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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12834 ***
+
+SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE
+
+[Frontispiece: Mr. and Mrs. Candle.
+
+From the original drawing by JOHN LEECH. In the possession of JOHN
+KENDRICK BANGS. Esq. The lower portion has never before been
+reproduced.]
+
+
+SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE.
+
+_By_ GEORGE DU MAURIER,
+
+_Author of "Trilby" "The Martian" &c._
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+
+MDCCCXCVIII
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+_Mr. and Mrs. Caudle_
+
+_John Leech_
+
+_"In the Bay of Biscay O"_
+
+_A Specimen of Pluck_
+
+_One of Mr. Briggs's Adventures in the Highlands_
+
+_Thank Goodness! Fly-fishing has begun!_
+
+_"The jolly little Street Arabs"_
+
+_Doing a little Business_
+
+_A Tolerably Broad Hint_
+
+_Charles Keene_
+
+_The Snowstorm, Jan. 2, 1867_
+
+_Waiting for the Landlord!_
+
+_A Stroke of Business_
+
+_"None o' your Larks"_
+
+_An Affront to the Service_
+
+_"Not up to his Business"_
+
+_George du Maurier_
+
+_Feline Amenities_
+
+_The New Society Craze_
+
+_A Pictorial Puzzle_
+
+_Refinements of Modern Speech_
+
+_"Reading without Tears"_
+
+_The Height of Impropriety_
+
+_Things one would wish to have expressed differently_
+
+
+
+
+SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE
+
+
+It is my purpose to speak of the craft to which I have devoted the
+best years of my life, the craft of portraying, by means of little
+pen-and-ink strokes, lines, and scratches, a small portion of the
+world in which we live; such social and domestic incidents as lend
+themselves to humorous or satirical treatment; the illustrated
+criticism of life, of the life of our time and country, in its lighter
+aspects.
+
+The fact that I have spent so many years in the practice of this craft
+does not of itself, I am well aware, entitle me to lay down the law
+about it; the mere exercise of an art so patent to all, so easily
+understanded of the people, does not give one any special insight into
+its simple mysteries, beyond a certain perception and appreciation of
+the technical means by which it is produced--unless one is gifted with
+the critical faculty, a gift apart, to the possession of which I make
+no claim.
+
+There are two kinds of critics of such work as ours. First there is
+the wide public for whom we work and by whom we are paid; "who lives
+to please must please to live"; and who lives by drawing for a comic
+periodical must manage to please the greater number. The judgment of
+this critic, though often sound, is not infallible; but his verdict
+for the time being is final, and by it we, who live by our wits and
+from hand to mouth, must either stand or fall.
+
+The other critic is the expert, our fellow-craftsman, who has learned
+by initiation, apprenticeship, and long practice the simple secrets of
+our common trade. He is not quite infallible either, and is apt to
+concern himself more about the manner than the matter of our
+performance; nor is he of immediate importance, since with the public
+on our side we can do without him for a while, and flourish like a
+green bay-tree in spite of his artistic disapproval of our work; but
+he is not to be despised, for he is some years in advance of that
+other critic, the public, who may, and probably will, come round to
+his way of thinking in time.
+
+The first of these two critics is typified by Molière's famous cook,
+who must have been a singularly honest, independent, and intelligent
+person, since he chose in all cases to abide by her decision, and not
+with an altogether unsatisfactory result to Mankind! Such cooks are
+not to be found in these days--certainly not in England; but he is an
+unlucky craftsman who does not possess some such natural critics in
+his family, his home, or near it--mother, sister, friend, wife, or
+child--who will look over his shoulder at his little sketch, and say:
+
+"Tommy [or Papa, or Grandpapa, as the case may be], that person you've
+just drawn doesn't look quite natural," or:
+
+"That lady is not properly dressed for the person you want her to
+be--those hats are not worn this year," and so forth and so forth.
+
+When you have thoroughly satisfied this household critic, then is the
+time to show some handy brother-craftsman your amended work, and
+listen gratefully when he suggests that you should put a tone on this
+wall, and a tree, or something, in the left middle distance to balance
+the composition, and raise or depress the horizon-line to get a better
+effect of perspective.
+
+In speaking of some of my fellow-artists on _Punch_, and of their
+work, I shall try and bring both these critical methods into
+play--promising, however, once for all, that such criticism on my part
+is simply the expression of my individual taste or fancy, the taste or
+fancy of one who by no means pretends to the unerring acumen of
+Molière's cook, on the one hand, and who feels himself by no means
+infallible in his judgment of purely technical matters, on the other.
+I can only admire and say why, or why I don't; and if I fail in making
+you admire and disadmire with me, it will most likely be my fault as
+well as my misfortune.
+
+I had originally proposed to treat of Richard Doyle, John Leech, and
+Charles Keene--and finally of myself, since that I should speak of
+myself was rather insisted upon by those who procured me the honour of
+speaking at all. I find, however, that there is so much to say about
+Leech and Keene that I have thought it better to sacrifice Richard
+Doyle, who belongs to a remoter period, and whose work, exquisite as
+it is of its kind, is so much slighter than theirs, and fills so much
+less of the public eye; for his connection with _Punch_ did not last
+long. Moreover, personally I knew less of him: just enough to find
+that to know was to love him--a happy peculiarity he shared with his
+two great collaborators on _Punch_.
+
+_John Leech_! What a name that was to conjure with, and is still!
+
+I cannot find words to express what it represented to me of pure
+unmixed delight in my youth and boyhood, long before I ever dreamed of
+being an artist myself! It stands out of the path with such names as
+Dickens, Dumas, Byron--not indeed that I am claiming for him an equal
+rank with those immortals, who wielded a weapon so much more potent
+than a mere caricaturist's pencil! But if an artist's fame is to be
+measured by the mere quantity and quality of the pleasure he has
+given, what pinnacle is too high for John Leech!
+
+Other men have drawn better; deeper, grander, nobler, more poetical
+themes have employed more accomplished pencils, even in black and
+white; but for making one _glad_, I can think of no one to beat him.
+
+To be an apparently hopeless invalid at Christmas-time in some dreary,
+deserted, dismal little Flemish town, and to receive _Punch's Almanac_
+(for 1858, let us say) from some good-natured friend in England--that
+is a thing not to be forgotten! I little dreamed then that I should
+come to London again, and meet John Leech and become his friend; that
+I should be, alas! the last man to shake hands with him before his
+death (as I believe I was), and find myself among the officially
+invited mourners by his grave; and, finally, that I should inherit,
+and fill for so many years (however indifferently), that half-page in
+_Punch_ opposite the political cartoon, and which I had loved so well
+when he was the artist!
+
+Well, I recovered from a long and distressing ailment of my sight
+which had been pronounced incurable, and came to England, where I was
+introduced to Charles Keene, with whom I quickly became intimate, and
+it was he who presented me to Leech one night at one of Mr. Arthur
+Lewis's smoking concerts, in the winter of 1860. I remember feeling
+somewhat nervous lest he should take me for a foreigner on account of
+my name, and rather unnecessarily went out of my way to assure him
+that I was rather more English than John Bull himself. It didn't
+matter in the least; I have no doubt he saw through it all: he was
+kindness and courtesy itself; and I experienced to the full that
+emotion so delightful to a young hero-worshipper in meeting face to
+face a world-wide celebrity whom he has long worshipped at a distance.
+In the words of Lord Tennyson:
+
+                                "I was rapt
+      By all the sweet and sudden passion of youth
+      Towards greatness in its elder...."
+
+But it so happened at just this particular period of his artistic
+career and of mine that he no longer shone as a solitary star of the
+first magnitude in my little firmament of pictorial social satire. A
+new impulse had been given to the art of drawing on wood, a new school
+had been founded, and new methods--to draw straight from nature
+instead of trusting to memory and imagination--had been the artistic
+order of the day. Men and women, horses and dogs, landscapes and
+seascapes, all one can make pictures of, even chairs and tables and
+teacups and saucers, must be studied from the life--from the
+still-life, if you will--by whoever aspired to draw on wood; even
+angels and demons and cherubs and centaurs and mermaids must be
+closely imitated from nature--or at least as much of them as could be
+got from the living model.
+
+_Once a Week_ had just appeared, and _The Cornhill Magazine_. Sir John
+Millais and Sir Frederick Leighton were then drawing on wood just like
+the ordinary mortals; Frederick Walker had just started on his brief
+but splendid career; Frederick Sandys had burst on the black-and-white
+world like a meteor; and Charles Keene, who was illustrating the
+_Cloister and the Hearth_ in the intervals of his _Punch_ work, had,
+after long and patient labour, attained that consummate mastery of
+line and effect in wood draughtsmanship that will be for ever
+associated with his name; and his work in _Punch_, if only by virtue
+of its extraordinary technical ability, made Leech's by contrast
+appear slight and almost amateurish in spite of its ease and boldness.
+
+So that with all my admiration for Leech it was at the feet of Charles
+Keene that I found myself sitting; besides which we were much together
+in those days, talking endless shop, taking long walks, riding side by
+side on the knife-boards of omnibuses, dining at cheap restaurants,
+making music at each other's studios. His personal charm was great, as
+great in its way as Leech's; he was democratic and so was I, as one is
+bound to be when one is impecunious and the world is one's oyster to
+open with the fragile point of a lead-pencil. His bohemian world was
+mine--and I found it a very good world and very much to my taste--a
+clear, honest, wholesome, innocent, intellectual, and most industrious
+British bohemia, with lots of tobacco, lots of good music, plenty of
+talk about literature and art, and not too much victuals or drink.
+Many of its denizens, that were, have become Royal Academicians or
+have risen to fame in other ways; some have had to take a back seat in
+life; surprisingly few have gone to the bad.
+
+This world, naturally, was not Leech's; if it had ever been, I doubt;
+his bohemia, if he ever had lived in one, had been the bohemia of
+medicine, not of art, and he seemed to us then to be living on social
+heights of fame and sport and aristocratic splendour where none of us
+dreamed of seeking him--and he did not seek us. We hated and despised
+the bloated aristocracy, just as he hated and despised foreigners
+without knowing much about them; and the aristocracy, to do it
+justice, did not pester us with its obtrusive advances. But I never
+heard Leech spoken of otherwise in bohemia than with affectionate
+admiration, although many of us seemed to think that his best work was
+done. Indeed, his work was becoming somewhat fitful in quality, and
+already showed occasional signs of haste and illness and fatigue; his
+fun was less genial and happy, though he drew more vigorously than
+ever, and now and again surprised us by surpassing himself, as in his
+series of Briggs in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.
+
+All that was thirty years ago and more. I may say at once that I have
+reconsidered the opinion I formed of John Leech at that time. Leech,
+it is true, is by no means the one bright particular star, but he has
+recovered much of his lost first magnitude: if he shines more by what
+he has to say than by his manner of saying it, I have come to think
+that that is the best thing of the two to shine by, if you cannot
+shine by both; and I find that his manner was absolutely what it
+should have been for his purpose and his time--neither more nor less;
+he had so much to say and of a kind so delightful that I have no time
+to pick holes in his mode of expression, which at its best has
+satisfied far more discriminating experts than I; besides which, the
+methods of printing and engraving have wonderfully improved since his
+day. He drew straight on the wood block, with a lead-pencil; his
+delicate grey lines had to be translated into the uncompromising
+coarse black lines of printers' ink--a ruinous process; and what his
+work lost in this way is only to be estimated by those who know. True,
+his mode of expression was not equal to Keene's--I never knew any that
+was, in England, or even approached it--but that, as Mr. Rudyard
+Kipling says, is another story.
+
+The story that I will tell now is that of my brief acquaintance with
+Leech, which began in 1860, and which I had not many opportunities of
+improving till I met him at Whitby in the autumn of 1864--a memorable
+autumn for me, since I used to forgather with him every day, and have
+long walks and talks with him--and dined with him once or twice at the
+lodgings where he was staying with his wife and son and daughter--all
+of whom are now dead. He was the most sympathetic, engaging, and
+attractive person I ever met; not funny at all in conversation, or
+ever wishing to be--except now and then for a capital story, which he
+told in perfection.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN LEECH.]
+
+The keynote of his character, socially, seemed to be self-effacement,
+high-bred courtesy, never-failing consideration for others. He was the
+most charming companion conceivable, having intimately known so many
+important and celebrated people, and liking to speak of them; but one
+would never have guessed from anything he ever looked or said that he
+had made a whole nation, male and female, gentle and simple, old and
+young, laugh as it had never laughed before or since for a quarter of
+a century.
+He was tall, thin, and graceful, extremely handsome, of the higher
+Irish type; with dark hair and whiskers and complexion, and very light
+greyish-blue eyes; but the expression of his face was habitually sad,
+even when he smiled. In dress, bearing, manner, and aspect, he was the
+very type of the well-bred English gentleman and man of the world and
+good society; I never met any one to beat him in that peculiar
+distinction of form, which, I think, has reached its highest European
+development in this country. I am told the Orientals are still our
+superiors in deportment. But the natural man in him was still the
+best. Thackeray and Sir John Millais, not bad judges, and men with
+many friends, have both said that they personally loved John Leech
+better than any man they ever knew.
+
+At this time he was painting in oil, and on an enlarged scale, some of
+his more specially popular sketches in _Punch_, and very anxious to
+succeed with them, but nervously diffident of success with them, even
+with [Greek: hoi polloi]. He was not at his happiest in these efforts;
+and there was something pathetic in his earnestness and perseverance
+in attempting a thing so many can do, but which he could not do for
+want of a better training; while he could do the inimitable so easily.
+
+I came back to town before Leech, and did not see him again until the
+following October. On Saturday afternoon, the 28th, I called at his
+house, No. 6 The Terrace, Kensington, with a very elaborate drawing in
+pencil by myself, which I presented to him as a souvenir, and with
+which he seemed much pleased.
+
+He was already working at the _Punch Almanac_ for '65, at a window on
+the second floor overlooking the street. (I have often gazed up at it
+since.) He seemed very ill, so sad and depressed that I could scarcely
+speak to him for sheer sympathy; I felt he would never get through the
+labour of that almanac, and left him with the most melancholy
+forebodings.
+
+Monday morning the papers announced his death on Sunday, October 29th,
+from angina pectoris, the very morning after I had seen him.
+
+I was invited by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, the publishers of
+_Punch_, to the funeral, which took place at Kensal Green. It was the
+most touching sight imaginable. The grave was near Thackeray's, who
+had died the year before. There were crowds of people, Charles Dickens
+among them; Canon Hole, a great friend of Leech's, and who has written
+most affectionately about him, read the service; and when the coffin
+was lowered into the grave, John Millais burst into tears and loud
+sobs, setting an example that was followed all round; we all forgot
+our manhood and cried like women! I can recall no funeral in my time
+where simple grief and affection have been so openly and spontaneously
+displayed by so many strangers as well as friends--not even in France,
+where people are more demonstrative than here. No burial in
+Westminster Abbey that I have ever seen ever gave such an impression
+of universal honour, love, and regret.
+
+"Whom the gods love die young." He was only forty-six!
+
+I was then invited to join the _Punch_ staff and take Leech's empty
+chair at the weekly dinner--and bidden to cut my initials on the
+table, by his; his monogram as it was carved by him is J.L. under a
+leech in a bottle, dated 1854; and close by on the same board are the
+initials W.M.T.
+
+I flatter myself that convivially, at least, my small D.M., carved in
+impenetrable oak, will go down to posterity in rather distinguished
+company!
+
+If ever there was a square English hole, and a square English peg to
+fit it, that hole was _Punch_, and that peg was John Leech. He was
+John Bull himself, but John Bull refined and civilised--John Bull
+polite, modest, gentle--full of self-respect and self-restraint, and
+with all the bully softened out of him; manly first and gentlemanly
+after, but very soon after; more at home perhaps in the club, the
+drawing-room, and the hunting-field, in Piccadilly and the Park, than
+in the farm or shop or market-place; a normal Englishman of the upper
+middle class, with but one thing abnormal about him, viz., his genius,
+which was of the kind to give the greater pleasure to the greater
+number--and yet delight the most fastidious of his day--and I think of
+ours. One must be very ultra-aesthetic, even now, not to feel his
+charm.
+
+He was all of a piece, and moved and worked with absolute ease,
+freedom, and certainty, within the limits nature had assigned him--and
+his field was a very large one. He saw and represented the whole
+panorama of life that came within his immediate ken with an unwavering
+consistency, from first to last; from a broadly humorous, though
+mostly sympathetic point of view that never changed--a very delightful
+point of view, if not the highest conceivable.
+
+Hand and eye worked with brain in singular harmony, and all three
+improved together contemporaneously, with a parallelism most
+interesting to note, as one goes through the long series of his social
+pictures from the beginning.
+
+He has no doubts or hesitations--no bewildering subtleties--no seeking
+from twelve to fourteen o'clock--either in his ideas or technique,
+which very soon becomes an excellent technique, thoroughly suited to
+his ideas--rapid, bold, spirited, full of colour, breadth, and
+movement--troubling itself little about details that will not help the
+telling of his story--for before everything else he has his story to
+tell, and it must either make you laugh or lightly charm you--and he
+tells it in the quickest, simplest, down-rightest pencil strokes,
+although it is often a complicated story!
+
+For there are not only the funny people and the pretty people acting
+out their little drama in the foreground--there is the scene in which
+they act, and the middle distance, and the background beyond, and the
+sky itself; beautiful rough landscapes and seascapes and skyscapes,
+winds and weathers, boisterous or sunny seas, rain and storm and
+cloud--all the poetry of nature, that he feels most acutely while his
+little people are being so unconsciously droll in the midst of it all.
+He is a king of impressionists, and his impression becomes ours on the
+spot--never to be forgotten! It is all so quick and fresh and strong,
+so simple, pat, and complete, so direct from mother Nature herself! It
+has about it the quality of inevitableness--those are the very people
+who would have acted and spoken in just that manner, and we meet them
+every day--the expression of the face, the movement and gesture, in
+anger, terror, dismay, scorn, conceit, tenderness, elation,
+triumph.... Whatever the mood, they could not have looked or acted
+otherwise--it is life itself. An optimistic life in which joyousness
+prevails, and the very woes and discomfitures are broadly comical to
+us who look on--like some one who has sea-sickness, or a headache
+after a Greenwich banquet--which are about the most tragic things he
+has dealt with.
+
+(I am speaking of his purely social sketches. For in his admirable
+large cuts, political and otherwise serious, his satire is often
+bitter and biting indeed; and his tragedy almost Hogarthian.)
+
+Like many true humorists, he was of a melancholy temperament, and no
+doubt felt attracted by all that was mirthful and bright, and in happy
+contrast to his habitual mood. Seldom if ever does a drop of his inner
+sadness ooze out through his pencil-point--and never a drop of gall;
+and I do not remember one cynical touch in his whole series.
+
+In his tastes and habits he was by nature aristocratic; he liked the
+society of those who were well dressed, well bred and refined like
+himself, and perhaps a trifle conventional; he conformed quite
+spontaneously and without effort to upper-class British ideal of his
+time, and had its likes and dislikes. But his strongest predilections
+of all are common to the British race: his love of home, his love of
+sport, his love of the horse and the hound--especially his love of the
+pretty woman--the pretty woman of the normal, wholesome English type.
+This charming creature so dear to us all pervades his show from
+beginning to end--she is a creation of his, and he thoroughly loves
+her, and draws her again and again with a fondness that is half
+lover-like and half paternal--her buxom figure, her merry bright eyes
+and fresh complexion and flowing ringlets, and pursed-up lips like
+Cupid's bow. Nor is he ever tired of displaying her feet and ankles
+(and a little more) in gales of wind on cliff and pier and parade, or
+climbing the Malvern Hills. When she puts on goloshes it nearly breaks
+his heart, and he would fly to other climes! He revels in her
+infantile pouts and jealousies and heart-burnings and butterfly
+delights and lisping mischiefs; her mild, innocent flirtations with
+beautiful young swells, whose cares are equally light.
+
+She is a darling, and he constantly calls her so to her face. Her
+favourite seaside nook becomes the mermaid's haunt; her back hair
+flies and dries in the wind, and disturbs the peace of the too
+susceptible Punch. She is a little amazon _pour rire_, and rides
+across country, and drives (even a hansom sometimes, with a pair of
+magnificent young whiskerandoes smoking their costly cigars inside);
+she is a toxophilite, and her arrow sticks, for it is barbed with
+innocent seduction, and her bull's-eye is the soft military heart. She
+wears a cricket-cap and breaks Aunt Sally's nose seven times; she puts
+her pretty little foot upon the croquet-ball--and croquet'd you are
+completely! With what glee she would have rinked and tennised if he
+had lived a little longer!
+
+[Illustration: "IN THE BAY OF BISCANY O"
+
+The Last Sweet Thing in Hats and Walking-Sticks.--_Punch_, September
+27, 1862.]
+
+She is light of heart, and perhaps a little of head! Her worst trouble
+is when the captain gives the wing of the fowl to some other darling
+who might be her twin-sister; her most terrible nightmare is when she
+dreams that great stupid Captain Sprawler upsets a dish of trifle over
+her new lace dress with the blue satin slip; but next morning she is
+herself again, and rides in the Row, and stops to speak with that
+great stupid Captain Sprawler, who is very nice to look at, whose back
+is very beautiful, and who sprawls most gracefully over the railings,
+and pays her those delightful, absurd compliments about her and her
+horse "being such a capital pair," while, as a foil to so much grace
+and splendour, a poor little snub-nosed, ill-dressed, ill-conditioned
+dwarf of a snob looks on, sucking the top of his cheap cane in abject
+admiration and hopeless envy! Then she pats and kisses the nice soft
+nose of Cornet Flinders's hunter, which is "deucedly aggravating for
+Cornet Flinders, you know"--but when that noble sportsman is frozen
+out and cannot hunt, she plays scratch-cradle with him in the boudoir
+of her father's country house, or pitches chocolate into his mouth
+from the oak landing; and she lets him fasten the skates on to her
+pretty feet. Happy cornet! And she plays billiards with her handsome
+cousin--a guardsman at least--and informs him that she is just
+eighteen to his love--and stands under the mistletoe and asks this
+enviable relation of hers to show her what the garroter's hug is like;
+and when he proceeds to do so she calls out in distress because his
+pointed waxed moustache has scratched her pretty cheek; and when Mr.
+Punch is there, at dinner, she and a sister darling pull crackers
+across his August white waistcoat, and scream in pretty terror at the
+explosion; to that worthy's excessive jubilation, for Mr. Punch is
+Leech himself, and nothing she does can ever be amiss in his eyes!
+
+Sometimes, indeed, she is seriously transfixed herself, and bids Mr.
+Tongs, the hairdresser, cut off a long lock of her hair where it will
+not be missed---and she looks so lovely under the smart of Cupid's
+arrow that we are frantically jealous of the irresistible warrior for
+whom the jetty tress is destined. In short, she is innocence and
+liveliness and health incarnate--a human kitten.
+
+When she marries the gilded youth with the ambrosial whiskers, their
+honeymooning is like playing at being married, their heartless
+billings and cooings are enchanting to see. She will have no
+troubles--Leech will take good care of that; her matrimonial tiffs
+will be of the slightest; hers will be a well-regulated household; the
+course of her conjugal love will run smooth in spite of her little
+indiscretions--for, like Bluebeard's wife, she can be curious at
+times, and coax and wheedle to know the mysteries of Freemasonry, and
+cry because Edwin will not reveal the secret of Mr. Percy, the
+horse-tamer; and how Edwin can resist such an appeal is more than we
+can understand! But soon they will have a large family, and live happy
+ever after, and by the time their eldest-born is thirteen years old,
+the darling of fourteen years back will be a regular materfamilias,
+stout, matronly, and rather severe; and Edwin will be fat, bald, and
+middle-aged, and bring home a bundle of asparagus and a nice new
+perambulator to celebrate the wedding-day!
+
+And he loves her brothers and cousins, military or otherwise, just as
+dearly, and makes them equally beautiful to the eye, with those lovely
+drooping whiskers that used to fall and brush their bosoms, their
+smartly waistcoated bosoms, a quarter of a century ago! He dresses
+them even better than the darlings, and has none but the kindliest and
+gentlest satire for their little vanities and conceits--for they have
+no real vices, these charming youths, beyond smoking too much and
+betting a little and getting gracefully tipsy at race-meetings and
+Greenwich dinners--and sometimes running into debt with their tailors,
+I suppose! And then how boldly they ride to hounds, and how splendidly
+they fight in the Crimea! how lightly they dance at home! How healthy,
+good-humoured, and manly they are, with all their vagaries of dress
+and jewellery and accent! It is easy to forgive them if they give the
+whole of their minds to their white neckties, or are dejected because
+they have lost the little gridiron off their chatelaine, or lose all
+presence of mind when a smut settles on their noses, and turn faint at
+the sight of Mrs. Gamp's umbrella!
+
+And next to these enviable beings he loves and reveres the sportsman.
+One is made to feel that the true sportsman, whether he shoots or
+hunts or fishes, is an August being, as he ought to be in Great
+Britain, and Leech has done him full justice with his pencil. He is no
+subject for flippant satire; so there he sits his horse, or stalks
+through his turnip-field, or handles his rod like a god! Handsome,
+well-appointed from top to toe, aristocratic to the finger-tips--a
+most impressive figure, the despair of foreigners, the envy of all
+outsiders at home (including the present lecturer)!
+
+[Illustration: A SPECIMEN OF PLUCK
+
+RUGGLES. "Hold hard, Master George. It's too wide, and uncommon deep!"
+
+MASTER GEORGE. "All right, Ruggles! We can both _swim_!"--_Punch_.]
+
+He has never been painted like this before! What splendid lords and
+squires, fat or lean, hook-nosed or eagle-eyed, well tanned by sun and
+wind, in faultless kit, on priceless mounts! How redolent they are of
+health and wealth, and the secure consciousness of high social
+position--of the cool business-like self-importance that sits so well
+on those who are knowing in the noblest pursuit that can ever employ
+the energies and engross the mind of a well-born Briton; for they can
+ride almost as well as their grooms, these mighty hunters before the
+Lord, and know the country almost as well as the huntsman himself! And
+what sons and grandsons and granddaughters are growing up round them,
+on delightful ponies no gate, hedge, or brook can dismay--nothing but
+the hard high-road!
+
+It is a glorious, exhilarating scene, with the beautiful wintry
+landscape stretching away to the cloudy November sky, and the lords
+and ladies gay, and the hounds, and the frosty-faced, short-tempered
+old huntsman, the very perfection of his kind; and the poor cockney
+snobs on their hired screws, and the meek clod-hopping labourers
+looking on excited and bewildered, happy for a moment at beholding so
+much happiness in their betters.
+
+[Illustration: ONE OF MR. BRIGG'S ADVENTURES IN THE HIGHLANDS
+
+After aiming for a Quarter of and Hour Mr. B. fires both of his
+Barrels--and--misses!!!! Tableau--The Forester's Anguish--_Punch_,
+1861.]
+
+To have seen these sketches of the hunting-field is to have been there
+in person. It is almost the only hunting that I ever had--and probably
+ever shall have--and I am almost content that it should be so! It is
+so much easier and simpler to draw for _Punch_ than to drive across
+country! And then, as a set-off to all this successful achievement,
+this pride and pomp and circumstance of glorious sport, we have the
+immortal and ever-beloved figure of Mr. Briggs, whom I look upon as
+Leech's masterpiece--the example above all others of the most humorous
+and good-natured satire that was ever penned or pencilled. The more
+ridiculous he is the more we love him; he is more winning and
+sympathetic than even Mr. Pickwick himself, and I almost think a
+greater creation! Besides, it took two to make Mr. Pickwick, the
+author and the artist, whereas Mr. Briggs issued fully equipped from
+the brain of Leech alone!
+
+Not indeed that all unauthorised gallopers after the fox find
+forgiveness in the eyes of Leech. Woe to the vulgar little cockney
+snob who dares to obtrude his ugly mug and his big cigar and his
+hired, broken-winded rip on these hallowed and thrice-happy
+hunting-grounds!--an earthenware pot among vessels of brass; the
+punishment shall be made to fit the crime; better if he fell off and
+his horse rolled over him than that he should dress and ride and look
+like that! For the pain of broken bones is easier to bear than the
+scorn of a true British sportsman!
+
+[Illustration: THANK GOODNESS! FLY-FISHING HAS BEGUN!
+
+MILLER. "Don't they really, perhaps they'll bite better towards the
+cool of the evening, they mostly do."--_Punch_, 1857.]
+Then there are the fishermen who never catch any fish, but whom no
+stress of weather can daunt or distress. There they sit or stand with
+the wind blowing or the rain soaking, in dark landscapes with ruffled
+streams and ominous clouds, and swaying trees that turn up the whites
+of their leaves--one almost hears the wind rush through them. One
+almost forgets the comical little forlorn figure who gives such point
+to all the angry turbulence of nature in the impression produced by
+the _mise en scène_ itself--an impression so happily, so vividly
+suggested by a few rapid, instructive pencil strokes and thumb smudges
+that it haunts the memory like a dream.
+
+He loves such open-air scenes so sincerely, he knows so well how to
+express and communicate the perennial charm they have for him, that
+the veriest bookworm becomes a sportsman through sheer sympathy--by
+the mere fact of looking at them.
+
+And how many people and things he loves that most of us love!--it
+would take all night to enumerate them--the good authoritative pater-
+and materfamilias; the delightful little girls; the charming cheeky
+school-boys; the jolly little street Arabs, who fill old gentlemen's
+letter-boxes with oyster-shells and gooseberry-skins; the cabmen, the
+busmen; the policemen with the old-fashioned chimney-pot hat; the old
+bathing-women, and Jack-ashores, and jolly old tars--his British tar
+is irresistible, whether he is hooking a sixty-four pounder out of the
+Black Sea, or riding a Turk, or drinking tea instead of grog and
+complaining of its strength! There seems to be hardly a mirthful
+corner of English life that Leech has not seen and loved and painted
+in this singularly genial and optimistic manner.
+
+[Illustration: "THE JOLLY LITTLE STREET ARABS"
+
+From the original drawing for _Punch_ in possession of John Kendrick
+Bangs, Esq.]
+
+His loves are many and his hates are few--but he is a good hater all
+the same. He hates Mawworm and Stiggins, and so do we. He hates the
+foreigner--whom he does not know, as heartily as Thackeray does, who
+seems to know him so well--with a hatred that seems to me a little
+unjust, perhaps: all France is not in Leicester Square; many Frenchmen
+can dress and ride, drive and shoot as well as anybody; and they began
+to use the tub very soon after we did--a dozen years or so,
+perhaps--say after the _coup d'état_ in 1851.
+
+Then he hates with a deadly hatred all who make music in the street or
+next door--and preach in the crossways and bawl their wares on the
+parade. What would he have said of the Salvation Army? He is haunted
+by the bark of his neighbour's dog, by the crow of his neighbour's
+Cochin China cock; he cannot even bear his neighbour to have his
+chimney swept; and as for the Christmas waits--we all remember _that_
+tragic picture! This exaggerated aversion to noises became a disease
+with him, and possibly hastened his end.
+
+Among his pet hates we must not forget the gorgeous flunky and the
+guzzling alderman, the leering old fop, the rascally book-maker, the
+sweating Jew tradesman, and the poor little snob (the 'Arry of his
+day) who tries vainly to grow a moustache, and wears such a shocking
+bad hat, and iron heels to his shoes, and shuns the Park during the
+riots for fear of being pelted for a "haristocrat," and whose
+punishment I think is almost in excess of his misdemeanor. To succeed
+in over-dressing one's self (as his swells did occasionally without
+marring their beauty) is almost as ignominious as to fail; and when
+the failure comes from want of means, there is also almost a pathetic
+side to it.
+
+[Illustration: DOING A LITTLE BUSINESS
+
+OLD EQUESTRIAN. "Well, but--you're not the boy I left my horse with!"
+
+BOY. "No, sir; I jist spekilated, and bought 'im of t'other boy for a
+harpenny."--_Punch_.]
+
+And he is a little bit hard on old frumps, with fat ankles and scraggy
+bosoms and red noses--but anyhow we are made to laugh--_quod erat
+demonstrandum_. We also know that he has a strong objection to cold
+mutton for dinner, and much prefers a whitebait banquet at Greenwich,
+or a nice well-ordered repast at the Star and Garter. So do we.
+
+And the only thing he feared is the horse. Nimrod as he is, and the
+happiest illustrator of the hunting-field that ever was, he seems for
+ever haunted by a terror of the heels of that noble animal he drew so
+well--and I thoroughly sympathise with him!
+
+In all the series the chief note is joyousness, high spirits, the
+pleasure of being alive. There is no _Weltschmerz_ in his happy world,
+where all is for the best--no hankering after the moon, no discontent
+with the present order of things. Only one little lady discovers that
+the world is hollow, and her doll is stuffed with bran; only one
+gorgeous swell has exhausted the possibilities of this life, and finds
+out that he is at loss for a new sensation. So what does he do? Cut
+his throat? Go and shoot big game in Africa? No; he visits the top of
+the Monument on a rainy day, or invites his brother-swells to a Punch
+and Judy show in his rooms, or rides to Whitechapel and back on an
+omnibus with a bag of periwinkles, and picks them out with a pin!
+
+Even when his humour is at its broadest, and he revels in almost
+pantomimic fun, he never loses sight of truth and nature--never
+strikes a false or uncertain note. Robinson goes to an evening party
+with a spiked knuckle-duster in his pocket and sits down. Jones digs
+an elderly party called Smith in the back with the point of his
+umbrella, under the impression that it is his friend Brown. A charming
+little street Arab prints the soles of his muddy feet on a smart old
+gentleman's white evening waistcoat.
+
+Tompkyns writes Henrietta on the stands under two hearts transfixed by
+an arrow, and his wife, whose name is Matilda, catches him in the act.
+An old gentleman, maddened by a bluebottle, smashes all his furniture
+and breaks every window-pane but one--where the bluebottle is. And in
+all these scenes one does not know which is the most irresistible, the
+most inimitable--the mere drollery or the dramatic truth of gesture
+and facial expression.
+
+The way in which every-day people really behave in absurd situations
+and under comically trying circumstances is quite funny enough for
+him; and if he exaggerates a little and goes beyond the absolute prose
+of life in the direction of caricature, he never deviates a
+hair's-breadth from the groove human nature has laid down. There is
+exaggeration, but no distortion. The most wildly funny people are low
+comedians of the highest order, whose fun is never forced and never
+fails; they found themselves on fact, and only burlesque what they
+have seen in actual life--they never evolve their fun from the depths
+of their inner consciousness; and in this naturalness, for me, lies
+the greatness of Leech. There is nearly always a tenderness in the
+laughter he excites, born of the touch of nature that makes the whole
+world kin!
+
+[Illustration: A TOLERABLY BROAD HINT
+
+"Oh, I beg your pardon, sir, but you didn't say as we were to pull up
+anywhere, did you, sir?"--_Punch_, 1859.]
+
+Where most of all he gives us a sense of the exuberant joyousness and
+buoyancy of life is in the sketches of the seaside--the newly
+discovered joys of which had then not become commonplace to people of
+the middle class. The good old seaside has grown rather stale by this
+time--the very children of to-day dig and paddle in a half-perfunctory
+sort of fashion, with a certain stolidity, and are in strange contrast
+to those highly elate and enchanting little romps that fill his
+seaside pictures.
+
+Indeed, nothing seems so jolly, nothing seems so funny, now, as when
+Leech was drawing for _Punch_. The gaiety of one nation at least has
+been eclipsed by his death. Is it merely that there is no such light
+humorist to see and draw for us in a frolicsome spirit all the fun and
+the jollity? Is it because some of us have grown old? Or is it that
+the British people themselves have changed and gone back to their old
+way of taking their pleasure sadly?
+
+Everything is so different, somehow; the very girls themselves have
+grown a head taller, and look serious, stately, and dignified, like
+Olympian goddesses, even when they are dancing and playing
+lawn-tennis.
+
+I for one should no more dream of calling them the darlings than I
+should dare to kiss them under the mistletoe, were I ever so splendid
+a young captain. Indeed I am too prostrate in admiration--I can only
+suck the top of my stick and gaze in jealous ecstasy, like one of
+Leech's little snobs. They are no longer pretty as their grandmothers
+were--whom Leech drew so well in the old days! They are _beautiful_!
+
+And then they are so cultivated, and _know_ such a lot--of books, of
+art, of science, of politics, and theology--of the world the flesh,
+and the devil. They actually think for themselves; they have broken
+loose and jumped over the ring-fence; they have taken to the water,
+these lovely chicks, and swim like ducklings, to the dismay of those
+good old cocks and hens, their grandparents! And my love of them is
+tinged with awe, as was Leech's love of that mighty, beautiful, but
+most uncertain quadruped, the thoroughbred horse--for, like him, when
+they are good, they are very, very good, but when they are bad, they
+are horrid. We have changed other things as well: the swell has become
+the masher, and is a terrible dull dog; the poor little snob has
+blossomed into a blatant 'Arry, and no longer wears impossible hats
+and iron heels to his boots; he has risen in the social scale, and
+holds his own without fear or favour in the Park and everywhere else.
+To be taken for a haristocrat is his dream!--even if he be pelted for
+it. In his higher developments he becomes a "bounder," and bounds away
+in most respectable West End ball-rooms. He is the only person with
+any high spirits left--perhaps that is why high spirits have gone out
+of fashion, like boxing the watch and wrenching off door-knockers!
+
+And the snob of our day is quite a different person, more likely than
+not to be found hobnobbing with dukes and duchesses--as irreproachable
+in dress and demeanour as Leech himself. Thackeray discovered and
+christened him for us long ago; and he is related to most of us, and
+moves in the best society. He has even ceased to brag of his intimacy
+with the great, they have become so commonplace to him; and if he
+swaggers at all, it is about his acquaintance with some popular actor
+or comic vocalist whom he is privileged to call by his christian-name.
+
+And those splendid old grandees of high rank, so imposing of aspect,
+so crushing to us poor mortals by mere virtue not of their wealth and
+title alone, but of their high-bred distinction of feature and
+bearing--to which Leech did such ample justice--what has become of
+them?
+
+They are like the snows of yester-year! They have gone the way of
+their beautiful chariots with the elaborate armorial bearings and the
+tasselled hammercloth, the bewigged, cocked-hatted coachman, and the
+two gorgeous flunkies hanging on behind. Sir Gorgeous Midas has beaten
+the dukes in mere gorgeousness, flunkies and all--burlesqued the
+vulgar side of them, and unconsciously shamed it out of existence;
+made swagger and ostentation unpopular by his own evil
+example--actually improved the manners of the great by sheer mimicry
+of their defects. He has married his sons and his daughters to them
+and spoiled the noble curve of those lovely noses that Leech drew so
+well, and brought them down a peg in many ways, and given them a new
+lease of life; and he has enabled us to discover that they are not of
+such different clay from ourselves after all. All the old slavish
+formulae of deference and respect--"Your Grace," "Your Ladyship," "My
+Lord"--that used to run so glibly off our tongues whenever we had a
+chance, are now left to servants and shopkeepers; and my slight
+experience of them, for one, is that they do not want to be toadied a
+bit, and that they are very polite, well-bred, and most agreeable
+people.
+
+If we may judge of our modern aristocracy by that very slender
+fragment of our contemporary fiction, mostly American, that still
+thinks it worth writing about, our young noble of to-day is the most
+good-humoured, tolerant, simple-hearted, simple-minded,
+unsophisticated creature alive--thinking nothing of his
+honours--prostrate under the little foot of some fair Yankee, who is
+just as likely as not to jilt him for some transatlantic painter not
+yet known to fame.
+
+Compare this unpretending youth to one of Bulwer's heroes, or
+Disraeli's, or even Thackeray's! And his simple old duke of a father
+and his dowdy old duchess of a mother are almost as devoid of swagger
+as himself; they seem to apologise for their very existence, if we may
+trust these American chroniclers who seem to know them so well; and I
+really think we no longer care to hear and read about them quite so
+much as we did--unless it be in the society papers!
+
+But all these past manners and customs that some of us can remember so
+well--all these obsolete people, from the heavily whiskered swell to
+the policeman with the leather-bound chimney-pot hat, from good pater-
+and mater-familias who were actually looked up to and obeyed by their
+children, to the croquet-playing darlings in the pork-pie hats and
+huge crinolines--all survive and will survive for many a year in John
+Leech's "Pictures of Life and Character."
+
+Except for a certain gentleness, kindliness, and self-effacing modesty
+common to both, and which made them appear almost angelic in the eyes
+of many who knew them, it would be difficult to imagine a greater
+contrast to Leech than Charles Keene.
+
+Charles Keene was absolutely unconventional, and even almost
+eccentric. He dressed more with a view to artistic picturesqueness
+than to fashion, and despised gloves and chimney-pot hats, and black
+coats and broadcloth generally.
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES KEENE
+
+From a photograph by Elliott and Fry, London.]
+
+Scotch tweed was good enough for him in town and country alike. Though
+a Tory in politics, he was democratic in his tastes and habits. He
+liked to smoke his short black pipe on the tops of omnibuses; he liked
+to lay and light his own fire and cook his mutton-chop upon it. He had
+a passion for music and a beautiful voice, and sang with a singular
+pathos and charm, but he preferred the sound of his bagpipes to that
+of his own singing, and thought that you must prefer it too!
+
+He was for ever sketching in pen and ink, indoors and out--he used at
+one time to carry a little ink-bottle at his buttonhole, and steel
+pens in his waistcoat-pocket, and thus equipped he would sketch
+whatever took his fancy in his walks abroad--houses, 'busses, cabs,
+people--bits of street and square, scaffoldings, hoardings with
+advertisements--sea, river, moor, lake, and mountain--what has he not
+sketched with that masterly pen that had already been so carefully
+trained by long and arduous practice in a life-school? His heart was
+in his work from first to last; beyond his bagpipes and his old books
+(for he was a passionate reader), he seemed to have no other hobby.
+His facility in sketching became phenomenal, as also his knowledge of
+what to put in and what to leave out, so that the effect he aimed at
+should be secured in perfection and with the smallest appearance of
+labour.
+
+Among his other gifts he had a physical gift of inestimable value for
+such work as ours--namely, a splendid hand--a large, muscular,
+well-shaped, and most workman-like hand, whose long deft fingers could
+move with equal ease and certainty in all directions. I have seen it
+at work--and it was a pleasure to watch its acrobatic dexterity, its
+unerring precision of touch. It could draw with nonchalant facility
+parallel straight lines, or curved, of just the right thickness and
+distance from each other--almost as regular as if they had been drawn
+with ruler or compass--almost, but not _quite_. The quiteness would
+have made them mechanical, and robbed them of their charm of human
+handicraft. A cunning and obedient slave, this wonderful hand, for
+which no command from the head could come amiss--a slave, moreover,
+that had most thoroughly learned its business by long apprenticeship
+to one especial trade, like the head and like the eye that guided it.
+
+Leech, no doubt, had a good natural hand, that swept about with
+enviable freedom and boldness, but for want of early discipline it
+could not execute these miracles of skill; and the commands that came
+from the head also lacked the preciseness which results from patiently
+acquired and well-digested knowledge, so that Mr. Hand was apt now and
+then to zigzag a little on its own account--in backgrounds, on floors
+and walls, under chairs and tables, whenever a little tone was felt to
+be desirable--sometimes in the shading of coats and trousers and
+ladies' dresses.
+
+But it never took a liberty with a human face or a horse's head; and
+whenever it went a little astray you could always read between the
+lines and know exactly what it meant.
+
+There is no difficulty in reading between Keene's lines; every one of
+them has its unmistakable definite intimation; every one is the right
+line in the right place!
+
+We must remember that there are no such things as lines in nature.
+Whether we use them to represent a human profile, the depth of a
+shadow, the darkness of a cloak or a thunder-cloud, they are mere
+conventional symbols. They were invented a long time ago, by a
+distinguished sportsman who was also a heaven-born amateur artist--the
+John Leech of his day--who engraved for us (from life) the picture of
+mammoth on one of its own tusks.
+
+And we have accepted them ever since as the cheapest and simplest way
+of interpreting in black and white for the wood-engraver the shapes
+and shadows and colours of nature. They may be scratchy, feeble, and
+uncertain, or firm and bold--thick and thin--straight, curved,
+parallel, or irregular--cross-hatched once, twice, a dozen times, at
+any angle--every artist has his own way of getting his effect. But
+some ways are better than others, and I think Keene's is the firmest,
+loosest, simplest, and best way that ever was, and--the most difficult
+to imitate. His mere pen-strokes have, for the expert, a beauty and an
+interest quite apart from the thing they are made to depict, whether
+he uses them as mere outlines to express the shape of things animate
+or inanimate, even such shapeless, irregular things as the stones on a
+sea-beach--or in combination to suggest the tone and colour of a
+dress-coat, or a drunkard's nose, of a cab or omnibus--of a distant
+mountain with miles of atmosphere between it and the figures in the
+foreground.
+
+[Illustration: THE SNOWSTORM, JAN. 2, 1867
+
+CABBY (_petulantly--the Cabbies even lose their tempers_). "It's no
+use your a-calling o' me, Sir! Got such a Job with these 'ere Two
+as'll last me a Fortnight!!"--_Punch_, January 19, 1867.]
+
+His lines are as few as can be--he is most economical in this respect
+and loves to leave as much white paper as he can; but one feels in his
+best work that one line more or one line less would impair the
+perfection of the whole--that of all the many directions, curves, and
+thicknesses they might have taken he has inevitably hit upon just the
+right one. He has beaten all previous records in this respect--in this
+country, at least. I heard a celebrated French painter say: "He is a
+great man, your Charles Keene; he take a pen and ink and a bit of
+paper, and wiz a half-dozen strokes he know 'ow to frame a gust of
+wind!" I think myself that Leech could frame a gust of wind as
+effectually as Keene, by the sheer force of his untaught natural
+instinct--of his genius; but not with the deftness--this economy of
+material--this certainty of execution--this consummate knowledge of
+effect.
+
+To borrow a simile from music, there are certain tunes so fresh and
+sweet and pretty that they please at once and for ever, like "Home,
+Sweet Home," or "The Last Rose of Summer"; they go straight to the
+heart of the multitude, however slight the accompaniment--a few simple
+chords--they hardly want an accompaniment at all.
+
+Leech's art seems to me of just such a happy kind; he draws--I mean he
+scores like an amateur who has not made a very profound study of
+harmony, and sings his pretty song to his simple accompaniment with so
+sweet and true a natural voice that we are charmed. It is the magic of
+nature, whereas Keene is a very Sebastian Bach in his counterpoint.
+There is nothing of the amateur about him; his knowledge of harmony in
+black and white is complete and thorough; mere consummate scoring has
+become to him a second nature; each separate note of his voice reveals
+the long training of the professional singer; and if his tunes are
+less obviously sweet and his voice less naturally winning and
+sympathetic than Leech's, his aesthetic achievement is all the
+greater. It is to his brother-artists rather than to the public at
+large that his most successful appeal is made--but with an intensity
+that can only be gained by those who have tried in vain to do what he
+has done, and who thereby know how difficult it is. His real magic is
+that of art.
+
+This perhaps accounts for the unmistakable fact that Leech's
+popularity has been so much greater than Keene's, and I believe is
+still. Leech's little melodies of the pencil (to continue the parallel
+with the sister art) are like Volkslieder--national airs--and more
+directly reach the national heart. Transplant them to other lands that
+have pencil Volkslieder of their own (though none, I think, comparable
+to his for fun and sweetness and simplicity) and they fail to please
+as much, while their mere artistic qualities are not such as to find
+favour among foreign experts, whereas Keene actually gains by such a
+process. He is as much admired by the artists of France and Germany as
+by our own--if not more. For some of his shortcomings--such as his
+lack of feeling for English female beauty, his want of perception,
+perhaps his disdain, of certain little eternal traits and conventions
+and differences that stamp the various grades of our social
+hierarchy--do not strike them, and nothing interferes with their
+complete appreciation of his craftsmanship.
+
+[Illustration: WAITING FOR THE LANDLORD!
+
+RIBBONMAN (_getting impatient_). "Bedad, they ought to be here be this
+toime! Sure, Tiriace, I hope the ould gintleman hasn't mit wid an
+accidint!!!"--_Punch_, July 27, 1878.]
+
+Perhaps, also, Leech's frequent verification of our manly British
+pluck and honesty, and proficiency in sport, and wholesomeness and
+cleanliness of body and mind, our general physical beauty and
+distinction, and his patriotic tendency to contrast our exclusive
+possession of these delightful gifts with the deplorable absence of
+them in any country but our own, may fail to enlist the sympathies of
+the benighted foreigner.
+
+Whereas there is not much to humiliate the most touchy French or
+German reader of _Punch_, or excite his envy, in Charles Keene's
+portraiture of our race. He is impartial and detached, and the most
+rabid Anglophobe may frankly admire him without losing his
+self-esteem. The English lower middle class and people, that Keene has
+depicted with such judicial freedom from either prejudice or
+pre-possession, have many virtues; but they are not especially
+conspicuous for much vivacity or charm of aspect or gainliness of
+demeanour; and he has not gone out of his way to idealise them.
+
+Also, he seldom if ever gibes at those who have not been able to
+resist the temptations (as Mr. Gilbert would say) of belonging to
+other nations.
+
+Thus in absolute craftsmanship and technical skill, in the ease and
+beauty of his line, his knowledge of effect, his complete mastery over
+the material means at his disposal, Charles Keene seems to me as
+superior to Leech as Leech is to him in grace, in human naturalness
+and geniality of humour, in accurate observation of life, in keenness
+of social perception, and especially in width of range.
+
+[Illustration: A STROKE OF BUSINESS
+
+VILLAGE HAMPDEN (_"who with dauntless breast" has undertaken for
+sixpence to keep off the other boys_). "If any of yer wants to see
+what we're a Paintin' of it's a 'Alfpenny a 'Ead, but you marn't make
+no Remarks."--_Punch_, May 4, 1867.]
+
+The little actors on Leech's stage are nearly all of them every-day
+people--types one is constantly meeting. High or low, tipsy or sober,
+vulgar or refined, pleasant or the reverse, we knew them all before
+Leech ever drew them; and our recognition of them on his page is full
+of delight at meeting old familiar friends and seeing them made fun of
+for our amusement.
+
+Whereas a great many of Keene's middle-class protagonists are peculiar
+and exceptional, and much of their humour lies in their eccentricity,
+they are characters themselves, rather than types of English
+characters. Are they really observed and drawn from life, do they
+really exist just as they are, or are they partly evolved from the
+depths of an inner consciousness that is not quite satisfied with life
+just as it is?
+
+[Illustration: "NONE O' YOUR LARKS"
+
+GIGANTIC NAVVY: "Let's walk between yer, Gents; folks 'll think you've
+took up a Deserter."--_Punch_, October 19, 1861.]
+
+They are often comic, with their exquisitely drawn faces so full of
+subtlety--intensely comic! Their enormous perplexities about nothing,
+their utter guilelessness, their innocence of the wicked world and its
+ways, make them engaging sometimes in spite of a certain ungainliness
+of gesture, dress, and general behaviour that belongs to them, and
+which delighted Charles Keene, who was the reverse of ungainly, just
+as the oft-recurring tipsiness of his old gentlemen delighted him,
+though he was the most abstemious of men. I am now speaking of his
+middle-class people--those wonderful philistines of either sex; those
+elaborately capped and corpulent old ladies; those
+muttonchop-whiskered, middle-aged gentlemen with long upper lips and
+florid complexions, receding chins, noses almost horizontal in their
+prominence; those artless damsels who trouble themselves so little
+about the latest fashions; those feeble-minded, hirsute swells with
+the sloping shoulders and the broad hips and the little hats cocked on
+one side; those unkempt, unspoiled, unspotted from the world brothers
+of the brush, who take in their own milk, and so complacently ignore
+all the rotten conventionalism of our over-civilised existence.
+
+When he takes his subjects from the classes beneath these, he is, if
+not quite so funny, at his best, I think. His costermongers and
+policemen, his omnibus drivers and conductors and cabbies, are
+inimitable studies; and as for his 'busses and cabs, I really cannot
+find words to express my admiration of them. In these, as in his
+street scenes and landscapes, he is unapproached and unapproachable.
+
+Nor must we forget his canny Scotsmen, his Irish labourers and
+peasants, his splendid English navvies, and least of all his
+volunteers--he and Leech might be called the pillars of the Volunteer
+movement, from the manner, so true, so sympathetic, and so humorous,
+in which they have immortalised its beginning.
+
+[Illustration: AN AFFRONT TO THE SERVICE
+
+OMNIBUS DRIVER (_to Coster_). "Now then, Irish! pull a one side, will
+you? What are you gaping at? Did you never see a Milisher man before?"
+
+_A disgustingly ignorant observation in the opinion of young Longslip,
+Lieutenant in Her Majesty's Fusileer Guards_--_Punch_, March 7, 1863.]
+
+Charles Keene is seldom a satirist. His nature was too tolerant and
+too sweet for hate, and that makes him a bad and somewhat perfunctory
+hater. He tries to hate 'Arry, but he can't, for he draws an ideal
+'Arry that surely never was, and thus his shaft misses the mark:
+compare his 'Arry to one of Leech's snobs, for instance! He tries to
+hate the haw-haw swell, and is equally unsuccessful. When you hate and
+can draw, you can draw what you hate down to its minutest
+details--better, perhaps, than what you love--so that whoever runs and
+reads and looks at your pictures hates with you.
+
+Who ever hated a personage of Keene's beyond that feeble kind of
+aversion that comes from mere uncongeniality, a slightly offended
+social taste, or prejudice? One feels a mere indulgent and
+half-humorous disdain, but no hate. On the other hand, I do not think
+that we love his personages very much--we stand too much outside his
+eccentric world for sympathy. From the pencil of this most lovable
+man, with his unrivalled power of expressing all he saw and thought, I
+cannot recall many lovable characters of either sex or any age. Here
+and there a good-natured cabby, a jolly navvy, a simple-minded
+flautist or bagpiper, or a little street Arab, like the small boy who
+pointed out the jail doctor to his pal and said, "That's my medical
+man."
+
+Whereas Leech's pages teem with winning, graceful, lovable types, and
+here and there a hateful one to give relief.
+
+But, somehow, one liked the man who drew these strange people, even
+without knowing him; when you knew him you loved him very much--so
+much that no room was left in you for envy of his unattainable mastery
+in his art. For of this there can be no doubt--no greater or more
+finished master in black and white has devoted his life to the
+illustration of the manners and humours of his time; and if Leech is
+even greater than he--and I for one am inclined to think he is--it is
+not as an artist, but as a student and observer of human nature, as a
+master of the light, humorous, superficial criticism of life.
+
+[Illustration: "NOT UP TO HIS BUSINESS"
+
+CROSS BUS DRIVER. "Now why didn't you take that there party?"
+
+CONDUCTOR: "Said they wouldn't go."
+
+CROSS BUS DRIVER. "_Said_ THEY wouldn't go? THEY said they wouldn't
+go? Why, what do you suppose you're put there for? You call that
+conductin' a buss. Oh! THEY wouldn't go! I like that, &c., &c."--
+_Punch_, September 1, 1860.]
+
+Charles Keene died of general atrophy on January 4, 1891. It was
+inexpressibly pathetic to see how patiently, how resignedly he wasted
+away; he retained his unalterable sweetness to the last.
+
+His handsome, dark-skinned face, so strongly lined and full of
+character; his mild and magnificent light-grey eyes, that reminded one
+of a St. Bernard's; his tall, straight, slender aspect, that reminded
+one of Don Quixote; his simplicity of speech and character; his love
+of humour, and the wonderful smile that lit up his face when he heard
+a good story, and the still more wonderful wink of his left eye when
+he told one--all these will remain strongly impressed on the minds of
+those who ever met him.
+
+I attended his funeral as I had attended Leech's twenty-six years
+before; Canon Ainger, a common friend of us both, performed the
+service. It was a bitterly cold day, which accounted for the
+sparseness of the mourners compared to the crowd that was present on
+the former occasion; but bearing in mind that all those present were
+either relations or old friends, all of them with the strongest and
+deepest personal regard for the friend we had lost, the attendance
+seemed very large indeed; and all of us, I think, in our affectionate
+remembrance of one of the most singularly sweet-natured,
+sweet-tempered, and simple-hearted men that ever lived, forgot for the
+time that a very great artist was being laid to his rest.
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE DU MAURIER
+
+From an unpublished photograph by Fradelle and Young, London.]
+
+And now, in fulfilment of my contract, I must speak of myself--a
+difficult and not very grateful task. One's self is a person about
+whom one knows too much and too little--about whom we can never hit a
+happy medium. Sometimes one rates one's self too high, sometimes (but
+less frequently) too low, according to the state of our digestion, our
+spirits, our pocket, or even the weather!
+
+In the present instance I will say all the good of myself I can
+decently, and leave all the rating to you. It is inevitable, however
+unfortunate it may be for me, that I should be compared with my two
+great predecessors, Leech and Keene, whom I have just been comparing
+to each other.
+
+When John Leech's mantle fell from his shoulders it was found that the
+garment was ample to clothe the nakedness of more than one successor.
+
+John Tenniel had already, it is true, replaced him for several years
+as the political cartoonist of _Punch_. How admirably he has always
+filled that post, then and ever since, and how great his fame is, I
+need not speak of here. Linley Sambourne and Harry Furniss, so
+different from each other and from Tenniel, have also, since then,
+brought their great originality and their unrivalled skill to the
+political illustrations of _Punch_--Sambourne to the illustration of
+many other things in it besides, but which do not strictly belong to
+the present subject.
+
+I am here concerned with the social illustrators alone, and, besides,
+only with those who have made the sketches of social subjects in
+_Punch_ the principal business of their lives. For very many artists,
+from Sir John Millais, Sir John Gilbert, Frederick Walker, and
+Randolph Caldecott downward, have contributed to that fortunate
+periodical at one time or another, and not a few distinguished
+amateurs.
+
+Miss Georgina Bowers, Mr. Corbould, and others have continued the
+fox-hunting tradition, and provided those scenes which have become a
+necessity to the sporting readers of _Punch_.
+
+To Charles Keene was fairly left that part of the succession that was
+most to his taste--the treatment of life in the street and the open
+country, in the shops and parlours of the lower middle class, and the
+homes of the people.
+
+And to me were allotted the social and domestic dramas, the nursery,
+the school-room, the dining and drawing rooms, and croquet-lawns of
+the more or less well-to-do.
+
+I was particularly told not to try to be broadly funny, but to
+undertake the light and graceful business, like a _jeune premier_. I
+was, in short, to be the tenor, or rather the tenorino, of that little
+company for which Mr. Punch beats time with his immortal baton, and to
+warble in black and white such melodies as I could evolve from my
+contemplations of the gentler aspect of English life, while Keene,
+with his magnificent, highly trained basso, sang the comic songs.
+
+We all became specialised, so to speak, and divided Leech's vast
+domain among us.
+
+We kicked a little at first, I remember, and whenever (to continue the
+musical simile) I could get in a comic song, or what I thought one, or
+some queer fantastic ditty about impossible birds and beasts and
+fishes and what not, I did not let the opportunity slip; while Keene,
+who had a very fine falsetto on the top of his chest register, would
+now and then warble, pianissimo, some little ballad of the
+drawing-room or nursery.
+
+Illustration: FELINE AMENITIES
+
+But gradually we settled into our respective grooves, and I have grown
+to like my little groove very much, narrow though it be--a poor thing,
+but mine own!
+
+"I_wish_ you hadn't asked Captain Wareham, Lizzie. Horrid man! I can't
+bear him!"
+
+"Dear me, Charlotte--isn't the world big enough for you both?"
+
+"Yes; but your little Dining-room _isn't_!"--_Punch_, February 16,
+1889.]
+
+Moreover, certain physical disabilities that I have the misfortune to
+labour under make it difficult for me to study and sketch the lusty
+things in the open air and sunshine. My sight, besides being defective
+in many ways, is so sensitive that I cannot face the common light of
+day without glasses thickly rimmed with wire gauze, so that sketching
+out of doors is often to me a difficult and distressing performance.
+That is also partly why I am not a sportsman and a delineator of
+sport.
+
+I mention this infirmity not as an excuse for my shortcomings and
+failures--for them there is no excuse--but as a reason why I have
+abstained from the treatment of so much that is so popular,
+delightful, and exhilarating in English country life. If there had
+been no Charles Keene (a terrible supposition both for _Punch_ and its
+readers), I should have done my best to illustrate the lower walks and
+phases of London existence, which attracts me as much as any other. It
+is just as easy to draw a costermonger or a washerwoman as it is a
+gentleman or lady--perhaps a little easier--but it is by no means so
+easy to draw them as Keene did! And to draw a cab or an omnibus after
+him (though I have sometimes been obliged to do so) is almost tempting
+Providence!
+
+If there had been no Charles Keene, I might, perhaps, with practice,
+have become a funny man myself--though I do not suppose that my fun
+would have ever been of the broadest.
+
+Before I became an artist I was considered particularly good at
+caricaturing my friends, who always foresaw for me more than one
+change of profession, and _Punch_ as the final goal of my wanderings
+in search of a career. For it was originally intended that I should be
+a man of science.
+
+Dr. Williamson, the eminent chemist and professor of chemistry, told
+me not long ago that he remembers caricatures that I drew, now forty
+years back, when I was studying under him at the Laboratory of
+Chemistry at University College, and that he and other grave and
+reverend professors were hugely tickled by them at the time. Indeed,
+he remembers nothing else about me, except that I promised to be a
+very bad chemist.
+
+I was a very bad chemist indeed, but not for long! As soon as I was
+free to do as I pleased, I threw up test-tubes and crucibles and went
+back to Paris, where I was born and brought up, and studied to become
+an artist in M. Gléyre's studio. Then I went to Antwerp, where there
+is a famous school of painting, and where I had no less a person than
+Mr. Alma-Tadema as a fellow-student. It was all delightful, but
+misfortune befell me, and I lost the sight of one eye--perhaps it was
+the eye with which I used to do the funny caricatures; it was a very
+good eye, much the better of the two, and the other has not improved
+by having to do a double share of the work.
+
+And then in time I came to England and drew for _Punch_, thus
+fulfilling the early prophecy of my friends and fellow-students at
+University College--though not quite in the sense they anticipated.
+
+[Illustration: THE NEW SOCIETY CRAZE
+
+THE NEW GOVERNESS (_through her pretty nose_). "Waall--I come right
+slick away from Ne'York City, an' I ain't had much time for foolin'
+around in Europe--you bet! So I can't fix up your Gals in the Eu-
+rôpean languages, no-how!"
+
+BELGRAVIAN MAMMA: (_who knows there's a Duke or two still left in the
+Matrimonial Market_). "Oh, that's of no consequence. I want my
+Daughters to aquire the American Accent in all its purity--and the
+Idioms, and all that. Now I'm sure _you_ will do _admirably_!"--
+_Punch_, December 1, 1888.]
+
+I will not attempt a description of my work--it is so recent and has
+been so widely circulated that it should be unnecessary to do so. If
+you do not remember it, it is that it is not worth remembering; if you
+do, I can only entreat you to be to my faults a little blind, and to
+my virtues very kind!
+
+I have always tried as honestly and truthfully as lies in me to serve
+up to the readers of _Punch_ whatever I have culled with the bodily
+eye, after cooking it a little in the brain. My raw material requires
+more elaborate working than Leech's. He dealt more in flowers and
+fruits and roots, if I may express myself so figuratively--from the
+lordly pineapple and lovely rose, down to the humble daisy and savory
+radish. _I_ deal in vegetables, I suppose. Little that I ever find
+seems to me fit for the table just as I see it; moreover, by dishing
+it up raw I should offend many people and make many enemies, and
+deserve to do so. I cook my green pease, asparagus, French beans,
+Brussels sprouts, German sauerkraut, and even a truffle now and then,
+so carefully that you would never recognise them as they were when I
+first picked them in the social garden. And they do not recognise
+themselves! Or even each other!
+
+And I do my best to dish them up in good, artistic style. Oh that I
+could arrange for you a truffle with all that culinary skill that
+Charles Keene brought to the mere boiling of a carrot or a potato! He
+is the _cordon bleu_ par excellence. The people I meet seem to me more
+interesting than funny--so interesting that I am well content to draw
+them as I see them, after just a little arrangement and a very
+transparent disguise--and without any attempt at caricature. The
+better-looking they are, the more my pencil loves them, and I feel
+more inclined to exaggerate in this direction than in any other.
+
+Sam Weller, if you recollect, was fond of "pootiness and wirtue." I
+_so_ agree with him! I adore them both, especially in women and
+children. I only wish that the wirtue was as easy to draw as the
+pootiness.
+
+But indeed for me--speaking as an artist, and also, perhaps, a little
+bit as a man--pootiness is almost a wirtue in itself. I don't think I
+shall ever weary of trying to depict it, from its dawn in the toddling
+infant to its decline and setting and long twilight in the beautiful
+old woman, who has known how to grow old gradually. I like to surround
+it with chivalrous and stalwart manhood; and it is a standing
+grievance to me that I have to clothe all this masculine escort in
+coats and trousers and chimney-pot hats; worse than all, in the
+evening dress of the period!--that I cannot surround my divinity with
+a guard of honour more worthily arrayed!
+
+Thus, of all my little piebald puppets, the one I value the most is my
+pretty woman. I am as fond of her as Leech was of his; of whom,
+by-the-way, she is the granddaughter! This is not artistic vanity; it
+is pure paternal affection, and by no means prevents me from seeing
+her faults; it only prevents me from seeing them as clearly as you do!
+
+Please be not very severe on her, for her grandmother's sake. Words
+fail me to express how much I loved her grandmother, who wore a
+cricket-cap and broke Aunt Sally's nose seven times.
+
+[Illustration: A PICTORIAL PUZZLE
+
+TENOR WARBLER (_with passionate emphasis on the first word of each
+line_)--
+"_Me-e-e-e-e-e-t_ me once again,  M-e-e-e-e-t me once aga-a-ain--"
+
+_Why does the Cat suddenly jump off the Hearth-rug, rush to the Door,
+and make frantic Endeavors to get out_?--_Punch_.]
+
+Will my pretty woman ever be all I wish her to be? All she ought to
+be? I fear not! On the mantelpiece in my studio at home there stands a
+certain lady. She is but lightly clad, and what simple garment she
+wears is not in the fashion of our day. How well I know her! Almost
+thoroughly by this time--for she has been the silent companion of my
+work for thirty years! She has lost both her arms and one of her feet,
+which I deplore; and also the tip of her nose, but that has been made
+good!
+
+She is only three feet high, or thereabouts, and quite two thousand
+years old, or more; but she is ever young--
+
+      "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
+      Her infinite variety!"
+
+and a very giantess in beauty. For she is a reduction in plaster of
+the famous statue at the Louvre.
+
+They call her the Venus of Milo, or Melos! It is a calumny--a libel.
+She is no Venus, except in good looks; and if she errs at all, it is
+on the side of austerity. She is not only pootiness but wirtue
+incarnate (if one can be incarnate in marble), from the crown of her
+lovely head to the sole of her remaining foot--a very beautiful foot,
+though by no means a small one--it has never worn a high-heel shoe!
+
+Like all the best of its kind, and its kind the best, she never sates
+nor palls, and the more I look at her the more I see to love and
+worship--and, alas! the more dissatisfied I feel--not indeed with the
+living beauty, ripe and real, that I see about and around--mere life
+is such a beauty in itself that no stone ideal can ever hope to match
+it! But dissatisfied with the means at my command to do the living
+beauty justice--a little bit of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of
+ink--and, alas! fingers and an eye less skilled than they would have
+been if I had gone straight to a school of art instead of a laboratory
+for chemistry!
+
+And now for social pictorial satire considered as a fine art.
+
+They who have practised it hitherto, from Hogarth downward, have not
+been many--you can count their names on your fingers! And the wide
+popularity they have won may be due as much to their scarcity as to
+the interest we all take in having the mirror held up to ourselves--to
+the malicious pleasure we all feel at seeing our neighbours held up to
+gentle ridicule or well-merited reproof; most of all, perhaps, to the
+realistic charm that lies in all true representation of the social
+aspects with which we are most familiar, ugly as these are often apt
+to be, with our chimney-pot hats, and trousers that unfit us, it
+seems, for serious and elaborate pictorial treatment at the hands of
+the foremost painters of our own times--except when we sit to them for
+our portraits; then they have willy-nilly to make the best of us, just
+as we are!
+
+[Illustration: REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH
+
+(SCENE--_A Drawing-room in "Passionate Brompton_.")
+
+FAIR AESTHETIC (_suddenly, and in deepest tones to Smith, who has just
+been introduced to take her in to Dinner_).
+
+"Are you Intense?"--_Punch_, June 14, 1879.]
+
+The plays and novels that succeed the most are those which treat of
+the life of our own day; not so the costly pictures we hang upon our
+walls. We do not care to have continually before our eyes elaborate
+representations of the life we lead every day and all day long; we
+like best that which rather takes us out of it--romantic or graceful
+episodes of another time or clime, when men wore prettier clothes than
+they do now--well-imagined, well-painted scenes from classic
+lore--historical subjects--subjects selected from our splendid
+literature and what not; or, if we want modern subjects, we prefer
+scenes chosen from a humble sphere, which is not that of those who can
+afford to buy pictures--the toilers of the earth--the toilers of the
+sea--pathetic scenes from the inexhaustible annals of the poor; or
+else, again, landscapes and seascapes--things that bring a whiff of
+nature into our feverish and artificial existence--that are in direct
+contrast to it.
+
+And even with these beautiful things, how often the charm wears away
+with the novelty of possession! How often and how soon the lovely
+picture, like its frame, becomes just as a piece of wall-furniture, in
+which we take a pride, certainly, and which we should certainly miss
+if it were taken away--but which we grow to look at with the pathetic
+indifference of habit--if not, indeed, with aversion!
+
+Chairs and tables minister to our physical comforts, and we cannot do
+without them. But pictures have not this practical hold upon us; the
+sense to which they appeal is not always on the alert; yet there they
+are hanging on the wall, morning, noon, and night, unchanged,
+unchangeable--the same arrested movement--the same expression of
+face--the same seas and trees and moors and forests and rivers and
+mountains--the very waves are as eternal as the hills!
+
+Music will leave off when it is not wanted--at least it ought to! The
+book is shut, the newspaper thrown aside. Not so the beautiful
+picture; it is like a perennial nosegay, for ever exhaling its perfume
+for noses that have long ceased to smell it!
+
+But little pictures in black and white, of little every-day people
+like ourselves, by some great little artist who knows life well and
+has the means at his command to express his knowledge in this easy,
+simple manner, can be taken up and thrown down like the book or
+newspaper. They are even easier to read and understand. They are
+within the reach of the meanest capacity, the humblest education, the
+most slender purse. They come to us weekly, let us say, in cheap
+periodicals. They are preserved and bound up in volumes, to be taken
+down and looked at when so disposed. The child grows to love them
+before he knows how to read; fifty years hence he will love them
+still, if only for the pleasure they gave him as a child. He will soon
+know them by heart, and yet go to them again and again; and if they
+are good, he will always find new beauties and added interest as he
+himself grows in taste and culture; and how much of that taste and
+culture he will owe to them, who can say?
+
+Nothing sticks so well in the young mind as a little picture one can
+hold close to the eyes like a book--not even a song or poem--for in
+the case of most young people the memory of the eye is better than
+that of the ear--its power of assimilating more rapid and more keen.
+And then there is the immense variety, the number!
+
+[Illustration: "READING WITHOUT TEARS"
+
+TEACHER. "And what comes after S, Jack?"
+
+PUPIL. "T!"
+
+TEACHER. "And what Comes after T?"
+
+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
+
+HE. "The fact is I never get any wild fowl shooting--never!"
+
+SHE. "Oh, then you ought to come down to our Neighborhood in the
+Winter. It would just suit you, there are such a lot of Geese about--
+a--a--I mean _Wild_ Geese of course!"--_Punch_, November 21, 1891.]
+
+Hogarth seems to have come nearer to this ideal pictorial satirist
+than any of his successors in _Punch_ and elsewhere. For he was not
+merely a light humorist and a genial caricaturist; he dealt also in
+pathos and terror, in tragic passion and sorrow and crime; he often
+strikes chords of too deep a tone for the pages of a comic periodical.
+
+But the extent of his productiveness was limited by the method of his
+production; he was a great painter in oils, and each of his life
+scenes is an important and elaborate picture, which, moreover, he
+engraved himself at great cost of time and labour, after the original
+time and labour spent in painting it. It is by these engravings, far
+more than by his pictures, that he is so widely known.
+
+It is quite possible to conceive a little sketchy woodcut no larger
+than a cut in _Punch_, and drawn by a master like Charles Keene, or
+the German Adolf Menzel, giving us all the essence of any picture by
+Hogarth even more effectively, more agreeably, than any of Hogarth's
+most finished engravings. And if this had been Hogarth's method of
+work, instead of some fifty or sixty of those immortal designs we
+should have had some five or six thousand! Almost a library!
+
+So much for the great pictorial satirist of the future--of the near
+future, let us hope--that I have been trying to evolve from my inner
+consciousness. May some of us live to see him!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Social Pictorial Satire, by George du Maurier
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12834 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Social Pictorial Satire, by George du Maurier
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Social Pictorial Satire
+
+Author: George du Maurier
+
+Release Date: July 7, 2004 [EBook #12834]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ben Courtney, Keith M. Eckrich and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE
+
+[Frontispiece: Mr. and Mrs. Candle.
+
+From the original drawing by JOHN LEECH. In the possession of JOHN
+KENDRICK BANGS. Esq. The lower portion has never before been
+reproduced.]
+
+
+SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE.
+
+_By_ GEORGE DU MAURIER,
+
+_Author of "Trilby" "The Martian" &c._
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+
+MDCCCXCVIII
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+_Mr. and Mrs. Caudle_
+
+_John Leech_
+
+_"In the Bay of Biscay O"_
+
+_A Specimen of Pluck_
+
+_One of Mr. Briggs's Adventures in the Highlands_
+
+_Thank Goodness! Fly-fishing has begun!_
+
+_"The jolly little Street Arabs"_
+
+_Doing a little Business_
+
+_A Tolerably Broad Hint_
+
+_Charles Keene_
+
+_The Snowstorm, Jan. 2, 1867_
+
+_Waiting for the Landlord!_
+
+_A Stroke of Business_
+
+_"None o' your Larks"_
+
+_An Affront to the Service_
+
+_"Not up to his Business"_
+
+_George du Maurier_
+
+_Feline Amenities_
+
+_The New Society Craze_
+
+_A Pictorial Puzzle_
+
+_Refinements of Modern Speech_
+
+_"Reading without Tears"_
+
+_The Height of Impropriety_
+
+_Things one would wish to have expressed differently_
+
+
+
+
+SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE
+
+
+It is my purpose to speak of the craft to which I have devoted the
+best years of my life, the craft of portraying, by means of little
+pen-and-ink strokes, lines, and scratches, a small portion of the
+world in which we live; such social and domestic incidents as lend
+themselves to humorous or satirical treatment; the illustrated
+criticism of life, of the life of our time and country, in its lighter
+aspects.
+
+The fact that I have spent so many years in the practice of this craft
+does not of itself, I am well aware, entitle me to lay down the law
+about it; the mere exercise of an art so patent to all, so easily
+understanded of the people, does not give one any special insight into
+its simple mysteries, beyond a certain perception and appreciation of
+the technical means by which it is produced--unless one is gifted with
+the critical faculty, a gift apart, to the possession of which I make
+no claim.
+
+There are two kinds of critics of such work as ours. First there is
+the wide public for whom we work and by whom we are paid; "who lives
+to please must please to live"; and who lives by drawing for a comic
+periodical must manage to please the greater number. The judgment of
+this critic, though often sound, is not infallible; but his verdict
+for the time being is final, and by it we, who live by our wits and
+from hand to mouth, must either stand or fall.
+
+The other critic is the expert, our fellow-craftsman, who has learned
+by initiation, apprenticeship, and long practice the simple secrets of
+our common trade. He is not quite infallible either, and is apt to
+concern himself more about the manner than the matter of our
+performance; nor is he of immediate importance, since with the public
+on our side we can do without him for a while, and flourish like a
+green bay-tree in spite of his artistic disapproval of our work; but
+he is not to be despised, for he is some years in advance of that
+other critic, the public, who may, and probably will, come round to
+his way of thinking in time.
+
+The first of these two critics is typified by Molière's famous cook,
+who must have been a singularly honest, independent, and intelligent
+person, since he chose in all cases to abide by her decision, and not
+with an altogether unsatisfactory result to Mankind! Such cooks are
+not to be found in these days--certainly not in England; but he is an
+unlucky craftsman who does not possess some such natural critics in
+his family, his home, or near it--mother, sister, friend, wife, or
+child--who will look over his shoulder at his little sketch, and say:
+
+"Tommy [or Papa, or Grandpapa, as the case may be], that person you've
+just drawn doesn't look quite natural," or:
+
+"That lady is not properly dressed for the person you want her to
+be--those hats are not worn this year," and so forth and so forth.
+
+When you have thoroughly satisfied this household critic, then is the
+time to show some handy brother-craftsman your amended work, and
+listen gratefully when he suggests that you should put a tone on this
+wall, and a tree, or something, in the left middle distance to balance
+the composition, and raise or depress the horizon-line to get a better
+effect of perspective.
+
+In speaking of some of my fellow-artists on _Punch_, and of their
+work, I shall try and bring both these critical methods into
+play--promising, however, once for all, that such criticism on my part
+is simply the expression of my individual taste or fancy, the taste or
+fancy of one who by no means pretends to the unerring acumen of
+Molière's cook, on the one hand, and who feels himself by no means
+infallible in his judgment of purely technical matters, on the other.
+I can only admire and say why, or why I don't; and if I fail in making
+you admire and disadmire with me, it will most likely be my fault as
+well as my misfortune.
+
+I had originally proposed to treat of Richard Doyle, John Leech, and
+Charles Keene--and finally of myself, since that I should speak of
+myself was rather insisted upon by those who procured me the honour of
+speaking at all. I find, however, that there is so much to say about
+Leech and Keene that I have thought it better to sacrifice Richard
+Doyle, who belongs to a remoter period, and whose work, exquisite as
+it is of its kind, is so much slighter than theirs, and fills so much
+less of the public eye; for his connection with _Punch_ did not last
+long. Moreover, personally I knew less of him: just enough to find
+that to know was to love him--a happy peculiarity he shared with his
+two great collaborators on _Punch_.
+
+_John Leech_! What a name that was to conjure with, and is still!
+
+I cannot find words to express what it represented to me of pure
+unmixed delight in my youth and boyhood, long before I ever dreamed of
+being an artist myself! It stands out of the path with such names as
+Dickens, Dumas, Byron--not indeed that I am claiming for him an equal
+rank with those immortals, who wielded a weapon so much more potent
+than a mere caricaturist's pencil! But if an artist's fame is to be
+measured by the mere quantity and quality of the pleasure he has
+given, what pinnacle is too high for John Leech!
+
+Other men have drawn better; deeper, grander, nobler, more poetical
+themes have employed more accomplished pencils, even in black and
+white; but for making one _glad_, I can think of no one to beat him.
+
+To be an apparently hopeless invalid at Christmas-time in some dreary,
+deserted, dismal little Flemish town, and to receive _Punch's Almanac_
+(for 1858, let us say) from some good-natured friend in England--that
+is a thing not to be forgotten! I little dreamed then that I should
+come to London again, and meet John Leech and become his friend; that
+I should be, alas! the last man to shake hands with him before his
+death (as I believe I was), and find myself among the officially
+invited mourners by his grave; and, finally, that I should inherit,
+and fill for so many years (however indifferently), that half-page in
+_Punch_ opposite the political cartoon, and which I had loved so well
+when he was the artist!
+
+Well, I recovered from a long and distressing ailment of my sight
+which had been pronounced incurable, and came to England, where I was
+introduced to Charles Keene, with whom I quickly became intimate, and
+it was he who presented me to Leech one night at one of Mr. Arthur
+Lewis's smoking concerts, in the winter of 1860. I remember feeling
+somewhat nervous lest he should take me for a foreigner on account of
+my name, and rather unnecessarily went out of my way to assure him
+that I was rather more English than John Bull himself. It didn't
+matter in the least; I have no doubt he saw through it all: he was
+kindness and courtesy itself; and I experienced to the full that
+emotion so delightful to a young hero-worshipper in meeting face to
+face a world-wide celebrity whom he has long worshipped at a distance.
+In the words of Lord Tennyson:
+
+                                "I was rapt
+      By all the sweet and sudden passion of youth
+      Towards greatness in its elder...."
+
+But it so happened at just this particular period of his artistic
+career and of mine that he no longer shone as a solitary star of the
+first magnitude in my little firmament of pictorial social satire. A
+new impulse had been given to the art of drawing on wood, a new school
+had been founded, and new methods--to draw straight from nature
+instead of trusting to memory and imagination--had been the artistic
+order of the day. Men and women, horses and dogs, landscapes and
+seascapes, all one can make pictures of, even chairs and tables and
+teacups and saucers, must be studied from the life--from the
+still-life, if you will--by whoever aspired to draw on wood; even
+angels and demons and cherubs and centaurs and mermaids must be
+closely imitated from nature--or at least as much of them as could be
+got from the living model.
+
+_Once a Week_ had just appeared, and _The Cornhill Magazine_. Sir John
+Millais and Sir Frederick Leighton were then drawing on wood just like
+the ordinary mortals; Frederick Walker had just started on his brief
+but splendid career; Frederick Sandys had burst on the black-and-white
+world like a meteor; and Charles Keene, who was illustrating the
+_Cloister and the Hearth_ in the intervals of his _Punch_ work, had,
+after long and patient labour, attained that consummate mastery of
+line and effect in wood draughtsmanship that will be for ever
+associated with his name; and his work in _Punch_, if only by virtue
+of its extraordinary technical ability, made Leech's by contrast
+appear slight and almost amateurish in spite of its ease and boldness.
+
+So that with all my admiration for Leech it was at the feet of Charles
+Keene that I found myself sitting; besides which we were much together
+in those days, talking endless shop, taking long walks, riding side by
+side on the knife-boards of omnibuses, dining at cheap restaurants,
+making music at each other's studios. His personal charm was great, as
+great in its way as Leech's; he was democratic and so was I, as one is
+bound to be when one is impecunious and the world is one's oyster to
+open with the fragile point of a lead-pencil. His bohemian world was
+mine--and I found it a very good world and very much to my taste--a
+clear, honest, wholesome, innocent, intellectual, and most industrious
+British bohemia, with lots of tobacco, lots of good music, plenty of
+talk about literature and art, and not too much victuals or drink.
+Many of its denizens, that were, have become Royal Academicians or
+have risen to fame in other ways; some have had to take a back seat in
+life; surprisingly few have gone to the bad.
+
+This world, naturally, was not Leech's; if it had ever been, I doubt;
+his bohemia, if he ever had lived in one, had been the bohemia of
+medicine, not of art, and he seemed to us then to be living on social
+heights of fame and sport and aristocratic splendour where none of us
+dreamed of seeking him--and he did not seek us. We hated and despised
+the bloated aristocracy, just as he hated and despised foreigners
+without knowing much about them; and the aristocracy, to do it
+justice, did not pester us with its obtrusive advances. But I never
+heard Leech spoken of otherwise in bohemia than with affectionate
+admiration, although many of us seemed to think that his best work was
+done. Indeed, his work was becoming somewhat fitful in quality, and
+already showed occasional signs of haste and illness and fatigue; his
+fun was less genial and happy, though he drew more vigorously than
+ever, and now and again surprised us by surpassing himself, as in his
+series of Briggs in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.
+
+All that was thirty years ago and more. I may say at once that I have
+reconsidered the opinion I formed of John Leech at that time. Leech,
+it is true, is by no means the one bright particular star, but he has
+recovered much of his lost first magnitude: if he shines more by what
+he has to say than by his manner of saying it, I have come to think
+that that is the best thing of the two to shine by, if you cannot
+shine by both; and I find that his manner was absolutely what it
+should have been for his purpose and his time--neither more nor less;
+he had so much to say and of a kind so delightful that I have no time
+to pick holes in his mode of expression, which at its best has
+satisfied far more discriminating experts than I; besides which, the
+methods of printing and engraving have wonderfully improved since his
+day. He drew straight on the wood block, with a lead-pencil; his
+delicate grey lines had to be translated into the uncompromising
+coarse black lines of printers' ink--a ruinous process; and what his
+work lost in this way is only to be estimated by those who know. True,
+his mode of expression was not equal to Keene's--I never knew any that
+was, in England, or even approached it--but that, as Mr. Rudyard
+Kipling says, is another story.
+
+The story that I will tell now is that of my brief acquaintance with
+Leech, which began in 1860, and which I had not many opportunities of
+improving till I met him at Whitby in the autumn of 1864--a memorable
+autumn for me, since I used to forgather with him every day, and have
+long walks and talks with him--and dined with him once or twice at the
+lodgings where he was staying with his wife and son and daughter--all
+of whom are now dead. He was the most sympathetic, engaging, and
+attractive person I ever met; not funny at all in conversation, or
+ever wishing to be--except now and then for a capital story, which he
+told in perfection.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN LEECH.]
+
+The keynote of his character, socially, seemed to be self-effacement,
+high-bred courtesy, never-failing consideration for others. He was the
+most charming companion conceivable, having intimately known so many
+important and celebrated people, and liking to speak of them; but one
+would never have guessed from anything he ever looked or said that he
+had made a whole nation, male and female, gentle and simple, old and
+young, laugh as it had never laughed before or since for a quarter of
+a century.
+He was tall, thin, and graceful, extremely handsome, of the higher
+Irish type; with dark hair and whiskers and complexion, and very light
+greyish-blue eyes; but the expression of his face was habitually sad,
+even when he smiled. In dress, bearing, manner, and aspect, he was the
+very type of the well-bred English gentleman and man of the world and
+good society; I never met any one to beat him in that peculiar
+distinction of form, which, I think, has reached its highest European
+development in this country. I am told the Orientals are still our
+superiors in deportment. But the natural man in him was still the
+best. Thackeray and Sir John Millais, not bad judges, and men with
+many friends, have both said that they personally loved John Leech
+better than any man they ever knew.
+
+At this time he was painting in oil, and on an enlarged scale, some of
+his more specially popular sketches in _Punch_, and very anxious to
+succeed with them, but nervously diffident of success with them, even
+with [Greek: hoi polloi]. He was not at his happiest in these efforts;
+and there was something pathetic in his earnestness and perseverance
+in attempting a thing so many can do, but which he could not do for
+want of a better training; while he could do the inimitable so easily.
+
+I came back to town before Leech, and did not see him again until the
+following October. On Saturday afternoon, the 28th, I called at his
+house, No. 6 The Terrace, Kensington, with a very elaborate drawing in
+pencil by myself, which I presented to him as a souvenir, and with
+which he seemed much pleased.
+
+He was already working at the _Punch Almanac_ for '65, at a window on
+the second floor overlooking the street. (I have often gazed up at it
+since.) He seemed very ill, so sad and depressed that I could scarcely
+speak to him for sheer sympathy; I felt he would never get through the
+labour of that almanac, and left him with the most melancholy
+forebodings.
+
+Monday morning the papers announced his death on Sunday, October 29th,
+from angina pectoris, the very morning after I had seen him.
+
+I was invited by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, the publishers of
+_Punch_, to the funeral, which took place at Kensal Green. It was the
+most touching sight imaginable. The grave was near Thackeray's, who
+had died the year before. There were crowds of people, Charles Dickens
+among them; Canon Hole, a great friend of Leech's, and who has written
+most affectionately about him, read the service; and when the coffin
+was lowered into the grave, John Millais burst into tears and loud
+sobs, setting an example that was followed all round; we all forgot
+our manhood and cried like women! I can recall no funeral in my time
+where simple grief and affection have been so openly and spontaneously
+displayed by so many strangers as well as friends--not even in France,
+where people are more demonstrative than here. No burial in
+Westminster Abbey that I have ever seen ever gave such an impression
+of universal honour, love, and regret.
+
+"Whom the gods love die young." He was only forty-six!
+
+I was then invited to join the _Punch_ staff and take Leech's empty
+chair at the weekly dinner--and bidden to cut my initials on the
+table, by his; his monogram as it was carved by him is J.L. under a
+leech in a bottle, dated 1854; and close by on the same board are the
+initials W.M.T.
+
+I flatter myself that convivially, at least, my small D.M., carved in
+impenetrable oak, will go down to posterity in rather distinguished
+company!
+
+If ever there was a square English hole, and a square English peg to
+fit it, that hole was _Punch_, and that peg was John Leech. He was
+John Bull himself, but John Bull refined and civilised--John Bull
+polite, modest, gentle--full of self-respect and self-restraint, and
+with all the bully softened out of him; manly first and gentlemanly
+after, but very soon after; more at home perhaps in the club, the
+drawing-room, and the hunting-field, in Piccadilly and the Park, than
+in the farm or shop or market-place; a normal Englishman of the upper
+middle class, with but one thing abnormal about him, viz., his genius,
+which was of the kind to give the greater pleasure to the greater
+number--and yet delight the most fastidious of his day--and I think of
+ours. One must be very ultra-aesthetic, even now, not to feel his
+charm.
+
+He was all of a piece, and moved and worked with absolute ease,
+freedom, and certainty, within the limits nature had assigned him--and
+his field was a very large one. He saw and represented the whole
+panorama of life that came within his immediate ken with an unwavering
+consistency, from first to last; from a broadly humorous, though
+mostly sympathetic point of view that never changed--a very delightful
+point of view, if not the highest conceivable.
+
+Hand and eye worked with brain in singular harmony, and all three
+improved together contemporaneously, with a parallelism most
+interesting to note, as one goes through the long series of his social
+pictures from the beginning.
+
+He has no doubts or hesitations--no bewildering subtleties--no seeking
+from twelve to fourteen o'clock--either in his ideas or technique,
+which very soon becomes an excellent technique, thoroughly suited to
+his ideas--rapid, bold, spirited, full of colour, breadth, and
+movement--troubling itself little about details that will not help the
+telling of his story--for before everything else he has his story to
+tell, and it must either make you laugh or lightly charm you--and he
+tells it in the quickest, simplest, down-rightest pencil strokes,
+although it is often a complicated story!
+
+For there are not only the funny people and the pretty people acting
+out their little drama in the foreground--there is the scene in which
+they act, and the middle distance, and the background beyond, and the
+sky itself; beautiful rough landscapes and seascapes and skyscapes,
+winds and weathers, boisterous or sunny seas, rain and storm and
+cloud--all the poetry of nature, that he feels most acutely while his
+little people are being so unconsciously droll in the midst of it all.
+He is a king of impressionists, and his impression becomes ours on the
+spot--never to be forgotten! It is all so quick and fresh and strong,
+so simple, pat, and complete, so direct from mother Nature herself! It
+has about it the quality of inevitableness--those are the very people
+who would have acted and spoken in just that manner, and we meet them
+every day--the expression of the face, the movement and gesture, in
+anger, terror, dismay, scorn, conceit, tenderness, elation,
+triumph.... Whatever the mood, they could not have looked or acted
+otherwise--it is life itself. An optimistic life in which joyousness
+prevails, and the very woes and discomfitures are broadly comical to
+us who look on--like some one who has sea-sickness, or a headache
+after a Greenwich banquet--which are about the most tragic things he
+has dealt with.
+
+(I am speaking of his purely social sketches. For in his admirable
+large cuts, political and otherwise serious, his satire is often
+bitter and biting indeed; and his tragedy almost Hogarthian.)
+
+Like many true humorists, he was of a melancholy temperament, and no
+doubt felt attracted by all that was mirthful and bright, and in happy
+contrast to his habitual mood. Seldom if ever does a drop of his inner
+sadness ooze out through his pencil-point--and never a drop of gall;
+and I do not remember one cynical touch in his whole series.
+
+In his tastes and habits he was by nature aristocratic; he liked the
+society of those who were well dressed, well bred and refined like
+himself, and perhaps a trifle conventional; he conformed quite
+spontaneously and without effort to upper-class British ideal of his
+time, and had its likes and dislikes. But his strongest predilections
+of all are common to the British race: his love of home, his love of
+sport, his love of the horse and the hound--especially his love of the
+pretty woman--the pretty woman of the normal, wholesome English type.
+This charming creature so dear to us all pervades his show from
+beginning to end--she is a creation of his, and he thoroughly loves
+her, and draws her again and again with a fondness that is half
+lover-like and half paternal--her buxom figure, her merry bright eyes
+and fresh complexion and flowing ringlets, and pursed-up lips like
+Cupid's bow. Nor is he ever tired of displaying her feet and ankles
+(and a little more) in gales of wind on cliff and pier and parade, or
+climbing the Malvern Hills. When she puts on goloshes it nearly breaks
+his heart, and he would fly to other climes! He revels in her
+infantile pouts and jealousies and heart-burnings and butterfly
+delights and lisping mischiefs; her mild, innocent flirtations with
+beautiful young swells, whose cares are equally light.
+
+She is a darling, and he constantly calls her so to her face. Her
+favourite seaside nook becomes the mermaid's haunt; her back hair
+flies and dries in the wind, and disturbs the peace of the too
+susceptible Punch. She is a little amazon _pour rire_, and rides
+across country, and drives (even a hansom sometimes, with a pair of
+magnificent young whiskerandoes smoking their costly cigars inside);
+she is a toxophilite, and her arrow sticks, for it is barbed with
+innocent seduction, and her bull's-eye is the soft military heart. She
+wears a cricket-cap and breaks Aunt Sally's nose seven times; she puts
+her pretty little foot upon the croquet-ball--and croquet'd you are
+completely! With what glee she would have rinked and tennised if he
+had lived a little longer!
+
+[Illustration: "IN THE BAY OF BISCANY O"
+
+The Last Sweet Thing in Hats and Walking-Sticks.--_Punch_, September
+27, 1862.]
+
+She is light of heart, and perhaps a little of head! Her worst trouble
+is when the captain gives the wing of the fowl to some other darling
+who might be her twin-sister; her most terrible nightmare is when she
+dreams that great stupid Captain Sprawler upsets a dish of trifle over
+her new lace dress with the blue satin slip; but next morning she is
+herself again, and rides in the Row, and stops to speak with that
+great stupid Captain Sprawler, who is very nice to look at, whose back
+is very beautiful, and who sprawls most gracefully over the railings,
+and pays her those delightful, absurd compliments about her and her
+horse "being such a capital pair," while, as a foil to so much grace
+and splendour, a poor little snub-nosed, ill-dressed, ill-conditioned
+dwarf of a snob looks on, sucking the top of his cheap cane in abject
+admiration and hopeless envy! Then she pats and kisses the nice soft
+nose of Cornet Flinders's hunter, which is "deucedly aggravating for
+Cornet Flinders, you know"--but when that noble sportsman is frozen
+out and cannot hunt, she plays scratch-cradle with him in the boudoir
+of her father's country house, or pitches chocolate into his mouth
+from the oak landing; and she lets him fasten the skates on to her
+pretty feet. Happy cornet! And she plays billiards with her handsome
+cousin--a guardsman at least--and informs him that she is just
+eighteen to his love--and stands under the mistletoe and asks this
+enviable relation of hers to show her what the garroter's hug is like;
+and when he proceeds to do so she calls out in distress because his
+pointed waxed moustache has scratched her pretty cheek; and when Mr.
+Punch is there, at dinner, she and a sister darling pull crackers
+across his August white waistcoat, and scream in pretty terror at the
+explosion; to that worthy's excessive jubilation, for Mr. Punch is
+Leech himself, and nothing she does can ever be amiss in his eyes!
+
+Sometimes, indeed, she is seriously transfixed herself, and bids Mr.
+Tongs, the hairdresser, cut off a long lock of her hair where it will
+not be missed---and she looks so lovely under the smart of Cupid's
+arrow that we are frantically jealous of the irresistible warrior for
+whom the jetty tress is destined. In short, she is innocence and
+liveliness and health incarnate--a human kitten.
+
+When she marries the gilded youth with the ambrosial whiskers, their
+honeymooning is like playing at being married, their heartless
+billings and cooings are enchanting to see. She will have no
+troubles--Leech will take good care of that; her matrimonial tiffs
+will be of the slightest; hers will be a well-regulated household; the
+course of her conjugal love will run smooth in spite of her little
+indiscretions--for, like Bluebeard's wife, she can be curious at
+times, and coax and wheedle to know the mysteries of Freemasonry, and
+cry because Edwin will not reveal the secret of Mr. Percy, the
+horse-tamer; and how Edwin can resist such an appeal is more than we
+can understand! But soon they will have a large family, and live happy
+ever after, and by the time their eldest-born is thirteen years old,
+the darling of fourteen years back will be a regular materfamilias,
+stout, matronly, and rather severe; and Edwin will be fat, bald, and
+middle-aged, and bring home a bundle of asparagus and a nice new
+perambulator to celebrate the wedding-day!
+
+And he loves her brothers and cousins, military or otherwise, just as
+dearly, and makes them equally beautiful to the eye, with those lovely
+drooping whiskers that used to fall and brush their bosoms, their
+smartly waistcoated bosoms, a quarter of a century ago! He dresses
+them even better than the darlings, and has none but the kindliest and
+gentlest satire for their little vanities and conceits--for they have
+no real vices, these charming youths, beyond smoking too much and
+betting a little and getting gracefully tipsy at race-meetings and
+Greenwich dinners--and sometimes running into debt with their tailors,
+I suppose! And then how boldly they ride to hounds, and how splendidly
+they fight in the Crimea! how lightly they dance at home! How healthy,
+good-humoured, and manly they are, with all their vagaries of dress
+and jewellery and accent! It is easy to forgive them if they give the
+whole of their minds to their white neckties, or are dejected because
+they have lost the little gridiron off their chatelaine, or lose all
+presence of mind when a smut settles on their noses, and turn faint at
+the sight of Mrs. Gamp's umbrella!
+
+And next to these enviable beings he loves and reveres the sportsman.
+One is made to feel that the true sportsman, whether he shoots or
+hunts or fishes, is an August being, as he ought to be in Great
+Britain, and Leech has done him full justice with his pencil. He is no
+subject for flippant satire; so there he sits his horse, or stalks
+through his turnip-field, or handles his rod like a god! Handsome,
+well-appointed from top to toe, aristocratic to the finger-tips--a
+most impressive figure, the despair of foreigners, the envy of all
+outsiders at home (including the present lecturer)!
+
+[Illustration: A SPECIMEN OF PLUCK
+
+RUGGLES. "Hold hard, Master George. It's too wide, and uncommon deep!"
+
+MASTER GEORGE. "All right, Ruggles! We can both _swim_!"--_Punch_.]
+
+He has never been painted like this before! What splendid lords and
+squires, fat or lean, hook-nosed or eagle-eyed, well tanned by sun and
+wind, in faultless kit, on priceless mounts! How redolent they are of
+health and wealth, and the secure consciousness of high social
+position--of the cool business-like self-importance that sits so well
+on those who are knowing in the noblest pursuit that can ever employ
+the energies and engross the mind of a well-born Briton; for they can
+ride almost as well as their grooms, these mighty hunters before the
+Lord, and know the country almost as well as the huntsman himself! And
+what sons and grandsons and granddaughters are growing up round them,
+on delightful ponies no gate, hedge, or brook can dismay--nothing but
+the hard high-road!
+
+It is a glorious, exhilarating scene, with the beautiful wintry
+landscape stretching away to the cloudy November sky, and the lords
+and ladies gay, and the hounds, and the frosty-faced, short-tempered
+old huntsman, the very perfection of his kind; and the poor cockney
+snobs on their hired screws, and the meek clod-hopping labourers
+looking on excited and bewildered, happy for a moment at beholding so
+much happiness in their betters.
+
+[Illustration: ONE OF MR. BRIGG'S ADVENTURES IN THE HIGHLANDS
+
+After aiming for a Quarter of and Hour Mr. B. fires both of his
+Barrels--and--misses!!!! Tableau--The Forester's Anguish--_Punch_,
+1861.]
+
+To have seen these sketches of the hunting-field is to have been there
+in person. It is almost the only hunting that I ever had--and probably
+ever shall have--and I am almost content that it should be so! It is
+so much easier and simpler to draw for _Punch_ than to drive across
+country! And then, as a set-off to all this successful achievement,
+this pride and pomp and circumstance of glorious sport, we have the
+immortal and ever-beloved figure of Mr. Briggs, whom I look upon as
+Leech's masterpiece--the example above all others of the most humorous
+and good-natured satire that was ever penned or pencilled. The more
+ridiculous he is the more we love him; he is more winning and
+sympathetic than even Mr. Pickwick himself, and I almost think a
+greater creation! Besides, it took two to make Mr. Pickwick, the
+author and the artist, whereas Mr. Briggs issued fully equipped from
+the brain of Leech alone!
+
+Not indeed that all unauthorised gallopers after the fox find
+forgiveness in the eyes of Leech. Woe to the vulgar little cockney
+snob who dares to obtrude his ugly mug and his big cigar and his
+hired, broken-winded rip on these hallowed and thrice-happy
+hunting-grounds!--an earthenware pot among vessels of brass; the
+punishment shall be made to fit the crime; better if he fell off and
+his horse rolled over him than that he should dress and ride and look
+like that! For the pain of broken bones is easier to bear than the
+scorn of a true British sportsman!
+
+[Illustration: THANK GOODNESS! FLY-FISHING HAS BEGUN!
+
+MILLER. "Don't they really, perhaps they'll bite better towards the
+cool of the evening, they mostly do."--_Punch_, 1857.]
+Then there are the fishermen who never catch any fish, but whom no
+stress of weather can daunt or distress. There they sit or stand with
+the wind blowing or the rain soaking, in dark landscapes with ruffled
+streams and ominous clouds, and swaying trees that turn up the whites
+of their leaves--one almost hears the wind rush through them. One
+almost forgets the comical little forlorn figure who gives such point
+to all the angry turbulence of nature in the impression produced by
+the _mise en scène_ itself--an impression so happily, so vividly
+suggested by a few rapid, instructive pencil strokes and thumb smudges
+that it haunts the memory like a dream.
+
+He loves such open-air scenes so sincerely, he knows so well how to
+express and communicate the perennial charm they have for him, that
+the veriest bookworm becomes a sportsman through sheer sympathy--by
+the mere fact of looking at them.
+
+And how many people and things he loves that most of us love!--it
+would take all night to enumerate them--the good authoritative pater-
+and materfamilias; the delightful little girls; the charming cheeky
+school-boys; the jolly little street Arabs, who fill old gentlemen's
+letter-boxes with oyster-shells and gooseberry-skins; the cabmen, the
+busmen; the policemen with the old-fashioned chimney-pot hat; the old
+bathing-women, and Jack-ashores, and jolly old tars--his British tar
+is irresistible, whether he is hooking a sixty-four pounder out of the
+Black Sea, or riding a Turk, or drinking tea instead of grog and
+complaining of its strength! There seems to be hardly a mirthful
+corner of English life that Leech has not seen and loved and painted
+in this singularly genial and optimistic manner.
+
+[Illustration: "THE JOLLY LITTLE STREET ARABS"
+
+From the original drawing for _Punch_ in possession of John Kendrick
+Bangs, Esq.]
+
+His loves are many and his hates are few--but he is a good hater all
+the same. He hates Mawworm and Stiggins, and so do we. He hates the
+foreigner--whom he does not know, as heartily as Thackeray does, who
+seems to know him so well--with a hatred that seems to me a little
+unjust, perhaps: all France is not in Leicester Square; many Frenchmen
+can dress and ride, drive and shoot as well as anybody; and they began
+to use the tub very soon after we did--a dozen years or so,
+perhaps--say after the _coup d'état_ in 1851.
+
+Then he hates with a deadly hatred all who make music in the street or
+next door--and preach in the crossways and bawl their wares on the
+parade. What would he have said of the Salvation Army? He is haunted
+by the bark of his neighbour's dog, by the crow of his neighbour's
+Cochin China cock; he cannot even bear his neighbour to have his
+chimney swept; and as for the Christmas waits--we all remember _that_
+tragic picture! This exaggerated aversion to noises became a disease
+with him, and possibly hastened his end.
+
+Among his pet hates we must not forget the gorgeous flunky and the
+guzzling alderman, the leering old fop, the rascally book-maker, the
+sweating Jew tradesman, and the poor little snob (the 'Arry of his
+day) who tries vainly to grow a moustache, and wears such a shocking
+bad hat, and iron heels to his shoes, and shuns the Park during the
+riots for fear of being pelted for a "haristocrat," and whose
+punishment I think is almost in excess of his misdemeanor. To succeed
+in over-dressing one's self (as his swells did occasionally without
+marring their beauty) is almost as ignominious as to fail; and when
+the failure comes from want of means, there is also almost a pathetic
+side to it.
+
+[Illustration: DOING A LITTLE BUSINESS
+
+OLD EQUESTRIAN. "Well, but--you're not the boy I left my horse with!"
+
+BOY. "No, sir; I jist spekilated, and bought 'im of t'other boy for a
+harpenny."--_Punch_.]
+
+And he is a little bit hard on old frumps, with fat ankles and scraggy
+bosoms and red noses--but anyhow we are made to laugh--_quod erat
+demonstrandum_. We also know that he has a strong objection to cold
+mutton for dinner, and much prefers a whitebait banquet at Greenwich,
+or a nice well-ordered repast at the Star and Garter. So do we.
+
+And the only thing he feared is the horse. Nimrod as he is, and the
+happiest illustrator of the hunting-field that ever was, he seems for
+ever haunted by a terror of the heels of that noble animal he drew so
+well--and I thoroughly sympathise with him!
+
+In all the series the chief note is joyousness, high spirits, the
+pleasure of being alive. There is no _Weltschmerz_ in his happy world,
+where all is for the best--no hankering after the moon, no discontent
+with the present order of things. Only one little lady discovers that
+the world is hollow, and her doll is stuffed with bran; only one
+gorgeous swell has exhausted the possibilities of this life, and finds
+out that he is at loss for a new sensation. So what does he do? Cut
+his throat? Go and shoot big game in Africa? No; he visits the top of
+the Monument on a rainy day, or invites his brother-swells to a Punch
+and Judy show in his rooms, or rides to Whitechapel and back on an
+omnibus with a bag of periwinkles, and picks them out with a pin!
+
+Even when his humour is at its broadest, and he revels in almost
+pantomimic fun, he never loses sight of truth and nature--never
+strikes a false or uncertain note. Robinson goes to an evening party
+with a spiked knuckle-duster in his pocket and sits down. Jones digs
+an elderly party called Smith in the back with the point of his
+umbrella, under the impression that it is his friend Brown. A charming
+little street Arab prints the soles of his muddy feet on a smart old
+gentleman's white evening waistcoat.
+
+Tompkyns writes Henrietta on the stands under two hearts transfixed by
+an arrow, and his wife, whose name is Matilda, catches him in the act.
+An old gentleman, maddened by a bluebottle, smashes all his furniture
+and breaks every window-pane but one--where the bluebottle is. And in
+all these scenes one does not know which is the most irresistible, the
+most inimitable--the mere drollery or the dramatic truth of gesture
+and facial expression.
+
+The way in which every-day people really behave in absurd situations
+and under comically trying circumstances is quite funny enough for
+him; and if he exaggerates a little and goes beyond the absolute prose
+of life in the direction of caricature, he never deviates a
+hair's-breadth from the groove human nature has laid down. There is
+exaggeration, but no distortion. The most wildly funny people are low
+comedians of the highest order, whose fun is never forced and never
+fails; they found themselves on fact, and only burlesque what they
+have seen in actual life--they never evolve their fun from the depths
+of their inner consciousness; and in this naturalness, for me, lies
+the greatness of Leech. There is nearly always a tenderness in the
+laughter he excites, born of the touch of nature that makes the whole
+world kin!
+
+[Illustration: A TOLERABLY BROAD HINT
+
+"Oh, I beg your pardon, sir, but you didn't say as we were to pull up
+anywhere, did you, sir?"--_Punch_, 1859.]
+
+Where most of all he gives us a sense of the exuberant joyousness and
+buoyancy of life is in the sketches of the seaside--the newly
+discovered joys of which had then not become commonplace to people of
+the middle class. The good old seaside has grown rather stale by this
+time--the very children of to-day dig and paddle in a half-perfunctory
+sort of fashion, with a certain stolidity, and are in strange contrast
+to those highly elate and enchanting little romps that fill his
+seaside pictures.
+
+Indeed, nothing seems so jolly, nothing seems so funny, now, as when
+Leech was drawing for _Punch_. The gaiety of one nation at least has
+been eclipsed by his death. Is it merely that there is no such light
+humorist to see and draw for us in a frolicsome spirit all the fun and
+the jollity? Is it because some of us have grown old? Or is it that
+the British people themselves have changed and gone back to their old
+way of taking their pleasure sadly?
+
+Everything is so different, somehow; the very girls themselves have
+grown a head taller, and look serious, stately, and dignified, like
+Olympian goddesses, even when they are dancing and playing
+lawn-tennis.
+
+I for one should no more dream of calling them the darlings than I
+should dare to kiss them under the mistletoe, were I ever so splendid
+a young captain. Indeed I am too prostrate in admiration--I can only
+suck the top of my stick and gaze in jealous ecstasy, like one of
+Leech's little snobs. They are no longer pretty as their grandmothers
+were--whom Leech drew so well in the old days! They are _beautiful_!
+
+And then they are so cultivated, and _know_ such a lot--of books, of
+art, of science, of politics, and theology--of the world the flesh,
+and the devil. They actually think for themselves; they have broken
+loose and jumped over the ring-fence; they have taken to the water,
+these lovely chicks, and swim like ducklings, to the dismay of those
+good old cocks and hens, their grandparents! And my love of them is
+tinged with awe, as was Leech's love of that mighty, beautiful, but
+most uncertain quadruped, the thoroughbred horse--for, like him, when
+they are good, they are very, very good, but when they are bad, they
+are horrid. We have changed other things as well: the swell has become
+the masher, and is a terrible dull dog; the poor little snob has
+blossomed into a blatant 'Arry, and no longer wears impossible hats
+and iron heels to his boots; he has risen in the social scale, and
+holds his own without fear or favour in the Park and everywhere else.
+To be taken for a haristocrat is his dream!--even if he be pelted for
+it. In his higher developments he becomes a "bounder," and bounds away
+in most respectable West End ball-rooms. He is the only person with
+any high spirits left--perhaps that is why high spirits have gone out
+of fashion, like boxing the watch and wrenching off door-knockers!
+
+And the snob of our day is quite a different person, more likely than
+not to be found hobnobbing with dukes and duchesses--as irreproachable
+in dress and demeanour as Leech himself. Thackeray discovered and
+christened him for us long ago; and he is related to most of us, and
+moves in the best society. He has even ceased to brag of his intimacy
+with the great, they have become so commonplace to him; and if he
+swaggers at all, it is about his acquaintance with some popular actor
+or comic vocalist whom he is privileged to call by his christian-name.
+
+And those splendid old grandees of high rank, so imposing of aspect,
+so crushing to us poor mortals by mere virtue not of their wealth and
+title alone, but of their high-bred distinction of feature and
+bearing--to which Leech did such ample justice--what has become of
+them?
+
+They are like the snows of yester-year! They have gone the way of
+their beautiful chariots with the elaborate armorial bearings and the
+tasselled hammercloth, the bewigged, cocked-hatted coachman, and the
+two gorgeous flunkies hanging on behind. Sir Gorgeous Midas has beaten
+the dukes in mere gorgeousness, flunkies and all--burlesqued the
+vulgar side of them, and unconsciously shamed it out of existence;
+made swagger and ostentation unpopular by his own evil
+example--actually improved the manners of the great by sheer mimicry
+of their defects. He has married his sons and his daughters to them
+and spoiled the noble curve of those lovely noses that Leech drew so
+well, and brought them down a peg in many ways, and given them a new
+lease of life; and he has enabled us to discover that they are not of
+such different clay from ourselves after all. All the old slavish
+formulae of deference and respect--"Your Grace," "Your Ladyship," "My
+Lord"--that used to run so glibly off our tongues whenever we had a
+chance, are now left to servants and shopkeepers; and my slight
+experience of them, for one, is that they do not want to be toadied a
+bit, and that they are very polite, well-bred, and most agreeable
+people.
+
+If we may judge of our modern aristocracy by that very slender
+fragment of our contemporary fiction, mostly American, that still
+thinks it worth writing about, our young noble of to-day is the most
+good-humoured, tolerant, simple-hearted, simple-minded,
+unsophisticated creature alive--thinking nothing of his
+honours--prostrate under the little foot of some fair Yankee, who is
+just as likely as not to jilt him for some transatlantic painter not
+yet known to fame.
+
+Compare this unpretending youth to one of Bulwer's heroes, or
+Disraeli's, or even Thackeray's! And his simple old duke of a father
+and his dowdy old duchess of a mother are almost as devoid of swagger
+as himself; they seem to apologise for their very existence, if we may
+trust these American chroniclers who seem to know them so well; and I
+really think we no longer care to hear and read about them quite so
+much as we did--unless it be in the society papers!
+
+But all these past manners and customs that some of us can remember so
+well--all these obsolete people, from the heavily whiskered swell to
+the policeman with the leather-bound chimney-pot hat, from good pater-
+and mater-familias who were actually looked up to and obeyed by their
+children, to the croquet-playing darlings in the pork-pie hats and
+huge crinolines--all survive and will survive for many a year in John
+Leech's "Pictures of Life and Character."
+
+Except for a certain gentleness, kindliness, and self-effacing modesty
+common to both, and which made them appear almost angelic in the eyes
+of many who knew them, it would be difficult to imagine a greater
+contrast to Leech than Charles Keene.
+
+Charles Keene was absolutely unconventional, and even almost
+eccentric. He dressed more with a view to artistic picturesqueness
+than to fashion, and despised gloves and chimney-pot hats, and black
+coats and broadcloth generally.
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES KEENE
+
+From a photograph by Elliott and Fry, London.]
+
+Scotch tweed was good enough for him in town and country alike. Though
+a Tory in politics, he was democratic in his tastes and habits. He
+liked to smoke his short black pipe on the tops of omnibuses; he liked
+to lay and light his own fire and cook his mutton-chop upon it. He had
+a passion for music and a beautiful voice, and sang with a singular
+pathos and charm, but he preferred the sound of his bagpipes to that
+of his own singing, and thought that you must prefer it too!
+
+He was for ever sketching in pen and ink, indoors and out--he used at
+one time to carry a little ink-bottle at his buttonhole, and steel
+pens in his waistcoat-pocket, and thus equipped he would sketch
+whatever took his fancy in his walks abroad--houses, 'busses, cabs,
+people--bits of street and square, scaffoldings, hoardings with
+advertisements--sea, river, moor, lake, and mountain--what has he not
+sketched with that masterly pen that had already been so carefully
+trained by long and arduous practice in a life-school? His heart was
+in his work from first to last; beyond his bagpipes and his old books
+(for he was a passionate reader), he seemed to have no other hobby.
+His facility in sketching became phenomenal, as also his knowledge of
+what to put in and what to leave out, so that the effect he aimed at
+should be secured in perfection and with the smallest appearance of
+labour.
+
+Among his other gifts he had a physical gift of inestimable value for
+such work as ours--namely, a splendid hand--a large, muscular,
+well-shaped, and most workman-like hand, whose long deft fingers could
+move with equal ease and certainty in all directions. I have seen it
+at work--and it was a pleasure to watch its acrobatic dexterity, its
+unerring precision of touch. It could draw with nonchalant facility
+parallel straight lines, or curved, of just the right thickness and
+distance from each other--almost as regular as if they had been drawn
+with ruler or compass--almost, but not _quite_. The quiteness would
+have made them mechanical, and robbed them of their charm of human
+handicraft. A cunning and obedient slave, this wonderful hand, for
+which no command from the head could come amiss--a slave, moreover,
+that had most thoroughly learned its business by long apprenticeship
+to one especial trade, like the head and like the eye that guided it.
+
+Leech, no doubt, had a good natural hand, that swept about with
+enviable freedom and boldness, but for want of early discipline it
+could not execute these miracles of skill; and the commands that came
+from the head also lacked the preciseness which results from patiently
+acquired and well-digested knowledge, so that Mr. Hand was apt now and
+then to zigzag a little on its own account--in backgrounds, on floors
+and walls, under chairs and tables, whenever a little tone was felt to
+be desirable--sometimes in the shading of coats and trousers and
+ladies' dresses.
+
+But it never took a liberty with a human face or a horse's head; and
+whenever it went a little astray you could always read between the
+lines and know exactly what it meant.
+
+There is no difficulty in reading between Keene's lines; every one of
+them has its unmistakable definite intimation; every one is the right
+line in the right place!
+
+We must remember that there are no such things as lines in nature.
+Whether we use them to represent a human profile, the depth of a
+shadow, the darkness of a cloak or a thunder-cloud, they are mere
+conventional symbols. They were invented a long time ago, by a
+distinguished sportsman who was also a heaven-born amateur artist--the
+John Leech of his day--who engraved for us (from life) the picture of
+mammoth on one of its own tusks.
+
+And we have accepted them ever since as the cheapest and simplest way
+of interpreting in black and white for the wood-engraver the shapes
+and shadows and colours of nature. They may be scratchy, feeble, and
+uncertain, or firm and bold--thick and thin--straight, curved,
+parallel, or irregular--cross-hatched once, twice, a dozen times, at
+any angle--every artist has his own way of getting his effect. But
+some ways are better than others, and I think Keene's is the firmest,
+loosest, simplest, and best way that ever was, and--the most difficult
+to imitate. His mere pen-strokes have, for the expert, a beauty and an
+interest quite apart from the thing they are made to depict, whether
+he uses them as mere outlines to express the shape of things animate
+or inanimate, even such shapeless, irregular things as the stones on a
+sea-beach--or in combination to suggest the tone and colour of a
+dress-coat, or a drunkard's nose, of a cab or omnibus--of a distant
+mountain with miles of atmosphere between it and the figures in the
+foreground.
+
+[Illustration: THE SNOWSTORM, JAN. 2, 1867
+
+CABBY (_petulantly--the Cabbies even lose their tempers_). "It's no
+use your a-calling o' me, Sir! Got such a Job with these 'ere Two
+as'll last me a Fortnight!!"--_Punch_, January 19, 1867.]
+
+His lines are as few as can be--he is most economical in this respect
+and loves to leave as much white paper as he can; but one feels in his
+best work that one line more or one line less would impair the
+perfection of the whole--that of all the many directions, curves, and
+thicknesses they might have taken he has inevitably hit upon just the
+right one. He has beaten all previous records in this respect--in this
+country, at least. I heard a celebrated French painter say: "He is a
+great man, your Charles Keene; he take a pen and ink and a bit of
+paper, and wiz a half-dozen strokes he know 'ow to frame a gust of
+wind!" I think myself that Leech could frame a gust of wind as
+effectually as Keene, by the sheer force of his untaught natural
+instinct--of his genius; but not with the deftness--this economy of
+material--this certainty of execution--this consummate knowledge of
+effect.
+
+To borrow a simile from music, there are certain tunes so fresh and
+sweet and pretty that they please at once and for ever, like "Home,
+Sweet Home," or "The Last Rose of Summer"; they go straight to the
+heart of the multitude, however slight the accompaniment--a few simple
+chords--they hardly want an accompaniment at all.
+
+Leech's art seems to me of just such a happy kind; he draws--I mean he
+scores like an amateur who has not made a very profound study of
+harmony, and sings his pretty song to his simple accompaniment with so
+sweet and true a natural voice that we are charmed. It is the magic of
+nature, whereas Keene is a very Sebastian Bach in his counterpoint.
+There is nothing of the amateur about him; his knowledge of harmony in
+black and white is complete and thorough; mere consummate scoring has
+become to him a second nature; each separate note of his voice reveals
+the long training of the professional singer; and if his tunes are
+less obviously sweet and his voice less naturally winning and
+sympathetic than Leech's, his aesthetic achievement is all the
+greater. It is to his brother-artists rather than to the public at
+large that his most successful appeal is made--but with an intensity
+that can only be gained by those who have tried in vain to do what he
+has done, and who thereby know how difficult it is. His real magic is
+that of art.
+
+This perhaps accounts for the unmistakable fact that Leech's
+popularity has been so much greater than Keene's, and I believe is
+still. Leech's little melodies of the pencil (to continue the parallel
+with the sister art) are like Volkslieder--national airs--and more
+directly reach the national heart. Transplant them to other lands that
+have pencil Volkslieder of their own (though none, I think, comparable
+to his for fun and sweetness and simplicity) and they fail to please
+as much, while their mere artistic qualities are not such as to find
+favour among foreign experts, whereas Keene actually gains by such a
+process. He is as much admired by the artists of France and Germany as
+by our own--if not more. For some of his shortcomings--such as his
+lack of feeling for English female beauty, his want of perception,
+perhaps his disdain, of certain little eternal traits and conventions
+and differences that stamp the various grades of our social
+hierarchy--do not strike them, and nothing interferes with their
+complete appreciation of his craftsmanship.
+
+[Illustration: WAITING FOR THE LANDLORD!
+
+RIBBONMAN (_getting impatient_). "Bedad, they ought to be here be this
+toime! Sure, Tiriace, I hope the ould gintleman hasn't mit wid an
+accidint!!!"--_Punch_, July 27, 1878.]
+
+Perhaps, also, Leech's frequent verification of our manly British
+pluck and honesty, and proficiency in sport, and wholesomeness and
+cleanliness of body and mind, our general physical beauty and
+distinction, and his patriotic tendency to contrast our exclusive
+possession of these delightful gifts with the deplorable absence of
+them in any country but our own, may fail to enlist the sympathies of
+the benighted foreigner.
+
+Whereas there is not much to humiliate the most touchy French or
+German reader of _Punch_, or excite his envy, in Charles Keene's
+portraiture of our race. He is impartial and detached, and the most
+rabid Anglophobe may frankly admire him without losing his
+self-esteem. The English lower middle class and people, that Keene has
+depicted with such judicial freedom from either prejudice or
+pre-possession, have many virtues; but they are not especially
+conspicuous for much vivacity or charm of aspect or gainliness of
+demeanour; and he has not gone out of his way to idealise them.
+
+Also, he seldom if ever gibes at those who have not been able to
+resist the temptations (as Mr. Gilbert would say) of belonging to
+other nations.
+
+Thus in absolute craftsmanship and technical skill, in the ease and
+beauty of his line, his knowledge of effect, his complete mastery over
+the material means at his disposal, Charles Keene seems to me as
+superior to Leech as Leech is to him in grace, in human naturalness
+and geniality of humour, in accurate observation of life, in keenness
+of social perception, and especially in width of range.
+
+[Illustration: A STROKE OF BUSINESS
+
+VILLAGE HAMPDEN (_"who with dauntless breast" has undertaken for
+sixpence to keep off the other boys_). "If any of yer wants to see
+what we're a Paintin' of it's a 'Alfpenny a 'Ead, but you marn't make
+no Remarks."--_Punch_, May 4, 1867.]
+
+The little actors on Leech's stage are nearly all of them every-day
+people--types one is constantly meeting. High or low, tipsy or sober,
+vulgar or refined, pleasant or the reverse, we knew them all before
+Leech ever drew them; and our recognition of them on his page is full
+of delight at meeting old familiar friends and seeing them made fun of
+for our amusement.
+
+Whereas a great many of Keene's middle-class protagonists are peculiar
+and exceptional, and much of their humour lies in their eccentricity,
+they are characters themselves, rather than types of English
+characters. Are they really observed and drawn from life, do they
+really exist just as they are, or are they partly evolved from the
+depths of an inner consciousness that is not quite satisfied with life
+just as it is?
+
+[Illustration: "NONE O' YOUR LARKS"
+
+GIGANTIC NAVVY: "Let's walk between yer, Gents; folks 'll think you've
+took up a Deserter."--_Punch_, October 19, 1861.]
+
+They are often comic, with their exquisitely drawn faces so full of
+subtlety--intensely comic! Their enormous perplexities about nothing,
+their utter guilelessness, their innocence of the wicked world and its
+ways, make them engaging sometimes in spite of a certain ungainliness
+of gesture, dress, and general behaviour that belongs to them, and
+which delighted Charles Keene, who was the reverse of ungainly, just
+as the oft-recurring tipsiness of his old gentlemen delighted him,
+though he was the most abstemious of men. I am now speaking of his
+middle-class people--those wonderful philistines of either sex; those
+elaborately capped and corpulent old ladies; those
+muttonchop-whiskered, middle-aged gentlemen with long upper lips and
+florid complexions, receding chins, noses almost horizontal in their
+prominence; those artless damsels who trouble themselves so little
+about the latest fashions; those feeble-minded, hirsute swells with
+the sloping shoulders and the broad hips and the little hats cocked on
+one side; those unkempt, unspoiled, unspotted from the world brothers
+of the brush, who take in their own milk, and so complacently ignore
+all the rotten conventionalism of our over-civilised existence.
+
+When he takes his subjects from the classes beneath these, he is, if
+not quite so funny, at his best, I think. His costermongers and
+policemen, his omnibus drivers and conductors and cabbies, are
+inimitable studies; and as for his 'busses and cabs, I really cannot
+find words to express my admiration of them. In these, as in his
+street scenes and landscapes, he is unapproached and unapproachable.
+
+Nor must we forget his canny Scotsmen, his Irish labourers and
+peasants, his splendid English navvies, and least of all his
+volunteers--he and Leech might be called the pillars of the Volunteer
+movement, from the manner, so true, so sympathetic, and so humorous,
+in which they have immortalised its beginning.
+
+[Illustration: AN AFFRONT TO THE SERVICE
+
+OMNIBUS DRIVER (_to Coster_). "Now then, Irish! pull a one side, will
+you? What are you gaping at? Did you never see a Milisher man before?"
+
+_A disgustingly ignorant observation in the opinion of young Longslip,
+Lieutenant in Her Majesty's Fusileer Guards_--_Punch_, March 7, 1863.]
+
+Charles Keene is seldom a satirist. His nature was too tolerant and
+too sweet for hate, and that makes him a bad and somewhat perfunctory
+hater. He tries to hate 'Arry, but he can't, for he draws an ideal
+'Arry that surely never was, and thus his shaft misses the mark:
+compare his 'Arry to one of Leech's snobs, for instance! He tries to
+hate the haw-haw swell, and is equally unsuccessful. When you hate and
+can draw, you can draw what you hate down to its minutest
+details--better, perhaps, than what you love--so that whoever runs and
+reads and looks at your pictures hates with you.
+
+Who ever hated a personage of Keene's beyond that feeble kind of
+aversion that comes from mere uncongeniality, a slightly offended
+social taste, or prejudice? One feels a mere indulgent and
+half-humorous disdain, but no hate. On the other hand, I do not think
+that we love his personages very much--we stand too much outside his
+eccentric world for sympathy. From the pencil of this most lovable
+man, with his unrivalled power of expressing all he saw and thought, I
+cannot recall many lovable characters of either sex or any age. Here
+and there a good-natured cabby, a jolly navvy, a simple-minded
+flautist or bagpiper, or a little street Arab, like the small boy who
+pointed out the jail doctor to his pal and said, "That's my medical
+man."
+
+Whereas Leech's pages teem with winning, graceful, lovable types, and
+here and there a hateful one to give relief.
+
+But, somehow, one liked the man who drew these strange people, even
+without knowing him; when you knew him you loved him very much--so
+much that no room was left in you for envy of his unattainable mastery
+in his art. For of this there can be no doubt--no greater or more
+finished master in black and white has devoted his life to the
+illustration of the manners and humours of his time; and if Leech is
+even greater than he--and I for one am inclined to think he is--it is
+not as an artist, but as a student and observer of human nature, as a
+master of the light, humorous, superficial criticism of life.
+
+[Illustration: "NOT UP TO HIS BUSINESS"
+
+CROSS BUS DRIVER. "Now why didn't you take that there party?"
+
+CONDUCTOR: "Said they wouldn't go."
+
+CROSS BUS DRIVER. "_Said_ THEY wouldn't go? THEY said they wouldn't
+go? Why, what do you suppose you're put there for? You call that
+conductin' a buss. Oh! THEY wouldn't go! I like that, &c., &c."--
+_Punch_, September 1, 1860.]
+
+Charles Keene died of general atrophy on January 4, 1891. It was
+inexpressibly pathetic to see how patiently, how resignedly he wasted
+away; he retained his unalterable sweetness to the last.
+
+His handsome, dark-skinned face, so strongly lined and full of
+character; his mild and magnificent light-grey eyes, that reminded one
+of a St. Bernard's; his tall, straight, slender aspect, that reminded
+one of Don Quixote; his simplicity of speech and character; his love
+of humour, and the wonderful smile that lit up his face when he heard
+a good story, and the still more wonderful wink of his left eye when
+he told one--all these will remain strongly impressed on the minds of
+those who ever met him.
+
+I attended his funeral as I had attended Leech's twenty-six years
+before; Canon Ainger, a common friend of us both, performed the
+service. It was a bitterly cold day, which accounted for the
+sparseness of the mourners compared to the crowd that was present on
+the former occasion; but bearing in mind that all those present were
+either relations or old friends, all of them with the strongest and
+deepest personal regard for the friend we had lost, the attendance
+seemed very large indeed; and all of us, I think, in our affectionate
+remembrance of one of the most singularly sweet-natured,
+sweet-tempered, and simple-hearted men that ever lived, forgot for the
+time that a very great artist was being laid to his rest.
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE DU MAURIER
+
+From an unpublished photograph by Fradelle and Young, London.]
+
+And now, in fulfilment of my contract, I must speak of myself--a
+difficult and not very grateful task. One's self is a person about
+whom one knows too much and too little--about whom we can never hit a
+happy medium. Sometimes one rates one's self too high, sometimes (but
+less frequently) too low, according to the state of our digestion, our
+spirits, our pocket, or even the weather!
+
+In the present instance I will say all the good of myself I can
+decently, and leave all the rating to you. It is inevitable, however
+unfortunate it may be for me, that I should be compared with my two
+great predecessors, Leech and Keene, whom I have just been comparing
+to each other.
+
+When John Leech's mantle fell from his shoulders it was found that the
+garment was ample to clothe the nakedness of more than one successor.
+
+John Tenniel had already, it is true, replaced him for several years
+as the political cartoonist of _Punch_. How admirably he has always
+filled that post, then and ever since, and how great his fame is, I
+need not speak of here. Linley Sambourne and Harry Furniss, so
+different from each other and from Tenniel, have also, since then,
+brought their great originality and their unrivalled skill to the
+political illustrations of _Punch_--Sambourne to the illustration of
+many other things in it besides, but which do not strictly belong to
+the present subject.
+
+I am here concerned with the social illustrators alone, and, besides,
+only with those who have made the sketches of social subjects in
+_Punch_ the principal business of their lives. For very many artists,
+from Sir John Millais, Sir John Gilbert, Frederick Walker, and
+Randolph Caldecott downward, have contributed to that fortunate
+periodical at one time or another, and not a few distinguished
+amateurs.
+
+Miss Georgina Bowers, Mr. Corbould, and others have continued the
+fox-hunting tradition, and provided those scenes which have become a
+necessity to the sporting readers of _Punch_.
+
+To Charles Keene was fairly left that part of the succession that was
+most to his taste--the treatment of life in the street and the open
+country, in the shops and parlours of the lower middle class, and the
+homes of the people.
+
+And to me were allotted the social and domestic dramas, the nursery,
+the school-room, the dining and drawing rooms, and croquet-lawns of
+the more or less well-to-do.
+
+I was particularly told not to try to be broadly funny, but to
+undertake the light and graceful business, like a _jeune premier_. I
+was, in short, to be the tenor, or rather the tenorino, of that little
+company for which Mr. Punch beats time with his immortal baton, and to
+warble in black and white such melodies as I could evolve from my
+contemplations of the gentler aspect of English life, while Keene,
+with his magnificent, highly trained basso, sang the comic songs.
+
+We all became specialised, so to speak, and divided Leech's vast
+domain among us.
+
+We kicked a little at first, I remember, and whenever (to continue the
+musical simile) I could get in a comic song, or what I thought one, or
+some queer fantastic ditty about impossible birds and beasts and
+fishes and what not, I did not let the opportunity slip; while Keene,
+who had a very fine falsetto on the top of his chest register, would
+now and then warble, pianissimo, some little ballad of the
+drawing-room or nursery.
+
+Illustration: FELINE AMENITIES
+
+But gradually we settled into our respective grooves, and I have grown
+to like my little groove very much, narrow though it be--a poor thing,
+but mine own!
+
+"I_wish_ you hadn't asked Captain Wareham, Lizzie. Horrid man! I can't
+bear him!"
+
+"Dear me, Charlotte--isn't the world big enough for you both?"
+
+"Yes; but your little Dining-room _isn't_!"--_Punch_, February 16,
+1889.]
+
+Moreover, certain physical disabilities that I have the misfortune to
+labour under make it difficult for me to study and sketch the lusty
+things in the open air and sunshine. My sight, besides being defective
+in many ways, is so sensitive that I cannot face the common light of
+day without glasses thickly rimmed with wire gauze, so that sketching
+out of doors is often to me a difficult and distressing performance.
+That is also partly why I am not a sportsman and a delineator of
+sport.
+
+I mention this infirmity not as an excuse for my shortcomings and
+failures--for them there is no excuse--but as a reason why I have
+abstained from the treatment of so much that is so popular,
+delightful, and exhilarating in English country life. If there had
+been no Charles Keene (a terrible supposition both for _Punch_ and its
+readers), I should have done my best to illustrate the lower walks and
+phases of London existence, which attracts me as much as any other. It
+is just as easy to draw a costermonger or a washerwoman as it is a
+gentleman or lady--perhaps a little easier--but it is by no means so
+easy to draw them as Keene did! And to draw a cab or an omnibus after
+him (though I have sometimes been obliged to do so) is almost tempting
+Providence!
+
+If there had been no Charles Keene, I might, perhaps, with practice,
+have become a funny man myself--though I do not suppose that my fun
+would have ever been of the broadest.
+
+Before I became an artist I was considered particularly good at
+caricaturing my friends, who always foresaw for me more than one
+change of profession, and _Punch_ as the final goal of my wanderings
+in search of a career. For it was originally intended that I should be
+a man of science.
+
+Dr. Williamson, the eminent chemist and professor of chemistry, told
+me not long ago that he remembers caricatures that I drew, now forty
+years back, when I was studying under him at the Laboratory of
+Chemistry at University College, and that he and other grave and
+reverend professors were hugely tickled by them at the time. Indeed,
+he remembers nothing else about me, except that I promised to be a
+very bad chemist.
+
+I was a very bad chemist indeed, but not for long! As soon as I was
+free to do as I pleased, I threw up test-tubes and crucibles and went
+back to Paris, where I was born and brought up, and studied to become
+an artist in M. Gléyre's studio. Then I went to Antwerp, where there
+is a famous school of painting, and where I had no less a person than
+Mr. Alma-Tadema as a fellow-student. It was all delightful, but
+misfortune befell me, and I lost the sight of one eye--perhaps it was
+the eye with which I used to do the funny caricatures; it was a very
+good eye, much the better of the two, and the other has not improved
+by having to do a double share of the work.
+
+And then in time I came to England and drew for _Punch_, thus
+fulfilling the early prophecy of my friends and fellow-students at
+University College--though not quite in the sense they anticipated.
+
+[Illustration: THE NEW SOCIETY CRAZE
+
+THE NEW GOVERNESS (_through her pretty nose_). "Waall--I come right
+slick away from Ne'York City, an' I ain't had much time for foolin'
+around in Europe--you bet! So I can't fix up your Gals in the Eu-
+rôpean languages, no-how!"
+
+BELGRAVIAN MAMMA: (_who knows there's a Duke or two still left in the
+Matrimonial Market_). "Oh, that's of no consequence. I want my
+Daughters to aquire the American Accent in all its purity--and the
+Idioms, and all that. Now I'm sure _you_ will do _admirably_!"--
+_Punch_, December 1, 1888.]
+
+I will not attempt a description of my work--it is so recent and has
+been so widely circulated that it should be unnecessary to do so. If
+you do not remember it, it is that it is not worth remembering; if you
+do, I can only entreat you to be to my faults a little blind, and to
+my virtues very kind!
+
+I have always tried as honestly and truthfully as lies in me to serve
+up to the readers of _Punch_ whatever I have culled with the bodily
+eye, after cooking it a little in the brain. My raw material requires
+more elaborate working than Leech's. He dealt more in flowers and
+fruits and roots, if I may express myself so figuratively--from the
+lordly pineapple and lovely rose, down to the humble daisy and savory
+radish. _I_ deal in vegetables, I suppose. Little that I ever find
+seems to me fit for the table just as I see it; moreover, by dishing
+it up raw I should offend many people and make many enemies, and
+deserve to do so. I cook my green pease, asparagus, French beans,
+Brussels sprouts, German sauerkraut, and even a truffle now and then,
+so carefully that you would never recognise them as they were when I
+first picked them in the social garden. And they do not recognise
+themselves! Or even each other!
+
+And I do my best to dish them up in good, artistic style. Oh that I
+could arrange for you a truffle with all that culinary skill that
+Charles Keene brought to the mere boiling of a carrot or a potato! He
+is the _cordon bleu_ par excellence. The people I meet seem to me more
+interesting than funny--so interesting that I am well content to draw
+them as I see them, after just a little arrangement and a very
+transparent disguise--and without any attempt at caricature. The
+better-looking they are, the more my pencil loves them, and I feel
+more inclined to exaggerate in this direction than in any other.
+
+Sam Weller, if you recollect, was fond of "pootiness and wirtue." I
+_so_ agree with him! I adore them both, especially in women and
+children. I only wish that the wirtue was as easy to draw as the
+pootiness.
+
+But indeed for me--speaking as an artist, and also, perhaps, a little
+bit as a man--pootiness is almost a wirtue in itself. I don't think I
+shall ever weary of trying to depict it, from its dawn in the toddling
+infant to its decline and setting and long twilight in the beautiful
+old woman, who has known how to grow old gradually. I like to surround
+it with chivalrous and stalwart manhood; and it is a standing
+grievance to me that I have to clothe all this masculine escort in
+coats and trousers and chimney-pot hats; worse than all, in the
+evening dress of the period!--that I cannot surround my divinity with
+a guard of honour more worthily arrayed!
+
+Thus, of all my little piebald puppets, the one I value the most is my
+pretty woman. I am as fond of her as Leech was of his; of whom,
+by-the-way, she is the granddaughter! This is not artistic vanity; it
+is pure paternal affection, and by no means prevents me from seeing
+her faults; it only prevents me from seeing them as clearly as you do!
+
+Please be not very severe on her, for her grandmother's sake. Words
+fail me to express how much I loved her grandmother, who wore a
+cricket-cap and broke Aunt Sally's nose seven times.
+
+[Illustration: A PICTORIAL PUZZLE
+
+TENOR WARBLER (_with passionate emphasis on the first word of each
+line_)--
+"_Me-e-e-e-e-e-t_ me once again,  M-e-e-e-e-t me once aga-a-ain--"
+
+_Why does the Cat suddenly jump off the Hearth-rug, rush to the Door,
+and make frantic Endeavors to get out_?--_Punch_.]
+
+Will my pretty woman ever be all I wish her to be? All she ought to
+be? I fear not! On the mantelpiece in my studio at home there stands a
+certain lady. She is but lightly clad, and what simple garment she
+wears is not in the fashion of our day. How well I know her! Almost
+thoroughly by this time--for she has been the silent companion of my
+work for thirty years! She has lost both her arms and one of her feet,
+which I deplore; and also the tip of her nose, but that has been made
+good!
+
+She is only three feet high, or thereabouts, and quite two thousand
+years old, or more; but she is ever young--
+
+      "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
+      Her infinite variety!"
+
+and a very giantess in beauty. For she is a reduction in plaster of
+the famous statue at the Louvre.
+
+They call her the Venus of Milo, or Melos! It is a calumny--a libel.
+She is no Venus, except in good looks; and if she errs at all, it is
+on the side of austerity. She is not only pootiness but wirtue
+incarnate (if one can be incarnate in marble), from the crown of her
+lovely head to the sole of her remaining foot--a very beautiful foot,
+though by no means a small one--it has never worn a high-heel shoe!
+
+Like all the best of its kind, and its kind the best, she never sates
+nor palls, and the more I look at her the more I see to love and
+worship--and, alas! the more dissatisfied I feel--not indeed with the
+living beauty, ripe and real, that I see about and around--mere life
+is such a beauty in itself that no stone ideal can ever hope to match
+it! But dissatisfied with the means at my command to do the living
+beauty justice--a little bit of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of
+ink--and, alas! fingers and an eye less skilled than they would have
+been if I had gone straight to a school of art instead of a laboratory
+for chemistry!
+
+And now for social pictorial satire considered as a fine art.
+
+They who have practised it hitherto, from Hogarth downward, have not
+been many--you can count their names on your fingers! And the wide
+popularity they have won may be due as much to their scarcity as to
+the interest we all take in having the mirror held up to ourselves--to
+the malicious pleasure we all feel at seeing our neighbours held up to
+gentle ridicule or well-merited reproof; most of all, perhaps, to the
+realistic charm that lies in all true representation of the social
+aspects with which we are most familiar, ugly as these are often apt
+to be, with our chimney-pot hats, and trousers that unfit us, it
+seems, for serious and elaborate pictorial treatment at the hands of
+the foremost painters of our own times--except when we sit to them for
+our portraits; then they have willy-nilly to make the best of us, just
+as we are!
+
+[Illustration: REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH
+
+(SCENE--_A Drawing-room in "Passionate Brompton_.")
+
+FAIR AESTHETIC (_suddenly, and in deepest tones to Smith, who has just
+been introduced to take her in to Dinner_).
+
+"Are you Intense?"--_Punch_, June 14, 1879.]
+
+The plays and novels that succeed the most are those which treat of
+the life of our own day; not so the costly pictures we hang upon our
+walls. We do not care to have continually before our eyes elaborate
+representations of the life we lead every day and all day long; we
+like best that which rather takes us out of it--romantic or graceful
+episodes of another time or clime, when men wore prettier clothes than
+they do now--well-imagined, well-painted scenes from classic
+lore--historical subjects--subjects selected from our splendid
+literature and what not; or, if we want modern subjects, we prefer
+scenes chosen from a humble sphere, which is not that of those who can
+afford to buy pictures--the toilers of the earth--the toilers of the
+sea--pathetic scenes from the inexhaustible annals of the poor; or
+else, again, landscapes and seascapes--things that bring a whiff of
+nature into our feverish and artificial existence--that are in direct
+contrast to it.
+
+And even with these beautiful things, how often the charm wears away
+with the novelty of possession! How often and how soon the lovely
+picture, like its frame, becomes just as a piece of wall-furniture, in
+which we take a pride, certainly, and which we should certainly miss
+if it were taken away--but which we grow to look at with the pathetic
+indifference of habit--if not, indeed, with aversion!
+
+Chairs and tables minister to our physical comforts, and we cannot do
+without them. But pictures have not this practical hold upon us; the
+sense to which they appeal is not always on the alert; yet there they
+are hanging on the wall, morning, noon, and night, unchanged,
+unchangeable--the same arrested movement--the same expression of
+face--the same seas and trees and moors and forests and rivers and
+mountains--the very waves are as eternal as the hills!
+
+Music will leave off when it is not wanted--at least it ought to! The
+book is shut, the newspaper thrown aside. Not so the beautiful
+picture; it is like a perennial nosegay, for ever exhaling its perfume
+for noses that have long ceased to smell it!
+
+But little pictures in black and white, of little every-day people
+like ourselves, by some great little artist who knows life well and
+has the means at his command to express his knowledge in this easy,
+simple manner, can be taken up and thrown down like the book or
+newspaper. They are even easier to read and understand. They are
+within the reach of the meanest capacity, the humblest education, the
+most slender purse. They come to us weekly, let us say, in cheap
+periodicals. They are preserved and bound up in volumes, to be taken
+down and looked at when so disposed. The child grows to love them
+before he knows how to read; fifty years hence he will love them
+still, if only for the pleasure they gave him as a child. He will soon
+know them by heart, and yet go to them again and again; and if they
+are good, he will always find new beauties and added interest as he
+himself grows in taste and culture; and how much of that taste and
+culture he will owe to them, who can say?
+
+Nothing sticks so well in the young mind as a little picture one can
+hold close to the eyes like a book--not even a song or poem--for in
+the case of most young people the memory of the eye is better than
+that of the ear--its power of assimilating more rapid and more keen.
+And then there is the immense variety, the number!
+
+[Illustration: "READING WITHOUT TEARS"
+
+TEACHER. "And what comes after S, Jack?"
+
+PUPIL. "T!"
+
+TEACHER. "And what Comes after T?"
+
+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
+
+HE. "The fact is I never get any wild fowl shooting--never!"
+
+SHE. "Oh, then you ought to come down to our Neighborhood in the
+Winter. It would just suit you, there are such a lot of Geese about--
+a--a--I mean _Wild_ Geese of course!"--_Punch_, November 21, 1891.]
+
+Hogarth seems to have come nearer to this ideal pictorial satirist
+than any of his successors in _Punch_ and elsewhere. For he was not
+merely a light humorist and a genial caricaturist; he dealt also in
+pathos and terror, in tragic passion and sorrow and crime; he often
+strikes chords of too deep a tone for the pages of a comic periodical.
+
+But the extent of his productiveness was limited by the method of his
+production; he was a great painter in oils, and each of his life
+scenes is an important and elaborate picture, which, moreover, he
+engraved himself at great cost of time and labour, after the original
+time and labour spent in painting it. It is by these engravings, far
+more than by his pictures, that he is so widely known.
+
+It is quite possible to conceive a little sketchy woodcut no larger
+than a cut in _Punch_, and drawn by a master like Charles Keene, or
+the German Adolf Menzel, giving us all the essence of any picture by
+Hogarth even more effectively, more agreeably, than any of Hogarth's
+most finished engravings. And if this had been Hogarth's method of
+work, instead of some fifty or sixty of those immortal designs we
+should have had some five or six thousand! Almost a library!
+
+So much for the great pictorial satirist of the future--of the near
+future, let us hope--that I have been trying to evolve from my inner
+consciousness. May some of us live to see him!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Social Pictorial Satire, by George du Maurier
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Social Pictorial Satire, by George du Maurier
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Social Pictorial Satire
+
+Author: George du Maurier
+
+Release Date: July 7, 2004 [EBook #12834]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ben Courtney, Keith M. Eckrich and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE
+
+[Frontispiece: Mr. and Mrs. Candle.
+
+From the original drawing by JOHN LEECH. In the possession of JOHN
+KENDRICK BANGS. Esq. The lower portion has never before been
+reproduced.]
+
+
+SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE.
+
+_By_ GEORGE DU MAURIER,
+
+_Author of "Trilby" "The Martian" &c._
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+
+MDCCCXCVIII
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+_Mr. and Mrs. Caudle_
+
+_John Leech_
+
+_"In the Bay of Biscay O"_
+
+_A Specimen of Pluck_
+
+_One of Mr. Briggs's Adventures in the Highlands_
+
+_Thank Goodness! Fly-fishing has begun!_
+
+_"The jolly little Street Arabs"_
+
+_Doing a little Business_
+
+_A Tolerably Broad Hint_
+
+_Charles Keene_
+
+_The Snowstorm, Jan. 2, 1867_
+
+_Waiting for the Landlord!_
+
+_A Stroke of Business_
+
+_"None o' your Larks"_
+
+_An Affront to the Service_
+
+_"Not up to his Business"_
+
+_George du Maurier_
+
+_Feline Amenities_
+
+_The New Society Craze_
+
+_A Pictorial Puzzle_
+
+_Refinements of Modern Speech_
+
+_"Reading without Tears"_
+
+_The Height of Impropriety_
+
+_Things one would wish to have expressed differently_
+
+
+
+
+SOCIAL PICTORIAL SATIRE
+
+
+It is my purpose to speak of the craft to which I have devoted the
+best years of my life, the craft of portraying, by means of little
+pen-and-ink strokes, lines, and scratches, a small portion of the
+world in which we live; such social and domestic incidents as lend
+themselves to humorous or satirical treatment; the illustrated
+criticism of life, of the life of our time and country, in its lighter
+aspects.
+
+The fact that I have spent so many years in the practice of this craft
+does not of itself, I am well aware, entitle me to lay down the law
+about it; the mere exercise of an art so patent to all, so easily
+understanded of the people, does not give one any special insight into
+its simple mysteries, beyond a certain perception and appreciation of
+the technical means by which it is produced--unless one is gifted with
+the critical faculty, a gift apart, to the possession of which I make
+no claim.
+
+There are two kinds of critics of such work as ours. First there is
+the wide public for whom we work and by whom we are paid; "who lives
+to please must please to live"; and who lives by drawing for a comic
+periodical must manage to please the greater number. The judgment of
+this critic, though often sound, is not infallible; but his verdict
+for the time being is final, and by it we, who live by our wits and
+from hand to mouth, must either stand or fall.
+
+The other critic is the expert, our fellow-craftsman, who has learned
+by initiation, apprenticeship, and long practice the simple secrets of
+our common trade. He is not quite infallible either, and is apt to
+concern himself more about the manner than the matter of our
+performance; nor is he of immediate importance, since with the public
+on our side we can do without him for a while, and flourish like a
+green bay-tree in spite of his artistic disapproval of our work; but
+he is not to be despised, for he is some years in advance of that
+other critic, the public, who may, and probably will, come round to
+his way of thinking in time.
+
+The first of these two critics is typified by Moliere's famous cook,
+who must have been a singularly honest, independent, and intelligent
+person, since he chose in all cases to abide by her decision, and not
+with an altogether unsatisfactory result to Mankind! Such cooks are
+not to be found in these days--certainly not in England; but he is an
+unlucky craftsman who does not possess some such natural critics in
+his family, his home, or near it--mother, sister, friend, wife, or
+child--who will look over his shoulder at his little sketch, and say:
+
+"Tommy [or Papa, or Grandpapa, as the case may be], that person you've
+just drawn doesn't look quite natural," or:
+
+"That lady is not properly dressed for the person you want her to
+be--those hats are not worn this year," and so forth and so forth.
+
+When you have thoroughly satisfied this household critic, then is the
+time to show some handy brother-craftsman your amended work, and
+listen gratefully when he suggests that you should put a tone on this
+wall, and a tree, or something, in the left middle distance to balance
+the composition, and raise or depress the horizon-line to get a better
+effect of perspective.
+
+In speaking of some of my fellow-artists on _Punch_, and of their
+work, I shall try and bring both these critical methods into
+play--promising, however, once for all, that such criticism on my part
+is simply the expression of my individual taste or fancy, the taste or
+fancy of one who by no means pretends to the unerring acumen of
+Moliere's cook, on the one hand, and who feels himself by no means
+infallible in his judgment of purely technical matters, on the other.
+I can only admire and say why, or why I don't; and if I fail in making
+you admire and disadmire with me, it will most likely be my fault as
+well as my misfortune.
+
+I had originally proposed to treat of Richard Doyle, John Leech, and
+Charles Keene--and finally of myself, since that I should speak of
+myself was rather insisted upon by those who procured me the honour of
+speaking at all. I find, however, that there is so much to say about
+Leech and Keene that I have thought it better to sacrifice Richard
+Doyle, who belongs to a remoter period, and whose work, exquisite as
+it is of its kind, is so much slighter than theirs, and fills so much
+less of the public eye; for his connection with _Punch_ did not last
+long. Moreover, personally I knew less of him: just enough to find
+that to know was to love him--a happy peculiarity he shared with his
+two great collaborators on _Punch_.
+
+_John Leech_! What a name that was to conjure with, and is still!
+
+I cannot find words to express what it represented to me of pure
+unmixed delight in my youth and boyhood, long before I ever dreamed of
+being an artist myself! It stands out of the path with such names as
+Dickens, Dumas, Byron--not indeed that I am claiming for him an equal
+rank with those immortals, who wielded a weapon so much more potent
+than a mere caricaturist's pencil! But if an artist's fame is to be
+measured by the mere quantity and quality of the pleasure he has
+given, what pinnacle is too high for John Leech!
+
+Other men have drawn better; deeper, grander, nobler, more poetical
+themes have employed more accomplished pencils, even in black and
+white; but for making one _glad_, I can think of no one to beat him.
+
+To be an apparently hopeless invalid at Christmas-time in some dreary,
+deserted, dismal little Flemish town, and to receive _Punch's Almanac_
+(for 1858, let us say) from some good-natured friend in England--that
+is a thing not to be forgotten! I little dreamed then that I should
+come to London again, and meet John Leech and become his friend; that
+I should be, alas! the last man to shake hands with him before his
+death (as I believe I was), and find myself among the officially
+invited mourners by his grave; and, finally, that I should inherit,
+and fill for so many years (however indifferently), that half-page in
+_Punch_ opposite the political cartoon, and which I had loved so well
+when he was the artist!
+
+Well, I recovered from a long and distressing ailment of my sight
+which had been pronounced incurable, and came to England, where I was
+introduced to Charles Keene, with whom I quickly became intimate, and
+it was he who presented me to Leech one night at one of Mr. Arthur
+Lewis's smoking concerts, in the winter of 1860. I remember feeling
+somewhat nervous lest he should take me for a foreigner on account of
+my name, and rather unnecessarily went out of my way to assure him
+that I was rather more English than John Bull himself. It didn't
+matter in the least; I have no doubt he saw through it all: he was
+kindness and courtesy itself; and I experienced to the full that
+emotion so delightful to a young hero-worshipper in meeting face to
+face a world-wide celebrity whom he has long worshipped at a distance.
+In the words of Lord Tennyson:
+
+                                "I was rapt
+      By all the sweet and sudden passion of youth
+      Towards greatness in its elder...."
+
+But it so happened at just this particular period of his artistic
+career and of mine that he no longer shone as a solitary star of the
+first magnitude in my little firmament of pictorial social satire. A
+new impulse had been given to the art of drawing on wood, a new school
+had been founded, and new methods--to draw straight from nature
+instead of trusting to memory and imagination--had been the artistic
+order of the day. Men and women, horses and dogs, landscapes and
+seascapes, all one can make pictures of, even chairs and tables and
+teacups and saucers, must be studied from the life--from the
+still-life, if you will--by whoever aspired to draw on wood; even
+angels and demons and cherubs and centaurs and mermaids must be
+closely imitated from nature--or at least as much of them as could be
+got from the living model.
+
+_Once a Week_ had just appeared, and _The Cornhill Magazine_. Sir John
+Millais and Sir Frederick Leighton were then drawing on wood just like
+the ordinary mortals; Frederick Walker had just started on his brief
+but splendid career; Frederick Sandys had burst on the black-and-white
+world like a meteor; and Charles Keene, who was illustrating the
+_Cloister and the Hearth_ in the intervals of his _Punch_ work, had,
+after long and patient labour, attained that consummate mastery of
+line and effect in wood draughtsmanship that will be for ever
+associated with his name; and his work in _Punch_, if only by virtue
+of its extraordinary technical ability, made Leech's by contrast
+appear slight and almost amateurish in spite of its ease and boldness.
+
+So that with all my admiration for Leech it was at the feet of Charles
+Keene that I found myself sitting; besides which we were much together
+in those days, talking endless shop, taking long walks, riding side by
+side on the knife-boards of omnibuses, dining at cheap restaurants,
+making music at each other's studios. His personal charm was great, as
+great in its way as Leech's; he was democratic and so was I, as one is
+bound to be when one is impecunious and the world is one's oyster to
+open with the fragile point of a lead-pencil. His bohemian world was
+mine--and I found it a very good world and very much to my taste--a
+clear, honest, wholesome, innocent, intellectual, and most industrious
+British bohemia, with lots of tobacco, lots of good music, plenty of
+talk about literature and art, and not too much victuals or drink.
+Many of its denizens, that were, have become Royal Academicians or
+have risen to fame in other ways; some have had to take a back seat in
+life; surprisingly few have gone to the bad.
+
+This world, naturally, was not Leech's; if it had ever been, I doubt;
+his bohemia, if he ever had lived in one, had been the bohemia of
+medicine, not of art, and he seemed to us then to be living on social
+heights of fame and sport and aristocratic splendour where none of us
+dreamed of seeking him--and he did not seek us. We hated and despised
+the bloated aristocracy, just as he hated and despised foreigners
+without knowing much about them; and the aristocracy, to do it
+justice, did not pester us with its obtrusive advances. But I never
+heard Leech spoken of otherwise in bohemia than with affectionate
+admiration, although many of us seemed to think that his best work was
+done. Indeed, his work was becoming somewhat fitful in quality, and
+already showed occasional signs of haste and illness and fatigue; his
+fun was less genial and happy, though he drew more vigorously than
+ever, and now and again surprised us by surpassing himself, as in his
+series of Briggs in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.
+
+All that was thirty years ago and more. I may say at once that I have
+reconsidered the opinion I formed of John Leech at that time. Leech,
+it is true, is by no means the one bright particular star, but he has
+recovered much of his lost first magnitude: if he shines more by what
+he has to say than by his manner of saying it, I have come to think
+that that is the best thing of the two to shine by, if you cannot
+shine by both; and I find that his manner was absolutely what it
+should have been for his purpose and his time--neither more nor less;
+he had so much to say and of a kind so delightful that I have no time
+to pick holes in his mode of expression, which at its best has
+satisfied far more discriminating experts than I; besides which, the
+methods of printing and engraving have wonderfully improved since his
+day. He drew straight on the wood block, with a lead-pencil; his
+delicate grey lines had to be translated into the uncompromising
+coarse black lines of printers' ink--a ruinous process; and what his
+work lost in this way is only to be estimated by those who know. True,
+his mode of expression was not equal to Keene's--I never knew any that
+was, in England, or even approached it--but that, as Mr. Rudyard
+Kipling says, is another story.
+
+The story that I will tell now is that of my brief acquaintance with
+Leech, which began in 1860, and which I had not many opportunities of
+improving till I met him at Whitby in the autumn of 1864--a memorable
+autumn for me, since I used to forgather with him every day, and have
+long walks and talks with him--and dined with him once or twice at the
+lodgings where he was staying with his wife and son and daughter--all
+of whom are now dead. He was the most sympathetic, engaging, and
+attractive person I ever met; not funny at all in conversation, or
+ever wishing to be--except now and then for a capital story, which he
+told in perfection.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN LEECH.]
+
+The keynote of his character, socially, seemed to be self-effacement,
+high-bred courtesy, never-failing consideration for others. He was the
+most charming companion conceivable, having intimately known so many
+important and celebrated people, and liking to speak of them; but one
+would never have guessed from anything he ever looked or said that he
+had made a whole nation, male and female, gentle and simple, old and
+young, laugh as it had never laughed before or since for a quarter of
+a century.
+He was tall, thin, and graceful, extremely handsome, of the higher
+Irish type; with dark hair and whiskers and complexion, and very light
+greyish-blue eyes; but the expression of his face was habitually sad,
+even when he smiled. In dress, bearing, manner, and aspect, he was the
+very type of the well-bred English gentleman and man of the world and
+good society; I never met any one to beat him in that peculiar
+distinction of form, which, I think, has reached its highest European
+development in this country. I am told the Orientals are still our
+superiors in deportment. But the natural man in him was still the
+best. Thackeray and Sir John Millais, not bad judges, and men with
+many friends, have both said that they personally loved John Leech
+better than any man they ever knew.
+
+At this time he was painting in oil, and on an enlarged scale, some of
+his more specially popular sketches in _Punch_, and very anxious to
+succeed with them, but nervously diffident of success with them, even
+with [Greek: hoi polloi]. He was not at his happiest in these efforts;
+and there was something pathetic in his earnestness and perseverance
+in attempting a thing so many can do, but which he could not do for
+want of a better training; while he could do the inimitable so easily.
+
+I came back to town before Leech, and did not see him again until the
+following October. On Saturday afternoon, the 28th, I called at his
+house, No. 6 The Terrace, Kensington, with a very elaborate drawing in
+pencil by myself, which I presented to him as a souvenir, and with
+which he seemed much pleased.
+
+He was already working at the _Punch Almanac_ for '65, at a window on
+the second floor overlooking the street. (I have often gazed up at it
+since.) He seemed very ill, so sad and depressed that I could scarcely
+speak to him for sheer sympathy; I felt he would never get through the
+labour of that almanac, and left him with the most melancholy
+forebodings.
+
+Monday morning the papers announced his death on Sunday, October 29th,
+from angina pectoris, the very morning after I had seen him.
+
+I was invited by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, the publishers of
+_Punch_, to the funeral, which took place at Kensal Green. It was the
+most touching sight imaginable. The grave was near Thackeray's, who
+had died the year before. There were crowds of people, Charles Dickens
+among them; Canon Hole, a great friend of Leech's, and who has written
+most affectionately about him, read the service; and when the coffin
+was lowered into the grave, John Millais burst into tears and loud
+sobs, setting an example that was followed all round; we all forgot
+our manhood and cried like women! I can recall no funeral in my time
+where simple grief and affection have been so openly and spontaneously
+displayed by so many strangers as well as friends--not even in France,
+where people are more demonstrative than here. No burial in
+Westminster Abbey that I have ever seen ever gave such an impression
+of universal honour, love, and regret.
+
+"Whom the gods love die young." He was only forty-six!
+
+I was then invited to join the _Punch_ staff and take Leech's empty
+chair at the weekly dinner--and bidden to cut my initials on the
+table, by his; his monogram as it was carved by him is J.L. under a
+leech in a bottle, dated 1854; and close by on the same board are the
+initials W.M.T.
+
+I flatter myself that convivially, at least, my small D.M., carved in
+impenetrable oak, will go down to posterity in rather distinguished
+company!
+
+If ever there was a square English hole, and a square English peg to
+fit it, that hole was _Punch_, and that peg was John Leech. He was
+John Bull himself, but John Bull refined and civilised--John Bull
+polite, modest, gentle--full of self-respect and self-restraint, and
+with all the bully softened out of him; manly first and gentlemanly
+after, but very soon after; more at home perhaps in the club, the
+drawing-room, and the hunting-field, in Piccadilly and the Park, than
+in the farm or shop or market-place; a normal Englishman of the upper
+middle class, with but one thing abnormal about him, viz., his genius,
+which was of the kind to give the greater pleasure to the greater
+number--and yet delight the most fastidious of his day--and I think of
+ours. One must be very ultra-aesthetic, even now, not to feel his
+charm.
+
+He was all of a piece, and moved and worked with absolute ease,
+freedom, and certainty, within the limits nature had assigned him--and
+his field was a very large one. He saw and represented the whole
+panorama of life that came within his immediate ken with an unwavering
+consistency, from first to last; from a broadly humorous, though
+mostly sympathetic point of view that never changed--a very delightful
+point of view, if not the highest conceivable.
+
+Hand and eye worked with brain in singular harmony, and all three
+improved together contemporaneously, with a parallelism most
+interesting to note, as one goes through the long series of his social
+pictures from the beginning.
+
+He has no doubts or hesitations--no bewildering subtleties--no seeking
+from twelve to fourteen o'clock--either in his ideas or technique,
+which very soon becomes an excellent technique, thoroughly suited to
+his ideas--rapid, bold, spirited, full of colour, breadth, and
+movement--troubling itself little about details that will not help the
+telling of his story--for before everything else he has his story to
+tell, and it must either make you laugh or lightly charm you--and he
+tells it in the quickest, simplest, down-rightest pencil strokes,
+although it is often a complicated story!
+
+For there are not only the funny people and the pretty people acting
+out their little drama in the foreground--there is the scene in which
+they act, and the middle distance, and the background beyond, and the
+sky itself; beautiful rough landscapes and seascapes and skyscapes,
+winds and weathers, boisterous or sunny seas, rain and storm and
+cloud--all the poetry of nature, that he feels most acutely while his
+little people are being so unconsciously droll in the midst of it all.
+He is a king of impressionists, and his impression becomes ours on the
+spot--never to be forgotten! It is all so quick and fresh and strong,
+so simple, pat, and complete, so direct from mother Nature herself! It
+has about it the quality of inevitableness--those are the very people
+who would have acted and spoken in just that manner, and we meet them
+every day--the expression of the face, the movement and gesture, in
+anger, terror, dismay, scorn, conceit, tenderness, elation,
+triumph.... Whatever the mood, they could not have looked or acted
+otherwise--it is life itself. An optimistic life in which joyousness
+prevails, and the very woes and discomfitures are broadly comical to
+us who look on--like some one who has sea-sickness, or a headache
+after a Greenwich banquet--which are about the most tragic things he
+has dealt with.
+
+(I am speaking of his purely social sketches. For in his admirable
+large cuts, political and otherwise serious, his satire is often
+bitter and biting indeed; and his tragedy almost Hogarthian.)
+
+Like many true humorists, he was of a melancholy temperament, and no
+doubt felt attracted by all that was mirthful and bright, and in happy
+contrast to his habitual mood. Seldom if ever does a drop of his inner
+sadness ooze out through his pencil-point--and never a drop of gall;
+and I do not remember one cynical touch in his whole series.
+
+In his tastes and habits he was by nature aristocratic; he liked the
+society of those who were well dressed, well bred and refined like
+himself, and perhaps a trifle conventional; he conformed quite
+spontaneously and without effort to upper-class British ideal of his
+time, and had its likes and dislikes. But his strongest predilections
+of all are common to the British race: his love of home, his love of
+sport, his love of the horse and the hound--especially his love of the
+pretty woman--the pretty woman of the normal, wholesome English type.
+This charming creature so dear to us all pervades his show from
+beginning to end--she is a creation of his, and he thoroughly loves
+her, and draws her again and again with a fondness that is half
+lover-like and half paternal--her buxom figure, her merry bright eyes
+and fresh complexion and flowing ringlets, and pursed-up lips like
+Cupid's bow. Nor is he ever tired of displaying her feet and ankles
+(and a little more) in gales of wind on cliff and pier and parade, or
+climbing the Malvern Hills. When she puts on goloshes it nearly breaks
+his heart, and he would fly to other climes! He revels in her
+infantile pouts and jealousies and heart-burnings and butterfly
+delights and lisping mischiefs; her mild, innocent flirtations with
+beautiful young swells, whose cares are equally light.
+
+She is a darling, and he constantly calls her so to her face. Her
+favourite seaside nook becomes the mermaid's haunt; her back hair
+flies and dries in the wind, and disturbs the peace of the too
+susceptible Punch. She is a little amazon _pour rire_, and rides
+across country, and drives (even a hansom sometimes, with a pair of
+magnificent young whiskerandoes smoking their costly cigars inside);
+she is a toxophilite, and her arrow sticks, for it is barbed with
+innocent seduction, and her bull's-eye is the soft military heart. She
+wears a cricket-cap and breaks Aunt Sally's nose seven times; she puts
+her pretty little foot upon the croquet-ball--and croquet'd you are
+completely! With what glee she would have rinked and tennised if he
+had lived a little longer!
+
+[Illustration: "IN THE BAY OF BISCANY O"
+
+The Last Sweet Thing in Hats and Walking-Sticks.--_Punch_, September
+27, 1862.]
+
+She is light of heart, and perhaps a little of head! Her worst trouble
+is when the captain gives the wing of the fowl to some other darling
+who might be her twin-sister; her most terrible nightmare is when she
+dreams that great stupid Captain Sprawler upsets a dish of trifle over
+her new lace dress with the blue satin slip; but next morning she is
+herself again, and rides in the Row, and stops to speak with that
+great stupid Captain Sprawler, who is very nice to look at, whose back
+is very beautiful, and who sprawls most gracefully over the railings,
+and pays her those delightful, absurd compliments about her and her
+horse "being such a capital pair," while, as a foil to so much grace
+and splendour, a poor little snub-nosed, ill-dressed, ill-conditioned
+dwarf of a snob looks on, sucking the top of his cheap cane in abject
+admiration and hopeless envy! Then she pats and kisses the nice soft
+nose of Cornet Flinders's hunter, which is "deucedly aggravating for
+Cornet Flinders, you know"--but when that noble sportsman is frozen
+out and cannot hunt, she plays scratch-cradle with him in the boudoir
+of her father's country house, or pitches chocolate into his mouth
+from the oak landing; and she lets him fasten the skates on to her
+pretty feet. Happy cornet! And she plays billiards with her handsome
+cousin--a guardsman at least--and informs him that she is just
+eighteen to his love--and stands under the mistletoe and asks this
+enviable relation of hers to show her what the garroter's hug is like;
+and when he proceeds to do so she calls out in distress because his
+pointed waxed moustache has scratched her pretty cheek; and when Mr.
+Punch is there, at dinner, she and a sister darling pull crackers
+across his August white waistcoat, and scream in pretty terror at the
+explosion; to that worthy's excessive jubilation, for Mr. Punch is
+Leech himself, and nothing she does can ever be amiss in his eyes!
+
+Sometimes, indeed, she is seriously transfixed herself, and bids Mr.
+Tongs, the hairdresser, cut off a long lock of her hair where it will
+not be missed---and she looks so lovely under the smart of Cupid's
+arrow that we are frantically jealous of the irresistible warrior for
+whom the jetty tress is destined. In short, she is innocence and
+liveliness and health incarnate--a human kitten.
+
+When she marries the gilded youth with the ambrosial whiskers, their
+honeymooning is like playing at being married, their heartless
+billings and cooings are enchanting to see. She will have no
+troubles--Leech will take good care of that; her matrimonial tiffs
+will be of the slightest; hers will be a well-regulated household; the
+course of her conjugal love will run smooth in spite of her little
+indiscretions--for, like Bluebeard's wife, she can be curious at
+times, and coax and wheedle to know the mysteries of Freemasonry, and
+cry because Edwin will not reveal the secret of Mr. Percy, the
+horse-tamer; and how Edwin can resist such an appeal is more than we
+can understand! But soon they will have a large family, and live happy
+ever after, and by the time their eldest-born is thirteen years old,
+the darling of fourteen years back will be a regular materfamilias,
+stout, matronly, and rather severe; and Edwin will be fat, bald, and
+middle-aged, and bring home a bundle of asparagus and a nice new
+perambulator to celebrate the wedding-day!
+
+And he loves her brothers and cousins, military or otherwise, just as
+dearly, and makes them equally beautiful to the eye, with those lovely
+drooping whiskers that used to fall and brush their bosoms, their
+smartly waistcoated bosoms, a quarter of a century ago! He dresses
+them even better than the darlings, and has none but the kindliest and
+gentlest satire for their little vanities and conceits--for they have
+no real vices, these charming youths, beyond smoking too much and
+betting a little and getting gracefully tipsy at race-meetings and
+Greenwich dinners--and sometimes running into debt with their tailors,
+I suppose! And then how boldly they ride to hounds, and how splendidly
+they fight in the Crimea! how lightly they dance at home! How healthy,
+good-humoured, and manly they are, with all their vagaries of dress
+and jewellery and accent! It is easy to forgive them if they give the
+whole of their minds to their white neckties, or are dejected because
+they have lost the little gridiron off their chatelaine, or lose all
+presence of mind when a smut settles on their noses, and turn faint at
+the sight of Mrs. Gamp's umbrella!
+
+And next to these enviable beings he loves and reveres the sportsman.
+One is made to feel that the true sportsman, whether he shoots or
+hunts or fishes, is an August being, as he ought to be in Great
+Britain, and Leech has done him full justice with his pencil. He is no
+subject for flippant satire; so there he sits his horse, or stalks
+through his turnip-field, or handles his rod like a god! Handsome,
+well-appointed from top to toe, aristocratic to the finger-tips--a
+most impressive figure, the despair of foreigners, the envy of all
+outsiders at home (including the present lecturer)!
+
+[Illustration: A SPECIMEN OF PLUCK
+
+RUGGLES. "Hold hard, Master George. It's too wide, and uncommon deep!"
+
+MASTER GEORGE. "All right, Ruggles! We can both _swim_!"--_Punch_.]
+
+He has never been painted like this before! What splendid lords and
+squires, fat or lean, hook-nosed or eagle-eyed, well tanned by sun and
+wind, in faultless kit, on priceless mounts! How redolent they are of
+health and wealth, and the secure consciousness of high social
+position--of the cool business-like self-importance that sits so well
+on those who are knowing in the noblest pursuit that can ever employ
+the energies and engross the mind of a well-born Briton; for they can
+ride almost as well as their grooms, these mighty hunters before the
+Lord, and know the country almost as well as the huntsman himself! And
+what sons and grandsons and granddaughters are growing up round them,
+on delightful ponies no gate, hedge, or brook can dismay--nothing but
+the hard high-road!
+
+It is a glorious, exhilarating scene, with the beautiful wintry
+landscape stretching away to the cloudy November sky, and the lords
+and ladies gay, and the hounds, and the frosty-faced, short-tempered
+old huntsman, the very perfection of his kind; and the poor cockney
+snobs on their hired screws, and the meek clod-hopping labourers
+looking on excited and bewildered, happy for a moment at beholding so
+much happiness in their betters.
+
+[Illustration: ONE OF MR. BRIGG'S ADVENTURES IN THE HIGHLANDS
+
+After aiming for a Quarter of and Hour Mr. B. fires both of his
+Barrels--and--misses!!!! Tableau--The Forester's Anguish--_Punch_,
+1861.]
+
+To have seen these sketches of the hunting-field is to have been there
+in person. It is almost the only hunting that I ever had--and probably
+ever shall have--and I am almost content that it should be so! It is
+so much easier and simpler to draw for _Punch_ than to drive across
+country! And then, as a set-off to all this successful achievement,
+this pride and pomp and circumstance of glorious sport, we have the
+immortal and ever-beloved figure of Mr. Briggs, whom I look upon as
+Leech's masterpiece--the example above all others of the most humorous
+and good-natured satire that was ever penned or pencilled. The more
+ridiculous he is the more we love him; he is more winning and
+sympathetic than even Mr. Pickwick himself, and I almost think a
+greater creation! Besides, it took two to make Mr. Pickwick, the
+author and the artist, whereas Mr. Briggs issued fully equipped from
+the brain of Leech alone!
+
+Not indeed that all unauthorised gallopers after the fox find
+forgiveness in the eyes of Leech. Woe to the vulgar little cockney
+snob who dares to obtrude his ugly mug and his big cigar and his
+hired, broken-winded rip on these hallowed and thrice-happy
+hunting-grounds!--an earthenware pot among vessels of brass; the
+punishment shall be made to fit the crime; better if he fell off and
+his horse rolled over him than that he should dress and ride and look
+like that! For the pain of broken bones is easier to bear than the
+scorn of a true British sportsman!
+
+[Illustration: THANK GOODNESS! FLY-FISHING HAS BEGUN!
+
+MILLER. "Don't they really, perhaps they'll bite better towards the
+cool of the evening, they mostly do."--_Punch_, 1857.]
+Then there are the fishermen who never catch any fish, but whom no
+stress of weather can daunt or distress. There they sit or stand with
+the wind blowing or the rain soaking, in dark landscapes with ruffled
+streams and ominous clouds, and swaying trees that turn up the whites
+of their leaves--one almost hears the wind rush through them. One
+almost forgets the comical little forlorn figure who gives such point
+to all the angry turbulence of nature in the impression produced by
+the _mise en scene_ itself--an impression so happily, so vividly
+suggested by a few rapid, instructive pencil strokes and thumb smudges
+that it haunts the memory like a dream.
+
+He loves such open-air scenes so sincerely, he knows so well how to
+express and communicate the perennial charm they have for him, that
+the veriest bookworm becomes a sportsman through sheer sympathy--by
+the mere fact of looking at them.
+
+And how many people and things he loves that most of us love!--it
+would take all night to enumerate them--the good authoritative pater-
+and materfamilias; the delightful little girls; the charming cheeky
+school-boys; the jolly little street Arabs, who fill old gentlemen's
+letter-boxes with oyster-shells and gooseberry-skins; the cabmen, the
+busmen; the policemen with the old-fashioned chimney-pot hat; the old
+bathing-women, and Jack-ashores, and jolly old tars--his British tar
+is irresistible, whether he is hooking a sixty-four pounder out of the
+Black Sea, or riding a Turk, or drinking tea instead of grog and
+complaining of its strength! There seems to be hardly a mirthful
+corner of English life that Leech has not seen and loved and painted
+in this singularly genial and optimistic manner.
+
+[Illustration: "THE JOLLY LITTLE STREET ARABS"
+
+From the original drawing for _Punch_ in possession of John Kendrick
+Bangs, Esq.]
+
+His loves are many and his hates are few--but he is a good hater all
+the same. He hates Mawworm and Stiggins, and so do we. He hates the
+foreigner--whom he does not know, as heartily as Thackeray does, who
+seems to know him so well--with a hatred that seems to me a little
+unjust, perhaps: all France is not in Leicester Square; many Frenchmen
+can dress and ride, drive and shoot as well as anybody; and they began
+to use the tub very soon after we did--a dozen years or so,
+perhaps--say after the _coup d'etat_ in 1851.
+
+Then he hates with a deadly hatred all who make music in the street or
+next door--and preach in the crossways and bawl their wares on the
+parade. What would he have said of the Salvation Army? He is haunted
+by the bark of his neighbour's dog, by the crow of his neighbour's
+Cochin China cock; he cannot even bear his neighbour to have his
+chimney swept; and as for the Christmas waits--we all remember _that_
+tragic picture! This exaggerated aversion to noises became a disease
+with him, and possibly hastened his end.
+
+Among his pet hates we must not forget the gorgeous flunky and the
+guzzling alderman, the leering old fop, the rascally book-maker, the
+sweating Jew tradesman, and the poor little snob (the 'Arry of his
+day) who tries vainly to grow a moustache, and wears such a shocking
+bad hat, and iron heels to his shoes, and shuns the Park during the
+riots for fear of being pelted for a "haristocrat," and whose
+punishment I think is almost in excess of his misdemeanor. To succeed
+in over-dressing one's self (as his swells did occasionally without
+marring their beauty) is almost as ignominious as to fail; and when
+the failure comes from want of means, there is also almost a pathetic
+side to it.
+
+[Illustration: DOING A LITTLE BUSINESS
+
+OLD EQUESTRIAN. "Well, but--you're not the boy I left my horse with!"
+
+BOY. "No, sir; I jist spekilated, and bought 'im of t'other boy for a
+harpenny."--_Punch_.]
+
+And he is a little bit hard on old frumps, with fat ankles and scraggy
+bosoms and red noses--but anyhow we are made to laugh--_quod erat
+demonstrandum_. We also know that he has a strong objection to cold
+mutton for dinner, and much prefers a whitebait banquet at Greenwich,
+or a nice well-ordered repast at the Star and Garter. So do we.
+
+And the only thing he feared is the horse. Nimrod as he is, and the
+happiest illustrator of the hunting-field that ever was, he seems for
+ever haunted by a terror of the heels of that noble animal he drew so
+well--and I thoroughly sympathise with him!
+
+In all the series the chief note is joyousness, high spirits, the
+pleasure of being alive. There is no _Weltschmerz_ in his happy world,
+where all is for the best--no hankering after the moon, no discontent
+with the present order of things. Only one little lady discovers that
+the world is hollow, and her doll is stuffed with bran; only one
+gorgeous swell has exhausted the possibilities of this life, and finds
+out that he is at loss for a new sensation. So what does he do? Cut
+his throat? Go and shoot big game in Africa? No; he visits the top of
+the Monument on a rainy day, or invites his brother-swells to a Punch
+and Judy show in his rooms, or rides to Whitechapel and back on an
+omnibus with a bag of periwinkles, and picks them out with a pin!
+
+Even when his humour is at its broadest, and he revels in almost
+pantomimic fun, he never loses sight of truth and nature--never
+strikes a false or uncertain note. Robinson goes to an evening party
+with a spiked knuckle-duster in his pocket and sits down. Jones digs
+an elderly party called Smith in the back with the point of his
+umbrella, under the impression that it is his friend Brown. A charming
+little street Arab prints the soles of his muddy feet on a smart old
+gentleman's white evening waistcoat.
+
+Tompkyns writes Henrietta on the stands under two hearts transfixed by
+an arrow, and his wife, whose name is Matilda, catches him in the act.
+An old gentleman, maddened by a bluebottle, smashes all his furniture
+and breaks every window-pane but one--where the bluebottle is. And in
+all these scenes one does not know which is the most irresistible, the
+most inimitable--the mere drollery or the dramatic truth of gesture
+and facial expression.
+
+The way in which every-day people really behave in absurd situations
+and under comically trying circumstances is quite funny enough for
+him; and if he exaggerates a little and goes beyond the absolute prose
+of life in the direction of caricature, he never deviates a
+hair's-breadth from the groove human nature has laid down. There is
+exaggeration, but no distortion. The most wildly funny people are low
+comedians of the highest order, whose fun is never forced and never
+fails; they found themselves on fact, and only burlesque what they
+have seen in actual life--they never evolve their fun from the depths
+of their inner consciousness; and in this naturalness, for me, lies
+the greatness of Leech. There is nearly always a tenderness in the
+laughter he excites, born of the touch of nature that makes the whole
+world kin!
+
+[Illustration: A TOLERABLY BROAD HINT
+
+"Oh, I beg your pardon, sir, but you didn't say as we were to pull up
+anywhere, did you, sir?"--_Punch_, 1859.]
+
+Where most of all he gives us a sense of the exuberant joyousness and
+buoyancy of life is in the sketches of the seaside--the newly
+discovered joys of which had then not become commonplace to people of
+the middle class. The good old seaside has grown rather stale by this
+time--the very children of to-day dig and paddle in a half-perfunctory
+sort of fashion, with a certain stolidity, and are in strange contrast
+to those highly elate and enchanting little romps that fill his
+seaside pictures.
+
+Indeed, nothing seems so jolly, nothing seems so funny, now, as when
+Leech was drawing for _Punch_. The gaiety of one nation at least has
+been eclipsed by his death. Is it merely that there is no such light
+humorist to see and draw for us in a frolicsome spirit all the fun and
+the jollity? Is it because some of us have grown old? Or is it that
+the British people themselves have changed and gone back to their old
+way of taking their pleasure sadly?
+
+Everything is so different, somehow; the very girls themselves have
+grown a head taller, and look serious, stately, and dignified, like
+Olympian goddesses, even when they are dancing and playing
+lawn-tennis.
+
+I for one should no more dream of calling them the darlings than I
+should dare to kiss them under the mistletoe, were I ever so splendid
+a young captain. Indeed I am too prostrate in admiration--I can only
+suck the top of my stick and gaze in jealous ecstasy, like one of
+Leech's little snobs. They are no longer pretty as their grandmothers
+were--whom Leech drew so well in the old days! They are _beautiful_!
+
+And then they are so cultivated, and _know_ such a lot--of books, of
+art, of science, of politics, and theology--of the world the flesh,
+and the devil. They actually think for themselves; they have broken
+loose and jumped over the ring-fence; they have taken to the water,
+these lovely chicks, and swim like ducklings, to the dismay of those
+good old cocks and hens, their grandparents! And my love of them is
+tinged with awe, as was Leech's love of that mighty, beautiful, but
+most uncertain quadruped, the thoroughbred horse--for, like him, when
+they are good, they are very, very good, but when they are bad, they
+are horrid. We have changed other things as well: the swell has become
+the masher, and is a terrible dull dog; the poor little snob has
+blossomed into a blatant 'Arry, and no longer wears impossible hats
+and iron heels to his boots; he has risen in the social scale, and
+holds his own without fear or favour in the Park and everywhere else.
+To be taken for a haristocrat is his dream!--even if he be pelted for
+it. In his higher developments he becomes a "bounder," and bounds away
+in most respectable West End ball-rooms. He is the only person with
+any high spirits left--perhaps that is why high spirits have gone out
+of fashion, like boxing the watch and wrenching off door-knockers!
+
+And the snob of our day is quite a different person, more likely than
+not to be found hobnobbing with dukes and duchesses--as irreproachable
+in dress and demeanour as Leech himself. Thackeray discovered and
+christened him for us long ago; and he is related to most of us, and
+moves in the best society. He has even ceased to brag of his intimacy
+with the great, they have become so commonplace to him; and if he
+swaggers at all, it is about his acquaintance with some popular actor
+or comic vocalist whom he is privileged to call by his christian-name.
+
+And those splendid old grandees of high rank, so imposing of aspect,
+so crushing to us poor mortals by mere virtue not of their wealth and
+title alone, but of their high-bred distinction of feature and
+bearing--to which Leech did such ample justice--what has become of
+them?
+
+They are like the snows of yester-year! They have gone the way of
+their beautiful chariots with the elaborate armorial bearings and the
+tasselled hammercloth, the bewigged, cocked-hatted coachman, and the
+two gorgeous flunkies hanging on behind. Sir Gorgeous Midas has beaten
+the dukes in mere gorgeousness, flunkies and all--burlesqued the
+vulgar side of them, and unconsciously shamed it out of existence;
+made swagger and ostentation unpopular by his own evil
+example--actually improved the manners of the great by sheer mimicry
+of their defects. He has married his sons and his daughters to them
+and spoiled the noble curve of those lovely noses that Leech drew so
+well, and brought them down a peg in many ways, and given them a new
+lease of life; and he has enabled us to discover that they are not of
+such different clay from ourselves after all. All the old slavish
+formulae of deference and respect--"Your Grace," "Your Ladyship," "My
+Lord"--that used to run so glibly off our tongues whenever we had a
+chance, are now left to servants and shopkeepers; and my slight
+experience of them, for one, is that they do not want to be toadied a
+bit, and that they are very polite, well-bred, and most agreeable
+people.
+
+If we may judge of our modern aristocracy by that very slender
+fragment of our contemporary fiction, mostly American, that still
+thinks it worth writing about, our young noble of to-day is the most
+good-humoured, tolerant, simple-hearted, simple-minded,
+unsophisticated creature alive--thinking nothing of his
+honours--prostrate under the little foot of some fair Yankee, who is
+just as likely as not to jilt him for some transatlantic painter not
+yet known to fame.
+
+Compare this unpretending youth to one of Bulwer's heroes, or
+Disraeli's, or even Thackeray's! And his simple old duke of a father
+and his dowdy old duchess of a mother are almost as devoid of swagger
+as himself; they seem to apologise for their very existence, if we may
+trust these American chroniclers who seem to know them so well; and I
+really think we no longer care to hear and read about them quite so
+much as we did--unless it be in the society papers!
+
+But all these past manners and customs that some of us can remember so
+well--all these obsolete people, from the heavily whiskered swell to
+the policeman with the leather-bound chimney-pot hat, from good pater-
+and mater-familias who were actually looked up to and obeyed by their
+children, to the croquet-playing darlings in the pork-pie hats and
+huge crinolines--all survive and will survive for many a year in John
+Leech's "Pictures of Life and Character."
+
+Except for a certain gentleness, kindliness, and self-effacing modesty
+common to both, and which made them appear almost angelic in the eyes
+of many who knew them, it would be difficult to imagine a greater
+contrast to Leech than Charles Keene.
+
+Charles Keene was absolutely unconventional, and even almost
+eccentric. He dressed more with a view to artistic picturesqueness
+than to fashion, and despised gloves and chimney-pot hats, and black
+coats and broadcloth generally.
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES KEENE
+
+From a photograph by Elliott and Fry, London.]
+
+Scotch tweed was good enough for him in town and country alike. Though
+a Tory in politics, he was democratic in his tastes and habits. He
+liked to smoke his short black pipe on the tops of omnibuses; he liked
+to lay and light his own fire and cook his mutton-chop upon it. He had
+a passion for music and a beautiful voice, and sang with a singular
+pathos and charm, but he preferred the sound of his bagpipes to that
+of his own singing, and thought that you must prefer it too!
+
+He was for ever sketching in pen and ink, indoors and out--he used at
+one time to carry a little ink-bottle at his buttonhole, and steel
+pens in his waistcoat-pocket, and thus equipped he would sketch
+whatever took his fancy in his walks abroad--houses, 'busses, cabs,
+people--bits of street and square, scaffoldings, hoardings with
+advertisements--sea, river, moor, lake, and mountain--what has he not
+sketched with that masterly pen that had already been so carefully
+trained by long and arduous practice in a life-school? His heart was
+in his work from first to last; beyond his bagpipes and his old books
+(for he was a passionate reader), he seemed to have no other hobby.
+His facility in sketching became phenomenal, as also his knowledge of
+what to put in and what to leave out, so that the effect he aimed at
+should be secured in perfection and with the smallest appearance of
+labour.
+
+Among his other gifts he had a physical gift of inestimable value for
+such work as ours--namely, a splendid hand--a large, muscular,
+well-shaped, and most workman-like hand, whose long deft fingers could
+move with equal ease and certainty in all directions. I have seen it
+at work--and it was a pleasure to watch its acrobatic dexterity, its
+unerring precision of touch. It could draw with nonchalant facility
+parallel straight lines, or curved, of just the right thickness and
+distance from each other--almost as regular as if they had been drawn
+with ruler or compass--almost, but not _quite_. The quiteness would
+have made them mechanical, and robbed them of their charm of human
+handicraft. A cunning and obedient slave, this wonderful hand, for
+which no command from the head could come amiss--a slave, moreover,
+that had most thoroughly learned its business by long apprenticeship
+to one especial trade, like the head and like the eye that guided it.
+
+Leech, no doubt, had a good natural hand, that swept about with
+enviable freedom and boldness, but for want of early discipline it
+could not execute these miracles of skill; and the commands that came
+from the head also lacked the preciseness which results from patiently
+acquired and well-digested knowledge, so that Mr. Hand was apt now and
+then to zigzag a little on its own account--in backgrounds, on floors
+and walls, under chairs and tables, whenever a little tone was felt to
+be desirable--sometimes in the shading of coats and trousers and
+ladies' dresses.
+
+But it never took a liberty with a human face or a horse's head; and
+whenever it went a little astray you could always read between the
+lines and know exactly what it meant.
+
+There is no difficulty in reading between Keene's lines; every one of
+them has its unmistakable definite intimation; every one is the right
+line in the right place!
+
+We must remember that there are no such things as lines in nature.
+Whether we use them to represent a human profile, the depth of a
+shadow, the darkness of a cloak or a thunder-cloud, they are mere
+conventional symbols. They were invented a long time ago, by a
+distinguished sportsman who was also a heaven-born amateur artist--the
+John Leech of his day--who engraved for us (from life) the picture of
+mammoth on one of its own tusks.
+
+And we have accepted them ever since as the cheapest and simplest way
+of interpreting in black and white for the wood-engraver the shapes
+and shadows and colours of nature. They may be scratchy, feeble, and
+uncertain, or firm and bold--thick and thin--straight, curved,
+parallel, or irregular--cross-hatched once, twice, a dozen times, at
+any angle--every artist has his own way of getting his effect. But
+some ways are better than others, and I think Keene's is the firmest,
+loosest, simplest, and best way that ever was, and--the most difficult
+to imitate. His mere pen-strokes have, for the expert, a beauty and an
+interest quite apart from the thing they are made to depict, whether
+he uses them as mere outlines to express the shape of things animate
+or inanimate, even such shapeless, irregular things as the stones on a
+sea-beach--or in combination to suggest the tone and colour of a
+dress-coat, or a drunkard's nose, of a cab or omnibus--of a distant
+mountain with miles of atmosphere between it and the figures in the
+foreground.
+
+[Illustration: THE SNOWSTORM, JAN. 2, 1867
+
+CABBY (_petulantly--the Cabbies even lose their tempers_). "It's no
+use your a-calling o' me, Sir! Got such a Job with these 'ere Two
+as'll last me a Fortnight!!"--_Punch_, January 19, 1867.]
+
+His lines are as few as can be--he is most economical in this respect
+and loves to leave as much white paper as he can; but one feels in his
+best work that one line more or one line less would impair the
+perfection of the whole--that of all the many directions, curves, and
+thicknesses they might have taken he has inevitably hit upon just the
+right one. He has beaten all previous records in this respect--in this
+country, at least. I heard a celebrated French painter say: "He is a
+great man, your Charles Keene; he take a pen and ink and a bit of
+paper, and wiz a half-dozen strokes he know 'ow to frame a gust of
+wind!" I think myself that Leech could frame a gust of wind as
+effectually as Keene, by the sheer force of his untaught natural
+instinct--of his genius; but not with the deftness--this economy of
+material--this certainty of execution--this consummate knowledge of
+effect.
+
+To borrow a simile from music, there are certain tunes so fresh and
+sweet and pretty that they please at once and for ever, like "Home,
+Sweet Home," or "The Last Rose of Summer"; they go straight to the
+heart of the multitude, however slight the accompaniment--a few simple
+chords--they hardly want an accompaniment at all.
+
+Leech's art seems to me of just such a happy kind; he draws--I mean he
+scores like an amateur who has not made a very profound study of
+harmony, and sings his pretty song to his simple accompaniment with so
+sweet and true a natural voice that we are charmed. It is the magic of
+nature, whereas Keene is a very Sebastian Bach in his counterpoint.
+There is nothing of the amateur about him; his knowledge of harmony in
+black and white is complete and thorough; mere consummate scoring has
+become to him a second nature; each separate note of his voice reveals
+the long training of the professional singer; and if his tunes are
+less obviously sweet and his voice less naturally winning and
+sympathetic than Leech's, his aesthetic achievement is all the
+greater. It is to his brother-artists rather than to the public at
+large that his most successful appeal is made--but with an intensity
+that can only be gained by those who have tried in vain to do what he
+has done, and who thereby know how difficult it is. His real magic is
+that of art.
+
+This perhaps accounts for the unmistakable fact that Leech's
+popularity has been so much greater than Keene's, and I believe is
+still. Leech's little melodies of the pencil (to continue the parallel
+with the sister art) are like Volkslieder--national airs--and more
+directly reach the national heart. Transplant them to other lands that
+have pencil Volkslieder of their own (though none, I think, comparable
+to his for fun and sweetness and simplicity) and they fail to please
+as much, while their mere artistic qualities are not such as to find
+favour among foreign experts, whereas Keene actually gains by such a
+process. He is as much admired by the artists of France and Germany as
+by our own--if not more. For some of his shortcomings--such as his
+lack of feeling for English female beauty, his want of perception,
+perhaps his disdain, of certain little eternal traits and conventions
+and differences that stamp the various grades of our social
+hierarchy--do not strike them, and nothing interferes with their
+complete appreciation of his craftsmanship.
+
+[Illustration: WAITING FOR THE LANDLORD!
+
+RIBBONMAN (_getting impatient_). "Bedad, they ought to be here be this
+toime! Sure, Tiriace, I hope the ould gintleman hasn't mit wid an
+accidint!!!"--_Punch_, July 27, 1878.]
+
+Perhaps, also, Leech's frequent verification of our manly British
+pluck and honesty, and proficiency in sport, and wholesomeness and
+cleanliness of body and mind, our general physical beauty and
+distinction, and his patriotic tendency to contrast our exclusive
+possession of these delightful gifts with the deplorable absence of
+them in any country but our own, may fail to enlist the sympathies of
+the benighted foreigner.
+
+Whereas there is not much to humiliate the most touchy French or
+German reader of _Punch_, or excite his envy, in Charles Keene's
+portraiture of our race. He is impartial and detached, and the most
+rabid Anglophobe may frankly admire him without losing his
+self-esteem. The English lower middle class and people, that Keene has
+depicted with such judicial freedom from either prejudice or
+pre-possession, have many virtues; but they are not especially
+conspicuous for much vivacity or charm of aspect or gainliness of
+demeanour; and he has not gone out of his way to idealise them.
+
+Also, he seldom if ever gibes at those who have not been able to
+resist the temptations (as Mr. Gilbert would say) of belonging to
+other nations.
+
+Thus in absolute craftsmanship and technical skill, in the ease and
+beauty of his line, his knowledge of effect, his complete mastery over
+the material means at his disposal, Charles Keene seems to me as
+superior to Leech as Leech is to him in grace, in human naturalness
+and geniality of humour, in accurate observation of life, in keenness
+of social perception, and especially in width of range.
+
+[Illustration: A STROKE OF BUSINESS
+
+VILLAGE HAMPDEN (_"who with dauntless breast" has undertaken for
+sixpence to keep off the other boys_). "If any of yer wants to see
+what we're a Paintin' of it's a 'Alfpenny a 'Ead, but you marn't make
+no Remarks."--_Punch_, May 4, 1867.]
+
+The little actors on Leech's stage are nearly all of them every-day
+people--types one is constantly meeting. High or low, tipsy or sober,
+vulgar or refined, pleasant or the reverse, we knew them all before
+Leech ever drew them; and our recognition of them on his page is full
+of delight at meeting old familiar friends and seeing them made fun of
+for our amusement.
+
+Whereas a great many of Keene's middle-class protagonists are peculiar
+and exceptional, and much of their humour lies in their eccentricity,
+they are characters themselves, rather than types of English
+characters. Are they really observed and drawn from life, do they
+really exist just as they are, or are they partly evolved from the
+depths of an inner consciousness that is not quite satisfied with life
+just as it is?
+
+[Illustration: "NONE O' YOUR LARKS"
+
+GIGANTIC NAVVY: "Let's walk between yer, Gents; folks 'll think you've
+took up a Deserter."--_Punch_, October 19, 1861.]
+
+They are often comic, with their exquisitely drawn faces so full of
+subtlety--intensely comic! Their enormous perplexities about nothing,
+their utter guilelessness, their innocence of the wicked world and its
+ways, make them engaging sometimes in spite of a certain ungainliness
+of gesture, dress, and general behaviour that belongs to them, and
+which delighted Charles Keene, who was the reverse of ungainly, just
+as the oft-recurring tipsiness of his old gentlemen delighted him,
+though he was the most abstemious of men. I am now speaking of his
+middle-class people--those wonderful philistines of either sex; those
+elaborately capped and corpulent old ladies; those
+muttonchop-whiskered, middle-aged gentlemen with long upper lips and
+florid complexions, receding chins, noses almost horizontal in their
+prominence; those artless damsels who trouble themselves so little
+about the latest fashions; those feeble-minded, hirsute swells with
+the sloping shoulders and the broad hips and the little hats cocked on
+one side; those unkempt, unspoiled, unspotted from the world brothers
+of the brush, who take in their own milk, and so complacently ignore
+all the rotten conventionalism of our over-civilised existence.
+
+When he takes his subjects from the classes beneath these, he is, if
+not quite so funny, at his best, I think. His costermongers and
+policemen, his omnibus drivers and conductors and cabbies, are
+inimitable studies; and as for his 'busses and cabs, I really cannot
+find words to express my admiration of them. In these, as in his
+street scenes and landscapes, he is unapproached and unapproachable.
+
+Nor must we forget his canny Scotsmen, his Irish labourers and
+peasants, his splendid English navvies, and least of all his
+volunteers--he and Leech might be called the pillars of the Volunteer
+movement, from the manner, so true, so sympathetic, and so humorous,
+in which they have immortalised its beginning.
+
+[Illustration: AN AFFRONT TO THE SERVICE
+
+OMNIBUS DRIVER (_to Coster_). "Now then, Irish! pull a one side, will
+you? What are you gaping at? Did you never see a Milisher man before?"
+
+_A disgustingly ignorant observation in the opinion of young Longslip,
+Lieutenant in Her Majesty's Fusileer Guards_--_Punch_, March 7, 1863.]
+
+Charles Keene is seldom a satirist. His nature was too tolerant and
+too sweet for hate, and that makes him a bad and somewhat perfunctory
+hater. He tries to hate 'Arry, but he can't, for he draws an ideal
+'Arry that surely never was, and thus his shaft misses the mark:
+compare his 'Arry to one of Leech's snobs, for instance! He tries to
+hate the haw-haw swell, and is equally unsuccessful. When you hate and
+can draw, you can draw what you hate down to its minutest
+details--better, perhaps, than what you love--so that whoever runs and
+reads and looks at your pictures hates with you.
+
+Who ever hated a personage of Keene's beyond that feeble kind of
+aversion that comes from mere uncongeniality, a slightly offended
+social taste, or prejudice? One feels a mere indulgent and
+half-humorous disdain, but no hate. On the other hand, I do not think
+that we love his personages very much--we stand too much outside his
+eccentric world for sympathy. From the pencil of this most lovable
+man, with his unrivalled power of expressing all he saw and thought, I
+cannot recall many lovable characters of either sex or any age. Here
+and there a good-natured cabby, a jolly navvy, a simple-minded
+flautist or bagpiper, or a little street Arab, like the small boy who
+pointed out the jail doctor to his pal and said, "That's my medical
+man."
+
+Whereas Leech's pages teem with winning, graceful, lovable types, and
+here and there a hateful one to give relief.
+
+But, somehow, one liked the man who drew these strange people, even
+without knowing him; when you knew him you loved him very much--so
+much that no room was left in you for envy of his unattainable mastery
+in his art. For of this there can be no doubt--no greater or more
+finished master in black and white has devoted his life to the
+illustration of the manners and humours of his time; and if Leech is
+even greater than he--and I for one am inclined to think he is--it is
+not as an artist, but as a student and observer of human nature, as a
+master of the light, humorous, superficial criticism of life.
+
+[Illustration: "NOT UP TO HIS BUSINESS"
+
+CROSS BUS DRIVER. "Now why didn't you take that there party?"
+
+CONDUCTOR: "Said they wouldn't go."
+
+CROSS BUS DRIVER. "_Said_ THEY wouldn't go? THEY said they wouldn't
+go? Why, what do you suppose you're put there for? You call that
+conductin' a buss. Oh! THEY wouldn't go! I like that, &c., &c."--
+_Punch_, September 1, 1860.]
+
+Charles Keene died of general atrophy on January 4, 1891. It was
+inexpressibly pathetic to see how patiently, how resignedly he wasted
+away; he retained his unalterable sweetness to the last.
+
+His handsome, dark-skinned face, so strongly lined and full of
+character; his mild and magnificent light-grey eyes, that reminded one
+of a St. Bernard's; his tall, straight, slender aspect, that reminded
+one of Don Quixote; his simplicity of speech and character; his love
+of humour, and the wonderful smile that lit up his face when he heard
+a good story, and the still more wonderful wink of his left eye when
+he told one--all these will remain strongly impressed on the minds of
+those who ever met him.
+
+I attended his funeral as I had attended Leech's twenty-six years
+before; Canon Ainger, a common friend of us both, performed the
+service. It was a bitterly cold day, which accounted for the
+sparseness of the mourners compared to the crowd that was present on
+the former occasion; but bearing in mind that all those present were
+either relations or old friends, all of them with the strongest and
+deepest personal regard for the friend we had lost, the attendance
+seemed very large indeed; and all of us, I think, in our affectionate
+remembrance of one of the most singularly sweet-natured,
+sweet-tempered, and simple-hearted men that ever lived, forgot for the
+time that a very great artist was being laid to his rest.
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE DU MAURIER
+
+From an unpublished photograph by Fradelle and Young, London.]
+
+And now, in fulfilment of my contract, I must speak of myself--a
+difficult and not very grateful task. One's self is a person about
+whom one knows too much and too little--about whom we can never hit a
+happy medium. Sometimes one rates one's self too high, sometimes (but
+less frequently) too low, according to the state of our digestion, our
+spirits, our pocket, or even the weather!
+
+In the present instance I will say all the good of myself I can
+decently, and leave all the rating to you. It is inevitable, however
+unfortunate it may be for me, that I should be compared with my two
+great predecessors, Leech and Keene, whom I have just been comparing
+to each other.
+
+When John Leech's mantle fell from his shoulders it was found that the
+garment was ample to clothe the nakedness of more than one successor.
+
+John Tenniel had already, it is true, replaced him for several years
+as the political cartoonist of _Punch_. How admirably he has always
+filled that post, then and ever since, and how great his fame is, I
+need not speak of here. Linley Sambourne and Harry Furniss, so
+different from each other and from Tenniel, have also, since then,
+brought their great originality and their unrivalled skill to the
+political illustrations of _Punch_--Sambourne to the illustration of
+many other things in it besides, but which do not strictly belong to
+the present subject.
+
+I am here concerned with the social illustrators alone, and, besides,
+only with those who have made the sketches of social subjects in
+_Punch_ the principal business of their lives. For very many artists,
+from Sir John Millais, Sir John Gilbert, Frederick Walker, and
+Randolph Caldecott downward, have contributed to that fortunate
+periodical at one time or another, and not a few distinguished
+amateurs.
+
+Miss Georgina Bowers, Mr. Corbould, and others have continued the
+fox-hunting tradition, and provided those scenes which have become a
+necessity to the sporting readers of _Punch_.
+
+To Charles Keene was fairly left that part of the succession that was
+most to his taste--the treatment of life in the street and the open
+country, in the shops and parlours of the lower middle class, and the
+homes of the people.
+
+And to me were allotted the social and domestic dramas, the nursery,
+the school-room, the dining and drawing rooms, and croquet-lawns of
+the more or less well-to-do.
+
+I was particularly told not to try to be broadly funny, but to
+undertake the light and graceful business, like a _jeune premier_. I
+was, in short, to be the tenor, or rather the tenorino, of that little
+company for which Mr. Punch beats time with his immortal baton, and to
+warble in black and white such melodies as I could evolve from my
+contemplations of the gentler aspect of English life, while Keene,
+with his magnificent, highly trained basso, sang the comic songs.
+
+We all became specialised, so to speak, and divided Leech's vast
+domain among us.
+
+We kicked a little at first, I remember, and whenever (to continue the
+musical simile) I could get in a comic song, or what I thought one, or
+some queer fantastic ditty about impossible birds and beasts and
+fishes and what not, I did not let the opportunity slip; while Keene,
+who had a very fine falsetto on the top of his chest register, would
+now and then warble, pianissimo, some little ballad of the
+drawing-room or nursery.
+
+Illustration: FELINE AMENITIES
+
+But gradually we settled into our respective grooves, and I have grown
+to like my little groove very much, narrow though it be--a poor thing,
+but mine own!
+
+"I_wish_ you hadn't asked Captain Wareham, Lizzie. Horrid man! I can't
+bear him!"
+
+"Dear me, Charlotte--isn't the world big enough for you both?"
+
+"Yes; but your little Dining-room _isn't_!"--_Punch_, February 16,
+1889.]
+
+Moreover, certain physical disabilities that I have the misfortune to
+labour under make it difficult for me to study and sketch the lusty
+things in the open air and sunshine. My sight, besides being defective
+in many ways, is so sensitive that I cannot face the common light of
+day without glasses thickly rimmed with wire gauze, so that sketching
+out of doors is often to me a difficult and distressing performance.
+That is also partly why I am not a sportsman and a delineator of
+sport.
+
+I mention this infirmity not as an excuse for my shortcomings and
+failures--for them there is no excuse--but as a reason why I have
+abstained from the treatment of so much that is so popular,
+delightful, and exhilarating in English country life. If there had
+been no Charles Keene (a terrible supposition both for _Punch_ and its
+readers), I should have done my best to illustrate the lower walks and
+phases of London existence, which attracts me as much as any other. It
+is just as easy to draw a costermonger or a washerwoman as it is a
+gentleman or lady--perhaps a little easier--but it is by no means so
+easy to draw them as Keene did! And to draw a cab or an omnibus after
+him (though I have sometimes been obliged to do so) is almost tempting
+Providence!
+
+If there had been no Charles Keene, I might, perhaps, with practice,
+have become a funny man myself--though I do not suppose that my fun
+would have ever been of the broadest.
+
+Before I became an artist I was considered particularly good at
+caricaturing my friends, who always foresaw for me more than one
+change of profession, and _Punch_ as the final goal of my wanderings
+in search of a career. For it was originally intended that I should be
+a man of science.
+
+Dr. Williamson, the eminent chemist and professor of chemistry, told
+me not long ago that he remembers caricatures that I drew, now forty
+years back, when I was studying under him at the Laboratory of
+Chemistry at University College, and that he and other grave and
+reverend professors were hugely tickled by them at the time. Indeed,
+he remembers nothing else about me, except that I promised to be a
+very bad chemist.
+
+I was a very bad chemist indeed, but not for long! As soon as I was
+free to do as I pleased, I threw up test-tubes and crucibles and went
+back to Paris, where I was born and brought up, and studied to become
+an artist in M. Gleyre's studio. Then I went to Antwerp, where there
+is a famous school of painting, and where I had no less a person than
+Mr. Alma-Tadema as a fellow-student. It was all delightful, but
+misfortune befell me, and I lost the sight of one eye--perhaps it was
+the eye with which I used to do the funny caricatures; it was a very
+good eye, much the better of the two, and the other has not improved
+by having to do a double share of the work.
+
+And then in time I came to England and drew for _Punch_, thus
+fulfilling the early prophecy of my friends and fellow-students at
+University College--though not quite in the sense they anticipated.
+
+[Illustration: THE NEW SOCIETY CRAZE
+
+THE NEW GOVERNESS (_through her pretty nose_). "Waall--I come right
+slick away from Ne'York City, an' I ain't had much time for foolin'
+around in Europe--you bet! So I can't fix up your Gals in the Eu-
+ropean languages, no-how!"
+
+BELGRAVIAN MAMMA: (_who knows there's a Duke or two still left in the
+Matrimonial Market_). "Oh, that's of no consequence. I want my
+Daughters to aquire the American Accent in all its purity--and the
+Idioms, and all that. Now I'm sure _you_ will do _admirably_!"--
+_Punch_, December 1, 1888.]
+
+I will not attempt a description of my work--it is so recent and has
+been so widely circulated that it should be unnecessary to do so. If
+you do not remember it, it is that it is not worth remembering; if you
+do, I can only entreat you to be to my faults a little blind, and to
+my virtues very kind!
+
+I have always tried as honestly and truthfully as lies in me to serve
+up to the readers of _Punch_ whatever I have culled with the bodily
+eye, after cooking it a little in the brain. My raw material requires
+more elaborate working than Leech's. He dealt more in flowers and
+fruits and roots, if I may express myself so figuratively--from the
+lordly pineapple and lovely rose, down to the humble daisy and savory
+radish. _I_ deal in vegetables, I suppose. Little that I ever find
+seems to me fit for the table just as I see it; moreover, by dishing
+it up raw I should offend many people and make many enemies, and
+deserve to do so. I cook my green pease, asparagus, French beans,
+Brussels sprouts, German sauerkraut, and even a truffle now and then,
+so carefully that you would never recognise them as they were when I
+first picked them in the social garden. And they do not recognise
+themselves! Or even each other!
+
+And I do my best to dish them up in good, artistic style. Oh that I
+could arrange for you a truffle with all that culinary skill that
+Charles Keene brought to the mere boiling of a carrot or a potato! He
+is the _cordon bleu_ par excellence. The people I meet seem to me more
+interesting than funny--so interesting that I am well content to draw
+them as I see them, after just a little arrangement and a very
+transparent disguise--and without any attempt at caricature. The
+better-looking they are, the more my pencil loves them, and I feel
+more inclined to exaggerate in this direction than in any other.
+
+Sam Weller, if you recollect, was fond of "pootiness and wirtue." I
+_so_ agree with him! I adore them both, especially in women and
+children. I only wish that the wirtue was as easy to draw as the
+pootiness.
+
+But indeed for me--speaking as an artist, and also, perhaps, a little
+bit as a man--pootiness is almost a wirtue in itself. I don't think I
+shall ever weary of trying to depict it, from its dawn in the toddling
+infant to its decline and setting and long twilight in the beautiful
+old woman, who has known how to grow old gradually. I like to surround
+it with chivalrous and stalwart manhood; and it is a standing
+grievance to me that I have to clothe all this masculine escort in
+coats and trousers and chimney-pot hats; worse than all, in the
+evening dress of the period!--that I cannot surround my divinity with
+a guard of honour more worthily arrayed!
+
+Thus, of all my little piebald puppets, the one I value the most is my
+pretty woman. I am as fond of her as Leech was of his; of whom,
+by-the-way, she is the granddaughter! This is not artistic vanity; it
+is pure paternal affection, and by no means prevents me from seeing
+her faults; it only prevents me from seeing them as clearly as you do!
+
+Please be not very severe on her, for her grandmother's sake. Words
+fail me to express how much I loved her grandmother, who wore a
+cricket-cap and broke Aunt Sally's nose seven times.
+
+[Illustration: A PICTORIAL PUZZLE
+
+TENOR WARBLER (_with passionate emphasis on the first word of each
+line_)--
+"_Me-e-e-e-e-e-t_ me once again,  M-e-e-e-e-t me once aga-a-ain--"
+
+_Why does the Cat suddenly jump off the Hearth-rug, rush to the Door,
+and make frantic Endeavors to get out_?--_Punch_.]
+
+Will my pretty woman ever be all I wish her to be? All she ought to
+be? I fear not! On the mantelpiece in my studio at home there stands a
+certain lady. She is but lightly clad, and what simple garment she
+wears is not in the fashion of our day. How well I know her! Almost
+thoroughly by this time--for she has been the silent companion of my
+work for thirty years! She has lost both her arms and one of her feet,
+which I deplore; and also the tip of her nose, but that has been made
+good!
+
+She is only three feet high, or thereabouts, and quite two thousand
+years old, or more; but she is ever young--
+
+      "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
+      Her infinite variety!"
+
+and a very giantess in beauty. For she is a reduction in plaster of
+the famous statue at the Louvre.
+
+They call her the Venus of Milo, or Melos! It is a calumny--a libel.
+She is no Venus, except in good looks; and if she errs at all, it is
+on the side of austerity. She is not only pootiness but wirtue
+incarnate (if one can be incarnate in marble), from the crown of her
+lovely head to the sole of her remaining foot--a very beautiful foot,
+though by no means a small one--it has never worn a high-heel shoe!
+
+Like all the best of its kind, and its kind the best, she never sates
+nor palls, and the more I look at her the more I see to love and
+worship--and, alas! the more dissatisfied I feel--not indeed with the
+living beauty, ripe and real, that I see about and around--mere life
+is such a beauty in itself that no stone ideal can ever hope to match
+it! But dissatisfied with the means at my command to do the living
+beauty justice--a little bit of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of
+ink--and, alas! fingers and an eye less skilled than they would have
+been if I had gone straight to a school of art instead of a laboratory
+for chemistry!
+
+And now for social pictorial satire considered as a fine art.
+
+They who have practised it hitherto, from Hogarth downward, have not
+been many--you can count their names on your fingers! And the wide
+popularity they have won may be due as much to their scarcity as to
+the interest we all take in having the mirror held up to ourselves--to
+the malicious pleasure we all feel at seeing our neighbours held up to
+gentle ridicule or well-merited reproof; most of all, perhaps, to the
+realistic charm that lies in all true representation of the social
+aspects with which we are most familiar, ugly as these are often apt
+to be, with our chimney-pot hats, and trousers that unfit us, it
+seems, for serious and elaborate pictorial treatment at the hands of
+the foremost painters of our own times--except when we sit to them for
+our portraits; then they have willy-nilly to make the best of us, just
+as we are!
+
+[Illustration: REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH
+
+(SCENE--_A Drawing-room in "Passionate Brompton_.")
+
+FAIR AESTHETIC (_suddenly, and in deepest tones to Smith, who has just
+been introduced to take her in to Dinner_).
+
+"Are you Intense?"--_Punch_, June 14, 1879.]
+
+The plays and novels that succeed the most are those which treat of
+the life of our own day; not so the costly pictures we hang upon our
+walls. We do not care to have continually before our eyes elaborate
+representations of the life we lead every day and all day long; we
+like best that which rather takes us out of it--romantic or graceful
+episodes of another time or clime, when men wore prettier clothes than
+they do now--well-imagined, well-painted scenes from classic
+lore--historical subjects--subjects selected from our splendid
+literature and what not; or, if we want modern subjects, we prefer
+scenes chosen from a humble sphere, which is not that of those who can
+afford to buy pictures--the toilers of the earth--the toilers of the
+sea--pathetic scenes from the inexhaustible annals of the poor; or
+else, again, landscapes and seascapes--things that bring a whiff of
+nature into our feverish and artificial existence--that are in direct
+contrast to it.
+
+And even with these beautiful things, how often the charm wears away
+with the novelty of possession! How often and how soon the lovely
+picture, like its frame, becomes just as a piece of wall-furniture, in
+which we take a pride, certainly, and which we should certainly miss
+if it were taken away--but which we grow to look at with the pathetic
+indifference of habit--if not, indeed, with aversion!
+
+Chairs and tables minister to our physical comforts, and we cannot do
+without them. But pictures have not this practical hold upon us; the
+sense to which they appeal is not always on the alert; yet there they
+are hanging on the wall, morning, noon, and night, unchanged,
+unchangeable--the same arrested movement--the same expression of
+face--the same seas and trees and moors and forests and rivers and
+mountains--the very waves are as eternal as the hills!
+
+Music will leave off when it is not wanted--at least it ought to! The
+book is shut, the newspaper thrown aside. Not so the beautiful
+picture; it is like a perennial nosegay, for ever exhaling its perfume
+for noses that have long ceased to smell it!
+
+But little pictures in black and white, of little every-day people
+like ourselves, by some great little artist who knows life well and
+has the means at his command to express his knowledge in this easy,
+simple manner, can be taken up and thrown down like the book or
+newspaper. They are even easier to read and understand. They are
+within the reach of the meanest capacity, the humblest education, the
+most slender purse. They come to us weekly, let us say, in cheap
+periodicals. They are preserved and bound up in volumes, to be taken
+down and looked at when so disposed. The child grows to love them
+before he knows how to read; fifty years hence he will love them
+still, if only for the pleasure they gave him as a child. He will soon
+know them by heart, and yet go to them again and again; and if they
+are good, he will always find new beauties and added interest as he
+himself grows in taste and culture; and how much of that taste and
+culture he will owe to them, who can say?
+
+Nothing sticks so well in the young mind as a little picture one can
+hold close to the eyes like a book--not even a song or poem--for in
+the case of most young people the memory of the eye is better than
+that of the ear--its power of assimilating more rapid and more keen.
+And then there is the immense variety, the number!
+
+[Illustration: "READING WITHOUT TEARS"
+
+TEACHER. "And what comes after S, Jack?"
+
+PUPIL. "T!"
+
+TEACHER. "And what Comes after T?"
+
+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
+
+HE. "The fact is I never get any wild fowl shooting--never!"
+
+SHE. "Oh, then you ought to come down to our Neighborhood in the
+Winter. It would just suit you, there are such a lot of Geese about--
+a--a--I mean _Wild_ Geese of course!"--_Punch_, November 21, 1891.]
+
+Hogarth seems to have come nearer to this ideal pictorial satirist
+than any of his successors in _Punch_ and elsewhere. For he was not
+merely a light humorist and a genial caricaturist; he dealt also in
+pathos and terror, in tragic passion and sorrow and crime; he often
+strikes chords of too deep a tone for the pages of a comic periodical.
+
+But the extent of his productiveness was limited by the method of his
+production; he was a great painter in oils, and each of his life
+scenes is an important and elaborate picture, which, moreover, he
+engraved himself at great cost of time and labour, after the original
+time and labour spent in painting it. It is by these engravings, far
+more than by his pictures, that he is so widely known.
+
+It is quite possible to conceive a little sketchy woodcut no larger
+than a cut in _Punch_, and drawn by a master like Charles Keene, or
+the German Adolf Menzel, giving us all the essence of any picture by
+Hogarth even more effectively, more agreeably, than any of Hogarth's
+most finished engravings. And if this had been Hogarth's method of
+work, instead of some fifty or sixty of those immortal designs we
+should have had some five or six thousand! Almost a library!
+
+So much for the great pictorial satirist of the future--of the near
+future, let us hope--that I have been trying to evolve from my inner
+consciousness. May some of us live to see him!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Social Pictorial Satire, by George du Maurier
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