Social Pictorial Satire | Page 3

order of the
day. Men and women, horses and dogs, landscapes and seascapes, all
one can make pictures of, even chairs and tables and teacups and
saucers, must be studied from the life--from the still-life, if you

will--by whoever aspired to draw on wood; even angels and demons
and cherubs and centaurs and mermaids must be closely imitated from
nature--or at least as much of them as could be got from the living
model.
Once a Week had just appeared, and The Cornhill Magazine. Sir John
Millais and Sir Frederick Leighton were then drawing on wood just like
the ordinary mortals; Frederick Walker had just started on his brief but
splendid career; Frederick Sandys had burst on the black-and-white
world like a meteor; and Charles Keene, who was illustrating the
Cloister and the Hearth in the intervals of his Punch work, had, after
long and patient labour, attained that consummate mastery of line and
effect in wood draughtsmanship that will be for ever associated with
his name; and his work in _Punch_, if only by virtue of its
extraordinary technical ability, made Leech's by contrast appear slight
and almost amateurish in spite of its ease and boldness.
So that with all my admiration for Leech it was at the feet of Charles
Keene that I found myself sitting; besides which we were much
together in those days, talking endless shop, taking long walks, riding
side by side on the knife-boards of omnibuses, dining at cheap
restaurants, making music at each other's studios. His personal charm
was great, as great in its way as Leech's; he was democratic and so was
I, as one is bound to be when one is impecunious and the world is one's
oyster to open with the fragile point of a lead-pencil. His bohemian
world was mine--and I found it a very good world and very much to my
taste--a clear, honest, wholesome, innocent, intellectual, and most
industrious British bohemia, with lots of tobacco, lots of good music,
plenty of talk about literature and art, and not too much victuals or
drink. Many of its denizens, that were, have become Royal
Academicians or have risen to fame in other ways; some have had to
take a back seat in life; surprisingly few have gone to the bad.
This world, naturally, was not Leech's; if it had ever been, I doubt; his
bohemia, if he ever had lived in one, had been the bohemia of medicine,
not of art, and he seemed to us then to be living on social heights of
fame and sport and aristocratic splendour where none of us dreamed of
seeking him--and he did not seek us. We hated and despised the bloated

aristocracy, just as he hated and despised foreigners without knowing
much about them; and the aristocracy, to do it justice, did not pester us
with its obtrusive advances. But I never heard Leech spoken of
otherwise in bohemia than with affectionate admiration, although many
of us seemed to think that his best work was done. Indeed, his work
was becoming somewhat fitful in quality, and already showed
occasional signs of haste and illness and fatigue; his fun was less genial
and happy, though he drew more vigorously than ever, and now and
again surprised us by surpassing himself, as in his series of Briggs in
the Highlands a-chasing the deer.
All that was thirty years ago and more. I may say at once that I have
reconsidered the opinion I formed of John Leech at that time. Leech, it
is true, is by no means the one bright particular star, but he has
recovered much of his lost first magnitude: if he shines more by what
he has to say than by his manner of saying it, I have come to think that
that is the best thing of the two to shine by, if you cannot shine by both;
and I find that his manner was absolutely what it should have been for
his purpose and his time--neither more nor less; he had so much to say
and of a kind so delightful that I have no time to pick holes in his mode
of expression, which at its best has satisfied far more discriminating
experts than I; besides which, the methods of printing and engraving
have wonderfully improved since his day. He drew straight on the
wood block, with a lead-pencil; his delicate grey lines had to be
translated into the uncompromising coarse black lines of printers' ink--a
ruinous process; and what his work lost in this way is only to be
estimated by those who know. True, his mode of expression was not
equal to Keene's--I never knew any that was, in England, or even
approached it--but that, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling says, is another story.
The story that