What is Caricature?—Interviewing—Catching Caricatures—Pellegrini—The "Ha! Ha!"—Black and White v. Paint—How to make a Caricature—M.P.'s—My System—Mr. Labouchere's Attitude—Do the Subjects object?—Colour in Caricature—Caught!—A Pocket Caricature—The Danger of the Shirt-cuff—The Danger of a Marble Table—Quick Change—Advice to those about to Caricature.
I am asked what is caricature, how can I define it? Ah, here it is explained by some great authority—whom I cannot say, for I have it under the heading of "Cuttings from Colney Hatch," undated, unnamed. Kindly read it carefully:
"The word itself, 'caricature,' is related etymologically to our own 'cargo,' and means, in all Italian simplicity, a loading. So, then, the finely analytical quality of the Italian intellect, disengaging the ultimate (material) element out of all the (spiritual) elements of pictorial distortion and travesty, called it simply a 'loading.' After all, 'exageration' only substitutes the idea of mound, or agger for carica—the heaping up of a mound—for the common Italian word 'load' or 'cartload.' One can easily understand how a cold, cynical, and hating Neapolitan, pushed about by the police for a likeness much too like, would shrug his shoulders, and say, possibly, the likeness was loaded. But when we look at the character of the loading, there may be anything there, from diabolical and malignant spite up to the simplest fun, to say nothing of the almost impossibility of drawing the real truth, and the almost necessary tendency to exaggerate one thing and diminish another. But if the Italian mind, with a head to be chopped off by a despot for a joke, discovered the colourless and impregnable word 'load,' the French gamin, on his own responsibility, hit upon the identical word in French, namely, 'charge'—une charge meaning both a pictorial or verbal goak or caricature, and a load. When did the word 'caricature' first obtain in the Italian language, and how? When did the word 'charge' acquire a similar meaning in France, and was it or not suggested by the Italian word? But the thing caricature goes back to the night of ages, and is in its origin connected with the subjective risible faculty on the one side and the objective tendency to making faces on the other. Curiously enough, the original German ideas of caricature appear to have hinged precisely upon the distortion of the countenance, since Fratze, the leading word for caricature, signifies originally a grimace. Then we have Posse, buffoonery (Italian, pazzie), which, without original reference to drawing, would exactly express many of Mr. ——'s very exquisite drolleries, diving as they do into the weirdest genius—conceptions of night and of day, of dawn and of twilight—the mixture of the terrible, the grotesque, the gigantic, the infinitely little, the animal, the beast, the ethereal, the divinely loving, the diabolically cynical, the crawling, the high-bred, all in a universal salmagundi and lobster nightmare, mixing up the loveliest conceptions with croaking horrors, the eternal aurora with the everlasting nitschewo of the frozen, blinding steppe. Caricature! What can we English call it?"
THE STUDIO OF A CARICATURIST.
What indeed after this? Except in despair we adopt the child's well-known definition—"First you think, and then you draw round the think." I have been more than once asked to deliver a lecture explaining the process. Of course such an idea is too absurd for serious consideration. The comic writer cannot give anyone a recipe for making jokes, nor can a comic actor show you how to grimace so as to make others laugh in this serious country. We are not taught to look at the comic side of things—any humorous element may grow, like Topsy, unaided—nor is the power given to many to explain to others their inventions. Bessemer, the inventor of the steel bearing his name, when he first made his discovery was asked to read a paper explaining his invention to a large meeting of experts. He had his carefully-prepared notes in front of him, but they only embarrassed him. He struggled to speak, but failed. Only the weight of the lumps of metal dangling in his coattail pocket kept him from collapsing. Suddenly he dived his hand into the pocket and produced a piece of steel, which he thumped on the table. "Bother the paper! Here is my steel, and I'll tell you how I made it!" So would it be with a caricaturist. After a struggle he would say, "Bother words, words, words! Here is a pencil, and here is some paper. I'll show you how I caricature."
CARICATURE OF ME BY MY DAUGHTER, AGE 15.
Personally, I have no objection to being caricatured—I frequently make caricatures of myself. Nor have I any objection to being interviewed—I interview myself. What else are these pages but interviews? I confess I fail to see any objection to a legitimate caricature or a legitimate interview. On the contrary, I look upon interviewing by an experienced and sympathetic writer as invaluable to a public man who is bringing out something novel and of interest to the public at large. It certainly seems to me judicious that he should give his preliminary ideas regarding it to the public firsthand, instead of allowing them to leak out in an unauthentic and disfigured form through the fervid imaginations of irresponsible scribes, leading to much misconception.