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.
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“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.”
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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.”
