But gradually we settled into our respective grooves, and I have grown
to like my little groove very much, narrow though it be--a poor thing,
but mine own!
"I_wish_ you hadn't asked Captain Wareham, Lizzie. Horrid man! I can't
bear him!"
"Dear me, Charlotte--isn't the world big enough for you both?"
"Yes; but your little Dining-room _isn't_!"--_Punch_, February 16,
1889.]
Moreover, certain physical disabilities that I have the misfortune to
labour under make it difficult for me to study and sketch the lusty
things in the open air and sunshine. My sight, besides being defective
in many ways, is so sensitive that I cannot face the common light of
day without glasses thickly rimmed with wire gauze, so that sketching
out of doors is often to me a difficult and distressing performance.
That is also partly why I am not a sportsman and a delineator of
sport.
I mention this infirmity not as an excuse for my shortcomings and
failures--for them there is no excuse--but as a reason why I have
abstained from the treatment of so much that is so popular,
delightful, and exhilarating in English country life. If there had
been no Charles Keene (a terrible supposition both for _Punch_ and its
readers), I should have done my best to illustrate the lower walks and
phases of London existence, which attracts me as much as any other. It
is just as easy to draw a costermonger or a washerwoman as it is a
gentleman or lady--perhaps a little easier--but it is by no means so
easy to draw them as Keene did! And to draw a cab or an omnibus after
him (though I have sometimes been obliged to do so) is almost tempting
Providence!
If there had been no Charles Keene, I might, perhaps, with practice,
have become a funny man myself--though I do not suppose that my fun
would have ever been of the broadest.
Before I became an artist I was considered particularly good at
caricaturing my friends, who always foresaw for me more than one
change of profession, and _Punch_ as the final goal of my wanderings
in search of a career. For it was originally intended that I should be
a man of science.
Dr. Williamson, the eminent chemist and professor of chemistry, told
me not long ago that he remembers caricatures that I drew, now forty
years back, when I was studying under him at the Laboratory of
Chemistry at University College, and that he and other grave and
reverend professors were hugely tickled by them at the time. Indeed,
he remembers nothing else about me, except that I promised to be a
very bad chemist.
I was a very bad chemist indeed, but not for long! As soon as I was
free to do as I pleased, I threw up test-tubes and crucibles and went
back to Paris, where I was born and brought up, and studied to become
an artist in M. Gléyre's studio. Then I went to Antwerp, where there
is a famous school of painting, and where I had no less a person than
Mr. Alma-Tadema as a fellow-student. It was all delightful, but
misfortune befell me, and I lost the sight of one eye--perhaps it was
the eye with which I used to do the funny caricatures; it was a very
good eye, much the better of the two, and the other has not improved
by having to do a double share of the work.
And then in time I came to England and drew for _Punch_, thus
fulfilling the early prophecy of my friends and fellow-students at
University College--though not quite in the sense they anticipated.
[Illustration: THE NEW SOCIETY CRAZE
THE NEW GOVERNESS (_through her pretty nose_). "Waall--I come right
slick away from Ne'York City, an' I ain't had much time for foolin'
around in Europe--you bet! So I can't fix up your Gals in the Eu-
rôpean languages, no-how!"
BELGRAVIAN MAMMA: (_who knows there's a Duke or two still left in the
Matrimonial Market_). "Oh, that's of no consequence. I want my
Daughters to aquire the American Accent in all its purity--and the
Idioms, and all that. Now I'm sure _you_ will do _admirably_!"--
_Punch_, December 1, 1888.]
I will not attempt a description of my work--it is so recent and has
been so widely circulated that it should be unnecessary to do so. If
you do not remember it, it is that it is not worth remembering; if you
do, I can only entreat you to be to my faults a little blind, and to
my virtues very kind!
I have always tried as honestly and truthfully as lies in me to serve
up to the readers of _Punch_ whatever I have culled with the bodily
eye, after cooking it a little in the brain. My raw material requires
more elaborate working than Leech's. He dealt more in flowers and
fruits and roots, if I may express myself so figuratively--from the
lordly pineapple and lovely rose, down to the humble daisy and savory
radish. _I_ deal in vegetables, I suppose. Little that I ever find
seems to me fit for the table just as I see it; moreover, by dishing
it up raw I should offend many people and make many enemies, and
deserve to do so. I cook my green pease, asparagus, French beans,
Brussels sprouts, German sauerkraut, and even a truffle now and then,
so carefully that you would never recognise them as they were when I
first picked them in the social garden. And they do not recognise
themselves! Or even each other!
And I do my best to dish them up in good, artistic style. Oh that I
could arrange for you a truffle with all that culinary skill that
Charles Keene brought to the mere boiling of a carrot or a potato! He
is the _cordon bleu_ par excellence. The people I meet seem to me more
interesting than funny--so interesting that I am well content to draw
them as I see them, after just a little arrangement and a very
transparent disguise--and without any attempt at caricature. The
better-looking they are, the more my pencil loves them, and I feel
more inclined to exaggerate in this direction than in any other.
Sam Weller, if you recollect, was fond of "pootiness and wirtue." I
_so_ agree with him! I adore them both, especially in women and
children. I only wish that the wirtue was as easy to draw as the
pootiness.
But indeed for me--speaking as an artist, and also, perhaps, a little
bit as a man--pootiness is almost a wirtue in itself. I don't think I
shall ever weary of trying to depict it, from its dawn in the toddling
infant to its decline and setting and long twilight in the beautiful
old woman, who has known how to grow old gradually. I like to surround
it with chivalrous and stalwart manhood; and it is a standing
grievance to me that I have to clothe all this masculine escort in
coats and trousers and chimney-pot hats; worse than all, in the
evening dress of the period!--that I cannot surround my divinity with
a guard of honour more worthily arrayed!
Thus, of all my little piebald puppets, the one I value the most is my
pretty woman. I am as fond of her as Leech was of his; of whom,
by-the-way, she is the granddaughter! This is not artistic vanity; it
is pure paternal affection, and by no means prevents me from seeing
her faults; it only prevents me from seeing them as clearly as you do!
Please be not very severe on her, for her grandmother's sake. Words
fail me to express how much I loved her grandmother, who wore a
cricket-cap and broke Aunt Sally's nose seven times.
[Illustration: A PICTORIAL PUZZLE
TENOR WARBLER (_with passionate emphasis on the first word of each
line_)--
"_Me-e-e-e-e-e-t_ me once again, M-e-e-e-e-t me once aga-a-ain--"
_Why does the Cat suddenly jump off the Hearth-rug, rush to the Door,
and make frantic Endeavors to get out_?--_Punch_.]
Will my pretty woman ever be all I wish her to be? All she ought to
be? I fear not! On the mantelpiece in my studio at home there stands a
certain lady. She is but lightly clad, and what simple garment she
wears is not in the fashion of our day. How well I know her! Almost
thoroughly by this time--for she has been the silent companion of my
work for thirty years! She has lost both her arms and one of her feet,
which I deplore; and also the tip of her nose, but that has been made
good!
She is only three feet high, or thereabouts, and quite two thousand
years old, or more; but she is ever young--
"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety!"
and a very giantess in beauty. For she is a reduction in plaster of
the famous statue at the Louvre.
They call her the Venus of Milo, or Melos! It is a calumny--a libel.
She is no Venus, except in good looks; and if she errs at all, it is
on the side of austerity. She is not only pootiness but wirtue
incarnate (if one can be incarnate in marble), from the crown of her
lovely head to the sole of her remaining foot--a very beautiful foot,
though by no means a small one--it has never worn a high-heel shoe!
Like all the best of its kind, and its kind the best, she never sates
nor palls, and the more I look at her the more I see to love and
worship--and, alas! the more dissatisfied I feel--not indeed with the
living beauty, ripe and real, that I see about and around--mere life
is such a beauty in itself that no stone ideal can ever hope to match
it! But dissatisfied with the means at my command to do the living
beauty justice--a little bit of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of
ink--and, alas! fingers and an eye less skilled than they would have
been if I had gone straight to a school of art instead of a laboratory
for chemistry!
And now for social pictorial satire considered as a fine art.
They who have practised it hitherto, from Hogarth downward, have not
been many--you can count their names on your fingers! And the wide
popularity they have won may be due as much to their scarcity as to
the interest we all take in having the mirror held up to ourselves--to
the malicious pleasure we all feel at seeing our neighbours held up to
gentle ridicule or well-merited reproof; most of all, perhaps, to the
realistic charm that lies in all true representation of the social
aspects with which we are most familiar, ugly as these are often apt
to be, with our chimney-pot hats, and trousers that unfit us, it
seems, for serious and elaborate pictorial treatment at the hands of
the foremost painters of our own times--except when we sit to them for
our portraits; then they have willy-nilly to make the best of us, just
as we are!
[Illustration: REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH
(SCENE--_A Drawing-room in "Passionate Brompton_.")
FAIR AESTHETIC (_suddenly, and in deepest tones to Smith, who has just
been introduced to take her in to Dinner_).
"Are you Intense?"--_Punch_, June 14, 1879.]
The plays and novels that succeed the most are those which treat of
the life of our own day; not so the costly pictures we hang upon our
walls. We do not care to have continually before our eyes elaborate
representations of the life we lead every day and all day long; we
like best that which rather takes us out of it--romantic or graceful
episodes of another time or clime, when men wore prettier clothes than
they do now--well-imagined, well-painted scenes from classic
lore--historical subjects--subjects selected from our splendid
literature and what not; or, if we want modern subjects, we prefer
scenes chosen from a humble sphere, which is not that of those who can
afford to buy pictures--the toilers of the earth--the toilers of the
sea--pathetic scenes from the inexhaustible annals of the poor; or
else, again, landscapes and seascapes--things that bring a whiff of
nature into our feverish and artificial existence--that are in direct
contrast to it.
And even with these beautiful things, how often the charm wears away
with the novelty of possession! How often and how soon the lovely
picture, like its frame, becomes just as a piece of wall-furniture, in
which we take a pride, certainly, and which we should certainly miss
if it were taken away--but which we grow to look at with the pathetic
indifference of habit--if not, indeed, with aversion!
Chairs and tables minister to our physical comforts, and we cannot do
without them. But pictures have not this practical hold upon us; the
sense to which they appeal is not always on the alert; yet there they
are hanging on the wall, morning, noon, and night, unchanged,
unchangeable--the same arrested movement--the same expression of
face--the same seas and trees and moors and forests and rivers and
mountains--the very waves are as eternal as the hills!
Music will leave off when it is not wanted--at least it ought to! The
book is shut, the newspaper thrown aside. Not so the beautiful
picture; it is like a perennial nosegay, for ever exhaling its perfume
for noses that have long ceased to smell it!
But little pictures in black and white, of little every-day people
like ourselves, by some great little artist who knows life well and
has the means at his command to express his knowledge in this easy,
simple manner, can be taken up and thrown down like the book or
newspaper. They are even easier to read and understand. They are
within the reach of the meanest capacity, the humblest education, the
most slender purse. They come to us weekly, let us say, in cheap
periodicals. They are preserved and bound up in volumes, to be taken
down and looked at when so disposed. The child grows to love them
before he knows how to read; fifty years hence he will love them
still, if only for the pleasure they gave him as a child. He will soon
know them by heart, and yet go to them again and again; and if they
are good, he will always find new beauties and added interest as he
himself grows in taste and culture; and how much of that taste and
culture he will owe to them, who can say?
Nothing sticks so well in the young mind as a little picture one can
hold close to the eyes like a book--not even a song or poem--for in
the case of most young people the memory of the eye is better than
that of the ear--its power of assimilating more rapid and more keen.
And then there is the immense variety, the number!
[Illustration: "READING WITHOUT TEARS"