Well, it is a long time since the eighties, and to-day the fame of Hogarth as a painter is as great as was his fame as a moralist and satirist in the eighteenth century. Indeed I observe that some writers are beginning to resent praise of Hogarth as a painter, considering that the incident is closed, that all are agreed. That is not so. My friend, the connoisseur, who sat by my side at the auction sale, dissents. When he asked me fiercely what I thought of Matisse, I countered with the question--“What do you think of Hogarth?” His answer was short and to the point. “There are only two of his things that interest me. They’re great. I mean, of course, ‘The Shrimp Girl,’ and ‘The Stay Maker.’ No! I don’t care about his moralities, and satires, and progresses. Single figures and incidental passages are charming, as good as the best episodes in Frith, but as a whole they’re dowdy, and every one of them shouts. I object to shouts and screams in art. Exaggeratedly exact and humorous records of eighteenth-century life and topography they may be, but I don’t want to be reminded of the eighteenth century. Give me the present or the real past, not the past of yesterday. It’s too near, too like us in our Bank Holiday moods, to be pleasant. Whistler called him the greatest English artist, did he? Merely another example of Whistler’s extravagance. Hogarth has his place. Let us keep cool and keep him there.” “But consider his portraits,” said I, “and the charm and skill of his oil paintings. Consider them apart altogether from the engravings, which do not do the pictures any sort of justice. ‘The Stay Maker,’ I remember, was hung at the Old Masters in 1908 with twenty-eight other Hogarths. What a display that was. Consider ‘Garrick and his Wife,’ ‘Mary Hogarth,’ ‘Miss Lavinia Fenton,’ ‘The Servants,’ the superb ‘Marriage à la Mode,’ ‘Captain Coram,’ ‘Peg Woffington,’ ‘The Fishing Party,’ ‘Pall Mall,’ ‘George II. and his Family,’ at Dublin, the water piece from the ‘Idle Apprentice’ series. And above all consider the time when he lived--you _must_ consider that. He was born in 1697. Like Giotto and Watteau, he was a pioneer.”