THE CONFESSIONS OF AN ILLUSTRATOR--A SERIOUS CHAPTER.
Drawing--"Hieroglyphics"--Clerical Portraiture--A Commission from General Booth--In Search of Truth--Sir Walter Besant--James Payn--Why Theodore Hook was Melancholy--"Off with his Head"--Reformers' Tree--Happy Thoughts--Christmas Story--Lewis Carroll--The Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson--Sir John Tenniel--The Challenge--Seven Years' Labour--A Puzzle MS.--Dodgson on Dress--Carroll on Drawing--Sylvie and Bruno--A Composite Picture--My Real Models--I am very Eccentric--My "Romps"--A Letter from du Maurier--Caldecott--Tableaux--Fine Feathers--Models--Fred Barnard--The Haystack--A Wicket Keeper--A Fair Sitter--Neighbours--The Post-Office Jumble--Puzzling the Postmen--Writing Backwards--A Coincidence.
If I confess as a caricaturist, surely I need not caricature my confessions by any mock-modesty. Although I have illustrated novels, short stories, fairy tales, poems, parodies, satires, and _jeux d'esprit_, for the realistic, the fanciful, the weirdly imaginative and the broadly humorous, as my _Punch_ colleague, E. T. Milliken, wrote, my more distinctive, natural and favourite _métier_ is that of graphic art. This intimate friend, in publishing his "appreciation" of me, put in his own too highly-coloured opinion of my black and white work in this direction. I blush to quote it:
[Illustration: MAJUBA HILL. DRAWN BY HARRY FURNISS. _Reproduced by permission of the proprietors of the "Illustrated London News."_]
"And they are in error who imagine Mr. Furniss's powers to be substantially limited to political satire or Parliamentary caricature. Much of the work he has already given to the public, and perhaps more of that which he has not yet published, but of which his chosen familiars are aware, will prove that in more serious or imaginative work, in strong, vivid realism as well as in frolic fancy, in landscape as well as in life, in the picturesque as well as in the humorous, he can display a notable mastery."
This confession of one of my "chosen familiars" I have the pluck to reprint, as an answer to those unknown strangers who so frequently write me down as "a conventional comic draughtsman of funny ill-drawn little figures." "What shall I call him?" said one; "a master of hieroglyphics?" Well, if I am commissioned to draw humorous hieroglyphics, I do my best to master their difficulties. Caricature pure and simple is not the art I either care for or succeed in practising as well as I do in my less known more serious and more finished work. When I joined _Punch_, at the age of twenty-six, I had had nine-tenths of my time previous to that occupied (ever since I was fifteen years of age) in drawing far more elaborate and finished work than would be in keeping in a periodical such as _Punch_. _Punch_ required "funny little figures," and I supplied them; but my _métier_, I must confess, was work requiring more demand upon direct draughtsmanship and power. I am a funny man, a caricaturist, by force of circumstances; an artist, a satirist, and a cartoonist by nature and training. The one requires technical knowledge--in the other, "drawing doesn't count." The more amateurish the work, the funnier the public consider it. The serious confession I have to make is that I have been mistaken for a caricaturist in the accepted and limited meaning of the term.