Caricature of Louis XIV., by Thackeray.
Even in our own time Louis XIV. has suggested one of the best caricatures ever drawn, and it is accompanied by an explanatory essay almost unique among prose satires for bitter wit and blasting truth. The same hand wielded both the pen and the pencil, and it was the wonderful hand of Thackeray. "You see at once," he says, in explanation of the picture, "that majesty is made out of the wig, the high-heeled shoes, and cloak, all fleurs-de-lis bespangled.... Thus do barbers and cobblers make the gods that we worship."
CHAPTER XI.
PRECEDING HOGARTH.
It was the bubble mania of 1719 and 1720, brought upon Europe by John Law, which completed the "secularization" of caricature. Art, as well as literature, learning, and science, was subservient to religion during the Middle Ages, and drew its chief nourishment from Mother Church. Since the Reformation they have all been obliged to pass through a painful process of weaning, and each in turn to try for an independent existence. The bubble frenzy, besides giving an impulse to the caricaturist's art it had not before received, withdrew attention from ecclesiastical subjects, and supplied abundant material drawn from sources purely mundane.
"Shares! Shares! Shares!"
The Night Share-crier and his Magic Lantern. A Caricature of John Law and his Bubble Schemes. (Amsterdam, 1720.)
Above all, the pictures which that mania called forth assisted to form the great satiric artist of his time and country, William Hogarth. He was a London apprentice carving coats of arms on silver plate when the early symptoms of the mania appeared; and he was still a very young man, an engraver, feeling his way to the career that awaited him, when the broadsheets satirizing John Law began to be "adapted" from Dutch originals, and shown in the shop-windows of London. Doubtless he inspected the picture of the "Night Share-crier," opposite, and noticed the cock's feather in his hat (indicating the French origin of the delusion), and the windmill upon the top of his staff. The Dutch pictures were full of that detail and by-play of which Hogarth was such a master in later years.
Visitors to New York who saw tumultuous Wall Street during the worst of our inflation period, and, following the crowd up-town, entered the Gold-room, where the wild speculation of the day was continued till midnight, may have flattered themselves that they were looking upon scenes never before exhibited in this world. What a strange intensity of excitement there was in those surging masses of young men! What fierce outcries! What a melancholy waste of youthful energies, so much needed elsewhere! But there was nothing new in all this, except that we passed the crisis with less loss and less demoralization than any community ever before experienced in circumstances at all similar.