Читать книгу Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and Many Lands - James Parton - Страница 5

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Much as the ancients differed from ourselves in other particulars, they certainly laughed at one another just as we do, for precisely the same reasons, and employed every art, device, and implement of ridicule which is known to us.

Observe this rude and childish attempt at a drawing. Go into any boys' school to-day, and turn over the slates and copy-books, or visit an inclosure where men are obliged to pass idle days, and you will be likely to find pictures conceived in this taste, and executed with this degree of artistic skill. But the drawing dates back nearly eighteen centuries. It was done on one of the hot, languid days of August, A.D. 79, by a Roman soldier with a piece of red chalk on a wall of his barracks in the city of Pompeii.[1] On the 23d of August, in the year 79, occurred the eruption of Vesuvius, which buried not Italian cities only, but Antiquity itself, and, by burying, preserved it for the instruction of after-times. In disinterred Pompeii, the Past stands revealed to us, and we remark with a kind of infantile surprise the great number of particulars in which the people of that day were even such as we are. There was found the familiar apothecary's shop, with a box of pills on the counter, and a roll of material that was about to be made up when the apothecary heard the warning thunder and fled. The baker's shop remained, with a loaf of bread stamped with the maker's name. A sculptor's studio was strewed with blocks of marble, unfinished statues, mallets, compasses, chisels, and saws. A thousand objects attest that when the fatal eruption burst upon these cities, life and its activities were going forward in all essential particulars as they are at this moment in any rich and luxurious town of Southern Europe.

In the building supposed to have been the quarters of the Roman garrison, many of the walls were covered with such attempts at caricature as the specimen just given, to some of which were appended opprobrious epithets and phrases. The name of the personage above portrayed was Nonius Maximus, who was probably a martinet centurion, odious to his company, for the name was found in various parts of the inclosure, usually accompanied by disparaging words. Many of the soldiers had simply chalked their own names; others had added the number of their cohort or legion, precisely as in the late war soldiers left records of their stay on the walls of fort and hospital. A large number of these wall-chalkings in red, white, and black (most of them in red) were clearly legible fifty years after exposure. I give another specimen, a genuine political caricature, copied from an outside wall of a private house in Pompeii.

Chalk Caricature on a Wall in Pompeii.

The allusion is to an occurrence in local history of the liveliest possible interest to the people. A few years before the fatal eruption there was a fierce town-and-country row in the amphitheatre, in which the Pompeians defeated and put to flight the provincial Nucerians. Nero condemned the pugnacious men of Pompeii to the terrible penalty of closing their amphitheatre for ten years. In the picture an armed man descends into the arena bearing the palm of victory, while on the other side a prisoner is dragged away bound. The inscription alone gives us the key to the street artist's meaning, Campani victoria una cum Nucerinis peristis—"Men of Campania, you perished in the victory not less than the Nucerians;" as though the patriotic son of Campania had written, "We beat 'em, but very little we got by it."

If the idlers of the streets chalked caricature on the walls, we can not be surprised to discover that Pompeian artists delighted in the comic and burlesque. Comic scenes from the plays of Terence and Plautus, with the names of the characters written over them, have been found, as well as a large number of burlesque scenes, in which dwarfs, deformed people, Pigmies, beasts, and birds are engaged in the ordinary labors of men. The gay and luxurious people of the buried cities seem to have delighted in nothing so much as in representations of Pigmies, for there was scarcely a house in Pompeii yet uncovered which did not exhibit some trace of the ancient belief in the existence of these little people. Homer, Aristotle, and Pliny all discourse of the Pigmies as actually existing, and the artists, availing themselves of this belief, which they shared, employed it in a hundred ways to caricature the doings of men of larger growth. Pliny describes them as inhabiting the salubrious mountainous regions of India, their stature about twenty-seven inches, and engaged in eternal war with their enemies, the geese. "They say," Pliny continues, "that, mounted upon rams and goats, and armed with bows and arrows, they descend in a body during spring-time to the edge of the waters, where they eat the eggs and the young of those birds, not returning to the mountains for three months. Otherwise they could not resist the ever-increasing multitude of the geese. The Pigmies live in cabins made of mud, the shells of goose eggs, and feathers of the same bird."

Battle between Pigmies and Geese.

Homer, in the third book of the "Iliad," alludes to the wars of the Cranes and Pigmies:

"So when inclement winters vex the plain

With piercing frosts, or thick-descending rain,

To warmer seas the Cranes embodied fly, With noise and order through the midway sky; To Pigmy nations wounds and death they bring, And all the war descends upon the wing."

A Pigmy Scene—from Pompeii.

One of our engravings shows that not India only, but Egypt also, was regarded as the haunt of the Pigmy race; for the Upper Nile was then, as now, the home of the hippopotamus, the crocodile, and the lotus. Here we see a bald-headed Pigmy hero riding triumphantly on a mighty crocodile, regardless of the open-mouthed, bellowing hippopotamus behind him. In other pictures, however, the scaly monster, so far from playing this submissive part, is seen plunging in fierce pursuit of a Pigmy, who flies headlong before the foe. Frescoes, vases, mosaics, statuettes, paintings, and signet-rings found in the ancient cities all attest the popularity of the little men. The odd pair of vases on the following page, one in the shape of a boar's head and the other in that of a ram's, are both adorned with a representation of the fierce combats between the Pigmies and the geese.

There has been an extraordinary display of erudition in the attempt to account for the endless repetition of Pigmy subjects in the houses of the Pompeians; but the learned and acute M. Champfleury "humbly hazards a conjecture," as he modestly expresses it, which commends itself at once to general acceptance. He thinks these Pigmy pictures were designed to amuse the children. No conjecture could be less erudite or more probable. We know, however, as a matter of record, that the walls of taverns and wine-shops were usually adorned with Pigmy pictures, such subjects being associated in every mind with pleasure and gayety. It is not difficult to imagine that a picture of a pugilistic encounter between Pigmies, like the one given at the head of this chapter, or a fanciful representation of a combat of Pigmy gladiators, of which many have been discovered, would be both welcome and suitable as tavern pictures in the Italian cities of the classic period.

Vases with Pigmy Designs.

The Pompeians, in common with all the people of antiquity, had a child-like enjoyment in witnessing representations of animals engaged in the labors or the sports of human beings. A very large number of specimens have been uncovered, some of them gorgeous with the hues given them by masters of coloring eighteen hundred years ago. In the following cut is a specimen of these—a representation of a grasshopper driving a chariot, copied in 1802 from a Pompeian work for an English traveler.

A Grasshopper driving a Chariot.

From an Antique Amethyst.

Nothing can exceed either the brilliancy or the delicacy of the coloring of this picture in the original, the splendid plumage of the bird and the bright gold of the chariot shaft and wheel being relieved and heightened by a gray background and the greenish brown of the course. The colorists of Pompeii have obviously influenced the taste of Christendom. There are few houses of pretension decorated within the last quarter of a century, either in Europe or America, which do not exhibit combinations and contrasts of color of which the hint was found in exhumed Pompeii. One or two other small specimens of this kind of art, selected from a large number accessible, may interest the reader.

Flight of Æneas from Troy.

The spirited air of the team of cocks, and the nonchalant professional attitude of the charioteer, will not escape notice. Perhaps the most interesting example of this propensity to personify animals which the exhumed cities have furnished us is a burlesque of a popular picture of Æneas escaping from Troy, carrying his father, Anchises, on his back, and leading by the hand his son, Ascanius, the old man carrying the casket of household gods. No scene could have been more familiar to the people of Italy than one which exhibited the hero whom they regarded as the founder of their empire in so engaging a light, and to which the genius of Virgil had given a deathless charm:

"Thus ord'ring all that prudence could provide

I clothe my shoulders with a lion's hide

And yellow spoils; then on my bending back

The welcome load of my dear father take;

While on my better hand Ascanius hung,

And with unequal paces tripped along."

Artists found a subject in these lines, and of one picture suggested by them two copies have been found carved upon stone.

Caricature of the Flight of Æneas.

This device of employing animals' heads upon human bodies is still used by the caricaturist, so few are the resources of his branch of art; and we can not deny that it retains a portion of its power to excite laughter. If we may judge from what has been discovered of the burlesque art of the ancient nations, we may conclude that this idea, poor as it seems to us, was the one which the artists of antiquity most frequently employed. It was also common with them to burlesque familiar paintings, as in the instance given. It is not unlikely that the cloyed and dainty taste of the Pompeian connoisseur perceived something ridiculous in the too-familiar exploit of Father Æneas as represented in serious art, just as we smile at the theatrical attitudes and costumes in the picture of "Washington crossing the Delaware." Fancy that work burlesqued by putting an eagle's head upon the Father of his Country, filling the boat with magpie soldiers, covering the river with icebergs, and making the oars still more ludicrously inadequate to the work in hand than they are in the painting. Thus a caricaturist of Pompeii, Rome, Greece, Egypt, or Assyria would have endeavored to cast ridicule upon such a picture.

From a Red Jasper.

Few events of the last century were more influential upon the progress of knowledge than the chance discovery of the buried cities, since it nourished a curiosity respecting the past which could not be confined to those excavations, and which has since been disclosing antiquity in every quarter of the globe. We call it a chance discovery, although the part which accident plays in such matters is more interesting than important. The digging of a well in 1708 let daylight into the amphitheatre of Herculaneum, and caused some languid exploration, which had small results. Forty years later, a peasant at work in a vineyard five miles from the same spot struck with his hoe something hard, which was too firmly fixed in the ground to be moved. It proved to be a small statue of metal, upright, and riveted to a stone pedestal, which was itself immovably fastened to some solid mass still deeper in the earth. Where the hoe had struck the statue the metal showed the tempting hue of gold, and the peasant, after carefully smoothing over the surface, hurried away with a fragment of it to a goldsmith, intending (so runs the local gossip) to work this opening as his private gold mine. But as the metal was pronounced brass, he honestly reported the discovery to a magistrate, who set on foot an excavation. The statue was found to be a Minerva, fixed to the centre of a small roof-like dome, and when the dome was broken through it was seen to be the roof of a temple, of which the Minerva had been the topmost ornament. And thus was discovered, about the middle of the last century, the ancient city of Pompeii, buried by a storm of light ashes from Vesuvius sixteen hundred and seventy years before.

Roman Masks, Comic and Tragic.

It was not the accident, but the timeliness of the accident, which made it important; for there never could have been an excavation fifteen feet deep over the site of Pompeii without revealing indications of the buried city. But the time was then ripe for an exploration. It had become possible to excite a general curiosity in a Past exhumed; and such a curiosity is a late result of culture: it does not exist in a dull or in an ignorant mind. And this curiosity, nourished and inflamed as it was by the brilliant and marvelous things brought to light in Pompeii and Herculaneum, has sought new gratification wherever a heap of ruins betrayed an ancient civilization. It looks now as if many of the old cities of the world are in layers or strata—a new London upon an old London, and perhaps a London under that—a city three or four deep, each the record of an era. Two Romes we familiarly know, one of which is built in part upon the other; and at Cairo we can see the process going on by which some ancient cities were buried without volcanic aid. The dirt of the unswept streets, never removed, has raised the grade of Cairo from age to age.

A Roman Comic Actor masked for the Part of Silenus.

The excavations at Rome, so rich in results, were not needed to prove that to the Romans of old caricature was a familiar thing. The mere magnitude of their theatres, and their habit of performing plays in the open air, compelled caricature, the basis of which is exaggeration. Actors, both comic and tragic, wore masks of very elaborate construction, made of resonant metal, and so shaped as to serve, in some degree, the office of a speaking-trumpet. In the engravings on this page are represented a pair of masks such as were worn by Roman actors throughout the empire, of which many specimens have been found.

If the reader has ever visited the Coliseum at Rome, or even one of the large hippodromes of Paris or New York, and can imagine the attempts of an actor to exhibit comic or tragic effects of countenance or of vocal utterance across spaces so extensive, he will readily understand the necessity of such masks as these. The art of acting could only have been developed in small theatres. In the open air or in the uncovered amphitheatre all must have been vociferation and caricature. Observe the figure of old Silenus, on preceding page, one of the chief mirth-makers of antiquity, who lives for us in the Old Man of the pantomime. He is masked for the theatre.

The legend of Silenus is itself an evidence of the tendency of the ancients to fall into caricature. To the Romans he was at once the tutor, the comrade, and the butt of jolly Bacchus. He discoursed wisdom and made fun. He was usually represented as an old man, bald, flat-nosed, half drunk, riding upon a broad-backed ass, or reeling along by the aid of a staff, uttering shrewd maxims and doing ludicrous acts. People wonder that the pantomime called "Humpty Dumpty" should be played a thousand nights in New York; but the substance of all that boisterous nonsense, that exhibition of rollicking freedom from restraints of law, usage, and gravitation, has amused mankind for unknown thousands of years; for it is merely what remains to us of the legendary Bacchus and his jovial crew. We observe, too, that the great comic books, such as "Gil Blas," "Don Quixote," "Pickwick," and others, are most effective when the hero is most like Bacchus, roaming over the earth with merry blades, delightfully free from the duties and conditions which make bondmen of us all. Mr. Dickens may never have thought of it—and he may—but there is much of the charm of the ancient Bacchic legends in the narrative of the four Pickwickians and Samuel Weller setting off on the top of a coach, and meeting all kinds of gay and semi-lawless adventures in country towns and rambling inns. Even the ancient distribution of characters is hinted at. With a few changes, easily imagined, the irrepressible Sam might represent Bacchus, and his master bring to mind the sage and comic Silenus. Nothing is older than our modes of fun. Even in seeking the origin of Punch, investigators lose themselves groping in the dim light of the most remote antiquity.

How readily the Roman satirists ran into caricature all their readers know, except those who take the amusing exaggerations of Juvenal and Horace as statements of fact. During the heat of our antislavery contest, Dryden's translation of the passage in Juvenal which pictures the luxurious Roman lady ordering her slave to be put to death was used by the late Mr. W. H. Fry, in the New York Tribune, with thrilling effect:

"Go drag that slave to death! You reason, Why

Should the poor innocent be doomed to die?

What proofs? For, when man's life is in debate,

The judge can ne'er too long deliberate.

Call'st thou that slave a man? the wife replies.

Proved or unproved the crime, the villain dies.

I have the sovereign power to save or kill,

And give no other reason but my will."

This is evidently caricature. Not only is the whole of Juvenal's sixth satire a series of the broadest exaggerations, but with regard to this particular passage we have evidence of its burlesque character in Horace (Satire III., Book I.), where, wishing to give an example of impossible folly, he says, "If a man should crucify a slave for eating some of the fish which he had been ordered to take away, people in their senses would call him a madman." Juvenal exhibits the Roman matron of his period undergoing the dressing of her hair, giving the scene the same unmistakable character of caricature:

"She hurries all her handmaids to the task;

Her head alone will twenty dressers ask.

Psecas, the chief, with breast and shoulders bare,

Trembling, considers every sacred hair:

If any straggler from his rank be found,

A pinch must for the mortal sin compound.

"With curls on curls they build her head, before,

And mount it with a formidable tower.

A giantess she seems; but look behind,

And then she dwindles to the Pigmy kind.

Duck-legged, short-waisted, such a dwarf she is

That she must rise on tiptoe for a kiss.

Meanwhile her husband's whole estate is spent;

He may go bare, while she receives his rent."

The spirit of caricature speaks in these lines. There are passages of Horace, too, in reading which the picture forms itself before the mind; and the poet supplies the very words which caricaturists usually employ to make their meaning more obvious. In the third satire of the second book a caricature is exhibited to the mind's eye without the intervention of pencil. We see the miser Opimius, "poor amid his hoards of gold," who has starved himself into a lethargy; his heir is scouring his coffers in triumph; but the doctor devises a mode of rousing his patient. He orders a table to be brought into the room, upon which he causes the hidden bags of money to be poured out, and several persons to draw near as if to count it. Opimius revives at this maddening spectacle, and the doctor urges him to strengthen himself by generous food, and so balk his rapacious heir. "Do you hesitate?" cries the doctor. "Come, now, take this preparation of rice." "How much did it cost?" asks the miser. "Only a trifle." "But how much?" "Eightpence." Opimius, appalled at the price, whimpers, "Alas! what does it matter whether I die of a disease, or by plunder and extortion?" Many similar examples will arrest the eye of one who turns over the pages of this master of satire.

The great festival of the Roman year, the Saturnalia, which occurred in the latter half of December, we may almost say was consecrated to caricature, so fond were the Romans of every kind of ludicrous exaggeration. This festival, the merry Christmas of the Roman world, gave to the Christian festival many of its enlivening observances. During the Saturnalia the law courts and schools were closed; there was a general interchange of presents, and universal feasting; there were fantastic games, processions of masked figures in extravagant costumes, and religious sacrifices. For three days the slaves were not merely exempt from labor, but they enjoyed freedom of speech, even to the abusing of their masters. In one of his satires, Horace gives us an idea of the manner in which slaves burlesqued their lords at this jocund time. He reports some of the remarks of his own slave, Davus, upon himself and his poetry. Davus, it is evident, had discovered the histrionic element in literature, and pressed it home upon his master. "You praise the simplicity of the ancient Romans; but if any god were to reduce you to their condition, you, the same man that wrote those fine things, would beg to be let off. At Rome you long for the country; and when you are in the country, you praise the distant city to the skies. When you are not invited out to supper, you extol your homely repast at home, and hug yourself that you are not obliged to drink with any body abroad. As if you ever went out upon compulsion! But let Mæcenas send you an invitation for early lamp-light, then what do we hear? Will no one bring the oil quicker? Does any body hear me? You bellow and storm with fury. You bought me for five hundred drachmas, but what if it turns out that you are the greater fool of the two?" And thus the astute and witty Davus continues to ply his master with taunts and jeers and wise saws, till Horace, in fury, cries out, "Where can I find a stone?" Davus innocently asks, "What need is there here of such a thing as a stone?" "Where can I get some javelins?" roars Horace. Upon which Davus quietly remarks, "This man is either mad or making verses." Horace ends the colloquy by saying, "If you do not this instant take yourself off, I'll make a field-hand of you on my Sabine estate!"

Roman Wall Caricature of a Christian.

That Roman satirists employed the pencil and the brush as well as the stylus, and employed them freely and constantly, we should have surmised if the fact had not been discovered. Most of the caricatures of passing events speedily perish in all countries, because the materials usually employed in them are perishable. To preserve so slight a thing as a chalk sketch on a wall for eighteen centuries, accident must lend a hand, as it has in the instance now given.

This picture was found in 1857 upon the wall of a narrow Roman street, which was closed up and shut out from the light of day about A.D. 100, to facilitate an extension of the imperial palace. The wall when uncovered was found scratched all over with rude caricature drawings in the style of the specimen given. This one immediately arrested attention, and the part of the wall on which it was drawn was carefully removed to the Collegio Romano, in the museum of which it may now be inspected. The Greek words scrawled upon the picture may be translated thus: "Alexamenos is worshiping his god."

These words sufficiently indicate that the picture was aimed at some member, to us unknown, of the despised sect of the Christians. It is the only allusion to Christianity which has yet been found upon the walls of the Italian cities; but it is extremely probable that the street artists found in the strange usages of the Christians a very frequent subject.

We know well what the educated class of the Romans thought of the Christians, when they thought of them at all. They regarded them as a sect of extremely absurd Jews, insanely obstinate, and wholly contemptible. If the professors and students of Harvard and Yale should read in the papers that a new sect had arisen among the Mormons, more eccentric and ridiculous even than the Mormons themselves, the intelligence would excite in their minds about the same feeling that the courtly scholars of the Roman Empire manifest when they speak of the early Christians. Nothing astonished them so much as their "obstinacy." "A man," says the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, "ought to be ready to die when the time comes; but this readiness should be the result of a calm judgment, and not be an exhibition of mere obstinacy, as with the Christians." The younger Pliny, too, in his character of magistrate, was extremely perplexed with this same obstinacy. He tells us that when people were brought before him charged with being Christians, he asked them the question, Are you a Christian? If they said they were, he repeated it twice, threatening them with punishment; and if they persisted, he ordered them to be punished. If they denied the charge, he put them to the proof by requiring them to repeat after him an invocation to the gods, and to offer wine and incense to the emperor's statue. Some of the accused, he says, reviled Christ; and this he regarded as a sure proof of innocence, for people told him there was no forcing real Christians to do an act of that nature. Some of the accused owned that they had been Christians once, three years ago or more, and some twenty years ago, but had returned to the worship of the gods. These, however, declared that, after all, there was no great offense in being Christians. They had merely met on a regular day before dawn, addressed a form of prayer to Christ as to a divinity, and bound themselves by a solemn oath not to commit fraud, theft, or other immoral act, nor break their word, nor betray a trust; after which they used to separate, then re-assemble, and eat together a harmless meal.

All this seemed innocent enough; but Pliny was not satisfied. "I judged it necessary," he writes to the emperor, "to try to get at the real truth by putting to the torture two female slaves who were said to officiate at their religious rites; but all I could discover was evidence of an absurd and extravagant superstition." So he refers the whole matter to the emperor, telling him that the "contagion" is not confined to the cities, but has spread into the villages and into the country. Still, he thought it could be checked: nay, it had been checked; for the temples, which had been almost abandoned, were beginning to be frequented again, and there was also "a general demand for victims for sacrifice, which till lately had found few purchasers." The wise Trajan approved the course of his representative. He tells him, however, not to go out of his way to look for Christians; but if any were brought before him, why, of course he must inflict the penalty unless they proved their innocence by invoking the gods. The remains of Roman literature have nothing so interesting for us as these two letters of Pliny and Trajan of the year 103. We may rest assured that the walls of every Roman town bore testimony to the contempt and aversion in which the Christians were held, particularly by those who dealt in "victims" and served the altars—a very numerous and important class throughout the ancient world.