M. Gambetta seldom received attention at the hands of English caricaturists; but in 1881, when the resignation of Jules Ferry and his colleagues resulted in the formation of a new ministry with Gambetta at the head, and both English and German newspapers were sarcastically saying that "the Gambetta Cabinet represented only himself," Punch had to have his little fling at the French statesman, portraying him as beaming with self-complacence, and striking an attitude in front of a statue of Louis XIV., while he echoes the latter's famous dictum, "L'État c'est moi!"
Gordon Waiting at Khartoum.
Two cartoons which tell their own story are devoted to Fenianism. The first commemorates the Phœnix Park outrage in which Lord Frederick Cavendish, the newly appointed Chief Secretary, lost his life. The cartoon is called "The Irish Frankenstein," and is certainly baleful enough to do full justice to the hideousness of the crime it is intended to symbolize. The second cartoon, entitled "The Hidden Hand," shows the Fenian monster receiving a bag of gold from a mysterious hand stretched from behind a curtain. The reference is to a supposed inner circle of assassins, directed and paid by greater villains who kept themselves carefully behind the scenes.
The tragedy of Khartoum formed the subject of several grim and forceful pages. "Mirage" was almost prophetic in its conception, representing General Gordon gazing across the desert, where, by the tantalizing refraction of the air, he can plainly see the advancing British hosts, which in reality are destined to arrive too late. "Too late," in fact, are the very words which serve as a caption of the next cartoon. Khartoum has fallen, and Britannia, having come upon a fruitless mission, stands a picture of despair, her face buried upon her arm, her useless shield lying neglected upon the ground.
CHAPTER XXVI
THOMAS NAST
It was not until late in the '60's, when Thomas Nast began his pictorial campaign in the pages of Harper's Weekly against the Ring which held New York in its clutches, that American caricature could claim a pencil which entitled it to any sort of consideration from the artistic point of view. Some of the cartoons which have been reproduced in earlier papers of this series have possessed unquestionable cleverness of invention and idea; for instance, many of those dealing with President Jackson's administration and his relations with the United States Bank, and some of the purely allegorical cartoons treating of slavery and of the Civil War. But in all these there was so much lacking; so many artistic shortcomings were covered up by the convenient loops. The artists felt themselves free from any obligation to give expression to the countenances of their subjects so long as the fundamental idea was there, and the loops offered an easy vehicle for the utterance of thoughts and feelings which a modern artist would feel obliged to express in the drawing itself—by a skillful quirk of the pencil, an added line, an exaggerated smile or frown. It was a thoroughly wooden school of caricature, in which one can find no trace of the splendid suggestion which the caricaturists should at that time have been drawing from contemporary masters of the art in France and England.
