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COPYRIGHT 2006 Southern Illinois University
A familiar element in eighteenth-century writing, the motif of the absent artist seems to have escaped discussion, although it was widely employed, especially in the novel. In essence, it takes the form of a sudden appeal for the aid of a visual artist, who will assist the writer by conveying with a brush what cannot be conveyed by words. The precise direction of the trope varies: sometimes the artist is imagined to appear on cue, but more often writers use the mention of a painter to point up the absence of the desired figure within the text. In this sense, the device may be seen as belonging to a widespread group of rhetorical devices, in which the discourse draws attention to absent elements that would complete its (as things stand, necessarily incomplete) mode of utterance. Viewed from a different conceptual viewpoint, the trope operates as an anti-rhetorical formula. Where enargeia had encouraged the use of vivid pictorial effects in literature, especially poetry, the effect of this appeal is to pass the responsibility for sharp or intense realization of a scene to an artist outside the main literary space. We can see this if we consider a related rhetorical concept like "ekphrasis," literally telling in full (from '[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], to speak out): this term came to mean placing objects or views before the eyes of a reader by the use of vivid particulars. The feeling was that by verbal devices of this kind a poet could emulate and even surpass a pictorial artist. By contrast, the appeal to an artist represents something of a towel-throwing exercise: the words admit their own insufficiency, unless they receive artificial respiration provided by an extra-textual agency.
Perhaps the best-known instance comes in Swift's late poem A Character, Panegyric, and Description of the Legion Club (1736). Swift did not invent the trope, which had existed for centuries. But he gave it a new force and immediacy of expression, partly because he couched his appeal in the form of a plea for the aid of William Hogarth. This was to leave a profound impress on the following generations of writers. Hogarth had only just come into real prominence, after producing both the Harlot's Progress and the Rake's Progress within the previous four years. What made his art specially appropriate for this trope was that he had taken over Scriblerian imagery and had already developed a distinctly authorial style of graphic satire. Soon he would cement the most important of his literary relationships, by entering into personal and artistic alliance with Henry Fielding. (1) Swift probably never met Hogarth, and it is a tribute to his percipience that, from his base in Dublin, he was able to identify this coming talent. No other European painter up to this date would have suited Swift's purposes so well, and for much of the century Hogarth clung on to his place as the favorite object of authorial longing. The history of the device, for some years to come, is little more than the record of literary raids on the matter and manner of Hogarth's art. Yet, in a period when the sister arts, in theory, commingled and supported one another, it was the very legibility of Hogarth--the readerly quality of his texts--that was constantly enlisted to demonstrate the limited descriptive powers of the written word as compared to those of visual media. (2)
Paradoxically, Hogarth himself used a back-handed version of the formula to express his sense of his own inadequacy in dealing with the written word. This occurs in a passage on the composition of The Analysis of Beauty (1753), a book that brought him some recognition in the literary world, even if its reception was muted within the art community. A surviving draft in the British Library (Add. MS 27992, ff. 10-11) contains this passage:
When this business first engag'd my attention, I was conscious of the danger [of] acting out of my own sphere, and so sensible of my inability, that I used my utmost endeavour to perswade some able pen, to undertake the work [...] so like one who makes use of signs and jestures to convey his meaning, in a language he is but little master of, I, as an expedient, to make up for my deficiencys in writing, have had frequent recourse to my Pencil. (Hogarth 119)
This provides a twist on the usual formula. Instead of an appeal by the author to Hogarth's visual skills to say what words alone cannot fully express (a ploy that remains resolutely logocentric), the artist himself has recourse to his engraver's tool--that is, he actually includes illustrative plates to enhance his argument. Where writers typically lament the fact that the painter's genius is unavailable to them, Hogarth supplies his own graphic assistance.
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One distinctive feature marks Swift's handling of the topos: the fact that he is still recognizably close to the methods employed in the traditional genre of advice to a painter. This need occasion little surprise, for he retained many attributes of the seventeenth century in all his poetic workings. By contrast, his eighteenth-century successors generally use the motif without obvious awareness of the advice genre.
"How I want thee, humorous Hogart Thou I hear, a pleasant Rogue art; Were but you and I acquainted, Every Monster should be painted; You should try your graving Tools On this odious Group of Fools; Draw the Beasts as I describe 'em, Form their Features, while I gibe them; Draw them like, for I assure you,
You will need no Car'catura; Draw them so that we may trace All the Soul in every Face." ("The Legion Club" 219-30) It will bear emphasis that not just "Car'catura" but also "Group" represent new importations into the language; that is to say they were terms still confined to technical artistic discourse and remained distinctly foreign in feel. Swift addresses Hogarth directly, as later exponents of the trope generally will not, and speaks in the language of the trade--graver's tools and the like. This is more than a vague gesture of requesting help: the lines convey a direct appeal to Hogarth to fill out through his art the critique Swift has been mounting in the earlier parts of his poem. Finally, in explicitly disavowing acquaintance with the painter, Swift is claiming an affinity that crosses the boundaries of friendship as it traverses the separate spheres of the arts and bridges the sea dividing England and Ireland.
In the event, someone who was an actual friend of Hogarth,...
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