Caricature and Other Comic Art Part 11

[Ill.u.s.tration: Archbishop of Paris--A Better Friend to Ladies than to the Pope. (Holland, 1686. By an Exiled Huguenot.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Archbishop of Rheims--Mitred a.s.s. (Holland, 1686. After the Expulsion of the Huguenots.)]

The caricaturists made the most of these points. Every town that he lost, every victory that Marlborough won, gave them an opportunity which they improved. We have him as a huge yellow sun, each ray of which bears an inscription referring to some defeat, folly, or shame. We have him as a jay, covered with stolen plumage, which his enemies are plucking from him, each feather inscribed with the name of a _lost_ city or fortress.

We have him as the Crier of Versailles, crying the ships lost in the battle of La Hogue, and offering rewards for their recovery. He figures as the Gallic c.o.c.k flying before that wise victorious fox of England, William III., and as a pompous drummer leading his army, and attended by his ladies and courtiers. He is an old French Apollo driving the sun, in wig and spectacles. He is a tiger on trial before the other beasts for his cruel depredations. He is shorn and fooled by Maintenon; he is bridled by Queen Anne. He is shown drinking a goblet of human blood. We see him in the stocks with his confederate, the Pope, and the devil standing behind, knocking their heads together. He is a sick man vomiting up towns. He is a sawyer, who, with the help of the King of Spain, saws the globe in two, Maintenon sitting aloft a.s.sisting the severance. As long as he lived the caricaturists continued to a.s.sail him; and when he died, in 1715, he left behind him a France so demoralized and impoverished that he still kept the satirists busy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Caricature of Louis XIV., by Thackeray.]

Even in our own time Louis XIV. has suggested one of the best caricatures ever drawn, and it is accompanied by an explanatory essay almost unique among prose satires for bitter wit and blasting truth. The same hand wielded both the pen and the pencil, and it was the wonderful hand of Thackeray. "You see at once," he says, in explanation of the picture, "that majesty is made out of the wig, the high-heeled shoes, and cloak, all _fleurs-de-lis_ bespangled.... Thus do barbers and cobblers make the G.o.ds that we worship."

CHAPTER XI.

PRECEDING HOGARTH.

It was the bubble mania of 1719 and 1720, brought upon Europe by John Law, which completed the "secularization" of caricature. Art, as well as literature, learning, and science, was subservient to religion during the Middle Ages, and drew its chief nourishment from Mother Church.

Since the Reformation they have all been obliged to pa.s.s through a painful process of weaning, and each in turn to try for an independent existence. The bubble frenzy, besides giving an impulse to the caricaturist's art it had not before received, withdrew attention from ecclesiastical subjects, and supplied abundant material drawn from sources purely mundane.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Shares! Shares! Shares!"

The Night Share-crier and his Magic Lantern. A Caricature of John Law and his Bubble Schemes. (Amsterdam, 1720.)]

Above all, the pictures which that mania called forth a.s.sisted to form the great satiric artist of his time and country, William Hogarth. He was a London apprentice carving coats of arms on silver plate when the early symptoms of the mania appeared; and he was still a very young man, an engraver, feeling his way to the career that awaited him, when the broadsheets satirizing John Law began to be "adapted" from Dutch originals, and shown in the shop-windows of London. Doubtless he inspected the picture of the "Night Share-crier," opposite, and noticed the c.o.c.k's feather in his hat (indicating the French origin of the delusion), and the windmill upon the top of his staff. The Dutch pictures were full of that detail and by-play of which Hogarth was such a master in later years.

Visitors to New York who saw tumultuous Wall Street during the worst of our inflation period, and, following the crowd up-town, entered the Gold-room, where the wild speculation of the day was continued till midnight, may have flattered themselves that they were looking upon scenes never before exhibited in this world. What a strange intensity of excitement there was in those surging ma.s.ses of young men! What fierce outcries! What a melancholy waste of youthful energies, so much needed elsewhere! But there was nothing new in all this, except that we pa.s.sed the crisis with _less_ loss and _less_ demoralization than any community ever before experienced in circ.u.mstances at all similar.

When Louis XIV. died in 1715, after his reign of seventy-two years, he left the finances of France in a condition of inconceivable disorder.

For fourteen years there had been an average annual deficit of more than fourteen millions of francs, to meet which the king had raised money by every paper device that had then been discovered. Having previously sold all the offices for which any pretext could be invented, he next sold annuities of all kinds, for one life, for two lives, for three lives, and in perpetuity. Then he issued all known varieties of promises to pay, from _rentes perpetuelles_ to treasury-notes of a few francs, payable on demand. But there was one thing he did not do--reduce the expenditure of his enormous and extravagant court. In the midst of that deficit, when his ministers were at their wits' end to carry on the government from day to day, and half the lackeys of Paris held the depreciated royal paper, the old king ordered one more of those magnificent fetes at Fontainebleau which had, as he thought, shed such l.u.s.tre on his reign. The fete would cost four millions, the treasury was empty, and treasury-notes had fallen to thirty-five. While an anxious minister was meditating the situation, he chanced to see in his inner office two valets slyly scanning the papers on his desk, for the purpose, as he instantly conjectured, of getting news for the speculators. He conceived an idea. The next time those enterprising valets found themselves alone in the same cabinet, they were so happy as to discover on the desk the outlines of a royal lottery scheme for the purpose of paying off a certain cla.s.s of treasury-notes. The news was soon felt in the street. Those notes mysteriously rose in a few days from thirty-five to eighty-five; and while they were at that point the minister, antic.i.p.ating the Fiskian era, slipped upon the market thirty millions of the same notes. The king had his fete; and when next he borrowed money of his subjects, for every twenty-five francs of coin he was obliged to give a hundred-franc note.[18]

[Footnote 18: "Law, son Systeme et son epoque," p. 2, par P. A. Cochut, Paris, 1853.]

Two years after, the foolish old king died, leaving, besides a consolidated debt of bewildering magnitude, a floating debt, then due and overdue, of seven hundred and eighty-nine millions, equivalent, as M. Cochut computes, to about twice the amount in money of to-day. Coin had vanished; the royal paper was at twenty-five; the treasury was void; prices were distressingly high; some provinces refused to pay taxes; trade languished; there were vast numbers of workmen unemployed; and during the winter after the king's death a considerable number of persons died in Paris of cold and hunger. The only prosperous people were Government contractors, farmers of the revenue, brokers, and speculators in the king's paper; and these cla.s.ses mocked the misery of their fellow-citizens by an ostentatious and tasteless profusion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Island of Madhead.

"Picture of the very famous Island of Madhead. Situated in Share Sea, and inhabited by a mult.i.tude of all kinds of people, to which is given the general name of Shareholders." (Amsterdam, 1720.)]

The natural successor of a king bigoted is a prince dissolute. The regent, who had to face this state of things on behalf of his nephew, Louis XV., a child of five, had at least the virtue and good sense to reject with indignant scorn the proposition made in his council by one member to declare France bankrupt and begin a new reign by opening a clean set of books. We, too, had our single repudiator, who fared no better than his French predecessor. But the regent's next measures were worthy of a prodigal. He called in the various kinds of public paper, and offered in exchange a new variety, called _billets d'etat_, bearing interest at four per cent. But the public not responding to the call, the new bills fell to forty in twenty-four hours, and drew down all other public paper, until in a few days the royal promise to pay one hundred francs was worth twenty francs. The regent's coffers did not fill. That scarred veterans could not get their pensions paid was an evil which could be borne; but the regent had mistresses to appease!

Then he tried a system of _squeezing_ the rich contractors and others of the vermin cla.s.s who batten on a sick body-politic. As informers were to have half the product of the squeeze, an offended lackey had only to denounce his master, to get him tried on a charge of having made too much money. Woe to the plebeian who was convicted of this crime! Besides being despoiled of his property, Paris saw him, naked to the shirt, a rope round his neck, a penitential candle in his handcuffed hands, tied to a dirty cart and dragged to the pillory, carrying on his back a large label, "PLUNDERER OF THE PEOPLE." The French pillory was a revolving platform, so that all the crowd had an equal chance to hurl mud and execration at the fixed and pallid face. Judge if there was not a making haste to compound with a government capable of such squeezing! There was also a mounting in hot haste to get out of such a France. One lucky merchant crossed the frontier, dressed as a peasant, driving a cart-load of straw, under which was a chest of gold. A train of fourteen carts loaded with barrels of wine was stopped, and in each barrel a keg of gold was found, which was emptied into the royal treasury.

The universal consternation and the utter paralysis of business which resulted from these violent spoliations may be imagined. Six thousand persons were tried, who confessed to the possession of twelve hundred millions of francs. The number of the condemned was four thousand four hundred and ten, and the sum extorted from them was, nominally, nearly four hundred millions, of which, however, less than one hundred millions reached the treasury. It was easy for a rich man to compound. A person condemned to disgorge twelve hundred thousand francs was visited by a "great lord." "Give me three hundred thousand francs," said the great lord, "and you won't be troubled for the rest." To which the merchant replied, "Really, my lord, you come too late, for I have already made a bargain with madame, your wife, for a hundred and fifty thousand." Thus the business of busy and frugal France was brought to a stand without relieving the Government. The royal coffers would not fill; the deficit widened; the royal paper still declined; the poor were hungry; and, oh, horror! the regent's mistresses pouted. The Government debased the coin.

But that, too, proved an aggravation of the evil.

Such was that _ancien regime_ which still has its admirers; such are the consequences of placing a great nation under the rule of the greatest fool in it; and such were the circ.u.mstances which gave the Scotch adventurer, John Law, his opportunity to madden and despoil France, so often a prey to the alien.

Two hundred years ago, when John Law, a rich goldsmith's son, was a boy in Edinburgh, goldsmiths were dealers in coin as well as in plate, and hence were bankers and brokers as well as manufacturers. They borrowed, lent, exchanged, and a.s.sayed money, and therefore possessed whatever knowledge of finance there was current in the world. It was in his father's counting-room that John Law acquired that taste for financial theories and combinations which distinguished him even in his youth. But the sagacious and practical goldsmith died when his son was fourteen, and left him a large inheritance in land and money. The example of Louis XIV. and Charles II. having brought the low vices into high fashion throughout Europe, it is not surprising that Law's first notoriety should have been owing to a duel about a mistress. A man of fashion in Europe in Louis XIV.'s time was a creature gorgeously attired in lace and velvet, and hung about with ringlets made of horse-hair, who pa.s.sed his days in showing the world how much there was in him of the goat, the monkey, and the pig. Law had the impudence to establish his mistress in a respectable lodging-house, which led to his being challenged by a gentleman who had a sister living there. Law killed his man on the field--"not fairly," as John Evelyn records--and he was convicted of murder. The king pardoned, but detained him in prison, from which he escaped, went to the Continent, and resumed his career, being at once a man of fashion, a gambler, and a connoisseur in finance. He used to attend card-parties, followed by a footman carrying two bags, each containing two thousand louis-d'ors, and once during the life-time of the old king he was ordered out of Paris on the ground that he "understood the games he had introduced into the capital _too well_."

Twenty years elapsed from the time of his flight from a London prison.

He was forty-four years of age, possessed nearly a million and three-quarters of francs in cash, producible on the green cloth at a day's notice, and was the most plausible talker on finance in Europe.

This last was a bad symptom, indeed, for it is well known that men who remain victors in finance, who really do extricate estates and countries from financial difficulties, are not apt to talk very effectively on the subject. Successful finance is little more than paying your debts and living within your income, neither of which affords material for striking rhetoric. Alexander Hamilton, for example, talked finance in a taking manner; but it was Albert Gallatin who quietly reduced the country's debt. Fifteen days after the death of the old king, Law was in Paris with all that he possessed, and in a few months he was deep in the confidence of the regent. His fine person, his winning manners, his great wealth, his constant good fortune, his fluent and plausible tongue, his popular vices, might not have sufficed to give him ascendency if he had not added to these the peculiar force that is derived from sincerity. That he believed in his own "system" is shown by his risking his whole fortune in it. And it is to his credit that the first use he made of his influence was to show that the spoliations, the debasing of the coin, and all measures that inspired terror, and thus tightened unduly the clutch upon capital, could not but aggravate financial distress.

His "system" was delightfully simple. Bear in mind that almost every one in Paris who had any property at all held the king's paper, worth one-quarter or one-fifth of its nominal value. Whatever project Law set on foot, whether a royal bank, a scheme for settling and trading with Louisiana, for commerce with the East Indies, or farming the revenues, any one could buy shares in it on terms like these: one-quarter of the price in coin, and three-quarters in paper at its nominal value.

The system was not immediately successful, and it was only in the teeth of powerful opposition that he could get his first venture, the bank, so much as authorized. Mark how clearly one of the council, the Duc de Saint-Simon, comprehended the weakness of a despotism to which he owed his personal importance. "An establishment," said he, "of the kind proposed may be in itself good; but it is so only in a republic, or in such a monarchy as England, where _the finances are controlled absolutely by those who furnish the money_, and who furnish only as much of it as they choose, and in the way they choose. But in a light and changing government like that of France, solidity would be necessarily wanting, since a king or, in his name, a mistress, a minister, favorites, and, still more, an extreme necessity, could overturn the bank, which would present a temptation at once too great and too easy."

Law, therefore, was obliged to alter his plan, and give his bank at first a board of directors not connected with the Government.

Gradually the "system" made its way. The royal paper beginning to rise in value, the holders were in good humor, and disposed to buy into other projects on similar terms. The Louisiana scheme may serve as an example of Law's method. Six years before, a great merchant of Paris, Antoine Crozat, had bought from the old king the exclusive right to trade with a vast unknown region in North America called Louisiana; but after five years of effort and loss he became discouraged, and offered to sell his right to the creator of the bank. Law, accepting the offer, speedily launched a magnificent scheme: capital one hundred millions of francs, in shares of five hundred francs, purchasable _wholly_ in those new treasury-notes bearing four per cent. interest, then at a discount of seventy per cent. Maps of this illimitable virgin land were published.

Pictures were exhibited, in which crowds of interesting naked savages, male and female, were seen running up to welcome arriving Frenchmen; and under the engraving a gaping Paris crowd could read, "In this land are seen mountains filled with gold, silver, copper, lead, quicksilver; and the savages, not knowing their value, gladly exchange pieces of gold and silver for knives, iron pots, a small looking-gla.s.s, or even a little brandy." One picture was addressed to pious souls; for even at that early day, as at present, there was occasionally observed a curious alliance between persons engaged in the promotion of piety and those employed in the pushing of shares. This work exhibited a group of Indians kneeling before some reverend fathers of the Society of Jesus.

Under it was written, "Indian Idolaters imploring Baptism."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Speculative Map of Louisiana.]

The excitement, once kindled, was stimulated by lying announcements of the sailing of great fleets for Louisiana laden with merchandise and colonists; of the arrival of vessels with freights worth "millions;" of the establishment of a silk-factory, wherein twelve thousand women of the Natchez tribe were employed; of the bringing of Louisiana ingots to the Mint to be a.s.sayed; of the discovery in Arkansas of a great rock of emerald, and the dispatch of Captain Laharpe with a file of twenty-two men to take possession of the same. In 1718 Law sent engineers to Louisiana, who did something toward laying out its future capital, which he named New Orleans, in honor of his patron, the regent.

The royal paper rose rapidly under this new demand. Other schemes followed, until John Law, through his various companies, seemed about to "run" the kingdom of France by contract, farming all its revenues, transacting all its commerce, and, best of all, paying all its debts!

Madness, ruled the hour. The depreciated paper rose, rose, and still rose; reached par; went beyond par, until gold and silver were at a discount of ten per cent. The street named Quincampoix, the centre and vortex of this whirl of business, a mere lane twenty feet wide and a quarter of a mile long, was crowded with excited people from morning till night, and far into the night, so that the inhabitants of the quarter sent to the police a formal complaint that they could get no sleep. n.o.bles, lackeys, bishops, monks, merchants, soldiers, women, pickpockets, foreigners, all resorted to _La Rue_, "panting, yelling, operating, s.n.a.t.c.hing papers, counting crowns," making up a scene of noisy confusion unexampled. One man hired all the vacant houses in the street, and made a fortune by subletting offices and desk-room, even placing sentry-boxes on some of the roofs, and letting them at a good price. The excitement spread over France, reached Holland, and drew to Paris, as was estimated at the time, five hundred thousand strangers, places in the public vehicles being engaged "two months in advance," and commanding a high premium.

There were the most extraordinary acquisitions of fortune. People suddenly enriched were called _Mississippiens_, and they behaved as the victims of sudden wealth, unearned, usually do. Men who were lackeys one week kept lackeys the next. A _garcon_ of a wine-shop gained twenty millions. A cobbler, who had a stall in the Rue Quincampoix made of four planks, cleared away his traps and let his boards to ladies as seats, and sold pens, paper, and ink to operators, making two hundred francs a day by both trades. Men gained money by hiring out their backs as writing-desks, bending over while operators wrote out their contracts and calculations. One little hunchback made a hundred and fifty thousand francs by thus serving as a _pupitre ambulant_ (strolling desk), and a broad-shouldered soldier gained money enough in the same way to buy his discharge and retire to the country upon a pretty farm. The general trade of the city was stimulated to such a degree that for a while the novel spectacle was presented of a community almost every member of which was prosperous beyond his hopes; for even in the Rue Quincampoix itself, although some men gained more money than others, no one appeared to lose any thing. And all this seemed the work of one man, the great, the incomparable "Jean La.s.s," as he was then called in Paris. It was a social distinction to be able to say, "I have seen him!" His carriage could with difficulty force its way through the rapturous, admiring crowd. Princes and n.o.bles thronged his antechamber, a d.u.c.h.ess publicly kissed his hand, and the regent made him controller-general of the finances.

This madness lasted eight months. No one needs to be told what followed it--how a chill first came over the feverish street, a vague apprehension, not confessed, but inspiring a certain wish to "realize."

Dread word, REALIZE! The tendency to realize was adroitly checked by Law, aided by operators who desired to "unload;" but the unloading, once suspected, converted the realizing tendency into a wild, ungovernable rush, which speedily brought ruin to thousands, and long prostration upon France. John Law, who in December, 1719, was the idol of Paris, ready to perish of his celebrity, escaped with difficulty from the kingdom in December, 1720, hated, despised, impoverished, to resume his career as elegant gambler in the drawing-rooms of Germany and Italy.

As the "system" collapsed in France, it acquired vogue in England, where, also, it originated in the desire to get rid of the public debt by brilliant finance instead of the homely and troublesome method of paying it. In London, besides the original South Sea Company which began the frenzy, there were started in the course of a few months about two hundred joint-stock schemes, many of which, as given in Anderson's "History of Commerce," are of almost incredible absurdity. The sum called for by these projects was three hundred millions of pounds sterling, which was more than the value of all the land in Great Britain. Shares in Sir Richard Steele's "fish-pool for bringing fresh fish to London" brought one hundred and sixty pounds a share! Men paid seventy pounds each for "permits," which gave them merely the _privilege_ of subscribing to a sail-cloth manufacturing company not yet formed. There was, indeed, a great trade in "permits" to subscribe to companies only planned. Here are a few of the schemes: for raising hemp in Pennsylvania; "Puckle's machine gun;" settling the Bahamas; "wrecks to be fished for on the Irish coast;" horse and cattle insurance; "insurance and improvement of children's fortunes;" "insurance of losses by servants;" "insurance against theft and robbery;" insuring remittances; "to make salt-water fresh;" importing walnut-trees from Virginia; improving the breed of horses; purchasing forfeited estates; making oil from sunflowers; planting mulberry-trees and raising silk-worms; extracting silver from lead; making quicksilver malleable; capturing pirates; "for importing a number of large jacka.s.ses from Spain in order to propagate a larger kind of mules;" trading in human hair; "for fatting of hogs;" "for the encouragement of the industrious;"

perpetual motion; making pasteboard; furnishing funerals.

There was even a company formed and shares sold for carrying out an "undertaking which shall in due time be revealed." The word "puts," now so familiar in Wall Street, appears in these transactions of 1720. "Puts and refusals" were sold in vast amounts. The prices paid for shares during the half year of this mania were as remarkable as the schemes themselves. South Sea shares of a hundred pounds par value reached a thousand pounds. It was a poor share that did not sell at five times its original price. As in France, so in England, the long heads, like Sir Robert Walpole and Alexander Pope, began to think of "realizing" when they had gained a thousand per cent. or so upon their ventures; and, in a very few days, realizing, in its turn, became a mania; and all those paper fortunes shrunk and crumpled into nothingness.

So many caricatures of these events appeared in Amsterdam and London during the year 1720 that the collection in the British Museum, after the lapse of a hundred and fifty-five years, contains more than a hundred specimens. I have myself eighty, several of which include from six to twenty-four distinct designs. Like most of the caricatures of that period, they are of great size, and crowded with figures, each bearing its label of words, with a long explanation in verse or prose at the bottom of the sheet. As a rule, they are dest.i.tute of the point that can make a satirical picture interesting after the occasion is past. In one we see the interior of an Exchange filled with merchants running wildly about, each uttering words appropriate to the situation: "To-day I have gained ten thousand!" "Who has money to lend at two per cent.?"

"A strait-jacket is what I shall want;" "d.a.m.ned is this wind business."

This picture, which originated in Amsterdam, is called "The Wind-buyers paid in Wind," and it contains at the bottom three columns of explanatory verse in Dutch, of which the following is the purport:

[Ill.u.s.tration: John Law, Wind Monopolist. (Amsterdam, 1720.)

"_Law loquitur._ The wind is my treasure, cushion, and foundation.

Master of the wind, I am master of life, and my wind monopoly becomes straightway the object of idolatry. Less rapidly turn the sails of the windmill on my head than the price of shares in my foolish enterprises."]

"Come, gentlemen, weavers, peasants, tailors! Whoever has relied on wind for his profit can find his picture here. They rave like madmen. See the French, the English, the Hebrew, and Jack of Bremen! Hear what a scream the absurd Dutch are making on the exchange of Europe! There is Fortune throwing down some charming wishes to silly mortals, while virtue, art, and intellect are despised and impoverished in the land; shops and counting-houses are empty; trade is ruined. All this is QUINCAMPOIX!"

The Dutch caricaturists recurred very often to the _windy_ character of the share business. In several of their works we see a puffy wind-G.o.d blowing up pockets to a great size, inflating share-bags, and wafting swiftly along vehicles with s.p.a.cious sails. The bellows play a conspicuous and not always decorous part. Jean Law is exhibited as a "wind monopolist." In one picture he appears a.s.sisting Atlas and others to bear up great globes of wind. Kites are flying and windmills revolving in several pictures. Pigeons fly away with shares in their bills. The hunchback who served as a walking desk is repeated many times. The Tower of Babel, the mad-house, the hospital, the whirligig, a garden maze, the lottery wheel, the drum, the magic lantern, the soap-bubble, the bladder, dice, the swing--whatever typifies pretense, uncertainty, or confusion was brought into the service. One Dutch broadsheet (sixteen inches by twenty), now before me, contains fifty-four finely executed designs, each of which burlesques a scene in Law's career, or a device of his finance, the whole making a pack of "wind cards for playing a game of wind."

Most of the Dutch pictures were "adapted" into English, and the adapters added verses which, in some instances, were better than the caricatures.

A few of the shorter specimens may be worth the s.p.a.ce they occupy, and give the reader a feeling of the situation not otherwise attainable. Of the pictures scarcely one would either bear or reward reduction, so large are they, so crowded with objects, and their style uninterestingly obsolete or boorishly indecent.

On Puckle's Machine Gun: