Part 2 (2/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”The Oven of the Allies.”

_From an anonymous French cartoon._]

Napoleon's escape from Elba was commemorated by Rowlandson in ”The Flight of Bonaparte from h.e.l.l Bay.” In it the foul fiend is amusing himself by letting his captive loose, to work fresh mischief in the world above. He has mounted the Corsican upon a bubble and sends him careering upward back to earth, while hissing dragons pour forth furious blasts to waft the bubble onward.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”The New Robinson Crusoe.”

_From a German caricature._]

”h.e.l.l Hounds Rallying around the Idol of France” is the t.i.tle of still another of Rowlandson's designs, which appeared in April, 1815. The head and bust of the Emperor drawn on a colossal scale, a hangman's noose around his throat, is mounted on a vast pyramid of human heads, his decapitated victims. Demons are flying through the air to place upon his brow a crown of blazing pitch, while a ring of other excited fiends, whose features represent Marechal Ney, Lefebre, Davoust and others, with horns, hoofs, and tails, are dancing in triumph around the idol they have replaced. Closely resembling this cartoon of Rowlandson is the German cartoon, which is reproduced in these pages, showing a double-faced Napoleon topping a monument built of skulls.

Rowlandson's ”h.e.l.l Hounds Rallying around the Idol of France” was the last English cartoon directed against Napoleon when he was at the head of France. Two months later the Emperor's power was finally broken at Waterloo.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”Napoleon caged by the Allies.”

_From a French cartoon of the period._]

PART II

_FROM WATERLOO THROUGH THE CRIMEAN WAR_

CHAPTER VII

AFTER THE DOWNFALL

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”Rest.i.tution: Or, to Each his Share.”

_From a colored stamp of the period._]

With the downfall of Napoleon the Gillray school of caricature came to an abrupt and very natural close. It was a school born of fear and nurtured upon rancor--a school that indulged freely in obscenity and sacrilege, and did not hesitate to stoop to kick the fallen hero, to heap insult and ignominy upon Napoleon in his exile. Only during a great world crisis, a death struggle of nations, could popular opinion have tolerated such wanton disregard for decency. And when the crisis was pa.s.sed it came to an end like some malignant growth, strangled by its own virulence. The truth is that Gillray and Rowlandson led caricature into an _impa.s.se_; they deliberately perverted its true function, which is, to advance an argument with the cogent force of a clever orator, to sum up a political issue in terms so simple that a child may read, and not merely to echo back the blatant rancor of the mob. In the hands of a master of the art it becomes an incisive weapon, like the blade with which the matador gives his _coup-de-grace_. Gillray's conception of its office seems to have been that of the red rag to be flapped tauntingly in the face of John Bull; and John Bull obediently bellowed in response. It would be idle to deny that for the purpose of spurring on public opinion, the Napoleonic cartoons exercised a potent influence. They kept popular excitement at fever heat; they added fuel to the general hatred. But when the crisis was pa.s.sed, when the public pulse was beating normally once more, when virulent attacks upon a helpless exile had ceased to seem amusing, there really remained no material upon which caricature of the Gillray type could exercise its offensive ingenuity. What seemed justifiable license when directed against the arch-enemy of European peace would have been insufferable when applied to British statesmen and to the milder problems of local political issues.

Another and quite practical reason helps to explain the dearth of political caricature in England for a full generation after the battle of Waterloo, and that is the question of expense. A public which freely gave s.h.i.+llings and even pounds to see its hatred of ”Little Boney” interpreted with Gillray's vindictive malice hesitated to expend even pennies for a cartoon on the corn laws or the latest ministerial changes. In England, as well as on the Continent, caricature as an effective factor in politics remained in abeyance until the advent of an essentially modern type of periodical, the comic weekly, of which _La Caricature_, the London _Punch_, the _Fliegende Blatter_, and in this country _Puck_ and _Judge_, are the most famous examples. The progress of lithography made such a periodical possible in France as early as 1830, when _La Caricature_ was founded by the famous Philipon; but the oppressive laws of censors.h.i.+p throughout Europe prevented any wide development of this cla.s.s of journalism until after the general political upheaval of 1848.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Adjusting the Balance of Power after Napoleon.]

It would be idle, however, to deny that Gillray exerted a lasting influence upon all future caricature. His license, his vulgarity, his repulsive perversion of the human face and form, have found no disciples in later generations; but his effective a.s.semblage of many figures, the crowded significance of minor details, the dramatic unity of the whole conception which he inherited from Hogarth, have been pa.s.sed on down the line and still continue to influence the leading cartoonists of to-day in England, Germany, and the United States, although to a much less degree in France. Even at the time of Napoleon's downfall the few cartoons which appeared in Paris were far less extreme than their English models, while the German caricaturists, on the contrary, were extremely virulent, notably the Berliner, Schadow, who openly acknowledged his indebtedness to the Englishman by signing himself the Parisian Gillray; and Volz, author of the famous ”true portrait of Napoleon”--a portrait in which Napoleon's face, upon closer inspection, is seen made up of a head of inextricably tangled dead bodies, his head surmounted by a bird of prey, his breast a map of Europe overspread by a vast spider web, in which the different national capitals are entangled like so many luckless flies. Had there been more liberty of the press, an interesting school of political cartoonists might have arisen at this time in Germany. But they met with such scanty encouragement that little of real interest is to be gleaned from this source until after the advent of the Berlin _Kladderadatsch_ in 1848, and the _Fliegende Blatter_, but a short time earlier.

[Ill.u.s.tration: John Bull making a new Batch of s.h.i.+ps to send to the Lakes.

This cartoon by William Charles, a Scotchman who was forced to leave Great Britain, and who came to the United States, and wielded his pencil against his renounced country, is in many ways an imitator of Gillray's famous ”Tiddy Do, the Great French Gingerbread-Baker, making a new Batch of Kings.”

_From the collection of the New York Public Library._]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Russia as Mediator between the United States and Great Britain.

_From the collection of the New York Public Library._]

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