Caricature and Other Comic Art Part 24

Under the heading of "Cheap Illumination," we are presented with a picture of an Esquimau with a lighted wick held in his mouth, and the following explanation: "The Esquimaux, as is well known, live on the fat of the reindeer, the seal, and the whale. This suggested to the arctic traveler, Warnie, the idea of drawing a wick through the body of one of the natives, and in this way obtaining a brilliant train-oil lamp for the long winter nights."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Bold Comparison. (Berlin, 1873.)

_Pastor's Wife._ "But half the cracknels are scorched to-day."

_Cracknel Man._ "So they are. But, you see, I have the same luck as the pastor: all his sermons do not turn out equally good."]

Two n.o.ble ladies chatting over their tea: "Only think, my dear, we are obliged to discharge our man." "Why?" "Oh, he begins to be too familiar.

What do you think? I saw him cleaning the boots, and I discovered, to my horror, that he had my husband's boots, my son's, and _his own_, all mixed together!"

A lady hurrying home from an approaching shower, dragging her little boy with her. _Boy._ "But, mother, why should we be so afraid of the thunder storm? Those hay-makers yonder don't care." _Mother._ "Child, they are poor people, who don't attract the lightning as we do, who always have gold and ready cash about us."

A scene in a police court, the magistrate questioning a witness: "You are a carpenter, are you not?" "I am." "You were at work in the vicinity of the place where the scuffle occurred?" "I was." "How far from the two combatants were you standing?" "Thirty-six feet and a half, Rhenish measure." "How can you speak so exactly?" "Because I measured it. I thought that most likely some fool would be asking about that at the trial."

These may suffice as examples of the average comic force of the German joke. A very few of the above--perhaps four or five in all--might have been accepted by the editors of _Punch_, with the requisite changes of scene and dialect. We must also bear in mind that the dialect counts for much in a comic scene, as we can easily perceive by changing a Yorkshire b.u.mpkin's language in a comedy into London English. Half of the laugh-compelling power of some of the specimens given may lie in peculiarities of dialect and grammar of which no one but a native of the country can feel the force. A few of the more vivid and telling examples are given in the accompanying ill.u.s.trations.

The glimpses of German life which the comic artists afford remind us that the children of men are of one family, the several branches of which do not differ from one another so much as we are apt to suppose.

German fathers, too, as we see in these pictures, stand amazed at the quant.i.ty of property their daughters can carry about with them in the form of wearing apparel. A domestic scene exhibits a young lady putting the last fond touches to her toilet, while a clerk presents a long bill to the father of the family, who throws his hands aloft, and exclaims, "Oh, blessed G.o.d! Thou who clothest the lilies of the field, provide also for my daughter, at least during the Carnival!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Strict Discipline in the Field--Major going the Rounds at Night.

_Sentinel._ "Who goes there? Halt!" (Major, not regarding the summons, the soldier fires, and misses.)

_Major._ "Three days in the guard-house for your bad shooting."]

Germany, not less than England and America, laughs at "the modern mother," who dawdles over Goethe, and is "literary," and wears eyegla.s.ses, while delegating to bottles and goats her peculiar duties.

An extravagant burlesque of this form of self-indulgence presents to view a baby lying on its back upon a centre-table, its head upon a pillow, taking nourishment _direct_ from a goat standing over it; the mother sitting near in a luxurious chair, reading. Enter the family doctor, who cries, aghast, "Why, what's this, baroness? I did not mean it _in that way_! A she-goat is not a wet-nurse." To which the baroness languidly replies, looking from her book, "Why not?"

And here is the German version of _Punch's_ widely disseminated joke upon marriage: "If you are going to be married, my son, I will give you some good advice." "And what is it?" "Better not."

The Woman's Rights agitation gave rise to burlesques precisely similar in inane extravagance to those which appeared in England, America, and France. We have the "Students of the Future," a series representing buxom la.s.ses in dashing bloomers, smoking, dissecting, fighting duels, and hunting. The young lady who has on her dissecting-table a bearded "subject" is leaning against it nonchalantly, drinking a pot of beer, and another young lady is using the pointed heel of her fashionable boot as a tobacco-stopper. Here, too, is the husband who comes home late, and whose wife _will_ sit up for him.

The great servant-girl question is also up for discussion in Germany, after occupying womankind for three thousand years. Here is a group of servants talking together. "Yesterday I gave warning," says one. "Why?"

asks another; "the wages are high, the food is good, and you have every Sunday out." The reply is: "Well, you must know, my Fritz don't like it.

Mistress buys her wine at the wine-merchant's, where I get the bottles all sealed. Don't you see?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ahead of Time.

The aged and extremely absent-minded prince of a little territory visits the public inst.i.tutions every year. On leaving the high school, he says to the teacher: "I am very much pleased with every thing, only the soup is a little too thin."

_Teacher_ (aside to aid-de-camp). "What does his Highness mean by thin soup?"

_Aid-de-camp._ "It is only a slip. His Highness should have said that in the hospital."]

In the same spirit, as every reader knows, the drawing-room judges the kitchen in other lands besides Germany, and is supported in its judgment by satiric artists who evolve preposterously impossible servants from the shallows of their own ignorance.

Rarely, indeed, does a German caricaturist presume to meddle with politics, and still more rarely does he do it with impunity. The Germans, with all their excellences, seem wanting in the spirit that has given us our turbulent, ill-organized freedom. Perhaps their beer has offered too ready and cheap a resource against the chafing resentments that tyranny excites; for a narcotized brain is indolently submissive to whatever is very difficult of remedy. Coffee and tobacco keep the Turk a slave. The wisest act of Louis Napoleon's usurpation was his giving a daily ration of tobacco to every soldier. Woe to despots when men cease to dull and pollute their brains with tobacco and alcohol! There will then be a speedy end put to the system that takes five millions of the _elite_ of Europe from industry, and consigns them to the business of suppression and ma.s.sacre. Whatever may be the cause, Germany has scarcely yet begun her apprenticeship to freedom; and, consequently, her public men lose the inestimable advantage of seeing their measures as the public sees them. Let us hope that the German people may be able to appropriate part of our experience, and so work their way to rational and orderly freedom without pa.s.sing through the stage of ignorant suffrage and thief-politicians. Meanwhile there is no political caricature in Germany.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Journeyman's Leave-taking.

"Hear me, all of you. You, and you, and you, and you! Good-bye, mistresses. I tell you freely to your faces, your bacon and greens are not to my taste. I am going to try my luck. I will march on."--LUDWIG RICHTER, _Leipsic_, 1848.]

As a set-off to this defect, I may mention again the absence from the German comic periodicals of the cla.s.s of subjects which, at present, seems to be the sole inspiration of French art and French humor. It is evident that the Germans do not regard illicit love as the chief end of man. The reason of the superior decency of German satire is, probably, that German methods of education awaken the intelligence and store the mind with the food of thought. Indecency is the natural resource of a thoughtless mind, because the physical facts of our existence const.i.tute a very large proportion of all the knowledge it possesses. Suppose those facts and the ideas growing directly out of them to be one hundred in number. The whole number of facts and ideas in an ignorant mind may not exceed two hundred; while in the intellect of a Goethe or a Lessing there may live and revolve twenty thousand. Convent education is probably the cause of French indecency, simply from its leaving the mind dull and the imagination active. Many Frenchmen must think _bodily_, or not think at all. This conjecture I hazard because I have observed in Protestant schools, professedly and distinctively religious, the same morbid tendency in the pupils that we notice in French art and drama.

The French are right in not trusting their convent-bred girls out of sight. The convent-bred boys, who can not be so closely watched, show the untrustworthiness of moral principle which is not fortified by intelligent conviction. The Germans, from their better mental culture and greater variety of topics, are not reduced to the necessity of amusing themselves by "bodily wit."

CHAPTER XXI.

COMIC ART IN SPAIN.

As it is "Don Quixote" that has given most of us whatever insight into Spanish life and character we possess, we should naturally expect to find in the Spain of to-day abundant manifestations of satirical talent.

But since the great age when such men as Cervantes could be formed, the intellect of Spain has suffered exhausting depletion, and the nation has in consequence long lain intellectually impotent, the natural prey of priests, dynasties, and harlots. The progress of a country depends upon the use it makes of its best men. Since Cervantes was born, in 1547, all the valuable men among the Moors and Jews, with a million of their countrymen, have been banished, carrying away with them precious arts, processes, instincts, apt.i.tudes, and talents; to say nothing of the good that comes to a country of having upon its soil a variety of races and religions, each developing some excellencies of human nature which the others overlook or undervalue. In the same generation hundreds of the valiant men of Spain went down in the Armada, and thousands were wasted in America.

But these were not the fatal losses. These men could have been replaced, such is the bountiful fertility of nature. But, in those days, if a man was reared who possessed independence or force of mind, or had much mind of any kind, he was likely to become a Protestant; and, if he did, one of two calamitous fates awaited him, either of which made him useless to Spain: he either concealed his opinions, and thus stifled his n.o.bler life, or else the Inquisition destroyed him. Never was such successful war waged upon the human mind as in Spain at that period, for every man who manifested any kind of mental superiority was either slain or neutralized. If he escaped the goldmines, the wars, and the Inquisition, there was still the Church to take him in and convert him into a priest.

Nor need we go as far as Spain to see the fatal damage done to communities by the absorption of promising youth into the priesthood. We have only to go to the French parts of Canada, and mark the difference between the torpid and hopeless villages there, and the vigorous, handsome towns of New England, New York, and Michigan, just over the border. The reason of this amazing contrast is that on our side of the line the natural leaders of the people found mills, factories, libraries, and schools; on the other side they enter convents and build churches; and the people, thus bereft of their natural chiefs, harness forlorn cows to crazy carts, and come down into Vermont and New Hampshire in harvest-time to get a little money to help them through the long Canadian winter. Thus, in Spain and Italy, the men who ought to serve the people, prey upon them, and the direct and chief reason why the northern nations of Europe surpa.s.s the southern is, that in the north the superior minds are turned to account, and in the south they have been entombed in the Church or paralyzed by t.i.tles of n.o.bility.

[Ill.u.s.tration: After Sedan.

"Senor, we have brought to your Majesty this paroquet, which we found as we were going our rounds in camp."--From _Gil Blas_, Madrid, September, 1870.]

Hence, in the country of Cervantes, in the native land of Gil Blas and Figaro, there is now little manifestation of their comic fertility and gayety of mind. A member of the American Legation obligingly writes from Madrid in 1875:

"I have questioned many persons here in regard to Spanish caricature, but have always received the same reply, namely, that pictorial caricature, political or other, has not existed in Spain till 1868. I have searched book-stores and book-stalls, and find nothing; nor have the venders been able to aid me. I found in a private library some Bibles and other religious books of the sixteenth century, in which were caricatures of the Pope and of similar subjects, but they were printed in Flanders, though in the Spanish language; and the art is Dutch. The pasquinades of Italy never prevailed in Spain. It is thought at our Legation here that there must have been caricature in Spain, from the writings of Spaniards being so full of satire and wit; but though the germ may have existed, I am inclined to think it was not developed till the dethronement of Isabel II. and the proclamation of the Republic broke down the barriers to the liberty, if not license, of the printing-press.

"Between 1868 and 1875 various papers were published here containing caricatures, copies of which are to be had, but at a premium. Until this period, I fancy the Inquisition, censorship, and other causes prevented any display of a spirit of caricature which may have existed. The real, untraveled Spanish mind has little idea of true wit: of satire and burlesque, yes; of inoffensive joke or pun, none. There is no Spanish word for _pun_; that for joke is _broma_, taken from the Spanish name of the _Teredo navalis_, or wood-borer, so fatal to vessels, and really means an annoying, or _practical_, joke. I have some samples of caricature, published during the period to which I refer, many of which, to one who is familiar with the politics, manners, and customs in Spain at the time, are equal in point, if not in execution, to any thing in _Punch_. They were, for the greater part, designed by Ortego, but are of the English or French style, and have little Spanish individuality."

[Ill.u.s.tration: To the Bull-fight.

"There they go, all resolved to yell _Bungler!_ at the picador, whether he does his part well or ill. It's all they know how to do."--From _El Mundo Comico_, Madrid, 1873.]

A great ma.s.s of the comic ill.u.s.trated series and periodicals alluded to by my attentive correspondent accompanied his letter, and justify its statements. The "French style" is indeed most apparent in them, as the reader shall see. The "Comic Almanac" for 1875 ("Almanaque Comico" para 1875), published at Madrid, and profusely ill.u.s.trated, is entirely in the French style. Many of the pictures have every thing of Gavarni except his genius. Here are some that catch the eye in running over its shabby, ill-printed pages:

Picture of an ill-favored father contemplating a worse-favored boy, aged about six years. Father speaks: "It is very astonishing! The more this son of mine grows, the more he looks like my friend Ramon."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Delegation of Birds of Prey, presenting Thanks to the Authors of the Bountiful Carnage provided for the Late Festival. (From _Gil Blas_, Madrid, September, 1870.)]

Picture of a gentleman in evening dress, flirting familiarly with a dancing-girl behind the scenes of a theatre. She says: "If only your intentions were good!" To which he replies by asking: "And what do you call good intentions?" She casts down her eyes and stammers: "To promise--to keep your word."

Picture of a young lady at the desk of a public writer, to whom she says: "Make the sweetest little verse to tell him that I hope to see him next Sunday at the gate of the Alcala, near the first swing."

Picture of a husband and wife, both in exuberant health. _She._ "You grow worse and worse; and sea-bathing is _so_ good for you!" _He._ "And you?" _She._ "I am well; but I shall go with you to take care of you, dear."

Picture of a very fashionably dressed lady and little girl, to whom enters, hat and cane in hand, a gentleman, who says to the child: "Do you not remember me, little Ruby?" She replies: "Ah, yes! You are the _first_ papa that used to come to our house a good while ago, and you always brought me caramels."

Picture of two young ladies in conversation. One of them says: "When he looks at me, I lower my eyes. When he presses my hand, I blush. And if he kisses me, I call to mamma, and the poor fellow believes it, and dares go no further."