Creativity Quote by John Leech

A “small glass” is doing a lot of work here: it’s the respectable fig leaf over a habit that wants to be bigger, more frequent, and less accountable. Leech’s line isn’t a confession so much as a sketch in prose, the kind of compact social observation a Victorian cartoonist could pin to a lapel and let the room do the rest. The comedy lives in the word “continually.” It turns the drink into a metronome, the day chopped into moments that must be justified, narrated, laundered into acceptability.

“Finding excuses” is the real subject. Not pleasure, not even addiction in the modern clinical sense, but the performance of restraint. Brandy and water reads as medicinal, moderated, adult; it’s what you take for the stomach, the nerves, the weather, the disappointments, the unexpected visitors. Leech is pointing at a culture that prized self-control while building endless little loopholes for indulgence, especially for men with status to protect. The drink is private, but the excuse is public-facing: a story you tell yourself and others so the habit stays invisible in plain sight.

As an artist working amid Punch-era satire, Leech understood that moral comedy lands hardest when it’s mundane. No grand vice, no gutter debauchery: just the endless micro-rationalizations that turn “I’m fine” into a lifestyle. The line pricks the Victorian balloon of propriety by showing how easily it refills itself, one “small” glass at a time.