Part 4 (1/2)

Tails not having been invented merely to mitigate the sorrows of Satan, Cruikshank had some more of these appendages to draw when with ”Kit Bam's Adventures” (1849) he entered the fairyland of Mrs Cowden Clarke.

The very rhetorical mariner of that story is remembered for the sake of the tails of mer-children twining about his legs in the frontispiece to it, and human children allow their Louis Wain to wane for a minute as, with Kit Bam, they look at Cruikshank's tortoisesh.e.l.l cat, ruffed and ap.r.o.ned, laying the table while Captain Capsic.u.m, horned and gouty, urbanely watches her.

Naturally Cruikshank desired to a.s.sociate himself permanently with fairy stories better known in England than the name of any folklorist or Perrault D'Armancourt himself. Rusher had published, circa 1814, ”Cinderella” and ”d.i.c.k Whittington” with cuts ”designed by Cruikshank,”

whose prenomen was or was not George; and to George Cruikshank is ascribed by Mr Edwin Pearson some early cuts for ”Mother Hubbard and her Dog.” Each of these ill.u.s.trations could be covered with a quartet of our postage stamps and only those for ”Mother Hubbard,” which are droll and tender, possess more than an antiquarian interest. In 1846, in twelve designs built round the t.i.tle ”Fairy Songs and Ballads for the young ...

By O. B. Dussek ...,” George Cruikshank ill.u.s.trated ”d.i.c.k Whittington,”

”Jack and the Beanstalk,” etc., and was lively and pretty in a wee way.

These were trifles, however, and Cruikshank was ambitious. In 1853-4 and 1864 he flattered his ambition by the issue of ”George Cruikshank's Fairy Library.” Unfortunately Ruskin was displeased with the earlier issues of this ”library,” for in 1857 he forbade his disciples to copy Cruikshank's designs for ”Cinderella,” ”Jack and the Beanstalk” and ”Tom Thumb” [_sic_] as being ”much over-laboured and confused in line.” But on July 30, 1853, Mrs Cowden Clarke begged Cruikshank to allow her to thank him in the name of herself ”and,” writes she, ”the other grown-up children of our family, together with the numerous little nephews and nieces who form the ungrown-up children among us, for the delightful treat you have bestowed in the shape of the 1st No. of the 'Fairy Library.'” This was the maligned ”Hop-o'-my-Thumb,” the pictures of which possess the charm of the artist's ”Pentamerone.” None of Cruikshank's ogres are as horrible as J. G. Pinwell's man-eating giant in ”The Arabian Nights,” and so the ogre in his ”Hop-o'-my Thumb” is merely a glutton with a knife, but what a pa.s.sion of entreaty is expressed in the kneeling children at his feet! The seven-leagued boots are worth all Lilley and Skinner's as, formally introduced, they bow before the smiling king. The architectural effect of the design which, as it were, makes a historian of a tree is admirable. The beanstalk in No. 2 is a true ladder of romance; and, seeing it, I think that Cruikshank escaped from the repugnant vulgarity of G. H. on that May or June day of 1815 when he drew The _Pedigree of Corporal Violet_ (_alias_ Napoleon) as a perpendicular of flowers and fungi and dreamed of the fairy seed he would sow for children. In ”Jack and the Beanstalk” there is not only a fairy plant but a real English fairy gauzy-winged, tiny, with a wand as fine as a needle. Yet Ruskin was displeased, and we may define the fault which caused his displeasure as a finicky unveracity about shade and textures.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OGRE IN THE FORM OF A LION. From George Cruikshank's Fairy Library, ”Puss in Boots,” 1864.]

In 1866, however, Cruikshank executed two plates for Ruskin; one of them ill.u.s.trated ”The Blue Light” from Grimm, the other showed the children of Hamelin following the Pied Piper into the mountain; and in the same year he almost paralleled the success of his fairy cobblers in Grimm by an etching of Pixies engaged in making boots, which he did for Frederick Locker, afterwards Locker-Lampson. In 1868 Cruikshank made the large and beautiful etching ent.i.tled ”Fairy Connoisseurs inspecting Mr Frederick Locker's Collection of Drawings.” Anyone who has read ”My Confidences”

(1896) will acknowledge that it was a happy thought to invite the Little People into Mr Locker-Lampson's library, for this bibliophile, so humorous and elegant, so ready with the exact Latin quotation needed to civilise perfectly the shape of an indecorum, was in essence a child whose toys were consecrated to the fairies by his purity in loving them.

We will take leave of Cruikshank as a fairy artist by a look at a sketch for his picture _The Fairy Ring_. He painted the picture, which is his best oil-painting, in 1855 for the late Henry Miller of Preston, for 800. The sketch referred to sold at Sotheby's in 1903 for 25, 10s.

This sketch--a painting--I saw at the Royal Aquarium, as in a bleak railway station without the romance of travel. The Fairy King stands on a mushroom about which rotate two rings of merrymakers between which run torch bearers. They are mad, these merrymakers, and madness is delight.

Hard by, a towering foxglove leans into s.p.a.ce, bearing two joyous sprites. Gigantic is the lunar crescent that s.h.i.+nes on the scene; it is a gate through which an intrepid fairy rides a bat above the revels. In this impressionistic sketch, Cruikshank shows himself partic.i.p.ant in the mysterious exultation of the open night where man, intruding, feels neither seen nor known. _The Fairy Ring_ belongs to the poetry of humour. It perorates for a supernaturalist whose fas.h.i.+onable ignorance, touched with less durable vulgarity, blinded him to such visions as, in our time, the poet ”A. E.” has depicted. Looking at Cruikshank's supernatural world of littleness and prettiness, of mirth, extravagance, and oddity, we feel in debt to his limitations.

VI

The humour of George Cruikshank deserves separate consideration, because it is essentially the man himself. Despite a technical excellence so peculiar that, according to the author of Number 1 of ”Bursill's Biographies,” the engraver Thompson ”kept a set of special tools, silver-mounted and with ivory handles, sacred for” Cruikshank's designs, his sense of beauty was not eyes to him. Women he usually saw as lard or bone, and this strange perversity of vision and art differentiates him from the moderns by more than time. For instance, the women presented by Mr S. D. Ehrhart and O'Neill Latham (a lady-artist), to mention only two modern humorists, materialise an idea of beauty in humour which was as foreign to Cruikshank as apple-blossom to a _pomme de terre_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A GENTLEMAN'S REST BROKEN (in consequence of going to bed with his leg on). From an etching in ”Sc.r.a.ps and Sketches,” Part 1, 1828.]

Humour with Cruikshank was elemental. A joke was sacred from implication; it was self-sufficient, vocal in line and curve, percussive. He was a contemporary of Douglas Jerrold, who was humorous when he called a town Hole-c.u.m-Corner. He was a contemporary of Thomas Hood, who was humorous when he announced that

”from her grave in Mary-bone They've come and bon'd your Mary.”

He was in that ”world of wit” where they kept a nutmeg-grater on the table in order to say, when a great man was mentioned, ”there's a grater.” He was in a world where professional humour was perversely destructive of faith in imagination.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EXCHANGE NO ROBBERY. From ”Points of Humour,” 1823. The unfaithful wife has concealed her lover in the clock. The husband, who has unexpectedly returned, devours bacon at 1 A.M., while she is in an agony of apprehension.]

But what is humour? Late though the question be, it should be answered.

Humour, then, is the ability to receive a shock of pleasant surprise from sounds and appearances without attributing importance to them. As the proof of humour is physiological, its appeal to the intellect is as peremptory as that of terror. It is a benignant despot which relieves us from the sense of destiny and of duty. Its range is illimitable. It is victoriously beneath contempt and above wors.h.i.+p.

Cruikshank was a humorist who could laugh coa.r.s.ely, broadly, selfishly, merrily, well. Coa.r.s.eness was natural to him, or he would not have selected for a (suppressed) ill.u.s.tration in ”Italian Tales” (1824) a subject which mingles tragedy with the laughter of Cloacina. One can only say that humour, like a sparrow, alights without regard to conventions. The majority can laugh with Rabelais, though they have not the idealism which created Theleme. Jokes that annoy the nose are no longer tolerable in art, but in Cruikshank's time so wholesome a writer as Captain Marryat thought Gillray worth imitating in his translation of disease into terms of humour. Hence _The Headache_ and _The Cholic_ (1819), signed with an anchor (Captain Marryat's signature) and etched by Cruikshank, follow _The Gout_ by Gillray (1799). The reader may well ask if the sight of a hideous creature sprawling on a man's foot is humour according to my definition. I can only presume that in what Mr Grego calls the ”port-wine days,” Gillray's plate was like sudden sympathy producing something so absolutely suitable for swearing at, that patients smiled in easy-chairs at grief.

Broad humour has an eye on s.e.x. The uncle who, on being asked at dinner for an opinion on a lady's costume, observes that he must go under the table to form it, is a type of the broad humorist in modern life.

Cruikshank had none of that tenderness for women's clothes which in modern representation removes altogether the pudical idea from costume and subst.i.tutes the idea of witchery by foam of lace and coil of skirts.

His guffaws and those of Captain Marryat and J. P***y, whose invention exercised his needle, at the Achilles in Hyde Park, in 1822, are vexatious enough to make one wish to restore all fig-leaves to the fig-forest. It is not possible for a man with an indefinite and inexpressible feeling for woman to laugh like that. Hearing his laughter we know that Cruikshank's humour about woman must always be obvious.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”EH., SIRS!” Ill.u.s.trates ”Waverley,” by Sir Walter Scott, in ”Landscape-Historical Ill.u.s.trations of Scotland and the Waverley Novels,” 1836.]

It is, and yet it is not measured by the height of her hat as he depicted it in 1828, when he contributed to that long series of jokes which culminate in Jan Linse's girl at the theatre who will not take her hat off because, ”mamma, if I put it in my lap I can't see myself.” In the annals of absurdity is there anything more worthy to be true at the expense of the British Navy than Cruikshank's picture of the chambermaid confronted with the leg which she has mistaken for a warming-pan?

Another woman, whom Cruikshank compels us to remember by force of humorous idea, is to be found in _Points of Humour_ (1823). She is the doxy in ”The Jolly Beggars,” sitting on the soldier's lap. We see her while she holds up

”her greedy gab Just like ae aumous dish.”