The best part of Cruikshank's service to Fact has yet to be considered.
We have seen how he journalised and exhorted; we have still to see the
talent he poured into journalism and exhortation refined by his
historical sense and expressing itself in shapes of treasurable beauty.
The historical sense in art may be liberally defined as an aesthetic
impulse to fix the vanishing and recover the vanished fact. It may be
absent at the birth of a cartoon filled with political portraits and it
may have urged the reproduction of a quiet landscape with nothing more
human in it than a few trees or a line of surf. It operates without
pressure of topicality and it is stronger than the tyranny of humour.
The reader, searching for the earliest examples of Cruikshank's
historical imagination to be found in the books which he illustrated,
would first of all alight on "The Annals of Gallantry," by Dr A. Moore
(1814-15), and "An Historical Account of the Campaign in the Netherlands
in 1815," by William Mudford (1817). Suspecting the grotesque, he would
nevertheless also examine the thirty plates to the Hudibrastic "Life of
Napoleon" (1815) by Dr Syntax.
As to the "Annals," one may unreluctantly condemn the whole series of
plates after a glance at the feeble scratches which disfigure the amours
of Lady Grosvenor and the Duke of Cumberland, and the elopement of Lady
W---- with Lord Paget. In Mudford's ungenerous history, Cruikshank's
frontispiece, engraved by Rouse (as are his other contributions), has
the stiff integrity of portraiture to be expected from a repressed
caricaturist; Napoleon in flight on his white horse in another plate
does not even support the comparison of his horsemanship to a sack of
flour's; the ribbon-like plate of Waterloo, full of microscopic figures,
has the chastened spirit natural to a work done "under the inspection of
officers who were present at that memorable conflict."
The illustrations to Dr Syntax's Hudibrastic poem on Napoleon have some
originality to recommend them as a starting-point for the student of
Cruikshank as a delineator of historical subjects. They are etchings,
broad as the typed surface of an octavo page is long, and include the
_Red Man_ derided on page 21. But the artist already shows that he has
fancy as well as satire at his command. Witness the illusion created by
the sleeping Napoleon lifting the coat on his bed in humping the
counterpane with perpendicular toes, an effect which was remembered in
Cruikshank's _Ideality_ (Phrenological Illustrations, 1826). There is
humour, too, in the etching which represents one of Napoleon's
grenadiers mounted on a stool in order to look as terrible as his
companions. Though a rancorous prejudice makes Napoleon stand on a cross
in one plate and his apothecary smile at poisoning the sick at Jaffa in
another, there is sympathy in a third which depicts him nursing the King
of Rome, and the eccentricities of Cruikshank's journalistic style are
happily absent.
We may now pause at the four famous volumes of "The Humourist"
(1819-20). They contain, _inter alia_, a portrait of Alfieri--a fine
figure of silent disdain--in the act of sweeping to the floor the tea
service of a badly drawn Princess, who was tactless enough to wish he
had broken the whole set instead of one cup. The table leg is a satyr's
surmounted by the Mephistophelian head considered appropriate to the
companions of Pan; above the main design are the implements of a writer;
below it are two porcelain mandarins yoked to a three-headed and triply
derisive bust. Another historical subject in "The Humourist" is Daniel
Lambert, to whom a bear once doffed his hat. Ursine politeness and the
petrified majesty of fat Lambert fill the foreground of the etching;
behind is a rout of people frightfully interested in another bear. In
the former of these etchings the hint is better than the performance;
the latter hints nothing and performs a little admirably.
1823-4 is a period to which we owe some historical etchings of
consummate skill. They illustrated "Points of Humour," a work in two
parts which was expressly designed to afford scope for Cruikshank's
power of rendering ludicrous situations. The artist was on his mettle,
and his twenty etchings for this collection of anecdotes are among the
immortal children of Momus. Among his simpler designs is the scene in
the apartment of Frederick the Great when his heir presumptive demanded
if the monarch would return his shuttlecock. The required studies of
childish impudence and royal amusement are perfect. More elaborate, but
equally successful, is the drawing of the voracious boor, the
ill-natured general whom he offered to eat, and the King of Sweden who
enjoyed the spectacle of their emotions. The boor with the hog on a
plate under his arm, his terrible teeth a-glitter for hog and general,
is more alarming than the ogre in Cruikshank's _Hop-o'-my-Thumb_; he
tacitly affirms his creator's power to confer delicious terrors on the
nursery. Flying Konigsmark's fear of pointing hand and barrack-like
paunch mingles exquisitely with the hatred of his backward glance, and
Charles Gustavus smiles with unpardonable _aplomb_. The etching is a
comic masterpiece. After this there is no advance in Cruikshank's comic
treatment of history, for his quite simple rendering, more than ten
years later, "Miscellany" (1838), of a freak of absent-mindedness on the
part of Sir Isaac Newton in "Bentley's," is of merely sufficient
merit.
[Illustration: TURPIN'S FLIGHT THROUGH EDMONTON. From "Rookwood," 1836.]
The Ainsworth-Cruikshank connection began, artistically, with the
etchings which illustrate the fourth edition of "Rookwood" (1836). If
for Turpin we read Nevison, the novel may pass as quasi-historical. The
etching here reproduced is in what may be called Cruikshank's
"Humourist" style. It has vivacity and brightness. The reader who
figured himself passing into romance through the pretty portico of trees
depicted on Ainsworth's title-page, will feel, as he looks at this
representation of comic prodigy, that he has arrived.
One thief succeeded another, and in 1839 Jack Sheppard was pilfering his
way through "Bentley's Miscellany." If he had done nothing else,
Cruikshank would have made a deathless reputation for technical skill by
the etchings in "Jack Sheppard." Sala, who copied the shop-scene
entitled _The name on the beam_, observes of this etching, at once so
precise and imaginative, that it is "in its every detail essentially
Hogarthian." It is a just saying. One can easily imagine Dr Trusler
poring over it and recording his small discoveries with something of
the relish he found in his Hogarthian exploration. Appropriately enough,
Hogarth's portrait appears in the clever etching which depicts Jack in
chains sitting to two artists, the other being Sir James Thornhill.
Thackeray has done justice to the high qualities of the etchings
entitled _The Storm_ and _The Murder on the Thames_. There are effects
in Cruikshank's river scenes poetic enough and near enough to that
verity which Impressionists serve better than Ruskinians, to have
detained Whistler for a minute that might have regenerated the fame of
Cruikshank.
[Illustration: JONATHAN WILD SEIZING JACK SHEPPARD AT HIS MOTHER'S GRAVE
IN WILLESDEN CHURCHYARD.