EXCHANGE NO ROBBERY. From "Points of Humour," 1823. The unfaithful wife has concealed her lover in the clock. The husband, who has unexpectedly returned, devours bacon at 1 A.M., while she is in an agony of apprehension.
But what is humour? Late though the question be, it should be answered. Humour, then, is the ability to receive a shock of pleasant surprise from sounds and appearances without attributing importance to them. As the proof of humour is physiological, its appeal to the intellect is as peremptory as that of terror. It is a benignant despot which relieves us from the sense of destiny and of duty. Its range is illimitable. It is victoriously beneath contempt and above worship.
Cruikshank was a humorist who could laugh coarsely, broadly, selfishly, merrily, well. Coarseness was natural to him, or he would not have selected for a (suppressed) illustration in "Italian Tales" (1824) a subject which mingles tragedy with the laughter of Cloacina. One can only say that humour, like a sparrow, alights without regard to conventions. The majority can laugh with Rabelais, though they have not the idealism which created Theleme. Jokes that annoy the nose are no longer tolerable in art, but in Cruikshank's time so wholesome a writer as Captain Marryat thought Gillray worth imitating in his translation of disease into terms of humour. Hence The Headache and The Cholic (1819), signed with an anchor (Captain Marryat's signature) and etched by Cruikshank, follow The Gout by Gillray (1799). The reader may well ask if the sight of a hideous creature sprawling on a man's foot is humour according to my definition. I can only presume that in what Mr Grego calls the "port-wine days," Gillray's plate was like sudden sympathy producing something so absolutely suitable for swearing at, that patients smiled in easy-chairs at grief.
Broad humour has an eye on sex. The uncle who, on being asked at dinner for an opinion on a lady's costume, observes that he must go under the table to form it, is a type of the broad humorist in modern life. Cruikshank had none of that tenderness for women's clothes which in modern representation removes altogether the pudical idea from costume and substitutes the idea of witchery by foam of lace and coil of skirts. His guffaws and those of Captain Marryat and J. P***y, whose invention exercised his needle, at the Achilles in Hyde Park, in 1822, are vexatious enough to make one wish to restore all fig-leaves to the fig-forest. It is not possible for a man with an indefinite and inexpressible feeling for woman to laugh like that. Hearing his laughter we know that Cruikshank's humour about woman must always be obvious.
"EH., SIRS!" Illustrates "Waverley," by Sir Walter Scott, in "Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley Novels," 1836.
It is, and yet it is not measured by the height of her hat as he depicted it in 1828, when he contributed to that long series of jokes which culminate in Jan Linse's girl at the theatre who will not take her hat off because, "mamma, if I put it in my lap I can't see myself." In the annals of absurdity is there anything more worthy to be true at the expense of the British Navy than Cruikshank's picture of the chambermaid confronted with the leg which she has mistaken for a warming-pan? Another woman, whom Cruikshank compels us to remember by force of humorous idea, is to be found in Points of Humour (1823). She is the doxy in "The Jolly Beggars," sitting on the soldier's lap. We see her while she holds up
"her greedy gab
Just like ae aumous dish."