Caricature and Other Comic Art Part 1

Caricature and Other Comic Art.

by James Parton.

PREFACE.

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 ill.u.s.trations. 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 j.a.pan, 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 pa.s.sing months, and in the preparation of which a great expenditure was directed to a single cla.s.s 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 ill.u.s.tration, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 ma.s.s 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 ill.u.s.trations. 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 apt.i.tude 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 s.e.x, 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 alb.u.ms 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 att.i.tude 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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.

AMONG THE ROMANS.

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Chalk Drawing by Roman Soldier in Pompeii.]

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 pa.s.s 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, compa.s.ses, 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.

[Footnote 1: "Naples and the Campagna Felice." In a Series of Letters addressed to a Friend in England, in 1802, p. 104.]

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 c.u.m 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 mult.i.tude of the geese. The Pigmies live in cabins made of mud, the sh.e.l.ls of goose eggs, and feathers of the same bird."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 repet.i.tion 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 a.s.sociated 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 cla.s.sic period.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 gra.s.shopper driving a chariot, copied in 1802 from a Pompeian work for an English traveler.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Gra.s.shopper driving a Chariot.]

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: From an Antique Amethyst.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Flight of aeneas from Troy.]

The spirited air of the team of c.o.c.ks, and the _nonchalant_ professional att.i.tude 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 aeneas 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 G.o.ds. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Caricature of the Flight of aeneas.]

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 aeneas as represented in serious art, just as we smile at the theatrical att.i.tudes and costumes in the picture of "Was.h.i.+ngton 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 a.s.syria would have endeavored to cast ridicule upon such a picture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ma.s.s 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 p.r.o.nounced bra.s.s, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Roman Masks, Comic and Tragic.]