THE ELVES AND THE COBBLER.”

THE WAITS OF BREMEN AND THE ROBBERS.”

FROM GEORGE CRUIKSHANK’S EDITION OF “GERMAN POPULAR STORIES.”

Face p. 180.

The “German Popular Stories” probably contain the most striking specimens of Cruikshank’s power as a designer of fairy subjects. In reference to these illustrations, our great critic, Mr. Ruskin, says: “They are of quite sterling and admirable art, in a class precisely parallel in elevation to the character of the tales which they illustrate; and the original etchings, as I have before said in the Appendix to my ‘Elements of Drawing,’ were unrivalled in masterfulness of touch since Rembrandt, in some qualities of delineation unrivalled even by him.” “The Two Elves,” says Hamerton, “especially the nearer one, who is putting on his breeches, are drawn with a point at once so precise and vivacious, so full of keen fun and inimitably happy invention, that I have not found their equal in comic etching anywhere ... the picturesque details of the room are etched with the same felicitous intelligence; but the marvel of the work is in the expression of the strange little faces, and the energy of the comical wee limbs.”[90] In The Witches’ Frolic [“Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft”], we find a happy blending of the terrible and the grotesque. Look at the old hags floating out to sea in their tubs; and the strange, uncanny thing with dreadful eyes bobbing up and down midway between the foremost old woman and the distant vessel. The thing may be a ship, it may be a fish, or it may be a fiend,—in the dim half light we cannot tell what,—but it is horribly suggestive of nightmare, and makes one laugh as well as shudder. Some ghostly goblins, the creations of George’s weird fancy, will be found in “The Omnibus”; we see them following a ghostly ship manned by ghostly mariners, and we find in the same book ghostly Dutchmen playing a game of diabolical leap-frog with Australian kangaroos. In one illustration he introduces us to a cheerful assembly of ancestral ghosts: there is the ghostly saucer-eyed head of the family, with a ghostly hound peeping beneath his chair, a ghostly grandmother, half a dozen ghostly spinster aunts, a ghostly butler, a ghostly cook, a ghostly small boy, two ghostly candles; and lastly, a ghostly cat. Small wonder that under the influence of such ghostly surroundings the hair of the affrighted ghost-seer stands erect in the extremity of his terror.

This same book contains, too, the celebrated etching of Jack o’Lantern, probably the best illustration of the supernatural which we owe to the pencil and weird imagination of the artist. “Talk of Fuseli and his wind-bag, there is real vivid imagination enough in this to make a whole academy of Fuselis. It is just an Egyptian darkness, with breaking through it, above a bog-hole, some black bulrushes, and above them a bending, leathery goblin exulting over some drowned traveller, the meteor lamp he carries casting a downward flicker on the dark water. Such darkness, such wicked speed, such bad, Puck-like malice, such devilry, Hoffman and Poe together could not have better devised. Many a May exhibition has not half the genius in all its pictures that focuses in that gem of jet.” The description is admirable; but Walter Thornbury has altogether misconceived the artist’s idea. Jack o’Lantern is simply misguiding a belated traveller into a bog, and the elfin grin which pervades his countenance testifies to the delight he takes in his mischievous employment. The words of the song in Dryden’s King Arthur convey the best possible description of this wondrous conception:—

“Hither this way, this way bend, Trust not that malicious fiend; Those are false, deluding lights, Wafted far and near by sprights; Trust ’em not, for they’ll deceive ye, And in bog and marshes leave ye, If you step no danger thinking, Down you fall, a furlong sinking; ’Tis a fiend who has annoyed ye, Name but Heav’n, and he’ll avoid ye.”

By way of contrast to all these, I would turn to the celebrated and much-too-often-described Triumph of Cupid, of the “Table Book”; but as the praises of this remarkable composition may already be counted by the ream, I have no intention whatever of contributing a further addition.

George Cruikshank.] [From “The Universal Songster.” “THE OLD COMMODORE.”
George Cruikshank.] [From “The Universal Songster.” “A tall figure her sight engross’d,
And it cried, ‘I beez Giles Scroggin’s Ghost.’” [Face p. 182.

A notice, however, of George Cruikshank’s supernatural work would be incomplete without some reference to his devils. From time immemorial our idea of His Satanic Majesty has been associated with the distinguishing appendages of horns, hoofs, and a cow’s tail. “A conceit there is,” says old Sir Thomas Browne, “that the devil commonly appeareth with a cloven hoof, wherein, although it seems excessively ridiculous, there may be somewhat of truth, and the ground thereof at first might be his frequent appearing in the shape of a goat, which answers the description.” George Cruikshank too well apprehended the cunning nature of His Satanic Majesty to suppose him idiotic enough to introduce his hoofs, his horns, or his tail into the company of all sorts and conditions of men. It will be remembered that Fitz Dottrel takes leave to doubt the identity of the devil who waits upon him in the character of a body servant. “You cannot,” he says, “cozen me. Your shoe’s not cloven, sir; you are whole hoofed.” But “Pug” simply and unaffectedly assures him, “Sir, that’s a popular error,—deceives many.”[91] Like “Pug,” George Cruikshank’s devils accommodate themselves, their appearance, and their costume to the prejudices of the persons they design to serve. With saints and perverse sinners it is obvious that any attempt at disguise would be futile; but with so respectable a person as a Dutch burgher, or so suspicious an individual as an English lawyer, the case is altogether different. We have specimens of the respectable devil in the “long-legged bondholder” who appears to his unfortunate Dutch debtor; the portly, well-dressed little man in the “Gentleman in black”; and the seedy looking old clothes dealer of “Peter Schlemihl.” Quite a different devil to any of these is the devil that interviews St. Nicholas, the devil whom St. Medard circumvented, or the simple-minded and unfortunate devil that fell into the clutches of St. Dunstan. This last is probably the most comical diabolique that Cruikshank ever designed. In an evil hour this miserable fiend had irritated the saint by mimicking his musical powers; and growing bolder with impunity, even ventured to challenge his skill as a mechanic, by doubting his ability to fit a shoe to his own diabolical hoof. The saint promptly whipped up the leg, and it was not until this simple devil found himself in the clutches of the saint, that he fully comprehended the prodigious powers of the holy personage he had ventured to chaff. In spite of his howls and frantic efforts to escape, the iron shoe is remorselessly fitted, and nail after nail driven into the quick. Imagine the sufferings of that poor devil; observe his comically distorted countenance as he bellows with agony and impotent rage; how his tail curls round his leg in the extremity of his anguish! The worst perhaps has to follow, for in spite of the agony of his crippled hoof, a deed will have to be “signed, sealed, and delivered,” by which his claim to a legion of sinful souls has to be for ever released and extinguished. It is worthy of remark that George Cruikshank’s devils—simple-minded, weak creatures, more mischievous than really wicked, in all their contests with the saints (Saint Anthony excepted) invariably come off second best.

In estimating his merits, the genius of George Cruikshank may not inaptly be compared to a diamond. One facet often emits more brilliant coruscations than any other; and if we may be permitted to compare his powers of realizing the grave, the comical, the supernatural, and the terrible to the facets of a diamond, we think the one which would be found to emit the most brilliant flashes of light would be the last. Thackeray, one of the most friendly and most competent of his critics, would seem to have considered that much of his power was shown in depicting subjects of this kind. “What a fine eye,” he tells us, in his famous article which has supplied the backbone—the muscles—the very integuments of so many others,—“what a fine eye the artist has, what a skilful hand, and what a sympathy for the wild and dreadful!”

Designed, Etched and Published by George Cruikshank.]

[November 1st, 1829.

THE GIN SHOP.

“—now, Oh dear, how shocking the thought is,
They makes the gin from aquafortis:

They do it on purpose folks’ lives to shorten,
And tickets it up at two-pence a quartern.”—New Ballad.

[Face p. 184.

From an early period of his career as an etcher and designer, George had waged a deadly war with gin,—that potent, insidious, and evil spirit of London; the most priceless services he rendered to the cause of temperance being unquestionably given long before he had any notion of joining the ranks of the total abstainers. Like the Triumph of Cupid, the well-known Gin Juggernaut of the “Sketch Book” requires nothing more than a passing allusion. An example less known but quite as admirable will be found in the “Scraps and Sketches.” It is called The Gin Shop,[92] and shows us the interior of a London gin palace. In place of the usual barrels, around the walls are ranged coffins, labelled respectively: “Deady’s Cordial;” “Blue Ruin;” “Gin and Bitters;” the largest (a huge one) being marked “Old Tom.” Death, habited as a watchman, has baited a huge gin trap, wherein stand five persons (two of them children, besides a baby in arms), all imbibing the deadly liquid. The wretched woman with the infant has actually placed her foot on the spring, and so great is the artist’s power of realization, that we momentarily expect to see the horrible thing close with a snap! A skeleton, whose fleshless skull is masked with a pleasant female countenance, officiates as barmaid, and behind her yawns a pit, on the further side of which a circle of evil spirits curvet around a huge still. Just such a weird scene as would strike a sympathetic chord in the artist’s fancy was found for him in Scott’s novel of “Red Gauntlet.” The episode selected for illustration is the frightful adventure of Hutcheon and Dougal MacCallum. “When midnight came, and the house was quiet as the grave, the silver whistle sounded as sharp and shrill as if Sir Robert was blowing it, and up got the two old serving-men and tottered into the room where the dead man lay. Hutcheon saw enough at the first glance; for there were torches in the room, which showed him the foul fiend in his ain shape, sitting on the laird’s coffin! Ower he couped, as if he had been dead. He could not tell how long he lay in a trance at the door; but when he gathered himself, he cried on his neighbour, and getting nae answer, raised the house, when Dougal was found lying dead within twa steps of the bed where his master’s coffin was placed. As for the whistle, it was lost ance and aye, but mony a time it was heard at the top of the house on the bartizan and among the auld chimneys and turrets, where the howlets have their nests.” The coffin of the dead laird lies in state on a table covered with black cloth, richly ornamented with his armorial bearings; at the foot of the bier stands his black plumed helmet; while atop of the coffin crouches the grinning ape with the laird’s whistle in his paw; on the ground, as they have been tossed about by the mischievous beast, lie his rapier, gauntlet, and other military trappings. The furniture, the fittings, the sombre hangings, the gloomy ancestral portraits, all are in keeping with the weird scene and its surroundings. The Death of Sikes, and Fagin in the Condemned Cell (especially the latter) have been described any number of times, and the circumstances, moreover, under which the latter design was conceived, told invariably wrong. In the Murder of Sir Rowland Trenchard [“Jack Sheppard”], we have a Rembrandtish etching, quite equalling in power and intensity that of Fagin in the Condemned Cell. The gloomy depths of the well hole are illumined only by the pine torch of the frightened Jew, as Wild hammers with his bludgeon on the fingers of the doomed wretch who, maimed and faint from loss of blood, clings with desperate tenacity to the bannister, from which his relaxing grip will presently plunge him into the black abyss below.