But it was not by his comic faculty alone that John Leech helped to make Punch great, nor even by his political work. It was also by his frank demonstration of that deep feeling which is often called "passion," whether love, or sympathy, or hot indignation. His love of children, even when he laughs at them, is surpassed by few other artists or writers, even by those of Mr. Punch—that adorer of first youth and green-apple and salad days. The enthusiasm with which he threw himself into all attacks upon abuses showed him a hot-blooded philanthropist. It was not for the first time that in his "Moral Lesson of the Gallows" he used his Hogarthian power against the scandal and brutalising horror of public executions. In the little "social" entitled "The Great Social Evil," which so electrified Punch's readers at the time, there appears the hand of the reformer, perhaps; but primarily a whole heartful of wide sympathy and pathos, from which, with true instinct, the artist has banished every suggestion of humour, retaining only with a few skilful strokes the sad and pathetic reality of the social problem. This drawing was made some time before, but Mark Lemon, with less courage than he showed in the publication of the "Song of the Shirt," hesitated to insert it; and it is traditionally asserted that it was at the time of the Editor's temporary absence through illness that Leech insisted upon its publication. And who can forget the contemptuous drawing of the brutalised dancers at Mabille (1847), or the other, made in full anger and disgust at the sight of a Spanish bullfight "with the gilt off," after he had attended one, when towards his life's end he visited Biarritz for a few days in fruitless search of health? It is a terrible page, and probably touches the limit of what is permissible in art. Shirley Brooks called it "a grim indictment of a nation pretending to be civilised;" and in England, at least, it met with a throb of responsive emotion and of cordial approval.
Passing from these things to a more pleasing one, we are struck with Leech's exceptional love of beauty. Never did Nature seem more delightful than in his cuts—in those dainty backgrounds in which the loveliest scenery is so skilfully reproduced. "What plump young beauties," cries Thackeray, "those are with which Mr. Punch's chief contributor supplies the old gentleman's pictorial harem!" It is true, they are nearly always the same girl, this ideal of Punch's—short in stature, simple and pouting and laughing, with big eyes and rounded chin, with bewitching dimples and pretty ringlets; but then this ideal, this "little dumpling," was none other than Mrs. Leech! The artist had seen her in the street in 1843, had fallen head over ears in love with her upon the spot, followed her to her home, looked up the directory to ascertain her name, obtained an introduction, and had straightway wooed and won her. "Now I'll bet ten to one," he wrote to Percival Leigh, as soon as he had been accepted, "that your reverence will think me the oddest person in the world, at a moment like the present, to think of writing to a friend; but I can't help sending you a line or two to say that I have been made a 'happy man'.... Never laugh again at the union of 2 soles (i.e., two flats); at any rate, don't expect me to join in the guffaw." And so Miss Annie Eaton became Mrs. John Leech, the object of her husband's devotion and of his inspired pencil. It is true that his young ladies and his servants are all much of the same type; but, in spite of Mr. Henry James' curious judgment that Leech had no great sense of beauty, he has usually been otherwise adjudged, as in the "poem" by Albert Smith and Edmund Yates—assuredly in harmony with most men's views—where he is spoken of as
"'Handsome Jack,' to whose dear girls and swells his life Punch owes."
And so it comes about that Punch's pages are eloquent with portraits of Mrs. Leech, who, with her children, became the very "orchard" of Leech's eye. The last block of all on which the artist was engaged was one to be called "An Afternoon on the Flags;" it represented a complimentary dog-fancier comparing the points of beauty in a dog with those of the lady before him, but it was still unfinished when he fell back in his bed, dead from the fatal breast-pang.
Leech would never employ artists' models—partly because his chic drawing, like Sir John Tenniel's, came natural to his genius, and his memory was extraordinarily retentive, and partly because when he began to draw for Punch, and for a long while after, it was unheard-of for black-and-white men on comic papers to do anything so seriously academic. But though he said that he had not in his life made half-a-dozen drawings from Nature, he was always sketching "bits" for use, and trusted to his memory and imagination for the rest. On one or two occasions he would ask Mrs. Hole, the wife of the Dean of Rochester, to sit for him in her riding-habit—but this was the nearest approach he ever made to the "model." He would make his first sketch and then trace it on to the block, finishing his rapid drawing with considerable deliberation, yet so quickly that he would often send off three drawings before dinner-time. He was extremely particular about the drawing, and the engraving, too, of his boots and feet, and expressed boundless admiration of Tenniel's power in that direction. "Talk of drawing!" he exclaimed to Mr. Frith; "what is my drawing compared to Tenniel's? Look at the way that chap can draw a boot; why, I couldn't do it to save my life!" Like all other artists, he was constantly asked by friends what paper was the best and what pencils he used. "H.B.," he would reply; "if you can't put it down with that, you can't put it down at all." His simplicity of means matched the simplicity of his art, and both the transparent simplicity of his character. His views relative to private persons' privacy prevented him from including portraiture in his drawings other than that of public men. But to get these, and especially members of the House of Commons, he would take considerable trouble. I have seen an extremely cordial letter addressed to him by Mr. Speaker Denison, in which special facilities were accorded him to witness the opening of Parliament.
"LEECH'S 'PRETTY GIRL.'"
(A Skit by Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., R.A. By Permission of W. W. Fenn, Esq.)
As a draughtsman Leech has been admirably placed by Mr. du Maurier, who calls him a perfect ballad-writer as compared with the more scientific counterpointing of Charles Keene. And I would remark that it was above all as a pencil and wood draughtsman that he excelled; his etchings—of which he made two-score for the Pocket-Books—are not, technically considered, up to the sustained level of either Cruikshank or "Phiz." But his sense of freedom on the block he makes us feel; he revels in it, and thereby imparts spontaneity to his drawings far beyond what we see in his plates. Yet his composition is almost uniformly excellent, whether in line or light and shade, and apparently as carefully thought out as though an oil picture and not a Punch cut was the work he had in hand. The relation between his landscapes and his figures has often been applauded; and a foreign critic has exclaimed, with unfeigned surprise and admiration, "Leech and Keene could not only draw light—they could even draw the wind!" And with all this he told his story in his drawings more completely than any man of his day; he appealed to every class of society, and touched them all with equal facility, with equal good-humour, brightness, and beauty. His power of legend-writing, too, was remarkable—his explanatory lines beneath the drawings being as concise and happy as what they described. Says Mr. Silver: "As brevity is the soul of wit, he always made his 'legends' as terse as possible, first jotting them down hastily, and condensing while he drew. I have, for instance, a slight drawing of a heavy pig-faced farmer admiring with his wife a fat pig in its stye. Beneath the sketch is scribbled 'There now; that's my style! I call him a perfect love!' As the joke lay in the likeness of the owner to the pig, the last phrase seemed redundant, and therefore was suppressed before the drawing went to Punch." It is curious that with this gift, he should have contributed only once, so far as I can ascertain, to the literary portion of Punch, and then merely some mock "Verses for Pantomime Music"—strictly speaking, for the harlequinade—(January 4th, 1845), designed to show the fatuous idiotcy of those compositions.
Contrary to what might have been expected in so prolific an artist, Leech never for a moment entertained the sentiment not unusual among comic artists—"je prends mon bien là où je le trouve." He was even diffident about accepting a suggestion for a joke. His own observation gave him the vast majority of his "pictures of life and character," but he would occasionally accept with a quiet undemonstrative smile some of the many proposals that were submitted to him. You might find it in Punch next week, or next year; but if the giver were an artist too, he would hesitate to make use of it, lest he might wrong a brother-pencil. He often figures in his own cuts, as in "The Dismay of Mr. Jessamy on being told that he will spoil the whole thing [private theatricals] if he doesn't Shave off his Whiskers" (Almanac, 1854—his own whiskers which he always regarded with a sort of mock-tender pride.) To his own little son we owe the delightful cut of the child who reminds the new nurse that he is one of those children who can only be managed by kindness, "so please get me a cake and an orange;" like that other Punch youngster who, aping mamma, faintly asks, "Is there such a thing as a bun in the house?" "Astonishingly quick Leech was," says Mr. Silver, "to seize on any sight or subject that seemed to have some humour in it. I can call to mind, for instance, how I chanced to see a chimney-sweep with his hand held to his eyes, as he was passing a street-door while the mat was being shaken. I told Leech of the incident; for, covered as he was with soot, the sweep seemed over-sensitive. In a very few minutes the scene was sketched most funnily, and was then drawn on the wood. The sketch hangs in my billiard-room, and they who please may turn to Punch and see the drawing. Another time I recollect we noticed some big buoys which were just the shape of fishing-floats, and which I said that Gulliver might have seen so used in Brobdingnag. 'Not a bad idea,' said Leech, and he made a hasty sketch then. Next morning the result appeared upon the wood, and soon afterwards in Punch, with a 'legend' which I quote from memory only:—'I s'pose you sometimes catch some biggish fish here, eh, old Cockywax?' 'Why, yes; and them's the floats we uses; see, young Cockywax'?"
From Millais he had many a joke; and when the two close friends were separated, the former would send him sketches of the idea. Several of these Leech left behind him, having only taken advantage of two—the protection that plaid is supposed to afford in the Highlands, when the unhappy novice who puts it on wrestles with it in a high wind; and the device of a couple of artists for defying the Scotch midges—a comic, balloon-like envelope for the head. From Dean Hole came that immortal joke of the yokel at a great country dinner, who on tossing off his liqueur-glass of Curaçoa, the first he has ever tasted, calls to the waiter that he'll "tak' some o' that in a moog;" and it was from a passage in one of the Dean's letters to the effect that in a long run he had only had three mishaps on his promising young chestnut, that Leech invented the drawing of "A Contented Mind"—wherein the mud-bespattered young hopeful has increased the number of falls to five. And he loved to watch the sons of his colleague, Gilbert Abbott à Beckett—both of them in due time called to the Table—and to base upon the mischievous adventures and the characteristic invention of the young pickles many a laughable drawing. They were the originals of the boys who, with a ten-and-sixpenny box of tools and a sufficiency of nails, in the absence of their parents put the furniture of the house in a state of thorough repair!! And on a skating experience of one of them—Mr. Arthur à Beckett—comes that well-known design of a youth at the mercy of a skate-tout at the ice-edge. "Look out!" he cries; "you are running the gimlet into my heel!" "Never mind, sir," responds the man, persuasively; "better 'ave 'em on firm!"