HERNE THE HUNTER APPEARING TO HENRY VIII. ("Windsor Castle"). From "Ainsworth's Magazine," vol. iii., 1843.
It is now time to say a few words about the Cruikshankian ghost. About the year 1860, Cruikshank offered £100 to anyone who should show him a ghost "said to have been seen frequently in the neighbourhood of some Roman Catholic institution near Leicester." No one claimed the money, and Cruikshank remained a religious materialist, charmingly boyish in his amusement over the ghosts of tears and dirt. His natural idea of a ghost was comic in the way of a wise old world that taxes pain and wrath for humour. His designs for Part II. of "Points of Humour" (1824) include a vision of spirits discharged from their bodies by the ministrations of a pompous doctor, who holds his stick against his mouth because Cruikshank condemned the use of "the crutch" as a toothpick. The ugliness of these spirits is not excelled by Cruikshank's Giles Scroggins, in vol. i. of "The Universal Songster" (1825),—a spook whose waving hands like bewitched gloves, exultant toes and nightcap tipsy as a blown flame, are duly noted by Molly Brown. Folklore had a refining influence on Cruikshank when, for Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft," he etched, in 1830, Mrs Leckie, a white-aproned ghost who, by a miracle of Scotchness, is perfectly decorous as she kicks with a high heeled shoe the doctor of physic who "shewed some desire to be rid of her society." Cruikshank's chef d'œuvre of ghost-humour is an etching for Captain Glascock's "Land Sharks and Sea Gulls" (1838). This triumph of pictorial anecdote confronts us with Ann Dobbs, who has materialised her head and hands for the purpose of exhibiting, with a proper show of accusation, to a whimpering sailor, whose pigtail has risen in homage to her, "the feller piece of the broken bit" of her tomb-stone, which he had stolen for a holy-stone to clean decks with. After this, the reader may be surprised to learn that a ghost, produced by Cruikshank for "The Scourge" of August 1815, was serious enough to be precautiously blacked out before the plate entitled A Financial Survey of Cumberland, Or the Beggar's Petition, was put into general circulation. It is the ghost of Sellis, the Duke of Cumberland's valet, who is made to accuse his earthly master of murder, by these words "Is this a razor I see before me? Thou canst not say I did it." Of that other serious ghost, St Winifred in "Guy Fawkes" (1840), enough has been said. Her dullness is absolutely unmystical, and it is a relief to turn from her to look at The Holy Infant, that prayed as soon as he was born ("Catholic Miracles," 1825), an exquisitely droll sketch, about as large as a penny, of "intense" chubbiness in a hand basin.
Though sympathy with men and women did not make Cruikshank courteous to ghosts, he was led by the credulity and experience of his childhood to be affectionate to fairies and almost patriotic in his feeling about the magical countries in which they dwell. In a note to "Puss in Boots" he informs us that his nurse told him when he was "a very little boy" that the fairies "had houses in the white places"—i.e. fungi—in the corners of cellars. In cellars he accordingly looked for them, "and certainly did ... fancy" that he saw "very, very tiny little people running in and out of these little white houses"—i.e. fungi—and attributed any power he possessed of drawing or describing a fairy to his nurse's communications and his visions in cellars.
Like a sword-swallower I saw in Belfast, I will ask you to "put your hands together," for the anecdote just related is corroborated by the charm of his fairy drawings.
From "Comic Composites for the Scrap-Book," 1821.
What happened when Cruikshank went into cellars is symbolical of poetry. He saw what was not there by that creative touch of mind which transforms an object by increasing its similitude to something else. In Comic Composites for the Scrap Book (1821), we have intelligent human creatures suggested by arrangements of household implements. As I look at the mundatory erection here reproduced, I anachronistically hum Stephen Glover's "March composed for Prince Albert's Hussars." It is, however, less brilliant than the aldermanic bellows and the doctor (with a mortar for body, cottonwool for hair and labels for feet), to whom he states his symptoms in "Scraps and Sketches" (1831), for they amuse the satirist even at this date when gluttony is merely not moderation and bored sapience is merely not sympathetic wisdom.
Cruikshank then had one great qualification for illustrating fairy tales: he could animate the inanimate. Let us now follow his career as a fairy artist, beginning with his first great success.