Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and Many Lands.
by James Parton · English · Gutenberg #39347 · 820,418 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and Many Lands.
Author: James Parton
Release date: April 2, 2012 [eBook #39347]
Language: English
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[Illustration: Portraits.]
CARICATURE
AND
OTHER COMIC ART
IN ALL TIMES AND MANY LANDS
By JAMES PARTON
_WITH 203 ILLUSTRATIONS_
[Illustration: Editor's logo.]
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
FRANKLIN SQUARE
1877
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
PREFACE.
In this volume there is, I believe, a greater variety of pictures of a
comic and satirical cast than was ever before presented at one view.
Many nations, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, are represented
in it, as well as most of the names identified with art of this nature.
The extraordinary liberality of the publishers, and the skill of their
corps of engravers, have seconded my own industrious researches, and the
result is a volume unique, at least, in the character of its
illustrations. A large portion of its contents appeared in _Harper's
Monthly Magazine_ during the year 1875; but many of the most curious and
interesting of the pictures are given here for the first time; notably,
those exhibiting the present or recent caricature of Germany, Spain,
Italy, China, and Japan, several of which did not arrive in time for use
in the periodical.
Generally speaking, articles contributed to a Magazine may as well be
left in their natural tomb of "back numbers," or "bound volumes;" for
the better they serve a temporary purpose, the less adapted they are for
permanent utility. Among the exceptions are such series as the present,
which had no reference whatever to the passing months, and in the
preparation of which a great expenditure was directed to a single class
of objects of special interest. I am, indeed, amazed at the cost of
producing such articles as these. So very great is the expense, that
many subjects could not be adequately treated, with all desirable
illustration, unless the publishers could offer the work to the public
in portions.
There is not much to be said upon the subject treated in this volume.
When I was invited by the learned and urbane editor of _Harper's
Monthly_ to furnish a number of articles upon caricature, I supposed
that the work proposed would be a relief after labors too arduous, too
long continued, and of a more serious character. On the contrary, no
subject that I ever attempted presented such baffling difficulties.
After ransacking the world for specimens, and collecting them by the
hundred, I found that, usually, a caricature is a thing of a moment, and
that, dying as soon as its moment has passed, it loses all power to
interest, instantly and forever. I found, too, that our respectable
ancestors had not the least notion of what we call decency. When,
therefore, I had laid aside from the mass the obsolete and the improper,
there were not so very many left, and most of those told their own story
so plainly that no elucidation was necessary. Instead of wearying the
reader with a mere descriptive catalogue, I have preferred to accompany
the pictures with allusions to contemporary satire other than pictorial.
The great living authorities upon this branch of art are two in
number--one English, and one French--to both of whom I am greatly
indebted. The English author is Thomas Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., whose
"History of Caricature and the Grotesque" is well known among us, as
well as his more recent volume upon the incomparable caricaturist of the
last generation, James Gillray. The French writer is M. Jules
Champfleury, author of a valuable series of volumes reviewing satiric
art from ancient times to our own day, with countless illustrations. No
one has treated so fully or so well as he the caricature of the Greeks
and Romans. Many years ago, M. Champfleury began to illustrate this part
of his subject in the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, and his contributions to
that important periodical were the basis of his subsequent volumes. He
is one of the few writers on comic matters who have avoided the lapse
into catalogue, and contrived to be interesting.
It has been agreeable to me to observe that Americans are not without
natural aptitude in this kind of art. Our generous Franklin, the friend
of Hogarth, to whom the dying artist wrote his last letter, replying to
the last letter he ever received, was a capital caricaturist, and used
his skill in this way, as he did all his other gifts and powers, in
behalf of his country and his kind. At the present time, every week's
issue of the illustrated periodicals exhibits evidence of the skill, as
well as the patriotism and right feeling, of the humorous artists of the
United States. For some years past, caricature has been a power in the
land, and a power generally on the right side. There are also humorous
artists of another and gentler kind, some even of the gentler sex, who
present to us scenes which surprise us all into smiles and good temper
without having in them any lurking sting of reproof. These domestic
humorists, I trust, will continue to amuse and soften us, while the
avenging satirist with dreadful pencil makes mad the guilty, and appalls
the free.
There must be something precious in caricature, else the enemies of
truth and freedom would not hate it as they do. Some of the worst
excesses and perversions of satiric art are due to that very hatred.
Persecuted and repressed, caricature becomes malign and perverse; or,
being excluded from legitimate subjects, it seems as if it were
compelled to ally itself to vice. We have only to turn from a heap of
French albums to volumes of English caricature to have a striking
evidence of the truth, that the repressive system represses good and
develops evil. It is the "Censure" that debauches the comic pencil; it
is freedom that makes it the ally of good conduct and sound politics. In
free countries alone it has scope enough, without wandering into paths
which the eternal proprieties forbid. I am sometimes sanguine enough to
think that the pencil of the satirist will at last render war
impossible, by bringing vividly home to all genial minds the ludicrous
absurdity of such a method of arriving at truth. Fancy two armies "in
presence." By some process yet to be developed, the Nast of the next
generation, if not the admirable Nast of this, projects upon the sky, in
the sight of the belligerent forces, a picture exhibiting the enormous
comicality of their attitude and purpose. They all see the point, and
both armies break up in laughter, and come together roaring over the
joke.
In the hope that this volume may contribute something to the amusement
of the happy at festive seasons, and to the instruction of the curious
at all times, it is presented to the consideration of the public.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. Page
Among the Romans 15
CHAPTER II.
Among the Greeks 28
CHAPTER III.
Among the Ancient Egyptians 32
CHAPTER IV.
Among the Hindoos 36
CHAPTER V.
Religious Caricature in the Middle Ages 40
CHAPTER VI.
Secular Caricature in the Middle Ages 50
CHAPTER VII.
Caricatures preceding the Reformation 64
CHAPTER VIII.
Comic Art and the Reformation 76
CHAPTER IX.
In the Puritan Period 90
CHAPTER X.
Later Puritan Caricature 105
CHAPTER XI.
Preceding Hogarth 120
CHAPTER XII.
Hogarth and his Time 133
CHAPTER XIII.
English Caricature in the Revolutionary Period 147
CHAPTER XIV.
During the French Revolution 159
CHAPTER XV.
Caricatures of Women and Matrimony 171
CHAPTER XVI.
Among the Chinese 191
CHAPTER XVII.
Comic Art in Japan 198
CHAPTER XVIII.
French Caricature 208
CHAPTER XIX.
Later French Caricature 230
CHAPTER XX.
Comic Art in Germany 242
CHAPTER XXI.
Comic Art in Spain 249
CHAPTER XXII.
Italian Caricature 257
CHAPTER XXIII.
English Caricature of the Present Century 267
CHAPTER XXIV.
Comic Art in "Punch" 284
CHAPTER XXV.
Early American Caricature 300
CHAPTER XXVI.
Later American Caricature 318
INDEX 335
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Page
Pigmy Pugilists, from Pompeii 15
Chalk Drawing by Roman Soldier in Pompeii 15
Chalk Caricature on a Wall in Pompeii 16
Battle between Pigmies and Geese 17
A Pigmy Scene--from Pompeii 18
Vases with Pigmy Designs 19
A Grasshopper driving a Chariot 19
From an Antique Amethyst 19
Flight of AEneas from Troy 20
Caricature of the Flight of AEneas 20
From a Red Jasper 21
Roman Masks, Comic and Tragic 22
Roman Comic Actor, masked for Silenus 22
Roman Wall Caricature of a Christian 25
Burlesque of Jupiter's Wooing of Princess Alcmena 29
Greek Caricature of the Oracle of Apollo 30
An Egyptian Caricature 32
A Condemned Soul, Egyptian Caricature 33
Egyptian Servants conveying Home their Masters from
a Carouse 33
Too Late with the Basin 34
The Hindoo God Krishna on his Travels 37
Krishna's Attendants assuming the Form of a Bird 37
Krishna in his Palanquin 38
Capital in the Autun Cathedral 41
Capitals in the Strasburg Cathedral, A.D. 1300 41
Engraved upon a Stall in Sherborne Minster, England 43
From a Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century 43
From a Mass-book of the Fourteenth Century 44
From a French Prayer-book of the Thirteenth Century 45
From Queen Mary's Prayer-book, A.D. 1553 46
Gog and Magog, Guildhall, London 50
Head of the Great Dragon of Norwich 51
Souls weighed in the Balance, Autun Cathedral 51
Struggle for Possession of a Soul between Angel and
Devil 52
Lost Souls cast into Hell 53
Devils seizing their Prey 54
The Temptation 55
French Death-crier 56
Death and the Cripple 57
Death and the Old Man 58
Death and the Peddler 58
Death and the Knight 58
Heaven and Earth weighed in the Balance 60
English Caricature of an Irishman, A.D. 1280 62
Caricature of the Jews in England, A.D. 1233 63
Luther inspired by Satan 64
Devil fiddling upon a Pair of Bellows 65
Oldest Drawing in the British Museum, A.D. 1320 66
Bishop's Seal, A.D. 1300 67
Pastor and Flock, Sixteenth Century 70
Confessing to God; and Sale of Indulgences 72
Christ, the True Light 73
Papa, Doctor Theologiae et Magister Fidei 77
The Pope cast into Hell 77
"The Beam that is in thine own Eye," A.D. 1540 78
Luther Triumphant 79
The Triumph of Riches 81
Calvin branded 83
Calvin at the Burning of Servetus 84
Calvin, the Pope, and Luther 85
Titian's Caricature of the Laocooen 89
The Papal Gorgon 90
Spayne and Rome defeated 94
From Title-page to Sermon "Woe to Drunkards" 97
"Let not the World devide those whom Christ hath
joined" 99
"England's Wolfe with Eagle's Clawes," 1647 102
Charles II. and the Scotch Presbyterians, 1651 103
Cris-cross Rhymes on Love's Crosses, 1640 105
Shrove-tide in Arms against Lent 107
Lent tilting at Shrove-tide 108
The Queen of James II. and Father Petre 109
Caricature of Corpulent General Galas 115
A Quaker Meeting, 1710 116
Archbishop of Paris 118
Archbishop of Rheims 118
Caricature of Louis XIV., by Thackeray 119
"Shares! Shares! Shares!" Caricature of John Law 120
Island of Madhead 122
Speculative Map of Louisiana 126
John Law, Wind Monopolist 129
The Sleeping Congregation 134
Hogarth's Drawing in Three Strokes 137
Hogarth's Invitation Card 137
Time Smoking a Picture 138
Dedication of a Proposed History of the Arts 140
Walpole paring the Nails of the British Lion 142
Dutch Neutrality, 1745 142
British Idolatry of the Opera-singer Mingotti 143
The Motion (for the Removal of Walpole) 144
Antiquaries puzzled 146
Caricature designed by Benjamin Franklin 147
Lord Bute 152
Princess of Wales--Bute--George III 152
The Wire-master (Bute) and his Puppets 153
The Gouty Colossus, William Pitt 156
The Mask (Coalition) 157
Heads of Fox and North 158
Assembly of the Notables at Paris 161
Mirabeau 162
The Dagger Scene in the House of Commons 164
The Zenith of French Glory 165
The Estates 166
The New Calvary 166
President of Revolutionary Committee amusing
himself with his Art 168
Rare Animals 169
Aristocrat and Democrat 170
"_You_ frank! Have confidence in _you_!" 171
Matrimony--A Man loaded with Mischief 173
Settling the Odd Trick 174
"Who was that gentleman that just went out?" 176
"Now, understand me. To-morrow morning he will
ask you to dinner" 177
"Madame, your Cousin Betty wishes to know if you
can receive her" 179
A Scene of Conjugal Life 180
A Splendid Spread 181
American Lady walking in the Snow 183
"My dear Baron, I am in the most pressing need
of five hundred franc" 184
"Sir, be good enough to come round in front and
speak to me" 185
"Where are the diamonds exhibited?" 185
Evening Scene in the Parlor of an American
Boarding-house 186
"He's coming! Take off your hat!" 188
The Scholastic Hen and her Chickens 189
Chinese Caricature of an English Foraging Party 191
A Deaf Mandarin 196
After Dinner. A Chinese Caricature 197
The Rat Rice Merchants. A Japanese Caricature 206
Talleyrand--the Man with Six Heads 209
A Great Man's Last Leap 210
Talleyrand 211
A Promenade in the Palais Royal 213
Family of the Extinguishers 214
The Jesuits at Court 215
Charles Philipon 218
Robert Macaire fishing for Share-holders 221
A Husband's Dilemma 223
Housekeeping 224
A Poultice for Two 226
Parisian "Shoo, Fly!" 227
Three! 228
Two Attitudes 230
The Den of Lions at the Opera 231
The Vulture 233
Partant pour la Syrie 234
Gavarni 236
Honore Daumier 237
Evolution of the Piano 243
A Corporal interviewed by the Major 244
A Bold Comparison 245
Strict Discipline in the Field 246
Ahead of Time 247
A Journeyman's Leave-taking 248
After Sedan 250
To the Bull-fight 251
A Delegation of Birds of Prey 252
"Child, you will take cold" 253
Inconvenience of the New Collar 254
Sufferings endured by a Prisoner of War 255
King Bomba's Ultimatum to Sicily 259
He has begun the Service with Mass, and completed
it with Bombs 260
The Burial of Liberty 261
Bomba at Supper 262
"Such is the Love of Kings" 263
Mr. Punch 264
Return of the Pope to Rome 265
James Gillray 267
Tiddy-Doll, the Great French Gingerbread Baker 268
The Threatened Invasion of England 269
The Bibliomaniac 270
Hope--A Phrenological Illustration 271
Term Time 273
Box in a New York Theatre in 1830 276
Seymour's Conception of Mr. Winkle 278
Probable Suggestion of the Fat Boy 280
A Wedding Breakfast 281
The Boy who chalked up "No Popery!" 284
John Leech 285
Preparatory School for Young Ladies 286
The Quarrel.--England and France 287
Obstructives 290
Jeddo and Belfast; or, a Puzzle for Japan 291
"At the Church-gate" 292
An Early Quibble 294
John Tenniel 295
Soliloquy of a Rationalistic Chicken 298
"I'll follow thee!" 299
Join or Die 304
Boston Massacre Coffins 306
A Militia Drill in Massachusetts in 1832 308
Fight in Congress between Lyon and Griswold 312
The Gerry-mander 316
Thomas Nast 318
Wholesale and Retail 319
The Brains of the Tammany Ring 320
"What are the wild waves saying?" 321
Shin-plaster Caricature of General Jackson's War
on the United States Bank 322
City People in a Country Church 323
"Why don't you take it?" 324
Popular Caricature of the Secession War 325
Virginia pausing 326
Tweedledee and Sweedledum 328
"Who Stole the People's Money?" 329
"On to Richmond!" 330
Christmas-time.--Won at a Turkey Raffle 331
"He cometh not, she said" 332
[Illustration: Pigmy Pugilists--from Pompeii.]
CARICATURE AND COMIC ART.
CHAPTER I.
AMONG THE ROMANS.
Much as the ancients differed from ourselves in other particulars, they
certainly laughed at one another just as we do, for precisely the same
reasons, and employed every art, device, and implement of ridicule which
is known to us.
[Illustration: Chalk Drawing by Roman Soldier in Pompeii.]
Observe this rude and childish attempt at a drawing. Go into any boys'
school to-day, and turn over the slates and copy-books, or visit an
inclosure where men are obliged to pass idle days, and you will be
likely to find pictures conceived in this taste, and executed with this
degree of artistic skill. But the drawing dates back nearly eighteen
centuries. It was done on one of the hot, languid days of August, A.D.
79, by a Roman soldier with a piece of red chalk on a wall of his
barracks in the city of Pompeii.[1] On the 23d of August, in the year
79, occurred the eruption of Vesuvius, which buried not Italian cities
only, but Antiquity itself, and, by burying, preserved it for the
instruction of after-times. In disinterred Pompeii, the Past stands
revealed to us, and we remark with a kind of infantile surprise the
great number of particulars in which the people of that day were even
such as we are. There was found the familiar apothecary's shop, with a
box of pills on the counter, and a roll of material that was about to be
made up when the apothecary heard the warning thunder and fled. The
baker's shop remained, with a loaf of bread stamped with the maker's
name. A sculptor's studio was strewed with blocks of marble, unfinished
statues, mallets, compasses, chisels, and saws. A thousand objects
attest that when the fatal eruption burst upon these cities, life and
its activities were going forward in all essential particulars as they
are at this moment in any rich and luxurious town of Southern Europe.
[Footnote 1: "Naples and the Campagna Felice." In a Series of Letters
addressed to a Friend in England, in 1802, p. 104.]
In the building supposed to have been the quarters of the Roman
garrison, many of the walls were covered with such attempts at
caricature as the specimen just given, to some of which were appended
opprobrious epithets and phrases. The name of the personage above
portrayed was Nonius Maximus, who was probably a martinet centurion,
odious to his company, for the name was found in various parts of the
inclosure, usually accompanied by disparaging words. Many of the
soldiers had simply chalked their own names; others had added the number
of their cohort or legion, precisely as in the late war soldiers left
records of their stay on the walls of fort and hospital. A large number
of these wall-chalkings in red, white, and black (most of them in red)
were clearly legible fifty years after exposure. I give another
specimen, a genuine political caricature, copied from an outside wall of
a private house in Pompeii.
[Illustration: Chalk Caricature on a Wall in Pompeii.]
The allusion is to an occurrence in local history of the liveliest
possible interest to the people. A few years before the fatal eruption
there was a fierce town-and-country row in the amphitheatre, in which
the Pompeians defeated and put to flight the provincial Nucerians. Nero
condemned the pugnacious men of Pompeii to the terrible penalty of
closing their amphitheatre for ten years. In the picture an armed man
descends into the arena bearing the palm of victory, while on the other
side a prisoner is dragged away bound. The inscription alone gives us
the key to the street artist's meaning, _Campani victoria una cum
Nucerinis peristis_--"Men of Campania, you perished in the victory not
less than the Nucerians;" as though the patriotic son of Campania had
written, "We beat 'em, but very little we got by it."
If the idlers of the streets chalked caricature on the walls, we can not
be surprised to discover that Pompeian artists delighted in the comic
and burlesque. Comic scenes from the plays of Terence and Plautus, with
the names of the characters written over them, have been found, as well
as a large number of burlesque scenes, in which dwarfs, deformed people,
Pigmies, beasts, and birds are engaged in the ordinary labors of men.
The gay and luxurious people of the buried cities seem to have delighted
in nothing so much as in representations of Pigmies, for there was
scarcely a house in Pompeii yet uncovered which did not exhibit some
trace of the ancient belief in the existence of these little people.
Homer, Aristotle, and Pliny all discourse of the Pigmies as actually
existing, and the artists, availing themselves of this belief, which
they shared, employed it in a hundred ways to caricature the doings of
men of larger growth. Pliny describes them as inhabiting the salubrious
mountainous regions of India, their stature about twenty-seven inches,
and engaged in eternal war with their enemies, the geese. "They say,"
Pliny continues, "that, mounted upon rams and goats, and armed with bows
and arrows, they descend in a body during spring-time to the edge of the
waters, where they eat the eggs and the young of those birds, not
returning to the mountains for three months. Otherwise they could not
resist the ever-increasing multitude of the geese. The Pigmies live in
cabins made of mud, the shells of goose eggs, and feathers of the same
bird."
[Illustration: Battle between Pigmies and Geese.]
Homer, in the third book of the "Iliad," alludes to the wars of the
Cranes and Pigmies:
"So when inclement winters vex the plain
With piercing frosts, or thick-descending rain,
To warmer seas the Cranes embodied fly,
With noise and order through the midway sky;
To Pigmy nations wounds and death they bring,
And all the war descends upon the wing."
[Illustration: A Pigmy Scene--from Pompeii.]
One of our engravings shows that not India only, but Egypt also, was
regarded as the haunt of the Pigmy race; for the Upper Nile was then, as
now, the home of the hippopotamus, the crocodile, and the lotus. Here we
see a bald-headed Pigmy hero riding triumphantly on a mighty crocodile,
regardless of the open-mouthed, bellowing hippopotamus behind him. In
other pictures, however, the scaly monster, so far from playing this
submissive part, is seen plunging in fierce pursuit of a Pigmy, who
flies headlong before the foe. Frescoes, vases, mosaics, statuettes,
paintings, and signet-rings found in the ancient cities all attest the
popularity of the little men. The odd pair of vases on the following
page, one in the shape of a boar's head and the other in that of a
ram's, are both adorned with a representation of the fierce combats
between the Pigmies and the geese.
There has been an extraordinary display of erudition in the attempt to
account for the endless repetition of Pigmy subjects in the houses of
the Pompeians; but the learned and acute M. Champfleury "humbly hazards
a conjecture," as he modestly expresses it, which commends itself at
once to general acceptance. He thinks these Pigmy pictures were designed
_to amuse the children_. No conjecture could be less erudite or more
probable. We know, however, as a matter of record, that the walls of
taverns and wine-shops were usually adorned with Pigmy pictures, such
subjects being associated in every mind with pleasure and gayety. It is
not difficult to imagine that a picture of a pugilistic encounter
between Pigmies, like the one given at the head of this chapter, or a
fanciful representation of a combat of Pigmy gladiators, of which many
have been discovered, would be both welcome and suitable as tavern
pictures in the Italian cities of the classic period.
[Illustration: Vases with Pigmy Designs.]
The Pompeians, in common with all the people of antiquity, had a
child-like enjoyment in witnessing representations of animals engaged in
the labors or the sports of human beings. A very large number of
specimens have been uncovered, some of them gorgeous with the hues given
them by masters of coloring eighteen hundred years ago. In the following
cut is a specimen of these--a representation of a grasshopper driving a
chariot, copied in 1802 from a Pompeian work for an English traveler.
[Illustration: A Grasshopper driving a Chariot.]
Nothing can exceed either the brilliancy or the delicacy of the coloring
of this picture in the original, the splendid plumage of the bird and
the bright gold of the chariot shaft and wheel being relieved and
heightened by a gray background and the greenish brown of the course.
The colorists of Pompeii have obviously influenced the taste of
Christendom. There are few houses of pretension decorated within the
last quarter of a century, either in Europe or America, which do not
exhibit combinations and contrasts of color of which the hint was found
in exhumed Pompeii. One or two other small specimens of this kind of
art, selected from a large number accessible, may interest the reader.
[Illustration: From an Antique Amethyst.]
[Illustration: Flight of AEneas from Troy.]
The spirited air of the team of cocks, and the _nonchalant_ professional
attitude of the charioteer, will not escape notice. Perhaps the most
interesting example of this propensity to personify animals which the
exhumed cities have furnished us is a burlesque of a popular picture of
AEneas escaping from Troy, carrying his father, Anchises, on his back,
and leading by the hand his son, Ascanius, the old man carrying the
casket of household gods. No scene could have been more familiar to the
people of Italy than one which exhibited the hero whom they regarded as
the founder of their empire in so engaging a light, and to which the
genius of Virgil had given a deathless charm:
"Thus ord'ring all that prudence could provide
I clothe my shoulders with a lion's hide
And yellow spoils; then on my bending back
The welcome load of my dear father take;
While on my better hand Ascanius hung,
And with unequal paces tripped along."
Artists found a subject in these lines, and of one picture suggested by
them two copies have been found carved upon stone.
[Illustration: Caricature of the Flight of AEneas.]
This device of employing animals' heads upon human bodies is still used
by the caricaturist, so few are the resources of his branch of art; and
we can not deny that it retains a portion of its power to excite
laughter. If we may judge from what has been discovered of the burlesque
art of the ancient nations, we may conclude that this idea, poor as it
seems to us, was the one which the artists of antiquity most frequently
employed. It was also common with them to burlesque familiar paintings,
as in the instance given. It is not unlikely that the cloyed and dainty
taste of the Pompeian connoisseur perceived something ridiculous in the
too-familiar exploit of Father AEneas as represented in serious art,
just as we smile at the theatrical attitudes and costumes in the
picture of "Washington crossing the Delaware." Fancy that work
burlesqued by putting an eagle's head upon the Father of his Country,
filling the boat with magpie soldiers, covering the river with icebergs,
and making the oars still more ludicrously inadequate to the work in
hand than they are in the painting. Thus a caricaturist of Pompeii,
Rome, Greece, Egypt, or Assyria would have endeavored to cast ridicule
upon such a picture.
[Illustration: From a Red Jasper.]
Few events of the last century were more influential upon the progress
of knowledge than the chance discovery of the buried cities, since it
nourished a curiosity respecting the past which could not be confined to
those excavations, and which has since been disclosing antiquity in
every quarter of the globe. We call it a chance discovery, although the
part which accident plays in such matters is more interesting than
important. The digging of a well in 1708 let daylight into the
amphitheatre of Herculaneum, and caused some languid exploration, which
had small results. Forty years later, a peasant at work in a vineyard
five miles from the same spot struck with his hoe something hard, which
was too firmly fixed in the ground to be moved. It proved to be a small
statue of metal, upright, and riveted to a stone pedestal, which was
itself immovably fastened to some solid mass still deeper in the earth.
Where the hoe had struck the statue the metal showed the tempting hue of
gold, and the peasant, after carefully smoothing over the surface,
hurried away with a fragment of it to a goldsmith, intending (so runs
the local gossip) to work this opening as his private gold mine. But as
the metal was pronounced brass, he honestly reported the discovery to a
magistrate, who set on foot an excavation. The statue was found to be a
Minerva, fixed to the centre of a small roof-like dome, and when the
dome was broken through it was seen to be the roof of a temple, of which
the Minerva had been the topmost ornament. And thus was discovered,
about the middle of the last century, the ancient city of Pompeii,
buried by a storm of light ashes from Vesuvius sixteen hundred and
seventy years before.
[Illustration: Roman Masks, Comic and Tragic.]
It was not the accident, but the timeliness of the accident, which made
it important; for there never could have been an excavation fifteen feet
deep over the site of Pompeii without revealing indications of the
buried city. But the time was then ripe for an exploration. It had
become possible to excite a general curiosity in a Past exhumed; and
such a curiosity is a late result of culture: it does not exist in a
dull or in an ignorant mind. And this curiosity, nourished and inflamed
as it was by the brilliant and marvelous things brought to light in
Pompeii and Herculaneum, has sought new gratification wherever a heap
of ruins betrayed an ancient civilization. It looks now as if many of
the old cities of the world are in layers or strata--a new London upon
an old London, and perhaps a London under that--a city three or four
deep, each the record of an era. Two Romes we familiarly know, one of
which is built in part upon the other; and at Cairo we can see the
process going on by which some ancient cities were buried without
volcanic aid. The dirt of the unswept streets, never removed, has raised
the grade of Cairo from age to age.
[Illustration: A Roman Comic Actor masked for the Part of Silenus.]
The excavations at Rome, so rich in results, were not needed to prove
that to the Romans of old caricature was a familiar thing. The mere
magnitude of their theatres, and their habit of performing plays in the
open air, compelled caricature, the basis of which is exaggeration.
Actors, both comic and tragic, wore masks of very elaborate
construction, made of resonant metal, and so shaped as to serve, in some
degree, the office of a speaking-trumpet. In the engravings on this page
are represented a pair of masks such as were worn by Roman actors
throughout the empire, of which many specimens have been found.
If the reader has ever visited the Coliseum at Rome, or even one of the
large hippodromes of Paris or New York, and can imagine the attempts of
an actor to exhibit comic or tragic effects of countenance or of vocal
utterance across spaces so extensive, he will readily understand the
necessity of such masks as these. The art of acting could only have been
developed in small theatres. In the open air or in the uncovered
amphitheatre all must have been vociferation and caricature. Observe
the figure of old Silenus, on preceding page, one of the chief
mirth-makers of antiquity, who lives for us in the Old Man of the
pantomime. He is masked for the theatre.
The legend of Silenus is itself an evidence of the tendency of the
ancients to fall into caricature. To the Romans he was at once the
tutor, the comrade, and the butt of jolly Bacchus. He discoursed wisdom
and made fun. He was usually represented as an old man, bald,
flat-nosed, half drunk, riding upon a broad-backed ass, or reeling along
by the aid of a staff, uttering shrewd maxims and doing ludicrous acts.
People wonder that the pantomime called "Humpty Dumpty" should be played
a thousand nights in New York; but the substance of all that boisterous
nonsense, that exhibition of rollicking freedom from restraints of law,
usage, and gravitation, has amused mankind for unknown thousands of
years; for it is merely what remains to us of the legendary Bacchus and
his jovial crew. We observe, too, that the great comic books, such as
"Gil Blas," "Don Quixote," "Pickwick," and others, are most effective
when the hero is most like Bacchus, roaming over the earth with merry
blades, delightfully free from the duties and conditions which make
bondmen of us all. Mr. Dickens may never have thought of it--and he
_may_--but there is much of the charm of the ancient Bacchic legends in
the narrative of the four Pickwickians and Samuel Weller setting off on
the top of a coach, and meeting all kinds of gay and semi-lawless
adventures in country towns and rambling inns. Even the ancient
distribution of characters is hinted at. With a few changes, easily
imagined, the irrepressible Sam might represent Bacchus, and his master
bring to mind the sage and comic Silenus. Nothing is older than our
modes of fun. Even in seeking the origin of Punch, investigators lose
themselves groping in the dim light of the most remote antiquity.
How readily the Roman satirists ran into caricature all their readers
know, except those who take the amusing exaggerations of Juvenal and
Horace as statements of fact. During the heat of our antislavery
contest, Dryden's translation of the passage in Juvenal which pictures
the luxurious Roman lady ordering her slave to be put to death was used
by the late Mr. W. H. Fry, in the New York _Tribune_, with thrilling
effect:
"Go drag that slave to death! You reason, Why
Should the poor innocent be doomed to die?
What proofs? For, when man's life is in debate,
The judge can ne'er too long deliberate.
Call'st thou that slave a man? the wife replies.
Proved or unproved the crime, the villain dies.
I have the sovereign power to save or kill,
And give no other reason but my will."
This is evidently caricature. Not only is the whole of Juvenal's sixth
satire a series of the broadest exaggerations, but with regard to this
particular passage we have evidence of its burlesque character in Horace
(Satire III., Book I.), where, wishing to give an example of impossible
folly, he says, "If a man should crucify a slave for eating some of the
fish which he had been ordered to take away, people in their senses
would call him a madman." Juvenal exhibits the Roman matron of his
period undergoing the dressing of her hair, giving the scene the same
unmistakable character of caricature:
"She hurries all her handmaids to the task;
Her head alone will twenty dressers ask.
Psecas, the chief, with breast and shoulders bare,
Trembling, considers every sacred hair:
If any straggler from his rank be found,
A pinch must for the mortal sin compound.
"With curls on curls they build her head, before,
And mount it with a formidable tower.
A giantess she seems; but look behind,
And then she dwindles to the Pigmy kind.
Duck-legged, short-waisted, such a dwarf she is
That she must rise on tiptoe for a kiss.
Meanwhile her husband's whole estate is spent;
He may go bare, while she receives his rent."
The spirit of caricature speaks in these lines. There are passages of
Horace, too, in reading which the picture forms itself before the mind;
and the poet supplies the very words which caricaturists usually employ
to make their meaning more obvious. In the third satire of the second
book a caricature is exhibited to the mind's eye without the
intervention of pencil. We see the miser Opimius, "poor amid his hoards
of gold," who has starved himself into a lethargy; his heir is scouring
his coffers in triumph; but the doctor devises a mode of rousing his
patient. He orders a table to be brought into the room, upon which he
causes the hidden bags of money to be poured out, and several persons to
draw near as if to count it. Opimius revives at this maddening
spectacle, and the doctor urges him to strengthen himself by generous
food, and so balk his rapacious heir. "Do you hesitate?" cries the
doctor. "Come, now, take this preparation of rice." "How much did it
cost?" asks the miser. "Only a trifle." "But how much?" "Eightpence."
Opimius, appalled at the price, whimpers, "Alas! what does it matter
whether I die of a disease, or by plunder and extortion?" Many similar
examples will arrest the eye of one who turns over the pages of this
master of satire.
The great festival of the Roman year, the Saturnalia, which occurred in
the latter half of December, we may almost say was consecrated to
caricature, so fond were the Romans of every kind of ludicrous
exaggeration. This festival, the merry Christmas of the Roman world,
gave to the Christian festival many of its enlivening observances.
During the Saturnalia the law courts and schools were closed; there was
a general interchange of presents, and universal feasting; there were
fantastic games, processions of masked figures in extravagant costumes,
and religious sacrifices. For three days the slaves were not merely
exempt from labor, but they enjoyed freedom of speech, even to the
abusing of their masters. In one of his satires, Horace gives us an
idea of the manner in which slaves burlesqued their lords at this jocund
time. He reports some of the remarks of his own slave, Davus, upon
himself and his poetry. Davus, it is evident, had discovered the
histrionic element in literature, and pressed it home upon his master.
"You praise the simplicity of the ancient Romans; but if any god were to
reduce you to their condition, you, the same man that wrote those fine
things, would beg to be let off. At Rome you long for the country; and
when you are in the country, you praise the distant city to the skies.
When you are not invited out to supper, you extol your homely repast at
home, and hug yourself that you are not obliged to drink with any body
abroad. As if you ever went out upon compulsion! But let Maecenas send
you an invitation for early lamp-light, _then_ what do we hear? _Will no
one bring the oil quicker? Does any body hear me?_ You bellow and storm
with fury. You bought me for five hundred drachmas, but what if it turns
out that you are the greater fool of the two?" And thus the astute and
witty Davus continues to ply his master with taunts and jeers and wise
saws, till Horace, in fury, cries out, "Where can I find a stone?" Davus
innocently asks, "What need is there here of such a thing as a stone?"
"Where can I get some javelins?" roars Horace. Upon which Davus quietly
remarks, "This man is either mad or making verses." Horace ends the
colloquy by saying, "If you do not this instant take yourself off, I'll
make a field-hand of you on my Sabine estate!"
[Illustration: Roman Wall Caricature of a Christian.]
That Roman satirists employed the pencil and the brush as well as the
stylus, and employed them freely and constantly, we should have surmised
if the fact had not been discovered. Most of the caricatures of passing
events speedily perish in all countries, because the materials usually
employed in them are perishable. To preserve so slight a thing as a
chalk sketch on a wall for eighteen centuries, accident must lend a
hand, as it has in the instance now given.
This picture was found in 1857 upon the wall of a narrow Roman street,
which was closed up and shut out from the light of day about A.D. 100,
to facilitate an extension of the imperial palace. The wall when
uncovered was found scratched all over with rude caricature drawings in
the style of the specimen given. This one immediately arrested
attention, and the part of the wall on which it was drawn was carefully
removed to the Collegio Romano, in the museum of which it may now be
inspected. The Greek words scrawled upon the picture may be translated
thus: "Alexamenos is worshiping his god."
These words sufficiently indicate that the picture was aimed at some
member, to us unknown, of the despised sect of the Christians. It is the
only allusion to Christianity which has yet been found upon the walls of
the Italian cities; but it is extremely probable that the street artists
found in the strange usages of the Christians a very frequent subject.
We know well what the educated class of the Romans thought of the
Christians, when they thought of them at all. They regarded them as a
sect of extremely absurd Jews, insanely obstinate, and wholly
contemptible. If the professors and students of Harvard and Yale should
read in the papers that a new sect had arisen among the Mormons, more
eccentric and ridiculous even than the Mormons themselves, the
intelligence would excite in their minds about the same feeling that the
courtly scholars of the Roman Empire manifest when they speak of the
early Christians. Nothing astonished them so much as their "obstinacy."
"A man," says the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, "ought to be ready to die
when the time comes; but this readiness should be the result of a calm
judgment, and not be an exhibition of mere obstinacy, as with the
Christians." The younger Pliny, too, in his character of magistrate, was
extremely perplexed with this same obstinacy. He tells us that when
people were brought before him charged with being Christians, he asked
them the question, Are you a Christian? If they said they were, he
repeated it twice, threatening them with punishment; and if they
persisted, he ordered them to be punished. If they denied the charge, he
put them to the proof by requiring them to repeat after him an
invocation to the gods, and to offer wine and incense to the emperor's
statue. Some of the accused, he says, reviled Christ; and this he
regarded as a sure proof of innocence, for people told him there was no
forcing real Christians to do an act of that nature. Some of the accused
owned that they had been Christians once, three years ago or more, and
some twenty years ago, but had returned to the worship of the gods.
These, however, declared that, after all, there was no great offense in
being Christians. They had merely met on a regular day before dawn,
addressed a form of prayer to Christ as to a divinity, and bound
themselves by a solemn oath not to commit fraud, theft, or other immoral
act, nor break their word, nor betray a trust; after which they used to
separate, then re-assemble, and eat together a harmless meal.
All this seemed innocent enough; but Pliny was not satisfied. "I judged
it necessary," he writes to the emperor, "to try to get at the real
truth by putting to the torture two female slaves who were said to
officiate at their religious rites; but all I could discover was
evidence of an absurd and extravagant superstition." So he refers the
whole matter to the emperor, telling him that the "contagion" is not
confined to the cities, but has spread into the villages and into the
country. Still, he thought it could be checked: nay, it _had_ been
checked; for the temples, which had been almost abandoned, were
beginning to be frequented again, and there was also "a general demand
for victims for sacrifice, which till lately had found few purchasers."
The wise Trajan approved the course of his representative. He tells him,
however, not to go out of his way to look for Christians; but if any
were brought before him, why, of course he must inflict the penalty
unless they proved their innocence by invoking the gods. The remains of
Roman literature have nothing so interesting for us as these two letters
of Pliny and Trajan of the year 103. We may rest assured that the walls
of every Roman town bore testimony to the contempt and aversion in which
the Christians were held, particularly by those who dealt in "victims"
and served the altars--a very numerous and important class throughout
the ancient world.
CHAPTER II.
AMONG THE GREEKS.
Greece was the native home of all that we now call art. Upon looking
over the two hundred pages of art gossip in the writings of the elder
Pliny, most of which relates to Greece, we are ready to ask, Is there
one thing in painting or drawing, one school, device, style, or method,
known to us which was not familiar to the Greeks? They had their
Landseers--men great in dogs and all animals; they had artists renowned
in the "Dutch style" ages before the Dutch ceased to be
amphibious--artists who painted barber-shop interiors to a hair, and
donkeys eating cabbages correct to a fibre; they had cattle pieces as
famous throughout the classic world as Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair" is
now in ours; they had Rosa Bonheurs of their own--famous women, a list
of whose names Pliny gives; they had portrait-painters too good to be
fashionable, and portrait-painters too fashionable to be good; they had
artists who excelled in flesh, others great in form, others excellent in
composition; they took plaster casts of dead faces; they had varnishers
and picture-cleaners. Noted pictures were spoken of as having lost their
charm through an unskillful cleaner. They had their "life school," and
used it as artists now do, borrowing from each model her special beauty.
Zeuxis, as Pliny records, was so scrupulously careful in the execution
of a religious painting that "he had the young maidens of the place
stripped for examination, and selected five of them, in order to adopt
in his picture the most commendable points in the form of each." And we
may be sure that every maiden of them felt it to be an honor thus to
contribute perfection to a Juno, executed by the first artist of the
world, which was to adorn the temple of her native city.
They _played_ with art as men are apt to play with the implements of
which they are masters. Sosus, the great artist in mosaics, executed at
Pergamus the pavement of a banqueting-room which presented the
appearance of a floor strewed with crumbs, fragments and scraps of a
feast, not yet swept away. It was renowned as the "Unswept Hall of
Pergamus." And what a pleasing story is that of the contest between
Zeuxis and his rival, Parrhasius! On the day of trial Zeuxis hung in the
place of exhibition a painting of grapes, and Parrhasius a picture of a
curtain. Some birds flew to the grapes of Zeuxis, and began to pick at
them. The artist, overjoyed at so striking a proof of his success,
turned haughtily to his rival, and demanded that the curtain should be
drawn aside and the picture revealed. But the curtain _was_ the
picture. He owned himself surpassed, since he had only deceived birds,
but Parrhasius had deceived Zeuxis.
[Illustration: Burlesque of Jupiter's Wooing of the Princess Alcmena.]
Could comic artists and caricaturists be wanting in Athens? Strange to
say, it was the gods and goddesses whom the caricaturists of Greece as
well as the comic writers chiefly selected for ridicule. All their works
have perished except a few specimens preserved upon pottery. We show one
from a Greek vase, a rude burlesque of one of Jupiter's love adventures,
the father of gods and men being accompanied by a Mercury ludicrously
unlike the light and agile messenger of the gods. The story goes that
the Princess Alcmena, though betrothed to a lover, vowed her hand to the
man who should avenge her slaughtered brothers. Jupiter assumed the form
and face of the lover, and, pretending to have avenged her brothers'
death, gained admittance. Pliny describes a celebrated burlesque
painting of the birth of Bacchus from Jupiter's thigh, in which the god
of the gods was represented wearing a woman's cap, in a highly
ridiculous posture, crying out, and surrounded by goddesses in the
character of midwives. The best specimen of Greek caricature that has
come down to us burlesques no less serious a theme than the great oracle
of Apollo at Delphos, given on page 30.
This remarkable work owes its preservation to the imperishable nature of
the material on which it was executed. It was copied from a large vessel
used by the Greeks and Romans for holding vinegar, a conspicuous object
upon their tables, and therefore inviting ornament. What audacity to
burlesque an oracle to which kings and conquerors humbly repaired for
direction, and which all Greece held in awe! Croesus propitiated this
oracle by the gift of a solid golden lion as large as life, and the
Phocians found in its coffers, and carried off, a sum equal to nearly
eleven millions of dollars in gold. Such was the general belief in its
divine inspiration! But in this picture we see the oracle, the god, and
those who consult them, all exhibited in the broadest burlesque: Apollo
as a quack doctor on his platform, with bag, bow, and cap; Chiron, old
and blind, struggling up the steps to consult him, aided by Apollo at
his head and a friend pushing behind; the nymphs surveying the scene
from the heights of Parnassus; and the manager of the spectacle, who
looks on from below. How strange is this!
But the Greek literature is also full of this wild license. Lucian
depicts the gods in council ludicrously discussing the danger they were
in from the philosophers. Jupiter says, "If men are once persuaded that
there are no gods, or, if there are gods, that we take no care of human
affairs, we shall have no more gifts or victims from them, but may sit
and starve on Olympus without festivals, holidays, sacrifices, or any
pomp or ceremonies whatever." The whole debate is in this manner, and is
at the same time a burlesque of the political discussions at the
Athenian mass-meetings. What can be more ludicrous than the story of
Mercury visiting Athens in disguise in order to discover the estimation
in which he was held among mortals? He enters the shop of a dealer in
images, where he inquires the price first of a Jupiter, then of an
Apollo, and, lastly, with a blush, of a Mercury. "Oh," says the dealer,
"if you take the Jupiter and the Apollo, I will throw the Mercury in."
[Illustration: Greek Caricature of the Oracle of Apollo at Delphos.]
Nor did the witty, rollicking Greeks confine their satire to the
immortals. Of the famous mirth-provokers of the world, such as
Cervantes, Ariosto, Moliere, Rabelais, Sterne, Voltaire, Thackeray,
Dickens, the one that had most power to produce mere physical laughter,
power to shake the sides and cause people to roll helpless upon the
floor, was the Greek dramatist Aristophanes. The force of the comic can
no farther go than he has carried it in some of the scenes of his best
comedies. Even to us, far removed as we are, in taste as well as in
time, from that wonderful Athens of his, they are still irresistibly
diverting. This master of mirth is never so effective as when he is
turning into ridicule the philosophers and poets for whose sake Greece
is still a dear, venerable name to all the civilized world. In his
comedy of "The Frogs" he sends Bacchus down into Hades with every
circumstance of riotous burlesque, and there he exhibits the two great
tragic poets, AEschylus and Euripides, standing opposite each other, and
competing for the tragic throne by reciting verses in which the
mannerism of each, as well as familiar passages of their plays, is
broadly burlesqued. Nothing in literature can be found more ludicrous or
less becoming, unless we look for it in Aristophanes himself. In his
play of "The Clouds" occurs his caricature of Socrates, of infinite
absurdity, but not ludicrous to us, because we read it as part of the
story of a sublime and affecting martyrdom. It fills our minds with
wonder to think that a people among whom a Socrates could have been
formed could have borne to see him thus profaned. A rogue of a father,
plagued by an extravagant son, repairs to the school of Socrates to
learn the arts by which creditors are argued out of their just claims in
courts of justice. Upon reaching the place, the door of the "Thinking
Shop" opens, and behold! a caricature all ready for the artist's pencil.
The pupils are discovered with their heads fixed to the floor, their
backs uppermost, and Socrates hanging from the ceiling in a basket. The
visitor, transfixed with wonder, questions his companion. He asks why
they present that portion of their bodies to heaven. "It is getting
taught astronomy alone by itself." "And who is this man in the basket?"
"HIMSELF." "Who's Himself?" "Socrates!" The visitor at length addresses
the master by a diminutive, as though he had said, "Socrates, dear
little Socrates." The philosopher speaks: "Why callest thou me, thou
creature of a day?" "Tell me, first, I beg, what you are doing up
there." "I am walking in the air, and speculating about the sun; for I
should never have rightly learned celestial things if I had not
suspended the intellect, and subtly mingled Thought with its kindred
Air." All this is in the very spirit of caricature. Half of Aristophanes
is caricature. In characterizing the light literature of Greece we are
reminded of Juvenal's remark upon the Greek people, "All Greece is a
comedian."
CHAPTER III.
AMONG THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS.
Egyptian art was old when Grecian art was young, and it remained crude
when the art of Greece had reached its highest development. But not the
less did it delight in caricature and burlesque. In the Egyptian
collection belonging to the New York Historical Society there is a
specimen of the Egyptians' favorite kind of burlesque picture which
dates back three thousand years, but which stands out more clearly now
upon its slab of limestone than we can engrave it here.
[Illustration: An Egyptian Caricature.]
Dr. Abbott, who brought this specimen from Thebes, interpreted it to be
a representation of a lion seated upon a throne, as king, receiving from
a fox, personating a high-priest, an offering of a goose and a fan. It
is probably a burlesque of a well-known picture; for in one of the
Egyptian papyri in the British Museum there is a drawing of a lion and
unicorn playing chess, which is a manifest caricature of a picture
frequently repeated upon the ancient monuments. It was from Egypt, then,
that the classic nations caught this childish fancy of ridiculing the
actions of men by picturing animals performing similar ones; and it is
surprising to note how fond the Egyptian artists were of this simple
device. On the same papyrus there are several other interesting
specimens: a lion on his hind-legs engaged in laying out as a mummy the
dead body of a hoofed animal; a tiger or wild cat driving a flock of
geese to market; another tiger carrying a hoe on one shoulder and a bag
of seed on the other; an animal playing on a double pipe, and driving
before him a herd of small stags, like a shepherd; a hippopotamus
washing his hands in a tall water-jar; an animal on a throne, with
another behind him as a fan-bearer, and a third presenting him with a
bouquet. No place was too sacred for such playful delineations. In one
of the royal sepulchres at Thebes, as Kenrick relates, there is a
picture of an ass and a lion singing, accompanying themselves on the
phorminx and the harp. There is also an elaborate burlesque of a battle
piece, in which a fortress is attacked by rats, and defended by cats,
which are visible on the battlements. Some rats bring a ladder to the
walls and prepare to scale them, while others, armed with spears,
shields, and bows, protect the assailants. One rat of enormous size, in
a chariot drawn by dogs, has pierced several cats with arrows, and is
swinging round his battle-axe in exact imitation of Rameses, in a
serious picture, dealing destruction on his enemies. On a papyrus at
Turin there is a representation of a cat with a shepherd's crook
watching a flock of geese, while a cynocephalus near by plays upon the
flute. Of this class of burlesques the most interesting example,
perhaps, is the one annexed, representing a Soul doomed to return to its
earthly home in the form of a pig.
[Illustration: A Condemned Soul, Egyptian Caricature.]
This picture, which is of such antiquity that it was an object of
curiosity to the Romans and the Greeks, is part of the decoration of a
king's tomb. In the original, Osiris, the august judge of departed
spirits, is represented on his throne, near the stern of the boat,
waving away the Soul, which he has just weighed in his unerring scales
and found wanting; while close to the shore a man hews away the ground,
to intimate that all communication is cut off between the lost spirit
and the abode of the blessed. The animals that execute the stern decree
are the dog-headed monkeys, sacred in the mythology of Egypt.
[Illustration: Egyptian Servants conveying Home their Masters from a
Carouse.]
That the ancient Egyptians were a jovial people who sat long at the
wine, we might infer from the caricatures which have been discovered in
Egypt, if we did not know it from other sources of information.
Representations have been found of every part of the process of
wine-making, from the planting of the vineyard to the storing-away of
the wine-jars. In the valuable works of Sir Gardner Wilkinson[2] many of
these curious pictures are given: the vineyard and its trellis-work; men
frightening away the birds with slings; a vineyard with a water-tank for
irrigation; the grape harvest; baskets full of grapes covered with
leaves; kids browsing upon the vines; trained monkeys gathering grapes;
the wine-press in operation; men pressing grapes by the natural process
of treading; pouring the wine into jars; and rows of jars put away for
future use. The same laborious author favors us with ancient Egyptian
caricatures which serve to show that wine was a creature as capable of
abuse thirty centuries ago as it is now.
[Footnote 2: "A Popular Account of the Ancient Egyptians," by Sir J.
Gardner Wilkinson, 2 vols., Harper & Brothers, 1854.]
Pictures of similar character are not unfrequent upon the ancient
frescoes, and many of them are far more extravagant than this,
exhibiting men dancing wildly, standing upon their heads, and riotously
fighting. From Sir Gardner Wilkinson's disclosures we may reasonably
infer that the arts of debauchery have received little addition during
the last three thousand years. Even the seductive cocktail is not
modern. The ancient Egyptians imbibed stimulants to excite an appetite
for wine, and munched the biting cabbage-leaf for the same purpose. Beer
in several varieties was known to them also; veritable beer, made of
barley and a bitter herb; beer so excellent that the dainty Greek
travelers commended it as a drink only inferior to wine. Even the
Egyptian ladies did not always resist the temptation of so many modes of
intoxication. Nor did they escape the caricaturist's pencil.
[Illustration: Too Late with the Basin.]
This unfortunate lady, as Sir Gardner conjectures, after indulging in
potations deep of the renowned Egyptian wine, had been suddenly
overtaken by the consequences, and had called for assistance too late.
Egyptian satirists did not spare the ladies, and they aimed their shafts
at the same foibles that have called forth so many efforts of pencil and
pen in later times. Whenever, indeed, we look closely into ancient life,
we are struck with the similarity of the daily routine to that of our
own time. Every detail of social existence is imperishably recorded upon
the monuments of ancient Egypt, even to the tone and style and mishaps
of a fashionable party. We see the givers of the entertainment, the
master and mistress of the mansion, seated side by side upon a sofa; the
guests coming up as they arrive to salute them; the musicians and
dancers bowing low to them before beginning to perform; a pet monkey, a
dog, or a gazelle tied to the leg of the sofa; the youngest child of the
family sitting on the floor by its mother's side, or upon its father's
knee; the ladies sitting in groups, conversing upon the deathless,
inexhaustible subject of dress, and showing one another their trinkets.
Sir Gardner Wilkinson gives us also the pleasing information that it was
thought a pretty compliment for one guest to offer another a flower from
his bouquet, and that the guests endeavored to gratify their
entertainers by pointing out to one another, with expressions of
admiration, the tasteful knickknacks, the boxes of carved wood or ivory,
the vases, the elegant light tables, the chairs, ottomans, cushions,
carpets, and furniture with which the apartment was provided. This too
transparent flattery could not escape such inveterate caricaturists as
the Egyptian artists. In a tomb at Thebes may be seen a ludicrous
representation of scenes at a party where several of the guests had been
lost in rapturous admiration of the objects around them. A young man,
either from awkwardness or from having gone too often to the wine-jar,
had reclined against a wooden column placed in the centre of the room to
support a temporary ornament. There is a crash! The ornamental structure
falls upon some of the absorbed guests. Ladies have recourse to the
immortal privilege of their sex--they scream. All is confusion. Uplifted
hands ward off the falling masses. In a few moments, when it is
discovered that no one is hurt, peace is restored, and all the company
converse merrily over the incident.
It is strange to find such pictures in a tomb. But it seems as if death
and funerals and graves, with their elaborate paraphernalia, were
provocative of mirthful delineation. In one noted royal tomb there is a
representation of the funeral procession, part of which was evidently
designed to excite merriment. The Ethiopians who follow in the train of
the mourning queen have their hair plaited in most fantastic fashion,
and their tunics of leopard's skin are so arranged that a preposterously
enormous tail hangs down behind for the next man to step upon. One of
the extensive colored plates of Sir Gardner Wilkinson's larger work
presents to our view a solemn and stately procession of funeral barges
crossing the Lake of the Dead at Thebes on its way to the place of
burial. The first boat contains the coffin, decorated with flowers, a
high-priest burning incense before a table of offerings, and the female
relatives of the deceased lamenting their loss; two barges are filled
with mourning friends, one containing only women and the other only men;
two more are occupied by professional persons--the undertaker's
assistants, as we should call them--employed to carry offerings, boxes,
chairs, and other funeral objects. It was in drawing one of these
vessels that the artist could not refrain from putting in a little fun.
One of the barges having grounded upon the shore, the vessel behind
comes into collision with her, upsetting a table upon the oarsmen and
causing much confusion. It is not improbable that the picture records an
incident of that particular funeral.
CHAPTER IV.
AMONG THE HINDOOS.
If we go farther back into antiquity, it is India which first arrests
and longest absorbs our attention--India, fecund mother of tradition,
the source of almost all the rites, beliefs, and observances of the
ancient nations. When we visit the collections of the India House, the
British Museum, the Mission Rooms, or turn over the startling pages of
"The Hindu Pantheon" of Major Edward Moor, we are ready to exclaim, Here
_all_ is caricature! This brazen image, for example, of a partly naked
man with an elephant's head and trunk, seated upon a huge rat, and
feeding himself with his trunk from a bowl held in his hand--surely this
is caricature. By no means. It is an image of the most popular of the
Hindoo deities--Ganesa, god of prudence and policy, invoked at the
beginning of all enterprises, and over whose head is written the sacred
word _Aum_, never uttered by a Hindoo except with awe and veneration. If
a man begins to build a house, he calls on Ganesa, and sets up an image
of him near the spot. Mile-stones are fashioned in his likeness, and he
serves as the road-side god, even if the pious peasants who place him
where two roads cross can only afford the rudest resemblance to an
elephant's head daubed with oil and red ochre. Rude as it may be, a
passing traveler will occasionally hang upon it a wreath of flowers.
Major Moor gives us a hideous picture of Maha-Kala, with huge mouth and
enormous protruding tongue, squat, naked, upon the ground, and holding
up a large sword. This preposterous figure is still farther removed from
the burlesque. It is the Hindoo mode of representing _Eternity_, whose
vast insatiate maw devours men, cities, kingdoms, and will at length
swallow the universe; then all the crowd of inferior deities, and
finally _itself_, leaving only _Brahm_, the One Eternal, to inhabit the
infinite void. Hundreds of such revolting crudities meet the eye in
every extensive Indian collection.
But the element of fun and burlesque is not wanting in the Hindoo
Pantheon. Krishna is the jolly Bacchus, the Don Juan, of the Indian
deities. Behold him on his travels mounted upon an elephant, which is
formed of the bodies of the obliging damsels who accompany him!
[Illustration: The Hindoo God Krishna on his Travels.]
There is no end to the tales related of the mischievous, jovial,
irrepressible Krishna. The ladies who go with him everywhere, a
countless multitude, are so accommodating as to wreathe and twist
themselves into the form of any creature he may wish to ride; sometimes
into that of a horse, sometimes into that of a bird.
[Illustration: Krishna's Attendants assuming the Form of a Bird.]
In other pictures he appears riding in a palanquin, which is likewise
composed of girls, and the bearers are girls also. In the course of one
adventure, being in great danger from the wrath of his numerous enemies,
he created an enormous snake, in whose vast interior his flocks, his
herds, his followers, and himself found refuge. At a festival held in
his honor, which was attended by a great number of damsels, he suddenly
appeared in the midst of the company and proposed a dance; and, that
each of them might be provided with a partner, he divided himself into
as many complete and captivating Krishnas as there were ladies. One
summer, when he was passing the hot season on the sea-shore with his
retinue of ladies, his musical comrade, Nareda, hinted to him that,
since he had such a multitude of wives, it would be no great stretch of
generosity to spare one to a poor musician who had no wife at all.
"Court any one you please," said the merry god. So Nareda went wooing
from house to house, but in every house he found Krishna perfectly
domesticated, the ever-attentive husband, and the lady quite sure that
she had him all to herself. Nareda continued his quest until he had
visited precisely sixteen thousand and eight houses, in each and all of
which, at one and the same time, Krishna was the established lord. Then
he gave it up. One of the pictures which illustrate the endless
biography of this entertaining deity represents him going through the
ceremony of marriage with a bear, both squatting upon a carpet in the
prescribed attitude, the bear grinning satisfaction, two bears in
attendance standing on their hind-feet, and two priests blessing the
union. This picture is more spirited, is more like art, than any other
yet copied from Hindoo originals.
[Illustration: Krishna in his Palanquin.]
To this day, as the missionaries report, the people of India are
excessively addicted to every kind of jesting which is within their
capacity, and delight especially in all the monstrous comicalities of
their mythology. No matter how serious an impression a speaker may have
made upon a village group, let him but use a word in a manner which
suggests a ludicrous image or ridiculous pun, and the assembly at once
breaks up in laughter, not to be gathered again.
In late years, those of the inhabitants of India who read the language
of their conquerors have had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with
their humor. Wherever a hundred English officers are gathered, there is
the possibility of an illustrated comic periodical, and, accordingly, we
find one such in several of the garrisoned places held by the English in
remote parts of the world. Calcutta, as the _Athenaeum_ informs us, "has
its _Punch_, or Indian _Charivari_," which is not unworthy of its
English namesake.
CHAPTER V.
RELIGIOUS CARICATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
Mr. Robert Tomes, American consul, a few years ago, at the French city
of Rheims, describes very agreeably the impression made upon his mind by
the grand historic cathedral of that ancient place.[3] Filled with a
sense of the majestic presence of the edifice, he approached one of the
chief portals, to find it crusted with a most uncouth semi-burlesque
representation, cut in stone, of the Last Judgment. The trump has
sounded, and the Lord from a lofty throne is pronouncing doom upon the
risen as they are brought up to the judgment-seat by the angels. Below
him are two rows of the dead just rising from their graves, extending to
the full width of the great door. Upon many of the faces there is an
expression of amazement, which the artist apparently designed to be
comic, and several of the attitudes are extremely absurd and ludicrous.
Some have managed to push off the lid of their tombs a little way, and
are peeping out through the narrow aperture, others have just got their
heads above the surface of the ground, and others are sitting up in
their graves; some have one leg out, some are springing into the air,
and some are running, as if in wild fright, for their lives. Though the
usual expression upon the faces is one of astonishment, yet this is
varied. Some are rubbing their eyes as if startled from a deep sleep,
but not yet aware of the cause of alarm; others are utterly bewildered,
and hesitate to leave their resting-place; some leap out in mad
excitement, and others hurry off as if fearing to be again consigned to
the tomb. An angel is leading a cheerful company of popes, bishops, and
kings toward the Saviour, while a hideous demon, with a mouth stretching
from ear to ear, is dragging off a number of the condemned toward the
devil, who is seen stirring up a huge caldron boiling and bubbling with
naked babies, dead before baptism. On another part of the wall is a
carved representation of the vices which led to the destruction of Sodom
and Gomorrah. These were so monstrously obscene that the authorities of
the cathedral, in deference to the modern sense of decency, have caused
them to be partly cut away by the chisel.
[Footnote 3: "The Champagne Country," p. 34, by Robert Tomes, London,
1867.]
The first cut on the next page is an example of burlesque ornament. The
artist apparently intended to indicate another termination of the
interview than the one recorded by AEsop between the wolf and the stork.
The old cathedral at Strasburg, destroyed a hundred years ago, was long
renowned for its sculptured burlesques. We give two of several capitals
exhibiting the sacred rites of the Church travestied by animals.
[Illustration: Capital in the Autun Cathedral.]
It marks the change in the feelings and manners of men that, three
hundred years after those Strasburg capitals were carved, with the
sanction of the chapter, a book-seller, for only exhibiting an engraving
of some of them in his shop window, was convicted of having committed a
crime "most scandalous and injurious to religion." His sentence was "to
make the _amende honorable_, naked to his shirt, a rope round his neck,
holding in his hand a lighted wax-candle weighing two pounds, before the
principal door of the cathedral, whither he will be conducted by the
executioner, and there, on his knees, with uncovered head," confess his
fault and ask pardon of God and the king. The pictures were to be burned
before his eyes, and then, after paying all the costs of the
prosecution, he was to go into eternal banishment.
[Illustration: Capitals in the Strasburg Cathedral, A.D. 1300.]
Other American consuls besides Mr. Tomes, and multitudes of American
citizens not so fortunate as to study mediaeval art at their country's
expense, have been profoundly puzzled by this crust of crude burlesque
on ecclesiastical architecture. The objects in Europe which usually give
to a susceptible American his first and his last rapture are the
cathedrals, those venerable enigmas, the glory and shame of the Middle
Ages, which present so complete a contrast to the toy-temples, new,
cabinet-finished, upholstered, sofa-seated, of American cities, not to
mention the consecrated barns, white-painted and treeless, of the rural
districts. And the cathedrals are a contrast to every thing in Europe
also, if only from their prodigious magnitude. A cathedral town
generally stands in a valley, through which a small river winds. When
the visitor from any of the encompassing hills gets his first view of
the compact little city, the cathedral looms up in the midst thereof so
vast, so tall, that the disproportion to the surrounding structures is
sometimes even ludicrous, like a huge black elephant with a flock of
small brown sheep huddling about its feet. But when at last the stranger
stands in its shadow, he finds the spell of its presence irresistible;
and it is a spell which the lapse of time not unfrequently strengthens,
till he is conscious of a tender, strong attachment to the edifice,
which leads him to visit it at unusual times, to try the effect upon it
of moonlight, of storm, of dawn and twilight, of mist, rain, and snow.
He finds himself going to it for solace and rest. On setting out upon a
journey, he makes a detour to get another last look, and, returning,
goes, valise in hand, to see his cathedral before he sees his
companions. Many American consuls have had this experience, have truly
fallen in love with the cathedral of their station, and remained
faithful to it for years after their return, like Mr. Howells, whose
heart and pen still return to Venice and San Carlo, so much to the
delight of his readers.
This charm appears to lie in the mere grandeur of the edifice as a work
of art, for we observe it to be most potent over persons who are least
in sympathy with the feeling which cathedrals embody. Very religious
people are as likely to be repelled as attracted by them; and, indeed,
in England and Scotland there are large numbers of Dissenters who have
avoided entering them all their lives on principle. It is Americans who
enjoy them most; for they see in them a most captivating assemblage of
novelties--vast magnitude, solidity of structure only inferior to
nature's own work, venerable age, harmonious and solemn
magnificence--all combined in an edifice which can not, on any principle
of utility, justify its existence, and does not pay the least fraction
of its expenses. Little do they know personally of the state of feeling
which made successive generations of human beings willing to live in
hovels and inhale pollution in order that they might erect those
wondrous piles. The cost of maintaining them--of which cost the annual
expenditure in money is the least important part--does not come home to
us. We abandon ourselves without reserve to the enjoyment of stupendous
works wholly new to our experience.
[Illustration: Engraved upon a Stall in Sherborne Minster, England.]
It is Americans, also, who are most baffled by the attempt to explain
the contradiction between the noble proportions of these edifices and
the decorations upon some of their walls. How could it have been, we ask
in amazement, that minds capable of conceiving the harmonies of these
fretted roofs, these majestic colonnades, these symmetrical towers,
could also have permitted their surfaces to be profaned by sculptures
so absurd and so abominable that by no artifice of circumlocution can an
idea of some of them be conveyed in printable words? In close proximity
to statues of the Virgin, and in chapels whose every line is a line of
beauty, we know not how to interpret what M. Champfleury truly styles
"deviltries and obscenities unnamable, vice and passion depicted with
gross brutality, luxury which has thrown off every disguise, and shows
itself naked, bestial, and shameless." And these mediaeval artists
availed themselves of the accumulated buffooneries and monstrosities of
all the previous ages. The gross conceptions of India, Egypt, Greece,
and Rome appear in the ornamentation of Christian temples along with
shapes hideous or grotesque which may have been original. Even the oaken
stalls in which the officiating priests rested during the prolonged
ceremonials of festive days are in many cathedrals covered with comic
carving, some of which is pure caricature. A rather favorite subject was
the one shown above, a whipping-scene in a school, carved upon an
ancient stall in an English cathedral.
[Illustration: From a Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century.]
It is not certain, however, that the artist had any comic intention in
engraving this picture of retributive justice, with which the children
of former ages were so familiar. It was a standard subject. The troops
of Flemish carvers who roamed over Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, offering their services wherever a church was to be
decorated, carried with them port-folios of stock subjects, of which
this was one. Other carvings are unmistakable caricatures: a monk caught
making love to a nun, a wife beating her husband, an aged philosopher
ridden by a woman, monkeys wearing bishops' mitres, barbers drawing
teeth in ludicrous attitudes, and others less describable. In the huge
cathedral of English Winchester, which abounds in curious relics of the
Middle Ages, there is a series of painted panels in the chapel of Our
Lady, one of which is an evident caricature of the devil. He is having
his portrait painted, and the Virgin Mary is near the artist, urging him
to paint him blacker and uglier than usual. The devil does not like
this, and wears an expression similar to that of a rogue in a modern
police station who objects to being photographed. Often, however, in
these old pictures the devil is master of the situation, and exhibits
contempt for his adversaries in indecorous ways.
If we turn from the sacred edifices to the sacred books used in
them--those richly illuminated missals, the books of "Hours," the
psalters, and other works of devotion--we are amazed beyond expression
to discover upon their brilliant pages a similar taste in ornamentation.
The school scene on the previous page, in which monkey-headed children
are playing school, dates back to the thirteenth century.
Burlesque tournaments, in the same taste, often figure in the
prayer-books among representations of the Madonna, the crucifixion, and
scenes in the lives of the patriarchs. The gallant hare tilts at the
fierce cock of the barn-yard, or sly Reynard parries the thrust of the
clumsy bear.
[Illustration: From a Manuscript Mass-book of the Fourteenth Century.]
One of the most curious relics of those religious centuries is a French
prayer-book preserved in the British Museum, where it was discovered and
described by Mr. Malcolm, one of the first persons who ever attempted to
elucidate the subject of caricature. Besides the "Hours of the Blessed
Virgin," it contains various prayers and collects, the office for the
dead, and some psalms, all in Latin. It is illustrated by several
brilliantly colored, well-drawn, but most grotesque and incomprehensible
figures, designed, as has been conjectured, to "expose the wicked and
inordinate lives of the clergy, who were hated by the manuscript writers
as taking away much of their business." This was the explanation given
of these remarkable pictures to the trustees of the Museum by the
collector of whom they bought the volume. Several of them are submitted
to the reader's ingenuity on the following page.
Besides the specimens given, there is a wolf growling at a snake
twisting itself round its hind-leg; there is "a grinning-match" between
a human head on an animal's body and a boar's head on a monkey's body;
there is a creature like a pea-hen, with two bodies, one neck, and two
dogs' heads; there is an animal with four bodies and one head; there is
a bearded man's face and a woman's on one neck, and the body has no
limbs, but an enormous tail; there is a turret, on the top of which a
monkey sits, and a savage below is aiming an arrow at him. In the
British Museum--that unequaled repository of all that is curious and
rare--there is the famous and splendid psalter of Richard II.,
containing many strange pictures in the taste of the period. On the
second page, for example, along with two pictures of the kind usual in
Catholic works of devotion, there is a third which represents an absurd
combat within lists between the court-fool and the court-giant. The
fool, who is also a dwarf, is belaboring the giant with an instrument
like those hollow clubs used in our pantomimes when the clown is to be
whacked with great violence. The giant shrinks from the blows, and the
king, pointing at the dwarf, seems to say, "Go it, little one; I bet
upon _you_."
[Illustration: From a French Prayer-book of the Thirteenth Century, in
the British Museum.]
Mr. Malcolm, who copied this picture from the original, where, he says,
it is most superbly finished, interprets it to be a caricature of the
famous combat between David and Goliath in the presence of King Saul and
his court. In the same mass-book there is a highly ridiculous
representation of Jonah on board ship, with a blue Boreas with cheeks
puffed out raising the tempest, and a black devil clawing the sail from
the yard. In selecting a few of the more innocent pictures from the
prayer-book of Queen Mary, daughter of Henry VIII. of England, Mr.
Malcolm gives expression to his amazement at the character of the
drawings, which he dared not exhibit to a British public! Was this book,
he asks, made on purpose for the queen? Was it a gift or a purchase? But
whether she bought or whether she accepted it, he thinks she must have
"delighted in ludicrous and improper ideas," or else "her inclination
for absurdity and caricature conquered even her religion, in defense of
which she spread ruin and desolation through her kingdom."
[Illustration: From Queen Mary's Prayer-book, A.D. 1553.]
As the reader has now before his eyes a sufficient number of specimens
of the grotesque ecclesiastical ornamentation of the period under
consideration, he is prepared to consider the question which has
perplexed so many students besides Mr. Malcolm: How are we to account
for these indecencies in places and books consecrated to devotion? A
voice from the Church of the fifth century gives us the hint of the true
answer. "You ask me," writes St. Nilus to Olympiodorus of Alexandria,
"if it is becoming in us to cover the walls of the sanctuary with
representations of animals of all kinds, so that we see upon them snares
set, hares, goats, and other beasts in full flight before hunters
exhausting themselves in taking and pursuing them with their dogs; and,
again, upon the bank of a river, all kinds of fish caught by fishermen.
I answer you that this is a _puerility with which to amuse the eyes of
the faithful_."[4] To one who is acquainted with the history and genius
of the Roman Catholic Church, this very simple explanation of the
incongruity is sufficient. The policy of that wonderful organization in
every age has been to make every possible concession to ignorance that
is compatible with the continuance of ignorance. It has sought always
to amuse, to edify, to moralize, and console ignorance, but never to
enlighten it. The mind that planned the magnificent cathedral at Rheims,
of which Mr. Tomes was so much enamored, and the artists who designed
the glorious San Carlo that kindled rapture in the poetical mind of Mr.
Howells, did indeed permit the scandalous burlesques that disfigure
their walls; but they only permitted them. It was a concession which
they had to grant to the ignorant multitude whose unquestioning faith
alone made these enormous structures possible.
[Footnote 4: Quoted in Champfleury, p. 7, from "Maxima Bibliotheca
Patrum," vol. xxvii., p. 323.]
We touch here the question insinuated by Gibbon in his first volume,
where he plainly enough intimates his belief that Christianity was a
lapse into barbarism rather than a deliverance from it. Plausible
arguments in the same direction have been frequently made since Gibbon's
time by comparing the best of Roman civilization with the worst of the
self-torturing monkery of the early Christian centuries. In a debate on
this subject in New York not long since between a member of the bar and
a doctor of divinity, both of them gentlemen of learning, ability, and
candor, the lawyer pointed to the famous picture of St. Jerome (A.D.
375), naked, grasping a human skull, his magnificent head showing vast
capacity paralyzed by an absorbing terror, and exclaimed, "Behold the
lapse from Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, the Plinys, and the
Antonines!" The answer made by the clergyman was, "That is _not_
Christianity! In the Christian books no hint of that, no utterance
justifying that, can be found." Perhaps neither of the disputants
succeeded in expressing the whole truth on this point. The vaunted Roman
civilization was, in truth, only a thin crust upon the surface of the
empire, embracing but one small class in each province, the people
everywhere being ignorant slaves. Into that inert mass of servile
ignorance Christianity enters, and receives from it the interpretation
which ignorance always puts upon ideas advanced or new, interpreting it
as hungry French peasants in 1792 and South Carolina negroes in 1870
interpreted modern ideas of human rights. The new leaven set the mass
heaving and swelling until the crust was broken to pieces. The
civilization of Marcus Aurelius was lost. From parchment scrolls poetry
and philosophy were obliterated, that the sheets might be used for
prayers and meditations. The system of which St. Jerome was the product
and representative was a baleful mixture, of which nine-tenths were
Hindoo and the remaining tenth was half Christian and half Plato.
The true inference to be drawn is that no civilization is safe, nor even
genuine, until it embraces all classes of the community; and the
promulgation of Christianity was the first step toward that.
As the centuries wore on, the best of the clergy grew restive under this
monstrous style of ornamentation. "What purpose," wrote St. Bernard,
about A.D. 1140, "serve in our cloisters, under the eyes of the brothers
and during their pious readings, those ridiculous monstrosities, those
prodigies of beauties deformed or deformities made beautiful? Why those
nasty monkeys, those furious lions, those monstrous centaurs, those
animals half human, those spotted tigers, those soldiers in combat,
those huntsmen sounding the horn? Here a single head is fitted to
several bodies; there upon a single body there are several heads; now a
quadruped has a serpent's tail, and now a quadruped's head figures upon
a fish's body. Sometimes it is a monster with the fore parts of a horse
and the hinder parts of a goat; again an animal with horns ends with the
hind quarters of a horse. Everywhere is seen a variety of strange forms,
so numerous and so odd that the brothers occupy themselves more in
deciphering the marbles than their books, and pass whole days in
studying all those figures much more attentively than the divine law.
Great God! if you are not ashamed of such useless things, how, at least,
can you avoid regretting the enormity of their cost?"
How, indeed! The honest abbe was far from seeing the symbolical meaning
in those odd figures which modern investigators have imagined. He was
simply ashamed of the ecclesiastical caricatures; but a century or two
later ingenious writers began to cover them with the fig-leaves of a
symbolical interpretation. According to the ingenious M. Durand, who
wrote (A.D. 1459) thirty years before Luther was born, every part of a
cathedral has its spiritual meaning. The stones of which it is built
represent the faithful, the lime that forms part of the cement is an
emblem of fervent charity, the sand mingled with it signifies the
actions undertaken by us for the good of our brethren, and the water in
which these ingredients blend is the symbol of the Holy Ghost. The
hideous shapes sculptured upon the portals are, of course, _malign
spirits flying from the temple of the Lord, and seeking refuge in the
very substance of the walls_! The great length of the temple signifies
the tireless patience with which the faithful support the ills of this
life in expectation of their celestial home; its breadth symbolizes that
large and noble love which embraces both the friends and the enemies of
God; its height typifies the hope of final pardon; the roof beams are
the prelates, who by the labor of preaching exhibit the truth in all its
clearness; the windows are the Scriptures, which receive the light from
the sun of truth, and keep out the winds, snows, and hail of heresy and
false doctrine devised by the father of schism and falsehood; the iron
bars and pins that sustain the windows are the general councils,
ecumenical and orthodox, which have sustained the holy and canonical
Scriptures; the two perpendicular stone columns which support the
windows are the two precepts of Christian charity, to love God and our
neighbor; the length of the windows shows the profundity and obscurity
of Scripture, and their roundness indicates that the Church is always in
harmony with itself.
This is simple enough. But M. Jerome Bugeaud, in his collection of
"Chansons Populaires" of the western provinces of France, gives part of
a catechism still taught to children, though coming down from the Middle
Ages, which carries this quaint symbolizing to a point of the highest
absurdity. The catechism turns upon the sacred character of the lowly
animal that most needed any protection which priestly ingenuity could
afford. Here are a few of the questions and answers:
_Priest._ "What signify the two ears of the ass?"
_Child._ "The two ears of the ass signify the two great patron saints of
our city."
_Priest._ "What signifies the head of the ass?"
_Child._ "The head of the ass signifies the great bell, and the halter
the clapper of the great bell, which is in the tower of the cathedral of
the patron saints of our city."
_Priest._ "What signifies the ass's mouth?"
_Child._ "The ass's mouth signifies the great door of the cathedral of
the patron saints of our city."
_Priest._ "What signify the four feet of the ass?"
_Child._ "The four feet of the ass signify the four great pillars of the
cathedral of the patron saints of our city."
_Priest._ "What signifies the paunch of the ass?"
_Child._ "The paunch of the ass signifies the great chest wherein
Christians put their offerings to the patron saints of our cathedral."
_Priest._ "What signifies the tail of the ass?"
_Child._ "The tail of the ass signifies the holy-water brush of the good
dean of the cathedral of the patron saints of our city."
The priest does not stop at the tail, but pursues the symbolism with a
simplicity and innocence which do not bear translating into our blunt
English words. As late as 1750 Bishop Burnet saw in a church at Worms an
altarpiece of a crudity almost incredible. It represented the Virgin
Mary throwing Christ into the hopper of a windmill, from the spout of
which he was issuing in the form of sacramental wafers, and priests were
about to distribute them among the people. The unquestionable purpose of
this picture was to assist the faith and animate the piety of the people
of Worms.
CHAPTER VI.
SECULAR CARICATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
[Illustration: Gog and Magog, the Giants in the Guildhall of London.]
If we turn from the sacred to the secular, we find the ornamentation not
less barbarous. Many readers have seen the two giants that stand in the
Guildhall of London, where they, or ugly images like them, have stood
from time immemorial. A little book sold near by used to inform a
credulous public that Gog and Magog were two gigantic brothers taken
prisoners in Cornwall fighting against the Trojan invaders, who brought
them in triumph to the site of London, where their chief chained them to
the gate of his palace as porters. But, unfortunately for this romantic
tale, Mr. Fairholt, in his work upon the giants,[5] makes it known that
many other towns and cities of Europe cherish from a remote antiquity
similar images. He gives pictures of the Salisbury giant, the huge
helmeted giant in Antwerp, the family of giants at Douai, the giant and
giantess of Ath, the giants of Brussels, as well as of the mighty dragon
of Norwich, with practicable iron jaw.
[Footnote 5: "Gog and Magog: the Giants in Guildhall," by F. W.
Fairholt, F.S.A., London, 1859.]
[Illustration: Head of the Great Dragon of Norwich.]
We may therefore discard learned theories and sage conjectures
concerning Gog and Magog, and attribute them to the poverty of invention
and the barbarity of taste which prevailed in the ages of faith.
[Illustration: Souls Weighed in the Balance. (Bas-relief of the Autun
Cathedral.)]
One of the subjects most frequently chosen for caricature during this
period was that cunning and audacious enemy of God and man, the devil--a
composite being, made up of the Satan who tested Job, the devil who
tempted Jesus, and the Egyptian Osiris who weighed souls in the balance,
and claimed as his own those found wanting. The theory of the universe
then generally accepted was that the world was merely a field of strife
between God and this malignant spirit; on the side of God were ranged
archangels, angels, the countless host of celestial beings, and all the
saints on earth and in heaven, while on the devil's side were a vast
army of fallen spirits and all the depraved portion of the human race.
The simple souls of that period did not accept this explanation in an
allegorical sense, but as the most literal statement of facts familiarly
known, concerning which no one in Christendom had any doubt whatever.
The devil was as composite in his external form as he was in his
traditional character. All the mythologies appear to have contributed
something to his make-up, until he had acquired many of the most
repulsive features and members of which animated nature gives the
suggestion. He was hairy, hoofed, and horned; he had a forked tail; he
had a countenance which expressed the fox's cunning, the serpent's
malice, the pig's appetite, the monkey's grin. As to his body, it varied
according to the design of the artist, but it usually resembled
creatures base or loathsome.
[Illustration: Struggle for the Possession of a Soul between Angel and
Devil. (From a Psalter, 1300.)]
In one picture there is a very rude but curious representation of the
weighing of souls, superintended by the devil and an archangel. The
devil, in the form of a hog, has won a prize in the soul of a wicked
woman, which he is carrying off in a highly disrespectful manner, while
casting a backward glance to see that he has fair play in the next
weighing. This was an exceedingly favorite subject with the artists of
the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They delighted to picture the
devil, in their crude uncompromising way, as an insatiate miser of
human souls, eager to seize them, demanding a thousand, a million, a
billion, _all_; and when one appeared in the scales so void of guilt
that the good angel must needs possess it, he may be seen slyly putting
a finger upon the opposite scale to weigh it down, and this sometimes in
spite of the angel's remonstrance. In one picture, described by M.
Merimee in his "Voyage en Auvergne," the devil plays this trick at a
moment when the archangel Michael has turned to look another way.
[Illustration: Lost Souls cast into Hell. (From Queen Mary's Psalter.)]
It is a strange circumstance that in a large number of these
representations the devil is exhibited triumphant, and in others the
victory is at least doubtful. In a splendid psalter preserved in the
British Museum there is a large picture (an engraving of which is given
on the preceding page) of a soul climbing an extremely steep and high
mountain, on the summit of which a winged archangel stands with
outstretched arms to receive him. The soul has nearly reached the top;
another step will bring him within the archangel's reach; but behind him
is the devil with a long three-pronged clawing instrument, which he is
about to thrust into the hair of the ascending saint; and no man can
tell which is to finally have that soul, the angel or the devil. M.
Champfleury describes a capital in a French church which represents one
of the minions of the devil carrying a lizard, symbol of evil, which he
is about to add to the scale containing the sins; and the spectator is
left to infer that fraud of this kind is likely to be successful, for
underneath is written, "_Ecce Diabolus!_" It is as if the artist had
said, "Such is the devil, and this is one of his modes of entrapping his
natural prey of human souls!" From a large number of similar pictures
the inference is fair that, let a man lead a spotless life from the
cradle to the grave, the devil, by a mere trick, may get his soul at
last. Some of the artists might be suspected of sympathizing with the
devil in his triumphs over the weakness of man. Observe, for example,
the comic exuberance of the above picture, in which devils are seen
tumbling their immortal booty into the jaws of perdition.
It is difficult to look at this picture without feeling that the artist
must have been alive to the humors of the situation. It is, however, the
opinion of students of these quaint relics that the authors of such
designs honestly intended to excite horror, not hilarity. Queen Mary
probably saw in this picture, as she turned the page of her sumptuous
psalter, an argument to inflame her bloody zeal for the ancient faith.
In the writings of some of the early fathers we observe the same
appearance of joyous exultation at the sufferings of the lost, if not a
sense of the comic absurdity of their doom. Readers may remember the
passage from Tertullian (A.D. 200) quoted so effectively by Gibbon:
"You are fond of all spectacles," exclaims this truly ferocious
Christian; "expect the greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal
judgment of the universe. How shall I rejoice, how laugh, how exult,
when I behold so many proud monarchs and fancied gods groaning in the
lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates who persecuted the name of
the Lord liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against
Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames with
their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the
tribunal; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own
sufferings; so many dancers--"
[Illustration: Devils seizing their Prey. (Bas-relief on the Portal of a
Church at Troyes.)]
This is assuredly not the utterance of compassion, but rather of the
fierce delight of an unregenerate Roman, when at the amphitheatre he
doomed a rival's defeated gladiator to death by pointing downward with
his thumb. In a similar spirit such pictures were conceived as the one
given above.
The sculptor, it is apparent, is "with" the adversary of mankind in the
present case. Kings and bishops carried things with a high hand during
their mortal career, but the devils have them at last with a rope round
their necks, crown and mitre notwithstanding!
The devil was not always victor. There was One whom neither his low
cunning nor his bland address nor his blunt audacity could beguile--the
Son of God, his predestined conqueror. The passages in the Gospels which
relate the attempts made by Satan to tempt the Lord furnished congenial
subjects to the illuminators of the Middle Ages, and they treated those
subjects with their usual enormous crudity. In one very ancient Saxon
psalter, in manuscript, preserved at the British Museum, there is a
colossal Christ, with one foot upon a devil, the other foot about to
fall upon a second devil, and with his hands delivering from the open
mouth of a third devil human souls, who hold up to him their hands
clasped as in prayer. In this picture the sympathies of the artist are
evidently not on the side of the evil spirits. Their malevolence is
apparent, and their attitude is ignominious. The rescued souls are,
indeed, a pigmy crew, of woe-begone aspect; but their resistless
Deliverer towers aloft in such imposing altitude that the tallest of the
saints hardly reaches above his knees. In another picture of very early
date, the Lord upon a high place is rescuing a soul from three scoffing
devils, who are endeavoring to pull him down to perdition by cords
twisted round his legs. _This_ soul we are permitted to consider safe;
but below, in a corner of the spacious drawing, a winged archangel is
spearing a lost soul into the flames of hell, using the spear in the
manner of a farmer handling a pitchfork.
[Illustration: The Temptation.]
These ancient attempts to exhibit the endless conflict between good and
evil are too rude even to be interesting. The specimen annexed, of later
date, about 1475, occurs in a Poor People's Bible (_Biblia Pauperum_),
block-printed, in which it forms part of an extensive frontispiece. The
book was once the property of George III., at the sale of whose personal
effects it was bought for the British Museum, where it now is. It has
the additional interest of being one of the oldest specimens of
wood-engraving yet discovered.
The mountain in the background, adorned by a single tree, is the height
to which the Lord was taken by the tempter, and from which the devil
urged him to cast himself down.
A very frequent object of caricature during the ages when terror ruled
the minds of men was human life itself--its brevity, its uncertainty,
and the absurd, ill-timed suddenness with which inexorable death
sometimes cuts it short. Herodotus records that at the banquets of the
Egyptians it was customary for a person to carry about the table the
figure of a corpse lying upon a coffin, and to cry out, "Behold this
image of what yourselves shall be; therefore eat, drink, and be merry."
There are traces of a similar custom in the records of other ancient
nations, among whom it was regarded as a self-evident truth that the
shortness of life was a reason for making the most of it while it
lasted. And their notion of making the most of it was to get from it the
greatest amount of pleasure. This vulgar scheme of existence vanished at
the promulgation of the doctrine that the condition of every soul was
fixed unalterably at the moment of its severance from the body, or, at
best, after a short period of purgation, and that the only way to avoid
unending anguish was to do what the Church commanded and to avoid what
the Church forbade. Terror from that time ruled Christendom. Terror
covered the earth with ecclesiastical structures, gave the Church a
tenth of all revenues and two-fifths of all property. By every possible
device death was clothed with new and vivid terrors, and in every
possible way the truth was brought home to the mind that the coming of
death could be as unexpected as it was inevitable and unwelcome. The
tolling of the church-bell spread the gloom of the death-chamber over
the whole town; and the death-crier, with bell and lantern, wearing a
garment made terrible by a skull and cross-bones, went his rounds, by
day or night, crying to all good people to pray for the soul just
departed.[6]
[Footnote 6: "Essai sur les Dances des Morts," vol. i., p. 151, par E.
H. Langlois, Paris, 1852.]
[Illustration: French Death-crier--"Pray for the Soul just departed."]
These criers did not cease to perambulate the streets of Paris until
about the year 1690, and M. Langlois informs us that in remote provinces
of France their doleful cry was heard as recently as 1850.
Blessed gift of humor! Against the most complicated and effective
apparatus of terror ever contrived, worked by the most powerful
organization that ever existed, the sense of the ludicrous asserted
itself, and saved the human mind from being crushed down into abject and
hopeless idiocy. The readers of "Don Quixote" can not have forgotten the
colloquy in the highway between the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance
and the head of the company of strollers.
"'Sir,' replied the Devil, politely, stopping his cart, 'we are the
actors of the company of the Evil Spirit. This morning, which is the
octave of Corpus Christi, we have represented the play of the Empire of
Death. This young man played Death, and this one an Angel. This woman,
who is the wife of the author of the comedy, is the Queen. Over there is
one who played the part of an Emperor, and the other man that of a
Soldier. As to myself, I am the Devil, at your service, and one of the
principal actors.'"
[Illustration: Death and the Cripple.]
For centuries the comedy of Death was a standard play at high festivals,
the main interest being the rude, sudden interruption of human lives and
joys and schemes by the grim messenger. Art adopted the theme, and the
Dance of Death began to figure among the decorations of ecclesiastical
structures and on the vellum of illuminated prayer-books. No sculptor
but executed his Dance of Death; no painter but tried his skill upon it;
and by whomsoever the subject was treated, the element of humor was
seldom wanting.
So numerous are the pictures and series of pictures usually styled
Dances of Death, that a descriptive catalogue of them would fill the
space assigned to this chapter; and the literature to which they have
given rise forms an important class of the works relating to the Middle
Ages. Two phases of the subject were especially attractive to artists.
One was the impartiality of Death, noted by Horace in the familiar
passage; and the other the incongruity between the summons to depart and
the condition of the person summoned. When these two aspects of the
subject had become hackneyed, artists pleased themselves sometimes with
a treatment precisely the opposite, and represented Death dancing gayly
away with the most battered, ancient, and forlorn of human kind, who had
least reason to love life, but did not the less shrink from the
skeleton's icy touch. Every one feels the comic absurdity of gay and
sprightly Death hurrying off to the tomb a cripple as dilapidated as the
one in the picture above. In another engraving we see Death, with
exaggerated courtesy, handing to an open tomb an extremely old man just
able to totter.
[Illustration: Death and the Old Man.]
Another subject in the same series is Death dragging at the garment of a
peddler, who is so heavily laden as he trudges along the highway that
one would imagine even the rest of the grave welcome. But the peddler,
too, makes a very wry face when he recognizes who it is that has
interrupted his weary tramp. The triumphant gayety of Death in this
picture is in humorous contrast with the lugubrious expression on the
countenance of his victim.
[Illustration: Death and the Peddler.]
[Illustration: Death and the Knight.]
In other series we have Death dressed as a beau seizing a young maiden,
Death taking from a house-maid her broom, Death laying hold of a
washer-woman, Death taking apples from an apple-stand, Death beckoning
away a bar-maid, Death summoning a female mourner at a funeral, and
Death plundering a tinker's basket. Death, standing in a grave, pulls
the grave-digger in by the leg; seated on a plow, he seizes the farmer;
with an ale-pot at his back, he throttles an inn-keeper who is
adulterating his liquors; he strikes with a bone the irksome chain of
matrimony, and thus sets free a couple bound by it; he mows down a
philosopher holding a clock; upon a miser who has thrust his body deep
down into a massive chest he shuts the heavy lid; he shows himself in
the mirror in which a young beauty is looking; to a philosopher seated
in his study he enters and presents an hour-glass. A pope on his throne
is crowning an emperor kneeling at his feet, with princes, cardinals,
and bishops in attendance, when a Death appears at his side, and another
in his retinue dressed as a cardinal. Death lays his hand upon an
emperor's crown at the moment when he is doing justice to a poor man
against a rich; but in another picture of the same series, Death seizes
a duke while he is disdainfully turning from a poor woman with her child
who has asked alms of him. The dignitaries of the Church were not
spared. Fat abbots, gorgeous cardinals, and vehement preachers all
figure in these series in circumstances of honor and of dishonor. In
most of them the person summoned yields to King Death without a
struggle; but in one a knight makes a furious resistance, laying about
him with a broadsword most energetically. It is of no avail. Death runs
him through the body with his own lance, though in the other picture the
weapon in Death's hand was only a long thigh-bone.
Mr. Longfellow, in his "Golden Legend," has availed himself of the Dance
of Death painted on the walls of the covered bridge at Lucerne to give
naturalness and charm to the conversation of Elsie and Prince Henry
while they are crossing the river. The strange pictures excite the
curiosity of Elsie, and the Prince explains them to her as they walk:
"_Elsie._ What is this picture?
"_Prince._ It is a young man singing to a nun,
Who kneels at her devotions, but in kneeling
Turns round to look at him; and Death meanwhile
Is putting out the candles on the altar!
"_Elsie._ Ah, what a pity 'tis that she should listen
Unto such songs, when in her orisons
She might have heard in heaven the angels singing!
"_Prince._ Here he has stolen a jester's cap and bells,
And dances with the queen.
"_Elsie._ A foolish jest!
"_Prince._ And here the heart of the new-wedded wife,
Coming from church with her beloved lord,
He startles with the rattle of his drum.
"_Elsie._ Ah, that is sad! And yet perhaps 'tis best
That she should die with all the sunshine on her
And all the benedictions of the morning,
Before this affluence of golden light
Shall fade into a cold and clouded gray,
Then into darkness!
"_Prince._ Under it is written,
'Nothing but death shall separate thee and me!'
"_Elsie._ And what is this that follows close upon it?
"_Prince._ Death playing on a dulcimer."
And so the lovers converse on the bridge, all covered from end to end
with these caricatures of human existence, until the girl hurries with
affright from what she calls "this great picture-gallery of death."
Tournaments were among the usual subjects of caricature during the
century or two preceding the Reformation. Some specimens have already
been given from the illuminated prayer-books (pp. 44, 46). The device,
however, seldom rises above the ancient one of investing animals with
the gifts and qualities of men. Monkeys mounted upon the backs of dogs
tilt at one another with long lances, or monsters utterly nondescript
charge upon other monsters more ridiculous than themselves.
All the ordinary foibles of human nature received attention. These never
change. There are always gluttons, misers, and spendthrifts. There are
always weak men and vain women. There are always husbands whose wives
deceive and worry them, as there are always wives whom husbands worry
and deceive; and the artists of the Middle Ages, in their own direct
rude fashion, turned both into caricature. The mere list of subjects
treated in Brandt's "Ship of Fools," written when Luther was a
school-boy, shows us that men were men and women were women in 1490.
That quaint reformer of manners dealt mild rebuke to men who gathered
great store of books and put them to no good use; to women who were ever
changing the fashion of their dress; to men who began to build without
counting the cost; to "great borrowers and slack payers;" to fools "who
will serve two lords both together;" to them who correct others while
themselves are "culpable in the same fault;" to "fools who can not keep
secret their own counsel;" to people who believe in "predestinacyon;" to
men who attend closely to other people's business, leaving their own
undone; to "old folks that give example of vice to youth;" and so on
through the long catalogue of human follies. His homely and wise ditties
are illustrated by pictures of curious simplicity. Observe the one
subjoined, in which "a foule" is weighing the transitory things of this
world against things everlasting, one being represented by a scale full
of castles and towers, and the other by a scale full of stars--the
earthly castles outweighing the heavenly bodies in the balance of this
"foule."
[Illustration: Heaven and Earth weighed in the Balance. (From "The Ship
of Fools.")]
One of the quaint poems of the gentle priest descants upon the bad
behavior of people at church. This poem has an historical interest, for
it throws light upon the manners of the time, over which poetry,
tradition, and romance have thrown a very delusive charm. We learn from
it that while the Christian people of Europe were on their knees praying
in church they were liable to be disturbed by the "mad noise and shout"
of a loitering crowd; by knights coming in from the field, falcon upon
wrist, with their dogs yelping at their heels; by men chaffering and
bargaining as they walked up and down; by the wanton laughter of girls
ogled by young men; by lawyers conferring with clients; and by all the
usual noises of a crowd at a fair. The author wonders
"That the false paynyms within theyr Temples be
To theyr ydols moche more devout than we."
The worthy Brandt was not the only satirist of Church manners. The
"Usurer's Paternoster," given by M. Champfleury, is more incisive than
Brandt's amiable remonstrance. The usurer, hurrying away to church,
tells his wife that if any one comes to borrow money while he is gone,
some one must be sent in all haste for him. On his way he says his
paternoster thus:
"_Our Father._ Blessed Lord God [Beau Sire Dieu], be favorable to me,
and give me grace to prosper exceedingly. Let me become the richest
money-lender in the world. _Who art in heaven._ I am sorry I wasn't at
home the day that woman came to borrow. Really I am a fool to go to
church, where I can gain nothing. _Hallowed be thy name._ It's too bad I
have a servant so expert in pilfering my money. _Thy kingdom come._ I
have a mind to go home to see what my wife is about. I'll bet she sells
a chicken while I am away, and keeps the money. _Thy will be done._ It
pops into my mind that the chevalier who owed me fifty francs paid me
only half. _In heaven._ Those damned Jews do a rushing business in
lending to every one. I should like very much to do as they do. _As on
earth._ The king plagues me to death in raising taxes so often."
Arrived at church, the money-lender goes through part of the service as
best he may; but as soon as sermon time comes, off he goes, saying to
himself, "I must get away home: the priest is going to preach a sermon
to draw money out of our purses." Doubtless the priest in those times of
ignorance had to deal with many most profane and unspiritual people, who
could only be restrained by fear, and to whose "puerility" much had to
be conceded. In touching upon the Church manners of the Middle Ages, M.
Champfleury makes a remark that startles a Protestant mind accustomed
only to the most exact decorum in churches. "Old men _of to-day_"
(1850), he says, speaking of France, "will recall to mind the _gayety_
of the midnight masses, when buffoons from the country waited
impatiently to send down showers of small torpedoes upon the pavement of
the nave, to barricade the alcoves with mountains of chairs, to fill
with ink the holy-water basins, and to steal kisses in out-of-the-way
corners from girls who would not give them." These proceedings, which M.
Champfleury styles "the pleasantries of our fathers," were among the
concessions made by a worldly-wise old Church to the "puerility" of the
people, or rather to the absolute necessity of occasional hilarious fun
to healthy existence.
Amusing and even valuable caricatures six and seven centuries old have
been discovered upon parchment documents in the English record offices,
executed apparently by idle clerks for their amusement when they had
nothing else to do. One of these, copied by Mr. Wright, gives us the
popular English conception of an Irish warrior of the thirteenth
century.
[Illustration: English Caricature of an Irishman, A.D. 1280.]
The broad-axes of the Irish were held in great terror by the English. An
historian of Edward I.'s time, while discoursing on that supreme
perplexity of British kings and ministers, how Ireland should be
governed _after_ being quite reduced to subjection, expresses the
opinion that the Irish ought not to be allowed in time of peace to use
"that detestable instrument of destruction which by an ancient but
accursed custom they constantly carry in their hands instead of a
staff." The modern Irish shillalah, then, is only the residuum of the
ancient Irish broad-axe--the broad-axe with its head taken off. The
humanized Irishman of to-day is content with the handle of "the
detestable instrument." Other pen-and-ink sketches of England's dreaded
foes, the Irish and the Welsh, have been found upon ancient vellum
rolls, but none better than the specimen given has yet been copied.
The last object of caricature which can be mentioned in the present
chapter is the Jew--the odious Jew--accursed by the clergy _as_ a Jew,
despised by good citizens as a usurer, and dreaded by many a profligate
Christian as the holder of mortgages upon his estate. When the ruling
class of a country loses its hold upon virtue, becomes profuse in
expenditure, ceases to comply with natural law, comes to regard
licentious living as something to be expected of young blood, and makes
a jest of a decorous and moral conversation, then there is usually in
that country a less refined, stronger class, who _do_ comply with
natural law, who _do_ live in that virtuous, frugal, and orderly manner
by which alone families can be perpetuated and states established. In
several communities during the centuries preceding the Reformation, when
the nobles and great merchants wasted their substance in riotous living
or in insensate pilgrimages and crusades, the Jew was the virtuous,
sensible, and solvent man. He did not escape the evil influence wrought
into the texture of the character by living in an atmosphere of hatred
and contempt, nor the narrowness of mind caused by his being excluded
from all the more generous and high avocations. But he remained through
all those dismal ages temperate, chaste, industrious, and saving, as
well as heroically faithful to the best light on high things that he
had. Hence he always had money to lend, and he could only lend it to men
who were too glad to think he had no rights which they were bound to
respect.
The caricature on the next page was also discovered upon a vellum roll
in the Public Record Office in London, the work of some idle clerk 642
years ago, and recently transferred to an English work[7] of much
interest, in which it serves as a frontispiece.
[Footnote 7: "History of Crime in England," vol. i., by Luke Owen Pike,
London, 1873.]
[Illustration: Caricature of the Jews in England, A.D. 1233.]
The ridicule is aimed at the famous Jew, Isaac of Norwich, a rich
money-lender and merchant, to whom abbots, bishops, and wealthy vicars
were heavily indebted. At Norwich he had a wharf at which his vessels
could receive and discharge their freights, and whole districts were
mortgaged to him at once. He lent money to the king's exchequer. He was
the Rothschild of his day. In the picture, which represents the outside
of a castle--his own castle, wrested from some lavish Christian by a
money-lender's wiles--the Jew Isaac stands above all the other figures,
and is blessed with four faces and a crown, which imply, as Mr. Pike
conjectures, that, let him look whichever way he will, he beholds
possessions over which he holds kingly sway. Lower down, and nearer the
centre, are Mosse Mokke, another Jewish money-lender of Norwich, and
Madame Avegay, one of many Jewesses who lent money, between whom is a
horned devil pointing to their noses. The Jewish nose was a peculiarly
offensive feature to Christians, and was usually exaggerated by
caricaturists. The figure holding up scales heaped with coin is, so far
as we can guess, merely a taunt; and the seating of Dagon, the god of
the Philistines, upon the turret seems to be an intimation that the
Jews, in their dispersion, had abandoned the God of their fathers, and
taken up with the deity of his inveterate foes.
So far as the records of those ages disclose, there was no one
enlightened enough to judge the long-suffering Jews with just allowance.
Luther's aversion to them was morbid and violent. He confesses, in his
Table-talk, that if it had fallen to his lot to have much to do with
Jews, his patience would have given way; and when, one day, Dr. Menius
asked him how a Jew ought to be baptized, he replied, "You must fill a
large tub with water, and, having divested a Jew of his clothes, cover
him with a white garment. He must then sit down in the tub, and you must
baptize him quite under the water." He said further to Dr. Menius that
if a Jew, not converted at heart, were to ask baptism at his hands, he
would take him to the bridge, tie a stone round his neck, and hurl him
into the river, such an obstinate and scoffing race were they. If Luther
felt thus toward them, we can not wonder that the luxurious dignitaries
of the Church, two centuries before his time, should have had qualms of
conscience with regard to paying Isaac of Norwich interest upon money
borrowed.
CHAPTER VII.
CARICATURES PRECEDING THE REFORMATION.
[Illustration: Luther inspired by Satan.]
We have in this strange, rude picture[8] a device of contemporary
caricature to cast ridicule upon the movement of which Martin Luther was
the conspicuous figure. It is reduced from a large wood-cut which
appeared in Germany at the crisis of the lion-hearted reformer's career,
the year of his appearance at the Diet of Worms, when he said to
dissuading friends, "If I knew there were as many devils at Worms as
there are tiles upon the houses, I would go." The intention of the
artist is obvious; but, in addition to the leading purpose, he desired,
as Mr. Chatto conjectures, to remind his public of the nasal drawl of
the preaching friars of the time, for which they were as proverbial as
the Puritans of London in Cromwell's day. Such is the poverty of human
invention that the idea of this caricature has been employed several
times since Luther's time--even as recently as 1873, when a London
draughtsman made it serve his turn in the contentions of party politics.
[Footnote 8: From "A Treatise on Wood-engraving," p. 268, by Jackson and
Chatto, London, 1866.]
The best humorous talent of Christendom, whether it wrought with pencil
or with pen, whether it avowed or veiled its sympathy with reform, was
on Luther's side. It prepared the way for his coming, co-operated with
him during his life-time, carried on his work after he was gone, and
continues it to the present hour.
Recent investigators tell us, indeed, that the Reformation began in
laughter, which the Church itself nourished and sanctioned. M.
Viollet-le-Duc, author of the "Dictionnaire d'Architecture," discourses
upon the gradual change which church decorators of the Middle Ages
effected in the figure of the devil. Upon edifices erected before the
year 1000 there are few traces of the devil, and upon those of much
earlier date none at all; but from the eleventh century he "begins to
play an important _role_," artists striving which should give him the
most hideous form. No one was then audacious enough to take liberties
with a being so potent, so awful, so real, the competitor and antagonist
of the Almighty Lord of Heaven and Earth. But mortals must laugh, and
familiarity produces its well-known effect. In the eyes of men of the
world the devil became gradually less terrible and more grotesque,
became occasionally ridiculous, often contemptible, sometimes silly. His
tricks are met by tricks more cunning than his own; he is duped, and
retires discomfited. Before Luther appeared on the scene, the painters
and sculptors, not to mention the authors and poets, had made progress
in reducing the devil from the grade of an antagonist of deity and
arch-enemy of men to that of a cunning and amusing deceiver of
simpletons. "The great devil," as the author just mentioned remarks,
"sculptured over the door of the Autun Cathedral in the twelfth century
is a frightful being, well designed to strike terror to unformed souls;
but the young devils carved in bas-reliefs of the fifteenth century are
more comic than terrible, and it is evident that the artists who
executed them cared very little for the wicked tricks of the Evil
Spirit." We may be sure that the artist who could sketch the devil
fiddling upon a pair of bellows with a kitchen dipper had outgrown the
horror which that personage had once excited in all minds. Such a sketch
is here reproduced from a Flemish MS. in the library of Cambrai.
[Illustration: Devil fiddling upon a Pair of Bellows.]
But this could not be said of the great mass of Christian people for
centuries after. Luther, as the reader is aware, speaks of the devil
with as absolute an assurance of his existence, activity, and nearness
as if he were a member of his own household. God, he once said, mocks
and scorns the devil by putting under his nose such a weak creature as
man; and at other times he dwelt upon the hardness of the conflict which
the devil has to maintain. "It were not good for us to know how
earnestly the holy angels strive for us against the devil, or how hard a
combat it is. If we could see for how many angels one devil makes work,
we should be in despair." Many devils, he remarks with curious
certainty, are in forests, in waters, in wildernesses, in dark pooly
places, ready to hurt and prejudice people; and there are some in the
thick black clouds, which cause hail, lightnings, and thunderings, and
poison the air, the pastures, and grounds. He derides the philosophers
and physicians who say that these things have merely natural causes; and
as to the witches who torment honest people, and spoil their eggs, milk,
and butter, "I should have no compassion upon them--I would burn them
all." The Table-talk of the great reformer is full of such robust
credulity.
Luther represented, as much as he reformed, his age and country. In
these utterances of his we discern the spirit against which the humor
and gayety of art had to contend, and over which it has gained a tardy
victory, not yet complete. Let us keep in mind also that in those
twilight ages, as in all ages, there were the two contending influences
which we now call "the world" and "the church." In other words, there
were people who took the devil lightly, as they did all invisible and
spiritual things, and there were people who dreaded the devil in every
"dark pooly place," and to whom nothing could be a jest which
appertained to him. Humorous art has in it healing and admonition for
both these classes.
[Illustration: Oldest Drawing in the British Museum, A.D. 1320.]
It was in those centuries, also, that men of the world learned to laugh
at the clergy, and, again, not without clerical encouragement. In the
brilliantly illuminated religious manuscripts of the two centuries
preceding Luther, along with other ludicrous and absurd images, of which
specimens have been given, we find many pictures in which the vices of
the religious orders are exhibited. The oldest drawing in the British
Museum, one of the only two that bear the date 1320, shows us two devils
tossing a monk headlong from a bridge into a rough and rapid river, an
act which they perform in a manner not calculated to excite serious
thought in modern minds.
In the old Strasburg Cathedral there was a brass door, made in 1545,
upon which was engraved a convent with a procession of monks issuing
from it bearing the cross and banners. The foremost figure of this
procession was a monk carrying a girl upon his shoulders. This was not
the coarse fling of an enemy. It was not the scoff of an Erasmus, who
said once, "These paunchy monks are called _fathers_, and they take good
care to deserve the name." It was engraved on the eternal brass of a
religious edifice for the warning and edification of the faithful.
Nothing more surprises the modern reader than the frequency and severity
with which the clergy of those centuries were denounced and satirized,
as well by themselves as by others. A Church which showed itself
sensitive to the least taint of what it deemed heresy appears to have
beheld with indifference the exhibition of its moral delinquencies--nay,
taken the lead in exposing them. It was a clergyman who said, in the
Council of Siena, fifty years before Luther was born: "We see to-day
priests who are usurers, wine-shop keepers, merchants, governors of
castles, notaries, stewards, and debauch brokers. The only trade which
they have not yet commenced is that of executioner. The bishops surpass
Epicurus himself in sensuality, and it is between the courses of a
banquet that they discuss the authority of the Pope and that of the
Council." The same speaker related that St. Bridget, being in St.
Peter's at Rome, looked up in a religious ecstasy, and saw the nave
filled with mitred hogs. She asked the Lord to explain this fantastic
vision. "These," replied the Lord, "are the bishops and abbes of
to-day." M. Champfleury, the first living authority on subjects of this
nature, declares that the manuscript Bibles of the century preceding
Luther are so filled with pictures exhibiting monks and nuns in
equivocal circumstances that he was only puzzled to decide which
specimens were most suitable to give his readers an adequate idea of
them.
From mere gayety of heart, from the exuberant jollity of a
well-beneficed scholar, whose future was secure and whose time was all
his own, some of the higher clergy appear to have jested upon themselves
and their office. Two finely engraved seals have been found in France,
one dating as far back as 1300, which represent monkeys arrayed in the
vestments of a Church dignitary. Upon one of them the monkey wears the
hood and holds the staff of an abbot, and upon the other the animal
appears in the character of a bishop.
[Illustration: Bishop's Seal, A.D. 1300.]
One of these seals is known to have been executed at the express order
of an abbot. The other, a copy of which is given here, was found in the
ruins of an ancient chateau of Picardy, and bears the inscription, "LE:
SCEL: DE: LEUECQUE: DE: LA: CYTE: DE: PINON"--"The seal of the bishop of
the city of Pinon." This interesting relic was at first thought to be
the work of some scoffing Huguenot, but there can now be no doubt of its
having been the merry conceit of the personage whose title it bears. The
discovery of the record relating to the monkey seal of the abbot,
showing it to have been ordered and paid for by the actual head of a
great monastery, throws light upon all the grotesque ornamentation of
those centuries. It suggests to us also the idea that the clergy joined
in the general ridicule of their order as much from a sense of the
ludicrous as from conviction of its justice. In the British Museum there
is a religious manuscript of the thirteenth century, splendidly
illuminated, one of the initial letters of which represents a young
friar drawing wine from a cask in a cellar, that contains several
humorous points. With his left hand he holds the great wine-jug, into
which the liquid is running from the barrel; with his right he lifts to
his lips a bowlful of the wine, and from the same hand dangle the large
keys of the cellar. If this was intended as a hint to the younger
brethren how they ought not to behave when sent to the cellar for wine,
the artist evidently felt also the comic absurdity of the situation.
The vast cellars still to be seen under ancient monasteries and
priories, as well as the kitchens, not less spacious, and supported by
archways of the most massive masonry, tell a tale of the habits of the
religious orders which is abundantly confirmed in the records and
literature of the time. "Capuchins," says the old French doggerel,
"drink poorly, Benedictines deeply, Dominicans pint after pint, but
Franciscans drink the cellar dry." The great number of old taverns in
Europe named the Mitre, the Church, the Chapel-bell, St. Dominic, and
other ecclesiastical names, point to the conclusion that the class that
professed to dispense good cheer for the soul was not averse to good
cheer for the body.[9]
[Footnote 9: "History of Sign-boards," p. 319, by Larwood and Hotten,
London.]
If the clergy led the merriment caused by their own excesses, we can not
wonder they should have had many followers. In the popular tales of the
time, which have been gathered and made accessible in recent years, we
find the priest, the monk, the nun, the abbot, often figuring in absurd
situations, rarely in creditable ones. The priest seems to have been
regarded as the satirist's fair game, the common butt of the jester. In
one of these stories a butcher, returning home from a fair, asks a
night's lodging at the house of a priest, who churlishly refuses it. The
butcher, returning, offers in recompense to kill one of his fine fat
sheep for supper, and to leave behind him all the meat not eaten. On
this condition he is received, and the family enjoy an excellent supper
in his society. After supper he wins the favor first of the priest's
concubine and afterward of the maid-servant by secretly promising to
each of them the skin of the sheep. In the morning, after he has gone, a
prodigious uproar arises, the priest and the two women each vehemently
claiming the skin, in the midst of which it is discovered that the
butcher had stolen the sheep from the priest's own flock.
From a merry tale of these ages a jest was taken which to-day forms one
of the stock dialogues of our negro-minstrel bands. The story was
apparently designed to show the sorry stuff of which priests were
sometimes made. A farmer sends a lout of a son to college, intending to
make a priest of him, and the lad was examined as to the extent of his
knowledge. "Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob," said the examiner: "who
was Jacob's father?" The candidate, being unable to answer this
question, is sent home to his tutor with a letter relating his
discomfiture. "Thou foole and ass-head!" exclaims the tutor. "Dost thou
not know Tom Miller of Oseney?" "Yes," answered the hopeful scholar.
"Then thou knowest he had two sons, Tom and Jacke: who is Jacke's
father?" "Tom Miller." Back goes the youth to college with a letter to
the examiner, who, for the tutor's sake, gives him another chance, and
asks once more who was Jacob's father. "Marry!" cries the candidate, "I
can tell you now: that was Tom Miller of Oseney."
We must be cautious in drawing inferences from the popular literature of
a period, since there is in the unformed mind a propensity to circulate
amusing scandal, and the satirist is apt to aim his shaft at characters
and actions which are exceptional, not representative. In some of the
less frequented nooks of Europe, where the tone of mind among the people
has not materially changed since the fifteenth century, we still find
priests the constant theme of scandal. The Tyrolese, for example, as
some readers may have observed, are profuse in their votive offerings,
and indefatigable in their pilgrimages, processions, and
observances--the most superstitious people in Europe; but a recent
writer tells us that they "have a large collection of anecdotes,
humorous and scandalous, about their priests, and they take infinite
delight in telling them." They are not pious, as the writer remarks,
"but magpious." The Tyrolese may judge their priests correctly, but a
person who believes in magpious humbug may be expected to lend greedy
ears to comic scandal, and what the Tyrolese do to-day, their ancestors
may have done when Luther was a school-boy.
But of late years the exact, methodical records of the past, the laws,
law-books, and trials, which are now recognized to be among the most
trustworthy guides to a correct interpretation of antiquity, have been
diligently scrutinized, and we learn from them that it was among the
commonest of criminal events for clergymen, in the time of Edward III.
of England, to take part in acts of brigandage. A band of fifty men, for
example, broke into the park and warren of a lady, the Countess of
Lincoln, killed her game, cut down two thousand pounds' worth of timber,
and carried it off. In the list of the accused are the names of two
abbots and a prior. Several chaplains were in a band of knights and
squires who entered an inclosure belonging to the Archbishop of
Canterbury, drove off his cattle, cut down his trees, harvested his
wheat, and marched away with their booty. In a band of seventy who
committed a similar outrage at Carlton there were five parsons. Two
parsons were accused of assisting to break into the Earl of
Northampton's park and driving off his cattle. The prior of Bollington
was charged with a robbery of horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs. Five
clergymen were in the band that damaged the Bishop of Durham's park to
the extent of a thousand pounds. These examples and others were drawn
from a single roll of parchment of the year 1348; and that roll, itself
one of three, is only one of many sources of information. The author of
the "History of Crime" explains that the rolls of that year consist of
more than one hundred and twenty skins of parchment, among which there
are few that do not contain a reference to some lawless act committed
by knights or priests, or by a band consisting of both.[10]
[Footnote 10: "History of Crime in England," p. 248, by L. O. Pike,
London, 1873.]
This is record, not gossip, not literature; and it may serve to indicate
the basis of truth there was for the countless allusions to the
dissoluteness of the clergy in the popular writings and pictures of the
century that formed Luther and the Lutherans.
[Illustration: Pastor and Flock. (From the Window of a French Church,
Sixteenth Century.)]
It is scarcely possible in the compass of a chapter to convey an idea of
the burst of laughter that broke the long spell of superstitious terror,
and opened the minds of men to receive the better light. Such works as
the "Decameron" of Boccaccio, which to modern readers is only
interesting as showing what indecency could be read and uttered by fine
ladies and gentlemen on a picnic in 1350, had one character that
harmonized with the new influence. Their tone was utterly at variance
with the voice of the priest. The clergy, self-indulgent, preached
self-denial; practicing vice, they exaggerated human guilt. But the
ladies and gentlemen of the "Decameron," while practicing virtue, made
light of vice, and brought off the graceful profligate victorious. Later
was circulated in every land and tongue the merry tale of "Reynard the
Fox," which children still cherish among the choicest of their literary
treasures. Reynard, who appears in the sculptures of so many convents
and in the illuminations of so many pious manuscripts, whom monks loved
better than their missal, exhibits the same moral: witty wickedness
triumphant over brute strength. The fox cheats the wolf, deludes the
bear, lies to King Lion, turns monk, gallops headlong up and down the
commandments, only to be at last taken into the highest favor by the
king and made Prime Minister. It is not necessary to discover allegory
in this tale. What made it potent against the spell of priestly
influence was the innocent and boisterous merriment which it excited,
amidst which the gloom evoked by priestly arts began to break away.
Innocent mirth, next to immortal truth, is the thing most hostile to
whatever is mingled with religion which is hostile to the interests of
human nature.
And "Reynard," we must remember, was only the best and gayest of a large
class of similar fables that circulated during the childhood of Columbus
and of Luther. In one of the Latin stories given by Mr. Wright in his
"Selection," we have an account of the death and burial of the wolf, the
hero of the tale, which makes a most profane use of sacred objects and
rites, though it was written by a priest. The holy water was carried by
the hare, hedgehogs bore the candles, goats rang the bell, moles dug the
grave, foxes carried the bier, the bear celebrated mass, the ox read the
gospel, and the ass the epistle. When the burial was complete, the
animals sat down to a splendid banquet, and wished for another grand
funeral. Mark the moral drawn by the priestly author: "So it frequently
happens that when some rich man, an extortionist or a usurer, dies, the
abbot or prior of a convent of beasts [_i. e._, of men living like
beasts] causes them to assemble. For it commonly happens that in a great
convent of black or white monks [Benedictines or Augustinians] there are
none but beasts--lions by their pride, foxes by their craftiness, bears
by their voracity, stinking goats by their incontinence, asses by their
sluggishness, hedgehogs by their asperity, hares by their timidity
(because they were cowardly when there was no fear), and oxen by their
laborious cultivation of their land." Unquestionably this author
belonged to another order than those named in his tirade.
A book with original life in it becomes usually the progenitor of a line
of books. Brandt's "Ship of Fools," which was published when Luther was
eleven years old, gave rise to a literature. As soon as it appeared it
kindled the zeal of a noted preacher of Strasburg, Jacob Geiler by name,
who turned Brandt's gentle satire into fierce invective, which he
directed chiefly against the monks. The black friars, he said, were the
devil, the white friars his dame, and the others were their chickens.
The qualities of a good monk, he declared, were an almighty belly, an
ass's back, and a raven's mouth. From the pulpit, on another occasion,
he foretold a coming reformation in the Church, adding that he did not
expect to live to see it, though some that heard him might. The monks
taunted him with looking into the "Ship of Fools" for his texts instead
of the Scripture; but the people heard him eagerly, and one of his
pupils gave the public a series of his homely, biting sermons,
illustrated by wood-cuts, which ran through edition after edition.
Badius, a noted scholar of the time, was another who imitated the "Ship
of Fools," in a series of satirical pieces entitled "The Boats of
Foolish Women," in which the follies of the ladies of the period were
ridiculed.
[Illustration: Confessing to God. (Holbein, 1520.) Sale of Indulgences.]
Among the great number of works which the "Ship of Fools" suggested,
there was one which directly and powerfully prepared the way for Luther.
Erasmus, while residing in England, from 1497 to 1506, Luther being
still a student, read Brandt's work, and was stirred by it to write his
"Praise of Folly," which, under the most transparent disguise, is
chiefly a satire upon the ecclesiastics of the day. We may at least say
that it is only in the passages aimed at them that the author is at his
best. Before Luther had begun to think of the abuses of the Church,
Erasmus, in his little work, derided the credulous Christians who
thought to escape mishaps all day by paying devotion to St. Christopher
in the morning, and laughed at the soldiers who expected to come out of
battle with a whole skin if they had but taken the precaution to "mumble
over a set prayer before the picture of St. Barbara." He jested upon the
English who had constructed a gigantic figure of their patron saint as
large as the images of Hercules; only the saint was mounted upon a horse
"very gloriously accoutred," which the people scarcely refrained from
worshiping. But observe this passage in the very spirit of Luther,
though written fifteen years before the reformer publicly denounced
indulgences:
"What shall I say of such as cry up and maintain the cheat of pardons
and indulgences? who by these compute the time of each soul's residence
in purgatory, and assign them a longer or shorter continuance, according
as they purchase more or fewer of these paltry pardons and salable
exemptions?... By this easy way of purchasing pardon, any notorious
highwayman, any plundering soldier, or any bribe-taking judge shall
disburse some part of their unjust gains, and so think all their
grossest impieties sufficiently atoned for.... And what can be more
ridiculous than for some others to be confident of going to heaven by
repeating daily those seven verses out of the Psalms?"
These "fooleries," which Erasmus calls most gross and absurd, he says
are practiced not merely by the vulgar, but by "such proficients in
religion as one might well expect should have more wit." He ridicules
the notion of each country and place being under the special protection
of a patron saint, as well as the kindred absurdity of calling upon one
saint to cure a toothache, upon another to restore lost goods, upon
another to protect seamen, and upon another to guard cows and sheep. Nor
does he refrain from reflecting upon the homage paid to the Virgin Mary,
"whose blind devotees think it manners now to place the mother before
the Son." He utterly scouts and reviles the folly of hanging up
offerings at the shrines of saints for their imaginary aid in getting
the donors out of trouble or danger. The responsibility of all this
folly and delusion he boldly assigns to the priests, who gain money by
them. "They blacken the darkness and promote the delusion, wisely
foreseeing that the people (like cows which never give down their milk
so well as when they are gently stroked) would part with less if they
knew more." If any serious and wise man, he adds, should tell the people
that a pious life is the only way of securing a peaceful death, that
repentance and amendment alone can procure pardon, and that the best
devotion to a saint is to imitate his example, there would be a very
different estimate put upon masses, fastings, and other austerities.
Erasmus saw this prophecy fulfilled before many years had rolled over
his head.
[Illustration: Christ, the True Light. (Holbein, about 1520.)]
It is, however, in his chapters upon the amazingly ridiculous subtleties
of the monastic theology of his time that Erasmus gives us his most
exquisite fooling. Here he becomes, indeed, the merry Erasmus who was so
welcome at English Cambridge, at Paris, at Rome, in Germany, in Holland,
wherever there were good scholars and good fellows. He pretends to
approach this part of his subject with fear; for divines, he says, are
generally very hot and passionate, and when provoked they set upon a man
in full cry, and hurl at him the thunders of excommunication, that being
their spiritual weapon to wound such as lift up a hand against them. But
he plucks up courage, and proceeds to discourse upon the puerilities
which absorbed their minds. Among the theological questions which they
delighted to discuss were such as these: the precise manner in which
original sin was derived from our first parents; whether time was an
element in the supernatural generation of our Lord; whether it would be
a thing possible for the first person in the Trinity to hate the second;
whether God, who took our nature upon him in the form of a man, could as
well have become a woman, a beast, an herb, or a stone; and if he could,
how could he have then preached the gospel, or been nailed to the cross?
whether if St. Peter had celebrated the eucharist at the time when our
Saviour was upon the cross, the consecrated bread would have been
transubstantiated into the same body that remained on the tree; whether,
in Christ's corporal presence in the sacramental wafer, his humanity was
not abstracted from his Godhead; whether, after the resurrection, we
shall carnally eat and drink as we do in this life; how it is possible,
in the transubstantiation, for one body to be in several places at the
same time; which is the greater sin, to kill a hundred men, or for a
cobbler to set one stitch in a shoe on Sunday? Such subtleties as these
alternated with curious and minute delineations of purgatory, heaven,
and hell, their divisions, subdivisions, degrees, and qualities.
He heaps ridicule also upon the public preaching of those profound
theologians. It was mere stage-playing; and their delivery was the very
acme of the droll and the absurd. "Good Lord! how mimical are their
gestures! What heights and falls in their voice! What toning, what
bawling, what singing, what squeaking, what grimaces, what making of
mouths, what apes' faces and distorting of their countenances!" And
their matter was even more ridiculous than their manner. One of these
absurd divines, discoursing upon the name of Jesus, subtly pretended to
discover a revelation of the Trinity in the very letters of which the
name was composed. It was declined only in _three_ cases. That was one
mysterious coincidence. Then the nominative ended in S, the accusative
in M, and the ablative in U, which obviously indicated Summus, the
beginning; Medius, the middle; and Ultimus, the end of all things. Other
examples he gives of the same profound nature. Nor did the different
orders of monks escape his lash. He dwelt upon the preposterous
importance they attached to trifling details of dress and ceremonial.
"They must be very critical in the precise number of their knots, in the
tying-on of their sandals, of what precise colors their respective
habits should be made, and of what stuff; how broad and long their
girdles, how big and in what fashion their hoods, whether their bald
crowns be of the right cut to a hair's-breadth, how many hours they must
sleep, and at what minute rise to prayers."
In this manner he proceeds for many a sprightly page, rising from monks
to bishops and cardinals, and from them to popes, "who _pretend_
themselves Christ's vicars," while resembling the Lord in nothing.
Luther never went farther, never was bolder or more biting, than Erasmus
in this essay. But all went for nothing with the great leader of reform,
because Erasmus refused to abandon the Church, and cast in his lot
openly with the reformers. Luther calls him "a mere Momus," who laughed
at Catholic and Protestant alike, and looked upon the Christian religion
itself very much as Lucian did upon the Greek. "Whenever I pray," said
Luther once, "I pray for a curse upon Erasmus." It was certainly a
significant fact that in the heat of that contest Erasmus should have
given the world a translation of Lucian. But he was a great, wise,
genial soul, whose fame will brighten as that age becomes more justly
and familiarly known to us.
The first place in the annals of such a warfare belongs of right to the
soldiers who took their lives in their hands and went forth to meet the
foe in the open field, braving torture, infamy, and death for the cause.
Such were Luther and his followers. But there is a place in human memory
for the philosopher and the humorist who first made the contest
possible, and then rendered it shorter and easier.
CHAPTER VIII.
COMIC ART AND THE REFORMATION.
When Luther began the immortal part of his public career in 1517 by
nailing to the church door his ninety-five theses against the sale of
indulgences, wood-engraving was an art which had been practiced nearly a
century. He found also, as we have seen, a public accustomed to
satirical writings illustrated by wood-cuts. The great Holbein
illustrated Erasmus's "Praise of Folly." Brandt's "Ship of Fools," as
well as the litter of works which it called forth, was even profusely
illustrated. Caricatures as distinct works, though usually accompanied
with abundant verbal commentary, were familiar objects. Among the
curiosities which Luther himself brought from Rome in 1510, some years
before he began his special work, was a caricature suggested by the
"Ship of Fools," showing how the Pope had "fooled the whole world with
his superstitions and idolatries." He showed it to the Prince Elector of
Saxony at the time. The picture exhibited a little ship filled with
monks, friars, and priests casting lines to people swimming in the sea,
while in the stern sat comfortably the Pope with his cardinals and
bishops, overshadowed and covered by the Holy Ghost, who was looking up
to heaven, and through whose help alone the drowning wretches were
saved.
In talking about the picture many years after, Luther said, "These and
the like fooleries we _then_ believed as articles of faith." He had not
reached the point when he could talk at his own table of the cardinals
as "peevish milksops, effeminate, unlearned blockheads, whom the Pope
places in all kingdoms, where they lie lolling in kings' courts among
the ladies and women."
[Illustration: Papa, Doctor Theologiae et Magister Fidei.
"A long-eared ass can with the Bagpipes cope
As well as with Theology the Pope."--Germany, 1545.]
Finding this weapon of caricature ready-made to his hands, he used it
freely, as did also his friends and his foes. He was himself a
caricaturist. When Pope Clement VII. seemed disposed to meet the
reformers half-way, and proposed a council to that end, Luther wrote a
pamphlet ridiculing the scheme, and, to give more force to his satire,
he "caused a picture to be drawn" and placed in the title-page. It was
not a work describable to the fastidious ears of our century, unless we
leave part of the description in Latin. The Pope was seated on a lofty
throne surrounded by cardinals having foxes' tails, and seeming "_sursum
et deorsum repurgare_." In the "Table-talk" we read also of a picture
being brought to Luther in which the Pope and Judas were represented
hanging to the purse and keys. "'Twill vex the Pope horribly," said
Luther, "that he whom emperors and kings have worshiped should now be
figured hanging upon his own picklocks." The picture annexed, in which
the Pope is exhibited with an ass's head performing on the bagpipes, was
entirely in the taste of Luther. "The Pope's decretals," he once said,
"are naught; he that drew them up was an ass." No word was too
contemptuous for the papacy. "Pope, cardinals, and bishops," said he,
"are a pack of guzzling, stuffing wretches; rich, wallowing in wealth
and laziness, resting secure in their power, and never thinking of
accomplishing God's will."
[Illustration: The Pope cast into Hell. (Lucas Cranach, 1521.)]
The famous pamphlet of caricatures published in 1521 by Luther's friend
and follower, Lucas Cranach, contains pictures that we could easily
believe Luther himself suggested. The object was to exhibit to the eyes
of the people of Germany the contrast between the religion inculcated by
the lowly Jesus and the pompous worldliness of the papacy. There was a
picture on each page which nearly filled it, and at the bottom there
were a few lines in German of explanation; the engraving on the page to
the left representing an incident in the life of Christ, and the page to
the right a feature of the papal system at variance with it. Thus, on
the first page was shown Jesus, in humble attitude and simple raiment,
refusing honors and dignities, and on the page opposite the Pope,
cardinals, and bishops, with warriors, cannon, and forts, assuming
lordship over kings. On another page Christ was seen crowned with thorns
by the scoffing soldiers, and on the opposite page the Pope wearing his
triple crown, and seated on his throne, an object of adoration to his
court. On another was shown Christ washing the feet of his disciples, in
contrast to the Pope presenting his toe to an emperor to be kissed. At
length we have Christ ascending to heaven with a glorious escort of
angels, and on the other page the Pope hurled headlong to hell,
accompanied by devils, with some of his own monks already in the flames
waiting to receive him. This concluding picture may serve as a specimen
of a series that must have told powerfully on the side of reform.[11]
[Footnote 11: From "A History of Caricature," p. 254, by Thomas Wright,
London, 1864.]
[Illustration: "The Beam that is in thine own Eye," A.D. 1540.]
These pictorial pamphlets were an important part of the stock in trade
of the colporteurs who pervaded the villages and by-ways of Germany
during Luther's life-time, selling the sermons of the reformers, homely
satiric verses, and broadside caricatures. The simplicity and directness
of the caricatures of that age reflected perfectly both the character
and the methods of Luther. One picture of Hans Sachs's has been
preserved, which was designed as an illustration of the words of Christ:
"I am the door. He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but
climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber." The
honest Sachs shows us a lofty, well-built barn, with a very steep roof,
on the very top of which sits the Pope crowned with his tiara. To him
cardinals and bishops are directing people, and urging them to climb up
the steep and slippery height. Two monks have done so, and are getting
in at a high window. At the open door of the edifice stands the Lord,
with a halo round his head, inviting a humble inquirer to enter freely.
Nothing was farther from the popular caricaturists of that age than to
allegorize a doctrine or a moral lesson; on the contrary, it was their
habit to interpret allegory in the most absurdly literal manner.
Observe, for example, the treatment of the subject contained in the
words, "How wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out
of thine eye, and, behold, a _beam_ is in thine own eye?"
[Illustration: Luther Triumphant. (Paris, 1535.)]
The marriage of Luther in 1525 was followed by a burst of caricature.
The idea of a priest marrying excited then, as it does now in a Catholic
mind, a sense of ludicrous incongruity. It is as though the words
"married priest" were a contradiction in terms, and the relation implied
by them was a sort of manifest incompatibility, half comic, half
disgusting. The spectacle occasionally presented in a Protestant church
of a clergyman ordained and married in the same hour is so opposed to
the Catholic conception of the priesthood that some Catholics can only
express their sense of it by laughter. Equally amazing and equally
ludicrous to them is the more frequent case of missionaries coming home
to be married, or young missionaries married in the evening and setting
out for their station the next morning. We observe that some of Luther's
nearest friends--nay, Luther himself--saw something both ridiculous and
contemptible in his marriage, particularly in the haste with which it
was concluded, and the disparity in the ages of the pair, Luther being
forty-two and his wife twenty-six. "My marriage," wrote Luther, "has
made me so despicable that I hope my humiliation will rejoice the angels
and vex the devils." And Melanchthon, while doing his best to restore
his leader's self-respect, expressed the hope that the "_accident_"
might be of use in humbling Luther a little in the midst of a success
perilous to his good sense. Luther was not long abased. We find him soon
justifying the act, which was among the boldest and wisest of his life,
as a tribute of obedience to his aged father, who "required it in hopes
of issue," and as a practical confirmation of what he had himself
taught. He speaks gayly of "my rib, Kate," and declared once that he
would not exchange his wife for the kingdom of France or the wealth of
Venice.
But the caricaturists were not soon weary of the theme. Readers at all
familiar with the manners of that age do not need to be told that few of
the efforts of their free pencils will bear reproduction now. Besides
exhibiting the pair carousing, dancing, romping, caressing, and in
various situations supposed to be ridiculous, the satirists harped a
good deal upon the old prophecy that Antichrist would be the offspring
of a monk and a nun. "If that is the case," said Erasmus, "how many
thousands of Antichrists there are in the world already!" Luther was
evidently of the same opinion, for he gave full credit to the story of
six thousand infants' skulls having been found at the bottom of a pond
near a convent, as well as to that of "twelve great pots, in each of
which was the carcass of an infant," discovered under the cellars of
another convent. But, then, Luther was among the most credulous of men.
The marriage of the monk and the nun gave only a brief advantage to the
enemies of reform. The great German artists of that generation were
friends of Luther. No name is more distinguished in the early annals of
German art than Albert Duerer, painter, engraver, sculptor, and author.
He did not employ his pencil in furtherance of Luther's cause, nor did
he forsake the communion of the ancient Church, but he expressed the
warmest sympathy with the objects of the reformer. A report of Luther's
death in 1521 struck horror to his soul. "Whether Luther be yet living,"
he wrote, "or whether his enemies have put him to death, I know not; yet
certainly what he has suffered has been for the sake of truth, and
because he has reprehended the abuses of unchristian papacy, which
strives to fetter Christian liberty with the incumbrance of human
ordinances, that we may be robbed of the price of our blood and sweat,
and shamefully plundered by idlers, while the sick and needy perish
through hunger." These words go to the heart of the controversy.
Holbein, nearly thirty years younger than Duerer, only just coming of age
when Luther nailed his theses to the castle church, did more, as the
reader has already seen, than express in words his sympathy with reform.
The fineness and graphic force of the two specimens of his youthful
talent given on pages 72, 73,[12] every reader must have remarked. Only
three copies of these pictures are known to exist. They appeared at the
time when Luther had kindled a general opposition to the sale of
indulgences, as well as some ill feeling toward the classic authors so
highly esteemed by Erasmus. They are in a peculiar sense Lutheran
pictures, and they give expression to the reformer's prejudices and
convictions. A third wood-cut of Holbein's is mentioned by Woltmann,
dated 1524, in which the Pope is shown riding in a litter surrounded by
an armed escort, and on the other side Christ is seen on an ass,
accompanied by his disciples. These three works were Holbein's
contribution to the earlier stage of the movement.
[Footnote 12: From "Holbein and his Time," p. 241-243, by Alfred
Woltmann; translated by F. E. Bunnett, London, 1872.]
This artist was soon drawn away to the splendid court of Henry VIII. of
England, where, among other works, he executed his renowned paintings,
"The Triumph of Riches" and "The Triumph of Poverty," in both of which
there is satire enough to bring them within our subject. Of these
stupendous works, each containing seventeen or more life-size figures,
every trace has perished except the artist's original sketch of "The
Triumph of Riches." But they made a vivid impression upon the two
generations which saw them, and we have so many engravings, copies, and
descriptions of them that it is almost as if we still possessed the
originals. Holbein's sketch is now in the Louvre at Paris. It will
convey to the reader some idea of the harmonious grandeur of the
painting, and some notion of the ingenious and friendly nature of its
satire upon human life.
[Illustration: The Triumph of Riches. (Holbein, about 1533.)]
In accordance with the custom of the age, the painting bore an
explanatory motto in Latin: "Gold is the father of lust and the son of
sorrow. He who lacks it laments; he who has it fears." Plutus, the god
of wealth, is an old, old man, long past enjoyment; but his foot rests
upon sacks of superfluous coin, and an open vessel before him, heaped
with money, affords the only pleasures left to him--the sight and
conscious possession of the wealth he can never use. Below him Fortuna,
a young and lovely woman, scatters money among the people who throng
about her, among whom are the portly Sichaeus, Dido's husband, the
richest of his people; Themistocles, who stooped to accept wealth from
the Persian king; and many others noted in classic story for the part
gold played in their lives. Croesus, Midas, and Tantalus follow on
horseback, and, last of all, the unveiled Cleopatra. The careful driver
of Plutus's chariot is Ratio--reason. "Faster!" cries one of the crowd,
but the charioteer still holds a tight rein. The unruly horses next the
chariot, named Interest and Contract, are led by the noble maidens
Equity and Justice; and the wild pair in front, Avarice and Deceit, are
held in by Generosity and Good Faith. In the rear, hovering over the
triumphal band, Nemesis threatens.
The companion picture, "The Triumph of Poverty," had also a Latin motto,
to the effect that, while the rich man is ever anxious, "the poor man
fears nothing, joyous hope is his portion, and he learns to serve God by
the practice of virtue." In the picture a lean and hungry-looking old
woman, Poverty, was seen riding in the lowliest of vehicles, a cart,
drawn by two donkeys, Stupidity and Clumsiness, and by two oxen,
Negligence and Indolence. Beside her in the cart sits Misfortune. A
meagre and forlorn crowd surround and follow them. But the slow-moving
team is guided by the four blooming girls, Moderation, Diligence,
Alertness, and Toil, of whom the last is the one most abounding in vigor
and health. The reins are held by Hope, her eyes toward heaven.
Industry, Memory, and Experience sit behind, giving out to the hungry
crowd the means of honorable plenty in the form of flails, axes,
squares, and hammers.
These human and cheerful works stand in the waste of that age of
wrathful controversy and irrational devotion like green islands in the
desert, a rest to the eye and a solace to the mind.
When Luther was face to face with the hierarchy at the Diet of Worms,
Calvin, a French boy of twelve, was already a sharer in the worldly
advantage which the hierarchy could bestow upon its favorites. He held a
benefice in the Cathedral of Noyon, his native town, and at seventeen he
drew additional revenue from a curacy in a neighboring parish. The
tonsured boy owed this ridiculous preferment to the circumstance that
his father, being secretary to the bishop of the diocese, was sure to be
at hand when the bishop happened to have a good thing to give away. In
all probability Jean Calvin would have died an archbishop or a cardinal
if he had remained in the Church of his ancestors, for he possessed the
two requisites for advancement--fervent zeal for the Church and access
to the bestowers of its prizes. At Paris, however, whither he was sent
by his father to pursue his studies, a shy, intense, devout lad, already
thin and sallow with fasting and study, the light of the Reformation
broke upon him. Like Luther, he long resisted it, and still longer hoped
to see a reformation _in_ the Church, not outside of its pale. The
Church never had a more devoted son. Not Luther himself loved it more.
"I was so obstinately given to the superstitions of popery," he said,
long after, "that it seemed impossible I should ever be pulled out of
the deep mire."
He struggled out at length. Observe one of the results of his conversion
in this picture, in which a slander of the day is preserved for our
inspection.[13]
[Footnote 13: From "Musee de la Caricature en France," Paris, 1834.]
[Illustration: Calvin branded. (Paris.)]
Gross and filthy calumny was one of the familiar weapons in the
theological contests of that century. Both sides employed it--Luther and
Calvin not less than others--for it belonged to that age to hate, and
hence to misinterpret, opponents. "Search the records of the city of
Noyon, in Picardie," wrote Stapleton, an eminent controversialist on the
Catholic side, and professor in a Catholic college of Calvin's own day,
"and read again that Jean Calvin, convicted of a crime" (infamous and
unmentionable), "by the very clement sentence of the bishop and
magistrate was branded with an iron lily on the shoulders." The records
have been searched; nothing of the kind is to be found in them; but the
picture was drawn and scattered over France. Precisely the same charge
was made against Luther. That both the reformers died of infamous
diseases was another of the scandals of the time. In reading these
controversies, it is convenient to keep in mind the remark of the
collector of the Calvin pictures: "When two theologians accuse one
another, both of them lie." One of these calumnies drew from Calvin a
celebrated retort. "They accuse me," said he, "of having no children. In
every land there are Christians who are my children."
Another caricature, shown on the following page, representing Calvin at
the burning of Servetus, had only too much foundation in truth.
The reformer was not indeed present at the burning, but he caused the
arrest of the victim, drew up the charges, furnished part of the
testimony that convicted him, consented to and approved his execution.
Servetus was a Spanish physician, of blameless life and warm
convictions, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. Catholic and
Protestant equally abhorred him, and Protestant Geneva seized the
opportunity to show the world its attachment to the true faith by
burning a man whom Rome was also longing to burn. It was a hideous
scene--a virtuous and devoted Unitarian expiring in the flames after
enduring the extremest anguish for thirty minutes, and crying, from the
depths of his torment, "Jesus, thou Son of the eternal God, have mercy
on me!" But it was not Calvin who burned him. It was the century. It was
imperfectly developed human nature. Man had not reached the
civilization which admits, allows, welcomes, and honors disinterested
conviction. It were as unjust to blame Calvin for burning Servetus as it
is to hold the Roman Catholic Church of the present day responsible for
the Inquisition of three centuries ago. It was Man that was guilty of
all those stupid and abominable cruelties. Luther, the man of his
period, honestly declared that if he were the Lord God, and saw kings,
princes, bishops, and judges so little mindful of his Son, he would
"_knock the world to pieces_." If Calvin had not burned Servetus,
Servetus might have burned Calvin, and the Pope would have been happy to
burn both.
[Illustration: Calvin at the Burning of Servetus.]
One of the best caricatures--perhaps the very best--which the
Reformation called forth was suggested by the dissensions that arose
between the followers of Luther and Calvin when both of them were in the
grave. It might have amused the very persons caricatured. We can fancy
Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics all laughing together at the
spectacle of the two reformers holding the Pope by the ear, and with
their other hands fighting one another, Luther clawing at Calvin's
beard, and Calvin hurling a Bible at Luther's head.
On the same sheet in the original drawing a second picture was given, in
which a shepherd was seen on his knees, surrounded by his flock,
addressing the Lord, who is visible in the sky. Underneath is written,
"The Lord is my Shepherd; he will never forsake me." The work has an
additional interest as showing how early the French began to excel in
caricature. In the German and English caricatures of that period there
are no existing specimens which equal this one in effective simplicity.
[Illustration: Calvin, the Pope, and Luther. (Paris, 1600.)]
Perhaps the all-pervading influence of Rabelais in that age may have
made French satire more good-humored. After all efforts to discover in
the works of Rabelais hidden allusions to the great personages and
events of his time, we must remain of the opinion that he was a
fun-maker pure and simple, a court-fool to his century. The anecdote
related of his convent life seems to give us the key both to his
character and his writings. The incident has often been used in comedy
since Rabelais employed it. On the festival of St. Francis, to whom his
convent was dedicated, when the country people came in, laden with
votive offerings, to pray before the image of the saint, young Rabelais
removed the image from its dimly lighted recess and mounted himself upon
the pedestal, attired in suitable costume. Group after group of awkward
rustics approached and paid their homage. Rabelais at length, overcome
by the ridiculous demeanor of the worshipers, was obliged to laugh,
whereupon the gaping throng cried out, "A miracle! a miracle! Our good
lord St. Francis moves!" But a cunning old friar, who knew when miracles
might and might not be rationally expected in that convent, ran into the
chapel and drew out the merry saint, and the brothers laid their knotted
cords so vigorously across his naked shoulders that he had a lively
sense of not being made of wood. That was Rabelais! He was a natural
laugh-compeller. He laughed at every thing, and set his countrymen
laughing at every thing. But there were no men who oftener provoked his
derision than the monks. "How is it?" asks one of his merry men, "that
people exclude monks from all good companies, calling them
feast-troublers, marrers of mirth, and disturbers of all civil
conversation, as bees drive away the drones from their hives?" The hero
answers this question in three pages of most Rabelaisan abuse, of which
only a very few lines are quotable. "Your monk," he says, "is like a
monkey in a house. He does not watch like a dog, nor plow like the ox,
nor give wool like the sheep, nor carry like the horse; he only spoils
and defiles all things. Monks disquiet all their neighborhood with a
tingle-tangle jangling of bells, and mumble out great store of psalms,
legends, and paternosters without thinking upon or apprehending the
meaning of what they say, which truly is a mocking of God." There is no
single theme to which Rabelais, the favorite of bishops, oftener returns
than this, and his boisterous satire had its effect upon the course of
events in Europe, as well as upon French art and literature.
The English caricatures that have come down to us from the era of the
Reformation betray far more earnestness than humor or ingenuity. There
is one in the British Museum which figures in so many books, and
continued to do duty for so many years, that the inroads of the worms in
the wood-cut can be traced in the prints of different dates. It
represents King Henry VIII. receiving a Bible from Archbishop Cranmer
and Lord Cromwell. The burly monarch, seated upon his throne, takes the
book from their hands, while he tramples upon Pope Clement, lying
prostrate at his feet, the tiara broken and fallen off, the triple cross
lying on the ground. Cardinal Pole, with the aid of another dignitary,
is trying to get the Pope on his feet again. A monk is holding the
Pope's horse, and other monks stand dismayed at the spectacle. This
picture was executed in 1537, but, as we learn from the catalogue, the
deterioration of the block and "the working of worms in the wood" prove
that the impression in the Museum was taken in 1631.[14]
[Footnote 14: "Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum,"
Division I., vol. i., p. 2. London, 1870.]
The martyrdom of the reformers in 1555, under Queen Mary of bloody
memory, furnished subjects for the satiric pen and pencil as soon as the
accession of Elizabeth made it safe to treat them. But there is no
spirit of fun in the pictures. They are as serious and grim as the
events that suggested them. In one we see a lamb suspended before an
altar, which the Bishop of Winchester (Gardiner), with his wolf's head,
is beginning to devour; and on the ground lie six slain lambs, named
_Houperus_, _Cranmerus_, _Bradfordus_, _Rydlerus_, _Rogerus_, and
_Latimerus_. Three reformers put a rope round Gardiner's neck, saying,
"_We will not this feloue to raigne over us_;" and on the other side of
him two bishops with wolves' heads mitred, and having sheepskins on
their shoulders, are drinking from chalices. Behind Gardiner are several
men attached by rings through their noses to a rope round his waist. The
devil appears above, holding a scroll, on which is written, "_Youe are
my verye chyldren in that youe have slayne the prophetes_. _For even I
from the begynning was a murtherer._" On the altar lie two books, one
open and the other shut. On the open book we read, "_Christ alone is not
sufficient without our sacrifice_." The only window in the edifice, a
small round one, is closed and barred. Many of the figures in this
elaborate piece utter severe animadversion upon opponents; but none of
them is scurrilous and indecent, except the mitred wolf, who is so
remarkably plain-spoken that the compiler of the catalogue was obliged
to suppress several of his words.
The English caricaturists of that age seem to have felt it their duty to
exhibit the entire case between Catholic and Protestant in each
broadside, with all the litigants on both sides, terrestrial and
celestial, all the points in both arguments, and sometimes the whole
history of the controversy from the beginning. The great expanse of the
picture was obscured with the number of remarks streaming from the
mouths of the persons depicted, and there was often at the bottom of the
engraving prose and verse enough to fill two or three of these pages.
Such extensive works call to mind the sermons of the following century,
when preachers endeavored on each occasion to declare, as they said,
"the _whole_ counsel of God;" so that if one individual present had
never heard the Gospel before, and should never hear it again, he would
hear enough for salvation in that one discourse.
Another of these martyrdom prints may claim brief notice. Two companies
of martyrs are seen, one composed of the bishops, and the other of less
distinguished persons, between whom there is a heap of burning fagots.
Nearly all the figures say something, and the space under the picture is
filled with verses. Cranmer, with the Bible in his left hand, holds his
right in the fire, exclaiming, "_Burne, unworthie right hand!_" Latimer
cries, "_Lord, Lord, receive my spirit!_" Philpot, pointing to a book
which he holds, says, "_I will pay my vowes in thee, O Smithfield!_" The
other characters utter their dying words. The verses are rough, but full
of the resolute enthusiasm of the age:
"First, Christian Cranmer, who (at first tho foild),
And so subscribing to a recantation,
God's grace recouering him, hee, quick recoil'd,
And made his hand ith flames make expiation.
Saing, burne faint-hand, burne first, 'tis thy due merit.
And dying, cryde, Lord Jesus take my spirit.
"Next, lovely Latimer, godly and grave,
Himselfe, Christs old tride souldier, plaine displaid,
Who stoutly at the stake did him behave,
And to blest Ridley (gone before) hee saide,
Goe on blest brother, for I followe, neere,
This day wee'le light a light, shall aye burne cleare.
"Whom when religious, reverend Ridley spide,
Deere heart (sayes hee) bee cheerful in y{r} Lord;
Who never (yet) his helpe to his denye'd,
& hee will us support & strength afford,
Or suage y{e} flame, thus, to the stake fast tide,
They, constantly Christs blessed Martyres dyde.
"Blest Bradford also comming to the stake,
Cheerfully tooke a faggott in his hand:
Kist it, &, thus, unto a young-man spake,
W{ch} with him, chained, to y{e} stake did stand,
Take courage (brother) wee shal haue this night,
A blessed supper w{th} the Lord of Light.
"Admir'd was Doctor Tailers faith & grace,
Who under-went greate hardship spight and spleene;
One, basely, threw a Faggot in his face,
W{ch} made y{e} blood ore all his face bee seene;
Another, barberously beate out his braines,
Whilst, at y{e} stake his corps was bound w{th} chaines."
In many of the English pictures of that period, the intention of the
draughtsman is only made apparent by the explanatory words at the
bottom. In one of these a friar is seen holding a chalice to a man who
stretches out his hands to receive it. From the chalice a winged
cockatrice is rising. There is also a man who stabs another while
embracing him. The quaint words below explain the device: "The man which
standeth lyke a Prophet signifieth godliness; the Fryer, treason; the
cup with the Serpent, Poyson; the other which striketh with the sworde,
Murder; and he that is wounded is Peace." In another of these pictures
we see an ass dressed in a judge's robes seated on the bench. Before him
is the prisoner, led away by a priest and another man. At one side a
friar is seen in conversation with a layman. No one could make any thing
of this if the artist had not obligingly appended these words: "The Asse
signifieth Wrathfull Justice; the man that is drawn away, Truth; those
that draweth Truth by the armes, Flatterers; the Frier, Lies; and the
associate with the Frier, Perjury." In another drawing the artist shows
us the Pope seated in a chair, with his foot on the face of a prostrate
man, and in his hand a drawn sword, directing an executioner who is in
the act of beheading a prisoner. In the distance are three men kneeling
in prayer. The explanation is this: "The Pope is Oppression; the man
which killeth is Crueltie; those which are a-killing, Constant Religion;
the three kneeling, Love, Furtherance, and Truth to the Gospel." In one
of these crude productions a parson is exhibited preaching in a pulpit,
from which two ecclesiastics are dragging him by the beard to the stake
outside. Explanation in this instance is not so necessary, but we have
it, nevertheless: "He which preacheth in the pulpit signifieth godly
zeale and a furtherer of the gospel; and the two which are plucking him
out of his place are the enemies of God's Word, threatening by fire to
consume the professors of the same; and that company which (sit) still
are _Nullifidians_, such as are of no religion, not regarding any
doctrine, so they may bee quiet to live after their owne willes and
mindes." Another picture shows us a figure seated on a rainbow, the
world at his feet, up the sides of which a pope and a cardinal are
climbing. In the middle is the devil tumbling off headlong. The world is
upheld by Death, who sits by the mouth of hell. This is the explanation:
"He which sitteth on the raynebowe signifieth Christ, and the sworde in
his hand signifieth his wrath against the wycked; the round compasse,
the worlde; and those two climing, the one a pope, the other a
cardinall, striving who shall be highest; and the Divell which falleth
headlong downe is Lucifer, whiche through pride fel; he whiche holdeth
the world is Death, standing in the entrance of hell to receyve all
superbious livers."
In another print is represented a Roman soldier riding on a boar, and
bearing a banner, on which is painted the Pope with his insignia. A man
stabs himself and tears his hair, and behind him is a raving woman. This
picture has a blunt signification: "The bore signifieth Wrath, and the
man on his back Mischief; the Pope in the flag Destruction, and the flag
Uncertaine Religion, turning and chaunging with every blaste of winde;
the man killing himselfe, Desperation; the woman, Madness."
There are fourteen specimens in this quaint manner in the collection of
the British Museum, all executed and published in the early part of the
reign of Elizabeth. As art, they are naught. As part of the record of a
great age, they have their value.
[Illustration: Titian's Caricature of the Laocooen.]
Germany, England, and France fought the battle of the Reformation--two
victors and one vanquished. From Italy in that age we have one specimen
of caricature, but it was executed by Titian. He drew a burlesque of the
Laocooen to ridicule a school of artists in Rome, who, as he thought,
extolled too highly the ancient sculptures, and, because they could not
succeed in coloring, insisted that correctness of form was the chief
thing in art. Since Titian's day, parodies of the Laocooen have been
among the stock devices of the caricaturists of all nations.
CHAPTER IX.
IN THE PURITAN PERIOD.
[Illustration: The Papal Gorgon. (Reign of Elizabeth, 1581.)]
The annexed picture,[15] a favorite with the Protestants of England,
Holland, and Germany for more than a century, is composed of twenty-two
articles and objects, most of which are employed in the Roman Catholic
worship. A church-bell forms the hat, which is decorated by crossed
daggers and holy-water brushes. A herring serves for a nose. The mouth
is an open wine-flagon. The eye is a chalice covered by the holy wafer,
and the cheek is a paten, or plate used in the communion service. The
great volume that forms the shoulders is the mass-book. The front of the
bell-tiara is adorned by a mitred wolf devouring a lamb, and by a goose
holding a rosary in its bill; the back, by a spectacled ass reading a
book, and by a boar wearing a scholar's cap. At the bottom of the
engraving the pierced feet of Christ are seen resting upon two creatures
called by the artist "the Queen's badges." The whole figure of Christ is
supposed to be behind this mass of human inventions; for in the original
these explanatory words are given, "Christ Covered."
[Footnote 15: From "Malcolm's Caricaturing," plate 2, and p. 23. See,
also, "Catalogue of the Prints and Drawings in the British Museum,"
Division I., vol. ii., p. 177.]
It was by this device that Master Batman, at the beginning of the
Puritan period, sought to present to the eye a summary of what the
Reformation had accomplished, and what it had still to fear. Half a
century before, Henry VIII. being still the Defender of the Faith, the
various articles used in Master Batman's satirical picture were objects
of religious veneration throughout Great Britain. They had now become
the despised but dreaded rattle-traps of a suppressed idolatry. From the
field of strife one of the victors gathered the scattered arms and
implements, the gorgeous ensigns and trappings of the defeated, and
piled them upon the plain, a trophy and a warning.
There is no revolution that does not sweep away much that is good. The
reformation in religion, chiefly wrought by Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, and
Calvin, was a movement of absolute necessity to the further progress of
our race. The intelligence of Christendom had reached a development
which was incompatible with respect for the assumptions of the papacy,
and with a belief in the fictions which the papacy had invented or
adopted. The vase must have broken, or the oak planted in it must have
ceased to grow. Nevertheless, those fictions had their beauty and their
use. There was a good and pleasing side to that system of fables and
ceremonies, which amused, absorbed, and satisfied the people of Europe
for a thousand years. If we could concede that the mass of men must
remain forever ignorant and very poor, we could also admit that nothing
was ever invented by man better calculated to make them thoughtlessly
contented with a dismal lot than the Roman Catholic Church as it existed
in the fifteenth century, before the faith of the people had been shaken
in its pretensions. There was something in it for every faculty of human
nature except the intellect. It gave play to every propensity except the
propensity of one mind in a thousand to ask radical questions. It
relieved every kind of distress except that which came of using the
reason. All human interests were provided for in it except the supreme
interest of human advancement.
One must have been in a Catholic community, or else lived close to an
important Catholic church, in order to form an idea of the great part
the Church once played in the lives and thoughts of its members--the
endless provision it made for the _entertainment_ of unformed minds in
the way of festivals, fasts, processions, curious observances, changes
of costume, and special rites. There was always something going on or
coming off. There was not a day in the year nor an hour in the day which
had not its ecclesiastical name and character. In our flowery observance
of Easter and in our joyous celebration of Christmas we have a faint
traditional residue of festivals that once made all Christendom gay and
jocund. And it was all so adapted to the limited abilities of our race!
In an average thousand men, there is not more than one man capable of
filling creditably the post of a Protestant minister, but there are a
hundred who can be drilled into competent priests.
Consider, for example, a procession, which was formerly the great event
of many of the Church festivals, gratifying equally those who witnessed
and those who took part in it. In other words, it gratified keenly the
whole community. And yet how entirely it was within the resources of
human nature! Not a child so young, not a woman so weak, not a man so
old, but could assist or enjoy it. The sick could view it from their
windows, the robust could carry its burdens, the skillful could contrive
its devices, and all had the feeling that they were engaged in enhancing
at once the glory of God, the fame of their saint, the credit of their
town, and the good of their souls. It was pleasure; it was duty; it was
masquerade; it was devotion. Some readers may remember the exaltation of
soul with which Albert Duerer, the first of German artists in Luther's
age, describes the great procession at Antwerp, in 1520, in honor of
what was styled the "Assumption" of the Virgin Mary. One of the pleasing
fictions adopted by the old Church was that on the 15th of August, A.D.
45, the Virgin Mary, aged seventy-five years, made a miraculous ascent
into heaven. Hence the annual festival, which was celebrated throughout
Europe with pomp and splendor. The passage in the diary of Duerer has a
particular value, because it affords us a vivid view of the bright side
of the ancient Church just before the reformers changed its gorgeous
robes into the Puritan's plain black gown, and substituted the long
prayer and interminable sermon for the magnificent ceremonial and the
splendid procession.
Albert Duerer was in sympathy with Luther, but his heart swelled within
him as he beheld, on that Sunday morning in Antwerp, the glorious
pageantry that filed past for two hours in honor of the "Mother of
God's" translation. All the people of the city assembled about the
Church of "Our Lady," each dressed in gayest attire, but each wearing
the costume of his rank, and exhibiting the badge of his guild or
vocation. Silver trumpets of the old Frankish fashion, German drums and
fifes, were playing in every quarter. The trades and guilds of the
city--goldsmiths, painters, masons, embroiderers, statuaries,
cabinet-makers, carpenters, sailors, fishermen, butchers, curriers,
weavers, bakers, tailors, shoe-makers, and laborers--all marched by in
order, at some distance apart, each preceded by its own magnificent
cross. These were followed by the merchants, shop-keepers, and their
clerks. The "shooters" came next, armed with bows, cross-bows, and
firelocks, some on horseback and some on foot. The city guard followed.
Then came the magistrates, nobles, and knights, all dressed in their
official costume, and escorted, as our artist records, "by a gallant
troop, arrayed in a noble and splendid manner." There were a number of
women in the procession, belonging to a religious order, who gained
their subsistence by labor. These, all clad in white from head to foot,
agreeably relieved the splendors of the occasion. After
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