Blanchard Jerrold

“ The rooting of the animal among the roses would in itself have awakened in us nothing but indignation; our pain arises from his being violently driven in by a man of genius, our own beloved friend, Mr. George Cruikshank. That incomparable artist is, of all men, the last who should lay his exquisite hand on fairy text. In his own art he understands it so perfectly, and illustrates it so beautifully, so humorously, so wisely, that he should never lay down his etching-needle to ‘edit’ the Ogre, to whom with that little instrument he can render such extraordinary justice. ”

“ And then, taking this revealed book of the past in his hand, how a man may sit and ponder on all that is to be—dream of times when some future geological hammer will be rapping at the clay about the stone relics of his bones, and a man will gaze upon his hardened anatomy with a mild and holy joy—when all that breathes and moves to-day will be entombed in ancient strata of the earth, and busy life will be carried on a hundred feet above the ruins of the present. ”

“ But can anything surpass, as a picture of close and various study of life, the “Parish Engine”—from the superb beadle at the door, to the urchins rejoicing over the excitement? As pictures of manners, dress, and the habits of the people some forty years ago, they have the value of historical records. Those times live again, under our wondering eyes, by the help of the artist’s genius; and none can deny the immense value they are in helping the younger generation to understand the fresh and racy humour of the text. ”

“ Do you think, my dear Emmy, there are many women foolish enough to applaud Dr. Mary Walker because she dresses like an overgrown school-girl, and shows her trousers? What is she like in society? Neither man nor woman. But how many have imitated her? How many women in England, France, and America have taken to the platform? One would think that all womankind was in a state of revolution, and about to make a general descent upon the tailors and tobacconists, turning over the lords of the creation to the milliners and the baby-linen warehouses. ”

“ The frieze of the Parthenon and the dramas of Sophocles, the forms of the marble and the conceptions of the great poet, still speak to our imagination and our understanding: we recognise, in both, the beauty of proportion, the simplicity and truth of design; and we all assent to a standard which we feel to be in harmony with nature, and to which all nations will yield a more ready obedience than to any other that we can name. ”

“ Cupid perches himself upon his foot, and toasts a heart at the fire; jumps upon the back of Old Time who bears the clock upon the mantelpiece; is enthroned in a triumphal car, with kings and princes, bishops and generals, lawyers and stock-jobbers, drummer-boys and jack-tars and sweeps, clown and harlequin, and even slippered pantaloon, and Chelsea pensioners upon wooden stumps, for his court. The car is drawn by subdued lions and leopards.
The blind beggar is waylaid by the little god, and brought to the ground. He has floored a dustman on his rounds. ”

“ No steam then to wield the hammer; only the most limited knowledge of the earth: the west an indescribable region of harmony and glory; the world a flat surface; fearful mariners hugging the shore close at home, and trusting to the stars; and England a savage place where wolves rent the air at night; and a heathen mythology the faith of the most civilised people of the earth. Under these barbarous circumstances, the poetry that dwells in the heart of all people who cultivate some affinity to nature, fashioned the mould of a Phidias for the people of Athens. ”

“ George Cruikshank’s various and admirable works should be in the possession of all lovers of the Arts. He is far more than the Prince of Caricaturists,—a man who regards the ongoings of life with the eye of genius; and he has a clear insight through the exterior of manners into the passions of the heart. He has wit as well as humour—feeling as well as fancy—and his original vein appears to be inexhaustible. ”

“ I hate a woman all surface as I hate a flat house. The Trefoil—queer name, isn't it?—can put a tremor in her voice suddenly. The Trefoil has memories—a fact: something which she doesn't give to the world, generous as she is. It is the shade to her abounding and sparkling passages of light. Only her deep art, I dare say; but devilish pleasant and refreshing when you get tired of laughing—gives a little repose to facial muscles. ”

“ As a whole the ‘Bacchus’ is easily described, although ‘none but itself can be its parallel.’ It is the province of genius to make rules where there are none, but as truth is a consistent whole, true genius bends the rule it makes into harmony with those already in existence; and in nothing has the artist been more successful than in combining his novel creation with the recognised canons of art. ”

“ Cruikshank was not of those who needed the warning. He remained heart and soul in his creative work throughout a long career, content to live modestly, and to rest his claim to the respect of the world upon his labours. If his indefatigable industry failed to bring him the fortune which fashion now lavishes upon his inferiors, he was consoled by the fervid admiration of such critics as Thackeray and Ruskin, and other distinguished contemporaries, whose opinions on his genius I have freely given, as the best aids to a thorough estimate of him as an artist. ”

“ And here the visitor will close his inspection of the Elgin Saloon. That he will return to these fine relics of the old Greeks, if he have the opportunity, is certain. He may come again and again, and each time gain something in the contemplation of these classical models; noble thoughts before the masterly figure of Theseus, a keen sense of beauty near the beautiful forms of the Parthenon frieze. Of all the glorious monuments of antiquity that have reached us of the proud nineteenth century, none have so noble a significance as the broken marbles collected in this room. ”

“ Hanger was not quite so sensitive. "Fools!" he cried—"they are answerable for more mischief in the world than all the men and children, and the rest of the animal creation put together."
"And yet no man's worth a woman's little finger, if you know what I mean," Reuben Sharp went on, struggling manfully to get clear expression for the tumult of painful feeling that was in him. "They don't know what the world is; you cannot make 'em understand. The best fall into the hands of the worst men. ”

“ He must, in fact, be old George Cruikshank, we are afraid, in the number of his years; yet our century has seen no better example of that ever-youthfulness which is one of the most frequent and least doubtful signs of genuine genius. That the name of Cruikshank deserves to be coupled with this epithet has never been dubious to those who, looking beyond certain mannerisms and limitations in his power as an artist, can appreciate high gifts to move both tears and laughter, exhibited on however small and unpretending a scale ”

“ Nor is this perfection the result of a lucky hit or happy accident, by which a far inferior artist may sometimes succeed in producing what is acknowledged by the eye as the impersonation of the impression produced on the mind by the art of the novelist or the poet. It is the result of deep study and profound sympathy, with all the varied action of the human heart. It is genius, the twin-brother of that which inspired Garrick and Kean, and which, in its rarest and most refined developments, brings before our eyes even now new beauties latent in the characters of Hamlet and of Rosalind. ”

“ My dear Mac, life is not to be measured by the hour-glass. There are minutes that are hours, there are hours that are years, there are years that are centuries. Again, some men are observant, and some pay no better compliment to the light of day than moles. You did me the honour of saying one evening, when we were having a late cigar at the Trafalgar (we should have been in bed hours before) , that you never knew a more quick-sighted man, nor a readier reader of the human heart than the individual who now addresses you. ”

“ It does all of us good to think often of what has been, and to dream of the future to which we are driving "down the ringing grooves of time"—to think sometimes of the fine people who had their glorious days, when London was distributed, untouched by human hands, in clayey strata, and remote stone quarries; and hereabouts, to the minds of the Greeks, lay the islands of the blessed. ”

“ But in all these things it is indisputable that the great moral artist was firmly persuaded that he was acting in the cause of suffering humanity, and engaged upon some work for the amelioration of his fellow-creatures. And whatever was the act, and however small and trivial it might appear in the sight of the majority, Cruikshank threw himself into it heart and soul, and, like everything else he put his hand to, he did it with all his might. ”

“ There is life in every accessory. Nature morte did not exist for him. “Dead as a door-nail” he could not understand; for under the magnetism of his etching-needle the nail would laugh and speak. He was so full of life himself—a hornpipe dancer in his eighty-fourth year *—that, in spite of him, he infused it into anything he touched. No artist ever threw such movement and infused such vital breath into his pictures, as this untaught man of genius spontaneously breathed into his etchings and woodcuts. ”

“ We are arguing for more work for our poor sisters who have neither father, husband, brother, nor fortune to depend upon; and these French comic scribblers describe us as unsexed brawlers, who want top-boots. I want no manly rights for women. I am content with the old position, that her head should just reach the height of a man's heart; but I do see where she is not well used—where she is left to genteel dependence, and a life in the darkest corner of the drawing-room, upon the chair with the unsafe leg, over the plate that is cracked, in the bedroom where the visitor died of scarlet fever. ”

“ Stone masons' chisels, and fine edged weapons of war, were made of bronze in those days. The collection of bronzes which the visitor is now about to examine, cannot be said to be a perfect collection; yet it contains some beautiful specimens, and one that is said to be the finest bronze in Europe. The antiquarian pauses with delight before these marvellous specimens of ancient skill; and reflecting upon the difficulties which beset the caster in bronze, it is astonishing to see the precision and the exquisite finish with which the artists of ancient Greece and Rome performed their labours. ”

“ Within the range of this decade of feverish activity is amassed such wealth of fancy, of invention, of jocund spirit, of sympathy for suffering, of rage over wrong, of minute observation of men and things, and withal such conscientious, ever-improving execution with pencil and needle, and lithographic ink and tinting-brush, upon wood and stone, and steel and copper, as not all the caricaturists or comic artists who have swarmed in Fleet Street since the Queen’s coronation day could equal, if they made a joint show of their best. ”

“ Of course, George is, like all other men of undoubted genius, a most ill-used gentleman. As Mathews laments that the general obtuseness of the public will not recognise his talents for tragedy,—as Liston mourns over the delusion which applauds him in Sam Swipes and Paul Pry, and does not permit him to appear as the Damon or Strephon of a sighing opera,—so Cruikshank is shocked at the evil fate which consigns him to drawing sketches and caricatures, instead of letting him loose in his natural domain of epic or historical picture. ”

“ The gilding and the mirrors, the marbles and the bronze, the myriad lamps of every fantastic form, the quaint and daring designs for shop fronts, the infinite arts employed to "set off" goods, and the surprising, never-ceasing varieties of art-manufacture—whether in chocolate or the popular Algerian onyx—bewilder strangers. ”

“ No work of the present time is ever universally admitted as an indisputable standard. It is only when time has placed an interval between the present and the past, wide enough to destroy all the rivalries of competition; that great works receive the full acknowledgments of their merits, and become standards to which we all appeal. Thus in the art of writing our own language, we refer to the best models of past instead of to the works of our own days; and our youth at school are chiefly trained on the written models of Greece and Home, instead of those of our own country. ”

“ Dickens had said of him and his fairies,—
“He is the only designer fairyland has had. Callot’s imps, for all their strangeness, are only of the earth, earthy. Fuseli’s fairies belong to the infernal regions; they are monstrous, lurid, and hideously melancholy. Mr. Cruikshank alone has a true insight into the ‘little people.’ They are something like men and women, and yet not flesh and blood; they are laughing and mischievous, but why we know not. ”

“ From the murderer’s cell to the pauper’s deathbed there is no phase of crime and misery which has not served him to point a moral. But his sympathies are never perverted, or his sense of right and wrong dimmed by the atmosphere in which he moves. He is a stern though kindly moralist. In his hands vice is vice—a foe with whom no terms are to be kept. ”

“ CHAPTER VI. A "GRANDE OCCASION."
"Well, these Paris tradespeople are the most extraordinary persons in the world," cried Sophonisba's mamma, and the absolute ruler of Mr. Cockayne. "I confess I can't make them out. They beat me. My dear, they are the most independent set I ever came across. They don't seem to care whether you buy or you don't; and they ask double what they intend to take."
"What is the matter now, my dear?" Mr. Cockayne ventured, in an unguarded moment, to ask, putting aside for a moment Mr. Bayle St. John's scholarly book on the Louvre. ”

“ Curious thoughts crowd in every busy brain, before these strange relics. Lost in the depths of the past, the mind, with a leap, often grasps at the future; and men will be found seriously saying to themselves, as they notice how we depend for our knowledge of ancient Egyptian fabrics upon the shrouds of ancient Egyptians,—what, if we looked forward, and in the remote centuries that are rolling toward us, see all our vast and busy Lancashire some layers underground, and archaeologists busy with our winding sheet! ”

“ I was not in high glee at the prospect of accompanying Cosmo Bertram to his free dancing party.
They are all very much alike. The fifteen sous basket, to use Dumas' fine illustration, in Paris, is very like the Vienna, the Berlin, or the London basket. The ladies are beautiful, exquisitely dressed, vivacious, and, early in the evening, well-mannered. At the outset you might think yourself at your embassy; at the close you catch yourself hoping you will get away safely. Shrill voices pipe in corners of the room. "On sautera!" People are jumping with a vengeance. ”

“ There is a fellow in the ‘Points of Humour’ who is offering to eat up a certain little general, that has made us happy any time these sixteen years; his huge mouth is a perpetual well of laughter—buckets full of fun can be drawn from it. We have formed no such friendships as that boyish one of the man with the mouth. But though, in our eyes, Mr. Cruikshank reached his apogee some eighteen years since, it must not be imagined that such is really the case. ”