_PUNCH'S_ ARTISTS: 1841.
_Punch's_ Primitive Art--A. S. Henning--Brine--A Strange
Doctrine--John Phillips--W. Newman--Pictorial Puns--H. G.
Hine--John Leech--His Early Life--Friendship with Albert
Smith--Leech Helps _Punch_ up the Social Ladder--His Political
Work--Leech Follows the "Movements"--"Servantgalism"--"The Brook
Green Volunteer"--The Great Beard Movement--Sothern's Indebtedness
to Leech for Lord Dundreary--Crazes and Fancies--Leech's
Types--"Mr. Briggs"--Leech the Hunter--Leech as a Reformer--Leech
as an Artist--His "Legend"-Writing--Friendship with Dickens--His
Prejudices--His Death--And Funeral.
One of the peculiarities of _Punch's_ career is the increasing
preponderance assumed by the artistic section. It is said that when
George Hodder was introduced to a distinguished Royal Academician, he
could find nothing better to say, with which to open the conversation,
than the tremendous sentiment--"Art is a great thing, sir!" _Punch_
gradually but surely realised, too, how great a thing art is, and for
many years past he has sought out artists to recruit his Staff, where
before he looked chiefly for draughtsmen. The statement may seem a
curious one to make, but it is an opinion shared nowadays by some of the
best artists on _Punch_ and off it, that were the drawings sent in
to-day which were contributed by the majority of the original artistic
Staff, not excluding the mighty Leech himself, they would be declined
without thanks, and--according to the somewhat harsh rule that has for
some time prevailed--without return of their contribution. There was a
promiscuous rough-and-ready manner about the drawing of comic cuts in
those early days, when intended for the periodical press, that would
offend the majority of people to-day. There was no photography then to
enable the artist to draw as big as he chose, and then to reproduce the
drawings on to the wood-block in any size he please. There were no
blocks which could be taken into sections and distributed among
half-a-dozen engravers at once for swift and careful cutting. There was
no "process," which permitted of reduction and reproduction of the
finest pen-and-ink work. There was no "drawing from the life" for these
little pictures of "life and character." The joke was the thing, not the
artistic drawing of it. Farce and burlesque had not yet developed into
comedy and comedietta, refined by degrees and beautifully æsthetic.
Nowadays, as Mr. du Maurier has publicly declared, everything must be
drawn straight from Nature, without trusting to memory or observation
alone. "Men and women, horses, dogs, seascapes, landscapes, everything
one can make little pictures out of, must be studied from life.... Even
centaurs, dragons, and cherubs must be closely imitated from Nature--or
at least as much as can be got from the living model!" It is, therefore,
more than likely that Leech would have been told that he must really be
more careful in his work before _Punch_ could publish it; and his first
contribution of "Foreign Affairs" would have been rejected as being
altogether too rough and with far too little point for its size. All
_Punch's_ pictures at this day, no doubt, cannot be said to surpass the
artistic achievement of some of the earliest cuts, but there is almost
invariably an artistic intention, technically speaking, which excuses
even the poorer work--a suggestion of the drawing-school rather than, to
use a modern expression, mere "dancing upon paper."
Although from the beginning to the present day the artistic Staff which
has sat at _Punch's_ Table has numbered less than a score, and the
outside Staff, unattached (such as Captain Howard, Mr. Sands, Mr.
Pritchett, Mr. Fairfield, Mr. Atkinson, Mr. Ralston, and Mr. Corbould),
but very few more--the total number of draughtsmen whose pencils have
been seen in _Punch's_ pages amount to about one hundred and seventy. In
some cases sketches have been sent in anonymously; a few others I have
been unable to trace; but these, it must be admitted, are hardly worth
the trouble expended on them.
[Illustration: A. S. HENNING.
(_From a Water-Colour by his son, Mr. Walton Henning._)]
The earliest recruit was Archibald S. Henning, the first in importance,
as he was to be cartoonist, and first to appear before the public,
inasmuch as the wrapper was from his hand. He was the third son of John
Henning, friend of Scott and Dr. Chalmers, on the strength of his famous
miniature restoration of the Parthenon frieze, of which he engraved the
figures on slate in intaglio; and he was well known besides not only for
these copies of the Elgin marbles, but for his portrait-busts and
medallions. Precision in all things was one of his characteristics, and
even showed itself in the inscriptions in his family Bible, wherein he
set on record that his son Archibald was "born at Edinburgh, on the 18th
of February, at 30 minutes past 3 a.m." But this accuracy was not
inherited, although the son was brought up to assist his father on the
friezes which he executed on Burton's Arch at Hyde Park Corner, and on
the Athenæum Club-house. His drawing was loose and undistinguished; his
sense of humour, such as it was, unrefined; and his fun exaggerated and
false. He was a Bohemian, but not of the type of his brother-in-law
Kenny Meadows, preferring a class of entertainment less exalted than
those who so warmly welcomed his sister's husband. Mr. Sala tells me
that Henning painted the show-blind for the Post Office, and afterwards
steadily drifted down the stream of time; and Mr. Sala ought to know,
for he employed him in those impecunious but jolly days when the
editorship of "Chat" was in his hands. One of the early memories of Mr.
Walton Henning, Archibald's son, is being sent by his father to collect
the sum of one pound sterling from Mr. Sala, and, after sitting on the
office-stool from eleven in the morning until two, being sent back
without the money, but instead with a letter of apology and of
congratulation on possessing a son who could sit for three hours, like
Patience on a monument, smiling at an empty till. Henning remained with
_Punch_ till the summer of 1842, having contributed eleven cartoons to
the first volume and several to the second, the last of which was that
of "Indirect Taxation," on p. 201. He also illustrated Albert Smith's
social "physiologies" of "The Gent" and "The Ballet Girl"--not ill-done;
and when _Punch_ had no further need of his services he transferred them
successively to "The Squib," "The Great Gun," and "Joe Miller the
Younger," in each case taking the post of cartoonist. Later on he worked
occasionally on "The Man in the Moon" and on the "Comic Times," and died
in 1864.
No greater loss was Brine, Henning's fellow-cartoonist, who remained
with _Punch_ until the beginning of the third volume, having drawn
nearly a dozen cartoons for each of the two volumes. He was a poor and
often a "fudgy" draughtsman, gifted with extremely little humour, who
had nevertheless worked a good deal at a Life Academy in the Tottenham
Court Road, along with Thomas Woolner, Elmore, Claxton, and J. R.
Herbert, and had even studied in Paris. He had some strange notions as
to figure-drawing, some of which he would impart to such young students
as cared to listen. One of these rules, which he sought to impress on
Mr. Birket Foster's 'prentice mind, was never to draw ankle-joints on
female legs; but Mr. Foster did not remain a figure-draughtsman long
enough to benefit by this valuable advice. Brine was poorly paid, some
of his smaller cuts commanding a sum no higher than three-and-six; but
it is impossible to say, looking at these sketches, that his efforts
were seriously underpaid.
Another of the Old Guard was John Phillips--who is not to be confused
with Watts Phillips, a contributor of a later period. He was the son of
an eccentric old water-colour painter, well known in his day, and has
been identified as the scene-painter whom Landells introduced later to
the "Illustrated London News." Phillips, with Crowquill, illustrated
Reynolds' popular "continuation" of Dickens' Pickwick Papers, entitled
"Pickwick Abroad," and, like Brine, he received his _congé_ when the
transfer of _Punch_ to Bradbury and Evans took place.
And then there was by far the most important and valuable draughtsman of
the quartette--William Newman. He was a very poor man, who in point of
payment for his work suffered more than the rest; and when he asked for
a slight increase in terms, he was met with a refusal on the ground that
"Mr. John Leech required such high prices." He was an old hand at
pictorial satire, and was one of those who drew the little caricatures
in "Figaro in London" several years before. He was brought on to _Punch_
by Landells, but, owing to his lack of breeding and of common manners,
he was never invited to the Dinner, nor did any of his colleagues care
to associate with him. Unfortunately for him he was an extremely
sensitive man, and the neglect with which he was perhaps not unnaturally
treated preyed greatly upon his mind. For a considerable time he was the
most prolific draughtsman on the paper. Thus in 1846 there are no fewer
than eighty-seven cuts by him; in 1847, one hundred and twenty-seven; in
1848, one hundred and sixty-four; and in 1849, one hundred and
twenty-one. From the cut on _Punch's_ first title-page down to the year
1850 his work is everywhere to be seen, in every degree of importance,
from the little _silhouettes_ called "blackies," which usually
constituted little pictorial puns in the manner of Thomas Hood, and
which were paid--those of them which were good and funny enough to be
used--at the all-round rate of eighteen shillings per dozen. Instances
of his happy punning vein are the sketches of a howling dog chained to a
post, entitled "The Moaning of the Tide;" a portrait of a
villainous-looking fellow, "Open to Conviction;" a horse insisting on
drinking at a pond through which he is being driven, "Stopping at a
Watering-Place;" a hare nursing her young, "The Hare a Parent;" a man
wrestling with his cornet, "A most Distressing Blow;" and a street-boy
picking a soldier's pocket, "Relieving Guard." But he was soon promoted
to other work; and to the first and second volumes, at times of
pressure, he even contributed a cartoon. This service was four times
repeated in 1846, and again in 1847 and 1848, when Leech met with his
serious bathing accident at Bonchurch: on which occasion the great John
was put to bed, as Dickens explained it, with a row of his namesakes
round his forehead. The cartoon in question was that entitled "Dirty
Father Thames," and a glance at it will show how great was the
improvement in the draughtsman's art. Newman did not, however, confine
himself to _Punch_ all this while; he had worked as cartoonist to "The
Squib" in 1842; and again for the "Puppet-Show," "Diogenes," and H. J.
Byron's "The Comic News" in 1864. Then, disappointed at the little
advance he had made in the world, he emigrated to the United States,
where more lucrative employment awaited him. He had a greater sense of
beauty and a more refined touch than most of his colleagues; and though
he did not shine as a satirist, he was always well in the spirit of
_Punch_.
[Illustration: H. G. HINE, V.P.R.I.
(_From a Photograph by E. Wheeler, Brighton._)]
But the most interesting of _Punch's_ earliest men before the advent of
Leech was H. G. Hine, who up to 1895 was the octogenarian Vice-President
of the Institute of Painters in Water-Colours, whose broad and masterly
drawings of poetic landscape have been the artistic wonder of recent
years. He began to draw for _Punch_ in September, 1841, and
thenceforward bore with Newman the brunt of the illustration. He was
really a serious painter--a water-colour artist of strong aim and
considerable accomplishment. Just before the starting of _Punch_
Landells had, as has already been explained, launched a landscape
periodical called "The Cosmorama," and had commissioned Hine to go to
the London Dock and make a drawing on the wood. The work was not new to
him, as Wood, a master-engraver of the time, taking pity on the sense of
foolish powerlessness with which every beginner is afflicted, had
explained to him the secret of the craft. Landscape was thus his
acknowledged line when he found himself at the Docks with his round of
boxwood in his hand. He marked off a square upon it, and, in order to
"get his hand in," he made what would nowadays be called a _remarque_ on
the margin--a comic sketch of a dustman and his dog. The block was
finished, and carried to Landells, who looked at it in some surprise.
"Did you do that?" said the North Countryman, pointing to the dustman.
"Would you draw sketches like that for _Poonch_?" "But I'm not a
figure-draughtsman," objected Hine. "Yes, you are; and it's just what we
want for _Poonch_." So Hine was enrolled, and in his line became an
exceedingly popular draughtsman. He began by making batches of the
"blackies" aforesaid, designing them and their clever punning titles
with the greatest freedom, unhampered by editorial interference. He
worked for _Punch_ until 1844, and rapidly became a contributor of the
first importance, whose merits were fully appreciated. One cut in
particular delighted Mark Lemon--that of "A Long Nap," in which a toper
has fallen into a sleep so deep and protracted that a spider has spun a
strong web from the man's nose to the bottle and the table before
him.[50] "Upon my word!" cried Lemon on examining the block when it was
delivered, "Mr. Hine is really tremendous!" Hine had greater imagination
and ingenuity than Newman, a brighter fancy and keener wit; and to him
rather than to others would application be made for the realisation of
new ideas. At Landells' request he produced the accompanying "project"
for a _Punch_ medal or seal; which, however, was never carried into
execution. His, too, were the stinging Anti-Graham Wafers, to which
reference is made elsewhere; and many other designs that went far to
increase _Punch's_ popularity.
[Illustration: DESIGN FOR "PUNCH" SEAL, BY H. G. HINE.]
He was chief stock-artist, so to say; for Leech did not at once assume
the commanding position on the paper that was soon to be his. And while
Hine shared with him the honour of drawing "Punch's Pencillings," as the
cartoons were called--several of the series of "Social Miseries" being
from his hand--he produced from time to time the chief cut when it
aspired to the dignity of a political caricature.
After a time, however, the amount of work sent to Hine was greatly
reduced. It was now some time since he had contributed the whole of the
cuts to the first "Almanac," but he was still an occasional cartoonist
(Vols. III., IV., and V.); so that he was the more surprised at being
roughly--and, as he proved, unjustly--accused of being late with a
block. Other unpleasantnesses, which seemed to him gratuitous, suggested
the idea that he might not be wanted on _Punch_. He put the point
blankly, and was reassured. Still, the quantity of work sent him
diminished; and as nothing came by Christmas, Hine accepted the offer of
Christmas-work by the publisher of "The Great Gun"--for which, by the
way, he never received payment. Then there suddenly arrived a mass of
blocks from _Punch_; but they were returned with the message that, not
hearing from his former proprietors, he had made other arrangements. And
that was the end of his connection. Later on he worked for "Joe Miller
the Younger," "Mephystopheles," and "The Man in the Moon," and used his
pencil, in the true Spirit of a genuine sportsman, in pointing his
well-barbed jokes against his old paper with as much enthusiasm as he
had before given to its service. On page 153 of the second volume of
_Punch_ may be seen a little cut entitled "Choice Spirits in
Bond"--being the portraits of himself and the lanky William Newman in
the dock of a police-court. Although fifty-four years had passed, the
strong resemblance of the little likeness could still be recognised by
those who knew the artist in the last few months of his life.
After the collapse of "The Man in the Moon" Hine dropped out of comic
draughtsmanship. By this time, indeed, he was tired of the work, for he
had begun to think in jokes, to turn every thought to ridicule, and to
look upon conversation rather as raw material for pun-making than as a
means of expressing and interchanging ideas. The last straw was an
occasion when he spent half a night with Horace Mayhew in trying to make
a joke to complete a series for "Cruikshank's Almanack"--the very
situation in Pope's epigram:--
"You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come;
Knock as you please, there's nobody at home."
Meanwhile another had arisen who was destined to overshadow for many
years the rest of his colleagues, and while he lived to be the life and
soul of the undertaking--Mr. Punch incarnate. This was John Leech, whose
signature first appears on page 43 of the first volume.
When Mr. Frith, R.A., sought to persuade the overworked Leech to take a
holiday, he added, just to drive the matter home: "If anything happened
to you, who are the 'backbone of _Punch_,' what would become of the
paper?" At which Leech smiled, says his biographer, and retorted, "Don't
talk such rubbish! Backbone of _Punch_, indeed! Why, bless your heart,
there isn't a fellow at work upon the paper that doesn't think _that_ of
himself, and with about as much right and reason as I should. _Punch_
will get on well enough without me, or any of those who think themselves
of such importance." In his life-time none would have been found to
share the speaker's views; nevertheless, _Punch_--for all Leech's
paramount importance to the paper--has maintained his prosperity, and
more than doubled his lease of life since Leech laid down his pencil.
Yet in his time he was as much the artistic _Punch_ as Jerrold was the
literary; and there are nearly as many who still believe that Leech at
one time was _Punch's_ Editor as accord the same unmerited honour to
Jerrold.
[Illustration: JOHN LEECH.
(_From the Portrait by Sir John E. Millais, Bart., R.A., in the National
Portrait Gallery._)]
The story of Leech's early life has been already told. How he was the
son of the luckless owner of the London coffee-house in Ludgate Hill;
how Flaxman saw his infantile drawings and declared he would be nothing
but an artist--nay, "he _was_ an artist;" how, at the Charterhouse, the
gentle, nervous lad was schoolfellow of Thackeray, with whom he formed a
passionate, life-long friendship; and of yet another hearty friend, Mr.
Nethercote; how, when he was medical student at Bartholomew's Hospital,
he contracted another evergreen friendship with Percival Leigh, and
formed an acquaintanceship, long maintained, but never fully ripened,
with another medico--Albert Smith, of Middlesex; how his father's
failure caused him to give up medicine and the knife in favour of art
and the pencil--by the exercise of which, when he was still under Dr.
Cockle, son of the pill-doctor, he had already fascinated his
fellow-students, and in particular Percival Leigh--on whose initiative
it was that the "Comic Latin Grammar" was carried into execution. All
this and more has ere now been recorded. But it all bears directly on
his _Punch_ career, and must not by any means be overlooked.
In 1836, when he was but nineteen years of age, he had made a bid for
the unhappy Seymour's vacant place as Charles Dickens' illustrator; but
he had been already forestalled by "Phiz," and Leech was perforce
rejected, as Thackeray had been refused before him, and Buss dismissed.
Leech was already a good draughtsman on wood, having while resident with
Orrin Smith the wood-engraver--he who had previously tried to magnetise
the idea of a "London Charivari" into life--received many practical
hints of the greatest artistic value. For some time afterwards he worked
in harmony with his fellow-student of a literary turn, whose noble
brass-plate inscribed "Mr. Albert Smith, M.R.C.S., Surgeon-Dentist!"
once brought upon the artist, says Percival Leigh, the candid chaff, of
a vulgar street-urchin. "Good boy!" said Leech, appreciating the
attention and rewarding it with a penny. "Now go and insult somebody
else." He drew furthermore upon the stone, and distinguished himself in
"Bell's Life in London"--the paper to which several of the most eminent
comic artists of the day then contributed--and in 1841, five years after
his first-published "Etchings and Sketchings, by A. Pen, Esq.," he
issued in its complete form his "Children of the Mobility." It was at
that time that Percival Leigh, having satisfied himself of the character
and tone of the new comic paper, not only made his own début in it, but
introduced his friend and colleague, John Leech--with what distressing
result as to his full-page block of "Foreign Affairs" the chapter on
cartoons discloses. (_See_ p. 173.) And here it may be added that all
was not plain sailing between Leech and _Punch_ at the commencement; for
soon after he resumed work he struck for higher terms. Until he got his
way he did no more work for the paper--as the reader may satisfy himself
by turning to its pages; and when he did, his triumph was visited, as
has already been described, upon the heads of less talented
contributors. It may safely be assumed that Leech knew nothing of this,
for the gentleness of the man was such that he could not have suffered
the idea that his success meant others' disadvantage.
Three things may be said to have brought Leech's powers as a humorous
draughtsman prominently before the public--his illustrations to the
"Comic Latin Grammar," the skit on the Mulready envelope (the most
successful of all the versions published), and his early _Punch_ work.
Mr. Frith tells of Mulready's indignation at Leech's drawing--not at the
caricature itself, but at the leech in a bottle, by which the
Academician took it for granted that the draughtsman meant to designate
him by innuendo as a "blood-sucker;" and of Leech's surprise and pain at
being so suspected, and how the two men became fast friends ever after.
Once a regular _Punch_ man, Leech immediately expanded, and as quickly
hit the taste and fancy of the public; and from that day forward rarely
did his hand or his humorous or tragic faculty play him false; nor did
the people falter in its praise or its allegiance.
Although he expanded, he yet took some time to settle down. Not until
the sixth volume (1844) could he be considered paramount in what was
esteemed the higher walk of cartooning--a department which he
subsequently shared, first with Doyle, and then with Tenniel. But it was
in the social cuts that he excelled--in his pictures of low life that
are never low; in his great mastery in the delineation of character and
his gift of seeing humour in most scenes of everyday happening, and his
power of recording comic conceptions, unfailingly and irresistibly. It
is true that as Mr. Punch went up in the social scale Leech accompanied
him in the rise--if, indeed, it was not Leech, together with Thackeray's
powerful help, who elevated _Punch_. At the same time he sympathised
profoundly with the horrors of poverty and oppression, and looked kindly
on gutter-children and on honest dirt and misery; and to the end he
regarded the "snob," the 'Arry of his day, with the genial contempt he
had lavished on him at the beginning. Thackeray appreciated the change
in the paper, and recorded it, too; though he credits Jerrold with a
policy which was nought but the policy of a comic paper softened in its
asperities by time, and encouraged by the greater refinement of its
Staff and of its more cultivated public.
"Mr. Leech," said Thackeray, "surveys society from the gentleman's point
of view. In old days, when Mr. Jerrold lived and wrote for that famous
periodical, he took the other side; he looked up at the rich and great
with a fierce, a sarcastic aspect, and a threatening posture, and his
outcry or challenge was: 'Ye rich and great, look out! We, the people,
are as good as you. Have a care, ye priests, wallowing on a tithe pig
and rolling in carriages and four; ye landlords, grinding the poor; ye
vulgar fine ladies, bullying innocent governesses, and what not--we will
expose your vulgarity; we will put down your oppression; we will
vindicate the nobility of our common nature,' and so forth. A great deal
was to be said on the Jerrold side, a great deal was said--perhaps, even
a great deal too much." And now, says Thackeray in effect, Leech looks
at all these people with a certain respect for their riches, with an
amiable curiosity concerning their footmen's calves. Nevertheless, to
the end he was not kinder to Dives' oppression, less sympathetic towards
the troubles of Lazarus, nor more indulgent to the vulgarity of the
snob; nor a whit more tolerant of viciousness, affectation, or meanness
of any kind.
Of Leech's political work (for which at first he entertained so great a
dislike) I say perhaps enough in dealing with what may be called
_Punch's_ Big Drum--the weekly cartoon. Taken together, those designs
might be held to represent a life's good work; yet they represent but a
fraction of what he executed during his seven-and-twenty years' hard
labour. If after a close study of all his productions with pencil and
etching-needle, you ask yourself what constitutes his real life's-work,
you will probably choose to ignore his book plates--even those to the
Comic Histories of Rome and England, to the sporting novels of "Mr.
Sponge," and the rest--and point to his "Pictures of Life and
Character," as given forth in one continuous stream from 1841 to 1864.
The "movements" and the "isms" and the creations of fashion, of nearly
all of which we have a whole series spread over a long, but none too
long a time, reflect in themselves alone the social history of our
day--development of intellect and its antithesis, fashion in dress and
language, art and literature, craze and affectation; in short, the whole
national evolution during a quarter of a century. It is amusing to
glance at some of them--a few out of the very many--and sample the
journalistic wit with which Leech eyed and illustrated the passing hour.
The periodical wail of the British householder and his wife on the
subject of the great "domestic difficulty" gave Leech a fund of anecdote
that he was not slow to draw upon. He was himself a typical middle-class
British householder, who liked to have everything nice and neat about
him, including the pretty, amiable, zealous, h-less maidservant in nice
white apron and clean print-dress. He closed his eyes and ears to Sydney
Smith's discovery that _all_ the virtues and most of the graces are not
to be had for £7 a year. And so Leech gave us the series he entitles
"Servantgalism," harshly illustrative for the most part of the comic
side of what a later generation calls Slaveyism. And as _Punch_, chiefly
under the influence of Thackeray, raised his eyes from Bloomsbury to
Belgravia, and found equal fun and better sport in baiting the far more
contemptible airs and graces of John Thomas, "Flunkeiana" became a
fertile field from which he drew some of his most caustic productions.
He made them the severer, too, that during the Crimean War and the
dangers that threatened the land, Leech could not bear with patience the
sight of "pampered menials" passing their time in relatively idle
luxury, when they, together with linen-drapers' assistants and others
engaged in what is really woman's work, ought rather to have been
bearing arms, or at the very least drilling in the newly-formed force of
Volunteers.
Yet the Volunteers had not to thank Leech for anything much but chaff
during the early years of the movement. If anything could snuff out
patriotism, "The Brook Green Volunteer," the laughable satire on the
Militia, would have done it, and the square into which that warrior
formed himself would assuredly have been broken and dispersed. And truly
this series, famous and still appreciated as it is, lost a good deal of
its force from the presence of a fault not often found in Leech's
work--grotesqueness of invention and undue exaggeration. In time Charles
Keene made us forget the unintentional injustice Leech had done to a
noble movement; and as fate willed it, Mr. G. Haydon, who had greatly
assisted the author of it, Sir J. C. Bucknill, became later an artistic
contributor to _Punch_ and a friend, not only of Leech, but of several
of the most distinguished of the Staff.
And after the Crimean War was over, there was a social upheaval known as
"the great beard movement." Leech was very keen upon all this question
of moustaches, and held with many others that no one had a right to them
save the crack cavalry regiments. One day it happened that Leech,
Tenniel, and Pritchett were riding together, and, agreeing on the
subject, they arrived at cross-roads, where, holding their crops
together, they cried "We Swear!"--not to wear hair on lip or chin. In
1865 the unregenerate Mr. Pritchett went to Skye to practise
water-colour and--to let his moustaches grow! Returning in due time to
Tenniel's house, he said nothing, but merely opened the door, and thrust
in his face with an air of defiant resignation, and waited. Tenniel
started. "You scoundrel!" he exclaimed; "_then I must!_" And he did. But
Leech was proof against this example of degeneracy, and to the end
remained true to his views and his vow, although moustaches soon came
into regular fashion.
Yet moustache, beard, and whiskers have been a mine of fun to
Leech--from the little Eton boy who tells the hairdresser, when he has
cut his curls, just to give him a close shave, and who ties the major's
whisker to his sister's ringlet; to the snobs who, "giving to hairy
nothings a local habitation and a name," flatter themselves that their
stubbly chins will get them mistaken for "captings" at the very least;
and to the military Adonises who may boast that their silken beards and
fierce moustaches lead a beauty by each single hair. One of the most
amusing results of Leech's drawings of whiskered swells was Sothern's
creation of "Lord Dundreary"--as the actor was always ready to proclaim.
But for the artist, this most comical character would have been nothing
but the ordinary stage-fool as it was at first designed, and the
playgoers of two generations would never have held their aching sides at
one of the most mirthful of modern _rôles_.
Then the series of hearty laughs that, in 1851, accompanied his handling
of "Bloomerism"--that parent of our modern dress reform and the divided
skirt, and certainly the ancestor of the lady-bicyclist's costume ("A
skirt divided against itself cannot stand; it must sit upon a
bicycle")--served to kill the thing that the natural modesty of Leech
put down as unwomanly and his æsthetic sense as hideous. And the
crinoline, to which the American invention was to afford an antidote,
provides Leech with material for a hundred humorous points of view. For
it grew and grew in monstrousness and outrageous proportions until 1861,
when it began to dwindle, and by such refuge as a "hooped petticoat" can
afford saved its dignity as it made its welcome exit from the scene.
And the Cochin-China Fancy, and the Table-Turning Craze (in respect to
which Mark Lemon declared that if Hope, the spiritualist, would give a
convincing _séance_ in Whitefriars, _Punch_ would recant), and the
Racecourse, and the Great Exhibition, and Horsetaming, and a score of
other subjects--whether pastime or fashion or phase--were all used by
Leech with unfailing humour. The Chartist period of 1848 was a great
opportunity, happily seized, and some of the artist's sketches were the
result of his personal observation; for he was himself sworn in. "Only
loyalty and extreme love of peace and order made me do it," he said; but
none the more did he enjoy his nocturnal patrol from ten o'clock till
one.
And all his types--his _dramatis personæ_, so to speak--the gent and his
vulgar associates; the Greedy Boy and the Comic Drunkard; the _Enfant
Terrible_, soon, it is devoutly hoped, to be packed off to school, and
the dreadful Schoolboy home for the holidays; the Choleric Old Gentleman
and the comfortable Materfamilias; Miss Clara and the Heavy Dragoon; the
Italian Organ-grinder, Frenchman, Irishman, and Hebrew (Leech's four
_bêtes noires_); the Rising Generation; and all the rest--what a boxful
of puppets they were for Mr. Punch's show! And besides them the two or
three distinct personalities he created! There was Tom Noddy--the
ridiculous little man who in real life was the estimable Mr. Mike
Halliday, sometime clerk of the House of Lords, and latterly poet and
successful artist, who was as pleased as _Punch_ himself at the
distinction conferred upon him and his doings by the artist, while all
the time Leech was secretly flattering his kindly self that his model
could not by any means discover himself in pictures in which the
features were so carefully altered--for all personalities were hateful
to the considerate, sensitive humorist. And Mr. Briggs, the Immortal! Of
him whose creation is sufficient to render the year 1849 memorable in
the annals of the land much has ere now been written--that type of a
well-to-do British householder, delightful for his follies and endearing
by his pluck, something of a lunatic, it must be admitted, yet more of a
sportsman, and most of all a "muff"--_Punch's_ "simple-minded Philistine
paterfamilias." Many of his adventures, especially of house-keeping and
its terrors, were based upon Leech's own experiences. For it was Leech
who had those terrible builders, and who was taken for a burglar by a
policeman when trying to get in at his own window. Mr. Briggs'
never-to-be-forgotten sensations of a spill from his horse, as recorded
by Leech, were the result of the artist's own bewildering experience--as
he confessed to "Cuthbert Bede"--and many of his adventures in
salmon-fishing, grouse and pheasant shooting, and deer-stalking were
founded on his visits to Sir John Millais in Scotland. "All the pools on
the Stanley Water," says one authority, "are sacred to the memory of
Briggs, for it was Leech's favourite fishing-ground; and 'Hell's Hole,'
'Death's Throat,' 'Black Stones,' and many other cuts, may all be
recognised from his humorous pictures, the originals of which are in the
possession of Colonel Stuart Sandeman, the proprietor. The Stanley Water
begins below Burnmouth." Many of his fishing-sketches were made at
Whitchurch in Hampshire, when staying with Mr. Haydon aforesaid.
Half Leech's popularity came, probably, from his sketches in the Row and
in the hunting-field. Even so hearty a hater of horse-flesh as
Ruskin--so far as he could hate animals at all--has declared that the
most beautiful drawing in all _Punch_ is Miss Alice on her father's
horse--"her, with three or four young Dians." Leech's sympathy for
horses was natural to the man, and had no little influence in toning
down those rampant ideas of Democracy and Socialism to which Thackeray
referred. In the opinion of many, not all the Conservative party,
landlords and House of Peers together, will, in the great coming
struggle with "King Demos," exert against him and his Socialism a
fraction of the power of resistance that will ultimately be found in the
national love of horses and of sport, whether in the hunting-field, on
the racecourse, or in the sporting column of the daily paper; and this
belief John Leech himself entertained.
Leech, whose pecuniary resources were always being drained by relations
other than those of his own immediate household, and on behalf of whom
it is generally admitted that he worked himself to death, rode and
hunted, as he said, not from extravagance, but in order that he might be
fit and able to do his work. And his riding, which was a necessity to
himself, was not less indispensable to _Punch_, for a very considerable
amount of the Paper's support in the Country depends upon his "horsey
sketches." Without them English life would not be properly represented,
particularly in its most delightful and engaging of pastimes, and
without them English support--from that prosperous class to which
_Punch_ specially appeals--would hardly be forthcoming.
But, for all his love of horses and the hunting-field, Leech was not a
particularly good rider, and a friend of his tells how he laughingly
insisted on buying from him a horse that was not sound in his wind, as
he could not run away. Yet he poked good-natured fun at the riding of
his friend Sir John Millais, and once told him that as he followed him
in the field he had conceived the original idea of drawing some
"triangular landscapes" as seen through Millais' legs. He satirised
himself with equal good-temper in the drawing in which a Cockney
horseman reins up at the edge of a steep hill--you might almost call it
a hole--down the side of which the rest are scampering, with the words
"Oh, if this is one of the places Charley spoke of, I shall go back!"
Indeed, in spite of all his sport, he almost agreed with Hood--
"There's something in a horse
That I can always honour, but never could _endorse_."
Yet, like his great rival "Phiz," who rode with the Surrey hounds, he
loved the cover-side; but as time went on, and youthful ardour cooled,
he would rather attend the meet than follow in the chase. As he favoured
the Puckeridge hounds, it comes about that most of his landscape
backgrounds are views in Hertfordshire. And when he preferred the more
sober delights of the Row--not the same Row we now scamper along from
Hyde Park Corner, but the old one along by the Serpentine, and, for a
time, in Kensington Gardens--his tall graceful figure always attracted
attention; and when he mounted his pony, which he called "Red Mullett,"
people who recognised him would turn and remark that Mr. Punch had come
out for a ride upon dog Toby.
[Illustration: THE GREAT SOCIAL EVIL.
TIME: Midnight. A Sketch not a Hundred Miles from the Haymarket.
_Bella:_ "Ah! Fanny! How long have you been _gay_?"
(From _Punch_, 12th Sept., 1857, Vol. xxxiii.)]
But it was not by his comic faculty alone that John Leech helped to
make _Punch_ great, nor even by his political work. It was also by his
frank demonstration of that deep feeling which is often called
"passion," whether love, or sympathy, or hot indignation. His love of
children, even when he laughs at them, is surpassed by few other artists
or writers, even by those of Mr. Punch--that adorer of first youth and
green-apple and salad days. The enthusiasm with which he threw himself
into all attacks upon abuses showed him a hot-blooded philanthropist. It
was not for the first time that in his "Moral Lesson of the Gallows" he
used his Hogarthian power against the scandal and brutalising horror of
public executions. In the little "social" entitled "The Great Social
Evil," which so electrified _Punch's_ readers at the time, there appears
the hand of the reformer, perhaps; but primarily a whole heartful of
wide sympathy and pathos, from which, with true instinct, the artist has
banished every suggestion of humour, retaining only with a few skilful
strokes the sad and pathetic reality of the social problem. This
drawing was made some time before, but Mark Lemon, with less courage
than he showed in the publication of the "Song of the Shirt," hesitated
to insert it; and it is traditionally asserted that it was at the time
of the Editor's temporary absence through illness that Leech insisted
upon its publication. And who can forget the contemptuous drawing of the
brutalised dancers at Mabille (1847), or the other, made in full anger
and disgust at the sight of a Spanish bullfight "with the gilt off,"
after he had attended one, when towards his life's end he visited
Biarritz for a few days in fruitless search of health? It is a terrible
page, and probably touches the limit of what is permissible in art.
Shirley Brooks called it "a grim indictment of a nation pretending to be
civilised;" and in England, at least, it met with a throb of responsive
emotion and of cordial approval.
Passing from these things to a more pleasing one, we are struck with
Leech's exceptional love of beauty. Never did Nature seem more
delightful than in his cuts--in those dainty backgrounds in which the
loveliest scenery is so skilfully reproduced. "What plump young
beauties," cries Thackeray, "those are with which Mr. Punch's chief
contributor supplies the old gentleman's pictorial harem!" It is true,
they are nearly always the same girl, this ideal of _Punch's_--short in
stature, simple and pouting and laughing, with big eyes and rounded
chin, with bewitching dimples and pretty ringlets; but then this ideal,
this "little dumpling," was none other than Mrs. Leech! The artist had
seen her in the street in 1843, had fallen head over ears in love with
her upon the spot, followed her to her home, looked up the directory to
ascertain her name, obtained an introduction, and had straightway wooed
and won her. "Now I'll bet ten to one," he wrote to Percival Leigh, as
soon as he had been accepted, "that your reverence will think me the
oddest person in the world, at a moment like the present, to think of
writing to a friend; but I can't help sending you a line or two to say
that I have been made a 'happy man'.... Never laugh again at the union
of _2 soles_ (_i.e._, two flats); at any rate, don't expect me to join
in the guffaw." And so Miss Annie Eaton became Mrs. John Leech, the
object of her husband's devotion and of his inspired pencil. It is true
that his young ladies and his servants are all much of the same type;
but, in spite of Mr. Henry James' curious judgment that Leech had no
great sense of beauty, he has usually been otherwise adjudged, as in the
"poem" by Albert Smith and Edmund Yates--assuredly in harmony with most
men's views--where he is spoken of as
"'Handsome Jack,' to whose dear girls and swells his life _Punch_
owes."
And so it comes about that _Punch's_ pages are eloquent with portraits
of Mrs. Leech, who, with her children, became the very "orchard" of
Leech's eye. The last block of all on which the artist was engaged was
one to be called "An Afternoon on the Flags;" it represented a
complimentary dog-fancier comparing the points of beauty in a dog with
those of the lady before him, but it was still unfinished when he fell
back in his bed, dead from the fatal breast-pang.
Leech would never employ artists' models--partly because his _chic_
drawing, like Sir John Tenniel's, came natural to his genius, and his
memory was extraordinarily retentive, and partly because when he began
to draw for _Punch_, and for a long while after, it was unheard-of for
black-and-white men on comic papers to do anything so seriously
academic. But though he said that he had not in his life made
half-a-dozen drawings from Nature, he was always sketching "bits" for
use, and trusted to his memory and imagination for the rest. On one or
two occasions he would ask Mrs. Hole, the wife of the Dean of Rochester,
to sit for him in her riding-habit--but this was the nearest approach he
ever made to the "model." He would make his first sketch and then trace
it on to the block, finishing his rapid drawing with considerable
deliberation, yet so quickly that he would often send off three drawings
before dinner-time. He was extremely particular about the drawing, and
the engraving, too, of his boots and feet, and expressed boundless
admiration of Tenniel's power in that direction. "Talk of drawing!" he
exclaimed to Mr. Frith; "what is my drawing compared to Tenniel's? Look
at the way that chap can draw a boot; why, I couldn't do it to save my
life!" Like all other artists, he was constantly asked by friends what
paper was the best and what pencils he used. "H.B.," he would reply; "if
you can't put it down with that, you can't put it down at all." His
simplicity of means matched the simplicity of his art, and both the
transparent simplicity of his character. His views relative to private
persons' privacy prevented him from including portraiture in his
drawings other than that of public men. But to get these, and especially
members of the House of Commons, he would take considerable trouble. I
have seen an extremely cordial letter addressed to him by Mr. Speaker
Denison, in which special facilities were accorded him to witness the
opening of Parliament.
[Illustration: "LEECH'S 'PRETTY GIRL.'"
(_A Skit by Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., R.A. By Permission of W. W. Fenn,
Esq._)]
As a draughtsman Leech has been admirably placed by Mr. du Maurier, who
calls him a perfect ballad-writer as compared with the more scientific
counterpointing of Charles Keene. And I would remark that it was above
all as a pencil and wood draughtsman that he excelled; his etchings--of
which he made two-score for the Pocket-Books--are not, technically
considered, up to the sustained level of either Cruikshank or "Phiz."
But his sense of freedom on the block he makes us feel; he revels in it,
and thereby imparts spontaneity to his drawings far beyond what we see
in his plates. Yet his composition is almost uniformly excellent,
whether in line or light and shade, and apparently as carefully thought
out as though an oil picture and not a _Punch_ cut was the work he had
in hand. The relation between his landscapes and his figures has often
been applauded; and a foreign critic has exclaimed, with unfeigned
surprise and admiration, "Leech and Keene could not only draw
light--they could even draw the wind!" And with all this he told his
story in his drawings more completely than any man of his day; he
appealed to every class of society, and touched them all with equal
facility, with equal good-humour, brightness, and beauty. His power of
legend-writing, too, was remarkable--his explanatory lines beneath the
drawings being as concise and happy as what they described. Says Mr.
Silver: "As brevity is the soul of wit, he always made his 'legends' as
terse as possible, first jotting them down hastily, and condensing while
he drew. I have, for instance, a slight drawing of a heavy pig-faced
farmer admiring with his wife a fat pig in its stye. Beneath the sketch
is scribbled 'There now; that's my style! I call him a perfect love!' As
the joke lay in the likeness of the owner to the pig, the last phrase
seemed redundant, and therefore was suppressed before the drawing went
to _Punch_." It is curious that with this gift, he should have
contributed only once, so far as I can ascertain, to the literary
portion of _Punch_, and then merely some mock "Verses for Pantomime
Music"--strictly speaking, for the harlequinade--(January 4th, 1845),
designed to show the fatuous idiotcy of those compositions.
Contrary to what might have been expected in so prolific an artist,
Leech never for a moment entertained the sentiment not unusual among
comic artists--"je prends mon bien là où je le trouve." He was even
diffident about accepting a suggestion for a joke. His own observation
gave him the vast majority of his "pictures of life and character," but
he would occasionally accept with a quiet undemonstrative smile some of
the many proposals that were submitted to him. You might find it in
_Punch_ next week, or next year; but if the giver were an artist too, he
would hesitate to make use of it, lest he might wrong a brother-pencil.
He often figures in his own cuts, as in "The Dismay of Mr. Jessamy on
being told that he will spoil the whole thing [private theatricals] if
he doesn't Shave off his Whiskers" (Almanac, 1854--his own whiskers
which he always regarded with a sort of mock-tender pride.) To his own
little son we owe the delightful cut of the child who reminds the new
nurse that he is one of those children who can only be managed by
kindness, "so please get me a cake and an orange;" like that other
_Punch_ youngster who, aping mamma, faintly asks, "Is there such a thing
as a bun in the house?" "Astonishingly quick Leech was," says Mr.
Silver, "to seize on any sight or subject that seemed to have some
humour in it. I can call to mind, for instance, how I chanced to see a
chimney-sweep with his hand held to his eyes, as he was passing a
street-door while the mat was being shaken. I told Leech of the
incident; for, covered as he was with soot, the sweep seemed
over-sensitive. In a very few minutes the scene was sketched most
funnily, and was then drawn on the wood. The sketch hangs in my
billiard-room, and they who please may turn to _Punch_ and see the
drawing. Another time I recollect we noticed some big buoys which were
just the shape of fishing-floats, and which I said that Gulliver might
have seen so used in Brobdingnag. 'Not a bad idea,' said Leech, and he
made a hasty sketch then. Next morning the result appeared upon the
wood, and soon afterwards in _Punch_, with a 'legend' which I quote from
memory only:--'I s'pose you sometimes catch some biggish fish here, eh,
old Cockywax?' 'Why, yes; and them's the floats we uses; see, young
Cockywax'?"
From Millais he had many a joke; and when the two close friends were
separated, the former would send him sketches of the idea. Several of
these Leech left behind him, having only taken advantage of two--the
protection that plaid is supposed to afford in the Highlands, when the
unhappy novice who puts it on wrestles with it in a high wind; and the
device of a couple of artists for defying the Scotch midges--a comic,
balloon-like envelope for the head. From Dean Hole came that immortal
joke of the yokel at a great country dinner, who on tossing off his
liqueur-glass of Curaçoa, the first he has ever tasted, calls to the
waiter that he'll "tak' some o' that in a moog;" and it was from a
passage in one of the Dean's letters to the effect that in a long run he
had only had three mishaps on his promising young chestnut, that Leech
invented the drawing of "A Contented Mind"--wherein the mud-bespattered
young hopeful has increased the number of falls to five. And he loved to
watch the sons of his colleague, Gilbert Abbott à Beckett--both of them
in due time called to the Table--and to base upon the mischievous
adventures and the characteristic invention of the young pickles many a
laughable drawing. They were the originals of the boys who, with a
ten-and-sixpenny box of tools and a sufficiency of nails, in the absence
of their parents put the furniture of the house in a state of thorough
repair!! And on a skating experience of one of them--Mr. Arthur à
Beckett--comes that well-known design of a youth at the mercy of a
skate-tout at the ice-edge. "Look out!" he cries; "_you_ are running the
gimlet into my heel!" "Never mind, sir," responds the man, persuasively;
"_better 'ave 'em on firm!_"
From Charles Dickens, from Mr. Frith, Mr. Holman Hunt, and Mr. Horsley,
R.A., Leech also accepted happy thoughts; and from an "Eton boy," the
smart reply of a belle of a ballroom to the young Oxford man who
"couldn't get on there without women's society"--"Pity you don't go to
a girls' school, then!" The Eton boy claimed and received remuneration,
to the amount of a couple of guineas, which came out of Leech's generous
pocket, accompanied by a present and good counsel--a form of
acknowledgment, however, which was "not to be taken as a precedent."
Sometimes, too, Leech would re-draw or touch up sketches of good jokes
sent in by outsiders; but on such occasions he, according to the usual
practice of the _Punch_ men, never signed the drawing so made.
The melancholy of Leech, which probably found relief in his more
sarcastic and serious drawings, was one of the predominant features of
his character. Sadness and dejection are often the birthwrong of the
humorist, as we have seen in the cases of Gillray, Seymour, André Gill,
and Labiche, and many others of _Punch's_ own day. But Leech's gravity
belonged to a mind too well-balanced to overreach itself, too genuine
for false sentiment. Moreover, he "could be a merry fellow when harmless
fun was demanded." So says Sir John Millais, who after Thackeray, and
perhaps Percival Leigh, was the friend Leech loved the best--far more
than any others of the _Punch_ Staff, cordial as his friendship with
them was. Sometimes his depression would make him think, says Dean Hole,
that he was "wasting his time on unworthy objects and an inferior
method," which was exactly what Kenny Meadows told him. It is true that
the said Bohemian had, in a soberer moment, assured him of his
immeasurable superiority to Kenny's self; but as the wine flowed, the
truth came out of it, it appeared that Meadows considered his own
illustrations of Shakespeare of vastly greater account than the mere
comic sketches of young John Leech.
Leech, it seemed, could be as humorous as he pleased, and as whimsical.
When his children misbehaved, he would correct them by making a sketch
of their "naughty faces;" and he was always ready to turn a joke upon
himself. He made merciless fun of sea-sickness--yet what is there so
comic in sea-sickness, after all, that we always laugh at it, just as we
laugh at the toothache, which George Cruikshank was so fond of
caricaturing?--the suffering, in both cases awful beyond the power of
words to express. One would almost be led to believe that Leech shared
the immunity of the robust scoffers whom one usually sees behind a big
cigar on board the yacht or steamboat. Yet when he crossed to Boulogne
on a visit to Dickens, and was received with uproarious applause from
what Americans call the "side-walk committee," by reason of his superior
greenness and more abject misery, he was quite pleased, and said with
the utmost gratification that he felt he had made a great hit. His
companionship with Dickens was frequent; and when, in 1848, he was
overthrown by a wave while bathing at Bonchurch, and received a slight
concussion of the brain, the novelist rendered him the greatest medical
service. On that occasion and the week after the cartoons were executed
by Doyle and Newman respectively, while Thackeray filled the space
usually occupied by Leech's smaller cuts.
His prejudices were to some extent the prejudices of Thackeray. That he
should have shared Gilbert à Beckett's dislike of Jews was perhaps to be
accounted for by his having in his youth been detained on two occasions
in "sponging-houses," though through no fault of his own; and visiting
the sins of the lowest upon the whole race, as is the orthodox practice,
he displayed towards them something of Alonzo Cano's ill-will and more
than his power of ill-doing. Similarly, towards Irishmen and Frenchmen
he showed the same hearty prejudice, not untinged, perhaps, with
patriotism; and of that Thackeray was led to write: "We trace in his
work a prejudice against the Hebrew nation, against the natives of an
island much celebrated for its verdure and its wrongs. These are
lamentable prejudices, indeed; but what man is without his own?" Yet
they were honestly entertained, and acted upon according to the lights
of _Punch_ which at that time were full aflame.
[Illustration: JOHN LEECH'S HOUSE, KENSINGTON HIGH STREET (NOW
DEMOLISHED).
(_Drawn by John Fulleylove, R.I._)]
But these playful dislikes paled beside the hatred he bore to
organ-grinders--a hatred as unrelenting as the organ-grinders
themselves. For this he had only too sound a reason, for it was they
who, grinding his overworked nerves, were destined literally to play him
into his grave. As early as 1843 he began his campaign against them in
_Punch_, and he never relaxed it until his death. Morbidly timid of all
noise, he loved to stay at some quiet English seaside place, "where the
door-knockers were dieted to three raps a day;" but he writhed most
under the sound of the organ, and not Hogarth's Enraged Musician endured
half the torture that Leech suffered in physical and nervous agony. He
appealed with his pencil to the law; he ridiculed the barbarous persons,
such as Lord Wilton, who "rather liked it;" he portrayed the effect of
these tyrants of the street upon the sick and on the worker; and he
never spared the offenders themselves. Once, indeed, he was goaded into
showing one of these dirty persons leading a louse, like a monkey, by a
string; but after a few copies had been struck off (and included in the
parcel for Scotland), the printing-press was stopped, and the "realism"
was cut from the block. From the first contribution, in which an old
lady was supposed to advertise for a professor of mesmerism--a discovery
much talked about at that time--in order to mesmerise all the organs in
her street, at so much per organ, down to the end, some scores of
drawings were directed against his unnatural enemy, who literally drove
him from house to house. Even when he took final refuge at his
delightful residence, 6 The Terrace, Kensington--now, alas! removed to
make way for showy shops--and fitted it with double windows, he still
could get no rest. Standing with Mr. Silver under the tree beneath whose
shade Thackeray, Keene, and Leech loved to foregather round his _al
fresco_ dinner-table, I have hearkened to the pretty clink, clink,
clink, of a far-distant smith as he smote his hammer upon the anvil,
and, wondering that so sweet a sound could trouble any man, I have
realised how shattered must have been the sufferer's nervous system as
he neared his end.
[Illustration: THE ASH-TREE IN THE GARDEN OF JOHN LEECH'S HOUSE, UNDER
WHICH LEECH AND THACKERAY USED TO DINE.
(_Drawn by John Fulleylove, R.I._)]
When Mr. M. T. Bass, M.P., brought in his private Bill to regulate
"street music," Mark Lemon sent him an eloquent letter of support, in
which he touchingly dwelt on the torments suffered by his friend. "The
effect," he wrote, "upon his health--produced, on my honour, by the
causes I have named--is so serious that he is forbidden to take horse
exercise, or indulge in fast walking, as a palpitation of the heart has
been produced--a form of _angina pectoris_, I believe--and his friends
are most anxiously concerned for his safety. He is ordered to Homburg,
and I know that the expatriation will entail a loss of nearly £50 a
week upon him just at present. I am sure I need not withhold from you
the name of this poor gentleman--it is Mr. John Leech."
[Illustration: TWO ROSES.
(_From a Sketch for "Punch" by John Leech._)]
The artist only survived this appeal for half a year, and died before he
could enjoy any relief from Mr. Bass's meagre Bill. But the public was
loud in denunciation of the nuisance when they learned that he who had
made their lives so much merrier for a quarter of a century had been
harassed into the grave. "Carlyle," wrote Mr. Moncure Conway, "who
suffered from the same fraternity, mingled with his sorrow for Leech
some severe sermons against that kind of liberty which 'permitted
Italian foreigners to invade London and kill John Leech, and no doubt
hundreds of other nervous people who die and make no sign!'" Leech's
last drawing appears on p. 188 (November 5th, 1864), in which an
Irishman is shown thoroughly enjoying the after-effects of a fight,
his face having been pummelled out of all recognition. It is full of
fun and life and spirit, and gives no hint that he who drew it would
delight the world no more.
[Illustration: MY LORD BROUGHAM AS SEEN AT MR. LUMLEY'S.
(_From a Sketch by John Leech. By Permission of Henry Silver, Esq._)]
And when the news went forth that John Leech was dead, a hush seemed to
fall on the country, as it had done ten months before, when Thackeray
died, and as it did again a few years after, on the death of Dickens.
The three men all died sudden deaths, and Leech felt and declared that
Thackeray's was the knell of his own. "I saw the remains of the poor
dear fellow," he said, "and, I assure you, I can hardly get over it. A
happy or merry Christmas is out of the question." What wonder, then,
that on hearing that Leech had followed, Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie should
have exclaimed, "How happy my father will be to meet him!"
"I fancy Thackeray was tired of life," said Leech in his deep bass voice
to his _Punch_ colleague Mr. Henry Silver. "At these words I wondered
much," says the latter gentleman, "as any young man might who failed to
see beneath the surface of a loved and prospering life. 'I feel somehow
I sha'n't survive him long,' he added rather wearily; 'and I shouldn't
much care either, if it were not for my family.' Then, after a pause, he
said more cheerfully, 'But I can do some work yet. And at any rate,
thank Heaven! they needn't send the hat round.'" But they _had_ need,
and they did. After his death _Punch_ made sturdy, repeated, and
successful efforts, not only to collect a fund for the artist's family,
but also to make known the facts of his death-sale.
_Punch's_ tribute to his mighty servant befitted the occasion: "The
simplest words are best where all words are vain. Ten days ago a great
artist in the noon of life, and with his glorious mental faculties in
full power, but with the shade of physical infirmity darkening upon him,
took his accustomed place among friends who have this day held his pall.
Some of them had been fellow-workers with him for a quarter of a
century, others for fewer years; but to know him well was to love him
dearly, and all in whose name these lines are written mourn for him as a
brother. His monument is in the volumes of which this is one sad leaf,
and in a hundred works which, at this hour, few will not remember more
easily than those who have just left his grave. While Society, whose
every phase he has illustrated with a truth, a grace, and a tenderness
heretofore unknown to satiric art, gladly and proudly takes charge of
his fame, they, whose pride in the genius of a great associate was
equalled by their affection for an attached friend, would leave on
record that they have known no kindlier, more refined, or more generous
nature than that of him who has been thus early called to his rest."
He was taken to the cemetery in the same hearse that had carried Douglas
Jerrold to his last abode. Mark Lemon, Shirley Brooks, Tom Taylor,
Horace Mayhew, F. M. Evans, John Tenniel, Henry Silver, F. C. Burnand,
J. E. Millais, and Samuel Lucas were the pall-bearers; around his grave,
close to where Thackeray lay, stood the whole _Punch_ Staff and many
friends who loved him; and Dean Hole completed the Burial Service in sad
and broken tones.
FOOTNOTES:
[50] See _Punch_, p. 237, Vol. I.