SHOEING THE DEVIL. From Edward G. Flight's "The True Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil," 1848.
THE DEVIL SIGNING. From Edward G Flight's "The True Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil," 1848.
The naïve evangelicism of "The Pilgrim's Progress" was productive of more of Cruikshank's serious monsters. 1827 is the date of seven woodcuts by him for this work (Reid 3555-61) which do not impress Mr Spielmann; they are, however, very neatly executed, and the drawing of Christian arriving at the Gate is quite unwarrantably pleasant in its suggestion of conflict and weariness ending in the bosom of hospitality. In 1838 Cruikshank contributed Vanity Fair—an elaborate etching—to a "Pilgrim's Progress" containing plates by H. Melville. Vanity Fair is a skilful catalogue marred by the misnaming of Britain Row. He produced another Vanity Fair, circa 1854, a vehement and uninteresting design which, with companion drawings by him of the same date, appears in Mr Henry Frowde's edition of "The Pilgrim's Progress" (1903). These drawings (only recently engraved) annoyed Mr G. S. Layard, and me they amuse and touch. They show that Cruikshank could draw the face of a man whose métier is goodness, ... and that Apollyon—a veritable creature of tinker-craft in Bunyan's text—was utterly beyond Cruikshank's power to shape according to the crooked splendour of his name. One must not forget that a pious convention of absurdity is a trap for the critic and the humorist alike. I feel that Cruikshank almost loved Bunyan. Witness the large coloured print inscribed in his last decade, "Geo. Cruikshank 1871," where Christian—a Galahad of knightliness—passes through the snake-afflicted valley of the Shadow of Death.
PETER SCHLEMIHL WATCHING THE CLOCK From "Peter Schlemihl," 1823. Copies of the book dated 1824 are also accepted as of the first edition.
Exit the Pilgrim, and re-enter the Devil. Cruikshank made remarkable successes in two series of illustrations wherein this magnate assumes the form of a man of our world. The books in which they appear are "Peter Schlemihl" by Adelbert von Chamisso (1823) and "The Gentleman in Black" by J. Y. Akerman (1831). To Chamisso the Devil is "a silent, meagre, pale, tall elderly man" wearing an "old-fashioned grey taffetan coat" with a "close-fitting breast-pocket" to it, and he is willing to buy Peter's shadow. Meagre and close-fitting is Cruikshank's idea of him; he is only substantial enough to give posture and movement to his clothes. That is a beautiful etching where he is folding Peter's shadow as a tailor folds a suit and Peter is unaware of the terrible oddity of a foot on the ground having for shadow a foot in the air—a foot no longer subordinate to Peter who will tread the earth in despair when he is a shadowless man; and that is a marrow-thrilling etching where Peter's tempter stands casting two shadows and flourishing a document promising the delivery of Peter's soul to the bearer after its separation from Peter's body. There is a haunting cold brightness about the Schlemihl etchings. If you see them without a sensation of their difference from the work of any body except him who made them, your acquaintance includes a prodigy, a Cruikshank plus x. To J. Y. Akerman the Devil was "a stout, short, middle-aged gentleman of a somewhat saturnine complexion" who "was clad in black" and "had a loose Geneva cloak ... of the same colour." Like Schlemihl's customer he pays with a bottomless purse and in the cuts, engraved by J. Thompson and C. Landells, we see him a grave humorous and sinister person, who after his urbanity has been shaken by the cleverness of the law, is exhibited without warrant of narrative, as Old Horny on a gibbet. I presume the above-mentioned J Thompson, by the way, to be the John Thompson whom Cruikshank describes at the foot of a letter from this engraver dated "Feb. 7, [18]40," as "the Great, the wonderful Artistic Engraver on wood—and who used to engrave my drawings as no other man ever did."
After the Devil comes Punch, who in the puppet play destroys him. Punch is only by irony a nursery character. He represents the comic genius of murder. A Hooligan may feel like a Pharisee after looking at him. His coarse materialism would affront a pierreuse. Cruikshank drew Punch as early as 1814 in a plate, satirising a fête given by the Duke of Portland on the occasion of the baptism of an infant marquis. The plate is entitled "Belvoir Frolic's" [sic] and appears in No. 4 of "The Meteor." A very long-nosed Punch extols the beverage bearing his name, and his infant son falls into a punch-bowl while being baptised by a drunkard. It was not, however, till 1828 that a reasonable joker could call Cruikshank's great hit a punch. That date is on the title-page of "Punch and Judy" edited by J. Payne Collier, for whose publisher (S. Prowett) Cruikshank drew the scenes of the immortal puppet-play as produced by Piccini, who defied any other puppet-showman in England to perform his feat of making the figure with the immoderate neck remove its hat with one hand. Thanks to Piccini, then, Cruikshank's Punch is the real Punch—a goggling miscreant, whose hump is a rigid and misplaced tail and whose military hat, above a crustacean's face, completes a rather melancholy effect of mania. The conductor of "George Cruikshank's Omnibus" confessed to feeling "that it was easy to represent" Punch's "eyes, his nose, his mouth, but that the one essential was after all wanting—the squeak." Cruikshank was barely just to his pencil. As one looks at his Punch one feels that such a being is either a squeaker or a mute. As for the Devil, whose rôle is so humiliating in the Punch tromedy (as a neologist might call it), he is of an aspect pitiably mean—like a corpse attired in river mud.