The humour of George Cruikshank deserves separate consideration, because
it is essentially the man himself. Despite a technical excellence so
peculiar that, according to the author of Number 1 of "Bursill's
Biographies," the engraver Thompson "kept a set of special tools,
silver-mounted and with ivory handles, sacred for" Cruikshank's designs,
his sense of beauty was not eyes to him. Women he usually saw as lard or
bone, and this strange perversity of vision and art differentiates him
from the moderns by more than time. For instance, the women presented by
Mr S. D. Ehrhart and O'Neill Latham (a lady-artist), to mention only two
modern humorists, materialise an idea of beauty in humour which was as
foreign to Cruikshank as apple-blossom to a _pomme de terre_.
[Illustration: A GENTLEMAN'S REST BROKEN (in consequence of going to bed
with his leg on). From an etching in "Scraps and Sketches," Part 1,
1828.]
Humour with Cruikshank was elemental. A joke was sacred from
implication; it was self-sufficient, vocal in line and curve,
percussive. He was a contemporary of Douglas Jerrold, who was humorous
when he called a town Hole-cum-Corner. He was a contemporary of Thomas
Hood, who was humorous when he announced that
"from her grave in Mary-bone
They've come and bon'd your Mary."
He was in that "world of wit" where they kept a nutmeg-grater on the
table in order to say, when a great man was mentioned, "there's a
grater." He was in a world where professional humour was perversely
destructive of faith in imagination.
[Illustration: EXCHANGE NO ROBBERY. From "Points of Humour," 1823. The
unfaithful wife has concealed her lover in the clock. The husband, who
has unexpectedly returned, devours bacon at 1 A.M., while she is in an
agony of apprehension.]
But what is humour? Late though the question be, it should be answered.
Humour, then, is the ability to receive a shock of pleasant surprise
from sounds and appearances without attributing importance to them. As
the proof of humour is physiological, its appeal to the intellect is as
peremptory as that of terror. It is a benignant despot which relieves us
from the sense of destiny and of duty. Its range is illimitable. It is
victoriously beneath contempt and above worship.
Cruikshank was a humorist who could laugh coarsely, broadly, selfishly,
merrily, well. Coarseness was natural to him, or he would not have
selected for a (suppressed) illustration in "Italian Tales" (1824) a
subject which mingles tragedy with the laughter of Cloacina. One can
only say that humour, like a sparrow, alights without regard to
conventions. The majority can laugh with Rabelais, though they have not
the idealism which created Theleme. Jokes that annoy the nose are no
longer tolerable in art, but in Cruikshank's time so wholesome a writer
as Captain Marryat thought Gillray worth imitating in his translation of
disease into terms of humour. Hence _The Headache_ and _The Cholic_
(1819), signed with an anchor (Captain Marryat's signature) and etched
by Cruikshank, follow _The Gout_ by Gillray (1799). The reader may well
ask if the sight of a hideous creature sprawling on a man's foot is
humour according to my definition. I can only presume that in what Mr
Grego calls the "port-wine days," Gillray's plate was like sudden
sympathy producing something so absolutely suitable for swearing at,
that patients smiled in easy-chairs at grief.
Broad humour has an eye on sex. The uncle who, on being asked at dinner
for an opinion on a lady's costume, observes that he must go under the
table to form it, is a type of the broad humorist in modern life.
Cruikshank had none of that tenderness for women's clothes which in
modern representation removes altogether the pudical idea from costume
and substitutes the idea of witchery by foam of lace and coil of skirts.
His guffaws and those of Captain Marryat and J. P***y, whose invention
exercised his needle, at the Achilles in Hyde Park, in 1822, are
vexatious enough to make one wish to restore all fig-leaves to the
fig-forest. It is not possible for a man with an indefinite and
inexpressible feeling for woman to laugh like that. Hearing his laughter
we know that Cruikshank's humour about woman must always be obvious.
[Illustration: "EH., SIRS!" Illustrates "Waverley," by Sir Walter Scott,
in "Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley
Novels," 1836.]
It is, and yet it is not measured by the height of her hat as he
depicted it in 1828, when he contributed to that long series of jokes
which culminate in Jan Linse's girl at the theatre who will not take her
hat off because, "mamma, if I put it in my lap I can't see myself." In
the annals of absurdity is there anything more worthy to be true at the
expense of the British Navy than Cruikshank's picture of the chambermaid
confronted with the leg which she has mistaken for a warming-pan?
Another woman, whom Cruikshank compels us to remember by force of
humorous idea, is to be found in _Points of Humour_ (1823). She is the
doxy in "The Jolly Beggars," sitting on the soldier's lap. We see her
while she holds up
"her greedy gab
Just like ae aumous dish."
The soldier has lost an arm and a leg, but his face is the face of
infatuation and her lips are the lips of lust. The toes of her bare feet
express pleasure longing for ecstasy. I write seriously: they are very
eloquent toes. There is a fire near the amorous pair, and the dog
basking by it, uninterested in them, is a token of peace unpried upon.
Her left hand grasps a pot of whiskey. She is in heaven. Indeed there is
too much heaven in the picture for me to laugh at it. Behind the
incongruity which clamours for laughter is the magic of drink reshaping
in idea a half-butchered man and reviving the fires of sex.
[Illustration: HOPE. From "Phrenological Illustrations," 1826.]
After this we glide politely from women as they blossom in the drollery
of Cruikshank. Jenny showers "pills, bolus, julep and apozem too" on the
physicians who would have exenterated her (_vide_ "The New Bath Guide,"
1830). The "patent washing machines" remember their sex at the approach
of Waverley (_vide_ "Landscape-Historical Illustrations," 1836), and
remind us that in 1810 T. Tegg published a less refined _Scotch Washing_
over the signature of Cruikshank. Nanse sheds the light of a candle upon
the corpse of the cat compressed by a heavy sitter (_vide_ "The Life of
Mansie Wauch," 1839). The squaw "in glass and tobacco-pipes dress'd"
evokes lyrical refusal from the Jack who has sworn to be constant to
Poll (_vide_ "Songs, Naval, and National, of the late Charles Dibdin,"
1841). Lady Jane Ingoldsby smilingly--with lifted hand for note of
interjection--allows her attention to be directed to the half of her
drowned husband which was not "eaten up by the eels" (_vide_ "Bentley's
Miscellany," 1843). William's widow contemplates with fury the sailor
upon whose nose has alighted her dummy babe (_vide_ "The Old Sailor's
Jolly Boat," 1844); and General Betsy gobbles her novel in a chaotic
kitchen, oblivious of the horror of her mistress (_vide_ "The Greatest
Plague in Life," 1847).
In all this pageant of absurdity is wanting the special touch which
surprises the spectator. The emotions of the women are rendered as with
a consciousness that they are a merchandise of art and "in stock."
[Illustration: Details from the Plate entitled _Heads of the Table_, in
"George Cruikshank's Table-Book," 1845.]
The caricaturist of mankind, to immortalise his work, must haunt us with
physiognomy. Thus Honore Daumier in _Le Bain Chaud_ haunts us with the
burlesque heroism in the face of a man about to sit down in water which
pretends to scald him. Sir John Tenniel haunts us with the complacent
slyness of Dizzy bringing in the hot water for February 1879 to that
distrustful lie-abed John Bull. Charles Dana Gibson haunts us with the
charmed vanity of an aged millionairess sitting up, bald and bony, in a
regal bed, with her coffee-cup arrested in hand by the fulsome puff of
her person and adornments read to her by her pretty maid. George Du
Maurier haunts us with the freezing question in the face of the
knight who has permitted himself to crack an empty eggshell on the
"Fust o' Hapril."
How does Cruikshank stand as a creator of humorous physiognomy? The
answer is not from a trumpet. He invented crowds of people who seem
merely the fruits of formulae, and in comedy the simple application of
the science of John Caspar Lavater is weak in effect, since laughter is
tributary to surprise.
Compare Daumier's man in hot water with Cruikshank's _Trotting_ (a
similar subject in "The Humourist," vol. iii., 1820), and one sees the
difference between mere Lavaterism and emotion detected with delight.
Compare Daumier's facetious ruffian asking the time of the man he
intends to rob with almost any ruffian in Cruikshank's humorous gallery
and one can only say that, in effect, one drew him to haunt the mind;
the other to bore it. One ruffian surpasses his type without deserting
it; the other is the type itself. Here and there, however, Cruikshank
creates an individual who is more than his type without being divergent
from it. Do we find such a one in the serious eater in _Hope_
("Phrenological Specimens," 1826), in whose bone, already as
innutritious as a toothbrush, his dog confides for sustenance? I think
so, because I see him when I think of appetite as of tragedy. Humour
accepts him in deference to her idea that there is nothing that cannot
be laughed at, and she is worthy of deification when she goes down,
down, down, laughing where even her worshippers are mute.
I doubt if Cruikshank twice excelled in respect of authenticity in
humour the host and guest whom he presented in the reproduced subjects
from _Heads of the Table_ (1845). Humour ascends from his _Hope_ to them
as to a heaven of animals from a purgatorial region. That even what I
have called Cruikshank's Lavaterism can be amusing is proved by his
portrait of Socrates at the moment before he said "rain follows
thunder."
We owe probably to Cruikshank's inveterate love of punning the capital
study in disdain as provoked by envy exhibited in one of the lions in
_The Lion of the Party_ (1845). Of his animal humour I shall have more
to say: these lions are more human than many of his representations
of _homo sapiens_; they need no footline.
[Illustration: X
_Xantippe_
From "A Comic Alphabet," 1836. See Pope's "The Wife of Bath" (after
Chaucer), II. 387-392.]
The student of Cruikshank's humour must follow him through many volumes
in which his pencil is subservient to literature; and in this journey he
will often open his mouth to yawn rather than to laugh. The professional
humorist, like the professional poet, is the prey of the Irony that sits
up aloft; and Cruikshank was not an exception. Indeed one may say of
some of his crowded caricatures that one has to wade through them. In
the humorous illustration of literature his work is seldom risible, but
it usually pleases by a combination of neatness and energy.
Despite his intense egotism he ventured to associate his art with the
works of Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett, R. E. Raspe, Cowper, Byron,
Scott, Dickens, Goldsmith, Douglas Jerrold, Thackeray, Le Sage, and
Cervantes. These names evoke a world of humorous life in which is
missing, to the knowledge of the spectator, only the humour which shines
in jewels of brief speech and rings in the heavenly onomatopoeia of
absurdity. Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde are decidedly not of that
world, though Raspe, by a freak of irony, graced his brutal pages with
lines which the snark-hunter might have coveted, and Smollett's elegance
in burlesque gravity is dear to an admirer of "The Importance of being
Earnest."
[Illustration: _Lion of the Party_