THE MARQUIS DE GUISCARD ATTEMPTING TO ASSASSINATE HARLEY. The man on the table drawing his sword is the Duke of Newcastle ("Saint James's"). From "Ainsworth's Magazine," 1844.
In "Ainsworth's Magazine" for January 1846 the last fruit of Cruikshank's connection with Ainsworth appeared, after a year's sterility, as a careful etching illustrating that novelist's "Sir Lionel Flamstead, a Sketch": in the preceding year Cruikshank produced for W. H. Maxwell the series of historic etchings which, in the opinion of Mr Frederic G. Stephens, "marks the highest point of Cruikshank's invention." These etchings illustrate a history of the insurrections in Ireland in 1798 and 1803. In the selection of Cruikshank, Maxwell or his publishers may have remembered the skill with which he had illustrated I. Whitty's "Tales of Irish Life" (1824), though it is one thing to render the frantic humour of a fight arising from O'Finn calling Redmond a rascal, or the muddled emotions of a wake, and quite another to exhibit the conflict between two nightmares of patriotism. Howbeit Cruikshank realised the horror and poetry of war. His twenty-one Maxwellian etchings are instructively comparable with Callot's precious series "Les Misères et les Mal-heurs de la Guerre" (1633). Callot is at once more horrible and self-restrained. One peers into his work; one listens to Cruikshank's. The artist of the seventeenth century drew with minute delicacy the forms and gestures of men. He studied them as a naturalist, indifferent to the individuality of the unit after fixing the individuality of the class to which it belongs. Callot's men are users of the wheel and the estrapade; they roast the husband while they ravish the wife. They are not grotesques: they are men. Maurice Leloir drew men of their age and country no more elegantly for the bravest novel of Dumas. Cruikshank, on the other hand, drew well and hideously not only Irish men, but Irish individuals. His rebel, obscenely jocose, impaling a child, might, though a detail in a crowded etching, have been drawn for Scotland Yard; so too might a woman squatting and smoking while a wretch writhes on four pikes which take his weight and give it him back in torture. England is to glow, Ireland is to blush as she looks at Cruikshank's people of '98. As clear on the memory as his Irish ruffianism is his portrait of the little drummer dying with his leg through his drum to protect its voice from dishonour. One has heard of Lieutenant Hepenstall—him who was called "The Walking Gallows"—as well as of the drummer of Gorey, but Cruikshank was satisfied with partizanship, and Ireland forgets him.
Our liberal interpretation of history allows us now to consider a few of the works of Cruikshank which preserve for us scenes and types of his age with or without the accompaniment of a fictitious text.
For his delineations of the sailor of Nelson's day we owe much to a capital but neglected novelist M. H. Barker, author of "Greenwich Hospital" (1826), "Topsail-Sheet Blocks" (1838), "The Old Sailor's Jolly Boat" (1844), etc. Before the appearance of the earliest of these books Cruikshank had etched Lieut. John Sheringham's designs entitled "The Sailor's Progress" (1818), and those by Capt. Marryat entitled "The Progress of a Midshipman" (1820). The illustrations to the quarto called "Greenwich Hospital," are deservedly the most famous of Cruikshank's sea-pictures. With lavish detail they exhibit Jack tearing along by coach across pigs and fowls at finable knots per hour; carousing in the Long Room with billowy sirens under a chandelier of candles; crossing the line in a frenzy of ceremonious facetiousness; yelling in an inn-parlour—though armless or "half a tree"—his delight in victory and Nelson; ... and tied up for a whipping like a naughty boy. Barker was so pleased with one of the illustrations for "Greenwich Hospital" that he wrote on a proof (No. 1003-4 in the Cruikshank collection at South Kensington), "Dear Friend, if you never do another design, the leg of that table will immortalise you. It is a bonâ fide Peg." There is a mood in which Clio prefers that crippled table-leg to Cruikshank's idea of Solomon Eagle "denouncing of Judgment" upon London.
SOLOMON EAGLE. From the drawing by G. Cruikshank, as engraved by Davenport for "A Journal of the Plague Year," 1833.
We have now sounded the word which invites inquiry as to the nature of Cruikshank's artistic service to London. London is not the Tower or St James's Palace. Cruikshank, however, is not injured by this scorching truism. If we go back to 1827 and 1829 we encounter in "The Gentleman's Pocket Magazine" twenty-four London Characters, of which fifteen are from the hand of George Cruikshank, who doubtless remembered Rowlandson's "Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders" (1820). George is responsible for very neat portraits of a beadle, waterman, dustman, watchman ..., and the Cruikshankian enthusiast cries "Eureka!" for he spies Mr Bumble among them. With "Sunday in London" (1833) came the first example of Cruikshank's comic treatment of London, which a book-collector, as distinct from a print-collector, can prize. The woodcuts in this volume reveal a state of society in which people had less sense of proportion than they have now, and were excessively vain or excessively humble, according to the state of their paunch and the view of them held by the policeman or the beadle. The power of the beadle had not yet been broken by a metrical inquiry concerning the origin of his hat. Frenchmen were still "mounseers," and soldiers marched to Divine Service through St James's Park to the tune of "Drops of Brandy." The flavour of the obsolete is rich in "Sunday in London"; we who look at it feel strangely toned-down.