From "Comic Composites for the Scrap-Book," 1821.From "Comic Composites for the Scrap-Book," 1821.
What happened when Cruikshank went into cellars is symbolical of poetry. He saw what was not there by that creative touch of mind which transforms an object by increasing its similitude to something else. InComic Composites for the Scrap Book(1821), we have intelligent human creatures suggested by arrangements of household implements. As I look at the mundatory erection here reproduced, I anachronistically hum Stephen Glover's "March composed for Prince Albert's Hussars." It is, however, less brilliant than the aldermanic bellows and the doctor (with a mortar for body, cottonwool for hair and labels for feet), to whom he states his symptoms in "Scraps and Sketches" (1831), for they amuse the satirist even at this date when gluttonyis merely not moderation and bored sapience is merely not sympathetic wisdom.
Cruikshank then had one great qualification for illustrating fairy tales: he could animate the inanimate. Let us now follow his career as a fairy artist, beginning with his first great success.
THE GOOSE GIRL. From "German Popular Stories," vol. ii., 1826.THE GOOSE GIRL. From "German Popular Stories," vol. ii., 1826.
In 1822 appeared a post-dated volume of "German Popular Stories ... collected by M. M. Grimm." A companion volume was published in 1826, and both books were adorned by the hand of George Cruikshank. Excepting two much-admired German leprechauns or fairy cobblers in one of Cruikshank's twenty-two etchings, they do not present a fairy worth smiling at, and these cobblers, boundlessly delighted by a present of clothes, are, of course, very far from being of the angelicéliteof Fairyland, as drawn by Sir Joseph Noel Paton for Mrs S. C. Hall. But Fairyland is in the imagination of democracy, and he is a good patriot of that country who amuses us with its "freaks," for they are dear to thehoi polloiwhich appreciate novelty more than perfection. Cruikshank in his Grimm mood is for the "living drollery" which cured Sebastian'sscepticism concerning the phœnix and the unicorn. He rejoicingly presents a nose as long as a garden hose—a nose worthy of the beard which travels from page 6 to page 7 of his "Table-Book" (1845). He refreshes us with the humorous pleasure of the giant inspecting Thumbling on the palm of his hand; and he convulses us with the vocal display of the ass, dog and cat which plunge through the glass of a window into the robbers' room. Ruskin said of these etchings that they "were unrivalled in masterfulness of touch since Rembrandt; (in some qualities of delineation unrivalled even by him)"; to that eulogy I can only add that they are inspiriting because they are candid and vivid, and show that realism can be on the side of magic.
Passing without pause some tiny cuts, upon which children would pounce for love of gnomes, in "The Pocket Magazine" (1827, 1828), we arrive again at Cruikshank's sketches for Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830), and inspect elves and fairies, barely prettier than mosquitoes, annoying mortals. Worry is incarnate in a horizontal man who is supported in and drawn through the air by elves, directedby two drivers, one on each of his boots. Beautiful is the contempt for herrings of an elf standing on a plate which a comrade is about to smash with a hammer in the presence of a cheaply-hospitable (and sluttish) housewife whom a dozen elves have pulled downstairs by her feet.
Fables which invent sorrow to prevent it can only be classed as fairy-tales by a sacrifice of themot juste, which I make in order to call attention to an exquisite quartet of etchings by George Cruikshank, illustrating Richard Frankum's verses entitled "The Bee and the Wasp" (1832). No hand but his who drew the shadow-buyer in Peter Schlemihl could have drawn the hair-lines of the criminal insect who mocks the drowning bee in the third of these etchings. So pleased and delicate a malignancy is expressed in him that he figures to me as a personification of evil, and I am disagreeably conscious of smiling to think that, because he speaks and is seen, he is a gentleman compared with a trypanosome or a bacillus coli.
AMARANTH "THE EVER YOUNG" IS CARRIED TO CORALLION BY THE BEE'S MONSTER STEED. From "The Good Genius that Turned Everything into Gold," by the Bros Mayhew, 1847.AMARANTH "THE EVER YOUNG" IS CARRIED TO CORALLION BY THE BEE'S MONSTER STEED. From "The Good Genius that Turned Everything into Gold," by the Bros Mayhew, 1847.
A bee—but a superbee—figured in the next fairy book illustrated by Cruikshank. Inhis designs for "The Good Genius that Turned Everything into Gold" (1847) he showed for the first time an ambition to idealise magic. The idea that power exists in beings of familiar shape and wieldy dimensions to build palaces and fleets without mistakes, without plans and adjustments, without the publication of embryos behind hoardings—to build them without economy and sacrificial fatigue—this is the breathless poem of the crowd. The Brothers Mayhew gave this idea to Cruikshank, and one at least of his etchings for their story—the palace emerging from rock and arborescence—shows that he almost objectified it. Thus (unconsciously) did he atone for that neglect of opportunity which allowed him to deck the magical and tender, the deep and lustrous fiction of E. T. W. Hoffmann, the inspired playmate of ideas that rock with laughter and subdue with awe, with nothing better than a frigidly humorous picture of a duel with spy-glasses.
In 1848 an incomplete and refined translation of "II Pentamerone" appeared with pretty and sprightly designs by Cruikshank. These designs show a more direct sympathy withjuvenile taste than his famous etchings for "German Popular Stories." With shut eyes one can still see his ogre swearing at the razor-crop, and his strong man marching off with all the wealth of the King of Fair-Flower, while the champion blower with one good blast makes bipeds of horses and kites of men. Nennella stepping grandly out of the enchanted fish to embrace her brother is dear to an indulgent scepticism. There were beautiful fields and a fine mansion inside that fish and his toothful mouth is but a portico of Fairyland.
From George Cruikshank's Fairy Library, 'Cinderella,' 1854.From George Cruikshank's Fairy Library, 'Cinderella,' 1854.
Tails not having been invented merely to mitigate the sorrows of Satan, Cruikshank had some more of these appendages to draw when with "Kit Bam's Adventures" (1849) he entered the fairyland of Mrs Cowden Clarke. The very rhetorical mariner of that story is remembered for the sake of the tails of mer-children twining about his legs in the frontispiece to it, and human children allow their Louis Wain to wane for a minute as, with Kit Bam, they look at Cruikshank's tortoiseshell cat, ruffed and aproned, laying the table while Captain Capsicum, horned and gouty, urbanely watches her.
Naturally Cruikshank desired to associate himself permanently with fairy stories better known in England than the name of any folklorist or Perrault D'Armancourt himself. Rusher had published, circa 1814, "Cinderella" and "Dick Whittington" with cuts "designed by Cruikshank," whose prenomen was or was not George; and to George Cruikshank is ascribed by Mr Edwin Pearson some early cuts for "Mother Hubbard and her Dog." Each of these illustrations could be covered with a quartet of our postage stamps and only those for "Mother Hubbard," which are droll and tender, possess more than an antiquarian interest. In 1846, in twelve designs built round the title "Fairy Songs and Ballads for the young ... By O. B. Dussek ...," George Cruikshank illustrated "Dick Whittington," "Jack and the Beanstalk," etc., and was lively and pretty in a wee way. These were trifles, however, and Cruikshank was ambitious. In 1853-4 and 1864 he flattered his ambition by the issue of "George Cruikshank's Fairy Library." Unfortunately Ruskin was displeased with the earlier issues of this "library," for in 1857 he forbade his disciplesto copy Cruikshank's designs for "Cinderella," "Jack and the Beanstalk" and "Tom Thumb" [sic] as being "much over-laboured and confused in line." But on July 30, 1853, Mrs Cowden Clarke begged Cruikshank to allow her to thank him in the name of herself "and," writes she, "the other grown-up children of our family, together with the numerous little nephews and nieces who form the ungrown-up children among us, for the delightful treat you have bestowed in the shape of the 1st No. of the 'Fairy Library.'" This was the maligned "Hop-o'-my-Thumb," the pictures of which possess the charm of the artist's "Pentamerone." None of Cruikshank's ogres are as horrible as J. G. Pinwell's man-eating giant in "The Arabian Nights," and so the ogre in his "Hop-o'-my Thumb" is merely a glutton with a knife, but what a passion of entreaty is expressed in the kneeling children at his feet! The seven-leagued boots are worth all Lilley and Skinner's as, formally introduced, they bow before the smiling king. The architectural effect of the design which, as it were, makes a historian of a tree is admirable. The beanstalk in No. 2 is a true ladder of romance; and, seeing it, Ithink that Cruikshank escaped from the repugnant vulgarity of G. H. on that May or June day of 1815 when he drew ThePedigree of Corporal Violet(aliasNapoleon) as a perpendicular of flowers and fungi and dreamed of the fairy seed he would sow for children. In "Jack and the Beanstalk" there is not only a fairy plant but a real English fairy gauzy-winged, tiny, with a wand as fine as a needle. Yet Ruskin was displeased, and we may define the fault which caused his displeasure as a finicky unveracity about shade and textures.
THE OGRE IN THE FORM OF A LION. From George Cruikshank's Fairy Library, "Puss in Boots," 1864.THE OGRE IN THE FORM OF A LION. From George Cruikshank's Fairy Library, "Puss in Boots," 1864.
In 1866, however, Cruikshank executed two plates for Ruskin; one of them illustrated "The Blue Light" from Grimm, the other showed the children of Hamelin following the Pied Piper into the mountain; and in the same year he almost paralleled the success of his fairy cobblers in Grimm by an etching of Pixies engaged in making boots, which he did for Frederick Locker, afterwards Locker-Lampson. In 1868 Cruikshank made the large and beautiful etching entitled "Fairy Connoisseurs inspecting Mr Frederick Locker's Collection of Drawings." Anyone who has read "MyConfidences" (1896) will acknowledge that it was a happy thought to invite the Little People into Mr Locker-Lampson's library, for this bibliophile, so humorous and elegant, so ready with the exact Latin quotation needed to civilise perfectly the shape of an indecorum, was in essence a child whose toys were consecrated to the fairies by his purity in loving them.
We will take leave of Cruikshank as a fairy artist by a look at a sketch for his pictureThe Fairy Ring. He painted the picture, which is his best oil-painting, in 1855 for the late Henry Miller of Preston, for £800. The sketch referred to sold at Sotheby's in 1903 for £25, 10s. This sketch—a painting—I saw at the Royal Aquarium, as in a bleak railway station without the romance of travel. The Fairy King stands on a mushroom about which rotate two rings of merrymakers between which run torch bearers. They are mad, these merrymakers, and madness is delight. Hard by, a towering foxglove leans into space, bearing two joyous sprites. Gigantic is the lunar crescent that shines on the scene; it is a gate through which an intrepid fairyrides a bat above the revels. In this impressionistic sketch, Cruikshank shows himself participant in the mysterious exultation of the open night where man, intruding, feels neither seen nor known.The Fairy Ringbelongs to the poetry of humour. It perorates for a supernaturalist whose fashionable ignorance, touched with less durable vulgarity, blinded him to such visions as, in our time, the poet "A. E." has depicted. Looking at Cruikshank's supernatural world of littleness and prettiness, of mirth, extravagance, and oddity, we feel in debt to his limitations.
The humour of George Cruikshank deserves separate consideration, because it is essentially the man himself. Despite a technical excellence so peculiar that, according to the author of Number 1 of "Bursill's Biographies," the engraver Thompson "kept a set of special tools, silver-mounted and with ivory handles, sacred for" Cruikshank's designs, his sense of beauty was not eyes to him. Women he usually saw as lard or bone, and this strange perversity of vision and art differentiates him from the moderns by more than time. For instance, the women presented by Mr S. D. Ehrhart and O'Neill Latham (a lady-artist), to mention only two modern humorists, materialise an idea of beauty in humour which was as foreign to Cruikshank as apple-blossom to apomme de terre.
A GENTLEMAN'S REST BROKEN (in consequence of going to bed with his leg on). From an etching in "Scraps and Sketches," Part i, 1828.A GENTLEMAN'S REST BROKEN (in consequence of going to bed with his leg on). From an etching in "Scraps and Sketches," Part 1, 1828.
Humour with Cruikshank was elemental. A joke was sacred from implication; it wasself-sufficient, vocal in line and curve, percussive. He was a contemporary of Douglas Jerrold, who was humorous when he called a town Hole-cum-Corner. He was a contemporary of Thomas Hood, who was humorous when he announced that
"from her grave in Mary-boneThey've come and bon'd your Mary."
"from her grave in Mary-boneThey've come and bon'd your Mary."
He was in that "world of wit" where they kept a nutmeg-grater on the table in order to say, when a great man was mentioned, "there's a grater." He was in a world where professional humour was perversely destructive of faith in imagination.
EXCHANGE NO ROBBERY. From "Points of Humour," 1823. The unfaithful wife has concealed her lover in the clock. The husband, who has unexpectedly returned, devours bacon at 1 A.M., while she is in an agony of apprehension.EXCHANGE NO ROBBERY. From "Points of Humour," 1823. The unfaithful wife has concealed her lover in the clock. The husband, who has unexpectedly returned, devours bacon at 1 A.M., while she is in an agony of apprehension.
But what is humour? Late though the question be, it should be answered. Humour, then, is the ability to receive a shock of pleasant surprise from sounds and appearances without attributing importance to them. As the proof of humour is physiological, its appeal to the intellect is as peremptory as that of terror. It is a benignant despot which relieves us from the sense of destiny and of duty. Its range is illimitable. It is victoriously beneath contempt and above worship.
Cruikshank was a humorist who could laugh coarsely, broadly, selfishly, merrily, well. Coarseness was natural to him, or he would not have selected for a (suppressed) illustration in "Italian Tales" (1824) a subject which mingles tragedy with the laughter of Cloacina. One can only say that humour, like a sparrow, alights without regard to conventions. The majority can laugh with Rabelais, though they have not the idealism which created Theleme. Jokes that annoy the nose are no longer tolerable in art, but in Cruikshank's time so wholesome a writer as Captain Marryat thought Gillray worth imitating in his translation of disease into terms of humour. HenceThe HeadacheandThe Cholic(1819), signed with an anchor (Captain Marryat's signature) and etched by Cruikshank, followThe Goutby Gillray (1799). The reader may well ask if the sight of a hideous creature sprawling on a man's foot is humour according to my definition. I can only presume that in what Mr Grego calls the "port-wine days," Gillray's plate was like sudden sympathy producing something so absolutely suitable for swearing at, that patients smiled in easy-chairs at grief.
Broad humour has an eye on sex. The uncle who, on being asked at dinner for an opinion on a lady's costume, observes that he must go under the table to form it, is a type of the broad humorist in modern life. Cruikshank had none of that tenderness for women's clothes which in modern representation removes altogether the pudical idea from costume and substitutes the idea of witchery by foam of lace and coil of skirts. His guffaws and those of Captain Marryat and J. P***y, whose invention exercised his needle, at the Achilles in Hyde Park, in 1822, are vexatious enough to make one wish to restore all fig-leaves to the fig-forest. It is not possible for a man with an indefinite and inexpressible feeling for woman to laugh like that. Hearing his laughter we know that Cruikshank's humour about woman must always be obvious.
"EH., SIRS!" Illustrates "Waverley," by Sir Walter Scott, in "Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley Novels," 1836."EH., SIRS!" Illustrates "Waverley," by Sir Walter Scott, in "Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley Novels," 1836.
It is, and yet it is not measured by the height of her hat as he depicted it in 1828, when he contributed to that long series of jokes which culminate in Jan Linse's girl at the theatre who will not take her hat off because, "mamma, if I put it in my lap I can't see myself." In the annals of absurdity isthere anything more worthy to be true at the expense of the British Navy than Cruikshank's picture of the chambermaid confronted with the leg which she has mistaken for a warming-pan? Another woman, whom Cruikshank compels us to remember by force of humorous idea, is to be found inPoints of Humour(1823). She is the doxy in "The Jolly Beggars," sitting on the soldier's lap. We see her while she holds up
"her greedy gabJust like ae aumous dish."
"her greedy gabJust like ae aumous dish."
The soldier has lost an arm and a leg, but his face is the face of infatuation and her lips are the lips of lust. The toes of her bare feet express pleasure longing for ecstasy. I write seriously: they are very eloquent toes. There is a fire near the amorous pair, and the dog basking by it, uninterested in them, is a token of peace unpried upon. Her left hand grasps a pot of whiskey. She is in heaven. Indeed there is too much heaven in the picture for me to laugh at it. Behind the incongruity which clamours for laughter is the magic of drink reshaping in idea a half-butchered man and reviving the fires of sex.
HOPE. From "Phrenological Illustrations," 1826.HOPE. From "Phrenological Illustrations," 1826.
After this we glide politely from women as they blossom in the drollery of Cruikshank. Jenny showers "pills, bolus, julep and apozem too" on the physicians who would have exenterated her (vide"The New Bath Guide," 1830). The "patent washing machines" remember their sex at the approach of Waverley (vide"Landscape-Historical Illustrations," 1836), and remind us that in 1810 T. Tegg published a less refinedScotch Washingover the signature of Cruikshank. Nanse sheds the light of a candle upon the corpse of the cat compressed by a heavy sitter (vide"The Life of Mansie Wauch," 1839). The squaw "in glass and tobacco-pipes dress'd" evokes lyrical refusal from the Jack who has sworn to be constant to Poll (vide"Songs, Naval, and National, of the late Charles Dibdin," 1841). Lady Jane Ingoldsby smilingly—with lifted hand for note of interjection—allows her attention to be directed to the half of her drowned husband which was not "eaten up by the eels" (vide"Bentley's Miscellany," 1843). William's widow contemplates with fury the sailor upon whose nose has alighted her dummy babe (vide"The Old Sailor's Jolly Boat,"1844); and General Betsy gobbles her novel in a chaotic kitchen, oblivious of the horror of her mistress (vide"The Greatest Plague in Life," 1847).
In all this pageant of absurdity is wanting the special touch which surprises the spectator. The emotions of the women are rendered as with a consciousness that they are a merchandise of art and "in stock."
Details from the Plate entitled Heads of the Table, in "George Cruikshank's Table-Book," 1845.Details from the Plate entitled Heads of the Table, in "George Cruikshank's Table-Book," 1845.
The caricaturist of mankind, to immortalise his work, must haunt us with physiognomy. Thus Honoré Daumier inLe Bain Chaudhaunts us with the burlesque heroism in the face of a man about to sit down in water which pretends to scald him. Sir John Tenniel haunts us with the complacent slyness of Dizzy bringing in the hot water for February 1879 to that distrustful lie-abed John Bull. Charles Dana Gibson haunts us with the charmed vanity of an aged millionairess sitting up, bald and bony, in a regal bed, with her coffee-cup arrested in hand by the fulsome puff of her person and adornments read to her by her pretty maid. George Du Maurier haunts us with the freezing question in the face of the knightwho has permitted himself to crack an empty eggshell on the "Fust o' Hapril."
How does Cruikshank stand as a creator of humorous physiognomy? The answer is not from a trumpet. He invented crowds of people who seem merely the fruits of formulæ, and in comedy the simple application of the science of John Caspar Lavater is weak in effect, since laughter is tributary to surprise.
Compare Daumier's man in hot water with Cruikshank'sTrotting(a similar subject in "The Humourist," vol. iii., 1820), and one sees the difference between mere Lavaterism and emotion detected with delight. Compare Daumier's facetious ruffian asking the time of the man he intends to rob with almost any ruffian in Cruikshank's humorous gallery and one can only say that, in effect, one drew him to haunt the mind; the other to bore it. One ruffian surpasses his type without deserting it; the other is the type itself. Here and there, however, Cruikshank creates an individual who is more than his type without being divergent from it. Do we find such a one in the serious eater inHope("Phrenological Specimens," 1826), inwhose bone, already as innutritious as a toothbrush, his dog confides for sustenance? I think so, because I see him when I think of appetite as of tragedy. Humour accepts him in deference to her idea that there is nothing that cannot be laughed at, and she is worthy of deification when she goes down, down, down, laughing where even her worshippers are mute.
I doubt if Cruikshank twice excelled in respect of authenticity in humour the host and guest whom he presented in the reproduced subjects fromHeads of the Table(1845). Humour ascends from hisHopeto them as to a heaven of animals from a purgatorial region. That even what I have called Cruikshank's Lavaterism can be amusing is proved by his portrait of Socrates at the moment before he said "rain follows thunder."
We owe probably to Cruikshank's inveterate love of punning the capital study in disdain as provoked by envy exhibited in one of the lions inThe Lion of the Party(1845). Of his animal humour I shall have more to say: these lions are more human than many of his representationsofhomo sapiens; they need no footline.
X Xantippe From "A Comic Alphabet," 1836. See Pope's "The Wife of Bath" (after Chaucer), II. 387-392.X Xantippe From "A Comic Alphabet," 1836. See Pope's "The Wife of Bath" (after Chaucer), Il. 387-392.
The student of Cruikshank's humour must follow him through many volumes in which his pencil is subservient to literature; and in this journey he will often open his mouth to yawn rather than to laugh. The professional humorist, like the professional poet, is the prey of the Irony that sits up aloft; and Cruikshank was not an exception. Indeed one may say of some of his crowded caricatures that one has to wade through them. In the humorous illustration of literature his work is seldom risible, but it usually pleases by a combination of neatness and energy.
Despite his intense egotism he ventured to associate his art with the works of Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett, R. E. Raspe, Cowper, Byron, Scott, Dickens, Goldsmith, Douglas Jerrold, Thackeray, Le Sage, and Cervantes. These names evoke a world of humorous life in which is missing, to the knowledge of the spectator, only the humour which shines in jewels of brief speech and rings in the heavenly onomatopœia of absurdity. Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde are decidedly not of that world,though Raspe, by a freak of irony, graced his brutal pages with lines which the snark-hunter might have coveted, and Smollett's elegance in burlesque gravity is dear to an admirer of "The Importance of being Earnest."
Lion of the Party From "George Cruikshank's Table Book," 1845.Lion of the Party From "George Cruikshank's Table Book," 1845.
For Shakespeare, Cruikshank seems to have felt a tender reverence. As early as 1814 we find him drawing Kean as Richard III., and Hamlet for J. Roach, the publisher of "The Monthly Theatrical Reporter"; 1815 is the date of a lithograph ofJuliet and the Nursepublished by G. Cruikshank and otherwise unmemorable; in 1827 he made one of his "Illustrations of Time," a vivacious portrait of Puck about to girdle the earth. In 1857-8 came the Cruikshankian series of etchings for R. B. Brough's "Life of Sir John Falstaff." This series exhibits great skill and conscientiousness; the critic of "The Art Journal" (July 1858) was able to suppose them "actual scenes." Falstaff has a serene and majestic face; his bulk is too dignified for the scales of a showman; one understands his æsthetic abhorrence of a "mountain of mummy." Humour cancels his debt of shame for cowardice, and well would it have been if that rebellious Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle,the original of Falstaff, could have looked into Falstaff's roguish eyes as he reclined on the field of Shrewsbury and peeped at his freedom from all the bigotries which threaten and terrify mankind. Cruikshank unconsciously imparts this thought, but it is with conscience that he is amiable to Falstaff, who, begging, hiding, shamming, "facing the music," and dying, is his pet and ours by grace of his refined and beautiful art.
We meet Cruikshank's Falstaff again in the drawing entitledThe First Appearance of William Shakespeare on the Stage of the Globe(January 1863). Here we have the élite of Shakespeare's creations in a throng about his cradle. Titania and Oberon are at its foot, as though he owed them birth; Touchstone and Feste try to catch a gleam of laughter from his eyes; Prospero waves his wand; Othello gazes with hate at the guarded enchanter, more potent than Prospero, who is to bring his woe to light; Romeo and Juliet have eyes only for each other. Richard the Third is there, sadder than Lear; the witches who prophesied the steps of Macbeth towards hell gesticulate hideously by their cauldron; and Falstaff,cornuted as becomes the "deer" of Mrs Ford, smiles at a vessel that reminds him, as do all vessels, of sack and metheglins. There is charm and beauty of ensemble in this picture, which I have described from a coloured drawing in the South Kensington Museum made by its designer in 1864-5. I know nothing that suggests more forcibly the fatefulness hidden in the inarticulate stranger who appears every day in the world without a history and without a name.
ADAMS'S VISIT TO PARSON TRULLIBER. Frontispiece to "Joseph Andrews," 1831. The book is dated 1832. This is one of the plates in "Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832).ADAMS'S VISIT TO PARSON TRULLIBER. Frontispiece to "Joseph Andrews," 1831. The book is dated 1832. This is one of the plates in "Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832).
Smollett and Fielding, both novelists who present humour as the flower of annoyance and catastrophe, were hardly to be congratulated when Cruikshank innocently showed them up in "Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832). In both the reader of literature discerns a gentleman. In Fielding he sees a radiant man of the world from whom literary giants who succeeded him drew nutriment for ambition. Both Smollett and Fielding have heroines, and touch men in the nerve of sweetness, and fell them with love. But Cruikshank cared naught for their women, though he reproduced something equivalent to the charm of Shakespeare's"Merry Wives." When first he went to Smollett, it was for aPoint of Humour(1824), which centres in an "irruption of intolerable smells" at dinner. The point pricked, as one may say, but it was blunt in effect compared with that of a later artist's drawing ofColumbus and the Eggor that of Cruikshank's cook swallowing to order inLand Sharks and Sea Gulls(1838). The really vivid picture is recognised by a lasting imprint on a mind which is incapable of learning Bradshaw by heart, and Cruikshank's drawings for Smollett are reduced in my mind toMrs Grizzle extracting three black hairs from Mr Trunnion, and his drawings for Fielding are reduced into the ruined face and rambling fat of Blear-eyed Moll.
Those who will may compare the Smollett of Rowlandson with that of Cruikshank. The comparison may determine whether a dog is funnier while being trodden on or immediately after, and shows the indifference of Rowlandson to his artistic reputation. Cruikshank's attempts to illustrate Goldsmith are few and, as a series, unsuccessful. The reproduced specimen is a fair example of his realistic method. It exhibits the blackguard's senseof absurdity in the Christian altruism which paralyses the nerves of the pocket—sensitive usually as the nerves of sex—and which tyrannises over the nerves of pride.
THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD PREACHING TO THE PRISONERS. From "Illustrations of Popular Works," 1830.THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD PREACHING TO THE PRISONERS. From "Illustrations of Popular Works," 1830.
Fisher, Son, & Co., the publishers of Cruikshank's illustrations of the "Waverley" novels (1836-7-8), assumed "the merit of having been the first to illustrate the scenes of mirth, of merriment, of humour, that often sparkle" in these works. In "Landscape Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley Novels" he supplied the comic plates; hisBailie Macwheeble rejoicing before Waverley, for chapter lxvi. of "Waverley," was the first etching done by him on steel. His "Waverley" etchings are characteristic works, sometimes brilliant in pattern or composition, occasionally ministering to a love of physiognomical ugliness which the small nurses of the dolls called "golliwoggs" can better explain than I. His predilection for the curious and uncanny is shown in some striking plates, including that in which he depicts the terror of Dougal and Hutcheon as they mistake the ape squatting on Redgauntlet's coffin for "the foul fiend in his ain shape."
Cruikshank's illustrations for "Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron" (1824-5) are cuts which include such deplorable effects of bathos (e.g. Haidee saving Don Juan from her Father's wrath) that one has no heart to praise the rough vigour ofJuan opposing the Entrance to the Spirit Room. A Byron illustrated by protected aborigines seems realisable after seeing these pictures. If anybody paid the artist for them it should have been Wordsworth; that they did not weigh on Cruikshank's conscience, we may infer from the fact that in 1833 he cheerfully caricatured Byron for "Rejected Addresses" as a gentleman in an easy-chair kicking the terrestrial globe.
We have already discussed the fruit of Cruikshank's association with Dickens. We have not, however, paid tribute to Cruikshank's capital etchings for "Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi," edited by Boz (1838). The portrait of the famous clown holding in his arms a hissing goose and a squeaking pig, while voluble ducks protrude their heads from his pockets and a basket of carrots and turnips afflicts his back, is extraordinarily funny.
Though Cruikshank's relations with Thackeray were far happier than with Dickens, they resulted in nothing important to his reputation. His etchings illustrating Thackeray's contributions to "The Comic Almanack" (1839-40) weary one with plain or uninteresting faces, though that which exhibits the expressive blubber-face of Stubbs, horsed for the birching earned by his usury, provokes an irrational smile which serves for praise. His illustrations to "A Legend of the Rhine" (Thackeray's contribution to "George Cruikshank's Table-Book," 1845) are not equal to Thackeray's drawings for "The Rose and the Ring" (1855).
PRO-DI-GI-OUS! (Dominie Sampson in "Guy Mannering"), "Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley Novels," 1836.PRO-DI-GI-OUS! (Dominie Sampson in "Guy Mannering"), "Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley Novels," 1836.
In the world of humour one does not descend in moving from Thackeray to Charles James Lever. With Lever's own portrait of his hero to guide him, Cruikshank illustrated "Arthur O'Leary" (1844). Among his ten etchings in this novel is an amusing exhibition of Corpulence submitting to identification by measurement; it surpasses the scene by Du Maurier in which the tailor promises to be round in a minute if his customer will press one end of the tape-measure to his waist.
Cruikshank's ten etchings for "Gil Blas" (1833) are the works of an intelligent machine, which may be called humorous because it takes down the fact that Dame Jacintha held the cup to the Canon's mouth "as if he had been an infant." R. Smirke, R.A., with his sympathetic eye for flesh (as of a gardener for flowers) is obviously preferable to Cruikshank as Le Sage's illustrator, though our artist's Euphrasia is a dainty miss. Cruikshank's fifteen illustrations for "Don Quixote" (1833-34) are neat and for the most part uninspired renderings of pathological humour. Although it was within his ability to make a readable picture without words, he merely reminds one of the anecdote of the attack on the wind-mills. Compare the plate referred to with the painting on the same subject by Jose Moreno Carbonaro. Cruikshank's combatant is no more than a knight about to attack something—presumably a wind-mill. Carbonaro chooses the moment that exposes the knight as mad, futile, dismally droll, and we see him and his horse in the air, the latter enough to make Pegasus hiccup with laughter. Cruikshank's designs for "Don Quixote" comparefavourably, however, with the audacious scratches which constitute most of his brother Robert's chronicle of the Knight of La Mancha (1824). The collector who affords a crown to buy the former designs should also acquire "Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote," by H. D. Inglis, with six etchings by George Cruikshank (1837). The etchings—three of which are perfect anecdotes—were evidently donecon amore; but, good as they are, they were lucky if they satisfied an editor who believed Inglis's "New Gil Blas" to be "one of the noblest and most finished efforts in the line of pure imaginative writing that ever fell from the pen of any one man."
DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO RETURNING HOME. From "The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote," 1833.DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO RETURNING HOME. From "The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote," 1833.
It would be a species of literary somnambulism to wander further in a path of bibliography where ideas must be taken as they come instead of being ideally chosen and grouped. There is this mischief in Cruikshank's fecundity, that it tends to convert even a fairly bright critic into a scolytus boring his way through a catalogue. We emerge from our burrowing more percipient than before of the speculative nature of the undertaking to illustrate illustrious works of imagination.Sinking in competitive humour is akin to drowning; for he who materialises images despatched to the mind's eye by literary genius incurs the risk of having his work not only excelled by images in the eyes of minds other than his own, but ignored in compliment to them. Fortunate, then, is Cruikshank in the fact that on the whole we do not regret the healthy industrialism which permitted him to illustrate so many examples of imaginative literature.
The reader to whom any appearance of digression is displeasing in art will now kindly believe that only a second has elapsed since he began the only complete paragraph of page 183. The scolytus is converted, and we return to our true viewpoint—the middle of a heterogeneous litter—and look for characteristics of Cruikshankian humour.
NEW READINGS. The Irishman tries to read a reversed sign by standing on his head. From "The Humourist," vol. iv., 1821.NEW READINGS. The Irishman tries to read a reversed sign by standing on his head. From "The Humourist," vol. iv., 1821.
We have seen so much of Cruikshank's kingdom of supernature that it is scarcely necessary to revisit it. The reader will note, however, that the degradation of the terrible to the absurd is his chief humorous idea of supernature, and that he respects the seriousness of fairy tales. Not even the burlesquemetaphors of Giambattista Basile—that monkey of genius among the euphuists—tempts him to ridicule the stories in "Il Pentamerone"; no one less than Milton can banish the ridiculous from his idea of Satan. A Satan who is a little lower than Punch, is he not more absurd than Man figured as a little lower than the angels? He is both more absurd and more satisfactory. Out of the folklore of Iceland and Wales and Normandy he comes to us outwitted by mortals who seem paradoxically to think that the Father of lies has a right to their adherence to the letter of their agreements with him. Out of Cruikshank's caricature he comes to us with a tail capable of delineating a whole alphabet of humour. The fire which he and his demons can live in without consumption becomes jocose. If you doubt it, compare Cruikshank's etching for Douglas Jerrold's story, "The Mayor of Hole-cum-Corner" (1842), with his etching,Sing old Rose and burn the Bellowsin "Scraps and Sketches" (1828). The human-looking demon with his left leg in the flabbergasted mayor's fire is much funnier in effect than the negro sailor boiling the kettleover his wooden leg. Human terror at superiority over natural law is highly ludicrous when the superiority is evinced as though it were ordinary, negligible, and compatible with sociableness. We cannot now say of such humour that it is a revelation, though once it was brighter than all the fires of Smithfield. There are foes of peace which in Cruikshank's simplicity he thought of as good. For these, too, there is a Humour to keep them at bay, until Science delivers us from their evil by making them obsequious to all who see them.
When Humour pretends to drop from the supernatural to the commonplace, it—I cannot for the moment persuade myself to write he or she—is about to continue its most important mission, for it deserts a subject which is naturally laughable for one which is not; it goes from the supernatural to the commonplace. The supernatural is naturally laughable because the human animal instinctively laughs at that which at once transcends and addresses his intelligence, on a principle similar perhaps to that which Schopenhauer acted on when he smiled at the angle formed by the tangent and the circumference of a circle. At thecommonplace, however, the human animal never spontaneously laughs. Its staleness is not dire to him; but negativeness is not good, and Cruikshank helps the commonplace to be his friend.
"THE WITS MAGAZINE" (2 vols., 1818) is "one of the rarest books illustrated by G. Cruikshank." A perfect copy is said to be worth £80. Another rendering by him of the above incident will be found in "The Humourist," vol. iv. (1821)"THE WITS MAGAZINE" (2 vols., 1818) is "one of the rarest books illustrated by G. Cruikshank." A perfect copy is said to be worth £80. Another rendering by him of the above incident will be found in "The Humourist," vol. iv. (1821)
When we view the demeanour of Cruikshank towards the commonplace we are agreeably surprised by his agility and daring. For instance, take a book called "Talpa," by C. W. Hoskyns (1852). It is a narrative of agricultural operations, in the course of which the author says, "The worst-laid tile is the measure of the goodness and permanence of the whole drain, just as the weakest link of a chain is the measure of its strength." Cruikshank, not being in the mood for drawing a drain, depicts a watchdog who has broken his chain's weakest link and is enthusiastically rushing towards an intruder whose most bitable tissues are reluctantly offered to him in the attempt to scale a wall. The hackneyed metaphor thus obviously illustrated being valueless on the page where we find it, our smile is for the "cheek" of the artist in calling attention to it rather than for the humour of the drawing as an exhibition offunk and glee. Thus the "obvious" marries the obvious, and the result is what is called originality. Again, what is more commonplace in its effect on the mind than decoration as viewed on wall-paper, frames, and linoleum, and in all those devices which flatter Nature's alleged abhorrence of vacuum? It is unhealthy to observe their repetitiousness. Cruikshank, however, saw that to be amusing where the utmost demanded is an inoffensive filling of vacancy was to triumph against dulness in its own sanctum. Consequently in the decorations above and below the main designs in "The Humourist" (1819-20) an appropriate hilarity animates effects which do not frustrate the decorative idea of announcing the completeness of the pictures of which they are the crown and base. His treatment of title-pages is delightfully droll. Thus the title-page of "My Sketch Book" (1834) takes the form of a portrait of himself, with a nose like the extinguisher of a candlestick, directing the posing of the required capital letters on the shelves of a proscenium. On the title page of "The Comic Almanac" (1835) the letter ~L~ is a man sitting sideways with his legs stretchedhorizontally together, and on the title-page of "The Pentamerone" (1848) the polysyllable becomes the teeth of an abnormal king. Studies by Cruikshank in the South Kensington Museum (9950-~T~) show that he imagined the letter ~M~ as two Chinamen united by their pigtails, which form the ~V~ between the perpendiculars of that letter, and are also employed as a hammock. This play with the alphabet is exhibited as early as 1828 inThe Pursuit of Letters, where all the letters in the word Literature flee, on legs as thin as the track of Euclid's point, from philomathic dogs, while their brethren ~A B C~ attempt to escape from three such babes as might have sprung from the foreheads of men made out of the dust of encyclopædias. As late as July 1874, in reply to a coaxing letter from George S. Nottage, we see Cruikshank making human figures of the letters of the word "Portraits."