ENGLISH CARICATURE OF THE PRESENT CENTURY.
[Illustration: James Gillray.]
James Gillray, though the favorite caricaturist of London before the
beginning of our century, did not reach the full development of his
talent until the later extravagancies of Napoleon Bonaparte gave him
subjects so richly suggestive of burlesque. Even at this late day, when
we have it in our power to know the infinite mischief done to our race
by such perjured charlatans as Bonaparte, it is difficult to read some
of his bulletins and messages without bursts of laughter--the imitation
of known models is so childish, and they reveal so preposterous an
ignorance of every thing that the ruler of a civilized country ought to
know. After giving London a long series of caricatures of the French
Revolution and of the English fermentation that followed it, Gillray
fell upon Napoleon, and exhibited the ludicrous aspects of the man and
his doings with a comic fertility and effectiveness rarely equaled.
True, he knew very little either of the Revolution or of
Bonaparte--England knew little--but while all well-informed and humane
persons have forgiven the excesses of the Revolutionary period, or laid
the blame at the door of the real culprits, the world is coming round to
the view of Napoleon Bonaparte which the caricaturist gave seventy years
ago. If I were asked to name the best five caricatures produced since
Hogarth, one of the five would be James Gillray's "Tiddy-Doll, the Great
French Gingerbread Baker drawing out a New Batch of Kings;" and another,
a picture by the same artist, "King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver"
ridiculing Napoleon's scheme of invading England in 1803. Both are
masterpieces of satiric art in what we may justly style the English
style; _i. e._, the style which amuses every body and wounds nobody,
not even the person satirized.
[Illustration: Tiddy-Doll, the Great French Gingerbread Baker, drawing
out a New Batch of Kings. His Man, Hopping Talley, mixing up the Dough.
(Gillray, 1806.)]
Born in 1757, when Hogarth had still seven years to live, the son of a
valiant English soldier who left an arm in Flanders, James Gillray
belongs more to the old school of caricaturists than to the new. Many of
his works could not now be exhibited; nor was Gillray superior in moral
feeling to the time in which he lived. He flattered the pride and the
prejudices of John Bull. In a deep-drinking age, his own habits were
excessively convivial; were such as to shorten his life, after having
impaired his reason. He was, nevertheless, for a period of twenty years
the favorite caricaturist of his country, and a very large number of his
works are in all respects admirable. The reader will remark that
Gillray, like most of his countrymen, was not acquainted with the
countenance of Napoleon, and could, therefore, only give the popularly
accepted portrait. His likenesses generally are excellent.
Among the crowds of laughing English boys who hailed every new picture
issued by Gillray during the last ten years of his career was one named
George Cruikshank, still living and honored among his countrymen in
1877. Him we may justly style the founder of the new school--the
virtuous school--of comic art, which accords so agreeably with the
humaner civilization which has been stealing over the world of late
years, and particularly since the suppression of Bonaparte in 1815. On
page 270 is a picture of his executed in his eightieth year, a proof of
the steadiness of hand and alertness of mind which reward a temperate
and honorable life even in extreme old age. This picture was both drawn
and engraved by his own hand to please one of his oldest American
friends, Mr. J. W. Bouton, of New York, long concerned in collecting and
distributing his works among us. Here, then, is a living artist whose
first handling of the etching-tool dates back almost three-quarters of a
century. Mr. Reid, the keeper of prints and drawings in the British
Museum, has been at the pains to make a catalogue of the works of George
Cruikshank. The number of entries in this catalogue is five thousand two
hundred and sixty-five, many of which comprise extensive series of
drawings, so that the total number of his pictures probably exceeds
twenty thousand--about one picture for every working-day during the
productive part of his career.
[Illustration: The Threatened Invasion of England, 1804. (Gillray.)
(The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver. _Scene_--Gulliver manoeuvring
with his little boat in the cistern.--_Vide_ Swift's "Gulliver.")
"I often used to row for my own diversion, as well as that of the queen
and her ladies, who thought themselves well entertained with my skill
and agility. Sometimes I would put up my sail and show my art by
steering starboard and larboard. However, my attempts produced nothing
else besides a loud laughter, which all the respect due to his majesty
from those about him could not make them contain. This made me reflect
how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor
among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with
him."]
[Illustration: The Bibliomaniac. (George Cruikshank, 1871.)]
There is perhaps no gift so likely to be transmitted from father to son
as a talent for drawing. Certainly it runs in the Cruikshank family, for
there are already five of the name known to collectors, much to their
confusion. As a guide to Mr. Reid in the preparation of his catalogue,
the old gentleman made a brief statement, which is one of the
curiosities of art gossip, and it may serve a useful purpose to
collectors in the United States. His father, Isaac Cruikshank, was a
designer and etcher and engraver, as well as a water-color draughtsman.
His brother, Isaac Robert, a miniature and portrait painter, was also a
designer and etcher, and "your humble servant likewise a designer and
etcher. When I was a mere boy," he adds, "my dear father kindly allowed
me to play at etching on some of his copper-plates, little bits of
shadows or little figures in the background, and to assist him a little
as I grew older, and he used to assist _me_ in putting in hands and
faces. And when my dear brother Robert (who in his latter days omitted
the Isaac) left off portrait-painting, and took almost entirely to
designing and etching, I assisted him, at first to a great extent, in
some of his drawings." The result was that, in looking over the pictures
of sixty years ago, he could not always tell his own work; and, to make
matters worse, his brother left a son, Percy Cruikshank, also a
draughtsman and engraver, and he, too, has an artist son, named George.
The family has provided work for the coming connoisseur.
The glory of the living veteran, however, will remain unique, because
he, first of the comic artists of his country, caught the new spirit,
avoided the grossness and thoughtless one-sidedness of his predecessors,
and used his art in such a manner that now, in his eighty-fourth year,
looking back through the long gallery of his works gathered by the
affectionate persistence of his admirers, he can not point to one
picture which for any moral reason he could wish to turn to the wall.
England owes much to her humorists of the new humane school. She owes,
perhaps, more than she yet perceives, because the changes which they
promote in manners and morals come about slowly and unmarked. It is the
American revisiting the country after many years of absence who
perceives the ameliorations which the satiric pencil and pen have
conjointly produced; nor are those ameliorations hidden from the
American who treads for the first time the fast-anchored isle. It is
with a peculiar rapturous recognition that we hail every indication of
that England with which English art and literature have made us
acquainted--a very different country indeed from the England of
politics and the newspaper. A student who found himself one fine Sunday
morning in June gliding past the lovely Hampshire coast, covered with
farms, lawns, and villas, gazed in silence for a long time, and could
only relieve his mind at last by gasping, "Thomson's 'Seasons?'" His
first glance revealed to him, what he had never before suspected, that
the rural poetry of England applied in a particular manner to the land
that inspired it, could have been written only there, and only there
could be quite appreciated. From Chaucer to Tennyson there is not a
sterling line in it which could have been what it is if it had been
composed in any part of the Western continent. We have a flower which we
call a daisy, a weed coarsened by our fierce sun, betraying barrenness
of soil, and suggestive of careless culture. There is also to be seen in
our windows and greenhouses a flower named the primrose, which, though
it has its merit, has not been celebrated by poets, nor is likely to be.
But the instant we see an English road-side bright with primroses and
daisies, we find ourselves saying, "Yes, of course; _these_ are what the
poets mean; _this_ is the daisy of Shakspeare and Burns; _here_ is
Wordsworth's yellow primrose!" And we go on holding similar discourse
with ourselves as often as we descry the objects, at once familiar and
unknown, which in every age the poets of Great Britain have loved to
sing.
[Illustration: Hope--A Phrenological Illustration. (George Cruikshank,
1826.)]
But when, in these recent days, the same traveler observes the human
life of English streets and homes and public places, he does not
perceive so exact a resemblance to the life portrayed in books and
pictures. English life seems gentler and better than it was represented
forty years ago; manners are freer and more cordial; people are less
intemperate; the physical life is much less obstreperous; the topics
discussed have a more frequent relation to the higher interests of human
nature. The glory of the last generation was held to be Waterloo; the
distinction of the present one is a peaceful arbitration. The six-bottle
men of Sheridan's time--where are they? Gone, quite gone. _One_ bottle
is now almost as unusual as it is excessive. Gone is the coach, with its
long train of barbarisms--its bloated Wellers, its coachmen who
swallowed "an imperial pint of vinegar" with their oysters without
winking, its mountainous landlord skillful in charging, its general
horseyness and cumbersome inconvenience. The hideous prize-fight seems
finally suppressed. If there are still estates upon which there are
family cottages of one room, they are held in horror, and it is an axiom
accepted that the owner who permits them to remain is a truer savage
than the most degraded peasants who inhabit them.
Art, humanizing art, has reached a development which a dreamer of
Hogarth's day could not have anticipated for any period much short of
the millennium; and not a development only, but a wide diffusion.
Chadband--where is he? If he exists, he has assumed a less offensive
form than when he ate muffins and sniveled inanity in Mrs. Snagsby's
back room. Where are Thackeray's snobs? They, too, have not ceased to
be, for the foible which he satirized is an integral part of human
nature, which can be ennobled, not eradicated. Strangers, however, do
not often observe those violent and crude manifestations of it which
Thackeray describes; and there seems a likelihood of the "Book of Snobs"
meeting the fate of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," which made itself
obsolete by accomplishing its purposes. Beer still flows redundant in
every part of the British Empire. Nevertheless, there is here and there
a person who has discovered how much more can be got out of life by
avoiding stimulation. A decided advance must have been made toward
tolerance of opinion when men can be borne to honorable burial in
Westminster Abbey whose opinions were at variance with those which built
and sustain the edifice. Chadbandom feebly protests, but no man regards
it.
[Illustration: Term Time. (George Cruikshank, 1827.)]
There are men still alive who remember the six-bottle period and all its
strenuous vulgarities, the period when the whole strength of the empire
was put forth in the Bonaparte wars. William Chambers, who was born when
George Cruikshank was a boy of eight, speaks of those years as a time of
universal violence. Children, ruled by violence at home and by cruelty
at school, pummeled and bullied one another in turn, besides practicing
habitual cruelty toward birds and beasts, hunting cats, pelting dogs,
plundering birds' nests. He tells us of a carter who used to turn out
his horses to die on the common of his native town, where the boys, in
the sight of the people, and without being admonished by them, would
daily amuse themselves by stoning the helpless creatures till they had
battered the life out of them. The news that roused the people was all
of bloodshed on land and sea. The only pleasures that were held to be
entirely worthy of men were hard riding and deep drinking. Those diaries
of persons who flourished in the first half of George Cruikshank's life,
of which so many volumes have been published lately--those, for example,
of Moore, Greville, Jerdan, and Young--what are they but a monotonous
record of dinner anecdotes? Marryat's novels preserve a popular
exhibition of that fighting age, and we perceive from his memoirs that
he did not exaggerate its more savage characteristics. Several of his
most brutal incidents were transcripts from his own experience.
Comic art, which the amelioration of manners has purified, has done much
in its turn to strengthen and diffuse that amelioration. Isaac
Cruikshank was among the last of the old school. He seems to have kept
his pencil on hire, for we have caricatures of his on all sides of the
politics of his time, from conservative to radical. In 1795 he
represented William Pitt as the royal extinguisher putting out the flame
of sedition; but in 1797 he exhibited the same minister in the character
of a showman deceiving the people with regard to the condition of the
country. "Observe," says "Billy," "what a busy scene presents itself.
The ports are filled with shipping, riches are flowing in from every
quarter." But the countrymen standing around declare that they can see
nothing but "a woide plain with some mountains and mole-hills upon't,"
and conjecture that the fine things which Billy sees must be behind one
of the mole-hills. During the same year we find him caricaturing Fox,
the leader of the Opposition, as having laid a train for the purpose of
blowing up the Constitution, and then leaving to others the risk of
touching it off. On both sides of the Irish questions of his day he
employed his pencil, ridiculing in some pictures the Irish discontents,
and in others the measures proposed by ministers for quieting them. When
the old king was losing his reason, he drew him as a "farthing
rush-light," around which were the Prince of Wales, Fox, Sheridan, and
their friends, all trying to blow out the flickering flame. At length,
in 1810, he caricatured the Burdett riots in a manner to please the most
"advanced" radical. This picture, however, may have been a tribute to
the mere audacity of the member for Westminster, who barricaded his
house for four days against the officers of the House of Commons ordered
to arrest him.
It was while Isaac Cruikshank was occasionally drawing such caricatures
as these that he "kindly allowed" his son George, "a mere boy," to "play
at etching on some of his copper-plates." The first real work done by
the lad was of a very modest character, but he speaks of them in a way
to make us regret that even they should have been lost. "Many of my
first productions, such as half-penny lottery books and books for little
children, can never be known or seen, having been destroyed long, long
ago by the dear little ones who had them to play with."
Men who write so of little children that tore up their picture-books
seventy years before are not formed for the strife of politics. George
Cruikshank early in life withdrew from political caricature, but not
before he had executed a few pictures of which he might reasonably boast
in his old age, after time had justified their severity. This aged
artist, who has lived to see the laws repealed which restricted the
importation of grain into England, was just coming of age when those
laws were passed, and he expressed his opinion of them in a caricature
called "The Blessings of Peace; or, The Curse of the Corn Bill." It was
in 1815--the year that consigned Bonaparte to St. Helena, and gave peace
to Europe. A vessel laden with grain has arrived from a foreign port,
and the supercargo, holding out a handful, says, "Here is the best for
fifty shillings." But on the shore stands a store-house filled with
home-grown grain, tight shut, in front of which is a group of British
land-owners, one of whom waves the foreign trader away, saying: "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." The foreign grain is thrown overboard, while a starving
family looks on, and the father says, "No, no, masters, I'll not starve,
but quit my native country, 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."
Such is the Protective System: an interested few, having the ear of the
Government, thriving at the expense of the many who have not the ear of
the Government! This young man saw the point in 1815 as clearly as
Cobden, Peel, or Mill in 1846.
In the same year he aimed a caricature at the ministry who took off the
income tax, and lessened the taxes upon property without diminishing
those which bore more directly upon the poor. Many pictures in a similar
spirit followed; but while he was still a young man he followed the bent
of his disposition, and has ever since employed his pencil in what his
great master Hogarth once styled "moral comedies," wherein humor appears
as the ally and teacher of morals.
John Doyle, who reigned next in the shop-windows of Great Britain, and
continued to bear sway for twenty years--1829 to 1849--was not known by
name to the generation which he amused. It chanced one day that two I's,
in a printing-office where he was, stood close to two D's, and he
observed that the conjunction formed a figure resembling HB. He adopted
this as the mark or signature of his caricatures, and consequently he
was always spoken of as H. B. down to the time of his death, which
occurred about the year 1869. He, too, shared the spirit of the better
time. Collectors number his published caricatures at nine hundred and
seventeen, which have been re-issued in eleven volumes; but in none of
his works is there any thing of the savage vulgarity of the caricatures
produced during the Bonaparte wars. It was a custom with English
print-sellers to keep port-folios 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 be safely 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, HB 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 likenesses of the men. An air of
refinement pervades his designs. His humor is not aggressive. It was
remarked at the time in the _Westminster Review_ that the great hits of
Gillray, on being put up for the first time in Mrs. Humphrey's window,
were received by the crowd with shouts of approval, but that the
kindlier humor of HB only elicited silent smiles.
[Illustration: Box in a New York Theatre in 1830.
"I observed in the front row of a dress box a lady performing the most
maternal office possible, several gentlemen without their coats, and a
general air of contempt for the decencies of life, certainly more than
usually revolting."--MRS. TROLLOPE, _Domestic Manners of the Americans_,
vol. ii., p. 194.]
Doubtless the war passion that raged throughout Christendom in Gillray's
day had much to do with the warmth of applause which his works called
forth. But, in truth, the vulgar portion of mankind appear to have a
certain relish of an effective thrust, no matter who may writhe. HB was
seldom severer than in his picture called "Handwriting on the Wall," in
which "Silly Billy" (as William IV. was familiarly styled) is seen
reading a placard headed "Reform Bill," and muttering, "Reform _Bill_?
Can that mean me?" Most of his pieces turn upon incidents or phases of
politics which would require many words to recall, and then scarcely
interest a reader of to-day. A caricature, as before remarked, is made
to be seen; it is a thing of the moment, and for the moment, and when
that moment is passed, it must be of exceptional quality to bear revival
in words.
Seeing caricatures from childhood has induced a habit in many persons of
surveying life in the spirit of caricature, and has developed some
tolerable private wielders of the satiric pencil. Mrs. Trollope was,
perhaps, a case in point. Her volumes upon the "Domestic Manners of the
Americans," the literary sensation of 1832, were illustrated by a dozen
or more of very amusing caricatures, some of which were fair hits, and
were of actual service in improving popular manners. There are persons
still alive who remember hearing the cry of "Trollope! Trollope!" raised
in our theatres when a man ventured to take off his coat on a hot night,
or sat with his feet too high in the air.[39] Her whole work, pictures
and all, was a purposed political caricature, as she frankly confesses
in her preface, where she says that her chief object was to warn her
countrymen of "the jarring tumult and universal degradation which
invariably follow the wild scheme of placing all the power of the State
in the hands of the populace." She was, besides, exceedingly
uncomfortable during her three years' residence in the United States,
except when she was so happy as to be served by slaves. "On entering a
slave State," she remarks, "I was immediately comfortable and at my
ease, and felt that the intercourse between me and those who served me
was profitable to both parties and painful to neither."
[Footnote 39: "In the pit [of the Chatham Theatre, New York] persons
pulled off their coats in order to be cool.... Gentlemen keep their hats
on in the boxes, and in the pit they make themselves in every respect
comfortable."--_Travels through North America during the Years 1825 and
1826_, p. 145, by his Highness Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach.]
Besides the specimen of her caricaturing powers given in this chapter,
there are several others which have, at least, some interest as
curiosities of insular judgment. Mrs. Trollope, the daughter of a
clergyman of the English Church, and the wife of an English lawyer of
aristocratic family, entered the United States, in 1827, by the
Mississippi, and spent a year or two in its newly settled valley. She
saw the Western people engaged in a life-and-death struggle with untamed
nature--the forest, wild men and beasts, the swamp, the flood, the
fever, a trying climate, and interminable distances. A partial conquest
had been won. Some fair towns had risen. A few counties were subdued.
The log school-house was a familiar object. To a mind of continental
compass, although Western life was still rough, rude, and haggard, the
prospect was hopeful; it was evident that civilization was winning the
day, and was destined, in the course of a century or two, to make the
victory complete. The worst that a person of liberal mind could say, or
can now say, of such a scene, would be this: "See what it costs to
transplant human families from the parish to the wilderness!"
Even cabbage plants wither when only transferred from the hot-bed to the
garden; but the transplanting of families from the organized society of
an old country to a wild new land is a process under which all sicken,
many degenerate, and many die.
[Illustration: Seymour's Conception of Mr. Winkle before that Hunter
appeared in "Pickwick." (Seymour's Sketches, 1834.)
"Vot, eighteen shillings for that ere little pig? Vy, I could buy it in
town for seven any day!"]
Our curate's daughter, on the contrary, after a long and close survey of
this interesting scene, could only discover that life on the banks of
the Ohio, in the twentieth year of their settlement, was neither as
pleasant, nor as graceful, nor as elegant, nor as clean, nor as
convenient as it is in an English village; and this discovery she
communicated to the world in two volumes, 12mo, with sixteen
illustrations, very much to the satisfaction of many English readers.
This worthy and gifted lady, mother of worthy and gifted children, was
utterly baffled in her attempts to account for the rudeness of Western
life. Provisions, she says, were abundant in Cincinnati, as many as four
thousand pigs being advertised sometimes by one man. The very gutters of
the town ran blood--the blood of cheap innumerable swine. But "the total
and universal want of manners, both in males and females, is so
remarkable that I was constantly endeavoring to account for it." The
people, she thought, had clear and active intellects; their conversation
was often weighty and instructive, occasionally dull, but never silly.
What an unaccountable thing, then, it was that these dealers in the pig
and slayers of the bear, these subduers of the wilderness and conquerors
of Tecumseh, should not bow with courtly grace, and converse with the
elegance and ease of Holland House! "There is no charm, no grace, in
their conversation," she laments. "I very seldom, during my whole stay
in the country, heard a sentence elegantly turned and correctly
pronounced from the lips of an American."
Such a thing it is to be brought up in an island! Her volumes, however,
are to this day entertaining, and not devoid of historical value. There
is here and there a passage which some of us could still read with
profit, and her misinterpretations are not much more insular and
perverse than those of Dickens. No one, indeed, yet knows much of this
mystery of transplanting, in which lies hidden the explanation of
America.
Her first caricature, entitled "Ancient and Modern Republics," is in two
scenes. An Ancient Republic is represented as a noble Greek, crowned
with flowers, reclining upon a lounge, one hand resting upon the strings
of a lyre, and the other gracefully holding up a beautiful cup, into
which a lovely maiden is squeezing the juice from a luxuriant bunch of
grapes. A Modern Republic figures as a Western bar-room politician, with
his hat over his eyes, his heels upon the table, a tumbler in his hand,
a decanter within reach, and a plug of tobacco at its side. We have next
a picture of a "Philosophical Millinery Store" at New Orleans, in which
Mrs. Trollope delineated an astounding event--"My being introduced _in
form_ to a milliner!" She, a curate's daughter, introduced to a maker of
bonnets, who actually proved to be a gifted and intelligent lady! A
"Cincinnati Ball-room" reveals to us twenty-two ladies sitting close to
the walls, the floor vacant, and all the men gormandizing at a table in
the next room, leaving the ladies to a "sad and sulky repast" of trash
in plates held on their laps. Then we are favored with a view of a young
lady who is making a shirt, but is ashamed to pronounce the name of the
garment in the presence of a man, and calls it pillow-case. Whereupon he
says, "Now that passes, Miss Clarissa! 'Tis a pillow-case for a giant,
then. Shall I guess, miss?" To which she sweetly replies, "Quit, Mr.
Smith; behave yourself, or I'll certainly be affronted."
Another picture represents some ladies about to enter a gallery of art
at Philadelphia, in which were exhibited several antique statues. The
old woman in attendance says: "Now, ma'am, _now_! this is just the time
for you. Nobody can see you. Make haste!" Mrs. Trollope stared at her
with astonishment, and asked her what she meant. "Only, ma'am," was the
reply, "that the ladies like to go into _that_ room by themselves, when
there be no gentlemen watching them." Another picture presents to us an
American citizen of "the highest standing" returning from market at 6
A.M. with a huge basket of vegetables on one arm and a large ham carried
in the other hand. A still more marvelous picture is given. Mr. Owen,
father of Robert Dale Owen, challenged debate on his assertion that all
the religions ever promulgated were equally false and pernicious. A
clergyman having accepted the challenge, the debate was continued during
fifteen sessions. But what amazed Mrs. Trollope was that Mr. Owen was
listened to with respect! Nothing was thrown at him. The benches were
not torn up. Another marvel was that neither of the disputants lost his
temper, but they remained excellent friends, and dined together every
day with the utmost gayety and cordiality. All this must have seemed
strange indeed to the doting daughter of a State Church whose belief was
regulated by act of Parliament.
[Illustration: Probable Suggestion of the Fat Boy of the "Pickwick
Papers." (Seymour's Sketches, 1834.)
"Walked twenty miles overnight; up before peep o' day again; got a
capital place; fell fast asleep; tide rose up to my knees; my hat was
changed, my pockets pick't, and a fish run away with my hook; dreamt of
being on a polar expedition and having my toes frozen."]
A famous contemporary of John Doyle and Mrs. Trollope was Robert
Seymour, who will be long remembered for his co-operation with Charles
Dickens in the production of the first numbers of "Pickwick." Nothing
can be more certain than that this unfortunate artist, who died by his
own hand just before the second number of the work was issued, did
actually suggest the idea which the genius of Dickens developed into the
"Pickwick Papers." While Dickens was still in the reporters' gallery of
the House of Commons, Seymour had attained a shop-window celebrity by a
kind of picture of which the English people seem never to be able to get
enough--caricatures of Londoners attempting country sports. It appears
to be accepted as an axiom in England that a man capable of conducting
business successfully becomes an absurd and ludicrous object the moment
he gets upon a horse or fires at a bird. It seems to be taken for
granted that horsemanship and hunting belong to the feudal system, and
are strictly entailed in county families. But as a man is supposed to
rank in fashionable circles according to his mastery of those arts,
great numbers of young men, it seems, live but to attempt feats
impossible except to inherited skill. Here is the field for such artists
as Robert Seymour, "For whose use," as Mr. Dickens wrote, "I put in Mr.
Winkle expressly," and who drew "that happy portrait of the founder of
the Pickwick Club by which he is always recognized, and which may be
said to have made him a reality." Perhaps as many as a third of the
comic pictures published at that period were in the Winkle vein.
[Illustration: MANNERS and CVSTOMS of ye ENGLYSHE in 1849
A Weddynge BREAKFASTE.
(Richard Doyle, 1849.)]
Upon looking over the sketches of Robert Seymour, which used to appear
from time to time in the windows--price threepence--while Boz was
getting _his_ "Sketches" through the press, we perceive that Dickens
really derived fruitful hints from this artist, besides the original
suggestion of the work. Mr. Winkle is recognizable in several of them;
Mr. Pickwick's figure occurs occasionally; the Fat Boy is distinctly
suggested; the famous picnic scene is anticipated; and there is much in
the spirit of the pictures to remind us that among the admiring crowd
which they attracted, the author of "Pickwick" might often have been
found. Seymour, however, gave him only hints. In every instance he has
made the suggested character or incident absolutely his own. Seymour
only supplied a piece of copper, which the alchemy of genius turned into
gold. In Dickens's broadest and most boisterous humor there are ever a
certain elegance and refinement of tone that are wanting in Seymour,
Seymour's cockney hunters being persons of the Tittlebat Titmouse grade,
who long ago ceased to amuse and began to offend.
Seymour's discovery, in the first numbers of "Pickwick," that it was the
author, not the artist, who was to dominate a work which was his own
conception and long-cherished dream, was probably among the causes of
his fatal despair. When he first mentioned to Chapman & Hall his scheme
of a Cockney Club ranging over England, he was a popular comic artist of
several years' standing, and Charles Dickens was a name unknown. Nor was
it supposed to be of so very much consequence who should write the
descriptive matter. The firm closed the bargain with Mr. Seymour without
having bestowed a thought upon the writer; and when they had suggested
the unknown "Boz," and procured a copy of his "Sketches" by way of
recommendation, Mrs. Seymour's remark was that, though she could not see
any humor in his writings herself, yet he might do as well as another,
and fifteen pounds a month to a poor and struggling author would be a
little fortune. To a sensitive and ambitious man, made morbid by various
hard usage such as the men who delight the world often undergo, it must
have been a cutting disappointment to be asked, in the infancy of an
enterprise which he deemed peculiarly his own, to put aside an
illustration that he had prepared, and make another to suit the fancies
of a subordinate. It was like requiring a star actor to omit his
favorite and most special "business" in order to afford a member of the
company an opportunity to shine.
The biographer of Mr. Dickens is naturally reluctant to admit the social
insignificance in London, forty years ago, of a "struggling author," and
he is grossly abusive of Mr. N. P. Willis for describing his hero as he
appeared at this stage of his career. Mr. Willis visited him at a dismal
building in Holborn, in company with one of Mr. Dickens's publishers,
and he gave a brief account of what he saw, which doubtless was the
exact truth. Willis was a faithful chronicler of the minutiae of a scene.
He was a stickler for having the small facts correct. "We pulled up," he
wrote, "at the entrance of a large building used for lawyers' chambers.
I followed by a long flight of stairs to an upper story, and was ushered
into an uncarpeted and bleak-looking room, with a deal table, two or
three chairs, and a few books, a small boy and Mr. Dickens, for the
contents. I was only struck at first with one thing (and I made a
memorandum of it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of
English obsequiousness to employers)--the degree to which the poor
author was overpowered with the honor of his publisher's visit." He
describes Dickens as dressed rather in the Swiveller style, though
without Richard's swell look: hair close cropped, clothes jaunty and
scant, "the very personification of a close sailer to the wind." There
is nothing in this discreditable to the "poor author," and nothing which
a person who knew London then would deem improbable. Is it not a
principle imbedded in the constitution of Britons that the person who
receives money in small amounts for work and labor done is the party
obliged, and must stand hat in hand before him who pays it?
Whoever shall truly relate the history of the people of Great Britain in
the nineteenth century will not pass by in silence the publication of
"Pickwick." Cruikshank, Seymour, and Irving, as well as the humorists of
other times, had nourished and molded the genius of Dickens; but, like
all the masters in art, he so far transcended his immediate teachers
that, even in what he most obviously derived from them, he was original.
And it is he, not they, who is justly hailed as the founder of that
benign school of comic art which gives us humor without coarseness, and
satire without ill nature. It is "Pickwick" that marks the era, and the
sole interest which Seymour's sketches now possess is in showing us from
what Charles Dickens departed when he founded the Pickwick Club.