Social Pictorial Satire Part 2

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 pa.s.sion 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 b.u.t.tonhole, 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, h.o.a.rdings with advertis.e.m.e.nts--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 pa.s.sionate 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 compa.s.s--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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 mult.i.tude, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 cla.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 amus.e.m.e.nt.

Whereas a great many of Keene's middle-cla.s.s 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?

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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-cla.s.s people--those wonderful philistines of either s.e.x; 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 c.o.c.ked 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 cla.s.ses 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 sn.o.bs, 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 s.e.x 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 ill.u.s.tration 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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 spa.r.s.eness 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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.