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think that august body would have great- we do not say which would-produce a

very unfavourable impression. In the first place for it may be as well to clear the ground as regards this matter-he is entirely devoid of all sense of what is usually regarded as beauty. This is so obvious that, like the statement that Milton had no humour, it has become one of the commonplaces of criticism. Like many commonplaces, however, it requires and will repay rigid examination. We admit then that an inspection of the artist's work, however sympathetically conducted, would fail to discover a single face or figure, whether male or female with the exception, perhaps, of Madame

ly honoured itself by such an appointment. Dickens, though deprecating Mr. Cruikshank's utilitarian employment of fairies as teachers of teetotalism, was full of respect for the artist's genius.* Mr. Francis Turner Palgrave,t to come to more recent judgments, is similarly laudatory; and Mr. P. G. Hamerton, in his interesting work on Etchers and Etching, is full of praise as regards technical skill and quality of work. And, lastly, for we do not care to multiply evidence, Mr. Ruskin, whose praise of any individual is generally relieved against a gloomy background of contempt for his own contemporaries, says, characteristical- Rachel in the Omnibus - which ly : "Among the reckless losses of the right services of intellectual power with which this country must be charged, very few are, to my mind, more to be regretted than that which is involved in its having turned to no higher purpose than the illustration of the career of Jack Sheppard and of the Irish Rebellion, the great, grave (I use the word deliberately, and with large meaning), and singular weaknesses. It is so rare a visitant, genius of George Cruikshank." ‡

was

beautiful by regularity of feature or purity of form. In other words, the classical ideal is here entirely wanting. Nor does prettiness take its place. This quality which, though pleasant in itself, has been regarded, not altogether without reason, as one of the curses of English art, luring it from the pursuit of higher things, has never been one of Mr. Cruikshank's

lurking so persistently, when present And yet, notwithstanding this concur- at all, in odd nooks and corners, in the rence of opinion, notwithstanding the spirals of a bean stalk, or the homely patent fact that the artist's work is now, adornments of a chamber, that it may and always has been, popular, in the best fairly be left out of the question. And sense of the word, we can perfectly if, in the absence of classic beauty and imagine that many well-educated persons modern prettiness, we seek for what was - well-educated that is generally, though regarded as beauty by the great Northnot in art might turn from a collection ern painters, by Dürer, for instance, and of his illustrations in honest distaste. Holbein, and Rembrandt, viz., the eviTo the uneducated their humour and di-dence of strongly marked character, and rectness of aim and result would always of the influence exercised by time and appeal irresistibly. The critical connois-circumstance on the human countenance seur would value them for their beauty of and form, we shall be equally disappointworkmanship and excellent qualities of ed. Mr. Cruikshank's power—and to light and shade. But to those whose us this is more singular, for his genius is eyes are still closed to the latter source essentially Gothic, essentially one in of pleasure, and open rather to impres- family with that of the men we have just sions of grace and well-ordered pretti- named Mr. Cruikshank's power is not ness, than of sturdy strength or quaint here. His sense of beauty, if so be that hilarious fancy, there are certain manner- our investigations will discover any, lies isms in Mr. Cruikshank's style, certain elsewhere. limitations in his powers, which might

Furthermore, it must be admitted that his drawing of the face and figure, except

See "Frauds on the Fairies," in Household Words when the subject is grotesque, generally

for October 1, 1853.

† See Mr. Palgrave's Essays on Art.

Modern Painters, Vol. V. p. 271.

leaves something to be desired, and is a good deal injured by one or two disa

or woman,

greeable mannerisms. Speaking of the garments which are preternaturally tight, former, Mr. Ruskin says, "his works and made of stuffs with a decidedly ... are often much spoiled by a curious- "loud" pattern; and their coats are of a ly mistaken type of face, divided so as to strangely obsolete cut. But the excuse is give too much to the mouth and eyes, naught. The old gentleman whom one and leave too little for forehead, the eyes sometimes meets walking about in the blue being set about two-thirds up, instead of coat and brass buttons, the redundant at half the height of the head." Similar-stock, and high collar, the frilled shirt, and ly in his more serious compositions, and even the tights and buckled shoes of a past in what may be called his pictures of generation, still looks like a gentleman genteel comedy, the figures are often or rather does or does not, according to awkwardly posed and ill-drawn, and, the stuff which is in him, and not accordwhich is a very damaging defect in such ing to the coat he wears. H. B.'s persubjects, they terribly lack "breeding." sonages are the contemporaries of those A really satisfactory lady or gentleman of Mr. Cruikshank, and dress similarly; seems almost beyond the compass of the and, moreover, they are intended to be artist's skill. This is strange; but so it caricatures, but, though stiffly drawn, is. Take the illustrations to Frank Fair- and without much vitality, they generally legh- though not among his best work, have an air of high breeding, and even of chiefly for the reason that they deal al-courtliness. And so Leech, whose forte most entirely with "high life" - they are perfectly fair samples as bearing on this question. See the frontispiece. No doubt it is difficult for a man to look well in the garb which custom prescribes on a wedding day. Still the outraged laws of taste do not require that he should look quite so vulgar and simpering as these three young groomsmen who are escorting their respective bridesmaids out of church. Or see again the portrait of "Frank" himself— a model of goodfeeling and scholarship, according to the story in the "mysterious bonnet " scene; or the "private pupils," wherever they are delineated. All are snobs. As to the undergraduates in the two wineparty pictures, perhaps it is not quite fair to bring them forward, as they may be supposed to have imbibed too freely, and therefore not to be in best portrait trim, -and, moreover, Mr. Cruikshank, in his zeal for temperance, may have meant them to point a dreadful moral; but they really are a thoroughly taproom set; and yet little worse than the soberer char

acters.

Now, it might, perhaps, be urged in extenuation, that a certain antique fashion of dress had something to do with this prevailing impression of vulgarity. For Mr. Cruikshank's personages wear lower

• See Appendix to the Elements of Drawing.

certainly was not the delineation of the
signs of intellect in man
could yet execute what is recognizably a
lady or gentleman, with no better help
than that afforded by the fashions of
thirty years ago. No, the explanation
must be sought elsewhere.

And it will be found, we think, in the same set of influences which also account, at least in our opinion, for the unsatisfactory drawing in the artist's work, and for the awkwardness of pose and attitude in many of his figures. We do not here refer to the fact that he received no academic training.* Stricter discipline at this earlier stage of his career might have done something for him, no doubt; still, it was not indispensable. Leech, with much less teaching, always places his personages, as if by inspiration, in the most natural position. They are never affected; they never attitudinize; one is never tempted to wonder how they got where they are, and what they will do next; their limbs are perfectly under their own control; you have the same feeling in looking at them as you have about the persons in real life, the same impression of propriety in gesture and expression. And if as much

Though entered as a student at the Academy, he derived no advantage from the instruction there, owing partly to the crowded state of the school, and partly to his own shortness of sight.

--

cannot always be said of Mr. Cruikshank | is an amazing creature. You look at him see, for instance, the secondary figures as you do at some of the long-legged in the illustrations entitled "The Un- birds in the Zoological Gardens, and expected Reverse" and the "Striking wonder where can be the muscles that Position," in Frank Fairlegh it must move these attenuated limbs. Then the be owing to other causes. And these fashions! People did dress oddly, no causes, we consider, are traceable to the doubt, and there always has been, and influence upon eye and hand of the art probably always will be, a certain miby which his early years were surrounded nority who will out-Herod Herod in their in the days of which he says — "When I attire. But not to this extent! The was a mere boy, my dear father kindly laws of gravitation, if not of gravity, allowed me to play at etching on some of would have prevented it. his copper-plates little bits of shadows, or little figures on the back-ground and to assist him a little as I grew older, and he used to assist me in putting in hands and faces."

which the artist has kept most clear of his usual habits of exaggeration, in which he approaches most nearly to the more delicate satire that lurks in M. Tenniel's cartoons for Punch, or the earlier and abler sketches in Vanity Fair.

It is true that in some of the best work of the men of that generation, the portraits are excellent. The thin face and eager, earnest manner of Burke,-they used to call him the Jesuit in those days, The art into the practice of which Mr. - the vehement portliness of Fox, the Cruikshank was thus, as we may say, stateliness of Pitt, the heaven-born Minborn-for his father was one of its vota-ister, are brought before you with a vivries was strong, course, vigorous cari- idness, which, of course, cannot be emucature, the very life of which was gro-lated by the best verbal description. But tesqueness and wild exaggeration. Its then these are precisely the pictures in great living master was Gillray, a man of wonderful fertility of invention and real humorous genius; and after him Rowlandson, for all his brutishness, occupied, perhaps, the most prominent place. We all know their prints. You come across them in old collections, in the portfolios of the curious, in side-street printshops. You may read of them in Mr. Wright's Caricature History of the Georges. They arrest the eye with their crude colour and broad humour. They pretty frequently repel it by features much more than questionable. The allegory in which the satire is clothed is often elaborate and recondite. The heathen mythologies, and Holy Writ itself, are ransacked for types and allusions; but yet there is something elementary and almost childish in the form of the fun. 66 Any stupid hand could draw a hunchback, and write 'Pope' underneath," says Thackeray, in his delightful paper on the poet; and similarly though it would certainly be false to say that Gillray's hand was stupid -still, it must be owned that the wit of distortion is the wit neither of refinement nor supreme skill. And these caricatures revelled in distortion. The fat men and women are so preposterously fat; the lean ones so impossibly lean. If a gentleman bows, he breaks his back; if a lady dances, she capers about in a manner quite galvanic. The typical Frenchman, who reappears pretty constantly, and under circumstances of great personal and national humiliation,

* English Humourists.

*

This was, however, the art into the practice of which Mr. Cruikshank threw himself at the beginning of his career, with all the ardour of youth and genius. His first recorded work bears date 1803, when he was only eleven years of age. But this, of course, could only be a childish production. His real entrance into the battle of life, then raging with particular fierceness, was in 1808; and, considering that he was but sixteen, it must be confessed that he carried into the fray a singularly practised hand and a very sturdy weapon, -not a rapier, perhaps, but certainly a very effective quarter-staff. He did not indeed effect a revolution in the style of political and social caricature,

that was reserved for other hands; and if he had died in 1820, he would have been remembered, probably, as one of the ablest of Gillray's followers and compeers, but not as what he has since shown himself to be a great and original genius. Still, what wealth of energy he threw into those early works! How vividly they reflect the thoughts and passions of the time! True, the scandals to which so many of them refer are forgotten by all except the professed student. Who now knows what was the precise nature of the revelations of "Molly Clarke," which made such a stir, and earned for her astute countenance a frequent place

in these sketches? What was the dis-humorous groan when the Princess creditable expedition to R- Hall, in Charlotte is announced as about to prewhich the Prince of Wales played, seem- sent the country with an heir to the throne. ingly, anything but an august figure? Alas! he might have spared himself that Whose memory is sufficiently retentive to jest. Fate gave it a sorry ending, and keep a place for all that royal personage's the prophecy was bitterly belied. No nusins and misdemeanours? But though merous, expensive progeny came of that the recollection of details is gone, the ill-starred marriage. Within a very few general impression remains, and is con- days, England, and the artist himself, siderably strengthened and vivified by were lamenting, with a sincerity of which these contemporary records. And there there can be no doubt, over the grave of are others which require no special inter- the mother and her first-born. But to pretation. Any one can understand the return to gayer themes. There had presatire when the Prince is represented as viously been much of our insular pride of pausing in the midst of a dance to ex- purse in the ridicule cast by the artist on press his satisfaction because his wife is Prince Leopold for his poverty, he leaving the room hurt and angry; or, landed on our shores in a pitiful state of again, where he is shown as hopelessly destitution, according to the caricature, intoxicated, with his garter half undone, —and some of our general insular arroa slave to the women by whom he is sur- gance in the earlier representations of the rounded. The subject was a favourite Prince of Orange, as a Dutch toy, played one with the artist. Again and again do with for a moment, and then to be cast we come across the figure of aside, by the Princess.

The man all shaven and shorn, All covered with orders, and all forlorn,

"there

Most of the events of the time are illustrated by this prolific pencil in a similar spirit: the buxom Princess's as he is described in one of the stinging quarrel with her father, and flight from pamphlets which Mr. Cruikshank then Carlton House in a hackney coach; Lord illustrated.* Byron's quarrel with his wife, and deNo very decided party bias is discover-parture from England, solaced by his own able in the political works of these early verses; the trial of Lord Cochrane, afteryears. George IV. is caricatured pretty wards Lord Dundonald; the Queen's freely, no doubt, more freely, perhaps, trial, of course, several times; the Cato than any one else, but his enemies are Street conspiracy; the amazement of not spared. An occasional shaft is shot Blucher at being made a doctor by the at the Queen, and Tom Paine and Cob- University of Oxford; and the O. P. riots, bett come in for their well-merited share which made havoc of Covent Garden of opprobrium. If the artist abhorred Theatre, then under the haughty managetyranny, he also hated revolution. He ment of John Kemble. In the caricahad no mission to plant his battery among tures on the latter subject, though they the ranks of Whig or Tory, and bombard assume a very personal and offensive the other side with consistent fury. His form in the "Stroller's Progress,' work-and this gives it the greater his- is a peculiar feature to be noted. Mr. torical value represents that sturdy Cruikshank's satire-it was the fault of John Bull feeling which, even now, un- nearly all the satire of the time- - generderlies all surface party divisions, and ally vulgarizes its object. It does not was so particularly strong at the begin- vulgarize "Black Jack," as Kemble seems ning of this century. He is the type of to have been called in the hour of his unthe Anglo-Saxon grumbler. Nothing popularity; and the "manager full of pleases him except the victories over the scorn" is a fine figure. Whether this French. For the Court and its ways, its was an involuntary tribute to the splenextravagance and dissolute habits, he en- did masculine beauty which contempotertains the most unbounded contempt.rary report ascribes to the man, or whether He does not scruple to accuse its hang- it was the result of respectful admiration ers-on of selling intelligence to the ene- here again genuinely British - for his my. The royal princes are a set of proud bearing under adversity, and his harpies, fattening on the spoils wrung undisguised contempt for the roaring from the people. The Ministry of the day are, of course, always fair game. Popular as she is, he cannot repress a

The House that Jack Built, 1818.

mob of his adversaries, we cannot say. But a certain circumstance inclines us to the latter view, and this is the character of the later portraits of Napoleon.

Towards Boney himself, in the days of

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unless we misread the signs, an earnestness of passion, a dignity of suffering in the pictures of the great Emperor, which show that the artist felt he was dealing with no common overthrow, and that buf

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his prosperity, and towards the French of his baneful presence, peace and plenty nation whom he governed, and the French will return to the earth. Still, through army he commanded, Mr. Cruikshank all their accumulated horrors, there is, entertained the most thoroughly British feelings. We are perfectly sure, from internal evidence, that it would have been useless to endeavor to prove to him, either by statistics based on the number of frogs available for human consump-foonery would be out of place. tion, or by any other process of argu- what is more singular, in the very clever ment, that those animals were not the caricature, entitled the "Devil among the staple food of the country. Probably, Tailors," executed during the flicker of however, no true Briton then living, ex- Napoleon's prosperity on his return from cept perhaps some disaffected reformers, Elba, and showing his sudden irruption not unjustly suspected of Jacobinism, among the monarchs of Europe, seated would have cared to undertake the proof. cross-legged at their work, the pictorial A belief in the hunger of our enemies advantage is altogether on his side. was an article of the national creed. Louis XVIII. has, of course, been knockWhen an Englishman and a Frenchman ed out of his place. England is picking are about to engage in mortal combat, him up. Prussia makes at the intruder, the former- we are following Mr. Cruik- armed with a pair of scissors. Constershank yearns to give the poor starve-nation is the prevailing sentiment; and ling fellow before him a meal as a prelimi- in the midst of the hubbub, Napoleon nary to the encounter. Nor is fiercer sits serene and confident, the only selfsatire wanting in these works, as when, possessed figure. True his feet are of a apparently during the hundred days that peculiar shape, but what is a trifling defollowed the return of Napoleon from formity when one is master of the situaElba, a large ape propounds to his small- tion? er brethren a code of laws beginning Unquestionably there is coarseness in thus: "Ye shall be vain, fickle, and much of this early work. The age was foolish." For all such sentiments there coarse, and tolerated great plainness of was, of course, the legitimate excuse speech. The immorality of George's not available for those who, like Mr. Free- Court, whether as Regent or King, was man, take up the same parable now - of so palpable and notorious, that righta fierce war and its attendant exaspera-minded men might, perhaps, be excused tion of feeling. And Boney himself, as for assailing it with the first weapons that Mr. Thackeray observes, what a deal of came to their hands. Whether, however, kicking he had to undergo! How un- satire on such subjects translated into pleasant are the straits in which the little art, and reproducing therefore, though dark Corsican is placed! At every new possibly against the designer's will, an disaster, whether in the Peninsula, or immoral image, be not calculated to do Germany, or at Moscow, how very pal- more harm than good, is a question we pably he is made to lick the dust. And should certainly answer in the affirmative. when not undergoing punishment him- It is a question, however, so entirely of self, how outrageously he belabours his the past, so absolutely devoid of any but followers; every bone in poor Talley- a retrospective importance, as to be rand's body must have been sore after worth no more than a passing allusion. such cuffing. But as the great Emperor's When Mr. Cruikshank was consulted light begins to wane, and to be swallowed about the preparation of a complete catfirst in the twilight of Elba, and then in alogue of his works, he objected that in the dark night of St. Helena, the "the subjects of many of the earlier artist's heart seems to relent towards ones were ill chosen, and not such as his him. His heart, be it observed, not his own judgment would have selected;" head. He still depicts him with cloven and we can imagine that the rigid morfeet and the other marks and insignia of alist, who has advocated temperance evil. He drums him to Elba to the tune with such fervour, and demonstrated of the Rogue's March. He would still "the folly of crime," in so fine a plate, erect a monument of human skulls to his and even held that the fairies poor goshonor. He consigns him chained into samer creatures-ought to be made to the hands of Satan, and slashes at him with the fiery sword of justice, and has no difficulty in believing that, once rid design, is attributable to Mr. Cruikshank.

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Of which, however, the execution only, and not the

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