But the visions that detain the student of Cruikshank the journalist are
not only of personages and events. He saw and recorded the crowd and the
clothes of the crowd. His art preserves the ladies of 1816, who
resembled the bowls of tobacco pipes; the men of 1822, who wore trousers
like pears; and the children of 1826, whom the hatter turned into
"Mushroom Monstrosities."
Cruikshank the journalist constitutes a fame in himself whose trumpeters
are Fairburn, Fores, Humphrey, Hone ..., publishers who, in an age
before photo-engraving, easily sold topical caricatures separately at a
shilling or more. Gillray's name, in my estimation, outweighs
Cruikshank's at the foot of such publications, while Rowlandson's weighs
less. Together these three masters of caricature compose a constellation
of third and fourth Georgian humour.
But we have by no means done with Cruikshank when we have admired him
there. A greater Cruikshank remains to be admired. Of him there is no
assignable master; neither Hogarth nor Gillray. He is the illustrator
whose fame makes more than six hundred books and pamphlets desirable; he
is truly an artist, a maker of beauty. Stimulated though this greater
Cruikshank was in the flatter and more decent epoch which succeeded the
age of _Coriolanus_ or _King Teapot_, of _Don Whiskerandos_ or
_Sardanapalus_, Regent and King of Britain and mandarin of Brighton, it
was in the age of muddle and debauch, not in the age of Victorian
propriety and reform, that Cruikshank entered fairyland for the first
time and saw the little people face to face. Cobbett has ignored the
fact, but there is grace in it even for the "Big Sovereign" whom he
pilloried in five hundred and eleven paragraphs.
We shall find, alas! as we proceed, that, as illustrator, Cruikshank
often sank below his journalistic level. The journalist may always take
refuge in the actual life of the fact before him; his are real
landscapes, real faces. But the illustrator has often only lifeless
words to instruct him; when short of inspiration he is in the thraldom
of his manner. Cruikshank's thraldom to his manner was the more obvious,
since the manner was often wooden, often joyously ugly. His fame
perpetuates his failures. The insipidity which affronted Boz has no
effect in stopping the demand for "the fireside plate." Still, his best
as well as his worst is in his illustration of books. It is his best
that excuses the criticism of his worst and enrols him among the great
artists of the nineteenth century.
I propose in the pages that shall follow to set down the significance
both of his best and of his worst, avoiding, as befits the date of my
labour, any biographical matter which does not throw light on his art.
And first let us follow his path in journalism.