Social Pictorial Satire Part 3

John Tenniel had already, it is true, replaced him for several years as the political cartoonist of _Punch_. How admirably he has always filled that post, then and ever since, and how great his fame is, I need not speak of here. Linley Sambourne and Harry Furniss, so different from each other and from Tenniel, have also, since then, brought their great originality and their unrivalled skill to the political ill.u.s.trations of _Punch_--Sambourne to the ill.u.s.tration of many other things in it besides, but which do not strictly belong to the present subject.

I am here concerned with the social ill.u.s.trators alone, and, besides, only with those who have made the sketches of social subjects in _Punch_ the princ.i.p.al business of their lives. For very many artists, from Sir John Millais, Sir John Gilbert, Frederick Walker, and Randolph Caldecott downward, have contributed to that fortunate periodical at one time or another, and not a few distinguished amateurs.

Miss Georgina Bowers, Mr. Corbould, and others have continued the fox-hunting tradition, and provided those scenes which have become a necessity to the sporting readers of _Punch_.

To Charles Keene was fairly left that part of the succession that was most to his taste--the treatment of life in the street and the open country, in the shops and parlours of the lower middle cla.s.s, and the homes of the people.

And to me were allotted the social and domestic dramas, the nursery, the school-room, the dining and drawing rooms, and croquet-lawns of the more or less well-to-do.

I was particularly told not to try to be broadly funny, but to undertake the light and graceful business, like a _jeune premier_. I was, in short, to be the tenor, or rather the tenorino, of that little company for which Mr. Punch beats time with his immortal baton, and to warble in black and white such melodies as I could evolve from my contemplations of the gentler aspect of English life, while Keene, with his magnificent, highly trained ba.s.so, sang the comic songs.

We all became specialised, so to speak, and divided Leech's vast domain among us.

We kicked a little at first, I remember, and whenever (to continue the musical simile) I could get in a comic song, or what I thought one, or some queer fantastic ditty about impossible birds and beasts and fishes and what not, I did not let the opportunity slip; while Keene, who had a very fine falsetto on the top of his chest register, would now and then warble, pianissimo, some little ballad of the drawing-room or nursery.

Ill.u.s.tration: FELINE AMENITIES

But gradually we settled into our respective grooves, and I have grown to like my little groove very much, narrow though it be--a poor thing, but mine own!

"I_wish_ you hadn't asked Captain Wareham, Lizzie. Horrid man! I can't bear him!"

"Dear me, Charlotte--isn't the world big enough for you both?"

"Yes; but your little Dining-room _isn't_!"--_Punch_, February 16, 1889.]

Moreover, certain physical disabilities that I have the misfortune to labour under make it difficult for me to study and sketch the l.u.s.ty things in the open air and sunshine. My sight, besides being defective in many ways, is so sensitive that I cannot face the common light of day without gla.s.ses thickly rimmed with wire gauze, so that sketching out of doors is often to me a difficult and distressing performance.

That is also partly why I am not a sportsman and a delineator of sport.

I mention this infirmity not as an excuse for my shortcomings and failures--for them there is no excuse--but as a reason why I have abstained from the treatment of so much that is so popular, delightful, and exhilarating in English country life. If there had been no Charles Keene (a terrible supposition both for _Punch_ and its readers), I should have done my best to ill.u.s.trate the lower walks and phases of London existence, which attracts me as much as any other. It is just as easy to draw a costermonger or a washerwoman as it is a gentleman or lady--perhaps a little easier--but it is by no means so easy to draw them as Keene did! And to draw a cab or an omnibus after him (though I have sometimes been obliged to do so) is almost tempting Providence!

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. For it was originally intended that I should be a man of science.

Dr. Williamson, the eminent chemist and professor of chemistry, told me not long ago that he remembers caricatures that I drew, now forty years back, when I was studying under him at the Laboratory of Chemistry at University College, and that he and other grave and reverend professors were hugely tickled by them at the time. Indeed, he remembers nothing else about me, except that I promised to be a very bad chemist.

I was a very bad chemist indeed, but not for long! As soon as I was free to do as I pleased, I threw up test-tubes and crucibles and went back to Paris, where I was born and brought up, and studied to become an artist in M. Gleyre's studio. Then I went to Antwerp, where there is a famous school of painting, and where I had no less a person than Mr. Alma-Tadema as a fellow-student. It was all delightful, but misfortune befell me, and I lost the sight of one eye--perhaps it was the eye with which I used to do the funny caricatures; it was a very good eye, much the better of the two, and the other has not improved by having to do a double share of the work.

And then in time I came to England and drew for _Punch_, thus fulfilling the early prophecy of my friends and fellow-students at University College--though not quite in the sense they antic.i.p.ated.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE NEW SOCIETY CRAZE

THE NEW GOVERNESS (_through her pretty nose_). "Waall--I come right slick away from Ne'York City, an' I ain't had much time for foolin'

around in Europe--you bet! So I can't fix up your Gals in the Eu- ropean languages, no-how!"

BELGRAVIAN MAMMA: (_who knows there's a Duke or two still left in the Matrimonial Market_). "Oh, that's of no consequence. I want my Daughters to aquire the American Accent in all its purity--and the Idioms, and all that. Now I'm sure _you_ will do _admirably_!"-- _Punch_, December 1, 1888.]

I will not attempt a description of my work--it is so recent and has been so widely circulated that it should be unnecessary to do so. If you do not remember it, it is that it is not worth remembering; if you do, I can only entreat you to be to my faults a little blind, and to my virtues very kind!

I have always tried as honestly and truthfully as lies in me to serve up to the readers of _Punch_ whatever I have culled with the bodily eye, after cooking it a little in the brain. My raw material requires more elaborate working than Leech's. He dealt more in flowers and fruits and roots, if I may express myself so figuratively--from the lordly pineapple and lovely rose, down to the humble daisy and savory radish. _I_ deal in vegetables, I suppose. Little that I ever find seems to me fit for the table just as I see it; moreover, by dishing it up raw I should offend many people and make many enemies, and deserve to do so. I cook my green pease, asparagus, French beans, Brussels sprouts, German sauerkraut, and even a truffle now and then, so carefully that you would never recognise them as they were when I first picked them in the social garden. And they do not recognise themselves! Or even each other!

And I do my best to dish them up in good, artistic style. Oh that I could arrange for you a truffle with all that culinary skill that Charles Keene brought to the mere boiling of a carrot or a potato! He is the _cordon bleu_ par excellence. The people I meet seem to me more interesting than funny--so interesting that I am well content to draw them as I see them, after just a little arrangement and a very transparent disguise--and without any attempt at caricature. The better-looking they are, the more my pencil loves them, and I feel more inclined to exaggerate in this direction than in any other.

Sam Weller, if you recollect, was fond of "pootiness and wirtue." I _so_ agree with him! I adore them both, especially in women and children. I only wish that the wirtue was as easy to draw as the pootiness.

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; worse than all, in the evening dress of the period!--that I cannot surround my divinity with a guard of honour more worthily arrayed!

Thus, of all my little piebald puppets, the one I value the most is my pretty woman. I am as fond of her as Leech was of his; of whom, by-the-way, she is the granddaughter! This is not artistic vanity; it is pure paternal affection, and by no means prevents me from seeing her faults; it only prevents me from seeing them as clearly as you do!

Please be not very severe on her, for her grandmother's sake. Words fail me to express how much I loved her grandmother, who wore a cricket-cap and broke Aunt Sally's nose seven times.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A PICTORIAL PUZZLE

TENOR WARBLER (_with pa.s.sionate emphasis on the first word of each line_)-- "_Me-e-e-e-e-e-t_ me once again, M-e-e-e-e-t me once aga-a-ain--"

_Why does the Cat suddenly jump off the Hearth-rug, rush to the Door, and make frantic Endeavors to get out_?--_Punch_.]

Will my pretty woman ever be all I wish her to be? All she ought to be? I fear not! On the mantelpiece in my studio at home there stands a certain lady. She is but lightly clad, and what simple garment she wears is not in the fashion of our day. How well I know her! Almost thoroughly by this time--for she has been the silent companion of my work for thirty years! She has lost both her arms and one of her feet, which I deplore; and also the tip of her nose, but that has been made good!

She is only three feet high, or thereabouts, and quite two thousand years old, or more; but she is ever young--

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety!"

and a very giantess in beauty. For she is a reduction in plaster of the famous statue at the Louvre.

They call her the Venus of Milo, or Melos! It is a calumny--a libel.

She is no Venus, except in good looks; and if she errs at all, it is on the side of austerity. She is not only pootiness but wirtue incarnate (if one can be incarnate in marble), from the crown of her lovely head to the sole of her remaining foot--a very beautiful foot, though by no means a small one--it has never worn a high-heel shoe!

Like all the best of its kind, and its kind the best, she never sates nor palls, and the more I look at her the more I see to love and worship--and, alas! the more dissatisfied I feel--not indeed with the living beauty, ripe and real, that I see about and around--mere life is such a beauty in itself that no stone ideal can ever hope to match it! But dissatisfied with the means at my command to do the living beauty justice--a little bit of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of ink--and, alas! fingers and an eye less skilled than they would have been if I had gone straight to a school of art instead of a laboratory for chemistry!

And now for social pictorial satire considered as a fine art.

They who have practised it hitherto, from Hogarth downward, have not been many--you can count their names on your fingers! And the wide popularity they have won may be due as much to their scarcity as to the interest we all take in having the mirror held up to ourselves--to the malicious pleasure we all feel at seeing our neighbours held up to gentle ridicule or well-merited reproof; most of all, perhaps, to the realistic charm that lies in all true representation of the social aspects with which we are most familiar, ugly as these are often apt to be, with our chimney-pot hats, and trousers that unfit us, it seems, for serious and elaborate pictorial treatment at the hands of the foremost painters of our own times--except when we sit to them for our portraits; then they have w.i.l.l.y-nilly to make the best of us, just as we are!

[Ill.u.s.tration: REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH

(SCENE--_A Drawing-room in "Pa.s.sionate Brompton_.")

FAIR AESTHETIC (_suddenly, and in deepest tones to Smith, who has just been introduced to take her in to Dinner_).

"Are you Intense?"--_Punch_, June 14, 1879.]

The plays and novels that succeed the most are those which treat of the life of our own day; not so the costly pictures we hang upon our walls. We do not care to have continually before our eyes elaborate representations of the life we lead every day and all day long; we like best that which rather takes us out of it--romantic or graceful episodes of another time or clime, when men wore prettier clothes than they do now--well-imagined, well-painted scenes from cla.s.sic lore--historical subjects--subjects selected from our splendid literature and what not; or, if we want modern subjects, we prefer scenes chosen from a humble sphere, which is not that of those who can afford to buy pictures--the toilers of the earth--the toilers of the sea--pathetic scenes from the inexhaustible annals of the poor; or else, again, landscapes and seascapes--things that bring a whiff of nature into our feverish and artificial existence--that are in direct contrast to it.

And even with these beautiful things, how often the charm wears away with the novelty of possession! How often and how soon the lovely picture, like its frame, becomes just as a piece of wall-furniture, in which we take a pride, certainly, and which we should certainly miss if it were taken away--but which we grow to look at with the pathetic indifference of habit--if not, indeed, with aversion!

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! The book is shut, the newspaper thrown aside. Not so the beautiful picture; it is like a perennial nosegay, for ever exhaling its perfume for noses that have long ceased to smell it!