The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 by Harry Furniss (best ebook reader for chromebook txt) 📖

"Have you anything new?" asked the Pen. "May I look? I know that St. Stephen's is your happy hunting ground."

"Ah, yes," responded the Pencil, "I know it well. But I can tell you it is not altogether a bed of roses. When we come across Members who have taken liberties with their personal appearance during the recess, H. F. and I resent it, I can tell you."

"Naturally," observed the Pen in a voice of the utmost sympathy, "for it means more work."

"Of course," continued the Pencil. "Now I have always held that model M. P.'s have no right to alter. They are the property of the political caricaturist, and what on earth is to become of him if the bearded men begin to shave and the smooth-faced to disguise themselves in 'mutton-chops' or 'Dundrearys'? Yet they will do it. We may draw them in their new guise, but the public won't have them at any price. They want their old favourites, and if they miss a well-known 'Imperial,' a moustache, a pair of dyed whiskers, or other such hall-mark in the picture, or on the other hand find a set of familiar chins concealed beneath an incipient Newgate fringe, a nose and chin which have been accustomed to meet for many a long year suddenly divided by the intrusion of a bristly moustache, or a delightfully asinine expression lost under the influence of a pair of bushy side-whiskers, recognition becomes impossible and the caricature falls flat. The fact is, my friend Pen, it is not only their features, [Pg 148] but their characteristic attitudes which we make familiar, and their political differences cause the artistic effect. To me it is marvellous to note how differently artists draw the same head. Expression of course varies, but the construction of the head must always remain the same. Yet I have seen no less a head than that of Mr. Gladstone so altered in appearance in the work of different artists that I have been forcibly reminded of the old story of St. Peter's skull. A tourist travelling in Italy was shown a cranium at Rome which he was assured was the veritable relic. In Florence he was shown another, and somewhere else he was shown a third. Upon his remonstrating the guide observed, 'It is quite right, sir: the skull you saw at Rome was that of St. Peter when he was a boy; that at Florence was his when he was a young man, and this was his skull when he died.'

"Then again, familiarity with the subject is only arrived at by continually watching and sketching a Member. A few years ago I was lying down in my berth in the sketch-book which was in H. F.'s pocket, when I overheard a conversation between him and Mr. Labouchere upon Parliamentary portraits."

"What did H. F. say about them?" asked the Pen. "He ought to know the alphabet of Parliamentary portraiture at all events by this time."

"You're right," nodded the Pencil. "He's drawn a few thousand of them in his time. What did H. F. say? Well, he told Labouchere that he always created a type for each Member, and to that he adheres."

"'Yes,' said the Sage, late of Queen Anne's Gate, 'and when the original turns up, those who derive their impression of a Member from your sketches are disappointed if the two do not exactly tally.'"

"But surely our guv'nor does not sketch direct from life?" asked the Pen, amazed.

"Of course he does," indignantly replied the Pencil. "He whips me out of my bed at all times, but as he pointed out to the Member for Northampton (see how Parliamentary I am getting), it would never do invariably to sketch a man as you see him. 'For instance,' went on H. F. addressing him, 'I [Pg 149] made a sketch of you, Mr. Labouchere, in the corridor of the House of Commons, kneeling on a seat, and had I never seen you before, I should have no doubt used this as a characteristic instead of an accidental attitude of yours.'

"Just fancy what you would have written, my dear Pen, if you had seen in Punch one of H. F.'s portraits of Lord Hartington with his hat upon the back of his head instead of over his eyes, or Mr. Gladstone depicted with a Shakespeare collar, or Mr. Cyril Flower without one, or Mr. Arnold Morley smiling, or Mr. Balfour looking cross, or Mr. Broadhurst MR. LABOUCHERE. in evening dress, or Mr. Chamberlain without an orchid in the button-hole of his coat! Yet I venture to say the time has been when Mr. Chamberlain may have had to rush down to the House orchidless, and when Mr. Broadhurst may have worn evening dress. Stranger things than that have happened, I can tell you. I have actually seen the irrepressible smile vanish from the face of Mr. John Morley. But never—no, never, will I believe that the ex-Chief Liberal Whip has ever looked jovial, that Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Cyril Flower ever exchanged collars, or that Lord Hartington ever wore his hat at the back of his head.

"On the other hand, my dear Pen, you know as well as I do that Lord Randolph Churchill did not wear imitation G.O.M. collars, that Mr. Herbert Gladstone is no longer in his teens, that Mr. Gladstone was not always so wild-looking as H. F. usually represented him, and that perhaps Sir William Harcourt is not simply an elephantine mass of egotism."

"Then why did he draw them so?" enquired the Pen.

"Ah! that is the secret of the caricaturist," laughed the Pencil. "There is something more in politicians, you know, than meets the eye, and the caricaturist tries to record it. You're so captious, my dear Pen. It is not given to everyone to see a portrait properly, however true it may be. Some folks there are who are colour-blind. There are others who are portrait-blind. [Pg 150] Others again are blind to the humorous. An old M.P. came up to H. F. one day in the Lobby of the House of Commons when a new Parliament had assembled for the first time, and said to him, 'Well, you have a rich harvest for your pencil (that was me). I never saw such odd specimens of humanity assembled together before.'

THE M.P. REAL AND IDEAL.

"'That may be so,' replied H. F., 'but mark my words, after a session or two, my comic sketches of the Members—for which, by the way, the specimens you are looking at are merely notes, and which you are now good enough to call faithful portraits—will become so familiar to you that they will cease to amuse you. And you may even come to pronounce them gross libels. In other words, you will find that their frequent repetition will rob them in your eyes of their comic character altogether, just as in the case with the attendants at the Zoo, on whose faces you will fail to detect the ghost of a smile at the most outrageous pranks of the monkeys, although you shall see everyone else in the place convulsed with laughter.'"

"But surely, Mr. Pencil," argued the Pen, "you lose friends by caricaturing them?"

"Not those who are worthy of friendship," replied the Pencil, with a solemn air. "And those who cannot take a joke are not worthy of it. H. F. is not a portrait painter. It makes the lead turn in my case to witness the snobbishness which exists nowadays among certain thin-skinned artists and writers. The Society grub has eaten the heart out of all true artistic ambitions. An honest satirist has no chance nowadays. He must not draw what he sees, or write what he really thinks about it. Pleasing wishy-washiness is idolised, whilst Hogarth is voted coarse. Great Scott! How this [Pg 151] age of cigarettes and lemon squash would have stirred the pulse and nerved the brush of the greatest of English caricaturists!"

THE PHOTO.

AS HE REALLY IS.

Then as the Pencil wiped away a tear of regret for the decadence of English satirical art the Pen jotted down the following lines culled from the old tomb-stone at Chiswick:

"If Genius fire thee Stranger stay,
If Nature touch thee, drop a tear.
If neither move thee, turn away,
For Hogarth's honoured dust lies here."

"When he has not seen a Member, and has no reference to go by, how does he manage?"

"He does not find photography of much use. Sometimes, if he has to draw a man for some special reason, and has not seen him, a photograph is, of course, the only means possible; then he generally gets a letter something like this:

"'Dear Sir,—I enclose you a photograph of myself, the only one I possess. It belongs to my wife, and she has reluctantly lent it, and trusts you will take every care of it and return it at once. It was taken on our wedding trip. I may mention that I have less hair at the top of my head and more on my face, and I may seem to some a trifle older.'

[Pg 152]

"Well, here, you see, H. F. has to use his judgment.

"But to my surprise H. F. received a visit from the original of the photograph shortly after his sketch was published, who came to inform the guv'nor that no one could possibly recognise him in the sketch; and when I saw him in the flesh I quite believed him. You can judge from the sketch how useful the photograph was.

"The second appearance of the new and ambitious M.P. in the pages of Punch did not satisfy the legislator either. It was not his face he took exception to, but his boots, like Mr. Goldfinch in 'A Pair of Spectacles.' He lost faith in his bootmaker, squeezed his extremities into patent leather shoes of the most approved and uncomfortable make, and hobbled through the Lobbies doing penance at the shrine of caricature. A caricature, you see, does not depend upon the face alone.

"One of H. F.'s earliest Parliamentary caricatures was a sketch of Mr. Henry Broadhurst,