[CHAPTER XX.]
DR. JOHN BROWN AND LEECH.
Whether that charming writer, Dr. John Brown, knew Leech in the flesh or not, I cannot say; but that he knew and fully appreciated him in spirit is evident enough in a paper published in a collection of essays entitled "Horæ Subsecivæ." I gather from the concluding passages of the Doctor's brilliant essay that it had been his intention to have written Leech's life, having collected much material for the purpose, but that "ill-health put a stop to this congenial labour." How admirably the labour would have been executed may be shown by the following extracts:
"Leech," says Dr. Brown, "was singularly modest, both as a man and an artist. This came by nature, and was indicative of the harmony and sweetness of his essence; but doubtless the perpetual going to Nature, and drawing out of her fulness, kept him humble, as well as made him rich—made him (what every man of sense and power must be) conscious of his own strength. But before 'the great mother' he was simple and loving, attentive to her lessons as a child, for ever learning and doing."
Again: "Of all our satirists, none have such a pervading sense and power of girlish, ripe, and womanly beauty as Leech.... There is a genuine domesticity about his scenes that could come only from a man who was much at his own fireside, and in the nursery when baby was washed. You see, he is himself pater familias, with no Bohemian trait or raffish turn. What he draws, he has seen; what he asks you to live in, and laugh at and with, he has laughed at and lived in. It is this wholesomeness and (to use the right word) this goodness that makes Leech more than a drawer of funny pictures, more even than a great artist. It makes him a teacher and an example of virtue in its widest sense, from that of manliness to the sweet devotion of a woman, and the loving open mouth and eyes of parvula on your knee."
I find it difficult to believe that these remarks were written by one who had no personal knowledge of Leech; indeed, I should have thought the writer must have enjoyed an amount of intimacy with him. If Dr. Brown and Leech were strangers to each other, the writer's accurate estimate of the artist shows how exactly the drawings reflect the delightful nature of their producer, so familiar to his nearest friends.
"What we owe to him," adds Dr. Brown, "of wholesome, hearty mirth and pleasure, and of something better than either—good as they are—purity, affection, pluck, humour, kindliness, good-humour, good-feeling, good-breeding, the love of Nature, of one another, of truth, the joys of children, the loveliness of our homely English fields, with their sunsets and village spires, their glimpses into the pure infinite beyond, the sea and all its fulness, its waves 'curling their monstrous heads and hanging them,' their crisping smiles on sunlit sands—all that variety of Nature and of man, which is only less infinite than its Maker! Something of this and of that mysterious quality called humour, that fragrance and flavour of the soul, which God has given us to cheer our lot, to help us to 'take heart and hope and steer right onward,' to have our joke, that lets us laugh and make game of ourselves when we have little else to laugh at or play with, of that which gives us when we will the silver lining of the cloud, and paints a rainbow on the darkened sky out of our own 'troublous tears'—something of all these has this great, simple-hearted, hard-working artist given to us and to our children as a joy and a possession for ever. Let us be grateful to him; let us give him our best honour, affection, and regard."
Walking with Leech one day, we met an old gentleman, to whom I introduced my friend: early in the fifties it was. The old man, though well stricken in years, sported a dark and heavy moustache.
"And so," said Leech, when, after a few commonplaces, we separated, "that is old Mr. Blank the portrait-painter, is it? What on earth induces him to wear purple moustachios?" Purple they were, certainly, and of rather a bright tinge.