George Cruikshank's Omnibus

by George Cruikshank

Lest there should be some who never saw the modern street-mountebank, going forth like Leporello with his ladder, and like Sancho with his donkey, we must describe his performance. His greatest feat consisted in balancing upon his chin a ladder with an ass on it. All other tricks performed, and all eyes and mouths opened, curiosity on tiptoe and incredulity on the stretch, forth came the wooden machine, and with legs twisted through the staves, up went the animal. "Who," exclaims the minstrel, "Ah who can tell how hard it is to climb!" But what poet ever found a steep so difficult as that gradus ad Parnassum to the seemingly dislocated donkey? To the topmast round, you would see him clinging like Shakspeare's giddy sea-boy on the mast; and surveying the mountebank who had taught him to be such an astonishing ass, with a look that seemed to say, "You're another!" Then would his master send round the hat upon its last and greatest voyage of discovery; then would the halfpence therein be rattled harmlessly in the vacant faces of boys with vacant pockets, and then would the irresistible appeal be heard, "Come, good gen'lemen, be liberal, be liberal—tuppence more, and up goes the donkey." Then bending up each corporal agent for the terrible feat, up indeed would go the ladder, donkey and all; high up in air, until its lowest stave rested fairly and firmly on the protruded chin of the mountebank, where it stood poised, fixed, moveless—the astonishing type, or rather the exact model, of the balance of power in Europe.

The amazement now should be transferred from the balanced to the balancer; for what is the difficulty of such a gradus ad Parnassum to the ass, compared with the sore trial of the man below, who has made the bridge of his nose a pons asinorum! But in rivalship with the donkey, the human being shrinks into insignificance; the grotesque patience of the brute beats the strength and dexterity of the man hollow; the gazers are all wrapped in ecstasy to see how the ass hangs on, not how the cunning mountebank balances him. The sympathies of the crowd, men and boys, are triumphantly borne off by the four-legged performer, and every one of them goes away more convinced of the uncommon cleverness of the ass, and consequently on better terms with himself.

But the obstinacy of the long-eared animal is proverbial; and in nothing is it more strikingly exhibited than in the fact that he will eat if he can. So was it before the days of Æsop's ass, that cropped a thistle and was torn in pieces for confessing it; and so has it been before and since the hour when Sterne's ass consumed the macaroon which curiosity and not charity presented to him. It is possibly this expensive habit that has led the mountebank, of late, to cast off the donkey, and to substitute a boy for him, in the feat of the ladder. The performance to this hour is the same, with that exception—a two-legged juvenile for a four. Perhaps the mountebank was jealous of the ass! Can we assume that, in the nature of a mountebank balancing on his chin a ladder surmounted by a long-eared brute, there is no room for vanity? Can we imagine a donkey-balancer incapable of feeling annoyed, when he sees his subordinate—the agent through whom his own abilities are to be demonstrated—creating peals of laughter by doing nothing, trotting off with the spoils he did not win, and cropping every thistle of fame that belongs to another? There is no mind too shallow for vanity to take root in, no talent too small for it to twine itself round, no competitor too contemptible to pique and wound it. "Why, Edmund Kean couldn't get a hand of applause, with such a noisy brute as that in the piece!" said an actor in the drama of the Dog of Montargis, when the quadruped was howling over the murdered body of his master, and breaking the hearts of the audience.

At all events the Boy has taken the Ass's place on the ladder. The change may have arisen out of that tenderness for the brute creation which is too amiable a feeling—when in excess—to pass unadmired. There is a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; and to risk a donkey's life on a ladder, for the sport of a heedless crowd, might be dangerous to the mountebank. In this age, society at large knows what is due to donkeys; we can all enter into their feelings. But as there is no law, and no moral principle, against the elevation of a human urchin, even to the top stave of the ladder, there is no reason why the sport should not continue. Philosophers will explain to you, that a boy is a free agent, and has a right to be balanced on a human chin, if he likes; but a donkey has no will of his own at all—except—except when you've hired him for an hour, at Ramsgate, and are endeavouring to persuade yourself that you're trotting him out of the town.

The last boy we saw balanced was worthy of the chin that sustained him. The mountebank to be sure was a miracle, and could have balanced anything. If the books of the Bank of England were to get into disorder, every sum confused, and every figure out of its place—he could balance them. But the boy was at least two miracles rolled into one—a more than Siamese prodigy—a boy, and yet an ass too. He looked more like one than the reality, his predecessor. He evidently felt the past importance of his elevation, high above his compeers. He seemed quite conscious that every inhabitant, not of that simply, but of the next parish, was gazing at him in profound amazement. He turned no glance, whether of contempt or benignant pity, on the open eyes and mouths around, but looked unutterable things at the knocker of a door opposite.

"So stands the statue that enchants the world!"

This, however, was only at the commencement of the performance, while the spectators were being coaxed to contribute, and while several among them, not knowing exactly what they were doing, were giving a half-penny. But when the ladder was deliberately hoisted up, and fixed on the chin, then came the utter hopelessness of presenting a true resemblance of the ass's face—the boy's we mean;—of the conscious pride in its own blankness, of its self-complacency, tinged with a slight touch of fear, amounting only to a pleasurable excitement! He was a boy picked out of the crowd around,—yet he was matchless. You saw at once that he was not employed by the mountebank—that he was not paid for being balanced. There was something in his look that distinguished him at a glance from the hired professor. It might be supposed that, the boy not being hired, there would be a little difficulty in procuring a substitute for the ass: not so; only blow a trumpet or beat a drum in the street, and you are surrounded in less than no time with able and willing volunteers. This boy entered into the soul of the ass's part; he did not hug, and hang on the ladder mechanically, or like one who had done the same thing a dozen times before, that very day. There was the freshness of the young aspiration, the delicious novelty of the first grand step in life—in the attempt. It was young Ambition (as Brutus says) just mounting his ladder. He was animated by the glorious intoxication of getting up in the world. He looked direct forward; not at, but through, the brick wall opposite, into futurity. If one of his schoolfellows had called out, "Master's a coming;" or, "Here's your father with the cartwhip;" or, "Bill, I'm blessed if here arn't the woman what we stole the apples on;"—no, even these notes of alarm would have failed to disturb his equanimity—or his equilibrium. "Have a slice o' cold pudden, Bill?" might have communicated perhaps to some part of his frame a momentary touch of human weakness—we can't say positively—boys are but men;—but nothing short of such an appeal to the weak side of his nature could have disturbed his rapt and lofty musings.

Since the days of the Hebrew with which we set out, when the Ass on the Ladder was but a fiction, history has recorded the doings—we had almost said the sayings—of scores of wonderful quadrupeds. We have had gifted horses, who should have been elected F.R.S.'s; learned pigs, who should have been chosen LL.D.'s; humane dogs, who merit statues like Howard's; and industrious fleas, who do the work of hot water in putting lobsters to the blush. But such an ass as the Lad on the Ladder eye never beheld but that once. His face spread before our curious and inquiring gaze, like a map of the world, and we traced in recollection an infinite variety of character. What it more immediately suggested was the expression in the face of a successful candidate at the moment of "chairing," elevated in some fantastic car, surrounded with banners bearing patriotic mottoes and devices, and accompanied by roaring raggamuffins. It also conjured up a vision of a youthful aspirant, fresh from the office or the shop, strutting in Richard, or fretting in Hamlet, before eight long sixes, and a full bench of aunts, in a private theatre.

The ass on the ladder brings to memory a thousand other spectacles. When we behold an orator (to listen is impossible) flourishing his arms on the hustings, and ever and anon placing his hand upon his crimson waistcoat, or declaiming for an hour together before a private company to the exclusion of conversation, in full force of lungs, but in virtue of no mental superiority, we are forcibly reminded of the ass on the ladder.