But George Cruikshank in Mexico! What on earth can the most stay-at-home of British artists have to do with that out-of-the-way old curiosity-shop of the American continent? One might fancy him now—but that it is growing late—in the United States. He might be invited to attend a Total Abstinence Convention. He might run Mr. J.B. Gough hard on his favorite stump. He might be tempted, perchance, to cross the ocean in the evening of his days, to note down, with his inimitable and still unfaltering pencil, some of the humors of Yankee-land. I am certain, that, were George Cruikshank or Dicky Doyle to come this way and give a pictorial history of a tour through the States, somewhat after the immortal Brown, Jones, and Robinson pattern, the Americans would be in a better temper with their brothers in Old England than after reading some long spun-out book of travels by brainless Cockneys or cynical dyspeptics. The laugh awakened by a droll picture hurts nobody. It is that ugly letter-press which smarts and rankles, and festers at last into a gangrene of hatred. The Patriarch of Uz wished that his enemy had written a book. He could have added ten thousand fold to the venom of the aspiration, had he likewise expressed a wish that the book had been printed.
You will be pleased to understand, then, that the name of the gentleman who serves as text for this essay is Cruikshank, and not Cruickshank. There is an old Scottish family, I believe, of that ilk, which spells its name with a c before the k. Perhaps the admirers of our George wished to give something like an aristocratic smack to his patronymic, and so interpolated the objectionable consonant. There is no Cruikshank to be found in the "Court Guide," but Cruickshanks abound. As for our artist, he is a burgess among burgesses,—a man of the people par excellence, and an Englishman above all. His travels have been of the most limited nature. Once, in the course of his long life, and with what intent you shall presently hear, he went to France, as Hogarth did; but France didn't please him, and he came home again, like Hogarth, with all convenient speed,—fortunately, without being clapped up in jail for sketching the gates of Calais. I believe that he has not crossed the Straits of Dover since George IV. was king. I have heard, on good authority, that he protested strongly, while in foreign parts, against the manner in which the French ate new-laid eggs, and against the custom, then common among the peasantry, of wearing wooden shoes. I am afraid even, that, were George hard pressed, he would own to a dim persuasion that all Frenchmen wear wooden shoes; also pigtails; likewise cocked hats. He does not say so in society; but those who have his private ear assert that his faith or his delusion goes even farther than this, and that he believes that all Frenchmen eat frogs,—that nine tenths of the population earn their living as dancing-masters, and that the late Napoleon Buonaparte (George Cruikshank always spells the Corsican Ogre's name with a u) was first cousin to Apollyon, and was not, upon occasion, averse to the consumption of human flesh,—-babies of British extraction preferred. Can you show me an oak that ever took so strong a root as prejudice?
Not that George Cruikshank belongs in any way to the species known as "Fossil Tories." He is rather a fossil Liberal. He was a Whig Radical, and more, when the slightest suspicion of Radicalism exposed an Englishman to contumely, to obloquy, to poverty, to fines, to stripes, to gyves, and to the jail. He was quite as advanced a politician as William Cobbett, and a great deal honester as a man. He was the fast friend of William Hone, who, for his famous "Political Catechism,"—a lampoon on the borough-mongers and their bloated king,—was tried three times on three successive days, before the cruel Ellenborough, but as many times acquitted. George Cruikshank inveighed ardently, earnestly, and at last successfully, with pencil and with etching-point, against the atrocious blood-thirstiness of the penal laws,—the laws that strung up from six to a dozen unfortunates on a gallows in front of Newgate every Monday morning, often for no direr offence than passing a counterfeit one-pound note. When the good old Tories wore top-boots and buckskins, George Cruikshank was conspicuous for a white hat and Hessians,—the distinguishing outward signs of ultra-liberalism. He was, of course, a Parliamentary Reformer in the year '30; and he has been a social reformer, and a most useful one, ever since. Still is there something about this brave old English worthy that approaches the fossil type. His droll dislike to the French—a hearty, good-humored disfavor, differing widely from the polished malevolence of Mr. John Leech, who never missed an opportunity to represent the airy Gaul as something repulsive, degraded, and ungentlemanly—I have already noticed. Then George Cruikshank has never been able to surmount a vague notion that steamboats and steam-engines are, generically speaking, a humbug, and that the old English sailing craft and the old English stage-coach are, after all, the only modes of conveyance worthy the patronage of Britons. Against exaggerated hoop-skirts he has all along set his face, and seldom, if ever, condescends to delineate a lady in crinoline. His beau-ideal of female beauty is comprised in an hour-glass waist, a skirt that fits close to the form, a sandalled shoe, and very long ringlets; whereas tight lacing, narrow skirts, sandalled shoes, and ringlets have been banished from the English modes any time these fifteen years. Those among George's critics, too, who are sticklers for exactitude in the "abstract and brief chronicle of the time" complain that his dandies always wear straps to their tight pantaloons in lieu of pegtops; that their vests are too short and their coat-collars too high; that they wear bell-crowned hats, and carry gold-knobbed canes with long tassels; and that they are dressed, in short, after the fashion of the year one, when Brummell or Pea-Green Haynes commanded the ton. It is obvious that the works of an artist who has refused to be indoctrinated with the perpetual changes of a capricious code of dress would never be very popular with the readers of "Punch,"—a periodical which, pictorially, owes its very existence to the readiness and skill displayed by its draughtsmen in shooting folly as it flies and catching the manners living as they rise, and pillorying the madness of the moment. Were George Cruikshank called upon, for instance, to depict a lady fording a puddle on a rainy day, and were he averse (for he is the modestest of artists) to displaying too much of her ankle, he would assuredly make manifest, beneath her upraised skirts, some antediluvian pantalet, bordered by a pre-Adamite frill. But the keen-eyed Mr. Leech would be guilty of no such anachronism. He would discover that the mysterious garments in question were ofttimes encircled by open-worked embroidery. He would find out that the ladies sometimes wore Knickerbockers. And this is what the ladies like. Exaggerate their follies as much as you please; but woe be to you, if you wrongfully accuse them! You may sneer at, you may censure, you may castigate them for what they really do, but beware of reprehending them for that which they have never done. Even Sir John Falstaff revolted at the imputation of having kissed the keeper's daughter. A sermon against crinoline, be it ever so fulminating, finds ever an attentive and smiling congregation; but venture to preach against coal-scuttle bonnets—until the ladies have really taken to wearing them—and your hearers would pull down the pulpit and hang the preacher.
Thus, although foreigners may express wonder that a designer, who for so many years has been in the front rank of English humorous artists, should never have contributed to the pages of our leading humorous periodical, astonishment may be abated, when the real state of the case, as I have endeavored to put it, is known. George Cruikshank is at once too good for, and not quite up to the mark of "Punch." His best works have always been his etchings on steel and copper; and wonderful examples of chalcographic brilliance and skill those etchings are,—many of them surpassing Callot, and not a few of them (notably the illustrations to Ainsworth's "Tower of London") rivalling Rembrandt. From the nature of these engravings, it would be impossible to print them at a machine-press for a weekly issue of fifty or sixty thousand copies. George has drawn much on wood, and his wondrous wood-cuts—xylographs, if you wish a more pretentious word—to "Three Courses and a Dessert," "The Odd Volume," "The Gentleman in Black," Grimm's "Fairy Tales," "Philosophy in Sport," and "The Table-Book," will be long remembered, and are now highly prized by amateurs; but his minute and delicate pencil-drawings have taxed the energies of the very best engravers of whom England can boast,—of Vizetelly, of Landells, of Jackson, of Thompson, and of Thurston. George Cruikshank would never suffer his drawings on wood to be slashed and chopped about by hasty or incompetent gravers; and although the ateliers of "Punch" are supplied with a first-rate staff of wood-cutters, very great haste and very little care must often be apparent in the weekly pabulum of cuts; nor should such an appearance excite surprise, when the exigencies of a weekly publication are remembered. The "Punch" artists, indeed, draw with a special reference to that which they know their engravers can or cannot do. Mr. Tenniel's cartoons are put on wood precisely as they are meant to be cut, in broad, firm, sweeping lines, and the wood-engraver has only to scoop out the white interstices between the network of lines; whereas Mr. Leech dashed in a bold pen-and-ink-like sketch and trusted to the xylographer, who knew his style well and of old, to produce an engraving, tant bien que mal, but as bold and as dashing as the original. The secession, for reasons theological, from "Punch" of Mr. Richard Doyle, an event which took place some fifteen years since, (how quickly time passes, to be sure!) was very bitterly regretted by his literary and artistic comrades; and the young man who calmly gave up something like a thousand pounds a year for conscience' sake lost nothing, but gained rather in the respect and admiration of society. But the wood-engravers must have held high carousal over the defection of Mr. Doyle. To cut one of his drawings was a crucial experiment. His hand was not sure in its touch; he always drew six lines instead of one; and in the portrait of a lady from his pencil, the agonized engraver had to hunt through a Cretan labyrinth of faces before he found the particular countenance which Mr. Doyle wished to be engraved.
I have strayed away, perhaps unpardonably, from George Cruikshank. To those whose only ludicrous prophet is "Punch" he may be comparatively little known. But in the great world of pictorial art, both in England and on the Continent, he worthily holds an illustrious place. His name is a household word with his countrymen; and whenever a young hopeful displays ever so crude an aptitude for caricaturing his schoolmaster, or giving with slate and pencil the facetious side of his grandmother's cap and spectacles, he is voted by the unanimous suffrage of fireside critics to be a "regular Cruikshank." In this connection I have heard him sometimes called "Crookshanks," which is taking, I apprehend, even a grosser liberty with his name than in the case of the additional c,—"Crookshanks" having seemingly a reference, and not a complimentary one, to George's legs.
This admirable artist and good man was the son of old Isaac Cruikshank, in his day a famous engraver of lottery-tickets, securities in which the British public are now no longer by law permitted to invest, but which, fifty years since, made as constant a demand on the engraver's art as, in our time and in America, is made by the thousand and one joint-stock banks whose pictorial promises-to-pay fill, or should properly fill, our pocket-books. The abilities of Isaac were not entirely devoted to the lottery; and I have at home, from his hand, a very rare and curious etching of the execution of Louis XVI., with an explanatory diagram beneath of the working of the guillotine. George Cruikshank's earliest pencil-drawings are dated, as I have remarked, before the present century drew breath; but he must have begun to gain reputation as a caricaturist upon copper towards the end of the career of Napoleon I.,—the "Boney" to whom he has adhered with such constant, albeit jocular, animosity. He was the natural successor of James Gillray, the renowned delineator of "Farmer George and Little Nap," and "Pitt and Boney at Dinner," and hundreds of political cartoons, eagerly bought in their day, but now to be found only in old print-shops. Gillray was a man of vast, but misapplied talents. Although he etched caricatures for a livelihood, his drawing was splendid,—wellnigh Michel-Angelesque,—but always careless and outré. He was continually betting crown-bowls of punch that he would design, etch, and bite in so many plates within a given time, and, with the assistance of a private bowl, he almost always won his bets; but the punch was too much for him in the long run. He went mad and died miserably. George Cruikshank was never his pupil; nor did he ever attain the freedom and mastery of outline which the crazy old reprobate, who made the fortune of Mr. Humphries, the St. James's Street print-seller, undeniably possessed; but his handling was grounded upon Gillray's style; and from early and attentive study of his works he must have acquired that boldness of treatment, that rotundity of light and shade, and that general "fatness," or morbidezza, of touch, which make the works of Gillray and Cruikshank stand out from the coarse scrawls of Rowlandson, and the bald and meagre scratches of Sir Charles Bunbury. Unless I am much mistaken, one of the first works that brought George into notice was an etching published in 1815, having reference to the exile of the detested Corsican to St. Helena. But it was in 1821 that he first made a decided mark. For William Hone—a man who was in perpetual opposition to the powers that were—he drew on wood a remarkable series of illustrations to the scurrilous, but perhaps not undeserved, satires against King George IV., called, "The Political House that Jack Built," "The Green Bag," "A Slap at Slop," and the like,—all of them having direct and most caustic reference to the scandalous prosecution instituted against a woman of whom it is difficult to say whether she was bad or mad or both, but who was assuredly most miserable,—the unhappy Caroline of Brunswick. George Cruikshank's sketch of the outraged husband, the finest and stoutest gentleman in Europe, being lowered by means of a crane into a pair of white kid pantaloons suspended between the posts of his bed, was inimitably droll, and clearly disloyal. But disloyalty was fashionable in the year '21.
For twenty years afterwards the history of the artist's career is but the history of his works, of his innumerable illustrations to books, and the sketchbooks, comic panoramas, and humorous cartoons he published on his own account. Besides, I am not writing a life of George Cruikshank, and all this time I have been keeping him on the threshold of the city of Mexico. Let it suffice to say, briefly, that in 1841 came a stand-point in his life, through the establishment of a monthly magazine entitled "George Cruikshank's Omnibus." Of this he was the sole illustrator. The literary editor was Laman Blanchard; and in the "Omnibus," William Makepeace Thackeray, then a gaunt young man, not much over thirty, and quite unknown to fame,—although he had published "Yellowplush" in "Fraser,"—wrote his quaint and touching ballad of "The King of Brentford's Testament." The "Omnibus" did not run long, nor was its running very prosperous. George Cruikshank seemed for a while wearied with the calling of a caricaturist; and the large etchings on steel, with which between '40 and '45 he illustrated Ainsworth's gory romances, indicated a power of grouping, a knowledge of composition, a familiarity with mediæval costume, and a command over chiaroscuro, which astonished and delighted those who had been accustomed to regard him only as a funny fellow,—one of infinite whim, to be sure, but still a jester of jests, and nothing more. Unfortunately, or fortunately, as the case might be,—for the rumor ran that George intended to abandon caricaturing altogether, and to set up in earnest as an historical painter,—there came from beyond the sea, to assist in illustrating "Windsor Castle," a Frenchman named Tony Johannot. Who but he, in fact, was the famous master of the grotesque who illustrated "Don Quixote" and the "Diable Boiteux" of Le Sage? To his dismay, George Cruikshank found a competitor as eccentric as himself, as skilful a manipulator rem acu, the etching-point, and who drew incomparably better than he, George Cruikshank, did. He gave up the mediæval in disgust; but he must have hugged himself with the thought that he had already illustrated Charles Dickens's "Oliver Twist," and that the Frenchman, powerful as he was, could never hope to come near him in that terrific etching of "Fagin in the Condemned Cell."
Again nearly twenty years have passed, and George Cruikshank still waves his Ithuriel's spear of well-ground steel, and still dabbles in aquafortis. An old, old man, he is still strong and hale. If you ask him a reason for his thus rivalling Fontenelle in his patriarchal greenness, for his being able at threescore and ten to paint pictures, (witness that colossal oil-painting of the "Triumph of Bacchus,") to make speeches, and to march at the head of his company as a captain of volunteers, he will give you at once the why and because. He is the most zealous, the most conscientious, and the most invulnerable of total abstainers. There were days when he took tobacco: witness that portrait of himself, smoking a very long meerschaum pipe in "Love's Triumph," etched about 1845. There were times when he heard the chimes at midnight, and partook of that "richt gude willie waucht" which tipsy Scotchmen, when they have formed in a ring, standing upon chairs, each with one foot on the table, hiccoughingly declare that we are bound to take for the sake of "auld lang syne." But George Cruikshank has done with willie wauchts as with bird's-eye and Killikinick. For many years he has neither drunk nor smoked. He is more than a confessor, he is an apostle of temperance. His strange, wild, grand performances, "The Bottle" and "The Drunkard's Children,"—the first quite Hogarthian in its force and pungency,—fell like thunderbolts among the gin-shops. I am afraid that George Cruikshank would not be a very welcome guest at Felix Booth's distillery, or at Barclay and Perkins's brewery. For, it must be granted, the sage is a little intolerant. "No peace with the Fiery Moloch!" "Écrasons l'infâme!" These are his mottoes. He would deprive the poor man of the scantiest drop of beer. You begin with a sip of "the right stuff," he teaches us in "The Bottle," and you end by swigging a gallon of vitriol, jumping on your wife, and dying in Bedlam of delirium tremens. I have not heard his opinions concerning cider, or root-beer, or effervescing sarsaparilla, or ginger-pop; but I imagine that each and every one of those reputed harmless beverages would enter into his Index Expurgatorius. "Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop [of alcohol] to drink." 'Tis thus he would quote Coleridge. He is as furious against tobacco as ever was King James in his "Counterblast." He is of the mind of the old divine, that "he who plays with the Devil's rattles will soon learn to draw his sword." In his pious rage against intemperance, and with a view to the instruction of the rising generation, he has even published teetotal versions of "Cinderella" and "Jack the Giant-Killer,"—a proceeding which Charles Dickens indignantly reprobated in an article in "Household Words," called "Frauds upon the Fairies." Nearly the last time I met George Cruikshank in London was at a dinner given in honor of Washington's birthday. He had just been gazetted captain of his rifle company, and was good enough to ask me if I knew any genteel young men, of strictly temperance principles, who would like commissions in his corps. I replied, that, so far as principles were concerned, I could recommend him five hundred postulants; but that, as regarded practice, most of the young men of my acquaintance, who had manifested an ambition for a military career, drank hard.
The which, oddly enough, leads me at last to Mexico.—We had had, on the whole, rather a hard morning of it. The Don, who was my host in the siempre leal y insigne ciudad de Méjico,—and a most munificent and hospitable Don he was,—took me out one day in the month of March last to visit a hacienda or farm which he possessed, called, if I remember aright, La Escalera. I repeat, we had a hard morning of it. We rose at six,—and in mountainous Mexico the ground at early morn, even during summer, is often covered with a frosty rime. I looked out of the window, and when I saw the leaves of the trees glistening with something which was not dew, and Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl mantled with eternal snows in the distance, I shivered. A cup of chocolate, a tortilla or thin griddle-cake of Indian meal, and a paper cigar, just to break your fast, and then to horse. To horse! Do you know what it is, being a poor horseman, to bestride a full-blood, full-bred white Arab, worth ever so many hundred pesos de oro, and, with his flowing mane and tail, and small, womanly, vixenish head, beautiful to look upon, but which in temper, like many other beauteous creatures I have known, is an incarnate fiend? The Arab they gave me had been the property of a French general. I vehemently suspect that he had been dismissed from the Imperial army for biting a chef d'escadron through one of his jackboots, or kicking in three of the ribs of a maréchal des logis. That was hard enough, to begin with. Then the streets of Mexico are execrably paved, and the roads leading out of the city are full of what in Ireland are termed "curiosities," to wit, holes; and my Arab had a habit, whenever he met an equine brother, and especially an equine sister, on the way, of screaming like a possessed Pythoness, and then of essaying to stand on his hind legs. However, with a Mexican saddle,—out of which you can scarcely fall, even though you had a mind to it,—and Mexican stirrups, and a pair of spurs nearly as big as Catharine-wheels, the Arab and I managed to reach the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, five miles out, and thence, over tolerably good roads, another five miles, to the Escalera. I wish they would make Mexican saddles of something else besides wood very thinly covered with leather. How devoutly did I long for the well-stuffed pig-skin of Hyde Park! We had an hour or two more hard work riding about the fields, when we reached the farm, watching the process of extracting pulque from the maguey or cactus,—and a very nasty process it is,—inspecting the granaries belonging to the hacienda, and dodging between the rows of Indian corn, which grows here to so prodigious a height as to rival the famous grain which is said to grow somewhere down South, and to attain such an altitude that a Comanche perched upon the head of a giraffe is invisible between the rows. About noon we had breakfast, and that was the hardest work of all. Item, we had mutton-chops, beefsteaks, veal cutlets, omelets, rice, hominy, fried tomatoes, and an infinity of Mexican hashes and stews seasoned with chiles or red-pepper pods. Item, we had a huge pavo, a turkey,—a wild turkey; and then, for the first time, did I understand that the bird we Englishmen consume only at Christmas, and then declare to be tough and flavorless, is to be eaten to perfection only in the central regions of the American continent. The flesh of this pavo was like softened ivory, and his fat like unto clotted cream. There were some pretty little tiny kickshaws in the way of pine-apples, musk-melons, bananas, papaws, and custard-apples, and many other tropical fruits whose names I have forgotten. I think, too, that we had some stewed iguana or lizard; but I remember, that, after inflicting exemplary punishment on a bowl of sour cream, we wound up by an attack on an albacor, a young kid roasted whole, or rather baked in a lump of clay with wood-ashes heaped over him, and brought to table on a tea-tray! Shade of Gargantua, how we ate! I blessed that fiery Arab for giving me such an appetite. There was a good deal of smoking going on at odd times during breakfast; but nobody ventured beyond a cigarro of paper and fine-cut before we attacked the albacor. When coffee was served, each man lighted a puro, one of the biggest of Cabaña's Regalias; and serious and solemn puffing then set in. It was a memorable breakfast. The Administrador, or steward of the estate, had evidently done his best to entertain his patron the Don with becoming magnificence, nor were potables as dainty as the edibles wanting to furnish forth the feast. There was pulque for those who chose to drink it. I never could stomach that fermented milk of human unkindness, which combines the odor of a dairy that has been turned into a grogshop with the flavor of rotten eggs. There was wine of Burgundy and wine of Bordeaux; there was Champagne: these three from the Don's cellar in Mexico, and the last cooled, not with vulgar ice, but with snow from the summit of Popocatepetl,—snow that had been there from the days of Montezuma and Guatimozin; while as chasse and pousse to the exquisitely flavored Mexican coffee, grown, ground, and roasted on the hacienda, we had some very ripe old French Cognac, (1804, I think, was the brand,) and some Peruvian pisco, a strong white cordial, somewhat resembling kirsch-wasser, and exceeding toothsome. We talked and laughed till we grew sleepy, (the edibles and potables had of course nothing to do with our somnolence,) and then, the farm-house of the hacienda having seemingly as many rooms as the Vatican, each man hied him to a cool chamber, where he found a trundle-bed, or a hammock, or a sofa, and gravely laid himself out for an hour's siesta. Then the Administrador woke us all up, and gleefully presented us with an enormous bowl of sangaree, made of the remains of the Bordeaux and the brandy and the pisco, and plenty of ice,—ice this time,—and sugar, and limes, and slices of pineapple, Madam,—the which he had concocted during our slumber. We drained this,—one gets so thirsty after breakfast in Mexico,—and then to horse again for a twelve miles' ride back to the city. I omitted to mention two or three little circumstances which gave a zest and piquancy to the entertainment. When we arrived at the hacienda, although servitors were in plenty, each cavalier unsaddled and fed his own steed; and when we addressed ourselves to our siesta, every one who didn't find a double-barrelled gun at the head of his bed took care to place a loaded revolver under his pillow. For accidents will happen in the best-regulated families; and in Mexico you can never tell at what precise moment Cacus may be upon you.
Riding back to the siempre leal y insigne ciudad at about three o'clock in the afternoon, when the sun was at its hottest, was no joke. Baking is not precisely the word, nor boiling, nay, nor frying; something which is a compound of all these might express the sensation I, for one, felt. Fortunately, the Don had insisted on my assuming the orthodox Mexican riding-costume: cool linen drawers, cut Turkish fashion; over these, and with just sufficient buttons in their respective holes to swear by, the leathern chapareros or overalls; morocco slippers, to which were strapped the Catharine-wheel spurs; no vest; no neckerchief; a round jacket, with quarter doubloons for buttons; and a low-crowned felt hat, with an enormous brim, a brim which might have made a Quaker envious, and have stricken mortification to the soul of a Chinese mandarin. This brim kept the sun out of your eyes; and then, by way of hatband, there was a narrow, but thick turban or "pudding," which prevented the rays of Sol from piercing through your skull, and boiling your brains into batter. The fact of the whole of this costume, and the accoutrements of your horse to boot, being embroidered with silver and embellished with golden bosses, thus affording a thousand tangents for Phœbus to fly off from, rather detracted from the coolness of your array; but one must not expect perfection here below. In a stove-pipe hat, a shooting-coat, and riding-cords, I should have suffered much more from the heat. As it was, I confess, that, when I reached home, in the Calle San Francisco, Mexico, I was exceedingly thankful. I am not used to riding twenty-four miles in one day. I think I had a warm bath in the interval between doffing the chapareros and donning the pantaloons of every-day life. I think I went to sleep on a sofa for about an hour, and, waking up, called for a cocktail as a restorative. Yes, Madam, there are cocktails in Mexico, and our Don's body-servant made them most scientifically. I think also that I declined, with thanks, the Don's customary invitation to a drive before dinner in the Paseo. Nor barouche, nor mail-phaëton, nay, nor soft-cushioned brougham delighted me. I felt very lazy and thoroughly knocked up.