Part 16 (2/2)
”And I thought it was right, as the music was come, To foot it a little in Tabitha's room.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”THE WITCH'S SWITCH.”
”ABSENT-MINDEDNESS.”
”THE TeTE-a-TeTE.”
”THE DENTIST.”
”BAT BOROO.”
SKETCHES FROM GEORGE CRUIKSHANK'S ”THREE COURSES AND A DESSERT.”
_Face p. 175._]
_The Last Cab Driver_ [”Sketches by Boz”] deserves a pa.s.sing notice, because it has preserved from oblivion a cla.s.s of vehicles which has long since disappeared from the London streets. It looked for all the world like the section of a coffin set on end, the seat (which was intended to accommodate only one person besides the driver) occupying the centre. The cabman being a very _mauvais sujet_, we find the surroundings (after the artist's practice) in strict keeping with his character. The building past which he drives is marked ”Old Bailey”; whilst a snuff manufacturer in the street at the back advertises himself as the vendor of ”Real Irish Blackguard.”
WAVERLEY NOVELS.
The dry, quaint humour of the author of ”Waverley” exactly suited the quaint imaginings of our artist. Both Scott and Cruikshank delighted in the supernatural and the marvellous, and this is why some of the most characteristic of the artist's designs are to be found in his ill.u.s.trations to the ”Waverley Novels.” In one of these he shows us the ill.u.s.trious Dominie at the moment, when reaching over to gather a water-lily, he falls souse into the Slough of Lochend, in which he forthwith became bogged up to the middle, his plight drawing from him of course his favourite e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of amazement. By the a.s.sistance of some women the luckless Dominie was extracted from his position, justifying the remark of one of his a.s.sistants, that ”the laird might as weel trust the care of his bairn to a potato-bogle.” Which was the most helpless of the two men--the Laird of Dumbiedikes, or the ill.u.s.trious Dominie--it would be difficult to say; both these most original characters took a powerful hold on the artist's imagination, and as a natural consequence the ideas of Scott were completely realized. A very comical design is that in which he shows us the worthy but witless laird with his laced c.o.c.ked hat and empty tobacco pipe,[89] and his hand extended ”like the claw of a heraldic griffin,” when he managed to utter something beyond his usual morning greeting, and frightened Jeannie into the belief that he had so far ”screwed his courage to the sticking place” as to venture on a matrimonial proposal, to which unwonted effort of imagination his intelligence, however, proved altogether unequal.
ALLITERATIVE DESIGNS.
In the ”Comic Almanack” will be found many examples of George's tendency to graphic alliteration. _The Fall of the Leaf_ affords a capital specimen of the kind of design to which we allude. The leaf of the dinner-table has been so insecurely fastened that it falls, burying with it the mistress of the house, the fish, the champagne, a sherry decanter, a vase of flowers,--everything, in fact, to which it formed a treacherous and unreliable support; Gibbon's ”Decline and Fall” lies in a corner of the room, and the walls are hung with appropriate subjects, such as the Fall of Foyers, the Falls of Niagara, Falls of the Clyde, and so on. An ill.u.s.tration of a similar kind will be found in _Taurus--a Literary Bull_. The animal has rushed into a printing office and scattered the compositors right and left; some seek shelter beneath their frames, one clambers wildly up the shelves of a paper case, while others scuttle over the frames, and one man, too wholly dismayed and bewildered to run, brandishes a stool in helpless imbecility. The bull is perhaps the most astonished of the _dramatis personae_, and evidently wonders into what manner of place fate has brought him. The walls are pasted with appropriate advertis.e.m.e.nts: ”Some Account of the Pope's Bull,” ”A c.o.c.k and Bull Story,” ”Theatre Royal, Haymarket--John Bull”
”To be Sold by Auction, the Bull Inn,” ”Abstract of the Act against Bull-baiting,” and so on. In _Libra Striking the Balance_ (same year), a dishonest tradesman has been detected in using false weights and measures. The beadle holds up a pair of scales, one of which weighs very much heavier than the other. The wretched culprit, conscious, all too late, that honesty would have proved ”the best policy” for himself, leans against his shelves the picture of sullen and detected guilt. The window of the shop bears on it the painted _legend_ of ”The cheapest shop in London.” Leaning against the counter we find a programme of the ”City Theatre,” announcing the performance of ”Measure for Measure”: to conclude with ”Honest Thieves”; an officer outside (surrounded by a deeply interested crowd) is engaged in breaking up a second pair of dishonest scales. Chronology, difference in politics, character, tastes, and disposition, are most amusingly set at defiance in the etching ent.i.tled _The Revolution at Madame Tussaud's_ [1847]: Mary Queen of Scots ”treads a measure” with William Penn the Quaker; Fox and Pitt make long noses at each other from opposite sides of the room; O'Connell shakes hands with Freschi, to whom our old friend the elderly country gentleman offers a friendly pinch of snuff; William Shakespeare flirts with an almond-eyed Chinese woman; Henry the Eighth smokes a long churchwarden with Judge Jefferys; Lord Byron (with greater propriety) exchanges friendly greetings with Jean Jacques Rousseau; whilst the great Napoleon unbends, as chroniclers a.s.sert that he was wont to do, and waltzes round the room with Madame Tussaud, and Britannia (to the uproarious delight of Sir William Wallace) rasps her trident across her s.h.i.+eld, by way of accompaniment to the fiddle of the Saturnine Paganini.
The fun of these side splitting designs is only equalled by their variety. The ”Almanack” of 1838 introduces us to the inevitable row which forms the wind-up of a Hibernian _festa_; chairs, sticks, shovels,--anything that comes to hand is used without fear or favour; men, women, children struggle together in inextricable confusion amidst the _debris_ of wrecked furniture, broken gla.s.s, and battered pewter; high above the din drone the nasal tones of the piper; while amidst the infernal clatter ”the praist” vainly endeavours to re-establish order and make himself heard. _Theatrical Fun Dinner_ (1841) represents the close of the banquet. Hamlet is already too far gone to know what he is doing; Oth.e.l.lo belabours Iago with a bottle; Shylock and Antonio fraternize; whilst a reconciliation is established between Macbeth and Macduff, who c.h.i.n.k gla.s.ses by way of cementing their friends.h.i.+p; Sir John Falstaff lights his pipe at Bardolph's nose; whilst Romeo hands up a gla.s.s of something short and strong to his Juliet in the balcony. 1842 gives us the celebrated etching of ”_Gone!_” an auctioneer ”knocking down” a bust of Socrates; at the word ”_gone_” the flooring gives way, and auctioneer, buyers, and Socrates, with all their surroundings, descend with a simultaneous crash into the cellars below. Drowning men catch at straws, and the spectacled visage of the auctioneer, as he clings wildly to his rostrum, is a perfect study of terrified imbecility.
In looking at these quaint designs, the mind of any one possessed of any imagination at all cannot fail to be impressed with a sense of the original train of thought which must have characterized the man who could conceive and realize them. How appropriately and admirably, even in trivial matters, the details of the design are worked out! If the reader will refer to the etching in ”St. James',” where the sergeant places the boot of his master, the Duke of Marlborough, on a map of Flanders, he will at once see what we mean. The action is accidental; and yet where could the boot have been placed with greater propriety?
for surely if any country was under the heel of the great English captain, it was Flanders. Nothing to equal these designs are ever seen in these days, perhaps nothing like them will ever be seen again. There are many excellent comic designs produced by our artists of to-day; but with the exception, perhaps, of Mr. Caldicott and Colonel Seccombe, they lack _character_. You pa.s.s them by, and straightway forget them. Not so with these admirable little designs; you turn to them again and again, and each time with a refres.h.i.+ng sense of pleasure. Herein seems to lie the power of true genius--that its productions give not only a sense of freshness and delight, but that the sensation so conveyed will not die.
There are people, I believe, on whom they produce no such impression; such people, as regards comic art, are for all practical purposes ”dry bones,” and to dry bones such as these the pencil of ”honest George”
will appeal in vain.
Some writers on the subject of Cruikshank and his work would have us believe that he developed his highest powers of imagination and fancy, and achieved his highest reputation, when depicting subjects of a fairy or supernatural order. Whether these scribes be right or whether they be wrong, there is no doubt that he discovered for himself an enchanted land of mountain and streamlet, of meadow and waterfall, of gnomes and fairies, of demons, witches, and of giants. The process by which he attained his excellence as an ill.u.s.trator of fairy lore and legend has been related by himself in his own simple, unpolished words in the (so-called) ”Fairy Library.” Unquestionably the opportunity which these subjects afforded of exercising untrammelled his marvellous gifts of imagination and fancy, and of realizing objects which owe their being to the creative faculties of his mind, were eagerly embraced by the artist; but, although the results were singularly weird and often very beautiful, I find myself obliged to differ from those who would have us believe that in realizing subjects of this kind he attained his highest excellence. The charm of George Cruikshank's talent lies in the fact that notwithstanding his defects in drawing, _everything_ he took in hand is impressed with the stamp of a strong and original genius; it is like nothing we have seen before; every one of his designs is marked with distinctive features of beauty, quaintness, or originality peculiar to himself.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”THE ELVES AND THE COBBLER.”
”THE WAITS OF BREMEN AND THE ROBBERS.”
FROM GEORGE CRUIKSHANK'S EDITION OF ”GERMAN POPULAR STORIES.”
_Face p. 180._]
The ”German Popular Stories” probably contain the most striking specimens of Cruikshank's power as a designer of _fairy_ subjects. In reference to these ill.u.s.trations, our great critic, Mr. Ruskin, says: ”They are of quite sterling and admirable art, in a cla.s.s precisely parallel in elevation to the character of the tales which they ill.u.s.trate; and the original etchings, as I have before said in the Appendix to my 'Elements of Drawing,' were unrivalled in masterfulness of touch since Rembrandt, in some qualities of delineation unrivalled even by him.” ”_The Two Elves_,”
says Hamerton, ”especially the nearer one, who is putting on his breeches, are drawn with a point at once so precise and vivacious, so full of keen fun and inimitably happy invention, that I have not found their equal in comic etching anywhere ... the picturesque details of the room are etched with the same felicitous intelligence; but the marvel of the work is in the expression of the strange little faces, and the energy of the comical wee limbs.”[90] In _The Witches' Frolic_ [”Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft”], we find a happy blending of the terrible and the grotesque.
Look at the old hags floating out to sea in their tubs; and the strange, uncanny thing with dreadful eyes bobbing up and down midway between the foremost old woman and the distant vessel. The _thing_ may be a s.h.i.+p, it may be a fish, or it may be a fiend,--in the dim half light we cannot tell what,--but it is horribly suggestive of nightmare, and makes one laugh as well as shudder. Some ghostly goblins, the creations of George's weird fancy, will be found in ”The Omnibus”; we see them following a ghostly s.h.i.+p manned by ghostly mariners, and we find in the same book ghostly Dutchmen playing a game of diabolical leap-frog with Australian kangaroos.
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