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THE HISTORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN CARICATURE
[Illustration: What it is and What is it?]
THE HISTORY
OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
IN CARICATURE
BY
ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE
and
FREDERIC TABER COOPER
_PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED_
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS
1904
Copyright, 1903, 1904
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
BURR PRINTING HOUSE
NEW YORK
CONTENTS
CHAPTER Page
PART I. THE NAPOLEONIC ERA
I. The Beginning of Political Caricature 1
II. Hogarth and his Times 12
III. James Gillray 19
IV. Bonaparte As First Consul 28
V. The Emperor at his Apogee 35
VI. Napoleon's Waning Power 44
PART II. FROM WATERLOO THROUGH THE CRIMEAN WAR
VII. After the Downfall 57
VIII. The "Poire" 65
IX. The Baiting of Louis-Phillipe 73
X. Mayeux and Robert Macaire 90
XI. From Cruikshank to Leech 97
XII. The Beginning of Punch 101
XIII. Retrospective 111
XIV. '48 and the Coup d'Etat 119
XV. The Struggle in the Crimea 128
PART III. THE CIVIL AND FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WARS
XVI. The Mexican War and Slavery 143
XVII. Neglected Opportunities 159
XVIII. The South Secedes 166
XIX. The Four Years' Struggle 175
XX. Nations and Men in Caricature 188
XXI. The Outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War 197
XXII. The Debacle 206
PART IV. THE END OF THE CENTURY
XXIII. The Evolution of American Caricature 231
XXIV. The Third French Republic 236
XXV. General European Affairs 245
XXVI. Thomas Nast 255
XXVII. The American Political Campaigns of 1880 and 1884 269
XXVIII. The Influence of Journalism 278
XXIX. Years of Turbulence 289
XXX. American Parties and Platforms 309
XXXI. The Spanish-American War 330
XXXII. The Boer War and the Dreyfus Case 342
XXXIII. The Men of To-day 355
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Page
What It Is and What Is It? Frontispiece
French Invasion of England 3
Nelson at the Battle of the Nile (Gillray) 5
Bonaparte after Landing (Gillray) 6
John Bull Taking a Luncheon (Gillray) 8
French Consular Triumvirate (Gillray) 11
Capture of the Danish Ships (Gillray) 14
The Broad-Bottom Administration (Gillray) 16
Pacific Overtures (Gillray) 19
The Great Coronation Procession (Gillray) 21
Napoleon and Pitt (Gillray) 23
Armed Heroes (Gillray) 25
The Handwriting on the Wall (Gillray) 27
The Double-Faced Napoleon (German cartoon) 29
The Two Kings of Terror (Rowlandson) 31
The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver (Gillray) 33
Napoleon's Burden (German cartoon) 36
The French Gingerbread Baker (Gillray) 38
The Devil and Napoleon (French cartoon) 39
The Consultation (French cartoon) 41
The Corsican Top in Full Flight 45
Napoleon in the Valley of the Shadow of Death (Gillray) 47
The Spider's Web (Volk) 48
The Partition of the Map 49
Napoleon's Plight (French cartoon) 50
The Signature of Abdication (Cruikshank) 52
The Allies' Oven (French cartoon) 54
The New Robinson Crusoe (German cartoon) 55
Napoleon Caged (French cartoon) 56
Restitution 58
Adjusting the Balance 60
John Bull's New Batch of Ships (Charles) 62
Russia as Mediator (Charles) 63
The Cossack Bite (Charles) 63
John Bull and the Alexandrians (Charles) 64
John Bull's Troubles (Charles) 64
The Order of the Extinguishers (French cartoon) 67
Proudhon 68
Digging the Grave 69
Le Poire (Philipon) 70
The Pious Monarch 74
The Great Nut-Cracker 75
Enfonce Lafayette (Daumier) 77
The Ship of State in Peril 79
The Pit of Taxation (Grandville) 81
The Question of Divorce (Daumier) 83
The Resuscitation (Grandville) 84
Louis Philippe as Bluebeard (Grandville) 85
Barbarism and Cholera Invading 89
The Raid 89
Mayeux (Travies) 91
Robert Macaire (Daumier) 93
Extinguished! 94
Louis Philippe as Cain 95
Laughing John--Crying John 96
The Wellington Boot 99
The Land of Liberty 103
England's Admonition (Leech) 104
The Napoleon of Peace 105
The Sea-Serpent of 1848 107
Europe in 1830 109
Honore Daumier (Benjamin) 112
The Evolution of John Bull 115
Joseph Prudhomme (Daumier) 116
The Only Authorised Lamps (Vernier) 120
Italian Cartoon of '48 121
Napoleon le Petit (Vernier) 122
The New Siamese Twins 123
Louis Napoleon and Madame France 124
The Proclamation (Gill) 125
Split Crow in the Crimea 126
Bursting of the Russian Bubble 130
General Fevrier Turned Traitor (Leech) 131
Rochefort and His Lantern 133
Brothers in Arms 134
An American Cartoon on the Crimean War 136
Theatrical Programme 138
The British Lion's Vengeance (Tenniel) 139
The French Porcupine (Leech) 141
Bank-Oh's Ghost, 1837 144
Balaam and Balaam's Ass 144
New Map of the United States 145
The Steeplechase for 1844 147
Uncle Sam's Taylorifics 150
The Mexican Commander 151
Defense of the California Bank 153
The Presidential Foot Race 153
Presidential Campaign of '56 154
No Higher Law 155
The Fugitive Slave Law 157
The Great Disunion Serpent 158
Rough and Ready Locomotive Against the Field 160
Sauce for Goose and Gander 162
Peace (Nast) 164
Virginia Pausing 166
Civil War Envelopes 167
Long Abe 168
The Promissory Note 169
The Great Tight Rope Feat 170
At the Throttle 171
The Expert Bartender 172
The Southern Confederacy a Fact 173
The Brighter Prospect 174
"Why Don't you Take It?" 175
The Old Bull Dog on the Right Track 176
Little Mac in his Great Act 178
The Grave of the Union 180
The Abolition Catastrophe 181
The Blockade 182
Miscegenation 183
The Confederacy in Petticoats 184
Uncle Sam's Menagerie 185
Protecting Free Ballot 186
The Nation at Lincoln's Bier (Tenniel) 187
Figures from a Triumph 189
The Diagnosis (Cham) 190
The Egerean Nymph (Daumier) 191
Paul and Virginia (Gill) 192
The First Conscript of France (Gill) 193
The Situation (Gill) 195
Louis Blanc (Gill) 197
Rival Arbiters (Tenniel) 198
The Man Who Laughs (Gill) 199
The Man Who Thinks (Gill) 200
"To Be or Not to Be" (Gill) 201
Achilles in Retreat (Gill) 202
The President of Rhodes (Daumier) 203
A Tempest in a Glass of Water (Gill) 204
A Duel to the Death (Tenniel) 205
September 4th, 1870 206
Her Baptism of Fire (Tenniel) 207
Andre Gill 208
The Marquis de Galliffet (Willette) 209
The History of a Reign (Daumier) 210
"This has Killed That" (Daumier) 211
The Mousetrap and its Victims (Daumier) 211
Prussia Annexes Alsace (Cham) 213
Britannia's Sympathy (Cham) 214
Adieu (Cham) 215
Souvenirs and Regrets (Aranda) 216
The Napoleon Mountebanks (Hadol) 217
Prussia Introducing the New Assembly (Daumier) 219
"Let us Eat the Prussian" (Gill) 220
Design for a New Handbell (Daumier) 222
Germany's Farewell 223
Bismarck the First 224
Trochu--1870 225
Marshal Bazaine (Faustin) 226
Rochefort 227
The German Emperor Enters Paris (Regamey) 228
Caran D'Ache 232
Gulliver Crispi 233
Changing the Map (Gill) 234
Poor France! (Daumier) 237
The Warning (Daumier) 238
The New Year (Daumier) 239
The Root of all Evil 240
The Napoleonic Drama 241
The French Political Situation (Regamey) 243
New Crowns for Old 245
Tightening the Grip 246
Aeolus 247
"L'Etat, C'est Moi" 248
The Hidden Hand 249
The Irish Frankenstein 250
The Daring Duckling 251
Settling the Alabama Claims 252
Gordon Waiting at Khartoum 253
The Gratz Brown Tag to Greeley's Coat (Nast) 256
Thomas Nast 257
Labour Cap and Dinner Pail (Nast) 259
The Rag Baby (Nast) 260
The Inflation Donkey (Nast) 261
The Brains of Tammany (Nast) 262
A Popular Verdict 263
The Tattooed Columbia (Keppler) 264
Splitting the Party 265
The Headless Candidates 266
On the Down Grade 267
Forbidding the Banns (Keppler) 270
The Wake (Keppler) 272
A Common Sorrow 273
Why They Dislike Him 274
The First Tattooed Man (Gillam) 275
A German Idea of Irish Home Rule 279
The New National Sexton 280
Horatius Cleveland 281
Bernard Gillam 282
Joseph Keppler 283
The John Bull Octopus 285
The Hand of Anarchy 286
The Triple Alliance 287
A Present-Day Lesson 290
Gordon in Khartoum 291
The Spurious Parnell Letters 291
Dropping the Pilot (Tenniel) 292
L'Enfant Terrible 293
William Bluebeard 294
Chinese Native Cartoon 295
Japan in Corea 296
Business at the Deathbed 297
The Start for the China Cup 297
End of the Chinese-Japanese War 298
The Chinese Exclusion Act 299
The Great Republican Circus (Opper) 300
To the Rescue 301
A Pilgrim's Progress 302
General Boulanger 303
The Hague Peace Conference 303
A Fixture 304
Group of Modern French Caricaturists 305
The Anglo-French War Barometer 307
Rip Van Winkle Awakes 310
They're Off 311
Where am I at? (Gillam) 312
The Political Columbus (Gillam) 314
Cleveland's Map of the United States (Gillam) 315
Return of the Southern Flags (Gillam) 317
The Champion Masher (Gillam) 319
The Harrison Platform (Keppler) 320
The Chilian Affair 322
A Political Tam O'Shanter (Gillam) 324
Don Quixote Bryan and the Windmill (Victor Gillam) 325
Outing of the Anarchists 326
To the Death 327
The Great Weyler Ape 328
We are the People 329
Be Careful! It's Loaded (Victor Gillam) 331
The Safety Valve 333
The Latest War Bulletin (Hamilton) 334
Spanish Cartoons of the Spanish-American War 335
The Spanish Brute (Hamilton) 337
Spanish Cartoons of the Spanish-American War 339
The Rhodes Colossus (Sambourne) 342
The Situation in South Africa (Gillam) 343
Bloody Cartography 344
Lady Macbeth 345
The Flying Dutchman 346
Oom Paul's Favorite Pastime 347
Up against the Breastworks 348
The Napoleon of South Africa 349
Fire! 350
The Last Phase of the Dreyfus Case 350
Toward Freedom 351
The French General's Staff 352
Between Scylla and Charybdis 353
Devil's Island 354
C. G. Bush 356
Willie and His Papa (Opper) 357
Homer Davenport 359
Davenport's Conception of the Trusts 361
HISTORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN CARICATURE
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 anticipate 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 passed 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
illustrates some important historical event, and throws light upon the
contemporary attitude of the public, is equally interesting to-day,
whether it anticipated 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 glass
a Lilliputian Napoleon. There is no element of prophecy about the
cartoon. It simply reflects the contemptuous attitude 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."
[Illustration: 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 advertisement. 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 passed 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 pass 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 illustrated 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.
[Illustration: 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 vassals; 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.
[Illustration: 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 coarser
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 principalities
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.
[Illustration: John Bull taking a Luncheon.]
An impressive illustration 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.
[Illustration: 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
Button-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
assisting 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.
[Illustration: "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.
[Illustration: "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 balls, which a contemporary journal, the
_Westminster Magazine_, seriously decried as "subversive of virtue and
every noble 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.
[Illustration: Pacific Overtures.]
CHAPTER III
JAMES GILLRAY
At a time when cheap abuse took the place of technical skill, and
vulgarity passed 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
illustrated 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
prostituted 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 quantities 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 spawn of some forgotten circle of the lower inferno.
[Illustration: "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 passions. 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.
[Illustration: "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 massing 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.
[Illustration: "Armed Heroes."]
[Illustration: "The Handwriting on the Wall."]
CHAPTER IV
BONAPARTE AS FIRST CONSUL
For the first decade of the nineteenth century there was but one
important source of caricature, and one all-important subject--England
and Bonaparte. America at this time counted for little in
international politics. The revolutionary period closed definitely
with the death of Washington, the one figure in our national politics
who stood for something definite in the eyes of Europe. Our incipient
naval war with France, which for a moment threatened to assign us a
part in the general struggle of the Powers, was amicably concluded
before the close of the eighteenth century. Throughout the
Jeffersonian period, national and local satire and burlesque
flourished, atoning in quantity for what it lacked in wit and artistic
skill. Mr. Parton, in his "Caricature and Other Comic Art," finds but
one cartoon which he thinks it worth while to cite--Jefferson kneeling
before a pillar labeled "Altar of Gallic Despotism," upon which are
Paine's "Age of Reason," and the works of Rousseau, Voltaire, and
Helvetius, with the demon of the French Revolution crouching behind
it, and the American Eagle soaring to the sky bearing away the
Constitution and the independence of the United States, and he adds:
"Pictures of that nature, of great size, crowded with objects,
emblems, and sentences--an elaborate blending of burlesque, allegory,
and enigma--were so much valued by that generation that some of them
were engraved upon copper."
[Illustration: "The Double-Faced Napoleon."
_From the collection of John Leonard Dudley, Jr._]
France, on the contrary, the central stage of the great drama of
nations, might at this time have produced a school of caricaturists
worthy of their opportunity--a school that would have offset with its
Gallic wit the heavier school of British invective, and might have
furnished Napoleon with a strong weapon against his most persistent
enemies, had he not, with questionable wisdom, sternly repressed
pictorial satire of a political nature. As the century opens, the
drama of the ensuing fourteen years becomes clearly defined; the
prologue has been played; Napoleon's ambition in the East has been
checked, first by the Battle of the Nile, and then definitely at
Aboukir. Henceforth he is to limit his schemes of conquest to Europe,
and John Bull is the only national figure who seems likely to attempt
to check him. The Battle of the Nile was commemorated by Gillray, who
depicted Nelson's victory in a cartoon entitled "Extirpation of the
Plagues of Egypt, Destruction of the Revolutionary Crocodiles, or the
British Hero Cleansing the Mouth of the Nile." Here Nelson is shown
dispersing the French fleet treated as crocodiles. He has destroyed
numbers with his cudgel of British oak; he is beating down others; a
whole bevy, with hooks through their noses, are attached by strings to
the iron hook which replaced his lost forearm. In the distance a
crocodile is bursting and casting fire and ruin on all sides. This is
an allusion to the destruction of the _Orient_, the flagship of the
Republican Admiral, the heroic Brueys, who declined to quit his post
when literally cut to pieces.
Another cartoon by Gillray which belongs to this period is "The French
Consular Triumvirate Settling the New Constitution." It introduces the
figures of Napoleon and his fellow-consuls, Cambaceres and Lebrun, who
replaced the very authors of the new instrument, Sieyes and Ducos,
quietly deposed by Napoleon within the year. The second and third
consuls are provided with blank sheets of paper, for mere form--they
have only to bite their pens. The Corsican is compiling a constitution
in accordance with his own views. A band of imps is beneath the table,
forging new chains for France and for Europe.
[Illustration: "The Two Kings of Terror."
_After a cartoon by Rowlandson_.]
In England, the Addington ministry, which in 1801 replaced that of
William Pitt, and are represented in caricature as "Lilliputian
substitutes" lost in the depths of Mr. Pitt's jack-boots, set out as a
peace ministry and entered into the negotiations with Napoleon which,
in the following March, resulted in the Peace of Amiens. Gillray
anticipated this peace with several alarmist cartoons: "Preliminaries
of Peace," representing John Bull being led by the nose across the
channel over a rotten plank, while Britannia's shield and several
valuable possessions have been cast aside into the water; and
"Britannia's Death Warrant," in which Britannia is seen being dragged
away to the guillotine by the Corsican marauder. The peace at first
gave genuine satisfaction in England, but toward the end of 1802 there
were growing signs of popular discontent, which Gillray voiced in "The
Nursery, with Britannia Reposing in Peace." Britannia is here
portrayed as an overgrown baby in her cradle and fed upon French
principles by Addington, Lord Hawkesbury, and Fox. Still more famous
was his next cartoon, "The First Kiss this Ten Years; or, the Meeting
of Britannia and Citizen Francois." Britannia, grown enormously stout,
her shield and spear idly reposing against the wall, is blushing
deeply at his warm embrace and ardent expressions of joy: "Madame,
permit me to pay my profound esteem to your engaging person, and to
seal on your divine lips my everlasting attachment!!!" She replies:
"Monsieur, you are truly a well-bred gentleman; and though you make
me blush, yet you kiss so delicately that I cannot refuse you, though
I was sure you would deceive me again." In the background the
portraits of King George and Bonaparte scowl fiercely at each other
upon the wall. This is said to be one of the very few caricatures
which Napoleon himself heartily enjoyed.
From now on, the cartoons take on a more caustic tone. Britannia is
being robbed of her cherished possessions, even Malta being on the
point of being wrested from her; while the bugaboo of an invading army
looms large upon the horizon. In one picture Britannia, unexpectedly
attacked by Napoleon's fleet, is awakening from a trance of fancied
peace, and praying that her "angels and ministers of _dis_grace defend
her!" In another, John Bull, having waded across the water, is
taunting little Boney, whose head just shows above the wall of his
fortress:
If you mean to invade us, why make such a rout?
I say, little Boney, why don't you come out?
Yes, d---- you, why don't you come out?
In his cartoon called "Promised Horrors of the French Invasion; or,
Forcible Reasons for Negotiating a Regicide Peace," Gillray painted
the imaginary landing of the French in England. The ferocious legions
are pouring from St. James's Palace, which is in flames, and they are
marching past the clubs. The practice of patronizing democracy in the
countries they had conquered has been carried out by handing over the
Tories, the constitution, and the crown to the Foxite reformers and
the Whig party. The chief hostility of the French troops is directed
against the aristocratic clubs. An indiscriminate massacre of the
members of White's is proceeding in the doorways, on the balconies,
and wherever the republican levies have penetrated. The royal princes
are stabbed and thrown into the street. A rivulet of blood is
running. In the center of the picture is a tree of liberty. To this
tree Pitt is bound, while Fox is lashing him.
[Illustration: The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver.
"You may have seen Gillray's famous print of him--in the old wig, in
the stout, old, hideous Windsor uniform--as the King of Brobdingnag,
peering at a little Gulliver, whom he holds up in his hand, whilst in
the other he has an opera-glass, through which he surveys the pygmy?
Our fathers chose to set up George as the type of a great king; and
the little Gulliver was the great Napoleon."--_Thackeray's_ "_Four
Georges_".]
The increasing venom of the English cartoons, and their frequent
coarse personalities, caused no little uneasiness to Bonaparte, until
they culminated in a famous cartoon by Gillray, "The Handwriting on
the Wall," a broad satire on Belshazzar's feast, which was published
August 24, 1803. The First Consul, his wife Josephine, and the members
of the court are seated at table, consuming the good things of Old
England. The palace of St. James, transfixed upon Napoleon's fork; the
tower of London, which one of the convives is swallowing whole; the
head of King George on a platter inscribed: "Oh, de beef of Old
England!" A hand above holds out the scales of Justice, in which the
legitimate crown of France weighs down the red cap with its attached
chain--despotism misnamed liberty.
CHAPTER V
THE EMPEROR AT HIS APOGEE
For the next year parliamentary strife at home, fostered by Pitt's
quarrel with the Addington ministry on the one hand and his opposition
to Fox on the other, kept the cartoonists busy. They found time,
however, to celebrate the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor in
December, 1804. Gillray anticipated the event with a cartoon entitled
"The Genius of France Nursing her Darling," in which the genius,
depicted as a lady with blood-stained garments and a reeking spear,
tosses an infant Napoleon, armed with a scepter, and vainly tries to
check his cries with a rattle surmounted by a crown.
Rowlandson, Gillray's clever and more artistic contemporary,
commemorated the event itself in a clever cartoon, "The Death of
Madame Republique," published December 14, 1804. The moribund
Republique lies stretched upon her death-bed, her nightcap adorned
with the tricolored cockade. The Abbe Sieyes, in the role of doctor,
is exhibiting the Emperor, portrayed as a newborn infant in long
clothes. John Bull, spectacles on nose, is regarding the altered
conditions with visible astonishment. "Pray, Mr. Abbe Sieyes, what was
the cause of the poor lady's death? She seemed at one time in a
tolerable thriving way." "She died in childbed, Mr. Bull, after giving
birth to this little Emperor!"
[Illustration: Napoleon's Burden.
From a German cartoon of the period.]
This was followed on the 1st of January by a large satirical print by
Gillray, of "The Grand Coronation Procession," in which the feature
that gave special offense was the group of three princesses, the
Princess Borghese, the Princess Louise, and the Princess Joseph
Bonaparte, arrayed in garments of indecent scantiness, and heading the
procession as the "three imperial Graces." The English caricatures of
this period relating to the new Emperor and Empress are as a rule not
only libelous, but grossly coarse. At the same time, the political
conditions of the times are cleverly hit off in "The Plum Pudding in
Danger; or, State Epicures Taking on Petit Souper," published February
26, 1805, which depicts the rival pretensions of Napoleon and Pitt.
They are seated at opposite sides of the table, the only dish between
them being the Globe, served up on a shallow plate and resembling a
plum pudding. Napoleon's sword has sliced off the continent--France,
Holland, Spain, Italy, Prussia--and his fork is dug spitefully into
Hanover, which was then an appanage of the British crown. Pitt's
trident is stuck in the ocean, and his carver is modestly dividing the
Globe down the middle.
During the summer of 1805 the third coalition against France was
completed, its chief factors being Great Britain, Russia, and Austria.
A contemporary print entitled "Tom Thumb at Bay" commemorates the new
armament. Napoleon, dropping crown and scepter in his flight, is
evading the Austrian eagle, the Russian bear, and the Westphalian pig,
only to run at last pell-mell into the gaping jaws of the British
lion. It is somewhat curious that the momentous events of the new
war--the annihilation of the French fleet at Trafalgar, the equally
decisive French victory at Austerlitz--were scarcely noticed in
caricature, and a few exceptions have little merit. But in the
following January, 1806, when Napoleon had entered upon an epoch of
king-making, with his kings of Wurtemburg and Bavaria, Gillray
produced one of his most famous prints. It was published the 23d of
January (the day that Pitt breathed his last), and was entitled
"Tiddy-Doll, the Great French Gingerbread Baker, Drawing out a new
Batch of Kings, His Man, 'Hopping Talley,' Mixing up the Dough." The
great gilt gingerbread baker is shown at work at his new French oven
for imperial gingerbread. He is just drawing from the oven's mouth a
fresh batch of kings. The fuel is shown in the form of cannon-balls.
Holland, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Venice and Spain are following
the fate of the French Republic. On top of the chest of drawers,
labeled respectively "kings and queens," "crowns and scepters," "suns
and moons" is arranged a gay parcel of little dough viceroys intended
for the next batch. Among them are the figures of Fox, Sheridan,
Derby, and others of the Whig party in England.
[Illustration: The French Gingerbread Baker.]
In the comprehensive and ill-assorted Coalition ministry which was
formed soon after Pitt's death, the caricaturists found a congenial
topic for their pencils. They ridiculed it unmercifully under the
title "All the Talents," and the "Board Bottomed" ministry. A
composite picture by Rowlandson shows the ministry as a spectacled ape
in the wig of a learned justice, with episcopal mitre and Catholic
crozier. He wears a lawyer's coat and ragged breeches, with a shoe on
one foot and a French jack-boot on the other. He is dancing on a
funeral pyre of papers, the results of the administration, its endless
negotiations with France, its sinecures and patronages, which are
blazing away. The creature's foot is discharging a gun, which
produces signal mischief in the rear and brings down two heavy folios,
the Magna Charta and the Coronation Oath, upon its head.
[Illustration: "The Devil and Napoleon."
_From an anonymous French caricature._]
This ministry's futile negotiations for peace with France are
frequently burlesqued. Gillray published on April 5 "Pacific
Overtures; or, a Flight from St. Cloud's 'over the water to Charley,'"
in which the negotiations are described as "a new dramatic _peace_,
now rehearsing." In this cartoon King George has left the state
box--where the play-book of "I Know You All" still remains open--to
approach nearer to little Boney, who, elevated on the clouds, is
directing attention to his proposed treaty. "Terms of Peace:
Acknowledge me as Emperor; dismantle your fleet, reduce your armies;
abandon Malta and Gibraltar; renounce all continental connection; your
colonies I will take at a valuation; engage to pay to the Great Nation
for seven years annually one million pounds; and place in my hands as
hostages the Princess Charlotte of Wales, with others of the late
administration whom I shall name." King George replies: "Very amusing
terms, indeed, and might do vastly well with some of the new-made
little gingerbread kings; but we are not in the habit of giving up
either ships or commerce or colonies merely because little Boney is in
a pet to have them." This cartoon introduces among others Talleyrand,
O'Conor, Fox, Lord Ellenborough, the Duke of Bedford, Lord Moira, Lord
Lauderdale, Addington, Lord Henry Petty, Lord Derby, and Mrs.
Fitzherbert.
Shortly afterward, on July 21, 1806, Rowlandson voices the current
feeling of distrust of Fox in "Experiments at Dover; or, Master
Charley's Magic Lantern." Fox is depicted at Dover, training the rays
of his magic lantern on the cliffs of Calais. John Bull, watching him,
is not satisfied. "Yes, yes, it be all very fine, if it be true; but I
can't forget that d--d Omnium last week.... I will tell thee what,
Charley, since thee hast become a great man, I think in my heart thee
beest always conjuring."
The cartoon entitled "Westminster Conscripts under the Training Act"
appeared September 1, 1806. Napoleon, the drill sergeant, is elevated
on a pile of cannon-balls; he is giving his authoritative order to
"Ground arms." The invalided Fox has been wheeled to the ground in his
armchair; the Prince of Wales' plume appears on the back of his seat.
Other figures in the cartoon are Lord Lauderdale, Lord Grenville, Lord
Howick, Lord Holland, Lord Robert Spencer, Lord Ellenborough, the Duke
of Clarence, Lord Moira, Lord Chancellor Erskine, Colonel Hanger, and
Talleyrand.
[Illustration: The Consultation.
_From the collection of John Leonard Dudley, Jr._]
Gillray has left a cartoon commemorating the arrival of the Danish
squadron, under the title of "British Tars Towing the Danish Fleet
into Harbor; the Broad Bottom Leviathan trying to swamp Billy's Old
Boat; and the Little Corsican Tottering on the Clouds of Ambition."
This cartoon was issued October 1, 1807. Lords Liverpool and
Castlereagh are lustily rowing the _Billy Pitt_; Canning, seated in
the stern, is towing the captured fleet into Sheerness, with the Union
Jack flying over the forts. Copenhagen, smoking from the recent
bombardment, may be distinguished in the distance. In Sheerness harbor
the sign of "Good Old George" is hung out at John Bull's Tavern; John
Bull is seated at the door, a pot of porter in his hand, waving his
hat and shouting: "Rule Britannia! Britannia Rules the Waves!" That
the expedition did not escape censure is shown by the figure of a
three-headed porpoise which is savagely assailing the successful crew.
This monster bears the heads of Lord Howick, shouting "Detraction!"
Lord St. Vincent tilled with "Envy," and discharging a watery
broadside; and Lord Grenville, who is raising his "Opposition Clamor"
to confuse their course.
CHAPTER VI
NAPOLEON'S WANING POWER
No period of the Napoleonic wars gave better opportunity for satire
than Napoleon's disastrous occupation of Spain and his invasion of
Portugal. The titles alone of the cartoons would fill a volume. The
sanguine hopes of success cherished by the English government are
expressed by Gillray in a print published April 10, 1808. "Delicious
Dreams! Castles in the Air! Glorious Prospects!" It depicts the
ministers sunken in a drunken sleep and visited by glorious visions of
Britannia and her lion occupying a triumphal car formed from the hull
of a British ship, drawn by an Irish bull and led by an English tar.
She is dragging captive to the Tower little Boney and the Russian
Bear, both loaded with chains.
[Illustration: "The Corsican Top in Full Flight."
_From a colored stamp of the period._]
The dangers which threatened Napoleon at this period were shown by
Gillray in one of the most striking of all his cartoons, the "Valley
of the Shadow of Death," which was issued September 24, 1808. The
valley is the valley of Bunyan's allegory. The Emperor is proceeding
timorously down a treacherous path, bounded on either side by the
waters of Styx and hemmed in by a circle of flame. From every side
horrors are springing up to assail him. The British lion, raging and
furious, is springing at his throat. The Portuguese wolf has broken
his chain. King Death, mounted on a mule of "True Royal Spanish
Breed," has cleared at a bound the body of the ex-King Joseph, which
has been thrown into the "Ditch of Styx." Death is poising his spear
with fatal aim, warningly holding up at the same time his hour-glass
with the sand exhausted; flames follow in his course. From the smoke
rise the figures of Junot and Dupont, the beaten generals. The papal
tiara is descending as a "Roman meteor," charged with lightnings to
blast the Corsican. The "Turkish New Moon" is seen rising in blood.
The "Spirit of Charles XII." rises from the flames to avenge the
wrongs of Sweden. The "Imperial German Eagle" is emerging from a
cloud; the Prussian bird appears as a scarecrow, making desperate
efforts to fly and screaming revenge. From the "Lethean Ditch" the
"American Rattlesnake" is thrusting forth a poisoned tongue. The
"Dutch Frogs" are spitting out their spite; and the Rhenish
Confederation is personified as a herd of starved "Rats," ready to
feast on the Corsican. The great "Russian Bear," the only ally
Napoleon has secured, is shaking his chain and growling--a formidable
enemy in the rear.
Gillray's caricature entitled "John Bull Taking a Luncheon; or,
British Cooks Cramming Old Grumble-Gizzard with Bonne Chere," shows
the strange-appearing John of the caricature of that day sitting at a
table, overwhelmed by the zealous attentions of his cooks, foremost
among whom is the hero of the Nile, who is offering him a "Fricassee a
la Nelson," a large dish of battered French ships of the line. John is
swallowing a frigate at a mouthful. Through the window we see Fox and
Sheridan, representative of the Broad Bottom administration, running
away in dismay at John Bull's voracity.
[Illustration: Napoleon in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
_From James Gillray's caricature._]
As Gillray retires from the field several other clever artists stand
ready to take his place, and chief among them Rowlandson. The latter
had a distinct advantage over Gillray in his superior artistic
training. He was educated in the French schools, where he gave
especial attention to studies from the nude. In the opinion of such
capable judges as Reynolds, West, and Lawrence, his gifts might have
won him a high place among English artists, if he had not turned,
through sheer perversity, to satire and burlesque. Rowlandson's
Napoleonic cartoons began in July, 1808. These initial efforts are
neither especially characteristic nor especially clever, but they
certainly were duly appreciated by the public. Joseph Grego, in his
interesting and comprehensive work upon Rowlandson, says of them:
[Illustration: The Spider's Web.
From a German caricature commemorating German success in 1814.]
"It is certain that the caricaturist's travesties of the little
Emperor, his burlesques of his great actions and grandiose
declarations, his figurative displays of the mean origin of the
imperial family, with the cowardice and depravity of its members, won
popular applause ... And when disasters began to cloud the career of
Napoleon, as army after army melted away, ... the artist bent his
skill to interpret the delight of the public. The City competed with
the West End in buying every caricature, in loyal contest to prove
their national enmity for Bonaparte. In too many cases, the incentive
was to gratify the hatred of the Corsican rather than any remarkable
merit that could be discovered in the caricatures. Very few of these
mock-heroic sallies imprint themselves upon the recollection by sheer
force of their own brilliancy, as was the case with Gillray, and
frequently with John Tenniel. Rowlandson and Cruikshank are risible,
but not inspired."
[Illustration: "The Partition of the Map."
_From the collection of John Leonard Dudley, Jr._]
On July 8 Rowlandson began his series with "The Corsican Tiger at
Bay." Napoleon is depicted as a savage tiger, rending four "Royal
Greyhounds," quite at his mercy. But a fresh pack appears in the
background and prepares for a fierce charge. The Russian bear and
Austrian eagle are securely bound with heavy fetters, but the eagle is
asking: "Now, Brother Bruin, is it time to break our fetters?"
[Illustration: "The Chief of the Grand Army in a Sad Plight."
_From a French cartoon of the period._]
"The Beast as Described in the Revelations" followed within two weeks.
The beast, of Corsican origin, is represented with seven heads, and
the names of Austria, Naples, Holland, Denmark, Prussia, and Russia
are inscribed on their respective crowns. Napoleon's head, severed
from the trunk, vomits forth flames. In the distance, cities are
blazing, showing the destruction wrought by the beast. Spain is
represented as the champion who alone dares to stand against the
monster.
"The Political Butcher" bears date September 12 of the same year. In
this print the Spanish Don, in the garb of a butcher, is cutting up
Bonaparte for the benefit of his neighbors. The body of the late
Corsican lies before him and is being cut up with professional zeal.
The Don holds up his enemy's heart and calls upon the other Powers to
take their share. The double-headed eagle of Austria is swooping upon
Napoleon's head: "I have long wished to strike my talons into that
diabolical head-piece"; the British bulldog has been enjoying portions
of the joints, and thinks that he would "like to have the picking of
that head." The Russian bear is luxuriously licking Napoleon's boots,
and remarks, "This licking is giving me a mortal inclination to pick a
bone."
The final failure of the Spanish campaign is signalized, September 20,
in a cartoon labeled "Napoleon the Little in a Rage with his Great
French Eagle." The Emperor, with drawn sword and bristling with rage,
threatens the French imperial eagle, larger than himself. The bird's
head and one leg are tied up--the result of damage inflicted by the
Spaniards. "Confusion and destruction!" thunders Napoleon, "what is
this I see? Did I not command you not to return until you had spread
your wing of victory over the whole of Spain?" "Aye, it's fine
talking," rejoins the bird, "but if you had been there, you would not
much have liked it. The Spanish cormorants pursued me in such a manner
that they set me molting in a terrible way. I wonder that I have not
lost my feathers. Besides, it got so hot I could not bear it any
longer."
[Illustration: "The Signature Symbol of Abdication."
_From a caricature in color by George Cruikshank._]
In August, 1809, Rowlandson published "The Rising Sun." Bonaparte is
surrounded by the Continental powers, and is busy rocking to sleep in
a cradle the Russian bear, securely muzzled with French promises.
But the dawn of a new era is breaking: the sun of Spain and Portugal
is rising with threatening import. The Emperor is disturbed by the new
light: "This rising sun has set me upon thorns." The Prussian eagle is
trussed; Denmark is snuffed out. But Austria has once more taken
heart: "Tyrant, I defy thee and thy cursed crew!"
The victories of the Peninsular war, and later of the disastrous
Russian campaign, called forth an ever-increasing number of cartoons,
which showed little mercy or consideration to a fallen foe. A sample
of the titles of this period show the general tendency; he is the
"Corsican Bloodhound," the "Carcass-Butcher"; he is a jail-bird doing
the "Rogues' March to the Island of Elba." An analysis of a few of the
more striking cartoons will serve to close the survey of the
Napoleonic period. "Death and Bonaparte" is a grewsome cartoon by
Rowlandson, dated January 1, 1814. Napoleon is seated on a drum with
his head clasped between his hands, staring into the face of a
skeleton Death, who is watching the baffled general, face to face.
Death mockingly parodies Napoleon's attitude. A broken eagle, the
imperial standard, lies at his bony feet. In the background the
Russian, Prussian, Austrian, and other allied armies are streaming
past in unbroken ranks, routing the dismayed legions of France.
"Bloody Boney, the Corsican Butcher, Left off Trade and Retiring to
Scarecrow Island" is the title of still another of Rowlandson's
characteristic cartoons. In it Napoleon is represented as riding on a
rough-coated donkey and wearing a fool's cap in place of a crown. His
only provision is a bag of brown bread. His consort is riding on the
same beast, which is being unmercifully flogged with a stick labeled
"Baton Marechal."
[Illustration: "The Oven of the Allies."
_From an anonymous French cartoon._]
Napoleon's escape from Elba was commemorated by Rowlandson in "The
Flight of Bonaparte from Hell Bay." In it the foul fiend is amusing
himself by letting his captive loose, to work fresh mischief in the
world above. He has mounted the Corsican upon a bubble and sends him
careering upward back to earth, while hissing dragons pour forth
furious blasts to waft the bubble onward.
[Illustration: "The New Robinson Crusoe."
_From a German caricature._]
"Hell Hounds Rallying around the Idol of France" is the title of still
another of Rowlandson's designs, which appeared in April, 1815. The
head and bust of the Emperor drawn on a colossal scale, a hangman's
noose around his throat, is mounted on a vast pyramid of human heads,
his decapitated victims. Demons are flying through the air to place
upon his brow a crown of blazing pitch, while a ring of other excited
fiends, whose features represent Marechal Ney, Lefebre, Davoust and
others, with horns, hoofs, and tails, are dancing in triumph around
the idol they have replaced. Closely resembling this cartoon of
Rowlandson is the German cartoon, which is reproduced in these pages,
showing a double-faced Napoleon topping a monument built of skulls.
Rowlandson's "Hell Hounds Rallying around the Idol of France" was the
last English cartoon directed against Napoleon when he was at the head
of France. Two months later the Emperor's power was finally broken at
Waterloo.
[Illustration: "Napoleon caged by the Allies."
_From a French cartoon of the period._]
PART II
_FROM WATERLOO THROUGH THE CRIMEAN WAR_
CHAPTER VII
AFTER THE DOWNFALL
[Illustration: "Restitution: Or, to Each his Share."
_From a colored stamp of the period._]
With the downfall of Napoleon the Gillray school of caricature came to
an abrupt and very natural close. It was a school born of fear and
nurtured upon rancor--a school that indulged freely in obscenity and
sacrilege, and did not hesitate to stoop to kick the fallen hero, to
heap insult and ignominy upon Napoleon in his exile. Only during a
great world crisis, a death struggle of nations, could popular opinion
have tolerated such wanton disregard for decency. And when the crisis
was passed it came to an end like some malignant growth, strangled by
its own virulence. The truth is that Gillray and Rowlandson led
caricature into an _impasse_; they deliberately perverted its true
function, which is, to advance an argument with the cogent force of a
clever orator, to sum up a political issue in terms so simple that a
child may read, and not merely to echo back the blatant rancor of the
mob. In the hands of a master of the art it becomes an incisive
weapon, like the blade with which the matador gives his
_coup-de-grace_. Gillray's conception of its office seems to have been
that of the red rag to be flapped tauntingly in the face of John
Bull; and John Bull obediently bellowed in response. It would be idle
to deny that for the purpose of spurring on public opinion, the
Napoleonic cartoons exercised a potent influence. They kept popular
excitement at fever heat; they added fuel to the general hatred. But
when the crisis was passed, when the public pulse was beating normally
once more, when virulent attacks upon a helpless exile had ceased to
seem amusing, there really remained no material upon which caricature
of the Gillray type could exercise its offensive ingenuity. What
seemed justifiable license when directed against the arch-enemy of
European peace would have been insufferable when applied to British
statesmen and to the milder problems of local political issues.
Another and quite practical reason helps to explain the dearth of
political caricature in England for a full generation after the battle
of Waterloo, and that is the question of expense. A public which
freely gave shillings and even pounds to see its hatred of "Little
Boney" interpreted with Gillray's vindictive malice hesitated to
expend even pennies for a cartoon on the corn laws or the latest
ministerial changes. In England, as well as on the Continent,
caricature as an effective factor in politics remained in abeyance
until the advent of an essentially modern type of periodical, the
comic weekly, of which _La Caricature_, the London _Punch_, the
_Fliegende Blaetter_, and in this country _Puck_ and _Judge_, are the
most famous examples. The progress of lithography made such a
periodical possible in France as early as 1830, when _La Caricature_
was founded by the famous Philipon; but the oppressive laws of
censorship throughout Europe prevented any wide development of this
class of journalism until after the general political upheaval of
1848.
[Illustration: Adjusting the Balance of Power after Napoleon.]
It would be idle, however, to deny that Gillray exerted a lasting
influence upon all future caricature. His license, his vulgarity, his
repulsive perversion of the human face and form, have found no
disciples in later generations; but his effective assemblage of many
figures, the crowded significance of minor details, the dramatic unity
of the whole conception which he inherited from Hogarth, have been
passed on down the line and still continue to influence the leading
cartoonists of to-day in England, Germany, and the United States,
although to a much less degree in France. Even at the time of
Napoleon's downfall the few cartoons which appeared in Paris were far
less extreme than their English models, while the German
caricaturists, on the contrary, were extremely virulent, notably the
Berliner, Schadow, who openly acknowledged his indebtedness to the
Englishman by signing himself the Parisian Gillray; and Volz, author
of the famous "true portrait of Napoleon"--a portrait in which
Napoleon's face, upon closer inspection, is seen made up of a head of
inextricably tangled dead bodies, his head surmounted by a bird of
prey, his breast a map of Europe overspread by a vast spider web, in
which the different national capitals are entangled like so many
luckless flies. Had there been more liberty of the press, an
interesting school of political cartoonists might have arisen at this
time in Germany. But they met with such scanty encouragement that
little of real interest is to be gleaned from this source until after
the advent of the Berlin _Kladderadatsch_ in 1848, and the _Fliegende
Blaetter_, but a short time earlier.
[Illustration: John Bull making a new Batch of Ships to send to the
Lakes.
This cartoon by William Charles, a Scotchman who was forced to leave
Great Britain, and who came to the United States, and wielded his
pencil against his renounced country, is in many ways an imitator of
Gillray's famous "Tiddy Do, the Great French Gingerbread-Baker,
making a new Batch of Kings."
_From the collection of the New York Public Library._]
[Illustration: Russia as Mediator between the United States and Great
Britain.
_From the collection of the New York Public Library._]
[Illustration: The Cossack Bite.
An american cartoon of the war of 1812.]
[Illustration: John Bull and the Alexandrians.]
[Illustration: John Bull's Troubles.
A caricature of the war of 1812.
_From the collection of the New York Public Library._]
CHAPTER VIII
THE "POIRE"
Throughout the Napoleonic period England practically had a monopoly in
caricature. During the second period, down to the year 1848, France is
the center of interest. Prior to 1830, French political cartoons were
neither numerous nor especially significant. Indeed they present a
simplicity of imagination rather amusing as compared with the
complicated English caricatures. A hate of the Jesuits, a mingling of
liberalism, touched with Bonapartism, and the war of newspapers
furnished the theme. The two symbols constantly recurring are the
_girouette_, or weather-cock, and the _eteignoir_, or extinguisher.
Many of the French statesmen who played a prominent part during the
French Empire and after the Restoration changed their political creed
with such surprising rapidity that it was difficult to keep track of
their changes. They were accordingly symbolized by a number of
weathercocks proportioned to the number of their political
conversions, Talleyrand leading the procession, with not less than
seven to his credit. The _eteignoir_ was constantly used in satire
directed against the priesthood, the most famous instance appearing in
the _Minerva_ in 1819. It took for the text a refrain from a song of
Beranger. In this cartoon the Church is personified by the figure of
the Pope holding in one hand a sabre, and, in the other, a paper with
the words Bulls, crusades, Sicilian vespers, St. Bartholomew. Beside
the figure of the Church, torch in hand, is the demon of discord. From
the smoke of the torch of the demon various horrors are escaping. We
read "the restoration of feudal rights," "feudal privileges,"
"division of families." Monks are trying to snuff out the memory of
Fenelon, Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montaigne, and other philosophers
and thinkers. For ten years the caricaturists played with this theme.
A feeble forerunner of _La Caricature_, entitled _Le Nain Jaune_,
depended largely for its wit upon the variations it could improvise
upon the _girouette_ and upon the _eteignoir_.
Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that French art was quite
destitute of humorists at the beginning of the century. M. Armand
Dayot, in a monograph upon French caricature, mentions among others
the names of Isabey, Boilly, and Carle Vernet as rivaling the English
cartoonists in the ingenuity of their designs, and surpassing them in
artistic finish and harmony of color. "But," he adds, "they were never
able to go below the surface in their satire. It would be a mistake to
enroll in the hirsute cohort of caricaturists these witty and charming
artists, who were more concerned in depicting the pleasures of mundane
life than in castigating its vices and irregularities." The 4th of
November, 1830, is a momentous date in the history of French
caricature. Prior to that time, French cartoons, such as there were,
were studiously, even painfully, impersonal. Thackeray, in his
delightful essay upon "Caricatures and Lithography," in the "Paris
Sketch Book," describes the conditions of this period with the
following whimsical allegory:
[Illustration: The Order of the Extinguishers.
_A typical French cartoon of the Restoration._]
"As for poor caricature and freedom of the press, they, like the
rightful princess in a fairy tale, with the merry fantastic dwarf, her
attendant, were entirely in the power of the giant who rules the
land. The Princess, the press, was so closely watched and guarded
(with some little show, nevertheless, of respect for her rank) that
she dared not utter a word of her own thoughts; and, as for poor
Caricature, he was gagged and put out of the way altogether."
[Illustration: Proudhon.]
[Illustration: Digging the Grave.]
On this famous 4th of November, however, there appeared the initial
number of Philipon's _La Caricature_, which was destined to usher in a
new era of comic art, and which proved the most efficacious weapon
which the Republicans found to use against Louis Philippe--a weapon as
redoubtable as _La Lanterne_ of Henri Rochefort became under the
Second Empire. Like several of his most famous collaborators, Charles
Philipon was a Meridional. He was born in Lyons at the opening of the
century. He studied art in the atelier of Gros. He married into the
family of an eminent publisher of prints, M. Aubert, and was himself
successively the editor of the three most famous comic papers that
France has had, _La Caricature_, _Charivari_, and the _Journal pour
Rire_. The first of these was a weekly paper. The _Charivari_ appeared
daily, and at first its cartoons were almost exclusively political.
Philipon had gathered around him a group of artists, men like Daumier,
Gavarni, Henry Monnier, and Travies, whose names afterward became
famous, and they united in a veritable crusade of merciless ridicule
against the king, his family, and his supporters. Their satire took
the form of bitter personal attacks, and a very curious contest ensued
between the government and the editorial staff of the _Charivari_. As
Thackeray sums it up, it was a struggle between "half a dozen poor
artists on the one side and His Majesty Louis Philippe, his august
family, and the numberless placemen and supporters of the monarchy on
the other; it was something like Thersites girding at Ajax." Time
after time were Philipon and his dauntless aids arrested. More than a
dozen times they lost their cause before a jury, yet each defeat was
equivalent to a victory, bringing them new sympathy, and each time
they returned to the attack with cartoons which, if more covert in
their meaning, were even more offensive. Perhaps the most famous of
all the cartoons which originated in Philipon's fertile brain is that
of the "Pear," which did so much to turn the countenance of Louis
Philippe to ridicule--a ridicule which did more than anything else to
cause him to be driven from the French throne. The "Pear" was
reproduced in various forms in _La Caricature_, and afterward in _Le
Charivari_. By inferior artists the "Pear" was chalked up on walls all
over Paris. The most politically important of the "Poire" series was
produced when Philipon was obliged to appear before a jury to answer
for the crime of provoking contempt against the King's person by
giving such a ludicrous version of his face. In his own defense
Philipon took up a sheet of paper and drew a large Burgundy pear, in
the lower parts round and capacious, narrower near the stalk, and
crowned with two or three careless leaves. "Is there any treason in
that?" he asked the jury. Then he drew a second pear like the first,
except that one or two lines were scrawled in the midst of it, which
bore somehow an odd resemblance to the features of a celebrated
personage; and, lastly, he produced the exact portrait of Louis
Philippe; the well-known _toupet_, the ample whiskers--nothing was
extenuated or set down maliciously. "Gentlemen of the jury," said
Philipon, "can I help it if His Majesty's face is like a pear?"
Thackeray, in giving an account of this amusing trial, makes the
curious error of supposing that Philipon's _naive_ defense carried
conviction with the jury. On the contrary, Philipon was condemned and
fined, and immediately took vengeance upon the judge and jury by
arranging their portraits upon the front page of _Charivari_ in the
form of a "Pear." In a hundred different ways his artists rang the
changes upon the "pear," and each new attack was the forerunner of a
new arrest and trial. One day _La Caricature_ published a design
representing a gigantic pear surmounting the pedestal in the Place de
la Concorde, and bearing the legend, "_Le monument expia-poire_." This
regicidal pleasantry brought Philipon once more into court. "The
prosecution sees in this a provocation to murder!" cried the accused.
"It would be at most a provocation to make marmalade." Finally, after
a picture of a monkey stealing a pear proved to be an indictable
offense, the subject was abandoned as being altogether too expensive a
luxury.
[Illustration: Facsimile of the Famous Defense presented by Philipon
when on Trial for Libeling the King.
"Is it my fault, gentlemen of the jury, if his Majesty's face looks
like a pear?"]
CHAPTER IX
THE BAITING OF LOUIS PHILIPPE
[Illustration: The Pious Monarch. Caricature of Charles X.]
But although the "Pear" was forced to disappear, Philipon continued to
harass the government, until Louis Philippe, who had gained his crown
largely by his championship of the freedom of the press, was driven in
desperation to sanction the famous September laws, which virtually
strangled its liberty. Yet, in spite of the obstacles thrown in their
way, the work of Philipon and of the remarkable corps of satirical
geniuses which he gathered round him, forms a pictorial record in
which the intimate history of France, from Charles X.'s famous _coup
d'etat_ down to the revolution of 1848, may be read like an open book.
The adversaries of the government of 1830 were of two kinds. One kind,
of which Admiral Carrel was a type, resorted to passionate argument,
to indignant eloquence. The other kind resorted to the methods of the
Fronde; they made war by pin-pricks, by bursts of laughter, with all
the resources of French gayety and wit. In this method the leading
spirit was Philipon, who understood clearly the power that would
result from the closest alliance between _la presse et l'image_. Even
before _La Caricature_ was founded the features of the last of the
Bourbons became a familiar subject in cartoons. Invariably the same
features are emphasized; a tall, lank figure, frequently contorted
like the "india-rubber man" of the dime museums; a narrow, vacuous
countenance, a high, receding forehead, over which sparse locks of
hair are straggling; a salient jaw, the lips drawn back in a
mirthless grin, revealing huge, ungainly teeth, projecting like the
incisors of a horse. In one memorable cartoon he is expending the full
crushing power of these teeth upon the famous "charter" of 1830, but
is finding it a nut quite too hard to crack.
[Illustration: Charles X. In the Role of the "Great Nutcracker."
In this caricature Charles X. is attempting to break with his teeth a
billiard ball on which is written the word "Charter." The cartoon is
entitled "The Great Nutcracker of July 25th, or the Impotent
Horse-jaw" (ganache)--a play upon words.]
From the very beginning _La Caricature_ assumed an attitude of hostile
suspicion toward Louis Philippe, the pretended champion of the
_bourgeoisie_, whose veneer of expedient republicanism never went
deeper than to send his children to the public schools, and to exhibit
himself parading the streets of Paris, umbrella in hand. Two cartoons
which appeared in the early days of his reign, and are labeled
respectively "_Ne vous y frottez pas_" and "_Il va bon train, le
Ministere!_" admirably illustrate the public lack of confidence. The
first of these, an eloquent lithograph by Daumier, represents a
powerfully built and resolute young journeyman printer standing with
hands clinched, ready to defend the liberty of the press. In the
background are two groups. In the one Charles X., already worsted in
an encounter, lies prone upon the earth; in the other Louis Philippe,
waving his ubiquitous umbrella, is with difficulty restrained from
assuming the aggressive. The second of these cartoons is more sweeping
in its indictment. It represents the sovereign and his ministers in
their "chariot of state," one and all lashing the horses into a mad
gallop toward a bottomless abyss. General Soult, the Minister of War,
is flourishing and snapping a military flag, in place of a whip. At
the back of the chariot a Jesuit has succeeded in securing foothold
upon the baggage, and is adding his voice to hasten the forward march,
all symbolic of the violent momentum of the reactionary movement.
[Illustration: Louis Philippe at the Funeral of Lafayette.
_"Enfonce Lafayette!... Attrape, mon vieux!"_]
[Illustration: The Ship of State in Peril--Its Sailors know not to
what Saints to commend Themselves.]
[Illustration: The People thrown into the Pit held by the Monsters of
Various Taxes.]
[Illustration: "Once more, Madame, do you wish divorce, or do you not
wish divorce? You are perfectly free to choose?"]
It was not likely that the part which Louis Philippe played in the
revolution of 1789, his share in the republican victories of Jemappes
and of Valmy, would be forgotten by those who saw in him only a
pseudo-republican, a "citizen king" in name only, and who seized
eagerly upon the opportunity of mocking at his youthful espousal of
republicanism. The names of these battles recur again and again in the
caricature of the period, in the legends, in maps conspicuously hung
upon the walls of the background. An anonymous cut represents the
public gazing eagerly into a magic lantern, the old "Poire"
officiating as showman: "You have before you the conqueror of Jemappes
and of Valmy. You see him surrounded by his nobles, his generals, and
his family, all ready to die in his defense. See how the jolly rascals
fight. They are not the ones to be driven in disgrace from their
kingdom. Oh, no!" Of all the cartoons touching upon Louis Philippe's
insincerity, probably the most famous is that of Daumier commemorating
the death of Lafayette. The persistent popularity of this veteran
statesman had steadily become more and more embarrassing to a
government whose reactionary doctrines he repudiated, and whose
political corruption he despised. "_Enfonce Lafayette!... Attrape, mon
vieux!_" is the legend inscribed beneath what is unquestionably one of
the most extraordinary of all the caricatures of Honore Daumier. It
represents Louis Philippe watching the funeral cortege of Lafayette,
his hands raised to his face in the pretense of grief, but the face
behind distorted into a hideous leer of gratification. M. Arsene
Alexandre, in his remarkable work on Daumier, describes this splendid
drawing in the following terms: "Under a grey sky, against the somber
and broken background of a cemetery, rises on a little hillock the fat
and black figure of an undertaker's man. Below him on a winding road
is proceeding a long funeral procession. It is the crowd that has
thronged to the obsequies of the illustrious patriot. Through the
leafage of the weeping willows may be seen the white tombstones. The
whole scene bears the mark of a profound sadness, in which the
principal figure seems to join, if one is to judge by his sorrowful
attitude and his clasped hands. But look closer. If this undertaker's
man, with the features of Louis Philippe, is clasping his hands, it is
simply to rub them together with joy; and through his fingers, half
hiding his countenance, one may detect a sly grin." The obsequious
attitude of the members of Parliament came in for its share of
satirical abuse. "This is not a Chamber, it is a Kennel," is the title
of a spirited lithograph by Grandville, representing the French
statesmen as a pack of hounds fawning beneath the lash of their
imperious keeper, Casimir Perier. Another characteristic cartoon of
Grandville's represents the legislature as an "Infernal laboratory for
extracting the quintessence of politics"--a composition which, in its
crowded detail, its grim and uncanny suggestiveness, and above all its
_bizarre_ distortions of the human face and form, shows more plainly
than the work of any other French caricaturist the influence of
Gillray. A collection of grinning skulls are labeled "Analysis of
Human Thought"; state documents of Louis Philippe are being cut and
weighed and triturated, while in the foreground a legislator with
distended cheeks is wasting an infinite lot of breath upon a blowpipe
in his effort to distill the much-sought-for quintessence from a
retort filled with fragments of the words "Bonapartism," "anarchy,"
"equality," "republic," etc. One of the palpable results of the
"political quintessence" of Louis Philippe's government took the form
of heavy imposts, and these also afforded a subject for Grandville's
graphic pencil. "The Public Thrown to the Imposts in the Great Pit of
the Budget" first appeared in _La Caricature_. It represented the
various taxes under which France was suffering in the guise of strange
and unearthly animals congregated in a sort of bear pit, somewhat
similar to the one which attracts the attention of all visitors to the
city of Berne. The spectacle is one given by the government in power
for the amusement of all those connected in any way with public
office: in other words, the salaried officials who draw their
livelihood from the taxes imposed upon the people. It is for their
entertainment that the tax-paying public is being hurled to the
monsters below--monsters more uncouth and fantastic than even Mr. H.
G. Wells's fertile brain conceived in his "War of the Worlds," or
"First Men in the Moon." Daumier in his turn had to have his fling at
the ministerial benches of the government of July--the "prostituted
Chamber of 1834." At the present day, when the very names of the men
whom he attacked are half forgotten, his famous cartoon, "Le Ventre
Legislatif," is still interesting; yet it is impossible to realize the
impression it must have made in the days when every one of those
"ventrigoulus," those rotund, somnolent, inanely smiling old men, with
the word "_bourgeoisie_" plainly written all over them, were familiar
figures in the political world, and Daumier's presentment of them, one
and all, a masterly indictment of complacent incapacity. As between
Daumier and Grandville, the two leading lights of _La Caricature_,
there is little question that the former was the greater. Balzac, who
was at one time one of the editors of _La Caricature_, writing under
pseudonym of "Comte Alexandre de B.," and was the source of
inspiration of one of its leading features, the curious _Etudes de
Genre_, once said of Daumier: "_Ce gaillard-la, mes enfants, a du
Michel-Ange sous la peau._" Balzac took Daumier under his protection
from the beginning. His first counsel to him was: "If you wish to
become a great artist, _faites des dettes_!" Grandville has been
defined by later French critics as _un nevrose_, a bitter and
pessimistic soul. It was he who produced the cruelest compositions
that ever appeared in _La Caricature_. He had, however, some admirable
pages to his credit, among others his interpretation of Sebastian's
famous "L'Ordre regne a Varsovie." Fearfully sinister is the field of
carnage, with the Cossack, with bloody _pique_, mounting guard,
smoking his pipe tranquilly, on his face the horrible expression of
satisfaction over a work well done. Grandville also conceived the
idea, worthy of a great cartoonist, of Processions and Corteges. These
enabled him to have pass before the eye, under costumes, each
conveying some subtle irony or allusion, all the political men in
favor. Every occasion was good. A religious procession, and the men of
the day appeared as choir boys, as acolytes, etc. _Un vote de budget_,
and then it was _une marche de boeuf gras_, with savages, musketeers,
clowns forming the escort of "_M. Gros, gras et bete_." It is easy
to guess who was the personage so designated. Nothing is more amusing
than these pages, full of a _verve, soutenue de pince sans rire_.
[Illustration: The Resuscitation of the French Censorship.
_By Grandville._]
[Illustration: Louis Philippe as Bluebeard.
"Sister Press, do you see anything?"
"Nothing, but the July sun beating on the dusty road."
"Sister Press, do you see anything?"
"Two Cavaliers, urging their horses across the plain, and bearing a
banner."]
It is one of the many little ironies of Louis Philippe's reign that,
after having owed his election to his supposed advocacy of freedom of
the press, he should in less than two years take vigorous measures to
stifle it. Some of the best known cartoons that appeared in _La
Caricature_ deal with this very subject. One of these, which bears the
signature of Grandville and is marked by all the vindictive bitterness
of which that artist was the master, represents Louis Philippe in the
role of Bluebeard, who, dagger in hand, is about to slay his latest
wife. The wife, the "Constitution," lies prostrate, hound with thongs.
The corpses of this political Bluebeard's other victims may be seen
through the open door of the secret chamber. Leaning over the balcony
and scanning the horizon is the figure of Sister Anne, in this case
symbolic of the Press. The unfortunate "Constitution," feeling that
her last minute has come, calls out: "Sister Press, do you see nothing
coming?" The Press replies: "I see only the sun of July beating down,
powdering the dusty road and parching the green fields." Again the
Constitution cries: "Sister Press, do you see nothing coming?" And
this time the Press calls back: "I see two cavaliers urging their
horses across the plain and carrying a banner." Below the castle of
Bluebeard may be seen the figures of the two cavaliers. The banner
which they carry bears the significant word, "Republic!"
Another cartoon bearing upon the same subject represents Liberty
wearing a Phrygian cap, driving the chariot of the sun. The King and
his ministers and judges, above whom a crow hovers ominously, flapping
its black wings, are seeking to stop the course of liberty by
thrusting between the spokes of the wheels sticks and rods inscribed
"Lawsuits against the Press," while Talleyrand comes to their aid by
throwing beneath the wheels stones symbolizing "standing armies,"
"imposts," "holy alliance," and so forth. This cartoon is inscribed:
"It would be easier to stop the course of the sun," and is the work of
Travies, who is best known as the creator of the grotesque hunchback
figure, "Mayeux."
[Illustration: Barbarism and the Cholera invading Europe in 1831.]
[Illustration: Raid on the Workshop of the Liberty of the Press.]
CHAPTER X
MAYEUX AND ROBERT MACAIRE
A peculiar feature of French caricature, especially after political
subjects were largely forbidden, was the creation of certain famous
types who soon became familiar to the French public, and whose
reappearances from day to day in new and ever grotesque situations
were hailed with growing delight. Such were the Mayeux of Travies and
the Macaire and Bertrand of Daumier, who in course of time became as
celebrated, in a certain sense, as the heroes of "The Three
Musketeers." In his "Curiosites Esthetiques" Beaudelaire has told the
story of the origin of Mayeux. "There was," he says, "in Paris a sort
of clown named Le Claire, who had the run of various low resorts and
theaters. His specialty was to make _tetes d'expression_, that is, by
a series of facial contortions he would express successively the
various human passions. This man, a clown by nature, was very
melancholy and possessed with a mad desire for friendship. All the
time not occupied in practice and in giving his grotesque performances
he spent in searching for a friend, and when he had been drinking,
tears of solitude flowed freely from his eyes. Travies saw him. It was
a time when the great patriotic enthusiasm of July was still at its
height. A luminous idea entered his brain. Mayeux was created, and for
a long time afterward this same turbulent Mayeux talked, screamed,
harangued, and gesticulated in the memory of the people of Paris."
[Illustration: Travies's "Mayeux."
"Adam destroyed us by the apple; Lafayette by the pear."]
In a hundred different guises, in the blue blouse of the workman, the
apron of the butcher, the magisterial gown of judge or advocate, this
hunchback Mayeux, this misshapen parody upon humanity, endeared
himself to the Parisian public. Virulent, salacious, corrupt, he was a
sort of French Mr. Hyde--the shadow of secret weaknesses and vices,
lurking behind the Dr. Jekyll of smug _bourgeois_ respectability; and
the French public recognized him as a true picture of their baser
selves. They laughed indulgently over the broad, Rabelaisian jests
that unfailingly accompanied each new cartoon--jests which M. Dayot
has admirably characterized as "seasoned with coarse salt, more German
than Gallic, and forming a series of legends which might be made into
a veritable catechism of pornography." This Mayeux series is not,
strictly speaking, political in its essence. It touches upon all sides
of life, without discrimination and without respect. It even
trespasses upon the subject of that forbidden fruit, "Le Poire." In an
oft-cited cartoon, Mayeux with extended arms, his head sunken lower
than usual between his huddled shoulders, is declaiming: "Adam
destroyed us with the apple; Lafayette has destroyed us with the
pear!" And later, when repeated arrests, verdicts, fines, edicts had
banished politics from the arena of caricature, Mayeux was still a
privileged character. Like Chicot, the jester, who could speak his
mind fearlessly to his "Henriquet," while the ordinary courtier
cringed obsequiously, Mayeux shared the proverbial privilege of
children and buffoons, to speak the truth. And oftentimes it was not
even necessary for his creator, Travies, to manifest any overt
political significance; the public were always more than ready to look
for it below the surface. In such a picture as that of Mayeux, in
Napoleonic garb striking an attitude before a portrait of the Little
Corporal and exclaiming, "_Comme je lui ressemble!_" they inevitably
discovered a hint that there were other hypocrites more august than
Mayeux who fancied themselves worthy of filling Napoleon's shoes.
[Illustration: Messieurs Macaire and Bertrand have found it expedient
to make a hurried departure for Belgium for the purpose of evading
French justice. The eloquent Macaire, on reaching the frontier,
declaims as follows: "Hail to thee, O land of hospitality! Hail,
fatherland of those who haven't got any! Sacred refuge of all
unfortunates proscribed by human justice, hail! To all drooping hearts
Belgium is dear."]
Even more famous than Mayeux are the Macaire and Bertrand series, the
joint invention of Philipon, who supplied the ideas and the text, and
of Daumier, who executed the designs. According to Thackeray, whose
analysis of these masterpieces of French caricature has become
classic, they had their origin in an old play, the "Auberge des
Adrets," in which two thieves escaped from the galleys were
introduced, Robert Macaire, the clever rogue, and Bertrand, his
friend, the "butt and scapegoat on all occasions of danger." The play
had been half-forgotten when it was revived by a popular and clever
actor, Frederick Lemaitre, who used it as a vehicle for political
burlesque. The play was suppressed, but _Le Charivari_ eagerly seized
upon the idea and continued it from day to day in the form of a
pictorial puppet show, of which the public never seemed to weary.
Thackeray's summary of the characters of these two illustrious rascals
can scarcely be improved upon:
[Illustration: Extinguished!]
"M. Robert Macaire [he says] is a compound of Fielding's 'Blueskin'
and Goldsmith's 'Beau Tibbs.' He has the dirt and dandyism of the one,
with the ferocity of the other: sometimes he is made to swindle, but
where he can get a shilling more, M. Macaire will murder without
scruple; he performs one and the other act (or any in the scale
between them) with a similar bland imperturbability, and accompanies
his actions with such philosophical remarks as may be expected from a
person of his talents, his energies, his amiable life and character.
Bertrand is the simple recipient of Macaire's jokes, and makes
vicarious atonement for his crimes, acting, in fact, the part which
pantaloon performs in the pantomime, who is entirely under the fatal
influence of clown. He is quite as much a rogue as that gentleman, but
he has not his genius and courage.... Thus Robert Macaire and his
companion Bertrand are made to go through the world; both swindlers,
but the one more accomplished than the other. Both robbing all the
world, and Robert robbing his friend, and, in the event of danger,
leaving him faithfully in the lurch. There is, in the two characters,
some grotesque good for the spectator--a kind of 'Beggars' Opera'
moral.... And with these two types of clever and stupid knavery, M.
Philipon and his companion Daumier have created a world of pleasant
satire upon all the prevailing abuses of the day."
[Illustration: Louis Philippe as Cain with the Angels of Justice in
Pursuit.]
The Macaire and Bertrand series were less directly political in their
scope than that of Travies's hunchback; at least, their political
allusions were more carefully veiled. Yet the first of the series had
portrayed in Macaire's picturesque green coat and patched red trousers
no less a personage than the old "Poire" himself, and the public
remembered it. When politics were banished from journalism they
persisted in finding in each new escapade of Macaire and Bertrand an
allusion to some fresh scandal, if not connected with the King
himself, at least well up in the ranks of governmental hypocrites.
And, although the specific scandals upon which they are based, the
joint-stock schemes for floating worthless enterprises, the
thousand-and-one plausible humbugs of the period, are now forgotten,
to those who take the trouble to read between the lines, these
masterpieces of Daumier's genius form a luminous exposition of the
_morale_ of the government and the court circles.
[Illustration: Laughing John--Crying John.
July, 1830. February, 1848.]
CHAPTER XI
FROM CRUIKSHANK TO LEECH
In contrast with the brilliancy of the French artists, the work in
England during these years, at least prior to the establishment of
_Punch_, is distinctly disappointing. The one man who might have
raised caricature to an even higher level than that of Gillray and
Rowlandson was George Cruikshank, but he withdrew early in life from
political caricature, preferring, like Hogarth, to concentrate his
talent upon the dramatic aspects of contemporary social life. Yet at
the outset of his career, just as he was coming of age, Cruikshank
produced one cartoon that has remained famous because it anticipated
by thirty years the attitude of Mill and Cobden in 1846. It was in
1815, just after the battle of Waterloo had secured an era of peace
for Europe, that he produced his protest against the laws restricting
the importation of grain into England. He called it "The Blessings of
Peace; or, the Curse of the Corn Bill." A cargo of foreign grain has
just arrived and is being offered for sale by the supercargo: "Here is
the best for fifty shillings." On the shore a group of British
landholders wave the foreigner away: "We won't have it at any price.
We are determined to keep up our own to eighty shillings, and if the
poor can't buy it at that price, why, they must starve." In the
background a storehouse with tight-shut doors bulges with home-grown
grain. A starving family stand watching while the foreign grain is
thrown overboard, and the father says: "No, no, masters, I'll not
starve, but quit my native land, where the poor are crushed by those
they labor to support, and retire to one more hospitable, and where
the arts of the rich do not interpose to defeat the providence of
God."
After Cruikshank, until the advent of the men who made _Punch_
famous,--Richard Doyle, John Leech, John Tenniel, and their
successors,--there are no cartoonists in England whose work rises
above mediocrity. When the death of Canning brought Wellington and
Peel into power, a series of colored prints bearing the signature H.
Heath, and persistently lampooning the new ministry, enjoyed a certain
vogue. They scarcely rose above the level of the penny comic
valentine, which they much resembled in crudeness of color and poverty
of invention. One set, entitled "Our Theatrical Celebrities," depicted
the Premier as stage manager, the other members of the cabinet as
leading man, premiere danseuse, prompter, etc. Another series depicts
the same statesmen as so many thoroughbreds, to be auctioned off to
the highest bidder, and describes the good points of each in the most
approved language of the turf. Lot No. 1 is the Duke of Wellington,
described as "the famous charger, Arthur"; Lot No. 2 is Peel, the
"Good Old Cobb, Bobby," and the rest of the series continue the same
vein of inane witticism. Somewhat more point is to be found in the
portrayal of Wellington buried up to his neck in his own boot--one of
the universal Wellington boots of the period. The cartoonist's
thought, quite obviously, was that the illustrious hero of Waterloo
had won his fame primarily in boots and spurs, and that as a statesman
he became a very much shrunken and insignificant figure. In its
underlying thought this cartoon suggests comparison with the familiar
"Grandpa's Hat" cartoons of the recent Harrison administration. Very
rarely Heath broke away from home politics and touched upon
international questions of the day. A print showing the Premier
engaged in the task of "making a rushlight," which he is just
withdrawing cautiously from a large tub labeled "Greece," is an
allusion to the part played by Great Britain in helping to add the
modest light of Greek independence to the general illumination of
civilized Europe.
[Illustration: The Duke of Wellington in Caricature.
_From the collection of the New York Public Library._]
Another man whose work enjoyed a long period of shop-window
popularity, and who nevertheless did not always rise above the
comic-valentine level, was John Doyle, who owes his memory less to his
own work than to the fact that he was the father of a real master of
the art, Richard Doyle. Parton, in his history of "Caricature and
Other Comic Art," notes the elder Doyle's remarkable prolificness,
estimating his collected prints at upward of nine hundred; and he
continues: "It was a custom with English print-sellers to keep
portfolios of his innocent and amusing pictures to let out by the
evening to families about to engage in the arduous work of
entertaining their friends at dinner. He excelled greatly in his
portraits, many of which, it is said by contemporaries, are the best
ever taken of the noted men of that day, and may safely be accepted as
historical. Brougham, Peel, O'Connell, Hume, Russell, Palmerston, and
others appear in his works as they were in their prime, with little
distortion or exaggeration, the humor of the pictures being in the
situation portrayed. Thus, after a debate in which allusion was made
to an ancient egg anecdote, Doyle produced a caricature in which the
leaders of parties were drawn as hens sitting upon eggs. The whole
interest of the picture lies in the speaking likeness of the men."
CHAPTER XII
THE BEGINNING OF "PUNCH"
What the advent of _La Caricature_ did for French comic art was done
for England by the birth of _Punch_, the "London Charivari," on July
17, 1841. It is not surprising that this veteran organ of wit and
satire, essentially British though it is in the quality and range of
its humor, should have inspired a number of different writers
successively to record its annals. Mr. M. H. Spielmann, whose
admirable volume is likely to remain the authoritative history, points
out that the very term "cartoon" in its modern sense is in reality a
creation of _Punch's_. In the reign of Charles I., he says, the
approved phrase was, "a mad designe"; in the time of George II. it was
known as a "hieroglyphic"; throughout the golden age of Gillray and
Cruikshank "caricature" was the epithet applied to the separate
copperplate broadsides displayed in the famous shops of Ackermann,
Mrs. Humphrey, and McClean. But it was not until July, 1843, when the
first great exhibition of cartoons for the Houses of Parliament was
held--gigantic designs handling the loftiest subjects in the most
elevated artistic spirit--that _Punch_ inaugurated his own sarcastic
series of "cartoons," and by doing so permanently enriched the
language with a new word, or rather with new meaning for an old word.
_Punch_, however, did far more than merely to change the terminology
of caricature, he revolutionized its spirit; he made it possible for
Gladstone to say of it that "in his early days, when an artist was
engaged to produce political satires, he nearly always descended to
gross personal caricature, and sometimes to indecency. To-day the
humorous press showed a total absence of vulgarity and a fairer
treatment, which made this department of warfare always pleasing."
As in the case of other famous characters of history, the origin and
parentage of _Punch_ have been much disputed, and a variety of legends
have grown up about the source of its very name, the credit for its
genesis being variously assigned to its original editors, Henry
Mayhew, Mark Lemon, the printer Joseph Last, the writer Douglas
Jerrold, and a number of obscurer literary lights. One story cited by
Mr. Spielmann, although clearly apocryphal, is nevertheless worthy of
repetition. According to this story, somebody at one of the
preliminary meetings spoke of the forthcoming paper as being like a
good mixture of punch, good for nothing without Lemon, when Mayhew
caught up the idea and cried, "A capital idea! We'll call it _Punch_!"
In marked contrast to its French prototype, the "London Charivari" was
from the beginning a moderate organ, and a stanch supporter of the
Crown. In its original prospectus its political creed was outlined as
follows: "_Punch_ has no party prejudices; he is conservative in his
opposition to Fantoccini and political puppets, but a progressive whig
in his love of _small change_ and a repeal of the union with public
Judies." And to this day this policy of "hitting all around," of
avoiding any bitter and prolonged partisanship, is the keynote of
_Punch's_ popularity and prestige. How this attitude has been
consistently maintained in its practical working is well brought out
by Mr. Spielmann in his chapter dedicated to the periodic _Punch_
dinners, where the editorial councils have always taken place:
[Illustration: The Land of Liberty.]
"When the meal is done and cigars and pipes are duly lighted, subjects
are deliberately proposed in half a dozen quarters, until quite a
number may be before the Staff. They are fought all round the Table,
and unless obviously and strikingly good, are probably rejected or
attacked with good-humored ridicule or withering scorn.... And when
the subject of a cartoon is a political one, the debate grows hot and
the fun more furious, and it usually ends by Tories and Radicals
accepting a compromise, for the parties are pretty evenly balanced at
the Table; while Mr. Burnand assails both sides with perfect
indifference. At last, when the intellectual tug-of-war, lasting
usually from half-past eight for just an hour and three-quarters by
the clock, is brought to a conclusion, the cartoon in all its details
is discussed and determined; and then comes the fight over the title
and the 'cackle,' amid all the good-natured chaff and banter of a pack
of boisterous, high-spirited schoolboys."
[Illustration: "What? You young Yankee-Noodle, strike your own
Father!"]
[Illustration: Louis Philippe as "The Napoleon of Peace."
_From the collection of the New York Public Library._]
Down to the close of the period covered in the present chapter, the
cartoon played a relatively small part in the weekly contents of
_Punch_, averaging barely one a week, and being omitted altogether
from many numbers. During these years the dominating spirit was
unquestionably John Leech, who produced no less than two hundred and
twenty-three cartoons out of a total of three hundred and fourteen,
or more than twice as many as all the other contributors put together.
He first appeared with a pageful of "Foreign Affairs" in the fourth
issue of _Punch_--a picture of some huddled groups of foreign
refugees--a design remembered chiefly because it for the first time
introduced to the world the artist's sign-manual, a leech wriggling in
a water bottle.
Of Doyle's political plates during these early years, none is more
interesting to the American reader than the few rare occasions upon
which he seeks to express the British impression of the United States.
One of these, "The Land of Liberty," appeared in 1847. A lean and
lanky, but beardless, Uncle Sam tilts lazily back in his
rocking-chair, a six-shooter in his hand, a huge cigar between his
teeth. One foot rests carelessly upon a bust of Washington, which he
has kicked over. The other is flung over the back of another chair in
sprawling insolence. In the ascending clouds of smoke appear the Stars
and Stripes, surrounded by a panorama of outrages, duels, barroom
broils, lynch law, etc., and above them all, the contending armies of
the Mexican war, over whom a gigantic devil hovers, his hands extended
in a malignant benediction. A closely analogous cartoon of this same
year by Richard Doyle sharply satirized Louis Philippe as the
"Napoleon of Peace," and depicted in detail the unsatisfactory
condition of European affairs as seen from the British vantage ground.
As a consequence of this cartoon _Punch_ was for some time excluded
from Paris.
[Illustration: The Great Sea Serpent of 1848.
_From the collection of the New York Public Library._]
From 1848 onward the cartoons in _Punch_ look upon the world politics
from a constantly widening angle. Indeed, the same remark holds good
for the comic organs not only of England, but of France, Germany,
Italy, and the other leading nations as well. Throughout the second
half of the nineteenth century the international relations of the
leading powers may be followed almost without a break in the cartoons
of _Punch_ and _Judy_, of the _Fliegende Blaetter_ and the
_Kladderadatsch_, of _Don Pirlone_, of the _Journal pour Rire_, of
_Life_ and _Puck_ and _Judge_, and the countless host of their
followers and imitators.
[Illustration: A Bird's Eye View of Europe in 1830.
_From the collection of the New York Public Library._]
CHAPTER XIII
RETROSPECTIVE
[Illustration: Daumier.
Daumier fut le peintre ordinaire
Des pairs, des deputes et des Robert-Macaire.
Son rude crayon fait l'histoire de nos jours.
--O l'etonnante boule! o la bonne figure!
--Je le crois pardieu bien, car Daumier est toujours Excellent en
caricature.]
The close of the first half of the nineteenth century marks a
convenient moment for a backward glance. These fifty years, which
began with the consulship of the first Napoleon and closed on the eve
of the third Napoleon's _coup d'etat_, witnessed the rise and fall of
more than one Napoleonic spirit in the realm of comic art. It was
essentially a period of individualism, of the one-man power in
caricature. Existing conditions forbade a logical and unbroken
development of the political cartoon; it evolved only by fits and
starts. It was often less an expression of the popular mood than a
vehicle for personal enthusiasm or personal rancor; at the hands of
just a few masters, it verged upon the despotic. At intervals, first
in one country and then in another, a Gillray, a Rowlandson, a
Daumier, would blaze forth, brilliant, erratic, meteor-like, leaving
behind them a trail of scintillating suggestion, destined to fire some
new fuse, to start caricature along some new curve of eccentricity.
The importance of these fifty years, the lasting influence of these
forerunners of the modern cartoonists, must not be underrated. Without
the inspiration of their brilliant successes, and, it may also be
added, the useful lessons of their errors and failures, the cartoon of
to-day would be radically different, and probably greatly inferior to
what it is. Above all, they taught, by two tremendous object lessons,
the potent force that lies in pictorial satire--by the share which
English cartoonists had in the overthrow of Napoleon I., and which
French cartoonists had in the downfall of Louis Philippe. But it was
only with the advent of the modern comic weekly of the high type
represented by _Punch_ that it became possible to develop schools of
caricature with definite aims and established traditions--schools that
have tended steadily to eliminate and reject the old-time elements of
vulgarity and exaggeration, to gain the increased influence that comes
from sobriety of method and higher artistic excellence, and to hold
erratic individuality in check. Few people who are not directly
concerned in its making ever realize how essentially the modern
caricature is a composite production. Take, for example, the big,
double-page cartoon which has become such a familiar weekly feature in
_Puck_ or _Judge_, with its complicated group of figures, its
suggestive background, its multitude of clever minor points; the germ
idea has been picked out from perhaps a dozen others, as the result of
careful deliberation, and from this starting point the whole design
has been built up, detail by detail, representing the joint cleverness
of the entire editorial staff. But the collaboration reaches further
back than this. A political cartoon resembles in a way a composite
photograph, which embodies not merely the superimposed features of the
men who sat before the camera, but something also of the countless
generations before them, who have made their features what they are by
transmitting from father to son something of their own personality. In
the same way, the political cartoon of to-day is the product of a
gradual evolution, mirroring back the familiar features of many a
cartoon of the past. It is not merely an embodiment of the ideas of
the satirists who suggested it and the artist who drew it, but also of
many a traditional and stereotyped symbol, bequeathed from generation
to generation by artists dead and gone. The very essence of pictorial
satire, its alpha and omega, so to speak, is symbolism, the use of
certain established types, conventional personifications of Peace and
War, Death and Famine and Disease, Father Time with his scythe, the
Old Year and the New; the Russian Bear, the British Lion, and the
American Eagle; Uncle Sam and Columbia, Britannia and John Bull. These
figures, as we have them to-day, cannot point to any one creator. They
are not an inspiration of the moment, a stroke of genius, like
Daumier's "Macaire" or Travies's "Mayeux." They are the product of a
century of evolution, a gradual survival of the fittest, resulting
from the unconscious natural selection of popular approval. No better
specific instance can be taken than that of the familiar figure of
John Bull as he appears from week to week in the contemporary pages of
_Punch_, for his descent may be traced in an unbroken line--there are
no missing links. No single British caricaturist, from Gillray to Du
Maurier, can claim the credit for having invented him; yet each in his
turn has contributed something, a touch here, a line there, toward
making him what he is to-day. As Mr. Spielmann has pointed out, the
earliest prototype of _Punch's_ John Bull is to be sought in Gillray's
conception of "Farmer George," that figured in a long series of
malevolent caricatures depicting George III., as a gaping country
lout, a heavy, dull-witted yokel. There is no more curious paradox in
the history of caricature than that this figure of "Farmer George,"
conceived in pure malice as a means of inspiring resentment against a
king popularly believed to care more for his farmyard than for the
interests of his subjects, should by gradual transition have come to
be accepted as the symbolic figure of the nation. Yet the successive
steps are easy enough to understand. When Gillray's point of attack
had shifted from the throne of England to the throne of France, his
type of "Farmer George" needed but slight modification to become a
huge, ungainly ogre, the incarnation of British wrath against "Little
Boney"--shaking a formidable fist at the coast of Calais, wading
knee-deep across the channel, or greedily opening a cavernous jaw to
take in a soul-satisfying meal of French frigates. But beneath the
exaggerated ferocity of Gillray's extreme type, the idea of a farmer
as the national figure is never quite lost sight of. In Gillray's
later cartoons the conception of John Bull had already taken on a more
consistent and definite form. At the hands of Rowlandson and Woodward
he lost much of his uncouthness and began to assume a mellower and
more benignant aspect; a cartoon by the latter, entitled "Genial
Rays," pictures him reclining luxuriously upon a bed of roses, basking
in "the sun of patriotism," the image of agricultural contentment. A
certain coarseness and vulgarity, however, clung to him until well
down into the forties, when the refining touch of Leech and Tenniel
gradually idealized him into the portly, choleric, well-to-do rural
gentleman who is to-day such a familiar figure the world over. This
type of John Bull as the representative Briton once called forth some
thoroughly characteristic comments from John Ruskin. "Is it not
surely," he asks, "some overruling power in the nature of things,
quite other than the desire of his readers, which compels Mr. Punch,
when the squire, the colonel, and the admiral are to be at once
expressed, together with all that they legislate or fight for, in the
symbolic figure of the nation, to present the incarnate Mr. Bull
always as a farmer--never as a manufacturer or shopkeeper?" Such a
view on the part of Mr. Ruskin is consistent with his life-long
insistence upon literal truth in art. But he was obviously mistaken
when he questioned that John Bull is the deliberate choice of the
British public. The average Englishman, whether soldier or sailor,
statesman, merchant, or manufacturer, approves and enjoys the pleasant
fiction that the representative type is a good, old-fashioned country
gentleman, conservative and rather insular, a supporter of landed
interests, a patron of country sports; in short, one who lives his
life close to his native soil, who seems to personify the rolling
down, the close-clipped hedge, the trim gardenplot, the neat thatched
roof, things which typify England the world over.
[Illustration: The Evolution of John Bull.]
[Illustration: Henri Monnier in the Role of Joseph Prudhomme.
"Never shall my daughter become the wife of a scribbler."
_By Daumier_]
Not only are most of the accepted symbolic figures--John Bull, Uncle
Sam, and the rest--what they are because they meet with popular
approval, but no cartoonist to-day could venture upon any radical
departure from the established type--a bearded John Bull, a
smooth-shaven Uncle Sam--without calling down public disfavor upon his
head. If one stops to think of it, our own accepted national type, the
tall, lank, awkward figure, the thin, angular Yankee face with a
shrewd and kindly twinkle in the eye, is even less representative of
the average American than John Bull is of the average Briton. It is
interesting to recall that before the Civil War our national type
frequently took the form of a Southerner--regularly in the pages of
_Punch_. To-day, in England and in America, there is but one type of
Uncle Sam, and we would not tolerate a change. It may be that in the
gaunt, loose-knit frame, the strong and rugged features we recognize a
kinship to that sterling and essentially American type of man which
found its best exponent in Lincoln, and that this is the reason why
Uncle Sam has become the most universally accepted and the best
beloved of all our conventional types.
CHAPTER XIV
'48 AND THE COUP D'ETAT
It was only natural that caricature, like every other form of free
expression of opinion, should feel the consequences of the general
political upheaval of 1848; and these consequences differed widely in
the different countries of Europe, according to the degree of civic
liberty which that revolutionary movement had effected. In Germany,
for example, it resulted in the establishment of a whole group of
comic weeklies, with a license for touching upon political topics
quite unprecedented in that land of imperialism and censorship. In
France, on the contrary, political caricature came to an abrupt close
just at a time when it had begun to give promise of exceptional
interest. Louis Napoleon, who owed his elevation to the presidency of
the republic chiefly to the popular belief in his absolute
harmlessness, developed a most unexpected and disconcerting strength
of character. His capacity for cunning and unscrupulousness was yet to
be learned; but a feeling of distrust was already in the air, and the
caricaturists were quick to reflect it. Louis Napoleon, however, was
keenly alive to the deadly harm wrought to his predecessor by
Philipon's pictorial sharp-shooters, and he did not propose to let
history repeat itself by holding him up to public ridicule, after the
fashion of the poor old "Poire," the citizen king. Accordingly the
_coup d'etat_ was hardly an accomplished fact when press laws were
passed of such a stringent nature that the public press, and pictorial
satire along with it, was reduced to a state of vassalage, dependent
upon the imperial caprice, a condition that lasted upward of fifteen
years. Consequently, the few cartoons satirizing Napoleon III., that
emanate from French sources, either belong to the closing years of his
reign or else antedate the law of 1851, which denied trial by jury to
all cases of infringement of the press laws. The latter cartoons,
however, are of special interest, for they serve to throw important
light upon the popular state of mind just prior to the famous _coup
d'etat_.
[Illustration: "The only Lamps authorized to light the Path of the
Government."
_By Vernier in "Charivari."_]
[Illustration: An Italian Cartoon of '48.]
The majority of these cartoons appeared in the pages of _Charivari_,
and some of the best are due to the caustic pencil of Charles Vernier.
A good specimen of this artist's work is a lithograph entitled "The
Only Lamps Authorized for the Present to Light up the Path of the
Government," showing Louis Napoleon marching along sedately, his hands
clasped behind his back and his way illuminated by three
lantern-bearers. The lanterns are, respectively, _La Patrie du Soir_,
_Le Moniteur du Soir_ and _La Gazette de France_, newspapers then in
favor with the government. Just in front of Louis Napoleon, however,
may be seen a dark and ominous manhole. Another of Vernier's cartoons
is called "The Shooting Match in the Champs Elysees." The target is
the head of the Constitution surmounting a pole. Napoleon is directing
the efforts of the contestants. "The man who knocks the target over
completely," he is saying, "I will make my Prime Minister." The
contrast between the great Napoleon and the man whom Victor Hugo liked
so to call "Napoleon the Little" suggested another pictorial effort of
Vernier. A veteran of the Grand Army is watching the coach of the
state passing by, Napoleon holding the reins. "What! That my Emperor!"
exclaims the veteran, shading his eyes. "Those rascally Englishmen,
how they have changed my vision!" The methods by which Louis Napoleon
obtained his election first as President for ten years, and secondly
as Emperor of the French, were satirized in _Charivari_ by Daumier in
a cartoon called "Les Aveugles" (The Blind). In the center of this
cartoon is a huge ballot jar marked "Universal Suffrage." Around this
the sightless voters are laboriously groping.
[Illustration: Napoleon Le Petit.
_By Vernier._]
Many were the designs by which Daumier in _Charivari_ satirized Louis
Napoleon's flirtation with the French republic. In one of them the
Prince, bearing a remote resemblance in manner and in dress to Robert
Macaire, is offering the lady his arm. "_Belle dame_," he is saying,
"will you accept my escort?" To which she replies coldly: "Monsieur,
your passion is entirely too sudden. I can place no great faith in
it."
[Illustration: The New Siamese Twins.]
[Illustration: Louis Napoleon and Madame France.]
Pictorial expressions of opinion regarding the "great crime" of 1851,
which once more replaced a republic with an empire, must be sought for
outside of France. But there was one subject at this time upon which
even the strictest of edicts could not enforce silence, and that was
the subject of Napoleon's marriage to Eugenie. The Emperor's Spanish
bride was never popular, not even during the first years of the Second
Empire, before she began to meddle with affairs of state; and in many
incisive ways the Parisians heaped ridicule upon her. A curious little
pamphlet, with text and illustrations, about the new Empress was sold
in Paris at the time of the marriage. This pamphlet was entirely
complimentary and harmless. The biting humor of it was on the
title-page, which the vendors went about crying in the streets: "The
portrait and virtues of the Empress, all for two sous!" But for a
frank expression of what the world thought of the new master of the
destinies of France, it is necessary to turn to the contemporary pages
of _Punch_. The "London Charivari" was at this time just entering upon
its most glorious epoch of political caricature. John Leech, one of
the two great English cartoonists of the past half century, had
arrived at the maturity of his talent; the second, John Tenniel, was
destined soon to join the staff of _Punch_ in place of Richard Doyle,
who resigned in protest against the editorial policy of attacking the
Roman Catholic Church. Both of these artists possessed a technical
skill and a degree of artistic inspiration that raised them far above
the level of the mere caricaturist. And as it happened, the world was
entering upon a long succession of stormy scenes, destined to furnish
them with matter worthy of their pencils. After forty years of peace,
Europe was about to incur an epidemic of war. The clash between Turkey
and Russia in 1853 was destined to assume international proportions in
the Crimean War; England's troubles were to be augmented by the revolt
of her Indian mercenaries; the Russian war was to be closely followed
by another between France and Austria; by the enfranchisement of Italy
from the Alps to the Adriatic; the bitter struggle between Prussia and
Austria; and the breaking up of the Confederation of the Rhine, with
the Franco-Prussian War looming up in the near future. It was on the
threshold of such troublous times, and as if prophetic of the end of
European tranquillity, that Leech signalized the accession of
Napoleon III. as Emperor with the significant cartoon, "France is
Tranquil!!!" Poor France cannot well be otherwise than tranquil, for
Mr. Leech depicts her bound hand and foot, a chain-shot fastened to
her feet and a sentry standing guard over her with a bayonet. The
artist soon followed this up with another cartoon, evidently suggested
by the initial plate of Hogarth's famous series of "The Rake's
Progress." The Prince President, in the character of the Rake, has
just come into his inheritance, and has cast aside his former
mistress, Liberte, to whom he is offering money, her mother (France)
standing by, an indignant witness to the scene. His military tailor is
measuring him for a new imperial uniform, while behind him a priest
(in allusion to the financial aid which the Papal party was receiving
from Napoleon) is helping himself from a plate of money standing
beside the President. On the floor is a confused litter of swords,
knapsacks, bayonets, crowns, crosses of the Legion of Honor, the Code
Napoleon, and other miscellaneous reminders of Louis' well-known craze
on the subject of his uncle and his uncle's ideas. Mr. Tenniel's early
cartoons of Louis Napoleon are scarcely more kindly. The Emperor's
approaching marriage is hit off in one entitled "The Eagle in Love,"
in which Eugenie, represented with the most unflattering likeness, is
employed in paring the imperial eagle's talons. In 1853 Tenniel
depicts an "International Poultry Show," where we see among the
entries a variety of eagles--the Prussian eagle, the American eagle,
the two-headed Russian and Austrian eagles--and among them a wretched
mongrel, more closely akin to a bedraggled barn-door fowl than to the
"French Eagle" which it claims to be. Queen Victoria, who is visiting
the show, under escort of Mr. Punch, remarks: "We have nothing of that
sort, Mr. Punch; but should there be a _lion_ show, we can send a
specimen!!"
[Illustration: Louis Napoleon's Proclamation.]
[Illustration: Split Crow in the Crimea.
_From Punch._]
CHAPTER XV
THE STRUGGLE IN THE CRIMEA
[Illustration: Bursting of the Russian Bubble.]
[Illustration: "General Fevrier" turned Traitor.]
The grim struggle of the Crimean War for a time checked Mr. Punch's
attacks upon Napoleon III., and turned his attention in another
direction. Although the war cloud in the East was assuming portentous
dimensions, there were many in England, the Peace Society, the members
of the peace-at-any-price party, with Messrs. Bright and Cobden at
their head, and most conspicuous of all the Prime Minister, Lord
Aberdeen, who deliberately blinded themselves to the possibility of
war. It was for the enlightenment of these gentlemen that Mr. Leech
designed his cartoon "No Danger," representing a donkey, eloquent in
his stolid stupidity, tranquilly braying in front of a loaded cannon.
In still another cartoon Lord Aberdeen himself is placidly smoking
"The Pipe of Peace" over a brimming barrel of gunpowder. John Bull,
however, has already become wide-awake to the danger, for he is
nailing the Russian eagle to his barn door, remarking to his French
neighbor that _he_ won't worry the Turkies any more. At this time
England had begun to watch with growing jealousy the cordial _entente_
between Russia and Austria, for the Emperor Nicholas was strongly
suspected of having offered to Austria a slice of his prospective
prize, Turkey. This rumor forms the basis of an effective cartoon by
Leech, "The Old 'Un and the Young 'Un," in which the Russian and
Austrian Emperors are seated at table, genially dividing a bottle of
port between them. "Now then, Austria," says Nicholas, "just help me
finish the Port(e)." Meanwhile, hostilities between Turkey and Russia
had begun, and the latter had already received a serious setback at
Oltenitza, an event commemorated by Tenniel in his cartoon of "A Bear
with a Sore Head." In spite of his blind optimism, Lord Aberdeen was
by this time finding it decidedly difficult to handle the reins of
foreign affairs. One of the best satires of the year is by Tenniel,
entitled "The Unpopular Act of the Courier of St. Petersburg,"
depicting Aberdeen performing the dangerous feat of driving a team of
vicious horses. The mettlesome leaders, Russia and Turkey, have
already taken the bit between their teeth, while Austria, catching the
contagion of their viciousness, is plunging dangerously. This cartoon
was soon followed by another still more notable, entitled "What It Has
Come To," one of those splendid animal pictures in which John Tenniel
especially excelled. It shows us the Russian bear, scampering off in
the distance, while in the foreground Lord Aberdeen is clinging
desperately to the British lion, which has started in mad pursuit,
with his mane erect and his tail stiffened like a ramrod; the lion
plunges along, dragging behind him the terrified premier, who is
gasping out that he can no longer hold him and is forced to "let him
go." At the same time Mr. Leech also represented pictorially Lord
Aberdeen awakening to the necessity of war in his "Bombardment of
Odessa." The cartoon is in two parts, representing respectively the
English Premier and the Russian Emperor reading their morning paper.
"Bombardment of Odessa," says Aberdeen. "Dear me, this will be very
disagreeable to my imperial friend." "Bombardment of Odessa," says
Nicholas; "confound it! This will be very annoying to dear old
Aberdeen!" In the following November the British victory of Inkerman,
won against almost hopeless odds, was witnessed by two members of the
Russian imperial family. Leech promptly commemorated this fact in his
picture of "The Russian Bear's Licked Cubs, Nicholas and Michael." The
cartoon entitled the "Bursting of the Russian Bubble" appeared in
_Punch_, October 14, 1854, just after the battle of the Alma had taken
place and part of the Russian fleet had been destroyed by the English
and French ships at Sebastopol. This cartoon is by the hand of Leech.
The Russian Emperor, Nicholas I., had boasted of the "irresistible
power" which was to enable him to overthrow the allied forces gathered
in the Crimea, and here the artist shows very graphically the
shattering of this "irresistible power" and of the "unlimited means."
Of all the cartoons which Leech produced there is none which enjoys a
more enduring fame than the one entitled "General Fevrier Turned
Traitor." Certainly no other in the whole series of Crimean War
cartoons appearing in _Punch_ compares with it in power. Yet splendid
and effective as it is, there is in it a cruelty worthy of Grandville
or Gillray, and when it appeared it caused a shudder to run through
all England. The Russian Emperor had boasted in a speech on the
subject of the Crimean War that, whatever forces France and England
might be able to send to the front, Russia possessed two generals on
whom she could always rely, General Janvier and General Fevrier. In
other words, Nicholas I. cynically alluded to the hardship of the
Russian winter, on which he counted to reduce greatly by death the
armies of the Allies in the Crimea. But toward the end of the winter,
the Emperor himself died of pulmonary apoplexy, after an attack of
influenza. In a flash, Leech seized upon the idea. _General Fevrier
had turned traitor._ Under this title, the cartoon was published by
_Punch_ in its issue of March 10, 1855. General Fevrier (Death in the
uniform of a Russian general) is placing his deadly hand on the breast
of Nicholas, and the icy cold of the Russian winter--the ally in whom
the Emperor had placed his trust--has recoiled upon himself. The
tragic dignity and grim significance of this cartoon made a deep
impression upon Ruskin, who regarded it as representing in the art of
caricature what Hood's "Song of the Shirt" represents in poetry. "The
reception of the last-named woodcut," he says, "was in several
respects a curious test of modern feeling ... There are some points to
be regretted in the execution of the design, but the thought was a
grand one; the memory of the word spoken and of its answer could
hardly in any more impressive way have been recorded for the people;
and I believe that to all persons accustomed to the earnest forms of
art it contained a profound and touching lesson. The notable thing
was, however, that it offended persons _not_ in earnest, and was
loudly cried out against by the polite journalism of Society. This
fate is, I believe, the almost inevitable one of thoroughly genuine
work in these days, whether poetry or painting; but what added to the
singularity in this case was that coarse heartlessness was even more
offended than polite heartlessness."
[Illustration: Henri Rochefort and his Lantern.]
[Illustration: Brothers in Arms. The French and English Troops in
Crimea.]
As was but natural, the Anglo-French alliance against Russia is
alluded to in more than one of Mr. Punch's Crimean War cartoons. One
of the earliest is a drawing by Tenniel of England and France typified
by two fine specimens of Guards of both nations standing back to back
in friendly rivalry of height, and Mr. Spielmann records in his
"History of Punch" that the cut proved so popular that under its title
of "The United Service:" it was reproduced broadcast on many articles
of current use and even served as a decoration for the backs of
playing cards. Still another cartoon, entitled "The Split Crow in the
Crimea," represents England and France as two huntsmen, hard on the
track of a wounded and fleeing two-headed bird! "He's hit
hard!--follow him up!" exclaimed the huntsmen. In a French
reproduction of this cartoon, which is to be found in Armand Dayot's
"Le Second Empire," "Crow" is amusingly translated as _couronne_
(crown), and the publishers of _Punch_ are given as "MM. Breadburg,
Agnew, et Cie." Another cartoon of the same period is called "Brothers
in Arms." It shows a British soldier carrying on his back a wounded
French soldier, and a French soldier carrying on his back a wounded
Englishman. The two wounded men are clasping hands. There is no better
evidence of the utter dearth of French caricature at this period than
the fact that M. Dayot, whose indefatigable research has brought
together a highly interesting collection of pictorial documents of all
classes upon this period of French history, could find nothing in the
way of a cartoon in his own country and was forced to borrow from
_Punch_ the few that he reproduces.
On the other side the Russian cartoonists were by no means backward in
recording the events of the war and holding up the efforts of the
Allies to pictorial derision. The Russian point of view has come down
to us in a series of excellent prints published in St. Petersburg
during the months of the conflict. In this warfare the Russians may be
said to have borrowed from their enemies, for this series is
essentially French in method and execution. All through this series
England and France are shown buffeted about from pillar to post by the
Conquering Bear. A description of one of these cartoons will give a
fair general idea of the entire series. Sir Charles Napier, at a
dinner given in his honor in London just before the departure of the
Allied fleet for Kronstadt, has made the foolish boast that he would
soon invite his hosts to dine with him in St. Petersburg. Of course
the fleet never reached St. Petersburg, and the Russian artist
satirically summed up the situation by depicting Sir Charles at the
top of the mast, endeavoring by the aid of a large spy-glass to catch
a sight of the Czar's capital.
[Illustration: Turkey, John Bull & Monsieur Frog-Eater in a Bad Fix.
An American Cartoon on the Crimean War.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
Among the crude American lithographs of this period the Crimean War
was not forgotten. A rather rare cartoon, entitled "Turkey, John Bull
and M. Frog-Eater in a Bad Fix," is especially interesting as an
evidence that American sympathy during the war was in a measure on the
Russian side. The Russian General Menshikoff is standing on the
heights of Sebastopol looking down smilingly and serenely on the
discomfited allies, saying: "How do you do, gentlemen? Very happy to
see you. You must be tired. Won't you walk in and take something?"
John Bull, seriously wounded, is lying prostrate, bawling out: "Come,
come, Turk, no dodging. Hulloa there! Is that the way you stick to
your friends? The coat of my stomach is ruined, my wind nearly gone. I
won't be able to blow for a month. Pull me out of this at any price!
The devil take one party and his dam the other. I am getting sick of
this business." By his side is the figure of a Frenchman just hit by a
cannon-ball from one of the Russian guns, and crying out: "O! By damn!
I not like such treat. I come tousand mile and spend ver much money to
take someting from wid you, and you treat me as I vas van Villin!
Scoundrel! Robbare!!"
In closing the subject of the Crimean War, it is worth while to call
attention to one curious phase of the war as contained in the
programme of a theatrical entertainment given by the French soldiers
in the trenches of Sebastopol, December 23, 1855. The programme is
headed "The Little Comic Review of the Crimea." It contains the
announcement of the Tchernaia Theater, which four days later is to
present three dramatic pieces. The drawing is by Lucien Salmont.
[Illustration: Programme of a Theatrical Performance given by the
French Soldiers in the Trenches before Sebastopol.]
[Illustration: The British Lion's Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger.]
One final echo of the struggle in the Crimea is found in another of
Tenniel's graphic animal pictures, "The British Lion Smells a Rat,"
which depicts an angry lion sniffing suspiciously at the crack of a
door, behind which is being held the conference which followed the
fall of Sebastopol. But by far the most famous instance of Tenniel's
work is his series of Cawnpore cartoons, the series bearing upon the
Indian mutiny of 1857; and one of the finest, if not the very finest,
of them all is that entitled "The British Lion's Vengeance on the
Bengal Tiger." It represents in the life work of Tenniel what "General
Fevrier Turned Traitor" stands for in the life work of John Leech. The
subject was suggested to Tenniel by Shirley Brooks. It summed up all
the horror and thirst for revenge which animated England when the news
came of the treacherous atrocities of the Sepoy rebels. The Cawnpore
massacre of women and children ordered by the infamous Nana Sahib had
taken place in June, and when this cartoon appeared in _Punch_, August
22, 1857, England had just sent thirty thousand troops to India. In
the picture the British lion is springing at the throat of the Bengal
tiger, which is standing over the prostrate bodies of a woman and a
child. The tiger, fearful of being robbed of its prey, is snarling at
the avenging lion. Another of the famous Cawnpore cartoons of Tenniel
is descriptive of British vengeance on the Sepoy mutineers. The
English troops were simply wild for revenge when the stories came to
them of the atrocities which had been perpetrated on English women and
children, and their vengeance knew no bounds. The Sepoys were blown
from the mouths of the English cannon. It was the custom of the
English soldiers to pile up a heap of Sepoys, dead or wounded, pour
oil over them, and then set fire to the pile. The Tenniel cartoon,
entitled "Justice," published September 12, 1857, shows the figure of
Justice with sword and shield cutting down the mutineers, while behind
her are the British troops working destruction with their bayonets.
[Illustration: The French Porcupine.
He may be an Inoffensive Animal, but he Don't Look like it.]
No sooner had the English-French alliance against Russia come to an
end than _Punch_ once more began to give expression to his disapproval
of Napoleon. A hostile spirit toward Frenchmen was ingrained in the
very nature of John Leech, and he vented it freely in such cartoons as
his celebrated "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" in which the French cock, clad in
the uniform of a colonel, is crowing lustily over the results of a war
of which Great Britain had borne the brunt. Or again, in "Some Foreign
Produce that Mr. Bull can very well Spare," a cut which includes
French conspirators, vile Frenchwomen, organ-grinders (Mr. Leech was
abnormally sensitive to street noises), and other objectionable
foreign refuse. It is interesting in this connection to note that
Leech's hostility to Louis Napoleon was the direct cause of
Thackeray's resignation from the staff of _Punch_ in the winter of
1854. In the letter written in the following March, Thackeray
explains that he had had some serious differences regarding the
editorial policy of _Punch_, and more specifically about the abuse of
Louis Napoleon which, he says, "I think and thought was writing
unjustly at that time, and dangerously for the welfare and peace of
the country:" and he then adds the specific instance which prompted
him to sever his connections: "Coming from Edinburgh, I bought a
_Punch_ containing a picture of a beggar on horseback, in which the
emperor was represented galloping to hell with a sword reeking with
blood. As soon as ever I could, after my return, I went to Bouverie
Street and gave in my resignation." Thackeray's act had no influence
upon the policy of _Punch_. Leech's cartoons grew steadily more
incisive in character. One of the most extraordinary is that known as
"The French Porcupine." It represents Napoleon III. as a porcupine,
bristling with French bayonets in place of quills. One of Napoleon's
favorite sayings was "_L'Empire c'est la paix._" But this saying was
very often contradicted by events, and the first ten years of his
occupation of the French throne showed France embroiled in the Crimean
War and the war with Austria. In preparation for the latter conflict
a large increase was being made in the French military armament; and
Leech seized upon the emperor's dictum only to express his skepticism.
The cartoon appeared in March, 1859. As a matter of fact, the idea in
this cartoon had previously been used in another called "The Puppet
Show," published in June, 1854, depicting the Czar Nicholas in a
manner closely similar; yet Mr. Spielmann, who notes this fact, adds
that Mr. Leech had probably never seen, or else had forgotten, the
earlier caricature. This "French Porcupine" is cited as an instance of
Leech's extraordinary speed in executing a cartoon directly upon the
wooden block. The regular _Punch_ dinner had that week been held a day
late. "Every moment was precious, and Leech proposed the idea for the
cartoon, drew it in two hours, and caught his midday train on the
following day, speeding away into the country with John Tenniel for
their usual Saturday hunt." It was during this same year, 1859, at the
close of the war which humbled Austria and forced her to surrender
Venetia to Sardinia, that Leech voiced the suspicion that Louis was
casting longing eyes upon Italian territory in a cartoon entitled "A
Scene from the New Pantomime." Napoleon III, here figures as a clown,
a revolver in his hand, a goose labeled Italy protruding from his
capacious pocket. He is earnestly assuring Britannia, represented as a
stout, elderly woman, eyeing him suspiciously, that his intentions
are strictly honorable.
PART III
_THE CIVIL AND FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WARS_
CHAPTER XVI
THE MEXICAN WAR AND SLAVERY
In this country the political cartoon, which practically began with
William Charles's parodies upon Gillray, developed in a fitful and
spasmodic fashion until about the middle of the century. Their basis
was the Gillray group of many figures, and they had also much of the
Gillray coarseness and indecency, with a minimum of artistic skill.
They were mostly lithographs of the crudest sort, designed to pass
from hand to hand, or to be tacked up on the wall. It was not until
the first administration of Andrew Jackson that a school of distinctly
American political caricature can be said to have existed. It was in
1848 that the firm of Currier & Ives, with an office in Nassau Street,
in New York City, began the publication of a series of campaign
caricatures of sufficient merit to have been a serious factor in
influencing public opinion. Crude as they are, these lithographs are
exceedingly interesting to study in detail. They tell their story very
plainly, even apart from the legends inclosed in the huge balloon-like
loops issuing from the lips of each member of the group--loops that
suggest a grotesque resemblance to a soap-bubble party on a large
scale. There is an amusing stiffness about the figures. They
stand in such painfully precise attitudes that at a little
distance they might readily be mistaken for some antiquated fashion
plates. The faces, however, are in most cases excellent likenesses;
they are neither distorted nor exaggerated. The artists, while sadly
behind the times in retaining the use of the loop which Continental
cartoonists discarded much earlier, were in other respects quite
up-to-date, especially in adopting the method of the elder Doyle,
whose great contribution to caricature was that of drawing absolutely
faithful likenesses of the statesmen he wished to ridicule, relying
for the humor of the cartoon upon the situation in which he placed
them. It was only natural that the events of the Mexican War should
have inspired a number of cartoons. One of these is entitled "Uncle
Sam's Taylorifics," and shows a complacent Yankee coolly snipping a
Mexican in two with a huge pair of shears. One blade bears the
inscription "Volunteers," and the other "General Taylor." The Yankee's
left arm is labeled "Eastern States," the tail of his coat "Oregon,"
his belt "Union," his left leg "Western States," and his right leg,
which he is using vigorously on the Mexican, "Southern States," and
the boot "Texas." Below the discomfited Mexican yawns the Rio Grande.
Behind the Yankee's back John Bull--a John Bull of the type introduced
by William Charles during the War of 1812--is looking on enviously.
[Illustration: New Edition of Macbeth--Bank-Oh's Ghost! 1837.
One of the caricatures inspired by the United States Bank Case.
_From the collection of the New York Public Library._]
[Illustration: Balaam and Balaam's Ass.
One of the caricatures inspired by the United States Bank Case.
_From the collection of the New York Public Library._]
[Illustration: A New Map of the United States with the Additional
Territories on an improved Plan.
1828.
_From the collection of the New York Public Library._]
[Illustration: The Great American Steeplechase for 1844.
Among the various candidates for the Presidency shown in this cartoon
are General Scott, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, James
Buchanan and Martin Van Buren.
_From the collection of the New York Public Library._]
American national feeling on the subject of the European Powers
deriving benefit from the discovery of gold in California is
illustrated by a cartoon which shows the United States ready to defend
her possessions by force of arms. The various Powers have crossed the
sea and are very near to our coast. Queen Victoria, mounted on a bull,
is in the lead. She is saying: "Oh, dear Albert, don't you cry for me.
I'm off for California with my shovel on my knee." Behind her is
the figure of Russia, saying: "As something is Bruin, I'll put in my
paw, while the nations around me are making a Jaw." Louis Napoleon,
who at the time had just been elected President of the French, is
drawn in the form of a bird. He is flying over the heads of Victoria
and Russia, and singing: "As you have gold for all creation, den
please give some to La Grand Nation. I have just become de President,
and back I shall not like to went." In the distance may be seen Spain,
and beyond the United States fleet. Along the shore stretch the tents
of an American army. Ominously coiled up on the rocks is the American
rattlesnake with the head of President Taylor. Back of the camp is a
battery of American guns directed by the American eagle, which wears
the head of General Scott, saying: "Retreat, you poor d----s! Nor a
squabble engender, for our Gold unto you we will never surrender.
Right about face! Double quick to the rear! And back to your keepers
all hands of you steer."
[Illustration: Uncle Sam's Taylorifics.]
[Illustration: The Mexican Commander enjoying the prospect opposite
Matamoras.
Can I believe my spectacles? Dare these "Northern Barbarians" thus
insult the "magnanimous Mexican Natian"? They have taken Texas--They
grasp at Oregon--Now they lay their "rapacious hand" on Mexico! "God &
Liberty!"--where is my friend, John Bull?
American cartoons of the war with Mexico.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
The Presidential election of 1852 was cartooned under the title "Great
Foot Race for the Presidential Purse ($100,000 and Pickings) Over the
Union Course, 1852." The Whigs, encouraged by their success with
General Taylor, put forth another military officer, General Scott, as
their candidate, but in this cartoon Daniel Webster is shown to be
well in the lead and receiving the plaudits of most of the spectators.
Behind him is Scott, and a little way back is Franklin Pierce, who
proved the ultimate winner. "I can beat you both, and walk in at that,
although you had a hundred yards the start of me," is Webster's
conviction. "Confound Webster!" cries Scott. "What does he want to get
right in my way for? If he don't give out, or Pierce don't faint, I
shall be beaten." "No, no, old Fuss and Feathers," retorts Pierce,
"you don't catch this child fainting now. I am going to make good
time! Whether I win or not, Legs, do your duty."
[Illustration: Defence of the California Bank.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
[Illustration: Great Footrace for the Presidential Purse $100,000 and
Pickings over the Union Course 1852.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
[Illustration: The Presidential Campaign of '56.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
[Illustration: "No Higher Law."
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
Caricature dealing with the Presidential campaign of 1856 is
represented by the cartoon called "The Presidential Campaign of '56."
Buchanan, who proved the successful candidate, is mounted on a hideous
monster resembling a snake, and marked "Slavery." The monster is being
wheeled along on a low, flat car drawn by Pierce, Douglas, and Cass. A
star bearing the word "Kansas" is about to disappear down the
monster's throat. In the distance Fremont, on horseback, is calling
out: "Hold on! Take that animal back! We don't want it this side of
the fence." Buchanan is saying, "Pull down that fence and make way for
the Peculiar Institution." The fence in question is the Mason and
Dixon's line. The faces of Cass, Douglas, and Pierce, who are drawing
along the monster, are obliterated--they are absolutely formless.
The evils of slavery from a Northern point of view are shown in a
cartoon called "No Higher Law." King Slavery is seated on his throne
holding aloft a lash and a chain. Under his left elbow is the Fugitive
Slave Bill, resting on three human skulls. Daniel Webster stands
beside the throne, holding in his hand the scroll on which is printed,
"I propose to support that bill to the fullest extent--to the fullest
extent." A runaway slave is fighting off the bloodhounds that are
worrying him, and in the distance, on a hill, the figure of Liberty is
toppling from her pedestal.
[Illustration: Practical Illustration of the Fugitive Slave Law.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
[Illustration: The Great Disunion Serpent.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
The cartoon "Practical Illustration of the Fugitive Slave Law" sums up
very completely Abolitionist sentiment on the subject. The
slaveholder, with a noose in one hand and a chain in the other, a
cigar in his mouth and his top-hat decorated with the single star,
which was the sign of the Southern Confederacy, is astride of the back
of Daniel Webster, who is crawling on all-fours. In Webster's left
hand is the Constitution. "Don't back out, Webster," says the
slaveholder. "If you do, we're ruined." The slave-woman who is being
pursued has taken refuge with William Lloyd Garrison, of the Boston
_Liberator_, who is saying: "Don't be alarmed, Susanna, you're safe
enough." One of Garrison's arms is encircling the negress's waist, at
the end of the other is a pistol. In the back of the picture is the
Temple of Liberty, over which two flags are flying. On one flag we
read: "All men are born free and equal;" on the other, "A day, an
hour, of virtuous Liberty is worth an Age of servitude."
CHAPTER XVII
NEGLECTED OPPORTUNITIES
Down to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the history of
American political caricature is a history of lost opportunities.
Revolution and war have always been the great harvest times of the
cartoonist. Gillray and Rowlandson owe their fame to the Napoleonic
wars; Philipon and Daumier, to the overthrow of Louis Philippe; Leech
and Tenniel reached their zenith in the days of the Crimean War and
the Sepoy Mutiny. It is not the election cartoon, or the tariff
cartoon, or the cartoon of local politics, it is the war cartoon that
is most widely hailed and longest remembered. Yet of all the wars in
which the United States has been engaged, not one has given birth to a
great satiric genius, and none but the latest, our recent war with
Spain, has received comprehensive treatment in the form of caricature.
It is not strange that the Revolutionary War and that of 1812 failed
to inspire any worthier efforts than William Charles's crude
imitations of Gillray. The mechanical processes of printing and
engraving, the methods of distribution, the standards of public taste,
were all still too primitive. The Mexican War was commemorated in a
number of the popular lithographs of the day; but it was not a
prolonged struggle, nor one calculated to stir the public mind
profoundly. With the Civil War the case was radically different. Here
was a struggle which threatened not only national honor, but national
existence--a struggle which prolonged itself grimly, month after
month, and was borne home to a great majority of American families
with the force of personal tragedy, arraying friend against friend,
and father against son, and offering no brighter hope for the future
than the vista of a steadily lengthening death-roll. There was never a
time in the history of the nation when the public mind, from one end
of the country to the other, was in such a state of tension; never,
since the days of Napoleon, had there been such an opportunity for a
real master of satiric art. It seems amazing, as one looks back over
the pictorial records of these four years, that the magnitude of the
events did not galvanize into activity some unknown genius of the
pencil, and found then and there a new school of American caricature
commensurate with the fever-heat of public sentiment. The existing
school of caricature seems to have been absurdly inadequate. The
prevailing types were a sort of fashion-plate lithograph--groups of
public men in mildly humorous situations, their features fixed in the
solemn repose of the daguerreotypes upon which they were probably
modeled; or else the conventional election steeplechase, in which the
contestants, with long, balloon-like loops trailing from their mouths,
suggest an absurd semblance to the cowboys of a Wild West show, all
engaged in a vain attempt to lasso and pull in their own idle words.
Many of the cartoons actually issued at the outbreak of the Civil War
impress one with a sense of indecorum, of ill-timed levity. What was
wanted was not the ineptitude of feeble humor, but the rancor and
venom of a Gillray, the stinging irony of a Daumier, the grim dignity
of a Tenniel. And it was not forthcoming. The one living American who
might have produced work of a high order was Thomas Nast; but although
Nast's pencil was dedicated to the cause of the Union from the
beginning to the end, in the series of powerful emblematic pictures
that appeared in _Harper's Weekly_, his work as a caricaturist did not
begin until the close of the war.
[Illustration: Rough and Ready Locomotive against the Field.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
It is interesting to conjecture what the great masters of caricature
would have made of such an opportunity. The issues of the war were so
clear-cut, their ethical significance so momentous, that an American
Gillray, a Unionist Gillray, would have found material for a series of
cartoons of eloquent and grewsome power. It is easy to imagine what
form they would have taken: an Uncle Sam, writhing in agony, his limbs
shackled with the chains of slavery, his lips gagged with the Fugitive
Slave Law, slowly being sawn asunder, while Abolition and Secession
guide the opposite ends of the saw, or else the American Eagle being
worried and torn limb from limb by Southern bloodhounds and stung by
copperheads, while the British Lion and the rest of the European
menagerie look on, wistfully licking their chops and with difficulty
restraining themselves from participating in the feast. Such a
cartoonist would have found a mine of suggestion in "Uncle Tom's
Cabin"; he would have crowded his plates with Legrees and Topsies,
Uncle Toms and Sambos and Quimbos, fearful and wonderful to look upon,
brutal, distorted, and unforgettable.
[Illustration: What's Sauce for the Goose is Sauce for the Gander.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
It is equally easy to imagine what a Daumier might have done with the
material afforded by the Civil War. Some types of faces seem to defy
the best efforts of the caricaturist--smooth, regular-featured faces,
like that of Lord Rosebery, over which the pencil of satire seems to
slip without leaving any effective mark. Other faces, strong, rugged,
salient, seem to invite the caricaturist's efforts; and these were the
types that predominated among the leaders of the struggle for the
Union. Daumier's genius lay in his ability to caricature the human
face, to seize upon a minimum of lines and points, to catch some
absurd semblance to an inanimate object, some symbolic suggestion. And
when once found, he would harp upon it, ringing all possible changes,
keeping it insistently, mercilessly before the public. One can fancy
with what avidity he would have seized upon the stolid, indomitable
figure of Grant, intrenched behind his big, black, ubiquitous cigar.
That cigar would have become the center of interest, the portentous
symbol of Grant's dogged, taciturn persistence. Gradually that cigar
would have grown and grown, its thickening smoke spreading in a dense
war cloud over the whole series of cartoons, until finally it became
the black, shining muzzle of a cannon, belching forth the powder and
fire and ammunition that was to decide the issue of the war. What
Tenniel would have done is evidenced by what he actually did in
_Punch_. The great tragedies of those four years, Gettysburg and Bull
Run and the Battle of the Wilderness, would have been pictured with
the tragic dignity that stamps his famous cartoon in which he
commemorated the assassination of Lincoln.
[Illustration: Nast's Famous Cartoon "Peace."]
CHAPTER XVIII
THE SOUTH SECEDES
[Illustration: Virginia Pausing.]
In view of what might have been done, it is somewhat exasperating to
look over the actual cartoons of the war as they have come down to us.
Even when a clever idea was evolved none seemed to have the cleverness
or the enterprise to develop it. As all the modern cartoonists
realize, nothing is more effective than a well-planned series. It is
like the constant dropping that wears away the stone. The most potent
pictorial satire has always been the gradual elaboration of some
clever idea--the periodic reappearance of the same characters in
slightly modified environment, like the successive chapters of a
serial story. The public learn to look forward to them, and hail each
reappearance with a renewed burst of enthusiasm. The cartoonists of
the Civil War do not seem to have grasped this idea. A single example
will serve as an illustration. A clever cartoon, entitled "Virginia
Pausing," appeared just at the time that Virginia, the last of the
States to secede, joined the Confederacy. The several Southern States,
represented as young rats, are gayly scampering off, in the order in
which they seceded, South Carolina heading the procession. Virginia
straggling in the rear finds herself under the paw of "Uncle Abe,"
represented as a watchful and alert old mouser, and has paused,
despite herself, to consider her next step. The Union, personified as
the mother rat of the brood, lies stark and stiff on her back, with
the Stars and Stripes waving over her corpse, and underneath, the
legend, "The Union must and shall be preserved." Now this idea of the
Southern States as a brood of "Secession rats" was capable of infinite
elaboration. It might have been carried on throughout the entire four
years of the struggle, the procession preserving the same significant
order, with South Carolina in the lead, Virginia bringing up the rear,
and Lincoln, as a wise and resourceful mouser, ever in pursuit. It
could have shown the rats at bay, cornered, entrapped--in short, the
whole history of the war in a form of genial allegory. But if the
initial cartoon, "Virginia Pausing," ever had a sequel, it perished in
the general wreckage of the Confederacy.
[Illustration: Some Envelopes of the Time of the War.]
[Illustration: Long Abe.]
The welcome which awaited caricature, even of the crudest sort, at the
outbreak of the war is illustrated by the curious vogue enjoyed by
envelopes adorned with all sorts of patriotic and symbolic devices--an
isolated tombstone inscribed "Jeff Davis alone," a Confederate Mule,
blanketed with the Stars and Bars--a slave-owner vainly brandishing
his whip and shouting to a runaway slave, "Come back here, you black
rascal." The latter, safe within the shadow of Fortress Monroe,
defiantly places his thumb to his nose, and in allusion to General
Butler's famous decision, retorts: "Can't come back, nohow, massa. Dis
chile's CONTRABAN'."
It is not surprising to find that Lincoln throughout the struggle was
a favorite subject for the caricaturist. His tall, ungainly,
loose-knit figure, his homely features, full of noble resolve, seemed
to offer a standing challenge to the cartoonist, who usually treated
him with indulgent kindness. The exceptions are all the more
conspicuous. A case in point is the cartoon commemorating Lincoln's
first call for volunteers for three months--a period then supposed to
be ample for crushing out the rebellion. The artist has represented
Lincoln as the image of imbecilic dismay, while a Union soldier with a
sternly questioning gaze relentlessly presents to him a promissory
note indorsed, "I promise to subdue the South in 90 days. Abe
Lincoln." A much more typical and kindly cartoon of Lincoln is the one
representing him as emulating the feat of Blondin and crossing the
rapids of Niagara on a tight-rope, bearing the negro problem on his
shoulders, and sustaining his equipoise with the aid of a balancing
pole labeled "Constitution."
[Illustration: The Promissory Note.]
The really clever cartoons of this period are so few in number, and
stand out so prominently from a mass of second-rate material, that
there is real danger of attaching undue importance to them. Such a
plate as "The Southern Confederacy a Fact! Acknowledged by a Mighty
Prince and Faithful Ally," which was issued by a Philadelphia
publisher in 1861, although crudely drawn, is one of the very few that
show the influence of the early English school. It represents the
Devil and his assembled Cabinet in solemn conclave, receiving the
envoys of the Southern Confederacy. The latter includes, among others,
Jeff Davis, General Beauregard, and a personification of "Mr. Mob Law,
Chief Justice." They are bearers of credentials setting forth the
fundamental principles of the government, as "Treason, Rebellion,
Murder, Robbery, Incendiarism, Theft, etc." Satan, interested in spite
of himself, is murmuring to his companions, "I am afraid in Rascality
they will beat us."
[Illustration: The Great Tight Rope Feat.]
[Illustration: At the Throttle.]
An effective allegorical cartoon, which appeared at a time when the
cause of the Union seemed almost hopeless, pictures Justice on the
rock of the Constitution dressed in the Stars and Stripes and waving
an American flag toward a happier scene, where the sun of Universal
Freedom is brightly shining. Behind her are hideous scenes of disorder
and national disaster. A loathsome serpent, of which the head is
called "Peace Compromise," the body, "Mason and Dixon's Line," and the
tail "Copperhead," is crawling up the rock seeking to destroy her. In
one of its coils it is crushing out the lives of a number of black
women and children. In one corner of the cartoon the figure of a
winged Satan is hovering gleefully over a mob which is hanging a negro
to a lamp-post--an allusion to the Draft Riots in New York. Some of
the mob are bearing banners with the words "Black Men have no
Rights." In the shadowy background of the picture a slaveholder is
lashing his slave, tied to a post, with a whip called "Lawful
Stimulant." An unctuous capitalist is talking with a group of
Secessionists, seated on a rock called "State Rights." In contrast
with the dark picture on which Justice has turned her back is the
bright vista of the future, "The Union as it will be," into which she
is looking. There we see a broad river and a prosperous city. A
negress, free and happy, is sewing by her cabin door, her child
reading a book upon her knee.
[Illustration: The Expert Bartender.]
[Illustration: The Southern Confederacy a Fact!!!
Acknowledged by a mighty prince and faithful ally.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
[Illustration: The Brighter Prospect.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
CHAPTER XIX
THE FOUR-YEARS' STRUGGLE
[Illustration: "Why don't You take it?"]
Many of the best cartoons of the period revolve around the rivalry
between General McClellan and General Grant, and the incidents of the
McClellan-Lincoln campaign of 1864. "The Old Bull-dog on the Right
Track" is one of the best products of the war cartoonists. It
represents Grant as a thoroughbred bulldog, seated in dogged tenacity
of purpose on the "Weldon Railroad," and preparing to fight it out on
that line, if it takes all summer. At the end of the line is a kennel,
labeled "Richmond," and occupied by a pack of lean, cowardly hounds,
Lee, Davis, and Beauregard among the number, who are yelping: "You
aint got the kennel yet, old fellow!" A bellicose little dwarf,
McClellan, is advising the bulldog's master: "Uncle Abraham, don't you
think you had better call the old dog off now? I'm afraid he'll hurt
these other dogs, if he catches hold of them!" To which President
Lincoln serenely rejoins: "Why, little Mac, that's the same pack of
curs that chased you aboard of the gunboat two years ago. They are
pretty nearly used up now, and I think it's best to go in and finish
them."
[Illustration: The Old Bull Dog on the Right Track.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
The conservative policy which marked the military career of General
McClellan and his candidacy for the Presidency in 1864 is ridiculed in
a cartoon entitled "Little Mac, in His Great Two-Horse Act, in the
Presidential Canvass of 1864." Here McClellan is pictured as a circus
rider about to come to grief, owing to the unwillingness of his two
steeds to pull together in harmony. A fiery and stalwart horse
represents "war"; while peace is depicted as a worthless and
broken-down hack. Little Mac is saying, "Curse them balky horses--I
can't manage the Act nohow. One threw me in Virginia, and the other is
bound the wrong way." In the background is the figure of Lincoln
attired as a clown. "You tried to ride them two horses on the
Peninsula for two years, Mac," he calls out, "but it wouldn't work."
Another striking cartoon of this Presidential campaign depicts the
Republican leaders burying the War Democracy. The cartoon is called
"The Grave of the Union," and was drawn by Zeke. The hearse is being
driven by Secretary Stanton, who commenced, "My jackasses had a load,
but they pulled it through bravely." In harness and attached to the
bodies of jackasses are the heads of Cochrane, Butler, Meagher, and
Dickinson. At the head of the grave, a sort of master of ceremonies,
is the familiar figure of Horace Greeley, saying, "I guess we'll bury
it so deep that it will never get up again." By his side is Lincoln,
who is inquiring, "Chase, will it stay down?" to which Chase replies,
"My God, it must stay down, or we shall go up." The funeral service is
being conducted by Henry Ward Beecher, who is carrying a little negro
in his arms. "Not thy will, O Lord, but mine be done." Beecher is
reading from the book before him. The coffins about to be lowered into
the grave are marked respectively "Free Speech and Free Press,"
"Habeas Corpus," and "Union."
[Illustration: Little Mac, in his Great Two Horse Act, in the
Presidential Canvass of 1864.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
One of the most striking caricatures suggested by the contest between
Lincoln and McClellan for the Presidency of 1864 is entitled "The
Abolition Catastrophe; or, the November Smash-up." It is really
nothing more than the old hackneyed idea of the "Presidential
Steeplechase" presented in a new guise. The artist, however, proved
himself to be a false prophet. It shows a race to the White House
between two trains, in which the one on which Lincoln is serving as
engineer has just come to destruction on the rocks of "Emancipation,"
"Confiscation," and "$400,000,000,000 Public Debt." The train in the
charge of General McClellan, its locomotive flying the flag
"Constitution," is running along smoothly and rapidly and is just
turning the curve leading up to the door of the White House.
McClellan, watching from his cab the discomfiture of his foe, calls
derisively, "Wouldn't you like to swap horses now, Lincoln?" In the
coaches behind are the elated passengers of the Democratic train. In
striking contrast is the plight in which the Republican Party is
shown. Lincoln, thrown up in the air by the shock of the collision,
calls back to his rival, "Don't mention it, Mac, this reminds me of
a"--an allusion to the President's fondness for illustrating every
argument with a story. From the debris of the wreck of the locomotive
peer out the faces of the firemen--two very black negroes. One is
calling, "War's de rest ob dis ole darky? Dis wot yer call
'mancipation?" And the other, "Lor' A'mighty! Massa Lincum, is dis wot
yer call Elewating de Nigger?" The passengers behind are in an equally
unhappy strait. Secretary Stanton, pinned under the wheels of the
first coach, is crying, "Oh, dear! If I could telegraph this to Dix
I'd make it out a victory." Among the passengers may be recognized the
countenances of Beecher, Butler, and Seward, while blown up in the air
is Horace Greeley, calling out to Lincoln that the disaster only
verifies the prediction which had been printed in the _Tribune_.
Popular discontent at the unreliability of news of the war found
utterance in a skit representing Lincoln as a bartender occupied in
concocting a mixed drink, called "New York Press," which he is
dexterously pouring back and forth between two tumblers, labeled
respectively "Victory" and "Defeat." The ingredients are taken from
bottles of "Bunkum," "Bosh," "Brag," and "Soft Sawder."
[Illustration: The Grave of the Union.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
[Illustration: The Abolition Catastrophe.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
[Illustration: The Blockade on the "Connecticut Plan".
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
In the same series as the "Abolition Catastrophe" is a cartoon
entitled "Miscegenation; or, the Millennium of Abolition," intended to
depict the possible alarming consequences of proclaiming the whole
colored race free and equal. It humorously depicts a scene in which
there is absolute social equality between the whites and the blacks.
At one end of the picture Mr. Lincoln is receiving with great warmth
and cordiality Miss Dinah Arabella Aramintha Squash, a negress of
unprepossessing appearance, who has as her escort Henry Ward Beecher.
At a table nearby Horace Greeley is treating another gorgeously
attired negress to ice cream. Two repulsive looking negroes are making
violent love to two white women. A passing carriage in charge of a
white coachman and two white footmen contains a negro family. In the
background, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and others are expressing their
astonishment at the condition in which they find American society.
[Illustration: Miscegenation.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
[Illustration: The Confederacy in Petticoats.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
The attempt at escape, the apprehension and the incarceration of the
President of the Confederacy are illustrated in a long series of
cartoons. Two of the best are "The Confederacy in Petticoats" and
"Uncle Sam's Menagerie." The first deals with the capture of Jefferson
Davis at Irwinsville by General Wilson's cavalry. Davis, attired in
feminine dress, is climbing over a fence in order to escape his
pursuers. He has dropped his handbag, but he still holds his
unsheathed knife. "I thought your government was too magnanimous to
hunt down women and children," he calls out to the Union soldiers, one
of whom has caught him by the skirts and is trying to drag him back.
Mrs. Davis, by her husband's side, is entreating, "Don't irritate the
President. He might hurt somebody."
[Illustration: Uncle Sam's Menagerie.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
The cartoon "Uncle Sam's Menagerie" shows Davis in captivity at
Fortress Monroe. The Confederate president is depicted as a hyena in a
cage, playing with a human skull. An Uncle Sans of the smooth-faced
type in which he at first appeared is the showman. Round Davis's neck
is a noose connecting with a huge gallows and the rope is about to be
drawn taut, while from an organ below the cage a musician is grinding
out the strain, "Yankee Doodle." In the shape of birds perched on
little gallows of their own above the President's cage, each with a
noose around his neck, are the figures of the other leaders of the
Confederacy. A crow is pecking at a grinning skull under which is
written "Booth." To this skull Uncle Sam is playfully pointing with
his showman's cane.
[Illustration: Protecting Free Ballot.
_From the collection of the New York Historical Society._]
Alleged Republican intimidation at the poles in the election of 1864
is assailed in a cartoon representing a Union soldier about to cast
his vote for McClellan. A thick-lipped negro stands guard over the
ballot box, rifle in hand. He presents the point of the bayonet at the
soldier's decorated breast. "Hallo, dar!" he calls out threateningly,
"you can't put in dat, you copper-head traitor, nor any odder, 'cept
for Massa Lincoln." To which the soldier sadly replies, "I am an
American citizen and did not think I had fought and bled for this.
Alas, my country!" A corrupt election clerk is regarding the scene
with disquiet. "I'm afraid we shall have trouble if that soldier is
not allowed to vote," he says. To which a companion cynically replies,
"Gammon him, just turn round; you must pretend you see nothing of the
kind going on, and keep on counting your votes."
[Illustration: The Nation Mourning at Lincoln's Bier.
_By Tenniel in "Punch."_]
CHAPTER XX
NATIONS AND MEN IN CARICATURE
In looking over the historical and political caricature of the
nineteenth century, one very naturally finds several different methods
of treatment and subdivision suggesting themselves. First, there is
the obvious method of chronological order, which is being followed in
the present volume, and which commended itself as being at once the
simplest and the most comprehensive. It is the one method by which the
history of the century may be regarded as the annals of a family of
nations--a grotesque family of ill-assorted quadrupeds and still more
curious bipeds, stepping forth two by two from the pages of comic art
as from the threshold of some modern Noah's ark--Britannia and the
British lion, Columbia and Uncle Sam, India and the Bengal tiger,
French Liberty and the imperial eagle. It is the one method which
focuses the attention upon the inter-relation, the significant
groupings of these symbolic figures, and disregards their individual
and isolated actions. What the Russian bear, the British lion, are
doing in the seclusion of their respective fastnesses is of vastly
less interest than the spectacle of the entire royal menagerie of
Europe uniting in an effort to hold Napoleon at bay. In other words,
this method enables us to pass lightly over questions of purely
national interest and home policy--the Corn Laws of England, the
tariff issues in the United States--and to keep the eye centered upon
the really big dramas of history, played upon an international stage.
It subordinates caricature itself to the sequence of great events and
great personages. It is the Emperor Napoleon, his reign and his wars,
and not the English caricaturist Gillray; it is Louis Philippe, the
bourgeois king, and not Philipon and Daumier, who form the center of
interest. In other words, from the present point of view, the
caricature itself is not so much the object looked at as it is a
powerful and clairvoyant lens through which we may behold past history
in the curiously distorted form in which it was mirrored back by
contemporary public opinion.
[Illustration: Figures from a Triumph.]
[Illustration: The Diagnosis.
"A bad regime during ten years. All your trouble comes from that. You
will soon become convalescent with a good constitution and fewer
leeches."]
Other methods, however, might be used effectively, each offering some
special advantage of its own. For instance, the whole history of the
nineteenth century might be divided, so to speak, geographically. The
separate history of each nation might have been followed down in
turn--the changing fortunes of England, typified by John Bull; of
Russia in the guise of the bear; of the United States under the forms
of the swarthy, smooth-faced Jonathan of early days, and the
pleasanter Uncle Sam of recent years; and of France, typified at
different times as an eagle, as a Gallic cock, as an angry goddess,
and as a plump, pleasant-faced woman in a tricolored petticoat. Again,
if it were desirable to emphasize the development of comic art rather
than its influence in history, one might group the separate divisions
of the subject around certain schools of caricature, dealing first
with Gillray, Rowlandson, and their fellows among the allied
Continental nations; passing thence to the caricaturists of 1830, and
thence carrying the sequence through Leech, Cham, Tenniel, Nast, down
to the caricaturists who in the closing years of the century developed
the scope of caricature to a hitherto unparalleled extent. Still
again, the history of the century in caricature might be traced along
from some peculiarity, greatly exaggerated, of some great man to
another personal peculiarity of some other great man: leaping from the
tri-cornered hat of the Emperor Napoleon to the great nose of the Iron
Duke, then on to the toupet and pear-shaped countenance of Louis
Philippe, the emaciation of Abraham Lincoln, the grandpa's hat of the
Harrison administration, the forehead curl of Disraeli, the collar of
Gladstone, the turned-up moustaches of the Emperor William, and the
prominent teeth of Mr. Roosevelt. This feature of the caricature seems
important enough to justify a brief digression. It forms one of the
foundation stones of the art, second only in importance to the
conventionalized symbols of the different nations. From the latter the
cartoonist builds up the century's history as recorded in its great
events. From the former he traces that history as recorded in the
personality of its great men.
[Illustration: The Egerean Nymph.]
[Illustration: Paul and Virginia.]
The cartoons in which these different peculiarities of personal
appearance are emphasized cover the whole range of caricature, and the
whole gamut of public opinion which inspired it. Here we may find
every degree of malice, from the fierce goggle eyes and diabolical
expression which Gillray introduced into his portraits of the hated
Bonaparte down to the harmless exaggeration of the collar points by
which Furniss good-naturedly satirized the appearance of Mr.
Gladstone. Again, in this respect caricature varies much, because all
the great men of the century did not offer to the caricaturists the
same opportunities in the matter of unusual features or personal
eccentricities.
[Illustration: The First Conscript of France.]
The authentic portraits and contemporary descriptions of the first
Napoleon show us that he was a man whose appearance was marred by no
particular eccentricity of feature, and that the cartoons of which he
is the principal subject are largely allegorical, or inspired by the
artist's intensity of hatred. One German caricaturist, by a subtle
distortion and a lengthening of the cheeks and chin, introduced a
resemblance to a rapacious wolf while preserving something of the real
likeness. But in the goggle-eyed monsters of Gillray there is nothing
save the hat and the uniform which suggests the real Napoleon. It was
a sort of incarnation of Beelzebub which Gillray wished to draw and
did draw, a monstrosity designed to rouse the superstitious hatred of
the ignorant and lower classes of England, and to excite the nation to
a warlike frenzy. The caricature aimed at Bonaparte's great rival, the
conqueror of Waterloo, was produced in more peaceful times, was the
work of his own countryman, was based mainly on party differences,
and, naturally enough, it was in the main good-natured and kindly.
Wellington in caricature may be summed up by saying that it was all
simply an exaggeration of the size of his nose. The _poire_ drawn into
resemblance of the countenance of Louis Philippe was originally
innocent enough, and had it been entirely ignored by the monarch and
his ministers, would probably have had no political effect, and in the
course of a few years been entirely forgotten. But being taken
seriously and characterized as seditious, it acquired an exaggerated
significance which may almost be said to have led to the revolution of
1848 and the establishment of the Second Republic. From the rich
material offered by our War of Secession the caricaturists drew little
more than the long, gaunt figure and the scraggy beard of Lincoln, and
the cigar of General Grant. The possibilities of this cigar, as they
probably would have been brought out by an artist like Daumier, have
been suggested in an earlier chapter. It was the goatee of Louis
Napoleon that was exaggerated to give a point to most of the cartoons
in which he was a figure, although during the days of his power there
were countless caricatures which drew suggestions from the
misadventures of his early life, his alleged experiences as a waiter
in New York and a policeman in London, his escape from prison in the
clothes of the workman Badinguet (a name which his political enemies
applied to him very freely), and the fiasco at Strasburg. No men of
their time were more freely caricatured than Disraeli in England and
Thiers in France, for no men offered more to the caricaturist,
Disraeli being at once a Jew and the most exquisite of affected
dandies, and Thiers being, with the exception of Louis Blanc, the
smallest man of note in France. In one cartoon in _Punch_, Disraeli
was figured as presiding over "Fagin's Political School." In another
he was represented as a hideous Oriental peri fluttering about the
gates of Paradise. Thiers's large head and diminutive stature are
subjects of countless cartoons, in which he is shown emerging from a
wineglass or concealed in a waistcoat pocket, although _Punch_ once
humorously depicted him as Gulliver bound down by the Lilliputians.
[Illustration: The Situation.
_By Gill._]
If one were to attempt to draw a broad general distinction between
French and English caricature throughout the century, it would be
along the line of English superiority in the matter of satirizing
great events, French superiority in satirizing great men. The English
cartoonists triumphed in the art of crowded canvases and effective
groupings; the French in seizing upon the salient feature of face or
form, and by a grotesque distortion, a malicious quirk, fixing upon
their luckless subject a brand of ridicule that refused to be
forgotten. Although the fashion of embodying fairly recognizable
portraits of prominent statesmen in caricatures became general in
England early in the century, for a long time the effect was marred by
their lack of facial expression. From situations of all sorts, ranging
from high comedy to deadly peril and poignant suffering, the familiar
features of British statesmen look forth placid, unconcerned, with the
fixed, impersonal stare of puppets in a Punch-and-Judy show. No French
artist ever threw away his opportunities in such a foolish,
spendthrift manner. Even where the smooth, regular features of some
especially characterless face gave little or nothing for a satiric
pencil to seize upon, a Daumier or a Gill would manufacture a
ludicrous effect through the familiar device of a giant's head on a
dwarf's body, or the absurdly distorted reflection of a cylindrical
mirror. But by the time hostilities broke out between France and
Prussia facial caricature had become an important factor in the
British school of satire, as exemplified in the weekly pages of
_Punch_.
CHAPTER XXI
THE OUTBREAK OF THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR
[Illustration: Louis Blanc.]
[Illustration: Rival Arbiters.
Napoleon and Bismarck at the time of the Austro-Prussian War.
_By Tenniel in Punch._]
This was very natural, because the history of these years was largely
a history of individuals. During the years between the close of the
Civil War and the outbreak of war between France and Prussia the three
dominant figures in European political caricature were the French
Emperor, Prince Bismarck, and Benjamin Disraeli. Since 1848, Louis
Napoleon had been the most widely caricatured man in Europe; and the
outcome of the War of 1866 had raised Bismarck, as the pilot of the
Prussian ship of state, to an importance second only to Napoleon
himself. The caricature of which Disraeli was the subject was
necessarily much narrower in its scope, and confined to a great extent
to England. It was not until the century's eighth decade that he
received full recognition at the hands of the Continental
caricaturists, and his prominence in the cartoons preceding the
Franco-Prussian War was due to the prestige of _Punch_, and to the
opportunity which his own peculiar personality and striking appearance
offered to the caricaturists. It was not long after the fall of
Richmond and the end of the war that the agitation over the claims of
the United States against England on account of the damage done by
the warship _Alabama_, a question which was not settled until a number
of years later, began. The two powers for a time could not agree on
any scheme of arbitration, and the condition of affairs in the autumn
of 1865 was summed up by Tenniel in _Punch_, in a cartoon entitled
"The Disputed Account," in which the United States and England are
represented as two haggling women and Madame Britannia is haughtily
saying: "Claim for damages against me? Nonsense, Columbia! Don't be
mean over money matters." But England, as well as America, had other
matters besides the _Alabama_ claims to disturb her and to keep busy
the pencils of her cartoonists. Besides purely political issues at
home, there were the Jamaica troubles and Fenianism: and the French
Emperor was very urgent that stronger extradition treaties should be
established between the two countries. This last issue was cleverly
hit off by _Punch_ in a cartoon which pictures Britannia showing
Napoleon the Third a portrait of himself as he appeared in 1848 and
saying: "That, Sire, is the portrait of a gentleman whom I should have
had to give up to the French Government had I always translated
'extradition' as your Majesty's lawyers now wish." The agitation over
the Jamaica troubles died out, the threatened Fenian invasion of
Canada came to nothing, Louis Napoleon withdrew the French troops from
Mexico, and the eyes of Europe were directed toward the war cloud
hovering over Prussia and Austria. Early in June, 1866, there was a
cessation of diplomatic relations between the two countries, followed
immediately by a declaration of war on the part of Prussia, whose
armies straightway entered Saxony and Hanover. The attitude of England
and France toward the belligerents was the subject of _Punch's_
cartoon that week. It was called "Honesty and Policy," and shows
Britannia and Napoleon discussing the situation, while in the
background the Prussian King and the Austrian Emperor are shaking
their fists in each other's faces. Britannia confides regretfully to
Napoleon: "Well, I've done my best. If they must smash each other,
they must." And the French Emperor says in a gleeful aside: "And
someone may pick up the pieces!" The same figure of speech is further
developed in a later cartoon which appeared in August, during the
negotiations for peace. Napoleon III., in the guise of a ragpicker,
is being warned off the Koenigstrasse by Bismarck: "Pardon, mon ami,
but we really can't allow you to pick up anything here;" and "Nap. the
Chiffonnier" rejoins: "Pray, don't mention it, M'sieu! It's not of the
slightest consequence."
[Illustration: The Man who Laughs.
_By Andre Gill._]
[Illustration: The Man who Thinks.
_By Andre Gill._]
[Illustration: "To be or not to be."
_By Gill._]
[Illustration: Achilles in Retreat.
_By Gill._]
After the battle of Sadowa, Austria accepted readily the offer of the
French Emperor to bring about a suspension of hostilities, the Emperor
of Austria agreeing to cede Venetia, which was handed over to France,
as a preliminary to its cession to Italy. Tenniel pictured this event
in a cartoon showing Napoleon acting as the temporary keeper of the
Lion of St. Mark's. Bismarck was now becoming a conspicuous figure in
European politics, and his rivalry to Napoleon is shown in a _Punch_
cartoon entitled "Rival Arbiters," which appeared about this time.
[Illustration: The President of Rhodes.
_By Daumier._]
The growing spirit of discontent in France during the year or two
immediately preceding the Franco-Prussian War was made the subject of
some excellent _Punch_ cartoons. One of these, called "Easing the
Curb," appeared in July, 1869. The imperial rule was gradually
becoming unpopular, and the opposition gaining in strength and
boldness. The Emperor found it prudent to announce that it was his
intention to grant to the French Chamber a considerable extension of
power. In "Easing the Curb," _Punch_ depicts France as a horse drawing
the imperial carriage. Within are the Empress and the Prince
Imperial, evidently greatly alarmed. Napoleon is standing at the
horse's head, calling out: "Have no fear, my dears. I shall just drop
ze curb a leetel." In another cartoon a few months later, Napoleon the
Third is shown wearing the crown of King John, and surrounded by a
group of persistent barons, signing a magna charta for France.
[Illustration: A Tempest in a Glass of Water.
_By Gill._]
In the pages of _Punch_ from July, 1870, until the spring of 1871, one
may follow very closely the history of the Franco-Prussian War and of
the Commune. The first of the cartoons on this subject, published just
before the declaration of war, is entitled "A Duel to the Death." In
it the King of Prussia and the French Emperor are shown as duellists,
sword in hand, while Britannia is endeavoring to act as mediator.
"Pray stand back, madam," says Napoleon. "You mean well, but this is
an old family quarrel and we must fight it out." _Punch_ seemed to
have an early premonition of what the result of the war would be, for,
before any decisive battle had been fought, it published a striking
cartoon entitled "A Vision on the Way," representing the shade of the
great Napoleon confronting the Emperor and his son on the warpath, and
bidding them "Beware!" The departure of the Prince Imperial to the
front is made the subject of a very pretty and pathetic cartoon called
"Two Mothers." It shows the Empress bidding farewell to her son, while
France, as another weeping mother, is saying: "Ah, madam, a sure
happiness for _you_, sooner or later; but there were dear sons of
_mine_ whom I shall never see again."
[Illustration: A Duel to the Death.
_By Tenniel in "Punch."_]
CHAPTER XXII
THE DEBACLE
[Illustration: France, September 4, 1870.
"Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons."]
After the unimportant engagement at Saarbrueck disaster began falling
thick and fast on the French arms, and soon we find _Punch_ taking up
again the idea of the two monarchs as rival duelists. By this time the
duel has been decided. Louis Napoleon, sorely wounded and with broken
sword, is leaning against a tree. "You have fought gallantly, sir,"
says the King. "May I not hear you say you have had enough?" To which
the Emperor replies: "I have been deceived about my strength. I have
no choice." With Sedan, the downfall of the Empire, and the
establishment of the Republic, France ceased to be typified under the
form of Louis Napoleon. Henceforth she became an angry, blazing-eyed
woman, calling upon her sons to rise and repel the advance of the
invader. The cartoon in _Punch_ commemorating September 4, 1870, when
the Emperor was formally deposed and a Provisional Government of
National Defense established under the Presidency of General Trochu,
with Gambetta, Favre, and Jules Ferry among its leading members, shows
her standing erect by the side of a cannon, the imperial insignia
trampled beneath her feet, waving aloft the flag of the Republic, and
shouting from the "Marseillaise":
"Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons!"
[Illustration: Her Baptism of Fire.
_By Tenniel in "Punch."_]
[Illustration: Andre Gill.]
The announcement that the German royal headquarters was to be removed
to Versailles, and that the palace of Louis XIV. was to shelter the
Prussian King surrounded by his conquering armies, drew from Tenniel
the cartoon in which he showed the German monarch seated at his table
in the palace studying the map of Paris, while in the background are
the ghosts of Louis XIV. and the great Napoleon. The ghost of the
Grand Monarque is asking sadly: "Is this the end of 'all the
glories'?" The sufferings of Paris during the siege are summed up in a
cartoon entitled "Germany's Ally," in which the figure of Famine is
laying its cold, gaunt hand on the head of the unhappy woman typifying
the stricken city. The beginning of the bombardment was commemorated
in a cartoon entitled "Her Baptism of Fire," showing the grim and
bloody results of the falling of the first shells. The whole tone of
_Punch_ after the downfall of the Emperor shows a growing sympathy on
the part of the English people toward France, and the feeling in
England that Germany, guided by the iron hand of Bismarck, was
exacting a cruel and unjust penalty entirely out of proportion. This
belief that the terms demanded by the Germans were harsh and excessive
is shown in the _Punch_ cartoon "Excessive Bail," where justice,
after listening to Bismarck's argument, says that she cannot "sanction
a demand for exorbitant securities."
[Illustration: Le Marquis aux Talons Rouges.
_By Willette._
The Marquis de Galliffet will be remembered as the French Minister of
War during the second Dreyfus trial. It was Willette's famous cartoon
of Queen Victoria which stirred up so much ill feeling during the Boer
War.]
[Illustration: The History of a Reign.
_By Daumier in "Charivari."_]
[Illustration: "This has killed That."
_By Daumier in "Charivari."_]
French caricature during "the terrible year" which saw Gravelotte,
Sedan, and the downfall of the Empire was necessarily somber and
utterly lacking in French gayety. It was not until the tragic days of
the Siege and the Commune that the former strict censorship of the
French press was relaxed, and the floodgates were suddenly opened for
a veritable inundation of cartoons. M. Armand Dayot, in his admirable
pictorial history of this epoch, which has already been frequently
cited in the present volume, says in this connection: "It has been
said with infinite justice that when art is absent from caricature
nothing remains but vulgarity." In proof of this, one needs only to
glance through the albums containing the countless cartoons that
appeared during the Siege, and more especially during the Commune.
Aside from those signed by Daumier, Cham, Andre Gill, and a few other
less famous artists, they are unclean compositions, without design or
wit, odious in color, the gross stupidity of their legends rivaling
their lamentable poverty of execution. But under the leadership of
Daumier, the small group of artists who infused their genius into the
weekly pages of _Charivari_, made these tragic months one of the
famous periods in the annals of French caricature. Of the earlier
generation, the irrepressible group whose mordant irony had hastened
the down fall of Louis Philippe, Daumier alone survived to chronicle
by his pencil the disasters which befell France, with a talent as
great as he had possessed thirty-odd years before, when engaged in his
light-hearted and malicious campaign against the august person of
Louis Philippe. Then there were the illustrious "Cham" (Comte de Noe),
and Andre Gill (a caricaturist of striking wit), Hadol, De Bertall, De
Pilopel, Faustin, Draner, and a number of others not so well known.
But, above all, it was Daumier who, after twenty years of the Empire,
during which his pencil had been politically idle, returned in his old
age to the fray with all the vigor of the best days of _La
Caricature_.
[Illustration: The Mouse-Trap and its Victims.
_By Daumier in "Charivari."_]
[Illustration: Prussia Annexes Alsace.
_By Cham in "Charivari."_]
[Illustration: "Oh, no! Prussia has not completely slain her. It is
not yet time to go to her aid."
_By Cham in "Charivari."_]
[Illustration: "Adieu!"
"No, 'au revoir.' Visits must be returned."
_By Cham._]
Yet to those whose sympathies were with France during the struggle of
1870-71, there is a distinct pathos in the change that is seen in the
later work of Daumier--not a personal pathos, but a pathos due to the
changed condition of the country which it reflects. The old dauntless
audacity, the trenchant sarcasm, the mocking, light-hearted laughter,
is gone. In its place is the haunting bitterness of an old man, under
the burden of an impotent wrath--a man who, for all that he dips his
pencil in pure vitriol, cannot do justice to the nightmare visions
that beset him. There is no better commentary upon the pervading
feeling of helpless anger and outraged national pride of this epoch
than in these haunting designs of Daumier's. They are the work of a
man tremulous with feverish indignation, weird and ghastly
conceptions, such as might have emanated from the caldron of Macbeth's
witches. The backgrounds are filled in with solid black, like a
funeral pall; and from out the darkness the features of Bismarck, of
Von Moltke, of William I., leer malevolently, distorted into hideous,
ghoulish figures--vampires feasting upon the ruin they have wrought.
French liberty, in the guise of a wan, emaciated, despairing figure,
the personification of a wronged and outraged womanhood, haunts
Daumier's pages. At one time she is standing, bound and gagged,
between the gaping muzzles of two cannon marked, respectively, "Paris,
1851," and "Sedan, 1870," and underneath the laconic legend, "Histoire
d'un Regne."
[Illustration: Souvenirs and Regrets.
_By Aranda._]
Another cartoon shows France as a female Prometheus bound to the rock,
her vitals being torn by the Germanic vulture. A number of these
cartoons, all of which appeared in _La Charivari_, treat bitterly of
the disastrous results of the twenty years during which Louis Napoleon
was the Emperor of the French. The sketch called "This Has Killed
That" has allusion to the popular ballot which elected the
Prince-President to the throne. A gaunt, angry female figure is
pointing with one hand to the ballot-box, in which repose the
"Ours" which made Louis Napoleon an Emperor, and with the other to the
corpses on the battlefield where the sun of his empire finally sets.
"This," she cries, "has killed that." The same idea suggested a
somewhat similar cartoon, in which a French peasant, gazing at the
shell-battered ruins of his humble home, exclaims in the peasant's
ungrammatical _patois_: "And it was for this that I voted 'Yes.'"
Still more grim and ominous is the cartoon showing a huge mouse-trap
with three holes. The mouse-trap represents the Plebiscite. Two of the
holes, marked respectively, "1851" and "1870," have been sprung, and
each has caught the throat of a victim. The third, however, still
yawns open warningly, with the date not completely filled in.
[Illustration: The Show of the Napoleonic Mountebanks.
_From a caricature by Hadol._]
[Illustration: Prussia introducing the New National Assembly to
France.
_By Daumier in "Charivari."_]
[Illustration: "Let Us eat the Prussian."
_By Andre Gill._]
Still another cartoon, thoroughly characteristic of Daumier's later
manner, is "The Dream of Bismarck," one which touches upon the idea
which has been used allegorically in connection with every great
conqueror whose wake is marked by the strewn corpses of fallen
thousands. In it Bismarck, frightfully haggard and ghastly of
countenance, is sleeping in his chair, while at his side is the grim
figure of Death bearing a huge sickle and pointing out over the bloody
battlefield.
Of the younger group of cartoonists none is more closely connected
with the events of the _annee terrible_ than "Cham," the Comte de Noe.
The name Noe, it will be remembered, is French for Noah, just as Cham
is the French equivalent of Ham, second son of the patriarch of
Scripture. The Comte de Noe was also second son of his father, hence
the appropriateness of his pseudonym. As a caricaturist, Cham was
animated by no such seriousness of purpose as formed the inspiration
of Daumier; and this was why he never became a really great
caricaturist. It was the humorous side of life, even of the tragedies
of life, that appealed to him, and he reflected it back with an
incisive drollery which was irresistible. He was one of the most rapid
and industrious of workers, and found in the events of _l'annee
terrible_ the inspiration of a vast number of cartoons. The looting
propensities of the Prussians were satirized in a sketch showing two
Prussian officers looking greedily at a clock on the mantelpiece in a
French chateau. "Let us take the clock." "But peace has already been
signed." "No matter. Don't you see the clock is slow?" The German
acquisition of the Rhenish provinces is summed up in a picture which
shows a German officer attaching to his leg a chain, at the end of
which is a huge ball marked Alsace. The siege having turned every
Parisian into a nominal soldier, this condition of affairs is hit off
by Cham in a cartoon underneath which is written: "Everybody being
soldiers, the officers will have the right to put through the paces
anyone whom they meet in the streets." The sketch shows a cook in the
usual culinary costume, and bearing on his head a flat basket filled
with kettles and pans, marking time at the command of an officer. The
attitude of England during the war seemed to the caricaturist
perfidious, after the practical aid which France had rendered Albion
in the Crimea. Cham hits this off by representing the two nations as
women, Britannia looking ironically at prostrate France and saying:
"Oh, no! Prussia has not yet entirely killed her! So it is not yet
time to go to her aid."
[Illustration: New Design for a Hand Bell proposed by "Charivari" for
the Purpose of Reminding the Assembly that Prussian Troops still hold
French Territory.]
[Illustration: Germany: "Farewell, Madame, and if--"
France: "Ha! We shall meet again!"]
The statesmen and warriors of that period were very happily
caricatured in a series of cartoons, most of which appeared in
_L'Eclipse_. Gill excelled in his caricature of individual men rather
than in the caricature of events or groups. His real name was Louis
Alexandre Gosset. He was born at Landouzy-li-Ville, October 19, 1840,
and died in Paris, December 29, 1885. Thiers, Gambetta, Louis Blanc,
all the men of the time, were hit off by his pencil. His method in
most cases consisted of the grotesque exaggeration of the subject's
head at the expense of the body. He was especially happy in his
caricature of Thiers, whose diminutive size, as well as his great
importance, made him a favorite subject for the cartoonist. Thiers as
Hamlet soliloquizing, "To be or not to be"; Thiers as "The Man Who
Laughs"; the head of Thiers peering over the rim of a glass, "A
tempest in a glass of water"; Thiers as the first conscript of France;
Thiers as Achilles in retreat--all these and countless others are from
the pencil of Gill.
[Illustration: Bismarck the First.]
[Illustration: Trochu--1870.]
A striking satirical sketch by Hadol, entitled "La Parade," sums up
all the buffooneries of the Second Empire. In it the Duc de Morny as
the barking showman is violently inviting the populace to enter and
inspect the wonders of the Theatre Badinguet. Badinguet, as said
before, was the name of the workman in whose clothes Louis Napoleon
was said to have escaped from his imprisonment at Ham; and throughout
the Second Empire it was the name by which the Parisians maliciously
alluded to the Emperor. Behind De Morny in the cartoon are the Emperor
and Empress, seated at the cashier's desk at the entrance of the
theater to take in the money of the dupes whom De Morny can persuade
to enter. To the right and left, in grotesque attire, are the actors
of the show, representing the various statesmen and soldiers whose
names were connected with the reign.
[Illustration: Bazaine.
_By Faustin._]
[Illustration: Rochefort.]
Popular hatred of Marshal Bazaine after the surrender of Metz, based
on the prevalent belief that he had sold the city and the army under
his command to the Germans, finds pictorial expression in the grim
cartoon by Faustin, reproduced here. The artist has cunningly drawn
into the features of the Marshal an expression of unutterable craft
and treachery. Round his neck there has been flung what at the first
glance seems like a decoration of honor, an impression strengthened by
the cross and inscription on his breast. But as you look more closely
you perceive that this decoration is suspended from the noose of the
hangman's rope, and that the words "Au Marechal Bazaine--La France
Reconnaissante" have another and a deeper significance. The defender
of the city of Paris, General Trochu, was genially caricatured by
Andre Gill in _L'Eclipse_ as a _blanchisseuse_ industriously ironing
out the dirty linen of France. However great his popularity was at the
time, Trochu has by no means escaped subsequent criticism. To him the
resistance of Paris seemed nothing but "an heroic folly," and he had
no hesitation about proclaiming his opinion. Another exceedingly happy
caricature by Andre Gill was that representing Henri Rochefort, the
implacable enemy of Louis Napoleon, as a member of the Government of
the National Defense. Here Rochefort's head is shown peering out of
the mouth of a cannon projecting through a hole in the city's
fortifications.
[Illustration: Entree Solennelle de l'Empereur d'Allemagne a Paris.
(Caricature de Felix Regamey.)]
PART IV
_THE END OF THE CENTURY_