ill-suited partners for personal gain, but there is also some condemnation of the young couple in the series. It is, however, the male’s excesses which receive the harshest condemnation.
In Hogarth’s first plate, a marriage contract is forged, although, as Robert Cowley notes, “the betrothed couple looks bored” (34). The Earl’s pose is affected, as he points dramatically at his all-important family tree, a branch of which is already broken. The groom stares narcissistically at himself in the mirror [The incomparable Lichtenberg inexplicably calls him “a sick angora rabbit beside a hot lady hedgehog” (87)], but the reflection we see is not his but that of Silvertongue, the lawyer who is soon to be his wife’s lover. Some commentators, including Peter Quennell, believe that the wife and attorney have already consummated their relationship (172). However, this reading is problematic as it destroys the young woman’s innocence that is so important to her ultimate status as martyr in the series.
To that effect, Hogarth uses many allusions to other art work in his series to both provide commentary upon the action and, sometimes, to even warn us (and possibly the characters) of the potential doom that is lurking. This clever foreshadowing device appears in this series as well. Looming in the background there are paintings, which, according to Paulson, “show scenes of violence and destruction” (Graphic 269) including David about to slay Goliath, Judith holding Holofernes' head and St. Sebastian being martyred. Less visible are pictures of Cain slaying Abel and Prometheus on the rock. There is also an image of Medusa shrieking in horror, one of St. Agnes, whose refusal to marry carries an additional interesting thematic gravity and an overdramatic painting of the Earl as Jupiter in an appropriately omnipotent pose. He’s controlling the action here.
The Squanderfield family tree, prominently placed in the foreground, is broken. The realization of this suggestion occurs in the final plate with the introduction of the couple’s syphilitic daughter. The forced union of the two will not secure the Earl’s hopes of an heir. Shesgreen also notes that the “manacled state” of the two dogs is “symbolic of the couple’s condition” (51). Indeed, Hogarth often uses dogs as an indicator of sexuality and sexual arousal. A dog appears alert in the second plate while exposing the cap of lord’s new mistress, but the canines here seem bored and despondent revealing that the sexual union of the pair is one based on the contract being signed rather than upon any natural affection and attraction.
Although the sexual suggestions are mild here in relation to the other plates in the series, the heavy implications of a sexual threat are important to remark upon, as is the establishment of the triangles which will become important to the tale. Paulson describes the “triangular arrangement of people: the Earl, the merchant, and the usurer make one group and Silvertongue, the groom and the bride another” (Life vol. 1 485). Furthermore, the placement of this latter group is significant. Lichtenberg perceptively notes, “On her right sits the man to whome she is to give her right hand in marriage, and on her left stands another, a young, virile, matrimonial adviser” (89). Certainly these associations of Silvertongue with the left will not escape those familiar with Latin who will notes the “sinister” acts predicted here. The term “sinister” has been used by critics, but typically in reference to Plate VI and the inadequacy of the Squanderfield heir. Used here, the term adds a heavier sense of impending danger to the entire series of plates. Importantly, however, the wife-to-be seems to be unmoved by the advances of her lawyer, preferring to scowl and play absently with her wedding ring.
Ronald Paulson notes that the “bawd of The Harlot’s Progress has now become the parent” (Life vol. 1 484), and this is made evident by the by the presence of the bed, alerting the audience to the sexual component of the transaction taking place. In reality, this is hardly different from the street-walking variety of prostitution. The girl’s father is selling her for the promise of prestige. Derek Jarrett states that the Earl is interested in having his son married in order to recoup debts “incurred in building the Italianate palace” which can be seen through the window (Ingenious 127). The subject, he comments, is “not lust but vanity” (Ingenious 128). Our gaze, as Cowley notes, is drawn “out of the window” (28). This is the first hint that the larger issues will be social ones—ones that will transcend the picture.
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1
Shesgreen, Sean. Engravings by Hogarth. (1973)
This scene depicts the crude commercial transaction which yokes a powerless middle-class girl and a vain aristocratic beau together in the marriage. Sitting under his grand canopy, the stout, gouty Lord Squanderfield points proudly to his family tree. His genealogy indicated that is he is descended from “William Duke of Normandy”; his family, entirely aristocratic, has flourished except for a single member who married out of class. Through the window the Earl’s new Palladian house is visible; work on the mansion has stopped for lack of money. Before the half-finished building loiter the curious, the scornful and the Earl’s idle servants. At the window the architect, anticipating resumption of work on the place, studies “A Plan of the New Building of the Right Honble.”
Across from the Earl the plainly dressed merchant sits stiffly in his chair, his sword sticking out awkwardly from between his legs. The chain on his vest suggests he is an alderman. He scrutinizes the “Marriage Settlemnt of The Rt. Honble. Lord Viscount Squanderfield.” Between the two men stands a thin usurer who accepts the Earl’s newly acquired money (he holds several bags in his hand and some notes marked “£1000”) for a “Mortgage.”
In the background, appropriately enough, the couple to be married sit together on a couch. The effete beau has turned his back to his bride to admire himself in the mirror. He gazes so narcissistically at himself in the glass that he fails to notice the conduct of Lawyer Silvertongue reflected there. Wearing a foolish look of self-approval, he takes snuff affectedly and balances himself on his tiptoes.
Hunched next to him sits his unsophisticated bride, dressed much more plainly than he, resentful and discontent at the way she is disposed of. She plays with her wedding ring. Beside her Councilor Silvertongue leans solicitously forward as he sharpens his pen. The girl, however, pays no attention to him. Beside the couple sit a pair of dogs, one with a coronet on its back; their manacled state is symbolic of the young couple’s condition.
On the wall a head of Medusa seems to gaze at the scene in utter horror. Above the usurer hangs a portrait of the Earl. A burlesque of portraits executed in the sublime manner, it depicts the Earl as Jupiter with a thunderbolt in his hand, a comet flashing above him, a cherub blowing his wig in a different direction from his voluminous clothing and a cannon (placed near his groin) exploding. On top of the elaborate frame a lion seems to grin at the work. All the other pictures are scenes of disaster in the form of death or torture; they comment on different aspects of the calamitous marriage and the Earl’s fashionable taste for foreign art of questionable worth. On the ceiling is a depiction of Pharaoh’s armies in the Red Sea. On the walls hang pictures of David and Goliath, Judith and Holophernes, the martyrdom of St. Sebastain, Prometheus being tortured by a vulture, the massacre of the innocents, Cain killing Abel and the martyrdom of St. Lawrence (51).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1
Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Graphic Works. (1965)
The scene is the house of Lord Squanderfield with his proprietary earl's coronet stamped on everything: his footstool, chair-backs, pictures crutches, dogs. Beyond the window his palladian building project has come to a halt, presumably for lack of funds, and his footmen are standing idly about the courtyard with nothing to do. The "troupe de laquais oisifs," as Rouquet says (p. 31), "acheve de caractériser le faste ruineux qui environne le comte." But this is to be rectified by the impending marriage of his son to a wealthy merchant's daughter. One of the lawyers stands at the window, marveling, with "A Plan of the New Building of the Right Honble ..." before him. The Earl is pointing to his own collateral, his family tree, growing out of "William Duke of Normandy." The branches bristle with coronets, except for one that is broken off, which represents the consequence of an alliance with a woman of obscure origin. The lean usurer hands the Earl the "Mortgage," now paid for with the banknotes he has received from the merchant (one for "£1000" shows). More "£1000" banknotes are lying on the table. Across from the Earl sits the cautious merchant holding the "Marriage Settlemt of the Rt Honble Lord Viscount Squanderfield." The chain he wears suggests that he is a Sheriff of London (Rouquet, p. 29).
A "marriage a la mode" is one that is arranged for the mutual profit of parents (Rouquet, pp. 29-30). The two young people who are being married sit in the rear. The merchant's daughter, looking rather angry, is playing with her engagement ring on her handkerchief and listening to the banter of one of the lawyers, whose name, we learn later, is Silvertongue. The Earl's son (he is distinguished throughout the series by the beauty patch under his right ear) is smiling foolishly at his own image in the mirror. And in front of this couple is a pair of dogs, one stamped with the coronet, and manacled together.
The paintings around the room, besides being by "dark masters," show scenes of violence and destruction. Most immediately applicable is the ceiling mural of Pharaoh being overwhelmed by the Red Sea (with what for Hogarth was the added impropriety of an ocean painted on a ceiling). On the wall is Hogarth's burlesque of a French-style portrait of the Earl with Jupiter's thunderbolt in his right hand, a comet flashing above his head, and wind-gods blowing in the upper left corner; curiously, his robes and his wig fly in opposite directions, and a small cannon is discharging just in front of him. The lion's head on the frame is smiling. The other pictures, of murders and martyrdoms, offer obvious parallels to the situation of the young couple: David preparing to cut off Goliath's head; Judith holding Holofernes' head; St. Sebastian being martyred; Prometheus torn by the vulture; the Slaughter of the Innocents; Cain slaying Abel; and St. Lawrence being grilled. An oval sconce frames Caravaggio's Medusa (Uffizi Gallery), who looks down with fury on the apathetic couple; above the gorgon's head is the ubiquitous coronet. The paintings show the Earl's taste in "dark masters," his vainglory, and his wastefulness. Everything in the room illustrates the last of these, even the candle for melting sealing wax; a "thief," an imperfection in the candle wick, causes it to gutter and waste.
The David and Goliath, Cain and Abel (Sta. Maria della Salute, Venice), Prometheus (Prado, Madrid), St. Lawrence (Gesuiti, Venice), Destruction of Pharaoh's Host (woodcut by delle Grecche), and perhaps St. Sebastian (SS. Nazaro e Celso, Brecia) are works after Titian.
There was a tradition in the eighteenth century that the Earl was based on John Wallop, Baron Wallop of Farleigh Wallop and Viscount Lymington, who had been created Earl of Portsmouth in 1743, and whose pride in his ancestry was well-known; also that the man delivering the mortgage to the Earl of Peter Walter, Fielding’s Peter Pounce in Joseph Andrews. The latter—whether he is usurer or steward—is characterized as a miser by the three pins he carries in his left sleeve (269-270).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1
Dobson, Austin. William Hogarth. (1907)
The first of the series represents the signing of the marriage contract. The scene, as the artist is careful to signify by the ostentatious coronets on the furniture and accessories (they are to be detected even on the crutches), is laid in the house of an earl, who, with his gouty foot, swathed in flannels, seems with a superb—if somewhat stiff-jointed—dignity to be addressing certain pompous observations respecting himself and his pedigree (dating from William the Conqueror) to a sober-looking personage opposite, who, horn-speactacles on nose is peering at the endorsement of the “Marriage Settlemt of the Rt Honble. Lord Viscount (Squanderfield).” This second figure, which is that of a London merchant, with its turned-in toes, the point of the sword-sheath between the legs, and the awkward constraint of its attitude, forms an admirable contrast to the other. A massive gold chain denotes the wearer to be an alderman. Between the two is a third person, perhaps the merchant’s confidential clerk or cashier, who holds out a “Mortgage” to the earl. Gold and notes lie upon the table, where also an inkstand, sealing-wax, and a lighted candle in which a “thief” is conspicuous. At the back of this trio is the happy couple—the earl’s son and the alderman’s daughter. It is in fact an alliance of sacs et parchemins, in which the young people are rather involved than interested. The lady, who looks young and pretty, wears a mingled expression of shyness and distaste for her position, and trifles listlessly with a ring, which she has strung upon her handkerchief, while a brisk and well built young lawyer, who trims a quill, bends towards her with a whispered compliment. Meanwhile the Viscount—a frail, effeminate-looking figure, holding an open snuff-box, from which he affectedly lifts a pinch—turns from his companion with a smirk of complacent foppery towards a pier-glass at his side. His wide-cuffed coat is light-blue; his vest is loaded with embroidery. He wears an enormous solitaire, and has high red heels to his shoes. Before him, in happy parody of the ill-matched pair, are two dogs in coupling-links:--the bitch sits up, alert and attentive, her companion is lying down. The only figure is that of an old lawyer, who, with a plan in his hand, and a gesture of contempt or wonder, looks through an open window at a partly-erected and apparently ill-designed building, in front of which several idle servants are lounging or sitting. Like Pope’s “Visto,” the earl has a “taste,” and his taste—interrupted for the moment by the lack of pence—is the ruinous one of bricks and mortar.
The pictures on the wall exemplify and satirise the fashion of the time. The largest is a portrait in the French style of one of the earl’s ancestors, who traverses the canvas triumphantly. A cannon exploded below him, a comet is seen above; and in his right hand, nothwithstanding his cuirass and voluminous Queen-Anne peruke, he brandishes the thunderbolt of Jupiter. Judith and Holofernes, St. Sebastian, The Murder of Abel, David and Goliath, the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, are some of the rest, all of which, it is perhaps needless to note, belong to those “dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental,” against which, we have already heard the painter inveigh. Upon the ceiling, with a nice sense of decorative fitness, is Pharaoh in the Red Sea. From a sconce at the side of Gorgon surveys the proceedings with astonishment. Hogarth has used a similar idea in the Strolling Actresses, where the same mask seems horror-stricken at the airy freedom of the lightly-clad lady who there enacts the parts of Diana.
In the picture of the Contract, the young couple and “Counsellor Silvertongue,” as he has been styled by the artist (See this name prefixed to his “Last Dying Speech” on the floor in the final picture.), are placed in close proximity. These are the real actors in the drama. Building sepulchri immemor, the old earl had but a few months to live. Henceforth he is seen no more; and the alderman reappears only at the close of the story (72-74).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1
Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth: His Life, Art and Times. (1971)
In Plate 1 the girl, placed between the count and the lawyer, chooses the lawyer; and the count, standing between the girl and his own image in the mirror, chooses the latter; but the essential choices were made and fixed by their parents when this particular bride and groom were joined together. Unlike the earlier series, this one makes a more despairing comment on society—and specifically high society—than on the individual. Before, the individual was condemned for having made the wrong or inappropriate choice, for having been seduced by society into imitating fashion; as society was also condemned for having seduced and then exploited her. In Marriage à la Mode, one feels that the two protagonists were destined from the start to become what they are, formed by their parents and their respective societies (vol. 1 484).
The structure of the scenes is again a triangular arrangement of people: in 1, the earl, the merchant, and the usurer make one group, and Silvertongue, the groom, and the bride another. The first pivots on the usurer, the second on the bride, suggesting a parallel in the relationships. In the last plate the bride has become the dying countess flanked by her baby and the merchant her father, who is removing from her finger the wedding ring she was playing with in Plate 1 (vol. 1 485).
The first shows the earl’s quarters with the old masters he collects, pictures of cruelty and compulsion from which his present act of compulsion naturally follows, his portrait of himself as Jupiter furens, and his coronet stamped on everything he owns. . . . Here art has become an integral part of Hogarth’s subject matter: it is here for itself, a comment on itself, and also on its owners and on the actions that go on before it. In no other series is the note so insistent . . . it dominates every room, every plate. The old masters have come to represent the evil that is the subject of their series: not aspiration, but the constriction of old, dead customs and ideals embodied in bad art. Both biblical and classical, this art holds up seduction, rape, compulsion, torture, and murder as the ideal, and the fathers act accordingly and force these stereotypes on their children (vol. 1 488-489).
The trends toward art as theme and reader as active participant are further underlined by the importance placed on viewing. In Plate 1, the Medusa looks down in horror on the scene (vol. 1 489).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1
Paulson, Ronald. Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth. (1979)
Hogarth draws upon the structure of the signboard’s aristocratic alternative, the escutcheon. The first scene of Marriage à la Mode (1745) parodies both the coat of arms and the group portrait of the aristocratic family. The family tree itself is present, emerging from William the Conqueror’s entrails, and laid out in terms of the crazy family relationships of the earl’s stock and the stock of the rich merchant who is bartering his daughter. As “supporters,” the earl and his heir frame the merchant and his daughter, who in heraldic terms make a quartering of the earl’s shield; and the earl’s own armorial markings—a gouty foot and his coronet—reappear in the sore on his son’s neck and the stamp on all the objects in his possession (including a pair of dogs, chained together like the young couple) (42-43).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1
Uglow, Jenny. Hogarth: A Life and a World. (1997)
And although took up the barter of money and title, his young couple do not even choose for themselves. In the first scene they are about to be yoked with as little say in the matter as the dogs chained together on the floor. Seated back to back, they are entirely uninterested in each other. The simpering, snuff-taking groom, Viscount Squanderfield, tosses back his head and perks himself up on his high-heels to gaze lovingly at his own reflection; his bride droops listlessly in white satin embroidered with gold, threading her muslin scarf through the constricting hoop of her gold ring. Her very show of feeling, compared to his worldly cool, betrays her lower class. In more ways than marriage, their fate is decided. His black beauty patch may shield a syphilitic sore; her dismay is soothed by the whispering barrister, Silvertongue.
The actual deal is being done between their fathers. The Alderman, in red broadcloth with a sheriff’s gold chain peers through half-raised spectacles and clutches the marriage settlement. The arrogant Earl is as desperate for cash as the merchant for status, having spent all his money on French paintings and grandiose building schemes, like the half-built Palladian mansion outside his window. He will recoup a lot from this marriage; in front of him notes and coins are piled high and a lean usurer is proffering him the mortgage, now redeemed; in return he offers his lineage, the great scroll of his family tree descending straight from 'William, Duke of Nomandye'. He can afford to lean back grandly in his brocade and fine lace, resting his gouty foot on the coroneted stool.
Among the Quality, parents had long assumed control over their children's marriages, their objective being financial or social aggrandizement. Critics had attacked this for years, stressing the feelings of the prospective partners, but cynics like Lord Lyttleton could still say quite straightforwardly that
'after all that sentimental talkers and sentimental writers may produce on the subject, marriage must be considered as a species of traffic, and as much a matter of commerce as any commodity that fills the warehouse of a merchant... One marries for connections, another for wealth, a third from lust, a fourth to have an heir, to oblige his parents, and so on'.
For high-spending aristocrats the motive was usually money Hervey put it pungently, explaining the advice he gave a friend in 1735, that the first thing to be considered was fortune:
'I never said, if one knew anything very bad of any woman's temper or morals, that money on one scale ought to be looked upon as a balance to any qualities you could put into the other (nor was that the case). But I did say, and continue to say, that the fortune may be a certainty; and that for the rest you must take your chance, for there is no getting a wife bespoke - you must take her ready made.'
Money was the surer bet
'in the fortune you may know to a farthing what your wife will be worth: and in the merit, as there is no touchstone for that ore but experience, you may marry pinchbeck for gold' (374-376).
Hogarth's wit had never been so assured. Each scene had a different kind of humour. The marriage contract, like the opening of a comedy of manners, introduced formal contrasts of class; the bourgeois and the aristocrat conform to convention - the Alderman stooping, feet wide apart, the Earl lying back with a pseudo-Watteauesque grace (381).
All of the paintings in the first scene, apart from the Earl’s portrait, are of violent biblical deaths and martyrdoms, mostly based on Titian; Prometheus being gnawed by the vulture; Judith and Holofernes, St. Sebastian, David and Goliath, the Slaughter of the Innocents, Cain and Abel, St. Lawrence on his gridiron. This is doubtless how the Earl feels as his creditors descend, but it is a gloomy chorus for a wedding contract (385-386).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1
Quennell, Peter. Hogarth’s Progress. (1955)
If A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress bear some resemblance to morality plays—enlivened, of course, by fascinating modern details—Marriage-à-la-Mode has many of the qualifications of true poetic tragedy. Its protagonists are not merely the victims of a well-established copybook code: we watch them growing, changing, gradually deteriorating, brought low by passions and weaknesses inherent in their separate natures. Two characters so ill-equipped and ill-matched as the unhappy Earl and Countess must eventually come into disastrous collision, and the origins of the inevitable clash lie both in themselves as they naturally are and in what society makes them to be. Society is at work when the curtain rises; for this is the Betrothal Scene. A marriage has been arranged, and will shortly take place, between the daughter of a rich City merchant and the heir to an ancient but impoverished earldom. Their fathers compete in arrogance; and, while the old Earl, with crutch and gout-stool, expatiates on his pedigree, the square-toed merchant, resolutely unimpressed though somewhat hampered by his unaccustomed sword, assumes his spectacles to scrutinise the financial provisions of the marriage settlement. The future bridegroom ogles his reflection in the glass; and the girl, who has recently been crying, fiddles with the engagement ring which she has threaded on her handkerchief, as she listens to the murmured advice of a sleek young lawyer, Counsellor Silvertongue. Evidently they have an understanding: perhaps they are already lovers. The old Earl is a man of taste; and his unfinished Palladian residence—designed for him, no doubt, by William Kent, or even by Lord Burlington—can be distinguished through the open window (171-172).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1
Lichtenberg, G. Ch. Lichtenberg’s Commentaries on Hogarth’s Engravings. (1784-1796). Translated from the German by Innes and Gustav Herdan (1966)
In the first Plate we see, in a richly and heavily furnished drawing-room, two portly gentlemen sitting opposite each other at a silver-plated table. The one somewhat old and palsied, the other still robust—in sound health, at least. One is His Grace the Earl of Squanderfield, a man of publicly attested blood and safely established honour; the other honourable merely in money and credit, an alderman and, to judge from his golden chain, a Sheriff at that time of the City of London, and so honourable at least pro nunc. They appear to be occupied either in concluding an agreement or in executing one they have already concluded; the occasion and the mutual relation of the parties are something like this. His Grace, though one would hardly believe it to look at him, is just as bankrupt as he is gouty, and his financial potency is, if anything, rather less than his physical. In contrast to him, the honourable gentleman is just as title-seeking as he is wealthy, and yet in the veins and arteries of his family all is as miserably middle-class as his coffers are princely. The former, therefore, is prospecting for the citizen's money to fill an empty, high-titled purse, and the latter for aristocratic blood with which to infuse his middle-class veins. Since the need on both sides is urgent, an agreement is speedily reached, and on the following terms. The Earl will transfer to the merchant's family a portion of his precious aristocratic blood in the person of his first- born, his Grace the Lord Viscount Squanderfield. In exchange, that family will open up its strong boxes to his Lordship, and hand over the daughter and sole heir to the immense fortune on condition that the above-mentioned Lord Viscount Squanderfield will perform, execute and complete in a legal way the inoculation of the aristocratic blood on the said girl of the merchant's family. All this is here given under seal. For the purpose of sealing it literally, a lighted candle burns on the table. Some imagine they notice a so-called “thief” on the candle, which would be an evil omen for the marriage lines. So much is certain, in any case, the candle is melting and omens of weakness are no good in matters like these.
The group at the little silver table is well worth a closer examination. The alderman as he sits there is tense, attentive and preoccupied. His less do not even seem aware that he is sitting: the shins inclined somewhat beyond the vertical, as if ready for a jump, the feet parallel, the stout shoes with their coarse Stock Exchange soles planted as firmly as his credit His Lordship s legs are also firm, if not in a fix—alas and alack!— just like his credit. The right, though not yet wholly in the grave, is deeply bowed m sackcloth and ashes, and the left peeps miserably through the lattice of its lazaret. That the latter looks fairly presentable is merely through the contrast with its suffering brother.
The alderman peruses the heading of the marriage contract with a concentration which his Lordship is unlikely to have devoted to its contents. This type of attentive reading is not learned in books nor from books but only through the enjoyment of great ideas—in bills of exchange. But perhaps there is in this attentiveness something more than mere caution It may at least be possible. Think of the beautiful Gothic script of the English calligraphers, and of the golden words written in that beautiful hand: The Right Honble Lord Viscount, and foresee in this Viscount the future son-in-law and in the son-in-law the future Earl, and in the Earl the inevitable Lord in the House of Lords with all his right and might until the end of the world. Indeed, if such a prospect could not bewitch the eye of a proud alderman, what in all the world could? He has, no doubt pondered all that often enough, but he sees it here for the first time written out in such heraldic magnificence and in morally ineradicable script. Beside him stands, hat under arm, his old, devoted clerk, desiccated by sixty years of service in his counting-house. It is he who executes the contract, and hands over to the old Earl in the name of his master what is known in this house as 'the alderman's daughter'. It is he who, so to speak, performs the marriage ceremony. It would certainly require much philosophy to look upon the table where that marriage ceremony is proceeding without some secret agitation. Bank notes with highly significant rows of noughts, as if adorned with pearls, are lying there on heaps of guineas, and similar embroidery is to follow. And yet these are, as is generally the case with the visible charms on such occasions, only accessory items. Just in front of the old man lie yet more purses which deserve special attention, just because one cannot tell how much is in them. However, the most secret and therefore the most important item in the whole collection is obviously the document with the title 'Mortgage'. I come to this conclusion because even the accountant, with good-natured curiosity, seems anxious to observe the impression which such an unexpected blessing will make upon his Lordship. For in all probability it is an IOU which the alderman is returning, and through which a part of his Grace's patrimonial estate had till now been held in captivity. 'Here, my Lord, take back your estate,' says the old man. The gift is extensive, and from the manner in which it is offered, there is something about it which is not quite in the nature of a commercial transaction. This is also felt very clearly on the part of the aristocracy; the dowry is grasped immediately and without loss of time so as to send the pack of commoners quickly back behind their natural frontiers. 'All right!' says the Earl, 'that is what your girl brings to our house, and this which pulses under here [pointing to the fifth waistcoat button], my blood, and here [pointing to the family tree], this cedar of Lebanon, my 700-year-old title, these are what my first-born son is bringing into your plebeian establishment.' In order to feel fully the immense excess weight of these words over the deed, we must consider the oriental pomp which accompanied their pronouncement, and upon which we should like to comment here only so far as it immediately concerns this group.
The old Earl is seen sitting immediately beneath a state-and-audience canopy, with an Earl's coronet not actually upon his wig, to be sure, but on the canopy; garbed in lofty, golden, heraldic splendour, and as if he were himself a sort of magnificent coat-of-arms, with two crutches as his shield-bearers. Each crutch is stamped with the emblem of the coronet. At the present moment he does not need them. The responsibility for his support has been taken over at the other end by one of the finest private thrones which gout has ever ascended on a festival day. The sick credit leg is upheld by a stool which even the most delicate fragility would not disdain to accept as support for temple or brow, and this stool also bears for its services the golden coronet. Near it lies William the Conqueror with his coat-of-mail, shield and sword, admiring the noble fruits of his 700-year-old-tree, on each branch of which hangs the golden ornament of the coronet. Poor alderman! What is now the jingle of your temporal purse compared with that magnificence and the trumpet sound of an ancestral glory almost a thousand years old? That family tree is really no great comfort to the alderman. With his spectacles on, at least, he should not come too near it. For if I see aright, the noble Norman has with his sword hewn down a branch because that branch bore a coronet which had married a non-coronet. The little branch with its mildew could not remain on the tree of aristocratic knowledge which had struck its roots right down into the entrails of William the Conqueror. That the black zero which we see falling denotes an unaristocratic zero is almost certain, but whether a tradesman's daughter or a valet's or a footman's is not revealed.
Behind the alderman, in quite a charming nook, sit the two lovers themselves—in natura. It is not altogether easy to describe how they are sitting. That their hearts are not turned to one another is pretty certain, or else the hearts would have to be differently situated in them than in other people. To express it by way of a simile is not easy either, at least not in any of the usual comparisons used in marriage songs. One could not think here of turtle doves and their billing and cooing, for instance, for who in all the world would bill and coo in that position? Perhaps the most fitting simile would be to say that the bridegroom is sitting beside the bride like a sick angora rabbit beside a hot lady hedgehog. He with the light and fire of his eyes already dimmed, and with a bon ton plaster behind the ear that speaks volumes, takes a pinch of snuff with superfine elegance. His hardly perceptible smile is a smile of the most empty self-approbation accompanied by extreme indolence of body and soul. What keeps him going is perhaps a half-jealous attention to a small whisper, to which we shall ourselves listen anon. He sits—yes, he does—but no matter what with and whereupon, so much at least is certain—he sits miserably. His feet too, just as his father's, are eloquent about credit. Even while he sits they raise themselves upon the toes, probably to diminish as much as possible somewhere in a higher region the point of contact between seat and sit-upon. His face is turned towards the mirror, but only because the mirror hangs on the side where his bride is not. With the mirror itself he is not concerned. All he could see there would be, at the utmost, a little of the silver embroidery on his magnificent sleeve. For it is a catoptric impossibility that, as Mr Ireland thinks, he could see himself in the mirror or could watch his bride in it. It gives one quite a queer feeling if one compares this fragile marzipan puppet with the iron Norman there whom it takes for its ancestor. And if the courageous, fiery, ambitious and any- thing but soft-hearted William with his sword had been here in person the safest little nook in the room for his Grace, provided he had his jumping legs with him, would have been near the window.
Now for the bride! Gracious Hymen, what are you doing here? And how was it possible to contemplate such a match? Just look at them. If we deduct the trivial item (the only point on which the two good people are still m agreement) that they both, as one can see, hate each other like the devil, they most emphatically differ in every other particular. It is too bad! As for the commercial transaction which is proceeding at the silver table with purses and family trees, all that is acceptable but--as to the performance of the contract in naturalibus there on the settee, it is too bad for words. Just consider: he with the slender, weak, but refined remnant of flesh and blood, which he has precariously saved from the fire, posed in the most beautiful of Hogarth's lines of beauty; she still sound, but in an attitude à dos d’âne, and bent over like a sawing-jack, which even her clothing cannot conceal. His arm, how gently propped up! And the hands how light y poised! Antinous and Adonis, if they had ever wanted to take snuff, could not have done it more charmingly. Hers, bent in parallel angles, hang down like lame hooks on an old bag which have lost their eyelets. He dallies with the snuff-box and the snuff and, in this way, at least three-quarters of the purpose of these toys are fulfilled; she, on the other hand, dallies with the wedding-ring, through which she has drawn her fine, soft handkerchief, and which she twirls and flings and will probably— fling away.
The wedding ring is to her just a pinch of snuff which she has taken this morning for her honour's sake and which, since it was not to her taste, she will get rid of at the first opportunity. Some people want to find a deeper meaning in the toys of these two lovers. That may be, but there may also be nothing more to them. I, at least, do not wish to put deep meanings into toys. His mien, how sweet! Somewhat languid of course, but gentle; with some traces of debauchery but of good breeding, too But hers! God save and protect everybody from such an ornament on their own shoulders, or on that of their future domestic honour. It would not do even as a figurehead on the family sledge. It would hardly be possible to draw a female creature looking less womanly. Uglier, perhaps, but in so few strokes, hardly more malicious, pig-headed, stubborn and yet sly. Indeed, the contrast in this couple goes very deep; it is not only concerned with head and heart, it extends even to parts which, especially when mankind goes on all fours (which no doubt will happen again in the not-too-distant future), are as distant as possible from head and heart I mean the good people are not even sitting, or sitting down, the one like the other. The bridegroom, does he not float above his chair, light as the God of Spring over the silver gossamer of a mist of dew? The bride on the other hand, is she not sitting there exactly in the attitude of a 'Boots' who is trying to close the lid of an over-filled trunk by means of a few rough, final hits with his behind? He sits, or seems to sit, as if he were afraid of needles on the seat; she just the opposite, as if she noticed in it an emptiness to be filled, and there are such seats in the world.
On her right sits the man to whom she is to give her right hand in marriage, and on her left stands another, a young, virile, matrimonial adviser who is in fact about to execute with her a similar proceeding for his own person, but in a left-handed way. The fox is aware that everything on the right appears to the bride as not quite right, and he begins an exposition forthwith on the left, not of that for which he sharpens his pen but of that for which she pricks up her ears. The young man is not a clergyman, as many Germans would perhaps conclude from his black gown and his collar, but a lawyer, a sort of solicitor and attorney In England, indeed, both higher faculties are constantly in mourning when on duty, whereas the faculty of medicine, for which that colour would perhaps, be most appropriate, wears all the colours of the rainbow, just as in Germany. From the title of a speech of his which appeared in print, and of which we shall have something more to say below, we learn that his name is Silvertongue. And indeed he must be whispering something very silvery, since he succeeds in inducing such attentiveness in that owl as can be inferred from the tension throughout the length of her neck and back, and all while sharpening his pen. That she accompanies this attentive- ness, which comes right from the depths of that spoilt creature, with the coarsest expression of vulgar indignation, is, it seems to me, an excellent touch of Hogarth's; for here he no longer characterizes the lady, and still less the mere creature of nature, but human vulgarity, be the fault whose it may. Has the father perhaps risen from fishmongering? As to the legal collar of our solicitor, I must draw attention to the fact that he does not wear that decoration throughout the story, but shortly before its end the Law presents him with another one, and with great solemnity.
This small scene on the settee contains the seed out of which our artist with the utmost subtlety develops the whole tale. Here glimmers the spark which by and by becomes the glow and finally the blaze through which the whole structure collapses. Hogarth, therefore, lays particular stress on it and explains what may still be obscure with a few excellent touches from the inexhaustible treasure-chest of his symbolic language. On the floor immediately in front of the young lord, the settee group is mirrored in the history of the two retainers belonging to the family's hunting establishment. They are a hound and a bitch. The hound, ennobled to some extent by a coronet on its side, is already somewhat aged, somewhat broken down, and somewhat weary. The bitch, a simple commoner, but fast and lively, has no inclination to sleep, at least not when he sleeps with whom she is united by the coarse chain around their necks. The little beast looks round quite greedily for something, most likely for a solicitor. The black spot on the hound's ear is not a bon ton plaster. On the wall above the settee Hogarth has placed a candelabra. The arms holding the candles are twined round one another (also a betrothal), but the two candles themselves bum just as little as the two hearts beneath. Or do the candles point more to the left wing where the solicitor is in command? This seems to me more likely, because both are still fresh and unlit, and because the one arm of the candelabra really comes from the side and against all laws of symmetry entwines itself with the main arm. Had Hogarth intended to point to the right wing, then it probably would have held a burnt down stump. They are not yet burning, but are quite ready to do so. To light them, only night is needed, which will come.
Before the open window stands yet another mourner of the second Faculty. He seems to be of somewhat higher rank than him of the left wing, first because he does less, and, secondly, because he really wears upon his head, the golden fleece of the English Themis. For nobody wears that fur who has not already stowed flesh and fowl safely in his larder. In his left hand he holds the plan of the old Earl's new palace, and compares the design with the execution. He works himself into such a state of admiring astonishment over this that his lower jaw and nose, which in his face are usually close neighbours, fall apart, and so do the five fingers of his right hand. If his admiration is not hypocritical, so much is certain, it is not that of an art connoisseur, but only that of a lawyer, for the building is abominable. The upper columns do not meet the lower ones; the column bases are round, fluted blocks; the basement windows are triangular; beside the main entrance lies a dark coach-house which admits some doubtful light through a round hole, and has an arched entrance cut so low that coachmen and carriages, when entering, could not possibly escape being cut off too. And so it goes on. But to reveal the old gentleman's lack of taste, his stupidity and mad squandering is not the sole reason why the artist has raised the window. There is no money there, he wants to tell us: a scaffolding and no workmen, the building has come to a standstill; nay, it almost seems as if here and there time had already started to break off parts of the scaffolding. Those swarms of people in the courtyard are not workmen, but either idlers from this establishment (superfluous servants) or the servants of other gentry who have come to look at the building and poke fun at it, and all this in honour of the descendant of William the Conqueror.
Just as the interpreter of these Plates was about to address himself to the collection of paintings in the room, he realized that with the guinea which lies there half covered with dust—the gratuity-box of the servants —the same had happened to him as to the three match-makers at the table with the chinking original itself. He had almost forgotten it over all the other treasures in that picture which are waiting to be discovered. The oversight was advantageous this time: it contains in itself the best object lesson, and therefore, at least to the gentle reader, the best excuse.
On the walls hang pictures which, apart from their diversity in other respects, are all terrifying portrayals of temporal misfortunes: war, murder, torture, inundation, pestilence, famine, cannon and comets everywhere, and all that in a betrothal chamber. Really! If Henry IV before his betrothal had consulted the coffee grounds, and the gipsy had shown him such a picture gallery in them, the famous massacre of St Bartholomew would certainly not have come to pass. Here, however, nobody seems to notice any bad omen, and so this Blood-marriage takes its course un-disturbed. We need only look and see.
Just above the bridegroom's head, they are racking Saint Laurence on his wedding-bed, the grill. Oh! if only you would give this a thought, poor Lorenzo with your snuff-box down there! On the opposite side, Cain and Abel warn Mr Silvertongue of fratricide. Above the holy Laurence, the story of Herod, the September briseur of Bethlehem, points to infanticide, and opposite it, Prometheus, the fire-thief, has his liver gnawed by the vulture of remorse. On the other wall there stretches a huge Goliath, his body on the Eastern and his right leg on the Western side of a hill, whence the boulder of his head is shortly to roll down. Underneath it, another head is rolling already, the head of Holofernes into the work basket of his faithful Judith; and beside that, poor Saint Sebastien receives the arrows in his breast. Thus, there is blood enough here. As to blood, it will in fact be forthcoming, also some similarities with the stories themselves may be found with some ingenuity of interpretation, everything in short—except the Saints.
We must ask the reader to give a little attention to the man whose portrait on the wall there occupies the space of four murder stories. It is a family hero, and whoever cares to see wind, storm and thunder without hearing them, should pause before this picture. The hero in a sort of wig which, despite the many recent advances in meteorology, would still, and rightly, be regarded as belonging among the thunder clouds, is in the midst of the turmoil of battle. That he stands at the head of his army is certain, but where that head is, whether in front or behind or on the side, has not been clearly indicated by the painter, following the manner of journalists. With a mien full of self-approval, he surveys the rich harvest of victory, and is just casting his eye to the side where the most successful harvester stands. His right hand has, with mercy and compassion, transferred the lightning to his left, where it plays peacefully with the Brussels lace of his ruffle. The right rests without weapon on his iron hip. Forty to fifty yards of drapery flutter around him, and full against the gale which is blowing on to it from three pairs of inflated cherubs' cheeks. The hero has thus his own wind. However, part of the external gale seizes the main tail of our hero's wig, and lifts it fearfully. He stands there inspiring awe, and could even defy that comet's tail which is hovering above him, considering how nearly related such omens are. Below, a cannon goes off right under the hero's cloak, almost as if the explosion emanated from his trouser pocket. His pocket pistols are to the cannon, as his pigtail to the comet tail. How magnificent! The cannon-ball seems to have been copied by the artist ad vivum in a favourable moment. That it appears somewhat small must be forgiven him because of the speed with which such objects must usually be observed. Around the whole portrait is a magnificent frame of gilded woodwork, which is decorated above with a grotesque carving, something between a tiger and a monkey. The picture on the ceiling is a seascape: Pharaoh with his army depicted just at the moment when his chariot up there, above the solicitor, takes to the water. As a counterpart, the Ptolemaic system of the stars on the carpet seems quite appropriate; considering the topsy-turvy domestic arrangements. Thus, in a way, the whole betrothal is proceeding at the bottom of the Red Sea, and something of the sort could really have materialized here if all that blood represented on the walls had actually flowed, or if it had started the stream to which the comet's tail points so ominously.
Finally, a small calculation: the Earl's coat-of-arms appears here definitely nine times and probably eleven. Once upon the canopy, twice on the crutches, once on the stool, once on the alderman's chair, once above the family Medusa on the candelabra, once above the mirror, once under the mirror table and once upon the sleeping hound. The two probable ones are: one hidden by the old Earl's wig, and the other hidden by the hair-bag of the young Viscount, on the backs of their chairs. Our honour as commentator forbids us to complete the dozen with a third probable on the bitch, for we are determined to believe that this lively animal was only a commoner. On the family tree, the coat-of-arms may well appear a further fourteen times. Such a thing really looks like omnipresence.
For the benefit of the owners of the original engravings, we should like to mention that in our reproduction, through our having intentionally omitted to reverse right and left, everything is now restored to how it stood in the original painting. The solicitor again sharpens his pen with the right hand; the hero carries his sword once more on the left side, and the old Earl again puts his right hand upon his heart. I believe that this translation of the English engraving back into the primitive good manners of the painting is not entirely without merit. What man of breeding would, by way of assurance, put his left hand on his heart? If his intentions are not honest, then, of course, he cannot expect the world to say in the end that he had meant everything honestly; but this at least, it seems to me, a man of breeding may ask: that if he cheats, the world should say that he has cheated with dignity (84-94).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1
Trusler, Rev. J. and E.F. Roberts. The Complete Works of William Hogarth. (1800)
The kindly and generous-hearted Richard Steele—whom we have often left slightly flushed with claret at Button’s—has much to say about goodness and the gentleness of woman. He has just sent home a pretty note to his fair wife, who is so fond of him as to be fearfully jealous of any of her sex who shall presume to set her cap at the gallant literary guardsman who rode in Coote’s company, and who fuddled himself at Hampstead or Hendon indiscriminately, writing a guinea leader, send hurriedly to town, in order to pay his score. The Right Hon. Joseph Addison was also, not reticent in his praise of feminine beauty and truthfulness in his renowned Spectator; so that I have little to add to their testimony, save that both were right; and, alas! also, both were oft-times wrong.
When Plato was pleased to state, that “beauty was virtue in flower,” he did not know the sex—quite. When he added, as a codicil, let us say “that a beautiful exterior is a synonym of that internal and perennial beauty, which grows by what it feeds on;” which is to say, that is becomes, day by day, more fragrant in its worth and excellent, he was in error: as the following example will prove.
In a handsome and commodious room of one of those noble and old city house which are still to be found bordering the Thames, its chambers decorated with rare tapestries, quaint vases, and other monstrosities of the Celestial land, abundantly augmented by other tropic collections brought from far climes by the ships of the thriving merchant, Sir Mammon Flighty—who has just but laid down his robes of mayoralty, and vacated the honourable chair, on which many good and some few indifferent men had sat—were two females—the young, young, blooming, and beautiful, but with an air so conscious of the same, that it marred the ingenuous grace by which youth and loveliness are so far assimilated, that their united charms become irresistible to any impressionable heart. The second was her feminine attendant, of whom more anon.
First, then, for Mistress Prudence Flighty, otherwise Miss “Prue,” that pretty diminutive assimilating so well with her girlish face, that the lips pronounced it naturally.
She was about seventeen years of age, almost a golden blonde, and “fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.” One that smooth, unruffled brow, so white, so pure, no care seemed to have sat hitherto. The silken fringe of her lambent eyes gave piquancy to their restless flash and sparkle; and the faint rose-blush on either cheek, and the vermeil of her somewhat full lips, added to a certain half-languid, half-voluptuous air, that sat upon her freely-developed form with an equal grace.
Nevertheless, any one accustomed to the influence of the beautiful, would have hesitated, after a brief study, in assenting to the first impression made. It would have recoiled in dissatisfaction at the result arrived at. There might be detected an undercurrent of petulance—not unusual in the sex—a want of firmness, a susceptibility to flattery, a desire to awaken admiration, and an amount of self-love, likely to prove fatal to her best interests, if opportunity should ever bring her into contact with temptation.
Such was Miss Prudence Flighty, as, seated in her chair before her glass, she resigned her beautiful silken hair to the skillful manipulation of her handmaiden, Mistress Abigail Taffetas, and seemed, by the complacent smile playing on her sunny face, to be lost for awhile in some pleasant reverie, on which she dwelt with a delight that had in no alloy of pain or care.
Mistress Abigail was an excellent specimen of her class, cunning, shrewd, and perfidious—entering upon intrigue with professional gusto; at once pretty and pert, and arrived at that age of discretion when a woman's wits are more than a match for the quickest intellectual powers of man-as thorough a go-between as the most experienced duenna. She was, perhaps, as dangerous a creature to be the companion of a young impulsive, and ingenuous girl, as it is possible to conceive; not that Miss Prue was wanting in mother wit herself. Far from it: to her female instincts was added a certain consciousness allied to precocity, which made her know that she was looked upon as a desirable alliance by numbers of the gallant city youth; while, during her father’s mayoralty, she had been to court, had visited Ranelagh Gardens, had played basset at the house of a countess in May Fair, and had certain notions of high-life, and of west-end splendour, not quite compatible with the limited desires dictated by common usages, an by common sense, to the daughter of a city trader.
For between the fine gentleman of the day—who frequented White's, lounged at the chocolate houses, who drank his claret at Pontack’s after a récherché dinner at the ordinary—and the city merchant, whose warehouse, offices, and house were mostly beneath the same roof, who seldom came westward of Temple Bar, save when a civic deputation went to the houses of parliament, or waited upon her majesty—imperial "Anna," lauded in loyal toast, and made musical in song—there lay a difference scarcely possible to realise; and there was a distinction to be confounded and absorbed in aftertime by that aristocracy of wealth, which would bridge over gulphs and social inequalities far keeper and wider than those we have known to exist hitherto.
She was thinking—thinking—and well, perhaps, she might.
"Make haste, Taffetas, thou dilatory wench! haste, I say. I shall have my father send and beat at the door like a drum, for thou knowest he hath but small patience."
"And, truly, I know of some others that have just as little," said Mistress Taffeta a little tartly, “though, on my troth, there may be reason for't."
"And what may be the reason, as you put it, mistress?" demanded the young lady turning upon her attendant with a heightened colour.
"Mercy defend us! Miss Prue, sure I meant no harm." “
“No, I'll be sworn thou dost not; but I trust thee not a jot the more. Hast thou any of those pretty three-cornered explosions—crackers and fireworks—in scented paper, thou aren’t won’t to have thy pockets lined with, Taffetas, and thou know'st it—which thou does so bountifully bestrew my path with? Come, speak out."
“No, I ha’nt,” replied the chambermaid, a little sulkily; for badinage from a young person not yet out of her teens, and still possessing a relish for bread-and-butter, to a woman of her experience, was a little more than Mistress Abigail Taffetas was inclined to put up with.
“No, I hadn’t,” said she, “and, if I had—“
“And if thou had'st—what then ?" saucily demanded her young mistress.
“Why I should take a better opportunity—when I found your ladyship in a better temper.”
“My ‘ladyship’ indeed!" laughed the other, "Now, I see, thou'rt angry with me—nay, don’t deny it pry’thee. There's my bombazine sacque, thou shalt have that to make amends! Heighho! truly, my father's in the right."
“Thanks, Miss Prue, for the dress,” says Mistress Abigail, making a low curtsey, for service, Lord knows, is no inheritance, but, as for your father, I thank my stars he is none of mine.”
“Truly,” retorts Miss Prue, with a malicious smile, “I don't doubt but there's room to be thankful o’sides. But, oh! Taffetas, Taffetas—" and the lovely girl clasped her hands with a delighted look, such as might have been raised by the recollection of a past pleasure.
“Well, what now?" asked Taffetas, “another conquest at Fox Hall, last night?"
“Oh, Taffetas, it's so pure and exquisite.—Oh, he's a beautiful man—"
“He is—who is?” demanded Mistress Taffetas, in a tone of injury, for she looked on the fact of her mistress making a male acquaintance as an infringement of her own rights and as poaching on her own manor, for Mistress Taffetas had no mean opinion other skill, and was tenacious of those rights which decayed gentlewomen in her office arrogated to themselves.
“He? who?--why Master Silvertongue, to be sure," replied Mistress Prue, clapping her hands, and laughing just as the wily Mistress Abigail Taffetas put the last finish to the silken hairs?
“Well, then I can tell him that his nose will be soon put out of joint," retorted Mistress Tafetta with a flushed face. "Marry, his crowns are few enough; and as for his trinkets—poof!” and she made a contemptuous gesture, significant of the value which the demure gentlewoman put upon them.
“What dost thou mean?" asked Miss Prue, a little put out by this outbreak on the part of one she must be in some degree necessarily dependent upon.
“Why ha’nt you heard the news?" asked Mistress Taffetas.
“The news!—no,” replied the young lady, with a look of astonishment, so real, that even her attendant, who believed in nothing, was compelled to have faith in.
“Oh, the fathers! why here's a great lord—a pure splendid nobleman come a-wooing of you; and what more--though you should have known it before—your father had ordered his coach, and the grooms, in their new liveries, to go and meet my lord, and sign the contract.”
“What dost thou say—or saying, what dost thou mean ?" asked Miss Prue; this time in real agitation.
"By my troth, I mean what I say; and that's why I have been taking more than usual pains to bedeck you this morning; and, if you do but look in the glass—"
"But is this true—quite true. Taffetas I" inquired the other, breathlessly.
"True as the sun, or I 'm not an honest woman,” at which asseveration Mistress Prue might have shaken her head, had she been so minded, but she did not, and Mistress Abigail continued—" Oh, yes, i' faith it's true, and that's why I said ‘your ladyship,’ just now. It sounds well, does it not?”
“Mighty fine—very well, but that’s not to the purpose," responded Prue, a little absently; "but ‘tis strange he hath not written to me—strange," and a cloud gathered on her fair brow; "not a word! not a line !" and her beautiful head drooped down on her hand, making her the very ideal of the repressed impatience that smiles at a cherished grief.
"And who says he has not written?" asked the waiting-woman, with an air of provoking mystery, as she placed her hand significantly upon her bosom.
"Hast thou got it? provoking wretch! the note! quick!" cried Miss Prue, jumping impatiently out of the chair, and making a rush at her attendant. The other, seeing that what must be done were "best done quickly," drew forth a billet-doux, which the your lady put, to her lips, and kissed rapturously.
"Here's your father in such a fume and pucker," cried Mistress Taffetas, as the sound of voices and the clatter of footsteps were heard on the staircase. "The carriage is waiting and the horses are pawing; and, O gemini! if your father's footmen are not as grand as if they were waiting upon an earl, as very likely they may be afore long."
"Urn—um—um," murmured Miss Prue, who had torn the note open, and was devouring its contents. " Oh, its delightful—all about hearts and darts—and loves and doves; and, oh! what do I see; that he shall meet me to-day—at—at my lord's house; what does all this mean—and who is my lord? Canst read me the riddle, Taffetas?"
"Why, if it be Counsellor Silvertongue, he’s my lord's lawyer, and have drawn up the marriage contrack," says Mistress Abigail, regardless of grammar; "and I think yely were best put on your mantle and hat, and go, or, by my word, we shall have your father storming at the doors, and--"
"Well, I shall see him, at all events," murmured Miss Prue, as the last touch was given, and she descended, rustling as a goddess might be supposed to do, when she alights on earth, and folds her spreading wings.
A contract of marriage had been going on for some time, it may be as well to state, this stage of our proceedings; and only the young people concerned were ignorant of fact that so many were buoying themselves in their interests. While they are driving to their destination, let us clearly understand the problem we are to solve with the assistance of the unapproachable artist.—A Marriage-a-la-Mode!
Yes, verily, a marriage-a-la-mode!
After all, what is a “marriage-a-la-mode?” For in the answer lies the whole pith and of the moral we are to draw from the story we endeavour to relate.
A “marriage-a-la-mode"—a marriage de convénance—is an union of prudence with common sense, that is to say, the selfish prudence that looks on the one hand for such sinews of war as extravagancies have necessitated, and who sees, in a union with lighter of some wealthy plebeian, the source from whence the lordling is to derive the coveted means, and for which he is willing to barter his title and his name.
No heart, no esteem, no community of feeling, no love, are requisite to constitute a marriage-a-la-mode—according to the fashion of the world—and, by the canons of the |world of fashion,—no truth, or any shadow of right feeling. It is a matter of barter, an involves nothing of those dread responsibilities in the future, which the prudent Lord Bacon summed up, under the designation of giving “hostages to fortune.” How to redeem these is quite another thing.
Husband and wife must be polite to each other, or their false taste, and their town-bred habits, will be speedily called in question. They must live a life of polished falsehood other a daily lie—a white one, be it understood, involving no great amount of moral infamy, though the one may lead as lax a life as a Roman pro-consul, and the other have as little womanly character to lose, as she who was of old the shame and the scandal of her sex.
I need not moralise further. This dismal corollary will come out quite soon and quite readily enough in the course of this story. Let us return to Miss Prue Flighty, and follow her through the process of the contract.
Summoned with some noisy impatience by the worthy knight, whose eager desire it was at any cost, to ally his 'ignoble blood with the “blue blood” of the high-born and the lofty, she descended with a strange, half-curious, half-eager throbbing at heart; and entering the coach, followed by Sir Mammon Flighty, was rapidly driven through Fleet Street and Temple Bar, until the vehicle finally stopped before a fine old house westward, and Sir Mammon and his daughter got out, and being received with a considerable amount of ceremony and state, were led by the obsequious menials to the drawing-room, in which were some four or five persons met together already.
First, seated in his chair of state, was my lord—a portly gentleman, on whom good living retaliated by giving him an extra distinction to his aristocratic claims—the gout. Next was the family steward—Old Honesty—with his worn, anxious look; and the family chaplain, the Rev. Agate Pius, in his rusty cassock; and there was the handsome young dog, Silvertongue; ah me! how the tones of his voice thrilled upon the heart of the woman who was already dabbling her feet in the waters of that Dead Sea, which leaved for the present the shores of that pleasant land, that fool’s paradise, wherein awhile for she wandered unheeding; for the moment of waking up the fierce reality, she was doomed to face, had not yet come to her. And, even if she did see the evil looming afar off; it was sufficient that it was so far; and, for the present, at least, she was free from any peril, and, of course, “sufficient for the hour is the evil thereof;” and the morrow, with whatever it may bring, is still—the morrow.
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Bed
Ronald Paulson notes that the “bawd of The Harlot’s Progress has now become the parent,” and this is made evident by the by the presence of the canopy; Lichtenberg calls it a “state-and audience canopy” (86), but it hints at the bedroom, alerting the audience to the sexual component of the transaction taking place.
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Dad
Shesgreen
Across from the Earl the plainly dressed merchant sits stiffly in his chair, his sword sticking out awkwardly from between his legs. The chain on his vest suggests he is an alderman. He scrutinizes the “Marriage Settlemnt of The Rt. Honble. Lord Viscount Squanderfield.” Between the two men stands a thin usurer who accepts the Earl’s newly acquired money (he holds several bags in his hand and some notes marked “£1000”) for a “Mortgage” (51).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Dad
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
Across from the Earl sits the cautious merchant holding the "Marriage Settlemt of the Rt Honble Lord Viscount Squanderfield." The chain he wears suggests that he is a Sheriff of London (269).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Dad
Dobson
This second figure, which is that of a London merchant, with its turned-in toes, the point of the sword-sheath between the legs, and the awkward constraint of its attitude, forms an admirable contrast to the other. A massive gold chain denotes the wearer to be an alderman. Between the two is a third person, perhaps the merchant’s confidential clerk or cashier, who holds out a “Mortgage” to the earl (72-73).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Dad
Quennell
Their fathers compete in arrogance; and, while the old Earl, with crutch and gout-stool, expatiates on his pedigree, the square-toed merchant, resolutely unimpressed though somewhat hampered by his unaccustomed sword, assumes his spectacles to scrutinise the financial provisions of the marriage settlement (172).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Dad
Lichtenberg
In the first Plate we see, in a richly and heavily furnished drawing-room, two portly gentlemen sitting opposite each other at a silver-plated table. The one somewhat old and palsied, the other still robust—in sound health, at least. One is His Grace the Earl of Squanderfield, a man of publicly attested blood and safely established honour; the other honourable merely in money and credit, an alderman and, to judge from his golden chain, a Sheriff at that time of the City of London, and so honourable at least pro nunc. They appear to be occupied either in concluding an agreement or in executing one they have already concluded; the occasion and the mutual relation of the parties are something like this. His Grace, though one would hardly believe it to look at him, is just as bankrupt as he is gouty, and his financial potency is, if anything, rather less than his physical. In contrast to him, the honourable gentleman is just as title-seeking as he is wealthy, and yet in the veins and arteries of his family all is as miserably middle-class as his coffers are princely. The former, therefore, is prospecting for the citizen's money to fill an empty, high-titled purse, and the latter for aristocratic blood with which to infuse his middle-class veins. Since the need on both sides is urgent, an agreement is speedily reached, and on the following terms. The Earl will transfer to the merchant's family a portion of his precious aristocratic blood in the person of his first- born, his Grace the Lord Viscount Squanderfield. In exchange, that family will open up its strong boxes to his Lordship, and hand over the daughter and sole heir to the immense fortune on condition that the above-mentioned Lord Viscount Squanderfield will perform, execute and complete in a legal way the inoculation of the aristocratic blood on the said girl of the merchant's family. All this is here given under seal. For the purpose of sealing it literally, a lighted candle burns on the table. Some imagine they notice a so-called “thief” on the candle, which would be an evil omen for the marriage lines. So much is certain, in any case, the candle is melting and omens of weakness are no good in matters like these.
The alderman as he sits there is tense, attentive and preoccupied. His less do not even seem aware that he is sitting: the shins inclined somewhat beyond the vertical, as if ready for a jump, the feet parallel, the stout shoes with their coarse Stock Exchange soles planted as firmly as his credit His Lordship s legs are also firm, if not in a fix—alas and alack!— just like his credit. The right, though not yet wholly in the grave, is deeply bowed m sackcloth and ashes, and the left peeps miserably through the lattice of its lazaret. That the latter looks fairly presentable is merely through the contrast with its suffering brother. The alderman peruses the heading of the marriage contract with a concentration which his Lordship is unlikely to have devoted to its contents. This type of attentive reading is not learned in books nor from books but only through the enjoyment of great ideas—in bills of exchange. But perhaps there is in this attentiveness something more than mere caution It may at least be possible. Think of the beautiful Gothic script of the English calligraphers, and of the golden words written in that beautiful hand: The Right Honble Lord Viscount, and foresee in this Viscount the future son-in-law and in the son-in-law the future Earl, and in the Earl the inevitable Lord in the House of Lords with all his right and might until the end of the world. Indeed, if such a prospect could not bewitch the eye of a proud alderman, what in all the world could? He has, no doubt pondered all that often enough, but he sees it here for the first time written out in such heraldic magnificence and in morally ineradicable script. Beside him stands, hat under arm, his old, devoted clerk, desiccated by sixty years of service in his counting-house. It is he who executes the contract, and hands over to the old Earl in the name of his master what is known in this house as 'the alderman's daughter'. It is he who, so to speak, performs the marriage ceremony. It would certainly require much philosophy to look upon the table where that marriage ceremony is proceeding without some secret agitation. Bank notes with highly significant rows of noughts, as if adorned with pearls, are lying there on heaps of guineas, and similar embroidery is to follow. And yet these are, as is generally the case with the visible charms on such occasions, only accessory items. Just in front of the old man lie yet more purses which deserve special attention, just because one cannot tell how much is in them. However, the most secret and therefore the most important item in the whole collection is obviously the document with the title 'Mortgage'. I come to this conclusion because even the accountant, with good-natured curiosity, seems anxious to observe the impression which such an unexpected blessing will make upon his Lordship. For in all probability it is an IOU which the alderman is returning, and through which a part of his Grace's patrimonial estate had till now been held in captivity. 'Here, my Lord, take back your estate,' says the old man. The gift is extensive, and from the manner in which it is offered, there is something about it which is not quite in the nature of a commercial transaction. This is also felt very clearly on the part of the aristocracy; the dowry is grasped immediately and without loss of time so as to send the pack of commoners quickly back behind their natural frontiers. 'All right!' says the Earl, 'that is what your girl brings to our house, and this which pulses under here [pointing to the fifth waistcoat button], my blood, and here [pointing to the family tree], this cedar of Lebanon, my 700-year-old title, these are what my first-born son is bringing into your plebeian establishment.' In order to feel fully the immense excess weight of these words over the deed, we must consider the oriental pomp which accompanied their pronouncement, and upon which we should like to comment here only so far as it immediately concerns this group (84-86).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Dogs
Shesgreen also notes that the “manacled state” of the two dogs is “symbolic of the couple’s condition” (51). Indeed, Hogarth often uses dogs as an indicator of sexuality and sexual arousal. A dog appears alert in the second plate while exposing the cap of lord’s new mistress, but the canines here seem bored and despondent revealing that the sexual union of the pair is one based on the contract being signed rather than upon any natural affection and attraction.
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Dogs
Shesgreen
a pair of dogs, chained together like the young couple (51).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Dogs
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
a pair of dogs, one stamped with the coronet, and manacled together (269).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Dogs
Dobson
in happy parody of the ill-matched pair, are two dogs in coupling-links:--the bitch sits up, alert and attentive, her companion is lying down (73).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Dogs
Lichtenberg
On the floor immediately in front of the young lord, the settee group is mirrored in the history of the two retainers belonging to the family's hunting establishment. They are a hound and a bitch. The hound, ennobled to some extent by a coronet on its side, is already somewhat aged, somewhat broken down, and somewhat weary. The bitch, a simple commoner, but fast and lively, has no inclination to sleep, at least not when he sleeps with whom she is united by the coarse chain around their necks. The little beast looks round quite greedily for something, most likely for a solicitor. The black spot on the hound's ear is not a bon ton plaster (90).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Earl
The Earl’s pose is affected, as he points dramatically at his all-important family tree, a branch of which is already broken. His coronet is stamped on his cane (and several other objects in the room).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Earl
Shesgreen
Sitting under his grand canopy, the stout, gouty Lord Squanderfield points proudly to his family tree. His genealogy indicated that is he is descended from “William Duke of Normandy”; his family, entirely aristocratic, has flourished except for a single member who married out of class (51).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Earl
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The Earl is pointing to his own collateral, his family tree, growing out of "William Duke of Normandy." The branches bristle with coronets, except for one that is broken off, which represents the consequence of an alliance with a woman of obscure origin (269).
There was a tradition in the eighteenth century that the Earl was based on John Wallop, Baron Wallop of Farleigh Wallop and Viscount Lymington, who had been created Earl of Portsmouth in 1743, and whose pride in his ancestry was well-known (270).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Earl
Dobson
an earl, who, with his gouty foot, swathed in flannels, seems with a superb—if somewhat stiff-jointed—dignity to be addressing certain pompous observations respecting himself and his pedigree (dating from William the Conqueror) to a sober-looking personage opposite, who, horn-speactacles on nose is peering at the endorsement of the “Marriage Settlemt of the Rt Honble. Lord Viscount (Squanderfield)” (72).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Earl
Paulson, Popular and Polite Art
The family tree itself is present, emerging from William the Conqueror’s entrails, and laid out in terms of the crazy family relationships of the earl’s stock and the stock of the rich merchant who is bartering his daughter. As “supporters,” the earl and his heir frame the merchant and his daughter, who in heraldic terms make a quartering of the earl’s shield; and the earl’s own armorial markings—a gouty foot and his coronet—reappear in the sore on his son’s neck and the stamp on all the objects in his possession (42-43).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Earl
Uglow
The arrogant Earl is as desperate for cash as the merchant for status, having spent all his money on French paintings and grandiose building schemes, like the half-built Palladian mansion outside his window. He will recoup a lot from this marriage; in front of him notes and coins are piled high and a lean usurer is proffering him the mortgage, now redeemed; in return he offers his lineage, the great scroll of his family tree descending straight from 'William, Duke of Nomandye'. He can afford to lean back grandly in his brocade and fine lace, resting his gouty foot on the coroneted stool (376).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Earl
Quennell
Their fathers compete in arrogance; and, while the old Earl, with crutch and gout-stool, expatiates on his pedigree, the square-toed merchant, resolutely unimpressed though somewhat hampered by his unaccustomed sword, assumes his spectacles to scrutinise the financial provisions of the marriage settlement (172).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Earl
Lichtenberg
In the first Plate we see, in a richly and heavily furnished drawing-room, two portly gentlemen sitting opposite each other at a silver-plated table. The one somewhat old and palsied, the other still robust—in sound health, at least. One is His Grace the Earl of Squanderfield, a man of publicly attested blood and safely established honour; the other honourable merely in money and credit, an alderman and, to judge from his golden chain, a Sheriff at that time of the City of London, and so honourable at least pro nunc. They appear to be occupied either in concluding an agreement or in executing one they have already concluded; the occasion and the mutual relation of the parties are something like this. His Grace, though one would hardly believe it to look at him, is just as bankrupt as he is gouty, and his financial potency is, if anything, rather less than his physical. In contrast to him, the honourable gentleman is just as title-seeking as he is wealthy, and yet in the veins and arteries of his family all is as miserably middle-class as his coffers are princely. The former, therefore, is prospecting for the citizen's money to fill an empty, high-titled purse, and the latter for aristocratic blood with which to infuse his middle-class veins. Since the need on both sides is urgent, an agreement is speedily reached, and on the following terms. The Earl will transfer to the merchant's family a portion of his precious aristocratic blood in the person of his first- born, his Grace the Lord Viscount Squanderfield. In exchange, that family will open up its strong boxes to his Lordship, and hand over the daughter and sole heir to the immense fortune on condition that the above-mentioned Lord Viscount Squanderfield will perform, execute and complete in a legal way the inoculation of the aristocratic blood on the said girl of the merchant's family. All this is here given under seal. For the purpose of sealing it literally, a lighted candle burns on the table. Some imagine they notice a so-called “thief” on the candle, which would be an evil omen for the marriage lines. So much is certain, in any case, the candle is melting and omens of weakness are no good in matters like these (84-85).
The old Earl is seen sitting immediately beneath a state-and-audience canopy, with an Earl's coronet not actually upon his wig, to be sure, but on the canopy; garbed in lofty, golden, heraldic splendour, and as if he were himself a sort of magnificent coat-of-arms, with two crutches as his shield-bearers. Each crutch is stamped with the emblem of the coronet. At the present moment he does not need them. The responsibility for his support has been taken over at the other end by one of the finest private thrones which gout has ever ascended on a festival day. The sick credit leg is upheld by a stool which even the most delicate fragility would not disdain to accept as support for temple or brow, and this stool also bears for its services the golden coronet. Near it lies William the Conqueror with his coat-of-mail, shield and sword, admiring the noble fruits of his 700-year-old-tree, on each branch of which hangs the golden ornament of the coronet. Poor alderman! What is now the jingle of your temporal purse compared with that magnificence and the trumpet sound of an ancestral glory almost a thousand years old? That family tree is really no great comfort to the alderman. With his spectacles on, at least, he should not come too near it. For if I see aright, the noble Norman has with his sword hewn down a branch because that branch bore a coronet which had married a non-coronet. The little branch with its mildew could not remain on the tree of aristocratic knowledge which had struck its roots right down into the entrails of William the Conqueror. That the black zero which we see falling denotes an unaristocratic zero is almost certain, but whether a tradesman's daughter or a valet's or a footman's is not revealed (86-87).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Jupiter
The earl’s room features an an overdramatic painting of himself as Jupiter in an appropriately omnipotent pose. He’s controlling the action here.
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Jupiter
Shesgreen
A burlesque of portraits executed in the sublime manner, it depicts the Earl as Jupiter with a thunderbolt in his hand, a comet flashing above him, a cherub blowing his wig in a different direction from his voluminous clothing and a cannon (placed near his groin) exploding. On top of the elaborate frame a lion seems to grin at the work (51).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Jupiter
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
On the wall is Hogarth's burlesque of a French-style portrait of the Earl with Jupiter's thunderbolt in his right hand, a comet flashing above his head, and wind-gods blowing in the upper left corner; curiously, his robes and his wig fly in opposite directions, and a small cannon is discharging just in front of him. The lion's head on the frame is smiling (269).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Jupiter
Lichtenberg
We must ask the reader to give a little attention to the man whose portrait on the wall there occupies the space of four murder stories. It is a family hero, and whoever cares to see wind, storm and thunder without hearing them, should pause before this picture. The hero in a sort of wig which, despite the many recent advances in meteorology, would still, and rightly, be regarded as belonging among the thunder clouds, is in the midst of the turmoil of battle. That he stands at the head of his army is certain, but where that head is, whether in front or behind or on the side, has not been clearly indicated by the painter, following the manner of journalists. With a mien full of self-approval, he surveys the rich harvest of victory, and is just casting his eye to the side where the most successful harvester stands. His right hand has, with mercy and compassion, transferred the lightning to his left, where it plays peacefully with the Brussels lace of his ruffle. The right rests without weapon on his iron hip. Forty to fifty yards of drapery flutter around him, and full against the gale which is blowing on to it from three pairs of inflated cherubs' cheeks. The hero has thus his own wind. However, part of the external gale seizes the main tail of our hero's wig, and lifts it fearfully. He stands there inspiring awe, and could even defy that comet's tail which is hovering above him, considering how nearly related such omens are. Below, a cannon goes off right under the hero's cloak, almost as if the explosion emanated from his trouser pocket. His pocket pistols are to the cannon, as his pigtail to the comet tail. How magnificent! The cannon-ball seems to have been copied by the artist ad vivum in a favourable moment. That it appears somewhat small must be forgiven him because of the speed with which such objects must usually be observed. Around the whole portrait is a magnificent frame of gilded woodwork, which is decorated above with a grotesque carving, something between a tiger and a monkey (92-93).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Bride
The betrothed bride looks unenthusiastic about her impending marriage, immediately indicating that there will be in trouble. Even the whisperings of the lawyer Silvertongue cannot lift her spirits. Her plain dress, denoting her middle-class background, will become more elaborate as the series continues.
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Bride
Shesgreen
Hunched next to him [the groom] sits his unsophisticated bride, dressed much more plainly than he, resentful and discontent at the way she is disposed of. She plays with her wedding ring. Beside her Councilor Silvertongue leans solicitously forward as he sharpens his pen. The girl, however, pays no attention to him (51).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Bride
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The merchant's daughter, looking rather angry, is playing with her engagement ring on her handkerchief and listening to the banter of one of the lawyers, whose name, we learn later, is Silvertongue (269).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Bride
Dobson
The lady, who looks young and pretty, wears a mingled expression of shyness and distaste for her position, and trifles listlessly with a ring, which she has strung upon her handkerchief, while a brisk and well built young lawyer, who trims a quill, bends towards her with a whispered compliment (73).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Bride
Uglow
his bride droops listlessly in white satin embroidered with gold, threading her muslin scarf through the constricting hoop of her gold ring. Her very show of feeling, compared to his worldly cool, betrays her lower class; her dismay is soothed by the whispering barrister, Silvertongue (375).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Bride
Quennell
the girl, who has recently been crying, fiddles with the engagement ring which she has threaded on her handkerchief, as she listens to the murmured advice of a sleek young lawyer, Counsellor Silvertongue (172).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Bride
Lichtenberg
Now for the bride! Gracious Hymen, what are you doing here? And how was it possible to contemplate such a match? Just look at them. If we deduct the trivial item (the only point on which the two good people are still m agreement) that they both, as one can see, hate each other like the devil, they most emphatically differ in every other particular. It is too bad! As for the commercial transaction which is proceeding at the silver table with purses and family trees, all that is acceptable but--as to the performance of the contract in naturalibus there on the settee, it is too bad for words. Just consider: he with the slender, weak, but refined remnant of flesh and blood, which he has precariously saved from the fire, posed in the most beautiful of Hogarth's lines of beauty; she still sound, but in an attitude à dos d’âne, and bent over like a sawing-jack, which even her clothing cannot conceal. His arm, how gently propped up! And the hands how light y poised! Antinous and Adonis, if they had ever wanted to take snuff, could not have done it more charmingly. Hers, bent in parallel angles, hang down like lame hooks on an old bag which have lost their eyelets. He dallies with the snuff-box and the snuff and, in this way, at least three-quarters of the purpose of these toys are fulfilled; she, on the other hand, dallies with the wedding-ring, through which she has drawn her fine, soft handkerchief, and which she twirls and flings and will probably— fling away.
The wedding ring is to her just a pinch of snuff which she has taken this morning for her honour's sake and which, since it was not to her taste, she will get rid of at the first opportunity. Some people want to find a deeper meaning in the toys of these two lovers. That may be, but there may also be nothing more to them. I, at least, do not wish to put deep meanings into toys. His mien, how sweet! Somewhat languid of course, but gentle; with some traces of debauchery but of good breeding, too But hers! God save and protect everybody from such an ornament on their own shoulders, or on that of their future domestic honour. It would not do even as a figurehead on the family sledge. It would hardly be possible to draw a female creature looking less womanly. Uglier, perhaps, but in so few strokes, hardly more malicious, pig-headed, stubborn and yet sly. Indeed, the contrast in this couple goes very deep; it is not only concerned with head and heart, it extends even to parts which, especially when mankind goes on all fours (which no doubt will happen again in the not-too-distant future), are as distant as possible from head and heart I mean the good people are not even sitting, or sitting down, the one like the other. The bridegroom, does he not float above his chair, light as the God of Spring over the silver gossamer of a mist of dew? The bride on the other hand, is she not sitting there exactly in the attitude of a 'Boots' who is trying to close the lid of an over-filled trunk by means of a few rough, final hits with his behind? He sits, or seems to sit, as if he were afraid of needles on the seat; she just the opposite, as if she noticed in it an emptiness to be filled, and there are such seats in the world (88-89).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Groom
The groom stares narcissistically at himself in the mirror (The incomparable Lichtenberg inexplicably calls him “a sick angora rabbit beside a hot lady hedgehog” (87), but the reflection we see is not his but that of Silvertongue, the lawyer who is soon to be his wife’s lover. He is already showing signs of syphilis indicated by the beauty patch on his neck.
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Groom
Shesgreen
The effete beau has turned his back to his bride to admire himself in the mirror. He gazes so narcissistically at himself in the glass that he fails to notice the conduct of Lawyer Silvertongue reflected there. Wearing a foolish look of self-approval, he takes snuff affectedly and balances himself on his tiptoes (51).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Groom
Dobson
the Viscount—a frail, effeminate-looking figure, holding an open snuff-box, from which he affectedly lifts a pinch—turns from his companion with a smirk of complacent foppery towards a pier-glass at his side. His wide-cuffed coat is light-blue; his vest is loaded with embroidery. He wears an enormous solitaire, and has high red heels to his shoes (73).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Groom
Uglow
The simpering, snuff-taking groom, Viscount Squanderfield, tosses back his head and perks himself up on his high-heels to gaze lovingly at his own reflection. His black beauty patch may shield a syphilitic sore (375).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Groom
Lichtenberg
Perhaps the most fitting simile would be to say that the bridegroom is sitting beside the bride like a sick angora rabbit beside a hot lady hedgehog. He with the light and fire of his eyes already dimmed, and with a bon ton plaster behind the ear that speaks volumes, takes a pinch of snuff with superfine elegance. His hardly perceptible smile is a smile of the most empty self-approbation accompanied by extreme indolence of body and soul. What keeps him going is perhaps a half-jealous attention to a small whisper, to which we shall ourselves listen anon. He sits—yes, he does—but no matter what with and whereupon, so much at least is certain—he sits miserably. His feet too, just as his father's, are eloquent about credit. Even while he sits they raise themselves upon the toes, probably to diminish as much as possible somewhere in a higher region the point of contact between seat and sit-upon. His face is turned towards the mirror, but only because the mirror hangs on the side where his bride is not. With the mirror itself he is not concerned. All he could see there would be, at the utmost, a little of the silver embroidery on his magnificent sleeve. For it is a catoptric impossibility that, as Mr Ireland thinks, he could see himself in the mirror or could watch his bride in it. It gives one quite a queer feeling if one compares this fragile marzipan puppet with the iron Norman there whom it takes for its ancestor. And if the courageous, fiery, ambitious and any- thing but soft-hearted William with his sword had been here in person the safest little nook in the room for his Grace, provided he had his jumping legs with him, would have been near the window (87-88).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Medusa
The pictures are disasters of Biblical and mythological proportions. Cain slaying Abel, the martyrdom of Saint Lawrence and the Destruction of Pharaoh's Host are all punctuated by the circular Medusa in the center. This shrieking horror compounds the unnatural events in the room and foreshadows the disasterous end.
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Medusa
Shesgreen
On the wall a head of Medusa seems to gaze at the scene in utter horror.
All the other pictures are scenes of disaster in the form of death or torture; they comment on different aspects of the calamitous marriage and the Earl’s fashionable taste for foreign art of questionable worth (51).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Medusa
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The paintings around the room, besides being by "dark masters," show scenes of violence and destruction. Most immediately applicable is the ceiling mural of Pharaoh being overwhelmed by the Red Sea (with what for Hogarth was the added impropriety of an ocean painted on a ceiling).
Cain slaying Abel; and St. Lawrence being grilled. An oval sconce frames Caravaggio's Medusa (Uffizi Gallery), who looks down with fury on the apathetic couple; above the gorgon's head is the ubiquitous coronet. The paintings show the Earl's taste in "dark masters," his vainglory, and his wastefulness. Everything in the room illustrates the last of these, even the candle for melting sealing wax; a "thief," an imperfection in the candle wick, causes it to gutter and waste. The David and Goliath, Cain and Abel (Sta. Maria della Salute, Venice), Prometheus (Prado, Madrid), St. Lawrence (Gesuiti, Venice), Destruction of Pharaoh's Host (woodcut by delle Grecche), and perhaps St. Sebastian (SS. Nazaro e Celso, Brecia) are works after Titian (269-270).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Medusa
Dobson
The pictures on the wall exemplify and satirise the fashion of the time. The largest is a portrait in the French style of one of the earl’s ancestors, who traverses the canvas triumphantly. A cannon exploded below him, a comet is seen above; and in his right hand, nothwithstanding his cuirass and voluminous Queen-Anne peruke, he brandishes the thunderbolt of Jupiter. Judith and Holofernes, St. Sebastian, The Murder of Abel, David and Goliath, the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, are some of the rest, all of which, it is perhaps needless to note, belong to those “dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental,” against which, we have already heard the painter inveigh. Upon the ceiling, with a nice sense of decorative fitness, is Pharaoh in the Red Sea. From a sconce at the side of Gorgon surveys the proceedings with astonishment. Hogarth has used a similar idea in the Strolling Actresses, where the same mask seems horror-stricken at the airy freedom of the lightly-clad lady who there enacts the parts of Diana (73-74).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Medusa
Paulson, His Life, Art and Times
The first shows the earl’s quarters with the old masters he collects, pictures of cruelty and compulsion from which his present act of compulsion naturally follows, his portrait of himself as Jupiter furens, and his coronet stamped on everything he owns. . . . Here art has become an integral part of Hogarth’s subject matter: it is here for itself, a comment on itself, and also on its owners and on the actions that go on before it. In no other series is the note so insistent . . . it dominates every room, every plate. The old masters have come to represent the evil that is the subject of their series: not aspiration, but the constriction of old, dead customs and ideals embodied in bad art. Both biblical and classical, this art holds up seduction, rape, compulsion, torture, and murder as the ideal, and the fathers act accordingly and force these stereotypes on their children (vol. 1 488-489).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Medusa
Uglow
All of the paintings in the first scene, apart from the Earl’s portrait, are of violent biblical deaths and martyrdoms, mostly based on Titian; Prometheus being gnawed by the vulture; Judith and Holofernes, St. Sebastian, David and Goliath, the Slaughter of the Innocents, Cain and Abel, St. Lawrence on his gridiron. This is doubtless how the Earl feels as his creditors descend, but it is a gloomy chorus for a wedding contract (385-386).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Medusa
Lichtenberg
On the walls hang pictures which, apart from their diversity in other respects, are all terrifying portrayals of temporal misfortunes: war, murder, torture, inundation, pestilence, famine, cannon and comets everywhere, and all that in a betrothal chamber. Really! If Henry IV before his betrothal had consulted the coffee grounds, and the gipsy had shown him such a picture gallery in them, the famous massacre of St Bartholomew would certainly not have come to pass. Here, however, nobody seems to notice any bad omen, and so this Blood-marriage takes its course un-disturbed. We need only look and see. Just above the bridegroom's head, they are racking Saint Laurence on his wedding-bed, the grill. Oh! if only you would give this a thought, poor Lorenzo with your snuff-box down there! On the opposite side, Cain and Abel warn Mr Silvertongue of fratricide. Above the holy Laurence, the story of Herod, the September briseur of Bethlehem, points to infanticide, and opposite it, Prometheus, the fire-thief, has his liver gnawed by the vulture of remorse. On the other wall there stretches a huge Goliath, his body on the Eastern and his right leg on the Western side of a hill, whence the boulder of his head is shortly to roll down. Underneath it, another head is rolling already, the head of Holofernes into the work basket of his faithful Judith; and beside that, poor Saint Sebastien receives the arrows in his breast. Thus, there is blood enough here. As to blood, it will in fact be forthcoming, also some similarities with the stories themselves may be found with some ingenuity of interpretation, everything in short—except the Saints (84-94).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Mirror
The groom stares narcissistically at himself in the mirror (The incomparable Lichtenberg inexplicably calls him “a sick angora rabbit beside a hot lady hedgehog”), but the reflection we see is not his but that of Silvertongue, the lawyer who is soon to be his wife’s lover.
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Outside
Derek Jarrett states that the Earl is interested in having his son married in order to recoup debts “incurred in building the Italianate palace” which can be seen through the window (Ingenious 127). Including this scene demonstrates that Hogarth thinks of the events of the series as more than a private family matter and shows his concern for the world outside.
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Outside
Shesgreen
Through the window the Earl’s new Palladian house is visible; work on the mansion has stopped for lack of money. Before the half-finished building loiter the curious, the scornful and the Earl’s idle servants (51).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Outside
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
Beyond the window his palladian building project has come to a halt, presumably for lack of funds, and his footmen are standing idly about the courtyard with nothing to do (269).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Outside
Lichtenberg
There is no money there, he wants to tell us: a scaffolding and no workmen, the building has come to a standstill; nay, it almost seems as if here and there time had already started to break off parts of the scaffolding. Those swarms of people in the courtyard are not workmen, but either idlers from this establishment (superfluous servants) or the servants of other gentry who have come to look at the building and poke fun at it, and all this in honour of the descendant of William the Conqueror (91).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: David
The painting is of David and Goliath, another of the Old Testament scenes in the room.
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: David
Lichtenberg
there stretches a huge Goliath, his body on the Eastern and his right leg on the Western side of a hill, whence the boulder of his head is shortly to roll down (92).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Judith
Judith’s slaying of Holofernes is the subject of the painting.
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Judith
Lichtenberg
another head is rolling already, the head of Holofernes into the work basket of his faithful Judith (92).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Sebastian
The picture is of St. Sebastain; his martyrdom is thematically connected to Hogarth’s view of the young couple as victims of their parents’ machinations.
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Sebastian
Lichtenberg
poor Saint Sebastien receives the arrows in his breast (92).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Silvertongue
The lawyer Silvertongue already has the bride’s attention; he will become her lover and the murderer of the new groom. The groom stares narcissistically at himself in the mirror [The incomparable Lichtenberg inexplicably calls him “a sick angora rabbit beside a hot lady hedgehog” (87)], but the reflection we see is not his but that of Silverongue. Some commentators, including Peter Quennell, believe that the wife and attorney have already consummated their relationship (172).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Silvertongue
Shesgreen
Councilor Silvertongue leans solicitously forward as he sharpens his pen (51).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Silvertongue
Dobson
a brisk and well built young lawyer, who trims a quill, bends towards her [the lady] with a whispered compliment (73).
Marriage a la Mode: Plate 1: Silvertongue
Lichtenberg
a young, virile, matrimonial adviser who is in fact about to execute with her a similar proceeding for his own person, but in a left-handed way. The fox is aware that everything on the right appears to the bride as not quite right, and he begins an exposition forthwith on the left, not of that for which he sharpens his pen but of that for which she pricks up her ears. The young man is not a clergyman, as many Germans would perhaps conclude from his black gown and his collar, but a lawyer, a sort of solicitor and attorney In England, indeed, both higher faculties are constantly in mourning when on duty, whereas the faculty of medicine, for which that colour would perhaps, be most appropriate, wears all the colours of the rainbow, just as in Germany. From the title of a speech of his which appeared in print, and of which we shall have something more to say below, we learn that his name is Silvertongue. And indeed he must be whispering something very silvery, since he succeeds in inducing such attentiveness in that owl as can be inferred from the tension throughout the length of her neck and back, and all while sharpening his pen. That she accompanies this attentive- ness, which comes right from the depths of that spoilt creature, with the coarsest expression of vulgar indignation, is, it seems to me, an excellent touch of Hogarth's; for here he no longer characterizes the lady, and still less the mere creature of nature, but human vulgarity, be the fault whose it may. Has the father perhaps risen from fishmongering? As to the legal collar of our solicitor, I must draw attention to the fact that he does not wear that decoration throughout the story, but shortly before its end the Law presents him with another one, and with great solemnity (87-88).