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CARICATURE
Principles of Political Economy applied to the Condition, liesources, and Institutions of the American People (the title of Francis Bowen’s text-book, 1856), instead of regarding the subject as one leading to general or absolute results. Carey’s first large work on political economy was preceded and followed by many smaller volumes on wages, the credit system, interest, slavery, copyright, &c. • and in 1858-59 he gathered the fruits of his lifelong labours into The Principles of Social Science, in three volumes. Carey laid chief stress upon the attainment, through political
economy, of beneficent results, intellectual, moral, and financial, to the individual man, whether capitalist, workman, or consumer, and upon a constant claim that the rise of wages is the measure of economic prosperity, inasmuch as in a period of high wages an increased proportion of the value of the product goes to the labourer, while the capitalist receives a smaller proportion though a larger gross amount. He died in Philadelphia, 13th October 1879. [See vol. xix. of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (pp. 384.5).]
CARICATUEE. Great Britain. — During the last quarter of the 19th century the term caricature, somewhat loosely used at all times, came gradually to cover almost every form of humorous art, from the pictorial wit and wisdom of Sir John Tenniel to the weird grotesques of Mr S. H. Sime, from the gay and spirited pleasantries of Randolph Caldecott to the graceful but sedate fancies of Mr Walter Crane. It is made to embrace alike the social studies—whether satirical or sympathetic—of Du Maurier and Keene, the political cartoons of Mr Harry Furniss and Mr F. C. Gould, the unextenuating likenesses of “ Ape,” and “ Spy,” and “ Max,” the subtle conceits of Mr Linley Sambourne, the whimsicalities of Mr E. T. Reed, the exuberant burlesques of Mr J. F. Sullivan, the frank buffooneries of the late W. G. Baxter. Of these diverse forms of graphic humour, some have no other object than to amuse, and therefore do not call for serious notice. The perpetrations of Mr Max Beerbohm (“ Max ”), for instance, need not be commented upon, though too original to be overlooked; while of the work of “ Spy ” (Mr Leslie Ward), in Vanity Fair, one need only say that if it does not rival the occasional brilliancy of his predecessor “ Ape ” (Carlo Pellegrini), it maintains a higher average of merit. The pupil, too, is much more genial than the master. Unlike “Ape” and his compatriots of the 17th century, to whose “ caricaturas ” Addison’s Spectator applied the description, he does not “ transform the most agreeable beauty into the most odious monster ”; his feeling for comeliness forbids : when his subject is good. looking, he is content if his pencil evokes the comment, “ How ridiculously like ! ” But caricature of this kind is merely an entertainment. Here we are concerned rather with those branches of caricature which, merrily or mordantly, reflect and comment upon the actual life we live. In treating of recent caricature of this kind, we must give the first place to Punch. Mr Punch’s outlook upon life has not changed much since the ’seventies. His influence upon the tone of caricature made itself felt most appreciably in the days of John Leech and Richard Doyle. Their successors but follow in their steps. In their work, says a clever German critic, is to be found no vestige of the “sour bilious temper of John Bull” that pervaded the pictures of Hogarth and Rowlandson. Keene and Du Maurier, he declares, are not caricaturists or satirists, but amiable and tenderly grave observers of life, friendly optimists. The characterization is truer of Keene, perhaps, than of Du Maurier. Keene’s sketches are almost always cheerful; almost without exception, they make you smile or laugh. In many of Du Maurier’s, on the other hand, there is an underlying seriousness. They are aphorisms, criticisms, verdicts upon character and conduct: the work of a less cynical La Rochefoucauld, expressing himself with a pencil as well as with a pen. While Keene looks on at life with easy tolerance, an amused spectator, Du Maurier shows himself sensitive, emotional, sympathetic, taking infinite delight in what is
pretty and gay and charming, but hurt and offended by the sordid and the ugly. Thus while Keene takes things dispassionately as they come, seeing only the humorous side of them, we find Du Maurier ever and anon attacking some new phase of snobbishness, or philistinism, or cant. For all his kindliness in depicting congenial scenes, he is at times as unrelenting a satirist as ever Rowlandson was : the difference in their methods is but the difference between the sword-play of Richard and the sword-play of Saladin. The other Punch artists whose chief work is in the same field as Keene’s and Du Maurier’s resemble the former in this respect rather than the latter. Mr RavenHill recalls Charles Keene not merely in temperament but in technique; like Keene, too, he finds his subjects principally in bourgeois life. Mr J. Bernard Partridge, though, like Du Maurier, he has an eye for physical beauty, is a spectator rather than a critic of life. Mr Phil May, a modern Touchstone, is less easily classified. Though he wears the cap and bells, he is alive to the pity of things ; he sees the pathos no less than the humour of his streetboys and “gutter-snipes.” He is, however, a jester primarily : a jester with an almost unrivalled faculty for pictorial expression; an artist, too, of high achievement. Two others stand out as masters of the art of social caricature—the late Frederick Barnard and Mr J. F. Sullivan. Barnard’s illustrations to Dickens, like his original sketches, have a lively humour all their own—the humour of irrepressible high spirits—and endless invention. High spirits and invention are characteristics also of Mr Sullivan. It is at the British artisan and petty tradesman—at the grocer given to adulteration and the plumber who outstays his welcome—that he aims his most boisterous fun. He rebels too, delightfully, against red tape and all the petty tyrannies of officialdom. In fact, there is hardly a grievance known to London and its suburbs which has not been hilariously vented by Mr Sullivan. In political caricature Sir John Tenniel has remained the leading artist of the period. The death of Abraham Lincoln, Bismarck’s fall from power, the tragedy of Khartum—to subjects such as these, worthy of a great painter, Tenniel has brought a classic simplicity and a sense of dignity unknown previously to caricature. It is hard to say in which field Tenniel most excels—whether in those ingenious parables in which the British Lion and the Russian Bear, John Chinaman, Jacques Bonhomme, and Uncle Sam play their part — or in the ever - changing scenes of the great parliamentary Comedy—or in sombre dramas of Anarchy, or Famine, or Crime—or in those London extravaganzas in which the symbolic personalities of Gog and Magog, Father Thames and the Fog Fiend, the duke of Mudford, and Mr Punch himself, have become familiar. Subjects similar to these have been treated also for many years by Mr Linley Sambourne in his fanciful and often beautiful designs. In the field of humorous portraiture also Mr Sambourne has made his mark, and he may be said almost to have originated, in a small way, that practice of illustrating
