Scotch tweed was good enough for him in town and country alike. Though
a Tory in politics, he was democratic in his tastes and habits. He
liked to smoke his short black pipe on the tops of omnibuses; he liked
to lay and light his own fire and cook his mutton-chop upon it. He had
a passion for music and a beautiful voice, and sang with a singular
pathos and charm, but he preferred the sound of his bagpipes to that
of his own singing, and thought that you must prefer it too!
He was for ever sketching in pen and ink, indoors and out--he used at
one time to carry a little ink-bottle at his buttonhole, and steel
pens in his waistcoat-pocket, and thus equipped he would sketch
whatever took his fancy in his walks abroad--houses, 'busses, cabs,
people--bits of street and square, scaffoldings, hoardings with
advertisements--sea, river, moor, lake, and mountain--what has he not
sketched with that masterly pen that had already been so carefully
trained by long and arduous practice in a life-school? His heart was
in his work from first to last; beyond his bagpipes and his old books
(for he was a passionate reader), he seemed to have no other hobby.
His facility in sketching became phenomenal, as also his knowledge of
what to put in and what to leave out, so that the effect he aimed at
should be secured in perfection and with the smallest appearance of
labour.
Among his other gifts he had a physical gift of inestimable value for
such work as ours--namely, a splendid hand--a large, muscular,
well-shaped, and most workman-like hand, whose long deft fingers could
move with equal ease and certainty in all directions. I have seen it
at work--and it was a pleasure to watch its acrobatic dexterity, its
unerring precision of touch. It could draw with nonchalant facility
parallel straight lines, or curved, of just the right thickness and
distance from each other--almost as regular as if they had been drawn
with ruler or compass--almost, but not _quite_. The quiteness would
have made them mechanical, and robbed them of their charm of human
handicraft. A cunning and obedient slave, this wonderful hand, for
which no command from the head could come amiss--a slave, moreover,
that had most thoroughly learned its business by long apprenticeship
to one especial trade, like the head and like the eye that guided it.
Leech, no doubt, had a good natural hand, that swept about with
enviable freedom and boldness, but for want of early discipline it
could not execute these miracles of skill; and the commands that came
from the head also lacked the preciseness which results from patiently
acquired and well-digested knowledge, so that Mr. Hand was apt now and
then to zigzag a little on its own account--in backgrounds, on floors
and walls, under chairs and tables, whenever a little tone was felt to
be desirable--sometimes in the shading of coats and trousers and
ladies' dresses.
But it never took a liberty with a human face or a horse's head; and
whenever it went a little astray you could always read between the
lines and know exactly what it meant.
There is no difficulty in reading between Keene's lines; every one of
them has its unmistakable definite intimation; every one is the right
line in the right place!
We must remember that there are no such things as lines in nature.
Whether we use them to represent a human profile, the depth of a
shadow, the darkness of a cloak or a thunder-cloud, they are mere
conventional symbols. They were invented a long time ago, by a
distinguished sportsman who was also a heaven-born amateur artist--the
John Leech of his day--who engraved for us (from life) the picture of
mammoth on one of its own tusks.
And we have accepted them ever since as the cheapest and simplest way
of interpreting in black and white for the wood-engraver the shapes
and shadows and colours of nature. They may be scratchy, feeble, and
uncertain, or firm and bold--thick and thin--straight, curved,
parallel, or irregular--cross-hatched once, twice, a dozen times, at
any angle--every artist has his own way of getting his effect. But
some ways are better than others, and I think Keene's is the firmest,
loosest, simplest, and best way that ever was, and--the most difficult
to imitate. His mere pen-strokes have, for the expert, a beauty and an
interest quite apart from the thing they are made to depict, whether
he uses them as mere outlines to express the shape of things animate
or inanimate, even such shapeless, irregular things as the stones on a
sea-beach--or in combination to suggest the tone and colour of a
dress-coat, or a drunkard's nose, of a cab or omnibus--of a distant
mountain with miles of atmosphere between it and the figures in the
foreground.
[Illustration: THE SNOWSTORM, JAN. 2, 1867
CABBY (_petulantly--the Cabbies even lose their tempers_). "It's no
use your a-calling o' me, Sir! Got such a Job with these 'ere Two
as'll last me a Fortnight!!"--_Punch_, January 19, 1867.]
His lines are as few as can be--he is most economical in this respect
and loves to leave as much white paper as he can; but one feels in his
best work that one line more or one line less would impair the
perfection of the whole--that of all the many directions, curves, and
thicknesses they might have taken he has inevitably hit upon just the
right one. He has beaten all previous records in this respect--in this
country, at least. I heard a celebrated French painter say: "He is a
great man, your Charles Keene; he take a pen and ink and a bit of
paper, and wiz a half-dozen strokes he know 'ow to frame a gust of
wind!" I think myself that Leech could frame a gust of wind as
effectually as Keene, by the sheer force of his untaught natural
instinct--of his genius; but not with the deftness--this economy of
material--this certainty of execution--this consummate knowledge of
effect.
To borrow a simile from music, there are certain tunes so fresh and
sweet and pretty that they please at once and for ever, like "Home,
Sweet Home," or "The Last Rose of Summer"; they go straight to the
heart of the multitude, however slight the accompaniment--a few simple
chords--they hardly want an accompaniment at all.
Leech's art seems to me of just such a happy kind; he draws--I mean he
scores like an amateur who has not made a very profound study of
harmony, and sings his pretty song to his simple accompaniment with so
sweet and true a natural voice that we are charmed. It is the magic of
nature, whereas Keene is a very Sebastian Bach in his counterpoint.
There is nothing of the amateur about him; his knowledge of harmony in
black and white is complete and thorough; mere consummate scoring has
become to him a second nature; each separate note of his voice reveals
the long training of the professional singer; and if his tunes are
less obviously sweet and his voice less naturally winning and
sympathetic than Leech's, his aesthetic achievement is all the
greater. It is to his brother-artists rather than to the public at
large that his most successful appeal is made--but with an intensity
that can only be gained by those who have tried in vain to do what he
has done, and who thereby know how difficult it is. His real magic is
that of art.
This perhaps accounts for the unmistakable fact that Leech's
popularity has been so much greater than Keene's, and I believe is
still. Leech's little melodies of the pencil (to continue the parallel
with the sister art) are like Volkslieder--national airs--and more
directly reach the national heart. Transplant them to other lands that
have pencil Volkslieder of their own (though none, I think, comparable
to his for fun and sweetness and simplicity) and they fail to please
as much, while their mere artistic qualities are not such as to find
favour among foreign experts, whereas Keene actually gains by such a
process. He is as much admired by the artists of France and Germany as
by our own--if not more. For some of his shortcomings--such as his
lack of feeling for English female beauty, his want of perception,
perhaps his disdain, of certain little eternal traits and conventions
and differences that stamp the various grades of our social
hierarchy--do not strike them, and nothing interferes with their
complete appreciation of his craftsmanship.
[Illustration: WAITING FOR THE LANDLORD!
RIBBONMAN (_getting impatient_). "Bedad, they ought to be here be this
toime! Sure, Tiriace, I hope the ould gintleman hasn't mit wid an
accidint!!!"--_Punch_, July 27, 1878.]
Perhaps, also, Leech's frequent verification of our manly British
pluck and honesty, and proficiency in sport, and wholesomeness and
cleanliness of body and mind, our general physical beauty and
distinction, and his patriotic tendency to contrast our exclusive
possession of these delightful gifts with the deplorable absence of
them in any country but our own, may fail to enlist the sympathies of
the benighted foreigner.
Whereas there is not much to humiliate the most touchy French or
German reader of _Punch_, or excite his envy, in Charles Keene's
portraiture of our race. He is impartial and detached, and the most
rabid Anglophobe may frankly admire him without losing his
self-esteem. The English lower middle class and people, that Keene has
depicted with such judicial freedom from either prejudice or
pre-possession, have many virtues; but they are not especially
conspicuous for much vivacity or charm of aspect or gainliness of
demeanour; and he has not gone out of his way to idealise them.
Also, he seldom if ever gibes at those who have not been able to
resist the temptations (as Mr. Gilbert would say) of belonging to
other nations.
Thus in absolute craftsmanship and technical skill, in the ease and
beauty of his line, his knowledge of effect, his complete mastery over
the material means at his disposal, Charles Keene seems to me as
superior to Leech as Leech is to him in grace, in human naturalness
and geniality of humour, in accurate observation of life, in keenness
of social perception, and especially in width of range.
[Illustration: A STROKE OF BUSINESS
VILLAGE HAMPDEN (_"who with dauntless breast" has undertaken for
sixpence to keep off the other boys_). "If any of yer wants to see
what we're a Paintin' of it's a 'Alfpenny a 'Ead, but you marn't make
no Remarks."--_Punch_, May 4, 1867.]
The little actors on Leech's stage are nearly all of them every-day
people--types one is constantly meeting. High or low, tipsy or sober,
vulgar or refined, pleasant or the reverse, we knew them all before
Leech ever drew them; and our recognition of them on his page is full
of delight at meeting old familiar friends and seeing them made fun of
for our amusement.
Whereas a great many of Keene's middle-class protagonists are peculiar
and exceptional, and much of their humour lies in their eccentricity,
they are characters themselves, rather than types of English
characters. Are they really observed and drawn from life, do they
really exist just as they are, or are they partly evolved from the
depths of an inner consciousness that is not quite satisfied with life
just as it is?
[Illustration: "NONE O' YOUR LARKS"
GIGANTIC NAVVY: "Let's walk between yer, Gents; folks 'll think you've
took up a Deserter."--_Punch_, October 19, 1861.]
They are often comic, with their exquisitely drawn faces so full of
subtlety--intensely comic! Their enormous perplexities about nothing,
their utter guilelessness, their innocence of the wicked world and its
ways, make them engaging sometimes in spite of a certain ungainliness
of gesture, dress, and general behaviour that belongs to them, and
which delighted Charles Keene, who was the reverse of ungainly, just
as the oft-recurring tipsiness of his old gentlemen delighted him,
though he was the most abstemious of men. I am now speaking of his
middle-class people--those wonderful philistines of either sex; those
elaborately capped and corpulent old ladies; those
muttonchop-whiskered, middle-aged gentlemen with long upper lips and
florid complexions, receding chins, noses almost horizontal in their
prominence; those artless damsels who trouble themselves so little
about the latest fashions; those feeble-minded, hirsute swells with
the sloping shoulders and the broad hips and the little hats cocked on
one side; those unkempt, unspoiled, unspotted from the world brothers
of the brush, who take in their own milk, and so complacently ignore
all the rotten conventionalism of our over-civilised existence.
When he takes his subjects from the classes beneath these, he is, if
not quite so funny, at his best, I think. His costermongers and
policemen, his omnibus drivers and conductors and cabbies, are
inimitable studies; and as for his 'busses and cabs, I really cannot
find words to express my admiration of them. In these, as in his
street scenes and landscapes, he is unapproached and unapproachable.
Nor must we forget his canny Scotsmen, his Irish labourers and
peasants, his splendid English navvies, and least of all his
volunteers--he and Leech might be called the pillars of the Volunteer
movement, from the manner, so true, so sympathetic, and so humorous,
in which they have immortalised its beginning.
[Illustration: AN AFFRONT TO THE SERVICE
OMNIBUS DRIVER (_to Coster_). "Now then, Irish! pull a one side, will
you? What are you gaping at? Did you never see a Milisher man before?"
_A disgustingly ignorant observation in the opinion of young Longslip,
Lieutenant in Her Majesty's Fusileer Guards_--_Punch_, March 7, 1863.]
Charles Keene is seldom a satirist. His nature was too tolerant and
too sweet for hate, and that makes him a bad and somewhat perfunctory
hater. He tries to hate 'Arry, but he can't, for he draws an ideal
'Arry that surely never was, and thus his shaft misses the mark:
compare his 'Arry to one of Leech's snobs, for instance! He tries to
hate the haw-haw swell, and is equally unsuccessful. When you hate and
can draw, you can draw what you hate down to its minutest
details--better, perhaps, than what you love--so that whoever runs and
reads and looks at your pictures hates with you.
Who ever hated a personage of Keene's beyond that feeble kind of
aversion that comes from mere uncongeniality, a slightly offended
social taste, or prejudice? One feels a mere indulgent and
half-humorous disdain, but no hate. On the other hand, I do not think
that we love his personages very much--we stand too much outside his
eccentric world for sympathy. From the pencil of this most lovable
man, with his unrivalled power of expressing all he saw and thought, I
cannot recall many lovable characters of either sex or any age. Here
and there a good-natured cabby, a jolly navvy, a simple-minded
flautist or bagpiper, or a little street Arab, like the small boy who
pointed out the jail doctor to his pal and said, "That's my medical
man."
Whereas Leech's pages teem with winning, graceful, lovable types, and
here and there a hateful one to give relief.
But, somehow, one liked the man who drew these strange people, even
without knowing him; when you knew him you loved him very much--so
much that no room was left in you for envy of his unattainable mastery
in his art. For of this there can be no doubt--no greater or more
finished master in black and white has devoted his life to the
illustration of the manners and humours of his time; and if Leech is
even greater than he--and I for one am inclined to think he is--it is
not as an artist, but as a student and observer of human nature, as a
master of the light, humorous, superficial criticism of life.
[Illustration: "NOT UP TO HIS BUSINESS"