MISTAKE OF THOSE WHO COMPARE MODERN CARICATURISTS WITH HOGARTH. productions to a dead level, and the work of an artist of inferior power and invention, may successfully compete for public favour with the work of a man of talent and genius like John Tenniel, a result surely to be deplored, seeing there never was a time which offered better opportunities for the pencil of a great and original caricaturist than the present.* It is a common practice, and I may add mistake, with writers on comic artists or caricaturists of our day, to compare them with Hogarth. Both Hogarth and the men of our day are graphic satirists, but there is so broad a distinction between the satire of each, and the circumstances of the times in which they respectively laboured, that comparison is impossible. Those who know anything of this great and original genius, must know that he entertained the greatest horror of being mistaken for a caricaturist pure and simple; and although he executed caricatures for special purposes, they may literally be counted on the fingers. "His pictures," says Hazlitt, "are not imitations of still life, or mere transcripts of incidental scenes and customs; but powerful moral satires, exposing vice and folly in their most ludicrous points of view, and with a profound insight into the weak sides of character and manners, in all their tendencies, combinations, and contrasts. There is not a single picture of his containing a representation of mere pictorial or domestic scenery. His object is not so much "to hold the mirror up to nature," as "to show vice her own feature, scorn her own image." "Folly is there seen at the height -the moon is at the full--it is the very error of the time. There is a perpetual error of eccentricities, a tilt and tournament of absurdities, pampered with all sorts of affectation, airy, extravagant, and ostentatious! Yet he is as little a caricaturist as he is a painter of still life. Criticism has not done him justice, though public opinion has."+"A set of severer satires," says Charles Lamb, "(for they are not so much comedies, which they have been Since the above was written, strange to say, caricature appears to be showing symptoms of revival. " A Mountebank Painter demonstrating to his admirers and subscribers that crookedness is ye most beautifull." [Face p. 7. HOGARTH NOT A CARICATURIST. 7 likened to, as they are strong and masculine satires), less mingled with anything of mere fun, were never written upon paper or graven upon copper. They resemble Juvenal, or the satiric touches in Timon of Athens." Hogarth was a stern moralist and satirist, but his satires have nothing in common with the satires of the nineteenth century; such men as the infamous Charteris and the quack Misaubin figure in his compositions, and their portraits are true to the life. Although his satire is relieved with flashes of humour, the reality and gravity of the satire remain undisturbed. The March to Finchley is one of the severest satires on the times; it shows us the utter depravity of the morals and manners of the day, the want of discipline of the king's officers and soldiers, which led to the routs of Preston and Falkirk, the headlong flight of Hawley and his licentious and cowardly dragoons. Some modern writers know so little of him that they have not only described his portrait of Wilkes as a caricature, but have cited the inscription on his veritable contemporary caricature of Churchill in proof of the assertion. Now what says this inscription? "The Bruiser (Churchill, once the Reverend), in the character of a Russian Hercules, regaling himself after having killed the monster Caricatura, that so severely galled his virtuous friend, the heaven-born Wilkes." Hogarth's use of the word caricatura conveys a meaning which is not patent at first sight; Wilkes's leer was the leer of a satyr, "his face," says Macaulay, "was so hideous that the caricaturists were forced in their own despite to flatter him." The real sting lies in the accuracy of Hogarth's portrait (a fact which Wilkes himself admitted), and it is in this sarcastic sense that Hogarth makes use of the word "caricatura." Turning from Hogarth to a modern artist, in spite of his faults of most marvellous genius and inventive faculty, I frequently find critics of approved knowledge and sagacity describing the late Gustave Doré as a caricaturist. It may seem strange at first sight to introduce the name of Doré into a work dealing exclusively with "Critical and Historical Essays," vol. iii., p. 574. CHARACTER OF GUSTAVE DORÉ. English caricature art, and I do so, not by reason of the fact that his works are as familiar to us in England as in France, not because he has pictorially interpreted some of the finest thoughts in English literature, but because I find his name so constantly mentioned in comparison with English caricaturists and comic artists, and more especially with our George Cruikshank. Now Gustave Doré is, if possible, still less a caricaturist than our English Hogarth. I have seen the ghastly illustrations to the licentious "Contes Diolatiques" of Balzac cited in proof of his claims to be considered a caricaturist. I will not deny that Doré did try his hand once upon a time at caricature, and if we are to judge him by these attempts, we should pronounce him the worst French caricaturist the world ever saw, which would be saying a great deal; for a worse school than that of the modern French caricaturists (and I do not except even Gavarni, Cham, or Daumier), does not anywhere exist. That this man of marvellous genius had humour I do not for one moment deny; but it was the grim humour of an inquisitor or torturer of the middle ages-of one that revels in a perfect nightmare of terror.* Genius is said to be nearly allied to madness; and if one studies some of his weird creations-such, for instance, as The Judgment Day in the legend of "The Wandering Jew"-the thought involuntarily suggests itself that a brain teeming with such marvellous and often morbid conceptions, might have been pushed off its balance at any moment. Gustave Doré delights in lofty, medieval-gabled buildings, with bartizans and antique galleries; in steep streets, dominated by gloomy turrets; in narrow entries, terminating in dark vistas; in gloomy forests, crowded with rocky pinnacles; in masses of strug gling, mutilated men and horses; in monstrous forms of creeping, crawling, slimy, ghastly horror. By the side of the conceptions of Gustave Doré-teste for instance the weird pictures of "The Wandering Jew" already mentioned-George Cruikshank sinks at times into We can scarcely call the wonderful series of historical cartoons which he executed at sixteen caricatures, even in the modern sense of the word. Whatever humour they possess is neutralized by the grim irony which, even at this early period, characterized his work. |