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

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 Camp10 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 that, when Walt Whitman died in 1892, he indited what was virtually a palinode: —

Whilst hearts are generous and woods are green,He shall find hearers, who, in a slack timeOf puny bards and pessimistic rhyme,Dared to bid men adventure and rejoice.His "yawp barbaric" was a human voice;The singer was a man.

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: —

Two men whose loss all Englishmen must rue,True servants of the Studio and the State.No manlier Churchman Trollope ever drewThan History will portray in gentle Tait.

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: —

Well, well, omnivorous are the Shades;But seldom hath that Stygian scullerOared o'er a gayer ghost than "Blayds,"11Whose transit leaves the dull world duller.

Literary Controversies

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 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: —

Quarterly pay was dear to manSince or ever the world began,Chances vanish, and ventures cross,Even sometimes for bards like Gosse;Since or ever the world began.Quarterly pay was dear to man.But there's a something in quarterly payWhich doesn't please all men alway!Less than half-truth is a quarter-lie,Bound to be found out by-and-by;Since or ever the world began,Quarterly pay has been strict with man.Play straight and honest – for, if you don't,The public meed 'tis receive you won't;The mutual arts of puff and praise,Even in these degenerate days,Sink at last in the scorn they raise;Since or ever the world began,Quarterly pay has been straight with man.Poet Dobson shall claim on highFrom Poet Gosse immortality!And Poet Dobson shall shed the same,No doubt, upon Poet Gosse's name —While a weak world wonders whence they came,And never a weakling dares deny(For there's no such thing as puffery)To each his immortality!Yet Quarterlies dare to say, for once,That dunce's works are reviewed by dunce.Shocking! Anonymous donkeys speakDonkey's dislike of a cultured clique —("Fudge," by Goldsmith; but now called "cheek") —Yet since or ever the world began,Quarterly reckoning's good for man!

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 Salutes Mr. Kipling

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 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 POETAir: – "O Ruddier than the Cherry."O Rudyard, in this sherry,I drink your very, veryGood health. I wouldThat write I couldLike Kipling, sad or merry.(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." 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: —

Lovers of Browning may laugh and grow fat again,Rid of the jargon of Furnivallese.

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: —

There was a poor poet named Clough;Poet Swinburne declares he wrote stuff —Ah, well, he is dead!'Tis the living are fed,By log-rollers on butter and puff!

Parodies and "Limericks"

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 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: —

I am she whose nameless naked name to utterThe strong are weak;The suet-sprung soft sweet sister of bad butter,Yet rid of reek.I, that, molten o'er the fires beneath me burning,From void of vat,Uprise supremer, in this my creamless churning,First-born of fat!

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: —

Il était un homme de MadèreQui cassa le nez à son père.On demandait "Pourquoi?"Il répondit "Ma foi!Vous n'avez pas connu mon père!"Il existe une Espinstère à Tours,Un peu vite, et qui porte toujoursUn ulsteur peau-de-phoque,Un chapeau bilicoque,Et des nîcrebocqueurs en velours.

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!"

Russel and Delane

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 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: —

The shadows that make up our night,Were growing thin for him to fight,But still he fights, we think with pride,Our battle from the other side!Long in our mêlée will be missedThe mace of Russel's mighty fist,That struck and, wasting nought in sound,Buried its blow without rebound.

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: —

Rest in thy grave, that knew no resting here,Editor without equal, strenuous soul,Staunch friend, despising favour, scorning fear,Far-seeing, forward, cleaving to thy goal.He left a different scene from that he found,And had a large part in all change he saw,No slave, nor leader, of his time, but boundAbreast of it to keep its glass from flaw.

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 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.

Punch and Æstheticism

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: —

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 Pain and other similar mock-hysterical imitations of the "Mighty Masters." Victor Hugo, Ouida, Swinburne, Burne-Jones, have much to answer for.

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.

Whistler and Ruskin

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": —

Whistler is "Niminy-Piminy,"Funny, fantastic, and quaint.Yet he's so clever that Jimmy nighMakes men believe he can paint.What of his works? Why, each etching isOnly at present half done,And on the copper the sketching isSimply a wild piece of fun.Vainly the Critics will sit on him,Why such a butterfly slay?No one can e'er put the bit on him —Whistler's the wag of the day.

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 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: —

Those women, ah, those women! They were white,Blue, green, and grey – all hues, save those of nature,Bony of frame, and dim, and dull of sight,And parlous tall of stature.Ars longa est– aye, very long indeed,And long as Art were all these High-Art ladies,And wan and weird; one might suppose the breedA cross 'twixt earth and Hades.If poor Persephone to the Dark KingHad children borne, after that rape from Enna,Much so might they have looked, when sufferingFrom too much salts and senna.Many their guises, but no various graceOr changeful charm relieved their sombre samenessOf form contorted, and cadaverous face,And limp lopsided lameness.

Homage to Cruikshank

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: —