Whole book · 34 sections
By JAMES PARTON
WITH 203 ILLUSTRATIONS
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
FRANKLIN SQUARE
1877
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
In this volume there is, I believe, a greater variety of pictures of a comic and satirical cast than was ever before presented at one view. Many nations, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, are represented in it, as well as most of the names identified with art of this nature. The extraordinary liberality of the publishers, and the skill of their corps of engravers, have seconded my own industrious researches, and the result is a volume unique, at least, in the character of its illustrations. A large portion of its contents appeared in Harper's Monthly Magazine during the year 1875; but many of the most curious and interesting of the pictures are given here for the first time; notably, those exhibiting the present or recent caricature of Germany, Spain, Italy, China, and Japan, several of which did not arrive in time for use in the periodical.
Generally speaking, articles contributed to a Magazine may as well be left in their natural tomb of "back numbers," or "bound volumes;" for the better they serve a temporary purpose, the less adapted they are for permanent utility. Among the exceptions are such series as the present, which had no reference whatever to the passing months, and in the preparation of which a great expenditure was directed to a single class of objects of special interest. I am, indeed, amazed at the cost of producing such articles as these. So very great is the expense, that many subjects could not be adequately treated, with all desirable illustration, unless the publishers could offer the work to the public in portions.
There is not much to be said upon the subject treated in this volume. When I was invited by the learned and urbane editor of Harper's Monthly to furnish a number of articles upon caricature, I supposed that the work proposed would be a relief after labors too arduous, too long continued, and of a more serious character. On the contrary, no subject that I ever attempted presented such baffling difficulties. After ransacking the world for specimens, and collecting them by the hundred, I found that, usually, a caricature is a thing of a moment, and that, dying as soon as its moment has passed, it loses all power to interest, instantly and forever. I found, too, that our respectable ancestors had not the least notion of what we call decency. When, therefore, I had laid aside from the mass the obsolete and the improper, there were not so very many left, and most of those told their own story so plainly that no elucidation was necessary. Instead of wearying the reader with a mere descriptive catalogue, I have preferred to accompany the pictures with allusions to contemporary satire other than pictorial.
The great living authorities upon this branch of art are two in number—one English, and one French—to both of whom I am greatly indebted. The English author is Thomas Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., whose "History of Caricature and the Grotesque" is well known among us, as well as his more recent volume upon the incomparable caricaturist of the last generation, James Gillray. The French writer is M. Jules Champfleury, author of a valuable series of volumes reviewing satiric art from ancient times to our own day, with countless illustrations. No one has treated so fully or so well as he the caricature of the Greeks and Romans. Many years ago, M. Champfleury began to illustrate this part of his subject in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, and his contributions to that important periodical were the basis of his subsequent volumes. He is one of the few writers on comic matters who have avoided the lapse into catalogue, and contrived to be interesting.
It has been agreeable to me to observe that Americans are not without natural aptitude in this kind of art. Our generous Franklin, the friend of Hogarth, to whom the dying artist wrote his last letter, replying to the last letter he ever received, was a capital caricaturist, and used his skill in this way, as he did all his other gifts and powers, in behalf of his country and his kind. At the present time, every week's issue of the illustrated periodicals exhibits evidence of the skill, as well as the patriotism and right feeling, of the humorous artists of the United States. For some years past, caricature has been a power in the land, and a power generally on the right side. There are also humorous artists of another and gentler kind, some even of the gentler sex, who present to us scenes which surprise us all into smiles and good temper without having in them any lurking sting of reproof. These domestic humorists, I trust, will continue to amuse and soften us, while the avenging satirist with dreadful pencil makes mad the guilty, and appalls the free.
There must be something precious in caricature, else the enemies of truth and freedom would not hate it as they do. Some of the worst excesses and perversions of satiric art are due to that very hatred. Persecuted and repressed, caricature becomes malign and perverse; or, being excluded from legitimate subjects, it seems as if it were compelled to ally itself to vice. We have only to turn from a heap of French albums to volumes of English caricature to have a striking evidence of the truth, that the repressive system represses good and develops evil. It is the "Censure" that debauches the comic pencil; it is freedom that makes it the ally of good conduct and sound politics. In free countries alone it has scope enough, without wandering into paths which the eternal proprieties forbid. I am sometimes sanguine enough to think that the pencil of the satirist will at last render war impossible, by bringing vividly home to all genial minds the ludicrous absurdity of such a method of arriving at truth. Fancy two armies "in presence." By some process yet to be developed, the Nast of the next generation, if not the admirable Nast of this, projects upon the sky, in the sight of the belligerent forces, a picture exhibiting the enormous comicality of their attitude and purpose. They all see the point, and both armies break up in laughter, and come together roaring over the joke.
In the hope that this volume may contribute something to the amusement of the happy at festive seasons, and to the instruction of the curious at all times, it is presented to the consideration of the public.
CHAPTER I. PAGE
Among the Romans 15
CHAPTER II.
Among the Greeks 28
CHAPTER III.
Among the Ancient Egyptians 32
CHAPTER IV.
Among the Hindoos 36
CHAPTER V.
Religious Caricature in the Middle Ages 40
CHAPTER VI.
Secular Caricature in the Middle Ages 50
CHAPTER VII.
Caricatures preceding the Reformation 64
CHAPTER VIII.
Comic Art and the Reformation 76
CHAPTER IX.
In the Puritan Period 90
CHAPTER X.
Later Puritan Caricature 105
CHAPTER XI.
Preceding Hogarth 120
CHAPTER XII.
Hogarth and his Time 133
CHAPTER XIII.
English Caricature in the Revolutionary Period 147
CHAPTER XIV.
During the French Revolution 159
CHAPTER XV.
Caricatures of Women and Matrimony 171
CHAPTER XVI.
Among the Chinese 191
CHAPTER XVII.
Comic Art in Japan 198
CHAPTER XVIII.
French Caricature 208
CHAPTER XIX.
Later French Caricature 230
CHAPTER XX.
Comic Art in Germany 242
CHAPTER XXI.
Comic Art in Spain 249
CHAPTER XXII.
Italian Caricature 257
CHAPTER XXIII.
English Caricature of the Present Century 267
CHAPTER XXIV.
Comic Art in "Punch" 284
CHAPTER XXV.
Early American Caricature 300
CHAPTER XXVI.
Later American Caricature 318
INDEX 335
Pigmy Pugilists—from Pompeii.
Much as the ancients differed from ourselves in other particulars, they certainly laughed at one another just as we do, for precisely the same reasons, and employed every art, device, and implement of ridicule which is known to us.
Observe this rude and childish attempt at a drawing. Go into any boys' school to-day, and turn over the slates and copy-books, or visit an inclosure where men are obliged to pass idle days, and you will be likely to find pictures conceived in this taste, and executed with this degree of artistic skill. But the drawing dates back nearly eighteen centuries. It was done on one of the hot, languid days of August, A.D. 79, by a Roman soldier with a piece of red chalk on a wall of his barracks in the city of Pompeii.[1] On the 23d of August, in the year 79, occurred the eruption of Vesuvius, which buried not Italian cities only, but Antiquity itself, and, by burying, preserved it for the instruction of after-times. In disinterred Pompeii, the Past stands revealed to us, and we remark with a kind of infantile surprise the great number of particulars in which the people of that day were even such as we are. There was found the familiar apothecary's shop, with a box of pills on the counter, and a roll of material that was about to be made up when the apothecary heard the warning thunder and fled. The baker's shop remained, with a loaf of bread stamped with the maker's name. A sculptor's studio was strewed with blocks of marble, unfinished statues, mallets, compasses, chisels, and saws. A thousand objects attest that when the fatal eruption burst upon these cities, life and its activities were going forward in all essential particulars as they are at this moment in any rich and luxurious town of Southern Europe.
In the building supposed to have been the quarters of the Roman garrison, many of the walls were covered with such attempts at caricature as the specimen just given, to some of which were appended opprobrious epithets and phrases. The name of the personage above portrayed was Nonius Maximus, who was probably a martinet centurion, odious to his company, for the name was found in various parts of the inclosure, usually accompanied by disparaging words. Many of the soldiers had simply chalked their own names; others had added the number of their cohort or legion, precisely as in the late war soldiers left records of their stay on the walls of fort and hospital. A large number of these wall-chalkings in red, white, and black (most of them in red) were clearly legible fifty years after exposure. I give another specimen, a genuine political caricature, copied from an outside wall of a private house in Pompeii.
Chalk Caricature on a Wall in Pompeii.
The allusion is to an occurrence in local history of the liveliest possible interest to the people. A few years before the fatal eruption there was a fierce town-and-country row in the amphitheatre, in which the Pompeians defeated and put to flight the provincial Nucerians. Nero condemned the pugnacious men of Pompeii to the terrible penalty of closing their amphitheatre for ten years. In the picture an armed man descends into the arena bearing the palm of victory, while on the other side a prisoner is dragged away bound. The inscription alone gives us the key to the street artist's meaning, Campani victoria una cum Nucerinis peristis—"Men of Campania, you perished in the victory not less than the Nucerians;" as though the patriotic son of Campania had written, "We beat 'em, but very little we got by it."
If the idlers of the streets chalked caricature on the walls, we can not be surprised to discover that Pompeian artists delighted in the comic and burlesque. Comic scenes from the plays of Terence and Plautus, with the names of the characters written over them, have been found, as well as a large number of burlesque scenes, in which dwarfs, deformed people, Pigmies, beasts, and birds are engaged in the ordinary labors of men. The gay and luxurious people of the buried cities seem to have delighted in nothing so much as in representations of Pigmies, for there was scarcely a house in Pompeii yet uncovered which did not exhibit some trace of the ancient belief in the existence of these little people. Homer, Aristotle, and Pliny all discourse of the Pigmies as actually existing, and the artists, availing themselves of this belief, which they shared, employed it in a hundred ways to caricature the doings of men of larger growth. Pliny describes them as inhabiting the salubrious mountainous regions of India, their stature about twenty-seven inches, and engaged in eternal war with their enemies, the geese. "They say," Pliny continues, "that, mounted upon rams and goats, and armed with bows and arrows, they descend in a body during spring-time to the edge of the waters, where they eat the eggs and the young of those birds, not returning to the mountains for three months. Otherwise they could not resist the ever-increasing multitude of the geese. The Pigmies live in cabins made of mud, the shells of goose eggs, and feathers of the same bird."
Battle between Pigmies and Geese.
Homer, in the third book of the "Iliad," alludes to the wars of the Cranes and Pigmies:
"So when inclement winters vex the plain
With piercing frosts, or thick-descending rain,
To warmer seas the Cranes embodied fly,
With noise and order through the midway sky;
To Pigmy nations wounds and death they bring,
And all the war descends upon the wing."
A Pigmy Scene—from Pompeii.
One of our engravings shows that not India only, but Egypt also, was regarded as the haunt of the Pigmy race; for the Upper Nile was then, as now, the home of the hippopotamus, the crocodile, and the lotus. Here we see a bald-headed Pigmy hero riding triumphantly on a mighty crocodile, regardless of the open-mouthed, bellowing hippopotamus behind him. In other pictures, however, the scaly monster, so far from playing this submissive part, is seen plunging in fierce pursuit of a Pigmy, who flies headlong before the foe. Frescoes, vases, mosaics, statuettes, paintings, and signet-rings found in the ancient cities all attest the popularity of the little men. The odd pair of vases on the following page, one in the shape of a boar's head and the other in that of a ram's, are both adorned with a representation of the fierce combats between the Pigmies and the geese.
There has been an extraordinary display of erudition in the attempt to account for the endless repetition of Pigmy subjects in the houses of the Pompeians; but the learned and acute M. Champfleury "humbly hazards a conjecture," as he modestly expresses it, which commends itself at once to general acceptance. He thinks these Pigmy pictures were designed to amuse the children. No conjecture could be less erudite or more probable. We know, however, as a matter of record, that the walls of taverns and wine-shops were usually adorned with Pigmy pictures, such subjects being associated in every mind with pleasure and gayety. It is not difficult to imagine that a picture of a pugilistic encounter between Pigmies, like the one given at the head of this chapter, or a fanciful representation of a combat of Pigmy gladiators, of which many have been discovered, would be both welcome and suitable as tavern pictures in the Italian cities of the classic period.
Vases with Pigmy Designs.
The Pompeians, in common with all the people of antiquity, had a child-like enjoyment in witnessing representations of animals engaged in the labors or the sports of human beings. A very large number of specimens have been uncovered, some of them gorgeous with the hues given them by masters of coloring eighteen hundred years ago. In the following cut is a specimen of these—a representation of a grasshopper driving a chariot, copied in 1802 from a Pompeian work for an English traveler.
A Grasshopper driving a Chariot.
From an Antique Amethyst.
Nothing can exceed either the brilliancy or the delicacy of the coloring of this picture in the original, the splendid plumage of the bird and the bright gold of the chariot shaft and wheel being relieved and heightened by a gray background and the greenish brown of the course. The colorists of Pompeii have obviously influenced the taste of Christendom. There are few houses of pretension decorated within the last quarter of a century, either in Europe or America, which do not exhibit combinations and contrasts of color of which the hint was found in exhumed Pompeii. One or two other small specimens of this kind of art, selected from a large number accessible, may interest the reader.
Flight of Æneas from Troy.
The spirited air of the team of cocks, and the nonchalant professional attitude of the charioteer, will not escape notice. Perhaps the most interesting example of this propensity to personify animals which the exhumed cities have furnished us is a burlesque of a popular picture of Æneas escaping from Troy, carrying his father, Anchises, on his back, and leading by the hand his son, Ascanius, the old man carrying the casket of household gods. No scene could have been more familiar to the people of Italy than one which exhibited the hero whom they regarded as the founder of their empire in so engaging a light, and to which the genius of Virgil had given a deathless charm:
"Thus ord'ring all that prudence could provide
I clothe my shoulders with a lion's hide
And yellow spoils; then on my bending back
The welcome load of my dear father take;
While on my better hand Ascanius hung,
And with unequal paces tripped along."
Artists found a subject in these lines, and of one picture suggested by them two copies have been found carved upon stone.
Caricature of the Flight of Æneas.
This device of employing animals' heads upon human bodies is still used by the caricaturist, so few are the resources of his branch of art; and we can not deny that it retains a portion of its power to excite laughter. If we may judge from what has been discovered of the burlesque art of the ancient nations, we may conclude that this idea, poor as it seems to us, was the one which the artists of antiquity most frequently employed. It was also common with them to burlesque familiar paintings, as in the instance given. It is not unlikely that the cloyed and dainty taste of the Pompeian connoisseur perceived something ridiculous in the too-familiar exploit of Father Æneas as represented in serious art, just as we smile at the theatrical attitudes and costumes in the picture of "Washington crossing the Delaware." Fancy that work burlesqued by putting an eagle's head upon the Father of his Country, filling the boat with magpie soldiers, covering the river with icebergs, and making the oars still more ludicrously inadequate to the work in hand than they are in the painting. Thus a caricaturist of Pompeii, Rome, Greece, Egypt, or Assyria would have endeavored to cast ridicule upon such a picture.
From a Red Jasper.
Few events of the last century were more influential upon the progress of knowledge than the chance discovery of the buried cities, since it nourished a curiosity respecting the past which could not be confined to those excavations, and which has since been disclosing antiquity in every quarter of the globe. We call it a chance discovery, although the part which accident plays in such matters is more interesting than important. The digging of a well in 1708 let daylight into the amphitheatre of Herculaneum, and caused some languid exploration, which had small results. Forty years later, a peasant at work in a vineyard five miles from the same spot struck with his hoe something hard, which was too firmly fixed in the ground to be moved. It proved to be a small statue of metal, upright, and riveted to a stone pedestal, which was itself immovably fastened to some solid mass still deeper in the earth. Where the hoe had struck the statue the metal showed the tempting hue of gold, and the peasant, after carefully smoothing over the surface, hurried away with a fragment of it to a goldsmith, intending (so runs the local gossip) to work this opening as his private gold mine. But as the metal was pronounced brass, he honestly reported the discovery to a magistrate, who set on foot an excavation. The statue was found to be a Minerva, fixed to the centre of a small roof-like dome, and when the dome was broken through it was seen to be the roof of a temple, of which the Minerva had been the topmost ornament. And thus was discovered, about the middle of the last century, the ancient city of Pompeii, buried by a storm of light ashes from Vesuvius sixteen hundred and seventy years before.
Roman Masks, Comic and Tragic.
It was not the accident, but the timeliness of the accident, which made it important; for there never could have been an excavation fifteen feet deep over the site of Pompeii without revealing indications of the buried city. But the time was then ripe for an exploration. It had become possible to excite a general curiosity in a Past exhumed; and such a curiosity is a late result of culture: it does not exist in a dull or in an ignorant mind. And this curiosity, nourished and inflamed as it was by the brilliant and marvelous things brought to light in Pompeii and Herculaneum, has sought new gratification wherever a heap of ruins betrayed an ancient civilization. It looks now as if many of the old cities of the world are in layers or strata—a new London upon an old London, and perhaps a London under that—a city three or four deep, each the record of an era. Two Romes we familiarly know, one of which is built in part upon the other; and at Cairo we can see the process going on by which some ancient cities were buried without volcanic aid. The dirt of the unswept streets, never removed, has raised the grade of Cairo from age to age.
A Roman Comic Actor masked for the Part of Silenus.
The excavations at Rome, so rich in results, were not needed to prove that to the Romans of old caricature was a familiar thing. The mere magnitude of their theatres, and their habit of performing plays in the open air, compelled caricature, the basis of which is exaggeration. Actors, both comic and tragic, wore masks of very elaborate construction, made of resonant metal, and so shaped as to serve, in some degree, the office of a speaking-trumpet. In the engravings on this page are represented a pair of masks such as were worn by Roman actors throughout the empire, of which many specimens have been found.
If the reader has ever visited the Coliseum at Rome, or even one of the large hippodromes of Paris or New York, and can imagine the attempts of an actor to exhibit comic or tragic effects of countenance or of vocal utterance across spaces so extensive, he will readily understand the necessity of such masks as these. The art of acting could only have been developed in small theatres. In the open air or in the uncovered amphitheatre all must have been vociferation and caricature. Observe the figure of old Silenus, on preceding page, one of the chief mirth-makers of antiquity, who lives for us in the Old Man of the pantomime. He is masked for the theatre.
The legend of Silenus is itself an evidence of the tendency of the ancients to fall into caricature. To the Romans he was at once the tutor, the comrade, and the butt of jolly Bacchus. He discoursed wisdom and made fun. He was usually represented as an old man, bald, flat-nosed, half drunk, riding upon a broad-backed ass, or reeling along by the aid of a staff, uttering shrewd maxims and doing ludicrous acts. People wonder that the pantomime called "Humpty Dumpty" should be played a thousand nights in New York; but the substance of all that boisterous nonsense, that exhibition of rollicking freedom from restraints of law, usage, and gravitation, has amused mankind for unknown thousands of years; for it is merely what remains to us of the legendary Bacchus and his jovial crew. We observe, too, that the great comic books, such as "Gil Blas," "Don Quixote," "Pickwick," and others, are most effective when the hero is most like Bacchus, roaming over the earth with merry blades, delightfully free from the duties and conditions which make bondmen of us all. Mr. Dickens may never have thought of it—and he may—but there is much of the charm of the ancient Bacchic legends in the narrative of the four Pickwickians and Samuel Weller setting off on the top of a coach, and meeting all kinds of gay and semi-lawless adventures in country towns and rambling inns. Even the ancient distribution of characters is hinted at. With a few changes, easily imagined, the irrepressible Sam might represent Bacchus, and his master bring to mind the sage and comic Silenus. Nothing is older than our modes of fun. Even in seeking the origin of Punch, investigators lose themselves groping in the dim light of the most remote antiquity.
How readily the Roman satirists ran into caricature all their readers know, except those who take the amusing exaggerations of Juvenal and Horace as statements of fact. During the heat of our antislavery contest, Dryden's translation of the passage in Juvenal which pictures the luxurious Roman lady ordering her slave to be put to death was used by the late Mr. W. H. Fry, in the New York Tribune, with thrilling effect:
"Go drag that slave to death! You reason, Why
Should the poor innocent be doomed to die?
What proofs? For, when man's life is in debate,
The judge can ne'er too long deliberate.
Call'st thou that slave a man? the wife replies.
Proved or unproved the crime, the villain dies.
I have the sovereign power to save or kill,
And give no other reason but my will."
This is evidently caricature. Not only is the whole of Juvenal's sixth satire a series of the broadest exaggerations, but with regard to this particular passage we have evidence of its burlesque character in Horace (Satire III., Book I.), where, wishing to give an example of impossible folly, he says, "If a man should crucify a slave for eating some of the fish which he had been ordered to take away, people in their senses would call him a madman." Juvenal exhibits the Roman matron of his period undergoing the dressing of her hair, giving the scene the same unmistakable character of caricature:
"She hurries all her handmaids to the task;
Her head alone will twenty dressers ask.
Psecas, the chief, with breast and shoulders bare,
Trembling, considers every sacred hair:
If any straggler from his rank be found,
A pinch must for the mortal sin compound.
"With curls on curls they build her head, before,
And mount it with a formidable tower.
A giantess she seems; but look behind,
And then she dwindles to the Pigmy kind.
Duck-legged, short-waisted, such a dwarf she is
That she must rise on tiptoe for a kiss.
Meanwhile her husband's whole estate is spent;
He may go bare, while she receives his rent."
The spirit of caricature speaks in these lines. There are passages of Horace, too, in reading which the picture forms itself before the mind; and the poet supplies the very words which caricaturists usually employ to make their meaning more obvious. In the third satire of the second book a caricature is exhibited to the mind's eye without the intervention of pencil. We see the miser Opimius, "poor amid his hoards of gold," who has starved himself into a lethargy; his heir is scouring his coffers in triumph; but the doctor devises a mode of rousing his patient. He orders a table to be brought into the room, upon which he causes the hidden bags of money to be poured out, and several persons to draw near as if to count it. Opimius revives at this maddening spectacle, and the doctor urges him to strengthen himself by generous food, and so balk his rapacious heir. "Do you hesitate?" cries the doctor. "Come, now, take this preparation of rice." "How much did it cost?" asks the miser. "Only a trifle." "But how much?" "Eightpence." Opimius, appalled at the price, whimpers, "Alas! what does it matter whether I die of a disease, or by plunder and extortion?" Many similar examples will arrest the eye of one who turns over the pages of this master of satire.
The great festival of the Roman year, the Saturnalia, which occurred in the latter half of December, we may almost say was consecrated to caricature, so fond were the Romans of every kind of ludicrous exaggeration. This festival, the merry Christmas of the Roman world, gave to the Christian festival many of its enlivening observances. During the Saturnalia the law courts and schools were closed; there was a general interchange of presents, and universal feasting; there were fantastic games, processions of masked figures in extravagant costumes, and religious sacrifices. For three days the slaves were not merely exempt from labor, but they enjoyed freedom of speech, even to the abusing of their masters. In one of his satires, Horace gives us an idea of the manner in which slaves burlesqued their lords at this jocund time. He reports some of the remarks of his own slave, Davus, upon himself and his poetry. Davus, it is evident, had discovered the histrionic element in literature, and pressed it home upon his master. "You praise the simplicity of the ancient Romans; but if any god were to reduce you to their condition, you, the same man that wrote those fine things, would beg to be let off. At Rome you long for the country; and when you are in the country, you praise the distant city to the skies. When you are not invited out to supper, you extol your homely repast at home, and hug yourself that you are not obliged to drink with any body abroad. As if you ever went out upon compulsion! But let Mæcenas send you an invitation for early lamp-light, then what do we hear? Will no one bring the oil quicker? Does any body hear me? You bellow and storm with fury. You bought me for five hundred drachmas, but what if it turns out that you are the greater fool of the two?" And thus the astute and witty Davus continues to ply his master with taunts and jeers and wise saws, till Horace, in fury, cries out, "Where can I find a stone?" Davus innocently asks, "What need is there here of such a thing as a stone?" "Where can I get some javelins?" roars Horace. Upon which Davus quietly remarks, "This man is either mad or making verses." Horace ends the colloquy by saying, "If you do not this instant take yourself off, I'll make a field-hand of you on my Sabine estate!"
Roman Wall Caricature of a Christian.
That Roman satirists employed the pencil and the brush as well as the stylus, and employed them freely and constantly, we should have surmised if the fact had not been discovered. Most of the caricatures of passing events speedily perish in all countries, because the materials usually employed in them are perishable. To preserve so slight a thing as a chalk sketch on a wall for eighteen centuries, accident must lend a hand, as it has in the instance now given.
This picture was found in 1857 upon the wall of a narrow Roman street, which was closed up and shut out from the light of day about A.D. 100, to facilitate an extension of the imperial palace. The wall when uncovered was found scratched all over with rude caricature drawings in the style of the specimen given. This one immediately arrested attention, and the part of the wall on which it was drawn was carefully removed to the Collegio Romano, in the museum of which it may now be inspected. The Greek words scrawled upon the picture may be translated thus: "Alexamenos is worshiping his god."
These words sufficiently indicate that the picture was aimed at some member, to us unknown, of the despised sect of the Christians. It is the only allusion to Christianity which has yet been found upon the walls of the Italian cities; but it is extremely probable that the street artists found in the strange usages of the Christians a very frequent subject.
We know well what the educated class of the Romans thought of the Christians, when they thought of them at all. They regarded them as a sect of extremely absurd Jews, insanely obstinate, and wholly contemptible. If the professors and students of Harvard and Yale should read in the papers that a new sect had arisen among the Mormons, more eccentric and ridiculous even than the Mormons themselves, the intelligence would excite in their minds about the same feeling that the courtly scholars of the Roman Empire manifest when they speak of the early Christians. Nothing astonished them so much as their "obstinacy." "A man," says the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, "ought to be ready to die when the time comes; but this readiness should be the result of a calm judgment, and not be an exhibition of mere obstinacy, as with the Christians." The younger Pliny, too, in his character of magistrate, was extremely perplexed with this same obstinacy. He tells us that when people were brought before him charged with being Christians, he asked them the question, Are you a Christian? If they said they were, he repeated it twice, threatening them with punishment; and if they persisted, he ordered them to be punished. If they denied the charge, he put them to the proof by requiring them to repeat after him an invocation to the gods, and to offer wine and incense to the emperor's statue. Some of the accused, he says, reviled Christ; and this he regarded as a sure proof of innocence, for people told him there was no forcing real Christians to do an act of that nature. Some of the accused owned that they had been Christians once, three years ago or more, and some twenty years ago, but had returned to the worship of the gods. These, however, declared that, after all, there was no great offense in being Christians. They had merely met on a regular day before dawn, addressed a form of prayer to Christ as to a divinity, and bound themselves by a solemn oath not to commit fraud, theft, or other immoral act, nor break their word, nor betray a trust; after which they used to separate, then re-assemble, and eat together a harmless meal.
All this seemed innocent enough; but Pliny was not satisfied. "I judged it necessary," he writes to the emperor, "to try to get at the real truth by putting to the torture two female slaves who were said to officiate at their religious rites; but all I could discover was evidence of an absurd and extravagant superstition." So he refers the whole matter to the emperor, telling him that the "contagion" is not confined to the cities, but has spread into the villages and into the country. Still, he thought it could be checked: nay, it had been checked; for the temples, which had been almost abandoned, were beginning to be frequented again, and there was also "a general demand for victims for sacrifice, which till lately had found few purchasers." The wise Trajan approved the course of his representative. He tells him, however, not to go out of his way to look for Christians; but if any were brought before him, why, of course he must inflict the penalty unless they proved their innocence by invoking the gods. The remains of Roman literature have nothing so interesting for us as these two letters of Pliny and Trajan of the year 103. We may rest assured that the walls of every Roman town bore testimony to the contempt and aversion in which the Christians were held, particularly by those who dealt in "victims" and served the altars—a very numerous and important class throughout the ancient world.
Greece was the native home of all that we now call art. Upon looking over the two hundred pages of art gossip in the writings of the elder Pliny, most of which relates to Greece, we are ready to ask, Is there one thing in painting or drawing, one school, device, style, or method, known to us which was not familiar to the Greeks? They had their Landseers—men great in dogs and all animals; they had artists renowned in the "Dutch style" ages before the Dutch ceased to be amphibious—artists who painted barber-shop interiors to a hair, and donkeys eating cabbages correct to a fibre; they had cattle pieces as famous throughout the classic world as Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair" is now in ours; they had Rosa Bonheurs of their own—famous women, a list of whose names Pliny gives; they had portrait-painters too good to be fashionable, and portrait-painters too fashionable to be good; they had artists who excelled in flesh, others great in form, others excellent in composition; they took plaster casts of dead faces; they had varnishers and picture-cleaners. Noted pictures were spoken of as having lost their charm through an unskillful cleaner. They had their "life school," and used it as artists now do, borrowing from each model her special beauty. Zeuxis, as Pliny records, was so scrupulously careful in the execution of a religious painting that "he had the young maidens of the place stripped for examination, and selected five of them, in order to adopt in his picture the most commendable points in the form of each." And we may be sure that every maiden of them felt it to be an honor thus to contribute perfection to a Juno, executed by the first artist of the world, which was to adorn the temple of her native city.
They played with art as men are apt to play with the implements of which they are masters. Sosus, the great artist in mosaics, executed at Pergamus the pavement of a banqueting-room which presented the appearance of a floor strewed with crumbs, fragments and scraps of a feast, not yet swept away. It was renowned as the "Unswept Hall of Pergamus." And what a pleasing story is that of the contest between Zeuxis and his rival, Parrhasius! On the day of trial Zeuxis hung in the place of exhibition a painting of grapes, and Parrhasius a picture of a curtain. Some birds flew to the grapes of Zeuxis, and began to pick at them. The artist, overjoyed at so striking a proof of his success, turned haughtily to his rival, and demanded that the curtain should be drawn aside and the picture revealed. But the curtain was the picture. He owned himself surpassed, since he had only deceived birds, but Parrhasius had deceived Zeuxis.
Burlesque of Jupiter's Wooing of the Princess Alcmena.
Could comic artists and caricaturists be wanting in Athens? Strange to say, it was the gods and goddesses whom the caricaturists of Greece as well as the comic writers chiefly selected for ridicule. All their works have perished except a few specimens preserved upon pottery. We show one from a Greek vase, a rude burlesque of one of Jupiter's love adventures, the father of gods and men being accompanied by a Mercury ludicrously unlike the light and agile messenger of the gods. The story goes that the Princess Alcmena, though betrothed to a lover, vowed her hand to the man who should avenge her slaughtered brothers. Jupiter assumed the form and face of the lover, and, pretending to have avenged her brothers' death, gained admittance. Pliny describes a celebrated burlesque painting of the birth of Bacchus from Jupiter's thigh, in which the god of the gods was represented wearing a woman's cap, in a highly ridiculous posture, crying out, and surrounded by goddesses in the character of midwives. The best specimen of Greek caricature that has come down to us burlesques no less serious a theme than the great oracle of Apollo at Delphos, given on page 30.
This remarkable work owes its preservation to the imperishable nature of the material on which it was executed. It was copied from a large vessel used by the Greeks and Romans for holding vinegar, a conspicuous object upon their tables, and therefore inviting ornament. What audacity to burlesque an oracle to which kings and conquerors humbly repaired for direction, and which all Greece held in awe! Crœsus propitiated this oracle by the gift of a solid golden lion as large as life, and the Phocians found in its coffers, and carried off, a sum equal to nearly eleven millions of dollars in gold. Such was the general belief in its divine inspiration! But in this picture we see the oracle, the god, and those who consult them, all exhibited in the broadest burlesque: Apollo as a quack doctor on his platform, with bag, bow, and cap; Chiron, old and blind, struggling up the steps to consult him, aided by Apollo at his head and a friend pushing behind; the nymphs surveying the scene from the heights of Parnassus; and the manager of the spectacle, who looks on from below. How strange is this!
But the Greek literature is also full of this wild license. Lucian depicts the gods in council ludicrously discussing the danger they were in from the philosophers. Jupiter says, "If men are once persuaded that there are no gods, or, if there are gods, that we take no care of human affairs, we shall have no more gifts or victims from them, but may sit and starve on Olympus without festivals, holidays, sacrifices, or any pomp or ceremonies whatever." The whole debate is in this manner, and is at the same time a burlesque of the political discussions at the Athenian mass-meetings. What can be more ludicrous than the story of Mercury visiting Athens in disguise in order to discover the estimation in which he was held among mortals? He enters the shop of a dealer in images, where he inquires the price first of a Jupiter, then of an Apollo, and, lastly, with a blush, of a Mercury. "Oh," says the dealer, "if you take the Jupiter and the Apollo, I will throw the Mercury in."
Greek Caricature of the Oracle of Apollo at Delphos.
Nor did the witty, rollicking Greeks confine their satire to the immortals. Of the famous mirth-provokers of the world, such as Cervantes, Ariosto, Molière, Rabelais, Sterne, Voltaire, Thackeray, Dickens, the one that had most power to produce mere physical laughter, power to shake the sides and cause people to roll helpless upon the floor, was the Greek dramatist Aristophanes. The force of the comic can no farther go than he has carried it in some of the scenes of his best comedies. Even to us, far removed as we are, in taste as well as in time, from that wonderful Athens of his, they are still irresistibly diverting. This master of mirth is never so effective as when he is turning into ridicule the philosophers and poets for whose sake Greece is still a dear, venerable name to all the civilized world. In his comedy of "The Frogs" he sends Bacchus down into Hades with every circumstance of riotous burlesque, and there he exhibits the two great tragic poets, Æschylus and Euripides, standing opposite each other, and competing for the tragic throne by reciting verses in which the mannerism of each, as well as familiar passages of their plays, is broadly burlesqued. Nothing in literature can be found more ludicrous or less becoming, unless we look for it in Aristophanes himself. In his play of "The Clouds" occurs his caricature of Socrates, of infinite absurdity, but not ludicrous to us, because we read it as part of the story of a sublime and affecting martyrdom. It fills our minds with wonder to think that a people among whom a Socrates could have been formed could have borne to see him thus profaned. A rogue of a father, plagued by an extravagant son, repairs to the school of Socrates to learn the arts by which creditors are argued out of their just claims in courts of justice. Upon reaching the place, the door of the "Thinking Shop" opens, and behold! a caricature all ready for the artist's pencil. The pupils are discovered with their heads fixed to the floor, their backs uppermost, and Socrates hanging from the ceiling in a basket. The visitor, transfixed with wonder, questions his companion. He asks why they present that portion of their bodies to heaven. "It is getting taught astronomy alone by itself." "And who is this man in the basket?" "Himself." "Who's Himself?" "Socrates!" The visitor at length addresses the master by a diminutive, as though he had said, "Socrates, dear little Socrates." The philosopher speaks: "Why callest thou me, thou creature of a day?" "Tell me, first, I beg, what you are doing up there." "I am walking in the air, and speculating about the sun; for I should never have rightly learned celestial things if I had not suspended the intellect, and subtly mingled Thought with its kindred Air." All this is in the very spirit of caricature. Half of Aristophanes is caricature. In characterizing the light literature of Greece we are reminded of Juvenal's remark upon the Greek people, "All Greece is a comedian."
Egyptian art was old when Grecian art was young, and it remained crude when the art of Greece had reached its highest development. But not the less did it delight in caricature and burlesque. In the Egyptian collection belonging to the New York Historical Society there is a specimen of the Egyptians' favorite kind of burlesque picture which dates back three thousand years, but which stands out more clearly now upon its slab of limestone than we can engrave it here.
An Egyptian Caricature.
Dr. Abbott, who brought this specimen from Thebes, interpreted it to be a representation of a lion seated upon a throne, as king, receiving from a fox, personating a high-priest, an offering of a goose and a fan. It is probably a burlesque of a well-known picture; for in one of the Egyptian papyri in the British Museum there is a drawing of a lion and unicorn playing chess, which is a manifest caricature of a picture frequently repeated upon the ancient monuments. It was from Egypt, then, that the classic nations caught this childish fancy of ridiculing the actions of men by picturing animals performing similar ones; and it is surprising to note how fond the Egyptian artists were of this simple device. On the same papyrus there are several other interesting specimens: a lion on his hind-legs engaged in laying out as a mummy the dead body of a hoofed animal; a tiger or wild cat driving a flock of geese to market; another tiger carrying a hoe on one shoulder and a bag of seed on the other; an animal playing on a double pipe, and driving before him a herd of small stags, like a shepherd; a hippopotamus washing his hands in a tall water-jar; an animal on a throne, with another behind him as a fan-bearer, and a third presenting him with a bouquet. No place was too sacred for such playful delineations. In one of the royal sepulchres at Thebes, as Kenrick relates, there is a picture of an ass and a lion singing, accompanying themselves on the phorminx and the harp. There is also an elaborate burlesque of a battle piece, in which a fortress is attacked by rats, and defended by cats, which are visible on the battlements. Some rats bring a ladder to the walls and prepare to scale them, while others, armed with spears, shields, and bows, protect the assailants. One rat of enormous size, in a chariot drawn by dogs, has pierced several cats with arrows, and is swinging round his battle-axe in exact imitation of Rameses, in a serious picture, dealing destruction on his enemies. On a papyrus at Turin there is a representation of a cat with a shepherd's crook watching a flock of geese, while a cynocephalus near by plays upon the flute. Of this class of burlesques the most interesting example, perhaps, is the one annexed, representing a Soul doomed to return to its earthly home in the form of a pig.
A Condemned Soul, Egyptian Caricature.
This picture, which is of such antiquity that it was an object of curiosity to the Romans and the Greeks, is part of the decoration of a king's tomb. In the original, Osiris, the august judge of departed spirits, is represented on his throne, near the stern of the boat, waving away the Soul, which he has just weighed in his unerring scales and found wanting; while close to the shore a man hews away the ground, to intimate that all communication is cut off between the lost spirit and the abode of the blessed. The animals that execute the stern decree are the dog-headed monkeys, sacred in the mythology of Egypt.
Egyptian Servants conveying Home their Masters from a Carouse.
That the ancient Egyptians were a jovial people who sat long at the wine, we might infer from the caricatures which have been discovered in Egypt, if we did not know it from other sources of information. Representations have been found of every part of the process of wine-making, from the planting of the vineyard to the storing-away of the wine-jars. In the valuable works of Sir Gardner Wilkinson[2] many of these curious pictures are given: the vineyard and its trellis-work; men frightening away the birds with slings; a vineyard with a water-tank for irrigation; the grape harvest; baskets full of grapes covered with leaves; kids browsing upon the vines; trained monkeys gathering grapes; the wine-press in operation; men pressing grapes by the natural process of treading; pouring the wine into jars; and rows of jars put away for future use. The same laborious author favors us with ancient Egyptian caricatures which serve to show that wine was a creature as capable of abuse thirty centuries ago as it is now.
Pictures of similar character are not unfrequent upon the ancient frescoes, and many of them are far more extravagant than this, exhibiting men dancing wildly, standing upon their heads, and riotously fighting. From Sir Gardner Wilkinson's disclosures we may reasonably infer that the arts of debauchery have received little addition during the last three thousand years. Even the seductive cocktail is not modern. The ancient Egyptians imbibed stimulants to excite an appetite for wine, and munched the biting cabbage-leaf for the same purpose. Beer in several varieties was known to them also; veritable beer, made of barley and a bitter herb; beer so excellent that the dainty Greek travelers commended it as a drink only inferior to wine. Even the Egyptian ladies did not always resist the temptation of so many modes of intoxication. Nor did they escape the caricaturist's pencil.
Too Late with the Basin.
This unfortunate lady, as Sir Gardner conjectures, after indulging in potations deep of the renowned Egyptian wine, had been suddenly overtaken by the consequences, and had called for assistance too late. Egyptian satirists did not spare the ladies, and they aimed their shafts at the same foibles that have called forth so many efforts of pencil and pen in later times. Whenever, indeed, we look closely into ancient life, we are struck with the similarity of the daily routine to that of our own time. Every detail of social existence is imperishably recorded upon the monuments of ancient Egypt, even to the tone and style and mishaps of a fashionable party. We see the givers of the entertainment, the master and mistress of the mansion, seated side by side upon a sofa; the guests coming up as they arrive to salute them; the musicians and dancers bowing low to them before beginning to perform; a pet monkey, a dog, or a gazelle tied to the leg of the sofa; the youngest child of the family sitting on the floor by its mother's side, or upon its father's knee; the ladies sitting in groups, conversing upon the deathless, inexhaustible subject of dress, and showing one another their trinkets.
Sir Gardner Wilkinson gives us also the pleasing information that it was thought a pretty compliment for one guest to offer another a flower from his bouquet, and that the guests endeavored to gratify their entertainers by pointing out to one another, with expressions of admiration, the tasteful knickknacks, the boxes of carved wood or ivory, the vases, the elegant light tables, the chairs, ottomans, cushions, carpets, and furniture with which the apartment was provided. This too transparent flattery could not escape such inveterate caricaturists as the Egyptian artists. In a tomb at Thebes may be seen a ludicrous representation of scenes at a party where several of the guests had been lost in rapturous admiration of the objects around them. A young man, either from awkwardness or from having gone too often to the wine-jar, had reclined against a wooden column placed in the centre of the room to support a temporary ornament. There is a crash! The ornamental structure falls upon some of the absorbed guests. Ladies have recourse to the immortal privilege of their sex—they scream. All is confusion. Uplifted hands ward off the falling masses. In a few moments, when it is discovered that no one is hurt, peace is restored, and all the company converse merrily over the incident.
It is strange to find such pictures in a tomb. But it seems as if death and funerals and graves, with their elaborate paraphernalia, were provocative of mirthful delineation. In one noted royal tomb there is a representation of the funeral procession, part of which was evidently designed to excite merriment. The Ethiopians who follow in the train of the mourning queen have their hair plaited in most fantastic fashion, and their tunics of leopard's skin are so arranged that a preposterously enormous tail hangs down behind for the next man to step upon. One of the extensive colored plates of Sir Gardner Wilkinson's larger work presents to our view a solemn and stately procession of funeral barges crossing the Lake of the Dead at Thebes on its way to the place of burial. The first boat contains the coffin, decorated with flowers, a high-priest burning incense before a table of offerings, and the female relatives of the deceased lamenting their loss; two barges are filled with mourning friends, one containing only women and the other only men; two more are occupied by professional persons—the undertaker's assistants, as we should call them—employed to carry offerings, boxes, chairs, and other funeral objects. It was in drawing one of these vessels that the artist could not refrain from putting in a little fun. One of the barges having grounded upon the shore, the vessel behind comes into collision with her, upsetting a table upon the oarsmen and causing much confusion. It is not improbable that the picture records an incident of that particular funeral.
If we go farther back into antiquity, it is India which first arrests and longest absorbs our attention—India, fecund mother of tradition, the source of almost all the rites, beliefs, and observances of the ancient nations. When we visit the collections of the India House, the British Museum, the Mission Rooms, or turn over the startling pages of "The Hindu Pantheon" of Major Edward Moor, we are ready to exclaim, Here all is caricature! This brazen image, for example, of a partly naked man with an elephant's head and trunk, seated upon a huge rat, and feeding himself with his trunk from a bowl held in his hand—surely this is caricature. By no means. It is an image of the most popular of the Hindoo deities—Ganesa, god of prudence and policy, invoked at the beginning of all enterprises, and over whose head is written the sacred word Aum, never uttered by a Hindoo except with awe and veneration. If a man begins to build a house, he calls on Ganesa, and sets up an image of him near the spot. Mile-stones are fashioned in his likeness, and he serves as the road-side god, even if the pious peasants who place him where two roads cross can only afford the rudest resemblance to an elephant's head daubed with oil and red ochre. Rude as it may be, a passing traveler will occasionally hang upon it a wreath of flowers. Major Moor gives us a hideous picture of Maha-Kala, with huge mouth and enormous protruding tongue, squat, naked, upon the ground, and holding up a large sword. This preposterous figure is still farther removed from the burlesque. It is the Hindoo mode of representing Eternity, whose vast insatiate maw devours men, cities, kingdoms, and will at length swallow the universe; then all the crowd of inferior deities, and finally itself, leaving only Brahm, the One Eternal, to inhabit the infinite void. Hundreds of such revolting crudities meet the eye in every extensive Indian collection.
But the element of fun and burlesque is not wanting in the Hindoo Pantheon. Krishna is the jolly Bacchus, the Don Juan, of the Indian deities. Behold him on his travels mounted upon an elephant, which is formed of the bodies of the obliging damsels who accompany him!
The Hindoo God Krishna on his Travels.
There is no end to the tales related of the mischievous, jovial, irrepressible Krishna. The ladies who go with him everywhere, a countless multitude, are so accommodating as to wreathe and twist themselves into the form of any creature he may wish to ride; sometimes into that of a horse, sometimes into that of a bird.
Krishna's Attendants assuming the Form of a Bird.
In other pictures he appears riding in a palanquin, which is likewise composed of girls, and the bearers are girls also. In the course of one adventure, being in great danger from the wrath of his numerous enemies, he created an enormous snake, in whose vast interior his flocks, his herds, his followers, and himself found refuge. At a festival held in his honor, which was attended by a great number of damsels, he suddenly appeared in the midst of the company and proposed a dance; and, that each of them might be provided with a partner, he divided himself into as many complete and captivating Krishnas as there were ladies. One summer, when he was passing the hot season on the sea-shore with his retinue of ladies, his musical comrade, Nareda, hinted to him that, since he had such a multitude of wives, it would be no great stretch of generosity to spare one to a poor musician who had no wife at all. "Court any one you please," said the merry god. So Nareda went wooing from house to house, but in every house he found Krishna perfectly domesticated, the ever-attentive husband, and the lady quite sure that she had him all to herself. Nareda continued his quest until he had visited precisely sixteen thousand and eight houses, in each and all of which, at one and the same time, Krishna was the established lord. Then he gave it up. One of the pictures which illustrate the endless biography of this entertaining deity represents him going through the ceremony of marriage with a bear, both squatting upon a carpet in the prescribed attitude, the bear grinning satisfaction, two bears in attendance standing on their hind-feet, and two priests blessing the union. This picture is more spirited, is more like art, than any other yet copied from Hindoo originals.
Krishna in his Palanquin.
To this day, as the missionaries report, the people of India are excessively addicted to every kind of jesting which is within their capacity, and delight especially in all the monstrous comicalities of their mythology. No matter how serious an impression a speaker may have made upon a village group, let him but use a word in a manner which suggests a ludicrous image or ridiculous pun, and the assembly at once breaks up in laughter, not to be gathered again.
In late years, those of the inhabitants of India who read the language of their conquerors have had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with their humor. Wherever a hundred English officers are gathered, there is the possibility of an illustrated comic periodical, and, accordingly, we find one such in several of the garrisoned places held by the English in remote parts of the world. Calcutta, as the Athenæum informs us, "has its Punch, or Indian Charivari," which is not unworthy of its English namesake.
Mr. Robert Tomes, American consul, a few years ago, at the French city of Rheims, describes very agreeably the impression made upon his mind by the grand historic cathedral of that ancient place.[3] Filled with a sense of the majestic presence of the edifice, he approached one of the chief portals, to find it crusted with a most uncouth semi-burlesque representation, cut in stone, of the Last Judgment. The trump has sounded, and the Lord from a lofty throne is pronouncing doom upon the risen as they are brought up to the judgment-seat by the angels. Below him are two rows of the dead just rising from their graves, extending to the full width of the great door. Upon many of the faces there is an expression of amazement, which the artist apparently designed to be comic, and several of the attitudes are extremely absurd and ludicrous. Some have managed to push off the lid of their tombs a little way, and are peeping out through the narrow aperture, others have just got their heads above the surface of the ground, and others are sitting up in their graves; some have one leg out, some are springing into the air, and some are running, as if in wild fright, for their lives. Though the usual expression upon the faces is one of astonishment, yet this is varied. Some are rubbing their eyes as if startled from a deep sleep, but not yet aware of the cause of alarm; others are utterly bewildered, and hesitate to leave their resting-place; some leap out in mad excitement, and others hurry off as if fearing to be again consigned to the tomb. An angel is leading a cheerful company of popes, bishops, and kings toward the Saviour, while a hideous demon, with a mouth stretching from ear to ear, is dragging off a number of the condemned toward the devil, who is seen stirring up a huge caldron boiling and bubbling with naked babies, dead before baptism. On another part of the wall is a carved representation of the vices which led to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. These were so monstrously obscene that the authorities of the cathedral, in deference to the modern sense of decency, have caused them to be partly cut away by the chisel.
The first cut on the next page is an example of burlesque ornament. The artist apparently intended to indicate another termination of the interview than the one recorded by Æsop between the wolf and the stork. The old cathedral at Strasburg, destroyed a hundred years ago, was long renowned for its sculptured burlesques. We give two of several capitals exhibiting the sacred rites of the Church travestied by animals.
Capital in the Autun Cathedral.
It marks the change in the feelings and manners of men that, three hundred years after those Strasburg capitals were carved, with the sanction of the chapter, a book-seller, for only exhibiting an engraving of some of them in his shop window, was convicted of having committed a crime "most scandalous and injurious to religion." His sentence was "to make the amende honorable, naked to his shirt, a rope round his neck, holding in his hand a lighted wax-candle weighing two pounds, before the principal door of the cathedral, whither he will be conducted by the executioner, and there, on his knees, with uncovered head," confess his fault and ask pardon of God and the king. The pictures were to be burned before his eyes, and then, after paying all the costs of the prosecution, he was to go into eternal banishment.
Capitals in the Strasburg Cathedral, A.D. 1300.
Other American consuls besides Mr. Tomes, and multitudes of American citizens not so fortunate as to study mediæval art at their country's expense, have been profoundly puzzled by this crust of crude burlesque on ecclesiastical architecture. The objects in Europe which usually give to a susceptible American his first and his last rapture are the cathedrals, those venerable enigmas, the glory and shame of the Middle Ages, which present so complete a contrast to the toy-temples, new, cabinet-finished, upholstered, sofa-seated, of American cities, not to mention the consecrated barns, white-painted and treeless, of the rural districts. And the cathedrals are a contrast to every thing in Europe also, if only from their prodigious magnitude. A cathedral town generally stands in a valley, through which a small river winds. When the visitor from any of the encompassing hills gets his first view of the compact little city, the cathedral looms up in the midst thereof so vast, so tall, that the disproportion to the surrounding structures is sometimes even ludicrous, like a huge black elephant with a flock of small brown sheep huddling about its feet. But when at last the stranger stands in its shadow, he finds the spell of its presence irresistible; and it is a spell which the lapse of time not unfrequently strengthens, till he is conscious of a tender, strong attachment to the edifice, which leads him to visit it at unusual times, to try the effect upon it of moonlight, of storm, of dawn and twilight, of mist, rain, and snow. He finds himself going to it for solace and rest. On setting out upon a journey, he makes a détour to get another last look, and, returning, goes, valise in hand, to see his cathedral before he sees his companions. Many American consuls have had this experience, have truly fallen in love with the cathedral of their station, and remained faithful to it for years after their return, like Mr. Howells, whose heart and pen still return to Venice and San Carlo, so much to the delight of his readers.
This charm appears to lie in the mere grandeur of the edifice as a work of art, for we observe it to be most potent over persons who are least in sympathy with the feeling which cathedrals embody. Very religious people are as likely to be repelled as attracted by them; and, indeed, in England and Scotland there are large numbers of Dissenters who have avoided entering them all their lives on principle. It is Americans who enjoy them most; for they see in them a most captivating assemblage of novelties—vast magnitude, solidity of structure only inferior to nature's own work, venerable age, harmonious and solemn magnificence—all combined in an edifice which can not, on any principle of utility, justify its existence, and does not pay the least fraction of its expenses. Little do they know personally of the state of feeling which made successive generations of human beings willing to live in hovels and inhale pollution in order that they might erect those wondrous piles. The cost of maintaining them—of which cost the annual expenditure in money is the least important part—does not come home to us. We abandon ourselves without reserve to the enjoyment of stupendous works wholly new to our experience.
Engraved upon a Stall in Sherborne Minster, England.
It is Americans, also, who are most baffled by the attempt to explain the contradiction between the noble proportions of these edifices and the decorations upon some of their walls. How could it have been, we ask in amazement, that minds capable of conceiving the harmonies of these fretted roofs, these majestic colonnades, these symmetrical towers, could also have permitted their surfaces to be profaned by sculptures so absurd and so abominable that by no artifice of circumlocution can an idea of some of them be conveyed in printable words? In close proximity to statues of the Virgin, and in chapels whose every line is a line of beauty, we know not how to interpret what M. Champfleury truly styles "deviltries and obscenities unnamable, vice and passion depicted with gross brutality, luxury which has thrown off every disguise, and shows itself naked, bestial, and shameless." And these mediæval artists availed themselves of the accumulated buffooneries and monstrosities of all the previous ages. The gross conceptions of India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome appear in the ornamentation of Christian temples along with shapes hideous or grotesque which may have been original. Even the oaken stalls in which the officiating priests rested during the prolonged ceremonials of festive days are in many cathedrals covered with comic carving, some of which is pure caricature. A rather favorite subject was the one shown above, a whipping-scene in a school, carved upon an ancient stall in an English cathedral.
From a Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century.
It is not certain, however, that the artist had any comic intention in engraving this picture of retributive justice, with which the children of former ages were so familiar. It was a standard subject. The troops of Flemish carvers who roamed over Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, offering their services wherever a church was to be decorated, carried with them port-folios of stock subjects, of which this was one. Other carvings are unmistakable caricatures: a monk caught making love to a nun, a wife beating her husband, an aged philosopher ridden by a woman, monkeys wearing bishops' mitres, barbers drawing teeth in ludicrous attitudes, and others less describable. In the huge cathedral of English Winchester, which abounds in curious relics of the Middle Ages, there is a series of painted panels in the chapel of Our Lady, one of which is an evident caricature of the devil. He is having his portrait painted, and the Virgin Mary is near the artist, urging him to paint him blacker and uglier than usual. The devil does not like this, and wears an expression similar to that of a rogue in a modern police station who objects to being photographed. Often, however, in these old pictures the devil is master of the situation, and exhibits contempt for his adversaries in indecorous ways.
If we turn from the sacred edifices to the sacred books used in them—those richly illuminated missals, the books of "Hours," the psalters, and other works of devotion—we are amazed beyond expression to discover upon their brilliant pages a similar taste in ornamentation. The school scene on the previous page, in which monkey-headed children are playing school, dates back to the thirteenth century.
Burlesque tournaments, in the same taste, often figure in the prayer-books among representations of the Madonna, the crucifixion, and scenes in the lives of the patriarchs. The gallant hare tilts at the fierce cock of the barn-yard, or sly Reynard parries the thrust of the clumsy bear.
From a Manuscript Mass-book of the Fourteenth Century.
One of the most curious relics of those religious centuries is a French prayer-book preserved in the British Museum, where it was discovered and described by Mr. Malcolm, one of the first persons who ever attempted to elucidate the subject of caricature. Besides the "Hours of the Blessed Virgin," it contains various prayers and collects, the office for the dead, and some psalms, all in Latin. It is illustrated by several brilliantly colored, well-drawn, but most grotesque and incomprehensible figures, designed, as has been conjectured, to "expose the wicked and inordinate lives of the clergy, who were hated by the manuscript writers as taking away much of their business." This was the explanation given of these remarkable pictures to the trustees of the Museum by the collector of whom they bought the volume. Several of them are submitted to the reader's ingenuity on the following page.
Besides the specimens given, there is a wolf growling at a snake twisting itself round its hind-leg; there is "a grinning-match" between a human head on an animal's body and a boar's head on a monkey's body; there is a creature like a pea-hen, with two bodies, one neck, and two dogs' heads; there is an animal with four bodies and one head; there is a bearded man's face and a woman's on one neck, and the body has no limbs, but an enormous tail; there is a turret, on the top of which a monkey sits, and a savage below is aiming an arrow at him. In the British Museum—that unequaled repository of all that is curious and rare—there is the famous and splendid psalter of Richard II., containing many strange pictures in the taste of the period. On the second page, for example, along with two pictures of the kind usual in Catholic works of devotion, there is a third which represents an absurd combat within lists between the court-fool and the court-giant. The fool, who is also a dwarf, is belaboring the giant with an instrument like those hollow clubs used in our pantomimes when the clown is to be whacked with great violence. The giant shrinks from the blows, and the king, pointing at the dwarf, seems to say, "Go it, little one; I bet upon you."
From a French Prayer-book of the Thirteenth Century, in the British Museum.
Mr. Malcolm, who copied this picture from the original, where, he says, it is most superbly finished, interprets it to be a caricature of the famous combat between David and Goliath in the presence of King Saul and his court. In the same mass-book there is a highly ridiculous representation of Jonah on board ship, with a blue Boreas with cheeks puffed out raising the tempest, and a black devil clawing the sail from the yard. In selecting a few of the more innocent pictures from the prayer-book of Queen Mary, daughter of Henry VIII. of England, Mr. Malcolm gives expression to his amazement at the character of the drawings, which he dared not exhibit to a British public! Was this book, he asks, made on purpose for the queen? Was it a gift or a purchase? But whether she bought or whether she accepted it, he thinks she must have "delighted in ludicrous and improper ideas," or else "her inclination for absurdity and caricature conquered even her religion, in defense of which she spread ruin and desolation through her kingdom."
From Queen Mary's Prayer-book, A.D. 1553.
As the reader has now before his eyes a sufficient number of specimens of the grotesque ecclesiastical ornamentation of the period under consideration, he is prepared to consider the question which has perplexed so many students besides Mr. Malcolm: How are we to account for these indecencies in places and books consecrated to devotion? A voice from the Church of the fifth century gives us the hint of the true answer. "You ask me," writes St. Nilus to Olympiodorus of Alexandria, "if it is becoming in us to cover the walls of the sanctuary with representations of animals of all kinds, so that we see upon them snares set, hares, goats, and other beasts in full flight before hunters exhausting themselves in taking and pursuing them with their dogs; and, again, upon the bank of a river, all kinds of fish caught by fishermen. I answer you that this is a puerility with which to amuse the eyes of the faithful."[4] To one who is acquainted with the history and genius of the Roman Catholic Church, this very simple explanation of the incongruity is sufficient. The policy of that wonderful organization in every age has been to make every possible concession to ignorance that is compatible with the continuance of ignorance. It has sought always to amuse, to edify, to moralize, and console ignorance, but never to enlighten it. The mind that planned the magnificent cathedral at Rheims, of which Mr. Tomes was so much enamored, and the artists who designed the glorious San Carlo that kindled rapture in the poetical mind of Mr. Howells, did indeed permit the scandalous burlesques that disfigure their walls; but they only permitted them. It was a concession which they had to grant to the ignorant multitude whose unquestioning faith alone made these enormous structures possible.
We touch here the question insinuated by Gibbon in his first volume, where he plainly enough intimates his belief that Christianity was a lapse into barbarism rather than a deliverance from it. Plausible arguments in the same direction have been frequently made since Gibbon's time by comparing the best of Roman civilization with the worst of the self-torturing monkery of the early Christian centuries. In a debate on this subject in New York not long since between a member of the bar and a doctor of divinity, both of them gentlemen of learning, ability, and candor, the lawyer pointed to the famous picture of St. Jerome (A.D. 375), naked, grasping a human skull, his magnificent head showing vast capacity paralyzed by an absorbing terror, and exclaimed, "Behold the lapse from Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, the Plinys, and the Antonines!" The answer made by the clergyman was, "That is not Christianity! In the Christian books no hint of that, no utterance justifying that, can be found." Perhaps neither of the disputants succeeded in expressing the whole truth on this point. The vaunted Roman civilization was, in truth, only a thin crust upon the surface of the empire, embracing but one small class in each province, the people everywhere being ignorant slaves. Into that inert mass of servile ignorance Christianity enters, and receives from it the interpretation which ignorance always puts upon ideas advanced or new, interpreting it as hungry French peasants in 1792 and South Carolina negroes in 1870 interpreted modern ideas of human rights. The new leaven set the mass heaving and swelling until the crust was broken to pieces. The civilization of Marcus Aurelius was lost. From parchment scrolls poetry and philosophy were obliterated, that the sheets might be used for prayers and meditations. The system of which St. Jerome was the product and representative was a baleful mixture, of which nine-tenths were Hindoo and the remaining tenth was half Christian and half Plato.
The true inference to be drawn is that no civilization is safe, nor even genuine, until it embraces all classes of the community; and the promulgation of Christianity was the first step toward that.
As the centuries wore on, the best of the clergy grew restive under this monstrous style of ornamentation. "What purpose," wrote St. Bernard, about A.D. 1140, "serve in our cloisters, under the eyes of the brothers and during their pious readings, those ridiculous monstrosities, those prodigies of beauties deformed or deformities made beautiful? Why those nasty monkeys, those furious lions, those monstrous centaurs, those animals half human, those spotted tigers, those soldiers in combat, those huntsmen sounding the horn? Here a single head is fitted to several bodies; there upon a single body there are several heads; now a quadruped has a serpent's tail, and now a quadruped's head figures upon a fish's body. Sometimes it is a monster with the fore parts of a horse and the hinder parts of a goat; again an animal with horns ends with the hind quarters of a horse. Everywhere is seen a variety of strange forms, so numerous and so odd that the brothers occupy themselves more in deciphering the marbles than their books, and pass whole days in studying all those figures much more attentively than the divine law. Great God! if you are not ashamed of such useless things, how, at least, can you avoid regretting the enormity of their cost?"
How, indeed! The honest abbé was far from seeing the symbolical meaning in those odd figures which modern investigators have imagined. He was simply ashamed of the ecclesiastical caricatures; but a century or two later ingenious writers began to cover them with the fig-leaves of a symbolical interpretation. According to the ingenious M. Durand, who wrote (A.D. 1459) thirty years before Luther was born, every part of a cathedral has its spiritual meaning. The stones of which it is built represent the faithful, the lime that forms part of the cement is an emblem of fervent charity, the sand mingled with it signifies the actions undertaken by us for the good of our brethren, and the water in which these ingredients blend is the symbol of the Holy Ghost. The hideous shapes sculptured upon the portals are, of course, malign spirits flying from the temple of the Lord, and seeking refuge in the very substance of the walls! The great length of the temple signifies the tireless patience with which the faithful support the ills of this life in expectation of their celestial home; its breadth symbolizes that large and noble love which embraces both the friends and the enemies of God; its height typifies the hope of final pardon; the roof beams are the prelates, who by the labor of preaching exhibit the truth in all its clearness; the windows are the Scriptures, which receive the light from the sun of truth, and keep out the winds, snows, and hail of heresy and false doctrine devised by the father of schism and falsehood; the iron bars and pins that sustain the windows are the general councils, ecumenical and orthodox, which have sustained the holy and canonical Scriptures; the two perpendicular stone columns which support the windows are the two precepts of Christian charity, to love God and our neighbor; the length of the windows shows the profundity and obscurity of Scripture, and their roundness indicates that the Church is always in harmony with itself.
This is simple enough. But M. Jérôme Bugeaud, in his collection of "Chansons Populaires" of the western provinces of France, gives part of a catechism still taught to children, though coming down from the Middle Ages, which carries this quaint symbolizing to a point of the highest absurdity. The catechism turns upon the sacred character of the lowly animal that most needed any protection which priestly ingenuity could afford. Here are a few of the questions and answers:
Priest. "What signify the two ears of the ass?"
Child. "The two ears of the ass signify the two great patron saints of our city."
Priest. "What signifies the head of the ass?"
Child. "The head of the ass signifies the great bell, and the halter the clapper of the great bell, which is in the tower of the cathedral of the patron saints of our city."
Priest. "What signifies the ass's mouth?"
Child. "The ass's mouth signifies the great door of the cathedral of the patron saints of our city."
Priest. "What signify the four feet of the ass?"
Child. "The four feet of the ass signify the four great pillars of the cathedral of the patron saints of our city."
Priest. "What signifies the paunch of the ass?"
Child. "The paunch of the ass signifies the great chest wherein Christians put their offerings to the patron saints of our cathedral."
Priest. "What signifies the tail of the ass?"
Child. "The tail of the ass signifies the holy-water brush of the good dean of the cathedral of the patron saints of our city."
The priest does not stop at the tail, but pursues the symbolism with a simplicity and innocence which do not bear translating into our blunt English words. As late as 1750 Bishop Burnet saw in a church at Worms an altarpiece of a crudity almost incredible. It represented the Virgin Mary throwing Christ into the hopper of a windmill, from the spout of which he was issuing in the form of sacramental wafers, and priests were about to distribute them among the people. The unquestionable purpose of this picture was to assist the faith and animate the piety of the people of Worms.
Gog and Magog, the Giants in the Guildhall of London.
If we turn from the sacred to the secular, we find the ornamentation not less barbarous. Many readers have seen the two giants that stand in the Guildhall of London, where they, or ugly images like them, have stood from time immemorial. A little book sold near by used to inform a credulous public that Gog and Magog were two gigantic brothers taken prisoners in Cornwall fighting against the Trojan invaders, who brought them in triumph to the site of London, where their chief chained them to the gate of his palace as porters. But, unfortunately for this romantic tale, Mr. Fairholt, in his work upon the giants,[5] makes it known that many other towns and cities of Europe cherish from a remote antiquity similar images. He gives pictures of the Salisbury giant, the huge helmeted giant in Antwerp, the family of giants at Douai, the giant and giantess of Ath, the giants of Brussels, as well as of the mighty dragon of Norwich, with practicable iron jaw.
Head of the Great Dragon of Norwich.
We may therefore discard learned theories and sage conjectures concerning Gog and Magog, and attribute them to the poverty of invention and the barbarity of taste which prevailed in the ages of faith.
Souls Weighed in the Balance. (Bas-relief of the Autun Cathedral.)
One of the subjects most frequently chosen for caricature during this period was that cunning and audacious enemy of God and man, the devil—a composite being, made up of the Satan who tested Job, the devil who tempted Jesus, and the Egyptian Osiris who weighed souls in the balance, and claimed as his own those found wanting. The theory of the universe then generally accepted was that the world was merely a field of strife between God and this malignant spirit; on the side of God were ranged archangels, angels, the countless host of celestial beings, and all the saints on earth and in heaven, while on the devil's side were a vast army of fallen spirits and all the depraved portion of the human race. The simple souls of that period did not accept this explanation in an allegorical sense, but as the most literal statement of facts familiarly known, concerning which no one in Christendom had any doubt whatever. The devil was as composite in his external form as he was in his traditional character. All the mythologies appear to have contributed something to his make-up, until he had acquired many of the most repulsive features and members of which animated nature gives the suggestion. He was hairy, hoofed, and horned; he had a forked tail; he had a countenance which expressed the fox's cunning, the serpent's malice, the pig's appetite, the monkey's grin. As to his body, it varied according to the design of the artist, but it usually resembled creatures base or loathsome.
Struggle for the Possession of a Soul between Angel and Devil. (From a Psalter, 1300.)
In one picture there is a very rude but curious representation of the weighing of souls, superintended by the devil and an archangel. The devil, in the form of a hog, has won a prize in the soul of a wicked woman, which he is carrying off in a highly disrespectful manner, while casting a backward glance to see that he has fair play in the next weighing. This was an exceedingly favorite subject with the artists of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They delighted to picture the devil, in their crude uncompromising way, as an insatiate miser of human souls, eager to seize them, demanding a thousand, a million, a billion, all; and when one appeared in the scales so void of guilt that the good angel must needs possess it, he may be seen slyly putting a finger upon the opposite scale to weigh it down, and this sometimes in spite of the angel's remonstrance. In one picture, described by M. Mérimée in his "Voyage en Auvergne," the devil plays this trick at a moment when the archangel Michael has turned to look another way.
Lost Souls cast into Hell. (From Queen Mary's Psalter.)
It is a strange circumstance that in a large number of these representations the devil is exhibited triumphant, and in others the victory is at least doubtful. In a splendid psalter preserved in the British Museum there is a large picture (an engraving of which is given on the preceding page) of a soul climbing an extremely steep and high mountain, on the summit of which a winged archangel stands with outstretched arms to receive him. The soul has nearly reached the top; another step will bring him within the archangel's reach; but behind him is the devil with a long three-pronged clawing instrument, which he is about to thrust into the hair of the ascending saint; and no man can tell which is to finally have that soul, the angel or the devil. M. Champfleury describes a capital in a French church which represents one of the minions of the devil carrying a lizard, symbol of evil, which he is about to add to the scale containing the sins; and the spectator is left to infer that fraud of this kind is likely to be successful, for underneath is written, "Ecce Diabolus!" It is as if the artist had said, "Such is the devil, and this is one of his modes of entrapping his natural prey of human souls!" From a large number of similar pictures the inference is fair that, let a man lead a spotless life from the cradle to the grave, the devil, by a mere trick, may get his soul at last. Some of the artists might be suspected of sympathizing with the devil in his triumphs over the weakness of man. Observe, for example, the comic exuberance of the above picture, in which devils are seen tumbling their immortal booty into the jaws of perdition.
It is difficult to look at this picture without feeling that the artist must have been alive to the humors of the situation. It is, however, the opinion of students of these quaint relics that the authors of such designs honestly intended to excite horror, not hilarity. Queen Mary probably saw in this picture, as she turned the page of her sumptuous psalter, an argument to inflame her bloody zeal for the ancient faith. In the writings of some of the early fathers we observe the same appearance of joyous exultation at the sufferings of the lost, if not a sense of the comic absurdity of their doom. Readers may remember the passage from Tertullian (A.D. 200) quoted so effectively by Gibbon:
"You are fond of all spectacles," exclaims this truly ferocious Christian; "expect the greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment of the universe. How shall I rejoice, how laugh, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs and fancied gods groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates who persecuted the name of the Lord liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the tribunal; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers—"
Devils seizing their Prey. (Bas-relief on the Portal of a Church at Troyes.)
This is assuredly not the utterance of compassion, but rather of the fierce delight of an unregenerate Roman, when at the amphitheatre he doomed a rival's defeated gladiator to death by pointing downward with his thumb. In a similar spirit such pictures were conceived as the one given above.
The sculptor, it is apparent, is "with" the adversary of mankind in the present case. Kings and bishops carried things with a high hand during their mortal career, but the devils have them at last with a rope round their necks, crown and mitre notwithstanding!
The devil was not always victor. There was One whom neither his low cunning nor his bland address nor his blunt audacity could beguile—the Son of God, his predestined conqueror. The passages in the Gospels which relate the attempts made by Satan to tempt the Lord furnished congenial subjects to the illuminators of the Middle Ages, and they treated those subjects with their usual enormous crudity. In one very ancient Saxon psalter, in manuscript, preserved at the British Museum, there is a colossal Christ, with one foot upon a devil, the other foot about to fall upon a second devil, and with his hands delivering from the open mouth of a third devil human souls, who hold up to him their hands clasped as in prayer. In this picture the sympathies of the artist are evidently not on the side of the evil spirits. Their malevolence is apparent, and their attitude is ignominious. The rescued souls are, indeed, a pigmy crew, of woe-begone aspect; but their resistless Deliverer towers aloft in such imposing altitude that the tallest of the saints hardly reaches above his knees. In another picture of very early date, the Lord upon a high place is rescuing a soul from three scoffing devils, who are endeavoring to pull him down to perdition by cords twisted round his legs. This soul we are permitted to consider safe; but below, in a corner of the spacious drawing, a winged archangel is spearing a lost soul into the flames of hell, using the spear in the manner of a farmer handling a pitchfork.
The Temptation.
These ancient attempts to exhibit the endless conflict between good and evil are too rude even to be interesting. The specimen annexed, of later date, about 1475, occurs in a Poor People's Bible (Biblia Pauperum), block-printed, in which it forms part of an extensive frontispiece. The book was once the property of George III., at the sale of whose personal effects it was bought for the British Museum, where it now is. It has the additional interest of being one of the oldest specimens of wood-engraving yet discovered.
The mountain in the background, adorned by a single tree, is the height to which the Lord was taken by the tempter, and from which the devil urged him to cast himself down.
A very frequent object of caricature during the ages when terror ruled the minds of men was human life itself—its brevity, its uncertainty, and the absurd, ill-timed suddenness with which inexorable death sometimes cuts it short. Herodotus records that at the banquets of the Egyptians it was customary for a person to carry about the table the figure of a corpse lying upon a coffin, and to cry out, "Behold this image of what yourselves shall be; therefore eat, drink, and be merry." There are traces of a similar custom in the records of other ancient nations, among whom it was regarded as a self-evident truth that the shortness of life was a reason for making the most of it while it lasted. And their notion of making the most of it was to get from it the greatest amount of pleasure. This vulgar scheme of existence vanished at the promulgation of the doctrine that the condition of every soul was fixed unalterably at the moment of its severance from the body, or, at best, after a short period of purgation, and that the only way to avoid unending anguish was to do what the Church commanded and to avoid what the Church forbade. Terror from that time ruled Christendom. Terror covered the earth with ecclesiastical structures, gave the Church a tenth of all revenues and two-fifths of all property. By every possible device death was clothed with new and vivid terrors, and in every possible way the truth was brought home to the mind that the coming of death could be as unexpected as it was inevitable and unwelcome. The tolling of the church-bell spread the gloom of the death-chamber over the whole town; and the death-crier, with bell and lantern, wearing a garment made terrible by a skull and cross-bones, went his rounds, by day or night, crying to all good people to pray for the soul just departed.[6]
French Death-crier—"Pray for the Soul just departed."
These criers did not cease to perambulate the streets of Paris until about the year 1690, and M. Langlois informs us that in remote provinces of France their doleful cry was heard as recently as 1850.
Blessed gift of humor! Against the most complicated and effective apparatus of terror ever contrived, worked by the most powerful organization that ever existed, the sense of the ludicrous asserted itself, and saved the human mind from being crushed down into abject and hopeless idiocy. The readers of "Don Quixote" can not have forgotten the colloquy in the highway between the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and the head of the company of strollers.
"'Sir,' replied the Devil, politely, stopping his cart, 'we are the actors of the company of the Evil Spirit. This morning, which is the octave of Corpus Christi, we have represented the play of the Empire of Death. This young man played Death, and this one an Angel. This woman, who is the wife of the author of the comedy, is the Queen. Over there is one who played the part of an Emperor, and the other man that of a Soldier. As to myself, I am the Devil, at your service, and one of the principal actors.'"
Death and the Cripple.
For centuries the comedy of Death was a standard play at high festivals, the main interest being the rude, sudden interruption of human lives and joys and schemes by the grim messenger. Art adopted the theme, and the Dance of Death began to figure among the decorations of ecclesiastical structures and on the vellum of illuminated prayer-books. No sculptor but executed his Dance of Death; no painter but tried his skill upon it; and by whomsoever the subject was treated, the element of humor was seldom wanting.
So numerous are the pictures and series of pictures usually styled Dances of Death, that a descriptive catalogue of them would fill the space assigned to this chapter; and the literature to which they have given rise forms an important class of the works relating to the Middle Ages. Two phases of the subject were especially attractive to artists. One was the impartiality of Death, noted by Horace in the familiar passage; and the other the incongruity between the summons to depart and the condition of the person summoned. When these two aspects of the subject had become hackneyed, artists pleased themselves sometimes with a treatment precisely the opposite, and represented Death dancing gayly away with the most battered, ancient, and forlorn of human kind, who had least reason to love life, but did not the less shrink from the skeleton's icy touch. Every one feels the comic absurdity of gay and sprightly Death hurrying off to the tomb a cripple as dilapidated as the one in the picture above. In another engraving we see Death, with exaggerated courtesy, handing to an open tomb an extremely old man just able to totter.
Death and the Old Man.
Another subject in the same series is Death dragging at the garment of a peddler, who is so heavily laden as he trudges along the highway that one would imagine even the rest of the grave welcome. But the peddler, too, makes a very wry face when he recognizes who it is that has interrupted his weary tramp. The triumphant gayety of Death in this picture is in humorous contrast with the lugubrious expression on the countenance of his victim.
Death and the Peddler.
Death and the Knight.
In other series we have Death dressed as a beau seizing a young maiden, Death taking from a house-maid her broom, Death laying hold of a washer-woman, Death taking apples from an apple-stand, Death beckoning away a bar-maid, Death summoning a female mourner at a funeral, and Death plundering a tinker's basket. Death, standing in a grave, pulls the grave-digger in by the leg; seated on a plow, he seizes the farmer; with an ale-pot at his back, he throttles an inn-keeper who is adulterating his liquors; he strikes with a bone the irksome chain of matrimony, and thus sets free a couple bound by it; he mows down a philosopher holding a clock; upon a miser who has thrust his body deep down into a massive chest he shuts the heavy lid; he shows himself in the mirror in which a young beauty is looking; to a philosopher seated in his study he enters and presents an hour-glass. A pope on his throne is crowning an emperor kneeling at his feet, with princes, cardinals, and bishops in attendance, when a Death appears at his side, and another in his retinue dressed as a cardinal. Death lays his hand upon an emperor's crown at the moment when he is doing justice to a poor man against a rich; but in another picture of the same series, Death seizes a duke while he is disdainfully turning from a poor woman with her child who has asked alms of him. The dignitaries of the Church were not spared. Fat abbots, gorgeous cardinals, and vehement preachers all figure in these series in circumstances of honor and of dishonor. In most of them the person summoned yields to King Death without a struggle; but in one a knight makes a furious resistance, laying about him with a broadsword most energetically. It is of no avail. Death runs him through the body with his own lance, though in the other picture the weapon in Death's hand was only a long thigh-bone.
Mr. Longfellow, in his "Golden Legend," has availed himself of the Dance of Death painted on the walls of the covered bridge at Lucerne to give naturalness and charm to the conversation of Elsie and Prince Henry while they are crossing the river. The strange pictures excite the curiosity of Elsie, and the Prince explains them to her as they walk:
"Elsie. What is this picture?
"Prince. It is a young man singing to a nun,
Who kneels at her devotions, but in kneeling
Turns round to look at him; and Death meanwhile
Is putting out the candles on the altar!
"Elsie. Ah, what a pity 'tis that she should listen
Unto such songs, when in her orisons
She might have heard in heaven the angels singing!
"Prince. Here he has stolen a jester's cap and bells,
And dances with the queen.
"Elsie. A foolish jest!
"Prince. And here the heart of the new-wedded wife,
Coming from church with her beloved lord,
He startles with the rattle of his drum.
"Elsie. Ah, that is sad! And yet perhaps 'tis best
That she should die with all the sunshine on her
And all the benedictions of the morning,
Before this affluence of golden light
Shall fade into a cold and clouded gray,
Then into darkness!
"Prince. Under it is written,
'Nothing but death shall separate thee and me!'
"Elsie. And what is this that follows close upon it?
"Prince. Death playing on a dulcimer."
And so the lovers converse on the bridge, all covered from end to end with these caricatures of human existence, until the girl hurries with affright from what she calls "this great picture-gallery of death."
Tournaments were among the usual subjects of caricature during the century or two preceding the Reformation. Some specimens have already been given from the illuminated prayer-books (pp. 44, 46). The device, however, seldom rises above the ancient one of investing animals with the gifts and qualities of men. Monkeys mounted upon the backs of dogs tilt at one another with long lances, or monsters utterly nondescript charge upon other monsters more ridiculous than themselves.
All the ordinary foibles of human nature received attention. These never change. There are always gluttons, misers, and spendthrifts. There are always weak men and vain women. There are always husbands whose wives deceive and worry them, as there are always wives whom husbands worry and deceive; and the artists of the Middle Ages, in their own direct rude fashion, turned both into caricature. The mere list of subjects treated in Brandt's "Ship of Fools," written when Luther was a school-boy, shows us that men were men and women were women in 1490. That quaint reformer of manners dealt mild rebuke to men who gathered great store of books and put them to no good use; to women who were ever changing the fashion of their dress; to men who began to build without counting the cost; to "great borrowers and slack payers;" to fools "who will serve two lords both together;" to them who correct others while themselves are "culpable in the same fault;" to "fools who can not keep secret their own counsel;" to people who believe in "predestinacyon;" to men who attend closely to other people's business, leaving their own undone; to "old folks that give example of vice to youth;" and so on through the long catalogue of human follies. His homely and wise ditties are illustrated by pictures of curious simplicity. Observe the one subjoined, in which "a foule" is weighing the transitory things of this world against things everlasting, one being represented by a scale full of castles and towers, and the other by a scale full of stars—the earthly castles outweighing the heavenly bodies in the balance of this "foule."
Heaven and Earth weighed in the Balance. (From "The Ship of Fools.")
One of the quaint poems of the gentle priest descants upon the bad behavior of people at church. This poem has an historical interest, for it throws light upon the manners of the time, over which poetry, tradition, and romance have thrown a very delusive charm. We learn from it that while the Christian people of Europe were on their knees praying in church they were liable to be disturbed by the "mad noise and shout" of a loitering crowd; by knights coming in from the field, falcon upon wrist, with their dogs yelping at their heels; by men chaffering and bargaining as they walked up and down; by the wanton laughter of girls ogled by young men; by lawyers conferring with clients; and by all the usual noises of a crowd at a fair. The author wonders
"That the false paynyms within theyr Temples be
To theyr ydols moche more devout than we."
The worthy Brandt was not the only satirist of Church manners. The "Usurer's Paternoster," given by M. Champfleury, is more incisive than Brandt's amiable remonstrance. The usurer, hurrying away to church, tells his wife that if any one comes to borrow money while he is gone, some one must be sent in all haste for him. On his way he says his paternoster thus:
"Our Father. Blessed Lord God [Beau Sire Dieu], be favorable to me, and give me grace to prosper exceedingly. Let me become the richest money-lender in the world. Who art in heaven. I am sorry I wasn't at home the day that woman came to borrow. Really I am a fool to go to church, where I can gain nothing. Hallowed be thy name. It's too bad I have a servant so expert in pilfering my money. Thy kingdom come. I have a mind to go home to see what my wife is about. I'll bet she sells a chicken while I am away, and keeps the money. Thy will be done. It pops into my mind that the chevalier who owed me fifty francs paid me only half. In heaven. Those damned Jews do a rushing business in lending to every one. I should like very much to do as they do. As on earth. The king plagues me to death in raising taxes so often."
Arrived at church, the money-lender goes through part of the service as best he may; but as soon as sermon time comes, off he goes, saying to himself, "I must get away home: the priest is going to preach a sermon to draw money out of our purses." Doubtless the priest in those times of ignorance had to deal with many most profane and unspiritual people, who could only be restrained by fear, and to whose "puerility" much had to be conceded. In touching upon the Church manners of the Middle Ages, M. Champfleury makes a remark that startles a Protestant mind accustomed only to the most exact decorum in churches. "Old men of to-day" (1850), he says, speaking of France, "will recall to mind the gayety of the midnight masses, when buffoons from the country waited impatiently to send down showers of small torpedoes upon the pavement of the nave, to barricade the alcoves with mountains of chairs, to fill with ink the holy-water basins, and to steal kisses in out-of-the-way corners from girls who would not give them." These proceedings, which M. Champfleury styles "the pleasantries of our fathers," were among the concessions made by a worldly-wise old Church to the "puerility" of the people, or rather to the absolute necessity of occasional hilarious fun to healthy existence.
Amusing and even valuable caricatures six and seven centuries old have been discovered upon parchment documents in the English record offices, executed apparently by idle clerks for their amusement when they had nothing else to do. One of these, copied by Mr. Wright, gives us the popular English conception of an Irish warrior of the thirteenth century.
English Caricature of an Irishman, A.D. 1280.
The broad-axes of the Irish were held in great terror by the English. An historian of Edward I.'s time, while discoursing on that supreme perplexity of British kings and ministers, how Ireland should be governed after being quite reduced to subjection, expresses the opinion that the Irish ought not to be allowed in time of peace to use "that detestable instrument of destruction which by an ancient but accursed custom they constantly carry in their hands instead of a staff." The modern Irish shillalah, then, is only the residuum of the ancient Irish broad-axe—the broad-axe with its head taken off. The humanized Irishman of to-day is content with the handle of "the detestable instrument." Other pen-and-ink sketches of England's dreaded foes, the Irish and the Welsh, have been found upon ancient vellum rolls, but none better than the specimen given has yet been copied.
The last object of caricature which can be mentioned in the present chapter is the Jew—the odious Jew—accursed by the clergy as a Jew, despised by good citizens as a usurer, and dreaded by many a profligate Christian as the holder of mortgages upon his estate. When the ruling class of a country loses its hold upon virtue, becomes profuse in expenditure, ceases to comply with natural law, comes to regard licentious living as something to be expected of young blood, and makes a jest of a decorous and moral conversation, then there is usually in that country a less refined, stronger class, who do comply with natural law, who do live in that virtuous, frugal, and orderly manner by which alone families can be perpetuated and states established. In several communities during the centuries preceding the Reformation, when the nobles and great merchants wasted their substance in riotous living or in insensate pilgrimages and crusades, the Jew was the virtuous, sensible, and solvent man. He did not escape the evil influence wrought into the texture of the character by living in an atmosphere of hatred and contempt, nor the narrowness of mind caused by his being excluded from all the more generous and high avocations. But he remained through all those dismal ages temperate, chaste, industrious, and saving, as well as heroically faithful to the best light on high things that he had. Hence he always had money to lend, and he could only lend it to men who were too glad to think he had no rights which they were bound to respect.
The caricature on the next page was also discovered upon a vellum roll in the Public Record Office in London, the work of some idle clerk 642 years ago, and recently transferred to an English work[7] of much interest, in which it serves as a frontispiece.
Caricature of the Jews in England, A.D. 1233.
The ridicule is aimed at the famous Jew, Isaac of Norwich, a rich money-lender and merchant, to whom abbots, bishops, and wealthy vicars were heavily indebted. At Norwich he had a wharf at which his vessels could receive and discharge their freights, and whole districts were mortgaged to him at once. He lent money to the king's exchequer. He was the Rothschild of his day. In the picture, which represents the outside of a castle—his own castle, wrested from some lavish Christian by a money-lender's wiles—the Jew Isaac stands above all the other figures, and is blessed with four faces and a crown, which imply, as Mr. Pike conjectures, that, let him look whichever way he will, he beholds possessions over which he holds kingly sway. Lower down, and nearer the centre, are Mosse Mokke, another Jewish money-lender of Norwich, and Madame Avegay, one of many Jewesses who lent money, between whom is a horned devil pointing to their noses. The Jewish nose was a peculiarly offensive feature to Christians, and was usually exaggerated by caricaturists. The figure holding up scales heaped with coin is, so far as we can guess, merely a taunt; and the seating of Dagon, the god of the Philistines, upon the turret seems to be an intimation that the Jews, in their dispersion, had abandoned the God of their fathers, and taken up with the deity of his inveterate foes.
So far as the records of those ages disclose, there was no one enlightened enough to judge the long-suffering Jews with just allowance. Luther's aversion to them was morbid and violent. He confesses, in his Table-talk, that if it had fallen to his lot to have much to do with Jews, his patience would have given way; and when, one day, Dr. Menius asked him how a Jew ought to be baptized, he replied, "You must fill a large tub with water, and, having divested a Jew of his clothes, cover him with a white garment. He must then sit down in the tub, and you must baptize him quite under the water." He said further to Dr. Menius that if a Jew, not converted at heart, were to ask baptism at his hands, he would take him to the bridge, tie a stone round his neck, and hurl him into the river, such an obstinate and scoffing race were they. If Luther felt thus toward them, we can not wonder that the luxurious dignitaries of the Church, two centuries before his time, should have had qualms of conscience with regard to paying Isaac of Norwich interest upon money borrowed.
Luther inspired by Satan.
We have in this strange, rude picture[8] a device of contemporary caricature to cast ridicule upon the movement of which Martin Luther was the conspicuous figure. It is reduced from a large wood-cut which appeared in Germany at the crisis of the lion-hearted reformer's career, the year of his appearance at the Diet of Worms, when he said to dissuading friends, "If I knew there were as many devils at Worms as there are tiles upon the houses, I would go." The intention of the artist is obvious; but, in addition to the leading purpose, he desired, as Mr. Chatto conjectures, to remind his public of the nasal drawl of the preaching friars of the time, for which they were as proverbial as the Puritans of London in Cromwell's day. Such is the poverty of human invention that the idea of this caricature has been employed several times since Luther's time—even as recently as 1873, when a London draughtsman made it serve his turn in the contentions of party politics.
The best humorous talent of Christendom, whether it wrought with pencil or with pen, whether it avowed or veiled its sympathy with reform, was on Luther's side. It prepared the way for his coming, co-operated with him during his life-time, carried on his work after he was gone, and continues it to the present hour.
Recent investigators tell us, indeed, that the Reformation began in laughter, which the Church itself nourished and sanctioned. M. Viollet-le-Duc, author of the "Dictionnaire d'Architecture," discourses upon the gradual change which church decorators of the Middle Ages effected in the figure of the devil. Upon edifices erected before the year 1000 there are few traces of the devil, and upon those of much earlier date none at all; but from the eleventh century he "begins to play an important rôle," artists striving which should give him the most hideous form. No one was then audacious enough to take liberties with a being so potent, so awful, so real, the competitor and antagonist of the Almighty Lord of Heaven and Earth. But mortals must laugh, and familiarity produces its well-known effect. In the eyes of men of the world the devil became gradually less terrible and more grotesque, became occasionally ridiculous, often contemptible, sometimes silly. His tricks are met by tricks more cunning than his own; he is duped, and retires discomfited. Before Luther appeared on the scene, the painters and sculptors, not to mention the authors and poets, had made progress in reducing the devil from the grade of an antagonist of deity and arch-enemy of men to that of a cunning and amusing deceiver of simpletons. "The great devil," as the author just mentioned remarks, "sculptured over the door of the Autun Cathedral in the twelfth century is a frightful being, well designed to strike terror to unformed souls; but the young devils carved in bas-reliefs of the fifteenth century are more comic than terrible, and it is evident that the artists who executed them cared very little for the wicked tricks of the Evil Spirit." We may be sure that the artist who could sketch the devil fiddling upon a pair of bellows with a kitchen dipper had outgrown the horror which that personage had once excited in all minds. Such a sketch is here reproduced from a Flemish MS. in the library of Cambrai.
But this could not be said of the great mass of Christian people for centuries after. Luther, as the reader is aware, speaks of the devil with as absolute an assurance of his existence, activity, and nearness as if he were a member of his own household. God, he once said, mocks and scorns the devil by putting under his nose such a weak creature as man; and at other times he dwelt upon the hardness of the conflict which the devil has to maintain. "It were not good for us to know how earnestly the holy angels strive for us against the devil, or how hard a combat it is. If we could see for how many angels one devil makes work, we should be in despair." Many devils, he remarks with curious certainty, are in forests, in waters, in wildernesses, in dark pooly places, ready to hurt and prejudice people; and there are some in the thick black clouds, which cause hail, lightnings, and thunderings, and poison the air, the pastures, and grounds. He derides the philosophers and physicians who say that these things have merely natural causes; and as to the witches who torment honest people, and spoil their eggs, milk, and butter, "I should have no compassion upon them—I would burn them all." The Table-talk of the great reformer is full of such robust credulity.
Luther represented, as much as he reformed, his age and country. In these utterances of his we discern the spirit against which the humor and gayety of art had to contend, and over which it has gained a tardy victory, not yet complete. Let us keep in mind also that in those twilight ages, as in all ages, there were the two contending influences which we now call "the world" and "the church." In other words, there were people who took the devil lightly, as they did all invisible and spiritual things, and there were people who dreaded the devil in every "dark pooly place," and to whom nothing could be a jest which appertained to him. Humorous art has in it healing and admonition for both these classes.
Oldest Drawing in the British Museum, A.D. 1320.
It was in those centuries, also, that men of the world learned to laugh at the clergy, and, again, not without clerical encouragement. In the brilliantly illuminated religious manuscripts of the two centuries preceding Luther, along with other ludicrous and absurd images, of which specimens have been given, we find many pictures in which the vices of the religious orders are exhibited. The oldest drawing in the British Museum, one of the only two that bear the date 1320, shows us two devils tossing a monk headlong from a bridge into a rough and rapid river, an act which they perform in a manner not calculated to excite serious thought in modern minds.
In the old Strasburg Cathedral there was a brass door, made in 1545, upon which was engraved a convent with a procession of monks issuing from it bearing the cross and banners. The foremost figure of this procession was a monk carrying a girl upon his shoulders. This was not the coarse fling of an enemy. It was not the scoff of an Erasmus, who said once, "These paunchy monks are called fathers, and they take good care to deserve the name." It was engraved on the eternal brass of a religious edifice for the warning and edification of the faithful.
Nothing more surprises the modern reader than the frequency and severity with which the clergy of those centuries were denounced and satirized, as well by themselves as by others. A Church which showed itself sensitive to the least taint of what it deemed heresy appears to have beheld with indifference the exhibition of its moral delinquencies—nay, taken the lead in exposing them. It was a clergyman who said, in the Council of Siena, fifty years before Luther was born: "We see to-day priests who are usurers, wine-shop keepers, merchants, governors of castles, notaries, stewards, and debauch brokers. The only trade which they have not yet commenced is that of executioner. The bishops surpass Epicurus himself in sensuality, and it is between the courses of a banquet that they discuss the authority of the Pope and that of the Council." The same speaker related that St. Bridget, being in St. Peter's at Rome, looked up in a religious ecstasy, and saw the nave filled with mitred hogs. She asked the Lord to explain this fantastic vision. "These," replied the Lord, "are the bishops and abbés of to-day." M. Champfleury, the first living authority on subjects of this nature, declares that the manuscript Bibles of the century preceding Luther are so filled with pictures exhibiting monks and nuns in equivocal circumstances that he was only puzzled to decide which specimens were most suitable to give his readers an adequate idea of them.
From mere gayety of heart, from the exuberant jollity of a well-beneficed scholar, whose future was secure and whose time was all his own, some of the higher clergy appear to have jested upon themselves and their office. Two finely engraved seals have been found in France, one dating as far back as 1300, which represent monkeys arrayed in the vestments of a Church dignitary. Upon one of them the monkey wears the hood and holds the staff of an abbot, and upon the other the animal appears in the character of a bishop.
Bishop's Seal, A.D. 1300.
One of these seals is known to have been executed at the express order of an abbot. The other, a copy of which is given here, was found in the ruins of an ancient château of Picardy, and bears the inscription, "LE: SCEL: DE: LEUECQUE: DE: LA: CYTE: DE: PINON"—"The seal of the bishop of the city of Pinon." This interesting relic was at first thought to be the work of some scoffing Huguenot, but there can now be no doubt of its having been the merry conceit of the personage whose title it bears. The discovery of the record relating to the monkey seal of the abbot, showing it to have been ordered and paid for by the actual head of a great monastery, throws light upon all the grotesque ornamentation of those centuries. It suggests to us also the idea that the clergy joined in the general ridicule of their order as much from a sense of the ludicrous as from conviction of its justice. In the British Museum there is a religious manuscript of the thirteenth century, splendidly illuminated, one of the initial letters of which represents a young friar drawing wine from a cask in a cellar, that contains several humorous points. With his left hand he holds the great wine-jug, into which the liquid is running from the barrel; with his right he lifts to his lips a bowlful of the wine, and from the same hand dangle the large keys of the cellar. If this was intended as a hint to the younger brethren how they ought not to behave when sent to the cellar for wine, the artist evidently felt also the comic absurdity of the situation.
The vast cellars still to be seen under ancient monasteries and priories, as well as the kitchens, not less spacious, and supported by archways of the most massive masonry, tell a tale of the habits of the religious orders which is abundantly confirmed in the records and literature of the time. "Capuchins," says the old French doggerel, "drink poorly, Benedictines deeply, Dominicans pint after pint, but Franciscans drink the cellar dry." The great number of old taverns in Europe named the Mitre, the Church, the Chapel-bell, St. Dominic, and other ecclesiastical names, point to the conclusion that the class that professed to dispense good cheer for the soul was not averse to good cheer for the body.[9]
If the clergy led the merriment caused by their own excesses, we can not wonder they should have had many followers. In the popular tales of the time, which have been gathered and made accessible in recent years, we find the priest, the monk, the nun, the abbot, often figuring in absurd situations, rarely in creditable ones. The priest seems to have been regarded as the satirist's fair game, the common butt of the jester. In one of these stories a butcher, returning home from a fair, asks a night's lodging at the house of a priest, who churlishly refuses it. The butcher, returning, offers in recompense to kill one of his fine fat sheep for supper, and to leave behind him all the meat not eaten. On this condition he is received, and the family enjoy an excellent supper in his society. After supper he wins the favor first of the priest's concubine and afterward of the maid-servant by secretly promising to each of them the skin of the sheep. In the morning, after he has gone, a prodigious uproar arises, the priest and the two women each vehemently claiming the skin, in the midst of which it is discovered that the butcher had stolen the sheep from the priest's own flock.
From a merry tale of these ages a jest was taken which to-day forms one of the stock dialogues of our negro-minstrel bands. The story was apparently designed to show the sorry stuff of which priests were sometimes made. A farmer sends a lout of a son to college, intending to make a priest of him, and the lad was examined as to the extent of his knowledge. "Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob," said the examiner: "who was Jacob's father?" The candidate, being unable to answer this question, is sent home to his tutor with a letter relating his discomfiture. "Thou foole and ass-head!" exclaims the tutor. "Dost thou not know Tom Miller of Oseney?" "Yes," answered the hopeful scholar. "Then thou knowest he had two sons, Tom and Jacke: who is Jacke's father?" "Tom Miller." Back goes the youth to college with a letter to the examiner, who, for the tutor's sake, gives him another chance, and asks once more who was Jacob's father. "Marry!" cries the candidate, "I can tell you now: that was Tom Miller of Oseney."
We must be cautious in drawing inferences from the popular literature of a period, since there is in the unformed mind a propensity to circulate amusing scandal, and the satirist is apt to aim his shaft at characters and actions which are exceptional, not representative. In some of the less frequented nooks of Europe, where the tone of mind among the people has not materially changed since the fifteenth century, we still find priests the constant theme of scandal. The Tyrolese, for example, as some readers may have observed, are profuse in their votive offerings, and indefatigable in their pilgrimages, processions, and observances—the most superstitious people in Europe; but a recent writer tells us that they "have a large collection of anecdotes, humorous and scandalous, about their priests, and they take infinite delight in telling them." They are not pious, as the writer remarks, "but magpious." The Tyrolese may judge their priests correctly, but a person who believes in magpious humbug may be expected to lend greedy ears to comic scandal, and what the Tyrolese do to-day, their ancestors may have done when Luther was a school-boy.
But of late years the exact, methodical records of the past, the laws, law-books, and trials, which are now recognized to be among the most trustworthy guides to a correct interpretation of antiquity, have been diligently scrutinized, and we learn from them that it was among the commonest of criminal events for clergymen, in the time of Edward III. of England, to take part in acts of brigandage. A band of fifty men, for example, broke into the park and warren of a lady, the Countess of Lincoln, killed her game, cut down two thousand pounds' worth of timber, and carried it off. In the list of the accused are the names of two abbots and a prior. Several chaplains were in a band of knights and squires who entered an inclosure belonging to the Archbishop of Canterbury, drove off his cattle, cut down his trees, harvested his wheat, and marched away with their booty. In a band of seventy who committed a similar outrage at Carlton there were five parsons. Two parsons were accused of assisting to break into the Earl of Northampton's park and driving off his cattle. The prior of Bollington was charged with a robbery of horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs. Five clergymen were in the band that damaged the Bishop of Durham's park to the extent of a thousand pounds. These examples and others were drawn from a single roll of parchment of the year 1348; and that roll, itself one of three, is only one of many sources of information. The author of the "History of Crime" explains that the rolls of that year consist of more than one hundred and twenty skins of parchment, among which there are few that do not contain a reference to some lawless act committed by knights or priests, or by a band consisting of both.[10]
This is record, not gossip, not literature; and it may serve to indicate the basis of truth there was for the countless allusions to the dissoluteness of the clergy in the popular writings and pictures of the century that formed Luther and the Lutherans.
Pastor and Flock. (From the Window of a French Church, Sixteenth Century.)
It is scarcely possible in the compass of a chapter to convey an idea of the burst of laughter that broke the long spell of superstitious terror, and opened the minds of men to receive the better light. Such works as the "Decameron" of Boccaccio, which to modern readers is only interesting as showing what indecency could be read and uttered by fine ladies and gentlemen on a picnic in 1350, had one character that harmonized with the new influence. Their tone was utterly at variance with the voice of the priest. The clergy, self-indulgent, preached self-denial; practicing vice, they exaggerated human guilt. But the ladies and gentlemen of the "Decameron," while practicing virtue, made light of vice, and brought off the graceful profligate victorious. Later was circulated in every land and tongue the merry tale of "Reynard the Fox," which children still cherish among the choicest of their literary treasures. Reynard, who appears in the sculptures of so many convents and in the illuminations of so many pious manuscripts, whom monks loved better than their missal, exhibits the same moral: witty wickedness triumphant over brute strength. The fox cheats the wolf, deludes the bear, lies to King Lion, turns monk, gallops headlong up and down the commandments, only to be at last taken into the highest favor by the king and made Prime Minister. It is not necessary to discover allegory in this tale. What made it potent against the spell of priestly influence was the innocent and boisterous merriment which it excited, amidst which the gloom evoked by priestly arts began to break away. Innocent mirth, next to immortal truth, is the thing most hostile to whatever is mingled with religion which is hostile to the interests of human nature.
And "Reynard," we must remember, was only the best and gayest of a large class of similar fables that circulated during the childhood of Columbus and of Luther. In one of the Latin stories given by Mr. Wright in his "Selection," we have an account of the death and burial of the wolf, the hero of the tale, which makes a most profane use of sacred objects and rites, though it was written by a priest. The holy water was carried by the hare, hedgehogs bore the candles, goats rang the bell, moles dug the grave, foxes carried the bier, the bear celebrated mass, the ox read the gospel, and the ass the epistle. When the burial was complete, the animals sat down to a splendid banquet, and wished for another grand funeral. Mark the moral drawn by the priestly author: "So it frequently happens that when some rich man, an extortionist or a usurer, dies, the abbot or prior of a convent of beasts [i. e., of men living like beasts] causes them to assemble. For it commonly happens that in a great convent of black or white monks [Benedictines or Augustinians] there are none but beasts—lions by their pride, foxes by their craftiness, bears by their voracity, stinking goats by their incontinence, asses by their sluggishness, hedgehogs by their asperity, hares by their timidity (because they were cowardly when there was no fear), and oxen by their laborious cultivation of their land." Unquestionably this author belonged to another order than those named in his tirade.
A book with original life in it becomes usually the progenitor of a line of books. Brandt's "Ship of Fools," which was published when Luther was eleven years old, gave rise to a literature. As soon as it appeared it kindled the zeal of a noted preacher of Strasburg, Jacob Geiler by name, who turned Brandt's gentle satire into fierce invective, which he directed chiefly against the monks. The black friars, he said, were the devil, the white friars his dame, and the others were their chickens. The qualities of a good monk, he declared, were an almighty belly, an ass's back, and a raven's mouth. From the pulpit, on another occasion, he foretold a coming reformation in the Church, adding that he did not expect to live to see it, though some that heard him might. The monks taunted him with looking into the "Ship of Fools" for his texts instead of the Scripture; but the people heard him eagerly, and one of his pupils gave the public a series of his homely, biting sermons, illustrated by wood-cuts, which ran through edition after edition. Badius, a noted scholar of the time, was another who imitated the "Ship of Fools," in a series of satirical pieces entitled "The Boats of Foolish Women," in which the follies of the ladies of the period were ridiculed.
Confessing to God. (Holbein, 1520.) Sale of Indulgences.
Among the great number of works which the "Ship of Fools" suggested, there was one which directly and powerfully prepared the way for Luther. Erasmus, while residing in England, from 1497 to 1506, Luther being still a student, read Brandt's work, and was stirred by it to write his "Praise of Folly," which, under the most transparent disguise, is chiefly a satire upon the ecclesiastics of the day. We may at least say that it is only in the passages aimed at them that the author is at his best. Before Luther had begun to think of the abuses of the Church, Erasmus, in his little work, derided the credulous Christians who thought to escape mishaps all day by paying devotion to St. Christopher in the morning, and laughed at the soldiers who expected to come out of battle with a whole skin if they had but taken the precaution to "mumble over a set prayer before the picture of St. Barbara." He jested upon the English who had constructed a gigantic figure of their patron saint as large as the images of Hercules; only the saint was mounted upon a horse "very gloriously accoutred," which the people scarcely refrained from worshiping. But observe this passage in the very spirit of Luther, though written fifteen years before the reformer publicly denounced indulgences:
"What shall I say of such as cry up and maintain the cheat of pardons and indulgences? who by these compute the time of each soul's residence in purgatory, and assign them a longer or shorter continuance, according as they purchase more or fewer of these paltry pardons and salable exemptions?... By this easy way of purchasing pardon, any notorious highwayman, any plundering soldier, or any bribe-taking judge shall disburse some part of their unjust gains, and so think all their grossest impieties sufficiently atoned for.... And what can be more ridiculous than for some others to be confident of going to heaven by repeating daily those seven verses out of the Psalms?"
These "fooleries," which Erasmus calls most gross and absurd, he says are practiced not merely by the vulgar, but by "such proficients in religion as one might well expect should have more wit." He ridicules the notion of each country and place being under the special protection of a patron saint, as well as the kindred absurdity of calling upon one saint to cure a toothache, upon another to restore lost goods, upon another to protect seamen, and upon another to guard cows and sheep. Nor does he refrain from reflecting upon the homage paid to the Virgin Mary, "whose blind devotees think it manners now to place the mother before the Son." He utterly scouts and reviles the folly of hanging up offerings at the shrines of saints for their imaginary aid in getting the donors out of trouble or danger. The responsibility of all this folly and delusion he boldly assigns to the priests, who gain money by them. "They blacken the darkness and promote the delusion, wisely foreseeing that the people (like cows which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked) would part with less if they knew more." If any serious and wise man, he adds, should tell the people that a pious life is the only way of securing a peaceful death, that repentance and amendment alone can procure pardon, and that the best devotion to a saint is to imitate his example, there would be a very different estimate put upon masses, fastings, and other austerities. Erasmus saw this prophecy fulfilled before many years had rolled over his head.
Christ, the True Light. (Holbein, about 1520.)
It is, however, in his chapters upon the amazingly ridiculous subtleties of the monastic theology of his time that Erasmus gives us his most exquisite fooling. Here he becomes, indeed, the merry Erasmus who was so welcome at English Cambridge, at Paris, at Rome, in Germany, in Holland, wherever there were good scholars and good fellows. He pretends to approach this part of his subject with fear; for divines, he says, are generally very hot and passionate, and when provoked they set upon a man in full cry, and hurl at him the thunders of excommunication, that being their spiritual weapon to wound such as lift up a hand against them. But he plucks up courage, and proceeds to discourse upon the puerilities which absorbed their minds. Among the theological questions which they delighted to discuss were such as these: the precise manner in which original sin was derived from our first parents; whether time was an element in the supernatural generation of our Lord; whether it would be a thing possible for the first person in the Trinity to hate the second; whether God, who took our nature upon him in the form of a man, could as well have become a woman, a beast, an herb, or a stone; and if he could, how could he have then preached the gospel, or been nailed to the cross? whether if St. Peter had celebrated the eucharist at the time when our Saviour was upon the cross, the consecrated bread would have been transubstantiated into the same body that remained on the tree; whether, in Christ's corporal presence in the sacramental wafer, his humanity was not abstracted from his Godhead; whether, after the resurrection, we shall carnally eat and drink as we do in this life; how it is possible, in the transubstantiation, for one body to be in several places at the same time; which is the greater sin, to kill a hundred men, or for a cobbler to set one stitch in a shoe on Sunday? Such subtleties as these alternated with curious and minute delineations of purgatory, heaven, and hell, their divisions, subdivisions, degrees, and qualities.
He heaps ridicule also upon the public preaching of those profound theologians. It was mere stage-playing; and their delivery was the very acme of the droll and the absurd. "Good Lord! how mimical are their gestures! What heights and falls in their voice! What toning, what bawling, what singing, what squeaking, what grimaces, what making of mouths, what apes' faces and distorting of their countenances!" And their matter was even more ridiculous than their manner. One of these absurd divines, discoursing upon the name of Jesus, subtly pretended to discover a revelation of the Trinity in the very letters of which the name was composed. It was declined only in three cases. That was one mysterious coincidence. Then the nominative ended in S, the accusative in M, and the ablative in U, which obviously indicated Summus, the beginning; Medius, the middle; and Ultimus, the end of all things. Other examples he gives of the same profound nature. Nor did the different orders of monks escape his lash. He dwelt upon the preposterous importance they attached to trifling details of dress and ceremonial. "They must be very critical in the precise number of their knots, in the tying-on of their sandals, of what precise colors their respective habits should be made, and of what stuff; how broad and long their girdles, how big and in what fashion their hoods, whether their bald crowns be of the right cut to a hair's-breadth, how many hours they must sleep, and at what minute rise to prayers."
In this manner he proceeds for many a sprightly page, rising from monks to bishops and cardinals, and from them to popes, "who pretend themselves Christ's vicars," while resembling the Lord in nothing. Luther never went farther, never was bolder or more biting, than Erasmus in this essay. But all went for nothing with the great leader of reform, because Erasmus refused to abandon the Church, and cast in his lot openly with the reformers. Luther calls him "a mere Momus," who laughed at Catholic and Protestant alike, and looked upon the Christian religion itself very much as Lucian did upon the Greek. "Whenever I pray," said Luther once, "I pray for a curse upon Erasmus." It was certainly a significant fact that in the heat of that contest Erasmus should have given the world a translation of Lucian. But he was a great, wise, genial soul, whose fame will brighten as that age becomes more justly and familiarly known to us.
The first place in the annals of such a warfare belongs of right to the soldiers who took their lives in their hands and went forth to meet the foe in the open field, braving torture, infamy, and death for the cause. Such were Luther and his followers. But there is a place in human memory for the philosopher and the humorist who first made the contest possible, and then rendered it shorter and easier.
When Luther began the immortal part of his public career in 1517 by nailing to the church door his ninety-five theses against the sale of indulgences, wood-engraving was an art which had been practiced nearly a century. He found also, as we have seen, a public accustomed to satirical writings illustrated by wood-cuts. The great Holbein illustrated Erasmus's "Praise of Folly." Brandt's "Ship of Fools," as well as the litter of works which it called forth, was even profusely illustrated. Caricatures as distinct works, though usually accompanied with abundant verbal commentary, were familiar objects. Among the curiosities which Luther himself brought from Rome in 1510, some years before he began his special work, was a caricature suggested by the "Ship of Fools," showing how the Pope had "fooled the whole world with his superstitions and idolatries." He showed it to the Prince Elector of Saxony at the time. The picture exhibited a little ship filled with monks, friars, and priests casting lines to people swimming in the sea, while in the stern sat comfortably the Pope with his cardinals and bishops, overshadowed and covered by the Holy Ghost, who was looking up to heaven, and through whose help alone the drowning wretches were saved.
In talking about the picture many years after, Luther said, "These and the like fooleries we then believed as articles of faith." He had not reached the point when he could talk at his own table of the cardinals as "peevish milksops, effeminate, unlearned blockheads, whom the Pope places in all kingdoms, where they lie lolling in kings' courts among the ladies and women."
Papa, Doctor Theologiæ et Magister Fidei.
"A long-eared ass can with the Bagpipes cope
As well as with Theology the Pope."—Germany, 1545.
Finding this weapon of caricature ready-made to his hands, he used it freely, as did also his friends and his foes. He was himself a caricaturist. When Pope Clement VII. seemed disposed to meet the reformers half-way, and proposed a council to that end, Luther wrote a pamphlet ridiculing the scheme, and, to give more force to his satire, he "caused a picture to be drawn" and placed in the title-page. It was not a work describable to the fastidious ears of our century, unless we leave part of the description in Latin. The Pope was seated on a lofty throne surrounded by cardinals having foxes' tails, and seeming "sursum et deorsum repurgare." In the "Table-talk" we read also of a picture being brought to Luther in which the Pope and Judas were represented hanging to the purse and keys. "'Twill vex the Pope horribly," said Luther, "that he whom emperors and kings have worshiped should now be figured hanging upon his own picklocks." The picture annexed, in which the Pope is exhibited with an ass's head performing on the bagpipes, was entirely in the taste of Luther. "The Pope's decretals," he once said, "are naught; he that drew them up was an ass." No word was too contemptuous for the papacy. "Pope, cardinals, and bishops," said he, "are a pack of guzzling, stuffing wretches; rich, wallowing in wealth and laziness, resting secure in their power, and never thinking of accomplishing God's will."
The Pope cast into Hell. (Lucas Cranach, 1521.)
The famous pamphlet of caricatures published in 1521 by Luther's friend and follower, Lucas Cranach, contains pictures that we could easily believe Luther himself suggested. The object was to exhibit to the eyes of the people of Germany the contrast between the religion inculcated by the lowly Jesus and the pompous worldliness of the papacy. There was a picture on each page which nearly filled it, and at the bottom there were a few lines in German of explanation; the engraving on the page to the left representing an incident in the life of Christ, and the page to the right a feature of the papal system at variance with it. Thus, on the first page was shown Jesus, in humble attitude and simple raiment, refusing honors and dignities, and on the page opposite the Pope, cardinals, and bishops, with warriors, cannon, and forts, assuming lordship over kings. On another page Christ was seen crowned with thorns by the scoffing soldiers, and on the opposite page the Pope wearing his triple crown, and seated on his throne, an object of adoration to his court. On another was shown Christ washing the feet of his disciples, in contrast to the Pope presenting his toe to an emperor to be kissed. At length we have Christ ascending to heaven with a glorious escort of angels, and on the other page the Pope hurled headlong to hell, accompanied by devils, with some of his own monks already in the flames waiting to receive him. This concluding picture may serve as a specimen of a series that must have told powerfully on the side of reform.[11]
"The Beam that is in thine own Eye," A.D. 1540.
These pictorial pamphlets were an important part of the stock in trade of the colporteurs who pervaded the villages and by-ways of Germany during Luther's life-time, selling the sermons of the reformers, homely satiric verses, and broadside caricatures. The simplicity and directness of the caricatures of that age reflected perfectly both the character and the methods of Luther. One picture of Hans Sachs's has been preserved, which was designed as an illustration of the words of Christ: "I am the door. He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber." The honest Sachs shows us a lofty, well-built barn, with a very steep roof, on the very top of which sits the Pope crowned with his tiara. To him cardinals and bishops are directing people, and urging them to climb up the steep and slippery height. Two monks have done so, and are getting in at a high window. At the open door of the edifice stands the Lord, with a halo round his head, inviting a humble inquirer to enter freely. Nothing was farther from the popular caricaturists of that age than to allegorize a doctrine or a moral lesson; on the contrary, it was their habit to interpret allegory in the most absurdly literal manner. Observe, for example, the treatment of the subject contained in the words, "How wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye, and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?"
Luther Triumphant. (Paris, 1535.)
The marriage of Luther in 1525 was followed by a burst of caricature. The idea of a priest marrying excited then, as it does now in a Catholic mind, a sense of ludicrous incongruity. It is as though the words "married priest" were a contradiction in terms, and the relation implied by them was a sort of manifest incompatibility, half comic, half disgusting. The spectacle occasionally presented in a Protestant church of a clergyman ordained and married in the same hour is so opposed to the Catholic conception of the priesthood that some Catholics can only express their sense of it by laughter. Equally amazing and equally ludicrous to them is the more frequent case of missionaries coming home to be married, or young missionaries married in the evening and setting out for their station the next morning. We observe that some of Luther's nearest friends—nay, Luther himself—saw something both ridiculous and contemptible in his marriage, particularly in the haste with which it was concluded, and the disparity in the ages of the pair, Luther being forty-two and his wife twenty-six. "My marriage," wrote Luther, "has made me so despicable that I hope my humiliation will rejoice the angels and vex the devils." And Melanchthon, while doing his best to restore his leader's self-respect, expressed the hope that the "accident" might be of use in humbling Luther a little in the midst of a success perilous to his good sense. Luther was not long abased. We find him soon justifying the act, which was among the boldest and wisest of his life, as a tribute of obedience to his aged father, who "required it in hopes of issue," and as a practical confirmation of what he had himself taught. He speaks gayly of "my rib, Kate," and declared once that he would not exchange his wife for the kingdom of France or the wealth of Venice.
But the caricaturists were not soon weary of the theme. Readers at all familiar with the manners of that age do not need to be told that few of the efforts of their free pencils will bear reproduction now. Besides exhibiting the pair carousing, dancing, romping, caressing, and in various situations supposed to be ridiculous, the satirists harped a good deal upon the old prophecy that Antichrist would be the offspring of a monk and a nun. "If that is the case," said Erasmus, "how many thousands of Antichrists there are in the world already!" Luther was evidently of the same opinion, for he gave full credit to the story of six thousand infants' skulls having been found at the bottom of a pond near a convent, as well as to that of "twelve great pots, in each of which was the carcass of an infant," discovered under the cellars of another convent. But, then, Luther was among the most credulous of men.
The marriage of the monk and the nun gave only a brief advantage to the enemies of reform. The great German artists of that generation were friends of Luther. No name is more distinguished in the early annals of German art than Albert Dürer, painter, engraver, sculptor, and author. He did not employ his pencil in furtherance of Luther's cause, nor did he forsake the communion of the ancient Church, but he expressed the warmest sympathy with the objects of the reformer. A report of Luther's death in 1521 struck horror to his soul. "Whether Luther be yet living," he wrote, "or whether his enemies have put him to death, I know not; yet certainly what he has suffered has been for the sake of truth, and because he has reprehended the abuses of unchristian papacy, which strives to fetter Christian liberty with the incumbrance of human ordinances, that we may be robbed of the price of our blood and sweat, and shamefully plundered by idlers, while the sick and needy perish through hunger." These words go to the heart of the controversy.
Holbein, nearly thirty years younger than Dürer, only just coming of age when Luther nailed his theses to the castle church, did more, as the reader has already seen, than express in words his sympathy with reform. The fineness and graphic force of the two specimens of his youthful talent given on pages 72, 73,[12] every reader must have remarked. Only three copies of these pictures are known to exist. They appeared at the time when Luther had kindled a general opposition to the sale of indulgences, as well as some ill feeling toward the classic authors so highly esteemed by Erasmus. They are in a peculiar sense Lutheran pictures, and they give expression to the reformer's prejudices and convictions. A third wood-cut of Holbein's is mentioned by Woltmann, dated 1524, in which the Pope is shown riding in a litter surrounded by an armed escort, and on the other side Christ is seen on an ass, accompanied by his disciples. These three works were Holbein's contribution to the earlier stage of the movement.
This artist was soon drawn away to the splendid court of Henry VIII. of England, where, among other works, he executed his renowned paintings, "The Triumph of Riches" and "The Triumph of Poverty," in both of which there is satire enough to bring them within our subject. Of these stupendous works, each containing seventeen or more life-size figures, every trace has perished except the artist's original sketch of "The Triumph of Riches." But they made a vivid impression upon the two generations which saw them, and we have so many engravings, copies, and descriptions of them that it is almost as if we still possessed the originals. Holbein's sketch is now in the Louvre at Paris. It will convey to the reader some idea of the harmonious grandeur of the painting, and some notion of the ingenious and friendly nature of its satire upon human life.
The Triumph of Riches. (Holbein, about 1533.)
In accordance with the custom of the age, the painting bore an explanatory motto in Latin: "Gold is the father of lust and the son of sorrow. He who lacks it laments; he who has it fears." Plutus, the god of wealth, is an old, old man, long past enjoyment; but his foot rests upon sacks of superfluous coin, and an open vessel before him, heaped with money, affords the only pleasures left to him—the sight and conscious possession of the wealth he can never use. Below him Fortuna, a young and lovely woman, scatters money among the people who throng about her, among whom are the portly Sichæus, Dido's husband, the richest of his people; Themistocles, who stooped to accept wealth from the Persian king; and many others noted in classic story for the part gold played in their lives. Crœsus, Midas, and Tantalus follow on horseback, and, last of all, the unveiled Cleopatra. The careful driver of Plutus's chariot is Ratio—reason. "Faster!" cries one of the crowd, but the charioteer still holds a tight rein. The unruly horses next the chariot, named Interest and Contract, are led by the noble maidens Equity and Justice; and the wild pair in front, Avarice and Deceit, are held in by Generosity and Good Faith. In the rear, hovering over the triumphal band, Nemesis threatens.
The companion picture, "The Triumph of Poverty," had also a Latin motto, to the effect that, while the rich man is ever anxious, "the poor man fears nothing, joyous hope is his portion, and he learns to serve God by the practice of virtue." In the picture a lean and hungry-looking old woman, Poverty, was seen riding in the lowliest of vehicles, a cart, drawn by two donkeys, Stupidity and Clumsiness, and by two oxen, Negligence and Indolence. Beside her in the cart sits Misfortune. A meagre and forlorn crowd surround and follow them. But the slow-moving team is guided by the four blooming girls, Moderation, Diligence, Alertness, and Toil, of whom the last is the one most abounding in vigor and health. The reins are held by Hope, her eyes toward heaven. Industry, Memory, and Experience sit behind, giving out to the hungry crowd the means of honorable plenty in the form of flails, axes, squares, and hammers.
These human and cheerful works stand in the waste of that age of wrathful controversy and irrational devotion like green islands in the desert, a rest to the eye and a solace to the mind.
When Luther was face to face with the hierarchy at the Diet of Worms, Calvin, a French boy of twelve, was already a sharer in the worldly advantage which the hierarchy could bestow upon its favorites. He held a benefice in the Cathedral of Noyon, his native town, and at seventeen he drew additional revenue from a curacy in a neighboring parish. The tonsured boy owed this ridiculous preferment to the circumstance that his father, being secretary to the bishop of the diocese, was sure to be at hand when the bishop happened to have a good thing to give away. In all probability Jean Calvin would have died an archbishop or a cardinal if he had remained in the Church of his ancestors, for he possessed the two requisites for advancement—fervent zeal for the Church and access to the bestowers of its prizes. At Paris, however, whither he was sent by his father to pursue his studies, a shy, intense, devout lad, already thin and sallow with fasting and study, the light of the Reformation broke upon him. Like Luther, he long resisted it, and still longer hoped to see a reformation in the Church, not outside of its pale. The Church never had a more devoted son. Not Luther himself loved it more. "I was so obstinately given to the superstitions of popery," he said, long after, "that it seemed impossible I should ever be pulled out of the deep mire."
He struggled out at length. Observe one of the results of his conversion in this picture, in which a slander of the day is preserved for our inspection.[13]
Calvin branded. (Paris.)
Gross and filthy calumny was one of the familiar weapons in the theological contests of that century. Both sides employed it—Luther and Calvin not less than others—for it belonged to that age to hate, and hence to misinterpret, opponents. "Search the records of the city of Noyon, in Picardie," wrote Stapleton, an eminent controversialist on the Catholic side, and professor in a Catholic college of Calvin's own day, "and read again that Jean Calvin, convicted of a crime" (infamous and unmentionable), "by the very clement sentence of the bishop and magistrate was branded with an iron lily on the shoulders." The records have been searched; nothing of the kind is to be found in them; but the picture was drawn and scattered over France. Precisely the same charge was made against Luther. That both the reformers died of infamous diseases was another of the scandals of the time. In reading these controversies, it is convenient to keep in mind the remark of the collector of the Calvin pictures: "When two theologians accuse one another, both of them lie." One of these calumnies drew from Calvin a celebrated retort. "They accuse me," said he, "of having no children. In every land there are Christians who are my children."
Another caricature, shown on the following page, representing Calvin at the burning of Servetus, had only too much foundation in truth.
The reformer was not indeed present at the burning, but he caused the arrest of the victim, drew up the charges, furnished part of the testimony that convicted him, consented to and approved his execution. Servetus was a Spanish physician, of blameless life and warm convictions, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. Catholic and Protestant equally abhorred him, and Protestant Geneva seized the opportunity to show the world its attachment to the true faith by burning a man whom Rome was also longing to burn. It was a hideous scene—a virtuous and devoted Unitarian expiring in the flames after enduring the extremest anguish for thirty minutes, and crying, from the depths of his torment, "Jesus, thou Son of the eternal God, have mercy on me!" But it was not Calvin who burned him. It was the century. It was imperfectly developed human nature. Man had not reached the civilization which admits, allows, welcomes, and honors disinterested conviction. It were as unjust to blame Calvin for burning Servetus as it is to hold the Roman Catholic Church of the present day responsible for the Inquisition of three centuries ago. It was Man that was guilty of all those stupid and abominable cruelties. Luther, the man of his period, honestly declared that if he were the Lord God, and saw kings, princes, bishops, and judges so little mindful of his Son, he would "knock the world to pieces." If Calvin had not burned Servetus, Servetus might have burned Calvin, and the Pope would have been happy to burn both.
Calvin at the Burning of Servetus.
One of the best caricatures—perhaps the very best—which the Reformation called forth was suggested by the dissensions that arose between the followers of Luther and Calvin when both of them were in the grave. It might have amused the very persons caricatured. We can fancy Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics all laughing together at the spectacle of the two reformers holding the Pope by the ear, and with their other hands fighting one another, Luther clawing at Calvin's beard, and Calvin hurling a Bible at Luther's head.
On the same sheet in the original drawing a second picture was given, in which a shepherd was seen on his knees, surrounded by his flock, addressing the Lord, who is visible in the sky. Underneath is written, "The Lord is my Shepherd; he will never forsake me." The work has an additional interest as showing how early the French began to excel in caricature. In the German and English caricatures of that period there are no existing specimens which equal this one in effective simplicity.
Calvin, the Pope, and Luther. (Paris, 1600.)
Perhaps the all-pervading influence of Rabelais in that age may have made French satire more good-humored. After all efforts to discover in the works of Rabelais hidden allusions to the great personages and events of his time, we must remain of the opinion that he was a fun-maker pure and simple, a court-fool to his century. The anecdote related of his convent life seems to give us the key both to his character and his writings. The incident has often been used in comedy since Rabelais employed it. On the festival of St. Francis, to whom his convent was dedicated, when the country people came in, laden with votive offerings, to pray before the image of the saint, young Rabelais removed the image from its dimly lighted recess and mounted himself upon the pedestal, attired in suitable costume. Group after group of awkward rustics approached and paid their homage. Rabelais at length, overcome by the ridiculous demeanor of the worshipers, was obliged to laugh, whereupon the gaping throng cried out, "A miracle! a miracle! Our good lord St. Francis moves!" But a cunning old friar, who knew when miracles might and might not be rationally expected in that convent, ran into the chapel and drew out the merry saint, and the brothers laid their knotted cords so vigorously across his naked shoulders that he had a lively sense of not being made of wood. That was Rabelais! He was a natural laugh-compeller. He laughed at every thing, and set his countrymen laughing at every thing. But there were no men who oftener provoked his derision than the monks. "How is it?" asks one of his merry men, "that people exclude monks from all good companies, calling them feast-troublers, marrers of mirth, and disturbers of all civil conversation, as bees drive away the drones from their hives?" The hero answers this question in three pages of most Rabelaisan abuse, of which only a very few lines are quotable. "Your monk," he says, "is like a monkey in a house. He does not watch like a dog, nor plow like the ox, nor give wool like the sheep, nor carry like the horse; he only spoils and defiles all things. Monks disquiet all their neighborhood with a tingle-tangle jangling of bells, and mumble out great store of psalms, legends, and paternosters without thinking upon or apprehending the meaning of what they say, which truly is a mocking of God." There is no single theme to which Rabelais, the favorite of bishops, oftener returns than this, and his boisterous satire had its effect upon the course of events in Europe, as well as upon French art and literature.
The English caricatures that have come down to us from the era of the Reformation betray far more earnestness than humor or ingenuity. There is one in the British Museum which figures in so many books, and continued to do duty for so many years, that the inroads of the worms in the wood-cut can be traced in the prints of different dates. It represents King Henry VIII. receiving a Bible from Archbishop Cranmer and Lord Cromwell. The burly monarch, seated upon his throne, takes the book from their hands, while he tramples upon Pope Clement, lying prostrate at his feet, the tiara broken and fallen off, the triple cross lying on the ground. Cardinal Pole, with the aid of another dignitary, is trying to get the Pope on his feet again. A monk is holding the Pope's horse, and other monks stand dismayed at the spectacle. This picture was executed in 1537, but, as we learn from the catalogue, the deterioration of the block and "the working of worms in the wood" prove that the impression in the Museum was taken in 1631.[14]
The martyrdom of the reformers in 1555, under Queen Mary of bloody memory, furnished subjects for the satiric pen and pencil as soon as the accession of Elizabeth made it safe to treat them. But there is no spirit of fun in the pictures. They are as serious and grim as the events that suggested them. In one we see a lamb suspended before an altar, which the Bishop of Winchester (Gardiner), with his wolf's head, is beginning to devour; and on the ground lie six slain lambs, named Houperus, Cranmerus, Bradfordus, Rydlerus, Rogerus, and Latimerus. Three reformers put a rope round Gardiner's neck, saying, "We will not this feloue to raigne over us;" and on the other side of him two bishops with wolves' heads mitred, and having sheepskins on their shoulders, are drinking from chalices. Behind Gardiner are several men attached by rings through their noses to a rope round his waist. The devil appears above, holding a scroll, on which is written, "Youe are my verye chyldren in that youe have slayne the prophetes. For even I from the begynning was a murtherer." On the altar lie two books, one open and the other shut. On the open book we read, "Christ alone is not sufficient without our sacrifice." The only window in the edifice, a small round one, is closed and barred. Many of the figures in this elaborate piece utter severe animadversion upon opponents; but none of them is scurrilous and indecent, except the mitred wolf, who is so remarkably plain-spoken that the compiler of the catalogue was obliged to suppress several of his words.
The English caricaturists of that age seem to have felt it their duty to exhibit the entire case between Catholic and Protestant in each broadside, with all the litigants on both sides, terrestrial and celestial, all the points in both arguments, and sometimes the whole history of the controversy from the beginning. The great expanse of the picture was obscured with the number of remarks streaming from the mouths of the persons depicted, and there was often at the bottom of the engraving prose and verse enough to fill two or three of these pages. Such extensive works call to mind the sermons of the following century, when preachers endeavored on each occasion to declare, as they said, "the whole counsel of God;" so that if one individual present had never heard the Gospel before, and should never hear it again, he would hear enough for salvation in that one discourse.
Another of these martyrdom prints may claim brief notice. Two companies of martyrs are seen, one composed of the bishops, and the other of less distinguished persons, between whom there is a heap of burning fagots. Nearly all the figures say something, and the space under the picture is filled with verses. Cranmer, with the Bible in his left hand, holds his right in the fire, exclaiming, "Burne, unworthie right hand!" Latimer cries, "Lord, Lord, receive my spirit!" Philpot, pointing to a book which he holds, says, "I will pay my vowes in thee, O Smithfield!" The other characters utter their dying words. The verses are rough, but full of the resolute enthusiasm of the age:
"First, Christian Cranmer, who (at first tho foild),
And so subscribing to a recantation,
God's grace recouering him, hee, quick recoil'd,
And made his hand ith flames make expiation.
Saing, burne faint-hand, burne first, 'tis thy due merit.
And dying, cryde, Lord Jesus take my spirit.
"Next, lovely Latimer, godly and grave,
Himselfe, Christs old tride souldier, plaine displaid,
Who stoutly at the stake did him behave,
And to blest Ridley (gone before) hee saide,
Goe on blest brother, for I followe, neere,
This day wee'le light a light, shall aye burne cleare.
"Whom when religious, reverend Ridley spide,
Deere heart (sayes hee) bee cheerful in yr Lord;
Who never (yet) his helpe to his denye'd,
& hee will us support & strength afford,
Or suage ye flame, thus, to the stake fast tide,
They, constantly Christs blessed Martyres dyde.
"Blest Bradford also comming to the stake,
Cheerfully tooke a faggott in his hand:
Kist it, &, thus, unto a young-man spake,
Wch with him, chained, to ye stake did stand,
Take courage (brother) wee shal haue this night,
A blessed supper wth the Lord of Light.
"Admir'd was Doctor Tailers faith & grace,
Who under-went greate hardship spight and spleene;
One, basely, threw a Faggot in his face,
Wch made ye blood ore all his face bee seene;
Another, barberously beate out his braines,
Whilst, at ye stake his corps was bound wth chaines."
In many of the English pictures of that period, the intention of the draughtsman is only made apparent by the explanatory words at the bottom. In one of these a friar is seen holding a chalice to a man who stretches out his hands to receive it. From the chalice a winged cockatrice is rising. There is also a man who stabs another while embracing him. The quaint words below explain the device: "The man which standeth lyke a Prophet signifieth godliness; the Fryer, treason; the cup with the Serpent, Poyson; the other which striketh with the sworde, Murder; and he that is wounded is Peace." In another of these pictures we see an ass dressed in a judge's robes seated on the bench. Before him is the prisoner, led away by a priest and another man. At one side a friar is seen in conversation with a layman. No one could make any thing of this if the artist had not obligingly appended these words: "The Asse signifieth Wrathfull Justice; the man that is drawn away, Truth; those that draweth Truth by the armes, Flatterers; the Frier, Lies; and the associate with the Frier, Perjury." In another drawing the artist shows us the Pope seated in a chair, with his foot on the face of a prostrate man, and in his hand a drawn sword, directing an executioner who is in the act of beheading a prisoner. In the distance are three men kneeling in prayer. The explanation is this: "The Pope is Oppression; the man which killeth is Crueltie; those which are a-killing, Constant Religion; the three kneeling, Love, Furtherance, and Truth to the Gospel." In one of these crude productions a parson is exhibited preaching in a pulpit, from which two ecclesiastics are dragging him by the beard to the stake outside. Explanation in this instance is not so necessary, but we have it, nevertheless: "He which preacheth in the pulpit signifieth godly zeale and a furtherer of the gospel; and the two which are plucking him out of his place are the enemies of God's Word, threatening by fire to consume the professors of the same; and that company which (sit) still are Nullifidians, such as are of no religion, not regarding any doctrine, so they may bee quiet to live after their owne willes and mindes." Another picture shows us a figure seated on a rainbow, the world at his feet, up the sides of which a pope and a cardinal are climbing. In the middle is the devil tumbling off headlong. The world is upheld by Death, who sits by the mouth of hell. This is the explanation: "He which sitteth on the raynebowe signifieth Christ, and the sworde in his hand signifieth his wrath against the wycked; the round compasse, the worlde; and those two climing, the one a pope, the other a cardinall, striving who shall be highest; and the Divell which falleth headlong downe is Lucifer, whiche through pride fel; he whiche holdeth the world is Death, standing in the entrance of hell to receyve all superbious livers."
In another print is represented a Roman soldier riding on a boar, and bearing a banner, on which is painted the Pope with his insignia. A man stabs himself and tears his hair, and behind him is a raving woman. This picture has a blunt signification: "The bore signifieth Wrath, and the man on his back Mischief; the Pope in the flag Destruction, and the flag Uncertaine Religion, turning and chaunging with every blaste of winde; the man killing himselfe, Desperation; the woman, Madness."
There are fourteen specimens in this quaint manner in the collection of the British Museum, all executed and published in the early part of the reign of Elizabeth. As art, they are naught. As part of the record of a great age, they have their value.
Titian's Caricature of the Laocoön.
Germany, England, and France fought the battle of the Reformation—two victors and one vanquished. From Italy in that age we have one specimen of caricature, but it was executed by Titian. He drew a burlesque of the Laocoön to ridicule a school of artists in Rome, who, as he thought, extolled too highly the ancient sculptures, and, because they could not succeed in coloring, insisted that correctness of form was the chief thing in art. Since Titian's day, parodies of the Laocoön have been among the stock devices of the caricaturists of all nations.
The Papal Gorgon. (Reign of Elizabeth, 1581.)
The annexed picture,[15] a favorite with the Protestants of England, Holland, and Germany for more than a century, is composed of twenty-two articles and objects, most of which are employed in the Roman Catholic worship. A church-bell forms the hat, which is decorated by crossed daggers and holy-water brushes. A herring serves for a nose. The mouth is an open wine-flagon. The eye is a chalice covered by the holy wafer, and the cheek is a paten, or plate used in the communion service. The great volume that forms the shoulders is the mass-book. The front of the bell-tiara is adorned by a mitred wolf devouring a lamb, and by a goose holding a rosary in its bill; the back, by a spectacled ass reading a book, and by a boar wearing a scholar's cap. At the bottom of the engraving the pierced feet of Christ are seen resting upon two creatures called by the artist "the Queen's badges." The whole figure of Christ is supposed to be behind this mass of human inventions; for in the original these explanatory words are given, "Christ Covered."
It was by this device that Master Batman, at the beginning of the Puritan period, sought to present to the eye a summary of what the Reformation had accomplished, and what it had still to fear. Half a century before, Henry VIII. being still the Defender of the Faith, the various articles used in Master Batman's satirical picture were objects of religious veneration throughout Great Britain. They had now become the despised but dreaded rattle-traps of a suppressed idolatry. From the field of strife one of the victors gathered the scattered arms and implements, the gorgeous ensigns and trappings of the defeated, and piled them upon the plain, a trophy and a warning.
There is no revolution that does not sweep away much that is good. The reformation in religion, chiefly wrought by Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, and Calvin, was a movement of absolute necessity to the further progress of our race. The intelligence of Christendom had reached a development which was incompatible with respect for the assumptions of the papacy, and with a belief in the fictions which the papacy had invented or adopted. The vase must have broken, or the oak planted in it must have ceased to grow. Nevertheless, those fictions had their beauty and their use. There was a good and pleasing side to that system of fables and ceremonies, which amused, absorbed, and satisfied the people of Europe for a thousand years. If we could concede that the mass of men must remain forever ignorant and very poor, we could also admit that nothing was ever invented by man better calculated to make them thoughtlessly contented with a dismal lot than the Roman Catholic Church as it existed in the fifteenth century, before the faith of the people had been shaken in its pretensions. There was something in it for every faculty of human nature except the intellect. It gave play to every propensity except the propensity of one mind in a thousand to ask radical questions. It relieved every kind of distress except that which came of using the reason. All human interests were provided for in it except the supreme interest of human advancement.
One must have been in a Catholic community, or else lived close to an important Catholic church, in order to form an idea of the great part the Church once played in the lives and thoughts of its members—the endless provision it made for the entertainment of unformed minds in the way of festivals, fasts, processions, curious observances, changes of costume, and special rites. There was always something going on or coming off. There was not a day in the year nor an hour in the day which had not its ecclesiastical name and character. In our flowery observance of Easter and in our joyous celebration of Christmas we have a faint traditional residue of festivals that once made all Christendom gay and jocund. And it was all so adapted to the limited abilities of our race! In an average thousand men, there is not more than one man capable of filling creditably the post of a Protestant minister, but there are a hundred who can be drilled into competent priests.
Consider, for example, a procession, which was formerly the great event of many of the Church festivals, gratifying equally those who witnessed and those who took part in it. In other words, it gratified keenly the whole community. And yet how entirely it was within the resources of human nature! Not a child so young, not a woman so weak, not a man so old, but could assist or enjoy it. The sick could view it from their windows, the robust could carry its burdens, the skillful could contrive its devices, and all had the feeling that they were engaged in enhancing at once the glory of God, the fame of their saint, the credit of their town, and the good of their souls. It was pleasure; it was duty; it was masquerade; it was devotion. Some readers may remember the exaltation of soul with which Albert Dürer, the first of German artists in Luther's age, describes the great procession at Antwerp, in 1520, in honor of what was styled the "Assumption" of the Virgin Mary. One of the pleasing fictions adopted by the old Church was that on the 15th of August, A.D. 45, the Virgin Mary, aged seventy-five years, made a miraculous ascent into heaven. Hence the annual festival, which was celebrated throughout Europe with pomp and splendor. The passage in the diary of Dürer has a particular value, because it affords us a vivid view of the bright side of the ancient Church just before the reformers changed its gorgeous robes into the Puritan's plain black gown, and substituted the long prayer and interminable sermon for the magnificent ceremonial and the splendid procession.
Albert Dürer was in sympathy with Luther, but his heart swelled within him as he beheld, on that Sunday morning in Antwerp, the glorious pageantry that filed past for two hours in honor of the "Mother of God's" translation. All the people of the city assembled about the Church of "Our Lady," each dressed in gayest attire, but each wearing the costume of his rank, and exhibiting the badge of his guild or vocation. Silver trumpets of the old Frankish fashion, German drums and fifes, were playing in every quarter. The trades and guilds of the city—goldsmiths, painters, masons, embroiderers, statuaries, cabinet-makers, carpenters, sailors, fishermen, butchers, curriers, weavers, bakers, tailors, shoe-makers, and laborers—all marched by in order, at some distance apart, each preceded by its own magnificent cross. These were followed by the merchants, shop-keepers, and their clerks. The "shooters" came next, armed with bows, cross-bows, and firelocks, some on horseback and some on foot. The city guard followed. Then came the magistrates, nobles, and knights, all dressed in their official costume, and escorted, as our artist records, "by a gallant troop, arrayed in a noble and splendid manner." There were a number of women in the procession, belonging to a religious order, who gained their subsistence by labor. These, all clad in white from head to foot, agreeably relieved the splendors of the occasion. After them marched "a number of gallant persons and the canons of Our Lady's Church, with all the clergy and scholars, followed by a grand display of characters." Here the enthusiasm of the artist kindles, as he recalls the glories of the day:
"Twenty men carried the Virgin and Christ, most richly adorned, to the honor of God. In this part of the procession were a number of delightful things represented in a splendid manner. There were several wagons, in which were representations of ships and fortifications. Then came a troop of characters from the Prophets, in regular order, followed by others from the New Testament, such as the Annunciation, the Wise Men of the East riding great camels and other wonderful animals, and the Flight into Egypt, all very skillfully appointed. Then came a great dragon, and St. Margaret with the image of the Virgin at her girdle, exceedingly beautiful; and last, St. George and his squire. In this troop rode a number of boys and girls very handsomely arrayed in various costumes, representing so many saints. This procession, from beginning to end, was upward of two hours in passing our house, and there were so many things to be seen that I could never describe them all even in a book."
In some such hearty and picturesque manner all the great festivals of the Church were celebrated age after age, the entire people taking part in the show. There was no dissent, because there was no thought. But the reformers preached, the Bible was translated into the modern tongues, the intelligence of Christendom awoke, and all that bright childish pageantry vanished from the sight of the more advanced nations. The reformers discovered that there was no reason to believe that the aged Virgin Mary, on the 15th of August, A.D. 45, was borne miraculously to heaven; and in a single generation many important communities, by using their reason even to that trifling extent, grew past enjoying the procession annually held in honor of the old tradition. All the old festivals fell under the ban. It became, at length, a sectarian punctilio not to abstain from labor on Christmas. The Puritan Sunday was gradually evolved from the same spirit of opposition, and life became intense and serious.
For it is not in a single generation, nor in ten, that the human mind, after having been bound and confined for a thousand years, learns to enjoy and safely use its freedom. Luther the reformer was only a little less credulous than Luther the monk. He assisted to strike the fetters from the reason, but the prisoner only hobbled from one cell into another, larger and cleaner, but still a cell. No one can become familiar with the Puritan period without feeling that the bondage of the mind to the literal interpretation of some parts of the Old Testament was a bondage as real, though not as degrading nor as hopeless, as that under which it had lived to the papal decrees. You do not make your canary a free bird by merely opening the door of its cage. It has to acquire slowly, with anguish and great fear, the strength of wing, lungs, and eye, the knowledge, habits, and instincts, which its ancestors possessed before they were captured in their native islands. It is only in our own day that we are beginning really to enjoy the final result of Luther's heroic life—a tolerant and modest freedom of thought—for it is only in our own day that the consequences of peculiar thinking have anywhere ceased to be injurious.
If there are any who can not yet forgive the Puritans for their intolerance and narrowness, it must be they who do not know the agony of apprehension in which they passed their lives. It is the Puritan age that could be properly called the Reign of Terror. It lasted more than a century, instead of a few months, and it was during that long period of dread and tribulation that they acquired the passionate abhorrence of the papal system which is betrayed in the pictures and writings of the time. There was a fund of terror in their own belief, in that awful Doubt which hung over every soul, whether it was or was not one of the Elect; and, in addition to that, it seemed to them that the chief powers of earth, and all the powers of hell, were united to crush the true believers.
Spayne and Rome Defeated. (London and Amsterdam, 1621.)
Examine the two large caricatures, "Rome's Monster" and "Spayne and Rome Defeated," in the light of a mere catalogue of dates. The Field of the Cloth of Gold, which we may regard as the splendid close of the old state of things, occurred in 1520, three years after Luther nailed up his theses. Henry VIII. defied the Pope in 1533; and twenty years after, Bloody Mary, married to Philip of Spain, was burning bishops at Smithfield. Elizabeth's reign began in 1558, which changed, not ended, the religious strife in England. The massacre of St. Bartholomew occurred in 1572, on that 24th of August which, as Voltaire used to say, all the humane and the tolerant of our race should observe as a day of humiliation and sorrow for evermore. In 1579 began the long struggle between the New and the Old, which is called the Thirty Years' War. The Prince of Orange was assassinated in 1584, in the midst of those great events which Mr. Motley has made familiar to the reading people of both continents. Every intelligent Protestant in Europe felt that the weapon which slew the prince was aimed at his own heart. The long dread of the Queen of Scots' machinations ended only with her death in 1587. Soon after, the shadow of the coming Spanish Armada crept over Great Britain, which was not dispelled till the men of England defeated and the storm scattered it in 1588. In 1605 Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot struck such terror to the Protestant mind, that it has not, in this year, 1877, wholly recovered from it, as all may know who will converse with uninstructed people in the remoter counties of Great Britain. Raleigh was beheaded in 1618. The civil war began in 1642. In 1665 the plague desolated England, and in the next year occurred the great fire of London, good Protestants not doubting that both events were traceable to the fell influence of the Beast. The accession of James II., a Roman Catholic, filled the Puritans with new alarm in 1685, and during the three anxious years of his reign their brethren, the Huguenots, were fleeing into all the Protestant lands from the hellish persecution of the priests who governed Louis XIV.
Upon looking back at this period of agitation and alarm, it startles the mind to observe in the catalogue of dates this one: "Shakspeare died 1616." It shows us, what the ordinary records do not show, that there are people who retain their sanity and serenity in the maddest times. The rapid succession of the plays—an average of nearly two per annum—proves that there was a public for Shakspeare when all the world seemed absorbed in subjects least akin to art and humor. And how little trace we find of all those thrilling events in the plays! He was a London actor when the Armada came; and during the year of the Gunpowder Plot he was probably meditating the grandest of all his themes, "King Lear!"
The picture entitled "Spayne and Rome Defeated"[16] was one of the most noted and influential broadsheets published during the Puritan period. It may properly be termed a broadsheet, since the copy of the original in the British Museum measures 20-2/3 inches by 13. The Puritans of England saw with dismay the growing cordiality between James I. and the Spanish court, and watched with just apprehension the visit of Prince Charles to Spain, and the prospect of a marriage between the heir-apparent and a Spanish princess. At this alarming crisis, 1621, the sheet was composed in England, and sent over to Holland to be engraved and printed, Holland being then, and for a hundred and fifty years after, the printing-house and type-foundry of Northern Europe. Some of the Pilgrim Fathers of Massachusetts, then residing at Leyden, and still waiting to hear the first news of the Mayflower company, who had sailed the year before, may have borne a hand in the work. Pastor Robinson, we know, gained part of his livelihood by co-operating with brethren in England in the preparation of works designed for distribution at home.
Besides being one of the most characteristic specimens of Puritan caricature which have been preserved, it presents to us a résumé of history, as Protestants interpreted it, from the time of the Spanish Armada to that of Guy Fawkes—1588 to 1605. It appears to have been designed for circulation in Holland and Germany as well as in England, as the words and verses upon it are in English, Dutch, and Latin. The English lines are these:
"In Eighty-eight, Spayne, arm'd with potent might,
Against our peacefull Land came on to fight;
But windes and waves and fire in one conspire,
To help the English, frustrate Spaynes desire.
To second that the Pope in counsell sitts,
For some rare stratagem they strayne their witts;
November's 5th, by powder they decree
Great Brytanes state ruinate should bee.
But Hee, whose never-slumb'ring Eye did view
The dire intendments of this damned crew,
Did soone prevent what they did thinke most sure.
Thy mercyes, Lord! for evermore endure."
This interesting sheet was devised by Samuel Ward, a Puritan preacher of Ipswich, of great zeal and celebrity, who dedicated it, in the fashion of the day, thus:
"To God. In memorye of his double deliveraunce from ye invincible Navie and ye unmatcheable powder Treason, 1605."
It was a timely reminder. As we occasionally see in our own day a public man committing the absurdity of replying in a serious strain to a caricature, so, in 1621, the Spanish embassador in London, Count Gondomar, called the attention of the British Government to this engraving, complaining that it was calculated to revive the old antipathy of the English people to the Spanish monarchy. The obsequious lords of the Privy Council summoned Samuel Ward to appear before them. After examining him, they remanded him to the custody of their messenger, whose house was a place of confinement for such prisoners; and there he remained. As there was yet no habeas corpus act known among men, he could only protest his innocence of any ill designs upon the Spanish monarchy, and humbly petition for release. He petitioned first the Privy Council; and they proving obdurate, he petitioned the king. He was set free at last, and he remained for twenty years a thorn in the side of those who dreaded "Spayne and Rome" less than they hated Puritans and Parliaments.
This persecution of Samuel Ward gave his print such celebrity that several imitations or pirated editions of the work speedily appeared, of which four are preserved in the great collection of the British Museum, each differing from the original in details. Caricatures aimed directly at the Spanish embassador followed, but they are only remarkable for the explanatory words which accompany them. In one we read that the residence of Count Gondomar in England had "hung before the eyes of many good men like a prodigious comet, threatening worse effects to Church and State than this other comet," which had recently menaced both from the vault of heaven. "No ecclipse of the sunne," continues the writer, "could more damnifie the earth, to make it barraine and the best things abortive, than did his interposition." We learn also that when the count left England for a visit to his own country, in 1618, "there was an uproare and assault a day or two before his departure from London by the Apprentices, who seemed greedy of such an occasion to vent their own spleenes in doing him or any of his a mischiefe." Another picture exhibits the odious Gondomar giving an account of his conduct in England to the "Spanishe Parliament," in the course of which he attributes the British abhorrence of Spain to such men as "Ward of Ipswich," whom he describes as "light and unstayed wits," intent on winning the airy applause of the vulgar, and to raise their desperate fortunes. Nor does he refrain from chuckling over the penalty inflicted upon that enemy of Spayne and Rome: "And I think that Ward of Ipswich escaped not safely for his lewed and profane picture of '88 and their Powder Treason, one whereof, my Lord Archbishop, I sent you in a letter, that you might see the malice of these detestable Heretiques against his Holiness and the Catholic Church." This broadsheet being entitled "Vox Populi," the writer concludes his explanation by styling the embassador "Fox Populi, Count Gondomar the Great."
From Title-page to a Sermon, "Woe to Drunkards," by Samuel Ward, of Ipswich, 1627.
Ward of Ipswich continued to be heard from occasionally during the first years of the reign of Charles I. Ipswich itself acquired a certain celebrity as a Puritan centre, and the name was given during the life-time of Samuel Ward to a town in Massachusetts, which is still thriving. One of his sermons upon drunkenness was illustrated by a picture, of which a copy is given here,[17] designed to show the degeneracy of manners that had taken place in England in his day. Mr. Chatto truly remarks that twenty years later the picture would have been more appropriate with the inscriptions transposed.
The marriage of Charles I. with the Princess Henrietta of France, in 1625, was one of the long series of impolitic acts which the king expiated on the scaffold in 1649. It aggravated every propensity of his nature that was hostile to the liberties of the people. Under James I. the élite of the Puritans had fled to Holland, and a little company had sought a more permanent refuge on the coast of New England. During the early years of the reign of Charles, the persecution of the Puritans by his savage bishops became so cruel and so vigilant as to induce men of family and fortune, like Winthrop and his friends, accompanied by a fleet of vessels laden with virtuous and thoughtful families, to cross the ocean and settle in Massachusetts. Boston was founded when Charles I. had been cutting off the ears and slitting the noses of Puritans for five years. All that enchanting shore of New England, with its gleaming beaches, and emerald isles, and jutting capes of granite and wild roses, now so dear to summer visitors—an eternal holiday-ground and resting-place for the people of North America—began to be dotted with villages, the names of which tell us what English towns were most renowned for the Puritan spirit two hundred and fifty years ago. The satirical pictures preserved in the British Museum which relate to events in earlier reigns number ninety-nine in all; but those suggested by events in the reign of Charles I. are nearly seven hundred in number. Most of them, however, were not published until after the downfall of the king.
Several of these prints are little more than portraits of the conspicuous persons of the time, with profuse accounts on the same sheet of their sufferings or misdeeds. One such records the heroic endurance of "the Reverend Peter Smart, mr of Artes, minister of God's word at Durham," who, for preaching against popery, lost above three hundred pounds per annum, and was imprisoned eleven years in the King's Bench. The composer adds these lines:
"Peter preach downe vaine rites with flagrant harte;
Thy Guerdon shall be greate, though heare thou Smart."
Another of these portrait pieces exhibits Dr. Alexander Leighton, who spoke of Queen Henrietta as "the daughter of Hell, a Canaanite, and an idolatresse," and spared not Archbishop Laud and his confederates. For these offenses he was, as the draughtsman informs us, "clapt up in Newgate for the space of 15 weekes, where he suffered great miserie and sicknes almost to death, afterward lost one of his Eares on the pillorie, had one of his nosthrills slitt clean through, was whipt with a whip of 3 Coardes knotted, had 36 lashes therewith, was fined 1000ll., and kept prisoner in the fleet 12 yeares, where he was most cruelly used a long time, being lodged day and night amongst the most desperately wiked villaines of ye whole prison." He was also branded on the cheek with the letters S. S.—sower of sedition. Several other prints of the time record the same mark of attention paid by the "martyred" king to his Catholic wife. By-and-by, the crowned and mitred ruffians who did such deeds as these being themselves in durance, Parliament set Dr. Leighton free, and made him a grant of six thousand pounds.
A caricature of the same bloody period is entitled, "Archbishop Laud dining on the Ears of Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton." We see Laud seated at dinner, having an ear on the point of his knife and three more ears in the plate before him, the three victims of his cruelty standing about, and two armed bishops at the foot of the table. The dialogue below represents Laud as rejecting with scorn all the dainties of his table, and declaring that nothing will content him but the ears of Lawyer Prynne and Dr. Bastwick. He cuts them off himself, and orders them to be dressed for his supper.
"Canterbury. This I doe to make you examples,
That others may be more careful to please my palate.
Henceforth let my servants know, that what I will, I will have done,
What ere is under heaven's Sunne."
"Let not the World devide those whom Christ hath joined."
A burst of caricature heralded the coming triumph of the Puritans in 1640, the year of the impeachment of the Earl of Strafford. Many of the pictures recorded both the sufferings and the joyful deliverance of the Puritan clergymen. Thus we have in one of them a glowing account of the return of the three gentlemen whose ears furnished a repast for the Archbishop of Canterbury. They had been imprisoned for many years in the Channel Islands, from which they were conveyed to Dartmouth, and thence to London, hailed with acclamations of delight and welcome in every village through which they passed. All the expenses of their long journey were paid for them, and presents of value were thrust upon them as they rode by. Within a few miles of London they were met by such a concourse of vehicles, horsemen, and people that it was with great difficulty they could travel a mile in an hour. But when at length, in the evening, they reached the city, masses of enthusiastic people blocked the streets, crying, "Welcome home! welcome home!" and strewing flowers and rosemary before them. Thousands of the people carried torches, which rendered the streets lighter than the day. They were three hours in making their way through the crowd from Charing Cross to their lodgings in the city, a distance of a mile.
It was during the exaltation of the years preceding the civil war that such pictures appeared as the one here given, urging a union between the Church of England and the Church of Scotland against the foe of both. This is copied from an original impression in the collection of the New York Historical Society.
The caricaturists pursued Laud and Strafford even to the scaffold. The archbishop was the author of a work entitled "Canons and Institutions Ecclesiastical," in which he gave expression to his extreme High-church opinions. In 1640 the victorious House of Commons canceled the canons adopted from this work, and fined the clergy who had sat in the Convocation. A caricature quickly appeared, called "Archbishop Laud firing a Cannon," in which the cannon is represented as bursting, and its fragments endangering the clergymen standing near. Laud's committal to the Tower was the occasion of many broadsheets, one of which exhibits him fastened to a staple in a wall, with a long string of taunting stanzas below:
"Reader, I know thou canst not choose but smile
To see a Bishop tide thus to a ring!
Yea, such a princely prelate, that ere while
Could three at once in Limbo patrum fling;
Suspend by hundreds where his worship pleased,
And them that preached too oft by silence eas'd;
"Made Laws and Canons, like a King (at least);
Devis'd new oaths; forc'd men to sweare to lies!
Advanc'd his lordly power 'bove all the rest.
And then our Lazie Priests began to rise;
But painfull ministers, which plide their place
With diligence, went downe the wind apace.
"Our honest Round heads too then went to racke;
The holy sisters into corners fled;
Cobblers and Weavers preacht in Tubs for lacke
Of better Pulpits; with a sacke instead
Of Pulpit-cloth, hung round in decent wise,
All which the spirit did for their good devise.
"Barnes, Cellers, Cole-holes, were their meeting-places,
So sorely were these babes of Christ abus'd,
Where he that most Church-government disgraces
Is most esteem'd, and with most reverence us'd.
It being their sole intent religiously
To rattle against the Bishops' dignity.
"Brother, saies one, what doe you thinke, I pray,
Of these proud Prelates, which so lofty are?
Truly, saies he, meere Antichrists are they.
Thus as they parle, before they be aware,
Perhaps a Pursuivant slips in behind,
And makes 'em run like hares before the wind.
"A yeere agone 'tad been a hanging matter
T'ave writ (nay, spoke) a word 'gainst little Will;
But now the times are chang'd, men scorne to flatter;
So much the worse for Canterbury still,
For if that truth come once to rule the roast,
No mar'le to see him tide up to a post.
"By wicked counsels faine he would have set
The Scots and us together by the eares;
A Patriark's place the Levite long'd to get,
To sit bith' Pope in one of Peter's chaires.
And having drunke so deepe of Babels cup,
Was it not time, d'ee think, to chaine him up?"
In these stanzas are roughly given the leading counts of the popular indictment against Archbishop Laud. Other prints present him to us in the Tower with a halter round his neck; and, again, we see him in a bird-cage, with the queen's Catholic confessor, the two being popularly regarded as birds of a feather. In another, a stout carpenter is holding Laud's nose to a grindstone, while the carpenter's boy turns the handle, and the archbishop cries for mercy:
"Such turning will soon deform my face;
Oh! I bleed, I bleed! and am extremely sore."
But the carpenter reminds him that the various ears that he had caused to be cut off were quite as precious to their owners as his nose is to him. A Jesuit enters with a vessel of holy water with which to wash the extremely sore nose. One broadsheet represents Laud in consultation with his physician, who administers an emetic that causes him to throw off his stomach several heavy articles which had been troubling him for years. First, the "Tobacco Patent" comes up with a terrible wrench. As each article appears, the doctor and his patient converse upon it:
"Doctor. What's this? A book? Whosoever hath bin at church may exercise lawful recreations on Sunday. What's the meaning of this?
"Canterbury. 'Tis the booke for Pastimes on the Sunday, which I caused to be made. But hold! here comes something. What is it?
"Doctor. 'Tis another book. The title is, 'Sunday no Sabbath.' Did you cause this to be made also?
"Canterbury. No; Doctor Pocklington made it; but I licensed it.
"Doctor. But what's this? A paper 'tis; if I be not mistaken, a Star-Chamber order made against Mr. Prinne, Mr. Burton, and Dr. Bastwicke. Had you any hand in this?
"Canterbury. I had. I had. All England knoweth it. But, oh, here comes up something that makes my very back ake! O that it were up once! Now it is up, I thank Heaven!
"Doctor. 'Tis a great bundle of papers, of presentations and suspensions. These were the instruments, my lord, wherewith you created the tongue-tied Doctors, and gave them great Benefices in the Country to preach some twice a year at the least, and in their place to hire some journeyman Curate, who will only read a Sermon in the forenoone, and in the afternoone be drunke, with his parishioners for company."
By the same painful process the archbishop is delivered of his "Book of Canons," and finally of his mitre; upon which the doctor says, "Nay, if the miter be come, the Divell is not far off. Farewell, my good lord."
There still exist in various collections more than a hundred prints relating directly to Archbishop Laud, several of which give burlesque representations of his execution. There are some that show him asleep, and visited by the ghosts of those whom he had persecuted, each addressing him in turn, as the victims of Richard III. spoke to their destroyer on Bosworth Field. One of the print-makers, however, relented at the spectacle of an old man, seventy-two years of age, brought to the block. He exhibits the archbishop speaking to the crowd from the scaffold:
"Lend me but one poore teare, when thow do'st see
This wretched portraict of just miserie.
I was Great Innovator, Tyran, Foe
To Church and State; all Times shall call me so.
But since I'm Thunder-stricken to the Ground,
Learn how to stand: insult not ore my wound."
This one poor stanza alone among the popular utterances of the time shows that any soul in England was touched by the cruel fanatic's bloody end.
"England's Wolfe with Eagle's Clawes" (Prince Rupert), 1647.
During the civil war and the government of Cromwell, 1642 to 1660, nine in ten of all the satirical prints that have been preserved are on the Puritan side. A great number of them were aimed at the Welsh, whose brogue seems to have been a standing resource with the mirth-makers of that period, as the Irish is at present. The wild roystering ways of the Cavaliers, their debauchery and license, furnished subjects. The cruelties practiced by Prince Rupert suggested the annexed illustration, in which the author endeavored to show "the cruell Impieties of Blood-thirsty Royalists and blasphemous Anti-Parliamentarians under the Command of that inhumane Prince Rupert, Digby, and the rest, wherein the barbarous Crueltie of our Civill uncivill Warres is briefly discovered." Beneath the portrait of England's wolf are various narratives of his bloody deeds. One picture exhibits the plundering habits of the mercenaries on the side of the king in Ireland. A soldier is represented armed and equipped with the utensils that appertain to good forage: on his head a three-legged pot, hanging from his side a duck, a spit with a goose on it held in his left hand as a musket, a dripping-pan on his arm as a shield, a hay-fork in his right hand for a rest, with a string of sausages for a match, a long artichoke at his side for a sword, bottles of canary suspended from his belt, slices of toast for shoe-strings, and two black pots at his garters. This picture may have been called forth by an item in a news-letter of 1641, wherein it was stated that such "great store of pilidges" was daily brought into Drogheda that a cow could be bought there for five shillings and a horse for twelve.
Charles II. and the Scotch Presbyterians, 1651.
"Presbyter. Come to the grinstone, Charles; 'tis now too late
To recolect, 'tis presbiterian fate.
"King. Yon Covenant pretenders, must I bee
The subject of your Tradgie Comedie?
"Jockey. I, Jockey, turne the stone of all your plots,
For none turnes faster than the turne-coat Scots.
"Presbyter. We for our ends did make thee king, be sure,
Not to rule us, we will not that endure.
"King. You deep dissemblers, I know what you doe,
And, for revenges sake, I will dissemble too."
The abortive attempt of Charles II., after the execution of his father, to unite the Scots under his sceptre, and by their aid place himself upon the throne of England, called forth the caricature annexed, in which an old device is put to a new use. A large number of verses explain the picture, though they begin by declaring:
"This Embleme needs no learned Exposition;
The World knows well enough the sad condition
Of regal Power and Prerogative.
Dead and dethron'd in England, now alive
In Scotland, where they seeme to love the Lad,
If hee'l be more obsequious than his Dad,
And act according to Kirk Principles,
More subtile than were Delphic Oracles."
In the verses that follow there is to be found one of the few explicit justifications of the execution of Charles I. that the lighter literature of the Commonwealth affords:
"But Law and Justice at the last being done
On the hated Father, now they love the Son."
The poet also taunts the Scots with having first stirred up the English to "doe Heroick Justice" on the late king, and then adopting the heir on condition of his giving their Church the same fell supremacy which Laud had claimed for the Church of England.
The Ironsides of Cromwell soon accomplished the caricaturist's prediction:
"But this religious mock we all shall see,
Will soone the downfall of their Babel be."
We find the pencil and the pen of the satirist next employed in exhibiting the young king fleeing in various ludicrous disguises before his enemies.
An interesting caricature published during the civil wars aimed to cast back upon the Malignants the ridicule implied in the nickname of Roundhead as applied to the Puritans. It contained figures of three ecclesiastics, "Sound-head, Rattle-head, and Round-head." Sound-head, a minister sound in the Puritan faith, hands a Bible to Rattle-head, a personage meant for Laud, half bishop and half Jesuit. On the other side is the genuine Round-head, a monk with shorn pate, who presents to Rattle-head a crucifix, and points to a monastery. Rattle-head rejects the Bible, and receives the crucifix. Over the figures is written:
"See heer, Malignants Foolerie
Retorted on them properly,
The Sound-head, Round-head, Rattle-head,
Well placed, where best is merited."
Below are other verses in which, of course, Rattle-head and Round-head are belabored in the thorough-going, root-and-branch manner of the time, Atheist and Arminian being used as synonymous terms:
"See heer, the Rattle-heads most Rotten Heart,
Acting the Atheists or Arminians part."
In looking over the broadsheets of that stirring period, we are struck by the absence of the mighty Name that must have been uppermost in every mind and oftenest on every tongue—that of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. A few caricatures were executed in Holland, in which "The General" and "Oliver" and "The Protector" were weakly satirized; but as most of the plates in that age were made to serve various purposes, and were frequently altered and redated, it is not certain that any of them were circulated in England during Cromwell's life-time. English draughtsmen produced a few pictures in which the Protector was favorably depicted dissolving the Long Parliament, but their efforts were not remarkable either with pen or pencil. The Protector may have relished, and Bunyan may have written, the verses that accompanied some of them:
"Full twelve years and more these Rooks they have sat
to gull and to cozen all true-hearted People;
Our Gold and our Silver has made them so fat
that they lookt more big and mighty than Paul's Steeple."
The Puritans handled the sword more skillfully than the pen, and the royalists were not disposed to satire during the rule of the Ironside chief. The only great writer of the Puritan age on the Puritan side was Milton, and he was one of the two or three great writers who have shown little sense of humor.
Cris-cross Rhymes on Love's Crosses, 1640. (Musarum, 306.)
What a change came over the spirit of English art and literature at the Restoration in 1660! Forty years before, when James I. was king, who loathed a Puritan, there was occasionally published a print in which Puritans were treated in the manner of Hudibras. There was one of 1612 in which a crown was half covered by a broad-brimmed hat, with verses reflecting upon "the aspiring, factious Puritan," who presumed to "overlooke his king." There was one in 1636, in the reign of Charles I., aimed at "two infamous upstart prophets," weavers, then in Newgate for heresy, which contains a description of a Puritan at church, which is entirely in the spirit of Hudibras:
"His seat in the church is where he may be most seene. In the time of the Sermon he drawes out his tables to take the Notes, but still noting who observes him to take them. At every place of Scripture cited he turnes over the leaves of his Booke, more pleased with the motion of the leaves than the matter of the Text; For he folds downe the leaves though he finds not the place. Hee lifts up the whites of his eyes towards Heaven when hee meditates on the sordid pleasures of the earth; his body being in God's Church, when his mind is in the divel's Chappell."
Again, in 1647, two years before the execution of Charles, an extensive and elaborate sheet appeared, in which the ignorant preachers of the day were held up to opprobrium. Each of these "erronious, hereticall, and Mechannick spirits" was exhibited practicing his trade, and a multitude of verses below described the heresies which such teachers promulgated.
"Oxford and Cambridge make poore Preachers;
Each shop affordeth better Teachers:
Oh blessed Reformation!"
Among the "mechannick spirits" presented in this sheet we remark "Barbone, the Lether-seller," who figures in many later prints as "Barebones." There are also "Bulcher, a Chicken man;" "Henshaw, a Confectioner, alias an Infectioner;" "Duper, a Cowkeeper;" "Lamb, a Sope-boyler," and a dozen more.
Such pictures, however, were few and far between during the twenty years of Puritan ascendency. But when the rule of the Sound-head was at an end, and Rattle-head had once more the dispensing of preferment in Church and State, the press teemed with broadsheets reviling the Puritan heroes. The gorgeous funeral of the Protector—his body borne in state on a velvet bed, clad in royal robes, to Westminster Abbey, where a magnificent tomb rose over his remains—was still fresh in the recollection of the people of London when they saw the same body torn from its resting-place, and hung on Tyburn Hill from nine in the morning until six in the evening, and then cast into a deep pit. Thousands who saw his royal funeral looked upon his body swinging from the gallows. The caricatures vividly mark the change. Cromwell now appears only as tyrant, antichrist, hypocrite, monster. Charles I. is the holy martyr. His son's flight in disguise, the hiding in the oak-tree, and other circumstances of his escape are no longer ignominious or laughable, but graceful and glorious.
A cherished fiction appears frequently in the caricatures that no man came to a good end who had had any hand in the king's execution, not even the executioner nor the humblest of his assistants. On one sheet we read of a certain drum-maker, named Tench, who "provided roapes, pullies, and hookes (in case the king resisted) to compel and force him down to the block." "This roague is also haunted with a Devill, and consumes away." There was the confession, too, of the hangman, who, being about to depart this life, declared that he had solemnly vowed not to perform his office upon the king, but had nevertheless dealt the fatal blow, trembling from head to foot. Thirty pounds had been his reward, which was paid him in half-crown pieces within an hour after the execution—the dearest money, as he told his wife, that he had ever received, for it would cost him his life, "which propheticall words were soon made manifest, for it appeared that, ever since, he had been in a most sad condition, and lay raging and swearing, and still pointing at one thing or another which he conceived to appear visible before him."
Shrove-tide in Arms against Lent, A.D. 1660.
Richard Cromwell was let off as easily by the caricaturist as he was by the king. He is depicted as "the meek knight," the mild incapable, hardly worth a parting kick. In one very good picture he is a cooper hammering away with a mallet at a cask, from which a number of owls escape, most of which, as they take their flight, cry out, "King!" Richard protests that he knows nothing of this trade of cooper, for the more he hammers, the more the barrel breaks up. Elizabeth, the wife of the Protector, figured in a ludicrous manner upon the cover of a cookery-book published in the reign of Charles II., the preface of which contained anecdotes of the kitchen over which she had presided.
Lent tilting at Shrove-tide, A.D. 1660.
Among other indications of change in the public feeling, we notice a few pictures conceived in the pure spirit of gayety, designed to afford pleasure to every one, and pain to no one. Two of these are given here—Shrove-tide and Lent tilting at one another—which were thought amazingly ingenious and comic two hundred years ago. They are quite in the taste of the period that produced them. Shrove-tide, in the calendar of Rome, is the Tuesday before Lent, a day on which many people gave themselves up to revelry and feasting, in anticipation of the forty days' fast. Shrove-tide accordingly is mounted on a fat ox, and his sword is sheathed in a pig and piece of meat, with capons and bottles of wine about his body. His flag, as we learn from the explanatory verses, is "a cooke's foule apron fix'd to a broome," and his helmet "a brasse pot." Lent, on the contrary, flings to the breeze a fishing-net, carries an angling-rod for a weapon, and wears upon his head "a boyling kettle." Thus accoutred, these mortal foes approach one another, and Lent lifts up his voice and proclaims his intention:
"I now am come to mundifie and cleare
The base abuses of this last past yeare:
Thou puff-paunch'd monster (Shrovetyde), thou art he
That were ordain'd the latter end to be
Of forty-five weekes' gluttony, now past,
Which I in seaven weekes come to cleanse at last:
Your feasting I will turn to fasting dyet;
Your cookes shall have some leasure to be quiet;
Your masques, pomps, playes, and all your vaine expence,
I'll change to sorrow, and to penitence."
Shrove-tide replies valiantly to these brave words:
"What art thou, thou leane-jawde anottamie,
All spirit (for I no flesh upon thee spie);
Thou bragging peece of ayre and smoke, that prat'st,
And all good-fellowship and friendship hat'st;
You'le turn our feasts to fasts! when, can you tell?
Against your spight, we are provided well.
Thou sayst thou'lt ease the cookes!-the cookes could wish
Thee boyl'd or broyl'd with all thy frothy fish;
For one fish-dinner takes more paines and cost
Than three of flesh, bak'd, roast, or boyl'd, almost."
This we are compelled to regard as about the best fun our ancestors of 1660 were capable of achieving with pencil and pen. Nor can we claim much for their pictures which aim to satirize the vices.
The Queen of James II. and Father Petre.
"It is a foolish sheep that makes the wolf her confessor." (1685.)
The joy of the English people at the restoration of the monarchy, which seemed at first to be as universal as it was enthusiastic, was of short duration. The Stuarts were the Bourbons of England, incapable of being taught by adversity. Within two years Charles II. alarmed Protestant England by marrying a Portuguese princess. The great plague of 1665, that destroyed in London alone sixty-eight thousand persons, was followed in the very next year by the great fire of London, which consumed thirteen thousand two hundred houses. At a moment when the public mind was reduced to the most abject credulity by such events as these, the scoundrel Titus Oates appeared, declaring that the dread calamities which had afflicted England, and others then imminent, were only parts of an awful Popish Plot, which aimed at the destruction of the king and the restoration of the Catholic religion. A short time after, 1678, Sir Edmundsbury Godfrey, the magistrate before whom Titus Oates made his deposition, was found dead in a field near London, the victim probably of some fanatic assassin of the Catholic party. The kingdom was thrown into an ecstasy of terror, from which, as before observed, it has not to this day wholly recovered. Terror may lurk in the blood of a race ages after the removal of its cause, as we find our sensitive horses shying from low-lying objects at the road-side, though a thousand generations may have peacefully labored and died since their ancestors crouched from the spring of a veritable wild beast. The broadsheets of that year, 1678, and of the troublous years following, even until William of Orange was seated on the throne of England, in 1690, have, we may almost say, but one topic—the Popish Plot. The spirit of that period lives in those sheets.
It had been a custom in England to celebrate the 17th of November, the day, as one sheet has it, on which the unfortunate Queen Mary died, and "that Glorious Sun, Queen Elizabeth, of happy memory, arose in the English horizon, and thereby dispelled those thick fogs and mists of Romish blindness, and restored to these kingdoms their just Rights both as men and Christians." The next recurrence of this anniversary after the murder of Godfrey was seized by the Protestants of London to arrange a procession which was itself a striking caricature. A pictorial representation of the procession is manifestly impossible here, but we can copy the list of objects as given on a broadsheet issued a few days after the event. This device of a procession, borrowed from Catholic times, was continually employed to promulgate and emphasize Protestant ideas down to a recent period, and has been used for political objects in our own day. How changed the thoughts of men since Albert Dürer witnessed the grand and gay procession at Antwerp, in honor of the Virgin's Assumption, one hundred and fifty-nine years before! The 17th of November, 1679, was ushered in, at three o'clock in the morning, by a burst of bell-ringing all over London. The broadsheet thus quaintly describes the procession:
"About Five o'clock in the Evening, all things being in readiness, the Solemn Procession began, in the following Order: I. Marched six Whiflers to clear the way, in Pioneers Caps and Red Waistcoats (and carrying torches). II. A Bellman Ringing, who, with a Loud and Dolesom Voice cried all the way, Remember Justice Godfrey. III. A Dead Body representing Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, in the Habit he usually wore, the Cravat wherewith he was murdered about his Neck, with spots of Blood on his Wrists, Shirt, and white Gloves that were on his hands, his Face pale and wan, riding on a White Horse, and one of his Murderers behind him to keep him from falling, representing the manner how he was carried from Somerset House to Primrose Hill. IV. A Priest in a Surplice, with a Cope Embroidered with Dead mens Bones, Skeletons, Skuls, &c., giving pardons very freely to those who would murder Protestants, and proclaiming it Meritorious. V. A Priest alone, in Black, with a large Silver Cross. VI. Four Carmelite Friers in White and Black Habits. VII. Four Grey Friars in their proper Habits. VIII. Six Jesuits with Bloody Daggers. IX. A Consort of Wind-musick, call'd the Waits. X. Four Popish Bishops in Purple and Lawn Sleeves, with Golden Crosses on their Breasts. XI. Four other Popish Bishops in their Pontificalibus, with Surplices, Rich Embroydered Copes, and Golden Miters on their Heads. XII. Six Cardinals in Scarlet Robes and Red Caps. XIII. The Popes Chief Physitian with Jesuites Powder in one hand, and a —— in the other. XIV. Two Priests in Surplices, with two Golden Crosses. Lastly, the Pope in a Lofty Glorious Pageant, representing a Chair of State, covered with Scarlet, the Chair richly embroydered, fringed, and bedeckt with Golden Balls and Crosses; at his feet a Cushion of State, two Boys in Surplices, with white Silk Banners and Red Crosses, and Bloody Daggers for Murdering Heritical Kings and Princes, painted on them, with an Incense-pot before them, sate on each side censing his Holiness, who was arrayed in a rich Scarlet Gown, Lined through with Ermin, and adorned with Gold and Silver Lace, on his Head a Triple Crown of Gold, and a Glorious Collar of Gold and precious stones, St. Peters Keys, a number of Beads, Agnus Dei's and other Catholick Trumpery; at his Back stood his Holiness's Privy Councellor, the Devil, frequently caressing, hugging, and whispering, and oft-times instructing him aloud, to destroy His Majesty, to forge a Protestant Plot, and to fire the City again; to which purpose he held an Infernal Torch in his hand. The whole Procession was attended with 150 Flambeaus and Torches by order; but so many more came in Voluntiers as made up some thousands. Never were the Balconies, Windows and Houses more numerously filled, nor the Streets closer throng'd with multitudes of People, all expressing their abhorrence of Popery with continual Shouts and Acclamations."
With slow and solemn step the procession marched to Temple Bar, then just rebuilt, and there it halted, while a dialogue in verse was sung in parts by "one who represented the English Cardinal Howard, and one the people of England." We can imagine the manner in which the crowd would come thundering in with
"Now God preserve Great Charles our King,
And eke all honest men;
And Traytors all to justice bring,
Amen! Amen! Amen!"
Fire-works succeeded the song, after which "his Holiness was decently tumbled from all his grandeur into the impartial flames," while the people gave so prodigious a shout that it was heard "far beyond Somerset House." For many years a similar pageant was given in London on the same day.
As an additional illustration of the feeling which then prevailed in Puritan circles, I will copy the rude and doleful rhymes which accompany a popular print of 1680, called "The Dreadful Apparition; or, the Pope haunted with Ghosts." Coleman, Whitebread, and Harcourt, who figure among the ghosts, had been recently executed as "popish plotters." The picture shows the Pope in bed, to whom the devil conducts Coleman, and an angel leads the spirit of Sir Edmundsbury Godfrey. Whitebread and Harcourt are in shrouds. A bishop, a cardinal, and other figures are seen. A label issuing from the mouth of each of the persons represented contains the rhymes which follow:
THE POPE IN BED.
"Away! Away! am not I Pope of Rome,
torment me not before my time is Come."
THE DEVIL, IN THE FORM OF A DRAGON.
"Your Sevt Sr! Ned Coleman doth appeare
he'll tell you all, therefore I brought him here."
COLEMAN'S GHOST.
"Sr you are Cause of my Continuall paine,
My Soul is Lost, for your Ambitious gaine."
GODFREY'S GHOST, INTRODUCED BY ——.
"Repent great Sr and be for ever blest,
in Heaven with me that happy place of rest."
ANGEL, IN A "ROMAN SHAPE."
"O Chariety! who mercy craves for those:
With Blūddy hands that ware his Cruell foes."
WHITEBREAD'S GHOST, WITH A SWORD THROUGH THE BODY.
"I am perplexed with perpetuall fright;
but who is this apeares this dreadful night."
HARCOURT'S GHOST, WITH A SWORD THROUGH THE BODY.
"'Tis Godfrey's Ghost I wish all things be well
that we may have our Pope of Rome in hell."
A BISHOP.
"Let us depart and Shun their cruell fate,
and all repent before it is to late."
CARDINAL.
"Come let us flie with all the Speed we may,
Ye Devil els will take us all away."
Below the picture are the verses subjoined:
NUNCIO.
"Horrors and Death! what dismal Sights Invade
His Nightly Slumbers, who in Blood does Trade.
The Ghostly Apparitions of the Dead;
The Bless'd by Angels; Damn'd by Demons Lead;
'Tis sure, Romes Conclave must Amazed stand,
When Souls Complaining, thus against them band;
Who All but One to please Ambitious Rome,
Have Gain'd Damnation for Their Final Doom.
Hear how They Curse Him all, but He who fell.
Great Brittains Sacrifice by Imps of Hell;
Who shew'd Their Bloody Vengeance in the Strife,
To Murther Him, who Business had for Life."
POPE.
"How do my Eye-Balls Roul, and Blood run back,
What Tortures at this sight my Conscience Rack;
Oh! Mountains now fall on me, some Deep Cave
Pitty me once, and prove my speedy Grave.
Involv'd in Darkness, from the Seated Light,
Let Me abscond in Everlasting Night.
Torment me not; you Shades, before my time,
I do confess, your Downfalls was my Crime;
To Satiate my Ambition and Revenge,
I push'd you on to this Immortal Change.
But Ah! fresh Horrors, Ah! my Power's grown weak,
What art thou Fiend? from whence? or where? O Speak;
That in this Frightful Form, a Dragon's hew
Presents One Sainted, to my Trembling View?"
FIEND.
"By Hells Grim King's Command, on whom I wait,
I've brought your Saint his Story to relate;
Who from the black Tartarian-Fire below,
So long beg'd Absence as to let you know
His Torments, and the Horrid Cheat condole,
You fix'd on him to Rob him of his Soul."
POPE.
"O! spare my Ears, I'll no such Horrors hear;"
COLEMAN.
"You must, and know your own Damnation's near:
You must ere long be Plung'd in Grizly Flame,
Which I shall laugh to see, tho, rack'd with pain
Thou Grand Deceiver of the Nations All,
Contriver of my Wretched Fate and Fall:
Thou who didst push me on to Murther Kings
Persuading me for it on Angels Wings
I should Transcend the Clouds, be ever Blest, )
And be of Al that Heav'n cou'd yield, possest, )
But these I mist, got Torment without Rest: )
For whilst on Earth I stand, a Hell within
Distracts my Conscience, pale with horrid Sin:
Instead of Mortals Pardon, One on High,
I must your Everlasting Martyr Fry;
Whilst Name of Saint I bear on Earth, below
It stirs the flames, and much Augments my Woe."
POPE.
"Horrors! 'tis Dismal, I can hear no more,
O! Hell and Furies, how I have lost my Pow'r."
SIR E. GODFREY.
"See Sir this Crimson Stain, this baleful Wound
See Murther'd me, with Joys Eternal Crown'd;
Though by the Darkest Deed of Night I fell,
Which shook Three Kingdoms, and Astonish'd Hell:
Yet rap'd above the Skyes to Mansion bright,
There to Converse with Everlasting Light;
Thence got I leave to View thy Wretched Face,
And find my Death thy Hell-born Plots did race,
And next to the Almighty Arm did Save
Great Albion's Glory from its yawning Grave;
From Sacred Bliss my Swift-Wing'd Soul did glide,
Conducted Hither by my Angel-Guide,
To let thee know thy Sands were almost run,
And that thy Thread of Life is well-nigh Spun;
Repent you then, Wash off the Bloody Stain,
Or You'll be Doom'd to Everlasting Pain."
ANGEL.
"Come Worthy of Seraphick Joys Above,
Worthy Our Converse, and Our Sacred Love;
Who hast Implor'd the Great Jehove for One )
Who Shed thy Blood, to Snatch thy Princes Throne )
In this thy Saviour's Great Examples shown: )
Come let Vs hence, and leave Him to his Fate,
When Divine Vengeance shall the Business State."
POPE.
"Chill Horror seizes me, I cannot flye;
Oh Ghastly! yet more Apparitions nigh?"
WHITEBREAD.
"Thus wandering through the Gloomy Shades, at last
I've found Thee, Traytor, that my Joys did Blast,
Whose Dam'd Injunctions, Dire Damnation Seal'd,
And Torments that were never yet Reveal'd:
Mirrihords of Plagues, Chains, Racks, Tempestuous Fire,
Sulpherian Lakes that Burn and ner Expire,
Deformed Demons, Uglier far than Hell,
The Half what We Endure, no Tongue can Tell;
This for a Bishoprick I Undergo,
But Now would give Earth's Empire wer't not so."
POPE.
"Retire, Good Ghosts, or I shall Dye with Fear."
HARCOURT.
"Nay stay Sir, first You must my Story Hear:
How could you thus Delude your Bosome-Friend?
Your Foes to Heaven, and Vs to Hell thus send;
Damnation seize You for't; ere long You'll be
Plung'd Headlong into vast Eternity;
There for to Howl, whilst We some Comfort gain, )
To see You welter in an endless Pain, )
And without Pitty, justly there Complain." )
POPE.
"Ho! Cardinals and Bishops, haste with speed,
Bell, Book, and Candle fetch, let me be free'd:
Ah! 'tis too late, by Fear Intranc'd I lye."
BISHOP.
"Heard you that Groan? with speed from hence let's flye."
CARDINAL.
"The Fiend has got Him, doubtless, lets away,
And in this Ghastly place no longer stay."
BISHOP.
"Dread Horrors seize me, Fly, for Mercy call,
Least Divine Vengeance over-whelm Vs all."
It was in this crude and lucid way that the forerunners of Gillray, Nast, Tenniel, and Leech satirized the murderous follies of their age. A volume larger than this would not contain the verse and prose that covered the broadsheets in the same style which appeared in London during the reign of Charles II. This specimen, however, suffices for any reader who is not making a special study of the period. To students and historians the collection of these prints in the British Museum is beyond price; for they show "the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure." Perhaps no other single source of information respecting that period is more valuable.
French Caricature of Corpulent General Galas, who defeated a French Convoy, 1635.
From the accession of William and Mary we notice a change in the subjects treated by caricaturists. If religion continued for a time to be the principal theme, there was more variety in its treatment. Sects became more distinct; the Quakers arose; the divergence between the doctrines of Luther and Calvin was more marked, and gave rise to much discussion; High Church and Low Church renewed their endless contest; the Baptists became an important denomination; deism began to be the whispered, and became soon the vaunted faith of men of the world; even the voice of the Jew was occasionally heard, timidly asking for a small share of his natural rights. It is interesting to note in the popular broadsheets and satirical pictures how quickly the human mind began to exert its powers when an overshadowing and immediate fear of pope and king in league against liberty had been removed by the flight of James II. and the happy accession of William III.
Political caricature rapidly assumed prominence, though, as long as Louis XIV. remained on the throne of France, the chief aim of politics was to create safeguards against the possible return of the Catholic Stuarts. The accession of Queen Anne, the career of Bolingbroke and Harley, the splendid exploits of Marlborough, the early conflicts of Whig and Tory, the attempts of the Pretenders, the peaceful accession of George I.—all these are exhibited in broadsheets and satirical prints still preserved in more than one collection. Louis XIV., his pomps and his vanities, his misfortunes and his mistresses, furnished subjects for hundreds of caricatures both in England and Holland. It was on a Dutch caricature of 1695 that the famous retort occurs of the Duc de Luxembourg to an exclamation of the Prince of Orange. The prince impatiently said, after a defeat, "Shall I, then, never be able to beat that hunchback?" Luxembourg replied to the person reporting this, "How does he know that my back is hunched? He has never seen it." Interspersed with political satires, we observe an increasing number upon social and literary subjects. The transactions of learned societies were now important enough to be caricatured, and the public was entertained with burlesque discourses, illustrated, upon "The Invention of Samplers," "The Migration of Cuckoos," "The Eunuch's Child," "A New Method of teaching Learned Men how to write Unintelligibly." There was an essay, also, "proving by arguments philosophical that Millers, though falsely so reputed, yet in reality are not thieves, with an intervening argument that Taylors likewise are not so."
A Quaker Meeting, 1710—Aminidel exhorting Friends to support Sacheverell.
A strange episode in the conflict between Whig and Tory was the career of Sacheverell, a clergyman who preached such extreme doctrines concerning royal and ecclesiastical prerogative that he was formally censured by a Whig Parliament, and thus lifted into a preposterous importance. During his triumphal tour, which Dr. Johnson remembered as one of the events of his earliest childhood, he was escorted by voluntary guards that numbered from one thousand to four thousand mounted men, wearing the Tory badges of white knots edged with gold, and in their hats three leaves of gilt laurel. The picture of the Quaker meeting reflects upon the alliance alleged to have existed between the high Tories and the Quakers, both having an interest in the removal of disabilities, and hence making common cause. A curious relic of this brief delirium is a paragraph in the Grub Street Journal of 1736, which records the death of Dame Box, a woman so zealous for the Church that when Sacheverell was relieved of censure she clothed herself in white, kept the clothes all her life, and was buried in them. As long as Dr. Sacheverell lived she went to London once a year, and carried a present of a dozen larks to that "high-flying priest."
The flight of the Huguenots from France, in 1685 and 1686, enriched Holland, England, and the American colonies with the élite of the French people. Holland being nearest to France, and honored above all lands for nearly a century as the refuge of people persecuted for opinions' sake, received at first the greatest number, especially of the class who could live by intellectual pursuits. The rarest of all rarities in the way of caricature, "the diamond of the pictorial library," is a series of burlesque portraits, produced in Holland in 1686, of the twenty-four persons most guilty of procuring the revocation of the wise edict of Henry IV., which secured to French Protestants the right to practice their religion. The work was entitled "La Procession Monacale conduite par Louis XIV. pour la Conversion des Protestans de son Royaume." The king, accordingly, leads the way, his face a sun in a monk's cowl, in allusion to his adoption of the sun as a device. Madame De Maintenon, his married mistress, hideously caricatured, follows. Père la Chaise, and all the ecclesiastics near the court who were reputed to have urged on the ignorant old king to this superlative folly, had their place in the procession. Several of the faces are executed with a freedom and power not common in any age, but at that period only possible to a French hand. Two specimens are given on the following page.
Louis XIV., as the caricature collections alone would suffice to show, was the conspicuous man of that painful period. The caricaturists avenged human nature. No man of the time called forth so many efforts of the satiric pencil, nor was there ever a person better adapted to the satirist's purpose, for he furnished precisely those contrasts which satire can exhibit most effectively. He stood five feet four in his stockings, but his shoe-maker put four inches of leather under his heels, and his wig-maker six inches of other people's hair upon his head, which gave him an imposing altitude. The beginning of his reign was prosperous enough to give some slight excuse for the most richly developed arrogance seen in the world since Xerxes lashed the Hellespont, but the last third of his reign was a collapse that could easily be made to seem ludicrous. There were very obvious contrasts in those years between the splendors of his barbaric court and the disgraceful defeats of his armies, between the opinion he cherished of himself and the contempt in which he was held abroad, between the adulations of his courtiers and the execrations of France, between the mass-attending and the morals of the court.
Archbishop of Paris—A Better Friend to Ladies than to the Pope. (Holland, 1686. By an Exiled Huguenot.)
Archbishop of Rheims—Mitred Ass. (Holland, 1686. After the Expulsion of the Huguenots.)
The caricaturists made the most of these points. Every town that he lost, every victory that Marlborough won, gave them an opportunity which they improved. We have him as a huge yellow sun, each ray of which bears an inscription referring to some defeat, folly, or shame. We have him as a jay, covered with stolen plumage, which his enemies are plucking from him, each feather inscribed with the name of a lost city or fortress. We have him as the Crier of Versailles, crying the ships lost in the battle of La Hogue, and offering rewards for their recovery. He figures as the Gallic cock flying before that wise victorious fox of England, William III., and as a pompous drummer leading his army, and attended by his ladies and courtiers. He is an old French Apollo driving the sun, in wig and spectacles. He is a tiger on trial before the other beasts for his cruel depredations. He is shorn and fooled by Maintenon; he is bridled by Queen Anne. He is shown drinking a goblet of human blood. We see him in the stocks with his confederate, the Pope, and the devil standing behind, knocking their heads together. He is a sick man vomiting up towns. He is a sawyer, who, with the help of the King of Spain, saws the globe in two, Maintenon sitting aloft assisting the severance. As long as he lived the caricaturists continued to assail him; and when he died, in 1715, he left behind him a France so demoralized and impoverished that he still kept the satirists busy.
Caricature of Louis XIV., by Thackeray.
Even in our own time Louis XIV. has suggested one of the best caricatures ever drawn, and it is accompanied by an explanatory essay almost unique among prose satires for bitter wit and blasting truth. The same hand wielded both the pen and the pencil, and it was the wonderful hand of Thackeray. "You see at once," he says, in explanation of the picture, "that majesty is made out of the wig, the high-heeled shoes, and cloak, all fleurs-de-lis bespangled.... Thus do barbers and cobblers make the gods that we worship."
It was the bubble mania of 1719 and 1720, brought upon Europe by John Law, which completed the "secularization" of caricature. Art, as well as literature, learning, and science, was subservient to religion during the Middle Ages, and drew its chief nourishment from Mother Church. Since the Reformation they have all been obliged to pass through a painful process of weaning, and each in turn to try for an independent existence. The bubble frenzy, besides giving an impulse to the caricaturist's art it had not before received, withdrew attention from ecclesiastical subjects, and supplied abundant material drawn from sources purely mundane.
"Shares! Shares! Shares!"
The Night Share-crier and his Magic Lantern. A Caricature of John Law and his Bubble Schemes. (Amsterdam, 1720.)
Above all, the pictures which that mania called forth assisted to form the great satiric artist of his time and country, William Hogarth. He was a London apprentice carving coats of arms on silver plate when the early symptoms of the mania appeared; and he was still a very young man, an engraver, feeling his way to the career that awaited him, when the broadsheets satirizing John Law began to be "adapted" from Dutch originals, and shown in the shop-windows of London. Doubtless he inspected the picture of the "Night Share-crier," opposite, and noticed the cock's feather in his hat (indicating the French origin of the delusion), and the windmill upon the top of his staff. The Dutch pictures were full of that detail and by-play of which Hogarth was such a master in later years.
Visitors to New York who saw tumultuous Wall Street during the worst of our inflation period, and, following the crowd up-town, entered the Gold-room, where the wild speculation of the day was continued till midnight, may have flattered themselves that they were looking upon scenes never before exhibited in this world. What a strange intensity of excitement there was in those surging masses of young men! What fierce outcries! What a melancholy waste of youthful energies, so much needed elsewhere! But there was nothing new in all this, except that we passed the crisis with less loss and less demoralization than any community ever before experienced in circumstances at all similar.
When Louis XIV. died in 1715, after his reign of seventy-two years, he left the finances of France in a condition of inconceivable disorder. For fourteen years there had been an average annual deficit of more than fourteen millions of francs, to meet which the king had raised money by every paper device that had then been discovered. Having previously sold all the offices for which any pretext could be invented, he next sold annuities of all kinds, for one life, for two lives, for three lives, and in perpetuity. Then he issued all known varieties of promises to pay, from rentes perpétuelles to treasury-notes of a few francs, payable on demand. But there was one thing he did not do—reduce the expenditure of his enormous and extravagant court. In the midst of that deficit, when his ministers were at their wits' end to carry on the government from day to day, and half the lackeys of Paris held the depreciated royal paper, the old king ordered one more of those magnificent fêtes at Fontainebleau which had, as he thought, shed such lustre on his reign. The fête would cost four millions, the treasury was empty, and treasury-notes had fallen to thirty-five. While an anxious minister was meditating the situation, he chanced to see in his inner office two valets slyly scanning the papers on his desk, for the purpose, as he instantly conjectured, of getting news for the speculators. He conceived an idea. The next time those enterprising valets found themselves alone in the same cabinet, they were so happy as to discover on the desk the outlines of a royal lottery scheme for the purpose of paying off a certain class of treasury-notes. The news was soon felt in the street. Those notes mysteriously rose in a few days from thirty-five to eighty-five; and while they were at that point the minister, anticipating the Fiskian era, slipped upon the market thirty millions of the same notes. The king had his fête; and when next he borrowed money of his subjects, for every twenty-five francs of coin he was obliged to give a hundred-franc note.[18]
Two years after, the foolish old king died, leaving, besides a consolidated debt of bewildering magnitude, a floating debt, then due and overdue, of seven hundred and eighty-nine millions, equivalent, as M. Cochut computes, to about twice the amount in money of to-day. Coin had vanished; the royal paper was at twenty-five; the treasury was void; prices were distressingly high; some provinces refused to pay taxes; trade languished; there were vast numbers of workmen unemployed; and during the winter after the king's death a considerable number of persons died in Paris of cold and hunger. The only prosperous people were Government contractors, farmers of the revenue, brokers, and speculators in the king's paper; and these classes mocked the misery of their fellow-citizens by an ostentatious and tasteless profusion.
Island of Madhead.
"Picture of the very famous Island of Madhead. Situated in Share Sea, and inhabited by a multitude of all kinds of people, to which is given the general name of Shareholders." (Amsterdam, 1720.)
The natural successor of a king bigoted is a prince dissolute. The regent, who had to face this state of things on behalf of his nephew, Louis XV., a child of five, had at least the virtue and good sense to reject with indignant scorn the proposition made in his council by one member to declare France bankrupt and begin a new reign by opening a clean set of books. We, too, had our single repudiator, who fared no better than his French predecessor. But the regent's next measures were worthy of a prodigal. He called in the various kinds of public paper, and offered in exchange a new variety, called billets d'état, bearing interest at four per cent. But the public not responding to the call, the new bills fell to forty in twenty-four hours, and drew down all other public paper, until in a few days the royal promise to pay one hundred francs was worth twenty francs. The regent's coffers did not fill. That scarred veterans could not get their pensions paid was an evil which could be borne; but the regent had mistresses to appease!
Then he tried a system of squeezing the rich contractors and others of the vermin class who batten on a sick body-politic. As informers were to have half the product of the squeeze, an offended lackey had only to denounce his master, to get him tried on a charge of having made too much money. Woe to the plebeian who was convicted of this crime! Besides being despoiled of his property, Paris saw him, naked to the shirt, a rope round his neck, a penitential candle in his handcuffed hands, tied to a dirty cart and dragged to the pillory, carrying on his back a large label, "Plunderer of the People." The French pillory was a revolving platform, so that all the crowd had an equal chance to hurl mud and execration at the fixed and pallid face. Judge if there was not a making haste to compound with a government capable of such squeezing! There was also a mounting in hot haste to get out of such a France. One lucky merchant crossed the frontier, dressed as a peasant, driving a cart-load of straw, under which was a chest of gold. A train of fourteen carts loaded with barrels of wine was stopped, and in each barrel a keg of gold was found, which was emptied into the royal treasury.
The universal consternation and the utter paralysis of business which resulted from these violent spoliations may be imagined. Six thousand persons were tried, who confessed to the possession of twelve hundred millions of francs. The number of the condemned was four thousand four hundred and ten, and the sum extorted from them was, nominally, nearly four hundred millions, of which, however, less than one hundred millions reached the treasury. It was easy for a rich man to compound. A person condemned to disgorge twelve hundred thousand francs was visited by a "great lord." "Give me three hundred thousand francs," said the great lord, "and you won't be troubled for the rest." To which the merchant replied, "Really, my lord, you come too late, for I have already made a bargain with madame, your wife, for a hundred and fifty thousand." Thus the business of busy and frugal France was brought to a stand without relieving the Government. The royal coffers would not fill; the deficit widened; the royal paper still declined; the poor were hungry; and, oh, horror! the regent's mistresses pouted. The Government debased the coin. But that, too, proved an aggravation of the evil.
Such was that ancien régime which still has its admirers; such are the consequences of placing a great nation under the rule of the greatest fool in it; and such were the circumstances which gave the Scotch adventurer, John Law, his opportunity to madden and despoil France, so often a prey to the alien.
Two hundred years ago, when John Law, a rich goldsmith's son, was a boy in Edinburgh, goldsmiths were dealers in coin as well as in plate, and hence were bankers and brokers as well as manufacturers. They borrowed, lent, exchanged, and assayed money, and therefore possessed whatever knowledge of finance there was current in the world. It was in his father's counting-room that John Law acquired that taste for financial theories and combinations which distinguished him even in his youth. But the sagacious and practical goldsmith died when his son was fourteen, and left him a large inheritance in land and money. The example of Louis XIV. and Charles II. having brought the low vices into high fashion throughout Europe, it is not surprising that Law's first notoriety should have been owing to a duel about a mistress. A man of fashion in Europe in Louis XIV.'s time was a creature gorgeously attired in lace and velvet, and hung about with ringlets made of horse-hair, who passed his days in showing the world how much there was in him of the goat, the monkey, and the pig. Law had the impudence to establish his mistress in a respectable lodging-house, which led to his being challenged by a gentleman who had a sister living there. Law killed his man on the field—"not fairly," as John Evelyn records—and he was convicted of murder. The king pardoned, but detained him in prison, from which he escaped, went to the Continent, and resumed his career, being at once a man of fashion, a gambler, and a connoisseur in finance. He used to attend card-parties, followed by a footman carrying two bags, each containing two thousand louis-d'ors, and once during the life-time of the old king he was ordered out of Paris on the ground that he "understood the games he had introduced into the capital too well."
Twenty years elapsed from the time of his flight from a London prison. He was forty-four years of age, possessed nearly a million and three-quarters of francs in cash, producible on the green cloth at a day's notice, and was the most plausible talker on finance in Europe. This last was a bad symptom, indeed, for it is well known that men who remain victors in finance, who really do extricate estates and countries from financial difficulties, are not apt to talk very effectively on the subject. Successful finance is little more than paying your debts and living within your income, neither of which affords material for striking rhetoric. Alexander Hamilton, for example, talked finance in a taking manner; but it was Albert Gallatin who quietly reduced the country's debt. Fifteen days after the death of the old king, Law was in Paris with all that he possessed, and in a few months he was deep in the confidence of the regent. His fine person, his winning manners, his great wealth, his constant good fortune, his fluent and plausible tongue, his popular vices, might not have sufficed to give him ascendency if he had not added to these the peculiar force that is derived from sincerity. That he believed in his own "system" is shown by his risking his whole fortune in it. And it is to his credit that the first use he made of his influence was to show that the spoliations, the debasing of the coin, and all measures that inspired terror, and thus tightened unduly the clutch upon capital, could not but aggravate financial distress.
His "system" was delightfully simple. Bear in mind that almost every one in Paris who had any property at all held the king's paper, worth one-quarter or one-fifth of its nominal value. Whatever project Law set on foot, whether a royal bank, a scheme for settling and trading with Louisiana, for commerce with the East Indies, or farming the revenues, any one could buy shares in it on terms like these: one-quarter of the price in coin, and three-quarters in paper at its nominal value.
The system was not immediately successful, and it was only in the teeth of powerful opposition that he could get his first venture, the bank, so much as authorized. Mark how clearly one of the council, the Duc de Saint-Simon, comprehended the weakness of a despotism to which he owed his personal importance. "An establishment," said he, "of the kind proposed may be in itself good; but it is so only in a republic, or in such a monarchy as England, where the finances are controlled absolutely by those who furnish the money, and who furnish only as much of it as they choose, and in the way they choose. But in a light and changing government like that of France, solidity would be necessarily wanting, since a king or, in his name, a mistress, a minister, favorites, and, still more, an extreme necessity, could overturn the bank, which would present a temptation at once too great and too easy." Law, therefore, was obliged to alter his plan, and give his bank at first a board of directors not connected with the Government.
Gradually the "system" made its way. The royal paper beginning to rise in value, the holders were in good humor, and disposed to buy into other projects on similar terms. The Louisiana scheme may serve as an example of Law's method. Six years before, a great merchant of Paris, Antoine Crozat, had bought from the old king the exclusive right to trade with a vast unknown region in North America called Louisiana; but after five years of effort and loss he became discouraged, and offered to sell his right to the creator of the bank. Law, accepting the offer, speedily launched a magnificent scheme: capital one hundred millions of francs, in shares of five hundred francs, purchasable wholly in those new treasury-notes bearing four per cent. interest, then at a discount of seventy per cent. Maps of this illimitable virgin land were published. Pictures were exhibited, in which crowds of interesting naked savages, male and female, were seen running up to welcome arriving Frenchmen; and under the engraving a gaping Paris crowd could read, "In this land are seen mountains filled with gold, silver, copper, lead, quicksilver; and the savages, not knowing their value, gladly exchange pieces of gold and silver for knives, iron pots, a small looking-glass, or even a little brandy." One picture was addressed to pious souls; for even at that early day, as at present, there was occasionally observed a curious alliance between persons engaged in the promotion of piety and those employed in the pushing of shares. This work exhibited a group of Indians kneeling before some reverend fathers of the Society of Jesus. Under it was written, "Indian Idolaters imploring Baptism."
The excitement, once kindled, was stimulated by lying announcements of the sailing of great fleets for Louisiana laden with merchandise and colonists; of the arrival of vessels with freights worth "millions;" of the establishment of a silk-factory, wherein twelve thousand women of the Natchez tribe were employed; of the bringing of Louisiana ingots to the Mint to be assayed; of the discovery in Arkansas of a great rock of emerald, and the dispatch of Captain Laharpe with a file of twenty-two men to take possession of the same. In 1718 Law sent engineers to Louisiana, who did something toward laying out its future capital, which he named New Orleans, in honor of his patron, the regent.
The royal paper rose rapidly under this new demand. Other schemes followed, until John Law, through his various companies, seemed about to "run" the kingdom of France by contract, farming all its revenues, transacting all its commerce, and, best of all, paying all its debts! Madness, ruled the hour. The depreciated paper rose, rose, and still rose; reached par; went beyond par, until gold and silver were at a discount of ten per cent. The street named Quincampoix, the centre and vortex of this whirl of business, a mere lane twenty feet wide and a quarter of a mile long, was crowded with excited people from morning till night, and far into the night, so that the inhabitants of the quarter sent to the police a formal complaint that they could get no sleep. Nobles, lackeys, bishops, monks, merchants, soldiers, women, pickpockets, foreigners, all resorted to La Rue, "panting, yelling, operating, snatching papers, counting crowns," making up a scene of noisy confusion unexampled. One man hired all the vacant houses in the street, and made a fortune by subletting offices and desk-room, even placing sentry-boxes on some of the roofs, and letting them at a good price. The excitement spread over France, reached Holland, and drew to Paris, as was estimated at the time, five hundred thousand strangers, places in the public vehicles being engaged "two months in advance," and commanding a high premium.
There were the most extraordinary acquisitions of fortune. People suddenly enriched were called Mississippiens, and they behaved as the victims of sudden wealth, unearned, usually do. Men who were lackeys one week kept lackeys the next. A garçon of a wine-shop gained twenty millions. A cobbler, who had a stall in the Rue Quincampoix made of four planks, cleared away his traps and let his boards to ladies as seats, and sold pens, paper, and ink to operators, making two hundred francs a day by both trades. Men gained money by hiring out their backs as writing-desks, bending over while operators wrote out their contracts and calculations. One little hunchback made a hundred and fifty thousand francs by thus serving as a pupitre ambulant (strolling desk), and a broad-shouldered soldier gained money enough in the same way to buy his discharge and retire to the country upon a pretty farm. The general trade of the city was stimulated to such a degree that for a while the novel spectacle was presented of a community almost every member of which was prosperous beyond his hopes; for even in the Rue Quincampoix itself, although some men gained more money than others, no one appeared to lose any thing. And all this seemed the work of one man, the great, the incomparable "Jean Lass," as he was then called in Paris. It was a social distinction to be able to say, "I have seen him!" His carriage could with difficulty force its way through the rapturous, admiring crowd. Princes and nobles thronged his antechamber, a duchess publicly kissed his hand, and the regent made him controller-general of the finances.
This madness lasted eight months. No one needs to be told what followed it—how a chill first came over the feverish street, a vague apprehension, not confessed, but inspiring a certain wish to "realize." Dread word, REALIZE! The tendency to realize was adroitly checked by Law, aided by operators who desired to "unload;" but the unloading, once suspected, converted the realizing tendency into a wild, ungovernable rush, which speedily brought ruin to thousands, and long prostration upon France. John Law, who in December, 1719, was the idol of Paris, ready to perish of his celebrity, escaped with difficulty from the kingdom in December, 1720, hated, despised, impoverished, to resume his career as elegant gambler in the drawing-rooms of Germany and Italy.
As the "system" collapsed in France, it acquired vogue in England, where, also, it originated in the desire to get rid of the public debt by brilliant finance instead of the homely and troublesome method of paying it. In London, besides the original South Sea Company which began the frenzy, there were started in the course of a few months about two hundred joint-stock schemes, many of which, as given in Anderson's "History of Commerce," are of almost incredible absurdity. The sum called for by these projects was three hundred millions of pounds sterling, which was more than the value of all the land in Great Britain. Shares in Sir Richard Steele's "fish-pool for bringing fresh fish to London" brought one hundred and sixty pounds a share! Men paid seventy pounds each for "permits," which gave them merely the privilege of subscribing to a sail-cloth manufacturing company not yet formed. There was, indeed, a great trade in "permits" to subscribe to companies only planned. Here are a few of the schemes: for raising hemp in Pennsylvania; "Puckle's machine gun;" settling the Bahamas; "wrecks to be fished for on the Irish coast;" horse and cattle insurance; "insurance and improvement of children's fortunes;" "insurance of losses by servants;" "insurance against theft and robbery;" insuring remittances; "to make salt-water fresh;" importing walnut-trees from Virginia; improving the breed of horses; purchasing forfeited estates; making oil from sunflowers; planting mulberry-trees and raising silk-worms; extracting silver from lead; making quicksilver malleable; capturing pirates; "for importing a number of large jackasses from Spain in order to propagate a larger kind of mules;" trading in human hair; "for fatting of hogs;" "for the encouragement of the industrious;" perpetual motion; making pasteboard; furnishing funerals.
There was even a company formed and shares sold for carrying out an "undertaking which shall in due time be revealed." The word "puts," now so familiar in Wall Street, appears in these transactions of 1720. "Puts and refusals" were sold in vast amounts. The prices paid for shares during the half year of this mania were as remarkable as the schemes themselves. South Sea shares of a hundred pounds par value reached a thousand pounds. It was a poor share that did not sell at five times its original price. As in France, so in England, the long heads, like Sir Robert Walpole and Alexander Pope, began to think of "realizing" when they had gained a thousand per cent. or so upon their ventures; and, in a very few days, realizing, in its turn, became a mania; and all those paper fortunes shrunk and crumpled into nothingness.
So many caricatures of these events appeared in Amsterdam and London during the year 1720 that the collection in the British Museum, after the lapse of a hundred and fifty-five years, contains more than a hundred specimens. I have myself eighty, several of which include from six to twenty-four distinct designs. Like most of the caricatures of that period, they are of great size, and crowded with figures, each bearing its label of words, with a long explanation in verse or prose at the bottom of the sheet. As a rule, they are destitute of the point that can make a satirical picture interesting after the occasion is past. In one we see the interior of an Exchange filled with merchants running wildly about, each uttering words appropriate to the situation: "To-day I have gained ten thousand!" "Who has money to lend at two per cent.?" "A strait-jacket is what I shall want;" "Damned is this wind business." This picture, which originated in Amsterdam, is called "The Wind-buyers paid in Wind," and it contains at the bottom three columns of explanatory verse in Dutch, of which the following is the purport:
John Law, Wind Monopolist. (Amsterdam, 1720.)
"Law loquitur. 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. Less rapidly turn the sails of the windmill on my head than the price of shares in my foolish enterprises."
"Come, gentlemen, weavers, peasants, tailors! Whoever has relied on wind for his profit can find his picture here. They rave like madmen. See the French, the English, the Hebrew, and Jack of Bremen! Hear what a scream the absurd Dutch are making on the exchange of Europe! There is Fortune throwing down some charming wishes to silly mortals, while virtue, art, and intellect are despised and impoverished in the land; shops and counting-houses are empty; trade is ruined. All this is Quincampoix!"
The Dutch caricaturists recurred very often to the windy character of the share business. In several of their works we see a puffy wind-god blowing up pockets to a great size, inflating share-bags, and wafting swiftly along vehicles with spacious sails. The bellows play a conspicuous and not always decorous part. Jean Law is exhibited as a "wind monopolist." In one picture he appears assisting Atlas and others to bear up great globes of wind. Kites are flying and windmills revolving in several pictures. Pigeons fly away with shares in their bills. The hunchback who served as a walking desk is repeated many times. The Tower of Babel, the mad-house, the hospital, the whirligig, a garden maze, the lottery wheel, the drum, the magic lantern, the soap-bubble, the bladder, dice, the swing—whatever typifies pretense, uncertainty, or confusion was brought into the service. One Dutch broadsheet (sixteen inches by twenty), now before me, contains fifty-four finely executed designs, each of which burlesques a scene in Law's career, or a device of his finance, the whole making a pack of "wind cards for playing a game of wind."
Most of the Dutch pictures were "adapted" into English, and the adapters added verses which, in some instances, were better than the caricatures. A few of the shorter specimens may be worth the space they occupy, and give the reader a feeling of the situation not otherwise attainable. Of the pictures scarcely one would either bear or reward reduction, so large are they, so crowded with objects, and their style uninterestingly obsolete or boorishly indecent.
On Puckle's Machine Gun:
"A rare invention to destroy the crowd
Of fools at home instead of foes abroad.
Fear not, my friends, this terrible machine—
They're only wounded that have shares therein."
On the Saltpetre Company (two and sixpence a share):
"Buy petre stock, let me be your adviser;
'Twill make you, though not richer, much the wiser."
On the German Timber Company:
"You that are rich and hasty to be poor,
Buy timber export from the German shore;
For gallowses built up of foreign wood,
If rightly used, will do Change Alley good."
On the Pennsylvania Company:
"Come all ye saints that would for little buy
Great tracts of land, and care not where they lie;
Deal with your Quaking Friends; they're men of light;
Their spirit hates deceit and scorns to bite."
On the Ship-building Company:
"To raise fresh barks must surely be amusing,
When hundreds rot in docks for want of using."
On Settling the Bahamas:
"Rare, fruitful isles, where not an ass can find
A verdant tuft or thistle to his mind.
How, then, must those poor silly asses fare
That leave their native land to settle there?"
On a South Sea Speculator imploring Alms through his Prison Bars:
"Behold a poor dejected wretch,
Who kept a S—— Sea coach of late,
But now is glad to humbly catch
A penny at the prison grate.
"What ruined numbers daily mourn
Their groundless hopes and follies past,
Yet see not how the tables turn,
Or where their money flies at last!
"Fools lost when the directors won,
But now the poor directors lose;
And where the S—— Sea stock will run,
Old Nick, the first projector, knows."
On a Picture of Change Alley:
"Five hundred millions, notes and bonds,
Our stocks are worth in value;
But neither lie in goods, or lands,
Or money, let me tell ye.
Yet though our foreign trade is lost,
Of mighty wealth we vapor,
When all the riches that we boast
Consist in scraps of paper."
On a "Permit:"
"You that have money and have lost your wits,
If you'd be poor, buy National Permits;
Their stock's in fish, the fish are still in water,
And for your coin you may go fish hereafter."
On a Roomful of Ladies buying Stocks of a Jew and a Gentile:
"With Jews and Gentiles, undismayed,
Young tender virgins mix;
Of whiskers nor of beards afraid,
Nor all their cozening tricks.
"Bright jewels, polished once to deck
The fair one's rising breast,
Or sparkle round her ivory neck,
Lie pawned in iron chest.
"The gentle passions of the mind
How avarice controls!
E'en love does now no longer find
A place in female souls."
On a Picture of a Man laughing at an Ass browsing:
"A wise man laughed to see an ass
Eat thistles and neglect good grass.
But had the sage beheld the folly
Of late transacted in Change Alley,
He might have seen worse asses there
Give solid gold for empty air,
And sell estates in hopes to double
Their fortunes by some worthless bubble,
Till of a sudden all was lost
That had so many millions cost.
Yet ruined fools are highly pleased
To see the knaves that bit 'em squeezed,
Forgetting where the money flies
That cost so many tears and sighs."
On the Silk Stocking Company:
"Deal not in stocking shares, because, I doubt,
Those that buy most will ere long go without."
These Dutch-English pictures William Hogarth, we may be sure, often inspected as they successively courted public notice in the shops of London, as we see in his early works a character evidently derived from them. During the bubble period of 1720, he was an ambitious young engraver and sign-painter (at least willing to paint signs if a job offered),[19] much given to penciling likenesses and strange attitudes upon his thumb-nail, to be transferred, on reaching home, to paper, and stored away for future use. He was one of those quick draughtsmen who will sketch you upon the spot a rough caricature of any odd person, group, or event that may have excited the mirth of the company; a young fellow somewhat undersized, with an alert, vigorous frame, a bright, speaking eye, a too quick tongue and temper, self-confident, but honest, sturdy, and downright in all his words and ways. "But I was a good paymaster even then" he once said, with just pride, after speaking of the days when he sometimes walked London streets without a shilling in his pocket.
Hogherd was the original name of the family, which was first humanized into Hogert and Hogart, and then softened into its present form. In Westmoreland, where Hogarth's grandfather cultivated a farm—small, but his own—the first syllable of the name was pronounced like that of the domestic animals which his remote ancestors may have herded. There was a vein of talent in the family, an uncle of Hogarth's having been the song-writer and satirist of his village, and his own father emerging from remote and most rustic Westmoreland to settle in London as a poor school-master and laborious, ill-requited compiler of school-books and proof-reader. A Latin dictionary of his making existed in manuscript after the death of the artist, and a Latin letter written by him is one of the curiosities in the British Museum. But he remained always a poor man, and could apprentice his boy only to an engraver of the lowest grade known to the art. But this sufficed for a lad who could scarcely touch paper with a pencil without betraying his gift, who drew capital burlesques upon his nail when he was fifteen, and entertained Addison's coffee-house with a caricature of its landlord when he was twenty-two.
The Sleeping Congregation. (Hogarth.)
The earliest work by this greatest English artist of his century, which has been preserved in the British Museum (1720), shows the bent of his genius as plainly as the first sketch by Boz betrays the quality of Dickens. It is called "Design for a Shop-bill," and was probably Hogarth's own shop-bill, his advertisement to the public that he was able and willing to paint signs. In those days, the school-master not having yet gone "abroad," signs were usually pictorial, and sometimes consisted of the popular representation of the saint having special charge of the business to be recommended. In Hogarth's shop-bill we see a tall man holding up a newly painted sign of St. Luke with his ox and book, at which a group of persons are looking, while Hogarth himself appears to be showing the sign to them as possible customers. Along the bottom of the sign is engraved W. Hogarth, Painter. In the background is seen an artist painting at an easel and a boy grinding colors. He could not even in this first homely essay avoid giving his work something of a narrative character. He must exhibit a story with humorous details. So in his caricature of Daniel Button, drawn to ridicule the Tory frequenters of Button's coffee-house, he relates an incident as well as burlesques individuals. There stands Master Button in his professional apron, with powdered wig and frilled shirt; and opposite to him a tall, seedy, stooping scholar or poet is storming at the landlord with clinched fists, because he will not let him have a cup of coffee without the money. There is also the truly Hogarthian incident of a dog smelling suspiciously the poet's coat tail. Standing about the room are persons whom tradition reports to have been intended as portraits of Pope, Steele, Addison, Arbuthnot, and others of Button's famous customers. This drawing, executed with a brush, is also preserved in the British Museum. Daniel Button, as Dr. Johnson reports, had once been a servant in the family of the Countess of Warwick, and was placed in the coffee-house by Addison. A writer in the Spectator alludes to this haunt of the Tories: "I was a Tory at Button's and a Whig at Child's."
The South Sea delusion drew from Hogarth his first engraved caricature. Among the Dutch engravings of 1720, called forth by the schemes of John Law, there was one in which the victims were represented in a merry-go-round, riding in revolving cars or upon wooden horses, the whole kept in motion by a horse ridden by the devil. The picture presents also the usual multitude of confusing details, such as the Dutch mad-house in the distance, with a long train of vehicles going toward it. In availing himself of this device the young Londoner showed much of that skill in the arrangement of groups, and that fertility in the invention of details, which marked his later works. His whirligig revolves higher in the air than in the Dutch picture, enabling him to show his figures clear of the crowd below, and instead of the devil on horseback giving the motion, he assigns that work more justly to the directors of the South Sea Company. Thus he has room and opportunity to impart a distinct character to most of his figures. We see perched aloft on the wooden horses about to be whirled around, a nobleman with his broad ribbon, a shoe-black, an old woman, a wigged clergyman, and a woman of the town. With his usual uncompromising humor, Hogarth places these last two characters next to one another, and while the clergyman ogles the woman, she chucks him under the chin. There is a world of accessories: a devil exhaling fire, standing behind a counter and cutting pieces of flesh from the body of Fortune and casting them to a hustling crowd of Catholic, Puritan, and Jew; Self-Interest breaking Honesty upon a wheel; a crowd of women rushing pell-mell into an edifice gabled with horns, and bearing the words, "Raffling for Husbands with Lottery Fortunes in here;" Honor in the pillory flogged by Villainy; an ape wearing a sword and cap. The scene chosen by the artist for these remarkable events is the open space in which the monument stands, then fresh and new, which commemorates the Great Fire; but he slyly changes the inscription thus: "This Monument was erected in Memory of the Destruction of this City by the South Sea in 1720."
Hogarth, engraver and sign-painter though he may have been, was all himself in this amusing and effective piece. If the Dutch picture and Hogarth's could be placed here side by side, the reader would have before him an interesting example of the honest plagiarism of genius, which does not borrow gold and merely alter the stamp, but converts a piece of crude ore into a Toledo blade. Unfortunately, both pictures are too large and crowded to admit of effective reduction.
In this, his first published work, the audacious artist availed himself of an expedient which heightened the effect of most of his later pictures. He introduced portraits of living persons. Conspicuous in the foreground of the South Sea caricature, among other personages now unknown, is the diminutive figure of Alexander Pope, who was one of the few lucky speculators of the year 1720. At least, he withdrew in time to save half the sum which he once thought he had made. The gloating rake in the first picture of the "Harlot's Progress" is that typical reprobate of eighteenth-century romances, Colonel Francis Charteris, upon whom Arbuthnot wrote the celebrated epitaph, which, it is to be hoped, is itself a caricature:
"Here continueth to rot
the body of Francis Charteris,
who, with an INFLEXIBLE CONSTANCY and
INIMITABLE UNIFORMITY of life,
PERSISTED,
in spite of AGE and INFIRMITIES,
in the practice of EVERY HUMAN VICE,
excepting PRODIGALITY and HYPOCRISY.
His insatiable AVARICE exempted him from the first;
his matchless IMPUDENCE from the second.
Oh, indignant reader!
think not his life useless to mankind;
Providence connived at his execrable designs
to give to after-ages a conspicuous
proof and example
of how small estimation is EXORBITANT WEALTH
in the sight of God, by His bestowing it on
the most UNWORTHY OF ALL MORTALS."
Hogarth was as much a humorist in his life as he was in his works. The invitation to Mr. King to eta beta py, given on the next page, was one of many similar sportive efforts of his pencil. He once boasted that he could draw a sergeant carrying his pike, entering an ale-house, followed by his dog, all in three strokes. He produced the following, also given on next page:
He explained the drawing thus: A is the perspective line of the door; B, the end of the sergeant's pike, who has gone in; C, the end of the dog's tail.
Hogarth's Invitation Card.
Nor was he too nice in his choice of subjects for way-side treatment. One of his fellow-apprentices used to relate an anecdote of the time when they were accustomed to make the usual Sunday excursion into the country, Hogarth being fifteen years of age. In a tap-room row a man received a severe cut upon the forehead with a quart beer-pot, which brought blood, and caused him to "distort his features into a most hideous grin." Hogarth produced his pencil and instantly drew a caricature of the scene, including a most ludicrous and striking likeness of the wounded man. There was of necessity a good deal of tap-room in all humorous art and literature of that century, and he was perfectly at home in scenes of a beery cast.
The "Five Days' Peregrination" of Hogarth and his friends, of which Thackeray discoursed to us so agreeably in one of his lectures, occurred when the artist was thirty-four years of age. But it shows us the same jovial Londoner, whose manners and pleasures, as Mr. Thackeray remarked, though honest and innocent, were "not very refined." Five friends set out on foot early in the morning from their tavern haunt in Covent Garden, gayly singing the old song, "Why should we quarrel for riches?" Billingsgate was their first halting-place, where, as the appointed historian of the jaunt records, "Hogarth made the caricature of a porter, who called himself the Duke of Puddle Dock," which "drawing was by his grace pasted on the cellar door." At Rochester, "Hogarth and Scott stopped and played at hop-scotch in the colonnade under the Town-hall." The Nag's Head at the village of Stock sheltered them one night, when, after supper, "we adjourned to the door, drank punch, stood and sat for our pictures drawn by Hogarth." In another village the merry blades "got a wooden chair, and placed Hogarth in it in the street, where he made the drawing, and gathered a great many men, women, and children about him to see his performance." The same evening, over their flip, they were entertaining the tap-room with their best songs, when some Harwich lobster-men came in and sung several sea-songs so agreeably that the Londoners were "quite put out of countenance." "Our St. John," records the scribe of the adventure, "would not come in competition, nor could Pishoken save us from disgrace." Here, too, is a Hogarthian incident: "Hogarth called me up and told me the good-woman insisted on being paid for her bed, or having Scott before the mayor, which last we did all in our power to promote." And so they merrily tramped the country round, singing, drawing, copying comic epitaphs, and pelting one another with dirt, returning to London at the end of the five days, having expended just six guineas—five shillings a day each man.
Time Smoking a Picture.
His sense of humor appears in his serious writings. One illustration which he gives in his "Analysis of Beauty," to show the essential and exhaustless charm of the waving line, is in the highest degree comic: "I once heard an eminent dancing-master say that the minuet had been the study of his whole life, and that he had been indefatigable in the pursuit of its beauties, yet at last could only say, with Socrates, he knew nothing, adding that I was happy in my profession as a painter, in that some bounds might be set to the study of it."
In his long warfare with the picture-dealers, who starved living art in England by the manufacture of "old masters," he employed ridicule and caricature with powerful effect. His masterly caricature of "Time smoking a Picture" was well seconded by humorous letters to the press, and by many a passing hit in his more elaborate writings. He maintained that a painting is never so good as at the moment it leaves the artist's hands, time having no possible effect upon it except to impair its beauty and diminish its truth. There was penned at this period a burlesque "Bill of Monsieur Varnish to Benjamin Bister," which is certainly Hogarthian, if it is not Hogarth's, and might well serve as a companion piece to the engraving. Among the items are these:
| £ | s. | d. | |
| To painting and canvas for a naked Mary Magdalen, in the undoubted style of Paul Veronese | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| To brimstone, for smoking ditto | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Paid Mrs. W—— for a live model to sit for Diana bathing, by Tintoretto | 0 | 16 | 0 |
| Paid for the hire of a layman, to copy the robes of a Cardinal, for a Vandyck | 0 | 5 | 0 |
| Paid the female figure for sitting thirty minutes in a wet sheet, that I might give the dry manner of that master | 0 | 10 | 6 |
| The Tribute-money Rendered, with all the exactness of Quintin Metsius, the famed blacksmith of Antwerp | 2 | 12 | 6 |
| The Martyrdom of St. Winifred, with a view of Holywell Bath, by old Frank | 1 | 11 | 6 |
| To a large allegorical altarpiece, consisting of men and angels, horses and river gods; 'tis thought most happily hit off for a Rubens | 5 | 5 | 0 |
| Paid for admission into the House of Peers, to take a sketch of a great character, for a picture of Moses breaking the Tables of the Law, in the darkest manner of Rembrandt, not yet finished | 0 | 2 | 6 |
The idea of a wet sheet imparting the effect of dryness was taken from a treatise on painting, which stated that "some of the ancient masters acquired a dry manner of painting from studying after wet drapery."
This robust and downright Briton, strong in the consciousness of original and native genius, did not object merely to the manufacture of old masters, but also to the excessive value placed upon the genuine productions of the great men of old. He could not feel it to be just or favorable to the progress of art that works representing a state of feeling long ago outgrown in England should take precedence of paintings instinct with the life of the present hour. In other words, he did not enjoy seeing one of his own paintings sell at auction for fourteen guineas, and an Old Master bring a thousand. He grew warm when he denounced "the picture-jobbers from abroad," who imported continually "ship-loads of dead Christs, Holy Families, Madonnas, and other dismal, dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental, on which they scrawl the terrible cramp names of some Italian masters, and fix upon us Englishmen the name of universal dupes." He imagines a scene between one of those old-master mongers and his customer. The victim says:
"'Mr. Bubbleman, that grand Venus, as you are pleased to call it, has not beauty enough for the character of an English cook-maid.' Upon which the quack answers, with a confident air: 'Sir, I find that you are no connoisseur; the picture, I assure you, is in Alesso Baldminetto's second and best manner, boldly painted, and truly sublime: the contour gracious; the air of the head in high Greek taste; and a most divine idea it is.' Then spitting in an obscure place, and rubbing it with a dirty handkerchief, takes a skip to t'other end of the room, and screams out in raptures, 'There's an amazing touch! A man should have this picture a twelvemonth in his collection before he can discover half its beauties!' The gentleman (though naturally a judge of what is beautiful, yet ashamed to be out of the fashion by judging for himself) with this cant is struck dumb, gives a vast sum for the picture, very modestly confesses he is indeed quite ignorant of painting, and bestows a frame worth fifty pounds on a frightful thing, which, without the hard name, is not worth so many farthings."
The no Dedication
Not Dedicated to any Prince in Christendom
for fear it might be thought an
Idle piece of Arrogance.
Nor Dedicated to any man of quality
for fear it might be thought too assuming.
Nor Dedicated to any learned body
of Men, as either of the universities or the
Royal Society, for fear it might be thought
an uncommon piece of Vanity.
Nor Dedicated to any one particular Friend
for fear of offending another.
Therefore Dedicated to nobody.
But if for once we may suppose
Nobody to be every body, as Every body
is often said to be nobody, then is this work
Dedicated to every body.
by their most humble and devoted W. Hogarth
Dedication of a Proposed History of the Arts. (From Hogarth's Manuscript.[20])
He gives picture-buyers a piece of advice which many of them have since taken, to the sore distress of their guests: Use your own eyes, and buy the pictures which they dwell upon with delight.
In the heat of controversy, Hogarth, as usual, went too far; but he stood manfully by his order, and defended resolutely their rights and his own. Artists owe him undying gratitude for two great services: he showed them a way to independence by setting up in business on his own account, becoming his own engraver and publisher, and retaining always the ownership of his own plates, which, indeed, constituted his estate, and supported creditably his family as long as any of them lived. He served all artists, too, by defending himself against the pirates who flooded the market with meanly executed copies of his own engravings. It was William Hogarth who obtained from Parliament the first act which secured to artists the sole right to multiply and sell copies of their works; and this right is the very corner-stone of a great national painter's independence. That act made genuine art a possible profession in England.
Such was Hogarth, the original artist of his country, an honest, valiant citizen, who stood his ground, paid his way, cheered and admonished his generation. He had the faults which belong to a positive character, trod on many toes, was often misunderstood, and had his ample share of trouble and contention. All that is now forgotten; and he was never so much valued, so frequently reproduced, so generally possessed, or so carefully studied as at the present time.
The generation that forms great satirists shines in the history of literature, but not in that of morals; for to supply with objects of satire such masters of the satiric arts as Hogarth, Swift, Pope, Gay, Steele, Arbuthnot, and Foote, there must be deep corruption in the State and radical folly in conspicuous persons. The process which has since been named "secularization" had then fairly set in. The brilliant men of the time had learned to deride the faith which had been a restraining force upon the propensities of man for fifteen centuries, but were very far from having learned to be continent, temperate, and just without its aid. "Four treatises against the miracles" Voltaire boasted of having seen during his residence in England in 1727 and 1728; but these treatises did not moderate the warmth of human passions, nor change any other element in the difficult problem of existence. Walpole bribed, Swift maligned, Bolingbroke intrigued, Charteris seduced, and Marlborough peculated just as if the New Light had not dawned and the miracles had remained intact. Do we not, even in our own time, see inquiring youth, bred in strait-laced homes, assuming that since there are now two opinions as to the origin of things, it is no longer necessary to comply with the moral laws? The splendid personages of that period seem to have been in a moral condition similar to that of such a youth. It was the fashion to be dissolute; it was "provincial" to obey those laws of our being from compliance with which all human welfare and all honest joy have come.
Sir Robert Walpole paring the Nails of the British Lion.
Politics were still most rudimentary. The English people were fully resolved on keeping out the dull and deadly Stuarts; but the price they had to pay for this was to submit to the rule of the dull and difficult Georges, whose bodies were in England and their hearts in Hanover. Between the king and the people stood Sir Robert Walpole—as good a man as could have held the place—who went directly to the point with members and writers, ascertained their price, and paid it. According to one of Pope's bitter notes on the "Dunciad," where he quotes a Parliamentary report, this minister in ten years paid to writers and publishers of newspapers "fifty thousand pounds eighteen shillings!" How much he paid to members of Parliament was a secret known only to himself and the king. The venality of the press was frequently burlesqued, as well as the fulsome pomp of its purchased eulogies. A very good specimen is that which appeared in 1735, during a ministerial crisis, when the opposition had high hopes of ousting the tenacious Walpoles. An "Advertisement" was published, in which was offered for sale a "neat and curious collection of well-chosen similes, allusions, metaphors, and allegories from the best plays and romances, modern and ancient, proper to adorn a panegyric on the glorious patriots designed to succeed the present ministry." The author gave notice that "all sublunary metaphors of a new minister, being a Rock, a Pillar, a Bulwark, a Strong Tower, or a Spire Steeple, will be allowed very cheap;" but celestial ones, being brought from the other world at a great expense, must be held at a higher rate. The author announced that he had prepared a collection of State satires, which would serve, with little variation, to libel a judge, a bishop, or a prime minister. "N.B.—The same satirist has collections of reasons ready by him against the ensuing peace, though he has not yet read the preliminaries or seen one article of the pacification."
Dutch Neutrality, 1745.
There was also a burlesque "Bill of Costs for a late Tory Election in the West," in which we find such items as "bespeaking and collecting a mob," "a set of No-Roundhead roarers," "a set of coffee-house praters," "Dissenter damners," "demolishing two houses," "committing two riots," "breaking windows," "roarers of the word Church," "several gallons of Tory punch on church tombstones." It is questionable, however, if in all the burlesques of the period there was one more ridiculous than the narrative of an actual occurrence in April, 1715, when the footmen of members of the House of Commons met outside of the House, according to established custom, to elect a Speaker. The Tory footmen cast their votes for "Sir Thomas Morgan's servant," and the Whigs for "Mr. Strickland's man." A dispute arising, a fight ensued between the two parties, in the midst of which the House broke up, and the footmen were obliged to attend their masters. The next day, as soon as the House was in session, the fight was renewed, and, after a desperate struggle, the victorious Whigs carried their man three times in triumph round Westminster Hall, and then adjourned to a Whig ale-house, the landlord of which gave them a dinner, the footmen paying only for their drink.
British Idolatry of the Opera-Singer Mingotti, 1756.
"Ra, ra, ra, rot ye,
My name is Mingotti.
If you worship me notti,
You shall all go to potti."
The caricatures of the Walpole period preserve the record of the first attempt to lessen by law the intemperate drinking of gin—the most pernicious of the spirituous liquors. A law was passed imposing upon this article a very heavy excise, and prohibiting its sale in small quantities. But in 1736 England had not reached, by a century and a half, the development of civilization which admits of the adequate consideration of such a measure; nor can the poor man's gin ever be limited by law while the rich man's wine flows free. This gin law appears to have been killed by ridicule. Ballads lamenting the near decease of "Mother Gin" were sung in the streets; the gin-shop signs were hung with black, and there were mock ceremonies of "Madame Geneva's Lying in State," "Mother Gin's Wake," and "Madame Gin's Funeral." Paragraphs notified the public that the funeral of Madame Gin was celebrated with great merriment, many of both sexes "getting soundly drunk," and a mob following her remains with torches. The night before the measure went into operation was one of universal revel among the gin-drinkers, and every one, we are assured, carried off as much of the popular liquor, for future consumption, as he could pay for. The law was evaded by the expedients long afterward employed in Maine, when first a serious attempt was made to enforce the "Maine Law." Apothecaries and others colored their gin, put it into phials, and labeled it "Colic Water," "Make-shift," "The Ladies' Delight," with printed "Directions" to take two or three spoonfuls three or four times a day, "or as often as the fit takes you." Informers sprung into an importance never before known, and many of them invented snares to decoy men into violations of the law. So odious did they become that if one of them fell into the hands of the mob, he was lucky to escape with only a ducking in the Thames or a horse-trough. In short, the attempt was ill-considered and premature, and after an experiment of two or three years it was given up, having contributed something toward the growing unpopularity of the ministry.
The Motion (for the Removal of Sir Robert Walpole).
The downfall of Sir Robert Walpole, after holding office for twenty years, was preceded by an animated fire of caricature, in which the adherents of Walpole held their own. The specimen given above, entitled "The Motion," was reduced from one of the most famous caricatures of the reign of George II., and one of the most finely wrought of the century.[21] Horace Walpole, son of the great minister, wrote from Florence that the picture had "diverted him extremely," and that the likenesses were "admirable." To us the picture says nothing until it is explained; but every London apprentice of the period recognized Whitehall and the Treasury, toward which the Opposition was driving with such furious haste, and could distinguish most of the personages exhibited. A few days before this caricature appeared, Sandys, who was styled the motion-maker, from the frequency of his attempts to array the House of Commons against the Walpole ministry, moved once more an address to the king, that he would be pleased to remove Sir Robert Walpole from his presence and councils forever. The debate upon this motion was long and most vehement, and though the ministry triumphed, it was one of those bloody victories which presage overthrow. On the same day a similar "motion" was made in the House of Lords by Lord Carteret, where an equally violent discussion was followed by a vote sustaining the ministry. The exultation of the Walpole party inspired this famous caricature, in which we see the Opposition peers trying to reach office in a lordly coach and six, and the Commons trudging toward the same goal on foot, their leader, Pulteney, wheeling a load of Opposition newspapers, and leading his followers by the nose. Every politician of note on the side of the Opposition is in the picture: Lord Chesterfield is the postilion; the Duke of Argyll the coachman; Lord Carteret the gentleman inside the coach, who, becoming conscious of the breakdown, cries, "Let me get out!" Bubb Dodington is the spaniel between the coachman's legs; the footman behind the coach is Lord Cobham, and the outrider Lord Lyttelton. On the side of the Commons there is Sandys, dropping in despair his favorite, often-defeated "Place Bill," and exclaiming, "I thought what would come of putting him on the box?" Much of the humor and point of the picture is lost to us, because the peculiar relations of the persons portrayed to the public, to their party, and to one another can not now be perfectly recalled.
Edition after edition of "The Motion" appeared, one of which was so arranged that it could be fitted to the frame of a lady's fan, a common device at the time. The Opposition retorted with a parody of the picture, which they styled "The Reason," in which Walpole figures as the coachman, driving the coach of state to destruction. Another parody was called "The Motive," in which the king was the passenger and Walpole the driver. Then followed "A Consequence of the Motion," "Motion upon Motion," "The Grounds," and others. The Walpole party surpassed their opponents in caricature; but caricature is powerless to turn back a genuine tide of public feeling, and a year later Sir Robert was honorably shelved in the House of Lords.
From this time forward the history of Europe is recorded or burlesqued in the comic pictures of the shop-window; not merely the conspicuous part played in it by ministers and kings, but the foibles, the fashions, the passions, the vices, the credulities, the whims, of each generation. The British rage for the Italian opera, the enormous sums paid to the singers, the bearish manners of Handel, the mania for gaming, the audacity of highwaymen, and the impositions upon popular credulity no more escape the satirist's pencil than Braddock's defeat, the Queen of Hungary's loss of Silesia, or William Pitt's timely, and also his ill-timed, fits of the gout. Nor were the abuses of the Church overlooked. One picture, entitled "The Fat Pluralist and his Lean Curates," published in 1733, exhibited a corpulent dignitary of the Church in a chariot drawn by six meagre and wretched curates. The portly priest carries under one arm a large church, and a cathedral under the other, while at his feet are two sucking pigs, a hen, and a goose, which he has taken as tithe from a farmyard in the distance. "The Church," says the pluralist, "was made for me, not I for the Church;" and under the wheels of the coach is a book marked "The Thirty-nine Articles." One starving curate cries, piteously, "Lord, be merciful to us poor curates!" to which another responds, "And send us more comfortable livings!" It required a century of satire and remonstrance to get that one monstrous abuse of the Church Ring reduced to proportions approaching decency. Corruption in the city of New York in the darkest days of Tweed was less universal, less systematic, less remote from remedy, than that of the Government of Great Britain under the least incapable of its four Georges. It was merely more decorous.
Antiquaries Puzzled. (London, 1756.)
A specimen of the harmless, good-humored satire aimed at the zealous antiquaries of the last century is given above. This picture may have suggested to Mr. Dickens the familiar scene in "Pickwick" where the roving members of the Pickwick Club discover the stone commemorative of Bill Stumps. The mysterious inscription in the picture is, "Beneath this stone reposeth Claud Coster, tripe-seller of Impington, as doth his consort Jane."
It is part of the office of caricature to assist in destroying illusions that have served their turn and become obstructive. As in Luther's time it gave important aid to the reformers in breaking the spell of the papacy, so now, when kingship broke down in Europe, the satiric pencil had much to do with tearing away the veil of fiction which had so long concealed the impotence of kings for nearly every thing but mischief.
A Caricature designed by Benjamin Franklin. (London, 1774.)
Explanation by Dr. Franklin: "The Colonies (that is, Britannia's limbs) being severed from her, Britannia is seen lifting her eyes and mangled stumps to heaven; her shield, which she is unable to wield, lies useless by her side; her lance has pierced New England; the laurel branch has fallen from the hand of Pennsylvania; the English oak has lost its head, and stands a bare trunk, with a few withered branches: briers and thorns are on the ground beneath it; the British ships have brooms at their topmast heads, denoting their being on sale; and Britannia herself is seen sliding off the world (no longer able to hold its balance), her fragments overspread with the label, Date obolum Bellisario" (Give a farthing to Belisarius).
The fatal objection to the hereditary principle in the government of nations is the importance which, to use Mr. Jefferson's words, it "heaps upon idiots." Idiot is a harsh word to apply to a person so well disposed as George III., King of England, to whom the violence of the Revolutionary period was chiefly due; but when we think of the evil and suffering from which Europe could have been saved if he had known a little more or been a little less, we can not be surprised that contemporaries should have summed him up with disrespectful brevity. But for him, so far as short-sighted mortals can discern, the period of bloody revolution could have been a period of peaceful reform. After exasperating his subjects nearly to the point of rebellion, he precipitated the independence of the American colonies, which, in turn, brought on the French Revolution, and that issued in Napoleon Bonaparte, whose sins France only finished expiating at Sedan.
It is true, there must have been in Great Britain myriads upon myriads of such heads as that of King George to make his policy possible. But suppose that, instead of placing himself at the head of the dull minds in his empire, he had given the prestige of the crown to the bright and independent souls! Suppose he had taken as kindly to Chatham, Burke, Fox, Franklin, Price, Priestley, and Barré as he did to Bute, Dr. Johnson, Addington, and Eldon!
And see how this heir to the first throne in Christendom was educated. That period has been so laid bare by diaries and correspondence that we can visit the orphan boy in his home at Carlton House, and listen to his mother, the widowed Princess of Wales, as she describes his traits and laments the defects of his training. Go back to the year 1752, and imagine a drawing-room in a royal residence. The dinner hour then had only got as far toward "to-morrow" as three in the afternoon, and therefore by early candle-light of an October evening the drawing-room may be supposed to be inhabited. The Princess of Wales, born a princess of a petty German sovereignty, still a young mother, is dressed in mourning, her husband being but a few months dead. Of the duties belonging to royalty she had no ideas except those which had prevailed from time immemorial at the court of absolute German sovereigns. Her chief care was to preserve the morals of her children, and to have her eldest son a king in reality as well as in name. "Be king" (Sois roi) were favorite words with her, often repeated in the hearing of the heir to the throne. She thought it infamy in a king to allow himself to be ruled by ministers. There is no reason to doubt that she was an honorable lady and affectionate mother. Horace Walpole's insinuation that she instilled virtuous principles into the mind of her son because she "feared a mistress," and that her intimacy with Lord Bute was a criminal intrigue, dishonors Horace Walpole and human nature, but not the mother of George III.
She has company this evening—Bubb Dodington, a gentleman of great wealth and agreeable manners, who controlled six votes in the House of Commons, and passed his life in scheming to buy a peerage with them, in which, a year before his death, he succeeded, but left no heir to inherit it. He was much in the confidence of the princess, and she had sent for him to "spend the day" with her. Dinner is over, the two ladies-in-waiting are present, and now the "children" enter to play a few games of cards with their mother before going to bed. The children are seven in number, of whom the eldest was George, Prince of Wales—a boy of fourteen, of fresh complexion, sturdy and stout in form, and a countenance open and agreeable, and wearing an expression of honesty. Human nature rarely assumes a more pleasing form than that of a healthy, innocent English boy of fourteen. He was such a boy as you may still see in the play-grounds of Eton, only he was heavier, slower, and ruddier than the average, and much more shy in company. He loved his horse, and was exceedingly fond of rural sports; but when lesson-time came—but let his mother speak on that point.
The old game of "comet" was the one which the lad usually preferred. The company play at comet for small stakes, until the clock strikes nine, when "the royal children" go to bed. Then the mother leaves her ladies, and withdraws with her guest to the other end of the room, where she indulges in a long, gossipy, confidential chat upon the subject nearest her heart—her son, the presumptive heir to the throne. To show the reader how she used to talk to confidants on such occasions, I will glean a few sentences from her conversations:
"I like that the prince should amuse himself now and then at small play; but princes should never play deep, both for the example, and because it does not become them to win great sums. George's real disposition, do you ask? You know him almost as well as I do. He is very honest, but I wish he was a little more forward and less childish at his age. I hope his preceptors will improve him. I really do not know what they are teaching him, but, to speak freely, I am afraid not much. They are in the country, and follow their diversions, and not much else that I can discover."
Dodington remarked upon this that, for his part, he did not much regard books; what he most wished was that the prince should begin to acquire knowledge of the world, and be informed of the general frame and nature of the British Government and Constitution, and, without going into minutiæ, get some insight into the manner of doing public business.
"I am of your opinion," said the princess; "and his tutor, Stone, tells me that when he talks with him on those subjects, he seems to give proper attention, and makes pertinent remarks. I stick to the learning as the chief point. You know how backward the children were, and I am sure you do not think them much improved since. It may be that it is not too late to acquire a competence. I am highly sensible how necessary it is that the prince should keep company with men. I know that women can not inform him; but if his education was in my power absolutely, to whom could I address him? What company can I wish him to keep? What friendships can I desire him to contract? Such is the universal profligacy, such is the character and conduct of the young people of distinction, that I am really afraid to have them near my children. I shall even be in more pain for my daughters than I am for my sons, for the behavior of the women is indecent, low, and much against their own interest by making themselves so very cheap."
Three years passed. The prince was seventeen. Still the anxious mother deplored the neglect of his education.
"His book-learning," said she to the same friend, "I am no judge of, though I suppose it is small or useless; but I did hope he might have been instructed in the general understanding of things. I once desired Mr. Stone to inform the prince about the Constitution; but he declined it to avoid giving jealousy to the Bishop of Norwich (official educator). I mentioned it again, but he still declined it as not being his province."
"Pray, madam," asked Dodington, "what is his province?"
"I don't know, unless it is to go before the prince up-stairs, to walk with him sometimes, seldomer to ride with him, and now and then to dine with him. But when they do walk together, the prince generally takes that time to think of his own affairs and say nothing."
The youth was, indeed, extremely indolent and stupid. At school he would have been simply called a dunce, for at eleven he could not read English with any fluency, and he could never have been induced to apply his mind to study except by violence. He never had the slightest notion of what Chatham, Burke, or Fox meant when they spoke of the Constitution. If Mr. Stone had not been in dread of invading the Bishop of Norwich's province, and if the bishop had not been a verbose and wearisome formalist, their united powers could not have shown this young man the unique and prodigious happiness of a constitutional king in governing through responsible ministers. His "governor" during the last few years of his minority was Lord Waldegrave, whose too brief memoirs confirm the excellent report which contemporaries give of his mind and character. Lord Waldegrave could make nothing of him. Speaking of the prince at nineteen, he says he was "uncommonly full of princely prejudices, contracted in the nursery and improved by the society of bedchamber women and pages of the back-stairs." He found the heavy youth an insufferable bore, and he was soon, as his relation, Horace Walpole, relates, "thoroughly fatigued with the insipidity of his pupil." The prince derived from his education only two ideas, one very good and the other very bad. The first was that he must be a Good Boy and not keep a mistress; the second was that he must be a king indeed.
An indolent and ignorant monarch who will not govern by ministers must govern by favorites. He has no other alternative but abdication. A favorite was at hand in the person of a poor Scotch lord who had married one of the richest heiresses in Europe, the daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her miserly husband. He had also, if we may believe Lord Waldegrave, "a good person, fine legs, and a theatrical air of the greatest importance." He was likewise fond of medals, engravings, and flowers; he pensioned Dr. Johnson and the dramatist Home; he really enjoyed some products of art, and was far from being either the execrable or the ridiculous personage which he was esteemed by men whom he kept from place. "Bute," said Prince Frederick, father of George III., "you would make an excellent embassador in a small, proud little court where there is nothing to do." He would have arranged the ceremonials, superintended the plays, been gracious to artists and musicians, smiled benignantly upon the court poet, bored the reigning prince, enchanted the reigning princess, amused her children, and ripened into a courtly and garrulous old Polonius, "full of wise saws and modern instances." Above all, he would have upheld the prerogative of the prince with stanch sincerity. Sois roi!
There is something in the Scotch character that causes it to relish royal prerogative. To this hour there are in Scotland families that cherish a kind of sentimental attachment to the memory of the Stuarts; and we find Scotchmen as eminent as Hume, Carlyle, Lockhart, Scott, Wilson—men of distinguished liberality in some provinces of thought—unable to widen out into liberal politics. Bute was a lord as well as a Scotchman, not as ignorant nor as vulgar as lords in that generation usually were, but still subject to the lowering influences that always beset a privileged order; predisposed, too, by temperament to the worship of the picturesque, and now the cherished sharer of the shy, proud, gloomy seclusion of the family upon which the hopes of an empire were fixed. He showed them medals and pictures, he discoursed of music and architecture—two of his most pronounced tastes—and he nourished every princely prejudice which a wise tutor would have striven to eradicate.
This unfortunate youth, dull offspring of the stimulated lust of ages, was an apt pupil in the Jacobin theory of kingly authority. He was caught one day reading the book written at the instance of the dethroned James II. to justify his arbitrary policy; and there were so many other signs of the heir to a constitutional throne being educated in unconstitutional principles that Horace Walpole drew up a formal remonstrance against it in the name of the Whig families. This document, which was privately circulated, produced no effect. Sois roi! That remained the ruling thought in the mind of this ignorant, proud, moral young man, about to fill a place which conferred more obstructive power than any other in the world. If he had only been dissolute in that most dissolute age, he could have been ruled through his vices; but being strictly moral and temperate, he was, alas! always himself; and he had at his back the great voiceless multitude, who know by instinct that morality is the first interest of civilized human nature, and who honor it supremely even in this crude, rudimentary form. "Your dad is safe on his throne," said some boon companion of George IV., "as long as he is faithful to that ugly old woman, your mother." And wise old Franklin said, "If George III. had had a bad private character and John Wilkes a good one, he might have turned the king out of his dominions." Such is the mighty power of the mere indispensable rudiments of virtue, its mere preliminary corporeal conditions. A chaste and temperate fool will carry the day nine times in ten over profligate genius.
Riding in the park on an October day in 1760, a messenger delivered to the prince a note from the valet de chambre of his grandfather, George II. The prince had coolly arranged with this valet, while yet the king seemed firm in health, that at the moment of the old man's death he should send him a note bearing a certain mark on the outside. The king, a vigorous old man of seventy-seven, fell dead in his closet at seven in the morning, and this note bore the preconcerted announcement of the fact. The moral and steady young man, quietly remarking to his groom that his horse was lame, turned about and gently rode back to Kew. Upon dismounting he said to the man, "I have said this horse is lame; I forbid you to say the contrary." At twenty-two years of age he was king. Except that he married, a few months after, a pliant, adoring German princess, his accession did not much change his mode of life. He still lived in strict seclusion, shut in against expanding influences, accessible at all times only to one man—him of the good legs and Jacobin mind, Bute, progenitor of the Pope's recent conquest, and Mr. Disraeli's hero, Lothair.
Lord Bute, 1768.
Princess of Wales—Bute—George III.
In the caricatures of the next fifty years we see the ghastly results. His first important act was to repel from his counsels humiliating superiority in the person of William Pitt, the darling of the nation, the first minister of the world, and one of the three great orators of all time. In his stead ruled a long monotony of servile incompetents, beginning with Bute himself, continuing with Grenville, and coming at last to Addington and Eldon, the king keeping far from his confidence every man in England who had a gleam of public sense, or a touch of independent spirit, or even a sound traditionary attachment to Whig principles. An immovable obstructive to the true interest of his country at every crisis, honoring the men whom the better sense of the nation did not honor, and repressing the men whom wise contemporaries loved, and whom posterity with unanimous voice pronounces the glory of England in that age, he kept the country in bad humor during most of his reign, put her wrong on every question of universal interest, lost the most valuable and affectionate colonies a country ever had, kept Europe in a broil for twenty-five years, and developed Napoleon Bonaparte into a destructive lunatic by creating for him a succession of opportunities for the display of his talent for beating armies which had no generals.
The Wire-master (Bute) and his Puppets. (London, 1767.)
"The power behind the throne greater than the throne itself."
A large proportion of the very caricatures of the period have something savage in them. A visitor to the library of the British Museum curious in such matters is shown ten huge folio scrap-books full of caricatures relating to this reign, most of them of great size and blazing with color. From a gentleman who recently inspected these volumes we learn some particulars showing the bad temper, bad manners, and bad morals of that time, all three aggravated by a king whose morals were excellent. One of the first to catch the eye of an American is a picture, of date about 1765, called "A New Method of Macarony-making, as practiced in Boston, North America," which represents two men tarring and feathering another, who has a halter round his neck. Of the pictures reflecting upon Lord Bute and the Princess of Wales nothing need be said except that they are such as might be expected from the caricaturists of that age. Many of the works of Gillray in the earlier years of George III. were of such coarseness, extravagance, and brutality that the exhibition of them nowadays would subject the vender to a prosecution by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Our informant adds: "Their savageness and filth give one a very curious idea of the taste of our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers, only our ancestors, male and female, could hardly have been as bad as they are represented. Such hideous faces, such deformed figures, such monstrous distortion and debasement, such general ugliness and sensuality, oppress one with a feeling of melancholy rather than exhilaration. You might as well be merry over the doings of Swift's Yahoos, who are certainly not more offensive than some of Gillray's men and women. Whether in home or foreign politics, he is equally unscrupulous."
Charles James Fox was the bête noire of Gillray. He delighted in depicting him and his friends in as odious a light as possible, giving him huge beetle-brows, heavy jaws, and a swarthy complexion. The famous Westminster election, at which the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire won a vote for Fox by giving a kiss to a butcher, supplied him with a rich source of caricature. Fox is drawn riding on the back of the lady; and again, sitting in a tap-room with the duchess on his knee; and in another picture, hobnobbing with a coster-monger, while the duchess has her shoes mended by a cobbler, and pays the cobbler's wife with a purse of gold. Fox chops off the head of the king; he is a traitor, a republican, a Jacobin, a confederate with the French, a forestaller, a buyer-up of corn with which to feed the enemy, a sot, a gambler—every thing that is bad. His very death-bed forms the subject of a brutal caricature. The noblest traits of his political character are the points satirized. His great crimes apparently are that he loved freedom abroad as well as at home, that he strove for peace with France, and endeavored to do justice to Ireland. For this he is depicted as the secret ally of Bonaparte and as the instigator of Irish rebellion. The ghosts of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, the Sheares brothers, Emmett, and other Irish martyrs are made to pass before Fox's bed, and point to him as the cause of their rebellion and their fate. When Burke went over to the Tories he then became the favorite of Gillray, who before had generally represented him as a Jesuit, because he demanded justice for the Catholics. Now he is the savior of his country, and the terror of Fox, Sheridan, and Priestley. Sheridan is depicted as a blazing meteor with an extremely rubicund nose. There is a picture of the Titans attempting to scale heaven, in which George III. figures as a comical Jupiter launching his thunder-bolts at the Whig Opposition. Queen Charlotte is shown as a miracle of ugliness. The prodigality of the Prince of Wales, who first appears as a handsome young man with long powdered hair, totally unlike the high-shouldered, curly-wigged, royal Turveydrop of later days, is contrasted in companion pictures with the alleged parsimony of his parents. He is represented reveling with inordinately fat but handsome women, who get drunk, hang round his neck, and indulge in familiarities. The popular hope that marriage would reform him suggested a large drawing, in which the slumbering prince is visited by a descending angel in the likeness of the unhappy Caroline, at whose approach a crowd of reprobates, male and female, hurry away into darkness. Thomas Paine did not escape. In a picture entitled "The Rights of Man; or, Tommy Paine, the Little American Taylor, taking the Measure of the Crown for a New Pair of Revolution Breeches," he is represented as the traditional starveling tailor, ragged and slippered, and armed with an immense pair of shears. He crouches to take the measure of an enormous crown, while uttering much irrelevant nonsense. This precious work is "humbly dedicated to the Jacobin clubs of France and England."
Bound with such pictures as these are a vast number by inferior hands, most of which are indescribable, the standard subjects being gluttony, drunkenness, incontinence, and fashion, and these in their most outrageous manifestations. They serve to show that a stupid king in that age, besides corrupting Parliament and debauching the Press, could demoralize the popular branch of art. The visitor, turning from this collection of atrocities and ferocities, finds himself relenting toward the unfortunate old king, and inclined to say that he was, after all, only the head noodle of his kingdom. Every improvement was mercilessly burlesqued—steam, gas, the purchase of the Elgin marbles; popular prejudices were nearly always flattered, seldom rebuked; so that if the caricatures were of any use at all in the promulgation of truth, they served only as part of the ordeal that tested its vitality.
We do not find in this or in any other collection many satirical pictures relating to the revolution which ended in the independence of the American colonies. There was, however, one gentleman in London during the earlier phases of the dispute who employed caricature and burlesque on behalf of America with matchless skill. He is described in the London Directory for 1770 in these words, "Franklin, Benjamin, Esq., agent for Philadelphia, Craven Street, Strand." The effective caricature placed at the beginning of this chapter was one of the best of a long series of efforts to avert the impending conflict. He loved his country with the peculiar warmth that usually animates citizens who live in a distant outlying province. His country, when he designed that caricature and wrote the well-known burlesques in a similar taste, was not Pennsylvania, nor America, nor England, but the great British Empire, to which William Pitt, within Franklin's own life-time, seemed to have given an ascendency over the nations of the earth similar to that which Rome had once enjoyed. It was, however, only on the coast of North America that Britain possessed colonies loyal and free, not won by conquest nor by diplomacy, and therefore entitled to every right secured by the British Constitution. Franklin loved and gloried in this great country of which he was born a citizen. He deplored the measures that threatened the severance of those colonies from the mother country, and would have prevented the severance if the king's folly had been any thing short of incurable. The most wonderful thing in the whole controversy was that the argument, fact, and fun which Franklin wrote and inspired, from 1765 to 1774, had only momentary influence on the course of events. "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."
The Gouty Colossus, William Pitt (Lord Chatham), with One Leg in London and the Other in New York. (London, 1766.)
His twenty "Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One," published three years before the caricature, inculcated the same lesson. A great empire, he remarked, was in one particular like a great cake: it could be most easily diminished at the edges. The person, therefore, who had undertaken the task of reducing it should take care to begin at the remotest provinces, and not till after they were lopped off cut up the central portion. His twenty "Rules" are merely a humorous history of the British colonial policy since the accession of George III.: Don't incorporate your colonies with the mother country, quarter troops among them, appoint for their governors broken gamblers and exhausted roués, despise their voluntary grants, and harass them with novel taxes. By such measures as these "you will act like a wise gingerbread baker, who, to facilitate a division, cuts his dough half through at the places where, when baked, he would have it broken to pieces." Franklin also wrote a shorter burlesque, pompously headed, "An Edict of the King of Prussia," in which that monarch was supposed to claim sovereign rights over Great Britain on the ground that the island had been colonized by Hengist, Horsa, and others, subjects of "our renowned ducal ancestors." The edict, of course, ordains and commands precisely those absurd things which the Government of Great Britain had ordained and commanded since the planting of the colonies. Iron, as the edict duly sets forth, had been discovered in the island of Great Britain by "our colonists there," who, "presuming that they had a natural right to make the best use they could of the natural productions of their country," had erected furnaces and forges for the manufacture of the same, to the detriment of the manufacturers of Prussia. This must be instantly stopped, and all the iron sent to Prussia to be manufactured. "And whereas the art and mystery of making hats has arrived at great perfection in Prussia," and "the islanders before mentioned, being in possession of wool, beaver, and other furs, have presumptuously conceived they had a right to take some advantage thereof by manufacturing the same into hats, to the prejudice of our domestic manufacture," therefore we do hereby forbid them to do so any more.
We call this piece a burlesque, but it was burlesque only in form. Precisely such restrictions existed upon the industry of the American colonists. It was part of the protective system of the age, and not much more unjust than the parts of the same system to which the descendants of those colonists have since subjected themselves.
An ignorant man at the head of a government, however honest he may be, is liable to make fatal mistakes in the selection of his ministers. He naturally dreads the close inspection of minds superior to his own. He has always to be on his good behavior before them, which is irksome. He shares the stock prejudices of mankind, one of which is a distrust of practiced politicians. But as the poorest company of actors will get through a comedy with less discredit than the best amateurs, so an administration of "party hacks" will usually carry on a government with less odious failure than an administration composed of better men without experience in public business. George III. had, moreover, a singularly unfortunate trait for a king who had to govern by party leaders—his prejudices against individuals were inveterate. Lord Waldegrave remarked "a kind of unhappiness in his temper" while he was still a youth. "Whenever he is displeased, his anger does not break out with heat and violence, but he becomes sullen and silent, and retires to his closet, not to compose his mind by study and contemplation, but merely to indulge the melancholy enjoyment of his own ill-humor." And when he re-appeared, it was but too evident that he had not forgotten the offense. He never forgot, he seldom forgave. "The same strength of memory," as Earl Russell once wrote of him, "and the same brooding sullenness against those who opposed his will, which had been observed in the boy, were manifest in the man."
The Mask (Coalition).
This peculiarity of character always prevented the formation of a proper ministry, and shortened the duration of every ministry which was approximately proper. During the first ten years of his reign his dislike of William Pitt, the natural chief of the Whig party, confused every arrangement; and during the next twenty years the most cherished object of his policy seemed to be to keep from power the natural successor of that minister—Charles James Fox. The ascendency of both those leaders was such that to exclude them from power was to paralyze their own party, and prevent the free play of politics in the House of Commons. It reduced the poor king at last to pit against Napoleon Bonaparte a young rhetorician of defective health, William Pitt, the son of the great minister.
Heads of Fox and North.
"In a committee on the sense of the nation, Moved, that for preventing future disorders and dissensions, the heads of the Mutiny Act be brought in, and suffered to lie on the table to-morrow."—Fox's Motion in Parliament, February, 1784.
That renowned "coalition" between Lord North and Mr. Fox in 1783, the theme of countless caricatures and endless invective, illustrates the confusing influence of the king. During the whole period of the American Revolution, Lord North, as the head of the ministry, was obliged to execute and defend the king's policy, much of which we now know he disapproved. Naturally he would have been an ally of Fox years before, and they could either have prevented or shortened the conflict. The spell of the royal closet and the personal entreaties of the king prevailed over his better judgment, and made him the antagonist of Fox. At length, the war being at an end and North in retirement, England saw these two men, whose nightly conflicts had been the morning news for ten years, suddenly forming a "coalition," united in the administration, and pledged to the same policy. As we trace the successive steps which led to the alliance in the memoirs and diaries of the time, we discover that it was not so much the coalition as the previous estrangement that was unnatural. The public, however, could not be expected to see it in that light, and an uproar greeted the reconciliation that greatly aided the king in getting rid of the obnoxious Fox. The specimens of the caricatures to which it gave rise, presented on this and the two preceding pages, are two out of a great number still procurable.
In France, more conspicuously than in England, kingship broke down in that century. Louis XV., born in a private station, might have risen to the ownership of a small livery-stable, in which position his neighbors, commenting upon his character in the candid manner of French neighbors, would have epitomized him as a cross, proud pig. Those dull kings who finished kingship in Europe possessed but one trait which we usually associate with the kingly character—pride—and this was the single point of resemblance between Louis XV. and George III. Once in his life, it is related, Louis XV. uttered a few words with a vivacity approaching eloquence. "Would you believe," said he to Madame de Pompadour, "that there is a man in my court who dares to lift his eyes to one of my daughters?" He was blazing with passion at the thought of such flagrant impiety.
And was there ever, since sacred childhood first appealed for protection to the human heart, a child so unhappily placed as that baby king, an orphan, with a roué for a guardian, a smooth, insinuating priest for preceptor, and a dissolute court conspiring to corrupt him? The priest, who represented what then passed for virtue, taught him virtue out of a dreary catechism, still extant, which never yet elevated or nobly formed a human soul—a dead, false thing, with scarcely an atom in it of sound nutrition for heart or mind. But Cardinal Fleury had some success with his pupil. Thirty years after, when Pompadour was supplying him with fresh young girls of fourteen and fifteen, bought from their mothers by her for this purpose, the king's conscience would not permit him to go to bed until he had knelt down by the side of the timid victim, and required her to join him in saying the prescribed prayers.
The courtiers were not less successful in their endeavors. At the tender age of six years they provided for him an entertainment which gave the old Marquis de Dangeau the idea that they had formed the purpose of "drying up in him the very source of good feeling." They caused thousands of sparrows to be let loose in a vast hall, where they gave the boy the "divertissement" of seeing them shoot the birds, and covering all the floor with bloody, fluttering, crying victims. He doubtless enjoyed the spectacle, for at sixteen he shot in cold blood a pointer bred by himself, and accustomed to feed from his hand. So rude was he at seventeen, the chroniclers tell us, that the courtiers used all their arts to give him du goût pour les femmes, hoping thereby to render him "more polite and tractable." The precise manner in which a bevy of illustrious princesses and duchesses sought to débaucher le roi during one of the royal hunts is detailed in the diaries and satirized in the epigrams of the time.
The ladies, long frustrated by the "ferocity" of the youth, who cared only for hunting, succeeded at last, and succeeded with the applause of all the court. "Every one else has a mistress," remarks Barbier, advocate and magistrate; "why shouldn't the king?" It was a long reign of mistresses. Changes of ministry, questions of peace or war, promotions and appointments of generals and admirals, the arrest of authors and nobles—all were traceable to the will or caprice of a mistress. Frederick of Prussia styled Pompadour, Petticoat the Third, which some one was kind enough to report to her; and when Voltaire, whom she "protected," conveyed to the Prussian monarch a complimentary message, he replied, coldly, "I don't know her." Maria Theresa of Austria, a proud and high-principled lady, stooped to recognize her existence, and wrote her civil notes. If there is any truth in the printed gossip of the innermost court circles of that period, it was this difference in the treatment of the king's mistress which made France the ally of Austria in the Seven Years' War.
Would the reader like to know how affairs go on in a court governed by a mistress, then let him ponder this one sample anecdote, related by the femme de chambre of Madame de Pompadour, showing how she, femme de chambre as she was, obtained a lieutenant's commission in the army for one of her relations. She first asked "madame" for the commission; but as madame was in full intrigue to remove the Minister of War, this application did not succeed. "Pressed by my family," the femme de chambre relates, "who could not conceive that, in the position in which I was, it could be difficult for me to procure a trifling commission for a good soldier, I asked it directly from the minister himself. He received me coldly, and gave me little hope. On going out, the Marquis de V—— followed me, and said: 'You desire a commission. There is one vacant, which has been promised to a protégé of mine; but if you are willing to exchange favors with me, I will yield it to you. What I desire is to play the part of Exempt de Police in "Tartuffe" the next time madame gives it in the palace before the king. It is a rôle of a few lines only. Get madame to assign that part to me, and the lieutenancy is yours.' I told madame of this. The thing was done. I obtained my lieutenancy, and the marquis thanked madame for the rôle as warmly as if she had made him a duke."
Generals were appointed to the command of expeditions for no better reason than this. That Pompadour drew thirty-six millions of francs from the "royal treasury," i. e., from the earnings of the frugal and laborious French people, could easily have been borne. It was government by mistresses and for mistresses, the government of ignorant and idle caprice, that broke down monarchy in France and set the world on fire. Of the evils which corrupt rulers bring upon communities, the waste of the people's money (though that is a great evil in so poor a world as ours, with such crowds of poor relations and so much to be done) is among the least. It is the absence of intelligence and public spirit in the Government that brings on ruin.
"As long as I live," said Louis XV. one day to Madame de Pompadour, "I shall be the master, to do as I like. But my grandson will have trouble." Madame was of the same mind, but gave it neater expression: "After us the deluge."
Assembly of the Notables at Paris, February 22d, 1787.[22]
"Dear objects of my care, I have assembled you to ascertain with what sauce you want to be eaten."
"But we don't want to be eaten at all."
"You are departing from the question."
Mirabeau.[23] (Paris, 1789.)
The world is familiar with the tragic incidents of the sudden collapse of the monarchy. Except during the Reign of Terror, which was short, the caricaturists, whether with the pen or the pencil, played their usual part. It was almost impossible to caricature the abuses of the times, so monstrous was the reality. The "local hits" in Beaumarchais' "Marriage of Figaro," played with rapturous applause a hundred nights in 1784, were little more than the truth given with epigrammatic brevity. When the saucy page, Cherubin, confessed that he had behaved very badly, but rested his defense upon the fact that he had never been guilty of the slightest indiscretion in words, and so obtained both pardon and promotion, the audience must have felt the perfect congruity of the incident with the moral code of the period. In Figaro's famous discourse on the English God-dam there is, indeed, a touch of caricature: "A fine language the English; a little of it goes a great way. The English people, it is true, throw in some other words in the course of conversation, but it is very easy to see that God-dam is the basis of their language." When he descants upon politics, he rarely goes beyond the truth: "Ability advance a man in the Government bureaus! My lord is laughing at me. Be commonplace and obsequious, and you get every thing." Figaro gives the whole art of French politics in a few words: "To pretend you don't know what you do know, and to know what you don't; to hear what you understand, and not to hear what you don't understand; and especially to pretend you can do a great deal more than you can; often to have for a very great secret that there is no secret; to shut yourself up to mend pens and seem profound, when you are only empty and hollow; to play well or ill the part of a personage; to spread abroad spies and pensioned traitors; to melt seals, intercept letters, and try to ennoble the poverty of the means by the importance of the ends—may I die if that isn't all there is of politics." It is a good hit of Susan's when she says that vapors are "a disease of quality," only to be taken in boudoirs. A poor woman whose cause is coming on at court remarks that selling judgeships is a great abuse. "You are right," says the dolt of a magistrate; "we ought to get them for nothing." And how a Paris audience, in the temper of 1789, must have relished the hits at the hereditary principle: "It is no matter whence you came; the important question is, whither are you bound?" "What have you done, my lord, to merit so many advantages—rank, fortune, place? You took the trouble to be born, nothing more." We can fancy, too, how such touches as this might bring down the house: "I was thought of for an office, but unfortunately I was fit for it. An arithmetician was wanted; a dancer got it."
All men, as Mr. Carlyle observes, laughed at these jests, and none louder than the persons satirized—"a gay horse-racing Anglo-maniac noblesse loudest of all."
The first picture given in these pages relating to the French Revolution, "The Assembly of the Notables," is one of the most celebrated caricatures ever produced, and one of the best. Setting aside one or two of Thackeray's, two or three of Gillray's, and half a dozen of Mr. Nast's, it would be difficult to find its equal. It may be said, however, that the force of the satire is wholly in the words, which, indeed, have since become one of the stock jokes of French Joe Millers. The picture appeared in 1787, when the deficit in the revenue, after having widened for many years, had become most alarming, and it was at length proposed to tax the nobility, clergy, and magistrates, hitherto exempt from vulgar taxation. But the Assembly of the Notables, which was chiefly composed of the exempt, preferred to prolong inquiry into the causes of the deficit, and showed an unconquerable reluctance to impose a tax upon themselves. It was during this delay, so fatal to the monarchy, that the caricature appeared. There must have been more than one version of the work, for the one described by Mr. Carlyle in his "History of the French Revolution" differs in several particulars from that which we take from M. Champfleury. Mr. Carlyle says: "A rustic is represented convoking the poultry of his barn-yard with this opening address, 'Dear animals, I have assembled you to advise me what sauce I shall dress you with,' to which a cock responding, 'We don't want to be eaten,' is checked by, 'You wander from the point!'"
The outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 menaced Europe with one of the greatest of all evils—the premature adoption of liberal institutions. Forever vain and always fruitful of prodigious evil will be attempts to found a government by the whole people where the mass of the working population are grossly ignorant and superstitious. The reason is known to all who have had an opportunity of closely observing the workings of such minds. They can only be swayed by arts which honest intelligence can not use, and therefore they will be usually governed by men who have an interest in misleading them. Great Britain was nearer a republic than any other nation in Europe; but England, too, needed another century to get the tap-room reduced, the people's school developed in every parish, and the educated class intensely alive to the "folly of heaping importance upon idiots."
The Dagger Scene in the House of Commons. (Gillray, 1793.)
Edmund Burke was the man who, more than any other, held England back from revolution in 1792. Rational appeals to the rational faculty could not have availed. Appalled at what he saw in France, Burke, after thirty years' advocacy of liberal principles, and assisting to create a republic in America, became a fanatic of conservatism, and terrified England into standing by the monarchy. He was alarmed even at the influx of Frenchmen into England, flying from La Lanterne, and he gave vehement support to the Alien Act, which authorized the summary expulsion from the kingdom of foreigners suspected by the Government. Vehement? Some of his sentences read like lunacy. It was in the course of this debate that the celebrated dagger scene occurred which Gillray has satirized in the picture on the following page. A wild tale reached his ears of the manufacture of daggers at Birmingham for the use of French Jacobins in England, and one of them was given him as a specimen. It was an implement of such undecided form that it might have served as a dagger, a pike-head, or a carving-knife. He dashed it upon the floor of the House of Commons, almost hitting the foot of an honorable member, and proceeded to declaim against the unhappy exiles in the highest style of absurdity. "When they smile," said he, "I see blood trickling down their faces; I see their insidious purposes; I see that the object of all their cajoling is blood." A pause ensued after the orator had spoken a while in this strain. "You have thrown down a knife," said Sheridan; "where is the fork?" A shout of laughter followed this sally, which relieved the suppressed feelings of the House, but spoiled the "effect" of Mr. Burke's performance.
The Zenith of French Glory—A View in Perspective. (Gillray, London, 1793.)
The Estates. (Paris, 1789.)
In the French caricatures that have come to us from the period of the Revolution (many hundreds in number) every phase of the struggle is exhibited with French finesse. There is even an elegance in some of their Revolutionary caricatures. How exquisite, for example, the picture which presents the first protest of the Third Estate, its first attempt to be Something in the nation which it maintained! We see a lofty and beautiful chariot or car of triumph, in which king, nobleman, and clergy gracefully ride, drawn by a pair of doves. The Third Estate is merely the beaten road on which the whole structure moves. Nothing could more elegantly satirize the sentimental stage of the Revolution, when the accumulated abuses of centuries were all to disappear amidst a universal effusion of brotherly love, while king, lords, and clergy rode airily along as before, borne up by a mute, submissive nation! When at last the Third Estate had become "Something" in the nation, a large number of sentimental pictures signalized the event. In one we see priest, noble, and peasant clasped in a fervent embrace, the noble trampling under foot a sheet of paper upon which is printed "Grandeurs," the priest treading upon "Benefices," the peasant upon "Hate." All wear the tricolor cockade, and underneath is written, "The wish accomplished. This is as I ever desired it should be." In another picture priest, noble, and peasant are playing together upon instruments—the priest upon a serpent-shaped trumpet, the noble upon a pipe, and the peasant upon the violin—the peasant in the middle, leading the performance, and exchanging looks of complacent affection with the others.
The New Calvary. (Paris, 1792.)
Louis XVI. crucified by the rebels; Monsieur and the Comte d'Artois bound by the decrees of the factions; Robespierre, mounted upon the Constitution, presents the sponge soaked in regicides' gall; the Queen, overwhelmed with grief, demands speedy vengeance; the Duchess de Polignac, etc.
But even in the moment of triumph the effusion was not universal. There are always disagreeable people who doubt the duration of a millennium as soon as it has begun. Caricatures represented the three orders dancing together. "Will it last? won't it last?" sings a by-stander, using the refrain of an old song. "It is I who must pay the fiddler," cries the noble to the priest. From being fraternal, the Third Estate became patronizing. The three orders sit together in a café, and the peasant says, familiarly, "All right; every man pays his own shot." A picture entitled "Old Times and the New Time" bore the inscription, "Formerly the most useful class carried the load, and was trodden under foot. To-day all share the burden alike." From patronizing and condescending, the Third Estate, as all the world knows, speedily became aggressive and arbitrary. "Down with taxes!" appeared on some of the caricatures of 1789, when the public treasury was running dry. An extremely popular picture, often repeated, exhibits a peasant wearing the costume of all the orders, with the well-known inscription, so false and so fatal, "A single One makes the Three." An ignorant family is depicted listening with gaping eagerness to one who reveals to them that they too are the order of which they have been hearing such fine things. "We belong to the Third Estate!" they exclaim, with the triumphant glee of M. Jourdain when he heard that he had been speaking "prose" all his life without knowing it.
But peace and plenty did not come to the poor man's cottage, and the caricaturists began to mock his dream of a better day. We see in one of the pictures of 1790 a father of a family in chains, with his eyes fixed in ecstasy upon a beam of light, labeled "Hope." In another, poor Louis XVI. is styled "The Restorer of Liberty," but underneath we read the sad question, "Eh bien, but when will that put the chicken in the pot?" A devil entering a hovel is set upon by a peasant, who pummels him with a stick, while an old man cries out, "Hit him hard, hard, my son; he is an aristocrat;" and under the whole is written, "Is the devil, then, to be always at our door?" Again, we have the three orders forging the constitution with great ardor, the blacksmith holding the book on the anvil, while the priest and noble swing the sledge-hammer. Under the picture is the French smith's refrain, "Tot-tot-tot, Battez chaud, Tot-tot-tot." From an abyss a working-man draws a bundle of papers bearing the words, "The New Constitution, the Desire of the Nation," saying, as he does so, "Ah, I shall be well content when I have all those papers!"
The popular pictures grew ill-tempered as the hopes of the people declined, and the word aristocrat became synonymous with all that is most hostile to the happiness of man. A devil attired as a priest, teaching a school of little aristocrats, extols the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Citizens and soldiers are in full cry after a many-headed monster labeled "Aristocracy." An ass presides over a court of justice, and the picture is inscribed, "The Ass on the Bench; or, the End of Old Times." The clergy came in for their ample share of ridicule and vituperation. "What do we want with monks?" exclaimed an orator from the tribune of the Assembly in 1790. "If you tell me," he continued, "that it is just to allow pious men the liberty to lead a sedentary, solitary, or contemplative life, my answer is, that every man can be sedentary, solitary, or contemplative in his own room." Another speaker said, "If England to-day is flourishing, she owes it in part to the abolition of the religious orders." The caricaturists did not delay to aim their shafts at this new game. We see nuns trying on fashionable head-dresses, and friars blundering through a military exercise. The spectacle was exhibited to Europe of a people raging with contemptuous hate of every thing which had from time immemorial been held in honor.
President of a Revolutionary Committee amusing Himself with his Art before the Session begins. (Paris, 1793.)
As time wore on, after every other order in the State had been in turn the object of special animosity, the royal family, the envied victims of the old state of things, became the unpitied victims of the new. Until their ill-starred attempt to escape from France in June, 1792, there remained some little respect for the king, and some tenderness for his children. The picture given elsewhere of the crucifixion of the king was published by his adherents some months before the crisis as figurative of his sufferings, not as prophetic of his fate. But there was neither respect nor pity for the unhappy man after his blundering attempt to leave the country. An explosion of caricature followed. Before that event satirical pictures had been exposed only in the print-sellers' windows, but now, as M. Bayer records, "caricatures were sold wherever any thing was sold." The Jacobin Club, he adds, as often as they had a point to carry, caused caricatures to be made, which the shop-keepers found it to their interest to keep for sale.
Rare Animals: or, The Transfer of the Royal Family from the Tuileries to the Temple. (Champfleury, 1792.)
A large number of the pictures which appeared during the last months of the king's life have been preserved. At an earlier stage of the movement both friends and foes of the monarchy used the satiric pencil, but now there was none to take the side of this bewildered family, and the pictures aimed at them were hard and pitiless. The reader has but to turn to the specimen here given, which was called forth by the transfer of the royal family from their home in the Tuileries to their prison in the Temple, to comprehend the spirit of those productions. In others we find the king represented as a blind man groping his way; as a baby; as an idiot who breaks his playthings and throws away his crown and sceptre. The queen excited a deeper feeling. The Parisians of 1792 appear to have had for that most unhappy of women only feelings of diabolical hate. She called forth all the tiger which, according to Voltaire, is an ingredient in the French character. The caricaturists liked to invest her with the qualities and the form of a tigress, living in a monstrous alliance with a king-ram, and becoming the mother of monsters. The foolish tale of her saying that she would quench her thirst with the blood of Frenchmen was treated by the draughtsmen of the day as though it were an unquestionable fact.
Never was a woman so hated as she was by infuriate Paris in 1792. Never was womanhood so outraged as in some of the caricatures of that period. Nothing relating to her had any kind of sacredness. Her ancestors, her country, her mother, her children, her love for her children, her attachment to her husband, were all exhibited in the most odious light as so many additional crimes against liberty. Need it be said that her person was not spared? The single talent in which the French excel all the rest of the human family is that of subtly insinuating indecency by pen and pencil. But they did not employ this talent in the treatment of Marie Antoinette when she was about to redeem a frivolous life by a dignified death. With hideous indecency they presented her to the scorn of the public, as African savages might exhibit the favorite wife of a hostile chief when they had brought her to their stinking village a captive, bound, naked, and defiled.
And so passed away forever from the minds of men the sense of the divinity that once had hedged in a king. But so congenial to minds immature or unformed is the idea of hereditary chieftainship that to this day in Europe the semblance of a king seems the easiest resource against anarchy. Yet kings were put upon their good behavior, to hold their places until majorities learn to control their propensities and use their minds.
Aristocrat and Democrat. (Paris, 1793.)
Aristocrat. "Take care of your cap."
Democrat. "Look out for your queue."
"You frank! You simple! Have confidence in you! You! Why, you would blow your nose with your left hand for nothing but the pleasure of deceiving your right, if you could!"—Gavarni, Fourberies de Femmes, Paris, 1846.
Observe this picture of man's scorn of woman, drawn by Gavarni, the most noted of French caricaturists. I place it first, because it expresses the feeling toward "the subject sex" which satiric art has oftenest exhibited, and because it was executed by the person who excelled all others in delineating what he called the fourberies de femmes. Such, in all time, has been the habitual tone of self-indulgent men toward their victims. Gavarni well represents men in this sorry business of reviling women; for in all the old civilizations men in general have done precisely what Gavarni did recently in Paris—first degraded women, then laughed at them.
The reader, perhaps, after witnessing some of the French plays and comic operas with which we have been favored in recent years—such as "Frou-Frou," "The Sphinx," "Alixe," and others—may have turned in wild amazement to some friend familiar with Paris from long residence, and asked, Is there any truth in this picture? Are there any people in France who behave and live as these people on the stage behave and live? Many there can not be; for no community could exist half a generation if the majority lived so. But are there any? The correct answer to this question was probably given the other evening by a person accustomed to Paris life: "Yes, there are some; they are the people who write such stuff as this. As for the bal masqué, and things of that kind, it is a mere business, the simple object of which is to beguile and despoil the verdant of every land who go to Paris in quest of pleasure." French plays and novels we know do most ludicrously misrepresent the people of other countries. What, for example, can be less like truth than that solemn donkey of a Scotch duke in M. Octave Feuillet's play of "The Sphinx?" The dukes of Scotland are not so numerous nor so unconspicuous a body of men that they can not be known to a curious inquirer, and it is safe to assert that, whatever their faults may be, there is not among them a creature so unspeakably absurd as the viveur infernal of this play. If the author is so far astray with his Scotch duke, he is perhaps not so very much nearer the truth with his French marquis, a personage equally foreign to his experience.
We had in New York some years ago a dozen or two of young fellows, more or less connected with the press, most of them of foreign origin, who cherished the delusion that eating a bad supper in a cellar late at night, and uttering or singing semi-drunken nonsense, was an exceedingly noble, high-spirited, and literary way of consuming a weakly constitution and a small salary. They thought they were doing something in the manner of Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb. Any one who should have judged New York in the year 1855 by the writings of these young gentlemen would have supposed that we were wholly given up to silly, vulgar, and reckless dissipation. But, in truth, the "Bohemians," as they were proud to be styled, were both few and insignificant; their morning scribblings expressed nothing but the looseness of their own lives, and that was half pretense.
Two admiring friends have written the life of Gavarni, the incomparable caricaturist of la femme; and they tell us just how and where and when the artist acquired his "subtle and profound knowledge" of the sex. It is but too plain that he knew but one class of women, the class that lives by deluding fools. "During all one year, 1835," say these admiring biographers, "it seems that in the life, the days, the thoughts of Gavarni, there was nothing but la femme. According to his own expression, woman was his 'grand affair.'" He was in love, then? By no means. Our admiring authors proceed to describe this year of devotion to la femme as a period when "intrigues were mingled together, crossed and entangled with one another; when passing inclinations, the fancies of an evening, started into being together with new passions; when rendezvous pressed upon rendezvous; when there fell upon Gavarni a rain of perfumed notes from the loves of yesterday, from the forgotten loves of last month, which he inclosed in one envelope, as he said, 'like dead friends in the same coffin.'"[24]
The authors enlarge upon this congenial theme, describing their hero as going forth upon le pavé de Paris in quest of la femme as a keen hunter takes to the forest for the plump partridge or the bounding deer. Some he brought down with the resistless magnetism of his eye. "It was for him a veritable rapture, as well as the exertion of a power which he loved to try, to magnetize with his eye and make his own the first woman whom he chanced to meet in the throng." The substance of the chapter is that Gavarni, casting aside all the restraints of civilization and decency, lived in Paris the life of a low and dirty animal; and when, in consequence of so living, he found himself in Clichy for debt, he replenished his purse by delineating, as the fourberies de femmes, the tricks of the dissolute women who had got his money. That, at least, is the blunt American of our authors' dainty and elegant French.
Matrimony—A Man loaded with Mischief.[25]
"A monkey, a magpie, and wife
Is the true emblem of strife."
Old English Tavern Sign.
In the records of the past, we find men speaking lightly of women whose laws and usages concede least to women.
Settling the Odd Trick. (London, 1778.[26])
The oldest thing accessible to us in these modern cities is the Saturday-morning service in an unreformed Jewish synagogue, some of the observances of which date back beyond the historic period. But there is nothing in it older than the sentiment expressed by the men when they thank God for his goodness in not making them women. Only men are admitted to the synagogue as equal worshipers, the women being consigned to the gallery, spectators of their husbands' devotion. The old Jewish liturgy does not recognize their presence.
Older than the Jewish liturgy are the sacred books of the Hindoos. The famous passage of the "Padma Parana," translated by the Abbé Dubois,[27] has been part of the domestic code of the Hindoos for thousands of years. According to the Hindoo lawgiver, a woman has no god on earth but her husband, and no religion except to gratify, obey, and serve him. Let her husband be crooked, old, infirm, offensive; let him be irascible, irregular, a drunkard, a gambler, a debauchee; let him be reckless of his domestic affairs, as if possessed by a devil; though he live in the world without honor; though he be deaf or blind, and wholly weighed down by crime and infirmity—still shall his wife regard him as her god. With all her might shall she serve him, in all things obey him, see no defects in his character, and give him no cause of uneasiness. Nay, more: in every stage of her existence woman lives but to obey—at first her parents, next her husband and his parents, and in her old age she must be ruled by her children. Never during her whole life can she be under her own control.
These are the general principles upon which the life of women in India is to be conducted. The Hindoo writer was considerate enough to add a few particulars: "If her husband laughs, she ought to laugh; if he weeps, she ought to weep; if he is disposed to speak, she ought not to join in the conversation. Thus is the goodness of her nature displayed. What woman would eat till her husband has first had his fill? If he abstains, she will surely fast also; if he is sad, will she not be sorrowful? and if he is gay, will she not leap for joy? In the absence of her husband her raiment will be mean." Such has been the conception of woman's duty to man by all the half-developed races from time immemorial, and such to this day are the tacit demand and expectation of the brutalized males of the more advanced races. Gavarni, married, would have been content with no subservience much short of that.
Happily, nature has given to woman the means of a fell revenge, for she usually holds the peace of the household and the happiness of all its members in her hands. The satirical works that come to us from the Oriental lands teem with evidence that women have always known how to get a fair share of domestic authority. If they are slaves, they have ever been adepts in the arts and devices of slaves. The very squaws of our Indians often contrive to rule their brawny lords. Is not the whole history of the war between the sexes included in the little story of the manner in which Pocahontas was entrapped on board a British vessel lying in the James River two hundred and fifty years ago? The captain had promised to the aunt of this dusky princess the gift of a copper kettle if she would bring her niece to the ship; and accordingly one afternoon, when she found herself on the river-bank with her husband and Pocahontas, she was suddenly seized with a longing to go on board, saying that this was the third time the ship had been in their river, and yet she had never visited it. Her grumpy old husband refusing, she began to cry, and then, Pocahontas joining her entreaties, of course the old man had to unfasten his canoe and paddle them off to the vessel. This model couple returned to the shore poorer by a niece of uncertain character, and richer by the inestimable treasure of a copper kettle. What fine lady could have managed this delicate affair better? Is it not thus that tickets, trinkets, and dresses are won every day in the cities of the modern world?
"Who was that gentleman that just went out?"
"Why, didn't he see you, after all? He called on business, and has been waiting for you these two hours. He leaves town this evening. But how warm you are, dear!"—Gavarni, Fourberies de Femmes, Paris, 1846.
An attentive study of the Greek and Roman literatures furnishes many illustrations of the remark just made, that men who degrade women deride them. Among the Greeks, who kept women in subjection and seclusion, and gave them no freedom of choice in matters of dearest concern to them, the foibles of the sex were treated very much as they now are by the dissolute caricaturists of Paris. Aristophanes's mode of representing the women of Athens is eminently Gavarnian; and nothing was more natural than that an Aristophanes should come after an Anacreon. The lyric poet depicts women as objects of desire, superior in alluring charm even to wine, rosy wine; and Aristophanes delights to exhibit the women's apartment of an Athenian house as a riotous and sensualized harem. How many expressions of utter distrust and dislike of women occur in the Greek poets!
"For this, and only this, I'll trust a woman,
That if you take life from her she will die;
And, being dead, will come to life no more.
In all things else I am an infidel."
Thus Antiphanes, who died twenty-two hundred years before Gavarni was born. Menander justifies the gods for tormenting Prometheus, though his crime was only stealing a spark of fire.
"But, O ye gods, how infinite the mischief!
That little spark gave being to a woman,
And let in a new race of plagues to curse us."
The well-known epigram of Palladas upon marriage expresses a thought which has been uttered by satirists in every form of which language is capable:
"In marriage are two happy things allowed—
A wife in wedding garb and in her shroud.
Who, then, dares say that state can be accurst
Where the last day's as happy as the first?"
She. "Now, understand me. To-morrow morning he will ask you to dinner. If he has his umbrella with him, it will mean that he has not got his stall at the theatre. In that case, don't accept. If he has no umbrella, come to dinner."
He. "But (you know we must think of every thing) suppose it should rain to-morrow morning?"
She. "If it rains, he will get wet—that's all. If I don't want him to have an umbrella, he won't have one. How silly you are!"—Gavarni, Fourberies de Femmes, Paris, 1846.
Many others will occur to the reader who is familiar with the lighter utterances of the ancients. But in Greece, as in China, India, and Japan, and wherever else men and women have been joined in wedlock, there have been marriages in which husband and wife have lived on terms nobler than those contemplated by the law or demanded by usage. Where could we find a juster view of the duties of husband and wife than in that passage of Xenophon's dialogue on Economy where Ischomachus tells Socrates how he had taken his young wife into his confidence, and come to a clear understanding with her as to the share each should take in carrying on the household? Goethe must have had this passage in his mind when he wrote the fine tribute to the dignity of housekeeping in "Wilhelm Meister." Ischomachus had married a girl of fifteen, who came to him as wives in Greece usually came to their husbands—an absolute stranger to him. He had to get acquainted with her after marriage, as, indeed, he says, "When we were well enough acquainted, and were so familiar that we began to converse freely with one another, I asked her why she thought I had taken her for my wife." Much is revealed in that sentence. He tells her that, being married, they are now to have all things in common, and each should only strive to enhance the good of the household. She stares with wonder. Her mother had told her that her fortune would be wholly her husband's, and all that she had to do was to live virtuously and soberly. Ischomachus assents, but he proceeds to show her that, in the nature of things, husband and wife must be equal co-operators, he getting the money, she administering it; he fighting the battle of life out-of-doors, she within the house. At great length this model husband illustrates his point, and entirely in the spirit of the noble passage in Goethe. She catches the idea at length. "It will be of little avail," she says, "my keeping at home unless you send such provisions as are necessary." "True," he replies, "and of very little use my providing would be if there were no one at home to take care of what I send; it would be pouring water into a sieve."
This fine presentation of household economy, like that of the German poet, is, unhappily, only a dialogue of fiction. It was merely Xenophon's conception of the manner in which a philosopher of prodigious wisdom might deal with a girl of fifteen, whom he had married without having enjoyed the pleasure of a previous acquaintance with her. Doubtless there was here and there in ancient Greece a couple who succeeded in approximating Xenophon's ideal.
Among the Romans women began to acquire those legal "rights" to which they owe whatever advance they have ever made toward a just equality with men. It was Roman law that lifted a wife from the condition of a cherished slave to a status something higher than that of daughter. But there was still one fatal defect in her position—her husband could divorce her, but she could not divorce him. Cicero, the flower of Roman culture, put away the wife of his youth after living with her thirty years, and no remonstrance on her part would have availed against his decision. But a Roman wife had rights. She could not be deprived of her property, and the law threw round her and her children a system of safeguards which gave her a position and an influence not unlike those of the "lady of the house" at the present time. Instead of being secluded in a kind of harem, as among the Greeks, she came forward to receive her husband's guests, shared some of their festivities, governed the household, superintended the education of her children, and enjoyed her ample share of the honor which he inherited or won. "Where you are Caius, I am Caia," she modestly said, as she entered for the first time her husband's abode. He was paterfamilias, she materfamilias; and the rooms assigned to her peculiar use were, as with us, the best in the house.
To the Roman law women are infinitely indebted. Among the few hundreds of families who did actually share the civilization of Cicero, the Plinys, and Marcus Aurelius, the position of a Roman matron was one of high dignity and influence, and accordingly the general tone of the best Roman literature toward woman is such as does honor to both sexes. She was even instructed in that literature. In such a family as that of Cicero, the daughter would usually have the same tutors as the son, and the wife of such a man would familiarly use her husband's library. Juvenal, that peerless reviler of women, the Gavarni of poets, deplores the fact:
"But of all plagues the greatest is untold—
The book-learned wife in Greek and Latin bold;
The critic dame who at her table sits,
Homer and Virgil quotes, and weighs their wits,
And pities Dido's agonizing fits.
She has so far the ascendant of the board,
The prating pedant puts not in one word;
The man of law is nonplused in his suit;
Nay, every other female tongue is mute."
"Madame, your cousin Betty wishes to know if you can receive her."
"Impossible! Tell her that to-day I receive."—Les Tribulations de la Vie Élégante, par Girin, Paris, 1870.
The whole of this sixth satire of Juvenal, in which the Gavarnian literature of all nations was anticipated and exhausted, is a tribute to woman's social importance in Rome. No Greek would have considered woman worthy of so elaborate an effort. And as in Athens, Anacreon, the poet of sensual love, was naturally followed by Aristophanes, a satirist of women, so, in Rome, Ovid's "Art of Love" preceded and will forever explain Juvenal's sixth satire. All illustrates the truth that sensualized men necessarily undervalue and laugh at women. In all probability, Juvenal's satire was a caricature as gross and groundless as the pictures of Gavarni. The instinct of the satirist is first to select for treatment the exceptional instance of folly, and then to exaggerate that exceptional instance to the uttermost. Unhappily many readers are only too much inclined to accept this exaggerated exception as if it were a representative fact. There is a passage in Terence in which he expresses the feeling of most men who have been plagued, justly or unjustly, by a woman:
"Not one but has the sex so strong within her,
She differs nothing from the rest. Step-mothers
All hate their step-daughters, and every wife
Studies alike to contradict her husband,
The same perverseness running through them all."
The acute reader, on turning to the play of the "Mother-in-law," from which these lines are taken, will not be surprised to learn that the women in the comedy are in the right, and the men grossly in fault.
A Scene of Conjugal Life. (Daumier, Paris, 1846.)
The literature of the Middle Ages tells the same story. The popular tales of that period exhibit women as equally seductive and malevolent, silly, vain, not to be trusted, enchanting to the lover, a torment to the husband. Caricatures of women and their extravagances in costume and behavior occur in manuscripts as far back as A.D. 1150, and those extravagances may serve to console men of the present time by their enormity. Many specimens could be given, but they are generally too formless or extravagant to be interesting. There are also many rude pictures from those centuries which aimed to satirize the more active foibles of the sex. One of these exhibits a wife belaboring her husband with a broom, another pounding hers with a ladle, another with a more terrible instrument, her withering tongue, and another with the surest weapon in all the female armory—tears. In the Rouen Cathedral there are a pair of carvings, one representing a fierce struggle between husband and wife for the possession of a garment the wearing of which is supposed to be a sign of mastery, and the other exhibiting the victorious wife in the act of putting that garment on. On the portal of a church at Ploërmel, in France, there is a well-cut representation of a young girl leading an elderly man by the nose. More violent contests are frequently portrayed, and even fierce battles with bellows and pokers, stirring incidents in the "eternal war between man and woman."
The gentle German priest who wrote the moral ditties of the "Ship of Fools" ought not to have known much of the tribulations of husbands; but in his poem on the "Wrath and great Lewdnes of Wymen," he becomes a kind of frantic Caudle, and lays about him with remarkable vigor. He calls upon the "Kinge most glorious of heaven and erth" to deliver mankind from the venomous and cruel tongues of froward women. One chiding woman, he observes, "maketh greater yell than a hundred magpies in one cage;" and let her husband do what he will, he can not quiet her till "she hath chid her fill." No beast on earth is so capable of furious hate—not the bear, nor the wolf, nor the lion, nor the lioness; no, nor the cruel tigress robbed of her whelps, rushing wildly about, tearing and gnawing stock and tree.
"A wrathfull woman is yet more mad than she.
Cruell Medea doth us example shewe
Of woman's furour, great wrath and cruelty;
Which her owne children dyd all to pecis hewe."
This poet, usually so moderate and mild in his satire of human folly, is transported with rage in contemplating the faults of women, and holds them up to the abhorrence of his readers. A woman, he remarks, can wallow in wicked delights, and then, giving her mouth a hurried wipe, come forward with tranquil mind and an air of child-like innocence, sweetly protesting that she has done nothing wrong. The most virulent woman-hater that was ever jilted or rejected could not go beyond the bachelor priest who penned this infuriate diatribe upon the sex.
A Splendid Spread. (Cruikshank, 1850.)
Nor was Erasmus's estimate of women more favorable than Brandt's, though he expresses it more lightly and gayly, as his manner was. And curious it is to note that the foibles which he selects for animadversion are precisely those which form the staple of satire against women at the present time. In one of his Colloquies he describes the "Assembly of Women, or the Female Parliament," and reports at length the speech of one of the principal members, the wise Cornelia. This eloquent lady heartily berates the wives of tradesmen for presuming to copy the fashions of the rich and noble. Would any one believe that the following sentences were written nearly four hundred years ago?
"'Tis almost impossible by the outside," says Cornelia to her parliament of fine ladies, "to know a duchess from a kitchen-wench. All the ancient bounds of modesty have been so impudently transgressed, that every one wears what apparel seems best in her own eyes. At church and at the play-house, in city and country, you may see a thousand women of indifferent if not sordid extraction swaggering it abroad in silks and velvets, in damask and brocard, in gold and silver, in ermines and sable tippets, while their husbands perhaps are stitching Grub-street pamphlets or cobbling shoes at home. Their fingers are loaded with diamonds and rubies, for Turkey stones are nowadays despised even by chimney-sweepers' wives. It was thought enough for your ordinary women in the last age that they were allowed the mighty privilege to wear a silk girdle, and to set off the borders of their woolen petticoats with an edging of silk. But now—and I can hardly forbear weeping at the thoughts of it—this worshipful custom is quite out-of-doors. If your tallow-chandlers', vintners', and other tradesmen's wives flaunt it in a chariot and four, what shall your marchionesses or countesses do, I wonder? And if a country squire's spouse will have a train after her full fifteen ells long, pray what shift must a princess make to distinguish herself? What makes this ten times worse than otherwise it would be, we are never constant to one dress, but are as fickle and uncertain as weathercocks—or the men that preach under them. Formerly our head-tire was stretched out upon wires and mounted upon barbers' poles, women of condition thinking to distinguish themselves from the ordinary sort by this dress. Nay, to make the difference still more visible, they wore caps of ermine powdered. But they were mistaken in their politics, for the cits soon got them. Then they trumpt up another mode, and black quoiss came into play. But the ladies within Ludgate not only aped them in this fashion, but added thereto a gold embroidery and jewels. Formerly the court dames took a great deal of pains in combing up their hair from their foreheads and temples to make a tower; but they were soon weary of that, for it was not long before this fashion too was got into Cheapside. After this they let their hair fall loose about their foreheads; but the city gossips soon followed them in that."
And this game, we may add, has been kept up from that day to this; nor does either party yet show any inclination to retire from the contest.
Erasmus was, indeed, an unmerciful satirist of women. In his "Praise of Folly" he returns to the charge again and again. "That which made Plato doubt under what genus to rank woman, whether among brutes or rational creatures, was only meant to denote the extreme stupidness and folly of that sex, a sex so unalterably simple, that for any of them to thrust forward and reach at the name of wise is but to make themselves the more remarkable fools, such an endeavor being but a swimming against the stream, nay, the turning the course of nature, the bare attempting whereof is as extravagant as the effecting of it is impossible: for as it is a trite proverb, That an ape will be an ape, though clad in purple; so a woman will be a woman, i. e., a fool, whatever disguise she takes up." And again: "Good God! what frequent divorces, or worse mischief, would oft sadly happen, except man and wife were so discreet as to pass over light occasions of quarrel with laughing, jesting, dissembling, and such like playing the fool? Nay, how few matches would go forward, if the hasty lover did but first know how many little tricks of lust and wantonness (and perhaps more gross failings) his coy and seemingly bashful mistress had oft before been guilty of? And how fewer marriages, when consummated, would continue happy, if the husband were not either sottishly insensible of, or did not purposely wink at and pass over, the lightness and forwardness of his good-natured wife?"
American Lady walking in the Snow.
"I have often shivered at seeing a young beauty picking her way through the snow with a pale rose-colored bonnet set on the very top of her head. They never wear muffs or boots, even when they have to step to their sleighs over ice and snow. They walk in the middle of winter with their poor little toes pinched into a miniature slipper, incapable of excluding as much moisture as might bedew a primrose."—Mrs. Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, vol. ii., p. 135. 1830.
The ill opinion entertained of women by men during the ages of darkness and superstition found expression in laws as well as in literature. The age of chivalry! Investigators who have studied that vaunted period in the court records and law-books tell us that respect for women is a thing of which those records show no trace. In the age of chivalry the widow and the fatherless were regarded by lords, knights, and "parsons" as legitimate objects of plunder; and woe to the widow who prosecuted the murderers of her husband or the ravagers of her estate! The homage which the law paid to women consisted in burning them alive for offenses which brought upon men the painless death of hanging. We moderns read with puzzled incredulity such a story as that of Godiva, doubtful if so vast an outrage could ever have been committed in a community not entirely savage. Let the reader immerse himself for only a few months in the material of which the history of the Middle Ages must be composed, if it shall ever be truly written, and the tale of Godiva will seem credible and natural. She was her lord's chattel; and probably the people of her day who heard the story commended him for lightening the burdens of Coventry on such easy terms, and saw no great hardship in the task assigned to her.
People read with surprise of Thomas Jefferson's antipathy to the poems and novels of Sir Walter Scott. He objected to them because they gave a view of the past ages utterly at variance with the truth as revealed in the authentic records, which he had studied from his youth up.
"'My dear Baron, I am in the most pressing need of five hundred franc!' Must I put an s to franc?"
"No. In the circumstances it is better not. It will prove to the Baron that, for the moment, you really are destitute of every thing—even of orthography."—Ed. de Braumont, Paris, 1860.
"Madame, I have the honor—"
"Sir, be good enough to come round in front and speak to me."
"Madame, I really haven't the time. I must be off in five minutes."—Cham, Paris, 1850.
Coming down to recent times, we still find the current anecdote and proverb in all lands bearing hardly upon the sex. A few kindly and appreciative sayings pass current in Scotland; and the literatures of Germany, England, and the United States teem with the noblest and tenderest homage to the excellence of women. But most of these belong to the literature of this century, and bear the names of men who may be said to have created the moral feeling of the present moment. It is interesting to notice that in one of our latest and best dictionaries of quotation, that of Mr. M. M. Ballou, of Boston, there are one hundred and eleven short passages relating to women, of which only one is dishonorable to them, and that dates back a century and a half, to the halcyon day of the British libertine—"Every woman is at heart a rake.—Pope." So thought all the dissolute men of Pope's circle, as we know from their conversation and letters. So thought the Duc de Rochefoucauld, who said, "There are few virtuous women who are not weary of their profession;" and "Most virtuous women, like concealed treasures, are secure because nobody seeks after them." So thought Chesterfield, who told his hopeful son that he could never go wrong in flattering a woman, for women were foolish and frail without exception: "I never knew one in my life who had good sense, or who reasoned and acted consequentially for four-and-twenty hours together." And so must think every man who lived as men of fashion then lived. "If I dwelt in a hospital," said Dr. Franklin once, "I might come to think all mankind diseased."
"Where are the diamonds exhibited?"
"I haven't the least idea; but I let myself be guided by my wife. Women get at such things by instinct."—Cham, Paris, 1868.
But a man need not be a fine gentleman nor a roué to think ill of womankind. He needs only to be commonplace; and hence it is that the homely proverbs of all time bear so hardly upon women. The native land of the modern proverb is Spain, as we might guess from Sancho Panza's exhaustless repertory; and most of those homely disparaging sentences concerning women that pass current in all lands appear to have originated there. What Spain has left unsaid upon women's foibles, Italy has supplied. Most of the following proverbs are traceable to one of the two peninsulas of Southern Europe: "He that takes an eel by the tail or a woman by her word may say he holds nothing." "There is one bad wife in Spain, and every man thinks he has her." "He that loses his wife and a farthing hath great loss of his farthing." "If the mother had never been in the oven, she would not have looked for her daughter there." "He that marries a widow and three children marries four thieves." "He that tells his wife news is but newly married." "A dead wife's the best goods in a man's house." "A man of straw is worth a woman of gold." "A woman conceals what she knows not." "As great a pity to see a woman weep as to see a goose go barefoot." "A woman's mind and winter's wind change oft." "There is no mischief in the world done but a woman is always one." "Commend a wedded life, but keep thyself a bachelor." "Where there are women and geese, there wants no noise." "Neither women nor linen by candle-light." "Glasses and lasses are brittle ware." "Two daughters and a back-door are three thieves." "Women commend a modest man, but like him not." "Women in mischief are wiser than men." "Women laugh when they can and weep when they will." "Women, priests, and poultry never have enough."
Evening Scene in the Parlor of an American Boarding-house.
"Ladies who have no engagements (in the evening) either mount again to the solitude of their chamber, or remain in the common sitting-room, in a society cemented by no tie, endeared by no connection, which choice did not bring together, and which the slightest motive would break asunder. I remarked that the gentlemen were generally obliged to go out every evening on business; and, I confess, the arrangement did not surprise me."—Mrs. Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, vol. ii., p. 111. 1830.
Among the simple people of Iceland similar proverbs pass current: "Praise the fineness of the day when it is ended; praise a woman when she is buried; praise a maiden when she is married." "Trust not to the words of a girl; neither to those which a woman utters, for their hearts have been made like the wheel that turns round; levity was put into their bosoms."
Among the few broadsides of Elizabeth's reign preserved in the British Museum there is one which is conceived in perfect harmony with these proverbs. It presents eight scenes, in all of which women figure disadvantageously. There is a child-bed scene, in which the mother lies in state, most preposterously dressed and adorned, while a dozen other women are idling and gossiping about the room. Women are exhibited also at the market, at the bakehouse, at the ale-house, at the river washing clothes, at church, at the bath, at the public well; but always chattering, gossiping, idling, unless they are fighting or flirting. Another caricature in the same collection, dated 1620, the year of the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock, contains seven scenes illustrative of the lines following:
"Who marieth a Wife upon a Moneday,
If she will not be good upon a Twesday,
Lett him go to ye wood upon a Wensday,
And cutt him a cudgell upon the Thursday,
And pay her soundly upon a Fryday;
And she mend not, ye divil take her a Saterday,
That he may eat his meat in peace on the Sunday."
To complete the record of man's ridicule of the sex to which he owes his happiness, I add the pictures given in this chapter, which bring that record down to date. They tell their own story. The innocent fun of English Cruikshank and Leech contrasts agreeably with the subtle depravity indicated by some of the French caricaturists, particularly by Gavarni, who surpasses all men in the art of exaggerating the address of the class of women who regard men in the light of prey. The point of Gavarni's satire usually lies in the words printed underneath his pictures, and the pictures generally consist of the two figures who utter those words. But the expression which he contrives to impart to his figures and faces by a few apparently careless lines is truly wonderful, and it can scarcely be transferred to another surface. He excels in the expression of a figure with the face turned away, the whole effect being given by the outline of the head three-quarters averted. There is one picture of his, given on the following page, of a woman and her lover, he sitting in a chair reading with his hat on, indicating the extreme of familiarity, she standing at the window sewing, and keeping an eye on the pavement below. "He's coming!" she says; "take off your hat." In the attitude of the woman there is a mingled effect of tranquillity and vigilance that is truly remarkable. In all the range of caricature it would be difficult to find a better specimen of the art than this, or a worse. The reader may be curious to see a few more of these fourberies de femmes, as evolved from the brain of the dissolute Gavarni. It is almost impossible to transfer the work of his pencil, but here are a few of his verbal elucidations:
Under a picture of a father and daughter walking arm-in-arm: "How did you know, papa, that I loved M. Léon?" "Because you always spoke of M. Paul."
Two young ladies in confidential conversation: "When I think that M. Coquardeau is going to be my husband, I feel sorry for Alexander." "And I for Coquardeau."
"He's coming! Take off your hat!"—Gavarni, Paris, 1846.
Two married ladies in conversation: "Yes, my dear, my husband has been guilty of bringing that creature into my house before my very eyes, when he knows that the only man I love in the world is two hundred leagues from here."—"Men are contemptible" (lâches).
Husband writing a note, and his wife standing behind him:
"My dear Sir,—Caroline begs me to remind you of a certain duet, of which she is extravagantly fond, and which you promised to give her. Pray be so good as to dine with her to-day, and bring your music with you. For my part, I shall be deprived of the pleasure of hearing you, for I have an engagement at Versailles. Pity me, my dear sir, and believe me always your affectionate
Coquardeau."
A young man in wild excitement reading a letter:
"On receipt of this, mount, fly; overtake in the Avenue de Neuilly a yellow cab, the steps down, gray horse, old coachman, 108, one lantern lighted! Follow it. It will stop at the side door of a house at Sablonville. A man and a woman will get out. That man—he was my lover! And that woman—she is yours!"
The Scholastic Hen and her Chickens. (Cruikshank, 1846.)
Miss Thimblebee loquitur. "Turn your heads the other way, my dears, for here are two horridly handsome officers coming."
Lady fainting, and a man in consternation supporting her head: "Clara, Clara! dearest, look up! Don't! Clara, I say! You don't know any nice young man! I am an ass, with my stupid jealousy. And you shall have your velvet shawl. Come, Clara! Now then, Clara, please!"
Lady dropping two letters into the post-office. First letter:
"My kind Amédée,—This evening, toward eight, at the Red Ball. Mind, now, and don't keep waiting your
Clara."
Second letter:
"My Henry,—Well-beloved, judge of my despair—I have a sore throat that is simply frightful. It will be impossible for me to go out this evening. They even talk of applying twenty leeches. Pity a great deal, and love always, your
Clara."
In these numberless satires upon women, executed by pen and pencil, there is a certain portion of truth, for, indeed, a woman powerfully organized and fully developed, but without mental culture and devoid of the sentiment of duty, can be a creature most terrific. If the possession of wealth exempts her from labor, there are four ways in which she can appease the ennui of a barren mind and a torpid conscience. One is deep play, which was, until within seventy years, the resource chiefly relied upon by women of fashion for killing the hours between dinner and bed; one is social display, or the struggle for the leadership of a circle, an ambition perhaps more pernicious than gambling; another is intrigues of love, no longer permitted in the more advanced countries, but formerly an important element in fashionable life everywhere; finally, there is the resource of excessive and ceaseless devotion, the daily mass, the weekly confession, frequent and severe fasting, abject slavery to the ritual. Of all these, the one last named is probably the most injurious, since it tends to bring virtue itself into contempt, and repels the young from all serious and elevated modes of living. Accordingly, in studying the historic families of Europe, we frequently find that the devotee and the debauchee alternate, each producing the other, both being expressions of the same moral and mental defect. But whether a mindless woman gambles, dresses, flirts, or fasts, she is a being who furnishes the satirist with legitimate material.
Equal rights, equal education, equal chances of an independent career—when women have enjoyed these for so much as a single century in any country, the foibles at which men have laughed for so many ages will probably no longer be remarked, for they are either the follies of ignorance or the vices resulting from a previous condition of servitude. Nor will men of right feeling ever regard women with the cold, critical eye of a Chesterfield or a Rochefoucauld, but rather with something of the exalted sentiment which caused old Homer, whenever he had occasion to speak of a mother, to prefix an adjective usually applicable to goddesses and queens, which we can translate best, perhaps, by our English word REVERED.
Chinese Caricature of an English Foraging Party.[28]
We are apt to think of the Chinese as a grave people, unskilled in the lighter arts of satire and caricature; but, according to that amusing traveler, M. Huc, they are the French of Asia—"a nation of cooks, a nation of actors"—singularly fond of the drama, gifted in pasquinade, addicted to burlesque, prolific in comic ideas and satirical devices. M. Huc likens the Chinese Empire to an immense fair, where you find mingled with the bustle of traffic all kinds of shows, mountebanks, actors, Cheap Jacks, thieves, gamblers, all competing continually and with vociferous uproar for the favor of the crowd. "There are theatres everywhere; the great towns are full of them; and the actors play night and day." When the British officers went ashore, in the retinue of their first grand embassy, many years ago, they were astonished to see Punch in all his glory with Judy, dog, and devil, just as they had last seen him on Ascot Heath, except that he summoned his audience by gong and triangle instead of pipes and drum. The Orient knew Punch perhaps ages before England saw him. In China they have a Punch conducted by a single individual, who is enveloped from head to foot in a gown. He carries the little theatre on his head, works the wires with his hands under the gown, executes the dialogue with his mouth concealed by the same garment, and in the intervals of performance plays on two instruments. He exhibits the theatre reduced to its simplest form, the work of the company, the band, the manager, treasurer, scene-shifter, and property-man all being done by one person.
In the very nature of the Chinese, whether men or women, there is a large element of the histrionic, even those pompous and noisy funerals of theirs being little more than an exhibition of private theatricals. The whole company gossip, drink tea, jest, laugh, smoke, and have all the air of a pleasant social party, until the nearest relation of the deceased informs them that the time to mourn has come. Instantly the conversation ceases and lamentation begins. The company gather round the coffin; affecting speeches are addressed to the dead; groans, sobs, and doleful cries are heard on every side; tears, real tears, roll down many cheeks—all is woe and desolation. But when the signal is given to cease mourning, "the performers," says M. Huc, "do not even stop to finish a sob or a groan, but they take their pipes, and, lo! they are again those incomparable Chinese, laughing, gossiping, and drinking tea."
It need not be said that Chinese women have an ample share of this peculiar talent of their race, nor that they have very frequent occasion to exercise it. Nowhere, even in the East, are women more subject or more artful than in China. "When a son is born," as a Chinese authoress remarks, "he sleeps upon a bed, he is clothed with robes, and plays with pearls; every one obeys his princely cries. But when a girl is born, she sleeps upon the ground, is merely wrapped in a cloth, plays with a tile, and is incapable of acting either virtuously or viciously. She has nothing to think of but preparing food, making wine, and not vexing her parents." This arrangement the authoress approves, because it prepares the girl to accept without repining the humiliations of her lot. It is a proverb in China that a young wife should be in her house but "a shadow and an echo." As in India, she does not eat with her husband, but waits upon him in silent devotion till he is done, and then satisfies her own appetite with inferior food.
Such is the theory of her position. But if we may judge from Chinese satires, women are not destitute of power in the household, and employ the arts of the oppressed with effect. Among the Chinese poems recently translated by Mr. G. C. Stent in the volume called "The Jade Chaplet," there are a few in the satiric vein which attest the ready adroitness of Chinese women in moments of crisis. According to an English author, "A woman takes as naturally to a lie as a rat to a hole." The author of these popular Chinese poems was evidently of the same opinion. The specimen subjoined, which has not been previously published in the United States, shows us that there is much in common between the jokes of the two hemispheres of our mundane sphere.
"FANNING THE GRAVE.
"'Twas spring—the air was redolent
With many a sweet and grateful scent;
The peach and plum bloomed side by side,
Like blushing maid and pale-faced bride;
Coy willows stealthily were seen
Opening their eyes of living green—
As if to watch the sturdy strife
Of nature struggling into life.
"One sunny morn a Mr. Chuang
Was strolling leisurely along;
Viewing the budding flowers and trees—
Sniffing the fragrance-laden breeze—
Staring at those who hurried by,
Each loaded with a good supply
Of imitation sycee shoes,
To burn—for friends defunct to use—
Of dainty viands, oil, and rice,
And wine to pour in sacrifice,
On tombs of friends who 'neath them slept.
(Twas '3d of the 3d,' when the graves are swept.)
"Chuang sauntered on. At length, on looking round,
He spied a cozy-looking burial-ground;
'I'll turn in here and rest a bit,' thought he,
'And muse awhile on life's uncertainty;
This quiet place just suits my pensive mood,
I'll sit and moralize in pleasant solitude.'
So, sitting down upon a grassy knoll,
He sighed—when all at once upon him stole
A smothered sound of sorrow and distress,
As if one wept in very bitterness.
"Mr. Chuang, hearing this, at once got up to see,
Who the sorrowing mourner could possibly be,
When he saw a young woman fanning a grave.
Her 'three-inch gold lilies'[29] were bandaged up tight
In the deepest of mourning—her clothes, too, were white.[30]
Of all the strange things he had read of or heard,
This one was by far the most strange and absurd;
He had never heard tell of one fanning a grave.
"He stood looking on at this queer scene of woe,
Unobserved, but astounded, and curious to know
The reason the woman was fanning the grave.
He thought, in this case, the best thing he could do
Was to ask her himself; so without more ado,
He hemmed once or twice, then bowing his head,
Advanced to the woman and smilingly said,
'May I ask, madam, why you are fanning that grave?'
"The woman, on this, glancing up with surprise,
Looked as though she could scarcely believe her own eyes,
When she saw a man watching her fanning the grave.
He was handsome, and might have been thirty or more;
The garb of a Taoist he tastefully wore;
His kind manner soon put her quite at her ease,
So she answered demurely, 'Listen, sir, if you please,
And I'll tell you the reason I'm fanning this grave.
"'My husband, alas! whom I now (sob, sob) mourn,
A short time since (sob) to this grave (sob) was borne;
And (sob) he lies buried in this (sob, sob) grave.'
(Here she bitterly wept.) 'Ere my (sob) husband died,
He called me (sob) once more (sob, sob) to his side,
And grasping my—(sob) with his dying lips said,
"When I'm gone (sob, sob) promise (sob) never to wed,
Till the mold is (sob) dry on the top of my grave."
"'I come hither daily to (sob) and to weep,
For the promise I gave (sob) I'll faithfully keep,
I'll not wed till the mold is (sob) dry on his grave.
I don't want to marry again (sob), I'm sure,
But poverty (sob) is so hard to endure;
And, oh! I'm so lonely, that I come (sob) to try
If I can't with my fan help the mold (sob) to dry;
And that is the reason I'm fanning his grave.'
"Hearing this, Chuang exclaimed, 'Madam, give me the fan.
I'll willingly help you as much as I can
In drying the mold on your poor husband's grave.'
She readily handed the fan up to Chuang
(Who in magic was skilled—as he proved before long),
For he muttered some words in a low under-tone,
Flicked the fan, and the grave was as dry as a bone;
'There,' said he, 'the mold's dry on the top of the grave.'
"Joy plainly was seen on the poor woman's face,
As she hastily thanked him, ere quitting the place,
For helping her dry up the mold on the grave.
Chuang watched her go off with a cynical sigh,
Thought he, 'Now suppose I myself were to die,
How long would my wife in her weeds mourn my fate?
Would she, like this woman, have patience to wait
Till the mold was well dry on her poor husband's grave?'"
There is an amusing sequel to this poem, in which Chuang is exhibited putting his wife to the test. Being a magician, endowed with miraculous power, he pretends to die; and while his body is in its coffin awaiting burial, he assumes the form of a handsome young man, and pays to his mourning wife ardent court.
"In short, they made love, and the next day were wed;
She cheerfully changing her white clothes to red.[31]
Excited by drink, they were going to bed,
When Chuang clapped his hand to his brow—
He groaned. She exclaimed, 'What! are you dying too?
One husband I've lost, and got married to you;
Now you are took bad. Oh, what shall I do?
Can I help you? If so, tell me how.'
"'Alas!' groaned the husband, 'I'm sadly afraid
The disease that I have is beyond human aid.
Oh! the sums upon sums I the doctors have paid!
There a remedy is, to be sure:
It is this: take the brains from a living man's head—
If not to be had, get, and mash up instead
Those of one who no more than three days has been dead.
'Twill effect an infallible cure!'"
The distracted widow did not hesitate. There was the coffin of her lamented husband before her, and he had not yet been dead three days:
"She grasped the chopper savagely, her brows she firmly knit,
And battered at the coffin until the lid was split.
But, oh! what mortal pen could paint her horror and her dread?
A voice within exclaimed, 'Hollo!' and Chuang popped up his head!
"'Hollo!' again repeated he, as he sat bolt-upright:
'What made you smash my coffin in?—I see, besides, you're tight!
You've dressed yourself in red, too! What means this mummery?
Let me have the full particulars, and don't try on flummery.'
"She had all her wits about her, though she quaked a bit with fear.
Said she (the artful wretch!), 'It seems miraculous, my dear!
Some unseen power impelled me to break the coffin-lid,
To see if you were still alive—which, of course, you know I did!
"'I felt sure you must be living; so, to welcome you once more,
My mourning robes I tore off, and my wedding garments wore;
But, were you dead, to guard against all noxious fumes, I quaffed,
As a measure of precaution, a disinfecting draught!'
"Said Chuang, 'Your tale is plausible, but I think you'd better stop;
Don't fatigue yourself by telling lies; just let the matter drop.
To test your faithfulness to me, I've been merely shamming dead,
I'm the youth you just now married—my widow I've just wed!'"
Appended to these two poems, there is the regulation moral, in which married ladies are warned not to be too sure of their constancy, nor judge severely the poor widows who make haste to console themselves.
"Do your best, but avoid supercilious pride,
For you never can tell what you'll do till you're tried."
We can not say much for the translation of these comic works. Mr. Stent is a high authority in the Chinese language and literature, but is not at home in English prosody. It is plain, however, from his translations, rough as they may be, that there is a comic vein in the Chinese character which finds expression in Chinese literature.
A Deaf Mandarin. (From a Figure in the British Museum.)[32]
Caricature, as we might suppose, is a universal practice among them; but, owing to their crude and primitive taste in such things, their efforts are seldom interesting to any but themselves. In Chinese collections, we see numberless grotesque exaggerations of the human form and face, some of which are not devoid of humor and artistic merit; but the specimens given on this and the next page suffice for the present purpose.
The Chinese, it appears, are fond of exhibiting their English visitors in a ridiculous light. The caricature of an English foraging party, given in the first part of this chapter, was brought home thirty years ago by a printer attached to an American mission in China. Recently a new illustration of this propensity has gone abroad. In 1874 an account appeared in the English papers of the audience granted to the foreign ministers by the Emperor of China, in which Mr. Wade, the English embassador, was represented as having been overwhelmed with awe and alarm in the presence of the august potentate, the Son of Heaven. The origin of the paragraph was explained by the Athenœum:
"The account was absurd in the extreme, and was universally recognized as a squib, except by a writer in the columns of a weekly contemporary, who gravely undertook the task of showing, by reference to the whole of his previous career, how very unlikely it was that Mr. Wade should give way to the weakness imputed to him. It now turns out that the imaginary narrative first appeared in the columns of Puck, a comic paper (in English), published at Shanghai; that it was translated into Chinese by some native wag, who palmed it off on his countrymen as a truthful account of the behavior of the English barbarian on this occasion; and that some inquiring foreigner, ignorant of the source from whence it came, retranslated it into English, and held it up as another instance of the way in which the Chinese pamphleteers were attempting to undermine our influence in China by covering our minister with contempt!"
After Dinner. A Chinese Caricature. (From a Figure in the British Museum.)[33]
The burlesque which thus imposed upon a London editor was a creditable specimen of Puck's comic talent: "His majesty having ascended the throne, the envoys were led to the space at its foot, when they performed the ceremony of inclining the body. They did not kneel. By the side of the steps there was placed a yellow table, and the envoys stood in rank to read out their credentials, the British having the leading place. When he had read a few sentences, he began to tremble from head to foot, and was incapable of completing the perusal. The emperor asked, 'Is the prince of your country well?' But he could utter no reply. The emperor again asked, 'You have besought permission to see me time and time again. What is it you have to say?' But again he was unable to make an answer. The next proceeding was to hand in the credentials; but, in doing this, he fell down on the ground time after time, and not a syllable could he articulate. Upon this Prince Kung laughed loud at him before the entire court, exclaimed 'Chicken-feather!' and gave orders to have him assisted down the steps. He was unable to move of his own accord, and sat down on the floor, perspiring and panting for breath. The whole twelve shook their heads and whispered together no one knows what. When the time came for the assembly at the banquet, they still remained incapable, and dispersed in hurried confusion. Prince Kung said to them, 'You would not believe that it is no light matter to come face to face with his majesty; but what have you got to say about it to-day?'"
The bright, good-tempered people of Japan are familiar with humor in many forms, and know how to sport with pencil as well as with pen. Their very sermons are not devoid of the jocular. When a preacher has pointed his moral by a comical tale, he will turn to the audience in the most familiar, confidential manner, and say, "Now, isn't that a funny story?" or, "Wasn't that delightful?" Sometimes he will half apologize for the introduction of mirth-moving anecdotes: "Now, my sermons are not written for the learned. I address myself to farmers and tradesmen, who, hard pressed by their daily business, have no time for study.... Now, positively you must not laugh if I introduce a light story now and then. Levity is not my object; I only want to put things in a plain and easy manner."[34] Nothing yet brought from that country is more interesting to us than the specimens given in Mr. Mitford's book of the short, homely, humorous, sound Japanese sermons. The existence of this work is another proof of the wisdom of giving consular and diplomatic appointments to men who know how to use their eyes, their hands, and their minds. The sumptuous work upon Japan by M. Aimé Humbert could scarcely have been produced if the author had not been at the head of a powerful embassy.
The Japanese are a gentler and kindlier people than the Chinese; women occupy a better position among them; and hence the allusions to the sex in their literature are less contemptuous and satirical. The preacher whose sermons Mr. Mitford selects for translation is what we should term an eclectic—one who owns fealty to none of the great religions of the East, but gleans lessons of truth and wisdom from them all. Imagine him clad in gorgeous robes of red and white, attended by an acolyte, entering a chapel—a spacious, pleasant apartment which opens into a garden—bowing to the sacred picture over the altar, and taking a seat at a table. Some prayers are intoned, incense is burned, offerings are received, a passage from a sacred book is read, a cup of tea is quaffed, and then the preacher rises and begins his chatty, humorous, anecdotical discourse. Whenever he makes a point, the audience utters a responsive "Nimmiyô," varying the sound so as to accord with the sentiment expressed by the speaker. Indeed, it would be difficult to name one rite, or observance, or custom, or eccentricity of religion practiced among us here in the United States, the counterpart of which has not been familiar to the Japanese from time immemorial. They have sacred books, a peculiar cross, liturgies, temples, acolytes, nunneries, monasteries, holy water, incense, prayers, sermons, collections, the poor-box, responses, priestly robes, the bell, a series of ceremonies strongly resembling the mass, followed by a sermon, sacred pictures, anointing, shaven crowns, sects, orders, and systems of theology.
Their sermons abound in parables and similes. The preacher just mentioned illustrates his points with amusing ingenuity. For example, in a sermon on the folly of putting excessive trust in wealth, strength, or any other advantage merely external or transitory, he relates a parable of a shell-fish—the sazayé—noted for the extreme hardness of its shell. One day, just after a large sazayé had been vaunting his perfect security against the dangers to which other fish were exposed, there came a great splash in the water. "Mr. Sazayé," continued the preacher, "shut his lid as quickly as possible, kept quite still, and thought to himself what in the world the noise could be. Could it be a net? Could it be a fish-hook? Were the tai and the other fish caught? he wondered; and he felt quite anxious about them. However, at any rate, he was safe. And so the time passed; and when he thought all was over, he stealthily opened his shell, and slipped out his head and looked all round him, and there seemed to be something wrong—something with which he was not familiar. As he looked a little more carefully, lo and behold! there he was in a fish-monger's shop, and with a card, marked 'Sixteen Cash,' on his back.
"Isn't that a funny story?" cries the jovial preacher, smiling complacently upon the congregation. "Poor shell-fish! I think there are people not unlike him to be found in China and India." This is a favorite joke with the preacher. He frequently closes a satirical passage by a similar remark. "I don't mean to say that there are any such persons here. Oh no. Still, there are plenty of them to be found—say, for instance, in the back streets of India."
The tone of this merry instructor in righteousness when he is speaking of women is that of a tender father toward children. He assumes that "women and children" can not understand any thing profound and philosophical. Righteousness he defines as "the fitting," the ought-to-be; and he considers it "fitting" that women should be the assiduous, respectful, and ever-obedient servants of men. A parable illustrates his meaning. A great preacher of old was once the guest of a rich man of low rank, who was "particularly fond of sermons," and had a lovely daughter of fifteen, who waited upon the preacher at dinner, and entertained him afterward upon the harp. "Really," said the learned preacher, "it must be a very difficult thing to educate a young lady up to such a pitch as this." The flattered parents, could not refrain from boasting of their daughter's accomplishments—her drawing, painting, singing, and flower-plaiting. The wily preacher, Socrates-like, rejoined: "This is something quite out of the common run. Of course she knows how to rub the shoulders and loins, and has learned the art of shampooing?" This remark offends the fond father. "I have not fallen so low as to let my daughter learn shampooing!" The preacher blandly advises him not to put himself in a passion, and proceeds to descant upon the Whole Duty of Woman, as understood in Japan. "She must look upon her husband's parents as her own. If her honored father-in-law or mother-in-law fall ill, her being able to plait flowers and paint pictures and make tea will be of no use in the sick-room. To shampoo her parents-in-law, and nurse them affectionately, without employing a shampooer or servant-maid, is the right path of a daughter-in-law." Upon hearing these words, the father sees his error, and blushes with shame; whereupon the preacher admits that music and painting are not bad in themselves, only they must not be pursued to the exclusion of things more important, of which shampooing is one.
He draws a sad picture of a wife who has learned nothing but the graceful arts. Before the bottom of the family kettle is scorched black the husband will be sick of his bargain—a wife all untidy about the head, her apron fastened round her as a girdle, a baby twisted somehow into the bosom of her dress, and nothing in the house to eat but some wretched bean-soup, and that bought at a store. "What a ten-million-times miserable thing it is when parents, making their little girls hug a great guitar, listen with pleasure to the poor little things playing on instruments big enough for them to climb upon, and squeaking out songs in their shrill treble voices!" Such girls, if not closely watched, will be prematurely falling in love and running away to be married.
These sermons are so curiously different from any thing which we are accustomed to think of as sermons that I am tempted to extract the conclusion of one of them. The text is a passage from "Môshi," which touches upon the folly of men in being more ashamed of a bodily defect than of a moral fault. Mark how the merry Japanese preacher "improves" the subject:
"What mistaken and bewildered creatures men are! What says the old song? 'Hidden far among the mountains, the tree which seems to be rotten, if its core be yet alive, may be made to bear flowers.' What signifies it if the hand or the foot be deformed? The heart is the important thing. If the heart be awry, what though your skin be fair, your nose aquiline, your hair beautiful? All these strike the eye alone, and are utterly useless. It is as if you were to put horse-dung into a gold-lacquer luncheon-box. This is what is called a fair outside, deceptive appearance.
"There's the scullery-maid been washing out the pots at the kitchen-sink, and the scullion, Chokichi, comes up and says to her, 'You've got a lot of charcoal smut sticking to your nose,' and points out to her the ugly spot. The scullery-maid is delighted to be told of this, and answers, 'Really! whereabouts is it?" Then she twists a towel round her finger, and, bending her head till mouth, and forehead are almost on a level, she squints at her nose, and twiddles away with her fingers as if she were the famous Gotô at work carving the ornaments of a sword-handle. 'I say, Master Chokichi, is it off yet?' 'Not a bit of it. You've smeared it all over your cheeks now.' 'Oh dear! oh dear! where can it be?' And so she uses the water-basin as a looking-glass, and washes her face clean; then she says to herself, 'What a dear boy Chokichi is!' and thinks it necessary, out of gratitude, to give him relishes with his supper by the ladleful, and thanks him over and over again. But if this same Chokichi were to come up to her and say, 'Now, really, how lazy you are! I wish you could manage to be rather less of a shrew,' what do you think the scullery-maid would answer then? Reflect for a moment. 'Drat the boy's impudence! If I were of a bad heart or an angular disposition, should I be here helping him? You go and be hanged! You see if I take the trouble to wash your dirty bedclothes for you any more.' And she gets to be a perfect devil, less only the horns.
"There are other people besides the poor scullery-maid who are in the same way. 'Excuse me, Mr. Gundabei, but the embroidered crest on your dress of ceremony seems to be a little on one side.' Mr. Gundabei proceeds to adjust his dress with great precision. 'Thank you, sir. I am ten million times obliged to you for your care. If ever there should be any matter in which I can be of service to you, I beg that you will do me the favor of letting me know;' and, with a beaming face, he expresses his gratitude. Now for the other side of the picture: 'Really, Mr. Gundabei, you are very foolish; you don't seem to understand at all. I beg you to be of a frank and honest heart: it really makes me quite sad to see a man's heart warped in this way.' What is his answer? He turns his sword in his girdle ready to draw, and plays the devil's tattoo upon the hilt. It looks as if it must end in a fight soon.
"In fact, if you help a man in any thing which has to do with a fault of the body, he takes it very kindly, and sets about mending matters. If any one helps another to rectify a fault of the heart, he has to deal with a man in the dark, who flies in a rage, and does not care to amend. How out of tune all this is! And yet there are men who are bewildered up to this point. Nor is this a special and extraordinary failing. This mistaken perception of the great and the small, of color and of substance, is common to us all—to you and to me.
"Please give me your attention. The form strikes the eye; but the heart strikes not the eye. Therefore, that the heart should be distorted and turned awry causes no pain. This all results from the want of sound judgment; and that is why we can not afford to be careless.
"The master of a certain house calls his servant Chokichi, who sits dozing in the kitchen. 'Here, Chokichi! The guests are all gone. Come and clear away the wine and fish in the back room.'
"Chokichi rubs his eyes, and, with a sulky answer, goes into the back room, and, looking about him, sees all the nice things paraded on the trays and in the bowls. It's wonderful how his drowsiness passes away: no need for any one to hurry him now. His eyes glare with greed, as he says, 'Halloo! here's a lot of tempting things! There's only just one help of that omelet left in the tray. What a hungry lot of guests! What's this? It looks like fish rissoles;' and with this he picks out one, and crams his mouth full, when, on one side, a mess of young cuttle-fish, in a Chinese porcelain bowl, catches his eyes. There the little beauties sit in a circle, like Buddhist priests in religious meditation! 'Oh, goodness! how nice!' and just as he is dipping his finger and thumb in, he hears his master's footstep, and, knowing that he is doing wrong, he crams his prize into the pocket of his sleeve, and stoops down to take away the wine-kettle and cups; and as he does this, out tumbles the cuttle-fish from his sleeve. The master sees it.
"'What's that?'
"Chokichi, pretending not to know what has happened, beats the mats, and keeps on saying, 'Come again the day before yesterday; come again the day before yesterday.' [An incantation used to invite spiders, which are considered unlucky by the superstitious, to come again at the Greek Kalends.]
"But it's no use his trying to persuade his master that the little cuttle-fish are spiders, for they are not the least like them. It's no use hiding things—they are sure to come to light; and so it is with the heart—its purposes will out. If the heart is enraged, the dark veins stand out on the forehead; if the heart is grieved, tears rise to the eyes; if the heart is joyous, dimples appear in the cheeks; if the heart is merry, the face smiles. Thus it is that the face reflects the emotions of the heart. It is not because the eyes are filled with tears that the heart is sad, nor that the veins stand out on the forehead that the heart is enraged. It is the heart which leads the way in every thing. All the important sensations of the heart are apparent in the outward appearance. In the 'Great Learning' of Kôshi it is written, 'The truth of what is within appears upon the surface.' How, then, is the heart a thing which can be hidden? To answer when reproved, to hum tunes when scolded, show a diseased heart; and if this disease be not quickly taken in hand, it will become chronic, and the remedy become difficult. Perhaps the disease may be so virulent that even Giba and Henjaku [two famous Indian physicians] in consultation could not effect a cure. So, before the disease has gained strength, I invite you to the study of the moral essays entitled 'Shingaku' [the "Learning of the Heart"]. If you once arrive at the possession of your heart as it was originally by nature, what an admirable thing that will be! In that case your conscience will point out to you even the slightest wrong bias or selfishness.
"While upon this subject, I may tell you a story which was related to me by a friend of mine. It is a story which the master of a certain money-changer's shop used to be very fond of telling. An important part of a money-changer's business is to distinguish between good and bad gold and silver. In the different establishments, the ways of teaching the apprentices this art vary; however, the plan adopted by the money-changer was as follows: at first he would show them no bad silver, but would daily put before them good money only; when they had become thoroughly familiar with the sight of good money, if he stealthily put a little base coin among the good, he found that they would detect it immediately. They saw it as plainly as you see things when you throw light on a mirror. This faculty of detecting base money at a glance was the result of having learned thoroughly to understand good money. Having been taught once in this way, the apprentices would not make a mistake about a piece of base coin during their whole lives, as I have heard. I can't vouch for the truth of this; but it is very certain that the principle, applied to moral instruction, is an excellent one—it is a most safe mode of study. However, I was further told that if, after having thus learned to distinguish good money, a man followed some other trade for six months or a year, and gave up handling money, he would become just like any other inexperienced person, unable to distinguish the good from the base.
"Please reflect upon this attentively. If you once render yourself familiar with the nature of the uncorrupted heart, from that time forth you will be immediately conscious of the slightest inclination toward bias or selfishness. And why? Because the natural heart is illumined. When a man has once learned that which is perfect, he will never consent to accept that which is imperfect; but if, after having acquired this knowledge, he again keeps his natural heart at a distance, and gradually forgets to recognize that which is perfect, he finds himself in the dark again, and that he can no longer distinguish base money from good. I beg you to take care. If a man falls into bad habits, he is no longer able to perceive the difference between the good impulses of his natural heart and the evil impulses of his corrupt heart. With this benighted heart as a starting-point, he can carry out none of his intentions, and he has to lift his shoulders, sighing and sighing again. A creature much to be pitied indeed! Then he loses all self-reliance, so that, although it would be better for him to hold his tongue and say nothing about it, if he is in the slightest trouble or distress he goes and confesses the crookedness of his heart to every man he meets. What a wretched state for a man to be in! For this reason, I beg you to learn thoroughly the true silver of the heart, in order that you may make no mistake about the base coin. I pray that you and I, during our whole lives, may never leave the path of true principles.
"I have an amusing story to tell you in connection with this, if you will be so good as to listen.
"Once upon a time, when the autumn nights were beginning to grow chilly, five or six tradesmen in easy circumstances had assembled together to have a chat; and, having got ready their picnic-box and wine-flask, went off to a temple on the hills, where a friendly priest lived, that they might listen to the stags roaring. With this intention they went to call upon the priest, and borrowed the guests' apartments [all the temples in China and Japan have guests' apartments, which may be secured for a trifle, either for a long or short period. It is false to suppose that there is any desecration of a sacred shrine in the act of using it as a hostelry: it is the custom of the country] of the monastery; and as they were waiting to hear the deer roar, some of the party began to compose poetry. One would write a verse of Chinese poetry, and another would write a verse of seventeen syllables; and as they were passing the wine-cup the hour of sunset came, but not a deer had uttered a call; eight o'clock came, and ten o'clock came; still not a sound from the deer.
"'What can this mean?' said one. 'The deer surely ought to be roaring.'
"But, in spite of their waiting, the deer would not roar. At last the friends got sleepy, and, bored with writing songs and verses, began to yawn, and gave up twaddling about the woes and troubles of life; and as they were all silent, one of them, a man fifty years of age, stopping the circulation of the wine-cup, said:
"'Well, certainly, gentlemen, thanks to you, we have spent the evening in very pleasant conversation. However, although I am enjoying myself mightily in this way, my people at home must be getting anxious, and so I begin to think that we ought to leave off drinking.'
"'Why so?' said the others.
"'Well, I'll tell you. You know that my only son is twenty-two years of age this year; and a troublesome fellow he is, too. When I'm at home, he lends a hand sulkily enough in the shop; but as soon as he no longer sees the shadow of me, he hoists sail, and is off to some bad haunt. Although our relations and connections are always preaching to him, not a word has any more effect than wind blowing into a horse's ear. When I think that I shall have to leave my property to such a fellow as that, it makes my heart grow small indeed. Although, thanks to those to whom I have succeeded, I want for nothing; still, when I think of my son, I shed tears of blood night and day.'
"And as he said this with a sigh, a man of some forty-five or forty-six years said:
"'No, no. Although you make so much of your misfortunes, your son is but a little extravagant, after all. There's no such great cause for grief there. I've got a very different story to tell. Of late years my shop-men, for one reason or another, have been running me into debt, thinking nothing of a debt of fifty or seventy ounces; and so the ledgers get all wrong. Just think of that! Here have I been keeping these fellows ever since they were little children unable to blow their own noses, and now, as soon as they come to be a little useful in the shop, they begin running up debts, and are no good whatever to their master. You see, you only have to spend your money upon your own son.'
"Then another gentleman said:
"'Well, I think that to spend money upon your shop-people is no such great hardship, after all. Now, I've been in something like trouble lately. I can't get a penny out of my customers. One man owes me fifteen ounces; another owes me twenty-five ounces. Really that is enough to make a man feel as if his heart were worn away.'
"When he had finished speaking, an old gentleman, who was sitting opposite, playing with his fan, said:
"'Certainly, gentlemen, your grievances are not without cause; still, to be perpetually asked for a little money, or to back a bill, by one's relations or friends, and to have a lot of hangers-on dependent on one, as I have, is a worse case still.'
"But before the old gentleman had half finished speaking, his neighbor called out:
"'No, no; all you gentlemen are in luxury compared to me. Please listen to what I have to suffer. My wife and my mother can't hit it off anyhow. All day long they're like a couple of cows butting at one another with their horns. The house is as unendurable as if it were full of smoke. I often think it would be better to send my wife back to her village; but, then, I've got two little children. If I interfere and take my wife's part, my mother gets low-spirited. If I scold my wife, she says that I treat her so brutally because she's not of the same flesh and blood; and then she hates me. The trouble and anxiety are beyond description: I'm like a post stuck up between them.'
"And so they all twaddled away in chorus, each about his own troubles. At last one of the gentlemen, recollecting himself, said:
"'Well, gentlemen, certainly the deer ought to be roaring; but we've been so engrossed with our conversation that we don't know whether we have missed hearing them or not.'
"With this he pulled aside the sliding-door of the veranda and looked out, and, lo and behold! a great big stag was standing perfectly silent in front of the garden.
"'Halloo!' said the man to the deer, 'what's this? Since you've been there all the time, why did you not roar?'
"Then the stag answered, with an innocent face,
"'Oh, I came here to listen to the lamentations of you gentlemen.'
"Isn't that a funny story?
"Old and young, men and women, rich and poor, never cease grumbling from morning till night. All this is the result of a diseased heart. In short, for the sake of a very trifling inclination or selfish pursuit, they will do any wrong in order to effect that which is impossible. This is want of judgment, and this brings all sorts of trouble upon the world. If once you gain possession of a perfect heart, knowing that which is impossible to be impossible, and recognizing that that which is difficult is difficult, you will not attempt to spare yourself trouble unduly. What says the 'Chin-Yo?' The wise man, whether his lot be cast among rich or poor, among barbarians or in sorrow, understands his position by his own instinct. If men do not understand this, they think that the causes of pain and pleasure are in the body. Putting the heart on one side, they earnestly strive after the comforts of the body, and launch into extravagance, the end of which is miserly parsimony. Instead of pleasure, they meet with grief of the heart, and pass their lives in weeping and wailing. In one way or another, everything in this world depends upon the heart. I implore every one of you to take heed that tears fall not to your lot."
The Rat Rice Merchants. (A Japanese Caricature, from "Japan and the Japanese," by Aimé Humbert.)
A people capable of producing and enjoying sermons like these, so free from the solemn and the sanctimonious, would be likely to wield the humorous pencil also. Turning to the illustrated work of M. Aimé Humbert, we find that the foibles of human nature are satirized by the Japanese draughtsmen in caricatures, of which M. Humbert gives several specimens. These, however, are not executed with the clearness and precision which alone could render them effective in our eyes; and a very large proportion of them employ that most ancient and well-worn device of investing animals with the faculties of human beings. The best is one representing rats performing all the labors of a rice warehouse. Rats, as M. Humbert remarks, are in Japan the most dreaded and determined thieves of the precious rice. The picture contains every feature of the scene—the cashier making his calculations with his bead calculator; the salesman turning over his books in order to show his customers how impossible it is for him to abate a single cash in the price; the shop-men carrying the bales; coolies bearing the straw bags of money at the end of bamboos; porters tugging away at a sack just added to the stock; and a new customer saluting the merchant. The Japanese do not confine themselves to this kind of burlesque. They take pleasure in representing a physician examining with exaggerated gravity a patient's tongue, or peering into ailing eyes through enormous spectacles, while he lifts with extreme caution the corner of the eyelid. A quack shampooing a victim is another of their subjects. One picture represents a band of blind shampooers on their travels, who, in the midst of a ford, are disputing what direction they shall take when they reach the opposite bank. Begging friars, mishaps of fishermen, blind men leading the blind, jealous women, household dissensions, women excessively dressed, furnish opportunities for the satirical pencil of the Japanese artists, who also publish series of comic pictures, as we do, upon such subjects as "Little Troubles in the Great World," "The Fat Man's Household," "The Thin Man's Household." If these efforts of the Japanese caricaturists do not often possess much power to amuse the outside world, they have one qualification that entitles them to respect—most of them are good-tempered.
It is inevitable that bad rulers should dread the satiric pencil. Caricature, powerless against an administration that is honest and competent, powerless against a public man who does his duty in his place, is nevertheless a most effective device against arrogance, double-dealing, corruption, cowardice, and iniquity. England, as the French themselves admit, is the native home of political caricature; but not an instance can be named in all its history of caricature injuring a good man or defeating a good measure. A free pencil, too, becomes ever a gayer and a kinder pencil. The measure of freedom which France has occasionally enjoyed during the last ninety years has never lasted long enough to wear off the keen point of the satirist's ridicule; and collectors can tell, by the number and severity of the pictures in a port-folio, just how much freedom Frenchmen possessed when they were produced. It is curious, also, to note that caricatures on the wrong side of great public questions are never excellent. It is doubtful if a bad man with the wealth of an empire at his command could procure the execution of one first-rate caricature hostile to the public good. A despot can never fight this fire with fire, and has no resource but to stamp it out.
Vainly, therefore, will the most vigilant collector search for French caricatures of Napoleon Bonaparte published during his reign. His government was a despotism not tempered by epigrams, and it was controlled by a despot who, though not devoid of a sense of humor, had all a Corsican's mortal hatred of ridicule. No man in France was less French than Napoleon, either in lineage or in character. His moral position in Paris was not unlike that which Othello might have held in Venice, if Othello had been base enough to betray and expel the senate which he had sworn to serve. We can imagine how the shy, proud Moor would have writhed under the pasquinades of the graceful, dissolute Venetian wits whom he despised. So Napoleon, who never ceased to have much in him of the semi-barbarian chief (and always looked like one when he was dressed in imperial robes), shrunk with morbid apprehension from the tongue of Madame De Staël, and wrote autograph notes to Fouché calling his attention to the placards and verses of the street-corners. There is something more than ludicrous in the spectacle of this rude soldier, with a million armed men under his command, and half Europe at his feet, sitting down in rage and affright to order Fouché to send a little woman over the frontiers lest she should say something about him for the drawing-rooms of Paris to laugh at.
Talleyrand—the Man with Six Heads. (Paris, 1817.)
In place of caricature, therefore, we have only allegorical "glory" in the fugitive pictures of his reign, few of which are worthy of remembrance.
English Gillray, on the other side of the Channel, made most ample amends. Modern caricature has not often equaled some of the best of Gillray's upon Napoleon. In 1806, when the conqueror had finally lost his head, dazzled and bewildered by his own victories, and was setting up new kingdoms with a facility which began to be amusing, Gillray produced his masterpiece of the "Great French Gingerbread Baker drawing out a New Batch of Kings." It is full of happy detail. Besides the central figure of Bonaparte himself drawing from the "New French Oven" a fresh batch of monarchs, we see Bishop Talleyrand kneading in the "Political Kneading-trough," into which Poland, Hanover, and Prussia have just been thrown. There is also the "Ash-hole for Broken Gingerbread," into which Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and broad-backed Holland have been swept. On a chest of drawers stand a number of "Dough Viceroys intended for the Next Batch," and the drawers are labeled "Kings and Queens," "Crowns and Sceptres," "Suns and Moons." Gillray burlesqued almost all the history of the gingerbread colossus from the Egyptian expedition onward, but he never surpassed the gayety and aptness of this picture, which was all the more effective in English eyes because gilt gingerbread made into figures of kings, queens, crowns, anchors, and princes' feathers, is a familiar object at English fairs.
Napoleon himself may have laughed at it. We know that at St. Helena he applauded English caricatures of a similar character, notably one which represented George III. as a corpulent old man standing on the English coast, hurling in fury a huge beet at the head of Napoleon on the other side of the Channel, and saying to him, "Go and make yourself some sugar!"[35] We know also that while he relished the satirical pictures aimed at his enemies and rivals, he was very far from enjoying those which reflected disagreeably upon himself. "If caricatures," said he one day at St. Helena, "sometimes avenge misfortune, they form a continual annoyance to power; and how many have been made upon me! I think I have had my share of them."
A Great Man's Last Leap—Napoleon going on Board the English Frigate, assisted by the Faithful Bertrand. (Paris, 1815.)
Even he did not care for caricature when he was right. If it can be said that Napoleon Bonaparte conferred upon France one lasting good, it was beet-root sugar; but the satire aimed at that useful article does not appear to have offended him. In a newspaper of June, 1812, we read: "A caricature has been executed at Paris, in which the emperor and the King of Rome are the most prominent characters. The emperor is represented as sitting at the table in the nursery with a cup of coffee before him, into which he is squeezing beet-root. Near to him is seated the young King of Rome, voraciously sucking the beet-root. The nurse, who is steadfastly observing him, is made to say, 'Suck, dear, suck; your father says it is sugar.'" He did not care, probably, for that. It would have been far otherwise if a draughtsman had touched upon his mad invasion of Russia.
It was not until his power was gone that French satirists tried their pencils upon him, and then with no great success. With the downfall of Napoleon was involved the prostration of France. Humiliation followed humiliation. The spirit of Frenchmen was broken, and their resources were exhausted. In the presence of such events as the Russian catastrophe, the march of the allies upon Paris, Napoleon's banishment to Elba, the Hundred Days, Waterloo, the encampment of foreign armies in the public places of Paris, the flight of the emperor, and his final exile, the satirist was superseded, and burlesque itself was outdone by reality. When at last Paris was restored to herself, and peace again gave play to the human mind, Napoleon was covered with the majesty of what seemed a sublime misfortune. That peerless histrionic genius took the precaution in critical moments to let the world know what character he was enacting, and accordingly, when he stepped on board the English man-of-war, he announced himself to mankind as Themistocles magnanimously seeking an asylum at the hands of the most powerful of his enemies.
The good ruler is he who leaves to his successor, if not an easy task, yet one not too difficult for respectable talents. Napoleon solved none of the menacing problems. He threw no light upon the difficulties with which the modern world finds itself face to face. Every year that he reigned he only heaped up perplexity for his successors, until the mountain mass transcended all human ability, and entailed upon Frenchmen that tumultuous apprenticeship in self-government which is yet far from ending.
Talleyrand.
The first effort of the caricaturists in Paris after the Restoration was simply to place the figure of a weather-cock after the names of public men who had shown particular alacrity in changing their politics with the changing dynasties. This was soon improved upon by putting weather-cocks enough to denote the precise number of times a personage had veered. Thus Talleyrand, who from being a bishop and a nobleman had become a republican, then a minister under Napoleon, and at last a supporter and servant of the Restoration, besides exhibiting various minor changes, was complimented with as many weather-cocks as the fancy of each writer suggested.
Six appears to have been the favorite number. We find in a previous picture that he is represented as the man with six heads. The public men signalized by this simple device were said to belong to the Order of the Weather-cock; and it was the interest of the reactionists, who urged on the trial and execution of Ney and his comrades, to cover them with odium. To this day much of that odium clings to the name of Talleyrand. A man who keeps a cool head in the midst of madmen is indeed a most offensive person, and Talleyrand committed this enormity more than once in his life. So far as we can yet discern, the only "treason" he ever practiced toward the governments with which he was connected consisted in giving them better advice than they were capable of acting upon. The few words which he uttered on leaving the council-chamber, after vainly advising Marie Louise to remain in her husband's abode and maintain the moral dignity of his administration, show how well he understood the collapse of the "empire" and its cause: "It is difficult to comprehend such weakness in such a man as the emperor. What a fall is his! To give his name to a series of adventures, instead of bestowing it upon his century! When I think of that, I can not help groaning." Then he added the words which gave him his high place in the Order of the Weather-cock: "But now what part to take? It does not suit every body to let himself be overwhelmed in the ruins of this edifice." Particularly it did not suit M. de Talleyrand, and he was not overwhelmed, accordingly. Considering the manner in which France was governed during his career, he might well say, "I have not betrayed governments: governments have betrayed me."
It is mentioned by M. Champfleury as a thing unprecedented that this weather-cock device did not wholly lose its power to amuse the Parisians for two years. The portly person and ancient court of the king, Louis XVIII., called forth many caricatures at a later period. This king was as good-natured, as well-intentioned, as honorable a Bourbon as could have been found in either hemisphere. It was not he who enriched all languages by the gift of his family name. It was not his obstinate adherence to ancient folly which caused it to be said that the Bourbons had forgotten nothing and learned nothing. Born as long before his accession as 1755, he was an accomplished and popular prince of mature age during the American Revolution and the intellectual ferment which followed it in France. A respectable scholar (for a prince), well versed in literature (for a prince), a good judge of art (for a prince), of liberal politics (for a prince), and not so hopelessly ignorant of state affairs as kings and princes usually were, he watched the progress of the Revolution with some intelligence and, at first, with some sympathy. Both then and in 1815 he appears to have been intelligently willing to accept a constitution that should have left his family on the throne by right divine.
Right divine was his religion, to which he sacrificed much, and, unquestionably, would have sacrificed his life. When he was living in exile upon the bounty of the Emperor of Russia, he said to his nephew, on the wedding-day of that young Bourbon: "If the crown of France were of roses, I would give it to you. It is of thorns; I keep it." And, indeed, a turn in politics expelled him soon after, in the middle of winter, from his abode, and made him again a dependent wanderer. In 1803, too, when there could be descried no ray of hope of the restoration of the old dynasty, and Napoleon, apparently lord of the world, offered him a principality in landed wealth if he would but formally renounce the throne, he replied in a manner which a believer in divine right might think sublime:
"I do not confound M. Bonaparte with those who have preceded him. His valor, his military talents, I esteem; and I am even grateful to him for several measures of his administration, since good done to my people will ever be dear to my heart. But if he thinks to engage me to compromise my rights, he deceives himself. On the contrary, by the very offer he now makes me he would establish them if they could be thought of as doubtful. I do not know what are the designs of God with regard to my house and myself, but I know the obligations imposed upon me by the rank in which it was his pleasure to cause me to be born. A Christian, I shall fulfill those obligations even to my latest breath; a son of St. Louis, I shall know, taught by his example, how even in chains to respect myself; a successor of Francis I., I desire at least to be able to say, like him, 'All is lost but honor!'"
Again, in 1814, when the Emperor Alexander of Russia urged him to concede so much to the popular feeling as to call himself King of the French, and to omit from his style the words "par la grâce de Dieu" he answered: "Divine right is at once a consequence of religious dogma and the law of the country. By that law for eight centuries the monarchy has been hereditary in my family. Without divine right I am but an infirm old man, long an exile from my country, and reduced to beg an asylum. But by that right, the exile is King of France."
De la Villevielle, Cambacérès, D'Aigre Feuille—A Promenade in the Palais Royal. (Paris, 1818.)
He wrote and said these "neat things" himself, not by a secretary. Among his happy sayings two have remained in the memory of Frenchmen: "Punctuality is the politeness of kings," and "Every French soldier carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack." He was, in short, a genial, witty, polite old gentleman, willing to govern France constitutionally, disposed to forget and forgive, and be the good king of the whole people. But he was sixty years of age, fond of his ease, and extremely desirous, as he often said, of dying in his own bed. He was surrounded by elderly persons who were bigoted to a Past which could not be resuscitated; and his brother, heir presumptive to the throne, was that fatal Comte d'Artois (Charles X.) who aggravated the violence of the Revolution of 1789, and precipitated that of 1830, by his total incapacity to comprehend either. Gradually the gloomy party of reaction and revenge who surrounded the heir presumptive gained the ascendency, and the good-natured old king could only restrain its extravagance enough to accomplish his desire of dying in his own house. Sincerely religious, he was no bigot; and it was not by his wish that the court assumed more and more the sombre aspect of a Jesuit seminary. It is doubtful if there would have been one exception to the amnesty of political offenses if Louis XVIII. had been as firm as he was kind. The reader sees a proof of his good-nature in the picture on the preceding page of Prince Cambacérès, who was Second Consul when Napoleon was First Consul, and Arch-chancellor under the Empire, peacefully walking in the streets of Paris with two of his friends. This caricature has a value in preserving an excellent portrait of a personage noted for twenty years in the history of France.
Family of the Extinguishers—Caricature of the Restoration. (Paris, 1819.)
To the Order of the Weather-cock succeeded, in 1819, when priestly ascendency at court was but too manifest, the Family of the Extinguishers. In the picture given below, the reader has the pleasure of viewing some of the family portraits, and in another he sees members of the family at work, rekindling the fire and extinguishing the lights. The fire was to consume the charter of French liberty and the records of science; the lights are the men to whom France felt herself indebted for liberty and knowledge—Buffon, Franklin, D'Alembert, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Montaigne, Fénélon, Condorcet, and their friends. Above is the personified Church, with sword uplifted, menacing mankind with new St. Bartholomews and Sicilian Vespers. Underneath this elaborate and ingenious work was the refrain of Béranger's song of 1819, entitled "Les Missionnaires," which was almost enough of itself to expel the Bourbons:
"Vite soufflons, soufflons, morbleu!
Éteignons les lumières
Et rallumons le feu."
The historian of that period will not omit to examine the songs which the incomparable Béranger wrote during the reign of the two kings of the Restoration. "Le peuple, c'est ma Muse," the poet wrote many years after, when reviewing this period. The people were his Muse. He studied the people, he adds, "with religious care," and always found their deepest convictions in harmony with his own. He had been completely fascinated by the "genius of Napoleon," never suspecting that it was Napoleon's lamentable want of ability which had devolved upon the respectable Louis XVIII. an impossible task. But he perceived that the task was impossible. There were two impossibilities, he thought, in the way of a stable government. It was impossible for the Bourbons, while they remained Bourbons, to govern France, and it was impossible for France to make them any thing but Bourbons. Hence, in lending his exquisite gift to the popular cause, he had no scruples and no reserves; and he freely poured forth those wonderful songs which became immediately part and parcel of the familiar speech of his countrymen. Alas for a Bourbon when there is a Béranger loose in his capital! Charles X. attempted the Bourbon policy of repression, and had the poet twice imprisoned. But he could not imprison his songs, nor prevent his writing new ones in prison, which sung themselves over France in a week. Caricature, too, was severely repressed—the usual precursor of collapse in a French government.
The Jesuits at Court. (Paris, 1819.)
"Quick! Blow! blow! Let us put out the lights and rekindle the fires!"
The end of the Restoration, in 1830, occurred with a sudden and spontaneous facility, which showed, among other things, how effectively Béranger had sung from his garret and his prison. The old king in 1824 had his wish of dying in his own bed, and is said to have told his successor, with his dying breath, that he owed this privilege to the policy of tacking ship rather than allowing a contrary wind to drive her upon the rocks. He advised "Monsieur" to pursue the same "tacking policy." But Monsieur was Comte d'Artois, that entire and perfect Bourbon, crusted by his sixty-seven years, a willing victim in the hands of Jesuit priests. In six years the ship of state was evidently driving full upon the rocks; but, instead of tacking, he put on all sail, and let her drive. At a moment when France was in the last extremity of alarm for the portion of liberty which her constitution secured her, this unhappy king signed a decree which put the press under the control of the Minister of Police, and the rest of the people of France under Marshal Marmont. Twenty-one days after, August 16th, 1830, the king and his suite were received on board of two American vessels, the Charles Carroll and the Great Britain, by which they were conveyed from Cherbourg to Portsmouth. "This," said the king to his first English visitors, "is the reward of my efforts to render France happy. I wished to make one last attempt to restore order and tranquillity. The factions have overturned me." The old gentleman resumed his daily mass, and found much consolation for the loss of a crown in the slaughter of beasts and birds. Louis Philippe was King of the French, by the grace of Lafayette and the acquiescence of a majority of the French people.
Caricature, almost interdicted during the last years of the Restoration, pursued the fugitive king and his family with avenging ridicule. Gavarni, then an unknown artist of twenty-six, employed by Émile de Girardin to draw the fashion plates of his new periodical, La Mode, gave Paris, in those wild July days of 1830, the only political caricatures he ever published. One represented the king as an old-clothes man, bawling, "Old coats! old lace!" In another he appeared astride of a lance, in full flight, in a costume composed of a priest's black robe and the glittering uniform of a general; white bands at his neck, the broad red ribbon of the Legion of Honor across his breast, one arm loaded with mitres, relics, and chaplets, with the scissors of the censer on the thumb, on the other side the end of a sabre, and the meagre legs encompassed by a pair of huge jack-boots. Another picture, called the "Lost Balloon," exhibited the king in the car of a balloon, with the same preposterous boots hanging down, along with the Duc d'Angoulême clinging to the sides, and the duchess crushing the king by her weight. The royal banner, white, and sown with fleurs-de-lis, streamed out behind as the balloon disappeared in the clouds.
These were the only political caricatures ever published by the man whom Frenchmen regard as the greatest of their recent satirical artists. He cared nothing for politics, and had the usual attachment of artists and poets to the Established Order. Having aimed these light shafts at the flying king in mere gayety of heart, because every one else was doing the same, he soon remembered that the king was an old man, past seventy-three, as old as his own father, and flying in alarm from his home and country. He was conscience-stricken. Reading aloud one day a poem in which allusion was made to a white-haired old man going into exile with slow, reluctant steps, his voice broke, and he could scarcely utter the lines:
"Pas d'outrage au vieillard qui s'exile à pas lents.
C'est une piété d'épargner les ruines.
Je n'enfoncerai pas la couronne d'épines
Que la main du malheur met sur ses cheveux blancs."
As he spoke these words the image of his old father rose vividly before his mind, and he could read no more. "I felt," said he, "as if I had been struck in the face;" and ever after he held political caricature in horror.
This feeling is one with which the reader will often find himself sympathizing while examining some of the heartless and thoughtless pictures which exasperated the elderly paterfamilias who was now called to preside over demoralized France. Louis Philippe was another good-natured Louis XVIII., minus divine right, plus a large family. With all the domestic virtues, somewhat too anxious to push his children on in the world, a good citizen, a good patriot, an unostentatious gentleman, he was totally destitute of those picturesque and captivating qualities which adventurers and banditti often possess, but which wise and trustworthy men seldom do. In looking back now upon that eighteen years' struggle between this respectable father of a family and anarchy, it seems as if France should have rallied more loyally and more considerately round him, and given him too the privilege, so dear to elderly gentlemen, of dying in his own bed. One-tenth of his virtue and one-half his intellect had sufficed under the old régime.
But since that lamentable and fatal day when the priests wrought upon Louis XIV. to decree the expulsion of the Huguenots, who were the élite of his kingdom, France had been undergoing a course of political demoralization, which had made a constitutional government of the country almost impossible. Recent events had exaggerated the criminal class. Twenty years of intoxicating victory had made all moderate success, all gradual prosperity, seem tame and flat; and the reduction of the army had set afloat great numbers of people indisposed to peaceful industry. Under the Restoration, we may almost say, political conspiracy had become a recognized profession. The new king, pledged to make the freedom of the press "a reality," soon found himself face to face with difficulties which Bourbons had invariably met by mere repression. Republicans and Legitimists were equally dissatisfied. Legitimists could only wait and plot; but Republicans could write, speak, and draw. A considerable proportion of the young, irresponsible, and adventurous talent was republican, and there was a great deal of Bohemian character available for that side. It was a time when a Louis Napoleon could belong to a democratic club.
Caricature speedily marked the "citizen king" for her own. Napoleon had employed all his subtlest tact during the last ten years of his reign in keeping alive in French minds the base feudal feeling, so congenial to human indolence and vanity, that it is nobler to be a soldier than to rear a family and keep a shop. In his bulletins we find this false sentiment adroitly insinuated in a hundred ways. He loved to stigmatize the English as a nation of shop-keepers. He displayed infinite art in exalting the qualities which render men willing to destroy one another without asking why, and in casting contempt on the arts and virtues by which the waste of war is repaired. The homely habits, the plain dress, the methodical ways, of Louis Philippe were, therefore, easily made to seem ridiculous. He was styled the first bourgeois of his kingdom—as he was—but the French people had been taught to regard the word as a term of contempt.
Unfortunately he abandoned the policy of letting the caricaturists alone. Several French rulers have adopted the principle of not regarding satire, but not one has had the courage to adhere to it long. Sooner or later all the world will come into the "American system," and all the world will at length discover the utter impotence of the keenest ridicule and the most persistent abuse against public men who do right and let their assailants alone. The chief harm done by the abuse of public men in free countries is in making it too difficult to expose their real faults. How would it be possible, for example, to make the people of the United States believe ill of a President in vilifying whom ingenious men and powerful journals had exhausted themselves daily for years? Nothing short of testimony, abundant and indisputable, such as would convince an honest jury, could procure serious attention. From President Washington to President Grant the history of American politics is one continuous proof of Mr. Jefferson's remark, that "an administration which has nothing to conceal has nothing to fear from the press."
Charles Philipon.
When Louis Philippe had been a year upon the throne appeared the first number of Le Charivari, a daily paper of four small pages, conducted by an unknown, inferior artist—Charles Philipon. Around him gathered a number of Bohemian draughtsmen and writers, not one of whom appears then to have shared in the social or political life of the country, or to have had the faintest conception of the consideration due to a fellow-citizen in a place of such extreme difficulty as the head of a government. They assailed the king, his person, his policy, his family, his habits, his history, with thoughtless and merciless ridicule. A periodical which has undertaken to supply a cloyed, fastidious public with three hundred and sixty-five ludicrous pictures per annum must often be in desperation for subjects, and there was no resource to Philipon so obvious or so sure as the helpless family imprisoned in the splendors and etiquette of royalty. Unfortunately for modern governments, the people of Europe were for so many centuries preyed upon and oppressed by kings that vast numbers of people, even in free countries, still regard the head of a government as a kind of natural enemy, to assail whom is among the rights of a citizen. And, moreover, the king, the president, the minister, is unseen by those who hurl the barbed and poisoned javelin. They do not see him shrink and writhe. To many an anonymous coward it is a potent consideration, also, that the head of a constitutional government can not usually strike back.
Mr. Thackeray, who was but nineteen when Louis Philippe came to the throne, witnessed much of the famous contest between this knot of caricaturists and the King of the French; and in one of the first articles which he wrote for subsistence, after his father's failure, he gave the world some account of it.[36] At a later period of his life he would probably not have regarded the king as the stronger party. He would probably not have described the contest as one 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." Half a dozen poor artists, with an unscrupulous publisher at their head, who gives them daily access to the eye and ear of a great capital, can array against the object of their satire and abuse the entire unthinking crowd of that capital. A firm, enlightened, and competent king would have united against these a majority of the responsible and the reflecting. Such a king would truly have been, as Mr. Thackeray observed, "an Ajax girded at by a Thersites." But Louis Philippe was no Ajax. He was no hero at all. He had no splendid and no commanding traits. He was merely an overfond father and well-disposed citizen of average talents. He was merely the kind of man which free communities can ordinarily get to serve them, and who will serve them passably well if the task be not made needlessly difficult. Hence Philipon and his "half a dozen poor artists" were very much the stronger party—a fact which the king, in the sight and hearing of all France, confessed and proclaimed by putting them in prison.
It was those prosecutions of Philipon that were fatal to the king. Besides adding emphasis, celebrity, and weight to the sallies of Le Charivari, they presaged the abandonment of the central principle of the movement that made him king—the freedom of utterance. The scenes in court when Philipon, or his artist, Daumier, was arraigned, were most damaging to the king's dignity. One, incorrectly related by Thackeray, may well serve to warn future potentates that of all conceivable expedients for the caricaturist's frustration, the one surest to fail is to summon him to a court of justice.
A favorite device of M. Philipon was to draw the king's face in the form of a huge pear, which it did somewhat resemble. Amateur draughtsmen also chalked the royal pear upon the walls of Paris; and the exaggerated pears with the king's features roughly outlined which everywhere met the eye excited the mocking laughter of the idle Parisian. No jest could have been so harmless if it had been unnoticed by the person at whom it was aimed, or noticed only with a smile. But the Government stooped to the imbecility of arraigning the author of the device. The poire actually became an object of prosecution, and the editor of Le Charivari was summoned before a jury on a charge of inciting to contempt against the person of the king by giving his face a ludicrous resemblance to one of the fruits of the earth. Philipon, when he rose to defend himself, exhibited to the jury a series of four sketches, upon which he commented. The first was a portrait of the king devoid of exaggeration or burlesque. "This sketch," said the draughtsman, "resembles Louis Philippe. Do you condemn it?" He then held up the second picture, which was also a very good portrait of the king; but in this one the toupet and the side-whiskers began to "flow together," as M. Champfleury has it (s'onduler), and the whole to assume a distant resemblance to the outline of a pear. "If you condemn the first sketch," said the imperturbable Philipon, "you must condemn this one which resembles it." He next showed a picture in which the pear was plainly manifest, though it bore an unmistakable likeness to the king. Finally, he held up to the court a figure of a large Burgundy pear, pure and simple, saying, "If you are consistent, gentlemen, you can not acquit this sketch either, for it certainly resembles the other three."
Mr. Thackeray was mistaken in supposing that this impudent defense carried conviction to the minds of the jury. Philipon was condemned and fined. He avenged himself by arranging the court and jury upon a page of Le Charivari in the form of a pear.[37] He and his artists played upon this theme hundreds of variations, until the Government found matter for a prosecution even in a picture of a monkey stealing a pear. The pear became at last too expensive a luxury for the conductor of Le Charivari, and that fruit was "exiled from the empire of caricature."
Before Louis Philippe had been three years upon the throne there was an end of all but the pretense of maintaining the freedom of press or pencil. "The Press," as Mr. Thackeray remarks, "was sent to prison; and as for poor dear Caricature, it was fairly murdered." In Le Charivari for August 30th, 1832, we read that Jean-Baptiste Daumier, for an equally harmless caricature of the king, was arrested in the very presence of his father and mother, of whom he was the sole support, and condemned to six months' imprisonment. It was Daumier, however, as M. Champfleury reveals, who had "served up the pear with the greatest variety of sauces." It was the same Daumier who after his release assailed the advocates and legal system of his country with ceaseless burlesque, and made many a covert lunge at the personage who moved them to the fatal absurdity of imprisoning him.
Driven by violence from the political field, to which it has been permitted to return only at long intervals and for short periods, French caricature has ranged over the scene of human foibles, and attained a varied development. Daumier and Philipon conjointly produced a series of sketches in Le Charivari which had signal and lasting success with the public. The play of "Robert Macaire," after running awhile, was suppressed by the Government, the actor of the principal part having used it as a vehicle of political burlesque. Le Charivari seized the idea of satirizing the follies of the day by means of two characters of the drama—Macaire, a cool, adroit, audacious villain, and Bertrand, his comrade, stupid, servile, and timid.
Robert Macaire fishing for Share-holders. (Daumier, 1833.)
Philipon supplying the words and Daumier executing the pictures, they made Macaire undertake every scheme, practice, and profession which contained the requisite ingredients of the comic and the rascally. The series extended beyond ninety sketches. Macaire founds a joint-stock charity—la morale en action, he explains to gaping Bertrand, each action (share) being placed at two hundred and fifty francs. He becomes a quack-doctor. "Don't trifle with your complaint," he says to a patient, as he gives him two bottles of medicine. "Come to see me often; it won't ruin you, for I make no charge for consultations. You owe me twenty francs for the two bottles." The patient appearing to be startled at the magnitude of this sum, Dr. Macaire blandly says, as he bows him out, "We give two cents for returned bottles." He becomes a private detective. A lady consults him in his office. "Sir," she says, "I have had a thousand-franc note stolen." "Precisely, madame. Consider the business done: the thief is a friend of mine." "But," says the lady, "can I get my note back, and find out who took it?" "Nothing easier. Give me fifteen hundred francs for my expenses, and to-morrow the thief will return the note and send you his card."
Every resource being exhausted, Macaire astounds the despairing Bertrand by saying, "Come, the time for mundane things is past; let us attend now to eternal interests. Suppose we found a religion?" "A religion!" cries Bertrand; "that is not so easy." To this Macaire replies by alluding to the recent proceedings of a certain Abbé Châtel, in Paris. "One makes a pontiff of himself, hires a shop, borrows some chairs, preaches sermons upon the death of Napoleon, upon Voltaire, upon the discovery of America, upon any thing, no matter what. There's a religion for you; it's no more difficult than that." On one occasion Macaire himself is a little troubled in mind, and Bertrand remarks the unusual circumstance. "You seem anxious," says Bertrand. "Yes," replies Macaire, "I am in bad humor. Those scoundrels of bond-holders have bothered me to such a point that I have actually paid them a dividend!" "What!" exclaims Bertrand, aghast, "a bona-fide dividend?" "Yes, positively." "What are you going to do about it?" "I am going to get it back again."
The reader will, of course, infer that each of these pictures was a hit at some scoundrelly exploit of the day, the public knowledge of which gave effect to the caricature. In many instances the event is forgotten, but the picture retains a portion of its interest. One of Macaire's professions was that of cramming students for their bachelor's degree. A student enters. "There are two ways in which we can put you through," says Macaire: "one, to make you pass your examination by a substitute; the other, to enable you to pass it yourself." "I prefer to pass it myself," says the young man. "Very well. Do you know Greek?" "No." "Latin?" "No." "All right. You know mathematics?" "Not the least in the world." "What do you know, then?" "Nothing at all." "But you have two hundred francs?" "Certainly." "Just the thing! You will get your degree next Thursday." We may find comfort in this series, for we learn from it that in every infamy which we now deplore among ourselves we were anticipated by the French forty years ago. Macaire even goes into the mining business, at least so far as to sell shares. "We have made our million," says the melancholy Bertrand; "but we have engaged to produce gold, and we find nothing but sand." "No matter; utilize your capital; haven't you got a gold mine?" "Yes—but afterward?" "Afterward you will simply say to the share-holders, 'I was mistaken; we must try again.' You will then form a company for the utilization of the sand." Bertrand, still anxious, ventures to remark that there are such people as policemen in the country. "Policemen!" cries Macaire, gayly. "So much the better: they will take shares." One of his circular letters was a masterpiece:
"Sir,—I regret to say that your application for shares in the Consolidated European Incombustible Blacking Association can not be complied with, as all the shares of the C. E. I. B. A. were disposed of on the day they were issued. I have nevertheless registered your name, and in case a second series should be put forth I shall have the honor of immediately giving you notice.
"I am, sir, etc.
Robert Macaire, Director."
"Print three hundred thousand of these," says the director, "and poison all France with them." "But," says Bertrand, "we haven't sold a single share; you haven't a sou in your pocket, and—" "Bertrand, you are an ass. Do as I tell you."
A Husband's Dilemma.
"Yes; but if you quarrel like that with all your wife's lovers, you will never have any friends."—From Paris Nonsensicalities (Baliverneries Parisiennes), by Gavarni.
Thus, week after week, for many a month, did Le Charivari "utilize" these impossible characters to expose and satirize the plausible scoundrelism of the period. Mr. Thackeray, who ought to be an excellent authority on any point of satirical art, praises highly the execution of these pictures by M. Daumier. They seem carelessly done, he remarks; but it is the careless grace of the consummate artist. He recommends the illustrator of "Pickwick" to study Daumier. When we remember that Thackeray had offered to illustrate "Pickwick," his comments upon the artist who was preferred to himself have a certain interest: "If we might venture to give a word of advice to another humorous designer [Hablot K. Browne], whose works are extensively circulated, the illustrator of 'Pickwick' and 'Nicholas Nickleby,' it would be to study well those caricatures of M. Daumier, who, though he executes very carelessly, knows very well what he would express, indicates perfectly the attitude and identity of the figure, and is quite aware beforehand of the effect he intends to produce. The one we should fancy to be a practiced artist taking his ease, the other a young one somewhat bewildered—a very clever one, however, who, if he would think more and exaggerate less, would add not a little to his reputation." Possessors of the early editions of "Pickwick" will be tempted to think that in this criticism of Mr. Browne's performances by a disappointed rival there was an ingredient of wounded self-love. The young author, however, in another passage, gave presage of the coming Thackeray. He observes that in France ladies in difficulties who write begging letters, or live by other forms of polite beggary, are wont to style themselves "widows of the Grand Army." They all pretended to some connection with le Grand Homme, and all their husbands were colonels. "This title," says the wicked Thackeray, "answers exactly to the clergyman's daughter in England;" and he adds, "The difference is curious as indicating the standard of respectability."
Housekeeping.
"Gracious, Dorothy, I have forgotten the meat for your cat!"
"Have you, indeed? But you didn't forget the biscuit for your bird, egotist! No matter! No matter! If there is nothing in the house for my cat, I shall give her your bird, I shall!"—From Impressions de Ménage, by Gavarni.
Many caricaturists who afterward attained celebrity were early contributors to M. Philipon's much-prosecuted periodical. Among them was "the elegant Gavarni," who for thirty years was the favorite comic artist of Paris roués and dandies—himself a roué and dandy. At this period, according to his friend, Théophile Gautier, he was a very handsome young man, with luxuriant blonde curls, always fashionably attired, somewhat in the English taste, neat, quiet, and precise, and "possessing in a high degree the feeling for modern elegances." He was of a slender form, which seemed laced in, and he had the air of being carefully dressed and thoroughly appointed, his feet being effeminately small and daintily clad. In short, he was a dandy of the D'Orsay and N. P. Willis period. For many years he expended the chief force of his truly exquisite talent in investing vice with a charm which in real life it never possesses. Loose women, who are, as a class, very stupid, very vulgar, most greedy of gain and pleasure, and totally devoid of every kind of interesting quality, he endowed with a grace and wit, a fertility of resource, an airy elegance of demeanor, never found except in honorable women reared in honorable homes. He was the great master of that deadly school of French satiric art which finds all virtuous life clumsy or ridiculous, and all abominable life graceful and pleasing.
Albums of this kind are extant in which married men are invariably represented as objects of contemptuous pity, and no man is graceful or interesting except the sneaking scoundrel who has designs upon the integrity of a household. Open the "Musée pour Rire," for example. Here is a little family of husband, wife, and year-old child in bed, just awake in the morning, the wife caressing the child, and the husband looking on with admiring fondness. This scene is rendered ridiculous by the simple expedient of making the wife and child hideously ugly, and the fond father half an idiot. Another picture shows the same child, with a head consisting chiefly of mouth, yelling in the middle of the night, while the parents look on, imbecile and helpless. Turn to the sketches of the masked ball or the midnight carouse, and all is elegant, becoming, and delightful. If the French caricatures of the last thirty years do really represent French social life and French moral feeling, we may safely predict that in another generation France will be a German province; for men capable of maintaining the independence of a nation can not be produced on the Gavarnian principles.
Marriage and civilization we might almost call synonymous terms. Marriage was at least the greatest conquest made by primitive man over himself, and the indispensable preliminary to a higher civilization. Nor has any mode yet been discovered of rearing full-formed and efficient men capable of self-control, patriotism, and high principle, except the union of both parents striving for that end with cordial resolution longer than an average life-time. It is upon this most sacred of all institutions that the French caricaturists of the Gavarni school pour ceaseless scorn and contempt. As I write these lines, my eyes fall upon one of the last numbers of a comic sheet published in Paris, on the first page of which there is a picture which illustrates this propensity. A dissolute-looking woman, smoking a cigarette, is conversing with a boy in buttons who has applied for a place in her household. "How old are you?" she asks. "Eleven, madame." "And your name?" "Joseph!" Upon this innocent reply the woman makes a comment which is truly comic, but very Gavarnian: "So young, and already he calls himself Joseph!"
A Poultice for Two—Sympathy and Economy.—From Impressions de Ménage, by Gavarni.
Among the heaps of albums to be found in a French collection we turn with particular curiosity to those which satirize the child life of France. Gavarni's celebrated series of "Enfants Terribles" has gone round the world, and called forth child satire in many lands. The presence of children in his pictures does not long divert this artist from his ruling theme. One of his terrible children, a boy of four, prattles innocently to his mother in this strain: "Nurse is going to get up very early, now that you have come home, mamma. Goodness! while you were in the country she always had her breakfast in bed, and it was papa who took in the milk and lighted the fire. But wasn't the coffee jolly sweet, though!" Another alarming boy of the same age, who is climbing up his father's chair and wearing his father's hat, all so merry and innocent, discourses thus to the petrified author of his being: "Who is Mr. Albert? Oh, he is a gentleman belonging to the Jardin des Plantes, who comes every day to explain the animals to mamma; a large man with mustaches, whom you don't know. He didn't come to-day until after they had shut up the monkeys. You ought to have seen how nicely mamma entertained him. Oh dear!" (discovering a bald place on papa's pate) "you have hardly any hair upon the top of your head, papa!" In a third picture both parents are exhibited seated side by side upon a sofa, and the terrible boy addresses his mother thus: "Mamma, isn't that little mustache comb which Cornelia found in your bedroom this morning for me?" Another sketch shows us father, mother, and terrible boy taking a walk in the streets of Paris. A dandy, in the likeness of Gavarni himself, goes by, with his cane in his mouth, and his face fixed so as to seem not to see them. But the boy sees him, and bawls to his mother: "Mamma! mamma! that Monsieur du Luxembourg!—you know him—the one you said was such a great friend to papa—he has gone by without saluting! I suppose the reason is, he don't know how to behave." Another picture presents to view a little girl seated on a garden bench eating nuts, and talking to a young man: "The rose which you gave to mamma?" "Yes, yes." "The one you nearly broke your neck in getting? Let me see. Oh, my cousin Nat stuck it in the tail of Matthew's donkey. How mamma did laugh! Got any more nuts?" The same appalling girl imparts a family secret to her tutor: "Mamma wrote to M. Prosper, and papa read the letter. Oh, wasn't papa angry, though! And all because she had spelled a word wrong." A mother hearing a little girl say the catechism is a subject which one would suppose was not available for the purposes of a Gavarni, but he finds even that suggestive. "Come, now, pay attention. What must we do when we have sinned [péché]?" To which the terrible child replies, playing unconsciously upon the word péché (sinned), which does not differ in sound from pêché (fished), "When we have pêché? Wait a moment. Oh! we go back to the White House with all the fish in the basket, which my nurse eats with Landerneau. He is a big soldier who has white marks upon his sleeve. And I eat my share, let me tell you!"
It is thus that the first caricaturist of France "utilized" the innocence of childhood when Louis Philippe was King of the French.
Parisian "Shoo, Fly!"
"Captain, I am here to ask your permission to fight a duel."
"What for, and with whom?"
"With Saladin, the trumpeter, who has so far forgotten himself as to call me a moucheron" (little fly).—From Messieurs nos Fils et Mesdemoiselles nos Filles, by Randon, Paris.
There is a later series by Randon, entitled "Messieurs nos Fils et Mesdemoiselles nos Filles," which exhibits other varieties of French childhood, some of which are inconceivable to persons not of the "Latin race." It has been said that in America there are no longer any children; but nowhere among us are there young human beings who could suggest even the burlesque of precocity such as M. Randon presents to us. We have no boys of ten who go privately to the hero of a billiard "tournament" and request him with the politest gravity, cap in hand, to "put him up to some points of the game for his exclusive use." We have no boys of eight who stand with folded arms before a sobbing girl of seven and address her in words like these: "Be reasonable, then, Amelia. The devil! People can't be always loving one another." We have no errand-boys of eight who offer their services to a young gentleman thus: "For delivering a note on the sly, or getting a bouquet into the right hands, monsieur can trust to me. I am used to little affairs of that kind, and I am as silent as the tomb." We have no little boys in belt and apron who say to a bearded veteran of half a dozen wars: "You don't know your happiness. For my part, give me a beard as long as yours, and not a woman in the world should resist me!" We have no little boys who in the midst of a fight with fists, one having a black eye and the other a bloody nose, would pause to say: "At least we don't fight for money, like the English. It is for glory that we fight." We have no little boys who, on starting for a ride, wave aside the admonitions of the groom by telling him that they know all about managing a horse, and what they want of him is simply to tell them where in the Bois they will be likely to meet most "Amazons." No, nor in all the length and breadth of English-speaking lands can there be found a small boy who, on being lectured by his father, would place one hand upon his heart, and lift the other on high, and say, "Papa, by all that I hold dearest, by my honor, by your ashes, by any thing you like, I swear to change my conduct!" All these things are so remote from our habits that the wildest artist could not conceive of them as passable caricature.
Three! (From "Arithmetic Illustrated," by Cham.)
The opprobrious words in use among French boys would not strike the boys of New York or London as being very exasperating. M. Randon gives us an imaginary conversation between a very small trumpeter in gorgeous uniform and a gamin of the street. Literally translated, it would read thus: "Look out, little fly, or you will get yourself crushed." To which the street boy replies, "Descend, then, species of toad: I will make you see what a little fly is!" On the other hand, if we may believe M. Randon, French boys of a very tender age consider themselves subject to the code of honor, and hold themselves in readiness to accept a challenge to mortal combat. A soldier of ten years appears in one of this series with his arm in a sling, and he explains the circumstance to his military comrade of the same age: "It's all a sham, my dear. I'll tell you the reason in strict confidence: it is to make a certain person of my acquaintance believe that I have fought for her." The boys of France, it is evident, are nothing if not military. Most of the young veterans blasés exhibited in these albums are in uniform.
An interesting relic of those years when Frenchmen still enjoyed some semblance of liberty to discuss subjects of national and European concern is Gavarni's series of masterly sketches burlesquing the very idea of private citizens taking an interest in public affairs. This is accomplished by the device of giving to all the men who are talking politics countenances of comic stupidity. An idiot in a blouse says to an idiot in a coat, "Poland, don't you see, will never forgive your ingratitude!" An idiot in a night-cap says to an idiot bare-headed, with ludicrous intensity, "And when you have taken Lombardy, then what?" Nothing can exceed the skill of the draughtsman of this series, except the perversity of the man, to whom no human activity seemed becoming unless its object was the lowest form of sensual pleasure. But the talent which he displayed in this album was immense. It was, if I may say so, frightful; for there is nothing in our modern life so alarming as the power which reckless and dissolute talent has to make virtuous life seem provincial and ridiculous, vicious life graceful and metropolitan.
Two Attitudes.
"With your air of romantic melancholy, you could succeed with some women. For my part, I make my conquests with drums beating and matches lighted."—From Messieurs nos Fils et Mesdemoiselles nos Filles, by Randon, Paris.
During the twenty years of Louis Napoleon, political caricature being extinguished, France was inundated with diluted Gavarni. Any wretch who drew or wrote for the penny almanacs, sweltering in his Mansard on a franc a day, could produce a certain effect by representing the elegant life of his country, of which he knew nothing, to be corrupt and sensual. Pick up one of these precious works blindfold, open it at random, and you will be almost certain to light upon some penny-a-line calumny of French existence, with a suitable picture annexed. I have just done so. The "Almanach Comique" for 1869, its twenty-eighth year, lies open before me at the page devoted to the month of August. My eye falls upon a picture of a loosely dressed woman gazing fondly upon a large full purse suspended upon the end of a walking-stick, and underneath are the words, "Elle ne tarde pas à se réapprivoiser." She does not delay to retame herself, the verb being the one applied to wild beasts. There is even a subtle deviltry in the syllable ré, implying that she has rebelled against her destiny, but is easily enough brought to terms by a bribe. The reading matter for the month consists of the following brief essay, entitled "August—the Virgin:" "How to go for a month to the sea-shore during the worst of the dog-days. Hire a chalet at Cabourg for madame, and a cottage on the beach of Trouville for mademoiselle. The transit between those two places is accomplished per omnibus in an hour. That is very convenient. Breakfast with Mademoiselle; dine with Madame. This double existence is very expensive, but as it is the most common, we are compelled to examine it in order to establish a basis for the expenditures of the twelve months." Is it not obvious that this was "evolved?" Does it not smell of a garlicky Mansard? And have not all modern communities a common interest in discrediting anonymous calumny? It were as unjust, doubtless, to judge the frugal people of France by the comic annuals as the good-natured people of England by the Saturday Review.
The Den of Lions at the Opera. (From Les Différents Publics de Paris, by Gustave Doré.)
It is evident, too, that the French have a totally different conception from ourselves of what is fit and unfit to be uttered. They ridicule our squeamishness; we stand amazed at their indelicacy. Voltaire, who could read his "Pucelle" to the Queen of Prussia, her young daughter being also present and seen to be listening, was astounded in London at the monstrous indecency of "Othello;" and English people of the same generation were aghast at the license of the Parisian stage. M. Marcelin, a popular French caricaturist of to-day, dedicates an album containing thirty pictures of what he styles Un certain Monde to his mother! We must not judge the productions of such a people by standards drawn from other than "Latin" sources.
Among the comic artists who began their career in Louis Philippe's time, under the inspiration of Philipon and Daumier, was a son of the Comte de Noé, or, as we might express it, Count Noah, a peer of France when there were peers of France. Amédée de Noé, catching the spirit of caricature while he was still a boy (he was but thirteen when Le Charivavi was started), soon made his pseudonym, Cham, familiar to Paris. Cham being French for Shem, it was a happy way of designating a son of Count Noah. From that time to the present hour Cham has continued to amuse his countrymen, pouring forth torrents of sketches, which usually have the merit of being harmless, and are generally good enough to call up a smile upon a face not too stiffly wrinkled with the cares of life. He is almost as prolific of comic ideas as George Cruikshank, but his pictures are now too rudely executed to serve any but the most momentary purpose. When a comic album containing sixty-one pictures by Cham is sold in Paris for about twelve cents of our currency, the artist can not bestow much time or pains upon his work. The comic almanac quoted above, containing one hundred and eighty-three pages and seventy pictures, costs the retail purchaser ten cents.
Gustave Doré, now so renowned, came from Strasburg to Paris in 1845, a boy of thirteen, and made his first essays in art, three years after, as a caricaturist in the Journal pour Rire. But while he scratched trash for his dinner, he reserved his better hours for the serious pursuit of art, which, in just ten years, delivered him from a vocation in which he could never have taken pleasure. His great subsequent celebrity has caused the publication of several volumes of his comic work. It abounds in striking ideas, but the pictures were executed with headlong haste, to gratify a transient public feeling, and keep the artist's pot boiling. His series exhibiting the Different Publics of Paris is full of pregnant suggestions, and there are happy thoughts even in his "Histoire de la Sainte Russie," a series published during the Crimean war, though most of the work is crude and hasty beyond belief.
In looking over the volumes of recent French caricature, we discover that a considerable number of English words have become domesticated in France. France having given us the words of the theatre and the restaurant, has adopted in return several English words relating to out-of-door exercises: Turf, ring, steeple-chase, box (in a stable), jockey, jockey-club, betting, betting-book, handicap, race, racer, four-in-hand, mail-coach, sport, tilbury, dog-cart, tandem, pickpocket, and revolver. Rosbif, bifstek, and "choppe" have long been familiar. "Milord" is no longer exclusively used to designate a sumptuous Englishman, but is applied to any one who expends money ostentatiously. Gentleman, dandy, dandyism, flirt, flirtation, puff, cockney, and cocktail are words that would be recognized by most Parisians. A French writer quotes the phrase "hero of two hemispheres," applied to Lafayette, as a specimen of the "puff" superlative. "Othello" has become synonymous with "jealous man;" and the sentence, "That is the question," from "Hamlet," seems to have acquired currency in France. Cab, abbreviated a century ago from the French (cabriolet), has been brought back to Paris, like the head of a fugitive decapitated in exile.
The Vulture. (From La Ménagerie Impériale, 1871.)
The recent events in France, beginning with the outbreak of the war with Prussia, have elicited countless caricatures and series of caricatures. The downfall of the "Empire," as it was called, gave the caricaturists an opportunity of vengeance which they improved. A citizen of New York possesses a collection of one thousand satirical pictures published in Paris during the war and under the Commune. A people who submit to a despised usurper are not likely to be moderate or decent in the expression of their contempt when, at length, the tyrant is no longer to be feared. It was but natural that the French court should insult the remains of Louis XIV., to whom living it had paid honors all but divine; for it is only strength and valor that know how to be either magnanimous or dignified in the moment of deliverance. Many of the people of Paris, when they heard of the ridiculous termination near Sedan of the odious fiction called the Empire, behaved like boys just rid of a school-master whom they have long detested and obeyed. Of course they seized the chalk and covered all the blackboards with monstrous pictures of the tyrant. The flight of his wife soon after called forth many scandalous sketches similar to those which disgraced Paris when Marie Antoinette was in prison awaiting the execution of her husband and her own trial. Many of these burlesques, however, were fair and legitimate. The specimen given on the next page, entitled "Partant pour la Syrie," which appeared soon after the departure of Eugénie and her advisers, was a genuine hit. It was exhibited in every window, and sold wherever in France the victorious Germans were not. A member of the American legation, amidst the rushing tide of exciting events and topics, chanced to save a copy, from which it is here reduced.
Partant pour la Syrie. (Published in Paris after the Flight of Eugénie.)
Among the "albums" of siege sketches, we come upon one executed by the veterans Cham and Daumier, the same Henri Daumier whom Louis Philippe imprisoned, and Thackeray praised, forty years ago. In this collection we see Parisian ladies, in view of the expected bombardment, bundled up in huge bags of cotton, leading lap-dogs protected in the same manner. An ugly Prussian touches off a bomb aimed at the children in the Jardin du Luxembourg. King William decorates crutches and wooden legs as "New-year's presents for his people." An apothecary sells a plaster "warranted to prevent wounds, provided the wearer never leaves his house." A workman goes to church for the first time in his life, and gives as a reason for so unworkman-like a proceeding that "a man don't have to stand in line for the blessed bread." A volunteer goes on a sortie with a pillow under his waistcoat "to show the enemy that we have plenty of provisions." All these are by the festive Cham.
Daumier does not jest. He seems to have felt that Louis Napoleon, like a child-murderer, was a person far beneath caricature—a creature only fit to be destroyed and hurried out of sight and thought forever. Amidst the dreary horrors of the siege, Henri Daumier could only think of its mean and guilty cause. One of his few pictures in this collection is a row of four vaults, the first bearing the inscription, "Died on the Boulevard Montmartre, December 2d, 1851;" the second, "Died at Cayenne;" the third, "Died at Lambessa;" the fourth, "Died at Sedan, 1870." But even then Daumier, true to the vocation of a patriotic artist, dared to remind his countrymen that it was they who had reigned in the guise of the usurper. A wild female figure standing on a field of battle points with one hand to the dead, and with the other to a vase filled with ballots, on which is printed the word Oui. She cries, "These killed those!"
During the Commune the walls of Paris were again covered with drawings and lithographs of the character which Frenchmen produce after long periods of repression: Louis Napoleon crucified between the two thieves, Bismarck and King William; Thiers in the pillory covered and surrounded with opprobrious inscriptions; Thiers, Favre, and M'Mahon placidly looking down from a luxurious upper room upon a slain mother and child ghastly with blood and wounds; landlords, lean and hungry, begging for bread, while fat and rosy laborers bask idly in the sun; little boy Paris smashing his playthings (Trochu, Gambetta, and Rochefort) and crying for the moon; "Paris eating a general a day;" Queen Victoria in consternation trying to stamp out the horrid centipede, International, while "Monsieur John Boule, Esquire," stands near with the habeas-corpus act in his hand; naked France pressing Rochefort to her bosom; and hundreds more, describable and indescribable.
Gavarni.
It remains to give a specimen of recent French caricature of another kind. Once more, after so many proofs of its impolicy, the Government of France attempts to suppress such political caricature as is not agreeable to it, while freely permitting the publication of pictures flagrantly indecent. At no former period, not even in Voltaire's time, could the French press have been more carefully hedged about with laws tending to destroy its power to do good, and increase its power to do harm. The Government treats the press very much after the manner of those astute parents who forbid their children to see a comedy of Robertson or a play of Shakspeare, but make it up to them by giving them tickets to the variety show. A writer familiar with the subject gives us some astounding details:
"There exist at present," he remarks, "sixty-eight laws in France, all intended to suppress, curtail, weaken, emasculate, and even to strangle newspapers; but not one single law to foster them in their dire misfortune. If any private French gentleman wishes to establish a newspaper, he must first write to the Préfet de Police, on paper of a certain size and duly stamped, and give this functionary notice that he intends to establish a newspaper. His signature has, of course, to be countersigned by the Maire. But if the paper our friend wishes to establish is purely literary, he has first to make his declaration to the police, who rake up every information that is possible about the unfortunate projector. After that, the Ministère de l'Intérieur institutes another searching inquiry, and these two take seven or eight months at least. When the enquête and the contre-enquête are ended, the avis favorable of the whole Ministry is necessary before the paper can be published. Another six months to wait yet; but this is not all. Our would-be newspaper proprietor or editor possesses now the right of publishing his paper; but he has not yet the right to sell it. In order to obtain this, he must begin anew all his declarations and attempts, so that his purely literary paper may be sold at all the ordinary book-sellers' shops. But if he wishes it to be sold in the streets—or, in other words, in the kiosques—he must address himself to another office ad hoc, and then the Commissaire de Police sends the answer of the Préfet de Police to the unfortunate proprietor, editor, or publisher, who by this time must be nearly at his wits' end.
But even this is not all. If the unhappy projector proposes to illustrate his paper, his labors are still far from ending. "He must," continues the writer, "obtain, of course, the permission of the Ministère de l'Intérieur for Paris, or of the prefects for the provinces. The Ministère asks for the opinion of the Governor of Paris, who asks, in his turn, for the opinion of the Bureau de Censure, a body of gentlemen working in the dark, and which, to the eye of the obtuse foreigner, appears only established to prevent any political insinuations to be made, but to allow the filthiest drawings to be publicly exposed for sale, and the most indecent innuendoes to be uttered on the stage or in novels. The Censure demands, under the penalty of seizing, forbidding, and bringing before the court, that every sketch or outline shall be submitted to it. When this is done, and the Censure finds nothing to criticise in it, it requires further that the drawing, when finished, be anew laid before it, and, if the drawing be colored, it must be afresh inspected after the dangerous paints have been smirched on. When our happy editor wishes to publish the caricature or the portrait of any one, he can not do so unless he has the permission of the gentleman or lady whose likeness he wishes to produce."
Honoré Daumier.
Such was the measure of freedom enjoyed in the French republic governed by soldiers. But this elaborate system of repression can be both evaded and turned to account by the caricaturist. During the last two or three years, a writer who calls himself Touchatout has been amusing Paris by a series of satirical biographies, each preceded by a burlesque portrait. But occasionally the Censure refuses its consent to the insertion of the portrait. The son of Louis Napoleon was one individual whom the Censure thus endeavored to protect. Observe the result. Instead of exhibiting to the people of Paris a harmless picture representing the head of the unfortunate young man mounted upon a pair of diminutive legs, Touchatout prints at the head of his biographical sketch the damaging burlesque subjoined:
RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE.
LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY,
AND CENSURE.
THE PUBLICATION OF THE PORTRAIT OF
Vélocipède IV.
HAS BEEN FORBIDDEN BY THE CENSURE.
IT CAN BE FOUND AT ALL THE PHOTOGRAPHERS.
I translate the burlesque biography that follows the above. It may serve also as a specimen of the new literary commodity of which the Parisians seem so fond, and for which a name has been invented—blague—which means amusingly malign gossip.
"Vélocipède IV. (Napoleon-Eugene-Louis-Jean-Joseph, Prince Imperial, more commonly known by the name of:) born at Paris, March 16th, 1856. He is the son of Napoleon III. and of the Empress, Eugénie de Montijo.
"Here a parenthesis. The Trombinoscope has often been accused of brutality. When we traced the profile of the ex-empress, the cry was that we had no consideration even for women. We replied that, in our eyes, sovereigns were no more women than were the she petroleum-throwers. To-day there will not be wanting people to say that we do not spare children; and we shall reply, as we have often said before, that sons are not responsible for the crimes of their fathers until the day when they set up a claim to profit by them. If, during the two years that the Trombinoscope has plied his vocation, we have not aimed a shot at the young hero of Sarrebruck, it is precisely because childhood inspires respect in us. If this youth, when consulted upon his calling, had replied, 'My desire is to be an architect or a shoe-maker,' we should have had nothing to say. But mark: scarcely has he ceased to be a child when, on being questioned as to his choice of a trade, he answers, 'I wish to be emperor.' Oh, indeed! The son of Napoleon III. has entered upon his career; he is a child no more; and the Trombinoscope re-enters into all his rights.
"We said, then, that Eugene-Napoleon was born March 16th, 1856. The doctor who received him perceived that he had upon la fesse droite a mass of odd little red marks. Upon examining closely this phenomenon, he perceived that these marks were a representation of the bombardment of the house Sallanvrouze in December, 1851, upon the Boulevard Montmartre. All was there: the intrepid artillery of Canrobert, smashing the shop-windows and pulverizing a newspaper stand; the nurses disemboweled upon the seats; the bootblack on the corner having his customer's leg carried away from between his hands, etc., etc.
"The empress during her pregnancy had read Victor Hugo's 'Napoleon the Little,' and had been much struck with the chapter in which the coup d'état is so well related. They concealed from the people this tattooing—this far too significant trade-mark—and they placed the new-born child in a cradle with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor around his neck. The high dignitaries then advanced to prostrate themselves before the august infant, who sucked his thumb, and they relate, in this connection, in the blatant clap-trap History of Napoleon III., that one of the courtiers narrowly escaped falling into disgrace by appearing stupefied to see the Prince Imperial decorated at the age of fifteen hours. Happily he recovered himself in time, and replied to the emperor, who had remarked his surprise:
"'Sire! I am indeed astonished that His Highness is only commander.'
"To the age of eighteen months, the Prince Imperial did nothing remarkable; but, dating from that moment, he became a veritable prodigy. Along with his first pair of trousers, his father ordered two dozen witticisms of the editors of Figaro. These sallies at once went the rounds of the domestic press, and the Prince Imperial had not reached his sixth year when he passed, in the rural districts, for having all the wit which his mother lacked. Thus, in full Figaro, appeared one morning a crayon drawing attributed to the Prince Imperial, at the age when as yet he only executed in sepia upon the flaps of his shirt.
"This marvel of precocity astonished all men who had need of a sub-prefectship or a place in the tobacco excise; and this to such a point that they were not in the least surprised when, during the Exhibition of 1867, a reporter prepared his left button-hole to receive the recompense due to the brave by printing—in the self-same Figaro, by heavens!—that the little prince, then eleven years of age, had discussed with engineers of experience the strong and weak points of all the wheel work in the grand hall of machinery.
"The years which followed were for the young phenomenon only a succession of triumphs of the same calibre, until the day when his father declared that, in order to complete his imperial education, nothing was wanting to him but to learn to ride the velocipede.
"It need not be said that he learned this noble art, like all the others, by just blowing upon it.
"Meanwhile, Eugene-Napoleon had achieved various grades in the army. Named Corporal in the Grenadiers of the Guard at the age of twenty-two months, one evening when he had not cried for being put to bed at eight o'clock, he had been made successively pioneer, sergeant, sergeant-major, and adjutant of the same corps. When he made some difficulties about swallowing his iodide of potassium in the morning, they promised him promotion, and that encouraged him. From glass to glass, he won the epaulet of sub-lieutenant; and at the moment when the war with Prussia broke out he had just deserved the epaulet of lieutenant by letting them give him, without crying, an injection with salt, which inspired him with profound horror.
"At the very beginning of the war, his father took him to the Prussian frontier, in order to make him pass by his side under triumphal arches into Berlin, which the army five times ready of Marshal Lebœuf was to enter within four days at the very latest.
"At the combat of Sarrebruck, that brilliant military pantomime which the Emperor caused to be performed under the guise of a parade, the Prince Imperial became the admiration of Europe by picking up on the field of battle 'a bullet which had fallen near him,' said the dispatch of Napoleon to Eugénie. 'From the pocket of a mischievous staff officer,' history will add.
"Since our disasters, the Prince Imperial grows and stuffs himself in exile, with some devoted servants whose salaries go on as before, and a Spanish mother who teaches him to love France as the most lucrative of the monarchical tobacco-excise offices in Europe.
"Recently the Prince Imperial, for the first time, declared his pretension to the throne by thanking the eight Bonapartists, who had hired a smoking compartment upon the Northern Line in order to present their compliments—and their bill—on the occasion of the 15th of August. That was the first act of a Pretender, the cutting of whose teeth still torments him, and whose new pantaloons become too short at the end of eight days. It was this which decided us to write his rather meagre biography.
"As to his person, the Prince Imperial is a perfect type of a slobbering aspirant of the eighth order. In his exterior, at least, he does not seem to have derived much from his father; but he has the empty, vain, and silly expression of his mother. He represents sufficiently well one of those married boobies whose insignificance condemns them to live upon their income in a little provincial city, working six hours a day their part of third cornet in a raw philharmonic society, while their wives at home make cuckolds of them with the officers of the garrison.
"Dates to be supplied by the collectors of the Trombinoscope.
"Eugene-Napoleon, attaining his majority March 16th, 1877, demands a settlement from his mother. She confesses to him that of his maternal fortune there remain but thirty-two francs. 'What has become, then,' he asks,'of all the fund which, during the twenty years of papa's empire, was produced by the exemption money of the conscripts for whom substitutes were not obtained, by the buttons which were wanting to the gaiters, and the gaiters which were wanting to the buttons?' 'What has become of it?' said the Empress. 'Do you suppose that, during these seven years past, I have maintained our French journals with my old chignons?' Eugene-Napoleon replied to his mother: 'Then, if I have no longer a sou with which to take Mandarine to the races, hand me one of papa's riding-jackets that I may make a descent at Boulogne, to dethrone Louis Philippe II. He makes a descent at Boulogne, the —— 18—, with five drunken men and the little Conneau, all disguised as circus staff officers. They put him on his trial; he is convicted the —— 18—; is pardoned the —— 18—; repeats the performance the —— 18—. The Republic having turned out Louis Philippe II., Eugene-Napoleon re-enters France the —— 18—as simple citizen. The republicans, who are always just so foolish, permit him to be elected deputy the —— 18—, and president the —— 18—. He seats himself upon the Republic December 2d, 18—, and re-establishes the Empire the —— 18—. The social decomposition resumes its course. Vélocipède IV. marries the —— 18—, a circus girl. The moral scale continues to rise: Blanche d'Antigny and Cora Pearl are ladies of honor at the Tuileries. The —— 18—, at the moment when Vélocipède IV. is about to engage in a war with Prussia, which he thinks will consolidate his throne, but which, considering the organization of our artillery, threatens to extend the German frontiers as far as Saint-Ouen. France stops the drain of those ruinous imitations, drives out the Emperor, and again proclaims the Republic. This time, a thing wholly unexpected, some republicans are found who, after having energetically swept France clean of all that appertains to former systems, whether pretenders, office-holders, spies, etc., etc., push their logic even to the point of bolting the door inside, in order not to be interfered with in their loyal endeavor. This device, so simple, but by which we have passed three times in a century without seeing it, succeeds to admiration; and at length it is announced, the —— 19—, that Vélocipède IV., after having been by turns, at London, keeper of a thirteen-sous bazaar, pickpocket, circus performer, magnetizer, and dealer in lead-pencils, dies in the flower of his age from the effects of a disease which his father did not contract while presiding at a meeting of his cabinet."
With this specimen of blague we may leave the caricaturists of France to fight it out with La Censure.
Upon the news-stands in St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, New York, and other cities, we find the comic periodicals of Germany, particularly the Fliegende Blätter of Berlin, and the Beilage der Fliegenden Blätter of Munchen, papers resembling Punch in form and design. The American reader who turns over their leaves can not but remark the mildness of the German jokes. Compared with the tremendous and sometimes ghastly efforts of the dreadful Funny Man of the American press, the jests of the Germans are as lager-beer to the goading "cocktail" and the maddening "smash!" But, then, they are delightfully innocent. Coming from the French comic albums and papers to those of the Germans, is like emerging, after sunrise, from a masquerade ball, all gas, rouge, heat, and frenzy, into a field full of children playing till the bell rings for school. Nevertheless, the impression remains that an extremely mild joke suffices to amuse the German reader of comic periodicals.
The pictured jests, as in Punch, are the attractive feature. Observe the infantile simplicity of a few of these, taken almost at random from recent volumes of the papers just mentioned:
Two young girls, about twelve, are sitting upon a bench in a public garden. Two dandies walk past, who are dressed alike, and resemble one another. "Tell me, Fanny," says one of the girls, "are not those two gentlemen brothers?" This is the reply: "One of them is, I know for certain; but I am not quite sure about the other."
A strapping woman, sooty, wearing a man's hat, and carrying a ladder and brushes, is striding along the street. The explanation vouchsafed is the following: "The very eminent magistrate has determined to permit the widow of the meritorious chimney-sweep, Spazzicammino, to continue the business."
A silly-looking gentleman is seen conversing with a lady upon whom he has called, while a number of cats are playing about the room. "Why have you so many cats?" he asks. The lady replies: "Well, you see, my cook kept giving warning because I locked up the milk and meat, and so I got the cats as a pretext."
Two ladies are conversing. The elder says: "Why do you quarrel with your husband so often?" The younger replies: "Oh, you know the making-up is extremely entertaining, and getting good again is so lovely!"
Evolution of the Piano, according to Darwin. (Berlin, 1872.)
A scene in a cheap book-store. A young lady says to the clerk: "I want a Lovers' Letter-writer—a cheap one." "Here, miss?" "How much is it?" "Eighteen kreutzers." "That is too dear for me." "Oh, but I beg your pardon, miss, if you take the Letter-writer, you get Schiller's works thrown in; and if a young lady buys at this shop a tract upon potatoes, she gets the whole of Goethe into the bargain."
The steps of a church are exhibited, with a clergyman assisting an old woman down to the sidewalk. A long explanation is given, as follows: "Parson Friedel, a thoroughly good fellow, though not a particularly good preacher, goes on Sunday morning to church to edify his flock. On his arrival he sees an old dame trying in vain to get up the icy steps. 'Oh, sir,' she says, not recognizing the holy man, 'pray help me up.' He does so, and when they have reached the top she thanks him, and adds, 'Oblige me also, dear sir, by telling me who preaches to-day?' 'Parson Friedel,' he courteously replies. 'Oh, sir, then help me down again.' The parson, smiling, rejoins: 'Quite right; I wouldn't go in myself if I were not obliged to.'"
A very tall man is bending over to light his cigar at an exceedingly short man's cigar. "What!" says the short man, "you wonder that your light goes out so often? That is owing to the rarity of the atmosphere in the elevated regions in which your cigar moves."
A stable scene, in which figure a horse, an officer, and a horse-dealer. The officer says: "The horse I bought of you yesterday has a fault; he is lame in the off fore-leg." The dealer replies: "Ah! and do you call that a fault? I call it a misfortune."
A clergyman's study. Enter a very ill-favored pair, to whom the clergyman says: "So you wish to be married, do you? Well, have you maturely reflected upon it?" The man replies: "Yes, we have asked beforehand about how much it will cost."
A Corporal, who is about to be promoted, presents Himself before the Major.
"Can you read?" "At your service, major." "Can you write?" "At your service, major." "Can you cipher?" "At your service, major." "What are you in civil life?" "Doctor of philosophy and lecturer in the university."—Fliegende Blätter, Berlin, 1872.
A compartment of a railway carriage, in which are two passengers, one of whom has two little pigs under the seat, and the other a small curly lap-dog in his lap. Conductor (standing outside). "Have you a dog's ticket?" "No." "Then get one." "But my dog troubles no one." "That makes no difference." "But this countryman here has two pigs in the carriage." "No matter for that; we have a rule about dogs, but none for pigs."
A boat on a Swiss lake with a party about to lunch. A lady, in great alarm, says to the boatman: "Stop, for Heaven's sake, stop! You told the people, when we got in, that your boat would sink if it were heavier by half an ounce. But if these men eat all that, we shall go to the bottom for a certainty."
A restaurant scene. A customer, handing back to a waiter a plate of meat, says: "Waiter, this meat is so tough I can't chew it." Waiter. "Excuse me, I will bring you a sharp knife immediately."
An aged clergyman parting with a young soldier about to join the army, says: "Augustus, you now enter upon a military career. Take care of your health, and mind you lead a good life." Augustus. "Same to you, pastor."
A boy up a tree, and a gentleman standing under it. "I'll teach you to steal my plums, you scoundrel! I'll tell your father." "What do I care? My father steals himself." This picture is headed, "Good Fruit."
A family seated at dinner. Mother. "But, Elsie, naughty girl! what horrid manners you have! You eat only the cream, and leave the dumplings." Elsie. "Why, papa can eat them."
A man and woman of Jewish cast of countenance are seen at a pawnbroker's sale. Woman. "Well, what will you buy for mother's birthday?" Man. "A handsome dress, I think." Woman. "How unpractical you are! She can only live three or four years at most; and even in that short time a dress will be in rags. Let us buy for the dear old soul a pair of silver candlesticks. Then when she dies we shall have them back again."
Under the heading of "Cheap Illumination," we are presented with a picture of an Esquimau with a lighted wick held in his mouth, and the following explanation: "The Esquimaux, as is well known, live on the fat of the reindeer, the seal, and the whale. This suggested to the arctic traveler, Warnie, the idea of drawing a wick through the body of one of the natives, and in this way obtaining a brilliant train-oil lamp for the long winter nights."
A Bold Comparison. (Berlin, 1873.)
Pastor's Wife. "But half the cracknels are scorched to-day."
Cracknel Man. "So they are. But, you see, I have the same luck as the pastor: all his sermons do not turn out equally good."
Two noble ladies chatting over their tea: "Only think, my dear, we are obliged to discharge our man." "Why?" "Oh, he begins to be too familiar. What do you think? I saw him cleaning the boots, and I discovered, to my horror, that he had my husband's boots, my son's, and his own, all mixed together!"
A lady hurrying home from an approaching shower, dragging her little boy with her. Boy. "But, mother, why should we be so afraid of the thunder storm? Those hay-makers yonder don't care." Mother. "Child, they are poor people, who don't attract the lightning as we do, who always have gold and ready cash about us."
A scene in a police court, the magistrate questioning a witness: "You are a carpenter, are you not?" "I am." "You were at work in the vicinity of the place where the scuffle occurred?" "I was." "How far from the two combatants were you standing?" "Thirty-six feet and a half, Rhenish measure." "How can you speak so exactly?" "Because I measured it. I thought that most likely some fool would be asking about that at the trial."
These may suffice as examples of the average comic force of the German joke. A very few of the above—perhaps four or five in all—might have been accepted by the editors of Punch, with the requisite changes of scene and dialect. We must also bear in mind that the dialect counts for much in a comic scene, as we can easily perceive by changing a Yorkshire bumpkin's language in a comedy into London English. Half of the laugh-compelling power of some of the specimens given may lie in peculiarities of dialect and grammar of which no one but a native of the country can feel the force. A few of the more vivid and telling examples are given in the accompanying illustrations.
The glimpses of German life which the comic artists afford remind us that the children of men are of one family, the several branches of which do not differ from one another so much as we are apt to suppose. German fathers, too, as we see in these pictures, stand amazed at the quantity of property their daughters can carry about with them in the form of wearing apparel. A domestic scene exhibits a young lady putting the last fond touches to her toilet, while a clerk presents a long bill to the father of the family, who throws his hands aloft, and exclaims, "Oh, blessed God! Thou who clothest the lilies of the field, provide also for my daughter, at least during the Carnival!"
Strict Discipline in the Field—Major going the Rounds at Night.
Sentinel. "Who goes there? Halt!" (Major, not regarding the summons, the soldier fires, and misses.)
Major. "Three days in the guard-house for your bad shooting."
Germany, not less than England and America, laughs at "the modern mother," who dawdles over Goethe, and is "literary," and wears eyeglasses, while delegating to bottles and goats her peculiar duties. An extravagant burlesque of this form of self-indulgence presents to view a baby lying on its back upon a centre-table, its head upon a pillow, taking nourishment direct from a goat standing over it; the mother sitting near in a luxurious chair, reading. Enter the family doctor, who cries, aghast, "Why, what's this, baroness? I did not mean it in that way! A she-goat is not a wet-nurse." To which the baroness languidly replies, looking from her book, "Why not?"
And here is the German version of Punch's widely disseminated joke upon marriage: "If you are going to be married, my son, I will give you some good advice." "And what is it?" "Better not."
The Woman's Rights agitation gave rise to burlesques precisely similar in inane extravagance to those which appeared in England, America, and France. We have the "Students of the Future," a series representing buxom lasses in dashing bloomers, smoking, dissecting, fighting duels, and hunting. The young lady who has on her dissecting-table a bearded "subject" is leaning against it nonchalantly, drinking a pot of beer, and another young lady is using the pointed heel of her fashionable boot as a tobacco-stopper. Here, too, is the husband who comes home late, and whose wife will sit up for him.
The great servant-girl question is also up for discussion in Germany, after occupying womankind for three thousand years. Here is a group of servants talking together. "Yesterday I gave warning," says one. "Why?" asks another; "the wages are high, the food is good, and you have every Sunday out." The reply is: "Well, you must know, my Fritz don't like it. Mistress buys her wine at the wine-merchant's, where I get the bottles all sealed. Don't you see?"
Ahead of Time.
The aged and extremely absent-minded prince of a little territory visits the public institutions every year. On leaving the high school, he says to the teacher: "I am very much pleased with every thing, only the soup is a little too thin."
Teacher (aside to aid-de-camp). "What does his Highness mean by thin soup?"
Aid-de-camp. "It is only a slip. His Highness should have said that in the hospital."
In the same spirit, as every reader knows, the drawing-room judges the kitchen in other lands besides Germany, and is supported in its judgment by satiric artists who evolve preposterously impossible servants from the shallows of their own ignorance.
Rarely, indeed, does a German caricaturist presume to meddle with politics, and still more rarely does he do it with impunity. The Germans, with all their excellences, seem wanting in the spirit that has given us our turbulent, ill-organized freedom. Perhaps their beer has offered too ready and cheap a resource against the chafing resentments that tyranny excites; for a narcotized brain is indolently submissive to whatever is very difficult of remedy. Coffee and tobacco keep the Turk a slave. The wisest act of Louis Napoleon's usurpation was his giving a daily ration of tobacco to every soldier. Woe to despots when men cease to dull and pollute their brains with tobacco and alcohol! There will then be a speedy end put to the system that takes five millions of the élite of Europe from industry, and consigns them to the business of suppression and massacre. Whatever may be the cause, Germany has scarcely yet begun her apprenticeship to freedom; and, consequently, her public men lose the inestimable advantage of seeing their measures as the public sees them. Let us hope that the German people may be able to appropriate part of our experience, and so work their way to rational and orderly freedom without passing through the stage of ignorant suffrage and thief-politicians. Meanwhile there is no political caricature in Germany.
A Journeyman's Leave-taking.
"Hear me, all of you. You, and you, and you, and you! Good-bye, mistresses. I tell you freely to your faces, your bacon and greens are not to my taste. I am going to try my luck. I will march on."—Ludwig Richter, Leipsic, 1848.
As a set-off to this defect, I may mention again the absence from the German comic periodicals of the class of subjects which, at present, seems to be the sole inspiration of French art and French humor. It is evident that the Germans do not regard illicit love as the chief end of man. The reason of the superior decency of German satire is, probably, that German methods of education awaken the intelligence and store the mind with the food of thought. Indecency is the natural resource of a thoughtless mind, because the physical facts of our existence constitute a very large proportion of all the knowledge it possesses. Suppose those facts and the ideas growing directly out of them to be one hundred in number. The whole number of facts and ideas in an ignorant mind may not exceed two hundred; while in the intellect of a Goethe or a Lessing there may live and revolve twenty thousand. Convent education is probably the cause of French indecency, simply from its leaving the mind dull and the imagination active. Many Frenchmen must think bodily, or not think at all. This conjecture I hazard because I have observed in Protestant schools, professedly and distinctively religious, the same morbid tendency in the pupils that we notice in French art and drama. The French are right in not trusting their convent-bred girls out of sight. The convent-bred boys, who can not be so closely watched, show the untrustworthiness of moral principle which is not fortified by intelligent conviction. The Germans, from their better mental culture and greater variety of topics, are not reduced to the necessity of amusing themselves by "bodily wit."
As it is "Don Quixote" that has given most of us whatever insight into Spanish life and character we possess, we should naturally expect to find in the Spain of to-day abundant manifestations of satirical talent. But since the great age when such men as Cervantes could be formed, the intellect of Spain has suffered exhausting depletion, and the nation has in consequence long lain intellectually impotent, the natural prey of priests, dynasties, and harlots. The progress of a country depends upon the use it makes of its best men. Since Cervantes was born, in 1547, all the valuable men among the Moors and Jews, with a million of their countrymen, have been banished, carrying away with them precious arts, processes, instincts, aptitudes, and talents; to say nothing of the good that comes to a country of having upon its soil a variety of races and religions, each developing some excellencies of human nature which the others overlook or undervalue. In the same generation hundreds of the valiant men of Spain went down in the Armada, and thousands were wasted in America.
But these were not the fatal losses. These men could have been replaced, such is the bountiful fertility of nature. But, in those days, if a man was reared who possessed independence or force of mind, or had much mind of any kind, he was likely to become a Protestant; and, if he did, one of two calamitous fates awaited him, either of which made him useless to Spain: he either concealed his opinions, and thus stifled his nobler life, or else the Inquisition destroyed him. Never was such successful war waged upon the human mind as in Spain at that period, for every man who manifested any kind of mental superiority was either slain or neutralized. If he escaped the goldmines, the wars, and the Inquisition, there was still the Church to take him in and convert him into a priest.
Nor need we go as far as Spain to see the fatal damage done to communities by the absorption of promising youth into the priesthood. We have only to go to the French parts of Canada, and mark the difference between the torpid and hopeless villages there, and the vigorous, handsome towns of New England, New York, and Michigan, just over the border. The reason of this amazing contrast is that on our side of the line the natural leaders of the people found mills, factories, libraries, and schools; on the other side they enter convents and build churches; and the people, thus bereft of their natural chiefs, harness forlorn cows to crazy carts, and come down into Vermont and New Hampshire in harvest-time to get a little money to help them through the long Canadian winter. Thus, in Spain and Italy, the men who ought to serve the people, prey upon them, and the direct and chief reason why the northern nations of Europe surpass the southern is, that in the north the superior minds are turned to account, and in the south they have been entombed in the Church or paralyzed by titles of nobility.
After Sedan.
"Señor, we have brought to your Majesty this paroquet, which we found as we were going our rounds in camp."—From Gil Blas, Madrid, September, 1870.
Hence, in the country of Cervantes, in the native land of Gil Blas and Figaro, there is now little manifestation of their comic fertility and gayety of mind. A member of the American Legation obligingly writes from Madrid in 1875:
"I have questioned many persons here in regard to Spanish caricature, but have always received the same reply, namely, that pictorial caricature, political or other, has not existed in Spain till 1868. I have searched book-stores and book-stalls, and find nothing; nor have the venders been able to aid me. I found in a private library some Bibles and other religious books of the sixteenth century, in which were caricatures of the Pope and of similar subjects, but they were printed in Flanders, though in the Spanish language; and the art is Dutch. The pasquinades of Italy never prevailed in Spain. It is thought at our Legation here that there must have been caricature in Spain, from the writings of Spaniards being so full of satire and wit; but though the germ may have existed, I am inclined to think it was not developed till the dethronement of Isabel II. and the proclamation of the Republic broke down the barriers to the liberty, if not license, of the printing-press.
"Between 1868 and 1875 various papers were published here containing caricatures, copies of which are to be had, but at a premium. Until this period, I fancy the Inquisition, censorship, and other causes prevented any display of a spirit of caricature which may have existed. The real, untraveled Spanish mind has little idea of true wit: of satire and burlesque, yes; of inoffensive joke or pun, none. There is no Spanish word for pun; that for joke is broma, taken from the Spanish name of the Teredo navalis, or wood-borer, so fatal to vessels, and really means an annoying, or practical, joke. I have some samples of caricature, published during the period to which I refer, many of which, to one who is familiar with the politics, manners, and customs in Spain at the time, are equal in point, if not in execution, to any thing in Punch. They were, for the greater part, designed by Ortego, but are of the English or French style, and have little Spanish individuality."
To the Bull-fight.
"There they go, all resolved to yell Bungler! at the picador, whether he does his part well or ill. It's all they know how to do."—From El Mundo Cómico, Madrid, 1873.
A great mass of the comic illustrated series and periodicals alluded to by my attentive correspondent accompanied his letter, and justify its statements. The "French style" is indeed most apparent in them, as the reader shall see. The "Comic Almanac" for 1875 ("Almanaque Cómico" para 1875), published at Madrid, and profusely illustrated, is entirely in the French style. Many of the pictures have every thing of Gavarni except his genius. Here are some that catch the eye in running over its shabby, ill-printed pages:
Picture of an ill-favored father contemplating a worse-favored boy, aged about six years. Father speaks: "It is very astonishing! The more this son of mine grows, the more he looks like my friend Ramon."
A Delegation of Birds of Prey, presenting Thanks to the Authors of the Bountiful Carnage provided for the Late Festival. (From Gil Blas, Madrid, September, 1870.)
Picture of a gentleman in evening dress, flirting familiarly with a dancing-girl behind the scenes of a theatre. She says: "If only your intentions were good!" To which he replies by asking: "And what do you call good intentions?" She casts down her eyes and stammers: "To promise—to keep your word."
Picture of a young lady at the desk of a public writer, to whom she says: "Make the sweetest little verse to tell him that I hope to see him next Sunday at the gate of the Alcalá, near the first swing."
Picture of a husband and wife, both in exuberant health. She. "You grow worse and worse; and sea-bathing is so good for you!" He. "And you?" She. "I am well; but I shall go with you to take care of you, dear."
Picture of a very fashionably dressed lady and little girl, to whom enters, hat and cane in hand, a gentleman, who says to the child: "Do you not remember me, little Ruby?" She replies: "Ah, yes! You are the first papa that used to come to our house a good while ago, and you always brought me caramels."
Picture of two young ladies in conversation. One of them says: "When he looks at me, I lower my eyes. When he presses my hand, I blush. And if he kisses me, I call to mamma, and the poor fellow believes it, and dares go no further."
Picture of a woman in a bath-tub, to whom enters a man presenting a bill. She says: "Take a seat, for I am about to rise from the bath, and then we can settle that account."
"Child, you will take cold."
"I take cold? But how well that overcoat fits him!"—From El Mundo Cómico, Madrid, 1873.
Picture of nurse, infant, and father. The father says: "Tell me, nurse; every body says it looks like me, but I think it takes after its mother more." The nurse replies: "When it laughs, yes; but when it frowns, it looks like you atrociously."
Picture of a "fast-looking" woman and the janitor of a lodging-house. He says: "You wish to see the landlord? I think he does not mean to have ladies in his house who are alone." She replies: "I am never alone."
Picture of young lady in bed, to whom a servant holds up an elegant bonnet, and says: "Tell me, since you are ill, and can not go to the ball, will you lend this to your affectionate and faithful servant, since I give you my word not to injure it?"
Picture of husband and wife at home, she taking out a note that had been concealed in a handkerchief. He speaks: "A woman who deceives her husband deserves no pity." She replies: "But if she does not deceive her husband, whom is she to deceive?"
Picture of the manager of a theatre in his office, to whom enters a dramatic author. Author: "I have called to know if you have read my play." Manager: "Not yet. It is numbered, in the list of plays received, 792; so that for this year—" Author: "No, sir; nor for that which is to come either."
This will suffice for the "Comic Almanac." The Comic World (El Mundo Cómico), which next invites attention, is a weekly paper published at Madrid during the last four years. This work, also, has much in common with the wicked world of Paris, as with the wicked world of all countries where the priest feeds the imagination and starves the intellect. This reveling in the illicit and the indecent, which so astonishes us in the popular literature of Catholic countries, is merely a sign of impoverished mind, which is obliged to revolve ceaselessly about the physical facts of our existence, because it is acquainted with so few other facts.
The first number of the Comic World presents a colored engraving of a Spanish beauty, attired in the last extremity of the fashion, bonnetless, fan in hand, with high-heeled boots, and a blending of French and Spanish in her make-up, walking in the street unattended. The picture is headed: "In Quest of the Unknown."
The next picture shows that Spain, too, has its savings-banks which do not save. Two strolling musicians, clothed in rags, are exhibited, one of whom says to the other: "A pretty situation! While men drive by in a coach after robbing us of our savings deposited in their banks, we ask alms of the robbers!"
Inconvenience of the New Collar.
"How, my Adela, can you ask me to whisper in your ear when you have put that cover over it?"—From El Mundo Cómico, Madrid, 1873.
There is a pair of pictures, one called "The Cocks," and the other "The Pullets." The Cocks are three very young Spanish dandies, with dawning mustaches, extremely thin canes, and all the other puppyisms. The Pullets are three young ladies of similar age and taste. As they pass in the street, one of the Cocks says to his companions: "Do you see how the tallest one blushes?" The reply is: "Yes; when she sees me." At the same moment the Pullets exchange whispers. "How fast you go!" says one. "Don't speak!" says another. "The dark-complexioned one is he whom we saw at the theatre." "Yes, I remember; the one in the box." In these pictures, as in most other Spanish caricatures, the men are meagre and disagreeable-looking, but the ladies are plump and attractive.
A "domestic scene" follows, which must be peculiar to Spain, one would think. A gay young husband, on leaving home in the evening, is addressed by his wife, who has a hand in his waistcoat-pocket: "You carry away twelve dollars and three shillings. We will see what extraordinary expense you incur to-night."
At Madrid, as at other capitals of Europe, the Englishman is an object of interest. Ladies seem to consider him a desirable match, and men make him the hero of extravagant anecdotes. There is a table-d'hôte picture in El Mundo Cómico, presenting a row of people at an advanced stage of dinner, when the guests become interesting to one another. "Have you seen the colonel?" asks a chaperon of the young lady by her side. The damsel, looking her demurest, says: "Do not distract me; the Englishman is looking at me." Other pictures indicate that the ladies of Madrid are accustomed to look upon Englishmen as worth posing for.
The Comic World aims a vilely executed caricature at the ghost of Hamlet's father, who is represented in the usual armor. The words signify: "All I ask is, did that ancient race take their afternoon nap in cuirass and helmet?" From which we may at least infer that "El Príncipe Hamlet" is a familiar personage to the inhabitants of Madrid.
Sufferings endured by a Prisoner of War. (From Gil Blas, Madrid, September, 1870.)
Among the numerous colored engravings which reflect upon, or, rather glorify, the frailty of women is one which can with difficulty be understood by Protestants. A girl is about to go to bed, and is saying a prayer beginning, "With God I lie down, with God I rise, with the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost!" The joke does not appear at the first glance, for there is no one else in the bedroom, unless there is some one in the curtained bed. We discover, at length, lying near her feet, a pair of man's boots!
Nothing is sacred to these savage caricaturists of the French school. Another colored picture in El Mundo Cómico is called "Absence," and is designed to exhibit the sorrow of a woman at the absence of her lover in the wars. She says: "Poor Louis! I am here alone, forsaken, and he is pursuing the insurgents in the mountains. Does he remember me?" The innocent reader may well ask, What is the comedy of the situation? The woman in this scene is sitting on the edge of her bed, nearly naked, taking off her earrings, with other finery of her trade lying about on the table and the floor.
After running through a volume of this periodical, we are prepared to believe the descriptions given of society in the Spanish capital by the correspondent of the London Times during the early months of Alfonso's "reign." Speaking of a monstrous scandal inculpating the king, he wrote: "In a profligate, frivolous, and gossiping capital like Madrid, where every one seems intent upon political plotting, debauchery, and idleness, there is no scandal, no invention of malice too gross and improbable for acceptance, provided those attacked are well known. The higher his or her rank, the greater is the cynical satisfaction with which the tale of depravity is retailed by the newsmongers in café, tertulia, and club."
Another comic weekly published at Madrid is called Gil Blas, Periódico Satírico. This is by far the least bad of the comic papers recently attempted in Spain. Many of its subjects are drawn from the politics of the period, and some of them appear to be very happily treated. The sorry adventures of Louis Napoleon and his son in the war between France and Prussia are presented with much comic effect. Queen Isabel and her hopeful boy figure also in many sketches, which were doubtless amusing to the people of Madrid when they appeared. The Duc de Montpensier and other possible candidates for the throne are portrayed in situations and circumstances not to be fully understood at this distance from the time and scene.
The Spanish caricatures given in this chapter, whatever the reader may think of them, were selected from about a thousand specimens; and if they are not the very best of the thousand, they are at least the best of those which can be appreciated by us.
Cuba had its comic periodical during the brief ascendency of liberal ideas in 1874. A Cuban letter of that year chronicles its suspension: "The comic weekly newspaper, Juan Palonio, has met its death-blow by an order of suspension for a month, and a strong hint to the director, Don Juan Ortega, that a trip to the Peninsula would be of benefit to his health. The immediate cause of this order was a cartoon, representing the arms of the captain-general wielding a broom, marked 'extraordinary powers,' and sweeping away ignorance, the insurrection, etc. There was nothing, in fact, to take umbrage at; but the cartoon served as a pretext to kill the paper, which was rather too republican in tone. The Government censor was removed from his position for the same reason, and a new one appointed."
In those countries long debauched by superstition, comic art has little chance; for if tyranny does not kill it, a dissolute public degrades it into a means of pollution.
As soon as comic art in Italy is mentioned, we think of Pasquino, the merry Roman tailor, whose name has enriched all the languages of Europe with an effective word. Many men whose names have been put to a similar use have, notwithstanding, been completely forgotten; but Pasquino, after having been the occasion of pasquinades for four centuries, is still freshly remembered, and travelers tell his story over again to their readers.
Pasquino was the fashionable tailor at Rome about the time when the discovery of America was a recent piece of news. In his shop, as tradition reports, bishops, courtiers, nobles, literary men, were wont to meet to order their clothes, and retail the scandal of the city. The master of the shop, a wit himself, and the daily receptacle of others' wit, uttered frequent epigrams upon conspicuous persons, which passed from mouth to mouth, as such things will in an idle and luxurious community. Whatever piece of witty malice was afloat in the town came to be attributed to Pasquino; and men who had more wit than courage attributed to him the satire they dared not claim.
Catholics who have seen the inside of Roman life, who have been domiciled with bishops and cardinals, report that the magnates of Rome, to this day, associate in the informal manner in which we should suppose they did four centuries ago, from the traditions of Pasquino and his sayings. The Pope sends papers of bonbons to the Sisters who have charge of infant schools, and shares among the cardinals the delicacies and interesting objects which are continually sent to him. Upon hearing their accounts of the easy familiarities and light tone of the higher ecclesiastical society of recent times, we can the better understand the traditions that have come down to us of Pasquino and his shop full of highnesses and eminences.
Pasquino, like the "fellow of infinite jest" upon whose skull Hamlet moralized in the church-yard, died, and was buried. Soon after his death it became necessary to dig up an ancient statue half sunk in the ground of his street; and, to get it out of the way, it was set up close to his shop. "Pasquino has come back," said some one. Rome accepted the jest, and thus the statue acquired the name of Pasquino, which it retains to the present day. Soon it became a custom to stick to it any epigram or satirical verse the author of which desired to be unknown. So many of these sharp sayings were aimed at the ecclesiastical lords of Rome, that one of the popes was on the point of having the statue thrown into the river, just as modern tyrants think to silence criticism by suppressing the periodical in which it appears. Pasquino, properly enough, was saved by an epigram.
"Do not throw Pasquino into the Tiber," said the Spanish embassador, "lest he should teach all the frogs in the river to croak pasquinades."
We can not wonder that the popes should have objected to Pasquino's biting tongue, if the specimens of his wit which are given by Mr. Story[38] fairly represent him. There was a volume of six hundred and thirty-seven pages of epigrams and satires, published in 1544, claiming to be pasquinades, many of which doubtless were such. Here is one upon the infamous pope, Alexander Sextus:
"Sextus Tarquinius, Sextus Nero—this also is Sextus.
Always under the Sextuses Rome has been ruined."
After the sudden death of Pope Leo X., two Latin lines to the following effect were found upon Pasquino:
"If you desire to hear why at his last hour Leo
Could not the sacraments take, know he had sold them."
The allusion is to Leo's unscrupulous use of every means within his power of raising money.
When Clement VII., after the sack of Rome, was held a prisoner, Pasquino had this:
"Papa non potest errare."
This sentence ordinarily means that the pope can not err; but the verb errare signifies also to wander, to stroll; so that the line was a sneer both at the pope's confinement and his claim to infallibility.
One of Pasquino's hardest hits was called forth by the grasping measures of Pius VI.:
"Three jaws had Cerberus, and three mouths as well,
Which barked into the blackest deeps of hell.
Three hungry mouths have you; ay, even four;
None of them bark, but all of them devour."
There was a capital one, too, and a just, upon the institution of the Legion of Honor in France by Napoleon Bonaparte, not long after he had stolen several hundred precious works of art and manuscripts from the Roman States.
"In times less pleasant and more fierce, of old,
The thieves were hung upon the cross, we're told.
In times less fierce, more pleasant, like to-day,
Crosses are hung upon the thieves, they say."
Thus for centuries have Pasquino and his rival, Marfario, an exhumed river-god, given occasional expression to the pent-up wrath of Italy at the spoliation of their beautiful country. Mr. Story reports a pasquinade which appeared but a very few years since, when all the world was longing to hear of the death of Ferdinand II. of Naples, who, under the name of King Bomba, was so deeply execrated by Italians. Pasquino supposes a traveler just arrived from Naples, and asks him what he has seen there, when the following conversation takes place:
"I have seen a tumor [tumore]." "A tumor? But what is a tumor?" "For answer, take away the t." "Ah! a humor [umore]. But is this humor dangerous?" "Take away the u." "He dies! what a pity! But when? Shortly?" "Take away the m." "Hours! In a few hours! But who, then, has this humor?" "Take away the o." "King! The king! I am delighted. But, then, where will he go?" "Take away the r." "E-e-e-h!"
King Bomba's Ultimatum to Sicily. (From Il Don Pirlone, Rome, December, 1848.)
Could there be any thing better than a pasquinade which appeared during the conference upon Italian affairs at Zürich between the representatives of Austria, Italy, and France? Pasquino enters the chamber, where he holds the following conversation with the plenipotentiaries:
"Do you speak French?" "No." "Do you speak German?" "No." "Do you speak Italian?" "No." "What language do you speak?" "Latin." "And what have you got to say in Latin?" "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, for ever and ever. Amen."
Happily, Pasquino was not a prophet, and the affairs of Italy are not as they were and had been during so many ages of despair.
From these specimens of Italian satire we should expect to find the people of Italy effective with the satirical pencil also. The spirit of caricature is in them, but the opportunities for its exercise and exhibition have been few and far between. As in Spain there was an exhaustive depletion of intellectual force, so in Italy the human mind, during late centuries, has been crushed under a dead weight of priests. Professor Charles Eliot Norton, in his "Travel and Study in Italy," tells us that Roman artists can not now so much as copy well the masterpieces by which they are surrounded.
"The utter sterility," he says, "and impotence of mind which have long been and are still conspicuous at Rome, the deadness of the Roman imagination, the absence of all intellectual energy in literature and in art, are the necessary result of the political and moral servitude under which the Romans exist. Where the exercise of the privileges of thought is dangerous, the power of expression soon ceases. For a time—as during the seventeenth century in Italy—the external semblance of originality may remain, and mechanical facility of execution may conceal the absence of real life; but by degrees the very semblance disappears, and facility of execution degenerates into a mere trick of the hand. The Roman artists of the present time have not, in general, the capacity even of good copyists. They can mix colors and can polish marble, but they are neither painters nor sculptors."
And yet (as the same author remarks) with the first breath of freedom the dormant capacity of the Italians awakes. In Italy, as in France, Spain, and Cuba, caricature dies when freedom is gone, and lives again as soon as the oppressor is removed. In 1848, when the Revolution had gained ascendency in Rome, a satirical paper appeared, called Il Don Pirlone, published weekly, and illustrated by strong, though rudely executed, caricatures. Don Pirlone was the name of a familiar character in Italian comedy and farce. The pictures in this work abundantly justify the encomiums of Professor Norton and Mr. Story, who both pronounce them to be full of spirit and vigor, proving that the satiric fire of the early pasquinades is not extinguished.
He has begun the Service with Mass, and completed it with Bombs. (From Il Don Pirlone, Rome, June 15th, 1849.)
Among the specimens given in this chapter, the reader will not fail to notice the one that made its appearance in June, 1849, when thirty thousand French troops, under the command of General Oudinot, were about to replace upon the heart and brain of Rome the cumbrous, fantastic Medicine-man of Christendom. This picture, slight as is the impression which it makes upon us, who can safely smile at the medicine-men of all climes and tribes, was most eagerly scanned by the outraged people of Rome, to whom the return of the Medicine-man boded another twenty years of asphyxia. Don Pirlone was obliged to print extra editions to supply the demand. The picture exhibits the interior of a church, and the Pope celebrating mass; General Oudinot assists him, kneeling at the steps of the altar and holding up the pontifical robes. The bell used at the mass is in the form of an imperial crown. Surrounding the altar, a crowd of military officers are seen, and behind them a row of bayonets. The candles on the altar are in the form of bayonets. The time chosen by the artist is the supreme moment of the mass, when the celebrant elevates the host. The image of Christ on the crucifix has withdrawn its arms from the cross-bars, and covered its face with its hands, as if to shut the desecration from its sight. Lightning darts from the cross, and a hissing serpent issues from the wine-cup. On the sole of one of General Oudinot's boots are the words, Articolo V. della Constituzione (Article V. of the Constitution, i. e., the French Constitution), which declared that "the French Republic never employs its forces against the liberty of any people." Underneath this fine caricature was printed: "He began the service with the mass, and completed it with bombs."
"But, dear Mr. Undertaker, are you so perfectly sure that she is dead?"—From Il Don Pirlone, Rome, July, 1849.
Two weeks more of life were vouchsafed to Il Don Pirlone after the publication of this caricature. On July 2d, 1849, the French army marched into Rome, and the paper appeared no more. The last number contained an engraving of Liberty, a woman lying dead upon the earth, with a cock on a neighboring dunghill crowing, and a French general covering over the prostrate body. Under the picture was printed: "But, dear Mr. Undertaker, are you so perfectly sure that she is dead?"
These were certainly vigorous specimens of satiric art, and increase both our wonder and our regret at the mental degradation of the beautiful countries of Southern Europe. They increase our wonder, I say, because the ascendency of priests in a nation is more an effect than a cause of degeneracy. When the canker-worm takes possession of a New England orchard, and devours every germ and green leaf, covering all the trees with loathsome blight, it is not because the canker-worm there is more vigorous or deadly than on the next farm, but because the soil of the blasted orchard is wanting in some ingredient or condition needful for the vigorous life of fruit-trees. It is not priests, beggars, and banditti that make Mexico, Peru, Italy, and Spain what we find them. Priests, beggars, and banditti are but the vermin whose natural prey is a low moral and mental life; and hence the wonder that Italy, so long a prey to such, should still produce originating minds.
Other caricatures in Il Don Pirlone were remarkable. The alliance between Austria and France in May, 1849, suggested a picture called "A Secret Marriage," which was also a church scene, the altar bearing the words "Ad minorem Dei gloriam" ("To the lesser glory of God"), a parody of the words adopted by the Inquisition, "Ad majorem Dei gloriam." The Pope is marrying the bridal pair, who kneel at a desk—the groom, a French officer with a cock's head, and for a crest an imperial crown; the bride, a woman with long robes, and on her head the Austrian double eagle. Upon the desk are an axe, a whip, a skull, and crossbones.
Bomba at Supper. Effect of Impressions. (From Il Don Pirlone, Rome, May, 1849.)
Mr. Norton describes another, called the "Wandering Jew." "Flying to the verge of Europe, where the Atlantic washes the shores of Portugal, is seen the tall figure of the unhappy Carlo Alberto, driven by skeleton ghosts, over whose heads shine stars with the dates 1821, 1831, 1848. In the midst of the sky, before the fugitive, are the flaming words 'A Carignano Maledizione Eterna!' ('Cursed be Carignano forever!') to which a hand, issuing from the clouds, points with extended forefinger. The grim and threatening skeletons, the ghosts of those whom Carignano had betrayed, the tormented look of the flying king, the malediction in the heavens, the solitude of the earth and the sea, display a concentrated power of imagination rare in art."
The ruling theme of these powerful sketches is the foul union of priest and king for the common purpose of spoiling fair Italy. The moral of the work might be summed up in the remark of an Italian soldier whom Mr. Norton met one day near Rome. "Are the roads quiet now?" asked the American traveler. "Ah, excellency," replied the man, "the poor must live, and the winter is hard, and there is no work!" "But how was the harvest?" "Small enough, signore! There is no grain at Tivoli, and no wine; and as for the olives, a thousand trees have not given the worth of a bajocco." "And what does the Government do for the poor?" "Nothing, nothing at all." "And the priests?" "Eh! They live well, always well; they have a good time in this world—but?"
"Such is the Love of Kings." (From Il Don Pirlone, Rome, 1849.)
One striking picture in Il Don Pirlone represents Italy in the form of a huge military boot lying prostrate on the earth, with Liberty half astride of it, holding a broom. She has just knocked off the boot a French general, who lies on the ground with his hat at some distance from him, and she has raised her broom to give a second blow. But at that critical moment, the Pope thrusts his hands from a cloud, seizes the broom, and holds it back. Inside the boot is seen ambushed a cardinal with two long daggers, waiting to strike Liberty to the heart when she shall be disarmed. Underneath is printed: "Impediments to Liberty."
In a similar spirit was conceived a picture called "A Modern Synod," which reflected upon the diplomatic conference in Belgium on Italian affairs between the representatives of Austria, France, and England. There sits Italy in the council-chamber, bound and naked to the waist, for the scourge. At the table are seated, Austria, with head of double eagle; France, with a cock's head and crest, but a woman's bosom and extremely low-necked dress; and England, with a head compounded of unicorn and donkey. Underneath the table are the Pope and King Bomba, with hidden scourges, only waiting for the conference to end to resume their congenial task of lashing helpless Italy.
Mr. Punch.
A terrific picture is one representing the Pope with a scourge in his hand, riding high in the air over Rome, mounted upon a hideous flying dragon with four heads. One of the heads is Austria's double eagle; another, the Gallic cock; the third, Spain; the fourth, Bomba. The papal crown is carried in the coil of the monster's forked tail. Under the picture are words signifying "Such is the love of kings!"
Imagine endless variations upon this theme in Il Don Pirlone, executed invariably with force, and sometimes with a power that, even at this distance of time, rouses the soul.
Laying aside the caricatures of the Revolution, of which considerable volumes have been collected, I may say a word or two of the comic entertainment that has now become universal, Punch, which, if Italy did not originate it, received there its modern form and character. Punch is now exhibited daily in every civilized and semi-civilized land or earth—in China, Siam, India, Japan, Tartary, Russia, Egypt, everywhere. A New York traveler, well known both for the extent of his journeys and for the excellent use he has made of them, tells me that he saw, not long ago, a performance of Punch at Cairo, in a tent, in Arabic, a small coin being charged for admission. The people entered with a grave demeanor, sat in rows upon the sand, listened to the dialogue without a smile, and at the close filed out in silence, as if from a solemnity. The performance was similar to that with which we are acquainted. The American reader, however, may not be very familiar with the exploits of Punch, for he has made his way slowly in the New World, and was rarely, if ever, seen here until within the last ten years.
Much second-hand erudition could be adduced to show that Punch, besides being universal, dates back to remote antiquity. The bronze figure could be mentioned which was found at Herculaneum some years ago, with the Punchian nose and chin; as well as a drawing on the wall of a guard-house at Pompeii, in which there is a figure costumed like Punch. Even the name Punch, which some derive from Paunch, is supposed by others to be a corruption of the first name of Pontius Pilate. The weight of probability favors the conjecture that Punch really did originate in India, at least three thousand years ago, and came down, through other Oriental lands, to Greece, part of the stock of traditions that gather about Bacchus and his comic audacities—jovial and impudent Vice triumphant over unskillful Virtue. Punch is a brother of Don Juan, except that Punch is victorious to the very end; and the fable of Don Juan is among the oldest of human imaginings.
Return of the Pope to Rome. (From Il Don Pirlone, Rome, 1849.)
It is agreed, however, that the Punch of modern European streets is Neapolitan; and even to this day, as travelers report, nowhere in the world is the drama of Punch given with such force of drollery as in Naples. What Mr. D'Israeli, in the "Curiosities of Literature," where much Punch learning may be found, says of the histrionic ability of the Italian people, has been often confirmed since his day. He adds an incident:
"Perhaps there never was an Italian in a foreign country, however deep in trouble, but would drop all remembrance of his sorrows should one of his countrymen present himself with the paraphernalia of Punch at the corner of a street. I was acquainted with an Italian, a philosopher and a man of fortune, residing in England, who found so lively a pleasure in performing Punchinello's little comedy, that, for this purpose, with considerable expense and curiosity, he had his wooden company, in all their costume, sent over from his native place. The shrill squeak of the tin whistle had the same comic effect on him as the notes of the ranz-des-vaches have in awakening the tenderness of domestic emotion in the wandering Swiss. The national genius is dramatic."
Through the joint labors of Mr. George Cruikshank and Mr. Payne Collier, we now know exactly what the Punchian drama is, as performed by the best artists. Mr. Cruikshank explains the truly English process by which this valuable information was obtained:
"Having been engaged by Mr. Prowett, the publisher, to give the various scenes represented in the street performances of Punch and Judy, I obtained the address of the proprietor and performer of that popular exhibition. He was an elderly Italian, of the name of Piccini, whom I remembered from boyhood, and he lived at a low public-house, the sign of 'The King's Arms,' in the 'Coal-yard,' Drury Lane. Having made arrangements for a 'morning performance,' one of the window-frames on the first floor of the public-house was taken out, and the stand, or Punch's theatre, was hauled into the 'Club-room.' Mr. Payne Collier (who was to write the description), the publisher, and myself, formed the audience; and as the performance went on, I stopped it at the most interesting parts to sketch the figures, while Mr. Collier noted down the dialogue; and thus the whole is a faithful copy and description of the various scenes represented by this Italian."
The drama thus obtained, which has since been published with Mr. Cruikshank's illustrations, must at least be pronounced the most popular of all dramatic entertainments past or present. It is now in the thirtieth century of its "run;" and even the modern Italian version dates back to the year 1600. It is a rough, wild caricature of human life.
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.
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.
The Threatened Invasion of England, 1804. (Gillray.)
(The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver. Scene—Gulliver manœuvring 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."
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.
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.
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
.
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,
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
only elicited
silent smiles.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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 minutiæ 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.
The Boy who chalked up "No Popery!" and then ran away!—Lord John Russell and the Bill for Preventing the Assumption of Ecclesiastical Titles by Roman Catholics. (John Leech, in Punch.)
Explanation by Earl Russell in 1874: "The object of that bill was merely to assert the supremacy of the Crown. It was never intended to prosecute.... Accordingly a very clever artist represented me in a caricature as a boy who had chalked up 'No Popery' upon a wall, and then ran away. This was a very fair joke.... When my object had been gained, I had no objection to the repeal of the bill."—Recollections and Suggestions, p. 210.
One happy consequence of the new taste was the publication of Punch, which has been ever since the chief vehicle of caricature in England. As long as caricature was a thing of the shop-windows only, its power was restricted within narrow limits. Since the founding of Punch, in 1841, about two years after the conclusion of the "Pickwick Papers," caricature has become an element in periodical literature, from which it will perhaps never again be separated. And it is the pictures in this celebrated paper which have prolonged its life to this day. It owes its success chiefly to artists. There was and is an error in the scheme of the work which would have been speedily fatal to it but for the ever-welcome pictures of Richard Doyle, John Leech, John Tenniel, Du Maurier, and their companions.
John Leech.
One of the rarest products of the human mind is a joke so good that it remains good when the occasion that gave rise to it is past. Probably the entire weekly harvest of wit and humor gathered from the whole earth would not fill a number of Punch with "good things;" and if it did, no one could enjoy so many all at once, and the surfeit would sicken and disgust. The mere sitting-down for the purpose of being funny in a certain number of lines or pages is death to the comic powers; and hence it is that a periodical to which nearly the whole humorous talent of England has contributed is sometimes dull in its reading, and we wonder if there can be in any quarter of the globe a person so bereft of the means of entertainment as to get quite through one number. Once or twice a year, however, Punch originates a joke which goes round the world, and remains part of the common stock of that countless host who are indebted to their memory for their jests.
But the pictures are almost always amusing, and often delightful. The artists have the whole scene of human life, public and private, to draw from, and they are able by their pencils to vividly reproduce the occasions that gave birth to their jokes.
Preparatory School for Young Ladies. (John Leech, "Follies of the Year," London, 1852.)
In looking over the long series of political caricatures by Leech and Tenniel, which now go back thirty-three years, we are struck, first of all, by the simplicity of the means which they usually employ for giving a comic aspect to the political situation. They reduce cabinet ministers and other dignitaries many degrees in the social scale, exhibiting them as footmen, as boys, as policemen, as nurses, as circus performers, so that a certain comic effect is produced, even if the joke should go no further. Of late years Mr. Tenniel has often reversed this device with fine effect by raising mundane personages to celestial rank, and investing them with a something more than a travesty of grandeur. It is remarkable how unfailing these simple devices are to amuse. Whether Mr. Leech presents us with Earl Russell as a small foot-boy covered with buttons, or Mr. Tenniel endows Queen Victoria with the majestic mien of Minerva, the public is well pleased, and desires nothing additional but a few apt words explanatory of the situation. But, simple as these devices may be, it is only a rarely gifted artist that can use them with effect. Between the sublime and the ridiculous there is a whole step; but in comic art there is but a hair's-breadth between the happy and the flat.
Lord Brougham was supposed to be courting the conservatives when Leech began to caricature. The superserviceable zeal of the ex-chancellor was hit very happily in a circus scene, in which the Duke of Wellington figures as the ring-master, Brougham as the clown, and Sir Robert Peel as the rider. The clown says to the ring-master, "Now, Mr. Wellington, is there any thing I can run for to fetch—for to come—for to go—for to carry—for to bring—for to take?" etc. In another picture the same uneasy spirit, restive under his titled and pensioned nothingness, appears as "Henry asking for more." Again we have him dancing with the Wool-sack, which is explained by the words, "The Polka, a new Dance, introducing the old Double Shuffle." And again we see him in a tap-room, smoking a pipe, with a pot of beer on the table, looking on with complacency while Mr. Roebuck bullies an Irish member. Brougham says, "Go it, my little Roebuck! Bless his little heart! I taught him to bounce like that."
The Quarrel.—England and France. (John Leech, 1845.)
Master Wellington. "You're too good a judge to hit me, you are!"
Master Joinville. "Am I?"
Master Wellington. "Yes, you are."
Master Joinville. "Oh, am I?"
Master Wellington. "Yes, you are."
Master Joinville. "Ha!"
Master Wellington. "Ha!"
[Moral—And they don't fight, after all.
Russell, Peel, Wellington, O'Connell, and Louis Philippe were other personages whom Mr. Punch often caricatured at that period of his existence, and he generally presented them in a manner that still coincides with public feeling in England, and was probably not disagreeable to the men themselves at the time. One of Leech's hits was a picture designed to ridicule certain utterances of the Prince de Joinville concerning the possible invasion of England in 1845, when some irritating conduct of the French ministry had been met by Wellington with good temper and firmness. The prince, as a boy, is "squaring off," with a great show of fight, at the duke, who stands with his hands in his pockets, not defiant, but serene and watchful. This picture is perfectly in the English taste. Leech liked to show great Britannia as infinitely able to fight, and not so very unwilling, but firmly resolved not to do so unless compelled by honor or necessity.
In these sixty-nine volumes of Punch there is much of the history of our time which words alone could not have preserved. We can trace in them the progress of ideas, of measures, and of men. The changes in public feeling are exhibited which enabled Cobden and Peel to strike from British industry the gilt fetters of protection, for Punch is only another name for Public Opinion. These pictures have a particular interest for us, since we are to travel the same road in due time, and thus, at length, give Great Britain a rival in the markets of the world. Nothing could be better than Mr. Leech's picture showing Sir Robert Peel as the "Deaf Postilion." In a debate on the Corn Laws he had said, "I shall still pursue steadily that course which my conscience tells me I should take; let you and those opposite pursue what course you think right." The picture shows us a post-chaise, the body of which has become detached from the fore-wheels—a mishap which the deaf postilion does not discover, but goes trotting along as though his horses were still drawing the load. The chaise, named Protection, is occupied by Tory lords, who shout in vain to the deaf postilion. Again, we have Disraeli as a viper biting the file, Sir Robert. Leech continued his effective support of the movement until the victory was won, when he designed a monument to the victor, consisting of a pyramid of large cheap loaves of bread crowned by the name of Peel.
The Puseyite imbecility was as effectively satirized by Leech in 1849 as the ritualistic imitation has recently been by Tenniel. American slavery came in for just rebuke. As a retort to "some bunkum" in the American press in 1848, Mr. Leech drew a picture of Liberty lashing a negro, while Jonathan, with rifle on his arm, cigar in his mouth, and bottle at his side, says, "Oh, ain't we a deal better than other folks! I guess we're a most a splendid example to them thunderin' old monarchies." The language is wrong, of course; no American ever said "a deal better." English attempts at American slang are always incorrect. But the satire was deserved. Leech was far from sparing his own country. Some readers must remember the pair of pictures by Leech, in 1849, entitled "Pin-money" and "Needle-money," one exhibiting a young lady's boudoir filled with luxurious and costly objects, and the other a poor needle-woman in her garret of desolation, sewing by the light of a solitary candle upon a shirt for which she is to receive three half-pence. In a similar spirit was conceived a picture presenting two objects often seen in agricultural fairs in England—a "Prize Peasant" and a "Prize Pig:" the first rewarded for sixty years of virtuous toil by a prize of two guineas, the owner of the fat pig being recompensed by an award of three guineas.
Toward Louis Napoleon Punch gradually relented. At first Mr. Leech gave just and strong expression to the world's contempt for that unparalleled charlatan; but as he became powerful, and seemed to be useful to Great Britain, Punch treated him with an approach to respect. A similar change toward Mr. Disraeli is observable. Seldom during the first fifteen years of his public life was he presented in a favorable light. Upon his retirement from office in 1853, Leech satirized his malevolent attacks upon the new ministry very happily by a picture in which he appears as a crossing-sweeper spattering mud upon Lord Russell and his colleagues. "Won't give me any thing, won't you?" says the sweeper: "then take that!" Nor did the admirable Leech fail to mark the public sense of Disraeli's silence during the long debates upon the bill giving to English Jews some of the rights of citizenship. In his whole public career there is nothing harder to forgive than that ignoble and unnecessary abstinence. During the last few years Mr. Disraeli has won by sheer persistence a certain solidity of position in English politics, and Punch pays him the respect due to a person who represents a powerful and patriotic party.
One quality of the Punch caricatures is worthy of particular regard: they are rarely severe, and never scurrilous. The men for whom Mr. Leech entertained an antipathy, such as O'Connell, O'Brien, Brougham, and others, were usually treated in a manner that could not have painfully wounded their self-love. We observe even in the more incisive works of Gillray a certain boisterous good-humor that often made their satire amusing to the men satirized. Mr. Rush, American minister in London in 1818, describes a dinner party at Mr. Canning's, at which the minister exhibited to his guests albums and scrap-books of caricature in which he was himself very freely handled. Fox and Burke, we are told, visited the shop where Gillray's caricatures were sold, and while buying the last hit at themselves would bandy jests with Mrs. Humphrey, the publisher. Burke winced a little under the lash, but the robuster and larger Fox was rarely disturbed, and behaved in the shop with such winning courtesy that Mrs. Humphrey pronounced him the peerless model of a gentleman. Punch, likewise, does not appear to irritate the men whom he caricatures. Lord Brougham used to laugh at the exceedingly ugly countenance given him by Leech, and to say that the artist, unable to hit his likeness, was obliged to designate him by his checked trousers. Lord Russell, as we see, does not object to Leech's delineations; and Palmerston, long a favorite with the Punch artists, may well have been content with their handsome treatment of him.
During the last fifteen years Mr. Tenniel has oftenest supplied the political cartoon of Punch. His range is not so wide as that of Leech, but within his range he is powerful indeed. He has produced some pictures which for breadth, strength, aptness, good feeling, and finish have rarely been equaled in their kind. He gives us sometimes such an impression of his power as we fancy Michael Angelo might have done if he had amused himself by drawings reflecting upon the politics of his time. If, as the Quarterly Review lately remarked, Tenniel's pictures are often something less than caricature, being wanting in the exuberant humor of his predecessors, we can also say that they are frequently much more than caricature. Mr. Tenniel was an artist of repute, and had furnished a cartoon for the Westminster Parliament-house before he became identified with Punch.
"Obstructives." (John Tenniel, 1870.)
Mr. Punch (to Bull A 1). "Yes, it's all very well to say 'Go to school!' How are they to go to school with those people quarreling in the door-way? Why don't you make 'em 'move on?'"
In common with John Leech and the ruling class of England generally, Mr. Tenniel was so unfortunate as to misinterpret the civil war in America. He was almost as much mistaken as to its nature and significance as some of our own politicians, who had not his excuse of distance from the scene. He began well, however. His "Divorce a Vinculo," published in January, 1861, when the news of the secession of South Carolina reached England, was too flattering to the North, though correct as to the attitude of the South. "Mrs. Carolina asserts her Right to 'larrup' her Nigger" was a rough statement of South Carolina's position, but we can not pretend that the Northern States objected from any interest they felt in the colored boy. On the part of the North it was simply a war for self-preservation. It was as truly such as if Scotland or Ireland, or both of them, had seceded from England in 1803, when the Peace of Amiens was broken, and the English people had taken the liberty to object. Again, Mr. Tenniel showed good feeling in admonishing Lord Palmerston, when the war had begun, to keep Great Britain neutral. "Well, Pam," says Mr. Punch to his workman, "of course I shall keep you on, but you must stick to peace-work." Nor could we object to the picture in May, 1861, of Mr. Lincoln's poking the fire and filling the room with particles of soot, saying, with downcast look, "What a nice White House this would be if it were not for the Blacks!"
Jeddo and Belfast; or, A Puzzle for Japan. (John Tenniel, in Punch, 1872.)
Japanese Embassador. "Then these people, your Grace, I suppose, are heathen?"
Archbishop of Canterbury. "On the contrary, your Excellency; those are among our most enthusiastic religionists."
But from that time to the end of the war all was misapprehension and perversity. In July, 1861, "Naughty Jonathan," an ill-favored little boy carrying a toy flag, addresses the majesty of Britain thus: "You sha'n't interfere, mother—and you ought to be on my side—and it's a great shame—and I don't care—and you shall interfere—and I won't have it." During the Mason and Slidell imbroglio the Tenniel cartoons were not "soothing" to the American mind. "Do what's right, my son," says the burly sailor, Jack Bull, to little Admiral Jonathan, "or I'll blow you out of the water." Again, we have a family dinner scene. John Bull at the head of the table, and Lord Russell the boy in waiting. Enter "Captain Jonathan, F.N.," who says, "Jist looked in to see if thar's any rebels he-arr." Upon which Mr. Bull remarks, "Oh, indeed! John, look after the plate-basket, and then fetch a policeman." This was in allusion to a supposed claim on the part of Mr. Seward of a right to search ships for rebel passengers. Then we have Mr. Lincoln as a "coon" in a tree, and Colonel Bull aiming his blunderbuss at him. "Air you in earnest, colonel?" asks the coon. "I am," replies the mighty Bull. "Don't fire," says the coon; "I'll come down." And accordingly Mason and Slidell were speedily released. In a similar spirit most of the events of the war were treated; and when the war had ended, there was still shown in Punch, as in the English press generally, the same curious, inexplicable, and total ignorance of the feelings of the American people. What an inconceivable perversity it was to attribute Mr. Sumner's statement of the damage done to the United States by the alliance which existed for four years between the owners of England and the masters of the South to a Yankee grab for excessive damages! In all the long catalogue of national misunderstandings there is none more remarkable than this. Mr. Tenniel from the first derided the idea that any particular damage had been done by the Alabama and her consorts: certainly there was no damage, he thought, upon which a "claim" could be founded. "Claim for damages against me?" cries big Britannia, in one of his pictures of October, 1865. "Nonsense, Columbia; don't be mean over money matters."
"At the Church-gate." (Du Maurier, in Punch, 1872.)
"So now you've been to church, Ethel! And which part of it all do you like best?"
"This part, mamma!"
All this has now become merely interesting as a curiosity of misinterpretation. The American people know something of England through her art, her literature, and press; but England has extremely imperfect means of knowing us. No American periodical, probably, circulates in Great Britain two hundred copies. We have no Dickens, no Thackeray, no George Eliot, no Punch, to make our best and our worst familiar in the homes of Christendom; and what little indigenous literature we have is more likely to mislead foreigners than enlighten them. Cooper's men, women, and Indians, if they ever existed, exist no more. Mr. Lowell's Yankee is extinct. Uncle Tom is now a freeman, raising his own bale of cotton. Mark Twain and Bret Harte would hardly recognize their own California. It is the literature, the art, and the science of a country which make it known to other lands; and we shall have neither of these in adequate development until much more of the work is done of smoothing off this rough continent, and educating the people that come to us, at the rate of a cityful a month, from the continent over the sea. At present it is nearly as much as we can do to find spelling-books for so many.
To most Americans the smaller pictures of Leech and others in Punch, which gently satirize the foibles and fashions of the time, are more interesting than the political cartoons. How different the life of the English people, as exhibited in these thousands of amusing scenes, from the life of America! We see, upon turning over a single volume, how much more the English play and laugh than we do. It is not merely that there is a large class in England who have nothing to do except to amuse themselves, but the whole people seem interested in sport, and very frequently to abandon themselves to innocent pleasures. Here is a young lady in the hunting field in full gallop, who cries gayly to her companion, "Come along, Mr. Green; I want a lead at the brook;" which makes "Mr. Green think that women have no business in hunting." England generally thinks otherwise, and Mr. Punch loves to exhibit his countrywomen "in mid-air" leaping a ditch, or bounding across a field with huntsmen and hounds about them. He does not object to a hunting parson. A churchwarden meets an "old sporting rector" on the road, and says, "Tell ye what 'tis, sir, the congregation do wish you wouldn't put that 'ere curate up in pulpit; nobody can't hear un." To which the old sporting parson on his pony replies, "Well, Blunt, the fact is, Tweedler's such a good fellow for parish work, I'm obliged to give him a mount sometimes." And in the distance we see poor Tweedler trudging briskly along, umbrella in hand, upon some parish errand. Another sporting picture shows us three gentlemen at dinner, one of whom is a clergyman whose mind is so peculiarly constituted that his thoughts run a little upon the duties of his office. Perhaps he is Tweedler himself. One of the laymen, a fox-hunter, says to the other, "That was a fine forty minutes yesterday." The other replies, "Yes; didn't seem so long either." Punch remarks that "the curate is puzzled, and wonders, do they refer to his lecture in the school-room?"
An Early Quibble. (Du Maurier, in Punch, 1872.)
George. "There, Aunt Mary! what do you think of that? I drew the horse, and Ethel drew the jockey!"
Aunt Mary. "H'm! But what would mamma say to your drawing jockeys on a Sunday?"
George. "Ah, but look here! We've drawn him riding to church, you know!"
And what a part eating and drinking play in English life and English art! Every body appears to give dinners occasionally, and all the dealers in vegetables seem to stand ready to serve as waiters at five shillings for an evening. Food is a common topic of conversation, and it is a civility for people to show an interest in one another's alimentary pleasures. "Glad to see yer feed so beautiful, Mrs. B——," remarks a portly host to a corpulent lady, his Christmas guest. "Thank yer, Mr. J——," says she, with knife and fork at rest and pointing to the ceiling; "I'm doin' lovely." Again, old Mr. Brown, entertaining young Mr. Green, says, with emphasis, "That wine, sir, has been in my cellar four-and-twenty years come last Christmas—four-and-twenty years, sir!" To which innocent Mr. Green, anxious to say something agreeable, replies, "Has it really, sir? What must it have been when it was new?" Little Emily asks her mother, "What is capital punishment?" Master Harry replies, "Why, being locked up in the pantry! I should consider it so." Even at the theatres, we may infer from some of the pictures, ale and porter are handed round between the acts of the play. In one picture we see two lovers looking upon the sky; poetical Augustus says, "Look, Edith! how lovely are those fleecy cloudlets, dappled over the—" Edith (not in a spirit of burlesque) replies, "Yes, 'xactly like gravy when it's getting cold—isn't it?" Then we have two gentlemen in the enjoyment of a little dinner, one of a long series given in the absence of the family at Boulogne. The master of the house receives a telegram. He reads it, heaves a deep sigh, and says, dolefully, "It's all up!" Bachelor friend asks, "What's the matter?" Paterfamilias replies, "Telegram! She says they've arrived safe at Folkestone, and will be home about 10.30." No more little dinners. Only a wife and children for comfort. And here are two of Mr. Du Maurier's pretty children eating slices of bread too thinly spread with jam, and Ethel says, with thoughtful earnestness, "I dare say the queen and her courtiers eat a whole pot of jam every day, Harry!" There are many hundreds of pictures in Punch which show a kind of solemn interest in the repair of wasted tissue never seen in this country. It is evident that the English have a deep delight in the act of taking sustenance which is to us unknown. Mr. Thackeray himself, in speaking of an Englishman's first glass of beer on returning home from a long journey in other lands, casts his eyes to heaven and gives way to something like enthusiasm.
John Tenniel.
Many pictures bring into juxtaposition extremes of civilization rarely witnessed in America. So many traps are set for ignorance in this country that a child can scarcely hope to get by them all, and escape into maturity an absolute dolt. Observe this conversation between a squire and a villager: "Hobson, they tell me you've taken your boy away from the national school. What's that for?" "'Cause the master ain't fit to teach un. He wanted to teach my boy to spell taters with a P." Here, again, is a scene in a London picture-gallery that presents a curious incongruity. A group is standing before one of the works of Ary Scheffer, and an East-ender, catalogue in hand, makes this comment upon the artist's name: "'Ary Scheffer! Hignorant fellers, these foreigners, Bill! Spells 'Enery without the Haitch!" In New York we have doubtless people that would be as incongruous as this in such a scene, but they do not visit picture-galleries. Nor have we among us a photographer who could essay to bring a smile to a sitter's face by saying, "Just look a little pleasant, miss: think of 'im!" It is evident from many hundreds of such sketches that there are great numbers of people in England who exercise difficult callings, hold responsible positions, dress in silk and broadcloth, and are in many particulars accomplished and well equipped for the stress of city life, who are destitute of mental culture to a degree which is associated in our minds only with squalor and degradation.
The spirit of caste, which appears to be only less strong in England than in India, affords countless opportunities to English comic art. Imagine a coster-monger profusely and laboriously apologizing to a well-dressed passer-by for presuming to speak to him in order to let him know that his coat-tail is burning: "You'll excuse my addressin' of you, sir—common man in a manner of speakin'—gen'leman like you, sir—beggin' pardon for takin' the liberty, which I should never 'a thought of doin' under ordinary succumstances, sir, only you didn't seem to be aware on it, but it struck me as I see you agoin' along as you were afire, sir!" During the delivery of this apology combustion had continued, and Brown's coat-tail was entirely consumed, his box of fusees having ignited some seconds before the coster-monger began his discourse. A few years ago Punch gave a little "Sea-side Drama" that illustrates another phase of the same universal foible. Mrs. De Tomkyns to her husband: "Ludovic dear, there's Algernon playing with a strange child! Do prevent it." "How on earth am I to prevent it?" "Tell its parents Algernon is just recovering from the scarlet fever." Mr. De Tomkyns accordingly makes this fictitious statement to the father of the obnoxious child, who replies, "It's all right, sir; so's our little girl." Punch hits it fairly, too, in a pictured tête-à-tête between Mr. Shoddy and Mrs. Sharp. Mr. Shoddy remarks, as he sips his coffee, that he never feels safe from the ubiquitous British snob until he is south of the Danube. To this Mrs. Sharp responds by asking, "And what do the—a—South Danubians say, Mr. Shoddy?"
The moral feeling of the Punch artists is so generally sound that it is surprising to find them often taking the wrong and popular side of the "conflict of ages" between mistress and maid. But if they usually laugh with the mistress and at the maid, they occasionally laugh with the maid and at the mistress; and truly the wildest absurdity attributed to the British servant seems venial compared with the thoughtless arrogance of the typical British mistress. Punch does not wholly neglect her morals. Another hundred volumes or so will doubtless bring her over to Sydney Smith's opinion, that all the virtues and graces are not to be had for seven pounds per annum. It was a happy retort upon "No Irish need apply," to present an English servant-girl peremptorily leaving a place because she had discovered that the family was Irish, alleging that her friends would never forgive her if they knew she had lived in an Irish family. The picture, too, is good of a pretty servant walking home in the evening behind an elderly and ill-favored lady to "protect" her from insult. Punch wishes to know who is to protect the pretty girl on her return through London streets alone. We see also from numberless pictures that the British mistress deems it her right to control the dress of the British maid. When crinoline came in, she thought it impudent in a servant to wear it; but when crinoline went out, she deemed it no less presuming in her to lay it aside.
For some years past the pictures of children and their ways by Mr. Du Maurier have been among the most pleasing efforts of comic art in England. There is not the faintest intimation in them of the malevolent or sarcastic. All good fathers, all good mothers, and all persons worthy to become such, delight in them. They are such pictures as we should naturally expect from an artist who was himself the happy father of a houseful of happy children, and who consequently looked upon all the children of the world in a fond, parental spirit. Surely no Bohemian, no hapless dweller in a boarding-house, no desolate frequenter of clubs, no one not sharing in the social life of his time, could so delightfully represent and minister to it. Du Maurier vindicates the generation that has produced Gavarni and Woodhull. He reminds us from week to week that children are the sufficient compensation of virtuous existence, worth all the rest of its honors and delights.
The recent agitation in England of questions relating to religion has not escaped the caricaturist. For two centuries or more the caricaturists of Great Britain have been hearty Protestants, though not long Puritan, and we still find them laughing at the fulminations of the testy old clergyman who lives in the Vatican. Nor have they failed to reflect upon the too evident fact that it is the contentions of clergymen in England that have blocked the way into the national school. The old-fashioned penny broadside, all alive with figures and words, has been revived by "Gegeef," to promote the secularization of the schools. In one of them all the parties to the controversy are exhibited—the candidate for the mastership of a Government school, who "believes in Colenso and geology, but don't mind teaching Genesis to oblige;" the minister who holds up the text, "One faith, one baptism," but demands that the baptism taught should be his baptism; Thomas Paine, too, who points to his "Age of Reason," and says, "When you finish, I shall have something to say;" the compromiser, who is willing to have Bible lessons given in the schools, provided they are given "without comment;" and, of course, the radical Bradlaugh, who demands secularization pure and simple. The same draughtsman, whose zeal is more manifest than his skill, has attempted to show, in various penny sheets, that amidst all those sectarian conflicts the one true light for the guidance of bewildered men is Science.
The only hit, however, in caricature, which these controversies have suggested is the "Soliloquy of a Rationalistic Chicken." It has had great currency in England among the clergy, many of whom have assisted in spreading it abroad; and even secularists have found it passable—as a caricature. Another recent "sensation" was the caricature by Mr. Matt Morgan, in the Tomahawk, which represented the Prince of Wales "following" the ghost of his predecessor, George IV. It had a great currency at the time, and may have served a good purpose in warning an amiable and well-disposed prince to be more careful of appearances.
Soliloquy of a Rationalistic Chicken. (S. J. Stone, London, 1873.)
How do I know I ever was inside?
Now I reflect, it is, I do maintain,
Less than my reason, and beneath my pride,
To think that I could dwell
In such a paltry, miserable cell
As that old shell.
Of course I couldn't! How could I have lain,
Body and beak and feathers, legs and wings,
And my deep heart's sublime imaginings,
In there?
I meet the notion with profound disdain;
It's quite incredible; since I declare
(And I'm a chicken that you can't deceive)
What I can't understand I won't believe.
What's that I hear?
My mother cackling at me! Just her way,
So prejudiced and ignorant I say;
So far behind the wisdom of the day.
What's old I can't revere.
Hark at her! "You're a silly chick, my dear,
That's quite as plain, alack!
As is the piece of shell upon your back!"
How bigoted! upon my back, indeed!
I don't believe it's there,
For I can't see it; and I do declare,
For all her fond deceivin',
What I can't see, I never will believe in!
The P****e of W***s to K**g G****e IV. (loq.). "I'll follow thee!"—Matt Morgan, in the Tomahawk, 1867.
During the life-time of the venerable Cruikshank comic art in England
has won the consideration due to a liberal profession, and now enjoys a
fair share of reward as well as honor. He found the comic artist
something of a Bohemian; he leaves him a solvent and respectable
householder. He may have visited Gillray at work in the little room
behind his publisher's shop; and he doubtless often enjoyed the elegant
hospitality of John Leech, one of the first in his branch of art to
attain the solid dignity of a front-door of his own. It is mentioned to
the credit of Richard Doyle, son of
,
that when he resigned
his connection with Punch on account of its caricatures of Wiseman and
the Pope, he gave up an income of eight hundred pounds a year. There is
no worthy circle in Great Britain where the presence of a Tenniel, a
Leech, a Du Maurier, a Doyle, or a Cruikshank would not be felt as an
honor and their society valued as a privilege. England owes them
gratitude and homage. They have not been always right, but they have
nearly always meant to be. Nothing malign, nothing unpatriotic, nothing
impure, nothing mean, has borne their signature; and in a vast majority
of instances they have led the laughter of their countrymen so that it
harmonized with humanity and truth.
Benjamin Franklin was the first American caricaturist. That propensity of his to use pictures whenever he desired to affect strongly the public mind was an inheritance from the period when only a very small portion of the people could read any other than pictorial language. Among the relics of his race preserved in Boston there is an illustrated handbill issued by his English uncle Benjamin, after whom he was named, which must have been a familiar object to him from the eighth year of his age. Uncle Benjamin, a London dyer when James II. fled from England, wishing to strengthen the impression made by his printed offer to "dye into colors" cloth, silk, and India calico, placed at the head of his bill a rude wood-cut of an East Indian queen taking a walk, attended by two servants, one bearing her train and the other holding over her an umbrella. At the door of his shop, too, in Princes Street, near Leicester Fields, a figure of an Indian queen appealed to the passer-by.
Such was the custom of the time. The diffusion of knowledge lessened the importance of pictorial representation; but the mere date of Franklin's birth—1706—explains in some degree his habitual resort to it. Nearly all the ancient books were illustrated in some way, and nearly every ancient building appears to have had its "sign." When Franklin was a boy in Boston a gilt Bible would have directed him where to buy his books, if he had had any money to buy them with. A gilt sheaf probably notified him where to get those three historic rolls with which he made his entry into Philadelphia. The figure of a mermaid invited the thirsty wayfarer to beer, and an anchor informed sailors where sea-stores were to be had. The royal lion and unicorn, carved in wood or stone, marked public edifices. Over the door of his father's shop, where soap and candles were sold, he saw a blue ball, which still exists, bearing the legible date 1698. Why a blue ball? He was just the boy to ask the question. A lad who could not accept grace before meat without wishing to know why it were not better to say grace once for all over the barrel of pork, would be likely to inquire what a blue ball had in common with soap and candles. His excellent but not gifted sire probably informed him that the blue ball was a relic of the time when he had carried on the business of a dyer, and that he had continued to use it for his new vocation because he "had it in the house." Benjamin, the gifted, was the boy to be dissatisfied with this explanation, and to suggest devices more in harmony with the industry carried on within, so that the very incongruity of his father's sign may have quickened his sense of pictorial effect.
Franklin lived long, figured in a great variety of scenes, accomplished many notable things, and exhibited versatility of talent—man of business, inventor, statesman, diplomatist, philosopher; and in each of these characters he was a leader among leaders; but the ruling habit of his mind, his forte, the talent that he most loved to exercise and most relished in others, was humor. He began as a humorist, and he ended as a humorist. The first piece of his ever printed and the last piece he ever wrote were both satirical: the first, the reckless satire of a saucy apprentice against the magnates of his town; the last, the good-tempered satire of a richly gifted, benevolent soul, cognizant of human weakness, but not despising it, and intent only upon opening the public mind to unwelcome truth—as a mother makes a child laugh before inserting the medicine spoon. So dominant was this propensity in his youthful days, that if he had lived in a place where it had been possible to subsist by its exercise, there had been danger of his becoming a professional humorist, merging all the powers of his incomparable intellect in that one gift.
Imagine Boston in 1722, when this remarkable apprentice began to laugh, and to make others laugh, at the oppressive solemnities around him and above him. Then, as now, it was a population industrious and moral, extremely addicted to routine, habitually frugal, but capable of magnificent generosity, bold in business enterprises, valiant in battle, but in all the high matters averse to innovation. Then, as now, the clergy, a few important families, and Harvard College composed the ruling influence, against which it was martyrdom to contend. But then, as now, there were a few audacious spirits who rebelled against these united powers, and carried their opposition very far, sometimes to a wild excess, and thus kept this noblest of towns from sinking into an inane respectability. The good, frugal, steady-going, tax-paying citizen, who lays in his coal in June and buys a whole pig in December, would subdue the world to a vast monotonous prosperity, crushing, intolerable, if there were no one to keep him and the public in mind that, admirable as he is, he does not exhaust the possibilities of human nature. When we examine the portraits of the noted men of New England of the first century and a half after the settlement, we observe in them all a certain expression of acquiescence. There is no audacity in them. They look like men who could come home from fighting the French in Canada, or from chasing the whale among the icebergs of Labrador, to be scared by the menaces of a pontiff like Cotton Mather. They look like men who would take it seriously, and not laugh at all, when Cotton Mather denounced the Franklins, for poking fun at him in their newspaper, as guilty of wickedness without a parallel. "Some good men," said he, "are afraid it may provoke Heaven to deal with this place as never any place has yet been dealt withal."
Never was a community in such sore need of caricature and burlesque as when James Franklin set up in Boston, in 1721, the first "sensational newspaper" of America, the Courant, to which his brother Benjamin and the other rebels and come-outers of Boston contributed. The Mathers, as human beings and citizens of New England, were estimable and even admirable; but the interests of human nature demand the suppression of pontiffs. These Mathers, though naturally benevolent, and not wanting in natural modesty, had attained to such a degree of pontifical arrogance as to think Boston in deadly peril because a knot of young fellows in a printing-office aimed satirical paragraphs at them. Increase Mather called upon the Government to "suppress such a cursed libel," lest "some awful judgment should come upon the land, and the wrath of God should rise, and there should be no remedy." It is for such men that burlesque was made, and the Franklins supplied it in abundance. The Courant ridiculed them even when they were gloriously in the right. They were enlightened enough and brave enough to recommend inoculation, then just brought from Turkey by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The young doctors who wrote for the paper assailed the new system, apparently for no other reason than because Increase and Cotton Mather were its chief defenders.
When Benjamin, at the age of sixteen, began to contribute to his brother's paper, he aimed at higher game even than the town pontiffs. He dared to lampoon Harvard College itself, the temple of learning where the clergy were formed, whose precincts he had hoped to tread, his father having dedicated this tenth son to the Church. He may have had his own father in mind when he wrote, in one of his early numbers, that every "peasant" who had the means proposed to send one of his children to this famous place; and as most of them consulted their purses rather than their children's capacities, the greater number of those who went thither were little better than blockheads and dunces. When he came to speak of the theological department of the college, he drew a pen caricature, having then no skill with the pencil: "The business of those who were employed in the temple of theology being laborious and painful, I wondered exceedingly to see so many go toward it; but while I was pondering this matter in my mind, I spied Pecunia behind a curtain, beckoning to them with her hand." He draws another when he says that the only remarkable thing he saw in this temple was one Plagius hard at work copying an eloquent passage from Tillotson's works to embellish his own.
This saucy boy, who had his "Hudibras" at his tongue's end, carried the satirical spirit with him to church on Sundays, and tried some of the brethren whom he saw there by the Hudibrastic standard. Even after his brother James had been in prison for his editorial conduct, Benjamin, who had been left in charge of the paper, drew with his subeditorial pen a caricature of a "Religious Knave, of all Knaves the Worst:" A most strict Sabbatarian, an exact observer not of the day only, but of the evening before and the evening after it; at church conspicuously devout and attentive, even ridiculously so, with his distorted countenance and awkward gesticulation. But try and nail him to a bargain! He will dissemble and lie, snuffle and whiffle, overreach and defraud, cut down a laborer's wages, and keep the bargain in the letter while violating its spirit. "Don't tell me," he cries; "a bargain is a bargain. You should have looked to that before. I can't help it now." Such was the religious knave invented by the author of "Hudibras," and borrowed by this Boston apprentice, who had, in all probability, never seen a character that could have fairly suggested the burlesque.
The authorities rose upon these two audacious brothers, and indicated how much need there was of such a sheet in Boston by ordering James Franklin to print it no more. They contrived to carry it on a while in Benjamin's name; but that sagacious youth was not long in discovering that the Mathers and their adherents were too strong for him, and he took an early opportunity of removing to a place established on the principle of doing without pontiffs. But during his long, illustrious career in Philadelphia as editor and public man he constantly acted in the spirit of one of the last passages he wrote before leaving Boston: "Pieces of pleasantry and mirth have a secret charm in them to allay the heats and tumults of our spirits, and to make a man forget his restless resentments. They have a strange power in them to hush disorders of the soul and reduce us to a serene and placid state of mind." He was the father of our humorous literature. If, at the present moment, America is contributing more to the innocent hilarity of mankind than other nations, it is greatly due to the happy influence of this benign and liberal humorist upon the national character. "Poor Richard," be it observed, was the great comic almanac of the country for twenty-five years, and it was Franklin who infused the element of burlesque into American journalism. He could not advertise a stolen prayer-book without inserting a joke to give the advertisement wings: "The person who took it is desired to open it and read the Eighth Commandment, and afterward return it into the same pew again; upon which no further notice will be taken."
This propensity was the more precious because it was his destiny to take a leading part in many controversies which would have become bitter beyond endurance but for "the strange power" of his "pieces of pleasantry and mirth" to "hush disorders of the soul." He employed both pen and pencil in bringing his excellent sense to bear upon the public mind. What but Franklin's inexhaustible tact and good-humor could have kept the peace in Pennsylvania between the non-combatant Quakers and the militant Christians during the long period when the province was threatened from the sea by hostile fleets and on land by savage Indians? Besides rousing the combatant citizens to action, he made them willing to fight for men who would not fight for themselves, and brought over to his side a large number of the younger and more pliant Quakers. Even in that early time (1747), while bears still swam the Delaware, he contrived to get a picture drawn and engraved to enforce the lessons of his first pamphlet, calling on the Pennsylvanians to prepare for defense. He may have engraved it himself, for he had a dexterous hand, and had long before made little pictures out of type-metal to accompany advertisements. Hercules sits upon a cloud, with one hand resting upon his club. Three horses vainly strive to draw a heavy wagon from the mire. The wagoner kneels, lifts his hands, and implores the aid of Hercules's mighty arm. In the background are trees and houses, and under the picture are Latin words signifying, "Not by offerings nor by womanish prayers is the help of gods obtained." In the text, too, when he essays the difficult task of reconciling the combatants to fighting for the non-combatants, he becomes pictorial, though he does not use the graver. "What!" he cries, "not defend your wives, your helpless children, your aged parents, because the Quakers have conscientious scruples about fighting!" Then he adds the burlesque picture: "Till of late I could scarce believe the story of him who refused to pump in a sinking ship because one on board whom he hated would be saved by it as well as himself."
JOIN or DIE
A Common Newspaper Heading in 1776; devised by Franklin in May, 1754, at the Beginning of the French War.
At the beginning of the contest which in Europe was the Seven Years' War, but in America a ten years' war, Franklin's pen and pencil were both employed in urging a cordial union of the colonies against the foe. His device of a snake severed into as many pieces as there were colonies, with the motto, "Join or Die," survived the occasion that called it forth, and became a common newspaper and handbill heading in 1776. It was he, also, as tradition reports, who exhibited to the unbelieving farmers of Pennsylvania the effect of gypsum, by writing with that fertilizer in large letters upon a field the words "This has been plastered." The brilliant green of the grass which had been stimulated by the plaster soon made the words legible to the passer-by. During his first residence in London as the representative of Pennsylvania he became intimately acquainted with the great artist from whom excellence in the humorous art of England dates—William Hogarth. The last letter that the dying Hogarth received was from Benjamin Franklin. "Receiving an agreeable letter," says Nichols, "from the American, Dr. Franklin, he drew up a rough draught of an answer to it." Three hours after, Hogarth was no more.
A few of Franklin's devices for the coins and paper money of the young republic have been preserved. He wished that every coin and every note should say something wise or cheerful to their endless succession of possessors and scrutinizers. Collectors show the Franklin cent of 1787, with its circle of thirteen links and its central words, "We are one" and outside of these, "United States." On the other side of the coin there is a noonday sun blazing down upon a dial, with the motto, "Mind your Business." He made the date say something more to the reader than the number of the year, by appending to it the word "Fugio" (I fly). Another cent has a central sun circled by thirteen stars and the words "Nova Constellatio." He suggested "Pay as you go" for a coin motto. Some of his designs for the Continental paper money were ingenious and effective. Upon one dingy little note, issued during the storm and stress of the Revolution, we see a roughly executed picture of a shower of rain falling upon a newly settled country, with a word of good cheer under it, "Serenabit" (It will clear). Upon another there is a picture of a beaver gnawing a huge oak, and the word "Perseverando." On another there is a crown resting upon a pedestal, and the words "Si recte facias" (If you do uprightly). There is one which represents a hawk and stork fighting, with the motto "Exitus in dubio est" (The event is in doubt); and another which shows a hand plucking branches from a tea-plant, with the motto "Sustain or Abstain."
The famous scalp hoax devised by Franklin during the Revolutionary war, for the purpose of bringing the execration of civilized mankind upon the employment of Indians by the English generals, was vividly pictorial. Upon his private printing-press in Paris he and his grandson struck off a leaf of an imaginary newspaper, which he called a "Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle." For this he wrote a letter purporting to be from "Captain Gerrish, of the New England Militia," accompanying eight packages of "scalps of our unhappy country folks," which he had captured on a raid into the Indian country. The captain sent with the scalps an inventory of them, supposed to be drawn up by one James Crawford, a trader, for the information of the Governor of Canada. Neither Swift nor De Foe ever surpassed the ingenious naturalness of this fictitious inventory. It was indeed too natural, for it was generally accepted as a genuine document, and would even now deceive almost any one who should come upon it unawares. Who could suspect that these "eight packs of scalps, cured, dried, hooped, and painted, with all the Indian triumphal marks" upon them, had never existed except in the imagination of a merry old plenipotentiary in Paris? There were "forty-three scalps of Congress soldiers, stretched on black hoops four inches diameter, the inside of the skin painted red, with a small black spot to denote their being killed with bullets;" and there were "sixty-two farmers, killed in their houses, marked with a hoe, a black circle all around to denote their being surprised in the night." Other farmers' scalps were marked with "a little red foot," to show that they stood upon their defense; and others with "a little yellow flame," to show that they had been burned alive. To one scalp a band was fastened, "supposed to be that of a rebel clergyman." Then there were eighty-eight scalps of women, and "some hundreds of boys and girls." The package last described was "a box of birch-bark containing twenty-nine little infants' scalps of various sizes, small white hoops, white ground, no tears, and only a little black knife in the middle to show they were ripped out of their mothers' bellies." The trader dwells upon the fact that most of the farmers were young or middle-aged, "there being but sixty-seven very gray heads among them; which makes the service more essential." Every detail of this supplement was worked out with infinite ingenuity, even to the editor's postscript, which stated that the scalps had just reached Boston, where thousands of people were flocking to see them.
Franklin was more than a humorist; he was an artist in humor. In other words, he not only had a lively sense of the absurd and the ludicrous, but he knew how to exhibit them to others with the utmost power and finish. His grandson, who lived with him in Paris during the Revolutionary period, a very good draughtsman, used to illustrate his humorous papers, and between them they produced highly entertaining things, only a few of which have been gathered. The Abbé Morellet, one of the gay circle who enjoyed them, remarks that in his sportive moods Franklin was "Socrates mounted on a stick, playing with his children." To this day, however, there are millions who regard that vast and somewhat disorderly genius, who was one of the least sordid and most generous of all recorded men, as the mere type of penny prudence. Even so variously informed a person as the author of "A Short History of the English People," published in 1875, speaks of the "close-fisted Franklin."
It is in vain that we seek for specimens of colonial caricature outside of the Franklin circle. Satirical pictures were doubtless produced in great numbers, and a few may have been published; but caricature is a thing of the moment, and usually perishes with the moment, unless it is incorporated with a periodical. Almost all the intellectual product of the colonial period that was not theological has some relation to the wise and jovial Franklin, the incomparable American, the father of his country's intellectual life, whether manifested in literature, burlesque, politics, invention, or science.
Boston Massacre Coffins; Boston, March, 1774. (From "American Historical Record.")
The Boston massacre, as it was called, which was commemorated by the device of a row of coffins, often employed before and since, might have been more properly styled a street brawl, if the mere presence of British troops in Boston in 1774 had not been an outrage of international dimensions. The four victims, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Cauldwell, and Crispus Attucks, were borne to the grave by all that was most distinguished in the province, and the whole people seemed to have either followed or witnessed the procession. Amidst the frenzy of the time, these coffin-lids served to express and relieve the popular feeling. The subsequent acquittal of the innocent soldiers, who had shown more forbearance than armed men usually do when taunted and assailed by an unarmed crowd, remains one of the most honorable of the early records of Boston.
There were attempts at caricature during the later years of the Revolutionary war. From 1778, when inflated paper, French francs, British gold, and Hessian thalers had given the business centres of the country a short, fallacious prosperity, there was gayety enough in Philadelphia and Boston. There were balls and parties, and sending to France for articles of luxury, and profusion of all kinds—as there was in the late war, and as there must be in all wars which are not paid for till the war is over. There are indications in the old books that the burlesquing pencil was a familiar instrument then among the merry lads of the cities and towns. But their efforts, after having answered their momentary purpose, perished.
And the habit of burlesque survived the war. There are few persons, even among the zealous fraternity of collectors, who are aware that a New York dramatist, in the year 1788, endeavored to burlesque, in a regular five-act comedy, the violent debates which distracted all circles while the acceptance of the new Constitution was the question of questions. A copy or two of this comedy, called "The Politician Outwitted," have been preserved. In lieu of the lost pictures, take this brief scene, which exhibits a violent squabble between an inveterate opponent of the Constitution and a burning patriot who supports it. They enter, in proper comedy fashion, after they are in full quarrel.
"Enter Old Loveyet and Trueman.
"Loveyet. I tell you, it is the most infernal scheme that ever was devised.
"Trueman. And I tell you, sir, that your argument is heterodox, sophistical, and most preposterously illogical.
"Loveyet. I insist upon it, sir, you know nothing at all about the matter! And give me leave to tell you, sir—
"Trueman. What! Give you leave to tell me I know nothing at all about the matter? I shall do no such thing, sir. I'm not to be governed by your ipse dixit.
"Loveyet. I desire none of your musty Latin, for I don't understand it, not I.
"Trueman. O the ignorance of the age! To oppose a plan of government like the new Constitution! Like it, did I say? There never was one like it. Neither Minos, Solon, Lycurgus, nor Romulus ever fabricated so wise a system. Why, it is a political phenomenon, a prodigy of legislative wisdom, the fame of which will soon extend ultramundane, and astonish the nations of the world with its transcendent excellence. To what a sublime height will the superb edifice attain!
"Loveyet. Your aspiring edifice shall never be erected in this State, sir.
"Trueman. Mr. Loveyet, you will not listen to reason. Only calmly attend one moment.
[Reads.] 'We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide—'
"Loveyet. I tell you I won't hear it.
"Trueman. Mark all that. [Reads.] 'Section the First. All legislative power herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.' Very judicious and salutary, upon my erudition! 'Section the Second—'
"Loveyet. I'll hear no more of your sections."
A Militia Drill in Massachusetts in 1832.
They continue the debate until both disputants are in the white heat of passion. Old Mr. Loveyet rushes away at last to break off the match between his daughter and Trueman's son, and Trueman retorts by calling his fiery antagonist "a conceited sot." This comedy is poor stuff, but it suffices to reveal the existence of the spirit of caricature among us at that early day, when New York was a clean, cobble-stoned, Dutch-looking town of thirty thousand inhabitants, one of whom, a boy five years of age, was named Washington Irving.
General Washington was inaugurated President at the same city in the following year. How often has the world been assured that no dissentient voice was heard on that occasion! The arrival of the general in New York was a pageant which the entire population is supposed to have most heartily approved; and a very pleasing spectacle it must have been, as seen from the end of the island—the vessels decked with flags and streamers, and the President's stately barge, rowed by thirteen pilots in white uniforms, advancing toward the city, surrounded and followed by a cloud of small boats, to the thunder of great guns. But even then, it seems, there were a few who looked askance. At least one caricature appeared. "All the world here," wrote John Armstrong to the unreconciled General Gates, "are busy in collecting flowers and sweets of every kind to amuse and delight the President." People were asking one another, he adds, by what awe-inspiring title the President should be called, even plain Roger Sherman, of Connecticut, regarding "His Excellency" as beneath the grandeur of the office. "Yet," says Armstrong, "in the midst of this admiration there are skeptics who doubt its propriety, and wits who amuse themselves at its extravagance. The first will grumble and the last will laugh, and the President should be prepared to meet the attacks of both with firmness and good nature. A caricature has already appeared, called 'The Entry,' full of very disloyal and profane allusions." It was by no means a good-natured picture. General Washington was represented riding upon an ass, and held in the arms of his favorite man Billy, once huntsman, then valet and factotum; Colonel David Humphreys, the general's aid and secretary, led the ass, singing hosannas and birthday odes, one couplet of which was legible:
"The glorious time has come to pass
When David shall conduct an ass."
This effort was more ill-natured than brilliant; but the reader who examines the fugitive publications of that period will often feel that the adulation of the President was such as to provoke and justify severe caricature. That adulation was as excessive as it was ill executed; and part of the office of caricature is to remind Philip that he is a man. The numberless "verses," "odes," "tributes," "stanzas," "lines," and "sonnets" addressed to President Washington lie entombed in the dingy leaves of the old newspapers; but a few of the epigrams which they provoked have been disinterred, and even some of the caricatures are described in the letters of the time. Neither the verses nor the pictures are at all remarkable. Probably the best caricature that appeared during the administration of General Washington was suggested by the removal of the national capital from New York to Philadelphia. Senator Robert Morris, being a Philadelphian, and having large possessions in Philadelphia, was popularly supposed to have procured the passage of the measure, and accordingly the portly Senator is seen in the picture carrying off upon his broad shoulders the Federal Hall, the windows of which are crowded with members of both Houses, some commending, others cursing this novel method of removal. In the distance is seen the old Paulus Hook ferry-house, at what is now Jersey City, on the roof of which is the devil beckoning to the heavy-laden Morris, and crying to him, "This way, Bobby." The removal of the capital was a fruitful theme for the humorists of the day. Even then "New York politicians" had an ill name, and Congress was deemed well out of their reach.
But those were the halcyon days of the untried administration; to which indeed there was as yet nothing that could be called an Opposition. The entire nation, with here and there an individual exception, was in full accord with the feeling expressed in Benjamin Russell's allegory that went "the round of the press" in 1789 and 1790:
"THE FEDERAL SHIP.
"Just launched on the Ocean of Empire, the Ship Columbia, GEORGE WASHINGTON, Commander, which, after being thirteen years in dock, is at length well manned, and in very good condition. The Ship is a first rate—has a good bottom, which all the Builders have pronounced sound and good. Some objection has been made to parts of the tackling, or running rigging, which, it is supposed, will be altered, when they shall be found to be incommodious, as the Ship is able to make very good headway with them as they are. A jury of Carpenters have this matter now under consideration. The Captain and First Mate are universally esteemed by all the Owners—Eleven[40] in number—and she has been insured, under their direction, to make a good mooring in the harbor of Public Prosperity and Felicity—whitherto she is bound. The Owners can furnish, besides the Ship's Company, the following materials:—New-Hampshire, the Masts and Spars; Massachusetts, Timber for the Hull, Fish, &c.; Connecticut, Beef and Pork; New-York, Porter and other Cabin stores; New-Jersey, the Cordage; Pennsylvania, Flour and Bread;—Delaware, the Colors, and Clothing for the Crew; Maryland, the Iron work and small Anchors; Virginia, Tobacco and the Sheet Anchor; South-Carolina, Rice; and Georgia, Powder and small Provisions. Thus found, may this good Ship put to sea, and the prayer of all is, that God may preserve her, and bring her in safety to her desired haven."
The Government had not been long domiciled in the City of Brotherly Love before parties became defined and party spirit acrimonious. The popular heart and hope and imagination were all on the side of revolutionized France in her unequal struggle with the allied kings. Conservative and "safe" men were more and more drawn into sympathy with the powers that were striving to maintain the established order, chief of which was Great Britain. President Washington, in maintaining the just balance between the two contending principles and powers, could not but give some dissatisfaction to both political parties, and, most of all, to the one in the warmest sympathy with France. In the dearth of pictorical relics of that period, I insert the parody of the Athanasian creed annexed, from the National Gazette of Philadelphia, edited by Freneau, and maintained by the friends of Jefferson and Madison:
"A NEW POLITICAL CREED FOR THE USE OF WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.
"Whoever would live peaceably in Philadelphia, above all things it is necessary that he hold the Federal faith—and the Federal faith is this, that there are two governing powers in this country, both equal, and yet one superior: which faith except every one keep undefiledly, without doubt he shall be abused everlastingly.
"The Briton is superior to the American, and the American is inferior to the Briton: and yet they are equal, and the Briton shall govern the American.
"The Briton, while here, is commanded to obey the American, and yet the American ought to obey the Briton.
"And yet they ought not both to be obedient, but only one to be obedient. For there is one dominion nominal of the American, and another dominion real of the Briton.
"And yet there are not two dominions, but only one dominion.
"For like as we are compelled by the British constitution book to acknowledge that subjects must submit themselves to their monarchs, and be obedient to them in all things:
"So we are forbid by our Federal executive to say that we are at all influenced by our treaty with France, or to pay regard to what it enforceth:
"The American was created for the Briton, and the Briton for the American:
"And yet the American shall be a slave to the Briton, and the Briton the tyrant of the American.
"And Britons are of three denominations, and yet only of one soul, nature, and subsistency:
"The Irishman of infinite impudence:
"The Scotchman of cunning most inscrutable:
"And the Englishman of impertinence altogether insupportable:
"The only true and honorable gentlemen of this our blessed country.
"He, therefore, that would live in quiet, must thus think of the Briton and the American.
"It is furthermore necessary that every good American should believe in the infallibility of the executive, when its proclamations are echoed by Britons:
"For the true faith is, that we believe and confess that the Government is fallible and infallible:
"Fallible in its republican nature, and infallible in its monarchical tendency, erring in its state of individuality, and unerring in its Federal complexity.
"So that though it be both fallible and infallible, yet it is not twain, but one government only, as having consolidated all state dominion, in order to rule with sway uncontrolled.
"This is the true Federal faith, which except a man believe and practice faithfully, beyond all doubt he shall be cursed perpetually."
A rude but very curious specimen of the caricature of the early time is given on the next page of the collision on the floor of the House of Representatives between Matthew Lyon and Roger Griswold, both representatives from Connecticut. Lyon, a native of Ireland, was an ardent Republican, who played a conspicuous part in politics during the final struggle between the Republicans and the Federalists. Roger Griswold, on the contrary, a member of an old and distinguished Connecticut family, a graduate of its ancient college, and a member of its really illustrious bar, was a pronounced Federalist. He was also a gentleman who had no natural relish for a strong-minded, unlettered emigrant who founded a town in his new country, built mills and foundries, invented processes, established a newspaper, and was elected to Congress. If Hamilton and Griswold and the other extreme Federalists had had their way in this country, there would have been no Matthew Lyons among us to create a new world for mankind, and begin the development of a better political system. Nor, indeed, was Matthew Lyon sufficiently tolerant of the old and tried methods that had become inadequate. He was not likely, either—at the age of fifty-two, standing upon the summit of a very successful career, which was wholly his own work—to regard as equal to himself a man of thirty-six, who seemed to owe his importance chiefly to his lineage. So here was a broad basis for an antipathy which the strife of politics could easily aggravate into an aversion extreme and fiery—fiery, at least, on the part of the Irishman.
Fight in Congress between Lyon and Griswold, February 15th, 1798.
"He in a trice struck Griswold thrice
Upon his head, enraged, sir;
Who seized the tongs to ease his wrongs,
And Griswold thus engaged, sir."
Imagine this process complete, and the House, on the last day of the year 1798, in languid session, balloting. The two members were standing near one another outside the bar, when Griswold made taunting allusion to an old "campaign story" of Matthew Lyon's having been sentenced to wear a wooden sword for cowardice in the field. Lyon, in a fury, spit in Griswold's face. Instantly the House was in an uproar; and although the impetuous Lyon apologized to the House, he only escaped expulsion, after eleven days' debate, through the constitutional requirement of a two-thirds vote. This affair called forth a caricature in which the Irish member was depicted as a lion standing on his hind-legs wearing a wooden sword, while Griswold, handkerchief in hand, exclaims, "What a beastly action!"
The vote for expulsion—52 to 44—did not satisfy Mr. Griswold. Four days after the vote occurred the outrageous scene rudely delineated in the picture already mentioned. Griswold, armed with what the Republican editor called "a stout hickory club," and the Federalist editor a "hickory stick," assaulted Lyon while he was sitting at his desk, striking him on the head and shoulders several times before he could extricate himself. But at last Lyon got upon his feet, and, seizing the tongs, rushed upon the enemy. This is the moment selected by the artist. They soon after closed and fell to the floor, where they enjoyed a good "rough-and-tumble" fight, until members pulled them apart. A few minutes after they chanced to meet again at the "water table," near one of the doors. Lyon was now provided with a stick, but Griswold had none. "Their eyes no sooner met," says the Federalist reporter, "than Mr. Lyon sprung to attack Mr. Griswold." A member handed Griswold a stick, and there was a fair prospect of another fight, when the Speaker interfered with so much energy that the antagonists were again torn apart. The battle was not renewed on the floor of Congress.
But it was continued elsewhere. Under that amazing sedition law of the Federalists, Lyon was tried a few months after for saying in his newspaper that President Adams had an "unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp," had turned men out of office for their opinions, and had written "a bullying message" upon the French imbroglio of 1798. He was found guilty, sentenced to pay a fine of a thousand dollars, besides the heavy costs of the prosecution, to be imprisoned four months, and to continue in confinement until the fine was paid. Of course the people of his district stood by him, and, while he was in prison, re-elected him to Congress by a great majority; and his fine was repaid to his heirs in 1840 by Congress, with forty-two years' interest. These events made a prodigious stir in their time. Matthew Lyon's presence in the House of Representatives, his demeanor there, and his triumphal return from prison to Congress, were the first distinct notification to parties interested that the sceptre was passing from the Few to the Many.
The satire and burlesque of the Jeffersonian period, from 1798 to 1809, were abundant in quantity, if not of shining excellence. To the reader of the present day all savors of burlesque in the political utterances of that time, so preposterously violent were partisans on both sides. It is impossible to take a serious view of the case of an editor who could make it a matter of boasting that he had opposed the Republican measures for eight years "without a single exception." The press, indeed, had then no independent life; it was the minion and slave of party. It is only in our own day that the press begins to exist for its own sake, and descant with reasonable freedom on topics other than the Importance of Early Rising and the Customs of the Chinese. The reader would neither be edified nor amused by seeing Mr. Jefferson kneeling before a stumpy 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 aloft, bearing in its talons the Constitution and the independence of the United States. 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.
On the day of the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson as President of the United States, March 4th, 1801, a parody appeared in the Centinel of Boston, a Federalist paper of great note in its time, which may serve our purpose here:
Monumental Inscription.
"That life is long which answers Life's great end."
Yesterday expired, deeply regretted by millions of grateful Americans,
and by all good men,
THE FEDERAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE
UNITED STATES:
animated by
A WASHINGTON, AN ADAMS, A HAMILTON, KNOX,
PICKERING, WOLCOTT,
M'HENRY, MARSHALL, STODDERT, AND DEXTER.
Æt. 12
years.
Its death was occasioned by the secret arts and open violence
of
foreign and domestic demagogues:
Notwithstanding its whole life was
devoted to the performance of every duty to promote
the Union, Credit,
Peace, Prosperity, Honor,
and Felicity of its Country.
At its birth, it found the Union of the States dissolving like a rope of
snow;
It hath left it stronger than the threefold cord.
It found the United States bankrupts in estate and reputation;
It hath
left them unbounded in credit, and respected throughout the world.
It
found the Treasuries of the United States and Individual States empty;
It hath left them full and overflowing.
It found all the evidences of
public debts worthless as rags;
It hath left them more valuable than
gold and silver.
It found the United States at war with the Indian nations;
It hath
concluded peace with them all.
It found the aboriginals of the soil
inveterate enemies of the whites;
It hath exercised toward them justice
and generosity, and hath left them fast friends.
It found Great Britain
in possession of all the frontier posts;
It hath demanded their
surrender, and it leaves them in the possession of the United States.
It
found the American sea-coast utterly defenseless;
It hath left it
fortified.
It found our arsenals empty, and magazines decaying;
It hath
left them full of ammunition and warlike implements.
It found our
country dependent on foreign nations for engines of defense;
It hath
left manufactories of cannon and musquets in full work.
It found the
American Nation at war with Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli;
It hath made
peace with them all.
It found American freemen in Turkish slavery, where
they had languished in chains for years;
It hath ransomed them and set
them free.
It found the war-worn, invalid soldier starving from want; or,
like Belisarius, begging his refuse-meat from door to door;
It hath left
ample provision for the regular payment of his pension.
It found the commerce of our country confined almost to coasting craft;
It hath left it whitening every sea with its canvas, and cheering every
clime with its stars.
It found our mechanics and manufacturers idle in the streets for want of
employ;
It hath left them full of business, prosperous, contented, and
happy.
It found the yeomanry of the country oppressed with unequal
taxes; their farms, houses, and
barns decaying; their cattle selling at
the sign-posts; and they driven to
desperation and rebellion;
It hath
left their coffers in cash, their houses in repair, their barns full,
their farms overstocked,
and their produce commanding ready money and a
high price.
In short, it found them poor, indigent malcontents;
It hath
left them wealthy friends to order and good government.
It found the United States deeply in debt to France and Holland;
It hath
paid all the demands of the former, and the principal part of the
latter.
It found the country in a ruinous alliance with France;
It hath
honorably dissolved the connection, and set us free.
It found the United States without a swivel on float for their defense;
It hath left a Navy—composed of 34 ships of war, mounting 918 guns, and
manned by 7350
gallant tars.
It found the exports of our country a mere song in value;
It hath left
them worth above seventy millions of dollars per annum.
In one word, it
found America disunited, poor, insolvent, weak, discontented, and
wretched;
It hath left her united, wealthy, respectable, strong, happy,
and prosperous.
Let the faithful historian, in after-times, say these
things of its successor, if he can.
And yet, notwithstanding all these
services and blessings, there are found many, very many, weak,
degenerate sons, who, lost to virtue, to gratitude, and patriotism,
openly exult that this Administration is no more, and
that the "Sun of
Federalism is set forever."
"Oh shame, where is thy blush?"
AS ONE TRIBUTE OF GRATITUDE IN THESE TIMES, THIS MONUMENT OF THE TALENTS
AND
SERVICES OF THE DECEASED IS RAISED BY
The Centinel.
March 4th, 1801.
The Gerry-Mander. (Boston, 1811.)
The victorious Republicans, if less skillful than their adversaries in the burlesque arts, had their own methods of parrying and returning such assaults as this. At an earlier period in Mr. Jefferson's ascendency, the politicians, borrowing the idea from Catholic times, employed stuffed figures and burlesque processions in lieu of caricature. While the people were still in warm sympathy with the French Revolution, William Smith, a Representative in Congress from South Carolina, gave deep offense to many of his constituents by opposing certain resolutions offered by "Citizen Madison" expressive of that sympathy. There was no burlesque artist then in South Carolina, but the Democrats of Charleston contrived, notwithstanding, to caricature the offender and "his infernal junto." A platform was erected in an open place in Charleston, upon which was exhibited to a noisy crowd, from early in the morning until three in the afternoon, a rare assemblage of figures: A woman representing the Genius of Britain inviting the recreant Representatives to share the wages of her iniquity; William Smith advancing toward her with eager steps, his right hand stretched out to receive his portion, in his left holding a paper upon which was written "Six per cents," and wearing upon his breast another with "£40,000 in the Funds;" Benedict Arnold with his hand full of checks and bills; Fisher Ames labeled "£400,000 in the Funds;" the devil and "Young Pitt" goading on the reprobate Americans. In front of the stage was a gallows for the due hanging and burning of these figures when the crowd were tired of gazing upon them. Each of the characters was provided with a label exhibiting an appropriate sentiment. The odious Smith was made to confess that his sentence was just: "The love of gold, a foreign education, and foreign connections damn me." "Young Pitt" owned to having let loose the Algerines upon the Americans, and Fisher Ames confessed that from the time when he began life as a horse-jockey his "Ames had been villainy."
It is an objection to this kind of caricature that the weather may interfere with its proper presentation. A shower of rain obliterated most of those labels, and left the figures themselves in a reduced and draggled condition. But, according to the local historian, the exhibition was continued, "to the great mirth and entertainment of the boys, who would not quit the field until a total demolition of the figures took place," nor "before they had taken down the breeches of the effigy of the Representative of this State and given him repeated castigations." In the evening the colors of Great Britain were dipped in oil and French brandy, and burned at the same fire which had consumed the effigies.
Later in the Jeffersonian period, the burlesque procession—caricature vivante—was occasionally employed by the New England Federalists to excite popular disapproval of the embargo which suspended foreign commerce. Elderly gentlemen in Newburyport remember hearing their fathers describe the battered old hulk of a vessel, with rotten rigging and tattered sails, manned by ragged and cadaverous sailors, that was drawn in such a procession in 1808, the year of the Presidential election. There are even a few old people who remember seeing the procession, for in those healthy old coast towns the generations are linked together, and the whole history of New England is sometimes represented in the group round the post-office of a fine summer morning. The odd-looking picture of the Gerry-mander, on the previous page, belongs to the same period, and preserves a record not creditable to party politicians. Democratic leaders in Massachusetts, in order to secure the election of two Senators of their party, redistricted the State with absurd disregard of geographical facts. The Centinel exhibited the fraud by means of a colored map, which the artist, Gilbert Stuart, by a few touches, converted into the immortal Gerry-mander. Governor Gerry, though not the author of the scheme, nor an approver of it, justly shares the discredit of a measure which he might have vetoed, but did not.
The war of 1812 yields its quota of caricature to the collector's port-folio. "John Bull making a New Batch of Ships to send to the Lakes" is an obvious imitation of Gillray's masterpiece of Bonaparte baking a new batch of kings. The contribution levied upon Alexandria, and the retreat of a party of English troops from Baltimore, furnish subjects to a draughtsman who had more patriotic feeling than artistic invention. His "John Bull" is a stout man, with a bull's head and a long sword, who utters pompous words. "I must have all your flour, all your tobacco, all your ships, all your merchandise—every thing except your Porter and Perry. Keep them out of sight; I have had enough of them already." No doubt this was comforting to the patriotic mind while it was lamenting a Capitol burned and a President in flight.
Thomas Nast, 1875.
WHOLESALE.
RETAIL.
(Harper's Weekly, September 16th, 1871.)
The era of good feeling which followed the war of 1812, and which exhausted the high, benign spirit infused into public affairs by Mr. Jefferson, could not be expected to call forth satirical pictures of remarkable quality. The irruption of the positive and uncontrollable Jackson into politics made amends. Once more the mind of the country was astir, and again nearly the whole of the educated class was arrayed against the masses of the people. The two political parties in every country, call them by whatever disguising names we may, are the Rich and the Poor. The rich are naturally inclined to use their power to give their own class an advantage; the poor naturally object; and this is the underlying, ever-operating cause of political strife in all countries that enjoy a degree of freedom; and this is the reason why, in times of political crisis, the instructed class is frequently in the wrong. Interest and pride blind its judgment. In Jackson's day the distinction between the right and the wrong politics was not so clear as in Jefferson's time; but it was, upon the whole, the same struggle disguised and degraded by personal ambitions and antipathies. It certainly called forth as many parodies, burlesques, caricatures, and lampoons as any similar strife since the invention of politics. The coffin handbills repeated the device employed after the Boston massacre of 1774 in order to keep it in memory that General Jackson had ordered six militiamen to be shot for desertion. The hickory poles that pierced the sky at so many cross-roads were a retort to these, admitting but eulogizing the hardness of the man. The sudden breakup of the cabinet in 1831 called forth a caricature which dear Mrs. Trollope described as "the only tolerable one she ever saw in the country." It represented the President seated in his room trying hard to detain one of four escaping rats by putting his foot on its tail. The rat thus held wore the familiar countenance of the Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren, who had been requested to remain till his successor had arrived. It was this picture that gave occasion for one of John Van Buren's noted sayings that were once a circulating medium in the lawyers' offices of New York. "When will your father be in New York?" asked some one. The reply was, "When the President takes off his foot."
The Brains of the Tammany Ring. (Harper's Weekly, October 21st, 1871.)
Then we have Van Buren as a baby in the arms of General Jackson, receiving pap from a spoon in the general's hand; Jackson and Clay as jockeys riding a race toward the Presidential house, Clay ahead; Jackson receiving a crown from Van Buren and a sceptre from the devil; Jackson, Benton, Blair, Kendall, and others, in the guise of robbers, directing a great battering-ram at the front door of the United States Bank; Jackson, as Don Quixote, breaking a very slender lance against one of the marble pillars of the same edifice; Jackson and Louis Philippe as pugilists in a ring, the king having just received a blow that makes his crown topple over his face.
"What are the Wild Waves saying?" (Harper's Weekly, July 9th, 1870.)
Burlesque processions were also much in vogue in 1832 during the weeks preceding the Presidential election. To the oratory of Webster, Preston, Hoffman, and Everett, the Democracy replied by massive hickory poles, fifty feet long, drawn by eight, twelve, or sixteen horses, and ridden by as many young Democrats as could get astride of the emblematic log, waving flags and shouting, "Hurra for Jackson!" Live eagles were borne aloft upon poles, banners were carried exhibiting Nicholas Biddle as Old Nick, and endless ranks of Democrats marched past, each Democrat wearing in his hat a sprig of the sacred tree. And again the cultured orators were wrong, and the untutored Democrats were substantially in the right. Ambition and interest prevented those brilliant men from seeing that in putting down the bank, as in other measures of his stormy administration, the worst that could be truly said of General Jackson was that he did right things in a wrong way. The "shin-plaster" caricature given on the following page is itself a record of the bad consequences that followed his violent method in the matter of the bank. The inflation of 1835 produced the wild land speculation of 1836, which ended in the woful collapse of 1837, the year of bankruptcy and "shin-plaster."
To this period belongs the picture, given on a previous page, which caricatures the old militia system by presenting at one view many of the possible mishaps of training-day. The receipt which John Adams gave for making a free commonwealth enumerated four ingredients—town meetings, training-days, town schools, and ministers. But in the time of Jackson the old militia system had been outgrown, and it was laughed out of existence. Most of the faces in this picture were intended to be portraits.
Shin-plaster Caricature of General Jackson's War on the United States Bank, and its Consequences, 1837.
Mr. Hudson, in his valuable "History of Journalism," speaks of a lithographer named Robinson, who used to line the fences and even the curb-stones of New York with rude caricatures of the persons prominent in public life during the administrations of Jackson and Van Buren. Several of these have been preserved, with others of the same period; but few of them are tolerable, now that the feeling which suggested them no longer exists; and as to the greater number, we can only agree with the New York Mirror, then in the height of its celebrity and influence, in pronouncing them "so dull and so pointless that it were a waste of powder to blow them up."
City People in a Country Church.
The publication of Mrs. Trollope's work upon the "Domestic Manners of the Americans" called forth many inanities, to say nothing of a volume of two hundred and sixteen pages, entitled "Travels in America, by George Fibbleton, Esq., ex-Barber to His Majesty the King of Great Britain." In this work Mrs. Trollope's burlesque was burlesqued sufficiently well, perhaps, to amuse people at the moment, though it reads flatly enough now. The rise and progress of phrenology was caricatured as badly as Spurzheim himself could have desired, and the agitation in behalf of the rights of women evoked all that the pencil can achieve of the crude and the silly. On the other hand, the burning of the Ursuline convent in Boston was effectively rebuked by a pair of sketches, one exhibiting the destruction of the convent by an infuriate mob, and the other a room in which Sisters of Charity are waiting upon the sick. Over the whole was written, "Look on this picture, and on this."
Why don't you take it?
The thirty years' word war that preceded the four years' conflict in arms between North and South produced nothing in the way of burlesque art that is likely to be revived or remembered. If the war itself was not prolific of caricature, it was because drawing, as a part of school training, was still neglected among us. That the propensity to caricature existed is shown by the pictures on envelopes used during the first weeks of the war. The practice of illustrating envelopes in this way began on both sides in April, 1861, at the time when all eyes were directed upon Charleston. The flag of the Union, printed in colors, was the first device. This was instantly imitated by the Confederates, who filled their mails with envelope-flags showing seven stars and three broad stripes, the middle (white) one serving as a place for the direction of the letter. Very soon the flags began to exhibit mottoes and patriotic lines, such as, "Liberty and Union," "The Flag of the Free," and "Forever float that Standard Sheet!" The national arms speedily appeared, with various mottoes annexed. General Dix's inspiration, "If any one attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot," was the most popular of all for several weeks. Portraits of favorite generals and other public men were soon added—Scott, Fremont, Dix, Lincoln, Seward, and others. Before long the satirical and burlesque spirit began to manifest itself in such devices as a black flag and death's-head, with the words "Jeff Davis—his Mark;" a gallows, with a man hanging; a large pig, with "Whole Hog or None;" a bull-dog with his foot on a great piece of beef, marked Washington, with the words "Why don't you take it?" The portrait of General Butler figured on thousands of letters during the months of April and May, with his patriotic sentence, "Whatever our politics, the Government must be sustained;" and, a little later, his happy application of the words "contraband of war" to the case of the fugitive negroes was repeated upon letters without number. "Come back here, you old black rascal!" cries a master to his escaping slave. "Can't come back nohow," replies the colored brother; "dis chile contraban'." On many envelopes printed as early as May, 1861, we may still read a prophecy under the flag of the Union that has been fulfilled, "I shall wave again over Sumter."
Popular Caricature of the Secession War.
(From Envelopes, 1861. Collected by William B. Taylor, Postmaster of New York, and presented by him to the New York Historical Society.)
Such things as these usually perish with the feeling that called them forth. Mr. William B. Taylor, then the postmaster of New York, struck with the peculiar appearance of the post-office, all gay and brilliant with heaps of colored pictures, conceived the fancy of saving one or two envelopes of each kind, selected from the letters addressed to himself. These he hastily pasted in a scrap-book, which he afterward gave to swell the invaluable collection of curiosities belonging to the New York Historical Society.
Virginia Pausing.
We should not naturally have looked for caricature in Richmond in April, 1861, while the convention was sitting that passed the ordinance of secession. But the reader will perceive on this page that the pencil lent its aid to those who were putting the native state of Washington and Jefferson on the wrong side of the great controversy. This specimen appeared on the morning of the decisive day, and was brought away by a lady who then left Richmond for her home in New York. The rats are arranged so as to show the order in which the States seceded: South Carolina first, Mississippi second, Alabama and Florida on the same day, and Virginia still held by the negotiations with Mr. Lincoln. This picture may stand as the contribution of the Confederacy to the satiric art of the world.
Few readers need to be informed that it was the war which developed and brought to light the caricaturist of the United States, Thomas Nast. When the war began he was a boyish-looking youth of eighteen, who had already been employed as a draughtsman upon the illustrated press of New York and London for two years. He had ridden in Garibaldi's train during the campaign of 1860 which freed Sicily and Naples, and sent sketches of the leading events home to New York and to the London Illustrated News. But it was the secession war that changed him from a roving lad, with a swift pencil for sale, into a patriot artist, burning with the enthusiasm of the time. Harper's Weekly, circulating in every town, army, camp, fort, and ship, placed the whole country within his reach, and he gave forth from time to time those powerful emblematic pictures that roused the citizen and cheered the soldier. In these early works, produced amidst the harrowing anxieties of the war, the serious element was of necessity dominant, and it was this quality that gave them so much influence. They were as much the expression of heart-felt conviction as Mr. Curtis's most impassioned editorials, or Mr. Lincoln's Gettysburg speech. This I know, because I sat by his side many a time while he was drawing them, and was with him often at those electric moments when the idea of a picture was conceived. It was not till the war was over, and President Andrew Johnson began to "swing round the circle," that Mr. Nast's pictures became caricatures. But they were none the less the utterance of conviction. Whether he is wrong or right in the view presented of a subject, his pictures are always as much the product of his mind as they are of his hand.
Concerning the justice of many of his political caricatures there must be, of course, two opinions; but happily his greatest achievement is one which the honest portion of the people all approve. Caricature, since the earliest known period of its existence, far back in the dawn of Egyptian history, has accomplished nothing else equal to the series of about forty-five pictures contributed by Thomas Nast to Harper's Weekly for the explosion of the Tammany Ring. These are the utmost that satiric art has done in that kind. The fertility of invention displayed by the artist, week after week, for months at a time, was so extraordinary that people concluded, as a matter of course, the ideas were furnished him by others. On the contrary, he can not draw from the suggestions of other minds. His more celebrated pictures have been drawn in quiet country places, several miles from the city in which they were published.
The presence in New York of seventy or eighty thousand voters, born and reared in Europe, and left by European systems of government and religion totally ignorant of all that the citizens of a free state are most concerned to know, gave a chance here to the political thief such as has seldom existed, except within the circle of a court and aristocracy. The stealing, which was begun forty years before in the old corporation tea-room, had at last become a system, which was worked by a few coarse, cunning men with such effect as to endanger the solvency of the city. They stole more like kings and emperors than like common thieves, and the annual festival given by them at the Academy of Music called to mind the reckless profusion of Louis XIV. when he entertained the French nobles at Versailles at the expense of the laborious and economical people of France. Their chief was almost as ignorant and vulgar, though not as mean and pig-like, as George IV. of England. In many particulars they resembled the gang of low conspirators who seized the supreme power in France in 1851, and in the course of twenty years brought that powerful and illustrious nation so near ruin that it is even now a matter of doubt whether it exists by strength or by sufferance.
TWEEDLEDEE AND SWEEDLEDUM.
(A New Christmas Pantomime at Tammany Hall.)
Clown (to Pantaloon). "Let's blind them with this, and then take some more."
Tweed's Gift of Fifty Thousand Dollars to the Poor of his Native Ward. (Harper's Weekly, January 14th, 1871.)
What an escape we had! But, also, what immeasurable harm was done! From being a city where every one wished to live, or, at least, often to remain, they allowed New York to become a place from which all escaped who could. Nothing saved its business predominance but certain facts of geology and geography which Rings can not alter. Two generations of wise and patriotic exertion will not undo the mischief done by that knot of scoundrels in about six years. The press caught them at the full tide of their success, when the Tammany Ring, in fell alliance with a railroad ring, was confident of placing a puppet of its own in the Presidential chair. The history of this melancholy lapse, from the hour when an alderman first pocketed a quire of note-paper, or carried from the tea-room a bundle of cigars, to the moment of Tweed's rescue from a felon's cell through the imperfection of the law, were a subject worthier far of a great American writer in independent circumstances than any he could find in the records of the world beyond the sea. The interests of human nature, not less than the special interests of this country, demand that it should be written; for all the nations are now in substantially the same moral and political condition. Old methods have become everywhere inadequate before new ones are evolved; and meanwhile the Scoundrel has all the new forces and implements at his command. If ever this story should be written for the instruction of mankind, the historian will probably tell us that two young men of the New York press did more than any others to create the feeling that broke the Ring. Both of them naturally loathed a public thief. One of these young men in the columns of an important daily paper, and the other on the broad pages of Harper's Weekly, waged brilliant and effective warfare against the combination of spoilers. They made mad the guilty and appalled the free. They gave, also, moral support to the able and patriotic gentlemen who, in more quiet, unconspicuous ways, were accumulating evidence that finally consigned some of the conspirators to felons' cells, and made the rest harmless wanderers over the earth.
"Who Stole the People's Money?"—DO TELL. N.Y. TIMES.
'TWAS HIM.
(Thomas Nast, in Harper's Weekly, August 19th, 1871.)
Comic art is now well established among us. In the illustrated papers there are continually appearing pictures which are highly amusing, without having the incisive, aggressive force of Mr. Nast's caricatures. The old favorites of the public, Bellew, Eytinge, Reinhart, Beard, are known and admired, and the catalogue continually lengthens by the addition of other names. Interesting sketches, more or less satirical, bear the names of Brackmere, C. G. Parker, M. Woolf, G. Bull, S. Fox, Paul Frenzeny, Thomas Worth, Hopkins, Frost, Wust, and others. Among such names it is delightful to find those of two ladies, Mary M'Donald and Jennie Browscombe. The old towns of New England abound in undeveloped and half-developed female talent, for which there seems at present no career. There will never be a career for talent undeveloped or half developed. Give the schools in those fine old towns one lesson a week in object-drawing from a teacher that knows his business, keep it up for one generation, and New England girls will cheer all homes by genial sketches and amusing glimpses of life, to say nothing of more important and serious artistic work. The talent exists; the taste exists. Nothing is wanting but for us all to cast away from us the ridiculous notion that the only thing in human nature that requires educating is the brain. We must awake to the vast absurdity of bringing up girls upon algebra and Latin, and sending them out into a world which they were born to cheer and decorate unable to walk, dance, sing, or draw; their minds overwrought, but not well nourished, and their bodies devoid of the rudiments of education.
"On to Richmond!"—The Peninsular Campaign. (1862.)
M'Clellan. "You must coax him along: conciliate him. Force won't do. I don't believe in it; but don't let go. Keep his head to the rear. If he should get away, he might go to Richmond, and then my plans for conquering the Rebellion will never be developed."
B-lm-t. "Hold fast, B-rl-w, or he will get to Richmond in spite of us; and then my capital for the European market is all lost."
B-rl-w. "I've got him fast; there's no danger. He's only changing his base to the Gun-boats."
B-lm-t. "Look out for that letter to the President which you wrote for him. Don't lose that."
B-rl-w. "No; I have it safe here in my pocket. When his change of base is effected, I will make him sign the letter, and send it to old Abe."
There is no country on earth where the humorous aspects of human life are more relished than in the United States, and none where there is less power to exhibit them by the pencil. There are to-day a thousand paragraphs afloat in the press which ought to have been pictures. Here is one from a newspaper in the interior of Georgia: "A sorry sight it is to see a spike team, consisting of a skeleton steer and a skinky blind mule, with rope harness, and a squint-eyed driver, hauling a barrel of new whisky over poor roads, on a hermaphrodite wagon, into a farming district where the people are in debt, and the children are forced to practice scant attire by day and hungry sleeping by night." The man who penned those graphic lines needed, perhaps, but an educated hand to reproduce the scene, and make it as vivid to all minds as it was to his own. The country contains many such possible artists.
A novel kind of living caricature has been presented occasionally, of late, by Mr. William E. Baker, of the famous firm of sewing-machine manufacturers, Grover & Baker. At his farm in Natick, Massachusetts, Mr. Baker is fond of burlesquing the national propensity to convert every trifling celebration into a banner-and-brass-band pageant. A great company was once invited to his place to "assist" at the naming of a calf. At another time, the birthday of a favorite heifer was celebrated with pomp and circumstance. In the summer of 1875, several hundreds of people were summoned to witness the laying of the corner-stone of a new pig-pen, and among the guests were a governor, military companies, singing clubs, members of foreign legations, and other persons of note and importance. The enormous card of invitation, besides being adorned with pictures of high-bred pigs in the happiest condition, contained a story showing how pigs had brought on a war between two powerful nations. This was the tale:
Christmas-time—Won at a Turkey Raffle. (Sol Eytinge, Jun., Harper's Weekly, January 3d, 1874.)
"De breed am small, but de flavor am delicious."
"By the carelessness of a boy in 1811, a garden-gate in Rhode Island was left open; two pigs entered and destroyed a few plants. The day was hot, the pigs fat, and when attempts were made to drive them out, the characteristic obstinacy of the animals occasioned such violent exercise as to cause their death. A quarrel ensued between the owner of the pigs and the owner of the garden, which, spreading among their friends, resulted in the election of the opposition candidate—Howell—by one majority to the United States Senate, by whose vote the motion to postpone until the next session further consideration on the question of declaring war was defeated by one majority; and by the vote following it war was declared with Great Britain in 1812, although Howell was opposed to and voted against it."
"He cometh not, she said." (M. Woolf, in Harper's Bazar, July 31st, 1875.)
This story was illustrated by excellent wood-cuts. The account of the festival, given in the Boston Advertiser, is worth preserving as a narrative of the most costly, extensive, and elaborate joke ever performed in the United States. Since kings and emperors ceased to amuse their guests with similar burlesques, I know not if the world has witnessed "fooling" on so large a scale.
"On Saturday" (June 19th, 1875, two days after the Bunker Hill Centennial) "the invited guests repaired to the Albany Railroad Dépôt. The nine-o'clock train took out the Fifth Maryland Regiment, which had been invited, and the Marine Band of Washington, also a delegation of the Washington Light Infantry of Charleston, South Carolina.
"The next train took out their escort, the Charlestown Cadets, Company A, Fifth Massachusetts Regiment, Captain J. E. Phipps, the corps missing the train; a large number of invited guests, including Governor Gaston, his aid, Colonel Wyman, Colonels Kingsbury and Treadwell, and other representatives of the State House, General I. S. Burrell, First Brigade, and a great many officers of rank of the different military organizations of the State in uniform.
"Upon arriving at the dépôt in Wellesley, the carriage of Governor Eustis, in which Lafayette rode into Boston in 1824, with large iron-gray horses and rich gold-mounted harness, as old-fashioned as the vehicle, was placed at the service of the governor and his party. The line, consisting of some fifty vehicles, each capable of transporting twenty or thirty persons, headed by Edmands's Band, was then formed under the direction of Lieutenant Francis L. Hills, of the United States Artillery, who, by-the-way, was a most useful marshal.
"The procession was welcomed to the Farms by George O. Sanford, Chief Marshal, who was attired in a rich dark-velvet suit of the style of 1775, trimmed with gold-lace, and a bag-wig.
"About two or three thousand persons were upon the ground. Among them were General Banks, General Underwood, Colonel Andrews, of Charleston, South Carolina, and many other citizens of note, in addition to those previously mentioned. The marshals were distinguished by wearing a miniature silver hog upon the lapels of their coats, upon which were the letters 'W. E. B., June 19th, 1875,' and underneath the metal a ribbon badge with 'Marshal' in gold letters, intended to read 'We B Marshal.' They also carried a silver baton with red, white, and blue ribbons. Of those upon the ground perhaps five hundred were ladies.
"Teams from all the surrounding country were in the roads about the place, with their occupants gazing upon the spectacle. The military, who had marched from the dépôt, were drawn up on the lawn. The Marine Band was discoursing its delightful music here, Edmands's Band at another point, and the Natick Cornet at a third.
"Old Father Time was circulating about in gray hair, long gray beard, a dark-purple velvet robe, and carrying the conventional scythe. Cheers upon cheers were going up for the host from the military and the other guests. Many hundreds of chairs were provided at different points for the use of the weary. The young son of Mr. Baker was dressed in full Revolutionary Minute-man costume.
"About twelve o'clock the military stacked their arms, and all repaired to an immense pavilion, where substantial refreshments, including iced tea for a beverage, were provided for the thousands. In the 'Minnehaha Sweet-water Wigwam' were two immense tubs holding about two barrels each, one filled with lemonade and the other with claret-punch.
"In a large pen or 'corral' built of railroad-ties, in a manner partaking of a Virginia fence, a log-cabin, and a block fortress, were a cage of youthful bears and cages of other animals. The place was surrounded with pictures of hogs and men, both indulging in a grand carouse. There was no roof, and the top was surmounted by stuffed birds and animals. In this place two of Satan's respectable representatives, a blue devil and a red devil, were dealing out whisky-punch.
"At about two o'clock a procession marched about a quarter of a mile to the vicinity of the Buffalo yards, where the corner-stone of the new piggery was to be laid. A platform some thirty feet square had been erected, and, after music from Edmands's Band, Mr. Baker made a brief address of welcome.
"Brief and pertinent remarks were made by Governor Gaston, Curtis Guild, Esq., of the Commercial Bulletin, Colonel Andrews, of South Carolina, and C. B. Farnsworth, of Rhode Island.
"Colonel Jenkins, commander of the Fifth, was called upon, and commenced a patriotic speech, when he was interrupted by Mr. Baker, who took from a box a live white pig, some six weeks old, and presented it to the colonel for a 'Child of the Regiment.'
"Amidst shouts of laughter, the gallant colonel, in his rich dress, went on, dealing out patriotism with one arm and holding the pig in the other, where it quietly reposed, looking for all the world like a quiet babe just from the bath. The effect was irrepressibly ludicrous.
"Soon afterward Mr. Baker produced a black pig, some three months old; but the officer, having his arms already full, handed it to one of his men, who threw it upon his back, and only its head and fore paws were visible over the shoulders of the soldier.
"The rueful look of Piggy as he contemplated society from this novel position, and his squeals of wonder and fright, sent off the whole audience again into laughter, and the Maryland boys cheered for their adopted twins.
"The corner-stone was then lowered into position, the rope being held by Governor Gaston, Colonel Andrews, Colonel Jenkins, and Mr. Farnsworth, Mr. Baker first remarking that, as the Jews considered the pig unclean, it might be well to put a scent under the stone, which Mr. Guild thought was a centimental idea. Many cents were thrown, after which there was a slight shower, and many persons entered the big stable where were the wonderful cows which gave milk-punch.
"After the ceremony there was another collation, and then the soldiers had a game of foot-ball. As they were about to be loaded into carriages—for they rode back to the dépôt—several hundred red, white, and blue toy balloons were cut loose, and the air was filled with flocks of them. The troops took the train and arrived in town at six o'clock, and left almost immediately for home."
With this remarkable specimen of Comic Art in America, I take leave of the subject.
A.
Abbott, Dr., interprets an Egyptian caricature,
32.
Adams, John, quoted, upon a free commonwealth,
321.
Æneas, burlesque picture of,
20.
Alcmena, Princess, burlesqued,
29.
Alexaminos, Roman caricature of,
26.
Alexander I., his advice to Louis XVIII.,
213.
American caricature, chapters upon,
300,
318.
Amsterdam, caricatures published in,
129.
Anchises burlesqued,
20.
Ancients, the, their modes of ridicule,
15.
Antiphanes, quoted, upon women,
176.
Antiquaries puzzled, picture of,
146.
Apollo burlesqued,
29,
30.
Arbuthnot, John, his epitaph upon Charteris,
136.
Aristophanes, his power to provoke mirth,
30;
satire of women,
176.
Armstrong, John, quoted,
309.
Ascanius burlesqued,
20.
Ass, the, catechism upon,
49.
Avegay, Madame, in a caricature,
63.
B.
Bacchus, legend of,
23.
Baker, William E., his burlesque celebration,
331.
Ballou, M. M., his quotation-book,
184.
Bastwick, Dr., loses his ears,
99;
his triumphal return to London,
99.
Beaumarchais, Caron de, quoted,
161,
162.
Beaumont, G. de, a caricature by,
184.
Beer known to the ancient Egyptians,
34.
Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, his songs during the Restoration,
214,
215.
Bernard, St., quoted, upon grotesque decoration,
47.
Biddle, Nicholas, burlesqued,
321.
Bohemians, the, described,
172.
Bomba caricatured,
262,
263.
Bonaparte, Eugénie, caricatured,
234,
238.
Bonaparte, Louis, burlesqued,
235,
238.
Bonaparte, L. N., caricatured,
233,
238,
250,
252,
255.
Bonaparte, Napoleon, developed through George III.,
153;
suppressed caricature,
208;
caricatures of,
210,
268,
269.
Boston described,
301.
Box, Dame, anecdote of,
117.
Bradlaugh, Charles, in a caricature,
297.
Brandt, Sebastian, his "Ship of Fools,"
60,
180.
Brougham, Lord, caricatured in Punch,
287,
289.
Browne, Hablot K., criticised by Thackeray,
223.
Burke, Edmund, in Gillray's caricatures,
154;
quoted, upon the French Revolution,
163;
caricature,
164.
Burnet, Bishop, describes an altar-piece,
48.
Bute, Lord, a favorite of George III.,
150;
caricatured,
152,
153.
Butler, B. F., upon war envelopes,
324.
Button, Daniel, his coffee-house,
135.
C.
Cairo never swept,
22.
Calvin, Jean, his origin,
82;
caricatures of,
83-85.
Cambacérès, Jean-Jacques Regis de, a portrait of,
213.
Canning, Mr., not offended by caricature,
289.
Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, upon the French,
162,
163.
Cathedrals, decorations of,
40-43;
explained,
48.
Centinel, the, a parody from,
314.
Chambers, William, quoted, upon his early time,
272.
Cham, caricatures by,
185,
228,
232.
Champfleury, Jules, quoted, on pigmies,
18;
on cathedral decoration,
43,
46,
53;
gives a burlesque Paternoster,
61;
upon midnight masses,
61;
upon burlesque decoration of manuscripts,
67;
caricature from,
161,
162,
211;
quoted,
212,
220.
Charivari, Le, its course,
218,
220.
Charles II., caricature of,
103,
106.
Charles X. dethroned,
216.
Charlotte, Queen, caricatured,
154.
Charteris, Colonel Francis, epitaph upon,
136.
Chatham, Lord, caricatured,
156; disliked by George III.,
157.
Chatto, W. A., quoted, upon an old caricature,
64,
97.
Chesterfield, Lord, quoted, upon women,
185.
China, caricatures of,
191.
Chiron burlesqued,
29.
Christians, Roman caricature of,
25;
Roman opinion of,
26.
Cicero divorces his wife,
178.
Clement VII. ridiculed by Luther,
76;
pasquinade upon,
258.
Clergy, the, dissolute in the early ages,
68;
anecdotes of,
68;
rob and plunder,
69.
Coalition, the, caricatured,
157,
158.
Collier, Payne, writes out Punch,
266.
Commune, the, caricatures of,
235.
Cranach, Lucas, caricaturist of the Reformation,
77.
Cranmer, Bishop, his martyrdom,
87.
Cris-cross rhymes, specimen of,
105.
Cromwell, Elizabeth, caricatured,
107.
Cromwell, Oliver, caricatured,
104;
his funeral and disinterment,
106.
Cromwell, Richard, in caricature,
107.
Crozat, Antoine, sells Louisiana trade,
125.
Cruikshank, George, his caricature of crinoline,
181;
of school-girls,
189;
draws Punch,
265;
his career,
268;
pictures by,
270,
271,
273;
his family,
269.
Cruikshank, Isaac, his career,
273.
Cuba, comic art in,
256.
D.
Dance of Death, in Art of Middle Ages,
57-59.
Dangeau, Marquis de, quoted, upon Louis XV.,
159.
Daumier, M., his caricatures,
180,
219,
235.
Davus satirizes Horace,
25.
Death-crier, picture of,
56.
"Decameron," the, its effect upon contemporaries,
70.
Devil, the, traditional character of,
51; caricatured,
52-55;
modified by time,
65.
Devonshire, Duchess of, caricatured,
153.
Dickens, Charles, his "Pickwick,"
23;
origin of his "Bill Stumps,"
146;
Pickwick suggested by Seymour,
280;
described by Willis,
282.
Disraeli, Benjamin, caricatured,
289.
D'Israeli, Isaac, quoted, upon Punch,
265.
Dodington, Bubb, quoted, upon early life of George III.,
148,
149.
"Don Quixote," one secret of its charm,
23;
quoted,
56.
Doré, Gustave, caricature by,
231,
232.
Doyle, John, his caricatures,
275.
Doyle, Richard, his Wedding Breakfast,
281;
leaves Punch for conscience' sake,
299.
Du Maurier, Mr., his pictures of children,
294,
297.
Durand, M., his interpretation of a cathedral,
48.
Dürer, Albert, describes a procession,
92.
E.
Egyptians, art among,
32,
33;
their habits,
34,
56.
Elizabeth, Queen, celebration of her birthday,
110.
England, caricature in,
267.
Erasmus, quoted, upon the monks,
66,
71;
detested by Luther,
75;
satirizes women,
181,
182.
Evelyn, John, quoted, upon law,
124.
Extinguishers, family of the,
214.
Eytinge, Sol, picture by,
331.
F.
Fairholt, F. W., upon Gog and Magog,
50.
Fanning the Grave—a Chinese poem,
193.
Feuillet, Octave, misrepresents,
172.
"Figaro, Marriage of," quoted,
161,
162.
Fleury, Cardinal, tutor of Louis XV.,
159.
Fox, Charles James, in Gillray's caricatures,
153,
154,
157;
disliked by George III.,
157;
caricatured by Isaac Cruikshank,
274.
France, caricature of,
208.
Franklin, Benjamin, his caricature of the Colonies Reduced,
147;
quoted, upon George III.,
151;
burlesques English policy,
155;
quoted,
185;
his early use of pictures,
300,
304;
his early lampoons,
302;
his love of humor,
301,
303;
his Scalp Hoax,
306.
Frederic II. snubs Pompadour,
160.
French Revolution, caricatures of,
161-170.
Fry, William H., his use of Juvenal,
23.
G.
Galas, General, caricature of,
115.
Gallatin, Albert, good financier,
124.
Ganesa, his character in Hindoo theology,
36.
Gardiner, Bishop, his martyrdom,
86,
87.
Gautier, Théophile, quoted, upon Gavarni,
224.
Gavarni, his caricatures of women,
171,
176,
187,
188;
his only political caricatures,
216;
social caricatures by,
223,
224,
226;
portrait of,
236.
Gegeef, his caricatures,
297.
Geiler, Jacob, satirizes the monks,
71.
George III., his early life,
148;
compared with Louis XV.,
159;
caricature of,
209,
269.
George IV., anecdote of,
151;
in Gillray's caricatures,
154.
Germany, comic art in,
242.
Gerry, Elbridge, in the affair of the Gerry-mander,
317.
Gerry-mander, the picture of,
316.
Gibbon, Edward, quoted, upon rise of Christianity,
47,
54.
"Gil Blas," secret of its charm,
23.
Gillray, James, his works described,
153,
154;
caricatures Napoleon,
209;
his portrait,
267.
Gin, law to diminish use of,
143.
Girin, a caricature from,
179.
Godfrey, Sir Edmundsbury, assassinated,
109-111.
Godiva, remark upon,
183.
Goethe, J. W., quoted, upon housekeeping,
177.
Gog and Magog, pictures of,
50.
Gondomar, Count, complains of a caricature,
96,
97.
Greeks, art among,
28.
Griswold, Roger, assaulted by Lyon,
312.
H.
Hamilton, Alexander, talked well on finance,
124.
Harper's Weekly, during war,
326;
pictures from,
318-332.
Herculaneum, how discovered,
21.
Hindoos, the, art among,
36;
their domestic code,
175.
Hogarth, William, his career,
120,
133;
caricatures by,
134,
137,
138;
his five days' peregrination,
137;
anecdote by,
138;
his burlesque dedication,
140;
procures act of Parliament,
141;
his last letter,
304.
Holbein, Hans, caricatures indulgences,
72,
73;
illustrates Erasmus and Brandt,
76;
his triumph of riches,
81.
Homer upon pigmies,
17.
Horace, quoted, upon slavery,
23;
upon a miser,
24;
upon the Saturnalia,
25.
Howard, Cardinal, personated,
111.
Howells, William D., upon San Carlo,
42,
47.
Huc, M., quoted, upon the Chinese,
191.
Huguenots, caricatures by,
118.
Humbert, Aimé, his work upon Japan,
198;
a caricature from,
206.
Humpty Dumpty, antiquity of,
23.
I.
Ipswich noted in Puritan period,
97.
Isaac the Jew, caricatured,
63.
Italy, caricature in,
257.
J.
Jackson, Andrew, in caricature,
320,
322.
"Jade Chaplet," the, a poem from,
193.
Japan, comic art in,
198,
206.
Jefferson, Thomas, quoted, upon the hereditary principle,
147;
upon Scott's novels,
184;
upon the freedom of the press,
218;
caricatured,
313.
Jerome, St., his portrait,
47.
Jews, the, position and character of, in Middle Ages,
62.
Jupiter, caricature of,
29,
30.
Juvenal, quoted, upon slavery,
23;
upon the toilette,
24;
upon the Greeks,
31;
upon learned women,
179.
K.
Kenrick, J., quoted, upon Theban remains,
33.
Krishna, in Hindoo theology,
36-38.
L.
Langlois, E. H., quoted, upon the Death-crier,
56.
Laud, Archbishop, caricatured,
98,
100-102.
Law, John, his career,
120,
123-132.
Leech, John, his comic pictures,
284-286;
his portrait,
285.
Leighton, Dr. Alexander, persecuted,
98.
Lent and Shrovetide, tilt of,
107,
108.
Leo X., pasquinade upon,
258.
Lincoln, Abraham, in Punch,
290,
291.
London, its antiquity,
22.
Longfellow, H. W., quoted, upon Dance of Death,
59.
Louisiana, scheme for settling,
125;
old map of,
126.
Louis Philippe, his reign,
216,
217;
caricatured,
218,
321.
Louis XIV., caricatured,
115,
116,
118;
his finances,
121.
Louis XV., his education,
159;
anecdote of,
161.
Louis XVI. caricatured,
166,
167.
Louis XVIII., his character and reign,
212,
213.
Lucian, quoted, upon Jupiter,
30.
Luther, Martin, his aversion to Jews,
63;
caricature of,
64;
upon the devil,
65;
disliked Erasmus,
75;
used caricature in the Reformation,
76;
his marriage,
78;
his credulity,
93.
Luxembourg, Duc de, anecdote of,
116.
Lyon, Matthew, his assault upon Griswold,
312;
fined and imprisoned,
313.
M.
Macaire, Robert, burlesques so called,
221.
Malcolm, J. P., quoted, upon grotesque decoration,
44-46;
picture from,
90,
95,
196,
197.
Marcelin, M., dedicates loose pictures to his mother,
231.
Marcus Aurelius, quoted, upon Christians,
26.
Maria Theresa civil to Pompadour,
160.
Marie Antoinette caricatured,
169,
170.
Mary, Queen, her prayer-book,
46,
53,
54.
Masks worn by ancient actors,
22.
Mather, Cotton, quoted, upon the Franklins,
301,
302.
Mather, Increase, quoted, upon the press,
302.
Matrimony, caricature of,
173,
177;
in China,
192.
Melanchthon, Philip, upon Luther's marriage,
79.
Menius, Dr., anecdote of,
63.
Mercury burlesqued,
29,
30.
Mérimée, M., quoted, on the devil,
53.
Middle Ages, caricature of,
40,
50.
Midnight masses, gayety of, in France,
61.
Mingotti, Signora, caricature of,
143.
Mirabeau, Gabriel, Comte de, caricature of,
162.
Mitford, A. W., quoted, upon Japanese preaching,
198.
Mokke, Mosse, caricatured,
63.
Moor, Major Edward, quoted, upon Hindoo art,
36.
Morellet, Abbé, quoted, upon Franklin,
306.
Morgan, Matt, a caricature by,
299.
Morris, Robert, caricatured,
309.
N.
Nareda, in Hindoo mythology,
38.
Nast, Thomas, portrait of,
318;
caricatures by,
319,
320,
328,
329;
his career,
326.
Nilus, St., quoted, upon grotesque decoration,
46.
Nonius Maximus caricatured at Pompeii,
16.
North, Lord, caricatured,
157;
disapproves policy of George III.,
158.
Norton, Charles Eliot, quoted, upon art in Italy,
260,
262.
Norwich, great dragon of,
51.
Notables, the, caricatured,
161.
Nucerians, the, their contest with the people of Pompeii,
17.
O.
Oates, Titus, denounces Popish plot,
109.
Old masters, Hogarth upon,
138;
burlesque of,
139.
Olympiodorus, St. Nilus to, on decoration,
46.
Opimius burlesqued by Horace,
24.
Orange, Prince of, anecdote of,
116.
Orleans, Duc de, Regent of France,
122.
Osiris, in Egyptian art,
33.
Oudinot, General, caricatured,
260,
261.
P.
Paine, Thomas, caricatured by Gillray,
154;
in a caricature,
297.
Palladas, his epigram upon marriage,
177.
Palmerston, Lord, in Punch,
289,
290.
Parrhasius, anecdote of,
28.
Pasquino, account of,
257,
259.
Pergamus, unswept hall of,
28.
Petre, Father, caricature of,
109.
Philipon, Charles, portrait of,
218;
his Charivari,
220;
his trial,
220.
Pigmies, Pompeian pictures of,
15,
17-19;
described by Pliny,
17;
uses of,
18.
Pike, Luke Owen, a caricature from,
63;
quoted, upon clerical robbers,
69.
Pirlone, Il Don, caricatures from,
259-263.
Pitt, William, antagonist of Napoleon,
158;
caricatured by Isaac Cruikshank,
274.
Pius VI., pasquinade upon,
258.
Pius IX. caricatured,
263.
Pliny the Elder describes pigmies,
17;
upon Greek art,
28.
Pliny the Younger, quoted, upon Christians,
26.
Pocahontas, anecdote of,
175.
Pole, Cardinal, caricatured,
86.
"Politician Outwitted," quoted,
307.
Pompadour, Madame de, anecdotes of,
159-161.
Pompeii, chalk caricatures from,
15,
17;
pigmy pugilists from,
15;
described,
16;
its amphitheatre closed,
17;
how discovered,
21.
"Poor Richard," the comic almanac of its day,
303.
Pope, Alexander, speculates in shares,
128;
in a caricature,
136;
quoted, upon Walpole,
142;
women,
184.
Popish plot, terror of,
109.
Processions, remarks upon,
91;
in honor of Virgin Mary,
92;
upon birthday of Queen Elizabeth,
110.
Proverbs satirizing women,
185.
Prynne, Lawyer, loses his ears,
99;
his triumphal return to London,
99.
Puck, a burlesque from,
197.
Punch, antiquity of the legend,
31;
in Calcutta,
39;
in China,
191;
at Cairo,
264;
origin of,
265.
Punch,
284.
Puritan period, caricatures of,
90;
terror of,
93,
94,
98,
105,
106.
Q.
Quaker meeting, caricature of,
116.
Queen of James II., caricature of,
109.
Quincampoix, scenes in the street so named,
127,
129.
R.
Rabelais, François, his influence,
85,
86.
Randon, M., his caricatures,
227,
230.
Rationalism, caricature of,
298.
Reformation, the, caricatures of,
76;
abolished processions,
93.
"Reynard the Fox," its effect,
70.
Rheims, its cathedral,
40.
Richard II., his psalter,
45.
Richter, Ludwig, caricature by,
248.
Rochefoucauld, Duc de, quoted, upon women,
184.
Roman Catholic Church, remark upon,
46.
Rome, actors of,
22.
Roundhead, the nickname, retorted,
104.
Rupert, Prince, caricature of,
102.
Russell, Benjamin, his allegory,
310.
Russell, Earl, quoted, upon George III.,
157;
upon a caricature of himself,
284.
S.
Sacheverell, Dr., caricatured,
116,
117.
Sachs, Hans, his picture described,
78.
Saint-Simon, Duc de, quoted, upon the French Government,
125.
Satan, traditional character of,
51.
Saturnalia, the, at Rome,
24.
Saxe-Weimar, Duke of, quoted, upon American manners,
277.
Scalp Hoax, the, described,
305.
Scott, Sir Walter, Jefferson upon his novels,
184.
Secession War, caricatures of,
324-326.
Servetus, Michael, burned,
83,
84.
Seymour, Robert, suggests "Pickwick,"
280.
Shakspeare, William, his death,
95.
Sheridan, R. B., in Gillray's caricatures,
154;
anecdote of,
165.
Sherman, Roger, upon title of the President,
309.
"Ship of Fools" described and quoted,
60,
180.
Shrovetide and Lent, caricatures of,
107,
108.
Silenus, the legend of,
23.
Sleeping Congregation, the, Hogarth's picture of,
134.
Smart, Rev. Peter, persecuted,
98.
Smith, William, burlesqued,
316.
Socrates burlesqued by Aristophanes,
31.
South Sea Scheme described,
128;
caricatures of,
135.
Spain, proverbs of,
185;
comic art in,
249.
Spayne and Rome defeated, picture of,
95.
Staël, Madame de, Napoleon afraid of,
208.
Stent, G. C., quoted, upon the Chinese,
192.
Stone, S. J., caricature by,
298.
Story, W. W., quoted, upon Pasquino,
258,
259.
Strafford, Earl of, caricatured,
99,
100.
Strasburg, its cathedral,
41.
T.
Talleyrand, Prince de, caricatures of,
209,
211;
quoted, upon Napoleon,
212;
caricatured,
268.
Tammany Ring, spoliations of,
328.
Taylor, W. B., collects war envelopes,
324,
325.
Temptation, the, picture of,
55.
Tench, drum-maker, his fête,
106.
Tenniel, John, his pictures in Punch,
286,
289,
290;
portrait of,
295.
Terence, quoted, upon women,
179.
Tertullian, quoted, upon Last Judgment,
54.
Thackeray, W. M., his caricature of Louis XIV.,
119;
quoted, upon Hogarth,
137;
upon Louis Philippe,
219,
220;
commends Daumier,
223.
Thebes, antiquities of,
33,
35.
Titian burlesques the Laocoön,
89.
Tomes, Robert, quoted, upon Rheims Cathedral,
40.
Training Day, burlesque of,
308.
Trajan to Pliny, upon the Christians,
27.
Trollope, Mrs., her burlesques of American women,
183,
186,
276,
277,
279;
burlesqued,
323.
Tweed, William, caricatured,
319,
320,
328.
Tyrolese, the, scandalize their priests,
69.
V.
Van Buren, John, anecdote of,
320.
Van Buren, Martin, in caricature,
320,
322.
Vélocipède IV. See Bonaparte, Louis.
Viollet-le-duc, M., quoted, upon burlesque decoration,
64.
Virgil, quoted, upon Æneas,
20.
Virginia Pausing, caricature,
326.
Virgin Mary, her festival,
92.
Voltaire, quoted, upon Massacre of St. Bartholomew,
94.
W.
Wade, Mr., burlesque of,
196,
197.
Waldegrave, Lord, quoted, upon George III.,
150,
157.
Wales, Prince of, caricatured,
299.
Wales, Princess of, quoted, upon George III.,
148;
caricatured,
152.
Wall Street, scenes in, during inflation,
121.
Walpole, Horace, quoted, upon a caricature,
144;
upon mother of George III.,
148.
Walpole, Sir Robert, in South Sea speculations,
128;
bribes,
141,
142;
caricatured,
144,
145;
downfall,
145.
Ward, Samuel, his caricature,
96,
97.
Washington, George, the picture of his crossing the Delaware,
21;
caricatured,
309.
Weather-cock, order of the,
214.
Wilkes, John, Franklin upon,
151.
Wilkinson, Sir Gardner, quoted, upon Egyptian remains,
34,
35.
William and Mary, caricatures during their reign,
115.
William IV. caricatured by Doyle,
276.
Williams, S. W., a Chinese caricature from,
191.
Willis, N. P., his interview with Dickens,
282.
Winchester, its cathedral,
43.
Wine among the Egyptians,
33,
34;
among the monks,
68.
Women and matrimony, caricatures of,
171-190.
Worms, altar-piece at,
49.
Wright, Thomas, gives caricature of Irish warrior,
61;
quoted,
70.
X.
Xenophon, quoted, upon marriage, 177.
Z.
Zeuxis, anecdote of, 28.
THE END.
☞ For a full List of Books suitable for Libraries, see Harper & Brothers' Trade-List and Catalogue, which may be had gratuitously on application to the Publishers personally, or by letter enclosing Nine Cents in Postage-Stamps.
☞ Harper & Brothers will send their publications by mail, postage prepaid [excepting School and College Text-Books and certain books whose weight would exclude them from the mail], on receipt of the price. Harper & Brothers' School and College Text-Books marked in this list with an asterisk (*) will be sent by mail on receipt of the advertised price and one-sixth additional for postage.
FIRST CENTURY OF THE REPUBLIC. A Review of American Progress. 8vo, Cloth, $5.00; Sheep, $5.50; Half Morocco, $7.25.
CONTENTS.
Introduction: I. Colonial Progress. By Eugene Lawrence.—II. Mechanical Progress. By Edward H. Knight.—III. Progress in Manufacture. By the Hon. David A. Wells.—IV. Agricultural Progress. By Professor William H. Brewer.—V. The Development of our Mineral Resources. By Professor T. Sterry Hunt.—VI. Commercial Development. By Edward Atkinson.—VII. Growth and Distribution of Population. By the Hon. Francis A. Walker.—VIII. Monetary Development. By Professor William G. Sumner.—IX. The Experiment of the Union, with its Preparations. By T. D. Woolsey, D.D., LL.D.—X. Educational Progress. By Eugene Lawrence.—XI. Scientific Progress: 1. The Exact Sciences. By F. A. P. Barnard, D.D., LL.D. 2. Natural Science. By Professor Theodore Gill.—XII. A Century of American Literature. By Edwin P. Whipple.—XIII. Progress of the Fine Arts. By S. S. Conant.—XIV. Medical and Sanitary Progress. By Austin Flint, M.D.—XV. American Jurisprudence. By Benjamin Vaughan Abbott.—XVI. Humanitarian Progress. By Charles L. Brace.—XVII. Religious Development. By the Rev. John F. Hurst, D.D.
*HAYDN'S DICTIONARY OF DATES, relating to all Ages and Nations. For Universal Reference. Edited by Benjamin Vincent, Assistant Secretary and Keeper of the Library of the Royal Institution of Great Britain; and Revised for the Use of American Readers. 8vo, Cloth, $3.00; Sheep, $3.37.
HUME'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the Abdication of James II., 1688. By David Hume. 6 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $5.40; Sheep, $7.80; Half Calf, $15.90.
HILDRETH'S UNITED STATES. History of the United States. First Series: From the Discovery of the Continent to the Organization of the Government under the Federal Constitution. Second Series: From the Adoption of the Federal Constitution to the End of the Sixteenth Congress. By Richard Hildreth. 6 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $18.00; Sheep, $21.00; Half Calf, $31.50.
HUDSON'S HISTORY OF JOURNALISM. Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872. By Frederic Hudson. 8vo, Cloth, $5.00; Half Calf, $7.25.
MOTLEY'S DUTCH REPUBLIC. The Rise of the Dutch Republic. A History. By John Lothrop Motley, LL.D., D.C.L. With a Portrait of William of Orange. 3 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $10.50; Sheep, $12.00; Half Calf, $17.25.
MOTLEY'S UNITED NETHERLANDS. History of the United Netherlands: from the Death of William the Silent to the Twelve Years' Truce—1609. With a full View of the English-Dutch Struggle against Spain, and of the Origin and Destruction of the Spanish Armada. By John Lothrop Motley, LL.D., D.C.L. Portraits. 4 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $14.00; Sheep, $16.00; Half Calf, $23.00.
MOTLEY'S LIFE AND DEATH OF JOHN OF BARNEVELD. The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland: with a View of the Primary Causes and Movements of "The Thirty Years' War." By John Lothrop Motley, LL.D., D.C.L. Illustrated. In 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $7.00; Sheep, $8.00; Half Calf, $11.50.
LAMB'S COMPLETE WORKS. The Works of Charles Lamb. Comprising his Letters, Poems, Essays of Elia, Essays upon Shakspeare, Hogarth, &c., and a Sketch of his Life, with the Final Memorials, by T. Noon Talfourd. With Portrait. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $3.00; Half Calf, $6.50.
LAWRENCE'S HISTORICAL STUDIES. Historical Studies. By Eugene Lawrence. Containing the following Essays: The Bishops of Rome.—Leo and Luther.—Loyola and the Jesuits.—Ecumenical Councils.—The Vaudois.—The Huguenots.—The Church of Jerusalem.—Dominic and the Inquisition.—The Conquest of Ireland.—The Greek Church. 8vo, Cloth, uncut edges and gilt tops, $3.00.
MYERS'S REMAINS OF LOST EMPIRES. Remains of Lost Empires: Sketches of the Ruins of Palmyra, Nineveh, Babylon, and Persepolis, with some Notes on India and the Cashmerian Himalayas. By P. V. N. Myers. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $3.50.
LOSSING'S FIELD-BOOK OF THE REVOLUTION. Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution; or, Illustrations by Pen and Pencil of the History, Biography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the War for Independence. By Benson J. Lossing. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $14.00; Sheep or Roan, $15.00; Half Calf, $18.00.
LOSSING'S FIELD-BOOK OF THE WAR OF 1812. Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812: or, Illustrations by Pen and Pencil of the History, Biography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the last War for American Independence. By Benson J. Lossing. With several hundred Engravings on Wood by Lossing and Barritt, chiefly from Original Sketches by the Author. 1088 pages, 8vo, Cloth, $7.00; Sheep or Roan, $8.50; Half Calf, $10.00.
MACAULAY'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. The History of England from the Accession of James II. By Thomas Babington Macaulay. 5 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $10.00; Sheep, $12.50; Half Calf, $21.25; 12mo, Cloth, $4.50; Sheep, $6.50; Half Calf, $13.25.
MACAULAY'S LIFE AND LETTERS. The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. By his Nephew, G. Otto Trevelyan, M.P. With Portrait on Steel. Complete in 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, uncut edges and gilt tops, $5.00; Sheep, $6.00; Half Calf, $9.50. Popular Edition, 2 vols. in one, 12mo, Cloth, $1.75.
*GREEN'S SHORT HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. A Short History of the English People. By J. R. Green, M.A., Examiner in the School of Modern History, Oxford. With Tables and Colored Maps. 8vo, Cloth, $1.30.
FORSTER'S LIFE OF DEAN SWIFT. The Early Life of Jonathan Swift (1667-1711). By John Forster. With Portrait. 8vo, Cloth, $2.50.
HALLAM'S MIDDLE AGES. View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages. By Henry Hallam. 8vo, Cloth, $2.00; Sheep, $2.50; Half Calf, $4.25.
HALLAM'S CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND. The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of George II. By Henry Hallam. 8vo, Cloth, $2.00; Sheep, $2.50; Half Calf, $4.25.
HALLAM'S LITERATURE. Introduction to the Literature of Europe during the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries. By Henry Hallam. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $4.00; Sheep, $5.00; Half Calf, $8.50.
SCHWEINFURTH'S HEART OF AFRICA. The Heart of Africa. Three Years' Travels and Adventures in the Unexplored Regions of the Centre of Africa. From 1868 to 1871. By Dr. Georg Schweinfurth. Translated by Ellen E. Frewer. With an Introduction by Winwood Reade. Illustrated by about 130 Woodcuts from Drawings made by the Author, and with two Maps. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $8.00.
M'CLINTOCK & STRONG'S CYCLOPÆDIA. Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature. Prepared by the Rev. John M'Clintock, D.D., and Jas. Strong, S.T.D. 7 vols, now ready. Royal 8vo. Price per vol., Cloth, $5.00; Sheep, $6.00; Half Morocco, $8.00.
MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM: Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in February and March, 1874. By R. Bosworth Smith, M.A., Assistant Master in Harrow School; late Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. With an Appendix containing Emanuel Deutsch's Article on "Islam." 12mo, Cloth, $1.50.
MOSHEIM'S ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY, Ancient and Modern; in which the Rise, Progress, and Variation of Church Power are considered in their Connection with the State of Learning and Philosophy, and the Political History of Europe during that Period. Translated, with Notes, &c., by A. Maclaine, D.D. Continued to 1826, by C. Coote, LL.D. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $4.00; Sheep, $5.00; Half Calf, $8.50.
STRICKLAND'S (Miss) QUEENS OF SCOTLAND. Lives of the Queens of Scotland and English Princesses connected with the Regal Succession of Great Britain. By Agnes Strickland. 8 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $12.00; Half Calf, $26.00.
HARPER'S NEW CLASSICAL LIBRARY. Literal Translations.
The following Volumes are now ready. 12mo, Cloth, $1.50 each.
Cæsar.—Virgil.—Sallust.—Horace.—Cicero's Orations.—Cicero's Offices, &c.—Cicero on Oratory and Orators.—Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, On the Commonwealth, On the Nature of the Gods.—Tacitus (2 vols.).—Terence.—Sophocles.—Juvenal.—Xenophon.—Homer's Iliad.—Homer's Odyssey.—Herodotus.—Demosthenes (2 vols.).—Thucydides.—Æschylus.—Euripides (2 vols.).—Livy (2 vols.).—Plato [Select Dialogues].
LIVINGSTONE'S SOUTH AFRICA. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa: including a Sketch of Sixteen Years' Residence in the Interior of Africa, and a Journey from the Cape of Good Hope to Loanda on the West Coast; thence across the Continent, down the River Zambesi, to the Eastern Ocean. By David Livingstone, LL.D., D.C.L. With Portrait, Maps, and Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $4.50; Sheep, $5.00; Half Calf, $6.75.
LIVINGSTONE'S ZAMBESI. Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries, and of the Discovery of the Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa, 1858-1864. By David and Charles Livingstone. With Map and Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $5.00; Sheep, $5.50; Half Calf, $7.25.
LIVINGSTONE'S LAST JOURNALS. The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to his Death. Continued by a Narrative of his Last Moments and Sufferings, obtained from his Faithful Servants Chuma and Susi. By Horace Waller, F.R.G.S., Rector of Twywell, Northampton. With Portrait, Maps, and Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $5.00; Sheep, $5.50; Half Calf, $7.25. Cheap Popular Edition, 8vo, Cloth, with Map and Illustrations, $2.50.
RECLUS'S EARTH. The Earth: a Descriptive History of the Phenomena of the Life of the Globe. By Élisée Reclus. With 234 Maps and Illustrations, and 23 Page Maps printed in Colors. 8vo, Cloth, $5.00; Half Calf, $7.25.
RECLUS'S OCEAN. The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life. Being the Second Series of a Descriptive History of the Life of the Globe. By Élisée Reclus. Profusely Illustrated with 250 Maps or Figures, and 27 Maps printed in Colors. 8vo, Cloth, $6.00; Half Calf, $8.25.
PARTON'S CARICATURE. Caricature and Other Comic Art, in All Times and Many Lands. By James Parton. With 203 Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth.
NORDHOFF'S COMMUNISTIC SOCIETIES OF THE UNITED STATES. The Communistic Societies of the United States, from Personal Visit and Observation; including Detailed Accounts of the Economists, Zoarites, Shakers, the Amana, Oneida, Bethel, Aurora, Icarian, and other existing Societies. With Particulars of their Religious Creeds and Practices, their Social Theories and Life, Numbers, Industries, and Present Condition. By Charles Nordhoff. Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $4.00.
NORDHOFF'S CALIFORNIA. California: for Health, Pleasure, and Residence. A Book for Travellers and Settlers. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $2.50.
NORDHOFF'S NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, OREGON, AND THE SANDWICH ISLANDS. Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands. By Charles Nordhoff. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $2.50.
*RAWLINSON'S MANUAL OF ANCIENT HISTORY. A Manual of Ancient History, from the Earliest Times to the Fall of the Western Empire. Comprising the History of Chaldæa, Assyria, Media, Babylonia, Lydia, Phœnicia, Syria, Judæa, Egypt, Carthage, Persia, Greece, Macedonia, Parthia, and Rome. By George Rawlinson, M.A., Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.
BAKER'S ISMAILÏA. Ismailïa: a Narrative of the Expedition to Central Africa for the Suppression of the Slave-trade, organized by Ismail, Khedive of Egypt. By Sir Samuel White Baker, Pasha, F.R.S., F.R.G.S. With Maps, Portraits, and Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $5.00; Half Calf, $7.25.
BOSWELL'S JOHNSON. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. By James Boswell, Esq. Edited by John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F.R.S. With a Portrait of Boswell. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $4.00; Sheep, $5.00; Half Calf, $8.50.
VAN-LENNEP'S BIBLE LANDS. Bible Lands: their Modern Customs and Manners Illustrative of Scripture. By the Rev. Henry J. Van-Lennep, D.D. Illustrated with upward of 350 Wood Engravings and two Colored Maps. 838 pp., 8vo, Cloth, $5.00; Sheep, $6.00; Half Morocco, $8.00.
VINCENT'S LAND OF THE WHITE ELEPHANT. The Land of the White Elephant: Sights and Scenes in Southeastern Asia. A Personal Narrative of Travel and Adventure in Farther India, embracing the Countries of Burma, Siam, Cambodia, and Cochin-China (1871-2). By Frank Vincent, Jr. Illustrated with Maps, Plans, and Woodcuts. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $3.50.
NICHOLS'S ART EDUCATION. Art Education applied to Industry. By George Ward Nichols, Author of "The Story of the Great March." Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $4.00.
SHAKSPEARE. The Dramatic Works of William Shakspeare. With Corrections and Notes. Engravings. 6 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $9.00. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $4.00; Sheep, $5.00. In one vol., 8vo, Sheep, $4.00.
SMILES'S HISTORY OF THE HUGUENOTS. The Huguenots: their Settlements, Churches, and Industries in England and Ireland. By Samuel Smiles. With an Appendix relating to the Huguenots in America. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2.00.
SMILES'S HUGUENOTS AFTER THE REVOCATION. The Huguenots in France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; with a Visit to the Country of the Vaudois. By Samuel Smiles. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2.00.
SMILES'S LIFE OF THE STEPHENSONS. The Life of George Stephenson, and of his Son, Robert Stephenson; comprising, also, a History of the Invention and Introduction of the Railway Locomotive. By Samuel Smiles. With Steel Portraits and numerous Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $3.00.
SQUIER'S PERU. Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas. By E. George Squier, M.A., F.S.A., late U. S. Commissioner to Peru, Author of "Nicaragua," "Ancient Monuments of Mississippi Valley," &c., &c. With Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $5.00.
THE "CHALLENGER" EXPEDITION. The Atlantic: an Account of the General Results of the Exploring Expedition of H.M.S. "Challenger." By Sir Wyville Thomson, K.C.B., F.R.S. With numerous Illustrations, Colored Maps, and Charts, from Drawings by J. J. Wyld, engraved by J. D. Cooper, and Portrait of the Author, engraved by C. H. Jeens. 2 vols., 8vo. (In Press.)
ALISON'S HISTORY OF EUROPE. First Series: From the Commencement of the French Revolution, in 1789, to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815. [In addition to the Notes on Chapter LXXVI., which correct the errors of the original work concerning the United States, a copious Analytical Index has been appended to this American Edition.] Second Series: From the Fall of Napoleon, in 1815, to the Accession of Louis Napoleon, in 1852. 8 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $16.00; Sheep, $20.00; Half Calf, $34.00.
CARLYLE'S FREDERICK THE GREAT. History of Friedrich II., called Frederick the Great. By Thomas Carlyle. Portraits, Maps, Plans, &c. 6 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $12.00; Sheep, $14.40; Half Calf, $22.50.
WALLACE'S GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS. The Geographical Distribution of Animals. With a Study of the Relations of Living and Extinct Faunas as Elucidating the Past Changes of the Earth's Surface. By Alfred Russel Wallace. With Maps and Illustrations. In 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $10.00.
WALLACE'S MALAY ARCHIPELAGO. The Malay Archipelago: the Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise. A Narrative of Travel, 1854-1862. With Studies of Man and Nature. By Alfred Russel Wallace. With Ten Maps and Fifty-one Elegant Illustrations. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2.50.
GIBBON'S ROME. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. By Edward Gibbon. With Notes by Rev. H. H. Milman and M. Guizot. With Index. 6 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $5.40; Sheep, $7.80; Half Calf, $15.90.
BOURNE'S LIFE OF JOHN LOCKE. The Life of John Locke. By H. R. Fox Bourne. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, uncut edges and gilt tops, $5.00.
GRIFFIS'S JAPAN. The Mikado's Empire: Book I. History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. Book II. Personal Experiences, Observations, and Studies in Japan, 1870-1874. By William Elliot Griffis, A.M., late of the Imperial University of Tōkiō, Japan. Copiously Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $4.00; Half Calf, $6.25.
THOMPSON'S PAPACY AND THE CIVIL POWER. The Papacy and the Civil Power. By the Hon. R. W. Thompson, Secretary of the U. S. Navy. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $3.00.
THE POETS AND POETRY OF SCOTLAND: from the Earliest to the Present Time. Comprising Characteristic Selections from the Works of the more Noteworthy Scottish Poets, with Biographical and Critical Notices. By James Grant Wilson. With Portraits on Steel. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $10.00; Half Calf, $14.50; Full Morocco, $18.00.
*THE STUDENT'S SERIES. With Maps and Illustrations. 12mo, Cloth.
France.—Gibbon.—Greece.—Hume.—Rome (by Liddell).—Old Testament History.—New Testament History.—Strickland's Queens of England (Abridged).—Ancient History of the East.—Hallam's Middle Ages.—Hallam's Constitutional History of England.—Lyell's Elements of Geology.—Merivale's General History Of Rome.—Cox's General History Of Greece.—Classical Dictionary. Price $1.25 per volume.
Lewis's History of Germany. Price $1.50.
THE REVISION OF THE ENGLISH VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. With an Introduction by the Rev. P. Schaff, D.D. 618 pp., Crown 8vo, Cloth, $3.00.
This work embraces in one volume:
I. ON A FRESH REVISION OF THE ENGLISH NEW TESTAMENT. By J. B. Lightfoot, D.D., Canon of St. Paul's, and Hulsean Professor of Divinity, Cambridge. Second Edition, Revised. 196 pp.
II. ON THE AUTHORIZED VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT in Connection with some Recent Proposals for its Revision. By Richard Chenevix Trench, D.D., Archbishop of Dublin. 194 pp.
III. CONSIDERATIONS ON THE REVISION OF THE ENGLISH VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. By C. J. Ellicott, D.D., Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. 178 pp.
ADDISON'S COMPLETE WORKS. The Works of Joseph Addison, embracing the whole of the Spectator. 3 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $6.00; Sheep, $7.50; Half Calf, $12.75.
ANNUAL RECORD OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. The Annual Record of Science and Industry. Edited by Professor Spencer F. Baird, of the Smithsonian Institution, with the Assistance of Eminent Men of Science. The Yearly Volumes for 1871, 1872, 1873, 1874, 1875, 1876, are ready. 12mo, Cloth, $2.00 per vol.
BROUGHAM'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham. Written by Himself. 3 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $6.00.
BULWER'S HORACE. The Odes and Epodes of Horace. A Metrical Translation into English. With Introduction and Commentaries. By Lord Lytton. With Latin Text from the Editions of Orelli, Macleane, and Yonge. 12mo, Cloth, $1.75.
BULWER'S KING ARTHUR. King Arthur. A Poem. By Lord Lytton. 12mo, Cloth, $1.75.
BULWER'S PROSE WORKS. The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $3.50. Also, in uniform style, Caxtoniana. 12mo, Cloth, $1.75.
DAVIS'S CARTHAGE. Carthage and her Remains: being an Account of the Excavations and Researches on the Site of the Phœnician Metropolis in Africa and other Adjacent Places. Conducted under the Auspices of Her Majesty's Government. By Dr. N. Davis, F.R.G.S. Profusely Illustrated with Maps, Woodcuts, Chromo-Lithographs, &c. 8vo, Cloth, $4.00; Half Calf, $6.25.
CAMERON'S ACROSS AFRICA. Across Africa. By Verney Lovett Cameron, C.B., D.C.L., Commander Royal Navy, Gold Medalist Royal Geographical Society, &c. With a Map and Numerous Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $5.00.
CARLYLE'S FRENCH REVOLUTION. The French Revolution: a History. By Thomas Carlyle. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $3.50; Sheep, $4.30; Half Calf, $7.00.
CARLYLE'S OLIVER CROMWELL. Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, including the Supplement to the First Edition. With Elucidations. By Thomas Carlyle. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $3.50; Sheep, $4.30; Half Calf, $7.00.
BARTH'S NORTH AND CENTRAL AFRICA. Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa: being a Journal of an Expedition undertaken under the Auspices of H.B.M.'s Government, in the Years 1849-1855. By Henry Barth, Ph.D., D.C.L. Illustrated. 3 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $12.00; Sheep, $13.50; Half Calf, $18.75.
THOMSON'S LAND AND BOOK. The Land and the Book; or, Biblical Illustrations drawn from the Manners and Customs, the Scenes and the Scenery, of the Holy Land. By W. M. Thomson, D.D., Twenty-five Years a Missionary of the A.B.C.F.M. in Syria and Palestine. With two elaborate Maps of Palestine, an accurate Plan of Jerusalem, and several hundred Engravings, representing the Scenery, Topography, and Productions of the Holy Land, and the Costumes, Manners, and Habits of the People. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $5.00; Sheep, $6.00; Half Calf, $8.50.
TENNYSON'S COMPLETE POEMS. The Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate. With numerous Illustrations by Eminent Artists, and Three Characteristic Portraits. 8vo, Paper, $1.00; Cloth, $1.50.
DU CHAILLU'S AFRICA. Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa: with Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the People, and of the Chase of the Gorilla, the Crocodile, Leopard, Elephant, Hippopotamus, and other Animals. By Paul B. Du Chaillu. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $5.00; Sheep, $5.50; Half Calf, $7.25.
DU CHAILLU'S ASHANGO LAND. A Journey to Ashango Land, and Further Penetration into Equatorial Africa. By Paul B. Du Chaillu. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $5.00; Sheep, $5.50; Half Calf, $7.25.
WHITE'S MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew: Preceded by a History of the Religious Wars in the Reign of Charles IX. By Henry White, M.A. With Illustrations. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $1.75.
DRAPER'S CIVIL WAR. History of the American Civil War. By John W. Draper, M.D., LL.D. 3 vols., 8vo, Cloth, Beveled Edges, $10.50; Sheep, $12.00; Half Calf, $17.25.
DRAPER'S INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPE. A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe. By John W. Draper, M.D., LL.D. New Edition, Revised. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $3.00; Half Calf, $6.50.
DRAPER'S AMERICAN CIVIL POLICY. Thoughts on the Future Civil Policy of America. By John W. Draper, M.D., LL.D., Professor of Chemistry and Physiology in the University of New York. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2.00; Half Morocco, $3.75.
FLAMMARION'S ATMOSPHERE. The Atmosphere. Translated from the French of Camille Flammarion. Edited by James Glaisher, F.R.S., Superintendent of the Magnetical and Meteorological Department of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. With 10 Chromo-Lithographs and 86 Woodcuts. 8vo, Cloth, $6.00; Half Calf, $8.25.
ABBOTT'S DICTIONARY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. A Dictionary of Religious Knowledge, for Popular and Professional Use; comprising full Information on Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Subjects. With nearly One Thousand Maps and Illustrations. Edited by the Rev. Lyman Abbott, with the Co-operation of the Rev. T. C. Conant, D.D. Royal 8vo, containing over 1000 pages, Cloth, $6.00; Sheep, $7.00; Half Morocco, $8.50.
ABBOTT'S FREDERICK THE GREAT. The History of Frederick the Second, called Frederick the Great. By John S. C. Abbott. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $5.00; Half Calf, $7.25.
ABBOTT'S HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. The French Revolution of 1789, as viewed in the Light of Republican Institutions. By John S. C. Abbott. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $5.00; Sheep, $5.50; Half Calf, $7.25.
ABBOTT'S NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. The History of Napoleon Bonaparte. By John S. C. Abbott. With Maps, Illustrations, and Portraits on Steel. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $10.00; Sheep, $11.00; Half Calf, $14.50.
ABBOTT'S NAPOLEON AT ST. HELENA. Napoleon at St. Helena; or, Interesting Anecdotes and Remarkable Conversations of the Emperor during the Five and a Half Years of his Captivity. Collected from the Memorials of Las Casas, O'Meara, Montholon, Antommarchi, and others. By John S. C. Abbott. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $5.00; Sheep, $5.50; Half Calf, $7.25.
CRUISE OF THE "CHALLENGER." Voyages over many Seas, Scenes in many Lands. By W. J. J. Spry, R.N. With Map and Illustrations. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2.00.
WOOD'S HOMES WITHOUT HANDS. Homes Without Hands: being a Description of the Habitations of Animals, classed according to their Principle of Construction. By J. G. Wood, M.A., F.L.S. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $4.50; Sheep or Roan, $5.00; Half Calf, $6.75.
SCHAFF'S CREEDS OF CHRISTENDOM. Bibliotheca Symbolica Ecclesiæ Universalis. The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes. By Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D., Professor of Biblical Literature in the Union Theological Seminary, New York. 3 vols. Vol. I.: The History of Creeds. Vol. II.: The Greek and Latin Creeds, with Translations. Vol. III.: The Evangelical Protestant Creeds, with Translations. 8vo, Cloth, $15.00.
YONGE'S LIFE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE. The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France. By Charles Duke Yonge, Regius Professor of Modern History and English Literature in Queen's College, Belfast. With Portrait. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2.50.
POETS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. The Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Selected and Edited by the Rev. Robert Aris Willmott. With English and American Additions, arranged by Evert A. Duyckinck, Editor of "Cyclopædia of American Literature." Comprising Selections from the Greatest Authors of the Age. Superbly Illustrated with 141 Engravings from Designs by the most Eminent Artists. In Elegant small 4to form, printed on Superfine Tinted Paper, richly bound in extra Cloth, Beveled, Gilt Edges, $5.00; Half Calf, $5.50; Full Turkey Morocco, $9.00.
COLERIDGE'S COMPLETE WORKS. The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. With an Introductory Essay upon his Philosophical and Theological Opinions. Edited by the Rev. W. G. T. Shedd, D.D. With a Portrait. 7 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $10.50; Half Calf, $22.75.
COLERIDGE'S (Sara) MEMOIR AND LETTERS. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge. Edited by her Daughter. With Two Portraits on Steel. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2.50; Half Calf, $4.25.
DRAKE'S NOOKS AND CORNERS OF THE NEW ENGLAND COAST. Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast. By Samuel Adams Drake, Author of "Old Landmarks of Boston," "Historic Fields and Mansions of Middlesex," &c. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $3.50; Half Calf, $5.75.
GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE. 12 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $18.00; Sheep, $22.80; Half Calf, $39.00.
PRIME'S OUR CHILDREN'S SONGS. Our Children's Songs. With Illustrations. 8vo. (In Press.)
TYERMAN'S WESLEY. The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., Founder of the Methodists. By the Rev. Luke Tyerman. With Portraits. 3 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $7.50; Half Calf, $14.25.
TYERMAN'S OXFORD METHODISTS. The Oxford Methodists: Memoirs of the Rev. Messrs. Clayton, Ingham, Gambold, Hervey, and Broughton, with Biographical Notices of others. By the Rev. L. Tyerman. With Portraits. 8vo, Cloth, $2.50.
VÁMBÉRY'S CENTRAL ASIA. Travels in Central Asia. Being the Account of a Journey from Teheran across the Turkoman Desert, on the Eastern Shore of the Caspian, to Khiva, Bokhara, and Samarcand, performed in the Year 1863. By Arminius Vámbéry, Member of the Hungarian Academy of Pesth, by whom he was sent on this Scientific Mission. With Map and Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $4.50; Half Calf, $6.75.
LYMAN BEECHER'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, &c. Autobiography, Correspondence, &c., of Lyman Beecher, D.D. Edited by his Son, Charles Beecher. With Three Steel Portraits, and Engravings on Wood. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $5.00; Half Morocco, $8.50.
BENJAMIN'S CONTEMPORARY ART. Contemporary Art in Europe. By S. G. W. Benjamin. Handsomely Illustrated. 8vo. (In Press.)
TROWBRIDGE'S POEMS. The Book of Gold, and Other Poems. By J. T. Trowbridge. Handsomely Illustrated. 8vo. (In Press.)
THE DESERT OF THE EXODUS. Journeys on Foot in the Wilderness of the Forty Years' Wanderings; undertaken in connection with the Ordnance Survey of Sinai and the Palestine Exploration Fund. By E. H. Palmer, M.A., Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic, and Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. With Maps and numerous Illustrations from Photographs and Drawings taken on the spot by the Sinai Survey Expedition and C. F. Tyrwhitt Drake. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $3.00.
THOMSON'S MALACCA, INDO-CHINA, AND CHINA. The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China; or, Ten Years' Travels, Adventures, and Residence Abroad. By J. Thomson, F.R.G.S. With over 60 Illustrations from the Author's own Photographs and Sketches. 8vo, Cloth, $4.00.
TREVELYAN'S SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY. Selections from the Writings of Lord Macaulay. By his Nephew, G. Otto Trevelyan, M.P. for Hawick District of Burghs. 8vo, Cloth, $2.50.
JEFFERSON'S DOMESTIC LIFE. The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson: compiled from Family Letters and Reminiscences, by his Great-granddaughter, Sarah N. Randolph. Illustrated. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2.50.
JOHNSON'S COMPLETE WORKS. The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. With an Essay on his Life and Genius, by Arthur Murphy, Esq. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $4.00; Sheep, $5.00; Half Calf, $8.50.
KINGLAKE'S CRIMEAN WAR. The Invasion of the Crimea: its Origin, and an Account of its Progress down to the Death of Lord Raglan. By Alexander William Kinglake. With Maps and Plans. Three Volumes now ready. 12mo, Cloth, $2.00 per vol.; Half Calf, $3.75 per vol.
Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York.
1: "Naples and the Campagna Felice." In a Series of Letters addressed to a Friend in England, in 1802, p. 104.
2: "A Popular Account of the Ancient Egyptians," by Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson, 2 vols., Harper & Brothers, 1854.
3: "The Champagne Country," p. 34, by Robert Tomes, London, 1867.
4: Quoted in Champfleury, p. 7, from "Maxima Bibliotheca Patrum," vol. xxvii., p. 323.
5: "Gog and Magog: the Giants in Guildhall," by F. W. Fairholt, F.S.A., London, 1859.
6: "Essai sur les Dances des Morts," vol. i., p. 151, par E. H. Langlois, Paris, 1852.
7: "History of Crime in England," vol. i., by Luke Owen Pike, London, 1873.
8: From "A Treatise on Wood-engraving," p. 268, by Jackson and Chatto, London, 1866.
9: "History of Sign-boards," p. 319, by Larwood and Hotten, London.
10: "History of Crime in England," p. 248, by L. O. Pike, London, 1873.
11: From "A History of Caricature," p. 254, by Thomas Wright, London, 1864.
12: From "Holbein and his Time," p. 241-243, by Alfred Woltmann; translated by F. E. Bunnett, London, 1872.
13: From "Musée de la Caricature en France," Paris, 1834.
14: "Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum," Division I., vol. i., p. 2. London, 1870.
15: From "Malcolm's Caricaturing," plate 2, and p. 23. See, also, "Catalogue of the Prints and Drawings in the British Museum," Division I., vol. ii., p. 177.
16: From Malcolm, who copied it from the original in the British Museum. See Malcolm's "Caricaturing," plate 22.
17: From Chatto's "Origin and History of Playing Cards," p. 131, London, 1848.
18: "Law, son Système et son Époque," p. 2, par P. A. Cochut, Paris, 1853.
19: "Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum," Division I., vol. ii., p. 566.
20: "Hogarth's Works," frontispiece to vol. iii., by Ireland and Nichols.
21: Thomas Wright, "Caricature History of the Georges," p. 128.
22: Champfleury, "Histoire de la Caricature sous la République," etc., p. 5.
23: Champfleury, "Histoire de la Caricature sous la République," p. 81.
24: "Gavarni, l'Homme et l'Œuvre," par Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Paris, 1873.
25: "From History of Sign-boards," by Larwood and Hotten.
26: From Wright's "Caricature History of the Georges," p. 256.
27: "Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India," vol. i., p. 316, by J. A. Dubois, London, 1817.
28: From "The Middle Kingdom," vol. ii., p. 177, by S. W. Williams, New York, 1871.
29: Small feet.
30: White is the color worn as mourning in China.
31: Red is worn on joyful occasions, such as weddings, etc.
32: "Malcolm's Caricaturing," plate iv., fig. 9.
33: "Malcolm's Caricaturing," plate iv., fig. 3.
34: "Tales of Old Japan," vol. ii., p. 138, by A. W. Mitford, Secretary of the British Legation in Japan, London, 1874.
35: "Napoleon at St. Helena," p. 90, by John S. C. Abbott, New York, Harper & Brothers.
36: In the London and Westminster Review for April, 1839, Article II.
37: "Histoire de la Caricature Moderne," p. 100, par Champfleury.
38: "Roba di Roma," p. 283.
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.
40: Only eleven States had accepted the Constitution when this was written.
Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected, all other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's spelling has been maintained.