George Cruikshank Part 5

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 "Ill.u.s.trations 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 a _Point of Humour_ (1824), which centres in an "irruption of intolerable smells" at dinner. The point p.r.i.c.ked, as one may say, but it was blunt in effect compared with that of a later artist's drawing of _Columbus and the Egg_ or that of Cruikshank's cook swallowing to order in _Land 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 to _Mrs 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 ill.u.s.trate Goldsmith are few and, as a series, unsuccessful. The reproduced specimen is a fair example of his realistic method. It exhibits the blackguard's sense of absurdity in the Christian altruism which paralyses the nerves of the pocket--sensitive usually as the nerves of s.e.x--and which tyrannises over the nerves of pride.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD PREACHING TO THE PRISONERS. From "Ill.u.s.trations of Popular Works," 1830.]

Fisher, Son, & Co., the publishers of Cruikshank's ill.u.s.trations of the "Waverley" novels (1836-7-8), a.s.sumed "the merit of having been the first to ill.u.s.trate the scenes of mirth, of merriment, of humour, that often sparkle" in these works. In "Landscape Historical Ill.u.s.trations of Scotland and the Waverley Novels" he supplied the comic plates; his _Bailie 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 of _Juan opposing the Entrance to the Spirit Room_. A Byron ill.u.s.trated 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 a.s.sociation with d.i.c.kens. 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 d.i.c.kens, they resulted in nothing important to his reputation. His etchings ill.u.s.trating 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 ill.u.s.trations 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).

[Ill.u.s.tration: PRO-DI-GI-OUS! (Dominie Sampson in "Guy Mannering"), "Landscape-Historical Ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.trated "Arthur O'Leary" (1844). Among his ten etchings in this novel is an amusing exhibition of Corpulence submitting to identification by measurement; it surpa.s.ses 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 ill.u.s.trator, though our artist's Euphrasia is a dainty miss.

Cruikshank's fifteen ill.u.s.trations 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" compare favourably, however, with the audacious scratches which const.i.tute 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 done _con 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 n.o.blest and most finished efforts in the line of pure imaginative writing that ever fell from the pen of any one man."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ill.u.s.trate ill.u.s.trious works of imagination. Sinking in compet.i.tive 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 ill.u.s.trate 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 burlesque metaphors 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-c.u.m-Corner" (1842), with his etching, _Sing old Rose and burn the Bellows_ in "Sc.r.a.ps 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 kettle over 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 circ.u.mference of a circle. At the commonplace, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE WITS MAGAZINE" (2 vols., 1818) is "one of the rarest books ill.u.s.trated 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 rus.h.i.+ng towards an intruder whose most bitable tissues are reluctantly offered to him in the attempt to scale a wall. The hackneyed metaphor thus obviously ill.u.s.trated 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 of funk 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 repet.i.tiousness. 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 t.i.tle-pages is delightfully droll. Thus the t.i.tle-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 t.i.tle page of "The Comic Almanac"

(1835) the letter ~L~ is a man sitting sideways with his legs stretched horizontally together, and on the t.i.tle-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 in _The 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 encyclopaedias. 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration:

"while he spake a braying a.s.s Did sing most loud and clear.--William Cowper.

From "The Diverting History of John Gilpin," 1828. An earlier design by Cruikshank for "John Gilpin" is in "The Humourist," vol. iii. (1819).

1836 is the date borne by a new edition of W. A. Nield's very monotonous musical setting of John Gilpin, "ill.u.s.trated by Cruikshank" (presumably Robert).]

We return now to the zoological humour which has flashed across these pages. In the United States the art of humanising the creatures of instinct to make them articulately droll has been practised with such success by Gus Dirks, J. S. Pughe, and A. Z. Baker, that if Noah's Ark is not too "denominational," it is there that we should seek the origin of their humour. Cruikshank, though he did re-draw William Clarke's swimming duck holding up an umbrella (in "Three Courses and a Dessert," 1830), achieved nothing so triumphantly zoological as the ostrich who swallowed her medicine but forgot to uncork the bottle containing it, or the porcupine who asked a barber for a shampoo, or the cat who discovered that her Thomas was leading a tenth life, or the elephant who wondered how the stork managed to convey him to his parents, or the beetle-farmer who mowed a hairbrush. Cruikshank, however, was in the Ark before them, and brought back enough humour resembling theirs to show what he missed, besides humour of a different kind which they do not excel. In "Sc.r.a.ps and Sketches" (1829) he preceded the Americans in the humour which makes the horse the critic of the motor-car, though not in that which seems to make the motor-car the caricaturist of the horse; and in the above-named publication he represents a dog in the act of prophesying cheap meat for the canine race. Again, in "Sc.r.a.ps and Sketches" (1832) two elephants laugh together over a pseudopun on the word trunk.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "When the Elephant stands upon his Head, does he himself know whether he is standing upon his Head or his Heels?" "George Cruikshank's Magazine," February 1854.]

We are not, however, reminded of America by the inquiry printed below the elephant on the next page, which might well have surprised Lewis Carroll by resemblance more than all the works of Mr G. E. Farrow.

Neither does America recognise the silence of her own laughter in those drawings in which Cruikshank caricatures humanity under zoological likenesses. His alderman realising Haynes Bayly's wish to be a b.u.t.terfly in "My Sketch Book" (1835); his coleopteral beadle in "George Cruikshank's Omnibus" (1842), are simple attempts to make _tours de force_ of what is rather obscurely called the obvious, and one realises that art can find itself strong in embracing feeble idea. The most striking of his zoological ideas is the effect of abnormal behaviour on human people. Witness in "Sc.r.a.ps and Sketches" (1832) the "dreadful tail" unfolded in the dialogue: "Doth he woggle his tail?" "Yes, he does." "Then I be a dead mon!" One may also cite the horror of the diver at the rising in air of a curly and vociferous salmon from the dish in front of him (_ibid._). Among all his drawings of animals (those for Grimm excepted) there is one etching which stands out as a technical triumph produced by a sense of irony. I refer to the etching ent.i.tled _The Cat Did It!_ in "The Greatest Plague of Life" (1847). Fifteen p.u.s.s.ies in a kitchen throw the crockery off the dresser, topple the draped clothes-horse into the fire, smash the window gla.s.s and devour the provisions. The scene is like a burlesque of one of its designer's etchings in Maxwell's "Irish Rebellion." It is unique.

We must not quit Cruikshank's zoological drawings without remarking on the curious inconsistency of his att.i.tude towards animals. We find him both callous and tender. In ill.u.s.trating "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" he chose (one a.s.sumes) to draw the Baron flaying the fox by flagellation; at any rate we have his wood-cut depicting the abominable operation; and in "Sc.r.a.ps and Sketches" (1832), poor Reynard, for the sake of a pun, is exhibited as "Tenant intail" of a spring-trap. Yet in "My Sketch Book" (1835) he presents us with frogs expostulating with small boys for throwing stones at them ("I pray you to cease, my little Dears! for though it may be sport to you, it is death to us"). Again, his canine reference to cats' meat, already mentioned, implies a heartlessness towards horses which is contradicted by his touching but not much prized etching _The Knackers Yard_, to be found in "The Voice of Humanity" (May 1831), in "The Melange" (1834), and in "The Elysium of Animals" (1836). Moreover, in "My Sketch Book" (1835) he severely exhibits human insensitiveness to the sufferings of quadrupeds in _The Omnibus Brutes--qy. which are they?_ It is therefore clear that Cruikshank thought humanely about animals, though as a humorist he was irresponsible and gave woe's present to ease--its comicality. And before we write him down a vulgarian let us remember our share in his laughter at the absurdity of incarnations which confer tails on elemental furies and indecencies, and compel elemental importances and respectabilities to satisfy their self-love by ruinous grimaces and scaffoldings of adipose tissue.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE CAT DID IT!" From "The Greatest Plague in Life"

(1847).]

In a comparison I have already a.s.sociated Cruikshank with Lewis Carroll, who was systematically the finest humorist produced by England till his death in 1898. The most intensely comic thing ever wrought by the hand of Cruikshank is, I think, by the absolute perfection of its reasoning _a priori_, a genuine "carroll" in a minor key. It is the drawing in "Sc.r.a.ps and Sketches" (1832) in which, to a haughty, unamused commander, the complainant says, "Please, your Honor, Tom Towzer has tied my tail so tight that I can't shut my eyes."

One of Cruikshank's humorous ideas is particularly his own, because it satisfies his pa.s.sionate industry. I mean those processions of images which he summoned by the enchantment of single central ideas. _The Triumph of Cupid_ in "George Cruikshank's Table Book" (1845) is as perfect an example as I can cite. Cruikshank is seated by a fire with his "little pet dog Lilla" on his lap. From the pipe he is smoking ascends and curls around him a world of symbolic life. The car of the boy-G.o.d is drawn by lions and tigers. Another cupid stands menacingly on a pleading Turk; a third cupid is the tyrant over a negro under Cruikshank's chair; a fourth cupid, sitting on Cruikshank's left foot, toasts a heart at the "fire office"; more cupids are dragging Time backwards on the mantelpiece, and another is stealing his scythe.

Consummate ability is shown in the delicate technique of this etching, which was succeeded as an example of _multum in parvo_ by the well-known folding etching _Pa.s.sing Events or the Tail of the Comet of 1853_, appearing in "George Cruikshank's Magazine" (February 1854).

[Ill.u.s.tration: t.i.tLE PAGE OF "ILl.u.s.tRATIONS OF TIME," 1827 This drawing borrows idea from Gillray, as also does the frontispiece by Cruikshank to "Angelo's Picnic" (1834). Compare Gillray's _John Bull taking a Luncheon_ (1798).]

Playing on words is very characteristic of Cruikshank's humour. Thus he shows us "parenthetical" legs, as d.i.c.kens wittily called them, by the side of those of "a friend in-kneed," and a man (dumbly miserable) arrested on a rope-walk is "taken in tow." Viewing Cruikshank at this game does not help one to endorse the statement of Thomas Love Peac.o.c.k, inspired by the drawing of January in "The Comic Almanack" (1838),

"A great philosopher art thou, George Cruikshank, In thy unmatched grotesqueness,"

for a philosopher is a systematiser and a punster is an anarchist. But we do not need him as a philosopher or as an Importance of any kind.

What we see and accept as philosophy in him is the appropriation of misery for that Gargantuan meal of humour to which his Time sits down.

Yet in that philosophy it is certain that ironists and pessimists excel him.

An entomologist as generous in cla.s.sification as Mr Swinburne, author of "Under the Microscope," will now observe me in the process of being re-transformed into a scolytus. "Impossible!" cries the reader who remembers my repentance on page 203. But I say "Inevitable." Since I had the courage to bore my way through a catalogue of famous books ill.u.s.trated humorously by Cruikshank, I feel it my duty to bid the reader look at a list of works of which he should acquire all the italicised items, in such editions as he can afford, if he wishes to know Cruikshank's humour as they know it who call him "The Great George."

The Humourist (4 vols., 1819-20).

_German Popular Stories_ (2 vols., 1823-4).

_Points of Humour_ (2 vols., 1823-4).

_Mornings at Bow Street_ (1824).

_Greenwich Hospital_ (1826).

_More Mornings at Bow Street_ (1827).

Phrenological Ill.u.s.trations (1826).

Ill.u.s.trations of Time (1827).

_Sc.r.a.ps and Sketches_ (4 parts and one plate of an unpublished 5th part, 1828-9, 1831-2, 1834).

_My Sketch Book_ (9 numbers, with plates dated 1833, 1834, 1835).

_Punch and Judy_ (1828).

_Three Courses and a Dessert_ (1830).

_Cruikshankiana_ (1835).

_The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman_ (1839).

_George Cruikshank's Omnibus_ (9 parts, 1841-2).

The Bachelor's Own Book (1844).

_George Cruikshank's Table Book_ (12 numbers, 1845).

George Cruikshank's Fairy Library (4 parts, 1853-4, 1864).

George Cruikshank's Magazine (2 numbers, 1854).