I saw it in 1902; visited it much as one visits an incarcerated friend, following a learned official with jingling keys to a dungeon under the show-rooms of the National Gallery. It was alone, was convict 495, alone and dingy. Many phrases have been found for this picture. John Stewart said that it contains "all the elemental types of pictorial grouping, generalised on the two axioms of balance and variety." Another critic said that "it is not even a picture, but a multitude of pictures and bits of pictures crowded together in one huge mass of confusion and puzzle." Cruikshank himself said, speaking August 28, 1862, "I have not the vanity to call it a picture.... I painted it with a view that a lecturer might use it as so many diagrams."

However he felt, Cruikshank spoke correctly. Painted in low relief, the oil-painting presents his intention less satisfactorily than his etching of the same subject. Whatever its demerit, the work is extremely Cruikshankian. Robert and George Cruikshank, in the "Corinthian Capital" of "Life in London," patched up a similarly artificial fabric. George, in a work that should not be mentioned in the same breath—The Triumph of Cupid (1845)—evokes innumerable amatory incidents by means of the tobacco which he renounced so contumeliously. We have in The Worship of Bacchus, the result of a method equally naïf and ingenious. The root idea is materialised in conjunction with a myriad of associative ideas, and the picture is worse than a confusion; it is a ghastly and ostentatious pattern at which one can neither laugh nor cry. It is the work of a big accomplished child, whose ambition to be grown up has destroyed his charm.

At the summit of the picture Bacchus and Silenus wave wine-glasses while respectively standing and sitting on hogsheads. In the middle of the design is a stone ornamented with death's-heads, on which a drunkard waves a glass and bottle in front of the god and demi-god. The stone has an inscription tributary to the drunkard's victims. On the left side of the throne of Bacchus are a distillery, reformatory, etc.; on the right is a House of Correction, Magdalen Hospital, etc. In short, the picture is a pictorial chrestomathy of drink. That it has converted people, that it has even won the tribute of a man's tears, is not surprising, for it is, or was, full of truthful suggestion seizable by the mind's eye. But it is not beautiful. Thackeray might call it "most wonderful and labyrinthine"; it is ugly and ill painted, for Cruikshank was no Hogarth with the brush.

So it lay, and perhaps yet lies in its dungeon, and overhead Silenus still triumphs divinely drunk on Rubens's canvas; and Bacchus, ardent for Ariadne, leaps from his chariot in that masterpiece of Titian, which Sir Edward Poynter believes is "possibly the finest picture in the world." Poussin's Bacchanalian festivities are still for the mirth of a world whence Bacchus has fled; but the god enthroned on hogsheads is not mistaken for Bacchus now: Bacchus was stronger than Cruikshank. The whole deathless pagan world of beauty and laughter is by him made rosier and more silvery. Cruikshank never drew him; the god he drew was Bung in masquerade.

I was at Sotheby's on May 22, 1903, when the Royal Aquarium copy of the etching of The Worship of Bacchus was sold. It evoked a sneer of "wall paper"; and if etchings could think, it would have envied the seclusion in which I found its brother in oils.

But at least it was not given to the nation. The fact that the National Gallery should possess Cruikshank's colossal failure instead of his Fairy Ring, instead of any etching from "Grimm" or "Points of Humour," is an accusation against common sense and a triumph of irony.

Let it be remembered, however, that Cruikshank's exposure of ebriety from 1829 to 1875, the date which John Pearce in "House and Home" assigns to his last temperance piece, deserved at times the notice of fame. Matthew Arnold, denying the power of "breathless glades, cheer'd by shy Dian's horn" to calm the spectator of The Bottle, showed more than his ignorance of Diana and her peace. He showed that Cruikshank the preacher was a magician too.

IV

The best part of Cruikshank's service to Fact has yet to be considered. We have seen how he journalised and exhorted; we have still to see the talent he poured into journalism and exhortation refined by his historical sense and expressing itself in shapes of treasurable beauty.