John Leech, His Life and Work. Vol. 1 [of 2]

And he proceeds “with a vengeance” to let us know that the spokesman of the above is an artist who had “halted in a deep ravine in the Abruzzi (where, on each side, the cliffs frowned like fiends upon the quailing traveller) to transfer to my portable sketch-book a slight souvenir of the celestial scene. Absorbed in my enthralling occupation, I heeded not the approach of a visitant; it was therefore with surprise, not unmingled with alarm, that I was aroused by a tap upon the shoulders, accompanied by the following sarcastic greeting:

“‘Is thy maternal parent, young man, aware of thine absence from home?’

“‘Quite so,’ I replied, in a tremulous tone, anxiously glancing round to behold the speaker.

“My acquaintance with literature – to say nothing of my constant attendance at the opera – at once convinced me that I was in the hands of a brigand.”

Had there been “any possible doubt whatever,” it would have been instantly dispelled; for after “smiling in demoniacal derision,” the disturber of the sketcher said, “deliberately and tranquilly, as he levelled a pistol at my head:

“‘Thy wealth or thy existence!’

“My sole remaining ducat was offered in vain. At the shrill sound of his whistle the crags bristled with bandits, and fifty carbines were pointed at my person. Blue with boiling agony, I made as a last resource the Masonic sign. It succeeded. At another signal every carbine was lowered, and breathless expectation brooded over the heart of its bearer.”

The bandits, however, were not so easily satisfied; for “a murmur of impatience, mingled with discontent, arose, like the billows of emotion, amongst the troop, and some twenty weapons again kissed with their stocks as many manly shoulders.

“‘Back, slaves, for your lives!’ shouted the infuriated Grabalotti, throwing himself in front of me. ‘One moment more, and, by the blood-stained power of the thundering Avalanche, the foremost of you dies!’

“Cowering in cream-like humility, each individual reversed his implement of death – all but one. A ball from the pistol of Grabalotti instantly crashed through his brain. For a moment he writhed in sable pangs; then all was over, and darkness mantled over his impetuosity for ever. Then, turning towards me, the brigand chief gave me a civil invitation to spend the day with him, which, under existing circumstances, I thought it best to accept. On our way I took the opportunity thus furnished me to survey my lawless companion. He was at least six feet and a half, independent of the coverings of his feet, in height; his air was stern and commanding; raven ringlets clustered down to his shoulders. Premature intensity glowed in his volcanic eyes; his nose was Roman, and he wore mustachios. The lines in the lower part of his face were indicative of death-fraught concentration; and the teeth, frequently disclosed by his smile of pervading bitterness, were remarkably white. The gloom of his conical hat was mocked by gay ribands. He wore a jacket of green velvet (an expensive article), lustrously gemmed with gold buttons; and those portions of his dress for which our language has no proper appellation were richly meandered with superior lace. His legs were variously swathed in the manner so characteristic of his profession. The carbine that slept in a snowy belt at his back; the pistols bickering in his girdle; and the stiletto reposing, like candid innocence, in its silver sheath, with its ivory handle protruding from his sash, were all of the most ornamental and valuable description.”

This extraordinary robber and the artist arrive at “the dwelling of the bandit, which was eligibly situate among the most romantic scenery.”

Signor Grabalotti conducted his visitor to a “table groaning with fruit, and supporting six sacramental chalices filled with the richest wine.”

The brigand has made a great haul of prisoners, whose friends have not shown the alacrity in rescuing them required by their captor, who, by way of entertaining his guest, orders them all, to the amount of a dozen, into his presence, and, arranging them in a row “along a trench in the background,” with the assistance of twelve of his men, has them all shot.

“Almost ere the smoke had cleared away, the earth was shovelled over the bodies.

“‘And now,’ said the chief, ‘for a dance in honour of our guest.’

“Four-and-twenty brisk young bandits, clad in jackets, green array, were instantly joined by as many maidens, each wearing the square coiffure, short dress, and petite apron, and otherwise fully attired in the costume of the country. Each robber provided himself with a partner, and a festive dance was performed with great spirit to a popular air.

“Their gaiety was at its height, when suddenly the sound of a distant bell stole with milky gentleness on the ear. In an instant all present fell on their knees, and, with their arms devoutly crossed upon their breasts, raised, in heavenly unison, their hymn of votive praise to the Virgin.”

Here endeth the first chapter of the “Emerald Monster of the Deep Dell.”

As “a satire on the literary absurdities of the day,” to quote its author, this capital fooling could not be surpassed; indeed, to those who remember, as the present writer can distinctly, the effusions in prose and verse – or, as Jerrold called it, “prose and worse” – that more or less filled the pages of the Keepsakes, the Books of Gems and Beauty of a long bygone time, the “Monster of the Deep Dell” is scarcely a caricature.

But I have not yet done with him. The second chapter is devoted to an account in Grabalotti language of the early life and loves of the interesting bandit:

“Rino Grabalotti is my name,” he says. “Italy is my nation; the Deep Dell is my dwelling-place, and – but no! never shall monkish cant pollute the lips to baleful imprecation attuned for ever. Let the blue and hideous glare of the lightning, and the ghastly gleam of the hag-ridden meteor, illumine the deeds of my doing. Growl, ye thunders! Roar, ye tempests! Yell, ye fiends, and howl in hideous harmony a prelude to my tale!”

He then proceeds to inform the artist (who, with an eye for copy, ventures to hint “that an outline of his history would be interesting”) that he was the son of a priest, and born in Naples; and naturally much annoyed by the scandalous irregularity of his birth, he devotes his life to robbing and murdering as many of his fellow-creatures as good fortune places in his hands in the practice of his profession.

But I anticipate. Grabalotti declines to say much about his infancy; he seems to have been pretty often reminded of the scandal of his birth, and as often he registered a vow that, sooner or later, he would close for ever the mouths of the slanderers.

“It was in my sixteenth summer,” he continues, “that I really began to live. Though in years a boy, I was in all else a man. Passion hurtled in my darkening eye, and plunged my heart in lava. I loved; what Italian at my age does not? Yes; I – the ruthless, the scathed, the smouldering, the sanguinary, the Emerald Monster of the Deep Dell – I, even I, gasped with tortuous anguish in the maddening transports of Cupid.”

Giulia is the name of the fair creature who has caused the eruption of this volcanic passion; and on what the bandit-lover calls “an evening of rosy gladness,” he seeks his fair enslaver’s window, guitar in hand. But the voice, “which was the best at a barcarole of any in Naples,” had raised a very few love notes, when a rough voice exclaims:

“‘What dost thou here, spurious offspring of sacrilege?’ accompanying the inquiry by an equally rough salutation from behind (oh, madness!) – ‘begone!’

“Confusion simmered in my brain. Frenzied, I turned; one stroke of my stiletto, and my wounded honour was salved – with gore. It was that of Giulia’s father!”

This sudden death of the author of her being offended Giulia, and she solemnly renounced young Grabalotti for ever. This intimation, conveyed in a mixture of “indignation mingled with scorn,” had an extraordinary effect. Says the lover:

“Twisting in bitterness awhile I lingered, then rushed distracted from the spot, and fled hissing with desperation to the mountains.”

The beauties of the Deep Dell produced no soothing effect on the desperate bitterness that twisted the soul of Grabalotti; he issued from the Dell to “soak and steep his heart in blood.”

“The dewy wail of infancy, the piercing zest of female innocence, and the tremulous pleading of piping feebleness, all mocked at the radiance of the crimson steel, have poured their bootless incense o’er my breast… Ha, ha! The nun, her dove-like innocence devastated, has broiled like a chestnut amid the ashes of her convent,” etc.

More “copy” in the style of the above is imparted to the artist. But an interruption takes place. A brigand enters, and so irritates the monster by the abruptness of his appearance that, had not the pistol with which his impatient master received him missed fire, his brains would have been scattered to the winds of heaven.

“‘Ha! dost thou dare to break in upon my mood?’ roared Grabalotti.

“‘Come to tell you,’ said the robber (speaking in the greatest possible haste), ‘that the nun who escaped the sacking of the convent has been taken.’

“‘Do as you list with her, and chop her head off! Stay, I would fain see it when it is done; and here, take this purse for the risk thou hast encountered.’”

Yet another interruption – this time in the person of a brigand spy disguised as a peasant. The chief anticipates startling and perhaps unpleasant news, and saying: “‘Excuse me, signor, for a few moments,’ he retires with his emissary.”

Grabalotti was absent some little time, during which the artist “added another sketch to his small collection,” when the monster returned, and informed his guest “in a lively tone” that they were about to have “some fun.”

“‘Of what description?’ inquired the artist.

“‘In an hour’s time we shall be attacked by the military,’” to whom he promises a warm reception; and in the event of the robbers being overpowered by numbers, “a train communicates with the magazine below.”

“Here the head of the unfortunate nun made its appearance on a silver dish. Its loveliness, even in death, was intensely overpowering. With a grin of fiendish malice, Grabalotti seized it by the hair, but no sooner did the features meet his eye, than he relinquished his hold and fell, senseless, backwards, faintly gasping, like a dying echo, ‘’Tis she! ’Tis Giulia!!’”

Unless the artist guest was possessed of courage uncommon among our fraternity, he could not have contemplated being blown into the air with the robbers, or being shot by the soldiers, with equanimity; and he must have been much relieved in any case by Grabalotti, who, when “the violence of frantic ferocity” had given way to “the calm profundity of despair,” muttered in a low and suppressed tone: “Nay, thou shalt live to tell the world my story!” and to enable his guest to do this eventually, “in a tone of sweetest melancholy” he said:

“Stranger, hence! thy further stay is perilous. Yon by-path will conduct thee to the valleys.”

Rising from “the valleys” was a crag, to the summit of which half an hour’s walk would take the artist, and from thence he was assured that “if he turned his gaze backwards he should see something worth seeing.”

The narrator tells us that he reached the crag in twenty-nine minutes exactly.

“For one minute I gazed in the direction of the Brigands’ Haunt, from which, precisely at the expiration of that time, a vivid flash of flame, shooting into the air, accompanied by a dense column of smoke, and followed by a terrific explosion, proclaimed too plainly the last achievement of the Emerald Monster of the Deep Dell.”

Mr. Percival Leigh contributes a second story to the “Fiddle-Faddle Fashion-book,” in which the novel of fashionable life, not uncommon fifty years ago, is satirized under the title of “Belleville: a Tale of Fashionable Life,” not less happily than the sanguinary and terribly romantic writers are treated in the burlesque of Grabalotti. The “Clara Matilda poets” of the Keepsake time are also amusingly parodied in some short poems, which, with comic advertisements, occasionally very humorous, fill up the literary portion of the “Fiddle-Faddle Fashion-book.”

This book is not the only one in which Leech’s powers have been enlisted – I was nearly saying prostituted – in publications devoted to eccentricities in dress and the caprices of fashion. In illustrations by him of the tale of fashionable life, or of Grabalotti, the genius of that great artist would have had full play; but as the draughtsman of fashion-plates it was, in my opinion, degraded. In vindication of my judgment I present my readers with two plates from the “Fiddle-Faddle” book, in which Leech portrays – no doubt under direction – caprices of fashion which could only have existed in his own imagination, and produced with a feeling of caricature that is so conspicuous by its absence in his usual work.

I now return to the paper which Mr. Leigh wrote with a view to this memoir.

That Leigh and Leech first met as students at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, I have noted elsewhere; and the details of his apprenticeship to the eccentric surgeon, which Mr. Leigh heard from Leech himself, I have also given, with the exception of one incident of which I was ignorant.

“In his dispensary,” says Mr. Leigh, “the doctor had one drawer amongst his boxes, in which there were pills of gentle efficacy, intended to be served out (they were made, I believe, of bread and soap) to the generality of his customers. This receptacle bore the label of ‘Pil. Hum.,’ – abbreviation of humbug – or, as their concoctor used to call them, ‘Humbugeraneous Pills.’ The Dr. Cockle to whom, Mr. Leigh says, Leech went after he left Mr. Whittle, was the son of the inventor of Cockle’s Pills.

“No sooner had he become of age,” continues Mr. Leigh, “than he was induced, in order to meet difficulties for which he was not responsible, to accept an accommodation bill, which the drawer of, when it fell due, failed to supply the means of meeting. Leech was consequently arrested for debt at the suit of this discounter, and lodged in a sponging-house kept by a sheriff’s officer, a Jew, by name (I think) of Levi, in Newman Street. There he remained about a fortnight, supporting himself in the meanwhile by drawing cartoons and caricatures. He lithographed them on stone for Spooner, in the Strand, at a guinea each, a friend having negotiated their sale.

“At last, an advance of money on a projected publication sufficient to discharge the debt having been obtained, he was liberated. But not long after, a second scrape – a repetition of the first – cost him another temporary sojourn with another Jew in another sponging-house in Cursitor Street. This detention, however, lasted but a few days. From that period to the close of his life he remained subject to repeated demands for pecuniary assistance under continued pressure, which, as at the outset, he could not withstand. The deficits he had to defray were always heavy; the last of them, as I understand, a thousand pounds. It cost him very hard work to make it good. Excess of generosity was his greatest failing.”

I have no means of knowing, nor do I desire to know, who the borrowers were to whom Percival Leigh alludes; but his revelations make the fact of Leech having died a comparatively poor man comprehensible enough. If ever man was killed by overwork, Leech was that man, and this must be a painful reflection for those whose incessant demands upon him made it only possible for him to meet them by the incessant exertions which destroyed him.

Mr. Leigh’s paper concludes with the anecdote that follows:

“Leech and Albert Smith worked together very harmoniously as illustrator and writer in several books – ‘Ledbury,’ ‘Brinvilliers,’ and many others – and one day when they were leaving Smith’s house together, a street-boy stepped up to them, and scoffing at the inscription on Smith’s large brass door-plate, cried:

“‘Oh yes! Mr. Albert Smith, M.R.C.S., Surgeon-Dentist.’

“‘Good boy!’ said Leech, putting a penny into the boy’s hand; ‘now go and insult somebody else.’”

CHAPTER IV

MEETING OF MULREADY AND LEECH

Mr. Mulready, R.A., was commissioned by the authorities to design a postal envelope for general use, a penny stamp affixed insuring free delivery of letters all over England. The design, which should have been of a simple character, was far too ornate and elaborate. At the top Britannia was represented in the act of despatching winged messengers with letters to all parts of the world, and down the sides of the envelope were the recipients of letters which had conveyed heart-breaking news to one side, and good tidings to the other. As a work of art the Mulready envelope has, in my opinion, great merit, but it was ludicrously inappropriate to the purposes for which it was intended. Leech saw and seized the opportunity, with the result appended.

The signature of the bottled leech, so familiar afterwards, is used here as Mulready’s signature, and “thereby hangs a tale,” which, though the burden of it deals with a future time, I venture to introduce in this place.

FORES’S COMIC ENVELOPES No. 1

My friend Augustus Egg, R.A., who lived in a charming house in Queen’s Road, Bayswater, was not only well known as an excellent artist, but also as being the Amphitryon whose hospitality was famous, and whose dinners were still more famous by reason of the guests who were wont to surround his table. Where is the hungry man who would not have been enchanted to meet Dickens and Leech, Mark Lemon and John Forster (Dickens’s biographer), Hawkins, Q.C. (now the judge), Landseer, Mulready, Webster, and other artists less famous? Of these dinners I shall have something to say by-and-by; at present I confine myself to one special occasion.

It was on one day during the year 1847 that Egg said to me:

“You know Mulready better than I do; I wish you would go and get him to fix a day to dine here – any day next week will suit me. Leech wants to meet him; and, somehow or other, though both have dined here frequently, they have never met.”

“Good,” said I; “I will do your bidding.”

And on the following Sunday I called upon Mulready.

“Egg will be pleased if you will dine with him any day next week, sir, that you may be disengaged. He expects the usual set – Dickens, Landseer, Leech, and the rest. You have never met Leech, I think; he is very desirous to make your acquaintance.”

“Ah, is he? Well, I don’t care about knowing Leech.”

“Really, sir” (it was always the Johnsonian sir to the old gentleman), said I, when I had recovered from my surprise, “may I ask why you won’t meet Leech?”

“Yes, you may,” said the old painter, “and I will tell you. Of course you remember that unfortunate postal envelope that I designed? Well, Leech caricatured it. You needn’t look so surprised – you don’t think I am such a fool as to mind being caricatured; but I do mind being represented as a blood-sucker! What else can he mean by using that infernal little leech in a bottle in the front of his caricature as my signature? You know well enough, Frith, that I have never asked monstrous prices for my pictures. You fellows get better paid for your work than I ever did, and you wouldn’t like to be called blood-suckers, I expect.”

Mr. Mulready was an Irishman, and rather a peppery one; and I am happy to say that I overcame my disposition to laugh in his face mainly through a feeling of astonishment that my old friend could be ignorant of the ordinary way in which Leech signed his drawings.

“Do you happen to have a number of Punch by you, Mr. Mulready?” said I.

“No; as a languid swell said when he was asked that same question, ‘I am no bookworm; I never see Punch.’”

As I could not give my angry friend ocular proof of his mistake by producing the usual signature to Punch drawings, I set to work to explain how the little leech came into the bottle, and, without much difficulty, convinced my old friend that an insult to him was not intended.

The two artists met; and it was delightful to watch Leech’s handsome face as Mulready himself told of his misconception. First there was a serious, almost pained, expression, which, no doubt, arose in that tender heart from being the innocent cause of pain to another; the serious look passed off, to give place to a smile, which broadened into a roar of laughter. From that moment Leech and Mulready were fast friends.

With an apology for the interruption, I return to my narrative.

Alas! I can well remember the appearance of the “Sketches by Boz,” to be so quickly followed by the “Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.” None but those who witnessed it can conceive the enthusiasm with which that immortal work was received by an eager public, who welcomed each number as it appeared, month after month, with hearty appreciation. Of course, there were carping critics, one of whom is reported to have said the author would “go up like a rocket and come down like a stick.” That prophet, a man of much literary ability, drank himself into a debtors’ prison, where, I was told, he died of delirium tremens.

There is, I think, a vein of melancholy unusually developed in the nature of almost all humorists. As an instance, I may give the actor Liston, whose humour on the stage was to me unparalleled; off it, he was gloom personified. Gillray, the caricaturist, died melancholy mad; and poor Seymour, the first illustrator of “Pickwick,” committed suicide. I may remark in this place the surprise with which I heard Leech say that he could see no fun in any of Seymour’s sketches.

In a walk that we took together, I tried to convert him by naming several examples of what appeared to me humorous work.

“No,” said Leech; “the only drawing I ever saw by Seymour that appeared funny to me was one in which two cockneys were represented out shooting. They are about to load their guns, when one says to the other:

“‘I say, which do you put in first – powder or shot?’

“‘Why, powder, to be sure,’ said his friend.

“‘Do you?’ was the reply. ‘Then I don’t!’”

I can vividly recall the shock occasioned by Seymour’s death. He was fairly prosperous, I believe. His engagement to illustrate “Pickwick” was a lucrative one, and he was much employed in other work. In spite of all these advantages, the humorist’s melancholy was fatal to him.

I was present at the banquet at the Royal Academy when Thackeray, in returning thanks for literature – Dickens being present – told us how, on finding there was a vacancy for an illustrator of “Pickwick,” he took a parcel of drawings to the author and applied for the place. From my own knowledge of Thackeray’s limited powers as an artist, I should have been sure of the failure of his application. Very different would have been the fate of Leech, who was also anxious to supply Seymour’s place; but he was too late, for Dickens had already chosen Hablot K. Browne, who, under the sobriquet of “Phiz,” worked in harmony with his author for very many years. There was no doubt a disposition on the part of “Phiz” to exaggeration in his illustration of Dickens’ characters (already fully charged, so to speak, by their author), sometimes to the verge of caricature, and even beyond it; this fault Leech would have avoided, as his exquisite etchings in Dickens’ Christmas books fully prove.

CHAPTER V

“THE PHYSIOLOGY OF EVENING PARTIES,” BY ALBERT SMITH

I have already spoken of the extreme difficulty of collecting material for this book, and to difficulty must be added the expense which is incurred by my publisher. I bear the latter affliction with the equanimity common to those who escape it; indeed, there is a kind of satisfaction in finding that books which are perfectly worthless as literary productions are so highly valued on account of the prints which illustrate them. I venture to give an instance in a very little book called “The Physiology of Evening Parties,” written by Albert Smith. My reader will be able to judge by the extracts given in explanation of the drawings, of the merits of Mr. Smith’s part in the “Physiology.” This work, published at 2s. 6d. when clean and new, costs 18s. 6d. when well “worn on the edge of time,” yellow, dirty, and unbound. The “Physiology” first saw the light in 1840. I plead again for forgiveness for chronological shortcomings, which my difficulties make unavoidable.