Chapter II: Part 2

Leech's art seems to me of just such a happy kind; he draws--I mean he scores like an amateur who has not made a very profound study of harmony, and sings his pretty song to his simple accompaniment with so sweet and true a natural voice that we are charmed. It is the magic of nature, whereas Keene is a very Sebastian Bach in his counterpoint. There is nothing of the amateur about him; his knowledge of harmony in black and white is complete and thorough; mere consummate scoring has become to him a second nature; each separate note of his voice reveals the long training of the professional singer; and if his tunes are less obviously sweet and his voice less naturally winning and sympathetic than Leech's, his aesthetic achievement is all the greater. It is to his brother-artists rather than to the public at large that his most successful appeal is made--but with an intensity that can only be gained by those who have tried in vain to do what he has done, and who thereby know how difficult it is. His real magic is that of art.

This perhaps accounts for the unmistakable fact that Leech's popularity has been so much greater than Keene's, and I believe is still. Leech's little melodies of the pencil (to continue the parallel with the sister art) are like Volkslieder--national airs--and more directly reach the national heart. Transplant them to other lands that have pencil Volkslieder of their own (though none, I think, comparable to his for fun and sweetness and simplicity) and they fail to please as much, while their mere artistic qualities are not such as to find favour among foreign experts, whereas Keene actually gains by such a process. He is as much admired by the artists of France and Germany as by our own--if not more. For some of his shortcomings--such as his lack of feeling for English female beauty, his want of perception, perhaps his disdain, of certain little eternal traits and conventions and differences that stamp the various grades of our social hierarchy--do not strike them, and nothing interferes with their complete appreciation of his craftsmanship.

RIBBONMAN (_getting impatient_). "Bedad, they ought to be here be this toime! Sure, Tiriace, I hope the ould gintleman hasn't mit wid an accidint!!!"--_Punch_, July 27, 1878.]

Perhaps, also, Leech's frequent verification of our manly British pluck and honesty, and proficiency in sport, and wholesomeness and cleanliness of body and mind, our general physical beauty and distinction, and his patriotic tendency to contrast our exclusive possession of these delightful gifts with the deplorable absence of them in any country but our own, may fail to enlist the sympathies of the benighted foreigner.

Whereas there is not much to humiliate the most touchy French or German reader of _Punch_, or excite his envy, in Charles Keene's portraiture of our race. He is impartial and detached, and the most rabid Anglophobe may frankly admire him without losing his self-esteem. The English lower middle class and people, that Keene has depicted with such judicial freedom from either prejudice or pre-possession, have many virtues; but they are not especially conspicuous for much vivacity or charm of aspect or gainliness of demeanour; and he has not gone out of his way to idealise them.

Also, he seldom if ever gibes at those who have not been able to resist the temptations (as Mr. Gilbert would say) of belonging to other nations.

Thus in absolute craftsmanship and technical skill, in the ease and beauty of his line, his knowledge of effect, his complete mastery over the material means at his disposal, Charles Keene seems to me as superior to Leech as Leech is to him in grace, in human naturalness and geniality of humour, in accurate observation of life, in keenness of social perception, and especially in width of range.

VILLAGE HAMPDEN (_"who with dauntless breast" has undertaken for sixpence to keep off the other boys_). "If any of yer wants to see what we're a Paintin' of it's a 'Alfpenny a 'Ead, but you marn't make no Remarks."--_Punch_, May 4, 1867.]

The little actors on Leech's stage are nearly all of them every-day people--types one is constantly meeting. High or low, tipsy or sober, vulgar or refined, pleasant or the reverse, we knew them all before Leech ever drew them; and our recognition of them on his page is full of delight at meeting old familiar friends and seeing them made fun of for our amusement.

Whereas a great many of Keene's middle-class protagonists are peculiar and exceptional, and much of their humour lies in their eccentricity, they are characters themselves, rather than types of English characters. Are they really observed and drawn from life, do they really exist just as they are, or are they partly evolved from the depths of an inner consciousness that is not quite satisfied with life just as it is?

GIGANTIC NAVVY: "Let's walk between yer, Gents; folks 'll think you've took up a Deserter."--_Punch_, October 19, 1861.]

They are often comic, with their exquisitely drawn faces so full of subtlety--intensely comic! Their enormous perplexities about nothing, their utter guilelessness, their innocence of the wicked world and its ways, make them engaging sometimes in spite of a certain ungainliness of gesture, dress, and general behaviour that belongs to them, and which delighted Charles Keene, who was the reverse of ungainly, just as the oft-recurring tipsiness of his old gentlemen delighted him, though he was the most abstemious of men. I am now speaking of his middle-class people--those wonderful philistines of either sex; those elaborately capped and corpulent old ladies; those muttonchop-whiskered, middle-aged gentlemen with long upper lips and florid complexions, receding chins, noses almost horizontal in their prominence; those artless damsels who trouble themselves so little about the latest fashions; those feeble-minded, hirsute swells with the sloping shoulders and the broad hips and the little hats cocked on one side; those unkempt, unspoiled, unspotted from the world brothers of the brush, who take in their own milk, and so complacently ignore all the rotten conventionalism of our over-civilised existence.

When he takes his subjects from the classes beneath these, he is, if not quite so funny, at his best, I think. His costermongers and policemen, his omnibus drivers and conductors and cabbies, are inimitable studies; and as for his 'busses and cabs, I really cannot find words to express my admiration of them. In these, as in his street scenes and landscapes, he is unapproached and unapproachable.

Nor must we forget his canny Scotsmen, his Irish labourers and peasants, his splendid English navvies, and least of all his volunteers--he and Leech might be called the pillars of the Volunteer movement, from the manner, so true, so sympathetic, and so humorous, in which they have immortalised its beginning.

OMNIBUS DRIVER (_to Coster_). "Now then, Irish! pull a one side, will you? What are you gaping at? Did you never see a Milisher man before?"

_A disgustingly ignorant observation in the opinion of young Longslip, Lieutenant in Her Majesty's Fusileer Guards_--_Punch_, March 7, 1863.]

Charles Keene is seldom a satirist. His nature was too tolerant and too sweet for hate, and that makes him a bad and somewhat perfunctory hater. He tries to hate 'Arry, but he can't, for he draws an ideal 'Arry that surely never was, and thus his shaft misses the mark: compare his 'Arry to one of Leech's snobs, for instance! He tries to hate the haw-haw swell, and is equally unsuccessful. When you hate and can draw, you can draw what you hate down to its minutest details--better, perhaps, than what you love--so that whoever runs and reads and looks at your pictures hates with you.

Who ever hated a personage of Keene's beyond that feeble kind of aversion that comes from mere uncongeniality, a slightly offended social taste, or prejudice? One feels a mere indulgent and half-humorous disdain, but no hate. On the other hand, I do not think that we love his personages very much--we stand too much outside his eccentric world for sympathy. From the pencil of this most lovable man, with his unrivalled power of expressing all he saw and thought, I cannot recall many lovable characters of either sex or any age. Here and there a good-natured cabby, a jolly navvy, a simple-minded flautist or bagpiper, or a little street Arab, like the small boy who pointed out the jail doctor to his pal and said, "That's my medical man."

Whereas Leech's pages teem with winning, graceful, lovable types, and here and there a hateful one to give relief.

But, somehow, one liked the man who drew these strange people, even without knowing him; when you knew him you loved him very much--so much that no room was left in you for envy of his unattainable mastery in his art. For of this there can be no doubt--no greater or more finished master in black and white has devoted his life to the illustration of the manners and humours of his time; and if Leech is even greater than he--and I for one am inclined to think he is--it is not as an artist, but as a student and observer of human nature, as a master of the light, humorous, superficial criticism of life.

CROSS BUS DRIVER. "Now why didn't you take that there party?"

CONDUCTOR: "Said they wouldn't go."

CROSS BUS DRIVER. "_Said_ THEY wouldn't go? THEY said they wouldn't go? Why, what do you suppose you're put there for? You call that conductin' a buss. Oh! THEY wouldn't go! I like that, &c., &c."-- _Punch_, September 1, 1860.]

Charles Keene died of general atrophy on January 4, 1891. It was inexpressibly pathetic to see how patiently, how resignedly he wasted away; he retained his unalterable sweetness to the last.

His handsome, dark-skinned face, so strongly lined and full of character; his mild and magnificent light-grey eyes, that reminded one of a St. Bernard's; his tall, straight, slender aspect, that reminded one of Don Quixote; his simplicity of speech and character; his love of humour, and the wonderful smile that lit up his face when he heard a good story, and the still more wonderful wink of his left eye when he told one--all these will remain strongly impressed on the minds of those who ever met him.

I attended his funeral as I had attended Leech's twenty-six years before; Canon Ainger, a common friend of us both, performed the service. It was a bitterly cold day, which accounted for the sparseness of the mourners compared to the crowd that was present on the former occasion; but bearing in mind that all those present were either relations or old friends, all of them with the strongest and deepest personal regard for the friend we had lost, the attendance seemed very large indeed; and all of us, I think, in our affectionate remembrance of one of the most singularly sweet-natured, sweet-tempered, and simple-hearted men that ever lived, forgot for the time that a very great artist was being laid to his rest.

From an unpublished photograph by Fradelle and Young, London.]

And now, in fulfilment of my contract, I must speak of myself--a difficult and not very grateful task. One's self is a person about whom one knows too much and too little--about whom we can never hit a happy medium. Sometimes one rates one's self too high, sometimes (but less frequently) too low, according to the state of our digestion, our spirits, our pocket, or even the weather!

In the present instance I will say all the good of myself I can decently, and leave all the rating to you. It is inevitable, however unfortunate it may be for me, that I should be compared with my two great predecessors, Leech and Keene, whom I have just been comparing to each other.

When John Leech's mantle fell from his shoulders it was found that the garment was ample to clothe the nakedness of more than one successor.

John Tenniel had already, it is true, replaced him for several years as the political cartoonist of _Punch_. How admirably he has always filled that post, then and ever since, and how great his fame is, I need not speak of here. Linley Sambourne and Harry Furniss, so different from each other and from Tenniel, have also, since then, brought their great originality and their unrivalled skill to the political illustrations of _Punch_--Sambourne to the illustration of many other things in it besides, but which do not strictly belong to the present subject.

I am here concerned with the social illustrators alone, and, besides, only with those who have made the sketches of social subjects in _Punch_ the principal business of their lives. For very many artists, from Sir John Millais, Sir John Gilbert, Frederick Walker, and Randolph Caldecott downward, have contributed to that fortunate periodical at one time or another, and not a few distinguished amateurs.

Miss Georgina Bowers, Mr. Corbould, and others have continued the fox-hunting tradition, and provided those scenes which have become a necessity to the sporting readers of _Punch_.

To Charles Keene was fairly left that part of the succession that was most to his taste--the treatment of life in the street and the open country, in the shops and parlours of the lower middle class, and the homes of the people.

And to me were allotted the social and domestic dramas, the nursery, the school-room, the dining and drawing rooms, and croquet-lawns of the more or less well-to-do.

I was particularly told not to try to be broadly funny, but to undertake the light and graceful business, like a _jeune premier_. I was, in short, to be the tenor, or rather the tenorino, of that little company for which Mr. Punch beats time with his immortal baton, and to warble in black and white such melodies as I could evolve from my contemplations of the gentler aspect of English life, while Keene, with his magnificent, highly trained basso, sang the comic songs.

We all became specialised, so to speak, and divided Leech's vast domain among us.

We kicked a little at first, I remember, and whenever (to continue the musical simile) I could get in a comic song, or what I thought one, or some queer fantastic ditty about impossible birds and beasts and fishes and what not, I did not let the opportunity slip; while Keene, who had a very fine falsetto on the top of his chest register, would now and then warble, pianissimo, some little ballad of the drawing-room or nursery.

Illustration: FELINE AMENITIES

But gradually we settled into our respective grooves, and I have grown to like my little groove very much, narrow though it be--a poor thing, but mine own!

"I_wish_ you hadn't asked Captain Wareham, Lizzie. Horrid man! I can't bear him!"

"Dear me, Charlotte--isn't the world big enough for you both?"

"Yes; but your little Dining-room _isn't_!"--_Punch_, February 16, 1889.]

Moreover, certain physical disabilities that I have the misfortune to labour under make it difficult for me to study and sketch the lusty things in the open air and sunshine. My sight, besides being defective in many ways, is so sensitive that I cannot face the common light of day without glasses thickly rimmed with wire gauze, so that sketching out of doors is often to me a difficult and distressing performance. That is also partly why I am not a sportsman and a delineator of sport.

I mention this infirmity not as an excuse for my shortcomings and failures--for them there is no excuse--but as a reason why I have abstained from the treatment of so much that is so popular, delightful, and exhilarating in English country life. If there had been no Charles Keene (a terrible supposition both for _Punch_ and its readers), I should have done my best to illustrate the lower walks and phases of London existence, which attracts me as much as any other. It is just as easy to draw a costermonger or a washerwoman as it is a gentleman or lady--perhaps a little easier--but it is by no means so easy to draw them as Keene did! And to draw a cab or an omnibus after him (though I have sometimes been obliged to do so) is almost tempting Providence!

If there had been no Charles Keene, I might, perhaps, with practice, have become a funny man myself--though I do not suppose that my fun would have ever been of the broadest.

Before I became an artist I was considered particularly good at caricaturing my friends, who always foresaw for me more than one change of profession, and _Punch_ as the final goal of my wanderings in search of a career. For it was originally intended that I should be a man of science.

Dr. Williamson, the eminent chemist and professor of chemistry, told me not long ago that he remembers caricatures that I drew, now forty years back, when I was studying under him at the Laboratory of Chemistry at University College, and that he and other grave and reverend professors were hugely tickled by them at the time. Indeed, he remembers nothing else about me, except that I promised to be a very bad chemist.

I was a very bad chemist indeed, but not for long! As soon as I was free to do as I pleased, I threw up test-tubes and crucibles and went back to Paris, where I was born and brought up, and studied to become an artist in M. Gléyre's studio. Then I went to Antwerp, where there is a famous school of painting, and where I had no less a person than Mr. Alma-Tadema as a fellow-student. It was all delightful, but misfortune befell me, and I lost the sight of one eye--perhaps it was the eye with which I used to do the funny caricatures; it was a very good eye, much the better of the two, and the other has not improved by having to do a double share of the work.

And then in time I came to England and drew for _Punch_, thus fulfilling the early prophecy of my friends and fellow-students at University College--though not quite in the sense they anticipated.

THE NEW GOVERNESS (_through her pretty nose_). "Waall--I come right slick away from Ne'York City, an' I ain't had much time for foolin' around in Europe--you bet! So I can't fix up your Gals in the Eu- rôpean languages, no-how!"

BELGRAVIAN MAMMA: (_who knows there's a Duke or two still left in the Matrimonial Market_). "Oh, that's of no consequence. I want my Daughters to aquire the American Accent in all its purity--and the Idioms, and all that. Now I'm sure _you_ will do _admirably_!"-- _Punch_, December 1, 1888.]

I will not attempt a description of my work--it is so recent and has been so widely circulated that it should be unnecessary to do so. If you do not remember it, it is that it is not worth remembering; if you do, I can only entreat you to be to my faults a little blind, and to my virtues very kind!

I have always tried as honestly and truthfully as lies in me to serve up to the readers of _Punch_ whatever I have culled with the bodily eye, after cooking it a little in the brain. My raw material requires more elaborate working than Leech's. He dealt more in flowers and fruits and roots, if I may express myself so figuratively--from the lordly pineapple and lovely rose, down to the humble daisy and savory radish. _I_ deal in vegetables, I suppose. Little that I ever find seems to me fit for the table just as I see it; moreover, by dishing it up raw I should offend many people and make many enemies, and deserve to do so. I cook my green pease, asparagus, French beans, Brussels sprouts, German sauerkraut, and even a truffle now and then, so carefully that you would never recognise them as they were when I first picked them in the social garden. And they do not recognise themselves! Or even each other!

And I do my best to dish them up in good, artistic style. Oh that I could arrange for you a truffle with all that culinary skill that Charles Keene brought to the mere boiling of a carrot or a potato! He is the _cordon bleu_ par excellence. The people I meet seem to me more interesting than funny--so interesting that I am well content to draw them as I see them, after just a little arrangement and a very transparent disguise--and without any attempt at caricature. The better-looking they are, the more my pencil loves them, and I feel more inclined to exaggerate in this direction than in any other.

Sam Weller, if you recollect, was fond of "pootiness and wirtue." I _so_ agree with him! I adore them both, especially in women and children. I only wish that the wirtue was as easy to draw as the pootiness.

But indeed for me--speaking as an artist, and also, perhaps, a little bit as a man--pootiness is almost a wirtue in itself. I don't think I shall ever weary of trying to depict it, from its dawn in the toddling infant to its decline and setting and long twilight in the beautiful old woman, who has known how to grow old gradually. I like to surround it with chivalrous and stalwart manhood; and it is a standing grievance to me that I have to clothe all this masculine escort in coats and trousers and chimney-pot hats; worse than all, in the evening dress of the period!--that I cannot surround my divinity with a guard of honour more worthily arrayed!

Thus, of all my little piebald puppets, the one I value the most is my pretty woman. I am as fond of her as Leech was of his; of whom, by-the-way, she is the granddaughter! This is not artistic vanity; it is pure paternal affection, and by no means prevents me from seeing her faults; it only prevents me from seeing them as clearly as you do!

Please be not very severe on her, for her grandmother's sake. Words fail me to express how much I loved her grandmother, who wore a cricket-cap and broke Aunt Sally's nose seven times.

TENOR WARBLER (_with passionate emphasis on the first word of each line_)-- "_Me-e-e-e-e-e-t_ me once again, M-e-e-e-e-t me once aga-a-ain--"

_Why does the Cat suddenly jump off the Hearth-rug, rush to the Door, and make frantic Endeavors to get out_?--_Punch_.]

Will my pretty woman ever be all I wish her to be? All she ought to be? I fear not! On the mantelpiece in my studio at home there stands a certain lady. She is but lightly clad, and what simple garment she wears is not in the fashion of our day. How well I know her! Almost thoroughly by this time--for she has been the silent companion of my work for thirty years! She has lost both her arms and one of her feet, which I deplore; and also the tip of her nose, but that has been made good!

She is only three feet high, or thereabouts, and quite two thousand years old, or more; but she is ever young--

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety!"

and a very giantess in beauty. For she is a reduction in plaster of the famous statue at the Louvre.

They call her the Venus of Milo, or Melos! It is a calumny--a libel. She is no Venus, except in good looks; and if she errs at all, it is on the side of austerity. She is not only pootiness but wirtue incarnate (if one can be incarnate in marble), from the crown of her lovely head to the sole of her remaining foot--a very beautiful foot, though by no means a small one--it has never worn a high-heel shoe!

Like all the best of its kind, and its kind the best, she never sates nor palls, and the more I look at her the more I see to love and worship--and, alas! the more dissatisfied I feel--not indeed with the living beauty, ripe and real, that I see about and around--mere life is such a beauty in itself that no stone ideal can ever hope to match it! But dissatisfied with the means at my command to do the living beauty justice--a little bit of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of ink--and, alas! fingers and an eye less skilled than they would have been if I had gone straight to a school of art instead of a laboratory for chemistry!

And now for social pictorial satire considered as a fine art.

They who have practised it hitherto, from Hogarth downward, have not been many--you can count their names on your fingers! And the wide popularity they have won may be due as much to their scarcity as to the interest we all take in having the mirror held up to ourselves--to the malicious pleasure we all feel at seeing our neighbours held up to gentle ridicule or well-merited reproof; most of all, perhaps, to the realistic charm that lies in all true representation of the social aspects with which we are most familiar, ugly as these are often apt to be, with our chimney-pot hats, and trousers that unfit us, it seems, for serious and elaborate pictorial treatment at the hands of the foremost painters of our own times--except when we sit to them for our portraits; then they have willy-nilly to make the best of us, just as we are!

(SCENE--_A Drawing-room in "Passionate Brompton_.")

FAIR AESTHETIC (_suddenly, and in deepest tones to Smith, who has just been introduced to take her in to Dinner_).

"Are you Intense?"--_Punch_, June 14, 1879.]

The plays and novels that succeed the most are those which treat of the life of our own day; not so the costly pictures we hang upon our walls. We do not care to have continually before our eyes elaborate representations of the life we lead every day and all day long; we like best that which rather takes us out of it--romantic or graceful episodes of another time or clime, when men wore prettier clothes than they do now--well-imagined, well-painted scenes from classic lore--historical subjects--subjects selected from our splendid literature and what not; or, if we want modern subjects, we prefer scenes chosen from a humble sphere, which is not that of those who can afford to buy pictures--the toilers of the earth--the toilers of the sea--pathetic scenes from the inexhaustible annals of the poor; or else, again, landscapes and seascapes--things that bring a whiff of nature into our feverish and artificial existence--that are in direct contrast to it.

And even with these beautiful things, how often the charm wears away with the novelty of possession! How often and how soon the lovely picture, like its frame, becomes just as a piece of wall-furniture, in which we take a pride, certainly, and which we should certainly miss if it were taken away--but which we grow to look at with the pathetic indifference of habit--if not, indeed, with aversion!

Chairs and tables minister to our physical comforts, and we cannot do without them. But pictures have not this practical hold upon us; the sense to which they appeal is not always on the alert; yet there they are hanging on the wall, morning, noon, and night, unchanged, unchangeable--the same arrested movement--the same expression of face--the same seas and trees and moors and forests and rivers and mountains--the very waves are as eternal as the hills!

Music will leave off when it is not wanted--at least it ought to! The book is shut, the newspaper thrown aside. Not so the beautiful picture; it is like a perennial nosegay, for ever exhaling its perfume for noses that have long ceased to smell it!

But little pictures in black and white, of little every-day people like ourselves, by some great little artist who knows life well and has the means at his command to express his knowledge in this easy, simple manner, can be taken up and thrown down like the book or newspaper. They are even easier to read and understand. They are within the reach of the meanest capacity, the humblest education, the most slender purse. They come to us weekly, let us say, in cheap periodicals. They are preserved and bound up in volumes, to be taken down and looked at when so disposed. The child grows to love them before he knows how to read; fifty years hence he will love them still, if only for the pleasure they gave him as a child. He will soon know them by heart, and yet go to them again and again; and if they are good, he will always find new beauties and added interest as he himself grows in taste and culture; and how much of that taste and culture he will owe to them, who can say?

Nothing sticks so well in the young mind as a little picture one can hold close to the eyes like a book--not even a song or poem--for in the case of most young people the memory of the eye is better than that of the ear--its power of assimilating more rapid and more keen. And then there is the immense variety, the number!

TEACHER. "And what comes after S, Jack?"

PUPIL. "T!"

TEACHER. "And what Comes after T?"

PUPIL. "For all that we have Received," &c., &c.--_Punch_, February 17, 1869.]

Our pictorial satirist taking the greatest pains, doing his very best, can produce, say, a hundred of these little pictures in a twelvemonth, while his elder brother of the brush bestows an equal labour and an equal time on one important canvas, which will take another twelvemonth to engrave, perhaps, for the benefit of those fortunate enough to be able to afford the costly engraving of that one priceless work of art, which only one millionaire can possess at a time. Happy millionaire! happy painter--just as likely as not to become a millionaire himself! And this elder brother of the brush will be the first to acknowledge his little brother's greatness--if the little brother's work be well done. You should hear how the first painters of our time, here and abroad, express themselves about Charles Keene! They do not speak of him as a little brother, I tell you, but a very big brother indeed.

Thackeray, for me, and many others, the greatest novelist, satirist, humorist of our time, where so many have been great, is said to have at the beginning of his career wished to illustrate the books of others--Charles Dickens's, I believe, for one. Fortunately, perhaps, for us and for him, and perhaps for Dickens, he did not succeed; he lived to write books of his own, and to illustrate them himself; and it is generally admitted that his illustrations, clever as they are, were not up to the mark of his writings.

It was not his natural mode of expression--and I doubt if any amount of training and study would have made it a successful mode: the love of the thing does not necessarily carry the power to do it. That he loved it he has shown us in many ways, and also that he was always practising it. Most of my hearers will remember his beautiful ballad of "The Pen and the Album"--

"I am my master's faithful old gold pen.
I've served him three long years, and drawn since then
Thousands of funny women and droll men ..."

MISS GRUNDISON, JUNIOR. "There goes Lucy Holyroyd, all alone in a Boat with young Snipson as usual. So impudent of them!"

HER ELDER SISTER. "Yes; how shocking if they were Upset and Drowned-- without a Chaperon, you know!"--_Punch_, August 8, 1891.]

Now conceive--it is not an impossible conception--that the marvellous gift of expression that he was to possess in words had been changed by some fairy at his birth into an equal gift of expression by means of the pencil, and that he had cultivated the gift as assiduously as he cultivated the other, and finally that he had exercised it as sedulously through life, bestowing on innumerable little pictures in black and white all the wit and wisdom, the wide culture, the deep knowledge of the world and of the human heart, all the satire, the tenderness, the drollery, and last, but not least, that incomparable perfection of style that we find in all or most that he has written--what a pictorial record that would be!

Think of it--a collection of little wood-cuts or etchings, with each its appropriate legend--a series of small pictures equal in volume and in value to the whole of Thackeray's literary work! Think of the laughter and the tears from old and young, rich and poor, and from the thousands who have not the intelligence or the culture to appreciate great books, or lack time or inclination to read them.

All there was in the heart and mind of Thackeray, expressed through a medium so simple and direct that even a child could be made to feel it, or a chimney-sweep! For where need we draw the line? We are only pretending.

Now I am quite content with Thackeray as he is--a writer of books, whose loss to literature could not be compensated by any gain to the gentle art of drawing little figures in black and white--"thousands of funny women and droll men." All I wish to point out--in these days when drawing is pressed into the service of daily journalism, and with such success that there will soon be as many journalists with the pencil as with the pen--is this, that the career of the future social pictorial satirist is full of splendid possibilities undreamed-of yet.

It is a kind of hybrid profession still in its infancy--hardly recognised as a profession at all--something halfway between literature and art--yet potentially combining all that is best and most essential in both, and appealing as effectively as either to some of our strongest needs and most natural instincts.

It has no school as yet; its methods are tentative, and its few masters have been pretty much self-taught. But I think that a method and a school will evolve themselves by degrees--are perhaps evolving themselves already.

The quality of black and white illustrations of modern life is immeasurably higher than it was thirty or forty years ago--its average and artistic quality--and it is getting higher day by day. The number of youths who can draw beautifully is quite appalling; one would think they had learned to draw before learning to read and write. Why shouldn't they?

Well, all we want, for my little dream to be realised, is that among these precocious wielders of the pencil there should arise here a Dickens, there a Thackeray, there a George Eliot or an Anthony Trollope, who, finding quite early in life that he can draw as easily as other men can spell, that he can express himself, and all that he hears and sees and feels, more easily, more completely, in that way than in any other, will devote himself heart and soul to that form of expression--as I and others have tried to do--but with advantages of nature, circumstances, and education that have been denied to us!

HE. "The fact is I never get any wild fowl shooting--never!"

SHE. "Oh, then you ought to come down to our Neighborhood in the Winter. It would just suit you, there are such a lot of Geese about-- a--a--I mean _Wild_ Geese of course!"--_Punch_, November 21, 1891.]

Hogarth seems to have come nearer to this ideal pictorial satirist than any of his successors in _Punch_ and elsewhere. For he was not merely a light humorist and a genial caricaturist; he dealt also in pathos and terror, in tragic passion and sorrow and crime; he often strikes chords of too deep a tone for the pages of a comic periodical.

But the extent of his productiveness was limited by the method of his production; he was a great painter in oils, and each of his life scenes is an important and elaborate picture, which, moreover, he engraved himself at great cost of time and labour, after the original time and labour spent in painting it. It is by these engravings, far more than by his pictures, that he is so widely known.

It is quite possible to conceive a little sketchy woodcut no larger than a cut in _Punch_, and drawn by a master like Charles Keene, or the German Adolf Menzel, giving us all the essence of any picture by Hogarth even more effectively, more agreeably, than any of Hogarth's most finished engravings. And if this had been Hogarth's method of work, instead of some fifty or sixty of those immortal designs we should have had some five or six thousand! Almost a library!

So much for the great pictorial satirist of the future--of the near future, let us hope--that I have been trying to evolve from my inner consciousness. May some of us live to see him!

End of Project Gutenberg's Social Pictorial Satire, by George du Maurier