The History of the Nineteenth Century in Caricature Part 1

The History of the Nineteenth Century in Caricature.

by Arthur Bartlett Maurice and Frederic Taber Cooper.

PART I

_THE NAPOLEONIC ERA_

CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNING OF POLITICAL CARICATURE

While the impulse to satirize public men in picture is probably as old as satiric verse, if not older, the political cartoon, as an effective agent in molding public opinion, is essentially a product of modern conditions and methods. As with the campaign song, its success depends upon its timeliness, upon the ability to seize upon a critical moment, a burning question of the hour, and antic.i.p.ate the outcome while public excitement is still at a white heat. But unlike satiric verse, it is dependent upon ink and paper. It cannot be transmitted orally.

The doggerel verses of the Roman legions pa.s.sed from camp to camp with the mysterious swiftness of an epidemic, and found their way even into the sober history of Suetonius. The topical songs and parodies of the Middle Ages migrated from town to town with the strolling minstrels, as readily as did the cycles of heroic poetry. But with caricature the case was very different. It may be that the man of the Stone Age, whom Mr. Opper has lately utilized so cleverly in a series of caricatures, was the first to draw rude and distorted likenesses of some unpopular chieftain, just as the Roman soldier of 79 A. D. scratched on the wall of his barracks in Pompeii an unflattering portrait of some martinet centurion which the ashes of Vesuvius have preserved until to-day. It is certain that the Greeks and Romans appreciated the power of ridicule latent in satiric pictures; but until the era of the printing press, the caricaturist was as one crying in a wilderness. And it is only with the modern co-operation of printing and photography that caricature has come into its full inheritance. The best and most telling cartoons are those which do not merely reflect current public opinion, but guide it. In looking back over a century of caricature, we are apt to overlook this distinction. A cartoon which cleverly ill.u.s.trates some important historical event, and throws light upon the contemporary att.i.tude of the public, is equally interesting to-day, whether it antic.i.p.ated the event or was published a month afterward.

But in order to influence public opinion, caricature must contain a certain element of prophecy. It must suggest a danger or point an interrogation. As an example, we may compare two famous cartoons by the English artist Gillray, "A Connoisseur Examining a Cooper" and the "King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver." In the latter, George III., in the guise of a giant, is curiously examining through his magnifying gla.s.s a Lilliputian Napoleon. There is no element of prophecy about the cartoon. It simply reflects the contemptuous att.i.tude of the time toward Napoleon, and underestimates the danger. The other cartoon, which appeared several years earlier, shows the King anxiously examining the features of Cooper's well-known miniature of Cromwell, the great overthrower of kings. Public sentiment at that time suggested the imminence of another revolution, and the cartoon suggests a momentous question: "Will the fate of Charles I. be repeated?" In the light of history, the Gulliver cartoon is to-day undoubtedly the more interesting, but at the time of its appearance it could not have produced anything approaching the sensation of that of "a Connoisseur."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Gillray's Conception of the French Invasion of England.]

The necessity of getting a caricature swiftly before the public has always been felt, and has given rise to some curious devices and makeshifts. In the example which we have noted as having come down from Roman times, a patriotic citizen of Pompeii could find no better medium for giving his cartoon of an important local event to the world than by scratching it upon the wall of his dwelling-house after the fashion of the modern advertis.e.m.e.nt. There was a time in the seventeenth century when packs of political playing-cards enjoyed an extended vogue. The fashion of printing cartoons upon ladies' fans and other articles of similarly intimate character was a transitory fad in England a century ago. Mr. Ackermann, a famous printer of his generation, and publisher of the greater part of Rowlandson's cartoons, adopted as an expedient for spreading political news a small balloon with an attached mechanism, which, when liberated, would drop news bulletins at intervals as it pa.s.sed over field and village. In this country many people of the older generation will still remember the widespread popularity of the patriotic caricature-envelopes that were circulated during the Civil War. To-day we are so used to the daily newspaper cartoon that we do not stop to think how seriously handicapped the cartoonists of a century ago found themselves. The more important cartoons of Gillray and Rowlandson appeared either in monthly periodicals, such as the _Westminster Magazine_ and the _Oxford Magazine_, or in separate sheets that sold at the prohibitive price of several shillings. In times of great public excitement, as during the later years of the Napoleonic wars, such cartoons were bought up greedily, the City vying with the aristocratic West End in their patriotic demand for them. But such times were exceptional, and the older caricaturists were obliged to let pa.s.s many interesting crises because the situations would have become already stale before the day of publication of the monthly magazines came round. With the advent of the ill.u.s.trated weeklies the situation was improved, but it is only in recent times that the ideal condition has been reached, when the cabled news of yesterday is interpreted in the cartoon of to-day.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Nelson at the Battle of the Nile.]

There is another and less specific reason why caricature had to await the advent of printing and the wider dissemination of knowledge which resulted. The successful political cartoon presupposes a certain average degree of intelligence in a nation, an awakened civic conscience, a sense of responsibility for the nation's welfare. The cleverest cartoonist would waste his time appealing to a nation of feudal va.s.sals; he could not expect to influence a people to whom the ballot box was closed. Caricature flourishes best in an atmosphere of democracy; there is an eternal incompatibility between its audacious irreverence and the doctrine of the divine right of kings.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Bonaparte 48 Hours after Landing.]

And yet the best type of caricature should not require a high degree of intelligence. Many clever cartoonists over-reach themselves by an excess of cleverness, appealing at best to a limited audience. Of this type are the cartoons whose point lies in parodying some famous painting or a masterpiece of literature, which, as a result, necessarily remains caviare to the general. There is a type of portrait caricature so cultured and subtle that it often produces likenesses truer to the man we know in real life than a photograph would be. A good example of this type is the familiar work of William Nicholson, whose portrait of the late Queen of England is said to have been recognized by her as one of the most characteristic pictures she had ever had taken. What appeals to the public, however, is a coa.r.s.er type, a gross exaggeration of prominent features, a willful distortion, resulting in ridicule or glorification. Oftentimes the caricature degenerates into a mere symbol. We have outgrown the puerility of the pictorial pun which flourished in England at the close of the seventeenth century, when cartoonists of Gillray's rank were content to represent Lord Bute as a pair of boots, Lord North as Boreas, the north wind, and the elder Fox with the head and tail of the animal suggested by his name. Yet personification of one kind and another, and notably the personification of the nations in the shape of John Bull and Uncle Sam and the Russian Bear, forms the very alphabet of political caricature of the present day. Some of the most memorable series that have ever appeared were founded upon a chance resemblance of the subject of them to some natural object. Notable instances are Daumier's famous series of Louis Philippe represented as a pear, and Nast's equally clever, but more local, caricatures of Tweed as a money-bag. It would be interesting, if the material were accessible, to trace the development of the different personifications of England, France, and Russia, and the rest, from their first appearance in caricature, but unfortunately their earlier development cannot be fully traced. The underlying idea of representing the different nations as individuals, and depicting the great international crises in a series of allegories or parables or animal stories--a sort of pictorial aesop's fables--dates back to the very beginning of caricature. In one of the earliest cartoons that have been preserved, England, France, and a number of minor princ.i.p.alities which have since disappeared from the map of Europe, are represented as playing a game of cards with some disputed island possessions as the stakes. In this case the several nations are indicated merely by heraldic emblems. The conception of John Bull was not to be evolved until a couple of centuries later. This cartoon, like the others of that time, originated in France under Louis XII. The further development of the art was decisively checked under the despotic reign of Louis XIV., and the few caricaturists of that time who had the courage to use their pencil against the king were driven to the expedient of publishing their works in Holland.

[Ill.u.s.tration: John Bull taking a Luncheon.]

An impressive ill.u.s.tration of the advantage which the satirical poet has over the cartoonist lies in the fact that some of the cleverest political satire ever written, as well as the best examples of the application of the animal fable to politics, were produced in France at this very time in the fables of La Fontaine.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The French Consular Triumvirate.]

CHAPTER II

HOGARTH AND HIS TIMES

From Holland caricature migrated to Great Britain in the closing years of the seventeenth century--a natural result of the attention which Dutch cartoonists had bestowed upon the revolution of 1688--and there it found a fertile and congenial soil. The English had not had time to forget that they had once put the divine right of kings to the test of the executioner's block, and what little reverence still survived was not likely to afford protection for a race of imported monarchs.

Moreover, as it happened, the development of English caricature was destined to be guided by the giant genius of two men, Hogarth and Gillray; and however far apart these two men were in their moral and artistic standards, they had one thing in common, a perennial scorn for the House of Hanover. Hogarth's contemptuous satire of George II.

was more than echoed in Gillray's merciless attacks upon George III.

The well-known cartoons of "Farmer George," and "George the b.u.t.ton-Maker," were but two of the countless ways in which he avenged himself upon the dull-witted king who had once acknowledged that he could not see the point of Gillray's caricatures.

Although Hogarth antedates the period covered by the present articles by fully half a century, he is much too commanding a figure in the history of comic art to be summarily dismissed. The year 1720 marks the era of the so-called "bubble mania," the era of unprecedented inflation, of the South Sea Company in London, and the equally notorious Mississippi schemes of John Law in France. Popular excitement found vent in a veritable deluge of cartoons, many of which originated in Amsterdam and were reprinted in London, often with the addition of explanatory satiric verses in English. In one, Fortune is represented riding in a car driven by Folly, and drawn by personifications of the different companies responsible for the disastrous epidemic of speculation: the Mississippi, limping along on a wooden leg; the South Sea, with its foot in splints, etc. In another, we have an imaginary map of the Southern seas, representing "the very famous island of Madhead, situated in Share Sea, and inhabited by all kinds of people, to which is given the general name of Shareholders." John Law came in for a major share of the caricaturist's attention. In one picture he is represented as a.s.sisting Atlas to bear up immense globes of wind; in another, he is a "wind-monopolist," declaring, "The wind is my treasure, cushion, and foundation. Master of the wind, I am master of life, and my wind monopoly becomes straightway the object of idolatry." The _windy_ character of the share-business is the dominant note in the cartoons of the period. Bubbles, windmills, flying kites, play a prominent part in the detail with which the background of the typical Dutch caricature was always crowded. These cartoons, displayed conspicuously in London shop windows, were not only seen by Hogarth, but influenced him vitally. His earliest known essay in political caricature is an adaptation of one of these Dutch prints, representing the wheel of Fortune, bearing the luckless and infatuated speculators high aloft.

His latest work still shows the influence of Holland in the endless wealth of minute detail, the painstaking elaboration of his backgrounds, in which the most patient examination is ever finding something new. With Hogarth, the overcharged method of the Dutch school became a medium for irrepressible genius. At the hands of his followers and imitators, it became a source of obscurity and confusion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The Capture of the Danish Ships."]

While Hogarth is rightly recognized as the father of English caricature, it must be remembered that his best work was done on the social rather than on the political side. Even his most famous political series, that of "The Elections," is broadly generalized. It is not in any sense campaign literature, but an exposition of contemporary manners. And this was always Hogarth's aim. He was by instinct a realist, endowed with a keen sense of humor--a quality in which many a modern realist is deficient. He satirized life as he saw it, the good and the bad together, with a frankness which at times was somewhat brutal, like the frankness of Fielding and of Smollett the frankness of the age they lived in. It was essentially an outspoken age, robust and rather gross; a red-blooded age, nurtured on English beef and beer; a jovial age that shook its sides over many a broad jest, and saw no shame in open allusion to the obvious and elemental facts of physical life. Judged by the standards of his day, there is little offense in Hogarth's work; even when measured by our own, he is not deliberately licentious. On the contrary, he set an example of moderation which his successors would have done well to imitate. He realized, as the later caricaturists of his century did not, that the great strength of pictorial satire lies in ridicule rather than in invective; that the subtlest irony often lies in a close adherence to truth, where riotous and unrestrained exaggeration defeats its own end. Just as in the case of "Joseph Andrews," Fielding's creative instinct got the upper hand of the parodist, so in much of Hogarth's work one feels that the caricaturist is forced to yield place to the realistic artist, the student of human life, carried away by the interest of the story he has to tell. His chief gift to caricature is his unprecedented development of the narrative quality in pictorial art. He pointed a road along which his imitators could follow him only at a distance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Bonaparte and his English Friends--The Broad Bottom Administration."]

With the second half of the eighteenth century there began an era of great license in the political press, an era of bitter vituperation and vile personal abuse. Hogarth was one of the chief sufferers. After holding aloof from partisan politics for nearly half a century, he published, in 1762, his well-known cartoon attacking the ex-minister, Pitt. All Europe is represented in flames, which are spreading to Great Britain in spite of the efforts of Lord Bute, aided by his Highlanders, to extinguish them. Pitt is blowing upon the flames, which are being fed by the Duke of Newcastle from a barrow full of _Monitors_ and _North Britons_, two scurrilous papers of the day. The bitterness with which Hogarth was attacked in retaliation and the persistence of his persecutors resulted, as was generally believed at the time, in a broken heart and his death in 1764.

An amazing increase in the number of caricatures followed the entry of Lord Bute's ministry into power. They were distinguished chiefly by their poor execution and gross indecency. As early as 1762, the _Gentleman's Magazine_, itself none too immaculate, complains that "Many of the representations that have lately appeared in the shops are not only reproachful to the government, but offensive to common-sense; they discover a tendency to inflame, without a spark of fire to light their own combustion." The state of society in England was at this time notoriously immoral and licentious. It was a period of hard living and hard drinking. The well-known habits of such public figures as Sheridan and Fox are eminent examples. The spirit of gambling had become a mania, and women had caught the contagion as well as men. Nowhere was the profligacy of the times more clearly shown than in the looseness of public social functions, such as the notorious masquerade b.a.l.l.s, which a contemporary journal, the _Westminster Magazine_, seriously decried as "subversive of virtue and every n.o.ble and domestic point of honor." The low standards of morals and want of delicacy are revealed in the extravagance of women's dress, the looseness of their speech. It was an age when women of rank, such as Lady Buckingham and Lady Archer, were publicly threatened by an eminent judge with exposure on the pillory for having systematically enticed young men and robbed them at their faro tables, and afterward found themselves exposed in the pillory of popular opinion in scurrilous cartoons from shop windows all over London.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Pacific Overtures.]

CHAPTER III

JAMES GILLRAY

At a time when cheap abuse took the place of technical skill, and vulgarity pa.s.sed for wit, a man of unlimited audacity, who was also a consummate master of his pencil, easily took precedence. Such a man was James Gillray, unquestionably the leading cartoonist of the reign of George III. Yet of the many who are to-day familiar with the name of Gillray and the important part he played in influencing public opinion during the struggle with Napoleon, very few have an understanding of the dominant qualities of his work. A large part of it, and probably the most representative part, is characterized by a foulness and an obscenity which the present generation cannot countenance. There is a whole series of cartoons bearing his name which it would not only be absolutely out of the question to reproduce, but the very nature of which can be indicated only in the most guarded manner. Imagine the works of Rabelais shamelessly ill.u.s.trated by a master hand! Try to conceive of the nature of the pictures which Panurge chalked up on the walls of old Paris. It was not merely the fault of the times, as in the case of Hogarth. Public taste was sufficiently depraved already; but Gillray deliberately prost.i.tuted his genius to the level of a procurer, to debauch it further. From first to last his drawings impress one as emanating from a mind not only unclean, but unbalanced as well--a mind over which there hung, even at the beginning, the furtive shadow of that madness which at last overtook and blighted him. There is but one of the hallmarks of great caricature in the work of Gillray, and that is the lasting impression which they make. They refuse to be forgotten; they remain imprinted on the brain, like the obsession of a nightmare.

While in one sense they stand as a pitiless indictment of the generation that tolerated them, they are not a reflection of the life that Gillray saw, except in the sense that their physical deformity symbolizes the moral foulness of the age. Grace and charm and physical beauty, which Hogarth could use effectively, are unknown quant.i.ties to Gillray. There is an element of monstrosity about all his figures, distorted and repellent. Foul, bloated faces; twisted, swollen limbs; unshapely figures whose protuberant flesh suggests a tumefied and fungoid growth--such is the brood begotten by Gillray's pencil, like the malignant sp.a.w.n of some forgotten circle of the lower inferno.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The Great Coronation Procession of Napoleon."]

It would be idle to dispute the far-reaching power of Gillray's genius, perverted though it was. Throughout the Napoleonic wars, caricature and the name of Gillray are convertible terms; for, even after he was forced to lay down his pencil, his brilliant contemporaries and successors, Rowlandson and Cruikshank, found themselves unable to throw off the fetters of his influence. No history of Napoleon is quite complete which fails to recognize Gillray as a potent factor in crystallizing public opinion in England. His long series of cartoons aimed at "little Boney" are the culminating work of his life. Their power lay, not in intellectual subtlety or brilliant scintillation of wit, but in the bitterness of their invective, the appeal they make to elemental pa.s.sions. They spoke a language which the roughest of London mobs could understand--the language of the gutter. They were, many of them, masterpieces of pictorial Billingsgate.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Napoleon and Pitt dividing the World between Them."]

There is rancor, there is venom, there is the inevitable inheritance of the warfare of centuries, in these caricatures of Gillray, but above all there is fear--fear of Napoleon, of his genius, of his star.

It has been very easy for Englishmen of later days to say that the French never could have crossed the Channel, that there was never any reason for disquiet; it was another matter in the days when troops were actually ma.s.sing by thousands on the hills behind Boulogne. You can find this fear voiced everywhere in Gillray, in the discordance between the drawings and the text. John Bull is the ox, Bonaparte the contemptible frog; but it is usually the ox who is bellowing out defiance, daring the other to "come on," flinging down insult at the diminutive foe. "Let 'em come, damme!" shouts the bold Briton in the pictures of the time. "Damme! where are the French bugaboos?

Single-handed I'll beat forty of 'em, damme!" Every means was used to rouse the spirit of the English nation, and to stimulate hatred of the French and their leader. In one picture, Boney and his family are in rags, and are gnawing raw bones in a rude Corsican hut; in another we find him with a hookah and turban, having adopted the Mahometan religion; in a third we see him murdering the sick at Joppa. In the caricatures of Gillray, Napoleon is always a monster, a fiend in human shape, craven and murderous; but when dealing with the question of this fiend's power for evil, Gillray made no attempt at consistency.

This ogre, who through one series of pictures was represented as kicked about from boot to boot, kicked by the Spaniards, the Turks, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians, in another is depicted as being very dangerous indeed. A curious example of this inconsistency will be found in placing side by side the two cartoons considered by many to be Gillray's best: "The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver,"

already referred to, and "Tiddy-Doll, the great French gingerbread Maker, Drawing out a new Batch of Kings." The "pernicious, little, odious reptile" whom George the Third is holding so contemptuously in the hollow of his hand, in the first caricature, is in the second concededly of European importance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Armed Heroes."]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The Handwriting on the Wall."]

CHAPTER IV