The limits of Cruikshank's genius and the spacious area between them are
almost implied in the fact that he was a Londoner who seldom or never
departed from the "tight little island." Born in Duke Street, St
George's, Bloomsbury, if the statement in his epitaph in St Paul's
Cathedral is to be accepted, he continued a Londoner to the end: living
in Dorset Street, near Fleet Street, in Amwell Street, and Myddelton
Terrace, Pentonville, and finally in the house called successively 48
Mornington Place and 263 Hampstead Road. Yet this cockney depicted the
Spain of Don Quixote and Gil Bias, the Ireland of Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, and the America of Uncle Tom. Such courageous versatility
was the outcome of a training so practical that I hesitate to call it an
artistic education.
His father, Isaac, was a Lowland Scot who lived and, unfortunately,
drank by his art, which in 1789, 1790 and 1792 was represented at the
Royal Academy. His period was from 1756 or 1757 to 1810 or 1811. Like
his friend James Gillray, he caricatured on the side of Pitt. I remember
no better caricature of his than _Pastimes of Primrose Hill_ ("Attic
Miscellany," 1st Sept. 1791), depicting a perspiring tallow chandler
trundling his children up that eminence. He was energetic in the
delineation of the insipid jollity considered appropriate to sailors,
and he celebrated the O.P. riots at Covent Garden by drawing Angelica
Catalani as a cat. Thomas Wright places him only after Gillray and
Rowlandson as a caricaturist, but it is probable that the man's best is
of an academic sort, such as the pretty drawings which he contributed to
a 1794 edition of Thomson's "Seasons." Isaac Cruikshank's workroom was
that of a busy hack, and George had not been long in the world before he
played ghost there on his father's copperplates. One of his early tasks
was the background of _Daniel in the Lions' Den_.
None who looks at the drawing of a supercilious benefactor, which is one
of George's earliest efforts, can doubt that in him the caricaturing
instinct was basic. The eye is indulgent to several crudities, because
the flinging is drawn though the hand of contempt is not, while the
gluttonous enthusiasm of the beggar is a triumph of juvenile
observation. Here are characters if not figures; here from a little boy
is work that deserves a laugh. Hence it is not surprising that George
Cruikshank has been erroneously credited with a share in _Facing the
Enemy_, a dateless etching, delightfully droll in animal expression,
etched by his father, after a sketch by H. Woodward, and published in
1797-8, according to Mr A. M. Broadley, and not in 1803 as formerly
conjectured.
[Illustration: SPECIMEN OF VERY EARLY WORK, from the original drawing,
No. 9850 in the George Cruikshank Collection, South Kensington Museum.]
1803 is the year of Cruikshank's Opus I., according to G. W. Reid, his
most voluminous bibliographer. This work, printed and sold by W. Belch
of Newington Butts, consists of four marine pieces on a sheet, most
comfortably unprecocious and as wooden as a Dutch doll. A humorist
inspecting it might profess to see in a woman, whose nose and forehead
produce one and the same straight line, a prophecy of the Cruikshankian
nose which is so monotonously recurrent an ornament in the works of
"the great George." Cruikshank himself averred that one of the first
etchings he was ever employed to do and paid for was a sheet of Lottery
Prints (published in 1804) of which he made a copy in his eighty-first
year. The etching contains sixteen drawings of shops. The barber's shop
door is open to disclose an equestrian galloping past it, although, even
as a man, he drew horses which G. A. Sala declared were wrong in all the
traditional forty-four points. George Cruikshank himself, whom, as Mr G.
S. Layard has shown, he repeatedly drew, appears in a compartment of
this etching, in the act of conveying the plate of it to the shop of
Belch, a name for which Langham is substituted in a re-issue of this
gamblers' temptation, and which dwindles into Langley & Belch in the
copy made by Cruikshank in 1873, published by G. Bell, York St., Covent
Garden.
1806 is the date of the first book, or rather pamphlet, with which
George Cruikshank is connected. It is entitled "The Impostor Unmasked,"
and pillories Sheridan for a farcical swindler and something worse.
There is a folding plate to fortify the charges of Patricius the
scandal-monger, and this is ascribed to George by Reid, though Captain
Douglas, George's latest bibliographer, only allows that "there seems to
be some of George's work in it." Reid's authority, which had in all
probability the living George's behind it, excuses a brief description
of this plate. Sheridan is depicted in the act of addressing a crowd of
Stafford electors, amongst whom are several creditors who pun bitterly
on the parliamentary word Bill and damn the respects which he pays them.
A house on the right of the hustings might have been sketched on a slate
by any child weary of pothooks, but there is a touch of true humour in
the quiet joy shown on the face of a supporter of Sheridan in the
heckling to which he is subjected. Gillray had already published (March
10, 1805) his _Uncorking Old Sherry_, and so this Cruikshankian
caricature may be accepted as George's first step in the Gillrayan path.
The path of Gillray, in and out of which runs the path of Thomas
Rowlandson, is seldom or never dull; sometimes unclean in a manner
malodorous as manure, but with risings which offer illuminating views.
His humour is tyrannically laughable. The guffaw is, as it were, kicked
out of the spectator of _The Apotheosis of Hoche_ (1798) by the
descending boots, depicted as reluctantly yielding to the law of
gravity, which the triumphant devastator of La Vendee has overcome.
Gillray's sense of design was superb, and he would be an enthusiast who
should assert that George Cruikshank in political caricature produced
works at once so striking and architecturally admirable as _The Giant
Factotum_ [Pitt] _Amusing Himself_ (1797). Gillray possessed what
Cruikshank lacked altogether, the inclination and power to draw
voluptuousness with some justice to its charm. One has only to cite in
confirmation of this statement _The Morning after Marriage_ (August 5,
1788), and compare it with any of those caricatures in which Cruikshank
exhibits the erotic preferences of George the Third's children. What,
however, Cruikshank, in the artistic meaning of vision, saw in Gillray,
he adapted with the force of a boisterous participant in the patriotism
and demagogy of his day. Gillray had Napoleon for his prey, and no
political criticism is pithier than the caricature which represents the
Emperor as _Tiddy-Doll, the great French Gingerbread-Baker, drawing out
a new Batch of Kings_ (1806). On the other hand, nothing that Swift is
believed to have omitted in his description of Brobdingnag could be
coarser than _The Corsican Pest_ (1803). It is almost literally humour
of the latrine. Unhappily Cruikshank exulted like a young barbarian in
the licence conferred by precedent, and it is hard to view with
tolerance his pictorial records of "the first swell of the age." One of
the wittiest is _Boney Hatching a Bulletin, or Snug Winter Quarters_
(Dec. 1812); the Grand Army is there seen in the form of heads and
bayonets protruding from a stratum of Russian snow; the courier who is
to convey the bulletin has boards under his boots to prevent his
submersion. Elsewhere one's admiration for inventive vigour struggles
against disgust at a mode which one only hesitates to call blackguardism
because the liveliest contents of the paint-box were lavished upon it.
Take, for instance, the caricature which bears the rhymed title, _Boney
tir'd of war's alarms, flies for safety to his darling's arms_ (1813).
The devil bears Bonaparte on his shoulders to the Empress Marie Louise,
after the Russian campaign. "Take him to Bed, my Lady, and Thaw him,"
says the devil. "I am almost petrified in helping him to escape from his
Army. I shall expect him to say his prayers to me every night!" Another
Cruikshankian caricature, _The Imperial Family going to the Devil_
(March 1814), represents the rejection of Napoleon by that connoisseur
of reprobates, though Rowlandson in the same month and year depicted the
fallen emperor as _The Devil's Darling_. Cruikshank's vulgar
facetiousness, interesting by sheer vigour and self-enjoyment, pursues
Napoleon even to St Helena in the heartless caricature which portrays
him as an ennuye reduced for amusement to rat-catching. It was not for
nothing that Thomas Moore, alluding to the Prince Regent as Big Ben,
made Tom Cribb say:--
"Having conquer'd the prime one, that mill'd us all round,
You kick'd him, old Ben, as he gasp'd on the ground."
Gillray is said to have sometimes disguised his style in order to evade
his agreement with Humphrey that he would work for no other publisher;
and there is more than one of Cruikshank's Napoleonic caricatures which
might be ascribed to Gillray's dram-providing _alter ego_ if their
authorship were in question. Of such is _Quadrupeds, or Little Boney's
Last Kick_, published in "The Scourge" (1813). Here the Russian bear
holds a birch in his right paw, and Napoleon by an ankle with his left;
a naked devil points to the crown, tumbling from the head of the
capsized emperor; on the ground is an ironical bulletin. _Old Blucher
beating the Corsican Big Drum_ (1814) is an even closer match of the
baser sort of Gillrayan caricature; while the particular stench of it
rises from _Boney's Elb(a)ow Chair_, of the same date. The last
caricature from Cruikshank upon Napoleon came feebly in 1842 with the
issue of "George Cruikshank's Omnibus," wherein he figures as a skeleton
in boots surmounting a pyramid of skulls. The caricaturist's
harlequinade had lasted too long; when it ceased, the soul of it utterly
perished, and one views impatiently so formal and witless a
galvanisation as was suggested by the return of Napoleon, dead, to the
reconquest of France.
Of Cruikshank's Napoleonic caricatures as a whole, it may be said that
their function was solely to relieve by ridicule the pressure of a
grandiose and formidable personality upon the nerves of his countrymen.
He did not, like Gillray in _The Handwriting on the Wall_, confess the
historic greatness of Napoleon by an allusion so sublime that it
afforded Hone a precedent for unpunished impiety. When, for serio-comic
verse, he attempted to delineate a monitory apparition, in the shape of
Napoleon's "Red Man," the result was absurdity veiled by dulness.
* * * * *
But it is time to turn to the Cruikshankian view of persons and things
in Great Britain in the lifetime of "Adonis the Great." It is said that
while Gillray was productive, an old General of the German Legion
remarked, alluding to caricature, "Ah! I dell you vot--England is
altogether von libel." With the spirit of this speech, one can cordially
agree. The concupiscence of princes was serialised for the mirth of the
crowd.
There were two great types of ascendant degeneracy to divert the eyes of
Farmer George's subjects from their shops and Bibles. One was his son
George, the other Mary Anne Clarke.
The cabinet in which George kept capillary souvenirs of so many women
was fastened against contemporary critics of his career. Undivulged,
therefore, was the touching sentiment of a philofeminism which, in
excluding his legal wife, was construed but as vice. There was no Max
Beerbohm in his day to appreciate his polish and talents and to pity his
wife for playing her tragedy in tights. There was no one to pronounce
him the slave of that most endearing of tyrants, the artistic
temperament. The caricaturists saw simply a polygamist eager to convict
of adultery the wife whom he disliked and avoided, and a spendthrift
whose debt was inflicted upon the nation. So far as man can show up his
fellow-men, this man was shown up, and in verse and picture became an
instrument of public titillation. So roguish a severity as the
caricaturists displayed can seldom be accepted as didactic Gillray,
indeed, in _The Morning after Marriage_ followed him into the bridal
chamber of Mrs Fitzherbert whom he married in 1785, and this caricature
is the best advertisement of his grace and beauty which perhaps exists.
When attacked by Cruikshank, he was over forty, for the first caricature
of him in which that artist's hand is noticeable was published in 1808.
It is entitled _John Bull Advising with His Superiors_: the superiors
being George and his brother Frederick, who sit under the portraits of
their respective mistresses, "Mrs Fitz" and Mrs Clarke. John Bull is
clean-shaven, fat-nosed, hatted, and holds a gnarled stick. "Servant
Measters," he begins, "I be come to ax a bit of thy advice"; but he
proceeds to freeze them with clumsy innuendo and adds, "I does love good
old Georg [_sic_], by Goles! because he is not of that there sort,"
meaning their own. After this, the Regent was for Cruikshank a stimulant
to the drollest audacities. The world was younger then and could laugh
uproariously at the bursting of a dandy's stays and the mislaying of a
roue's removable whiskers. Mrs Grundy had not persuaded it of the
superior comicality of Mrs Newlywed's indestructible pie-crust and Mr
Staylate's interview with the parental boot. So George, who, at any
rate, was real life, blossomed abundantly to another George's
advantage. Thus _The Coronation of the Empress of the Nairs_ (September
1812)--a simile suggested by a contemporary account of a curious Asiatic
race--depicts him as crowning the Marchioness of Hertford in her bath;
_A Kick from Yarmouth to Wales_ illustrates the assault of the provoked
Earl of Yarmouth upon his wife's too fervent admirer; and _Princely
Agility_ (January 1812) shows His Royal castigated Highness confined by
a convenient sprained ankle to bed, where his whiskers and wig are
restored to him. The opening of Henry the Eighth's coffin in St George's
Chapel, Windsor, April 1, 1813, suggests to Cruikshank _Meditations
Amongst the Tombs_, in which the greatness of the deceased sovereign
forcibly strikes the Regent. "Great indeed!" he is made to say, "for he
got rid of many wives, whilst I, poor soul, can't get rid of one. Cut
off his beard, doctor, 'twill make me a prime pair of royal whiskers."
The prince's partiality for the bottle is severely illustrated. In _The
Phenix [sic] of Elba Resuscitated by Treason_ (May 1, 1815), he receives
the news of Napoleon's outbreak, seated on a cushion with a decanter
behind him; and even when he was King, Cruikshank dared to draw him
(1822) as drunk and curing an irritated cuticle by leaning his kilted
person against one of the posts of Argyleshire.
If, however, Caroline of Brunswick had not, by adopting a Meredithian
baby and other eccentricities, condemned herself to "Delicate
Investigation" in 1806 and to a trial before the House of Peers in 1820,
Cruikshank's delineations of Adonis the Great would have seemed genial
compared with Thackeray's contempt. That his sentiment for the lady was
less chivalrous than Thackeray esteemed it, may be divined by his
caricature of her as an ugly statue of Xantippe put up to auction
"without the least reserve" (1821), which is less than two months older
than his conception of her as a rushlight which Slander cannot blow out.
But he perceived, as did the whole intelligent proletariat, the
monstrous irony of George's belated notice of his wife. Hence in his
woodcuts to "The Queen's Matrimonial Ladder" and "Non Mi Ricordo!" he is
not comic but satirical, and satirical with strokes that turn The Dandy
of Sixty who bows with a grace into a figure abjectly defiant, meanly
malevolent, devoid of levity. A cut in the former pamphlet shows him
standing in a penitential sheet under the seventh, ninth and tenth
commandments, meeting the gaze of an astonished urchin; on the outside
of the latter pamphlet we see him in the throes of awkward
interrogation, uttering the "Non Mi Ricordo" which Caroline's
ill-wishers were tired of hearing in the mouth of Bergami.
Mary Anne Clarke, our second type of ascendant degeneracy, was, if
Buck's drawing of her is truthful, a woman of seductive prettiness, but
she could not teach Cruikshank her charm in atonement for her venality.
He drew her petticoat "supported by military boots" and surmounted by a
cocked hat and the mitre of the ducal bishop of Osnaburg (February 23,
1809); "under this," it is stated, "may be found a soothing for every
pain." When Whigs and the Prince of Wales sent the Duke of York back in
1811 to the high post which he had disgraced, Mrs Clarke dwindled in
Cruikshank's caricature to a dog improperly exhibiting its contempt for
Colonel Wardle's left eye. It is curious that the Clarke scandal did not
apparently inspire any caricature which deserves to live as pictorial
criticism. Revealing, as it did, not only rottenness in the State, but
in the Church, since Dr O'Meara sought Mrs Clarke's interest for the
privilege of preaching "before royalty," one may well be surprised at
the failure of caricature to ennoble itself in the cause of honour and
religion. Yet Cruikshank produced in 1811 a powerful etching--_Interior
View of the House of God_--which shows, apropos a lustful fanatic named
Carpenter, his power to have seized the missed opportunity. In this
plate is the contemporary portrait of himself which P. D'Aiguille
afterwards copied.
If we ask, for our soul's sake, to sicken of the Regent's amours and of
the demure "Magdalen" of York, whose scarlet somehow softens to maroon
because she is literary and quotes Sallust, it is necessary to leave the
caricatures which laugh with her--especially Rowlandson's--and look at
Cruikshank's tormented John Bull. The most pathetic is perhaps _John
Bull's Three Stages_ (1815). In the last stage (_Peace with all the
World_) his child, once pressed to eat after repletion, says, "Give me
some more bone." The hand that drew the earlier plates of _The Bottle_
is unmistakable in this etching.
It was seemingly in 1819 that Cruikshank first realised his great powers
as a critic in caricature. To that period belongs what a pamphleteer
called "Satan's Bank Note":--
"Notes which a 'prentice boy could make
At fifteen for a shilling."
The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street earned thereby the sobriquet of
Hangland's Bank, and her victims included two women on a day when
Cruikshank looked at the gibbet of the Old Bailey. They were hanged for
passing forged one pound notes. Cruikshank thereupon drew his famous
_Bank Restriction Note_, signed by Jack Ketch, and with a vignette of
Britannia devouring her children above an $L$ of rope. Hone issued this
note (of which there are three varieties) from his shop on Ludgate Hill,
a stone's throw from the gibbet; the public flocked to see and buy it,
and the moral was not lost upon the Bank of England, who thereafter sent
forth no more one pound notes. The pathos as distinct from the tragedy
of the condition thus relieved is well recalled by the caricature
invented by Yedis and drawn by Cruikshank entitled _Johnny Bull and his
Forged Notes_ (January 7, 1819).
[Illustration: Johnny Bull and his FORGED Notes!! or
RAGS & RUIN in the Paper Currency!!!