Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and Many Lands. James Parton
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and saved the human mind from being crushed down into abject and hopeless idiocy. The readers of "Don Quixote" can not have forgotten the colloquy in the highway between the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and the head of the company of strollers.
"'Sir,' replied the Devil, politely, stopping his cart, 'we are the actors of the company of the Evil Spirit. This morning, which is the octave of Corpus Christi, we have represented the play of the Empire of Death. This young man played Death, and this one an Angel. This woman, who is the wife of the author of the comedy, is the Queen. Over there is one who played the part of an Emperor, and the other man that of a Soldier. As to myself, I am the Devil, at your service, and one of the principal actors.'"
Death and the Cripple.
For centuries the comedy of Death was a standard play at high festivals, the main interest being the rude, sudden interruption of human lives and joys and schemes by the grim messenger. Art adopted the theme, and the Dance of Death began to figure among the decorations of ecclesiastical structures and on the vellum of illuminated prayer-books. No sculptor but executed his Dance of Death; no painter but tried his skill upon it; and by whomsoever the subject was treated, the element of humor was seldom wanting.
So numerous are the pictures and series of pictures usually styled Dances of Death, that a descriptive catalogue of them would fill the space assigned to this chapter; and the literature to which they have given rise forms an important class of the works relating to the Middle Ages. Two phases of the subject were especially attractive to artists. One was the impartiality of Death, noted by Horace in the familiar passage; and the other the incongruity between the summons to depart and the condition of the person summoned. When these two aspects of the subject had become hackneyed, artists pleased themselves sometimes with a treatment precisely the opposite, and represented Death dancing gayly away with the most battered, ancient, and forlorn of human kind, who had least reason to love life, but did not the less shrink from the skeleton's icy touch. Every one feels the comic absurdity of gay and sprightly Death hurrying off to the tomb a cripple as dilapidated as the one in the picture above. In another engraving we see Death, with exaggerated courtesy, handing to an open tomb an extremely old man just able to totter.
Death and the Old Man.
Another subject in the same series is Death dragging at the garment of a peddler, who is so heavily laden as he trudges along the highway that one would imagine even the rest of the grave welcome. But the peddler, too, makes a very wry face when he recognizes who it is that has interrupted his weary tramp. The triumphant gayety of Death in this picture is in humorous contrast with the lugubrious expression on the countenance of his victim.
Death and the Peddler.
Death and the Knight.
In other series we have Death dressed as a beau seizing a young maiden, Death taking from a house-maid her broom, Death laying hold of a washer-woman, Death taking apples from an apple-stand, Death beckoning away a bar-maid, Death summoning a female mourner at a funeral, and Death plundering a tinker's basket. Death, standing in a grave, pulls the grave-digger in by the leg; seated on a plow, he seizes the farmer; with an ale-pot at his back, he throttles an inn-keeper who is adulterating his liquors; he strikes with a bone the irksome chain of matrimony, and thus sets free a couple bound by it; he mows down a philosopher holding a clock; upon a miser who has thrust his body deep down into a massive chest he shuts the heavy lid; he shows himself in the mirror in which a young beauty is looking; to a philosopher seated in his study he enters and presents an hour-glass. A pope on his throne is crowning an emperor kneeling at his feet, with princes, cardinals, and bishops in attendance, when a Death appears at his side, and another in his retinue dressed as a cardinal. Death lays his hand upon an emperor's crown at the moment when he is doing justice to a poor man against a rich; but in another picture of the same series, Death seizes a duke while he is disdainfully turning from a poor woman with her child who has asked alms of him. The dignitaries of the Church were not spared. Fat abbots, gorgeous cardinals, and vehement preachers all figure in these series in circumstances of honor and of dishonor. In most of them the person summoned yields to King Death without a struggle; but in one a knight makes a furious resistance, laying about him with a broadsword most energetically. It is of no avail. Death runs him through the body with his own lance, though in the other picture the weapon in Death's hand was only a long thigh-bone.
Mr. Longfellow, in his "Golden Legend," has availed himself of the Dance of Death painted on the walls of the covered bridge at Lucerne to give naturalness and charm to the conversation of Elsie and Prince Henry while they are crossing the river. The strange pictures excite the curiosity of Elsie, and the Prince explains them to her as they walk:
"Elsie. What is this picture?
"Prince. It is a young man singing to a nun, Who kneels at her devotions, but in kneeling Turns round to look at him; and Death meanwhile Is putting out the candles on the altar!
"Elsie. Ah, what a pity 'tis that she should listen Unto such songs, when in her orisons She might have heard in heaven the angels singing!
"Prince. Here he has stolen a jester's cap and bells, And dances with the queen.
"Elsie. A foolish jest!
"Prince. And here the heart of the new-wedded wife, Coming from church with her beloved lord, He startles with the rattle of his drum.
"Elsie. Ah, that is sad! And yet perhaps 'tis best That she should die with all the sunshine on her And all the benedictions of the morning, Before this affluence of golden light Shall fade into a cold and clouded gray, Then into darkness!
"Prince. Under it is written, 'Nothing but death shall separate thee and me!'
"Elsie. And what is this that follows close upon it?
"Prince. Death playing on a dulcimer."
And so the lovers converse on the bridge, all covered from end to end with these caricatures of human existence, until the girl hurries with affright from what she calls "this great picture-gallery of death."
Tournaments were among the usual subjects of caricature during the century or two preceding the Reformation. Some specimens have already been given from the illuminated prayer-books (pp. 44, 46). The device, however, seldom rises above the ancient one of investing animals with the gifts and qualities of men. Monkeys mounted upon the backs of dogs tilt at one another with long lances, or monsters utterly nondescript charge upon other monsters more ridiculous than themselves.
All the ordinary foibles of human nature received attention. These never change. There are always gluttons, misers, and spendthrifts. There are always weak men and vain women. There are always husbands whose wives deceive and worry them, as there are always wives whom husbands worry and deceive; and the artists of the Middle Ages, in their own direct rude fashion, turned both into caricature. The mere list of subjects treated in Brandt's "Ship of Fools," written when Luther was a school-boy, shows us that men were men and women were women in 1490. That quaint reformer of manners dealt mild rebuke to men who gathered great store of books and put them to no good use; to women who were ever changing the fashion of their dress; to men who began to build without counting the cost; to "great borrowers and slack payers;" to fools "who will serve two lords both together;" to them who correct others while themselves are "culpable in the same fault;" to "fools who can not keep secret their own counsel;" to people who believe in "predestinacyon;" to men who attend closely to other people's business, leaving their own undone; to "old folks that give example of vice to youth;" and so on through the long catalogue of human follies. His homely and wise ditties are illustrated by pictures of curious simplicity. Observe