TURPIN'S FLIGHT THROUGH EDMONTON. From "Rookwood," 1836.TURPIN'S FLIGHT THROUGH EDMONTON. From "Rookwood," 1836.
The Ainsworth-Cruikshank connection began, artistically, with the etchings which illustrate the fourth edition of "Rookwood" (1836). If for Turpin we read Nevison, the novel may pass as quasi-historical. The etching here reproduced is in what may be called Cruikshank's "Humourist" style. It has vivacity and brightness. The reader who figured himself passing into romance through the pretty portico of trees depicted on Ainsworth's title-page, will feel, as he looks at this representation of comic prodigy, that he has arrived.
One thief succeeded another, and in 1839 Jack Sheppard was pilfering his way through "Bentley's Miscellany." If he had done nothing else, Cruikshank would have made a deathless reputation for technical skill by the etchings in "Jack Sheppard." Sala, who copied the shop-scene entitledThe name on the beam, observes of this etching, at once so precise and imaginative, that it is "in its every detail essentially Hogarthian." It is a just saying. One can easily imagine Dr Trusler poring over it and recording his small discoveries withsomething of the relish he found in his Hogarthian exploration. Appropriately enough, Hogarth's portrait appears in the clever etching which depicts Jack in chains sitting to two artists, the other being Sir James Thornhill. Thackeray has done justice to the high qualities of the etchings entitledThe StormandThe Murder on the Thames. There are effects in Cruikshank's river scenes poetic enough and near enough to that verity which Impressionists serve better than Ruskinians, to have detained Whistler for a minute that might have regenerated the fame of Cruikshank.
JONATHAN WILD SEIZING JACK SHEPPARD AT HIS MOTHER'S GRAVE IN WILLESDEN CHURCHYARD. From "Jack Sheppard," 1839.JONATHAN WILD SEIZING JACK SHEPPARD AT HIS MOTHER'S GRAVE IN WILLESDEN CHURCHYARD. From "Jack Sheppard," 1839.
From "Jack Sheppard," 1839.From "Jack Sheppard," 1839.
"Jack Sheppard," with its requisition of antiquarian exactness so plausibly met, may well have suggested to Cruikshank a more epic theme than the exploits of a master-thief, revolving about a nobler gaol than Newgate. In a letter which may or may not have been posted (it is to be read at the back of No. 9910 H in the Cruikshank collection at South Kensington), he writes: "The fact is, I am endeavouring to emancipate myself from the thraldom of the Booksellers, whose slave I have been nearly all my life; to effect this object I have published, in conjunction withthe author, a work called 'The Tower of London.'"
THE DEATH WARRANT. From "The Tower of London," 1840.THE DEATH WARRANT. From "The Tower of London," 1840.
Of the acrimonious discussion that Cruikshank started by claiming to have originated Ainsworth's romance, I shall say little. That Cruikshank was the senior partner there is no doubt. It was he who took Ainsworth to the Tower, and he asserted that he "hardly ever read a line" of the text, which must be considered to illustrate his designs. It may be said, however, that Ainsworth's text has been repeatedly devoured without the aid of Cruikshank's designs. He was a public idol. Smiled on once by Sir Walter Scott, he contrived to become the first horror-monger,viâhistory, of an age whose favourite realism was the safe realism of torture and decent crime. In the September before his death, which occurred January 3, 1882, he was informed by the Mayor of Manchester that the last twelve months' record of the public free libraries of that town showed that "twenty volumes of his works" were "being perused in Manchester by readers of the free libraries every day all the year through."
That I may not write a decrescendo aboutthe designs for "The Tower of London," I begin with their faults. Cruikshank's Simon Renard is too darkling a Spaniard even for a staged Spain, and even Lady Jane Grey's waist should have been made rather larger than her throat. "Mere skeletons in farthingales," quoth "The Athenæum" of Cruikshank's Queen Mary, Jane and Elizabeth. To what extent defective figure-drawing diminishes the proper force of Cruikshank's designs the reader may judge by the reproduction ofThe Death Warrant, which is presented as a frank example of his melodramatic invention. The masked assassin peers at the Spanish Ambassador through the window of the chamber of the Tower where the little princes were murdered, and where the pen that has just doomed Lady Jane Dudley hovers in Queen Mary's hand. Her hound is an incarnate presentiment and the gods of old Drury could have asked no more. There are, however, far finer plates in the book. In Underhill, the Hot Gospeller, burning at the stake, his finger nails riveted to his bare shoulders while he bawls his last agony, Cruikshank shows the longevity of the Marian crime—the crime of creating fears andloathings, for here we have absolutely a reflective shudder, a naked confidence from an abominable place which we thought was cleansed by merciful years. No other figure in the gallery of Cruikshank's "Tower" is so vital as this dying man, but he drew a handsome Wyat, an executioner as repulsive as a ghoul, and groups—for instance Elizabeth and her escort on the steps of Traitor's Gate—which a stage manager of melodrama might like to imitate.
Partly contemporaneous with "The Tower of London" was Ainsworth's "Guy Fawkes" (1840-1) with Cruikshankian etchings, which are as little serviceable to the dignity of a brave fanatic as the effigies exhibited by boys on the fifth of November. Cruikshank had drawn a typical effigy of Guy for "The Every-Day Book" of 1826; twelve years later came his ludicrousGuys in Council, but being required in 1840 to produce a serious Guy he only succeeded in being operatic. In one of his etchings the rigidity of Guy's cloak suggests that the garment is a "bath-cabinet" in occupation; in another a celestial visitor resembles a Dutch doll. Such failures are notto be explained by a desire to annoy the publisher of "Guy Fawkes," Richard Bentley, whom Cruikshank bitterly attacked in 1842. Cruikshank could and did produce etchings in a hurry for stories which he had not read, by way of expressing his dislike for a contract which survived his approval of it; but he could also be befooled by his own solemnity.
THE DUEL IN TOTHILL FIELDS ("The Miser's Daughter"). From "Ainsworth's Magazine," 1842.THE DUEL IN TOTHILL FIELDS ("The Miser's Daughter"). From "Ainsworth's Magazine," 1842.
Cruikshank's relations with Ainsworth continued in "Ainsworth's Magazine," of which the first number bears the date February 1842. Among the stories in this magazine which Cruikshank illustrated must now be mentioned "The Miser's Daughter" (1842), "Windsor Castle" (1842-3) and "St James's: or the Court of Queen Anne" (1844). The first of these stories is only incidentally historical, but it afforded Cruikshank an opportunity for quickening his hand with the spirit of place. He has told us that his drawing of Westminster Abbey Cloisters and Lambeth Church, etc., are "correct copies from nature" [sic], and it almost seems as we look at his etchings and water-colours for "The Miser's Daughter" that he copied not only stones but living scenes. His ball in the Rotunda at Ranelagh has thecharm of lavish light and dainty gaiety; the humour and grace of hisMasquerade in Ranelagh Gardensare too obvious for discovery, and his rendering of the pursuit of a Jacobite Club on the roofs of houses within view of Westminster Abbey is a striking nocturne.
In Cruikshank's designs for "Windsor Castle," Mr Julian Moore finds "the minimum of charm and freshness in the drawing, and maximum of achievement in technique." I am in disagreement with this verdict, but it is not unintelligent. Cruikshank's "machine-ruling" is tyrannous to his Ainsworthian work, and an artist serving the historic muse when she is very much in earnest can only pray to be academic when he is not inspired. But Cruikshank did admirable work for "Windsor Castle," and could hardly help wishing to outshine Tony Johannot, who was also employed in illustrating that romance. Since "the great George" is not present to assail me in a vehement script, I may say that I discern an influence of Johannot upon Cruikshank's design (spirited but not insufferably vigorous) entitledThe Quarrel between Will Sommers and Patch, for there was somethingcalled artistic restraint to be learned from the French illustrator of Cervantes, and this quality is in the etching I have mentioned, and not negatively there but as a positive gift of touch. Of Cruikshank's Henry the Eighth, it need only be said that he is bluff King Hal; his Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour are mere females: his Herne is as impressive as a person can be who jeopardises the dignity of demonhood by wearing horns.
"St James's," the last important novel by Ainsworth which Cruikshank illustrated, gave the artist opportunities for drawing St James's Palace, London, and portraits of the Duke of Marlborough and other celebrities. He accepted these opportunities, but his most striking designs remind one of his illustrations for Smollett. He rejoices in the contrast between masculine lath and feminine tub, and in one plate afflicts us with a grinning face which exceeds in ugliness any of C. Delort's portraits of "l'Homme qui rit." The vigorous design here given touches the imagination on account of the absent presence of the dame in the picture hanging on the wall.
THE MARQUIS DE GUISCARD ATTEMPTING TO ASSASSINATE HARLEY. The man on the table drawing his sword is the Duke of Newcastle ("Saint James's"). From "Ainsworth's Magazine," 1844.THE MARQUIS DE GUISCARD ATTEMPTING TO ASSASSINATE HARLEY. The man on the table drawing his sword is the Duke of Newcastle ("Saint James's"). From "Ainsworth's Magazine," 1844.
In "Ainsworth's Magazine" for January1846 the last fruit of Cruikshank's connection with Ainsworth appeared, after a year's sterility, as a careful etching illustrating that novelist's "Sir Lionel Flamstead, a Sketch": in the preceding year Cruikshank produced for W. H. Maxwell the series of historic etchings which, in the opinion of Mr Frederic G. Stephens, "marks the highest point of Cruikshank's invention." These etchings illustrate a history of the insurrections in Ireland in 1798 and 1803. In the selection of Cruikshank, Maxwell or his publishers may have remembered the skill with which he had illustrated I. Whitty's "Tales of Irish Life" (1824), though it is one thing to render the frantic humour of a fight arising from O'Finn calling Redmond a rascal, or the muddled emotions of a wake, and quite another to exhibit the conflict between two nightmares of patriotism. Howbeit Cruikshank realised the horror and poetry of war. His twenty-one Maxwellian etchings are instructively comparable with Callot's precious series "Les Misères et les Mal-heurs de la Guerre" (1633). Callot is at once more horrible and self-restrained. One peers into his work; onelistens to Cruikshank's. The artist of the seventeenth century drew with minute delicacy the forms and gestures of men. He studied them as a naturalist, indifferent to the individuality of the unit after fixing the individuality of the class to which it belongs. Callot's men are users of the wheel and the estrapade; they roast the husband while they ravish the wife. They are not grotesques: they are men. Maurice Leloir drew men of their age and country no more elegantly for the bravest novel of Dumas. Cruikshank, on the other hand, drew well and hideously not only Irish men, but Irish individuals. His rebel, obscenely jocose, impaling a child, might, though a detail in a crowded etching, have been drawn for Scotland Yard; so too might a woman squatting and smoking while a wretch writhes on four pikes which take his weight and give it him back in torture. England is to glow, Ireland is to blush as she looks at Cruikshank's people of '98. As clear on the memory as his Irish ruffianism is his portrait of the little drummer dying with his leg through his drum to protect its voice from dishonour. One has heard of LieutenantHepenstall—him who was called "The Walking Gallows"—as well as of the drummer of Gorey, but Cruikshank was satisfied with partizanship, and Ireland forgets him.
Our liberal interpretation of history allows us now to consider a few of the works of Cruikshank which preserve for us scenes and types of his age with or without the accompaniment of a fictitious text.
For his delineations of the sailor of Nelson's day we owe much to a capital but neglected novelist M. H. Barker, author of "Greenwich Hospital" (1826), "Topsail-Sheet Blocks" (1838), "The Old Sailor's Jolly Boat" (1844), etc. Before the appearance of the earliest of these books Cruikshank had etched Lieut. John Sheringham's designs entitled "The Sailor's Progress" (1818), and those by Capt. Marryat entitled "The Progress of a Midshipman" (1820). The illustrations to the quarto called "Greenwich Hospital," are deservedly the most famous of Cruikshank's sea-pictures. With lavish detail they exhibit Jack tearing along by coach across pigs and fowls at finable knots per hour; carousing in the Long Room with billowy sirens under a chandelier ofcandles; crossing the line in a frenzy of ceremonious facetiousness; yelling in an inn-parlour—though armless or "half a tree"—his delight in victory and Nelson; ... and tied up for a whipping like a naughty boy. Barker was so pleased with one of the illustrations for "Greenwich Hospital" that he wrote on a proof (No. 1003-4 in the Cruikshank collection at South Kensington), "Dear Friend, if you never do another design, the leg of that table will immortalise you. It is a bonâ fide Peg." There is a mood in which Clio prefers that crippled table-leg to Cruikshank's idea of Solomon Eagle "denouncing of Judgment" upon London.
SOLOMON EAGLE. From the drawing by G. Cruikshank, as engraved by Davenport for "A Journal of the Plague Year," 1833.SOLOMON EAGLE. From the drawing by G. Cruikshank, as engraved by Davenport for "A Journal of the Plague Year," 1833.
We have now sounded the word which invites inquiry as to the nature of Cruikshank's artistic service to London. London is not the Tower or St James's Palace. Cruikshank, however, is not injured by this scorching truism. If we go back to 1827 and 1829 we encounter in "The Gentleman's Pocket Magazine" twenty-fourLondon Characters, of which fifteen are from the hand of George Cruikshank, who doubtless remembered Rowlandson's "Characteristic Sketches of theLower Orders" (1820). George is responsible for very neat portraits of a beadle, waterman, dustman, watchman ..., and the Cruikshankian enthusiast cries "Eureka!" for he spies Mr Bumble among them. With "Sunday in London" (1833) came the first example of Cruikshank's comic treatment of London, which a book-collector, as distinct from a print-collector, can prize. The woodcuts in this volume reveal a state of society in which people had less sense of proportion than they have now, and were excessively vain or excessively humble, according to the state of their paunch and the view of them held by the policeman or the beadle. The power of the beadle had not yet been broken by a metrical inquiry concerning the origin of his hat. Frenchmen were still "mounseers," and soldiers marched to Divine Service through St James's Park to the tune of "Drops of Brandy." The flavour of the obsolete is rich in "Sunday in London"; we who look at it feel strangely toned-down.
THE STREETS, MORNING. From "Sketches by Boz," Second Series, 1837.THE STREETS, MORNING. From "Sketches by Boz," Second Series, 1837.
Place in London as well as character is presented vividly in Cruikshank's contributions to "Sketches by Boz" (1836-7). Witness theexamples here given. InThe Streets, Morning, I, a Londoner, feel the poetry of streets cleansed by quiet, the chastity of Comfort enjoyed, as it were, by the tolerance of Hardship. The little sweep is an extinct animal, and yet we are in the neighbourhood of Seven Dials.Monmouth Street, as exhibited by Cruikshank in the same work, is an appreciation of the Hebrew dealer in old clothes as well as a caricature. We feel the street to be an open-air parlour and nursery combined; it remains imperturbably domestic though we walk in it. Another etching, depicting a beadle hammering the door of a house supposed to be on fire, elicited from Mr Frederick Wedmore the confession that he knew no artist "so alive as Cruikshank to the pretty sedateness of Georgian architecture," though the remark will be more appreciated after a look at the pretty etching entitledFrench Musicians or Les Savoyards(1819), reprinted in "Cruikshankiana" (1835).
Cruikshank's London ideas were further realised in "Oliver Twist" (1838), a novel to which he contributed etchings so documentary as well as imaginative that he attempted todeprive Dickens of the glory of authorship, by claiming the origination of the story. The fact was, he had grown to be a collector: he was collecting fame, and in the passion of his hobby he felt that he might claim to have originated the novel which owed local colour and a formative idea to his suggestions. The subject really belongs to the pathology of egoism. Cruikshank gained nothing by seeking laurels in the field of literature except the impression on paper of a weakness one prefers to call juvenile rather than puerile.
THE LAST CAB-DRIVER. From "Sketches by Boz," Second Series, 1837.THE LAST CAB-DRIVER. From "Sketches by Boz," Second Series, 1837.
Yet he had much to give Boz, if that gentleman was minded to write of rogues. Cruikshank knew all about Buzmen and Adam-tilers; the days when he drank bene bowse had not been wasted, if low life be worth depicting. We may accept as portraits his Fagin and Sikes and Artful Dodger, without digesting the statement that Fagin condemned is himself in perplexity, and Fagin uncondemned the image of Sir Charles Napier. Undoubtedly, the workhouses in England of the third decade of the nineteenth century are in popular fancy all ruled by the nameless master in cook's uniform, of whom Oliverasked more, but it is not Boz's master, it is Cruikshank's. All beadles are one Mr Bumble—the Bumble of Boz and Cruikshank, though without the shadow of the sack with which the novelist eclipsed him. The etched scene where Fagin, frying sausages, receives Oliver in a den of thieves, has a squalid comfortableness—a leering charity—which praises Hell. The etched scene of Sikes's desperation on the roof of a house in Jacob's Island, Bermondsey, is in essence Misery itself, vermicular as well as violent. The etched scene where Fagin sits with blazing eyes in the condemned cell at Newgate under a window which shows him up like the Day of Judgment has been called "a picture by Fagin," for rhetoric exhausts itself in confessing its horror. In "Jack Sheppard," Cruikshank drew Newgate with particularity, he drew Bedlam with a maniac in it; for "A Journal of the Plague Year," he drewThe Great Pit in Aldgate, but Fagin in his extremity belittles other horrors in Cruikshank's gallery of art. London is ashamed to see and acknowledge him; he makes her long for rain, and soap in the rain; he makes her remember her river.
The reader will therefore look sympathetically at the powerful etching here reproduced from Angus B. Reach's "Clement Lorimer" (1849). It is a kidnapping scene; there is a drugged girl in the boat; the pier against which an oar has snapped supports an arch of London Bridge.
It might be doubted if Cruikshank personally cared for any locality except London if it were not for evidence in the South Kensington Museum and the dispersed collection of the metropolitan Royal Aquarium. Number 9502A/Cin the South Kensington collection of his work is a design for a house which he intended to build for himself at the seaside. The Royal Aquarium collection contained several water-colours by him of littoral subjects. Hastings may remember what she was like before the building of her esplanade by means of two water-colours by him, dated respectively 1820 and 1828, which Mr Walter Spencer bought for five guineas.A Distant View of Shakespeare's Cliff, Dover, secured by Mr Frank Karslake, tempted that art-dealer, who was its possessor when I last saw it, to withhold it from his customers. It is soft, slight and pretty. With a fancifulBeachy Head(a water-colour "sketch from [sic] part of Shakespeare's Cliff, Dover, 1830") it sold for seven guineas, the "Beachy Head" being an outline of the cliff resembling a head looking left with dropped eyelid as seen (perhaps exclusively) by Cruikshank, who represents himself as standing in front of it; and I mention this "Beachy Head" because the same idea informs a rather subtle drollery in "My Sketch Book" (1833), where a couple are depicted in their fright at seeing a human face outlined by the edge of the top of Shakespeare's Cliff. All the sales mentioned in this paragraph were made at the auction at Sotheby's, 22 and 23 May 1903.
Miss Eske carried away during her Trance. From "Clement Lorimer," 1849.Miss Eske carried away during her Trance. From "Clement Lorimer," 1849.
We have had already to touch on the way in which Cruikshank was the historian of himself. Thanks to his literary aggressiveness, mixed with love, so quaint and like talk in expression, that his pages resemble cylinders for a phonograph, we look at his autobiographical drawings with genuine interest. In Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson's publication of 1895—"Drawings by George Cruikshank, prepared by him to illustrate an intended autobiography"—we are introduced pictoriallyto "George, Nurse, Brother and Mother at Hampstead"; and the same volume shows our artist unpleasantly situated on a roofsub titulo The Button-hole of a Naughty boy caught by a nail. In the South Kensington collection George shows us very crudelya Fire in the South East end of London to which I ran when a boy with the Engine from Bloomsbury. In 1877 George sketched himself as he was about 1799, when he looked at his father while Isaac Cruikshank was drawing, and we realise the affection in this reminiscence upon seeing George's grotesques of low life done when he was "a very little boy" on the same page where the academic Isaac has drawn a conventional heroic nude and a little girl suitable for a nursery magazine (S.K. coll. No. 9814). Under a pencil sketch (S.K. coll. No. 9817) we read "George Cruikshank when a boy used to put his mother's Fur Tippet over his head like the above and make frightful faces for fun." In published work Cruikshank repeatedly presents his own portrait, my favourite examples of his self-portraiture being the painter inNobody desires the Painter to make him as ugly and ridiculous as possible("Scraps andSketches," 1831), and that of himself going in as a steward with Dickens and others to a Public Dinner ("Sketches by Boz," 1836). An excellent example of a comic presentation of himself is the frontispiece to this volume. Enviable and admirable health of mind is shown by Cruikshank's love of his own face, upon which flourished, under a high forehead and "blue-grey eyes, full of a cheerful sparkling light," "an ambiguous pair of ornaments," partaking "vaguely," writes Mr Walter Hamilton, "of the characteristics" of whiskers, moustaches and beard.
I conclude this chapter with a reproduction of a painting by George Cruikshank in the South Kensington Museum. The lady is yellow-haired and has a good complexion. It appears to be a portrait of Mrs George Cruikshank (née Widdison), his second wife, whose prenomen was Eliza. She could draw, for there is a vapid but well-finished female head by her in the South Kensington collection of her husband's work (No. 10,038-4). She is not, of course, to be confounded with Cruikshank's sister Eliza, who designed the caricature of the Four Prues.
ELIZA CRUIKSHANK. From a painting by George Cruikshank in the South Kensington Museum, No. 9769, endorsed "Mrs George Cruikshank E. C. 1884." The date is supposed to refer to the year of presentation to the museum.ELIZA CRUIKSHANK. From a painting by George Cruikshank in the South Kensington Museum, No. 9769, endorsed "Mrs George Cruikshank E. C. 1884." The date is supposed to refer to the year of presentation to the museum.
We have now to consider Cruikshank as a supernaturalist. Perhaps there is no rôle in which he is more sincerely esteemed. His simple egoism and self-conceit protected him from an apprehension of the nothingness of matter in the eye of a being who is uncontrolled by the world-idea. He could not conceive that a mind can impose the idea of a form upon an inferior mind, or a mind in sympathy with it: hence his egregious "discovery concerning ghosts." His world of supernature was a playground of fancy where powers are denoted by the same symbols which inform us that this animal can run, and that animal can fly, and the other animal can think. It is a world of which the major part is peopled with forms so lively, gracious and fanciful that Mr Frederick Wedmore's violent preference of Keene to Cruikshank seems, in view of it, a kind of aggressive rationalism. This world, however,contains the Devil, and on this colliery monster we will bestow a few glances.
LEGEND OF ST MEDARD. The Saint has slit the bag in which the fiend is carrying children. From "The Ingoldsby Legends," 1842.LEGEND OF ST MEDARD. The Saint has slit the bag in which the fiend is carrying children. From "The Ingoldsby Legends," 1842.
Cruikshank's best idea of the Devil is comedy of tail. In one of the "Twelve Sketches illustrative of Sir Walter Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830) he shows the archfiend seated on the back of a smiling elf who poses as a quadruped to provide a stool. The fiend is "dighting" an arrow by the light of the flaming hair of an elf who wears an extinguisher on his tail, and a cat enthusiastically plays with the forked appendage of the illustrious artisan. The dignity of labour is here inimitably manifest. Lovably ludicrous, too, is the Devil whom Cruikshank presents inThe De'il cam fiddling thro' the Town("Illustrations of Popular Works," 1830). "Auld Mahoun's" forked tail has caught the exciseman by the cravat. In "Scraps and Sketches" (1832). Cruikshank has another Devil who plays on a gridiron as if it were a guitar, to soothe a man who has been lassoed by his tail. "And if my tail should make you sad I'll strike my light guitar." In "A Discovery concerning Ghosts" (1863) Cruikshank depicts the Devil as lifting a table with his tail and one hoof. One of theDevils offered to my readers—he whom St Medard thwarted—is an example of good work in a bad setting; the machine-ruled sky and "scandalously slurred distance" must be viewed as symptoms of Cruikshank's dislike for Bentley, the publisher of "The Ingoldsby Legends." The cuts from "The True Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil" (1848) replace the perverted Pan—Pan as perverted for the abolition of his prestige—with a plaintive ruffian whose horns and hoofs disgrace a very obvious humanity.
Exit Devil: enter Satan. About 1827 Cruikshank drew him on wood, in the act of calling on his followers as related by Milton in "Paradise Lost," Book I., Il. 314-332. Cruikshank described the drawing referred to, which was engraved by an unconfident hand, as "the best drawing that I ever did in my life." A solitary print of the engraving made of it sold at Sotheby's for £3, 6s. On a towering rock, Satan calls up an army which looks like living ribbon wound up out of the bottomless pit to the ceiling of the air. His personality is felt by the effect of his command, not by his individual appearance.Michelangelo might have favourably considered this book-illustration as a bare sketch of a muster of the damned; for as one looks at it he is tempted to give it to half a dozen painters and "put it in hand."
SHOEING THE DEVIL. From Edward G. Flight's "The True Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil," 1848.SHOEING THE DEVIL. From Edward G. Flight's "The True Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil," 1848.
THE DEVIL SIGNING. From Edward G Flight's "The True Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil," 1848.THE DEVIL SIGNING. From Edward G Flight's "The True Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil," 1848.
The naïve evangelicism of "The Pilgrim's Progress" was productive of more of Cruikshank's serious monsters. 1827 is the date of seven woodcuts by him for this work (Reid 3555-61) which do not impress Mr Spielmann; they are, however, very neatly executed, and the drawing ofChristian arriving at the Gateis quite unwarrantably pleasant in its suggestion of conflict and weariness ending in the bosom of hospitality. In 1838 Cruikshank contributedVanity Fair—an elaborate etching—to a "Pilgrim's Progress" containing plates by H. Melville.Vanity Fairis a skilful catalogue marred by the misnaming of Britain Row. He produced anotherVanity Fair, circa 1854, a vehement and uninteresting design which, with companion drawings by him of the same date, appears in Mr Henry Frowde's edition of "The Pilgrim's Progress" (1903). These drawings (only recently engraved) annoyed Mr G. S. Layard, and me they amuse and touch. Theyshow that Cruikshank could draw the face of a man whosemétieris goodness, ... and that Apollyon—a veritable creature of tinker-craft in Bunyan's text—was utterly beyond Cruikshank's power to shape according to the crooked splendour of his name. One must not forget that a pious convention of absurdity is a trap for the critic and the humorist alike. I feel that Cruikshank almost loved Bunyan. Witness the large coloured print inscribed in his last decade, "Geo. Cruikshank 1871," where Christian—a Galahad of knightliness—passes through the snake-afflicted valley of the Shadow of Death.
PETER SCHLEMIHL WATCHING THE CLOCK From "Peter Schlemihl," 1823. Copies of the book dated 1824 are also accepted as of the first edition.PETER SCHLEMIHL WATCHING THE CLOCK From "Peter Schlemihl," 1823. Copies of the book dated 1824 are also accepted as of the first edition.
Exit the Pilgrim, and re-enter the Devil. Cruikshank made remarkable successes in two series of illustrations wherein this magnate assumes the form of a man of our world. The books in which they appear are "Peter Schlemihl" by Adelbert von Chamisso (1823) and "The Gentleman in Black" by J. Y. Akerman (1831). To Chamisso the Devil is "a silent, meagre, pale, tall elderly man" wearing an "old-fashioned grey taffetan coat" with a "close-fitting breast-pocket" to it, and he is willing to buy Peter's shadow. Meagreand close-fitting is Cruikshank's idea of him; he is only substantial enough to give posture and movement to his clothes. That is a beautiful etching where he is folding Peter's shadow as a tailor folds a suit and Peter is unaware of the terrible oddity of a foot on the ground having for shadow a foot in the air—a foot no longer subordinate to Peter who will tread the earth in despair when he is a shadowless man; and that is a marrow-thrilling etching where Peter's tempter stands casting two shadows and flourishing a document promising the delivery of Peter's soul to the bearer after its separation from Peter's body. There is a haunting cold brightness about the Schlemihl etchings. If you see them without asensationof their difference from the work of any body except him who made them, your acquaintance includes a prodigy, a Cruikshank plus x. To J. Y. Akerman the Devil was "a stout, short, middle-aged gentleman of a somewhat saturnine complexion" who "was clad in black" and "had a loose Geneva cloak ... of the same colour." Like Schlemihl's customer he pays with a bottomless purse and in the cuts, engraved by J. Thompson and C. Landells, we seehim a grave humorous and sinister person, who after his urbanity has been shaken by the cleverness of the law, is exhibited without warrant of narrative, as Old Horny on a gibbet. I presume the above-mentioned J Thompson, by the way, to be the John Thompson whom Cruikshank describes at the foot of a letter from this engraver dated "Feb. 7, [18]40," as "the Great, the wonderful Artistic Engraver on wood—and who used to engrave my drawings as no other man ever did."
After the Devil comes Punch, who in the puppet play destroys him. Punch is only by irony a nursery character. He represents the comic genius of murder. A Hooligan may feel like a Pharisee after looking at him. His coarse materialism would affront apierreuse. Cruikshank drew Punch as early as 1814 in a plate, satirising a fête given by the Duke of Portland on the occasion of the baptism of an infant marquis. The plate is entitled "Belvoir Frolic's" [sic] and appears in No. 4 of "The Meteor." A very long-nosed Punch extols the beverage bearing his name, and his infant son falls into a punch-bowl whilebeing baptised by a drunkard. It was not, however, till 1828 that a reasonable joker could call Cruikshank's great hit a punch. That date is on the title-page of "Punch and Judy" edited by J. Payne Collier, for whose publisher (S. Prowett) Cruikshank drew the scenes of the immortal puppet-play as produced by Piccini, who defied any other puppet-showman in England to perform his feat of making the figure with the immoderate neck remove its hat with one hand. Thanks to Piccini, then, Cruikshank's Punch is the real Punch—a goggling miscreant, whose hump is a rigid and misplaced tail and whose military hat, above a crustacean's face, completes a rather melancholy effect of mania. The conductor of "George Cruikshank's Omnibus" confessed to feeling "that it was easy to represent" Punch's "eyes, his nose, his mouth, but that the one essential was after all wanting—thesqueak." Cruikshank was barely just to his pencil. As one looks at his Punch one feels that such a being is either a squeaker or a mute. As for the Devil, whose rôle is so humiliating in the Punch tromedy (as a neologist might call it), he is of an aspectpitiably mean—like a corpse attired in river mud.
PUNCH THROWING AWAY THE BODY OF THE SERVANT. From "Punch and Judy," 1828 (early proof). The portrait of George Cruikshank below his initials does not appear in the book.PUNCH THROWING AWAY THE BODY OF THE SERVANT. From "Punch and Judy," 1828 (early proof). The portrait of George Cruikshank below his initials does not appear in the book.
After this, it is impossible not to realise the enormity of the compliment paid by the hand of Cruikshank (serving the imagination of G. H.) to Napoleon in that publication of August 1815, rashly stated by Mr Bruton to be the finest Napoleonic caricature, which depicts the imperial exile of St Helena as the Devil addressing a solar Prince Regent. Here the Devil gets the credit of a handsome face and Napoleon the debit of cloven feet.
Cruikshank's representation of the Devil as Old Nick has the absurd merit of recalling his idea of the servant of a good Peri! CompareThe Handsome Clear-starcher("Bentley's Miscellany," 1838) withThe Peri[, the Djin]and the Taylor("Minor Morals, Part III.," 1839). Both these ornaments of my sex have white eyes windowing a black face, and the former, with heraldic sulphur fumes above his figure of Elizabethan dandy, is, if we do not date him, a horrible gibe at the feminine Satan of "sorrows."
Is there, the reader may now ask, not unmindful of the Miltonic drawing alreadydescribed, no Satan among Cruikshank's Netherlanders, to show that he saw the sublime of evil as clearly as he saw Fagin? Alas forcatalogues raisonnés! for if it were not for G. W. Reid we could not point the querist to Cruikshank's Lucifer in his illustrations on wood to George Clinton's "Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron" (1825). Of "a shape like to the angels, yet of a sterner and a sadder aspect of spiritual essence," not less beauteous than the cherubim, Cruikshank, with or without an accomplice in another engraver, makes a black and white Moor, jointed like a Dutch doll, with wings which an Icarus would distrust.
Perhaps the most impressive conception of the author of unhappiness which Cruikshank executed was that which he owed to the imagination of Mrs Octavian Blewitt. In his last published etching,The Rose and the Lily(1875), he depicts, by her instruction, a lake out of which appears, like an islet, the weed-covered top of a vast head, the eyes of which are the only visible features. The lake is the abode of "The Demon of Evil" and his eyes of bale are upturned to regard a fairyqueen and her suite who hover over a rose and a lily.
Cruikshank's favourite among semi-infernal or hemi-demi-semi celestial characters would seem to have been Herne, the demon of Windsor Forest, whom legend derives from a suicide. Our illustration of Herne appearing to Henry VIII. (1843) is sombre and grandiose. The artist recurred to Herne again in one of his beautiful etchings for "The life of Sir John Falstaff" by R. B. Brough (1858). Falstaff as Herne, with antlers on his head, lies prone beneath the great riven oak which is called Herne's oak, because human Herne is supposed to have hanged himself from a bough of it. Fairies, depicted by their lover, have taken into their invisible web of glamour the grossness of Falstaff, and to me the etching which contains in harmony so tragic a tree, so gluttonous a man, and the only angels that shame can love without terror is not an illustration of Shakespeare but a vision of everybody's heaven. For if it is an illustration of Shakespeare, then are these no fairies but Mistress Quickly, Anne Page and other actresses, in a punitive and moralising mood!The last appearance of Cruikshank's Herne is in a drawing, done when the artist was eighty-three, for "Peeps at Life" (1875), in which the demon rides through Windsor Forest with a monk behind him.
HERNE THE HUNTER APPEARING TO HENRY VIII. ("Windsor Castle"). From "Ainsworth's Magazine," vol. iii., 1843.HERNE THE HUNTER APPEARING TO HENRY VIII. ("Windsor Castle"). From "Ainsworth's Magazine," vol. iii., 1843.
It is now time to say a few words about the Cruikshankian ghost. About the year 1860, Cruikshank offered £100 to anyone who should show him a ghost "said to have been seen frequently in the neighbourhood of some Roman Catholic institution near Leicester." No one claimed the money, and Cruikshank remained a religious materialist, charmingly boyish in his amusement over the ghosts of tears and dirt. His natural idea of a ghost was comic in the way of a wise old world that taxes pain and wrath for humour. His designs for Part II. of "Points of Humour" (1824) include a vision of spirits discharged from their bodies by the ministrations of a pompous doctor, who holds his stick against his mouth because Cruikshank condemned the use of "the crutch" as a toothpick. The ugliness of these spirits is not excelled by Cruikshank's Giles Scroggins, in vol. i. of "The Universal Songster" (1825),—a spook whose wavinghands like bewitched gloves, exultant toes and nightcap tipsy as a blown flame, are duly noted by Molly Brown. Folklore had a refining influence on Cruikshank when, for Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft," he etched, in 1830, Mrs Leckie, a white-aproned ghost who, by a miracle of Scotchness, is perfectly decorous as she kicks with a high heeled shoe the doctor of physic who "shewed some desire to be rid of her society." Cruikshank's chef d'œuvre of ghost-humour is an etching for Captain Glascock's "Land Sharks and Sea Gulls" (1838). This triumph of pictorial anecdote confronts us with Ann Dobbs, who has materialised her head and hands for the purpose of exhibiting, with a proper show of accusation, to a whimpering sailor, whose pigtail has risen in homage to her, "the feller piece of the broken bit" of her tomb-stone, which he had stolen for a holy-stone to clean decks with. After this, the reader may be surprised to learn that a ghost, produced by Cruikshank for "The Scourge" of August 1815, was serious enough to be precautiously blacked out before the plate entitledA Financial Survey of Cumberland, Or the Beggar'sPetition, was put into general circulation. It is the ghost of Sellis, the Duke of Cumberland's valet, who is made to accuse his earthly master of murder, by these words "Is this a razor I see before me? Thou canst not say I did it." Of that other serious ghost, St Winifred in "Guy Fawkes" (1840), enough has been said. Her dullness is absolutely unmystical, and it is a relief to turn from her to look atThe Holy Infant, that prayed as soon as he was born("Catholic Miracles," 1825), an exquisitely droll sketch, about as large as a penny, of "intense" chubbiness in a hand basin.
Though sympathy with men and women did not make Cruikshank courteous to ghosts, he was led by the credulity and experience of his childhood to be affectionate to fairies and almost patriotic in his feeling about the magical countries in which they dwell. In a note to "Puss in Boots" he informs us that his nurse told him when he was "a very little boy" that the fairies "had houses in the white places"—i.e.fungi—in the corners of cellars. In cellars he accordingly looked for them, "and certainly did ... fancy" that he saw "very,verytiny little people running in and out of these littlewhite houses"—i.e.fungi—and attributed any power he possessed of drawing or describing a fairy to his nurse's communications and his visions in cellars.
Like a sword-swallower I saw in Belfast, I will ask you to "put your hands together," for the anecdote just related is corroborated by the charm of his fairy drawings.