Social Pictorial Satire | Page 2

that you should put a tone on this
wall, and a tree, or something, in the left middle distance to balance the
composition, and raise or depress the horizon-line to get a better effect
of perspective.
In speaking of some of my fellow-artists on _Punch_, and of their work,
I shall try and bring both these critical methods into play--promising,
however, once for all, that such criticism on my part is simply the
expression of my individual taste or fancy, the taste or fancy of one
who by no means pretends to the unerring acumen of Molière's cook,
on the one hand, and who feels himself by no means infallible in his
judgment of purely technical matters, on the other. I can only admire
and say why, or why I don't; and if I fail in making you admire and
disadmire with me, it will most likely be my fault as well as my
misfortune.
I had originally proposed to treat of Richard Doyle, John Leech, and
Charles Keene--and finally of myself, since that I should speak of
myself was rather insisted upon by those who procured me the honour
of speaking at all. I find, however, that there is so much to say about
Leech and Keene that I have thought it better to sacrifice Richard
Doyle, who belongs to a remoter period, and whose work, exquisite as
it is of its kind, is so much slighter than theirs, and fills so much less of
the public eye; for his connection with Punch did not last long.
Moreover, personally I knew less of him: just enough to find that to
know was to love him--a happy peculiarity he shared with his two great
collaborators on Punch.
_John Leech_! What a name that was to conjure with, and is still!
I cannot find words to express what it represented to me of pure
unmixed delight in my youth and boyhood, long before I ever dreamed
of being an artist myself! It stands out of the path with such names as
Dickens, Dumas, Byron--not indeed that I am claiming for him an
equal rank with those immortals, who wielded a weapon so much more
potent than a mere caricaturist's pencil! But if an artist's fame is to be
measured by the mere quantity and quality of the pleasure he has given,
what pinnacle is too high for John Leech!
Other men have drawn better; deeper, grander, nobler, more poetical

themes have employed more accomplished pencils, even in black and
white; but for making one _glad_, I can think of no one to beat him.
To be an apparently hopeless invalid at Christmas-time in some dreary,
deserted, dismal little Flemish town, and to receive _Punch's Almanac_
(for 1858, let us say) from some good-natured friend in England--that is
a thing not to be forgotten! I little dreamed then that I should come to
London again, and meet John Leech and become his friend; that I
should be, alas! the last man to shake hands with him before his death
(as I believe I was), and find myself among the officially invited
mourners by his grave; and, finally, that I should inherit, and fill for so
many years (however indifferently), that half-page in Punch opposite
the political cartoon, and which I had loved so well when he was the
artist!
Well, I recovered from a long and distressing ailment of my sight
which had been pronounced incurable, and came to England, where I
was introduced to Charles Keene, with whom I quickly became
intimate, and it was he who presented me to Leech one night at one of
Mr. Arthur Lewis's smoking concerts, in the winter of 1860. I
remember feeling somewhat nervous lest he should take me for a
foreigner on account of my name, and rather unnecessarily went out of
my way to assure him that I was rather more English than John Bull
himself. It didn't matter in the least; I have no doubt he saw through it
all: he was kindness and courtesy itself; and I experienced to the full
that emotion so delightful to a young hero-worshipper in meeting face
to face a world-wide celebrity whom he has long worshipped at a
distance. In the words of Lord Tennyson:
"I was rapt By all the sweet and sudden passion of youth Towards
greatness in its elder...."
But it so happened at just this particular period of his artistic career and
of mine that he no longer shone as a solitary star of the first magnitude
in my little firmament of pictorial social satire. A new impulse had
been given to the art of drawing on wood, a new school had been
founded, and new methods--to draw straight from nature instead of
trusting to memory and imagination--had been the artistic