After aiming for a Quarter of and Hour Mr. B. fires both of his Barrels—and—misses!!!! Tableau—The Forester's Anguish—Punch, 1861.]
To have seen these sketches of the hunting-field is to have been there in person. 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; he is more winning and sympathetic than even Mr. Pickwick himself, and I almost think a greater creation! Besides, it took two to make Mr. Pickwick, the author and the artist, whereas Mr. Briggs issued fully equipped from the brain of Leech alone!
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!
[Illustration: THANK GOODNESS! FLY-FISHING HAS BEGUN!
MILLER. "Don't they really, perhaps they'll bite better towards the cool of the evening, they mostly do."—Punch, 1857.] Then there are the fishermen who never catch any fish, but whom no stress of weather can daunt or distress. 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.
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.
And how many people and things he loves that most of us love!—it would take all night to enumerate them—the good authoritative pater- and materfamilias; the delightful little girls; the charming cheeky school-boys; the jolly little street Arabs, who fill old gentlemen's letter-boxes with oyster-shells and gooseberry-skins; the cabmen, the busmen; the policemen with the old-fashioned chimney-pot hat; the old bathing-women, and Jack-ashores, and jolly old tars—his British tar is irresistible, whether he is hooking a sixty-four pounder out of the Black Sea, or riding a Turk, or drinking tea instead of grog and complaining of its strength! There seems to be hardly a mirthful corner of English life that Leech has not seen and loved and painted in this singularly genial and optimistic manner.
[Illustration: "THE JOLLY LITTLE STREET ARABS"
From the original drawing for Punch in possession of John Kendrick
Bangs, Esq.]
His loves are many and his hates are few—but he is a good hater all the same. He hates Mawworm and Stiggins, and so do we. He hates the foreigner—whom he does not know, as heartily as Thackeray does, who seems to know him so well—with a hatred that seems to me a little unjust, perhaps: all France is not in Leicester Square; many Frenchmen can dress and ride, drive and shoot as well as anybody; and they began to use the tub very soon after we did—a dozen years or so, perhaps—say after the coup d'état in 1851.