" PHIZ " AND " BOZ."
WHEN Mr. Dickens was making his last tour in the United States, the following incident occurred at one of the Western towns, where he gave a series of reading. The programme included the trial scene from "Pickwick ;": a very large awl attentive audience was assembled, and all seemed pleased, with the exception of one individual, a burly and em- phatic person, who, accosting • a member of the Reader's party, inquired whether the gentleman to whom he had been listening was really Mr. Dickens P " Certainly, that is Mr. Dickens," was the reply. "He who wrote Pickwick r" "Yes, the same." "Then you just tell him," said the aggrieved questioner, "that he knows no more about Sam Weller than a cow knows about pleating a shirt !" How often has one heard the same thing (not so graphically expressed) said by disappointed listeners to the heavy, lumpish, drawling rendering of the " Sam " of whom one has so totally different an idea, by the humourist to whom we are accustomed to think ourselves entirely in- debted for him ! That Sam could never have "bestowed a wink the intense significance of which passes descrip- tion" on anybody, or been capable of catching the tone of the "friendly swarry " of the Bath footmen. That Sam was a hoarse, vulgar lout, needing a great deal of room to turn him- self round in, and no more like the smart fellow who plays a return match with Job Trotter in Mr. Nubbles's kitchen, than the Single Gentleman of the "Old Curiosity Shop" is like the pathetic figure of Master Humphrey seated in the corner by the Clock, though the identity of these two is indicated to the reader in a passage which both the author and the illus- trator seem to have overlooked. The truth is, our Sam Weller —the Sam of that frank Western farmer—is Hablot Browne's Sam Weller, and it is impossible to accept any other. This is a striking instance of the power of the distinguished artist whom we have so lately lost, and who is indissolubly assouiated with one of the most precious of the treasures of memory—that of the books that delighted us, and the fancies that were realities to us in early days. It is, however, only one among many, for every one of the characters in the works of Dickens and Lever which have a peculiarly strong hold upon the memory, mean and are what" Phiz " has made them. He put the fine point on the humour of Dickens, and catching—especially in the illustrations to "Master Humphrey's Clock "—that de- lightful vein of extravagance, which a lesser artist of a duller wit would have swollen into sheer caricature, he gives us two such finely differentiated figures as the delightful Dick and the whimsical Chuckster, and then Quilp, with the "doglike smile" and the bow-legs ; Codlin, Short, Jerry, the dancing dogs, and Whisker. The latter we hold to be the most characteristic four- legged portrait in existence. Think of him, as he stands at Mr. Witherden's door, steadily turning a deaf ear to the mild remonstrances of Mr. Abel, and the "dear, dear, what a naughty Whisker !" of the old lady ; as he dashes off, full of purpose, with the Marchioness hanging on behind the little carriage, in the act of losing her one shoe for ever, and as he submits to be hugged by the rescued Kit, and say whether playfulness, obstinacy, good living, and a serene conscious- ness of being master of the situation, could find more perfect expression in the form of a pony. Again, think of the half-tipsy horror in the faces of Mrs. Jiniwin and Sampson Brass, the suspended motion of the tea- spoon in the hand of the cruelly disappointed mother-in-law, and the lifting of her warning finger, as Quilp interrupts the calumnious description of his nose, by "Aquiline, you hag !"
Could. anything beat the expressiveness of that little picture, with the stolid men in sou'-westers, who have been dragging the river (it is to drown the Dwarf, in the end, so that there is a touch of iron grimness in this conceit), and are requested by Quilp to "keep everything they find—upon the body." It is a good plan to turn at once from this scene to the fine picture of Quilp's corpse, when the river, after it has "toyed and jested with its ghastly freight," has flung it on the bank, amid the weeds and stones and stamps of a lonely place, where pirates had been hung in chains. The reaches of the winding river, the long, fiat shores, the rough, heavy, numbered posts, the heavily-swooping birds of prey, the tumbled, dishonoured corpse tossed there, head downwards, with the clenched hand, bared arm, and one leg, with the claw-like foot in its torn stocking, crooked over a stump, form a composition that " Phiz " has rarely excelled. And if he has been the one interpreter of Dickens who adorned every humorous conception which he touched, he has also done away with much of the mawkishness of Dickens's sentiment, and modified his vulgarity. Edith Dombey, Lady Dedlock, and Mrs. Merdle are instances that will occur to every one ; the three are caricatures in the books, but they are sympathetic personages in the artist's presentments. It is, indeed, owing to the two fine illustrations of the Carker episode, that the whole story of the elopement in "Dombey and Son" fails to strike the reader at once as simply a mock-heroic treatment of the feat of "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face." When " Phiz " fails as the illustrator of Dickens, it is because he has had to illustrate a failure ; he never missed the humour of the author, because he always felt it; the sentiment he probably despised. The self-conscious, affected Esther Summerson, in "Bleak House," would be altogether odious ; the less tiresome, but feeble and lachrymose Amy Dorrit ; and the shadowy Mary Graham, of "Martin Chuzzle.
wit," would be nobodies, but for their portraiture by " Phiz."
Both author and artist failed equally to interest the reader in Madeline Bray. Kate Nickleby is charming; Ralph, one of Mr. Hablot Browne's memorable works ; Squeers, though caricatured, is admirable ; Smike, the Kenwigses, and the Crummleses, are very clever ; Morleena in the barber's shop, with the coal-heaver who is on the wrong side of "the line," scratching his head in puzzled disconcertedness, is as good as Mr. Pickwick going down the slide ; but Nicholas Nickleby's ladylove, with a big face, and no figure inside her clothes, is as feeble a creature as Minnie Gowan in " Little Dorrit."
The tea and quarrel scene between Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Prig is one of the author's masterpieces ; the same may certainly be said. of the illustration, from the toppling pip.
pins on the bedstead, and. the extinguisher bandboxes, to the symptoms of inflammation in the faces and tempers of the ladies. Wonderfully good, also, is the scene of Mr. Pecksniff's discomfiture ; the detected humbug's face, as he rests his head against the wainscot, "with an expression of disconcerted meekness enormously ridiculous," is perfect. Among the semi.
comical, as distinguished from the broadly-farcical characters whom " Phiz " had to portray for " Boz," Tim Linkinwater is highly meritorious ; the smiling, yet anxious solicitude with which he watches Nicholas Nickleby's debut, the wave of his pen with which he invites the Brothers to silence and motionlessness, the tilted stool, the natty shoes, all are admirably characteristic. Miss La Creevy is sheer caricature, and this is a pity. " Phiz ", might have made them "a comfortable couple."
It is difficult to believe that " Phiz " might not have induced Mr. Dickens to suppress the introductory chapter of "Martin Chuzzlewit,"—it is not surpassed in vulgarity and puerile would-be humour by any of his earlier " Sketches," or even by certain parts of his "Pictures from Italy" (which we take to be the low-water mark of his performances)— for the frontispiece to that work, in some respects, the author's best, is one of Mr. Hablot Browne's happiest achievements. So graceful is the conceit, so beautiful is the musing, vision-seeing 'figure of Tom Pinch, with all the aerial fabric of the story floating round him, that we cannot bear to reflect that a real Tom Pinch would be an insufferable idiot, and that a real Pocksniff could not take in even such a fool as he.
" Phiz " found Mr. Dombey a difficult ideal to portray, and made no less than seventeen sketches, before he hit upon that one to which he generally, not always, adhered.
Mr. Dombey, in his courting days at Leamington, is not like Mr. Dombey talking about "a cold spring" to deceive the world; but the artist's perplexity is not surprising, for the author varied his Dombey considerably, making him merely a pompous ass in the first part of the story, intensifying his purse-pride and folly in the second part, and turning him into a brute and the dupe of the coarsest chicanery in the third. This tendency to exaggeration, a note of Dickens's lack of education which, but for his wonderful humour, must have been fatal to his fictions, was in most instances toned down by the sympathetic, but more refined taste of the artist, who, after "Pickwick," almost always avoided caricature in illustrating Dickens. In his illustrations to the works of Lever and Ains- worth, " Phiz " showed. that he could enter into and render human interests, emotions, and passions which were out of the range of Dickens's humour and of narrative power. To Mr. F. G. Kitton we are indebted for a slight memoir of " Phiz," which is chiefly coneerned, as it ought to be, with tb4 artist. The man chose to live in retirement, to "keep him- self to himself " in the strictest sense of the phrase ; and he was in his right so to choose, and it is the artist, and not the man, with whom the public are concerned. We do not want to know for what reason " Phiz " and " Boz " quarrelled in 1859, just after " Phiz " had illustrated "A Tale of Two Cities," with etchings which come nearer to those in " Barnaby Budge" than any other of the artist's works of this kind. "Phiz " was not the only friend whom Dickens lost, for he had played the part of iconoclast to him- self. The quarrel, however, was a disaster for the readers of Dickens. Mr. Marcus Stone and Mr. Luke Fildes illustrated "Our Mutual Friend" and the fragment of "Edwin Drood." Mr. Kitton truly says that these accomplished painters avoided caricature and forced humour ; but those two works are full of both, and they failed either to illustrate, or to palliate them. We doubt whether any of the thousands of readers to whom the Pickwickians, Dick Swiveller, Mark Tapley, Pecksniff, Peggotty, Barna,by Budge, Maypole Hugh, Grip, Guppy, Skimpole, and Inspector Bucket, are images as familiar and recognisable as their own in a glass, have the least idea of the personages of either story, or have ever cared to form one, by the assistance of Mr. Stone and Mr. Fildes.
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