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.