DR. JOHN BROWN AND LEECH.
Whether that charming writer, Dr. John Brown, knew Leech in the flesh or not, I cannot say; but that he knew and fully appreciated him in spirit is evident enough in a paper published in a collection of essays entitled "Horæ Subsecivæ." I gather from the concluding passages of the Doctor's brilliant essay that it had been his intention to have written Leech's life, having collected much material for the purpose, but that "ill-health put a stop to this congenial labour." How admirably the labour would have been executed may be shown by the following extracts:
"Leech," says Dr. Brown, "was singularly modest, both as a man and an artist. This came by nature, and was indicative of the harmony and sweetness of his essence; but doubtless the perpetual going to Nature, and drawing out of her fulness, kept him humble, as well as made him rich—made him (what every man of sense and power must be) conscious of his own strength. But before 'the great mother' he was simple and loving, attentive to her lessons as a child, for ever learning and doing."
Again: "Of all our satirists, none have such a pervading sense and power of girlish, ripe, and womanly beauty as Leech.... There is a genuine domesticity about his scenes that could come only from a man who was much at his own fireside, and in the nursery when baby was washed. You see, he is himself pater familias, with no Bohemian trait or raffish turn. What he draws, he has seen; what he asks you to live in, and laugh at and with, he has laughed at and lived in. It is this wholesomeness and (to use the right word) this goodness that makes Leech more than a drawer of funny pictures, more even than a great artist. It makes him a teacher and an example of virtue in its widest sense, from that of manliness to the sweet devotion of a woman, and the loving open mouth and eyes of parvula on your knee."
I find it difficult to believe that these remarks were written by one who had no personal knowledge of Leech; indeed, I should have thought the writer must have enjoyed an amount of intimacy with him. If Dr. Brown and Leech were strangers to each other, the writer's accurate estimate of the artist shows how exactly the drawings reflect the delightful nature of their producer, so familiar to his nearest friends.
"What we owe to him," adds Dr. Brown, "of wholesome, hearty mirth and pleasure, and of something better than either—good as they are—purity, affection, pluck, humour, kindliness, good-humour, good-feeling, good-breeding, the love of Nature, of one another, of truth, the joys of children, the loveliness of our homely English fields, with their sunsets and village spires, their glimpses into the pure infinite beyond, the sea and all its fulness, its waves 'curling their monstrous heads and hanging them,' their crisping smiles on sunlit sands—all that variety of Nature and of man, which is only less infinite than its Maker! Something of this and of that mysterious quality called humour, that fragrance and flavour of the soul, which God has given us to cheer our lot, to help us to 'take heart and hope and steer right onward,' to have our joke, that lets us laugh and make game of ourselves when we have little else to laugh at or play with, of that which gives us when we will the silver lining of the cloud, and paints a rainbow on the darkened sky out of our own 'troublous tears'—something of all these has this great, simple-hearted, hard-working artist given to us and to our children as a joy and a possession for ever. Let us be grateful to him; let us give him our best honour, affection, and regard."
Walking with Leech one day, we met an old gentleman, to whom I introduced my friend: early in the fifties it was. The old man, though well stricken in years, sported a dark and heavy moustache.
"And so," said Leech, when, after a few commonplaces, we separated, "that is old Mr. Blank the portrait-painter, is it? What on earth induces him to wear purple moustachios?" Purple they were, certainly, and of rather a bright tinge.
"Well," I replied, "he has dyed them, for they were white the other day."
"In my opinion," said Leech, "only soldiers should be allowed moustachios."
In my early days, that "hirsute appendage" created such a prejudice against the wearers as would not be credited in these beard-bearing times. There were places of business the doors of which were closed against the moustache. At a well-known bank complete shaving of moustache and beard is insisted upon to this day. The sufferings of our troops in the Crimea were sufficiently agonizing without the torment or even the possibility of the morning's shave; and it is to the Russian campaign we owe the "beard movement," which from that time to the present is so universal. Our officers returned from their battles covered with glory and hair, and so much improved by the latter—in the opinion of those whose approval was most valued—as to make a sacrifice of it out of the question. Little did Leech imagine when he made his sweeping objection to the moustache, what a factor he would find it in his future work. How many delightful sketches turn upon it! Who can forget those two little rival snobs—rivals in the love of some fair approver of beards—who have withdrawn themselves from society during the incubation of their moustachios, and who, having accidentally sought the same suburban retirement, meet face to face, stubbly beard to stubbly beard, at a corner of a lane? And that precocious young gentleman who asks his sisters if they approve of the removal of a moustache, the presence of which they had never been able to discover!
Under the heading of "The Beard Movement," we have a British swell in a fainting state in the arms of a policeman; this serious condition having arisen from the sight of a postman with moustachios. In another drawing, policemen are marching to their posts of duty decorated by beards of such magnitude as to strike terror into the street boys, who scatter in all directions at the sight of them.
In "Pictures of Life and Character" other examples of the alarm excited by the beard movement are given with the refined humour peculiar to Leech.
I find I have to modify somewhat my conviction that Leech rarely adopted the subjects proposed to him for illustration; no doubt by far the largest number were the outcome of his own conception, or observation of incidents in his experience; but I have proof of several examples to the contrary. For instance, Mr. Holman Hunt says: "One Friday night I had sat down to much correspondence, intending before concluding to write of two or three amusing facts picked up that might suit him (Leech) for illustration. It had become very late, and I was clearing away my paper, when, with vexation, I remembered his letter had not been written. I seized the pen, and on a page I drew two horizontal lines quite dividing the space. In the top I put: 'Scene—Kitchen garden, country cottage. Dramatis Personæ: Factotum, master entering,' and then a line or two of dialogue.
"The second subject I treated similarly, and the third also, which was not so promising. I enclosed this without a word to Leech, and posted it with my other letters about two in the morning. The following Wednesday the two subjects, admirably treated, were in Punch. When next I saw him he was eager with excuses for not having written. He added: 'The letter when it was opened at breakfast was most opportune, for I had to leave town by five, and I was bound to furnish two designs before going, and I had come down without having the wildest notion what to do. The subjects in your note were ready-made, and I was able to sketch them without a moment's waste of time."
Mr. Hunt tells an anecdote of Kenny Meadows, the jovial Bohemian, whom, I hope, the reader of these pages may remember, that is so characteristic and amusing, and illustrative of his own nature and of that of Leech, that I insert it in this place. "Meadows was quite at the head of the Punch artists when Leech joined them, and was naturally delighted by the praise bestowed upon his drawings by 'this ruler amongst the illustrators of Punch.' He—Meadows—declared that a sight of Leech's illustrations had so disgusted him with his own work that he felt inclined to give up art altogether. 'Why,' said he, 'should I go on giving proof after proof of my incapacity when you leave me so far behind?' This modest effusion was uttered early in the evening, and before the setting in of the gin-and-water period, which was destined to effect a striking change in Meadows' estimate of himself, and of the recent addition to the pictorial staff.
"Leech was a sincere admirer of Meadows' work, and of this he assured the self-condemning artist in no measured terms, instancing for special praise many of Kenny's designs brimming over with poetic conceits in the illustrations of Shakespeare. Meadows listened to Leech's compliments, and said it was 'deuced liberal' of him to say what he did. He then mixed himself a glass of gin and water, saying, 'Well, after all, it's wise to make the best of things, and be as jolly as one can under all circumstances.'
"The two artists then fell into general conversation, and into—on the part of one of them—the imbibing of much gin and water. Under the influence of the latter, Meadows returned to the subject of his own works, and proceeded to show in what respect they surpassed those of others—even Leech's, which were worthless from the absence of 'poetry,' which ought to sanctify all art.
"'Give me imagination or nothing, my dear boy!' he exclaimed. 'I don't want your commonplace facts done with a little trick of caricature, as it is called. Why don't you aim at something better, something higher? I would rather do nothing than the things you do, which, not only in design, but in execution, are unworthy of a true artist.'"
All this was told to my friend by Leech himself, and, says Mr. Hunt, "Leech's shrug of the shoulders, expressive of bearing infinite disgrace, was the gesture of a comedian, but a hearty, good-natured laugh gave the real expression of the feeling left in his kind soul; there was not a jot of malice there against the severe judgment upon himself. The Scandinavian hero returning so sedate from victory that he might have been supposed to have suffered a defeat, or from disaster in the field, so composed that he might have been thought victorious, could not have surpassed Leech's manner in accepting both the praise and the censure of his elder rival."
Another old friend of mine, Mr. Horsley, R.A., offers further proof of Leech's occasional acceptance of suggestions for his designs. In the course of a walk Mr. Horsley was accosted by one of those itinerant traders to whom the street is the shop, and solicited to buy a rope of onions.
"Take the last rope, sir," says the man. My friend looks like a prosperous gentleman, to whom the offer might be made with a prospect of success, though the awkwardness of his appearance with the addition of a long rope of large onions in his hand would most likely prove a deterrent to the purchase. Mr. Horsley declined the offer, but it instantly occurred to him that such a proposal, if made to one of Leech's "swells," would be intensely comic, and he accordingly mentioned the incident to Leech, who smiled as usual and said nothing. A drawing, however, appeared immediately in Punch, but, strange to say, the incident is defrauded of much, if not all, its humour. The swell leaves nothing to be desired, except that he certainly should have been alone, and not, as according to Leech, accompanied by a lady, to whom the onions might have been useful. The absurdity surely consisted in the ludicrous position of a young gentleman who was subjected to an offer of which he would scarcely know the meaning, and much less likely to take advantage of it. My friend expressed his disappointment to Leech, who, with characteristic modesty, acknowledged his mistake.
"I may mention another curious failure," says Mr. Horsley. "Leech came into my room one day roaring with laughter at a story he had just heard of two small boys who had been overheard discussing the age of a companion, and one said to the other, 'Well, I don't 'zactly know how old Charley is; but he must be very old, for he blows his own nose.' This is delightful as coming from the little chaps that Leech drew so perfectly; but, wonderful to relate, he represented the conversation as passing between a boy looking fourteen or fifteen and a girl in a riding-habit."
"He Blows His Nose."
I subjoin the first idea of that which seems to be the incident told to Mr. Horsley, though it fails to illustrate the scene as described by Mr. Horsley, or the rendering of it afterwards adopted by Leech. The sketch, however, will show the rough manner in which all the thoughts so perfectly expressed on the wood-block were first sketched by the artist.