and this important caution is laid down, that "the check ticket given to the passenger on payment of his fare will be demanded from him at the station next before his arrival at London or Birming ham, and if not then produced he will be liable to have the fare again demanded. Further, "No smoking is allowed at the stations or in the company's carriages." An annual subscription ticket to Brighton and back was fixed at the startling prohibitive figure of 100%.!

1844 we find the companies consulting the pious sentiment of their customers, for it is laid down that "On Sundays the trains cease running from ten three quarters until one, being the hours of divine service." This it will be seen is a matter of respect, not as now when the amount of Sunday trains is regulated by the demands of the traffic, which on the Sabbath is but slender.

Dogs were to be "conveyed in a proper vehicle," while "gentlemen riding in their There were some railway phrases then own carriages "were charged second-class introduced which were inexpressive fares. The word used for " correspondenough, and which have given place to ence was "conjunction" and " "joining." much more telling forms. Places were Thus, "The train from joins the "booked" as in the way-bill of a coach, train from;" or we are told (regardand you were asked the place to which you less of the jingle) of " trains in conjunction were "destined," the place itself being with the Grand Junction." Post-horses your "destination." The carriages were were kept "in readiness" at the principal always described as the "coaches," while stations of the great railways, such as voyagers" "rode" in their "coaches." London, Birmingham, Bristol, etc., and on As to the luggage, "passengers are espe- due notice given, would be sent to bring cially recommended to have their names carriages from any part of London at the and address or destination legibly written general charge of half a sovereign. As on each part of their luggage," when it we have seen, the companies invariably will be placed on the top of the "coach" use "ride" as their favorite technical in which they "ride." If the passenger be word for “travel," but they furnished a "destined for Manchester or Liverpool happy reductio ad absurdum of this unand has booked his place through, his lug-pleasant word when they fixed a special gage will be placed on the Liverpool or Manchester coach, and will not be disturbed until it reaches its destination."

tariff for "servants and grooms riding with their horses."

Close on fifty years have passed by, and our guide with every year has continued like Mr. Stiggins to be a "swellin' wisibly." The transformation is indeed almost like one in a pantomime. The existing

There was an odd significance in these directions as to infants: "Children in arms, unable to walk, are free of charge," a regulation which showed disinclination to accept the "being in arms "as evidence" Bradshaw " has become really a vast enof being "unable to walk." The seats appear to have been numbered, as it was ruled that "a passenger may claim the seat corresponding to the number on his ticket, and when not numbered he may take any seat not previously occupied." As to "tips" the companies were particularly severe. "No gratuity, under any circumstances, is allowed to be taken by any servant of the company." "Soldiers en route" were charged under a special agreement. It is well known that in these early days a railway journey was thought a serious and uncertain enterprise, and the companies seem to have tried to allay apprehensions by directions of a minute and soothing, not to say infantine, character, such as "Preserve your ticket until called for by the company's servant." Nowadays, by a sort of instinct, nothing is so precious or so carefully "preserved as one's ticket. So with the kindly injunction, "Do not lean upon the door of the carriage." In the "Companion" for

terprise which entails a constant strain
upon all the resources of its projectors,
not the least being the difficulty in the
face of ever-increasing material to keep
the whole within measurable bounds.
Perpetual and minute changes are taking
place in the hours and places, and these
have to be introduced often at the last
moment. The type is perhaps the most
crowded of any known type, yet it has also
to be made clear and brilliant.
The paper
must be thin and light, yet it must not
be transparent, or the type will be seen
through it. Another intricate problem is
to compress the arrangement of a railway
into two pages, so that a general view of
the whole may be set before the traveller,
an almost procrustean task. There are
besides innumerable intellectual processes
in the way of abstraction and simplifica-
tion, so as to make the intricate complica-
tions of crossing or "joining " trains clear
and intelligible. Mystifying as all this is
to the uninitiated, the practised hand soon

out.

learns the key and will thread his way | In most of these countries there is an exreadily through the maze; nay, by a little cellent and useful plan adopted, of disstudy will be rewarded by discovering ex- playing the whole railway system of the traordinary facilities for his movements, kingdom on a single sheet, which is affixed short cuts and happy solutions of difficul- to the walls of every station. At the ties, which will save him time and money. head of each line is set out in bold letters A few years ago there was a sort of the names of the leading towns to which abridgement of the time-tables of some the line runs. The only drawback is that half-dozen of the great railways, supposed as every inquirer finds it necessary to run to give a clue to the bewildering maze of his finger down the figures till he reaches figures, but this has recently been dropped what he is in search of, the whole speedily becomes blackened and illegible. Another serviceable device is the printing in faint outlines on the time-table a general map of the railway system, which gives an idea of the distance, relative position, etc. In Italy, the railway companies place a streak of transparent color on the columns devoted to night trains, while in other countries a larger form of figure is used to make the same distinction. This has been tried in England, but has apparently found no favor; the truth is our lines are so elaborate in their arrangements and the trains so multiplied, that all such attempts to simplify only cause confusion. The public prefers to find out these things for itself.

Compressed into this wonderful "sixpenn'orth" of information there is an amount of matter and type which only careful calculation and comparison can give an idea of. A single page will be found to contain an enormous collection of characters, words, numerals, which are as laborious to set by the compositor as words. An ordinary page of a novel contains about five-and-twenty lines, each line holding from eight to ten words; so each page might be set down roughly as containing, say, three hundred words. But a page of Bradshaw contains some eighty lines, each line having about forty characters; the whole therefore displays about three thousand characters, and therefore equivalent to some ten pages of the novel. Four hundred pages of the guide would be equivalent to, say four thousand pages of a novel, and as an ordinary novel runs to three volumes, of three hundred pages each, this little manual will be found to contain the matter of some twelve octavo volumes. There are besides sixty pages of advertisements, equivalent at least to a couple of volumes more. To follow out the comparison further, the weight of the original little guide was but a couple of ounces, while the modern Bradshaw is over eleven.

What a monument this is of British railway enterprise can be shown by yet another comparison. As is well known, the spirited Bradshaw soon supplemented his labors by a "Continental Guide," which now furnishes the tables of the foreign lines. Here we find all the railways of France, Germany, Belgium, Russia, Spain, Algiers, etc. Yet the whole universe and its railways put together fills but three hundred pages, a fourth less space than that devoted to England alone. As usual, foreign nations have offered the sincerest form of flattery by imitating in omnibus this useful model. In Germany there is found "Hendschel's Telegraph," a replica of our foreign Bradshaw; France has its "Chaix Guide: " Belgium a rather lean compilation," Guide des Voyageurs."

"Bradshaw's Railway and Steam Navigation Guide," which once appealed so humbly for aid from Brown Street, Manchester, now is issued from an imposing building devoted to its presses, composition, agencies, etc. It is published by Blacklock, one of the original firm of Bradshaw and Blacklock. The worthy, untiring G. Bradshaw has himself long since passed away, and fell, as was becoming, in the cause of British homes and duty, and the "Guide." He had gone to Norway in 1853, to make some arrangements with the companies of that country. The cholera was raging. He was seized with illness, and died. Let us hope that this public benefactor travelled peacefully "through" to his "destination," a region where, it is to be hoped, he will no more be bewildered with such whirling words as "express," "fast," etc., and will never be checked at his journey's end by the black line and fatal word "stop."

From The Fortnightly Review. CARICATURE, THE FANTASTIC, THE GROTESQUE.

I.

CARICATURE is a distinct species of characterization, in which the salient features of a person or an object have been

emphasized with the view of rendering | The real aim of caricature is to deprethem ridiculous. The derivation of this ciate its object by evoking contempt or word justifies my definition. It comes stirring laughter, when the imaginative from the Italian caricare, to charge with a rendering of the person is an unmistakable burden, or to surcharge. Thus caricare portrait, but defects are brought into reun ritratto means to exaggerate what is al- lief which might otherwise have escaped ready prominent in the model, and in this notice. Instead therefore of being realway to produce a likeness which misrep-istic, this branch of art must be reckoned resents the person, while it remains recog- as essentially idealistic. In so far as a nizable. Instead of emphasis, simple caricature is powerfully conceived, it calls distortion may be used to secure the effect into play fine, though never the noblest, of a caricature. For example, the hints never the most amiable, qualities of intersuggested by reflection in a spoon are pretation. amplified into an absurd portrait. Some faces and figures lend themselves better to the concave, others to the convex surface of the spoon. Or a fairly accurate image of a man or woman, modelled in gutta-percha, may be pulled about in various directions, with the result of producing a series of burlesque portraits, in which the likeness of the individual is never wholly lost.

The most effective kind of caricature does not proceed by such distortion. It renders its victim ludicrous or vile by exaggerating what is defective, mean, ignoble in his person, indicating at the same time that some corresponding flaws in his spiritual nature are revealed by them. The masterpieces of this art are those in which truth has been accentuated by slight but deft and telling emphasis. Nothing, as Aretino once remarked, is more cruel than malevolent insistence upon fact. You cannot injure your neighbor better than by telling the truth about him, if the truth is to his discredit. You cannot make him appear ridiculous more crushingly than by calling attention to real faults in his physique.

Those extraordinary caricatures of human faces which Lionardo da Vinci delighted to produce, illustrate both methods of emphasis and distortion. But they also exhibit the play of a fantastic imagination. He accentuated the analogies of human with bestial features, or degraded his models to the level of goitred idiots by subtle blurrings and erasures of their nobler traits.

Caricature is not identical with satire. Caricature implies exaggeration of some sort. The bitterest satire hits its mark by no exaggeration, but by indignant and unmerciful exposure of ignobility. Yet caricature has always been used for satirical purposes, with notable effect by Aristophanes in his political comedies, with coarse vigor by Gilray in lampoons of the last century, with indulgent humor by our contemporary Punch.

II.

THE fantastic need have no element of caricature. It invariably implies a certain exaggeration or distortion of nature; but it lacks that deliberate intention to disparage, which lies at the root of caricature. What we call fantastic in art results from an exercise of the capricious fancy, playing with things which it combines into arbitrary non-existent forms. These may be merely graceful, as is the case with arabesques devised by old Italian painters

- frescoed patterns upon walls and ceilings, in which tendrils of the vine, acanthus foliage, parts of beasts and men and birds, and fabulous creatures are brought into quasi-organic fusion with candelabra, goblets, lyres, and other familiar objects of utility.

In its higher manifestations fantastic art creates beautiful or terrific forms in correspondence with some vision of the excited imagination. The sphinx and the dragon, the world-snake of Scandinavian mythology, Shakespeare's Ariel, Dante's Lucifer, are fantastic in this higher sense. In them real conditions of man's subjective being have taken sensuous shape at the bidding of creative genius. The artist, while giving birth to such fantastic creatures of imagination, resembles a deeply stirred and dreaming man, whose brain projects impossible shapes to symbolize the perturbations of his spirit. Myth and allegory, the metamorphosis of mortals into plants, fairies, satyrs, nymphs, and tutelary deities of sea or forest, are exam. ples of the fantastic in this sphere of highest poetry.

According to the view which I have just expressed, fantastic art has to be considered as the least realistic of all artistic species; it is that in which the human mind shows its ideality, its subjective freedom, its independence of fact and external nature, most completely. Here a man's studies of reality outside him, acute and penetrating as these may be,

become subservient to the presentation of | scribed to naïveté and lack of technical thoughts and emotions which have no skill. On the contrary, Lombard sculp validity except for his internal conscious

ness.

He will watch from dawn till gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy bloom,
Nor heed nor see what things they be,
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.

ture, as we study this on the façades of north-Italian churches, and mediæval Teutonic art in general, as we study this upon the pages of illustrated manuscripts, in the choir-stalls of our cathedrals, or in the carven ornaments of their exteriors, rarely fails to introduce some grotesque element. The free play of the northern fancy ran over easily into distortion, degradation of form, burlesque. Scandinavian poetry of the best period exhibits strik

When well constructed, powerfully conceived, vigorously projected, with sufficiency of verisimilitude to give them ranking specimens of Aristophanic satire, in among extraordinary phenomena, and with which the gods are mercilessly dealt with. sufficient correspondence to the natural Grotesqueness may be traced in all the fanmoods of human thought, these phantasies tastic beings of Celtic and Germanic folkand their appropriate shapes acquire a lore, in gnomes inhabiting the mounreality of their own, and impose upon the tains, in kelpies of the streams and credulity of mankind. They are felt to mermaids of the ocean, in Puck and Robin be actual through the force with which Goodfellow, in fairies of heath and woodtheir makers felt them, and through their land, in the princesses of Border ballad adaptation to the fancies of imaginative literature fated by magic spells to dree minds in general. Thus the chimæra of their doom as loathly dragons. Hellenic sculpture, the horned and hoofed Of such grotesqueness I doubt whether devil of medieval painting, Shakespeare's we can discern a trace in classical mythol Caliban, Milton's Death, Goethe's Mephis-ogy and art. Ugly stories about Zeus and topheles, can all be claimed as products Cronos, quaint stories about the metaof fantastic art. Yet these figments are morphoses of Proteus, and the Phorcyhardly less real for our consciousness ade with their one eye, are not grotesque. than the Farnese bull, Lancelot, Land- They lack the touch of caricature, always seer's stags, Hamlet, Dr. Brown's Rab, a conscious or semi-conscious element, Adam Bede, and other products of im- which is needful to create the species. aginative art which are modelled from familiar objects. In this way fantastic art strikingly brings home to us the truth of what Tasso once said: Non è creatore se non Iddio ed il poeta (God and the poet are the only creators). It does this because it proves that the recombining power of the imagination, as in dreams, so also in poetry and plastic art, is able to construct unrealities which possess even more than the spiritual influence and all but the validity of fact for human minds.

III.

THE grotesque is a branch of the fantastic. Its specific difference lies in the fact that an element of caricature, whether deliberately intended or imported by the craftsman's spontaneity of humor, forms an ingredient in the thing produced. Certain races and certain epochs display a predilection for the grotesque, which is conspicuously absent in others. Hellenic art, I think, was never intentionally gro tesque, except on rare occasions in the comedy of Aristophanes. What resem. bles grotesqueness in the archaic stages of Greek sculpture — in the bas-reliefs from Selinus, for example — must be as

It is absent in the voluminous literature of the Arabs, as this is known to us through the Arabian Nights." Princesses transformed into parrots, djinns with swarthy faces doting on fair damsels, water-carriers converted by some spell into caliphs, ghouls, animals that talk, immense birds brooding over treasures in the wil derness, are not grotesque. They lack the touch of conscious caricature added to free fancy which differentiates the species.

Both caricature and the fantastic played an important part in southern and eastern literature, but they did not come into the peculiar connection which is necessary to grotesqueness. The fantastic made itself moderately felt in Hellas, and assumed gigantic proportions in Islam. The Asiatic and Greek minds, however, lacked a quality which was demanded in order to elicit grotesqueness from phantasy. That quality the Teutonic section of the Aryan fam ily possessed in abundance; it was allpersuasive in the products of their genius. We may define it broadly as humor. I do not deny humor to the Greeks and Orientals; but I contend that Teutons have the merit of applying humor to caricature and

the fantastic, so as to educe from both in | were naïve, where we have become selfcombination what we call grotesqueness. For obvious reasons I must omit all mention of what strikes us as grotesque in the art-work of races with whom we are imperfectly in sympathy. Hindoo idols, Chinese and Japanese bronzes, Aztec basreliefs, and such things seem to us grotesque. But it is almost impossible to decide how far this apparent grotesque ness is due to inadequate comprehension on our part, or to religious symbolism. We cannot eliminate the element of genuine intentional grotesqueness which things so far remote from us contain.