Cruikshank's didactic work was the offspring of his journalism. No man can journalise with spirit and remain uncritical. Criticism is, in truth, the soul of caricature, which by stressing the emphasis of Nature on face and expression makes even simpletons judges of grandees. Photography itself is on the side of illusion; but caricature has X-rays for the deformed fact. That a habit of criticism should evolve a passion for preaching is only natural, though it is the modern critic with his hedonistic bias who has armed the word didactic with a sting. Even such a critic must admit that Cruikshank's preaching was from living texts and that the preacher seemed well versed in "St Giles's Greek." But before speaking specifically of his didactic drawing we will consider what led up to it. A balladier of circa 1811 threatens mankind as follows:—

This animal outburst breathes the spirit of all the "bang up" books of the last Georgian period, and might almost have served as a motto for Pierce Egan's "Life in London" (1821), and David Carey's "Life in Paris" (1822). Blanchard Jerrold's bibliography of Cruikshank begins with "A Dictionary of the Slang and Cant Languages" (1809), to which the artist contributes The Beggars' Carnival—a folding frontispiece. In assisting his brother Robert—who styled himself "original suggester and artist of the 2 vols." containing "Life in London" and its sequel—to illustrate the rambles and sprees of "Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom," George seems to have seen carnival on a more liberal scale. "Life in London" ranges from the Westminster [Dog] Pit to Rotten Row, and from the [Cyprian] Saloon of Covent Garden to the Press Yard of Newgate. One of the spirited plates (Tom and Jerry taking Blue Ruin) powerfully presents some pitiable pothouse types, and is a text, though it is not a sermon. Another illustration, reproduced here, compares equally with Dick and His Companions Smashing the Glim in Carey's work. While illustrating "Life in Paris," George, working alone, pursued the example set by Robert when they collaborated. Carey credits him with "accuracy of local delineation"—praise which he has often and variously deserved—yet it must be confessed that Dick Wildfire like Corinthian Tom is at once commonplace and out-of-date. In face he is like George in early manhood as Corinthian Tom was like Robert; that is his chief recommendation. The book may be silently offered to any one who asserts that George's taste in literature was too nice for Pierce Egan. One of his plates turns a catacomb into a scene of vulgar mirth.

These novels of excess were stepping-stones to a sounder realism which we find in "Mornings at Bow Street" (1824) and "More Mornings at Bow Street" (1827). Here the illustrator's task was to illustrate selected police cases, and through the medium of wood engraving a most delectable entertainment was the result. A choleric gentleman's row with a waiter presents itself as a fractured plate in the rim of which two tiny figures display respectively the extremes of napkined deprecation and of kicking impudence. Tom Crib[b]'s pursuit of a coppersmith suggests a wild elephant storming after a frenzy of flying limbs. The genius that was to realise Falstaff is disclosed in the drawing of a drummer boy discovered in a clothes basket. Did he come to Bow Street? we ask, and did those Cupids fighting in the circuit of a wedding-ring come too? The answer is Yes, but because of one who probably was not there, whose name we know.

At one illustration let us cry halt. It represents a foaming pot of beer assaulting a woman who said to the magistrate, "Your honour, it was the beer." In itself it is a masterpiece of delicate literalism. That power of enlivening the inanimate, which humanises the pump, representing Father Mathew at a small party in "The Comic Almanack" of 1844, exasperates this pot and bids it strike home. But what we are to observe particularly is this early presentation to Cruikshank's mind of alcohol as a personality at war with human beings. As far back as 1811, in The Dinner of the Four-in-Hand Club at Salthill, an uproarious piece in the style of Rowlandson's The Brilliants (1801), he put the genius of the bottle into form and anecdote, but here we have the serious aspect of drink obvious even in humour. Beer is striking a woman. In 1832 he produced in The Ale House and the Home a contrast so stated in the title that we need say no more than that the gloomy wife and her baby, sitting by candlelight in the bare room where the man's supper lies to reproach his drink-spoiled appetite, are a sadder sight than the frying-pan of St Bartholomew's Fair in the number of "Scraps and Sketches" where they appear.

To "Sunday in London" (1833)—a capital social satire—Cruikshank contributed fourteen cuts, one of which, The Pay-Table, preserves the memory of those mischievous contracts between publican and foreman, whereby the latter received a percentage of the spendings of his men on drink and the men were provided with drink on the credit of the foreman. It is an admirable study in fuddled perplexity confronted with Bung in a business instead of a Bacchic mood, abetted by a shark of the victim's calling. Two other cuts—mere rabblement and eyesore—leave on the mind a feeling of disgust almost without interest and without shame. The spectator has no sense that these people turned out at church time, raging, leering, tottering, have deteriorated from any average or standard of human seemliness. If it were not for a dog gazing in amazement at one prone drunkard, if it were not for the dog and his question, one would ask, Cui bono?

This is not missionary work—Cruikshank was only "flirting with temperance" as late as 1846—and we need have no compunction in seeking relief from such ugliness in the exquisite burlesque of pathos contained in Over-head and Under-foot (1842). Forget who can the agonised impatience bolted and Chubb-locked in the breast of that lonely bachelor, but expressed in his folded arms and upturned face.

1842, which saw that, also saw John O'Neill's poem "The Drunkard," and especially The Raving Maniac and the Driv'ling Fool, one of four etchings by Cruikshank which illustrate it. An anonymous writer, in an article for an 1876 reprint of the etchings, says that these two figures "are the most forcible ever drawn by the artist's pencil." This opinion is unjust to the force of Cruikshank's comic figures, and to that terrible pair, Fagin in the condemned cell and Underhill bawling at the stake, but the force of the etching thus praised is extraordinary. With parted blubber lips and knees relaxed, his nerveless left hand dangling at the wrist like a dead white leaf, his right hand grasping the gin-glass, the fool, unconscious of tragedy, faces the maniac who streams upon the air sleeves that much exceed the length of his homicidal arms. By reason of the delicacy of the etching which conveys these haunting figures, they excite pleasure before horror, and always in horror a little pleasure too.

We now come to the famous series entitled The Bottle (1847) and its sequel The Drunkard's Children (1848). Both these works were printed from glyphographic blocks and have as little charm as a stentorian oration in a small chapel. The story they tell, told also in verse by Dr Charles Mackay, is the ruin of a working man and his family through drink. The appeal of The Bottle is simple enough to appal the aborigines of Africa, to say nothing of the East End: the bottle is a "Ju-ju," an evil fetish; the impulse of the beholder is to smash the bottle rather than to spill and waste its contents. 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. In plate 2 the cupboard holds naught but two jugs; the lean cat prowls over the bare table; an ornament on the mantelshelf lies on its side. Had an artist and not a missionary composed plate 3, we might have been spared the indecency of a bottle in Lucy's lap when the furniture is distrained to pay the bottle's debt. Yet with what horrid strength does the maniac in plate 7 clutch the mantelpiece, whose bare ledge is lit by a dip stuck in a bottle, while all the neighbours stare at something whose face we cannot see! The artist has shouted till he was hoarse, but his story is in our marrows.

The Drunkard's Children contains one masterpiece: plate 7, the boy's death on the convict-ship. 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. Certain it is that in his version of Cinderella (1854) he causes the dwarf to inform the King that "the history of the use of strong drinks is marked on every page by excess which follows, as a matter of course, from the very nature of their composition," the italics being Cruikshank's, though they might well be mine. Teetotalism needs talking and writing, and Cruikshank was happy to oblige. He possessed a fluent pen, and delivered lay sermons with enthusiasm and originality.

About four years after his abandonment of alcohol, Cruikshank began to figure as a pamphleteer. In 1851 appeared his "Stop Thief"—containing hints for the prevention of housebreaking, hallmarked by teetotalism: it has a drawing of a burglar retiring because his companion discloses a board containing the words, "No Admittance Except On Business." In 1852 came the "Betting Book," against both drink and betting; this has a drawing of two wonderfully knowing fox-faced bipeds contemplating a row of geese absorbed in the perusal of the betting lists. Followed "The Glass and the New Crystal Palace" (1853), in which, after confessing that he "clung to that contemptible, stupid and dirty habit" of smoking three years after he had "left off wine and beer," he adds, "at last I laid down my meerschaum pipe and said, 'Lie you there! and I will never take you up again,'" The drawings of anserine flight and intoxication here reproduced compel us to admit that the cerebral compartment containing Cruikshank's sense of humour was watertight. In 1854 came "George Cruikshank's Magazine." It lived long enough for him to inveigh against tobacco through the medium of a rather lifeless etching entitled Tobacco Leaves No. 1; and he died before he could publish in it certain drawings, included, I believe, in a series given to the world in 1895 by Sir B. W. Richardson, which ridicule the "hideous, abominable, and most dangerous custom" of sucking the handles of sticks and umbrellas. To the didactic excesses of his "Fairy Library" I need not further refer, but in 1856 came a quasi-temperance pamphlet, "The Bands in the Parks," where the devil plays the violin with his tail; in 1857, "A Slice of Bread and Butter" (re-issued with prefatory "Remarks" in 1870), a good-humoured satire on conflicting views of charity towards waifs; in 1860, "A Pop-Gun ... in Defence of the British Volunteers of 1803"; in 1863, "A Discovery concerning Ghosts," in which he claimed to be the only one who ever thought "of the gross absurdity ... of there being such things as ghosts of wearing apparel, iron armour, walking sticks, and shovels;" and here we have a mild and pleasant hint of the inspissated egoism which dictated "The Artist and the Author" (1872), the work in which Cruikshank asserted himself to be the originator of "Oliver Twist," "The Miser's Daughter" and "The Tower of London." This unfortunate but characteristic pamphlet is the last of the series that seems to have been called into existence by the insanabile scribendi cacoËthes induced by his fame as a teetotaler. I said characteristic, because a jealous dislike of seeing his individuality merged into, overshadowed by, or confounded with any other is apparent not only in 1872, but in 1834, when he carefully named in "My Sketch Book" his brother Robert's works, and pictured himself as lifting off the ground, by tongs applied to the nose, their publisher Kidd, for whom he is anxious to state he only illustrated "The Gentleman in Black" (1831). Moreover in 1860 he misused his "Pop-Gun" to picture another publisher, who advertised his nephew Percy as Cruikshank tout court, as a sandwich-man similarly assaulted by him; yet by some freak of humour or affection the "very excellent, industrious, worthy good fellow" Percy, over whom I throw the embroidery of his uncle's praise, bestowed the name of George upon his son, as if for the confusion of bibliographers, and the evocation of a spirit armed with the ghosts of tongs. Indeed the gods themselves seem to have sported with George Cruikshank's name, for Dr Nagler, having read that "the real Simon Pure was George Cruikshank," wrote thus in his "Neues allgemeines KÜnstler-Lexicon" (1842): "Pure Simon, der eigentliche Name des beruhmten Carikaturzeichners Georg [sic] Cruikshank."

Simon Pure shall save us from digression by leading us to a didactic work by Cruikshank of which Mrs Centlivre's "quaking preacher" would have heartily approved. This work is the oil-painting entitled The Worship of Bacchus (1862). It is an old man's athletic miracle, being a picture thirteen feet four by seven feet eight, of which there exists an etching by the same hand of less, though formidable size, which was published June 20, 1864. The oil-painting was presented to the nation by Cruikshank's friends and conveyed to its destination April 8, 1869. Cruikshank drew a fancy sketch of his mammoth on that great day of its life. Little did he imagine what the cognoscenti of the twentieth century would think of it.

I saw it in 1902; visited it much as one visits an incarcerated friend, following a learned official with jingling keys to a dungeon under the show-rooms of the National Gallery. It was alone, was convict 495, alone and dingy. Many phrases have been found for this picture. John Stewart said that it contains "all the elemental types of pictorial grouping, generalised on the two axioms of balance and variety." Another critic said that "it is not even a picture, but a multitude of pictures and bits of pictures crowded together in one huge mass of confusion and puzzle." Cruikshank himself said, speaking August 28, 1862, "I have not the vanity to call it a picture.... I painted it with a view that a lecturer might use it as so many diagrams."

However he felt, Cruikshank spoke correctly. Painted in low relief, the oil-painting presents his intention less satisfactorily than his etching of the same subject. Whatever its demerit, the work is extremely Cruikshankian. Robert and George Cruikshank, in the "Corinthian Capital" of "Life in London," patched up a similarly artificial fabric. George, in a work that should not be mentioned in the same breath—The Triumph of Cupid (1845)—evokes innumerable amatory incidents by means of the tobacco which he renounced so contumeliously. We have in The Worship of Bacchus, the result of a method equally naÏf and ingenious. The root idea is materialised in conjunction with a myriad of associative ideas, and the picture is worse than a confusion; it is a ghastly and ostentatious pattern at which one can neither laugh nor cry. It is the work of a big accomplished child, whose ambition to be grown up has destroyed his charm.

At the summit of the picture Bacchus and Silenus wave wine-glasses while respectively standing and sitting on hogsheads. In the middle of the design is a stone ornamented with death's-heads, on which a drunkard waves a glass and bottle in front of the god and demi-god. The stone has an inscription tributary to the drunkard's victims. On the left side of the throne of Bacchus are a distillery, reformatory, etc.; on the right is a House of Correction, Magdalen Hospital, etc. In short, the picture is a pictorial chrestomathy of drink. That it has converted people, that it has even won the tribute of a man's tears, is not surprising, for it is, or was, full of truthful suggestion seizable by the mind's eye. But it is not beautiful. Thackeray might call it "most wonderful and labyrinthine"; it is ugly and ill painted, for Cruikshank was no Hogarth with the brush.

So it lay, and perhaps yet lies in its dungeon, and overhead Silenus still triumphs divinely drunk on Rubens's canvas; and Bacchus, ardent for Ariadne, leaps from his chariot in that masterpiece of Titian, which Sir Edward Poynter believes is "possibly the finest picture in the world." Poussin's Bacchanalian festivities are still for the mirth of a world whence Bacchus has fled; but the god enthroned on hogsheads is not mistaken for Bacchus now: Bacchus was stronger than Cruikshank. The whole deathless pagan world of beauty and laughter is by him made rosier and more silvery. Cruikshank never drew him; the god he drew was Bung in masquerade.

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.

Let it be remembered, however, that Cruikshank's exposure of ebriety from 1829 to 1875, the date which John Pearce in "House and Home" assigns to his last temperance piece, deserved at times the notice of fame. Matthew Arnold, denying the power of "breathless glades, cheer'd by shy Dian's horn" to calm the spectator of The Bottle, showed more than his ignorance of Diana and her peace. He showed that Cruikshank the preacher was a magician too.

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