VI
The humour of George Cruikshank deserves separate consideration, because it is essentially the man himself. Despite a technical excellence so peculiar that, according to the author of Number 1 of "Bursill's Biographies," the engraver Thompson "kept a set of special tools, silver-mounted and with ivory handles, sacred for" Cruikshank's designs, his sense of beauty was not eyes to him. Women he usually saw as lard or bone, and this strange perversity of vision and art differentiates him from the moderns by more than time. For instance, the women presented by Mr S. D. Ehrhart and O'Neill Latham (a lady-artist), to mention only two modern humorists, materialise an idea of beauty in humour which was as foreign to Cruikshank as apple-blossom to a pomme de terre.
A GENTLEMAN'S REST BROKEN (in consequence of going to bed with his leg on). From an etching in "Scraps and Sketches," Part 1, 1828.
Humour with Cruikshank was elemental. A joke was sacred from implication; it was self-sufficient, vocal in line and curve, percussive. He was a contemporary of Douglas Jerrold, who was humorous when he called a town Hole-cum-Corner. He was a contemporary of Thomas Hood, who was humorous when he announced that
"from her grave in Mary-bone
They've come and bon'd your Mary."
He was in that "world of wit" where they kept a nutmeg-grater on the table in order to say, when a great man was mentioned, "there's a grater." He was in a world where professional humour was perversely destructive of faith in imagination.