Social Pictorial Satire Part 1

Social Pictorial Satire.

by George du Maurier.

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 ill.u.s.trated 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, ent.i.tle 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, apprentices.h.i.+p, 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 ac.u.men 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 d.i.c.kens, 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 quant.i.ty and quality of the pleasure he has given, what pinnacle is too high for John Leech!

Other men have drawn better; deeper, grander, n.o.bler, 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 a.s.sure 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-wors.h.i.+pper in meeting face to face a world-wide celebrity whom he has long wors.h.i.+pped at a distance.

In the words of Lord Tennyson:

"I was rapt By all the sweet and sudden pa.s.sion 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 ill.u.s.trating 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 draughtsmans.h.i.+p that will be for ever a.s.sociated 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 surpa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+nes 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 s.h.i.+ne by, if you cannot s.h.i.+ne 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 coa.r.s.e 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 wis.h.i.+ng to be--except now and then for a capital story, which he told in perfection.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 d.i.c.kens 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 G.o.ds 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 cla.s.s, 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 a.s.signed 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-cla.s.s 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 b.u.t.terfly 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!

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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 sn.o.b 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 n.o.ble 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!