* Meeting Mr. R. H. Horne some two years before his death,
he danced the hornpipe before him, to show how sound and
strong and active he still was.
On the other hand, is his mood solemn, he can make your heart beat quick, and send you shuddering away, with his images in your brain—presences you will find it hard to banish. “The awful Jew that Cruikshank drew” lingered for years in Thackeray’s mind; and the profound impression which it made on the public, when it appeared, has not faded even now.
More searching observation than that of Cruikshank in his prime was never possessed by an artist. His range did not stretch beyond the suburbs of London except perhaps to Margate in the hoy, but all that came within it he made his own. Out of the suburban landscapes he conjured fairy scenes; and Highgate and Hampstead supplied him with distant horizons which his imagination widened at his will. Thackeray declared that Cruikshank had a fine eye for homely landscapes, and yet his trees are as bad as his horses. “Old villages, farm-yards, groups of stacks, queer chimneys, churches, gable-end cottages, Elizabethan mansion-houses, and other old English scenes, he depicts with evident enthusiasm.” His scenes to Brough’s “Life of Falstaff” are exquisitely drawn. Where Falstaff is arrested at the suit of Mrs. Quickly, and again when he persuades her to lend him more money, the old houses are fine picturesque studies.
But London, and London streets and suburbs, constituted Cruikshank’s world in his heyday; and he caught all the phases of this his universe, save and except its upper classes. He lived in the midst of the people; he was of them. His humble fortunes cast his lot, in his early time, among the poorer classes of professional men. He was passionately fond of the stage, and was familiar with the popular comedians of the minor theatres, and the landlords of the houses which they and he frequented. He lived at Islington, and belonged to a club called “The Crib,” which had a room at the Sir Hugh Middleton public-house, of which Joseph Grimaldi,* the clown, was president. Mr. C. L. Gruneisen, who made Cruikshank’s acquaintance at “The Crib,” related how on one occasion, when a member bantered George rather savagely, and he—contrary to his custom—had borne the “chaff” without replying, he presently turned to him, and holding up his hand, showed a caricature of his assailant executed upon his thumb-nail, and said, “Look here! See how I have booked him!”
* Cruikshank illustrated songs Grimaldi sang; for instance,
“All the World’s in Paris. Sung with great applause by M.
Grimaldi, in the popular pantomime of Harlequin
Whittington.” Published Feb. 1st, 1815.
In 1824 he drew “the celebrated actor astride of a common
washing-stool, metamorphosed, with the aid of the copper-
stick, a broom, and an animal’s skull, into his “Neddy,”
while singing his favourite song of the season—“Here we go,
me and my neddy, gee woo!”
In 1825 he drew another portrait of Grimaldi in the
pantomime of Harlequin Whittington.
It was in this and kindred scenes with which Cruikshank was familiar in his prime, and out of the excesses which, as we have seen, Professor Wilson—himself no fastidious liver—tried to tempt him by promises of a higher and wider fame, that Cruikshank drew the matchless gallery of contemporary life, in which the humours, passions, whims, and absurdities of our fathers and grandfathers are snatched from oblivion, and left to inform and brighten the page of the future historian.
“We can submit to public notice,” says Mr. Thackeray, “a complete little gallery of dustmen. Here is, in the first place, the professional dustman, who, having in the enthusiastic exercise of his delightful trade, laid hands upon property not strictly his own, is pursued, as we presume, by the right owner, from whom he flies as fast as his crooked shanks will cany him. What curious picture it is—the horrid rickety houses in me dingy suburb of London, the grinning cobbler, the smothered butcher, the very trees which are covered dust—it is fine to look at the different expressions of the two interesting fugitives. The fiery charioteer who belabours yonder poor donkey has still a glance for his brother on foot, on whom punishment is about to descend. And not a little curious is it to think of the creative power of the man who has arranged this tale of low life. How logically it is conducted! how cleverly each one of the accessories is made to contribute to the effect of the whole! What a deal of thought and humour has the artist expended on this little block of wood! a large picture might have been painted out of the very same materials which Mr. Cruikshank, out of his wondrous fund of merriment and observation, can afford to throw away upon a drawing not twi inches long. From the practical dustmen we pass to those purely poetical. Here are three of them, who rise on a cloud of their own raising, the very genius of the sack and shovel. Is there no one to write a sonnet to these? and yet a whole poem was written about Peter Bell the waggoner, a character by no means so poetic.* And, lastly, we have the dustman in love. The honest fellow is on the spectator’s right hand; and having seen a young beauty stepping out of a gin-shop on a Sunday morning, is pressing eagerly his suit. His arms round the ‘young beauty’s’ neck, her face is hidden behind the dustman’s fantail hat.” That society of dustmen, which Cruikshank used to observe, when he lived in Dorset Street, Salisbury Square, sank deep into his mind. In the Triumph of Cupid, many years later, we shall still find the dustman. He is lying in the foreground, “compelled to bite the dust”—while the artist smokes his long pipe, and Cupid, astride his slippers, toasts a heart at the fire. That long pipe (only it was honest clay, and not the magnificent meerschaum to which George has treated himself in his vision) was his companion for many a year. “Yes, I remember Mr. Cruikshank very well when I was a little girl,” writes an old friend of his. “When he came, a long clay pipe was sent for. He would sit smoking it after dinner, and we were greatly amused by the energetic gesticulation with which he accompanied his conversation.” His was a handsome face, with steely blue eyes that struck through you. They flashed as brightly as the eyes of Mr. Dickens, but they had no merriment—only keenness, and a certain fierceness in them. Those eyes penetrated all the mysteries of London life, and peered through clouds of tobacco-smoke, and over foaming tankards in all kinds of strange and queer places.
* Mr. Thackeray overlooked “The Literary Dustman.”
“For Jews, sailors, Irishmen, Hessian boots, little boys, beadles, policemen, tall life-guardsmen, charity children, pumps, dustmen, very short pantaloons, dandies in spectacles, and ladies with aquiline noses, remarkably taper waists, and wonderfully long ringlets,” says Thackeray, “Mr. Cruikshank has a special predilection. The tribe of Israelites he has studied with amazing gusto; witness the Jew in Mr. Ainsworth’s ‘Jack Shepherd,’ and the immortal Fagin of ‘Oliver Twist,’ Whereabouts lies the comic vis in these persons and things? Why should a beadle be coinic, and his opposite a charity boy? Why should a tall life-guards-man have something in him essentially absurd? Why are short breeches more ridiculous than long? What is there particularly jocose about a pump? and wherefore does a long nose always provoke the beholder to laughter? These points may be metaphysically elucidated by those who list. It is probable that Mr. Cruikshank could not give an accurate definition of that which is ridiculous in these objects, but his instinct has told him that fun lurks in them, and cold must be the heart that can pass by the pantaloons of his charity boys, the Hessian boots of his dandies, and the fantail hats of his dustmen, without respectful wonder.”
George Cruikshank also created the ladies of the Sairy Gamp order. We find one in a set of his Lottery Puffs, published in January 1818—a midwife with a prodigious bonnet. And does she not appear as Mrs. Toddles, the ancestress of Mrs. Brown of our day, in the Omnibus? The debt of the humourists and public caricaturists who have lived and flourished (aye, flourished as poor George never did) on the crumbs of his Rabalaisian banquet of humour, is immeasurable. Many of the comic London characters of to-day are only his figures redressed. They are seen through the spectacles which he invented. Only, the fine fancy, the rollicking gaiety, the cumulation of fun in some four inches square of box-wood, are thinly spread over square feet. Think of Cruikshank’s Irishmen! Thackeray says of them,—