Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and Many Lands. James Parton
Читать онлайн книгу.
and when one appeared in the scales so void of guilt that the good angel must needs possess it, he may be seen slyly putting a finger upon the opposite scale to weigh it down, and this sometimes in spite of the angel's remonstrance. In one picture, described by M. Mérimée in his "Voyage en Auvergne," the devil plays this trick at a moment when the archangel Michael has turned to look another way.
Lost Souls cast into Hell. (From Queen Mary's Psalter.)
It is a strange circumstance that in a large number of these representations the devil is exhibited triumphant, and in others the victory is at least doubtful. In a splendid psalter preserved in the British Museum there is a large picture (an engraving of which is given on the preceding page) of a soul climbing an extremely steep and high mountain, on the summit of which a winged archangel stands with outstretched arms to receive him. The soul has nearly reached the top; another step will bring him within the archangel's reach; but behind him is the devil with a long three-pronged clawing instrument, which he is about to thrust into the hair of the ascending saint; and no man can tell which is to finally have that soul, the angel or the devil. M. Champfleury describes a capital in a French church which represents one of the minions of the devil carrying a lizard, symbol of evil, which he is about to add to the scale containing the sins; and the spectator is left to infer that fraud of this kind is likely to be successful, for underneath is written, "Ecce Diabolus!" It is as if the artist had said, "Such is the devil, and this is one of his modes of entrapping his natural prey of human souls!" From a large number of similar pictures the inference is fair that, let a man lead a spotless life from the cradle to the grave, the devil, by a mere trick, may get his soul at last. Some of the artists might be suspected of sympathizing with the devil in his triumphs over the weakness of man. Observe, for example, the comic exuberance of the above picture, in which devils are seen tumbling their immortal booty into the jaws of perdition.
It is difficult to look at this picture without feeling that the artist must have been alive to the humors of the situation. It is, however, the opinion of students of these quaint relics that the authors of such designs honestly intended to excite horror, not hilarity. Queen Mary probably saw in this picture, as she turned the page of her sumptuous psalter, an argument to inflame her bloody zeal for the ancient faith. In the writings of some of the early fathers we observe the same appearance of joyous exultation at the sufferings of the lost, if not a sense of the comic absurdity of their doom. Readers may remember the passage from Tertullian (A.D. 200) quoted so effectively by Gibbon:
"You are fond of all spectacles," exclaims this truly ferocious Christian; "expect the greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment of the universe. How shall I rejoice, how laugh, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs and fancied gods groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates who persecuted the name of the Lord liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the tribunal; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers—"
Devils seizing their Prey. (Bas-relief on the Portal of a Church at Troyes.)
This is assuredly not the utterance of compassion, but rather of the fierce delight of an unregenerate Roman, when at the amphitheatre he doomed a rival's defeated gladiator to death by pointing downward with his thumb. In a similar spirit such pictures were conceived as the one given above.
The sculptor, it is apparent, is "with" the adversary of mankind in the present case. Kings and bishops carried things with a high hand during their mortal career, but the devils have them at last with a rope round their necks, crown and mitre notwithstanding!
The devil was not always victor. There was One whom neither his low cunning nor his bland address nor his blunt audacity could beguile—the Son of God, his predestined conqueror. The passages in the Gospels which relate the attempts made by Satan to tempt the Lord furnished congenial subjects to the illuminators of the Middle Ages, and they treated those subjects with their usual enormous crudity. In one very ancient Saxon psalter, in manuscript, preserved at the British Museum, there is a colossal Christ, with one foot upon a devil, the other foot about to fall upon a second devil, and with his hands delivering from the open mouth of a third devil human souls, who hold up to him their hands clasped as in prayer. In this picture the sympathies of the artist are evidently not on the side of the evil spirits. Their malevolence is apparent, and their attitude is ignominious. The rescued souls are, indeed, a pigmy crew, of woe-begone aspect; but their resistless Deliverer towers aloft in such imposing altitude that the tallest of the saints hardly reaches above his knees. In another picture of very early date, the Lord upon a high place is rescuing a soul from three scoffing devils, who are endeavoring to pull him down to perdition by cords twisted round his legs. This soul we are permitted to consider safe; but below, in a corner of the spacious drawing, a winged archangel is spearing a lost soul into the flames of hell, using the spear in the manner of a farmer handling a pitchfork.
The Temptation.
These ancient attempts to exhibit the endless conflict between good and evil are too rude even to be interesting. The specimen annexed, of later date, about 1475, occurs in a Poor People's Bible (Biblia Pauperum), block-printed, in which it forms part of an extensive frontispiece. The book was once the property of George III., at the sale of whose personal effects it was bought for the British Museum, where it now is. It has the additional interest of being one of the oldest specimens of wood-engraving yet discovered.
The mountain in the background, adorned by a single tree, is the height to which the Lord was taken by the tempter, and from which the devil urged him to cast himself down.
A very frequent object of caricature during the ages when terror ruled the minds of men was human life itself—its brevity, its uncertainty, and the absurd, ill-timed suddenness with which inexorable death sometimes cuts it short. Herodotus records that at the banquets of the Egyptians it was customary for a person to carry about the table the figure of a corpse lying upon a coffin, and to cry out, "Behold this image of what yourselves shall be; therefore eat, drink, and be merry." There are traces of a similar custom in the records of other ancient nations, among whom it was regarded as a self-evident truth that the shortness of life was a reason for making the most of it while it lasted. And their notion of making the most of it was to get from it the greatest amount of pleasure. This vulgar scheme of existence vanished at the promulgation of the doctrine that the condition of every soul was fixed unalterably at the moment of its severance from the body, or, at best, after a short period of purgation, and that the only way to avoid unending anguish was to do what the Church commanded and to avoid what the Church forbade. Terror from that time ruled Christendom. Terror covered the earth with ecclesiastical structures, gave the Church a tenth of all revenues and two-fifths of all property. By every possible device death was clothed with new and vivid terrors, and in every possible way the truth was brought home to the mind that the coming of death could be as unexpected as it was inevitable and unwelcome. The tolling of the church-bell spread the gloom of the death-chamber over the whole town; and the death-crier, with bell and lantern, wearing a garment made terrible by a skull and cross-bones, went his rounds, by day or night, crying to all good people to pray for the soul just departed.[6]
French Death-crier—"Pray for the Soul just departed."
These criers did not cease to perambulate the streets of Paris until about the year 1690, and M. Langlois informs us that in remote provinces of France their doleful cry was heard as recently as 1850.
Blessed gift of humor! Against the most complicated and effective apparatus of terror ever contrived, worked by the most powerful organization that ever existed, the sense of the ludicrous asserted itself,