DID THE ANCIENTS CARICATURE?
TIRE industry of modern scholarship has so thoroughly ransacked the stores of ancient learning, and has poured so full a light, not merely on the public, but even the domestic, life of our prede- cessors in the history of civilization, that it perhaps does not often occur to us how many paths of inquiry are still untrodden even by a solitary traveller. In the sense of humour, for instance, we have abundant evidence that the ancients were not deficient; and even if the overwhelming fun of Aristophanes had not been preserved for the delight and admiration of mankind, our consciousness of the uniformity of human nature would be sufficient to assure us of it. Laughter is, after all, the most distinctive characteristic of man : some form of satire is to be found among even the rudest tribes; and it is the natural resource of weakness in a lawless age—a retort of which no bodily strength avails to turn the edge. Literature is not, however, the only means of communicating his ideas to the public which the satirist possesses. So soon as the pictorial art has attained any considerable development, he may address the mind through the medium, not of the ear, but of the eye, with the pencil rather than the pen. Thus it wears an aspect of singularity, that, while we possess the comic literature of antiquity—to a sufficient extent, at all events, to let us judge of its quality—we search long, and with scanty results, upon the vases of Greece and among the frescoes of Pompeii, for any trace of that humour which informs the outlines of H. B. or of Leech. We have the comic literature of the ancients, but where is their caricature?
This question has recently engaged the attention of M. Champ- fleury, who has concealed the scantiness of the information which he has been able to collect, with all that airy grace which is the charac- teristic of a French essayist. In his rashaess, or his despair, he interrogated, even the awful remains of Egyptian art; and has suc- ceeded, as he thinks, in showing that the caricaturist of the Nile did not respect even the sacred rites of religion or the royal majesty of Rameses. There are, it seems, three papyri in existence of a 'deci- dedly humorous character, one in the Royal Library at Turin, one in the British Museum, and another in a private collection in America. In all these, animals—cats, rats, wolves, and lions—are represented as performing human actions, and especially such actions as are the conventional subjects of the hieroglyphical paintings. There is a pleasing group, for instance, frequently repeated on the walls of the Egyptian palaces, in which four females are represented as playing respectively on the harp, the lyre, the theorbo, and a sort of double flute. In the Turin papyrus these female figures are metamorphosed into an ass, a lion, a crocodile, and an ape. In the papyrus of the British Museum the rites of religion are travestied—a cat with a flower in its hand offers the sacred funereal offerings to a rat, which, gravely seated in a chair, scents the perfume of an enormous lotus- flower. While, in another place, a lion is represented as playing at chess with a gazelle, the group being an exact copy of one on the walls of the palace of Medinet-Abou, in which Rameses III. is play- ing this game with one of his wives. And this is all—some two hundred figures of animals on three papyri—while the remains of Egyptian art fill whole galleries in every capital of Europe, and cover acres of wall along the whole course of the mysterious Nile. Either Time has been very capricious in his destruction, or the Egyptian caricaturist was not entirely appreciated by the public of his day. Of the comic art of Greece we possess nothing but a name, but, then, to M. Champfleury a name is everything. He has built the airiest of castles on the few isolated facts that can be gleaned from the ancient writers respecting the genius of Pauson. This painter was the contemporary of Aristophanes, who, besides twice taunting him with poverty, makes the chorus in the itcharxiane expressly con- gratulate the Megarian that "he will no longer be the laughing-stock of the infamous Pauson." About one hundred and twenty years later, Aristotle, in the Poetics, distinguishing, apparently, the idealist, the caricaturist, and the realist from each other, remarks that in imi- tation one must necessarily represent men as better than they are, as worse than they are, or as they are, and he gives Pauson as an in- stance of a painter who painted men uglier than they were. These pas- sages may, perhaps, be sufficient to establish that Pauson did draw caricatures, and that the Greeks, therefore, must have known what a caricature was, but they are surely somewhat slender grounds on which to found the reputation of a great comic painter. Aristotle, perhaps, did not perceive the importance which, in a more advanced civilization, the art of caricature might assume, but where is the evi- dence that Aristophanes was writhing under the pangs of wounded vanity and avenging the wrongs of his distorted features ? We may, perhaps, conjecture that if Aristophanes, who gibbeted so many more important persons on so small a provocation, had been caricatured, he would not have let off the offender with three insignificant sneers, and that Aristotle did not comprehend the possibilities of the art of
caricature, by no means proves that he did not comprehend the possi bilities of the art of Pauson. The fact, however, that he is mentioned a century after his death by Aristotle as, in some degree, the repre- sentative of a class, may, perhaps, be taken as sufficient proof that he was really a painter of celebrity. Moreover, his name is preserved in the pages of Lucian, Plutarch, and even (Man; though the anecdote which they record of him would go to show him, not so much a cari- caturist, as a painter of animals of rather more than the proverbial irritability of his calling. Be this as it may, on the name of Pauson rests as yet the reputation of Greek caricature.
In the pages of Pliny, however, we arrive on land of a somewhat firmer character. Bapaltis and Athenis painted the portrait of the poet Hipponax, who was remarkably ugly, and exposed it, by way of joke, to the public. I pupil of Apelles made himself famous by a burlesque painting, in which he represented Jupiter, in female attire, giving birth to Bacchus amid a group of goddesses officiating as monthly nurses. "True caricaturist," says M. Champfleury, "who respects not even the gods." The fame of Clesides depends oft a picture of Queen Stratonice, whom, in revenge for some slight which he had received from her, he portrayed as rolling with a fisherman, who was rumoured to be her lover. This picture he exposed in the market-place of Ephesus, and fled for his life. The queen, however, was so pleased with the accuracy of the portraits, that she over- looked the insult to her fame. But, except in traditions of this sort, no trace remains to us of anything like personal caricature. Gro- tesque painting indeed there is, and of the happiest kind, of which the famous studio of a painter from the walls of Pompeii affords a well-known instance. In this sort of painting the human figure is reduced to the dimensions of a pigmy, while an exaggerated impor- tance is given to the head and upper portion of the body, precisely like those distorted elves which do such constant duty in the illus- trated fairy tales of modern artists. In the painting to which we have alluded the painter sits at his easel with his colours ranged on a little table at his side. The sitter, on whose portrait he is engaged, has all that expression of gratified vanity and foolish sheepish- ness which sitters always have. On the left, an attendant pre- pares the colours in a vase placed over charcoal. Behind him, a pupil leaves the book which he is studying to gaze furtively over his shoulder at what is going on around him. On the right, two dwarf friends of the painter are engaged in a lively criticism of his work, while a most grotesque bird, ',considerably taller than the human figures, serves at once to represent the customary contents of a studio, and to puzzle the commentators. The drawings of this sort at Herculaneum are still more unreal. There a number of naked little gnomes are engaged in the different pursuits of a country life, all animated by something of the same comic earnestness with which Stothard supplies the fat little children who form the subject of his woodcuts. In another instance, attributed to the time of the Mace- donian kingdom, the flight of Aneas with Anchises on his shoulder, and leading the little Ascanius, is travestied by representing the three figures with the heads and tails of dogs. But all the labour and ingenuity of M. Champfleury has not succeeded in producing a single extant painting or drawing which can with propriety be called a caricature. Burlesque painting there is ; but, except in the few vague traditions which we have enumerated above, from the pages of Pliny, no proof can be given that any ancient artist ever endeavoured to throw ridicule on the actions of a contemporary by the publication during his life of a distorted representation of his features.
It assuredly does not follow, from the fact that they have not reached us among the fragments of ancient art, which alone time has spared to us, that they never in truth existed. But it is hard to attribute such partiality to so impartial a destroyer, and there may perhaps be mechanical reasons why the art of caricature was likely to be far less efficacious in the hands of the satirist then than now. Now-a-days, the sketch of the artist is multiplied a thousand times in a few hours by the skill of the printer, and thus his meaning is easily and cheaply disseminated among the multitude. But the original, passed from hand to hand, would generally have disappeared altogether even before the ephemeral interest attached to it had expired. While, on the other hand, satirical verses were easily learned and repeated from mouth to mouth, while men's memories, too, were probably more practised before the invention of paper and ink. It may well be doubted whether pictorial satire is not the in- vention of a very late age. The same qualities must, of course, have existed in the human mind from the beginning, of which here and there a trace may be discovered by the learning, and expanded by the ingenuity, of the modern inquirer. But even human qualities need favourable circumstances before they can flourish, and mul- tiply, and produce a continuous harvest, and of such a harvest in the ancient world there is not a trace. A few isolated passages of antiquity have given birth to a fanciful and graceful essay, and we, who have profited by M. Champtleury's labours, will be content to hope that, as he continues his task, he may find arguments which may satisfy the minds of his readers as well as he has already satisfied his own.
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