When Humour pretends to drop from the supernatural to the commonplace, it—I cannot for the moment persuade myself to write he or she—is about to continue its most important mission, for it deserts a subject which is naturally laughable for one which is not; it goes from the supernatural to the commonplace. The supernatural is naturally laughable because the human animal instinctively laughs at that which at once transcends and addresses his intelligence, on a principle similar perhaps to that which Schopenhauer acted on when he smiled at the angle formed by the tangent and the circumference of a circle. At the commonplace, however, the human animal never spontaneously laughs. Its staleness is not dire to him; but negativeness is not good, and Cruikshank helps the commonplace to be his friend.
"THE WITS MAGAZINE" (2 vols., 1818) is "one of the rarest books illustrated by G. Cruikshank." A perfect copy is said to be worth £80. Another rendering by him of the above incident will be found in "The Humourist," vol. iv. (1821)
When we view the demeanour of Cruikshank towards the commonplace we are agreeably surprised by his agility and daring. For instance, take a book called "Talpa," by C. W. Hoskyns (1852). It is a narrative of agricultural operations, in the course of which the author says, "The worst-laid tile is the measure of the goodness and permanence of the whole drain, just as the weakest link of a chain is the measure of its strength." Cruikshank, not being in the mood for drawing a drain, depicts a watchdog who has broken his chain's weakest link and is enthusiastically rushing towards an intruder whose most bitable tissues are reluctantly offered to him in the attempt to scale a wall. The hackneyed metaphor thus obviously illustrated being valueless on the page where we find it, our smile is for the "cheek" of the artist in calling attention to it rather than for the humour of the drawing as an exhibition of funk and glee. Thus the "obvious" marries the obvious, and the result is what is called originality. Again, what is more commonplace in its effect on the mind than decoration as viewed on wall-paper, frames, and linoleum, and in all those devices which flatter Nature's alleged abhorrence of vacuum? It is unhealthy to observe their repetitiousness. Cruikshank, however, saw that to be amusing where the utmost demanded is an inoffensive filling of vacancy was to triumph against dulness in its own sanctum. Consequently in the decorations above and below the main designs in "The Humourist" (1819-20) an appropriate hilarity animates effects which do not frustrate the decorative idea of announcing the completeness of the pictures of which they are the crown and base. His treatment of title-pages is delightfully droll. Thus the title-page of "My Sketch Book" (1834) takes the form of a portrait of himself, with a nose like the extinguisher of a candlestick, directing the posing of the required capital letters on the shelves of a proscenium. On the title page of "The Comic Almanac" (1835) the letter ~L~ is a man sitting sideways with his legs stretched horizontally together, and on the title-page of "The Pentamerone" (1848) the polysyllable becomes the teeth of an abnormal king. Studies by Cruikshank in the South Kensington Museum (9950-~T~) show that he imagined the letter ~M~ as two Chinamen united by their pigtails, which form the ~V~ between the perpendiculars of that letter, and are also employed as a hammock. This play with the alphabet is exhibited as early as 1828 in The Pursuit of Letters, where all the letters in the word Literature flee, on legs as thin as the track of Euclid's point, from philomathic dogs, while their brethren ~A B C~ attempt to escape from three such babes as might have sprung from the foreheads of men made out of the dust of encyclopædias. As late as July 1874, in reply to a coaxing letter from George S. Nottage, we see Cruikshank making human figures of the letters of the word "Portraits."
"while he spake a braying ass Did sing most loud and clear.—William Cowper. From "The Diverting History of John Gilpin," 1828. An earlier design by Cruikshank for "John Gilpin" is in "The Humourist," vol. iii. (1819). 1836 is the date borne by a new edition of W. A. Nield's very monotonous musical setting of John Gilpin, "illustrated by Cruikshank" (presumably Robert).
We return now to the zoological humour which has flashed across these pages. In the United States the art of humanising the creatures of instinct to make them articulately droll has been practised with such success by Gus Dirks, J. S. Pughe, and A. Z. Baker, that if Noah's Ark is not too "denominational," it is there that we should seek the origin of their humour. Cruikshank, though he did re-draw William Clarke's swimming duck holding up an umbrella (in "Three Courses and a Dessert," 1830), achieved nothing so triumphantly zoological as the ostrich who swallowed her medicine but forgot to uncork the bottle containing it, or the porcupine who asked a barber for a shampoo, or the cat who discovered that her Thomas was leading a tenth life, or the elephant who wondered how the stork managed to convey him to his parents, or the beetle-farmer who mowed a hairbrush. Cruikshank, however, was in the Ark before them, and brought back enough humour resembling theirs to show what he missed, besides humour of a different kind which they do not excel. In "Scraps and Sketches" (1829) he preceded the Americans in the humour which makes the horse the critic of the motor-car, though not in that which seems to make the motor-car the caricaturist of the horse; and in the above-named publication he represents a dog in the act of prophesying cheap meat for the canine race. Again, in "Scraps and Sketches" (1832) two elephants laugh together over a pseudopun on the word trunk.