Kitabı oku: «John Leech, His Life and Work, Vol. 2 [of 2]», sayfa 9

 
"Her cheek is pale, and her eye is dim,
And downward cast, yet not at the limb
Once the centre of all speculation;
But downward drooping in comfort's dearth,
As gloomy thoughts are drawn to the earth —
Whence human sorrows derive their birth —
By a moral gravitation.
 
 
"How blessed the heart that has a friend
A sympathizing ear to lend
To troubles too great to smother!
But friend or gossip she had none
To hear the vile deeds the Count had done,
How night after night he rambled;
And how she learned by sad degrees
That he drank and smoked, and, worse than these,
That he 'swindled, intrigued, and gambled'!
 
 
    *      *      *      *      *
 
 
"He brought strange gentlemen home to dine
That he said were in the Fancy Line, —
And they fancied spirits instead of wine,
And called her lap-dog 'Wenus.'"
 

Leech has pretty well marked the profession of the "strange gentlemen" in this admirable drawing; their attitudes, the cut of their clothes, the character in their figures, to say nothing of the sticking-plaster on a face that could belong to no one but a "fighting man," sufficiently proclaim their habits. The figure of the Count is tragic in its intensity of drunken self-abandonment.

A leg of solid gold would, no doubt, if turned into cash, represent a large sum of money. It seems to have been the determination of the Countess, while still Miss Kilmansegg, to have reserved to herself all rights over the golden leg, for that auriferous limb was settled, as well as fixed upon herself, to be disposed of by will or otherwise, as she pleased. Says the poet:

 
"So the Countess, then Miss Kilmansegg,
At her marriage refused to stir a peg
Till her lawyers had fastened on her leg,
As fast as the law could tie it."
 

Means which seem illimitable very speedily vanish when they fall into the hands of such people as the foreign Count. It was said of a famous roué of the last century that he "practised every vice except prodigality and hypocrisy – his insatiable avarice exempted him from the first, and his matchless impudence from the second." Our Count seems to have surpassed his prototype, whose "impudence" may not have been of the brutal character from which the poor Countess suffered; whilst a slight dash of avarice might have prevented the golden leg from being all that was left of her golden fortune.

The following lines eloquently describe the Count's state of mind after his orgies:

 
"And then how wildly he used to stare,
And shake his fist at nothing, and swear,
And pluck by the handful his shaggy hair,
Till he looked like a study of Giant Despair
For a new edition of Bunyan!
 
 
"For dice will run the contrary way,
As is well known to all who play,
And cards will conspire as in treason."
 

At all events, cards, dice, and other expensive amusements had so reduced the Count that he had not a leg to stand upon, except his wife's golden one, and as that limb was in her own control, it was but a doubtful security. The Countess had made a will in which the leg was left to the Count, but life is uncertain – the Countess might outlive her husband; moreover, he was so placed that delay was not only dangerous, but inconvenient. The chronicler thus continues:

 
"Now, the precious leg while cash was flush,
Or the Count's acceptance worth a rush,
Had never excited dissension;
But no sooner the stocks began to fall,
Than, without any ossification at all,
The limb became what people call
A perfect bone of contention.
 
 
"For altered days made altered ways,
And instead of the complimentary phrase
So current before her bridal,
The Countess heard, in language low,
That her precious leg was precious slow,
A good 'un to look at, but bad to go,
And kept quite a sum lying idle.
 
 
    *      *      *      *      *
 
 
"But spite of hint, and threat, and scoff,
The leg kept its situation;
For legs are not to be taken off
By a verbal amputation.
 
 
"Firmly then – and more firmly yet —
With scorn for scorn, and with threat for threat,
The proud one confronted the cruel;
And loud and bitter the quarrel arose,
Fierce and merciless – one of those
With spoken daggers, and looks like blows —
In all but the bloodshed a duel.
 
 
"Rash and wild, and wretched and wrong,
Were the words that came from weak and strong,
Till, maddened for desperate matters,
Fierce as a tigress escaped from her den,
She flew to her desk – 'twas opened – and then,
In the time it takes to try a pen,
Or the clerk to utter his slow 'Amen,'
Her will was in fifty tatters!
 
 
"But the Count, instead of curses wild,
Only nodded his head and smiled,
As if at the spleen of an angry child;
But the calm was deceitful and sinister!
And a lull like the lull of the treacherous sea —
For Hate in that moment had sworn to be
The golden leg's sole legatee,
And that very night to administer."
 

"That very night!" – one more night of golden dreaming, in the midst of which comes death; the deliverer from an existence which the worship of gold has made so pitiful:

 
"'Tis a stern and startling thing to think,
How often mortality stands on the brink
Of its grave without any misgiving:
And yet in this slippery world of strife,
In the stir of human bustle so rife,
There are daily sounds to tell us that life
Is dying, and Death is living!
 
 
"But breath and bloom set doom at nought —
How little the wretched Countess thought,
When at night she unloosed her sandal,
That the fates had woven her burial-cloth,
And that Death, in the shape of a death's head moth,
Was fluttering round her candle!
 
 
"As she looked at her clock of ormolu,
For the hours she had gone so wearily through
At the end of a day of trial,
How little she saw in the pride of prime
The dart of Death in the hand of Time —
That hand which moved the dial!
 
 
"As she went with her taper up the stair,
How little her swollen eye was aware
That the shadow which followed was double!
Or when she closed her chamber-door,
It was shutting out, and for evermore,
The world and its worldly trouble.
 
 
"Little she dreamt as she laid aside
Her jewels – after one glance of pride —
They were solemn bequests to Vanity;
Or when her robes she began to doff,
That she stood so near to the putting off
Of the flesh that clothes humanity.
 
 
"And when she quenched the taper's light,
How little she thought, as the smoke took flight,
That her day was done and merged in a night
Of dreams and duration uncertain;
Or along with her own
That a hand of bone
Was closing mortality's curtain!
 
 
    *      *      *      *      *
 
 
"Thus, even thus, the Countess slept,
While death still nearer and nearer crept,
Like the Thane who smote the sleeping;
But her mind was busy with early joys,
Her golden treasures and golden toys,
That flashed a bright
And golden light
Under lids still red with weeping.
 
 
"The golden guineas in silken purse,
And the 'Golden Legends' she heard from her nurse,
Of the Mayor in his gilded carriage —
And London streets that were paved with gold,
And the golden eggs that were laid of old —
With each golden thing
To the golden ring
At her own auriferous marriage!
 
 
"And still the golden light of the sun
Through her golden dream appeared to run,
Though the night that roared without was one
To terrify seamen or gipsies —
While the moon, as if in malicious mirth,
Kept peeping down at the ruffled earth,
As though she enjoyed the tempest's birth,
In revenge of her old eclipses.
 
 
"But vainly, vainly the thunder fell,
For the soul of the sleeper was under a spell,
That time had lately embittered —
The Count, as once at her foot he knelt —
That foot which now he wanted to melt!
But, hush! 'twas a stir at her pillow she felt,
And some object before her glittered.
 
 
"'Twas the golden leg! she knew its gleam!
And up she started and tried to scream;
But even in the moment she started,
Down came the limb with a frightful smash,
And, lost in the universal flash
That her eyeballs made at so mortal a crash,
The spark called vital departed.
 
 
"Gold, still gold, hard, yellow, and cold,
For gold she had lived, and died for gold —
By a golden weapon, not oaken;
In the morning they found her all alone —
Stiff, and bloody, and cold as a stone —
But her leg, the golden leg, was gone,
And the 'golden bowl was broken.'
 
 
"Her Moral.
 
 
"Gold! gold! gold! gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold,
Molten, graven, hammered, and rolled;
Heavy to get, and light to hold;
Hoarded, bartered, bought, and sold,
Stolen, borrowed, squandered, doled;
Spurned by the young, but hugged by the old
To the very verge of the churchyard mould;
Price of many a crime untold;
Gold! gold! gold! gold!
Good or bad a thousandfold!
How widely its agencies vary —
To save, to ruin, to curse, to bless —
As even its minted coins express,
Now stamped with the image of good Queen Bess,
And now of Bloody Mary!"
 

The admirable design – the "tailpiece" to the legend of "Miss Kilmansegg and her Golden Leg" – which Leech calls "Bedtime," is reproduced, not only for its excellence as a composition, but also in evidence of the readiness of the artist's imagination to adopt an idea that has been suggested by the poem, and of the skill with which that cunning hand has realized it. The little old miser has been "counting out his money" with the delight that "time cannot wither, nor custom stale." His shrunken shanks, thin face and hands, betray his age. Death cannot be far off; but no thought apart from the treasure can be spared for the inevitable visitor who surprises the miser at last in the midst of his golden worship. He is far from being tired; but he must go to bed, and sleep the sleep that knows no waking. His skeleton nurse has come for him; her bony hands encircle him. His shroud is on her arm; she cannot wait – no, not for him to handle once more those glittering coins, on which his eye sparkles, and his claw-like fingers make vain attempts to reach.

CHAPTER XX.
DR. JOHN BROWN AND LEECH

Whether that charming writer, Dr. John Brown, knew Leech in the flesh or not, I cannot say; but that he knew and fully appreciated him in spirit is evident enough in a paper published in a collection of essays entitled "Horæ Subsecivæ." I gather from the concluding passages of the Doctor's brilliant essay that it had been his intention to have written Leech's life, having collected much material for the purpose, but that "ill-health put a stop to this congenial labour." How admirably the labour would have been executed may be shown by the following extracts:

"Leech," says Dr. Brown, "was singularly modest, both as a man and an artist. This came by nature, and was indicative of the harmony and sweetness of his essence; but doubtless the perpetual going to Nature, and drawing out of her fulness, kept him humble, as well as made him rich – made him (what every man of sense and power must be) conscious of his own strength. But before 'the great mother' he was simple and loving, attentive to her lessons as a child, for ever learning and doing."

Again: "Of all our satirists, none have such a pervading sense and power of girlish, ripe, and womanly beauty as Leech… There is a genuine domesticity about his scenes that could come only from a man who was much at his own fireside, and in the nursery when baby was washed. You see, he is himself pater familias, with no Bohemian trait or raffish turn. What he draws, he has seen; what he asks you to live in, and laugh at and with, he has laughed at and lived in. It is this wholesomeness and (to use the right word) this goodness that makes Leech more than a drawer of funny pictures, more even than a great artist. It makes him a teacher and an example of virtue in its widest sense, from that of manliness to the sweet devotion of a woman, and the loving open mouth and eyes of parvula on your knee."

I find it difficult to believe that these remarks were written by one who had no personal knowledge of Leech; indeed, I should have thought the writer must have enjoyed an amount of intimacy with him. If Dr. Brown and Leech were strangers to each other, the writer's accurate estimate of the artist shows how exactly the drawings reflect the delightful nature of their producer, so familiar to his nearest friends.

"What we owe to him," adds Dr. Brown, "of wholesome, hearty mirth and pleasure, and of something better than either – good as they are – purity, affection, pluck, humour, kindliness, good-humour, good-feeling, good-breeding, the love of Nature, of one another, of truth, the joys of children, the loveliness of our homely English fields, with their sunsets and village spires, their glimpses into the pure infinite beyond, the sea and all its fulness, its waves 'curling their monstrous heads and hanging them,' their crisping smiles on sunlit sands – all that variety of Nature and of man, which is only less infinite than its Maker! Something of this and of that mysterious quality called humour, that fragrance and flavour of the soul, which God has given us to cheer our lot, to help us to 'take heart and hope and steer right onward,' to have our joke, that lets us laugh and make game of ourselves when we have little else to laugh at or play with, of that which gives us when we will the silver lining of the cloud, and paints a rainbow on the darkened sky out of our own 'troublous tears' – something of all these has this great, simple-hearted, hard-working artist given to us and to our children as a joy and a possession for ever. Let us be grateful to him; let us give him our best honour, affection, and regard."

Walking with Leech one day, we met an old gentleman, to whom I introduced my friend: early in the fifties it was. The old man, though well stricken in years, sported a dark and heavy moustache.

"And so," said Leech, when, after a few commonplaces, we separated, "that is old Mr. Blank the portrait-painter, is it? What on earth induces him to wear purple moustachios?" Purple they were, certainly, and of rather a bright tinge.

"Well," I replied, "he has dyed them, for they were white the other day."

"In my opinion," said Leech, "only soldiers should be allowed moustachios."

In my early days, that "hirsute appendage" created such a prejudice against the wearers as would not be credited in these beard-bearing times. There were places of business the doors of which were closed against the moustache. At a well-known bank complete shaving of moustache and beard is insisted upon to this day. The sufferings of our troops in the Crimea were sufficiently agonizing without the torment or even the possibility of the morning's shave; and it is to the Russian campaign we owe the "beard movement," which from that time to the present is so universal. Our officers returned from their battles covered with glory and hair, and so much improved by the latter – in the opinion of those whose approval was most valued – as to make a sacrifice of it out of the question. Little did Leech imagine when he made his sweeping objection to the moustache, what a factor he would find it in his future work. How many delightful sketches turn upon it! Who can forget those two little rival snobs – rivals in the love of some fair approver of beards – who have withdrawn themselves from society during the incubation of their moustachios, and who, having accidentally sought the same suburban retirement, meet face to face, stubbly beard to stubbly beard, at a corner of a lane? And that precocious young gentleman who asks his sisters if they approve of the removal of a moustache, the presence of which they had never been able to discover!

Under the heading of "The Beard Movement," we have a British swell in a fainting state in the arms of a policeman; this serious condition having arisen from the sight of a postman with moustachios. In another drawing, policemen are marching to their posts of duty decorated by beards of such magnitude as to strike terror into the street boys, who scatter in all directions at the sight of them.

In "Pictures of Life and Character" other examples of the alarm excited by the beard movement are given with the refined humour peculiar to Leech.

I find I have to modify somewhat my conviction that Leech rarely adopted the subjects proposed to him for illustration; no doubt by far the largest number were the outcome of his own conception, or observation of incidents in his experience; but I have proof of several examples to the contrary. For instance, Mr. Holman Hunt says: "One Friday night I had sat down to much correspondence, intending before concluding to write of two or three amusing facts picked up that might suit him (Leech) for illustration. It had become very late, and I was clearing away my paper, when, with vexation, I remembered his letter had not been written. I seized the pen, and on a page I drew two horizontal lines quite dividing the space. In the top I put: 'Scene – Kitchen garden, country cottage. Dramatis Personæ: Factotum, master entering,' and then a line or two of dialogue.

"The second subject I treated similarly, and the third also, which was not so promising. I enclosed this without a word to Leech, and posted it with my other letters about two in the morning. The following Wednesday the two subjects, admirably treated, were in Punch. When next I saw him he was eager with excuses for not having written. He added: 'The letter when it was opened at breakfast was most opportune, for I had to leave town by five, and I was bound to furnish two designs before going, and I had come down without having the wildest notion what to do. The subjects in your note were ready-made, and I was able to sketch them without a moment's waste of time."

Mr. Hunt tells an anecdote of Kenny Meadows, the jovial Bohemian, whom, I hope, the reader of these pages may remember, that is so characteristic and amusing, and illustrative of his own nature and of that of Leech, that I insert it in this place. "Meadows was quite at the head of the Punch artists when Leech joined them, and was naturally delighted by the praise bestowed upon his drawings by 'this ruler amongst the illustrators of Punch.' He – Meadows – declared that a sight of Leech's illustrations had so disgusted him with his own work that he felt inclined to give up art altogether. 'Why,' said he, 'should I go on giving proof after proof of my incapacity when you leave me so far behind?' This modest effusion was uttered early in the evening, and before the setting in of the gin-and-water period, which was destined to effect a striking change in Meadows' estimate of himself, and of the recent addition to the pictorial staff.

"Leech was a sincere admirer of Meadows' work, and of this he assured the self-condemning artist in no measured terms, instancing for special praise many of Kenny's designs brimming over with poetic conceits in the illustrations of Shakespeare. Meadows listened to Leech's compliments, and said it was 'deuced liberal' of him to say what he did. He then mixed himself a glass of gin and water, saying, 'Well, after all, it's wise to make the best of things, and be as jolly as one can under all circumstances.'

"The two artists then fell into general conversation, and into – on the part of one of them – the imbibing of much gin and water. Under the influence of the latter, Meadows returned to the subject of his own works, and proceeded to show in what respect they surpassed those of others – even Leech's, which were worthless from the absence of 'poetry,' which ought to sanctify all art.

"'Give me imagination or nothing, my dear boy!' he exclaimed. 'I don't want your commonplace facts done with a little trick of caricature, as it is called. Why don't you aim at something better, something higher? I would rather do nothing than the things you do, which, not only in design, but in execution, are unworthy of a true artist.'"

All this was told to my friend by Leech himself, and, says Mr. Hunt, "Leech's shrug of the shoulders, expressive of bearing infinite disgrace, was the gesture of a comedian, but a hearty, good-natured laugh gave the real expression of the feeling left in his kind soul; there was not a jot of malice there against the severe judgment upon himself. The Scandinavian hero returning so sedate from victory that he might have been supposed to have suffered a defeat, or from disaster in the field, so composed that he might have been thought victorious, could not have surpassed Leech's manner in accepting both the praise and the censure of his elder rival."

Another old friend of mine, Mr. Horsley, R.A., offers further proof of Leech's occasional acceptance of suggestions for his designs. In the course of a walk Mr. Horsley was accosted by one of those itinerant traders to whom the street is the shop, and solicited to buy a rope of onions.

"Take the last rope, sir," says the man. My friend looks like a prosperous gentleman, to whom the offer might be made with a prospect of success, though the awkwardness of his appearance with the addition of a long rope of large onions in his hand would most likely prove a deterrent to the purchase. Mr. Horsley declined the offer, but it instantly occurred to him that such a proposal, if made to one of Leech's "swells," would be intensely comic, and he accordingly mentioned the incident to Leech, who smiled as usual and said nothing. A drawing, however, appeared immediately in Punch, but, strange to say, the incident is defrauded of much, if not all, its humour. The swell leaves nothing to be desired, except that he certainly should have been alone, and not, as according to Leech, accompanied by a lady, to whom the onions might have been useful. The absurdity surely consisted in the ludicrous position of a young gentleman who was subjected to an offer of which he would scarcely know the meaning, and much less likely to take advantage of it. My friend expressed his disappointment to Leech, who, with characteristic modesty, acknowledged his mistake.

"I may mention another curious failure," says Mr. Horsley. "Leech came into my room one day roaring with laughter at a story he had just heard of two small boys who had been overheard discussing the age of a companion, and one said to the other, 'Well, I don't 'zactly know how old Charley is; but he must be very old, for he blows his own nose.' This is delightful as coming from the little chaps that Leech drew so perfectly; but, wonderful to relate, he represented the conversation as passing between a boy looking fourteen or fifteen and a girl in a riding-habit."

I subjoin the first idea of that which seems to be the incident told to Mr. Horsley, though it fails to illustrate the scene as described by Mr. Horsley, or the rendering of it afterwards adopted by Leech. The sketch, however, will show the rough manner in which all the thoughts so perfectly expressed on the wood-block were first sketched by the artist.