Social Pictorial Satire | Page 5

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 a fondness that is half lover-like and half paternal--her buxom figure, her merry bright eyes and fresh complexion and flowing ringlets, and pursed-up lips like Cupid's bow. Nor is he ever tired of displaying her feet and ankles (and a little more) in gales of wind on cliff and pier and parade, or climbing the Malvern Hills. When she puts on goloshes it nearly