Caricature and Other Comic Art Part 20

"'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 hards.h.i.+p, 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 b.u.t.ting 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 pa.s.s 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Rat Rice Merchants. (A j.a.panese Caricature, from "j.a.pan and the j.a.panese," by Aime 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 ill.u.s.trated work of M. Aime Humbert, we find that the foibles of human nature are satirized by the j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan the most dreaded and determined thieves of the precious rice. The picture contains every feature of the scene--the cas.h.i.+er 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese caricaturists do not often possess much power to amuse the outside world, they have one qualification that ent.i.tles them to respect--most of them are good-tempered.

CHAPTER XVIII.

FRENCH CARICATURE.

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 Oth.e.l.lo might have held in Venice, if Oth.e.l.lo 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 Stael, and wrote autograph notes to Fouche 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 Fouche to send a little woman over the frontiers lest she should say something about him for the drawing-rooms of Paris to laugh at.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 surpa.s.sed 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."

[Footnote 35: "Napoleon at St. Helena," p. 90, by John S. C. Abbott, New York, Harper & Brothers.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Great Man's Last Leap--Napoleon going on Board the English Frigate, a.s.sisted 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 ma.s.s transcended all human ability, and entailed upon Frenchmen that tumultuous apprentices.h.i.+p in self-government which is yet far from ending.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Talleyrand.]

The first effort of the caricaturists in Paris after the Restoration was simply to place the figure of a weather-c.o.c.k 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-c.o.c.ks enough to denote the precise number of times a personage had veered. Thus Talleyrand, who from being a bishop and a n.o.bleman 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-c.o.c.ks 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-c.o.c.k; 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-c.o.c.k: "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-c.o.c.k 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 const.i.tution 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 princ.i.p.ality 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 G.o.d 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 grace 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: De la Villevielle, Cambaceres, 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 const.i.tutionally, 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 a.s.sumed 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 Cambaceres, 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.