Part 1 (2/2)
Although Hogarth antedates the period covered by the present articles by fully half a century, he is much too commanding a figure in the history of comic art to be summarily dismissed. The year 1720 marks the era of the so-called ”bubble mania,” the era of unprecedented inflation, of the South Sea Company in London, and the equally notorious Mississippi schemes of John Law in France. Popular excitement found vent in a veritable deluge of cartoons, many of which originated in Amsterdam and were reprinted in London, often with the addition of explanatory satiric verses in English. In one, Fortune is represented riding in a car driven by Folly, and drawn by personifications of the different companies responsible for the disastrous epidemic of speculation: the Mississippi, limping along on a wooden leg; the South Sea, with its foot in splints, etc. In another, we have an imaginary map of the Southern seas, representing ”the very famous island of Madhead, situated in Share Sea, and inhabited by all kinds of people, to which is given the general name of Shareholders.” John Law came in for a major share of the caricaturist's attention. In one picture he is represented as a.s.sisting Atlas to bear up immense globes of wind; in another, he is a ”wind-monopolist,” declaring, ”The wind is my treasure, cus.h.i.+on, and foundation. Master of the wind, I am master of life, and my wind monopoly becomes straightway the object of idolatry.” The _windy_ character of the share-business is the dominant note in the cartoons of the period. Bubbles, windmills, flying kites, play a prominent part in the detail with which the background of the typical Dutch caricature was always crowded. These cartoons, displayed conspicuously in London shop windows, were not only seen by Hogarth, but influenced him vitally. His earliest known essay in political caricature is an adaptation of one of these Dutch prints, representing the wheel of Fortune, bearing the luckless and infatuated speculators high aloft.
His latest work still shows the influence of Holland in the endless wealth of minute detail, the painstaking elaboration of his backgrounds, in which the most patient examination is ever finding something new. With Hogarth, the overcharged method of the Dutch school became a medium for irrepressible genius. At the hands of his followers and imitators, it became a source of obscurity and confusion.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”The Capture of the Danish s.h.i.+ps.”]
While Hogarth is rightly recognized as the father of English caricature, it must be remembered that his best work was done on the social rather than on the political side. Even his most famous political series, that of ”The Elections,” is broadly generalized. It is not in any sense campaign literature, but an exposition of contemporary manners. And this was always Hogarth's aim. He was by instinct a realist, endowed with a keen sense of humor--a quality in which many a modern realist is deficient. He satirized life as he saw it, the good and the bad together, with a frankness which at times was somewhat brutal, like the frankness of Fielding and of Smollett the frankness of the age they lived in. It was essentially an outspoken age, robust and rather gross; a red-blooded age, nurtured on English beef and beer; a jovial age that shook its sides over many a broad jest, and saw no shame in open allusion to the obvious and elemental facts of physical life. Judged by the standards of his day, there is little offense in Hogarth's work; even when measured by our own, he is not deliberately licentious. On the contrary, he set an example of moderation which his successors would have done well to imitate. He realized, as the later caricaturists of his century did not, that the great strength of pictorial satire lies in ridicule rather than in invective; that the subtlest irony often lies in a close adherence to truth, where riotous and unrestrained exaggeration defeats its own end. Just as in the case of ”Joseph Andrews,” Fielding's creative instinct got the upper hand of the parodist, so in much of Hogarth's work one feels that the caricaturist is forced to yield place to the realistic artist, the student of human life, carried away by the interest of the story he has to tell. His chief gift to caricature is his unprecedented development of the narrative quality in pictorial art. He pointed a road along which his imitators could follow him only at a distance.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”Bonaparte and his English Friends--The Broad Bottom Administration.”]
With the second half of the eighteenth century there began an era of great license in the political press, an era of bitter vituperation and vile personal abuse. Hogarth was one of the chief sufferers. After holding aloof from partisan politics for nearly half a century, he published, in 1762, his well-known cartoon attacking the ex-minister, Pitt. All Europe is represented in flames, which are spreading to Great Britain in spite of the efforts of Lord Bute, aided by his Highlanders, to extinguish them. Pitt is blowing upon the flames, which are being fed by the Duke of Newcastle from a barrow full of _Monitors_ and _North Britons_, two scurrilous papers of the day. The bitterness with which Hogarth was attacked in retaliation and the persistence of his persecutors resulted, as was generally believed at the time, in a broken heart and his death in 1764.
An amazing increase in the number of caricatures followed the entry of Lord Bute's ministry into power. They were distinguished chiefly by their poor execution and gross indecency. As early as 1762, the _Gentleman's Magazine_, itself none too immaculate, complains that ”Many of the representations that have lately appeared in the shops are not only reproachful to the government, but offensive to common-sense; they discover a tendency to inflame, without a spark of fire to light their own combustion.” The state of society in England was at this time notoriously immoral and licentious. It was a period of hard living and hard drinking. The well-known habits of such public figures as Sheridan and Fox are eminent examples. The spirit of gambling had become a mania, and women had caught the contagion as well as men. Nowhere was the profligacy of the times more clearly shown than in the looseness of public social functions, such as the notorious masquerade b.a.l.l.s, which a contemporary journal, the _Westminster Magazine_, seriously decried as ”subversive of virtue and every n.o.ble and domestic point of honor.” The low standards of morals and want of delicacy are revealed in the extravagance of women's dress, the looseness of their speech. It was an age when women of rank, such as Lady Buckingham and Lady Archer, were publicly threatened by an eminent judge with exposure on the pillory for having systematically enticed young men and robbed them at their faro tables, and afterward found themselves exposed in the pillory of popular opinion in scurrilous cartoons from shop windows all over London.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Pacific Overtures.]
CHAPTER III
JAMES GILLRAY
At a time when cheap abuse took the place of technical skill, and vulgarity pa.s.sed for wit, a man of unlimited audacity, who was also a consummate master of his pencil, easily took precedence. Such a man was James Gillray, unquestionably the leading cartoonist of the reign of George III. Yet of the many who are to-day familiar with the name of Gillray and the important part he played in influencing public opinion during the struggle with Napoleon, very few have an understanding of the dominant qualities of his work. A large part of it, and probably the most representative part, is characterized by a foulness and an obscenity which the present generation cannot countenance. There is a whole series of cartoons bearing his name which it would not only be absolutely out of the question to reproduce, but the very nature of which can be indicated only in the most guarded manner. Imagine the works of Rabelais shamelessly ill.u.s.trated by a master hand! Try to conceive of the nature of the pictures which Panurge chalked up on the walls of old Paris. It was not merely the fault of the times, as in the case of Hogarth. Public taste was sufficiently depraved already; but Gillray deliberately prost.i.tuted his genius to the level of a procurer, to debauch it further. From first to last his drawings impress one as emanating from a mind not only unclean, but unbalanced as well--a mind over which there hung, even at the beginning, the furtive shadow of that madness which at last overtook and blighted him. There is but one of the hallmarks of great caricature in the work of Gillray, and that is the lasting impression which they make. They refuse to be forgotten; they remain imprinted on the brain, like the obsession of a nightmare.
While in one sense they stand as a pitiless indictment of the generation that tolerated them, they are not a reflection of the life that Gillray saw, except in the sense that their physical deformity symbolizes the moral foulness of the age. Grace and charm and physical beauty, which Hogarth could use effectively, are unknown quant.i.ties to Gillray. There is an element of monstrosity about all his figures, distorted and repellent. Foul, bloated faces; twisted, swollen limbs; unshapely figures whose protuberant flesh suggests a tumefied and fungoid growth--such is the brood begotten by Gillray's pencil, like the malignant sp.a.w.n of some forgotten circle of the lower inferno.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”The Great Coronation Procession of Napoleon.”]
It would be idle to dispute the far-reaching power of Gillray's genius, perverted though it was. Throughout the Napoleonic wars, caricature and the name of Gillray are convertible terms; for, even after he was forced to lay down his pencil, his brilliant contemporaries and successors, Rowlandson and Cruikshank, found themselves unable to throw off the fetters of his influence. No history of Napoleon is quite complete which fails to recognize Gillray as a potent factor in crystallizing public opinion in England. His long series of cartoons aimed at ”little Boney” are the culminating work of his life. Their power lay, not in intellectual subtlety or brilliant scintillation of wit, but in the bitterness of their invective, the appeal they make to elemental pa.s.sions. They spoke a language which the roughest of London mobs could understand--the language of the gutter. They were, many of them, masterpieces of pictorial Billingsgate.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”Napoleon and Pitt dividing the World between Them.”]
There is rancor, there is venom, there is the inevitable inheritance of the warfare of centuries, in these caricatures of Gillray, but above all there is fear--fear of Napoleon, of his genius, of his star.
It has been very easy for Englishmen of later days to say that the French never could have crossed the Channel, that there was never any reason for disquiet; it was another matter in the days when troops were actually ma.s.sing by thousands on the hills behind Boulogne. You can find this fear voiced everywhere in Gillray, in the discordance between the drawings and the text. John Bull is the ox, Bonaparte the contemptible frog; but it is usually the ox who is bellowing out defiance, daring the other to ”come on,” flinging down insult at the diminutive foe. ”Let 'em come, damme!” shouts the bold Briton in the pictures of the time. ”Damme! where are the French bugaboos?
Single-handed I'll beat forty of 'em, damme!” Every means was used to rouse the spirit of the English nation, and to stimulate hatred of the French and their leader. In one picture, Boney and his family are in rags, and are gnawing raw bones in a rude Corsican hut; in another we find him with a hookah and turban, having adopted the Mahometan religion; in a third we see him murdering the sick at Joppa. In the caricatures of Gillray, Napoleon is always a monster, a fiend in human shape, craven and murderous; but when dealing with the question of this fiend's power for evil, Gillray made no attempt at consistency.
This ogre, who through one series of pictures was represented as kicked about from boot to boot, kicked by the Spaniards, the Turks, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians, in another is depicted as being very dangerous indeed. A curious example of this inconsistency will be found in placing side by side the two cartoons considered by many to be Gillray's best: ”The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver,”
already referred to, and ”Tiddy-Doll, the great French gingerbread Maker, Drawing out a new Batch of Kings.” The ”pernicious, little, odious reptile” whom George the Third is holding so contemptuously in the hollow of his hand, in the first caricature, is in the second concededly of European importance.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”Armed Heroes.”]
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”The Handwriting on the Wall.”]
CHAPTER IV
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