[CHAPTER XVIII.]
MICHAEL HALLIDAY AND LEECH.
"No man can put more into a picture than there is in himself," says Sir Joshua Reynolds. As an art student I have always felt the force of this aphorism. I would even go further, and add that no man can avoid the disclosure in numberless ways of what "there is in himself" of special mental organization, under the heads of taste, temper, delicacy, honesty, kindliness, and the true and full appreciation of the beauties of nature.
"I cannot see nature as you represent it," someone is said to have remarked to Turner.
"Don't you wish you could?" was the reply.
It is not the subject of a great artist's work that we admire, but the artist's mind as reflected in his subject. Reynolds was fortunate in having for his sitters most of the beauties of the last century, and they were more fortunate still in falling into the hands of a painter who had such intense sympathy with their loveliness—so intense in some instances as to emphasize it somewhat to the sacrifice of individuality. It is what Turner sees in nature that we reverence, producing beauties for us to which we were blind, till they were called up by the spell of the great magician. Heads as fine as any of those painted by Vandyke can be seen any day, but there is no Vandyke to show us the impression they make upon him. Let anyone compare Vandyke's Charles I. with a contemporary rendering of that monarch, and he will feel with me that it is the great painter's power of penetrating the inner man before him, so to speak, added to his sympathy with the melancholy and dignified King, that, combined with his transcendent technical power, enabled him to present to us both the person and the mind of the unfortunate King. The contemporary painters give us but the husk and shell of him.
But of all artists who have reflected themselves in their works, Leech is the best example. Save when his hatred of injustice and oppression is aroused, the man's loving, tender nature, and his honest English, manly character, are apparent in everything he does. As he was to all who knew him well, he shows himself in his treatment of every theme he touches with his pencil. Of his life—quiet, studious, and ever observant—there is little to relate that cannot be gathered from his works. His passionate love of children and childish ways and tricks, his sympathy with beauty in all its forms, his eager participation in manly sports, with numberless other delightful qualities, are part and parcel of the man who was never tired of giving us unconscious revelations of himself in his drawings. Even when a certain amount of ridicule is attached to the principal incidents in the career of a ludicrous personage, we never have a feeling for him approaching contempt.
In the history of Messrs. Briggs and Tom Noddy these gentlemen present themselves in positions of laughable difficulty. Laugh at them we certainly do, but we never despise them; for do they not show the good qualities of courage and fortitude? Tom Noddy is thrown from his horse; nothing daunted, he instantly remounts. He drops his whip; he recovers it: is thrown again, and this time his horse gallops off; but though the little hunter pursues as fast as his little legs can go, the horse has the best of it and escapes. An ordinary being would despair and bemoan his loss; not so Tom Noddy, who gives up the pursuit for a time, and being no doubt a little tired, lights a cigar as he sits upon a stile. When refreshed by tobacco and repose he resumes his horse-chase, and ultimately succeeds in finding the animal in the possession of a rustic, who had amused himself by nearly galloping him to death. Tom Noddy is a delightful little creature; his numerous escapades are plentiful in "Pictures of Life and Character," and will be for all time a hearty, healthy pleasure to all who study them.
Many attempts were made to betray Leech into personality. Subjects were suggested, and offers were made to him, by persons who had real or imaginary grievances, to place well-known public characters in positions ridiculous or contemptible. Those attempts would not have been made if the proposers had known Leech; such suggestions were always rejected, and sometimes in terms very unpleasant to their proposers. I was not aware that Tom Noddy had a prototype until I was informed by my old friend, Mr. Holman Hunt, in a paper of Leech reminiscences, originally intended for this memoir, that Mike Halliday, a man I knew well forty years ago, was the original Tom Noddy. Halliday's figure was intended for an ordinary-sized man, but when Nature had produced his head and shoulders she seemed to have changed her intention, and the rest of his figure was that of a diminutive form, a full foot shorter altogether than an ordinary middle-sized man. When I first became acquainted with Halliday he was a clerk in the House of Lords. "He then," says Holman Hunt, "took to poetry, to love that never found its earthly close, and to our art—for he found time for all. So well did he succeed in picture-making that he once completed an oil-painting of two lovers sitting under a ruined abbey window, habited in contemporary costume, the gentleman intent on taking the size of the lady's marriage-finger."