CHAPTER XX

NATIONS AND MEN IN CARICATURE

In looking over the historical and political caricature of the nineteenth century, one very naturally finds several different methods of treatment and subdivision suggesting themselves. First, there is the obvious method of chronological order, which is being followed in the present volume, and which commended itself as being at once the simplest and the most comprehensive. It is the one method by which the history of the century may be regarded as the annals of a family of nations--a grotesque family of ill-assorted quadrupeds and still more curious bipeds, stepping forth two by two from the pages of comic art as from the threshold of some modern Noah's ark--Britannia and the British lion, Columbia and Uncle Sam, India and the Bengal tiger, French Liberty and the imperial eagle. It is the one method which focuses the attention upon the inter-relation, the significant groupings of these symbolic figures, and disregards their individual and isolated actions. What the Russian bear, the British lion, are doing in the seclusion of their respective fastnesses is of vastly less interest than the spectacle of the entire royal menagerie of Europe uniting in an effort to hold Napoleon at bay. In other words, this method enables us to pass lightly over questions of purely national interest and home policy--the Corn Laws of England, the tariff issues in the United States--and to keep the eye centered upon the really big dramas of history, played upon an international stage. It subordinates caricature itself to the sequence of great events and great personages. It is the Emperor Napoleon, his reign and his wars, and not the English caricaturist Gillray; it is Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, and not Philipon and Daumier, who form the center of interest. In other words, from the present point of view, the caricature itself is not so much the object looked at as it is a powerful and clairvoyant lens through which we may behold past history in the curiously distorted form in which it was mirrored back by contemporary public opinion.

Other methods, however, might be used effectively, each offering some special advantage of its own. For instance, the whole history of the nineteenth century might be divided, so to speak, geographically. The separate history of each nation might have been followed down in turn--the changing fortunes of England, typified by John Bull; of Russia in the guise of the bear; of the United States under the forms of the swarthy, smooth-faced Jonathan of early days, and the pleasanter Uncle Sam of recent years; and of France, typified at different times as an eagle, as a Gallic cock, as an angry goddess, and as a plump, pleasant-faced woman in a tricolored petticoat. Again, if it were desirable to emphasize the development of comic art rather than its influence in history, one might group the separate divisions of the subject around certain schools of caricature, dealing first with Gillray, Rowlandson, and their fellows among the allied Continental nations; passing thence to the caricaturists of 1830, and thence carrying the sequence through Leech, Cham, Tenniel, Nast, down to the caricaturists who in the closing years of the century developed the scope of caricature to a hitherto unparalleled extent. Still again, the history of the century in caricature might be traced along from some peculiarity, greatly exaggerated, of some great man to another personal peculiarity of some other great man: leaping from the tri-cornered hat of the Emperor Napoleon to the great nose of the Iron Duke, then on to the toupet and pear-shaped countenance of Louis Philippe, the emaciation of Abraham Lincoln, the grandpa's hat of the Harrison administration, the forehead curl of Disraeli, the collar of Gladstone, the turned-up moustaches of the Emperor William, and the prominent teeth of Mr. Roosevelt. This feature of the caricature seems important enough to justify a brief digression. It forms one of the foundation stones of the art, second only in importance to the conventionalized symbols of the different nations. From the latter the cartoonist builds up the century's history as recorded in its great events. From the former he traces that history as recorded in the personality of its great men.

The cartoons in which these different peculiarities of personal appearance are emphasized cover the whole range of caricature, and the whole gamut of public opinion which inspired it. Here we may find every degree of malice, from the fierce goggle eyes and diabolical expression which Gillray introduced into his portraits of the hated Bonaparte down to the harmless exaggeration of the collar points by which Furniss good-naturedly satirized the appearance of Mr. Gladstone. Again, in this respect caricature varies much, because all the great men of the century did not offer to the caricaturists the same opportunities in the matter of unusual features or personal eccentricities.

The authentic portraits and contemporary descriptions of the first Napoleon show us that he was a man whose appearance was marred by no particular eccentricity of feature, and that the cartoons of which he is the principal subject are largely allegorical, or inspired by the artist's intensity of hatred. One German caricaturist, by a subtle distortion and a lengthening of the cheeks and chin, introduced a resemblance to a rapacious wolf while preserving something of the real likeness. But in the goggle-eyed monsters of Gillray there is nothing save the hat and the uniform which suggests the real Napoleon. It was a sort of incarnation of Beelzebub which Gillray wished to draw and did draw, a monstrosity designed to rouse the superstitious hatred of the ignorant and lower classes of England, and to excite the nation to a warlike frenzy. The caricature aimed at Bonaparte's great rival, the conqueror of Waterloo, was produced in more peaceful times, was the work of his own countryman, was based mainly on party differences, and, naturally enough, it was in the main good-natured and kindly. Wellington in caricature may be summed up by saying that it was all simply an exaggeration of the size of his nose. The _poire_ drawn into resemblance of the countenance of Louis Philippe was originally innocent enough, and had it been entirely ignored by the monarch and his ministers, would probably have had no political effect, and in the course of a few years been entirely forgotten. But being taken seriously and characterized as seditious, it acquired an exaggerated significance which may almost be said to have led to the revolution of 1848 and the establishment of the Second Republic. From the rich material offered by our War of Secession the caricaturists drew little more than the long, gaunt figure and the scraggy beard of Lincoln, and the cigar of General Grant. The possibilities of this cigar, as they probably would have been brought out by an artist like Daumier, have been suggested in an earlier chapter. It was the goatee of Louis Napoleon that was exaggerated to give a point to most of the cartoons in which he was a figure, although during the days of his power there were countless caricatures which drew suggestions from the misadventures of his early life, his alleged experiences as a waiter in New York and a policeman in London, his escape from prison in the clothes of the workman Badinguet (a name which his political enemies applied to him very freely), and the fiasco at Strasburg. No men of their time were more freely caricatured than Disraeli in England and Thiers in France, for no men offered more to the caricaturist, Disraeli being at once a Jew and the most exquisite of affected dandies, and Thiers being, with the exception of Louis Blanc, the smallest man of note in France. In one cartoon in _Punch_, Disraeli was figured as presiding over "Fagin's Political School." In another he was represented as a hideous Oriental peri fluttering about the gates of Paradise. Thiers's large head and diminutive stature are subjects of countless cartoons, in which he is shown emerging from a wineglass or concealed in a waistcoat pocket, although _Punch_ once humorously depicted him as Gulliver bound down by the Lilliputians.

If one were to attempt to draw a broad general distinction between French and English caricature throughout the century, it would be along the line of English superiority in the matter of satirizing great events, French superiority in satirizing great men. The English cartoonists triumphed in the art of crowded canvases and effective groupings; the French in seizing upon the salient feature of face or form, and by a grotesque distortion, a malicious quirk, fixing upon their luckless subject a brand of ridicule that refused to be forgotten. Although the fashion of embodying fairly recognizable portraits of prominent statesmen in caricatures became general in England early in the century, for a long time the effect was marred by their lack of facial expression. From situations of all sorts, ranging from high comedy to deadly peril and poignant suffering, the familiar features of British statesmen look forth placid, unconcerned, with the fixed, impersonal stare of puppets in a Punch-and-Judy show. No French artist ever threw away his opportunities in such a foolish, spendthrift manner. Even where the smooth, regular features of some especially characterless face gave little or nothing for a satiric pencil to seize upon, a Daumier or a Gill would manufacture a ludicrous effect through the familiar device of a giant's head on a dwarf's body, or the absurdly distorted reflection of a cylindrical mirror. But by the time hostilities broke out between France and Prussia facial caricature had become an important factor in the British school of satire, as exemplified in the weekly pages of _Punch_.