The Bibliomaniac. (George Cruikshank, 1871.)
There is perhaps no gift so likely to be transmitted from father to son as a talent for drawing. Certainly it runs in the Cruikshank family, for there are already five of the name known to collectors, much to their confusion. As a guide to Mr. Reid in the preparation of his catalogue, the old gentleman made a brief statement, which is one of the curiosities of art gossip, and it may serve a useful purpose to collectors in the United States. His father, Isaac Cruikshank, was a designer and etcher and engraver, as well as a water-color draughtsman. His brother, Isaac Robert, a miniature and portrait painter, was also a designer and etcher, and "your humble servant likewise a designer and etcher. When I was a mere boy," he adds, "my dear father kindly allowed me to play at etching on some of his copper-plates, little bits of shadows or little figures in the background, and to assist him a little as I grew older, and he used to assist me in putting in hands and faces. And when my dear brother Robert (who in his latter days omitted the Isaac) left off portrait-painting, and took almost entirely to designing and etching, I assisted him, at first to a great extent, in some of his drawings." The result was that, in looking over the pictures of sixty years ago, he could not always tell his own work; and, to make matters worse, his brother left a son, Percy Cruikshank, also a draughtsman and engraver, and he, too, has an artist son, named George. The family has provided work for the coming connoisseur.
The glory of the living veteran, however, will remain unique, because he, first of the comic artists of his country, caught the new spirit, avoided the grossness and thoughtless one-sidedness of his predecessors, and used his art in such a manner that now, in his eighty-fourth year, looking back through the long gallery of his works gathered by the affectionate persistence of his admirers, he can not point to one picture which for any moral reason he could wish to turn to the wall.
England owes much to her humorists of the new humane school. She owes, perhaps, more than she yet perceives, because the changes which they promote in manners and morals come about slowly and unmarked. It is the American revisiting the country after many years of absence who perceives the ameliorations which the satiric pencil and pen have conjointly produced; nor are those ameliorations hidden from the American who treads for the first time the fast-anchored isle. It is with a peculiar rapturous recognition that we hail every indication of that England with which English art and literature have made us acquainted—a very different country indeed from the England of politics and the newspaper. A student who found himself one fine Sunday morning in June gliding past the lovely Hampshire coast, covered with farms, lawns, and villas, gazed in silence for a long time, and could only relieve his mind at last by gasping, "Thomson's 'Seasons?'" His first glance revealed to him, what he had never before suspected, that the rural poetry of England applied in a particular manner to the land that inspired it, could have been written only there, and only there could be quite appreciated. From Chaucer to Tennyson there is not a sterling line in it which could have been what it is if it had been composed in any part of the Western continent. We have a flower which we call a daisy, a weed coarsened by our fierce sun, betraying barrenness of soil, and suggestive of careless culture. There is also to be seen in our windows and greenhouses a flower named the primrose, which, though it has its merit, has not been celebrated by poets, nor is likely to be. But the instant we see an English road-side bright with primroses and daisies, we find ourselves saying, "Yes, of course; these are what the poets mean; this is the daisy of Shakspeare and Burns; here is Wordsworth's yellow primrose!" And we go on holding similar discourse with ourselves as often as we descry the objects, at once familiar and unknown, which in every age the poets of Great Britain have loved to sing.
Hope—A Phrenological Illustration. (George Cruikshank, 1826.)
But when, in these recent days, the same traveler observes the human life of English streets and homes and public places, he does not perceive so exact a resemblance to the life portrayed in books and pictures. English life seems gentler and better than it was represented forty years ago; manners are freer and more cordial; people are less intemperate; the physical life is much less obstreperous; the topics discussed have a more frequent relation to the higher interests of human nature. The glory of the last generation was held to be Waterloo; the distinction of the present one is a peaceful arbitration. The six-bottle men of Sheridan's time—where are they? Gone, quite gone. One bottle is now almost as unusual as it is excessive. Gone is the coach, with its long train of barbarisms—its bloated Wellers, its coachmen who swallowed "an imperial pint of vinegar" with their oysters without winking, its mountainous landlord skillful in charging, its general horseyness and cumbersome inconvenience. The hideous prize-fight seems finally suppressed. If there are still estates upon which there are family cottages of one room, they are held in horror, and it is an axiom accepted that the owner who permits them to remain is a truer savage than the most degraded peasants who inhabit them.
Art, humanizing art, has reached a development which a dreamer of Hogarth's day could not have anticipated for any period much short of the millennium; and not a development only, but a wide diffusion. Chadband—where is he? If he exists, he has assumed a less offensive form than when he ate muffins and sniveled inanity in Mrs. Snagsby's back room. Where are Thackeray's snobs? They, too, have not ceased to be, for the foible which he satirized is an integral part of human nature, which can be ennobled, not eradicated. Strangers, however, do not often observe those violent and crude manifestations of it which Thackeray describes; and there seems a likelihood of the "Book of Snobs" meeting the fate of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," which made itself obsolete by accomplishing its purposes. Beer still flows redundant in every part of the British Empire. Nevertheless, there is here and there a person who has discovered how much more can be got out of life by avoiding stimulation. A decided advance must have been made toward tolerance of opinion when men can be borne to honorable burial in Westminster Abbey whose opinions were at variance with those which built and sustain the edifice. Chadbandom feebly protests, but no man regards it.