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

THE brtN, LONDON, MONDAY EVENING, NOVEMBER 7, 1864.

the gent out for a holiday, or the exquisite at his club or
in the parks, or the lady of fashion at dinner or ball, or
jauntily a-horseback in bewitching hat and feather, or the
Paterfamilias and Materfamilies of middle-class life at home
or by the seaside, surrounded by the girls and boys, or the
footman of Belgravia, or the " servant gal" of Paddington,
or the garotting ruffian, or the foreigner whom he detested,
or the whole tribe of huntsmen, sportsmen, and anglers
whom he loved—in all he was equally at home, for the
quick eye for truth and nature, and the cunning hand to
interpret what the eye had seen, were never wanting. What
a heaped measure and overplus of life do we find in these
amazing sketches What a reflex of our age ! What a
miniature England 1 For not only did he give us character
and life to excess, but he " threw in," as a sort of careless
make-weight, horses and dogs and donkeys, all discrimi-
nated with the touch of a master in that special walk ;
and not content with this, but adding wealth to wealth, be
would dash on to the block, as mere backgrounds, and often
effected by a few rough strokes, landscapes and sea-
scapes and sky-scapes, wherein we saw the tangled
brakes and hedgerows of our land, the long flat fields, the
soft retirement of distant hills, the rivers drowsy with
muffling sedge and reedy overgrowth, the heavy heat
August noons, the wiry trees of M-trch scratching and
quivering in a keen air from the north, or a wild coast
in autumn with the wind in visible motion on the frothy
billows and the scudding clouds, and in the streaming
hair and skirts of ladies on the shore, At this present
moment, with the shock of the artist's death fresh upon
us, we cannot pretend to enter into anything like an ana-
lytical criticism on his genius, or to show wherein he
failed, or what were the limitations of his powers. We

glance in imagination over the long achievements of years,
and can only note the wonderful panorama which they
unfold. But one point should be specially mentioned—
the tender, almost touching, sense which Mr Leech pos-
sessed of the beauty of women and children. And when-
ever we look again at those beautiful sketches of fresh young
life, we shall recollect with a sad interest that, on the
very evening when he breathed his last, a child's party
had assembled at his house, and was hastily dismissed by
the approach of death. The writer of the admirable
obituary notice in the Times hints that the melancholy
end of Mr Leech was accelerated by the agony he endured
from the organ men whom he so often satirised ; and a
iAt fp,. from Mr Mark Lemon is quoted to that effect. Our
street musicians have already enough to answer for in dis-

turbing the peace of studious men, but this is surely an
extreme exaggeration. Mr Leech suffered greatly from all
sorts of noises ; but the first causes of his sufferings were
the first causes of his death. The truth—the sad truth
--is, that he worked his delicate organisation until the
whole nervous system gave way. The man was struck

down by excessive toil, yet he went on toiling. A form
of heart disease supervened, and while his years were
still in all their vigour, and not a little in their freshness,
he was taken from the place he filled only too well, and
which we do not expect to see filled again,
THE SPECTATOR.—The death of John Leech is a
great loss to the public, but not exactly for the reason which
is to-day upon everybody's lip. He was not a great cari-
caturist, or a caricaturist at. all. He might possibly have
become one, though we do not think his genius lay specially
in that direction, but he never seriously tried, at least in the
many years during which ha delighted the public who now
misdescribe him, Satirist he was occasionally, and, if he
himself thought out some of the sketches he drew, he could
rise to a high level of pictorial pathos, but his true function
was that of a social humouriet, a man who used his pencil
instead of his pen to make the humorous side of ordinary
life clear to the least observant, to reflect the ways and the
whims and the follies current in English society. Gifted
with a rare sense of the ludicrous element always discern-
ible in artificial life, and specially visible in the pushing
life of the English middle class, and with a still more rare
felicity of expression, he generally contrived to make his
sketches eomic, but they were never caricatures. The
essence of caricature is the exaggeration of some details,
some part of an idea on which the draughtsman perceives
that the impression of the whole idea rests, in which he de-
tects, to use the phrase of another art, the point which all
other men have missed. Leech, if he exaggerated at all,
which he very rarely did, exaggerated the whole meaning,
not She figures by which he was making his meaning clear.
The boys of the young generation, for example, seldom do
things quite so mannish as the acts Leech loved to ascribe
to them, and there was therefore exaggeration in the idea of
all that series of pictures, but the boys themselves were not
exaggerated. On the contrary, the very Essence of the fun
was the lifelike rendering of lads who were doing things
which lads according to popular judgment ought to leave
to men, or which only men could do. Cruikshank
would have made the boys' figures express the pom-
posity, precocity, or affectation which Leech con-
veyed through the design and the written scroll. In
many of his pictures, perhaps the majority, the whole force
consists in the realistic rendering of a comic incident, and
the spirit of caricature is not only absent, but it would if
present entirely destroy the effect. Nothing more laugh-
able, for example, can be conceived than a sketch now before
us, " An Advertising Medium,' or animated sandwich, re-
gularly enclosed in placards, standing in the Strand while a
wicked little street Arab, his face as full of fun, and mis-
chief, and rascality as if Murillo had painted him, tickles
the unfortunate's nose with a long straw, but a touch
of caricature in any of the figures would simply have
spoilt the design, In another, which ma all London
laugh, the joke is not in the picture at all, which
shows simply two street lads pointing at one of those
dressed-up errand boys whom pretentious people call pages,
but in the letter-press, " I say Jim, here's Bill been and
got the influeeze, and broke out all over buttons." Very
often Mr Leech threw aside comedy altogether, and reli.ed
f VGLUIIt. UI pLuLLy gwo
in the attitudes in which they at e most commonly seen, but
which painters of Academy pictures studiously avoid, and
which so to speak excite the memory to a slain No man
indeed illustrated more strongly the difference between the
tendency of the ultimate tendencies of caricature and of
pictorial humour. The tendency of the former is towards
the grotesque, ending in fantastic but weird dreams like
the "Dance of Death ;" of the latter towards the common-
place, ending in sketches like the vapidities published in
_London &clay, and it was into this that Leech was always
in danger of fallirg. That he did not fall was owing
partly to his admirable skill as a draughtsman, partly to a
rich store of native humour, of true genial fun, such as
only Englishmen and Italians fully appreciate, partly
to some very keen antipathies—witness the series of
" Flunkeiana and all sketches of foreigners—and
partly to an unusually wide experience. A man who
is London littcroteur, artist, tourist, and sportsman all
at once has scope for the exercise of what faculty of obser-
vation nature may have have bestowed on him, and nature
had given Leech a considerable one. Into the respective
merits of the two kinds of power it is not now necessary to
enter. Caricature as an art has almost ceased to be prac-
tised in England, and the rising generation scarcely under'
stand the estimation in which the few professors like Cruik-
shank left among us were once held by their countrymen.
Here and there a few thinkers are left who regret the deca-
dence of a great art, who will tell you, and tell 3ou truly,
that the caricaturist is as much greater than the humorist
as the poet is greater than the special correspondent, that
the one creates and the other only copies, that one requires
imagination and gives scope to genius, the other needs only
a skilful hand and eye, and leaves room only. for a faculty
of power which is to genius what shrewdness is to intelleo-
lectual power, but the public voice is against them. The
taste of the day is for realism in this as in all other branches
of art, and as the taste is not unsound but only narrow,
there is neither object nor use in contending too vehemently
against it. The success of Mr Leech—a very real success,
or half England would not have read the announcement of
his death with a sense of personal loss—was due to the readi-
ness with which he perceived the change, and seized on the
new path it opened to artists like himself, gifted with a per-
ception almost amounting to genius, real skill in design,
and facility in very rapid execution. Wo question if Mr
Leech, had Punch not existed, would have gained a great
place in art, but Punch unquestionably owes to Mr Leech a
debt no amount of money would ever repay. In his own
walk, the representation of common incidents from the
humorous point of view, he was almost matchless. Whether
the subject were Mr Briggs hugging his first salmon out
of the water, or two Frenchman discussing English
voracity, or Ed win slightly bored by Augelina's exzgeamce,
or the street Arab quizzing the street sente y, or the foot-
man giving in his "resignation," or the nouveau riche
giving a party with greengrocers for servants, no one could
give to the realistic rendering of the simplest accidents so
exquisite; a flavour of absurdity. There is nothing that we
know of particularly absurd in fly-fishing in the rain, or a
footman dropping a plate over an exquisite's whiskers, or
an angry old gentleman rating a conductor. or a child
bathing in water too cold for him—but only look at Leech's
sketches of the victims of those occurrences. You can
see the oath in the old gentleman's mouth, the groan of
the exquisite, and the shudder of the child, and gain an
idea somehow of a slight unreasonableness in all three. The
joke was never over the head of the public for
whom it was intended, yet never coarse, and never tainted
by malice. Leech was with his pencil thoroughly good.
humoured, except when depicting foreigners, whom he de-
tested and always represents in some grotesquely ridiculous
light. In other cases his antipathies, which extended to whole
classes such as footmen, the unrefined wealthy, cabmen, and
old maids, merely gave his work a slight flavour of sarcasm,
which it occasionally required to keep it from insipidity.
He represented. on paper precisely the view Punch's
good-humoured John Bull sometimes takes, and always
wishes to take, of the incidents around him, and the spec-
tator was pleased by finding his own pleasantest thoughts
realised before him. If no laugh was to be had his pretty
girls were an unfailing resource, and were, on the whole,
more popular than the comic sketches. We aro not at-
tempting to estimate Mr Leech's rank as an artist, but if
any ore wishes to compare him with other humorous
draughtsmen let him study the girls in Punch, and in any
of its rivals, Mr Leech could draw girls who were pretty,
and ladylike, yet belonged to the middle class, and were
pursuing ordinary, or it might be undignified, occupations
—a feat in which at least five-sixths of our comic artists
fail. The truth seems to have been that, unlike most men
who think much of the ludicrous side of life, Mr Leech not
only understood refinement but sympathised with it, and
could therefore give it expression almost at will— in artLans,
f .r example, 48 fully as in the Guardsmen he was fond of