Then the series of hearty laughs that, in 1851, accompanied his handling of "Bloomerism"—that parent of our modern dress reform and the divided skirt, and certainly the ancestor of the lady-bicyclist's costume ("A skirt divided against itself cannot stand; it must sit upon a bicycle")—served to kill the thing that the natural modesty of Leech put down as unwomanly and his æsthetic sense as hideous. And the crinoline, to which the American invention was to afford an antidote, provides Leech with material for a hundred humorous points of view. For it grew and grew in monstrousness and outrageous proportions until 1861, when it began to dwindle, and by such refuge as a "hooped petticoat" can afford saved its dignity as it made its welcome exit from the scene.
And the Cochin-China Fancy, and the Table-Turning Craze (in respect to which Mark Lemon declared that if Hope, the spiritualist, would give a convincing séance in Whitefriars, Punch would recant), and the Racecourse, and the Great Exhibition, and Horsetaming, and a score of other subjects—whether pastime or fashion or phase—were all used by Leech with unfailing humour. The Chartist period of 1848 was a great opportunity, happily seized, and some of the artist's sketches were the result of his personal observation; for he was himself sworn in. "Only loyalty and extreme love of peace and order made me do it," he said; but none the more did he enjoy his nocturnal patrol from ten o'clock till one.
And all his types—his dramatis personæ, so to speak—the gent and his vulgar associates; the Greedy Boy and the Comic Drunkard; the Enfant Terrible, soon, it is devoutly hoped, to be packed off to school, and the dreadful Schoolboy home for the holidays; the Choleric Old Gentleman and the comfortable Materfamilias; Miss Clara and the Heavy Dragoon; the Italian Organ-grinder, Frenchman, Irishman, and Hebrew (Leech's four bêtes noires); the Rising Generation; and all the rest—what a boxful of puppets they were for Mr. Punch's show! And besides them the two or three distinct personalities he created! There was Tom Noddy—the ridiculous little man who in real life was the estimable Mr. Mike Halliday, sometime clerk of the House of Lords, and latterly poet and successful artist, who was as pleased as Punch himself at the distinction conferred upon him and his doings by the artist, while all the time Leech was secretly flattering his kindly self that his model could not by any means discover himself in pictures in which the features were so carefully altered—for all personalities were hateful to the considerate, sensitive humorist. And Mr. Briggs, the Immortal! Of him whose creation is sufficient to render the year 1849 memorable in the annals of the land much has ere now been written—that type of a well-to-do British householder, delightful for his follies and endearing by his pluck, something of a lunatic, it must be admitted, yet more of a sportsman, and most of all a "muff"—Punch's "simple-minded Philistine paterfamilias." Many of his adventures, especially of house-keeping and its terrors, were based upon Leech's own experiences. For it was Leech who had those terrible builders, and who was taken for a burglar by a policeman when trying to get in at his own window. Mr. Briggs' never-to-be-forgotten sensations of a spill from his horse, as recorded by Leech, were the result of the artist's own bewildering experience—as he confessed to "Cuthbert Bede"—and many of his adventures in salmon-fishing, grouse and pheasant shooting, and deer-stalking were founded on his visits to Sir John Millais in Scotland. "All the pools on the Stanley Water," says one authority, "are sacred to the memory of Briggs, for it was Leech's favourite fishing-ground; and 'Hell's Hole,' 'Death's Throat,' 'Black Stones,' and many other cuts, may all be recognised from his humorous pictures, the originals of which are in the possession of Colonel Stuart Sandeman, the proprietor. The Stanley Water begins below Burnmouth." Many of his fishing-sketches were made at Whitchurch in Hampshire, when staying with Mr. Haydon aforesaid.
Half Leech's popularity came, probably, from his sketches in the Row and in the hunting-field. Even so hearty a hater of horse-flesh as Ruskin—so far as he could hate animals at all—has declared that the most beautiful drawing in all Punch is Miss Alice on her father's horse—"her, with three or four young Dians." Leech's sympathy for horses was natural to the man, and had no little influence in toning down those rampant ideas of Democracy and Socialism to which Thackeray referred. In the opinion of many, not all the Conservative party, landlords and House of Peers together, will, in the great coming struggle with "King Demos," exert against him and his Socialism a fraction of the power of resistance that will ultimately be found in the national love of horses and of sport, whether in the hunting-field, on the racecourse, or in the sporting column of the daily paper; and this belief John Leech himself entertained.
Leech, whose pecuniary resources were always being drained by relations other than those of his own immediate household, and on behalf of whom it is generally admitted that he worked himself to death, rode and hunted, as he said, not from extravagance, but in order that he might be fit and able to do his work. And his riding, which was a necessity to himself, was not less indispensable to Punch, for a very considerable amount of the Paper's support in the Country depends upon his "horsey sketches." Without them English life would not be properly represented, particularly in its most delightful and engaging of pastimes, and without them English support—from that prosperous class to which Punch specially appeals—would hardly be forthcoming.
But, for all his love of horses and the hunting-field, Leech was not a particularly good rider, and a friend of his tells how he laughingly insisted on buying from him a horse that was not sound in his wind, as he could not run away. Yet he poked good-natured fun at the riding of his friend Sir John Millais, and once told him that as he followed him in the field he had conceived the original idea of drawing some "triangular landscapes" as seen through Millais' legs. He satirised himself with equal good-temper in the drawing in which a Cockney horseman reins up at the edge of a steep hill—you might almost call it a hole—down the side of which the rest are scampering, with the words "Oh, if this is one of the places Charley spoke of, I shall go back!" Indeed, in spite of all his sport, he almost agreed with Hood—
"There's something in a horse
That I can always honour, but never could endorse."
Yet, like his great rival "Phiz," who rode with the Surrey hounds, he loved the cover-side; but as time went on, and youthful ardour cooled, he would rather attend the meet than follow in the chase. As he favoured the Puckeridge hounds, it comes about that most of his landscape backgrounds are views in Hertfordshire. And when he preferred the more sober delights of the Row—not the same Row we now scamper along from Hyde Park Corner, but the old one along by the Serpentine, and, for a time, in Kensington Gardens—his tall graceful figure always attracted attention; and when he mounted his pony, which he called "Red Mullett," people who recognised him would turn and remark that Mr. Punch had come out for a ride upon dog Toby.
THE GREAT SOCIAL EVIL.
Time: Midnight. A Sketch not a Hundred Miles from the Haymarket.
Bella: "Ah! Fanny! How long have you been gay?"
(From Punch, 12th Sept., 1857, Vol. xxxiii.)