MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IHAVE had the good fortune this week to obtain a copy of Volume IX of the " Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires " which has just been published under the auspices of the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. This latest volume (as its four immediate predecessors) has been edited by Dr. Mary George, who worked on the material during the long period of exile at Aberystwyth, and who has revised and completed the book since the end of the war. Clearly a work of such importance must be both formidable in appearance and weighty in bulk. But Mrs. George is not merely a scholar of great energy and precision ; she is also what so many specialists fail to be, a considerate person. In cataloguing these 1,800 odd items she provides the expert with all the information and material he need require ; but she also assists the ordinary student by producing her entries in the most convenient form and by providing him with as many as five separate indexes, so that with th6 least trouble to himself he can follow any particular trail or identify any special item. The catalogue is not, of course, an illustrated catalogue ; that would have been physically impossible ; but it is a fully descriptive catalogue in the sense that both the nature, origin and captions of the prints and drawings are reproduced and to each is added some explanatory note or gloss. It is a pleasure to possess for present reading and for future reference a book which has been so admirably edited and which contains in such accessible form material essential to any undertanding of the period. This ninth volume of the Catalogue covers the years between 1811 and 1819, in fact " the tremendous drama and the startling transitions " of the Regency period. As Mr. A. E. Popham, the Keeper of Prints and Drawings, remarks in his preface, the material here catalogued is " for the historian of politics and manners rather than for the historian of art." It is as a description of the changes in public opinion during those eventful years that the volume provides such Valuable information and such sustained interest.
The research worker of 2050, when he comes to examine or to catalogue British political and personal satires between 1938 and 1947 will be impressed by the extreme gentility displayed. One can pore over the pages of Punch during the nine years which covered the Munich episode, the war and the loss of India without finding a single joke which the most genteel person could justly describe as being in bad taste ; and without encountering any verse or comment which could (except to the historian) occasion a start of surprise. The whole tone of modern satire is temperate, conven- tional and clean. Yet if in 1811 one had paused to scan the prints displayed in 'the window of Mr. Fores' shop at the corner of Sackville Street and Piccadilly, or in that of Thomas Tegg in Cheapside, one would be left with the impression that under-statement and a sense of fair play were not the dominant characteristics of the cartoonists and caricaturists of this island. " Gentlemanliness and restraint," remarks Mrs. George, " were no part of the caricaturist's code." To our more sensitive nerves there is something shocking about the insults hurled at Bonaparte when he was down and out, and we experience a sense of embarrassed distaste at the many lampoons and drawings which depict in lurid colours the private lives of statesmen and poets, or which expose to public shame the self- indulgence of the Regent and his brothers. The laws of libel, and indeed the general level of public taste, were far less exacting than they are today. The caricaturist appears to have been immune to any threat of prosecution.
He took full advantage of this licence. It is to our minds almost inconceivable that a publisher such as Fores could display in his shop in Piccadilly anything so coarse and cruel as C. Williams' engraving on the occasion of the betrothal of Princess Charlotte to Prince Leopold. That, after all, was on the whole a popular engagement, and it seems strange that any cartoonist could have wished or dared to celebrate it with such savage scurrility. We can understand that the long menace of Napoleonic invasion should have rendered Bonaparte for us a bogy figure, and that he should for so long have been represented as a violent and bombastic young man still clad in the feathers of the Directoire. But it is somewhat strange that the King of Rome, who in similar circum- stance would today have been spared all vituperation, should be depicted with a tail. We can appreciate perhaps the shrewd cruelty which represents Lady Holland as wearing her husband's trousers, or the jokes deservedly passed on Samuel Whitbread on the falsifica- tion of all his defeatist prophecies. We can account for the constant attacks upon the Prince Regent, for the sentimental adula- tion of Princess Charlotte and for the many complaints of extravagance at Court. But it must have been most galling to the Hertford family to observe, as they passed in their chariots, the grinning faces glued to the windows of Fores' shop, and to know that their most intimate and delicate managements were being distorted and exposed. The general impression conveyed as we turn these pages is one of ferocious violence and unrestrained invective. We seem to live today in a sweeter, purer air.
Yet if we dismiss from our minds the brutality of it all, and concentrate upon what Mrs. George calls " the news-reel " aspect, we find many things which remind us of popular satire as it exists today. There is, for instance, the tendency to attribute to certain individuals who happen to attract momentary attention an importance greater than they, in fact, deserve. Thus Platoff, the Hetman of the Cossacks, becomes in 1814 more beloved by the British people even than Bliicher or Wellington. Joseph Bonaparte, the brothers Hunt and Lord Petersham acquire a contemporary prominence which history has not, to the same extent, accorded them. Strange phrases and catch-words (" push on keep moving ! " or " Cambridge butter ") emerge for a year or so and then drift away into disuse. Legends arise, transitory, nick-names are given ; at one period Napoleon figures as " Corporal Violet " and is accompanied by " The Red Man " as his evil genius. Curious facts (such as the introduction of porcelain teeth by a Parisian dentist) float into the news-reel ; we have all the momentary and evanescent jokes about Joanna Southcott, the great frost, the Regent's mortar presented to him by the Spanish Government, the kaleidoscope and the velocipede. We can trace, even in the course of those nine years, a certain shifting of tone and temper. It is interesting, for instance, to notice how Gillray's representation of John Bull as an oafish yokel gradually becomes the prosperous but exploited citizen of the later cartoonists. The John Bull of these years of ordeal and triumph is, however, very different from the calm and dignified old gentleman so frequently depicted by Bernard Partridge. He is a fierce but pathetic figure, bullied by the Inland Revenue, his life- blood drained by all manner of leeches, at one and the same time formidable and bewildered.
The sturdy patriotism of these cartoons was to be expected. Foreigners (unless they be Cossacks) are invariably depicted as excitable and underfed. All innovations are regarded with suspicion. Vaccination is derided, the Elgin Marbles are dismissed as " these here Stones " and the Regent's interest in Chinese and other works of art is held up for public merriment. Such mistakes and exaggera- tions are inevitable. Yet how far can we say, as Lord Salisbury contended, that " mankind are the dupes of a squib or of a carica- ture " ? Reading this catalogue one is left with the impression that the many errors of contemporary satire fade into forgetfulness ; what remains is the truth they tell. At the time, emotions may be wrongly affected ; but in the end Clio gets her way.
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