Frederic Taber Cooper

“ 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 quantities to Gillray. ”

“ Even if you could not tell the truth, you might at least have prepared a plausible lie, something better than that self-evident pretense that you could not remember! I have tried to be just; I have tried to believe that you meant well, that you were nothing worse than a clumsy blunderer. But it's no use, I simply can't! There is just one possible excuse for you, and that is that you were protecting the name of some other woman, at no matter what cost to me. Oh, the shame of it, Brandon! Robbing me of honor, love, happiness, in order to shield some other woman with real sins on her soul! ”

“ Steady, plodding work: that is Trollope's panacea for success in literature. "Let their work be to them as is his work to the common labourer," that is the one phrase to be treasured up and committed to memory. The art of writing—that is the part that savours of genius, the part for which we cannot prescribe rules, the part which makes laws unto itself. But the craftsmanship is a different matter. It may be congenial labour, but labour it must always be, differing in kind but not in degree from that of the hewer of wood or the tiller of the field. ”

“ The truth is that Gillray and Rowlandson led caricature into an impasse; 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 ”

“ We had only to tell the truth, the simple, literal truth. I never dreamed that justice could become so monstrous a farce. Yet, as I sat there day by day, and saw the net they were weaving around me, the tangle of misstatements, slips, and contradictions, there were times when I doubted my own brain, times when I wanted to cry out, 'This isn't I, Natalie Griswold! It is some poor, wretched creature who must have done all these nameless things and is too miserable and too tired to remember!' And there were lies, too, deliberate, malicious lies. ”

“ It is very much as though he were to say to the contemporary translator of Flaubert or Maupassant: "Do not trouble yourself about what the modern Frenchman thinks of these authors; do not trouble yourself about what the modern Englishman is likely to think; put no faith in what you yourself think,—but try to imagine that you are translating for the benefit of a small audience of people who know French as well as English, who by long residence have absorbed the customs of the country and who by nature and training have rather more interest in literature than they have in life." ”

“ Some types of faces seem to defy the best efforts of the caricaturist—smooth, regular-featured faces, like that of Lord Rosebery, over which the pencil of satire seems to slip without leaving any effective mark. Other faces, strong, rugged, salient, seem to invite the caricaturist's efforts; and these were the types that predominated among the leaders of the struggle for the Union. Daumier's genius lay in his ability to caricature the human face, to seize upon a minimum of lines and points, to catch some absurd semblance to an inanimate object, some symbolic suggestion. ”

“ But, whatever form a young writer uses, it is his first duty to master the technique of that form, to familiarise himself with its entire history, to learn not only how the best authors have used that form in the past, but also how the modern generation is modifying it to-day. I am continually amazed at being asked by beginners, "Isn't it better for me to read as little as possible of contemporary books? Am I not in danger of losing my originality if I fill my mind with the ideas of others? ”

“ There was never a time in the history of the nation when the public mind, from one end of the country to the other, was in such a state of tension; never, since the days of Napoleon, had there been such an opportunity for a real master of satiric art. It seems amazing, as one looks back over the pictorial records of these four years, that the magnitude of the events did not galvanize into activity some unknown genius of the pencil, and found then and there a new school of American caricature commensurate with the fever-heat of public sentiment. ”

“ Style is the aroma of literature, comparable to the bouquet of old wine. You cannot age a new vintage over night by any artificial process. No writer, by taking thought, can add a cubit to his height as a stylist. It is a matter of growth, and slow ripening. We have seen that what every young writer should first strive to acquire is a clear-cut idea of what he is trying to accomplish ”

“ Not only are most of the accepted symbolic figures—John Bull, Uncle Sam, and the rest—what they are because they meet with popular approval, but no cartoonist to-day could venture upon any radical departure from the established type—a bearded John Bull, a smooth-shaven Uncle Sam—without calling down public disfavor upon his head. If one stops to think of it, our own accepted national type, the tall, lank, awkward figure, the thin, angular Yankee face with a shrewd and kindly twinkle in the eye, is even less representative of the average American than John Bull is of the average Briton. ”

“ It may teach nothing more than the unwisdom of submitting a certain type of story or article to one particular magazine; or again, it may bring a salutary awakening to the fact that what the author fondly believed to be a masterpiece is, after all, a rather tawdry and banal performance. But in any case, a setback is wholesome discipline if it makes a writer ask himself seriously what is the matter with his work—for it is better to tear up half a dozen good manuscripts than to let a single bad one find its way into print. ”

“ What was wanted was not the ineptitude of feeble humor, but the rancor and venom of a Gillray, the stinging irony of a Daumier, the grim dignity of a Tenniel. And it was not forthcoming. The one living American who might have produced work of a high order was Thomas Nast; but although Nast's pencil was dedicated to the cause of the Union from the beginning to the end, in the series of powerful emblematic pictures that appeared in Harper's Weekly, his work as a caricaturist did not begin until the close of the war. ”

“ It would be a great comfort to believe, with Emerson, that "There is no choice of words for him who clearly sees the truth; that provides him with the best word"; but to most of us such clearness of vision is denied. If a writer could really know down to the ultimate shade of thought exactly what he wanted to say and exactly the tone in which he wanted to say it, and if his brain was so equipped that it had at command the entire contents of the unabridged dictionary then, theoretically, the one inevitable word-sequence ought forthwith to present itself to him. ”

“ It is the one method by which the history of the century may be regarded as the annals of a family of nations—a grotesque family of ill-assorted quadrupeds and still more curious bipeds, stepping forth two by two from the pages of comic art as from the threshold of some modern Noah's ark—Britannia and the British lion, Columbia and Uncle Sam, India and the Bengal tiger, French Liberty and the imperial eagle. ”

“ In practice, however, there are a hundred different ways that occur to us for saying even some quite simple thing, each of them not precisely what we want to say, but representing a compromise, a sacrifice, on the side of meaning, or of euphony, or of rhythm. The one perfect way is the dream of a visionary, a forever unattainable ideal. We may come more or less near to it in proportion to our ten talents or our two talents or our one, but it always eludes us. And the finer the artist, the more he is apt to suffer because he sees so clearly how far short he has fallen. ”

“ And yet, if one stops to analyze the individual cartoons, to take them apart and discover the essence of their humor, the incisive edge of their irony and satire, one finds that there is nothing really new in them; that the basic principles of caricature were all understood as well in the eighteenth century as in the nineteenth, and that, in many cases, the successful cartoon of to-day is simply the replica of an old one of a past generation, modified to fit a new set of facts. ”

“ Mark Pattison, of Oxford, used to say to a pupil who happens now to be both a brilliant writer and a leading statesman: "My good friend, you are not the stuff of which men of letters are made. You want to make people do something or you want to teach something. That is fatal to pure literature." Once or twice in my life I have taken up the pen in a vein of literary exercise, as a man turns to a game of billiards or to gardening after his day's work. ”

“ In looking backward over a century of caricature, it is interesting to ask just what it is that makes the radical difference between the cartoon of to-day and that of a hundred years ago. That there is a wide gulf between the comparative restraint of the modern cartoonist and the unbridled license of Gillray's or Rowlandson's grotesque, gargoyle types, is self-evident; that comic art, as applied to politics, is to-day more widespread, more generally appreciated, and in a quiet way more effective in molding public opinion than ever before, needs no argument. ”

“ A painter does not need to distress himself about the beauty and harmony of all the colours that he may sooner or later be called upon to mix,—the important thing is to do the best he can to obtain the particular colour that he needs for the moment. "Colour is a gift," says Dick Heldar to Maisie, in The Light that Failed, "Put it aside and think no more about it." Similarly, although the parallel is not wholly true, a beginner will certainly do himself no great harm by assuming that in the craft of writing, style is a gift that may for the time be put aside and forgotten. ”

“ It does not by any means follow that an author is not free to invent new literary forms or varieties, if he has the inventive power. There is no rule in art forbidding the unusual, the new or even the grotesque. There is no reason why we should not have, from time to time, something undreamed of in the philosophy of literary form, any more than there is a reason why the sculptor should not carve a griffin out of stone, although he never saw a griffin in the flesh. ”

“ Down to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the history of American political caricature is a history of lost opportunities. Revolution and war have always been the great harvest times of the cartoonist. Gillray and Rowlandson owe their fame to the Napoleonic wars; Philipon and Daumier, to the overthrow of Louis Philippe; Leech and Tenniel reached their zenith in the days of the Crimean War and the Sepoy Mutiny. It is not the election cartoon, or the tariff cartoon, or the cartoon of local politics, it is the war cartoon that is most widely hailed and longest remembered. ”

“ The technique of writing is constantly in a state of transition; and however much we may delight in the methods of a generation or a century ago, we do not tolerate them at the hands of modern writers. Take for instance the modern novel; its form and structure—one might almost say its spirit, too—have been radically changed from that of Thackeray and Dickens. And it does not help us nearly so much, as writers, to know which of the two is the greater novelist, as to understand in what respects Henry James and Maupassant are better craftsmen than either of them. ”

“ Take away the personal rancor, the almost irrational hatred of "Little Boney" from Gillray, take away Daumier's mordant irony, his fearless contempt for Louis Philippe, and the life of their work is gone. The typical cartoon of to-day is, to a large extent, not a one-man production at all. It is frequently built up, piecemeal, one detail at a time, and in the case of a journal like Punch or Judge or Life often represents the thoughtful collaboration of the entire staff. ”

“ It is hard for the critic to understand that it is really his business to classify and analyse the fruits of the human mind very much as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise or blame them; that there is a measure of the same absurdity in his trampling on a poem, a novel or an essay that does not please him as in a botanist grinding a plant underfoot because he does not find it pretty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The celerity with which a caricature is now conceived and executed, thanks to the modern mechanical improvements and the prevailing spirit of alertness, makes it possible for the cartoonist to keep pace with the news of the day, to seize upon the latest political blunder, the social fad of the moment, and hit it off with a stroke of incisive irony, without fear that it will be forgotten before the drawing can appear in print. The consequences of all this modern haste and enterprise are not wholly advantageous. ”

“ A certain proportion of people, on the other hand, think of style in dress as a sort of self-advertisement, a matter of force and emphasis, a question of flamboyance and the dernier cri. And there are still others who, with a finer conservatism, understand style to be that rare art in dress which effects a perfect compromise between the prevailing fashion and the personality, and which unerringly chooses, in color and in form, the garment best designed to suit, most completely and at the same time most unobtrusively the individual need. ”

“ No translation will seem to them of much worth compared with the original; they alone can say whether the translation produces more or less the same effect upon them as the original. They are the only competent tribunals in this matter; the Greeks are dead; the unlearned Englishman has not the data for judging; and no man can safely confide in his own single judgment of his own work. Let not the translator, then, trust to his notions of what the ancient Greeks would have thought of him; he will lose himself in the vague. ”

“ And many another teacher of rhetoric has similarly invented his own special classification and definition. But according to the ordinary and common sense understanding of the terms, clearness is not so much an element of style as it is a condition precedent to it, just as health is not beauty, but a condition precedent to beauty. Clearness may be that crystal transparency of word and phrase that belongs to finished art, or it may be the mere dry bones of fact picked clean of the last shred and fragment of adornment. ”

“ The greatest mistake that a young writer can make is that of thinking of ideas as being in any sense a lot of square pegs that must not be placed in round holes, or vice versa. An idea is not foreordained to any exclusive appropriation by any one artistic form; it is not inevitably the beginning of a sonnet or of a four-act drama, any more than a ball of yarn is necessarily destined, as it comes from the spinning-wheel, either for an afghan or a pair of stockings. Ideas are the raw material of literature ”

“ Yet it cannot be too strongly insisted that, in writing far more than in painting, there is a great deal that cannot be taught and that you must think out for yourself. One reason, undoubtedly, is that the craftsmanship of letters is more elastic than that of the other arts—there is scope for a greater freedom and originality. Henry James, in The Art of Fiction, shrewdly says: "The painter is able to teach the rudiments of his practice, and it is possible, from the study of good work (granted the aptitude) both to learn how to paint and to learn how to write. ”

“ In a great writer the style is the man,—the man as made by his ancestors, his education, his career, his circumstances, and his genius.
It is idle, then, to attempt to secure a good style by imitating this or that writer; for the best part of a good style is incommunicable. An imitator may, if he applies himself closely to the task, catch mannerisms and reproduce defects, and perhaps superficial merits; but most valuable qualities, those that have their root in character, he will miss altogether, except in so far as his own personality resembles that of his model. ”

“ That, of course, is arrant nonsense, and very disastrous nonsense, as well—because, if you once get the idea firmly fixed in your mind that a masterpiece can spring, like Pallas Athene, perfected from its author's brain, then good-bye to all hope for that honest drudgery, that loving patience over infinite detail, which is such an essential accompaniment of the creative gift that it almost justifies that threadbare paradox that genius is the art of taking infinite pains. ”

“ The Inborn Talent, then, is something distinct from the material of our experience and the technical use we make of that material. Just what it is proves rather baffling to define. But at least it includes several different elements: First, the art of really seeing—the artist's eye, which looks through and beyond the mere outward material aspect and sees the vision of some great, unpainted picture. Secondly, a fine instinct for the value of words—a gift that is something quite different from mere richness of vocabulary on the one hand, and the possession of style, on the other. ”

“ Does your real apprenticeship begin now with its toll of disappointments and delays; manuscripts that grow soiled and shabby and one by one are consigned to the waste-basket? Or have you been unconsciously apprenticed to literature from early childhood, surrounded by an atmosphere of books, absorbing, because you could not help it, correct ideas of form and technique from the daily conversation around you? Are you still in the first enthusiasm of youth with your views of life still mainly rose-coloured dreams? ”