accompanies in all manner of disguises, and whom he assists with a most absurd air of eager self-importance on all occasions. This use of the puppet and his dog is characteristic of Mr. Doyle's genius, which revels in the whimsical and the grotesque. His famous "Manners and Customs of ye English" was undertaken consequence the great success of a drawing in which he showed "Mr. Punch pre in of senting his Tenth Volume to y Queen." It was a caricature in the style of medieval illumination and tapestry, in which similar presentations of volumes to patrons are depicted. In it were the Queen, Prince Albert, the Duke of Wellington staggering under an enormous state sword, Brougham as dwarf Courtfool, and other distinguished persons of rank, while in the train of Punch were Jerrold and Thackeray, with others of the staff. All these figures were drawn with an exaggeration of the medieval style, itself a monstrous caricature of humanity, both in semblance and in action; and yet the likeness of the figures to the originals was so strong that they were recognized at once. The effect was most ridiculous, and the sensation produced by the composition so great that the artist followed it up by others in the same style, modified, however, very much, and purged of much of its Goth ic rudeness. Mr. Doyle treated the California fever in this style, and made great fun of all the world thereanent. In one of his California drawings there was a touch so delicate that it probably escaped many eyes. His cipher is the letters RD together (the R reversed), and surmounted with a little bird, called a dickey-bird in England. The drawing in question represented "Ye Wyld Goose Chase after ye Golden Calfe," and showed a great flock of geese, most of them with hats on, crossing the ocean to the shores of California. It was funny enough, and the satire was keen, but the exquisite touch of the thing was, that as your eye glanced down for Doyle's cipher, there stood RD, but the little dickey bird, not able to resist the contagion of the flight above him, had sprung from his perch, and was making way to join the wild goose chase after the golden calf himself. This was most characteristic of the good-nature and unassuming style of Mr. Doyle's satire, who, unlike his quondam coadjutor, is never cruel. In one respect Mr. Doyle's works compare unfavorably with those of his sometime fellow-laborer. Mr. Leech always shows that he is a great draughtsman; but whatever may be Mr. Doyle's ability in this regard (and we suspect it to be greater than it seems), it is rarely that he draws a face or figure correctly. His figures, when they are not drawn in his modified Gothic style, all look as if they were designed from grotesque clay models which had been laid down upon their faces while they were wet, and so had flattened out. In these points his recent society designs, and also those which he drew to illustrate John Ruskin's fairy tale, the "King of the Golden River" (in which are some of his most charming fancies), are notably faulty. In this respect Mr. Keene, who is one of his successors in Punch, is conspicuously excellent, even in the minute and accidental parts of his compositions. But his correctness would be of comparatively small importance, were it not that it enables him to express with great nicety an appreciation of character equally delicate and true. His satire is very keen, his humor subtle, and his style what people mean when they say genial-that is, good-natured, cheery, and suggestive of pleasant thoughts. One of the best examples of his style that has yet appeared in Punch is a scene between an old baronet and his butler. The former, sitting at table with a face of disgust at a scarce-tasted glass of wine before him, turns to the latter and asks, "Swiggles, what induced you to put such wine as this before me?" and gets for answer, "Well, you see, Sir William, as somebody must drink it-and there ain't none of us in the Hall as can touch it." The humorous impudence of the reply is magnificent, and makes a good story of itself. But the character of the personages in the drawing, and their momentary expression of countenance, are given with an exquisitely delicate and truthful pencil. The two men are about the same age, and it is plain that they have grown old together under the same roof. They are both dandies in their way, and their style of dress is much the samethe butler being rather the more exquisite personage of the two. Respectability, authority, and assured position appear in every line of his face as well as of his master's; and yet how trigue. Monsieur Coquardeau and Mademoiselle Beaupertuis are their staple characters. One or the other is generally present, and if not present is implicated, in nearly every scene. Even the little children are made innocently to enlist in this service. In the very Enfants terribles, by far the greater number of the subjects are of like character; and the tendency of nearly all of this popular artist's compositions is to make faith and purity ridiculous. But his works, as studies of French social life in the second quarter of the century 1800, can not be overestimated for their vivid faithfulness. In some of his later drawings he has abandoned his earlier choice of subject, and views life from a stand-point more Experi clearly and decidedly is it shown that the latter |—are of this kind, and, almost without excepis aristocratic, and a master, and the former tion, the point on which they turn is amorous inplebeian and servile! In this delicate, firm distinction of nice shades of character Keene is without a superior, almost without a rival, among all the caricaturists whose works are known to us. Among Keene's recent contributions to Punch there is a capital little social sketch in which Captain Fitz Flint and Lucy Brabazon are the personages. The fun in the words is not much; but Miss Brabazon is the most satisfactory representation of the high-bred young woman of society that we have ever seen. The artist has managed to express a real softness and delicacy and modesty, combined with a certain firmness and hard, high polish and aplomb which are only to be found in a woman who is at once a true woman and a thorough-bred wo-elevated and in a purer atmosphere. man of the world. Her companion is her fitting match. The delicacy and decision of hand shown in the heads of this sketch are indicative of rare gifts and high artistic culture. So much-insufficient to the topic though it be-for the English caricaturists of the day; and they are, with three eminent exceptions, the great masters of their art in this period. Of the exceptions two are Frenchmen, and one is an American. The Germans have comic papers, some of the drawings in which are funny enough, but rather grotesque than humorous, and too little enlivened by marked distinction of individual character. They have yet produced no great works in this department of art, except Kaulbach's illustrations of Reineke Fuchs, in which the expression of human character and emotion by the lineaments of beasts is a true, though singular, application of the art of caricature. Kaulbach has in this series of plates exhibited a mastery of the anatomy of expression both in man and beast-to say nothing of the drawing of the animals and the composition of the groups-which would make him immortal had he accomplished nothing else. Italy, beneath whose bosom, beauteous and bountiful, literature and art were regenerate, and which gave modern caricature its life and its name, has been so long in the power of tyrants who sought to crush both soul and body that her laughing offspring left her. Even in France caricature is forced to respect power, though not | decency, and works with hands half-manacled. The French caricatures are almost entirely of social subjects, and are either mere comical whims, like those of Cham, designed with a certain coarse freedom, or they are social satires, the humor being conveyed in the thought, and not in the figures, as, for instance, those of Gavarni. Ga ence has probably taught him that vice must at some time put off the guise of gayety, and that virtue is not inconsistent with a satisfying happiness. Without being old, he has lived long enough to see what kind of fruit life bears. Among his recent works Les Lorettes vieilles (The Lorettes grown old) makes this confession with alternating wit and pathos. Lorettes are always represented young and pretty, as if, like butterflies, they died but never grew old. varni first thought of showing the declining years of those of whose youthful days he had so faithfully portrayed the specious brightness. The spectacle is heart-breaking. "Sophie," says one wretched, broken-down creature to a gay girl who is what she was, and who turns away heartlessly from her petitions, "your mother was my chambermaid!" Lorettes rarely have children. They do not know the pure delight which can be given by a child's caresses, even when unlawfully obtained. Gavarni shows us a happy young mother in humble life, sitting by her cottage door, with one child at her breast and a boy who had been playing round her knee. A haggard woman approaches, way-worn, emaciated, and forlorn, concealing the face which she was once so solicitous to decorate and to show, and says: "In the name of those little loves, who will console your age, Madame, have pity on me!" And the little boy leans pensively upon his mother's knee, and looks with sad wonder at the strange figure, doubtful whether it is a woman such as his mother is, not knowing that it is a woman such as his mother might have been. This is admirable; but it is not caricature. It is but the bare, unexaggerated truth. So in a series of plates styled Le Propos de Thomas Vireloque (The sentiments of Thomas Vireloque). Vireloque is a creature of monThis artist is one of the two great French car-strous person, a squalid human animal, with the icaturists above mentioned; yet his works are, strictly, not caricatures. For in them the figures are not overcharged; they are, no less than Hogarth's, faithful representations of certain types of French character. All of them-Fourberies de Femmes, Clichy, Paris le soir, Paris le matin, La vie de jeune homme, Les Débardeurs, Le Carnival, Les Lorettes, Les Enfants terribles figure of a Caliban and the wit of a Thersites, who wanders about satirizing the world. At the sight of two young men fighting, he exclaims, "Brothers? possible! but cousins?-no, not cousins." But it is the world as he finds it, and as it is. Except himself, there is not an exaggerated, overcharged conception in the whole series of drawings. Gavarni is again a charac terist. So are Leech and Keene; Doyle being always a caricaturist either in the figures or in the incidents of his drawing, and generally in both. But the two former are caricaturists also; and even in their social satire their humor is broader, the incidents more highly colored, than in the drawings of Gavarni. But in Gustave Doré France has not only one of the greatest of caricaturists but one of the most gifted artists of the age. Doré is the Rembrandt of caricature. He unites all of that painter's miraculous mastery of light and shade to a knowledge of physiognomy and a grotesqueness and a humor which, while they are inferior to those of no other caricaturist, are peculiarly his own. He does not choose his subjects from nowaday political or social life, but goes back into the times of chivalry and superstition. Kings, knights, ladies, feats of arms, from single com bats to the shocks of mail-clad armies, and scenes of enchantment and sorcery engage his pencil. Upon all of these he pours merciless ridicule. He is never tired of showing how really absurd are the descriptions of battles, jousts, and other feats of arms in the old romances:-tales of one man putting a hundred to flight, of men cut in two at a blow, of two or three knights killed at a single thrust of a spear, of those combats in which hosts of men chop each other into human hash seasoned with bits of steel armor. In one drawing he shows a body of men at arms who have charged another and driven them pell-mell off a precipice. The action does not transcend the descriptions of such scenes which are sometimes found even in romances of modern days; and yet its impossibility has an absurd likeness to possibility. The impetuous rush and headlong scramble are given to the life; that is, to A MUNICIPAL MISUNDERSTANDING.-BY DORE. our imagination of the life. Pursuers and pursued are flying over the brink together, the former so intent upon the attack that they do not see their own fate. Their very lances partake of their furious eagerness, and shoot out miraculously far into the air over the edge of the precipice, where they spit unhappy victims, men and horses, in all sorts of uncomfortable places; while below, expectant and delighted alligators stand open-mouthed to an catch up and bear off every living thing that falls. In the accompanying design, of like motive, he whimsically illustrates the statement of his author, that a certain arrest "was the cause of great troubles and taking up of arms in the town," by representing a tumultuous fight in a narrow street and the houses commanding it, in which almost every man is at once killing some other man and being killed himself, and where combatants break out of the roofs and walls of houses like an eruption. His heads of monks, and judges, and ancient dignitaries of all classes and grades are quite marvelous in their union of faithfulness to a type THE HOLY ABBOT OF MARMOUSTIERS.-BY DORÉ. and overcharge of characteristic traits. He excels in the delineation of extreme and senile old age, of pompous fatuity, and of countenances so malformed or so distorted that while they preserve marked traits of humanity and of individual character, they approach the monstrous. Even in his most exaggerated heads, the very types of which are removed from us by centuries of a mollifying civilization and refinement, we always recognize at least the germs of character that we have observed, if not the very characters themselves. He caricatures not only men and things, but the impressions which they make upon the mind; and some of his most striking designs are those in which he presents us with what we see at a glance represents the appreciation of one of his personages by the other. Thus he shows us a king admiring a pretty peasant-girl; and his majesty has "that growed, and that swelled, and that gentle-folked" in the dazzled eyes of the poor girl and her mother, that he and his puffed and slashed sleeves and his plumed cap nearly fill the cabin in which they sit. He makes endless fun of monks and the incidents of monkish life. One of his drollest compositions is one in which he represents the rush of a convent full of monks to greet the return of one of their number, who was a great favorite with them. They rush headlong down a hill to meet him; dancing, kicking, tumbling over one another, sprawling. They pour out of the postern in an impossible yet possible-seeming throng: they jump out of the uppermost windows, and sail down with their frocks expanded like parachutes. He is never tired of turning chivalric ceremonies and heraldic symbols into ridicule; and it having been the custom to embroider coats of arms upon garments, he shows some of his figures kneeling with their faces from us, and displaying thus armorial bearings which in any other position would be hidden, though blazoned upon seats of honor. Doré caricatures architecture and even landscape; and in his treatment of these subjects shows that mastery of light and shade which makes him the rival of Rembrandt. Some of his drawings of old towns seen by moonlight or torchlight, where the narrow streets run tortuously between houses which are covered with projecting turrets, and balconies, and galleries, and pent-houses, and winding staircases, and irregular projections of all kinds which catch the light on all their angles and curves, look as if the architecture had sprouted, and was blossoming out into a monstrous growth-a fungus growth of stone, and brick, and mortar. The exaggeration is enormous, yet there is keeping and coherence; and the effect is not less mysterious than grotesque. So in his landscapes the effects of gloom are so heightened that his trees become portentous and his shadows ominous. He shows us the awful reduced to an absurdity; and yet makes us feel that awe can not be entirely made absurd, and that even ridicule can not quite free us from its power. The best drawings that Doré has yet published are his illustrations of Balzac's Contes Drolatiques-a book in the highest degree indecorous, and written in French so old as to be un THE KING IN THE COTTAGE-BY DORÉ. |