George Du Maurier

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”