Caricature and Other Comic Art Part 2

[Ill.u.s.tration: Egyptian Servants conveying Home their Masters from a Carouse.]

That the ancient Egyptians were a jovial people who sat long at the wine, we might infer from the caricatures which have been discovered in Egypt, if we did not know it from other sources of information.

Representations have been found of every part of the process of wine-making, from the planting of the vineyard to the storing-away of the wine-jars. In the valuable works of Sir Gardner Wilkinson[2] many of these curious pictures are given: the vineyard and its trellis-work; men frightening away the birds with slings; a vineyard with a water-tank for irrigation; the grape harvest; baskets full of grapes covered with leaves; kids browsing upon the vines; trained monkeys gathering grapes; the wine-press in operation; men pressing grapes by the natural process of treading; pouring the wine into jars; and rows of jars put away for future use. The same laborious author favors us with ancient Egyptian caricatures which serve to show that wine was a creature as capable of abuse thirty centuries ago as it is now.

[Footnote 2: "A Popular Account of the Ancient Egyptians," by Sir J.

Gardner Wilkinson, 2 vols., Harper & Brothers, 1854.]

Pictures of similar character are not unfrequent upon the ancient frescoes, and many of them are far more extravagant than this, exhibiting men dancing wildly, standing upon their heads, and riotously fighting. From Sir Gardner Wilkinson's disclosures we may reasonably infer that the arts of debauchery have received little addition during the last three thousand years. Even the seductive c.o.c.ktail is not modern. The ancient Egyptians imbibed stimulants to excite an appet.i.te for wine, and munched the biting cabbage-leaf for the same purpose. Beer in several varieties was known to them also; veritable beer, made of barley and a bitter herb; beer so excellent that the dainty Greek travelers commended it as a drink only inferior to wine. Even the Egyptian ladies did not always resist the temptation of so many modes of intoxication. Nor did they escape the caricaturist's pencil.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Too Late with the Basin.]

This unfortunate lady, as Sir Gardner conjectures, after indulging in potations deep of the renowned Egyptian wine, had been suddenly overtaken by the consequences, and had called for a.s.sistance too late.

Egyptian satirists did not spare the ladies, and they aimed their shafts at the same foibles that have called forth so many efforts of pencil and pen in later times. Whenever, indeed, we look closely into ancient life, we are struck with the similarity of the daily routine to that of our own time. Every detail of social existence is imperishably recorded upon the monuments of ancient Egypt, even to the tone and style and mishaps of a fashionable party. We see the givers of the entertainment, the master and mistress of the mansion, seated side by side upon a sofa; the guests coming up as they arrive to salute them; the musicians and dancers bowing low to them before beginning to perform; a pet monkey, a dog, or a gazelle tied to the leg of the sofa; the youngest child of the family sitting on the floor by its mother's side, or upon its father's knee; the ladies sitting in groups, conversing upon the deathless, inexhaustible subject of dress, and showing one another their trinkets.

Sir Gardner Wilkinson gives us also the pleasing information that it was thought a pretty compliment for one guest to offer another a flower from his bouquet, and that the guests endeavored to gratify their entertainers by pointing out to one another, with expressions of admiration, the tasteful knickknacks, the boxes of carved wood or ivory, the vases, the elegant light tables, the chairs, ottomans, cushions, carpets, and furniture with which the apartment was provided. This too transparent flattery could not escape such inveterate caricaturists as the Egyptian artists. In a tomb at Thebes may be seen a ludicrous representation of scenes at a party where several of the guests had been lost in rapturous admiration of the objects around them. A young man, either from awkwardness or from having gone too often to the wine-jar, had reclined against a wooden column placed in the centre of the room to support a temporary ornament. There is a crash! The ornamental structure falls upon some of the absorbed guests. Ladies have recourse to the immortal privilege of their s.e.x--they scream. All is confusion. Uplifted hands ward off the falling ma.s.ses. In a few moments, when it is discovered that no one is hurt, peace is restored, and all the company converse merrily over the incident.

It is strange to find such pictures in a tomb. But it seems as if death and funerals and graves, with their elaborate paraphernalia, were provocative of mirthful delineation. In one noted royal tomb there is a representation of the funeral procession, part of which was evidently designed to excite merriment. The Ethiopians who follow in the train of the mourning queen have their hair plaited in most fantastic fashion, and their tunics of leopard's skin are so arranged that a preposterously enormous tail hangs down behind for the next man to step upon. One of the extensive colored plates of Sir Gardner Wilkinson's larger work presents to our view a solemn and stately procession of funeral barges crossing the Lake of the Dead at Thebes on its way to the place of burial. The first boat contains the coffin, decorated with flowers, a high-priest burning incense before a table of offerings, and the female relatives of the deceased lamenting their loss; two barges are filled with mourning friends, one containing only women and the other only men; two more are occupied by professional persons--the undertaker's a.s.sistants, as we should call them--employed to carry offerings, boxes, chairs, and other funeral objects. It was in drawing one of these vessels that the artist could not refrain from putting in a little fun.

One of the barges having grounded upon the sh.o.r.e, the vessel behind comes into collision with her, upsetting a table upon the oarsmen and causing much confusion. It is not improbable that the picture records an incident of that particular funeral.

CHAPTER IV.

AMONG THE HINDOOS.

If we go farther back into antiquity, it is India which first arrests and longest absorbs our attention--India, fecund mother of tradition, the source of almost all the rites, beliefs, and observances of the ancient nations. When we visit the collections of the India House, the British Museum, the Mission Rooms, or turn over the startling pages of "The Hindu Pantheon" of Major Edward Moor, we are ready to exclaim, Here _all_ is caricature! This brazen image, for example, of a partly naked man with an elephant's head and trunk, seated upon a huge rat, and feeding himself with his trunk from a bowl held in his hand--surely this is caricature. By no means. It is an image of the most popular of the Hindoo deities--Ganesa, G.o.d of prudence and policy, invoked at the beginning of all enterprises, and over whose head is written the sacred word _Aum_, never uttered by a Hindoo except with awe and veneration. If a man begins to build a house, he calls on Ganesa, and sets up an image of him near the spot. Mile-stones are fashioned in his likeness, and he serves as the road-side G.o.d, even if the pious peasants who place him where two roads cross can only afford the rudest resemblance to an elephant's head daubed with oil and red ochre. Rude as it may be, a pa.s.sing traveler will occasionally hang upon it a wreath of flowers.

Major Moor gives us a hideous picture of Maha-Kala, with huge mouth and enormous protruding tongue, squat, naked, upon the ground, and holding up a large sword. This preposterous figure is still farther removed from the burlesque. It is the Hindoo mode of representing _Eternity_, whose vast insatiate maw devours men, cities, kingdoms, and will at length swallow the universe; then all the crowd of inferior deities, and finally _itself_, leaving only _Brahm_, the One Eternal, to inhabit the infinite void. Hundreds of such revolting crudities meet the eye in every extensive Indian collection.

But the element of fun and burlesque is not wanting in the Hindoo Pantheon. Krishna is the jolly Bacchus, the Don Juan, of the Indian deities. Behold him on his travels mounted upon an elephant, which is formed of the bodies of the obliging damsels who accompany him!

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Hindoo G.o.d Krishna on his Travels.]

There is no end to the tales related of the mischievous, jovial, irrepressible Krishna. The ladies who go with him everywhere, a countless mult.i.tude, are so accommodating as to wreathe and twist themselves into the form of any creature he may wish to ride; sometimes into that of a horse, sometimes into that of a bird.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Krishna's Attendants a.s.suming the Form of a Bird.]

In other pictures he appears riding in a palanquin, which is likewise composed of girls, and the bearers are girls also. In the course of one adventure, being in great danger from the wrath of his numerous enemies, he created an enormous snake, in whose vast interior his flocks, his herds, his followers, and himself found refuge. At a festival held in his honor, which was attended by a great number of damsels, he suddenly appeared in the midst of the company and proposed a dance; and, that each of them might be provided with a partner, he divided himself into as many complete and captivating Krishnas as there were ladies. One summer, when he was pa.s.sing the hot season on the sea-sh.o.r.e with his retinue of ladies, his musical comrade, Nareda, hinted to him that, since he had such a mult.i.tude of wives, it would be no great stretch of generosity to spare one to a poor musician who had no wife at all.

"Court any one you please," said the merry G.o.d. So Nareda went wooing from house to house, but in every house he found Krishna perfectly domesticated, the ever-attentive husband, and the lady quite sure that she had him all to herself. Nareda continued his quest until he had visited precisely sixteen thousand and eight houses, in each and all of which, at one and the same time, Krishna was the established lord. Then he gave it up. One of the pictures which ill.u.s.trate the endless biography of this entertaining deity represents him going through the ceremony of marriage with a bear, both squatting upon a carpet in the prescribed att.i.tude, the bear grinning satisfaction, two bears in attendance standing on their hind-feet, and two priests blessing the union. This picture is more spirited, is more like art, than any other yet copied from Hindoo originals.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Krishna in his Palanquin.]

To this day, as the missionaries report, the people of India are excessively addicted to every kind of jesting which is within their capacity, and delight especially in all the monstrous comicalities of their mythology. No matter how serious an impression a speaker may have made upon a village group, let him but use a word in a manner which suggests a ludicrous image or ridiculous pun, and the a.s.sembly at once breaks up in laughter, not to be gathered again.

In late years, those of the inhabitants of India who read the language of their conquerors have had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with their humor. Wherever a hundred English officers are gathered, there is the possibility of an ill.u.s.trated comic periodical, and, accordingly, we find one such in several of the garrisoned places held by the English in remote parts of the world. Calcutta, as the _Athenaeum_ informs us, "has its _Punch_, or Indian _Charivari_," which is not unworthy of its English namesake.

CHAPTER V.

RELIGIOUS CARICATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

Mr. Robert Tomes, American consul, a few years ago, at the French city of Rheims, describes very agreeably the impression made upon his mind by the grand historic cathedral of that ancient place.[3] Filled with a sense of the majestic presence of the edifice, he approached one of the chief portals, to find it crusted with a most uncouth semi-burlesque representation, cut in stone, of the Last Judgment. The trump has sounded, and the Lord from a lofty throne is p.r.o.nouncing doom upon the risen as they are brought up to the judgment-seat by the angels. Below him are two rows of the dead just rising from their graves, extending to the full width of the great door. Upon many of the faces there is an expression of amazement, which the artist apparently designed to be comic, and several of the att.i.tudes are extremely absurd and ludicrous.

Some have managed to push off the lid of their tombs a little way, and are peeping out through the narrow aperture, others have just got their heads above the surface of the ground, and others are sitting up in their graves; some have one leg out, some are springing into the air, and some are running, as if in wild fright, for their lives. Though the usual expression upon the faces is one of astonishment, yet this is varied. Some are rubbing their eyes as if startled from a deep sleep, but not yet aware of the cause of alarm; others are utterly bewildered, and hesitate to leave their resting-place; some leap out in mad excitement, and others hurry off as if fearing to be again consigned to the tomb. An angel is leading a cheerful company of popes, bishops, and kings toward the Saviour, while a hideous demon, with a mouth stretching from ear to ear, is dragging off a number of the condemned toward the devil, who is seen stirring up a huge caldron boiling and bubbling with naked babies, dead before baptism. On another part of the wall is a carved representation of the vices which led to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. These were so monstrously obscene that the authorities of the cathedral, in deference to the modern sense of decency, have caused them to be partly cut away by the chisel.

[Footnote 3: "The Champagne Country," p. 34, by Robert Tomes, London, 1867.]

The first cut on the next page is an example of burlesque ornament. The artist apparently intended to indicate another termination of the interview than the one recorded by aesop between the wolf and the stork.

The old cathedral at Strasburg, destroyed a hundred years ago, was long renowned for its sculptured burlesques. We give two of several capitals exhibiting the sacred rites of the Church travestied by animals.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Capital in the Autun Cathedral.]

It marks the change in the feelings and manners of men that, three hundred years after those Strasburg capitals were carved, with the sanction of the chapter, a book-seller, for only exhibiting an engraving of some of them in his shop window, was convicted of having committed a crime "most scandalous and injurious to religion." His sentence was "to make the _amende honorable_, naked to his shirt, a rope round his neck, holding in his hand a lighted wax-candle weighing two pounds, before the princ.i.p.al door of the cathedral, whither he will be conducted by the executioner, and there, on his knees, with uncovered head," confess his fault and ask pardon of G.o.d and the king. The pictures were to be burned before his eyes, and then, after paying all the costs of the prosecution, he was to go into eternal banishment.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Capitals in the Strasburg Cathedral, A.D. 1300.]

Other American consuls besides Mr. Tomes, and mult.i.tudes of American citizens not so fortunate as to study mediaeval art at their country's expense, have been profoundly puzzled by this crust of crude burlesque on ecclesiastical architecture. The objects in Europe which usually give to a susceptible American his first and his last rapture are the cathedrals, those venerable enigmas, the glory and shame of the Middle Ages, which present so complete a contrast to the toy-temples, new, cabinet-finished, upholstered, sofa-seated, of American cities, not to mention the consecrated barns, white-painted and treeless, of the rural districts. And the cathedrals are a contrast to every thing in Europe also, if only from their prodigious magnitude. A cathedral town generally stands in a valley, through which a small river winds. When the visitor from any of the encompa.s.sing hills gets his first view of the compact little city, the cathedral looms up in the midst thereof so vast, so tall, that the disproportion to the surrounding structures is sometimes even ludicrous, like a huge black elephant with a flock of small brown sheep huddling about its feet. But when at last the stranger stands in its shadow, he finds the spell of its presence irresistible; and it is a spell which the lapse of time not unfrequently strengthens, till he is conscious of a tender, strong attachment to the edifice, which leads him to visit it at unusual times, to try the effect upon it of moonlight, of storm, of dawn and twilight, of mist, rain, and snow.

He finds himself going to it for solace and rest. On setting out upon a journey, he makes a detour to get another last look, and, returning, goes, valise in hand, to see his cathedral before he sees his companions. Many American consuls have had this experience, have truly fallen in love with the cathedral of their station, and remained faithful to it for years after their return, like Mr. Howells, whose heart and pen still return to Venice and San Carlo, so much to the delight of his readers.

This charm appears to lie in the mere grandeur of the edifice as a work of art, for we observe it to be most potent over persons who are least in sympathy with the feeling which cathedrals embody. Very religious people are as likely to be repelled as attracted by them; and, indeed, in England and Scotland there are large numbers of Dissenters who have avoided entering them all their lives on principle. It is Americans who enjoy them most; for they see in them a most captivating a.s.semblage of novelties--vast magnitude, solidity of structure only inferior to nature's own work, venerable age, harmonious and solemn magnificence--all combined in an edifice which can not, on any principle of utility, justify its existence, and does not pay the least fraction of its expenses. Little do they know personally of the state of feeling which made successive generations of human beings willing to live in hovels and inhale pollution in order that they might erect those wondrous piles. The cost of maintaining them--of which cost the annual expenditure in money is the least important part--does not come home to us. We abandon ourselves without reserve to the enjoyment of stupendous works wholly new to our experience.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Engraved upon a Stall in Sherborne Minster, England.]

It is Americans, also, who are most baffled by the attempt to explain the contradiction between the n.o.ble proportions of these edifices and the decorations upon some of their walls. How could it have been, we ask in amazement, that minds capable of conceiving the harmonies of these fretted roofs, these majestic colonnades, these symmetrical towers, could also have permitted their surfaces to be profaned by sculptures so absurd and so abominable that by no artifice of circ.u.mlocution can an idea of some of them be conveyed in printable words? In close proximity to statues of the Virgin, and in chapels whose every line is a line of beauty, we know not how to interpret what M. Champfleury truly styles "deviltries and obscenities unnamable, vice and pa.s.sion depicted with gross brutality, luxury which has thrown off every disguise, and shows itself naked, b.e.s.t.i.a.l, and shameless." And these mediaeval artists availed themselves of the acc.u.mulated buffooneries and monstrosities of all the previous ages. The gross conceptions of India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome appear in the ornamentation of Christian temples along with shapes hideous or grotesque which may have been original. Even the oaken stalls in which the officiating priests rested during the prolonged ceremonials of festive days are in many cathedrals covered with comic carving, some of which is pure caricature. A rather favorite subject was the one shown above, a whipping-scene in a school, carved upon an ancient stall in an English cathedral.

[Ill.u.s.tration: From a Ma.n.u.script of the Thirteenth Century.]

It is not certain, however, that the artist had any comic intention in engraving this picture of retributive justice, with which the children of former ages were so familiar. It was a standard subject. The troops of Flemish carvers who roamed over Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, offering their services wherever a church was to be decorated, carried with them port-folios of stock subjects, of which this was one. Other carvings are unmistakable caricatures: a monk caught making love to a nun, a wife beating her husband, an aged philosopher ridden by a woman, monkeys wearing bishops' mitres, barbers drawing teeth in ludicrous att.i.tudes, and others less describable. In the huge cathedral of English Winchester, which abounds in curious relics of the Middle Ages, there is a series of painted panels in the chapel of Our Lady, one of which is an evident caricature of the devil. He is having his portrait painted, and the Virgin Mary is near the artist, urging him to paint him blacker and uglier than usual. The devil does not like this, and wears an expression similar to that of a rogue in a modern police station who objects to being photographed. Often, however, in these old pictures the devil is master of the situation, and exhibits contempt for his adversaries in indecorous ways.

If we turn from the sacred edifices to the sacred books used in them--those richly illuminated missals, the books of "Hours," the psalters, and other works of devotion--we are amazed beyond expression to discover upon their brilliant pages a similar taste in ornamentation.

The school scene on the previous page, in which monkey-headed children are playing school, dates back to the thirteenth century.

Burlesque tournaments, in the same taste, often figure in the prayer-books among representations of the Madonna, the crucifixion, and scenes in the lives of the patriarchs. The gallant hare tilts at the fierce c.o.c.k of the barn-yard, or sly Reynard parries the thrust of the clumsy bear.

[Ill.u.s.tration: From a Ma.n.u.script Ma.s.s-book of the Fourteenth Century.]

One of the most curious relics of those religious centuries is a French prayer-book preserved in the British Museum, where it was discovered and described by Mr. Malcolm, one of the first persons who ever attempted to elucidate the subject of caricature. Besides the "Hours of the Blessed Virgin," it contains various prayers and collects, the office for the dead, and some psalms, all in Latin. It is ill.u.s.trated by several brilliantly colored, well-drawn, but most grotesque and incomprehensible figures, designed, as has been conjectured, to "expose the wicked and inordinate lives of the clergy, who were hated by the ma.n.u.script writers as taking away much of their business." This was the explanation given of these remarkable pictures to the trustees of the Museum by the collector of whom they bought the volume. Several of them are submitted to the reader's ingenuity on the following page.

Besides the specimens given, there is a wolf growling at a snake twisting itself round its hind-leg; there is "a grinning-match" between a human head on an animal's body and a boar's head on a monkey's body; there is a creature like a pea-hen, with two bodies, one neck, and two dogs' heads; there is an animal with four bodies and one head; there is a bearded man's face and a woman's on one neck, and the body has no limbs, but an enormous tail; there is a turret, on the top of which a monkey sits, and a savage below is aiming an arrow at him. In the British Museum--that unequaled repository of all that is curious and rare--there is the famous and splendid psalter of Richard II., containing many strange pictures in the taste of the period. On the second page, for example, along with two pictures of the kind usual in Catholic works of devotion, there is a third which represents an absurd combat within lists between the court-fool and the court-giant. The fool, who is also a dwarf, is belaboring the giant with an instrument like those hollow clubs used in our pantomimes when the clown is to be whacked with great violence. The giant shrinks from the blows, and the king, pointing at the dwarf, seems to say, "Go it, little one; I bet upon _you_."

[Ill.u.s.tration: From a French Prayer-book of the Thirteenth Century, in the British Museum.]

Mr. Malcolm, who copied this picture from the original, where, he says, it is most superbly finished, interprets it to be a caricature of the famous combat between David and Goliath in the presence of King Saul and his court. In the same ma.s.s-book there is a highly ridiculous representation of Jonah on board ship, with a blue Boreas with cheeks puffed out raising the tempest, and a black devil clawing the sail from the yard. In selecting a few of the more innocent pictures from the prayer-book of Queen Mary, daughter of Henry VIII. of England, Mr.

Malcolm gives expression to his amazement at the character of the drawings, which he dared not exhibit to a British public! Was this book, he asks, made on purpose for the queen? Was it a gift or a purchase? But whether she bought or whether she accepted it, he thinks she must have "delighted in ludicrous and improper ideas," or else "her inclination for absurdity and caricature conquered even her religion, in defense of which she spread ruin and desolation through her kingdom."