Part 6 (1/2)
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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”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 ill.u.s.trated by Cruikshank, Thackeray contributed the notes considered by some to be by d.i.c.kens. Mr Blanchard Jerrold thinks ”n.o.body 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 cla.s.s 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 d.i.c.kens and Thackeray ”at a dinner of the Antiquarian Society, with the c.o.c.kney mal-p.r.o.nunciations 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 ill.u.s.trations. 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 nave and expressive. The bibliophool pays eight guineas for a first edition, minus the shading of the trees in the plate ent.i.tled _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 att.i.tudes 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 m.u.f.fet 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,” p.r.o.nounced 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 s.p.a.ces 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 compa.s.sion 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.
VII
Our cla.s.sification 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 princ.i.p.al was etching.
”O! I've seen Etching!” exclaims Cruikshank in 1859; ”it's easy enough, you only rub some black stuff over the copper plate, and then take a[n]
etching needle, and scratch away a bit--and then clap on some a-ke-ta-ke (otherwise aquafortis)--and there you are!” ”Wash the _steel_,” he says in another of his quaint revelations, ”with a solution of _copper_ in _Nitro[u]s acid_--to _tarnish_ the _tarnation Bright steel_ before Etching, to save the eyes.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: NORNA DESPATCHING THE PROVISIONS. Ill.u.s.trates ”The Pirate,” by Sir Walter Scott, in ”Landscape-Historical Ill.u.s.trations of Scotland, and the Waverley Novels,” 1838.]
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.”
As he had etched about 2700 designs when he made this statement, it is impossible not to sympathise with his recreative change of medium. It must be remembered that, except in dry-point etching, the bite of the acid is trusted to engrave the design of the needle and that, when the stronger lines are obtained ”by allowing the acid to act for a longer time” on a particular part or parts of the etched plate, the mechanical work, and work of calculation, imposed upon the etcher is formidable.