George Cruikshank Part 1

George Cruikshank.

by W. H. Chesson.

I

The life of George Cruikshank extended from September 27, 1792, to February 1, 1878, and the known work of his hand dates from 1799 to 1875. In 1840 Thackeray wrote of him as of a hero of his boyhood, asking jocundly, "Did we not forego tarts in order to buy his _Breaking-up_ or his _Fashionable Monstrosities_ of the year eighteen hundred and something?" In 1863, the year of Thackeray's death, Cruikshank was asked, by the committee who exhibited his _Worship of Bacchus_, to a.s.sociate with that work some of his early drawings in order to prove that he was not his own grandfather.

For years before he reached the great but unsensational age at which he died, a sort of cult was vested in his longevity. Dated plates--that ent.i.tled "The Rose and the Lily" (1875) offers the last example--imply that his art figured to him finally as a kind of athleticism.

It was as if, in using his burin or needles, he was doing a "turn"

before sightseers, with a hired Time innocuously scything on the platform beside him to show him off.

Now that his mortality has been proven for a quarter of a century, we can coldly ask: why did he seem so old to himself and the world? Others greater than he--t.i.tian, Watts--have laboured with genius under a heavier crown of snow than he; and the public has applauded their vigour without a doubt of their ident.i.ty. The reason is that they have not been the journalists of their age. They have not, like Cruikshank, reflected in their works inventions and fashions, wars and scandals, jokes and politics, whence the world has emerged unrecognisably the same.

It is said that when Cruikshank was eighty-three, he executed a sword-dance before an old officer who had mentally buried him. It was an action characteristic of a nature that was scarcely more nave and impulsive at one time than another, but it was the most confusing proof of the fact in debate which he could have offered. It was not of a numeral that the doubter thought when the existence of Cruikshank was presented to his mind's eye. His thought we may elaborate as follows.

The artist who drew Napoleon week by week, with all the vulgar insolence which only a great man's contemporaries can display towards him, was the same who, half a century after the Emperor's death, produced a conception of the "Leader of the Parisian Blood Red Republic of 1870."

The artist who, in the last year of the reign of George the Third, depicted Thistlewood's lair in Cato Street, drew also, as though with "a mother's tender care," almost every pane in that gla.s.s palace which the trees of Hyde Park inhabited in 1851.

Before the punctuality of his interest in everything new that rose to the surface to obliterate an expiring mode or event, we stand astonished. It is not so much as an artist that we here admire him. It is as an Argus of the street, an Argus not only with many eyes but with feet enough to plant him at once in a hundred corners. From this voluble Argus his mistress Clio recoils but cannot dismiss him. Aghast she observes him presenting the Prince Regent in a hundred burlesquely improper parts; and it is a discreet generation indeed which remembers _Coriola.n.u.s addressing the Plebeians_ and forgets _The Fat in the Fire_.

Clio withdraws, but does not forbid us to stay. And stay I do, at all events, to examine the packed and ugly caricatures which are the visible laughter of Cruikshank the Argus of journalism. Their violent colours and vigorous lines fail not in invocation. Before the student of them rise the supple, blue-eyed leech called Mrs Clarke and her grossly-doating Commander-in-chief; Lady Jersey, Lady Douglas and the other villains of the drama ent.i.tled "Queen Caroline;" the Marchioness of Hertford, the Countess of Yarmouth, or whoever brought down upon _Coriola.n.u.s_ the "heigho!" of a ribald Rowly; and, lest one grow lenient to royal self-indulgence, it is accused by the recurring presence of a figure of tormented respectability. It is the Cruikshankian John Bull, as different from Sir F. C. Gould's well-fed monitor of Conservative politicians as is Cruikshank's darkly criminal Punch from Richard Doyle's domesticated patron of humour. This John Bull is hacked to make a Corsican and Yankee holiday, taxed at the bayonet's point, starved on bread at eighteenpence the quartern, and offered up as a sacrifice to a Bourbon "b.u.mble-head."

[Ill.u.s.tration: CARICATURE ON TAXATION

No. 464 of Reid's Catalogue, published March 19, 1815.]

But the visions that detain the student of Cruikshank the journalist are not only of personages and events. He saw and recorded the crowd and the clothes of the crowd. His art preserves the ladies of 1816, who resembled the bowls of tobacco pipes; the men of 1822, who wore trousers like pears; and the children of 1826, whom the hatter turned into "Mushroom Monstrosities."

Cruikshank the journalist const.i.tutes a fame in himself whose trumpeters are Fairburn, Fores, Humphrey, Hone ..., publishers who, in an age before photo-engraving, easily sold topical caricatures separately at a shilling or more. Gillray's name, in my estimation, outweighs Cruikshank's at the foot of such publications, while Rowlandson's weighs less. Together these three masters of caricature compose a constellation of third and fourth Georgian humour.

But we have by no means done with Cruikshank when we have admired him there. A greater Cruikshank remains to be admired. Of him there is no a.s.signable master; neither Hogarth nor Gillray. He is the ill.u.s.trator whose fame makes more than six hundred books and pamphlets desirable; he is truly an artist, a maker of beauty. Stimulated though this greater Cruikshank was in the flatter and more decent epoch which succeeded the age of _Coriola.n.u.s_ or _King Teapot_, of _Don Whiskerandos_ or _Sardanapalus_, Regent and King of Britain and mandarin of Brighton, it was in the age of muddle and debauch, not in the age of Victorian propriety and reform, that Cruikshank entered fairyland for the first time and saw the little people face to face. Cobbett has ignored the fact, but there is grace in it even for the "Big Sovereign" whom he pilloried in five hundred and eleven paragraphs.

We shall find, alas! as we proceed, that, as ill.u.s.trator, Cruikshank often sank below his journalistic level. The journalist may always take refuge in the actual life of the fact before him; his are real landscapes, real faces. But the ill.u.s.trator has often only lifeless words to instruct him; when short of inspiration he is in the thraldom of his manner. Cruikshank's thraldom to his manner was the more obvious, since the manner was often wooden, often joyously ugly. His fame perpetuates his failures. The insipidity which affronted Boz has no effect in stopping the demand for "the fireside plate." Still, his best as well as his worst is in his ill.u.s.tration of books. It is his best that excuses the criticism of his worst and enrols him among the great artists of the nineteenth century.

I propose in the pages that shall follow to set down the significance both of his best and of his worst, avoiding, as befits the date of my labour, any biographical matter which does not throw light on his art.

And first let us follow his path in journalism.

II

The limits of Cruikshank's genius and the s.p.a.cious area between them are almost implied in the fact that he was a Londoner who seldom or never departed from the "tight little island." Born in Duke Street, St George's, Bloomsbury, if the statement in his epitaph in St Paul's Cathedral is to be accepted, he continued a Londoner to the end: living in Dorset Street, near Fleet Street, in Amwell Street, and Myddelton Terrace, Pentonville, and finally in the house called successively 48 Mornington Place and 263 Hampstead Road. Yet this c.o.c.kney depicted the Spain of Don Quixote and Gil Bias, the Ireland of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and the America of Uncle Tom. Such courageous versatility was the outcome of a training so practical that I hesitate to call it an artistic education.

His father, Isaac, was a Lowland Scot who lived and, unfortunately, drank by his art, which in 1789, 1790 and 1792 was represented at the Royal Academy. His period was from 1756 or 1757 to 1810 or 1811. Like his friend James Gillray, he caricatured on the side of Pitt. I remember no better caricature of his than _Pastimes of Primrose Hill_ ("Attic Miscellany," 1st Sept. 1791), depicting a perspiring tallow chandler trundling his children up that eminence. He was energetic in the delineation of the insipid jollity considered appropriate to sailors, and he celebrated the O.P. riots at Covent Garden by drawing Angelica Catalani as a cat. Thomas Wright places him only after Gillray and Rowlandson as a caricaturist, but it is probable that the man's best is of an academic sort, such as the pretty drawings which he contributed to a 1794 edition of Thomson's "Seasons." Isaac Cruikshank's workroom was that of a busy hack, and George had not been long in the world before he played ghost there on his father's copperplates. One of his early tasks was the background of _Daniel in the Lions' Den_.

None who looks at the drawing of a supercilious benefactor, which is one of George's earliest efforts, can doubt that in him the caricaturing instinct was basic. The eye is indulgent to several crudities, because the flinging is drawn though the hand of contempt is not, while the gluttonous enthusiasm of the beggar is a triumph of juvenile observation. Here are characters if not figures; here from a little boy is work that deserves a laugh. Hence it is not surprising that George Cruikshank has been erroneously credited with a share in _Facing the Enemy_, a dateless etching, delightfully droll in animal expression, etched by his father, after a sketch by H. Woodward, and published in 1797-8, according to Mr A. M. Broadley, and not in 1803 as formerly conjectured.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SPECIMEN OF VERY EARLY WORK, from the original drawing, No. 9850 in the George Cruikshank Collection, South Kensington Museum.]

1803 is the year of Cruikshank's Opus I., according to G. W. Reid, his most voluminous bibliographer. This work, printed and sold by W. Belch of Newington b.u.t.ts, consists of four marine pieces on a sheet, most comfortably unprecocious and as wooden as a Dutch doll. A humorist inspecting it might profess to see in a woman, whose nose and forehead produce one and the same straight line, a prophecy of the Cruikshankian nose which is so monotonously recurrent an ornament in the works of "the great George." Cruikshank himself averred that one of the first etchings he was ever employed to do and paid for was a sheet of Lottery Prints (published in 1804) of which he made a copy in his eighty-first year. The etching contains sixteen drawings of shops. The barber's shop door is open to disclose an equestrian galloping past it, although, even as a man, he drew horses which G. A. Sala declared were wrong in all the traditional forty-four points. George Cruikshank himself, whom, as Mr G.

S. Layard has shown, he repeatedly drew, appears in a compartment of this etching, in the act of conveying the plate of it to the shop of Belch, a name for which Langham is subst.i.tuted in a re-issue of this gamblers' temptation, and which dwindles into Langley & Belch in the copy made by Cruikshank in 1873, published by G. Bell, York St., Covent Garden.

1806 is the date of the first book, or rather pamphlet, with which George Cruikshank is connected. It is ent.i.tled "The Impostor Unmasked,"

and pillories Sheridan for a farcical swindler and something worse.

There is a folding plate to fortify the charges of Patricius the scandal-monger, and this is ascribed to George by Reid, though Captain Douglas, George's latest bibliographer, only allows that "there seems to be some of George's work in it." Reid's authority, which had in all probability the living George's behind it, excuses a brief description of this plate. Sheridan is depicted in the act of addressing a crowd of Stafford electors, amongst whom are several creditors who pun bitterly on the parliamentary word Bill and d.a.m.n the respects which he pays them.

A house on the right of the hustings might have been sketched on a slate by any child weary of pothooks, but there is a touch of true humour in the quiet joy shown on the face of a supporter of Sheridan in the heckling to which he is subjected. Gillray had already published (March 10, 1805) his _Uncorking Old Sherry_, and so this Cruikshankian caricature may be accepted as George's first step in the Gillrayan path.

The path of Gillray, in and out of which runs the path of Thomas Rowlandson, is seldom or never dull; sometimes unclean in a manner malodorous as manure, but with risings which offer illuminating views.

His humour is tyrannically laughable. The guffaw is, as it were, kicked out of the spectator of _The Apotheosis of Hoche_ (1798) by the descending boots, depicted as reluctantly yielding to the law of gravity, which the triumphant devastator of La Vendee has overcome.

Gillray's sense of design was superb, and he would be an enthusiast who should a.s.sert that George Cruikshank in political caricature produced works at once so striking and architecturally admirable as _The Giant Factotum_ [Pitt] _Amusing Himself_ (1797). Gillray possessed what Cruikshank lacked altogether, the inclination and power to draw voluptuousness with some justice to its charm. One has only to cite in confirmation of this statement _The Morning after Marriage_ (August 5, 1788), and compare it with any of those caricatures in which Cruikshank exhibits the erotic preferences of George the Third's children. What, however, Cruikshank, in the artistic meaning of vision, saw in Gillray, he adapted with the force of a boisterous partic.i.p.ant in the patriotism and demagogy of his day. Gillray had Napoleon for his prey, and no political criticism is pithier than the caricature which represents the Emperor as _Tiddy-Doll, the great French Gingerbread-Baker, drawing out a new Batch of Kings_ (1806). On the other hand, nothing that Swift is believed to have omitted in his description of Brobdingnag could be coa.r.s.er than _The Corsican Pest_ (1803). It is almost literally humour of the latrine. Unhappily Cruikshank exulted like a young barbarian in the licence conferred by precedent, and it is hard to view with tolerance his pictorial records of "the first swell of the age." One of the wittiest is _Boney Hatching a Bulletin, or Snug Winter Quarters_ (Dec. 1812); the Grand Army is there seen in the form of heads and bayonets protruding from a stratum of Russian snow; the courier who is to convey the bulletin has boards under his boots to prevent his submersion. Elsewhere one's admiration for inventive vigour struggles against disgust at a mode which one only hesitates to call blackguardism because the liveliest contents of the paint-box were lavished upon it.

Take, for instance, the caricature which bears the rhymed t.i.tle, _Boney tir'd of war's alarms, flies for safety to his darling's arms_ (1813).

The devil bears Bonaparte on his shoulders to the Empress Marie Louise, after the Russian campaign. "Take him to Bed, my Lady, and Thaw him,"

says the devil. "I am almost petrified in helping him to escape from his Army. I shall expect him to say his prayers to me every night!" Another Cruikshankian caricature, _The Imperial Family going to the Devil_ (March 1814), represents the rejection of Napoleon by that connoisseur of reprobates, though Rowlandson in the same month and year depicted the fallen emperor as _The Devil's Darling_. Cruikshank's vulgar facetiousness, interesting by sheer vigour and self-enjoyment, pursues Napoleon even to St Helena in the heartless caricature which portrays him as an ennuye reduced for amus.e.m.e.nt to rat-catching. It was not for nothing that Thomas Moore, alluding to the Prince Regent as Big Ben, made Tom Cribb say:--

"Having conquer'd the prime one, that mill'd us all round, You kick'd him, old Ben, as he gasp'd on the ground."

Gillray is said to have sometimes disguised his style in order to evade his agreement with Humphrey that he would work for no other publisher; and there is more than one of Cruikshank's Napoleonic caricatures which might be ascribed to Gillray's dram-providing _alter ego_ if their authorship were in question. Of such is _Quadrupeds, or Little Boney's Last Kick_, published in "The Scourge" (1813). Here the Russian bear holds a birch in his right paw, and Napoleon by an ankle with his left; a naked devil points to the crown, tumbling from the head of the capsized emperor; on the ground is an ironical bulletin. _Old Blucher beating the Corsican Big Drum_ (1814) is an even closer match of the baser sort of Gillrayan caricature; while the particular stench of it rises from _Boney's Elb(a)ow Chair_, of the same date. The last caricature from Cruikshank upon Napoleon came feebly in 1842 with the issue of "George Cruikshank's Omnibus," wherein he figures as a skeleton in boots surmounting a pyramid of skulls. The caricaturist's harlequinade had lasted too long; when it ceased, the soul of it utterly perished, and one views impatiently so formal and witless a galvanisation as was suggested by the return of Napoleon, dead, to the reconquest of France.

Of Cruikshank's Napoleonic caricatures as a whole, it may be said that their function was solely to relieve by ridicule the pressure of a grandiose and formidable personality upon the nerves of his countrymen.

He did not, like Gillray in _The Handwriting on the Wall_, confess the historic greatness of Napoleon by an allusion so sublime that it afforded Hone a precedent for unpunished impiety. When, for serio-comic verse, he attempted to delineate a monitory apparition, in the shape of Napoleon's "Red Man," the result was absurdity veiled by dulness.

But it is time to turn to the Cruikshankian view of persons and things in Great Britain in the lifetime of "Adonis the Great." It is said that while Gillray was productive, an old General of the German Legion remarked, alluding to caricature, "Ah! I dell you vot--England is altogether von libel." With the spirit of this speech, one can cordially agree. The concupiscence of princes was serialised for the mirth of the crowd.

There were two great types of ascendant degeneracy to divert the eyes of Farmer George's subjects from their shops and Bibles. One was his son George, the other Mary Anne Clarke.

The cabinet in which George kept capillary souvenirs of so many women was fastened against contemporary critics of his career. Undivulged, therefore, was the touching sentiment of a philofeminism which, in excluding his legal wife, was construed but as vice. There was no Max Beerbohm in his day to appreciate his polish and talents and to pity his wife for playing her tragedy in tights. There was no one to p.r.o.nounce him the slave of that most endearing of tyrants, the artistic temperament. The caricaturists saw simply a polygamist eager to convict of adultery the wife whom he disliked and avoided, and a spendthrift whose debt was inflicted upon the nation. So far as man can show up his fellow-men, this man was shown up, and in verse and picture became an instrument of public t.i.tillation. So roguish a severity as the caricaturists displayed can seldom be accepted as didactic Gillray, indeed, in _The Morning after Marriage_ followed him into the bridal chamber of Mrs Fitzherbert whom he married in 1785, and this caricature is the best advertis.e.m.e.nt of his grace and beauty which perhaps exists.

When attacked by Cruikshank, he was over forty, for the first caricature of him in which that artist's hand is noticeable was published in 1808.

It is ent.i.tled _John Bull Advising with His Superiors_: the superiors being George and his brother Frederick, who sit under the portraits of their respective mistresses, "Mrs Fitz" and Mrs Clarke. John Bull is clean-shaven, fat-nosed, hatted, and holds a gnarled stick. "Servant Measters," he begins, "I be come to ax a bit of thy advice"; but he proceeds to freeze them with clumsy innuendo and adds, "I does love good old Georg [_sic_], by Goles! because he is not of that there sort,"

meaning their own. After this, the Regent was for Cruikshank a stimulant to the drollest audacities. The world was younger then and could laugh uproariously at the bursting of a dandy's stays and the mislaying of a roue's removable whiskers. Mrs Grundy had not persuaded it of the superior comicality of Mrs Newlywed's indestructible pie-crust and Mr Staylate's interview with the parental boot. So George, who, at any rate, was real life, blossomed abundantly to another George's advantage. Thus _The Coronation of the Empress of the Nairs_ (September 1812)--a simile suggested by a contemporary account of a curious Asiatic race--depicts him as crowning the Marchioness of Hertford in her bath; _A Kick from Yarmouth to Wales_ ill.u.s.trates the a.s.sault of the provoked Earl of Yarmouth upon his wife's too fervent admirer; and _Princely Agility_ (January 1812) shows His Royal castigated Highness confined by a convenient sprained ankle to bed, where his whiskers and wig are restored to him. The opening of Henry the Eighth's coffin in St George's Chapel, Windsor, April 1, 1813, suggests to Cruikshank _Meditations Amongst the Tombs_, in which the greatness of the deceased sovereign forcibly strikes the Regent. "Great indeed!" he is made to say, "for he got rid of many wives, whilst I, poor soul, can't get rid of one. Cut off his beard, doctor, 'twill make me a prime pair of royal whiskers."

The prince's partiality for the bottle is severely ill.u.s.trated. In _The Phenix [sic] of Elba Resuscitated by Treason_ (May 1, 1815), he receives the news of Napoleon's outbreak, seated on a cushion with a decanter behind him; and even when he was King, Cruikshank dared to draw him (1822) as drunk and curing an irritated cuticle by leaning his kilted person against one of the posts of Argyleshire.

If, however, Caroline of Brunswick had not, by adopting a Meredithian baby and other eccentricities, condemned herself to "Delicate Investigation" in 1806 and to a trial before the House of Peers in 1820, Cruikshank's delineations of Adonis the Great would have seemed genial compared with Thackeray's contempt. That his sentiment for the lady was less chivalrous than Thackeray esteemed it, may be divined by his caricature of her as an ugly statue of Xantippe put up to auction "without the least reserve" (1821), which is less than two months older than his conception of her as a rushlight which Slander cannot blow out.

But he perceived, as did the whole intelligent proletariat, the monstrous irony of George's belated notice of his wife. Hence in his woodcuts to "The Queen's Matrimonial Ladder" and "Non Mi Ricordo!" he is not comic but satirical, and satirical with strokes that turn The Dandy of Sixty who bows with a grace into a figure abjectly defiant, meanly malevolent, devoid of levity. A cut in the former pamphlet shows him standing in a penitential sheet under the seventh, ninth and tenth commandments, meeting the gaze of an astonished urchin; on the outside of the latter pamphlet we see him in the throes of awkward interrogation, uttering the "Non Mi Ricordo" which Caroline's ill-wishers were tired of hearing in the mouth of Bergami.

Mary Anne Clarke, our second type of ascendant degeneracy, was, if Buck's drawing of her is truthful, a woman of seductive prettiness, but she could not teach Cruikshank her charm in atonement for her venality.

He drew her petticoat "supported by military boots" and surmounted by a c.o.c.ked hat and the mitre of the ducal bishop of Osnaburg (February 23, 1809); "under this," it is stated, "may be found a soothing for every pain." When Whigs and the Prince of Wales sent the Duke of York back in 1811 to the high post which he had disgraced, Mrs Clarke dwindled in Cruikshank's caricature to a dog improperly exhibiting its contempt for Colonel Wardle's left eye. It is curious that the Clarke scandal did not apparently inspire any caricature which deserves to live as pictorial criticism. Revealing, as it did, not only rottenness in the State, but in the Church, since Dr O'Meara sought Mrs Clarke's interest for the privilege of preaching "before royalty," one may well be surprised at the failure of caricature to enn.o.ble itself in the cause of honour and religion. Yet Cruikshank produced in 1811 a powerful etching--_Interior View of the House of G.o.d_--which shows, apropos a l.u.s.tful fanatic named Carpenter, his power to have seized the missed opportunity. In this plate is the contemporary portrait of himself which P. D'Aiguille afterwards copied.

If we ask, for our soul's sake, to sicken of the Regent's amours and of the demure "Magdalen" of York, whose scarlet somehow softens to maroon because she is literary and quotes Sall.u.s.t, it is necessary to leave the caricatures which laugh with her--especially Rowlandson's--and look at Cruikshank's tormented John Bull. The most pathetic is perhaps _John Bull's Three Stages_ (1815). In the last stage (_Peace with all the World_) his child, once pressed to eat after repletion, says, "Give me some more bone." The hand that drew the earlier plates of _The Bottle_ is unmistakable in this etching.

It was seemingly in 1819 that Cruikshank first realised his great powers as a critic in caricature. To that period belongs what a pamphleteer called "Satan's Bank Note":--

"Notes which a 'prentice boy could make At fifteen for a shilling."