Caricature and Other Comic Art Part 14

says the pluralist, "was made for me, not I for the Church;" and under the wheels of the coach is a book marked "The Thirty-nine Articles." One starving curate cries, piteously, "Lord, be merciful to us poor curates!" to which another responds, "And send us more comfortable livings!" It required a century of satire and remonstrance to get that one monstrous abuse of the Church Ring reduced to proportions approaching decency. Corruption in the city of New York in the darkest days of Tweed was less universal, less systematic, less remote from remedy, than that of the Government of Great Britain under the least incapable of its four Georges. It was merely more decorous.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Antiquaries Puzzled. (London, 1756.)]

A specimen of the harmless, good-humored satire aimed at the zealous antiquaries of the last century is given above. This picture may have suggested to Mr. d.i.c.kens the familiar scene in "Pickwick" where the roving members of the Pickwick Club discover the stone commemorative of Bill Stumps. The mysterious inscription in the picture is, "Beneath this stone reposeth Claud Coster, tripe-seller of Impington, as doth his consort Jane."

CHAPTER XIII.

ENGLISH CARICATURE IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.

It is part of the office of caricature to a.s.sist in destroying illusions that have served their turn and become obstructive. As in Luther's time it gave important aid to the reformers in breaking the spell of the papacy, so now, when kingship broke down in Europe, the satiric pencil had much to do with tearing away the veil of fiction which had so long concealed the impotence of kings for nearly every thing but mischief.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Caricature designed by Benjamin Franklin. (London, 1774.)

Explanation by Dr. Franklin: "The Colonies (that is, Britannia's limbs) being severed from her, Britannia is seen lifting her eyes and mangled stumps to heaven; her shield, which she is unable to wield, lies useless by her side; her lance has pierced New England; the laurel branch has fallen from the hand of Pennsylvania; the English oak has lost its head, and stands a bare trunk, with a few withered branches: briers and thorns are on the ground beneath it; the British ships have brooms at their topmast heads, denoting their being on sale; and Britannia herself is seen sliding off the world (no longer able to hold its balance), her fragments overspread with the label, Date obolum Bellisario" (Give a farthing to Belisarius).]

The fatal objection to the hereditary principle in the government of nations is the importance which, to use Mr. Jefferson's words, it "heaps upon idiots." Idiot is a harsh word to apply to a person so well disposed as George III., King of England, to whom the violence of the Revolutionary period was chiefly due; but when we think of the evil and suffering from which Europe could have been saved if he had known a little more or been a little less, we can not be surprised that contemporaries should have summed him up with disrespectful brevity. But for him, so far as short-sighted mortals can discern, the period of b.l.o.o.d.y revolution could have been a period of peaceful reform. After exasperating his subjects nearly to the point of rebellion, he precipitated the independence of the American colonies, which, in turn, brought on the French Revolution, and that issued in Napoleon Bonaparte, whose sins France only finished expiating at Sedan.

It is true, there must have been in Great Britain myriads upon myriads of such heads as that of King George to make his policy possible. But suppose that, instead of placing himself at the head of the dull minds in his empire, he had given the prestige of the crown to the bright and independent souls! Suppose he had taken as kindly to Chatham, Burke, Fox, Franklin, Price, Priestley, and Barre as he did to Bute, Dr.

Johnson, Addington, and Eldon!

And see how this heir to the first throne in Christendom was educated.

That period has been so laid bare by diaries and correspondence that we can visit the orphan boy in his home at Carlton House, and listen to his mother, the widowed Princess of Wales, as she describes his traits and laments the defects of his training. Go back to the year 1752, and imagine a drawing-room in a royal residence. The dinner hour then had only got as far toward "to-morrow" as three in the afternoon, and therefore by early candle-light of an October evening the drawing-room may be supposed to be inhabited. The Princess of Wales, born a princess of a petty German sovereignty, still a young mother, is dressed in mourning, her husband being but a few months dead. Of the duties belonging to royalty she had no ideas except those which had prevailed from time immemorial at the court of absolute German sovereigns. Her chief care was to preserve the morals of her children, and to have her eldest son a king in reality as well as in name. "Be king" (_Sois roi_) were favorite words with her, often repeated in the hearing of the heir to the throne. She thought it infamy in a king to allow himself to be ruled by ministers. There is no reason to doubt that she was an honorable lady and affectionate mother. Horace Walpole's insinuation that she instilled virtuous principles into the mind of her son because she "feared a mistress," and that her intimacy with Lord Bute was a criminal intrigue, dishonors Horace Walpole and human nature, but not the mother of George III.

She has company this evening--Bubb Dodington, a gentleman of great wealth and agreeable manners, who controlled six votes in the House of Commons, and pa.s.sed his life in scheming to buy a peerage with them, in which, a year before his death, he succeeded, but left no heir to inherit it. He was much in the confidence of the princess, and she had sent for him to "spend the day" with her. Dinner is over, the two ladies-in-waiting are present, and now the "children" enter to play a few games of cards with their mother before going to bed. The children are seven in number, of whom the eldest was George, Prince of Wales--a boy of fourteen, of fresh complexion, st.u.r.dy and stout in form, and a countenance open and agreeable, and wearing an expression of honesty.

Human nature rarely a.s.sumes a more pleasing form than that of a healthy, innocent English boy of fourteen. He was such a boy as you may still see in the play-grounds of Eton, only he was heavier, slower, and ruddier than the average, and much more shy in company. He loved his horse, and was exceedingly fond of rural sports; but when lesson-time came--but let his mother speak on that point.

The old game of "comet" was the one which the lad usually preferred. The company play at comet for small stakes, until the clock strikes nine, when "the royal children" go to bed. Then the mother leaves her ladies, and withdraws with her guest to the other end of the room, where she indulges in a long, gossipy, confidential chat upon the subject nearest her heart--her son, the presumptive heir to the throne. To show the reader how she used to talk to confidants on such occasions, I will glean a few sentences from her conversations:

"I like that the prince should amuse himself now and then at _small_ play; but princes should never play deep, both for the example, and because it does not become them to win great sums. George's real disposition, do you ask? You know him almost as well as I do. He is very honest, but I wish he was a little more forward and less childish at his age. I hope his preceptors will improve him. I really do not know what they are teaching him, but, to speak freely, I am afraid not much. They are in the country, and follow their diversions, and not much else that I can discover."

Dodington remarked upon this that, for his part, he did not much regard books; what _he_ most wished was that the prince should begin to acquire knowledge of the world, and be informed of the general frame and nature of the British Government and Const.i.tution, and, without going into minutiae, get some insight into the manner of doing public business.

"I am of your opinion," said the princess; "and his tutor, Stone, tells me that when he talks with him on those subjects, he seems to give proper attention, and makes pertinent remarks. I stick to the learning as the chief point. You know how backward the children were, and I am sure you do not think them much improved since. It may be that it is not too late to acquire a competence. I am highly sensible how necessary it is that the prince should keep company with men. I know that women can not inform him; but if his education was in my power absolutely, to whom could I address him? What company can I wish him to keep? What friendships can I desire him to contract? Such is the universal profligacy, such is the character and conduct of the young people of distinction, that I am really afraid to have them near my children. I shall even be in more pain for my daughters than I am for my sons, for the behavior of the women is indecent, low, and much against their own interest by making themselves so very cheap."

Three years pa.s.sed. The prince was seventeen. Still the anxious mother deplored the neglect of his education.

"His book-learning," said she to the same friend, "I am no judge of, though I suppose it is small or useless; but I did hope he might have been instructed in the general understanding of things. I once desired Mr. Stone to inform the prince about the Const.i.tution; but he declined it to avoid giving jealousy to the Bishop of Norwich (official educator). I mentioned it again, but he still declined it as not being his province."

"Pray, madam," asked Dodington, "what _is_ his province?"

"I don't know, unless it is to go before the prince up-stairs, to walk with him sometimes, seldomer to ride with him, and now and then to dine with him. But when they do walk together, the prince generally takes that time to think of his own affairs and say nothing."

The youth was, indeed, extremely indolent and stupid. At school he would have been simply called a dunce, for at eleven he could not read English with any fluency, and he could never have been induced to apply his mind to study except by violence. He never had the slightest notion of what Chatham, Burke, or Fox meant when they spoke of the Const.i.tution. If Mr.

Stone had not been in dread of invading the Bishop of Norwich's province, and if the bishop had not been a verbose and wearisome formalist, their united powers could not have shown this young man the unique and prodigious happiness of a const.i.tutional king in governing through responsible ministers. His "governor" during the last few years of his minority was Lord Waldegrave, whose too brief memoirs confirm the excellent report which contemporaries give of his mind and character.

Lord Waldegrave could make nothing of him. Speaking of the prince at nineteen, he says he was "uncommonly full of princely prejudices, contracted in the nursery and improved by the society of bedchamber women and pages of the back-stairs." He found the heavy youth an insufferable bore, and he was soon, as his relation, Horace Walpole, relates, "thoroughly fatigued with the insipidity of his pupil." The prince derived from his education only two ideas, one very good and the other very bad. The first was that he must be a Good Boy and not keep a mistress; the second was that he must be a king indeed.

An indolent and ignorant monarch who will not govern by ministers must govern by favorites. He has no other alternative but abdication. A favorite was at hand in the person of a poor Scotch lord who had married one of the richest heiresses in Europe, the daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her miserly husband. He had also, if we may believe Lord Waldegrave, "a good person, fine legs, and a theatrical air of the greatest importance." He was likewise fond of medals, engravings, and flowers; he pensioned Dr. Johnson and the dramatist Home; he really enjoyed some products of art, and was far from being either the execrable or the ridiculous personage which he was esteemed by men whom he kept from place. "Bute," said Prince Frederick, father of George III., "you would make an excellent emba.s.sador in a small, proud little court where there is nothing to do." He would have arranged the ceremonials, superintended the plays, been gracious to artists and musicians, smiled benignantly upon the court poet, bored the reigning prince, enchanted the reigning princess, amused her children, and ripened into a courtly and garrulous old Polonius, "full of wise saws and modern instances." Above all, he would have upheld the prerogative of the prince with stanch sincerity. _Sois roi!_

There is something in the Scotch character that causes it to relish royal prerogative. To this hour there are in Scotland families that cherish a kind of sentimental attachment to the memory of the Stuarts; and we find Scotchmen as eminent as Hume, Carlyle, Lockhart, Scott, Wilson--men of distinguished liberality in some provinces of thought--unable to widen out into liberal politics. Bute was a lord as well as a Scotchman, not as ignorant nor as vulgar as lords in that generation usually were, but still subject to the lowering influences that always beset a privileged order; predisposed, too, by temperament to the worship of the picturesque, and now the cherished sharer of the shy, proud, gloomy seclusion of the family upon which the hopes of an empire were fixed. He showed them medals and pictures, he discoursed of music and architecture--two of his most p.r.o.nounced tastes--and he nourished every princely prejudice which a wise tutor would have striven to eradicate.

This unfortunate youth, dull offspring of the stimulated l.u.s.t of ages, was an apt pupil in the Jacobin theory of kingly authority. He was caught one day reading the book written at the instance of the dethroned James II. to justify his arbitrary policy; and there were so many other signs of the heir to a const.i.tutional throne being educated in unconst.i.tutional principles that Horace Walpole drew up a formal remonstrance against it in the name of the Whig families. This doc.u.ment, which was privately circulated, produced no effect. _Sois roi!_ That remained the ruling thought in the mind of this ignorant, proud, moral young man, about to fill a place which conferred more obstructive power than any other in the world. If he had only been dissolute in that most dissolute age, he could have been ruled through his vices; but being strictly moral and temperate, he was, alas! always _himself_; and he had at his back the great voiceless mult.i.tude, who know by instinct that morality is the first interest of civilized human nature, and who honor it supremely even in this crude, rudimentary form. "Your dad is safe on his throne," said some boon companion of George IV., "as long as he is faithful to that ugly old woman, your mother." And wise old Franklin said, "If George III. had had a bad private character and John Wilkes a good one, he might have turned the king out of his dominions." Such is the mighty power of the mere indispensable rudiments of virtue, its mere preliminary corporeal conditions. A chaste and temperate fool will carry the day nine times in ten over profligate genius.

Riding in the park on an October day in 1760, a messenger delivered to the prince a note from the _valet de chambre_ of his grandfather, George II. The prince had coolly arranged with this valet, while yet the king seemed firm in health, that at the moment of the old man's death he should send him a note bearing a certain mark on the outside. The king, a vigorous old man of seventy-seven, fell dead in his closet at seven in the morning, and this note bore the preconcerted announcement of the fact. The moral and steady young man, quietly remarking to his groom that his horse was lame, turned about and gently rode back to Kew. Upon dismounting he said to the man, "I have said this horse is lame; I forbid you to say the contrary." At twenty-two years of age he was king.

Except that he married, a few months after, a pliant, adoring German princess, his accession did not much change his mode of life. He still lived in strict seclusion, shut in against expanding influences, accessible at all times only to one man--him of the good legs and Jacobin mind, Bute, progenitor of the Pope's recent conquest, and Mr.

Disraeli's hero, Lothair.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lord Bute, 1768.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Princess of Wales--Bute--George III.]

In the caricatures of the next fifty years we see the ghastly results.

His first important act was to repel from his counsels humiliating superiority in the person of William Pitt, the darling of the nation, the first minister of the world, and one of the three great orators of all time. In his stead ruled a long monotony of servile incompetents, beginning with Bute himself, continuing with Grenville, and coming at last to Addington and Eldon, the king keeping far from his confidence every man in England who had a gleam of public sense, or a touch of independent spirit, or even a sound traditionary attachment to Whig principles. An immovable obstructive to the true interest of his country at every crisis, honoring the men whom the better sense of the nation did not honor, and repressing the men whom wise contemporaries loved, and whom posterity with unanimous voice p.r.o.nounces the glory of England in that age, he kept the country in bad humor during most of his reign, put her wrong on every question of universal interest, lost the most valuable and affectionate colonies a country ever had, kept Europe in a broil for twenty-five years, and developed Napoleon Bonaparte into a destructive lunatic by creating for him a succession of opportunities for the display of his talent for beating armies which had no generals.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Wire-master (Bute) and his Puppets. (London, 1767.)

"The power behind the throne greater than the throne itself."]

A large proportion of the very caricatures of the period have something savage in them. A visitor to the library of the British Museum curious in such matters is shown ten huge folio sc.r.a.p-books full of caricatures relating to this reign, most of them of great size and blazing with color. From a gentleman who recently inspected these volumes we learn some particulars showing the bad temper, bad manners, and bad morals of that time, all three aggravated by a king whose morals were excellent.

One of the first to catch the eye of an American is a picture, of date about 1765, called "A New Method of Macarony-making, as practiced in _Boston_, North America," which represents two men tarring and feathering another, who has a halter round his neck. Of the pictures reflecting upon Lord Bute and the Princess of Wales nothing need be said except that they are such as might be expected from the caricaturists of that age. Many of the works of Gillray in the earlier years of George III. were of such coa.r.s.eness, extravagance, and brutality that the exhibition of them nowadays would subject the vender to a prosecution by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Our informant adds: "Their savageness and filth give one a very curious idea of the taste of our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers, only our ancestors, male and female, could hardly have been as bad as they are represented. Such hideous faces, such deformed figures, such monstrous distortion and debas.e.m.e.nt, such general ugliness and sensuality, oppress one with a feeling of melancholy rather than exhilaration. You might as well be merry over the doings of Swift's Yahoos, who are certainly not more offensive than some of Gillray's men and women. Whether in home or foreign politics, he is equally unscrupulous."

Charles James Fox was the _bete noire_ of Gillray. He delighted in depicting him and his friends in as odious a light as possible, giving him huge beetle-brows, heavy jaws, and a swarthy complexion. The famous Westminster election, at which the beautiful d.u.c.h.ess of Devonshire won a vote for Fox by giving a kiss to a butcher, supplied him with a rich source of caricature. Fox is drawn riding on the back of the lady; and again, sitting in a tap-room with the d.u.c.h.ess on his knee; and in another picture, hobn.o.bbing with a coster-monger, while the d.u.c.h.ess has her shoes mended by a cobbler, and pays the cobbler's wife with a purse of gold. Fox chops off the head of the king; he is a traitor, a republican, a Jacobin, a confederate with the French, a forestaller, a buyer-up of corn with which to feed the enemy, a sot, a gambler--every thing that is bad. His very death-bed forms the subject of a brutal caricature. The n.o.blest traits of his political character are the points satirized. His great crimes apparently are that he loved freedom abroad as well as at home, that he strove for peace with France, and endeavored to do justice to Ireland. For this he is depicted as the secret ally of Bonaparte and as the instigator of Irish rebellion. The ghosts of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, the Sheares brothers, Emmett, and other Irish martyrs are made to pa.s.s before Fox's bed, and point to _him_ as the cause of their rebellion and their fate. When Burke went over to the Tories he then became the favorite of Gillray, who before had generally represented him as a Jesuit, because he demanded justice for the Catholics. Now he is the savior of his country, and the terror of Fox, Sheridan, and Priestley. Sheridan is depicted as a blazing meteor with an extremely rubicund nose. There is a picture of the t.i.tans attempting to scale heaven, in which George III. figures as a comical Jupiter launching his thunder-bolts at the Whig Opposition. Queen Charlotte is shown as a miracle of ugliness. The prodigality of the Prince of Wales, who first appears as a handsome young man with long powdered hair, totally unlike the high-shouldered, curly-wigged, royal Turveydrop of later days, is contrasted in companion pictures with the alleged parsimony of his parents. He is represented reveling with inordinately fat but handsome women, who get drunk, hang round his neck, and indulge in familiarities. The popular hope that marriage would reform him suggested a large drawing, in which the slumbering prince is visited by a descending angel in the likeness of the unhappy Caroline, at whose approach a crowd of reprobates, male and female, hurry away into darkness. Thomas Paine did not escape. In a picture ent.i.tled "The Rights of Man; or, Tommy Paine, the Little American Taylor, taking the Measure of the Crown for a New Pair of Revolution Breeches," he is represented as the traditional starveling tailor, ragged and slippered, and armed with an immense pair of shears. He crouches to take the measure of an enormous crown, while uttering much irrelevant nonsense. This precious work is "humbly dedicated to the Jacobin clubs of France and England."

Bound with such pictures as these are a vast number by inferior hands, most of which are indescribable, the standard subjects being gluttony, drunkenness, incontinence, and fashion, and these in their most outrageous manifestations. They serve to show that a stupid king in that age, besides corrupting Parliament and debauching the Press, could demoralize the popular branch of art. The visitor, turning from this collection of atrocities and ferocities, finds himself relenting toward the unfortunate old king, and inclined to say that he was, after all, only the head noodle of his kingdom. Every improvement was mercilessly burlesqued--steam, gas, the purchase of the Elgin marbles; popular prejudices were nearly always flattered, seldom rebuked; so that if the caricatures were of any use at all in the promulgation of truth, they served only as part of the ordeal that tested its vitality.

We do not find in this or in any other collection many satirical pictures relating to the revolution which ended in the independence of the American colonies. There was, however, one gentleman in London during the earlier phases of the dispute who employed caricature and burlesque on behalf of America with matchless skill. He is described in the London Directory for 1770 in these words, "Franklin, Benjamin, Esq., agent for Philadelphia, Craven Street, Strand." The effective caricature placed at the beginning of this chapter was one of the best of a long series of efforts to avert the impending conflict. He loved his country with the peculiar warmth that usually animates citizens who live in a distant outlying province. His country, when he designed that caricature and wrote the well-known burlesques in a similar taste, was not Pennsylvania, nor America, nor England, but the great British Empire, to which William Pitt, within Franklin's own life-time, seemed to have given an ascendency over the nations of the earth similar to that which Rome had once enjoyed. It was, however, only on the coast of North America that Britain possessed colonies loyal and free, not won by conquest nor by diplomacy, and therefore ent.i.tled to every right secured by the British Const.i.tution. Franklin loved and gloried in this great country of which he was born a citizen. He deplored the measures that threatened the severance of those colonies from the mother country, and would have prevented the severance if the king's folly had been any thing short of incurable. The most wonderful thing in the whole controversy was that the argument, fact, and fun which Franklin wrote and inspired, from 1765 to 1774, had only momentary influence on the course of events. "Against stupidity the G.o.ds themselves contend in vain."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Gouty Colossus, William Pitt (Lord Chatham), with One Leg in London and the Other in New York. (London, 1766.)]

His twenty "Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One," published three years before the caricature, inculcated the same lesson. A great empire, he remarked, was in one particular like a great cake: it could be most easily diminished at _the edges_. The person, therefore, who had undertaken the task of reducing it should take care to begin at the remotest provinces, and not till after they were lopped off cut up the central portion. His twenty "Rules" are merely a humorous history of the British colonial policy since the accession of George III.: Don't incorporate your colonies with the mother country, quarter troops among them, appoint for their governors broken gamblers and exhausted _roues_, despise their voluntary grants, and hara.s.s them with novel taxes. By such measures as these "you will act like a wise gingerbread baker, who, to facilitate a division, cuts his dough half through at the places where, when baked, he would have it broken to pieces." Franklin also wrote a shorter burlesque, pompously headed, "An Edict of the King of Prussia," in which that monarch was supposed to claim sovereign rights over Great Britain on the ground that the island had been colonized by Hengist, Horsa, and others, subjects of "our renowned ducal ancestors."

The edict, of course, ordains and commands precisely those absurd things which the Government of Great Britain _had_ ordained and commanded since the planting of the colonies. Iron, as the edict duly sets forth, had been discovered in the island of Great Britain by "our colonists there,"

who, "_presuming_ that they had a natural right to make the best use they could of the natural productions of their country," had erected furnaces and forges for the manufacture of the same, to the detriment of the manufacturers of Prussia. This must be instantly stopped, and all the iron sent to Prussia to be manufactured. "And whereas the art and mystery of making _hats_ has arrived at great perfection in Prussia,"

and "the islanders before mentioned, being in possession of wool, beaver, and other furs, have presumptuously conceived they had a right to take some advantage thereof by manufacturing the same into hats, to the prejudice of our domestic manufacture," therefore we do hereby forbid them to do so any more.

We call this piece a burlesque, but it was burlesque only in form.

Precisely such restrictions existed upon the industry of the American colonists. It was part of the protective system of the age, and not much more unjust than the parts of the same system to which the descendants of those colonists have since subjected themselves.

An ignorant man at the head of a government, however honest he may be, is liable to make fatal mistakes in the selection of his ministers. He naturally dreads the close inspection of minds superior to his own. He has always to be on his good behavior before them, which is irksome. He shares the stock prejudices of mankind, one of which is a distrust of practiced politicians. But as the poorest company of actors will get through a comedy with less discredit than the best amateurs, so an administration of "party hacks" will usually carry on a government with less odious failure than an administration composed of better men without experience in public business. George III. had, moreover, a singularly unfortunate trait for a king who had to govern by party leaders--his prejudices against individuals were inveterate. Lord Waldegrave remarked "a kind of unhappiness in his temper" while he was still a youth. "Whenever he is displeased, his anger does not break out with heat and violence, but he becomes sullen and silent, and retires to his closet, not to compose his mind by study and contemplation, but merely to indulge the melancholy enjoyment of his own ill-humor." And when he re-appeared, it was but too evident that he had not forgotten the offense. He never forgot, he seldom forgave. "The same strength of memory," as Earl Russell once wrote of him, "and the same _brooding sullenness_ against those who opposed his will, which had been observed in the boy, were manifest in the man."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Mask (Coalition).]

This peculiarity of character always prevented the formation of a proper ministry, and shortened the duration of every ministry which was approximately proper. During the first ten years of his reign his dislike of William Pitt, the natural chief of the Whig party, confused every arrangement; and during the next twenty years the most cherished object of his policy seemed to be to keep from power the natural successor of that minister--Charles James Fox. The ascendency of both those leaders was such that to exclude them from power was to paralyze their own party, and prevent the free play of politics in the House of Commons. It reduced the poor king at last to pit against Napoleon Bonaparte a young rhetorician of defective health, William Pitt, the son of the great minister.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Heads of Fox and North.

"In a committee on the sense of the nation, Moved, that for preventing future disorders and dissensions, the _heads_ of the Mutiny Act be brought in, and suffered to lie on the table to-morrow."--_Fox's Motion in Parliament, February, 1784._]