Graham Everitt

“ This was Richard Doyle’s dream in 1849. He did not live to wake to the reality of 1884: half a dozen “Gladstone” bags filled with American dynamite, the property of subjects of a republic who allows her mongrel murderers to plot the deaths of thousands of the people of a friendly nation without lifting a hand or a finger to restrain them. A home government too weak to pass a law which would stop these outrages by hanging these foreign miscreants as high as Haman. These formed no part of course of the young artist’s dream. ”

“ From an early period of his career as an etcher and designer, George had waged a deadly war with gin,—that potent, insidious, and evil spirit of London; the most priceless services he rendered to the cause of temperance being unquestionably given long before he had any notion of joining the ranks of the total abstainers. Like the Triumph of Cupid, the well-known Gin Juggernaut of the “Sketch Book” requires nothing more than a passing allusion. ”

“ The author of a recent sketch would cite these water colours as a complete answer to those who like ourselves maintain, in no mere spirit of detraction, that the artist possessed not one particle of genius. Surely he cannot be in earnest. If so, we have only to say, that if painting subjects in oils or water colour from the thousand and one hints to be gathered from history, fiction, or every-day life, be a test of genius, the walls of every summer and winter exhibition—to say nothing of the Royal Academy would be furnished annually with examples from end to end. ”

“ The charm of George Cruikshank’s talent lies in the fact that notwithstanding his defects in drawing, everything he took in hand is impressed with the stamp of a strong and original genius; it is like nothing we have seen before; every one of his designs is marked with distinctive features of beauty, quaintness, or originality peculiar to himself. ”

“ Folly is there seen at the height—the moon is at the full—it is the very error of the time. There is a perpetual error of eccentricities, a tilt and tournament of absurdities, pampered with all sorts of affectation, airy, extravagant, and ostentatious! Yet he is as little a caricaturist as he is a painter of still life. ”

“ All this we fancy has been done in another place; our task is altogether of a simpler character. We have to trace the connection which subsisted between the artist and author; to show how this book—the creation of a writer in the spring-time of his genius—the essence of fun, the unfailing source of merriment to countless readers past, present, and to come, came to be associated with the memory of a terrible and still incomprehensible tragedy. ”

“ It is high time that the public should think more than they have hitherto done of George Cruikshank; and it is also high time that George Cruikshank should begin to think more than he seems to have done hitherto of himself. Generally speaking, people consider him as a clever, sharp caricaturist, and nothing more; a free-handed, comical young fellow, who will do anything he is paid for, and who is quite contented to dine off the proceeds of a ’George IV.’ to-day, and those of a ‘Hone,’ or a ‘Cobbett’ to-morrow. ”

“ The application of wood-engraving to all kinds of illustration, whether graphic or comic, and the mode in which time, labour, and expense are economised, by the large wood blocks being cut up into squares, and each square entrusted to the hands of a separate workman, has virtually superseded the old and far mere effective process of etching. Economy is now the order of the day in matters of graphic satire as in everything else; people are no longer found willing to pay a shilling for a caricature when they may obtain one for a penny. ”

“ I travelled partly on horseback and partly on foot through almost every county that lies southern of Inverness; I have read the map of Scotland upon the great scale of nature, from the summits of Ben Nevis and Ben Lomond; I have visited that island whence savage and roaming bands derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. Yes, amid the ruins of Iona I have abjured the rigid philosophy which would conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground that has been dignified by wisdom, by bravery, and by virtue. ”

“ In the etching of Story Telling, the deep shadows of an old baronial hall are illuminated solely by the moonbeams and the flickering flame of the firelight; a door opens into a gallery beyond, and one of the listeners, fascinated by the ghost story to which she is listening, glances fearfully over her shoulder as if apprehensive that something uncanny will presently issue out of the black recesses. ”

“ Not so with these admirable little designs; you turn to them again and again, and each time with a refreshing sense of pleasure. Herein seems to lie the power of true genius—that its productions give not only a sense of freshness and delight, but that the sensation so conveyed will not die. There are people, I believe, on whom they produce no such impression; such people, as regards comic art, are for all practical purposes “dry bones,” and to dry bones such as these the pencil of “honest George” will appeal in vain. ”

“ While society, whose every phase he has illustrated with a truth, a grace, and a tenderness heretofore unknown to satiric art, gladly and proudly takes charge of his fame, they, whose pride in the genius of a great associate was equalled by their affection for an attached friend, would leave on record that they have known no kindlier, more refined, or more generous nature than that of him who has been thus early called to his rest. ”

“ Their primitive style is singularly adapted to enlist the sympathies of the little folk to whom they specially address themselves: their highest aim and object is not to instruct, but to amuse. All this the artist, in the ardour of his new crusade, lost sight of, and so dead had he become to the fairy fancies and reveries of his youth, that he placed sacrilegious hands on these time-honoured and favourite legends of our childhood, and converted them (with most indifferent literary ability) into something little better than temperance tracts! ”

“ At the opening of the present chapter we said that Robert Seymour was almost a genius. Genius, however, he never absolutely touched; he was destitute of the inventive faculties which distinguished John Leech, and lacked the vivid imagination which enabled George Cruikshank to realize any idea which occurred to him, whether comical, grave, realistic, or terrible. His talents as an artist, though undoubtedly great, ran in a narrow groove, and their bent is shown by the well-known “Humorous Sketches,” and the less known but far more admirable designs which he executed for the “Comic Magazine.” ”

“ The truth is, that we forget the artist's weaknesses, many and glaring as they are, in the lustre of his unexampled genius. The Times, in an otherwise laudatory article which it published after his death, remarked that "there was not a single beautiful face or figure probably in the whole range of Cruikshank's work." Now, although this is not entirely true, there is at least so much of truth, in it that we may admit that the cases in which he has produced a pretty face or figure are very few and far between, and even those cases seem rather to have been the result of accident than of design. ”

“ By its side stood Mark Lemon, who, for two and twenty years has presided over the weekly dinner where the good things are suggested, and the weekly sheet whereon they are inscribed; who has seen comrades fall out of the ranks in the march of life, and perish by the wayside. And such comrades! Gone the brilliant, meteoric A’Beckett; fiery, impulsive, scathing Jerrold; playfully cynical Thackeray; and now—John Leech! ”

“ People who knew and judged of George Cruikshank (as the majority of his contemporaries necessarily did) by his work alone, formed altogether an erroneous judgment of the character and disposition of the man. Because his later designs showed or seemed to show a love of little children, a liking for home and homely subjects, a delight in fairy lore and legend, it seems therefore to have been assumed that the artist was almost child-like in simplicity, innocence, and guilelessness of heart. ”

“ In bringing to the remembrance of those who do know, and to the knowledge of those who do not know, some of the work which entitled him in our judgment to occupy a leading place amongst the number of those of whom we write, we have endeavoured to brush away the dust of oblivion which for so many years has obscured the name and reputation of an artist, who, in spite of much slovenliness and carelessness of execution, was both an able caricaturist and a skilful draughtsman. ”

“ There is indeed a nephew of mine, who, as a wood-engraver, and a wood-engraver only, has been employed by Mr. Bentley to engrave ’Crowquill’s designs;’ just as in my ‘Omnibus’ he engraved my own drawings upon wood, and still does engrave them in ’Ainsworth’s Magazine.’ Now, can any one imagine it possible for any respectable publisher, especially ‘Her Majesty’s Publisher in Ordinary,’ to be guilty of so miserable a trick, so wretched an expedient, as that of putting off the engraver of a few of the drawings as the designer himself—as one of the ‘illustrators’ of the ‘Miscellany’? ”

“ But this study of Rembrandt and of Hogarth, this minute attention to detail, this careful and conscientious elaboration, would have done little for George Cruikshank if he had not possessed in an eminent degree that faculty of creation, otherwise of originality, which men call genius. Various descriptions of this gift have been attempted by eminent men, but the most felicitous seems to us to be that given by Robert William Elliston: “A true actor,” says this distinguished comedian, “must possess the power of creation, which is genius, as well as the faculty of imitation, which is only talent.” ”

“ Look round the world of art, and ask, How many are there of whom anything like this can be said? Why, there are not half a dozen names that could bear being mentioned at all; and certainly there is not one, the pretensions of which will endure sifting, more securely and more triumphantly than that of George Cruikshank. In the first place, he is—what no living caricaturist but himself has the least pretensions to be, and what, indeed, scarcely one of their predecessors was—he is a thoroughbred artist. [2] He draws with the ease and freedom and fearlessness of a master ”

“ Nobody, that has the least of an eye for art, can doubt that Cruikshank, if he chose, might design as many annunciations, beatifications, apotheoses, metamorphoses, and so forth, as would cover York cathedral from end to end. It is still more impossible to doubt that he might be a famous portrait painter. Now, these are fine lines both of them, and yet it is precisely the chief merit of Cruikshank that he cuts them both; that he will have nothing to do with them; that he has chosen a walk of his own, and that he has made his own walk popular. Here lies genius ”

“ There is "genius" for you, if you will. If you are overworked, turn to them; they will do you good, for they will not only make you merry, but force upon you the conviction that the conception which created them was essentially original. It is this delightful originality of George Cruikshank which constitutes his genius. ”

“ Richard Doyle, as we have seen, was young when he joined the ranks of the Punch staff. Young men are apt to "dream dreams," and one of Richard Doyle's was in truth a charming one. In Ireland: a Dream of the Future, he shows us our Queen gazing into the depths of an Irish lake, wherein she beholds prosperous towns, smiling fields, a contented peasantry, flourishing homesteads, a land flowing with milk and honey. ”

“ For some weeks previously The Times had attacked the eccentric Chancellor with a constancy and vigour of satire quite unexampled; the tide of ridicule was swelled by contributions from the London and provincial press; Brougham made some foolish speeches at Aberdeen and Dundee, which excited the laughter of his enemies and the alarm of his friends. "Those who are charitably disposed," remarks the unfriendly Greville, "express their humane conviction that he is mad, and it probably is not very remote from the truth." ”

“ The true comic inspiration possessed in so wonderful a degree by Cruikshank, by John Leech, and even by Robert Seymour, he never indeed possessed. Some fifteen years before his death he suffered from incipient paralysis, and furthermore injured his thumb, which obliged him to hold his pencil between his middle and fore-fingers. Gradually this great and graceful artist dropped so far behind in the race of life that he yielded latterly to proposals to illustrate boys’ literature of a very inferior class. ”

“ He tried politics and he tried literature, and few people will say that he was entirely successful at either. As a politician, for instance, his general capacity for getting himself and his party into a mess, earned from the most intellectually powerful of his political opponents the enduring title of “Lord Meddle and Muddle.” He has not been dead very long, yet what reputation has he left behind him as a dramatist—novelist—historian—biographer—editor—pamphleteer, all of which rôles he essayed at some time or other of his long and eventful career? ”

“ It cannot be doubted that the estrangement from Bentley was unwise and impolitic, for as one of the greatest publishers of fiction of the day, his influence was both far-reaching and comprehensive. In quarrelling with Dickens, Ainsworth, and Bentley, three of the great artistic employers of labour of his time, and in face of the growing popularity of John Leech and Hablot Knight Browne, he was literally quarrelling with his bread and butter, and few men, even of genius, may afford to do that. ”

“ Dombey at Home, the proud, haughty beauty chafing under the consciousness that she has been sacrificed to the wealth of the heartless merchant, takes no pains to veil the contempt she feels for the admiring men who surround her. These men (by the way) are scarcely men at all, they are all grossly exaggerated; but “Phiz,” like many artists of greater pretensions, has sacrificed everything to his 346 central figure, and the presence and bearing of the disdainful beauty makes the coup d’œil delightful. ”

“ Like Hogarth, with whom this artist, like all other comic designers, has been frequently and improperly compared, young Robert Seymour declined to waste his abilities as a mere mechanical draughtsman, and used his technical education as a means of cultivating the artistic gifts with which nature and inclination had endowed him. He seems at first to have selected a walk in art which required for its ultimate success a larger amount of application and patience than he could well spare for the purpose. ”

“ Hence it has come to pass, that whilst comic artists abound, the prevailing spirit of economy has reduced their productions to a dead level, and the work of an artist of inferior power and invention, may successfully compete for public favour with the work of a man of talent and genius like John Tenniel, a result surely to be deplored, seeing there never was a time which offered better opportunities for the pencil of a great and original caricaturist than the present. ”

“ A mob of boys and degraded women had taken complete possession of Bristol,—had driven its deformed little mayor over a stone wall in ignominious flight,—had burnt down the gaol and the mansion-house, 223 and laid Queen Square in ashes, whilst the military and its very strangely incompetent officer looked on while the city was burning.103 Every one in those days was either a rabid Tory or an ultra Radical. It was just the period for an enthusiastic youth to plunge into the excitement of political life ”

“ The verdict of posterity on this restless but unquestionably brilliant man of genius must of necessity be a somewhat disappointing one; he aimed at being nothing less than an Admirable Crichton, and such a character in the nineteenth century, when every public man must be more or less talented, more or less brilliant, would be an impossibility even to a genius. ”

“ In estimating his merits, the genius of George Cruikshank may not inaptly be compared to a diamond. One facet often emits more 184 brilliant coruscations than any other; and if we may be permitted to compare his powers of realizing the grave, the comical, the supernatural, and the terrible to the facets of a diamond, we think the one which would be found to emit the most brilliant flashes of light would be the last. Thackeray, one of the most friendly and most competent of his critics, would seem to have considered that much of his power was shown in depicting subjects of this kind. ”

“ The wretched woman with the infant has actually placed her foot on the spring, and so great is the artist’s power of realization, that we momentarily expect to see the horrible thing close with a snap! A skeleton, whose fleshless skull is masked with a pleasant female countenance, officiates as barmaid, and behind her yawns a pit, on the further side of which a circle of evil spirits curvet around a huge still. ”