Social Pictorial Satire | Page 5

convivially, at least, my small D.M., carved in
impenetrable oak, will go down to posterity in rather distinguished
company!

If ever there was a square English hole, and a square English peg to fit
it, that hole was _Punch_, and that peg was John Leech. He was John
Bull himself, but John Bull refined and civilised--John Bull polite,
modest, gentle--full of self-respect and self-restraint, and with all the
bully softened out of him; manly first and gentlemanly after, but very
soon after; more at home perhaps in the club, the drawing-room, and
the hunting-field, in Piccadilly and the Park, than in the farm or shop or
market-place; a normal Englishman of the upper middle class, with but
one thing abnormal about him, viz., his genius, which was of the kind
to give the greater pleasure to the greater number--and yet delight the
most fastidious of his day--and I think of ours. One must be very
ultra-aesthetic, even now, not to feel his charm.
He was all of a piece, and moved and worked with absolute ease,
freedom, and certainty, within the limits nature had assigned him--and
his field was a very large one. He saw and represented the whole
panorama of life that came within his immediate ken with an
unwavering consistency, from first to last; from a broadly humorous,
though mostly sympathetic point of view that never changed--a very
delightful point of view, if not the highest conceivable.
Hand and eye worked with brain in singular harmony, and all three
improved together contemporaneously, with a parallelism most
interesting to note, as one goes through the long series of his social
pictures from the beginning.
He has no doubts or hesitations--no bewildering subtleties--no seeking
from twelve to fourteen o'clock--either in his ideas or technique, which
very soon becomes an excellent technique, thoroughly suited to his
ideas--rapid, bold, spirited, full of colour, breadth, and
movement--troubling itself little about details that will not help the
telling of his story--for before everything else he has his story to tell,
and it must either make you laugh or lightly charm you--and he tells it
in the quickest, simplest, down-rightest pencil strokes, although it is
often a complicated story!
For there are not only the funny people and the pretty people acting out
their little drama in the foreground--there is the scene in which they act,

and the middle distance, and the background beyond, and the sky itself;
beautiful rough landscapes and seascapes and skyscapes, winds and
weathers, boisterous or sunny seas, rain and storm and cloud--all the
poetry of nature, that he feels most acutely while his little people are
being so unconsciously droll in the midst of it all. He is a king of
impressionists, and his impression becomes ours on the spot--never to
be forgotten! It is all so quick and fresh and strong, so simple, pat, and
complete, so direct from mother Nature herself! It has about it the
quality of inevitableness--those are the very people who would have
acted and spoken in just that manner, and we meet them every day--the
expression of the face, the movement and gesture, in anger, terror,
dismay, scorn, conceit, tenderness, elation, triumph.... Whatever the
mood, they could not have looked or acted otherwise--it is life itself.
An optimistic life in which joyousness prevails, and the very woes and
discomfitures are broadly comical to us who look on--like some one
who has sea-sickness, or a headache after a Greenwich banquet--which
are about the most tragic things he has dealt with.
(I am speaking of his purely social sketches. For in his admirable large
cuts, political and otherwise serious, his satire is often bitter and biting
indeed; and his tragedy almost Hogarthian.)
Like many true humorists, he was of a melancholy temperament, and
no doubt felt attracted by all that was mirthful and bright, and in happy
contrast to his habitual mood. Seldom if ever does a drop of his inner
sadness ooze out through his pencil-point--and never a drop of gall; and
I do not remember one cynical touch in his whole series.
In his tastes and habits he was by nature aristocratic; he liked the
society of those who were well dressed, well bred and refined like
himself, and perhaps a trifle conventional; he conformed quite
spontaneously and without effort to upper-class British ideal of his time,
and had its likes and dislikes. But his strongest predilections of all are
common to the British race: his love of home, his love of sport, his love
of the horse and the hound--especially his love of the pretty
woman--the pretty woman of the normal, wholesome English type.
This charming creature so dear to us all pervades his show from

beginning to end--she is a creation of his, and he thoroughly loves her,
and draws her again and again with