We have had already to touch on the way in which Cruikshank was the
historian of himself. Thanks to his literary aggressiveness, mixed with
love, so quaint and like talk in expression, that his pages resemble
cylinders for a phonograph, we look at his autobiographical drawings
with genuine interest. In Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson's publication of
1895--"Drawings by George Cruikshank, prepared by him to illustrate an
intended autobiography"--we are introduced pictorially to "George,
Nurse, Brother and Mother at Hampstead"; and the same volume shows our
artist unpleasantly situated on a roof _sub titulo The Button-hole of a
Naughty boy caught by a nail_. In the South Kensington collection George
shows us very crudely _a Fire in the South East end of London to which I
ran when a boy with the Engine from Bloomsbury_. In 1877 George sketched
himself as he was about 1799, when he looked at his father while Isaac
Cruikshank was drawing, and we realise the affection in this
reminiscence upon seeing George's grotesques of low life done when he
was "a very little boy" on the same page where the academic Isaac has
drawn a conventional heroic nude and a little girl suitable for a
nursery magazine (S.K. coll. No. 9814). Under a pencil sketch (S.K.
coll. No. 9817) we read "George Cruikshank when a boy used to put his
mother's Fur Tippet over his head like the above and make frightful
faces for fun." In published work Cruikshank repeatedly presents his own
portrait, my favourite examples of his self-portraiture being the
painter in _Nobody desires the Painter to make him as ugly and
ridiculous as possible_ ("Scraps and Sketches," 1831), and that of
himself going in as a steward with Dickens and others to a Public Dinner
("Sketches by Boz," 1836). An excellent example of a comic presentation
of himself is the frontispiece to this volume. Enviable and admirable
health of mind is shown by Cruikshank's love of his own face, upon which
flourished, under a high forehead and "blue-grey eyes, full of a
cheerful sparkling light," "an ambiguous pair of ornaments," partaking
"vaguely," writes Mr Walter Hamilton, "of the characteristics" of
whiskers, moustaches and beard.
I conclude this chapter with a reproduction of a painting by George
Cruikshank in the South Kensington Museum. The lady is yellow-haired and
has a good complexion. It appears to be a portrait of Mrs George
Cruikshank (nee Widdison), his second wife, whose prenomen was Eliza.
She could draw, for there is a vapid but well-finished female head by
her in the South Kensington collection of her husband's work (No.
10,038-4). She is not, of course, to be confounded with Cruikshank's
sister Eliza, who designed the caricature of the Four Prues.
[Illustration: ELIZA CRUIKSHANK. From a painting by George Cruikshank in
the South Kensington Museum, No. 9769, endorsed "Mrs George Cruikshank
E. C. 1884." The date is supposed to refer to the year of presentation
to the museum.]
V
We have now to consider Cruikshank as a supernaturalist. Perhaps there
is no role in which he is more sincerely esteemed. His simple egoism and
self-conceit protected him from an apprehension of the nothingness of
matter in the eye of a being who is uncontrolled by the world-idea. He
could not conceive that a mind can impose the idea of a form upon an
inferior mind, or a mind in sympathy with it: hence his egregious
"discovery concerning ghosts." His world of supernature was a playground
of fancy where powers are denoted by the same symbols which inform us
that this animal can run, and that animal can fly, and the other animal
can think. It is a world of which the major part is peopled with forms
so lively, gracious and fanciful that Mr Frederick Wedmore's violent
preference of Keene to Cruikshank seems, in view of it, a kind of
aggressive rationalism. This world, however, contains the Devil, and on
this colliery monster we will bestow a few glances.
[Illustration: LEGEND OF ST MEDARD. The Saint has slit the bag in which
the fiend is carrying children. From "The Ingoldsby Legends," 1842.]
Cruikshank's best idea of the Devil is comedy of tail. In one of the
"Twelve Sketches illustrative of Sir Walter Scott's Demonology and
Witchcraft" (1830) he shows the archfiend seated on the back of a
smiling elf who poses as a quadruped to provide a stool. The fiend is
"dighting" an arrow by the light of the flaming hair of an elf who wears
an extinguisher on his tail, and a cat enthusiastically plays with the
forked appendage of the illustrious artisan. The dignity of labour is
here inimitably manifest. Lovably ludicrous, too, is the Devil whom
Cruikshank presents in _The De'il cam fiddling thro' the Town_
("Illustrations of Popular Works," 1830). "Auld Mahoun's" forked tail
has caught the exciseman by the cravat. In "Scraps and Sketches" (1832).
Cruikshank has another Devil who plays on a gridiron as if it were a
guitar, to soothe a man who has been lassoed by his tail. "And if my
tail should make you sad I'll strike my light guitar." In "A Discovery
concerning Ghosts" (1863) Cruikshank depicts the Devil as lifting a
table with his tail and one hoof. One of the Devils offered to my
readers--he whom St Medard thwarted--is an example of good work in a bad
setting; the machine-ruled sky and "scandalously slurred distance" must
be viewed as symptoms of Cruikshank's dislike for Bentley, the publisher
of "The Ingoldsby Legends." The cuts from "The True Legend of St Dunstan
and the Devil" (1848) replace the perverted Pan--Pan as perverted for
the abolition of his prestige--with a plaintive ruffian whose horns and
hoofs disgrace a very obvious humanity.
Exit Devil: enter Satan. About 1827 Cruikshank drew him on wood, in the
act of calling on his followers as related by Milton in "Paradise Lost,"
Book I., Il. 314-332. Cruikshank described the drawing referred to,
which was engraved by an unconfident hand, as "the best drawing that I
ever did in my life." A solitary print of the engraving made of it sold
at Sotheby's for L3, 6s. On a towering rock, Satan calls up an army
which looks like living ribbon wound up out of the bottomless pit to the
ceiling of the air. His personality is felt by the effect of his
command, not by his individual appearance. Michelangelo might have
favourably considered this book-illustration as a bare sketch of a
muster of the damned; for as one looks at it he is tempted to give it to
half a dozen painters and "put it in hand."
[Illustration: SHOEING THE DEVIL. From Edward G. Flight's "The True
Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil," 1848.]
[Illustration: THE DEVIL SIGNING. From Edward G Flight's "The True
Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil," 1848.]
The naive evangelicism of "The Pilgrim's Progress" was productive of
more of Cruikshank's serious monsters. 1827 is the date of seven
woodcuts by him for this work (Reid 3555-61) which do not impress Mr
Spielmann; they are, however, very neatly executed, and the drawing of
_Christian arriving at the Gate_ is quite unwarrantably pleasant in its
suggestion of conflict and weariness ending in the bosom of hospitality.
In 1838 Cruikshank contributed _Vanity Fair_--an elaborate etching--to a
"Pilgrim's Progress" containing plates by H. Melville. _Vanity Fair_ is
a skilful catalogue marred by the misnaming of Britain Row. He produced
another _Vanity Fair, circa 1854_, a vehement and uninteresting design
which, with companion drawings by him of the same date, appears in Mr
Henry Frowde's edition of "The Pilgrim's Progress" (1903). These
drawings (only recently engraved) annoyed Mr G. S. Layard, and me they
amuse and touch. They show that Cruikshank could draw the face of
a man whose _metier_ is goodness, ... and that Apollyon--a veritable
creature of tinker-craft in Bunyan's text--was utterly beyond
Cruikshank's power to shape according to the crooked splendour of his
name. One must not forget that a pious convention of absurdity is a trap
for the critic and the humorist alike. I feel that Cruikshank almost
loved Bunyan. Witness the large coloured print inscribed in his last
decade, "Geo. Cruikshank 1871," where Christian--a Galahad of
knightliness--passes through the snake-afflicted valley of the Shadow of
Death.
[Illustration: PETER SCHLEMIHL WATCHING THE CLOCK
From "Peter Schlemihl," 1823. Copies of the book dated 1824 are also
accepted as of the first edition.]
Exit the Pilgrim, and re-enter the Devil. Cruikshank made remarkable
successes in two series of illustrations wherein this magnate assumes
the form of a man of our world. The books in which they appear are
"Peter Schlemihl" by Adelbert von Chamisso (1823) and "The Gentleman in
Black" by J. Y. Akerman (1831). To Chamisso the Devil is "a silent,
meagre, pale, tall elderly man" wearing an "old-fashioned grey taffetan
coat" with a "close-fitting breast-pocket" to it, and he is willing to
buy Peter's shadow. Meagre and close-fitting is Cruikshank's idea of
him; he is only substantial enough to give posture and movement to his
clothes. That is a beautiful etching where he is folding Peter's shadow
as a tailor folds a suit and Peter is unaware of the terrible oddity of
a foot on the ground having for shadow a foot in the air--a foot no
longer subordinate to Peter who will tread the earth in despair when he
is a shadowless man; and that is a marrow-thrilling etching where
Peter's tempter stands casting two shadows and flourishing a document
promising the delivery of Peter's soul to the bearer after its
separation from Peter's body. There is a haunting cold brightness about
the Schlemihl etchings. If you see them without a _sensation_ of their
difference from the work of any body except him who made them, your
acquaintance includes a prodigy, a Cruikshank plus x. To J. Y. Akerman
the Devil was "a stout, short, middle-aged gentleman of a somewhat
saturnine complexion" who "was clad in black" and "had a loose Geneva
cloak ... of the same colour." Like Schlemihl's customer he pays with a
bottomless purse and in the cuts, engraved by J. Thompson and C.
Landells, we see him a grave humorous and sinister person, who after
his urbanity has been shaken by the cleverness of the law, is exhibited
without warrant of narrative, as Old Horny on a gibbet. I presume the
above-mentioned J Thompson, by the way, to be the John Thompson whom
Cruikshank describes at the foot of a letter from this engraver dated
"Feb. 7, [18]40," as "the Great, the wonderful Artistic Engraver on
wood--and who used to engrave my drawings as no other man ever did."
After the Devil comes Punch, who in the puppet play destroys him. Punch
is only by irony a nursery character. He represents the comic genius of
murder. A Hooligan may feel like a Pharisee after looking at him. His
coarse materialism would affront a _pierreuse_. Cruikshank drew Punch as
early as 1814 in a plate, satirising a fete given by the Duke of
Portland on the occasion of the baptism of an infant marquis. The plate
is entitled "Belvoir Frolic's" [sic] and appears in No. 4 of "The
Meteor." A very long-nosed Punch extols the beverage bearing his name,
and his infant son falls into a punch-bowl while being baptised by a
drunkard. It was not, however, till 1828 that a reasonable joker could
call Cruikshank's great hit a punch. That date is on the title-page of
"Punch and Judy" edited by J. Payne Collier, for whose publisher (S.
Prowett) Cruikshank drew the scenes of the immortal puppet-play as
produced by Piccini, who defied any other puppet-showman in England to
perform his feat of making the figure with the immoderate neck remove
its hat with one hand. Thanks to Piccini, then, Cruikshank's Punch is
the real Punch--a goggling miscreant, whose hump is a rigid and
misplaced tail and whose military hat, above a crustacean's face,
completes a rather melancholy effect of mania. The conductor of "George
Cruikshank's Omnibus" confessed to feeling "that it was easy to
represent" Punch's "eyes, his nose, his mouth, but that the one
essential was after all wanting--the _squeak_." Cruikshank was barely
just to his pencil. As one looks at his Punch one feels that such a
being is either a squeaker or a mute. As for the Devil, whose role is so
humiliating in the Punch tromedy (as a neologist might call it), he is
of an aspect pitiably mean--like a corpse attired in river mud.
[Illustration: PUNCH THROWING AWAY THE BODY OF THE SERVANT. From "Punch
and Judy," 1828 (early proof). The portrait of George Cruikshank below
his initials does not appear in the book.]
After this, it is impossible not to realise the enormity of the
compliment paid by the hand of Cruikshank (serving the imagination of G.
H.) to Napoleon in that publication of August 1815, rashly stated by Mr
Bruton to be the finest Napoleonic caricature, which depicts the
imperial exile of St Helena as the Devil addressing a solar Prince
Regent. Here the Devil gets the credit of a handsome face and Napoleon
the debit of cloven feet.
Cruikshank's representation of the Devil as Old Nick has the absurd
merit of recalling his idea of the servant of a good Peri! Compare _The
Handsome Clear-starcher_ ("Bentley's Miscellany," 1838) with _The Peri_
[, the Djin] _and the Taylor_ ("Minor Morals, Part III.," 1839). Both
these ornaments of my sex have white eyes windowing a black face, and
the former, with heraldic sulphur fumes above his figure of Elizabethan
dandy, is, if we do not date him, a horrible gibe at the feminine Satan
of "sorrows."
Is there, the reader may now ask, not unmindful of the Miltonic drawing
already described, no Satan among Cruikshank's Netherlanders, to show
that he saw the sublime of evil as clearly as he saw Fagin? Alas for
_catalogues raisonnes_! for if it were not for G. W. Reid we could not
point the querist to Cruikshank's Lucifer in his illustrations on wood
to George Clinton's "Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron"
(1825). Of "a shape like to the angels, yet of a sterner and a sadder
aspect of spiritual essence," not less beauteous than the cherubim,
Cruikshank, with or without an accomplice in another engraver, makes a
black and white Moor, jointed like a Dutch doll, with wings which an
Icarus would distrust.
Perhaps the most impressive conception of the author of unhappiness
which Cruikshank executed was that which he owed to the imagination of
Mrs Octavian Blewitt. In his last published etching, _The Rose and the
Lily_ (1875), he depicts, by her instruction, a lake out of which
appears, like an islet, the weed-covered top of a vast head, the eyes of
which are the only visible features. The lake is the abode of "The Demon
of Evil" and his eyes of bale are upturned to regard a fairy queen and
her suite who hover over a rose and a lily.
Cruikshank's favourite among semi-infernal or hemi-demi-semi celestial
characters would seem to have been Herne, the demon of Windsor Forest,
whom legend derives from a suicide. Our illustration of Herne appearing
to Henry VIII. (1843) is sombre and grandiose. The artist recurred to
Herne again in one of his beautiful etchings for "The life of Sir John
Falstaff" by R. B. Brough (1858). Falstaff as Herne, with antlers on his
head, lies prone beneath the great riven oak which is called Herne's
oak, because human Herne is supposed to have hanged himself from a bough
of it. Fairies, depicted by their lover, have taken into their invisible
web of glamour the grossness of Falstaff, and to me the etching which
contains in harmony so tragic a tree, so gluttonous a man, and the only
angels that shame can love without terror is not an illustration of
Shakespeare but a vision of everybody's heaven. For if it is an
illustration of Shakespeare, then are these no fairies but Mistress
Quickly, Anne Page and other actresses, in a punitive and moralising
mood! The last appearance of Cruikshank's Herne is in a drawing, done
when the artist was eighty-three, for "Peeps at Life" (1875), in which
the demon rides through Windsor Forest with a monk behind him.
[Illustration: HERNE THE HUNTER APPEARING TO HENRY VIII. ("Windsor
Castle"). From "Ainsworth's Magazine," vol. iii., 1843.]
It is now time to say a few words about the Cruikshankian ghost. About
the year 1860, Cruikshank offered L100 to anyone who should show him a
ghost "said to have been seen frequently in the neighbourhood of some
Roman Catholic institution near Leicester." No one claimed the money,
and Cruikshank remained a religious materialist, charmingly boyish in
his amusement over the ghosts of tears and dirt. His natural idea of a
ghost was comic in the way of a wise old world that taxes pain and wrath
for humour. His designs for Part II. of "Points of Humour" (1824)
include a vision of spirits discharged from their bodies by the
ministrations of a pompous doctor, who holds his stick against his mouth
because Cruikshank condemned the use of "the crutch" as a toothpick. The
ugliness of these spirits is not excelled by Cruikshank's Giles
Scroggins, in vol. i. of "The Universal Songster" (1825),--a spook whose
waving hands like bewitched gloves, exultant toes and nightcap
tipsy as a blown flame, are duly noted by Molly Brown. Folklore had a
refining influence on Cruikshank when, for Scott's "Demonology and
Witchcraft," he etched, in 1830, Mrs Leckie, a white-aproned ghost who,
by a miracle of Scotchness, is perfectly decorous as she kicks with a
high heeled shoe the doctor of physic who "shewed some desire to be rid
of her society." Cruikshank's chef d'oeuvre of ghost-humour is an
etching for Captain Glascock's "Land Sharks and Sea Gulls" (1838). This
triumph of pictorial anecdote confronts us with Ann Dobbs, who has
materialised her head and hands for the purpose of exhibiting, with a
proper show of accusation, to a whimpering sailor, whose pigtail has
risen in homage to her, "the feller piece of the broken bit" of her
tomb-stone, which he had stolen for a holy-stone to clean decks with.
After this, the reader may be surprised to learn that a ghost, produced
by Cruikshank for "The Scourge" of August 1815, was serious enough to be
precautiously blacked out before the plate entitled _A Financial Survey
of Cumberland, Or the Beggar's Petition_, was put into general
circulation. It is the ghost of Sellis, the Duke of Cumberland's valet,
who is made to accuse his earthly master of murder, by these words "Is
this a razor I see before me? Thou canst not say I did it." Of that
other serious ghost, St Winifred in "Guy Fawkes" (1840), enough has been
said. Her dullness is absolutely unmystical, and it is a relief to turn
from her to look at _The Holy Infant, that prayed as soon as he was
born_ ("Catholic Miracles," 1825), an exquisitely droll sketch, about as
large as a penny, of "intense" chubbiness in a hand basin.
Though sympathy with men and women did not make Cruikshank courteous to
ghosts, he was led by the credulity and experience of his childhood to
be affectionate to fairies and almost patriotic in his feeling about the
magical countries in which they dwell. In a note to "Puss in Boots" he
informs us that his nurse told him when he was "a very little boy" that
the fairies "had houses in the white places"--_i.e._ fungi--in the
corners of cellars. In cellars he accordingly looked for them, "and
certainly did ... fancy" that he saw "very, _very_ tiny little people
running in and out of these little white houses"--_i.e._fungi--and
attributed any power he possessed of drawing or describing a
fairy to his nurse's communications and his visions in cellars.
Like a sword-swallower I saw in Belfast, I will ask you to "put your
hands together," for the anecdote just related is corroborated by the
charm of his fairy drawings.
[Illustration: From "Comic Composites for the Scrap-Book," 1821.]
What happened when Cruikshank went into cellars is symbolical of poetry.
He saw what was not there by that creative touch of mind which
transforms an object by increasing its similitude to something else. In
_Comic Composites for the Scrap Book_ (1821), we have intelligent human
creatures suggested by arrangements of household implements. As I look
at the mundatory erection here reproduced, I anachronistically hum
Stephen Glover's "March composed for Prince Albert's Hussars." It is,
however, less brilliant than the aldermanic bellows and the doctor (with
a mortar for body, cottonwool for hair and labels for feet), to whom he
states his symptoms in "Scraps and Sketches" (1831), for they amuse the
satirist even at this date when gluttony is merely not moderation and
bored sapience is merely not sympathetic wisdom.
Cruikshank then had one great qualification for illustrating fairy
tales: he could animate the inanimate. Let us now follow his career as a
fairy artist, beginning with his first great success.
[Illustration: THE GOOSE GIRL. From "German Popular Stories," vol. ii.,
1826.]
In 1822 appeared a post-dated volume of "German Popular Stories ...
collected by M. M. Grimm." A companion volume was published in 1826, and
both books were adorned by the hand of George Cruikshank. Excepting two
much-admired German leprechauns or fairy cobblers in one of Cruikshank's
twenty-two etchings, they do not present a fairy worth smiling at, and
these cobblers, boundlessly delighted by a present of clothes, are, of
course, very far from being of the angelic _elite_ of Fairyland, as
drawn by Sir Joseph Noel Paton for Mrs S. C. Hall. But Fairyland is in
the imagination of democracy, and he is a good patriot of that country
who amuses us with its "freaks," for they are dear to the _hoi polloi_
which appreciate novelty more than perfection. Cruikshank in his Grimm
mood is for the "living drollery" which cured Sebastian's
scepticism concerning the phoenix and the unicorn. He rejoicingly
presents a nose as long as a garden hose--a nose worthy of the beard
which travels from page 6 to page 7 of his "Table-Book" (1845). He
refreshes us with the humorous pleasure of the giant inspecting
Thumbling on the palm of his hand; and he convulses us with the vocal
display of the ass, dog and cat which plunge through the glass of a
window into the robbers' room. Ruskin said of these etchings that they
"were unrivalled in masterfulness of touch since Rembrandt; (in some
qualities of delineation unrivalled even by him)"; to that eulogy I can
only add that they are inspiriting because they are candid and vivid,
and show that realism can be on the side of magic.
Passing without pause some tiny cuts, upon which children would pounce
for love of gnomes, in "The Pocket Magazine" (1827, 1828), we arrive
again at Cruikshank's sketches for Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft"
(1830), and inspect elves and fairies, barely prettier than mosquitoes,
annoying mortals. Worry is incarnate in a horizontal man who is
supported in and drawn through the air by elves, directed by two
drivers, one on each of his boots. Beautiful is the contempt for
herrings of an elf standing on a plate which a comrade is about to smash
with a hammer in the presence of a cheaply-hospitable (and sluttish)
housewife whom a dozen elves have pulled downstairs by her feet.
Fables which invent sorrow to prevent it can only be classed as
fairy-tales by a sacrifice of the _mot juste_, which I make in order to
call attention to an exquisite quartet of etchings by George Cruikshank,
illustrating Richard Frankum's verses entitled "The Bee and the Wasp"
(1832). No hand but his who drew the shadow-buyer in Peter Schlemihl
could have drawn the hair-lines of the criminal insect who mocks the
drowning bee in the third of these etchings. So pleased and delicate a
malignancy is expressed in him that he figures to me as a
personification of evil, and I am disagreeably conscious of smiling to
think that, because he speaks and is seen, he is a gentleman compared
with a trypanosome or a bacillus coli.
[Illustration: AMARANTH "THE EVER YOUNG" IS CARRIED TO CORALLION BY THE
BEE'S MONSTER STEED. From "The Good Genius that Turned Everything into
Gold," by the Bros Mayhew, 1847.]
A bee--but a superbee--figured in the next fairy book illustrated by
Cruikshank. In his designs for "The Good Genius that Turned
Everything into Gold" (1847) he showed for the first time an ambition to
idealise magic. The idea that power exists in beings of familiar shape
and wieldy dimensions to build palaces and fleets without mistakes,
without plans and adjustments, without the publication of embryos behind
hoardings--to build them without economy and sacrificial fatigue--this
is the breathless poem of the crowd. The Brothers Mayhew gave this idea
to Cruikshank, and one at least of his etchings for their story--the
palace emerging from rock and arborescence--shows that he almost
objectified it. Thus (unconsciously) did he atone for that neglect of
opportunity which allowed him to deck the magical and tender, the deep
and lustrous fiction of E. T. W. Hoffmann, the inspired playmate of
ideas that rock with laughter and subdue with awe, with nothing better
than a frigidly humorous picture of a duel with spy-glasses.
In 1848 an incomplete and refined translation of "II Pentamerone"
appeared with pretty and sprightly designs by Cruikshank. These designs
show a more direct sympathy with juvenile taste than his famous
etchings for "German Popular Stories." With shut eyes one can still see
his ogre swearing at the razor-crop, and his strong man marching off
with all the wealth of the King of Fair-Flower, while the champion
blower with one good blast makes bipeds of horses and kites of men.
Nennella stepping grandly out of the enchanted fish to embrace her
brother is dear to an indulgent scepticism. There were beautiful fields
and a fine mansion inside that fish and his toothful mouth is but a
portico of Fairyland.
[Illustration: From George Cruikshank's Fairy Library, 'Cinderella,'
1854.]
Tails not having been invented merely to mitigate the sorrows of Satan,
Cruikshank had some more of these appendages to draw when with "Kit
Bam's Adventures" (1849) he entered the fairyland of Mrs Cowden Clarke.
The very rhetorical mariner of that story is remembered for the sake of
the tails of mer-children twining about his legs in the frontispiece to
it, and human children allow their Louis Wain to wane for a minute as,
with Kit Bam, they look at Cruikshank's tortoiseshell cat, ruffed and
aproned, laying the table while Captain Capsicum, horned and gouty,
urbanely watches her.
Naturally Cruikshank desired to associate himself permanently with fairy
stories better known in England than the name of any folklorist or
Perrault D'Armancourt himself. Rusher had published, circa 1814,
"Cinderella" and "Dick Whittington" with cuts "designed by Cruikshank,"
whose prenomen was or was not George; and to George Cruikshank is
ascribed by Mr Edwin Pearson some early cuts for "Mother Hubbard and her
Dog." Each of these illustrations could be covered with a quartet of our
postage stamps and only those for "Mother Hubbard," which are droll and
tender, possess more than an antiquarian interest. In 1846, in twelve
designs built round the title "Fairy Songs and Ballads for the young ...
By O. B. Dussek ...," George Cruikshank illustrated "Dick Whittington,"
"Jack and the Beanstalk," etc., and was lively and pretty in a wee way.
These were trifles, however, and Cruikshank was ambitious. In 1853-4 and
1864 he flattered his ambition by the issue of "George Cruikshank's
Fairy Library." Unfortunately Ruskin was displeased with the earlier
issues of this "library," for in 1857 he forbade his disciples to copy
Cruikshank's designs for "Cinderella," "Jack and the Beanstalk" and "Tom
Thumb" [_sic_] as being "much over-laboured and confused in line." But
on July 30, 1853, Mrs Cowden Clarke begged Cruikshank to allow her to
thank him in the name of herself "and," writes she, "the other grown-up
children of our family, together with the numerous little nephews and
nieces who form the ungrown-up children among us, for the delightful
treat you have bestowed in the shape of the 1st No. of the 'Fairy
Library.'" This was the maligned "Hop-o'-my-Thumb," the pictures of
which possess the charm of the artist's "Pentamerone." None of
Cruikshank's ogres are as horrible as J. G. Pinwell's man-eating giant
in "The Arabian Nights," and so the ogre in his "Hop-o'-my Thumb" is
merely a glutton with a knife, but what a passion of entreaty is
expressed in the kneeling children at his feet! The seven-leagued boots
are worth all Lilley and Skinner's as, formally introduced, they bow
before the smiling king. The architectural effect of the design which,
as it were, makes a historian of a tree is admirable. The beanstalk in
No. 2 is a true ladder of romance; and, seeing it, I think that
Cruikshank escaped from the repugnant vulgarity of G. H. on that May or
June day of 1815 when he drew The _Pedigree of Corporal Violet_ (_alias_
Napoleon) as a perpendicular of flowers and fungi and dreamed of the
fairy seed he would sow for children. In "Jack and the Beanstalk" there
is not only a fairy plant but a real English fairy gauzy-winged, tiny,
with a wand as fine as a needle. Yet Ruskin was displeased, and we may
define the fault which caused his displeasure as a finicky unveracity
about shade and textures.
[Illustration: THE OGRE IN THE FORM OF A LION. From George Cruikshank's
Fairy Library, "Puss in Boots," 1864.]
In 1866, however, Cruikshank executed two plates for Ruskin; one of them
illustrated "The Blue Light" from Grimm, the other showed the children
of Hamelin following the Pied Piper into the mountain; and in the same
year he almost paralleled the success of his fairy cobblers in Grimm by
an etching of Pixies engaged in making boots, which he did for Frederick
Locker, afterwards Locker-Lampson. In 1868 Cruikshank made the large and
beautiful etching entitled "Fairy Connoisseurs inspecting Mr Frederick
Locker's Collection of Drawings." Anyone who has read "My Confidences"
(1896) will acknowledge that it was a happy thought to invite the Little
People into Mr Locker-Lampson's library, for this bibliophile, so
humorous and elegant, so ready with the exact Latin quotation needed to
civilise perfectly the shape of an indecorum, was in essence a child
whose toys were consecrated to the fairies by his purity in loving them.
We will take leave of Cruikshank as a fairy artist by a look at a sketch
for his picture _The Fairy Ring_. He painted the picture, which is his
best oil-painting, in 1855 for the late Henry Miller of Preston, for
L800. The sketch referred to sold at Sotheby's in 1903 for L25, 10s.
This sketch--a painting--I saw at the Royal Aquarium, as in a bleak
railway station without the romance of travel. The Fairy King stands on
a mushroom about which rotate two rings of merrymakers between which run
torch bearers. They are mad, these merrymakers, and madness is delight.
Hard by, a towering foxglove leans into space, bearing two joyous
sprites. Gigantic is the lunar crescent that shines on the scene; it is
a gate through which an intrepid fairy rides a bat above the revels. In
this impressionistic sketch, Cruikshank shows himself participant in the
mysterious exultation of the open night where man, intruding, feels
neither seen nor known. _The Fairy Ring_ belongs to the poetry of
humour. It perorates for a supernaturalist whose fashionable ignorance,
touched with less durable vulgarity, blinded him to such visions as, in
our time, the poet "A. E." has depicted. Looking at Cruikshank's
supernatural world of littleness and prettiness, of mirth, extravagance,
and oddity, we feel in debt to his limitations.