The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life Of George Cruikshank, Vol. II. (of
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Title: The Life Of George Cruikshank, Vol. II. (of II)
The Life Of George Cruikshank In Two Epochs, With Numerous Illustrations
Author: Blanchard Jerrold
Illustrator: George Cruikshank
Release Date: January 23, 2014 [EBook #44742]
Last Updated: December 11, 2016
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, II ***
Produced by David Widger
THE LIFE
of
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK
By BLANCHARD JERROLD
Illustrations by GEORGE CRUIKSHANK
In Two Volumes—Volume Two
1882
CONTENTS
THE LIFE OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK.
EPOCH I. (continued).
CHAPTER XI. THE COMIC ALMANAC.
CHAPTER XII. LORD BATEMAN AND THE TABLE BOOK.
EPOCH II. 1848—1878.
CHAPTER I. AT GILLRAY’s GRAVE.
CHAPTER II. THE BOTTLE.
CHAPTER III. GEORGE CRUIKSHANK AS A TEETOTALER.
CHAPTER IV. THE TRIUMPH OF BACCHUS.
CHAPTER V. “FRAUDS ON THE FAIRIES” AND “WHOLE
HOGS.”
CHAPTER VI. A SLICE OF BREAD AND BUTTER.
CHAPTER VII. CRUIKSHANK’S LAST TWENTY YEARS.
CHAPTER VIII. THE END.
ADDITIONAL IMAGES:
THE LIFE OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK.
EPOCH I. (continued).
CHAPTER XI. THE COMIC ALMANAC.
In 1835 the late Mr. Tilt, publisher, of Fleet Street, started the Comic
Almanac, and engaged George Cruikshank to illustrate it. It was a happy
idea, exactly suited to the more popular side of the mood and genius of
the artist; and Cruikshank entered upon his task with zest For nineteen
years this annual comic and satirical commentary on passing and probable
events, not only furnished him with a regular income, giving him work on
which he might reckon with certainty in estimating his very fluctuating
resources; but it afforded him the opportunity, in which he always
delighted, of recording in his own quaint, original manner, his opinions
on the questions of the day.
In the nineteen volumes to which the Almanac ran, there are nearly two
hundred and fifty etchings by him; and among these there are some of his
happiest bits of observation, of his shrewdest exposures of folly and vice
and cant, and of his original fancy. After looking over these nineteen
volumes, and noticing that the wit and earnestness of purpose are as fresh
and strong in that of 1853 as in the first volume, the reader cannot
refuse to endorse what Thackeray said of Cruikshank’s humour—viz.,
that it is so good and benevolent, any man must love it. While in his
illustrations of books the many-sided artist continued to express his
serious or tragic power, which Mr. Ruskin has asserted to be as great as
his grotesque power, though warped by “habits of caricature”; in these
pleasant annual volumes, in the letterpress of which he had the assistance
of his friends, Thackeray, Gilbert à Beckett, Albert Smith, Robert Brough,
Horace and Henry Mayhew, he maintained his original popularity with the
laughter-loving sections of the British public.
In 1835, when the first almanac appeared, the water cure was amusing the
public. Cruikshank’s first plate shows one enthusiast under the
water-butt, another under a burst water-pipe, and a third in an elegant
attitude, being pumped upon by his servant, and remarking, “Well, I could
not have supposed that being ‘pumped upon’ was such a luxury! and so
invigorating! And to think that so good a thing should hitherto have been
thrown away upon qui tam attorneys, sprained ankles, and
pickpockets!” Then Mr. Rigdum Funnidos (originated by the late Mr.
Vizetelly, I am informed by his son Henry), enters upon the scene, and
continues year after year to be the nom de plume of a succession of
wits and humourists; and Cruikshank unfolds his series of plates of the
months, each season being indicated by some humorous incident or some
happy notes of observation of our London streets. The ice-carts and slides
of January; the muddy streets and bustling postmen of St. Valentine’s day,—how
unlike (with their great leather bags) the postmen of our day! the winds
of March outside Mr. Tilt’s shop, blowing even a dog’s tail over his back;
showery April, with a wonderful group of Cockneys standing up; the sweeps
of Mayday; June, at the Royal Academy—a bit of Cruikshank at his
brightest; July, in Vauxhall Gardens, with the band in cocked hats, and
the famous master of the ceremonies in pumps; Cruikshank’s old friend, the
dustman, eating his first oyster in August; Greenwich Fair in September;
going into the country by the stage coaches in October; Guy Fawkes in
November; and the Christmas pudding, with a laughing company welcoming it,
in December. As pictures of the humorous side of London life upwards of
forty years ago, these spirited etchings, which teem with life, are
invaluable.
The fun of Mr. Rigdum Funnidos was of a kind that has found many
imitators. In the “proceedings of learned societies” we find that the
fossil remains of an antediluvian pawnbroker had been dug up within a mile
of Hog’s Norton; that a successful method of converting stones into bread
has been transmitted to the New Poor Law Commissioners, and a
three-and-sixpenny medal presented to the ingenious discoverer thereof;
then that a laborious investigator has reckoned that there are exactly
nine millions, one hundred and sixty-four thousand, five hundred and
thirty-three hairs on a tom-cat’s tail, which he defies all the zoologists
of Europe to disprove. Later on (1839) Thackeray contributed “Stubbs’
Diary” and “Barber Cox, or the Cutting of his Comb,” to the pages of
Funnidos. From the first, Cruikshank hit hard at quacks and shams. The
first almanac has an “advertisement extraordinary” of the “British Humbug
College of Health,” and some amusing testimonials from Gudgeon and
Gosling, who have been cured by “Morising Pills.” The moral at the close
of the almanac is, “While we venerate what is deserving of veneration, let
us not forget that quackery, knavery, bigotry, and superstition always
merit exposure and castigation.”
The versatility and the perennial vigour and vivacity of Cruikshank’s
genius is nowhere more strikingly displayed than in the variety with which
he has treated of the seasons in the Comic Almanac. One year March is
illustrated by a meeting of workmen going to work, and roysterers
returning home, day and night being nearly equal. Next March the cook is
tossing pancakes. April is now shown upon the famous hill in Greenwich
Park, and now in a wet return from the races. One November we have Lord
Mayor’s Day, with one of Cruikshank’s dense crowds, and the next year we
are treated to a delicious bit of humour.
Guys in council over the gunpowder plot May now famishes the artist with
one of his happiest bits of suburban scenery, “all a-growing,”—a
housewife exchanging old garments for spring flowers; and now such a crowd
of lean-shanked charity boys, with such a beadle as only the “inimitable
George” could draw before Leech’s time, are beating the bounds. July
furnishes a whimsical scene of the dog-days—with London dogs
fighting, drawing carts, playing Toby in a Punch and Judy show, running
under a truck, and an aristocratic dog looking haughtily down from a
first-floor window. (Landseer took more than one hint from Cruikshank’s
animals.) June “down at Beulah,” a December dance; May “settling for the
Derby”—a wonderful assemblage of broad and long faces; July at the
seaside, with cockneys donkey-riding—“long days and long ears;” a
November fog; December—“a swallow at Christmas,” a procession of the
many substantial items of Christmas cheer, making a procession into the
prodigious maw of John Bull. The fountain of humour is inexhaustible. The
satirical contrasts also, are capital. Premium, a smart gentleman, with
the ladies smiling upon him; Discount, in the dumps, and shabby, with the
ladies’ backs resolutely turned towards him. The Parlour and the Cellar,
each getting drunk after its fashion. The “Shop and the Shay,” two
delightful bits of London life. Then there is the British Museum in 2043,
with a gibbet, the pillory, a stage coachman, a Whig, a Tory, and a
tax-gatherer’s book among the curiosities.
In 1844, Cruikshank began a series of large folded drawings, with a most
humorous etching of the probable effects of over-female emigration. An
importation of the fair sex from the savage islands has been effected, “in
consequence of exporting all our own to Australia;” and the dark ladies
are making eyes at a crowd of anxious men, who are advancing towards them,
while in the distance would-be husbands are running to the scene. The
faces of the imported squaws on shore, as well as those in the boats,
being landed from the big ship, are the creations of a most searching
humorous observer. Cruikshank’s cartoon of Guy Fawkes treated classically
is wonderfully funny. The artist explained it himself in his own rough
fantastic way.
“Having been advised,” he said, “by my friends to publish a sketch of my
cartoon” (the great cartoon competition for the Houses of Parliament was
going on in 1844) “intended for exhibition at Westminster Hall, I think
the public, upon seeing it, will require some explanation of it. The
subject has often been treated, and sometimes rather ill-treated, by
preceding artists. Being forcibly struck by the grand classical style, I
have aimed at it, and I trust I have succeeded in hitting it. At all
events, if I have not quite come up to the mark, I have had a good bold
fling at it. The first thing I thought it necessary to think of (though,
by-the-bye, it is generally the last thing thought of in historical
painting) was to get a faithful portrait of the principal character. For
that purpose I determined to study nature, and strolled about London and
the suburbs on the 5th of November, in search of a likeness of Fawkes,
caring little under what Guys it might be presented to me. Unfortunately,
some had long noses and some had short; so, putting this and that
together, the long and the short of it is, that I determined on adopting a
living prototype, who has been blowing up both Houses of Parliament for
several years, and if not a Guy Fawkes in other respects, is at least
famous for encouraging forking out on the part of others. Having got over
the preliminary difficulty,
“I set to work upon my cartoon; and being resolved to make it a greater
work than had ever before been known, I forgot the prescribed size, for my
head was far above the consideration of mere fact, and I did not reflect,
that where Parliament had given an inch, I was taking an ell as the very
lowest estimate.
“Having strolled towards Westminster Hall to survey the scene of my future
triumphs, it struck me that I had carried the grand classical to such a
height as to preclude all chance of my cartoon being got in through the
doorway; and I therefore, with the promptitude of a Richard the Third,
determined to ‘off with his head’ by taking a slice off the top of the
canvas. This necessary piece of execution rather spoiled the design, but
it enabled me to throw a heaviness into the brows of my principal figure,
which, if it marred the resemblance to Fawkes, gave him an additional look
of the Guy at all events. It then occurred to me that I might diminish the
dimensions by taking a couple of feet off the legs; and this happy idea
enabled me to carry out the historical notion that Fawkes was the mere
tool of others, in which case, to cramp him in the understanding must be
considered a nice blending of the false in art with the true in nature.
The Guy’s feet were accordingly foreshortened, till I left him as he
appeared when trying to defend himself at his trial, with hardly a leg to
stand upon. Besides, I knew I could fresco out his calves in fine style,
when once I got permission to turn the fruit of my labours into wall fruit
on the inside of the Houses of Parliament.
“It will now be naturally asked why my cartoon was not exhibited with
others, some of which were equally monstrous, in the Hall of Westminster.
The fact is, if the truth must out, the cartoon would not go in. Though I
had cramped my genius already to suit the views of the Commissioners and
the size of the door, I found I must have stooped much lower if I had
resolved on finding admittance for my work. I wrote at once to the Woods
and Forests, calling upon them to widen the door for genius, by taking
down a portion of the wall: but it will hardly be believed, that though
there were, at the time, plenty of workmen about the building, no answer
was returned to my request. Alas! it is all very well to sing, as they do
in Der Freischutz, ‘Through the Woods and through the Forests,’ but
towards me the Woods and Forests proved themselves utterly impenetrable.
“It will be seen that the arch-conspirator—for so I must continue to
call him, though he could not be got into the archway—has placed his
hat upon the ground, a little point in which I have blended imagination
with history, and both with convenience. The imagination suggests that
such a villain ought not to wear his hat; history does not say that he
did, which is as much as to hint that he didn’t; while convenience, coming
to the aid of both, renders it necessary for his hat to lie upon the
ground; for if I had tried to place it on his head, there would have been
no room for it There was one gratifying circumstance connected with this
cartoon, which, in spite of my being charged with vanity, I must repeat.
As it was carried through the streets, it seemed to be generally
understood and appreciated; every one, even children, exclaiming as it
passed, ‘Oh! there’s a Guy!’
“George Cruikshank.”
There was some bitterness in this jesting; for Cruikshank felt conscious
of the latent power to execute a cartoon about which there should have
been no buffoonery. Alas! his lines had been cast in humble places. He had
lived to earn his bread from day to day in the grotesque market; and the
solemn and poetic side of his genius had been left unworked, or had been
only partially and fitfully developed as he became an illustrator of
books.
In the Almanac which included the Guy Fawkes cartoon appeared Cruikshank’s
Father Mathew, a nice man for a small party. Father Mathew appears in the
shape of a pump or filter to a convivial domestic circle, and holds parley
with them. The animated pump, with the extended handle for a warning arm,
and the spout for a nose, is an old Cruikshankian figure. “Touch not—taste
not,” says the preacher-pump: “if you must take anything, take the
Pledge.”
Paterfamilias, with a severe frown and aggressive attitude, has turned
upon the intruder. “Dost thou think,” he says, “because thou art virtuous,
there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Pater’s friend is more insinuating,
and has an excuse. “Why, you see, old gent,” he remarks, “the case is this—the
ladies insist upon my singing a comic song, and I should like to know how
I am to manage that over a glass of pump-water.” The grandfather pleads:
“Won’t you allow an old gentleman a little warm elder wine this cold
night?” And the buxom lady of the house is coaxing: “Pray take a chair,
sir, and taste my home-made wine, or a glass of our home-brewed ale.”
These suggested compromises expressed very faithfully the mood of the
artist’s mind at the time. His sympathies inclined him towards the Apostle
of Temperance; but he was not yet prepared to go over, body and soul, to
the cause. The picture is accompanied by an “Ode to Father Mathew,”
conceived in a spirit of hearty opposition, that only goes towards proving
that Cruikshank was at the half-way house of elder and home-made wines and
home-brewed beer, between the punch bowl and the pump. The ode is in the
fine old style:—
“Oh, Father Mathew I why dost thou incline
Against all spirits thus to whine?
To preach against good liquor is a scandal.
Why to such rash conclusions jump—
To airy, dull, unsocial pump,
Why give a handle?
Water is very well—but then ‘tis known
That well is always better let alone.
Washing is water’s only function,
Save when a little drop poured in—
To brandy, whisky, rum, or gin,
Makes glorious grand junction.”
The kindly humourist’s etching-needle was inspired by every good cause.
These almanacs have all morals underlying the fun. Cruikshank liked to
have an object in view. No class, no creature was too humble for his
sympathy. Landseer never drew anything better than the plate of the
Dog-Days—suggested by “the Dogs Bill” of 1843. Two hard-working,
very radical dogs who are drawing a truckful of hardware, scowl at a pair
of genteel dogs, extravagantly arrayed, and smoking cigars, who cross
their path. First radical dog says he believes they don’t know the side
“their tails hang on,” they are so proud—adding, “Why, a cousin of
mine, as lives at Barking, tells me as how the celebrated dog Billy has
grown so proud that he has declined to kill any more rats. And as
to cigars! why bless you, there ain’t a Puppy about Town but wot
has got a cigar stuck in his mouth.” In a corner a watch-dog and a dancing
dog are talking over their grievances; while in the distance a lady tells
her footman to take care her spaniel, Duchess, does not get her feet wet.
The dogs are inimitable. Bloomers, crinoline, over-population (a
Cruikshankian plate showing the housetops covered with the superabundant
humanity), the “steamed-out” stage-coachman, the “fast man,” female
parliaments, baby-jumpers, cheap excursion trains, taking the census, the
effect of the Peace Society (a regiment hay-making), Jullien as the
President of the French Republic, “with entire new politics and polkas,” a
pack of knaves, being a meeting of the betting interest,—these are
but a few notable pictures of the crowded gallery. Cruikshank revelled in
the fun, and sought to extract wisdom from it He had an old-fashioned idea
of woman and her rights, and was sharp with his needle over female
suffrage, ladies in pantalettes, and women of mind.
Henry Mayhew wrote some verses on a woman of mind, during one of the years
of his editorship (1847), beginning,—
“My wife is a woman of mind,
And Deville, who examined her bumps,
Vow’d that never were found in a woman
Such large intellectual lumps.
‘Ideality’ big as an egg,
With ‘Causality’—great—was combined;
He charg’d me ten shillings, and said,
‘Sir, your wife is a woman of mind.’”
Cruikshank’s picture of her is one of his stereotyped, ill-favoured,
stuck-up, figureless ladies, of whom a friend said one day, when looking
over some sketches, in Amwell Street, “Why, George, your females are all
shaped like hour-glasses.”
For pure fun nothing could be better than the “Banquet of the Black
Dolls,” in commemoration of the reduction of the Duty on Bags. The doll
who occupies the chair has before her a Grand Potage de Dripping, and the
menu includes Pâté de Horseshoes, Omelette de Old Iron, Bones Boil-é,
Rag-out de Superior White Linen Rag, Fricassée de Broken Glass, and Poudin
Kitchen Stuff.
The arrival of Tom Thumb, and his reception by the élite of society, as
the bills said, and the brilliant court he held under a shower of John
Bull’s gold in Piccadilly, suggested two scenes to hard-working and most
moderately-paid Cruikshank. The first is called “Born a Genius.” In a
garret a poor artist sits in despair and poverty—his empty plate
upon the table, his tattered boots upon the floor. The second is called
“Born a Dwarf.”
The little man reclines upon a sofa, with a jewel-case and full money-bags
beside him. He toys with a trinket, having finished his foie-gras and
champagne.
He had seen inexcusable personalities in the paper, he remarked; and when
Lemon said to him, “We shall have you yet,” George shouted in reply,
striking one of his theatrical attitudes, “Never!”
He had repented of his early days of unscrupulous caricature. It must be
remembered, always to Cruikshank’s lasting honour, that, his wild youth
past, he refused scores of tempting offers of work that did not quite
commend itself to his conscience. He used to say he would illustrate
nothing which he did not feel.
Later, when Punch goodnaturedly rallied him on his temperance
eccentricities, he declared that he had a great mind to go down to Fleet
Street “and knock the old rascal’s wooden head about.”
CHAPTER XII. LORD BATEMAN AND THE TABLE BOOK.
Between 1837 and 1847, in addition to his work with Dickens and Ainsworth,
and in his Omnibus and “Comic Almanac,” Cruikshank threw off some
of his most popular minor drawings and etchings. Within this decade he
etched many of his plates for the “Waverley Novels,” he illustrated “Peter
Parley’s Tales about Christmas,” “Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote”
(1837), “More Hints on Etiquette” (1838), “Lympsfield and its Environs”
(1838), “The Life of Mansie Waunch (1838) for Blackwood, “Land-Sharks and
Sea-Gulls” (1838), “Rejected Addresses” (1838), “Out and About,” a boy’s
adventures, by Hain Friswell (1840), John O’Neill’s poem of “The Drunkard”
(1842), Dibdin’s Songs (1841-2), “Picnic Papers” (1841), edited by
Dickens; Douglas Jerrold’s “Cakes and Ale” (1842), “Modern Chivalry, or a
new Orlando Furioso” (1843); Martin’s “Vagaries,” a sequel to “A Tale of a
Tub” (1843); “The Bachelor’s own Book, or the Life of Mr. Lambkin, gent”
(1844); Harry Lorrequer’s “Arthur O’Leary” (1844); Maxwell’s “Irish
Rebellion” (1845), “The Old Sailor’s Jolly Boat” (1845), “The Comic
Blackstone” (1846), Mrs. Gore’s “Snow-Storm” and “New Year’s Day” (1845),
“Our Own Times” (1845), the Brothers Mayhew’s “Greatest Plague of Life”
(1847), “The Emigrant,’ by Sir Francis Head, Captain Chamier’s “Ben Brace”
(1847), “Nights at Mess,” and Laman Blanchard’s “Sketches from Life.” He
also began his capital illustrations to “The Ingoldsby Legends,”inBentley’s
Miscellany. To this period, also, his wellknown “John Gilpin” and
“Lord Bateman” (1839) belong.
According to Mr. Walter Hamilton, the history of the “Loving Ballad of
Lord Bateman” is, that George Cruikshank “sang the old English ballad, in
the manner of a street-ballad singer, at a dinner of the Antiquarian
Society, at which Dickens and Thackeray were present.
The latter is reported to have remarked, “I should like to print that
ballad, with illustrations.” But Cruikshank warned him off, saying that
this was exactly what he himself had resolved to do. The original ballad
was much longer than that which Cruikshank illustrated, and to which
Charles Dickens furnished humorous notes; and was not comic in any
respect. Mr. Sala’s version is the more vraisetnblant:—
“The authorship of the ballad itself, which has furnished the basis for no
less than three theatrical burlesques—one by a forgotten dramatist
at the Strand, another by Robert Brough at the Adelphi, and a third by
Henry J. Byron at the Globe—is involved in mystery. George
Cruikshank’s assertion, and one to which he doggedly adhered, was that he
heard the song sung one night by an itinerant minstrel outside a
public-house near Battle Bridge; and that he subsequently chanted and
‘performed’ (George was as good as any play, or as a story-teller in a
Moorish coffee-house, at ‘performing’) the ditty to Charles Dickens, who
was so delighted with it that he persuaded George to publish it, adorned
with copper-plates. But internal evidence would seem to be against the
entire authenticity of the artist’s version. That he had heard some
doggerel sung outside a tavern, and relating to Lord Bateman, is likely
enough. ‘Vilikins and his was immortalised by Robson in Jem Baggs. George
Cruikshank’s error, it strikes us, was more one of omission than of
commission. He may have lyrically narrated the adventures of the ‘Noble
Lord of High Degree’ to Dickens; but he assuredly warbled and ‘performed’
them too in the presence of Thackeray, who in all probability ‘revised and
settled’ the words, and made them fit for publication. Nobody but
Thackeray could have written those lines about ‘The young bride’s mother,
who never before was heard to speak so free,’ and in the ‘Proud Young
Porter’ all Titmarshian students must recognise the embryo type of James
de la Pluche.”
“Lord Bateman” was Cruikshank’s delight. The exquisite foolery expressed
in his plates of this eccentric nobleman he would act, at any moment, in
any place, to the end of his life. Mr. Percival Leigh remembers a
characteristic scene at the Cheshire Cheese tavern, in Fleet Street, about
1842 or 1843. “This,” * he says, “was in G. C.‘s pre-teetotal period.
After dinner came drink and smoke, of course; and G. C. was induced to
sing ‘Billy Taylor,’ which he did with grotesque expression and action,
varied to suit the words. He likewise sang ‘Lord Bateman,’ in his
shirt-sleeves, with his coat flung cloak-wise over his left arm, whilst he
paced up and down, disporting himself with a walking-stick, after the
manner of the noble lord, as represented in his illustration to the
ballad.”
Six-and-twenty years afterwards we find the bright-hearted old man still
with spirits enough for his favourite part.
* Letter to B. J., Feb. 18,1878.
“One day,” says Mr. Frederick Locker, “he asked us to tea, and to hear him
sing ‘Lord Bateman’ in character, which he did to our infinite
delight. He posed in the costume of that, deeply interesting but somewhat
mysterious nobleman. I am often reminded of the circumstance; for I have a
copy of ‘Lord Bateman’ (1851), and on the false title is written—
‘This Evening, July 13, 1868,
I sang LORD BATEMAN to
My dear little friend Eleanor Locker.
George Cruikshank.’”
This in his seventy-sixth year!
Within the busy decade, 1837—1847, Cruikshank executed many separate
etchings for Bentley’s Miscellany and Ainsworth’s Magazine. His
work is to be found scattered far and wide. One month he appears as the
illustrator of a humorous song or scena by J. Blewitt—“The
Matrimonial Ladder” (the ladder was a favourite form with him for
conveying the various aspects of a subject)—or Keeley in the new
comic song of “Wery Ridiculous”; the next he is the whimsical illustrator
of Beaufoy’s Advertisement of his Cure for the Toothache—wood
drawings engraved by Orrin Smith. Nor had he quite put aside his habit of
expressing himself pictorially on political events. In 1843 he published,
from Mr. David Bogue’s shop in Fleet Street, a separate design entitled
“The Queen and the Union. No Repeal! No O’Connell!” It was a woodcut
enclosing text in type, the text being Cruikshank’s own declamation
against the Irish Agitator. Britannia and Erin are represented in the
drawing seated, with joined hands, on the shores of the Channel; while the
“blustering, foul-mouthed bully, with one foot on Britannia’s shoulder,
and the other on Erin’s harp, has raised an axe to sunder the friends.”
Frontispieces and covers he designed by the score,—now to “A Tale of
a Comical Stick,” and now to The Yorkshireman, a religious and
literary journal; and now again a headpiece to one of Mrs. S. C. Hall’s
“Sketches of Irish Character,” or a frontispiece to a book on “Prisons and
Prisoners.” To every item of this extraordinary quantity and variety of
pictorial labour Cruikshank gave his utmost energy. He was a most faithful
worker, who never stinted himself, even when the humblest or least
important subject was in hand. Let me note, however, some exceptions.
* Letter to B. J.
In 1843 he had quarrelled with Mr. Bentley, and purposely put bad work in
them. This was his revenge—and to the end of his life he never
perceived the fault he committed in this act. “One day,” says Mr. Locker,*
u at my house, he explained how these (the bad etchings) had been etched.
It appears that he had quarrelled with Mr. Richard Bentley (he was a
singularly kind-hearted man, but, I fancy, had a somewhat remarkable
faculty for quarrelling with almost every one with whom he was connected
in business), and was obliged to fulfil his contract to supply an etching
for each monthly number of Bentley’s Miscellany, and he did them as badly
as he possibly could, and etched his name under them so illegibly as to be
quite indecipherable: ‘And,’ said he, ‘I used to take out my watch, and
put it beside me on the table, and give myself just—’ (mentioning
the number of minutes) ‘for each plate.’”
It was after another and a final parting from Mr. Ainsworth, on the sale
of his magazine, that Cruikshank, “left in the lurch,” to use his own
phrase, started his “Table-Book,” with Gilbert à Beckett as editor, and
Bradbury and Evans as printers and publishers. The artist has put on
record the manner in which he and the eminent Whitefriars firm came
together:—
“I will not go into the details of how I assisted this author
(Ainsworth) with head and hand work in these novels, but I did my best to
design and suggest; and my time was so much occupied in performing this
duty, and also with some other matters, that I was not able to bring out
my Omnibus as an annual, as I had intended to have done; but
I now determined to bring it out again in monthly numbers; and as Bradbury
and Evans (the fathers of the present firm) had printed that work for me,
I went to their office to see what stock there was of the Omnibus
on hand, and to make arrangements for the republishing of it; and when I
mentioned this to my friend Bradbury, he said, ‘Ah, it is a pity that work
was ever stopped; we should have been glad to have bought it of you, and
will buy it now, if you would like to sell it.’ I replied that I did not
wish to dispose of it, but if they would like to join me, I should be glad
to have them as partners. ‘Agreed,’ said both Mr. Bradbury and Mr. Evans;
and as these friends of mine were men of business, as well as gentlemen
and men of honour, in this case there was a written agreement clearly
and legally drawn out, and duly signed by both parties. But their
engagements at that time were so many, that a considerable time elapsed
before arrangements could be made for the republishing of the Omnibus;
so they then suggested, as it was such a long time since my Omnibus
had been on the road, that it would, perhaps, be better to start another
vehicle of the same build, but under another name. To this I agreed; and
thus originated ‘The Table Book,’ which was edited by my friends the late
Gilbert à Becket and Mark Lemon.”
The “Table Book” includes two of Cruikshank’s most powerful and perfect
etchings—viz., “The Triumph of Cupid” and “The Folly of Crime.” The
fertility of imagination manifest in “The Triumph of Cupid” is amazing.
The execution is that of an original master. No man who ever held an
etching-needle has surpassed the truth and beauty and boldness of the
touches by which hundreds of figures live, a happy tumultuous throng, in
this octavo plate. The central figure is the artist, in slippers and
embroidered dress-ing-gown, before his fire, smoking a handsome meerschaum
pipe, gazing abstractedly into the fire; and upon the cloud of smoke from
his lips, his dreams of the triumphs of Cupid rise till they fill the
room.
Cupid perches himself upon his foot, and toasts a heart at the fire; jumps
upon the back of Old Time who bears the clock upon the mantelpiece; is
enthroned in a triumphal car, with kings and princes, bishops and
generals, lawyers and stock-jobbers, drummer-boys and jack-tars and
sweeps, clown and harlequin, and even slippered pantaloon, and Chelsea
pensioners upon wooden stumps, for his court. The car is drawn by subdued
lions and leopards.
The blind beggar is waylaid by the little god, and brought to the ground.
He has floored a dustman on his rounds. He makes the Great Mogul sue for
mercy. He drags a little black page from under the armchair, and puts
gyves upon his wrists. All is clearly and beautifully grouped, and frankly
and boldly, and at the same time delicately, drawn. It is as precise and
luminous as Durer. It is perfect etching, by one who knew the limits as
well as all the capabilities of his exquisite art.
“The Folly of Crime” has been not extravagantly described by a writer in
the London Quarterly Review (1873) as a very great work indeed. He
says it is perhaps the artist’s highest effort: I should rather say it “is
clearly and beautifully, and at the same time precise and luminous by one
who knew the value of his exquisite art. He says it suggests an
undeveloped power of the highest order—albeit the management of the
direct and reflected lights is most admirable, and the skill throughout is
consummate. “Without lingering over the framework of lesser groups, though
these are sufficiently impressive,” says the reviewer, “let us go straight
to the central picture. A murdered man lies stark in the shadow. The
murderer springs forward to catch at, a bowl of pearls, snake-like and
seemingly incandescent, that are borne swayingly before him on the head of
a grinning fiend. The ground smiles at his feet. He falls, and, as he
falls, the light from the pit leaps up, catching his bloody hand, and the
fatal knife, and the long ears of his fool’s-cap, and gleaming in his
despairing eyes; while all the air is filled with chattering and mowing
demons, whose eyes and teeth also glitter white and cruel. And the horror
of the man’s face is terrible.” The little morals framed around the
central picture complete the awful story. The murderer lies—always
wearing the fool’s-cap—in his bed, with a heavy weight upon his
chest, snakes hissing in his ears, and the scales of justice held steady
before his eyes. He is upon the treadmill. He crouches in a corner of the
condemned cell. A convict, he carries a weighty burden upon his shoulders,
marked “for life.”
The many light, playful, and fanciful sketches that are included in the
one thin volume to which in “The Table Book” ran, are trifles light as
air, when compared with those two great efforts of Cruikshank’s genius, at
its ripest and brightest. They mark the highest point of his ascent. In
the sequel we shall find him executing much noteworthy, honourable
Work,with the zeal of a great moral preacher; but he will not surpass
these two noble etchings.
George Cruikshank worked, as he reader knows, with great care and
deliberation. He thought out his subject well before beginning to realize
his conception. He made, to begin with, a careful design upon paper,
trying doubtful points on the margin of the paper. The design was
heightened by vigorous touches of colour. Then a careful tracing was made,
and laid, pencil side down, upon the steel plate. This was carried to the
printer, who having placed it between damp paper, and passed it through
the press, returned it, the blacklead outline distinctly appearing upon
the etching ground. And then the work was straightforward to the artist’s
firm hand. The firmness and fineness of his touch are as conspicuous in
his wood drawings as in his etchings.
“It was the custom of the artist,” according to his nephew, Percy
Cruikshank, “before parting with his plates, to have India-paper proofs of
the etchings, and this being ‘before letters’—that is, before the
title was engraved on the plate—made them the more valuable. He also
insisted on the engraver’s supplying him with a proof of his drawings on
wood when completed. This, in time, formed a scarce and choice collection,
of which he knew the value full well. The centralizing all that was
Cruikshankian within himself was the end which crowned the work. The late
Prince Consort being desirous of possessing a collection of George’s
proofs, offered a considerable sum for them; but the artist, although
pressed for money, not considering it sufficient, respectfully declined
the proposal.”
To return to the “Table Book.” The miscellaneous etchings and drawings in
this book are mostly arrows aimed at folly as it was flying at that time.
The railway mania, clairvoyance, emigration, the fashions, furnished
Cruikshank with inexhaustible humorous or grave material. His etching of
Mr. John Ball in a Quandary, or the Anticipated Effects of the Railway
Calls, is one of those wondrously filled drawings, in the composition of
which he stands alone. John Bull is in his armchair, with a great railway
bell clanging over his head. Hosts of pestilent demons cover him, and are
stripping him. Some are hoisting his hat, some are bearing away his wig,
others have perched ladders against his capacious paunch, and are dragging
his money and his watch from his waistcoat pockets. The greedy imps are
tugging his gloves from his hands, unfastening his neckcloth, and pulling
his boots off. Liliputian lawyers, at hand, are demolishing a barrel of
oysters, and leaving a plentiful supply of shells for their clients. Imps,
driving a little locomotive, have attached it to Bull’s cash-box, and are
making off with it; and in the distance the pictures are marked for sale.
Then we have a few bits of Cruikshankian humour called “‘Heads of the
Table,”—the final head being a capital study of an old gentleman who
is entre deux vins, saying, “Well, we’ll just take another glass—and
then—we’ll join the—the ladies.” Opposite this page is a
drawing of a family, and also of their shoes.
I will now endeavour to afford the reader an idea of the man who created
the extraordinary variety of artistic work of high excellence briefly
described in the foregoing chapters. George Cruikshank was eminently a
convivial man. He was born in a boisterous and coarse convivial time; when
Lords and Commons boxed at Jackson’s; went to see monkeys set to fight
terriers at Cribb’s; fought “Charleys” and turnpike-men; and drank hard
and played high at Crockford’s. Their humble imitators were the associates
of Robert and George Cruikshank. George’s associates were tavern
frequenters for the most part: in those days taverns were used by many of
the men who now frequent clubs. The portrait of him drawn by Maclise was
Cruikshank in his earlier and humbler time, when he was in the hands of
the caricature vendors. The writer in Fraser says: “Here we have
the sketcher sketched; and, as is fit, he is sketched sketching. Here is
George Cruikshank (see Frontispiece)—the George Cruikshank—seated
upon the head of a barrel, catching inspiration from the scenes presented
to him in a pot-house, and consigning the ideas of the moment to
immortality on the crown of his hat....
Of George Cruikshank the history is short. He stands too often and too
well before the eyes of the public to render it necessary that we should
say much about him; and we confess that of his earlier annals we know
little or nothing.... The first of Cruikshank’s works known to us are his
caricatures of George IV. and his friends. Tories as we were and are, and
as we trust we still shall be, these comic picturings haunt our
imagination. The poor old king in every attitude of ludicrous distress
(the ‘Fat in the Fire’ was perfection); Copley (sketched, as we have been
assured, merely from description, and yet a great likeness); Castlereagh
(but even the professed caricaturist could not destroy the gentlemanly
grace of that noble face and figure); the ‘Waterloo man,’ with his sword
dropping into the scale against the pen; the various persons, jailors,
jockeys, lawyers, and the rest, were first-rate. As Cruikshank himself
says of Gillray, ‘He that did those things was a great man, sir,—a
very great man, sir.’ To Cruikshank, however, they were productive of
nothing but the fame of their cleverness and the odium of their politics;
as Hone, for whom and his blockhead authors George’s talents floated the
dire rubbish of the ‘House that Jack Built,’ and other witless
productions, never paid him for what he had done. In all these stupid
productions there were loud puffs at the power of the press. George
never knew anything of it when in their hands but as a screw.*
However, what he did, gave him fame and name.... Of course, George is,
like all other men of undoubted genius, a most ill-used gentleman. As
Mathews laments that the general obtuseness of the public will not
recognise his talents for tragedy,—as Liston mourns over the
delusion which applauds him in Sam Swipes and Paul Pry, and does
not permit him to appear as the Damon or Strephon of a sighing opera,—so
Cruikshank is shocked at the evil fate which consigns him to drawing
sketches and caricatures, instead of letting him loose in his natural
domain of epic or historical picture.
* According to a Reviewer of “Three Courses and a Dessert,”inFraser (June 1830), the whole sum received by
Cruikshank from Hone was £18; but this was not so.
Let him content himself; he can draw what will be held in honoured
remembrance when ninety-nine out of every hundred of the great ‘masters’
of our ‘schools’ and a still larger proportion of all the R.A’s and A.
RA.‘s that ever existed, or ever are doomed to exist, will be forgotten.
The historical which weshould cultivate is such as that which
appears in his recently published ‘Sketch-Book,’ where, for example, the
life of Bonaparte, whether as eagle soaring over the Alps, or eagle
chained to a perch, is depicted in all its stages, from artillery lad on
watch, through triumph, splendour, and flight to the little cock-hatted
and round-paunched exile of St. Helena.”
Many years later Cruikshank had not quite given up his dream of the epic
or historical picture; for the dream had been encouraged by the criticisms
of some of the most thoughtful of his contemporaries, who set him on a
level with Hogarth and Durer, and said that posterity would delight in him
as one of our most venerated old masters.
But our present concern is with George Cruikshank as he lived, and moved,
and impressed his friends. They all speak cordially of him. Poor Samuel
Phillips, who was hearty in spirit, albeit he lived for many years at
death’s door, says of him: “George is popular among his associates. His
face is an index of his mind. There is nothing anomalous about him and his
doings. His appearance, his illustrations, his speeches, are all alike—all
picturesque, artistic, full of fun, feeling, geniality, and quaintness.
His seriousness is grotesque, and his drollery is profound. He is the
prince of caricaturists, and one of the best of men.”
In a whimsical account of an amateur strolling excursion, in which
Cruikshank was one of the company (1847), supposed to be written by Mrs.
Gamp, Dickens has vividly described the illustrator of ‘Oliver Twist’:—
“I do assure you, Mrs. Harris, when I stood in the railways office that
morning, with my bundle on my arm, and one patten in my hand, you might
have knocked me down with a feather, far less porkmangers which was a
lumping against me, continual and sewere all round. I was drove about like
a brute animal and almost worritted into fits, when a gentleman with a
large shirt-collar, and a hook nose, and a eye like one of Mr.
Sweedlepipes’s hawks, and long locks of hair, and wiskers that I wouldn’t
have no lady as I was engaged to meet suddenly a turning round a corner,
for any sum of money you could offer me, says, laughing, ‘Halloa, Mrs.
Gamp, what are you up to?’
“I didn’t know him from a man (except by his clothes); but I says faintly,
‘If you’re a Christian man, show me where to get a second-cladge ticket
for Manjester, and have me put in a carriage, or I shall drop.’ Which he
kindly did, in a cheerful kind of way, skipping about in the strangest
manner as ever I see, making all kinds of actions, and looking and vinking
at me from under the brim of his hat (which was a good deal turned up), to
that extent, that I should have thought he meant something but for being
so flurried as not to have no thoughts at all until I was put in a
carriage along with an individgle—the politest as ever I see—in
a shepherd’s plaid suit with a long gold watch-guard hanging round his
neck, and his hand a trembling through nervousness worse than an aspian
leaf. Presently they fell into conversation.
“‘P’raps,’ he says,'if you’re not of the party, you don’t know who it was
that assisted you into this carriage!’
“‘No, sir,’ I says, ‘I don’t indeed.’
“‘Why, ma’am,’ he says, a-wisperin, ‘that was George, ma’am.’
“‘What George, sir? I don’t know no George,’ says I.
‘"The great George, ma’am,’ says he. ‘The Crookshanks.’
“‘If you’ll believe me, Mrs. Harris, I turned my head, and see the werry
man a-making pictures of me on his thumb nail, at the winder! While
another of em—a tall slim, melancholly gent, with dark hair, and a
bage vice—looks over his shoulder, with his head o’ one side as if
he understood the subject, and cooly says, ‘I’ve draw’d her several times—inPunch,’ he says too I The owdacious wretch.’”
The melancholy gent with the “bage vice” was Leech.
In those days, and down to those days, Cruikshank was convivial—sometimes
to excess. It was not for nothing that Maclise had drawn him seated upon a
beer barrel.*
* His brother Robert drew his portrait as a young man, his
hair and whiskers uncombed, cross-legged, in a contemplative
mood, his dress in disorder, and called it “George in a
Brown study.” It was a picture of him in his days of
dissipation, when his sister-in-law would occasionally seize
and wash and comb him, while he laughed at the absurdity of
his position. He was very sensitive in later life about any
allusion to his appearance. When Mrs. Stowe, in her book of
London impressions, roughly described him as “an old man,
with a keen eye and grey hair,” he was deeply mortified, and
he addressed an expostulation to the papers. His portraits,
by himself, in oil, abounded in his studio. They were marked
with touches of chalk, giving a fresh curl to the whisker, a
fiercer flash to the eye, a more effective arrangement of
the hair; but not one was finished.
His fortunes threw him early among humble boon companions, at Grimaldi’s
club and elsewhere, as we have seen; and his wild exuberant spirits and
lively sense of humour made him king among them. Later, when Dickens knew
him, he would fall away occasionally from his new and more dignified
friends (who were not ascetics), and run a wild career for a night in his
old haunts. Dickens used to describe one wonderful day—among others—he
had passed with “the inimitable George.”
Dickens was living in Devonshire Place, and was just setting to work one
morning in his library, when Cruikshank, unwashed and “smelling of
tobacco, beer, and sawdust,” as Dickens described him, burst into the
room. He said he had been up all night; was afraid to go home, and begged
for some breakfast. While he was breakfasting, Dickens did his utmost to
persuade him to go to bed. But George resolutely set his face against it.
He said he dared not even think of Islington. Seeing the state of affairs,
Dickens closed his desk, and proposed to accompany his friend to face the
domestic storm with him. But Cruikshank would only consent to a walk—the
farther from Islington the better.
Dickens, under such circumstances, was an admirable friend. His cheery
talk and wise counsel had great weight with Cruikshank; but each time he
artfully turned the truant’s face east, he drew back with a—“No, no,
Charley—not that way.”
And so they walked about the streets for hours, strolling in the course of
the day into the famous aviary of the Pantheon in Oxford Street.* Here
Cruikshank came suddenly face to face with one of Mrs. Cruikshank’s
intimate friends. The scene which ensued, Dickens used to say, was one
exquisitely farcical. And the manner in which he set forth the episodes of
the long day in the streets, with Cruikshank’s droppings into various
hostelries, and his final dejected departure homewards, utterly worn out,
and having exhausted his faithful friend, was in his happiest vein.
* Dickens used to tell, with humorous details, how “George,”
On another occasion, was refused admittance because he was
plashed to the shoulders with mud.
“I remember him about 1846,” said Mr. W. H. Wills, another old friend. “He
was then flirting with Temperance. I wanted him to dine at my house; but
he excused himself, saying he should be led into temptation, and he had
resolved to be a water-drinker thenceforth.” He did not go to dinner, but
dropped in later—much excited; and when his host pushed the
water-bottle towards him, he gently added brandy. The guests departed,
leaving the hilarious George, with two others, to finish the evening; and
when the trio got into the street, they found the old difficulty in
restraining Cruikshank’s boisterous spirits. After trying in vain for
something more than an hour to lead him home, they left him—climbing
up a lamp-post!
The same friend hastens to tell me how generous this wild bon-vivant
was, even in his more convivial moods:—
“The force of George Cruikshank’s character lay in the single-minded
earnestness with which he carried out his objects. These throughout his
life were numerous and always good. Zeal and energy glowed out of him upon
whatever he undertook, whether saving a family from starvation (and there
are instances in which he could only have done this at the risk of
stinting himself), or rehearsing the character assigned to him in a
private play, or commanding a regiment of volunteers, or advocating and
advancing the temperance cause at every conceivable sacrifice of time and
money. It was not until after his second marriage that he took to
temperance. In his first wife’s lifetime he sacrificed to the jolly god
rather oftener than occasionally; and surely no man drank with more
fervour and enjoyment, nor carried his liquor so kindly, so merrily. Then
was the time to hear him sing ‘Lord Bateman’ in character, and costume
improvised from table-covers, table-napkins, and antimacassars—anything
he could lay hands on—with the laughing help of his host. He was
what Albert Smith called ‘great fun’ in this song at any time.
“Even when dependent upon his pencil and etching-needle for means of
existence, if any good was to be done for a decayed brother artist or
literary friend, George was only too ready (for his own prosperity) to
throw down his tools, and stroll about the country with a theatrical
company, or go anywhere to solicit subscriptions and make speeches, or to
settle to his worktable again to make gratuitous sketches for bazaars and
charities. When acting in Edinburgh, for Leigh Hunt’s benefit, with
Charles Dickens and his brilliant dramatis personae, news came to
him that a country editor, with a large family, whom he had often
previously helped, was on the edge of ruin for the want of fifty pounds.
‘I must send it to the poor fellow,’ he said to Dickens,
‘immediately.’ ‘That would be very kind to him,’ answered Dickens, ‘but
very unkind to yourself. By-the-bye, have you got fifty pounds in your
pocket?’ ‘Oh dear, no,’ was Cruikshank’s reply, ‘but I want you to lend me
the money to send to him—now—at once.’ Dickens’s rejoinder was
not resort to his cheque book, but the remark that he knew George’s
incapable friend would be as badly off as ever after the execution had
been paid out of his house, even if the money was sent. ‘Then,’ he added,
‘you would deny yourself all sorts of things and be miserable till you
paid me back. That I can’t stand, so I must decline.’”
On the day of his death, his old friend and fervent admirer repaid his
kindness by sketching this loving portrait of him:—
“Only a few days ago there was extant—nay, it may be said,
flourishing, in the midst of the life and bustle of the Great City, and to
all seeming as lively and bustling as any citizen there—a hale,
bright, active, elderly gentleman, whose age might, by the majority of
cursory age-judges, have been set down as ‘a good sixty-five,’ but who was
in reality closely verging upon ninety. A quarter of a century before his
death he had looked—so those who knew him well loved to declare—much
older than when he was past fourscore. Like the American lady mentioned by
Dickens, he seemed to have grown old, ‘got over it,’ and become young
again. He was slightly below the middle height, spare but solid of frame,
somewhat long-armed and short-legged, as powerful and long-lived men are
apt to be, and very broad in the chest. His head, scarcely bowed or
blanched to the very last, was massive and well-shapen. He had a high
forehead, blue-grey eyes full of a cheerful, sparkling light, penthouse
brows, somewhat high cheek-bones, a prominent aquiline nose that Caesar
would have liked to look upon, and a mouth cut in firm, sharp lines, and
from whose corners grew an ambiguous pair of hirsute ornaments which were
neither moustaches, nor whiskers, nor beard, but partook vaguely of the
characteristics of all three. But, beyond these, there was curious and
original individuality in his hair, which, after its fashion, marked him
as typically as the well-known mèche marks the portraits of
Napoleon L and M. Emile de Girardin. The elderly gentleman’schevelure
had dwindled down to a few thin locks, indigenous, it is to be feared, to
his occiput, but which, by careful combing, and an artful contrivance—so
rumour ran—of wire and ‘elastic,’ had been seduced over his temples
and his parietal bone. Thus to the greater justice could point
triumphantly to the fact that his sparse wisps of hair were still mellow
brown in hue, and soft as silk in texture. His face was full of wrinkles;
but the furrows seemed to have been ploughed more by hard work, sedulously
and unwearyingly performed, than by the mere plodding footsteps of the
dragging years. In his port and mien, indeed, until almost the very moment
when the hand of the Grim Sergeant was laid upon his shoulder, there was
but little of the feebleness and less of the caducity of age. Its
garrulity he had; but his friends rejoiced in the good old man’s
loquacity, recognizing, as they did, the undimmed clearness of his
understanding and tenacity of his memory. Nor, with one singular
exception, to which we shall subsequently allude, did that memory play him
the woful tricks to which the very aged are so often subject. He could
remember perfectly well trifling occurrences which happened in 1800, but
he did not forget events of moment which had end he repudiated the
imputation of baldness, and with happened in 1877. He was, to sum up, a
light-hearted, merry, and, albeit a teetotaler, an essentially ‘jolly’ old
gentleman, full physically of humorous action and impulsive gesticulation,
imitatively illustrating the anecdotes he related; somewhat dogged in
assertion and combative in argument; strong-rooted as the oldest of old
oaks in old true British prejudices; decidedly eccentric, obstinate, and
whimsical; but in every word and deed a God-fearing, queen-honouring,
truth-loving, honest man.
“This was the famous George Cruikshank, caricaturist, social satirist and
moralist, illustrator of books, engraver on steel and copper, draughtsman
on wood, painter in oils and water-colours, the doughtiest champion, in
his degree, of the temperance cause; and, albeit his ‘foaming bowl’ was
for many years replenished only from the pump, the Prince of Good
Fellows.”
The Prince of Good Fellows looked very much as his later friends
remembered him, some five-and-thirty years ago, as I can well remember.
The ingeniously arranged chevelure was within artful elastic bands
drawn over the skull, when I was a boy. I was one of many youngsters who
would creep round his chair clay pipe in his mouth (he always smoked a
long clay pipe while he smoked at all) and his brandy-and-water before
him, talking loudly and eagerly, gesticulating like a Frenchman, and
turning now one ear and now the other, to catch the conversation of the
company. A man incapable of rest, with a swift, glancing, steely eye, a
mobile mouth, and a grotesquely fierce general aspect, aggravated by the
hook-nose, which was awry; prodigal in the matters of whisker,
shirt-collar, and wristband; old-fashioned enough, even in the year 1845,
to strike boys. *
* George Cruikshank was very careful about any portrait of
him that was drawn or painted. One in coloured chalks by his
friend Mill, that hung in his Amwell Street studio,
satisfied him entirely. The eyes were at their fiercest, and
the whiskers were superb. One day, when Cruikshank was
illustrating Scott, Mr. Lockhart called, and, remarking the
portrait, said drily, “I saw a man, very like that, in
Italy, executed for murder.” Some people would have been
offended, but Cruikshank was delighted. He affected the
brigand look.
In his social habits and relations, Cruikshank was a most modest,
self-respecting man. He never courted great folk, he submitted to no form
of patronage, and he never pretended to ape the manners and habits of the
fashionable world. He lived the first half of his life in Pentonville,*
and the second in Camden Town. He confined his acquaintance to congenial
friends; and when these happened to be persons of rank and wealth, in its
unfashionable neighbourhood. In this he set an example which many of his
brother artists—his inferiors in genius—might have followed
with advantage to their fame. He stood, at the end of his life, in strong
contrast with the petits maîtres in the arts, who give themselves
fashionable airs, decorate their houses extravagantly, and spend their too
easily acquired gains in slavish imitations of Mayfair life. Cruikshank,
in his Omnibus, reproved, in his own quaint way, a writer who had
said that he was a collector of curiosities.
* Among the visitors to Amwell Street was the Baron de
Berenger, a remarkable adventurer and spectator. George
Cruikshank, when a young volunteer, had been intimate with
Charles Ransom of his corps, who as a print colourer at
Ackermann’s, and who, as a volunteer, was remarked as a good
shot. Being a well-mannered young fellow, he was patronized
by Mr. Hammerley the banker; and at this gentleman’s house
he met the Baroness de Berenger, a German widow. He married
her, and assumed the title of Baron de Berenger. Being a man
fond of athletics, he conceived the idea of turning Cremorae
Farm, Lord Cremome’s place at Chelsea, into a suburban
gymnasium and place for field sports. Cremorne Farm became
the Stadium, and flourished under the Baron’s management. He
rode out always attended by his four sons on horseback,
dressed in grey military tunics, and with swords at their
sides. This cavalcade occasionally clattered along Amwell
Street, Pentonville, to pay a business visit to Cruikshank,
who, with his brother, was illustrating with sporting
etchings the guide-book to the Stadium.
“No single symp—I was about to say that no single symptom of a
curiosity, however insignificant, is visible in my dwelling, when by
audible tokens I was (or rather am) rendered sensible of the existence of
a pair of bellows. Well, in these it must be admitted that we do
possess a curiosity. We call them ‘bellows,’ because, on a close
inspection, they appear to bear a much stronger resemblance to ‘bellows’
than to any other species of domestic implement; but what in reality they
are, the next annual meeting of the great Scientific Association must
determine; or the public may decide for themselves, when admitted
hereafter to view the precious deposit in the British Museum.” Then
follows an amusing account of the old bellows, with a sketch of them. “The
origin of the bellows I know not,” says their owner; “but a suspicion has
seized me that they might have been employed in the Ark, had there been a
kitchen fire there; and they may have assisted in raising a flame under
the first tea-kettle put on to celebrate the laying of the first stone of
the great wall of China.”
Cruikshank, moreover, took exception to the description of his person by
the same writer. If careless about his house, he was vain of his person.
The writer said: “In person, G. C. is about the middle height, and
proportionbly made. His complexion is something between pale and clear;
and his hair, which is tolerably ample, partakes of a lightish hue. His
face is of the angular form, and his forehead has a ‘prominently receding
shape.” Cruikshank closed with his antagonist:—
“As Hamlet said to the ghost, I’ll go no further! The indefinite
complexion, and the hair ‘partaking’ of an opposite hue to the real one,
may be borne; but I stand, not upon my head, but on my forehead! To a man
who has once passed the Rubicon in having dared to publish his portrait,
the exhibition of his mere profile can do no more injury than a petty
larceny would after the perpetration of a highway robbery. But why be
tempted to show, by an outline, that my forehead is innocent of a shape
(the ‘prominently receding’ one) that never yet was visible in nature or
in art? Let it pass, till it can be explained.
“‘He delights in a handsome pair of whiskers.’ Nero had one flower flung
upon his tomb. ‘He has somewhat of a dandified appearance.’ Flowers soon
fade, and are cut down; and this is the ‘unkindest cut of all.’ I, who,
humbly co-operating with the press, have helped to give permanence to the
name of dandy—I, who have all my life been breaking butterflies upon
wheels in warring against dandyism and dandies—am at last discovered
to be ‘somewhat’ of a dandy myself.
‘Come, Antony, and young Octavius, come!
Revenge yourselves’ as you may; but, dandies all,
I have not done with you yet.”
The “inimitable George,” however, was a dandy—in his way.
Old-fashioned, tumbled, eccentric, his dress had a studied look. The
strong individuality of the vivacious and active little man (for he was
under the middle height) appeared to be preserved by attention to the
elaboration of a costume unlike that of any of his neighbours. It was
foppishness like that of the late Marquis of Lansdowne, whose buff and
blue had become a fancy dress at the end of his life.
I cannot do better than conclude this description of the George Cruikshank
of the first epoch, by an account of him, in 1840-42, written by his old
friend W. L. Sammons, who is now a Temperance light at the Cape, but who
has a vivid recollection of his friend in days when they met over a mug of
ale. It comes to me from Cape Town. The scene opens in Amwell Street,
Pentonville:—“The same evening a friend or two dropped in—Douglas
Jerrold and, I think, Laman Blanchard, the editor of Cruikshank’sOmnibus,—and
the former Mrs. Cruikshank was present and presided, and threw a charm
over the tea and supper tables; and I saw and revelled, as it were,
through all the gems, both ancient and modern, signed “G. Ck.,” in the
Royal workshop, and lingered over that famous notorious Screen in it,
covered by him with texts of thought for present and future use, in the
shape of “Odd People and Things”—queer “head and tail pieces”—strange
“monstrosities of Fashions” for the day—noses, dresses, and phizes
of all dimensions and shades, ready for adaptation according to the age
and epoch required. George Cruikshank was particularly busy on this day,
because of “The Miser’s Daughter,” by Ainsworth, that he was illustrating
for Bentley’s Miscellany, and he assured me if not finished by such
an hour and such a day he should forfeit fifty pounds; and yet he risked
the uncertainty to show hospitality to his friends.
“During this visit to London, dear George took me the round of several of
the theatres and gardens—Old Vauxhall, that we had seen as boys,
when unknown to each other, being closed, and the great “M. C.”
Simpson dead; and I could not fail to perceive how he was petted and
respected by all, lessees, managers, and actors, and readily ushered into
any quarter that caprice, pleasure, or professional duties required,
whether pit-boxes, or gallery; but the “dress circle” was less to his
taste than others, because there life was fossilised, artificial, and
restrained, and dress mere tinsel; and no dialogue suitable for his
reports, or action worthy of his crayons. This may account, perhaps, for
that ‘absence of beauty’ that is said to pervade his works; because beauty
per se is apt to give itself airs and become unseemly and
ungraceful; and George Cruikshank’s high and stern mission was in ‘the
highways and hedges,’ and to reclaim by a moral and pictorial force the
repelling, the vicious, and the vile.
“But I confess to feeling a little disturbed, when at his side, at seeing
so many long necks and bright eyes and glasses turned upon him from all
directions, and to perceive the whispering and commotion in consequence.
Here G. C.‘s thumb-nails often served as ample Space for a photo.
“As a thing of beauty is said to be a joy for ever, so at the period above
stated we had our glorious days together, and may be figuratively
described as ‘being in clover and sleeping in lavender’; for kind George
devoted many hours in taking me to some of his favourite, and it may be
added, requisite haunts, where he gathered his Fame for his simple wants,
without i hoarding. One morning he led me to the burial-ground of St.
James’s Chapel, Pentonville, near his house, and pointed out the graves of
Thomas Dibdin, son of the great sea-songster, and of his old and ‘mutual
friend,’ Joey Grimaldi, whose mortal coils are laid near each other; and I
wish I could remember so as to record the tender and sympathetic little
oration he then delivered.
“At night Sadler’s Wells was the scene of action, but poor Joey being
absent,
‘Greece was living Greece no more,’
and all things were changed since our boyhood Friend Cruikshank reminded
me of that passage (in Dickens’s ‘Life of the King of Clowns’) that he
illustrated in two vols., where Joey and his much better-half, one
evening, disputing about precedency, resolved upon taking poison to end
all contention, and to settle their differences of opinion for ever. But
not taking enough, and forgetting the oft-quoted maxim, now travestied,
‘Drink deep, or taste not any poisonous thing,’
the feeble dose merely kept them awake and talkative, and lying in the
same room, with a slight partition between them, sensations became
unpleasant, and so they held a colloquy in their fears as follows: ‘Joey,
are you dead?’ ‘No, Mary,—are you?’ ‘No.’ And then they altered
their minds, and felt disposed to live a little longer, arose, had a good
supper and something warm and comfortable as a sedative and antidote, and
then jogged on a little more in unison.
“On passing through the Queen’s Bench with him, I called his attention to
the prison window, behind the bars of which stood a miserable inmate with
a black box before him, on which was written, ‘Remember the poor debtors.’
George smiled, and said, ‘Yes, but think of the poor creditors.’ And this
scene I find recorded by him, and his own remarks, on a small placard at
the top of the picture ‘Remember the poor creditors.’ But what numbers of
similar Hogarthian hints he has left behind him!
Shortly afterwards Cruikshank paid his friend a visit at Bath:—
“‘The Bottle Conjurer’ and smasher of it, and part destroyer of his
contents—I mean George Cruikshank—arrived safely at the city
of King Bladud and the throne of Beau Nash; and he commanded me with a
willing assent to become a second ‘Anstey,’ or little ‘Bath Guide,’ to
ferret all quarters with him—West to East and High to Low—having
a monthly serial still on hand that required certain characters for
illustration (perhaps ‘Jack Sheppard’ or the ‘Tower of London,’ after the
Omnibus had ceased running). Friend George began with the upper
crust, as nearest ‘home’ and Lansdown; and leaving his card the day before
at William Beckford’s mansion in the Crescent, went with me where I had
been several times before. Possibly at the foot of Table Mountain it may
not be known that this William Beckford was an esquire and a somebody in
England, the owner and builder of Fonthill Abbey, inheritor but not
enjoyer of immense wealth, and the celebrated author of ‘Vathek’ and the
‘Halls of Eblis,’ before which, in point of imagination, Byron, or
somebody else, said ‘Rasselas’ must bow.”
Mr. Beckford, notwithstanding original gifts, and the accident of riches,
was a shy and eccentric bird that flew from every one, and nobody must
approach; and so, when we got there, and were passing along a corridor,
door suddenly in our faces, the apology being, ‘he saw Mr. Beckford
coming, and it was more than he dare hazard for any one to notice him.’
And yet he left a gracious message in the hands of his house-steward, Mr.
F-, who himself kept a stylish establishment and carriage, ‘to show Mr.
Cruikshank all he desired;’ and even added, ‘that if Mr. Cruikshank knew
how much he (Mr. B.) valued his earlier sketches, he would not have
refused some of them when once solicited.’ I asked ‘G. C.’ the cause of
this, and he remarked, ‘at that time he parted with few of his originals;’
and when we left Lansdown Crescent, he commented warmly on the treat and
pleasure he had derived, and as a red-letter day in his biography. ‘From
the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step,’ and so we soon threaded the
externals of Royal a black dwarf—or rather a nutmeg shade—banged
a Anstey’s “New Bath Guide.”
Crescents and Circuses, Pulteney and Milsom Streets, and Queen Squares,
and odd holes, lanes,’ and corners, until reaching Avon Street, where ‘the
power of sinking could no further go,’ nor the Pig and Whistle meet with a
more picturesque if degraded aspect In this latter neighbourhood it was
requisite for professional purposes and home orders that George Cruikshank
should have a nightly sojourn, if not revel; and so a suitable tavern was
chosen that had a skittle-alley attached, that except in name or position
might form a capital match for that Lion in the Wood in Wilderness Lane,
that he mentions in ‘My Portrait,’ at the commencement of bis Omnibus.
Whilst we were there as lookers-on only, and sipping ‘half-and-half’ out
of the same pewter ‘between the acts,’ if they may be so called, or during
the ‘intervals,’ at this Beggars’ Opera, friend Cruikshank amused himself
by chalking one scene on the wall, and all eyes were soon upon it, for it
was lifelike and spirited. Oh that I could have removed that wonderful
cartoon from its surface, or preserved a copy! it would now realize the
value of many ordinary frescoes and presumed originals—and more than
drunken Morland’s ‘Goat-in-Boots’ signboard. But leaving Bath for Cape
Town three months afterwards, the mind was absorbed in other matters, and
both places and scenes forgotten at the time, but now stand out in bold
relief and vividly.”
This was George Cruikshank only a few years before he gave himself wholly
up to the cause of Temperance.
EPOCH II. 1848—1878.
CHAPTER I. AT GILLRAY’s GRAVE.
No great stretch of the imagination is needed to conjure up an interesting
picture in the corner of the graveyard of St. James’s, Piccadilly, in that
momentous June when the forces of France and the Allies were gathering
hastily for the field of Waterloo. It was on the first of the month. From
the famous print-shop of Mistress Humphrey in St. James’s Street, before
which hosts of laughing men and women had been wont to linger, a coffin
was home, containing the mortal part of the “Juvenal of caricature” as he
had been called—of the hapless man of genius, who had lain, with
short flashes of sanity, full six years with mind unstrung—a
dreadful shadow over the mirthful shop. Behind followed the good Mistress
Humphrey and her faithful Betty, her maid; probably stout Mortimer the
picture dealer, possibly Mr. Gifford. Let us think of Landseer and James
Stanley and others to whom poor Gillray had been known in his bright days,
standing by the open grave near the Rectory House, within full sound of
the hum of Piccadilly. And at hand we shall note a slim young man, with
eager, piercing eyes, a hook nose, with fall whiskers trimmed to the
corners of his mouth; a young man with incessant spasmodic action. His
eyes start and his mouth works, as, the service ended, he gazes into the
yawning grave. To his neighbour he says, under his breath, “A great man,
sir—a very great man.”
With a bow to weeping Mistress Humphrey he retires. The good soul, who has
now done her last duty to the poor madman with whom she has borne
patiently and gratefully so long, is pleased to note that Mr. Cruikshank
had not forgotten to pay his last tribute of respect and gratitude to his
master. Mrs. Humphrey, no doubt, regarded the young man whom she had
employed to finish Gillray’s work when he first fell ill, and who had
since managed to keep the crowds laughing before her windows, as a very
poor substitute for the dead genius. And in those days Cruikshank himself
was still very modest, and was proud to be accounted strong enough to hold
the pencil and the needle of the stricken Gillray.
Upon a sensitive, imaginative, observant man like George Cruikshank, the
life of him whom he owned in his early days as his master, with its awful
close, must have made a deep impression. Men said that Gillray had wrecked
his career through frequenting low company, and by intemperate habits.
Cruikshank knew something of this, had seen much of such company, and was
in close companionship with tipplers. Gillray was not the first man of
mark whom he had watched from tavern to tavern, and so on to poverty and
death. Almost his earliest recollections were of drinking bouts, and their
debasing consequences. His boyish sight had been offended at his father’s
house with the spectacle of drunken men rolled up in carpets, upon whose
blank and soddened faces the morning sun was shining.* He had been
saddened as a son by his father’s example, and inexpressibly shocked by
the manner of his death. It appears that Isaac Cruikshank, who was a heavy
whisky drinker, laid a bet with a boon companion that he would drink more
tumblers than his friend without falling under the table. He won his
wager, but his excess brought upon him the illness of which he died, about
his fifty-fifth year. **
* “At a meeting held at Manchester, this great artist gave
an address on Temperance; in the course of which, referring
to the early days of his life, and to the drinking habits
which existed at that period, he said he recollected
gentlemen coming to dine occasionally at his father’s house,
and he was often surprised on coming downstairs of a morning
to find some of them rolled up in the carpet in an
extraordinary manner. His own father took too much drink,
and shortened his life by it. He shortened his life by the
fashion of the day, and left him (the speaker)
uneducated.... He had watched the effects of drink ever
since he had begun to reflect, both among the higher and
lower orders.”—Poor Richards Almanac, 1876.
** This story was told to the Rev. Dr. Rogers by George
Cruikshank.
Such experiences, albeit they led Cruikshank to reflect seriously on the
evils of excessive drinking, did not, as we have seen, at once turn him
from the bottle. Mr. Paget remarked in Blackwood that Cruikshank
was a severe anatomist of the vice long before any idea of his celebrated
“Bottle” could have crossed his mind. In his “Sunday in London,” published
in 1833, he depicted the drunkard paying his week’s score. In one of his
Temperance speeches he said: “I am ashamed to say that for many years I
went on following the ordinary custom of drinking, till I fell into
pecuniary difficulties. I had some money at a banker’s; he fell into
difficulties, took to drinking brandy-and-water, and ended by blowing out
his brains.
I lost my money, and in my distress applied to friends who aided me for a
time, but they themselves fell into difficulties, and I was forced to
extricate myself by the most extraordinary exertions. In this strait I
thought, The best thing I can do is to take to water; but still I went on
for some time before I quite weaned myself from my own drinking habits. I
went to take luncheon with my friend Dickens (who, I am sorry to say, is
not a teetotaler); he asked me to take wine, but I told him I had taken to
water, for, in my opinion, a man had better take a glass of prussic acid
than fall into the other habit of taking brandy-and-water; and I am happy
to say that Charles Dickens quite agreed with me, that a mam had better
wipe himself out at once, than extinguish himself by degrees by the
soul-degrading and body-destroying enemy.”
Immediately after the death of Gillray, we find evidence of the twinges of
conscience which Cruikshank felt, even while he continued to fall, at
intervals, into wild excesses. These were followed by dark passages of
remorse, and by resolutions which were again and again broken. The fate of
the men—and that of Gillray especially—whom he had seen fall
victims to what he was pleased to call the fashionable vice, would rise
before him. But, in an impulsive, convivial moment, his own sad
experiences of time wasted and opportunities gone, and of the friends he
had lost, were often forgotten; and he found himself, as of old, wending
his way home, in the small hours, covered with a sense of disgrace.
Cruikshank was no better, and no worse, than his contemporaries. A letter
in Procter’s * neat hand lies before me. It is dated from Gray’s Inn
Square, March 13th, 1839; and he says:
“I shall be very happy to be one of the number to dine with Macready. But,
remember, I cannot be one of those who will doubtless be found under
the table at four a.m. (as I understand was the case upon a late
occasion).”
* Barry Cornwall.
If, however, Cruikshank was not early a convert to the practice of
temperance, he was, as I have remarked, a preacher betimes.
His “Introduction to the Gout” (1818) is in his best vein. A toper is
seated over his pot, and holding a peach upon his fork, with which he is
about to cool his mouth. An imp—one Gout—approaches from the
fireplace, and with the tongs is about to drop a red coal on the great-toe
of Toper. Another drawing (a lithograph) of this date is suggestive. It is
called “Deadly Lively.” Death has stepped in, surprising a man and two
women, who are drinking in a kitchen, before a blazing fire. Death is
filling the man’s glass; the old woman is falling from her seat, and the
young man is tumbling drunk under the table. Presently (in the same year)
the artist is in a gayer mood as a satirist. The picture is called
“Tit-Bits.” An Irishwoman, overcome by beer, has fallen into a deep sleep
under a tree. Her slumbers give a yokel an opportunity of stealing one of
her chickens, while a cur licks the tarts in her basket.* Then we have
“The Three Bottle Divine,”norara avis in those days. It is the
head of a heavy, coarse-featured man, in sporting guise, his face
garnished with carbuncles and large spectacles.
So far back as 1836, Cruikshank gave the public a foretaste of “The
Bottle” in a vignette to a music title. Two individuals are represented—one
old and spectacled, the other young and with an eyeglass,—examining
with horror the contents of a spirit bottle, which is filled with
malignant imps emblematical of alcohol as “doctored by publicans,” and
sold for “Old Tom,” etc. The cork has turned devil, and throws up his arms
in delight at the work of his imps.
* The foregoing were drawn by Cruikshank from Captain Hehl’s
designs.
“Gin” remarks Mr. Thackeray, years before Cruikshank had become a
Temperance advocate, or in the least degree an abstainer; “gin has
furnished many subjects to Mr. Cruikshank, who labours in his own sound
and hearty way to teach his countrymen the dangers of that drink. In the
‘Sketch-book’ is a plate upon the subject, remarkable for fancy and beauty
of design; it is called the ‘Gin Juggernaut,’ and represents a hideous
moving palace, with a reeking still as the roof, and vast gin-barrels for
wheels, under which unhappy millions are crushed to death. An immense
black cloud of desolation covers over the country through which the gin
monster had passed, dimly looming through the darkness, whereof you see an
agreeable prospect of gibbets with men dangling, burnt houses, etc. The
vast cloud comes sweeping on in the wake of this horrible body-crusher;
and you see, by way of contrast, a distant, smiling, sunshiny tract of old
English country, where gin as yet is not known. The allegory is as good,
as earnest, and as fanciful as one of John Bunyan’s, and we have often
fancied there was a similarity between the men.”
The similarity, if you look deeply into the two imaginations, is strong
and striking, as it is between the genius of Doré in its grotesque and
moral moods, and that of Cruikshank. Compare Doré’s “Wandering Jew,” his
“Rabelais,” his “Contes Drolatiques,” with Cruikshank’s work about 1826,
and even later, and you cannot fail to discover the strong affinity
between the two great artists. Doré knew nothing of Cruikshank’s work in
his early time, and Cruikshank had never heard Doré’s name when, in 1854,
I brought over to England the blocks of his “Wandering Jew.” **
** I introduced George Cruikshank to Gustave Doré in the
Doré Gallery in Bond Street. Doré looked wonderingly at the
vivacious, wild old man as he went through a pantomime in
default of French, to express his admiration of the pictures
the gallery.
In his illustrations to “Sketches by Boz,” Cruikshank first approached
intemperance from that point of view in which he treated it afterwards in
“The Bottle.” His view of the gin-shop comprehends a complete story.
“We have sketched this subject, says Dickens, “very slightly, not only
because our limits compel us to do so, but because, if it were pursued
further, it would be painful and repulsive. Well-disposed gentlemen and
charitable ladies would alike turn with coldness and disgust from a
description of the drunken besotted men and wretched, broken-down,
miserable women, who form no inconsiderable portion of the frequenters of
these haunts; forgetting, in the pleasant consciousness of their own high
rectitude, the poverty of the one and the temptation of the other.
Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but poverty is a greater; and
until you can cure it, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek
relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery with the pittance
which, divided among his family, would just furnish a morsel of bread for
each, gin-shops will increase in number and splendour If-Temperance
Societies could suggest an antidote against hunger and distress, or
establish dispensaries for the gratuitous distribution of bottles of
Lethe-water, gin palaces would be numbered among the things that were.
Until then, their decrease may be despaired of.” Dickens here glanced, and
only carelessly, at the surface of the great question. This poverty which
he deplored was the result of the drink. The Lethe-water would be
unnecessary if the gin-and-water were stopped. Poverty, dirt, hunger,
promote the publican’s trade; but this trade breeds the misery on which it
thrives. The quartern which the father drinks, helps to raise a customer
in his son, for the trade of the publican’s son. More than ten years
elapsed before this view of the Temperance question was destined to have
complete sway and mastery over the genius of Dickens’s illustrator; but
already he saw deeper into it, because he looked more earnestly into it
than the writer, who had not yet done with the comedy element of
drunkenness.
In 1841, Cruikshank drew for Bentley’s Miscellany an “allegorical
representation of the infatuation of the mob for ardent spirits, and the
drunkenness occasioned by an election, from a design by T. L. F.” * In
1846, he illustrated Our Own Times, and in the London Penetralia
we find him moralizing with his etching-needle, in the ragged school of
Chick Lane, Smithfield, and satirising, under the head of “A Tremendous
Sacrifice,” the slop-sellers who live in luxury on the work of poor
seamstresses.
* “In the centre of the composition is the pedestal of an
altar, ornamented with a bas-relief of Britannia, on which
is resting a barrel of liquor, inscribed, ‘Ruin Members and
Co.—Poverty—Treadmill—Botany Bay,’ the tap running for
the gratification of an assemblage of drunken wretches, who
eagerly endeavour to get their favourite beverage, excepting
those who are helplessly drunk or fighting.”—Reid’s
Descriptive Catalogue.
Cruikshank was now inclining strongly to the work to which he was destined
to give the last thirty years of his life. And in 1847 he gave himself up
heart and soul to the preaching, by example as well as by tongue and
etching-needle, the moral which had haunted him so long, that had left him
no rest till he grappled with and conquered it, since he had watched the
eclipse of Gillray’s genius, and seen his own father hurried, by a
boastful toper’s bet, to his premature grave.
CHAPTER II. THE BOTTLE.
We have seen that many years before the Temperance question fastened
itself upon Cruikshank’s mind, never to be blotted out again for a single
day, he had marked and satirized the effects of drunkenness in the
desolate home, the workhouse, and the gaol. His “Gin Shop,” where Death
sets a trap for a party of topers, the “Ale-house,” and the “Pillars of
the Gin Shop,” were drawn some fifteen years before he added to the
preaching of his needle and his pencil, the force of his personal example.
In 1836, as the reader has already learned, the germ of “The Bottle”
appeared in a lithographed vignette to a music title, “The Dream of the
Bottle,” and was published by poor old A. Schloss, proprietor of “lie
Bijou Almanac,” a little annual that was issued with a magnifying glass.*
Schloss was a well-known figure in London years afterwards, first as
Staudigl’s secretary, and afterwards as an employé at the office of
Dickens’s “Household Words.” Then again, in “Sunday in London,” Cruikshank
drew a Temperance moral from “The Pay Table.” A publican is pointing out a
workman’s score for the foreman to deduct from his week’s wages—with
the lean and hungry wife and children at hand. In the same series we find
“The Sunday Market”—a butcher’s shop between two public-houses,
where the food money is spent.
But “The Bottle” was Cruikshank’s diploma work, as L. E. L., who edited
it, says in her dedication of the number for 1837 to Queen Adelaide. It
was bound in vellum and gold; illustrated with tiny portraits of Pastor,
Malibran, and others, enriched by fairy pages of music, and enclosed in a
blue velvet or morocco case, with a magnifying glass for the reader’s use.
In that for 1839, poor L. E. L. bade her farewell to England.
It was a pictorial Temperance drama—so essentially dramatic indeed,
that on its first appearance it immediately found its way to the stage. *
* It was published by the late David Bogue, of Fleet Street.
The story of The Bottle is unfolded in eight designs executed in
glyphography—a process by which it was possible to execute the
immense number of copies which the publisher anticipated, and with good
reason, would be required by the public, but which is ungrateful and
unfaithful to the touch of the artist.
In the first plate we have a cosy family party. The open cupboard is well
supplied. The children are playing by the hearth; a kitten is toying with
the cat’s tail upon the rug; the mantelpiece is loaded with pretty
ornaments; there is a picture of a village church against the wall; at the
table the husband and wife are seated at dinner, and he is handing her a
glass, which she coyly refuses. Under the plate we read: “The bottle is
brought out for the first time: the husband induces his wife ‘just to take
a drop.’” The interest deepens apace. The effect of the first drop is
seen in Plate 2. The sottish husband, with a pipe hanging from his mouth,
his kerchief awry, his clothes in disorder, sits drowsy with drink, his
children looking fearingly at him, while the wife is giving a bundle of
clothes to the servant girl, to pawn, “to supply the bottle.” The starved
cat is licking an empty platter upon the table; the cupboard door ajar
discloses empty shelves. In the next plate “an execution sweeps off the
greater part of the furniture,” but the drunken man and wife huddle
themselves before the fire, and “comfort themselves with the bottle.”
There are Hogarthian touches, developing the story throughout the series.
In this plate the china cottage upon the mantelpiece is broken, and the
husband’s battered hat upon a peg is the only ornament to the bare walls.
From the empty house the family repair to the streets to beg, “and by this
means they still supply the bottle.” In the fifth plate, “cold, want, and
misery” have destroyed their youngest child, and still “they console
themselves with the bottle.” A little open coffin is in the room, and
while the eldest girl weeps over it, the father and mother drink, and weep
also. A broken toy dog is upon the mantelpiece near a candle, with a
bottle for a candlestick. An old shawl is fastened before the window with
a fork. There are only a few sticks in the fire. In the next scene the
husband has his wife by the throat; and his children and neighbours
intervene.
“Fearful quarrels and brutal violence,” says the artist-preacher, “are the
natural consequences of the frequent use of the bottle.” Murder is the
next scene. The wife lies dead, with the doctor leaning over her, and all
the horrible commères who gather round death in the dark, byways of
great cities, are staring and talking. The murderer is in the clutches of
the police; the boy looks on aghast, holding his chin, and trembling in
his rags; the bottle, which has done the deed, is shivered upon the floor
and the fragments lie near a broken pipe, a ragged slipper and a battered
hat. The final scene is a mad-house. “The bottle has done its work; it has
destroyed the infant and the mother, the boy and the girl left destitute
and thrown on the streets, and has left the father a hopeless maniac.” The
figure of the madman before the caged fire is a very powerful bit of
realism.
The moral of “The Bottle” was enforced by the poetic genius, Charles
Mackay. His “Gin-Fiend” sang to the scratching of Cruikshank’s needle—
“There watch’d another by the hearth,
With sullen face and thin;
She utter’d words of scorn and hate,
To one that stagger’d in.
Long had she watch’d; and when he came,
His thoughts were bent on blood;
He could not brook her taunting look,
And he slew her where she stood.
‘And it’s hip I’ said the Gin-Fiend, ‘hip, hurrah!
My right good friend is he;
He hath slain his wife, he hath given his life,
And all for the love of me!’”
Regarded as a sample of Cruikshank’s art power, these plates are far below
the level of his best. We do not perceive here the master-craftsman. His
dramatic force is evident in every plate. He tells his story with the
fulness and intensity which are in all his pictorial narratives; but the
drawing is without grace, and the types, with the exception of the
husband, are wanting in that strong individuality he generally realized.
In a letter to Mr. Forster (September 2nd, 1847), Mr. Dickens describes
the impression “The Bottle” made on him:—
“At Canterbury yesterday, I bought George Cruikshank’s ‘Bottle.’ I think
it very powerful indeed: the two last plates most admirable, except that
the boy and girl in the very last are too young, and the girl more like a
circus-phenomenon than that no-phenomenon she is intended to represent. I
question, however, whether anybody else living could have done it so well.
There is a woman in the last plate but one, garrulous about the murder,
with a child in her arms, that is as good as Hogarth. Also the man who is
stooping down, looking at the body. The philosophy of the thing, as a
great lesson, I think all wrong; because, to be striking, and original
too, the drinking should have begun in sorrow, or poverty, or ignorance—the
three things in which, in its awful aspect, it does begin. The
design would thus have been a double-handed sword—but too ‘radical’
for good old George, I suppose.”
And yet such calamities as that which “old George” has drawn happen every
day; beginning not in sorrow, or poverty, or ignorance, but in little
yieldings to temptation, in apparently trivial and accidental excesses.
What constitutes intemperance? According to Dr. Alfred Carpenter, any
consumption of alcohol sufficient to furnish the blood with one part of
alcohol in five hundred of blood, is dangerous to health, and therefore is
an act of intemperance. A more moderate indulgence, he says, is not yet
proved to be deleterious. The late Dr. Anstie put temperance in a
different way. An average man or woman cannot, according to him, take more
than a couple of glasses of sherry daily without injury. Dr. Carpenter has
denounced the habitual use of stimulants, even in a very diluted form, to
enable the drinker to do more work than he could get through without them,
as unquestionably injurious—and therefore an act of intemperance.
There is not a middle-aged man of education who has not come across the
wrecks of lives where the ruin was a gradual giving way to-the temptation
of stimulants.
The police courts unfold daily stories of clerks and others, holding
positions of honour and of trust, who have first staggered out of the
straight path under the influence of drink. Cruikshank’s beginning of his
drama is only too true to life; and I think he would have made a mistake,
that he would have weakened the tremendous force of his moral, if he had
put the excuse of sorrow, or poverty, or ignorance into his opening scene.
As his story, stands, it teaches humble and happy households, in a rough
text which all who run may read, to have a care whenever the bottle
appears on the scene; and to lose no opportunity of impressing, upon the
children the danger, of putting; the enemy near, their mouths, who may
steal away, not their brains only, but their heart and soul.
“Coarsely designed and coarsely executed, yet very suggestive, very full
of that story-teller’s power which was so much Hogarth’s and his own,” as
Mr. Frederick Wedmore remarks, “Cruikshank’s ‘Bottle,’ and the ‘Drunkard’s
Children,’ which immediately followed it, albeit executed when the finer
qualities of his genius were suffering decay, must always be welcomed as
admirable contributions to the matériel of Temperance advocacy.”
Cruikshank used to relate how, when his “Bottle” was finished, and he was
anxious to secure for this first Temperance sermon the widest possible
publicity, he carried the plates to Mr. William Cash, then chairman of the
National Temperance Society, for his approval, and the support of his
powerful Association. Mr. Cash, although a Quaker, was a gentleman with a
very sharp, humorous manner. Having attentively examined the series, he
turned upon the artist, and asked him how he himself could ever have
anything to do with using “The Bottle,” which, by his own showing, was the
means of such dreadful evil? Cruikshank, in his own forcible way,
described how he was “completely staggered” by this point-blank question.
He said, when he had left Mr. Cash, he could not rid himself of the
impression that had been made upon him. After a struggle, he did not get
rid of it, but acted upon it, by resolving to give his example as well as
his art to the total abstainers.
He was immediately rewarded by the extraordinary success which “The
Bottle” achieved. It was sold by tens of thousands, and was the talk of
the day. If it has not directly led to a tangible result, as Hogarth’s
“Harlot’s Progress” is said to have led to the foundation of the Magdalen
Hospital, it and the “Drunkard’s Children,” a poor sequel (but then
sequels are always poor), have had the effect of powerful, popular, and
permanent sermons against the monster evil of our time.
Not the least of the artist’s rewards was the tribute to his genius it
inspired in Mr. Matthew Arnold, who wrote:—
TO G. CRUIKSHANK,
ON SEEING, IN THE COUNTRY, HIS PICTURE OF “THE BOTTLE.”
“Artist, whose hand, with horror wing’d hath torn
From the rank life of towns this leaf! and flung
The prodigy of full-blown crime among
Valleys and men to middle fortune born,
Not innocent, indeed, yet not forlorn—
Say, what shall calm us when such guests intrude
Like comets on the heavenly solitude?
Shall breathless glades, cheer’d by shy Dian’s horn,
Cold-bubbling springs, or caves?—Not so!
The soul Breasts her own griefs, and, urged too fiercely, says—
‘Why tremble? True, the nobleness of man
May be effaced; man can control
To pain, to death, the bent of his own days.
Know thou the worst!
So much, not more, he can. ‘”
CHAPTER III. GEORGE CRUIKSHANK AS A TEETOTALER.
George Cruikshank was an enthusiast in all things to which he gave his
mind. He did nothing in a halfhearted way. Whether preparing to address a
great Exeter Hall audience on the evils of drunkenness, or marching at the
head of his riflemen, or arraying himself in a table-cover to enact the
part of Lord Bateman; in small things as in great, he was ever at
fever-heat. He would have made a good actor, had he not been incapable of
a moment’s repose; he would have been an admirable Temperance advocate,
had it been in him to give himself pause in order to think over the heads
of his discourse; he would have been a good volunteer officer, had it been
possible for him to sit quiet in his saddle. But he seemed to be troubled
with an excess of life. Life at fever-heat is the dominant characteristic
of all his work. The “quiet spaces” in his etchings are rare.
Having been converted by his own “Bottle” to total abstinence from
fermented liquors, he could be nothing less than an earnest and a vehement
worker in the cause. He threw himself heart and soul into it; and during
the thirty remaining years of his life his zeal never slackened, and he
had never made sacrifices enough in it. His impulsive advocacy often took
ludicrous forms. He sometimes offended people by his denunciations of even
the most moderate drinkers, but he never made an enemy by his gaucherie
or his downright phrases imported into quiet circles, because the parity
of his motive and the well-known impetuosity of his nature excused him. I
can remember, in the first year of his total abstinence, meeting him at a
ball given in Fitzroy Square, by Mr. Joshua Mayhew, the father of Horace
and the Brothers Mayhew. He danced and was light-hearted with the
youngest; but when at supper the wine began to circulate, he stole round
to the head of the table, and, laying his hand upon the shoulder of the
venerable host (who was a very haughty and quick-tempered old gentleman),
said, in a deep, warning voice, “Sir, you are a dangerous man.” Mr. Mayhew
had a glass of wine in his hand, and was about to drink a toast to the
health of one of his sons, when Cruikshank’s hand fell upon his shoulder.
“I look upon every wine-drinker,” Cruikshank added firmly, “as a dangerous
man, sir.” The company, knowing the hot temper of their host, expected an
explosion of rage; but it was staunched by Horace Mayhew, who burst into a
hearty laugh, and told his father to go on, for “it was only dear old
George.”
In the same way, when dining at the Mansion House, Cruikshank, at the
passing of the loving-cup, would go through an extraordinary pantomime
before all the company, expressive of his horror of strong drinks. He
would shake his hand angrily at the Lord Mayor, and raise his arms with
horror while his neighbour quaffed of the cup. The company humoured the
eccentric old gentleman; for, in their hearts, they could not but respect
his downright earnestness. He lost no opportunity. Returning home at the
head of his volunteer corps, he showed his jaded officers, who had freely
taken beer, how fresh he was—on two oranges.
“Ah! you may laugh,” he would say, when his friends bantered him about his
aggressive protests in society; “you may laugh, but I can tell you this——the
presence of the old jackdaw checked the drinking, if didn’t stop it, and I
am very grateful to feel sure of that.” * As Mr. Sala has observed, “the
veteran sticks bravely to his text.” And well he might, for his temperance
renewed his youth. “He neither smoked tobacco nor drank fermented liquors
in his old age; but he was a hearty eater, an early riser, and a vigorous
walker and his reward was that which, according to Gray, is only felt by
boys at school—a perpetual ‘sunshine of the breast.’” He was fond of
showing this vigour renewed by temperance, at every possible opportunity;
for he very wisely regarded it as his most forcible argument. It enabled
him, in his old age, to capture a burglar on his own premises. The story
runs that when he was following the burglar to the station, with the
police, he drew him under a lamp, and told him that he could see drink had
brought him to this—adding that he himself drank nothing but water.
“I wish I’d ha’ known that,” said the ruffian, “I’d ha’ broken your head
for you.” Cruikshank delighted to show an audience how he could hold a
tumbler full of water steady upon the palm of his outstretched hand. At
eighty, he was seen in costume at a fancy dress ball at Willis’s Rooms,
joining heartily in the dance, and letting everybody know that it was
“water that did it.”
* Grace Stebbing’s article on Cruikshank in the Graphic.
It was very difficult to obtain from him the toleration of tobacco smoke
in his company; for, after he had given up alcoholic stimulants, he threw
away his pipe. He would say to a man of letters whom he favoured, laying
his hand upon his arm, and turning those fierce eyes of his full upon him,
“I want you to give up drinking and smoking, and you tell me that if you
don’t smoke you can’t write. Now, I’ll meet you half-way. Give up the
drink, and you may smoke—-just a little.” But, as a rule, he
was as stern in the matter of tobacco as in that of beer or gin. One
evening M. Legros, the distinguished French artist, lighted a cigarette in
his hall as he was leaving Mornington Place. “To that vice,” said “the
inimitable George” in his deepest tone, “I was a slave for many years, but
now I am a free man.”
To it also, it must be added, he owed one of his most imaginative and
delightful etchings,—“The Triumph, of Cupid,”—published in his
“Table Book.”
His earnestness was extravagantly expressed in all things. As a furious
anti-Papist, he would draw aside and shake his coat when Sisters of
Charity or a Catholic priest passed him. “Do you see that fellow in
front?” he suddenly asked a friend with whom he was walking. It was a
workman quietly enjoying his pipe. “Do you know what I would do to him if
I were a man of fortune? I’d kick him! To think that any man should be
fool enough to place a tube between his lips, and go puff, puff, puff!”
This was his “counter blast.” And he glared at the workman as he passed
on. He had himself been an inveterate smoker for more than forty years!
On another occasion he drew sharply up before the windows of his old wine
merchant, and called out, “Give me back my thousand pounds!”
When the Crystal Palace was opened at Sydenham, Cruikshank, in his rage
that it had not been made a Temperance palace, drew some extravagant
drawings of the opening ceremony for Messrs. Cassell, one of which
represented the Archbishop of Canterbury bestowing his blessing upon a
public-house.
Dining one day at Grampian Lodge, Forest Sill, with his friend Dr. Rogers,
he suddenly began to tell the company that he had had a vision the night
before. Then he related it with much gesticulation, and with dramatic
effect.
He had seen two devils in council. One had said, “England is moral,
prosperous, happy—this will never do. How can we put an end to it?
Her crops are splendid; look, for instance, at her barley, her-” The
second devil interrupted: “I have an idea. Her barley, which makes such
splendid food, let us teach them to soak it, to sour it, to make it
ferment; in short, to turn it into a tempting poison.”
“Agreed!” cried the first devil.
“Why,” the second devil continued, “we will actually make them drink it of
their own accord; they shall lift the poison to their own lips with their
own hands.”
“Ha! ha!” shouted the first devil; “and then of course, there will be
murder, robbery, violence, and misery all over the land.”
“The devils have had their way,” the old man added his keen eyes glancing
round the table to mark the effect of his vision.
He was indeed, as a writer called him, a “muscular teetotaler.”
“In his time,” a Temperance writer * records to his honour, “he must have
attended thousands of temperance meetings, and at these few men were more
welcome.
* The Temperance Record, February 7th, 1878.
The style of his advocacy was peculiar, he passed from grave to gay with
facility, but he never lost sight of the great object he had in view. He
seemed for years, to be deeply impressed at the numerous murders that were
taking place, all of them, or nearly so, being in the last instance, if
not in the first, attributable to drink. He used to exclaim, with deep
fervour, ‘Can nothing be done to stop these dreadful murders?’ The clear
remedy of total abstinence from that drink which was their inciting cause
then came naturally from his lips; but though individuals responded to his
appeal, the general mass of the public remained unmoved. Sometimes he
would suggest a deputation to the House of Lords. But though this idea was
not acted upon, yet he lived to see that august assembly collect evidence
well fitted to be of service to them, and also to the public at large. Mr.
Cruikshank’s powers of mimicry were also very great, and often has he
convulsed his audience with his inimitable acting; but, at the same time,
there was no mistaking his deep earnestness, and the sincerity with which
he expressed the convictions of his heart.
He did his utmost, when the teetotalers had failed at the Crystal Palace,
to establish a teetotal palace in the old Surrey Zoological Gardens; and
he was drawn in state from the Hampstead Road to Walworth, in a carriage
and four, to open a bazaar in aid of the scheme. He even prepared a design
for the building. But although many went to cheer the honest, earnest old
man, few remained to invest, and the design fell to the ground. It may
have been some consolation to him and to his Temperance friends to mark,
afterwards, the services which the Crystal Palace was destined to render
to the cause of Temperance, for a drunkard has hardly ever been seen under
its shining roof.
Cruikshank could never convert his mother to his views. She lived with him
during the latter years of her life, and died under his roof, in the care
of a most reverent and attentive son.. She had always been a careful,
sober body, and would not be coerced, because her son could not take his
beer or toddy without committing excesses. She had been a handsome woman
in her days, a grandson records, and it was picturesque to see the lame
old lady, leaning upon her crutch, and wrapped in a plaid,—with her
shrivelled features and wild grey hair,—raise her withered arm, and
with the old fire declare that she would not surrender her principles. A
glass of beer with dinner, and a little toddy at bedtime, she had always
taken, and she took them to the end, and George had to submit.
Addressing, on one occasion, a Temperance oration to a Bristol audience,
he appealed to his female hearers not to believe that “nourishing stout”
was necessary to nursing-mothers; and he pointed to himself as a
melancholy example, saying, “My mother first lifted the poisoned chalice
to my lips.” His aged mother read this in the morning paper. Her wrath was
violent. “What!” she cried, “am I to be told publicly, at eighty years of
age, that I, who always begged and prayed him to be sober, taught him to
drink?” Her son did not return home for several days; but he heard of his
speech in no uncertain tones when he presented himself to the old lady,
who had, in his youth, often physically chastised him for his excesses.
Perhaps the best specimen of his manner of laying his subject before an
audience is the speech which he delivered at the Grand Demonstration of
the National Temperance League, in the Guildhall, on the 19th of November,
1864. It wants his by-play, his dramatic delivery, his grotesque
movements, and then the solemn sounds of his voice, to be completely
understood; but it is sufficiently original and suggestive as reported:—
“My Lord Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen,—-My worthy friend the doctor
has given you a very excellent discourse upon his own profession. It So
happens that as I was coming to this meeting I met with a gentleman who
had just been to consult his medical man; and finding I was coming to this
meeting, he laughed at all idea of abstaining from intoxicating drinks. He
told me he had been to see a very eminent member of the medical
profession. I asked him what was the result.
“He said the physician told him he wanted a stimulant and prescribed one.
I said, ‘What did you give him:’
“He replied, ‘Of course, I gave him the usual fee—a guinea.’ I said,
‘I can show you how to save that guinea in future. If you will give me
half of it. I will give it to some good charity, and the other half you
may keep in your pocket.’ He said, ‘How is that?’ I said, ‘Instead of
going to the physician, go to the publican, and tell him what is the
matter with you, and he will prescribe the same thing; and if the landlord
is not in, say the same to the potboy, and he will do as well. Rely upon
it, they will prescribe exactly the same thing as the doctor, and the
effects will be the same. Now, I must say one word, if you please, to
defend a very eminent prince who has been mentioned here to-night. I am
sorry to say it happened to be my fate to hold up to ridicule the Prince
Regent—very often indeed; but he was not such a bad man as he is
represented to be. It must be recollected that if he committed excess in
the way of drinking, it was then the fashion for all the eminent persons
to get drunk. No man was considered a liberal man—no man was
considered a gentleman, in fact, unless he made his companions drunk; and
therefore, with all due respect to my friend Mr. Scott, who mentioned the
circumstance, it must be recollected that about half a century back it was
the fashion—it is a fearful thing, but it was the fashion—of
gentry to get drunk; therefore we ought to make allowances. But now, my
Lord Mayor, to come to this very serious question. This hall is the place
where the great City feasts are held, and the question is, is it possible
that there can be any grand entertainment given without mixing up with it
the intoxicating cup? What will be said? It is very well for you, my lord,
who are almost an abstainer yourself—very well for you—but
what will be said of another Lord Mayor who comes here and gives a dinner
without wine and beer? What will be said of him? He will be called a
shabby fellow; and the question is, whether the guests will not all be
melancholy. It will, perhaps, be somewhat in this style: ‘Have a little
more soup?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘More fish?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘Bit of fowl?’
‘No.’ ‘Venison?’ ‘No.’ ‘What, can’t you eat any more?’ ‘No, I don’t like
it: I want something to drink.’ There is the serious thing: what is to be
done? There is one way of settling that question. It is supposed that
there can be no sociality, no comfort, no enjoyment, without intoxicating
drinks. Now, I recommend the next Lord Mayor who may succeed our honoured
chairman, if he be in favour of the moderate use of these delightful
drinks, to be so good as to ask the present company to come to dinner.
Wouldn’t you enjoy yourselves? And then, when we have had enough to eat,
and want something to drink, here you are (holding up a glass of water)—Mr.
Chairman, your very good health! Ladies and gentlemen, your good health!
(drinking the toast.) We should have a jolly time of it. (Loud and
long-continued cheering.) Mr. Morley says we will take the sherbet without
the punch. That is the way in which these things are looked at; but
supposing that it is impossible that any social enjoyment can be had
without the use of these stimulants, let us take another view of the
question. I have had the honour of dining here, and I have enjoyed myself
very much, not only in the time when I used to take wine myself—because
I recollect there was such a time as that—but when I have been a
teetotaler I have been, here, and enjoyed my dinner very much indeed,
without any of these drinks. But supposing we had this hall upon the
occasion of the Lord Mayor’s feast with the most elegant people in the
world (for I believe of all the people in the world the British people are
the best looking and the best dressed): imagine the scene! The tables are
set out in the most splendid manner; everything looks grand and happy; but
what is going on outside? Ay! my friends, the most splendid monument in
the world where this drink is used in moderation as it is in this country,
may in the inside be a splendid monument of good order, taste, and
sobriety, but at the outside there is filth and dirt and crime through
drink. I say, suppose these social meetings cannot be enjoyed without
these drinks, let us look at the outside. Now, there are a certain number
of circumstances or acts committed in society, which are always injurious,
not only to the individual himself, but also to society at large. Now, I
do not mean to say that every teetotaler is an honest man. There may be
some dishonest fellows amongst them. I have heard of two in the last
thirty years. This reminds me, by-the-bye, of a teetotal turnkey at
Coldbath Fields. There were two youths brought into the prison, who were
teetotalers, and the other turnkeys jeered the teetotal turnkey upon it.
He said, ‘It is true that there are two teetotalers here, but they are
here only for begging, whereas you have about fifteen hundred brought in
who drink, and they are most of them committed for stealing.’ There are a
number of besetting sins connected with drinking, such as robberies,
brutal assaults, garotting, house-breaking, suicide, and murder.
By-the-bye, speaking of murder, there has been a very strong feeling
existing for many years, and still increasing, against the punishment of
death. I think it is a very horrible thing indeed to hang anybody; but, my
friends, do not forget that it is a still more horrible thing for one to
be murdered. Do not let us forget that. There was a young man in the
country a little while ago hanged for murder—quite a young man. It
was a sad thing indeed, no doubt, to see this poor fellow gibbeted; but
what was he hanged for? He had been drinking on the Saturday night, and he
murdered a young woman as she was going to church on the Sunday morning.
Do not forget that these horrible, detestable, damnable crimes are
committed under the influence of drink. We will talk about doing away with
the punishment of death after we have stopped murders. I had the honour of
speaking in the Mansion House when Mr. Charles Pearson, the City
solicitor, brought on the question about the convicts; and I told the Lord
Mayor then, that if we could do away with intoxicating liquors altogether,
we might wheel out that dreadful instrument the gibbet into the Old
Bailey, and make a bonfire of it. I believe you will find, if you go into
the question, that there is hardly a murder committed in this country out
of a hundred—I may say out of a thousand—not ten out of ten
thousand—but drink has something to do with it. Remove the drink,
and you will stop murder. But there is a gentleman who ought to have been
speaking instead of myself, and therefore I will not detain you much
longer; but I will say this, my friends, and call your attention to it
especially, that the teetotal question has now been before the world for
about thirty years, and during that short time I challenge any one to
point out any teetotaler who has been committed for a brutal assault upon
his wife, or for garotting, or picking pockets, or house robbery, or
murder. I challenge the world to produce one single case wherein any real
teetotaler has been convicted of one of those crimes. Then, if this be so,
what have we to do but to spread this Temperance movement throughout the
length and breadth of the land? and then we should stop, if not all
crimes, if not all offences, still the great majority of them; and that is
what we are aiming at. And recollect this, my friends, that we are not a
society formed merely for the purpose of reclaiming the drunkard. It is a
very good thing to do so, and I am sorry to say that my time is so
occupied that I am almost in despair. I have six most dreadful cases in
hand at the present moment There is nobody to assist them. I could not go
to the brewer or distiller, and ask them to give me funds for the support
of these people whom they have rained; and why not? Because there is blood
upon the money. I would not have it. But I had to-day a letter imploring
me for help from the nephew of an old friend of my father. What am I to
do? I have a lady in the country at this moment, the wife of a barrister,
who is starving for want of help, and whose husband has been ruined by
drinking. My time is occupied, and my friends are gone, and I am called
upon for all I can afford. But, my friends, if you do away with these
drinks, you do away with these cases. But it is utterly impossible to go
into the evils arising out of these drinks in the time I have to speak—they
are so extensive; all I have to say is, ‘Go on and prosper!’ and prosper
we shall. I cannot sit down without saying that I look upon this meeting
to-night to be one of the grandest movements that this cause has ever had.
I say it from my heart, and think that those gentlemen who have assisted
in getting up this meeting deserve our best thanks.”
The idea of a temperance Lord Mayor’s Banquet suggests, no doubt, many
vastly amusing incidents and episodes to the mind of the comic writer, but
honest-hearted George Cruikshank could not, and would not, in his latter
dav, see any element of fun in drunkenness, and he was quite in earnest in
recommending the next Lord Mayor to fill his loving-cup with pump water. *
* Since Cruikshank delivered the above speech, a Temperance
banquet has been held at the Mansion House.
The account he gave, moreover, of his trouble about the many people who
were seeking his assistance, was true of his experience year after year.
His doors were besieged. He was waylaid by petitioners for his known
bounty (the recklessness of which, as we have seen, Dickens reproved)
whenever he went abroad. A poor man himself, for ever in money troubles,
even to the end of his laborious life, his heart lay always open to a tale
of distress. He was never without “cases” on hand.
It has been remarked of his Temperance days, by one of his friendliest
critics, that his style suffered from the contraction of his ideas and
sympathies, “and it cannot be questioned that with the general public his
reputation declined in proportion to the increase of his popularity among
the teetotalers.” He lost heavily, in a pecuniary sense, by his Temperance
advocacy. Publishers ceased to employ him. He remarked that, for the last
ten years of his life, he was without commissions. He had refused none, he
would say. He was willing to work, and he held that his powers were
unimpaired.
Temperance preacher; to them the inimitable George, the illustrator of
Boz, the kindly satirist, the creator of “Points of Humour,” the
illustrator of Grimm, was dead.
And, firmly believing this, the brave old man held on in the rigid course
of duty he had laid down for himself. He had seen all the horrors which
lie behind drunkenness; in his early time he had himself been a tavern
hero; and he had dedicated the remainder of his life to the work of
warning the rising generation out of the path in which he himself had
stumbled.
“I come forth,” he said, in one of his earliest temperance harangues, “to
set by my humble example the opinion of this unthinking world at
defiance.”
But the public had come to regard him simply as a keen a sense of the
ridiculous as most men. I can see clearly what is ridiculous in others. I
am so sensitive myself, that I am quite alive to every situation, and
would not willingly place myself in a ridiculous one; and, I must confess,
that if to be a teetotaler was to be a milksop, if it was to be a
namby-pamby fellow, or a man making a fool of himself or of others, then
indeed I would not be one—certainly not; but if, on the contrary, to
be a teetotaler is to be a man that values himself, and tries by every
means in his power to benefit others; if to be a teetotaler is to be a man
who tries to save the thoughtless from destruction; if to be a teetotaler
is to be a man who does battle with false theories and bad customs, then I
am one. I have been a convert but a short time, not much over twelve
months. I only wish that I could say, with Dr. Gourley, that I had never
taken a glass of spirits in my life; I wish that I had acted upon the
principles of total abstinence only thirty years ago; for if I had, I am
convinced that at this time I should have been much better, both in body
and mind. I have experienced much benefit already, both physically and
mentally. I never did sneer at or scorn the question of Temperance, yet I
never thought that I should stand up as a teetotal advocate; but I am
proud that I have been put into the position in which I am now placed.
Later on, still conscious of the disadvantage at which he was placing
himself as an artist, he said to another audience—.
“When I left off drinking wine altogether, and became a total abstainer, I
became a healthier and stronger man, more capable of meeting the heavy
responsibilities that were upon me, and for the following two years I had
my life renewed, and all the elasticity of my schoolboy days came back to
me. Domestic afflictions then came upon me, ending in death, and my
spirits and health were crushed down. In this extremity I applied to my
medical adviser. He said, ‘Medicine is of no use to you; you must drink
wine again.’ I refused, and my medical friend called in some others of his
profession; he told me they had had a consultation, the result being that
all of them agreed it was necessary I should drink wine to restore my
sinking constitution. I replied,
“‘Doctor, I’ll take your physic, but not your wine. Let me try everything
else first, and only when there is no other chance give me wine, because I
feel there is a great principle at stake in this matter.’ I have said, and
I believe, wine is unnecessary, even as a medicine, and I do not wish to
do a single act which would tend to weaken or destroy the weight and force
of that conviction. And here I stand. I have not tasted the vile and
destroying enemy, and I am almost restored to health, without having
risked the violation of my principles. I call this a triumph; and I stand
here as an evidence that wine is totally unnecessary, even as a medicine.”
Much later, we find the preacher an octogenarian—albeit rudely
buffeted by the world, and well-nigh forgotten as a living artist—still
true to his noble text. “Alcoholic liquors,” he exclaimed to an audience,
little more than two years before his death, “were recommended to keep up
strength! But what kept up his strength? He had not taken a drop of wine,
beer, or any alcoholic drink, for twenty-seven years, and he would be
eighty-three next September, if he lived till then. What was it, then,
that kept up his strength? Since he had given up drinking beer and
smoking, he had had a higher enjoyment of life, because all his nervous
system was in proper tone.”
Cuthbert Bede, who knew Cruikshank intimately in his teetotal days, has
drawn this graphic picture of the Temperance advocate at home:—
“Though I had interchanged letters with Mr. George Cruikshank for several
years, it was not until early in the autumn of 1853 that I made his
personal acquaintance. He had asked me to write a serial story for a
projected publication to be illustrated by himself ; and, as it would
simplify matters if we could talk over the subject together, I went up
from the country to London to call upon him. He was then living in
Mornington Crescent, near to Regent’s Park. Numerous portraits had made me
familiar with his personal appearance, so that I needed not to be told who
was the gentleman who so courteously received me downstairs, and then took
me upstairs to his comfortable studio, where he introduced me to his wife.
Some of our first conversation, indeed, was on the subject of his
portrait; for, among the pictures on his walls, I had noticed the original
of the portrait by Frank Stone, which was engraved on steel for the
Omnibus, and was certainly a far more flattering representation of George
Cruikshank than the caricaturist’s sketches of himself. I told him that I
considered the best portrait of himself was to be found in his own
etching, ‘The Reverie,’ published in his Table- Book, and in every respect
a wonderfully fine specimen of his art and genius. I also referred to his
own account of ‘My Portrait,’ in the Omnibus, in which, with his
own pen and pencil, he portrayed himself, and made comments on a curious
description of himself that had been given in a publication called
‘Portraits of Public Characters’; how he was said to be of the medium
height, with a forehead of a prominently receding shape, with a handsome
pair of whiskers, and hair partaking of a lightish hue; and, moreover, how
the ludicrous and extraordinary fancies with which his mind was constantly
teeming often imparted a sort of wildness to his look frighten from his
presence those unacquainted with him.
“He read these and similar passages to me, and was immensely tickled at
their egregious absurdity. In truth, his manner at once impressed me as
being peculiarly gentle, and kind, and genial. Instead of assuming any
airs of superiority, I found him possessed of all the humble modesty and
chivalrous courtesy of the truly great artist and thorough gentleman; and
although I was quite young, and he was in his sixty-first year, he treated
me as though I had been his equal, if not superior, in ability. We had so
much to talk about, and he had so much to show me, that my first interview
with George Cruikshank had been prolonged to nearly four hours before I
became aware how quickly the time had flown. The time had then arrived for
their luncheon, or early dinner; and as both Mr. and Mrs. Cruikshank
pressed me to stay, and I had by this time overlapped the hour at which I
had made another engagement, I readily and peculiarity to his manner,
which would suffice to consented to remain, and we went downstairs to
dinner. ‘There will be nothing else than a leg of mutton,’ said
Cruikshank. ‘I happen to know that, for I came in with it,’ I replied;
‘for as I knocked at the hall door the butcher’s boy was down in the area,
delivering the leg of mutton to the cook.’ Cruikshank seemed to be greatly
amused at this, for he laughed heartily, and said to his wife, ‘My dear,
Mr. ———— came in with the mutton.’ Something in
the occurrence seemed to mightily tickle his fancy, for more than once he
repeated the words to his wife, ‘My dear, Mr. ————
came in with the mutton!’ It was while I was eating it that I terribly
forgot myself. The day was very sultry; it was five hours since I had
breakfasted; we had been busy talking, and I felt thirsty. So, while the
parlourmaid was handing something to me. I asked her to give me a glass of
beer. She replied, ‘We have no beer, sir.’ ‘Then,’ I said, ‘please to
bring me the sherry.’ ‘There is no sherry, sir.’ Whereupon my host
interposed, and laughingly explained that he could not allow the
introduction of any alcoholic liquor into his house; and that, while I was
his guest, I must content myself with drinking water. Then I suddenly
remembered that which I ought not to have forgotten, even for a moment,
that my host had devoted himself to teetotal, who, six years before, had
drawn the eight scenes of ‘The Bottle,’ and had thereby struck a powerful
blow at one of the greatest vices of the age.
“I duly apologized for my forgetfulness; and the incident naturally led
Cruikshank to dilate on that important theme, in furtherance of which he
so steadily devoted his great powers to the very end of his career, with a
persistent courage and devoted zeal that won for him the genuine respect
and admiration of those even who could not wholly agree with him in
details. I was one of those. I could travel with him, very willingly, up
to a certain point, after which our paths parted, and we ‘agreed to
differ.’ I could accompany him to temperance, but not to total abstinence.
During the remainder of the time that we occupied over dinner, we scarce
spoke on any other subject than that which gave ism, and that I was
sitting at the table of the artist rise to the scenes of ‘The Bottle,’
‘The Drunkard’s Children,’ ‘The Gin Trap,’ ‘The Gin Juggernaut’—and,
at a later period, his large oil-painting, ‘The Worship of Bacchus.’
“Our discussion on the subject was preserved with perfect good humour; so
much so, that I ventured to remind him that only a year or so before he
had been converted to teetotalism he had caricatured Father Mathew, in an
etching for the Comic Almanac for 1844, representing him as an old
pump. I reminded my host that these were his sentiments for more than
fifty years of his life, and that he had never during that period objected
to the moderate use of alcoholic liquors, although he had always
vigorously lashed their gross abuse; and I pleaded that I had not lived
for half those years that I had named, and that I might be pardoned for my
forgetfulness in asking his servant for beer and wine.
“Then he told me how the crying sin of the age had sunk deep down into his
heart, especially when he had seen it flourishing, like an upas tree, in
all its foul deformity, in those courts and alleys into which he was so
often led in search of subjects for his pencil; and how the design for
‘The Bottle’ had gradually grown upon him, and the necessity for
practising what he preached, which he found he could do only by cutting
himself adrift from all alcoholic drinks. He also explained how his plans
to disseminate the scenes of his ‘Drunkard’s Progress,’ in such a form and
at such a low price that they should reach those masses for whom he
specially designed them, were hampered and well-nigh frustrated, chiefly
by the cost of engraving such large drawings on wood; and how the new art
of glyphography had come to his assistance, and enabled him to draw the
eight designs, and to sell them (with Dr. Charles Mackay’s explanatory
poem) for a shilling—which in the year 1847 was an extraordinarily
low price for such a production. ‘You will remember,’ he said, ‘how
Maclise represented me seated on a beer-barrel, getting my inspiration
from pothouse scenes, and pencilling them on the crown of my hat?’ ‘Yes, I
remember: it was in the Fraser gallery of portraits.
And you have amply proved to the world since then that you can turn to the
best account, and for the public good, the people and incidents that you
saw in those places.’ I told him that of ‘The Bottle’ and ‘Drunkard’s
Children’ series I preferred the one where the poor girl commits suicide
from Waterloo Bridge—the idea of the body falling from a height
being so vividly conveyed to the eye, as to impress one with the
conviction that we can really see the swift descent of that ‘one more
unfortunate.’”
An instance of Cruikshank’s earnestness in the Temperance cause happened
in May 1854. He had been invited to preside over a meeting of total
abstainers, to be held in Sadler’s Wells Theatre, a place associated in
his mind with the glories of his friend Joe Grimaldi, the clown, and the
days when he was a frequenter of the clown’s club, “The Crib,” hard by.
The great Temperance advocate, J. B. Gough, was to address the audience.
Cruikshank introduced him in his own original way, delivering, as the
papers remarked, a speech full of piquant and incontrovertible truth. But
it was at the close of the orator’s speech that the chairman proved
himself equal to the occasion. Seeing that the audience were under the
spell of Mr. Gough’s eloquence, he rose and exhorted them at once to come
forward and sign the pledge. With this he advanced to the footlights,
bridged the orchestra with a few planks, and stood by to receive the
ladies who came forward in crowds, many of them leading their children. So
delighted was the artist with the number of converts he led to the table
to sign the pledge, that he drew the scene for the Illustrated London
News, with himself for central figure.
I remember attending another meeting in George Cruikshank’s company. It
was a gathering of London pickpockets, called by Mr. Henry Mayhew, when he
was engaged upon his London Labour and London Poor inquiry. The solemn,
but still somewhat grotesque impressiveness of the Temperance preacher, as
he rose, while that dreadful company of keen-eyed vicious lads were eating
the plain Temperance supper which had been provided for them, to bid them
renounce the evils of their way, and as a beginning, to shun the bottle
and the beer-pot, dwelt long in my memory. “Man,” said Lord Lytton, “has
no majesty like earnestness.” That night, honest, whole-hearted
Cruikshank, as with wild gesticulation he talked to “the dear lads”—for
the forlornest and wickedest waif was dear to him—was clothed in
majesty; and it cowed a man at hand, who acknowledged, within his hearing,
that he had smuggled something stronger than water into the room.
CHAPTER IV. THE TRIUMPH OF BACCHUS.
Mr. Wedmore, in his critical sketch of Cruikshank, has described in a few
pregnant sentences, how in his later days the public fell away from the
great humourist and subtle observer:—
“As time went on apace, neither the passage of time itself, nor the hard
work which crowded the days of his maturity in art, nor the comparative
neglect of the later years, when Cruikshank, no longer quite in the
movement of the day, was solaced by visits in the Hampstead Road, chiefly
of a very few who were collectors of his work, or of some stray humourist
still faithful and confident in the achievement of so many years ago. As
time went on, Cruikshank wore well and slowly, so that it was truly said
of him that he looked as if he had once been very old and then had
forgotten it. Employed no longer in sketching and satirising the society
of which he was hardly any more a part, he betook himself, a good deal by
choice, to work more distinctly ambitious than any he had attempted when
his hand was really the strongest and his brain the most fertile. He
furnished the design for a monument to King Robert the Bruce. He painted
in oils, not only this or that moral lesson, but a tale of heroism in
humble life. No doubt the absence of the knowledge of academical
draughtsmanship told against him not less in 1871 than it would have done
half a century before, and no doubt the absence of any capacity for the
subtle modulations of colour—nay, the absence even of sensitiveness
to these—made his painting in oil a failure when judged by the side
even of quite every-day work by every-day artists. Thus it was that no
fresh honours came to him when he was still eager for them. The popularity
of the great days was a little forgotten by the public in the presence of
the failure of the most recent. And then again, advertised poverty is
never a helpful thing. We worship merit a little, but success more, and
success must have its stamp. The public of Cruikshank narrowed. Of course
critics and journalists—the men whose business it is to keep in
memory some work that the chance public praises one day and forgets the
next—knew that Cruikshank was great, and how he had been great, and
having in more than one notable instance said so faithfully during his old
age, said so again last month, when he died. And of course, again, so much
of his work having become rare, collectors of it had arisen—curious
and anxious seekers, to whose interest we shall owe the preservation of
many of his early and many even of his riper things. For them, when
Cruikshank’s work was pretty well accomplished, and ‘finis’ seemed about
to be written to that immense volume of production, Mr. G. W. Reid engaged
on a task of care—the great catalogue raisonné in which, with
here and there errors not easily avoided, he has chronicled well-nigh five
thousand designs: ‘the smiling offspring,’ as Thackeray so admirably said
of them, ‘the smiling offspring of painful labour.’ But in the main
Cruikshank was forgotten, and the weekly smiles—feint though now and
again they needs must be, and of indulgence rather than commendation—which
are given by the English public to the efforts of our youngest English
humour, a little trivial and slight, had ceased to be bestowed on that
larger and more massive humourist who lingered from the past he was part
of.”
This is very true, and is a very sad story skilfully told. Think what
would have become of the neglected or forgotten humourist, if, when the
mere laughing public had turned away from him to Leech and Doyle, and
Tenniel and Du Maurier, he had not been fired with the ardour of an
apostle in the cause he had taken up. His Almanac had failed for lack of
readers; and David Bogue had thrown up Cruikshank’s Magazine, after the
second number—convinced that the artist had outlived his public. His
ambition to become a painter was mercifully renewed, with the renewal of
his health and mind, through temperance. Full of vigour he used to say, “A
painter should paint from his shoulder, sir.” He became almost wholly a
serious man in his work, and appealed to a public in a new capacity. He
resolved, stimulated by the success of “The Bottle,” to execute a great
picture that should remain behind him, a monument of his genius, and an
immortal Temperance lesson.
In the early ardour of his second youth he had braced himself to supply,
so far as he might, albeit he had reached his sixtieth year, the
deficiency in his art education, by working as a student at the Royal
Academy. He had, he believed, all his powers unimpaired; why then should
he not yet obtain the academical knowledge, of which he had been deprived,
as he had said bitterly, through the improvident habits of his
whisky-drinking father. Mr. Charles Landseer says: “He entered as student
at the Royal Academy, during my keepership, April 22nd, 1853; but made
very few drawings in the Antique, and never got into the Life.
He was placed upon the Turner Fund in 1866—£50 per annum. I have
heard that he made an application to Fuseli for admission to the R.A., and
was informed that the school was too full, but that he might go and draw
there if he could find a place.” *
* Letter from Charles Landseer to B. J., Feb. 18, 1878.
This is the brief record of George Cruikshank’s relations with the
Academy. He was past the years when men learn. Time pressed too heavily
upon the elderly man to leave him patience for the slow progress from the
“Antique” to the “Life.” He had been at the “Life” in his own keen way
since he was a boy; and he must be content to paint with the imperfect but
original knowledge which had sufficed for his etchings.
And so he turned to his easel, and painted in oils, with something of his
own inimitable power of concentration and dramatic story-telling, such
subjects as he had treated in earlier days with his etching-needle. His
“Tam o’ Shanter,” “Grimaldi the Clown Shaved by a Girl,” “The Runaway
Knock,” “The Fairy Ring,” “Titania and Bottom the Weaver,” “Dressing for
the Day,” “A New Situation,” and “Disturbing the Congregation,” were
exhibited at the Royal Academy or at the British Institution; and were
welcomed, for the fancy, the life, the humour that were in them—although
they were one and all crude or violent in tone, and betrayed in every part
a hand unpractised with the brush, and an eye dead to the delicacies of
colour. They were, in truth, such bits of humour or fancy as the master
humourist was wont in the old time to throw off at the rate of two or
three in a week—only laboriously rendered in oils. The Runaway
Knock, for instance, might be a plate in the “Sketch-Book,” or in “Points
of Humour”—and the remark applies to Grimaldi being Shaved by a
Girl, and the Disturbing the Congregation—which latter, to the
artist’s great delight, the Prince Consort, who was one of Cruikshank’s
cordial admirers, bought. Some of these fetched high prices. The Fairy
Ring, the most imaginative, and as a composition the best of Cruikshank’s
oil-paintings, painted in 1855, was a commission given to the artist by
Mr. Henry Miller, of Preston—the price being £800. * The fairy revel
is full of exquisitely suggestive bits. The canvas swarms with fairy life,
and abounds with fanciful episodes.
* It is now in the possession of Captain Douglass Kennedy,
of Summerfield, Kirkby-Lonsdale, Mr. Miller’s son-in-law.
The grace and spirit with which the artist could treat fairy or elfin life
may be seen in scores of his earlier works. Look at this “Fairy Revenge,”
from “Scott’s Demonology,” drawn in 1833.
“The Runaway Knock” is, as the reader will perceive, simply such a bit of
Cruikshankian humour as he had been wont to treat with his etching-needle.
It is full of life and excitement. The entire household, to the pug
puppy-dog, has been aroused; nor could the painter refrain from throwing
life into the carved stone head over the street-door. Again, “Disturbing
the Congregation” is an etching subject, elaborated. A little boy, in
church, has dropped his pegtop, and the awful eye of the beadle
(Cruikshank created the British beadle as a humorous figure) is upon him.
The Prince Consort, whom a genuine bit of humour delighted, was glad to
add this most characteristic Cruikshank to his collection.
Cruikshank’s old friend, Clarkson Stanfield, first persuaded him to trust
himself to oils. In his tinted designs, he showed that sense of colour
which was everywhere manifest in the etchings of his best time—in
his designs to Ainsworth, for instance. The watercolour drawings for his
Walter Scott plates, again, are admirable. * But in oil, it must be
repeated, he failed utterly.
* They were for a long time the property of Mr. Lumley, of
Her Majesty’s Theatre, and on the sale of his effects
passed, fortunately, into the hands of Mr. Ellison, who
bequeathed his collection to the South Kensington Museum.
The touch of the etcher remained. He was hard and crude. The first
painting he exhibited was “Bruce attacked by Assassins”—the Bruce
upon a burlesque horse smothered in drapery! It was exhibited at the Royal
Academy. His next picture was “Moses dressing for the Fair”—a
subject more within his power; but it was coarse, inharmonious, and
sketchy. The wonder was that Cruikshank could not perceive that he was on
the wrong road. So far, however, was he from suspecting this, that he was
constantly meditating great historical subjects; and actually “got in”
upon a spacious canvas the Battle of Agincourt. He even began a scriptural
subject, “Christ riding into Jerusalem.” But the genius that could realize
a street or fairy mob * upon a surface no broader than the palm of the
hand, could not paint a battle-piece. Without his outline he was all
abroad. The sacred subject remained in the studio, with many other
canvases, to the end. It was his “Battle of a Gin Court,” in his “Sunday
in London” that showed the master. He admitted, when it was suggested to
him, that the “etching-point feeling” was always in his fingers, giving a
“living” sensation to the brush, and that he never could get rid of it.
His Falstaff tormented by the Fairies, was, on the whole, the painting he
completed with most thorough satisfaction to himself.
* “Cruikshank’s crowds give one exactly the impression of
reality. They show a certain monotony, from the common
impulse of the mob, yet they are full of characteristic
figures, no two exactly alike. There is also all the due
sense of air, and motion, and fluctuation about them. They
are penetrable crowds, especially the Irish, which he
delights to draw,—true mobiles,—ready to break out into
new mischief, or disperse before the onslaught of the
Saxon.”—Francis Turner Palgrave.
Mr. Wedmore, dwelling on the shortcomings of biographers, complains that
where an artist is the subject they tell “not much of the work he had
planned but never executed; work, nevertheless, on which perhaps he had
set great store, and looked forward to completing, and ‘purposes unsure.’
‘That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount.’
“You should see the comedies I have not written,” said a pensive
playwright. Cruikshank was, throughout his life, disturbed by unfulfilled
dreams of great subjects, with which he felt his genius could cope. He
would have grappled with Milton, as we have seen, but hard fate kept him
tied to bread-and-cheese work, and to minor themes. His “Pilgrim’s
Progress” remains unfinished, and, even so far as he executed it,
unpublished. *
* The plates are in the possession of Mr. Truman.
“Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power,
And the lost clue regain?
The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower,
Unfinished must remain.”
It would have gone sadly then, when the publishers could no longer find
profit in his work, when the public had turned from his old-fashioned
humour and fancy, to the fresher and more peaceful, albeit more
circumscribed and less earnest, genius of Leech, had he not been buoyed up
and comforted with the self-imposed mission, for which he had buckled on
new armour, resolved to die fighting in the good cause. And so while his
rival rode prosperously on the fashion of the hour, catching, in the words
of Herrick,
“A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat”—
he ordered a broad canvas to be carried to his modest studio in the
Hampstead Road, and sat himself patiently down—his morrow’s bread
secured by the sympathetic admiration of a few real friends—to build
up that monument of his many-sided genius, his cartoon, composed in the
manner of his master Gillray’s “Democracy, or a Sketch of the Life of
Bonaparte”—in a series of compartments.
The story of the Triumph of Bacchus is honourable to all parties
concerned. On the one hand we find the veteran artist eager to perform an
enduring work in support of the Temperance cause; and on the other a knot
of friends, also good servants of the cause, anxious to put him in a
position to labour in comfort. It has been said the National Temperance
League was the means of giving the great painting and engraving to the
world; but the truth is, that no temperance association—as an
association—took action in the matter. The many earnest men who have
this good cause at heart co-operated in several ways in furtherance of the
artist’s plans; but these plans were actually directed by a small
independent committee, who held on to their task through many troubles and
some disagreements, until the plate was completed, and the picture was
finally made over to the nation.
When Cruikshank had drawn a rough sketch in oils of his design, he invited
a few friends to his house to consult with him as to ways and means. The
gentlemen who met as a committee were Sir Francis Crossley, John Stewart—the
art critic, Mr. Hugh Owen of the Poor Law Board, Mr. John Taylor, and Mr.
W. Tweedie, the publisher. The result of their consultation was the
adoption of a proposal submitted by Mr. Stewart, who was a fervent admirer
and devoted friend of the artist.
George Cruikshank undertook to produce his complete design in
water-colours, from which a steel etching was to be executed. The artist
assumed the entire pecuniary responsibility of the undertaking, on the
condition that his friends would supply him with what he called “spending
money,” or money for his daily wants, while the engraving was in progress.
The advances of his supporters were to be refunded out of the proceeds of
the sale of the plate. On this arrangement Cruikshank went to work with
his usual vigour. The water-colour design was soon completed, and placed
in the hands of Mr. Mottram, the engraver—the understanding being
that the outline of every figure was to be etched by Cruikshank himself.
This laborious work he finally performed, but not before serious and
harmful delays had occurred.
It had been distinctly understood that the great oil painting—the
ultimate form which the design was to take—was not to be begun until
the engraving had been completed; but Cruikshank’s impatience to be at his
magnum opus led him to break through his agreement. A member of the
committee, on calling at his house one morning, found him before the broad
canvas, with the upper row of figures already sketched in. In reply to
remonstrances, he gave the reasonable explanation that no man could etch
all day long. The committee then agreed that he should work as fast as was
prudent at the engraving, and “for rest” take a turn at the big picture.
In order further to encourage him, an honorary committee of about seventy
gentlemen was formed, to promote the subscription to the engraving. But so
engrossed did Cruikshank become in his oil-painting, that, although he
knew that the delay in the print was destroying the chances of a great
subscription list, he never touched an etching tool until the painting was
finally lifted from the easel.
This work was to bring him, not only glory, but fortune. He was confident
that crowds would flock to see it He had visions of policemen at the door
of his gallery to keep off the tumultuous throng. The advances of his
friendly committee exceeded a thousand pounds; but in a few weeks, he
believed, the public, for whom he had been labouring since the beginning
of the century, would fill his coffers, and he would be able to release
himself from his obligations. Flushed with hope, he wreathed some choice
specimens of his early work about the magnum opus, in a little
gallery next to the Lyceum Theatre, in Wellington Street, Strand; and
threw open the doors, and summoned the world to enter. But the world
passed his door. *
* It was a bitter pecuniary disappointment also. Cruikshank
believed that he would have excelled as an actor, but his
power amounted to nothing more than the realization of a
burlesque brigand. He was violent, fierce in ridiculous
excess, and extravagant in all his movements. He had always
a yearning for the stage, and thought, as we have seen, of
adopting it as a profession in his youth. He played with the
Charles Dickens troupe in 1848 (Oliver Cob in “Every Man in
his Humour,” Doctor Camphor in “Love and Physic,” and Pistol
in “The Merry Wives of Windsor”), but he could not compare
with such accomplished amateurs as Dickens and Mark Lemon.
He never lost faith, however, in his power; and even late in
life when he contemplated—to compensate for his pecuniary
disappointment with his Triumph of Bacchus—a benefit at
Drury Lane Theatre, he proposed to play Macbeth himself,
saying to a friend, “I will show them how the dagger-scene
should be done.’”
On the 28th of April, 1863, he carried his painting, by command, to
Windsor Castle, for the inspection of the Queen; and he never tired of
talking gratefully and excitedly about the interview, acting with great
solemnity the sweeping bow he made to Her Majesty. But the Queen’s
kindness failed to draw her subjects in the crowds the artist had
expected. Then his trusty friends organised a little soirée in the
exhibition room on the 28th of August, and invited him to deliver a
lecture on his picture, which he did in his own original manner, giving a
reason for every group, almost every figure, upon his crowded canvas. *
Still the laggard public disappointed the expectant veteran, who had
cherished visions of a peaceful close for his life, won by this
extraordinary labour. Kind Thackeray came, with his grave face, and looked
through the little gallery, and went off to write one of his charming
essays, which appeared in the Times (May 15,1863). He said:—
* See Appendix I.
“In a quiet little room in Exeter Hall a veteran lecturer is holding forth
all day upon a subject which moves his heart very strongly. His text, on
which he has preached before in many places, is still ‘The Bottle.’ He
divides his sermon into many hundreds of heads, and preaches with the most
prodigious emphasis and grotesque variety. He is for no half measures. He
will have no compromise with the odious god Bacchus; the wicked idol is
smashed like Bel and Dagon. He will empty into the gutter all Master
Bacchus’s pipes, his barrels, quarter-casks, demijohns, gallons, quarts,
pints, gills, down to your very smallest liqueur glasses of spirits or
wine. He will show you how the church, the bar, the army, the
universities, the genteel world, the country gentleman in his polite
circle, the humble artisan in his, the rustic ploughman in the fields, the
misguided washerwoman over her suds and tubs—how all ranks and
conditions of men are deteriorated and corrupted by the use of that
abominable strong liquor: he will have patience with it no longer. For
upwards of half a century, he says, he has employed pencil and pen against
the vice of drunkenness, and in the vain attempt to shut up drinking shops
and to establish moderate drinking as a universal rule; but for
seventeen years he has discovered that teetotalism, or the total
abstaining from all intoxicating liquors, was the only real remedy for the
entire abolition of intemperance. His thoughts working in this direction,
one day this subject of ‘the Worship of Bacchus’ flashed across his mind,
and hence the origin of a work of art measuring 13 ft. 4 in. by 7 ft. 8
in., which has occupied the author no less than a year and a half.
“This sermon has the advantage over others, that you can take a chapter at
a time, as it were, and return and resume the good homilist’s discourse at
your leisure. What is your calling in life? In some part of this vast
tableau you will find it is de te fabula. In this compartment the
soldiers are drinking and fighting; in the next the parsons are drinking
‘Healths to the young Christian.’ Here are the publicans, filthily
intoxicated with their own horrible liquors; yonder is a masquerade
supper, ‘where drunken masquerade fiends drag down columbines to
drunkenness and ruin.’ Near them are ‘the public singers chanting forth
the praises of the “God of Wine.”’ ‘Is it not marvellous to think,’ says
Mr. Cruikshank in a little pamphlet, containing a speech by him which is
quite as original as the picture on which it comments,—‘Is it not
marvellous what highly talented poetry and what harmonious musical
compositions have been produced, from time to time, in praise of this
imaginative, slippery, deceitful, dangerous myth?’
“‘This myth,’ the spectator may follow all through this most wonderful and
labyrinthine picture. In the nursery the doctor is handing a pot of beer
to mamma; the nurse is drinking beer; the little boy is crying for beer;
and the papa is drawing a cork, so that ‘he and the doctor may have a
drop.’ Here you have a group of women, victims of intemperance, ‘tearing,
biting, and mutilating one another.’ Yonder are two of the police carrying
away a drunken policeman. Does not the mind reel and stagger at the
idea of this cumulated horror? And what is the wine which yonder clergyman
holds in his hand but the same kind of stuff which has made the mother in
the christening scene above ‘so tipsy that she has let her child fall out
of her lap, while her idiotic husband points to his helpless wife, and
exclaims, “Ha, ha; she’s dr-unk’”?”
And then Thackeray appealed to the public to come and be grateful to the
painter:—
“With what vigour, courage, good-humour, honesty, cheerfulness, have this
busy hand and needle plied for more than fifty years! From 1799, * when
about eight or nine years of age,’ until yesterday, the artist has; never
taken rest. When you would think he might desire quiet, behold he starts
up lively as ever, and arms himself to do battle with the demon
drunkenness. With voice and paint-brush, with steel-plate and wood-block,
he assails ‘that deceitful, slippery, dangerous myth!’ To wage war against
some wrong has been his chief calling; and in lighter moments to waken
laughter, wonder, or sympathy. To elderly lovers of fun, who can remember
this century in its teens and its twenties, the benefactions of this great
humourist are as pleasant and well remembered as papa’s or uncle’s ‘tips’
when they came to see the boys at school. The sovereign then administered
bought delights not to be purchased by sovereigns of later coinage, tarts
of incomparable sweetness which are never to be equalled in these times,
sausages whose savour is still fragrant in the memory, books containing
beautiful prints (sometimes ravishingly coloured) signed with the magic
initials of the incomparable ‘G. Ck.’ No doubt the young people of the
present day have younger artists to charm them; and many hundred thousand
boys and girls are admiring Mr. Leech, and will be grateful to him forty
years hence, when their heads are grey. These will not care for the
Cruikshank drawings and etchings as men do whose boyhood was delighted by
them; but the moderns can study the manners of the early century in the
Cruikshank etchings, as of the French Revolution period in Gillray,
Woodward, Bunbury.”
Still the public, the paying public, held back.
Mr. Francis Turner Palgrave took up the Exhibition in the Saturday
Review, and thought it necessary to reintroduce Cruikshank to the
British public: “Old George Cruikshank has been old George Cruikshank,” he
said, “any time during the last thirty years to those whose nursery days
date so far back. Indeed, we have heard his illustrations to Grimm’s
Fairy Stories spoken of as the delight of their youth by some whose
childhood dates forty years ago, whilst the similar labour of love which
he has devoted to Jack and the Beanstalk is the thumbed and
tattered darling of many who do not yet aspire to rank in the rising
generation. He must, in fact, be old George Cruikshank, we are afraid, in
the number of his years; yet our century has seen no better example of
that ever-youthfulness which is one of the most frequent and least
doubtful signs of genuine genius. That the name of Cruikshank deserves to
be coupled with this epithet has never been dubious to those who, looking
beyond certain mannerisms and limitations in his power as an artist, can
appreciate high gifts to move both tears and laughter, exhibited on
however small and unpretending a scale; or who can value downright
originality, expressing itself in its own manner, irrespective of popular
fashion; or who are aware what peculiar skill he has reached as an
etcher.”
But the opus Georgii had been scattered through modest ways, in
children’s books, title-pages to forgotten music, ephemeral pamphlets,
mediocre works, or romances of passing popularity, as well as in the pages
of Fielding, Smollett, Grimm, Scott, and Dickens. Nearly thirty years had
passed over his head since he illustrated “Oliver Twist”; and so the crowd
passed by his sterling excellence, and, in the old fashion, turned “to
some loud trumpet-blowing hero of the hour.”
I remember seeing him standing in his exhibition room. It was empty. There
was a wild, anxious look in his face, when he greeted me. While we talked,
he glanced once or twice at the door, when he heard any sound in that
direction. Were they coming at last, the tardy, laggard public for whom he
had been bravely toiling so many years? Here was his last mighty labour
against the wall, and all the world had been told that it was there. His
trusty friend Thackeray had hailed it in the Times. A great
committee of creditable men had combined to usher it with pomp into the
world. All who loved and honoured and admired him had spoken words of
encouragement. Yet it was near noon, and only a solitary visitor had
wandered into the room. Thackeray might well say, “How little do we think
of the extraordinary powers of this man, and how ungrateful we are to
him!”
I was reminded of a visit I had paid years before to a room in the
Egyptian Hall, where Haydon, wild and lowering, lingered by his pictures,
a solitary, almost heart-broken man. In a letter he said that Douglas
Jerrold was one of the two or three who answered his summons to
Piccadilly. But it was I, then a young art-student, who had begged my
father’s ticket, and stood for him, in the empty Haydon gallery. It was
thus, with a sinking at the heart, that I went away from Wellington
Street.
In order to make the exhibition more attractive, Mr. John Taylor suggested
to Cruikshank that he should group around him a complete collection of his
art work of sixty years; his original water-colour sketches of the Miser’s
Daughter, the Tower of London, the Irish Rebellion, and indeed a selection
from the rich store he had garnered in his home, in the hope that he
should be able to leave a complete record of his long art-life as a legacy
to his country.
This was the origin of the collection which was ultimately bought by the
Aquarium Company, and is now, unfortunately, huddled in a corner of a
gallery of their building.
From Wellington Street the Cruikshank exhibition was transported late in
1863 to Exeter Hall. All who knew the worth of Cruikshank’s genius went,
and were delighted; but Cruikshank was made to see that the new generation
had turned irrevocably to other and less gifted favourites, and that he
had outlived his popularly with the multitude. * As one of the committee
remarks, “The public neither spake nor moved.”
* “The Triumph of Bacchus” was taken afterwards through the
provinces; and although the provincials in many places gave
it a heartier welcome than it had obtained in London, the
upshot of the speculation was that the expenses of
exhibition were barely covered.
And yet Cruikshank, although burdened with the pecuniary liability which
he had incurred, and which had continuously increased while the exhibition
was in progress, set himself down with heroic fortitude to complete the
etching. “Following the big picture painfully, wearily,” one of the
committee writes, “the etching was at last completed; but the long delay
had damped the ardour of subscribers. The engraving is a noble work,
unique as a steel etching in its great size and multiplicity of figures.
Each one is complete; nothing is scamped. Its power as a teacher has yet
to be fully felt.”
Yet etching and picture brought only heart-aches to the artist. Both were
got through under the pressure of grave money complications. Now the
water-colour drawing had to be made over to Mr. Samuel Gurney, as an
equivalent for the £400 which he had contributed towards the “spending
money” fund; now the collection was pledged to another friend; now the
artist found himself deeper in the books of Mr. W. Tweedie, his publisher;
and now the plate and engravings were made over to the “spending money”
committee, to recoup them for their advances. There were bickerings—nay,
there were absolute quarrels, in the course of these entanglements; for
Cruikshank was an unmanageable business man, and prone, as we have seen,
to fall out even with his most devoted friends. Still there was so much
that was good and lovable in him, that they bore with his foibles and his
outbursts, and remained willing to help the brave old man again. His
admirer, Mr. Raskin, and his secretary or representative, Mr. Howell, with
others, got up a testimonial which cast something approaching a thousand
pounds into Cruikshank’s lap, and at the same time they offered him five
guineas apiece for such little thumb-nail water-colour drawings of fairies
as he could throw off at least by the half-dozen in the week. But
Cruikshank was fevered with mighty ideas, harassed by complicated monetary
transactions, and at the same time elated by dreams of a great national
transaction which was to put him clear of the world, and at ease in a
serene light of steady popularity. An art union of his works was talked
about; but it fell through. But no good end could be served by a minute
account of the projects and counterprojects which arose around the
“Triumph of Bacchus.”
The painting and the etching consumed nearly three busy years of the
artist’s life; and his pecuniary reward was exactly £2,053 7s. 6d. as Mr.
Tweedie’s ledger shows.
Of the art merits of this great cartoon the critics have pronounced many
clashing opinions. “I think, on the whole,” Mr. Sala says, “looking at the
amount of sheer labour in the picture, the well-nigh incredible
multiplicity of figures, and the extreme care with which the minutest
details have been delineated by a hand following the eye of a man past
threescore years and ten, the ‘Triumph of Bacchus’ must be regarded as a
phenomenon. Its pictorial merit is slight; but it possesses and commands
interest of a very different nature from that excited by a mere picture,
when we remember the painter’s purpose, and the tremendous moral lesson he
sought to teach. It is an eloquent protest against the drinking customs of
society, and a no less eloquent—and terribly ghastly—exposition
of the evils wrought on that same society by the vice of drunkenness.”
If for no other reason than to do honour to George Cruikshank, it is well
that this monument of work by an earnest old man has found its way to
South Kensington, having been presented to the nation by a committee of
subscribers, one of whom contributed a cheque for £800. Here, according to
many Temperance authorities, it has ir made converts. A member of the
Cruikshank committee writes: “An actor one day stood before the painting
at South Kensington, gazing at it, and taking in its sad history, till,
bursting into tears, he left the museum, took a cab direct for Mr.
Cruikshank’s house, and signed the pledge for three years. Dr. Richardson
told the other day of a clergyman who was pulled up by the vestry scene.
Though the public did not patronise the exhibition, yet the warmest
commendations of the picture have come from non-abstainers, and for this
cause I suspect that the argument of the picture was to them a new idea
never before fully considered.”
Mr. John Stewart’s estimate of his friend’s work is technically the most
satisfactory verdict which has been written. “As a whole the ‘Bacchus’ is
easily described, although ‘none but itself can be its parallel.’ It is
the province of genius to make rules where there are none, but as truth is
a consistent whole, true genius bends the rule it makes into harmony with
those already in existence; and in nothing has the artist been more
successful than in combining his novel creation with the recognised canons
of art. This was a daring effort; and, however hyper-criticism might carp
or ignorance may sneer at details, nothing but the feeling of a poet,
which enables him to compose with a poet’s facility, could have sustained
the effort so successfully. The general composition contains all the
elemental types of pictorial grouping, generalised on the two axioms of
balance and variety. So fully has the artist carried out this subtle truth
of art—because an essential truth of nature—that it would not
be difficult to point out every principle Haydon could extract from the
combined works of Raphael successfully modified by Cruikshank to build up
and support this picture. The horizontal is represented by the groups in
the immediate foreground; the pyramidal by the Bacchus, Silenus, and
Bacchante; the circular by the publicans, and repeated by the widows and
orphan children; the perpendicular by the saloons of high life introduced
on either side: and these are repeated out and still out, till the art
which produced them is lost in the higher art necessary to hide the method
of production.
“What is true of the picture as a whole is still more visible in the
individual groups. These, however, must be seen to be appreciated, for
they cannot be described in words, not even by George Cruikshank. But this
may be affirmed without hesitation, that no other artist in Britain or in
Europe could have produced the same variety of incident, action, and
expression—that is, the same amount and quality of thought, in the
same period of time—as Cruikshank has displayed in this ‘Triumph of
Bacchus.’ The number that could have done it at all is easily counted, and
they—artists like Frith—knowing most fully the difficulties,
are most enthusiastic in their admiration of the genius and devotion by
which Cruikshank has worked and conquered. True, the work wants finish,
but this want is most felt by those ignorant enough to confound smoothness
and prettiness with finish; but a lifetime would be too short to finish
such pictures up to their standard, and they should understand that the
artist never intended to finish after their fashion. His objects were
entirely different: first, to produce his thoughts in a style that could
be seen by an audience at a distance; and second, using the work in oil as
a basis and a guide for the etching and engraving the more permanent work
which is now in preparation. In the first the success is greater than the
greatest smoothness could have given, and it would be as reasonable to
blame Rembrandt for not finishing those studies in oil he painted to etch
from, as to blame Cruikshank for following Rembrandt’s example. With this
‘Triumph of Bacchus,’ as with Yan Ryan’s ‘Hundred Guilders,’ the etching—the
print—is the true completion of the work; while the picture is only
a portion of the preparatory means to the nobler and more enduring end and
aim. It is different with artists whose works, if engraved, must be
translated from paintings into prints by others—often by those with
little sympathy for the subject or the style in which it has been treated
by the painter. Such pictures, however highly finished, lose much that is
valuable in process of translation. With etchers like Rembrandt or
Cruikshank, however diverse their styles, they have this in common, that
their prints are more perfect than the pictures from which they are
produced, because the artist is perfecting his idea while elaborating his
plate. The shrewd old Dutch burgomasters, alive to this fact, secured
Rembrandt’s most matured works by subscribing for impressions of his
plates, and the wisest admirers of Cruikshank’s genius are following the
same course, not doubting that his finished etching of this great work
will be the most finished embodiment of his grand idea.”
CHAPTER V. “FRAUDS ON THE FAIRIES” AND “WHOLE HOGS.”
The works which George Cruikshank illustrated, and the enterprises on
which he entered during the thirty-years of his teetotal career, would be
enough to fill the life of an ordinary worker. After he had contributed
“The Bottle” and “The Drunkard’s Children” to the Temperance cause, he
engaged with renewed ardour, if with failing fortunes, in his old work of
book illustration. For the Brothers Mayhew he illustrated “The Greatest
Plague in Life,” “Whom to Marry and How to get Married,” “The Magic of
Kindness,” and “The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys during ‘the
World’s Show’ of 1851.” In the first two are some etchings full of the old
spirit and the old quickness of observation. In the “Magic of Kindness”
are some charming fairy scenes, notably the “Genius of Industry And “Whole
Hogs.”
“Turning the Forest into a Fleet,” and in the “Adventures of the Sandboys”
is Cruikshank’s famous plate of all the world going to Hyde Park—a
new rendering of his pictorial preface to the Omnibus. In this we find
that the hand had lost none of its cunning, and that the fancy and the
power of observation were undimmed.
About this time—that is, between 1849 and 1853—Cruikshank
illustrated two Christmas stories by Mrs. G-ore, “The Snowstorm” and “The
Inundation,” in Angus B. Beach’s “Clement Lorimer,” * the “Songs of the
late Charles Dibdin,” Frank Smedley’s “Frank Fairleigh,” and “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin”—representing some seventy etchings, and as many wood blocks.
The “Frank Fairleigh” etchings introduced Cruikshank to Frank Smedley, and
led to a final venture in the magazine form, with which David Bogue, the
publisher, had resolved to test finally the hold the artist still had on
the public.
* Mr. Wedmore, in his article on Cruikshank, says of one of
the etchings in this book, “Miss Eske carried away during
her Trance,” that it is among the things that show him to
have had “the imagination of tragedy.”
Bogue had long been Cruikshank’s fast friend and admirer, and was loth to
believe that his name had ceased to be an attraction to the British public
upon a title-page. Moreover, he had had some recent successes with the
“inimitable” George. In two years the “Sandboys,” in which was his
amazingly minute “All the World going to see the Exhibition” and his
drawing of the transept, packed with myriads of people at the opening
ceremony (I remember standing by him while he sketched it from the
south-western gallery), had gone through four editions. But his recent
Fairy Library had been a failure. Dickens (inHousehold Words),
among others, had protested against teetotalism being introduced into
fairyland; and had, two years previously, even ridiculed what was called
Cruikshank’s temperance fanaticism, in a paper called “Whole Hogs.” These
attacks, no doubt, helped to put an end to the George Cruikshank’s
Fairy Library, after he had illustrated with some exquisitely dainty
scenes, “Pass in Boots,” “Hop o’ my Thumb,” u Jack and the Beanstalk,” and
“Cinderella.” * Cuthbert Bede, in a “Reminiscence of Cruikshank”inNotes
and Queries, remarks: “It was very evident from that article, ‘Frauds
on the Fairies,’ and also from a previous one from the same pen, called
‘Whole Hogs,’ that Dickens considered Cruikshank to be occasionally given
over to the culture of crotchets, and to the furious riding of favourite
hobbies. But in all these things it is indisputable that the great moral
artist was firmly persuaded that he was acting in the cause of suffering
humanity, and engaged upon some work for the amelioration of his
fellow-creatures. And whatever was the act, and however small and trivial
it might appear in the sight of the majority, Cruikshank threw himself
into it heart and soul, and, like everything else he put his hand to, he
did it with all his might.”
* These have been since published in a volume by Bell and
Daldy, and by Routledge and Co.
To be driven from fairyland, which was the realm of his happiest dreams,
was a bitter disappointment, and he felt deeply the blow of the friend who
drove him forth from it.
Dickens had said of him and his fairies,—
“He is the only designer fairyland has had. Callot’s imps, for all their
strangeness, are only of the earth, earthy. Fuseli’s fairies belong to the
infernal regions; they are monstrous, lurid, and hideously melancholy. Mr.
Cruikshank alone has a true insight into the ‘little people.’ They are
something like men and women, and yet not flesh and blood; they are
laughing and mischievous, but why we know not. Mr. Cruikshank, however,
has had some dream or the other, or else a natural mysterious instinct, or
else some preternatural fairy revelation, which has made him acquainted
with the looks and ways of the fantastical subjects of Oberon and
Titania.”
When this wizard of the etching-needle, some fifteen years after he had
drawn “the awful Jew,” pretended to put forth a whole Fairy Library of his
own, the author of the Jew sat himself down and wrote:—
“We have lately observed, with pain, the intrusion of a ‘Whole Hog’ of
unwieldy dimensions into the fairy flower-garden. The rooting of the
animal among the roses would in itself have awakened in us nothing but
indignation; our pain arises from his being violently driven in by a man
of genius, our own beloved friend, Mr. George Cruikshank. That
incomparable artist is, of all men, the last who should lay his exquisite
hand on fairy text. In his own art he understands it so perfectly, and
illustrates it so beautifully, so humorously, so wisely, that he should
never lay down his etching-needle to ‘edit’ the Ogre, to whom with that
little instrument he can render such extraordinary justice. But, to
‘editing’ Ogres, and Hop-o’-my-Thumbs, and their families, our dear
moralist has in a rash moment taken, as a means of propagating the
doctrines of Total Abstinence, Prohibition of the Sale of Spirituous
Liquors, Free Trade, and Popular Education. For the introduction of these
topics, he has altered the text of a fairy story; and against his right to
do any such thing we protest with all our might and main. Of his likewise
altering it to advertise that excellent series of plates, ‘The Bottle,’ we
say nothing more than that we foresee a new and improved edition of ‘Goody
Two Shoes,’ edited by E. Moses and Son; of the ‘Dervish’ with the box of
ointment, edited by Professor Holloway; and of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’
edited by Mary Wedlake, the popular authoress of ‘Do you Bruise your Oats
yet?’” Dickens goes on to point out what would become of our great books
if this kind of liberty were to be tolerated. “Imagine a total abstinence
edition of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ with the rum left out. Imagine a peace
edition, with the gunpowder left out, and the rum left in. Imagine a
vegetarian edition, with the goat’s flesh left out. Imagine a Kentucky
edition, to introduce a flogging of that ‘tarnal old nigger Friday, twice
a week. Imagine an Aborigines Protection Society edition, to deny the
cannibalism and make Robinson embrace the amiable savages whenever they
landed. Robinson Crusoe would be edited out of his island in a hundred
years, and the island would be swallowed up in the editorial ocean.” Then
follows a most humorous story of “Cinderella,” edited by a stump orator on
Temperance, Ocean Penny Postage:
“Frauds on the Fairies once permitted, we see little reason why they may
not come to this, and great reason why they may. The Vicar of Wakefield
was wisest when he was tired of being always wise. The world is too much
with us, early and late. Leave this precious old world, escape from it
alone.”
Poor George Cruikshank dropped his pencil, and Cuthbert Bede has told us
how he found the artist, on an October day in 1853, still smarting from
the effects of Dickens’s article. Cruikshank, however, was not the man to
feel a blow and sit down under it.
Bogue had resolved, as I have already stated, to test finally the extent
of Cruikshank’s remaining popularity with a magazine that was to bear his
name, and that was to be edited by Mr. Frank Smedley, then a popular
writer of fiction. Cruikshank had no sooner an organ of his own, than he
buckled on his armour, and prepared for a lively assault upon the author
of the two House-hold Words articles, In the second (and last)
number of George Cruikshank’s magazine * (to which I have already
referred) is a letter from Hop-o’-my-Thumb to Charles Dickens, Esq., upon
“Frauds on the Fairies,” “Whole Hogs,” etc. It is in Cruikshank’s homely
style, but the reader will see that it is not without several good
home-thrusts. He begins:—
“Right trusty, well-beloved, much-read, and admired Sir,—My
attention has lately been called to an article in Household Words,
entitled ‘Frauds on the Fairies,’ in which I fancy I recognise your master
hand as the author—and in which article, as it appears to me, you
have gone a leetle out of your way to find fault with our mutual
friend George Cruikshank, for the way in which he has edited
‘Hop-o’-my-Thumb and the Seven League Boots.’ You may, perhaps, be
surprised at receiving a letter from so small an individual as myself;
but, independently of the deep debt of gratitude which I feel that I owe
to that gentleman, for the way in which he has edited my history, my
anxiety to maintain the honour and credit of the noble family to which I
belong impels me to take up my pen (made from the quill of a
humming-bird), to endeavour to justify the course adopted by my editor,
and also to take the liberty of setting you right upon one or two points
in which you are entirely mistaken.
“These may seem bold words, from such a mite as I am, to such a literary
giant as you are; but I have had to deal with giants in my time, and I am
not afraid of them, and I shall therefore take leave to tell you, that
although you may have held in your memory some of the remarkable facts in
my interesting history, yet that you were ignorant of the general
character of the whole; and the only way in which I can account for a man
of your remarkable acuteness having made such a great mistake is, that you
have suffered that extraordinary seven-league boot imagination of yours to
run away with you into your own Fairy Land,—and thus have
given your own colours to this history; and, consequently, a credit
and a character to the old editions which do not belong to them.”
Cruikshank then quotes passages from Dickens’s article, and continues:
“Now this, which you call ‘Frauds on the Fairies,’ in my humble opinion,
might as well have been called ‘Much Ado about Nothing’; for, had my
editor been altering the title of any standard literary work, the writing
of any man of mark—one of your own glorious books, for example—then,
indeed, you might have raised a hue and cry; but to insist upon preserving
the entire integrity of a fairy tale, which had been and is constantly
altering in the recitals, and in the printing of various editions of
various countries, and even counties, appears to my little mind like
shearing one of your own ‘whole hogs,’ where there is ‘great cry and
little wool.’”
Then Cruikshank asks where is tenderness and mercy in Tom Thumb’s father,
when he induced his wife to take their seven children into the forest to
perish miserably of hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts? “My editor,”
Hop-o’-my-Thumb proceeds, “seeing that such a statement was not only
disgusting, but against nature, and consequently unfit for the pure and
parentloving minds of children, felt certain that any father acting in
such a manner must either be mad or under the influence of intoxicating
liquor, which is much the same thing, and therefore, wishing to avoid
any allusion to such an awful affliction as insanity, has accounted for my
father’s unnatural conduct by attributing to it that cause which marks its
progress, daily and hourly, by acts of unnatural brutality.” Farther on,
Hop-o’-my-Thumb, referring to the little peculiarity of the young ogres
“biting little children on purpose to suck their blood,” wants to know
whether they are good things to be nourished in a child’s heart. “And I
should also like to know,” he adds, “what there is so enchanting and
captivating to ‘young fancies’ in this description of a father
(ogre though he be) cutting the throats of his own seven children? Is this
the sort of stuff that helps to ‘keep us ever young,’ or give us
that innocent delight which we may share with children?” Having thanked
Mr. Cruikshank for rescuing his family character from the moral taints
which former biographers had put upon it, representing him to be, in the
transaction of the seven-league boots and the mother of the slaughtered
children, “anunfeeling, artful liar, and a thief,” and his parents
“receivers of stolen goods,” he turns upon Mr. Dickens for his
attempt to throw ridicule upon the Temperance question, and also his
“evident contempt, and even hatred, against that cause,” as shown in his
“Whole Hogs.” Hop-o’my-Thumb hereupon valiantly and defiantly remarks:
“This is not the place, nor is it my purpose, now to discuss the
Temperance question, but I take the liberty of telling you that it is a
question which you evidently do not understand, for if you did, your good
heart and sanguine disposition would make you, if possible, a more
enthusiastic advocate than my editor.”
About the good intentions of both artist and critic there cannot be any
doubt in any honest mind, Cruikshank had his parting thrust at his
assailant; he could not help that:—
“You are generally,” he says to his friend Dickens, “most happy in your
titles; but, in this instance, the application seems singularly
inappropriate. The ‘whole hog’ should, by rights, belong to those parties
who patronise pork butchers; and the term as applied to the peace people
would be better used in regard to the Great Bear, or any other war party;
and surely, as to any allusion to the ‘unclean animal,’ in connection with
total abstinence, the term would more properly attach to those who wallow
in the mire, and destroy their intellects by the use of intoxicating
liquors, until they debase themselves to the level of the porcine
quadruped! And, as far as my editor is concerned, I consider it a great
act of injustice to mix him up with other questions, and with which, you
know, he has nothing whatever to do. I have therefore to beg that in
future you will not drive your ‘whole hogs’ against us, but take them to
some other market, or keep them to yourself, if you like; but we’ll none
of ‘em, and therefore I take this opportunity of driving them back.”
The controversy is closed with a capital cut of Hop-o’-my-Thumb driving
some prodigious porkers back to Household Words.
The first number of the magazine had warned the public that hobbies were
to be ridden regularly. One of the folded etchings was the first of a
series of “Tobacco Leaves,” in which the habit of smoking was to be
attacked. The plate was a series of grotesque absurdities, in which a
moral was torn to tatters. Boys with hoops are smoking pipes; an adult son
is offering a “long day” and a spittoon in a drawing-room to his venerable
mother; a young gentleman is passing ladies in the street with a cigar in
his mouth, and under the picture is written, “No one but a very
unthinking gentleman or a most contemptible snob or puppy would smoke
in the streets or public places, regardless who he may annoy with his
offensive tobacco smoke.” In one corner of the plate a gentleman is
offering a cigar to his sister, saying, “Come, sister dear, soothe your
distressed feelings with a mild Havannah!” in the opposite corner a lover
on his knees is making a declaration in these words: “Dearest (puff)
Virginia (puff), I (puff) love you (puff) dearer (puff) than my pipe
(puff).” Virginia is listening, with a cigar in her hand.
Other hobbies were in preparation. Cothbert Bede, who was then in constant
communication with Cruikshank, was invited to co-operate in them with his
pen. “At one of our interviews at his house,” he says, “relative to his
projected magazine, he showed me some wood-blocks, on which were his own
designs, and which he had already gone to the expense of having carefully
engraved by (if I remember rightly) Mr. T. Williams. He then explained to
me the nature of the designs and the special object for which he had
prepared them. I must continually have noticed (he said) an evil that was
patent to every one, both indoors and out of doors, in the streets, and
railway carriages, and omnibuses, and all public vehicles. It was an evil
not confined to the young or the old; it was most injurious in its
effects, and it only required the public attention to be pointedly
directed to it to have it stopped and put down. This was what he desired
to do with his pencil, and it was for this that he sought the co-operation
of my pen.
“Now, what does the reader imagine was this evil that had obtained such a
hold upon the nation?—It was nothing more or less than the habit of
ladies and gentlemen, and boys and girls, placing the handles of their
sticks, canes, parasols, or umbrellas to their mouths, and either sucking
them or tapping their teeth with them! Suiting the action to the word, and
acting the characters, Cruikshank showed me how the gent of the period
tried to make himself look excessively knowing by sucking the ivory or
bone handle of his cane; how the young lady, and even the very little
girl, made their morning calls, and sucked their parasol handles—a
sure sign of great gaucherie; how other ladies, even elderly ones,
who ought to know better, did the same in carriages and omnibuses, thereby
running the risk of having their teeth broken if the vehicle gave a sudden
lurch; and how even grave physicians carried their gold or ivoryheaded
canes up to their lips. (I here reminded Mr. Cruikshank that if they did
so it was in traditionary keeping with an old custom dating from the days
of the Great Plague of London, when every doctor who carried ‘fate and
physic in his eye’ had a cunningly devised box for aromatic scents fixed
on the top of his cane, so that he might hold it under his nose whenever
he visited an infectious case.)
“Cruikshank spoke most gravely on this ‘hideous, abominable, and most
dangerous custom,’ an evil that he was determined to try to put down, and
for this end he had prepared the designs that he showed to me, and which
had been already engraved. These illustrations he wished me to work into
letterpress, which should first appear in the projected magazine, and
should then be reprinted in the form of a small pamphlet. He did not
desire to make money by the publication of this pamphlet; on the contrary,
he intended to have many thousand copies printed at his own expense, and
to employ men to distribute them gratuitously to the public. There were to
be men posted outside every railway station in London, and as each cab or
carriage rolled from under the gateway, one of the pamphlets was to be
tossed into the vehicle. The omnibus travellers were to be liberally dealt
with in the same way, and by these means Cruikshank was quite sanguine
that the reform which he so much desired would be effected in generation.
“I could not see in this a very promising subject my pen; but, as the
article was to make its first appearance in the new magazine, I agreed, to
write something in furtherance of the object that he had in mind, and to
incorporate the illustrations that he had prepared. After a while I took
Mr. Cruikshank the article that I had written. He was more than
disappointed with it—he was horrified. I had treated that grave and
earnest question in a light and jocular spirit! It would only amuse
instead of warn the reader! it would never do! and so on, with a great
deal of action of hands and head. I argued that it was more likely to make
the desired impression upon their minds, if they read what I had written,
than if they were presented with a grave sermon-like treatise on the
theme. But my arguments failed to move him, and he asked me to write
another, and far more serious, paper on the subject. This I declined to
do, and requested him to get some other author to carry out his ideas.
“Whether he ever did so or not, I do not know. The collapse of the new
magazine in its early infancy prevented the appearance in that quarter of
George Cruikshank’s tilt against stick and parasol sucking, and I am not
aware if the engraved blocks of which I have spoken were ever made public.
If any one is sufficiently curious to know the nature of the manuscript
that I submitted to Cruikshank, he may do so by referring to Motley,
by Cuthbert Bede, published by James Blackwood in 1855. There he will find
eight pages taken up by an article, illustrated by myself, called ‘Dental
Dangers,’ which is, verbatim, printed from the manuscript that I
had written for Mr. Cruikshank—which, however, I called ‘Take Care
of your Teeth!’
“In that paper I spoke of a lady in an omnibus, whose set of false teeth
were projected into her opposite neighbour’s lap through a sudden jolt of
the vehicle while she was sucking her parasol handle. This led me to tell
Cruikshank an anecdote that I had then recently heard, and which, as it
has not been in print, I may here narrate; for Cruikshank laughed very
heartily at it, and said that he should like to make an illustration to
it, and asked me if I could not write a paper on country rectors and their
adventures, in which it might be introduced, and which he would further
illustrate. Very likely this suggestion might have been carried into
effect if Mr. D. Bogue had carried on the magazine. As it was, it was lost
to the world.”
Cuthbert Bede has also given us an account of Cruikshank’s first
introduction to the editor of his unfortunate final magazine:—
“He told me that, as in my own case, he had not known Cruikshank
personally until this projected magazine brought them together, although
Cruikshank had illustrated ‘Frank Fairleigh.’ The great artist’s first
call upon Smedley was made only a few days previous to my own; and Smedley
gave me the following account of it: ‘He was shown into this room, while I
was sitting at that writing-desk by the window, I wheeled my chair round
(poor Smedley had to use a self-acting wheeled chair), and advanced to
meet him. Thus I had my back to the light, and he was facing the window.
He appeared so amazed at seeing me such a cripple as I am, that he could
not overcome his wonder, but kept exclaiming, “Good God! I thought you
could gallop about on horses!” and the like expressions. I explained how
it was; and we then proceeded to discuss business details. It was a hot,
sultry day, and Cruikshank had walked fast; he was heated, and his face
and forehead were very red. His hair was blown about, and, instead of
sitting quietly on a chair, he was standing up and gesticulating wildly. I
have a sense of the ludicrous, and had the greatest difficulty to keep
from laughing, or to look him in the face. For all this time, in the very
centre of his capacious and very red forehead, there was a round something
of ivory, not plain, but carved in circles, and as big as a large button.
I wondered what it could be. Was it some Temperance badge? Was it some
emblem of office in some secret society, in which he held rank as a Great
Panjandrum with the little button atop? For the life of me I could not
divine what it was. And all the time he was holding me with his glittering
eye, and going through a whole pantomime of gesticulations. Suddenly, and
to my from his forehead, and dropped on the hearthrug at his feet.
Cruikshank looked at it with bewilderment, and said, “Wherever did that
come from?”
“From off your forehead,” I replied. “From off my forehead!” he echoed, as
he rubbed it fiercely. “Yes,” I said, “it has been there ever since you
entered the room.” Cruikshank seized his hat, and looked into its crown,
when it appeared that the ivory circlet had dropped from, the ventilating
hole in the crown of the hat as Cruikshank had walked to my house, and
that it had found its way down to his forehead, where, what with the heat
of his head and the fragments of glue on the ivory, it had become firmly
fixed, and would perhaps have remained there for some hours longer if he
had not accompanied his conversation with so much action When he found out
the truth, and fully realized the absurdity of the intense relief—for
I was beginning to feel that I could not bear the mystery much longer—the
ivory badge fell situation, he burst into such a hearty roar of laughter
as I have not heard for many a day. This was my first personal
introduction to George Cruikshank.’”
Cuthbert Bede had also the advantage of seeing Cruikshank at work on that
plate of his magazine which will make its two numbers live longer than
many a serial which has lasted twenty years.
“When I first went into his studio,’’ says Cuthbert Bede, “there were many
specimens of his work around him, oil paintings, etchings, and wood-block
drawings in various stages of execution. He seemed to take a particular
pleasure in showing me these, and in explaining their designs. The chief
work on which he was thus engaged was his wondrous etching of ‘The Comet
of 1853,’ which was to form the frontispiece for the projected magazine.
On account of its dimensions—the actual plate, without the title,
‘Passing Events, or the Tail of the Comet of 1853,’ being 15 1/4 by 7
inches—it had to appear as a folding plate. It was crammed with
hundreds of figures, giving, at one view, an epitome of the leading events
of the year—the Peace Conference, the war between Russia and Turkey,
the war in China, the Queen’s review of the troops at Chobham, the naval
review at Portsmouth, Spirit Rapping, Table Turning, the Derby Day,
Betting, the City Corporation Commission, John Gough and the Temperance
Demonstration, the Nineveh Bulls, the Zulu Kaffirs and Earthmen, the
Anteater, Albert Smith’s ‘Mont Blanc,’ Charles Kean’s ‘Sardanapalus,’
Bribery and Corruption, the Australian Gold Discovery, Mrs. Stowe and
‘Uncle Tom,’ the New York and Dublin Exhibitions, the Vivarium, Guy
Fawkes, Lord Mayor’s Day, Wyld’s Great Globe, Captain McClure and the
North-west Passage, Miss Cunningham’s Seizure by the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, the Ceiling-walker, Smithfield Cattle Show, Chiswick Flower Show,
Christmas Merry-making, and the Pantomimes—these are among the
subjects that appear in the Comet’s Tail, and the gradual progress of
which to its ultimate perfection I was so fortunate as to see....
“The hundreds of tiny figures in this etching are shown with a
distinctness and power of characterisation unrivalled by any other artist.
I think that he surpassed Callot in this respect; and that no one could
approach George Cruikshank in his vigorous, life-like, and picturesque
delineation of surging crowds and packed masses of human beings.”
It was his wont to open a serial with a tour-de-force of this description.
CHAPTER VI. A SLICE OF BREAD AND BUTTER.
George Cruikshank’s habit of putting himself forward as the originator of
any work with which he was connected was never more amusingly displayed
than when, in March 1870, he made one of a deputation of the National
Education League to Mr. Gladstone. “I must say,” he remarked on this
event, in his introduction to the second edition of his ‘Slice of Bread
and Butter,’ “that it afforded me much gratification to hear all the
suggestions which I had placed before the public so many years ago, so
eloquently and forcibly advocated upon this occasion.”
It was a harmless assumption in this instance, to be freely forgiven in
the earnest old man who was still exerting himself to the utmost of his
ability for what he conceived to be the right way, in the cause of popular
education.
He had thrown his ideas into one of those whimsical forms, peculiar to
him. He was fond of illustrated pamphleteering, and the reclamation of
ragged children left out in the cruel streets hungry and half naked had
always been a subject near to his heart. His last effort in their behalf
he called “A Slice of Bread and Butter.” On the title page we find one of
his bright little pictorial stories in wood. An outcast child lies upon
the pavement surrounded by a crowd of men, who are in eager consultation
as to the restorative which shall be administered. In the distance is the
parish church, but overhead swings the sign of the Britannia, and the
landlord, with a pipe in his mouth, is contemplating the scene from the
bar parlour. The story is told with all the old completeness.
The crowd consists of “some worthy gentlemen, magistrates, and others,”
who, on their way “to the Town Hall on county business,” have found this
forlorn boy upon the pavement leaning against the wall. As he was neither
begging nor stealing, and did not obstruct the pathway, he could not be
taken into custody. When asked what was the matter, he replied, “I wants
summut to eat.” Then follows the learned consultation around the starving
boy:—
“Now the worthy magistrates and the other gentlemen—some of whom
were clergymen, and ministers, and lawyers—were all kind-hearted and
benevolent men as well as the doctor; and they all exclaimed, as with one
voice, upon hearing what the doctor said, ‘Oh, dear me, how very shocking!—let
him have some food instantly!’
‘Yes, yes!’ cried one: ‘here, officer! go into the Britannia, and get him
something to eat instantly.’
‘I suppose,’ said he, turning to the doctor, “a bit of plain bread and
butter wall be best for him in his present condition?’ ‘The very thing,’
he replied; and as the officer was about to run into the house to get a
bit of bread and butter, another gentleman of the party cried out, ‘Stop!
see that you bring brown bread.’ ‘Pooh! pooh!’ said another; ‘it
does not matter what sort of bread it is, but it must be toasted.’
‘White or brown, or plain or toasted, it matters not much,’ exclaimed a
fourth, ‘provided there is plenty of butter on it.’ ‘I object most
decidedly to the butter,’ observed a very sedate gentleman. ‘As to
that,’ shouted out another, ‘I consider the butter as most essential:
it is full of nourishment; and, besides, the poor boy might be choked by
cramming dry bread down his throat without butter; but then we must
be careful that it be salt butter.’ ‘No! no!’ cried another; ‘fresh
butter, if you please, and as much as you please; but no salt.’
‘You are all wrong, my friends!—quite wrong!’ vociferated another of
the party; ‘depend upon it, that dry toast is the best thing he can
have.’ ‘Oh! oh! oh!’ exclaimed all the other gentlemen; ‘who ever heard of
such a thing as giving dry toast to a starving child?’ ‘Who ever,
indeed!’ chimed in another; ‘it is quite ridiculous to toast the bread at
all; the poor child might die before it was ready! No! no! plain bread and
butter is best for him; but mind, if I have to pay my part towards it, the
bread must be new—yes, new bread.’
‘New bread!’ exclaimed some of the party why, that’s worse than all; for
if it does not stick in his throat, it will in his stomach, and perhaps
kill him. New bread is indigestible and most unwholesome stuff.’ ‘Well,
well; let it be plain stale bread and butter, but only the crumb of the
loaf, and I will pay my part willingly,’ observed another. ‘Crumb without
crust!’ said one of the former speakers; ‘why, the crust of the loaf
contains ten times more nourishment than the crumb, and I, for one, will
have nothing to do with it, nor pay a farthing towards it, unless he has a
good lump of crust.’
“Now during this contention, or
‘all this splutter About the toast and bread and butter,’
the poor boy seemed to be getting worse and worse, and at the same time
all these worthy gentlemen becoming more and more excited; some calling
out for ‘Fancy bread,’ some for ‘French rolls,’ others for ‘German black
bread,’ and all refusing to pay any part towards the bread and butter,
unless cut after their own fashion, when they were reminded by one of the
party that there was not the least necessity to trouble themselves about
paying for what the boy might have, as it could be charged to the county.
To which they all replied, rather sharply, that, as to that, if they did
not think it right to pay out of their own individual pockets, neither did
they think it right that the public money should be used for purposes
which they could not individually approve of. ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’
cried the doctor, ‘pray let the child have something. Is it not dreadful
to let this poor boy perish before our eyes, when there are the means of
relief within reach? For mercy’s sake, let him have something to keep him
alive!’ ‘Well,’ replied one of the magistrates (who was chairman of the
Sessions),'as you see he cannot have the bread and butter, you must
prescribe something else for him.
‘Dear, dear me!’ said the doctor, ‘I am really shocked at such
inconsistency. Will you let him have a little brandy, then!’ ‘Oh yes I’
they all cried out together, ‘let him have some brandy—by all means
give him some brandy!’”
The brandy made Ragged Jack drank; and presently, being still hungry, he
is tempted to steal a roll from a baker’s shop, and dragged to the Town
Hall, where the magistrates, who had left him upon the pavement taking
brandy, give him a month’s imprisonment, and detention in a reformatory
school.’ The chaplain was kind to him, and said, “Yes, now that Jack was a
convicted thief, he had plenty of good wholesome bread and butter.” In the
reformatory he was educated, and taught a trade, and sent to a distant
town where his antecedents would not be against him. On his way he met his
cousin, Tom Rag—“a boy as ragged and wretched as he used to be
himself.” Tom wants to know how Jack has managed to get such nice clothes
and a basket of tools, that he may go and do likewise.
“Cousin Jack, who had been taught, and indeed now knew, that thieving was
a wicked thing to do, was sorely puzzled how to advise his friend in this
matter; for, having a great regard for Tommy, he wished to save him from
the miserable state in which he himself had once been—skulking and
wandering about the streets all day, picking up hits and scraps of food,
even out of the gutters like the dogs, and at night sleeping in the
corner, perhaps, of an open sheep-pen in the cattle-market, or crouching
from the drenching rain by the side of a doorway; and when he contrasted
that state of his existence with the comfort he had felt, and the
attention he had received whilst in the jail and the reformatory, he knew
not how to advise his poor cousin, knowing that poor Tom was, as he
himself had been, almost perishing for want of a little good wholesome
bread and butter, clean clothes, and a comfortable bed to lie in, which he
well knew poor Tom would have if he could be sent to jail, as he had been.
When he thought of all this he was sorely puzzled what to recommend; but
at last he said: ‘Tom, you must not steal; so you had better go a-begging,
and perhaps you may be lucky enough to be sent to jail for that, and then
you will have everything done for you, as I have had, and come out better
than me; for nobody will be able to say that you have been a thief. Yes;
go and beg, Tom!
But if this don’t answer, why, then, I suppose you must go
a-THIEVING, as I did.’”
“It may be asked, Where were the parents of these poor boys all this time?
Well, they could tell you at the Britannia public-house, only they don’t
like to talk about such disagreeable matters there. But the fact is,
Jack’s father used to use that house, and was once a decent sort of
man, and was at one time a ‘moderate drinker’; but upon one occasion he
got mad drunk, and in that state of drunken insanity went home and killed
his wife, was sent to jail, and died there. Tom’s father was transported
for committing some crime after he had ‘been drinking’ at the Britannia;
and Tom’s mother took a little drop at first to comfort her, and
then drank herself to death.” The foregoing will remind many readers of
the scheme of Mr. Jenkins’s “Ginx’s Baby.”
But Cruikshank gives his views on popular education in his homely simple
way:—
“One of the great social questions of the day is the necessity and
importance of a general or national system of education for the humble
classes, upon such a comprehensive plan as shall give every child born in
the United Kingdom a certain amount of book knowledge, and also of moral
and religious training, as they are, or ought to be, entitled to as
juvenile members of a civilized community—such training as may
prepare them to fill useful and honest positions in life, or, perhaps, be
the first step to those high stations so often filled by honest,
hardworking, mercantile men, or ingenious mechanics. Now, every thinking
and right-minded person will agree that this object is a most desirable
one, and that no innocent child should be so neglected as to be allowed to
grow up in a state of savage ignorance; and at the first blush nothing
seems more easily to be accomplished, in a wealthy and intelligent country
like ours, than to arrange such a general system as is here alluded to,
and to provide the ways and means. Well! all this would be simple
and easily accomplished, but for one obstacle—namely, the
differences in the religious opinions of a portion of the adult
population. Yes, strange as it may appear,—nay, monstrous as it is,—nevertheless
these religious differences have been, and are now, the only bar to the
adoption of any wide and general system of secular education.”
“It is of course impossible to please all parties; but few persons, I
imagine, could surely object to a national system of education upon the
following plan:—In the first place, an Act of Parliament should be
passed, making it imperative that every child should receive some
education, and where the parents are destitute or depraved, then that the
State shall take the position of the parents, and educate and train up all
the neglected and helpless children. In the second place:—In the
schools, let reading, writing, and arithmetic be taught (with other
branches of education, if possible, or required), and such moral training
as will teach a child the difference between Right and Wrong—and
here let the schoolmaster’s duty cease, and that of the ministers of
religion begin. And in the third place:—Let it be the duty of the
clergyman, and ministers of all denominations, to instruct all those
children who belong to their particular church, chapel, or sect, in the
religious belief of their parents; but when the parents do not attend any
place of worship, or profess any particular creed—then, that the
clergy of the Established Church be allowed to instruct all such children
in the religion of the State. By such an arrangement as this, it appears
to me that if all the poor helpless children of the land were schooled in
the common elements of reading, writing, etc., for five days in the week,
and the clergy and ministers of all denominations were to instruct these
children one day in the six in the religion of the class to which they
belong (independent of the Sunday), that then all parties might be
satisfied, and a great objection done away with as to the great general
system which I here propose for secular instruction and moral and
religious training.”
He goes on to remark that a reformatory may be wanted in any country,
under any circumstances, “but why should we have Ragged Schools in
rich England?” He proceeds to argue that there would be no need for
either Ragged Schools or Reformatories if the use of “strong drink” were
abolished; and he calls upon “the grown-up people not to allow innocent
children to starve and fall into evil ways, because they cannot agree upon
the mode of cutting a Slice op Bread and Butter.” He adds: “But as
prevention is better than cure, I call upon all those who delight in good
works to aid the Temperance cause, which is, in truth, the only radical
cure for the evils complained of.”
The tail-piece to this characteristic pamphlet—as charming as it is
characteristic—is a brightly-executed drawing on wood of Britannia
seated upon the British lion, couchant, with her arms about “her ragged
and reformatory pets.”
Cruikshank’s zeal for the cause to which he had devoted himself led him to
take delight in the illustration even of little Temperance pamphlets and
fly-sheets.
Ruskin had said, in his “Time and Tide, by Weare and Tyne” (1867), “It is
no more his business to etch diagrams of drunkenness than it is mine at
this moment to be writing these letters against anarchy.” Yet just as Mr.
Ruskin has gone on with his letters, so Cruikshank went on with his
diagrams of drunkenness to the end.
In 1867, when Cruikshank brought out his “British Bee-Hive,” with a worker
at a trade or profession in every cell, the estates of the realm at the
top, and the army and navy at the bottom, and called it “a penny political
picture for the people, with a few words upon Parliamentary Reform, by
their old friend George Cruikshank,” he was opposed to the Reform Bill,
and advised the working-men to be content with the glorious constitution
as it stood, and keep away from Reform meetings, as “revolutionary
proceedings.”
Perhaps the best of Cruikshank’s pamphlets, taking the text and the
drawings together, is “The Glass and the New Crystal Palace,” published by
John Cassell. It is thoroughly Cruikshankian, and in his most vivacious
mood: some of the illustrations—as the Spirit Level—a drunkard
at full length upon the pavement; the Social Villagers, with Death for the
host, and the villagers represented by their tombstones; and the whisky
after the goose, and the goose after the whisky, for instance.
Think what would have become of the neglected or forgotten humourist, if,
when the mere laughing public had turned away from him to Leech and Doyle,
and Tenniel and Du Maurier, he had not been fired with the ardour of an
apostle in the cause he had taken up. His Almanac had failed for lack of
readers; and David Bogue had thrown up Cruikshank’s magazine, after the
second number—convinced that the artist had outlived his public. His
ambition to become a painter was mercifully renewed, with the renewal of
his health and mind, through temperance. Full of vigour he used to say, “A
man should paint from his shoulder, sir.” He became almost wholly a
serious man in his work, and appealed to the public in a new capacity. He
resolved, stimulated by the success of “The Bottle,” to paint a great
picture that should remain behind him, a monument of his genius, and an
immortal temperance lesson. He was ready, and eager, to give a helping
hand in all directions to the last. In 1870, I asked him to join my
Committee, when I was a candidate for the Maryle-bone division of the
London School Board. I give his prompt answer as an example of his clear
head and hearty readiness in his old age to serve a friend:—
“October 27th, 1870.
“Dear Blanchard Jerrold,—Your request would have been complied with
on the instant, but it so happens that a gentleman called upon me a few
days back with a message from friend Hepworth Dixon, asking me to allow my
name to be placed on his Committee for this ‘Educational Council,’
to which, of course, I assented.
“Now if one man can have his name placed on two Committees,
then by all means place my name on your Committee, but if not, then let me
know if there is any other way in which I can assist in this matter the
man who is a relative of, and who bears the name of two dear friends who
were always held in the highest esteem by,
“Yours truly,
“Geo. Cruikshank.”
CHAPTER VII. CRUIKSHANK’S LAST TWENTY YEARS.
The most notable of George Cruikshank’s book-work, after the failure of
bis magazine, was his “Life of Sir John Falstaff,” * illustrating a
biography of the knight, written in Robert Brough’s happiest manner.
Cruikshank’s twenty Falstaff etchings are admirable examples of his
peculiar excellences as an etcher, and of his matured artistic faculty of
composition and observation.
* Published by Messrs. Longman and Co., 1857.
In these plates are some of the brightest bits of his picturesqueness of
outline, his happy, sprightly treatment of light and shade, and of his
higher faculties as an artist, of which fate permitted him to give the
world only scattered fragmentary evidences. Thackeray said of him, that he
could draw an ancient gloomy market-place as well as Mr. Front or Mr.
Nash. What could be more picturesque, or daintier in the play of light, or
happier in the variety of the architecture, than the backgrounds of the
scenes where Sir John is arrested at the suit of Mrs. Quickly, or when the
knight not only persuades Mrs. Quickly to withdraw her action, but also to
lend him more money? Mr. F. Wedmore has called attention, and with ample
reason, to the exquisite pathos of the death of Falstaff, “in which the
face of one who has died ‘a babbling of green fields,’ lies very calm,
with the sign of gentle fancies but lately flown.”
These plates were reissued in a “Library Shakspeare” published in parts
between 1871 and 1874, together with illustrations by Sir John Gilbert
(who, by the way, in his youth delighted in copying Cruikshank’s etchings
and drawings on wood); but it is to be hoped that they may some day be
rewedded to Brough’s biography, and reappear as the artist’s last
important creation.
The twenty years which elapsed between the first issue of “Falstaff” and
the artist’s death, albeit no idle years, have left not much completely
worthy of the best that had gone before. Cruikshank furnished etchings to
the “Life and Enterprises of Robert William Elliston, Comedian” (1857),
“Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs—revelations of the Wynds and
Dens of Glasgow” (1858), Mr. Alfred Cole’s “Lorimer Littlegood” (1858),
“Stenelaus and Amylda, a Christmas Temperance Tale” (1858), a frontispiece
to Lowell’s “Biglow Papers” (1859), Dudley Costello’s “Holiday with
Hobgoblins” (1861), “The Bee and the Wasp; a Fable in Verse” (1861), “A
Discovery concerning Ghosts” (1863), Robert Hunt’s “Popular Romances of
the West of England” (1865), the “Savage Club Papers” (1867), “The Oak,” a
magazine, edited by his friend the Rev. Charles Rogers (1868), “Coila’s
Whispers,” by the Knight of Morar (1869), “The Brownies,” and other tales,
by Juliana Horatia Ewing (1870), “The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the
Devil,” by Edward G. Flight (1871), “Lob-lie-by-the-Fire,” and other
tales, by Juliana Horatia Ewing (1874). Then there are two works, the
illustrations to which proclaim the coming end. “Peeps at Life,” and
“Studies in my Cell,” by the London Hermit, published in 1875, are signed
“George Cruikshank, aged 83, 1875;” and in Mrs. Octavian Blewitt’s “The
Rose and the Lily,” is a frontispiece—George Cruikshank’s last
design—signed, “Designed and etched by George Cruikshank, age 88,
1875.” This plate is here reproduced.
Not before 1869 did George Cruikshank publish his last political plate.
In 1867 he put forth “The British Bee-Hive,” which was a rearrangement of
a design made in 1840. The artist drew a section of the hive, displaying
fifty-four cells, in which the various grades of society—from the
Queen to the costermonger—are shown, all supported by the army, the
navy, and the volunteers, and surmounted by the crown, the royal standard,
and the union jack. This was a protest against further Parliamentary
Reform; for, as it has been observed, Cruikshank was something of a
Radical and something of a Tory—but more of a Tory. He afterwards
issued this plate on a double sheet, inscribed “A Penny Political Picture
for the People, with a few words upon Parliamentary Reform, by their old
friend, George Cruikshank.”
In the following year the old satirist drew a “Design for a Ritualist High
Church Tower and Steeple,” which he dedicated to Dr. Pusey and the Vicar
of Bray. It was etched on glass by Hancock’s process. The tower of the
church was a fool’s cap and bells, with the Pope for weathercock. The
porch was a bull’s head, with a procession of Ritualist fools entering by
the nostrils. The last, dated July 1869, is a satire upon Miss Rye’s
proposition to export “gutter children” to America. “The little dears,” as
the artist always called children, are being scooped by a clergyman into a
mud-cart, from the volunteers, and sur-royal standard.
The satire was against those who had christened the little waifs and
strays of our streets “gutter children.” The name jarred upon Cruikshank’s
sensitive heart.
Mr. Wedmore, referring to the closing years of the great pictorial
moralist, remarks, “He continued to labour; some of his work being even
now but little known. * Early unpublished plates for the ‘Pilgrim’s
Progress’ remain, amongst others, in the hands of Mr. Truman. Quite in
recent years” (it was in 1868) “he must have executed a private plate for
Mr. Frederick Locker, which shows that there were moments at least in
which the store of his fancy was not impoverished. No more ingenious
design could have been furnished to a collector than this of ‘Fairy
Connoisseurs examining Mrs. Locker’s treasures of Durer, Rembrandt, etc.’
For Mr. Ruskin, too, in 1866, there had been designed the ‘Piper of
Hamelin,’ leading the children mountain wards with the spell of his
wonderful music. And in 1870 a a frontispiece representing the fertile Mr.
Barham, surrounded by the creatures of his brain. And yet more recent
plates, the property of Mr. Bell, the publisher—one of the ‘Family
Window,’ and one in ‘Lob-lie-by-the-Fire’—show that Cruikshank did
not wholly outlive his talent. What he outlived was the social conditions
he had best comprehended. Dying as it were only yesterday, he belongs so
much to the past, because, though his period of production did not seem
long over, his time of receptiveness was gone by. As a satirist, he
belonged in spirit to another generation; we could not ask him to grapple,
at fourscore years, with the foibles of ours.”
* His “Bachelor’s own Book; or, The Adventures of Mr.
Lambkin, Gent,” the story as well as the etchings being by
Cruikshank, for instance.
This is a true account of him, to all who knew Cruikshank well in his
latter days.
Earnest, healthy, vigorous, and ambitious to the last; he could not resign
himself to live on the glory of the past He must be ever up and doing—especially
in the work that lay nearest his valiant heart. He scattered his
temperance work far and wide. “The Fruits of Intemperance,” published by
John Cassell, about 1855, is a minor design akin to that of the Triumph of
Bacchus. The tree is covered with medallion-shaped fruit, and on each
medallion is a picture showing the effects of intoxicating liquors. The
roots of the tree are a bundle of serpents, and the surrounding ground is
covered with tombstones, inscribed “early fruit.” But Cruikshank never
lost an opportunity of preaching his moral. He made a drawing of “a
drunken man knocking down a drunken woman, in Oxford Street” on a Sunday
afternoon; and another of “a drunken ruffian knocking down a woman who
carries a child,” in Farringdon Street. He illustrated the “Autobiography
of a Thirsty Soul” in the Weekly Record; and for the same paper he
drew a publican’s quart measure, with a death’s head in lieu of ale froth,
two drunkards babbling of the strengthening properties of beer by a “Noted
Stout House.” In the Band of Hope Review he illustrated a series, a
parody on “The House that Jack Built,” called “the Gin Shop.” He threw off
fly-leaves for Mr. Tweedie, as “A Man a Thing,” “The House in Shadow,”
“The Loaf Lecture,” “There is Poison in the Pot,” “The Red Dragon,” and
“The Smokeless Chimney,”—the last of which he designed as a
contribution to the Cotton Famine Fund, during the American Civil War. But
it didn’t pay. He was consoled, when publishers fell away from him and his
means of living became precarious by the steady friendship of many
admirers. He received a pension of £95 from the Crown, and one of £50 from
the Royal Academy. In 1875, an endeavour was made by Mr. Charles Rogers to
raise a second testimonial; but this effort finally took the shape of a
committee (of which his good friend Dr. B. W. Richardson was chairman) to
purchase the Cruikshank collection of etchings and drawings for the nation
and drawings for the nation—the price put on it being £3,000—£500
more than the artist himself had fixed.
After much trouble and many disappointments, the collections passed into
the possession of the Westminster Aquarium Company; Cruikshank receiving
in December, £2500—the price put upon it being what artist himself
had fixed; then receiving in 1876, £2,500, and a survivorship life-annuity
for himself and wife of about £35.
The closing years of George Cruikshank’s life were harassed by a
controversy about a design he made and a statue he modelled of King Robert
the Bruce, to be erected by subscription at Bannockburn. The consequence
was a very lamentable quarrel, during which Cruikshank claimed that he had
been engaged by the committee to make the design, * and that the statue
modelled by Mr. Currie was originated by him—the contrary being,
according to the committee, the fact. Cruikshank, in co-operation with Mr.
Adams-Acton, produced a model; that is, Cruikshank made a design, and then
himself stood in the attitude of it as Mr. Adams-Acton’s model—the
result being a statue, and one which found favour with members of the
committee. But money disputes put an end to negotiations with Cruikshank.
He had drawn £85 for expenses; his plan involved in any case an outlay
which the funds would not cover; and finally, after many difficulties, the
statue was committed to the care of Mr. Currie.
* In a letter to the Times (December 5th, 1877), he
remarked: “As I am the artist who was first engaged by the
Bruce Committee to make a design for a monumental statue of
King Robert the Bruce, I was very much surprised, upon
reading in the Times of the 26th ult. the account of the
unveiling of the Bruce statue at Stirling, to find that no
statement was made as to my being the original designer,”
etc.
But Cruikshank’s share in the transaction, as set forth by himself, and as
addressed to the Scottish people in his eighty-fourth year, is too
remarkable an example of his vigour in old age to be omitted.
“An Address and Explanation to the Scottish People, by George Cruikshank,
with respect to the proposed Statue in Honour of King Robert the Bruce.
“In the month of May 1870, several Scottish noblemen and gentlemen formed
themselves into a committee with the object of raising a fund by
subscription, for the purpose of having a statue of King Robert the Bruce
placed on “the field of Bannockburn,” in honour of that hero, and in
memory of the great victory achieved by him and his army in that field on
the 24th of June, 1314.
“Some friends of mine, who were on this committee, invited me to be a
member thereof—which honour I was obliged to decline, as I could not
spare the time to attend the meetings; but, as ‘The Bruce’ was one of my
great heroes, I promised to give them all the assistance I could, and
suggested the attitude for the figure, which they all approved of, and at
their first meeting they decided that I should be requested to make the
design for the statue.
“I must here explain that, although I am an artist and designer, I am not
what is termed a sculptor; but it so happened that a friend of
mine, a brother artist, who isa sculptor, chanced to see my
design, and was so pleased with it, that he volunteered to make a model of
it, which he did, acting upon my suggestions, and from me as I
stood in the attitude and equipped in the armour.
“I also designed a pedestal; and when the model was completed, a cast in
plaster of Paris was taken, and exhibited in my studio to the committee,
and the noblemen, gentlemen, and friends who attended. All highly approved
of the design and the model, and the gentlemen gave most flattering
reports, for which I most sincerely thank them. After this I had the very
great honour of submitting the model for the inspection of Her Most
Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle.
“Several casts in plaster were taken from the model for exhibition in
London and Scotland, for the inspection of any one who might feel disposed
to subscribe; and the committee gave a commission to the sculptor, Mr.
John Adams-Acton, to execute a bronze statue of ‘The Bruce,’ ten or twelve
feet in height, to be placed on a rocky grey granite pedestal twenty-two
feet high; and all seemed to be going on well, and the work was about to
be commenced, when suddenly the subscriptions all stopped at once! and
this, no doubt, was in consequence of the breaking out of the late war
between France and Germany, which terrible contest so entirely absorbed
the public mind, that ‘The Bruce’ was quite forgotten.
“This was, of course, a great disappointment to all connected with the
press, who had visited my studio, concerned in the movement, and the
matter since that time has been almost at a standstill; but I am happy to
say that a military officer has joined our ranks, and who now takes the
lead, and seems determined, if possible, to conquer and overcome all
difficulties. This is Major-General Sir James E. Alexander, C.B., of
Westerton, Bridge of Allan, and who is chairman of the ‘Bruce Local
Committee of Stirling.’
“I have now to mention another disappointment to myself and the committee,
which was, that the Odd Fellows of Stirling had erected a large flagstaff
(by permission of the owner of the land) on the very spot where we had
intended to have applied for permission to place the statue; that being
the site where the Scottish standard was fixed on the day of the battle.
This bit of ground being occupied, it was then thought that the best place
to have the statue would be on the esplanade of Stirling Castle. Sir James
Alexander thereupon applied to the Secretary of State for War for a space
on the esplanade for this purpose, which request has most kindly been
complied with.
“I must now explain to those who have not seen the original model that
Bruce is there represented as if he were looking down with pity on the
slain, and as if he were saying, ‘The fight is o’er, the day is won: I
sheathe my sword.’ But now that the site is quite different to what
was originally intended, it is necessary that the position of the figure
should be altered; and, as will be seen by the accompanying rough sketch,
the head is now elevated, and Bruce is supposed to be looking across
the esplanade towards the field of Bannockburn, which is a mile and a
half from Stirling Castle, and, as in the first model, Bruce has sheathed
his sword.
“With respect to the pedestal, I may just explain that on the front part
are the words ‘King Robert the Bruce’ in large letters, and following
this, in smaller letters, is ‘Bannockburn, June 24, 1314.’ Under this line
are two branches—one of laurel and the other of willow, emblems of
victory and sorrow for the slain. Then is stated, ‘Erected by public
subscription in the reign of Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Ireland. Between the words Victoria and Queen is a
circular wreath formed of the Rose, the Thistle, and the Shamrock, in
which circle are two hands joined, a male and female, as an emblem of the
union by marriage of the two royal families of England and Scotland, and
on one side of these royal families were the descendants of ‘the Bruce.’
“Nearly fifty years back I painted a picture of an incident in the life of
Bruce, exhibited in the British Institution, Pall Mall, London, and was
then careful to have the correct costume; but when making the design for
the statue, ‘to make assurance doubly sure,’ I got my friend Mr. Bond,
keeper of the Ancient Manuscripts at the British Museum, to let me look
over the MSS. of the time of Bruce, and then found that I had got the
correct costume. I think this is important; for should the statue be
erected, all those who might look at it would see just such a powerful man
as Bruce was, in the exact sort of armour and coat of mail that he wore on
the field of Bannockburn.
“The Bruce in his early progress met with many difficulties, all of which,
however, he overcame by his perseverance, and the ‘Bruce Committee’ and
myself are following his noble example in this respect; and I trust that
all the descendants of those ‘Scots whom Bruce had often led’ will rally
round the Major-General and his committee corps, and assist them to place
the statue of him who was the great commander of the Scottish army at the
battle of Bannockburn in this safe and commanding position on the
esplanade of Stirling.
“With regard to myself, as my ancestors were all natives of Scotland—some
Lowlanders and some Highlanders—I should indeed be pleased to have
my name associated with any national work of art that might be placed in
the land of my forefathers, and I should consider it one of the greatest
honours that could be conferred upon me if it could be written on the
pedestal that this monument in honour of King Robert the Bruce was
designed by the artist,
“George Cruikshank.
“Hampstead Road, London, August 1874.
“P. S.—I am authorized to state that subscriptions may be remitted
to W. Christie, Esq., secretary to the Bruce Committee, Port Street,
Stirling; or to the treasurer, John A. Murrie, Esq., the manager of the
branch of the National Bank of Scotland at Stirling; and at London. And I
am given to understand that about fourteen or fifteen hundred pounds are
required, in addition to what is already in hand, in order to carry out
the work in the first style of art.”
At the ceremony of unveiling Mr. Currie’s statue in front of Stirling
Castle (November 24, 1877), Major-General Sir James Alexander, of
Westerton, in handing over the work to the Provost and Corporation of
Stirling, said, that as they could not get a bronze statue “under the
direction of an eminent artist, Mr. George Cruikshank, of London,” they
had resolved to have one of durable stone.
This closing transaction of his life poor Cruikshank felt most bitterly;
and he charged his old friend Dr. Rogers, Sir James Alexander, and all
concerned in it, with having behaved in “a most dishonourable and
disgraceful manner.” These were hot, ill-considered words, uttered in the
pain of a very trying disappointment: words to be forgotten over the
artist’s grave.
Mr. Frederick Wedmore gives us a peep at him as he went about of late, his
heart still upon his sleeve as when he was young, in the days of the
Regency: “Many of us who did not know him at home have at least met him
about; for not only was he a familiar figure of the dreary quarter which
he inhabited—where the dingy squalor of St. Paneras touches on the
shabby respectability of Camden Town—but he travelled much in
London, and may well have been beheld handing his card to a stranger with
whom he had talked casually in a Metropolitan Railway carriage, or
announcing his personality to a privileged few who were invited to see in
him the convincing proof of the advantages of a union of genius with
water-drinking. He was an entirely honest man; and who is there that would
not forgive the little pleasurable vanities that he chose to allow himself
at the fag end of a life not over-prosperous—a career no one had
carefully made smooth, a career filled full of inventive work as rich as
Hogarth’s and as genial as Dickens’s?”
“Occasionally,” Mr. Frederick Locker writes,* “he used to come to us and
tell us his troubles, and what was occupying him; but, like many other
interesting people, he did not talk about what would have been most worth
hearing. The last time I saw him he spoke of having known Tom Hood (the
elder) ** very well, but he did not tell as anything about him worth
remembering.
* March 26th, 1878.
** When it was agreed that Cruikshank was to illustrate
Hood’s “Epping Hunt,” author and artist, with two or three
friends, spent a highly convivial day in the Forest. Hood
and Cruikshank were fast friends, and sat up together very
late of nights in Amwell Street—the wild humour and
prodigious animal spirits being a delight to the quiet
humourist, under whose form lay a serious poetic mind, and a
tender heart.
Poor man, it was a bitterly cold morning last December, and he arrived
before breakfast, and stayed to breakfast. Mr. Austin Dobson was there;
and he told us the story of how he invented Old Fagin in the condemned
cell.” Mr. Dobson says of him at this breakfast: “On the morning in
question (I think it must have been the 14th of December last, 1877), Mr.
Cruikshank came in; and I, who had not seen him more than once or twice in
my life, was only too eager to ask him all sorts of questions about
himself. Except that he was a little bent, he had no appearance of age—certainly
not of the advanced age he had reached. He was very-bright and alert, and
appeared to have an excellent memory for the circumstances of his career.”
He celebrated his silver wedding on the 8th of March, 1875, when his house
was crowded with his friends and admirers, who took tea with him. Mr. S.
O. Hall, his old friend, addressed a few words to the company, which so
affected Mrs. Cruikshank, that she fell weeping upon her husband’s neck.
Mr. Walter Hamilton, who was present, remarks: “To receive the
congratulations of so many friends was a task which would have fatigued
and excited many a younger man than Mr. Cruikshank; but he preserved his
self-possession through it well, having a ready jest and a smile for each
and all; whilst Mrs. Cruikshank, who was fairly hedged in on every side
with bouquets, looked far too young to be one of the principals in such a
ceremony. A guard of honour from his old corps attended to congratulate
their late colonel. It was late in the afternoon before Mr. Cruikshank
withdrew for a few moments from the crowded rooms, and as he went he
whispered, laughingly, to the author, ‘You are down on our list of
visitors for the Golden Wedding.’”
“On the morning of the 1st of February,” writes his young friend, Grace
Stebbing, ** “there was still living a bright, brave-spirited old man, who
had worked on untiringly almost to the end, even to within three weeks of
his death, when I, one of those privileged to claim his friendship even
from my infancy upwards, met him hurrying along the streets with cheerful,
eager aspect, to keep ‘a business appointment.’”
** The Graphic, February 9th, 1878.
CHAPTER VIII. THE END.
George Cruikshank fell ill in the first month of 1878, and was attended by
his sympathetic and distinguished friend, Dr. B. W. Richardson.
He died at his house in the Hampstead Road, on the 1st of February. He was
buried temporarily—the Crypt of St. Paul’s being under repair—at
Kensal Green. The only member of the Royal Academy who attended his
funeral was Charles Landseer, R.A., who was almost as old as Cruikshank.
But Messrs. Tenniel and Du Maurier were there, with poor W. Brunton, a
clever caricaturist, who was to fall in his youth. Cruikshank’s friend,
George Augustus Sala, and Lord Houghton, were among his pall-bearers; and
in the group about the coffin were Edmund Yates, S. G. Ball, General
M’Murdo, and John Sheehan, the “Irish Whisky-drinker.”
On the 29th of the following November, a hearse, followed by a
mourning-coach containing Mrs. George Cruikshank, conveyed the mortal part
of the illustrious artist to St. Paul’s, and four sergeants of the
volunteer corps which he had commanded brought up the procession. The
coffin was silently lowered to its final resting-place immediately after
the afternoon service.
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