PUNCH’S GREATEST CARTOONIST.

Dunstan Times, Issue 2486, 21 June 1909, Page 8

PUNCH’S GREATEST CARTOONIST.

Latter-day illustrators have tried their hands with the wonderful Alice who visited Wonderland, but it is doubtful if any self-respecting child, to say nothing ut the judicious adult, will give up Tenniel lor later comers. So at least a writer who signs the initials "E. C. B.” seems to feel in speaking of “the recent flood of preposterous attempts to challenge ’ Tenniel’s work as “Lewjs Carroll’s” illustrator. The stamp which this artist, now just turned ninety, gave to the figures of Carroll’s story, we may be surprised to learn, was not “the result of any keen sympathy between author and artist.’ In the London Daily News this writer adds; "Dodgson did not admired Tenniel’s illustrations ; and Tenniel did not admire Dodgson. Happily, that perfect combination of text and picture was a part 01 the purpose of things, and it came duly to fulfilment. Tenniel’s spleen never took him far. Of that temper which has handed down to this day, on the cover ot Punch, Hoyle’s hatred*of Brougham (whose face a faun is dragging in the dirt at the end of a string) Tenniel had nothing. He is to-day what he always was among his colleagues and friends, the most courteous of old-world gentlemen.” TennieTs birthday occurred on February 28, an occasion which gives the writer his cue for measuring the achievements of this great cartoonist of Punch. For fifty years he drew for this journal, and nothing of his long series of contributions is probably more .famous than his ‘‘Dropping the Pilot,” which marked Bismarck’s retirement from active life. The writer draws this picture: "Retired from the world as he is, and visited with the cruelest of all the privations of sense, the loss of sight, the old man surely enjoys such consolations as come to few at the end of the journey. Fame is a thing never easily measured; and his is quite immeasurable. Every one who saw Punch at all during the fifty years that ended in 1901, every one who knows the ‘Alice’ books, luis done homage to the art of Tenniel. His pencil has pleased millions, and will please millions more. Never since Hogarth’s day was such a universality of appreciation. From the children in the nursery, laughing over Father William or the Mad Hatter, to John Ruskin on the pinnacle of criticism, uttering judgment on the cartoons, he has delighted. ‘Tenniel,’ said Ruskin, ‘has much of the largeness and symbolic 'mystery of imagination which belonged to the great leaders of classic art; in the shadowy masses and sweep of lines of his great compositions there are tendencies which might have won his adoption into the school of Tintoret.’ “Tenniel may claim, indeed, to have created the cartoon as understood in England. When Punch took a young artist of ideals, fresh from painting fresco on the

walls of the Houses of Parliament, and made of him its chief pictorial satirist and commentator on great affairs, a new influence was brought into play. If we consider all that marks the best work of Tenniel, the splendid firmness and purity of his line, the loftiness of his conception, the boldness and fidelity of his treatment, the wonderful strength of it all, we take away an impression of dignitydignity such as showed itself in the erect and quiet personality, in the avoidance of ail publicity and display in his simple, secluded life, in the refusal to grasp at money, in the unbroken maintenance through fifty years of a standard of 1 effort that outlasted the power of the pencil. He could draw President Oarnot hounding in air like a ballet-dancer, and the picture would be dignified. He could show the British Lion in preposterous check trousers and white waistcoat, and there would be dignity in it. In the long discussions at the Punch table about the next cartoon, Tenniel would never suggest a topic. He would sit smoking silently; and-when the politicians had settled the subject, the artist would go home, devote the next day to thought, and tha next to execution. “But though Tenniel sto id aloof from the political debates, he had his opinions, and held them- strongly. His Disraeli, that Protean caricature that had throughout all its mutations the smile of the trickster, was drawn with no indifferent hand. His Abraham Lincoln was touched by a less reasonable prejudice. An honest man’s point of view is likely to make itself felt in the course of production of some 2500 weekly cartoons. Whoever had suggested the cartoon, ho had always to admit that Tenniel had brought much to it, and improved upon the notion. Tenniel’s stamp, for all his silence, is upon half a century of Punch policy—the stamp of a downright nature, touched with something more nearly akin to magnanimity than was ever before seen, perhaps, in political draftsmanship.” (tf all changes Tenniel has lived to see, says the writer, the change in Punch is not the least or the least significant. It is set out in this wise:

“His first editor thought nothing of going down to the Fleet street office in fish-ing-boots and a sombrero. Mr Owen Henman has never darkened the door of the modern Punch office in any such impossible attire. Old Punch reeked of the Bohemia of fifty years ago, that grew its beard, and smoked, its clay, and borrowed money, and live on hot brandy-and-water and loon companionship. Modern Punch is as thoroughly upper-class and well-bred-as is consistent with being openly and unblushingly clever. It meets the country gentleman and the smart young stockbroker on their own ground. Of the great Charles Keene some one uttered the halftruth that 'he could not draw a gentleman,’ and Keene’s Punch work —that brilliant episode in the history of black-and-white art —drew the whole of its inspiration from the intimate life spirit of old Punch. But when Tenniel retired, Punch lost the last of the men who confessed to a knowledge of and an interest in the middle classes. Those classes read their Punch to-day ; but it is no more a mirror held up to them. It is a light work of information—occasional obscure to them on the habits and ideas of the wealthy class. Punch has perhaps never been cleverer, either with pen or pencil, than he is to-day: and he has certainly never been so aristocratic. The old man in bis hermitage at Maidavale has seen every motion of that melancholy change.”