The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 by Harry Furniss (ebook reader that looks like a book TXT) 📗

Now in Punch, as I was cast for it, I played the villain's part. In doing so I was at times necessarily "ugly," and therefore to some unpopular. I confess I felt it my duty not [Pg 253] to shrink from being "ugly," although whenever I could I introduced some redeeming element into my designs—the figure of a girl, allegorical of Parliament or whatever the "ugly" subject might happen to be—but in some of my Punch drawings this relief was impossible. For instance, the series of "Puzzle Heads," in each of which a portrait of the celebrity is built up of personal attributes, characteristics, or incidents in the career of the person represented, could not but be unpleasant pictures. Some subscribers threatened to give up the paper if they were continued; others became subscribers for these Puzzle Heads alone. It is ever so. The old saying, "One man's meat is another's poison," is as applicable to caricature as to anything else. It is impossible to please all tastes when catering for the large public, unless an editor is satisfied to be stereotyped and perfunctory; but Mr. Punch has made his name by his strength, not his weakness, and it may be safely inferred that no Tory thinks less of him for having used all his talent in attacking Benjamin Disraeli year after year as no man has been attacked before—or since—in his pages.

In looking through the volumes of Punch one is apt to forget that the strong situations and stirring events by which a caricaturist's hit is made effective at the time of publication fade from one's memory. The cartoon in all its strength remains a record of an event which has lost its interest. One cannot always realise that the drawing was only strong because the feeling and interest at the time of its conception demanded it. Allowance should therefore be made for the villain's ugly caricature, if it is a good drawing, prophetically correct, and therefore historically interesting.

Perhaps no cartoon of mine in Punch caused such hostile criticism as "The New Cabinet" (August 27, 1892). It gave great offence to the Gladstonians. The Radical Press attacked me ferociously, and as I think most unfairly, for they treated it politically and not pictorially, and severely reprimanded Mr. Punch for publishing it. Had it been a Conservative Cabinet the Tory Press would not have resented it or allowed narrow-minded party politics to prejudice their mind in such trivial [Pg 254] matters. Punch is supposed to be non-political. Its present editor is impartial. Mr. Punch's traditions are Whig, and somehow or other a certain class of its readers at that particular crisis was strongly opposed to the two sides of a question being treated. Yet I venture to say two-thirds of the readers of Punch are Conservatives, and should therefore be amused. It is impossible to treat a strong political subject—such as the meeting of that particular Cabinet caricatured by me—without offending some readers by amusing others, unless, as I say, the subject is treated in a colourless manner. This particular cartoon hurt because it hit a strong situation in a truthful and straight-forward manner, and subsequent events proved it to be a correct conception. Yet at the time no name was too bad for me, and as these are my confessions, let me assure the public that had the Cabinet been a Conservative one I would have treated it in exactly the same way; and it is my firm conviction that had such been the case I would have given no offence either inside or outside of Mr. Punch's office.

My readers will sympathise with me. I am to draw political cartoons without being political; I am to draw caricatures without being personal; I am to be funny without holding my subject up to ridicule; I am to be effective without being strong—in fact, I am to be a caricaturist without caricature! On the other hand, no cartoon I ever drew for Punch was more popular. Non-politicians were good enough to accept it as an antidote to the usual caricatures, and those papers on the other side of politics were extravagantly complimentary, and I received a large sum for the original for a private collection. I allow the following leaderette from the Birmingham Post to illustrate the point, and at the same time to describe the cartoon. The same paper, I may add, comments on the principal cartoon in Punch that week—drawn by Tenniel—as showing that Punch "thinks little of the prospects of the present Government":