Read Ebook: Social Pictorial Satire by Du Maurier George

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But all these past manners and customs that some of us can remember so well--all these obsolete people, from the heavily whiskered swell to the policeman with the leather-bound chimney-pot hat, from good pater- and mater-familias who were actually looked up to and obeyed by their children, to the croquet-playing darlings in the pork-pie hats and huge crinolines--all survive and will survive for many a year in John Leech's "Pictures of Life and Character."

Except for a certain gentleness, kindliness, and self-effacing modesty common to both, and which made them appear almost angelic in the eyes of many who knew them, it would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast to Leech than Charles Keene.

Charles Keene was absolutely unconventional, and even almost eccentric. He dressed more with a view to artistic picturesqueness than to fashion, and despised gloves and chimney-pot hats, and black coats and broadcloth generally.

Scotch tweed was good enough for him in town and country alike. Though a Tory in politics, he was democratic in his tastes and habits. He liked to smoke his short black pipe on the tops of omnibuses; he liked to lay and light his own fire and cook his mutton-chop upon it. He had a passion for music and a beautiful voice, and sang with a singular pathos and charm, but he preferred the sound of his bagpipes to that of his own singing, and thought that you must prefer it too!

He was for ever sketching in pen and ink, indoors and out--he used at one time to carry a little ink-bottle at his buttonhole, and steel pens in his waistcoat-pocket, and thus equipped he would sketch whatever took his fancy in his walks abroad--houses, 'busses, cabs, people--bits of street and square, scaffoldings, hoardings with advertisements--sea, river, moor, lake, and mountain--what has he not sketched with that masterly pen that had already been so carefully trained by long and arduous practice in a life-school? His heart was in his work from first to last; beyond his bagpipes and his old books , he seemed to have no other hobby. His facility in sketching became phenomenal, as also his knowledge of what to put in and what to leave out, so that the effect he aimed at should be secured in perfection and with the smallest appearance of labour.

Leech, no doubt, had a good natural hand, that swept about with enviable freedom and boldness, but for want of early discipline it could not execute these miracles of skill; and the commands that came from the head also lacked the preciseness which results from patiently acquired and well-digested knowledge, so that Mr. Hand was apt now and then to zigzag a little on its own account--in backgrounds, on floors and walls, under chairs and tables, whenever a little tone was felt to be desirable--sometimes in the shading of coats and trousers and ladies' dresses.

But it never took a liberty with a human face or a horse's head; and whenever it went a little astray you could always read between the lines and know exactly what it meant.

There is no difficulty in reading between Keene's lines; every one of them has its unmistakable definite intimation; every one is the right line in the right place!

We must remember that there are no such things as lines in nature. Whether we use them to represent a human profile, the depth of a shadow, the darkness of a cloak or a thunder-cloud, they are mere conventional symbols. They were invented a long time ago, by a distinguished sportsman who was also a heaven-born amateur artist--the John Leech of his day--who engraved for us the picture of mammoth on one of its own tusks.

And we have accepted them ever since as the cheapest and simplest way of interpreting in black and white for the wood-engraver the shapes and shadows and colours of nature. They may be scratchy, feeble, and uncertain, or firm and bold--thick and thin--straight, curved, parallel, or irregular--cross-hatched once, twice, a dozen times, at any angle--every artist has his own way of getting his effect. But some ways are better than others, and I think Keene's is the firmest, loosest, simplest, and best way that ever was, and--the most difficult to imitate. His mere pen-strokes have, for the expert, a beauty and an interest quite apart from the thing they are made to depict, whether he uses them as mere outlines to express the shape of things animate or inanimate, even such shapeless, irregular things as the stones on a sea-beach--or in combination to suggest the tone and colour of a dress-coat, or a drunkard's nose, of a cab or omnibus--of a distant mountain with miles of atmosphere between it and the figures in the foreground.

His lines are as few as can be--he is most economical in this respect and loves to leave as much white paper as he can; but one feels in his best work that one line more or one line less would impair the perfection of the whole--that of all the many directions, curves, and thicknesses they might have taken he has inevitably hit upon just the right one. He has beaten all previous records in this respect--in this country, at least. I heard a celebrated French painter say: "He is a great man, your Charles Keene; he take a pen and ink and a bit of paper, and wiz a half-dozen strokes he know 'ow to frame a gust of wind!" I think myself that Leech could frame a gust of wind as effectually as Keene, by the sheer force of his untaught natural instinct--of his genius; but not with the deftness--this economy of material--this certainty of execution--this consummate knowledge of effect.

To borrow a simile from music, there are certain tunes so fresh and sweet and pretty that they please at once and for ever, like "Home, Sweet Home," or "The Last Rose of Summer"; they go straight to the heart of the multitude, however slight the accompaniment--a few simple chords--they hardly want an accompaniment at all.

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 are like Volkslieder--national airs--and more directly reach the national heart. Transplant them to other lands that have pencil Volkslieder of their own 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.

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.

Also, he seldom if ever gibes at those who have not been able to resist the temptations 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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!

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

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 , 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 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.

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. Gl?yre'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.

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!

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.

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.

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