M. H. Spielmann

Mr. G. du Maurier's First Drawing—The "Romantic Tenor"—Polite Satire—His Types and Creations—His Pretty Women—And Fair American—"Chang," "Don," and "Punch"—Mr. du Maurier as a Punch Writer—Mr. Gordon Thompson—Mr. Stacy Marks, R.A.—Paul Gray—Sir John Millais, Bart., R.A.—Mr. Fred Barnard—First Joke Refused as "Painful"—Mr. R. T. Pritchett—Initiation by Sir John Tenniel—Fritz Eltze—His Amiable Jocularity—Mr. A. R. Fairfield—Colonel Seccombe—Fred Walker, A.R.A.—Mr. J. Priestman Atkinson ("Dumb Crambo")—C. H. Bennett—Mr. W. S. Gilbert ("Bab")—His Classic Joke—G. B. Goddard—Miss Georgina Bowers—Mr. Walter Crane.

When, in 1860, Mr. George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier contributed his first drawing to Punch, he had little suspicion that he would be counted, together with John Leech, John Tenniel, and Charles Keene, as one of the four great pillars on which would rest the artistic reputation of the paper. In that first drawing, himself and two of his friends were represented entering the "studio" of a photographer, smoking, as the manner of artists is; and they are coldly requested by the deity of the place to leave their tobacco outside, as "they are in an artist's studio" (p. 150, Vol. XXXIX.). It was a poor sketch enough, showing some straining after comicality, and lacking every trace of the grace and beauty the draughtsman was so soon to develop. He was Parisian born, and after studying with a view to a scientific career, he became convinced, through Dr. Williamson's amiable assurance that he would make a "shocking bad chemist," that art and not science was his destiny—more especially as his professors had been delighted with such little caricatures of his as they had seen; but, as Mr. du Maurier suggestively put it in his lecture on "Social Pictorial Satire," "they had not seen them all." He studied art at Antwerp and Paris in company with several notabilities of the day; but when, through an accident in the laboratory, he lost the sight of one eye, and found the other seriously imperilled, his chances of success in life seemed small. It was when lying, during his long illness, in the Antwerp Hospital, in 1858, that he first saw "Punch's Almanac"—a delight which he never forgot. When he recovered his ordinary health, he returned to England, though with little improvement of sight to cheer him. With a courage, however, equal to that of Sir John Tenniel, he girded himself against fate; he worked hard in London, where he lived in humble lodgings at 85, Newman Street, which he shared with his life-long friend, the late Lionel Henley, afterwards R.B.A.—"the dearest fellow that ever was." He sometimes wondered, he has told me, if he would eat a dinner that day; and as becomes the impecunious, he was a tremendous democrat. He "hated the bloated aristocracy, without knowing much about it; and, to do it justice, the bloated aristocracy did not go out of its way to pester him with its attentions." But in those happy, hungry, hard-working days, when dinner was not always a vested interest, Mr. du Maurier seemed already tinged with the daintier tastes that were destined to lead his pencil to the delineation of these same "bloated" classes; and even in those hard times he could always boast a dress-suit.

So at the age of twenty-six—the same as that at which Charles Keene made his dÉbut in Punch—he sent in an occasional contribution that was far more in Leech's manner than in what came to be his own.

Art has a way, figuratively speaking, of flourishing on an empty stomach, and Mr. du Maurier made rapid progress on the training. Keene's acquaintance and genial friendship enslaved at once his artistic methods, as well as his artistic adoration. It was not that he admired Leech less, but that he appreciated Keene more; and when the former died, to the sorrow and consternation of the Staff, Mr. du Maurier was appointed to his seat at the Table. He obeyed the summons on the first Wednesday that followed Leech's death, and carved his monogram on the board between those of the bosom friends, Thackeray and Leech. Mark Lemon, with characteristic shrewdness, soon discovered in what direction lay the talent and perhaps the penchant of the artist, and told him not to try to be "too funny," but to do the graceful side of things, and to be "the romantic tenor in Mr. Punch's opera bouffe company," while Keene was to do the comic songs. The little social dramas of the day, the drawing-rooms of Belgravia, and the nurseries of Mayfair—those were his preserves, from which he could get as much game as he chose, humorous if he liked, but graceful withal.

But Mr. du Maurier is emphatically not what is commonly understood by "a funny man," for all his subtlety and love of humour; he is a combination of the artistic, with a distinct and clear sense of beauty, and of the scientific, with speculations and theories of race and heredity—who would as lief draw East-End types for the sake of their "character," and would look at a queer face more for the interest that is in it than for its comicality. If Mr. du Maurier's sense of beauty is strong, so is his appreciation of ugliness; and if you take down any of the volumes of Punch—that shine in their shelves like the teeth in the great laughing mouth of Humour itself—you will find no faces or forms more hideous or grotesque than those which the artist has chosen to put there.

But if there is one thing to justify the opinion of his admirers that he is the "Thackeray of the pencil," it is primarily to be found, not so much in the keen satire of his drawing and legends, but in his startling, his strikingly truthful creations. Creations we have had from Leech, Keene, and others—from Leech's pure sense of fun and jollity; from Keene's unerring observation of men and women, and fleeting emotion—but those of Mr. du Maurier go deeper into vices, virtues, habits, and motives, and are at the root of his pictorial commentaries. He has given us true pictures of the manners of his time; and those manners he has satirised with more politeness and irony, perhaps, than broad humour. He worked well with Keene in double harness, and his pictures are at once a foil and a complement of that genius's work and point de vue. He has satirised everything, and his art has been admirably adapted to the depth of the civilisation he probes and dissects. His sense of beauty and tenderness apart, he is to art much what Corney Grain was to the stage, though his hand is not so heavy; and while you laugh with Leech, you smile with Mr. du Maurier—lovingly at his children, respectfully at his pretty women, and sardonically at his social puppets.

His own particular creations—his types and "series"—are to some sections of Punch's admirers, Punch's chief attraction. Especially is this the case in the United States,[59] where to Mr. du Maurier many people have looked almost exclusively, not only for English fashions in male and female attire, and the derniÈre mode in social etiquette, but for the truest reflection of English life and character. First of all these types are Sir Gorgius Midas—who, the artist once confided to me, was drawn without exaggeration from real life—and his common wife and still vulgarer son. Then Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, the clever and scheming, and her husband, depressed and stolidly obedient; the bishop and the flunkey, all calves and dignity; Grigsby, the "comic" man, and his punctilious friend, Sir Pompey Bedell, inflated with pretentious emptiness; 'Arry and 'Arriet, blatant and irrepressible; young Cadby, the Cockney; and the Duke and Duchess of Stilton, whose very figures seem to be drawn in purple ink; the refined colonel, a counterpart and not unworthy comrade of Newcome himself; Maudle, Postlethwaite, and Mrs. Cimabue Brown, most delightful trio of sickening "Æsthetes"—specially beloved of Mr. du Maurier, whose famous drawing, "Are You Intense?" is perhaps the particular favourite of all his satiric Punch work; Mr. Soapley and Mr. Todeson, who vie with each other in vulgar servility and sycophancy; the Herr Professor, ponderously humorous in smoking-room or boudoir; and Anatole, the bridegroom, happy and dapper in the Bois de Boulogne; Titwillow and the ex-Jew at the Club—what an assemblage of carefully differentiated specimens of London's characteristic inhabitants! That many of them are often accepted, universally quoted as types, apart from any express reference to Punch or to its artist, is the best testimony of the truth of his irony; for they are as recognisable in the real world as the Jacques, the Becky Sharps, and the Pecksniffs of other brains. And besides these there are the general characters so accurately presented to us—the refined lady with the very old face and frontal grey or white curls whom Mr. du Maurier used to draw, I believe, from the person of Mrs. Hamilton AÄdÉ; the charming young ladies for whom, in succession, his wife and daughters have sat; and the delightful little ones to whom Professor Ruskin paid partial tribute when he declared, a little cruelly, perhaps, that the "charm of his extremely intelligent, and often exquisitely pretty children, is dependent, for the greater part, on the dressing of their back hair and the fitting of their boots."

The admirable setting in which Mr. du Maurier frames his series of jokes is testimony to his genius. He follows Leech's plan of such series ("Servantgalism," "The Rising Generation," etc.), but the quality of the thought and its presentation is as much more elaborate than Leech's as his method of draughtsmanship is more complicated. These series or formulÆ, in their chief heads and subtle variations, display the quality of his mind. If you turn to the volumes for 1888 (XCIV. and XCV.) you will find examples of no fewer than nine of them: (1) Things one would rather have left unsaid; (2) Things one would rather have expressed differently; (3) Social Agonies; (4) Feline Amenities; (5) Our Imbeciles; (6) Typical Modern Developments; (7) Studies in Evolution; (8) Nincompoopiana; and (9) What our Artist has to put up with;—the last-named, however, a vein which Keene began to work as early as 1854.

His talent, too, in devising the legends, or "cackle," for the drawings is uniformly happy, unsurpassed by any man who ever wrote for Punch. As Mr. Anstey says, he has brought the art of prÉcis-writing to perfection. His legends are not always so concise as Leech's, but for truth of expression, felicitous colloquialism, and above all, for foreign accent, he is unapproached. I go farther, and say that he is the first man who ever put truthfully upon paper, and properly differentiated, the "broken English" and slangy mispronunciations of German, French, and Semite, to say nothing of his Cockney; indeed, his studies in this direction prove him, besides an admirable physiologist pour rire and a pungent though courteous satirist, an inimitable comparative-"broken"-philologist.

True to his rÔle of "Romantic Tenor," Mr. du Maurier has endowed Punch with the greater part of the grace and beauty which have done so much to make the paper what it is. "In his social subjects," says a distinguished critic,[60] "Mr. du Maurier, though somewhat mannered and fond of a single type of face and figure, has carried the ironical genre, received by Leech from Gavarni and Charlet, to the highest point of elegance it has attained." He is too fond of the beautiful, sighs Mr. James; he sees everything en beau, and Mistress and Maid with him are a good deal of Juno and Hebe. No doubt his grace often militates against his fun, but Mr. du Maurier, as has already been suggested, is only by accident a professional funny man. Besides, when he wishes to be merely funny, he passes Beauty by as if he were not the most devoted of her adorers, as you may see in one of the best of all his drawings in Punch, in which a typically selfish master of the house orders up the cook into the breakfast-room, complaining that he cannot eat the bacon which he has just served; his wife's, he says, is the worst he ever saw—and his own is nearly as bad!

Even more than his lovely child (often drawn from his little grandson), his superb youth, and his splendid gentleman, Mr. du Maurier's pretty woman is the pedestal upon which he has erected his reputation—at least, so far as Punch is concerned. His pretty woman, he declares, is the granddaughter of Leech's, and he beseeches the public to love her, paternally at least as he does, "for her grandmother's sake."

Writing his mind on the subject of his delightful creation at my own request,[61] he says:—

Nowadays, he has declared, girls are no longer pretty—they are beautiful; and as Mr. Galton, the anthropometrical expert, himself admits, they, even more than the rest of mankind, have certainly grown taller. The artist, as we have seen, invented the tall woman; the Psyches of our fathers' days have become the Venuses and Junos of these; and more than one writer has gravely sought to fix the responsibility, or the credit, on Mr. du Maurier and his pencil. Scientific investigation has taught us that the English girl tops her foreign sisters, though her average weight is two pounds less than that of the fair American; and there is little doubt that if she does not absolutely adapt her height to the artist's sense of beauty and power of inspiration, she has at least to thank him for making it fashionable. The truth of the matter is that Mr. du Maurier has always been a close observer; and just as his drawings have always been in the fashion in point of dress through his careful watching of the changing wardrobe of his wife and daughters, so was he the first to record the increasing stature of English girls, even while Leech was still drawing them as he had known them—short and buxom and "plump little dumplings"—never recognising that they had been deposed by Fashion and improved by Nature. But the race changed, and Punch changed with them. Venus was Venus once more, and Mr. du Maurier was her Prophet.

"And the old ladies!" proceeds Mr. du Maurier; "it is such a pleasure to draw them, and do one's best. To think of all the charming old ladies one has known, and (according to one's letterpress) to select the chin of one, the white curls of another, the mouth and nose of a third, and then to make a subtle arrangement in sweet sympathetic wrinkles—too often to be subtly disarranged by the engraver and the printer!

"Then we get to the male characters, and there it is comparatively plain sailing; and would be pleasant sailing enough but for the hideousness of certain portions of the modern male attire. However new, however good the tailor, however comely the leg beneath, the Trouser is the one heart-breaking object to the conscientious but Æsthetically-minded draughtsman on wood! It ignores the knee, and falls on the boot in a shape that has no reference to the ankle whatever—a shape of its own—and yet the ankle is the foundation of everything!

"Next in order of demerit and impossibility comes the chimney-pot hat, which is not lacking in character, but is ugly and ridiculous. Its one redeeming feature is the difficulty it presents to the draughtsman. It is mathematical, geometrical, with every curve known to science, as hard to represent correctly as a boat or a fiddle—more so; and the delight of successful achievement is proportionately great. Linley Sambourne alone, who was originally trained as an engineer, has been able to grapple with the chimney-pot hat; Walker all but succeeded by the sheer force of his heaven-born genius."

But, in spite of all this beauty, surely his misrepresentation of that divinity—the American Girl—is beyond all hope of pardon, beyond contrition, beyond all penance. He does full justice to her refined and splendid loveliness and her magnificent proportions; but he seems to regard her, if one may say so, as a sort of Kensington-Town-Hall-Subscription-Dance young lady, a little more outrÉe and free and slangy and vulgar. She guesses in the ballroom that English partners don't "bunch" (give bouquets); when invited to go in to supper she avers, not without a sense of inward satisfaction, that she is "pretty crowded already;" she has a deep though entirely a tourist's interest in English institutions, ruins, and celebrities; she has little reverence else for what is in the heavens above or the earth beneath; and she dearly loves a lord—or she would, if by any honourable means she can obtain the chance. His American girls, too, all come from one and the same place; they are all born from one and the same mother; their natural cleverness and unnatural ignorance are compounded in the same proportions, and, altogether, they are the most charming and delightful libels on American young-womanhood that well could be. But is his representation of the American girl any less pleasant than the common, home-made American view of an English gentleman—at least, of an English "swell"? Not at all. On the contrary, she is, as I said before, a divinity.

More than once Mr. du Maurier has broken away from his light comedy rÔle and, besides giving vent to his fantastic power in his wonderful "Night-mares," has given us something with serious thought, and, now and again, with tragedy in it—has offered us, indeed, a taste of the deepest poetic quality that he has shown in his novels of "Peter Ibbetson" and "Trilby." You may see a touch of it in Tenniel's great cartoon at the outbreak of hostilities between France and Germany, in which the great Napoleon stands warningly in the path of the infatuated Emperor; that was du Maurier's suggestion. You may see a touch of it in the page drawing of "Old Nickotin Stealing Away the Brains of His Devotees" (1868), in which a circle of strange men, whose own heads are their pipe-bowls, smoke away their brains through long tubes that work well into the composition, while, in the foreground, one of the poor foolish wretches drops, just as a last little curling puff rises from his smoked-out skull. There were more of such compositions before 1880, at the time when Mr. du Maurier was still making full-page drawings in Punch. But, after all, it is not in Punch, but rather in the "Cornhill Magazine" and "Once a Week," in "Esmond," and other works—particularly in the "Illustrated Magazine"—that his full power in serious work must be sought.

Professor Ruskin, after declaring that the "terrific force" of Mr. du Maurier's satire of character in face and figure consists in the absence of caricature, describes as "cruelly true" the design "representing the London mechanic with his family when Mr. Todeson is asked to amuse 'the dear creatures' at Lady Clara's garden tea;" and proclaims the artist more exemplary than either John Leech or John Tenniel ("the real founders of Punch, and by far the greatest of its illustrators both in force of art and range of thought") "in the precision of the use of his means, and the subtle boldness to which he has educated the interpreter of his design."[62] In point of fact, the engraver has had to "interpret" Mr. du Maurier's drawings far less than those of many of his colleagues, for his line is too delicate, sympathetic, and precise to leave room for anything but the strictest possible facsimile. This was quite as true in the old days when he drew upon the block, as in later times, when, yielding to the stern demands of failing eyesight—which, for a period, forced him to suspend work altogether—he drew with the pen upon paper several times larger than the ultimate reduction effected by means of photography. It is curious in tracing his hand through Punch to see how his work gradually strengthened; how his early vigour of subject and activity of mind, expressed in strong black-and-white, gave way to a daintier touch when the grace and prettiness of his dramatis personÆ came to demand greater refinement of the drawn line; and how this again constantly widened out into a broader method, under the inspiration of Charles Keene. And yet from first to last, in the smallest sketch as in the most elaborate picture, his hand is unmistakable.

In common with Keene and others, Mr. du Maurier has suffered from time to time from printers' errors. One of the most curious, perhaps, is that in which three little boys are shown in a drawing playing upon a sofa, evidently very much in the way of their elder sister, who is receiving a visit from an admirer. The sister asks her brothers with pardonable point if they will not go and play downstairs. No, the oldest replies, Mamma has sent them up "to play forfeits." The joke, utterly pointless as printed, becomes intelligible when it is explained that "forfeits" is an error for "propriety." Many of the artist's jokes, as already explained, have come from various friends; indeed, in this case, they are probably less often manufactured than in that of others. All the same, it may be of interest to record that the oft-quoted joke of the Æsthetic young couple who agreed that they must "live up to" their blue and white tea-pot, was not "made up," but was spoken in downright, imbecile earnest.

Like Keene, too, Mr. du Maurier loved to put his own dogs into Punch. Whether it was his magnificent St. Bernard, "Chang," whose seven-foot skeleton now graces the Royal College of Surgeons, or his little terrier, "Don," or his dachshund, "Punch," they have all played their part in public and justified their existence as models, and have in their time been the pets as much of you and me as of their legal owner. But, for all his connoisseurship in dogs, Mr. du Maurier is woefully deficient in certain forms of sportsmanlike knowledge, and could he but have heard the howls in the cricket world a few years since when he ventured on depicting a "mixed match," and showed the wickets about forty yards apart, he would almost have wished the excellent joke untold. Herein, of course, he was not more ignorant than his friend Keene, who had to be specially coached (yet with what disastrous results!) when he wished to present a picture involving the "placing" of the field.

Apart from his artistic services to Punch, Mr. du Maurier has been a contributor to its pages of verse and prose, comparable with some of the best that has appeared there. Who can forget his admirable nonsense-verses, his "Vers Nonsensiques À l'usage des Familles Anglaises," or his exquisite fooling in his "Shalott" poem, or his "Alphabet" verses, or his vers de sociÉtÉ? They worthily heralded the novelist as we know him now, who is also the author of one of the most brilliant lectures—brimming over with happy thought and sparkling epigram—that have been composed in recent years. It is by his long, varied, and effective service that Mr. du Maurier has to be recognised as one of the four artists—Leech, Keene, and Tenniel being the others—who bore the chief share in raising Punch to his pinnacle, and he is to be named with Keene as a truthful recorder of the life and humours of Society during the last forty years of the nineteenth century. But if it is for this achievement, and for his delightful genius that he is primarily esteemed in Whitefriars and throughout the English-speaking world, it is for himself and his own good-humour that "Kiki"—as he is known to his intimates—has been regarded with affection and admiration by his colleagues during the long period of his honourable, dignified, and brilliant connection.

For the space of one-and-twenty years—a period which drew to a close in 1895—Mr. du Maurier has lived and worked in his house near Hampstead Heath, from which he has wrought so many backgrounds for his Punch pictures. Whitby, Scarborough, Boulogne, as well as Paris and London, have oftentimes afforded him local colour; but you get to learn Hampstead as you look at his drawings better than any of the others, and to know his sanctum—his salon-studio. Its characteristic bits, its bow-window, its Late-Gothic fireplace, its window-seat, are all familiar. And here the artist's model has latterly been the draughtsman's more constant companion, for "the older I grow," says Mr. du Maurier, "the more careful, the more of a student I become." So, for every Punch drawing he now makes beautiful pencil studies which, in my opinion, are even more delightful and more dainty than the pen-and-ink pictures they assist in perfecting. Examples of these studies, accurately and simply drawn, are here reproduced, and they will be seen to reveal the draughtsman's graceful artistry more completely than any other work in his recognised medium.

It was in the year following Mr. du Maurier's dÉbut that Mr. John Gordon Thompson began his short connection with Punch. He was a very young man, and these drawings were almost his earliest work. He was at that time studying for the Civil Service, and after his appointment to Somerset House he discontinued to a great extent his artistic efforts; but when he left the Service in 1870 he resumed the pencil, and became, and remained for twenty years without one week's break, the cartoonist of "Fun." His style was not yet formed when he contributed to Punch, and his three-and-thirty socials, all published by 1864, gave little promise of the ability he afterwards displayed in the papers, magazines and books innumerable which he illustrated with such furious ardour.

Mr. H. Stacy Marks, R.A., also made his appearance in the paper in 1861, with a design for an architectural hat of Tudor-Gothic order, fitted with gargoyles round the brim for rainy weather. He also made an initial "I," and then was seen in Punch no more until the Almanac for 1882, when he made a full-page ornithological drawing of "Up before the Beak."

Paul Gray was another of Punch's promising contributors fated to an early death. He began with a few initials—a couple of "A's" were his first little feat, one of them made out of an old woman and a bathing machine. Then came "socials" up to 1865, which attracted attention for their grace, in spite of their lack of backbone; but after a variety of work, including drawings for the "Argosy" and illustrations for Kingsley's "Hereward," his pencil was laid down, and he was no more than twenty-five when he died.

Half-a-dozen sketches by Harris in 1863 were followed by Sir John Millais' first contribution—a mock-heroic illustration to Mr. Burnand's "Mokeanna" (p. 115, Vol. XLIV.). The distinguished artist repeated his unusual experience in the Almanac for 1865, when in a technically exquisite drawing he showed a couple of children in a studio assaulting the lay figure. There were other pictures by which Sir John figured indirectly in Punch. As one of the most intimate friends of John Leech, he took the liveliest interest in his work. "Once," he informs me, "I forwarded two drawings to Leech from Scotland, and he traced them on to the wood and they appeared in Punch—one a tourist struggling against the wind in a plaid; the other, two artists sketching with veils on to escape the midges. Possibly they were the occasion of my attending the Dinner. Leech, I think, asked me to do a drawing for 'Mokeanna' and the drawing of the 'Children in the Studio.'"

About this time it is claimed that Miss Joanna Hill, the niece of Sir Rowland Hill, contributed some sketches on the convict question; but it is certain that nothing in her name was ever accepted.

A far more interesting and amusing adherent was Mr. Fred Barnard, a humorist of the first rank; but as he was not yet seventeen years of age at the time it is not surprising that his drawings were greatly inferior to his admirable work of later years. His first joke was rejected, as he quaintly explains in the following note: "In 1863 I was a student (and in consequence fondly supposed to be studying) at Heatherley's School of Art in Newman Street, and was then half-past sixteen. I must have had plenty of assurance at that time, for, unknown to anyone, I sent a joke, accompanied by a pencil sketch, to Punch. It represented a brute of a dustman belabouring his horse's head with the butt-end of his whip. To him enters a fussy, benevolent-looking, and slightly sarcastic old gentleman, who remonstrates with him in these words: 'My good man, that isn't the way to treat your horse! You should poke it in his eye—poke it in his eye, man!' Mark Lemon returned it as, he said, 'the enclosed is rather too painful for Punch.' Encouraged by this repulse, I sent in another joke and drawing, which were accepted. A small parcel arrived shortly afterwards containing a 'block' of wood. As I had never seen one before, and had no notion whatever as to the process of wood engraving, I didn't know what it was, or for what use. At the back, on its rough ribbed surface, was a mystic inscription which I interpreted into 'C. Bramitsi Struss,' but which a friend informed me was intended for '6, Bouverie Street,' and he showed me how to set to work. And so I did the drawing and some dozen others.... But I rather fancy I shine with more than usual brilliancy in religious periodicals—especially when the articles I have to illustrate are written by imbecile women or ministers of the Gospel—I find it so congenial and instructive." In three years Mr. Barnard was seen but fifteen times in all. Twenty years later, in 1884, he made a last appearance in a drawing which did not show him at his best (p. 303, Vol. LXXXIV.). This was entitled "Early Prejudice," in which a child, referring to the baby, suddenly exclaims, "Oh, mamma! when baby begins to talk, what a dreadful thing if we find out he's an Irishman!"—a joke, by the way, which in its main point was anticipated by Mr. du Maurier in 1876, in his drawing called "Waiting for the Verdict." Lastly there was a sketch called "Evening at Earls," which was sent in and engraved, but not used; and since that day Mr. Barnard abstained from further contribution.

In this same year a young lady named Miss Mansel (now Mrs. Bull) sent in a drawing of an incident which occurred at her uncle's place at Anglesey in Hampshire—the initials "R. M." on the buckets being those of Colonel Mansel. "My eyes!" says Cooper the groom, in effect, to a gentleman who has watched a lady dismount from her over-ridden animal; "to them ladies a 'oss is a 'oss, and he must go!" Leech slightly re-touched the drawing, adding pigeons in the foreground, and so forth, but, of course, did not add his initials. Curiously enough, this block was included among that artist's "Pictures of Life and Character" (p. 52, Series IV.). "I remember I was very proud," writes the lady, "a few days after the drawing appeared, at hearing some officers in High Street, Portsmouth, quoting my sketch as a lady galloped up the road. I was only about seventeen then."

After a single contribution (entitled "Clara") by that ill-fated genius, George Pinwell, Mr. R. T. Pritchett left his rifles for Punch's pages. He was in fact but a boy when he took charge of his father's gun factory at Enfield, and was still a lad when he conducted experiments in competition, with his own hand, for a new Government gun, introducing a bullet of his own conception, firing every shot, and triumphing over every competitor. So the "Enfield" or "Pritchett rifle" brought him fame; but it proved the stumbling-block of his artistic career, for he found out for himself the truth that a man known for one thing has little chance in any other field—particularly in the artistic field. He was glad, however, when the Government eventually decided to manufacture the gun themselves, and the House of Commons voted him £1,000—though the experiments had cost nearly three times as much—and he was enabled to take to art.

It was at a meeting of the Moray Minstrels, the delightful "Jermyn Band" promoted by Mr. Arthur Lewis—where every man was invited on his own merits and guests were excluded—that he met John Tenniel. John Forster was the leader, and there were often present John Leech, Dickens, Stanfield, Thackeray, Landseer, Tom Angell, Sir John Millais, Mr. Carl Haag, Mr. Frith, Mr. Marks, Charles Keene, Mr. Whistler, and Sir Arthur Sullivan; altogether a notable company. It was under Sir John Tenniel's hospitable roof that Mr. Pritchett was initiated into the mysteries of wood-drawing. He had been watching the Master drawing his cartoon, and was busy sketching the top of his amiable head, when its owner told him he would be much better occupied in drawing on the wood, and threw him over a piece. Upon it Mr. Pritchett made a sketch, which Sir John took to Mr. Swain, and which afterwards appeared in one of A. K. H. B.'s works. By Mr. Swain the draughtsman was introduced to "Once a Week" and to Punch, and for the latter Mr. Pritchett began with some initials. His work appears from 1863 until 1869, some six-and-twenty amusing drawings in all, and when he ceased in order to take to painting, he drew for no other comic paper; for he had adopted the proud motto: "Aut Punch, aut nullus." He then took to travel, writing books and illustrating them by himself, and commended himself still further by the cruise he made and illustrated with Lady Brassey in The Sunbeam. Moreover, he has for many years drawn privately for the Queen, in recognition of which he received the Jubilee medal. A portrait of him, drawn by Charles Keene, may be seen in the Punch picture wherein a little girl asks her papa if she "may have the gentleman's moustache for a tail for her horse"—a portrait so good that by virtue of it he made the acquaintance of Mr. Sambourne years after, when the latter gentleman accosted him with the words "I know you by Keene's likeness of you in Punch!"

Then came Fritz Eltze, who was introduced to Punch on May 1st, 1864, and in due course took up some of the work let fall by Leech. He was a son of Sir Richard Mayne's confidential secretary, and most of what he knew of the life he drew was what he could see down Scotland Yard, or what he could remember of happy early days at Ramsgate. He was a confirmed invalid who had never enjoyed life like other children, and the consumption from which he died was already developing. He submitted a few sketches to Mark Lemon who, according to his custom, sent Mr. Swain to make inquiries, with a result that was the brightest spot in the artist's life. Although his work had the touch of the amateur about it, it had a curious charm; and rapid improvement followed. His humours of the fashions and follies of the day were greatly appreciated, especially as his work advanced to half-page "socials;" but it was to his tender touches that his popularity was chiefly due, particularly in his treatment of child-life. The little one who—being told that they may not have mistletoe in church at Christmas—naively asks if "they must not love one another in church," and the other who, when playing at "horses" and one of the leaders falls, cries to its companion next in command to "sit on her head and cut the traces," are typical of his work in this direction. His last contribution (Mr. Punch À la Turc on a minaret) appeared in September, 1870, but a couple of drawings, in 1872 and 1875, were published "out of stock." Eltze, one of Punch's tall men, by the way, was a pleasing draughtsman whose work, in its curious absence of lining, had a striking appearance of originality in its practically broad outline.

Mr. A. R. Fairfield may be known by his sign-manual like a Sign of the Zodiac run wild. It is, however, merely an inverted "A" on the Greek character F with its stem elongated. He sprang from an artistic family, and after three months' training at South Kensington in 1857, he began to draw on wood for "Fun" at about the same time as Mr. W. S. Gilbert—the autumn of 1861. His connection with Punch was fortuitous. Being sent by Dr. James Macaulay, the editor of the "Leisure Hour," to Mr. Swain for some blocks on which to make his drawings for that magazine, he was smartly captured by the vigilant engraver for the "London Charivari." The result was many initials and drawings made to his own jokes; but his first contributions appeared in the special "Shakespeare Jubilee Number." His work appears often enough after that—four-and-twenty times in 1864 and 1865. They were at times amateurish in manner, but they had character and humour. It was Leech's death that practically put an end to Mr. Fairfield's connection with Punch, for Keene then came to reign supreme in the art department; but it did not matter much, as Mr. Fairfield, at that time a clerk at the Board of Trade—in which capacity only he ever came into contact with Tom Taylor, then Secretary of the Local Government Board—was given to understand that his career would be interfered with if he prosecuted too far his outside work. In 1887 (p. 245, Vol. XC.) another sketch appears, comet-like, after an interval of more than twenty years.

Colonel Seccombe followed a few weeks after Mr. Fairfield's dÉbut. At that time he was a subaltern. His youthful military drawings—signed with a sketch of a cannon—were clever, and highly promising. His cuts appeared in 1864, 1866, and again in 1882—eight altogether. Foreign service interrupted the young draughtsman's artistic studies for a considerable period, but the result of his later labours is seen in the many works for children and others which he has since published.

At the same time came a bevy of draughtsmen, who added little to Punch's prestige—Dever, whose eight drawings are but caricatures, which none can see without being reminded of some of the grotesque types which later on were adopted by Mr. E. T. Reed in his earlier work; H. R. Robinson with two (though his work was not printed till two years later); Chambers with one; and Rogat with three; and then the year 1865 brought two or three contributors of interest and importance.

The first of these was Fred Walker, A.R.A., whose first drawing, printed in the "Almanac," shows a number of water-nymphs sea-bathing around Neptune—called "The New Bathing Company (Limited). Specimens of the Costumes to be worn by the Shareholders"—is graceful, and technically good, but not particularly remarkable, and is rather fanciful than funny. His second and last, "Captain Jinks of the Selfish and his Friends enjoying themselves on the River"—a more masterly sketch—was made in 1869 (p. 74, Vol. LVII.), in hot indignation at the selfishness and mischievousness of steam-launch skippers on the upper Thames. He had himself been an angry witness of the destruction of the river-banks by private steamboats, but had fairly boiled over at the sight of the very incident which he recorded in Punch—the outrageous, insolent indifference shown by the trippers to all on the river or its banks, save their own selfish selves. As a fisherman, Mr. Leslie, R.A., tells us, Walker looked upon the steam-launcher as his natural enemy; and it was while the two friends were on the river together that the incident occurred, and the drawing was decided upon. "He was most fastidious about this work, rehearsing it many times before he was satisfied.... In rendering the distant landscape the work becomes entirely finished and tender. It is a beautiful little bit of Bray, with the church and poplars drawn direct from Nature; a bridge is introduced to prevent the scene being too easily recognised. On the opposite bank is a portrait of myself, with easel and picture upset by the steamer's swell.... I was told that three copies of Punch were sent to the steam-launch proprietor on the day of publication.... This clever bit of satire had no effect."

"Dumb Crambo, Junior"—Mr. J. Priestman Atkinson—is better remembered by Punch readers, perhaps, by his pencil-name than by his common cipher. In 1864 he was in the General Manager's office at Derby, pleasingly varying his clerical duties by drawing caricatures for the amusement of his fellow-clerks, and designing cartoons for the local satirical journal, the "Derby Ram," which appeared spasmodically and devoted itself principally to electioneering purposes. One of his colleagues was Harry Lemon, Mark's son, who showed his father some of his friend's sketches. On the occasion of a subsequent visit paid by Mr. Atkinson to town, Mark Lemon invited him to dine at the Garrick Club (whither they drove in a hansom, much in the style shown in the sketch), and Shirley Brooks drank to him as "the future cartoonist of Punch." His first cut—an initial T—appeared on p. 15, Vol. XLVIII, and thenceforward Mr. Atkinson has been considered on the "outside Staff," with but two breaks: the first during an absence in Paris for artistic instruction, and the second from 1869 to 1876, when an opportunity occurred to make a "sure fortune" in commerce. The "sure fortune," as usually befalls, became a pecuniary loss, and the draughtsman gladly went back to the service of Punch and the other papers and books to which his pencil (under a different signature) has been devoted. It is years since Mr. Atkinson, who has latterly worked less for Punch than in the early days of his connection, was able to do himself full justice in a half-page drawing; but his "Dumb Crambo" series remain among the happy things which Punch has published in the direction of punning sketches. They remind one of those by Hine, Newman, and the rest, in the old "blackie" days, and are often little masterpieces of comic ingenuity—as may be seen in "Shooting over an Extensive Moor," where a man is discharging his weapon over the portly figure of a Moorish gentleman. Mr. Atkinson, in addition, made some two score literary contributions to the paper and "Pocket-book"—poems chiefly, and stories, not counting smaller trifles, between August, 1877, and the accession of Mr. Burnand to the Editorship. It was, I may add, at the suggestion of Mr. Burnand that Mr. Atkinson adopted his nom de crayon, just as he suggested Mr. Furniss's "Lika Joko."

One of the brightest and most talented draughtsmen Punch has ever had was Charles H. Bennett, the forerunner of Mr. Linley Sambourne. He had graduated in comic draughtsmanship, having been the life and soul of "Diogenes" (August, 1855), and rendered solid service to the "Comic Times" (1855), and the "Comic News" (1863 to 1865), by which time his cipher of an owl, and then of a B in an owl's beak ("B in it" = Bennett), were known and appreciated. Apart from his Punch work, his "Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress" was his masterpiece in serious art; while in the opposite direction his "Shadows" (which procured him for a time the public nickname of "Shadow Bennett"), as well as his amusing "Studies in Darwinesque Development" for Vizetelly's "Illustrated Times," and his second series, somewhat less satisfactory, of "Shadow and Substance," obtained for him great popularity. But when he came on Punch, introduced to Mark Lemon by Hain Friswell, he was within two years of his death. His dÉbut was on February 11th, 1865, with a sketch of "Our Play Box," in which "Mr. Punch's delight at finding his Dear Old Puppets where he left them in July" shows that the artist had already begun those illustrations to the "Essence of Parliament" which form the backbone of his Punch work. Occasional pictures there are, unconventional in shape, grotesque, ingenious, graceful in fancy, that delight us while, as a rule, they successfully conceal any lack of early artistic education; but the Parliamentary drawings are those by which Bennett will be best remembered. Between the date of his first sketch, when he was forthwith summoned to the Table without serving any probationary period, to that last sketch in the spring of 1867, showing Lord John Russell as a cock crowing upon the 1832 Easter egg (p. 116, Vol. LII.), he had made over 230 drawings for the paper, besides his contributions to the Pocket-books of 1866 and 1867. He had already established himself, despite repeated absences through ill-health, one of the greatest favourites in Punch's company; and the comic letter addressed to him by his colleagues during one of his illnesses is printed in the chapter on the "Punch Dinner." Indeed, he had not time to cut his cipher on the Table; the H is begun and abandoned. "As for dear Bennett," Mr. Frederic Shields tells me, "every link that attached me to him has so long since been severed, that to attempt to find the lost end of the thread is hopeless. Nothing remains but the sweet odour of his memory—like a faded rose-leaf turned up in a long-closed drawer." But Mr. Sala declares that he had been, "socially, the most miserable of mankind. He was sober, industrious, and upright, and scarcely a Bohemian; but throughout his short life he was 'Murad the Unlucky.' At one time he occupied shabby chambers in the now defunct Lyon's Inn, Strand; and it was the poor fellow's fate to have a child born—a child that died—the sack from his employers, and the brokers in, all in the same day." Still, Bennett, who was one of the original founders of the Savage Club, was cheerful enough, and of a singularly lovable disposition—as may almost be gathered from his pictures in Punch, in which the shadow of none of his former troubles is ever reflected: nothing but his "facile execution and singular subtlety of fancy." Indeed, "Cheerful Charley," as he was known to his intimates, became, as he himself declared, one of the luckiest and happiest of men—fully appreciated for his art and his own delightful qualities by troops of admiring friends. It was his extraordinary power of realising an abstract thought and crystallising it at once into a happy pictorial fancy that set him on a pedestal, a poet among his colleagues—those colleagues who, when he died, lamented "the loss of a comrade of invaluable skill, and the death of one of the kindliest and gentlest of our associates, the power of whose hand was equalled by the goodness of his heart."

But Bennett left his family in sad straits, and, on Shirley Brooks's initiative, the "Punch men" at once set about devising a means to help them. The result was the theatrical performance referred to on pp. 132-134. The Moray Minstrels wound up this famous entertainment, and Shirley Brooks delivered a touching address of his own writing.

Besides T. W. Woods (who made four drawings), Prehn (two), Lowe (six), and Hays (three), Mr. W. S. Gilbert swelled the list of contributors in this same year (1865). His work, consisting of fifteen small cuts signed with the now familiar "Bab," and designed to illustrate the rhymes they accompany, was lost to Punch by the indisposition for compromise displayed by contributor and Editor alike. "I sent three or four drawings," Mr. Gilbert informs me, "and half-a dozen short articles; but I was told by Mark Lemon, or rather a message reached me from him, that he would insert nothing more of mine unless I left 'Fun,' with which I was connected. This I declined to do unless he would take me on the regular staff of Punch. This he declined to do, and so the matter ended. I had previously offered 'The Yarn of the Nancy Bell' (the first of the Bab Ballads) to Punch, but Mark Lemon declined it on the ground that it was 'too cannibalistic for his readers.'" So Mr. Gilbert knew Punch no more; and it is commonly related that he enjoys nothing more than an occasional good-humoured fling at the journal which could not see his worth. "I say, Burnand," he has many times been reported to have said at the Garrick Club and elsewhere, when the Editor had referred to the heavy post-bag delivered each day at the office, though witticisms found among the wilderness of suggestions were desperately few, "do you never get anything good?" "Oh, sometimes—occasionally." "Then," drawled the other, "why don't you ever put one of them in?"

"A Hot Chestnut" (p. 143, Vol. XLIX.) was the first contribution of G. B. Goddard, well known a little later on as Bouverie Goddard, the animal-painter. Oil-colour was in truth his medium; but his drawings were good, and Punch for a couple of years rejoiced in his new hunting draughtsman. Goddard was a great friend of Charles Keene, with whom he shared for a time a studio in Baker Street; but feeling that he must paint pictures rather than draw upon the wood-block, he left the paper, after placing to his credit fourteen drawings—of which some were adjudged to contain the best horses seen in its pages since the death of Leech.

By far the most important lady artist who ever worked for Punch was Miss Georgina Bowers (for some years now Mrs. Bowers-Edwards).[63] It is not usual, as I have remarked before, to find a woman a professional humorist, though a colonial Punch is edited by a lady; but it is, I believe, an undoubted fact, that up to this year of grace no female caricaturist has yet appeared before man's vision. But Miss Bowers was a humorist, with very clear and happy notions as to what fun should be, and how it should be transferred to a picture. Her long career began in 1866, and thenceforward, working with undiminished energy, she executed hundreds of initials and vignettes as well as "socials," devoting herself in chief part to hunting and flirting subjects. She was a facile designer, but her manner was chronically weak. It was John Leech who set her on the track; Mark Lemon, to whom she took her drawings, encouraged her, and with help from Mr. Swain she progressed.

"My first published drawing," Miss Bowers tells me, "was a dreadful thing of a girl urging a muff of a man to give her a lead at a brook. My 'jokes' all came from incidents I saw out hunting, and from my own varied adventures with horse and hound; but occasionally a suggestion sent to the Editor was transferred to me to be put into shape. Then some one else wrote up to them. When I first hunted in Hertfordshire, I had great opportunities for provincial sporting studies. I feel now that some of my subjects were too personal, and wonder how many people forgave me. I often overheard stories about myself in the hunting-field (where I had hard times with ladies occasionally). When Shirley Brooks died, I felt I had lost my best and most helpful friend; and then Mr. Tom Taylor cared nothing for sport or sporting subjects, so that I felt that my work was uncongenial to him, and I got on badly and lost all interest in it, and gave up, after having drawn ten years for the paper, to which I shall never again contribute."

Mr. Walter Crane, of all people in the world, appears on p. 33 of Vol. LI. The cut is hardly funny, except in idea—it represents a chignon-show—nor is it as well drawn as much of the work he was doing at the time; he had not yet hit upon the style or subject that he afterwards made his own. A couple of sketches by O. Harling, an amateur, conclude the list for the year.

The year 1867 is famous in Punch's calendar for the acquisition of Mr. Linley Sambourne; but an earlier arrival was Mr. Frederic Shields. Mr. Swain suggested that he should "do a letter or two"; Mr. Shields did three, including a "social" ("Want your door swep', marm?"), and a girl curling her hair with the fender-tongs. The initials were kept over until 1870; and this constituted the sum of Mr. Shields' artistic adventure into the domain of humour.