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 sparseness 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.
[Illustration: 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From an unpublished photograph by Fradelle and Young, London.]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.
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 illustrations of Punch—Sambourne to the illustration of many other things in it besides, but which do not strictly belong to the present subject.
I am here concerned with the social illustrators alone, and, besides, only with those who have made the sketches of social subjects in Punch the principal 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 class, and the homes of the people.