The first drawing by Tenniel in the bound volume is, as he says, the frontispiece to the second half-yearly volume for 1850, but his actual first contribution the initial on p. 224 of that volume. Perhaps the most notable thing about it is the extraordinary resemblance between the artist's work at the beginning and at the end of his career. Of course, it is much "tighter;" it is much younger. But the hand and method are strangely unchanged. It is beautiful in its exquisite precision and its refinement, and altogether superior in its character to what its creator, in a spirit of severe self-criticism, chooses to believe. "My first cartoon," he wrote to me, "was 'Lord Jack the Giant-Killer'—and awfully bad it is; in fact, all my work, at that particular time, now seems to me about as bad as bad could be, and fills me with wonder and amazement!!" But this cartoon, continuing the Papal campaign so hateful to Doyle, by showing Lord John Russell with his sword of truth and liberty attacking the crozier-armed Cardinal Wiseman, was greatly inferior to the smaller contributions. His improvement, however, was rapid. Tenniel's first "half-page social" is on p. 218 of the same volume; while in 1852 we have his first superb Lion, and his first obituary cartoon. Gradually he took over the political big cut, which Leech was happy to place in his hands; but during the long years that they worked together the two men were admirable foils to one another. Leech sketched and Tenniel drew; Leech gave us farce and drama, and Tenniel, high comedy and tragedy; and the freedom of the one heightened the severer beauties of the other. And when Leech died, his friend continued the labour alone. Except in 1864, 1868, and 1875-6-7-8, in which last-named year he took his first holiday from Punch work and went with Mr. Silver to Venice—(during his illness or absence Charles Keene contributed thirteen cartoons[54])—and again in 1884 and 1894 (when Mr. Sambourne twice took over the duty), he has never, from that day to this present time of writing, missed a single week. Nearly two thousand cartoons, initials innumerable, "socials," double-page cartoons for the Almanac and other special numbers, and two hundred and fifty designs for the Pocket-books—such is the record of the great satirist's career; and the only change has been in the direction of freedom of pencil and breadth of artistic view.

Of his work little need be said here, for in its main bearings it has already been fully considered. But acknowledgment must at least be made of how, with all his sense of fun and humour, Sir John Tenniel has dignified the political cartoon into a classic composition, and has raised the art of politico-humorous draughtsmanship from the relative position of the lampoon to that of polished satire—swaying parties and peoples, too, and challenging comparison with the higher (at times it might almost be said the highest) efforts of literature in that direction. The beauty and statuesque qualities of his allegorical figures, the dignity of his beasts, and the earnestness and directness of his designs, apart from the exquisite simplicity of his work at its best, are things previously unknown in the art of which he is the most accomplished master, standing alone and far ahead of any of his imitators. The Teutonic character and the academic quality of his work, modified by the influence of Flaxman and the Greeks, are no blemishes; one does not even feel that he draws entirely from memory. Indeed, the things are completely satisfying as the work of a true artist, and—a quality almost as grateful and charming as it was previously rare—of a gentleman.

Yet this practice of drawing from memory has its drawbacks; for the things remembered are apt to grow old-fashioned. The Flying Dutchman was running when Sir John's locomotive still had the odour of Puffing Bilfy about it. His indifference to that "actuality" which is the characteristic of Mr. Sambourne has often raised the howl of the specialist. When in an excellently drawn cartoon full of point (November, 1893), entitled "A Bicycle made for Two," he grafted the features of a modern roadster on to the type of 1860, the cycling world fluttered in a manner that must have been very encouraging to the artist. His machine, they said, was the most wonderful one ever placed on the market. Sir H. H. Fowler, it was said, was sitting on a half-inch tube without a saddle, and "working with his heels on pedals shaped like a Mexican gaucho's stirrup"—but his critics had clearly never seen a gaucho's stirrup. "Nor has the lady—riding behind, instead of in front—better accommodation, being in suspension over a frame that lacks a backstay, and above a wheel that buckles under her weight; while the handles are thrown up instead of down, and their bars so slender that they must inevitably break." The gear-case is on one side of the frame and the chain on the other, and the frame itself was a marvel of ingenuity misapplied. Thus did the cyclists moan in many newspapers, taking the matter au grand sérieux, with quite unusual regard for mechanical accuracy, and a total disregard for the political allusion and point. Similarly in January of the same year the "Forlorn Maiden" of trade was shown lying across the railway lines while an engine is bearing down upon her. But "there are five rails in sight, all at equal distances apart, though the railway gauge is four feet eight inches and a half, and the locomotive is running on the six-foot way." The girl, too, stretches across it, and spans it from waist to ankles, not counting a bend at the knees, so that at the lowest estimate she is ten feet high. This violated the public conscience even more than the fact that the engine rushes along the inside line of the two sets of rails; and they declared that never before had the maxim ars longa been more triumphantly indicated than in the maiden's figure. But what of it all? Is it not a striking commentary on our English temperament, that while an inaccuracy of a purely mechanical description raises the protests of thousands who have no idea beyond the parts of a bicycle or the width of a railway gauge, a score of artistic beauties pass unnoticed and unchallenged?

And so Tenniel worked his way upwards. The fact that in a fencing bout he had partially lost his sight, through the button of his father's foil dropping off, whereupon he received the point in his eye, was not the slightest deterrent. He regarded it merely as an annoying, though not a very important, incident. Being satisfied that the Almighty had only given us two eyes as a measure of precaution, to provide against such vexatious little accidents as he had experienced, he went on working as if nothing had happened. "It's a curious thing, is it not," he said one day to the writer, "that two of the principal men on Punch, du Maurier and I, have only two eyes between them?" Yet it only made him the more careful. Free from mannerism, he never allowed carefulness to interfere with fun, and his cartoon of Britannia discovering the source of the Nile, and of Lord Beaconsfield as a peri entering the Paradise of Premiership, are among the memorably funny things of Punch. His elevation to the leading position on the paper has thus been gradual and certain; not of his own assumption, however, but the ready tribute of his colleagues, who have always regarded him not only as the great artist, but as the link incarnate of the tradition of Punch of the present with the past. So he is the favourite of the band, to whom he is the beloved "Jackīdēs" of Shirley Brooks's christening. It was Mark Lemon who, at the Dinner, first applied to him the burlesque line—"No longer Jack, henceforth Jackīdēs call;" but it was Brooks who confirmed the practice of according to him the sobriquet which Punch (p. 148, Vol. XLV.) had previously conferred on Lord John Russell, "England's Briefest Peer."

It was a startling proof of his extraordinary, and by him half-unsuspected, popularity, that when Tenniel's knighthood became known the honour was received with loud and general applause—with an enthusiasm quite unusual in its command of popular approval. "I am receiving shoals of letters and telegrams," he wrote to me on the day of the announcement; "I suppose you know the reason Y." It is said that Lord Salisbury had intended to make the recommendation himself, but that the nomination was delayed and forgotten; but when Mr. Gladstone came into office the new Premier repaired the neglect of the old, and at the same time acknowledged the steady support which Punch had offered to the Whig policy. By the general public it was regarded as an appreciation of the man who was the personification of the good-humoured and the loftier side of political life—who had brought the Punch spirit round to something a good deal better and higher than he found it, blending fun with classic grace, and humour with dignity. To the art world it was the recognition of that "Black-and-white" drawing which has been the glory of England and the Cinderella of the Royal Academy of Arts. It was in this sense that Sir John Tenniel accepted the distinction. But it was to "Jackīdēs" that the Punch Staff drank when Mr. Agnew proposed his health at the Dinner following the announcement of the nomination; it was "dear old John Tenniel" that the Arts Club toasted when, with Mr. Val Prinsep, R.A., in the chair and Mr. du Maurier in the vice-chair, the new knight was the honoured guest of his club, and received its congratulations with the modest dignity and kindly good taste characteristic of him. And it was "good Sir John," the cartoonist—who has also been, at extremely rare intervals, a Punch writer too (see Punch, p. 56, Vol. XX.)—who was celebrated by the pen of Mr. Milliken—"the Pride of Mr. Punch and the delight of the British Public."

[Contents]CHAPTER XX.

PUNCH'S ARTISTS: 1850-60.

Captain Howard—Receipt for Landscape Drawing—Earnings, Real and Ideal—George H. Thomas—Charles Keene—His Training—Introduction to Punch—Called to the Table—Uselessness in Council—A Strong Politician—Inherits Leech's Position—Keene as an Artist—Where He Failed—His Joke-Primers—Torturing the Bagpipes—Good Stories, Used, Spoiled, and Rejected—"Toby" as a Dachshund—Death of "Frau"—Keene's Technique—His Inventions and Creations—And what He Earned by Them—Charles Martin—Harry Hall—Rev. Edward Bradley ("Cuthbert Bede")—"Verdant Green" or "Blanco White"?—Double Acrostics—George Cruikshank Defies Punch—Mr. T. Harrington Wilson—Mr. Harrison Weir—Mr. Ashby-Sterry—Alfred Thompson—Frank Bellew—Julian Portch—"Cham"—G. H. Haydon—J. M. Lawless.