How does Cruikshank stand as a creator of humorous physiognomy? The answer is not from a trumpet. He invented crowds of people who seem merely the fruits of formulæ, and in comedy the simple application of the science of John Caspar Lavater is weak in effect, since laughter is tributary to surprise.
Compare Daumier's man in hot water with Cruikshank's Trotting (a similar subject in "The Humourist," vol. iii., 1820), and one sees the difference between mere Lavaterism and emotion detected with delight. Compare Daumier's facetious ruffian asking the time of the man he intends to rob with almost any ruffian in Cruikshank's humorous gallery and one can only say that, in effect, one drew him to haunt the mind; the other to bore it. One ruffian surpasses his type without deserting it; the other is the type itself. Here and there, however, Cruikshank creates an individual who is more than his type without being divergent from it. Do we find such a one in the serious eater in Hope ("Phrenological Specimens," 1826), in whose bone, already as innutritious as a toothbrush, his dog confides for sustenance? I think so, because I see him when I think of appetite as of tragedy. Humour accepts him in deference to her idea that there is nothing that cannot be laughed at, and she is worthy of deification when she goes down, down, down, laughing where even her worshippers are mute.
I doubt if Cruikshank twice excelled in respect of authenticity in humour the host and guest whom he presented in the reproduced subjects from Heads of the Table (1845). Humour ascends from his Hope to them as to a heaven of animals from a purgatorial region. That even what I have called Cruikshank's Lavaterism can be amusing is proved by his portrait of Socrates at the moment before he said "rain follows thunder."
We owe probably to Cruikshank's inveterate love of punning the capital study in disdain as provoked by envy exhibited in one of the lions in The Lion of the Party (1845). Of his animal humour I shall have more to say: these lions are more human than many of his representations of homo sapiens; they need no footline.
X Xantippe From "A Comic Alphabet," 1836. See Pope's "The Wife of Bath" (after Chaucer), Il. 387-392.
The student of Cruikshank's humour must follow him through many volumes in which his pencil is subservient to literature; and in this journey he will often open his mouth to yawn rather than to laugh. The professional humorist, like the professional poet, is the prey of the Irony that sits up aloft; and Cruikshank was not an exception. Indeed one may say of some of his crowded caricatures that one has to wade through them. In the humorous illustration of literature his work is seldom risible, but it usually pleases by a combination of neatness and energy.
Despite his intense egotism he ventured to associate his art with the works of Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett, R. E. Raspe, Cowper, Byron, Scott, Dickens, Goldsmith, Douglas Jerrold, Thackeray, Le Sage, and Cervantes. These names evoke a world of humorous life in which is missing, to the knowledge of the spectator, only the humour which shines in jewels of brief speech and rings in the heavenly onomatopœia of absurdity. Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde are decidedly not of that world, though Raspe, by a freak of irony, graced his brutal pages with lines which the snark-hunter might have coveted, and Smollett's elegance in burlesque gravity is dear to an admirer of "The Importance of being Earnest."