Caricature and Other Comic Art Part 7

There are fourteen specimens in this quaint manner in the collection of the British Museum, all executed and published in the early part of the reign of Elizabeth. As art, they are naught. As part of the record of a great age, they have their value.

[Ill.u.s.tration: t.i.tian's Caricature of the Laoc.o.o.n.]

Germany, England, and France fought the battle of the Reformation--two victors and one vanquished. From Italy in that age we have one specimen of caricature, but it was executed by t.i.tian. He drew a burlesque of the Laoc.o.o.n to ridicule a school of artists in Rome, who, as he thought, extolled too highly the ancient sculptures, and, because they could not succeed in coloring, insisted that correctness of form was the chief thing in art. Since t.i.tian's day, parodies of the Laoc.o.o.n have been among the stock devices of the caricaturists of all nations.

CHAPTER IX.

IN THE PURITAN PERIOD.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Papal Gorgon. (Reign of Elizabeth, 1581.)]

The annexed picture,[15] a favorite with the Protestants of England, Holland, and Germany for more than a century, is composed of twenty-two articles and objects, most of which are employed in the Roman Catholic worship. A church-bell forms the hat, which is decorated by crossed daggers and holy-water brushes. A herring serves for a nose. The mouth is an open wine-flagon. The eye is a chalice covered by the holy wafer, and the cheek is a paten, or plate used in the communion service. The great volume that forms the shoulders is the ma.s.s-book. The front of the bell-tiara is adorned by a mitred wolf devouring a lamb, and by a goose holding a rosary in its bill; the back, by a spectacled a.s.s reading a book, and by a boar wearing a scholar's cap. At the bottom of the engraving the pierced feet of Christ are seen resting upon two creatures called by the artist "the Queen's badges." The whole figure of Christ is supposed to be behind this ma.s.s of human inventions; for in the original these explanatory words are given, "Christ Covered."

[Footnote 15: From "Malcolm's Caricaturing," plate 2, and p. 23. See, also, "Catalogue of the Prints and Drawings in the British Museum,"

Division I., vol. ii., p. 177.]

It was by this device that Master Batman, at the beginning of the Puritan period, sought to present to the eye a summary of what the Reformation had accomplished, and what it had still to fear. Half a century before, Henry VIII. being still the Defender of the Faith, the various articles used in Master Batman's satirical picture were objects of religious veneration throughout Great Britain. They had now become the despised but dreaded rattle-traps of a suppressed idolatry. From the field of strife one of the victors gathered the scattered arms and implements, the gorgeous ensigns and trappings of the defeated, and piled them upon the plain, a trophy and a warning.

There is no revolution that does not sweep away much that is good. The reformation in religion, chiefly wrought by Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, and Calvin, was a movement of absolute necessity to the further progress of our race. The intelligence of Christendom had reached a development which was incompatible with respect for the a.s.sumptions of the papacy, and with a belief in the fictions which the papacy had invented or adopted. The vase must have broken, or the oak planted in it must have ceased to grow. Nevertheless, those fictions had their beauty and their use. There was a good and pleasing side to that system of fables and ceremonies, which amused, absorbed, and satisfied the people of Europe for a thousand years. If we could concede that the ma.s.s of men must remain forever ignorant and very poor, we could also admit that nothing was ever invented by man better calculated to make them thoughtlessly contented with a dismal lot than the Roman Catholic Church as it existed in the fifteenth century, before the faith of the people had been shaken in its pretensions. There was something in it for every faculty of human nature except the intellect. It gave play to every propensity except the propensity of one mind in a thousand to ask radical questions. It relieved every kind of distress except that which came of using the reason. All human interests were provided for in it except the supreme interest of human advancement.

One must have been in a Catholic community, or else lived close to an important Catholic church, in order to form an idea of the great part the Church once played in the lives and thoughts of its members--the endless provision it made for the _entertainment_ of unformed minds in the way of festivals, fasts, processions, curious observances, changes of costume, and special rites. There was always something going on or coming off. There was not a day in the year nor an hour in the day which had not its ecclesiastical name and character. In our flowery observance of Easter and in our joyous celebration of Christmas we have a faint traditional residue of festivals that once made all Christendom gay and jocund. And it was all so adapted to the limited abilities of our race!

In an average thousand men, there is not more than one man capable of filling creditably the post of a Protestant minister, but there are a hundred who can be drilled into competent priests.

Consider, for example, a procession, which was formerly the great event of many of the Church festivals, gratifying equally those who witnessed and those who took part in it. In other words, it gratified keenly the whole community. And yet how entirely it was within the resources of human nature! Not a child so young, not a woman so weak, not a man so old, but could a.s.sist or enjoy it. The sick could view it from their windows, the robust could carry its burdens, the skillful could contrive its devices, and all had the feeling that they were engaged in enhancing at once the glory of G.o.d, the fame of their saint, the credit of their town, and the good of their souls. It was pleasure; it was duty; it was masquerade; it was devotion. Some readers may remember the exaltation of soul with which Albert Durer, the first of German artists in Luther's age, describes the great procession at Antwerp, in 1520, in honor of what was styled the "a.s.sumption" of the Virgin Mary. One of the pleasing fictions adopted by the old Church was that on the 15th of August, A.D.

45, the Virgin Mary, aged seventy-five years, made a miraculous ascent into heaven. Hence the annual festival, which was celebrated throughout Europe with pomp and splendor. The pa.s.sage in the diary of Durer has a particular value, because it affords us a vivid view of the bright side of the ancient Church just before the reformers changed its gorgeous robes into the Puritan's plain black gown, and subst.i.tuted the long prayer and interminable sermon for the magnificent ceremonial and the splendid procession.

Albert Durer was in sympathy with Luther, but his heart swelled within him as he beheld, on that Sunday morning in Antwerp, the glorious pageantry that filed past for two hours in honor of the "Mother of G.o.d's" translation. All the people of the city a.s.sembled about the Church of "Our Lady," each dressed in gayest attire, but each wearing the costume of his rank, and exhibiting the badge of his guild or vocation. Silver trumpets of the old Frankish fashion, German drums and fifes, were playing in every quarter. The trades and guilds of the city--goldsmiths, painters, masons, embroiderers, statuaries, cabinet-makers, carpenters, sailors, fishermen, butchers, curriers, weavers, bakers, tailors, shoe-makers, and laborers--all marched by in order, at some distance apart, each preceded by its own magnificent cross. These were followed by the merchants, shop-keepers, and their clerks. The "shooters" came next, armed with bows, cross-bows, and firelocks, some on horseback and some on foot. The city guard followed.

Then came the magistrates, n.o.bles, and knights, all dressed in their official costume, and escorted, as our artist records, "by a gallant troop, arrayed in a n.o.ble and splendid manner." There were a number of women in the procession, belonging to a religious order, who gained their subsistence by labor. These, all clad in white from head to foot, agreeably relieved the splendors of the occasion. After them marched "a number of gallant persons and the canons of Our Lady's Church, with all the clergy and scholars, followed by a grand display of characters."

Here the enthusiasm of the artist kindles, as he recalls the glories of the day:

"Twenty men carried the Virgin and Christ, most richly adorned, to the honor of G.o.d. In this part of the procession were a number of delightful things represented in a splendid manner. There were several wagons, in which were representations of ships and fortifications. Then came a troop of characters from the Prophets, in regular order, followed by others from the New Testament, such as the Annunciation, the Wise Men of the East riding great camels and other wonderful animals, and the Flight into Egypt, all very skillfully appointed. Then came a great dragon, and St. Margaret with the image of the Virgin at her girdle, exceedingly beautiful; and last, St. George and his squire. In this troop rode a number of boys and girls very handsomely arrayed in various costumes, representing so many saints. This procession, from beginning to end, was upward of two hours in pa.s.sing our house, and there were so many things to be seen that I could never describe them all even in a book."

In some such hearty and picturesque manner all the great festivals of the Church were celebrated age after age, the entire people taking part in the show. There was no dissent, because there was no thought. But the reformers preached, the Bible was translated into the modern tongues, the intelligence of Christendom awoke, and all that bright childish pageantry vanished from the sight of the more advanced nations. The reformers discovered that there was no reason to believe that the aged Virgin Mary, on the 15th of August, A.D. 45, was borne miraculously to heaven; and in a single generation many important communities, by using their reason even to that trifling extent, grew past enjoying the procession annually held in honor of the old tradition. All the old festivals fell under the ban. It became, at length, a sectarian punctilio _not_ to abstain from labor on Christmas. The Puritan Sunday was gradually evolved from the same spirit of opposition, and life became intense and serious.

For it is not in a single generation, nor in ten, that the human mind, after having been bound and confined for a thousand years, learns to enjoy and safely use its freedom. Luther the reformer was only a little less credulous than Luther the monk. He a.s.sisted to strike the fetters from the reason, but the prisoner only hobbled from one cell into another, larger and cleaner, but still a cell. No one can become familiar with the Puritan period without feeling that the bondage of the mind to the literal interpretation of some parts of the Old Testament was a bondage as real, though not as degrading nor as hopeless, as that under which it had lived to the papal decrees. You do not make your canary a free bird by merely opening the door of its cage. It has to acquire slowly, with anguish and great fear, the strength of wing, lungs, and eye, the knowledge, habits, and instincts, which its ancestors possessed before they were captured in their native islands.

It is only in our own day that we are beginning really to enjoy the final result of Luther's heroic life--a tolerant and modest freedom of thought--for it is only in our own day that the consequences of peculiar thinking have anywhere ceased to be injurious.

If there are any who can not yet forgive the Puritans for their intolerance and narrowness, it must be they who do not know the agony of apprehension in which they pa.s.sed their lives. It is the Puritan age that could be properly called the Reign of Terror. It lasted more than a century, instead of a few months, and it was during that long period of dread and tribulation that they acquired the pa.s.sionate abhorrence of the papal system which is betrayed in the pictures and writings of the time. There was a fund of terror in their own belief, in that awful Doubt which hung over every soul, whether it was or was not one of the Elect; and, in addition to that, it seemed to them that the chief powers of earth, and all the powers of h.e.l.l, were united to crush the true believers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Spayne and Rome Defeated. (London and Amsterdam, 1621.)]

Examine the two large caricatures, "Rome's Monster" and "Spayne and Rome Defeated," in the light of a mere catalogue of dates. The Field of the Cloth of Gold, which we may regard as the splendid close of the old state of things, occurred in 1520, three years after Luther nailed up his theses. Henry VIII. defied the Pope in 1533; and twenty years after, b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, married to Philip of Spain, was burning bishops at Smithfield. Elizabeth's reign began in 1558, which changed, not ended, the religious strife in England. The ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew occurred in 1572, on that 24th of August which, as Voltaire used to say, all the humane and the tolerant of our race should observe as a day of humiliation and sorrow for evermore. In 1579 began the long struggle between the New and the Old, which is called the Thirty Years' War. The Prince of Orange was a.s.sa.s.sinated in 1584, in the midst of those great events which Mr. Motley has made familiar to the reading people of both continents. Every intelligent Protestant in Europe felt that the weapon which slew the prince was aimed at his own heart. The long dread of the Queen of Scots' machinations ended only with her death in 1587. Soon after, the shadow of the coming Spanish Armada crept over Great Britain, which was not dispelled till the men of England defeated and the storm scattered it in 1588. In 1605 Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot struck such terror to the Protestant mind, that it has not, in this year, 1877, wholly recovered from it, as all may know who will converse with uninstructed people in the remoter counties of Great Britain.

Raleigh was beheaded in 1618. The civil war began in 1642. In 1665 the plague desolated England, and in the next year occurred the great fire of London, good Protestants not doubting that both events were traceable to the fell influence of the Beast. The accession of James II., a Roman Catholic, filled the Puritans with new alarm in 1685, and during the three anxious years of his reign their brethren, the Huguenots, were fleeing into all the Protestant lands from the h.e.l.lish persecution of the priests who governed Louis XIV.

Upon looking back at this period of agitation and alarm, it startles the mind to observe in the catalogue of dates this one: "Shakspeare died 1616." It shows us, what the ordinary records do not show, that there are people who retain their sanity and serenity in the maddest times.

The rapid succession of the plays--an average of nearly two per annum--proves that there was a _public_ for Shakspeare when all the world seemed absorbed in subjects least akin to art and humor. And how little trace we find of all those thrilling events in the plays! He was a London actor when the Armada came; and during the year of the Gunpowder Plot he was probably meditating the grandest of all his themes, "King Lear!"

The picture ent.i.tled "Spayne and Rome Defeated"[16] was one of the most noted and influential broadsheets published during the Puritan period.

It may properly be termed a broadsheet, since the copy of the original in the British Museum measures 20-2/3 inches by 13. The Puritans of England saw with dismay the growing cordiality between James I. and the Spanish court, and watched with just apprehension the visit of Prince Charles to Spain, and the prospect of a marriage between the heir-apparent and a Spanish princess. At this alarming crisis, 1621, the sheet was composed in England, and sent over to Holland to be engraved and printed, Holland being then, and for a hundred and fifty years after, the printing-house and type-foundry of Northern Europe. Some of the Pilgrim Fathers of Ma.s.sachusetts, then residing at Leyden, and still waiting to hear the first news of the _Mayflower_ company, who had sailed the year before, may have borne a hand in the work. Pastor Robinson, we know, gained part of his livelihood by co-operating with brethren in England in the preparation of works designed for distribution at home.

[Footnote 16: From Malcolm, who copied it from the original in the British Museum. See Malcolm's "Caricaturing," plate 22.]

Besides being one of the most characteristic specimens of Puritan caricature which have been preserved, it presents to us a _resume_ of history, as Protestants interpreted it, from the time of the Spanish Armada to that of Guy Fawkes--1588 to 1605. It appears to have been designed for circulation in Holland and Germany as well as in England, as the words and verses upon it are in English, Dutch, and Latin. The English lines are these:

"In Eighty-eight, Spayne, arm'd with potent might, Against our peacefull Land came on to fight; But windes and waves and fire in one conspire, To help the English, frustrate Spaynes desire.

To second that the Pope in counsell sitts, For some rare stratagem they strayne their witts; November's 5th, by powder they decree Great Brytanes state ruinate should bee.

But Hee, whose never-slumb'ring Eye did view The dire intendments of this d.a.m.ned crew, Did soone prevent what they did thinke most sure.

Thy mercyes, Lord! for evermore endure."

This interesting sheet was devised by Samuel Ward, a Puritan preacher of Ipswich, of great zeal and celebrity, who dedicated it, in the fashion of the day, thus:

"To G.o.d. In memorye of his double deliveraunce from y{e} invincible Navie and y{e} unmatcheable powder Treason, 1605."

It was a timely reminder. As we occasionally see in our own day a public man committing the absurdity of replying in a serious strain to a caricature, so, in 1621, the Spanish emba.s.sador in London, Count Gondomar, called the attention of the British Government to this engraving, complaining that it was calculated to revive the old antipathy of the English people to the Spanish monarchy. The obsequious lords of the Privy Council summoned Samuel Ward to appear before them.

After examining him, they remanded him to the custody of their messenger, whose house was a place of confinement for such prisoners; and there he remained. As there was yet no habeas corpus act known among men, he could only protest his innocence of any ill designs upon the Spanish monarchy, and humbly pet.i.tion for release. He pet.i.tioned first the Privy Council; and they proving obdurate, he pet.i.tioned the king. He was set free at last, and he remained for twenty years a thorn in the side of those who dreaded "Spayne and Rome" less than they hated Puritans and Parliaments.

This persecution of Samuel Ward gave his print such celebrity that several imitations or pirated editions of the work speedily appeared, of which four are preserved in the great collection of the British Museum, each differing from the original in details. Caricatures aimed directly at the Spanish emba.s.sador followed, but they are only remarkable for the explanatory words which accompany them. In one we read that the residence of Count Gondomar in England had "hung before the eyes of many good men like a prodigious comet, threatening worse effects to Church and State than this other comet," which had recently menaced both from the vault of heaven. "No ecclipse of the sunne," continues the writer, "could more d.a.m.nifie the earth, to make it barraine and the best things abortive, than did his interposition." We learn also that when the count left England for a visit to his own country, in 1618, "there was an uproare and a.s.sault a day or two before his departure from London by the Apprentices, who seemed greedy of such an occasion to vent their own spleenes in doing him or any of his a mischiefe." Another picture exhibits the odious Gondomar giving an account of his conduct in England to the "Spanishe Parliament," in the course of which he attributes the British abhorrence of Spain to such men as "Ward of Ipswich," whom he describes as "light and unstayed wits," intent on winning the airy applause of the vulgar, and to raise their desperate fortunes. Nor does he refrain from chuckling over the penalty inflicted upon that enemy of Spayne and Rome: "And I think that Ward of Ipswich escaped not safely for his lewed and profane picture of '88 and their Powder Treason, one whereof, my Lord Archbishop, I sent you in a letter, that you might see the malice of these detestable Heretiques against his Holiness and the Catholic Church." This broadsheet being ent.i.tled "Vox Populi," the writer concludes his explanation by styling the emba.s.sador "Fox Populi, Count Gondomar the Great."

[Ill.u.s.tration: From t.i.tle-page to a Sermon, "Woe to Drunkards," by Samuel Ward, of Ipswich, 1627.]

Ward of Ipswich continued to be heard from occasionally during the first years of the reign of Charles I. Ipswich itself acquired a certain celebrity as a Puritan centre, and the name was given during the life-time of Samuel Ward to a town in Ma.s.sachusetts, which is still thriving. One of his sermons upon drunkenness was ill.u.s.trated by a picture, of which a copy is given here,[17] designed to show the degeneracy of manners that had taken place in England in his day. Mr.

Chatto truly remarks that twenty years later the picture would have been more appropriate with the inscriptions transposed.

[Footnote 17: From Chatto's "Origin and History of Playing Cards," p.

131, London, 1848.]

The marriage of Charles I. with the Princess Henrietta of France, in 1625, was one of the long series of impolitic acts which the king expiated on the scaffold in 1649. It aggravated every propensity of his nature that was hostile to the liberties of the people. Under James I.

the _elite_ of the Puritans had fled to Holland, and a little company had sought a more permanent refuge on the coast of New England. During the early years of the reign of Charles, the persecution of the Puritans by his savage bishops became so cruel and so vigilant as to induce men of family and fortune, like Winthrop and his friends, accompanied by a fleet of vessels laden with virtuous and thoughtful families, to cross the ocean and settle in Ma.s.sachusetts. Boston was founded when Charles I. had been cutting off the ears and slitting the noses of Puritans for five years. All that enchanting sh.o.r.e of New England, with its gleaming beaches, and emerald isles, and jutting capes of granite and wild roses, now so dear to summer visitors--an eternal holiday-ground and resting-place for the people of North America--began to be dotted with villages, the names of which tell us what English towns were most renowned for the Puritan spirit two hundred and fifty years ago. The satirical pictures preserved in the British Museum which relate to events in earlier reigns number ninety-nine in all; but those suggested by events in the reign of Charles I. are nearly seven hundred in number.

Most of them, however, were not published until after the downfall of the king.

Several of these prints are little more than portraits of the conspicuous persons of the time, with profuse accounts on the same sheet of their sufferings or misdeeds. One such records the heroic endurance of "the Reverend Peter Smart, mr of Artes, minister of G.o.d's word at Durham," who, for preaching against popery, lost above three hundred pounds per annum, and was imprisoned eleven years in the King's Bench.

The composer adds these lines:

"Peter preach downe vaine rites with flagrant harte; Thy Guerdon shall be greate, though heare thou Smart."

Another of these portrait pieces exhibits Dr. Alexander Leighton, who spoke of Queen Henrietta as "the daughter of h.e.l.l, a Canaanite, and an idolatresse," and spared not Archbishop Laud and his confederates. For these offenses he was, as the draughtsman informs us, "clapt up in Newgate for the s.p.a.ce of 15 weekes, where he suffered great miserie and sicknes almost to death, afterward lost one of his Eares on the pillorie, had one of his nosthrills slitt clean through, was whipt with a whip of 3 Coardes knotted, had 36 lashes therewith, was fined 1000_ll._, and kept prisoner in the fleet 12 yeares, where he was most cruelly used a long time, being lodged day and night amongst the most desperately wiked villaines of y{e} whole prison." He was also branded on the cheek with the letters S. S.--sower of sedition. Several other prints of the time record the same mark of attention paid by the "martyred" king to his Catholic wife. By-and-by, the crowned and mitred ruffians who did such deeds as these being themselves in durance, Parliament set Dr. Leighton free, and made him a grant of six thousand pounds.

A caricature of the same b.l.o.o.d.y period is ent.i.tled, "Archbishop Laud dining on the Ears of Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton." We see Laud seated at dinner, having an ear on the point of his knife and three more ears in the plate before him, the three victims of his cruelty standing about, and two armed bishops at the foot of the table. The dialogue below represents Laud as rejecting with scorn all the dainties of his table, and declaring that nothing will content him but the ears of Lawyer Prynne and Dr. Bastwick. He cuts them off himself, and orders them to be dressed for his supper.

"_Canterbury._ This I doe to make you examples, That others may be more careful to please my palate.

Henceforth let my servants know, that what I will, I _will_ have done, What ere is under heaven's Sunne."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Let not the World devide those whom Christ hath joined."]