After Lockhart’s statement that George Cruikshank was capable George’s ideas of Female Beauty. of designing an Annunciation, a Beatification, or an Apotheosis, we must accept his assertion that he “understood the [human] figure completely” with a certain amount of reservation. Perhaps he did; and if he did, he certainly played some extraordinary tricks with the “figure” aforesaid. The truth is, that we forget the artist’s weaknesses, many and glaring as they are, in the lustre of his unexampled genius. The Times, in an otherwise laudatory article which it published after his death, remarked that “there was not a single beautiful face or figure probably in the whole range of Cruikshank’s work.” Now, although this is not entirely true, there is at least so much of truth in it that we may admit that the cases in which he has produced a pretty face or figure are very few and far between, and even those cases seem rather to have been the result of accident than of design. There is no getting over the fact that George’s ideas of female beauty were, to say the least of them, peculiar: his women are fearfully and wonderfully made; they are horse-faced; their eyebrows are black and strongly marked; their hair is plastered to the sides of their faces, and meet bobs of hair at the back of their heads; their waists are as thin as their necks; and they all bear a strong family likeness to one another. The Times assertion is happily, however, so broad that it is easy to traverse and contradict it. George’s handsome women are so few, that it is difficult at the moment to say where any of them may be found. I know at least of one amazingly handsome one—the London Barrow Woman in Hone’s “Every-Day Book.” Some pretty servant girls will be found in the etching of The Sergeant Introducing his Dutch Wife to his Friends in “St. James’s, or the Court of Queen Anne,” and I will undertake to point out at least half a dozen pretty faces in the course of illustrations to “The Miser’s Daughter”; but after all, these are only exceptions to the general rule; and it may be safely conceded that as a delineator of female beauty, George could not hold a candle to John Leech, to John Tenniel, or even to his own brother, Isaac Robert.

As for the celebrated Cruikshankian steed, I give him up The Cruikshankian Steed. at once as an utterly irreclaimable and unmanageable brute. Thackeray, writing in 1840, said, that “though our artist does not draw horses very scientifically, to use the phrase of the atelier; he feels them very keenly, and his queer animals, after one is used to them, answer quite as well as better.” Even on this subject, however, the ablest critics have contradicted each other. George Augustus Sala tells us that the artist “could draw the ordinary nag of real life well enough,” and cites by way of example the very horses of the celebrated Deaf Postilion, in “Three Courses and a Dessert,” which Thackeray had previously held up to well-merited execration. He goes on to tell us that when George “essayed to portray a charger or a hunter, or a lady’s hack, or even a pair of carriage horses, the result was the most grotesque of failures. The noble animal has, I apprehend, forty-four ‘points,’ technically speaking, and from the muzzle to the spavin-place, from the crest to the withers, from the root of the dock to the fetlock, George was wrong in them all. His fiery steed bore an equal resemblance to a Suffolk punch with the head of a griffin and the legs of an antelope, and that traditionary cockhorse on which the lady was supposed to ride to Banbury Cross with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes.”[86] His peculiarities notwithstanding, George himself was in no wise conscious of them, and never hesitated to introduce “the fiery untamed” into any scene—battle or otherwise—in which the services of the eccentric animal might be turned to account. We find him assisting Washington in his triumphal journey to the capitol; astonishing the French squares in the character of a Mameluke charger at the Battle of the Pyramids; and leaping into the lake along with “Herne the Hunter,” that peculiar creation of the late Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, on which supernatural occasion he comes out, as might have been expected, with peculiar force and vigour.

Thackeray, moreover, says of his trees, that they were decidedly original, “being decidedly of his own make and composition, not imitated from any master;” another and a minor difficulty with the artist was a boot, which he invariably drew half a foot too long. George lived in the days of straps, and being strictly conservative in principle, when he met with a pair of trousers, his idea of the “fitness of things” was not satisfied until he pinned them to the wearer’s feet with a pair of these most uncomfortable appendages.

Against these shortcomings, which are a sufficient answer to those who would give him credit for possessing the faculty of designing “Annunciations, Beatifications, Apotheoses,” and the like, we must set his excellencies, the power and brilliancy of his imaginative faculties, his extraordinary talents of conception and realization, the delicacy of his manipulation and execution: in a word, the strong original “genius” with which Lockhart credited him from the moment he had seen his “Points of Humour.” Examples of this “genius” might be cited by the thousand. Look only at the famous “Sketch Book;” its recent republication has placed it within the reach of every one of our readers. Look at the Sprig of Shelalegh, the rollicking, whiskey drinking, fighting, devil-may-care expression he has thrown into that piece of wood; turn to the sheet wherein he has recorded his Recollections of the Court of Common Pleas, and study the group of lawyers’ and witnesses’ faces therein contained. There is “genius” for you, if you will. If you are overworked, turn to them; they will do you good, for they will not only make you merry, but force upon you the conviction that the conception which created them was essentially original. It is this delightful originality of George Cruikshank which constitutes his genius.

George Cruikshank.] [“Three Courses and a Dessert.” THE DEAF POSTILION. (See p. 169.)George Cruikshank.] [“Three Courses and a Dessert.” THE BRAINTREES. “I doan’t want to hurt thee, zo I leaves thee wi’ un, but, mind—he’ll hold thy droat a little tighter than I did, if thee wags a hair.” [Face p. 171.

“No plan!” “no ambition!” “not much industry!” so at least said Lockhart. We may doubt whether even at the time it was spoken this charge had any foundation of truth to rest upon; an answer to it at least will be found in the fact that, before the mysterious spell had fallen upon him we shall presently have to describe, this sterling and indefatigable genius had already produced thousands upon thousands of miraculous little drawings. From the mass of these wonderful creations we propose now to select a few examples, choosing them in the first instance from a graver type than some we shall presently have to consider.

“Greenwich Hospital” gives us one of the very best drawings which Cruikshank ever designed. The scene of the Point of Honour is laid on board the Triumph, at Spithead, at the time of the famous mutiny. A detachment of marines with shouldered arms are drawn up on the quarter deck, their drummer is beating to quarters, while all hands are assembled to witness a degrading and demoralizing spectacle,—a sailor, with his shoulders bare and his hands tied to the triangles, about to receive punishment for disobedience to orders. Conspicuous amongst the figures are two little middies, habited in the strange naval uniform of sixty years ago. The illustration to The Braintrees, at page 90 of the “Three Courses and a Dessert” is a marvellous specimen, not only of the graphic power of the artist, but a triumph of the wood-engraver’s craft. In The Gin Shop (“Sketches by Boz”), the artist selected a subject which invariably enlisted his sympathy and called into action the full power of his graphic satire. Mark the flaming gas, the huge spirit vats, the gaudily painted pillars and mouldings; above all, the strange people: the young man with his hat on one side who chaffs the young ladies behind the bar, the gin-drinking female by his side, the gin-loving cripple, the small boy who brings the family bottle to be filled with gin, whose head barely reaches the counter, the gin-drinking charwoman to the left, and the quarrelsome gin-drinking Irish customers at the back. Everything in this picture reeks of gin; the only persons not imbibing it are the proprietor and his dowdy barmaids, whom I have no manner of doubt the artist intended to look captivating.

“What a fine touching picture of melancholy desolation,” remarks Thackeray, “is that of ‘Sikes and the dog.’ The poor cur is not too well drawn, the landscape is stiff and formal; but in this case the faults, if faults they be, of execution rather add to than diminish the effect of the picture: it has a strange, wild, dreary, broken-hearted look; we fancy we see the landscape as it must have appeared to Sikes, when ghastly and with bloodshot eyes he looked at it.” The etching of Jonathan Wild Discovering Darrell in the Loft [“Jack Sheppard”] reminds one, in its treatment, of Rembrandt, for the work of Cruikshank, be it observed, distinctly shows in its results that he studied both Hogarth and Rembrandt. The effect the artist has produced is wonderful; the ray of light thrown through the gloom upon the figure of Darrell as he stands against the wall, sword in hand, is capitally managed, “while the intricacies of the tile-work, and the mysterious twinkling of light among the beams are excellently felt and rendered.”[87] Simon Renard and Winwike on the Roof of the White Tower [“Tower of London”] is another admirable drawing. The scene is laid on the platform of one of the antique guns which frown from the embrasures of the river face of the fortress. The head of Renard is not well drawn. The character of the ambassador gives one the idea of a Spanish Iago, a clever, calculating knave, whom we should credit with the possession of a broad and lofty forehead, indicative of deep and concentrated thought; in the etching, however, before us, he has none at all, a deficiency compensated by puffy cheeks and a preposterous beak. These imperfections, which in another artist would mar the drawing, serve only to throw its excellencies into prominent notice. The lights and shadows are most effectively rendered, and the setting sun throws a broad light upon the features of the warder, who has laid aside his arquebus while conversing with the wily Spaniard. Of the many who have noticed the well-known etching of Born a Genius and Born a Dwarf [“Comic Almanack, 1847”], not one (so far at least as we know) has ever mentioned its origin. The subject was prompted by one of the last entries in the diary of poor Benjamin Robert Haydon, who died by his own hand on the 22nd of June, 1846, his corpse being found at the foot of his colossal picture of Alfred the Great and the First British Jury. The entry runs as follows:—“Tom Thumb had 12,000 people last week, B. R. Haydon 133-1/2 (the 1/2 a little girl). Exquisite taste of the English people!” In the etching which shows us Randulph and Hilda Dancing in the Rotunda at Ranelagh [“Miser’s Daughter”], he brings us face to face with our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers; wherever he got his authority from, the huge circular hall with galleries and arches running round it, illuminated by a thousand lamps, and the curious orchestra with the old-fashioned sounding-board above, are no freak of the artist’s imagination. The etching possesses a wondrous charm of reality. We find ourselves assisting, as it were, at one of the masquerades described in “Sir Charles Grandison”; many of the company are in fancy dresses, and we find it difficult to realize, in these broad-cloth days, that the gentlemen in the velvet coats, with gold-bound embroidered waistcoats, silk stockings, silver gilt rapiers, and laced hats, dancing minuets with Chinamen, harlequins, scaramouches, templars, and other fancifully-dressed persons, are simply wearing the every-day costume of men of fashion of the day.

Perhaps more than any other comic artist of past or present time, Mannerism. George is distinguished by his mannerisms. His horses, his women, the costumes of his male and female characters, the cut of their garments and of their boots, the arrangement of their hair, will proclaim his individuality anywhere; and yet, if you look at any of the designs which he executed in his best and brightest days, before he took up with the mania which contributed, as we shall presently see, so largely to the ruin of his artistic genius, fame, and fortunes, we cannot fail to be impressed with the quaintness of his imagination. In this quaintness and originality lie the charm and freshness which is the peculiar characteristic of his designs. Unlike those of other artists, you may turn over volume after volume of his sketches, and be conscious of no sense of weariness. Much of this no doubt is due to their constant variety. Unlike the generality of modern illustrators, he is not limited to the costumes and incidents of the every-day commonplace life of the nineteenth century; he does not confine himself to humour; his fancy takes a wider range, and revels in subjects of wonder, diablery, and romance. Gnomes and fairies, devils and goblins, knights, giants, jesters, and morris dancers are continually passing before us; there is an endless succession of novelties, treated with a quaintness of fancy which distinguishes it above all others; there is a ceaseless variety in his dramatis personæ, while the characters are as various as the subjects. In these characteristics seem to lie the secret of the pleasure which his illustrations, whether they be drawn on wood or etched on the copper, never fail to inspire.