The P****e of W***s to K**g G****e IV. (loq.). "I'll follow thee!"—Matt Morgan, in the Tomahawk, 1867.
During the life-time of the venerable Cruikshank comic art in England has won the consideration due to a liberal profession, and now enjoys a fair share of reward as well as honor. He found the comic artist something of a Bohemian; he leaves him a solvent and respectable householder. He may have visited Gillray at work in the little room behind his publisher's shop; and he doubtless often enjoyed the elegant hospitality of John Leech, one of the first in his branch of art to attain the solid dignity of a front-door of his own. It is mentioned to the credit of Richard Doyle, son of
, that when he resigned his connection with Punch on account of its caricatures of Wiseman and the Pope, he gave up an income of eight hundred pounds a year. There is no worthy circle in Great Britain where the presence of a Tenniel, a Leech, a Du Maurier, a Doyle, or a Cruikshank would not be felt as an honor and their society valued as a privilege. England owes them gratitude and homage. They have not been always right, but they have nearly always meant to be. Nothing malign, nothing unpatriotic, nothing impure, nothing mean, has borne their signature; and in a vast majority of instances they have led the laughter of their countrymen so that it harmonized with humanity and truth.
CHAPTER XXV.
EARLY AMERICAN CARICATURE.
Benjamin Franklin was the first American caricaturist. That propensity of his to use pictures whenever he desired to affect strongly the public mind was an inheritance from the period when only a very small portion of the people could read any other than pictorial language. Among the relics of his race preserved in Boston there is an illustrated handbill issued by his English uncle Benjamin, after whom he was named, which must have been a familiar object to him from the eighth year of his age. Uncle Benjamin, a London dyer when James II. fled from England, wishing to strengthen the impression made by his printed offer to "dye into colors" cloth, silk, and India calico, placed at the head of his bill a rude wood-cut of an East Indian queen taking a walk, attended by two servants, one bearing her train and the other holding over her an umbrella. At the door of his shop, too, in Princes Street, near Leicester Fields, a figure of an Indian queen appealed to the passer-by.
Such was the custom of the time. The diffusion of knowledge lessened the importance of pictorial representation; but the mere date of Franklin's birth—1706—explains in some degree his habitual resort to it. Nearly all the ancient books were illustrated in some way, and nearly every ancient building appears to have had its "sign." When Franklin was a boy in Boston a gilt Bible would have directed him where to buy his books, if he had had any money to buy them with. A gilt sheaf probably notified him where to get those three historic rolls with which he made his entry into Philadelphia. The figure of a mermaid invited the thirsty wayfarer to beer, and an anchor informed sailors where sea-stores were to be had. The royal lion and unicorn, carved in wood or stone, marked public edifices. Over the door of his father's shop, where soap and candles were sold, he saw a blue ball, which still exists, bearing the legible date 1698. Why a blue ball? He was just the boy to ask the question. A lad who could not accept grace before meat without wishing to know why it were not better to say grace once for all over the barrel of pork, would be likely to inquire what a blue ball had in common with soap and candles. His excellent but not gifted sire probably informed him that the blue ball was a relic of the time when he had carried on the business of a dyer, and that he had continued to use it for his new vocation because he "had it in the house." Benjamin, the gifted, was the boy to be dissatisfied with this explanation, and to suggest devices more in harmony with the industry carried on within, so that the very incongruity of his father's sign may have quickened his sense of pictorial effect.
Franklin lived long, figured in a great variety of scenes, accomplished many notable things, and exhibited versatility of talent—man of business, inventor, statesman, diplomatist, philosopher; and in each of these characters he was a leader among leaders; but the ruling habit of his mind, his forte, the talent that he most loved to exercise and most relished in others, was humor. He began as a humorist, and he ended as a humorist. The first piece of his ever printed and the last piece he ever wrote were both satirical: the first, the reckless satire of a saucy apprentice against the magnates of his town; the last, the good-tempered satire of a richly gifted, benevolent soul, cognizant of human weakness, but not despising it, and intent only upon opening the public mind to unwelcome truth—as a mother makes a child laugh before inserting the medicine spoon. So dominant was this propensity in his youthful days, that if he had lived in a place where it had been possible to subsist by its exercise, there had been danger of his becoming a professional humorist, merging all the powers of his incomparable intellect in that one gift.
Imagine Boston in 1722, when this remarkable apprentice began to laugh, and to make others laugh, at the oppressive solemnities around him and above him. Then, as now, it was a population industrious and moral, extremely addicted to routine, habitually frugal, but capable of magnificent generosity, bold in business enterprises, valiant in battle, but in all the high matters averse to innovation. Then, as now, the clergy, a few important families, and Harvard College composed the ruling influence, against which it was martyrdom to contend. But then, as now, there were a few audacious spirits who rebelled against these united powers, and carried their opposition very far, sometimes to a wild excess, and thus kept this noblest of towns from sinking into an inane respectability. The good, frugal, steady-going, tax-paying citizen, who lays in his coal in June and buys a whole pig in December, would subdue the world to a vast monotonous prosperity, crushing, intolerable, if there were no one to keep him and the public in mind that, admirable as he is, he does not exhaust the possibilities of human nature. When we examine the portraits of the noted men of New England of the first century and a half after the settlement, we observe in them all a certain expression of acquiescence. There is no audacity in them. They look like men who could come home from fighting the French in Canada, or from chasing the whale among the icebergs of Labrador, to be scared by the menaces of a pontiff like Cotton Mather. They look like men who would take it seriously, and not laugh at all, when Cotton Mather denounced the Franklins, for poking fun at him in their newspaper, as guilty of wickedness without a parallel. "Some good men," said he, "are afraid it may provoke Heaven to deal with this place as never any place has yet been dealt withal."
Never was a community in such sore need of caricature and burlesque as when James Franklin set up in Boston, in 1721, the first "sensational newspaper" of America, the Courant, to which his brother Benjamin and the other rebels and come-outers of Boston contributed. The Mathers, as human beings and citizens of New England, were estimable and even admirable; but the interests of human nature demand the suppression of pontiffs. These Mathers, though naturally benevolent, and not wanting in natural modesty, had attained to such a degree of pontifical arrogance as to think Boston in deadly peril because a knot of young fellows in a printing-office aimed satirical paragraphs at them. Increase Mather called upon the Government to "suppress such a cursed libel," lest "some awful judgment should come upon the land, and the wrath of God should rise, and there should be no remedy." It is for such men that burlesque was made, and the Franklins supplied it in abundance. The Courant ridiculed them even when they were gloriously in the right. They were enlightened enough and brave enough to recommend inoculation, then just brought from Turkey by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The young doctors who wrote for the paper assailed the new system, apparently for no other reason than because Increase and Cotton Mather were its chief defenders.