Page:The Obligations of the Universities Towards Art.djvu/37

 troubles. After these were over they came again, and the work they left us was most precious; but a superstitious prejudice against native art was established which has never since died out. This has ever been a great injustice to English art; it made the profession a hopeless one for men of the race of Shakespeare and Milton; it led to the absolute death of painting at the end of the days of Sir Godfrey Kneller, and the Art course became a desolated stadium.

Without any honours offered for the contest Hogarth entered the arena. He had the pure blood of an Englishman; he laughed to scorn the thought of following the decrepit and the dead. He determined to be understanded of the people; we judge him wrongly when we take his representations of low vice as pictures; for he was as much a humanitarian as he was a painter, and he hated cruelty, drunkenness, sensuality, and untrustworthiness as he loved innocence and straightforwardness. For pictures, he kept ideas which had the poetic redeeming grace of beauty, but there was no Humane Society, no power of any kind to combat hidden vice, and no journalistic exposure in his day. He felt the power in his hands to lash evil, and so at times he went from art, to reveal the untold horrors of false society, and he made coarse engravings of such scenes, only using the artist's cunning in the epitomizing and contrasting of facts.

A good lover is of necessity a good hater: he detested the ugly, although he dealt much with it; but in his pictures he gave the beauty which opens the heart of the spectator for helpless innocency at the first