August 18, 2025 • 25 mins
In Partial Portraits, acclaimed writer Henry James offers a fascinating exploration into the lives and works of a remarkable array of literary figures, some of whom he knew personally. Delve into the creative minds of legends like Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Alphonse Daudet, Guy De Maupassant, Ivan Turgenev, and George du Maurier. This insightful narrative reveals the rich tapestry of their inspirations and artistic journeys. (Summary by Rita Boutros)
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter ten, part one of partial portraits by Henry James.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by
Rita Boutros. Chapter ten George de Mourier, many years ago,
a small American child who lived in New York and
played in Union Square, which was then enclosed by a
(00:24):
high railing and governed by a solitary policeman, a strange,
super annuated, dilapidated functionary, carrying a little cane and wearing
with a very copious and very dirty shirt front the
costume of a man of the world. A small American
child was a silent devotee of punch. Half an hour
(00:47):
spent to day in turning over the early numbers transports
him quite as much to Old New York as to
the London of the First Crystal Palace and the years
that immediately followed it. From about eighteen fifty to eighteen
fifty five, he lived in imagination, no small part of
(01:08):
his time in the world represented by the pencil of leech.
He pored over the pictures of the people riding in
the row, of the cabmen and the costermongers, of the
little pages and buttons of the bathing machines at the
sea side, of the small boys in tall hats and
(01:28):
eaten jackets, of the gentleman hunting the fox, of the
pretty girls in striped petticoats and coiffurs, of the shape
of the mushroom. These things were the features of a
world which he longed so to behold. That the familiar woodcuts,
they were not so good in those days as they
have become since, grew at last as real to him
(01:51):
as the furniture of his home. And when he at
present looks at the punch of thirty years ago, he
finds in it an odd association of medieval New York.
He remembers that it was in such a locality in
that city that he first saw such a picture. He
recalls the fading light of the winter dusk, with the
(02:14):
red fire and the red curtains in the background, in
which more than once he was bidden to put down
the last numbers of the humorous sheet and come to
his tea. Punch was England, Punch was London, And England
and London were at that time words of multifarious suggestion
(02:35):
to this small American child. He liked much more to
think of the British empire than to indulge in the
sports natural to his tender age, and many of his
hours were spent in making mental pictures of the society
of which the recurrent woodcuts offered him, specimens and revelations.
(02:56):
He had from year to year the prospect of beholding
this society. He heard every spring from the earliest period
that his parents would go to Europe, and then he
heard that they would not, And he had measured the
value of the prospect with a keenness, possibly premature. He
(03:17):
knew the names of the London streets, of the theaters,
of many of the shops. The dream of his young
life was to take a walk in Kensington Gardens and
go to Drury Lane to see a pantomime. There was
a great deal in the Old Punch about the pantomimes,
and Harlequins and Columbines peopled the secret visions of this
(03:39):
perverted young New Yorker. It was a mystic satisfaction to
him that he had lived in Piccadilly when he was
a baby. He remembered neither the period nor the place,
but the name of the latter had a strange delight
for him. It had been promised him that he should
behold once more that Rome romantic thoroughfare, and he did
(04:02):
so by the time he was twelve years old. Then
he found that if Punch had been London, as he
lay on the hearth rug inhaling the exotic fragrance of
the freshly arrived journal, London was Punch and something more.
He remembers today vividly his impression of the London streets
in the summer of eighteen fifty five. They had an
(04:26):
extraordinary look of familiarity, and every figure, every object he
encountered appeared to have been drawn by Leech. He has
learned to know these things better since then, but his
childish impression is subject two extraordinary revivals. The expensive back
of an old lady getting into an omnibus, the attitude
(04:50):
of a little girl bending from her pony in the park,
The demureness of a maid servant opening a street door
in Brompton. The top heavy attitude of the small ameliar
ann as she stands planted with the baby in her
arms on the corner of a Westminster slum. The coal heavers,
the cabmen, the publicans, the butcher boys, the flunkys, the guardsmen,
(05:15):
the policemen in spite of their change of uniform, are
liable at this hour, in certain moods, to look more
like sketchy taiale pieces than natural things. There are moments,
indeed not identical with those we speak of, in which
certain figures, certain episodes in the London streets strike an
(05:37):
even stranger, deeper note of reminiscence. They remind the American
traveler of hogarth He may take a walk in Oxford
Street on some dirty winter afternoon and find everything he
sees Hogarthian. We know not whether the form of infantine
nostalgia of which we speak is common, or was then
(06:01):
common among small Americans, but we are sure that when
fortune happens to favor it, it is a very delightful pain.
In those days in America, the manufacturer of children's picture
books was an undeveloped industry. The best things came from
London and brought with them the aroma of a richer civilization.
(06:24):
The covers were so beautiful and shining, the paper and
print so fine, the colored illustrations so magnificent, that it
was easy to see that over there the arts were
at a very high point. The very name of the
publisher on the title page the small boy we speak
of always looked at that had a thrilling and mystifying effect.
(06:49):
But above all, the contents were so romantic and delectable.
There were things in the English story books that one
read as a child, just as there were and Punch
that one couldn't have seen in New York, even if
one had been fifty years old. The age had nothing
to do with it. One had a conviction that they
(07:11):
were not there to be seen. We can hardly say why.
It is perhaps because the plates and the picture books
were almost always colored, but it was evident that there
was a great deal more color in that other world.
We remember well the dazzling tone of a little Christmas
book by Leech, which was quite in the spirit of Punch,
(07:35):
only more splendid, for the plates were plastered with blue
and pink. It was called Young Troublesome or Master Jackie's Holidays,
and it has probably become scarce to day. It related
the mischievous pranks of an Eton schoolboy while at home
for his Christmas vacation, and the exploit we chiefly recollect
(07:59):
was his black with a burnt stick. The immaculate calves
of the footman who was carrying up some savory dish
to the banquet, from which, in consequence of his age
and his habits, Master Jackie is excluded. Master Jackie is
so handsome, so brilliant, so heroic, so regardless of dangers
(08:21):
and penalties, so fertile in resources. And those charming young ladies,
his sisters, his cousins, the innocent victims of his high spirits,
had such golden ringlets, such rosy cheeks, such pretty shoulders,
such delicate blue sashes, over such fresh muslin gowns. Master
(08:43):
Jackie seemed to lead a life all illumined with rosy
Christmas fire. A little later came Richard Doyle's delightful volume
giving the history of Brown, Jones and Robinson, And it
would be difficult to exaggerate the action of these remarkable
designs in forming the taste of our fantastic little amateur.
(09:07):
They told him indeed, much less about England than about
the cities of the continent, but that was not a drawback,
for he could take in the continent too. Moreover, he
felt that these three travelers were intensely British. They looked
at everything from the London point of view, and it
(09:27):
gave him an immense feeling of initiation to be able
to share their susceptibilities. Was there not also a delightful
little picture at the end, which represented them as restored
to British ground, each holding up a tankard of foaming ale,
with the boots behind them rolling their battered portmanteau into
(09:49):
the inn. This seemed somehow to commemorate one's own possible
arrival in Old England, even though it was not likely
that overflowing beer would be a feature of so modest
an event, just as all the rest of it was
a foretaste of Switzerland, of the Rhine of North Italy,
(10:11):
which after this would find one quite prepared. We are
sorry to say that, when many years later we ascend
it for the first time to the roof of Milan Cathedral,
what we first thought of was not the waveless plain
of Lombardy, nor the beauty of the edifice, but the
(10:32):
little London snob whom Brown, Jones and Robinson saw writing
his name on one of the pinnacles of the church.
We had our preferences in this genial trio. We adored
little Jones, the artist. If memory doesn't betray us, we
haven't seen the book for twenty years, and Jones was
(10:54):
the artist. It is difficult to say why we adored him,
but it was certainly the dream of our life at
that foolish period to make his acquaintance. We did so,
in fact, not very long after we were taken in
due course to Europe, and we met him on a
steamboat on the Lake of Geneva. There was no introduction,
(11:17):
we had no conversation, but he was the Jones we
had prefigured and loved. Thackeray's Christmas books, The Rose and
the Ring, apart it dates from eighteen fifty four, came
before this. We remember them in our earliest years. They
too were of the family of Punch, which is my
(11:40):
excuse for this superfluity of preface. And they were a
revelation of English manners. English manners for a child could
of course only mean certain individual English figures. The figures
in our street in Doctor Birch and his Young Friends
we were. We were not of the number in Missus
(12:03):
Perkins's Ball. In the first of these charming little volumes,
there is a pictorial exposition of the reason why the
nursemaids in our street like Kensington Gardens, when in the
course of time we were taken to walk in those
lovely shades, we looked about us for a simpering young
(12:23):
woman and an insinuating soldier on a bench with a
bawling baby sprawling on the path hard by, and we
were not slow to discover the group. Many people in
the United States, and doubtless in other countries, have gathered
their knowledge of English life almost entirely from Punch, and
(12:44):
it would be difficult to imagine a more abundant, and
on the whole, a more accurate informant. The accumulated volumes
of this periodical contain evidence on a multitude of points
of which there is no mention in the series works,
not even in the novels of the day. The smallest
(13:05):
details of social habit are depicted there, and the oddities
of a race of people in whom oddity is strangely
compatible with the dominion of convention. That the ironical view
of these things is given does not injure the force
of the testimony. For the irony of Punch, strangely enough,
(13:26):
has always been discreet, even delicate. It is a singular
fact that, though taste is not supposed to be the
strong point of the English mind, this eminently representative journal
has rarely been guilty of a violation of decorum. The
taste of Punch, like its good humor, has known very
(13:48):
few lapses. The London Charivarie, we remember how difficult it
was in eighteen fifty three to arrive at the right pronunciation,
has in this respect very little to envy its Parisian original.
English comedy is coarse. French comedy is fine. That would
(14:09):
be the general assumption, certainly on the part of a
French critic. But a comparison between the back volumes of
the Charavarrie and the back volumes of Punch would make
it necessary to modify this formula. English humor is simple, innocent, plain,
a trifle insipid, apt to sacrifice to the graces, to
(14:34):
the proprieties. But if Punch be our a witness, English
humor is not coarse. We are fortunately not obliged to
declare just now what French humor appears to be in
the light of the Charavarrie, the jennal amusin the genal Pourier.
A Frenchman may say, in perfect good faith that to
(14:57):
his sense, English drallery has doubtless every merit but that
of being droll. French drollery, he may say, is salient, saltatory,
whereas the English comic effort has little freedom of wing.
The French in these matters like a great deal of salt,
(15:18):
whereas the English, who spice their food very highly and
have a cluster of sharp condiments on the table, take
their caricatures comparatively mild. Punch, in short, is for the family.
Punch may be sent up to the nursery. This surely
may be admitted. And it is the fact that punch
(15:40):
is for the family that constitutes its high value. The
family is, after all the people. And a satirical sheet
which holds up the mirror to this institution can hardly
fail to be instructive. Yes, if it hold the mirror
up impartially, we can imagine the foreign critic to rejoin.
(16:03):
But in these matters the British caricaturist is not to
be trusted. He slurs over a great deal, he omits
a great deal more. He must, above all things be proper,
And there is a whole side of life which, in
spite of his juvenilian pretensions, he never touches at all.
(16:24):
We must allow the foreign critic his supposed retort without
taking space to answer back. We may imagine him to
be a bit of a naturalist and admit that it
is perhaps because they are obliged to be proper that
Leech and du Maurier give us on the whole. Such
a cleanly, healthy, friendly picture of English manners, such sustained
(16:49):
and inveterate propriety, is in itself a great force. It
takes in a good deal as well as leaves out.
The general impression that we derive from the long series
of Punch is a very cheerful and favorable one. It
speaks of a vigorous, good humored, much civilized people. The
(17:11):
good humor is perhaps the most striking point, not only
the good humor of the artist who represents the scene,
but that of the figures engaged in it. The difference
is remarkable in this respect between Punch and the French
comic papers. The wonderful cham who for so many years
(17:32):
contributed to those sheets, had an extraordinary sense of the
ludicrous and a boundless stock of facetious invention. He was
strangely expressive. He could place a figure before you in
the most violent action with half a dozen strokes of
his pencil. But his people were like wildcats and scorpions.
(17:56):
The temper of the French bourgeoisie, as represented by Cham,
is a thing to make one take to one's heels.
They perpetually tear and rend each other, show their teeth
and their claws, kick each other downstairs, and pitch each
other from windows. All this is in the highest degree
(18:17):
farcical and grotesque, but at bottom it is almost horrible.
It must be admitted that Cham and his wonderful colleague
Doumier are much more horrible than Gaevarny, who was admirably
real and at the same time capable of beauty and grace.
Gaevarney's women are charming. Those of Cham and Domier are monsters.
(18:43):
There is nothing, or almost nothing of the horrible and Punch.
The author of these remarks has a friend whom he
has heard more than once maintained the two ingenious thesis
that the caricatures of Cham prove the French to be
a cruel people. The same induction could at least never
(19:04):
be made, even in an equal spirit of paradox, from
the genial pages of Punch. If Punch is never horrible,
it is because Punch is always superficial. For life is
full of the horrible, so we may imagine our naturalistic
objector to go on, however this may be. Punch is
(19:26):
fortunate in having fallen on so smooth a surface. English life,
as depicted by Leech en deu Mourier, and by that
admirable Charles Keene, the best humored perhaps of the three,
whose talent is so great that we have always wondered
why it is not more comprehensive, is a compound of
(19:47):
several very wholesome tastes. The love of the country, the
love of action, the love of a harmless joke within
the limits of due reverence, the love of sport, of
horses and dogs, of family, life, of children, of horticulture.
With this there are a few other tastes of a
(20:08):
less innocent kind, the love of ardent spirits, for instance,
or of punching people's heads, or even the love of
a lord. In Leech's drawings, country life plays a great part.
His landscapes, in their extreme sketchiness, are often admirable. He
(20:29):
gave in a few strokes the look of a hunting
field in winter, the dark damp slopes, the black dense hedges,
the low, thick sky. He was very general. He touched
on everything sooner or later. But he enjoyed his sporting
subjects more than anything else. In this he was thoroughly English.
(20:51):
No close observer of that people can fail to perceive
that the love of sport is the thing that binds
them most closely together, and in which they have the
greatest number of feelings in common. Leech depicted with infinite
vividness the accidents of the chase and of the fishing season,
(21:11):
and his treatment of the horse in especial contributed greatly
to his popularity. He understood the animal, he knew him intimately,
he loved him, and he drew him as if he
knew how to ride as well as to draw. The
English forgive a great deal to those who ride well,
and this is doubtless why the badness of some of
(21:34):
the sporting subjects that have appeared in Punch since Leech's
death has been tolerated. The artist has been presumed to
have a good seat. Leech never made a mistake. He
did well whatever he did, and it must be remembered
that for many years he furnished the political cartoon to Punch,
(21:55):
as well as the smaller drawings. He was always amusing,
always full of sense and point, always intensely English. His
foreigner is always an inferior animal. His Frenchman is the
Frenchman of Lester Square, the Frenchman whom the Exhibition of
eighteen fifty one revealed to the people of London. His
(22:19):
point is perfectly perceptible, it is never unduly fine. His
children are models of ruddy, chubby, shy, yet sturdy British babyhood.
And nothing could be nicer than his young women. The
English maiden in Leech is emphatically a nice girl, modest
(22:40):
and fresh, simple and blooming, and destined evidently for use
as much as for ornament. In those early days to
which we referred at the beginning of this article, we
were deeply in love with the young ladies of Leech,
and we have never ceased to admire the simple art
with which he made. These hastily designed creatures can form
(23:03):
unerringly to the English type. They have English eyes and
English cheeks, English figures, English hands and feet, English ringlets,
English petticoats. Leech was extremely observant, but he had not
a strong imagination. He had a sufficient, but not a
(23:25):
high sense of beauty. His ideal of the beautiful had
nothing of the unattainable. It was simply a resume of
the fresh faces he saw about him. The gray thing, however,
was that he was unnatural. Though not in the least
an analytic or an exact draftsman. His little figures live
(23:46):
and move. Many of his little scenes are stamped on
the memory. I have spoken of his representations of the country,
but his town pictures are numerous and capital. He knew
his London, and his sketches of the good people of
that metropolis are as happy as his episodes in the
drawing room and the hunting field. He was admirably broad
(24:10):
and free, and no one in his line has had
more than he the knack of giving what is called
a general effect. He conveys at times the look of
the London streets, the color, the temperature, the damp blackness.
He does the winter weather to perfection, long before I
had seen it. I was acquainted through his sketches with
(24:34):
the aspect of Baker Street in December. Out of such
a multitude of illustrations, it is difficult to choose. The
two volumes of sketches of Life and Character transferred from
Punch are a real museum but I recall, for instance,
the simple little sketch of the worthy man up to
(24:55):
his neck in bed on a January morning, to whom
on the other side of the door, the prompt housemaid,
with her hammer in her hand, announces that I have
just broken the ice in your bath, sir. The black
cold dawn, the very smell of the early chill, that
raw sootiness of the London winter air, the red nose
(25:18):
of the housemaid, the unfashionable street seen through the window,
impart a peculiar vividness to the small, inky looking woodcut.
End of Chapter ten, Part one, George de Mourier
Chapter ten, part one of partial portraits by Henry James.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by
Rita Boutros. Chapter ten George de Mourier, many years ago,
a small American child who lived in New York and
played in Union Square, which was then enclosed by a
(00:24):
high railing and governed by a solitary policeman, a strange,
super annuated, dilapidated functionary, carrying a little cane and wearing
with a very copious and very dirty shirt front the
costume of a man of the world. A small American
child was a silent devotee of punch. Half an hour
(00:47):
spent to day in turning over the early numbers transports
him quite as much to Old New York as to
the London of the First Crystal Palace and the years
that immediately followed it. From about eighteen fifty to eighteen
fifty five, he lived in imagination, no small part of
(01:08):
his time in the world represented by the pencil of leech.
He pored over the pictures of the people riding in
the row, of the cabmen and the costermongers, of the
little pages and buttons of the bathing machines at the
sea side, of the small boys in tall hats and
(01:28):
eaten jackets, of the gentleman hunting the fox, of the
pretty girls in striped petticoats and coiffurs, of the shape
of the mushroom. These things were the features of a
world which he longed so to behold. That the familiar woodcuts,
they were not so good in those days as they
have become since, grew at last as real to him
(01:51):
as the furniture of his home. And when he at
present looks at the punch of thirty years ago, he
finds in it an odd association of medieval New York.
He remembers that it was in such a locality in
that city that he first saw such a picture. He
recalls the fading light of the winter dusk, with the
(02:14):
red fire and the red curtains in the background, in
which more than once he was bidden to put down
the last numbers of the humorous sheet and come to
his tea. Punch was England, Punch was London, And England
and London were at that time words of multifarious suggestion
(02:35):
to this small American child. He liked much more to
think of the British empire than to indulge in the
sports natural to his tender age, and many of his
hours were spent in making mental pictures of the society
of which the recurrent woodcuts offered him, specimens and revelations.
(02:56):
He had from year to year the prospect of beholding
this society. He heard every spring from the earliest period
that his parents would go to Europe, and then he
heard that they would not, And he had measured the
value of the prospect with a keenness, possibly premature. He
(03:17):
knew the names of the London streets, of the theaters,
of many of the shops. The dream of his young
life was to take a walk in Kensington Gardens and
go to Drury Lane to see a pantomime. There was
a great deal in the Old Punch about the pantomimes,
and Harlequins and Columbines peopled the secret visions of this
(03:39):
perverted young New Yorker. It was a mystic satisfaction to
him that he had lived in Piccadilly when he was
a baby. He remembered neither the period nor the place,
but the name of the latter had a strange delight
for him. It had been promised him that he should
behold once more that Rome romantic thoroughfare, and he did
(04:02):
so by the time he was twelve years old. Then
he found that if Punch had been London, as he
lay on the hearth rug inhaling the exotic fragrance of
the freshly arrived journal, London was Punch and something more.
He remembers today vividly his impression of the London streets
in the summer of eighteen fifty five. They had an
(04:26):
extraordinary look of familiarity, and every figure, every object he
encountered appeared to have been drawn by Leech. He has
learned to know these things better since then, but his
childish impression is subject two extraordinary revivals. The expensive back
of an old lady getting into an omnibus, the attitude
(04:50):
of a little girl bending from her pony in the park,
The demureness of a maid servant opening a street door
in Brompton. The top heavy attitude of the small ameliar
ann as she stands planted with the baby in her
arms on the corner of a Westminster slum. The coal heavers,
the cabmen, the publicans, the butcher boys, the flunkys, the guardsmen,
(05:15):
the policemen in spite of their change of uniform, are
liable at this hour, in certain moods, to look more
like sketchy taiale pieces than natural things. There are moments,
indeed not identical with those we speak of, in which
certain figures, certain episodes in the London streets strike an
(05:37):
even stranger, deeper note of reminiscence. They remind the American
traveler of hogarth He may take a walk in Oxford
Street on some dirty winter afternoon and find everything he
sees Hogarthian. We know not whether the form of infantine
nostalgia of which we speak is common, or was then
(06:01):
common among small Americans, but we are sure that when
fortune happens to favor it, it is a very delightful pain.
In those days in America, the manufacturer of children's picture
books was an undeveloped industry. The best things came from
London and brought with them the aroma of a richer civilization.
(06:24):
The covers were so beautiful and shining, the paper and
print so fine, the colored illustrations so magnificent, that it
was easy to see that over there the arts were
at a very high point. The very name of the
publisher on the title page the small boy we speak
of always looked at that had a thrilling and mystifying effect.
(06:49):
But above all, the contents were so romantic and delectable.
There were things in the English story books that one
read as a child, just as there were and Punch
that one couldn't have seen in New York, even if
one had been fifty years old. The age had nothing
to do with it. One had a conviction that they
(07:11):
were not there to be seen. We can hardly say why.
It is perhaps because the plates and the picture books
were almost always colored, but it was evident that there
was a great deal more color in that other world.
We remember well the dazzling tone of a little Christmas
book by Leech, which was quite in the spirit of Punch,
(07:35):
only more splendid, for the plates were plastered with blue
and pink. It was called Young Troublesome or Master Jackie's Holidays,
and it has probably become scarce to day. It related
the mischievous pranks of an Eton schoolboy while at home
for his Christmas vacation, and the exploit we chiefly recollect
(07:59):
was his black with a burnt stick. The immaculate calves
of the footman who was carrying up some savory dish
to the banquet, from which, in consequence of his age
and his habits, Master Jackie is excluded. Master Jackie is
so handsome, so brilliant, so heroic, so regardless of dangers
(08:21):
and penalties, so fertile in resources. And those charming young ladies,
his sisters, his cousins, the innocent victims of his high spirits,
had such golden ringlets, such rosy cheeks, such pretty shoulders,
such delicate blue sashes, over such fresh muslin gowns. Master
(08:43):
Jackie seemed to lead a life all illumined with rosy
Christmas fire. A little later came Richard Doyle's delightful volume
giving the history of Brown, Jones and Robinson, And it
would be difficult to exaggerate the action of these remarkable
designs in forming the taste of our fantastic little amateur.
(09:07):
They told him indeed, much less about England than about
the cities of the continent, but that was not a drawback,
for he could take in the continent too. Moreover, he
felt that these three travelers were intensely British. They looked
at everything from the London point of view, and it
(09:27):
gave him an immense feeling of initiation to be able
to share their susceptibilities. Was there not also a delightful
little picture at the end, which represented them as restored
to British ground, each holding up a tankard of foaming ale,
with the boots behind them rolling their battered portmanteau into
(09:49):
the inn. This seemed somehow to commemorate one's own possible
arrival in Old England, even though it was not likely
that overflowing beer would be a feature of so modest
an event, just as all the rest of it was
a foretaste of Switzerland, of the Rhine of North Italy,
(10:11):
which after this would find one quite prepared. We are
sorry to say that, when many years later we ascend
it for the first time to the roof of Milan Cathedral,
what we first thought of was not the waveless plain
of Lombardy, nor the beauty of the edifice, but the
(10:32):
little London snob whom Brown, Jones and Robinson saw writing
his name on one of the pinnacles of the church.
We had our preferences in this genial trio. We adored
little Jones, the artist. If memory doesn't betray us, we
haven't seen the book for twenty years, and Jones was
(10:54):
the artist. It is difficult to say why we adored him,
but it was certainly the dream of our life at
that foolish period to make his acquaintance. We did so,
in fact, not very long after we were taken in
due course to Europe, and we met him on a
steamboat on the Lake of Geneva. There was no introduction,
(11:17):
we had no conversation, but he was the Jones we
had prefigured and loved. Thackeray's Christmas books, The Rose and
the Ring, apart it dates from eighteen fifty four, came
before this. We remember them in our earliest years. They
too were of the family of Punch, which is my
(11:40):
excuse for this superfluity of preface. And they were a
revelation of English manners. English manners for a child could
of course only mean certain individual English figures. The figures
in our street in Doctor Birch and his Young Friends
we were. We were not of the number in Missus
(12:03):
Perkins's Ball. In the first of these charming little volumes,
there is a pictorial exposition of the reason why the
nursemaids in our street like Kensington Gardens, when in the
course of time we were taken to walk in those
lovely shades, we looked about us for a simpering young
(12:23):
woman and an insinuating soldier on a bench with a
bawling baby sprawling on the path hard by, and we
were not slow to discover the group. Many people in
the United States, and doubtless in other countries, have gathered
their knowledge of English life almost entirely from Punch, and
(12:44):
it would be difficult to imagine a more abundant, and
on the whole, a more accurate informant. The accumulated volumes
of this periodical contain evidence on a multitude of points
of which there is no mention in the series works,
not even in the novels of the day. The smallest
(13:05):
details of social habit are depicted there, and the oddities
of a race of people in whom oddity is strangely
compatible with the dominion of convention. That the ironical view
of these things is given does not injure the force
of the testimony. For the irony of Punch, strangely enough,
(13:26):
has always been discreet, even delicate. It is a singular
fact that, though taste is not supposed to be the
strong point of the English mind, this eminently representative journal
has rarely been guilty of a violation of decorum. The
taste of Punch, like its good humor, has known very
(13:48):
few lapses. The London Charivarie, we remember how difficult it
was in eighteen fifty three to arrive at the right pronunciation,
has in this respect very little to envy its Parisian original.
English comedy is coarse. French comedy is fine. That would
(14:09):
be the general assumption, certainly on the part of a
French critic. But a comparison between the back volumes of
the Charavarrie and the back volumes of Punch would make
it necessary to modify this formula. English humor is simple, innocent, plain,
a trifle insipid, apt to sacrifice to the graces, to
(14:34):
the proprieties. But if Punch be our a witness, English
humor is not coarse. We are fortunately not obliged to
declare just now what French humor appears to be in
the light of the Charavarrie, the jennal amusin the genal Pourier.
A Frenchman may say, in perfect good faith that to
(14:57):
his sense, English drallery has doubtless every merit but that
of being droll. French drollery, he may say, is salient, saltatory,
whereas the English comic effort has little freedom of wing.
The French in these matters like a great deal of salt,
(15:18):
whereas the English, who spice their food very highly and
have a cluster of sharp condiments on the table, take
their caricatures comparatively mild. Punch, in short, is for the family.
Punch may be sent up to the nursery. This surely
may be admitted. And it is the fact that punch
(15:40):
is for the family that constitutes its high value. The
family is, after all the people. And a satirical sheet
which holds up the mirror to this institution can hardly
fail to be instructive. Yes, if it hold the mirror
up impartially, we can imagine the foreign critic to rejoin.
(16:03):
But in these matters the British caricaturist is not to
be trusted. He slurs over a great deal, he omits
a great deal more. He must, above all things be proper,
And there is a whole side of life which, in
spite of his juvenilian pretensions, he never touches at all.
(16:24):
We must allow the foreign critic his supposed retort without
taking space to answer back. We may imagine him to
be a bit of a naturalist and admit that it
is perhaps because they are obliged to be proper that
Leech and du Maurier give us on the whole. Such
a cleanly, healthy, friendly picture of English manners, such sustained
(16:49):
and inveterate propriety, is in itself a great force. It
takes in a good deal as well as leaves out.
The general impression that we derive from the long series
of Punch is a very cheerful and favorable one. It
speaks of a vigorous, good humored, much civilized people. The
(17:11):
good humor is perhaps the most striking point, not only
the good humor of the artist who represents the scene,
but that of the figures engaged in it. The difference
is remarkable in this respect between Punch and the French
comic papers. The wonderful cham who for so many years
(17:32):
contributed to those sheets, had an extraordinary sense of the
ludicrous and a boundless stock of facetious invention. He was
strangely expressive. He could place a figure before you in
the most violent action with half a dozen strokes of
his pencil. But his people were like wildcats and scorpions.
(17:56):
The temper of the French bourgeoisie, as represented by Cham,
is a thing to make one take to one's heels.
They perpetually tear and rend each other, show their teeth
and their claws, kick each other downstairs, and pitch each
other from windows. All this is in the highest degree
(18:17):
farcical and grotesque, but at bottom it is almost horrible.
It must be admitted that Cham and his wonderful colleague
Doumier are much more horrible than Gaevarny, who was admirably
real and at the same time capable of beauty and grace.
Gaevarney's women are charming. Those of Cham and Domier are monsters.
(18:43):
There is nothing, or almost nothing of the horrible and Punch.
The author of these remarks has a friend whom he
has heard more than once maintained the two ingenious thesis
that the caricatures of Cham prove the French to be
a cruel people. The same induction could at least never
(19:04):
be made, even in an equal spirit of paradox, from
the genial pages of Punch. If Punch is never horrible,
it is because Punch is always superficial. For life is
full of the horrible, so we may imagine our naturalistic
objector to go on, however this may be. Punch is
(19:26):
fortunate in having fallen on so smooth a surface. English life,
as depicted by Leech en deu Mourier, and by that
admirable Charles Keene, the best humored perhaps of the three,
whose talent is so great that we have always wondered
why it is not more comprehensive, is a compound of
(19:47):
several very wholesome tastes. The love of the country, the
love of action, the love of a harmless joke within
the limits of due reverence, the love of sport, of
horses and dogs, of family, life, of children, of horticulture.
With this there are a few other tastes of a
(20:08):
less innocent kind, the love of ardent spirits, for instance,
or of punching people's heads, or even the love of
a lord. In Leech's drawings, country life plays a great part.
His landscapes, in their extreme sketchiness, are often admirable. He
(20:29):
gave in a few strokes the look of a hunting
field in winter, the dark damp slopes, the black dense hedges,
the low, thick sky. He was very general. He touched
on everything sooner or later. But he enjoyed his sporting
subjects more than anything else. In this he was thoroughly English.
(20:51):
No close observer of that people can fail to perceive
that the love of sport is the thing that binds
them most closely together, and in which they have the
greatest number of feelings in common. Leech depicted with infinite
vividness the accidents of the chase and of the fishing season,
(21:11):
and his treatment of the horse in especial contributed greatly
to his popularity. He understood the animal, he knew him intimately,
he loved him, and he drew him as if he
knew how to ride as well as to draw. The
English forgive a great deal to those who ride well,
and this is doubtless why the badness of some of
(21:34):
the sporting subjects that have appeared in Punch since Leech's
death has been tolerated. The artist has been presumed to
have a good seat. Leech never made a mistake. He
did well whatever he did, and it must be remembered
that for many years he furnished the political cartoon to Punch,
(21:55):
as well as the smaller drawings. He was always amusing,
always full of sense and point, always intensely English. His
foreigner is always an inferior animal. His Frenchman is the
Frenchman of Lester Square, the Frenchman whom the Exhibition of
eighteen fifty one revealed to the people of London. His
(22:19):
point is perfectly perceptible, it is never unduly fine. His
children are models of ruddy, chubby, shy, yet sturdy British babyhood.
And nothing could be nicer than his young women. The
English maiden in Leech is emphatically a nice girl, modest
(22:40):
and fresh, simple and blooming, and destined evidently for use
as much as for ornament. In those early days to
which we referred at the beginning of this article, we
were deeply in love with the young ladies of Leech,
and we have never ceased to admire the simple art
with which he made. These hastily designed creatures can form
(23:03):
unerringly to the English type. They have English eyes and
English cheeks, English figures, English hands and feet, English ringlets,
English petticoats. Leech was extremely observant, but he had not
a strong imagination. He had a sufficient, but not a
(23:25):
high sense of beauty. His ideal of the beautiful had
nothing of the unattainable. It was simply a resume of
the fresh faces he saw about him. The gray thing, however,
was that he was unnatural. Though not in the least
an analytic or an exact draftsman. His little figures live
(23:46):
and move. Many of his little scenes are stamped on
the memory. I have spoken of his representations of the country,
but his town pictures are numerous and capital. He knew
his London, and his sketches of the good people of
that metropolis are as happy as his episodes in the
drawing room and the hunting field. He was admirably broad
(24:10):
and free, and no one in his line has had
more than he the knack of giving what is called
a general effect. He conveys at times the look of
the London streets, the color, the temperature, the damp blackness.
He does the winter weather to perfection, long before I
had seen it. I was acquainted through his sketches with
(24:34):
the aspect of Baker Street in December. Out of such
a multitude of illustrations, it is difficult to choose. The
two volumes of sketches of Life and Character transferred from
Punch are a real museum but I recall, for instance,
the simple little sketch of the worthy man up to
(24:55):
his neck in bed on a January morning, to whom
on the other side of the door, the prompt housemaid,
with her hammer in her hand, announces that I have
just broken the ice in your bath, sir. The black
cold dawn, the very smell of the early chill, that
raw sootiness of the London winter air, the red nose
(25:18):
of the housemaid, the unfashionable street seen through the window,
impart a peculiar vividness to the small, inky looking woodcut.
End of Chapter ten, Part one, George de Mourier
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