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Ebook has 359 lines and 34909 words, and 8 pages

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.

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.

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 , 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" 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" two elephants laugh together over a pseudopun on the word trunk.

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 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" ,

"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 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."

Our classification of Cruikshank's works has enabled us to see the objective range of his artistic personality. A few words must now be said of the media in which he worked. Of these media the principal was etching.

In his 77th year he says: "I am working away as hard as ever at water color drawings and paintings in oil, doing as little Etching as possible as that is very slavish work."

To do him justice he was academically interested in the whole technique of pictorial art as practised in his day. He admitted, for instance, to Charles Hancock, "the sole inventor and producer of blocks by the process known as 'Etching on Glass,'" that if this invention had come earlier before him "it would have altered the whole character" of his drawing, though the designs which he produced by Hancock's process--the first of which was completed in April 1864--include nothing of importance.

We will not further linger over the media of reproduction employed by our artist, but summon a few ideas suggested by the vision we have had of him sitting like a schoolboy in the schoolroom of the Royal Academy.

"Prone on the flood, extended long and large, Lay floating many a rood."

Cruikshank's greatest enemy was his mannerism which may even delude the pessimist of scant acquaintance with him into the idea that it imperfectly disguises an inability to draw up to the standard of Vere Foster. The Cruikshankian has merely to direct the attention of such a person to the frontispiece executed by Cruikshank for T. J. Pettigrew's "History of Egyptian Mummies" . If a man can draw well in the service of science his mannerism is the accomplishment of an intention.

Ruskin said that Cruikshank's works were "often much spoiled by a curiously mistaken type of face, divided so as to give too much to the mouth and eyes and leave too little for forehead," and yet there is extant a curious MS. note by Cruikshank to the effect that Mr Ruskin's eyes were "in the wrong Place and not set properly in his head," showing that Cruikshank was a student of even a patron's physiognomy and suggesting that, if Ruskin had roamed in Cruikshank's London he would have convicted the artist of a malady of imitativeness. It must be remembered that he repeatedly drew recognisable portraits of his contemporaries; indeed he was so far from being a realist devoted to libel that Mr Layard confides to us that various studies by George Cruikshank of "the great George" would, he thinks, "have resulted in an undue sublimation had completion ever been attained."

Yet the sublimation of the respectable is precisely the rosy view of Cruikshank the man enjoyed by me at the present moment. He is Captain of the 24th Surrey Rifle Volunteers; he is Vice-President of the London Temperance League. He sketches a beautiful palace as a pastime. He is in the same ballroom as Queen Victoria, and Her Majesty bows to him. Withal he is sturdy and declines the Prince Consort's offer for his collection of works by George Cruikshank. In the end St Paul's Cathedral receives him, and the person who knew him most intimately declares on enduring stone that she loved him best.

We are now at the end, and cannot stimulate the muse of our prose to further efforts. She being silent obliges our blunt British voice to speak for itself. Inasmuch as Cruikshank was a mannerist, he is inimitable except by them who take great pains to vex the critical of mankind. Inasmuch as he expressed the beauty of crookedness, as though he found the secret of artistic success in punning on his own name, he offers a model worthy of practical study. His fame as an etcher is too loud to be lost in the silence of Henri Beraldi, who enumerated "Les graveurs du dix-neuvi?me si?cle," in 12 tomes , without mentioning his name. Though C is more employed in the initials of words than any other letter in our alphabet, the name of Cruikshank comes only after "Curious" in its attractiveness for the readers of entries under the letter C in English catalogues of second-hand books. It may be that to etchings in books of Cruikshank's period is ascribed, since the usurpation of the process-block, the factitious value of curios, and that he, Beraldi's Great Omitted, profits thereby. It is a fact that he is "collected" like postage-stamps, though no published work of his has attained the price per copy of the imperforate twopenny Mauritius of 1847. But we have descended to a comparison so unfortunate in its logical consequences that it is well to prophesy the immortality of Cruikshank from other than commercial tokens. Those tokens exist in the undying praises of Dickens, Thackeray, "Christopher North," and Ruskin, in the enormous work of his principal bibliographer George William Reid, and, not least to the spiritual eye, in the permanence of the impression made by a few of his designs on a memory that has forgotten a little of that literary art which is the only atonement offered by its owner to the world for all the irony of his requickened life.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX

Adam-tilers. An Adam-tiler is a receiver of stolen goods, a pickpocket, a fence, 103.

A. E. , 161.

"Ainsworth's Magazine: a Miscellany of Romance, General Literature, and Art. Edited by William Harrison Ainsworth" , 86, $, 90, $, 93, 137.

Albert Memorial, 43.

Alfieri, 72.

Andersen, Hans Christian, 36.

"Angelo's Picnic; or, Table Talk, including numerous Recollections of Public Characters, who have figured in some part or another of the stage of life for the last fifty years; forming an endless variety of talent, amusement, and interest, calculated to please every person fond of Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes. Written by Himself.... In addition to which are several original literary contributions from the following Distinguished Authors:--Colman, Theodore Hook, Bulwer, Horace Smith, Mrs Radcliffe, Miss Jane Porter, Mrs Hall, Kenny, Peake, Boaden, Hermit in London, &c." , 5$.

"Annals of Gallantry, or the Conjugal Monitor," by A. Moore, LL.D. , 70-71.

"Arabian Nights" , 156.

Arnold, Matthew, 69.

"Arthur O'Leary: His Wanderings and Ponderings in many Lands. Edited by his Friend, Harry Lorrequer, and Illustrated by George Cruikshank. In Three Volumes" , 196.

"Artist and the Author. A Statement of Facts, by the Artist, George Cruikshank. Proving that the Distinguished Author, Mr W. Harrison Ainsworth, is 'labouring under a singular delusion' with respect to the origin of 'The Miser's Daughter,' 'The Tower of London,' &c." , 60.

"Art Journal ," 184.

"Athenaeum ," 82.

"Attic Miscellany," 11.

"Bachelor's Own Book. The Adventures of Mr Lambkin, Gent., in the Pursuit of Pleasure and Amusement, and also in search of Health and Happiness" , 232-233.

Baker, A. Z., 212.

Ballooning, 40.

"Bands in the Parks. Copy of a letter supposed to have been sent from a High Dignitary of the Church to 'the Right Man in the Right Place,' upon the subject of the military Bands Playing in the Parks on Sundays. Picked up and published by George Cruikshank" , 59.

Bank of England, 28.

Bank Restriction Note , 28.

Bartholomew Fair, 39.

Bayly, Thomas Haynes , 216.

Beachy Head, 108.

"Bee and the Wasp. A Fable--in verse. With designs and etchings, by G. Cruikshank" , 148.

Beerbohm, Max, 22.

Belch, W, 12.

Bentley, Richard, publisher , 86.

Bentley's Miscellany , 74 , 133 , 175 .

Beraldi, Henri, 248, 251.

Bergami, Baron Bartolomo, 26.

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