“Doyle remonstrated, but received answer that, as he had been allowed to turn Exeter Hall and its doings into ridicule, it was only fair that his own opinions should have their turn. But those who used this argument little knew, and could scarcely be expected to know, the difference between the devotion of supernatural faith and the bigotry of a self-chosen creed. Doyle was anything but narrow or over-scrupulous. It was not any of the cartoons which was the immediate occasion of the step that he took, nor was it (as some of the notices of him have intimated) any mere personal attachment to Cardinal Wiseman. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said, ‘as long as you keep to the political and personal side of the matter, but doctrines you must not attack.’ Douglas Jerrold and Thackeray were not likely to appreciate this reversal of the general sentiment, which resents personal attack above all else. ‘Look at the Times,’ they argued; ‘its language has been most violent, but the Catholic writers on its staff do not for that reason resign. They understand, and the world at large understands, that the individual contributor is not responsible for the opinions expressed by other contributors in articles with which he has nothing to do.’ ‘That is very well in the Times,’ was Doyle’s answer, ‘but not in Punch. For the Times is a monarchy [we believe these were his very words], whereas Punch is a republic.’ So, when a week or so later an article, attributed to Jerrold himself, jeeringly advised the Pope to ’feed his flock on the wafers of the Vatican,’ it was too much for Doyle. Dignified protest was not sufficient now. To be any longer identified with a paper which could use such language was intolerable to the faithful soul. To ply his skilful fingers and busy inventive brain in behalf of those who scoffed at the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar was out of the question. His connection with Punch must cease. But is he bound in conscience to throw away a good income and congenial work, because there were expressed opinions different from his own in a paper in which, republic though it was, solidarity was scarcely possible? Who would expect that in a comic journal each and all of the contributors should agree with each and every sentiment expressed? Never mind; whatever Richard Doyle might have been strictly bound to do, generosity at least urged him to make the sacrifice—the sacrifice of his career, of his future success it may be. At least he could show that Catholic belief was no empty superstition, no set of mere traditional observances, which sat lightly on the man of culture, even if in his heart he accepted them at all. So he wrote to resign his connection with Punch, stating the reasons plainly and simply. This was in 1850, after he had been contributing for more than six years. Now he must simply start afresh, in consequence of what his Protestant friends regarded as an ecclesiastical crotchet. He must turn aside from the path of worldly success; he must give up all for conscience’ sake. But as the Daily Telegraph remarks, in an article respecting him that does it honour, ‘He made a wise and prudent choice. The loss was ours, not his; and, apart from the claims of his genius to admiration, such conduct at the critical moment of a career will never cease to command respect.’”
Passing by (as we may afford to do) the assertion that we Protestants “raved and stormed and talked bigoted nonsense without end respecting this new invasion,” and the somewhat unnecessary boast that Lord John Russell’s Ecclesiastical Titles Bill has been suffered to become a “futile and obsolete” measure, we would recognise the value of the writer’s remarks as establishing in the clearest possible manner the perfect honesty and unselfishness of the motives which induced the artist to resign his connection with Punch, and to throw up the chances of an assured and brilliant future. We think however, that the value of his statement does not end here. We may here acknowledge that, while admitting the perfect purity and disinterestedness of Doyle’s motives, we ourselves never thoroughly understood them until we had read the article from which we have quoted. We had taken into consideration the fact that when he took this decided step he was but twenty-five years of age, and we suspected (let us honestly own it) that other influences might have been at work independent of the artist himself, of which we as Protestants must always remain ignorant. There are grounds on which Protestant and Catholic writers may meet one another even in connection with religious questions; and although a “bigoted” Protestant, I am glad to admit that the writer’s clear and lucid statement has removed an impression that was absolutely without foundation.
With respect, however, to the ultimate consequences of this decisive step, the Catholic writer and ourselves are wholly at variance. “We are inclined to believe,” continues the former, “that apart from the respect he earned by his noble sacrifice, Mr. Doyle achieved a higher reputation in consequence of his retirement from comic journalism, than if he had continued to employ his pencil in its services all his life through. It is true that his name was not, towards the end of his life, so familiar to the popular mind of England as was that of John Leech at the end of his career, and as that of Du Maurier at the present time, but the work which he did in his later life was more lasting and more world-wide. Punch is an English periodical; you must be an Englishman to understand the allusions. The humour is essentially and almost exclusively English; it would never attain any great popularity in other English-speaking nations, in spite of its undoubted claim to be the first comic journal in the world. If Doyle had confined himself to the pages of Punch, or directed his energies mainly to the weekly issue of some design in its numerous columns, the limnings of his pencil would scarcely be known outside of England, whereas all over the continent of America, and in the English colonies, the old Colonel Newcome, and the Marquis of Farintosh, Lady Kew, and Trotty Veck meet us with their familiar faces as we turn over the Transatlantic editions of Thackeray and Dickens, not to mention the exquisite paintings, of which we shall have more to say presently, exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery, and to be found in many a country mansion as a lasting memorial of Dicky Doyle.” Does the writer seriously mean to tell us that Doyle could not illustrate Thackeray and Dickens at the same time and side by side with his illustrations for Punch or any other serial of a satirical character? Granted that Punch is a periodical appealing to English tastes and sympathies, yet it was through the introduction obtained by means of its pages that the artist probably obtained employment upon the very works to which the writer refers, and upon which (as he claims) his reputation will rest.
Nor do we, nor can we, admit that, out of the circle of his coreligionists, or the still narrower circle of educated unbiassed minds, Doyle reaped much respect by the “noble sacrifice” of which the writer speaks. English prejudice looks with special coldness on conscientious motives it does not understand, and with which it can have but little sympathy. Doyle was a man of purer motives and finer sympathies than George Cruikshank; but the same insular prejudice which conduced to the ruin of George Cruikshank, wrecked the future prospects of an artist almost as original in some respects as the more brilliant George. From the moment that Doyle retired from Punch, English fanaticism and English prejudice persisted in regarding him as a supporter of the “Papal aggression,” and he permanently lost from that moment the ground which his talent and his reputation had so honourably won for him. From the moment he deemed it his duty to retire from the circle of literary and artistic wits and humourists with whom he was then associated, he took himself practically out of the range of comic art, and the public ceased to trouble itself about him, although it had lost (in the expressive language of Mr. Thackeray) “the graceful pencil, the harmless wit, the charming fancy,” of one of the most genial and promising of English graphic satirists of the modern time. Before he left Punch he had executed for the periodical upwards of five hundred illustrations, of which nearly eighty are cartoons.
But Richard Doyle manifested the honesty of purpose which was a part of his noble nature by other sacrifices than his retirement from Punch. From the friendly hand which has strewn flowers upon his grave, we learn that at one time he was offered a handsome income to draw for a periodical started some years ago, but declined the engagement because he disapproved of the principles of those by whom it was conducted. “At another he had a similar offer made him by a distinguished statesman on behalf of a political journal, in which the work would have been light and the remuneration excellent.” He was offered his own terms to illustrate an edition of Swift’s humorous works; but here too he refused, because he did not admire the morality of the witty Dean of St Patrick’s. “In these and other cases like them, religion, virtue, high principle, carried the day against interests which would have proved too much for any but a man of Doyle’s noble and lofty character.” His biographer points out the fact that all this while he had to look to his pencil for bread, and denies the statement, made by one of the leading newspapers at the time of his death, that during the latter part of his life he was independent of his profession.
In one set of illustrations, now very scarce and little known, Doyle has shown that he possessed eminent powers as a caricaturist. We have a set of lithographs before us, entitled, “Rejected Cartoons,” a sort of pictorial “Rejected Addresses,” supposed to be intended for the then new Houses of Parliament, some of them caricatures of the works of living artists—Maclise, Pugin, etc., whose styles are closely imitated and most amusingly burlesqued. Some of them are irresistibly droll, such as King Alfred sending the Danes into a Profound Slumber with the Sleepy Notes of his Harp; “Canute reproving the Flattery of his Courtiers;” The Faces of King John and his Barons at the Signing of Magna Charta; Perkin Warbeck in the Stocks; The Meeting of Francis and Harry in the Field of the Cloth of Gold, etc. Few people with whom the touch of Richard Doyle is perfectly familiar would recognise his hand in these amazing and amusing cartoons. We met with them at a bookstall twenty years ago, unconscious until lately that they were due to his pencil.
The once celebrated “Adventures of Brown, Jones, and Robinson” would alone secure for this artist an eminent position amongst the number of English comic designers. Graphically relating the experiences of the most ordinary class of continental tourists, they cannot fail to bring to the recollection even of the most commonplace traveller some of the experiences which may have actually happened to himself. Doyle of course enlarges on these experiences as his fancy and imagination suggest; but after all, there is little which might not have actually befallen any ordinary English travellers such as this unlucky trio. The episode of “Jones’s Portmanteau undergoing the ordeal of Search” at Cologne; The scene at the “Speise-Saal” Hotel; The Jewish “Quarter of the City of Frankfort, and what they saw there”; The Gambling Scene at Baden: The Descent of the St. Gothard; The Academia at Venice; will appeal to the actual experiences of nearly every continental tourist; and notwithstanding its extravagant drollery, little Browne’s adventure at Verona is sufficiently possible to remind one of personal vicissitudes encountered off the track or on the frontiers, which might almost match the experiences of this personally uninteresting little sketcher.
| Richard Doyle. [“Brown, Jones & Robinson,” 1855. Robinson (solo): “I stood in Venice—,” etc. Jones and Brown, having heard something like it before, have walked on a little way. [Face p. 392. |
Besides Punch, Mr. Doyle’s hand will be found in the following:—“The Fairy Ring,” Leigh Hunt’s “Jar of Honey,” Professor Ruskin’s “King of the Golden River,” Montalba’s “Fairy Tales from all Nations,” “Jack and the Giants,” “The Cornhill Magazine,” “Pictures from the Elf World,” “The Bon Gaultier Ballads,” Thackeray’s “Rebecca and Rowena,” Charles Dickens’s “Battle of Life,” “The Family Joe Miller,” Mr. Tom Hughes’ “Scouring of the White Horse,” “Pictures of Extra Articles and Visitors to the Exhibition,” Laurence Oliphant’s “Piccadilly,” “Puck on Pegasus,” PLanche’s “Old Fairy Tales,” À Beckett’s “Almanack of the Month,” “London Society,” and Mr. Thackeray’s “Newcomes.” Writing of this last, Mr. Hamerton says, “I never regretted the hard necessity which forbids an art critic to shut his eyes to artistic shortcomings more heartily than I do now in speaking of Richard Doyle. Considered as commentaries on human character, his etchings are so full of wit and intelligence, so bright with playful satire and manly relish of life, that I scarcely know how to write sentences with a touch at once light enough and keen enough to describe them”;[190] and then the critic goes on to expose the glaring faults which characterize Mr. Doyle’s performances from a purely artistic point of view, his feeble attempts of light, his undeveloped “sense of the nature of material,” and his absence of imitative study. It is somewhat singular that whilst Mr. Hamerton is silent on the subject of the book etchings of Leech and Phiz, he should have selected for criticism those of Doyle, who never intended to claim for these sketches the dignity of etchings. The critic, however, is not only just, but remarkably fair. With reference to the illustrations to the “Newcomes,” he acknowledges “their all but inestimable dramatic value.” “Illustrations to imaginative literature,” he continues, “are too frequently an intrusion and an impertinence, but these really added to our enjoyment of a great literary masterpiece, and Doyle’s conception of the Colonel, of Honeyman, of Lady Kew, is accepted at once as authentic portraiture. In Ethel he was less happy, which was a misfortune, as she was the heroine of the book; but many of the minor characters were successes of the most striking and indisputable kind.” Further on, he says of Doyle’s etching, A Student of the Old Masters,—“Colonel Newcome is sitting in the National Gallery, trying to see the merits of the old masters. Observe the enormous exaggeration of aërial perspective resorted to in order to detach the figure of the Colonel. The people behind him must be several miles away; the floor of the room, if judged by aërial perspective only, is as broad as the Lake of Lucerne.” The criticism, though exaggerated, is not unfair or unjust; but the people are certainly not miles away. Doyle has perpetuated a mistake common with many English artists, who seem to think, as Hazlitt expresses it, that, “if they only leave out the subordinate parts, they are sure of the general result.”[191] Doyle’s intention to give us a portrait of Colonel Newcome only has prompted him to treat the subordinates as almost non-existent. His work, however, was never intended to be faultless; it carries out his own intention most thoroughly and admirably, and in a manner very far superior to anything which Thackeray himself could have done.
The closing scenes in the life of this most amiable and unselfish of artists we give in the singularly graceful words of his Catholic biographer: “In the autumn of last year (1883), Mr. Doyle spent some time in North Devon, and while there painted a picture of Lynton churchyard. The view is taken at a distance of some ten or fifteen yards to the south-west of the church, and is looking in an easterly direction. In front of the picture one sees far down below the blue waters of the Bristol Channel, while behind the picturesque little church nestles among the trees. In the churchyard an old man is mowing down the long grass amid the graves, while two or three little children scatter flowers on one of them. This picture was unfinished at the time of his death. A strange coincidence that he should have chosen such a scene for his last picture, when, as far as man can judge, he had no sort of reason for thinking that death was so near; stranger still, that on his return home he chose for the sketch a black frame, as if to clothe it in the garb of mourning for its maker. There it remains on his easel, unfinished still, as if to tell of one cut off so suddenly, not indeed in the summer of life, but in a mellow autumn, which seemed to give promise of many years of good work still to be done. But the time had come when the little sprites who peopled his dreams of earth, were to be exchanged for the angel forms who were to welcome the faithful servant to his reward in heaven. On the 10th of December, as he was preparing to return from the Athenæum club, Mr. Doyle was struck down by apoplexy. An ambulance was procured, and he was carried home. He never regained the power of speech, and it is doubtful whether he was ever again conscious, though the priest who anointed him for his journey from thence to heaven thought that he detected some traces of a joyful acquiescence in the rite. The next morning, in the home where the last years had been spent in quiet peaceful pursuit of the art he passionately loved, his simple, innocent, loyal soul passed away from earth to heaven.”