For years before he reached the great but unsensational age at which he died, a sort of cult was vested in his longevity. Dated plates—that entitled "The Rose and the Lily" (1875) offers the last example—imply that his art figured to him finally as a kind of athleticism.
It was as if, in using his burin or needles, he was doing a "turn" before sightseers, with a hired Time innocuously scything on the platform beside him to show him off.
Now that his mortality has been proven for a quarter of a century, we can coldly ask: why did he seem so old to himself and the world? Others greater than he—Titian, Watts—have laboured with genius under a heavier crown of snow than he; and the public has applauded their vigour without a doubt of their identity. The reason is that they have not been the journalists of their age. They have not, like Cruikshank, reflected in their works inventions and fashions, wars and scandals, jokes and politics, whence the world has emerged unrecognisably the same.
It is said that when Cruikshank was eighty-three, he executed a sword-dance before an old officer who had mentally buried him. It was an action characteristic of a nature that was scarcely more naïve and impulsive at one time than another, but it was the most confusing proof of the fact in debate which he could have offered. It was not of a numeral that the doubter thought when the existence of Cruikshank was presented to his mind's eye. His thought we may elaborate as follows.
The artist who drew Napoleon week by week, with all the vulgar insolence which only a great man's contemporaries can display towards him, was the same who, half a century after the Emperor's death, produced a conception of the "Leader of the Parisian Blood Red Republic of 1870." The artist who, in the last year of the reign of George the Third, depicted Thistlewood's lair in Cato Street, drew also, as though with "a mother's tender care," almost every pane in that glass palace which the trees of Hyde Park inhabited in 1851.
Before the punctuality of his interest in everything new that rose to the surface to obliterate an expiring mode or event, we stand astonished. It is not so much as an artist that we here admire him. It is as an Argus of the street, an Argus not only with many eyes but with feet enough to plant him at once in a hundred corners. From this voluble Argus his mistress Clio recoils but cannot dismiss him. Aghast she observes him presenting the Prince Regent in a hundred burlesquely improper parts; and it is a discreet generation indeed which remembers Coriolanus addressing the Plebeians and forgets The Fat in the Fire. Clio withdraws, but does not forbid us to stay. And stay I do, at all events, to examine the packed and ugly caricatures which are the visible laughter of Cruikshank the Argus of journalism. Their violent colours and vigorous lines fail not in invocation. Before the student of them rise the supple, blue-eyed leech called Mrs Clarke and her grossly-doating Commander-in-chief; Lady Jersey, Lady Douglas and the other villains of the drama entitled "Queen Caroline;" the Marchioness of Hertford, the Countess of Yarmouth, or whoever brought down upon Coriolanus the "heigho!" of a ribald Rowly; and, lest one grow lenient to royal self-indulgence, it is accused by the recurring presence of a figure of tormented respectability. It is the Cruikshankian John Bull, as different from Sir F. C. Gould's well-fed monitor of Conservative politicians as is Cruikshank's darkly criminal Punch from Richard Doyle's domesticated patron of humour. This John Bull is hacked to make a Corsican and Yankee holiday, taxed at the bayonet's point, starved on bread at eighteenpence the quartern, and offered up as a sacrifice to a Bourbon "Bumble-head."
THE SCALE OF JUSTICE REVERSED No. 464 of Reid's Catalogue, published March 19, 1815.
But the visions that detain the student of Cruikshank the journalist are not only of personages and events. He saw and recorded the crowd and the clothes of the crowd. His art preserves the ladies of 1816, who resembled the bowls of tobacco pipes; the men of 1822, who wore trousers like pears; and the children of 1826, whom the hatter turned into "Mushroom Monstrosities."