PUPIL. "For all that we have Received," &c., &c.--_Punch_, February
17, 1869.]
Our pictorial satirist taking the greatest pains, doing his very best,
can produce, say, a hundred of these little pictures in a twelvemonth,
while his elder brother of the brush bestows an equal labour and an
equal time on one important canvas, which will take another
twelvemonth to engrave, perhaps, for the benefit of those fortunate
enough to be able to afford the costly engraving of that one priceless
work of art, which only one millionaire can possess at a time. Happy
millionaire! happy painter--just as likely as not to become a
millionaire himself! And this elder brother of the brush will be the
first to acknowledge his little brother's greatness--if the little
brother's work be well done. You should hear how the first painters of
our time, here and abroad, express themselves about Charles Keene!
They do not speak of him as a little brother, I tell you, but a very
big brother indeed.
Thackeray, for me, and many others, the greatest novelist, satirist,
humorist of our time, where so many have been great, is said to have
at the beginning of his career wished to illustrate the books of
others--Charles Dickens's, I believe, for one. Fortunately, perhaps,
for us and for him, and perhaps for Dickens, he did not succeed; he
lived to write books of his own, and to illustrate them himself; and
it is generally admitted that his illustrations, clever as they are,
were not up to the mark of his writings.
It was not his natural mode of expression--and I doubt if any amount
of training and study would have made it a successful mode: the love
of the thing does not necessarily carry the power to do it. That he
loved it he has shown us in many ways, and also that he was always
practising it. Most of my hearers will remember his beautiful ballad
of "The Pen and the Album"--
"I am my master's faithful old gold pen.
I've served him three long years, and drawn since then
Thousands of funny women and droll men ..."
[Illustration: THE HEIGHT OF IMPROPRIETY
MISS GRUNDISON, JUNIOR. "There goes Lucy Holyroyd, all alone in a Boat
with young Snipson as usual. So impudent of them!"
HER ELDER SISTER. "Yes; how shocking if they were Upset and Drowned--
without a Chaperon, you know!"--_Punch_, August 8, 1891.]
Now conceive--it is not an impossible conception--that the marvellous
gift of expression that he was to possess in words had been changed by
some fairy at his birth into an equal gift of expression by means of
the pencil, and that he had cultivated the gift as assiduously as he
cultivated the other, and finally that he had exercised it as
sedulously through life, bestowing on innumerable little pictures in
black and white all the wit and wisdom, the wide culture, the deep
knowledge of the world and of the human heart, all the satire, the
tenderness, the drollery, and last, but not least, that incomparable
perfection of style that we find in all or most that he has
written--what a pictorial record that would be!
Think of it--a collection of little wood-cuts or etchings, with each
its appropriate legend--a series of small pictures equal in volume and
in value to the whole of Thackeray's literary work! Think of the
laughter and the tears from old and young, rich and poor, and from the
thousands who have not the intelligence or the culture to appreciate
great books, or lack time or inclination to read them.
All there was in the heart and mind of Thackeray, expressed through a
medium so simple and direct that even a child could be made to feel
it, or a chimney-sweep! For where need we draw the line? We are only
pretending.
Now I am quite content with Thackeray as he is--a writer of books,
whose loss to literature could not be compensated by any gain to the
gentle art of drawing little figures in black and white--"thousands of
funny women and droll men." All I wish to point out--in these days
when drawing is pressed into the service of daily journalism, and with
such success that there will soon be as many journalists with the
pencil as with the pen--is this, that the career of the future social
pictorial satirist is full of splendid possibilities undreamed-of yet.
It is a kind of hybrid profession still in its infancy--hardly
recognised as a profession at all--something halfway between
literature and art--yet potentially combining all that is best and
most essential in both, and appealing as effectively as either to some
of our strongest needs and most natural instincts.
It has no school as yet; its methods are tentative, and its few
masters have been pretty much self-taught. But I think that a method
and a school will evolve themselves by degrees--are perhaps evolving
themselves already.
The quality of black and white illustrations of modern life is
immeasurably higher than it was thirty or forty years ago--its average
and artistic quality--and it is getting higher day by day. The number
of youths who can draw beautifully is quite appalling; one would think
they had learned to draw before learning to read and write. Why
shouldn't they?
Well, all we want, for my little dream to be realised, is that among
these precocious wielders of the pencil there should arise here a
Dickens, there a Thackeray, there a George Eliot or an Anthony
Trollope, who, finding quite early in life that he can draw as easily
as other men can spell, that he can express himself, and all that he
hears and sees and feels, more easily, more completely, in that way
than in any other, will devote himself heart and soul to that form of
expression--as I and others have tried to do--but with advantages of
nature, circumstances, and education that have been denied to us!
[Illustration: THINGS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE EXPRESSED DIFFERENTLY