Hand and eye worked with brain in singular harmony, and all three improved together contemporaneously, with a parallelism most interesting to note, as one goes through the long series of his social pictures from the beginning.
He has no doubts or hesitations—no bewildering subtleties—no seeking from twelve to fourteen o'clock—either in his ideas or technique, which very soon becomes an excellent technique, thoroughly suited to his ideas—rapid, bold, spirited, full of colour, breadth, and movement—troubling itself little about details that will not help the telling of his story—for before everything else he has his story to tell, and it must either make you laugh or lightly charm you—and he tells it in the quickest, simplest, down-rightest pencil strokes, although it is often a complicated story!
For there are not only the funny people and the pretty people acting out their little drama in the foreground—there is the scene in which they act, and the middle distance, and the background beyond, and the sky itself; beautiful rough landscapes and seascapes and skyscapes, winds and weathers, boisterous or sunny seas, rain and storm and cloud—all the poetry of nature, that he feels most acutely while his little people are being so unconsciously droll in the midst of it all. He is a king of impressionists, and his impression becomes ours on the spot—never to be forgotten! It is all so quick and fresh and strong, so simple, pat, and complete, so direct from mother Nature herself! It has about it the quality of inevitableness—those are the very people who would have acted and spoken in just that manner, and we meet them every day—the expression of the face, the movement and gesture, in anger, terror, dismay, scorn, conceit, tenderness, elation, triumph…. Whatever the mood, they could not have looked or acted otherwise—it is life itself. An optimistic life in which joyousness prevails, and the very woes and discomfitures are broadly comical to us who look on—like some one who has sea-sickness, or a headache after a Greenwich banquet—which are about the most tragic things he has dealt with.
(I am speaking of his purely social sketches. For in his admirable large cuts, political and otherwise serious, his satire is often bitter and biting indeed; and his tragedy almost Hogarthian.)
Like many true humorists, he was of a melancholy temperament, and no doubt felt attracted by all that was mirthful and bright, and in happy contrast to his habitual mood. Seldom if ever does a drop of his inner sadness ooze out through his pencil-point—and never a drop of gall; and I do not remember one cynical touch in his whole series.
In his tastes and habits he was by nature aristocratic; he liked the society of those who were well dressed, well bred and refined like himself, and perhaps a trifle conventional; he conformed quite spontaneously and without effort to upper-class British ideal of his time, and had its likes and dislikes. But his strongest predilections of all are common to the British race: his love of home, his love of sport, his love of the horse and the hound—especially his love of the pretty woman—the pretty woman of the normal, wholesome English type. This charming creature so dear to us all pervades his show from beginning to end—she is a creation of his, and he thoroughly loves her, and draws her again and again with a fondness that is half lover-like and half paternal—her buxom figure, her merry bright eyes and fresh complexion and flowing ringlets, and pursed-up lips like Cupid's bow. Nor is he ever tired of displaying her feet and ankles (and a little more) in gales of wind on cliff and pier and parade, or climbing the Malvern Hills. When she puts on goloshes it nearly breaks his heart, and he would fly to other climes! He revels in her infantile pouts and jealousies and heart-burnings and butterfly delights and lisping mischiefs; her mild, innocent flirtations with beautiful young swells, whose cares are equally light.
She is a darling, and he constantly calls her so to her face. Her favourite seaside nook becomes the mermaid's haunt; her back hair flies and dries in the wind, and disturbs the peace of the too susceptible Punch. She is a little amazon pour rire, and rides across country, and drives (even a hansom sometimes, with a pair of magnificent young whiskerandoes smoking their costly cigars inside); she is a toxophilite, and her arrow sticks, for it is barbed with innocent seduction, and her bull's-eye is the soft military heart. She wears a cricket-cap and breaks Aunt Sally's nose seven times; she puts her pretty little foot upon the croquet-ball—and croquet'd you are completely! With what glee she would have rinked and tennised if he had lived a little longer!
[Illustration: "IN THE BAY OF BISCANY O"
The Last Sweet Thing in Hats and Walking-Sticks.—Punch, September 27, 1862.]
She is light of heart, and perhaps a little of head! Her worst trouble is when the captain gives the wing of the fowl to some other darling who might be her twin-sister; her most terrible nightmare is when she dreams that great stupid Captain Sprawler upsets a dish of trifle over her new lace dress with the blue satin slip; but next morning she is herself again, and rides in the Row, and stops to speak with that great stupid Captain Sprawler, who is very nice to look at, whose back is very beautiful, and who sprawls most gracefully over the railings, and pays her those delightful, absurd compliments about her and her horse "being such a capital pair," while, as a foil to so much grace and splendour, a poor little snub-nosed, ill-dressed, ill-conditioned dwarf of a snob looks on, sucking the top of his cheap cane in abject admiration and hopeless envy! Then she pats and kisses the nice soft nose of Cornet Flinders's hunter, which is "deucedly aggravating for Cornet Flinders, you know"—but when that noble sportsman is frozen out and cannot hunt, she plays scratch-cradle with him in the boudoir of her father's country house, or pitches chocolate into his mouth from the oak landing; and she lets him fasten the skates on to her pretty feet. Happy cornet! And she plays billiards with her handsome cousin—a guardsman at least—and informs him that she is just eighteen to his love—and stands under the mistletoe and asks this enviable relation of hers to show her what the garroter's hug is like; and when he proceeds to do so she calls out in distress because his pointed waxed moustache has scratched her pretty cheek; and when Mr. Punch is there, at dinner, she and a sister darling pull crackers across his August white waistcoat, and scream in pretty terror at the explosion; to that worthy's excessive jubilation, for Mr. Punch is Leech himself, and nothing she does can ever be amiss in his eyes!