George Cruikshank Part 6

This list reminds us that, though Cruikshank often conferred a bibliophile's immortality upon authors more "writative," to quote the Earl of Rochester, than inspired, he was sometimes the means of arresting great literary merit on its way to oblivion. A case in point is William Clarke's "Three Courses and a Dessert," a book of racy stories containing droll and exquisite cuts by Cruikshank, after rude sketches by its author, who did Cruikshank the service of accusing him in "The Cigar" (1825) of being stubbornly modest for half an hour.

Again, we owe to Cruikshank our knowledge of "The Adventures of Sir Frizzle Pumpkin; Nights at Mess; and Other Tales" (1836), a work of which I will only say that its anonymous narrative of good luck in cowardice won a smile from one of the most lovable of poets on the day she died.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The Turk's only daughter approaches to mitigate the sufferings of Lord Bateman." "The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman," 1839.]

"The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman" is one of the puzzles of literature.

Mr Andrew Lang decides that it is a _volkslied_, to which, for the version of it ill.u.s.trated by Cruikshank, Thackeray contributed the notes considered by some to be by d.i.c.kens. Mr Blanchard Jerrold thinks "n.o.body but Thackeray" could have written the lines about "this young bride's mother Who never was heard to speak so free," and I think that the notes are Thackeray's, and the ballad an example of a cla.s.s of literature from which Thackeray drew comic inspiration. Cruikshank heard it sung outside "a wine vaults" (_sic_) at Battle Bridge by a young gentleman called "The Tripe-skewer." The ballad became part of Cruikshank's repertory. Mr Walter Hamilton states that Cruikshank sang "Lord Bateman" in the presence of d.i.c.kens and Thackeray "at a dinner of the Antiquarian Society, with the c.o.c.kney mal-p.r.o.nunciations he had heard given to it by a street ballad-singer." He adds that Thackeray expressed a wish, which he allowed Cruikshank to sterilise, to print the ballad with ill.u.s.trations. We may therefore suppose, despite the omission of the notes to Lord Bateman from the "Biographical Edition" of Thackeray's works, that they are by the author of "The Ballad of Eliza Davis."

Cruikshank, overflowing with lacteal kindness, added three verses to the "loving ballad" as he heard it, in which the bride who yields place to the Turk's daughter is married to the "proud porter." Cruikshank's etchings are charmingly nave and expressive. The bibliophool pays eight guineas for a first edition, minus the shading of the trees in the plate ent.i.tled _The Proud Young Porter in Lord Bateman's State Apartment_.

"The Bachelor's Own Book" is a story told in pictures and footlines, both by the artist. The hero is "Mr Lambkin, gent," a podgy-nosed prototype of Juggins, who amuses himself by the nocturnal removal of knockers and duly appears in the police court, but is ultimately led to domestic felicity by the dreary spectacle of a confirmed bachelor alone in an immense salon of the Grand Mausoleum Club. Some of the etchings--notably Mr Lambkin feebly revolting against his medicine--are mirth-provoking, and his various swaggering att.i.tudes are well-imagined.

"Cruikshankiana" conveniently presents a number of George Cruikshank's caricatures in reprints about a decade older than the plates. The preface solemnly but with ludicrous inaccuracy states that in each etching "a stern moral is afforded, and that in the most powerful and attractive manner."

We are now brought to the conclusion of our most important chapter. Will Cruikshank's humour live? or, rather, may it live? for things live centuries without permission, and the fright of Little Miss m.u.f.fet is more remembered than the terror of Melmoth. The answer should be "Yes"

from all who acknowledge beauty in the sparkle of evil and of good. No humorist worthy of that forbidden fruit which made thieves of all mankind can refrain from the laughter which is paid for by another.

Mark Twain, who has nerves to thrill for martyred Joan of Arc, delights in the epitaph, "Well done, good and faithful servant," p.r.o.nounced over the frizzled corpse of a negro cook. Lowell, the poet, extracted a pun from the blind eyes of Milton. _Punch_, in 1905, amused us with the boy who supposed that horses were made of cats' meat, and in 1905 Sir Francis Burnand thought that the most humorous pictorial joke published by him in Punch was Phil May's drawing of a fisherman being invited to enter the Dottyville Lunatic Asylum. There is heroism as well as vulgarity in laughter saluting death and patience, hippophagy and cannibalism, ugliness and deprivation. He is a wise man who sees smiling mouths in the rents of ruin and the s.p.a.ces between the ribs of the skeleton angel. Humour, irresponsible and purposeless, is of eternity, and to me (at least) it is the one masterful human energy in the world to-day. It is against compa.s.sion and importance and remorse and horror and blame, but it is not for cruelty, or for indifference to distress.

Nothing exists so separate from truth and falsehood and right and wrong. Nothing is more instant in pure appeal to the intellect, no blush is more sincere than that of the person who before company cannot see a joke. Humorists are dear to the critic because they criticise by re-making in the world of idea the things they criticise. Among them Cruikshank is dearer than some, less dear than others. Through the regency and reign of the eldest son of George the Third he, even more than Cobbett, seems to me the historian of genius, by virtue of prodigious merriment in vulgar art. The great miscellany of humour which he poured out revitalises his name whenever it is examined by the family of John Bull. For it is his own humour--the humour of one who had the power to appropriate without disgrace because he was himself an Original.

VII

Our cla.s.sification of Cruikshank's works has enabled us to see the objective range of his artistic personality. A few words must now be said of the media in which he worked. Of these media the princ.i.p.al was etching.

"O! I've seen Etching!" exclaims Cruikshank in 1859; "it's easy enough, you only rub some black stuff over the copper plate, and then take a[n]

etching needle, and scratch away a bit--and then clap on some a-ke-ta-ke (otherwise aquafortis)--and there you are!" "Wash the _steel_," he says in another of his quaint revelations, "with a solution of _copper_ in _Nitro[u]s acid_--to _tarnish_ the _tarnation Bright steel_ before Etching, to save the eyes."

[Ill.u.s.tration: NORNA DESPATCHING THE PROVISIONS. Ill.u.s.trates "The Pirate," by Sir Walter Scott, in "Landscape-Historical Ill.u.s.trations of Scotland, and the Waverley Novels," 1838.]

In his 77th year he says: "I am working away as hard as ever at water color drawings and paintings in oil, doing as little Etching as possible as that is very slavish work."

As he had etched about 2700 designs when he made this statement, it is impossible not to sympathise with his recreative change of medium. It must be remembered that, except in dry-point etching, the bite of the acid is trusted to engrave the design of the needle and that, when the stronger lines are obtained "by allowing the acid to act for a longer time" on a particular part or parts of the etched plate, the mechanical work, and work of calculation, imposed upon the etcher is formidable.

Until, in the late seventies of the nineteenth century, the invasion of the process-block gave manual freedom to the bookseller's artist, that individual was continually sighing over the complexity of the method by which he paid the tribute of his imagination to Mammon. In the hands of the wood-engraver an artist's unengraved work was apparently always liable to the danger of misrepresentation unless the artist engraved it himself. Even the great John Thompson is not free from the suspicion of having unconsciously a.s.sisted "demon printers" in transforming into "little dirty scratches" some designs by Daniel Maclise, whose expressions are preserved in this sentence. Cruikshank who, if we add his woodcuts to his etchings, saw upwards of 4000 designs by him given with laborious indirectness to the world, would have been more than human if he had considered his unskilfulness in the art of producing and employing the colours between black and white as a reason for refraining from painting in oils. In 1853 "he entered as a student at the Royal Academy"; but his industry, in the role of a pupil of 60, was, it seems, less than his humility, for "he made very few drawings in the _Antique_," says Mr Charles Landseer, "and never got into the _Life_."

Cruikshank, however, had exhibited in the Royal Academy as early as 1830, and in 1848 he dared to paint for the Prince Consort the picture ent.i.tled _Disturbing the Congregation_. This picture of a boy in church looking pa.s.sionately unconscious of the fact that his sacrilegious pegtop is lying on the grave of a knight in full view of the beadle, is an anecdote painted more for G.o.d to laugh at than for Christians of the "so-called nineteenth century," but a philosophic sightseer like myself rejoices in it. This picture and _The Fairy Ring_, already praised, reveal Cruikshank's talent sufficiently to prevent one from regretting that he ultimately preferred covering canvases to furrowing plates.

[Ill.u.s.tration: (_a_) CRUSOE'S FARMHOUSE.

(_b_) CRUSOE IN HIS ISLAND HOME.

From "Robinson Crusoe," 1831.]

To do him justice he was academically interested in the whole technique of pictorial art as practised in his day. He admitted, for instance, to Charles Hanc.o.c.k, "the sole inventor and producer of blocks by the process known as 'Etching on Gla.s.s,'" that if this invention had come earlier before him "it would have altered the whole character" of his drawing, though the designs which he produced by Hanc.o.c.k's process--the first of which was completed in April 1864--include nothing of importance.

We will not further linger over the media of reproduction employed by our artist, but summon a few ideas suggested by the vision we have had of him sitting like a schoolboy in the schoolroom of the Royal Academy.

As a draughtsman he had been professorial in 1817 when he published with S. W. Fores two plates ent.i.tled _Striking Effects produced by lines and dots for the a.s.sistance of young draftsmen_, wherein he showed, like Hogarth, the amount of pictorial information which an artist can convey by a primitively simple method. He was professorial, too, when in 1865 he attempted to put in perspective a twelve mile giant taking a stride of six miles, on a plate 6 inches long and 3-3/5 inches broad, and informed the publisher of "Popular Romances of the West of England"

(1865) that about 1825 he had attempted to put in perspective the Miltonic Satan whose body

"p.r.o.ne on the flood, extended long and large, Lay floating many a rood."

Cruikshank's greatest enemy was his mannerism which may even delude the pessimist of scant acquaintance with him into the idea that it imperfectly disguises an inability to draw up to the standard of Vere Foster. The Cruikshankian has merely to direct the attention of such a person to the frontispiece executed by Cruikshank for T. J. Pettigrew's "History of Egyptian Mummies" (1834). If a man can draw well in the service of science his mannerism is the accomplishment of an intention.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE VETERANS. From "Songs, Naval and National, of the late Charles Dibden," 1841.]

Ruskin said that Cruikshank's works were "often much spoiled by a curiously mistaken type of face, divided so as to give too much to the mouth and eyes and leave too little for forehead," and yet there is extant a curious MS. note by Cruikshank to the effect that Mr Ruskin's eyes were "in the wrong Place and not set properly in his head," showing that Cruikshank was a student of even a patron's physiognomy and suggesting that, if Ruskin had roamed in Cruikshank's London he would have convicted the artist of a malady of imitativeness. It must be remembered that he repeatedly drew recognisable portraits of his contemporaries; indeed he was so far from being a realist devoted to libel that Mr Layard confides to us that various studies by George Cruikshank of "the great George" would, he thinks, "have resulted in an undue sublimation had completion ever been attained."

Yet the sublimation of the respectable is precisely the rosy view of Cruikshank the man enjoyed by me at the present moment. He is Captain of the 24th Surrey Rifle Volunteers; he is Vice-President of the London Temperance League. He sketches a beautiful palace as a pastime. He is in the same ballroom as Queen Victoria, and Her Majesty bows to him.

Withal he is st.u.r.dy and declines the Prince Consort's offer for his collection of works by George Cruikshank. In the end St Paul's Cathedral receives him, and the person who knew him most intimately declares on enduring stone that she loved him best.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VIGNETTE. From "Peeps at Life," by the London Hermit (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co.), engraved by Bolton, 1875.]

We are now at the end, and cannot stimulate the muse of our prose to further efforts. She being silent obliges our blunt British voice to speak for itself. Inasmuch as Cruikshank was a mannerist, he is inimitable except by them who take great pains to vex the critical of mankind. Inasmuch as he expressed the beauty of crookedness, as though he found the secret of artistic success in punning on his own name, he offers a model worthy of practical study. His fame as an etcher is too loud to be lost in the silence of Henri Beraldi, who enumerated "Les graveurs du dix-neuvieme siecle," in 12 tomes (1885-1892), without mentioning his name. Though C is more employed in the initials of words than any other letter in our alphabet, the name of Cruikshank comes only after "Curious" in its attractiveness for the readers of entries under the letter C in English catalogues of second-hand books. It may be that to etchings in books of Cruikshank's period is ascribed, since the usurpation of the process-block, the fact.i.tious value of curios, and that he, Beraldi's Great Omitted, profits thereby. It is a fact that he is "collected" like postage-stamps, though no published work of his has attained the price per copy of the imperforate twopenny Mauritius of 1847. But we have descended to a comparison so unfortunate in its logical consequences that it is well to prophesy the immortality of Cruikshank from other than commercial tokens. Those tokens exist in the undying praises of d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, "Christopher North," and Ruskin, in the enormous work of his princ.i.p.al bibliographer George William Reid, and, not least to the spiritual eye, in the permanence of the impression made by a few of his designs on a memory that has forgotten a little of that literary art which is the only atonement offered by its owner to the world for all the irony of his requickened life.