S caricature an art? Ask even the most liberal judge of things æsthetic, and his answer, if indeed it be affirmative, will very likely take the form of a double-syllabled "ye-es," more indicative of doubt than of conviction. We are all of us too much inclined to recall certain ambitious efforts of our own, dating back, it may be, to the era of slate pencils. Hallowed by the memory of the imminent birchen peril under which they were executed, these fantastic representations of "dere teecher" are apt to breed in us the notion that caricature is easy, and that we ourselves might readily have obtained renown by the exercise of our talents in this field. Moreover, the great output of the commonplace in the cartoons and so-called "comic" supplements of the daily press belittles the work of the great masters, for great masters there are here as well as in what for lack of a better name one may call the more legitimate walks of art.

Wilhelm Busch ranks unquestionably as one of these great masters of caricature, perhaps the greatest that Germany has produced. His drawings have been published in editions that rival in number those of Zola's most popular novels, and still the press of Basserman in Munich is busy with the task of supplying an ever-increasing demand. Millions of German children have laughed over the adventures of Max und Moritz, of Plisch und Plum, of Hans Huckebein and Fipps, der Affe, yet the empire of their creator over the diaphragms of sober German grown-ups is no less firmly established. It is not Schiller or Goethe that one hears quoted oftenest in the Vaterland, but the quaint, homely lines in which Busch tells the story of his pictured heroes. Grave sittings of Reichstag and Landtag are lightened by "winged words" from the same source, while on the stump they prove irresistible.

Of the life of Busch little can be said. Personally, his strongest characteristic

was a retiring modesty that kept the player hidden while his puppets amused the world. For a long time, indeed, the story was current that Busch was dead, and that a younger brother was the author of a number of later pieces to which Wilhelm's name was attached for the sake of the wider sales it would bring. In 1893, however, Busch published as an introduction to the fiftieth edition of his Fromme Helene (it has since reached the one hundred and fiftieth) a brief autobiography, with the characteristic title, Von mir ueber mich-"By me about me.' None of his distinctively humorous works is more humorous than this account of his own life, and yet it is a perfect specimen of biography in that it tells us with the clearness and sharpness and something of the compression of a cameo all that we need to know of the great caricaturist's life in order to understand his work.

According to this statement, Busch was born in the little hamlet of Wiedensahl, in Hanover, in April, 1832. His father was a small shopkeeper, his mother a typical German Hausfrau. From his earliest years, the future caricaturist seems to have been gathering unconsciously the types and incidents that were to figure later in his drawings. It is significant that considerably more than a third of the autobiographical sketch referred to above is taken up with a description of the village worthies with whom Busch became familiar in his boyhood days. Among these was the old beadle, who bore a short spear as a symbol of his mighty office. "In the summer season," writes Busch, "he was accustomed to take his noon-day nap in the grass. He could snore most remarkably. When he drew in his breath, he opened his mouth wide, and it went Kra-a-ah! When he breathed out his mouth narrowed to a point, and it went Pühh, like the soft tone of a flute. One day we found him dead under the most famous pear tree in the village, with his spear under his arm and his mouth open, so that one saw clearly that Kra-a-ah was the last sound he had uttered. Round about him lay the

After some instruction from the pastor of a neighbouring village, Busch was sent at the age of sixteen to the polytechnic school in Hanover. Here his love for art asserted itself, and he abandoned engineering studies for the galleries of Antwerp. Rubens, Brouwer, Teniers, and Franz Hals roused his profoundest admiration, but his interest in the domestic life of Jan the barber and his wife Mie, with whom he lodged, is chronicled at equal length in the Von mir ueber mich. After Antwerp came Munich, but the academic tendency then manifest in the art of the Bavarian capital repelled Busch. Instead of devoting himself to the palette, he caricatured his more industrious fellow-students, organised the details of the famous artists' balls of those days, wrote the texts for a number of very successful operettas presented on such occasions, and incidentally made himself the life of the Jung-München art students' club. Krempelsetzer, the young composer with whom Busch collaborated at this time, fell a victim, among others, to the caricaturist's pencil, as the reproduction herewith presented of one of the best of his earlier drawings will sufficiently attest.

Art students can come as close as any

CARICATURE OF KREMPELSETZER, THE COMPOSER (From Busch's earlier work)

others to living on moonshine, but even where the incidental beer is as good as that of Munich something more is necessary for a steady diet. In 1859, Busch discovered this truism, and began to do a little work for the Fliegende Blaetter. His first drawings, it must be admitted, were rather crude and awkward, while the prose text accompanying them gave little evidence of the peculiar facility of expression and versification he was soon to acquire. Max und Moritz, his first great success, appeared in 1860, after having been refused by one publisher and accepted by another on terms miserably small even for an unknown beginner. It is probably the best bad boy story in any language, and far superior to the Struwwelpeter, which is its only mentionable competitor by another German author. Following Max und Moritz appeared in quick succession Hans Huckebein (The Unlucky Raven), Der Schreihals, Die Prise, Das Pusterohr, Das Bad am Samstag Abend, and Schnurrdibur.

With the early seventies a powerful new impulse was given to Busch's work by the establishment of the German Empire and the outbreak of the great Kulturkampf. Busch was a Reichsdeutscher, an imperialist to the core. Above all things, he hated bigotry, clericalism and superstition. These traits of character found expression in Der Heilige Antonius, 1870; Die Fromme Helene, 1871; and Pater Filucius, 1872.

To the foreign reader unfamiliar with the passions engendered by Bismarck's struggle with the church there is a vindictiveness about these three works which detracts somewhat from their humorous effect. Thus in the Fromme Helene, Busch is evidently unsatisfied with the worldly calamities which he heaps upon the heads of the outwardly pious heroine and her priestly paramour. With true mediæval spirit he pursues them beyond the confines of the lower world, leaving them in a final picture to roast side by side in the same infernal skillet surrounded by a circle of dancing devils. The last of Busch's political works was Der Geburtstag (1873), in which he overwhelms with more genial humour the particularism of certain village adherents to the cause of the dethroned house of

St. Anthony, Padua's holy one,
Sat often at his desk alone,
As late into the night he read
By the aid of the light his halo shed.

Hanover.

One noteworthy characteristic of all four of these productions of the early seventies is the fact that Busch, unlike most caricaturists, devotes no attention to the princes, prelates or potentates engaged in the Kulturkampf or the particularist movement. True to the sources of his power, he deals with ordinary, or rather less than ordinary, German typesstupid peasants, smug citizens, intriguing parish priests and the like, through whose ignorance and low cunning the general political tendencies which he opposes are most effectually covered with ridicule.

Early in his successful career as a caricaturist Busch left Munich for his native village, in the immediate neighbourhood of which he has lived ever since. During the first years of this long retirement he made frequent visits to Munich, spending the time mostly with his old friends Ramberg, Leibl, Defregger, Diez, Lindenschmidt, and Gabriel Max. With Lorenz Gedon and von Lenbach, the great portrait painter, Busch's relations were particularly intimate. Lenbach is said to have entertained the highest opinion of Busch's ability as a painter, and on one occasion endeavoured to have

him establish an atelier in Munich. The project failed, however, whether from Busch's inveterate turn for caricature or his hatred of city life it is impossible to say.

After 1873, Busch abandoned the political field for that of general satire. His Knopp trilogie describing the adventures of a bachelor, his later married life, and the love affairs of his daughter, Julchen, is the largest and one of the most humorous of all his works. During the eighties the publication of his illustrations to the Jobsiade, Balduin Bählamm (the interrupted poet), Dideldum, Fipps, and Plisch und Plum showed his powers at their highest. Two short romances, Eduard's Traum (1891) and Der Schmetterling (1895), are models of homely, incisive German prose. His high qualities as a poet had been recognised since the publication in 1874 of the Kritik des Herzens. Bitter, mocking, often grim and malicious, yet full of keen insight into human nature, many of the shorter poems in this collection are among the most remarkable expressions in literature of the spirit of Schopenhauer. One of the best known of these criticises the critics of Darwin somewhat after the following fashion:

At wine they argued points profound
And settled Darwin's place;
They found his theory unsound

And a slur on the human race.
Full oft the flowing bowl they passed,
Then stumbled out of doors,
And grunting loud reached home at last
By creeping on all fours.

Paradoxical as it may seem, pessimism is the foundation of all of Busch's humour. He confesses in his autobiography that he had read Schopenhauer with passionate enthusiasm. Practically all of his work, whether with pencil or pen, reveals this influence. His marvellous gift for the presentation of the narrow-minded, self-satisfied life of the German Philistertum is everywhere in evidence, sometimes with such bitterness, indeed, as to react unfavourably upon the reader. At other times a more genial trait finds expression, the philosophy of which Busch formulates in his autobiog