A German Idea of Irish Home Rule.
In looking backward over a century of caricature, it is interesting to ask just what it is that makes the radical difference between the cartoon of to-day and that of a hundred years ago. That there is a wide gulf between the comparative restraint of the modern cartoonist and the unbridled license of Gillray's or Rowlandson's grotesque, gargoyle types, is self-evident; that comic art, as applied to politics, is to-day more widespread, more generally appreciated, and in a quiet way more effective in molding public opinion than ever before, needs no argument. And yet, if one stops to analyze the individual cartoons, to take them apart and discover the essence of their humor, the incisive edge of their irony and satire, one finds that there is nothing really new in them; that the basic principles of caricature were all understood as well in the eighteenth century as in the nineteenth, and that, in many cases, the successful cartoon of to-day is simply the replica of an old one of a past generation, modified to fit a new set of facts. When Gilbert Stuart drew his famous "Gerrymander" cartoon, he was probably not the first artist to avail himself of the chance resemblance of the geographical contour of a state or country to some person or animal. He certainly was not the last. Again and again the map of the United States has been drawn so as to bring out some significant similarity, as recently when it was distorted into a ludicrous semblance of Mr. Cleveland, bending low in proud humility, the living embodiment of the principle, L'État c'est Moi; or again, just before our war with Spain, when it was so drawn as to present a capital likeness of Uncle Sam, the Atlantic and Gulf States forming his nose and mouth, the latter suggestively opened to take in Cuba, which is swimming dangerously near. Puck's famous "Tattooed Man" was only a new application of an idea that had been used before; while the representation of a group of leading politicians as members of a freak show, a circus, or a minstrel troop, is as old as minstrels or dime museums themselves. Few leading statesmen of the past half century have not at some time in their career been portrayed as Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Richard III.; while as for the conventional use of animals and symbolic figures to represent the different nations, the British Lion and the Russian Bear, Uncle Sam and French Liberty, these belong to the raw materials of caricature, dating back to its very inception as an art. And yet, while the means used are essentially the same as in the days of Hogarth and Cruikshank, the results are radically different.
The World (Newspaper).
Horatius Cleveland at the Bridge.
From New York "Life."