From the Quarterly Review.

A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art. By Thomas Wright, Esq.; with Illustrations from various sources, drawn and engraved by F. W. Fairholt, Esq.

course, an Italian word, derived from the verb
caricare, to charge or load; and therefore it
means a picture which is charged or exaggerat-
ed. ["Kitratto ridicolo," says Baretti s Dic-
tionary, "in cui fiensi grandemente accresciuti
i difetti." The old French dictionaries say.
"c'est la même chose que charge en peinture."]
The word appears not to have come into use in
Italy until the latter half of the seventeenth cen-
ployment by an English writer is that quoted
by Johnson from the Christian Morals' of Sir
Thomas Brown, who died in 1682, but it was
one of his latest writings, and was not printed
till long after his death: "Expose not thyself
by fourfooted manners unto monstrous draughts
(i. e. drawings) and caricatura representations."
This very quaint writer, who had passed some
time in Italy, evidently uses it as an exotic
word. We find it next employed by the writer
of the Essay, No. 537, of the Spectator,' who,
speaking of the way in which different people
are led by feelings of jealousy and prejudice to
detract from the characters of others, goes on to
say From all these hands we have such
draughts of mankind as are represented in those
burlesque pictures which the Italians call cari-
caturas, where the art consists in preserving
amidst distorted proportions and aggravated
features, some distinguishing likeness of the
the most agreeable beauty into the most odious
person, but in such a manner as to transform
monster." The word was not fully established
in our language in its English form of carica-
ture until late in the last century.'-p. 415.

AMONG the many contributions which Mr. Thomas Wright has made towards Eng-tury, and the earliest instance I know of its emlish antiquarian research, and, in particular, towards the familiar delineation of the manners and customs of our ancestors, none is, perhaps, so popular or so well known as his two volumes entitled England under the House of Hanover, illustrated from the Caricatures and Satires of the day.' The very spirited woodcuts with which this book is adorned by Mr. Fairholt might alone have sufficed to make its fortune. Published only in 1848, it is already difficult to procure a copy. Encouraged by his success in this line, Mr. Wright has now attempted the wider enterprise announced in this titlepage. We fear that in doing so he has been somewhat over ambitious. A history of the 'caricature and grotesque in literature and art,' extending over all countries and all time, comprising not only pictorial representations, but poetry, satire, the drama, and buffoonery of all descriptions, is a subject which, if it be attempted at all in a single octavo volume, could only be so in the form of a compact and well-reasoned essay, to which Mr. Wright's entertaining fragmenThis, no doubt, is a serviceable, artistic tary sketches bear little resemblance. The definition of the word; but its popular immeasurable laughter' of nations, ancient meaning is, perhaps, a little more limited. and modern, cannot be reduced within so It would be difficult accurately to distinsmall a compass. We must therefore con- guish caricature' in composition, accordtent ourselves with thanking Mr. Wrighting to the above description, from what we for his desultory but agreeable attempts for simply term 'grotesque;' exaggeration, our enlightenment. And we propose, on the present occasion, to confine ourselves entirely to the artistic portion of them: enlivened, as it is, by a new series of Mr. Fairholt's excellent illustrations. Our inability to transfer these to our own pages places us, as we feel, at a great disadvantage: many words are required to explain to the reader the contents of a picture, which a few outlines by an able hand impress at once visibly on the recollection. Deprived of this advantage, we must confine ourselves as well as we can to the points on which caricature touches the history of social and political life, rather than those by which it borders on the great domain of Art, properly so called.

"The word caricature is not found in the dictionaries, I believe, until the appearance of that of Dr. Johnson, in 1755. Caricature is, of

that is, of natural effects for the mere purpose of the ludicrous. In using the word caricature, we generally add to this notion that of satire; and the best definition for our purpose, as well as to suit ordinary apprehension, though not at all originating in the primary meaning of the word, will be, that caricature' implies the use of the grotesque for the purpose of satire: satire, of course, of many kinds, individual, moral, political, as the case may be.

Looking at our subject from this point of view, we must never eliminate from it all those amusing details respecting classical caricature,' to which Mr. Wright has devoted the first part of his work, and which a clever French writer, M. Champfleury, has just illustrated in a little book, superficial, entertaining, and cock-sure of everything,' as the manner of his nation is, entitled Histoire de la Caricature Antique.' The

ancients were passionately fond of the gro- | erical creatures.' In others, the desired tesque: the Greeks intermingled it strange- effect is produced, not by these mere fabrily, but gracefully, with their inimitable cre- cations, but by grouping men and animals ations of beauty: the Romans, after their together in fanciful or ridiculous conjuncnature, made it coarse and sensual, where tions. And these conceived and executnot merely imitative of the Hellenic. ed with a prodigality of imagination amounting in many instances to genius constitute, perhaps, the favourite, though by no means the only, style of comic art familiar to the classical ancients; one of which the known examples have of late years greatly multiplied, owing to the discoveries of ancient paintings at Pompeii and elsewhere. There is a pretty description of a picture of this sort in the Icones' of Philostratus. It represents a number of Cupids riding races on swans: one is tightening his golden rein, another loosening it; one dexterously wheeling round the goal: you might fancy that you could hear them encouraging their birds, and threatening and quarrelling with one another, as their very faces represent: one is trying to throw down his neighbour; another has just thrown down his; another is slipping off his steed, in order to bathe himself in the basin of the hippodrome.'*

The discourses of Socrates resemble the pictures of the painter Pauson.' Some one had ordered of Pauson the picture of a horse rolling on the ground. Pauson painted him running. The customer complained that the condition of his order had not been fulfilled. Turn the picture upside down,' said the artist, and the horse will seem to roll on the ground.' From this moderately facetious anecdote of Lucian; from a passage of Aristotle, in which it is said that Polygnotus painted men better than they are; Pauson, worse than they are; Dionysius, such as they are;' and, lastly, from a few lines of Aristophanes, in which some Pauson or other is jeered at for his poverty, assumed to be the lot of Bohemian artists in general; M. Champfleury has arrived at the rapid conclusion, that Pauson was the doyen of all caricaturists. And he vindicates him, eloquently, from the aspersions of the Stagyrite. Aristotle,' says he, preoccupied with the idea of absolute beauty, has not expounded the scope of caricature, and its importance in society. This thinker, plunged in philosophical abstractions, despised as futile an act which nevertheless consoles the people in its sorrows, avenges it on its tyrants, and reproduces, with a satirical pencil, the thoughts of the multitude.'

Pliny the elder, after mentioning the serious compositions of the painter Antiphilus, informs us that idem (Antiphilus) jocoso. nomine Gryllum deridiculi habitus pinxit. Undè hoc genus picturæ Grylli vocabantur. The meaning of this obscure passage. whether Gryllus was a ridiculous personage who had the misfortune to descend to posterity in some too faithful portrait by Antiphibus, or whether Gryllus was a serious personage, perhaps the son of Xenophon and hero o Mantinea, whose portrait was placed by the Athenians in the Ceramicus, whom Antiphilus had the audacity to caricaturehas exercised the wits of plenty of antiquaries, and will no doubt give occupation

to

many more. However, it seems to be from this anecdote of Pliny that grotesque figures engraved on ancient gems have received the name of Grylli' among the curious in modern times. This title has been particularly applied to those which represent figures composed of the heads and bodies of different animals capriciously united, so as to form monstrous and chim

But, to revert to our original distinction, ancient art, though rich in the grotesque, does not produce on us the effect of caricature; either it has no definite satirical aim, or, if it has such, the satire is lost upon our ignorance. The attempts of antiquaries to explain its productions by giving them a supposed libellous meaning are among the most comical efforts of modern pedantry. A laughable scene on an Etruscan vase, representing a lover climbing a ladder to his mistress's casement, figures, we are told, Jupiter and Alemena. The capital travestie of Eneas and Anchises as monkeys (Pompei) is meant to satirise the imitative style of Virgil! The well-known and amusing scene in a painter's studio (ibid.) is an allusion to the decadence of art.' A pigmy and a fox (Gregorian Museum) are a philosopher and flatterer. An owl cutting off the head of a cock is Clytemnestra murdering Agamemnon; and a grasshopper driving a parrot in a car (Herculaneum) is

*The Icones' of Flavius Philostratus, a writer of the age of the Flavian Emperors, contain a rhetorical description of a series of pictures which he saw, or feigns himself to have seen, in, a 'stoa,' or colonnaded building, of four or five stories,' situated in a suburb of the city Neapolis. The subjects described are partly mythological, partly landscape. Some of them are identical with those of frescoes of Pompeii, overwhelmed at the same period; and the general description of the style of those beautiful and singular specimens of the art treatment such as to remind the reader closely of of a world gone by.

'The transition from antiquity to what we usually understand by the name of the middle ages,' says Mr. Wright, was long and slow: it was a period during which much of the tex ture of the old society was destroyed, while, at the same time, a new life was gradually given to that which remained. We know very little of the comic literature of this period of transition; its literary remains consist chiefly of a mass of heavy theology or of lives of Saints.

tians, they still found pagan emblems and figures in their models, and still went on imitating them, sometimes merely copying, and at others turning them to caricature or burlesque. And this tendency continued so long that, at a much later date, where there still existed remains of Roman buildings, the med æval architects adopted them as models, and did not hesitate to copy the sculpture, although it might be evidently pagan in character. The accompanying cut represents a bracket in the church of Mont Majour, near Nismes, built in the tenth century. The subject is a monstrous head eating a child, and we can hardly doubt that it was really intended for a caricature on Saturn devouring one of his children.' — pp. 40–49.

For our own parts, we should doubt greatly whether the sculptor in question had Saturn in his mind at all, any more than Dante had when he imagined Satan devouring a sinner with each of his three mouths: the illustrations of which passage, in early illuminations and woodcuts, are exactly like the copy in Mr. Wright's work of this Mont Majour sculpture. And generally, we doubt whether Mr. Wright does not attribute to classical recollections too large a share in the production of that monstrous style of art which furnishes our next remarkable chapter in the history of caricathe Ecclesiastical Grotesque, such ture as it exhibited itself especially in France, England, and Germany. It has to minds very distinctive marks of a rougher Northern original. However this may be, there is something humiliating, as we have said, in the degradation of skill and æsthet

our

The period between antiquity and the middle ages was one of such great and general destruction, that the gulf between ancient and mediæval art seem to us greater and more abrupt than it really was. The want of monu ments, no doubt, prevents our seeing the gradual change of the one into the other; but enough, nevertheless, of facts remain to convince usic perception which is evinced by these relthat it was not a sudden change. It is now, ics of generations to which we so often asindeed, generally understood that the knowledge and practice of the arts and manufactures of cribe a peculiarly reverential character. the Romans were handed onward from master No doubt its elements, so to speak, may be to pupil after the empire had fallen; and this traced in part to some very ordinary protook place especially in the towns, so that the pensities of the human mind. It has been workmanship, which had been declining in said, probably with some truth, that when character during the later periods of the em- the most prevailing of all common motives pire, only continued in the course of degrada- was an intense fear of hell and of evil tion afterwards. Thus, in the first Christian spirits, the most natural mode of relief, by edifices, the builders who were employed, or at least many of them, must have been pagans; ridicule. And however impossible it may reaction, was that of turning them into and they would follow their old models of ornamentation, introducing the same grotesque be, to intellects cultivated after the modern figures, the same masks and monstrous faces, fashion, to reconcile these propensities with and even sometimes the same subjects from the a strong sense of the majestic and the beauold mythology, to which they had been accus-tiful, yet we cannot doubt the fact that they tomed. It is to be observed, a so, that this kind were so reconciled. As Dante could interof iconographical ornamentation had been en- mingle his unique conceptions of supernatu croaching more and more upon the old archi-ral grandeur with minute descriptions of tectural purity during the latter ages of the the farcical proceedings of the vulgarest Empire, and that it was employed more profusely in the later works, fro u which this task possible fiends with their pitchforks, so the was transferred to the ecclesiasical and to the same artists who produced, or at least orna domestic architecture of the middle ages. Af-mented, our cathedrals, with those glorious ter the architects themselves had become Chris- expressions of thought sublimed at once by