Before I became an artist I was considered particularly good at caricaturing my friends, who always foresaw for me more than one change of profession, andPunchas the final goal of my wanderings in search of a career. For it was originally intended that I should be a man of science.
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. Gléyre'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.
And then in time I came to England and drew forPunch, thus fulfilling the early prophecy of my friends and fellow-students at University College—though not quite in the sense they anticipated.
[Illustration: THE NEW SOCIETY CRAZE
THE NEW GOVERNESS (through her pretty nose). "Waall—I come right slick away from Ne'York City, an' I ain't had much time for foolin' around in Europe—you bet! So I can't fix up your Gals in the Eu- rôpean languages, no-how!"
BELGRAVIAN MAMMA: (who knows there's a Duke or two still left in theMatrimonial Market). "Oh, that's of no consequence. I want myDaughters to aquire the American Accent in all its purity—and theIdioms, and all that. Now I'm sureyouwill doadmirably!"—Punch, December 1, 1888.]
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!
I have always tried as honestly and truthfully as lies in me to serve up to the readers ofPunchwhatever I have culled with the bodily eye, after cooking it a little in the brain. My raw material requires more elaborate working than Leech's. He dealt more in flowers and fruits and roots, if I may express myself so figuratively—from the lordly pineapple and lovely rose, down to the humble daisy and savory radish.Ideal in vegetables, I suppose. Little that I ever find seems to me fit for the table just as I see it; moreover, by dishing it up raw I should offend many people and make many enemies, and deserve to do so. I cook my green pease, asparagus, French beans, Brussels sprouts, German sauerkraut, and even a truffle now and then, so carefully that you would never recognise them as they were when I first picked them in the social garden. And they do not recognise themselves! Or even each other!
And I do my best to dish them up in good, artistic style. Oh that I could arrange for you a truffle with all that culinary skill that Charles Keene brought to the mere boiling of a carrot or a potato! He is thecordon bleupar excellence. The people I meet seem to me more interesting than funny—so interesting that I am well content to draw them as I see them, after just a little arrangement and a very transparent disguise—and without any attempt at caricature. The better-looking they are, the more my pencil loves them, and I feel more inclined to exaggerate in this direction than in any other.
Sam Weller, if you recollect, was fond of "pootiness and wirtue." Isoagree with him! I adore them both, especially in women and children. I only wish that the wirtue was as easy to draw as the pootiness.
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.
[Illustration: A PICTORIAL PUZZLE
TENOR WARBLER (with passionate emphasis on the first word of each line)— "Me-e-e-e-e-e-tme once again, M-e-e-e-e-t me once aga-a-ain—"
Why does the Cat suddenly jump off the Hearth-rug, rush to the Door, and make frantic Endeavors to get out?—Punch.]
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 staleHer infinite variety!"
and a very giantess in beauty. For she is a reduction in plaster of the famous statue at the Louvre.
They call her the Venus of Milo, or Melos! It is a calumny—a libel. She is no Venus, except in good looks; and if she errs at all, it is on the side of austerity. She is not only pootiness but wirtue incarnate (if one can be incarnate in marble), from the crown of her lovely head to the sole of her remaining foot—a very beautiful foot, though by no means a small one—it has never worn a high-heel shoe!
Like all the best of its kind, and its kind the best, she never sates nor palls, and the more I look at her the more I see to love and worship—and, alas! the more dissatisfied I feel—not indeed with the living beauty, ripe and real, that I see about and around—mere life is such a beauty in itself that no stone ideal can ever hope to match it! But dissatisfied with the means at my command to do the living beauty justice—a little bit of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of ink—and, alas! fingers and an eye less skilled than they would have been if I had gone straight to a school of art instead of a laboratory for chemistry!
And now for social pictorial satire considered as a fine art.
They who have practised it hitherto, from Hogarth downward, have not been many—you can count their names on your fingers! And the wide popularity they have won may be due as much to their scarcity as to the interest we all take in having the mirror held up to ourselves—to the malicious pleasure we all feel at seeing our neighbours held up to gentle ridicule or well-merited reproof; most of all, perhaps, to the realistic charm that lies in all true representation of the social aspects with which we are most familiar, ugly as these are often apt to be, with our chimney-pot hats, and trousers that unfit us, it seems, for serious and elaborate pictorial treatment at the hands of the foremost painters of our own times—except when we sit to them for our portraits; then they have willy-nilly to make the best of us, just as we are!
[Illustration: REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH
(SCENE—A Drawing-room in "Passionate Brompton.")
FAIR AESTHETIC (suddenly, and in deepest tones to Smith, who has just been introduced to take her in to Dinner).
"Are you Intense?"—Punch, June 14, 1879.]
The plays and novels that succeed the most are those which treat of the life of our own day; not so the costly pictures we hang upon our walls. We do not care to have continually before our eyes elaborate representations of the life we lead every day and all day long; we like best that which rather takes us out of it—romantic or graceful episodes of another time or clime, when men wore prettier clothes than they do now—well-imagined, well-painted scenes from classic lore—historical subjects—subjects selected from our splendid literature and what not; or, if we want modern subjects, we prefer scenes chosen from a humble sphere, which is not that of those who can afford to buy pictures—the toilers of the earth—the toilers of the sea—pathetic scenes from the inexhaustible annals of the poor; or else, again, landscapes and seascapes—things that bring a whiff of nature into our feverish and artificial existence—that are in direct contrast to it.
And even with these beautiful things, how often the charm wears away with the novelty of possession! How often and how soon the lovely picture, like its frame, becomes just as a piece of wall-furniture, in which we take a pride, certainly, and which we should certainly miss if it were taken away—but which we grow to look at with the pathetic indifference of habit—if not, indeed, with aversion!
Chairs and tables minister to our physical comforts, and we cannot do without them. But pictures have not this practical hold upon us; the sense to which they appeal is not always on the alert; yet there they are hanging on the wall, morning, noon, and night, unchanged, unchangeable—the same arrested movement—the same expression of face—the same seas and trees and moors and forests and rivers and mountains—the very waves are as eternal as the hills!
Music will leave off when it is not wanted—at least it ought to! The book is shut, the newspaper thrown aside. Not so the beautiful picture; it is like a perennial nosegay, for ever exhaling its perfume for noses that have long ceased to smell it!
But little pictures in black and white, of little every-day people like ourselves, by some great little artist who knows life well and has the means at his command to express his knowledge in this easy, simple manner, can be taken up and thrown down like the book or newspaper. They are even easier to read and understand. They are within the reach of the meanest capacity, the humblest education, the most slender purse. They come to us weekly, let us say, in cheap periodicals. They are preserved and bound up in volumes, to be taken down and looked at when so disposed. The child grows to love them before he knows how to read; fifty years hence he will love them still, if only for the pleasure they gave him as a child. He will soon know them by heart, and yet go to them again and again; and if they are good, he will always find new beauties and added interest as he himself grows in taste and culture; and how much of that taste and culture he will owe to them, who can say?
Nothing sticks so well in the young mind as a little picture one can hold close to the eyes like a book—not even a song or poem—for in the case of most young people the memory of the eye is better than that of the ear—its power of assimilating more rapid and more keen. And then there is the immense variety, the number!
[Illustration: "READING WITHOUT TEARS"
TEACHER. "And what comes after S, Jack?"
TEACHER. "And what Comes after T?"
PUPIL. "For all that we have Received," &c., &c.—Punch, February 17, 1869.]
Our pictorial satirist taking the greatest pains, doing his very best, can produce, say, a hundred of these little pictures in a twelvemonth, while his elder brother of the brush bestows an equal labour and an equal time on one important canvas, which will take another twelvemonth to engrave, perhaps, for the benefit of those fortunate enough to be able to afford the costly engraving of that one priceless work of art, which only one millionaire can possess at a time. Happy millionaire! happy painter—just as likely as not to become a millionaire himself! And this elder brother of the brush will be the first to acknowledge his little brother's greatness—if the little brother's work be well done. You should hear how the first painters of our time, here and abroad, express themselves about Charles Keene! They do not speak of him as a little brother, I tell you, but a very big brother indeed.
Thackeray, for me, and many others, the greatest novelist, satirist, humorist of our time, where so many have been great, is said to have at the beginning of his career wished to illustrate the books of others—Charles Dickens's, I believe, for one. Fortunately, perhaps, for us and for him, and perhaps for Dickens, he did not succeed; he lived to write books of his own, and to illustrate them himself; and it is generally admitted that his illustrations, clever as they are, were not up to the mark of his writings.
It was not his natural mode of expression—and I doubt if any amount of training and study would have made it a successful mode: the love of the thing does not necessarily carry the power to do it. That he loved it he has shown us in many ways, and also that he was always practising it. Most of my hearers will remember his beautiful ballad of "The Pen and the Album"—
"I am my master's faithful old gold pen.I've served him three long years, and drawn since thenThousands of funny women and droll men …"
[Illustration: THE HEIGHT OF IMPROPRIETY
MISS GRUNDISON, JUNIOR. "There goes Lucy Holyroyd, all alone in a Boat with young Snipson as usual. So impudent of them!"
HER ELDER SISTER. "Yes; how shocking if they were Upset and Drowned— without a Chaperon, you know!"—Punch, August 8, 1891.]
Now conceive—it is not an impossible conception—that the marvellous gift of expression that he was to possess in words had been changed by some fairy at his birth into an equal gift of expression by means of the pencil, and that he had cultivated the gift as assiduously as he cultivated the other, and finally that he had exercised it as sedulously through life, bestowing on innumerable little pictures in black and white all the wit and wisdom, the wide culture, the deep knowledge of the world and of the human heart, all the satire, the tenderness, the drollery, and last, but not least, that incomparable perfection of style that we find in all or most that he has written—what a pictorial record that would be!
Think of it—a collection of little wood-cuts or etchings, with each its appropriate legend—a series of small pictures equal in volume and in value to the whole of Thackeray's literary work! Think of the laughter and the tears from old and young, rich and poor, and from the thousands who have not the intelligence or the culture to appreciate great books, or lack time or inclination to read them.
All there was in the heart and mind of Thackeray, expressed through a medium so simple and direct that even a child could be made to feel it, or a chimney-sweep! For where need we draw the line? We are only pretending.
Now I am quite content with Thackeray as he is—a writer of books, whose loss to literature could not be compensated by any gain to the gentle art of drawing little figures in black and white—"thousands of funny women and droll men." All I wish to point out—in these days when drawing is pressed into the service of daily journalism, and with such success that there will soon be as many journalists with the pencil as with the pen—is this, that the career of the future social pictorial satirist is full of splendid possibilities undreamed-of yet.
It is a kind of hybrid profession still in its infancy—hardly recognised as a profession at all—something halfway between literature and art—yet potentially combining all that is best and most essential in both, and appealing as effectively as either to some of our strongest needs and most natural instincts.
It has no school as yet; its methods are tentative, and its few masters have been pretty much self-taught. But I think that a method and a school will evolve themselves by degrees—are perhaps evolving themselves already.
The quality of black and white illustrations of modern life is immeasurably higher than it was thirty or forty years ago—its average and artistic quality—and it is getting higher day by day. The number of youths who can draw beautifully is quite appalling; one would think they had learned to draw before learning to read and write. Why shouldn't they?
Well, all we want, for my little dream to be realised, is that among these precocious wielders of the pencil there should arise here a Dickens, there a Thackeray, there a George Eliot or an Anthony Trollope, who, finding quite early in life that he can draw as easily as other men can spell, that he can express himself, and all that he hears and sees and feels, more easily, more completely, in that way than in any other, will devote himself heart and soul to that form of expression—as I and others have tried to do—but with advantages of nature, circumstances, and education that have been denied to us!
[Illustration: THINGS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE EXPRESSED DIFFERENTLY
HE. "The fact is I never get any wild fowl shooting—never!"
SHE. "Oh, then you ought to come down to our Neighborhood in the Winter. It would just suit you, there are such a lot of Geese about— a—a—I meanWildGeese of course!"—Punch, November 21, 1891.]
Hogarth seems to have come nearer to this ideal pictorial satirist than any of his successors inPunchand elsewhere. For he was not merely a light humorist and a genial caricaturist; he dealt also in pathos and terror, in tragic passion and sorrow and crime; he often strikes chords of too deep a tone for the pages of a comic periodical.
But the extent of his productiveness was limited by the method of his production; he was a great painter in oils, and each of his life scenes is an important and elaborate picture, which, moreover, he engraved himself at great cost of time and labour, after the original time and labour spent in painting it. It is by these engravings, far more than by his pictures, that he is so widely known.
It is quite possible to conceive a little sketchy woodcut no larger than a cut inPunch, and drawn by a master like Charles Keene, or the German Adolf Menzel, giving us all the essence of any picture by Hogarth even more effectively, more agreeably, than any of Hogarth's most finished engravings. And if this had been Hogarth's method of work, instead of some fifty or sixty of those immortal designs we should have had some five or six thousand! Almost a library!
So much for the great pictorial satirist of the future—of the near future, let us hope—that I have been trying to evolve from my inner consciousness. May some of us live to see him!
End of Project Gutenberg's Social Pictorial Satire, by George du Maurier