A Biographical S/cetch 



a painter of English domestic life a century and a half ago Morland 

 should be endeared to all of us. 



It is a pity that the man himself was not a more attractive 

 personality, or rather a more estimable character. Attractive he 

 must have been in many ways, for reading between the grandiloquent 

 lines of his contemporary biographers who, in imitation of the 

 eighteenth century made his bad habits serve for such lengthy 

 moralising that one sickens at it, one sees that the man had much 

 natural goodness in him, and that in spite of many weaknesses, his 

 heart, as the old phrase goes, was in the right place. 



Those who know their " Tom Jones " and their " Roderick 

 Random " do not need reminding that eighteenth century England 

 is not to be pictured from the polished phrases of Joseph Addison, 

 nor judged by the standards of grave respectability which animated 

 the divines and scholars of that time. The morality, or rather the 

 non-morality, of the youthful Tom Jones was not more nor less lax 

 than that of the average young Englishman ; and Squire Weston, 

 the father of the adorable and impossible Sophy, with his love of 

 rough sport and strong drink, with his coarse speech, his loud 

 oaths, his good-natured violence, was a truthful portrait of the 

 typical country squire. George Morland seems to have been a 

 mixture of Tom Jones and the fox-hunting squire, though with the 

 gift of genius which neither of these two immortals possessed. 

 The adventures of his early life, indeed of his career throughout, 

 read like pages of Fielding and Smollett, and though we must blame 

 a man for letting himself sink into the moral degradation to which 

 Morland eventually arrived, we must not forget that it was caused 

 by an intemperance encouraged by the habits of his time. 



Brushing on one side the moral disquisitions of biographers, 

 which, truly or not, seem insincere and hypocritical, and making 

 allowance for a difference in the moral code, there is a good deal to 

 admire and something to love in the character of George Morland. 

 His joviality, his open-handed generosity in good fortune or bad, his 

 democratic friendship with farmers, cotters, gypsies, tramps, 

 jockeys, and prize-fighters, his hatred of snobs and snobbishness, 

 his spirit of fun and freakishness, his intense love of animals and of 

 little children, are qualities of a more human and lovable kind than 



