"You're right," nodded the Pencil. "He's drawn a few thousand of them in his time. What did H. F. say? Well, he told Labouchere that he always created a type for each Member, and to that he adheres."
"'Yes,' said the Sage, late of Queen Anne's Gate, 'and when the original turns up, those who derive their impression of a Member from your sketches are disappointed if the two do not exactly tally.'"
"But surely our guv'nor does not sketch direct from life?" asked the Pen, amazed.
"Of course he does," indignantly replied the Pencil. "He whips me out of my bed at all times, but as he pointed out to the Member for Northampton (see how Parliamentary I am getting), it would never do invariably to sketch a man as you see him. 'For instance,' went on H. F. addressing him, 'I made a sketch of you, Mr. Labouchere, in the corridor of the House of Commons, kneeling on a seat, and had I never seen you before, I should have no doubt used this as a characteristic instead of an accidental attitude of yours.'
"Just fancy what you would have written, my dear Pen, if you had seen in Punch one of H. F.'s portraits of Lord Hartington with his hat upon the back of his head instead of over his eyes, or Mr. Gladstone depicted with a Shakespeare collar, or Mr. Cyril Flower without one, or Mr. Arnold Morley smiling, or Mr. Balfour looking cross, or Mr. Broadhurst
MR. LABOUCHERE. in evening dress, or Mr. Chamberlain without an orchid in the button-hole of his coat! Yet I venture to say the time has been when Mr. Chamberlain may have had to rush down to the House orchidless, and when Mr. Broadhurst may have worn evening dress. Stranger things than that have happened, I can tell you. I have actually seen the irrepressible smile vanish from the face of Mr. John Morley. But never—no, never, will I believe that the ex-Chief Liberal Whip has ever looked jovial, that Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Cyril Flower ever exchanged collars, or that Lord Hartington ever wore his hat at the back of his head.
"On the other hand, my dear Pen, you know as well as I do that Lord Randolph Churchill did not wear imitation G.O.M. collars, that Mr. Herbert Gladstone is no longer in his teens, that Mr. Gladstone was not always so wild-looking as H. F. usually represented him, and that perhaps Sir William Harcourt is not simply an elephantine mass of egotism."
"Then why did he draw them so?" enquired the Pen.
"Ah! that is the secret of the caricaturist," laughed the Pencil. "There is something more in politicians, you know, than meets the eye, and the caricaturist tries to record it. You're so captious, my dear Pen. It is not given to everyone to see a portrait properly, however true it may be. Some folks there are who are colour-blind. There are others who are portrait-blind. Others again are blind to the humorous. An old M.P. came up to H. F. one day in the Lobby of the House of Commons when a new Parliament had assembled for the first time, and said to him, 'Well, you have a rich harvest for your pencil (that was me). I never saw such odd specimens of humanity assembled together before.'