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

"'Look here, Bartley,' said Tommy Bowles; 'if you're going on that tack, you must come and sit on this side. When I saw MacNeill open his mouth to speak, I confess I thought I was going to be swallowed whole. You sit here; there's more of you.'"

Now had I shown "Pongo," as he was familiarly called in the House, in the act of swallowing "Tommy Bowles," I might have produced a most objectionable caricature. I made, however, a smiling portrait of the genial Member. I was away at the time recovering from a long illness: the sketch was made in the country, and sent up to the Punch engraver's office. By some mistake there, it was not reduced in size in reproduction as others had been; therefore in the paper it was apparently given extra importance—I had nothing to do with that. That Mr. Lucy's reference to Mr. MacNeill is not a caricature can be judged by anyone reading the passage I had to illustrate, given above. The notion that the drawing was purposely produced on a larger scale than usual, so as to give this special caricature prominence, is disproved by the fact that the caricature of the gallant and genial [Pg 260] Admiral Field I drew exactly under the same conditions appears on the same page also far too large. Therefore it is a mistaken idea that this particular portrait was intentionally offensive, or different from others.

It was really the combination of circumstances, if anything, that called special attention to that particular page in Punch, and gave rise to

I shall, in describing the curtain rising on this historical incident, borrow Mr. Lucy's own account of the way in which the Member approached me after he had seen my illustration to Mr. Lucy's clever Diary of the Week:

"It was shortly after seven o'clock that Mr. Harry Furniss strolled into the Lobby. He had been suffering from a long and severe sickness, dedicating this the first evening of his convalescence to a visit to the scene of labours which have delighted mankind. Over the place there brooded an air of ineffable peace. The bustle of the earlier hour of meeting was stilled. The drone of talk went on in the half-empty House within the glass doors. Now and then a Member hastily crossed the floor of the Lobby, intent on preparations for dinner. One of these chanced to be Mr. Swift MacNeill, a Member who, beneath occasional turbulence of manner, scarcely conceals the gentlest, kindliest disposition, a gentleman by birth and training, a scholar and a patriot. The House, whilst it sometimes laughs at his exuberance of manner, always shows that it likes him. Mr. Furniss, seeing him approach with hurried step, may naturally have expected that he was making haste to offer those congratulations on renewed health and reappearance on the scene of labour that had already been proffered from other quarters. What followed has been told by Mr. Furniss in language the simplicity and graphicness of which Defoe could not have excelled."

Mr. Lucy refers to the following account I wrote at the time:

"On my return to continue my work in Parliament for [Pg 261] Mr. Punch after my severe illness, I found the jaded legislators yearning for fresh air, and even the approaching final division on the Home Rule Bill had failed to arouse more than a languid interest. I felt this depression when I entered the Lobby, its sole occupants being the tired-out doorkeepers and the leg-weary policemen. I really believe a swarm of wasps would not have roused them to activity, for I noticed a bluebottle resting undisturbed upon the nose of one of Inspector Horsley's staff. Even the Terrace was dusty, and the Members rusty and morose. One of the Irish Members had selected as his friend Frank Slavin, the well-known prize-fighter, who had an admiring group round him, to whom no doubt he was relating the history of his many plucky battles.

WHAT HAPPENED.

"The stimulating effect of this may have been the cause for the assault upon me in the Inner Lobby, which has afforded the stale House some little excitement, which has been the salvation of the silly season. So many papers have given startling accounts of this attack upon me, some stating that I was caned, others that I was pummelled, shaken like a dog, and so on, that I am glad to take the opportunity of giving a clear statement of what really occurred. I was standing close to the doors of the Inner Lobby, talking to Mr. Cuthbert Quilter, when Mr. Swift MacNeill interrupted us by asking me, 'Are you the man that draws the cartoons in Punch?' 'That depends upon what they are,' said I. 'I refer to one,' said the excited Member, 'that has annoyed me very much,' 'Let me see it,' I replied. Mr. MacNeill then drew out his pocket-book and showed me a cutting from the current number of Punch. 'Yes,' I said, 'that is from a drawing of mine,' 'Then ye're a low, black-guardly scoundrel,' melodramatically exclaimed the usually genial Member. Taking two or three steps back, he hissed at me, with a livid face, a series of offensive epithets too coarse for [Pg 262] publication. Having exhausted his vocabulary of vulgarity, a happy thought seemed to strike him. 'I want to assault you,' he said, and forthwith he nervously and gingerly tapped me as if he were playing with a hot coal. He then danced off to Members who were looking on, crying, 'This is the scoundrel who has caricatured me; witness, I assault him!' and he recommenced the tapping process which constituted this technical assault. DR. TANNER. Knowing that Mr. MacNeill is a very excitable subject, and at once detecting that this assault was a 'put-up job,' I was determined to remain perfectly cool; and, truth to tell, the pirouetting of the agitated Member hugely amused me, particularly as the more excited he became, the more he resembled the caricature which was the cause, or supposed to be the cause, of this attack, I treated the hon. Member exactly as the policeman treated the bluebottle—with perfect indifference, not even troubling to brush away the trifling annoyance. But when in the midst of its buzzing round me I moved in the direction of one of the officials, it flew away. Then appeared what I had been anticipating, and the real cause of the insult transpired. Dr. Tanner came up to me just as I recollect Slavin approaching Jackson in their historic fight. He showered the grossest insults upon me, and I was surrounded at once by his clique, who were anxious for the scene which must have occurred had I, like Jackson, been the first to let out with my left. But here again was I face to face with a chronically excited Member, backed up by his friends, and I refused to be drawn into a brawl. But the secret of the real cause of this organised attack upon me was revealed to me by Dr. Tanner, who at once informed me that it was the outcome of my imitations of the Irish Members in my entertainment, 'The Humours of Parliament,' which I have given for two seasons all over the country. This was my [Pg 263] offence; my caricature of Mr. Swift MacNeill the excuse for the attack."

ASSAULT ON ME IN THE HOUSE.
WHAT THE PRESS DESCRIBED.

Mr. MacNeill's "technical assault" was a very childish incident. He merely touched the sleeve of my coat with the tip of his finger, and asked me if I would accept that as a "technical assault." This mysterious pantomime was subsequently explained to me, and meant that I was to take out a summons—but I only laughed. At the moment Mr. MacNeill was pirouetting round me at a distance, Mr. John Burns came on to the scene, and chaffed Mr. MacNeill, drawing an imaginary picture (for Mr. Burns was not in the Lobby) of a real assault upon me. A gentleman connected with an evening paper, who happened to enter with Mr. Burns, failed to see Mr. Burns's humour, and thereupon took down in shorthand Mr. Burns's imaginary picture as a matter of fact. It was published as a fact, and, for all I know or care, some may still believe that I was assaulted!

When I read that I had been treated like a cur, I was rather amused; but when I read a statement in the papers from a man like John Burns saying that he saw me "taken by the lapels of the coat and shaken like a dog, and then taken by the ear and shaken by that," I thought the joke had been carried far enough. Determined to have this cock-and-bull story contradicted at once, I went down to the House and saw Mr. John Burns, who expressed to me his regret that he should have invented the story, and he left me to go to the writing-room, and promised I should have from him a written contradiction.

After waiting a considerable time, a message was brought to [Pg 264] me that Mr. Burns declined to keep his promise. I therefore wrote these particulars and sent them off to the Press. At the same time Mr. Burns, who had been closeted with some Radical journalists, wrote an offensive note—which was shown me, and which I advised him to publish.

Poor Mr. MacNeill! Well may he say, "Save me from my friends!" The Press put on their comic men to make copy at his expense. If I were to publish it all, it would make a volume as large as this. By permission I publish the following lay from the St. James' Budget (September, 1893):

"THE LAY OF SWIFT MACNEILL.

(Picked up in the Lobby.)

"Have ye heard, have ye heard, of the late immortal fray,
When the lion back of Swift MacNeill got up and stood at bay,
When the lion voice of Tanner cried, 'To Judas wid yer chaff!'
An' the Saxon knees were shaking, though they made believe to laugh.

"'Twas widin the Commons' Lobby, in the corner by the dure,
There was Misther Harry Furniss a-standing on the flure,
When up to him came stalking, like O'Tarquin in his pride,
The bowldest of the bowld, MacNeill, wid the Docther by his side.

"Then the valiant Swift MacNeill from his pocket he took out
A picther very like him, an' he brandished it about,
An' he