W. H. Chesson

“ But what is humour? Late though the question be, it should be answered. Humour, then, is the ability to receive a shock of pleasant surprise from sounds and appearances without attributing importance to them. As the proof of humour is physiological, its appeal to the intellect is as peremptory as that of terror. It is a benignant despot which relieves us from the sense of destiny and of duty. Its range is illimitable. It is victoriously beneath contempt and above worship. [Pg 166]
Cruikshank was a humorist who could laugh coarsely, broadly, selfishly, merrily, well. ”

“ Fairies, depicted by their lover, have taken into their invisible web of glamour the grossness of Falstaff, and to me the etching which contains in harmony so tragic a tree, so gluttonous a man, and the only angels that shame can love without terror is not an illustration of Shakespeare but a vision of everybody's heaven. ”

“ Humorists are dear to the critic because they criticise by re-making in the world of idea the things they criticise. Among them Cruikshank is dearer than some, less dear than others. Through the regency and reign of the eldest son of George the Third he, even more than Cobbett, seems to me the historian of genius, by virtue of prodigious merriment in vulgar art. The great miscellany of humour which he poured out revitalises his name whenever it is examined by the family of John Bull. ”

“ Will Cruikshank's humour live? or, rather, may it live? for things live centuries without permission, and the fright of Little Miss Muffet is more remembered than the terror of Melmoth. The answer should be "Yes" from all who acknowledge beauty in the sparkle of evil and of good. No humorist worthy of that forbidden fruit which made thieves of all mankind can refrain [Pg 234] from the laughter which is paid for by another. ”

“ Humour cancels his debt of shame for cowardice, and well would it have been if that rebellious Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle, [Pg 187] the original of Falstaff, could have looked into Falstaff's roguish eyes as he reclined on the field of Shrewsbury and peeped at his freedom from all the bigotries which threaten and terrify mankind. Cruikshank unconsciously imparts this thought, but it is with conscience that he is amiable to Falstaff, who, begging, hiding, shamming, "facing the music," and dying, is his pet and ours by grace of his refined and beautiful art. ”

“ The professional humorist, like the professional poet, is the prey of the Irony that sits up aloft; and Cruikshank was not an exception. Indeed one may say of some of his crowded caricatures that one has to wade through them. In the humorous illustration of literature his work is seldom risible, but it usually pleases by a combination of neatness and energy.
Despite his intense egotism he ventured to associate his art with the works of Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett, R. E. Raspe, Cowper, Byron, Scott, Dickens, Goldsmith, Douglas Jerrold, Thackeray, Le Sage, and Cervantes. ”

“ There are foes of peace which in Cruikshank's simplicity he thought of as good. For these, too, there is a Humour to keep them at bay, until Science delivers us from their evil by making them obsequious to all who see them.
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. ”

“ Smollett and Fielding, both novelists who present humour as the flower of annoyance and catastrophe, were hardly to be congratulated when Cruikshank innocently showed them up in "Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832) . In both the reader of literature discerns a gentleman. In Fielding he sees a radiant man of the world from whom literary giants who succeeded him drew nutriment for ambition. Both Smollett and Fielding have heroines, and touch men in the nerve of sweetness, and fell them with love. ”

“ I was at Sotheby's on May 22, 1903, when the Royal Aquarium copy of the etching of The Worship of Bacchus was sold. It evoked a sneer of "wall paper"; and if etchings could think, it would have envied the seclusion in which I found its brother in oils.
But at least it was not given to the nation. The fact that the National Gallery should possess Cruikshank's colossal failure instead of his Fairy Ring, instead of any etching from "Grimm" or "Points of Humour," is an accusation against common sense and a triumph of irony. ”

“ Yet when the eye succeeds in detaching itself from this pompously evident bottle, it perceives that the artist has cared also for details less immediate, but of a finer eloquence. The liberally filled mantelshelf of plate 1 is at least not a mere labour of memory, though no one exceeds George Cruikshank in the pictorial multiplication of domestic details. This mantelshelf is a symbol; symbols, too, are the open cupboard, so well furnished that a less industrious artist would have shut it, and the ill-drawn but well-nourished felinity by the fire. ”

“ The artist of the seventeenth century drew with minute delicacy the forms and gestures of men. He studied them as a naturalist, indifferent to the individuality of the unit after fixing the individuality of the class to which it belongs. Callot's men are users of the wheel and the estrapade; they roast the husband while they ravish the wife. They are not grotesques: they are men. Maurice Leloir drew men of their age and country no more elegantly for the bravest novel of Dumas. Cruikshank, on the other hand, drew well and hideously not only Irish men, but Irish individuals. ”

“ The idea that power exists in beings of familiar shape and wieldy dimensions to build palaces and fleets without mistakes, without plans and adjustments, without the publication of embryos behind hoardings—to build them without economy and sacrificial fatigue—this is the breathless poem of the crowd. The Brothers Mayhew gave this idea to Cruikshank, and one at least of his etchings for their story—the palace emerging from rock and arborescence—shows that he almost objectified it. ”

“ His world of supernature was a playground of fancy where powers are denoted by the same symbols which inform us that this animal can run, and that animal can fly, and the other animal can think. It is a world of which the major part is peopled with forms so lively, gracious and fanciful that Mr Frederick Wedmore's violent preference of Keene to Cruikshank seems, in view of it, a kind of aggressive rationalism. ”

“ Gigantic is the lunar crescent that shines on the scene; it is a gate through which an intrepid fairy [Pg 161] rides a bat above the revels. In this impressionistic sketch, Cruikshank shows himself participant in the mysterious exultation of the open night where man, intruding, feels neither seen nor known. The Fairy Ring belongs to the poetry of humour. It perorates for a supernaturalist whose fashionable ignorance, touched with less durable vulgarity, blinded him to such visions as, in our time, the poet "A. E." has depicted. ”

“ Gillray's plate was like sudden sympathy producing something so absolutely suitable for swearing at, that patients smiled in easy-chairs at grief. [Pg 171]
Broad humour has an eye on sex. The uncle who, on being asked at dinner for an opinion on a lady's costume, observes that he must go under the table to form it, is a type of the broad humorist in modern life. Cruikshank had none of that tenderness for women's clothes which in modern representation removes altogether the pudical idea from costume and substitutes the idea of witchery by foam of lace and coil of skirts. ”

“ One can only say that humour, like a sparrow, alights without regard to conventions. The majority can laugh with Rabelais, though they have not the idealism which created Theleme. Jokes that annoy the nose are no longer tolerable in art, but in Cruikshank's time so wholesome a writer as Captain Marryat thought Gillray worth imitating in his translation of disease into terms of humour. ”

“ It would be a species of literary somnambulism to wander further in a path of bibliography where ideas must be taken as they come instead of being ideally chosen and grouped. There is this mischief in Cruikshank's fecundity, that it tends to convert even a fairly bright critic into a scolytus boring his way through a catalogue. We emerge from our burrowing more percipient than before of the speculative nature of the undertaking to illustrate illustrious works of imagination. [Pg 203] Sinking in competitive humour is akin to drowning ”

“ Gillray's name, in my estimation, outweighs Cruikshank's at the foot of such publications, while Rowlandson's weighs less. Together these three masters of caricature compose a constellation of third and fourth Georgian humour.
But we have by no means done with Cruikshank [Pg 8] when we have admired him there. A greater Cruikshank remains to be admired. Of him there is no assignable master; neither Hogarth nor Gillray. He is the illustrator whose fame makes more than six hundred books and pamphlets desirable; he is truly an artist, a maker of beauty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We will take leave of Cruikshank as a fairy artist by a look at a sketch for his picture The Fairy Ring. He painted the picture, which is his best oil-painting, in 1855 for the late Henry Miller of Preston, for £800. The sketch referred to sold at Sotheby's in 1903 for £25, 10s. This sketch—a painting—I saw at the Royal Aquarium, as in a bleak railway station without the romance of travel. The Fairy King stands on a mushroom about which rotate two rings of merrymakers between which run torch bearers. They are mad, these merrymakers, and madness is delight. ”

“ Excepting two much-admired German leprechauns or fairy cobblers in one of Cruikshank's twenty-two etchings, they do not present a fairy worth smiling at, and these cobblers, boundlessly delighted by a present of clothes, are, of course, very far from being of the angelic élite of Fairyland, as drawn by Sir Joseph Noel Paton for Mrs S. C. Hall. But Fairyland is in the imagination of democracy, and he is a good patriot of that country who amuses us with its "freaks," for they are dear to the hoi polloi which appreciate novelty more than perfection. ”

“ This picture of a boy in church looking passionately unconscious of the fact that his sacrilegious pegtop is lying on the grave of a knight in full view of the beadle, is an anecdote painted more for God to laugh at than for Christians of the "so-called nineteenth century," but a philosophic sightseer like myself rejoices in it. This picture and The Fairy Ring, already praised, reveal Cruikshank's [Pg 243] talent sufficiently to prevent one from regretting that he ultimately preferred covering canvases to furrowing plates. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In A Pop Gun (1860) there is a pathetically feeble engraving, after a drawing by Cruikshank of Prince Albert and the late Queen, which almost brings tears to the eyes, its insipidity is so loyally unconscious. And what does all his marvellous needlework in the Great Exhibition novel entitled "1851: or The Adventures of Mr and Mrs Cursty Sandboys," accomplish for satire in comparison with what it accomplishes as a puff and a fanfare? Here, as in the Comet of his ill-fated Magazine (1854) , is a skill beside which his Georgian caricatures are but a brat's defacement of his Board School wall. ”

“ Cruikshank in his Grimm mood is for the "living drollery" which cured Sebastian's [Pg 147] scepticism concerning the phœnix and the unicorn. He rejoicingly presents a nose as long as a garden hose—a nose worthy of the beard which travels from page 6 to page 7 of his "Table-Book" (1845) . He refreshes us with the humorous pleasure of the giant inspecting Thumbling on the palm of his hand; and he convulses us with the vocal display of the ass, dog and cat which plunge through the glass of a window into the robbers' room. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The convict who closes his eyes has the sagacity of a sentient corpse; the shadow he casts on the screen which two convicts draw around the bed is, in effect, a creature to startle us, and the visible half of the chaplain's top-hat lying on a bench in a corner of the drawing is an irony which seems to belong to a later age than Cruikshank's.
The Bottle, employed as an argument by Mr William Cash, converted Cruikshank to teetotalism. The result has been to present the artist to modern hedonists in the light of a ludicrous bore. ”

“ Undoubtedly, the workhouses in England of the third decade of the nineteenth century are in popular fancy all ruled by the nameless master in cook's uniform, of whom Oliver [Pg 104] asked more, but it is not Boz's master, it is Cruikshank's. All beadles are one Mr Bumble—the Bumble of Boz and Cruikshank, though without the shadow of the sack with which the novelist eclipsed him. The etched scene where Fagin, frying sausages, receives Oliver in a den of thieves, has a squalid comfortableness—a leering charity—which praises Hell. ”

“ We are now at the end, and cannot stimulate the muse of our prose to further efforts. She being silent obliges our blunt British voice to speak for itself. Inasmuch as Cruikshank was a mannerist, he is inimitable except by them who take great pains to vex the critical of mankind. ”