Part 6 (2/2)
Until, in the late seventies of the nineteenth century, the invasion of the process-block gave manual freedom to the bookseller's artist, that individual was continually sighing over the complexity of the method by which he paid the tribute of his imagination to Mammon. In the hands of the wood-engraver an artist's unengraved work was apparently always liable to the danger of misrepresentation unless the artist engraved it himself. Even the great John Thompson is not free from the suspicion of having unconsciously a.s.sisted ”demon printers” in transforming into ”little dirty scratches” some designs by Daniel Maclise, whose expressions are preserved in this sentence. Cruikshank who, if we add his woodcuts to his etchings, saw upwards of 4000 designs by him given with laborious indirectness to the world, would have been more than human if he had considered his unskilfulness in the art of producing and employing the colours between black and white as a reason for refraining from painting in oils. In 1853 ”he entered as a student at the Royal Academy”; but his industry, in the role of a pupil of 60, was, it seems, less than his humility, for ”he made very few drawings in the _Antique_,” says Mr Charles Landseer, ”and never got into the _Life_.”
Cruikshank, however, had exhibited in the Royal Academy as early as 1830, and in 1848 he dared to paint for the Prince Consort the picture ent.i.tled _Disturbing the Congregation_. This picture of a boy in church looking pa.s.sionately unconscious of the fact that his sacrilegious pegtop is lying on the grave of a knight in full view of the beadle, is an anecdote painted more for G.o.d to laugh at than for Christians of the ”so-called nineteenth century,” but a philosophic sightseer like myself rejoices in it. This picture and _The Fairy Ring_, already praised, reveal Cruikshank's talent sufficiently to prevent one from regretting that he ultimately preferred covering canvases to furrowing plates.
[Ill.u.s.tration: (_a_) CRUSOE'S FARMHOUSE.
(_b_) CRUSOE IN HIS ISLAND HOME.
From ”Robinson Crusoe,” 1831.]
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 Hanc.o.c.k, ”the sole inventor and producer of blocks by the process known as 'Etching on Gla.s.s,'” 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 Hanc.o.c.k'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.
As a draughtsman he had been professorial in 1817 when he published with S. W. Fores two plates ent.i.tled _Striking Effects produced by lines and dots for the a.s.sistance of young draftsmen_, wherein he showed, like Hogarth, the amount of pictorial information which an artist can convey by a primitively simple method. He was professorial, too, when in 1865 he attempted to put in perspective a twelve mile giant taking a stride of six miles, on a plate 6 inches long and 3-3/5 inches broad, and informed the publisher of ”Popular Romances of the West of England”
(1865) that about 1825 he had attempted to put in perspective the Miltonic Satan whose body
”p.r.o.ne 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” (1834). If a man can draw well in the service of science his mannerism is the accomplishment of an intention.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE VETERANS. From ”Songs, Naval and National, of the late Charles Dibden,” 1841.]
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 st.u.r.dy 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: VIGNETTE. From ”Peeps at Life,” by the London Hermit (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co.), engraved by Bolton, 1875.]
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-neuvieme siecle,” in 12 tomes (1885-1892), 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 fact.i.tious 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 d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, ”Christopher North,” and Ruskin, in the enormous work of his princ.i.p.al 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.
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