“George Cruikshank! But stop a wee, my tumbler’s dune. Here’s to him in a caulker, and there’s no mony folk whose health I wad drink, during toddy, in pure speerit.”
Thackeray bears witness to the popularity of the Phrenological Sketches as quaintly as Christopher North:—
“He is the friend of the young especially. Have we not read all the story-books that his wonderful pencil has illustrated? Did we not forego tarts, in order to buy his ‘Breaking-up,’ or his ‘Fashionable Monstrosities’ of the year eighteen hundred and something? Have we not before us, at this very moment, a print—one of the admirable ‘Illustrations of Phrenology’—which entire work was purchased by a joint-stock company of boys, each drawing lots afterwards for the separate prints, and taking his choice in rotation? The writer of this, too, had the honour of drawing the first lot, and seized immediately upon ‘Philoprogenitiveness—a marvellous print (our copy is not at all improved by being coloured, which operation we performed on it ourselves)—a marvellous print, indeed, full of ingenuity and fine jovial humour. A father, possessor of an enormous nose and family, is surrounded by the latter, who are, some of them, embracing the former. The composition writhes and twists about like the Kermes of Rubens. No less than seven little men and women in nightcaps, in frocks, in bibs, in breeches, are clambering about the head, knees, and arms of the man with the nose; their noses, too, are preternaturally developed—the twins in the cradle have noses of the most considerable kind; the second daughter, who is watching them; the youngest but two, who sits squalling in a certain wicker chair; the eldest son, who is yawning; the eldest daughter, who is preparing with the gravy of two mutton-chops a savoury dish of Yorkshire pudding for eighteen persons; the youths who are examining her operations (one a literary gentleman, in a remarkably neat nightcap and pinafore, who has just had his finger in the pudding); the genius who is at work on the slate, and the two honest lads who are hugging the good-humoured washerwoman, their mother,—all, all, save this worthy woman, have noses of the largest size. Not handsome, certainly, are they, and yet everybody must be charmed with the picture. It is full of grotesque beauty. The artist has at the back of his own skull, we are certain, a large bump of philoprogenitiveness. He loves children in his heart: every one of those he has drawn is perfectly happy, and jovial, and affectionate, and as innocent as possible. He makes them with large noses, but he loves them; and you always find something kind in the midst of his humour, and the ugliness redeemed by a sly touch of beauty.”
Pursuing this current of genial criticism, Thackeray has pointed out that in Cruikshank’s “Sketch Book” the observer may gather a good deal of information regarding the character of the individual man. “What strikes his eye as a painter; what moves his anger or admiratiqn as a moralist; what classes he seems most especially disposed to observe, and what to ridicule. There are quacks of all kinds, to whom he has a mortal hatred; quack dandies, who assume under his pencil, perhaps in his eye, the most grotesque appearance possible—their hats grow larger, their legs infinitely more crooked and lean; the tassels of their canes swell out to a most preposterous size; the tails of their coats dwindle away, and finish where coat-tails generally begin. Let us lay a wager that Cruikshank, a man of the people, if ever there was one, heartily hates and despises these supercilious, swaggering, young gentlemen; and his contempt is not a whit the less laudable because there may be tout soit peu of prejudice in it. It is right and wholesome to scorn dandies, as Nelson says it was to hate Frenchmen; in which sentiment (as we have before said) George Cruikshank undoubtedly shares....
“Against dandy footmen he is particularly severe. He hates idlers, pretenders, boasters, and punishes these fellows as best he may. Who does not recollect the famous picture, ‘What is Taxes, Thomas?’ What is taxes, indeed! Well may that vast, over-fed, lounging flunkey ask the question of his associate Thomas, and yet not well, for all that Thomas says in reply is, I don’t know. O beati plushicolo, what a charming state of ignorance is yours! In the Sketch Book many footmen make their appearance: one is a huge, fat Hercules of a Portman Square porter, who calmly surveys another poor fellow,—a porter likewise, but out of livery,—who comes staggering forward with a box that Hercules might lift with his little finger. Will Hercules do so? Not he. The giant can carry nothing heavier than a cocked-hat note on a silver tray, and his labours are to walk from his sentry-box to the door, and from the door back to his sentry-box, and to read the Sunday paper, and to poke the hall fire twice or thrice, and to make five meals a day. Such a fellow does Cruikshank hate and scorn worse even than a Frenchman.
“The man’s master, too, comes in for no small share of our artist’s wrath. See, here is a company of them at church, who humbly designate themselves ‘miserable sinners.’ Miserable sinners, indeed! O what floods of turtle-soup, what tons of turbot and lobster-sauce, must have been sacrificed to make those sinners properly miserable! My lady there, with the ermine tippet and draggling feathers, can we not see that she lives in Portland Place, and is the wife of an East India Director? She has been to the opera over-night (indeed, her husband, on her right, with his fat hand dangling over the pew-door, is at this minute thinking of Mademoiselle Léscadie, whom he saw behind the scenes)—she has been to the opera over-night, which with a trifle of supper afterwards—a white and brown soup, a lobster salad, some woodcocks, and a little champagne—sent her to bed quite comfortable. At half-past eight her maid brings her chocolate to bed, at ten she has fresh eggs and muffins, with, perhaps, a half-hundred of prawns for breakfast, and so can get over the day and the sermon till lunch-time pretty well. What an odour of musk and bergamot exhales from the pew! how it is wadded, and stuffed, and spangled over with brass nails! what hassocks are there for those who are not too fat to kneel! what a flustering and flapping of gilt prayer-books! and what a pious whirring of Bible-leaves one hears all over the church, as the doctor blandly gives out the text! To be miserable at this rate, you must, at the very least, have four thousand a year; and many persons are there so enamoured of grief and sin, that they would willingly take the risk of the misery to have a life-interest in the Consols that accompany it, quite careless about consequences, and sceptical as to the notion that a day is at hand when you must fulfil your share of the bargain.
“Our artist loves to joke at a soldier, in whose livery there appears to him to be something almost as ridiculous as in the uniform of the gentleman of the shoulder-knot. Tall life-guardsmen and fierce grenadiers figure in many of his designs, and almost always in a ridiculous way. Here, again, we have the honest, popular English feeling which jeers at pomp or pretension of all kinds, and is especially jealous of all display of military authority. ‘Raw recruit,’ ‘ditto dressed,’ ditto ‘served up,’ as we see them in the Sketch Book, are so many satires upon the army. Hodge with his ribbons flaunting in his hat, or with red coat and musket, drilled stiff and pompous, or that last, minus leg and arm, tottering about on crutches, do not fill our English artist with the enthusiasm that follows the soldier in every other part of Europe. Jeanjean, the conscript in France, is laughed at, to be sure, but then it is because he is a bad soldier; when he comes to have a huge pair of moustachios and the croix d’honneur to briller on his poitrine cicatrisé, Jeanjean becomes a member of a class that is more respected than any other in the French nation. The veteran soldier inspires our people with no such awe: we hold that democratic weapon the fist in much more honour than the sabre and bayonet, and laugh at a man tricked out in scarlet and pipeclay.”
“In the supernatural,” says Thackeray, “we find Cruikshank reigning supreme. He has invented in his time a little comic pandemonium, peopled with the most droll, good-natured fiends possible. We have before us Chamisso’s ‘Peter Schlemil’ (1824), with Cruikshank’s designs translated into German, and gaining nothing by the change.... He has also made designs for Victor Hugo’s ‘Hans of Iceland.’ Strange, wild etchings were those, on a strange, mad subject; not so good, in our notion, as the designs for the German, books, the peculiar humour of which latter seemed to suit the artist exactly. There is a mixture of the awful and ridiculous in these, which perpetually excites and keeps awake the reader’s attention; the German writer and the English artist seem to have an entire faith in their subject. The reader, no doubt, remembers the awful passage in ‘Peter Schleusihl,’ when the little, gentleman purchases the shadow of that hero: ‘Have the kindness, noble sir, to examine and try this bag.’ He put his hand into his pocket, and drew thence a tolerably large bag of Cordovan leather, to which a couple of thongs were fixed. I took it from him, and immediately counted out ten gold pieces, and ten more, and ten more, and still other ten, whereupon I held out my hand to him. ‘Done,’ said I, ‘it is a bargain; you shall have my shadow for your bag.’ The bargain was concluded; he knelt down before me, and I saw him with a wonderful neatness take my shadow from head to foot, lightly lift it up from the grass, roll and fold it up neatly, and at last pocket it. He then rose up, bowed to me once more, and walked away again, disappearing behind the rose-bushes. I don’t know, but I thought I heard him laughing a little. I, however, kept fast hold of the bag. Everything around me was bright in the sun, and as yet I gave no thought to what I had done.’ This marvellous event, narrated by Peter with such a faithful, circumstantial detail, is painted by Cruikshank in the most wonderful poetic way, with that happy mixture of the real and supernatural that makes the narrative so curious, and like truth.”
The artist, in short, in a wonderfully complete way, embodies the author’s feeling, as well as his idea. He plays, as it were, with the supernatural. Professor Wilson goes even farther. “Nobody, that has the least of an eye for art, can doubt that Cruikshank, if he chose, might design as many Annunciations, Beatifications, Apotheoses, Metamorphoses, and so forth, as would cover York Cathedral from end to end. It is still more impossible to doubt that he might be a famous portrait painter. Now, these are fine lines both of them, and yet it is precisely the chief merit of Cruikshank that he cuts them both, that he will have nothing to do with them, that he has chosen a walk of his own, and that he has made his own walk popular. Here lies genius; but let him do himself justice, let him persevere and rise in his own path, and then, ladies and gentlemen, then the day will come when his name will be a name indeed, not a name puffed and paraded in the newspapers, but a living, a substantial, perhaps even an illustrious, English name. Let him, in one word, proceed, and, as he proceeds, let him think of Hogarth.”
Under such encouragement as this, Cruikshank braced himself for work worthy of his genius, even in the hurly-burly of the daily life he led in London, and with the incessant demands upon him still, as the pictorial moralist and satirist of his time,—demands which he answered richly out of the inexhaustible fund of his fancy and humour,—as we shall see.