Social Pictorial Satire Part 4

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 a.s.similating more rapid and more keen.

And then there is the immense variety, the number!

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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 ill.u.s.trate the books of others--Charles d.i.c.kens's, I believe, for one. Fortunately, perhaps, for us and for him, and perhaps for d.i.c.kens, he did not succeed; he lived to write books of his own, and to ill.u.s.trate them himself; and it is generally admitted that his ill.u.s.trations, 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 Alb.u.m"--

"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 ..."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 a.s.siduously 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 d.i.c.kens, 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, circ.u.mstances, and education that have been denied to us!

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 pa.s.sion 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!