Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/443

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p . 381.

The illustration may serve political as well as artistic ends, as the text may have a primary political end and a secondary literary one and it may have its counterpart in a corresponding form of literature, as the illustrated satires of Life find their counter part in thedescriptions of the sameconditions given by the gentle satire of George William Curtis in the Potiphar Papers . The

intellectual lineage of both pictorial and written satire has been traced to classic Greece by a recent writer in reminding us that “ In nineteenth , if not twentieth century England , cartoons like those of Sir John Tenniel or Sir F . C . Gould ,and the best political

writing by prose satirists in the weekly journals have produced impressions closely akin to those that Aristophanes made it his business to create. " 20 Yet the advantagemust be held to lie with the illustration rather than with the writer. “ For the 'Biglow Papers' and the best of Mr. Dooley 's political satire there have been dozens of notable cartoons. ” 21

The illustration , like the press as a whole , has its own distin guishing national traits . “ The spirit of French comic art,” says

Bunner, " turns distinctly — and delightfully — to caricature. The French cartoon — the pictorial lampoon , that is — has but to exhibit in an exaggerated form the objectionable characteristics

of an individual, to serve its purpose and to touch its public .” The French nature , he finds rather observant than deductive, Princess of Wales. After the ceremony, the Prince of Wales and the artist spent two days in Moscow where they witnessed as spectators a dance of

Russian gypsies. The artist sketched the scene and introduced inconspicu

ously in a corner the figures of the Prince of Wales and Prince George of Denmark . Some years later , a lady was criticizing the Prince of Wales to

the artist, saying, among other things, “ Yes, and see how he went on in

Russia , among a parcel of gipsy dancing- girls."

The only evidence she

could have had was the illustration of the dance, witnessed by the artist and

the Prince of Wales because a member of the suite of the Prince had in formed them that the dancing much resembled an Indian nautch . - W . Simpson , Autobiography, pp . 179 - 181. The illustration is given in the Illus trated London News, December 15 , 1866 .

19 " I was frequently called to theMinister 's room (Bismarck 's) to receive instructions. Our illustrated papers were to publish pictures of the charge at Spichernberg , and also to deny the statement of the Constitutionnel that the

Prussians had burnt down everything on their march , leaving nothing but ruins behind them . We could say with a clear conscience that we had not ob

served the least signs of this.” - M . Busch, Bismarck : Some Secret Pages of his History , I, 82 – 83.

20 T . H . S . Escott, Masters of English Journalism , p . 26 . 21 New York Evening Post, December 14, 1912 .