We have now to consider Cruikshank as a supernaturalist. Perhaps there is no rÔle in which he is more sincerely esteemed. His simple egoism and self-conceit protected him from an apprehension of the nothingness of matter in the eye of a being who is uncontrolled by the world-idea. He could not conceive that a mind can impose the idea of a form upon an inferior mind, or a mind in sympathy with it: hence his egregious "discovery concerning ghosts." 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. This world, however, contains the Devil, and on this colliery monster we will bestow a few glances.

Cruikshank's best idea of the Devil is comedy of tail. In one of the "Twelve Sketches illustrative of Sir Walter Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830) he shows the archfiend seated on the back of a smiling elf who poses as a quadruped to provide a stool. The fiend is "dighting" an arrow by the light of the flaming hair of an elf who wears an extinguisher on his tail, and a cat enthusiastically plays with the forked appendage of the illustrious artisan. The dignity of labour is here inimitably manifest. Lovably ludicrous, too, is the Devil whom Cruikshank presents in The De'il cam fiddling thro' the Town ("Illustrations of Popular Works," 1830). "Auld Mahoun's" forked tail has caught the exciseman by the cravat. In "Scraps and Sketches" (1832). Cruikshank has another Devil who plays on a gridiron as if it were a guitar, to soothe a man who has been lassoed by his tail. "And if my tail should make you sad I'll strike my light guitar." In "A Discovery concerning Ghosts" (1863) Cruikshank depicts the Devil as lifting a table with his tail and one hoof. One of the Devils offered to my readers—he whom St Medard thwarted—is an example of good work in a bad setting; the machine-ruled sky and "scandalously slurred distance" must be viewed as symptoms of Cruikshank's dislike for Bentley, the publisher of "The Ingoldsby Legends." The cuts from "The True Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil" (1848) replace the perverted Pan—Pan as perverted for the abolition of his prestige—with a plaintive ruffian whose horns and hoofs disgrace a very obvious humanity.

Exit Devil: enter Satan. About 1827 Cruikshank drew him on wood, in the act of calling on his followers as related by Milton in "Paradise Lost," Book I., Il. 314-332. Cruikshank described the drawing referred to, which was engraved by an unconfident hand, as "the best drawing that I ever did in my life." A solitary print of the engraving made of it sold at Sotheby's for £3, 6s. On a towering rock, Satan calls up an army which looks like living ribbon wound up out of the bottomless pit to the ceiling of the air. His personality is felt by the effect of his command, not by his individual appearance. Michelangelo might have favourably considered this book-illustration as a bare sketch of a muster of the damned; for as one looks at it he is tempted to give it to half a dozen painters and "put it in hand."

The naÏve evangelicism of "The Pilgrim's Progress" was productive of more of Cruikshank's serious monsters. 1827 is the date of seven woodcuts by him for this work (Reid 3555-61) which do not impress Mr Spielmann; they are, however, very neatly executed, and the drawing of Christian arriving at the Gate is quite unwarrantably pleasant in its suggestion of conflict and weariness ending in the bosom of hospitality. In 1838 Cruikshank contributed Vanity Fair—an elaborate etching—to a "Pilgrim's Progress" containing plates by H. Melville. Vanity Fair is a skilful catalogue marred by the misnaming of Britain Row. He produced another Vanity Fair, circa 1854, a vehement and uninteresting design which, with companion drawings by him of the same date, appears in Mr Henry Frowde's edition of "The Pilgrim's Progress" (1903). These drawings (only recently engraved) annoyed Mr G. S. Layard, and me they amuse and touch. They show that Cruikshank could draw the face of a man whose mÉtier is goodness, ... and that Apollyon—a veritable creature of tinker-craft in Bunyan's text—was utterly beyond Cruikshank's power to shape according to the crooked splendour of his name. One must not forget that a pious convention of absurdity is a trap for the critic and the humorist alike. I feel that Cruikshank almost loved Bunyan. Witness the large coloured print inscribed in his last decade, "Geo. Cruikshank 1871," where Christian—a Galahad of knightliness—passes through the snake-afflicted valley of the Shadow of Death.

Exit the Pilgrim, and re-enter the Devil. Cruikshank made remarkable successes in two series of illustrations wherein this magnate assumes the form of a man of our world. The books in which they appear are "Peter Schlemihl" by Adelbert von Chamisso (1823) and "The Gentleman in Black" by J. Y. Akerman (1831). To Chamisso the Devil is "a silent, meagre, pale, tall elderly man" wearing an "old-fashioned grey taffetan coat" with a "close-fitting breast-pocket" to it, and he is willing to buy Peter's shadow. Meagre and close-fitting is Cruikshank's idea of him; he is only substantial enough to give posture and movement to his clothes. That is a beautiful etching where he is folding Peter's shadow as a tailor folds a suit and Peter is unaware of the terrible oddity of a foot on the ground having for shadow a foot in the air—a foot no longer subordinate to Peter who will tread the earth in despair when he is a shadowless man; and that is a marrow-thrilling etching where Peter's tempter stands casting two shadows and flourishing a document promising the delivery of Peter's soul to the bearer after its separation from Peter's body. There is a haunting cold brightness about the Schlemihl etchings. If you see them without a sensation of their difference from the work of any body except him who made them, your acquaintance includes a prodigy, a Cruikshank plus x. To J. Y. Akerman the Devil was "a stout, short, middle-aged gentleman of a somewhat saturnine complexion" who "was clad in black" and "had a loose Geneva cloak ... of the same colour." Like Schlemihl's customer he pays with a bottomless purse and in the cuts, engraved by J. Thompson and C. Landells, we see him a grave humorous and sinister person, who after his urbanity has been shaken by the cleverness of the law, is exhibited without warrant of narrative, as Old Horny on a gibbet. I presume the above-mentioned J Thompson, by the way, to be the John Thompson whom Cruikshank describes at the foot of a letter from this engraver dated "Feb. 7, [18]40," as "the Great, the wonderful Artistic Engraver on wood—and who used to engrave my drawings as no other man ever did."

After the Devil comes Punch, who in the puppet play destroys him. Punch is only by irony a nursery character. He represents the comic genius of murder. A Hooligan may feel like a Pharisee after looking at him. His coarse materialism would affront a pierreuse. Cruikshank drew Punch as early as 1814 in a plate, satirising a fÊte given by the Duke of Portland on the occasion of the baptism of an infant marquis. The plate is entitled "Belvoir Frolic's" [sic] and appears in No. 4 of "The Meteor." A very long-nosed Punch extols the beverage bearing his name, and his infant son falls into a punch-bowl while being baptised by a drunkard. It was not, however, till 1828 that a reasonable joker could call Cruikshank's great hit a punch. That date is on the title-page of "Punch and Judy" edited by J. Payne Collier, for whose publisher (S. Prowett) Cruikshank drew the scenes of the immortal puppet-play as produced by Piccini, who defied any other puppet-showman in England to perform his feat of making the figure with the immoderate neck remove its hat with one hand. Thanks to Piccini, then, Cruikshank's Punch is the real Punch—a goggling miscreant, whose hump is a rigid and misplaced tail and whose military hat, above a crustacean's face, completes a rather melancholy effect of mania. The conductor of "George Cruikshank's Omnibus" confessed to feeling "that it was easy to represent" Punch's "eyes, his nose, his mouth, but that the one essential was after all wanting—the squeak." Cruikshank was barely just to his pencil. As one looks at his Punch one feels that such a being is either a squeaker or a mute. As for the Devil, whose rÔle is so humiliating in the Punch tromedy (as a neologist might call it), he is of an aspect pitiably mean—like a corpse attired in river mud.

After this, it is impossible not to realise the enormity of the compliment paid by the hand of Cruikshank (serving the imagination of G. H.) to Napoleon in that publication of August 1815, rashly stated by Mr Bruton to be the finest Napoleonic caricature, which depicts the imperial exile of St Helena as the Devil addressing a solar Prince Regent. Here the Devil gets the credit of a handsome face and Napoleon the debit of cloven feet.

Cruikshank's representation of the Devil as Old Nick has the absurd merit of recalling his idea of the servant of a good Peri! Compare The Handsome Clear-starcher ("Bentley's Miscellany," 1838) with The Peri [, the Djin] and the Taylor ("Minor Morals, Part III.," 1839). Both these ornaments of my sex have white eyes windowing a black face, and the former, with heraldic sulphur fumes above his figure of Elizabethan dandy, is, if we do not date him, a horrible gibe at the feminine Satan of "sorrows."

Is there, the reader may now ask, not unmindful of the Miltonic drawing already described, no Satan among Cruikshank's Netherlanders, to show that he saw the sublime of evil as clearly as he saw Fagin? Alas for catalogues raisonnÉs! for if it were not for G. W. Reid we could not point the querist to Cruikshank's Lucifer in his illustrations on wood to George Clinton's "Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron" (1825). Of "a shape like to the angels, yet of a sterner and a sadder aspect of spiritual essence," not less beauteous than the cherubim, Cruikshank, with or without an accomplice in another engraver, makes a black and white Moor, jointed like a Dutch doll, with wings which an Icarus would distrust.

Perhaps the most impressive conception of the author of unhappiness which Cruikshank executed was that which he owed to the imagination of Mrs Octavian Blewitt. In his last published etching, The Rose and the Lily (1875), he depicts, by her instruction, a lake out of which appears, like an islet, the weed-covered top of a vast head, the eyes of which are the only visible features. The lake is the abode of "The Demon of Evil" and his eyes of bale are upturned to regard a fairy queen and her suite who hover over a rose and a lily.

Cruikshank's favourite among semi-infernal or hemi-demi-semi celestial characters would seem to have been Herne, the demon of Windsor Forest, whom legend derives from a suicide. Our illustration of Herne appearing to Henry VIII. (1843) is sombre and grandiose. The artist recurred to Herne again in one of his beautiful etchings for "The life of Sir John Falstaff" by R. B. Brough (1858). Falstaff as Herne, with antlers on his head, lies prone beneath the great riven oak which is called Herne's oak, because human Herne is supposed to have hanged himself from a bough of it. 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. For if it is an illustration of Shakespeare, then are these no fairies but Mistress Quickly, Anne Page and other actresses, in a punitive and moralising mood! The last appearance of Cruikshank's Herne is in a drawing, done when the artist was eighty-three, for "Peeps at Life" (1875), in which the demon rides through Windsor Forest with a monk behind him.

It is now time to say a few words about the Cruikshankian ghost. About the year 1860, Cruikshank offered £100 to anyone who should show him a ghost "said to have been seen frequently in the neighbourhood of some Roman Catholic institution near Leicester." No one claimed the money, and Cruikshank remained a religious materialist, charmingly boyish in his amusement over the ghosts of tears and dirt. His natural idea of a ghost was comic in the way of a wise old world that taxes pain and wrath for humour. His designs for Part II. of "Points of Humour" (1824) include a vision of spirits discharged from their bodies by the ministrations of a pompous doctor, who holds his stick against his mouth because Cruikshank condemned the use of "the crutch" as a toothpick. The ugliness of these spirits is not excelled by Cruikshank's Giles Scroggins, in vol. i. of "The Universal Songster" (1825),—a spook whose waving hands like bewitched gloves, exultant toes and nightcap tipsy as a blown flame, are duly noted by Molly Brown. Folklore had a refining influence on Cruikshank when, for Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft," he etched, in 1830, Mrs Leckie, a white-aproned ghost who, by a miracle of Scotchness, is perfectly decorous as she kicks with a high heeled shoe the doctor of physic who "shewed some desire to be rid of her society." Cruikshank's chef d'oeuvre of ghost-humour is an etching for Captain Glascock's "Land Sharks and Sea Gulls" (1838). This triumph of pictorial anecdote confronts us with Ann Dobbs, who has materialised her head and hands for the purpose of exhibiting, with a proper show of accusation, to a whimpering sailor, whose pigtail has risen in homage to her, "the feller piece of the broken bit" of her tomb-stone, which he had stolen for a holy-stone to clean decks with. After this, the reader may be surprised to learn that a ghost, produced by Cruikshank for "The Scourge" of August 1815, was serious enough to be precautiously blacked out before the plate entitled A Financial Survey of Cumberland, Or the Beggar's Petition, was put into general circulation. It is the ghost of Sellis, the Duke of Cumberland's valet, who is made to accuse his earthly master of murder, by these words "Is this a razor I see before me? Thou canst not say I did it." Of that other serious ghost, St Winifred in "Guy Fawkes" (1840), enough has been said. Her dullness is absolutely unmystical, and it is a relief to turn from her to look at The Holy Infant, that prayed as soon as he was born ("Catholic Miracles," 1825), an exquisitely droll sketch, about as large as a penny, of "intense" chubbiness in a hand basin.

Though sympathy with men and women did not make Cruikshank courteous to ghosts, he was led by the credulity and experience of his childhood to be affectionate to fairies and almost patriotic in his feeling about the magical countries in which they dwell. In a note to "Puss in Boots" he informs us that his nurse told him when he was "a very little boy" that the fairies "had houses in the white places"—i.e. fungi—in the corners of cellars. In cellars he accordingly looked for them, "and certainly did ... fancy" that he saw "very, very tiny little people running in and out of these little white houses"—i.e. fungi—and attributed any power he possessed of drawing or describing a fairy to his nurse's communications and his visions in cellars.

Like a sword-swallower I saw in Belfast, I will ask you to "put your hands together," for the anecdote just related is corroborated by the charm of his fairy drawings.

What happened when Cruikshank went into cellars is symbolical of poetry. He saw what was not there by that creative touch of mind which transforms an object by increasing its similitude to something else. In Comic Composites for the Scrap Book (1821), we have intelligent human creatures suggested by arrangements of household implements. As I look at the mundatory erection here reproduced, I anachronistically hum Stephen Glover's "March composed for Prince Albert's Hussars." It is, however, less brilliant than the aldermanic bellows and the doctor (with a mortar for body, cottonwool for hair and labels for feet), to whom he states his symptoms in "Scraps and Sketches" (1831), for they amuse the satirist even at this date when gluttony is merely not moderation and bored sapience is merely not sympathetic wisdom.

Cruikshank then had one great qualification for illustrating fairy tales: he could animate the inanimate. Let us now follow his career as a fairy artist, beginning with his first great success.

In 1822 appeared a post-dated volume of "German Popular Stories ... collected by M. M. Grimm." A companion volume was published in 1826, and both books were adorned by the hand of George Cruikshank. 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. Cruikshank in his Grimm mood is for the "living drollery" which cured Sebastian's scepticism concerning the phoenix 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. Ruskin said of these etchings that they "were unrivalled in masterfulness of touch since Rembrandt; (in some qualities of delineation unrivalled even by him)"; to that eulogy I can only add that they are inspiriting because they are candid and vivid, and show that realism can be on the side of magic.

Passing without pause some tiny cuts, upon which children would pounce for love of gnomes, in "The Pocket Magazine" (1827, 1828), we arrive again at Cruikshank's sketches for Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830), and inspect elves and fairies, barely prettier than mosquitoes, annoying mortals. Worry is incarnate in a horizontal man who is supported in and drawn through the air by elves, directed by two drivers, one on each of his boots. Beautiful is the contempt for herrings of an elf standing on a plate which a comrade is about to smash with a hammer in the presence of a cheaply-hospitable (and sluttish) housewife whom a dozen elves have pulled downstairs by her feet.

Fables which invent sorrow to prevent it can only be classed as fairy-tales by a sacrifice of the mot juste, which I make in order to call attention to an exquisite quartet of etchings by George Cruikshank, illustrating Richard Frankum's verses entitled "The Bee and the Wasp" (1832). No hand but his who drew the shadow-buyer in Peter Schlemihl could have drawn the hair-lines of the criminal insect who mocks the drowning bee in the third of these etchings. So pleased and delicate a malignancy is expressed in him that he figures to me as a personification of evil, and I am disagreeably conscious of smiling to think that, because he speaks and is seen, he is a gentleman compared with a trypanosome or a bacillus coli.

A bee—but a superbee—figured in the next fairy book illustrated by Cruikshank. In his designs for "The Good Genius that Turned Everything into Gold" (1847) he showed for the first time an ambition to idealise magic. 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. Thus (unconsciously) did he atone for that neglect of opportunity which allowed him to deck the magical and tender, the deep and lustrous fiction of E. T. W. Hoffmann, the inspired playmate of ideas that rock with laughter and subdue with awe, with nothing better than a frigidly humorous picture of a duel with spy-glasses.

In 1848 an incomplete and refined translation of "II Pentamerone" appeared with pretty and sprightly designs by Cruikshank. These designs show a more direct sympathy with juvenile taste than his famous etchings for "German Popular Stories." With shut eyes one can still see his ogre swearing at the razor-crop, and his strong man marching off with all the wealth of the King of Fair-Flower, while the champion blower with one good blast makes bipeds of horses and kites of men. Nennella stepping grandly out of the enchanted fish to embrace her brother is dear to an indulgent scepticism. There were beautiful fields and a fine mansion inside that fish and his toothful mouth is but a portico of Fairyland.

Tails not having been invented merely to mitigate the sorrows of Satan, Cruikshank had some more of these appendages to draw when with "Kit Bam's Adventures" (1849) he entered the fairyland of Mrs Cowden Clarke. The very rhetorical mariner of that story is remembered for the sake of the tails of mer-children twining about his legs in the frontispiece to it, and human children allow their Louis Wain to wane for a minute as, with Kit Bam, they look at Cruikshank's tortoiseshell cat, ruffed and aproned, laying the table while Captain Capsicum, horned and gouty, urbanely watches her.

Naturally Cruikshank desired to associate himself permanently with fairy stories better known in England than the name of any folklorist or Perrault D'Armancourt himself. Rusher had published, circa 1814, "Cinderella" and "Dick Whittington" with cuts "designed by Cruikshank," whose prenomen was or was not George; and to George Cruikshank is ascribed by Mr Edwin Pearson some early cuts for "Mother Hubbard and her Dog." Each of these illustrations could be covered with a quartet of our postage stamps and only those for "Mother Hubbard," which are droll and tender, possess more than an antiquarian interest. In 1846, in twelve designs built round the title "Fairy Songs and Ballads for the young ... By O. B. Dussek ...," George Cruikshank illustrated "Dick Whittington," "Jack and the Beanstalk," etc., and was lively and pretty in a wee way. These were trifles, however, and Cruikshank was ambitious. In 1853-4 and 1864 he flattered his ambition by the issue of "George Cruikshank's Fairy Library." Unfortunately Ruskin was displeased with the earlier issues of this "library," for in 1857 he forbade his disciples to copy Cruikshank's designs for "Cinderella," "Jack and the Beanstalk" and "Tom Thumb" [sic] as being "much over-laboured and confused in line." But on July 30, 1853, Mrs Cowden Clarke begged Cruikshank to allow her to thank him in the name of herself "and," writes she, "the other grown-up children of our family, together with the numerous little nephews and nieces who form the ungrown-up children among us, for the delightful treat you have bestowed in the shape of the 1st No. of the 'Fairy Library.'" This was the maligned "Hop-o'-my-Thumb," the pictures of which possess the charm of the artist's "Pentamerone." None of Cruikshank's ogres are as horrible as J. G. Pinwell's man-eating giant in "The Arabian Nights," and so the ogre in his "Hop-o'-my Thumb" is merely a glutton with a knife, but what a passion of entreaty is expressed in the kneeling children at his feet! The seven-leagued boots are worth all Lilley and Skinner's as, formally introduced, they bow before the smiling king. The architectural effect of the design which, as it were, makes a historian of a tree is admirable. The beanstalk in No. 2 is a true ladder of romance; and, seeing it, I think that Cruikshank escaped from the repugnant vulgarity of G. H. on that May or June day of 1815 when he drew The Pedigree of Corporal Violet (alias Napoleon) as a perpendicular of flowers and fungi and dreamed of the fairy seed he would sow for children. In "Jack and the Beanstalk" there is not only a fairy plant but a real English fairy gauzy-winged, tiny, with a wand as fine as a needle. Yet Ruskin was displeased, and we may define the fault which caused his displeasure as a finicky unveracity about shade and textures.

In 1866, however, Cruikshank executed two plates for Ruskin; one of them illustrated "The Blue Light" from Grimm, the other showed the children of Hamelin following the Pied Piper into the mountain; and in the same year he almost paralleled the success of his fairy cobblers in Grimm by an etching of Pixies engaged in making boots, which he did for Frederick Locker, afterwards Locker-Lampson. In 1868 Cruikshank made the large and beautiful etching entitled "Fairy Connoisseurs inspecting Mr Frederick Locker's Collection of Drawings." Anyone who has read "My Confidences" (1896) will acknowledge that it was a happy thought to invite the Little People into Mr Locker-Lampson's library, for this bibliophile, so humorous and elegant, so ready with the exact Latin quotation needed to civilise perfectly the shape of an indecorum, was in essence a child whose toys were consecrated to the fairies by his purity in loving them.

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. Hard by, a towering foxglove leans into space, bearing two joyous sprites. Gigantic is the lunar crescent that shines on the scene; it is a gate through which an intrepid fairy 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. Looking at Cruikshank's supernatural world of littleness and prettiness, of mirth, extravagance, and oddity, we feel in debt to his limitations.

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