TEACHER. "And what Comes after T?"
PUPIL. "For all that we have Received," &c., &c.—Punch, February 17, 1869.]
Our pictorial satirist taking the greatest pains, doing his very best, can produce, say, a hundred of these little pictures in a twelvemonth, while his elder brother of the brush bestows an equal labour and an equal time on one important canvas, which will take another twelvemonth to engrave, perhaps, for the benefit of those fortunate enough to be able to afford the costly engraving of that one priceless work of art, which only one millionaire can possess at a time. Happy millionaire! happy painter—just as likely as not to become a millionaire himself! And this elder brother of the brush will be the first to acknowledge his little brother's greatness—if the little brother's work be well done. You should hear how the first painters of our time, here and abroad, express themselves about Charles Keene! They do not speak of him as a little brother, I tell you, but a very big brother indeed.
Thackeray, for me, and many others, the greatest novelist, satirist, humorist of our time, where so many have been great, is said to have at the beginning of his career wished to illustrate the books of others—Charles Dickens's, I believe, for one. Fortunately, perhaps, for us and for him, and perhaps for Dickens, he did not succeed; he lived to write books of his own, and to illustrate them himself; and it is generally admitted that his illustrations, clever as they are, were not up to the mark of his writings.
It was not his natural mode of expression—and I doubt if any amount of training and study would have made it a successful mode: the love of the thing does not necessarily carry the power to do it. That he loved it he has shown us in many ways, and also that he was always practising it. Most of my hearers will remember his beautiful ballad of "The Pen and the Album"—
"I am my master's faithful old gold pen.
I've served him three long years, and drawn since then
Thousands of funny women and droll men …"
[Illustration: THE HEIGHT OF IMPROPRIETY
MISS GRUNDISON, JUNIOR. "There goes Lucy Holyroyd, all alone in a Boat with young Snipson as usual. So impudent of them!"
HER ELDER SISTER. "Yes; how shocking if they were Upset and Drowned— without a Chaperon, you know!"—Punch, August 8, 1891.]
Now conceive—it is not an impossible conception—that the marvellous gift of expression that he was to possess in words had been changed by some fairy at his birth into an equal gift of expression by means of the pencil, and that he had cultivated the gift as assiduously as he cultivated the other, and finally that he had exercised it as sedulously through life, bestowing on innumerable little pictures in black and white all the wit and wisdom, the wide culture, the deep knowledge of the world and of the human heart, all the satire, the tenderness, the drollery, and last, but not least, that incomparable perfection of style that we find in all or most that he has written—what a pictorial record that would be!