TENNIEL'S HUMOUR.
R. TENNIEL'S pictorial satire is extraordinarily unique. Ill He is in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in hearty sympathy with the ordinary British bourgeoisie, taking the plain- sailing 'Philistine' view of political and social questions almost 'without a single sign of hesitation or mental debate. 'And yet he not only manages to throw a sharp flavour of contempt into all his best drawings,—which is noticeable only for its marked intellectual tone, for there is no frame of mind so delightful and easy to the man who has borrowed all his ideas from his neighbours, as scorn for the man who has ideas of his own,—bat to throw, at least into the very best of his conceptions, and in some degree into a very considerable number of them, a tone of grimness or ghast- liness, which removes them far beyond the range of common-place productions. No one who remembers his first series of cartoons from Punch can well forget that weird picture of the genius of Cholera haunting the putrid and deadly Thames,—a picture worthy to rank in the first class of imaginative dreams, from its strange power of combining the ghastliness of ideal pestilence with the foul realities which breed pestilence. Compare with that wonderful picture in the first series the one in this* in which Mr. Tenniel pillories the infamous quack doctor who lives by the secret terrors he inspires (No. 25); what a mystery of loathsomeness is that rapacious face, spotted with the interior foulness of the man as it peers through the pillory with a leer of physical uneasiness, but without the least abatement of the greedy, carrion-feeding voracity behind it ; what harpy claws are those which hang through the arm-holes ; what a gruesome air of unfathomable uncleanness and moral putridity possesses the whole figure ; it positively turns one sick to look at it ! The genius of Cholera is a pallid and wholesome dream compared with this. Or, to take a case in which Mr. Tenniel has studied the ghastliness of morale less, and the ghastliness of grotesquerie more, look at that picture of the Demon-Butcher (No. 32). The subject was not in this case one that would have suggested the ghastly at all to any ordinary mind, for it was only that British clamour against the high prices of the retail butchers which stormed the smoky Lon- don skies of November 1865. Yet Mr. Tenniel has made of it a picture far more ghastly than ever was made of the Demon-Hunter of the Harz. The butcher stands with his scant and bristly hair rising into horns on either side of his forehead, his eyes rolled down till hardly anything but the whites are seen, his mouth open and his tongue convulsed, his arms and hands raised and his legs wide apart, as he exults with a demonical ha ! ha ! over the price of beef, " fourteenpence a pound!" his knife hangs down over his apron ; his money-bags am on the table beside him ; and the British housekeeper with a big marketing-basket is dropping her door- key in affright, and gazing with horror-struck open mouth at the frenzied figure,—her vulgar, bunchy crinoline making her own figure look still more grotesque. Mr. Tenniel evidently studied the grotesque only in this picture. He rather wished to laugh at the public horror over the high price of butcher's meat, and to caricature the indignation against the butcher. Yet he went be- yond his intention. Instead of making the British anguish of mind and fury at the dearness of butcher's meat simply ridiculous, he contrived to make the demon-batcher ' so ghastly. as to sug- gest not so much the insane violence of the British indignation, as the possibility that some mystery of iniquity, some unsuspected man of sin, might really lurk in the British butcher's bosom, and direct the arm which wields that deadly knife. It is a marvel- lously lurid conception of a prosaic subject.
And you see something of the same genius in all the more remarkable social pictures. Look at that one of "The Haunted Lady ; or, the Ghost in the Looking-Glass" (No. 13),. where Madame la Modiste, with a face full of cruel and grinning sub- serviency. dressed in a bonnet overloaded with artificial flowers, is telling her customer that, as she would not have disappointed her ladyship "at any sacrifice, the dress is finished is merveille," and her ladyship herself, gazing into the mirror to admire her own ball- dress, sees in it the collapsing figure of the dying girl whose failing powers have been taxed to complete the dress in which her ladyship is arrayed. The ghastliness consists, as you might expect, with Mr. Tenniel, less in the ghost that appears in the mirror,—for there is a grateful sense of coming rest thrown into its counten- ance,—than in the wheedling cruelty of the triumphant milliner, and the start of dismay which the artist has given to the plump, comfortable, inexpressive countenance of the noble ball-goer. The picture of death Mr. Tenniel has made only pathetic ; the picture of dismay on a thoughtless, common-place, and well-nourished countenance he has made just a little uncanny ; but the picture of cruel adulation, of rapacious satisfaction, of the milliner's face, in its overdressed framework of artificial flowers, he has made thoroughly grim. There is real hate in Mr. Tenniers finest conceptions.
But the hate is often grossly misdirected. In fact, the curious thing is, that with this great gift of grim creativeness, especially under the influence of hate, Mr. Tenniel should seem to have such a wonderful power of hating precisely, or almost precisely, what the English bourgeois for the time being hates, and of expressing with infinite resource that rather stupid indi- vidual's slightest aversions. Take Mr. Tenniel's pictorial attacks upon the North, for instance, during the American civil war, his fine picture of the worship of the American Juggernaut in the
* Published by Bradbury and Brans.
shape of the Northern prostrations before the power of the Cannon, when the North were beginning to succeed in 1864; his picture
after the peace in October, 1865, when he draws Colonel North as a cunning and rowdy Yankee, proposing to Colonel South, who has the grave, sad, dignified expression of valour in misfortune, "that as they couldn't both win, they should shake bands, and just liquor up ; " and, most of all, his picture of President Lincoln's Negro difficulties in 1862. Lincoln is drawn (No. 14) as Brutus in his tent before Philippi, while Cmsar's ghost appears in the shape of the irrepressible negro in a grand toga, but with the idiotic type of negro's head, glaring whites to his eyes, and great shining rows of prominent teeth, "Wall now, do tell, who's you ? " asks the American Brutus, with a hard, brassy, inquisitive glance, the negro Cmsar replying, "I am dy ebil genus, Massa Linking ; dis child am awful inimpressional." A booby negro in the corner, his cheeks cowering between high walls of collar, has been playing on the guitar for Brutus's amusement, and is almost falling off his chair in terror at the apparition. The same sort of contempt for the negro comes out in the cartoon drawn at the time of the Jamaica insurrection. This tendency of Mr. Tenuiel's of course does not stand alone, but reappears in his contempt for other peoples who, because they make inconvenient subjects, are comfortably dubbed by the English bourgeoisie as "inferior races." He paints indeed an allegorical Erin with a touch of sentiment, but he never paints the typical Irishman without contempt ; and as for the Fenians, he delineates them as an especially loathsome and mischievous variety of baboons. Into all his caricature attacks on the Fenians Mr. Tenniel has poured a scornful hate which is exceedingly lurid and grim in its effects.
In the political caricatures, Mr. Tenniel's favourite subjects are those which afford him most scope for his wonderful power in delineating what is sinister. The ex-Emperor of the French,—if indeed he be vanished from the political stage,—will be a very great loss to him. There was no figure he drew with more mar- vellous force. Look, for instance, at that adaptation from Faust (No. 4), where he draws Italy as Gretchen pulling the leaves off her rose, and repeating "He loves me," "loves me not," to test the fidelity of Victor Emanuel, who is the Faust. In the background is the Ex-Emperor as Mephistepheles, deep in conversation with the old woman Martha (the Pope), and plotting the destruction of the girl. The mixture of finesse and animal stupidity in the Emperor's face is wonderfully given, while the old woman is simply all fuss and open-mouthed cackle. Or look at that "Vision by the Way" (No. 106), where the Emperor, riding with little Louis through a night as dark as Erebus, is warned back by the ghost of Napoleon I. to which the boy is pointing. The Emperor's scowl of difficult thought,—not as if he were in the least terrified, but as if he knew he had not quite brain enough for the occasion, and were trying to make the most of all the brain he had, and focus it on the situation, ie., on the best mode of utilizing the imperial ghost's somewhat tardy warning, is marvel- lously given. Mr. Tenniel has attributed in all these caricatures to the ex-Emperor a cunning, but heavy, inert, animal nature, that it takes a great deal of exertion to get under intellectual weigh at all, and we know few studies of him nearer the truth. In English politics, Mr. Tenniel fixes with most avidity on Mr. Disraeli and Earl Russell. To Mr. Disraeli he always gives a bold and brazen expression, something like that of a groom who is giving warn- ing after effecting a private marriage with his young mistress. Look, for instance, at the picture of the Derby of 1867, in which "Dizzy wins with Reform Bill" (No. 51), where Disraeli is turning back to look at the frowning Gladstone with a smirk of effrontery ; or the still better picture of him after Lord Derby's resignation in 1868 (No. 65), where he is taking the part of Hamlet for the first time, and with the princely feathers nodding on his head, and an air of ineffably sinister vulgarity on his pursed, complacent lips, is repeating to himself, "To be, or not to be, that is the question,—ahem !" Mr. Disraeli is always bold and brazen, and generally daring and able in Mr. Tenniel's pictures. As in No. 66, where Messrs. Gladstone and Bright are boarding his craft, and he, with cocked pistol, is threatening to blow up the powder magazine rather than surrender, —in other words, threatening a dissolution,—Mr. Disraeli is generally credited by his caricaturist with real daring, though with still more effrontery. As for Earl Russell, in him too evidently Mr. Tenniel finds something slightly sinister. The picture of "Strengthening the Bill,"—a parody of Mr. Fechter's mode of strengthening his bill at the Lyceum by introducing his son for the first time on to the stage—wherein Earl Russell is introduced as presenting Lord Amberley to public life, discovers in Earl
Russell a most sinister mixture of frigid acuteness and family pride. There is a coldness about the conceit, an experivaen- talizing air about the pride, as though Earl Russell were saying to himself, 'That is a masterpiece,—but if not, I am quite ready to try again,' that marks the face of the caricature as both sly and proud at once. So, too, in the picture where Mr. Roebuck as Hector is attacking Earl Russell as Teucer, who skulks for protection under the shield of Ajax (Lord Palmerston), but looks out very imperturbably from under it. It is not fear, it is policy which drives him there ; he is as cool as self-possession could make him, but he enjoys the shelter he gets at another's expense ; that gives it a new relish to him.
Mr. Tenniel's political criticism is always with the uppermost current of London opinion, but he always contrives to throw in a cynical infusion, which gives an original flavour, generally a flavour of something grim, when it is possible of something even gruesome, into his contempt. His genius is fundamentally sardonic, and is greatest when it can reach the ghastly. The only exception we know in this volume is the admirable picture of Mr. Bright trotting about like a small Gulliver between the legs of "A Brummagem Frankenstein "(No. 43), the Brobdignag working-man, and saying with affrighted accents, "I have no fe-fe-fear of Ma-Manhood Suffrage,"—a cartoon of real broad humour, satirical, indeed, but not sardonic,—one of the few pictures of Mr. Tenniel's which disposes to a hearty laugh.
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