Frederic Taber Cooper

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One of the most striking of these cartoons represents France as a deep-rooted tree which has been bent and rent by the passing whirlwind. "Poor France! The branches are broken, but the trunk holds always." Simple as (p. 237) the design is, the artist by countless touches of light and of shadow has given it a somber significance which long remains in the memory. It was to Napoleon that Daumier bitterly ascribed the misfortunes of La Patrie, and in these cartoons he lost no opportunity of attacking Napoleonic legend. Stark and dead, nailed to the Book of History is the Imperial eagle. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While the impulse to satirize public men in picture is probably as old as satiric verse, if not older, the political cartoon, as an effective agent in molding public opinion, is essentially a product of modern conditions and methods. As with the campaign song, its success depends upon its timeliness, upon the ability to seize upon a critical moment, a burning question of the hour, and anticipate the outcome while public excitement is still at a white heat. ”

“ Nimble pencils are still busy, as in the days of Rowlandson and Gillray, in recording and in influencing the trend of history. And although, now and again during the past century, there has been some individual cartoonist whose work has stood out more boldly and prominently than the work of any one of our contemporaries in Europe or in this country stands out to-day, there has never been a time in the whole history of comic art when Caricature has held such sway and maintained such dignity, and has enlisted in her service so many workers of the first talent and rank. ”

“ Lafayette has destroyed us with the pear!" And later, when repeated arrests, verdicts, fines, edicts had banished politics from the arena of caricature, Mayeux was still a privileged character. Like Chicot, the jester, who could speak his mind fearlessly to his "Henriquet," while the ordinary courtier cringed obsequiously, Mayeux shared the proverbial privilege of children and buffoons, to speak the truth. And oftentimes it was not even necessary for his creator, Traviès, to manifest any overt political significance; the public were always more than ready to look for it below the surface. ”

“ A political cartoon resembles in a way a composite photograph, which embodies not merely the superimposed features of the men who sat before the camera, but something also of the countless generations before them, who have made their features what they are by transmitting from father to son something of their own personality. In the same way, the political cartoon of to-day is the product of a gradual evolution, mirroring back the familiar features of many a cartoon of the past. ”

“ And if to-day, at the beginning of the twentieth century, we have a school of caricature which for scope and craftsmanship is equal, if not superior, to that of any nation of Europe, it is only just to recognize that it was Thomas Nast who first gave American caricature a dignity and a meaning. ”

“ The most potent pictorial satire has always been the gradual elaboration of some clever idea—the periodic reappearance of the same characters in slightly modified environment, like the successive chapters of a serial story. The public learn to look forward to them, and hail each reappearance with a renewed burst of enthusiasm. The cartoonists of the Civil War do not seem to have grasped this idea. A single example will serve as an illustration. A clever cartoon, entitled "Virginia Pausing," appeared just at the time that Virginia, the last of the States to secede, joined the Confederacy. ”

“ Bush, "the dean of American caricaturists," may be said to have spoken for them all when he said, in a recent interview, that he looks upon a cartoon as an editorial pure and simple.
"To be a success it should point a moral. Exaggeration and a keen sense of humor are only adjuncts of the cartoonist, for he must deal with real people. He must also be a student. I am obliged not only to use my pencil, but to study hard, and read everything I can lay my hands on. The features of Roosevelt, Bryan, Hanna, and Croker may be familiar to me, but I must know what these men are doing. ”

“ The very essence of pictorial satire, its alpha and omega, so to speak, is symbolism, the use of certain established types, conventional personifications of Peace and War, Death and Famine and Disease, Father Time with his scythe, the Old Year and the New; the Russian Bear, the British Lion, and the American Eagle; Uncle Sam and Columbia, Britannia and John Bull. These figures, as we have them to-day, cannot point to any one creator. They are not an inspiration of the moment, a stroke of genius, like Daumier's "Macaire" or Traviès's (p. 114) "Mayeux." ”

“ Bryan's appeal to the farmer in 1896 was hit off by Hamilton in a powerful, but exceedingly blasphemous, cartoon entitled "The Temptation." Bryan in the form of a huge angel of darkness has taken the farmer to the top of a high mountain to show him the riches of the world. As far as the eye can see stretch oceans and cities and hills and rivers and mountains of silver. It is a great pity that so grim and (p. 328) powerful a cartoon should have been marred by that display of bad taste which has been too frequent in the history of caricature. ”

“ There is a type of portrait caricature so cultured and subtle that it often produces likenesses truer to the man we know in real life than a photograph would be. A good example of this type is the familiar work of William Nicholson, whose portrait of the late Queen of England is said to have been recognized by her as one of the most characteristic pictures she had ever had taken. What appeals to the public, however, is a coarser type, a gross exaggeration of prominent features, a willful distortion, resulting in ridicule or glorification. ”

“ One can fancy with what avidity he would have seized upon the stolid, indomitable figure of Grant, intrenched behind his big, black, ubiquitous cigar. That cigar would have become the center of interest, the portentous symbol of Grant's dogged, taciturn persistence. Gradually that cigar would have grown and grown, its thickening smoke spreading in a dense war cloud over the whole series of cartoons, until finally it became the black, shining muzzle of a cannon, belching forth the powder and fire and ammunition that was to decide the issue of the war. ”

“ No history of Napoleon is quite complete which fails to recognize Gillray as a potent factor in crystallizing public opinion in England. His long series of cartoons aimed at "little Boney" are the culminating work of his life. Their power lay, not in intellectual subtlety or brilliant scintillation of wit, but in the bitterness of their invective, the appeal they make to elemental passions. ”

“ There is no more curious paradox in the history of caricature than that this figure of "Farmer George," conceived in pure malice as a means of inspiring resentment against a king popularly believed to care more for his farmyard than for the interests of his subjects, should by gradual transition have come to be accepted as the symbolic figure of the nation. ”