The Nation Mourning at Lincoln's Bier.
By Tenniel in "Punch."
CHAPTER XX
NATIONS AND MEN IN CARICATURE
In looking over the historical and political caricature of the nineteenth century, one very naturally finds several different methods of treatment and subdivision suggesting themselves. First, there is the obvious method of chronological order, which is being followed in the present volume, and which commended itself as being at once the simplest and the most comprehensive. It is the one method by which the history of the century may be regarded as the annals of a family of nations—a grotesque family of ill-assorted quadrupeds and still more curious bipeds, stepping forth two by two from the pages of comic art as from the threshold of some modern Noah's ark—Britannia and the British lion, Columbia and Uncle Sam, India and the Bengal tiger, French Liberty and the imperial eagle. It is the one method which focuses the attention upon the inter-relation, the significant groupings of these symbolic figures, and disregards their individual and isolated actions. What the Russian bear, the British lion, are doing in the seclusion of their respective fastnesses is of vastly less interest than the spectacle of the entire royal menagerie of Europe uniting in an effort to hold Napoleon at bay. In other words, this method enables us to pass lightly over questions of purely national interest and home policy—the Corn Laws of England, the tariff issues in the United States—and to keep the eye centered upon the really big dramas of history, played upon an international stage. It subordinates caricature itself to the sequence of great events and great personages. It is the Emperor Napoleon, his reign and his wars, and not the English caricaturist Gillray; it is Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, and not Philipon and Daumier, who form the center of interest. In other words, from the present point of view, the caricature itself is not so much the object looked at as it is a powerful and clairvoyant lens through which we may behold past history in the curiously distorted form in which it was mirrored back by contemporary public opinion.
Figures from a Triumph.
The Diagnosis.