CHAPTER IV. CRUIKSHANK AS A POLITICAL CARICATURIST.
It is recorded that when it was proposed to cast a statue of Sir Robert Peel, the portrait selected as most striking in its resemblance, most faithful to his natural expression, was found in a cartoon by John Leech, published in Punch; and that from this drawing the head was modelled. The caricaturist is something more than the mere portrait-painter, who produces his work after a few sittings, and with his model in a set position. Gillray, for example, spent his life in studying his subjects. He had never finished observing Pitt, and Fox, and Burke, and Sheridan. From his vantage-ground over Mrs. Humphrey’s shop in St. James’s Street, he caught his victims unawares. He was familiar with every angle and every shade of expression of the public men who were his unconscious sitters. * In the same way, Leech snatched a sitting from Peel and Palmerston, Lord John and Wellington, and had thrust it safely into his waistcoat pocket, in that small note-book which he always carried. And thus the public figures which Sandby and Gillray, Sayer, Bunbury, Rowlandson, the Cruikshanks, the elder Doyle, Leech, Doyle, and Tenniel have fixed with their needles or pencils upon their cartoons, present to us men and manners living as they rose, with a vividness and truth and force the value of which can hardly be exaggerated. Estimate, if you can, the treasure a Gillray of the time of Henry VIII., a Leech of the Commonwealth, a Cruikshank contemporaneous with Shakspeare, would be!
* Pitt, however, paid the great pictorial satirist the
compliment of giving him sittings for a serious portrait.
As I have already noted, the art of the caricaturist does not date beyond the time of Hogarth in this country, and he did little in the way of political caricature. What we understand by caricature—that is, pictorial satirical commentary on public events—arose while Gillray was a boy, and when Paul Sandby and Saver were at the height of their fame. Sayer’s caricatures of the early time of George the Third were the models on which the infant genius of Gillray was nursed; as that of George Cruikshank’s was fed five-and-twenty years later at the print-shop windows of St. James’s Street and Piccadilly, where the crowd stretched even into the roadway, laughing at, and discoursing over, Gillray’s last. Cruikshank, although he never had Gillray’s academical training, enjoyed the benefit of his master’s matchless skill and infinite variety. Gillray unconsciously provided him with a rich inheritance. It has been justly observed that the works of Gillray preserve an entire social revolution; they form the link uniting the habits, fashions, and manners of the past, with the later generation which inaugurated our present ways of life.
This later generation it fell to the lot of George Cruikshank to preserve for the edification of posterity. As the etching-needle was trembling and wandering in the hands of the poor demented Gillray, when
“Drooped the spent fingers from the nerveless wrist,”
the keen, flashing eyes of old Isaac Cruikshank’s second son were making perpetual rounds of observation in London streets, and his hand was learning that cunning which would enable him to point with his etching-needle the morals that lay thick about him, in strange guises and combinations of never-ending variety, in the great world of London.
Gillray “lived among the subjects of his satire, almost within sight of the palace, whose inmate was aware of the proximity of this Georgian Juvenal; he mixed with the men who possessed the power of suspending his freedom, and was himself as easy of recognition as he had made the faces and figures of those whose caricatures he drew.... His eye was quick to detect the weakest point of the best-armed champion: but the stab was more often playful than cruel. The same quiver furnished shafts for friend and foe alike. Gillray stood alone, and lent his aid to the side which had the greatest need of his weapon. Strengthening and satirizing both factions in turn, to neither side was he a servile champion; his own misfortunes, his gratitude, his necessities, and his weaknesses, were all powerless to confine his satire to the object of mere party advancement. No curb could control his irony. His works are, however, stamped with one attribute—popularity—which is indispensable to lasting success amidst the fluctuations of opinion. His intuitive knowledge of human nature had convinced him of the expediency of securing this advantage; and by recognizing the force of public opinion, he, it may be unconsciously, assumed to a large degree, as his works abundantly prove, the responsibility of shaping and directing it; so far, that is, as the popular voice is subject to individual expression. Gillray and his caricatures enjoyed in their day—allowing for a little excess of colouring to suit the age—the position that the Times and Punch now fill. His satire has a speciality: it is often heroic, elevating its object far above the heads of his fellow-men in the semblance of a demi-god, dignified and commanding, even when associated with the attributes of burlesque.” *
* Wright.