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THE ART OF " PUNCH." (Finsr NOTICE.]
CARICATURE, in common with most other things, has undergone a marked change since the days of the Regency. There is as much difference between the satirical art of that and this time as there is between the manners of the hard-drinking, hard-swearing, gambling, duelling " beau" of sixty years ago, and the modern, im- passive, drawling "swell." While caricature has lost much of its grossness of incident and coarse brutality of treatment, it has gained considerably in humour, truth to nature, and artistic power. It is no longer held extremely funny to contrast a very fat and a very lean man, nor is it considered a fine touch of sarcasm to examrate the personal deformities of our fellow-creatures. The impurities in which our elder caricaturists indulged find no place now-a-days even in those comic penny publications which, devoted chiefly to quizzing the Volunteer movement, may now and then be seen hanging in the windows of the cheap newsvendors, and, as regards art, there must be few people who would prefer the drawings of Bunbury, Rowland- son, and Gilray, to those of Cruikshank, Leech, Doyle, or TennieL It is not, however, my purpose to discuss the merits or record the past history of caricature in this country, but simply to offer a few remarks on that form of it which finds expression in the pages of Punch. In looking over the earlier volumes, now republishing, one is struck by the difference existing between the cuts in them and those which find favour now. The pages then were covered with armies of little black figures, looking as if they had been cut out of court-plaister and stuck on the white paper. One looks in vain for those subjects of contemporary domestic life (technically called "socials," I believe) which now form the most characteristic feature of a number of Punch, and though the fun of the earlier drawings is up to the present standard, in point of artistic excellence they are very far short of it. Many artists have been " on Punch," some for a few weeks, some for a few years, while others have contented themselves with a single appearance; but we find Mr. Leech's hand busy from the first, and he is the only one that has followed the inte- rests of the periodical from its commencement. Kenny Meadows, Hine, Alfred Crowquill, McConnell, and others, have " fretted their hour" on the Punch stage. Mr. Richard Doyle's connexion with it lasted for some years, and his retirement is to be re- gretted, not only because with his departure the element of the grotesque, in which he so particularly excelled, vanished too, but also because, with but few exceptions, he has since done nothing worthy of his powers. Among these exceptions the admirable "Adventures of Brown, Jones, and Robinson" must, of course, be placed; but not the illustrations to the " Newcomes," not the " Bird's-eye Views of Society" in the Cornhill Magazine. I think most people would have preferred Mr. Thackeray to illustrate his own story; and, though the " Bird's-eye Views" enjoy the luxury of tinted paper, and the delicate engraving of Dalziel Brothers, they will not in their laboured humour compare for one moment with the freshness and droll fun of their more soberly arrayed progenitors, " The Man- ners and Customs of the English in 1849." But though Mr. Doyle has quitted Punch, his design for the wrapper is still continued; and every week the "dickey bird" surmounting the R D appears in company with Punch, grinning as he pats his finger to his nose, the melancholy Toby squatting on his many-volumed pedestal, and the bacchanalian procession, in which the little faun drags along by a string the mask of Brougham, a parody of an incident (not a com- plimentary one, by the way, to his Lordship) in Titian's great picture of ,,Rac&us and Ariadne' in our National Gallery. The present staff of Punch artists consists of Messrs. Leech, Ten- Mel, and Charles Keene. The name of Mr. Howard must also be placed on the list. His drawings of animal., birds, and insects, are, I am told, popular with the public; they may be known by the pecu- liarity of their style, and the signature of a trident. Besides these gentlemen, there are occasional contributors, Mr. Julian Portcb, Mr. G. Du Mariner, &c. &c. Foremost among these stands Mr. Leech. Connected as he has been with Punch from the first, he has been in a great degree instrumental in attaining and maintaining the position which it now enjoys. The heaviest blow that could fall on Peach would be the loss of Mr. Leech. His drawings are now the first things one looks for in opening a number. In saying this, I hope I am not wounding the feelings of any of the Punch writers; but it must be confessed that the letter-press has not kept pace with the woodcuts. The comparison of the present articles with those of the days of the "Snob Papers" and the "Caudle Lectures," is not in favour of the former. For twenty years hal Mr. Leech been throw- ing off his brilliant and truthful sketches. In them we can trace the reflex of his mind and the gradual ripening of his humour. He is always hearty, playful, and genial, occasionally solemn and severe, but never ill-natured, morbid, or misanthropical. He enjoys the world and the good it contains, and goes through life pleasantly laughing; he has his stern moments' now and then, and lights resolutely against cant, hypocrisy, arrogance, and vanity. Like all true humorists, he has the pathetic faculty, and though in the pages of a comic paper there is seldom opportunity for its dis- play, it peeps out now and then with genuine effect. Mr. Leech delights in the " swells," respects the poor man, but hates the snob. He does not see much to admire or to interest him in people whose incomes are under 3001. a year, nor can he conceive the moral worth independent of a correct aspiration of the letter H. His respect for the professors of the Church, law, and physic is limited, and he seems to think with Mr. Carlyle that when in the neighbourhood of a bishop the safest course is to keep on the other side of the hedge. The Dissenters fare no better, and he has more than once reproduced that Chadband and Stiggius type of character. All healthy manly English sports meet with ready sympathy from Mr. Leech. He prefers the life of physical enjoyment to that of intellectual exertion. The savans and blue-stockings find little favour at his hands ; the scientific man bores him ; he likes far better to be salmon-fishing with Mr. Briggs, riding across country with Tom Noddy and the Brookside harriers, or wading through the turnip-fields with Tomkins after partridges " on the lst." And what shall we say of Mr. Leech's ladies? As girls, they are charmingly pretty creatures, full blown buxom beauties ; but how is it, Mr. Leech, that these very interest- ing young people grow up into such repulsively ugly middle-aged women ? Why do you so seldom represent a lady who has attained a "certain age" as an object on which the eye can rest with com- placency ? The elderly married lady becomes coarse-featured and unwieldy, and the mature spinster, especially if she have a turn for vegetarianism or marine zoology, presents an unpleasantly angular surface, fiat feet, and rigid, meagre ankles. But if Mr. Leech is rather hard on middle-aged womanhood, he has a most kindly appre- ciation of childhood. How well he enters into the little aspirations and jealousies of children, their whims, their assumptions of im- portance, their hastily struck-up friendships, and their naive queries with which they so frequently puzzle their elders. He laughs gently, too, at the boy's affectation of manly airs ; his youths have an en- gaging air of frank, honest good nature. The political caricatures of Mr. Leech are smart and telling, and have that look of having been rapidly bit off on the spur of the mo- ment which all work of this class should possess. I can fancy Lord Palmerston often chuckling over his own portrait in Punch, though sometimes the joke is too pungent to allow an "honourable member" with limited sense of humour to see the joke. Thus, Mr. Roebuck, the other day at Sheffield, was very contemptuous about "that thing in Punch," a drawing of Mr. Tenniel's, in which the Emperor of Austria is running away with " Tear'em." The point evidently went home. It is gratifying to find that the legislative wisdom of the country does not consider it beneath its dignity to see Punch for itself, and does not find it necessary to undergo that mysterious process suggested in the formula, " my attention has been called," &c., a formula with which it appears incumbent on nine persons out of ten who write to the Times to commence their letters. It would be tedious and needless to enumerate Mr. Leech's most striking political caricatures. They sound coldly in description, while much of their interest belongs necessarily to the hour of their birth. One of his most serious and impressive drawings, " General Fivrier turned Traitor," the last moments of the Emperor Nicholas, with Death in the costume of a Russian general, lifting the curtain of the dying man's bed, elicited high commendation from Mr. Ruskin. Occasionally the large woodcut is devoted to matters connected with social reform, and in one of the volumes of 1852, I find two drawings especially applicable to the present day of railway " catastrophes" and " tragedme." One is called "Railway Amalgamation—a Plea- sant State of Things." A train has suddenly stopped with a jerk and crash, the passengers show signs of fear, and the following conversa- tion takers place between an elderly gentleman and the jolly indif-
ferent guard, who carries himself with a jaunty air, his hands in his pockets :
Passenger. What's the matter, guard? Guard. (With presence of mind.) Oh, nothing particular, sir. We've only run into an excursion train !
Passenger. But, good gracious ! There's a train just behind us, isn't there ?
Guard. Yes, sir. But a boy has gone down the line with a sigma, and its very likely they'll see it! The second, headed "Railway Undertaking," represents a train about to start. One of the carriage's is fitted up as a surgery. The dramatis person are a passenger and a touter, habited as an under- taker's mute. Touter asks if the passenger " is going by this train." " Tim P eh? Yes," doubtfully, replies the, passenger. " Allow me, then," says the touter, "to give you one of my cards, sir." An
i ominously prophetic card it s : at its top is a skull and a pair of marrow-bones.
As regards artistic execution, everything must be said in praise of Mr. Leech. Given a certain and limited number of touches, I know of no man who can produce with them such happy results. He does not profess to be academic or elaborate, but he invariably puts the right line in the right place. He never follows out the intricacies of a fold of drapery with the definite certainty of Mr. Tenniel, or gives
himself difficult problems of foreshortening, or unusual attitudes, of which Mr. Keene is fond, bat, as far as he professes to go, he is
thoroughly right. His feeling for character and the salient points of expression is very strong, and it is very uncommon to find a cari- caturist with such a perception of beauty as Mr. Leech possesses. The great George Cruikshank, with all his genius, powerful and varied as it is, has never drawn a pretty female face. Individuality is another of Mr. Leech's good qualities. We have met all his people at one time or another : his country farmers and town swells, worldly mammas and gorgeous footmen, his knowing horse-dealers and pecu- lating lodging-house keepers, his dandified hairdressers and linen- drapers, his stout-built, red-faced old boatmen and chaffing cabmen ; and those eternal plagues, the London street-boys, are all good and true in character. In his wildest fun nature is never lost sight of. Equally happy in expression, Mr. Leech shows us the complacent smirk of Paterfamilias as he stands in the balcony of his sea-side lodgings, surrounded by his wife and daughters, or aghast with horror as he breaks his first egg at breakfast and finds himself pursued by
the organ-grinders, or smiling joyously as be bears up against the breeze, which threatens to blow him and his daughters off the jetty— the set grin of the French garcon—the sad face of the man who, the•
morning after a whitebait dinner at Greenwich, is asked by the page " what fish he would like to-day ?"—the terror of the old gentleman, elaborately dressed for a dinner party, on finding the imprint of the young street acrobat's dirty feet on his spotless waistcoat—the glut- tonous enjoyment of the greedy boy who has retired to a "desolate shade" with a dozen potties of strawberries—the joy of the country children, who have just discovered that by peering undeethe canvas of a travelling circus they can see the "'oofs of the 'orses" for no- thing—and hundreds of others, which it would be vain to attempt particularizing. The effects of sea-sickness on the human countenance have been well remembered and portrayed by Mr. Leech. A newly married couple start for the Continent, aid Boulogne, to spend the honeymoon ; their faces are pallid, and the eyes of Edwin have a fixed and stony stare, admirably rendered by mere dots. His only chance , is perfect tranquillity, but his Angelina requests him to fetch up more shawls from the cabin. It is putting the love of Edwin to a severe test.
Mr. Leech's taste and feeling in landscape deserve special mention. The backgrounds to his hunting and fishing subjects reveal a watchful and keen appreciation of nature, and, like his figures, they have no more touches than are absolutely necessary to secure the desired effect. In Highland glens and Irish lakes, m river scenes with the
swans and water-lilies, and the dense masses of foliage under which the cows seek shelter from the rays of the scorching son, or the broad expanse of meadow lands, he is equally at ease. Hill and dale, moor and upland, are all faithfully drawn by this facile hand. As a specimen of reckless pencilling over which the hand apparently (but not really) has had no control, but which bears considerable re- semblance to the object imitated, I should cite Mr. Leech's drawing of a turnip-field in the " Alinanack" for 1860.
The works of Mr. Leech are a household word. Combining good art with good jokes, they appeal to all tastes, and delight every class. Future antiquarians will revere Mr. Leech's memory for the light he has thrown on our manners and customs. The present generation owes him a heavy debt in consideration of the many hearty laughs he has afforded it. Mr. Leech should be a happy man. He commands a large audience, and with all he is deservedly a favourite. On my table, as I write, are some volumes of woodcuts by Gavarni, and others, of French life and character. They overflow with artistic cleverness and skill, but what a moral, or rather immoral, atmosphere surrounds them ! They are devoted to the glorification of the "lorette," and aim at showing the ridiculous absurdity of regarding the marriage vow as sacred or binding. I am glad to think that the pictures of life and character on this side the Channel are in purer and healthier taste, and that we can place the works of Mr. Leech in the hands of boy or girl without fear of causing a blush on their cheeks. From him they will learn to admire only what is goody upright, and manly, and to eschew all that is vicious, mean, and heartless. Next week I hope to have something to say respecting Mr. Tenniel
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