GEORGE CRUIKSHANK.*
THERE are many ways of writing a biography, and one which seems to be growing in favour with authors and the public, is to allow the subject in great measure to tell his own story. The result is apt to be a record which loses in coherence, perhaps, more than it gains in truth, which is less a life than materials for a life ; less. the picture of a man, than a bundle of qualities, emotions, and actions, strung on an almost invisible thread of character. At the end of such a book, the reader is apt to be scarcely less ignorant of the real nature of the subject of the biography than he was at the beginning, unless he is specially skilful at constructing a mental picture from the disjecta membra a actions, feelings, and thoughts that have been brought before him. We confess that in some ways we prefer the older method, which frankly selects from the mass of material chiefly that which is suitable to its purpose, and rejects irrelevant matter with an unsparing hand. At all events, if one is at all given to mental laziness—and who is not, in these days of multifarious interests P—it saves a world of trouble to have our composition done for us, and not to have to drag all the details of a life hither and thither, ere we can get any notion of it as a whole.
In the present instance of Mr. Blanchard jerrold's Life of George Oruilcehanh, the defect, if it be a defect, which is hinted at in the above paragraph, is almost the only one of which we have to complain. The book is not a laborious, possibly not an .exhaustive, one. It does not deal, or profess to deal, much with the social and political events of the days in which the great caricaturist lived, and it does not set itself to give any very profound analysis or minute description of the character of his art. It chats pleasantly along, following the course of the artist's work and life, giving little anecdotes of his doings and those of his contemporaries, telling how many copies were sold of this etching, how great an effect produced by that, and detailing his various friendships, squabbles, and undertakings generally. No greater praise, perhaps, could be given to a book of this kind than to say that it is admirably readable; that from first to last the author has gathered a large amount of information bearing upon his snbject, that he arranges his material with the skill of a practised writer. The book, too, is filled with the best possible kind of illustrations, namely, those from Cruik- shank's own work, and though some of these lose almost in- expressibly from being only woodcuts from the original etchings, the majority are good. It is essentially a book of which quotation is unable to give a correct idea, for its chief merit is its dexterous stringing-together of quotations from other writers, and there is scarcely a page of interesting matter in which Mr. Jerrold has not pressed into the service of his story the descriptions of Ruskin, Thackeray, Forster, Sala, or Craikshank himself. The following, which is et propos of Cruikshank's liking for the appear- ance of a dustman,will serve to give an idea of Mr. Jerrold's style of writing :—"Dusty Bob was always a favourite character with George (Cruikshank). The two brothers, who enjoyed their frolics together very much in their early days, having resolved to go to a masquerade in Covent Garden, Robert, who was fond of dress, selected a gorgeous Cavalier costume, while George re- solved to appear as a dustman. The dustman of those days in his Sunday clothes was a picturesque object, with his well- blacked, fan-tailed hat, white-flannel jacket, scarlet-plush breeches, white stockings, and neat gaiters. He had a liberal display of linen, and about his neck a bright-tinted 'Barcelona' kerchief. But George Cruikshank resolved to go as the work- a-day dustman, as he had studied him in his low haunts. He obtained a dustman's old patched suit, begrimed his face and hands artistically, put a dirty clay pipe in his mouth, and strolled on a summer's evening from Dorset Street to Covent Garden Theatre, where, with all a dustman's roughness, he pre- sented his ticket. The collector hesitated, amazed that so low a fellow should have obtained possession of the ticket. Hain't it reglar P' shouted the dustman."
On the whole, what sort of a picture is it that we gain from Mr. Jerrold's book on Cruikshank P He seems to have been a
• George Cruileshanle. By Blanchard Jerrold. London : Chatto and Wiudna. bright, strong character, feeling with almost equal intensity the laughing and the tragic sides of life,—glad to smoke a pipe in the "Coal Hole," to have a bout with a pugilist or a supper with a lord, and not inapt, when song and supper, pipes aud pugilism were over, to wander about the darker ways of London life, and pause under the shadow of the workhouse wall and the New- gate gibbet. We have no space, and this is not the place, in which to try to estimate the scope and character of his genius. In some ways, it was one of the most wonderful that the world has ever known, especially in its adaptation of ends to means. In all ways, it possessed one great characteristic of genius,— it was essentially inimitable. Whatever the world of Art may see in the future, it will never see another Cruikshank. He was the product of a stern and stirring time, in which national abuses and national triumphs went hand in hand, and the character of the period is impressed upon his work. He is often vulgar, often coarse, nearly always violent, and a caricaturist by nature, even when he tries to be most serious ; but he is, nevertheless, a strong, honest man, taking the "right side" by a sort of blundering instinct, and hitting out right and left in defence of all things that he considers honest, wholesome, and true, and against whatever seems to him to be base or mean. Looking through these illus- trations, one is struck by the fact that with all their won- derful fertility of invention, there is a strong element of common- sense running through even the most fanciful. There is at bottom of each drawing a real meaning, which rests upon a sub- stratum of true feeling. And there is also something of the large method of epic poetry about them, both in their meaning and their technique,—in truth, there was nothing petty about either the man or his work. He was about the last genuine John Bull in English Art.
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