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III of IV, by Charles L. Graves

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Title: Mr. Punch's History of Modern England Vol. III of IV

Author: Charles L. Graves

Release Date: November 6, 2014 [EBook #47300]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. PUNCH'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND ***




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[Pg   i]

M^r. PUNCH'S HISTORY
OF MODERN ENGLAND

[Pg  ii]

EMPRESS AND EARL;
Or, One Good Turn Deserves Another

Lord Beaconsfield: "Thanks, your Majesty! I might have had it before! Now I think I have earned it!"

Reproduced from the Cartoon by John Tenniel.

[Pg iii]

M^r.Punch's History
of Modern England

By
CHARLES L. GRAVES

In Four Volumes

VOL. III.—1874-1892

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1922

[Pg  iv]

Published by arrangement with the Proprietors of "Punch"

[Pg   v]

CONTENTS

PART I

THE NATIONAL OUTLOOK

PART II

THE SOCIAL FABRIC

[Pg 1]

PART I

THE NATIONAL OUTLOOK

[Pg 3]

HIGH POLITICS

The pageant of the Victorian age reached its grand climacteric in the period on which we now enter. As a "drum and trumpet chronicle" the history of the eighteen years from 1874 to 1892 was void of any British military operations on the grand scale. Of the names Kandahar, Maiwand, Isandhlwana, Majuba, Khartoum and Tel-el-Kebir only the first and last minister to our complacency. Yet the achievements of Lord Roberts in the two Afghan campaigns were splendid examples of bold leadership and British endurance, and Lord Wolseley's suppression of the revolt of Arabi was more than efficient. In the mid 'seventies Germany came perilously near forcing a fresh war on France; but the influence of the British Crown and Government was largely instrumental in averting the calamity. We were twice on the verge of war with Russia in 1878, first in April after the Treaty of San Stefano at the close of the Russo-Turkish war, and second in July over Russia's intervention in Afghanistan. The country was divided, for while there had been a revival of the old distrust of Russia, Gladstone had thrown the whole weight of his influence into the campaign of protest against the "Bulgarian atrocities." The Government, on the whole, steered a middle course between the "Jingoes" and those who supported Gladstone's "bag and baggage" policy towards the Turks. At the height of the Tory Press campaign against Russia, Lord[Pg 4] Salisbury, in a speech in the City, observed: "It has been generally acknowledged to be madness to go to war for an idea, but it is yet more unsatisfactory to go to war against a nightmare." Punch, who was never pro-Russian, but at the moment was strongly anti-Turk, interpreted this saying as a caution against Jingo scaremongering.

In one of the earliest of his cartoons on the possibility of war over the Eastern question, he represented Disraeli standing on the edge of a precipice with Britannia, asking her to move "just a leetle nearer." Britannia declines to move one inch farther, adding, "I'm a good deal nearer than is pleasant already." But four months later, in May, 1878, when he showed Britannia between two advisers, Disraeli and Bright[1]—the former wearing a sword camouflaged with an olive wreath—Punch supported neither, but applauded the third Voice, that of Neutrality. Professorial intervention he resented strongly; and severely rebuked Freeman, the historian, for a violent and unpatriotic speech. In fine, he was equally down on the blatant bunkum of the music-halls and the ill-considered agitation of fussy Pacificists; on War-Donkeys and Peace-Donkeys; "Asses are asses, whether bound in Lion or in Calf."

[Pg 5]

NATIONAL SPRING MEETING, 1874: THE FINAL HEAT

But if in Europe Great Britain never got beyond the stage of naval demonstrations and the summoning of troops from India, these eighteen years were not devoid of great as well as spectacular events. They opened with the triumphant return to power of Disraeli, admirably symbolized in Tenniel's great cartoon of the chariot driver and his fallen rival, and with his efforts to translate into practical politics his grandiose doctrines of Imperialism. He made the Queen Empress of India, he riveted our hold on the Suez Canal by the opportune purchase of the Khedive's shares in 1875; he claimed to have brought back "Peace with Honour" from the Berlin Congress of 1878, the year which marked the zenith of his power and the beginning of its decline. The twelve years that followed Gladstone's[Pg 6] success at the polls in 1880 were crowded with momentous events; the rise and ferment of the new nationalities abroad; the advent of new champions and gladiators in the political arena at home—Parnell and Randolph Churchill and Chamberlain. In the sphere of domestic politics Ireland dominated the scene. Parliamentary obstruction was raised to a high art; the activities of the physical force extremists culminated in the tragedy of the Phœnix Park murders, and the history of the next few years is written in the two words Coercion and Conciliation, which split the Liberal Party, brought back the Conservatives to power in 1886, and under the Balfourian régime restored a certain measure of peace and prosperity to Ireland. Lord Beaconsfield's "spirited foreign policy" had been largely reversed under Gladstone, and the results did not nourish our national pride. The handling of our frontier troubles in India had at least the support of some of the wisest Anglo-Indian experts, but our magnanimity to the Boers after Majuba was not merely open to the charge of craven-spiritedness, it paved the way to further troubles. It has been said that "any fool can annex"; but it needs a wise man to know when to grant autonomy. Moreover, the loyalty of Gladstone's supporters—including Punch—was strained to the uttermost by the disastrous failure of the attempt to relieve Gordon at Khartoum. The full knowledge now available makes it clear that Gordon's appointment was a risky experiment—that his judgment was not equal to his nobility of character—but the months and months of procrastination and vacillation, and the inadequacy of the relieving force when dispatched, cannot be explained away. It was just one of those situations which warranted the old gibe against Gladstone's "three courses." There were moments, and this was one of the most searching, in which he was mentally incapable of "seeing his duty, a dead sure thing" and going for it "there and then" in the way in which plain men with plain minds would have done.

[Pg 7]

WILFUL WILHELM
An Imperial German Nursery Rhyme. (From the Very latest edition of "Struwwelpeter.")

Wilful Wilhelm: "Take the nasty Punch away!

I won't have any Punch to-day!"

Young Wilhelm was a wilful lad,

And lots of "cheek" young Wilhelm had.

He deemed the world should hail with joy

A smart and self-sufficient boy,

And do as it by him was told;

He was so wise, he was so bold.

When we add to this brief summary the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887, the passing of Lord Beaconsfield and Bright among the elder statesmen, and the tragic eclipse of Parnell, it will be seen that there was enough and more than enough to[Pg 8] engage the pen and pencil of Punch as a political and social chronicler. Mention has already been made of our thorny relations with Russia. With regard to Germany, the attitude of England might be described as one of reluctant admiration punctuated by moments of misgiving. These moments were not infrequent in the days of the old Emperor; they ceased during the brief reign of his son, only to recur in a more acute form when Kaiser Wilhelm II "dropped the pilot," made it clear that he intended not only to rule but govern, and by his meteoric versatility and frequent references to his divine mission and to the Germans as the chosen race, awakened the world to the emergence of a new and formidable promoter of European unrest. Our relations with France were correct rather than cordial; her rapprochement with Russia did not make for popularity on this side of the Channel; but in the main English observers read the inner meaning of the Boulanger episode aright, and without exactly exulting over his collapse, were relieved by his failure to revive a military dictatorship.

By way of filling in this rough outline with more detail, we may note that Gladstone's resignation of the Liberal leadership at the close of 1874 was regarded by Punch as premature. In one of the first cartoons in the next year Dizzy is shown saying good-bye to his great antagonist: "Sorry to lose you! I began with books; you're ending with them. Perhaps you're the wiser of the two." Perhaps he would have been—in the ultimate verdict of posterity—had his decision been final. But Punch was right in regarding Gladstone as an unspent force, and in his regretful and affectionate farewell clearly indicates a hope of his return:—

[Pg 9]

Lord Hartington, moved by public spirit rather than ambition or enthusiasm, undertook what in the circumstances was the far from enviable task of leading the Liberals. Punch hit off the situation truly enough in the cartoon in which Bright hands the crook of leadership to the "New Shepherd"—and Hartington in his smock-frock replies, "Hey, but Measter!—Where be the sheep?"

The parallel is followed up in the doggerel lines:—

Punch, always concerned with the dignity of the Mother of Parliaments, was from the very outset exasperated by the increasing levity and obstructiveness of the new House. The levity he satirized in a series of burlesque entertainments with Mr. Whalley as call-boy and Dr. Kenealy as gasman. Dr. Kenealy's efforts to re-open the Tichborne case ended in absurdity—his motion being supported by only two members, Mr. Whalley and Major O'Gorman, that gigantic playboy of the West.[2] Obstruction, another and far more serious matter, was soon organized into a science, and led to repeated scenes of which more anon. Of the new Ministers, Mr. Ward Hunt, the First Lord, was especially singled out for attack because of his cavalier treatment of the loss of the Vanguard and the Admiralty's Fugitive Slave Circulars. A propos of the former, Punch represented Neptune warning Britannia that there would be a row if she did not rule the waves properly. The Fugitive Slave question led to protracted debates and much hostile criticism. In October, 1875, a cartoon shows a slave[Pg 10] crawling on board a British warship and clinging to the flagstaff, while Ward Hunt, popping up from the companion, observes: "A runaway slave, John. You'll have to give him up, you know! See our Circular of July 31." John Bull retorts: "Give 'im up, yer Honour!! As well order me to haul down that there flag at once!!!" A fortnight later Ward Hunt is made to reply to his friend Punch:—

Punch's view, expressed in comments on the debate in the following February, was that the matter should be left in the discretion of captains—as it had been for thirty-six years. He declared, not without reason, that both circulars were virtually dead, and that the country would not stand them. Meanwhile the growth of the German Navy, which in his earlier years Punch had persistently ridiculed and belittled, had begun to excite attention and misgiving; Punch, though a Liberal, was a "big Navy" man, and, early in 1875, was concerned with the dangers of our falling behind in the race of naval armaments:—

RULE, GERMANIA!

The Times informs us that, of "iron-clad cruisers of the strongest type, Germany will, in the present year, have seven built against five of our own navy." The Pall Mall Gazette is of opinion that "the Germans have too many irons in the political fire to give exclusive attention to any one of them."

But very soon, unless we get beforehand with the Germans, will they not have too many irons in the water, too?

[Pg 11]

NEUTRALITY UNDER DIFFICULTIES

Dizzy: "Bulgarian Atrocities! I can't find them in the Official Reports'!!!"

The restoration of the monarchy in Spain under Alfonso XII, in the same year, also gave Punch occasion for serious thought. We may pass over the cartoon representing John Bull's anxiety about Spanish bonds as a satire on British commercialism. But there is shrewd political insight in the picture of Alfonso between two fires—Bismarck and the Pope. The German Chancellor makes his support conditional on the withdrawal[Pg 12] of the anti-Protestant edicts; while the Pope, on the other hand, maintains the claims of his Church.

In 1876 the Queen assumed the title of Empress of India; Disraeli went to the Lords as Earl of Beaconsfield, Sir Stafford Northcote succeeding him as Leader of the House of Commons; and the "Bulgarian Atrocities" proved the first phase in the conflict which made the Balkans the cockpit of Europe for over forty years. Punch did not cavil at Disraeli's earldom, though he thought his refusal of the Garter in 1878 well calculated rather than modest. He suggests, moreover, that Earl of Coningsby would have been a better title; and in the cartoon headed, "Empress and Earl, or One Good Turn deserves Another," shows Dizzy kneeling to the Queen and saying, "Thank your Majesty! I might have had it before! Now I think I have earned it!" More sympathetic are the verses in which Punch describes the realization of Disraeli's triple dream of success in Fashion, Letters and Politics—the dream that inspired him when he was only an articled clerk and a Jew boy:—

Mr. Gladstone was now employing his leisure by felling trees at Hawarden, and the contrast lent point to one of Tenniel's happiest cartoons—that of "The Earl and the Woodman"; Disraeli, in his earl's robes and coronet, contemplates Gladstone arrayed à la Watteau, and observes with emotion: "How happy is this blithe peasant, whilst I, alas!—" (Dissembles.) Punch, however, was becoming more sceptical of the genuineness of Gladstone's desire for retirement, and in a parody of "You are old, Father William," scouts the notion of his prematurely posing as a Nestor.

[Pg 13]

"NO MISTAKE"

The British Lion: "Look here! I don't understand you!—But it's right you should understand me! I don't fight to uphold what's going on yonder!!"

[Pg 14]

The Balkan trouble led to a violent conflict of public opinion in which Punch sided whole-heartedly with Gladstone against those, and they were many, who upheld the traditional view of the "Gentlemen's party," that the Turk was the only "gentleman" in the Near East, and that he might do what he liked with his own. Disraeli's scepticism; his professed inability to find any "atrocities" in official reports; and his dismissal as "coffee-house babble" of evidence brought by a Bulgarian to a vice-Consul, roused Punch's indignation against the Premier and his official informants. It was a "hideous subject" of which Government had heard a good deal and was likely to hear a good deal more:—

Let Punch speak his mind in this matter. Political partisanship and party spirit are both at low, as well as lukewarm, water in England just now; but, if anything will fire John Bull's blood to fever heat, it is such horrors as have been perpetrated in Bulgaria—and part of his wrath will assuredly be visited on those who have striven to interpose official blinds or buffers between England and the sight or shock of these horrors.... The head of Her Majesty's Opposition asserted for the Newspaper Correspondents the credit which English common sense and experience unite to claim for them.

Contemporary records—including the files of Punch—do not bear out the statement about the lukewarmness of party spirit. The country was acutely divided, and dissatisfaction with Sir H. Elliot, our Ambassador at Constantinople, prompted Punch's retort, when Lord Beaconsfield declared that the Bulgarian atrocities were "beyond recall," "Yes, but your Ambassador isn't." Gladstone is rebuked for hiding in his tent; but he made amends by launching his famous, though sadly premature, phrase about clearing the Turk out of Europe, "bag and baggage."

Serbia's resistance was soon overcome, but the Powers forced Turkey to grant her an armistice, and largely through Great Britain's influence, a Conference was held at Constantinople where Lord Salisbury was our representative. A short breathing-space was thus gained, but the Conference was abortive, and war between Russia and Turkey broke out in 1877. Punch was in rather a delicate position: for while distinctly[Pg 15] anti-Turk, he had never trusted Russia. Thus, while assailing the Daily Telegraph, Pall Mall Gazette and Morning Post for their Chauvinism, and the Tory press generally for their campaign against Russia and their support of the "veracious Turk," he was hardly less severe in his strictures on the belligerent humanitarians who would have welcomed pro-Russian intervention. Punch advocated neutrality, but he was fully alive to the difficulties of the situation, and expressed them in a cartoon in which the British Lion is exhibited in a bothered mood, distrustful of Russia, and unable to make out what the Government meant, or the Opposition either. In his comments on the debate on Mr. Gladstone's resolution, Punch deplores the weakness and dissensions of the Opposition and supports the bolder spirits. Many years were to elapse before Lord Salisbury made his remarkable speech about our having "backed the wrong horse," i.e. Turkey, in the Crimean War. That speech proved that Punch was fully justified in seizing on the caution which the same speaker had given nearly twenty years earlier. For Lord Salisbury declared in 1897 that the defence of the diplomacy of 1878 lay in its traditional character, not in its inherent excellence, and that neither he nor Lord Beaconsfield was free from misgivings as to its results. The music halls have not often enriched the language with permanent additions, but they added "Jingo" and "Jingoism" in 1877. Punch's comment on Macdermott's famous song is instructive. It was inspired by a reference in the Paris Figaro:—

On the back page of the Figaro is given one verse in English, with the music, of that "War Song" of the Music Halls, which just now enjoys its share of popularity with "Nancy Lee," and "Jeremiah, Blow the Fire," and a translation of the whole song into French, of which the Figaro says apologetically, "Des vers français n'auraient pu arriver à la sauvage énergie de l'original." The chorus of the song, as sung by most of our London street-boys, instead of "They all do it," and "Woa Emma," recently shelved, is this:—

"We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do," etc. And the translation, which "n'aurait pu arriver à la sauvage énergie de l'original," is:

[Pg 16]

"Nous ne voulons pas la guerre, mais, par Dieu! si nous combattons," etc.

If "par Dieu!" is not to an Englishman's thinking rather more savagely energetic than "By Jingo!" then words are meaningless. If "par Dieu!" is to be accepted as an equivalent, and as, after all, rather a weak equivalent for "by Jingo!" then either the Frenchman has a very low idea of the Englishman's religion, or his "Dieu" means nothing more, ordinarily, than our "Jingo." But "Jingo" is not a savagely energetic exclamation, nor is the true feeling of this country to be gauged by the popularity of a Music-Hall song.

Punch was both right and wrong. The music halls are not a true index of the political sagacity of the country; but he did not foresee that the refrain of this particular song would survive, by virtue of its very blatancy, as a terse summary of national complacency. At the same time he paid homage to its merits by printing a neat Latin rendering from the pen of an Etonian:—

The intervention of amateur diplomatists, clerical or professorial, however well-meant, was firmly and impolitely discouraged when Turkey and Russia were at death grips at Plevna. Early in 1878 Punch endeavoured to turn such efforts into ridicule, as instances of "self-election of the unfittest." Still the naval demonstration in Besika Bay found Punch in his most pacific mood, applauding Lord Carnarvon, who with Lord Derby had resigned, and condemning Lord Beaconsfield's dangerous action and unconvincing explanations. The calling out of the Reserves still further increased Punch's anxiety, and inspired a "Proclamation" calling for self-restraint. When it was announced that Carlyle had joined Bright and the Duke of Westminster in signing a petition against war, Punch noted that the old sage of Chelsea was anything but a lover of peace at any price. But the incident which perturbed him and other critics of the Government more than anything else was the bringing of a contingent of Indian troops to Europe. Punch[Pg 17] vigorously supported Gladstone, who held the action of the Government to be not merely provocative but unconstitutional. When the troops were re-shipped to India, he published a sarcastic inscription, to be engraved on a monument on Primrose Hill commemorating an exploit which had cost £750,000. It seems a little sum to us with our profligate habit of thinking in millions, but the frugal taxpayer of the 'seventies, as represented by Punch, thought it a monstrous extravagance. The inscription is too long to quote in its entirety, but we may give the peroration:—

Heu vatum ignarae mentes! But Punch, who printed this acid jeu d'esprit on August 3, 1878, could hardly be expected to foresee the need of August 4, 1914.

The year 1878 marked the zenith of Lord Beaconsfield's prestige, for it was the year of the Berlin Congress—from which he claimed to have brought back "Peace with Honour"—and of the annexation of Cyprus. Punch, however, was always suspicious of Dizzy's phrases and preferred to symbolize the results of the Congress in a Pas de Deux by Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury, both Gartered, and in a rhymed dialogue complacently referring to their egg-dance. The Afghan trouble[Pg 18] was assuming a menacing aspect, finely typified in Charles Keene's cartoon, "The Shadow on the Hills." Punch applauded vigilance, but distrusted the Government's intentions, deprecated the spirited policy which involved "a vague and boundless adventure of annexation," and showed Lord Beaconsfield leading John Bull by the nose in search of a "scientific frontier"—another Disraelian phrase—and the Ameer of Afghanistan, between the Bear and the Lion, exclaiming, "Save me from my friends."

THE SHADOW ON THE HILLS

The Transvaal had been annexed by Sir Theophilus Shepstone in the previous year, but Punch had received Lord Carnarvon's announcement with acquiescence rather than enthusiasm.

[Pg 19]

On the other hand, the visit of the Australian cricket team in 1878 furnished him with an occasion for paying tribute to the progress and enlightenment of the Colonies and acknowledging England's debt to their loyalty.

The services of King Edward as a promoter of the Entente with France date back to the same year, in which as Prince of Wales he is represented in a Pas de Trois with the Republic and Marshal MacMahon. Punch applauded the visit, but rebuked the flunkeyism of the accounts given by the Paris correspondent of The Times. For the moment Germany's home rather than her foreign policy engrossed attention, for this was the time of the Kulturkampf and the campaign against Socialism. Bismarck is shown in one cartoon squeezing down the Socialist Jack-in-the-Box. These repressive measures were deprecated by Punch, and a few months later he commented ironically on Bismarck's rapprochement with the Papacy, the cartoon "Of one mind (for once!)" showing Bismarck and the Pope barring the door against Socialism and Democracy. The reminiscences of the notorious Dr. Busch had appeared, and Punch based on them a bitter set of verses, "The Pious Chancellor's Creed," adapted from one of Lowell's Biglow Papers:—

Bismarck was alive and formidable. Thiers and Pio Nono[Pg 20] passed away in 1877 and 1878. The services of the French Statesman are tersely summed up in the stanza:—

In the accompanying cartoon France is seen laying a wreath on the tomb inscribed "Libérateur de la Patrie, 1872," while the shades of monarchists and Communards are seen in the background. The tribute to Pius IX is kindly but not uncritical. He had outlived the patriotic Liberalism of his younger self:—

In Home Politics Ireland largely dominated the scene during the latter half of the Beaconsfield administration. As early as 1876 Punch had dealt faithfully with the plea advanced on behalf of political prisoners in the following caustic argument:—

Killing is no murder if complicated with treason. That renders it a mere misdemeanour. A military offence, simply capital, becomes a minor offence when treasonable besides. Treason is an extenuating circumstance of mutiny and murder, and its commission in committing those crimes reduces murderers and mutineers to political offenders. Therefore, instead of being hanged or shot, they ought, if punished at all, and not, on the contrary, rewarded, to be condemned to nothing worse than temporary seclusion, and should, all of them, after a merely nominal imprisonment, be respectfully released.

This was a logical and ironical reductio ad absurdum; yet Punch lived to see it translated into practical politics forty[Pg 21] years later. In 1877 the scientific obstruction practised by the Irish Party in the House of Commons prompted a whole series of cartoons. In one Parnell, Biggar and Callan appear as "Erin's Three Graces." In another a drove of Irish pigs (including Whalley) are shown blocking the railway line of Parliament. In a third Punch bids schoolmaster Northcote to take down not the words, but something else of the obstructives. Commenting on the twenty-six hours' sitting in July, 1877, in which the House was held up by a group of obstructives that never rose above seven, Punch observes:—

Four Chairmen—Raikes, Childers, Sir H. Selwin-Ibbetson, and W. H. Smith—were used up in the night-watches, and the House was kept, by relays, against the "Dauntless Three"—for Gray, Callan, Nolan and Kirk are but recruits to the banner of Biggar, Parnell and O'Donnell, the standard-bearers of Obstruction. All pretence of argument was early abandoned; and it became a mere contest of endurance, varied by episodes of more or less—generally less—lively squabbling and chaff—if such a word may be used of anything that passes in the august Temple of Legislation. All this while the new Standing Orders seemed, by tacit consent, set aside; and Parnell, Biggar and O'Donnell moved the Chairman out of the Chair, or report of progress, again and again. And yet the Leader of the House had the rod of suspension in his hand, though he forbore to use it, preferring the reductio ad absurdum of such a night's match between the toughness of the House and the tenacity of its Obstructives. Once only he went so far as to threaten more summary proceedings, on which, they say, O'Donnell collapsed. Of course, the great O denies it.

But why, Punch must again ask, allow debates to be degraded to a farce, and the House to a bear-garden? Go to his Cartoon, ye squeamish, and be wise. With the rod in the Speaker's hands, it is not the Obstructives' words that Punch would have taken down. The House sat from four o'clock on Tuesday till six on Wednesday.

The announcement of Mr. Gladstone's visit to Ireland later on in the year prompted a burlesque account of what his omniscience and omnivorous thirst for information would enable him to achieve. Nor could Punch be moved to treat seriously O'Donovan Rossa's threat to introduce osmic acid—a forerunner of tear-shells—into the House of Commons. But it was beginning to be difficult to joke about Ireland, and there was[Pg 22] grim point in Keene's picture of the native reassuring the English angler who hadn't a licence for salmon: "Sure ye might kill a man or two about here an' nobody'd say a word t'ye."

LIFE IN LEITRIM

Saxon Angler: "Oh, but I can't try for a salmon, I haven't got a licence."

Native: "Is it a licence ye want to kill a fish? Sure ye might kill a man or two about here an' nobody'd say a word t'ye."

The death of Isaac Butt in the spring of 1879 marked the final close of the moderate stage of Parliamentary agitation; the reins of leadership had already passed into the hands of a bolder, more masterful and uncompromising chief—the "uncrowned King," as he was called, till the days of Committee Room 15. Moreover, discontent was aggravated by genuine distress in the South and West of Ireland, and here, unfortunately, benevolence was hampered by party politics, for the violent speeches made by Parnell in America at the close of 1879 were not exactly designed to assist the Duchess of Marlborough's Relief Fund. According to Punch, however, in his comments on "Irish Obstructives to Irish Aid," these speeches failed to influence the American public:—

[Pg 23]

Uncle Sam is showing his sense by sending his liberal contributions in relief of Irish distress through all channels except the cruelly warped ones of Messrs. Parnell and Dillon. The arch-agitator has the impudence to accuse the Duchess of Marlborough's and all other relief agencies, except his own, of political bias. This is the Gracchi complaining of sedition with a vengeance! Pigs, we know, cut their own throats in trying to keep their heads above water. This Irish Mis-leader seems involuntarily to be imitating the short-sighted Irish animal. If any man could have frozen the current of charity—in New World and Old—it would be such a bitter and malignant advocate of mutual hate, civil strife, anarchy, and insecurity of life and property, as CHARLES STEWART PARNELL.

Ireland was only one of many embarrassments to the Beaconsfield administration in its closing years. Early in that year Punch published a cartoon on "Bull and his burdens"—John Bull as a patient ox carrying Russia; the Ameer; the Turk; a Glasgow Bank Director (commemorating a recent discreditable financial disaster); a striker; and last of all a Zulu jumping on behind. For this was the year of the unhappy Zulu war, which Punch described as "one of the costliest blunders of modern times"—it cost ten millions—and again as "alike unnecessary, costly, and disastrous." He saw in Isandhlwana not merely a tragedy but a lesson, and enforced it in a cartoon showing a Zulu warrior writing on a slate, "Despise not your enemy." The accompanying verses, while deprecating rashness, assert that the dead must be honoured and avenged. The heroes of Rorke's Drift, Chard and Bromhead, are duly acclaimed, but Punch, true to an old and honourable tradition, prints a letter on behalf of the non-combatant officers who gallantly took part in the defence. As the only rampart which they had was made of meal-bags, Punch ingeniously applies to them the phrase, "Couvert de gloire et de farine," which Voltaire had used of Frederick the Great, who spent his first battle sheltering in a mill behind sacks of flour. Cetewayo, the Zulu chieftain, was subsequently captured, brought to London and lionized, Punch observing that "the great Farini [the impresario who introduced Zazel, the acrobat who was shot from a cannon] suggests that he should be exhibited at the Aquarium."

[Pg 33]

Throughout the war and afterwards Punch was a harsh and ungenerous critic of the policy of Sir Bartle Frere, whom he regarded as a prancing proconsul and nothing more. Nor was Punch much happier in his treatment of the painful episode of the death of the Prince Imperial who, whether owing to his own rashness or the negligence or loss of nerve of his escort, fell to the assegais of the Zulus. Punch's inveterate anti-Imperialism is betrayed even in the memorial verses:—

Unfortunately, the raising of the question of a memorial to the Prince in Westminster Abbey induced Punch to abandon his resolve of reticence, and prompted other "thoughts," which he expressed with more vigour than good taste. There is no proof that the suggestion emanated from Dean Stanley, as Punch implies, though the Dean certainly favoured a proposal for which a strong precedent could be found in the burial in Henry VII's chapel of the Duc de Montpensier (the younger brother of Louis Philippe) who died an exile in England in 1807. Public opinion was divided, but democratic sentiment prevailed, and in deference to a hostile vote in the Commons the scheme was withdrawn.

The waning splendours of the Beaconsfield régime were not revived by the launching of one of the last of his phrases, "Imperium et Libertas." Punch only saw in it "the catchword of a self-seeking swaggerer." Great men suffer much at the hands of injudicious admirers, and the "People's Tribute" to Lord Beaconsfield organized by an amiable enthusiast, heavily weighted by the unpropitious name of Tracy Turnerelli, must have been a sore trial to the Premier, while it supplied Punch with food for mirth for the best part of a year. The subscriptions of the million were invited to purchase a gold wreath, but after a little while Mr. Turnerelli had to appeal for further funds to clear off a deficit. Later on, when the Tribute had been finally refused by Lord Beaconsfield, Mr. Turnerelli[Pg 25] offered to hand over the wreath to one of our great national museums, if a suitable case were provided. He also suggested that he might be reimbursed for his out-of-pocket expenses in getting up the Tribute. Punch recommended that he should pocket the affront and hand over the "Tribute" to Madame Tussaud's, where he had already appeared in wax. This is what actually happened, and in November, 1879, Punch sardonically records the fulfilment of his suggestion.

SUNSET
(After B. R. Haydon.)

The disquieting news from the Afghan frontier led to a serious attack on the Government early in 1880, an attack in which Punch vigorously joined, publishing a list of questions[Pg 26] all animated by misgiving and by distrust of Lord Beaconsfield's phrases and Lord Lytton's policy and silence. The tension was relieved by Lord Roberts' famous march to Kandahar, and on his return to England in the autumn Punch represented him as snowed under by invitations to complimentary banquets, and invoked the shade of Wellington to congratulate him on his celerity. Meanwhile, however, Parliament had been dissolved in March, and the verdict of 1874 completely reversed at the General Election. Punch hailed Gladstone triumphing with his axe over Lord Dalkeith, and borne aloft on a shield by Harcourt, Hartington, and Bright, under the heading, "Hail to the Chief." As a pendant we have the cartoons in which Lord Beaconsfield is eclipsed by the sun of Liberalism or watches the sinking of the sun of Popularity, and the verses in which the parting Sphinx soliloquizes on his methods of leadership—appeals to sentiment and passion and the deft use and reiteration of phrases which intoxicate the masses.

When the House reassembled, it was to find the Irish Question still further complicated by the activities of the Land League and the No Rent Campaign. There was also another burning question—that of the Parliamentary Oath—which the return of Mr. Bradlaugh made a matter of urgency. Punch, as the "sturdiest of Protestants, was perforce the staunch supporter of the right of private judgment which is the corner-stone of Protestantism." Also he frankly admitted that he had no desire to see Mr. Bradlaugh made a martyr. His point of view is developed with refreshing common sense in the following argument:—

The House has swallowed such a succession of camels, Quakers and Separatists, Moravians and Jews, Latitudinarians and Platitudinarians, Unitarians and Humanitarians, Anythingarians and Nothingarians, and now it is straining over such a gnat as poor Mr. Bradlaugh, natural representative of the Northampton Shoemakers, who object to the immortality of the Sole, and spell the word indifferently with or without a "u" and an "e."

Irish Troubles

The time has surely passed when the House should seek shelter against objectionable beliefs or unbeliefs, behind such delusive defences as oaths and tests. "Let the Swearers swear, and the Sayers say," the Law has proclaimed, in all Courts. Why, then, not in[Pg 27] the High Court of Parliament—the Court of Courts—the very conduit and fountain-head of Law?

Unluckily the collective wisdom of the House was slow to accept this view, and the inevitable conclusion was only arrived at after a great expenditure of time and a great loss of temper. Bradlaugh was ejected and finally admitted; but the pacification of Ireland seemed farther off than ever. Gladstone was anxious to proceed with the further instalment of his policy of conciliation inaugurated by the Disestablishment of the Irish Church in his previous administration, but Punch summed up his difficulties pretty accurately in the cartoon of November 20, 1880, in which Law tells Liberty to wait until Ireland first learned to respect her. Punch regarded the Land League as sheer anarchy; it was the League and not the Government who practised Coercion. He summoned up the shade of Dan O'Connell to condemn outrages and the tyranny of "Captain Moonlight." But posthumous evocations are seldom of any avail; and O'Connell's was no longer a name to conjure with. In the year 1880, "Boycott" ceased to be a surname, and became an engine of political intimidation, while in the House obstructionist methods continued, culminating in the suspension of some thirty Irish M.P.s en masse early in 1881. Irish "scenes" were frequent and only excited Punch's disgust. At the same time he administered a severe rap over the knuckles to the "Honourable the Irish Society of London" for maladministering their funds, pauperizing prosperous towns and neglecting to subsidize deserving poverty or encourage Irish industries. The appeal to the Queen, the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Duke of Connaught to visit Ireland, signed, "Larry Doolan of the Irish Jaunting Car," is shorn of all its cogency by the Transpontine Donnybrook Fair language in which it is couched. Punch has been a frequent offender in this respect; and also in his representations of the Irish peasant. It did not really help the cause of Unionism to portray Fenians and Land Leaguers with baboon-like faces. Dan O'Connell, whom Punch again evoked from the shades, this time to play Virgil to Gladstone's Dante in the Irish "Inferno," though he was a potato-faced Irishman, would have resented this method of[Pg 28] criticism. As a matter of fact, Punch was so seriously remonstrated with for his Irish cartoons that he published a long article in self-defence and justification of his methods, maintaining that he never hit the weaker side because it was the weaker side, but because that side at the time appeared to be in the wrong:—

THE IRISH "INFERNO"

"Death, violent death, and painful wounds upon his neighbour he inflicts; and wastes, by devastation, pillage, and the flames, his substance."—Dante, Canto XI.

The Ogreish character is the embodiment of the spirit of Lawlessness, of Anarchy, and of that Communism which, by its recent No Rent manifesto, has now drawn down upon itself the just condemnation of such men as the Archbishops of Dublin and Cashel. Houghing[Pg 29] and mutilating dumb animals, maiming men and women, and shooting defenceless victims, are ugly crimes, and the embodiment of them in one single figure cannot be made too hideous or too repulsive. On the other hand, Punch has consistently and persistently kept before the public his ideal classic figure of Hibernia, graceful, gentle, tender, loving but "distressful," as being more or less in fear of that Ogre, her evil genius, from whose bondage may she soon be free; and then, mistress of herself, with peace and plenty in her land, blessed with wise Administration and Local Government, in happy and unbroken union with her sister, England, with a regal residence in her midst, may she see the emerald gem of the Western World set glittering in the crown of one who will be no longer a stranger.

Punch was moved to return to the subject in September, 1882, in order to repel the attacks made on him by the Spectator and the Nineteenth Century. The latter had not been sparing of rebuke:—

"No savages have ever been so mercilessly held up to loathing mockery as the Irish peasants by the one comic paper in Europe which has been most honourably distinguished for its restraint and decorum and good nature."

Here the defence takes the form of an imaginary trial before L.J. Public Opinion, in which Hibernia gives evidence in Punch's favour on the strength of cartoons published from 1844 onwards. Of course, Punch is acquitted and pronounced to have triumphantly refuted a calumnious attack. This much, however, must be admitted to Punch's credit, that he did not regard the campaign of outrage and defiance of the Law in Ireland as a reason for withholding remedial legislation, but supported Gladstone's measures designed to promote a settlement of the Land question.

Over the war with the Transvaal in 1881 Punch found it hard to find the justum medium. The true estimate of the situation was no more to be found in the view of the "excellent law-abiding people who would send off a British army of 15,000 men to crush out a rebellious enterprise," than in the demands of the enthusiastic humanitarians who would give "a struggling community their legitimate liberty." Punch frankly admitted that the Boers had been brutal to the natives, had shown an inability to govern themselves,[Pg 30] and by their unfitness either to establish or extend civilization had almost jeopardized the hold of the white man on South Africa altogether. Yet he supported the Boers in their contention that the Proclamation of Sir Theophilus Shepstone in 1877 was invalid. There was wrong and right upon both sides. Writing in January, 1881, he expressed the hope that a pacific settlement might be arrived at by a Cabinet "not deficient either in the ready pluck which deals with pressing danger or the quieter courage that is not afraid of timely compromise." These hopes were not fulfilled, and Punch's confidence in the pluck and courage of the Gladstone Cabinet was severely shaken in 1884 and 1885. In 1881 he was hardly a true interpreter of public opinion in his comments on the disaster of Majuba, when he excused the British defeat by the valour of the Boers. The cartoon, "Fas est et ab Hoste," and the verses on the inadequacy of our military training, rubbed in the lessons of the war with more point than consideration. The sequel of Majuba humiliated the majority of Englishmen: and the policy of compromise and concession failed to achieve a lasting settlement.

Lord Beaconsfield died in the spring, but Punch, though respectful and appreciative, added little in his memorial tribute to what he had said on many previous occasions in the way of criticism and eulogy. The insecurity of Russian rule had a year previously been recognized in a cartoon representing Nihilism lighting a torch in a cavern beneath the throne. The assassination of the Tsar Alexander II prompts an appeal to the "Northern Terror." Ordered Liberty must disown such fiendish methods. Punch, no lover of autocracy, admits that the Tsar was "the gentlest of his line," and implores the Russians to put manhood in their wrath, and "not foul the work they call divine with demon ruthlessness," an appeal that still remains unanswered. This was the year in which another, but an uncrowned Head, was laid low in President Garfield, and the loss of the United States is recognized as a common sorrow.

[Pg 31]

THE SCHOOL OF MUSKETRY

Boer (to F.-M. H.R.H. the Commander-in-Chief): "I say, Dook! You don't happen to want a practical 'musketry instructor,' do you?"

In Home politics no one is more frequently or unflatteringly referred to than Lord Randolph Churchill. Sambourne's[Pg 32] "Fancy Portrait" represents him as a midge: in verse, bitter and derisive, he is dubbed "the coming mannikin." On the other hand, Mr. Balfour is welcomed as an accession of strength to his party, and his wit is commended as being no less pretty than his uncle's, though less explosive in its flashing forth. To this year also belongs the reaction of "Fair" against "Free" Trade; and the adoption of the new cry by Lord Randolph and Mr. James Lowther, amongst others, is alluded to in a parody of a once popular drawing-room song, "O Fair Dove, O Fond Dove." But these amenities and trivialities were soon forgotten. In May, 1882, came the terrible tragedy of the Phœnix Park murders—the first deliberate political assassinations that had stained our history for centuries—and if Punch's references in prose and verse seem perfunctory and laboured, it may be pleaded in the words of the classic aphorism: "small cares are vocal, mighty woes are dumb." Better justice was rendered to the event in the cartoon of the "Irish Frankenstein" in which Parnell crouches horrified before the monster of his own creation. Punch did not, however, despair of conciliation, and a fortnight later supported the Arrears of Rent Bill as "a gift badly wanted," though his support was tempered by the observation that "Ireland is to have a clean slate, and, as usual, at the expense chiefly of the British taxpayer. That patient Jackass is to be saddled with another burden."

In the latter half of 1882 Ireland gave place to Egypt as a storm-centre. Arabi's revolt, which involved us in another of our small wars, was speedily suppressed, after Alexandria had been bombarded by Admiral Sir Beauchamp Seymour, and the rebel forces on land had been routed at Tel-el-Kebir by Sir Garnet Wolseley, "our only General," as he was then called. Punch celebrated his success and his peerage in an "Idyll of the Queen," beginning, "Garnet the brave, Garnet the fortunate." But he also recognized the strained relations with France which the campaign brought about, and uncompromisingly maintained our position in his cartoon, "The Lion's Just Share." Here the claims of all the other Powers are made ridiculous in comparison with those of Britain, France figuring as a poodle, Turkey as a fox, Spain as a mule, and Italy as a toy[Pg 33] greyhound. It is not a conciliatory picture; Punch was on safer ground in emphasizing the intrigues of Abdul Hamid and the unpatriotic sympathies of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt.

THE IRISH FRANKENSTEIN

"The baneful and blood-stained Monster ... yet was it not my Master to the very extent that it was my Creature?... Had I not breathed into it my spirit?" ... (Extract from the Works of C. S. P-rn-ll, M.P.)

Ireland resumed the first place as a preoccupying factor in British politics in 1883, when the capture of Monaghan by the Parnellites inspired Punch to depict him as cutting a bit off a coat labelled Ulster. Another cartoon, "Crowning the O'Caliban," prompted by the Irish leader's talk of the "moderation" of the Land League, shows him crowning a hideous[Pg 34] figure, sitting on a barrel labelled Anarchy, Rebellion and Murder, and receiving from him a bag containing £40,000—in reference to the "Parnell Tribute" presented to the Irish leader in that year.

Lord Randolph is easily the chief butt of the year. He is the "bumptious boy," the 'Arry of the hunting field, disregarding the old whip, Stafford Northcote. Yet amid all this derision there is an uneasy consciousness that this aggressive and ill-mannered young man may yet "arrive." In another cartoon Lord Randolph is drawn as a small boy looking at Lord Beaconsfield's statue and saying, "Ah! They'll have to give me a statue—some day." The twenty-fifth anniversary of John Bright's election for Birmingham, which fell in June, 1883, is treated in a very different spirit. Punch disagreed with Bright over the Egyptian war, but strikes no jarring note in the verses on his political silver wedding:—

That "annual blister, Marriage with deceased Wife's sister," as Gilbert called it, found Punch still faithful to the cause of relief, and exceedingly and impartially wroth against clerical obstructors, Anglican or Roman Catholic, to the extent of depicting Cardinal Manning and Archbishop Benson in the guise of old women. Where the Liquor Laws were concerned, however, Punch was frankly reactionary. In a "Look into Limbo" in July, 1883, he forecasts a general revolt against crotcheteers and faddists, his pet aversion being Local Option, which he defines as "a scheme for giving the six, who love spouting, supreme control over the liberty of the sixty or six hundred who dislike noise, and so hold their tongues until, in self-defence, they are compelled to use them."

Foreign politics do not obtrude themselves much on Punch's[Pg 35] vision during the Gladstonian administration. But he was alive to the menace of militarism contained in a characteristic speech by Marshal von Manteuffel, the sentiment of which curiously resembles some of the utterances of the ex-Crown Prince William:—

THE PSALM OF DEATH

"Gentlemen, I am a soldier, and war is the soldier's element; and well I should like again to experience the elevated feeling of commanding in a pitched battle, knowing that the balls of the enemy are every instant summoning men before the judgment seat of God."—Marshal von Manteuffel to the Provincial Committee of Alsace-Lorraine.

What the heart of the young Teuton said to the old Marshal is summed up as follows:—

Gambetta's brief and stormy career had closed at the beginning of the year, and Punch acknowledged the debt which France owed to his passionate patriotism and "wild strength" in a cartoon showing the Republic leaning sadly against his memorial bust while Bismarck, with arms folded, stands in the background.

Punch had for some twenty years been, on the whole, a consistent supporter of Mr. Gladstone, but his loyalty was more severely tested in the years 1884 and 1885 than at any[Pg 36] other time in the Liberal leader's career. Indeed, there were moments when it might be said to have broken down, and respect gave place to something like contempt. This mood was revealed in the very first of the Gordon cartoons early in 1884. Gordon is seen ploughing along through Egyptian difficulties with Gladstone, "The Grand Old Man of the (Red) Sea," complacently smirking on his back. In February Punch demands instant action. An angry John Bull bids Gladstone unmuzzle the British Lion at once, and Punch comments severely on the Premier's word-jugglery and sophistry. Later on we see Gladstone in the desert "after the Simoom," leading a camel. "Mirage" shows Gordon looking anxiously for relief from the battlements of Khartoum. A burlesque correspondence between a British Hero and the British Government pours satire on the cheap sympathy and lax opportunism of the Government, who are only concerned with saving their skin and their faces. The Premier's preoccupation with trivial home legislation comes in for indignant rebuke, and the Trelawny quatrain is adapted for the benefit of Gordon. The two cartoons in May are especially bitter. Mr. Gladstone, on the Treasury Bench, as Micawber, declares, "I am delighted to add that I have now an immediate prospect of something turning up. I am not at liberty to say in what direction." A fortnight later the Liberal Majority (or Mrs. Micawber) protests she will never desert Mr. Micawber—referring to the result of the Vote of Censure.

Punch, however, had no intention of crossing the floor of the House. The Conservative opposition to the Franchise Bill rekindled his Liberalism. Lord Salisbury's attitude in particular excited his hostility. He figures in verse as "The Losing Leader" (after Browning), and in a cartoon as the bell-wether followed into the pit by a flock of coroneted sheep. It was "no Curtius leap, but mutton madness," and the hotheads are compared to the Gadarene swine. Punch heaped laboured ridicule on the great Hyde Park Demonstration, printed burlesque advertisements suggesting employment for peers after the abolition of the House of Lords, and indulged in prophetic forecasts of "What it may come to."

[Pg 37]

"BILL" THE GIANT-KILLER

The Opposition suffered from the defection or lukewarmness of some of the wiser peers—Cranbrook, Cairns and Wemyss—and finally withdrew on the unofficial but opportune publication in the Standard of the outline of the Government's Redistribution Scheme. Punch gives his own account of the incident, according to which the whole Cabinet was mesmerized into revealing the Government plans, and summed up the whole business in his cartoon, "'Bill' the Giant-killer." The little Franchise Bill is seen blowing his horn before a castle (the House of Lords) with Lord Salisbury, as a huge Ogre, looking over the battlements and dismayed to find that his castle is not impregnable against Truth. In this context we may note that[Pg 38] the payment of members was foreseen by Punch in a burlesque "Thumb-nail Summary for 1884," printed in the first issue of that year. Under July we read:—

Newly elected Parliament meets for the first time, and commences a campaign of active legislative reform by abolishing the Speaker.

The "Payment of Members Bill," involving a State income of £2,000 a year, the right to a stall at West End Theatres on first nights, family railway tourist-tickets during the summer season, and free dining for self and friend at the Holborn Restaurant while Parliament is in Session, carried without a division.

The "Payment of Members Bill," being thrown out by the Peers, the House of Lords is abolished by a short comprehensive Act, framed for the purpose, in one sitting.

Much aristocratic distress prevails towards the end of the month, and gangs of hungry Peers infesting the public thoroughfares are prosecuted daily by the Secretary of the Charity Organisation Society, and ultimately shipped to a Coral Island in the Pacific.

Mr. Gladstone's seventy-fifth birthday on December 29, 1884, was welcomed in a set of verses in which the eulogy is only tempered by a faint reserve as to his lack of youthful resolution and his excess of caution. Had the anniversary fallen a few weeks later, Punch might have found it harder to pay such generous homage, for on February 7 appeared the unlucky cartoon which assumed that Gordon had been relieved. Yet even then, when the truth became known and while raising the cry of "Too late," Punch, though condemning delay and caution, deprecated party rancour:—

[Pg 39]

Punch's contribution to the Gordon "Memorial" was an ode from which we may quote one stanza:—

"MY BOYS!"

Other pens were busy over this episode, which inspired perhaps the most scarifying epigram of our times:—

The disaster, however, had one heartening result in the offer of military assistance from Canada, Victoria and New South Wales, duly recorded by Punch in his cartoon of the[Pg 40] Lion and the Colonial cubs. The year 1885 had opened with a sinister display of activity by dynamiters, and Punch rebuked Sir William Harcourt for his alleged apathy and imperious resentment of criticism by calling him the "Not-at-Home Secretary." America promptly took legislative action, refusing sanctuary to dynamiters, and was loudly applauded, while Mr. Parnell, in Punch's opinion, missed a golden opportunity for disavowing and condemning these outrages. In "What Mr. Parnell might have said" Punch printed the speech which he did not make but ought to have made, "as a man, an Irishman and a Christian."

[Pg 41]

THE POLITICAL "MRS. GUMMIDGE"

Mrs. Gummidge-Gladstone: "I ain't what I could wish myself to be. My troubles has made me contrairy. I feel my troubles, and they make me contrairy. I make the house uncomfortable. I don't wonder at it!!!"

John Peggotty-Bull (deeply sympathizing aside): "She's been thinking of the old 'un!"—David Copperfield.

The days of the Gladstone administration were numbered, and the motion in favour of Proportional Representation excited but a languid and academic interest. Punch thought the system far too complicated, and sought to reduce it to absurdity by a practical illustration. He was much more serious in his resentment at the hectoring attitude of Bismarck à propos of a recent speech of the Imperial Chancellor. In "Lecturing a Lecturer—a Friendly Tip to the Teuton Titan," he showed Bismarck standing in a truculent pose before a map of Europe while Punch looks on in amusement. The point of the accompanying verses is that Britain was not to be scared or scolded into submission:—

The attempt to represent Bismarck as a professor might not seem to show a very acute reading of the facts were it not that German professors proved the chief inflamers of militarism. It must be added that, as a set off to this expostulation, Punch indited a remarkably genial poem to Bismarck a couple of weeks later on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. But this can hardly have atoned for the extremely acid and acute satire on the Spirit of German Colonization published about the same time. Here Germania declares her intentions to the native[Pg 42] races in language which the treatment of the Herreros in German South-West Africa proved to be well within the mark:—

When the Government was defeated in June "on the Budget Stakes," as Punch put it, he went so far as to accuse Gladstone of "riding to lose," and resented this action as not quite on the square. A month earlier he had shown Gladstone as the political Mrs. Gummidge, the "Old 'un" being Disraeli, whose portrait hangs on the wall. There was a rumour of Mr. Gladstone going to the Lords, and Punch had a picture of Tennyson, in his robes in the "gay garden of elegant earls," inviting W. E. G. to "come into the garden," but Mr. Gladstone declines, preferring to paddle his own canoe. Lord Randolph was included in the Salisbury administration, which[Pg 43] held office for six months, as Secretary of State for India, but his elevation to Cabinet rank did not appease Punch's distrust—rather the reverse. He was not really an undersized man, but he invariably appears in Punch about this time as a boy, a mannikin or some diminutive pest, while the vehemence of his language is resented in bitter criticism of his "mud-spattering" abuse, vulgar invective, and "Billingsgate Babel." In particular a speech which he delivered at a Conservative gathering at Canford Manor, Wimborne, excited Punch's wrath, and prompted the picture of "Funny Little Randolph," as a "star comique" singing a topical song, "I don't care a rap," and exulting in his grimaces and bad manners. In the previous[Pg 44] year Punch had fallen foul of the "windy ravings of Loyalist Speakers" in Ireland, "the Loyalist Cæsar, and the Nationalist Pompey seem 'very much alike' indeed—in the matter of noisy mischief.... One feels that the Orange Champions would not hate 'disloyalty' so much did they not hate their 'Green' fellow countrymen more."

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE

Dick: "I've chose my Three Acres—next to the Parson's. I mean to dig and grow 'Taters. Where 'ave you chose yours?"

Harry: "I ain't chose no Land. I shan't grow no 'Taters. I shall take your 'Taters!"

Yet in the autumn of 1885, when Lord Carnarvon was Viceroy, Punch developed a strong distrust of the conciliatory policy of the Conservatives. In one cartoon he shows Captain Moonlight masked and armed at an open door, the bar of the Crimes Act having been removed. In October he wrote, "when Tyranny alone is free where is the safety—save for slaves." In another cartoon he showed the National League as the Irish Vampire, hovering over Hibernia in her uneasy sleep, and bade her awake and banish the hideous monster that was sapping her strength. Mr. Punch's "Political Address," issued shortly before the resignation of the Salisbury Cabinet, claimed that he was the only real Independent Candidate, the nominee of no party, section, or sect; bound to no programme, but "all for the four P's—Principle, Progress, Patriotism and Peace"—in fine, "whichever Party he returned to office, Mr. Punch, the non-partisan Member for Everywhere, will be in power." The new cry of "Three Acres and a Cow" raised at the close of 1885 left him cold, witness Du Maurier's "Sauce for the Goose." The verses in the same number on "New Words and Old Songs" imply that it was a mere vote-catching device, and at the same time mock at the cadging tactics of the Knights and Dames of the Primrose League founded in 1884.

On the resignation of the Salisbury Cabinet, Mr. Gladstone returned to power with Mr. Morley as Chief Secretary for Ireland. The story of his conversion to Home Rule, his failure to convert his colleagues, the split in the Cabinet and the introduction and rejection of the Home Rule Bill of 1886 is well told in the series of cartoons which begin with "At the Cross Roads" in February. There Gladstone is shown hesitating between Land Purchase and Home Rule, while Chamberlain as the cowboy advises the former. In "The Thanes fly from[Pg 45] me" we see Gladstone as Macbeth asking Morley (Seyton) to give him his armour: "This push will cheer me ever or disseat me now." The Home Rule Bill is typified as the "Divided Skirt." Gladstone as the Grand Old Man Milliner is trying in vain to reconcile Britannia to her new dress. The sequel is shown in the "Actæon" cartoon in which Gladstone is pulled down by his own hounds—Chamberlain, Hartington, Goschen—and in the adaptation of Meissonier's "Retreat from Moscow," where Gladstone figures as the defeated Napoleon. It is rather[Pg 46] curious, by the way, to note that during the debates Punch, in his "Essence of Parliament," describes Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Mr. Labouchere as the "two drolls of the House" at Question time.

THE "DIVIDED SKIRT"

Grand Old Man-Milliner (persuasively): "Fits beautifully, Madam! A little alteration here and there!"

Mrs. Britannia: "It's very uncomfortable, and I'm sure it isn't becoming. I shall never get along with it as it is!!"

On the merits of Home Rule Punch is rather non-committal, and speaks with more than one voice. The secession of the Liberal Unionists impressed him greatly; but he was bitterly antagonistic to the Ulster extremists, witness this epigram printed in May:—

Lucus a non Lucendo

Loyal? Nay, Ulster, you, for very shame

Should cede your long monopoly of that name.

Loyal—to whom—to what? To power, to pelf,

To place, to privilege, in a word, to self.

They who assume, absorb, control, enjoy all,

Must find it vastly pleasant to be "loyal."

Lord Randolph Churchill's famous jingle: "Ulster will fight. Ulster will be right," inspired a prophetic forecast of the result of such action, in which Ulster does fight and is defeated:—

The battle had been severe, but it was over at last. Belfast was taken. Derry was in ruins. Everywhere the Orange faction had been outnumbered and worsted. The reverse was crushing and complete. "We shall now," said the General commanding the National forces, "be suffered, perhaps, to hold our Parliament on College Green in peace." He turned to a batch of captured officers as he spoke. They were a motley crew. Among them figured several wearing the Queen's uniform, while here and there stood some distinguished sympathizer with the beaten cause, who had thrown in his lot to support rebellion against Queen and Empire. Among these latter a scion of a Ducal House and former well-known Member of the House of Commons, was weeping over a broken drumhead. The General singled him out, and beckoned him to approach. He drew near, surlily: "Well, my Lord," continued the Commander, in a tone of banter. "How about your prophecy? Ulster will fight. Ulster will be right. Ulster has fought. Ha! Ha!"

"And she has been wrong!" was the submissive and humble reply.

[Pg 47]

This squib was written before the rejection of the Home Rule Bill, a result which Punch, or the writer, probably did not anticipate. The accuracy of the forecast, however, remains still to be tested.

The Elections went against the Government, and Lord Salisbury was returned to power, with Lord Randolph as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. The verses which accompany and expand the cartoon of "The Grand Young Man" with the shade of Dizzy looking on, almost deviate into geniality. Punch fancies that Randolph, in spite of his defects of taste and manners, is "more than a mere mime," but, in contrasting his career with that of Lord Beaconsfield, points out that he was born in the purple and that his rise to power was easier and quicker. This comparatively friendly mood soon gave way to the old distrust, and by October, in "Swag, or the political Jack Sheppard," we see Lord Randolph, anxious to eclipse Dizzy as a Tory Turpin and "disher" of the Whigs, rifling a chest labelled "Liberal Measures," while Mr. Gladstone peers into the room at the back. Punch's distrust was partly justified by Lord Randolph's impetuous resignation in December. What might have been a great career was wrecked by an impatient temper. Immense ability, industry, courage and reforming zeal were there, and it was hardly fair to represent him as a modern Curtius leaping into the pit of Popularity. The Treasury was not the only Government Office in which reform was thwarted by obstruction and mismanagement. Punch attacked the War Office in the autumn of 1886 for setting its face "not merely against change, but against experiments pointing to change," and scouting all inventors as nuisances. He simultaneously proposed the foundation of an official organ of the Admiralty to be called "Dowb," the burlesque prospectus of which obliquely satirizes the abuse of perquisites, bad stores, muddled finance, futile commissions of inquiry and general incompetence in high places. Home politics engrossed attention throughout the year, but Punch did not fail to note the gathering clouds in the Balkans, when Prince Alexander of Battenberg, the hero of Slivnitza, a gallant and picturesque figure, had abdicated the[Pg 48] throne of Bulgaria, Russian jealousy having rendered his position untenable. In the cartoon of "The Vanishing Lady," the Tsar is shown as a juggler using the cloak of diplomacy to extinguish the freedom of the country he had helped to emancipate. The same year which witnessed the disappearance from the political scene of Prince Alexander was marked by the birth of Alfonso XIII of Spain, and Punch offered his ceremonial greeting to one of the few sovereigns who survived the monarchical débâcle of the Great War of 1914.

The Victorian age reached its grand climacteric in 1887, the year of the Queen's Golden Jubilee and the gathering of the Kings and Captains. Of the celebrations we speak elsewhere. Punch, no longer anti-Papist, linked them with those at the Vatican—in honour of Leo XIII, who had been ordained priest in 1837—in his lines on "Two Jubilees":—

And so on with praise of the Good Queen and Holy Father, Punch, as a "true freeman unfettered by servile fear or hate's poor purblind heat," being free to celebrate them both.

It was also the Centenary year of the United States, welcomed by Punch in John Bull's song on Miss Columbia's Hundredth birthday to the air of "I'm getting a big boy now." Mr. Gladstone was invited to the celebrations but did not cross the Atlantic. John Bull abounds in professions of good-will, but there is a slight sting in the last chorus:—

[Pg 49]

THE CHALLENGE

[Pg 50]

The Salisbury Cabinet was strengthened by the inclusion of Mr. Goschen as Chancellor of the Exchequer—Mr. Goschen whom Lord Randolph "forgot," and whom Punch styled the "Emergency man," a phrase now also forgotten, but then applied to the volunteers who assisted boycotted farmers and loyalists in Ireland. Mr. Balfour was at the Irish Office, the scene of his greatest administrative successes, and the Crimes Act and the Land Act were the two principal measures of the Session. In those days The Times was the great champion of the Unionist policy, and in the summer of 1887 is shown prodding on Lord Salisbury and Mr. Balfour, armed with Crimes Act blunderbusses, in their attack on the Land League wild boar. The Land League was "proclaimed" in August; and already the controversy had begun between Mr. Parnell and The Times over the former's alleged participation in the responsibility for the Phoenix Park murders. The question was raised in a series of articles on "Parnellism and Crime"; but the charges were not made specific until the following year. John Bright's secession from the Gladstonian Liberals had been a serious blow, and his contributions to the Unionist armoury were so vigorous and pointed, that it is rather strange to find Punch assailing him in March, 1887, for his pacificist tendencies:—

John Bright certainly spoke daggers against those who, in his own phrase, kept the rebellion pot always on the boil.

The Earl of Iddesleigh, better known as Sir Stafford Northcote, died in January. There is an unmistakable reference to Lord Randolph Churchill's treatment of his one-time leader in the verses in which Punch paid homage to a statesman "worn yet selfless, disparaged and dispraised," yet a "pattern of proud but gentle chivalry":—

[Pg 51]

Here the reference to Lord Randolph is inferential though unmistakable. But an opportunity for having a dig at him is never missed. When the Bulgarian throne was offered to Prince Ferdinand, and his cautious and diplomatic tactics resulted in long delays, Punch in pure malice suggested that the crown should be offered to Lord Randolph. He may be forgiven, however, in view of the remarkably accurate estimate which he formed of the slyness, timidity and meanness of "Ferdinand the Fox," and the alternations of servility and insolence in his attitude towards Russia. Bismarck again comes in for honorific notice this year in the guise of Sintram, accompanied and menaced by Socialism (the Little Master), but confidently riding along on his steed Majority. But 1888 was a momentous year for Germany—the year in which two Kaisers died and a third succeeded to the heritage of the Hohenzollerns. The old Emperor Wilhelm, the "Greise Kaiser," died on March 9; within a hundred days his son, the "Weise Kaiser," had fallen to the fatal malady which had sapped his splendid physique, to be succeeded in turn by the "Reise Kaiser," the nickname bestowed on Wilhelm II for his passion for movement and travel. At the moment of his accession Punch was not inclined to be critical. The cartoon of "The Vigil" in June of that year expresses no misgivings, but only sympathy for one called to bear so heavy a burden. And this view is amplified in the verses in which the lessons of the past are used to fortify the hopes of the future:—

THE VIGIL

Only a fortnight before the death of the old Emperor, Bismarck's Army Bill had awakened Punch's misgivings. He reluctantly admired the strength of the lion combined with the shrewdness of the fox; and put into Bismarck's mouth the sonorous couplet:—

[Pg 53]

A WISE WARNING

(Founded on the first part of an old Fable of Dædalus and Icarus, the Sequel of which Mr. Punch trusts may never apply.)

But by September it was the young Kaiser, not Bismarck, who invited "A Word in Season." The counsel was prompted by a speech in which he declared, "It is the pride of the Hohenzollerns to reign at once over the noblest, the most intellectual and most cultured of nations," a sentiment mild when compared with later utterances, yet sufficiently thrasonic to earn a rebuke[Pg 54] for indulging in demagogic flattery, coupled with the advice to read Lord Wolseley's article in the Fortnightly on Marlborough, Wellington and Napoleon, and to emulate the reticence of Moltke. In less than a month the inevitable cleavage between the Kaiser and his Chancellor is foreshadowed in the splendid cartoon reproduced, where Bismarck as Dædalus warns Wilhelm as Icarus, in a paraphrase of Ovid:—

For the establishment of the Triple Alliance Punch held Bismarck responsible. The three high contracting Powers become the "Sisters Three," Italy as Atropos, Austria as Lachesis, and Germany as Clotho. The policy is expounded in "a Bismarckian version of an old classical myth." Bismarck claims to be working for peace so long as he is the cloud compeller. While he is in power it will be all well with Germany. Of Austria he is less certain, owing to the precariousness of her crown, but he counts confidently on Italy, and ends on an optimistic note, dwelling on the pacific aims of this new political pact. It is hard to tell whether this is irony on the part of Punch or a genuine approval of the Triple Alliance. But there is no doubt of his mistrust of Germany's ulterior motives in undertaking to co-operate with England in suppressing the Slave Trade in Africa—a mistrust expressed in the quatrain:—

[Pg 55]

The sequel justified the suspicion, and less than a year later Punch published a companion cartoon in which the Lion, coming round the corner, finds the Fox has pulled down the notice "Down with Slavery" and is about to put up a Proclamation in which "Up" takes the place of "Down."

Bismarck's hostility to the Empress Frederick was notorious. In her husband's brief reign there was a question of their daughter, Princess Victoria, marrying Prince Alexander, ex-sovereign of Bulgaria. Punch represented Bismarck forbidding the banns, and putting an extinguisher labelled "Policy" on Cupid. It was stated that Bismarck threatened to resign if the marriage plan were proceeded with; Punch, the sentimentalist, believed that love would find out a way, and it did, but in a different direction. The Prince married, but the lady was not of royal or even noble birth, and as Count Hartenau he remained in obscurity and died while still a young man.

France also had her troubles in 1888, for this was the year of Boulanger, the brav' Général, who captivated the mob for a while, seemed at one moment to be within an ace of overthrowing the Republic and establishing a stratocracy, but collapsed ignobly in the testing hour. Punch recognized the danger in his cartoon of France ruefully balancing the Cap of Liberty on her finger. But even in L'Audace, where Boulanger is shown climbing up a steep cliff, with "Deputy" at the bottom, "President" and "Dictator" at the top, and the Imperial Eagle peering over the summit—we are made to feel that the climber is not equal to the task. The conditions are exactly reproduced in the companion picture, "Many a Slip," only that Boulanger is shown rolling down the precipice.

New South Wales celebrated her Centenary on January 26, 1888, and Punch added his tribute in a happily-worded greeting under the familiar heading, "Advance, Australia!":—

The same year witnessed the starting of the Australian navy. "Naturally the biggest island in the world has the biggest coast-line, and so needs the biggest fleet." The lead was taken by Victoria. Punch saw nothing but healthy rivalry between the different colonies as the outcome of the movement, but looked to Federation as the true means to prevent the different Australian Colonies from being at "Southern Cross-purposes" when they all had their navies. The trouble in the Soudan prompts a warning from the Shade of Gordon: "If you mean to send help, do it thoroughly and do it at once," but anxiety was allayed by the success of General Grenfell at Suakin, an example of prompt action worthy of the attention of "long-halting statesmen."

[Pg 57]

The most important measure of the Session at Westminster was the Local Government Bill establishing County Councils. Punch made considerable capital out of Mr. Chamberlain's rapprochement to the Tory interests. At a meeting of the National Society, Archbishop Benson had referred amid cheers to the words of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain at the opening of a School Board in Birmingham, and his acknowledgment of the fact that Voluntary Schools must have their place in the education of the people recognized. Mr. Chamberlain's views on the Liquor question had shown a similar concession to the demands of the brewing trade. So Punch represents the "Artful Joe" walking arm-in-arm with the Archbishop and "Bung," and observing, "What a lot of nice friends I'm making." Mr. Chamberlain is already acknowledged to be "incomparably the best debater in the House"; Punch rendered full justice to his ability, but his chief cartoonist, Tenniel, though still capable of splendid work, never managed to seize and reproduce the alert vivacity of Mr. Chamberlain's features. The progress of the controversy between Mr. Parnell and The Times impelled Punch as an amicus curiæ to suggest that one or other of the disputants should wake up the Public Prosecutor in preference to the appointment of a Special Commission. The latter method of procedure, however, was adopted. The course of the inquiry was followed by Punch in a series of articles, and when Parnell was exculpated on the chief count by the breakdown of The Times witness Pigott, who confessed to forgery, fled the country and committed suicide, Punch exhibited the Clock-face doing penance in a white sheet with the lines, "His honour rooted in dishonour stood, etc." But when the Report of the Commission was finally published, Punch found it a veritable chameleon, which disappointed both sides, because most of those interested wore party-coloured spectacles or else were colour-blind.

England was visited in 1889 by two of the most perturbing personalities in European politics, the Kaiser Wilhelm II and General Boulanger. Punch, however, resolutely and, as it turned out, rightly refused to take the brav' Général seriously, though he found in him plenty of food for disparaging satire[Pg 58] as a shoddy hero on his prancing steed, as a "General Boum" in real life (recalling the grotesque figure in La Grande Duchesse), and as an uninvited guest, whose unwelcome arrival John Bull took as an occasion for going off to the French Exhibition. In a burlesque cartoon on France's embarrassments in choosing the right form of Government, Punch exhibited President Carnot, the Comte de Paris, Prince Jerome Bonaparte ("Plon-Plon") and General Boulanger dancing a grotesque pas de quatre before the French Electorate. But Boulanger was already ended, though his death, by his own hand, did not take place till the autumn of 1891. His histrionic equipment was perfect, and the French, though the most logical of people, are often carried away by their theatrical sense. He had served with some distinction in the army, and he was a fine figure on a horse. But he lacked the inflexible will, the iron resolution and the ruthlessness which make Cæsars and Napoleons; and Punch's epitaph is a closely-packed summary of the forces and influences which conspired to his undoing:—

The Kaiser's visit to attend the Naval Review at Spithead is treated in a somewhat jocular and cavalier spirit in the cartoon, "Visiting Grandmamma":—

Grandma Victoria: "Now, Willie dear, you've plenty of soldiers at home; look at these pretty ships—I'm sure you'll be pleased with them!"

The Kaiser is shown with a toy spade making sand castles for his soldiers. Yet these soldiers were giving ground for[Pg 59] anxiety—witness the cartoon in January on the armed peace of Europe with Peace holding out the olive in one hand, with the other on a sword hilt. The inevitable verses allude to the "truculent Kaiser" and evince mistrust of one who comes in such equivocal guise. Punch credited Bismarck with exerting a restraining influence on the warlike activities of the Triple Alliance. He showed him in the spring playing Orpheus to this Cerberus, and lulling it to sleep. But the Kaiser inspired no such confidence, and at the close of the year he is shown posing as a peacemaker but preparing for war—fondling the dove on his hand, while behind is the eagle, with bayonets for feathers, feeding on the Army estimates.

THE RIVAL PETS; OR, FONDLING AND FEEDING

Another sovereign whom Punch failed to read with the same[Pg 60] penetration was King Leopold II of the Belgians. On the occasion of the International Anti-Slavery Congress at Brussels in November, 1889, Punch, while very properly applauding the occasion as tending to the overthrow of "the demon of the shackle and the scourge," acclaimed Leopold II as a "magnanimous King." Cecil Rhodes, some years later, after an interview with the same monarch, said that he felt just as if he had been spending the morning in the company of the Devil.

Punch, like other critics, was happier in dealing with the dead than the living, and the death of John Bright in March inspired a generous though discriminating tribute to the memory and achievements of "Mercy's sworn militant, great Paladin of Peace":—

These memorial verses, however, if I may say so without incurring the charge of unfilial disrespect—suffer throughout this period from prolixity. The writer says excellently, but diffusely, in ninety lines what is summed up in the majestic quatrain of Scott which stands at their head:—

Mr. Gladstone's golden-wedding day in July furnished the[Pg 61] theme for friendly and affectionate congratulations to a couple who stood for "Darby and Joan" in excelsis. Mr. Gladstone's domestic happiness was unclouded, but he was subjected to a painful ordeal in 1890 by the disclosures of the Parnell-O'Shea divorce case and the split in the Irish Party which followed. Punch supported Gladstone in his breach with the Irish leader. He is shown in one cartoon refusing to give his hand to Parnell:—

Gladstone is acquitted of "mere Pharisaic scorn." But an element bordering on the ridiculous enters into the succeeding cartoon of Gladstone and Morley as the Babes in the Wood, while Parnell and Healy as the wicked uncles are seen fighting in the background. The further developments of the struggle are shown in an adaptation of Meissonier's famous "La Rixe," in which Parnell is held back by Dillon and O'Brien from Healy, who is restrained by Justin McCarthy. Parnell's sun was setting in gloom and storm, but a greater than Parnell was passing from the stage of high politics in 1890. For this was the year of the dismissal of Bismarck by the Kaiser, commemorated in the issue of March 29 by Tenniel's famous "Dropping the Pilot" cartoon. Punch saw no good in the change; he indulges in ominous speculations. Was Bismarck animated by faith or fear of the future in quitting his post? Would the new Pilot strike on sunken shoals or "wish on the wild main, the old Pilot back again"? The Kaiser's gifts are seen to be no solace for the wound of dismissal. As a matter of fact, Bismarck never used the ducal title of Lauenburg conferred on him. In little more than a month the Kaiser is shown as the Enfant Terrible of Europe, "rocking the boat," while France, Italy, Austria and Spain all appeal to him to be more careful and not tempt fate. The Kaiser's dabbling in industrial problems, in the hope of propping his rule by concessions to Socialism, meets with no sympathy. But a more serious ground for discontent arose over the cession of[Pg 63] Heligoland. Punch waxes indignantly sarcastic over Lord Salisbury's deal in East Africa by which Germany gained Heligoland as a bonus. It was "given away with a pound of tea"; Salisbury's weakness was worse than Gladstone's scuttle and surrender, and Punch ruefully recalls the verses he printed nineteen years earlier:—

TIME THE AVENGER!

On June 24, 1871, Mr. Punch sang, à propos of the Germans desiring to purchase Heligoland:

Though to rule the waves, we may believe they aspire,

If their Navy grows great, we must let it;

But if one British island they think to acquire,

Bless their hearts, don't they wish they may get it?

And they have got it!

[Pg 62]

"GIVEN AWAY WITH A POUND OF TEA!!!"

But the fashionable world went on its way unheeding. Du Maurier satirized this indifference in a picture in which one lady asks another: "Where is this Heligoland they're all talking so much about?" and her friend replies, "Oh, I don't know, dear. It's one of the places lately discovered by Mr. Stanley."

Russia, it may be added, also incurred Punch's censure in 1890, the legalized persecution of Jews forming the theme of a prophetic cartoon in August, in which the shade of Pharaoh warns the Tsar, as he stands with a drawn sword and his foot on a prostrate Hebrew: "Forbear! That weapon always wounds the hand that wields it."

In 1891 the new "orientations" of the European Powers attract a good deal of notice. The Franco-Russian entente is symbolized by the Bear making France dance to the tune of the Russian loan. Punch's distrust of Russia—semi-Asiatic and half-Tartar—dated from the 'forties. The tightening of the Franco-Russian Entente in 1891 gave him no pleasure. He quotes with manifest approval the comment of a daily paper on the infatuation of France:—

The success of a Russian Loan is not dearly purchased by a little effusion, which, after all, commits Russia to nothing. French sentiment is always worth cultivating in that way, because unlike the British variety, it has a distinct influence upon investments.

[Pg 64]

The cartoon of President Carnot embracing, and being hugged by, the Bear was founded on an episode at Aix-les-Bains where he kissed a little girl in Russian dress who gave him a bouquet, saying: "J'embrasse la Russie." Punch's verses represent Carnot as fully conscious of his blague, yet with an uneasy consciousness that the Bear is going to squeeze him. Russia's religious intolerance again comes in for strong condemnation. The Tsar is shown wielding the knout on an aged Jew while the Emperor of China greets a Christian priest. This contrast was based on the issue of a decree in which the Chinese Government condemned anti-Christian excesses. In another cartoon the Tsar bids his minions remove another aged Jew on the familiar ground that Jews were always to the fore in Nihilist plots. The European Powers, it should be added, were not satisfied by China's official tolerance. The treatment of foreigners had provoked a collective protest, from which Russia abstained. So when John Bull, as a sailor, asks Russia to take a hand in controlling the Chinese Dragon, Russia replies: "Well, I don't know—you see, he's a sort of relation of mine!"

The admiration which Punch had so often if reluctantly expressed for Bismarck in office yielded to something like disgust at his undignified bitterness in retirement, above all at his use of the "reptile press" as a means of attacking the Imperial policy and Caprivi, his successor as Chancellor. This feeling animates the "Coriolanus" cartoon in February, where Bismarck is shown with the Hamburger Nachrichten in his hand. The death of Moltke a couple of months later is duly recorded in a versified tribute making all the usual points—on his taciturnity, composure, foresight and strategy. With his death Bismarck became the lonely survivor of "the Titanic three, Who led the Eagles on to Victory." Moltke died full of years and honours. It was otherwise with Parnell who at forty-five fell,

[Pg 65]

Punch notes his coldness, his impassive persistence as an agitator, but says nothing of the ill-concealed contempt he showed for his followers, and the entire lack of geniality, bonhomie, and humour, which partly explained the mercilessness with which he was pursued once his power was shaken. As he had never won or tried to win their affection, he could not expect to find magnanimity in mean souls.

The wheels of the Parliamentary chariot drove heavily over the Land Purchase Bill. Punch showed Mr. Balfour leading the poor tired little Bill through a maze of amendments. A propos of its complicated nature and endless, obscure sub-sections, which aroused much hostile criticism in The Times, Mr. Balfour is made to say:—

This, of course, was in the days when The Times was ultra-Unionist. However, the Bill finally passed through its various stages, and Mr. W. H. Smith exhibits it with the fruits of the Session in June, 1891, as a gigantic strawberry. The choice of this particular fruit as a symbol was dictated by the fact that both he and Lord Salisbury had exhibited strawberries at the Horticultural Show.

The relations of Canada with England and the United States provoked much discussion in 1891. Punch expressed confidence in Canada's loyalty, and simultaneously published a burlesque "Canadian Calendar (to be hoped not prophetic)," foretelling complete absorption in the United States. It begins with Reciprocity with the U.S.A., and goes on with the dying[Pg 66] out of trade with and emigration from the old country, the increase of improvident Irish, the request of Canada to be annexed to America, and finally her decline into a tenth-rate Yankee state. On the death of the Canadian premier, Sir John Macdonald, "old To-morrow" as he was nicknamed from his habit of procrastination, Punch overlooked the thrasonical magniloquence criticized in an earlier poem, and only dwelt on his long services to the Dominion.

Earlier in the year Punch had typified the Federation of the Australian Colonies in a boating cartoon, the British Lion from the bank applauding a racing eight, manned by cubs and coxed by a kangaroo, and bidding them swing together.

On the death of the old Duke of Devonshire at the close of 1891, and the accession of Lord Hartington to the title, Mr. Chamberlain became leader of the Liberal-Unionists in the Commons. Mr. Chamberlain, in spite of the rapprochement already noted, was still looked upon in some quarters as a somewhat dangerous Radical, and in January, 1892, Punch represented the clock-faced Times lecturing him on his responsibilities. Mr. Balfour succeeded Mr. W. H. Smith on the death of that unselfish, honest and capable statesman, as Leader of the House of Commons. The shades of Dizzy and Pam are friendly in the cartoon which records the promotion; slightly anxious on the score of Mr. Balfour's youth—he was then forty-four—but on the whole inclined to think that he will do. Parliament was dissolved in June, the Liberals were returned at the Elections, and the new House met on the now ominous date of August 4.

NATIONAL DEFENCE

In the 'seventies Punch, as we have seen, was decidedly non-interventionist. By the middle 'eighties he found it harder to preserve a middle course between the extremes of Jingoism and Pacificism, though he bestows impartial ridicule on both "Scuttle and Grab" in his burlesque forecast of the alternate foreign policies of the ultra-Imperialists and the ultra-Radicals. This was published early in 1885, when the Liberals were in power, and though deliberately fantastical and even[Pg 67] farcical, shows how the wildest anticipations are sometimes verified by fact. Four periods are chosen. In 1890 the Grab Party inaugurate a forward policy all round by spending fifty millions upon the Army and Fleet, and are turned out by John Bull when it is found that their schemes involve:—

The seizure of sixteen islands, conquest of five native races, absorption of fifty thousand square miles of—useless—new territory, seven small wars, two large ones, four massacres, and an Income-tax of five shillings in the pound.

The Scuttle Party is installed in power in 1895 with a big majority and bigger promises:—

Finishes off all wars by caving in all round, retiring everywhere and relinquishing everything. Cuts down Army, and resolves to sell half the Ironclad Fleet as old metal. Power which buys it immediately utilizes it against us. Another Fleet has to be ordered at once at fancy prices in response to Press clamour. Scuttle Party, in cleft stick, halts between two opinions; in pursuit of peace is found fighting all over the world, and after frantic efforts at economy, runs up Income-tax to six shillings in the pound. John Bull turns out Scuttle Party.

Then we jump to A.D. 2000, but even then the wildest stretch of Punch's imagination does not exceed the establishment of conscription and the raising of the Army to a million men. Finally in his last forecast Punch is reduced to solving the problem by an insurrection under a popular soap-boiler, the seizure of the leaders of the two parties, and the banishing of both "Scuttle" and "Grab" from the political dictionary.

With the return of the Conservatives to power, we find that Punch, so far from rebuking the Government for their expenditure on bloated armaments, develops into something like an alarmist on the subject of national preparedness and the folly of "cheap defences." The inefficiency of the Army and Navy is a constant theme from 1887 onwards. The bursting of big naval guns, the badness of munitions and designs for battleships are dealt with in bitter satirical verses: while the damaging report of the Parliamentary Committee on Army equipment and stores prompts a series of advertisements of the "Benevolent[Pg 68] Bayonet," the "Blazing Breech-loader," the "Comic Cartridge," and so on. Dishonest contractors and incompetent officials are attacked as "the Vultures of Trade" and "the Vermin of Office and Mart." The persistent discouragement of volunteers by the military authorities was an old grievance of Punch's, and it crops up in this year in connexion with the removal of the camp from Wimbledon by order of "George Ranger." Indeed, the bitterness of Punch's attack on the Duke of Cambridge revives the memories of the 'forties, when a duke, royal or otherwise, was his favourite cockshy:—

Punch was not generous or just in representing the Duke of Cambridge as a mere obstructive; and the sequel has not verified his forecast. Wimbledon Common remains a great playground of the people, and the annual meetings of the National Rifle Association, held at Wimbledon from 1860 to 1888, have not suffered in prestige or value since the move to Bisley in 1890.

References to the inadequate state of the national defences reach their highest frequency in 1888. We have the duel between Lord Randolph Churchill preaching retrenchment and Lord Charles Beresford advocating expenditure on an increased Navy. This is followed up by Punch's "Alarmist Alphabet" dedicated to our naval and military experts, to whose warnings our rulers attach no particular importance:—

Simultaneously Britannia figures in a cartoon as the "Unprotected Female" surrounded by a litter of burst guns, broken contracts, broken blades, unfinished ships, etc. Then we find Punch suddenly appearing at Downing Street at "the first meeting of the Inner Cabinet," and shattering the complacent satisfaction of the Premier and the War Secretary by a peremptory and menacing demand for speeding-up in the supply of rifles and more energetic recruiting. In July, under the heading of "Punch's Parallels," the tercentenary of the Armada is celebrated in a satiric perversion of the famous game of bowls into "a nice little game of Ducks and Drakes—with the public money," in which Lord George Hamilton, the First Lord of the Admiralty, is attacked as a lethargic aristocrat. Another cartoon shows Moltke rebuking the Duke of Cambridge for persistently discouraging the volunteer movement; while the enforced expense of life in the regular army is condemned in "The Pleasant Way of Glory." Commenting on the swamping[Pg 71] of the subaltern's pay by compulsory but unnecessary outlay, Punch remarks that "the life of the British officer, as thus revealed, seems to resolve itself into a prolonged struggle to keep up a false position on insufficient means"; and he regrets that Lord Wolseley seemed to acquiesce in the evil instead of encouraging British officers to be more frugal. Such criticisms are not unfamiliar even to-day, for the old traditions die hard. On the general question of national and especially naval defence, Punch was not by any means a voice crying in the wilderness. Public opinion had been worked up by other powerful advocates, amongst whom Punch rightly mentions Mr. W. T. Stead. The debate on the Address in the session of 1889 was prolonged and acrimonious. Early in March, however, Lord George Hamilton moved a resolution, on which the Naval Defence Bill was founded, authorizing an expenditure of £21,500,000 on the Navy. The measure, of course, met with some opposition from various quarters, but public opinion was manifestly in its favour, and it received the Royal Assent before the end of May.

Throughout this campaign it is interesting to note how the personality of the German Emperor obtrudes itself as a disquieting factor in the international race in armaments. At the close of 1891 a lady with alleged abnormal "magnetic" power was giving performances at the Alhambra, and Punch adapts the incident in a cartoon suggested by the Kaiser's dictum—inscribed in the Visitors' Book of the City Council at Munich—Suprema Lex Regis Voluntas. The accompanying verses on "The Little Germania Magnate" are derisive, not to say abusive, with their references to "Behemoth Billy," "Panjandrum-plus-Cæsar," "Thraso" and "Vulcan-Apollo." Punch was evidently inclined to regard the German Emperor as one of those "impossible people" who, as The Times had suggested in a happy phrase, ought to "retire into fiction." Unfortunately he remained a fact, and was not to be killed by Punch's mouth.

[Pg 72]

MEN AND MASTERS: WORK AND WAGES

In the preceding volume I endeavoured to trace and account for the waning of Punch's reforming zeal and democratic ardour, and to illustrate his gradual movement from Left to Right Centre in the 'fifties, 'sixties, and early 'seventies. Many abuses had been remedied, the barriers of class privilege had been broken down, the cleavage between the "Two Nations" was less glaring, national prosperity had increased, the ladder of learning had been set up by Forster's Education Act. Free Trade and Gladstonian finance had eased the burden of the working man and the taxpayer. England was not a Utopia, but she had travelled far from the days of the Hungry 'Forties. In December, 1883, the late Sir Robert Giffen, one of the most trustworthy and deservedly respected of the much abused tribe of statisticians, published a comparative table of the consumption of the agricultural labourer in 1840 and 1881. Punch's comment takes the form of an imaginary letter from a farm hand under the heading of "Food and Figures":—

"Sir, Maister Punch,

"Look 'ee here, Sir. Squire Giffen, a-spoutin' tother night about I and we country folk, stuck to it that we wur better fed nowadays than we wur forty-one year ago; and them as 'eard 'im say that there, they up and swore as how we wur a grumblin', cantankerous, discontented, set o' chaps as didn't knaw naught of our own jolly good luck. Now look 'ee 'ere, Maister Punch; 'ere be Squire Giffen's figures. Says he that forty-one year ago, that be in 1840, I eat this 'ere in the first column, say in about a couple o' weeks, and that now I gets through this 'ere, wot he's set down in the second, in the same matter o' time."

The table follows, and then Hodge continues:—

"Now addin' all that there up, that be for 1840, about 69 lbs. of food for I; while now he says, says he, 'Hodge, you old pig,[Pg 73] you swallows 373 lbs.—that be six times as much—just as easy in the same time, and you grumbles at it too!' Now look 'ee 'ere, Maister Punch, if I does that there—and figures is figures—well ain't it plain that a feed up like that must give I such a fit o' blues from indigestion, as sets I hankerin' about franchise and land stealin', and such like things o' which I knows and cares just naught, and gets I called by a set o' chaps, as wants nothin' more than to make summat out o' me, yours all of a puzzle,

"Discontented Hodge."

THE WAGES QUESTION
(Overheard at Ironopolis)

Intelligent Working Man: "Arbitration! Ca' that arbitration! Why, they've given it against us!"

"Appetite comes with eating"; and here we have a concrete and "luciferous" example of the somewhat grudging approval which made Punch acknowledge improved conditions, while at the same time he expressed his misgivings at the leverage which the improvement furnished to agitation and unrest. In the[Pg 74] 'forties Punch had recognized that the legitimate grievances of the underfed masses were a real danger. He now recognized, or at any rate implied, that when well-fed they might become equally dangerous under the guidance of extremists. He still believed that there was a great fund of inert anti-revolutionary sentiment amongst the rank and file of the people, but long before the days of "direct action," was alive to the possibilities inherent in the oligarchical rule of Trade Unionism. He saw that a well-organized minority in a key industry might dislocate the whole fabric of production, and when in 1877 the miners attempted to restrict output in order to keep up the price of coal and the rate of wages, addressed the following remonstrance to Mr. Macdonald, the mining M.P.:—

THE ARGUMENT A MINORI

Towards the close of the 'seventies industrial distress was so general that in January, 1879, Punch abandoned his critical attitude and appealed for united effort and a cessation of party strife to drive the wolf from the door. The "New Charity" that he recommended was a voluntary curtailment of the luxuries of the rich—balls, entertainments, dinners, and theatre parties, the purchase of jewels, wines, etc.—in order to help in relieving distress. This involved a surrender of his old argument in favour of the production of luxuries on the ground that they provided lucrative employment. At the same time, the terrorism applied to non-Unionists by the "Rebecca" gangs in Durham moved him to vigorous protest, and in the verses on "blacklegs" in April he writes:—

[Pg 75]

THE TEMPTER

Spirit of Anarchy: "What! No work! Come and enlist with me—I'll find work for you!!"

Henry George's Progress and Poverty, which attained a wide circulation in 1883, comes in for a good deal of hostile criticism. It was an epoch-making book; and though, as water to wine when compared to the strong drink of modern anti-capitalistic literature, it was thought worthy of serious attention by Punch. In his cartoon in January, 1884, Red Riding Hood is confronted by the Wolf of Socialism, with Henry George's book peeping out of his pocket. Punch, who reminds us that Mr. Labouchere called the author "George the Fifth," admits that gross inequalities existed, but saw no remedy in Henry[Pg 76] George's policy, which he regarded as wholesale robbery, and in "St. George and the Dragon" ranked the American author along with Proudhon, the author of the saying "Property is Theft." Yet a few weeks later he rebukes the Duke of Albany, who, in a speech at Liverpool, had recommended that the poor should be taught cookery. Punch was a great believer in cookery, but held that your hare must be caught first:—

In 1886 the number of the unemployed rose to a formidable figure. There was rioting in Pall Mall and Piccadilly on February 8th after a meeting in Trafalgar Square, and Punch, under the heading, "Sneaking Sedition," indulged in a violent tirade against the "firebrand fanatics," Messrs. Hyndman, John Burns, and Champion. It is headed by a picture in which Punch is gleefully stringing up three puppets whose faces are portraits of the three "blatant trumpeters of sedition who prated a mixed mob to passion heat, and then discreetly withdrew whilst that passion found vent in wrecking and ruffianism." The writer denies with an exuberance of fiery rhetoric that they represented the unemployed, or anything but "fanatic hatred and shallow conceit—that is to say, themselves." They were "cowardly Catilines of the gutter," recruiting sergeants of the "Army of Anarchy," "Sedition-spouters," who egged on "the drunken, violent unworking-Man" to outrage. Punch appealed to all honest working men to repudiate these so-called but misrepresentative leaders, and "sweep these social democrats for ever from the land." It is a tremendous tirade, but disfigured by a great deal of sheer abuse, and the cause of law and order was not assisted thereby. Sedition cannot be quelled by strong language, and Punch admitted that honest wage-earners were exploited by Capitalists, Monopolists, and Middlemen; that all must compassionate the workless working man, and that all should help him by friendly aid at the moment and hereafter by well-considered reform. In the same number[Pg 78] a strong appeal is made to the opulent to help the Mansion House Fund for Unemployed, and not to be scared by frothy street sedition. There had been wild talk at the Trafalgar Square meeting about gallows and lamp-posts for Ministers and Members of Parliament, and Punch, who on occasion was a true prophet, may be pardoned for his failure to foresee a time when John Burns would be denounced as a crusted bureaucrat and Mr. Hyndman publish an enthusiastic eulogy of the Clemenceau whose motto was "Je fais la guerre."

[Pg 77]

SOWING TARES
(With a thousand apologies to
Sir John E. Millais, Bart., R.A.)

THE TWO VOICES

One of the Real "Unemployed": "How am I to make my voice heard in this blackguard row!"

THE GUINEA-FOWL THAT LAYS THE GOLDEN EGGS
(Æsop slightly altered)

Mr. P.: "Don't lose your head, my man! Who'd suffer most if you killed it?"

The contrast between the unemployed and the unemployables is repeatedly emphasized in these years. Works were closed down because the hands took themselves off to join a procession of unemployed. Wasters refused work, preferring hymn-singing in the streets and levying doles from credulous householders. A cartoon in 1887 shows one of the "real unemployed" exclaiming: "How am I to make my voice heard in this blackguard row?" Socialism is seen "Sowing Tares"—after Millais's picture. Anarchy as the tempter prompts unemployment to plunder, looting, and riot—the wrong way. But Punch was not content with chastising sedition-mongers,[Pg 80] and in another cartoon rebuked callous complacency as a real danger in a time of serious distress. The contrasts of splendour and discontent were curiously illustrated in these years. In the spring of 1886 there was a "scene" at the Opera when the scene shifters struck work in the middle of the performance, and appeared on the stage begging for money. In 1887, the year of the Queen's Jubilee, special constables were sworn in, and Mr. Gladstone as the "Grand Old Janus" is shown with one face applauding a constable "downing" an English rough, while the other frowns on an R.I.C. man standing over a rebellious Irishman. It was in the same year that the growth and popularity of street processions moved Punch to protest against the invasion of the Parks by public meetings, which drove away quiet people who used them for recreation from fear of King Mob and the rabble rout. The procession habit has long since come to stay, though it is only of recent years that the presence of children has become a feature in these demonstrations. As for the Hyde Park stump orators, the types genially satirized in one of the Voces Populi series in 1889 include the Elderly Faddist, the Irish Patriot, the Reciter, and the Physical Force Socialist. The Reciter, who dates back to the time when the Latin satirist spoke of him as a nuisance in the dog-days, has disappeared from the Parks, though he flourishes in Georgian coteries. The other types remain with us, together with some new varieties. But there is little new under the sun. In 1887 the Annual Register mentions the exploit of a political agitator who chained himself to the railings in a conspicuous position in Central London, thus depriving the militant "suffragettes" of the credit of introducing this method of protest.

THE MODERN "BED OF PROCRUSTES"

Procrustes: "Now, then, you fellows; I mean to fit you all to my little Bed!"

Chorus: "Oh, Lor-r!"

["It is impossible to establish universal uniformity of hours without inflicting very serious injury to workers." (Motion at the recent Trades Congress.)

In the great dock strike of 1889 Punch, on the whole, showed a disposition to side with the men. In his first cartoon in September the working man appeals to the employer to think less of his luxuries, more of Labour's needs. A week later Punch appeals to the working man not to kill the guinea-fowl (Trade), that lays the golden eggs, by striking. In October, employer and employee are shown at the game of Beggar-my-Neighbour, the master playing Lock-out against[Pg 81] Strike. Punch pleads for give-and-take. Both will lose by the game they are playing. The same argument is further developed a few months later in another cartoon in which the foreign competitor is the tertius gaudens. The foreign Fox goes off with Trade, while the two dogs, Capital and Labour, are asleep. To return to the dock strike, we may note that Cardinal Manning's intervention was warmly applauded. Punch thought the Cardinal ought to have been made a Privy Councillor and Lord Mayor Whitehead a baronet for their services as conciliators. Praise for a Cardinal and a Lord Mayor is indeed a wonderful change from the Punch of forty years earlier. The settlement of that "deed of darkness," the gas strike in 1889, prompted the cartoon showing the indignation[Pg 82] of Bill Sikes and the Artful Dodger over the frustration of their plans. Industrial troubles were rife in 1890. The Labour May Day, already instituted, inspires a set of verses after Tennyson, in which an enthusiastic operative sings,

The introduction of an eight hours' day, already vigorously agitated for, set Punch thinking on what would happen if the principle were logically applied all round—to the Courts, restaurants, theatres and the medical profession. He returned to the subject in the following year, and came to much the same conclusion—that it would turn out a new bed of Procrustes, on the ground that the universal uniformity of hours of work could not be established without inflicting serious injury on the workers. Socialism still continued to preoccupy Punch in 1890. This time it is depicted as a snake attacking an eagle in mid-air, rather a strange inversion of natural history. The eagle is Trade, the wings are Labour and Capital. The prosaic critic will ask how the snake got there except on the wings of a soaring imagination. John Burns is still a favourite bête noire, and is severely rebuked for his dictatorial and aggressive speeches at the Trade Union Congress and his action in connexion with industrial trouble on the Clyde, the ghost of Robert Burns being invoked to chastise his namesake in an adaptation of "The Dumfries Volunteer." At the Congress John Burns had said that he was "in the unfortunate position of having probably to go to Parliament at the next election, but he would rather go to prison half a dozen times than to Parliament once.... He must know on what terms he must do the dirty work of going to Parliament." This was not a happy utterance, though it hardly merited Punch's bludgeoning. Burns was "perhaps Boanerges spelt little": he "laid about him like mules who can kick hard"; "the mustard had gone to his nose," etc. But in view of the way in which Mr. Burns sank without a ripple from public notice in August, 1914, there is point in the caution:—

[Pg 83]

THE NEW "QUEEN OF THE MAY"

To modern readers, however, the most instructive passages dealing with industrial unrest in 1890 relate to the Coal Strike. In March of that year Punch published a prophetic journal of events, looming possibly somewhere ahead, of life in London after being without coal for sixteen weeks. It is interesting to compare this forecast with the realities of 1921. According to the prophet, people have burned their banisters and bed[Pg 84] furniture; a syndicate of noblemen start boring for coal in Belgrave Square, but are stopped by the sanitary inspector. The wood pavement is pulled up and riots have broken out. The Archbishop of Canterbury preaches on the Plague of Darkness in the Abbey by the light of a farthing candle, which goes out; etc. Even if the recent stoppage had lasted sixteen instead of thirteen weeks, it is more than doubtful if Punch's prophecies would have been fulfilled. At best they are an exercise in burlesque, and lacking in circumstantial imagination. Punch might have foreseen the scenic possibilities of a long coal stoppage and its clarifying effect on the atmosphere. And with his belief in the solid sense of the people he ought to have refrained from the suggestion of riot. But he may be pardoned for failing to foresee how oil would come to our rescue. At the close of the same month Punch addresses a versified remonstrance to the miners. He admits that pay should be liberal for dangerous underground work, but deprecates the use of the strike weapon as ruinous to trade and other industries by the laying up of ships and the closing of factories and railways. So, just two years later, in a cartoon on "Going on Play," he condemns the miners' strike, which aimed openly at creating an artificial scarcity, and thereby kept up wages. A poor clerk is seen expostulating with a working man: "It's all very well, but what's play to you is death to us." In the omnibus strike of 1891 Punch was decidedly sympathetic towards the overworked drivers and conductors, just as he backed up the hairdressers in the same year when they agitated for an early closing day and better and healthier conditions. The verses on the Democratic Village of the Future, a paradise of sanitation in which there would be no more "bobbing to their betters," and the rule of Squire and parson would cease, are largely ironical, and the Socialist appropriation of May Day inspires a long warning to this "new May Day Medusa"—the International—in a "Hymn of Honest Labour" in May, 1892.

Irony predominates, again, in the cynical verses of a year earlier satirizing the tendency of all parties to bid for the Labour vote:—

[Pg 85]

STRIKING TIMES
New Version of an Old Street Ballad (By a Labouring Elector)

Cheer up, cheer up, you sons of toil, and listen to my song,

The times should much amuse you; you are up, and going strong.

The Working Men of England at length begin to see

That their parsnips for to butter now the Parties all agree.

Chorus.

It's high time that the Working Men should have it their own way,

And their prospect of obtaining it grows brighter every day!

It isn't "Agitators" now, but Parties and M.P.'s,

Who swear we ought to have our way, and do as we darn please.

Upon my word it's proper fun! A man should love his neighbour,

Yet Whigs hate Tories, Tories Whigs; but oh! they all love Labour!

Chorus—It's high time, etc.

There's artful Joey Chamberlain, he looks as hard as nails,

But when he wants to butter us, the Dorset never fails;

He lays it on so soft and slab, not to say thick and messy,

He couldn't flummerify us more were each of us a Jesse!

Chorus—It's high time, etc.

Then roystering Random takes his turn; his treacle's pretty thick;

He gives the Tories the straight tip—and don't they take it—quick?

And now, by Jove, it's comical!—where will the fashion end?—

There's Parnell ups and poses as the genuine Labourer's Friend!

Chorus—It's high time, etc.

Comrades, it makes me chortle. The Election's drawing nigh,

And Eight Hours' Bills, or anything, they'll promise for to try.

They'll spout and start Commissions; but, O mighty Labouring Host,

Mind your eye, and keep it on them, or they'll have you all on toast!

Chorus.

It's high time that the Working Men should have it their own way,

They'll strain their throats—you mind your votes, and you may find it pay!

We have now seen Punch more as the critic than the friend of organized Labour, and it will be remembered that even in his most democratic days he evinced a deep-rooted distrust of delegates and Union officials. But there is another side to[Pg 86] the picture, in which the old championship of the poor and oppressed is as vigorous and vocal as ever. If Punch was more mistrustful of Trade Unionism, he was at least as unsparing as in his early days in pillorying examples of the greed and tyranny of masters and employers who misused their opportunities of exploiting unorganized or partially organized labour. In the notes made for this section during this period the very first relates to the sinking of the La Plata and the burning of the Cospatrick, two emigrant ships, in 1875, and the indignation felt when it was found that the cargo of the latter vessel was highly inflammable and the boats inadequate in number. The scandal moved Punch to rewrite Dibdin, with compliments to Mr. Plimsoll for his campaign against coffin ships, which had not yet been carried to its successful legislative conclusion. He also published, in January, 1875, a mock inquiry—after the manner of Dickens's Bardell v. Pickwick trial—by shipowners into the loss of the emigrant ship Crossbones. The Court exculpates the offenders after finding that the cargo—containing all sorts of combustible and inflammable materials—was of the most harmless description, adding as a rider that the boats should in future be always launched keel upwards. The old abuse of the "climbing boys" still reared its unsightly head; Lord Shaftesbury, in the debate on his Chimney Sweepers' Bill, in May, 1875, quoted the remark of a master sweep: "In learning a child you can't be soft with him; you must use violence," and Punch enlarged on this text in his best manner. No appeal on behalf of children left him unmoved. When subscriptions were invited in 1878 to lay out a children's playground near St. Peter's, London Docks, he suggests that the fortunate children of the West End should help to give this playground to their less favoured brothers and sisters of the East. As a lover of children, Punch was quick to recognize those who had laboured on their behalf. In the Christmas number of 1879

he tells the life story of George Smith, of Coalville, who began life as a poor lad in the brickfields; worked his way up to the post of foreman and manager; and then devoted his life to calling attention to the cruel overwork and ill-treatment of[Pg 87] the children whose labour he had once shared. In spite of neglect, opposition, and obloquy, he secured the passing of an Act which brought these hopeless little outcasts under the eye of Inspectors, limited their hours of labour, and secured them some measure of teaching. Though his action gave grievous offence and he lost his job, he set to work to render a similar service to the children of the bargees, and was the main agent in passing a law for the registration and inspection of canal boats. In these labours he sacrificed not only[Pg 88] his time, but his means, and Punch appealed to his readers to contribute to the support of "this practical preacher of good will to man, this friend of the friendless, this helper of those who, till he came, had none to help them."

CRAMMING VERSUS "CLEMMING"!

Board-School Master: "Now then, boys, we must get to work again!"

Advanced Scholar: "Please, Sir—mayn't we have somethin' to relieve the craving of 'unger fust?"

In 1881 the hard time of boys in attendance on weighing machines, said to be on duty for thirteen or fourteen hours a day, aroused Punch's sympathy and ire. Invention, however, rather than philanthropy, furnished a remedy in the "automatics."

In the same year Punch's appeal for the fund to provide poor children with country holidays, embodied in "The Children's Cry," enabled him to forward £280 to the promoters. In 1885 the "almost formidable success" achieved by the experiment of Poor Children's Play-Rooms, in the parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, delighted his heart. In 1888, Punch, in "Cramming versus 'Clemming'" emphasizes the need of providing free meals for poor children. At the very end of the period under review in this volume I have come across a notice of a book purporting to show up the cruelties practised on young people and animals in training them for acrobatic performances. The book was poor as literature, but if true called for searching inquiry. Children have, we may safely assume, been long safeguarded from the mishandling alleged to have been possible in 1892; but at the moment of writing these lines—August 11, 1921—an inquiry is being held into the treatment of animals by showmen and conjurers.

Nor was Punch less concerned with the conditions of women workers. In his "Dream of Fair Women " suggested by factory inspectors' reports in 1875, he points to lack of combination among women as the incentive to slave-driving on the part of "foggers." He prefaces a set of verses in October with a passage from a Report on the Black Country:—

The women are said to take the place of fathers as well as husbands, while the men are idle and drunken.... At Bromsgrove I heard also of the growing custom of idle, lazy young lads looking out for skilled industrious wives, in order to obtain an easy life.

[Pg 89]

It was, as Punch puts it, an inversion of the old legend of Penthesilea and the Amazons. Women were unsexed by labour and serfdom. As for the men:—

So at the time of distress in the mining districts in 1875 the miners are accused of using charitable relief for the welfare of their dogs rather than of their families. "How is it," asks a benevolent directress, "you've brought two cans to-day, Geordie?" And a miner on strike replies: "The yain's for my mither, marm, and t'uther for the greyhound."

"TEMPORA MUTANTUR"

Farmer's Daughter: "I say, Jem, fancy! Mother said to me to-day I was to help in the Dairy, and might help in the Milking! Because she did when she was a Girl! I said I'd go for a Gov'ness first!"

There is little mention of the hardships of life on the land, though labourers' wages were still very low; but the rise of the farmer class to "gentility" is noted in 1885 in the picture of the farmer's daughter seated at the piano and declaring that she would rather go as a governess than help in the[Pg 90] dairy. Punch's sympathies were more readily enlisted on behalf of shop and saloon girls. The movement began in Bristol in 1876, where a number of ladies issued a circular to employers asking that chairs should be provided for shop girls; the plan was adopted in Manchester, and, following the lead of Lancashire, Punch repeatedly urges the plea for more considerate treatment. The matter was "beyond a joke," and Punch recommended ladies to patronize shops where they were allowed, and boycott others. The subject was taken up by the Lancet, and the movement spread to Scotland, where a group of ladies made a personal tour of inspection in Edinburgh to see which shops provided seats. One of Punch's pictures in this year shows a considerate customer handing a chair over the counter to a tired shop-girl, and a set of verses describes a girl driven into sin by need of rest. As he put it in his plea for "More Seats and Shorter Hours," "A country where humanity interposes on behalf of an over-driven cab-horse will surely not go on suffering hard-working, weak and defenceless girls to be driven to death with impunity." There was only one other place in which seats are not allowed. "That is the House of Commons, but there the torture is only inflicted on one-half of the Members." We hear little nowadays of the hardships of shop-girls, but the seating accommodation of the House of Commons is even more inadequate than in 1880. Punch, however, discussed Sir John Lubbock's Shop Hours Bill in 1887 with an impartiality that borders on inconsistency, showing the other side of the question and the popular preference in poor districts for shopping in the evening, districts in which "St. Lubbock" was looked upon as a well-meaning but fussy philanthropist.

As an individualist, a lover of independence, and an opponent of monopoly, Punch was in a difficult position. Some, at any rate, of the monster shops led the way in the humane and considerate treatment of their assistants. But the freezing out of the small shopkeeper struck him as an undoubted hardship, and in 1886 he published a prophetic article describing an interview in the "dim and distant future" between a Stranger and the last shopkeeper in London. It[Pg 91] is an allegory of the tyranny of capitalism and monopoly, of the cult of bigness and universality, the triumph of ubiquitous caterers. That "dim and distant future" has not yet arrived, and after thirty-five years the small shopkeeper is still going almost as strong as in the days when Punch uttered his dismal prophecy. But his most impassioned plea in the 'eighties was not uttered on behalf of the working man or woman, or the small shopkeeper. It was reserved for the victims of State parsimony, underpaid clerks and Government officials. The campaign on behalf of these new protégés of his opened with "The Cry of the Clerk," a long wail, charged with sentiment, uttered by an overworked and underpaid drudge:—

TAKING THE LAW IN ONE'S OWN HANDS

Fair but Considerate Customer: "Pray sit down. You look so tired. I've been riding all the afternoon in a carriage, and don't require a chair."

The verses lack the desperate poignancy of Hood's "Song of the Shirt," but they made their mark and were quoted in their entirety in The Times. Subsequent articles and verses especially single out the telegraph clerks as the victims of State slave-driving. Punch declares that there was no rest for the telegraph "operator," and describes a letter of appointment from the Government to one of this class as being really a death warrant, offering £65 a year with the prospect of rising to £160 after twenty years' service. Early in 1881 he writes under the heading, "Wiredrawn Salaries":—

The giggling girls, precocious boys, and half-starved clerks, who form the Telegraphic Staff of that money-grubbing department of Government—the Post Office—have petitioned for a slight increase of pay, and have been officially snubbed for their pains. They have petitioned for eight years, and for eight years they have received no[Pg 93] answer. The Manchester clerks were too wise to petition. They struck, and their demands were at once attended to.

This is not very polite to the ladies, but the comment is significant, since it shows that Punch was, on occasion, ready to abandon his old view of the inefficacy of the strike weapon. In June of the same year he announced that "The worms have turned":—

The chief art of Government is to do nothing with an air of doing much. The best administrators are those who have thoroughly mastered the axiom that zeal is a crime, and who are clever at sitting upon troublesome questions. Unfortunately there are questions that will not be sat upon, and the grievance of the Telegraph Clerks is one of them. The Government have "considered" this grievance so long and so dreamily, that at last the discontented Clerks have threatened to strike. They may not at present have the organization and the command of funds of the "working man," who is always on the verge of striking, but these will come in the fullness of time. The Government have roused a spirit of self-reliance in these overworked and underpaid servants of a money-grubbing department, which no tardy concessions can destroy. The patronizing, not to say fatherly articles in some of the newspapers will encourage this spirit, for under the tone of warning is an ill-concealed fear that skilful telegraphists are not to be obtained from the fields and gutters. How much better it would have been to have "considered" less and acted more, and have yielded gracefully.

The Government were not, however, the only offenders whose parsimony excited Punch's indignation. In 1878, when the wages of the railwaymen on the Midland were reduced, he prophesied increased inefficiency and more accidents. Railway servants were, in his opinion, overworked and underpaid. Twelve years later, in the autumn of 1890, Major Marindin, in his report on the collision at Eastleigh, found that an engine-driver and stoker had failed to keep a proper look-out, but noted that they had been on duty for sixteen and a half hours. Punch's comment took the form of the cartoon of "Death and his brother Sleep" on the engine. The overloaded country postman had excited Punch's compassion in 1885, and in the same year the outrageously long hours—sixteen a day and seven days a week—imposed on tram drivers and conductors[Pg 94] had come in for severe censure in an article which also mentions the sweating of East End tailors' apprentices. It was this scandal, and the campaign which it provoked, that led to the appointment of a Royal Commission with Lord Dunraven as Chairman. Punch joined in the controversy with a whole series of articles, cartoons, and verses. His first contribution was headed with a picture of a fat fur-coated contractor raking sovereigns out of the "sweating furnace," and took for its text Lord Dunraven's statement that "as regards hours of labour, earnings, and sanitary surroundings, the condition of these workers is more deplorable than that of any body of working men in any portion of the civilized or uncivilized world." A set of ironical advertisements followed of clothes made by sweated labour, including "The Happy Duchess Jacket—straight from a fever-stricken home," and "The Churchyard Overcoat," the product of slave-labour in the East End. Then we have "The modern Venus attired by the Three Dis-Graces"—a stalwart fashionable lady waited on by three starveling sempstresses; a mock Ode on the Triumph of Capital, full of ironic eulogy of Mammon; and, most remarkable of all, a long sardonic poem, published in September, 1888, under the heading, "Israel and Egypt; or Turning the Tables," which is at once an indictment of, and an apology for, the Jew Sweaters.

Punch prefaces the poem with two extracts:—

"The Children of Israel multiplied so as to excite the jealous fears of the Egyptians.... They were therefore organized into gangs under taskmasters, as we see in the vivid pictures of the monuments, to work upon the public edifices. 'And the Egyptians made the Children of Israel to serve with rigour. And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage in mortar and in brick and in all manner of service in the field.'"—Smith's Ancient History.

"The Sweater is probably a Jew, and, if so, he has the gift of organization, and an extraordinary power of subordinating everything—humanity, it may be, included—to the great end of getting on.... The conditions of life in East London ruin the Christian labourer, and leave the Jewish labourer unharmed."—The Spectator on Sweaters and Jews.

The verses compare the treatment of the Israelites under[Pg 95] Pharaoh with the modern sweating of the Gentile by the Jew middleman:—

ONE EFFECT OF THE SWEATING COMMISSION

Swell (at West-End Tailor's, to the Foreman): "Ah—look here, Snipson, I've been reading all about this Sweating System, don'tcherno!—and as I find that the Things I pay you Eight Guineas for—ah—you get made by the Sweaters for about—ah—Two-and-Six—I've made up my mind—ah—to do the thing well, without screwing you down. So—ah—just take my order for a Seven-and-Sixpenny Dress Suit."

The moral is summed up in the last four lines:—

[Pg 96]

Lord Dunraven withdrew from the Commission, and Punch congratulated him on his retirement, though it "seemed caused by a fad," when the Report was published in 1890. The recommendations were inadequate, in Punch's view. He spoke contemptuously of applying the "rose-water cure" and whitewashing the sweater, whom he depicts as a monster vampire. Socialism, as we have seen, was a serpent of the boa constrictor type. The tendency to big combines was typified by an octopus, labelled Monopoly, controlling cotton, iron, coal, salt and copper, and threatening a distressful lady (Commerce) perilously navigating a frail canoe.

Bumbledom was not dead, but its activities were less blatant. Punch gibbets the stinginess of the Lambeth Workhouse when in 1875 the Guardians decided that Christmas pudding was too rich in good things and recommended a plainer variety. Fourteen years later, under the sarcastic heading, "Luxury for Paupers," we encounter the following elegant extract from the Standard of December 5, 1889:—

"At the Chester Board of Guardians yesterday, a discussion took place as to whether, in view of the Christmas dinner, it would be advisable to allow the inmates to have knives to cut their meat. It was explained that at present the paupers had to tear the meat to pieces with their fingers and teeth.... The Rev. O. Rawson proposed that they should buy knives and forks.... Mr. Charmley, farmer, opposed the proposal.... The motion to hire knives and forks on Christmas Day only was put, and carried by thirteen votes to ten."

The negligence and delay in administering Parish relief moved Punch in 1876 to declare that sick paupers were worse treated than sick cows or horses. As an illustration of "The way we die now," there are further exposures of cruelty in lunatic asylums, and the hard-heartedness of Guardians in harrying "bundles of rags." But these revelations are fewer than in former years, and dwell more on mismanagement and extravagance than actual inhumanity. Thus the report of the committee of inquiry into the administration of the Metropolitan Asylums Board in 1885 revealed gross waste and extravagant consumption of wine and[Pg 97] stimulants, not by the patients, but by the officials. Punch was "so long accustomed to hear of the wondrous doings of 'Manchester the Great' and the grand example she set to the rest of the Kingdom in all that constituted good and pure government and sound finance," that he could not repress a certain malicious satisfaction at the result of the audit of the accounts of her Corporation by the "Citizens' auditor," published in the autumn of 1884. The first instalment, reviewed in October, is an entertaining document winding up with an allusion to the pantomime of the Forty Thieves, fully justified by the further revelations summarized by Punch a month later:—

MANCHESTER'S PLUCKY AUDITOR

This bold Gentleman continues his amusing revelations to the apparent delight of the ratepayers, and the disgust of the bumptious Corporation. We can only make room for one or two extracts. This is the bill for a dinner, at the Queen's Hotel, for the Members of the Baths and Wash-houses Committee, at which it will be seen that they drank punch, sherry, hock, champagne, claret, port, gin, whiskey, brandy, liqueurs, and mild ale:—

"To Twenty-one dinners, caviare, turtle, etc., 15s. each, £15 15s. 0d.; sherry, 16s.; hock, 50s.; punch, 7s. 6d.; champagne, 138s. 6d.; claret, 50s.; port, 25s.; mild ale, 1s.; liqueur, 20s.; coffee, 10s. 6d.; cigars, 64s. 6d.; soda, 22s. 6d.; gin, 2s. 6d.; whiskey, 15s.; brandy, 27s. 6d.; service, 21s.

"In addition to the above, the Committee had sent up to the Baths the day before the opening, one dozen bottles of whiskey, 48s.; one dozen gin, 36s.; half-a-dozen brandy, 84s.; half-a-dozen port, 48s.; half-a-dozen sherry, 48s.; two dozen soda, 4s. 6d.; one dozen lemonade, 4s. 6d.; one dozen potass, 4s. 6d.; two boxes cigars, 22s. 6d. each; and half-a-dozen bottles of St. Julien, 36s.; making a total of £52 2s. paid to the proprietors of the Queen's Hotel."

He adds that strenuous efforts have been made to find out the Gentleman who called for Mild Ale, and, when got, consumed a shilling's-worth of it.

If there were many such auditors, audits would form a most amusing portion of our comic literature.

In these circumstances Punch expressed a natural joy that Municipal Reform was tackled at last in Sir William Harcourt's[Pg 98] Bill, while in his "Bitter Cry of Alderman and Bumble" he showed these two worthies bursting into tears over the iniquities of "Werdant 'Arcourt."

The housing problem comes up early in 1877 à propos of the late Sir B. W. Richardson's hygienic theories. Punch admits that he was probably on the right track, but waxes sarcastic at the expense of crotchety alarmists, and his own suggestions are more whimsical than helpful. It was not until 1883 that he began to take the problem seriously. I deal in another section with the fashionable craze for "slumming," which Punch ridiculed as insincere and absurd. But there is genuine indignation in his verses on a judge's remarks at Manchester, and on the report of an inquest, at which it came out that a whole family occupied one bed on the floor; in the poem (after Hood) on the Real Haunted House, comparing slum dwellers with rural labourers; in the cartoon, "Mammon's Rents," on the text, "Dives, the owner of property condemned as unfit for habitation, is getting from 50 to 60 per cent. on his money"; and in "The Slum-dweller's Saturday Night" (after Burns), where Punch drives home his old point of the futility of foreign missions when we had all this unreclaimed slum savagery at home. The personal investigations of slum areas undertaken by Sir Charles Dilke, then President of the Local Government Board, traced the evil to the greed of grasping landlords.

To this year belong Punch's tirades against the iniquity of unjust rates. In December he has quite a long article based on the hardships of shopkeepers, small and large. He quotes two cases. The first is that of a small shopkeeper. The street in which he lived had been recently widened. Immediately his landlord raised his rent £30 a year, and his rates were at once raised from £16 to £30. Another victim carrying on business in a principal City thoroughfare paid a rental of £800 a year, his gross profits being £1,500. The street was improved; his rent was increased to £1,000; and £40 a year were added to his rates in consequence of an improvement which had already cost him £200 a year, which the landlord had received without the expenditure of a single shilling. One does not expect[Pg 99] to find precise information on rating and rentals in a comic journal, but in the 'eighties at any rate Punch did not shirk such topics.

In the issue of December 8, 1883, Punch ventured to remind his readers that on the 16th of that month, exactly forty years had elapsed since Hood's immortal "Song of the Shirt" appeared in his pages; but it was perhaps an overstatement to say that the "Bitter Cry" was as "loud and heart-rending" then as in the 'forties. The handling of the Housing Commission in 1884 is decidedly irreverent, and the account of its meetings and the speeches of Lord Salisbury, Mr. Lyulph Stanley (now Lord Sheffield), and Mr. Jesse Collings borders on the burlesque. Only towards Cardinal Manning does Punch extend a limited measure of sympathy. There was, however, no alloy in his praise of Sir Edward Guinness's gift in 1880 of £250,000 for the better housing of the poor. When Christ Church Cathedral was restored in Dublin by the liberality of a wealthy distiller, a poor Irishwoman, as she gazed on the building, remarked: "Glory be to God! To think that whisky could do all that!" Punch more discreetly commended "good Edward Guinness" as the "munificent host of 'The Tankard.'"

This was the year of the Health Exhibition, the second of that annual series which was a special feature of the 'eighties. On their recreative aspect I speak elsewhere. It may suffice here to say that Punch summed up the conflict of aims which they represented in the phrase "Commerce v. Cremorne." His anticipatory notice of the "Healtheries" abounds in burlesque suggestions for hygienic exhibits; in the account of the opening praise is largely tempered with irony; and his "insane-itary guide" shows how largely these Exhibitions depended on al fresco entertainments, illuminations, and bands.

The growth of the modern mania for amusement was still in its infancy, but Punch has some instructive remarks on the decline of the many institutions which had begun with the highest instructional aims and aspirations:—

The Crystal Palace at Sydenham ... commenced its career with the highest aspirations. The British Public were to be shown the[Pg 100] architectural glories of the Alhambra and Pompeii, and soon found themselves watching the evolutions of Léotard and Blondin. In like manner the Westminster Aquarium was inaugurated by the Duke of Edinburgh, as a sort of supplement to "the mission of Albert the Good," but soon had to fall back on Zazel and a "Variety entertainment."

Punch accordingly prophecies a similar evolution in the character of the South Kensington Exhibition, and the sequel proved that here, at any rate, he was a true prophet.

Students of Criminology will find much to interest them in Punch's pages during this period. We have already seen that he had abandoned his objection to capital punishment in the 'sixties. Commenting on the debate in June, 1877, Punch defended the maintenance of the gallows as an ultima ratio legum—much on the lines of J. S. Mill, who had, more than anyone else, converted him from his old view. Later on, when the abolition was rejected by 263 votes to 64, he writes:—

We keep our gallows for the brute whom no rope weaker than the hempen halter will bind, and no terror less terrible than Tyburn Tree will hold in awe. There are such ruffians; and for them the gallows is, and will be, kept for the present standing.

In 1879 the trial of Peace, the murderer, gave Punch a good opening for condemning the undue prominence given in the Press to the personalities and tastes of criminals. He makes a good point against papers which speak with two voices: filling their news columns with personal details of murderers and denouncing the cult of the criminal in their leading articles. Such inconsistencies, however, still continue to grieve the judicious. In the early 'eighties the urbane inefficiency of the Police Force, and especially of the detective side, is a frequent theme of criticism, both burlesque and serious. The most amusing entry relates to a constable alleged to have reported: "At 1.45 this morning, found an earthquake opposite No. 207." Punch christened the C.I.D. the "Defective Police," but proved his impartiality by handsomely admitting the heavy odds against which constables had to contend—the truncheon was no match for the burglar's revolver.

[Pg 101]

Frequent allusions to hooliganism and armed burglars occur in 1882. Punch speaks of a "Mohock Revival," and asks, "Is the Police Force no remedy, or must we all carry revolvers?" For a while complaints against the impotence of the police cease, or take a new form, as when Punch turns his attention to the disgraceful conditions prevailing at the Central Criminal Court, where respectable men and women subpœnaed as witnesses were exposed to hustling and insults from roughs—and constables. In 1887 he extended his censure to the shocking condition of the prisons in which unconvicted prisoners were lodged awaiting trial. For the conduct of the police during the Jubilee Celebrations he has nothing but praise, and waxed lyrical in "Punch to the Peelers" over their humanity and courtesy.

But a far more severe ordeal awaited the police in 1888, the year of the crime wave in Whitechapel. Sarcastic allusions to the inefficiency of the Force are renewed. One cartoon represents them blindfolded and stumbling about amongst jeering criminals. Punch was nearer the mark in the cartoon headed, "The Nemesis of Neglect"—based on a letter from "S. G. O." in The Times pointing out that East End slums invited crime—and in his admissions that the numbers of the police were inadequate and that their inefficiency was largely due to the publicity given to the movements of detectives, and the measures taken by the authorities, by sensational interviewers in the cheap press. The amateur "crime investigator" unfortunately continued to flourish in spite of Punch's censure. Hideous picture-posters, vividly representing sensational scenes of murder, exhibited as the "great attractions" of certain plays, are also condemned as a blot on civilization, a disgrace to the Drama, and a suggestion of crime. It should be added that Punch expressly exempted Sir Charles Warren from blame, and indignantly dissociated himself from the attacks of those who joined in making him a scapegoat:—

The Police Force requires strengthening, and Sir Charles is perfectly alive to the fact. What on earth can it matter if, in number, our Police compare favourably with the Police Force at[Pg 102] Constantinople, or St. Petersburgh, or Vienna, or Jericho, if we have not sufficient Police to protect life and property in the Metropolis? Socialistic sensational Journalists and rowdy demagogues would like to see the Police Force reduced to one in every two thousand, until they fell to fighting among themselves, when they would be the first to yell out "Police!" and scream for the intervention of the enfeebled arm of the law.

In April, 1889, the proposed flogging of dangerous criminals excited a good deal of controversy. In Punch's cartoon in April Bill Sikes protests as an injured innocent against the cat on the ground that it will make a brute of him. Punch's attitude was strongly anti-sentimentalist, but he held that the lash should be used with discretion.

In the summer he renews his demand for increasing the police. The new Chief Commissioner, Monro, is shown telling John Bull that he can have any number of policemen if he likes to pay for them, while Policeman X, Junior, declares that the Force is overworked. It is curious to note that, in the list of police difficulties, besides Whitechapel murders, Punch includes the control of Salvation Army processions and obstructions. But in these days even so wise and good a man as Huxley did not hesitate to label—and libel—Salvationism as "Corybantic Christianity."

On the everlasting Drink Question Punch sided with the moderate reformers, disapproved of coercion or Prohibition, and found confirmation of his views in the testimony of the Howard Association in 1876 that moral persuasion and improvement in the conditions of living afforded the only real remedy. Recreation, as an alternative to and distraction from the public-house, he always advocated. When the Sunday opening of galleries and museums was again rejected in 1879, Punch's cartoon took his familiar line that Sabbatarianism drove men to drink. "Bung" congratulates Archbishop Tait on the support of the Episcopal bench in defeating the measure. But in the same month, in "Friend Bung's Remonstrance," Punch inserted a protest against the notion that all public-housekeepers would support Sabbatarian legislation. That he was sensitive to foreign criticism is shown by his skit on M.[Pg 103] Millaud's articles in the Figaro in 1880 in which the drunkenness of London had been unfavourably commented upon.

The "marvellous magisterial licensing system" of the period, which was "vexatious, inconsistent, and meddlesome," is repeatedly criticized in the year. In an article on the degeneracy of the Aquarium, Punch gives a full account of its vulgar, inane, and sensational shows, and alludes to the nocturnal orgies enacted at that place of entertainment. Music and dancing licences, he declared, would be applied for by the ten thousand if there were freedom and wisdom, instead of the chaos and vested interest maintained by "Maw-worm" and "Meddlevex" (Middlesex) magistrates. The result was that London was "a city of unmitigated pot-houses." Yet drinking, judged by the test of state finance, was decreasing. The revenue from intoxicants in 1882 had fallen 2-1/2 millions in seven years, and Punch indulges in ironical comment. The picture in the spring of 1883 of the "Temperance Budget" shows the financial conditions of the country as only fairly satisfactory, and represents John Bull as saying: "I have been too sober—Nunc est bibendum." This was obviously ironical, but it was irony that might easily be misread. Punch would probably have endorsed Archbishop Magee's famous dictum: "Better England free than England sober." Teetotalism was to Punch inextricably associated with cranks, faddists, and fanatics. He was a robust humanitarian. Cock-fighting was a barbarous pastime, but he resented the unfair differentiation which punished working men who indulged in it with a heavy fine, while rich and aristocratic pigeon-shooters went scot-free. Dr. Carver's shooting performances at the Crystal Palace in 1879 are specially praised because he did not exhibit his skill by the slaughter of pigeons. So in 1876 Punch had supported Mr. Flower's agitation against the use of bearing-reins for horses. Cruelty to animals he detested; but, on the burning question of vivisection, firmly upheld the practice, in the interests of humanity, when guarded by stringent regulations, and sided with Lister and Paget against Lord Shaftesbury, whose opposition he deeply regretted.

[Pg 104]

HAPPY THOUGHT—A "SUNDAY SCHOOL FOR THE UPPER CLASSES"

(Vide Bishop of Oxford's Speech at the Church Congress)

Elizabeth Waring (Laundress and Charwoman, and Sunday School Teacher to the U.C.): "And now, my dear little Ladies and Gentlemen, I trust you will not desecrate this beautiful Sunday Afternoon by going on the River! You can do that from Monday Morning till Saturday Night, you know! His Lordship here, who was at Eton and Oxford, will no doubt remember how the Oars he had plied so busily all the week, lay untouched on Sunday! And you too, my dears, will please to give up the River, on that one day—to those who have been toiling all the busy Week long in stifling Offices and grimy Workshops, and suchlike!"

Wages, as I have remarked above, were still remarkably low, judged by our post-war standards. In 1880 Punch quotes an advertisement from the Lincoln Gazette for an "active young town crier and bill-poster who can live on 1s. 3d. a week." But prices were low also, and by the mid 'seventies cheap railway fares and excursions had led to a great increase of travelling among the working classes. The "cheap tripper" figures largely in Punch throughout these years, and his (and her) manners and customs lent themselves more readily to satire than sympathy. Punch was still the friend as well as the critic of the masses, and when in 1883 the steam launch nuisance on the[Pg 106] Thames was exciting a good deal of inflammatory comment, published his "Sunday School for the Upper Classes," in which a laundress and charwoman is seen giving a lesson to young gentlefolk, turning the tables on their Sabbatarian teaching, and asking them to give up the river on Sunday to those who worked all the week. But here, as so often, Punch showed his habitual impartiality by simultaneously admitting that the state of the river was a scandal, and welcoming an official inquiry by the Thames Conservancy Board. A year later he emphasized Sir Charles Dilke's statement that the river was "a sort of savage place," with no real police to enforce the law; Punch's picture of the Thames on Bank Holiday exhibits a carnival of rowdyism, collisions, and upsets. The steam launch was no favourite of Punch. He had already shown it as an intruder on the waterways of Venice, crowded with 'Arries and 'Arriets emitting characteristic comments on the Bridge of Sighs.

[Pg 105]

THE STEAM LAUNCH IN VENICE

("Sic Transit Gloria Mundi")

'Andsome 'Arriet: "Ow, my! If it 'yn't that bloomin' old Temple Bar, as they did aw'y with out o' Fleet Street!"

Mr. Belleville (referring to Guide-book): "Now it 'yn't! It's the famous Bridge o' Sighs, as Byron went and stood on; 'im as wrote Our Boys, yer know!"

'Andsome 'Arriet: "Well, I never! It 'yn't much of a size, any'ow!"

Mr. Belleville: "'Ear! 'Ear! Fustryte!"

Throughout the 'eighties all the unlovely and odious attributes of lower middle-class vulgarity were concentrated by Punch in a series of verses directed against 'Arry, who takes the place of the "snob" and the "gent" of the 'forties and 'fifties. One sometimes wonders whether the late Mr. Milliken, the creator of Punch's 'Arry, was not intoxicated by the exuberance of his own invention, by the deftness of his patter, and exaggerated the atrocities of the original. For there is no redeeming feature in 'Arry, or in 'Arriet, who is indeed the worse of the two. "... Modesty? Meekness? Thrift? Oh, Jiminy! Ladies of Fashion ain't caught now with no such moral niminy piminy." Their lingo is extensive, peculiar, and unpleasant, and much of it has mercifully passed into the limbo of lost words—"rorty," for example, and (let us hope) "lotion" for drink. 'Arry, as depicted in these monologues, is always the Cockney; the withers of the provincial are unwrung in contemplating his excesses. He is sometimes a clerk, though not of the class whose "Cry" had evoked Punch's sympathy, sometimes a counter-jumper, but always a cad. He and his partner are always drawn in such a way as to lend point to the cynical saying that "life would be endurable but for its amusements." His notion of pleasure is largely made up of din and[Pg 107] destruction. If he takes a holiday in the country, he disturbs its sylvan seclusion by tearing up ferns and tearing down branches. But he is in his true element at the seaside—witness Punch's gruesome adaptation of Southey's lines on Lodore, under the heading "The Shore."

A GROUP OF 'ARRIES

In the centre of which may be seen the plain but captivating Mr. Belleville, who explains to the lovely Miss Eliza Larkins that it's of no consequence whether a man be handsome or not, "so long as he looks like a gentleman!"

'Arry figures in a less repulsive mood when visiting the Paris Exhibition of 1889—"'Arry in Parry." He is very far from belonging to the submerged classes, and has generally plenty of money to spend on his amusements and creature comforts. But he is not enamoured of hard work. The competition of the German clerk in 1886 fills him with fury. He is disgusted with the "Sossidges" for ousting Englishmen from their jobs, but is not prepared to emulate the industry of the foreigner:—

[Pg 108]

Mr. Gladstone had appealed to the Englishman to prove himself the better man by competing with the German on the ground on which the latter excelled. The Cockney clerk retorts that it isn't good enough, and clamours for the expulsion of the industrious aliens who undercut him.

Mixed up with 'Arry's selfishness, greediness, and general lack of decency and good feeling there is a certain element of shrewdness, of practical common sense, but it is always exerted on behalf of Number One. Taken all round, he is easily the most disagreeable of all the types created by Punch in a period in which his former complacency had given place, at best, to a somewhat peevish optimism, sinking at times, as we note elsewhere, to dismal laments over our decadence. But, in justice to Punch, it is right to add that by far the most severe denunciations are reserved for the degenerates in high places. The 'Arry poems do not show Punch in the light of a Jeremiah or a Juvenal. Taken together, they form a sort of composite photograph of the mean Cockney who belongs neither to the classes nor the masses, who lacks the breeding and reticence of the one and the primitive virtues of the other. Moreover, the unabashed and undefeated complacency of these monologues, apart from their shrewdness, inspires a certain grudging admiration for this entirely impenitent "bounder."

But we part from him without regret, and with a feeling that he is almost too odious to be true to type. He bulks so largely in the pages of Punch as to obscure the evidences of abiding friendliness to the true democracy on which 'Arry was a mere excrescence. The manners of the cheap tripper might offend Punch, but he was genuinely delighted when bands were introduced in the Parks on Sundays to the discomfiture of Sabbatarians and Pharisees; and we find him contrasting the activity of the police in suppressing gambling in Bermondsey with the tolerance extended to certain West End clubs. There was nothing new in this attitude, but we may note a change in regard to his views on emigration, which in earlier days Punch had supported with enthusiasm. In 1877 a curious letter, guaranteed genuine, is published from a settler in Australia, describing the conditions there, and strongly[Pg 109] deterring emigration to a country where there were no comforts, and nothing was cheaper than in England save meat.

TECHNICAL

"'Ellow, 'Erry! Why, 'ow are yer?"

"Eighteen Car-rat, ole man! 'Ow's yerself?"

In the earlier volumes of this survey it has been shown how deep-seated was the prejudice against the Army amongst respectable middle-class and working people. In his earlier and anti-militarist days Punch had shared this feeling, and even denounced the recruiting-sergeant as an ogre or worse. From the Crimean War onward this hostility gave place to the wiser and saner view that the men who served their country bravely and faithfully should be decently treated, properly fed, and encouraged in self-respect by the community which they defended. How far public opinion fell short in this regard may be seen in the excellent appeal headed "Men Wanted" which Punch issued in January, 1875. The Army was greatly in need of recruits, and the evidence taken before the Recruiting Commission proved that "the want of respect shown by civilians to Her Majesty's uniform had a great deal to do with the Army's loss of popularity." Whereupon Punch proceeds to point out:—

1. That the intellectual training of Soldiers is now a matter of paramount importance, and that the Privates of many Regiments can compare favourably with civilians as regards education.

[Pg 110]

2. That through the exertions of H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge, Recreation Rooms and Libraries have been established in all the Barracks, with the object (an object that has been attained) of fostering refinement in the ranks.

3. That, during the recent series of Autumn Manœuvres, the Armies in the Field have gained golden opinions from all with whom they have come in contact.

4. That most Soldiers, when they leave the Service, are found to be admirably adapted to fill the positions of clerks, railway-guards, policemen, and other posts of importance and responsibility.

5. That a Colour-Sergeant is a Non-Commissioned Officer in command of some sixty or a hundred men, who has been promoted after many years' service in the ranks, in recognition of zeal, cleverness, and good conduct.

Having made these observations, Field-Marshal Punch is forced to record his deep regret:—

1. That a Magistrate speaking from the Bench should have thought proper to inform a Recruit that to join the Army was to take a false step in life, which might possibly entail the breaking of his parents' hearts.

2. That a Non-Commissioned Officer should be refused admission to the best seats in a place of public entertainment because he (the Non-Commissioned Officer in question) happened at the time of purchasing his ticket to be wearing the should-be honoured uniform of Her Majesty the Queen.

Field-Marshal Punch consequently feels it to be his duty to issue the following orders:—

1. In future, City Aldermen, in their official capacities, will refrain from making remarks calculated to bring the Army into ridicule, hatred, or contempt.

2. If any regulation exists preventing soldiers in uniform from appearing in the better seats of places of entertainment, the rule in question must be immediately abolished.

In conclusion, Field-Marshal Punch is strongly of opinion that recruiting will continue to remain slack until the difference existing between the social conditions of the British Soldier in the present, and the Negro Slave in the past, is thoroughly understood and admitted by the public in general, and the people to whom this circular is addressed in particular. It must be remembered in future[Pg 111] that the Livery of Her Majesty is worn by warriors, and not by flunkeys.

The remonstrance was well needed, though many years were to elapse before the second of these orders was acted on. Yet if Punch had little mercy on those who imagined that all soldiers were "brutal and licentious," he had no compassion on those who disgraced their uniform. In the controversy which arose in 1880 between Dr. W. H. Russell and Sir Garnet Wolseley over alleged breaches of discipline among our troops during the Zulu campaign, Punch held that the war correspondent's was a "true bill," and actually advocated the reintroduction of flogging in the Army for "exceptional cases of brutality which degrade the soldier to the level of the garrotter or the wife-beater."

The allusions to the Volunteer Review in the Great Park at Windsor in July, 1881, dwell chiefly on the habitual neglect and lack of consideration meted out to the Army on these occasions:—

HOW TO TREAT THE ARMY

Select the hottest day you can possibly find for a perfectly useless sham fight and send the men out with the heaviest, clumsiest, most antiquated, and unseasonable headgear. When a few of them perish, as a matter of course, of sunstroke, express the utmost astonishment that anybody can die from such a cause in such perfect uniform in a temperate climate.

HOW TO TREAT THE VOLUNTEERS

Encourage fifty thousand men to attend a Review, and then tell them coolly that your military organization is quite unequal to the task of giving them a day's food.... As they are nearly all respectable middle-class members of Society, give them a shilling apiece to take care of themselves, and trust to their decency not to abuse such extraordinary liberality.

Punch gave credit to the Duke of Cambridge for his efforts to improve the amenities of barrack life, but came down heavily on him for opposing the introduction, when the late Duke of Devonshire was at the War Office, of neutral-tinted uniforms[Pg 112] on active service. The Duke of Cambridge thought it a good thing for a soldier that, when in action, he should be visible, and Punch dealt faithfully with this ducal ineptitude:—

"THE THIN RED LINE"

(Horse Guards Duo.)

Pro.

Who says a soldier's a thing ready made

Of a suit of grey and a service-spade?—

That there's pluck in picking a 'vantage ground,

Then digging a hole and heaping a mound?

The notion's preposterous, laughable, quizzible!

By Jove, Sir, a soldier—he ought to be visible!

Con.

I grant you all that; but when Six-foot Guards

Like ninepins go down at a thousand yards,

'Tis time to note that, if work's to be done,

A field to be saved, a day to be won,

It won't be by speeches as firework as fizzible,

But by getting well home with movement invisible.

Pro.

Pooh! Stuff, Sir! What served us at Waterloo?

Your neutral tint, or your washed-out blue?

Digging and dodging?—I rather opine

A rush with a cheer of a "thin red line,"

In the midst of a hailstorm of all things whizzible!

Don't talk, Sir, to me of a coat that's not visible!

Con.

No use, my good friend; for though you may bless

The days that departed with Old Brown Bess,

If you make that "red line," that never will yield,

A target for every shot in the field,

Of your foemen you'll stir the faculties risible—

For neither your troops nor your brains will be visible!

Nor did Punch in his zeal for the soldier on active service forget the claims to grateful recognition of the ex-service man. In 1890 we find an indignant appeal for the survivors of the Balaklava Charge, showing how they had been forgotten—except in music-hall recitations. To reinforce the appeal,[Pg 113] Punch printed a picture contrasting a Balaklava survivor, dying in a garret, with the well-remunerated professional "fasting man," one of whom was much in the public eye just then. An even more lurid contrast in modern hero-worship is exhibited in the sardonic description of the fêting and glorifying of criminals. The verses "I'd be a criminal" show how fashion, pseudo-science, sensational journalism, and sentimental folly conspired to apotheosize the murderer.

[Pg 114]

THE STATUS OF WOMEN

The history of modern England as set forth in the files of Punch is largely a record of the education of the average man; and there are few, if any, aspects of this education during the period under review in this volume in which greater changes are observable than in Punch's altered view of the status of women. Even in his earliest days he had "rounded Cape Turk"; he had never favoured an Oriental seclusion of his womankind. But an element of condescension and patronage mingled with his chivalry. Their efforts to emerge from the sphere of domestic duties met for the most part with amused ridicule. For the rest the phrase "pretty dears" fairly sums up Punch's earlier view of the place of women in the universe. This view had already been largely modified. We have seen how he had been shaken over the question of the suffrage, how he had been converted to women's invasion of the medical and other professions, and to their election to the London School Board. The progress of this recognition continues throughout this period; the competition of women sometimes excites chaff, sometimes misgiving, but it is no longer regarded as futile. Their solid achievements in a variety of spheres of activity are handsomely acknowledged. We hear less of the "pretty dears" and "ducks"; they are increasingly credited with the capacity to hold their own intellectually with the lords of creation. A conspicuous proof of this altered view is to be found in the texts which accompany the "social cuts" in the 'eighties and 'nineties. It has been said that "the ball of repartee cannot be kept up without constant repercussion," but in the days of Leech the repercussive quality was denied to the fair sex. This defect has now been so completely redressed that the balance inclines rather to the other side, and in Du Maurier's pictures the "score" is generally given to the women. The day of the domestic "doormat" was passing, and grown-up girls are no[Pg 115] longer at the mercy of pert or tyrannous schoolboy brothers. True, this self-assertion was far from complete. The solidarity and cohesion of the family circle was substantially unimpaired. Bachelor girls and revolting daughters were a negligible minority; and in the 'eighties the number of professional women was so small that unmarried aunts still played a considerable part in the domestic system, and are frequently found in charge of their small nephews and nieces. It was not until 1890 that Punch included in his series of "Modern Types" that of "The Undomestic Daughter"; and even then her self-expression is circumscribed by lack of opportunity and, in the portrait given, can only find vent in fussy and futile philanthropy. She is a dreary rebel, with a genius for discomfort, who neglects her family when they need her most, ultimately contracts an unromantic marriage, and ends up as a domestic tyrant—a sort of variant on Mrs. Jellyby, but hardly recognizable as a forerunner of the emancipated daughter of to-day.

MODERN ÆSTHETICS

Materfamilias: "Where have you been all the morning, girls?"

Sophronia Cassandra: "We've been practising old Greek attitudes at lawn-tennis, mamma!"

Papa (who is not æsthetic): "Ah! hope you like it, I'm sure!"

Sophronia Cassandra: "Very much, papa—only we never hit the ball!"

[Pg 116]

Punch was already a convert to the higher education of women within certain limits. His reservations are shown in 1875 in an interview between Professor Punch and an ideal candidate for the Ladies' University as it should be. Domestic economy comes first in the curriculum, the humanities second. A picture in the following year would seem to indicate that Punch's ideal was inverted, for one Girton student is shown reading to another a valentine headed with the famous lines from the Antigone of Sophocles beginning Ερωϛ ἁνἱκατε μἁχαντ.[3] "How much jollier," she observes, "than those silly English verses fellows used to send!" Classics were still the predominant partner, and in 1878 Punch notes and resents the attempted revival of classical costume inaugurated by a fashionable poetess. 'Arry's tirade against the higher education of women in 1879, blaspheming against the whole movement as ridiculous and unnatural, is heavily ironical, for in the same year Punch has some friendly verses on the extension of Girton and Newnham, and in 1880 congratulates Miss Scott on being bracketed eighth Wrangler. Punch simultaneously congratulated Mrs., afterwards Lady Butler, on being elected an A.R.A., and rejoiced that the doors of the Academy had been reopened to the sex once honoured in the days of Sir Joshua:—

Mrs. Butler, née Elizabeth Thompson, Punch takes off his hat to you as the first Lady Associate. Your predecessors, Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser, sprang into being full-blown R.A.'s.

This is as it should be. At last Punch may say, and with pride he says it, the Ladies are looking up—looking up to the high places of Science and Art, which should never have been held beyond their reach, and which will be graced by their occupancy.

But when the Academy doors are reopened to the Ladies, let them be opened to their full width. Let us not hear of any petty restrictions or exclusions from this or that function or privilege of R.A. What these letters bring men let them bring to women.

Punch's congratulations were premature. Forty years have elapsed, and no women have yet been elected Associates.

[Pg 117]

It was in 1880 again that Punch backed the appeal of Girton for funds to carry out the extension scheme and supported the petition of women for university degrees. Here he represents the would-be woman graduate as Vivien endeavouring to win over the recalcitrant academic Merlin:—

The decision of Durham University to grant women the B.A. degree in 1881 is cordially applauded, though the welcome is impaired by the facetious heading, "'Ducks' at Durham"; and the liberality of Cambridge in admitting women to the Tripos Examination is contrasted with the churlishness of Oxford. As I write the tables have been turned and Oxford is the paradise of the girl graduate.

In his earlier days Punch never wearied of insisting on the importance of cookery, but a set of verses in 1881 marks an altered mood towards the old "woman in the kitchen" cry. Here the suggestion is even made that men would be benefited by a course of lessons in cooking, and there is obvious irony in the concluding lines:—

The two moods are subtly combined in Du Maurier's famous and unforgettable picture of the cynical widow advising a wife of two years' standing to "feed the brute."

[Pg 118]

EXPERIENTIA DOCET

Wife of Two Years' Standing: "Oh yes! I'm sure he's not so fond of me as at first. He's away so much, neglects me dreadfully, and he's so cross when he comes home. What shall I do?"

Widow: "Feed the brute!"

From the 'eighties onward physical culture plays an ever-increasing part in the education of girls. Punch went astray in assuming in 1883 that bicycling was impossible for women, but in this and the next year we find him encouraging gymnastics for girls, though there is a touch of satire in Du Maurier's fashionable mother, who boasts to an eligible aspirant that every one of her daughters can knock their father down. The invasion of the domain of pastime and athletics by women and girls will be noted later on. For the moment I am concerned with their intellectual rather than their physical development. Little is said of girls' schools, though an interesting sidelight is shed on the methods of the old-fashioned boarding-school in the picture of the charming girl who explains to a[Pg 119] Frenchman her fluency in his tongue: "At school the girl who sat next me at dinner used to eat my fat, and I used to do her French exercise for her; so I got lots of practice." Girls were becoming more studious, more highly educated, but they were not all female Admirable Crichtons. In 1885 Punch chronicles the ingenuous remark of a young lady to her friend, "Only fancy! As You Like It is by Shakespeare!" He welcomed the admission of lady graduates to the Convocation of the University of London in 1884, but misgiving mingles with admiration in his forecast of the omniscient "Woman of the Future" in the same year:—

Here we find Punch reverting to his earlier attitude. Moreover, as I have shown elsewhere, in the middle 'eighties he[Pg 120] was in a decidedly pessimistic frame of mind, and inclined, like Porson, to "damn the scheme of things in general." The dismal mood passed, and Punch is himself again and obviously rejoicing in his own malice in the verses on an imaginary episode at Girton, where a breakdown in health, attributed to the excessive study of Browning, is traced to over-indulgence in chocolate creams by the members of the Browning Club. Punch's claim to be regarded as an expert authority where women's colleges are concerned is seriously invalidated by his confusing the sites of Newnham and Girton and, worse still, by calling the former "Nuneham" in the same year. But he redeemed himself triumphantly in his study of "The Girton Girl" (No. IX, and by far the best, of his series of "Studies from Mr. Punch's Studio") in December, 1886. I have the testimony of a distinguished Girton student of nearly twenty years later that Punch's sketch remained even then a masterly dissection of the "mentality" of the Girton Girl, and reveals an inside knowledge, both of generalities and details, which no mere man could have attained. The Girton Girl of fact is carefully distinguished from the Girton Girl of superstition. The latter is fast becoming as extinct as the Dodo:—

The modern schoolgirl is taking her place, no longer the giggling, flirting maiden of fiction, but an ascetic and hard-working young woman. Work has been her lot since the day when she stepped out of her cradle to combine education and amusement in the arrangement of alphabet bricks; and she looks back with a wistful incredulity to the time when the mystic letters, B.A., were to her nothing worse than the voice of the black sheep in the nursery rhyme. She inclines by instinct towards æstheticism in dress, affecting the limpest materials and the strangest hues, and making a compromise in the matter of collar and cuffs by wearing at neck and wrists a piece of very écru lace, turned down the wrong way. Her boots are the terror of stray blackbeetles, for a course of lectures on Hygienic clothing early taught her to view with horror and distrust a slim ankle and a pointed toe. She has a scholarly touch of shortsightedness, which she corrects by free use of the tortoiseshell pince-nez that dangles from her neck.

Her sense of duty is remarkable, and appalling. She virtuously accepts the onerous office of secretary to innumerable societies. Countless notices, in her bold and clear handwriting, may be seen[Pg 121] day after day upon the College notice-boards, some of them of a sufficiently pathetic character. "Will the following members be so very good as to pay their subscriptions due the term before last to the 'Society for promoting Masculine Intelligence'?" She does not even resent her appointment as sub-officer of the Fire Brigade, the duties of which position involve a constant personal supervision of two or three repulsively oily little hand-engines, which she tends and lubricates with loving care, till she has reduced her hands and face to the colour of the brown holland apron which enshrouds the rest of her person. Not even the horrors of an alarm practice can daunt her, though she may just have settled herself to revel for an hour in the pleasant byways of Professor Sidgwick's Ethics, when screams of "Fire!" rushing footsteps, and an alarm-rattle, such as heralds a bump in the May races, compel her to leave her books, and fly to the Hall. Then the canvas buckets must be produced, her corps arranged in alphabetical order, and marched off to the supposed scene of action. All this she does in an incredibly short time; and when, at the discretion of the head captain, the pumping of engines and passing of buckets is allowed to stop, she returns to her work with fortitude and resignation past belief.

HONOUR TO AGNETA FRANCES RAMSAY!

(Cambridge, June, 1887)

Yet in spite of her multifarious and strenuous activities the Girton Girl is not inhuman or immune to the appeal of her less serious-minded fellow students, and the sketch ends with a really charming portrait of a witty, incorrigibly frivolous, generously[Pg 122] hospitable and irresistibly popular member of the college. At once critical, judicial, and genial, the study is a little masterpiece of its kind. The verses, published some months earlier, on a young Spanish lady who took her doctor's degree at Barcelona at the age of nineteen, are appropriately cast in Swinburne's "Dolores" stanza (as that was her Christian name) with the refrain, "Our M.D. of Spain," but are not remarkable either as a parody or an appreciation. Much happier in every way is the well-known picture of Miss Ramsay (afterwards Mrs. Montagu Butler) entering a first-class carriage "For Ladies Only" on the occasion of her being placed Senior Classic in 1887, an exploit which caused Punch once more to raise his voice on behalf of the bestowal of degrees on women.

An even more remarkable success was achieved by Miss Philippa Fawcett, who in 1890 was declared to be "above the Senior Wrangler," and Punch, in "Topping the Tripos, or Something like a Score for the Sex," while congratulating the daughter, did not forget her father, always one of his heroes:—

Yet along with his acknowledgment of these scholastic triumphs, Punch was equally ready to welcome evidences of feminine weakness in the haunts of austere study. In 1888 Miss Helen Gladstone recalled the fact that when she was at[Pg 123] Newnham, a motion had been brought forward at the Debating Society that "life without gossip was not worth living" and carried by a large majority, and Punch alluded to the incident under the heading, "Nous at Newnham."

To round off Punch's educational record in this period, I may add that in 1892 he alludes to that irrepressible controversialist, Sir James Crichton-Browne, the champion of mutton chops, and common sense, who had condemned the higher education of women from the medical point of view. Punch professes himself converted by a young Amazon who reduces him to pulp and humiliation by her prowess at games of all sorts.

THE OLD, OLD STORY

The Colonel: "Yes, He was Senior Wrangler of his Year, and She took a Mathematical Scholarship at Girton; and now they're Engaged!"

Mrs. Jones: "Dear me, how interesting! And oh, how different their Conversation must be from the insipid twaddle of Ordinary Lovers!"

THEIR CONVERSATION

He: "And what would Dovey do if Lovey were to die?"

She: "Oh, Dovey would die too!"

The entrance of women into existing professions or the[Pg 124] creation by them of new callings is in the main viewed with sympathy and benevolence. In the controversy that arose in 1875 between Mrs. Nassau Senior, who had been appointed an inspector of Female Pauper Schools, and Mr. Tufnell, an official of the L.G.B., Punch espoused the side of the lady, who, he considers, had the best of it both in temper and argument. The statement in April of the same year that a lady had been engaged by a firm of solicitors as consulting counsel at a high salary, quoted from a Liverpool paper, was probably apocryphal; but it prompted Punch to observe that the more employments fit for gentlemen that are opened to ladies the better. Any such calling is better than marriage accepted merely as a situation.

Unfortunately some doubt is thrown on the sincerity of this testimonial by the sketch "Portia in Petticoats" in 1882—a burlesque description of a solicitor's office where only women clerks are employed. After a week's absence the head of the firm returns to find that they have mostly disappeared, eloped or got married. The election of Miss Maude Stanley, a cousin of the Dean, as a Guardian in 1877 is the subject of a friendly notice at the expense of Bumble, who regards it as a "most unporochial innowation." In the same year Punch views with admiration the beneficent work of the Ladies' Sanitary Association, established twenty years earlier to inculcate the value of healthy, sensible habits by means of lectures, tracts and handbooks. The suggestion made by a Hastings doctor in 1879 that women might be employed as dispensers is praised, though not without some reserves, in "Girls among the Gallipots," and the new "Ladies' Association for the Promotion of Horticulture and Minor Food Production" founded in the same year by Mrs. Thorne meets with Punch's unqualified approval. This is the first mention that I have met in Punch of a movement which led to the establishment of the horticultural schools at Swanley and elsewhere and the numerous poultry farms run by women all over the country. The institution of the "Royal Red Cross" decoration for nurses in 1883 is welcomed in friendly doggerel. As Bumble had condemned women guardians, so Mrs. Gamp is now represented as very indignant and contemptuous of the[Pg 125] "nursing sisters," their position and recognition. But Punch had no use here for amateurs. There is excellent point in Du Maurier's picture of the applicant for the post of matron or head nurse to a hospital who based her claim on being "not trained but gifted." By 1885 the female commercial traveller was apparently already in existence, but Punch treated this innovation with jocular suspicion:—

And so on with other shopkeepers.

On the efficiency of female clerks Punch speaks with two voices in 1887, under the heading "Jills in Office." First of all we have an unflattering picture of the rudeness and inattention of the girls in one of those joint establishments—half shop and half post-office. In the next number we are given the reverse of the medal; the public are the offenders, and the girls act up to their names—Miss Goodchild, Miss Meekin and Miss Mannerly. The announcement in the same year that ladies were to be allowed to take diplomas in dentistry prompts Punch to some frigid pleasantries; but this is a subject on which it has always been difficult to joke with discretion. Punch found a happier theme in the institution of the "Lady Guide Association" in 1888. He applauds the scheme which aimed at "providing remuneration and employment for intelligent gentlewomen debarred by the present overcrowded labour market from earning a livelihood," but he recognized that the guides would have to be very formidably accomplished persons, since their[Pg 126] duties comprised the giving advice and information to newcomers on every possible subject. As a "preliminary examination" was spoken of, Punch supplied a test paper containing, inter alia, the following questions:—

1. A four-wheeled cab, containing five inside passengers, two children on the box, and seven trunks on the roof, is taken from Liverpool Street Station to the extreme end of Hammersmith, and the Lady who has secured your services as guide, after having made the cabman carry the seven trunks up to the third storey offers him, as his fare, two and ninepence, which he indignantly refuses. On his subsequently claiming thirteen and sixpence, and taking off his coat and offering to fight the gentleman of the party for that amount on the steps of the house in the presence of a sympathizing crowd, what speedy measures, if any, should you adopt to effect a compromise?

2. You are engaged to conduct an intelligent, scientific, and inquiring party of sixteen people over Windsor Castle, the Marylebone Workhouse, the Thames Tunnel, Hanwell Lunatic Asylum, the National Gallery, the British Museum, and the London Docks. Do you think that your thorough knowledge of English history, your acquaintance with the working of the Poor Laws, your grasp of the progress of European Art, and your general familiarity with all the great political, commercial, engineering, economic and other problems of the hour are such as to warrant you in facing the coming ordeal with a jaunty confidence?

3. You are required by an economical Duke to provide a cheap wedding for his only daughter, and he has stipulated that the breakfast shall not, at the outside, cost more than ninepence a head. With a four-and-sixpenny bridal cake, and a sound champagne that must not exceed fifteen shillings a dozen, how do you propose to make the thing go off with éclat?

In 1890 the "Dorothy" Restaurant was started for "Ladies Only," but this condition, though the raison d'être of the venture, was soon modified: men were admitted from 6.30 to 10 p.m., and Punch was unchivalrous enough to make humorous capital out of the concession.

In regard to the suffrage and "Women's Rights" Punch remained on the side of the fence where he had got down after a good deal of vacillation. In 1879 he publishes what is apparently a bonâ fide letter from "A Lancashire Witch" protesting[Pg 128] against Miss Lydia Becker's claim to represent the general feeling of the district. "I assure you," she writes, "that Miss Becker's followers are chiefly ladies of her own pronounced politics, or semi-foreigners, and not Englishwomen pur sang." Punch observes that "no Lancashire Witch need fear to be mixed up with the Representative Gathering of vote-claiming Spinsters which Miss Lydia Becker threatens to bring down on the Free Trade Hall. Witches who know whence comes the real potency of their charms will certainly not seek to mix voting-powder in the cauldron." This was not friendly to the Suffragists, but the tone is preferable to that of 'Arry's views on Women's Rights in 1881 after attending a lecture. There is a certain admixture of shrewd commonplace in his remarks, but the verses are chiefly remarkable as a storehouse of cad-slang, fortunately mostly obsolete. Female emigration comes up for comment in the same year, but, as the object was avowedly matrimonial, the scheme had no political significance. The picture of the large, self-indulgent, sultanic brother advising his adoring sisters, cousins and aunts to assert their rights by learning to be more independent of men is purely ironical and has no bearing on the problem of women's economic dependence. The dialogue in two scenes between Edwin and Angelina in 1883 on the working of the new Married Women's Property Act is a rather cynical burlesque. The first scene shows the Act as it is expected to work, to the advantage of women; in the second we see it as it is sure to work—to the confirmation of the status quo, the woman continuing to leave her money affairs entirely in her husband's hands.

[Pg 127]

"THE ANGEL IN 'THE HOUSE'": OR, THE RESULT OF FEMALE SUFFRAGE

(A Troubled Dream of the Future)

Women Jurors

Sambourne's prophetic picture of "The Angel in 'the House'" in 1884 is an improvement on Punch's earlier fancy portraits of women legislators, but it does not render prophetic justice either to Lady Astor or Mrs. Wintringham. Punch refers more than once in 1885 to the Parliamentary candidature of Miss Helen Taylor who stood for Camberwell, but her nomination papers were not accepted. Punch offers "Helen of Camberwell" his condolences, but they are shorn of all grace by his previous comparison of her to the Three Tailors of Tooley Street and other acidulated puns. Du Maurier's picture in 1887 of a Jury[Pg 129] of Women antedates reality by more than thirty years; while the tension of party feeling in 1888 is illustrated by the genuine advertisement of a governess seeking work who had been "dismissed from a Conservative Clergyman's family for her Gladstonian views." Lady canvassers were already beginning to make their influence felt, and Punch recognizes their value in a "lay" which gives an entertaining account of their "unscrupulous, seductive, siren ways." At any rate they could not be ignored. The temper of "The Political Woman"—one of the "Modern Types" series—in 1890 is acid and disparaging throughout:—

"A FAIR JURY, AND ALL HOME-RULERS"

Having left school with an ill-assorted mass of miscellaneous knowledge, she will show her contempt for ordinary feminine accomplishments by refusing to attend dances, and by crushing mild young men whom misfortune may have thrown in her way. Having discovered from one of these that he imagines the Rebecca Riots to be an incident of Old Testament History, and has no definite views upon the currency question, she will observe in a tone of some bitterness, that "These are our Governors!" and, having left him in a state of collapse, will scale the ramparts of political discussion, in company[Pg 130] with a Professor, who happens to be unmarried and a Member of Parliament. After making love for some months, by means of an interchange of political tracts, these two will be married in a registrar's office and will spend their honeymoon in investigating the social requirements of Italian organ-grinders.

Thenceforward she exists chiefly as a member or president of innumerable committees; she neglects her husband and the son "whom, in a moment of regrettable absent-mindedness, she bore to the professor and brings up on Spartan principles and little else." Her home is a centre of slatternly discomfort:—

She will eventually fail to be elected a member of the School Board, and having written a strong book on a delicate social question, will die of the shock of seeing it adversely reviewed in The Spectator.

Sir Albert Rollit's Bill for extending the franchise to women was introduced in the early summer of 1892, and defeated on the second reading by only twenty-three votes. Punch, in his "Essence of Parliament," refers to an uproarious meeting in St. James's Hall, and to Mr. Asquith's "merciless logic" in demolishing the Bill. The Women's Liberal Federation had declared for the suffrage, and Punch illustrated the situation in a picture of two political lady cricketers appealing to the G.O.M. at the wicket: "A team of our own? I should think so! If we're good enough to scout [i.e. field] for you, why shouldn't we take a turn at the bat?"

Women's clubs increased in numbers throughout this period, but met with little encouragement from Punch. In 1877 they are satirized as enemies to domestic life; as the haunts of semi-detached, smart women—types which Punch portrayed in his "Dream of Queer Women" (after Tennyson) in the same year, wherein mention is made of the "shrieking sisterhood," realistic novelists, "art-beauties," shrewish suffragists and shady adventuresses. When the project of a Women's University Club was mooted in 1886, Punch takes a less lurid view of its possibilities. Smoking, card-playing and billiards are indicated, but at worst the ladies will only be mild, if sedulous apes of the male clubman. Gossip will predominate, and Punch suggests that the new venture should be called "The Blue-Stocking." As[Pg 131] for smoking, in 1888 Punch registered a protest under the title, "To a Fair Nicotian," in which the Laureate remonstrates with Lady Clara. He likes his own yard-long Broseley clay pipe, but disapproves even of a cigarette in the lips of lovely woman.

AT "LORD'S"

(It is always well to be well informed)

Clara (pointing to the Umpires): "Who are the two men in billycock hats and white coats?"

Matilda: "Oh, don't you know? Those are the headmasters of Eton and Harrow!"

Towards the athletic woman Punch was, on the whole, more benevolent. In 1883 he pays graceful homage to a woman with the engaging name of Jessie Ace who had saved a man from drowning. In the same year young ladies are gently chaffed for beginning to affect a knowledge of the technicalities of pastime and sport. But if Punch is to be believed, it was still sketchy. Rugby and Association football are mixed up[Pg 132] with cricket, and the two charming girls at the Eton and Harrow match at Lord's mistake the two umpires for the two headmasters. The slightly more serious view taken in 1884, when several cricket matches were played by women, is noted elsewhere. Fencing and boxing for women, under male instructors, French and British, are depicted by Du Maurier as "the last new fad" in 1886. The former, at any rate, came to stay and deserved to. Ladies had long figured in lawn tennis tournaments, but in his "Caution to Championesses" in 1887, Punch displayed some misgiving as to the development of this competition. Nor did he approve of the novelty of women riding astride in 1890, begging them to do anything but that, and rewriting the old nursery rhyme for these new Amazons:—

The Almanack for the same year gives four types of model middle-class wives. The French keeps her husband's accounts; the German is the Hausfrau and cook; the American is an intellectual; the English plays lawn tennis. The "Manly Maiden" (No. XXII in Punch's "Modern Types") described in December, 1890, is less closely observed and far less interesting than Punch's "Model Fast Lady" of forty years earlier. The sketch is a rather cruel caricature of the persevering but inefficient sportswoman who is always in the way, and is destined to "develop from a would-be hard-riding maiden into a genuinely hard-featured old maid." In agreeable contrast to this acid study is Punch's homage to the exploits of a Guernsey rifle-woman, Miss Leale, at Bisley in 1891, and his welcome to Mrs. Sheldon, the American traveller, on her return from her travels in Africa, in which he suggests that in time to come Stanley may be known as "the male Mrs. Sheldon." The exaggeration may be ironical, but the irony is so well veiled as to be almost imperceptible. In the years that were to come the achievements of Mary Kingsley and Gertrude Bell were beyond the reach of the most subtle disparagement.

[Pg 133]

A NEW TASTE IN MEN AND WOMEN

She: "What a fine-looking man Mr. O'Brien is!"

He: "H'm—hah—rather rough-hewn, I think. Can't say I admire that loud-laughing, strong-voiced, robust kind of man. Now that's a fine-looking woman he's talking to!"

She: "Well—er—somewhat effeminate, you know. Confess I don't admire effeminate women!"

On the subject of women workers Punch's utterances are apparently but not really irreconcilable. The "Wail of the Male; being a British workman's view of the cheap female labour question, respectfully submitted to the Trade Union Congress" in 1887, is a protest against women undercutting men in the labour market. But the voice is the voice of 'Arry, not of Punch—shrewd, glib and entirely selfish. The speaker has just got the "bullet"—having been sacked without notice—and speculates on further possibilities:—

Against these arguments, illustrative of a certain habit of mind, which at best excite a grudging acknowledgment of their coarse common sense, one may set the "Dream of Unfairly Treated Women" (after Tennyson) in 1890, describing the hardships of sempstresses, governesses, "slaveys" and shop-girls, the victims of sweating, greed, and worse, which unhappily were all too prevalent so recently as thirty years ago.

Punch, in fine, exhibits through this period a progressive acknowledgment of women's claims to be regarded as an intelligent being, tempered by moments of reaction. In 1875 he has a picture of an evening party at which all the men are anxious to be introduced to the wonderful Miss Pynke, that rara avis "who has never written a novel or contributed to a magazine." In 1887 the "score" is given to the professor in his retort to the "high-brow" lady:—

[Pg 135]

Miss Hypatia: "Yes, now that we are gradually educating ourselves up to your level, you Men ought at least to meet us halfway."

The Professor: "Meet you halfway? How? By gradually uneducating ourselves down to yours?"

In 1890, again, the amusing series of "Feline amenities" continued for some years, though they are a tribute to the wit of women, are invariably based on a denial of the quality of magnanimity. In this context I am minded to include a curiosity, dating from the year 1886, in the shape of an imaginary letter signed "Elizabeth Fry Romper," which is of interest as showing the change in the attitude of philanthropic women during the century. The writer describes how "of course on the hottest day of the whole summer" she was told off to take a lot of Sunday school girls for "a day in the country" to Greenwich, "which is supposed to have an elevating effect upon them for the rest of the year." Of all the disagreeable things she ever has to do, this is "far the worst." The picture given is decidedly realistic:—

It is no joke waiting for an hour at a suburban station, with eighty "young girls"—real young girls—pouring in by detachments, all in the wildest state of excitement, and decked with the entire contents of their jewel-cases. Of course, the first thing they did was to rush, helter-skelter, into a wrong train, and all the railway staff hardly sufficed to pull them out again before the train started. I had a whole compartment to look after, and felt rather nervous at the thought that the next one was filled with men—smoking shocking tobacco, by the way—and that the talk was distinctly audible.

I was truly thankful to reach Greenwich, and trusted that the girls might be fully occupied in getting tea, and that the heavy cake might calm down their excitement a little. So we all set to with a great deal of unnecessary bustle, and were flattering our elderly hearts that everything was going off splendidly, when, on the bell being rung—we had brought one on purpose—for the girls to be seated, the Superintendent looked round for the head girl to lead the singing grace. Instead of pious music of any sort, our ears were greeted with a shout of discordant laughter, which was found to proceed from some broken ground in the distance, where the whole of our first class were engaged in playing Kiss in the Ring with a party of soldiers from the neighbouring barracks. My[Pg 136] dear, if you could have seen the picture, you would never have forgotten it. I thought I should have died of laughing on the spot. The hot, dishevelled, romping girls, and the smart soldiers, quite unconscious of the awful face of the Superintendent, as she advanced towards them, and the way the damsels scuttered off as she let fall a few words of rebuke—it was the funniest thing I ever saw. She succeeded in driving her flock, sheepish but giggling, before her; all but one, who stoutly declined to leave her soldier, declaring she didn't want no tea, but would 'ave a spree in the merry-go-round with 'im. A separation was ultimately effected, but the gloom that hung over that meal I never shall forget. It was a mercy everyone else took it so seriously, or I couldn't have held out; as it was, when I got home, I laughed myself nearly into a fit.

The combination of duty, detachment and a sense of humour is not commonly credited to Victorian girls. But the problems that had to be tackled were very much the same, and so was human nature.

[Pg 137]

EDUCATION

Hasty generalizations from the study of Punch throughout this period might easily lead one to the conclusion that the two great evils in national education were the craze for athletics in Public and Preparatory, and over-pressure in Board and Elementary, Schools. A more detailed examination of his pages tends to correct or modify this view. Punch was in the main a firm believer in the public school system as an instrument of character-building, and he was no enemy of the ladder of learning which had been erected by Forster's Act of 1871. But while he detested snobbery, extravagance and complacent Philistinism, he was by no means satisfied that the State was getting good value for its constantly increasing expenditure on education. Thus to take the Elementary schools first, we find continual references, mostly unfavourable, to the administration and working of the Board School System. In 1875 he falls foul of the pedantry of over-zealous officials—the red-tape methods of inspectors, and the action of visitors who sent children back to school before they were free from infection. These inquisitorial activities roused Punch's old democratic sympathies, and some ten years later we find him suggesting that a similar method might fairly be applied to the upper and upper middle classes—that what was sauce for the goose in the slums might be served up to the gander in the squares.

PREDESTINED!

Northern Matron (before the School Board): "I'm not against Eddication, Ladies and Gen'l'men. I al'ays make him take his Book o' nights. But reelly I calls it a flyin' in the face o' Providence to be keepin' a Boy out o' the Stables with such a pair o' Legs as his'n!!"

In the series of articles on "Education Made Easy" in 1887, Punch sympathizes with the mothers who were constantly harried by "attendance officers" for neglecting to send their children to the Board Schools. Ignorance was a great evil, but the Board Schools were attempting too much. The essentials were not thoroughly taught; pupil-teachers were overworked; there was too much of the 'ologies, and the three R's were in danger of going to the wall. The reactionary protest[Pg 138] against the teaching of music—"We don't want Grisis at Board Schools"—is ironical; but Punch espoused the cause of those who condemned over-cramming in Board Schools, and based their crusade on Sir James Crichton-Browne's Report on over-pressure in 1884. But his great point was that there was too much teaching of the things that did not matter. His "Indignant Ratepayer" in 1887 welcomes the decision of the London School Board to hold an inquiry into the curriculum of their schools. The special committee were also to report "whether such changes can be made as shall secure that children leaving school shall be more fitted than they now are to perform the duties and work of life before them." One of the speakers had declared that "the boys educated in public elementary schools scorned all handicraft work, and wanted to be clerks, while girls in like-manner scorned all domestic service." The "Indignant Ratepayer" congratulated the School Board on turning over a new leaf, though it had taken them sixteen years to realize that they were on the wrong tack.

[Pg 139]

A week later Punch published another letter from another "Indignant Ratepayer," deprecating the congratulations as premature and indiscreet:—

I, too, Mr. Punch, am a ratepayer; I have seen my rates trebled since the creation of the School Board; and I am now told that I ought to thank my stars that, after sixteen years' work, they have at length displayed a glimmering of common sense. There seems to be something ominous in this term of sixteen years, for it appears that it is just for this period that we have been supplying the Army with bayonets that won't stab, and the Navy with cutlasses that won't cut. We are always calling ourselves, though nobody else does, a practical people. But what care we for the opinion of our neighbours, so long as we are happy in the calm contemplation of our superiority?

"The unexpected always happens," so said Beaconsfield, and it seems he was right, for who would have ever dreamed that the School Board would have ever made such a confession? But although they confessed much, they did not confess all. They said nothing of the numberless half-starved children whose health has been impaired or ruined by the tasks imposed upon them. Nothing of the hundreds of thousands spent in bullying and worrying their poor parents. Nothing of the money spent in endless litigation. On all such subjects the Board are discreetly silent. They draw attention only to the outcome of their labours, namely the boys and girls whose education has been completed—the survival of the fittest in short—but who are fit for nothing.

"No handicraft work for the boys, no domestic service for the girls." The boys all want to be clerks; what the girls want to be we are not informed, but domestic service is not to be thought of, so the sooner my wife and daughters take to such work the better. And for this have I paid trebled rates. For this have we been passing Code after Code, and fixing Standard after Standard, to find at last that the whole work must be begun afresh. I too am indignant, as well as your Correspondent, not that the School Board have been telling the truth, but that they have been so long in telling it.

I protest against my money having been spent in injuring the health of half the poor children of London, and of injuring the morals of the other half.

Punch was ready to give a hearing to economists who really felt the burden, but he had no sympathy with the "old gang"[Pg 140] of City Fathers who were frankly obscurantist on the subject of education, while they were proud of having dined and wined themselves into the possession of "first class stomachs":—

"WHERE IGNORANCE IS BLISS," Etc.

That not particularly learned body which rejoices in the name of the Commissioners of Sewers of the City of London, held a Special Meeting at the Guildhall last week, to discuss the terribly extravagant conduct of the London School Board in adding one penny in the pound to the amount of the rate to be levied in the wealthy City of London for the ensuing year. Much burning eloquence, of the peculiar City type, was used on the occasion, and a statement by one highly excited member that there were no fewer than 313 Board Schools in the Metropolis in which the great work of education was being successfully carried on, and that the cry was still for more, was received with as terrible a groan of horror as if it had been announced, on authority, that there were to be no more "Cakes and Ale" for the Sewage Commissioners.

In vain was it stated by those who, apparently, love light rather than darkness, that whereas the population of London some ten or twenty years ago was one of the most ignorant of any capital of Europe, it was now, thanks to the School Board, assuming its proper place in this respect, by giving all its children a good education. They were met by a shout of derision from an angry Commissioner, who demanded to know "why they didn't try to teach a cow to win the Derby," which brilliant interrogation elicited great applause.

In vain was it suggested that this sudden affectation of sympathy with the poor Ratepayer for having to pay this additional penny for education, was but a blind to screen their own increased rate of double the amount, for a purpose of not one-tenth the importance. The Sewage Commissioners listened with impatience, reserving their enthusiastic approbation for the very demonstrative gentleman who addressed them after their own heart; and in language that all could understand and thoroughly sympathise with. He was quite willing, generous soul, that the poor children should have bread, but what he objected to was rumpsteaks! and he concluded his brilliant oration with the following magnificent peroration:—"Everybody should have his meal, but he must have a stomach of the highest class before they could give him turtle soup and port wine!"

Who but a member of the City Corporation could have contrived, when discussing the question of the education of the Poor, to have brought in those two gods of his idolatry, turtle soup and port wine? And in combination too!

[Pg 141]

PROGRESS

Young Rustic: "Gran'fa'r, who was Shylock?"

Senior (after a pause): "Lauk a' mussy, boy, yeou goo to Sunday Skewl, and don't know that!"

This well-merited castigation preceded the protests of the "Indignant Ratepayers" by a couple of years, but it is more truly representative of Punch's convictions on the main question. We had to educate our masters, and we must not squeal over the bill—provided the education was sound. On that point Punch was by no means satisfied, and in 1887 he invokes the testimony of the British workmen, who is made to protest against the unpractical nature of modern education, and the undue prominence assigned to the 'ologies and 'ometries. A cartoon in 1888 represents Education betrayed by its "friends"—pedantry and jobbery. Over-pressure was aggravated by under-feeding and under-housing. As for the former, Punch prints an East End remonstrance against the penny rate: "When we wants daily bread it ain't any good saying you only wants 'that there penny.'" But the steady growth of State expenditure on education is resented on the ground that it was devoted to inappropriate or unnecessary objects. In 1891 Punch publishes a forecast of the Exasperated Public[Pg 142] protesting against the ever-increasing extravagance of the London School Board, who have taken to building observatories and raised the salaries of elementary teachers to £2,500 a year.

This is burlesque, but there is criticism and dissatisfaction at the back of it. So when the Bill providing for "assisted" (i.e. Free) Education, for which the Budget surplus of £2,000,000 was to be devoted, was introduced in the same year, Punch represented the cross-currents of the Unionist Party in his cartoon. Mother Goschen, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is seen introducing her adopted child (Free Education), whom she had found in Birmingham, to the Old Tory Party (Mrs. Gamp), who doesn't like the looks of him at all. But Goschen carried his point—that the Government were pledged to alleviate the burden which compulsory education had, in recent years, imposed upon the poorer portion of the people; and by September 1 the free education proposals of the Government were generally adopted throughout the country by both Board and Voluntary Schools.

The old question of corporal punishment comes up in 1880 and 1881, but in a new light. There was "one law for the rich and another for the poor," but here, at any rate, it could not be maintained that the poor were oppressed. Already flogging was only commonly resorted to in the schools for the upper classes, and Punch emphasizes the contrast in his dialogue between the Peer and the Peasant. The Peasant observes that when he is tapped over the head with a cane, his mother goes and bashes the teacher over the head with the poker and gets him fired for assaulting her son. The Peer, on the other hand, owns to having been "swished" four times in a fortnight without attempting reprisals. Whereupon the Peasant suggests that he should have sent his mother to go and bang his old master. If Punch is to be believed, conflicts between teachers and parents were pretty frequent at this time. They are not unknown even to-day; but parents are less inclined to take the law into their own hands.

The education of the million, however, was not confined to school hours, and with the decline of illiteracy the growth[Pg 143] of the reading habit brought its perils as well as its privileges. Juvenile criminality was no longer the result of ignorance and neglect—at least to the same extent. Punch was inclined to trace the evil largely to the low tone of the cheap literature provided for the young. In the Diary of a Boy Burglar in 1886, his downfall is ascribed to his putting into practice the principles imbibed by a perusal of Jack Sheppard. A somewhat alarmist article in the Fortnightly Review on "What Boys Read" declared that while many boys' books were healthy and helpful, the majority of the journals supplied for the children of the working classes were devoid of every element of sweetness and light. "They are filled with stories of blood and revenge, of passion and cruelty, as improbable and almost impossible in plot as they are contemptible in literary execution."

The solution of the matter by Press censorship, advocated by the writer, presented difficulties which Punch did not shirk, and his own views, though strong, are tempered by sound common sense:—

Ainsworth's story may serve the turn of an Opéra-bouffe Librettist, and the scamp himself be played by a sprightly actress without much harm being done to anybody. Jack Sheppard, for instance, ought not to be sanctioned by the Licenser any more than Claude Duval, Dick Turpin, or any other drama of a like kind, of which the recognized motive is the veiled incentive to crime. Still, a raid on Harrison Ainsworth, notwithstanding the acknowledged mischief that has been done to the young and ignorant by a perusal of his cracksman's romance, would scarcely be the same thing, and yet the cases are sufficiently parallel to admit at least of argument. We should be inclined to suppress such romances as Jack Sheppard, Rookwood, Bulwer's Claude Duval, and also Eugene Aram, which was so severely and so justly satirized by Thackeray in Mr. Punch's pages. For the truth about Jack Sheppard our readers have only to refer to one of the earliest volumes of Mr. Punch's series, where they will find his character as described by Ainsworth, and his true character as given in the Newgate Calendar, displayed side by side in parallel columns. There was no sort of romance about the real Jack Sheppard.

Meantime, for want of a better remedy to meet the evil, let parents and guardians, and those who have charge and direction of the young idea, keep their eyes open and have a special regard to the direction in which it shows inclination to shoot. It is just as[Pg 144] ready to derive its nutriment from the "penny healthful," as from the "penny dreadful," and as a mere matter of commercial enterprise, the former could be as easily forthcoming and available as the latter. Philanthropy is continually actively busying itself about the education of the young—here is something practical for it to do—let it look to the quality of its Magazine literature. It wants some energy and some capital, but both in these days ought to be forthcoming. To drive the penny dreadful out of the literary field is not a task beyond the powers of organization and enterprise. And it is in this direction that the first steps will be taken in the material and moral amelioration of "What boys read."

The subject recurs in 1889 and 1890, when sensational juvenile literature is again denounced; but the new stories are more vigorously condemned than the old, and the Ghost of Jack Sheppard, in a conversation with the Shade of Dick Turpin, scouts the notion that they could upset the minds of the young. Why, they weren't in it with the papers read by everyone everywhere! Punch vigorously supported the efforts of those who sought to abate the evils of child insurance, and welcomed the intervention of Magee, then Archbishop of York, who died while on a visit to London to attend a Committee of the House of Lords on his Infant Insurance Bill, in May, 1891. But when the Prevention of Cruelty Bill was in Committee in the summer of 1887, Punch strongly supported the Attorney-General's amendment to omit from the Bill the words prohibiting the employment of children under ten in theatres and licensed places of public entertainment. Mr. Mundella, who was in charge of the Bill, accepted the amendment, but "Dick Temple, Sam Smith and other superlatively good people objected," and it was defeated both in the Committee and the Report stages, to Punch's undisguised annoyance. After the Bill became law in July, he added "one word more," and his arguments, if not convincing, are at least consistent with his life-long sympathy with the professional actor:—

Well-intentioned persons do a heap of mischief, and talk and write a lot of nonsense about what they don't understand. There are dangers to morality ("who deniges of it?") in the Theatrical Profession, as in every other profession; but these affect the amateur, and those who go on the stage late in life, not those who are to the[Pg 145] manner born. The loves of poor, honest, hard-working theatrical families, where the sons and daughters obtain theatrical employment at an early age, are thoroughly respectable. Their stage-work is not only compatible with their receiving a sound education, but is a complement of it. Habits of strict discipline, cleanliness, and domestic thrift are inculcated; the little children, from the biggest down to "the Widow's Mites" engaged in a Pantomime, are seldom sick, and never sorry, but do their work with pleasure, and would probably be willing to undertake even "more study," rather than be deprived of their theatrical employment which brings in the money, pays the school, and helps to keep a happy family together under one roof, which, "be it never so 'umble," is styled by that dear old English word "home"—and there is no place like it. The efforts of those who would exclude children under ten from theatrical work may cause great misery and break up many such happy homes. We say this in serious earnest, and, from practical experience, we do know what we are talking about.

Punch resented pedantic, official, or fussy interference with children whether at work or play. A Children's Party at the Mansion House in January, 1881, provokes well-merited ridicule. No mixed dancing was allowed; the only diversion was provided by some "hideous negro entertainers" and, by way of compensation, a sermon by Mr. Spurgeon! After 11.30 p.m. young ladies were allowed to dance, but only with young ladies; and the young gentlemen with young gentlemen. At the same time Punch was a believer in the cane, when administered with discretion, and a resolute discourager of precocity. The full-page illustration in the Almanack of 1884, "Education's Frankenstein," representing the omniscient child of the future, ruining all professions, as everyone can do everything, is an extravagant burlesque, but it foreshadows the complaints we have had of late of the "unfair competition" of the infant author and artist with the adult practitioner. In 1885 Du Maurier's Child of the Period gravely rebukes her grandmother who speaks of a "puff-puff"—"The locomotive, I suppose you mean, grandmamma." But this is a form of joke which recurs throughout the ages.

Punch's "Winter Exhibition of the Works of Young Masters" in 1888 is a really illuminating piece of prophetic satire. The exhibitors are all children, and the works shown[Pg 146] all belong to the Nursery Period. We may take one example:—

Billy Bolaine, born 1868, flourished 1880-2. No. 3. Landscape, with horse, ducks and figures. Silvery effect of about eight o'clock in the morning anywhere. The animals have given rise to some discussion, but the general impression seems to be that the artist, who never depicted anything without a subtle meaning, originally intended at least one of them for a cow.

Altogether this is an excellent skit on the critics who greet all the efforts of the young with a foolish voice of praise. Self-conscious, aggressive and complacent precocity Punch could not endure; the small American child who treats a bishop, who had endeavoured to repress him, as a back number, is clearly regarded as a nuisance. But in his plea for the unhappy infant prodigy Punch recognized it as a real grievance that child performers were overworked by over-practising and continual travelling. In 1888 it was borne in upon him that, whether from the engrossing nature of modern girls' and boys' occupations, or their preference for contemporary and realistic fiction, the study of Fairy Tales and Nursery Lore was fast falling into neglect if not into positive contempt. To avert what he considered a national calamity, he felt it his duty to suggest to parents that no child should be allowed on any pretext in future to leave the Nursery for School until it had passed an examination in these subjects.

Punch's test papers are all excellent, but I can only find room for the General and the Pantomime Papers:—

CRITICAL AND GENERAL.

1. What is your opinion of the intelligence of Giants as a race? Of what substance were they in the habit of making their bread? Would you draw any and what distinction between (a) Giants and Giantesses, (b) Ogres and Ogresses, (c) a Mamma Ogress and her daughters?

2. What is a Roc? What do Rocs feed on? If you were on the edge of steep cliffs surrounding an inaccessible valley, strewn with diamonds and visited by Rocs—how would you proceed in order to obtain some of those diamonds? Give the reply of the[Pg 147] Slave of the Lamp to Aladdin's request that a Roc's egg should be hung up in his dome.

3. Mention instances when (a) a Wolf, (b) a Bear, (c) a Cat, (d) a Harp, are recorded to have spoken, and give the substance of their remarks, when possible, in each case.

4. Write down the name of any hero you can remember who suffered inconvenience from (a) the imprudence, (b) the disobedience, of his wife.

5. How would you act if you were invited to go to a party on the opposite side of the way, and had nothing to go in but a pair of Seven-Leagued Boots? Compare the drawbacks and advantages of going to a State Ball in glass slippers.

6. State which family you would rather belong to: One in which there was (i.) a Wicked Uncle, (ii.) an Envious Sister, (iii.) a Jealous Brother, or (iv.) a Cruel Stepmother? Give your reasons, and illustrate them by examples. How many Wicked Uncles do you remember to have read of? Are Wicked Uncles ever sorry, and, if so, when?

7. Give any instances that occur to you where it is stated that the chief personages of the story "all lived happily ever afterwards." Are there any exceptions to this rule?

PANTOMIME PAPER.

(Optional, and for those Students only who may decide to "take up" this branch of the subject.)

1. Did the manners, language, and general deportment of the various Kings and Queens you have seen in Pantomimes correspond at all with what you had expected them to be from the books?

2. Mention any fairy tale in which (1) long ballets, (2) allusions to subjects in last year's papers, (3) jokes about "drinks" and "pawn-tickets," (4) comic duets which you didn't quite understand, and (5) men dressed up in women's clothes, occur. Mention (if you can) any Pantomime in which they do not.

3. Were you surprised to hear at Drury Lane that the King who befriended the Marquis of Carabas was originally a Potman? Do you remember this in the original text?

4. Why do you suppose that the Wicked Brothers in this year's Pantomime were frightened by green snakes, pink lizards, and enormous frogs? Did their own explanation that they had "the jumps" convey much to your mind? Did this scene make you laugh?

5. Give as clear and intelligible an account as you are able of the story of any one Pantomime you have been to, mentioning where—if at all—it departed from the version you have studied,[Pg 148] and whether or not you considered such departures (if any) to be improvements.

6. Investigate the principal peculiarities of Pantomime Animals. How do they chiefly differ from other animals? Describe the effect of kindness upon a Pantomime Donkey, and account for it.

N.B.—Not more than four questions need be attempted in each of the above papers. Candidates are advised not to leave any question unattempted from a mere inability to answer every part of such question.

The Pantomime Paper conveys some excellent dramatic criticism, which is needed as much to-day as thirty years ago, but it may be permitted to stand in this educational context. As a counterblast to the charge of indifference towards fairy tales on the part of the modern child, it is only right to add that in 1892 Du Maurier's picture, "A Warning," shows a touching belief in the actuality of Bluebeard:—

Archie (to his Sister, who has been reading him Fairy Tales): "Won't there be a lot of Us, if none of us go and get married? Worse than Hop-o'-my-Thumb!"

Sister: "Yes; but you know I mean to be married!"

Archie: "Do you mean to say you'd go and live alone with a Man after reading Bluebeard?"

When we turn to the Public and Preparatory Schools we find that Punch's criticisms resolve themselves into a triple indictment of their costliness, their curriculum and their undue exaltation of athletics. The attack on the athletic craze begins in 1875, when Punch published an imaginary Report of a boy's work for 1895 at St. Paul's, Eastminster, which deals with nothing but his progress at games and sports.

The charge had a good deal to justify it, but the choice of a name was not happy, since Colet's famous foundation has in its recent phase never invited criticism on the score of any slackness in studious industry. Punch renews the attack more than once. In 1880, in a burlesque account of a Prize Day, brain-work is just tolerated; athletic prowess is the only thing really encouraged and rewarded. Yet simultaneously we encounter Master Freddy from Eton, who considers that energy[Pg 149] of any sort is "bad form." "Good form," in Punch's view, might easily degenerate into a snobbish fetish, and in one of his "International Comparisons," in the Almanack of 1879, he emphasizes the comprehensiveness of French public schools as contrasted with the class distinctions observed in England. It was in the same year that an inquiry was held into the administration of Wellington College and the alleged departure from the intentions of the founders. Punch took the line that what was meant to be a military orphanage had become a rather costly public school of the common type, and noted that Mr. Gladstone defended the change because Benson, his son-in-law, was head master. This was a partial error. Gladstone's son-in-law was Wickham, who had succeeded Benson as head master. But the sting remained. Punch, it may be added, was thoroughly consistent in his attitude of antagonism to the diversion of old foundations from their original aims.

THE NEW TYRANNY

"Of course you needn't Work, Fitzmilksoppe; but Play you must and shall."

The costly inefficiency of the public schools came up again in 1880, à propos of a correspondence in The Times, in which a "disappointed mother" recounted the experience of her two sons who, on leaving a public school at the age of nineteen, had forgotten all they knew before they went there:—

[Pg 150]

Hence a justly "Disappointed Mother" naturally enough concludes that "Our great schools want inspection sadly." Experience has certainly given her some cause to compare them unfavourably with private schools; although as to the latter she generalizes rather widely in saying that they "must teach, or close." Too many of them do neither.

Her boys, at any rate, both of them learned at a Private Boarding School enough to enable them to pass the Junior Oxford Local Examination at an early age. Unquestionably they were taught so much; but then how were they taught it? In such a style that they have now, at an adult age, to be taught it over again.

So it seems that a "Disappointed Mother's" two sons were educated at the Private Boarding School as the bottles are aërated in a soda-water manufactory. Information must have been forced into the former as carbonic acid gas is pumped into the latter. The gas is retained in the bottles whilst corked down, but escapes on the removal of pressure; so, if the boyish minds are left open, their school-learning, set free from forcible compression, goes off in youthful effervescence. Admirable system, by which our youth at an early age are enabled to pass the examinations, for which at maturer years they have to be crammed all over again!

The inspection of public schools has remained a subject of acute controversy ever since; and it is not clear whether Punch's approval would have extended to Government inspection. It was in the same year, by the way, that Du Maurier illustrated the dialogue between Sir Gorgius Midas and an aristocratic Colonel. Sir Gorgius's main regret was that he had never been at a public school; the Colonel, who was once at Eton, laments that he suffers from a neglected education. Burnand, who succeeded to the editorship of Punch in 1880, was also an old Etonian, but was not on that account prepared to grant his old school a complete immunity from criticism. The "Diary of a Present Etonian," which appeared in 1885, is in the main jocularly descriptive, but illustrates a prevalent Philistinism, the habits of ragging and borrowing money, and tells of a week with only one whole school-day and two whole holidays. Yet while fully alive to the waste of time and money which went on at the public schools, Punch was very far from embracing the creed of the revolutionary utilitarians who would scrap the old curriculum wholesale. In 1887 he printed an ironic account of the[Pg 151] "Public School of the Future," thoroughly impregnated with the Commercial Spirit. The hero, the new "Tom Brown," develops a talent for finance so remarkable that his father longs to see him loose on the Stock Exchange.

Punch did not believe in compulsory classics, because he disliked dons, pedants and academics; but in his parody of "The Isles of Greece" from the point of view of a British schoolboy, he made it abundantly clear that he had no love of the purely commercial "bread-study" view of Education:—

In dealing with University Education Punch maintained his attitude of a moderate reformer. Keble College, Oxford, dates from 1870; in 1878 Punch twice over displays a keen hostility to the Anglican spirit of its founders and the "gingerbread and gilt" of Butterfield's architecture. He seizes the occasion to belittle Keble's poetry, to attack Pusey, Burgon and Liddon, and to describe the college in the following contemptuous quatrain:—

Punch did not share the late Canon Liddon's pessimism over the new Science degree at Oxford in 1879. Liddon is quoted as saying that without the habits of exactness and precision[Pg 152] acquired by classical studies it was impossible to reach the higher characteristics of an educated man. The argument was naturally resented by those who maintained that "exactness and precision" were precisely the qualities inculcated by scientific training, and in an ironical dialogue Punch derides specialization as compared with the "humanities." In 1885 the neglect of English literature at the older Universities is satirized in the picture of the undergraduate reading out his illiterate letter, in which the first and third persons are hopelessly mixed up.

In 1886 the spread of free education to the Universities is foreshadowed in a description of the Slade Professor at Oxford lecturing to a mixed audience of coal-heavers and undergraduates; and the "Progressists' Calendar" indicates a revolt of Ratepayers against their new burdens. In the same year the "Studies from Punch's Studio" include a portrait of the new type of University don. "Wyckham of Jude's," who displays much versatile energy and a wide range of interests—athletics, music, philosophy, Browning and psychical research—ultimately goes to Australia as a Professor of Greek. The reference to "Eleutheria Hall" foreshadows Ruskin College, which was founded in 1899, and in other ways Punch's fancy portraiture illustrates the changes which had come over the spirit of Oxford's dream. We note, for example, the allusion to the new cosmopolitanism—the invasion of foreigners, white and coloured, anticipating the time some thirty years later which gave birth to one of the best of modern Oxford anecdotes. A film was being exhibited showing a large canoe manned by Hawaiian natives, whereon a voice arose from the audience, "Well rowed, Balliol!"

The proposal, since realized, to introduce Agriculture as a subject for study at Oxford is jocularly treated early in 1887 in the form of a diary of a candidate who is ploughed for his unorthodox views on potato culture. As for modern languages, the advantages of a foreign education—social and artistic as well as commercial—are excellently summed up in the same year in Du Maurier's picture of the industrious and accomplished young man from Hamburg, who is not only a skilled[Pg 153] pianist but can speak six languages, live on a pound a week, work eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and do without a holiday!

ADVANTAGES OF A FOREIGN EDUCATION

Young Müller (from Hamburg) accompanies the Miss Goldmores in some of Rubinstein's lovely duets—to the envy and disgust of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. (N.B.—Young Müller can also speak six languages, live on a pound a week, work eighteen hours out of twenty-four, and do without a holiday.)

In 1875 Punch dwelt sympathetically on the still surviving prevalence of classical learning amongst statesmen. The occasion was furnished by Disraeli's florid eulogy of the imagination of the English School of Art at the Royal Academy banquet:—

"HE TOO WAS BORN IN ARCADIA"

(Matthew Arnold on Disraeli at the R.A. Dinner).

Probably the exigencies of the metre are responsible for the strange lapse which made Punch substitute "Orestiades" for "Oreades." Greek was not then in the "last ditch," though the following advertisement, which Punch reproduces in the same year, seems to show that its study did not conduce to opulence:—

A Bachelor, elderly and somewhat infirm, having a moderate acquaintance with the Latin and Greek languages and who is likewise expert with a weeding hoe, seeks a Home and Employment. A bracing air and easy access to the services of the Church indispensable.—Address, &c.

Nowadays one of our leading literary weeklies talks of the "Hyperion Spring." But as early as 1891 the question of Compulsory Greek was attracting a good deal of attention, and Punch sided with The Times in expressing his disbelief in "protected studies." He also took occasion to criticize the narrowness of the old curriculum in his picture deriding the ignorance of Dante shown by classical students. It is just as well that he heads the picture "Too much Greek," for no good Virgilian would ever have laid himself open to such a charge.

THE RESULT OF TOO MUCH GREEK

First Classic: "By the way, hadn't Dante got another Name?"

Second Classic: "Yes; Alfieri, I think—or else Alighieri."

First Classic: "Ah, perhaps you're right. I had a notion it was Gabriel Rossetti, or something!"

At the beginning of this period Punch undoubtedly showed a good deal of mistrust of the new methods of elementary[Pg 155] education, in so far as they encouraged literary aspirations among the masses and tended to convert the artisan into the clerk. At its close he strikes a different and decidedly more democratic note in his ironical proposed "inscription for a Free Public Library" under the heading, "Laissez Faire":—

Laissez Faire in the family circle was another matter. The authority of the father in domestic affairs is represented as still unquestioned even by the mother as late as 1879. But, just as you can always find proverbs which are mutually contradictory the one of the other, so the pages of Punch constantly provide simultaneous illustrations of opposing tendencies. In the very same year in which the doctrine of patriarchal rule is shown to be still firmly established, Punch exhibits a highly modern aspect of the relations between the two generations. Squire Quiverfull's son, who pays 60s. a hundred for his cigars, rebukes his father for paying 3d. each for his: "If I had as many children to provide for as you, I wouldn't smoke at all."

[Pg 157]

RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES

In the previous volume it was shown how Punch ranged himself on the side of the determined Protestantism of the mass of the English people against the growth of Ritualistic opinions and practices in the Church of England.

The tone of Punch's remonstrances was not always judicious or considerate, and it would be easy to overrate their influence. Still, they were not unrepresentative, and undoubtedly played a part in the movement which led to the introduction in the spring of 1874 of the Archbishops' Bill for the Regulation of Public Worship. As it was originally drafted, the directory power as to worship was given to the Bishop, assisted by a board of Assessors, clerical and lay, with an appeal to the Archbishop with a Board of Assessors whose decision should be final. The provisions of the Bill were criticized by Lord Salisbury, the Bishop of Peterborough, and Lord Shaftesbury, but of the amendments proposed those of Lord Shaftesbury carried the day, viz. that an Ecclesiastical Judge should preside in the Courts of Canterbury and York, to be appointed by the two Archbishops with the approval of the Crown, and that before this Judge, and not before the Bishop, such case of complaint, if not dismissed by the Bishop as frivolous, was to go for trial; one appeal should lie from this Judge to the Privy Council. These amendments gave the final character to the Act.

So far the Ministers had not committed themselves, and grave differences of opinion were known to exist in the Cabinet. On the introduction of the Bill into the Commons further cross-currents were revealed. Mr. Gladstone declared uncompromising war on the Bill, on the ground that it was not asked for by the Bishops, and as now modified was "manufactured not by the two Primates but by members of Parliament independently of them"; that it lacked weight and authority; and gave undue[Pg 158] powers to indiscreet Bishops. He accordingly formulated six resolutions embodying the principles which ought to guide legislation on the subject. Sir William Harcourt followed, vigorously traversing his late leader's argument, and defending the Bill. His "Erastian Manifesto" was so favourably received by the House that Disraeli, in a remarkable speech, made it clear that the Government had adopted the Bill. It was in this speech that he declared that it "would be wise for us to rally on the broad platform of the Reformation." As long as the doctrines relating to the worship of the Virgin, or the Confessional were held by Roman Catholics, he was prepared to treat them with reverence. "What I do object to is Mass in masquerade."

The second reading was carried without a division; on the following day Mr. Gladstone withdrew his resolutions; and large majorities confirmed the principal clauses in Committee. When the Bill came back from the Lords, Disraeli gave way on an important amendment dealing with the question of appeal, which the Commons had introduced and the Lords had thrown out; he repeated that the Bill was intended "to put down Ritualism"; incidentally he described Lord Salisbury, who had repudiated "the bugbear of a majority of the House of Commons," as "a great master of gibes and flouts and jeers," but appealed to the House not to fall into the trap and lose the Bill by gratifying their amour-propre. The appeal was not in vain; the Commons without a division decided not to insist on their amendment, and the Bill which was appointed to come into operation in July, 1875, was read a third time on August 3. It is hard to say whether Sir William Harcourt's panegyrics of Disraeli, or Disraeli's sarcasms at the expense of Lord Salisbury caused more remark.

But a more sensational sequel of the debates in Parliament was provided by Mr. Gladstone's article on Ritualism in the October Contemporary and his pamphlet issued in November on The Vatican Decrees. By the former, in which he insisted on the hopelessness of the attempt to Romanize the Church and people of England, he provoked the Irish Romanist journals to fury and indignation. The reverberations of the[Pg 159] Vatican Decrees pamphlet were even wider. For Mr. Gladstone was not content with assailing the Papal claim to Infallibility: he went so far as to say that "it was a political misfortune that during the last thirty years the Roman Catholic Church should have acquired such an extension of its hold upon the highest classes of this country." The conquests had been chiefly among women, "but the number of male converts, or captives (as I might prefer to call them), has not been inconsiderable."

Gladstone's challenge was taken up both by Ultramontane and Liberal Catholic champions, lay and clerical, with the result that the latter disowned the former, and their conflicting answers revealed an extraordinary divergence of opinion among the professing members of the Roman Church. The views of Cardinal Manning and Lord Acton were irreconcilable; and Manning's circular issued at the end of November amounted to an excommunication of the followers of Döllinger, the famous German "modernist" whom Gladstone had visited earlier in the year, and who had been excommunicated himself in 1871 for refusing to subscribe to the Vatican decrees. But Döllinger had refused to allow himself to be consecrated a bishop of the old Catholic Church, and though by conviction he belonged to the old Catholic Community he never formally joined them.

The Ultramontane organs in Rome ascribed Gladstone's pamphlet to the alarm occasioned by the progress Romanism was making in England, and even hinted that his attacks were designed to clear himself of the suspicion of hidden Catholicism, which he had incurred by his conversations with Döllinger. This brief sketch of current theological controversy in 1874 may assist us in recognizing the incentives which animated Punch's continued attacks on High Anglicans and Ritualists. At the close of 1875 he quotes the following from the Church Times:—

"We regret to observe that that 'chartered libertine,' the Dean of Westminster, has once more degraded the venerable church which is so unfortunate as to be committed to his charge, by making its nave a lecture room in which Nonconformist Ministers may disport themselves."

[Pg 160]

The same organ described the service in the Abbey on St. Andrew's Day as "Dr. Moffatt's entertainment," and Punch asks, "if this is High Church pleasantry, what is Low?" In 1876, when communion was refused on account of the would-be communicant's disbelief in the Devil, Punch observes:—

[Pg 161]

AT THE CATTLE SHOW

(A Troublesome Lot.)

The intransigent attitude of the High Church party towards Nonconformists is condemned with equal frankness when a Cornish vicar repudiated the title of Reverend as it was "desecrated" by the "carrion of dissent." In the same year the Rev. Arthur Tooth, of Hatcham, was inhibited by the Dean of Arches, and Punch warns Mother Church that she will have no peace till she has got rid of this tooth. The familiar line of argument is adopted that he was neither a sound Anglican nor a true Romanist, and his church is called "St. James's (Colney) Hatcham." Frequent and unflattering allusions to a manual entitled, The Priest in Absolution, occur in 1877; and ironical comment is passed on the suggestion made in the Lower House of Convocation, that vestments might be allowed as from a distance they were not distinguishable from a surplice.

Mr. Mackonochie's continued recalcitrancy also occupied Punch's attention a good deal in 1877. In December he explains the views on canonical obedience of the Vicar of St. Alban's, Holborn, as follows:—

When a Ritualist has gone on too long playing at Popery, he may, through impaired biliary function affecting the sensorium, finally contract a subjective delusion, induced upon his dominant fixed idea that he is his own Pope, etc.

A week later, when Mr. Mackonochie was reported to have withdrawn into a Retreat, Punch kindly suggests that in earlier ages it would have been Anticyra—the town celebrated for hellebore, the chief remedy in antiquity for madness. Later on he gives specimens, under the heading of "Obedientia Docet," of correspondence from Mackonochie's Letter Writer[Pg 162] to meet the situation of a subaltern reprimanded by his colonel, a stockbroker replying to a client who has objected to an investment effected on his credit, etc.—in all of which insubordination and disregard of orders and instructions are casuistically defended. On matters of doctrine and discipline Punch differed acutely from Archdeacon Denison, but he greeted the publication of his Notes of My Life affectionately, holding the author to be "most optimist of pessimists, John Bullest of John Bulls." In 1879 under the heading, "Coronatus, non Pileatus," Punch applauds Newman's refusal of a cardinal's hat, accompanying his approval with a back-handed sarcastic reference to Manning, who had accepted the honour in 1875. Manning's instructions for the observance of Lent are roughly handled in the lines which end,

But this was practically the Swan-song of Punch's no-Popery campaign. Lord Salisbury, in his speech on the Public Worship Regulation Bill, had spoken of three schools of religious thought—the Sacramental, the Emotional and the Philosophical. Henceforth and for a good many years to come Punch was mainly concerned with the two latter schools, and most of all with the second. He reverted with undiminished vigour to his old campaign against the Sabbatarians, but his chief bête noire was the Salvation Army. Here he was at one with Huxley in his criticisms on "Corybantic Christianity," but for the rest he impartially combated the pretensions of scientific dogmatism, of Agnosticism (which he called the Nothingarian creed) and Positivism. He warns France against the danger of a purely secularist education:—

He satirizes the advocates of undenominationalism in the picture of the toy-shop man who declines to supply a Noah's[Pg 163] Ark to a lady customer. He had given up keeping them since School Boards came in: "They was considered too denominational, M'um."

TOYS AND THEIR TEACHINGS

Lady Customer: "My little boy wishes for a Noah's Ark. Have you one?"

Toyman: "No, M'um, no. We've given up keeping Noah's Harks since the School Boards come in. They was considered too denominational, M'um!"

As for the keeping of Sunday, Punch eulogizes Canon Basil Wilberforce for encouraging Sunday bands, and contrasts his tolerance with the attitude of a Dr. Watts, of Belfast, who objected to Sunday bathing: "It was not necessary for a man to bath himself every morning. He did not see, therefore, why it was necessary to open public baths on the Sabbath morning." The Sunday opening of the picture galleries at the Royal Manchester Institution proved a conspicuous success in 1880. Those who opposed the experiment had been, if not silenced, confuted, and Punch entreated London to follow this excellent lead and not stand last in the Sunday Race between Public House and Public Gallery.

So when the Tay Bridge disaster was regarded by the[Pg 164] Sabbatarian zealots as a direct judgment on Sunday travelling, Punch dealt with them as they deserved:—

One of these self-sufficient judges of judgments, and complacent dealers out of denunciations, converting the awful catastrophe triumphantly to the account of his own black and bitter creed—in which the Almighty figures as a sort of Ashantee Fetish, to be propitiated by death and destruction—has no hesitation in putting his finger on its immediate cause. Referring to the imprisoned passengers—men, women, and little children—many of them known to have been on their way to or from errands of friendship, mercy and family affection—he asks whether it was not "awful to think" that—

"They had been carried away when many of them must have known that they were transgressing the law of God."

It might do this gentleman some good to reflect that it is possible to be "carried away" in another fashion, and to transgress a great law of God—"Judge not that ye be not judged," in a more questionable manner. To see the professing minister of a religion, of whose virtues one of its leading Apostles has declared charity the greatest, swept off his narrow line of literal sectarianism in a hurricane of bitter bigotry, is suggestive of reflections which, if not exactly "awful," are neither agreeable nor edifying.

In the lines on "Our Sunday—down East"—permission to include which in the programme of any Sabbatarian Penny Reading was freely granted by Punch—he writes:—

The persistence of the Sabbatarian instinct, even where it was disregarded, is illustrated in the picture of the young lady on a railway platform asking her grandfather to hide their rackets: "We needn't show everybody that we are going to play lawn tennis on a Sunday afternoon."

When in 1888 Sunday boating was allowed in the parks[Pg 165] after church time, Punch applauds "George Ranger" and Mr. David Plunket for the act but not the language of the order, which he condemns as "Pharisaical trash." In the same year a largely signed petition was laid before the Upper House of Convocation of Canterbury protesting against the increasing pursuit of Sunday pastime by the "upper and fashionable classes of Society." Punch ridicules the vagueness of the protest against "amusing programmes of fun and frolic," and sums up in these words:—

Our English Sunday is none too lovely or lively an institution, but as yet neither the upper nor the lower classes of English Society have shown any tendency, publicly, to desecrate it. When they do, it will be time enough, if not for the Upper House of the Convocation of Canterbury, at least for the Public Opinion of the country to express itself upon the matter. Meantime, grandmotherly interference had better let it alone.

Punch had evidently modified his earlier views as to the saving grace of Sunday dullness in England as compared with the Continental Sunday. The Bill for the Sunday closing of public-houses introduced in 1889 is dealt with in detail and at great length. The cartoon of "Sunday à la Pharisee" aims at showing that the habitual toper will not suffer, but that the decent working-man will be incommoded. It is rather unfortunate, however, that the latter is shown sending his little girl to the public-house for his beer. The accompanying verses are founded on a wonderful fulmination in The Times:—

"To hedge people round with petty restrictions instead of teaching them nobility of conduct and a worthy use of liberty, is the perennial resource of shallow and incompetent reformers.... A depraved and servile human nature, cribbed, cabined and confined by an infinity of minute regulations enforced by the policemen, is their reading of the social problem.... A small minority occasionally injure themselves with bad liquor on Sunday, and these reformers can think of nothing better than to forbid the entire Community to drink on Sundays at all."

Punch descants rhetorically for nearly one hundred lines on Smugby's Sabbath, fanaticism, Pharisaism, etc., but as a Londoner he had probably never witnessed the orgies of the[Pg 166] Glasgow Fair. He never failed to insist on the intemperateness of Temperance reformers, but as a supporter of moderate drinking he was himself often guilty of immoderate language.

In regard to anti-Semitism, another of his pet aversions in this period, his record is far less open to criticism. He made a perfectly fair point in representing men of Jewish extraction as the chief offenders, for these were the days of the Libre Parole, edited by Drumont, himself a renegade Jew, and of the anti-Semitic campaign in France which reached its climax in the Dreyfus "affair" in the middle 'nineties. As early as 1881, in one of Du Maurier's pictures, Sir Gorgius Midas is backed up in a tirade against the Jews by "Baron von Meyer," who, with the stigmata of his race written all over him, flatters himself that nobody can suspect his origin. In the cartoon on the Jewish "pogroms" in Russia in 1882, Humanity, compared to a Portia who pleads for and not against the Jews, is shown appealing to the Tsar, who stands with his back turned and arms crossed. How would it read in English, Punch asks, if our papers contained accounts of the murdering of Jews and the burning of their houses in Houndsditch, with the police looking on in amused indifference, and the Home Secretary sending messages of thanks to the murderers?

In the verses published in January, 1882, "A Cry from Christendom," against the old anti-Semitic cry of "Hep! Hep!" Punch indignantly denounces the hounding down of the Hebrew in the name of the Cross:—

No warnings of possible retaliation come from Punch; such a possibility did not enter into the calculations of sympathizers with the oppressed Jews, who were regarded as incapable of effective resistance. A different aspect of the question is satirized in references to Society "mariages de convenance" with rich Jewesses, probably not unconnected with a recent notable alliance between a distinguished peer and the daughter[Pg 167] of a great Jewish house. Punch's general view, however, was that expressed in the saying that "every country has the Jews which it deserves," and he was ready to admit that the good English Jews were very good indeed. In 1883 he published Sambourne's portrait of Sir Moses Montefiore, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, "who on the 8th day of Chesvan (November 8) entered on the hundredth year of his blameless, brave and beneficent life"; and when the old man died in the summer of 1885 Punch paid him farewell homage in these lines:—

In 1886 Punch vociferously applauded Dean Bradley, Stanley's successor, for "his admirable answer to the three fanatical Protestant-defence Secretaries, who would have forcibly ejected from Westminster Abbey some Roman Catholics who were saying their private prayers around the 'strong quadrilateral barrier of bronze,' which, as stated by Canon Duckworth, protects the tomb of Edward the Confessor from profane hands." He improves the occasion by some general remarks aimed at Protestant visitors to Roman Catholic churches on the Continent:—

Mr. Punch heartily wishes that the conduct of English Protestants visiting the Catholic Churches abroad were anything like as inoffensive, and as appropriate to the sacred precincts, as was that of the poor benighted Romanists in Westminster Abbey, who, thinking that the best use to which a church could be put was to say prayers in it, knelt and prayed accordingly.

After rebuking the insolent caddishness of ill-bred British tourists which not only offended the congregation proper, but scandalized their decent compatriots, Punch continues:—

If Dean Punch saw a hundred 'Arrys, Romans or Rum 'uns of any sort, praying in Westminster Abbey would he interfere? No, bless 'em, certainly not. But if he saw one of them sneaking out a pencil to scribble his name on a monument, or attempting to nick[Pg 168] a bit out of a shrine, or off a tomb, he'd be down upon him then and there, and have him up before the nearest police-magistrate charged with "maliciously damaging," and fined heavily for the offence, no matter what his excellent motive might have been for such wanton destruction. And this is what the Dean and Chapter would do, too; for whether it be a fanatic on one side or the other, law and order must not be set aside in favour of such a rule as "Omne ignotum pro Fanatico."

The doctrine is excellent if the language is jocular. But Punch's plea for tolerance is seriously impaired by the virulent hostility with which he had for years assailed the Salvation Army and its founder. It is true that he had always discouraged and discountenanced emotional religion. The visit of Moody and Sankey in 1875 had drawn from him a set of acid verses on "Missionaries in Motley." After describing their methods, he continues:—

[Pg 169]

The verses gave such offence that Punch was moved to publish an explanation a week later, disclaiming any intention to throw any doubts on the motives or the sincerity of the American Evangelists, but maintaining his right to criticize what he honestly believed to be bad taste in the style and manner of their appeals.

Let it be granted that there was much in the early methods of the Salvation Army that provoked opposition and caused the judicious to grieve. The outrageous familiarity with which the most sacred names and subjects were treated in the War Cry; the conversion of the most popular songs into hymn tunes; the military organization, uniforms and titles; the "allonging and marshonging" with big drums and trombones—all these features affronted and disgusted good people who associated worship with privacy and reticence; while the hooligans looked on the Salvationists as sour-faced Puritans, and organized a "Skeleton Army" to break up their meetings. Collisions were frequent, and throughout the 'eighties members of the Salvation Army were fined and even imprisoned as disturbers of the public peace. Those of us who are old enough to remember these scenes can well recall the impression which the Salvationists made upon the detached observer of forty years ago. Men and women and girls, they wore the set look of people who had espoused an unpopular and even perilous cause and were resolved to carry it through. They seldom looked happy, and they had little cause for it. In ten years the physiognomy of the Salvationists had changed, and they went about their work unmolested with serene and cheerful faces. Punch could at least plead this extenuation of his hostility, that it was shared by learned and excellent men. But there is really no excuse for his childish exultation over the Queen's refusal to subscribe to the Salvation Army's funds in 1882, and his jeers at the Archbishop of Canterbury for investing "his modest fiver in the Booth Bank."

The prophecy in which he indulged in that year in an article headed, "Bootheration to 'Em," is worth quoting. Punch regretted the conversion of the Grecian Theatre—"a[Pg 170] place of generally harmless recreation for the East End"—into a temple of Salvationism:—

Yet we feel certain that the Army, once possessed of a great permanent meeting-place, will speedily convert it into some sort of Conventicle, the excitement of "drums and excursions" will gradually cease, conservatism will increase, Respectability and recognition by Respectability will be the object of the majority, reformers will arise and "camp out," regiments will desert, and some twenty new Sects will be added to the list of the country which possesses "any number of religions and only one sauce."

Part of the prophecy has been fulfilled; the concluding part, in which the wish was father to the thought, has been falsified. For Punch in these days only saw hysteria and vulgarity in what he considered an unhealthy mania. He seized on the repellent features of the crusade, e.g. the song, "On Board of the 'Allelujah," issued by "Admiral Tug" of the Salvation Navy—and overlooked the sincere and devoted efforts at social reclamation which underlay these exuberances. Mr. Justice Field's decision in June, 1882, allowing Salvationists to hold processions and parades was deplored as likely to encourage all the strange sects enumerated in Whitaker's Almanack—Jumpers, Shakers, Mormons and Recreative Religionists—to go and do likewise. The verses printed in November, 1883, are a bitter and violent tirade against the movement in general and the Booth family in particular, with offensive references to "dear Catherine ... blushing so feminine" who had been arrested by a Swiss magistrate:—

"Atlas" of the World denounced the "Salvation Army nuisance" in the autumn of 1884. It had spoilt a season at Worthing and might do so at Brighton. Punch, welcoming the pious Mr. Edmund Yates as an ally, proposed as a remedy the prohibition of all processions, excepting only those of State requirements, as a relic of barbarism and an anachronism:—

[Pg 171]

Let the Salvation Army, with their ensigns and captains and uniforms, and drums and trumpets, assemble in their Barracks just as Christians, Jews, Turks and Heathens do in their Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples; and let their recruiting sergeants go about where they list, or where they are likely to 'list; but let this out-of-door irreligious movement, this outrageous travesty of Ecclesiastical symbolism, with its fanatic war-cries, its fanfares, its martial hymns, and brass-band accompaniment, leading to riot and bloodshed on the Lord's Day, let this be forthwith suppressed, as it can be, we believe, by existing law; and if not, let the law be made. Of course that harmless body of publicans and sinners, the Freemasons, would be sufferers by such a regulation; but with His Royal Highness of Wales, their Grand Master, at their head, they would be willing to bear the privation of being occasionally deprived of an open-air display of sashes, aprons and emblems for the sake of law and order.

Punch's animosity towards the Salvationists showed little abatement right on into the 'nineties. General Booth was twice caricatured: in 1885 as "His own Trumpeter" blowing an instrument like a French horn in mid air, and in 1892 as "General Boombastes"—a composite title of derision founded on Bombastes Furioso and General Boum of the Grande Duchesse—in connexion with a great demonstration held by the Salvation Army in Hyde Park in February of that year. Sarcastic references occur from time to time to the finance of the Army, which in those years lent itself to criticism. But science and intellect, cynicism and fastidiousness were routed or converted in the sequel. The Salvation Army came nearer success in reclaiming "the submerged tenth" than any other sect or church: it outlived derision, criticism and scepticism, and earned the tribute of imitation in the organization of the Church Army. No finer example of this conversion is to be found than in the life of Frank Crossley, the senior partner in the great Manchester engineering firm, that noble and benevolent philanthropist, who began in antipathy to the methods of the Salvation Army and devoted the end of his life to intimate, self-sacrificing and cordial co-operation with them in the slums of Ancoats.

Burnand, who succeeded to the editorship of Punch in 1880, was a Roman Catholic; but it cannot be asserted that[Pg 172] he abused his opportunities any more than Charles Cooper, who was a Romanist when he joined the editorial staff of the Scotsman, a much more delicate position for a member of that communion. Punch became perhaps less aggressively Protestant, but there was no substantial change in the theological policy of the paper, or in its mainly Erastian attitude in regard to the relations of Church and State. No serious exception can be taken to the verdict on the Revised Version—completed in 1880—as "a very qualified success if not an absolute failure," coupled with a wish to know what were the suggestions for improvements made by our American cousins. The verses in the same year on "A Life's Work and a Life's Wage," recounting the sad experience of a Devonshire curate who after thirty years' work, applied for an order to enter the workhouse as a pauper—are only a renewal of Punch's familiar complaints on the scandal of underpaid clergy. Eleven years later, in 1891, he takes up the same parable à propos of a statement by Mr. Gladstone to the effect that "if the priest is to live, he must beg, earn or steal," comparing the needy vicar, with eighty pounds a year, and the bishop with five thousand. Yet in the same number, under the heading of "Mitred Misery," Punch has an article on the heavy and extortionate fees incurred by bishops on their installation or translation. The victim is represented as just managing to meet the expenses of his elevation to one episcopal see and his translation to another, but declining an archbishopric on the ground that it would land him in the Bankruptcy Court. In an earlier year the contrast between the well-to-do cleric and the poor is ironically emphasized in the "Consolation" administered by Mr. Dean: "Ah, my poor fellow, your case is very sad, no doubt! But remember that the rich have their troubles too. I dare say, now, you can scarcely realize what it is not to know where to find an investment which will combine adequate security with a decent interest on one's money."

Doctrinal opportunism is satirized in Du Maurier's picture of the vicar of a seaside town who was "High Church during the season, and Low all the rest of the year." Much in the[Pg 173] same spirit is the list of qualifications necessary for a curate in a country parish: the chief desideratum being that he must be able to play tennis with the vicar's daughters. These jests were almost common form at the close of the Victorian age. A more serious situation arose in 1885 owing to the demand for Disestablishment put forward by the Radicals, but Punch refused to treat it seriously. His cartoon, "A False Alarm," shows a chorus of Conservative owls—including Lord Salisbury and Mr. Cross—crying, "Too-whit, too-whoo, Church in Danger."

"TEMPORA MUTANTUR"

The Bishop (to his youngest and favourite son): "Now, why shouldn't you adopt the stage as a profession, Theodore? Lord Ronald Beaumanoir, who's a year younger than yourself, is already getting sixteen guineas a week for low comedy parts at the Criterion! The duchess told me so herself only yesterday!"

Punch appends an extract from a speech by Mr. Chamberlain expressing his incredulity of any settlement of this question being arrived at in the Parliament about to assemble. This view is further developed in a burlesque forecast, "The Disestablisher's Diary," with sensational and circumstantial details of the passing of Disestablishment, the conversion of Westminster Abbey into a Coffee Hall, bishops begging in[Pg 174] the streets, riots of country clergy, etc. In 1887 the scheme of the late Dean, then Archdeacon or "Harsh Deacon" Farrar (as Punch called him), for a Church House as a Jubilee memorial roused Punch's violent animosity. It was giving a stone to those who needed bread—the poor clergy. In the cartoon on "Mammon the mendicant," who was sending round the hat, John Bull declines to give anything to the seedy cleric for the Church House: "I'd rather put it into your own [hat]."

A long article is devoted in 1890 to the trial of Bishop King of Lincoln, but beyond facetious descriptions of the eminent counsel engaged the only point made is that the bishop never came near the place. In the same year another bishop, Dr. Jayne of Chester, earned Punch's unstinted approval for encouraging dancing among the working classes. At a conference of the Girls' Friendly Society the bishop had remarked that, "until they were prepared to introduce basket-making into London Society as a substitute for quadrilles and waltzes he was not disposed to accept it as an equivalent for balls and dances among girls of other classes." This liberality of view prompted Punch to cut a series of ecstatic capers over the pluck and common sense of "my pithy Jayne."

In agreeable contrast to these punning comments on Church matters are the tributes to two remarkable men, widely sundered in temperament, physique and doctrine, who both passed away in January, 1892. The memorial lines on Cardinal Manning insist that he was much more than

He is extolled as the friend of the poor, the struggling weak, the toiler for temperance, the hastener on of light:—

It should be remembered that Punch did not easily applaud Temperance advocates in this period, when he avowed himself as "capable of special sympathy with the publicans." Punch[Pg 175] owed an amende to Spurgeon as well as to Manning, and made it handsomely. He recognizes Spurgeon's sturdiness and geniality:—

Spurgeon stirred the throng, not fastidious or sensitive souls. He was honest, robust, Puritan but not ascetic:—

FICTION—PRESENT STYLE

Gertrude: "You never do anything now, Margaret, but go to all sorts of Churches, and read those old Books of Theology. You never used to be like that."

Margaret: "How can I help it, Gerty? I'm writing a Popular Novel!"

At all points Spurgeon was poles apart from the "Adulated Clergyman," one of Punch's "Modern Types" held up to contempt[Pg 176] in the previous year, and noted in another section—who develops out of a mincing effeminate boy into an unconventional emotional preacher, ferocious in pulpit denunciations, but full of honeyed sweetness in fashionable drawing-rooms; adored by weak women, distrusted and despised by normal men.

A new rival to the pulpit, it may be noted in conclusion, had sprung up in the "theological romance." Mrs. Humphry Ward, whose Robert Elsmere appeared in 1888, was its most widely read representative. But perhaps her greatest title to our gratitude in this context is the fact that it was her recommendation which induced Messrs. Macmillan to publish Mr. Shorthouse's remarkable novel John Inglesant.

[Pg 177]

LONDON AND ITS GOVERNMENT

Growth and expansion rather than reconstruction was the leading feature of London in the period with which we are now concerned. The spreading of the "great wen," as Cobbett called it, went on in almost all directions, and the linking up of the once detached village of Kensington with Central London was followed by a remarkable extension of that typically Victorian suburb. In 1884 Punch described travellers journeying for hours and hours in a northerly or westerly direction, only to find that they had reached North Kensington or West Kensington, as the case might be. Already in 1876 he had noted the swallowing up of Brompton in South Kensington. Concurrently with this suburban expansion the disappearance or removal of many old landmarks went on apace. In 1876 Punch had suggested that Temple Bar should be removed by one of the elephants in the Lord Mayor's procession. The long contemplated removal took place in 1878, and the historic site was duly occupied by the pedestal bearing the much-criticized "Griffin," which led to abundant satirical comment in prose and verse and pictures. The block in the traffic had been removed, but the cartoon of "Alice in Blunderland" showed that from an architectural point of view Punch thought the remedy worse than the disease. Cremorne Gardens, the scenes of alternate revelries in high and low life, were closed in 1877, and the withdrawal of "Evans's" licence in 1879 was plaintively celebrated in the lament of a middle-aged Man about Town:—

In January, 1883, the old colossal equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington at Hyde Park Corner was taken down, and on the night of August 12, 1884, was "removed by Messrs. Pickford in a specially constructed waggon drawn by ten horses to Aldershot." The old statue, universally condemned and ridiculed, which would have been removed immediately but for Wellington's own objection, had been allowed to de-decorate a splendid site for nearly forty years. Boehm's statue, which replaced it, dates from 1888. To turn from the grandiose to the homely, we may note that Punch vigorously espoused the cause of the cow-keepers in St. James's Park in 1885, and under the heading, "Wild Sports Near the Horse Guards," protested against the "chivvying from their milk-stalls of a lot of poor old women." One does not look for humour in the Annual Register, but the mention of this episode in that useful book of reference blends information with entertainment:—

September 1st, 1885. In pursuance of the orders of H.R.H. The Ranger, the stall-holders in St. James's Park, who represented the ancient "Milk Fair," held for nearly two centuries in the Mall, were ordered to close their booths and remove their cows. Two only of the stall-keepers refused to comply and after a strong protest in the newspapers, stating that some of the existing tenants had held stalls for more than a century [sic], the order for their immediate removal was relaxed and a compromise at length effected.

The respite granted to these interesting centenarians expired a few years later, and now the St. James's Park menagerie contains nothing larger than the pelicans.

The proposed demolition of Staple Inn in 1886 was peculiarly distasteful to Punch, who held all these old buildings in pious reverence, and inspired him to indite a ballad of remonstrance to the builder. As a matter of fact, the protest was premature, for the Prudential Assurance Company, into whose[Pg 179] hands it passed by purchase, maintained the building as a relic of vanishing London. No such regrets as those awakened by the passing of Staple Inn were aroused by the announcement in 1887 that the Old Bailey and Newgate Prison were to be demolished. When the old Fleet prison was dismantled, Punch could indulge in legitimate rejoicing, because it marked the close of a harsh and cruel penal system—imprisonment for debt. Here it was only a case of structural and sanitary improvements. In ancient days there were prisons impressive by their dignity of design. Their purpose inspired the strange and sinister side of Piranesi's genius in his famous imaginative series of "Carcere." But a modern gaol can at best be an unobtrusive reminder of a still necessary evil.

Though no achievement comparable in size and importance to the scheme of the Thames Embankment is associated with this period, new architectural features were not wanting; foremost among them were Street's new Law Courts, the swan-song in stone of the Gothic revival; a group of buildings dignified in conception and treatment, but terribly handicapped by their internal discomforts and darkness. I have already spoken of the "Griffin." Cleopatra's Needle was at last set up on the Embankment in 1878, and remains to this day a standing proof of the doubtful wisdom of detaching ancient historic monuments from their surroundings. There is something forlorn in this relic of Ptolemaic Egypt, as it faces the winking sky signs of the Surrey side. To the late 'seventies belongs another architectural innovation destitute of beauty, and only remarkable for its size and height—Queen Anne's Mansions. The invincible conservatism of the English could not be more strikingly displayed than by the fact that after more than forty years Queen Anne's Mansions remains our solitary skyscraper. The El Dorado which this method of economizing space offers to landlords and builders has never been exploited. Some put it down to our sense of the æsthetic fitness of things; others to the paralysing effect of building laws, vested interests, and the dead hand of "ancient lights." Sir Martin Conway, as becomes one who has scaled high peaks in both hemispheres, has recently come forward as an apostle of altitude in architecture, but so[Pg 180] far without much response. Punch had no quarrel with anything about Queen Anne's Mansions except their ugliness, and unreservedly withdrew the charge of irregular financial procedure which he had brought—on the strength of The Times—against the projector and original proprietor, Mr. Hankey.

But Queen Anne's Mansions were interesting in another way, for they marked the beginning of the system of residential flats, which has since revolutionized London life. Though Queen Anne's Mansions remain unique at the moment when I write, the flat system "came to stay," to be extensively used, exploited, and criticized. "Flats" however, as we understand the term, were devised for the convenience of the well-to-do or middle-class people. Among the contributions to the solving of the housing problem of the poor on the block system, the most notable in this period was the benefaction of Lord Iveagh, who in 1889 set aside £250,000 for the purpose, following the fine example set by the American millionaire, Peabody. Charing Cross Road, opened in February, 1887, was one of the first of the new thoroughfares which have changed the face of Central London. Punch was much concerned in 1883 by a report that tramways were about to invade Kensington; some years were to elapse before they were admitted to the Embankment, but Punch already complained in this year that it was being spoiled by railways and roughs. Trafalgar Square continued to excite his unflattering comments, but there is no public place in the world which lends itself to more criticism. As an American writer once remarked, the buildings seem to emphasize rather than to correct the slope, so that everything seems to be slithering down towards Whitehall. A notable addition was made to the Square in 1887 by the erection of the Gordon Memorial, and Punch records the curious fact that Thornycroft's statue was unveiled, without any formality, by Mr. David Plunket, Chief Commissioner of Works, in the presence of a few friends of the general.

The connexion of art with architecture was not very happy or impressive in these years. When the Royal College of Music was founded in 1882 with Sir George Grove, Punch's old friend, as Director, it was temporarily and inadequately[Pg 181] housed in the buildings of the National Training School of Music, in which it had been merged. The move to the new buildings in Prince Consort Road did not take place till 1894. The annals of opera, so far as architecture is concerned, are positively disastrous. Mapleson, the once famous operatic impresario, projected a grand National Opera House on the Embankment; the first brick was laid by Mlle. Titiens in September, 1875, and the first stone of the building by the Duke of Edinburgh in December. But the patronage of "stars" and Royal Dukes could not conjure money out of the pockets of the investing public. The scheme languished, and in 1881 Punch records that the unfinished Opera House was being converted, not musically, into "flats." By the summer of 1884 the project collapsed entirely, and Punch's comments on "A Beggar's Opera House" are not without their point to-day:—

The sale by auction last week of what the retiring newspaper paragraph chronicling the melancholy fact described as the "materials of the unfinished Grand National Opera House on the Thames Embankment," cannot but afford food even to the least artistic mind for some rather disagreeable reflections. That after a six years' struggle, involving the sinking of something like £100,000 in hard cash, the speculative element, that ought to have been equal to the emergency in the first capital in the world, should have been contented to look on and smile, while, to quote once more the paragraph in question, "157 lots, the principal portion of which consisted of the iron girders and columns used in the formation of the pit and box circles, originally costing, it is said, £40,000," were knocked down for "the small sum of £218" is something not very far removed from a national disgrace.

The building was finally demolished in 1888.

Another scheme which also ended disastrously, though the building survives, was D'Oyly Carte's venture into the domain of serious opera. The new English Opera House in Shaftesbury Avenue opened in 1891 with Sullivan's Ivanhoe, but the analogy of the Gilbert and Sullivan light operas was deceptive: the expectation of a long run was doomed to failure, and the English Opera House was shortly afterwards converted into the Palace Music Hall. Punch's patriotic amour propre was[Pg 182] wounded by the fact that where Ivanhoe had failed, the Basoche, its successor, and an essentially French opera, had caught on. Why, he asks, call it the English Opera House? Why not the "Cosmopolitan" or the "Royal Babel Opera House"? But these are questions which do not fall within the scope of our immediate inquiry. It is enough to record the fact that an abortive attempt to establish English opera on a permanent basis succeeded in enriching the variety stage with a new temple, while the site of Mapleson's projected Grand National Opera House is now occupied by New Scotland Yard, generally admitted to be the most successful outcome of the genius of Norman Shaw.

In earlier days Punch had constituted himself an unofficial Inspector of Nuisances for the Metropolis, and he never fulfilled these self-imposed duties with greater zeal and even fury than in the long campaign which he waged throughout the 'eighties against the then Duke of Bedford. London was a "City of Dreadful Dirt" and Covent Garden Market and the small streets around it, in Punch's view, held the palm for filthiness. He had given the Dukes a rest for a good many years, but the scandal of "Mud-Salad Market" revived in him a truculence worthy of Douglas Jerrold:—

Mud-Salad Market belongs to his Grace the Duke of Mudford. It was once a tranquil Convent Garden, belonging first to the Abbot of Westminster, and finally to the Dukes of Mudford. The property having been let on building leases, it became a small square in the centre of London, bounded on one side by Inigo Jones's church—"The handsomest barn in England"—on another side by a theatre, and warmly supported on other sides by numerous minor taverns. The hot-houses of the old Garden have become the pot-houses of the modern Market. Mud-Salad Market, like its own vegetables, has now sprouted out in all directions. You may start from Cabbage-leaf corner, near the site of Temple Bar, on a market-morning, and may go as far as Turnip-top Square in Bloomsbury, or Cauliflower-place at Charing Cross, and it is all Mud-Salad Market. Houses are barricaded with mountainous carts of green-stuff, cabs lose themselves in vain attempts to drive through the maze of vegetables, the costermonger makes temporary gardens on the pathway, while the roads are blocked with waggons, carts, donkey-trucks, and porters staggering under the weight of huge baskets. Carrots,[Pg 183] turnips, vegetable-marrows, potatoes, lettuces, and onions are masters of the situation. Vegetable refuse, ankle deep, carpets the pathway in every direction, mixed with mud and rain-water, and trampled into a pulpy slimy muck by thousands of hob-nailed boots. Leases drop in, old houses are pulled down, great spaces are cleared, new houses of an approved stucco type are built, and no attempt is made to increase the legitimate limits of Mud-Salad Market.

A HOLIDAY TASK

Scene—Mud-Salad Market

Duke of Mudford: "Sweet pretty place, ain't it?"

Mr. P. (Inspector of Nuisances): "No, my Lord Duke, it isn't pretty, and it isn't sweet! Here, take this broom, and make a clean sweep of it!"

It is not too much to say that Mud-Salad Market is a disgrace to London, a special disgrace to his Grace of Mudford, and about the greatest nuisance ever permitted in a great City of Nuisances.

[Pg 184]

Rather different this account of Mud-Salad Market from Leigh Hunt's description of a certain Covent Garden Market in his day, when "it was the most agreeable in the metropolis," and when it had been "raised" into "a convenient and elegant state by the noble proprietor." Let his Grace of Mudford take a leaf from that Duke's tree, and, if he can't "raise" Mud-Salad Market, let him "raze" it, and give us a new one.

Grant, your Grace, a new broom to some one, let a clean sweep be made of Mud-Salad Market, and your petitioners will never again pray anything any more.

That was written in August, 1880. A fortnight later Punch renews and enlarges his attack:—

THE DUKE OF MUDFORD IN GLOOMSBURY

The Duke of Mudford's grip upon London extends far beyond Mud-Salad Market. As Lord Cul-de-Sac and the Earl of No Thoroughfare, he claims and exercises a right of blockade in Gloomsbury. London is a very peculiar city. It is said to be sixteen miles long and eight miles broad, and is supposed to contain a population of four millions. Its parochial rulers for the last ten years have devoted all their energy to the improvement of the great avenues of communication from East to West, but the cross avenues are in much the same condition as they were in the days of Dr. Johnson. The Strand and Fleet Street have been improved, Oxford Street, Holborn, Newgate Street, etc., have been widened, a noble Embankment has been made, and a great serpentine roadway, extending from Waterloo Bridge to Whitechapel, is in course of formation. While this is done, or being done, there is not a thoroughfare worthy of the name from South to North, from Park Lane to Chancery Lane. Berkeley Street, Bond Street, St. Martin's Lane, and other cross streets have to get rid of their northern traffic by dodging round corners. The most central and most important thoroughfare from South to North, is composed of Waterloo Bridge (a bridge from which the halfpenny tax on suicide has just been removed), Wellington Street (which stands on a hill, and is adorned by the Thalia and Melpomene Theatres), Bow Street (which might be called Bow-legged Street, where criminals are tried), Endell Street (where they grow the criminals who are tried at Bow Street), and Gower Street, which belongs to the Duke of Mudford.

A Ducal Defaulter

At the north end of Gower Street the traffic is stopped by a ducal barrier, and turned round several narrow streets, to find its way to the Euston Road as best it can. Three of the largest railway termini—the North Western, the Midland and the Great Northern[Pg 185] lie in this direction; but the Duke of Mudford, Lord Cul-de-Sac, and Earl of No Thoroughfare claims his right to stand between these railways and their floods of traffic. The line must be drawn somewhere, and it is drawn at Gower Street. It was Mrs. Partington's mission to try to mop back the Atlantic: it is the Duke of Mudford's mission to push back four millions of people.

By the way, Mud-Salad Market was at its dirtiest and filthiest last Thursday. Such a standing nuisance in London ought to be as impossible as it is impassable.

When the Duke of Westminster helped to start a cheap eating-house with beds and baths in Bow Street, Punch invidiously contrasted his philanthropy with the recalcitrance of the Duke of "Mudford." Nor was he content with agitating for the improvement of Covent Garden, but followed up his attack by a similar exposure of the filthy condition of Billingsgate, maintained by force of vested interests, where the overcrowding led to the destruction of large quantities of fish and the consequent enhancement of prices.[5] In 1883 the Duke of Bedford had apparently been goaded into offering Covent Garden Market to the Municipal Authorities, but they declined to relieve him of his responsibilities, and the campaign continued. Punch was not the only paper which attacked the Duke for neglecting his London property, but it was the most outspoken and persistent. The Duke had the reputation of being an improving landlord on his country estates, but over a million sterling had been added to the ducal revenues in his time by fines exacted on leases falling due on his Bloomsbury estate, and, in view of this fact, the scandal of Covent Garden inevitably exposed him to hostile comment, from which his successors have been wholly immune.

Much of Punch's criticism of the drawbacks of London was destructive. But he did not refrain from specific suggestions. For example, he persistently agitated for the painting of street names on lamps as a guide at night, and to good purpose, as the extract overleaf shows. The lighting of London still left[Pg 186] much to be desired, and foreshadowed the obligatory darkness of war time:—

Punch has long been pegging away at the Vestries and District Boards, to turn the street lamps to account for display of the street names after dark. His pegging has profited. He is glad to hear that the practice is spreading, and will soon, he hopes and trusts, be general. Wherever it is neglected, let ratepayers take up the cry, and bombard not their street lamps, but their District Boards. The manufacturer who has supplied labels with street names for the lamps in Camberwell, writes to Punch to say that he has furnished similar labels throughout the parishes of Kennington, St. George the Martyr Southwark, St. Mary's Newington, and Limehouse, as also to the boroughs of Leeds, Leicester, Birmingham, Bootle-cum-Linacre near Liverpool, and Newcastle-on-Tyne. He has also been supplying the Board of Works with lamp-tablets notifying the position of Fire-plugs and Hydrants, in the parishes of St. George the Martyr Rotherhithe, Deptford, Charlton, and Woolwich, and is now preparing to fix similar tablets in the parish of St. George the Martyr Hanover Square.

"Light—more Light"—is Punch's cry, as it was fighting Ajax's, and dying Goethe's. All honour to Sugg for his railway-Argand-burner, and his new naphthalene with its forty-candle power—and when next he fits it to a train, may Punch be there to see, instead of to struggle with a tantalising twilight, as he does under the present mockery of railway-carriage illumination.

Another movement in which Punch took an active part was that for the provision of respectable restaurants for girl workers. The "Coffee-Houses," which were then almost the only sort of cheap eating-houses available, were both dirty and dismal, and the need offered Punch in 1881 an opportunity for combining a practical suggestion with a dig at the Duke of Bedford:—

A GOOD THING TO DO.

If the Church and Stage Guild, and the Association for Administering Weak Tea to Reluctant Ballet Girls, are inclined for practical work, we can tell them how to make themselves exceedingly useful to the humbler members of the dramatic profession. Pantomime rehearsals are beginning, and hundreds of girls, many of them living far off in the suburbs, and most of them receiving only a few shillings a week, are brought into the neighbourhood of Covent Garden early, kept at work all day, with no time to return home[Pg 187] before they are required for their night duty at the theatres. There are hundreds of taverns, public-houses, coffee-shops, restaurants, and pastry-cooks, in and about the Strand, but, as far as we are aware, and we are pretty well up in the supply resources of this neighbourhood, there is not one place where these girls can go to get a cheap and decent meal. They can go to hundreds of places, if they like to spend half their week's earnings in less than an hour, but they cannot even do this without being stared at like wild beasts, or annoyed by the insolent patronage of the cad and the prowler. Commercial philanthropy has given the market-men and women of Covent Garden a "kiosk" in Bow Street, and what is done for the Mudford gang might surely be done for Theatrical London. The old Bow Street Police Station is empty and wanting a tenant, as "To Let" bills are stuck upon its broken windows. It has space and position, and the least the Duke of Mudford—the proprietor of Covent Garden and Drury Lane Theatres—can do, is to offer it at a very moderate rental for this useful purpose. A chance for Mudford and popularity.

A series of articles on "How to Improve London" began in the same year, and though some of the suggestions were fantastic or counsels of perfection, many have since been translated into reality. The list of metropolitan improvements suggested in 1886 betrays perhaps an excessive solicitude for equestrians in the Parks and a corresponding desire to control 'buses and carts in their interests. The scheme for doing away with all private residences within Regent's Park is magnificently comprehensive. Punch wished to construct

a public Summer and Winter Garden on a French and German model, with Restaurants open for luncheons, dinners, and suppers, a theatre, a circus, lawn tennis grounds, tennis court, boating by day, and by night fireworks on the ornamental water. Such an establishment is a real want, and Regent's Park, being at once well within reach, and yet so far removed as to offer no obstruction to traffic, is the very place for the purpose.

There is a patriarchalism which is almost Teutonic in his suggestion for preserving the amenities of the Parks and public places:—

Parks and Streets. All Processions, not being State Pageants, should be prohibited. All bodies of persons marching about with and[Pg 188] playing, or attempting to play, musical instruments, should be prohibited. Fine and imprisonment should be the punishment for breaking these laws.

Quiet Streets. All organ-grinders and so-called street-musicians should not be permitted to come within a radius of ten miles of Charing Cross on pain of imprisonment, fine, and, for a third offence, penal servitude for not less than seven years.

Meetings. Public spaces, at least four miles out of London, to be set apart for open-air meetings, if required, and only such spaces to be used for such purposes.

Parks. The London Parks shall be only used by the Public for the purposes of recreation and enjoyment, and not for political meetings, haranguing, preachings, and suchlike nuisances, which render Sunday a day of turbulence and unrest, and prevent quiet, peaceable people, who are at work all the week, from enjoying the fresh air on their only holiday.

The reference to musical instruments in processions is clearly aimed at the Salvation Army, of which in its earlier phase Punch, as we have learned, was the resolute enemy.

WINDOW STUDIES

June. The festive hour, 7.45 p.m., Piccadilly.

In 1889 Punch drew up a new Bill for London Improvements,[Pg 189] including his old schemes for extending Rotten Row, making new rides, and otherwise protecting the equestrian interest, but adding new suggestions for the wholesale planting of trees along the principal streets and thoroughfares, the training of creepers over all the structures of the District Railway, the provision of popular restaurants in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and in general the opening of as many open-air refreshment places as possible—on the French model.

GETTING GOOD TIMES OUT OF BAD

Times are so bad, that the Stanley de Vere Talbots have to give up their Carriage. They go about (Grandpapa included) all over London on those nice Omnibuses with proper Staircases behind and Chairs on the top instead of a Knife-board, and find it much less monotonous than eternally driving round the Park. Their Carriage Acquaintances still bow to them; perhaps because they are still Stanley de Vere Talbots!

There is much less abuse of the imperfections of public vehicles in this period, though they are by no means exempt from censure. In 1875 Punch quotes at length the account of an exceptionally honest cabman with the additional information that his name was Isaacs. The frequency of cab accidents in 1880 elicits the fact, if it was a fact, that cabs were not obliged to carry lights! The congestion of horse-drawn traffic at the Marble Arch and the Piccadilly end of Hamilton Place[Pg 190] clamoured for a remedy, but Punch was more concerned by the discreditable congestion of pedestrian traffic in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly Circus, and the nocturnal orgies enacted there. These belonged to the scenes and institutions calculated to bring London into disrepute, of which Punch made a list in 1882 under the heading, "Things to Show Cetewayo." To return to the vehicles, the hansom still retained its popularity—witness Du Maurier's picture—and taximeter cabs introduced in Paris by 1890 aroused hopes not destined to be fulfilled until much later. The "growler" still held its own. Punch had no love for it or its driver, but supported the plea for more cab-shelters. As for the omnibuses, the abolition of the "knife-board" and the introduction of garden-seats and proper staircases were handsomely acknowledged by Punch, though he still resented the importunities of rival conductors. Only those who can remember the atmosphere on the old and unelectrified Underground can properly appreciate Punch's tirades against the dirt and discomfort of subterranean travel in the 'eighties. They were aggravated, moreover, by an outbreak of hooliganism, which became a serious nuisance in 1881. Nor was it any comfort to the semi-asphyxiated passenger to be assured that the underground officials were singularly free from bronchial affections.

In this atmospheric context the question of London fog and the smoke nuisance naturally emerges. The table of the total number of days of fog in London from 1871 onwards published in the Meteorological Society's Journal shows a decline in the 'seventies and a recrudescence in the 'eighties and early 'nineties. In 1878 Punch notes ironically that the London fogs made it impossible to see colours at a dressmaker's, but did not interfere with "doing" the Old Masters. There are frequent allusions in his pages to the Conference on Smoke and Fog held in 1880, but at the end of the decade, when the nuisance was unusually acute, Punch launched out in a long, sardonic, and spirited doggerel tribute to the unimpaired sovereignty of the demon King Fog. The occasion was the visitation of January 9th-13th, 1888, when a heavy fog settled over England and a great part of Ireland, traffic by sea and land being greatly impeded[Pg 191] and many accidents reported from all parts of the country. But London, as usual, suffered most. Punch describes how King Fog, having summoned all his attendant demons, determined to surpass all his previous efforts in torturing "miserable mortals," and succeeded.

FERVOUR IN THE FOG

Unpromising Individual (suddenly, his voice vibrating with passion): "She's moy Unney; Oi'm 'er Joy!"

The fog of January, 1888, was equalled, if not eclipsed, by that of Christmas, 1904, but the table of statistics already referred[Pg 192] to records a marked decline from 1900 onwards. Statistics, however, are a poor consolation. The late Director of the Meteorological Society, writing in 1910, frankly owns that no statistics of the "frequency occurrence" of fog warrant the inference that the atmosphere of London is approaching that of the surrounding districts as regards transparency. It is true that an absolute approximation was made in the spring and early summer of 1921, but it was purchased at a cost which even in these days must be regarded as exorbitant.

Sir William Harcourt's Bill for the reform of the Government of London, introduced in April, 1884, and withdrawn in July, fell between two stools; it exasperated the Obstructives and failed to satisfy the Reformers. Punch, however, seized the opportunity to indulge in a burlesque prophetic account of the first meeting of the reformed Corporation, illustrating the embarrassment created by the damnosa hæreditas of the Metropolitan Board of Works, and, in general, indicating the immense amount of work to be done, and the rooted disinclination of the old gang to undertake it. Yet when the new authority was established five years later, and the first elections to the London County Council were held in January, 1889, it cannot be said that Punch exhibited any great enthusiasm. It is true that in his verses on the "London County Council Dream," widespread improvements and reforms are foreshadowed, but they end up on a note of tempered optimism.

REACTION

Indignant Citizen (who had expected great things of the London County Council after the extinction of the Metropolitan Board of Works and the abolition of the Wine and Coal Dues, receives an application for Rates amounting to 2s. 8-3/4d. in the pound): "D—! D—!! D—!!!"

In the very next month the mood of disillusionment is apparent in the cartoon revealing friction and the delight of the ex-Bumble and ex-member of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Not that Punch regretted the Board, though he rendered justice to its greatest achievements in the decidedly mixed epitaph composed for its tombstone, to be surmounted by an armed figure labelled "Black Mail" and headed "Peace to Its Hashes":—

The series of articles on "County Councildom" are by no means sympathetic; and the indignation of the ratepayer, who had expected a reduction in his burdens and was proportionately disappointed, is vividly and vocally expressed in Du Maurier's picture of "Reaction." The resignation of Sir John Lubbock and later on of Lord Rosebery,[6] the Chairman of the L.C.C., lent point to Punch's allusions to the jubilation of "Bumble" and his confident hope that he will have to come back. "Bumble's" idea is that the "toffs" and "big pots" were "hooking it" in disgust at the bad manners and arrogance of the "Progressives." But if the truth be told, it was not the methods of the L.C.C. in dealing with ordinary affairs of administration that disappointed and exasperated Punch: it was the spirit in which the Progressives addressed themselves to the task of regulating theatres and places of entertainment. In his verses "Ye Moderates of England" he inveighs against the grand-maternal rule of the Puritan L.C.C., and more especially Messrs. McDougall and Lidgett:—

That was in March, 1892, and in the cartoon of "The Bogie Man" in the previous number, Gog and Magog are seen shaking in their shoes before the Progressives, who had been returned with a largely increased majority. Lord Rosebery[Pg 196] had declared his intention of not offering himself for re-election to the L.C.C. in consequence of the announcement that the election would be fought on Party lines. Punch made no secret of his disappointment, for he believed that Progressivism was merely extravagance writ large, and had advised everyone to vote for the Moderates:—

"Ben" was Mr. Ben Tillett. As a matter of fact, Lord Rosebery was re-elected Chairman, and held the post for a few months longer.

To conclude this survey of London between 1874 and 1892, one may note that the changes included not only a new form of self-government, but a new lingo. The progressive development of the Cockney dialect is far too large a subject to be treated in a paragraph. Let it suffice to say that while in Dickens's time the distinguishing mark of the Cockney was the interchange of the "v" and "w," in the 'eighties and 'nineties he turned his attention to the other end of the alphabet, replaced "a" by "y," and began that "general post" of the vowels which is the despair of those who seek to erect a true phonetic standard.

POOR LETTER "A"

"Do you sell Type?"

"Type, Sir? No, Sir. This is an Ironmonger's. You'll find Type at the Linendryper's over the w'y!"

"I don't mean Tape, Man! Type, for Printing!"

"Oh, Toype yer mean! I beg yer pardon, Sir!"

[Pg 195]

THE BOGIE MAN

"Hush! Hush! Hush!

Here comes the bogie man!"

"Then hide your heads, my darlings,

He'll catch you if he can!"

[Pg 198]

RAILWAYS AND INVENTIONS: FORECASTS AND NOVELTIES

Railways continue to be a fertile seed plot of grievances. In 1876 Charles Keene devises a patent costume for collisions, closely resembling that of a diver. This was the year in which Captain Tyler's report on the Long Ashton accident to the "Flying Dutchman" on July 27 prompted Punch to a scathing set of verses on the G.W.R. directors, of which the motto was, "Westward Ho! with grim Death." The introduction of the Pullman dining-car in 1879 is welcomed in a lyrical effusion, to the air of "The Low-backed Car," in which Punch contrasts the discomforts of "Mugby Junction" days with the new amenities of travel:—

Punch's jubilation was short-lived; and in 1883 his discontent takes the form of a wholesale indictment of unnecessary noises, draughts, dismal chilly waiting-rooms, atrocious refreshment-rooms, undistinguishable station-names. The regulations and adjustments of Railwaydom, he sums up, "can only be praised in the same spirit as that in which Charles Kingsley lauded the British North-Easter." On the question of Railways in the Lake District, about which Ruskin had raised an exceeding bitter cry, Punch seems rather to favour the Philistine view:—

"Justice at Fault," a cartoon in 1887, based on a recent inquiry, reiterates Punch's familiar complaint: overworked signalmen are punished, while the directors go scot free. No jarring note, however, is struck in the cartoon in the same year on the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway—"the New North-West Passage," or in the verses in which Britannia and Canada exchange mutual compliments and indulge in hopeful auguries. The opening of the first electric underground railway in England by the Prince of Wales on November 4, 1890, passed unnoticed by Punch, but he rendered full justice in 1891 to the historic conclusion of the famous "Battle of the Gauges," when Stephenson's triumph over Brunel was finally crowned by the abandonment of the broad gauge on the Great Western. It had been an heroic contest, and Punch treated the defeated champion with dignity and respect, quoting the words, "Good-bye, poor old Broad Gauge, God bless you!" which were found written on the G.W. track.

The record of novelties, inventions and discoveries opens modestly in 1875 with the mention of hot-water bottles in bed[Pg 200] as "a new idea." They have long since ousted the warming-pan, which until recently maintained a precarious existence in old-fashioned inns, and is now merely a picturesque antique. Lovers of The Rose and the Ring will remember its use as a weapon, and romantics will deplore its abandonment, for there is no romance in a hot-water bottle. I have dealt with the bicycle under the head of Pastime, but may supplement what I have said elsewhere with a few further observations on this momentous innovation. What I believe to be the first mention of the word occurs towards the end of 1878. Before that we only hear of velocipedes or "rantoones," and in the year 1879 an epigram refers to the "Bycicle." Punch's early references to the "steel horse" and the "public wheel" are decidedly friendly, and he contrasts the bicyclist favourably with the hangers-on of the noble animal:—

Another substitute for the horse, I may remark in parenthesis, comes in for notice at the time of our Egyptian campaigns.

The rules for the road in 1878 are farcical, their only interest being the reference to proprietors of 64-in. machines, for this was the day of the old "ordinary." The use of bells was first made obligatory in Liverpool in 1877. Twelve years later, when the "safety" bicycle was coming in, Punch addressed a warning to enthusiasts in the form of a skeleton cyclist stooping over the handles, in the approved attitude, with an alarming curvation of the spine. In the same year allusion is made to the thrill caused by the Bishop of Chester's taking to the bicycle; but the rumour was exaggerated, for Dr. Jayne only patronized the tricycle. A propos of skeletons, it may be noted that Mr. (afterwards Sir) Seymour Haden's advocacy of burial in wicker coffins and the exhibition held at Stafford House to popularize the scheme in 1875 merely served Punch as an occasion for punning on the projector's name, and suggesting that the funeral march of the future seemed likely to be Haydn's "With[Pg 201] Verdure Clad," as the wicker baskets were to be filled with moss and ferns.

CAMEL-SHIP!

Tommy Atkins (to Mate, who had been told off to the same refractory Animal): "Oh, look here, Bill, here's this cussed Beast has been playing 'Cup and Ball' with me for the last Two Hours! Missed me ever so many times!"

(Vide Special Correspondence from the Soudan.)

Of more topical interest to the readers of to-day is the account given by Punch in the autumn of 1876 of a flying machine invented by a Mr. Ralph Stott of Dover. Under the heading, "A Dædalus at Dover," Punch forecasts the use of the flying machine as an engine of war. Mr. Stott, who claimed that his machine was capable of speed up to one hundred miles an hour, and of hovering in mid-air, went to Berlin to see Bismarck, but backed out of the proposed trial ascent when the German Government declined to pay him £1,000 in advance. This recalled to Punch the old story of "Twopence more and up goes the donkey"; for the rest, while suspending judgment on the invention, he observes that its use in war will constitute a "fearfully costly addition to already bloated armaments: but the cheap defence of nations is now no[Pg 202] longer possible, and Governments, in their martial preparations, are obliged to be regardless of expense."

THE WAR-SHIP OF THE (REMOTE) FUTURE

Punch was not an inventor himself; he never even put a hat on the market; but almost every new invention or discovery prompted him to indulge in forecasts, often farcical or fantastical, but, when read in the light of subsequent views, sometimes proving that he prophesied better than he knew. This is specially true of the development of scientific warfare. The warship of the future, designed by Sambourne in 1875, is not nearly so wonderful as some of the "blisters" of the late war. In the following year the eighty-one-ton guns made at Woolwich prompt an account of an imaginary sea-fight in which battleships engage at fourteen miles distance. In 1879 Victor Hugo declared that the twentieth century would see war abolished, along with capital punishment, monarchy, dogmas and frontiers. Punch replied with a satirical forecast, in Hugo's manner, of a twentieth-century invasion of Paris based on the pacificist assumption that, given non-resistance, it would result in a "fraternal walk-over." The Channel Tunnel scheme, revived in the early 'eighties, was the subject of much discussion and debate, until in 1883 the Joint Select Committee of the Lords and Commons decided by a majority that it was inexpedient to[Pg 204] give Parliamentary sanction to a submarine communication between England and France. In 1881 Punch notes the acute divergence of views between various experts, and the military opposition headed by the Duke of Cambridge and Lord Wolseley. He summed up the views of the majority in a picture of Britannia saying that she was glad to lunch with Sir Edward Watkin—the indefatigable champion of the scheme—any day, but drew the line at the tunnel. Early in 1883, under the heading, "After it is Open," Punch, in a vein of laboured and fantastic irony, records the evidence given before a "Channel Tunnel Closing Committee." Here by a complete change of front Lord Wolseley is represented as urging the maintenance of the tunnel, and John Bright as opposing it—both on account of the unforeseen consequences of its having been made. The alternative and subsequent scheme of a ferry or bridge is dealt with in 1890 by Du Maurier in a picture of a cross-Channel gigantic Pullman car labelled, "Electric Plate-glass Express." Du Maurier's fantasies were always fascinating, but the nightmare element robs them of any pretence to realism. This applies also to the "Tale for the Submarines in A.D. 2086" with Sambourne's illustration, published in February, 1886. The forecast of a naval battle given in 1891 under the title "Who'd be a Sailor? A Story of Blood and Battle," is a slightly more circumstantial attempt to realize the possibilities of marine warfare fifty years later. Punch's description of the devastating effect of high explosives is not too extravagant, though it is meant to be farcical. Points of more real interest in this fantasy are the idea of a Federation of Anglo-Saxon nations—England, the Dominions and the United States—and the well-merited recognition by name of the late Mr. Stead as an advocate of the maintenance of Great Britain's naval supremacy.

[Pg 203]

"UNDER THE SEA!"

(A Tale for the Submarines in A.D. 2086)

"Mr. Nordenfeldt, if he has not actually made a discovery that will revolutionize naval warfare, is on the track of one."—Daily Paper.

In 1881 Punch published a cartoon with the title "What will he grow to?" in which King Steam and King Coal are seen sulkily contemplating the new and portentous infant Electricity. The question has only been partially answered in the ensuing forty years, but Punch found ample material for comment and speculation in the achievements of the 'seventies and[Pg 205] 'eighties. In his "Ode to the Coming Light" in 1878 delight is expressed at the possibility of a clean substitute for gas. Yet he showed a wise caution as well as true foresight in the verses accompanying the cartoon inspired by the slump in gas shares in the same year. The notion that gas is likely to go utterly to the wall is discouraged, and the panic-stricken share-holders typified by the silly birds clustering round the Electric Lighthouse are advised not to knock their brains out against the "Edison Light." Things would work themselves out right in the end, and they did. Night has not yet been turned into day, though a football match was played by electric light at Sheffield more than forty years ago, and fresh comfort for holders of gas shares was furnished in 1882 when the eminent Dr. Siemens recommended the use of gas stoves for cookery. The Electric Exhibition in 1881 is celebrated in an explosion of jocular optimism; and in a burlesque fantasia on electricity in the house in 1883, Punch anticipates the time when everything will be done by electricity—shaving, boot-cleaning, carpet-beating—down or up to an "Electric Family Prayer Reader," though not without frequent accidents, as when the last-named machine gives the same chapter of Genesis three mornings running. It was in the same year, by the way, that sixpenny telegrams were first introduced—one of the many vanished privileges which inspire envy in the harassed Georgian citizen.

References of the telephone abound through these years. The prevailing temper of Punch is shown in one of his earliest allusions to what he calls "The Coming Agony," in 1877. An experiment in long-distance telephoning is described in which a newspaper reporter is quoted as saying, "On putting the instrument to my ear, I felt somewhat as if a regiment of the line had fired a volley, at a hundred yards, into that member." The Almanack of 1878 has a page of telephone pictures, illustrating bottled composers and singers—Gounod, Patti, Nilsson, Santley, Henschel and De Soria—talks with the antipodes, etc. Mary starts a "tallyphone" in the kitchen to converse with her young man; and in another picture, suggested by the phonograph, Du Maurier foreshadows the coming of the gramophone. A more friendly note is struck in the article "Good-bye, Telephone,"[Pg 206] in 1881, lamenting that vested interests were, by legal decision, ousting the telephone in order to perpetuate the inefficiency of the telegraph:—

We may read about scientific progress, but we must go abroad to see it. The wire that misspells a message, and the street Arab who delivers it at his leisure, are all we shall get in this country till the day when we are conquered by the Irish.

On the whole I am inclined to think that this is the strangest of Punch's many strange prophecies.

In the illustration of the "Photophone," the long-promised and culminating development of the film, Du Maurier in 1881 depicts the romance of long-distance courtship between Boulogne and Folkestone. The "Telephone Trials" of 1885 are hardly distinguishable from those of to-day. Telephonic communication with Paris was first established in March, 1891, and Punch represents Lord Salisbury and President Carnot conversing over the wire about "outstanding questions." For the ordinary person it was an expensive luxury, even in those days of cheapness, and the lonely wife in Du Maurier's picture, on being reassured by her husband (just off to Paris) that she can talk to him over the telephone, but that it was rather costly, suggests he had better leave her some blank cheques. A cartoon in the following year, 1892, represents the telephone as the Cinderella of the Post Office; but Punch boldly predicts her final triumph over her "ugly sisters"—the Telegraph and the Letter Post. The imperfections of the telephone were simultaneously "guyed" in a delightful burlesque on "Telephonic Theatre-goers," suggested by performances of the "Theatrophone" at the Electrical Exhibition held in that year. The experiences of auditors of different types are ludicrously reproduced, notably those of the Irritable Person who is just beginning to hear the dialogue of an exciting melodrama:—

Ghostly Voices (in the Irritable Person's ear as before): "Your wife?" "Yes, my wife, and the only woman in the world I ever loved!"

The Irr. P. (pleased, to himself): "Come, now I'm getting accustomed to it, I can hear capitally."

[Pg 207]

The Voices: "Then why have you——?... I will tell you all. Twenty-five years ago, when a shinder foodle in the Borjeezlers I——"

A Still Small Voice (in everybody's ear): "Time, Please."

In the realm of discovery the return of the Arctic Expedition of the Alert and the Discovery under Nares was an outstanding event of 1876 and was commemorated in two cartoons. As a mountain had been named after Punch he was naturally inclined to be proud of an expedition which had given him something to be proud of. In 1880 a plan for a new Arctic Expedition in which balloons should take part attracted a good deal of notice, but Punch was reluctantly sceptical of the feasibility of this "wild scheme," expounded before the Lord Mayor by a deputation mainly of sailors, but including Coxwell the famous aeronaut. In 1885 we catch the first murmurs of modern psychological jargon in a ballade on "The Unconscious Self":—

Write "Subconscious" for "Unconscious," and Punch's lines remain an excellent exposition and criticism of the fashionable doctrine of Psycho-Analysis of to-day.

NO MISTAKE THIS TIME

Lodger: "Dear me, Mrs. Cribbles, your cat's been at this mutton again!"

Landlady: "Oh no, Mum, it can't be the cat. My 'usband says he b'lieves it's the Collerlarda Beetle."

The arrival of the Colorado Beetle, a "newcomer" the reverse of "blithe," is turned to humorous account by Keene in 1877. It was not Punch, however, who was responsible for the unfeeling suggestion that a young man, who had little to recommend him but the size of his feet, and was in need of employment, should emigrate to Colorado to crush the Beetle. Inoculation was already sufficiently advanced by 1881 for Punch to make it the subject of what no doubt seemed to him burlesque treatment. A lady, whose nephew is going out to Sierra Leone, comes to buy him some Yellow Fever from her chemist, who offers her the Traveller's half-guinea assortment of six of the Commonest Zymotics, to be supplemented with most of the Tropical diseases at 5s. each. In the light of the development of medical science the burlesque[Pg 209] is not so fantastic after all. Of the alternative method of cure by suggestion or hypnotism Punch was sceptically critical, though he exhibits in 1889 an ironical preference for the hypnotic treatment of dipsomaniacs as compared with the repressive laws advocated by temperance extremists.

In 1890 influenza attained the proportions of an epidemic, and under the heading, "Refreshments in Vogue," a butler is shown saying to a lady, "Quinine or Antipyrin, my lady?" A propos of refreshments, it is to be noted that Punch, while no teetotaller, bestowed a somewhat lukewarm benediction on Vegetarianism in 1886, when a Vegetarian Restaurant was opened in the Strand opposite the Law Courts. The movement was supported by several eminent medical men, including Sir Henry Thompson and Sir James Crichton-Browne, on the ground that we ought to eat less meat. Of late years Sir James Crichton-Browne has shown more benevolence to carnivorous habits.

The general speeding-up of traffic on land and sea by improved methods of locomotion inspired Punch with mixed feelings. He was far-sighted enough to recognize the need of raising the status of the engineer in the Royal Navy long years before the introduction of the system of the "common entry," but when he read in 1883 that a ship was being built to cross the Atlantic in five days, he remarked that we were reducing our periods of astonishment: "It's only a five days' wonder now." Wonder gives place to protest, in 1889, against the racing of great Atlantic liners; and the following passage has a curiously prophetic ring when one thinks of the tragedy of the Titanic:—

RACING THE "RECORD"

(Suggestion for a brief Mid-Atlantic Cantata).

"Tearing ahead with the green sea sweeping the decks from end to end, never slacking speed in the face of the heaviest weather, regardless alike of the risk of crashing into some coming vessel and of the chance of splitting in half on some suddenly appearing iceberg, as of the dense fog which conceals both; with fires blazing and stokers fainting over the stress of work that is wrung out of them—the passage is made, from start to finish, at high-pressure pace. What is gained is a few hours' triumph in time over the performance of some rival Company, and the cost, if the practice be not[Pg 210] speedily checked, will, sooner or later, most assuredly be the loss in Mid-Atlantic of a whole shipload of loudly protesting but as yet helpless and totally unheeded passengers."—Notes of some recent Atlantic Passages taken at random from the Daily Papers.

The speeding-up of agriculture by machinery found little favour in Punch's eyes. In the two pictures representing the "Delights of the Peaceful Country" in 1884, the point of view is that of the sportsman. Horses, maddened by the noise and smoke of steam ploughs and traction engines, are seen bolting in all directions. The leader of a tandem is shown standing on his hind-legs. Nowadays we expect to see sensitive motorcars behaving in a similar way in the presence of Highland cattle.

Punch did not retain a City editor on his staff, but the great increase of limited liability companies in the 'eighties did not escape his notice. The movement had gone so far that in 1886 a cartoon shows a "Baked Tater Merchant" about to convert his business into a limited liability company and retire into private life. The gold boom in Johannesburg in 1889 inspired him with no misgivings, and an optimistic article in the Daily News prompted him to picture the Transvaal, a Colonial Cinderella, transformed by Gold the fairy godmother. England was visited in the same year by a party of American engineers on their way to the Paris Exhibition, and their impressions are summarized in a set of verses entitled, "Yankee Notions," in which Punch undertakes to interpret their admiration and gratitude. They would be admirable if they had been written by an American, but acknowledgments of this sort lose nine-tenths of their virtue when the host usurps the privilege of the guest. Yet as a record of British achievement the lines are worth quoting:—

[Pg 211]

SALTS AND STOKERS

Vulcan (Chief Engineer): "Yes, Ma'am, things do look bad, and won't be better till you make a change in your officering! It's been Captain Nep's boys till now—it must be both our boys in future!!"

"Snapshot" photography is mentioned, but one cannot say honourably mentioned, in 1887, and in 1892 the "detective" camera is spoken of as a fashionable plaything. The introduction of the Parcel Post in 1883 inspires a burlesque correspondence on its abuse by the senders of unsuitable articles, such as red herrings. In 1890 the Jubilee of the Penny Post is celebrated in a ballad in praise of Rowland Hill, always one of Punch's heroes, who had carried his point though denounced as a lunatic.

[Pg 213]

PART II

THE SOCIAL FABRIC

[Pg 214]
[Pg 215]

CROWN AND COURT

It was in keeping with the "Orientalism" which coloured Disraeli's conception of Empire that his return to power in 1874 should be marked by a strengthening of the ceremonial ties linking the throne with our great Eastern Dependency. In 1875 the Prince of Wales visited India; in 1876 the Queen assumed the title of Empress of India. Punch showed no lack of good will in speeding the Prince on his journey, while frankly criticizing the incidence of the cost. The grant of money for his expenses was opposed in the House in January, and Punch admitted that the opposition was not altogether captious:—

Everybody but Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone seems to think the Government has done the thing shabbily. To be sure, the Government ought to know best.

Punch, with Mr. Fawcett, would have preferred that England should have paid every penny of the bill. India has certainly not invited the Prince, and is as little in a position to invite him as she is to decline his visit: is certainly not as well able to afford the expense of entertaining him as Canada was. As to the feeling of the Working-men (Punch is a representative Working-man, and knows), nineteen-twentieths of them—as Mr. Burt, with characteristic straightforwardness admitted—neither think nor care a ha'penny about the matter: the other twentieth, including the blatant gentlemen who get up nasty noisy little mobs in Trafalgar Square, and who claim to speak for the Working-men, because they speak, peculiarly, for themselves, oppose the visit and the grant for it—as they oppose everything suggested by their betters, and, in particular, all grants to members of the Royal Family. They have found just enough voice in Parliament to show how thoroughly they stand opposed to general opinion.

The Prince's return was welcomed with a disclaimer of all venal courtiership:—

[Pg 216]

It was once said of an old Tory that, although generally intelligent, whenever he began to talk of the Royal Family or the nobility, his jaw dropped, and he became quite inarticulate. Punch's jaw certainly did not drop over the Queen's new title, for which he had no welcome. He thought it a piece of Oriental Disraelian clap-trap, gave a sarcastic account of the Proclamation at Delhi, and published cartoons in which Disraeli figured as repainting the sign of the old Queen's Head, and as a magician with new crowns for old. Punch's antipathy to the new style also found vent in a "Hymn to Victoria" after Ben Jonson:—

[Pg 217]

"THE QUEEN WITH TWO HEADS"

Mr. Bull: "No, no, Benjamin, it will never do! You can't improve on the old 'Queen's Head'!"

[Pg 218]

Another set of verses printed a month or so later go so far as to call "Emperor" a "name accursed." The old title was good enough for Punch:—

The Queen's visit to Lord Beaconsfield at Hughenden in December, 1877, is treated in a spirit of genial irony with an undercurrent of distrust in the Premier's flamboyant imagination. Punch wonders what the tree was that the Queen planted: possibly "of some Asian order from a Hebrew root." In the accompanying picture it is labelled, "Conditional Neutrality," and Gladstone is shown looking on, with his axe, as though he would like to cut it down. Opposition to the Royal grants was again vocal in 1878 in connexion with the Duke of Connaught's marriage, when Sir Charles Dilke's motion was defeated by 320 to 33 votes. Dilke's view was that there was no instance of the Crown holding out for a marriage portion—except in the case of marriages in a manner forced to raise Royal issue—before the present reign. The Government and the Opposition, backed by Gladstone, contended that the precedents did not apply. Punch advocated an overhauling of the existing arrangements as soon as they ran out. In the memorial stanzas on Princess Alice, the Grand Duchess of Hesse Darmstadt, Punch abstains from prophecy, a fortunate abstention in view of the tragic future in store for her daughters; and pays a well merited tribute to a good woman, above reproach whether as daughter, wife, mother and sovereign. He applauds the Duke of Albany for a speech in 1879 warning the British working man not to be outstripped by foreign competitors in industry, intelligence and taste, and welcomes the Prince as following in the steps of his father. The Duke[Pg 219] of Connaught's marriage in the same year is celebrated in verse, Punch declaring that he can't gush, but feels glad; a sentiment tempered by an ironical description of the Royalties and nobilities present at the wedding and of their cheap and homely presents.

There is a kindly reference in the same year to the death of the Prince of Abyssinia (son of King Theodore), who was taken prisoner at Magdala in 1868, and buried at Windsor by the Queen's desire. In his Elegy on "poor Rasselas," Punch speaks of the "kind Queen's mother heart." Yet the continued seclusion of the "Royal Recluse" does not escape notice, and the Birthday verses to the Princess of Wales show that it proved a strain on Punch's loyalty:—

The artistic efforts of Royalties are commended in 1881, when Princess Louise and the German Crown Princess exhibited canvases at the Society of Painters in Water Colours. Punch, in his earlier days, had seldom a good word to say for the Royal patronage of the arts, and in the same year he indulged in an audacious description of the depressing conditions under which they were studied in Royal Palaces, and of the boredom resulting from perpetual attendance on the Queen in her self-imposed seclusion:—

FROM A COURT JOURNAL

(Not published every Saturday)

1st. Back from Balmoral. What a relief! So pleasant to be near something civilized again. Dear L—— called early, and wanted me so much to make a pleasant day of it. It would have been so nice. Private view of some lovely frescoes to begin with. Then [Pg 220]a quiet little luncheon together, and, after that, to Lady—— 's delightful place, to have some lawn-tennis, perhaps a little boating, and then finish with a drive back to town in the cool of the evening. Of course, I couldn't be spared. So, rest of diurnal programme as usual. Walked with Mamma. Had luncheon with Mamma. Drove with Mamma. Dined with Mamma. On the whole, rather a monotonous day.

2nd to 9th inclusive. Nothing particular. Walked daily with Mamma. Had luncheon daily with Mamma. Drove daily with Mamma. Dined daily with Mamma. So, the fifteen pressing invitations for various things this week had, of course, to be declined. Never mind: I got on with my etchings; but the next book I illustrate shall be called "The New Cinderella." Dear me! if I could only get somebody to write it, couldn't I make a capital picture of the young maid's delight at finding her wretched State-coach changed suddenly into a lovely pumpkin!

10th. A very eventful day. Some Indian potentate, with a peculiar turban, was made, by Mamma, an honorary Member of Knights of the Third Class of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. I attended. As usual, it was all over in three minutes. I wonder whether he could have taken a walk with Mamma, stayed to luncheon with Mamma, had a drive with Mamma, and have dined with Mamma, if Mamma had thought of ordering him! But there was no opportunity. The gentleman, too, who brought him, seemed so very anxious to get him back to Claridge's Hotel as quickly as possible. Perhaps he feared the honour might be too much for the Asiatic mind. N'importe! Ah! happy Indian potentate, breathing the free air of Claridge's Hotel!

11th to 18th. More walking with Mamma, taking luncheon with Mamma, driving with Mamma, and dining with Mamma. Some Germans to dinner once or twice. I shall learn Chinese. And that reminds me. I wonder whether Aladdin's Princess, with her tiny little feet, managed, after all, to get better about Pekin than I can about London.

19th. Osborne. Dear A—— came with the children and pressed for me to be allowed to join them on the yacht, and see the regatta, and have a real sail, and spend a quite too lovely day! No use; so she went back, and I took a walk as usual with Mamma, had luncheon as usual with Mamma, and dined as usual with Mamma. Everything very much as usual. Stay, though; I am forgetting. I must add a two hours' steam up and down on the Alberta, a mile and a half away from everything, which the Court Journal will no doubt describe as "witnessing the regatta" with Mamma!

20th to 27th. The usual Osborne routine. Of course, I am perfectly happy doing nothing else but walking, taking luncheon, driving and dining continually with Mamma; though I should like[Pg 221] to be able to get away a little now and then. In one of our drives round the island we passed several groups of happy girls enjoying themselves, in the society of their relatives and friends, in various healthful and innocent ways (with the permission of their Mammas). Yes, I must take in hand "The New Cinderella"!

28th and 29th. Off again to Balmoral, without waiting for the State ball on the 30th. Journey full of novelty.

30th. Once more in the bonnie Highlands! Attend the Servants' Ball, and wonder why, while they may enjoy a dance, I mayn't. Wonder how the State Ball is going on. Go to rest wondering, and finally dream that I am walking, taking luncheon, driving, dining and making immense progress in Chinese, simultaneously, with Mamma till further notice!

In this context it should be noted that Princess Beatrice's Birthday Book, illustrated by Walter Crane, Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, is commended by Punch at the close of the year.

The Kaiser's marriage forms the theme of some jocular and negligible lines: too little then was known of his character and temperament to expect any illuminating comment on the event. But a good deal of space is devoted to the Empress of Austria's hunting visits to Ireland and England—a vivid contrast to the dreary experiences chronicled in the Court Journal quoted above. Hunting in Meath had been boycotted in the winter of 1881, and the Empress returned to her quarters at Combermere Abbey in Cheshire. Punch appeals to the Irish to wipe out the stain and revert to the chivalry of the Irish Brigade, while he welcomed the Empress to England.

In the following year the attempt on the Queen's life by a lunatic, and the intervention of the Eton boy who punched the lunatic's head, are duly chronicled. In one of the worst of his ceremonial cartoons Punch is seen on bended knee presenting a letter of congratulation from her loving People to the Queen and Princess Beatrice. Even the great Tenniel could not always give dignified expression to a genuine and general sentiment. No criticism, however, can be offered on Punch's approval of the Queen's courage in appearing in public, shortly after this incident, to open Epping Forest. The verses on the marriage of the Duke of Albany in 1882 alluded to him as[Pg 222] "the latest, youngest, not least wise" of Royal Princes, and the worthy inheritor of the Prince Consort's studious tastes. The accompanying cartoon shows the Duke with the Duchess behind him on a pillion, riding to Claremont. In the autumn of the same year his delicate health aroused public uneasiness, and Punch contrasts the formidable technical account of his symptoms in the Lancet with the reassuring statements of the Morning Post.

On the relations of Royalty to sport, Punch had always been extremely sensitive. The bitterest things he ever said of the Prince Consort were directed against his stag-shooting exploits and pheasant battues in the 'forties. Much in the same spirit is the vehement protest which he uttered early in 1878 against the cruelty to an eagle which was trapped at Windsor after Prince Christian and several keepers had vainly tried to shoot it. The wretched eagle, according to The Times, tore itself out of the trap, leaving one of its toes behind, and Punch is indignantly sarcastic at this treatment of the royal bird. He was mildly satirical in 1876 when the Balmoral Curling Club was broken up owing to the tendency of the game "to encourage a love for whisky." On the other hand, and unlike other critics, he was always ready to acknowledge when Royalties acted on the maxim noblesse oblige. The Princess of Wales's efforts to get pigeon shooting abolished at Hurlingham in 1883 prompted the picture of the Triumph of Sir Pigeon in the Lists with the Princess as Queen of Beauty in the Tournament of Doves. Unluckily Punch's jubilation was premature. Mr. Anderson's Bill, supported by W. E. Forster, and opposed by Sir Walter Barttelot, was "turned down" by the House, to the disgust of Punch, who asked why could not the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, follow the example of Holland and forbid pigeon shooting. Still, two minor victories are scored to the credit of the Princess of Wales this year. "She has banished the crinolette, in spite of Paris. She has retained the small bonnet, still in spite of Paris," and Punch chronicles the triumph in pleasantly whimsical rhymes.

The critic re-emerges in a long and sarcastic account of the public sale by auction of portraits and furniture—down to[Pg 223] kitchen chairs—belonging to the Duke and Duchess of Teck, which Punch considered as undignified and improper, though he found the catalogue a feeding-ground for laughter and a stimulant to satire. In the same year the Queen's trusted attendant, John Brown, died. It is hard for the present generation to realize the mixed feelings which the Queen's reliance on this royal factotum excited in the minds of the public at a time when the popularity of the Court was impaired by her long seclusion. His very name is now forgotten, though in the 'seventies and early 'eighties it was on every lip—often as an incentive to slighting or indecorous comment. Punch's tribute is somewhat ponderous in style, but he makes a good point in distinguishing this faithful if somewhat angular Scotsman from the minions and freaks of other Courts:—

Punch's alternations of loyalty and exceedingly frank criticism of Royalty during this period are, it must be admitted, abrupt and even bewildering. In the following extracts from The Speaker; a Handbook to ready-made Oratory, we find him in his most unbridled and unmuzzled mood:—

PART I.—LOYAL TOASTS.

Duke of Edinburgh.—Sailor. Plays the fiddle like an angel. Married to rich Russian Princess. Friend of Sir Arthur Sullivan.

Duke of Connaught.—First-class Soldier, covered with Egyptian Medals.... His Royal Highness may be called "the heroic and beloved son of our revered Sovereign"—by a provincial Mayor. Name may be introduced in connexion with Ireland, the Franco-German War, Foreign Stocks—"Prefs." and "Unified"—the late Duke of Wellington, and "the Patrol Camp Equipage Hold-all."

Duke of Albany.—Scientific. Called after the King of the Belgians. Was at Oxford. Connected more or less with South[Pg 224] Kensington, Upton Park Road, Bedford Park, the Kyrle Society, and Cremona violins. Is walking in the steps of the late greatly lamented Prince Consort.

Prince Teck.—Served with distinction as a letter-carrier on the field of Tel-el-Kebir, sold furniture of Kensington Palace by auction, and retired abroad. Name of no great value to anyone.

Here Punch, consciously or unconsciously, was satirizing himself in his ceremonial moods. He was on much safer ground in the excellent pictorial burlesque of the life of the Duke of Clarence at Cambridge, based on a series of illustrations in a serious picture-paper in which, amongst other incidents, the Prince had been depicted as "coxing" a racing boat from the bow! This was fair game. There is a spice of malice in the prospectus of an hotel which would supply "a long felt want" by catering at cheap prices for Royal visitors, foreign Princes and potentates, who could not be suitably accommodated in Buckingham Palace. The publication in February, 1884, of a further instalment of "Leaves from her Journal in the Highlands" is claimed as the Queen's Valentine to Mr. Punch. When the Duke of Albany died in March, Punch did not err on the side of underestimating the promise and achievement of that estimable Prince, but there is an uncanny resemblance between his graceful elegiac stanzas and the points outlined in the handbook of loyal toasts noted above. For a few months the irresponsible satirist is silent; but he explodes again towards the close of the year over the rumour that the Crown of Brunswick had been offered to the Duke of Cambridge, and that he absolutely refused to resign the command of the British Army. As the rumour was groundless, there was no excuse for Punch's malicious imaginary dialogue between the Duke and the foreign officer who had come to make him the offer. In representing the Duke as being discovered writing an article for the Sunday Times on "Dress," Punch was only reverting to the old familiar gibe at the passionate preoccupation of the Royal Family with tailoring.

CHARITY THAT BEGINNETH NOT WHERE IT SHOULD

"And what's all this I hear, Barbara, about your wanting to find some Occupation?"

"Well, you see, it's so dull at Home, Uncle. I've no Brothers or Sisters—and Papa's paralysed—and Mamma's going blind—so I want to be a Hospital Nurse."

The alternations of candour and cordiality continue in the following year. The Duke of Clarence is heartily congratulated[Pg 225] on attaining his majority; and the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to Ireland is chronicled in cartoons in which the Prince figures as a stage Irishman, and Erin is seen reproving a sullen little rebel. The Prince of Wales's visit to Berlin in the same year (1885) is hailed as an omen of more pacific relations—the Prince figuring as a Dove, the old Emperor as a friendly Eagle. This was the year in which Princess Beatrice, the youngest of the Queen's daughters, was married to Prince Henry of Battenberg. Punch makes a remarkably frank allusion to the discussions in the House over her marriage portion in May. The passage is interesting not merely for the matter[Pg 226] but for the new manner of the "Essence of Parliament," widely different from that of Shirley Brooks:—

Thursday. Gladstone moved Resolution allotting Wedding Dowry of six thousand a year to Princess Beatrice. On the whole rather a depressing business. More like a funeral than the preliminary to a wedding party. House listened in politely glum silence. Gladstone seemed to feel this, and laboured along making most of argument that this was the last. Also (being the last) promised Committee for next year to go into whole matter. Labby opposed vote, and O'Brien testified afresh to his disappointment at failure of efforts made to spoil success of Prince of Wales' visit to Ireland. W. Redmond gave the proposal a great fillip by opposing it, and House divided: 337 for making the little present; 38, chiefly Parnellites, against.

By way of set-off, Punch descanted melodiously on the "Royal Ring-Doves," alluding to Princess Beatrice as

Here one cannot forget that terrible Court Journal of four years back, or acquit Punch of irony in the light of the fact (recorded in the Annual Register) that the Queen only gave her consent to the marriage on condition of Princess Beatrice's living in England. The discomforts and stinginess of the Court are satirized in an acid extract from the "Letter of a Lady-in-Waiting" in January, 1886, and there is a good deal of veiled sarcasm in the long account of the opening of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in the summer. The whole ceremony is made to appear tedious, badly rehearsed and trivial, and the Queen is described as speaking with a "slightly foreign accent." Cordiality revives, however, in the verses "Astræa Redux," on the Queen's "happy restoration to public life," à propos of her visit to Liverpool; and in the reference to her patronage of the Carl Rosa Opera Company at the Lyceum.

With the year of the Queen's Golden Jubilee Punch's chivalrous devotion to the person of the sovereign, which had[Pg 227] never failed even in his most democratic days, reawakened in full force. In his Jubilee ode he emphasizes throughout the peaceful aim of the celebration:—

The June and July numbers are dominated by the Jubilee, and Punch, though he spoke with many voices in dealing with the various phases of the festival, kept his criticism within limits of wholly genial satire and whimsicality. There was a scene of decorous "revelry by night" at the Reform Club, which gave a ball on June 16, recorded in a set of verses with solos for Sir William Harcourt, John Bright and Lord Rosebery, packed with political innuendoes, and winding up with a soliloquy from the grand old M.C. (without) who sings:—

The Lord Chamberlain, in Sambourne's picture, figures as the "boots" of an hotel, run off his legs by the demands of Princes, Potentates, Ambassadors:—

"Robert, the City Waiter," descants on the festivities; the Editor was prodigal of puns; there were Jubilee mock advertisements; and a certain amount of criticism of the arrangements, though, as I note elsewhere, Punch pays a special tribute to the police for their efficiency, courtesy, patience and humanity. A protest is entered against the route of procession being exclusively West End, and Punch suggests an extension to take in some of the poorer parts of London. The procession itself is described in a long article entitled "The Longest Day," noting various incidents, such as the unhorsing of the Marquis of Lorne, and summing up in the words: "For impressive splendour and simple dignity, the Royal[Pg 230] Procession couldn't be beaten. But as a Pageant there was much to be desired." The closed carriages were a mistake; the military bands were not fully used, and musically the procession was "the dullest of its sort ever witnessed in any big city on any big occasion." Still the police were A1, and Messrs. Brock gave the public a "Brocken night" at the Crystal Palace, where the rhododendrons were in their glory. The scene in the Abbey was "Abbey and glorious." But Punch, after an explosion of punning, becomes serious as he describes the scene when the Queen took her seat on the Throne, and the moving sequel when she discarded precedent and showed her womanliness by embracing her children. Nor does Punch omit to mention the masque, performed by the Benchers of Gray's Inn, originally produced by Sir Francis Bacon in 1613; the Naval Review with the curious incident of Lord Charles Beresford's resignation in consequence of a breach of etiquette on his part in using public signals to send a private message to his wife; and the Queen's visit to Hatfield when the "lordly Cecil" entertained his sovereign as his ancestor had done in 1573.

[Pg 229]

"GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!"

Punch, as I have often been at pains to insist, was a Londoner, but he did not hesitate to pronounce the Manchester Exhibition as the "gem of the Jubilee," a "perfect article" and "a superb model." It was better than any of the shows at South Kensington, and Punch rightly singles out as its special glory the magnificent Picture Gallery of Modern English Painters. On the other hand, provincial ideas of suitable Jubilee memorials come in for a good deal of ridicule. The list, which includes a central pig-market, a new town pump, a cemetery, a new sewage scheme, gasworks, etc., is clearly farcical, but an actual instance is quoted from the Western Daily Mail of the decision of a village in Cardiganshire to celebrate Her Majesty's Jubilee by providing a public hearse. "The chairman, who originated the proposal, was congratulated upon his happy idea, and an Executive Committee was formed to carry it out," which prompted Punch to suggest that they ought to get Mr. Hayden Coffin to sing their Jubilee ode. Punch's own serious suggestion for a Jubilee memorial was the[Pg 231] revival and extension of Queen Anne's Bounty to improve the lot of the poor clergy, in place of the Church House Scheme.

The visit of Prince Albert Victor (the Duke of Clarence) and Prince George (the present King) to Ireland in the summer of 1887 is taken as the text of one of Punch's periodical appeals to the Queen to conciliate Ireland by going there herself, Hibernia being credited with a desire for her presence:—

The Prince of Wales's silver wedding fell in 1888, and furnished Punch with a theme for loyal verse. It was also the momentous year in which three Emperors reigned in Germany, but of the significance of the change from Wilhelm I to Wilhelm II I have spoken elsewhere. Punch's Jubilee fervour had now died down, and Prince Henry of Battenberg's appointment as Governor of the Isle of Wight is recorded in a semi-burlesque picture of the Prince "with new scenery and costumes," and the comment: "Old England is safe at last."

On May 21 Prince Leopold of Battenberg (now Lord Mountbatten) had been born at Windsor: on the following day a meeting was held under the chairmanship of Lord Waterford to discuss the advisability of abolishing the office of Viceroy of Ireland. Accordingly, Punch, more in malice than seriousness, suggests as a solution of the Irish difficulty that a Battenberg Prince should be born in Ireland, and brought up as the future Viceroy, in imitation of the trick of Edward Longshanks as related by Drayton in his "Polyolbion":—

[Pg 232]

Punch treats the parallel from Paddy's point of view, and winds up:—

The last line is, we fear, a much truer reading of the problem than the sentiments ascribed to Hibernia on a previous page.

The betrothal of the Princess Louise to the Earl, afterwards Duke, of Fife, in the summer of 1889, impelled Punch to rewrite Burns's "The Wooing o't" for the occasion. The messages to the House from the Crown, asking that provision should be made for Prince Albert Victor and Princess Louise, led to a prolonged debate, and the question of Royal Grants was referred to a Committee of all sections of the House, on the basis that "Parliament ought not to recognize in an indefinite way the duty of providing for the Royal Family in the third generation." The Queen did not formally waive her claim, but made it clear that she would not press it in the case of any other of her grandchildren. Mr. Labouchere, Mr. Bradlaugh and Mr. Storey opposed the Majority Report of the Committee in spite of a strong speech made by Gladstone in favour of the grants, which were ultimately carried by large majorities. Punch approved of the Committee, on the ground that it was high time we knew exactly how far the system was to be carried, and ascribed similar sentiments to the average working man in his new version of a popular song of the day. The Majority Report was embodied in the Prince of Wales's Children Bill, which became law on August 9, in spite of the opposition of those, including Mr. Morley and Sir William Harcourt, who maintained that the grant was proposed in such a way as to leave room for further claims and to bind future Parliaments.

The young Kaiser and his wife visited England in 1891, and Punch's greeting came near to being fulsome. In July[Pg 233] Punch, the Kaiser and the Prince of Wales are associated in the cartoon, "A Triple Alliance," the accompanying legend containing the following high tribute to the Imperial guest:—

Yet at the close of the year the feverish versatility of the young ruler is treated with the utmost disrespect:—

The German Emperor has lately rearranged his scheme of work for weekdays. From six a.m. to eight a.m. he gives lectures on Strategy and Tactics to generals over forty years old. From eight to ten he instructs the chief actors, musicians and painters of Berlin in the principles of their respective arts. The hours from ten to twelve he devotes to the compilation of his Memoirs in fifty-four volumes. A limited edition of large-paper copies is to be issued. From twelve to four p.m. he reviews regiments, cashiers colonels, captures fortresses, carries his own dispatches to himself, and makes speeches of varying length to all who will listen to him. Any professional reporter found taking accurate notes of His Majesty's words is immediately blown from a Krupp gun with the new smokeless powder. From four to eight he tries on uniforms, dismisses Ministers and officials, dictates state-papers to General Caprivi, and composes his history of "How I pricked the Bismarck Bubble." From eight to eleven p.m. His Majesty teaches schoolmasters how to teach, wives how to attend to their families, bankers how to carry on their business, and cooks how to prepare dinners. The rest of the day he devotes to himself. On Thursday next His Majesty leaves Berlin on his tenth visit to the European Courts.

Another royal visitor in 1891 was Prince Victor Emmanuel of Italy—the present King—to whom Punch, in the character of Niccolo Puncio Machiavelli, proffers worldly advice, advising him to be liberal of snuff-boxes.

The Prince of Wales, born in the same year as Punch, completed his fiftieth year in November. Punch's Jubilee greeting is friendly without being effusive. Reviewing the Prince's career from childish days, Punch recalls the picture[Pg 234] of him in sailor kit as a child; the nation's "Suspense" at the time of the dangerous illness in December, 1871. Punch had watched him all along, abroad and at home, "where'er you've travelled, toiled, skylarked"; and recognizes him at fifty as "every inch a Prince," and worthy of cordial greeting; adding a graceful compliment to Alexandra, "the unfading flower from Denmark, o'er the foam."

The betrothal of the Duke of Clarence to Princess Mary of Teck had been hailed with loyal enthusiasm, and his premature death in January, 1892, was recorded with genuine feeling and sympathy. In neither cartoon, however, was Tenniel at his best, and the memorial verses, though graceful and kindly, do not lend themselves to quotation, the reference to the "rending of Hymen's rosy band" betraying a pardonable inability to predict the sequel.

[Pg 235]

SOCIETY

THE HEIGHT OF MAGNIFICENCE

Sir Gorgius Midas: "Hullo! Where's all the rest of yer gone to?"

Head Footman: "If you please, Sir Gorgius, as it was past two o'clock, and we didn't know for certain whether you was coming back here, or going to sleep in the City, the hother footmen thought they might go to bed——"

Sir Gorgius: "'Thought they might go to bed,' did they? A pretty state of things, indeed! So that if I'd 'a 'appened to brought 'ome a friend, there'd 'a only been you four to let us hin, hay!"

Critics and satirists of fashionable English society in the early and middle periods of the Victorian age were mainly concerned with its arrogance and exclusiveness. As we reach the 'seventies, with the breaking down of the old caste barriers and the intrusion of the new plutocracy, the ground of attack is shifted; the "old nobility," dislodged from their Olympian fastnesses, are exhibited as not merely accepting but paying court to underbred millionaires, and eking out their reduced incomes by an irregular and undignified competition[Pg 236] with journalists, shopkeepers, and even actors. Society had ceased to be exclusive; it was becoming "smart," and had taken to self-advertisement. Wealth without manners had invaded Mayfair.

These days ushered in the age of Society journals, of Society beauties, of vulgarity in high places, of parasitic peers, of the invasion of society by American heiresses, of the beginning of the end of the chaperon, the dawn of the gospel of "self-expression," and the rebellion of sons and daughters. Money, or the lack of it, was at the root of all, or nearly all, these changes. Dukes had already begun to sell their libraries and art treasures, and the wail of the old landed aristocracy was not unfairly vocalized in "The Song of the Country Squire," to the air of "The Fine old English Gentleman," and published by Punch in the autumn of 1882:—

The "profiteer" was already in Society and on the moors; Punch reviled him in "My 'art's in the 'Ighlands," and in a picture of an opulent Semite swearing that he hasn't "a drop of Hebrew blood in ma veinth, 'thelp me." Du Maurier created Sir Gorgius Midas as typical of the New Plutocracy—a gross, bediamonded figure, surrounded by flunkeys, with Dukes and Duchesses as his pensioners. The alleged poverty-stricken condition of the aristocracy is a frequent theme: one ducal family can only afford to go to the opera when Sir Gorgius lends them his box. But the Dukes still had their uses. The Beresford Midases put their boy's name down both for Eton and Harrow, and decided to send him to whichever has most "dooks" when the time comes. The New Rich show themselves apt pupils in all the snobbery of rank. For example, Sir Gorgius is shocked at the innovation of ladies and gentlemen riding in or on omnibuses. This is not documentary evidence, of course, but it was perfectly legitimate caricature. Du Maurier was not attacking the self-made man whose creed is summed up in the Lancashire saying: "Them as 'as brass don't care a damn what them as 'asn't thinks on 'em." He bestowed his ridicule impartially on the servile plutocrats who aped the customs of the titled classes, and the aristocrats who were unable to grow poor with dignity. Du Maurier's contribution to the social history of the middle and later Victorian age was invaluable on its critical and satirical side. But he was emphatically an aristocrat in the sense that he believed in good manners and fine physique: he set beauty above rank or riches, and was an early apostle of Eugenics. Long before the cult of athletics had begun to affect the stature and build of English girls, he devoted his pencil to glorifying the Junoesque type of English beauty. And while none of Punch's artists ever paid more consistent homage to elegance and distinction of feature and figure, he could be on occasion a merciless satirist of the physical deterioration brought about by intermarriage amongst[Pg 240] the old nobility. Thus in 1880 he showed a ridiculous little degenerate affectionately rebuking his effete parents for "interfering in his affairs," with the result that he is "under 5 feet 1 inch, can't say Boh to a goose, and justly passes for the gweatest guy in the whole county."

The same spirit is shown in the fantastic contrast between the aristocracies of the past and the future. The scene is "an island in British Oceana"; the time 1989, a hundred years later than the date of the picture:—

His Highness the Grand Duke of Gerolstein: "Ach! Miss Prown—in your lôfly bresence I forket my zixty-vour kvarterings. I lay my Ditle at your Veet. Bitte! pecome ze Crant Tochess of Gerolstein!"

Miss Brown: "Your Highness also forgets that I have sixty-four Quarterings!"

His Highness: "Ach! How is dat, Miss Prown?"

Miss Brown: "Why, my father and mother, my four grandparents, my eight great-grandparents, my sixteen great-great-grandparents, and my thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents were all certified over six foot six inches, perfect in form and feature, and with health and minds and manners to match, or they would not have been allowed to marry. And though I'm the shortest and plainest girl in the colony, I should never be allowed to marry anyone so very much beneath myself as your Highness!"

[Pg 237]

THE CHOICE OF A SCHOOL

Mrs. Beresford Midas: "I'm so glad we've put down Plantagenet's name for Eton, Beresford! Here, the newspaper says there are more Lords and Baronets there than ever!"

Beresford Midas, Esq., J.P. (Brother and Junior Partner of Sir Gorgius): "Ah, but only one Dook! Pity there ain't a few more Dooks, Maria!"

Mrs. Beresford Midas: "Perhaps there will be when Plantagenet's of an age to go there."

Mr. Beresford Midas: "Let's 'ope so! At all events, we'll put down his name for 'Arrow as well; and whichever 'as most Dooks when the time comes, we'll choose that, yer know!"

[Pg 239]

THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

Our prophetic instinct enables us to foresee that the British Aristocracy of the future will consist of two distinct parties—not the Tories and the Whigs—but the handsome people and the clever people. The former will be the highly developed descendants of the athletes and the beauties, the splendid cricketers and lawn tennis players of our day. The latter will be the offspring, not of modern æsthetes—oh, dear, no! but of a tougher and more prolific race, one that hasteth not, nor resteth; and for whom there is a good time coming. The above design is intended to represent a fashionable gathering at Lord Zachariah Mosely's, let us say, in the year two thousand and whatever-you-like.

N.B.—The happy thought has just occurred to His Lordship that a fusion of the two parties into one by means of intermarriage, would conduce to their mutual welfare and to that of their common progeny.

In illustrating the falling away of the titled classes from the maxim noblesse oblige on its physical side, Du Maurier occupied an exceptional position on Punch; but he was not less active than other artists and writers in exposing the "moral and intellectual damage" which they inflicted on the community. In 1878 the vogue of "Fancy Fairs" evokes a vigorous protest against the vanity, bad taste, forwardness and free-and-easiness of society women who made themselves cheap in order to sell dear to 'Arries. From this date onwards the vagaries of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, in whom Du Maurier incarnated all the pushfulness of the thrusting woman of fashion, are a constant source of entertainment. One of her earliest exploits as a Lion-hunter was to invite Monsieur de Paris to one of her receptions. Her husband thought she meant the Comte de Paris, but she[Pg 241] speedily undeceives him. It was the headsman she was pursuing, not the Prince. "All the world" came, but the faithless executioner went to visit the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's instead! Later on, as the social mentor, guide, philosopher and friend of Lady Midas, we find her warning her pupil against inviting the aristocracy to meet each other. A music-hall celebrity must be provided as a "draw," and Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns recommends Nellie Micklemash and her banjo. "She is not respectable, but she is amusing, and that is everything." So when the Tichborne Claimant was released in 1884, Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns contemplates inviting him to dinner: "Surely there are still some decent people who would like to meet him." Elsewhere and in more serious vein Punch denounces the undue publicity given to this impostor's movements in the Press—one leading paper having stultified itself by condemning the practice in a leading article and simultaneously publishing an advertisement of the Claimant's appearance at a music-hall. This dualism, however, was no monopoly of the 'eighties and has become common form in the Georgian Press.

Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns acts as a bridge between the old and the new régime in her ceaseless and indiscriminate worship of celebrities and notorieties. She is the descendant of Mrs. Leo Hunter, but adds the shrewdness and cynicism of the go-between to the simple silliness of her ancestress. Todeson, another familiar figure in Du Maurier's gallery, attaches himself exclusively to the old nobility, but is always putting his foot in it by being plus royaliste que le roi, or more ducal than the duchess. For in the slightly distorting mirror of Du Maurier's genius we see, as an evidence of the spread of liberal ideas, a Duke dining with his tailor and being kept in very good order by him; and a musical Duchess learning to sing Parisian chansonnettes from a French expert in the franchement canaille manner. The craze for the stage among "Society people" had now reached formidable dimensions. They were no longer content with amateur theatricals, but had begun to enter into competition with the professionals.

The invasion of journalism by the same class Punch[Pg 242] took much more seriously. Hazlitt, some fifty years earlier, had written in his essay "On the Conversation of Lords": "The Press is so entirely monopolized by beauty, birth or importance in the State, that an author by profession resigns the field to the crowd of well-dressed competitors, out of modesty or pride." But this was written when the mania for fashionable novels by Noble Authors was at its height, and Hazlitt uses the word Press of the printing press generally. In the early 'eighties the competition of titled amateurs was mainly confined to Society journals, a characteristic product of the new fusion of classes. As one of their ablest and most cynical editors said of his own paper, they were "written by and for nobs and snobs." They are now practically dead, owing to the absorption in the daily Press of the special features—above all the "personal note"—then peculiar to these weekly chronicles of high life. Punch ascribed the invasion of the Street of Ink by the amateurs to the penurious condition of the aristocracy and their ignoble readiness to turn their social opportunities into "copy" and cash. Under the heading of "Labor Omnia Vincit, or How Some of 'em try to live now," Punch published a satiric sketch of the new activities of Mayfair. The scene is laid in the boudoir of Lady Skribeler, a successful contributor to various Society journals. The scene opens with the arrival of her friend the Hon. Mrs. Hardup, who gives a pathetic account of her disastrous ventures in business and her failure to secure an engagement on the stage. Why, asks Lady Skribeler, had she not made her husband go into trade or keep a shop, or sell wine?—

Mrs. Hardup: "Oh, he has done that. He was Chairman of that Thuringian Claret Company; and we got ever so many people about us to take a quantity. But it fermented—or did something stupid; and they do say it killed the poor Duke, who was very kind to Harry, you know, and took a hundred dozen at once. And now, of course, there's no sale—or whatever they call it; and Harry says if it can't be got rid of to a firm of Blue Ink Makers, who are inquiring about it, it will have to go out to the Colonies as Château Margaux—at a dreadful loss. [Summing up.] I don't believe the men understand trade a bit, dear. So I'm going to do something for myself."

[Pg 243]

The sequel describes her initiation into the tricks of the trade by Lady Skribeler:—

Profiting by the morning's conversation, Mrs. Hardup besieges unprotected Editors, contributes to the literature of her country most interesting weekly accounts of the doings of her friends and acquaintances, and, it is to be hoped, practically solves, to her own satisfaction, the secret of the way in which a good many of us manage to live now.

REMOVAL OF ANCIENT LANDMARKS

Lady Gwendoline: "Papa says I'm to be a great artist, and exhibit at the Royal Academy!"

Lady Yseulte: "And papa says I'm to be a great pianist, and play at the Monday Pops!"

Lady Edelgitha: "And I'm going to be a famous actress, and act Ophelia, and cut out Miss Ellen Terry! Papa says I may—that is, if I can, you know!"

The New Governess: "Goodness gracious, young ladies! Is it possible His Grace can allow you even to think of such things! Why, my Papa was only a poor half-pay officer, but the bare thought of my ever playing in public or painting for hire, would have simply horrified him—and as for acting Ophelia or anything else—gracious goodness, you take my breath away!"

For success in this walk of journalism, "literary culture must be eschewed, for with literary culture come taste and discrimination—qualities which might fatally obstruct the path of the journalistic aspirant." It was not by any means monopolized[Pg 244] by amateurs, and Punch, in his series of "Modern Types" a few years later, traces, under the heading "The Jack of all Journalisms," the rise to power and influence of a humble but unscrupulous scribe, successively venal musical and dramatic critic, interviewer and picturesque social reporter, but always "the blatant, cringing, insolent, able, disreputable wielder of a pen which draws much of its sting and its profit from the vanities and fears of his fellow-creatures." The sketch is an ingenious composite photograph, in which those familiar with London journalism in the 'eighties and 'nineties will recognize in almost every paragraph the lineaments of one or other of the most notorious and poisonous representatives of the Society Press.

As we have seen, journalism was only one field for the commercial instincts of penurious "Society people." In 1887 Punch takes for his text the following paragraph from a daily paper:—

"One well-known West End Milliner is a graduate of Girton; another bears a title; a third conceals a name not unknown to Burke under a pseudonym.... Many of the best women of all classes are ready to do anything by which the honest penny may be earned."

Punch was somewhat sceptical as to the honesty of their intentions; the only way, he tells us, to get an invitation to the dances given by one titled shopkeeper was to buy one of her bonnets. This may have been a malicious invention, but he was fairly entitled to make game of the advertisement which appeared in the Manchester Evening Times in the spring of 1887:—

"To Christian Widowers.—A Nobleman's Widow, of good birth, about 40, no family, left with small income, pleasing, sweet-tempered, cultured, domesticated, fond of children, desires Settled Home and a high-minded Protestant Husband of 50, or older, seeking domestic happiness with a devoted, loving Christian wife.—Address——"

The lady shopkeeper had become such an institution that Punch included her in one of his series of "Modern Types" in 1891. The portrait is not exactly flattering, though he admitted that she sometimes possessed other than purely social qualifications for success:—

[Pg 245]

At first everything will go swimmingly. Friends will rally round her, and she may perhaps discover with a touching surprise that the staunchest and truest are those of whom, in her days of brilliant prosperity, she thought the least. But a succès d'estime is soon exhausted. Unless she conducts her business on purely business lines, delivers her goods when they are wanted, and, for her own protection, sends in her accounts as they fall due, and looks carefully after their payment, her customers and her profits will fall away. But if she attends strictly to business herself, or engages a good business woman to assist her, and orders her affairs in accordance with the dictates of a proper self-interest, she is almost certain to do well, and to reap the reward of those who face the world without flinching, and fight the battle of life sturdily and with an honest purpose.

[Pg 246]

THE NEW SOCIETY CRAZE!

The New Governess (through her pretty nose): "Waall—I come right slick away from Ne' York City, an' I ain't had much time for foolin' around in Europe—you bet! So I can't fix up your gals in the Eu-ropean Languages no-how!"

Belgravian Mamma (who knows there's a Duke or two still left in the Matrimonial Market): "Oh, that's of no consequence. I want my daughters to acquire the American accent in all its purity—and the idioms, and all that. Now I'm sure you will do admirably!"

Millinery was the favourite field of enterprise, but the duchess who rebuked the indiscreet Todeson for his condemnation of trade as unworthy of the nobility, mentioned that her husband had gone in for bric-à-brac and her mother for confectionery. "Society people," in short, were dabbling extensively in trade, but it was mainly confined to the luxury trades. Punch does not mention, however, what was generally believed to be true, that a well-known peer was a partner in a firm of money-lenders, trading under a name most literally suggestive of blood-sucking. Commercialism in high places is illustrated indirectly but pointedly by the invasion of American heiresses. Dowagers with large families of daughters—for large families were still frequent and fashionable—found themselves seriously affected by the "unfair competition" of these wealthy and vivacious beauties. In 1888 Punch satirized their misfortunes in a picture representing English society mothers engaging American governesses so that their daughters might be instructed how to hold their own against American girls in attracting eligible dukes. So again in the Almanack of 1889, under the title "Social Diagnosis," a French baron identifies a certain lady as an English duchess on the evidence of her indisputably American origin, and in the same year, in a sardonic article, Punch exposes the American tendency to gloat over evidences of class distinctions in English society, while pretending to denounce them. This was inspired by the activities of certain American correspondents and "G. W. S." (the late Mr. Smalley) in particular, who is described as "too intimate with the 'hupper suckles' to think much of them." It was he, by the way, whose favourite form of social entertainment was described as not a "small and early" but an "Earl and Smalley." The hardest thing that Punch said of the American heiresses was put into the mouth of one of their number. In 1890 he published a picture of three fair New Yorkers conversing with a young Englishman. When he asks whether their father had come with them to Europe, one of them replies: "Pa's much too vulgar to be with us. It's as much as we can do to stand Ma." But the verses on "The American Girl" in the same year wind up on a note of reluctant admiration:—

[Pg 247]

THE AMERICAN GIRL.

(An American Correspondent of The Galignani Messenger is very severe on the manners of his fair countrywomen.)

An heroic attempt was made in 1882 by that devoted apostle of the (socially) Sublime and Beautiful, Mr. Gillett, to revive Almack's. But, as Punch had frankly and even cheerfully recognized in connexion with a previous attempt, the time had gone by for the oligarchical control of the entertainments of the fashionable world.

Society had ceased to be small, select and exclusive; it was becoming increasingly mixed, cosmopolitan and plutocratic. The horizon was enlarged and the range of interests multiplied, but the desire to be in the movement was not always indulged in with dignity or discretion. Mayfair worshipped at new shrines and erected new idols. It was an age of strange crazes and pets and favourites. The great ladies of the 'thirties and[Pg 248] 'forties may have been arrogant, but they seldom exploited their personalities, or cultivated a limelight notoriety. There is shrewd criticism in the legend of one of the earliest of the "Things one would have rather left unsaid," illustrated by Du Maurier in 1888:—

Aunt Jane: "Ugh! When I was your age, Matilda, Ladies of Rank and Position didn't have their photographs exposed in the shop windows."

Matilda (always anxious to agree): "Of course not, Aunt Jane. I suppose photography wasn't invented then?"

Photography has much to answer for; and certainly played its part in luring the titled classes from their ivory towers, and creating the professional beauty. The "Giddy Society Lady," as portrayed by Punch in 1890, is a new version of the "Model Fast Lady" he described some forty years earlier, and though less mannish in her deportment, is much more flashy, vulgar and selfish than her predecessor. Tailor-made by day, excessively décolletée at night, and preferring Bessie Bellwood to Beethoven, this semi-detached and expensive wife as delineated by Punch is not an attractive figure. Yet with very few changes the portrait might stand for the modern society Maenad. Cigarette-smoking, it should be noted, was still considered "fast." Another recurrent type of unlovely womanhood much in evidence in these years is the "old Bailey lady" as Punch christened her many years before. In 1886 the writer of "A Bad Woman's Diary" expressly states that she would not go to a theatre in Lent, though she spends all her spare time attending murder trials. Punch did not spare the judges who lent themselves to this abuse, as may be gathered from the following dialogue:—

Her Grace: "Thank you so much for keeping such nice places for us, Judge! It was quite a treat! What romantic looking creatures they are, those four pirates! I suppose they really did cut the Captain and Mate and Cook into bits, and there's no doubt about the Verdict?"

Sir Draco: "Very little indeed, I fear!"

Her Grace: "Poor Dears! I suppose if I and the girls get there[Pg 249] between five and six to-morrow, we shall be in time to see you pass the sentence? Sorry to miss your summing-up, but we've got an afternoon concert, you know!"

Sir Draco: "I'll take care that it shall be all right for you, Duchess!"

So, again, under the sarcastic heading, "True Feminine Delicacy of Feeling," this morbid curiosity is scarified in the conversation of two ladies in 1889:—

Emily (who has called to take Lizzie to the great Murder Trial): "What, deep black, dearest?"

Lizzie: "Yes. I thought it would be only decent, as the poor wretch is sure to be found guilty."

Emily: "Ah! Where I was dining last night, it was even betting which way the verdict would go, so I only put on half mourning!"

TAKING TIME BY THE FORELOCK

Gwendoline: "Uncle George says every woman ought to have a profession, and I think he's quite right!"

Mamma: "Indeed! And what profession do you mean to choose?"

Gwendoline: "I mean to be a professional beauty!"

It was in the same year that Punch published a double cut, showing the tricoteuses under the guillotine at the French Revolution,[Pg 250] and, as a pendant, society ladies in a modern English Court of Justice.

The fashionable craze for "slumming," which set in early in the 'eighties, was less objectionable; it was at worst an excrescence on the genuine interest taken in the housing question by serious reformers. But as practised by Mayfair it was ridiculed by Punch as a mere excuse for excitement; Du Maurier reduced it to an absurdity by his picture of society ladies going slumming in mackintoshes to avoid infection; and by another of Todeson, who had taken part in one of these excursions, being disillusioned by contact with real workers, and self-sacrificing East End clergymen. I have not been able to ascertain whether the same artist's picture of professional pugilists being fêted by society in 1887 was a mere piece of burlesque or not; but it was, at any rate, a good example of intelligent anticipation. His satire of "Society's new pet—the artist's model," in a picture of a handsome Junonian girl surrounded by infatuated Duchesses, drinking in her artless and h-less confidences, is probably only a fantastic caricature of aristocratic commercialism, as one of the great ladies is represented as thinking of letting her daughter become a model as a means of social advancement. Mention has been made of the invasion of journalism by society people. But students of foretastes and parallels will find a really remarkable anticipation of the terrors of modern Diaritis—not to use a more vulgar word—in the burlesque review of A Modern Memoir—the Autobiography and Letters of Miss Skimley Harpole, published by Messrs. Rakings & Co.:—

Seldom have we perused a book with so much interest as has thrilled us during our reading of these two handsome volumes. Situate as Miss Harpole was, the daughter of a famous bishop, claiming for mother a lady whose good deeds are remembered to this day, sister of one of the most brilliant female leaders of society, and herself popular, fêted and caressed, there is small room for wonder that even the bare details of Miss Harpole's everyday life would prove interesting, but when told in a charmingly frank style her book becomes a model of what a Memoir should be. In a few short simple sentences she, with delicious naïveté, relates her home[Pg 251] life, and so clearly is the picture put before us that we cannot resist quoting the fragment:

"Take us at home of a night! The Bishop in an easy chair, with his gaitered legs crossed, and elevated on the back of another, with a short clay pipe in his mouth, is vaguely mixing his eleventh tumbler of hot gin-and-water, causing us girls great pain to conceal our titters, when, as happens very often at this period of the evening, he deposits the greater part of the hot water on the tablecloth or himself. My mother, regardless of him, sits, carefully studying a sporting paper, and the Racing Calendar, and making her selections for the next day's horse-race. For a heavy gambler is my mother, as is my brother, who, when at home—which is seldom—is either delighted at having won, or in the sulks because he has lost money to his fellow legal students at billiards. As a rule he is delighted, and always carries a lump of chalk in his pocket. My sister is writing notes to Men about Town, Peers and Guardsmen, her lovely features only losing their serenity when lit up by an[Pg 252] arch look of wonderment whether she has made appointments with two different men at the same hour and place, while I am sitting, in my school-girlish way, by myself, making notes, so as to tell the world some day the true story of my life."

Space forbids us to say any more of the merits of this charming work, but we cannot resist one extract which shows how true was the estimate of the Bishop's noble character:—

"We were one night at the Italian opera, of which my father was passionately fond, and during the ballet our attention was drawn to a singularly lovely girl on the stage. 'Alas!' said the Colonel, 'she is as bad as she is beautiful.' The Bishop immediately avowed his readiness to investigate the case at the earliest opportunity. He was always thinking of others, despite Mamma's occasionally stubborn opposition."

This concludes our notice. In brief, the book is a most excellent specimen of the modern style of Memoir, conceived with kindliness of heart and charity of remembrance and executed with literary taste, skill and polish.

This was fiction, based on what purported to be truth, and in turn was destined to be easily eclipsed by the actual reminiscences of a later generation. It may be noted in this context that the "blazing indiscretions" in the "Life of Bishop Wilberforce," published in 1883, and the letters of protest which they evoked, had already prompted the satire and sympathy of Punch.

OVERDOING IT

"What? Going already? And in Mackintoshes? Surely you are not going to Walk?"

"Oh, dear no! Lord Archibald is going to take us to a dear little Slum he's found out near the Minories—such a fearful place! Fourteen poor Things in One Bed, and no Window—and the Mackintoshes are to keep out Infection, you know, and hide one's Diamonds, and all that!"

The fashionable quest of the unseen world took no new forms in the 'seventies and 'eighties. We hear much less of Spiritualism under that name. This was no doubt in part due to the success of Maskelyne and Cook in outdoing the "manifestations" of mediums, a success so remarkable that they were actually claimed as spiritualists by some of the fraternity. In 1874 Punch waxes facetious at the statement that additional help had been obtained in the working of certain mines by ghostly assistants. Later on there are references to the activities of palmists and Society Sibyls, but the study of the Unseen and the Occult in the 'eighties entered on a new and formidable phase with the advent of thought-readers, theosophists and psychical researchers. Punch devotes a good deal of space to an exhibition of his powers by Irving Bishop, a well-known thought-reader of the time, at which politicians were impressed[Pg 253] and sceptics—represented by Ray Lankester—were unconvinced. The pin-finding business was certainly much less impressive than the exploits of the Zancigs some thirty years later. The invasion of the drawing-room by pseudo-science met with little sympathy from Punch, who summed up his view in the phrase, "modish science is a sciolist"; and in 1891 he expressed his resentment against the new mysticism and the jargon of Theosophy in a comprehensive denunciation of "useless knowledge." The verses are worth quoting, not for their poetic quality but for the list of names quoted:—

OUR REAL DESIDERATUM

(By a "Well-informed" Fool)

Ah! I was fogged by the Materialistic,

By Huxley and by Zola, Koch and Moore;

[Pg 254]

And now there comes a Maëlstrom of the Mystic

To whirl me further yet from sense's shore.

Microbes were much too much for me, bacilli

Bewildered me, and phagocytes did daze,

But now the author 'cute of Piccadilly,

Harris the Prophet, the Blavatsky craze,

Thibet, Theosophy, and Bounding Brothers—

No, Mystic Ones—Mahatmas I should say,

But really they seem so much like the others

In slippery agility!—day by day

Mystify me yet more. Those germs were bad enough,

But what are they compared with Astral Bodies?

Of Useless Knowledge I have almost had enough,

I really envy uninquiring noddies.

I would not be a Chela if I could.

I have a horror of the Esoterical.

Besant and Olcott may be wise and good,

They seem to me pursuing the chimerical.

Maddened by mysteries of "Precipitation,"

The Occult Dream and the Bacillus-Dance;

We need Societies for the propagation

Of Useful—Ignorance!

This bracketing of Huxley with Zola is decidedly unfair, and the juxtaposition of Koch the famous physiologist and of Mr. George Moore—already known for his realistic romances—borders on the grotesque. Piccadilly is, of course, the brilliant novel by Laurence Oliphant, diplomatist, man of the world and mystic, who became the disciple of the American "prophet" Harris, spiritualist and founder of the "Brotherhood of the New Life"; and Blavatsky is the amazing Russian lady who brought a new religion from the Far East as another woman, Mrs. Eddy, brought another from the Far West. Madame Blavatsky is no more, but Mrs. Besant is still very much with us, and Theosophy and Christian Science are firmly established in a country which, as the French cynic remarked, boasts a hundred and fifty religions but only one sauce.

LAST NEWS FROM THE SPIRIT-WORLD

Medium: "The spirit of the late Mr. Jones is present."

Jones's Widow (with emotion): "I hope you are happy, Jones!"

Jones (raps out): "Far happier than I ever was on earth!"

Jones's Widow: "Oh, Jones! Then you must be in Heaven!"

Jones: "On the contrary!"

THE PASSION FOR OLD CHINA

Husband: "I think you might let me nurse that teapot a little now, Margery! You've had it to yourself all the morning you know!"

AFFILIATING AN ÆSTHETE

Pilcox, a promising young Pharmaceutical Chemist, has modelled from memory an Heroic Group, in which Mrs. Cimabue Brown is represented as the Muse of this Century, crowning Postlethwaite and Maudle as the Twin Gods of its Poetry and Art.

Postlethwaite: "No loftiah theme has evah employed the sculptah's chisel!"

Maudle: "Distinctly so. Only work on in this reverent spirit, Mr. Pilcox, and you will achieve the Truly Great!"

Mrs. Cimabue Brown: "Nay, you have achieved it! Oh, my young friend, do you not know that you are a HEAVEN-BORN GENIUS?"

Poor Pilcox: "I do!"

(Gives up his pestle and mortar, and becomes a hopeless Nincompoop for life.)

But of all the Society crazes of this period the Æsthetic movement created the most resounding stir. Æstheticism on its social side was an excrescence on, and a perversion of, doctrines and principles to which English art and decorative design and[Pg 255] letters owed a real and lasting debt. It is enough to mention the names of Rossetti and Morris, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Ruskin to realize how far the fashionable æsthetes disimproved on their masters. Ruskin was in particular unfortunate, since many of their catchwords were borrowed from him and distorted to serve other ends. For while Ruskin deplored the fetish-worship of athletics, he believed in honest manual labour, and never subscribed to the maxim of art for art's sake, which, by the way, was anathema to Watts. Morris was essentially manly and a worker. The æsthetes were neither. In life and letters they cultivated languor, eccentricity, paradox, and extravagance of speech and dress. It was their aim to exploit, as a social asset and a means to the achievement of notoriety, the creed of artistic emotion which had been formulated by Pater. For Oxford, it must be regretfully admitted, was the "spiritual home" of the æsthetes. The word "æsthetic," as we have seen, in its modern cant sense dates back to the 'sixties, but it was not until the middle 'seventies that it began seriously to attract the attention of Punch. To 1874 belongs Du Maurier's picture of the effete-looking artist begging his wife to let him nurse the china teapot she had monopolized all the morning. In 1876 we read of the damping of "Mr. Boniface Brasenose's" enthusiasm[Pg 257] by a fashionable lady. But the fashionable ladies soon succumbed to the craze, and became adepts in the lingo of intensity. Punch attacked the æsthetes alternately with the rapier and the bludgeon, using the former in the delicate raillery of Du Maurier's pictures, the latter in prose and verse comments on their eccentricities and extravagance. Here his attitude is invariably that of the healthy Philistine. But when we speak of "æsthetes" it would be more precise to use the singular. Maudle and Postlethwaite and all the other types satirized by Du Maurier are only variants on the chief priest of the new cult, Oscar Wilde, whom Punch attacked directly and indirectly with all the weapons at his disposal. Punch's ridicule was often trenchant and effective, but undoubtedly it helped to advertise one who was avid of notoriety, and infinitely preferred abuse to neglect. Punch's feelings towards him were all through of a piece with those of the witty Fellow of All Souls who, when a friend of Wilde's indignantly remarked that the men who had ducked him in the Cherwell ought to be prosecuted, interposed with the biting comment, "I suppose you mean under the Rivers' Pollution Act." For more than a year and a half, from the spring of 1881 to the end of 1882, there was seldom a number without a picture or a poem or a prose article in which the chief æsthete was held up to derision. Sambourne's drawing in June, 1881, is called a "fancy portrait," but it is quite a realistic likeness. "A Maudle-in Ballad, to the Lily," had appeared in April:—

Other parodies by "Oscuro Wildegoose" followed, and Wilde's poems are "slated" in the Bludyer vein under the heading "Swinburne and Water." A good deal of Wilde's verse was derivative—even tertiary deposit—and Punch made fair game of the Swinburnian echoes and phrases such as "argent body," "pulse of sin," and "kosmic soul." But his literary criticism is somewhat heavy-handed. He is much happier in "Oscuro Wildegoose's" burlesque sonnet lamenting the unenlightened Philistinism of Grahamstown, in South Africa, where the Town Council did not know what a dado was, and conjectured that it was an ecclesiastical term! Wilde's visit to America in 1882 let loose a cascade of ridicule beginning with a bogus interview, followed up by a cartoon "Ariadne in Naxos," representing (in the manner of W. B. Richmond) the grief of Æstheticism at the departure of her hierophant. When Wilde lectured at Boston sixty students appeared in white waistcoats and knee-breeches, with sun-flowers in their buttonholes, and Punch welcomed the attention as a reductio ad absurdum of Wilde's efforts to revolutionize costume. Later on occurred the episode—which caused Punch unfeigned delight—of a letter addressed to "Oscar Wilde, Poet, London," being returned as "Not known." But the craze was passing. Gilbert's Patience, produced in 1881, had been largely instrumental in reducing the pose of preciosity to its true proportions, and by the summer of 1883 we find Punch coupling "Oscar" and "Jumbo" (the elephant) together as overrated lions. From this point onward the campaign slackens. In some acid verses on the Zeit-Geist in the spring of 1884, which we quote later on, a would-be Juvenal denounces vulgarity as the dominant feature of the time; and in his list of nuisances[Pg 259] and impostors no room is found for the æsthete. At the close of the same year, however, to judge by another set of pessimistic verses, he was still active if not exactly rampant:—

REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH

Scene—A drawing-room in "Passionate Brompton."

Fair Æsthetic (suddenly, and in deepest tones, to Smith, who has just been introduced to take her in to dinner): "Are you intense?"

The "Dilettante" satirized in a rather ponderous article—one of the series of "Modern Types"—in 1890 represents a[Pg 260] later stage of pseudo-culture, in which a contempt for everything characteristically English is the leading trait. He warbles French chansonnettes, defies all the rules of English grammar and metre in his poetry, is much in request at charitable concerts in aristocratic drawing-rooms, affects a mincing delicacy in gait and manner, paints his face in middle age, talks habitually in an artistic jargon, and passes away in an odour of pastilles. The type existed and exists, but hardly deserved such detailed and elaborate portraiture. There is more interest in the verses on the over-cultured undergraduate in 1891—one of a series entitled "Men who have taken me in—to dinner," by a Dinner Belle:—

BRITISH PROPRIETY

Hawker: "Book o' the words, my Lady. Hortherized copy. The Dam o' Cameleers!"

Mrs. Jones (for the benefit of the bystanders): "Oh no, thank you. We've come to see the acting, we do not wish to understand the play!"

It is not a bad picture of Oxford preciosity in the early 'nineties—the age of the Yellow Book—and contains the first reference in Punch to the new educational gospel of self-realization, or "self-expression," as it is now called. The mention of early Chinese poetry was probably only a piece of "intelligent anticipation," for its vogue only began yesterday. So too with the Nursery Rhymes which some of the Georgian poets assiduously cultivate. But there is no foreshadowing of the characteristic Balliol product of some ten years later, the "intellectual blood" who combined hard and free living with hard work for his schools—who was at once[Pg 262] dissipated and distinguished. The new worship of intellect—a sort of inverted snobbery—had already been satirized by Du Maurier in his sketch of the new parvenu, foreshadowing the "coming aristocracy of mind":—

He: "Charming youth, that young Bellamy—such a refined and cultivated intellect! When you think what he's risen from, poor fellow, it really does him credit!"

She: "Why, were his people—a—inferiah?"

He: "Well, yes. His Grandfather's an Earl, you know, and his Uncle's a Bishop; and he himself is Heir to an old Baronetcy with eighty thousand a year!"

Manners were in a state of transition and flux. As late as 1883 smoking in the presence of ladies was still taboo and severely restricted even at clubs, and Punch contrasts the "bereavement" of gentlemen by the disappearance of ladies after dessert with the "consolation" afforded by the cigarette. It was not until 1884 that smoking was allowed for the first time after dinners at the Mansion House, an innovation deplored in the wail of an "Old Fogey." Punch had no love of the old proprieties where they were insincere, as, for example, when in 1881 he represented Mrs. Jones declining the offer of a "hortherized copy" of the book of words of the Dam o' Cameleers from a hawker: "Oh no, thank you. We've come to see the acting, we do not wish to understand the play." But he resented the curt colloquialisms, an outcome of the general speeding-up of life, which in his view impaired the courtesies of social intercourse between the sexes; while on the other hand modish artificialities, whether new or old, always excited his ire. Twice over in 1884 he was moved to protest against the excessive use of cosmetics, in the verses to a "Painted Lady" (prompted by Malcolm Morris's address at the Health Exhibition), in which the writer looks forward to the time when it will be fashionable to be healthy, and a few months later, in "A Few Home Truths," we read:—

[Pg 263]

1787	1887"

"HERE'S A HOW-D'Y'-DO!"

A Chapter on the Evolution of Deportment.

Nowadays young ladies begin making-up rather earlier, but, if Punch is to be believed, we can draw consolation from the fact that they are little worse in this respect than their modish mothers or grandmothers. Another of Punch's pet aversions was the fashionable high hand-shake introduced in the 'nineties:—

HANDS AS THEY ARE SHOOK

(New Style)

In healthier times, when friends would meet

Their friends in chamber, park, or street,

Each, as hereunder, each would greet.

Your level hand went forth; you clasped

Your crony's; each his comrade's grasped—

If roughly, neither friend was rasped.

Such was the good old-fashioned cue

Of honest British "How d'ye do?"

I think it manly still—don't you?

[Pg 264]

But now, when smug acquaintance hails

A set that would be "smart," but fails,

Another principle prevails.

The arm, in lifted curve displayed,

Droops limply o'er the shoulder-blade,

As needing some chirurgeon's aid.

THE EARLSWOOD TOTTER

Our Mashers are still improving. They no longer enter the Ball Room with their Hands in their Pockets. They have adopted a Mode of Progression more in harmony with their Mental Structure.

The offenders here castigated are young men, but the ladies excelled in the new greeting. Languor was the distinguishing note of the young men of fashion in the 'eighties and 'nineties. It was the age of the "masher"—dreadful word—of the "Johnnie" and the "Chappie." In 1883 Punch published a poem entitled "Child Chappie's Pilgrimage," a modern Rake's Progress. Later on he satirized the studied[Pg 265] imbecility of deportment of young dandies entering a ballroom as "The Earlswood Totter." Students of slang will note with interest the emergence of the word "bounder" in the year 1887. Punch's verses on the type thus designated indicate a much harsher view than now prevails. Nowadays we admit that a "bounder," though socially "impossible," may be a "stout fellow." Punch's portrait, in which the "bounder" is represented as a bilker and a blackmailer, corresponds with the "cad" in the worst sense which we now attribute to that word. Mention has been made of the decline of the chaperon. Here Punch virtually sides with the "little flirt" who boldly enunciates the doctrine that "in future a girl is her own chaperon." At the same time he clearly disapproved of the new habit of dispensing with introductions, and its logical outcome, satirized in one of Du Maurier's most graceful pictures—entertainments at which the hostess was ignorant of the very names of her guests.

MODERN SOCIAL PROBLEMS

Susceptible Youth: "Would you present Me to that Young Lady with the Black Fan?"

Hostess: "With pleasure, if you will tell me her Name—and Yours!"

[Pg 266]

The Roller-Skating craze, which attained the dimensions of an epidemic in 1875 and 1876, is treated by Punch rather as a form of social recreation fraught with matrimonial possibilities than an athletic pastime.

The year 1876 was also noteworthy for an epidemic of Fancy Dress Balls and Spelling Bees. The latter were never popular in Mayfair; spelling had never been a strong point with the British aristocracy. But in less exalted circles Spelling Bees flourished exceedingly for a while, and the prizes awarded may well have conduced to an improvement in the orthography of the upper middle classes. Punch's references to the craze are copious. It may suffice, however, to quote his "Dream of a Spelling-Bee," an engaging piece of dictionary-made nonsense verse:—

The Spelling Bee was a solace of the suburbs, which were steadily rising into prominence, owing to increased facilities of communication with the centre of London, and the "Suburban Love Song" which Punch printed in May, 1889, marks the emergence of a class of society hitherto neglected in his pages—a class quite well-educated and not vulgar, but essentially bourgeois and sentimental:—

[Pg 268]

THE TIME-HONOURED BRITISH THREAT

Indignant Anglo-Saxon (to Provincial French Innkeeper, who is bowing his thanks for the final settlement of his exorbitant and much-disputed account): "Oh, oui, Mossoo! pour le matière de ça, je paye! Mais juste vous regardez ici, mon ami! et juste-vous-marquez-mes-mots! Je paye—mais je mette le dans la 'Times'!"

For another view of the suburbs one may turn to the drab and depressing realism of George Gissing's novels. Punch himself did not always look at them through rose-coloured spectacles, and a year later, under the heading "Green Pastures or Piccadilly?" (adapted from a book by William Black), emphasizes the drawbacks of a bad train service, exorbitant tradesmen, imperfect drainage, and the desolation of a region[Pg 269] in which, from 9 A.M.. to 6 P.M.., "not a single male human being is visible, all of them being in town."

ABOLITION OF SECOND-CLASS CARRIAGES

"Are there any second-class carriages on this line, Rogers?"

"No, my lord."

"Ah! Then take two first-class tickets and two third."

"Beg pardon, my lord! But is me and Mrs. Parker expected to go third-class?"

"Gracious heavens! No, Rogers! Not for the world! The third-class tickets are for my lady and me!"

At the beginning of this period foreign travel had ceased to be the exclusive privilege of the "classes." The days of cheap trips to "Lovely Lucerne" were yet to come, but Cook was already a power in the land, and as early as the close of 1874 we find Punch frankly expressing his opinion that travel agencies had assisted to "lower middle-class-Englishize the Continent." The value of travel as a corrective of insularity and a means of promoting a better understanding of our foreign neighbours is not recognized. Residence on the Continent[Pg 270] was another matter, and the series of articles, "Elizabeth's residence in a French country house," indicate the possibilities of enlightenment on various points. In particular stress is laid on the fact that there was no spoiling of women in France; in that country they were the real workers. At home the increase of excursion trains only served to excite Punch's wrath against their discomfort and overcrowding and the greed of directors. Yet these drawbacks did not prevent impecunious or economical aristocrats from travelling third class, though their domestics had to go first.

The everlasting servant problem recurs again and again in the 'eighties. Complaints of inadequate wages are seldom heard. In 1876 Punch refers to a letter of Charles Reade on the comparative luxury of the lives of servants contrasted with those of dressmakers. In 1875 Mrs. Crawshay, of Cyfarthfa, had read a paper before the British Association advocating the introduction of "Lady Helps," but Punch was not convinced by her arguments, and turned the suggestion to something like ridicule in his burlesque extension of the idea in a series of advertisements of "Gentlemen Helps." "Jeames" was still a target, but a dwindling target of Punch's satire. When the Morning Post was reduced to a penny in 1881, "Jeames" tells the policeman that on hearing the news "you might have knocked me down with a peacock's feather." As of old, Punch found the real root of flunkeyism in the snobbery of masters and mistresses, and the worst offenders in this period were the parvenus, like Sir Gorgius Midas, who surrounded themselves with flunkeys even at picnics, and exaggerated the ostentation of the class whose manners they crudely aped. The shabbily dressed peer is contrasted with the bediamonded parvenu, and in one of Du Maurier's "Social Problem" pictures the problem is to tell the butler from the lord, the former being a most aristocratic-looking person, while his master—a new creation—is an unmistakable "bounder." Towards the growing self-assertion of female servants Punch was much more tolerant. In 1877, when the problem was already acute, he praises an independent attitude in a servant as being merely business-like, and later on sides with Mary Ann against[Pg 271] despotic mistresses who advertised for parlourmaids and cooks who must not wear fringes. In 1891 Punch published a set of verses inspired by the dismissal, after nine days, of a maid who refused to wear a cap. But the extremists who would make the mistress the "woman" and the servant the "lady" found no favour in his sight; he was no more a supporter of tyrannical servants than of exacting mistresses, and in 1884 our sympathies are distinctly enlisted on the side of the graceful young wife, terrified at the prospect of having to give warning to a formidable cook, and begging the page-boy to stand by during the ordeal.

Jeames: "They tells me as the Mornin' Post is comin' to a penny! When I fust heard of it, constable, you might 'ave knocked me down with a peacock's feather!!"

In 1886 Punch discussed the formation of an Anti-Tipping League, but came to the shrewd conclusion, verified by experience, that it called for too much courage to prove successful.[Pg 272] A year before, in a series of papers on "Public Grievances," he had published a set of letters written from different points of view, showing that mistresses and maids were both at fault. The sketch of "My Housemaid" in 1892 reverts to the old complaints of destructiveness and "followers," and notices, as special traits, a love of funerals and Exeter Hall.

Nine years earlier the Daily Telegraph had published a sensational report of the impending importation of Chinese labour for domestic service. Punch was not inclined to take the report seriously, but it cropped up again in 1882 in the St. James's Gazette:—

Domestic servants will view with well-grounded anxiety a decision arrived at by the Chinese merchants who met in conference a few days ago in London. It was resolved, among other things, to send letters to various Clubs in China, recommending emigration to England. If this recommendation is acted on, we may be on the eve of a great domestic and social revolution. There will, no doubt, be a prejudice at first in some households against the introduction into the family circle of the "heathen Chinee." But when his merits are discovered, it is not impossible he may be warmly welcomed as a valuable acquisition, meeting one of the most pressing requirements of the day.

Punch contented himself with publishing a mock protest from "John Thomas" of Belgravia against this "rediklus" proposal:—

The "St. Jeames's" takes a Lo view of the Domestic's Posishon. As if Work was the one thing Needfull. Whereas the fact is that a Footman in Good Societa is requier'd not only for Use but much more still for horniment. Look at a Chinee's legs. Look at his shoalders. Where's the bredth of the Won and the Carves of the Huther? Compare our ites mine and his. Six foot to sixpennuth of apence. Ow can I and sitch as me think of bein jellus of a Beger like that? If we was we mite petition for a additional Dooty on Forren Men Servants; but we don't want No sich Protection for Native Industry agin Imports.

In the same vein is a picture of a policeman paralysed by the appearance of a male Chinese cook in the area. But a somewhat different note is sounded in the Rip Van Winkle[Pg 273] survey of England in 1932, published in the same number as John Thomas's protest, showing the British workman crowded out of every sort of employment by his laziness and greed and forced to take refuge in the workhouse, while the work of the country is wholly done by industrious aliens.

The scandal of underpaid governesses practically disappears from Punch's pages in this period. The evil was not extinct, but "superfluous women" were beginning to find other occupations, and the growing popularity of girls' schools undoubtedly diminished the demand for governesses.

1846	1886

OUR MEDICAL STUDENTS

In regard to inequalities of remuneration, Punch proved himself a sturdy champion of the medical profession. A lecture by Mr. Richard Davy at the Westminster Hospital in the autumn of 1875 took a decidedly pessimistic view of the professional prospects of medical students:—

Their salaries were simply miserable; hospital physicians and surgeons were, for the most part, unpaid. Poor Law Officers most piteously; surgeons in the services very badly, and young practitioners not at all. For seven years' hard work in the Marylebone[Pg 274] Dispensary he had received one guinea, and a very distinguished London assistant physician had found that his salary equalled that of the man who put the skid on the omnibus wheels at Holborn Hill.

He advised every one to resign at once any and every thought of becoming a medical man unless he possessed three qualifications:—First, independence; second, an aptitude and love for the profession; third, the readiness to pay a heavy premium in this world for his prospects of reward in the next.

Punch expressed righteous indignation at the "generosity" with which an appreciative Government and a grateful Public were accustomed to requite the services of medical men. But the disparities of which Mr. Davy legitimately complained were nothing to those which have been common of late years. In 1920 the demonstrators in science at Oxford were getting just about the same pay as the Oxford road-sweepers. Attempts to disparage the social status of doctors were invariably resented by Punch, and when, in November, 1880, the Bishop of Liverpool, in a speech to medical men, observed "I am not ashamed to say I have a son a doctor," Punch promptly retorted in the following epigram:—

Punch, it will be remembered, had been a caustic critic of medical students of the Bob Sawyer type in the 'forties. But he made his amende handsomely in 1886, when he acknowledged the change in the type and contrasted the serious and frugal modern student with the rowdy, bibulous sawbones of forty years before. Of irregular practitioners Punch had always been a hostile critic, and even the orthodox members of the profession did not always escape a certain amount of genial satire, as when, in 1886, an eminent physician, feeling ill, declines to call in any doctor because "we all go in for[Pg 275] thinking each other such humbugs." In this context it may be permissible to add to what has already been said on the subject of cremation, and Punch's support of Sir Henry Thompson, that in 1874 there appeared the following mock "Grave-digger's Remonstrance" with that eminent surgeon:—

CREMATION

Nephew: "I hope you haven't been waiting long, Uncle?"

Uncle: "All right, my boy. Been reading the paper, and had a pinch—By the by, it's queer flavoured snuff in this jar of yours, Fred."

Nephew (aghast): "Snuff, Uncle!—Jar! Good gracious!—That's not snuff! Those are the ashes of my landlord's first wife!"

Punch, always a strong advocate of comprehension, saw in cremation a means of breaking down the barriers erected[Pg 276] between conformists and nonconformists by exclusive graveyards.

Turning to other callings and the social problems which they presented, we may note that the difficulty experienced by retired officers in finding suitable and remunerative employment had begun to attract attention in 1885. The suggestions made by Lord Napier of Magdala in that year did not meet with a sympathetic response from Punch, who, in a somewhat infelicitous burlesque, foreshadowed the strange results on hotel management of the employment of officers in various menial capacities. The hardships of the underpaid clergy and "ragged curates" are seldom referred to in this period. In 1889 we are introduced to a new type in the moustachioed, eye-glassed, but energetic curate, who observes, "My vicar's away. I preach three times on Sunday, and boss the entire show." Indulgence in slang by bishops, however, did not come in till more than thirty years later.

Social inversions are a frequent theme of comment. The new commercial Crœsus expresses a contemptuous compassion for the "poor devils with fixed incomes." The Highlands are invaded by prosperous suburban tradesmen in kilts, and pen and pencil are enlisted to illustrate the embarrassments of the "New Poor," the altered balance between High and Low Life, and the comparative wealth of the working classes owing to their freedom from taxation and responsibilities. A notable sign of the times was the emergence of the American millionaire art collector. The first great ducal sale at Stowe dates back to 1848, but it was an isolated example and looked upon as almost a portent. In the 'eighties the depression of the landed interest led to further dispersion of treasures, beginning with the Duke of Hamilton's sale in 1882, and in 1889 the activity of American purchasers excited the laments of patriotic Frenchmen, echoed by Punch. There is, however, a good deal to be said on the other side when the American millionaire happens to be as enlightened and generous as the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan and his son. The influence of the "New Rich" in England on art only ministered to Punch's sense of ridicule, happily exercised at the expense of parvenus who[Pg 277] bought books by the hundred yards or purchased faked "ancestral" portraits. These atrocities furnished congenial scope for the comments of Du Maurier's "Grigsby"—one of his most diverting creations—who plays the part of the facetious skeleton at the feasts of "Sir Pompey Bedell" and other self-satisfied plutocrats.

HISTORY OF A FAMILY PORTRAIT

Grigsby: "By the way, that's a new Picture, Sir Pompey—the Knight in Armour, I mean!"

Sir Pompey Bedell: "Er—yes. It came to me in rather a curious way—er—too long to relate at present. It's an Ancestor of mine—a Bedell of Richard the Third's period!"

Grigsby (who made an all but successful offer of three-seventeen-six for said Picture, last week, to old Moss Isaacs, in Wardour Street): "By Jove, he was precious near being an Ancestor of Mine, too!"

(Proceeds to explain, but is interrupted by Sir P.'s proposing to join the Ladies.)

Punch's attitude to the French, it may be noted, had grown much more genial and appreciative after the war of 1870. This mellower temper reflected a general feeling, but it was due in part at least to the influence of Du Maurier, who had French blood in his veins and had studied art in Paris. He did not refrain from chaffing the French "sportman,"[Pg 278] but his satire was delicate and tempered by candour. For example, one need only point to the picture of the Englishman in France expostulating with his French artist friend at the caricatures of Englishwomen in the Parisian Press, and suddenly silenced by the inopportune appearance of a party of Englishwomen exactly bearing out the caricature! Punch had no love of the English tourist on the Continent, and seldom failed to gibbet his inconsiderate angularity. He was no believer in globe-trotting as a means of promoting mutual understanding. But he was increasingly ready to admit that there were things which they managed better abroad, and to acknowledge that we might go very far astray if we formed our estimate of France on "Les Français peints par eux mêmes." Both nations have a way of putting their worst foot foremost, the one through shyness and reserve, the other through an excess of outspokenness, and Du Maurier's racial dualism made him an excellent interpreter of both failings.

Out of many miscellaneous features of this period we may single out the Japanese craze, a form of cheap æstheticism satirized by Punch in the early 'eighties; the popularity of the banjo, honoured by more than one reference in 1886 when it appears among the luggage to be taken to the seaside; the fashion in huge St. Bernard dogs, beloved of Du Maurier, who yet recognized the absurdity of breeding gigantic types in one of his nightmare pictures in 1879; and the plague of recitation, faithfully dealt with in Punch's admirable "Manual for Young Reciters." Christmas cards became fashionable in 1876; and Punch, as a sentimentalist, did not support the agitation against them as a "senseless extravagance" in 1878. The "Missing Word Competition" entered on its devastating career in 1892.

As a symptom of the general speeding-up of life, and the resort to short cuts of all sorts in speech, as well as in action, one may note the appearance of a group of new words, of which "leaderette" and "sermonette" were the most notable until the arrival, many years later, of the "Suffragette." With the arrival of the 'nineties another formidable phrase, fin-de-siècle,[Pg 279] sprang into prominence, and soon achieved a popularity that exasperated Punch beyond the bounds of endurance:—

WANTED, A WORD-SLAYER

WHAT OUR ARTIST (THE INTENSELY PATRIOTIC ONE) HAS TO PUT UP WITH!

Just as he is pointing out to Monsieur Anatole Duclos, the Parisian journalist, how infinitely the English type of female beauty (especially amongst our Aristocracy) transcends that of France, or any other nation—who should come up from the beach but Lady Lucretia Longstaff and her five unmarried daughters!

—"And as for those idiotic old French caricatures of les Anglaises, with long gaunt faces and long protruding teeth and long flat feet—why, good heavens! my dear Duclos, the type doesn't even exist!"

Punch was much preoccupied with "modernity" and its numerous manifestations in these years, and his preoccupation took the form of a comprehensive series of "Modern Types," to which reference has already been made. Some of them will appear anything but modern to the Georgian reader, and, indeed, are not so much new as recurrent types—for example,[Pg 280] the precocious undergraduate who gambles, drinks, fails in his schools, emigrates and dies miserably. The "Young Guardsman" is an eminently conventional portrait of a type which disappeared in the Great War, and is almost a libel on a Brigade whose social prestige is of infinitely less importance than its magnificent record of heroic achievement. The "Average Undergraduate" is in the main a handsome tribute to the public school system. He is not an Admirable Crichton, a Blue or a Scholar, but a decent fellow, truthful and ingenuous, who will always be a "useful member of the community." The tone of the whole series, however, is very far from ministering to national complacency. The bitterest of all these portraits is that of "The Adulated Clergyman," an effeminate, self-indulgent, insincere and unwholesome impostor, at all points a base variant of the type satirized in Thackeray's fashionable preacher, Charles Honeyman.

Punch's handling of social pests and evils throughout this period is decidedly pessimistic. The frank verses on divorce by consent—or rather collusion—in 1886 are a legitimate criticism enough. But at times he quite overshoots the mark, as, for example, in the acrimonious and grotesque tirade against the House of Lords, published in December, 1883, under the heading of "The Speaker: A Handbook to Ready-made Oratory." After giving a few notes on the personal appearance of some "titled types," the writer continues:—

There is a motto which every Peer is supposed to adopt as a rule of life—"noblesse oblige." It is presumed that every bearer of a hereditary title, carrying with it a right to receive numberless Blue Books published at the expense of the Public, is willing, in virtue of his position, to please everyone. Now it gratifies the community at large to hear a Peer talking in public, and, as some Peers cannot talk in public, it may be as well to give the specimen of the sort of speech which would cause unlimited satisfaction in all quarters but the highest. Of course, the imaginary speaker is a myth—a foolish but frank Lord, with the courage of his opinions. Should such a person, however, be found, there would be no doubt about his popularity—again, in certain circles. It must be remembered that, as the speaker would be a Peer addressing Commoners, all his Lordship's remarks would be received with the deepest approval.

[Pg 281]

FLOWERS OF MODERN SPEECH AND SENTIMENT

Our Gallant Colonel: "And where and how have you spent the Summer, Miss Golightly?"

Miss Golightly: "Oh, I sat in a punt with my favourite man—a quite too delicious man!"

Noble Orator (rising at the right of the Chairman). Gentlemen—(enthusiastic applause)—I am sure I must thank you for the honour you have conferred upon me. ("No, no!") Yes, it is an honour, because I believe I am verily the most uneducated dolt in all this brilliant assembly. (Cheers.) I am, indeed: and, although a great many of my peers—perhaps the majority—are highly respectable, still in my class you will discover many who resemble me in nearly every particular. (Applause.) As a lad I refused to learn anything, and could scarcely spell my name—certainly it was a long one—at fifteen. (Great cheering.) I was a dunce at school, and a cad at the University. (Frantic enthusiasm.) It is my great pride to remember that at this latter seat of learning I had the honour to[Pg 282] burn half the College library, and to screw up the door to my tutor's apartments. (Roars of laughter.) But from this you must not imagine that I am fond of squandering. On the contrary, I audit my own butcher's book, and superintend the store-cupboard of my Lady's housekeeper. (Cheers.) I never go by a cab when I can take an omnibus, and if asked for a shilling by a genuinely starving beggar, would, after mature consideration, advance him a halfpenny on account, chargeable on approved security. (Cheers.) And yet I am very rich, enormously rich. (Renewed applause.) Many of the slums of the greatest city in the world belong to me. (Cheers.) And although slums are not pretty to look at or live in, they are good ones to pay. (Shouts of enthusiasm.) From this slight confession you may imagine that I am ignorant, vicious, mean, and grasping. (Prolonged cheering.) Well, I am all these, and more, for I am an ass into the bargain. (Thunders of applause.) Besides this, I have no birth to boast of. A hundred years ago or so, my great-grandfather swept a crossing, and his wife dealt in hare-and rabbit-skins. But what matter the past when we have the present before us! I am crassly ignorant and intolerably offensive, but I am a Lord. (Enormous enthusiasm.) And, as a Lord, I can give you what laws I please—("You can; you can!")—or never go near the House of Lords from one year's end to another. I generally adopt the latter course, except when the interest of my own class, or the gratification of a fad, cause me to perform my highly responsible duties. On these occasions, however, I take care that I represent none but myself. (A storm of applause.) Under these circumstances, as I am bored out of my life, and have just enough sense to see that I am a nuisance to everyone, inclusive of myself, I am sure you are glad that you are not me. "Noblesse oblige," I want to console you! (The noble speaker here resumed his seat amidst the wildest enthusiasm.)

Such a speech as the above would, no doubt, reconcile many listeners to cease to envy the Peerage, the more especially if they happened to be either Baronets of James the First's creation or members of the oldest (not the mushroom) county families.

The speaker was "imaginary," though the burning down half a College library was a true bill, and the ringleader in this exploit afterwards attained high rank as a politician. But these composite portraits are seldom satisfactory, and in this instance the resultant monstrosity ceases to be representative. The House of Lords was not exclusively composed of black sheep at any time, and on the whole more dangerous scoundrels[Pg 283] have made their way into the elected House. But here, as so often happens, Punch provides the antidote to his own bane. In 1886, under the heading "A Radical Snob," he reprints what Thackeray wrote in his own pages just forty years earlier:—

"Perhaps, after all, there's no better friend to Conservatism than your outrageous Radical Snob. When a man preaches to you that all Noblemen are tyrants, that all Clergymen are hypocrites or liars, that all Capitalists are scoundrels, banded together in an infamous conspiracy to deprive the people of their rights, he creates a wholesome revulsion of feeling in favour of the abused parties, and a sense of fair play leads the generous heart to take a side with the object of unjust oppression.

"The frantic dwarf ... becomes a most wicked and dangerous Snob when he gets the ear of people more ignorant than himself, inflames them with lies, and misleads them into ruin."

Yet, when all allowance has been made for inconsistency and extravagance, we cannot deny that a strongly marked vein of discontent and dissatisfaction—often too well-grounded—with the "scheme of things in general" runs through the pages of Punch throughout these years, culminating in a dismal explosion of pessimism in March, 1884, over the decadence, the degeneracy and the vulgarity of the age:—

THE "ZEIT-GEIST"

What a list it is! The quest of notoriety, blatant advertisement, party rancour and sectarian strife, forensic greed, mummer-worship, incompetent and ungenerous criticism, fleshly poetry, the arrogance of science, "Corybantic Christianity," tarnished womanhood, the decay of manly fibre, prying journalism, amateurism in letters, windy Agnosticism, with vulgarity enthroned as high priestess of the age! Modern Juvenals, when they are Jeremiahs into the bargain, are not exhilarating companions. Here Punch saw life in England neither steadily nor whole, and made the mistake, not surprising in a Londoner, of confounding the extravagances, the eccentricities and the vices of London coteries and cliques, and, above all, of her idle rich, with the tone and temper of the nation at large. "Smart" London Society did not represent England or even London. But Punch spoke with many voices, and in the "Voces Populi," with which, towards the end of this period, Mr. Anstey had begun to refresh and rejoice the hearts of his readers, you will find an agreeable corrective of the unqualified pessimism of "Marius." The "people" whose "voices" are recorded were often ridiculous, vulgar and semi-educated, but they were not corrupt or degenerate. Twenty years later the extravagances castigated by "Marius" were even more pronounced, but were confined to the same limited though highly advertised circles. Yet many of those who seemed most wedded to self-indulgence were capable of a noble regeneration in the hour of their country's need. And outside these circles there was, in 1884, as at a later date, a great if unobtrusive throng of men and women who stood in the authentic line of the heroes and heroines of the past, only waiting for an opportunity to prove themselves the inheritors of their spirit.

[Pg 287]

RECREATION, SPORT, AND PASTIME

The second half of the nineteenth century was not only notable for the organization of Labour. It was also the age of the organization of Recreation, the age of Exhibitions. The Exhibition of 1851 was a serious affair in which entertainment was subordinated to the demands of Commerce, Industry and Science. The series of Exhibitions which marked the decade of the 'eighties, though their names and their avowed aims were serious, practical or scientific, were run with an ever increasing tendency to emphasize the spectacular element, to cater for the amusement and entertainment (in all senses) of the public.

Punch summarized this tendency happily enough in the phrase that he applied to the possibilities of the Imperial Institute—"Commerce v. Cremorne." He had already deplored the decline of institutions, such as the Crystal Palace, which beginning with high educational aims, had come to rest their popular appeal on dangerous acrobatics and freak performances. He was even more outspoken in his comments on the degeneracy of the Aquarium at Westminster in 1879 and 1880.

References to "Zazel," the acrobat who was nightly shot from a cannon, and to Zazel's successor, "Zæo," abound in protests not only against the enterprising manager, and the cynical indifference of the Home Secretary, but above all against the public who went simply because of the risk, the chance of seeing accidents. "Zazel's" performance, as a matter of fact, was not as dangerous as it appeared; it proved a theme of fruitful burlesque on the part of Nellie Farren at the Gaiety Theatre; and when it was rumoured that Zazel was going to marry an Archdeacon, Punch did not refrain from a ribald allusion to her passing "out of the mouth of a Canon into the arms of an Archdeacon." At the same[Pg 288] time he was equally critical of the ostentatiously labelled "Entertainments for the People" organized as a sort of compromise between High Art, the Penny Reading and the Variety Stage. The efforts of the Kyrle Society to "bring Beauty home to the working-classes" left him cold or facetiously intolerant of patronizing preciosity. So, too, the performances at the Victoria Coffee Music-Hall in 1881 are damned with less than faint praise in a criticism put into the mouth of one of the class they were intended to reach, on the grounds that they were not only teetotal, but third-rate music-hall, and dull at that. The whole thing was spoiled by an atmosphere of conscious edification and of condescending patronage.

Punch's attitude to the series of annual exhibitions which began with the "Fisheries" in 1883, underwent many phases. It began in hope and mild praise, but ended in disillusion, as the side-shows, al fresco entertainments, bands and illuminations, and the everlasting "Welcome Club," became the stereotyped and dominating attractions of each successive show. Punch wanted the site of the Fisheries made into a permanent Public Garden with a shilling gate money. But while he applauded the good intention of the promoters, he represented the West End fishmonger as "none the worse for it": the price of fish had not come down as it was thought it would.

The "Healtheries" and "Inventories" followed in 1884 and 1885, and Punch's verdict was that "The Fisheries and the Healtheries were very much the same, especially the Inventories." The Colonial and Indian Exhibition (the "Colinderies" as Punch christened it) in 1886 prompts the usual mock-serious account of the opening ceremony. Some distrust was excited by the suggestion of the Prince of Wales that the Exhibition should be given a permanent existence as an Imperial Institute, to be founded as a Jubilee Memorial, and Punch gave his blessing to a proposal which was carried into effect. The subsequent history of the Imperial Institute affords an interesting commentary on the fear, expressed by Punch in 1888, that it would degenerate into another popular Exhibition, with bands, side-shows, etc. He regarded it at the moment as "a big-sounding name, signifying nothing; to conjure[Pg 289] with but nothing more"; and some of the names of the organizing committee filled him with astonishment at the ineptitude of their choice.

Buffalo Bill's "Wild West" Show in West Kensington in 1887 struck a somewhat new note. Punch was impressed by the buck-jumping, but the rest smelt too much of footlights and sawdust, and he asks, "Why should Noble Savages be always beaten by the Cowboys?" Still "Buffalo Bill" was a picturesque figure, with a not undistinguished record of active service; the Queen's visit is appropriately described in the "Hiawatha" metre, and Du Maurier, in a spirited fantasy, hints that the introduction of a team of buck-jumping ponies would brighten the monotonous decorum of the meets of the Four-in-Hand Club.

The absurdities of the annual Exhibitions did not escape Punch in their earlier days. At the "Healtheries" he describes a representation of a street in Old London, in which there was a girl in Tudor costume selling photographs! The strange miscellaneous international exhibitions which followed the first four were rich in material for ridicule. A prominent attraction at the Anglo-Danish Exhibition of 1888 was a "grotto of Mystery," consisting chiefly of skeletons. At the Italian Exhibition which followed, the great feature was the "Triumph of Titus," a representation of a gladiatorial contest, and chariot races by "wild omnibus horses." The sons of Belial, as represented by Master Freddy, who was disappointed because "they didn't have lions and—and real martyrs," were dissatisfied, but Mr. Anstey in his "Voces Populi" had a glorious time.

Ridicule predominates in the notice of the Spanish Exhibition in 1889, and in the same year Punch devoted a special number to the Paris Exhibition, containing the impressions of his staff, and bristling with references to the Eiffel Tower, Paulus, the comic singer, and other delights. In 1889 also Barnum returned, "the greatest Showman," in Punch's opinion, "of this or any other age"; and the autobiographic speech which he made on the occasion of the opening of his show at Olympia prompted Punch to revive old memories:—

[Pg 290]

Forty-five years ago Albert Smith wrote in Bentley's Miscellany a paper entitled "A Go-a-head Day with Barnum." The article wound up by saying: "As we expressed our fatigue at supper, Barnum said, 'Well, I don't know what you call work in England; but if you don't make thirty hours out of the twenty-four in Merekey, I don't know where you'd be at the year's end. If a man can't beat himself in running, he'll never go ahead; and if he don't go ahead, he's done.'" The Great Barnum is apparently as active in 1889 as he was in 1844. He is as enthusiastic on the wrong side of eighty as he was on the right side of forty. If he has not beaten himself in running, he has allowed no one to beat him. He has caught most people, but the old bird himself has never yet been caught. If you look in just now at Olympia, you will find him up to time and smiling, and going ahead more than ever.

The last and one of the very best of the Exhibitions in this period that I have to record was held at Chelsea in 1891. Punch renders justice to the Royal Naval Exhibition in light-hearted style, but "Robert, the City Waiter," is righteously indignant that none but German waiters were employed.

The increasing predominance of pastime throughout this period is faithfully illustrated in the pages of Punch. It is true that he never was much of a racing man, though always ready to find parallels in the classic events for political situations, and, as we have noted elsewhere, anxious to safeguard the privileges of the equestrian. But hunting and fishing cuts are far less frequent than in the days of Leech and Mr. Briggs, and in 1881 we find Punch lamenting the degeneracy of modern sports-big battues, champagne luncheons on the moors, the lavish refreshment of the shooters and the facile butchery of tame birds.

In 1882 we meet a series of sporting illustrations from the victims' point of view—e.g., a coursing match as envisaged by the hare with a crowd of yelling "sportsmen" looking on. Punch had respected and admired the pugilists of the old school, but here, again, he found signs of decadence. In 1890 Slavin, an Australian, fought Jem Smith in France, and the crowd intervened and ill-treated the former, who won. Punch treats the affair in a neo-Virgilian episode (somewhat in the style of his lay on the Sayers-Heenan contest), which takes[Pg 291] the form of a dialogue between "Punchius" and "Sayerius" in the Elysian Fields; and when Punch, after narrating the fight, asks the shade of Sayers what he thought of it, Sayers thinks the sooner the P.R. is put down the better. The craze for contests for futile endurance met with no encouragement from Punch. When swimming for women was advocated in the Medical Press and Circular in 1878, Punch printed a letter on "Maids and Mermaids" in the style and over the signature of "William Cobbett" vigorously recommending this exercise. But a year or so later, when Miss Beckwith swam for a hundred hours in a tank, Punch registered a vehement protest against these "agony-point Amusements." The spectacle of a girl of eighteen floundering in a tank for a hundred hours at a stretch was to him as objectless as it was penitential, as ungraceful as it was degrading. The exploits of Gale, the pedestrian, at Lillie Bridge in 1880 only disgusted Punch, who marvelled at the folly of the promoters of a "stupid, cruel, degrading piece of tomfoolery" in sending him tickets to witness it. "I knew," he says, "that were a horse treated as this man consented to be treated, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would interfere. But there's no Royal Society and no power in the world that can prevent a man making an ass of himself if he chooses to do so." Even in the noble sport of mountaineering Punch found symptoms of a vainglorious love of self-advertisement. His tribute to Mr. Whymper in 1880 is decidedly two-edged. Under title of "Excelsior, Excelsissimus" Punch salutes his achievements with a strong undercurrent of satire, suggesting, e.g., that he should "change his name from Whymper to Crow and take for his crest a Chanticleer struttant, chantant on a mountain reduced to a molehill." Punch winds up on the same disparaging note;—

If ever a Gentleman was entitled to advertise himself as "in the perpetual Snow line," Whymper is the man, a self with no Company. We propose that the Empire he has so proudly assisted over the old-established inaccessibilities of the world should be recognized as a higher form of Imperialism—Whymperialism.

The overdoing of athletics at schools is a favourite topic[Pg 292] in these years, but on the whole Punch acquiesced in the new and formidable organization of pastimes of all sorts that went on in the 'seventies and 'eighties. He saw nothing but wholesome rivalry in contests with the Dominions. The early visits of the Australian cricket teams are dealt with at great length. In 1878, the year of Spofforth's "demoniacal" exploits, we read how,

Criticism was not wanting, but it was not directed against the visitors. At the close of the season Punch gives wholesome advice to English cricketers to repair their bad taste, bad management and bad play, and the advice is not without its point in 1921. Punch had already adapted Byron for his purpose; now he turned to Campbell:—

In the valedictory lines a week later Punch wishes the Australians godspeed on their homeward journey, with special mention of Spofforth, Gregory, Bannerman, Blackham and Boyle. They returned in 1880, and the match at the Oval inspired the usual Lion and Kangaroo cut. W. G. Grace made 152 and Murdoch 153, but England won. Punch celebrates the heroic contest in the manner of Macaulay. "W. G." was now one of Punch's special heroes. He had even in 1878 bracketed him with Mr. Gladstone in "The Two W. G.'s" (based on "The Two Obadiahs," a popular song of the hour),[Pg 293] and in July, 1880, the verses on "Grace: an Ode à la mode," are a good picture of W. G. in his large mastery of the grand style:—

"THE LEVIATHAN BAT"

Or Many-Centuried Marvel of the Modern (Cricket) World, in his high-soaring, top-scoring, Summer-day Flight. (Dr. William Gilbert Grace.)

As Champion him the whole World hails,

Lords! How he smites and thumps!

It takes a week to reach the Bails

When he's before the Stumps.

"Chevy Chase" (revised).

CRICKETANA: YOUNG LADIES v. BOYS

Fair Batter (ætat. 18): "Now, just look here, Algy Jones—none of your Patronage! You dare to Bowl to me with your Left Hand again, and I'll Box your Ears!"

In 1888 when Grace made 215 runs at Brighton Punch saluted him as "my black-bearded, cricketing Titan," and in 1889 he figures in a fancy portrait as "The Leviathan Bat" with scores on his wings. From 1880 onwards notices of[Pg 294] matches abound; Eton and Harrow, and the Canterbury Week in 1881, and in 1882 Southey is laid under contribution to celebrate the "famous victory" of Australia at the Oval with Spofforth as hero of the occasion. Surrey v. Notts in 1887 inspires a column of verses from an enthusiastic Surreyite with due praise of W. W. Read, K. J. Key and the exhilarating and intrepid George Lohmann. But even in these years Punch had his moments of misgiving, his cold as well as his hot fits. The lines professing to bewail the feminine invasion of man's last stronghold in pastime—cricket—in 1884, are facetious, or semi-ironical. Women had competed in croquet, roller-skating and lawn tennis, and man had successively yielded these various fields of pastime, hoping to retain the mastery of the cricket field, now threatened. But the verses on "Lord's" in the same year contain a serious and even ponderous indictment of the fetish-worship of athleticism, "the Muscle-Cultus forced into a fever," with a lurid portrait of the "adipose Old Blue," and the decline of the popular compiler of centuries into that "unvirile[Pg 295] vaurien a Town-dangler" with no profession, no intellectual resources, no interests save his own past. Yet in the very next year Punch glorified Lord's in an illustration of the Pavilion crowded with portraits of cricketing celebrities—"W. G.," I. D. Walker, A. J. Webbe, Lord Harris, A. P. Lucas, C. J. Thornton, Alfred Lyttelton, A. G. Steel, C. T. Studd, etc. Whether this was intended as an amende or not, I cannot say, but it was certainly a considerable advertisement.

LAWN TENNIS UNDER DIFFICULTIES—"PLAY?"

If space is limited, there is no reason why one shouldn't play with one's next-door neighbours, over the garden wall. (One needn't visit them, you know.)

Passing on to 1892, we find that Punch was petrified in that year by the exploits of "Ranji," who scored eleven centuries in that season. His laudatory ode, however, is largely taken up with efforts to wrestle with the spelling and pronunciation of the hero's name, for the now familiar abbreviation had not been generally adopted.

Cricket was still the national pastime par excellence, but new rivals were already creeping up. Lawn tennis, even in 1878, had ceased to be the monopoly of fashionable circles;[Pg 296] it was already invading the suburbs. In 1885 Punch sang, after Tennyson,

Two years later Du Maurier satirized the social importance attached to the stars of the "Lawn-Tennis world." Football was not yet regarded, by Punch at any rate, as a serious competitor. Professionalism was as yet in its infancy. Punch greeted the Maori team which visited England in 1888, and complimented them on their successes over Surrey and Kent:—

The allusion to rough play is not an isolated mention; John Bull is shown protesting in the same month (October, 1888) against "this brutal sort of thing," in a cut in which the players are arrayed in knee-breeches and long stockings; and a year later two football players, after losing the match, are shown carrying off the referee in a bag. Lacrosse was already acclimatized in England in the early 'eighties, and the visit of the Toronto Club in 1888 gave impetus to a fine game which has never seriously threatened the popularity of cricket and football.

The American baseball team who came over in the spring[Pg 297] of 1889 not only failed to impress Punch, they excited him to hostile and unsympathetic comment on a game which he didn't understand and didn't want to. Still, he had the grace to admit that he was a prejudiced spectator; also that the players were as agile as cats and threw like catapults. He had not the vision to foresee a time when "baseball results" would be a daily feature of the tape and an Exalted Personage would be credited with the confession that he thought it was a better game to watch than cricket, adding, however, "for goodness' sake, don't say that I said so, or there might be a Revolution."

"NOUVELLES COUCHES SOCIALES!"

"I say, Uncle, that was Young Baldock that went by—Wilmington Baldock, you know——!"

"Who the dickens is he?"

"What! Haven't you heard of him? Hang it! He's making himself a very first-rate position in the Lawn-Tennis world, I can tell you!"

Pastime was not only being organized, systematized, commercialized. It was beginning to be the subject of serious literary and scientific study. The Badminton Library series[Pg 298] dates from 1885, when the first three volumes were published. Punch made excellent fun of the Duke of Beaufort's preface, repeated in each volume, with its glowing account of the Prince of Wales's accomplishments as a sportsman, and of the literary lapses of the Duke and his editors. The volume on Golf, by Horace Hutchinson, with contributions by Mr. Balfour and Andrew Lang, certainly did not lay itself open to this rebuke. It was a delightful tribute to the charm of a pastime which had invaded England seriously in the 'eighties. Golf had been played sporadically in the south ever since the days of James I. But until the 'eighties, the golfer was looked upon as a species of lunatic. Punch's first notable acknowledgment of the fascinations of the Royal and Ancient Game dates from 1885, when Du Maurier in "The Golf Stream" shows the stream of all ages and both sexes that "flows along the Eastern Coast of Scotland during the summer and autumn."

THE GOLF STREAM

Flows along the Eastern Coast of Scotland during the summer and autumn.

(Vide Report of British Association—Section V.)

The jealousy of the votaries of other pastimes is made vocal in Keene's lawn-tennis player, who sees no fun in a game which consists in "knockin' a ball into a bush and then 'untin' about[Pg 299] for it." Even in 1890 Du Maurier represents the newcomer in an invidious light when he makes a weedy little man say to an Amazonian lady lawn-tennis player that "golf is the only game for men nowadays. Lawn tennis is only for girls." Punch prophesied more truly in the verses, "Golf Victor!" at the close of the same year. There it is the ladies who say, "Golf is the game for the girls":—

THE PILLION-BICYCLE

In 1892 the confessions of the "Duffer" at Golf after forty years' experience are interesting from the classified gradations of competence:—

[Pg 300]

The Learned have divided golf into several categories. There is Professional golf, the best Amateur golf, enthusiasts' golf, golf, Beginners' golf, Ladies' golf, Infant golf, Parlour golf, the golf of Scotch Professors. But the true Duffer's Golf is far, far below that. The born Duffer is incurable. No amount of odds will put him on the level of even Scotch Professors.

To-day these categories need revising; the ladies have gone up two or three classes; amateurs have not for the first time held their own with the best professionals, and even the infants are becoming formidable.

Mentions of cycling in the 'eighties are mainly confined to the tricycle. There is a strange picture of a kind of tricycle for four in 1882. Du Maurier's Pillion-Bicycle is a romantic anticipation of the "Flapper-rack" of a later age. The four chapters on "Cyclomania" in 1885, including an account of a "spin" to Brighton ending in a smash, are largely burlesque, but indicate that, though clubs were multiplying, the cult had not yet outgrown its fashionable phase, or established itself on a democratic basis.

Signs of advancing popularity, however, are manifest in 1887, when the old Scotswoman in Keene's picture observes: "Ah dinna ken what's come ower the Kirk. Ah canna bide to see our Minister spankin' aboot on yon cyclopaedy!" The publication of a new edition of Mr. Sturmey's Handbook of Bicycling in the same year inspires a set of verses reviewing the immense progress made since the days of the old "bone-shaker," the expansion of the industry at Coventry, and the exploits on the racing track of Keen and other professionals. The safety bicycle associated with the name of J. K. Starley dates from 1885, but it was not until the invention of the pneumatic tyre by Dunlop in 1888 that what had been a pastime was revolutionized and became an universal mode of locomotion. Punch celebrates the coming of the "Safety" in October, 1890, in "Breaking a record on the Wheel" (after Tennyson's "Break, break"), but his admiration of the exploits of Messrs. Mecredy and Osmond is tempered by regret for the heroes of the "ordinary"—Keen and the Hon. Ion Keith Falconer. Punch was not aware that he was in the presence of an epoch-making invention, the most wide-reaching[Pg 302] in its influence in our time between the railway engine and the coming of the motor. The verses make no mention of the pneumatic tyre; the present writer saw a bicycle race in 1891 at Eastbourne at which all the competitors save one rode on the high model, and he proved the winner.

[Pg 301]

PAST AND PRESENT

In The Sixties.	In The Seventies.
In The Eighties.	In The Nineties.

A SLIGHT MISUNDERSTANDING

"Do you evah Wink, Miss Evangeline?"

"Do I ever what, Mr. Smythe?"

"Wink?"

"What do you mean, Sir?"

"Well, skate, if you pwefer the expwession!"

In contrast with the ever-increasing speeding-up of life one may note Punch's tribute in 1889 to the charms of caravanning; its inevitable slowness being compensated by freedom from hotel bandits and extortionate lodging-house keepers.

Rifle-shooting is a serious pursuit rather than a pastime or sport, but may claim a word of notice in this survey. The National Rifle Association came of age in 1881, and Punch celebrated the event in a cartoon in which he toasts a handsome young rifleman in a Jeroboam of Perrier-Jouet, 1859, and in verses congratulating the comrades of the rifle on their long survival and triumph over official snubbing.

[Pg 303]

Lastly I may note that in the Jubilee number of Punch in 1891 the popular or rather fashionable recreations in the 'sixties, 'seventies, 'eighties and 'nineties are shown in four illustrations of croquet, roller-skating, lawn tennis and golf. Of these roller-skating has temporarily disappeared. In the 'seventies "Rinkomania" was a short-lived but acute malady. It led to a good many accidents and much speculation, mostly disastrous. Much money was made and more lost by the financiers who embarked on rink-building. At the end of 1875 Punch notes a report that the Albert Hall was to be converted into a Grand Skating Rink. At the moment the rumour was by no means incredible; and the scenes of social and political revelry enacted in that building of recent years must have often disturbed the manes of its eponymous hero.

Lawn tennis and golf have become democratic, international and spectacular pastimes; while croquet continues to hold its own in a select, scientific and secluded circle of votaries.

[Pg 304]

FASHION IN DRESS

Men's dress had already ceased to be decorative long before the 'seventies were in their mid career. There had been spasmodic attempts to introduce a note of colour and picturesqueness into male attire, and a fresh effort was made by the apostles of the æsthetic movement, but the average man of fashion took no heed of these eccentricities. His aim was to be unobtrusively well dressed, though in the domain of pastime one may note an increasing addiction to highly coloured hose and the multiplication of club colours and ribbons.

As a chronicler and illustrator of the vagaries of Mode, Punch continues to pay far more attention to the costume of women than of men. But here also one notes a change—a tendency which warrants the labelling of this period as the Age of Approximation, in which in regard both to material and design women were more and more inclined to take a leaf from the fashion books of their brothers. The increasing addiction of girls to athletic pastimes was no doubt largely responsible for a change which could not be better exemplified than in Du Maurier's picture in 1877 of an old gentleman who mistakes the Dean's three daughters for young men and is gravely corrected by the verger. The mistake was venial, for the young amazons in their ulsters and hard hats presented a decidedly masculine appearance. In a word, they were "tailor-made"—a word of vast and epoch-making significance.

References to this approximation recur throughout the 'eighties. In 1880 Sambourne, taking for his text an article in the Journal des Modes, gives us a design of evening dress entitled, "Man or Woman—a Toss Up," and in the same year Du Maurier, in a picture of the "Ne Plus Ulster," represents a customer expostulating with the shop-woman, "But it makes one look so like a man," only to be told, "That's just the beauty[Pg 305] of it, Miss." Within limits Punch applauded the change. When short dresses for dances were said to be coming in, in the same year, he dilates in verse on the salutary innovation. To the year 1881 belongs the foundation of the "Rational Dress Society." "Bloomerism," as I pointed out in an earlier volume, never appealed to Mayfair. But the Rational Dress Society claimed a live Viscountess—Lady Harberton—as its President, and recommended the adoption of a "dual garmenture" or "divided skirt" as its cardinal tenet. Punch declared that the "divided skirt" was simply the old Bloomer costume slightly disguised, and saw in the movement only a fresh proof of woman's conscious inferiority:—

LEVELLING TENDENCY OF MODERN DRESS

Old Gentleman (shocked beyond description) to Verger: "Don't you think those youths had better be told to take their hats off?"

Verger: "Take their 'ats off! Bless you, Sir, those are the Dean's young ladies!"

[Pg 306]

The Rational Dress reformers were tremendously in earnest, but they entirely failed to convert the fashionables, and Punch, who refused to take them seriously, ridiculed the movement in a burlesque cut of "United Trousers v. Divided Skirts," in which retaliation effects a reductio ad absurdum. An exhibition of Rational Dress was held in Prince's Hall in the summer of 1883, but Punch remained unconvinced, and even obscurantist in his comments:—

[Pg 307]

Strong-minded women, in Punch's view, only emphasized their angularity by the masculinity of their attire—witness his "Aunt Jemima," an uncompromising Blue Ribbonite, in an ulster and hard felt hat, explaining to a French cab-driver that the extra half-franc is a "pour-manger" and not a "pour-boire." The allusion to corsets in the lines quoted above may be supplemented by a paragraph which appeared early in 1891 showing that the "rationalizing" of dress had spread to the Dominions. At Sydenham, Ontario, corsets had been declared, in a memorable phrase, to be "incompatible with Christianity." To the end of this period Punch discourages the extremes of the "Rational" school. His wittiest criticism is the paradoxical remark put in the mouth of one girl who disapproves of the mannish costume of a friend in a covert coat with a man's hat: "It makes you look like a Young Man, you know, and that's so effeminate!" The small deer-stalking cap worn by the lady, salmon fishing with a formidable gillie, in 1885, is identical with that worn by the male sportsman. The ulsters and "golf-capes," worn by women when travelling, and the narrow-brimmed felt hats shown in 1891, are practically identical for men and women; and in 1892 Punch laments (after Herrick) the introduction of the loose "sack" coat, in imitation of the masculine model:—

Later on in the same poem his clothes philosophy is summed up in six lines:—

In the last three lines we find the whole essence and spirit of Du Maurier's method. He proved to demonstration again and again that women could dress in the fashion of the moment and be delightful to look at, so long as they were the judicious interpreters and not the Slaves of Mode. If he saw no beauty in the designs of the "Rationalists," and habitually ridiculed the sprawling attitudes, the shapeless garments, and unwholesome languor of the female "æsthetes," he did not spare the monstrosities and barbarities of the ultra-fashionables. The age of lateral expansion had given place to a craze for compression, to the "eel-skin" model. Skirts were so tight in 1875 that Du Maurier suggests that upholsterers should devise a special sort of chair suited to the peculiar exigencies of ladies who can neither stoop nor sit down. Three years later a lady[Pg 310] and a hussar officer at a dance are depicted as both equally unable to depart from a rigidly perpendicular attitude. Tight lacing was again in fashion but met with no approval from Punch. In 1877 Du Maurier depicts a lady resolutely determined to lace down to the waist measurement of a rival, and Punch quotes with approval Miss Frances P. Cobbe's indictment of the causes which led to the "Little Health of Women." Besides tight lacing the list includes the neglect of exercise, the discouragement of appetite, sentimental brooding over disappointments, the lack of healthy occupation for mind and body, false hair, bonnets that don't protect the head, heavy dragging skirts, high heels and "pull-backs"—a tolerably comprehensive catalogue. Punch renews his attack on tightly-laced pinched-in figures in his Horatian ode to "A Modern Pyrrha" in 1880, and in 1889 Jones, after offering the wasp-waisted Miss Vane tea and strawberries at a garden party, remarks to himself: "By Jove! she takes 'em—she's going to swallow 'em! But where she'll put 'em—goodness knows!"

A MODERN WAIST

Jones (to himself, as he offers Miss Vane a cup of tea and some strawberries): "By Jove! She takes 'em—she's going to swallow 'em! But where she'll put 'em—goodness knows!"

[Pg 308]

TO UPHOLSTERERS, etc.

Now that fashionable skirts are worn so tight that the fair wearers thereof can neither stoop nor sit down, it might be worth somebody's while to devise a chair suited to the peculiar exigencies of the positions.

FASHIONABLE EMULATION

Lady (speaking with difficulty): "What have you made it round the waist, Mrs. Price?"

Dressmaker: "Twenty-one inches, ma'am. You couldn't breathe with less!"

Lady: "What's Lady Jemima Jones's waist?"

Dressmaker: "Nineteen-and-a-half just now, ma'am. But her Ladyship's a head shorter than you are, and she's got ever so much thinner since her illness last autumn?"

Lady: "Then make it nineteen, Mrs. Price, and I'll engage to get into it!"

[Pg 309]

The crusade against wearing birds' wings is an old story. The Baroness Burdett-Coutts' efforts in 1875—cordially supported by Punch—were prompted by the cruel practice of obtaining rare feathers by plucking birds when alive. The Baroness had approached Mme. Louise, who was sympathetic but pointed out that there was an increasing demand for this kind of decoration. Punch repeatedly protests against the practice, and in 1889, when flowers were once more in fashion as hat trimmings, expressed his delight at a change which checked wholesale bird slaughter:—

His delight, however, was short-lived, and in 1892 he was again moved to denounce the "Modish Moloch of the Air," and pillory, under the title of "A Bird of Prey," the woman of fashion who decked herself out in feathers.

This was the age of the fringe, another of Punch's pet[Pg 311] aversions, whether worn by 'Arriet or the maidens and matrons of Mayfair. Du Maurier lent his aid in the triple cut headed "Alas!" representing "Pretty Grandmamma Robinson" as she was in 1851, as she is now in 1880, in a tight dress cut low in front with a monstrous frizzed fringe, and finally as she might and should be—altogether a most instructive sermon on the art of growing old gracefully and the reverse.

A VIKING ON MODERN FASHION

"What does t'lass want wi' yon Boostle for? It aren't big enough to Smoggle things, and she can't Steer herself wi' it!"

It is interesting to note, by way of contrast, that caps were still worn in the house by quite young married women. The affectation of perennial youth was not universal in 1880. The popularity and drawbacks of the jersey are attested in the same year, when we are shown the fearful struggles of Jones in his efforts to help his lovely wife to divest herself of this garment. In 1881 reference is made to the agitation against a revival of the crinoline. The successful stand made against the "crinolette" by the Princess of Wales in 1883 is alluded to elsewhere. Punch declares that the very large fans used at this time were almost as great a nuisance in the stalls as crinoline had been,[Pg 312] but this is obviously a gross exaggeration. The red veils which were introduced in 1884 were to him a sheer abomination. "It makes girls look blear-eyed and red-nosed. It gives them the appearance of just recovering from the measles."

In the same year the ultra-smart ladies are shown wearing hats, while others still have bonnets. In 1886 Du Maurier shows ladies in a brougham specially built to match the fashion of hats with high conical crowns. The small fur capes of a few years back give place in 1887 to long fur boas—so long that one picture shows a lady walking between two men with the ends of her boa round their necks.

A more formidable monstrosity of these years was the "bustle," admirably criticized by the fisherman in Du Maurier's picture. By 1889 Punch celebrated its departure along with other excrescences in a parody of Browning:—

EVELYN'S HOPE

[Pg 313]

In 1891 a new fashion of dressing hair in the "teapot handle" style arose and was pronounced by Punch to be "frightful," and the epithet is at least justified by Punch's caricature.

THE HEIGHT OF ÆSTHETIC EXCLUSIVENESS

Mamma: "Who are those extraordinary-looking children?"

Effie: "The Cimabue Browns, Mamma. They're Æsthetic, you know!"

Mamma: "So I should imagine. Do you know them to speak to?"

Effie: "Oh dear no, Mamma—They're most exclusive. Why, they put out their tongues at us if we only look at them!"

Throughout this period the children in Du Maurier's pictures, however dressed, are a joy to look at. The fashion of arraying them in "æsthetic" costumes meets, however, with no favour. It is even implied that such a garb impairs their manners and conduces to arrogance, witness Du Maurier's picture of the young Cimabue Browns putting out their tongues in derision at ordinary normally clad children in the park. In 1881 we read:—

The poor little Guys who have been compelled by unthinking parents to walk about in long skirts, antique cloaks, and coal-scuttle bonnets, have caused so much laughter that the dress is now called "The Grinaway Costume."

[Pg 314]

It may have been by Punch; but against his churlish condemnation must be set the enthusiastic approval of Kate Greenaway's illustrations by leading art critics, including Ruskin, throughout the world; and the extraordinary success of her revival of old-fashioned costumes for children. In spite of Punch, and in virtue of the exquisite charm of her designs, she went a long way toward justifying the verdict of one of her admirers that "Kate Greenaway dressed the children of two continents."

THE DANCING MAN

She: "Awfully nice Dance at Mrs. Masham's last night?"

He: "Yaas. Were you there?"

She: "Was I there? Why—I danced with you Three Times!"

He: "Really! So glad!"

Allusions to men's attire in this period are few and far between, and a careful study of Punch's illustrations reveals little substantial divergence between the fashions of 1880 and 1920. The only approach to a crusade or campaign in which Punch engaged was directed against his old enemy the "chimney pot." When Dr. Carpenter in 1882 declared that Englishmen "would rather suffer martyrdom than give up its use," Punch enlarged on this text in an "anti-sanitary ballad." He reverts to the theme in "All round my hat" in 1889:—

[Pg 315]

The centenary of the tall-hat (according to the Daily News) arrived in 1890, and Punch heaped scorn on this unlovely centenarian:—

For holiday or sporting wear Tyrolese hats came into vogue in the late 'eighties, and the picture of two "chappies" at Monte Carlo in what is presumably the height of the fashion presents them in check tweeds, spats and Austrian jäger hats. The Homburg hat belongs to a slightly later period.

Mr. A. C. Corbould, in an illustration of the correct costume[Pg 316] for Rotten Row in 1885 and 1889, shows that for men the tall hat and frock coat had yielded in the latter year to the bowler and tweeds. The dress of the ladies shows less change, but the tall hat has gone and the skirts are grey not black. Short tailless coats for morning wear were coming in, and Punch welcomes in 1889 the introduction of brown boots as a relief from "that dual despotism, dreadful grown, of needless nigritude and futile polish." Whiskers were still worn, but, amongst young men, were severely restricted in length, and shorn of the ambrosial exuberance of the 'fifties and 'sixties.

"Æsthetes" were once described as a set of long-haired men and short-haired women, and Du Maurier's pictures justify the summary, but these peculiarities were confined to a coterie; they never seriously affected the usages of Mayfair or involved any revision of the "petty decalogue of Mode." Spats were generally worn, and the "mashers" of the 'eighties carried very slim umbrellas when they took their walks abroad in the park for Sunday parade. Evening dress presents few and negligible differences from that in vogue to-day. One of the very few references to military uniforms in these years indicates the reaction against "useless flummery." A military correspondent in The Times had said, in 1890, that the day of cocked hats and plumes was gone, and Punch availed himself of the saying to design a new and rational uniform for general officers, so that they might be mistaken by the enemy for harmless gentlemen farmers.

[Pg 317]

LETTERS AND JOURNALISM: DRAMA AND MUSIC

As I ventured to remark in an earlier volume, a literary critic's acumen and flair are better shown in his estimates of writers whose fame is as yet unassured, or who are just emerging above the horizon, than of authors of established reputation. No special credit attaches to Punch for writing with reverence of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Scott or Charles Lamb, whose centenary evoked a charming tribute in 1875, when the Headmaster of Christ's Hospital appealed in The Times for support in erecting a memorial to Elia in his old school. A better test is furnished in his references to Browning and Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, Charles Reade and Trollope, Jefferies and Stevenson and Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward, and, to come down to the end of this period, Kipling and Barrie. Yet all established reputations were not respected by Punch. When Rabelais was included in Professor Henry Morley's series of World's Classics in 1883 Punch uttered a vehement protest against the choice. He calls Rabelais a "dirty-minded, scurrilous, blasphemous, witty, broadly humorous and extravagantly grotesque clerical buffoon." The Saturday Review thought otherwise, but Punch declared that the defence was only put forward as "a stalking-horse for a malicious attack on ourselves."

The lines on George Eliot in 1881 are brief but laudatory. The phrase declining to rank her "among the tricksy mimes" is not happy; but she is spoken of as "this large-orbed glory of our times," and Punch prophesies for her "unfading bays," a prophecy to which the present generation would seem inclined to demur. Punch had little to add to his previous tributes to Carlyle when the Sage of Chelsea passed away in the same[Pg 318] year, except to express the view that he was profoundly discontented with the England of to-day:—

CULTURE—1881

Mistress: "As you've never been in Service, I'm afraid I can't engage you without a 'character.'"

Young Person: "I have three School Board certificates, Ma'am!"

Mistress: "Oh, well—I suppose for honesty, cleanliness——"

Young Person: "No, Ma'am—for 'Literatoor,' Joggr'phy and Free'and Drawin'!"

The founding of the Browning Society in the same year met with no more encouragement from Punch than Miss Braddon's boiled-down versions of Scott's novels. Punch dimly recognized Browning's greatness while resenting his obscurities and eccentricities, and in a further skit on the Society carefully disclaims any disrespect for Browning himself. This mitigated appreciation is developed in the memorial[Pg 319] verses in 1889 which hail him as a gallant and manly singer and apostle of healthy optimism, while denying his Muse the quality of elegance. Punch was nearer the mark in his laconic reference to Tupper, who died in the same year:—

"His name has passed into a Proverb."

Martin F. Tupper, famed for his Proverbial Philosophy, has joined the majority. He was thoroughly in earnest, and said many a true thing in what popularly passed for poetry. He will be remembered as "The Great Maxim Gun" of the nineteenth century.

The Annual Register reminds us that in twenty-five years over 100,000 copies of Proverbial Philosophy were sold in England and nearly half a million in America.

Punch was happier in dealing with Longfellow than with Emerson; the description of the latter as "the cheery oracle, alert and quick," is hardly adequate. Punch, however, protested against the proposed monument to Longfellow in the Abbey. He had learned to appreciate J. R. Lowell, who, on leaving England in 1885 after his four years' tenure of office as American Minister, said that "he had come among them as a far-away cousin, and they were sending him away as something very like a brother." Punch refused to say good-bye to this great and wise American, and his "au revoir" verses contain pleasant allusions to The Biglow Papers and Study Windows. Nor was his welcome of Oliver Wendell Holmes a whit less cordial, when the beloved "Autocrat" visited England to receive a D.C.L. degree in 1886. Bret Harte had been welcomed by Punch in 1879 as a master of wit and wisdom, humour and pathos. Though, as was said of a famous composer, he began as a genius and ended as a talent, the influence of The Luck of Roaring Camp[10] on the development of the short story was fruitful and abiding. To complete the record of Punch's relations with American authors it may be noted that in 1881 he greeted Joel Chandler Harris, the author of Uncle Remus, as a benefactor; that he resented Mr. W. D. Howells's critical depreciations of Dickens and Thackeray; and[Pg 320] that, when Walt Whitman died in 1892, he indited what was virtually a palinode:—

To return to native writers, Punch happily linked a great Churchman and a great Victorian novelist in the stanza which appeared at the close of 1882:—

Punch had long acclaimed Tennyson as one of the major poets; but a slight element of reserve mingles in the congratulations on his peerage in 1883. Approval is tempered by chaff, and allusion is made to the Laureate's being prevented from taking his seat in the Lords by having lost his robes. There are no reserves in the tribute to the "beloved Cambridge rhymer" C. S. Calverley, when he passed away in early middle age in 1884. The memorial verses omit all mention of Calverley's genius for high parody, and incorrectly speak of the Ode to Beer as being written in Spenserian stanzas, but are otherwise affectionately appreciative:—

Charles Reade, who died in the same year, is not ineptly described as the "Rupert of Letters," and his indiscretions and exuberances are overlooked in virtue of his services both as a[Pg 321] dramatist and novelist, and the "noble rage" with which he vindicated "the master-virtue, Justice."

Echoes of a controversy over the censorship exerted by the libraries, revived periodically in later years, come to us from the years 1884 and 1885, when the banning of Mr. George Moore's novels led to a correspondence in the Pall Mall Gazette. Here the late Mr. George Gissing, while professing little sympathy with Mr. Moore, had fallen foul of Thackeray for truckling to the demands of Mrs. Grundy and betraying his artistic conscience—à propos of the Preface to Pendennis. This was altogether too much for Punch, who belaboured Mr. Gissing to his heart's content in his most truculent vein, and did not abstain from his old and ugly habit of making offensive capital out of an antagonist's name: "humbly we own that we never heard of his name before, though it seems suggestive of a kind of guttural German embrace performed by the nationalizer of the Land [Henry George]."

Another famous literary quarrel broke out in 1886, the year of the trenchant attack, recalling the style and temper of Macaulay, on Mr. Gosse in the Quarterly Review for October. As Punch had already indulged in a good deal of acid pleasantry at the expense of the mutual admiration of "Poet Dobson" and "Poet Gosse," it was easy to guess on which side his sympathies would be enlisted. The sting of the Quarterly's indictment lay in the statement that "the men who write bad books are the men who criticize them," and Punch did not refrain from rubbing in the charge:—

The Quarterly, not for the first time, overshot the mark by its "savage and tartarly" methods, and the incriminated critic survived an attack fortified by accurate learning but impaired by unrestrained animosity.

Punch resumed his genial strain in his tribute to Richard Jefferies, when that admirable prose poet of rural England and the pageantry of the seasons died prematurely in 1887. Matthew Arnold was not exactly one of Punch's literary heroes. His urbanity was admitted, but Punch slightly resented his intellectual superciliousness. Yet the verses on his death in 1888, cast in the "Thyrsis" stanza, acknowledge the value of his crusade against Philistinism, and the beauty of his elegiac poetry; he was "the great son of a good father." Towards Matthew Arnold's distinguished niece, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Punch was less benevolent on the occasion of the appearance of Robert Elsmere in the same year. The sorely tried hero is described as "wandering about, a married Hamlet in clerical attire, undecided as to his[Pg 323] mission to set everything right and dying a victim to the Mephistophelean-Betsy-Prig spirit." Nor was Punch altogether appreciative of R. L. Stevenson, though he pays a reluctant homage to his genius in one of the "Mems for the New Year" for a literary man in January, 1889: "Resolutely to avoid making the most distant reference to 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.'" The standard of precision in the editing of Punch at this time was not above reproach. In the same year "Mr. J. L. Stevenson's Master of Ballantine" is reviewed though there was no such author and no such book. Punch made amends, however, in 1890 in his salutations of two notable newcomers. In February he was delighted by "the homely simplicity," the keen observation, shrewd wit and gentle pathos of Barrie in A Window in Thrums. Six weeks later he recognized in Rudyard Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills a "new and piquant flavour," as of an Anglo-Indian Bret Harte. Punch found an "excessive abundance of phrases and local allusions which will be dark sayings to the uninitiated." But here adverse criticism ends. For the rest he acknowledges in the new writer a surprising knowledge of life, civil, military and native, and a happy command of pathos and humour. This tribute was followed up a few weeks later by a much more characteristic act of homage in doggerel verse:—

TO THE NEW SCRIBE AND POET

Air:—"O Ruddier than the Cherry."

(Signed) Invidius Naso.

The literary quality of Punch's literary criticism was not high in these days and his outlook was decidedly limited. It is therefore a welcome surprise to find him not only recognizing the beauty of Cory's Ionica in 1891, but specially singling out the famous version of the epitaph on Heraclitus. Punch could not dissect it as Walter Headlam did afterwards, but he noted one blemish—the confusion of "thou" and "you."[Pg 324] Almost as unexpected, in view of his attitude towards much contemporary realism, is Punch's eulogy of Hardy's Tess in 1892. Barring the "absurdly melodramatic character of the villain" Punch has nothing but praise for its essential truth; acquits the author of "foolhardiness" in "boldly telling ugly truths about the Pagan Phyllises and Corydons of our dear old Christian England," and accepts his word for the faithfulness of the portraiture.

Punch had rejoiced over the dissolution of the Browning Society formed by Dr. Furnivall in 1891:—

He was not, however, any better disposed to Swinburne, Furnivall's antagonist and rival in the art of ferocious obloquy, of whom he wrote in the same year:—

Of Punch's relations with Ruskin we speak in another place. The most detailed notice of Meredith grew out of a real incident, the calling of the illustrious novelist as a witness in a libel action in the year 1891. Punch professes to give a full report of his evidence, in which Judge and Counsel are overwhelmed in a deluge of Meredithyrambics. It is a perfectly friendly and by no means inexpert parody of the contortions and obscurities which induced Tennyson to declare that reading Meredith was like wading through glue. Punch's friendly irreverence to his old friend of thirty years' standing prompts me to add that, throughout this period, parody was continually and increasingly employed, not like the bladder with which the Fool belabours bystanders, but as a weapon of genuine criticism. Here is a list, though not a complete list, of the authors who were subjected to this method in the period under review. Rhoda Broughton (for her emotional sentimentality) in Gone Wrong; Captain Hawley Smart, the sporting novelist; "Ouida"; Trollope; Disraeli, the florid magnificence[Pg 325] and aristocratic atmosphere of whose Endymion is amusingly travestied in 1880; J. C. Harris, the author of Uncle Remus; Rider Haggard; Lord Lytton ("Owen Meredith") in "Fitzdotterel," a parody of Glenaveril; Stevenson; F. C. Philips, the author of As in a Looking Glass; Oscar Wilde; Barrie; Kipling; Hardy; Henley and Maeterlinck (in the style of Ollendorff).

Burnand was not a parodist of the class of Calverley or Sir Owen Seaman, Max Beerbohm or Mr. J. C. Squire; but what he lacked in literary felicity and scholarship and in that impersonation which assumes the habit of mind of the author travestied, he made up in his unfailing sense of the ludicrous, his high spirits and audacious burlesque. He confined himself mainly to prose. At the end of this period Mr. Anstey was a veritable tower of strength to the paper. His Voces Populi and his burlesques of recitations and music-hall songs are masterpieces of close observation and high-spirited fun. The extravagances of the æsthetic poets engaged other pens, but the best literary parodies belong to a rather later date. There is, however, a good specimen in the "domestic threnody" on Oleo-Margarine in the manner of Swinburne, which appears in 1881, and opens impressively:—

In this context I may note an original contribution to existing forms of verse in the ingenious doggerel French "Limericks" of Du Maurier, of which two specimens may suffice:—

VICISSITUDES OF A RISING PERIODICAL

The Proprietor: "I'll tell you what it is, Shardson, I'm getting sick of the 'ole bloomin' Show! The Knacker ain't selling a Scrap—no notice took of us anywhere—not a bloomin' Advertisement! And yet there ain't 'ardly a livin' Englishman of mark, from Tennyson downwards, as we 'aven't shown up and pitched into, and dragged 'is Name in the Mud!"

The Editor: "Don't let's throw up the Sponge yet, Old Man! Let's give the dead 'uns a turn—let's have a shy at Thackeray, Browning, George Eliot, or, better still, let's bespatter General Gordon and Cardinal Newman a bit—that ought to fetch 'em a few, and bring us into Notice!"

Turning for the moment from gay to grave, we may note that Punch bestowed his benediction on the Dictionary of National Biography, when the first instalment of what was the[Pg 327] greatest act of true sportsmanship in the publishing world of our times appeared in January, 1885. Per contra, the proposal for a British Academy in 1890 only met with irreverent suggestions from Punch for the constitution of the Elective Body.

Punch kept a watchful eye on the developments of journalism and periodical literature. He notes in 1876 the impending appearance of Truth, but his opinion of Society journals, discussed elsewhere, was not flattering. When Alexander Russel, the great editor of the Scotsman, died in July, 1876, Punch did not fail to recognize the conspicuous services of that fearless, honest and trenchant publicist and malleus stultorum:—

Bagehot, equally distinguished in letters and journalism, passed unnoticed in 1877, but Delane, the third and most widely renowned of the three great editors who died in the last half of this decade, was fitly eulogized in 1879 by one who was not the only writer who had served on the staff of both Punch and The Times:—

The centenary of The Times, which occurred in 1888, is duly noted, and by way of contrast to what was then a national institution there are allusions to short-lived but now forgotten[Pg 328] papers and periodicals, more notorious than notable. Punch kept a vigilant eye on the provincial press, but he was, on the whole, more inclined to utilize it when it suited its purpose and to make humorous capital out of its shortcomings than to acknowledge its solid merits. Of Punch's own domestic history it may suffice to maintain that a mountain in the Arctic regions was named after him by the expedition under Captain Nares in 1876; and that he was once more banned in Paris on account of the cartoons on Marshal MacMahon in 1878. He paid affectionate homage to Tom Taylor on his death in 1880 as a cultivated man of letters, a considerate and judicious editor, above all, a warm-hearted, upright man and a staunch and loyal friend. Henry Mayhew, who died in 1887, "comrade of Punch and champion of the poor," was only associated with the paper in its earlier days and for a short period. By the death of the gentle Percival Leigh, of "Pips's Diary" fame, in 1889, the last link was snapped with the days of Mark Lemon, Douglas Jerrold, Leech and Doyle and Thackeray.

FINE ARTS

A survey of the Fine Arts from 1874 to 1892, based on a study of Punch, reveals changes and even reactions in his outlook. As we have seen in an earlier volume, he had been converted in great measure to Pre-Raphaelitism; he had welcomed Whistler as a master etcher; he had been a severe and at times even savage critic of the stereotyped conventions, the opportunism, the inanities of the Royal Academy.

Something of this spirit remains in the period under review. The annual exhibitions at Burlington House are dealt with in no reverential mood. As far back as 1877 we note the first appearance of an article with illustrations very much on the lines of the modern "Academy Depressions." The pictures exhibited in the years of his declining powers by the late Mr. J. R. Herbert, R.A., are caricatured without mercy in 1885, and the New English Art Club is welcomed in 1889 for its revolt against "the dull dead level of sleek respectability, the commonplace churchwardenism of suburban gentility." The sequel invites quotation:—

[Pg 329]

A bold, original, impudent lot are these New Englanders, but they are notwithstanding wonderfully refreshing. Sometimes their spirits are too much for their strength, and they come tremendous "croppers." It has been well said that a strikingly original writer occasionally writes absolute nonsense, and by the same rule an artist, who turns aside from the well-swept, carefully watered, mathematically paved academic high road, must not infrequently paint absolute nonsense; but he thinks for himself, he does not view Nature through the spectacles of others, and in nine cases out of ten he is likely to produce works that will be successful in the long run. Though there are some pictures among the collection will make the casual visitor jump, there are not a few will make him think.

Some of the rebels of 1889 have developed into the academics of thirty years later, and Punch's list of the most notable contributors makes us jump as well as think: John S. Sargent, Solomon J. Solomon, Whistler, B. Sickert, Tuke, Edward Stott, A. Roche, N. Garstin, G. Roussell, Sidney Starr, F. Brown, A. Mann, H. Vos, W. J. Laidlaw and J. E. Christie.

Punch, then, cannot be written down as a Philistine, but there is no denying the fact that his artistic judgment was warped and impaired by his invincible hostility to the æsthetic movement; his inability to disentangle the good in it from the evil; his confusion of charlatanry and sincerity; and his failure to recognize the great services rendered by Morris in the domain of decorative design. Prejudice and ignorance mingle with good sense and good feeling in the manifesto which Punch put forth in 1882, and which may serve as a general exposition of his artistic and literary creed in the 'eighties:—

IN EARNEST

Let us be clearly understood. The word "Æstheticism" has been perverted from its original meaning; i.e. the perception of all that is good, pure and beautiful in Nature and in Art, and, as now vulgarly applied, it has come in a slang sort of way to stand for an effeminate, invertebrate, sensuous, sentimentally-Christian, but thoroughly Pagan taste in literature and art, which delights in the idea of the resuscitation of the Great God Pan, in Swinburnian songs at their highest fever-pitch, in the mystic ravings of a Blake, the affectation of a Rossetti, the Charmides and revoltingly pantheistic Rosa Mystica of Oscar Wilde, the Songs of Passion and[Pg 330] Pain and other similar mock-hysterical imitations of the "Mighty Masters." Victor Hugo, Ouida, Swinburne, Burne-Jones, have much to answer for.

ACUTE CHINAMANIA

May: "Mamma! Mamma! Don't go on like this, pray!!"

Mamma (who has smashed a favourite pot): "What have I got left to live for?"

May: "Haven't you got me, Mamma?"

Mamma: "You, child! You're not unique!! There are six of you—a complete set!!"

This Æstheticism, as it has gradually come to be known, is the reaction from Kingsley's muscular Christianity. Exaggerated muscular Christianity, in its crusade against canting and whining religion, in its bold attempt to show that the practice of true religion was for men, as well as for women, trampled on the Christian Lily, emblem of perfect purity; and what Athleticism trod under foot, Æstheticism picked up, cherished, and then, taking the sign for the reality, paid to it the extravagant honours of a Pagan devotion; and the worship of the Lily was substituted for the veneration paid to the sacred character, in whose hand Christian Art had originally placed it. To this was added the worship of the Peacock's Feather. It is this false Æstheticism which we have persistently attacked, and will persistently attack to the bitter end, and henceforward those who misunderstand us do so wilfully, and it may be maliciously.

[Pg 331]

Punch was justified in deploring the opportunism of Millais in painting "pot-boilers" and "pretty-pretty" pictures, such as "Bubbles." He had powerful and well-equipped allies in his view that Whistler in his later manner left off painting or etching where the difficulties began, a view expressed in the lines in 1883 on "Whistler in Venice":—

Yet Punch thought Ruskin had gone too far in the famous onslaught which led to the historic lawsuit and verdict in 1878:—

To John Ruskin

(On a recent Verdict)

If "Fors Clavigera," dear Slade Professor,

Means "Force that bears a club,"

Be warned, since of a big stick you're possessor,

And more discreetly drub.

Strength unrestrained's not greater strength but lesser,

And scorn provoketh snub.

The Grosvenor Gallery, opened in 1877, at once eclipsed Burlington House as the favourite target of Punch's ridicule and caricature, and as the home of all the tendencies which he repudiated in the manifesto quoted above. His general attitude is very much that of Gilbert in Patience; and Burne-Jones and Rossetti (whom he miscalls "D. S. Rosetti" as late as 1880) were indiscriminately confounded in dispraise along with the lesser fry. Tennyson's "Palace of Art" is perverted into a vehicle for assailing Pre-Raphaelitism. The "Dream of Queer[Pg 332] Women" in 1878 gives prominence to the artistic type, and a visit to the Grosvenor Gallery in the early summer of the same year inspires "The Haunted Limbo; a May-night Vision" animated by the same hostility:—

Leighton's "Athlete and Python" in 1877 had been saluted as "a statue at last," and Punch welcomed his election as P.R.A. in the following year, with an excellent portrait by Sambourne of "the right man in the right place." It was in 1878 again that Punch turned aside from the flagellation of his pet aversions to pay homage to the genius of George Cruikshank, who died on February 1:—

England is the poorer by what she can ill spare—a man of genius. Good, kind, genial, honest and enthusiastic George Cruikshank, whose frame appeared to have lost so little of its wiry strength and activity, whose brain seemed as full of fire and vitality at fourscore as at forty, has passed away quietly and painlessly after a few days' struggle. He never worked for Punch, but he always worked with him, putting his unresting brain, his skill—in some forms of Art unrivalled—and his ever productive fancy, at the service of humanity and progress, good works, and good will to man. His object, like[Pg 333] our own, was always to enforce truth and urge on improvement by the powerful forces of fun and humour, clothed in forms sometimes fanciful, sometimes grotesque, but never sullied by a foul thought, and ever dignified by a wholesome purpose.

A LOVE-AGONY. Design by Maudle

(With verses by Jellaby Postlethwaite, who is also said to have sat for the Picture.)

His fourscore and six years of life have been years of unintermitting labour, that was yet, always, labour of love. There never was a purer, simpler, more straightforward, or altogether more blameless man. His nature had something childlike in its transparency. You saw through him completely. There was neither wish nor effort to disguise his self-complacency, his high appreciation of himself, his delight in the appreciation of others, any more than there was to make himself out better, or cleverer, or more unselfish than his neighbours.

In him England has lost one who was, in every sense, as true a man as he was a rare and original genius, and a pioneer in the arts of illustration.

Punch's estimate accords with that of the friend who knew Cruikshank well and described him as "in every word and deed a God-fearing, Queen-honouring, truth-loving, honest man," and it is all the more significant in view of Cruikshank's[Pg 334] vehement and even fanatical espousal of the cause of temperance. Another great illustrator, though of a very different type, emerged in the following year in Randolph Caldecott. His genial and graceful commentaries on Nursery Rhymes were entirely after Punch's heart. He was speedily enlisted as an occasional contributor up to 1886, the year of his premature death, when Punch faithfully summed up the gifts of a true benefactor of all ages:—

But in these years Punch had little time to spare for praise; he was so busy belabouring Burne-Jones and Rossetti, the Grosvenor Gallery, the Kyrle Society, or new fashions in house decorations and furniture, in which he saw nothing but gloom and discomfort. The protest in 1879 of the three Slade Professors—Sidney Colvin, W. B. Richmond and Legros—against the critics who denied Burne-Jones genius and greatness on the strength of defective anatomical details, left Punch impenitent. He mocked at their "triune testimonial" as an unconvincing attempt to convert the callous and captious critics who,

[Pg 335]

MODERN ÆSTHETICS

(Ineffable Youth goes into ecstasies over an extremely Old Master—say, Fra Porcinello Babaragianno, A.D. 1266-1281?)

Matter-of-fact Party: "But it's such a repulsive subject!"

Ineffable Youth: "'Subject' in art is of no moment! The Picktchah is beautiful!"

Matter-of-fact Party: "But you'll own the Drawing's vile, and the Colour's beastly!"

Ineffable Youth: "I'm Cullah-blind, and don't p'ofess to understand D'awing! The Picktchah is beautiful!"

Matter-of-fact Party (getting warm): "But it's all out of Perspective, hang it, and so abominably untrue to Nature!"

Ineffable Youth: "I don't care about Naytchah, and hate Perspective. The Picktchah is most beautiful!"

Matter-of-fact Party (losing all self-control): "But, dash it all, man, where the dickens is the beauty, then?"

Ineffable Youth (quietly): "In the Picktchah!"

Total defeat of Matter-of-fact Party.

It is true that Punch makes some reservations in his "Moral":—

But his sympathies undoubtedly remain with the critics, and he virtually identifies himself with Philistia in the plea of the Philistine in the following year:—

[Pg 336]

The "Lay of the Private View" at the Grosvenor Gallery in May, 1881, forms a useful supplement to Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, produced a fortnight before the verses appeared:—

I deal in another section with the fashionable cult of æstheticism, which was now at its zenith. In estimating its artistic importance, Punch erred in his refusal to discriminate between eccentricity and independence. He continued to "belabour B.-J.," and brackets him with Whistler in the ribald suggestion that they were jointly responsible for the pictures exhibited by the "Screevers" or pavement artists. Millais is congratulated on breaking away from Pre-Raphaelitism, and invidious comparisons are drawn in 1886 between his pictures and those of Holman Hunt:—

There couldn't be a better foil to the manliness of the Millais Show at the Grosvenor than the pseudo-mediæval-O-quite-too-beautiful-namby-pamby-gilt-edged-and-gothic-clasped-Church-service style of the effeminate religious Art of Mr. Holman Hunt. Millais tried it, and, after a struggle, snapped the Pre-Raphaelite fetters, and escaped.

Yet in the next two years Millais is criticized for sacrificing character to "prettiness" and desecrating his talent by placing[Pg 338] it at the disposal of the advertiser. Watts's enigmatic "Hope" was "guyed" in 1887 under the title "Cutting off her head with a saw." The multifarious activities of Herkomer—painter, etcher, director of a school of art at Bushey, designer of posters, operatic composer, etc.—did not escape Punch's amused notice. Punch himself, as might readily be expected, did not enjoy an immunity from art criticism. In 1883 he had congratulated Ruskin on his second election to the Slade Professorship at Oxford; at the end of the year Ruskin repaid the compliment, in his lectures on the Art of England, by a long detailed and in the main highly eulogistic survey of Punch's artistic work. But the panegyric was tempered by certain reserves:—

Says Mr. Ruskin, having before him in review one or two selected specimens of Mr. Punch's cartoons:—

"Look, too, at this characteristic type of British heroism—'John Bull guards his pudding.' Is this the final outcome of King Arthur and Saint George, of Britannia and the British Lion? And is it your pride or hope or pleasure that in this sacred island that has given her lion hearts to Eastern tombs and her Pilgrim Fathers to Western lands, that has wrapped the sea round her as a mantle, and breathed against her strong bosom the air of every wind, the children born to her in these latter days should have no loftier legend to write upon their shields than 'John Bull guards his Pudding'?"

And then Mr. Ruskin, as if conscious that the very onward sweep of his own free fancy has carried him beyond the limits of fair and reasonable estimate, as it were, harks somewhat back again, and offering Mr. Punch something in the nature of an apology, acquits him of all true responsibility for this same terrible and offending "pudding":—

"It is our fault" (proceeds Mr. Ruskin) "and not the Artist's; and I have often wondered what Mr. Tenniel might have done for us if London had been as Venice, or Florence, or Siena. In my first course of Lectures I called your attention to the Picture of the Doge Mocenigo kneeling in prayer; and it is our fault more than Mr. Tenniel's if he is forced to represent the heads of the Government dining at Greenwich rather than worshipping at St. Paul's."

Punch took the criticism in good part, while declaring that he had found this commonplace nineteenth century and its humdrum materials pretty well suited to his purpose; and after indulging in a whimsical dialogue between the editor, Giovanni[Pg 339] Tennielo, and Ruskino in Venice, comes to the conclusion that after all the Queen of the Adriatic may have had even in her great days something less noble to lose than that condemned typical "pudding" which John Bull as yet has fortunately known how to guard. In this context I may add that in 1885 Punch reprinted an advertisement in which a young man, seeking for a place, stated amongst his credentials that he could "paint and talk Ruskinesque."

WHAT PORTRAIT-PAINTING IS COMING TO

The Duke of Dilwater: "I—a—have taken the liberty of calling to say that I shall esteem myself highly honoured if you will be so very kind as to accept from me a Commission to paint my Portrait, at any time most convenient to yourself!"

Fashionable Artist (after careful survey of His Grace's features): "You must excuse me, Duke, but I really can't. I—a—always choose my own Subjects now, you know, and I'm sorry to say that your Grace won't do!"

As I have not minimized Punch's limitations as an art critic, it is only fair to add that he was often sound and sometimes even acute. He said the right thing on the parvenu as art patron, and delicately hinted his approval of the independence of portrait painters. His appreciation of the strength of[Pg 340] "Phiz" (Hablot K. Browne) as the illustrator of Dickens and Lever in helping us to visualize and fix certain types is excellently done, and generous admiration does not prevent him pointing out "Phiz's" weaknesses—his sketchiness, thin and skimpy style, and simpering mannerisms. This was said on the occasion of the show of "Phiz's" drawings in 1883 (the year after his death) which Punch recommended to "genial Middle-age with memories and unpriggish Youth without hyperæsthetic prejudices."

Nothing could be better in its way, again, than the castigation of the "slick" and deliberate eccentricities of Jan Van Beers in 1886. Punch admits the Dutch artist's talent, his capacity for higher work, proved in historical paintings, and then sets to work to wield the lash:—

Popinjay Art is plentiful enough. It is the trick whereby mediocrity antics itself into a sort of notoriety, and cynical cleverness indolently plays the fool with an easily humbugged public. It is probably calculated—perhaps with some reason—that these stagey tricks, and limelight effects, and dismal draperies, and bogey surprises, and peep-show horrors will perplex people into a foolish wonder, if not into an impossible enjoyment or an honest approval. Maybe that is all which is aimed at? But what an aim for anything calling itself Art!

Posturing Pierrots and smirking skeletons, goggling sphinxes and giggling cocottes, cadaverous surprises and ensanguined startlers, all the parade of nightmare and nastiness, pall upon the mind, as the phantasmagoric effects and sickly scents do upon the senses, of the visitors to the Salon Parisien. Whim and fantasy are all very delightful in their way. But this is not Wonderland, it is the world of drunken delirium and the Witches' Sabbath. A girl with emerald face, purple hair, and vivid vermilion lips, peeping between amber portières, is an inoffensive though purposeless, and not very interesting bizarrerie. But such gratuitous ghastlinesses as "Will o' the Wisp," "Felo de se," "Vive la Mort!" and particularly the offensively named "Ecce Homo," are simply revolting horrors. Somebody has hazarded the statement that they are Edgar-Poe-ish. Pooh! Poe was creepy sometimes, but he was an artist, an idealist, subordinating even occasional horror to the beautiful in his daring dreams.

A FORTIORI

Philistine Father: "Why the dickens don't you paint something like Frith's 'Derby Day'—something everybody can understand, and somebody buy?"

Young Genius: "Everybody understand, indeed! Art is for the few, Father, and the higher the art, of course, the fewer the few. The highest art of all is for one. That art is mine. That one is—myself!"

Fond Mamma: "There speaks my own brave boy!"

As a rôle Punch was a strong partisan in art; yet on occasion he could hold the balance. I have illustrated the change[Pg 341] in his view of Whistler, but it never degenerated into abuse. The dialogue, "Wrestling with Whistler," suggested by the exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in the spring of 1892, impartially satirizes Whistlerites, frank Philistines, and the literal and prosaic persons who were puzzled and bewildered by "arrangements," "harmonies," "symphonies" and "nocturnes." These simple souls, unable to recognize the objects depicted, were not helped by the faithful who retorted, "Ah, but it's the way he saw it!" To-day, as thirty years ago, their point of view is faithfully expressed in the unconscious irony of the serious elderly lady:

[Pg 342]

I've no patience with the man. Look at Gustave Doré now. I'm sure he was a beautiful artist if you like. Did he go and call his "Leaving the Prætorium" a "Symphony" or a "Harmony," or any nonsense of that kind? Of course not—and yet look at the difference!

It is true that the artist, like the prophet, is often "not without honour save in his own country and in his own house." The saying happily does not apply to Punch and his contributors. When Richard Doyle died in 1883, more than thirty years had elapsed since he severed his connexion with the paper, but Punch had never forgotten the old comrade who had designed his cover, and had been equally at home among the imps of Elfland and the swells and snobs of society:—

Personally I should invert the epithet "thrice immortal" and apply it to the "Continental Tour of Brown, Jones and Robinson"; otherwise the verses are a well merited tribute to the winged fancy and graceful humour of "Dicky Doyle." Charles Keene's death in January, 1891, removed another good comrade whose association with the paper was unbroken up to his last illness, and was one of the chief if not the greatest of its artistic glories:—

So much for the man; as for the artist, Punch was hardly overstating the case when he claimed that the exhibition of[Pg 343] Keene's work in the following May stood for the supreme triumph of black and white in the achievements of its greatest master.

Ruskin, in the lecture noted above, had described Leech's work as containing "the finest definition and natural history of the classes of our society, the kindest and subtlest analysis of its foibles, the tenderest flattery of its pretty and well-bred ways, with which the modesty of subservient genius ever immortalized or amused careless masters." Small wonder was it, then, that Punch appealed for greater generosity to John Leech's three surviving sisters. Their combined pensions only amounted to £180—a "dole" which lent point to the dramatic dialogues in 1881 between a Minister and a Celebrity and (after the Celebrity's death) between the Minister and his Secretary, as a result of which the former decides to give the orphan daughter £50.

The cult of Japanese art in the late 'eighties furnished Punch's artists with new formulas and new methods of treating Parliamentary scenes. It also inspired the following ingenious adaptation of a famous phrase:—

Madame Roland Re-Edited (from a sham Japanese point of view): O Liberty! what strange (decorative) things are done in thy name!

Punch had reproached Millais for condescending to the "pretty-pretty" style, but in 1888 he was moved to caricature the modern fear of the same tendency—a fear destined to dominate so much of modern art in later years and to enthrone the Golliwog in the nursery.

DRAMA, OPERA AND MUSIC

Punch was mixed up with the drama from the very beginning. He drew his name and his initial inspiration from a puppet-show; all four editors who held the office between 1841 and 1892 were playwrights—three of them, Mark Lemon, Tom Taylor and Burnand prolific playwrights—and many of his leading contributors from Douglas Jerrold onwards owed a double allegiance to journalism and the drama. In these circumstances[Pg 344] one can hardly expect to find in Punch's copious references to plays and players an entirely judicial or dispassionate critical attitude. Yet when all deductions have been made on the score of old loyalties, partisanship and even prejudice, his record, during the period which opened with the visits of Salvini and ended with Tree's Hamlet and the tyranny of "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," shows a creditable readiness to acclaim fresh talent and to applaud a good thing irrespective of its origin. We find a certain amount of resentment against the adulation of foreigners, but his patriotism in this respect is untainted by any Chauvinism—witness his "Salvo to Salvini" in 1875:—

Punch is rejoiced to see that a representative body of the London Actors lately made express application to the great Italian Player, now displaying his art for London's behoof, to give a morning performance of Othello, at which they could be present. Salvini answered the application with an Italian's courtesy, and an artist's feeling with his fellows. Remembering how, when Punch was young, an illiterate English mob once howled and hooted a French company from the stage of Drury Lane, and how, when the noblest Actor of his generation, William Macready, published a protest against the cowardly outrage, in which he associated his brother Actors with himself, a large body of those Actors disclaimed such association, and denied William Macready's right to speak for more than William Macready—Punch cannot but rejoice in the present indication of a larger and less "parochial" spirit of appreciation.

The actors who had the good fortune to see Salvini on Monday have seen a great artist, in the ideal sense of the word—one whose art "in the very storm and whirlwind of his passion, can beget a temperance that gives it smoothness"; whose voice keeps its music even in rage or agony, and whose action can be graceful, even in its moments of utmost vehemence; and this without forfeiture of force, or sacrifice of truth. It is of secondary importance whether or not those who hear Salvini understand Italian. They are sure to know the text of Othello; and Salvini's look, tone, and gesture speak the universal language.

Salvini, Ristori, Bernhardt

They must have marked the breadth and calmness of his style, the self-restraint that never betrays effort, and the grandeur resulting from this element of large effect. They will have seen how superior to points and petty tricks and clap-traps he is from first to last; how completely the Moor, steeped at first in the stately Oriental calm that almost looks like languor, till love lights in his eye and[Pg 345] mantles in his face, or doubt begins to torture, and sense of wrong gathers and glows to fury, and a rage, far more terrible and unsparing than a wild beast's, works to madness in his brain.

The over-vehemence of Othello's final agony is deprecated, but Punch concludes by recommending all "who wish to know the highest expression of ideal tragic acting to see this famous Italian actor."

As he had welcomed another glory of Italian art in Ristori, so he yielded to the versatile enchantments of the "divine Sarah" in her frequent visits to our shores. The following tribute dates from 1879:—

TO SARAH!

(By an exuberant Enthusiast)

[Pg 346]

THE DIVINE SARAH

(For whose sake we've all gone wrong)

First Critic (ætat. 21): "Beats Rachel hollow in Ong-Dromack, hanged if she don't!"

Second Critic (ditto): "So I think, Old man! And in L'Etrong-jair she licks Mademoiselle Mars all to fits!"

This is enthusiasm at high-water mark, though the note of irony is not absent. Admiration, appreciation, or criticism never lacking in friendliness mark the notices of other visitors[Pg 347] from the Old or the New World—the Dutch actors from Rotterdam in 1879 whose performance in Anne Mie impelled Punch to rewrite Canning's dispatch:—

INANITIES OF THE DRAWING-ROOM

"Seen the Enfant Prodigue, Mr. Softy?"

"No; waiting till they do it in English!"

Modjeska, "a charming and consummate actress" in 1880; the German Shakespearean actors at Drury Lane in 1881; Mary Anderson in 1883; Coquelin in 1887; and Mlle. Jane May in L'Enfant Prodigue, that delightful pioneer dumb-show play which prompted Punch to exclaim in 1891, "Vive Pierrot à Londres!" with the Victorian caveat "but not a play for children." Punch's views on the transplantation of foreign products were never expressed more frankly or wisely than in his comments on the abortive attempt made by Mr. Wybrow Robertson to present selected tableaux from the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play at the Westminster Aquarium in 1879. The announcement[Pg348] of the withdrawal of the scheme was followed by a statement that no native of Ober-Ammergau had anything to do with it, which gave Punch his cue:—

It is a comfort that one set of people come well out of the mess—the worthy, simple and pious peasants of the Ober-Ammergau, for whom the performance of their Passion Play is a religious solemnity, in performance of a vow made in 1633, when their village was ravaged by a pestilence. When the performance of Passion Plays was interdicted in Bavaria in 1779, this one was specially excepted, as being under the superintendence of the monks of Ettal, hard by, and, besides, in fulfilment of a vow.

But if the institution of the play stayed the pestilence in 1633 (as these simple Ober-Ammergauers believe), its continuance may introduce a new pestilence in 1880, should it bring on Ober-Ammergau, as yet pure and simple, the plague of speculating Managers to tempt the village Actors, as well as of Cook's tourists and cosmopolitan audiences, to poison the village life with greed of gain, and take the sanctity of simple faith from this Passion Play, so turning it—as there is already fear it has begun to be turned—into a show which, in becoming popular, must become profane.

The long and consistently hostile campaign which Punch conducted against Ibsen and the Ibsen plays shows him in a much less favourable light and on precarious ground. It was open to him to pronounce Ibsen dreary, disagreeable and didactic; some of his plays were fair game for the parodist and the opportunity was turned to excellent account. But the long and acrimonious tirade against the Ibsenites and their "Arch or Archer-priest" in 1891 is seriously weakened by the writer's confession that his knowledge of the Ibsen plays was confined to perusal of "several of them"—that he had never seen one of them on the stage; and his challenge to the Ibsen-worshippers to test the merits of their idol by a single performance at a London theatre was rash, to say the least of it.

Turning to native drama, one cannot avoid noticing that Punch, who had followed Irving's career with interest and sympathy from its modest beginnings in farce and comedy, became increasingly critical of his later ventures. He is pronounced physically unsuited to the part of Macbeth in 1875, and Punch did not fail to fasten on the vulnerable points[Pg 349] in his Romeo in 1882. In the same year Irving is especially blamed for his resort to the "benefit" performance system, and his defence is pronounced unconvincing in an article ingeniously headed, "The Doubt of the Benefit," in which Irving is described as "an admirable Comedian, an occasionally impressive Tragedian, a nervously painstaking Actor, and, generally, an indifferent Elocutionist." But Punch had indulged in even more caustic criticism of the popular actor-manager in the previous year, à propos of an address delivered at Edinburgh:—

Again the sickening cry is raised about the "social status of the Actor," and this time à propos of a paper read by Mr. Henry Irving, at a Philosophical Institution known as The Music Hall in Edinburgh. The social status of the Actor is that of a well-fed, well-clothed, well-paid—perhaps over-paid—worker in a curious profession. If he be amusing and intelligent, and behaves like a gentleman, he is exceptionally favoured by what is called "Society"; as most people, except a few fanatics, are interested in the world behind the footlights. But every Actor is not necessarily amusing, intelligent, and gentlemanly, and these are the people, probably, who are a little uneasy about their status. If they are not content with their pudding, the world is all before them. On the other hand, the more favoured ones are a little apt to be spoiled by injudicious patronage. "Society" is a little too ready to treat them like pet poodles.

Why on earth does Mr. Irving yearn for the companionship of Bishops? Does he want to convert them all to Irvingism, and to come and listen to him discoursing Shakespearean Inspirations in Unknown Tongues? Does he require Church Patronage for the Stage, and his Theatre Stalls filled as those of a Cathedral are with Prebends, Minor Canons and Greater Guns of the Ecclesiastical Establishment? Is it the height of an Actor's ambition to swell the crowd of distinguished Nobodies at the Duchess of Mountrouge's reception, or to appear as a great attraction of Lady Doubtful's Assemblies, and to be able to exhibit cards of fashionable "At Homes" in the mirror which is held up to Nature over his mantelpiece?

Elevation of the Stage forsooth! We should have thought that the Stage had elevated Mr. Irving above all such twaddle as this.

"Act well your part, there all the honour lies."

Be satisfied with this: Live for your Art, not for that limited, narrow, uncharitable, scandalmongering section of the great public[Pg 350] which calls itself "Society," and which loves to patronize Art in any form at the least possible cost to itself.

Even harsher is the rebuke administered three weeks later to Irving for his self-laudatory speeches, and the unnecessary autobiographical reminiscences in which he contrasted his present with his past earnings, thus creating a false impression of one who was in reality the most generous of men. The petting of actors by society appealed to Punch no more than the invasion of the stage by amateurs; he regarded such favouritism as ministering to their worst infirmity, vanity; and in 1884 he fell foul of Mrs. Kendal's speech at the Social Science Congress on the social position of actors, in which she reprobated self-advertisement (Satan rebuking Sin, according to her critic), but claimed a recognition which Punch denounced as mere snobbishness. Of Ellen Terry, who was associated with Irving at the Lyceum from 1878, Punch remained the affectionate and benevolent admirer, though he admitted that her conception of Lady Macbeth in 1889 raised a good deal of legitimate criticism. The lavish mounting of the Lyceum revivals, I may add, exercised Punch's frugal mind, and reached a climax in the production of Henry VIII in 1892.

THE NEW CRAZE

Scene—The Green-Room of the Parthenon, before rehearsal.

Hard-working Baronet: "Here's the Duke, confound him! Only been six months on the stage, and getting twenty guineas a week!"

Conscientious Viscount: "Yes, and us only getting six after ten years of it. I hate these beastly Dukes coming and spoiling the profession!"

Ambitious Earl: "Ugh! I hate all amateurs, hang 'em, taking the bread out of one's mouth!"

Punch, as I have so often insisted, was a Londoner first and foremost, but he did not exclude the provinces from his survey. The opening of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon in 1879 was a landmark in the history of the legitimate drama, and Punch did not fail to acknowledge the strenuous local labour and large local liberality which had carried to completion a worthy scheme for commemorating the most memorable work ever wrought by mortal brain. It was in the same year, again, that Punch recorded with sympathy and admiration the memorial performances given at Manchester for the benefit of the widow and family of Charles Calvert, the actor-manager "who did more for the elevation and development of the higher drama, historical and imaginative, than any provincial manager on record, and than any metropolitan managers, except Macready, Charles Kean and Phelps." Phelps and Charles Mathews had both died in 1878, and Buckstone in 1879. Mrs. Langtry, who had taken to the stage, is advised[Pg 351] to give up acting in 1882. In 1883 Mr. Anstey Guthrie's immortal Vice Versâ was dramatized and produced with Mr. Charles Hawtrey as Mr. Bultitude. The evergreen veterans of to-day were already advancing in fame and popularity. Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson had appeared as Romeo in 1881. In 1884 the late Mr. Wilson Barrett, encouraged by his successes in melodrama, essayed the rôle of Hamlet. Punch maliciously embodies his criticisms in a letter to Irving, then touring in America, but the general tenor of his remarks is decidedly reassuring to Irving. The long run of Our Boys in 1877 was equalled and eclipsed, after an initial failure, by the prodigious popularity of The Private Secretary, also in 1884. Lady Bancroft died only the other day; Sir Squire is still hale and hearty. Yet it is thirty-six years ago since they resolved,[Pg 352] while still at the zenith of their popularity and in early middle age, to quit the scenes of their many triumphs, and Punch, in his notice of their farewell performance, says no more than the strict truth:—

The Bancrofts have done much for the Stage; in fact, the mise-en-scène at the houses where Comedy is played, owes its present completeness entirely to them. They, and Mr. Hare with them, introduced the natural style of acting, thereby supplanting the theatrical tone and gestures of the old school, which Burlesques had done good service in laughing off our Stage for ever.

The performance at Cambridge of the Eumenides by "Messrs. Æschylus and Verrall" in the same year is handled in a vein of friendly facetiousness. Punch found Sir Charles Stanford's music rather more than worthy of the occasion, but thinks Æschylus and his very clever collaborator might have shown more common sense and allowance for modern feeling.

Punch was less considerate in his treatment of the performance of Shelley's Cenci by the Shelley Society which had been founded by "a Dr. Furnivall," the scholar and redoubtable controversialist whom Punch had already attacked in connexion with the Browning Society. The performance was described by a member of the society as four hours of monotonous horror:—

"The actors and actresses in the labour of love did all that could be done; but the play is proved to be impossible, and so let us leave it in the hope (shared by many of my fellow-members) that before another 'sixty years' it will be possible to debate the matter calmly, but not to put 'The Cenci' on the Stage."

Punch was less hopeful. He regarded "the literary disease of which the Shelley Society may be regarded as an exemplar" as an ineradicable malady.

Sir Frank Benson's productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Taming of the Shrew in 1890 come in for more commendation of the scenic effects than the acting, but a favourable exception is made in favour of the late Stephen Phillips, afterwards better known as poet and dramatist. Punch's notice of the late Sir Herbert Tree's Hamlet in the summer of 1892[Pg 353] is a good specimen of discreetly veiled disparagement. But it does not quite accord with Gilbert's famous description, "funny without being vulgar," as Punch considered some of the new readings and by-play to be tasteless and grotesque. It was this production that gave rise to that "desperate saying" that to solve the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, all that was necessary was to let Tree play Hamlet and then open the two graves and see which of the mighty dead had turned.

It would be tedious to enumerate all the references to actors and plays, famous or forgotten, which crowd the pages of Punch in this period; to quote them in full would be impossible. Toole was one of his favourites. Boucicault was not, and excites satirical comment for having written a letter to Disraeli in 1876, puffing his own play The Shaughraun. A little earlier The Great Vance—immortalized in Stevenson's Wrong Box—the "lion comique" of the music-halls, is rapped over the knuckles for advertising his performances as "patronized by the Prince and Princess of Wales." Punch's notice of Zola's L'Assommoir when he saw it in Paris in May, 1879, reflects a divided mind. He found it fascinating and intolerable. Gil-Naza's acting as Coupeau was "wonderful, fearful, admirable, awful, infernal." Yet "the moral to most of those who assisted, the other evening, at L'Assommoir was, 'I say! Dash it! It's too horrible! Let's go and drink!' and the biggest drink I've had for a long time—much needed, I assure you—was after seeing L'Assommoir." Punch doubts whether the play could ever be done in English, but it was produced at the Princess's Theatre only a few weeks later in Charles Reade's version, with Charles Warner as Coupeau. The notice in Punch purports to be written by a working man, who signs himself "one as is a-thinking seriously of Taking the Pledge, but don't see his Way to it yet." He acknowledges the terrible realism of Warner's acting, but his testimonial is invalidated by the final sentences:—

Yes, Sir, Drink is a moral drama if ever there was one. It ought to do a deal of good. And as I think it over, I feel as I want a little something just to take the taste on it out o' my mouth.

Punch clearly did not believe in temperance propaganda on[Pg 354] the stage. Nor did he support the restriction of child performers, maintaining in 1880 that the theatres at Christmas time were admirable infant schools; "even for teaching," he was "open to back the Theatre, while it lasts, against the Board School any day." There was much talk at this time about dramatic schools, but Punch refused to take the movement seriously, preferring to give a burlesque list of lectures by well-known actresses on aspects of acting entirely foreign to their own styles. He joined in the protest against the abolition of the pit at the Haymarket and the general raising of prices in the same year; and Captain Shaw's Treatise on Fires in Theatres found in him an energetic supporter of reform in respect of structural and other safeguards. Laments over the degeneracy of pantomime and the decline of the red-hot poker business still occur, but honourable exception is invariably made on behalf of the famous Vokes family. He had at an early date described the Drury Lane pantomime as "Vokes et præterea nihil." Bluebeard, at Christmas, 1879, is called "Vokes's Entire." "The family is a necessity at Drury Lane"; and then Punch goes on to embroider his text. Necessity has no Legs, but here the Vokes family have the pull over the Mother of Invention—alluding to the high-kicking exploits of Fred Vokes and other members of that engaging and high-spirited family. If pantomime showed signs of decay, the "sacred lamp of Burlesque" was burning brightly at the Gaiety with John Hollingshead as Lampadephoros and the famous quartet—Nellie Farren, Kate Vaughan, Edward Terry and Royce—as his chief hierophants. Miss Vaughan's secession in 1883, chronicled in a graceful tribute, rendered possible the historic question from the bench, "Who is Miss Connie Gilchrist?" but by 1892 she too had quitted the Gaiety to add histrionic lustre to the pages of Debrett. In 1883 Miss Vesta Tilley was playing in pantomime at Drury Lane; in 1884 Mrs. John Wood was singing "His Heart was true to Poll"; in 1886 the inauguration of the O.U.D.S. at Oxford introduced Mr. Bourchier as Feste in Twelfth Night; in 1887 Punch records the début of Miss Violet Vanbrugh.

Ibsen's Pillars of Society, produced at a matinée in July,[Pg 355] 1888, is compared by Punch with a melodrama performed at the "Old Vic" before it became "a sort of frisky Coffee Palace," very much to the disadvantage of Ibsen. In the old play the dialogue was crisp and to the point, in the new it was "hopelessly dull." Punch adds that Mr. William Archer's translation seemed excellent, adding, "But what a pity he ever learned Norwegian!" Ada Rehan, the famous Irish-American actress, made her first appearance in London with Daly's company in the summer of 1890, but Punch, while delighted by her charming vivacity, thought she was already too old to play ingénue parts. Her successes in Shakespearean comedy were to come later.

IBSEN IN BRIXTON

Mrs. Harris: "Yes, William, I've thought a deal about it, and I find I'm nothing but your Doll and Dicky Bird, and so I'm going!"

[Pg 356]

Three familiar names greet us in the notices of the Christmas pantomimes of 1891. Marie Lloyd, Dan Leno and Little Tich all appeared in Humpty Dumpty, but the last-named receives the Benjamin's portion of praise. "Why Marie?" asks Punch, who disliked these unnecessary variants, which have since taken a more eccentric form in "Maudi," "Mai," and so forth.

The Court Theatre was drawing the town with its Triple Bill in the spring of 1892, and Punch did not spare his praise of the "Pantomime Rehearsal" which, with Ellaline Terriss, Decima Moore, Weedon Grossmith and Brandon Thomas in the leading parts, is pronounced to be "about the very funniest thing to be seen in any London theatre." Gilbert's brilliant Hamlet burlesque, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, was for a while included in the bill, and Punch describes it as "an excellent piece of genuine fun." It is all that and more. Gilbert never wrote anything wittier than the passage in which Ophelia discusses the various theories of the Prince's "mentality" and synthesizes them in the conclusion:—

These were stirring years in the realm of music. To take only some of the outstanding events, there was the Wagner Festival at the Albert Hall in 1877, conducted by the composer, which led in due time to something like a revolution in the repertory of grand opera in London; there was the coming of Hans Richter, whose orchestral concerts lent a fresh impetus to the cult of symphonic music already fostered by Manns and Hallé; there were the visits of Rubinstein and Liszt in 1886; the superb performance of Verdi's Otello in 1887 by the Scala Company, with Tamagno and Maurel in the cast; the advent of the de Reszkes and Melba in 1889 and of Paderewski in 1890. Last and assuredly not least, when the test of pleasure and popularity is applied, there was the long and fruitful collaboration of Gilbert and Sullivan which began with Thespis, or the Gods grown Old, in 1871, and continued till nearly the close of the period under review.

All these events and many others came under Punch's[Pg 357] notice, but it must be confessed that his shortcomings as a critic are nowhere so conspicuous as in the domain of music. It is true that in 1875 he expressed a guarded admiration for Lohengrin: he found it good in parts, like the curate's egg. "Though not melodious, it is certainly most musically interesting and abundantly poetical." But the report of his Bayreuth correspondent in 1876 is admittedly a bogus document, compiled from German phrase-books in London, and tells us nothing about the music, for the writer never went to Bayreuth. The Albert Hall Festival is treated much in the same spirit of entirely irresponsible burlesque. Punch is determined at all costs to represent the Festival as a carnival of "Wagnerian waggeries." When it was over he admitted that many who went to scoff remained to praise. "The Rhinegold is a masterpiece," but he, is careful to add "this is not a discovery of mine," and goes on to express his deliberate opinion that the Tetralogy must inevitably be vulgarized by representation on the stage. "Such a mise-en-scène as the Ring demands is impossible," and he turns with obvious relief to discuss Patti in Dinorah and the performance of Orphée aux Enfers at the Alhambra.

In 1882 Punch attended the performances of the Ring, and after four nights "deliberately" said, "Never again with you, Wotan, Siegfried & Co." He found nothing new in the idea of leading motives: it was as old as the oldest pantomime. A few weeks later Punch heard Tristan done at Drury Lane and was bored to extinction:—

Had it been by a young English composer, or an elderly English composer of the Hanwellian School, it would not have been tolerated for half an hour after its commencement. For ourselves, if of two penances we had to choose one, either to sit out a long, dull sermon in a stuffy church on an August afternoon, or to hear one Act of Tristan and Isolda, we should unhesitatingly select the former, where, at all events, there would be the certainty of a tranquil repose, from which no cruel drum, bassoon, or violoncello, but only the snoring of our own nose, could rouse us. That there are occasional snatches of melody is undeniable, but a snatch here and there is not the grasp of a master hand to hold an audience. Judicious selections will always be welcome; but that, taken as a[Pg 358] whole, it is the embodiment of stupendous boredom, might be the verdict of all English opera-goers who delight in the Operas of Rossini, Mozart, Meyerbeer, Gounod, Verdi, Balfe, Wallace, Bizet, and we are not afraid to add, even in these days of æsthetic mysticism, art-vagueness, and higher cultchaw—Bellini.

Punch then proceeds to "guy" the libretto and stage directions and continues:—

This sort of music can never, in our lifetime at least, thank goodness, become popular with the British public. It may, as Dr. Johnson said of the violoncello performance, be wonderful, but we only wish it were impossible. Wagner's lyrical-dramatic music requires no operatic vocalists at all. Let there be a first-rate orchestra, a book of the plot in hands of the audience, and tableaux vivants or dissolving views to illustrate it—as illustration is still necessary for the illiterate. To ourselves, speaking as mere laics in the matter, with a fondness for tune, harmony, and good dramatic situations, it seems that singing and acting are thrown away on such vocal music and such tedious and unsavoury libretti. Richard Wagner's Operas will be remembered when the Barbiere and a few more trifles are forgotten, but not till then.

And then Wagner inconsiderately went and died a few months later, and Punch, who was never given to indulging in war-dances over his dead enemies, printed not exactly a palinode, but a liberal acknowledgment that this "arch-revolutionist" of the brood of "Demiurgus militant" was a considerable figure. Given his temperament and aims, Punch asks:—

[Pg 359]

The splendid Indian summer of Verdi's genius which gave us Aïda, Otello and Falstaff is only partially recognized. When Aïda was produced in 1876 Punch was more interested in Patti and Nicolini, the magnificence of the mounting and the chatter of the boxes, than in the music. In the finale "the brass was everywhere, the voices nowhere." Punch was happier in dealing with Carmen, in which Nietzsche, after he had abandoned Wagnerism, found the exemplification of his dictum "il faut Méditerraniser la musique," and which has won the allegiance of all schools. And it is interesting in view of the wonderful success recently achieved by the revival of The Beggar's Opera to read Punch's eulogies of Sims Reeves, when the famous tenor appeared at Covent Garden as Captain Macheath in 1878. But here again he is more interested in Sims Reeves's singing and acting than in the play or the music:—

It was a treat. But what a stupid play! What a set of sordid, squalid, ruffianly characters, all, except Polly Peachum, prettily played by Madame Cave-Ashton, who obtained more than one encore. The chorus of "Let us take the Road" was very effectively given. I should like to see The Beggar's Opera with a well remodelled plot, an efficient cast, to include, of course, Mr. Sims Reeves (it would be nothing at all without his Captain Macheath) and Madame Cave-Ashton, and produced under such careful stage-management as was shown by Mr. Hare in bringing out Olivia at the Court Theatre. However, for the present, The Beggar's Opera, which, I believe, was the result of a considerable amount of "collaboration," is, as played the other night at Covent Garden, good enough, by way of a musical treat, for Your Representative.

What Punch wished to see forty years ago has been achieved under the inspiring direction of Mr. Nigel Playfair, though not exactly on the lines indicated.

Cherishing an old-fashioned weakness for a tune, Punch naturally deplored the passing of Offenbach, one of the greatest tune-coiners of the century. The memorial lines in October, 1880, are an admirable summary of the qualities which made Offenbach the musical incarnation of the unbridled gaiety of the Second Empire. But it is rather a surprise to find an allusion to "Golden Schneider" in view of Punch's earlier castigation of that ultra-vivacious lady. For the rest Punch[Pg 360] was still true to the tradition expressed in the avowal of the Philistine who said he would rather hear Offenbach than Bach often. Regret of a very different temper inspires the tribute to Jenny Lind, Punch's favourite singer, on her death in 1887. Forty years earlier he had christened her "the Nightingale that sings in Winter," and recognized her unfailing response to all charitable appeals:—

[Pg 361]

THE LATEST FASHION IN MUSIC AT HOME

"By Mendelssohn, is it not, Miss Prigsby?"

"We believe so."

"One of the 'Songs Without Words'?"

"Possibly. We nevah listen to Mendelssohn."

"Indeed! You don't admire his music?"

"We do not."

"May I ask why?"

"Because there are no wrong notes in it!"

(Our gallant colonel is "out of it" again.)

The idols of the operatic world in Punch's earlier days were mainly Italian or trained in Italy. In the period which we have now reached no single nation retained a monopoly of "stars." Madame Nordica, who appeared in 1890, was an American, Madame Melba was Australian-born of Scottish descent, and the two de Reszkes, Jean and Edouard, the chief glories of many recurrent seasons at Covent Garden, were Poles. A hundred years earlier Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, a famous amateur and critic, declared that the French opera singers were excruciating to listen to. In the late 'eighties and 'nineties the best singing was heard from those who had been trained in Paris. The de Reszkes in particular helped to achieve what Punch had declared to be impossible—they made Wagner popular among the fashionable opera-goers by singing his later works as they had never been sung before, turning to them at the zenith of their powers and reputation, a service to art which more self-protective singers have sedulously avoided. Jean de Reszke was great in Faust, Roméo et Juliette, Aïda, Le Prophète, but he was greater as Siegfried and Tristan. And so with his brother Edouard, when his Mephistopheles or his Friar Laurence[Pg 362] are compared with his Wotan, his Hagen or his King Marke. I have spoken elsewhere of the disastrous National Opera House scheme of Mapleson and the fiasco of the Royal English Opera House in Shaftesbury Avenue. Ivanhoe, Sullivan's solitary excursion into the domain of grand opera, which was written for the opening of the last-named building, did not achieve more than a succès d'estime. Punch's notice is friendly but not enthusiastic. When it gave place to the Basoche, he summed up the situation facetiously but shrewdly enough under the heading, "English Opera as She isn't sung":—

It seems impossible to support a Royal English Opera House with its special commodity of English Opera, that is, Opera composed by an Englishman to an Englishman's libretto, and played by English operatic singers. Ivanhoe, a genuine English Opera, by a genuine English Composer (with an Irish name), produced with great éclat, has, after a fair run and lots of favour, been Doylécarté, in order to make room for the Basoche, an essentially French Opera, by a French Composer and Librettist, done, of course, into English, so as to be "understanded of the people." The Basoche has "caught on," and our friends in front, including Composer, Librettist, and Middleman—Druriolanus, who bought it, and Doyly Carty, who bought it of Sir Druri—are all equally pleased and satisfied. Considered as a matter of business, what signifies the nationality as long as the spec pays?—tout est là.

"Druriolanus" was Punch's ingenious agnomen for Augustus Harris, who, beginning as a melodramatic actor, had blossomed into a manager and operatic impresario and was knighted in 1891. It was at the close of the same year that Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana was first produced in England, scored a success which the composer has never succeeded in recapturing, and established the tyranny of the "Intermezzo," which is not even yet overpast. Verga's powerful story of love and revenge, on which the libretto is based, counted for much, but the crude emotional vigour of the score is not to be denied. Punch adored the "Intermezzo," speaks of the "charm" of the music, but says nothing of the plot. The Italian Company in 1891 were only moderately good; Madame Calvé's marvellously tragic impersonation of Santuzza, in the season of 1892, is[Pg 363] inseparably associated in the minds of middle-aged opera-goers with Mascagni's solitary triumph.

AN IRISH MELODY TRANSPLANTED

German Tenor warbles:—

"I'll not leaf zee, sow lone von,

To bine on ze Schtem!

Zins ze lôfly are Szchleebingk,

Coh! szchleeeb sow fiz dem!

Zos ghyntly I schgadder

Zy leafs on the bet,

Vair zy maids of ze karrten

Lie schentless and tet!"

When we turn from grand to comic opera, the names of Gilbert and Sullivan confront us throughout the entire period under review in a light that sheds a still undiminished lustre on native art. Of each of the two partners in this long and fruitful collaboration it may be said, in the often quoted phrase, that if not absolutely great he was great in his genre. Between them they created an entirely new type of light opera. Moreover, it was an entirely English or British product in its spirit and structure, and relied entirely on British performers. Punch welcomed the venture from the outset, and in 1880, in some verses modelled on the Judge's song in Trial by Jury, and anticipating Sullivan's knighthood in 1883, he happily summarizes the career of the composer, with whom, by the way, Burnand had been associated in Cox and Box in 1866:—

[Pg 364]

In 1885, on the occasion of the production of the Mikado, which Punch bracketed with Pinafore as the best of all the series, there are some excellent observations on the dual autocracy exerted to admiration at the Savoy:—

Rarely, if ever, have Composer and Author produced piece after piece under conditions so favourable to success as have Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan at the Savoy. They are their own Managers, the theatre is practically theirs, the Members of the Company, from the soprano and tenor down to the latest novice in the chorus, or among the "extras," depend mainly, if not entirely, upon the Composer and Author for their engagements. This Beaumont and Fletcher of Eccentric Opera can order rehearsals when they choose, can command the scene-painters and property-men, and, what is much more to the point, be obeyed. They have jointly and separately the authority of the Centurion: the Author is the autocrat of the acting and the Savoy stage generally; the Composer is the autocrat of the music, vocal and instrumental.

The Savoy Autocrats

At other theatres an Author may try to assume the autocrat, but, unless he can be absolutely independent, and able to take his piece out of the theatre without damaging his chance of earning a livelihood, the attempt is only a ridiculous and palpable failure. True that times have changed, considerably for the better, since Albert Smith said that "there was only one person in the theatre lower than the call-boy, and that was the Author," yet, in spite of much improvement, a young Dramatist will still sympathize[Pg 365] with the spirit of Albert Smith's observation; and, ordinarily, the most experienced Playwright, if not, as I have said, absolutely independent, has, in almost every instance, to accommodate himself to the exigencies of the theatre, and to the tempers of the Actors. From the moment he has a piece in rehearsal, there is no peace for him on the Stage. He is promised what he will never obtain; he has to accept just what he can get; he has to humour the ideas of others and sacrifice his own; he has to make the best of unintentional mistakes and deliberately intentional alterations; he has to accede to the Manager's date for producing the piece, and its first night of public performance is, in the majority of cases, really and truly only a dressed rehearsal, and, in some cases, it is the first real rehearsal the piece has had.

Now nothing of this sort ought to take place at the Savoy. There Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan have only themselves to please, only themselves and their piece to consider; they are monarchs of all they Savoy—I should say "survey"—they are masters of the situation, and if they allow any piece of theirs to be produced in a hurry, with incomplete appointments, with inappropriate scenery, faulty dresses, or after insufficient rehearsal, on their own heads be it and on no one else's. The Actor-singers are only intelligent puppets in their Showman's hands, and the more faithfully they carry out the instructions given them by their masters, the greater their individual and collective chance of success.

It delights me to see the precision of the action on the Stage of the Savoy, the result of a carefully-thought-out plan and well-regulated drill. The principals have been judiciously selected for the work, and they are suited by the two clever fellow-workers who, having taken their measure to a nicety, give them just what they can do, and no more; and who insist on their original conceptions being executed exactly according to their ideas. The result is that the ensemble is about the most effective thing in London—or in Paris for that matter—because the individuality of the Actor-singer is not destroyed, but is judiciously made use of, and worked up, as valuable material for the character he has to represent.

Patience in 1881 specially appealed to Punch because it was aimed against the æsthetes. His general appreciation of the Savoy Operas was, however, tempered by criticism. For example, he pronounces Iolanthe in 1882 to be "not within a mile of Pinafore and not a patch upon Patience." The Gondoliers in 1890 is placed third in order of excellence after the Mikado and Pinafore. The unfortunate temporary estrangement between the collaborators which led to the severance of[Pg 366] their partnership in the same year, and which was alleged to have grown out of a dispute over a carpet, is treated in "A Chapter of Dickens up to Date," with Gilbert as Mrs. Gamp and Sullivan as Mrs. Prig. Punch's view of the merits of the dispute may be gathered from the fact that he gives the last word to Mrs. Prig, who, after alluding to a tempest in a teapot, observes: "Wich I don't believe there's either rhyme or reason in sech an absurd quarrel!" Yet when the Court Circular of March 9, 1891, recorded the performance at Windsor Castle of The Gondoliers, "a Comic Opera composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan," with full details of the programme, performers, etc., but no mention of Gilbert at all, Punch rubs in this conspicuous absence in his most sarcastic vein.

Mr. D'Oyly Carte, it seems, was presented to the Queen after the performance, and Punch goes on:—

Did R. D'Oyly think of mentioning that "the words" were by W.S.G.? And then it is told how D'Oyly refused to take any payment for the performance. Noble, generous-hearted, large-minded and liberal D'Oyly! Sir Arthur Courtly Sullivan's name was to the Bill, and so his consent to this extra act of generosity may be taken for granted. But what said Sir Brian de Bois Gilbert? By the merry-maskins, but an he be not pleased, dub me Knight Samingo! Will D'Oyly be dubbed Knight? And what sort of Knight? Well, remembering a certain amusing little episode in the more recent history of the Savoy Theatre, why not a "Carpet Knight"?

If Punch kept most of his friendships in good repair, it must be admitted that he also displayed on occasion a positive genius for impish malice.

Among the musical celebrities who visited us in these years Punch had a special word for Joachim, to whom England was almost a second home, and Madame Schumann, whose portrait with that of the great violinist appears in 1881. M. Pachmann's performance at a concert in 1883 is described with more fidelity than reverence:—

Then came a M. Vladimir de Pachmann, who, in consequence of his long hair, and a bulkiness about his waist and coat-tails suggestive of concealed fish-bowls, to be presently produced from under a handkerchief, I at first set down as a Conjurer. He wasn't,[Pg 367] however, being a Pianist of considerable skill, with an overpowering propensity for getting the most out of every note, and listening in rapt admiration to its dying away in the distance, and then slowly raising his left hand as if pronouncing a blessing on the instrument as he went along.

Liszt and Rubinstein (who once said that compared with Liszt all other pianists, including himself, were mere wood-choppers) both visited England in 1886—Rubinstein still in the full possession of his powers, which he displayed in his remarkable cycle of seven historical recitals; Liszt, full of years and honours, but claiming attention as a composer, not as a performer, though he did play once or twice in private. The mention of the performance of his oratorio St. Elizabeth in St. James's Hall comes home to the present writer, who was a humble member of the chorus. Punch's notice is an adroit blending of facetiousness and respect. In his Postscript he observes, "How tired Liszt must be of hearing his own music! Fancy Pears being treated for a whole week to nothing but his own Soap!" I wonder whether Punch knew, what was the fact, that Liszt fell asleep in the performance of his own oratorio. Three months later he died at Bayreuth, having never recovered from the exhaustion caused by the lionizing hospitality of his English admirers. Rubinstein survived his visit for eight years. Punch was not far out in describing him in 1886 as the first player in the world. He was then fifty-seven, and his playing of Beethoven's Op. 57—the Appassionata Sonata—beggared description. Rubinstein used to say that in these recitals he played enough wrong notes to make a symphony; he was at times violent and extravagant and took strange liberties with the text. But here he was Titanic, and Punch's welcome was well deserved, though the critic erred in ranking Rubinstein the composer on the same plane with Rubinstein the performer. It is amusing to read, in the reference to the last recital, that the programme included works by

—such small contemporary deer as Liadoff, Balakireff, Rimsky-Korsakoff, and César Cui. My gracious! What names! Familiar, too, don't they seem? In the same category the patronymic of Tschaikowski rings refreshingly as that of an old friend.

[Pg 368]

The spelling of foreign musicians' names had always been a stumbling block to Punch, and I have revised his versions of two of the composers mentioned above, but by 1886 he had at least learned to spell Liszt correctly.

Hans Richter had shared the duties of conductor at the Wagner Festival of 1877 with the great composer himself. The concerts which made his name a household word in the musical world began in 1879. His leonine appearance and Olympian calm, his wonderful memory, which enabled him to conduct the great masterpieces, classical and modern, without a score; and the dignity and authority of his interpretations soon gained for him an admiration which survived his repudiation in 1914 of all the honours and distinctions conferred on him by the country in which for many years he had made his home. There are still a good many orchestral players amongst us who have a warm corner in their hearts for the "Doctor," and a profound respect for his mastery of the high art of conducting. His quaint sayings are legion, and ought to be collected. One of the best is his rebuke of his band at a rehearsal of the Venusberg music: "Gentlemen, you play it as if you were teetotallers, which you are not."

Punch acclaimed him as a master in 1886, and his tribute is all the more remarkable because it is coupled with an unexpected acknowledgment of the genius of Brahms, whose Fourth Symphony, a very tough nut to crack in those days, is contrasted with the "howling balderdash" of other moderns. Paderewski, who made his first appearance in the spring of 1890, is handsomely extolled. His first concert, which the present writer attended, only attracted a meagre audience, but the effect on his hearers was electrifying and the crescendo of popularity was immediate and abiding. Punch, of course, made puns on his name, but in these years he was so consistent an offender that he might very well have appropriated the old doggerel confession:—

[Pg 369]

London has never been free from the plague of prodigies, but the epidemic was acute in 1888, and Punch treated the matter in a style which has a strangely familiar ring—when allowance is made for the usual puns:—

That there is a regular flood of these musical prodigies threatening to sweep over every concert-hall platform, there is not a doubt; and while the public rush in applauding crowds to welcome them, it is not easy to see where it is to stop. As long as the fever lasts, their parents, whatever their weight, may be counted upon to keep hurrying them to the "scales," and set them down to the key-board practising till they are often literally laid on their Bachs. Meantime, while the infants struggle, it is becoming a serious question for the regular adult performers, who will find their occupation gone, and certainly not know what to do with themselves, if the former are to have it all their own way. For them, whatever the public may think of it, the matter will undoubtedly be no mere "child's play," and they will surely hail any signs indicating that this recent determined invasion of the concert-room by the nursery is at all on the wane, with every expression of unfeigned delight.

The subject is handled more judiciously in one of the admirable "Voces Populi" series; best of all in Du Maurier's "Happy Thought":—

Mrs. Triplets: "And how is your concert getting on, Herr Pfeiffer?"

Eminent Violinist: "Pudiful, as far as de Brogramme is goncerned—Beethoven—Schumann—Brahms! But ze dickets don't zell!! Ach! Py ze vay, Mrs. Triplets, you don't happen to haf zoch a zing as a Moozicalish Infantile Venomenon apout you zat you could lend me for ze occasion. Ja? Gonzertina! Pantscho! Pones! Gomb! Anyzing vill blease ze Pritish Boblic, if ze berformer is onter vife years olt!"

Punch was in his element when Eduard Strauss—son of Johann the elder, and brother of the most famous of all the Viennese Waltz-Kings, Johann Strauss of the Blue Danube and the Fledermaus—brought his band to the Inventions Exhibition in 1885. In these days waltzing was still popular, and on the page overleaf I give two phases in its evolution as recorded by the pen of Du Maurier. Eduard Strauss wrote many delightful waltzes, and was an inspiring if somewhat exuberant conductor. Punch, who had sat under Jullien in[Pg 370] his boyhood, compares the methods of the two, and pronounces the performance of dance-music by Strauss's band to be a revelation. "It unvulgarizes even the polka, and, from time to time, imparts an elevating tone to that ungraceful and prosaic dance." Finally Punch rewrites C. F. Adams's "Leedle Yawcob Strauss" in honour of the Waltz-King:—

The cult of Berlioz, started by Hallé at Manchester in 1880, was now in full swing, and his Faust figures constantly in the programmes of choral concerts and festivals, with Henschel and Santley (who had abandoned opera for oratorio), Mary Davies and Edward Lloyd in the principal rôles. Punch did not overlook the provincial festivals in the days when the standard quartet was made up of Mmes. Albani and Patey—whose likeness to Handel was noted by Samuel Butler—Edward Lloyd and Santley. He was present at Leeds in 1886 when Sir Arthur Sullivan conducted his Golden Legend, and Stanford his exhilarating Revenge. Sullivan is saluted as "the[Pg 372] English Offenbach," a somewhat two-edged compliment, though meant sincerely. At Gloucester, in 1889, Punch praises the music of Parry's Judith, but damns the libretto: "Punch and Judith can never agree." No subject, sacred or profane, was secure from Punch's puns. The Golden Legend and The Prodigal Son, both by Sullivan, were included in the programme at Gloucester, and are turned to characteristic account in the following comment:—

The Golden Legend is a traditional tale of a fortune amassed at Gloucester by an hotel-keeper during the Festival week; while The Prodigal Son is the sad story of a young man who, in spite of his father's warnings, lived an entire week at a Gloucester Inn.

[Pg 371]

WHAT OUR WALTZING IS COMING TO

Distinguished Foreigner: "Voulez-vous me faire l'honneur de Danser cette Valse avec moi, Meess Matilde?"

Miss Matilda (an accomplished waltzer): "Avec plaiseer, Monsieur. Quelle est voter Forme—le 'Lurch de Liverpool,' le 'Dip de Boston,' ou le 'Kick de Ratcliffe Highway'?"

(We have feebly tried to represent the "Ratcliffe Highway Kick," which at present is only danced in the very best society, and confers a great air of distinction on the performers.)

STUDIES IN EVOLUTION

This is not an example of the Struggle for Existence—it is merely "The Valse," as we have lately seen it danced at Suburban Subscription Balls, etc.

The Royal College of Music was founded in 1882. George Grove, the first director, the "dear 'G'" of countless friends in all walks of life, was an old ally, and the venture, in which the Prince of Wales took from the very outset an active and energetic part, received Punch's benediction, though an element of genial chaff is not absent in the picture of the Prince conducting his orchestra of royal and noble minstrels, with the Duke of Edinburgh as first violin. Punch showed a truer insight into the potentialities of the new institution when he suggested that it might help to solve the problem of National Opera. By its annual operatic performances so admirably directed for some thirty years by Sir Charles Stanford, and by the training of first-class instrumentalists and singers, the R.C.M. has done an amount of spade-work which has more than fulfilled Punch's prediction.

On the educative value of the music-halls Punch in earlier years had maintained an attitude of scepticism, not to say hostility. He had been careful to draw invidious distinctions between the vulgarity of music-hall comedians and the entertainments provided by the German Reeds and Corney Grain, in whom he recognized "one in ten thousand" and a true follower of John Parry, the father and perhaps the greatest of all musical entertainers, whose vis comica, allied to unfailing good taste and reinforced by remarkable musicianship, had won the admiration of Lablache and Malibran. I have noted elsewhere Punch's disparagement of the efforts to improve the[Pg 373] music-halls. He displays a certain lukewarm approval of the prospectus of the "Coffee Music Hall Company, Limited," issued in 1879 under the auspices of Lord and Lady Cowper, Mr. and Mrs. Cowper-Temple, Sir Charles Trevelyan and Canon Duckworth; the names of Mr. and Mrs. German Reed and Sir Jules Benedict, however, inspired him with more confidence than their aristocratic co-patrons.

The popular songs of the hour seldom failed to attract Punch's vigilant censure. In 1887 "Two Lovely Black Eyes" enchanted the million. It was well parodied in the series of "Popular Songs Resung" by "Miss Virginia Bowdler" in 1891, and in 1889 Punch published his excellent "Model Music-Hall Songs." The song that broke his heart in 1891 was "Hi-tiddly-hi-ti"; in 1892 a "Melancholy Muser" is plunged into despair by the "Ta-ra-ra" boom:—

The amazing popularity of Mr. Albert Chevalier's coster songs is acknowledged in 1892, but Punch hardly does justice to the talents of the creator of what was virtually a new and specialized type of comic song heavily larded with sentiment.

[Pg 374]

HEROES AND WORTHIES

In the course of these chapters mention has not infrequently been made of the homage paid by Punch to his special heroes and heroines. Memorial verses had always been a feature of the paper, and in the beginning of this period they assumed formidable dimensions: at its close there was a welcome reaction towards brevity; but in the following anthology I have not always quoted these tributes in full, preferring to extract the stanzas or lines which seemed to me to come nearest the mark in truth of portraiture or felicity of expression. Thus, while other features of Charles Kingsley's work in life and letters are noted in the verses printed on his death in 1875, his achievement in the domain of historical romance is much the most happily treated:—

To 1878 belong the lines on the "Christian athlete" Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand and afterwards of Lichfield:—

The epitaph on Lord John Russell, who died three weeks after his golden wedding in 1878, applauds his consistency but is not memorable, though he is well described as a fighter for freedom "in spite of what was done in Freedom's name."

The lines on the great John Lawrence in July, 1879, contain one good stanza:—

[Pg 375]

Rowland Hill, always one of Punch's special heroes, was buried in the Abbey in September of the same year. Here Punch's best tribute is in prose, when he speaks of him as

One of the greatest benefactors to his country and to the civilized world that it ever produced; now inhabiting an abode among the band of departed worthies who in this life were heroes and saints and bards of the better sort:—

Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes.

The verses on Dean Stanley in July, 1881, are not quoted in his Life by Lord Ernle, so I make no excuse for printing them here:—

Punch's most generous acknowledgment of the genius of Charles Darwin was published in 1877:—

THREE ILLUSTRATIONS OF A THEORY

When Darwin died in April, 1882, Punch had entered on a phase in which the claims of science to solve the riddle of the universe excited his misgiving, and his obituary lines are of a non-committal order, save for one admirable couplet:—

There are no reserves in his valediction to Henry Fawcett in November, 1884:—

Another statesman of equal fearlessness and independence was W. E. Forster; but here the whole virtue of Punch's salutation in April, 1886, is summed up in the two lines:—

I pass over the "In Memoriam" lines on the good Lord Shaftesbury in the previous year. They render full justice to his splendid and life-long service on behalf of the "helpless thralls of trade" and the "all unchildlike children" "victims of modern Molochs," "all who creep or fall on poverty's rough road or crime's steep slope"; but they are otherwise laboured and diffuse. Sincerity is no guarantee of literary excellence. Punch shows to greater advantage in the lines on Newman in August, 1890, who is lauded, not as a great Cardinal nor as one

[Pg 377]

Two statesmen, widely differing in birth, temperament and character, are commemorated in 1891. Of Lord Granville Punch writes:—

Mr. W. H. Smith was a much harder subject for eulogy, for he was not a "dæmonic genius," an orator, or a romantic figure, but simply a good plain honest servant of his country. Yet Punch's verses, if not inspired by high poetic rapture, are something more than adequate in their appreciation of Mr. W. H. Smith's solid qualities:—

To turn from grave to gay, I may round off this collection with two zoological elegies. When "Jumbo," the famous elephant at the Zoo, whose purchase by Barnum and departure from London had provoked a grotesque explosion of sentimentality, was killed by a railway accident in America in 1885, Punch recorded his decease in the following epigram:—

The elegy on Charles Jamrach, the celebrated naturalist and menagerie-keeper of St. George's-in-the-East, who died in September, 1891, at the age of seventy-six, was better deserved. Charles Jamrach, the most notable of the dynasty which for three-quarters of a century enjoyed a practical monopoly of the trade in wild animals in this country, was a "stout fellow": Frank Buckland describes his single-handed struggle with a runaway tiger in 1857; he appears in the D.N.B.; and Punch, in his lines on "The King of the Beasts," after describing the lamentations of the animals at the Zoo, ends up on a note of genuine regret:—

Printed in England by Cassell & Company, Limited, London, E.C.4.[Pg 379]

A complete Index will be found in the Fourth Volume.

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