EXAGGERATION AND CARICATURE.
A SPLENDID Baron Munchausen, illustrated very fully by Li Gustave Dore, has been issued by the publishers of Gustave Dore's Dante, but it seems to us that the artist's genius is almost wasted on subjects of such mere exaggeration as the Baron's adventures. There are no doubt some illustrations of great power wherever the stories of the Baron accidentally approach weird subjects,—for any touch of the kind is always accidental in that string of exaggerated impossibilities. Thus the picture of the Baron's device for securing a valuable black fox's skin with- out injuring it with a bullet-hole, suits the artist's genius for painful grotesquerie. The Baron, it will be remembered, fires a ten- penny nail at the fox's brush so as to nail him to a tree, and then, cutting a cross cut on his forehead, thereby opening a hole in the skin, whips him violently with a whip till the fox jumps out of his own skin, leaving it complete and uninjured for his assailant. Gustave Dore carelessly exaggerates even upon the Baron's exaggeration by making the skinless fox issue from the mouth of the fox-skin instead of from the cross cut in the head—the only touch in the story meant to reconcile the out- raged imagination of the reader to the gross absurdity it con- tains—and he is very faulty in not drawing the skin from which the skinless fox is issuing as limp and collapsing as the flesh and bone is withdrawn. But it is impossible to give a better or m.ore unpleasant conception of a fox that from excessive anguish had just jumped out of its own skin than the artist has do.m. It is much more weird than a skeleton, and the flesh has the appearance of having recently torn itself out of its natural covering. The picture of the running hare with four legs as well under as over its back, so that when it is tired it has only to turn over on its back and run with the other quartet, has also some- thing uncanny about it, but for the most part the Baron's absurd stories are not worthy of Gustave Dora's illustrations. If any one wishes to think of a horse out in two, each half of which can run about separately, he can do so without the help of an artist of this kind, and pictures of lions jumping right down a crocodile's jaws, or of a fall-grown cherry tree upon a stag's forehead sown there by a cherry-stone from the Baron's gun, are quite as lively in children's fancies as in this great artist's
drawings. In truth the stories of Baron Mtuiehausen are not even caricature, but pure exaggeration, and not exaggeration of that peculiar kind which calls out the quaint unnatural gleams of Gustave Dore's distorting imagination. Instead of being subtle and unexpected deviations from the regular course of thought, which surprise one by the happy ingenuity of the variations on ordinary long-bow stories, their one characteristic is that they are very vigorous pulls at the ordinary long bow, only exceeding other pulls in audacity and continuity of strain. Perhaps now and then there may be a gleam of humour, as where the fur cloak bitten by a mad dog goes mad, and falls violently upon a dress suit in the same bureau, but for the most part they are stories of pure exaggeration in the direct line of conception of ordinary bounces.
The true difference between exaggeration and caricature is no doubt that the latter always implies an idea of some sort which can be separated from the alloy with which it is mixed, and ren- dered prominent, onlyby exaggeration,—of tenby the slightest possi- ble exaggeration,—the more subtle the better,—while exaggeration is nothing but multiplication by so high a multiplier as to convert a possibility into an absurdity. Many of Munchauseu's stories are really nothing more than possibilities enormously magnified into impossibilities,—as, for instance, the tying of the horse on the snow field to a protuberance which turns out on the subsidence of the snow in the morning to be a village church steeple, to which the horse remains dangling,—or the ocean of milk and islands of cheese, which of course are simply dairy-maids' visions with infinite mul- tipliers. And where the impossibility is organic, as in the case of the cherry-tree on the stag's forehead, the impossibility only arises from applying the rough analogy of growth in the earth to growth in the stag's forehead. This is not caricature. There is no idea in the thing which is capable of being thrown into relief by ex- aggeration. And as a rain there never is such an idea when it needs exaggeration of a very gross order to produce the sense of the ludicrous. True caricature always exaggerates no doubt, but the slighter the touch of exaggeration, so that it answer the purpose, the more complete is the caricature. When Mr. Pecksuiff's piety is to be caricatured, Dickens manages it entirely by the calmness and minuteness of his particularity in alluding to ordinary domes- ticities, while still supposed to be at once smarting under a sense of injury, and overcoming it by an effort of great Christian forgive- ness. "Charity, my dear, when you give me my bed candlestick to- night, remind me to pray for Mr. Jonas Chuzzlewit, who has done sue an injury;" and the bed candlestick is just the touch of exaggera- tion which makes this sentence caricature. His mind remains so calm and transparent through insult that he is not only in danger of for- getting the whole matter, but can conceive clearly the minutest in- .cident of the occasion on which he wishes to be reminded of the duty of praying for his enemy. So, again, the caricature of his candour, when he is beaten by Mr. Anthony Chuzzlewit, is effected by a similar delicacy of touch,—" You have beaten me with a stick which / have every reason to believe had knobs on it ; but I am not angry." He will not even assert the fact, but takes care to make it clear that he is only inferring (perhaps erroneously) to the conformation of the stick from .certain indentations which he had felt, or supposed himself to have felt, in his flesh during the beating. The "every rea- son to believe" is here the touch of exaggeration essential to .the caricature. Or, to take another instance, when poor Mr. Lillywick, the water-rate collector, is so profoundly captivated by the charms of the spinster actress, Miss Petowker, that, after witnessing her performance of the dance in the "Blood- Drinker's Burial," he describes it as "absorbing, fairy-like, toomu/- .tuous," the caricature is scarcely exaggeration at all ; it con- -slats only in the very slight magnifying power applied to a water-rate collector's conceptions of the Ideal, and the dis- covery, under that microscopic examination, of the same state of mind in a water-rate collector which induces poets so .often to clothe as it were the external universe with the hues of their own minds. Mr. Lillywick's mind was " toomnituous " with excitement at Miss Petowker's dance, at the length of the back-hair she had Jet down as it waved about during the per- lorrnance of the "Blood-Drinker's Burial," and he transferred the tumultuousness of his own nature to the fairy-like being he was .extolling. The caricature after all consists simply in the very alight but happy exaggeration of the bald. contrasts in a water- rate collector's poetic raptures,—exaggeration just enough to make .you feel that his mind was genuinely in that attitude which, had he not been a water-rate collector, or rather, had he been a culti- vated man, would have been poetic. It-is' the latent idea brought out in the words, which constitutes the caricature,—the exaggera-
tion, so far as it exists, only serves to bring out the idea more dis- tinctly to the reader's mind.
But it will be said that the American exaggerating stories are genuine caricature, and that their fun consists almost exclusively in the vastness of the multipliers which they use so coolly. We do not think so. There is humour no doubt in their case in the very magnitude of the exaggeration,—but why? Only because the greatness of the country has suggested to Americans such quantita- tive vastness in comparing themselves with Europeans, that their attitude of mind has become big, and there is consequently a drama- tic idea, not mere exaggeration, in putting great stretches-of thought into their mouths. When the Yankee said that America was bounded on the North by Aurora Borealis, on the South by the Southern Cross, on the east by the Rising Sun, and on the west by the Day of Judgment, the caricature was not in the greatness of the language, but in the relation of that big language to the big thought in the minds of genuine Yankees. Still even this is poor caricature compared with the best American stories, which always contain something much more than a mere magnified image of fact,— naiuely, some little bit of realistic detail that expresses intense repose of mind in relation to the exaggeration of which they are guilty ; and the caricature lies in the high relief given by exaggeration to this quiet self- possession of the Yankee intellect far more than in the exag- geration itself. Thus in that humorous story about the man who was fastened up in an old oil tub by the Indians, and who released himself by the ahl of a bear, who put in his tail through the bung-hole in order to get at the remains of the oil, the essence of the caricature is far less in the bounces of the narrator, who relates how the bear ran off when he felt his tail seized hold of, jumped over a precipice, and so shattered his prison to pieces and released the prisoner, than in the calm Yankee reflection and precision of detail with which the whole story is narrated. When he had seized hold of the bear's tail, he tells us that he cried out, "Charge, Chester, charge ! on, Stanley, on !" to alarm the bear into action, and the effect of this " eleguent extract" coming from a man in such a situation is irresis- tible. So when Arternus Ward in one of his orations tells his audi- ence that "The ear* continues its diurnal rotashun on its axis, subjdck to the Constitution of the United States," the essence of the caricature consists entirely in the happy emphasis given by the exaggeration to the value set by the Americans on their Consti- tution, and which suggests to Aitemus Ward to enthrone it among the laws of the physical universe with a licence such as Words- worth used with respect to Duty, when he said in his great ode,- - "Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And the most ancient Heavens through Thee are freak and strong."
True caricature cannot exist without some idea to bring out, which it often brings out by the slightest possible touches of ex- aggeration. Exaggeration, without caricature, rings flat and vulgar on any but raw childish imaginations.
And this is the true difficulty of caricature in art. It is not easy for an artist to bring out clearly an idea by means of exaggeration, and nothing is more vulgar than the long noses, and round stomachs, and other exaggerations of mere physical defects or eccentricities. Nothing is rarer than a great pictorial caricaturist. Cruikshauk has something of that power, but he excels more in the grotesque and quaint than in caricature. Still his picture in Grinun's German Stories of Dummling carrying that golden goose which has the peculiar property that it draws after him any one who merely touches his dress or touches the dress of any one touching him, is genuine caricature. The long procession of involuntary followers in all arts of costumes would not alone constitute a caricature. But Dummling's own apparent entire unconsciousness of the train behind him, the genuine earnestness of purpose with which he is proceeding in order to make the melancholy princess at the window laugh, and the excessive alarm and excitement of a very small dog that is a spectator of the procession, and which is bark- ing furiously at it, turn mere drollery into caricature. The exag- gerated embarrassments of the various parties to this ludicrous procession, set off so curiously the business-thrift of Dummling, who is making his fortune out of its absurdities, and also the un- consciousness of the dog to those absurdities, that what would otherwise be mere food for laughter, takes the subtler humour of caricature. But in general there is nothing more rare in art than true caricature. Full as Punch is of humorous designs, it is rarely indeed that we find in it one that can be properly called' happy and delicate caricature, a picture, that is, in which some exaggeration of touch—more or less slight, as the case may be—brings out clearly a humorous idea that would not otherwise be sufficiently distinct.
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