John Leech, His Life and Work Volume II Part 6

Mrs. Hall, a daughter of Mr. Adams--the Chattie of Leech's letters--supplies me with an example, "one out of many instances of great kindness to her as a child," which I present to my readers:

"I was about eight years old," says Mrs. Hall, "and on one rough morning during my stay with him at Broadstairs I was sent in charge of a maid to play upon the beach. The wind carried away my bonnet. Regardless of danger, I rushed into the sea after it, and after many struggles I recovered it, but was horrified to find that a crowd had collected round me. I was taken home dripping, and feeling very guilty. You can imagine the relief it was to find my dear friend ready to comfort and not to scold; and I have a happy recollection of being snugly tucked up on his knee for some hours after the event, while he continued his drawing."

The publication of my desire for information respecting John Leech's youthful days has put into my possession one of his earliest drawings; for this I am indebted to one of his Charterhouse schoolfellows, a very young old gentleman indeed. Mr. Charles Maitland Tate's name may be found in the first division of the fourth form in the list of scholars of 1828. Mr. Maitland's first acquaintance with "little Johnny Leech"

began at Brighton in 1823, where he found our embryo six-year-old artist learning equestrian accomplishments, with the help of a small pony and the instruction of "an old retired jockey," who was one of the stable servants of George IV. at the Pavilion.

"Leech was a gentle, dear little fellow," says Mr. Maitland. "I accompanied him on several of his pony excursions, and the more I saw of him, the better I liked him."

Leech was entered at Charterhouse in 1824, Maitland a year or two afterwards, having grown into a strapping boy of eleven. Mr. Maitland's father was a Dean of St. Paul's, able, no doubt, from his position to procure a presentation--as he did from Lord Grey--for his son, who entered as a Gown boy, thus taking, and maintaining, a higher position in the school than Leech ever succeeded in reaching. Young Maitland had been a few days in the Charterhouse, when he was accosted by a small boy, who was obliged to tell his name before his early friend could recognise him. Boy-like, Maitland immediately took young Leech under his protection, and threatened dire consequences to anyone who bullied or ill-treated him. The protector's prowess, however, was not wanted, for Leech never made an enemy then or afterwards.

Amongst the scholars was one named Douglas, whose powers of sketching in caricature were very remarkable. Of this I convinced myself by a book of drawings in the possession of Mr. Maitland. Douglas's talent made him very attractive to Leech, and the boys became great friends.

"Leech copied several of his friend's drawings," says Mr. Maitland; but, as might have been expected, he soon abandoned copying and took to original work, a specimen of which I give below, as perhaps the earliest known drawing by Leech.[A]

If, before I had written the first portion of this book, I had known Mr.

Maitland's story, I should have introduced it earlier; for this and other shortcomings and irregularities, I hope to be forgiven on the ground of my inexperience and ignorance of the laws of literary composition. With this apology I proceed to make more mistakes, but mistakes only in the _order_ in which the _truth_ should be told.

CHAPTER X.

LEECH AND HIS PREDECESSORS.

John Leech may be truly said to be _sui generis_; there has been nothing like him before his time, or since his bright and short career ended. It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that existing between the works of Leech and those of his predecessors, at the head and front of whom must be placed Hogarth, who stands _longo intervallo_ above any of his successors. In his terrible lashing of the vices and follies of his own time--vices and follies that are common to all time--Hogarth sometimes, though rarely, indulged in an exaggeration of character amounting to caricature. Leech dealt with the life about him in a totally different spirit; his was a lighter, a more genial, and a kinder hand. Unlike Hogarth, he made us laugh at the follies of our fellow-creatures, and would have nothing to do with their vices, though he has shown us in many examples how keen was his sympathy with the poor and the oppressed, and how intense was his hatred of the oppressor.

The name of caricaturist is as inappropriate to Leech as it is to Hogarth, though instances may be found, as in Hogarth, of occasional indulgence in exaggeration. These examples are mostly to be found in the ill.u.s.tration of books which in themselves somewhat outrage the modesty of nature. Hogarth's pictures are often disfigured by a coa.r.s.eness closely bordering on indecency; instances may, indeed, be found where the great artist has pa.s.sed the border with revolting audacity. In the thousands of drawings by Leech, instead of the _double entendre_, we have some delightful trait of child-life; instead of the adulterous husband, we have paterfamilias living a healthy, happy life among his children, only amused at his schoolboy son's tricks played upon his sisters.

Consideration should, no doubt, be shown to Hogarth and his immediate successors in respect of the coa.r.s.eness of the time in which they lived; certainly the works of Bunbury, Woodward, Rowlandson and Gillray require all the excuses that can be made for them. Compared to the two latter-named artists, the two former may be said to be harmless. In the hands of all four, however, caricature reigned triumphant.

Rowlandson had less excuse for the constant displays of vulgarity and ugliness that abound in his works, than the other designers, who were dest.i.tute of any sense of beauty. It was not so with Rowlandson. I have seen early drawings by him full of the charm of beauty in women: refined, and graceful. This power, which one would have thought was a part of the man's nature, vanished altogether as he advanced in life; swamped in the whirl of dissipation in which he lived, his originally better nature became utterly vulgarized by his surroundings. That Rowlandson had a certain very coa.r.s.e humour, a facility in grouping ma.s.ses of figures in large compositions, and a power of inventing faces and figures for which he had no authority in nature, cannot be denied; but there is always an intense vulgarity, in which the man seems to revel with as intense a pleasure.

Gillray altogether differed from Rowlandson, both in his subjects and in the way he treated them. In politics he was a savage partisan, lashing his opponents with merciless fury and cruel personality. Gillray was in art what Churchill was in literature. He had a grim humour all his own; witness his constant attacks upon Bonaparte, then, and always, the _bete noire_ of this country. There are many examples in which the Corsican tyrant is made ridiculous, ferocious, or cowardly, according to the events of the time and the humour of the artist.

In a parody of Belshazzar's feast, Bonaparte, as Belshazzar, has caught sight of the writing on the wall; he looks with extended arms and an expression of cowardly horror at the warning. By his side sits the Empress, an outrage upon the fattest of fat women, ill-drawn and vulgar in the extreme. A man with a face hideous beyond the dreams of ugliness (caricature _in excelsis_) is devouring the Tower of London, which figures as a _plat_ in the banquet; the rest of the guests round the monarch's table, vying with the dreadful gourmand in repulsiveness, are one and all caricatured out of nature. The meats provided for this singular entertainment consist of what may be called English fare, the _piece de resistance_ in front of Bonaparte, which he will presently demolish, being the Bank of England; and that indigestible dish is flanked by St. James's Palace. Then we have the head of Pitt, which is labelled "The Roast Beef of Old England," and served up appetizingly on a trencher, etc. Behind the Emperor stand his guards with huge uplifted sabres, from which blood is dripping, while behind the dropsical Empress stand her ladies-in-waiting, three female ghouls of wondrous hideousness, in dresses so _decolette_ as to shock persons less nice than Mrs. Grundy.

In another example the great Corsican is represented as "Teddy Doll, the great French Gingerbread Baker, drawing out a new Batch of Kings," while his man, Talleyrand, is making up the dough for others. Bonaparte is pictured in uniform, with boots and spurs, and a huge c.o.c.ked-hat with an impossible feather, drawing out a batch of newly-made kings--Bavaria, Wurtemburg, and Baden--from an enormous oven, labelled "New French Oven for Imperial Gingerbread." Beneath the oven-door is what is called "an ash-hole for broken gingerbread." Amongst the _debris_ which has been swept into the ash-hole by a broom labelled "Corsican Besom of Destruction," Spain, a crowned death's head, is prominent; together with Austria, Holland, Switzerland, Venice, etc., "all in wild destruction blent." In the background Hanover is being destroyed by the Prussian Eagle, as Talleyrand is busy kneading up the dough to be presently pa.s.sed from "the Political Kneading-Trough," to reappear in the shape of gingerbread kings of Poland, Turkey, and Hungary, after the manipulation of the King-maker and a visit to the French oven.

There is much grim humour in this piece, and humour as well as a deeper meaning in the parody of "Belshazzar's Feast"; but, turning from such work and the thoughts that arise from it to that of Leech is like turning from a slaughter-house to a flower-garden, from ugliness to beauty.

From the time of Gillray to that of Leech, there is little to be said of the caricaturists, with one splendid exception, "Immortal George." I do not agree with those who place Cruikshank above Leech. Cruikshank was essentially a caricaturist; Leech was not. Comparisons, as Mrs. Malaprop says, are "odorous," but we are sometimes forced into them; and, while admitting that there were certain paths--heights, perhaps--which Cruikshank ascended with honour, and on which Leech could not have found foothold, there was a highroad, bordered by beautiful things, on which he would have easily distanced his formidable rival.

In my young days the political drawings of "H. B.," the father of Richard Doyle, were much esteemed and in great request. They dealt solely with the political events of the hour, and, though feebly drawn and ineffective as works of art, the designer managed to produce unmistakable likenesses of Sir Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington, _et hoc genus_, with remarkable certainty, and always without a trace of caricature.

CHAPTER XI.

KENNY MEADOWS.

The reader has only to look at the early numbers of _Punch_ to see how inferior were the drawings compared to Leech's work, or to that of the excellent artists now at work on _Punch_. Kenny Meadows was perhaps the best; indeed, he was a fellow of excellent fancy, quaintly humorous at times--seen, I think, at his best in his Shakespeare ill.u.s.trations; which, in spite of some extravagance, are full of character, and, as in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," almost poetical in their realization of the scenes of that immortal play. But Kenny was a sad Bohemian, a jovial soul, loving company and the refreshments that attend it, in which he indulged in happy forgetfulness till "all but he departed."

In ill.u.s.tration of Kenny's habits, I introduce a little story told to me by himself. Long years ago Mr. Carter Hall edited a book of British ballads, and engaged a number of artists to ill.u.s.trate them; Kenny Meadows amongst the rest. I also had the honour of supplying a contribution. When the drawings were finished, we were invited one evening to the Rosery--as Mr. Hall called his Brompton cottage--to submit our work for his criticism, and approval or condemnation, as the case might be. Our refreshment was coffee and biscuits, a repast very unsatisfactory to all of us, more or less--to Meadows especially. Kenny bore his disappointment very well till we left the Rosery--this we did at the earliest moment consistent with good manners--when he said, after criticising our entertainment in strong language:

"There is a house close by where we can get supper. What do you fellows say?"

We all said "that was the place for us."

Under Meadows' guidance, we found an inn and an excellent supper, and about midnight, when the fun was getting fast and furious, I left; Meadows remaining with two or three other choice spirits--how long I only knew when I met him a few days afterwards. The time of his return home may be guessed by what follows. Day was breaking as Meadows stealthily entered his bedroom, almost praying that Mrs. Meadows might be asleep; but that lady awoke, and, catching sight of her husband, said:

"You are very late, Meadows."

"Oh no," said Meadows, "I am not; it's quite early."

("So it was, you know," said the Bohemian to me, as he told me of his reception.)

"Early!" exclaimed the wife. "Why, what o'clock is it?"

"Oh, about one, or a little after," said Kenny.

Unluckily, at that moment the peculiar but unmistakable cry of the milkman was heard--"and that pretty well settled the time, you know, Frith."

CHAPTER XII.

"COMIC HISTORY OF ROME."

The extreme difficulty--in some instances the impossibility--of procuring copies of some of the books ill.u.s.trated by Leech makes exact chronological sequence impossible in any attempt to describe the career of the artist. I hope to be pardoned, therefore, for the irregularity of my dates.

In 1852 a "Comic History of Rome" appeared, written by Gilbert a Beckett, with "ten coloured etchings and numerous woodcuts by Leech."

Rome fares pretty much the same as England at the hands of both writer and ill.u.s.trator. In Mr. a Beckett's part of the work the history of Rome becomes a very comic history indeed, and Leech, of course, enters into the spirit of the fun with all his exuberance of fancy and irresistible humour. Visitors to the National Gallery, should they be curious to see the difference of treatment of the same subject by different minds, can be gratified by comparing Rubens' "Rape of the Sabines" with Leech's rendering of that famous historical event.

In one particular the ill.u.s.tration of the scene is identical in both pictures. Rubens dresses the ladies in the costume peculiar to his own time; Leech in the time of Queen Victoria. In the great Fleming's work the princ.i.p.al victim of the Roman youth is the wife of the painter, in the dress of Rubens' day; in Leech's drawing, strange to say, we have an excellent likeness of Mrs. Leech, as she sits complacently on the shoulders of a Roman youth. Rubens, however, pays more attention to truth in the habiliments of his ravishers, for if they, in all probability, did not much resemble Roman soldiers in their habits as they lived, they present a tolerable resemblance to the ancient Roman as we know him. Whereas Leech--while preserving something like the form of the upper part of the Roman costume--cannot be said to be correct when he puts Hessian boots upon one man, hunting-tops upon another, and consigns the nether portion of a third to the military trousers, boots and spurs of the modern Life-Guardsman. n.o.body, I think, will believe that umbrellas were known to the Romans, as Leech would have us to understand, by putting one as a weapon into the hands of the stout, very modern woman belabouring the Roman who is carrying off her daughter.

In explanation of the following cut, I may remind readers of Roman history that Romulus sent cards of invitation to attend certain games to the Latins and Sabines, with their wives and daughters.

"The weather being propitious," says Mr. a Beckett, "all the Sabine beauty and fashion were attracted to the place, and the games, consisting of horse-racing, gave to the scene all the animation of Ascot on a Cup-day. Suddenly, at a preconcerted signal, there was a general elopement of the Roman youth with the Sabine ladies, who were in the most ungallant manner abandoned to their fate by the Sabine gentlemen.

It is true the latter were taken by surprise, but they certainly made the best of their way home before they thought of avenging the wrong and insult that had been committed. Had they been all married ladies who were carried off, the cynic might have suggested that the Sabine husbands would not have objected to a cheap mode of divorce; but--to make use of an Irishism--there was only one single woman who happened to be a wife in the whole of that goodly company."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

An Etruscan ruler named Porsenna had a difficulty with Rome. He speedily besieged that city, frightening the people in the suburbs "out of their wits and into the city, where he never enjoyed a moment's peace till peace was concluded." Presently a treaty of peace was negotiated, greatly to the advantage of Porsenna; for not only was Rome compelled to restore the territory taken from the Veii, but the victor also "claimed hostages, among whom were sundry young ladies of the princ.i.p.al Roman families. One of these was named Claelia, who, with other maidens, having resolved on a bold plunge for their liberty, jumped into the Tiber's bed, and swam like a party of ducks to the other side of the river."