I T was a coincidence that the publication of the latest
volume of the Westminster Gazette cartoons should have been almost immediately followed by a dinner to Mr. F. C. Gould, given by the New Reform Club, at which Sir Robert Reid presided, and at which Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman proposed Mr. Gould's health. The occasion was remarkable, because, so far as we are aware, no political car tooniat has ever before been paid a compliment of this kind, or has been publicly thanked by one of his party leaders for his services to a political cause. Mr. Gould certainly has deserved the distinction conferred upon him. No cartoonist of our time has worked harder or with greater effect for his party. He possesses the power to-day, if he did not always possess it, of actually attracting opponents ; his humour has become mellowed ; and just because there is nothing acrimonious in his work, be gets those who very likely do not agree with his opinions at least to listen to them. As Sir Henry Campbell- Bannerman remarked, it takes a Liberal politician an hour to say what Mr. Gould expresses in a few lines. But the politician may not be listened to by his opponents, while Mr. Gould's work is enjoyed, probably, just as heartily by Unionists as by Liberals.
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman said at the New Reform Club that Mr. Gould was called by some persons a caricaturist, but that he was not a caricaturist in reality. Mr. Gould, who names his drawings " political caricatures," must be supposed to disagree, at least partially. Perhaps Sir Henry Campbell- Bannerman would have expressed his meaning better if he had said that Mr. Gould was not first and foremost a carica- turist.. He can caricature, doubtless ; sometimes he does so, and sometimes he does not; but first and foremost he is a politician,—more than that, an extremely earnest politician, with decided views which he takes every opportunity of expressing. A political cartoonist, he has said, to succeed, must have conviction and a purpose, and Mr. Gould is effective because his work is instinct with both. But his work is cer- tainly not pure caricature. The word implies exaggeration, the loading up of the peculiarities of a person or a figure until the line that separates the serious from the ridiculous is passed. But Mr. Gould does not always pass the line. It is a prime necessity for a political cartoon intended to " tell " that every figure in the cartoon should he recognisable, and Mr. Gould is often content, in order to attain that end, to make his likenesses extremely close. With some of his subjects, of course, he can take greater liberties than with others; he can turn Mr. Chamberlain, for instance, into a terrier, or a fox, or a swan, or a clothes-prop—almost into anything, in fact—and still be sure that the personality will be recognised In dealing with Sir Michael Hicks Beach, again, or the Duke of Devonshire, or Mr. Ritchie, or Mr. Chaplin, or with any other politician possessing strongly marked features, he allows his pencil to run freely enough; but he is much more If, then, these slightly exaggerated and humorous repre- sentations of living politicians are not pure caricature, what is pure caricature? Perhaps as full an answer as can be obtained from the work of English draughtsmen of to-day is supplied by Mr. Max Beerbohm's " The Poets' Corner," just published by Mr. Heinemann (5s. net). Mr. Beerbohm's work, it seems to us, has passed through several stages, not always entirely satisfactory, before reaching the extremely high level which he has attained in these drawings. He has always been first and foremost a caricaturist, but his caricatures up to the present have been to a considerable extent dis- pleasing, because of a certain monstrousness in them which has repelled,—not that this repellent property which they possessed was inconsistent with the true spirit of caricature. For, of course, in making men into monsters the caricaturist, if he can also combine other essen- tials with his monster-making, has logic on his side. The essence of caricature, he argues, is to convey to others the extreme impression of the man as it impinges upon the cari- caturist's mind. When you see a man often, perhaps day by day—or even if you only catch a single sudden glimpse of him —there is usually one predominant note which he strikes. It may be an aggressive chin, or an uplifted eyebrow, or a tilt in the angles of the face, or a peculiar forehead; it may be, perhaps, no especial facial feature, but a general air of alert- ness, or despondency, or -thinness, or redness. Whatever it may be, it is the province of the caricaturist to reproduce, first and foremost, that extreme impression, and to make all other points subsidiary to it. He site down, therefore, to make his caricature, and as he sits, before his mind's eye one feature becomes insistent; it grows and grows, until every- thing else is swallowed up in it. The nose is slightly tip- tilted, perhaps ; if that is the first thing that strikes the caricaturist, up goes the nose to Alpha Centauri, and the rest of the man does not matter, except that it must not draw attention away from the nose. Or there is, perchance, a certain catlike obliquity in the tilt of the eyes ; then every other feature must be shaded out of prominence to make the first insistent point of resemblance to a cat ; or the chin is prognathous, and then it must protrude until what urges itself on the spectator is not so much a man with a prognathous jaw, as a jaw to which a man's head and body are subservient furniture. All that is perfectly logical; it is the extreme overloading of the salient characteristic which is the essence, the reason of the being, of caricature. But although it is the logical extreme of caricature, it is not, surely, caricature's highest form. It involves of necessity a certain savagery and monstrousness which, simply because nothing that is high is first and foremost savage or monstrous, cannot belong to the highest form of any province of art.
Whether or not all caricaturists would admit this—would admit, that is, that nothing essentially monstrous can be representative of the highest form of any art—one thing is plain enough : that in the case of Mr. Beerbohm, at all events, his maturer work is characterised by a sense of beauty which had no part in bis earlier drawings,—in, for instance, his " Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen." In " The Poets' Corner " he has always kept before him a regard for decorativeness, which immensely enhances the effect he aims at producing. Taking a drawing at random out of this collection, one is struck at once with the charm of the scheme of " Goethe, looking at the shadow of Lili on the Blind." This surely is Goethe ; the strength and grace of his verse are in every line of the figure suddenly halting before the shadowed window. Or take the drawing of Wordsworth, at cross-purposes in a rain- storm with a small, hooded maiden, who, thin and plain, surely conveys the real idea of the child always coming back to the irritating answer : " We are seven,"—a sentence which no child would ever utter. Or again, take the picture of "Tennyson Reading In Memoriam' to his Sovereign" ; there is a rough, unpolished, keen strength of manner in the declaiming poet, and a lonely grace in the tiny figure of the Queen, separated from the Laureate by acres of patterned
carpet, which have their own peculiar distinction. lir. Kipling's Britannia, again, with whom he has changed hats, is really quite charming enough to justify her companion in blowing loud trumpets; and the "Highland Mary" at whose light figure Burns, "having put his hand to the plough, looks back," is queerly attractive, however carelessly she dances out of drawing. Last but one in the series of twenty pictures comes Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his back garden. This is, perhaps, the cleverest and most imaginative thing in the whole book. Each member of the Brotherhood, and each of the poets and artists who were magnetised by Rossetti's strange, strong personality, is admirably suggested in a few clear lines. Holman Hunt, proffering a flower to a complacent, begging creature something like a wombat; Whistler, swaggering daintily with a cane; William Morris, bellowing out great iambics ; Burne-Jones and Millais,—they are each of them the "extreme impression" of the man, yet conveying that impression without the suggestion of mon- strosity which has hitherto characterised so much of Mr. Beerbohm's work. Was that monstrosity ever worth aiming at, and is it an ideal at which any caricaturist should aim ? Surely the caricaturist is working towards higher levels when, as Lamb said of Ford, he " can discover a right line in obliquity "; when he can import an element of beauty even into so essentially grotesque a province of art as caricature.
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