LIFE OF JOHN LEECH.*
Iv must be confessed that Mr. Frith's Life of John Leech is very far from being a model biography. It is readable, but to Leech's innumerable admirers it will be also a source of much disappointment. There can be but few students of the earlier pages of Punch who had not formed for themselves some idea of the kindly satirist, and who would not be deeply interested to learn something of the life of an artist whose work had inspired them almost with a feeling of personal affection for the man himself. They will, of course, learn much from Mr. Frith's book that they did not know before, but the process of learning will be a laborious and vexatious one. Mr. Frith, in his preface, says that he is very "conscious of the sins of omis- sion and commission" of which he has been guilty, and pleads that the life of Leech was somewhat devoid of incidents that would interest the public, and that the chronological deficien- cies of his work are mainly due to the difficulty he experienced in acquiring certain information, and the varying times at which that information was supplied. The plea is hardly sufficient, for Mr. Frith's sins are rather those of commission than of omission ; and of the former, the venial offence of rambling is the smallest that can be laid to his charge. His main offence is that, having material for one short and in- teresting volume, he has thought fit to supply the public with two long ones, and has been guilty of the most manifest and uncalled-for "padding." It is certainly interesting to hear the criticisms of an artist like Mr. Frith upon Leech's work, and we would not quarrel with him for giving us a fair amount of it, even if that criticism had been sometimes hostile; but we really do not care to wade through chapter upon chapter of per- fectly aimless and invariably favourable description, which simply amounts to a rapturous and undiscriminating laudation of nearly all the work which Leech ever did. Mr. Frith thinks it his duty to give us the whole plot and several lengthy quotations from The Marchioness of Brinvilliets, The Man Made of Money, and the Comic Histories of Rome and England. Leech's illustrations. of Albert Smith, Jerrold, and A Beckett, though forming an important part of his early work, hardly justified his biographer in forcing such a doubtful intellectual treat upon his readers. As for Thomas Hood, Mr. Frith quotes "Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg" almost in full, in order to introduce some of what perhaps were the worst illustrations that Leech perpetrated. We may safely say that we prefer his quotations to the examples that he gives of Leech's illustrations, and that we prefer both to the singularly inept criticisms with- Which he has interspersed Hood's verses.
Taking away the quotations from old novels, and a • good many anecdotes which do not bear upon the -subject a this biography, there does not remain very much;, but even what does remain is presented to us in a nacist unsatisfactory form, The illustrations are far from representing the best specimens of Leech's work ; and the story of Leech's life is not only meagre, but told in such a rambling_ ftashion -,a.nd with so many irrelevant digressions, as to rob, it JO the greater part of its interest. Material may have been wanting in a life which was certainly uneventful ; but Mr. Frith
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• John Leech: Ms Life and Work. P. Fittb.--B.A: tandon: Bentley and ON . has not done the best that was possible with Vie scatty material at his command. The father of the artist, also John Leech, had succeeded an uncle in an estab- lishment known as the London Coffee-House, on Ludgate Hill. The uncle had retired with a large fortune; but Leech's father does not appear to have been very successful with the business. At an early age the son showed his extraordinary taste and capacity for drawing—a taste which was in no way discouraged by his parents—but there seems to have been no idea in the family that his talents could be turned to any practical end, for, on leaving school, he was sent to St. Bar- tholomew's with the view of following the medical profession. Fortunately, perhaps, for Leech, his father's affairs became so very unprosperous, that he himself was compelled to abandon - the idea of becoming a doctor, and to try to earn a livelihood by turning his only talent to an immediate use. His first struggles to find a market for his drawings must have been heart-breaking for a man of his sensitive nature ; but of them there remains no record whatever. His boyhood appears to have been happy enough, and his letters from school, the Charterhonse, are delightful reading. To judge from their evidence, the boy must have been rather spoilt by his father and mother, an early training which undoubtedly made his early encounter with the hard- ships of life doubly hard to bear. His caricature of the famous Mulrea.dy envelope was the first thing to bring him into public notice, and from that time he does not seem to have lacked employment. Also, from that time he was subject to incessant calls upon his purse. What Leech did with the large sums that he evidently earned, is a mystery which his biographer does not explain, and which is probably inex- plicable. He always worked under high pressure, the pressure of want of money, and his work ultimately killed him. 'Excess of generosity," one of his best friends says, "was his greatest failing." But it certainly did not need this open-handed liberality on his part to endear him to his friends. To know Leech was to love him ; and his friends, for the most part, were his equals. Thackeray, Sir John Millais, and a host of others bear witness to their affection for the man, and their keen appreciation of the artist and humorist. Thackeray's article in the Quarterly Review admirably sums up the strength and beauty of Leech's work. The same article brought down much wrath upon the head of its writer, on account of one unlucky and rather invidious phrase. "Fancy a number of Punch," he said, "without John Leech's pictures ! What would you give for it?" At this distance of time, we may safely say that we should not have been disposed to give very much. Without John Leech's schoolboys, without his pretty girls and their flirtations, without his horses and his hunting, his shooting and his Cockney sportsmen, and, most terrible loss of all, without the adventures of the immortal Mr. Briggs, the pages of those early numbers would have been blank enough. Leech himself would have been the last to recognise this : few men have been more consistently modest about the value of their work than he was. He seems always to have been more mindful of what he was not, than of what he was. He was not a painter ; he was almost absolutely without law and schooling in his art, and, in his own opinion, his deficiencies far outweighed his merits. But he cannot be considered as an artist alone ; it is as a humorist that he has taken the firmest hold upon our imaginations and our sym- pathy. There is a kindliness, an unfailing charity, about all his satire that robs it of its sting. Of him it might truly be said that, he considered nihil huniani alienum. His facile pencil ranged over the whole field of humanity, with all its feelings, its billings, and its follies, and never de- scribed it in any but the friendliest fashion, nor set down aught in malice to its account. In only two cases, perhaps, did his good-humour ever fail him. He could not conceal his prejudice against foreigners ; he was. intensely insular in his attitude towards them ; he did not understand them, nor wish to understand them ; 'he distrusted and disliked them, and he could not help Saying so. When the foreigner was also an itinerant musician, then his dislike grew to hatred. In his lifer life, his nervous terror of street-noises almost became thinania ; and his pictures of organ grinders and their kin are iaVage in their wrath.
No doubt the public does owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Frith for having presented it with a biography of John Leech. Many, apparently, had undertaken the task as a labour of
love, but by some fatality no one ever performed it; and Mr. Frith only stepped in when all others had failed. For this reason alone, one would be glad to part from the author with some word of grateful recognition. His book is readable, and that is a quality which covers a multitude of sins ; also, it is to the restrictions of the Law of Copyright, and not to his own judgment, that the extraordinary selection of illustrations is mainly due.
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