ewnes green
with envy.

CARICATURE.

CHAPTER V.

A CHAT BETWEEN MY PEN AND PENCIL.

What is Caricature?--Interviewing--Catching Caricatures--Pellegrini--The
"Ha! Ha!"--Black and White _v._ Paint--How to make a
Caricature--M.P.'s--My System--Mr. Labouchere's Attitude--Do the
Subjects object?--Colour in Caricature--Caught!--A Pocket
Caricature--The Danger of the Shirt-cuff--The Danger of a Marble
Table--Quick Change--Advice to those about to Caricature.

[Illustration: If]

If I am asked what is caricature, how can I define it? Ah, here it is
explained by some great authority--whom I cannot say, for I have it
under the heading of "Cuttings from Colney Hatch," undated, unnamed.
Kindly read it carefully:

[Illustration: THE STUDIO OF A CARICATURIST.]

"The word itself, 'caricature,' is related etymologically to our own
'cargo,' and means, in all Italian simplicity, a _loading_. So, then,
the finely analytical quality of the Italian intellect, disengaging the
ultimate (material) element out of all the (spiritual) elements of
pictorial distortion and travesty, called it simply a 'loading.' After
all, 'exageration' only substitutes the idea of mound, or _agger_ for
_carica_--the heaping up of a mound--for the common Italian word 'load'
or 'cartload.' One can easily understand how a cold, cynical, and hating
Neapolitan, pushed about by the police for a likeness much too like,
would shrug his shoulders, and say, possibly, the likeness was loaded.
But when we look at the character of the loading, there may be anything
there, from diabolical and malignant spite up to the simplest fun, to
say nothing of the almost impossibility of drawing the real truth, and
the almost necessary tendency to exaggerate one thing and diminish
another. But if the Italian mind, with a head to be chopped off by a
despot for a joke, discovered the colourless and impregnable word
'load,' the French _gamin_, on his own responsibility, hit upon the
identical word in French, namely, 'charge'--_une charge_ meaning both a
pictorial or verbal goak or caricature, and a load. When did the word
'caricature' first obtain in the Italian language, and how? When did the
word 'charge' acquire a similar meaning in France, and was it or not
suggested by the Italian word? But the thing caricature goes back to the
night of ages, and is in its origin connected with the subjective