In 1836, when he was but nineteen years of age, he had made a bid for the unhappy Seymour's vacant place as Charles Dickens' illustrator; but he had been already forestalled by "Phiz," and Leech was perforce rejected, as Thackeray had been refused before him, and Buss dismissed. Leech was already a good draughtsman on wood, having while resident with Orrin Smith the wood-engraver—he who had previously tried to magnetise the idea of a "London Charivari" into life—received many practical hints of the greatest artistic value. For some time afterwards he worked in harmony with his fellow-student of a literary turn, whose noble brass-plate inscribed "Mr. Albert Smith, M.R.C.S., Surgeon-Dentist!" once brought upon the artist, says Percival Leigh, the candid chaff, of a vulgar street-urchin. "Good boy!" said Leech, appreciating the attention and rewarding it with a penny. "Now go and insult somebody else." He drew furthermore upon the stone, and distinguished himself in "Bell's Life in London"—the paper to which several of the most eminent comic artists of the day then contributed—and in 1841, five years after his first-published "Etchings and Sketchings, by A. Pen, Esq.," he issued in its complete form his "Children of the Mobility." It was at that time that Percival Leigh, having satisfied himself of the character and tone of the new comic paper, not only made his own début in it, but introduced his friend and colleague, John Leech—with what distressing result as to his full-page block of "Foreign Affairs" the chapter on cartoons discloses. (See p. [173].) And here it may be added that all was not plain sailing between Leech and Punch at the commencement; for soon after he resumed work he struck for higher terms. Until he got his way he did no more work for the paper—as the reader may satisfy himself by turning to its pages; and when he did, his triumph was visited, as has already been described, upon the heads of less talented contributors. It may safely be assumed that Leech knew nothing of this, for the gentleness of the man was such that he could not have suffered the idea that his success meant others' disadvantage.
Three things may be said to have brought Leech's powers as a humorous draughtsman prominently before the public—his illustrations to the "Comic Latin Grammar," the skit on the Mulready envelope (the most successful of all the versions published), and his early Punch work. Mr. Frith tells of Mulready's indignation at Leech's drawing—not at the caricature itself, but at the leech in a bottle, by which the Academician took it for granted that the draughtsman meant to designate him by innuendo as a "blood-sucker;" and of Leech's surprise and pain at being so suspected, and how the two men became fast friends ever after. Once a regular Punch man, Leech immediately expanded, and as quickly hit the taste and fancy of the public; and from that day forward rarely did his hand or his humorous or tragic faculty play him false; nor did the people falter in its praise or its allegiance.
Although he expanded, he yet took some time to settle down. Not until the sixth volume (1844) could he be considered paramount in what was esteemed the higher walk of cartooning—a department which he subsequently shared, first with Doyle, and then with Tenniel. But it was in the social cuts that he excelled—in his pictures of low life that are never low; in his great mastery in the delineation of character and his gift of seeing humour in most scenes of everyday happening, and his power of recording comic conceptions, unfailingly and irresistibly. It is true that as Mr. Punch went up in the social scale Leech accompanied him in the rise—if, indeed, it was not Leech, together with Thackeray's powerful help, who elevated Punch. At the same time he sympathised profoundly with the horrors of poverty and oppression, and looked kindly on gutter-children and on honest dirt and misery; and to the end he regarded the "snob," the 'Arry of his day, with the genial contempt he had lavished on him at the beginning. Thackeray appreciated the change in the paper, and recorded it, too; though he credits Jerrold with a policy which was nought but the policy of a comic paper softened in its asperities by time, and encouraged by the greater refinement of its Staff and of its more cultivated public.
"Mr. Leech," said Thackeray, "surveys society from the gentleman's point of view. In old days, when Mr. Jerrold lived and wrote for that famous periodical, he took the other side; he looked up at the rich and great with a fierce, a sarcastic aspect, and a threatening posture, and his outcry or challenge was: 'Ye rich and great, look out! We, the people, are as good as you. Have a care, ye priests, wallowing on a tithe pig and rolling in carriages and four; ye landlords, grinding the poor; ye vulgar fine ladies, bullying innocent governesses, and what not—we will expose your vulgarity; we will put down your oppression; we will vindicate the nobility of our common nature,' and so forth. A great deal was to be said on the Jerrold side, a great deal was said—perhaps, even a great deal too much." And now, says Thackeray in effect, Leech looks at all these people with a certain respect for their riches, with an amiable curiosity concerning their footmen's calves. Nevertheless, to the end he was not kinder to Dives' oppression, less sympathetic towards the troubles of Lazarus, nor more indulgent to the vulgarity of the snob; nor a whit more tolerant of viciousness, affectation, or meanness of any kind.
Of Leech's political work (for which at first he entertained so great a dislike) I say perhaps enough in dealing with what may be called Punch's Big Drum—the weekly cartoon. Taken together, those designs might be held to represent a life's good work; yet they represent but a fraction of what he executed during his seven-and-twenty years' hard labour. If after a close study of all his productions with pencil and etching-needle, you ask yourself what constitutes his real life's-work, you will probably choose to ignore his book plates—even those to the Comic Histories of Rome and England, to the sporting novels of "Mr. Sponge," and the rest—and point to his "Pictures of Life and Character," as given forth in one continuous stream from 1841 to 1864.
The "movements" and the "isms" and the creations of fashion, of nearly all of which we have a whole series spread over a long, but none too long a time, reflect in themselves alone the social history of our day—development of intellect and its antithesis, fashion in dress and language, art and literature, craze and affectation; in short, the whole national evolution during a quarter of a century. It is amusing to glance at some of them—a few out of the very many—and sample the journalistic wit with which Leech eyed and illustrated the passing hour.
The periodical wail of the British householder and his wife on the subject of the great "domestic difficulty" gave Leech a fund of anecdote that he was not slow to draw upon. He was himself a typical middle-class British householder, who liked to have everything nice and neat about him, including the pretty, amiable, zealous, h-less maidservant in nice white apron and clean print-dress. He closed his eyes and ears to Sydney Smith's discovery that all the virtues and most of the graces are not to be had for £7 a year. And so Leech gave us the series he entitles "Servantgalism," harshly illustrative for the most part of the comic side of what a later generation calls Slaveyism. And as Punch, chiefly under the influence of Thackeray, raised his eyes from Bloomsbury to Belgravia, and found equal fun and better sport in baiting the far more contemptible airs and graces of John Thomas, "Flunkeiana" became a fertile field from which he drew some of his most caustic productions. He made them the severer, too, that during the Crimean War and the dangers that threatened the land, Leech could not bear with patience the sight of "pampered menials" passing their time in relatively idle luxury, when they, together with linen-drapers' assistants and others engaged in what is really woman's work, ought rather to have been bearing arms, or at the very least drilling in the newly-formed force of Volunteers.
Yet the Volunteers had not to thank Leech for anything much but chaff during the early years of the movement. If anything could snuff out patriotism, "The Brook Green Volunteer," the laughable satire on the Militia, would have done it, and the square into which that warrior formed himself would assuredly have been broken and dispersed. And truly this series, famous and still appreciated as it is, lost a good deal of its force from the presence of a fault not often found in Leech's work—grotesqueness of invention and undue exaggeration. In time Charles Keene made us forget the unintentional injustice Leech had done to a noble movement; and as fate willed it, Mr. G. Haydon, who had greatly assisted the author of it, Sir J. C. Bucknill, became later an artistic contributor to Punch and a friend, not only of Leech, but of several of the most distinguished of the Staff.
And after the Crimean War was over, there was a social upheaval known as "the great beard movement." Leech was very keen upon all this question of moustaches, and held with many others that no one had a right to them save the crack cavalry regiments. One day it happened that Leech, Tenniel, and Pritchett were riding together, and, agreeing on the subject, they arrived at cross-roads, where, holding their crops together, they cried "We Swear!"—not to wear hair on lip or chin. In 1865 the unregenerate Mr. Pritchett went to Skye to practise water-colour and—to let his moustaches grow! Returning in due time to Tenniel's house, he said nothing, but merely opened the door, and thrust in his face with an air of defiant resignation, and waited. Tenniel started. "You scoundrel!" he exclaimed; "then I must!" And he did. But Leech was proof against this example of degeneracy, and to the end remained true to his views and his vow, although moustaches soon came into regular fashion.
Yet moustache, beard, and whiskers have been a mine of fun to Leech—from the little Eton boy who tells the hairdresser, when he has cut his curls, just to give him a close shave, and who ties the major's whisker to his sister's ringlet; to the snobs who, "giving to hairy nothings a local habitation and a name," flatter themselves that their stubbly chins will get them mistaken for "captings" at the very least; and to the military Adonises who may boast that their silken beards and fierce moustaches lead a beauty by each single hair. One of the most amusing results of Leech's drawings of whiskered swells was Sothern's creation of "Lord Dundreary"—as the actor was always ready to proclaim. But for the artist, this most comical character would have been nothing but the ordinary stage-fool as it was at first designed, and the playgoers of two generations would never have held their aching sides at one of the most mirthful of modern rôles.