Caricature and Other Comic Art Part 15

That renowned "coalition" between Lord North and Mr. Fox in 1783, the theme of countless caricatures and endless invective, ill.u.s.trates 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.

CHAPTER XIV.

DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

In France, more conspicuously than in England, kings.h.i.+p broke down in that century. Louis XV., born in a private station, might have risen to the owners.h.i.+p 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 kings.h.i.+p in Europe possessed but one trait which we usually a.s.sociate 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 pa.s.sion 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 _roue_ for a guardian, a smooth, insinuating priest for preceptor, and a dissolute court conspiring to corrupt him? The priest, who represented what then pa.s.sed for virtue, taught him virtue out of a dreary catechism, still extant, which never yet elevated or n.o.bly 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 "_divertiss.e.m.e.nt_" of seeing them shoot the birds, and covering all the floor with b.l.o.o.d.y, 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 gout pour les femmes_, hoping thereby to render him "more polite and tractable." The precise manner in which a bevy of ill.u.s.trious princesses and d.u.c.h.esses sought to _debaucher 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 n.o.bles--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 _protege_ 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 _role_ of a few lines only. Get madame to a.s.sign 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 _role_ 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: a.s.sembly of the Notables at Paris, February 22d, 1787.[22]

"Dear objects of my care, I have a.s.sembled 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."

[Footnote 22: Champfleury, "Histoire de la Caricature sous la Republique," etc., p. 5.]]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Mirabeau.[23] (Paris, 1789.)

[Footnote 23: Champfleury, "Histoire de la Caricature sous la Republique," p. 81.]]

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 _G.o.d-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 _G.o.d-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 enn.o.ble 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 judges.h.i.+ps 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 n.o.blesse loudest of all."

The first picture given in these pages relating to the French Revolution, "The a.s.sembly 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 n.o.bility, clergy, and magistrates, hitherto exempt from vulgar taxation. But the a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sembled you to advise me what sauce I shall dress you with,' to which a _c.o.c.k_ 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 inst.i.tutions.

Forever vain and always fruitful of prodigious evil will be attempts to found a government by the whole people where the ma.s.s of the working population are grossly ignorant and superst.i.tious. 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 cla.s.s intensely alive to the "folly of heaping importance upon idiots."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 a.s.sisting 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Zenith of French Glory--A View in Perspective.

(Gillray, London, 1793.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Estates. (Paris, 1789.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Const.i.tution, presents the sponge soaked in regicides' gall; the Queen, overwhelmed with grief, demands speedy vengeance; the d.u.c.h.ess de Polignac, etc.]

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, n.o.bleman, 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 acc.u.mulated 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, n.o.ble, and peasant clasped in a fervent embrace, the n.o.ble 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 c.o.c.kade, and underneath is written, "The wish accomplished.

This is as I ever desired it should be." In another picture priest, n.o.ble, and peasant are playing together upon instruments--the priest upon a serpent-shaped trumpet, the n.o.ble 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.

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 n.o.ble to the priest. From being fraternal, the Third Estate became patronizing. The three orders sit together in a cafe, and the peasant says, familiarly, "All right; every man pays his own shot." A picture ent.i.tled "Old Times and the New Time" bore the inscription, "Formerly the most useful cla.s.s 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 const.i.tution with great ardor, the blacksmith holding the book on the anvil, while the priest and n.o.ble 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 Const.i.tution, 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 ma.s.sacre of St.

Bartholomew. Citizens and soldiers are in full cry after a many-headed monster labeled "Aristocracy." An a.s.s presides over a court of justice, and the picture is inscribed, "The a.s.s 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 a.s.sembly 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 flouris.h.i.+ng, 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 pa.s.sed 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 chieftains.h.i.+p 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Aristocrat and Democrat. (Paris, 1793.)

_Aristocrat._ "Take care of your cap."

_Democrat._ "Look out for your queue."]