We will not further linger over the media of reproduction employed by our artist, but summon a few ideas suggested by the vision we have had of him sitting like a schoolboy in the schoolroom of the Royal Academy.
As a draughtsman he had been professorial in 1817 when he published with S. W. Fores two plates entitled Striking Effects produced by lines and dots for the assistance of young draftsmen, wherein he showed, like Hogarth, the amount of pictorial information which an artist can convey by a primitively simple method. He was professorial, too, when in 1865 he attempted to put in perspective a twelve mile giant taking a stride of six miles, on a plate 6 inches long and 3-3/5 inches broad, and informed the publisher of "Popular Romances of the West of England" (1865) that about 1825 he had attempted to put in perspective the Miltonic Satan whose body
"Prone on the flood, extended long and large,
Lay floating many a rood."
Cruikshank's greatest enemy was his mannerism which may even delude the pessimist of scant acquaintance with him into the idea that it imperfectly disguises an inability to draw up to the standard of Vere Foster. The Cruikshankian has merely to direct the attention of such a person to the frontispiece executed by Cruikshank for T. J. Pettigrew's "History of Egyptian Mummies" (1834). If a man can draw well in the service of science his mannerism is the accomplishment of an intention.
THE VETERANS. From "Songs, Naval and National, of the late Charles Dibden," 1841.
Ruskin said that Cruikshank's works were "often much spoiled by a curiously mistaken type of face, divided so as to give too much to the mouth and eyes and leave too little for forehead," and yet there is extant a curious MS. note by Cruikshank to the effect that Mr Ruskin's eyes were "in the wrong Place and not set properly in his head," showing that Cruikshank was a student of even a patron's physiognomy and suggesting that, if Ruskin had roamed in Cruikshank's London he would have convicted the artist of a malady of imitativeness. It must be remembered that he repeatedly drew recognisable portraits of his contemporaries; indeed he was so far from being a realist devoted to libel that Mr Layard confides to us that various studies by George Cruikshank of "the great George" would, he thinks, "have resulted in an undue sublimation had completion ever been attained."
Yet the sublimation of the respectable is precisely the rosy view of Cruikshank the man enjoyed by me at the present moment. He is Captain of the 24th Surrey Rifle Volunteers; he is Vice-President of the London Temperance League. He sketches a beautiful palace as a pastime. He is in the same ballroom as Queen Victoria, and Her Majesty bows to him. Withal he is sturdy and declines the Prince Consort's offer for his collection of works by George Cruikshank. In the end St Paul's Cathedral receives him, and the person who knew him most intimately declares on enduring stone that she loved him best.