HOGARTH ON HIGH LIFE. THE MARRIAGE A LA MODE SERIES FROM GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG'S COMMENTARIES.

Translatedand edited by Arthur S. Wensinger '48with W. B. Coley. Middletown: WesleyanUniversity Press, 1970. 150 pp. Withreproductions of Hogarth paintings andengravings and Riepenhausen engravings.$35.

This splendid book, beautifully bound, printed, and illustrated, scholarly but not pedantic, large but not unwieldly, fills a long-standing need for a proper presentation of a priceless creation by the artistmoralist-commentator William Hogarth and of Lichtenberg's critical analyses.

In a lengthy foreword Mr. Wensinger gives a vivid account of the Explanations, expansive commentaries about Hogarth's prints, written by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg [1742-1799], a hunchback, the seventeenth child of a German theologian and preacher in Oberramstadt, near Darmstadt. In England for a second visit lasting 18 months, Lichtenberg wanted to study at first hand British aristocracy and the burgeoning middle classes. He roamed the streets, observed maniacs in Bedlam, attended boxing matches, sauntered in salons and dined in clubs, witnessed the hanging of five criminals at Tyburn, talked with leading London and Oxford intellectuals, and sat with Mrs. Garrick in the actor's own box as he watched Garrick perform for the eighth time.

Against the backgrounds of drawing rooms and brothels, levees and gaming houses, Hogarth tells the story of the daughter of an arrogant square-toed merchant and the son of an old earl, a man of taste, even more arrogant. The young couple marry: the bride for social position, the bridegroom for money. Hogarth, and Lichtenberg, comment with acute insight on the changes occurring in a healthy and sensual girl, capricious, greedy, and idle, voluptuously enjoying herself in all the pleasures of fashionable London, and in the young aristocrat, weak-willed, self-indulgent, and vicious, suffering despondently from over-whelming lassitude, boredom, and disease. The plates show the unfolding of the domestic tragedy and treat furniture, dress, and manners as criteria of sound and meretricious tastes.

Hogarth on High Life contains much to interest America where money and leisure may corrupt and where plutocrats and bluebloods attempt to wrest from one another the best of both worlds. Although the Lichtenberg commentary translated by Mr. Wensinger is the major piece, it does not stand alone. The focus is on Hogarth and particularly on the Marriage a la Mode. The first of three appendices contains excerpts from Lichtenberg correspondence. The second, the Rouquet document, the only contemporary commentary on Marriage a laMode apparently composed with Hogarth's assistance, is completely translated for the first time from the French. The third, Marriage A-la Mode: an Humorous Tale, inSix Cantos in Hudibrastic Verse, an extremely rare and anonymous poem, provides the only other well-known contemporary commentary on Marriage a la Mode. The full scale reproductions of Hogarth's engravings may be folded out and remain in view as one reads Lichtenberg's commentary on each plate.

Walter Bagehot wrote of Dickens that "he described London like a special correspondent for posterity." Hogarth too is Dickensian, a born reporter and story teller. So is Lichtenberg. The Wensinger volume could be placed high on your Christmas list for persons interested in art, morality, and marriages of convenience.