* 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.”