Leech it will be remembered obtained a footing on the staff of “Bentley’s Miscellany” at the time when George Cruikshank was leaving it. Cruikshank, however, was an admirer of the genius of Leech, and when they laid him in his untimely grave in Kensal Green Cemetery, on the 4th November, 1864, the veteran artist was among the crowd of distinguished men who looked sorrowfully on. The influence which George Cruikshank exercised upon the genius of Leech will be apparent to any one who has given attention to the early etchings of the latter. This influence will be particularly discernible in the illustrations to “Richard Savage” and “The Marchioness of Brinvilliers.” Both were men of genius, but Leech’s fancy was of a tamer kind, and little inclined him in the direction of the supernatural or the terrible. Leech, for instance, never produced anything which equalled Fagin in the Condemned Cell; The Murder of Sir Rowland Trenchard; Xit Wedded to the Scavenger’s Daughter; Jack o’ Lantern; or the reverie of the Triumph of Cupid. We shall find but few diabolicals in his gallery of pictorial subjects, notwithstanding which there is not a fiend in the whole of Cruikshank’s demon ranks who equals Leech’s devil in Thomas Ingoldsby’s legend of “The House-warming.”
It may seem invidious to institute a comparison between the two men. Some, indeed, may hold that a comparison is impossible; but we will quickly show that such a comparison is not only possible but unavoidable. George Cruikshank, for instance, might or might not have illustrated the “Comic Histories” of England and of Rome better than John Leech; we may fancy, however, his hand on the Surtees’ novels, the odd men, the strange coats, the eccentric women, the podgy “cockhorses,” the wonderful dogs that would have put in an appearance in the various sporting scenes and incidents which form the subject of these “horsey” romances; we should like, for instance, to see what he would have made of the pretty serving woman who figures in the frontispiece of “Ask Mamma;” how he would have treated the fair “de Glancey”; how he would have grouped and dressed his figures at The Handley Cross Ball; how he would have treated poor old Jorrocks when he fell into the shower bath. But, admirable as are Leech’s book illustrations and etchings, it is in the minor designs which he executed for Punch during the short quarter of a century allotted to him that we must seek for Leech’s genius: it is these little drawings which place him in the front rank of nineteenth century graphic satirists. They are characterized by genuine humour and satire, unalloyed with a single trace of ill-humour, exaggeration, or vulgarity. It was in this direction that the artistic instincts of poor Robert Seymour inclined him; but his imagination and invincible tendency to exaggerate, inherited from the caricaturists who preceded him, failed to bear him beyond the limited sphere of cockney sports and cockney sportsmen in which his soul delighted. Here, we have the swells and vulgarians, the flunkies and servants, the old men and maidens, the soldiers, the parsons, the pretty women of English everyday life, placed in situations more or less embarrassing, but presenting nevertheless perfect types of the respective classes thus harmlessly and admirably satirized. In this lies their chief value, and as years roll on and the Punch volumes become scarce, this value will necessarily increase.
A shy and unobtrusive member of the society in which he moved, Abhorrence for Frenchmen. and which delighted in the enjoyment of his friendship, John Leech was the keenest of observers, noting and satirizing as no one before his time had attempted, or indeed had been able to do, the cant and hypocrisy, the pride and selfishness, the upstart and arrogant exclusiveness, the insular prejudices and weaknesses, which form a part of our national character; but doing this, he loved his countrymen and countrywomen for their finer qualities, and hated the bungling foreigners who presume to caricature them without the barest knowledge of their subject. This is the secret of the hearty abhorrence which Leech always testified for Frenchmen. The ignorance of his countrymen on the subject of English women has been amusingly ridiculed by one of the most distinguished of their own writers—Eugene Sue, in his novel of “Mathilde”:—“That an Englishwoman! Nonsense; there is nothing more easy to recognise than an Englishwoman; you have only to look at her dress; it is simple enough, in all conscience! A straw bonnet all the year through; a pink spencer; a Scotch plaid petticoat, and bright green or lemon-coloured boots; you may see the costume any day in Les Anglaises pour rire, at the Variétés. We all know it is a Vaudeville, and it would not be publicly acted unless it were authentic. I repeat it once more, ever since this world has been a world, Englishwomen—real genuine Englishwomen—have never been differently dressed.” M. Taine, who devoted himself to the study of our language and literature, and spent much time amongst us, has (if I remember rightly) admitted the errors which prevail amongst his countrymen and women with reference to ourselves; but such observers as M. Taine and M. Sue are unfortunately rare in France, and many have essayed to depict us, with as much knowledge of their subject as our Sir John Maundeville possessed when he sat down to write his absurd but quaint and amusing “Book of Voiage and Travaile.” John Leech resented this deplorable ignorance on the part of our neighbours; and the Punch volumes are filled with biting sarcasms on French habits, manners, and sentiments, which were keenly felt, because, unlike the English who figure at the Variétés or in French caricatures, in the dirty men who regard with astonishment the English washstand at the exhibition, the cabs full of hirsute monstrosities, the “Flowers of the French army,” the grimy Revolutionists of Leicester Square—the hundred and one Frenchmen who figure in the satires of John Leech, the Parisian recognises compatriots whose ridiculous lineaments have been too faithfully reproduced to render identification a matter of doubt or difficulty.
Leech executed very few illustrations for Dickens; and the amusing blunder which he perpetrated in “The Battle of Life,” in allowing the lady to elope with the wrong man, and the “horror and agony” of the author in consequence thereof, have been set forth in Forster’s “Life.” The mistake was discovered too late for correction, and remains a curious proof of the carelessness with which distinguished artists will sometimes read the manuscript of an author however illustrious.
| John Leech. [“Illuminated Magazine.” “I HOPE MR. SMUG, YOU DON’T BEAT YOUR BOYS?” [Face p. 292. |
The Surtees’ novels afford singular evidence of the keenness of John Leech’s critical observation. An ardent lover of sport himself, and a frequent attendant at the “Pytchley,” when he went a day’s hunting it was his custom to single out some fellow disciple of Nimrod that happened to take his fancy, keeping behind him all day, noting his attitudes in the saddle, and marking every item of his turn-out, to the last button and button-hole of his hunting coat. It was in this way that he obtained the correctness of detail which renders his famous sporting etchings so wonderfully true to nature. Strange to say, notwithstanding his knowledge of every detail of the huntsman’s dress, even to the number of buttons on his coat, he himself, with reference to his own outfit, invariably presented in the hunting field a somewhat incongruous appearance. Either he would wear the wrong kind of boots, or would dispense with some detail which on the part of an enthusiast would be considered an unpardonable omission. Leech, however, was not what is called a “rough rider,” his constitutional nervousness prevented him indeed from making a prominent figure in the hunting field, and his friends attributed this want of attention to detail in dress to his sensitiveness to criticism, and his unwillingness to place himself in any position which would be likely to incur it.
[126] Vol. iii., 1860.
[127] Shirley Brooks in the Illustrated London News, 19th Nov., 1864.
[128] George Redway, 12, York Street, Covent Garden.