It is my purpose to speak of the craft to which I have devoted the
best years of my life, the craft of portraying, by means of little
pen-and-ink strokes, lines, and scratches, a small portion of the
world in which we live; such social and domestic incidents as lend
themselves to humorous or satirical treatment; the illustrated
criticism of life, of the life of our time and country, in its lighter
aspects.
The fact that I have spent so many years in the practice of this craft
does not of itself, I am well aware, entitle me to lay down the law
about it; the mere exercise of an art so patent to all, so easily
understanded of the people, does not give one any special insight into
its simple mysteries, beyond a certain perception and appreciation of
the technical means by which it is produced--unless one is gifted with
the critical faculty, a gift apart, to the possession of which I make
no claim.
There are two kinds of critics of such work as ours. First there is
the wide public for whom we work and by whom we are paid; "who lives
to please must please to live"; and who lives by drawing for a comic
periodical must manage to please the greater number. The judgment of
this critic, though often sound, is not infallible; but his verdict
for the time being is final, and by it we, who live by our wits and
from hand to mouth, must either stand or fall.
The other critic is the expert, our fellow-craftsman, who has learned
by initiation, apprenticeship, and long practice the simple secrets of
our common trade. He is not quite infallible either, and is apt to
concern himself more about the manner than the matter of our
performance; nor is he of immediate importance, since with the public
on our side we can do without him for a while, and flourish like a
green bay-tree in spite of his artistic disapproval of our work; but
he is not to be despised, for he is some years in advance of that
other critic, the public, who may, and probably will, come round to
his way of thinking in time.
The first of these two critics is typified by Molière's famous cook,
who must have been a singularly honest, independent, and intelligent
person, since he chose in all cases to abide by her decision, and not
with an altogether unsatisfactory result to Mankind! Such cooks are
not to be found in these days--certainly not in England; but he is an
unlucky craftsman who does not possess some such natural critics in
his family, his home, or near it--mother, sister, friend, wife, or
child--who will look over his shoulder at his little sketch, and say:
"Tommy [or Papa, or Grandpapa, as the case may be], that person you've
just drawn doesn't look quite natural," or:
"That lady is not properly dressed for the person you want her to
be--those hats are not worn this year," and so forth and so forth.
When you have thoroughly satisfied this household critic, then is the
time to show some handy brother-craftsman your amended work, and
listen gratefully when he suggests that you should put a tone on this
wall, and a tree, or something, in the left middle distance to balance
the composition, and raise or depress the horizon-line to get a better
effect of perspective.
In speaking of some of my fellow-artists on _Punch_, and of their
work, I shall try and bring both these critical methods into
play--promising, however, once for all, that such criticism on my part
is simply the expression of my individual taste or fancy, the taste or
fancy of one who by no means pretends to the unerring acumen of
Molière's cook, on the one hand, and who feels himself by no means
infallible in his judgment of purely technical matters, on the other.
I can only admire and say why, or why I don't; and if I fail in making
you admire and disadmire with me, it will most likely be my fault as
well as my misfortune.
I had originally proposed to treat of Richard Doyle, John Leech, and
Charles Keene--and finally of myself, since that I should speak of
myself was rather insisted upon by those who procured me the honour of
speaking at all. I find, however, that there is so much to say about
Leech and Keene that I have thought it better to sacrifice Richard
Doyle, who belongs to a remoter period, and whose work, exquisite as
it is of its kind, is so much slighter than theirs, and fills so much
less of the public eye; for his connection with _Punch_ did not last
long. Moreover, personally I knew less of him: just enough to find
that to know was to love him--a happy peculiarity he shared with his
two great collaborators on _Punch_.
_John Leech_! What a name that was to conjure with, and is still!
I cannot find words to express what it represented to me of pure
unmixed delight in my youth and boyhood, long before I ever dreamed of
being an artist myself! It stands out of the path with such names as
Dickens, Dumas, Byron--not indeed that I am claiming for him an equal
rank with those immortals, who wielded a weapon so much more potent
than a mere caricaturist's pencil! But if an artist's fame is to be
measured by the mere quantity and quality of the pleasure he has
given, what pinnacle is too high for John Leech!
Other men have drawn better; deeper, grander, nobler, more poetical
themes have employed more accomplished pencils, even in black and
white; but for making one _glad_, I can think of no one to beat him.
To be an apparently hopeless invalid at Christmas-time in some dreary,
deserted, dismal little Flemish town, and to receive _Punch's Almanac_
(for 1858, let us say) from some good-natured friend in England--that
is a thing not to be forgotten! I little dreamed then that I should
come to London again, and meet John Leech and become his friend; that
I should be, alas! the last man to shake hands with him before his
death (as I believe I was), and find myself among the officially
invited mourners by his grave; and, finally, that I should inherit,
and fill for so many years (however indifferently), that half-page in
_Punch_ opposite the political cartoon, and which I had loved so well
when he was the artist!
Well, I recovered from a long and distressing ailment of my sight
which had been pronounced incurable, and came to England, where I was
introduced to Charles Keene, with whom I quickly became intimate, and
it was he who presented me to Leech one night at one of Mr. Arthur
Lewis's smoking concerts, in the winter of 1860. I remember feeling
somewhat nervous lest he should take me for a foreigner on account of
my name, and rather unnecessarily went out of my way to assure him
that I was rather more English than John Bull himself. It didn't
matter in the least; I have no doubt he saw through it all: he was
kindness and courtesy itself; and I experienced to the full that
emotion so delightful to a young hero-worshipper in meeting face to
face a world-wide celebrity whom he has long worshipped at a distance.
In the words of Lord Tennyson:
"I was rapt
By all the sweet and sudden passion of youth
Towards greatness in its elder...."
But it so happened at just this particular period of his artistic
career and of mine that he no longer shone as a solitary star of the
first magnitude in my little firmament of pictorial social satire. A
new impulse had been given to the art of drawing on wood, a new school
had been founded, and new methods--to draw straight from nature
instead of trusting to memory and imagination--had been the artistic
order of the day. Men and women, horses and dogs, landscapes and
seascapes, all one can make pictures of, even chairs and tables and
teacups and saucers, must be studied from the life--from the
still-life, if you will--by whoever aspired to draw on wood; even
angels and demons and cherubs and centaurs and mermaids must be
closely imitated from nature--or at least as much of them as could be
got from the living model.
_Once a Week_ had just appeared, and _The Cornhill Magazine_. Sir John
Millais and Sir Frederick Leighton were then drawing on wood just like
the ordinary mortals; Frederick Walker had just started on his brief
but splendid career; Frederick Sandys had burst on the black-and-white
world like a meteor; and Charles Keene, who was illustrating the
_Cloister and the Hearth_ in the intervals of his _Punch_ work, had,
after long and patient labour, attained that consummate mastery of
line and effect in wood draughtsmanship that will be for ever
associated with his name; and his work in _Punch_, if only by virtue
of its extraordinary technical ability, made Leech's by contrast
appear slight and almost amateurish in spite of its ease and boldness.
So that with all my admiration for Leech it was at the feet of Charles
Keene that I found myself sitting; besides which we were much together
in those days, talking endless shop, taking long walks, riding side by
side on the knife-boards of omnibuses, dining at cheap restaurants,
making music at each other's studios. His personal charm was great, as
great in its way as Leech's; he was democratic and so was I, as one is
bound to be when one is impecunious and the world is one's oyster to
open with the fragile point of a lead-pencil. His bohemian world was
mine--and I found it a very good world and very much to my taste--a
clear, honest, wholesome, innocent, intellectual, and most industrious
British bohemia, with lots of tobacco, lots of good music, plenty of
talk about literature and art, and not too much victuals or drink.
Many of its denizens, that were, have become Royal Academicians or
have risen to fame in other ways; some have had to take a back seat in
life; surprisingly few have gone to the bad.
This world, naturally, was not Leech's; if it had ever been, I doubt;
his bohemia, if he ever had lived in one, had been the bohemia of
medicine, not of art, and he seemed to us then to be living on social
heights of fame and sport and aristocratic splendour where none of us
dreamed of seeking him--and he did not seek us. We hated and despised
the bloated aristocracy, just as he hated and despised foreigners
without knowing much about them; and the aristocracy, to do it
justice, did not pester us with its obtrusive advances. But I never
heard Leech spoken of otherwise in bohemia than with affectionate
admiration, although many of us seemed to think that his best work was
done. Indeed, his work was becoming somewhat fitful in quality, and
already showed occasional signs of haste and illness and fatigue; his
fun was less genial and happy, though he drew more vigorously than
ever, and now and again surprised us by surpassing himself, as in his
series of Briggs in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.
All that was thirty years ago and more. I may say at once that I have
reconsidered the opinion I formed of John Leech at that time. Leech,
it is true, is by no means the one bright particular star, but he has
recovered much of his lost first magnitude: if he shines more by what
he has to say than by his manner of saying it, I have come to think
that that is the best thing of the two to shine by, if you cannot
shine by both; and I find that his manner was absolutely what it
should have been for his purpose and his time--neither more nor less;
he had so much to say and of a kind so delightful that I have no time
to pick holes in his mode of expression, which at its best has
satisfied far more discriminating experts than I; besides which, the
methods of printing and engraving have wonderfully improved since his
day. He drew straight on the wood block, with a lead-pencil; his
delicate grey lines had to be translated into the uncompromising
coarse black lines of printers' ink--a ruinous process; and what his
work lost in this way is only to be estimated by those who know. True,
his mode of expression was not equal to Keene's--I never knew any that
was, in England, or even approached it--but that, as Mr. Rudyard
Kipling says, is another story.
The story that I will tell now is that of my brief acquaintance with
Leech, which began in 1860, and which I had not many opportunities of
improving till I met him at Whitby in the autumn of 1864--a memorable
autumn for me, since I used to forgather with him every day, and have
long walks and talks with him--and dined with him once or twice at the
lodgings where he was staying with his wife and son and daughter--all
of whom are now dead. He was the most sympathetic, engaging, and
attractive person I ever met; not funny at all in conversation, or
ever wishing to be--except now and then for a capital story, which he
told in perfection.
[Illustration: JOHN LEECH.]
The keynote of his character, socially, seemed to be self-effacement,
high-bred courtesy, never-failing consideration for others. He was the
most charming companion conceivable, having intimately known so many
important and celebrated people, and liking to speak of them; but one
would never have guessed from anything he ever looked or said that he
had made a whole nation, male and female, gentle and simple, old and
young, laugh as it had never laughed before or since for a quarter of
a century.
He was tall, thin, and graceful, extremely handsome, of the higher
Irish type; with dark hair and whiskers and complexion, and very light
greyish-blue eyes; but the expression of his face was habitually sad,
even when he smiled. In dress, bearing, manner, and aspect, he was the
very type of the well-bred English gentleman and man of the world and
good society; I never met any one to beat him in that peculiar
distinction of form, which, I think, has reached its highest European
development in this country. I am told the Orientals are still our
superiors in deportment. But the natural man in him was still the
best. Thackeray and Sir John Millais, not bad judges, and men with
many friends, have both said that they personally loved John Leech
better than any man they ever knew.
At this time he was painting in oil, and on an enlarged scale, some of
his more specially popular sketches in _Punch_, and very anxious to
succeed with them, but nervously diffident of success with them, even
with [Greek: hoi polloi]. He was not at his happiest in these efforts;
and there was something pathetic in his earnestness and perseverance
in attempting a thing so many can do, but which he could not do for
want of a better training; while he could do the inimitable so easily.
I came back to town before Leech, and did not see him again until the
following October. On Saturday afternoon, the 28th, I called at his
house, No. 6 The Terrace, Kensington, with a very elaborate drawing in
pencil by myself, which I presented to him as a souvenir, and with
which he seemed much pleased.
He was already working at the _Punch Almanac_ for '65, at a window on
the second floor overlooking the street. (I have often gazed up at it
since.) He seemed very ill, so sad and depressed that I could scarcely
speak to him for sheer sympathy; I felt he would never get through the
labour of that almanac, and left him with the most melancholy
forebodings.
Monday morning the papers announced his death on Sunday, October 29th,
from angina pectoris, the very morning after I had seen him.
I was invited by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, the publishers of
_Punch_, to the funeral, which took place at Kensal Green. It was the
most touching sight imaginable. The grave was near Thackeray's, who
had died the year before. There were crowds of people, Charles Dickens
among them; Canon Hole, a great friend of Leech's, and who has written
most affectionately about him, read the service; and when the coffin
was lowered into the grave, John Millais burst into tears and loud
sobs, setting an example that was followed all round; we all forgot
our manhood and cried like women! I can recall no funeral in my time
where simple grief and affection have been so openly and spontaneously
displayed by so many strangers as well as friends--not even in France,
where people are more demonstrative than here. No burial in
Westminster Abbey that I have ever seen ever gave such an impression
of universal honour, love, and regret.
"Whom the gods love die young." He was only forty-six!
I was then invited to join the _Punch_ staff and take Leech's empty
chair at the weekly dinner--and bidden to cut my initials on the
table, by his; his monogram as it was carved by him is J.L. under a
leech in a bottle, dated 1854; and close by on the same board are the
initials W.M.T.
I flatter myself that convivially, at least, my small D.M., carved in
impenetrable oak, will go down to posterity in rather distinguished
company!
If ever there was a square English hole, and a square English peg to
fit it, that hole was _Punch_, and that peg was John Leech. He was
John Bull himself, but John Bull refined and civilised--John Bull
polite, modest, gentle--full of self-respect and self-restraint, and
with all the bully softened out of him; manly first and gentlemanly
after, but very soon after; more at home perhaps in the club, the
drawing-room, and the hunting-field, in Piccadilly and the Park, than
in the farm or shop or market-place; a normal Englishman of the upper
middle class, with but one thing abnormal about him, viz., his genius,
which was of the kind to give the greater pleasure to the greater
number--and yet delight the most fastidious of his day--and I think of
ours. One must be very ultra-aesthetic, even now, not to feel his
charm.
He was all of a piece, and moved and worked with absolute ease,
freedom, and certainty, within the limits nature had assigned him--and
his field was a very large one. He saw and represented the whole
panorama of life that came within his immediate ken with an unwavering
consistency, from first to last; from a broadly humorous, though
mostly sympathetic point of view that never changed--a very delightful
point of view, if not the highest conceivable.
Hand and eye worked with brain in singular harmony, and all three
improved together contemporaneously, with a parallelism most
interesting to note, as one goes through the long series of his social
pictures from the beginning.
He has no doubts or hesitations--no bewildering subtleties--no seeking
from twelve to fourteen o'clock--either in his ideas or technique,
which very soon becomes an excellent technique, thoroughly suited to
his ideas--rapid, bold, spirited, full of colour, breadth, and
movement--troubling itself little about details that will not help the
telling of his story--for before everything else he has his story to
tell, and it must either make you laugh or lightly charm you--and he
tells it in the quickest, simplest, down-rightest pencil strokes,
although it is often a complicated story!
For there are not only the funny people and the pretty people acting
out their little drama in the foreground--there is the scene in which
they act, and the middle distance, and the background beyond, and the
sky itself; beautiful rough landscapes and seascapes and skyscapes,
winds and weathers, boisterous or sunny seas, rain and storm and
cloud--all the poetry of nature, that he feels most acutely while his
little people are being so unconsciously droll in the midst of it all.
He is a king of impressionists, and his impression becomes ours on the
spot--never to be forgotten! It is all so quick and fresh and strong,
so simple, pat, and complete, so direct from mother Nature herself! It
has about it the quality of inevitableness--those are the very people
who would have acted and spoken in just that manner, and we meet them
every day--the expression of the face, the movement and gesture, in
anger, terror, dismay, scorn, conceit, tenderness, elation,
triumph.... Whatever the mood, they could not have looked or acted
otherwise--it is life itself. An optimistic life in which joyousness
prevails, and the very woes and discomfitures are broadly comical to
us who look on--like some one who has sea-sickness, or a headache
after a Greenwich banquet--which are about the most tragic things he
has dealt with.
(I am speaking of his purely social sketches. For in his admirable
large cuts, political and otherwise serious, his satire is often
bitter and biting indeed; and his tragedy almost Hogarthian.)
Like many true humorists, he was of a melancholy temperament, and no
doubt felt attracted by all that was mirthful and bright, and in happy
contrast to his habitual mood. Seldom if ever does a drop of his inner
sadness ooze out through his pencil-point--and never a drop of gall;
and I do not remember one cynical touch in his whole series.
In his tastes and habits he was by nature aristocratic; he liked the
society of those who were well dressed, well bred and refined like
himself, and perhaps a trifle conventional; he conformed quite
spontaneously and without effort to upper-class British ideal of his
time, and had its likes and dislikes. But his strongest predilections
of all are common to the British race: his love of home, his love of
sport, his love of the horse and the hound--especially his love of the
pretty woman--the pretty woman of the normal, wholesome English type.
This charming creature so dear to us all pervades his show from
beginning to end--she is a creation of his, and he thoroughly loves
her, and draws her again and again with a fondness that is half
lover-like and half paternal--her buxom figure, her merry bright eyes
and fresh complexion and flowing ringlets, and pursed-up lips like
Cupid's bow. Nor is he ever tired of displaying her feet and ankles
(and a little more) in gales of wind on cliff and pier and parade, or
climbing the Malvern Hills. When she puts on goloshes it nearly breaks
his heart, and he would fly to other climes! He revels in her
infantile pouts and jealousies and heart-burnings and butterfly
delights and lisping mischiefs; her mild, innocent flirtations with
beautiful young swells, whose cares are equally light.
She is a darling, and he constantly calls her so to her face. Her
favourite seaside nook becomes the mermaid's haunt; her back hair
flies and dries in the wind, and disturbs the peace of the too
susceptible Punch. She is a little amazon _pour rire_, and rides
across country, and drives (even a hansom sometimes, with a pair of
magnificent young whiskerandoes smoking their costly cigars inside);
she is a toxophilite, and her arrow sticks, for it is barbed with
innocent seduction, and her bull's-eye is the soft military heart. She
wears a cricket-cap and breaks Aunt Sally's nose seven times; she puts
her pretty little foot upon the croquet-ball--and croquet'd you are
completely! With what glee she would have rinked and tennised if he
had lived a little longer!
[Illustration: "IN THE BAY OF BISCANY O"
The Last Sweet Thing in Hats and Walking-Sticks.--_Punch_, September
27, 1862.]
She is light of heart, and perhaps a little of head! Her worst trouble
is when the captain gives the wing of the fowl to some other darling
who might be her twin-sister; her most terrible nightmare is when she
dreams that great stupid Captain Sprawler upsets a dish of trifle over
her new lace dress with the blue satin slip; but next morning she is
herself again, and rides in the Row, and stops to speak with that
great stupid Captain Sprawler, who is very nice to look at, whose back
is very beautiful, and who sprawls most gracefully over the railings,
and pays her those delightful, absurd compliments about her and her
horse "being such a capital pair," while, as a foil to so much grace
and splendour, a poor little snub-nosed, ill-dressed, ill-conditioned
dwarf of a snob looks on, sucking the top of his cheap cane in abject
admiration and hopeless envy! Then she pats and kisses the nice soft
nose of Cornet Flinders's hunter, which is "deucedly aggravating for
Cornet Flinders, you know"--but when that noble sportsman is frozen
out and cannot hunt, she plays scratch-cradle with him in the boudoir
of her father's country house, or pitches chocolate into his mouth
from the oak landing; and she lets him fasten the skates on to her
pretty feet. Happy cornet! And she plays billiards with her handsome
cousin--a guardsman at least--and informs him that she is just
eighteen to his love--and stands under the mistletoe and asks this
enviable relation of hers to show her what the garroter's hug is like;
and when he proceeds to do so she calls out in distress because his
pointed waxed moustache has scratched her pretty cheek; and when Mr.
Punch is there, at dinner, she and a sister darling pull crackers
across his August white waistcoat, and scream in pretty terror at the
explosion; to that worthy's excessive jubilation, for Mr. Punch is
Leech himself, and nothing she does can ever be amiss in his eyes!
Sometimes, indeed, she is seriously transfixed herself, and bids Mr.
Tongs, the hairdresser, cut off a long lock of her hair where it will
not be missed---and she looks so lovely under the smart of Cupid's
arrow that we are frantically jealous of the irresistible warrior for
whom the jetty tress is destined. In short, she is innocence and
liveliness and health incarnate--a human kitten.
When she marries the gilded youth with the ambrosial whiskers, their
honeymooning is like playing at being married, their heartless
billings and cooings are enchanting to see. She will have no
troubles--Leech will take good care of that; her matrimonial tiffs
will be of the slightest; hers will be a well-regulated household; the
course of her conjugal love will run smooth in spite of her little
indiscretions--for, like Bluebeard's wife, she can be curious at
times, and coax and wheedle to know the mysteries of Freemasonry, and
cry because Edwin will not reveal the secret of Mr. Percy, the
horse-tamer; and how Edwin can resist such an appeal is more than we
can understand! But soon they will have a large family, and live happy
ever after, and by the time their eldest-born is thirteen years old,
the darling of fourteen years back will be a regular materfamilias,
stout, matronly, and rather severe; and Edwin will be fat, bald, and
middle-aged, and bring home a bundle of asparagus and a nice new
perambulator to celebrate the wedding-day!
And he loves her brothers and cousins, military or otherwise, just as
dearly, and makes them equally beautiful to the eye, with those lovely
drooping whiskers that used to fall and brush their bosoms, their
smartly waistcoated bosoms, a quarter of a century ago! He dresses
them even better than the darlings, and has none but the kindliest and
gentlest satire for their little vanities and conceits--for they have
no real vices, these charming youths, beyond smoking too much and
betting a little and getting gracefully tipsy at race-meetings and
Greenwich dinners--and sometimes running into debt with their tailors,
I suppose! And then how boldly they ride to hounds, and how splendidly
they fight in the Crimea! how lightly they dance at home! How healthy,
good-humoured, and manly they are, with all their vagaries of dress
and jewellery and accent! It is easy to forgive them if they give the
whole of their minds to their white neckties, or are dejected because
they have lost the little gridiron off their chatelaine, or lose all
presence of mind when a smut settles on their noses, and turn faint at
the sight of Mrs. Gamp's umbrella!
And next to these enviable beings he loves and reveres the sportsman.
One is made to feel that the true sportsman, whether he shoots or
hunts or fishes, is an August being, as he ought to be in Great
Britain, and Leech has done him full justice with his pencil. He is no
subject for flippant satire; so there he sits his horse, or stalks
through his turnip-field, or handles his rod like a god! Handsome,
well-appointed from top to toe, aristocratic to the finger-tips--a
most impressive figure, the despair of foreigners, the envy of all
outsiders at home (including the present lecturer)!
[Illustration: A SPECIMEN OF PLUCK