The historical sense in art may be liberally defined as an æsthetic impulse to fix the vanishing and recover the vanished fact. It may be absent at the birth of a cartoon filled with political portraits and it may have urged the reproduction of a quiet landscape with nothing more human in it than a few trees or a line of surf. It operates without pressure of topicality and it is stronger than the tyranny of humour.
The reader, searching for the earliest examples of Cruikshank's historical imagination to be found in the books which he illustrated, would first of all alight on "The Annals of Gallantry," by Dr A. Moore (1814-15), and "An Historical Account of the Campaign in the Netherlands in 1815," by William Mudford (1817). Suspecting the grotesque, he would nevertheless also examine the thirty plates to the Hudibrastic "Life of Napoleon" (1815) by Dr Syntax.
As to the "Annals," one may unreluctantly condemn the whole series of plates after a glance at the feeble scratches which disfigure the amours of Lady Grosvenor and the Duke of Cumberland, and the elopement of Lady W—— with Lord Paget. In Mudford's ungenerous history, Cruikshank's frontispiece, engraved by Rouse (as are his other contributions), has the stiff integrity of portraiture to be expected from a repressed caricaturist; Napoleon in flight on his white horse in another plate does not even support the comparison of his horsemanship to a sack of flour's; the ribbon-like plate of Waterloo, full of microscopic figures, has the chastened spirit natural to a work done "under the inspection of officers who were present at that memorable conflict."
The illustrations to Dr Syntax's Hudibrastic poem on Napoleon have some originality to recommend them as a starting-point for the student of Cruikshank as a delineator of historical subjects. They are etchings, broad as the typed surface of an octavo page is long, and include the Red Man derided on page 21. But the artist already shows that he has fancy as well as satire at his command. Witness the illusion created by the sleeping Napoleon lifting the coat on his bed in humping the counterpane with perpendicular toes, an effect which was remembered in Cruikshank's Ideality (Phrenological Illustrations, 1826). There is humour, too, in the etching which represents one of Napoleon's grenadiers mounted on a stool in order to look as terrible as his companions. Though a rancorous prejudice makes Napoleon stand on a cross in one plate and his apothecary smile at poisoning the sick at Jaffa in another, there is sympathy in a third which depicts him nursing the King of Rome, and the eccentricities of Cruikshank's journalistic style are happily absent.
We may now pause at the four famous volumes of "The Humourist" (1819-20). They contain, inter alia, a portrait of Alfieri—a fine figure of silent disdain—in the act of sweeping to the floor the tea service of a badly drawn Princess, who was tactless enough to wish he had broken the whole set instead of one cup. The table leg is a satyr's surmounted by the Mephistophelian head considered appropriate to the companions of Pan; above the main design are the implements of a writer; below it are two porcelain mandarins yoked to a three-headed and triply derisive bust. Another historical subject in "The Humourist" is Daniel Lambert, to whom a bear once doffed his hat. Ursine politeness and the petrified majesty of fat Lambert fill the foreground of the etching; behind is a rout of people frightfully interested in another bear. In the former of these etchings the hint is better than the performance; the latter hints nothing and performs a little admirably.
1823-4 is a period to which we owe some historical etchings of consummate skill. They illustrated "Points of Humour," a work in two parts which was expressly designed to afford scope for Cruikshank's power of rendering ludicrous situations. The artist was on his mettle, and his twenty etchings for this collection of anecdotes are among the immortal children of Momus. Among his simpler designs is the scene in the apartment of Frederick the Great when his heir presumptive demanded if the monarch would return his shuttlecock. The required studies of childish impudence and royal amusement are perfect. More elaborate, but equally successful, is the drawing of the voracious boor, the ill-natured general whom he offered to eat, and the King of Sweden who enjoyed the spectacle of their emotions. The boor with the hog on a plate under his arm, his terrible teeth a-glitter for hog and general, is more alarming than the ogre in Cruikshank's Hop-o'-my-Thumb; he tacitly affirms his creator's power to confer delicious terrors on the nursery. Flying Konigsmark's fear of pointing hand and barrack-like paunch mingles exquisitely with the hatred of his backward glance, and Charles Gustavus smiles with unpardonable aplomb. The etching is a comic masterpiece. After this there is no advance in Cruikshank's comic treatment of history, for his quite simple rendering, more than ten years later, "Miscellany" (1838), of a freak of absent-mindedness on the part of Sir Isaac Newton in "Bentley's," is of merely sufficient merit.
TURPIN'S FLIGHT THROUGH EDMONTON. From "Rookwood," 1836.
The Ainsworth-Cruikshank connection began, artistically, with the etchings which illustrate the fourth edition of "Rookwood" (1836). If for Turpin we read Nevison, the novel may pass as quasi-historical. The etching here reproduced is in what may be called Cruikshank's "Humourist" style. It has vivacity and brightness. The reader who figured himself passing into romance through the pretty portico of trees depicted on Ainsworth's title-page, will feel, as he looks at this representation of comic prodigy, that he has arrived.