**** The dates in the footlines and in this list are those of the first
appearance of the works to which they refer. In certain cases the
reproductions have been made from good impressions which are not the
earliest of the plates in question.
I
The life of George Cruikshank extended from September 27, 1792, to
February 1, 1878, and the known work of his hand dates from 1799 to
1875. In 1840 Thackeray wrote of him as of a hero of his boyhood, asking
jocundly, "Did we not forego tarts in order to buy his _Breaking-up_ or
his _Fashionable Monstrosities_ of the year eighteen hundred and
something?" In 1863, the year of Thackeray's death, Cruikshank was
asked, by the committee who exhibited his _Worship of Bacchus_, to
associate with that work some of his early drawings in order to prove
that he was not his own grandfather.
For years before he reached the great but unsensational age at which he
died, a sort of cult was vested in his longevity. Dated plates--that
entitled "The Rose and the Lily" (1875) offers the last example--imply
that his art figured to him finally as a kind of athleticism.
It was as if, in using his burin or needles, he was doing a "turn"
before sightseers, with a hired Time innocuously scything on the
platform beside him to show him off.
Now that his mortality has been proven for a quarter of a century, we
can coldly ask: why did he seem so old to himself and the world? Others
greater than he--Titian, Watts--have laboured with genius under a
heavier crown of snow than he; and the public has applauded their vigour
without a doubt of their identity. The reason is that they have not been
the journalists of their age. They have not, like Cruikshank, reflected
in their works inventions and fashions, wars and scandals, jokes and
politics, whence the world has emerged unrecognisably the same.
It is said that when Cruikshank was eighty-three, he executed a
sword-dance before an old officer who had mentally buried him. It was an
action characteristic of a nature that was scarcely more naive and
impulsive at one time than another, but it was the most confusing proof
of the fact in debate which he could have offered. It was not of a
numeral that the doubter thought when the existence of Cruikshank was
presented to his mind's eye. His thought we may elaborate as follows.
The artist who drew Napoleon week by week, with all the vulgar insolence
which only a great man's contemporaries can display towards him, was the
same who, half a century after the Emperor's death, produced a
conception of the "Leader of the Parisian Blood Red Republic of 1870."
The artist who, in the last year of the reign of George the Third,
depicted Thistlewood's lair in Cato Street, drew also, as though with "a
mother's tender care," almost every pane in that glass palace which the
trees of Hyde Park inhabited in 1851.
Before the punctuality of his interest in everything new that rose to
the surface to obliterate an expiring mode or event, we stand
astonished. It is not so much as an artist that we here admire him. It
is as an Argus of the street, an Argus not only with many eyes but with
feet enough to plant him at once in a hundred corners. From this voluble
Argus his mistress Clio recoils but cannot dismiss him. Aghast she
observes him presenting the Prince Regent in a hundred burlesquely
improper parts; and it is a discreet generation indeed which remembers
_Coriolanus addressing the Plebeians_ and forgets _The Fat in the Fire_.
Clio withdraws, but does not forbid us to stay. And stay I do, at all
events, to examine the packed and ugly caricatures which are the visible
laughter of Cruikshank the Argus of journalism. Their violent colours
and vigorous lines fail not in invocation. Before the student of them
rise the supple, blue-eyed leech called Mrs Clarke and her
grossly-doating Commander-in-chief; Lady Jersey, Lady Douglas and the
other villains of the drama entitled "Queen Caroline;" the Marchioness
of Hertford, the Countess of Yarmouth, or whoever brought down upon
_Coriolanus_ the "heigho!" of a ribald Rowly; and, lest one grow lenient
to royal self-indulgence, it is accused by the recurring presence of a
figure of tormented respectability. It is the Cruikshankian John Bull,
as different from Sir F. C. Gould's well-fed monitor of Conservative
politicians as is Cruikshank's darkly criminal Punch from Richard
Doyle's domesticated patron of humour. This John Bull is hacked to
make a Corsican and Yankee holiday, taxed at the bayonet's point,
starved on bread at eighteenpence the quartern, and offered up as a
sacrifice to a Bourbon "Bumble-head."
[Illustration: CARICATURE ON TAXATION