Alas! I can well remember the appearance of the “Sketches by Boz,” to be so quickly followed by the “Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.” None but those who witnessed it can conceive the enthusiasm with which that immortal work was received by an eager public, who welcomed each number as it appeared, month after month, with hearty appreciation. Of course, there were carping critics, one of whom is reported to have said the author would “go up like a rocket and come down like a stick.” That prophet, a man of much literary ability, drank himself into a debtors’ prison, where, I was told, he died of delirium tremens.
There is, I think, a vein of melancholy unusually developed in the nature of almost all humorists. As an instance, I may give the actor Liston, whose humour on the stage was to me unparalleled; off it, he was gloom personified. Gillray, the caricaturist, died melancholy mad; and poor Seymour, the first illustrator of “Pickwick,” committed suicide. I may remark in this place the surprise with which I heard Leech say that he could see no fun in any of Seymour’s sketches.
In a walk that we took together, I tried to convert him by naming several examples of what appeared to me humorous work.
“No,” said Leech; “the only drawing I ever saw by Seymour that appeared funny to me was one in which two cockneys were represented out shooting. They are about to load their guns, when one says to the other:
“‘I say, which do you put in first—powder or shot?’
“‘Why, powder, to be sure,’ said his friend.
“‘Do you?’ was the reply. ‘Then I don’t!’”
I can vividly recall the shock occasioned by Seymour’s death. He was fairly prosperous, I believe. His engagement to illustrate “Pickwick” was a lucrative one, and he was much employed in other work. In spite of all these advantages, the humorist’s melancholy was fatal to him.
I was present at the banquet at the Royal Academy when Thackeray, in returning thanks for literature—Dickens being present—told us how, on finding there was a vacancy for an illustrator of “Pickwick,” he took a parcel of drawings to the author and applied for the place. From my own knowledge of Thackeray’s limited powers as an artist, I should have been sure of the failure of his application. Very different would have been the fate of Leech, who was also anxious to supply Seymour’s place; but he was too late, for Dickens had already chosen Hablot K. Browne, who, under the sobriquet of “Phiz,” worked in harmony with his author for very many years. There was no doubt a disposition on the part of “Phiz” to exaggeration in his illustration of Dickens’ characters (already fully charged, so to speak, by their author), sometimes to the verge of caricature, and even beyond it; this fault Leech would have avoided, as his exquisite etchings in Dickens’ Christmas books fully prove.
