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We see a ghost: Hogarth's satire on Methodists and Connoisseurs
Art Bulletin, The, June, 1998 by Bernd Krysmanski
As Hogarth never published his attack on academic connoisseurship, the original intention of his print was lost. Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism, the version that came out a year later, is aimed solely at Methodist fanaticism and contains nothing of the ridicule of shopworn views on art he initially intended. Certainly Enthusiasm Delineated, with its clear formal structure, is a more coherent composition. Cluttered with details, such as the many additional people in the background or the cloud with the heavenly postboy's head, Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism is less mature. The proportions of the print have been slightly altered to accommodate such things as the books under the brain or the rabbits hopping out from under Mary Toft's dress. In Enthusiasm Delineated the clerk, placed in the center of the composition, is no doubt the principal figure and might well be a caricature of Samuel Johnson,(98) the editor of the Idler. In Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism, where the figure is turned into a portrait of Whitefield, the common target of anti-Methodist satire, he has lost most of his prominence. No doubt Hogarth compromised on clarity of composition to obliterate his original intent.
Probably John Ireland is right in guessing that Hogarth's near scatological treatment of Christian iconography in the first state might have caused a scandal. As even his closest friends, when shown Enthusiasm Delineated, reproached Hogarth for his irreligion, he may well have refrained from publishing the first design because he feared persecution. In his manuscript notes for an autobiography of about 1763, he retrospectively confessed that he "sometimes objected to the Devinity of even Raphael Urbin Corregio and Michael Angelo for which I have been severly treated," and as in his pictures "the life so far surpassed the utmost efforts of imitation," he admitted that by drawing "the comparison in my mind I could not help uttering Blasphemous expression that I fear I fear persecution."(99) For a few months the original plate must have remained untouched in Hogarth's drawer until either January or February 1762, when the Cock Lane Ghost story in the newspaper headlines prompted him to dig out the old plate and use it for a revised print. Focusing on the Methodists and their belief in ghosts meant that he had to eliminate almost every motif of his complex parodic reference to art and aesthetic theory, since George Whitefield, John Wesley, and William Romaine, like the iconoclastic Puritans a century before, regarded (or rather disregarded) painting and sculpture as a distraction to their followers. Certainly it would not have been an easy decision for Hogarth to sacrifice a great deal of clarity of composition by dotting new imagery all over his print, but he must have felt much safer from persecution with his blasphemous art lovers hidden forever behind the "print of the Ghost."
Notes
I would like to thank Friedrich Wilms, who helped to translate my thoughts into English, and Lory Frankel, Stephen Reader, and Brian Nattress for their suggestions concerning the finer points of the English language. Deep gratitude goes to Stephen Cone Weeks for transferring the rough style of the first draft of the text into polite, fluent English.
