Cruikshank was a humorist who could laugh coarsely, broadly, selfishly,
merrily, well. Coarseness was natural to him, or he would not have
selected for a (suppressed) illustration in "Italian Tales" (1824) a
subject which mingles tragedy with the laughter of Cloacina. 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. Hence _The Headache_ and _The Cholic_
(1819), signed with an anchor (Captain Marryat's signature) and etched
by Cruikshank, follow _The Gout_ by Gillray (1799). The reader may well
ask if the sight of a hideous creature sprawling on a man's foot is
humour according to my definition. I can only presume that in what Mr
Grego calls the "port-wine days," Gillray's plate was like sudden
sympathy producing something so absolutely suitable for swearing at,
that patients smiled in easy-chairs at grief.
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.
His guffaws and those of Captain Marryat and J. P***y, whose invention
exercised his needle, at the Achilles in Hyde Park, in 1822, are
vexatious enough to make one wish to restore all fig-leaves to the
fig-forest. It is not possible for a man with an indefinite and
inexpressible feeling for woman to laugh like that. Hearing his laughter
we know that Cruikshank's humour about woman must always be obvious.
[Illustration: "EH., SIRS!" Illustrates "Waverley," by Sir Walter Scott,
in "Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley
Novels," 1836.]
It is, and yet it is not measured by the height of her hat as he
depicted it in 1828, when he contributed to that long series of jokes
which culminate in Jan Linse's girl at the theatre who will not take her
hat off because, "mamma, if I put it in my lap I can't see myself." In
the annals of absurdity is there anything more worthy to be true at the
expense of the British Navy than Cruikshank's picture of the chambermaid
confronted with the leg which she has mistaken for a warming-pan?
Another woman, whom Cruikshank compels us to remember by force of
humorous idea, is to be found in _Points of Humour_ (1823). She is the
doxy in "The Jolly Beggars," sitting on the soldier's lap. We see her
while she holds up
"her greedy gab
Just like ae aumous dish."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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