CIARA_N D'AOHE.
WHO can doubt that the moat personal,.the most self- revealing, of all the arts is the art of caricature P The poet, the dramatist, the musician, the great painter or sculptor,—these can elude us in their works; they can project their creations into a life which is independent of their own. " We ask and ask ; thou smilest and art still,"—it is not only te Shakespeare that the words are applicable, but to Velazquez, to Sophocles, to Mozart, to half the great artists of the world. The reason is pbvious enough ; great art is concerned, by its very nature, with abstractions and generalities, with eternal thoughts and passions, with things that are the common heritage of all mankind; and it ie only when the artist descends from these heights, when he walks among us in the ordinary daylight and occupies himself with the passing circumstances of some special time and place, that we begin to ave a chance of recognising his features and learning what tuanner of men be is. Thus the novelist, whose busiuess lies with the actual and the particular, seems as a rule far closer to is than the poet. We feel that we know Thackeray and Dickens almost personally, while we can hardly venture to claim more than a bowing acquaintance with Tennyson and Frowning. But the caricaturist, the artist who lives in the moment, observing, criticising, and interpreting the Auatuating face of things, who cracks his jokes to us at breakfast, and laughs with us every evening at the absurdities of the day,—him we feel that we know with a peculiar intimacy ; he is, in some odd true way, one of our friends. Some such feeling as this tenet have crossed the minds of many Englishmen when the news came of the death of Caran d'Ache, the only modern French caricaturist Whose work has become really familiar to tie on this side of the Channel. Every one who knew his pictures must have been convinced that they knew the man. Those rapid, pre- posterous, good-humoured, and somewhat scurrilous drawings gall up before the mind the image of one imbued through and through with some of the most marked characteristics of the French race, There weld be to more striking instance of the forge of racial qualities than the fad that Caren, d'Aolos was barn and educated in Russia, and that be never saw Paris till his twenty-first year. His charaeterietice, beyond a doubt, were net " aequired," but "inherited." Yet, though it is true that his genius was supremely French, it is. equally true that there were some sides of the French nature which it did not represent. ()e'en d'Aehe possessed. very, little of the exquisite wit, the delicacy, the refinement, the. love of formal perfection, which have made the influence of France unique in the history of modern Europe. He belonged to a very different, but a no less decidedly French, acing:IL-- the school of Rabelais and Moliere, of Scerron and Regnard and Labiche, the school which produces to-day the exhilarating and effervescing farce* of the Palais Royal.
"Sport that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter holding both his sides," —that is the essential spirit of this element in the Frontal• character which has exercised so persistent and so healthy an influence upon French art and literature. If sheer laughter is at the bottom of it, it is laughter which is neither malignant nor meaningless, but eminently human. At its best, as in Rabelais, it is elemental,—the golden and eternal laughter of the gods. Caran d'Ache certainly never quite reached that plenitude or that significance; but the same stuff was in him. which went to the making of Gargantua, and his drawings, in their smaller way, have the same happy and marvellous faculty of clearing the air. To look at them is to find oneself transported in a moment to a Paris boulevard, with all its out-of-door gaiety and its immense vitality thronging about one. In that atmosphere, one feels, dullness and stupidity and ill-nature are impossible things ; one has only to live and to laugh, and all will be well.
Unlike other artists, whose main concern is with the beautiful, the caricaturist's first duty is to be expressive: His work may be beautiful as well,—it often is; but, if it fails to be expressive, no amount of beauty will prevent its failing as caricature. Judged by this standard, the drawings of Caran d'Ache must take a very high rank. They are rarely remarkable for their intrinsic beauty ; though their work- manship is never slovenly, though their composition—that pitfall for the caricaturist—is always careful, they lack those qualities of merely sensuous beauty which make so many of the drawings of Rowlandson, for instance, or of Phil May, a pure delight to the eye. It is in their expressiveness that they triumph,—their amazing vigour of presenta- tion, their consummate faculty for bringing out the salient qualities of things. And this effect is produced by an extreme simplicity of means,—the sure sign of a master. A simple style is the first condition for success in caricature, because the beauties of ornament and elaboration are out of place in an art which aims primarily at the emphatic representation of objects. It is impossible to conceive of a successful caricature painted full length in oils : the interest aroused by the mere workmanship would distract the mind from the subject and destroy the effect of the whole. A notable example of the virtues of simplicity—of austerity even—is to be found in the work of Sir John Tenniel, the great cartoonist whose eighty-ninth birthday was celebrated at the beginning of the week. What could be more masterly than that firm economy of line, that plain disposition of sober masses P What better calculated to produce those effects of forcible humour and grandiose allegory which we know so well P Different as it is in tone and in style, the work of Caran d'Ache resembles that of Sir John Tenniel through its combination of expressiveness and simplicity. If we look at the famous pair of drawings published when the "Affairs Dreyfus" was at its height—the first, entitled " Surtout ne parlous pas de l'affaire," depicting a comfortable bourgeois party seated round the dinner-table, and the second, " Its en ont parhi," showing the terrific and cataclysmal result of the fatal discussion—we shall find it difficult to believe that effects so extraordinarily diverse could have been produced by a few plain acratchings from a single pen. The first picture is all order and stolidity,—the very chairs seem monstrously respectable; the second is all riot and frenzy,—the tablecloth torn from the table, the glass broken, the lamp swinging and shattered, and every guest in a life- and-death struggle with his neighbour. But the change in the faces is what is most deserving of attention,—the fatuous, pleased looks of the first picture compared with the desperate, malignant, and insensate expressions in the second. In both cases there is an almost incredible absence of detail; a single line has been enough to indicate all the placidity and emptiness of which a human countenance is capable, and the extremity of rage and hatred has been put into a mouth or an eye by means of a simple circle, or a spot and a dash.
It is, no doubt, in his line that all Caran d'Ache's most characteristic qualities live and move and have their being, —his farcical humour, his energy, his sense of life. • It is a somewhat gross, a somewhat unimaginative line. And certainly it would he vain to claim for it any rare emotional value ; its virtues lie elsewhere. It is admirable because of that vitality, that mobility, that inexhaustible rich raciness which flows in every curve and every wriggle of it, and brings a gladness to our eyes. Melancholy indeed is the reflection that this line, so bold and so amusing, dashing forward so impetuously and so untiringly on its happy course, has come to a stop now for ever.
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