CHAPTER XIII

RETROSPECTIVE

The close of the first half of the nineteenth century marks a convenient moment for a backward glance. These fifty years, which began with the consulship of the first Napoleon and closed on the eve of the third Napoleon's _coup d'état_, witnessed the rise and fall of more than one Napoleonic spirit in the realm of comic art. It was essentially a period of individualism, of the one-man power in caricature. Existing conditions forbade a logical and unbroken development of the political cartoon; it evolved only by fits and starts. It was often less an expression of the popular mood than a vehicle for personal enthusiasm or personal rancor; at the hands of just a few masters, it verged upon the despotic. At intervals, first in one country and then in another, a Gillray, a Rowlandson, a Daumier, would blaze forth, brilliant, erratic, meteor-like, leaving behind them a trail of scintillating suggestion, destined to fire some new fuse, to start caricature along some new curve of eccentricity. The importance of these fifty years, the lasting influence of these forerunners of the modern cartoonists, must not be underrated. Without the inspiration of their brilliant successes, and, it may also be added, the useful lessons of their errors and failures, the cartoon of to-day would be radically different, and probably greatly inferior to what it is. Above all, they taught, by two tremendous object lessons, the potent force that lies in pictorial satire--by the share which English cartoonists had in the overthrow of Napoleon I., and which French cartoonists had in the downfall of Louis Philippe. But it was only with the advent of the modern comic weekly of the high type represented by _Punch_ that it became possible to develop schools of caricature with definite aims and established traditions--schools that have tended steadily to eliminate and reject the old-time elements of vulgarity and exaggeration, to gain the increased influence that comes from sobriety of method and higher artistic excellence, and to hold erratic individuality in check. Few people who are not directly concerned in its making ever realize how essentially the modern caricature is a composite production. Take, for example, the big, double-page cartoon which has become such a familiar weekly feature in _Puck_ or _Judge_, with its complicated group of figures, its suggestive background, its multitude of clever minor points; the germ idea has been picked out from perhaps a dozen others, as the result of careful deliberation, and from this starting point the whole design has been built up, detail by detail, representing the joint cleverness of the entire editorial staff. But the collaboration reaches further back than this. A political cartoon resembles in a way a composite photograph, which embodies not merely the superimposed features of the men who sat before the camera, but something also of the countless generations before them, who have made their features what they are by transmitting from father to son something of their own personality. In the same way, the political cartoon of to-day is the product of a gradual evolution, mirroring back the familiar features of many a cartoon of the past. It is not merely an embodiment of the ideas of the satirists who suggested it and the artist who drew it, but also of many a traditional and stereotyped symbol, bequeathed from generation to generation by artists dead and gone. The very essence of pictorial satire, its alpha and omega, so to speak, is symbolism, the use of certain established types, conventional personifications of Peace and War, Death and Famine and Disease, Father Time with his scythe, the Old Year and the New; the Russian Bear, the British Lion, and the American Eagle; Uncle Sam and Columbia, Britannia and John Bull. These figures, as we have them to-day, cannot point to any one creator. They are not an inspiration of the moment, a stroke of genius, like Daumier's "Macaire" or Traviès's "Mayeux." They are the product of a century of evolution, a gradual survival of the fittest, resulting from the unconscious natural selection of popular approval. No better specific instance can be taken than that of the familiar figure of John Bull as he appears from week to week in the contemporary pages of _Punch_, for his descent may be traced in an unbroken line--there are no missing links. No single British caricaturist, from Gillray to Du Maurier, can claim the credit for having invented him; yet each in his turn has contributed something, a touch here, a line there, toward making him what he is to-day. As Mr. Spielmann has pointed out, the earliest prototype of _Punch's_ John Bull is to be sought in Gillray's conception of "Farmer George," that figured in a long series of malevolent caricatures depicting George III., as a gaping country lout, a heavy, dull-witted yokel. There is no more curious paradox in the history of caricature than that this figure of "Farmer George," conceived in pure malice as a means of inspiring resentment against a king popularly believed to care more for his farmyard than for the interests of his subjects, should by gradual transition have come to be accepted as the symbolic figure of the nation. Yet the successive steps are easy enough to understand. When Gillray's point of attack had shifted from the throne of England to the throne of France, his type of "Farmer George" needed but slight modification to become a huge, ungainly ogre, the incarnation of British wrath against "Little Boney"--shaking a formidable fist at the coast of Calais, wading knee-deep across the channel, or greedily opening a cavernous jaw to take in a soul-satisfying meal of French frigates. But beneath the exaggerated ferocity of Gillray's extreme type, the idea of a farmer as the national figure is never quite lost sight of. In Gillray's later cartoons the conception of John Bull had already taken on a more consistent and definite form. At the hands of Rowlandson and Woodward he lost much of his uncouthness and began to assume a mellower and more benignant aspect; a cartoon by the latter, entitled "Genial Rays," pictures him reclining luxuriously upon a bed of roses, basking in "the sun of patriotism," the image of agricultural contentment. A certain coarseness and vulgarity, however, clung to him until well down into the forties, when the refining touch of Leech and Tenniel gradually idealized him into the portly, choleric, well-to-do rural gentleman who is to-day such a familiar figure the world over. This type of John Bull as the representative Briton once called forth some thoroughly characteristic comments from John Ruskin. "Is it not surely," he asks, "some overruling power in the nature of things, quite other than the desire of his readers, which compels Mr. Punch, when the squire, the colonel, and the admiral are to be at once expressed, together with all that they legislate or fight for, in the symbolic figure of the nation, to present the incarnate Mr. Bull always as a farmer--never as a manufacturer or shopkeeper?" Such a view on the part of Mr. Ruskin is consistent with his life-long insistence upon literal truth in art. But he was obviously mistaken when he questioned that John Bull is the deliberate choice of the British public. The average Englishman, whether soldier or sailor, statesman, merchant, or manufacturer, approves and enjoys the pleasant fiction that the representative type is a good, old-fashioned country gentleman, conservative and rather insular, a supporter of landed interests, a patron of country sports; in short, one who lives his life close to his native soil, who seems to personify the rolling down, the close-clipped hedge, the trim gardenplot, the neat thatched roof, things which typify England the world over.

Not only are most of the accepted symbolic figures--John Bull, Uncle Sam, and the rest--what they are because they meet with popular approval, but no cartoonist to-day could venture upon any radical departure from the established type--a bearded John Bull, a smooth-shaven Uncle Sam--without calling down public disfavor upon his head. If one stops to think of it, our own accepted national type, the tall, lank, awkward figure, the thin, angular Yankee face with a shrewd and kindly twinkle in the eye, is even less representative of the average American than John Bull is of the average Briton. It is interesting to recall that before the Civil War our national type frequently took the form of a Southerner--regularly in the pages of _Punch_. To-day, in England and in America, there is but one type of Uncle Sam, and we would not tolerate a change. It may be that in the gaunt, loose-knit frame, the strong and rugged features we recognize a kinship to that sterling and essentially American type of man which found its best exponent in Lincoln, and that this is the reason why Uncle Sam has become the most universally accepted and the best beloved of all our conventional types.