Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/197

 Now, although amused (and surely he cannot fail to be amused) at the curious incapacity of an art critic so strangely ignorant of his subject as to conceive George Cruikshank an artist capable of designing annunciations, beatifications, apotheoses, and subjects so completely out of the range of his sympathies and abilities, the reader will, at the same time, be struck with the prescience of the intelligent writer who discerned in him the possession of true genius, and predicted for him, even at this early period of his career, the reputation—"living, substantial," and "illustrious"—which he afterwards so justly achieved for himself.

In everything save the power to realize an annunciation, a beatification, or an apotheosis, George Cruikshank was, at the time this article was penned, exactly what Mr. Lockhart describes him. The most able and accomplished of the caricaturists of his time, he was nevertheless willing to etch the works of an amateur or of an artist inferior to himself, to whose work he has frequently imparted a vitality of which it would have been destitute but for the interposition of his hand. He was ready, moreover, to execute woodcuts for a song-book or the political skits of any scribbler of his time, whether on the ministerial or the popular side mattered little to him. It was therefore rot unnatural that doing "just what was suggested or thrown in his way," Lockhart should come to the erroneous conclusion that the artist had "no plan," "no ambition," and "not much industry." The assertion that he had "no ambition" has been amply disproved by his subsequent life, whilst so far from having "no plan," the sequel shows that all this time, unsuspected by the critic, he had been gradually developing the style of illustration by which he made his mark and reputation,—a style first displayed in the celebrated "Points of Humour," the publication of which served as the occasion for Lockhart's criticism.

On this account, if for no other reason, the caricatures of George Cruikshank possess so remarkable an interest, that it is singular that this field of artistic labour has been left almost unexplored