John Leech, His Life and Work, Vol. 2 [of 2]. Frith William Powell
![John Leech, His Life and Work, Vol. 2 [of 2] - Frith William Powell](limg_read228691.jpg "John Leech, His Life and Work, Vol. 2 [of 2] - Frith William Powell")
fancy her dread when she saw a great head
In her bucket – with fright she was ready to drop!
Conceive, if you can, how she roared and she ran,
With the head rolling after her, bawling out 'Stop!'"
As this memoir progresses I propose to submit further illustrations from some of the many serials, novels, tales, poems, etc., with which Leech was connected. I also propose, in the course of my narrative, to quote opinions of Leech's powers from men better qualified to judge of them, and able to express their opinions in far more felicitous language than mine. Amongst those Dickens takes a foremost place. I think the friendship between Leech and Dickens began very early in the life of the former; the nature of Leech's work, and the modest and gentle character of the man, were especially attractive to Dickens.
In the amateur company of actors formed by Dickens, Leech was a conspicuous figure; but his heart was not in the work, though he entirely sympathized with the object of it, which was of a charitable nature, resulting in many performances – very successful in a pecuniary sense – for the benefit of poor and deserving literary men. The company consisted of Dickens, Mark Lemon, John Forster, G. H. Lewis, Douglas Jerrold, Leech, Egg, Wilkie Collins, Frank Stone, and others, who christened themselves "The Guild of Literature and Art." The late Lord Lytton took great interest in the Guild, for which he wrote a play called "Not so Bad as We Seem; or, Many Sides to a Character," and to this he added a gift of land on his estate in Hertfordshire, where some houses of a superior cottage form were built, in which decayed artists and authors were to end their days; but these gentlemen declined to begin any days there under the conditions prescribed; and when the houses were built, tenants for them could not be found. The Guild, therefore, was something of a fiasco, with the exception of the relief it afforded in several instances to worthy objects.
Leech acted in the first play that the amateurs ventured upon, no less than Ben Jonson's "Every Man in his Humour," in which Dickens played Bobadil and Leech Master Matthew. This occurred about 1847, I think, and I was honoured by an invitation to the first or second performance. Par parenthèse, I may add that I had the honour of being asked to join the company, but feeling that I could not learn a part, or, if I did get over that difficulty, the footlights would paralyze my memory, and also having neither face nor figure for the stage, I thought it best to "stick to my last."
Though Leech had a good part in "Every Man," strange to say, I have no recollection of his performance; though that of Dickens, Jerrold, Egg, and others remains vividly in my memory. Dickens gave proofs in Bobadil, and in many other characters, that he might have been a great actor. The same, nor anything like it, could not be said with truth of Leech, if he played his other parts no better than he did that of Slender in the "Merry Wives of Windsor." It is only in that character that I can remember him, though I must have seen him in others. The tone in which he said "Oh, sweet Anne Page!" can I ever forget? There was a ring of impatience in his performance, a kind of "Oh, I wish this was all over!" that was plainly perceptible to those who knew him intimately. Leech's tall figure and handsome face told well upon the stage, but with those his attractions as an actor ceased. In Lord Lytton's play Leech had no part, I think, but my old friend Egg played that of a poor poet, who is discovered in a miserable attic when the curtain rises, and the poet soliloquizes to the effect that "Years ago, when under happier circumstances" – something or other. Egg always begun, "Here's a go, when under," etc. Unlike Leech, Egg was fond of acting, but, like Leech, he displayed no capacity for the art.
CHAPTER VII.
DICKENS AND THACKERAY ON LEECH
Perhaps the most striking difference between Leech and the caricaturists who preceded him, as well as those who were his contemporaries, was shown in the part that beauty played in every drawing in which it could be appropriately introduced; he may be credited with the creation of many of the loveliest creatures that ever fell from the pencil of an artist. Leech revelled in beauty as Gillray and Rowlandson revelled in ugliness.
In 1841 a work appeared, in book-form, of sketches by Leech, entitled "The Rising Generation," in which the rising youth, with their mannish manners, were satirized. Of this book Dickens wrote:
"We enter our protest against those of the rising generation who are precociously in love being made the subject of merriment by a pitiless and unsympathizing world. We never saw a boy more distinctly in the right than the young gentleman kneeling in the chair to beg a lock of hair from his pretty cousin to take back to school. Madness is in her apron, and Virgil, dog-eared and defaced, is in her ringlets. Doubts may suggest themselves of the perfect disinterestedness of the other young gentleman contemplating the fair girl at the piano – doubts engendered by his worldly allusion to 'tin,' although that may have arisen in his modest consciousness of his own inability to support an establishment; but that he should be 'deucedly inclined to go and cut that fellow out' appears to us one of the most natural emotions of the human breast. The young gentleman with the dishevelled hair and clasped hands, who loves the transcendent beauty with the bouquet and can't be happy without her, is to us a withering and desolate spectacle. Who could be happy without her? The growing youths are not less happily observed and depicted than the grown women. The languid little creature, who 'hasn't danced since he was quite a boy,' is perfect; and the eagerness of the small dancer, whom he declines to receive for a partner at the hands of the glorious old lady of the house (the little feet quite ready for the first position, the whole heart projected into the quadrille, and the glance peeping timidly at the desired one out of a flutter of hope and doubt), is quite delightful to look at. The intellectual youth, who awakens the tremendous wrath of a Norma of private life by considering woman an inferior animal, is lecturing at the present moment, we understand, on the Concrete in connection with the Will. The legs of the young philosopher who considers Shakespeare an overrated man were seen by us dangling over the side of an omnibus last Tuesday. We have no acquaintance with the scowling young gentleman, who is clear that 'if his governor don't like the way he is going on, why, he must have chambers and so much a week;' but, if he is not by this time in Van Diemen's Land, he will certainly go to it through Newgate. We should exceedingly dislike to have personal property in a strong-box, to live in the quiet suburb of Camberwell, and to be in the relation of bachelor uncle to that youth. In all his designs, whatever Mr. Leech desires to do he does. His drawing seems to us charming, and the expression, indicated by the simplest means, is exactly the natural expression, and is recognised as such at once. Some forms of our existing life will never have a better chronicler. His wit is good-natured, and always the wit of a gentleman. He has a becoming sense of responsibility and restraint; he delights in agreeable things, and he imparts some pleasant air of his own to things not pleasant in themselves; he is suggestive and full of matter, and he is always improving. Into the tone as well as into the execution of what he does, he has brought a certain elegance which is altogether new, without involving any compromise of what is true. Popular art in England has not had so rich an acquisition."
In the endeavour to satisfy Dickens with the type required for the characters in his stories, Leech encountered the difficulty that all the author's illustrators had to master. "Phiz" made many drawings in Dickens' presence before he could realize the author's idea of Mr. Dombey; Cruikshank was more than once required to redraw a whole scene from "Oliver Twist"; and Leech has often been heard to speak of the minute details as to feature, height, thinness or fatness – in fact, every physical and, so far as it could be shown by appearance, mental quality – that Dickens insisted upon before he could be satisfied with the vera effigies of one of his characters. The feelings of the great author, then, may be imagined when he found – too late for correction – a terrible error into which Leech had fallen in the drawing of a scene from "The Battle of Life," by introducing a personage into a scene which closes the second part of the tale, who was not intended to have been present.
It was in December, 1846, that "The Battle of Life" made one of the series of Christmas stories. In Leech's unfortunate illustration, which represented the flight of the bride, he made the mistake of supposing that Michael Warden had taken part in the elopement, and introduced his figure with that of Marian. Leech's error was not discovered until too late for remedy, the publication of the book having been delayed to the utmost limit expressly for those drawings; and it is highly characteristic of Dickens, and of the true regard he had for the artist,