Mr. Wedmore, in his critical sketch of Cruikshank, has described in a
few pregnant sentences, how in his later days the public fell away from
the great humourist and subtle observer:--
“As time went on apace, neither the passage of time itself, nor the hard
work which crowded the days of his maturity in art, nor the comparative
neglect of the later years, when Cruikshank, no longer quite in the
movement of the day, was solaced by visits in the Hampstead Road,
chiefly of a very few who were collectors of his work, or of some stray
humourist still faithful and confident in the achievement of so many
years ago. As time went on, Cruikshank wore well and slowly, so that it
was truly said of him that he looked as if he had once been very old and
then had forgotten it. Employed no longer in sketching and satirising
the society of which he was hardly any more a part, he betook himself,
a good deal by choice, to work more distinctly ambitious than any he had
attempted when his hand was really the strongest and his brain the
most fertile. He furnished the design for a monument to King Robert the
Bruce. He painted in oils, not only this or that moral lesson, but a
tale of heroism in humble life. No doubt the absence of the knowledge
of academical draughtsmanship told against him not less in 1871 than it
would have done half a century before, and no doubt the absence of any
capacity for the subtle modulations of colour--nay, the absence even of
sensitiveness to these--made his painting in oil a failure when judged
by the side even of quite every-day work by every-day artists. Thus it
was that no fresh honours came to him when he was still eager for them.
The popularity of the great days was a little forgotten by the public
in the presence of the failure of the most recent. And then again,
advertised poverty is never a helpful thing. We worship merit a little,
but success more, and success must have its stamp. The public of
Cruikshank narrowed. Of course critics and journalists--the men whose
business it is to keep in memory some work that the chance public
praises one day and forgets the next--knew that Cruikshank was great,
and how he had been great, and having in more than one notable instance
said so faithfully during his old age, said so again last month, when
he died. And of course, again, so much of his work having become rare,
collectors of it had arisen--curious and anxious seekers, to whose
interest we shall owe the preservation of many of his early and many
even of his riper things. For them, when Cruikshank’s work was pretty
well accomplished, and ‘finis’ seemed about to be written to that
immense volume of production, Mr. G. W. Reid engaged on a task of
care--the great _catalogue raisonné_ in which, with here and there
errors not easily avoided, he has chronicled well-nigh five thousand
designs: ‘the smiling offspring,’ as Thackeray so admirably said
of them, ‘the smiling offspring of painful labour.’ But in the main
Cruikshank was forgotten, and the weekly smiles--feint though now
and again they needs must be, and of indulgence rather than
commendation--which are given by the English public to the efforts of
our youngest English humour, a little trivial and slight, had ceased to
be bestowed on that larger and more massive humourist who lingered from
the past he was part of.”
This is very true, and is a very sad story skilfully told. Think what
would have become of the neglected or forgotten humourist, if, when the
mere laughing public had turned away from him to Leech and Doyle, and
Tenniel and Du Maurier, he had not been fired with the ardour of an
apostle in the cause he had taken up. His Almanac had failed for lack of
readers; and David Bogue had thrown up Cruikshank’s Magazine, after the
second number--convinced that the artist had outlived his public. His
ambition to become a painter was mercifully renewed, with the renewal of
his health and mind, through temperance. Full of vigour he used to say,
“A painter should paint from his shoulder, sir.” He became almost wholly
a serious man in his work, and appealed to a public in a new capacity.
He resolved, stimulated by the success of “The Bottle,” to execute a
great picture that should remain behind him, a monument of his genius,
and an immortal Temperance lesson.
In the early ardour of his second youth he had braced himself to
supply, so far as he might, albeit he had reached his sixtieth year, the
deficiency in his art education, by working as a student at the Royal
Academy. He had, he believed, all his powers unimpaired; why then
should he not yet obtain the academical knowledge, of which he had been
deprived, as he had said bitterly, through the improvident habits of
his whisky-drinking father. Mr. Charles Landseer says: “He entered as
student at the Royal Academy, during my keepership, April 22nd, 1853;
but made very few drawings in the _Antique_, and never got into the
_Life_. He was placed upon the Turner Fund in 1866--£50 per annum. I
have heard that he made an application to Fuseli for admission to the
R.A., and was informed that the school was too full, but that he might
go and draw there if he could find a place.” *
* Letter from Charles Landseer to B. J., Feb. 18, 1878.
This is the brief record of George Cruikshank’s relations with the
Academy. He was past the years when men learn. Time pressed too heavily
upon the elderly man to leave him patience for the slow progress from
the “Antique” to the “Life.” He had been at the “Life” in his own
keen way since he was a boy; and he must be content to paint with the
imperfect but original knowledge which had sufficed for his etchings.
And so he turned to his easel, and painted in oils, with something of
his own inimitable power of concentration and dramatic story-telling,
such subjects as he had treated in earlier days with his etching-needle.
His “Tam o’ Shanter,” “Grimaldi the Clown Shaved by a Girl,” “The
Runaway Knock,” “The Fairy Ring,” “Titania and Bottom the Weaver,”
“Dressing for the Day,” “A New Situation,” and “Disturbing the
Congregation,” were exhibited at the Royal Academy or at the British
Institution; and were welcomed, for the fancy, the life, the humour that
were in them--although they were one and all crude or violent in tone,
and betrayed in every part a hand unpractised with the brush, and an
eye dead to the delicacies of colour. They were, in truth, such bits
of humour or fancy as the master humourist was wont in the old time
to throw off at the rate of two or three in a week--only laboriously
rendered in oils. The Runaway Knock, for instance, might be a plate in
the “Sketch-Book,” or in “Points of Humour”--and the remark applies
to Grimaldi being Shaved by a Girl, and the Disturbing the
Congregation--which latter, to the artist’s great delight, the Prince
Consort, who was one of Cruikshank’s cordial admirers, bought. Some of
these fetched high prices. The Fairy Ring, the most imaginative, and as
a composition the best of Cruikshank’s oil-paintings, painted in
1855, was a commission given to the artist by Mr. Henry Miller, of
Preston--the price being £800. * The fairy revel is full of exquisitely
suggestive bits. The canvas swarms with fairy life, and abounds with
fanciful episodes.
* It is now in the possession of Captain Douglass Kennedy,
of Summerfield, Kirkby-Lonsdale, Mr. Miller’s son-in-law.
The grace and spirit with which the artist could treat fairy or elfin
life may be seen in scores of his earlier works. Look at this “Fairy
Revenge,” from “Scott’s Demonology,” drawn in 1833.
[Illustration: 178]
“The Runaway Knock” is, as the reader will perceive, simply such a
bit of Cruikshankian humour as he had been wont to treat with his
etching-needle. It is full of life and excitement. The entire household,
to the pug puppy-dog, has been aroused; nor could the painter refrain
from throwing life into the carved stone head over the street-door.
Again, “Disturbing the Congregation” is an etching subject, elaborated.
A little boy, in church, has dropped his pegtop, and the awful eye of
the beadle (Cruikshank created the British beadle as a humorous figure)
is upon him. The Prince Consort, whom a genuine bit of humour delighted,
was glad to add this most characteristic Cruikshank to his collection.
Cruikshank’s old friend, Clarkson Stanfield, first persuaded him to
trust himself to oils. In his tinted designs, he showed that sense
of colour which was everywhere manifest in the etchings of his best
time--in his designs to Ainsworth, for instance. The watercolour
drawings for his Walter Scott plates, again, are admirable. * But in
oil, it must be repeated, he failed utterly.
* They were for a long time the property of Mr. Lumley, of
Her Majesty’s Theatre, and on the sale of his effects
passed, fortunately, into the hands of Mr. Ellison, who
bequeathed his collection to the South Kensington Museum.
The touch of the etcher remained. He was hard and crude. The first
painting he exhibited was “Bruce attacked by Assassins”--the Bruce upon
a burlesque horse smothered in drapery! It was exhibited at the Royal
Academy. His next picture was “Moses dressing for the Fair”--a subject
more within his power; but it was coarse, inharmonious, and sketchy. The
wonder was that Cruikshank could not perceive that he was on the
wrong road. So far, however, was he from suspecting this, that he was
constantly meditating great historical subjects; and actually “got
in” upon a spacious canvas the Battle of Agincourt. He even began a
scriptural subject, “Christ riding into Jerusalem.” But the genius that
could realize a street or fairy mob * upon a surface no broader than the
palm of the hand, could not paint a battle-piece. Without his outline
he was all abroad. The sacred subject remained in the studio, with many
other canvases, to the end. It was his “Battle of a Gin Court,” in his
“Sunday in London” that showed the master. He admitted, when it was
suggested to him, that the “etching-point feeling” was always in his
fingers, giving a “living” sensation to the brush, and that he never
could get rid of it. His Falstaff tormented by the Fairies, was, on
the whole, the painting he completed with most thorough satisfaction to
himself.
* “Cruikshank’s crowds give one exactly the impression of
reality. They show a certain monotony, from the common
impulse of the mob, yet they are full of characteristic
figures, no two exactly alike. There is also all the due
sense of air, and motion, and fluctuation about them. They
are penetrable crowds, especially the Irish, which he
delights to draw,--true _mobiles_,--ready to break out into
new mischief, or disperse before the onslaught of the
Saxon.”--Francis Turner Palgrave.
Mr. Wedmore, dwelling on the shortcomings of biographers, complains that
where an artist is the subject they tell “not much of the work he had
planned but never executed; work, nevertheless, on which perhaps he
had set great store, and looked forward to completing, and ‘purposes
unsure.’ ‘That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount.’
“You should see the comedies I have not written,” said a pensive
playwright. Cruikshank was, throughout his life, disturbed by
unfulfilled dreams of great subjects, with which he felt his genius
could cope. He would have grappled with Milton, as we have seen, but
hard fate kept him tied to bread-and-cheese work, and to minor themes.
His “Pilgrim’s Progress” remains unfinished, and, even so far as he
executed it, unpublished. *
* The plates are in the possession of Mr. Truman.
“Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power,
And the lost clue regain?
The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower,
Unfinished must remain.”
It would have gone sadly then, when the publishers could no longer find
profit in his work, when the public had turned from his old-fashioned
humour and fancy, to the fresher and more peaceful, albeit more
circumscribed and less earnest, genius of Leech, had he not been buoyed
up and comforted with the self-imposed mission, for which he had buckled
on new armour, resolved to die fighting in the good cause. And so while
his rival rode prosperously on the fashion of the hour, catching, in the
words of Herrick,
“A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat”--
he ordered a broad canvas to be carried to his modest studio in the
Hampstead Road, and sat himself patiently down--his morrow’s bread
secured by the sympathetic admiration of a few real friends--to build
up that monument of his many-sided genius, his cartoon, composed in the
manner of his master Gillray’s “Democracy, or a Sketch of the Life of
Bonaparte”--in a series of compartments.
The story of the Triumph of Bacchus is honourable to all parties
concerned. On the one hand we find the veteran artist eager to perform
an enduring work in support of the Temperance cause; and on the other a
knot of friends, also good servants of the cause, anxious to put him
in a position to labour in comfort. It has been said the National
Temperance League was the means of giving the great painting
and engraving to the world; but the truth is, that no temperance
association--as an association--took action in the matter. The many
earnest men who have this good cause at heart co-operated in several
ways in furtherance of the artist’s plans; but these plans were actually
directed by a small independent committee, who held on to their task
through many troubles and some disagreements, until the plate was
completed, and the picture was finally made over to the nation.
When Cruikshank had drawn a rough sketch in oils of his design, he
invited a few friends to his house to consult with him as to ways and
means. The gentlemen who met as a committee were Sir Francis Crossley,
John Stewart--the art critic, Mr. Hugh Owen of the Poor Law Board, Mr.
John Taylor, and Mr. W. Tweedie, the publisher. The result of their
consultation was the adoption of a proposal submitted by Mr. Stewart,
who was a fervent admirer and devoted friend of the artist.
George Cruikshank undertook to produce his complete design in
water-colours, from which a steel etching was to be executed. The artist
assumed the entire pecuniary responsibility of the undertaking, on
the condition that his friends would supply him with what he called
“spending money,” or money for his daily wants, while the engraving was
in progress. The advances of his supporters were to be refunded out of
the proceeds of the sale of the plate. On this arrangement Cruikshank
went to work with his usual vigour. The water-colour design was soon
completed, and placed in the hands of Mr. Mottram, the engraver--the
understanding being that the outline of every figure was to be etched
by Cruikshank himself. This laborious work he finally performed, but not
before serious and harmful delays had occurred.
It had been distinctly understood that the great oil painting--the
ultimate form which the design was to take--was not to be begun until
the engraving had been completed; but Cruikshank’s impatience to be at
his _magnum opus_ led him to break through his agreement. A member of
the committee, on calling at his house one morning, found him before
the broad canvas, with the upper row of figures already sketched in. In
reply to remonstrances, he gave the reasonable explanation that no man
could etch all day long. The committee then agreed that he should work
as fast as was prudent at the engraving, and “for rest” take a turn
at the big picture. In order further to encourage him, an honorary
committee of about seventy gentlemen was formed, to promote the
subscription to the engraving. But so engrossed did Cruikshank become in
his oil-painting, that, although he knew that the delay in the print was
destroying the chances of a great subscription list, he never touched an
etching tool until the painting was finally lifted from the easel.
This work was to bring him, not only glory, but fortune. He was
confident that crowds would flock to see it He had visions of policemen
at the door of his gallery to keep off the tumultuous throng. The
advances of his friendly committee exceeded a thousand pounds; but in a
few weeks, he believed, the public, for whom he had been labouring since
the beginning of the century, would fill his coffers, and he would be
able to release himself from his obligations. Flushed with hope, he
wreathed some choice specimens of his early work about the _magnum
opus_, in a little gallery next to the Lyceum Theatre, in Wellington
Street, Strand; and threw open the doors, and summoned the world to
enter. But the world passed his door. *
* It was a bitter pecuniary disappointment also. Cruikshank
believed that he would have excelled as an actor, but his
power amounted to nothing more than the realization of a
burlesque brigand. He was violent, fierce in ridiculous
excess, and extravagant in all his movements. He had always
a yearning for the stage, and thought, as we have seen, of
adopting it as a profession in his youth. He played with the
Charles Dickens troupe in 1848 (Oliver Cob in “Every Man in
his Humour,” Doctor Camphor in “Love and Physic,” and Pistol
in “The Merry Wives of Windsor”), but he could not compare
with such accomplished amateurs as Dickens and Mark Lemon.
He never lost faith, however, in his power; and even late in
life when he contemplated--to compensate for his pecuniary
disappointment with his Triumph of Bacchus--a benefit at
Drury Lane Theatre, he proposed to play Macbeth himself,
saying to a friend, “I will show them how the dagger-scene
_should_ be done.’”
On the 28th of April, 1863, he carried his painting, by command, to
Windsor Castle, for the inspection of the Queen; and he never tired of
talking gratefully and excitedly about the interview, acting with great
solemnity the sweeping bow he made to Her Majesty. But the Queen’s
kindness failed to draw her subjects in the crowds the artist had
expected. Then his trusty friends organised a little _soirée_ in the
exhibition room on the 28th of August, and invited him to deliver a
lecture on his picture, which he did in his own original manner, giving
a reason for every group, almost every figure, upon his crowded canvas.
* Still the laggard public disappointed the expectant veteran, who
had cherished visions of a peaceful close for his life, won by this
extraordinary labour. Kind Thackeray came, with his grave face, and
looked through the little gallery, and went off to write one of his
charming essays, which appeared in the Times (May 15,1863). He said:--
* See Appendix I.
“In a quiet little room in Exeter Hall a veteran lecturer is holding
forth all day upon a subject which moves his heart very strongly. His
text, on which he has preached before in many places, is still ‘The
Bottle.’ He divides his sermon into many hundreds of heads, and preaches
with the most prodigious emphasis and grotesque variety. He is for no
half measures. He will have no compromise with the odious god Bacchus;
the wicked idol is smashed like Bel and Dagon. He will empty into
the gutter all Master Bacchus’s pipes, his barrels, quarter-casks,
demijohns, gallons, quarts, pints, gills, down to your very smallest
liqueur glasses of spirits or wine. He will show you how the church,
the bar, the army, the universities, the genteel world, the country
gentleman in his polite circle, the humble artisan in his, the rustic
ploughman in the fields, the misguided washerwoman over her suds and
tubs--how all ranks and conditions of men are deteriorated and corrupted
by the use of that abominable strong liquor: he will have patience with
it no longer. For upwards of half a century, he says, he has employed
pencil and pen against the vice of drunkenness, and in the vain attempt
to shut up drinking shops and to establish _moderate drinking as
a universal rule_; but for seventeen years he has discovered that
teetotalism, or the total abstaining from all intoxicating liquors,
was the only real remedy for the entire abolition of intemperance. His
thoughts working in this direction, one day this subject of ‘the Worship
of Bacchus’ flashed across his mind, and hence the origin of a work of
art measuring 13 ft. 4 in. by 7 ft. 8 in., which has occupied the author
no less than a year and a half.
“This sermon has the advantage over others, that you can take a chapter
at a time, as it were, and return and resume the good homilist’s
discourse at your leisure. What is your calling in life? In some part
of this vast tableau you will find it is _de te fabula_. In this
compartment the soldiers are drinking and fighting; in the next the
parsons are drinking ‘Healths to the young Christian.’ Here are the
publicans, filthily intoxicated with their own horrible liquors; yonder
is a masquerade supper, ‘where drunken masquerade fiends drag down
columbines to drunkenness and ruin.’ Near them are ‘the public singers
chanting forth the praises of the “God of Wine.”’ ‘Is it not marvellous
to think,’ says Mr. Cruikshank in a little pamphlet, containing a
speech by him which is quite as original as the picture on which it
comments,--‘Is it not marvellous what highly talented poetry and what
harmonious musical compositions have been produced, from time to time,
in praise of this imaginative, slippery, deceitful, dangerous myth?’
“‘This myth,’ the spectator may follow all through this most wonderful
and labyrinthine picture. In the nursery the doctor is handing a pot of
beer to mamma; the nurse is drinking beer; the little boy is crying for
beer; and the papa is drawing a cork, so that ‘he and the doctor may
have a drop.’ Here you have a group of women, victims of intemperance,
‘tearing, biting, and mutilating one another.’ Yonder are two of the
police carrying away _a drunken policeman_. Does not the mind reel and
stagger at the idea of this cumulated horror? And what is the wine which
yonder clergyman holds in his hand but the same kind of stuff which has
made the mother in the christening scene above ‘so tipsy that she has
let her child fall out of her lap, while her idiotic husband points to
his helpless wife, and exclaims, “Ha, ha; she’s dr-unk’”?”
And then Thackeray appealed to the public to come and be grateful to the
painter:--
“With what vigour, courage, good-humour, honesty, cheerfulness, have
this busy hand and needle plied for more than fifty years! From 1799, *
when about eight or nine years of age,’ until yesterday, the artist has;
never taken rest. When you would think he might desire quiet, behold he
starts up lively as ever, and arms himself to do battle with the
demon drunkenness. With voice and paint-brush, with steel-plate and
wood-block, he assails ‘that deceitful, slippery, dangerous myth!’ To
wage war against some wrong has been his chief calling; and in lighter
moments to waken laughter, wonder, or sympathy. To elderly lovers of
fun, who can remember this century in its teens and its twenties, the
benefactions of this great humourist are as pleasant and well remembered
as papa’s or uncle’s ‘tips’ when they came to see the boys at school.
The sovereign then administered bought delights not to be purchased by
sovereigns of later coinage, tarts of incomparable sweetness which are
never to be equalled in these times, sausages whose savour is still
fragrant in the memory, books containing beautiful prints (sometimes
ravishingly coloured) signed with the magic initials of the incomparable
‘G. Ck.’ No doubt the young people of the present day have younger
artists to charm them; and many hundred thousand boys and girls are
admiring Mr. Leech, and will be grateful to him forty years hence, when
their heads are grey. These will not care for the Cruikshank drawings
and etchings as men do whose boyhood was delighted by them; but the
moderns can study the manners of the early century in the Cruikshank
etchings, as of the French Revolution period in Gillray, Woodward,
Bunbury.”
Still the public, the paying public, held back.
Mr. Francis Turner Palgrave took up the Exhibition in the _Saturday
Review_, and thought it necessary to reintroduce Cruikshank to the
British public: “Old George Cruikshank has been old George Cruikshank,”
he said, “any time during the last thirty years to those whose nursery
days date so far back. Indeed, we have heard his illustrations to
_Grimm’s Fairy Stories_ spoken of as the delight of their youth by some
whose childhood dates forty years ago, whilst the similar labour of
love which he has devoted to _Jack and the Beanstalk_ is the thumbed
and tattered darling of many who do not yet aspire to rank in the rising
generation. He must, in fact, be old George Cruikshank, we are afraid,
in the number of his years; yet our century has seen no better example
of that ever-youthfulness which is one of the most frequent and least
doubtful signs of genuine genius. That the name of Cruikshank deserves
to be coupled with this epithet has never been dubious to those who,
looking beyond certain mannerisms and limitations in his power as an
artist, can appreciate high gifts to move both tears and laughter,
exhibited on however small and unpretending a scale; or who can value
downright originality, expressing itself in its own manner, irrespective
of popular fashion; or who are aware what peculiar skill he has reached
as an etcher.”
But the _opus Georgii_ had been scattered through modest ways, in
children’s books, title-pages to forgotten music, ephemeral pamphlets,
mediocre works, or romances of passing popularity, as well as in the
pages of Fielding, Smollett, Grimm, Scott, and Dickens. Nearly thirty
years had passed over his head since he illustrated “Oliver Twist”; and
so the crowd passed by his sterling excellence, and, in the old fashion,
turned “to some loud trumpet-blowing hero of the hour.”
[Illustration: 196]
I remember seeing him standing in his exhibition room. It was empty.
There was a wild, anxious look in his face, when he greeted me. While we
talked, he glanced once or twice at the door, when he heard any sound in
that direction. Were they coming at last, the tardy, laggard public for
whom he had been bravely toiling so many years? Here was his last mighty
labour against the wall, and all the world had been told that it was
there. His trusty friend Thackeray had hailed it in the _Times_. A great
committee of creditable men had combined to usher it with pomp into the
world. All who loved and honoured and admired him had spoken words of
encouragement. Yet it was near noon, and only a solitary visitor had
wandered into the room. Thackeray might well say, “How little do we
think of the extraordinary powers of this man, and how ungrateful we are
to him!”
I was reminded of a visit I had paid years before to a room in the
Egyptian Hall, where Haydon, wild and lowering, lingered by his
pictures, a solitary, almost heart-broken man. In a letter he said that
Douglas Jerrold was one of the two or three who answered his summons to
Piccadilly. But it was I, then a young art-student, who had begged my
father’s ticket, and stood for him, in the empty Haydon gallery. It
was thus, with a sinking at the heart, that I went away from Wellington
Street.
In order to make the exhibition more attractive, Mr. John Taylor
suggested to Cruikshank that he should group around him a complete
collection of his art work of sixty years; his original water-colour
sketches of the Miser’s Daughter, the Tower of London, the Irish
Rebellion, and indeed a selection from the rich store he had garnered in
his home, in the hope that he should be able to leave a complete record
of his long art-life as a legacy to his country.
[Illustration: 199]
This was the origin of the collection which was ultimately bought by
the Aquarium Company, and is now, unfortunately, huddled in a corner of a
gallery of their building.
From Wellington Street the Cruikshank exhibition was transported late in
1863 to Exeter Hall. All who knew the worth of Cruikshank’s genius
went, and were delighted; but Cruikshank was made to see that the new
generation had turned irrevocably to other and less gifted favourites,
and that he had outlived his popularly with the multitude. * As one of
the committee remarks, “The public neither spake nor moved.”
* “The Triumph of Bacchus” was taken afterwards through the
provinces; and although the provincials in many places gave
it a heartier welcome than it had obtained in London, the
upshot of the speculation was that the expenses of
exhibition were barely covered.
And yet Cruikshank, although burdened with the pecuniary liability
which he had incurred, and which had continuously increased while the
exhibition was in progress, set himself down with heroic fortitude to
complete the etching. “Following the big picture painfully, wearily,”
one of the committee writes, “the etching was at last completed; but
the long delay had damped the ardour of subscribers. The engraving is a
noble work, unique as a steel etching in its great size and multiplicity
of figures. Each one is complete; nothing is scamped. Its power as a
teacher has yet to be fully felt.”
Yet etching and picture brought only heart-aches to the artist. Both
were got through under the pressure of grave money complications. Now
the water-colour drawing had to be made over to Mr. Samuel Gurney, as an
equivalent for the £400 which he had contributed towards the “spending
money” fund; now the collection was pledged to another friend; now
the artist found himself deeper in the books of Mr. W. Tweedie, his
publisher; and now the plate and engravings were made over to the
“spending money” committee, to recoup them for their advances. There
were bickerings--nay, there were absolute quarrels, in the course of
these entanglements; for Cruikshank was an unmanageable business man,
and prone, as we have seen, to fall out even with his most devoted
friends. Still there was so much that was good and lovable in him, that
they bore with his foibles and his outbursts, and remained willing to
help the brave old man again. His admirer, Mr. Raskin, and his secretary
or representative, Mr. Howell, with others, got up a testimonial which
cast something approaching a thousand pounds into Cruikshank’s lap, and
at the same time they offered him five guineas apiece for such little
thumb-nail water-colour drawings of fairies as he could throw off at
least by the half-dozen in the week. But Cruikshank was fevered with
mighty ideas, harassed by complicated monetary transactions, and at the
same time elated by dreams of a great national transaction which was
to put him clear of the world, and at ease in a serene light of steady
popularity. An art union of his works was talked about; but it fell
through. But no good end could be served by a minute account of
the projects and counterprojects which arose around the “Triumph of
Bacchus.”
The painting and the etching consumed nearly three busy years of the
artist’s life; and his pecuniary reward was exactly £2,053 7s. 6d. as
Mr. Tweedie’s ledger shows.
Of the art merits of this great cartoon the critics have pronounced many
clashing opinions. “I think, on the whole,” Mr. Sala says, “looking
at the amount of sheer labour in the picture, the well-nigh incredible
multiplicity of figures, and the extreme care with which the minutest
details have been delineated by a hand following the eye of a man past
threescore years and ten, the ‘Triumph of Bacchus’ must be regarded as a
phenomenon. Its pictorial merit is slight; but it possesses and commands
interest of a very different nature from that excited by a mere picture,
when we remember the painter’s purpose, and the tremendous moral lesson
he sought to teach. It is an eloquent protest against the
drinking customs of society, and a no less eloquent--and terribly
ghastly--exposition of the evils wrought on that same society by the
vice of drunkenness.”
If for no other reason than to do honour to George Cruikshank, it is
well that this monument of work by an earnest old man has found its way
to South Kensington, having been presented to the nation by a committee
of subscribers, one of whom contributed a cheque for £800. Here,
according to many Temperance authorities, it has ir made converts.
A member of the Cruikshank committee writes: “An actor one day stood
before the painting at South Kensington, gazing at it, and taking in its
sad history, till, bursting into tears, he left the museum, took a
cab direct for Mr. Cruikshank’s house, and signed the pledge for three
years. Dr. Richardson told the other day of a clergyman who was
pulled up by the vestry scene. Though the public did not patronise the
exhibition, yet the warmest commendations of the picture have come from
non-abstainers, and for this cause I suspect that the argument of the
picture was to them a new idea never before fully considered.”
Mr. John Stewart’s estimate of his friend’s work is technically the most
satisfactory verdict which has been written. “As a whole the ‘Bacchus’
is easily described, although ‘none but itself can be its parallel.’
It is the province of genius to make rules where there are none, but as
truth is a consistent whole, true genius bends the rule it makes into
harmony with those already in existence; and in nothing has the artist
been more successful than in combining his novel creation with the
recognised canons of art. This was a daring effort; and, however
hyper-criticism might carp or ignorance may sneer at details, nothing
but the feeling of a poet, which enables him to compose with a poet’s
facility, could have sustained the effort so successfully. The general
composition contains all the elemental types of pictorial grouping,
generalised on the two axioms of balance and variety. So fully has the
artist carried out this subtle truth of art--because an essential truth
of nature--that it would not be difficult to point out every principle
Haydon could extract from the combined works of Raphael successfully
modified by Cruikshank to build up and support this picture. The
horizontal is represented by the groups in the immediate foreground; the
pyramidal by the Bacchus, Silenus, and Bacchante; the circular by
the publicans, and repeated by the widows and orphan children; the
perpendicular by the saloons of high life introduced on either side: and
these are repeated out and still out, till the art which produced them
is lost in the higher art necessary to hide the method of production.
“What is true of the picture as a whole is still more visible in the
individual groups. These, however, must be seen to be appreciated, for
they cannot be described in words, not even by George Cruikshank. But
this may be affirmed without hesitation, that no other artist in Britain
or in Europe could have produced the same variety of incident, action,
and expression--that is, the same amount and quality of thought, in the
same period of time--as Cruikshank has displayed in this ‘Triumph of
Bacchus.’ The number that could have done it at all is easily counted,
and they--artists like Frith--knowing most fully the difficulties, are
most enthusiastic in their admiration of the genius and devotion by
which Cruikshank has worked and conquered. True, the work wants
finish, but this want is most felt by those ignorant enough to confound
smoothness and prettiness with finish; but a lifetime would be too short
to finish such pictures up to their standard, and they should understand
that the artist never intended to finish after their fashion. His
objects were entirely different: first, to produce his thoughts in a
style that could be seen by an audience at a distance; and second, using
the work in oil as a basis and a guide for the etching and engraving
the more permanent work which is now in preparation. In the first the
success is greater than the greatest smoothness could have given, and
it would be as reasonable to blame Rembrandt for not finishing those
studies in oil he painted to etch from, as to blame Cruikshank for
following Rembrandt’s example. With this ‘Triumph of Bacchus,’ as with
Yan Ryan’s ‘Hundred Guilders,’ the etching--the print--is the true
completion of the work; while the picture is only a portion of the
preparatory means to the nobler and more enduring end and aim. It is
different with artists whose works, if engraved, must be translated from
paintings into prints by others--often by those with little sympathy for
the subject or the style in which it has been treated by the painter.
Such pictures, however highly finished, lose much that is valuable
in process of translation. With etchers like Rembrandt or Cruikshank,
however diverse their styles, they have this in common, that their
prints are more perfect than the pictures from which they are produced,
because the artist is perfecting his idea while elaborating his
plate. The shrewd old Dutch burgomasters, alive to this fact, secured
Rembrandt’s most matured works by subscribing for impressions of his
plates, and the wisest admirers of Cruikshank’s genius are following the
same course, not doubting that his finished etching of this great work
will be the most finished embodiment of his grand idea.”
[Illustration: 208]