The Sun.
London, England, 1864-11-07 00:00:00

" taking down." It is a striking but not altogether melan- '
choly fact to record that a man gifted in such a way and to
such a degree should have died at 47, a victim to overwork.
That seems to have been the truth. His morbid hatred of
organ-grinders, and indeed of all causes of noise, was merely
a symptom of the nervous irritability produced by confirm,
ous and exhausting labour. To say, as has been said every-
where, that he was killed by organ-grinders is absurd. He
was killed by the cause which kills half the literary men in
London, and everywhere else except Germany, a continuous
strain upon the mental powers producing in him nervous
sensitiveness and ultimately disease of the heart, as it pro-
duces in others paralysis and in a few the habit of intoxica-
tion. There is no cure for that disease excepting idleness,
and we do not know why writer or artist should be blamed
for not skulking work any more than the soldier is blamed
for not skulking the bullets. It is only for us that it is im-
moral to die rather than put off harness ? Among reflecting
men the manner of Mr Leech's death will increase their
sense of the vacancy caused by the fact, for it proves that
he laboured in his vocation with loving zeal, that his genial
drawings were no result of accidental facility, but of that
absorption, that energetic, persistent struggle to do the very
bast circumstances will admit that separates the true artist
from the man gifted with powers which will never yield to
the world the result those powers were given him to pro-
duce. Mr Leech's death, like his best work in life, was a

protest against pretension.
THE READER.—John Leech, one of the greatest o
English artists, one of the bravest and tenderest of English
gentlemen, died in his prime on Saturday evening. The
announcement of his death shocked us as when we learn
of some great calamity. To his friends his loos is, indeed,
irreparable; but it will also be felt through the length and
breadth of the land. All will comprehend that a great
light has been quenched. A pure as well as a great light,
set up on high to show us what sort of men and women we
are in the nineteenth century, his place may be occupied,
but it is too great to be filled by any of his living contem-
poraries. Like his schoolfellow Thackeray, he has met his
death in the plentitude of his powers, while engaged
in producing his most carefully considered works
with what appeared to be extraordinary fertility of
invention and ease. Yet we know that he had
been ailing for some time, that his system had become sub-
ject to a nervous irritability which deprived him of rest and
induced a peculiar susceptibility to noise. He has often
been heard to complain bitterly of the pain to which he was
subjected by the presence of street-organs in his neighbour-
hood ; and he had his revenge, though not his remedy, in
the drawings by which he illustrated this form of street
nuisance in the pages of Punch. The torments he endured
from the grinding of these instruments were beyond his
powers of endurance; and to these and the never-ceasing
monotonous hammering of some small mechanic in his
neighbourhood, acting upon an overwrought brain, his
death is attributed. If an artist is to be measured
by the ideas he is able to express without reference to
the materials with which he works, it would be difficult to
assign limits to the claims of John Leech to public recogni-
tion ; but, if there are clearly-defined limits in which his
position may be fixed as an artist, let us remember that he
was a great teacher, as sensitive as he was humorous,
open to all genial and healthy influences, always steering
clear of sentimentality, on the one hand, and coarseness on
the other. He epitomised the life of his generation, seizing
with the true instinct of genius the types of the various
classes of which the community is composed. Nor was his
intuition ever at fault in the representations of any part of
the subject he selected for his sketch. He was Hogarthian
in the truth and meaning with which all the salient points
of the scene he represented were touched ; he was equally
at home in the hunting-field or at the seaside, in
a lady's boudoir or a costermonger's club, in the park or
on a cab-rank, in the kitchen or in the nursery; and the
atmosphere, as it were, of each was expressed by a few
mysterious touches whichf'give the sense of dulness or of
brightness, of summer breezes or of autumnal glooming.
Of his humour it is almost unnecessary to speak, because
it is just that part of his nature which was widely, almcst
universally, appreciated. But, although he was one of the
greatest humorists of this or of any age, his faculty was always
restrained, so to speak, by the presence of a genial sympathy.
He struck at all our follies, vices, affectations, and conceits
—but with no cynical arm, and in no misanthropical spirit.
He held the " mirror up to nature ;" and in it we might see
ourselves reflected, and take the truth to our hearts that there
were classes and conditions of ..life; in, this society of ours,
besides our own supreme individualities and cliques, the
existence of which may serve to teach a lesson as well as
to provoke a laugh ; and that such reflections can be sug-
gested by sketches in which the lessen is veiled behind the
fun is the sign of a power of which, as far as we know.
Hogarth is, in another mantra., the only previous example.
How John Leech passed from the rank of a caricaturist into
that of an artist may best be seen by a reference to the
back numbers of Punch. The pages of this periodical con-
tain the chief records of his artistic life ; and his death will
prove, it is to be feared, an irreparable loss to those with
whom he had been so long associated. The sketches which
he produced twenty years ago bear witness to the inborn
faculty—the native humour which found its vent in a
prof,esion for the exercise of which he had never been
qualified by education, yet in which, with a rare in-
stinct, he at once cultivated and restrained his powers,
to the end that ho might attain the greatest pod
Bible results within the restricted bounds which the limited
materials at his command imposed. In all his earlier
sketches the humour is paramount, and it is expressed by
means of that exaggeration of drawing and character which
distinguish the mere caricaturist; but with this positi' n, a
native-born artist like John Leech could never rest con-
tent; and we find that he gradually but surely advanced
ta higher leve . eVer na o• roorsain and nays, no .4
ie mire ot Lath—his lamented death at the early age
of forty-seven, in the full brightness of his powers, cut
down, as it were, like a tree full of sap, and bearing
fruit a hundredfold. We may easily count the living
attists who may fairly be said to take a higher position
than John Leech. Seen in one aspect, he takes pre •
eminence of all, for he has rescued his generation
from oblivion, A collection of his works will be for
our childon's children a record of our customs, our habits,
our fashions, our social relations, and even our figure of
speech. We shall speak again through him to those who
shalt come after no ; and, in this view, his versatility and
the multitude of his productions leave little room for the
regret that has sometimes been expressed that such rare
faculties should not have found a worthier medium of ex-
pression than rough woodcuts in the pages of Punch. It is
as an artist, even more than as a humorist, that John Leech
is rightly appreciated among his brethren, and it would be
well that the public at large should understand fully the
greatness of the loss that we deplore. The difference be-
tween his drawings and those of his imitators is one of kind
and net only one of degree. He did not merely reproduce
a street incident selec'ed for the illustration of a bit of
popular slang, or a hunting-field in order to depict
the scrapes of a Mr Briggs, or a Scotch salmon river
or hill side on purpose to set forth in a ridiculous
light the accidents to which sporting tourists are liable ;
such incidents he took, indeed, for his subjects, and deli-
neated them with wonderful truth and inexhaustible
humour ; but they are also set forth with a graphic power
that places the author in the first rank among the artists of
his time. There is now no one left among us who can re-
present not merely the incidents and humour of a hunting-
field, but who can, as it were, carry us into the field with
him—make us partakers in the excitement of the sport
and sensitive to the very atmosphere of the scene ; there is
no one left who can set before us the real aspect of an Eng,
lish or Continental watering-place so that wo instinctively
recognise its truthfulness, and this not merely in one or two
particulars, but as a whole—the bright sunlight, the move-
ment of the sea, the scudding clouds, being all suggested
by a few scratches which he knew how to make infi-
nitely suggestive, The images of the persons and of the
things he represented were photographed on his brain, and
his drawings were representations of real living people en-
gaged in the pursuit of business or pleasure, and not of a
mere collection of models brought together to act parts
according to the common recipe of picture-making. In his
keen observation, which nothing escaped, and in the power
of retaining and tutting the fruits of it to account, lay the
secret of his influence and his success. His active brain
seems latterly to have acted upon his nerves, and he was
unable to sleep or rest ; and, though he had been ailing for
some time, he died unexpectedly and suddenly at his own
house on Saturday evening about 7 o'clock. He has re-
joined his old friend and schoolfellow Thackeray, and we
are left to mourn his less, and to recall the shadow of the
grave, gentle face and dignified presence that have vanished
from amongst us like a dream.
THE EXAMINER.—After four-and-twenty years of ser-
vice to the public, John Leech is now resting from his
labour. Death only could take the pencil from his busy
hand. There had been no pause in the genial eterrent of
his wit. His health had failed, he had been to see his doc-
tor on the previous day, but last Saturday evening there
was a children's party in his house, and he died then with
the voices of the children in his ears. Upon them, and
upon all that is good and graceful and belongs to the true
cheerfulness of life, he had laid a loving touch in all his
work, lie found his place in the world early, went straight
to it, and held by it firmly to the last. He was not to be
teml ted into a second seat at what was thought a higher table
of the oil painters. Among thew, however good his work, he
could have had little influence on the main body of his coun-
trymen. Knowing thevalue and use of his skill as a caricatu-
rist of the follies of the day he waged a wholesome war against
that which Fielding at the outset of his own career dee
dared to be the only fit subject of ridicule, affectation;
provoking laughter against all forms, whether in child
or man, of the endeavour to appear what one is not. But
always it was a kindly laughter of good fellowship, telling
many a truth whimsically and wisely in few strokes of
simple outline, through which ho seemed to express cha-
racter, and criticise it too, in every light turn of the hand
that answered with so wonderful an aptitude to each
directing movement of his wit. He drew, indeed, vin-
dictively when he attacked the organ grinders by whom
his sensitive brain was tortured, and by whom he was
driven out of a comfortable house in Brunswick-square to
the doubtful quiet of Kensington. How much distress he
suffered from their discordant grinding noise was told,
only too truly we now feel, in Mr Mark Lemon's
letter addressed to Mr Bass, when he was about to
bring into Parliament his bill for the regulation
of street music (already published ill The !Fun).