Lion of the Party From "George Cruikshank's Table Book," 1845.
For Shakespeare, Cruikshank seems to have felt a tender reverence. As early as 1814 we find him drawing Kean as Richard III., and Hamlet for J. Roach, the publisher of "The Monthly Theatrical Reporter"; 1815 is the date of a lithograph of Juliet and the Nurse published by G. Cruikshank and otherwise unmemorable; in 1827 he made one of his "Illustrations of Time," a vivacious portrait of Puck about to girdle the earth. In 1857-8 came the Cruikshankian series of etchings for R. B. Brough's "Life of Sir John Falstaff." This series exhibits great skill and conscientiousness; the critic of "The Art Journal" (July 1858) was able to suppose them "actual scenes." Falstaff has a serene and majestic face; his bulk is too dignified for the scales of a showman; one understands his æsthetic abhorrence of a "mountain of mummy." Humour cancels his debt of shame for cowardice, and well would it have been if that rebellious Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle, the original of Falstaff, could have looked into Falstaff's roguish eyes as he reclined on the field of Shrewsbury and peeped at his freedom from all the bigotries which threaten and terrify mankind. Cruikshank unconsciously imparts this thought, but it is with conscience that he is amiable to Falstaff, who, begging, hiding, shamming, "facing the music," and dying, is his pet and ours by grace of his refined and beautiful art.
We meet Cruikshank's Falstaff again in the drawing entitled The First Appearance of William Shakespeare on the Stage of the Globe (January 1863). Here we have the élite of Shakespeare's creations in a throng about his cradle. Titania and Oberon are at its foot, as though he owed them birth; Touchstone and Feste try to catch a gleam of laughter from his eyes; Prospero waves his wand; Othello gazes with hate at the guarded enchanter, more potent than Prospero, who is to bring his woe to light; Romeo and Juliet have eyes only for each other. Richard the Third is there, sadder than Lear; the witches who prophesied the steps of Macbeth towards hell gesticulate hideously by their cauldron; and Falstaff, cornuted as becomes the "deer" of Mrs Ford, smiles at a vessel that reminds him, as do all vessels, of sack and metheglins. There is charm and beauty of ensemble in this picture, which I have described from a coloured drawing in the South Kensington Museum made by its designer in 1864-5. I know nothing that suggests more forcibly the fatefulness hidden in the inarticulate stranger who appears every day in the world without a history and without a name.
ADAMS'S VISIT TO PARSON TRULLIBER. Frontispiece to "Joseph Andrews," 1831. The book is dated 1832. This is one of the plates in "Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832).
Smollett and Fielding, both novelists who present humour as the flower of annoyance and catastrophe, were hardly to be congratulated when Cruikshank innocently showed them up in "Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832). In both the reader of literature discerns a gentleman. In Fielding he sees a radiant man of the world from whom literary giants who succeeded him drew nutriment for ambition. Both Smollett and Fielding have heroines, and touch men in the nerve of sweetness, and fell them with love. But Cruikshank cared naught for their women, though he reproduced something equivalent to the charm of Shakespeare's "Merry Wives." When first he went to Smollett, it was for a Point of Humour (1824), which centres in an "irruption of intolerable smells" at dinner. The point pricked, as one may say, but it was blunt in effect compared with that of a later artist's drawing of Columbus and the Egg or that of Cruikshank's cook swallowing to order in Land Sharks and Sea Gulls (1838). The really vivid picture is recognised by a lasting imprint on a mind which is incapable of learning Bradshaw by heart, and Cruikshank's drawings for Smollett are reduced in my mind to Mrs Grizzle extracting three black hairs from Mr Trunnion, and his drawings for Fielding are reduced into the ruined face and rambling fat of Blear-eyed Moll.
Those who will may compare the Smollett of Rowlandson with that of Cruikshank. The comparison may determine whether a dog is funnier while being trodden on or immediately after, and shows the indifference of Rowlandson to his artistic reputation. Cruikshank's attempts to illustrate Goldsmith are few and, as a series, unsuccessful. The reproduced specimen is a fair example of his realistic method. It exhibits the blackguard's sense of absurdity in the Christian altruism which paralyses the nerves of the pocket—sensitive usually as the nerves of sex—and which tyrannises over the nerves of pride.