She loves to visit the 18th century, but wouldn't want to live in it

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, February 1, 1998

Page: C4

Section: Books

William Hogarth, the great 18th-century English engraver and painter, appeals to me because of the strong narrative element in his work, because he can summon up real character, and because he has a mischievous, ultimately misanthropic, eye. Born 301 years ago, he is best known for his series: ``The Rake's Progress,'' ``The Harlot's Progress,'' and ``Marriage a la Mode,'' each of which makes up a satiric, rambunctious cautionary tale. But even his other pictures, the ones that stand alone, do so in medias res, as you might say. What went before and what lies ahead are as evident and as much a part of what's going on as the state of affairs depicted.

He is, in other words, very much an artist for readers. Expressions of anticipation, regret, concupiscence, greed, delusion, and epiphany are captured as they flit across faces; accidents and missteps are discovered in the making; the lives of servants are glimpsed in the background of the portraits of the great; city life and domestic arrangements are laid bare; pots and bowls, corsets and wigs, pills, prophylactics, vermin and pets, and all the daily detritus of 18th-century life litter the pictures.

To recognize everything for what it is, both as artifact and as emblem, is not easy. The language of these drawings has become more and more obscure as the years pass; we are deaf to allusions and blind to much of what is going on, including Hogarth's ironic subversion of the aesthetic views he deplored. How impoverished we are -- but then again, how fortunate, to have in Uglow such an indefatigable guide.

This is an odd biography, actually, in that it is not Hogarth's life itself of which we gain a real sense, but rather of the life he so brilliantly conjured up in his work. He was appalled by human nature and simultaneously relished it, a frame of mind essential to great satire, of which the 18th century was so productive. Indeed, in his distaste for fine feeling, high seriousness, and the cult of politeness, as well as in his rejection of classical form and continental culture, Hogarth represents a strain of 18th-century sensibility that did not prevail. This is the sensibility of both irony and riot that helped to make the 18th ``the last best century,'' as one of my editors has so wistfully described it.

In keeping with everything else about him, Hogarth was a champion of English art. He railed against ``Picture-jobbers from abroad, who are . . . continually importing Ship Loads of dead Christs, Holy Families, Madona's, and other dismal Dark Subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental; on which they scrawl the terrible cramp Names of some Italian Masters, and fix on us poor Englishmen, the Character of Universal Dupes.''

Hogarth was strengthened in his views on the superiority of English over continental art because he was a businessman. He neither subsisted on patronage nor languished in the thrall of print shops. He was, in fact, one of the first truly professional artists, a category that arose in 18th-century England along with the idea of high culture itself. This fascinating development is the subject of John Brewer's impressively researched social, cultural, and commercial history, ``The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40.) Everyone seems to know and deplore that, today, art, music, and literature are brass-knuckle businesses, but we might also remember that the making of art into business went hand in hand with bringing it into being.

Brewer explores the interconnectedness of the commercialization of the arts in his period with changes in attitudes about what art actually is. He investigates the reasons for and ramifications of changes in theory, technique, and format and the development of institutions such as academies, galleries, bookshops, and libraries that fostered the consumption of the arts. He looks at who operated these outfits, as well as who made up the consumers. This is one of those great books that shows the dynamics of flux. Such magisterial volumes, as we like to say, expose how complex and provisional are the relationships among activities that give rise to what might otherwise seem an inevitable, straightforward outcome.

I once heard it proclaimed, by no less an authority than Patrick O'Brian, that the 18th century did not truly end until 1825. Up until then, piety, Progress, and that padding smugness that characterize much of the 19th century had not taken hold. This seems just right. Otherwise how could we fit the indisputably 18th-century novels of Jane Austen, published between 1811 and 1818, into its compass? Unfortunately, the author's character was bowdlerized for 19th-century consumption by her relations, who destroyed much of her correspondence in order to present her as a sweet, domestic little body.

The work of her recent biographers has been to restore Jane Austen's acerbic toughness and acknowledge her wicked appreciation for the ruthlessness of respectable society and precariousness of social position. Such is the task of Claire Tomalin's ``Jane Austen: A Life'' (Knopf, $27.50), the second biography of the writer that I have read in four months. Tomalin does a truly superb job of shaking the sugar off her subject as well as granting the reader a view of her vulnerable social standing, so dependent on events and decisions beyond her control, on legacies, gifts, and the whims of others. For all the greatness of the 18th century -- however defined -- I can say that I am heartily glad to be able to read about it without encountering its realities at first hand.