curious and fortunate chance fell in with a congenial fellow-student
named Percival Leigh, whose interest in comic journalism was to play a
very important part in Leech's career. Leigh had two friends who shared
his literary tastes and ambitions--Albert Smith, a medical student at
the Middlesex Hospital, and Gilbert Abbott a Beckett, a young
barrister, these forming a humorous band of brothers to which Leech made
a very welcome addition. Leigh was seriously concerned also with
medicine, but there is no evidence that Leech burnt any midnight oil in
its pursuit, although he made some excellent anatomical drawings. The
popularity of the London Coffee-House on Ludgate Hill meanwhile
declining, a less expensive instructor than St. Bartholomew became
necessary; and Leech was placed with the ingenious Mr. Whittle of
Hoxton, who, under the guise of a healer, devoted most of his attention
to pigeons and boxing. Mr. Whittle of Hoxton (who is to be found under
the name of Rawkins in Albert Smith's novel, "The Adventures of Mr.
Ledbury," which Leech illustrated) may not appreciably have extended his
pupil's knowledge of therapeutics, but he is our benefactor in
quickening his interest in sport. Leech's next mentor was Dr. John
Cockle, son of the Cockle of the pills; and then, the paternal purse
being really empty, he, at the age of eighteen, flung physic to the dogs
and trusted for a living to his pencil, which, since Charterhouse had
the most indifferent of drawing-masters, was still untrained.
In those days there were many ephemeral satirical sheets, in addition to
the magazines, to offer employment to the comic draughtsman, and Leech
did not starve; his two experiences of the inside of a sponging-house
being due to his good nature rather than to financial foolishness of his
own. His first publication was a slender collection of street types
entitled "Etchings and Sketchings," by A Pen, 1835. He tried also
political caricatures and drew bruisers for "Bell's Life in London." In
1836 he was among those draughtsmen (Thackeray was another) who competed
without success for Seymour's post as illustrator of a series of
humorous papers describing the proceedings of the Pickwick Club. In 1840
appeared his parody of the Mulready envelope, which was very popular and
a real foundation-stone for the young artist, and Percival Leigh's
"Comic Latin Grammar" and "Comic English Grammar," the illustrations to
which fortified the impression which the Mulready skit had made, and
established the fact that a new pictorial humorist of resource and
vigour had appeared.
In 1841 _Punch_ was founded, with Mark Lemon as its editor and Leigh on
its staff; and for Leech to join up was merely a matter of time. His
first efforts were tentative, but by 1844, when Thackeray was also a
power on the staff, he had become the paper's strong man, and its strong
man he remained until his death twenty years after. _Punch_ had a great
personnel, courage, and sound ideas, but without Leech's sunny humanity
week after week it is unlikely to have won its way to such complete
popularity and trust. It was he, more than any other contributor, who
drove it home to the heart of the nation.
Leech's cartoons were for the most part suggested to him, the outcome of
discussion round the Mahogany Tree (which is made of pine); but to a
larger extent probably than with any of his colleagues or successors the
social drawings, by which he is now best known and by which he will
live, were the fruits of his own observation, visual and aural. That is
to say, he provided words as well as drawings. He also followed the line
of least resistance. It was enough for him to think an incident funny,
to set it down, and by the time it had passed through that filter--a
blend of humane understanding and humane fun--which he kept in his
brain, it was assured of a welcome by _Punch's_ readers too. To-day the
paper is a little more exacting, a little more complex: a consequence
possibly, in some measure, of the fertility and universality of its
earlier giant, who anticipated so many jokes. To-day, as it happens,
there is more of the Leech spirit in _Life_, where absurdity for its own
sake is to a greater extent cultivated. But for twenty years that
spirit permeated and dominated _Punch_. Leech had a great chance and he
rose to it. Never before had things been made so easy for a satirical
artist with alert eyes. Hogarth had had to plan and struggle to get his
engravings before the public; Gillray and Rowlandson had only the
print-sellers as a medium; but Leech had an editor who appreciated him
and gave him his head, and employers who paid handsomely, while his work
appeared in a paper which increased its circulation with every number.
That is to say, he knew that he had an audience: no small incentive. The
result is that "Pictures of Life and Character" is the completest survey
of the social England of his times that any artist has ever made or is
likely to make.
To-day this inexhaustible work in three immense volumes is out of print,
but there never was a book that better deserved continuous
accessibility. It is Leech's monument, and he has no other. One learns
from it, while laughing the honestest of laughter, how inveterate a
plagiarist from herself is Dame Fashion. The number of drawings which
need only the slightest modernizing change to be telling now is
extraordinary. Leech missed nothing; and the world is always coming full
circle.
The criticism has too often been made that Leech could not draw. Placed
beside Keene or Phil May he is, it is true, wanting in inevitableness;
his line is merely efficient, never splendid; yet sometimes he could
draw amazingly and get the very breath of life into a figure. In
particular was he a master of gesture, and now and then his landscapes
are a revelation. But the resplendent fact is that he could draw well
enough; he did, as Thackeray said, what he wished to do; that is proved
by his triumph. A man who cannot draw does not get all his
fellow-countrymen following his pencil in a rapture (as though it were
the Pied Piper's whistle) as Leech did for twenty years. Du Maurier, who
admired him immensely, hit on a happy comparison when he said that Leech
was "a ballad-writer among draughtsmen," or, in other words, he had
simplicity, lucidity, movement, and a story. It has to be remembered,
too, that Leech did single-handed what ever since his day it has needed
a syndicate to accomplish. He, himself and alone, was cartoonist, social
draughtsman, low-life draughtsman, and the provider of hunting scenes.
If the Volunteers were to be chaffed, Leech's was the hand; if the
priceless Mr. Briggs was to be invented and kept busy, Leech was his
impresario. And it was he also who drew the prettiest girls in what
Thackeray called "Mr. Punch's harem."
All his life, after finding himself, Leech worked too hard, being,
although well paid, in some mysterious way continually either in debt or
about to be. He was also uniformly behind time; and Mark Lemon used
humorously to bemoan half his days misspent in cabs between the _Punch_
office and the artist's various residences collecting his belated
drawings. Leech, however, when once he had made up his mind, drew very
rapidly, and his productiveness was amazing, for besides his _Punch_
work he illustrated a large number of books, including (which some
people would call his masterpiece) the sporting novels of Surtees.
In private life--but all his life was private--Leech was not less simple
than that other great Carthusian, Colonel Newcome. He loved his family,
rode his horse Red Mullet whenever there was a free moment, and as often
as possible had a day's run with the Puckeridge hounds, not only for
enjoyment, but in order that that very important section of his work,
his hunting scenes, might not languish. He was fond of dinner parties,
both as host and guest, and after them preferred conversation to cards.
He sang lugubrious songs in a deep, melancholy voice, with his eyes
fixed upwards--the favourite being Barry Cornwall's "King Death," the
words of which, Dickens averred, were inscribed on the ceiling in mystic
characters discernible only by the singer. He told stories well, but the
record of good things said by him is meagre, and his letters are
singularly free from humorous passages. Once, however, when a liberty
had been taken with him by a public man, he threatened "to _draw_ and
defend himself"; and there is a pleasant story of his retort to some
rowdy inebriated men in Kensington who excused themselves by saying that
they were Foresters: "Then, why the devil don't you go to the forest and
make a din there?" Noise was, indeed, his bane. He had double windows in
his house, but was always in danger of headaches and shattered nerves
from street sounds and, in particular, barrel organs. It is even said
that street music led to his early death; but that probably was only
indirectly. He died of overwork, aged forty-seven.
Leech's friends were devoted to him, as he to them. Thackeray came
first, and indeed once he said that he loved him more than any man,
although on another occasion it was FitzGerald and Brookfield whom he
named. Dickens and Leech were friends as well as collaborators. It is to
Dean Hole, with whom Leech took the "Little Tour in Ireland" in 1858,
that we must go for the best description of his appearance--"A slim,
elegant figure, over six feet in height, with a grand head 'on which
nature had written Gentleman,' with wonderful genius in his ample
forehead; wonderful penetration, observation, humour in his blue-grey
Irish eyes, and wonderful sweetness and sympathy and mirth about his
lips, which seemed to speak in silence."
Of Leech's genius and accomplishment no one has written better than Dr.
John Brown in "Horoe Subsecivae," third series. Millais, who coached
Leech in oil painting for his exhibition of enlarged scenes from the
career of Mr. Briggs, also was his close friend; while Trelawny, whom
Millais painted, claimed to have loved Leech next only to Shelley.
Another artist friend was W. P. Frith, who became his biographer. All
his friends testify to the sweetness of his nature and the purity of his
character, while the two great novelists of his day, writing of his
work--Dickens of his "Rising Generation" and Thackeray of the "Pictures
of Life and Character"--used independently the phrase that he came to
his task like "a gentleman." In those days gentlemen, at any rate in
public places, were less uncommon than now; but even then Leech was
conspicuous.
It is perhaps with Dickens and Thackeray that he will be most closely
associated by posterity. He stands between them as a fellow-Victorian
colossus. All three were doing, in different ways, the same work--that
is to say, they were selecting and fixing, for all time, their time; and
all three were distinguished by that remarkable abundance which makes
the middle years of the last century so astonishing to us. Dickens,
Thackeray, Carlyle, Macaulay, Ruskin, Trollope, Leech, in England;
Dumas, Balzac, Hugo, Dore, in France. What rivulets to-day compared with
those floods!
Leech died prematurely (in his father's arms, while a children's party
was in progress in his house) on October 29, 1864, less than a year
after Thackeray. "How happy," said Miss Thackeray (afterward Lady
Ritchie), "my father will be to meet him!" _Punch's_ tribute contained
this sentence: "Society, whose every phase he has illustrated with a
truth or grace and a tenderness heretofore unknown in satiric art,
gladly and proudly takes charge of his fame." No words to-day, fifty-six
years after, can improve on it; nor has in the interim any greater
social delineator or humaner genius arisen.
_IN RE_ PHYSIOGNOMY
I. IDENTIFICATION
Many summers ago I was on one of David MacBrayne's steamers on the way
to a Scotch island. Among the few passengers was an interesting man with
whom I fell into conversation. He was vigorous, bulky, tall, with a
pointed grey beard and a mass of grey hair under a Panama, and he was
bound, he told me, for a well-known fishing-lodge, whither he went every
August. He had been a great traveller and knew Persia well; he had also
been in Parliament, and one of his sons was in the siege of Mafeking. So
much I remember of his affairs; but his name I did not learn. We talked
much about books, and I introduced him to Doughty's "Arabia Deserta."
I have often thought of him since and wondered who he was, and whenever
I have met fishermen or others likely to be acquainted with this
attractive and outstanding personality. I have asked about him; but
never with success. And then the other day I seemed really to be on the
track, for I met a man in a club who also has the annual custom of
spending a fortnight or so in the same Scotch island, and he claimed to
know every one who has ever visited that retired spot.
This is what happened.
"If you're so old an islander as that," I said, "you're the very person
to solve the problem that I have carried about for four or five years.
There's a man who fishes regularly up there"--and then I described my
fellow-passenger. "Tell me," I said, "who he is."
He considered, knitting his brows.
"You're sure you're right in saying he is unusually tall?" he inquired
at last.
"Absolutely," I replied.
"That's a pity," he said, "because otherwise it might be Sir Gerald
Orpington. Only he's short. Still, he was in Parliament right enough.
But, of course, if it was a tall man it's not Orpington."
He considered again.
"You say," he remarked, "that he had been in Persia? Now old Jack
Beresford is tall enough and has plenty of hair, but I swear he's never
been to Persia, and of course he hasn't a son at all. It's very odd.
Describe him again."
I described my man again, and he followed every point on his fingers.
"Well," he said; "I could have sworn I knew every man who ever fished at
Blank, but this fellow----Oh, wait a minute! You say he is tall and
bulky and had travelled. Why, it must be old Carstairs. And yet it can't
be. Carstairs was never married and was never in Parliament."
He pondered again.
Then he said, "You're sure it wasn't a clean-shaven bald man with a
single eyeglass?"
"Quite," I said.
"Because," he went on, "if he had been, it would have been old Peterson
to the life."
"He wasn't bald or clean-shaven," I said.
"You're sure he said Blank?" he inquired after another interval of
profound thought.
"Absolutely," I replied.
"Tell me again what he was like. Tell me exactly. I know every one up
there; I must know him."
"He was a vigorous, bulky, very tall man," I said, "with a pointed beard
and a mass of grey hair under a Panama; and he used to go to Blank every
August. He had been a great traveller and knew Persia; he had been in
Parliament, and one of his sons was in the siege of Mafeking."
"I don't know him," he said.
II. DR. SULLIVAN
It had been decided that there never was such a resemblance as is to be
traced between my homely features and those of a visitor to the same
hotel the previous year--Dr. Sullivan of Harley Street. This had become
an established fact, irrefutable like a proposition of Euclid, and one
of my new friends, and a friend also of the Harley Street physician who
had so satisfyingly and minutely anticipated my countenance, made it the
staple of his conversation. "Isn't this gentleman," he would say to this
and that habitue of the smoking-room as they dropped in from the
neighbouring farms at night, "the very image of Dr. Sullivan of Harley
Street, who was here last year?" And they would subject my physiognomy
to a searching study and agree that I was. Perhaps the nose--a little
bigger, don't you think? or a shade of dissimilarity between the chins
(he having, I suppose, only two, confound him!), but, taking it all
around, the likeness was extraordinary.
This had been going on for some time, until I was accustomed, if not
exactly inured, to it, and was really rather looking forward to the time
when, on returning to London, I could trump up a sufficient ailment to
justify me in calling upon my double in Harley Street and scrutinising
him with my own eyes. But last night my friend had something of a
set-back, which may possibly, by deflecting his conversation to other
topics, give me relief. I hope so.
It happened like this. We were as usual sitting in the smoking-room, he
and I, when another local acquaintance entered--one who, I gathered, had
been away for a few weeks and whom I had therefore not yet seen, and who
(for this was the really important thing to my friend) consequently had
not yet seen me.
In course of time the inevitable occurred. "Don't you think," my friend
asked, "that this gentleman is the very image of Dr. Sullivan of Harley
Street, who was here last summer?"
"What Dr. Sullivan's that?" the new-comer inquired.
"Dr. Sullivan of Harley Street, who was fishing here last summer. Don't
you remember him? The very image of this gentleman."
"The only Dr. Sullivan I know," replied the new-comer, "is Dr. Sullivan
of Newcastle. He's a very old man by now. A very learned man too. He has
a wonderful private museum. He----"
"No, no, the Dr. Sullivan I mean was from Harley Street--a
specialist--who took the Manor fishing last summer and stayed in the
hotel."
"Dr. Sullivan of Newcastle is a very old man--much older than this
gentleman," replied the stranger, "and not a bit like him. He's a most
interesting personality. He is the great authority on the South Sea
Islanders. You should see his collection of Fiji war clubs."
"But that's not the Dr. Sullivan I mean. You must remember him," said my
impresario; "we all used to meet evening after evening, just as we're
doing now--Dr. Sullivan of Harley Street, the specialist, a clean-shaven
man, exactly like this gentleman here. Every one has noticed the
likeness."
"Dr. Sullivan of Newcastle has a beard," said the new-comer. "And he's a
very old man by now. A great receptacle of miscellaneous learning. He
showed me once his collection of coins and medals. He's got coins back
to the Roman Emperors and stories about every one of them. His
collection----"
"Yes, but----"
"--of idols is amazing. You never saw such comic figures as those
natives worship. There's nothing he doesn't collect. He's got a mummy
covered with blue beads. He's got skulls from all over the world,
showing different formations. It's some years----"
"Yes, but----"
"--since I saw him last, and of course he may be----"
"Yes, but----"
"--dead. But if not, he's a man worth knowing. If ever you go to
Newcastle, sir,"--this was to me,--"don't forget about him. But he must
be very old by now. He----"
At this point I finished my glass and slipped away to bed. Consulting
the mirror as I undressed, I smiled at the reflection that confronted
me. "You can sleep more comfortably to-night," I said, "for there are
signs that you are about to have a rest."
THE WORLD'S DESIRE
Reading the terms of the agreement which Charlie Chaplin refused in New
York early in 1916 I had a kind of nervous collapse. For we English are
not so accustomed to great sums of money as the Americans are. Then I
bound a wet towel round my head and studied the figures as
dispassionately as it is possible to study figures when they run into
kings' ransoms. Charlie was offered ten thousand dollars a week for a
year: which came then to L104,000 and is now (1920) much more. He was
offered one hundred thousand dollars as a bonus for signing the
agreement. He was also offered 50 per cent. of any profits made by his
films after his salary had been paid. But it did not satisfy him. He
refused it.
Now here is a most remarkable state of affairs--that the popular demand
for laughter is such that a little acrobatic man with splay feet and a
funny way with a cigarette, a hat, and a cane could be offered and could
repudiate such colossal wealth as that, and for no other services than
to clown it for the cinematoscope. Nor is the oddity of the matter
decreased by the reflection that these figures which make an ordinary
person dizzy, belonged to war-time. Charlie Chaplin's rise to affluence
and power coincided with the bloodiest struggle in history.
If it is needful for so many people to hold their sides, Charlie's
career is justified. He is also the first droll to conquer the whole
world. I suppose that it is no exaggeration to say that at any moment of
the day and night--allowing for divergences of time--it would be safe to
maintain that ten million people are laughing at the Chaplin antics
somewhere or other on this planet of ours. For wherever there is a
township of more than two thousand inhabitants, there, I imagine, is a
cinema; and wherever there is a cinema there is Charlie; not always
quite up to date, of course, for managers are wily birds, but in some
film, even though an ancient one. Does the Funniest Man on Earth, as he
is called, I should like to know, realise what a role he fills? Does he
stand before the glass and search the recesses of his countenance--which
is now far more familiar to the world than any other--and marvel?
Charlie, by the way, has his private uses too. During a recent visit
from a young friend, I found that the ordinary gulf that is fixed
between a boy in the neighbourhood of ten and a man in the
neighbourhood of five times that number was for once easily bridgeable.
We found common ground, and very wisely stuck to it, in the circumstance
that each of us had seen Charlie, and, by great good fortune, we had
each seen him in his latest sketch. Whenever, therefore, a _longueur_
threatened, I had but to mention another aspect of Charlie's genius, and
in the discussion that followed all was well.
That Charlie is funny is beyond question. I will swear to that. His
humour is of such elemental variety that he could, and probably does,
make a Tierra del Fuegan or a Bushman of Central Australia laugh not
much less than our sophistical selves. One needs no civilised culture to
appreciate the fun of the harlequinade, and to that has Charlie, with
true instinct, returned. But it is the harlequinade accelerated,
intensified, toned up for the exacting taste of the great and growing
"picture" public. It is also farce at its busiest, most furious. Charlie
brought back that admirable form of humour which does not disdain the
co-operation of fisticuffs, and in which, by way of variety, one man is
aimed at, and another, too intrusive, is hit. However long the world may
last, it is safe to say that the spectacle of one man receiving a blow
meant for another will be popular.
What strikes one quickly is the realisation of how much harder Charlie
works than many of the more illustrious filmers. He is rarely out of the
picture, he is rarely still, and he gives full measure. There is no
physical indignity that he does not suffer--and inflict. Such
impartiality is rare in drama, where usually men are either on top or
underneath. In the ordinary way our pet comedians must be on top and
untouched. Even the clown, though he receives punishment _en route_,
eventually triumphs. But Charlie seldom wins. He remains a butt, or, at
any rate, a victim of circumstances whom nothing can discourage or
deter. His very essence is resiliency under difficulties, an unabashed
and undefeatable front. His especial fascination to me is that life
finds him always ready for it--not because he is armed by sagacity, but
because he is even better armed by folly. He is first cousin to the
village idiot, a natural child of nonsense, licensed up to the hilt, and
(like Antaeus) every time he rises from a knockdown blow he is the
stronger.
It is a proof of the charter which the world has handed to this
irresistible humourist that he has been permitted to introduce such an
innovation in stage manners as the hitting of women. We only laugh the
more when, having had his ears boxed by the fair, he retaliates with
double strength. And there is one of his plays in which every audience
becomes practically helpless, as after, with great difficulty,
extricating a lady in evening dress from a fountain, he deliberately
pushes her in again. It required a Charlie Chaplin to make this
tolerable; but such is his radiant unworldliness that we accept it as
quite legitimate fun.