ous at all. What looks like
humour in some of his pictures is probably unconscious. In like manner
he lacked pathos, and never strove to moralise the themes he treated.
Where would Hogarth be if we excluded Gargantuan humour, Juvenalian
satire, stern morality, and cruel pathos from his scenes of social life?
Longhi is never gross and never passionate. With a kind of sensitive
French curiosity, he likes to graze the darker and the coarser side of
life, and pass it by. He does not want to probe the cancers of the human
breast, or to lay bare the festering sores of vice. What would become of
Hogarth if he were deprived of his grim surgical anatomy? Neither in the
heights nor in the depths was Longhi at home--neither in the region of
Olympian poetry nor in the purgatory of man's sin and folly. He sailed
delightfully, agreeably, across the middle waters of the world, where
steering is not difficult.

In all this Goldoni resembles him, except only that Goldoni had a rich
vein of cheerful humour. It would be therefore more just to call Longhi
the Goldoni of painting than the Venetian Hogarth.

Longhi's portrait, unlike that of Goldoni, betrays no sensuousness. He
seems to have had a long, refined face, with bright, benignant black
eyes, a pleasantly smiling mouth, thin lips, and a look of gently
subrisive appreciation rather than of irony or sarcasm. The engraving by
which I know his features suggests an intelligent, attenuated
Addison--not a powerful or first-rate man, but a genially observant
superior mediocrity.

Although Longhi, as a personality, is clearly not of the same type as
Hogarth, there are certain points of similarity between the men as
artists. Both were taught the goldsmith's trade, and both learned
painting under Bolognese influences. Both eventually found their sphere
in the delineation of the life around them. There the similarity ceases.
Longhi lacks, as I have said, the humour, the satire, the penetrative
imagination, the broad sympathy with human nature in its coarser
aspects, which make Hogarth unrivalled as a pictorial moralist. At the
same time, it is difficult to imagine that Longhi was not influenced by
Hogarth. In the technique of his art he displays something which appears
to be derived from the elder and stronger master--a choice of points for
observation, an arrangement of figures in groups, a mode of rendering
attitude and suggesting movement; finally, the manner of execution
reminds us of Ho