FROM CHARLES KEENE TO HIS EDITOR.
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But his sorest point against Punch—to which, after all, he was sincerely attached—was not the alteration, but the total suppression of some of his work. Two such cases are duly recorded by Mr. Layard—both of them admirable jokes in their way, though perhaps of questionable taste. The first deals with a "Bereaved Husband's" opposition to the "Sympathetic Undertaker's" remorseless insistence that the chief mourner should enter the first carriage with his mother-in-law. "Ah! well," he sighs, with resignation; "but it will completely spoil my day!"

The second story—to which an excellent drawing was made—tells of a widow who looks with sorrowful resignation upon a portrait of her husband that hangs above the fireplace, and says to her sympathising friend: "But why should I grieve, dear? I know where he passes his evenings now!" The first of these Mark Lemon—ever anxious to avoid giving offence—declined on the ground that it was too hard upon mothers-in-law; and the second because, in Keene's own words, "Our Philistine Editor ... said it would 'jar upon feelings'!" He surely could not have borne completer testimony to the care, the ultra-respect for others' sentiments, which has usually distinguished Punch, to the disgust of critics of less refinement and consideration.

On another point, too, he was not at one with Punch, and that was "Toby." The form and face of Mr. Punch, as rendered by him, was hardly a classic rendering; but this was forgiven him. But Keene's Toby was neither the cur represented by some, nor the Irish terrier affected by others, but a dachshund! And he persisted in so drawing him to the end, not because he thought it right, but because "it might have been!" and because the original of the beast was his own much-loved pet "Frau," which he survived not many days. (See next page.)

To this drawing particular interest attaches, for it is the very last that ever came from his hand—a loving tribute to an old friend that had passed away. Concerning it, Mr. Henry S. Keene writes to me: "The history of the dog is shortly this. She was a favourite old dog of my brother's, and has figured a good many times in his drawings as the dog of the 'typical' Punch, and was of the breed of the 'dachshund.' She was very old and full of infirmities, and my brother consented, with some reluctance, to put the poor thing out of its misery. When it was dead, he had it put on a chair in his room, and made the sketch. This was about three months before he died, and was the last thing he drew. It required an effort on his part, as he had entirely left off doing any work since the beginning of last year [1890]."

More than any other man on Punch, Keene suffered at the hands of the engraver. But it was wholly his own fault. He took no heed whatever of the engraver, and set before him problems to which there was no solution. Thus, he loved to make his drawings on old rough paper, which by its grain gave a wonderfully charming but irreproducible quality to his ragged lines, and which by stains of age would impart effects wholly foreign to the art of the wood-cutter.

"FRAU," ALIAS "TOBY," LYING IN STATE.
(Keene's Last Drawing.)

Moreover, he would manufacture his own inks in varying degrees of greyness, and even of different colours, and then set them before the cutter (not the engraver, mind) to translate into black-and-white. Yet there are some who blame the craftsman for not reproducing what it was an absolute impossibility to reproduce by printer's ink and graver! But Keene was engrossed in his art; and I have seen a drawing, at Mr. Birket Foster's house at Witley, which was the seventh attempt he made before he was satisfied. This was the drawing entitled "Ahem!" representing a man kissing a girl, while someone, with the familiar inconsiderateness of humanity, is approaching. The background for this drawing is Mr. Foster's house.

But although Keene was not a man of ideas, his merits as a creator—as a realiser of types—were supreme. Many of his dramatis personæ no doubt became old-fashioned in a sense; but who can deny the truth to life of the Kirk Elder, the slavey, the policeman, the fussy City man, the diner-out, the waiter (did he not invent "Robert"?), the cabman, the hen-pecked husband, the drunkard, the gillie, the Irish peasant, the schoolboy, and the Mrs. Brown of Arthur Sketchley's prosaic muse? The wealth of his limited fancy, and his power of resolving it into well-ordered design, and presenting it with strange economy of means, invested these puppets of his with a vividness which is often startling. With greater force and subtlety, if with less refinement and grace, than Leech—though not, like him, the genial sketcher of the genial side of things—he has recorded, in the five or six thousand designs that make up the sum of his contribution, the character of "the classes" of our day, and that with such intensity of truth that we derive our delight in his work even more from the faithfulness of its representation than from the fun of the joke and the comic rendering of the subject. One writer has been found who sees in his pictures nothing but degradation, and who condemns the one which shows a tippler who has returned late and thrown himself upon the bed beside his wife fully clad and with his umbrella open, as "obscene, and it is matched by many another equally odious!" But everybody else will endorse Sir Frederic Leighton's enthusiastic testimony that "among the documents for the study in future days of middle-class and of humble English life, none will be more weighty than the vivid sketches of this great humorist."[56] In praising Keene's "feeling of out-of-doorness," in the "Magazine of Art," Mr. William Black criticised truly when he declared, "Ever and again we come upon a bit of a turnip-field, a hedge-row, even the corner of a London street, the vividness of which is a sudden delight to the eyes." This estimate was well thrown into verse a few months later, when Punch in its bereavement sang the praises of its greatest artist:—