George Cruikshank Part 3

With a fanciful _Beachy 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ill.u.s.trate an intended autobiography"--we are introduced pictorially to "George, Nurse, Brother and Mother at Hampstead"; and the same volume shows our artist unpleasantly situated on a roof _sub t.i.tulo The b.u.t.ton-hole of a Naughty boy caught by a nail_. In the South Kensington collection George shows us very crudely _a 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 in _n.o.body desires the Painter to make him as ugly and ridiculous as possible_ ("Sc.r.a.ps and Sketches," 1831), and that of himself going in as a steward with d.i.c.kens 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 (nee 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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.]

V

We have now to consider Cruikshank as a supernaturalist. Perhaps there is no role 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ill.u.s.trative 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 ill.u.s.trious artisan. The dignity of labour is here inimitably manifest. Lovably ludicrous, too, is the Devil whom Cruikshank presents in _The De'il cam fiddling thro' the Town_ ("Ill.u.s.trations of Popular Works," 1830). "Auld Mahoun's" forked tail has caught the exciseman by the cravat. In "Sc.r.a.ps 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 la.s.soed 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 the Devils 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-ill.u.s.tration as a bare sketch of a muster of the d.a.m.ned; for as one looks at it he is tempted to give it to half a dozen painters and "put it in hand."

[Ill.u.s.tration: SHOEING THE DEVIL. From Edward G. Flight's "The True Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil," 1848.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DEVIL SIGNING. From Edward G Flight's "The True Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil," 1848.]

The nave 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 of _Christian arriving at the Gate_ is quite unwarrantably pleasant in its suggestion of conflict and weariness ending in the bosom of hospitality.

In 1838 Cruikshank contributed _Vanity Fair_--an elaborate etching--to a "Pilgrim's Progress" containing plates by H. Melville. _Vanity Fair_ is a skilful catalogue marred by the misnaming of Britain Row. He produced another _Vanity 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. They show that Cruikshank could draw the face of a man whose _metier_ is 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--pa.s.ses through the snake-afflicted valley of the Shadow of Death.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ill.u.s.trations wherein this magnate a.s.sumes 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. Meagre and 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 doc.u.ment 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 a _sensation_ of 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 see him 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 h.o.r.n.y 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 coa.r.s.e materialism would affront a _pierreuse_. Cruikshank drew Punch as early as 1814 in a plate, satirising a fete given by the Duke of Portland on the occasion of the baptism of an infant marquis. The plate is ent.i.tled "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 while being 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 t.i.tle-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--the _squeak_." 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 role is so humiliating in the Punch tromedy (as a neologist might call it), he is of an aspect pitiably mean--like a corpse attired in river mud.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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! Compare _The Handsome Clear-starcher_ ("Bentley's Miscellany," 1838) with _The Peri_ [, the Djin] _and the Taylor_ ("Minor Morals, Part III.," 1839). Both these ornaments of my s.e.x 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 already described, no Satan among Cruikshank's Netherlanders, to show that he saw the sublime of evil as clearly as he saw f.a.gin? Alas for _catalogues raisonnes_! for if it were not for G. W. Reid we could not point the querist to Cruikshank's Lucifer in his ill.u.s.trations 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 fairy queen 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 p.r.o.ne 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 ill.u.s.tration of Shakespeare but a vision of everybody's heaven. For if it is an ill.u.s.tration 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 inst.i.tution near Leicester." No one claimed the money, and Cruikshank remained a religious materialist, charmingly boyish in his amus.e.m.e.nt 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 waving hands 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-ap.r.o.ned 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'oeuvre of ghost-humour is an etching for Captain Glasc.o.c.k'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 ent.i.tled _A Financial Survey of c.u.mberland, Or the Beggar's Pet.i.tion_, was put into general circulation. It is the ghost of Sellis, the Duke of c.u.mberland'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 at _The 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, _very_ tiny little people running in and out of these little white 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: From "Comic Composites for the Sc.r.a.p-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. In _Comic Composites for the Sc.r.a.p 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 "Sc.r.a.ps and Sketches" (1831), for they amuse the satirist even at this date when gluttony is merely not moderation and bored sapience is merely not sympathetic wisdom.

Cruikshank then had one great qualification for ill.u.s.trating fairy tales: he could animate the inanimate. Let us now follow his career as a fairy artist, beginning with his first great success.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 angelic _elite_ of 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 the _hoi polloi_ which appreciate novelty more than perfection. Cruikshank in his Grimm mood is for the "living drollery" which cured Sebastian's scepticism concerning the phoenix 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 a.s.s, dog and cat which plunge through the gla.s.s 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.

Pa.s.sing 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, directed by 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 s.l.u.ttish) housewife whom a dozen elves have pulled downstairs by her feet.

Fables which invent sorrow to prevent it can only be cla.s.sed as fairy-tales by a sacrifice of the _mot juste_, which I make in order to call attention to an exquisite quartet of etchings by George Cruikshank, ill.u.s.trating Richard Frank.u.m's verses ent.i.tled "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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ill.u.s.trated by Cruikshank. In his 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 h.o.a.rdings--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 l.u.s.trous 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-gla.s.ses.

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 with juvenile 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: From George Cruikshank's Fairy Library, 'Cinderella,'

1854.]