At one illustration let us cry halt. It represents a foaming pot of beer
assaulting a woman who said to the magistrate, "Your honour, it was the
beer." In itself it is a masterpiece of delicate literalism. That power
of enlivening the inanimate, which humanises the pump, representing
Father Mathew at a small party in "The Comic Almanack" of 1844,
exasperates this pot and bids it strike home. But what we are to observe
particularly is this early presentation to Cruikshank's mind of
alcohol as a personality at war with human beings. As far back as 1811,
in _The Dinner of the Four-in-Hand Club at Salthill_, an uproarious
piece in the style of Rowlandson's _The Brilliants_ (1801), he put the
genius of the bottle into form and anecdote, but here we have the
serious aspect of drink obvious even in humour. Beer is striking a
woman. In 1832 he produced in _The Ale House and the Home_ a contrast so
stated in the title that we need say no more than that the gloomy wife
and her baby, sitting by candlelight in the bare room where the man's
supper lies to reproach his drink-spoiled appetite, are a sadder sight
than the frying-pan of St Bartholomew's Fair in the number of "Scraps
and Sketches" where they appear.
To "Sunday in London" (1833)--a capital social satire--Cruikshank
contributed fourteen cuts, one of which, _The Pay-Table_, preserves the
memory of those mischievous contracts between publican and foreman,
whereby the latter received a percentage of the spendings of his men on
drink and the men were provided with drink on the credit of the foreman.
It is an admirable study in fuddled perplexity confronted with Bung in
a business instead of a Bacchic mood, abetted by a shark of the victim's
calling. Two other cuts--mere rabblement and eyesore--leave on the mind
a feeling of disgust almost without interest and without shame. The
spectator has no sense that these people turned out at church time,
raging, leering, tottering, have deteriorated from any average or
standard of human seemliness. If it were not for a dog gazing in
amazement at one prone drunkard, if it were not for the dog and his
question, one would ask, _Cui bono_?
This is not missionary work--Cruikshank was only "flirting with
temperance" as late as 1846--and we need have no compunction in seeking
relief from such ugliness in the exquisite burlesque of pathos contained
in _Over-head and Under-foot_ (1842). Forget who can the agonised
impatience bolted and Chubb-locked in the breast of that lonely
bachelor, but expressed in his folded arms and upturned face.
[Illustration: OVER-HEAD AND UNDER-FOOT. From "The Comic Almanack,"
1842.]
1842, which saw that, also saw John O'Neill's poem "The Drunkard," and
especially _The Raving Maniac and the Driv'ling Fool_, one of four
etchings by Cruikshank which illustrate it. An anonymous writer, in
an article for an 1876 reprint of the etchings, says that these two
figures "are the most forcible ever drawn by the artist's pencil." This
opinion is unjust to the force of Cruikshank's comic figures, and to
that terrible pair, Fagin in the condemned cell and Underhill bawling at
the stake, but the force of the etching thus praised is extraordinary.
With parted blubber lips and knees relaxed, his nerveless left hand
dangling at the wrist like a dead white leaf, his right hand grasping
the gin-glass, the fool, unconscious of tragedy, faces the maniac who
streams upon the air sleeves that much exceed the length of his
homicidal arms. By reason of the delicacy of the etching which conveys
these haunting figures, they excite pleasure before horror, and always
in horror a little pleasure too.
We now come to the famous series entitled _The Bottle_ (1847) and its
sequel _The Drunkard's Children_ (1848). Both these works were printed
from glyphographic blocks and have as little charm as a stentorian
oration in a small chapel. The story they tell, told also in verse by Dr
Charles Mackay, is the ruin of a working man and his family through
drink. The appeal of _The Bottle_ is simple enough to appal the
aborigines of Africa, to say nothing of the East End: the bottle is a
"Ju-ju," an evil fetish; the impulse of the beholder is to smash the
bottle rather than to spill and waste its contents. Yet when the eye
succeeds in detaching itself from this pompously evident bottle, it
perceives that the artist has cared also for details less immediate, but
of a finer eloquence. The liberally filled mantelshelf of plate 1 is at
least not a mere labour of memory, though no one exceeds George
Cruikshank in the pictorial multiplication of domestic details. This
mantelshelf is a symbol; symbols, too, are the open cupboard, so well
furnished that a less industrious artist would have shut it, and the
ill-drawn but well-nourished felinity by the fire. In plate 2 the
cupboard holds naught but two jugs; the lean cat prowls over the bare
table; an ornament on the mantelshelf lies on its side. Had an artist
and not a missionary composed plate 3, we might have been spared the
indecency of a bottle in Lucy's lap when the furniture is distrained to
pay the bottle's debt. Yet with what horrid strength does the maniac in
plate 7 clutch the mantelpiece, whose bare ledge is lit by a dip stuck
in a bottle, while all the neighbours stare at something whose face we
cannot see! The artist has shouted till he was hoarse, but his story is
in our marrows.
_The Drunkard's Children_ contains one masterpiece: plate 7, the boy's
death on the convict-ship. The convict who closes his eyes has the
sagacity of a sentient corpse; the shadow he casts on the screen which
two convicts draw around the bed is, in effect, a creature to startle
us, and the visible half of the chaplain's top-hat lying on a bench in a
corner of the drawing is an irony which seems to belong to a later age
than Cruikshank's.
_The Bottle_, employed as an argument by Mr William Cash, converted
Cruikshank to teetotalism. The result has been to present the artist to
modern hedonists in the light of a ludicrous bore. Certain it is that in
his version of _Cinderella_ (1854) he causes the dwarf to inform the
King that "the history of the use of strong drinks is marked on every
page by _excess which follows, as a matter of course, from the very
nature of their composition_," the italics being Cruikshank's, though
they might well be mine. Teetotalism needs talking and writing, and
Cruikshank was happy to oblige. He possessed a fluent pen, and delivered
lay sermons with enthusiasm and originality.
[Illustration: (_a_) THE GLASS OF WHISKEY AFTER THE GOOSE. From "The
Glass and the New Crystal Palace," 1853.]
[Illustration: (_b_) THE GOOSE AFTER THE WHISKEY. From "The Glass and
the New Crystal Palace," 1853.]
About four years after his abandonment of alcohol, Cruikshank began to
figure as a pamphleteer. In 1851 appeared his "Stop Thief"--containing
hints for the prevention of housebreaking, hallmarked by teetotalism: it
has a drawing of a burglar retiring because his companion discloses a
board containing the words, "No Admittance Except On Business." In 1852
came the "Betting Book," against both drink and betting; this has a
drawing of two wonderfully knowing fox-faced bipeds contemplating a row
of geese absorbed in the perusal of the betting lists. Followed "The
Glass and the New Crystal Palace" (1853), in which, after confessing
that he "clung to that contemptible, stupid and dirty habit" of smoking
three years after he had "left off wine and beer," he adds, "at last I
laid down my meerschaum pipe and said, 'Lie you there! and I will never
take you up again,'" The drawings of anserine flight and intoxication
here reproduced compel us to admit that the cerebral compartment
containing Cruikshank's sense of humour was watertight. In 1854 came
"George Cruikshank's Magazine." It lived long enough for him to inveigh
against tobacco through the medium of a rather lifeless etching entitled
_Tobacco Leaves No. 1_; and he died before he could publish in it
certain drawings, included, I believe, in a series given to the world in
1895 by Sir B. W. Richardson, which ridicule the "hideous, abominable,
and most dangerous custom" of sucking the handles of sticks and
umbrellas. To the didactic excesses of his "Fairy Library" I need not
further refer, but in 1856 came a quasi-temperance pamphlet, "The Bands
in the Parks," where the devil plays the violin with his tail; in 1857,
"A Slice of Bread and Butter" (re-issued with prefatory "Remarks" in
1870), a good-humoured satire on conflicting views of charity towards
waifs; in 1860, "A Pop-Gun ... in Defence of the British Volunteers of
1803"; in 1863, "A Discovery concerning Ghosts," in which he claimed to
be the only one who ever thought "of the gross absurdity ... of there
being such things as ghosts of wearing apparel, iron armour, walking
sticks, and shovels;" and here we have a mild and pleasant hint of the
inspissated egoism which dictated "The Artist and the Author" (1872),
the work in which Cruikshank asserted himself to be the originator of
"Oliver Twist," "The Miser's Daughter" and "The Tower of London." This
unfortunate but characteristic pamphlet is the last of the series that
seems to have been called into existence by the _insanabile scribendi
cacoethes_ induced by his fame as a teetotaler. I said characteristic,
because a jealous dislike of seeing his individuality merged into,
overshadowed by, or confounded with any other is apparent not only in
1872, but in 1834, when he carefully named in "My Sketch Book" his
brother Robert's works, and pictured himself as lifting off the ground,
by tongs applied to the nose, their publisher Kidd, for whom he is
anxious to state he only illustrated "The Gentleman in Black" (1831).
Moreover in 1860 he misused his "Pop-Gun" to picture another publisher,
who advertised his nephew Percy as Cruikshank _tout court_, as a
sandwich-man similarly assaulted by him; yet by some freak of
humour or affection the "very excellent, industrious, worthy good
fellow" Percy, over whom I throw the embroidery of his uncle's praise,
bestowed the name of George upon his son, as if for the confusion of
bibliographers, and the evocation of a spirit armed with the ghosts of
tongs. Indeed the gods themselves seem to have sported with George
Cruikshank's name, for Dr Nagler, having read that "the real Simon Pure
was George Cruikshank," wrote thus in his "Neues allgemeines
Kuenstler-Lexicon" (1842): "Pure Simon, der eigentliche Name des
beruhmten Carikaturzeichners Georg [_sic_] Cruikshank."
Simon Pure shall save us from digression by leading us to a didactic
work by Cruikshank of which Mrs Centlivre's "quaking preacher" would
have heartily approved. This work is the oil-painting entitled _The
Worship of Bacchus_ (1862). It is an old man's athletic miracle, being a
picture thirteen feet four by seven feet eight, of which there exists an
etching by the same hand of less, though formidable size, which was
published June 20, 1864. The oil-painting was presented to the nation by
Cruikshank's friends and conveyed to its destination April 8, 1869.
Cruikshank drew a fancy sketch of his mammoth on that great day of its
life. Little did he imagine what the cognoscenti of the twentieth
century would think of it.
I saw it in 1902; visited it much as one visits an incarcerated friend,
following a learned official with jingling keys to a dungeon under the
show-rooms of the National Gallery. It was alone, was convict 495, alone
and dingy. Many phrases have been found for this picture. John Stewart
said that it contains "all the elemental types of pictorial grouping,
generalised on the two axioms of balance and variety." Another critic
said that "it is not even a picture, but a multitude of pictures and
bits of pictures crowded together in one huge mass of confusion and
puzzle." Cruikshank himself said, speaking August 28, 1862, "I have not
the vanity to call it a picture.... I painted it with a view that a
lecturer might use it as so many diagrams."
However he felt, Cruikshank spoke correctly. Painted in low relief, the
oil-painting presents his intention less satisfactorily than his etching
of the same subject. Whatever its demerit, the work is extremely
Cruikshankian. Robert and George Cruikshank, in the "Corinthian Capital"
of "Life in London," patched up a similarly artificial fabric. George,
in a work that should not be mentioned in the same breath--_The Triumph
of Cupid_ (1845)--evokes innumerable amatory incidents by means of the
tobacco which he renounced so contumeliously. We have in _The Worship of
Bacchus_, the result of a method equally _naif_ and ingenious. The root
idea is materialised in conjunction with a myriad of associative ideas,
and the picture is worse than a confusion; it is a ghastly and
ostentatious pattern at which one can neither laugh nor cry. It is the
work of a big accomplished child, whose ambition to be grown up has
destroyed his charm.
At the summit of the picture Bacchus and Silenus wave wine-glasses while
respectively standing and sitting on hogsheads. In the middle of the
design is a stone ornamented with death's-heads, on which a drunkard
waves a glass and bottle in front of the god and demi-god. The stone has
an inscription tributary to the drunkard's victims. On the left side of
the throne of Bacchus are a distillery, reformatory, etc.; on the right
is a House of Correction, Magdalen Hospital, etc. In short, the picture
is a pictorial chrestomathy of drink. That it has converted people, that
it has even won the tribute of a man's tears, is not surprising, for it
is, or was, full of truthful suggestion seizable by the mind's eye. But
it is not beautiful. Thackeray might call it "most wonderful and
labyrinthine"; it is ugly and ill painted, for Cruikshank was no Hogarth
with the brush.
So it lay, and perhaps yet lies in its dungeon, and overhead Silenus
still triumphs divinely drunk on Rubens's canvas; and Bacchus, ardent
for Ariadne, leaps from his chariot in that masterpiece of Titian, which
Sir Edward Poynter believes is "possibly the finest picture in the
world." Poussin's Bacchanalian festivities are still for the mirth of a
world whence Bacchus has fled; but the god enthroned on hogsheads is not
mistaken for Bacchus now: Bacchus was stronger than Cruikshank. The
whole deathless pagan world of beauty and laughter is by him made rosier
and more silvery. Cruikshank never drew him; the god he drew was Bung
in masquerade.
I was at Sotheby's on May 22, 1903, when the Royal Aquarium copy of the
etching of _The Worship of Bacchus_ was sold. It evoked a sneer of "wall
paper"; and if etchings could think, it would have envied the seclusion
in which I found its brother in oils.
But at least it was not given to the nation. The fact that the National
Gallery should possess Cruikshank's colossal failure instead of his
_Fairy Ring_, instead of any etching from "Grimm" or "Points of Humour,"
is an accusation against common sense and a triumph of irony.
Let it be remembered, however, that Cruikshank's exposure of ebriety
from 1829 to 1875, the date which John Pearce in "House and Home"
assigns to his last temperance piece, deserved at times the notice of
fame. Matthew Arnold, denying the power of "breathless glades, cheer'd
by shy Dian's horn" to calm the spectator of _The Bottle_, showed more
than his ignorance of Diana and her peace. He showed that Cruikshank the
preacher was a magician too.