ENGLISH GOOD HUMOUR.
MR. CARRTJTHERS GOULD, replying to a toast to his health at a dinner given by the Authors' Club on Monday night, descanted cu the principles of the caricaturist's art. To succeed, he said, in this country it was necessary for the caricaturist "to use vinegar and never vitriol." We should prefer "lemon-juice" to "vinegar," as more nearly the exact truth ; and we should like to know from a caricaturist like Mr. Gould, who confesses that he is a political propa gandist, whether be has vitriol at command. Do vitriolic ideas ever arise in his mind, only to be repressed by his better judgment, or is the thought itself when it comes unbidden always a little sweet? We fancy the latter is the fact; but in any case the epigrammatic advice is perfectly true of this country and the present time. It is more than thirty years since a really vitriolic caricature appeared in England, and that one (by Matt. Morgan)was received with a sort of shriek of angry disdain. British political caricature, though vitriolic enough in the time of George IV., and occasionally nearly as dirty as recent German or French caricature, has during the lifetime of most living men been singularly gentle, and even sym- pathetic. Every politician in turn has been ridiculed, but none has been portrayed as vicious, and none that we can remember as even abject. Even the faces of the subjects have been spared. An Italian draughtsman who published really wonderful sketches in Vanity Fair used to bring out in any English face he portrayed whatever of sinister sugges- tion it contained, but even be never made his subject hideous, and most of his rivals have been content with emphasising some grotesque, or rather, odd, particularity. Mr. Ch amber- lam, says Mr. Gould, pardons his innumerable caricatures of himself ; and we cannot remember to have heard during the half-century of a public man who was. seriously annoyed. Sir Richard Temple, if the legend is true, did, it is true, once ask why caricaturists so often made sport of him ; but he is incapable of anything but a genial chuckle over any presentment of his rather striking physiognomy. We doubt, indeed, whether a really malicious caricature would be enjoyed, and are quite certain that a vicious one would excite no feeling but indig- nation. Our Mob jeers on occasion, but jeers as dogs bay, in inarticulate "woofs." • Even foreigners are spared. The G-ernians say we insult them in pictures as they insult us ; but the statement is absolutely untrue, unless a slight exagge- ration of the fierce curl of the Emperor's moustache is to be taken for insult.. In the fiercest tempest of popular wrath with Napoleon Ill, it was always a Certain quality of impas- siveness in his face upon which the draughtsmen seized, and often, as in Morgan's wonderful sketch of him as Memnon seated in statuesque calm waiting for the ray to strike his head and compel him to speak, he was invested with a _majesty of bearing which even at his height of .power and pros- perity never belonged to him. He always looked a Jew banker with a hidden but powerful mind. Even the national dislike of Russia has never induced the caricaturists to do-more than portray the typical Russian as a bear, and in England only Macaulay ever thought of the bear as a beast always lying "amidst bones and blood." Englishmen, taught by the "Zoo," think of him as always ravenous, but for buns rather than blood.
A fact of this kind which separates us so markedly from the Continental nations must arise from some inherent quality in • British .nature, from, in fact, a quality of good
humour, which has increased among us of late until, as we
had occasion to observe last week, it has almost killed out the power of enjoying, cr even of appreciating, stinging satire. That good humour is a. permanent quality in our popular, and especially our ephemeral, literature—though we must admit it sometimes disappears when Pro-Boers discuss the statistics of concentration camps—and we should like to know rather more exactly than we yet know what it springs from. There is plenty of " temper " among us, making misery for thousands of households, though the clergy so seldom denounce it, and we are all capable at times of white-lipped anger; and yet we produce no satirist, and scream our protests when a poet tells us of our foibles in harshly satirical verse.
We are a coarse people enough, and yet there is not a jury in the remotest county before whom the author- of an obscene,
pictorial libel would have a chance either of acquittal or of secret sympathy. One reason, no doubt., is that the habit of contempt is uncommon among us, or rather is replaced by a cold hauteur which foreigners find even more galling, but which among ourselves all ranks condone and usually respect as self-command or reserve. "He keeps hisself to bisself," remarks one mechanic of another ; but he do s not feel despised by the stand-offish comrade as even Americans dc„ but is rather inclined to apologise for him, as we heard a working man do the other day. "He ain't bad, but be takes a deal of knowin', he do." The main reason, however, we are satisfied, is that English hatred, being unmixed with envy, never rises high. The present writer can look back more years than he cares to remember, but he cannot recall one public man who was hated in the true sense, that is, as a man whose death or painful suffering would have given the people pleasure. Even a detested employer is in more danger of hooting than of personal injury, and an in- cident like the one which occurred in France shortly after 1848, the burning of a tyrannical landlord in the Dordogne, is absolutely unthinkable. Even Mr. Chamberlain would not be . burnt by a mob of Steads or devotees of the Daily News. One reason for this is the fewness of the causes for political. or social hate. Wilful oppression from above has been extinct among us for three generations. (We shall always think that the old laws which punished offences like larceny with death were oppressive in intention as well'aa effect.) The laws have become lenient. The only taxation which is not lenient falls upon those who are able to endure it without curses, or fearing—which is much to the purpose— the personal insolence of the taxgatherer. Blows, except between equals in rough duel, are never given without official redress. Eviction is still frequent, and often causes misery; but the idea that he ought to pay, if he owes, is rooted in the English poor man, and he looks on eviction, if he has had fair warning, as a result, not as a punishment. The only social evil, in fact., now bitterly felt is poverty, and the English- man frets at that, often savagely, and not at the people who are not poor. He hopes at the bottom of his heart to join their ranks some day, and meanwhile thinks of them only as lucky. The -writer has seen a countryside during an epidemic of rick-burning intended to punish the use of machines for threshing, but he never even heard of a house being fired because, its owner was too rich. Hatred, therefore, though it is not extinct us a motive power among us—Lord Lytton, who said it was, had an insuf- ficient, experience—has taken on a milder quality. As to foreigners, we suppose hatred was really felt when there was danger that Napoleon would invade—there are certainly family legends of prayers for his death being offered with the household petitions—but there is none now. There is anger at French or German insult; but if the Boer leaders who have killed so many of us expressed a readiness to forget, no human being in this country would object to their getting cavalry commissions. To a temper so softened pictorial insult of the really savage kind gives pain, not• pleasure; and even bitter satire is repellent. _ Ridicule there may be in plenty,. but ridicule embitters . only the weak. " Joe " is laughed at pictorially every week, but tells the draughtsman that he bears him no malice, and, we doubt not, treasures up the sketches as useful materials for the future biographer.
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