Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 3 of 4.—1874-1892

"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: —

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!

Classics v. Commerce

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 "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: —

Oh feed me not on mythic lore,But Science and the Modern Fact;Teach me Electric Fires to store,The difference 'twixt "Bill" and "Act."Why should a Cockney care a "cuss"For Homer or for Æschylus?For who are they? But what art thou,My Country? On thy fertile shoreThe heroic lyre is tuneless now;To scheme for dividends, dig for ore,These are the things we hold divine,Not Homer's long-resounding line.

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: —

Half withdrawn in ways ascetic,Half with modern notions stirring;Half athletic, half æsthetic,Neither fish, flesh nor red herring.

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 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 Value of Modern Languages

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 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!

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)Born in Arcadia! Ay, he knewPan's cloven foot-print on the dew,And heard, the mystic woods across,Aigipodē, Philokrotos,"The bright-haired god of pastoral,"4With pipings to his wood-nymphs call.Yes, but a nobler sound there came —The clarion of imperial Fame,By which our greatest are withdrawnFrom the serene Arcadian lawn.Derby and Gladstone felt the breezeThat urged their sails to Homer's seas;Yet in the Senate found their fate,And drank the hot wine of debate.Perish the thought that England's realmShould e'er have dullards at the helm!Far from us be the stolid serfWho ne'er has trod Arcadian turf,Nor heard, amid the glimmering trees,Pan's happy Orestiades.

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.

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 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": —

Here is an Institution doomed to scareThe furious devotees of Laissez Faire.What mental shock, indeed, could prove immenserTo Mumbo Jumbo – or to Herbert Spencer?Free Books? Reading provided from the Rates?Oh, that means Freedom's ruin, and the State's!Self-help's all right – e'en if you rob a brother —But human creatures must not help each other!The "Self-made Man," whom Samuel Smiles so praises,Who on his fellows' necks his footing raises,The systematic "Sweater," who sucks wealthFrom toiling crowds by cunning and by stealth —He is all right, he has no maudlin twist,He does not shock the Individualist!But rate yourselves to give the poor free reading?The Pelican to warm her nestlings bleeding,Was no such monument of feeble folly.Let folks alone, and all will then be jolly.Let the poor perish, let the ignorant sink,The tempted tumble, and the drunkard drink!Let – no, don't let the low-born robber rob,Because – well, that would rather spoil the job.If footpad-freedom brooked no interference,Of Capital there might be a great clearance;But, Wealth well-guarded, let all else alone,'Tis thus our race hath to true manhood grown:To make the general good the common care,Breaks through the sacred law of 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."

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 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.

Gladstone on Vatican Decrees

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 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."

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: —

The cleric mind in quarrels seems to revel.Devil or none, some clerks will play the Devil.

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 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,

Will the great Lord Cardinal kindly make knownOn what day, if any, our souls are our own?

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: —

An Atheist's "The Fool" – the Psalmist saith:Will France risk such a brood of Fools?Irreverent youth, with neither Hope nor Faith,Will be the product of your Godless Schools.

Sunday Observance

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

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 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.