For Shakespeare, Cruikshank seems to have felt a tender reverence. As
early as 1814 we find him drawing Kean as Richard III., and Hamlet for
J. Roach, the publisher of "The Monthly Theatrical Reporter"; 1815 is
the date of a lithograph of _Juliet and the Nurse_ published by G.
Cruikshank and otherwise unmemorable; in 1827 he made one of his
"Illustrations of Time," a vivacious portrait of Puck about to girdle
the earth. In 1857-8 came the Cruikshankian series of etchings for R. B.
Brough's "Life of Sir John Falstaff." This series exhibits great skill
and conscientiousness; the critic of "The Art Journal" (July 1858) was
able to suppose them "actual scenes." Falstaff has a serene and majestic
face; his bulk is too dignified for the scales of a showman; one
understands his aesthetic abhorrence of a "mountain of mummy." Humour
cancels his debt of shame for cowardice, and well would it have been if
that rebellious Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle, the original of
Falstaff, could have looked into Falstaff's roguish eyes as he reclined
on the field of Shrewsbury and peeped at his freedom from all the
bigotries which threaten and terrify mankind. Cruikshank unconsciously
imparts this thought, but it is with conscience that he is amiable to
Falstaff, who, begging, hiding, shamming, "facing the music," and dying,
is his pet and ours by grace of his refined and beautiful art.
We meet Cruikshank's Falstaff again in the drawing entitled _The First
Appearance of William Shakespeare on the Stage of the Globe_ (January
1863). Here we have the elite of Shakespeare's creations in a throng
about his cradle. Titania and Oberon are at its foot, as though he owed
them birth; Touchstone and Feste try to catch a gleam of laughter from
his eyes; Prospero waves his wand; Othello gazes with hate at the
guarded enchanter, more potent than Prospero, who is to bring his woe to
light; Romeo and Juliet have eyes only for each other. Richard the Third
is there, sadder than Lear; the witches who prophesied the steps of
Macbeth towards hell gesticulate hideously by their cauldron; and
Falstaff, cornuted as becomes the "deer" of Mrs Ford, smiles at a
vessel that reminds him, as do all vessels, of sack and metheglins.
There is charm and beauty of ensemble in this picture, which I have
described from a coloured drawing in the South Kensington Museum made by
its designer in 1864-5. I know nothing that suggests more forcibly the
fatefulness hidden in the inarticulate stranger who appears every day in
the world without a history and without a name.
[Illustration: ADAMS'S VISIT TO PARSON TRULLIBER. Frontispiece to
"Joseph Andrews," 1831. The book is dated 1832. This is one of the
plates in "Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832).]
Smollett and Fielding, both novelists who present humour as the flower
of annoyance and catastrophe, were hardly to be congratulated when
Cruikshank innocently showed them up in "Illustrations of Smollett,
Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832). In both the reader of literature
discerns a gentleman. In Fielding he sees a radiant man of the world
from whom literary giants who succeeded him drew nutriment for ambition.
Both Smollett and Fielding have heroines, and touch men in the nerve of
sweetness, and fell them with love. But Cruikshank cared naught for
their women, though he reproduced something equivalent to the charm of
Shakespeare's "Merry Wives." When first he went to Smollett, it was
for a _Point of Humour_ (1824), which centres in an "irruption of
intolerable smells" at dinner. The point pricked, as one may say, but it
was blunt in effect compared with that of a later artist's drawing of
_Columbus and the Egg_ or that of Cruikshank's cook swallowing to order
in _Land Sharks and Sea Gulls_ (1838). The really vivid picture is
recognised by a lasting imprint on a mind which is incapable of learning
Bradshaw by heart, and Cruikshank's drawings for Smollett are reduced in
my mind to _Mrs Grizzle extracting three black hairs from Mr Trunnion_,
and his drawings for Fielding are reduced into the ruined face and
rambling fat of Blear-eyed Moll.
Those who will may compare the Smollett of Rowlandson with that of
Cruikshank. The comparison may determine whether a dog is funnier while
being trodden on or immediately after, and shows the indifference of
Rowlandson to his artistic reputation. Cruikshank's attempts to
illustrate Goldsmith are few and, as a series, unsuccessful. The
reproduced specimen is a fair example of his realistic method. It
exhibits the blackguard's sense of absurdity in the Christian altruism
which paralyses the nerves of the pocket--sensitive usually as the
nerves of sex--and which tyrannises over the nerves of pride.
[Illustration: THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD PREACHING TO THE PRISONERS. From
"Illustrations of Popular Works," 1830.]
Fisher, Son, & Co., the publishers of Cruikshank's illustrations of the
"Waverley" novels (1836-7-8), assumed "the merit of having been the
first to illustrate the scenes of mirth, of merriment, of humour, that
often sparkle" in these works. In "Landscape Historical Illustrations of
Scotland and the Waverley Novels" he supplied the comic plates; his
_Bailie Macwheeble rejoicing before Waverley_, for chapter lxvi. of
"Waverley," was the first etching done by him on steel. His "Waverley"
etchings are characteristic works, sometimes brilliant in pattern or
composition, occasionally ministering to a love of physiognomical
ugliness which the small nurses of the dolls called "golliwoggs" can
better explain than I. His predilection for the curious and uncanny is
shown in some striking plates, including that in which he depicts the
terror of Dougal and Hutcheon as they mistake the ape squatting on
Redgauntlet's coffin for "the foul fiend in his ain shape."
Cruikshank's illustrations for "Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord
Byron" (1824-5) are cuts which include such deplorable effects of bathos
(_e.g. Haidee saving Don Juan from her Father's wrath_) that one has no
heart to praise the rough vigour of _Juan opposing the Entrance to the
Spirit Room_. A Byron illustrated by protected aborigines seems
realisable after seeing these pictures. If anybody paid the artist for
them it should have been Wordsworth; that they did not weigh on
Cruikshank's conscience, we may infer from the fact that in 1833 he
cheerfully caricatured Byron for "Rejected Addresses" as a gentleman in
an easy-chair kicking the terrestrial globe.
We have already discussed the fruit of Cruikshank's association with
Dickens. We have not, however, paid tribute to Cruikshank's capital
etchings for "Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi," edited by Boz (1838). The
portrait of the famous clown holding in his arms a hissing goose and a
squeaking pig, while voluble ducks protrude their heads from his pockets
and a basket of carrots and turnips afflicts his back, is
extraordinarily funny.
Though Cruikshank's relations with Thackeray were far happier than with
Dickens, they resulted in nothing important to his reputation. His
etchings illustrating Thackeray's contributions to "The Comic Almanack"
(1839-40) weary one with plain or uninteresting faces, though that which
exhibits the expressive blubber-face of Stubbs, horsed for the birching
earned by his usury, provokes an irrational smile which serves for
praise. His illustrations to "A Legend of the Rhine" (Thackeray's
contribution to "George Cruikshank's Table-Book," 1845) are not equal to
Thackeray's drawings for "The Rose and the Ring" (1855).
[Illustration: PRO-DI-GI-OUS! (Dominie Sampson in "Guy Mannering"),
"Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley
Novels," 1836.]
In the world of humour one does not descend in moving from Thackeray to
Charles James Lever. With Lever's own portrait of his hero to guide him,
Cruikshank illustrated "Arthur O'Leary" (1844). Among his ten etchings
in this novel is an amusing exhibition of Corpulence submitting to
identification by measurement; it surpasses the scene by Du Maurier in
which the tailor promises to be round in a minute if his customer will
press one end of the tape-measure to his waist.
Cruikshank's ten etchings for "Gil Blas" (1833) are the works of an
intelligent machine, which may be called humorous because it takes down
the fact that Dame Jacintha held the cup to the Canon's mouth "as if he
had been an infant." R. Smirke, R.A., with his sympathetic eye for flesh
(as of a gardener for flowers) is obviously preferable to Cruikshank as
Le Sage's illustrator, though our artist's Euphrasia is a dainty miss.
Cruikshank's fifteen illustrations for "Don Quixote" (1833-34) are neat
and for the most part uninspired renderings of pathological humour.
Although it was within his ability to make a readable picture without
words, he merely reminds one of the anecdote of the attack on the
wind-mills. Compare the plate referred to with the painting on the same
subject by Jose Moreno Carbonaro. Cruikshank's combatant is no more than
a knight about to attack something--presumably a wind-mill. Carbonaro
chooses the moment that exposes the knight as mad, futile, dismally
droll, and we see him and his horse in the air, the latter enough to
make Pegasus hiccup with laughter. Cruikshank's designs for "Don
Quixote" compare favourably, however, with the audacious scratches
which constitute most of his brother Robert's chronicle of the Knight of
La Mancha (1824). The collector who affords a crown to buy the former
designs should also acquire "Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote,"
by H. D. Inglis, with six etchings by George Cruikshank (1837). The
etchings--three of which are perfect anecdotes--were evidently done _con
amore_; but, good as they are, they were lucky if they satisfied an
editor who believed Inglis's "New Gil Blas" to be "one of the noblest
and most finished efforts in the line of pure imaginative writing that
ever fell from the pen of any one man."
[Illustration: DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO RETURNING HOME. From "The History
and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote," 1833.]
It would be a species of literary somnambulism to wander further in a
path of bibliography where ideas must be taken as they come instead of
being ideally chosen and grouped. There is this mischief in Cruikshank's
fecundity, that it tends to convert even a fairly bright critic into a
scolytus boring his way through a catalogue. We emerge from our
burrowing more percipient than before of the speculative nature of the
undertaking to illustrate illustrious works of imagination. Sinking
in competitive humour is akin to drowning; for he who materialises
images despatched to the mind's eye by literary genius incurs the risk
of having his work not only excelled by images in the eyes of minds
other than his own, but ignored in compliment to them. Fortunate, then,
is Cruikshank in the fact that on the whole we do not regret the healthy
industrialism which permitted him to illustrate so many examples of
imaginative literature.
The reader to whom any appearance of digression is displeasing in art
will now kindly believe that only a second has elapsed since he began
the only complete paragraph of page 183. The scolytus is converted, and
we return to our true viewpoint--the middle of a heterogeneous
litter--and look for characteristics of Cruikshankian humour.
[Illustration: NEW READINGS. The Irishman tries to read a reversed sign
by standing on his head. From "The Humourist," vol. iv., 1821.]
We have seen so much of Cruikshank's kingdom of supernature that it is
scarcely necessary to revisit it. The reader will note, however, that
the degradation of the terrible to the absurd is his chief humorous idea
of supernature, and that he respects the seriousness of fairy tales. Not
even the burlesque metaphors of Giambattista Basile--that monkey of
genius among the euphuists--tempts him to ridicule the stories in "Il
Pentamerone"; no one less than Milton can banish the ridiculous from his
idea of Satan. A Satan who is a little lower than Punch, is he not more
absurd than Man figured as a little lower than the angels? He is both
more absurd and more satisfactory. Out of the folklore of Iceland and
Wales and Normandy he comes to us outwitted by mortals who seem
paradoxically to think that the Father of lies has a right to their
adherence to the letter of their agreements with him. Out of
Cruikshank's caricature he comes to us with a tail capable of
delineating a whole alphabet of humour. The fire which he and his demons
can live in without consumption becomes jocose. If you doubt it, compare
Cruikshank's etching for Douglas Jerrold's story, "The Mayor of
Hole-cum-Corner" (1842), with his etching, _Sing old Rose and burn the
Bellows_ in "Scraps and Sketches" (1828). The human-looking demon with
his left leg in the flabbergasted mayor's fire is much funnier in effect
than the negro sailor boiling the kettle over his wooden leg. Human
terror at superiority over natural law is highly ludicrous when the
superiority is evinced as though it were ordinary, negligible, and
compatible with sociableness. We cannot now say of such humour that it
is a revelation, though once it was brighter than all the fires of
Smithfield. There are foes of peace which in Cruikshank's simplicity he
thought of as good. For these, too, there is a Humour to keep them at
bay, until Science delivers us from their evil by making them obsequious
to all who see them.
When Humour pretends to drop from the supernatural to the commonplace,
it--I cannot for the moment persuade myself to write he or she--is about
to continue its most important mission, for it deserts a subject which
is naturally laughable for one which is not; it goes from the
supernatural to the commonplace. The supernatural is naturally laughable
because the human animal instinctively laughs at that which at once
transcends and addresses his intelligence, on a principle similar
perhaps to that which Schopenhauer acted on when he smiled at the angle
formed by the tangent and the circumference of a circle. At the
commonplace, however, the human animal never spontaneously laughs. Its
staleness is not dire to him; but negativeness is not good, and
Cruikshank helps the commonplace to be his friend.
[Illustration: "THE WITS MAGAZINE" (2 vols., 1818) is "one of the rarest
books illustrated by G. Cruikshank." A perfect copy is said to be worth
L80. Another rendering by him of the above incident will be found in
"The Humourist," vol. iv. (1821)]
When we view the demeanour of Cruikshank towards the commonplace we are
agreeably surprised by his agility and daring. For instance, take a book
called "Talpa," by C. W. Hoskyns (1852). It is a narrative of
agricultural operations, in the course of which the author says, "The
worst-laid tile is the measure of the goodness and permanence of the
whole drain, just as the weakest link of a chain is the measure of its
strength." Cruikshank, not being in the mood for drawing a drain,
depicts a watchdog who has broken his chain's weakest link and is
enthusiastically rushing towards an intruder whose most bitable tissues
are reluctantly offered to him in the attempt to scale a wall. The
hackneyed metaphor thus obviously illustrated being valueless on the
page where we find it, our smile is for the "cheek" of the artist in
calling attention to it rather than for the humour of the drawing as an
exhibition of funk and glee. Thus the "obvious" marries the obvious,
and the result is what is called originality. Again, what is more
commonplace in its effect on the mind than decoration as viewed on
wall-paper, frames, and linoleum, and in all those devices which flatter
Nature's alleged abhorrence of vacuum? It is unhealthy to observe their
repetitiousness. Cruikshank, however, saw that to be amusing where the
utmost demanded is an inoffensive filling of vacancy was to triumph
against dulness in its own sanctum. Consequently in the decorations
above and below the main designs in "The Humourist" (1819-20) an
appropriate hilarity animates effects which do not frustrate the
decorative idea of announcing the completeness of the pictures of which
they are the crown and base. His treatment of title-pages is
delightfully droll. Thus the title-page of "My Sketch Book" (1834) takes
the form of a portrait of himself, with a nose like the extinguisher of
a candlestick, directing the posing of the required capital letters on
the shelves of a proscenium. On the title page of "The Comic Almanac"
(1835) the letter ~L~ is a man sitting sideways with his legs stretched
horizontally together, and on the title-page of "The Pentamerone" (1848)
the polysyllable becomes the teeth of an abnormal king. Studies by
Cruikshank in the South Kensington Museum (9950-~T~) show that he
imagined the letter ~M~ as two Chinamen united by their pigtails, which
form the ~V~ between the perpendiculars of that letter, and are also
employed as a hammock. This play with the alphabet is exhibited as early
as 1828 in _The Pursuit of Letters_, where all the letters in the word
Literature flee, on legs as thin as the track of Euclid's point, from
philomathic dogs, while their brethren ~A B C~ attempt to escape from
three such babes as might have sprung from the foreheads of men made out
of the dust of encyclopaedias. As late as July 1874, in reply to a
coaxing letter from George S. Nottage, we see Cruikshank making human
figures of the letters of the word "Portraits."
[Illustration:
"while he spake a braying ass
Did sing most loud and clear.--William Cowper.
From "The Diverting History of John Gilpin," 1828. An earlier design by
Cruikshank for "John Gilpin" is in "The Humourist," vol. iii. (1819).
1836 is the date borne by a new edition of W. A. Nield's very monotonous
musical setting of John Gilpin, "illustrated by Cruikshank" (presumably
Robert).]
We return now to the zoological humour which has flashed across these
pages. In the United States the art of humanising the creatures of
instinct to make them articulately droll has been practised with such
success by Gus Dirks, J. S. Pughe, and A. Z. Baker, that if Noah's
Ark is not too "denominational," it is there that we should seek the
origin of their humour. Cruikshank, though he did re-draw William
Clarke's swimming duck holding up an umbrella (in "Three Courses and a
Dessert," 1830), achieved nothing so triumphantly zoological as the
ostrich who swallowed her medicine but forgot to uncork the bottle
containing it, or the porcupine who asked a barber for a shampoo, or the
cat who discovered that her Thomas was leading a tenth life, or the
elephant who wondered how the stork managed to convey him to his
parents, or the beetle-farmer who mowed a hairbrush. Cruikshank,
however, was in the Ark before them, and brought back enough humour
resembling theirs to show what he missed, besides humour of a different
kind which they do not excel. In "Scraps and Sketches" (1829) he
preceded the Americans in the humour which makes the horse the critic of
the motor-car, though not in that which seems to make the motor-car the
caricaturist of the horse; and in the above-named publication he
represents a dog in the act of prophesying cheap meat for the canine
race. Again, in "Scraps and Sketches" (1832) two elephants laugh
together over a pseudopun on the word trunk.
[Illustration: "When the Elephant stands upon his Head, does he himself
know whether he is standing upon his Head or his Heels?" "George
Cruikshank's Magazine," February 1854.]
We are not, however, reminded of America by the inquiry printed below
the elephant on the next page, which might well have surprised Lewis
Carroll by resemblance more than all the works of Mr G. E. Farrow.
Neither does America recognise the silence of her own laughter in those
drawings in which Cruikshank caricatures humanity under zoological
likenesses. His alderman realising Haynes Bayly's wish to be a butterfly
in "My Sketch Book" (1835); his coleopteral beadle in "George
Cruikshank's Omnibus" (1842), are simple attempts to make _tours de
force_ of what is rather obscurely called the obvious, and one realises
that art can find itself strong in embracing feeble idea. The most
striking of his zoological ideas is the effect of abnormal behaviour on
human people. Witness in "Scraps and Sketches" (1832) the "dreadful
tail" unfolded in the dialogue: "Doth he woggle his tail?" "Yes, he
does." "Then I be a dead mon!" One may also cite the horror of the diver
at the rising in air of a curly and vociferous salmon from the dish
in front of him (_ibid._). Among all his drawings of animals (those
for Grimm excepted) there is one etching which stands out as a technical
triumph produced by a sense of irony. I refer to the etching entitled
_The Cat Did It!_ in "The Greatest Plague of Life" (1847). Fifteen
pussies in a kitchen throw the crockery off the dresser, topple the
draped clothes-horse into the fire, smash the window glass and devour
the provisions. The scene is like a burlesque of one of its designer's
etchings in Maxwell's "Irish Rebellion." It is unique.
We must not quit Cruikshank's zoological drawings without remarking on
the curious inconsistency of his attitude towards animals. We find him
both callous and tender. In illustrating "The Adventures of Baron
Munchausen" he chose (one assumes) to draw the Baron flaying the fox by
flagellation; at any rate we have his wood-cut depicting the abominable
operation; and in "Scraps and Sketches" (1832), poor Reynard, for the
sake of a pun, is exhibited as "Tenant intail" of a spring-trap. Yet in
"My Sketch Book" (1835) he presents us with frogs expostulating with
small boys for throwing stones at them ("I pray you to cease, my little
Dears! for though it may be sport to you, it is death to us"). Again,
his canine reference to cats' meat, already mentioned, implies a
heartlessness towards horses which is contradicted by his touching but
not much prized etching _The Knackers Yard_, to be found in "The Voice
of Humanity" (May 1831), in "The Melange" (1834), and in "The Elysium of
Animals" (1836). Moreover, in "My Sketch Book" (1835) he severely
exhibits human insensitiveness to the sufferings of quadrupeds in _The
Omnibus Brutes--qy. which are they?_ It is therefore clear that
Cruikshank thought humanely about animals, though as a humorist he was
irresponsible and gave woe's present to ease--its comicality. And before
we write him down a vulgarian let us remember our share in his laughter
at the absurdity of incarnations which confer tails on elemental furies
and indecencies, and compel elemental importances and respectabilities
to satisfy their self-love by ruinous grimaces and scaffoldings of
adipose tissue.
[Illustration: "THE CAT DID IT!" From "The Greatest Plague in Life"
(1847).]
In a comparison I have already associated Cruikshank with Lewis Carroll,
who was systematically the finest humorist produced by England till
his death in 1898. The most intensely comic thing ever wrought by the
hand of Cruikshank is, I think, by the absolute perfection of its
reasoning _a priori_, a genuine "carroll" in a minor key. It is the
drawing in "Scraps and Sketches" (1832) in which, to a haughty, unamused
commander, the complainant says, "Please, your Honor, Tom Towzer has
tied my tail so tight that I can't shut my eyes."
One of Cruikshank's humorous ideas is particularly his own, because it
satisfies his passionate industry. I mean those processions of images
which he summoned by the enchantment of single central ideas. _The
Triumph of Cupid_ in "George Cruikshank's Table Book" (1845) is as
perfect an example as I can cite. Cruikshank is seated by a fire with
his "little pet dog Lilla" on his lap. From the pipe he is smoking
ascends and curls around him a world of symbolic life. The car of the
boy-god is drawn by lions and tigers. Another cupid stands menacingly on
a pleading Turk; a third cupid is the tyrant over a negro under
Cruikshank's chair; a fourth cupid, sitting on Cruikshank's left foot,
toasts a heart at the "fire office"; more cupids are dragging Time
backwards on the mantelpiece, and another is stealing his scythe.
Consummate ability is shown in the delicate technique of this etching,
which was succeeded as an example of _multum in parvo_ by the well-known
folding etching _Passing Events or the Tail of the Comet of 1853_,
appearing in "George Cruikshank's Magazine" (February 1854).
[Illustration: TITLE PAGE OF "ILLUSTRATIONS OF TIME," 1827 This drawing
borrows idea from Gillray, as also does the frontispiece by Cruikshank
to "Angelo's Picnic" (1834). Compare Gillray's _John Bull taking a
Luncheon_ (1798).]
Playing on words is very characteristic of Cruikshank's humour. Thus he
shows us "parenthetical" legs, as Dickens wittily called them, by the
side of those of "a friend in-kneed," and a man (dumbly miserable)
arrested on a rope-walk is "taken in tow." Viewing Cruikshank at this
game does not help one to endorse the statement of Thomas Love Peacock,
inspired by the drawing of January in "The Comic Almanack" (1838),
"A great philosopher art thou, George Cruikshank,
In thy unmatched grotesqueness,"
for a philosopher is a systematiser and a punster is an anarchist. But
we do not need him as a philosopher or as an Importance of any kind.
What we see and accept as philosophy in him is the appropriation of
misery for that Gargantuan meal of humour to which his Time sits down.
Yet in that philosophy it is certain that ironists and pessimists excel
him.
An entomologist as generous in classification as Mr Swinburne, author of
"Under the Microscope," will now observe me in the process of being
re-transformed into a scolytus. "Impossible!" cries the reader who
remembers my repentance on page 203. But I say "Inevitable." Since I had
the courage to bore my way through a catalogue of famous books
illustrated humorously by Cruikshank, I feel it my duty to bid the
reader look at a list of works of which he should acquire all the
italicised items, in such editions as he can afford, if he wishes to
know Cruikshank's humour as they know it who call him "The Great
George."
The Humourist (4 vols., 1819-20).
_German Popular Stories_ (2 vols., 1823-4).
_Points of Humour_ (2 vols., 1823-4).
_Mornings at Bow Street_ (1824).
_Greenwich Hospital_ (1826).
_More Mornings at Bow Street_ (1827).
Phrenological Illustrations (1826).
Illustrations of Time (1827).
_Scraps and Sketches_ (4 parts and one plate of an
unpublished 5th part, 1828-9, 1831-2, 1834).
_My Sketch Book_ (9 numbers, with plates dated 1833, 1834, 1835).
_Punch and Judy_ (1828).
_Three Courses and a Dessert_ (1830).
_Cruikshankiana_ (1835).
_The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman_ (1839).
_George Cruikshank's Omnibus_ (9 parts, 1841-2).
The Bachelor's Own Book (1844).
_George Cruikshank's Table Book_ (12 numbers, 1845).
George Cruikshank's Fairy Library (4 parts, 1853-4, 1864).
George Cruikshank's Magazine (2 numbers, 1854).
This list reminds us that, though Cruikshank often conferred a
bibliophile's immortality upon authors more "writative," to quote the
Earl of Rochester, than inspired, he was sometimes the means of
arresting great literary merit on its way to oblivion. A case in point
is William Clarke's "Three Courses and a Dessert," a book of racy
stories containing droll and exquisite cuts by Cruikshank, after rude
sketches by its author, who did Cruikshank the service of accusing
him in "The Cigar" (1825) of being stubbornly modest for half an hour.
Again, we owe to Cruikshank our knowledge of "The Adventures of Sir
Frizzle Pumpkin; Nights at Mess; and Other Tales" (1836), a work of
which I will only say that its anonymous narrative of good luck in
cowardice won a smile from one of the most lovable of poets on the day
she died.
[Illustration: "The Turk's only daughter approaches to mitigate the
sufferings of Lord Bateman." "The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman," 1839.]
"The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman" is one of the puzzles of literature.
Mr Andrew Lang decides that it is a _volkslied_, to which, for the
version of it illustrated by Cruikshank, Thackeray contributed the notes
considered by some to be by Dickens. Mr Blanchard Jerrold thinks "nobody
but Thackeray" could have written the lines about "this young bride's
mother Who never was heard to speak so free," and I think that the notes
are Thackeray's, and the ballad an example of a class of literature from
which Thackeray drew comic inspiration. Cruikshank heard it sung outside
"a wine vaults" (_sic_) at Battle Bridge by a young gentleman called
"The Tripe-skewer." The ballad became part of Cruikshank's repertory. Mr
Walter Hamilton states that Cruikshank sang "Lord Bateman" in the
presence of Dickens and Thackeray "at a dinner of the Antiquarian
Society, with the Cockney mal-pronunciations he had heard given to it by
a street ballad-singer." He adds that Thackeray expressed a wish, which
he allowed Cruikshank to sterilise, to print the ballad with
illustrations. We may therefore suppose, despite the omission of the
notes to Lord Bateman from the "Biographical Edition" of Thackeray's
works, that they are by the author of "The Ballad of Eliza Davis."
Cruikshank, overflowing with lacteal kindness, added three verses to the
"loving ballad" as he heard it, in which the bride who yields place to
the Turk's daughter is married to the "proud porter." Cruikshank's
etchings are charmingly naive and expressive. The bibliophool pays eight
guineas for a first edition, minus the shading of the trees in the plate
entitled _The Proud Young Porter in Lord Bateman's State Apartment_.
"The Bachelor's Own Book" is a story told in pictures and footlines,
both by the artist. The hero is "Mr Lambkin, gent," a podgy-nosed
prototype of Juggins, who amuses himself by the nocturnal removal of
knockers and duly appears in the police court, but is ultimately led to
domestic felicity by the dreary spectacle of a confirmed bachelor alone
in an immense salon of the Grand Mausoleum Club. Some of the
etchings--notably Mr Lambkin feebly revolting against his medicine--are
mirth-provoking, and his various swaggering attitudes are well-imagined.
"Cruikshankiana" conveniently presents a number of George Cruikshank's
caricatures in reprints about a decade older than the plates. The
preface solemnly but with ludicrous inaccuracy states that in each
etching "a stern moral is afforded, and that in the most powerful and
attractive manner."
We are now brought to the conclusion of our most important chapter. Will
Cruikshank's humour live? or, rather, may it live? for things live
centuries without permission, and the fright of Little Miss Muffet is
more remembered than the terror of Melmoth. The answer should be "Yes"
from all who acknowledge beauty in the sparkle of evil and of good. No
humorist worthy of that forbidden fruit which made thieves of all
mankind can refrain from the laughter which is paid for by another.
Mark Twain, who has nerves to thrill for martyred Joan of Arc, delights
in the epitaph, "Well done, good and faithful servant," pronounced over
the frizzled corpse of a negro cook. Lowell, the poet, extracted a pun
from the blind eyes of Milton. _Punch_, in 1905, amused us with the boy
who supposed that horses were made of cats' meat, and in 1905 Sir
Francis Burnand thought that the most humorous pictorial joke published
by him in Punch was Phil May's drawing of a fisherman being invited to
enter the Dottyville Lunatic Asylum. There is heroism as well as
vulgarity in laughter saluting death and patience, hippophagy and
cannibalism, ugliness and deprivation. He is a wise man who sees smiling
mouths in the rents of ruin and the spaces between the ribs of the
skeleton angel. Humour, irresponsible and purposeless, is of eternity,
and to me (at least) it is the one masterful human energy in the world
to-day. It is against compassion and importance and remorse and horror
and blame, but it is not for cruelty, or for indifference to distress.
Nothing exists so separate from truth and falsehood and right and
wrong. Nothing is more instant in pure appeal to the intellect, no
blush is more sincere than that of the person who before company cannot
see a joke. Humorists are dear to the critic because they criticise by
re-making in the world of idea the things they criticise. Among them
Cruikshank is dearer than some, less dear than others. Through the
regency and reign of the eldest son of George the Third he, even more
than Cobbett, seems to me the historian of genius, by virtue of
prodigious merriment in vulgar art. The great miscellany of humour which
he poured out revitalises his name whenever it is examined by the family
of John Bull. For it is his own humour--the humour of one who had the
power to appropriate without disgrace because he was himself an
Original.