George Cruikshank Part 4

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 tortoisesh.e.l.l cat, ruffed and ap.r.o.ned, laying the table while Captain Capsic.u.m, horned and gouty, urbanely watches her.

Naturally Cruikshank desired to a.s.sociate 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 "d.i.c.k 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 t.i.tle "Fairy Songs and Ballads for the young ...

By O. B. Dussek ...," George Cruikshank ill.u.s.trated "d.i.c.k 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 disciples to 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 pa.s.sion 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, I think that Cruikshank escaped from the repugnant vulgarity of G. H. on that May or June day of 1815 when he drew The _Pedigree of Corporal Violet_ (_alias_ Napoleon) 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ill.u.s.trated "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 ent.i.tled "Fairy Connoisseurs inspecting Mr Frederick Locker's Collection of Drawings." Anyone who has read "My Confidences"

(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 picture _The 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 s.p.a.ce, bearing two joyous sprites. Gigantic is the lunar crescent that shines on the scene; it is a gate through which an intrepid fairy rides a bat above the revels. In this impressionistic sketch, Cruikshank shows himself partic.i.p.ant in the mysterious exultation of the open night where man, intruding, feels neither seen nor known. _The Fairy Ring_ belongs 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.

VI

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 a _pomme de terre_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A GENTLEMAN'S REST BROKEN (in consequence of going to bed with his leg on). From an etching in "Sc.r.a.ps and Sketches," Part 1, 1828.]

Humour with Cruikshank was elemental. A joke was sacred from implication; it was self-sufficient, vocal in line and curve, percussive. He was a contemporary of Douglas Jerrold, who was humorous when he called a town Hole-c.u.m-Corner. He was a contemporary of Thomas Hood, who was humorous when he announced that

"from her grave in Mary-bone They'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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 coa.r.s.ely, broadly, selfishly, merrily, well. Coa.r.s.eness was natural to him, or he would not have selected for a (suppressed) ill.u.s.tration 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. Hence _The Headache_ and _The Cholic_ (1819), signed with an anchor (Captain Marryat's signature) and etched by Cruikshank, follow _The Gout_ by 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 s.e.x. 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 subst.i.tutes 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "EH., SIRS!" Ill.u.s.trates "Waverley," by Sir Walter Scott, in "Landscape-Historical Ill.u.s.trations 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 is there 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 in _Points 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 gab Just 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 l.u.s.t. 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 s.e.x.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOPE. From "Phrenological Ill.u.s.trations," 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 s.e.x at the approach of Waverley (_vide_ "Landscape-Historical Ill.u.s.trations," 1836), and remind us that in 1810 T. Tegg published a less refined _Scotch Washing_ over 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 gla.s.s 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Details from the Plate ent.i.tled _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 Honore Daumier in _Le Bain Chaud_ haunts 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 knight who has permitted himself to crack an empty eggsh.e.l.l 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 formulae, 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's _Trotting_ (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 surpa.s.ses 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 in _Hope_ ("Phrenological Specimens," 1826), in whose bone, already as innutritious as a toothbrush, his dog confides for sustenance? I think so, because I see him when I think of appet.i.te 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 from _Heads of the Table_ (1845). Humour ascends from his _Hope_ to 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 in _The Lion of the Party_ (1845). Of his animal humour I shall have more to say: these lions are more human than many of his representations of _h.o.m.o sapiens_; they need no footline.

[Ill.u.s.tration: X

_Xantippe_

From "A Comic Alphabet," 1836. See Pope's "The Wife of Bath" (after Chaucer), II. 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 a.s.sociate his art with the works of Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett, R. E. Raspe, Cowper, Byron, Scott, d.i.c.kens, 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 onomatopoeia 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _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 of _Juliet and the Nurse_ published by G.

Cruikshank and otherwise unmemorable; in 1827 he made one of his "Ill.u.s.trations 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 aesthetic 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 ent.i.tled _The First Appearance of William Shakespeare on the Stage of the Globe_ (January 1863). Here we have the elite of Shakespeare's creations in a throng about his cradle. t.i.tania 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; Oth.e.l.lo 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 h.e.l.l 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ADAMS'S VISIT TO PARSON TRULLIBER. Frontispiece to "Joseph Andrews," 1831. The book is dated 1832. This is one of the plates in "Ill.u.s.trations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832).]