CHAPTER VII. THREE COURSES AND A DESSERT
Even Mr. Clarke’s “Dessert,” albeit various, is remembered chiefly by the artist’s immortal plate of the deaf postilion. The Ralph and Harry Hickorys of our day are but poor wrestlers, and are absolutely ignorant of backsword. The singlestick players of Somerset are no longer doughty yeomen of the old school; and “Hopping John made Tom Nottle’s fashion,” * it is to be hoped, has become an unknown tipple. Sir Matthew Ale, the west country squire, with a face strongly resembling a frothing mug of beer, who gave up his time to his apotheosis of John Barleycorn, has gone to his fathers, and the record of his singlestick and drinking bouts with him. His descendant is sipping a light claret sparingly, and possibly playing croquet or lawn tennis on very warm afternoons. He gives not even one pig with a greasy tail to be caught as a prize at the village fair; nor does he entertain the cobblers of his neighbourhood with a barrel of strong ale, “in order to keep up the good old custom of Crispin’s sons draining a horn of malt liquor, in which a lighted candle was placed, without singeing their faces, if they could.”
*A pint of brandy to a gallon of cider, sugared, and warmed
by a dozen hissing roasted apples bobbing in the bowl.
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How well he tells a story! how he contrives to fasten a character in your mind, and in the course of a few pages to drag you heart and soul into his company! * In his modest preface he says he hopes that even if the dishes be disliked, the plates at least will please. They have more than pleased. They are all that lives in the minds of most men of the banquet, having fallen into the hands of collectors. And yet even Mr. Clarke had a hand in this. “He feels bound to state,” he remarked, in the handsome first edition of his work, “that whatever faults the decorations may be chargeable with on the score of invention, he alone is to blame, and not Mr. George Cruikshank, to whom he is deeply indebted for having embellished his rude sketches in their transfer to wood, and translated them into a proper pictorial state, to make their appearance in public.” They have necessarily acquired a value, which they did not intrinsically possess, in passing through the hands of that distinguished artist, of whom it may truly, and on this occasion especially, be said, “Quod tetigit, ornavit,” Little did the author think that even his hand in the drawings would be forgotten, and that “Three Courses and a Dessert” would be spoken of as a book in which some of George Cruikshank’s best bits of humorous illustration on wood, exquisitely engraved, ** are to be found. Mr. Clarke’s West Country, Irish, and Legal Stories deserved a better fate; they are bright, full of humour and observation of character, and the style is easy and graceful.
* The book ran through two editions in the year of original
publication; in 1836 a third edition was issued; it was
republished in 1849, and was added to Bohn’s Illustrated
Library in 1852. But so completely has the author
disappeared (albeit he gave the artist the sketches for his
pictures), that in the London Library catalogue the book is
called “George Cruikshank’s Three Courses and a Dessert.”
* Messrs. Williams, Vizetelly, Thompson, and E. Landells
admirably caught the peculiar flow and effective confusion
and involvement of Cruikshank’s lines on wood.
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In these illustrations are some of Cruikshank’s most astonishing feats in the way of making inanimate things laugh and speak. Take the three lemons which serve for introduction to “the Dessert.” Most charming as to pencilling and engraving, they are exquisitely humorous. Remaining lemons that you might squeeze, they are three still convivial fellows in close confabulation.
The portrait of an old Irish boy, the hoops of the keg serving for nightcap, which introduces the second course of Irish dishes, is a jewel of a boy.
These illustrations delighted Thackeray. He has transferred some of them to his essay in the Westminster.
“Is there,” he asks of a battle of bottles on spider legs, “any need of having a face after this? * ‘Come on,’ says Claret-bottle, a dashing, genteel fellow, with his hat on one ear, ‘come on; has any man a mind to tap me? ‘Claret-bottle is a little screwed (as one may see by his legs), but full of gaiety and courage. Not so that stout, apoplectic Bottle of Rum, who has staggered against the wall, and has his hand upon his liver; the fellow hurts himself with smoking, that is clear, and is as sick as sick can be. See, Port is making away from the storm, and Double X is as flat as ditch-water. Against these, awful in their white robes, the sober watchmen come.”
* This illustration is not in “Three Courses and a Dessert.”
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Again the artist moulds an Irish physiognomy upon a keg of whisky, or gives us a mushroom aristocrat,—or imparts a venerable human aspect to a mug of ale.
The mushroom is a triumph. “You’d think,” says the story, “that Purcell’s pride might be brought down a little by what had befallen him; but no,—he strutted out of the cabin without condescending to say be baw, or a civil word to any one, and rode off to The Beg—mushroom as he was—with his nose in the air, as though the ground wasn’t good enough for him to look on.” Only Cruikshank could have turned this veritable mushroom into so proud a man, and left the mushroom obviously the fungus of which catsup is made. Cruikshank was never tired of making still life quick life.
The deaf postilion is a masterpiece of acute observation. There is, to begin with, the suggestion of a pleasant landscape. The story is complete. The body of the chariot, with the runaway couple in it, broken away from the shafts and fore-wheels; the excited swain stretching out of the window, and bawling his hardest to the postilion, who, deaf as a door-post (never was deafness more forcibly expressed in a human countenance), is jogging on with the fore-wheels, unconscious that any contretemps has happened; and the startled cow, gazing wildly over the hedge, make up one of Cruikshank’s completest triumphs as a humorous illustrator. How closely, how searchingly had he read men and things! How thoroughly had he become a master of expression! In this illustration to Clarke’s whimsical poem, in Hood’s style, “The Dos-a-Dos Tête-à-Tête,” you can almost hear the man snoring, and yet it is a mere outline of a face.
Says the lady:—
“When I had in some cordials so rich,
With letters all labelled quite handy,
Says you, ‘I’ll inquire, you old witch,
If O.D.V. doesn’t mean brandy!’
Whenever I sink to repose,
You rouse me, you wretch, with a sneeze;
And lastly, if I doze-a-doze,To wex me, you just wheeze-a-wheeze.”
Then we have an Irish scene! The drunken piper; the pigs who have upset a basket of live crabs, the excited group looking in through the door, the dog barking at the man in bed, the crab pinching the little porker’s tail. What life is here! and all true to the main incident of the scene. You don’t want the letterpress to read the story. The pigs have got into the room to attack the basket of crabs. Pompey, who has been tied to his master’s toe to wake him in case of danger, is tugging away in mortal fear of the old sow, who is scratching the good man’s foot with her bristles. The noise has set Corney Carolum, only half sober and half away, droning upon his pipes. The clatter has brought the children from their beds to the door. The fowls in the rafters are clucking and crowing. “All this noise,” says the author, “couldn’t go for nothing; the whole place was in arms. Mick Maguire fired off his gun through a hole in the thatch, and Bat Boroo, flourishing his big stick, took Mick under his command, for he thought the French was landed, at the least; and no blame to him.”
Cruikshank’s illustrations to William Clarke’s book, and his twelve etchings to Walter Scott’s “Demon-ology” (there are no finer examples of his imaginative and executive powers), both issued in 1830, were the starting-points of his career as an illustrator of books; that is, of his career at the maturity of his power.
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During this time, albeit he was still compelled to do daily-bread work unworthy of his genius, he buckled to labours, by some of which his name is destined to live. In 1831 he undertook to illustrate Roscoe’s Novelists’ Library; and his genius brightens some seventeen volumes of the series.* But his fertility—and in his best vein between 1830 and the year when he and Dickens came in contact—was prodigious. In addition to his forty-nine etchings to “Tom Jones,” “Amelia,” “Roderick Random,” “Joseph Andrews,” “Tristram Shandy,” “The Vicar of Wakefield,” “Don Quixote,” “Gil Bias,” etc., in Roscoe’s Library, “Beauties of Washington Irving,” “Baron Munchausen,” he illustrated “The Gentleman in Black,” “The New Bath Guide,” “Hood’s Comic Annual,” “Sunday in London” (curious as studies of the fashions of the day) (1833), Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague,” “Bombastes Furioso,” in which he revelled. Ainsworth’s “Rookwood,” “Tough Yarns,” “Odds and Ends.”
* The complete set is in nineteen volumes—the first two
volumes, containing Robinson Crusoe, were illustrated by
Jacob George Strutt. Cruikshank, however, illustrated a
Robinson Crusoe with two steel plates and some thirty small
woodcuts in 1831. It was reprinted in 1836.
“Mirth and Morality” (a collection of original tales by Carlton Bruce, published by Tegg), and “Minor Morals for Young People,” by his friend John Bowring. Within this period, moreover, he began his Comic Almanacs, and his fine series of illustrations to the Waverley Novels; and he superintended the collection of his more important scattered works, as his large French caricatures, retouching them, for Mr. M’Lean, the eminent print-seller of the Haymarket. I pass over much minor work as his drawings or etchings from the sketches of others, as Auldjo’s “Constantinople.” The third and fourth parts of his “Scraps and Sketches,” and his “Sketch-Book”—in which are some of his most famous bits—are also of this most fruitful epoch. In these we find some of his hardest hits against intemperance, as in, the Gin Shop, where Death is setting a trap for a party of drinkers, who, with their young children, are tippling at the bar of a public-house; and the Alehouse and the Home, and the Pillars of the Gin Shop. In the first composition we have the parlour of a tavern, where, in the midst of the uproarious conviviality, a boy is trying to wake his drunken father; in the second is the wretched home, with the poor wife nursing a sick child. So far back as 1832 this chord had been struck in Cruikshank’s heart. In the Pillars of the Gin Shop (also of this time), a drunkard and his wife, with their poor children, are watched by the arch-fiend, who is perched near a stile in the distance.
Mr. Charles Wylie notes * that—“Of the nineteen volumes of which that admirable series of books, Roscoe’s Novelists’ Library, consists, seventeen were illustrated by George Cruikshank. The two in which he was not concerned have illustrations on India-paper by Strutt and others.... There can be no doubt that Defoe’s story was the first published, as an advertisement in the duplicated No. I. volume refers to it as already out. ‘Humphrey Clinker’ (the second No. I. volume) was illustrated by George Cruikshank, as were all the subsequent issues. As a matter of fact, therefore, George Cruikshank never discontinued his connection with the work, but two volumes were published before he commenced it. It would appear that the publishers made a change in their original plan, for the advertisement prefixed to ‘Robinson Crusoe’ states that the Novelists’ Library, edited by Thomas Roscoe, will be illustrated ‘from designs, original or selected,’ by ‘Jacob George Strutt,’ who, as I have already said, was concerned in the first two volumes. The advertisement to ‘Humphrey Clinker’ is identically the same as that to ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ except that the name of George Cruikshank appears in place of J. G. Strutt; and a paragraph is added stating that he, G. Cruikshank, ‘is engaged to illustrate the whole series of the Novelists’ Library, which, with the exception mentioned, he did.... The volumes appeared monthly, the first issue being in May 1831.”
* Notes and Queries, 4th series, vol. vi., Nov. 12,1870.
The fact was that Mr. Roscoe began with Strutt, found him a failure, and then started de novo with George Cruikshank, whose genius carried him triumphantly through seventeen volumes.
How strangely various were Cruikshank’s creations! The eminent surgeon, the late Mr. Pettigrew, * was, it will be remembered, his intimate friend; and for him he executed a series of carefully drawn plates for his “History of Egyptian Mummies” (1833). ** Even now he was not quite quit of political caricatures and headings to popular songs. He satirized quack qill vendors. In 1831, he lent a hand to the Reform movement—albeit he was a very moderate Liberal, even in his youth, if we are to judge by the way in which his pencil was employed against Cobbett. The Reform Bill drew from him “Sweeping Measures; or, Making a Clean House”—an etching in which Lord John Russell appears with an immense “Reform” broom, sweeping the Opposition out of the House of Commons—the Opposition consisting of owls, spiders, and vermin. The Chancellor, almost buried under petitions, cries, “Aye, I thought this rotten rubbish would make a fine dust.” Then he put upon stone (1832) a squib called “Cholera Consultation,” in which “the Central Board of Health” are represented at a sumptuous dinner, drinking toasts to their own prosperity.
* Doctor Pettigrew, the family doctor of Cruikshank’s
family, was among the few who exercised a little authority
over the turbulent and self-willed George. When his fortunes
grew, and he became assistant surgeon to the Duchess of
Kent, then librarian to the Duke of Sussex, and afterwards
Mummy Pettigrew and a personage of his time, Cruikshank was
a constant guest at his table, as well as an artist at his
service.
** “Reading lately a very appreciative lecture just
republished in pamphlet form by Mr. Walter Hamilton on the
genius and art-work of George Cruikshank, I found mention
made of a fact hitherto unknown to me; to wit, that George
executed, many years ago, a series of very careful
anatomical drawings for a work on Egyptian mummies, written
by the late eminent surgeon, Mr. Pettigrew. G. C. an
anatomist! For the moment I was puzzled. Yet how strangely
do things come together! I happened to be turning over a
ragged little old folio, of the date of 1825, entitled
‘Anatomy of the Bones and Muscles, for the use of Artists
and Members of the Artists’ Anatomical Society,’ by George
Simpson, surgeon; and in the list of subscribers attached to
the work I found the name of ‘George Cruickshank, Esq.’
(they would spell his surname with two c’s), Myddelton
Terrace, Pentonville. ‘Eureka!’ I cried. It was at the feet
of George Simpson, surgeon, then, that George studied
osteology and myology.”—“Echoes of the Week,” by G. A.
Sala: Illustrated London News.
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On looking over all this scattering of the sparks of great genius through wide fields; at the woful waste of much of the light and heat; at the hard and stern necessity which compelled the most thoughtful, suggestive, observant, and imaginative artist of his day to illustrate doggerel, furnish frontispieces to poor dramas, and to put the sketches of others upon wood, in the interval of such congenial labour of a noble kind as we find scattered through Roscoe s series, in the “Demonology,” and in his own separate albums of wit, humour, and human wisdom, it is impossible not to marvel.
