V
We have now to consider Cruikshank as a supernaturalist. Perhaps there is no rôle in which he is more sincerely esteemed. His simple egoism and self-conceit protected him from an apprehension of the nothingness of matter in the eye of a being who is uncontrolled by the world-idea. He could not conceive that a mind can impose the idea of a form upon an inferior mind, or a mind in sympathy with it: hence his egregious "discovery concerning ghosts." His world of supernature was a playground of fancy where powers are denoted by the same symbols which inform us that this animal can run, and that animal can fly, and the other animal can think. It is a world of which the major part is peopled with forms so lively, gracious and fanciful that Mr Frederick Wedmore's violent preference of Keene to Cruikshank seems, in view of it, a kind of aggressive rationalism. This world, however, contains the Devil, and on this colliery monster we will bestow a few glances.
LEGEND OF ST MEDARD. The Saint has slit the bag in which the fiend is carrying children. From "The Ingoldsby Legends," 1842.
Cruikshank's best idea of the Devil is comedy of tail. In one of the "Twelve Sketches illustrative of Sir Walter Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830) he shows the archfiend seated on the back of a smiling elf who poses as a quadruped to provide a stool. The fiend is "dighting" an arrow by the light of the flaming hair of an elf who wears an extinguisher on his tail, and a cat enthusiastically plays with the forked appendage of the illustrious artisan. The dignity of labour is here inimitably manifest. Lovably ludicrous, too, is the Devil whom Cruikshank presents in The De'il cam fiddling thro' the Town ("Illustrations of Popular Works," 1830). "Auld Mahoun's" forked tail has caught the exciseman by the cravat. In "Scraps and Sketches" (1832). Cruikshank has another Devil who plays on a gridiron as if it were a guitar, to soothe a man who has been lassoed by his tail. "And if my tail should make you sad I'll strike my light guitar." In "A Discovery concerning Ghosts" (1863) Cruikshank depicts the Devil as lifting a table with his tail and one hoof. One of the Devils offered to my readers—he whom St Medard thwarted—is an example of good work in a bad setting; the machine-ruled sky and "scandalously slurred distance" must be viewed as symptoms of Cruikshank's dislike for Bentley, the publisher of "The Ingoldsby Legends." The cuts from "The True Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil" (1848) replace the perverted Pan—Pan as perverted for the abolition of his prestige—with a plaintive ruffian whose horns and hoofs disgrace a very obvious humanity.
Exit Devil: enter Satan. About 1827 Cruikshank drew him on wood, in the act of calling on his followers as related by Milton in "Paradise Lost," Book I., Il. 314-332. Cruikshank described the drawing referred to, which was engraved by an unconfident hand, as "the best drawing that I ever did in my life." A solitary print of the engraving made of it sold at Sotheby's for £3, 6s. On a towering rock, Satan calls up an army which looks like living ribbon wound up out of the bottomless pit to the ceiling of the air. His personality is felt by the effect of his command, not by his individual appearance. Michelangelo might have favourably considered this book-illustration as a bare sketch of a muster of the damned; for as one looks at it he is tempted to give it to half a dozen painters and "put it in hand."
