With one of the finest, a little more broken and varied than those
previously described, we came up at a little past noon, and the schooner
stood off and on while Bradford went in the boat to sketch it in
color,--Captain Handy's steady and skilful hand upon the sculling-oar.
Bradford worked at it like a beaver all the afternoon, and then directed
the schooner to lie to through the night, that he might resume his task
in the morning,--coveting especially the effects of early light The
ardent man was off before three o'clock. Nature was kind to him; he
sketched the berg under a dawn of amber and scarlet, followed by floods
on floods of morning gold; and returned to breakfast, after five hours'
work, half in rapture and half in despair. The colors, above all, the
purples, were inconceivable, he said, and there was no use trying to
render them. I reminded him of Ruskin's brave words:--"He that is not
appalled by his tasks will do nothing great." But his was an April
despair, after all, with rifted clouds and spring sunshine pouring
through.
Another memorable one was seen outside while we were in harbor,
storm-bound. A vast arch went through the very heart of it, while each
end rose to a pinnacle,--the arch blue, blue! We were going out to it;
but, during the second night of storm, its strength broke, and beneath
blinding snow there remained only a mad dance of waves over the wreck of
its majesty.
There was another, curiously striped with diagonal dirt-bands, whose
fellowship, however, the greens and purples did not disdain.
Another had the shape of three immense towers, seeming to _stand on the
water_, more than a hundred feet of sea rolling between. The tallest
tower could not be much less than two hundred feet in height; the others
slightly, just perceptibly, lower. This was seen in rain, and the
purples here were more crystalline and shining than any others which I
observed.
These towers were seen on our last day among the bergs. In my memory
they are monumental. They stand there, a purple trinity, to commemorate
the terrors and glories that I shall behold no more.
KALLUNDBORG CHURCH.
"Tie stille, barn min!
Imorgen kommer Fin,
Fa'er din,
Og gi'er dig Esbern Snares oeine og hjerte at lege med!"
_Zealand Rhyme._
"Build at Kallundborg by the sea
A church as stately as church may be,
And there shalt thou wed my daughter fair,"
Said the Lord of Nesvek to Esbern Snare.
And the Baron laughed. But Esbern said,
"Though I lose my soul, I will Helva wed!"
And off he strode, in his pride of will,
To the Troll who dwelt in Ulshoi hill.
"Build, O Troll, a church for me
At Kallundborg by the mighty sea;
Build it stately, and build it fair,
Build it quickly," said Esbern Snare.
But the sly Dwarf said, "No work is wrought
By Trolls of the Hills, O man, for nought.
What wilt thou give for thy church so fair?"
"Set thy own price," quoth Esbern Snare.
"When Kallundborg church is builded well,
Thou must the name of its builder tell,
Or thy heart and thy eyes must be my boon."
"Build," said Esbern, "and build it soon."
By night and by day the Troll wrought on;
He hewed the timbers, he piled the stone;
But day by day, as the walls rose fair,
Darker and sadder grew Esbern Snare.
He listened by night, he watched by day,
He sought and thought, but he dared not pray;
In vain he called on the Elle-maids shy,
And the Neck and the Nis gave no reply.
Of his evil bargain far and wide
A rumor ran through the country-side;
And Helva of Nesvek, young and fair,
Prayed for the soul of Esbern Snare.
And now the church was wellnigh done;
One pillar it lacked, and one alone;
And the grim Troll muttered, "Fool thou art!
To-morrow gives me thy eyes and heart!"
By Kallundborg in black despair,
Through wood and meadow, walked Esbern Snare,
Till, worn and weary, the strong man sank
Under the birches on Ulshoi bank.
At his last day's work he heard the Troll
Hammer and delve in the quarry's hole;
Before him the church stood large and fair:
"I have builded my tomb," said Esbern Snare.
And he closed his eyes the sight to hide,
When he heard a light step at his side:
"O Esbern Snare!" a sweet voice said,
"Would I might die now in thy stead!"
With a grasp by love and by fear made strong,
He held her fast, and he held her long;
With the beating heart of a bird afeard,
She hid her face in his flame-red beard.
"O love!" he cried, "let me look to-day
In thine eyes ere mine are plucked away;
Let me hold thee close, let me feel thy heart
Ere mine by the Troll is torn apart!
"I sinned, O Helva, for love of thee!
Pray that the Lord Christ pardon me!"
But fast as she prayed, and faster still,
Hammered the Troll in Ulshoi hill.
He knew, as he wrought, that a loving heart
Was somehow baffling his evil art;
For more than spell of Elf or Troll
Is a maiden's prayer for her lover's soul.
And Esbern listened, and caught the sound
Of a Troll-wife singing underground:
"To-morrow comes Fine, father thine:
Lie still and hush thee, baby mine!
"Lie still, my darling! next sunrise
Thou'lt play with Esbern Snare's heart and eyes!"
"Ho! ho!" quoth Esbern, "is that your game?
Thanks to the Troll-wife, I know his name!"
The Troll he heard him, and hurried on
To Kallundborg church with the lacking stone.
"Too late, Gaffer Fine!" cried Esbern Snare;
And Troll and pillar vanished in air!
That night the harvesters heard the sound
Of a woman sobbing underground,
And the voice of the Hill-Troll loud with blame
Of the careless singer who told his name.
Of the Troll of the Church they sing the rune
By the Northern Sea in the harvest moon;
And the fishers of Zealand hear him still
Scolding his wife in Ulshoi hill.
And seaward over its groves of birch
Still looks the tower of Kallundborg church,
Where, first at its altar, a wedded pair,
Stood Helva of Nesvek and Esbern Snare!
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK IN MEXICO.
And first, let it be on record that his name is GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, and
not CRUICKSHANK. The good old man is seventy years of age, if not more,
(the earliest drawing I have seen of his bears the date of 1799, and he
could scarcely have begun to limn in his long-clothes,) yet, with a
persistence of perversity wellnigh astonishing,--although his name has
been before the public for considerably more than half a
century,--although he has published nothing anonymously, but has
appended his familiar signature in full to the minutest scratchings of
his etching-needle,--although he has been the conductor of two
magazines, and of late years has been one of the foremost agitators and
platform-orators in the English temperance movement,--the vast majority
of his countrymen have always spelt his surname "Cruickshank," and will
continue so to spell it, I suppose, even should he live as long as
Cornaro. I hope he may, I am sure, with or without the additional _c_
for his age and his country can ill spare him.
But George Cruikshank in Mexico! What on earth can the most stay-at-home
of British artists have to do with that out-of-the-way old
curiosity-shop of the American continent? One might fancy him now--but
that it is growing late--in the United States. He might be invited to
attend a Total Abstinence Convention. He might run Mr. J.B. Gough hard
on his favorite stump. He might be tempted, perchance, to cross the
ocean in the evening of his days, to note down, with his inimitable and
still unfaltering pencil, some of the humors of Yankee-land. I am
certain, that, were George Cruikshank or Dicky Doyle to come this way
and give a pictorial history of a tour through the States, somewhat
after the immortal Brown, Jones, and Robinson pattern, the Americans
would be in a better temper with their brothers in Old England than
after reading some long spun-out book of travels by brainless Cockneys
or cynical dyspeptics. The laugh awakened by a droll picture hurts
nobody. It is that ugly letter-press which smarts and rankles, and
festers at last into a gangrene of hatred. The Patriarch of Uz wished
that his enemy had written a book. He could have added ten thousand fold
to the venom of the aspiration, had he likewise expressed a wish that
the book had been printed.
You will be pleased to understand, then, that the name of the gentleman
who serves as text for this essay is Cruikshank, and not Cruickshank.
There is an old Scottish family, I believe, of that ilk, which spells
its name with a _c_ before the _k_. Perhaps the admirers of our George
wished to give something like an aristocratic smack to his patronymic,
and so interpolated the objectionable consonant. There is no Cruikshank
to be found in the "Court Guide," but Cruickshanks abound. As for our
artist, he is a burgess among burgesses,--a man of the people _par
excellence_, and an Englishman above all. His travels have been of the
most limited nature. Once, in the course of his long life, and with what
intent you shall presently hear, he went to France, as Hogarth did; but
France didn't please him, and he came home again, like Hogarth, with all
convenient speed,--fortunately, without being clapped up in jail for
sketching the gates of Calais. I believe that he has not crossed the
Straits of Dover since George IV. was king. I have heard, on good
authority, that he protested strongly, while in foreign parts, against
the manner in which the French ate new-laid eggs, and against the
custom, then common among the peasantry, of wearing wooden shoes. I am
afraid even, that, were George hard pressed, he would own to a dim
persuasion that _all_ Frenchmen wear wooden shoes; also pigtails;
likewise cocked hats. He does not say so in society; but those who have
his private ear assert that his faith or his delusion goes even farther
than this, and that he believes that all Frenchmen eat frogs,--that nine
tenths of the population earn their living as dancing-masters, and that
the late Napoleon Buonaparte (George Cruikshank always spells the
Corsican Ogre's name with a _u_) was first cousin to Apollyon, and was
not, upon occasion, averse to the consumption of human flesh,---babies
of British extraction preferred. Can you show me an oak that ever took
so strong a root as prejudice?
Not that George Cruikshank belongs in any way to the species known as
"Fossil Tories." He is rather a fossil Liberal. He was a Whig Radical,
and more, when the slightest suspicion of Radicalism exposed an
Englishman to contumely, to obloquy, to poverty, to fines, to stripes,
to gyves, and to the jail. He was quite as advanced a politician as
William Cobbett, and a great deal honester as a man. He was the fast
friend of William Hone, who, for his famous "Political Catechism,"--a
lampoon on the borough-mongers and their bloated king,--was tried three
times on three successive days, before the cruel Ellenborough, but as
many times acquitted. George Cruikshank inveighed ardently, earnestly,
and at last successfully, with pencil and with etching-point, against
the atrocious blood-thirstiness of the penal laws,--the laws that strung
up from six to a dozen unfortunates on a gallows in front of Newgate
every Monday morning, often for no direr offence than passing a
counterfeit one-pound note. When the good old Tories wore top-boots and
buckskins, George Cruikshank was conspicuous for a white hat and
Hessians,--the distinguishing outward signs of ultra-liberalism. He was,
of course, a Parliamentary Reformer in the year '30; and he has been a
social reformer, and a most useful one, ever since. Still is there
something about this brave old English worthy that approaches the fossil
type. His droll dislike to the French--a hearty, good-humored disfavor,
differing widely from the polished malevolence of Mr. John Leech, who
never missed an opportunity to represent the airy Gaul as something
repulsive, degraded, and ungentlemanly--I have already noticed. Then
George Cruikshank has never been able to surmount a vague notion that
steamboats and steam-engines are, generically speaking, a humbug, and
that the old English sailing craft and the old English stage-coach are,
after all, the only modes of conveyance worthy the patronage of Britons.
Against exaggerated hoop-skirts he has all along set his face, and
seldom, if ever, condescends to delineate a lady in crinoline. His
beau-ideal of female beauty is comprised in an hour-glass waist, a skirt
that fits close to the form, a sandalled shoe, and very long ringlets;
whereas tight lacing, narrow skirts, sandalled shoes, and ringlets have
been banished from the English _modes_ any time these fifteen years.
Those among George's critics, too, who are sticklers for exactitude in
the "abstract and brief chronicle of the time" complain that his dandies
always wear straps to their tight pantaloons in lieu of pegtops; that
their vests are too short and their coat-collars too high; that they
wear bell-crowned hats, and carry gold-knobbed canes with long tassels;
and that they are dressed, in short, after the fashion of the year one,
when Brummell or Pea-Green Haynes commanded the _ton_. It is obvious
that the works of an artist who has refused to be indoctrinated with the
perpetual changes of a capricious code of dress would never be very
popular with the readers of "Punch,"--a periodical which, pictorially,
owes its very existence to the readiness and skill displayed by its
draughtsmen in shooting folly as it flies and catching the manners
living as they rise, and pillorying the madness of the moment. Were
George Cruikshank called upon, for instance, to depict a lady fording a
puddle on a rainy day, and were he averse (for he is the modestest of
artists) to displaying too much of her ankle, he would assuredly make
manifest, beneath her upraised skirts, some antediluvian pantalet,
bordered by a pre-Adamite frill. But the keen-eyed Mr. Leech would be
guilty of no such anachronism. He would discover that the mysterious
garments in question were ofttimes encircled by open-worked embroidery.
_He would find out that the ladies sometimes wore Knickerbockers._ And
this is what the ladies like. Exaggerate their follies as much as you
please; but woe be to you, if you wrongfully accuse them! You may sneer
at, you may censure, you may castigate them for what they really do, but
beware of reprehending them for that which they have never done. Even
Sir John Falstaff revolted at the imputation of having kissed the
keeper's daughter. A sermon against crinoline, be it ever so
fulminating, finds ever an attentive and smiling congregation; but
venture to preach against coal-scuttle bonnets--until the ladies have
really taken to wearing them--and your hearers would pull down the
pulpit and hang the preacher.
Thus, although foreigners may express wonder that a designer, who for so
many years has been in the front rank of English humorous artists,
should never have contributed to the pages of our leading humorous
periodical, astonishment may be abated, when the real state of the case,
as I have endeavored to put it, is known. George Cruikshank is at once
too good for, and not quite up to the mark of "Punch." His best works
have always been his etchings on steel and copper; and wonderful
examples of chalcographic brilliance and skill those etchings are,--many
of them surpassing Callot, and not a few of them (notably the
illustrations to Ainsworth's "Tower of London") rivalling Rembrandt.
From the nature of these engravings, it would be impossible to print
them at a machine-press for a weekly issue of fifty or sixty thousand
copies. George has drawn much on wood, and his wondrous
wood-cuts--xylographs, if you wish a more pretentious word--to "Three
Courses and a Dessert," "The Odd Volume," "The Gentleman in Black,"
Grimm's "Fairy Tales," "Philosophy in Sport," and "The Table-Book," will
be long remembered, and are now highly prized by amateurs; but his
minute and delicate pencil-drawings have taxed the energies of the very
best engravers of whom England can boast,--of Vizetelly, of Landells, of
Jackson, of Thompson, and of Thurston. George Cruikshank would never
suffer his drawings on wood to be slashed and chopped about by hasty or
incompetent gravers; and although the ateliers of "Punch" are supplied
with a first-rate staff of wood-cutters, very great haste and very
little care must often be apparent in the weekly pabulum of cuts; nor
should such an appearance excite surprise, when the exigencies of a
weekly publication are remembered. The "Punch" artists, indeed, draw
with a special reference to that which they know their engravers can or
cannot do. Mr. Tenniel's cartoons are put on wood precisely as they are
meant to be cut, in broad, firm, sweeping lines, and the wood-engraver
has only to scoop out the white interstices between the network of
lines; whereas Mr. Leech dashed in a bold pen-and-ink-like sketch and
trusted to the xylographer, who knew his style well and of old, to
produce an engraving, _tant bien que mal_, but as bold and as dashing as
the original. The secession, for reasons theological, from "Punch" of
Mr. Richard Doyle, an event which took place some fifteen years since,
(how quickly time passes, to be sure!) was very bitterly regretted by
his literary and artistic comrades; and the young man who calmly gave up
something like a thousand pounds a year for conscience' sake lost
nothing, but gained rather in the respect and admiration of society. But
the wood-engravers must have held high carousal over the defection of
Mr. Doyle. To cut one of his drawings was a crucial experiment. His hand
was not sure in its touch; he always drew six lines instead of one; and
in the portrait of a lady from his pencil, the agonized engraver had to
hunt through a Cretan labyrinth of faces before he found the particular
countenance which Mr. Doyle wished to be engraved.
I have strayed away, perhaps unpardonably, from George Cruikshank. To
those whose only ludicrous prophet is "Punch" he may be comparatively
little known. But in the great world of pictorial art, both in England
and on the Continent, he worthily holds an illustrious place. His name
is a household word with his countrymen; and whenever a young hopeful
displays ever so crude an aptitude for caricaturing his schoolmaster, or
giving with slate and pencil the facetious side of his grandmother's cap
and spectacles, he is voted by the unanimous suffrage of fireside
critics to be a "regular Cruikshank." In this connection I have heard
him sometimes called "Crookshanks," which is taking, I apprehend, even a
grosser liberty with his name than in the case of the additional
_c_,--"Crookshanks" having seemingly a reference, and not a
complimentary one, to George's legs.
This admirable artist and good man was the son of old Isaac Cruikshank,
in his day a famous engraver of lottery-tickets, securities in which the
British public are now no longer by law permitted to invest, but which,
fifty years since, made as constant a demand on the engraver's art as,
in our time and in America, is made by the thousand and one joint-stock
banks whose pictorial promises-to-pay fill, or should properly fill, our
pocket-books. The abilities of Isaac were not entirely devoted to the
lottery; and I have at home, from his hand, a very rare and curious
etching of the execution of Louis XVI., with an explanatory diagram
beneath of the working of the guillotine. George Cruikshank's earliest
pencil-drawings are dated, as I have remarked, before the present
century drew breath; but he must have begun to gain reputation as a
caricaturist upon copper towards the end of the career of Napoleon
I.,--the "Boney" to whom he has adhered with such constant, albeit
jocular, animosity. He was the natural successor of James Gillray, the
renowned delineator of "Farmer George and Little Nap," and "Pitt and
Boney at Dinner," and hundreds of political cartoons, eagerly bought in
their day, but now to be found only in old print-shops. Gillray was
a man of vast, but misapplied talents. Although he etched
caricatures for a livelihood, his drawing was splendid,--wellnigh
Michel-Angelesque,--but always careless and _outre_. He was continually
betting crown-bowls of punch that he would design, etch, and bite in so
many plates within a given time, and, with the assistance of a private
bowl, he almost always won his bets; but the punch was too much for him
in the long run. He went mad and died miserably. George Cruikshank was
never his pupil; nor did he ever attain the freedom and mastery of
outline which the crazy old reprobate, who made the fortune of Mr.
Humphries, the St. James's Street print-seller, undeniably possessed;
but his handling was grounded upon Gillray's style; and from early and
attentive study of his works he must have acquired that boldness of
treatment, that rotundity of light and shade, and that general
"fatness," or _morbidezza_, of touch, which make the works of Gillray
and Cruikshank stand out from the coarse scrawls of Rowlandson, and the
bald and meagre scratches of Sir Charles Bunbury. Unless I am much
mistaken, one of the first works that brought George into notice was an
etching published in 1815, having reference to the exile of the detested
Corsican to St. Helena. But it was in 1821 that he first made a decided
mark. For William Hone--a man who was in perpetual opposition to the
powers that were--he drew on wood a remarkable series of illustrations
to the scurrilous, but perhaps not undeserved, satires against King
George IV., called, "The Political House that Jack Built," "The Green
Bag," "A Slap at Slop," and the like,--all of them having direct and
most caustic reference to the scandalous prosecution instituted against
a woman of whom it is difficult to say whether she was bad or mad or
both, but who was assuredly most miserable,--the unhappy Caroline of
Brunswick. George Cruikshank's sketch of the outraged husband, the
finest and stoutest gentleman in Europe, being lowered by means of a
crane into a pair of white kid pantaloons suspended between the posts of
his bed, was inimitably droll, and clearly disloyal. But disloyalty was
fashionable in the year '21.
For twenty years afterwards the history of the artist's career is but
the history of his works, of his innumerable illustrations to books, and
the sketchbooks, comic panoramas, and humorous cartoons he published on
his own account. Besides, I am not writing a life of George Cruikshank,
and all this time I have been keeping him on the threshold of the city
of Mexico. Let it suffice to say, briefly, that in 1841 came a
stand-point in his life, through the establishment of a monthly magazine
entitled "George Cruikshank's Omnibus." Of this he was the sole
illustrator. The literary editor was Laman Blanchard; and in the
"Omnibus," William Makepeace Thackeray, then a gaunt young man, not much
over thirty, and quite unknown to fame,--although he had published
"Yellowplush" in "Fraser,"--wrote his quaint and touching ballad of "The
King of Brentford's Testament." The "Omnibus" did not run long, nor was
its running very prosperous. George Cruikshank seemed for a while
wearied with the calling of a caricaturist; and the large etchings on
steel, with which between '40 and '45 he illustrated Ainsworth's gory
romances, indicated a power of grouping, a knowledge of composition, a
familiarity with mediaeval costume, and a command over chiaroscuro, which
astonished and delighted those who had been accustomed to regard him
only as a funny fellow,--one of infinite whim, to be sure, but still a
jester of jests, and nothing more. Unfortunately, or fortunately, as the
case might be,--for the rumor ran that George intended to abandon
caricaturing altogether, and to set up in earnest as an historical
painter,--there came from beyond the sea, to assist in illustrating
"Windsor Castle," a Frenchman named Tony Johannot. Who but he, in fact,
was the famous master of the grotesque who illustrated "Don Quixote" and
the "Diable Boiteux" of Le Sage? To his dismay, George Cruikshank found
a competitor as eccentric as himself, as skilful a manipulator _rem
acu_, the etching-point, and who drew incomparably better than he,
George Cruikshank, did. He gave up the mediaeval in disgust; but he must
have hugged himself with the thought that he had already illustrated
Charles Dickens's "Oliver Twist," and that the Frenchman, powerful as he
was, could never hope to come near him in that terrific etching of
"Fagin in the Condemned Cell."