At any rate the British public has always accepted as final Mr. Punch’s opinion on matters of humour. He has given it an almost unbroken tradition—which is more than can be said of any other institution of English art—and it is grateful. When he imported from Australia the brilliant draughtsman Phil May it took the newcomer to its bosom without any hesitation—and he has nestled there ever since. But the artworld—so-called—though on quite good terms with Mr. Punch does not always accept his opinion unquestioned: it has been known to make invidious comparisons between his paper and Jugend or Le Rire, and has even gone so far as to attempt wit at his expense; as in the case of the gentleman who said Punch is “written by Mr. Pickwick, for Mr. Pickwick about Mr. Pickwick”—which was rude and surely lacking in the deference due to our elderly purveyor of humour! However, in the matter of Phil May, Mr. Punch scored handsomely, and persons, even with the highest brows, have accepted his drawings con amore.
Phil May’s drawings look the most spontaneous things imaginable—and no doubt this is true of their humour—but his method of drawing was an elaborate process of elimination. The execution of a rather finished pencil drawing was the first stage of his work—in this he elaborated all the characteristics that his keen eye and ready humour had observed—and the final stage was calligraphic in character and displayed his genius for simplification. With a few deft strokes of the pen—disposed with an almost uncanny knowledge of essentials—he made what appeared to be—when the careful pencil work was rubbed out—a most spontaneous sketch. In truth, it was no such thing, but an intellectual exercise in the eclectic art of elimination arrived at by means exactly opposite to those usually employed by artists who seek spontaneity in their work. Phil May understood the English people and they understood Phil May. His humour synchronized with the public of his day—as did the work of Rowlandson in another age and probably, like his, it will be prized as a record of a period, as well as for its intrinsic value as the work of a most original draughtsman.
The witty line is most often the brief line, but though Phil May’s line was not always a brief one it never failed to be a witty one.
The Englishman has probably the finest collection of drawings that has ever been brought together in one place. It is housed in an excellent museum built for its accommodation and placed in charge of the finest experts that can be found. It is further ordained that if the Englishman wishes to inspect his treasures he shall do so in the greatest possible comfort. No guest of a Sultan could look at his host’s collection of, let us say, Persian miniatures, in more luxury than can the-man-in-the-street look at his own collection of drawings in the Print Room of the British Museum; patient and courteous persons wait on his every whim; and expert opinion, should he require it, is imparted to him without a smile or hint of impatience at his ignorance. In short, everything is done to coax him to a study of his collections except one thing—and that is to inform him that he possesses these treasures.
I think the attention of the Trustees of the British and other Museums might be drawn to the fact that the-man-in-the-street cannot know about his priceless possessions unless someone informs him. The assumption that the information is imparted to him in early youth by his parents is erroneous. He may well live and die, and frequently does, without knowing what the words Print Room stand for. The question of how to inform him if he does not know might be left in the hands of one who is an expert in the art of reaching his intelligence. True, the notice boards of our Museums might then assume a somewhat jaunty air, offensive to the grave habitués—this is what might greet them and what they might not like: “Come where it’s always bright! Free! Now showing all day in the Print Room. The finest collection of drawings in the world: Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, supported by an allstar company of draughtsmen! Central heating! Perfect ventilation!” But the habitués would doubtless come back to their haunts after a few days’ disgusted abstention from their habits and—what is more important—the-man-in-the-street would now be the-man-in-the-Print-Room.
I am aware that the subject I am required to write about is Pen and Pencil Drawings, and I have faith that I shall come to it but—being filled with a desire to write about chalk drawings, charcoal drawings, paintings, the-man-in-the-street, and all manner of things relevant and irrelevant—I need to remind myself of it. Even then I may come to my subject by a route not unlike that taken by Mr. William Caine in his essay on Cats: he began, he continued and he went on to the end in an unbroken eulogy on dogs and their admirable qualities viewed from all angles, and then summed up and dismissed his subject for ever with this line: “Cats have none of these characteristics.”
I shall, then, continue my aberrant course with the remark that I am constantly struck by the fact, in most exhibitions, that in half the pictures there either the subject is too small to deserve a picture or the picture is too large for its subject. The first is an error of taste and the second an error of scale.
The pleasure we derive from a sense of the fitness and rightness of the scale of a picture may be only common-sense but it is certainly lacking in many painters, especially in the average painter of modern “exhibition pictures.” In these so often there are great spaces of merely tinted canvas which serve no really useful or legitimate purpose; and do not even contribute to the scheme of the picture as a decoration. Sometimes, possibly, this coloured canvas may suggest a sense of space and bigness but it is a rather obvious expedient and it fails to be impressive if one compares it with the sense of spaciousness that has been conveyed to one often by a few square inches of paper in a drawing. Fortunately, as a rule, big pictures nowadays are generally painted for exhibitions—just as fat-stock is reared to be shown at a particular agricultural show: the show over—the fat-stock is hastily conveyed to the nearest butcher. But the fate of the big picture is rather mysterious and I will not suggest what I think really happens to it, for after all I may be quite wrong. Certainly in France though, where the output of big pictures is double or treble that of this country, their post-exhibition fate is fairly obvious: the great majority of French houses are incapable of accommodating these Salon triumphs, and it is the rarest thing to find one of these huge canvases in the houses of the rich and ostentatious bourgeois. Happily for the draughtsman he is not tempted to work on the heroic scale so that—when the swing of the pendulum may have placed his work temporarily or permanently out of fashion—his work can usually be accommodated in a portfolio; for the size of a drawing is generally regulated by the medium employed. However, as genius may ignore custom, habit and even existing rules of good taste, someone—with a right to the title—may come along and do silverpoint drawings on ten-foot sheets of paper—just as a famous modern etcher is doing plates of a size absolutely forbidden by the professors, and yet everyone—except a few contemporary etchers—admits them to be masterly.
The official picture could and should be a human document, but this it can hardly be if all humorous side-lights are rigidly excluded in it—however serious the affairs it purports to present. The old masters knew human nature, therefore in their paintings of ceremonial affairs they did not forget to touch delicately on its weaknesses, even sometimes accenting these as comic-relief. Though I would not be so rash as to suggest the desirability of comic-relief in our official pictures, I am tempted to think that relief of some kind would be well received.