Part 7

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."

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.

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.

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 encyclopædias. 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."

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.

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.

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).

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.

"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 naïve 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."