Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 4 of 4.—1892-1914

Oh, self-elected shepherds, with your crooks,Fighting, while round your folds the wolves are creeping! —Pedagogues wrangling o'er your lesson-books,Whilst your wrath rages human love sits weeping!If of "a common Christianity"Ye were but practical and patient teachers,In Education's task ye might agree.Now sense is asking, "Who shall teach our teachers?"

Inexperienced and Anxious Young Mistress: "The new housemaid, Maria, is a Roman Catholic; but I hope you will not allow any religious controversy in the servants' hall."

Cook (with much dignity): "You needn't have any fear, my lady. In really 'igh-class families religion is never mentioned!"

The Abortive Bill of 1896

Punch's comments foreshadowed the conflict that raged over the Education Bill of 1896, which had been framed to redeem the pledge given by the Government to aid voluntary schools. Denounced by the Opposition as a deliberate attempt to shatter the school-board system and promote the interest of a particular sect, while, on the other hand, all sects were agreed that the proposed aid was inadequate; swamped by amendments – 1,238, to be precise, had been placed on the paper when the House met in June after the Whitsuntide Recess – the Bill was abandoned in Committee without exciting any real regret from any party. Punch chronicles its withdrawal without any comment, but his silence cannot be interpreted as expressing satisfaction with the existing régime. In 1899 he falls foul of Sir John Gorst, then the acting head of the Board of Education, for his alleged intention of entrusting the teaching of all other children to half-educated pupil teachers.

The progress and passage of the much-discussed Education Act of 1902 revived Punch's distrust of the so-called "friends" of the human child. He shows Mr. Balfour on a bicycle steering a perilous and devious course beset with obstacles, and develops the theme in a fable, based on that of the Old Woman going to Market, in which Lord Hugh Cecil, Mr. Bryce, Archbishop Temple, Mr. Lloyd George and Sir William Harcourt are brought in to represent the various and conflicting elements in the struggle. Punch's moral is that "if you don't all hurt each others' feelings a good deal, there's no chance of getting the Education Bill through Parliament." The truth of this comment was abundantly shown by the vehement controversy which arose over the famous Kenyon-Slaney amendment, limiting the right of an incumbent to give religious instruction in a Church School – a provision which infuriated the High Anglicans and was reluctantly acquiesced in by moderate Churchmen. Per contra Dr. Percival, the Bishop of Hereford, who voted with the Opposition, declared that the Bill had given great strength to the Opposition to the Church in the country and tended to destroy its spiritual influence. And Lord Rosebery, while not in favour of the refusal of Nonconformists to pay rates, confessed that if they submitted tamely to the enactments of the Bill they would cease to exist politically.

A Stepping-Stone Ministry

Punch had no sympathy with the "passive resistance" movement, and when Mr. Lloyd George in 1904 advocated the closing of all the elementary schools in Wales as a protest against the Education Act, he regarded him as more desirous to serve party ends than to save the souls of the young. In 1906 it was the turn of the Liberals to redeem their pledges, and Mr. Birrell was in charge of the measure. Punch accordingly depicted him as a schoolmaster saying to the Act of 1902, "My boy, this [the cane he is holding] can't hurt you more than it's going to hurt me." Punch evidently had no love for the new Bill, but his satire is impartially levelled at the irreconcilable sectarian differences of the supporters and antagonists of the measure. All this wrangling had nothing to do with the education of children. The gradual and inevitable transformation of the measure by the end of the year is happily hit off in an adaptation from "Alice in Wonderland," with Mr. Balfour as the Cheshire Cat and Mr. Birrell as Alice carrying what had been a baby, but was now a pig, as the Cheshire Cat expected.

"I am glad to see you come so regularly to our evening services, Mrs. Brown."

"Yus. Yer see, me 'usband 'ates me goin' hout of a hevening, so I does it to spite 'im."

The Education Office in these years was the great jumping-off ground for aspirants to higher Ministerial office, and was occupied by a succession of "transient and (sometimes) embarrassed phantoms." Mr. Birrell quitted Whitehall to govern Ireland from Overstrand, and in 1908 Punch, in his cartoon on the tardy compromise achieved by the Church and Nonconformity, showed "Master Runciman," with his Bill, being carried safely through the waters of strife by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Dr. Clifford.

Mother (visiting son at preparatory school): "Well, my darling!"

Son: "I say, Mother, don't look so ghastly pleased before all these fellows."

In 1905, according to the Scotsman (quoted by Punch), the prospective Unionist candidate for Berwick maintained before a meeting of electors that "the only way to deal with the religious question was to allow each denomination to provide religious teaching in school hours for the parents of such children as desired it." The italics are provided by Punch, who threw further light on the need for this "vicarious religion" in an illustrated dialogue published in 1911: —

Schoolmistress: "And am I to give the child religious instruction?"

Mother: "I don't care wot yer do so long as yer don't bash 'er abaht the 'ead."

John Bull, Junior

Throughout this period Punch was perhaps more concerned with the youngest than with the younger generation – with the progress of the child than with that of the ingenuous youth. Yet he was not neglectful of the changes going on in public and preparatory schools. The picture of "John Bull, Junior," in 1905 represents the human boy of the public-school type as still primarily interested in pastime: —

For instance, his industry's tirelessIn getting his Wisden by rote;But of Signor Marconi (the wireless)He takes the most negligent note.That the primary use of the cableIs cricket, he's free to maintain —He associates cricket with Abel,And bats with the mention of Cain.He can't tell the whereabouts clearlyOf Constantinople or Prague,But he'll talk by the hour about Brearley,He'll tell you the birthplace of Haigh.He cannot be sure if the Hooghly'sA river, a town, or a hill;But then upon Bosanquet's "googlies"A volume he'd easily fill.

This was before the aeroplane and the motor had infected schoolboys with a passion for mechanics, and the view expressed is borne out by a suggestion made in 1907 by Sir J. J. Thomson, and duly noted in Punch, that boys should go to school in holiday time and during term time should "stay at home and learn something." A year earlier Punch had very properly laid his finger on a blot in the school system – the inadequate salaries of assistant masters. In "The Worm Turns" he had enlarged on the protest which one of the number had registered in the Westminster Gazette. It was all very well, as "Kappa" had done in the columns of that paper, to abuse schoolmasters, but what could you expect at the price when, at the best preparatory schools, £120 a year, resident, was considered adequate pay for a first-class man, and things were not much better in the public schools. Hence Punch's versified gloss, in which the much-maligned assistant master sums up the matter thus: —

Ah, well, it may be we are all past praying for,But in this world one gets what one is paying for,(That seems a fairly obvious remark);And I for one, although exposed so crushingly,Still mean to draw my salary unblushingly —That of a third-rate clerk.

Young Hopeful: "'Shamefully ignorant'! Of course I'm ignorant, Father. But then why did you send me to a Public School? I always look upon a fellow who's learnt anything at a Public School as a self-educated man!"

Punch clearly admitted that all was not well with a system in which undue prominence was attached to the athletic prowess, and in 1909 he pilloried an advertisement for a schoolmaster which had appeared in the Spectator: "Rugby Blue required. Football is the chief subject, but elementary Latin, English and Mathematics are also looked for." On the other hand, Punch was no believer in the commercializing of our public schools. When Lord Rosebery in 1896 had said that "an inquiry by Chambers of Commerce into the progress of technical and commercial education in Germany would make our hair stand on end," Punch showed him as the Fat Boy in Pickwick saying, "I wants to make yer flesh creep." And when, in the fateful year 1914, a "Commercial Side," on lines already laid down in many secondary schools of a different type, was started at Bradfield College, Punch sought to reduce the plan to an absurdity by an imaginative account of its working.

The Headmaster of Rugby is reported to have said at the recent Conference on School Diet that "while adults should rise from the table hungry, children should reach a sense of repletion before rising."

House-Master (with pride, to Parent): "Then with regard to food: we feed our boys to repletion five times a day, and our chef's puddings have no equal in any school in the kingdom."

School Diet

As regards the feeding of boys at school, the change from the Spartan régime of the previous generation can be vividly illustrated from the pages of Punch. Down to the close of the Victorian age, hampers were, if not an absolute necessity, at any rate a welcome supplement to the frugal diet provided at most schools. In 1899 Punch supported the continuance of hampers in some ironical verses inspired by a letter in the Daily Chronicle from a schoolmaster's wife. The good lady had complained of the effect of Tuck upon the ethics of schoolboys, and advocated ordinary school diet. Punch at the time regarded this as a counsel of stoical perfection utterly wasted on the ordinary human boy. A very different note was sounded by the Headmaster of Rugby in 1912, who was reported to have said at the Conference on School Diet that "while adults should rise from the table hungry, children should reach a sense of repletion before rising." Accordingly Punch published a picture of a mother with an alarmingly obese small boy interviewing a house-master who proudly remarks: "Then as to food, we feed our boys to repletion five times a day, and our chef's puddings have no equal in any school in the Kingdom." This was an exaggeration so far as the public schools were concerned, but it was fair satire of the sumptuousness of the fashionable and expensive preparatory school of pre-war days. There the pendulum had swung to the opposite extreme from the meagre diet of the 'seventies, when there was no luxury at preparatory schools and at many of the public schools the feeding was a scandal.

On the new relations that had sprung up between boys and masters – the "elder brother" theory – I do not find any notable mention in Punch. I suspect him of adhering to the old view that it was a far higher compliment to a master to describe him as a "just beast" than "popular." The decline of the classical side is touched on, while the continued inefficiency of instruction in modern languages is delightfully satirized in the late Mr. F. H. Townsend's picture of a young lord of creation, the centre of an adoring group of small sisters. "Now Guy," says his mother, "tell us about the school. Is everything all right?" "Oh, yes, Mother – except one thing." "My darling! What is it?" "Well, I wish you hadn't got us that French nurse to teach us the right pronunciation; it makes the other fellows laugh so." Punch's picture was true of a time now rapidly passing away, and furnishes a valuable comment on the solution of a century-old problem. The French master, generally a refugee in the old days, was never accorded a proper status and very seldom recognized as one of themselves by his colleagues. He was generally poor, and he was a standing proof of the saying of the Latin satirist that there is nothing more cruel about poverty than the fact that it makes people ridiculous. Also nine times out of ten he was unable to keep order; so that in the fullness of time headmasters found themselves confronted by this dilemma. They had to choose between foreigners with a correct accent who could not maintain discipline, and natives with a bad accent who could. And in pre-war days they often decided in favour of the latter.

Smithson Junior (as the homily ends and the real business is about to start): "Please, sir, is it sterilized?"

Commerce at the Universities

Punch viewed the multiplication of universities with acquiescence rather than enthusiasm. He had been, as we have seen, a severe critic of academic obstructives at Oxford and Cambridge, but he was entirely opposed to their reconstruction on purely utilitarian lines. In his view there was room for universities of different types; to standardize them would be a blunder, almost a crime. So when a school of brewing was established at Birmingham, he gave a forecast of Oxford in the year 2000 a. d., completely commercialized, with the Ashmolean transformed into the University Co-operative Stores. In 1901 a daily paper had said that, compared with the University of Birmingham, Oxford must seem hopelessly out of date. Punch rejoined in a masque in which the claims of the old and new universities are reviewed and contrasted, but the last word is left to the Oxford chorus: —

Out of date and useless we,Commerce is beyond our ken —Let us thank the gods we beTwenty Oxford men.

Mr. Andrew Carnegie's gift of £2,000,000 to the Scottish universities in the same year is eulogized in the cartoon of "The Macmillion," but the prose comment, in which the extensions of the scheme are foreshadowed, is not lacking in an element of irony.

Mr. Rhodes's historic bequest to Oxford is discussed in an imaginary letter from a Cambridge to an Oxford don. The Cambridge don ridicules the notion that it would revolutionize Oxford, convert it into the University of the Empire, or transform the hoary old home of lost causes into a realization of the ideals of young barbarians from the bounding prairie or of the pipe-sucking beer-nurtured students of the Fatherland. The new-comers would find their level and, if really decent fellows, would do well enough. "Oxford will still remain Oxford, and that, at any rate, we may be thankful for." Nor did the Cambridge man anticipate any serious change in inter-'Varsity relations: —

As to ourselves at Cambridge, why, I fancy we shall be able to rub along quite comfortably, thank you. If I may use a commercial expression, we've got our own line of Australians and Canadians and Americans, and even of Afrikanders, and I think we shall be able to continue business at the old shop in the old style without any of the new-fangled additions that Mr. Rhodes has conferred upon Oxford. I'll wager that when fifty years are past we shall still be able to meet you on the river, at cricket, at football, nay, even at chess and billiards, on the same terms of average equality. And in after life we shall still manage to compete.

This letter, by the way, was virtually a rejoinder to a set of verses, published a few weeks earlier, in which Punch indulged in a fantastic forecast of the results of the invasion of the Rhodes scholars – including an entire revision of the system of examinations in accordance with the terms of Mr. Rhodes's will. The Craven would be awarded for manliness and the Ireland for muscle: —

Then at last shall Oxford Greats menReally be Imperial statesmen.

The sequel has shown that the views ascribed to the Cambridge don were much nearer the mark.

The Sleeping Beauty Oxford University.

The Fairy Prince Lord Curzon.

The Chancellor (after reading aloud his "Memorandum"): "Awake, adorable dreamer!"

The Awakening of Oxford

In 1904 Punch ranged himself unfalteringly on the side of compulsory Greek. Oxford had decided to retain it, and Punch, garbed as a Hellenic sage, appeals to Cambridge not to be outdone in loyalty to the old faith by her sister. It is hard to avoid reading into the cartoon "Breaking the Charm" in 1909 more than Punch meant to express. Lord Curzon, as the Fairy Prince, is seen, with his Memorandum on University Reform, appealing to the Sleeping Beauty in Matthew Arnold's phrase, "Awake, adorable dreamer!" Of course, the "adorable dreamer" was bound to be pictorially represented by a woman, but recent concessions have lent a special significance to the awakening. Strange to say, the most powerful and eloquent impeachment of the intrusion of women into Oxford comes from the New World; from the pen of the most brilliant of American essayists – Mr. Paul Elmer More. "With petticoats," he writes of Oxford, "came the world and the conventions of the world; manners were softened, the tongue was filed, angles of originality were ironed out; the drawing-room conquered the cloister."

Punch's practical abandonment of the rôle of religious controversialist was noticed in the previous volume. In the period under review references to the churches are for the most part confined to the part they played in connexion with the Education Bills already mentioned. The echoes of the "No Popery" campaign had so far died down that, on the publication in 1898 of Mr. Wilfrid Ward's review of Cardinal Wiseman's life, Punch's notice was not merely sympathetic but laudatory. "The storm that arose in England on his return from Rome to England with the rank of Cardinal was sufficient to have blown a punier man clean off the island. The Cardinal stood four square to it and lived it down." This is a notable tribute from Punch, who had blown and stormed with the best of the Cardinal's assailants. As for the now forgotten but once notorious "Kensitite" demonstrations, Punch's attitude is seen in his advertisement printed in the same year: —

To Prize-Fighters and others.– Wanted, MUSCULAR CHRISTIANS to act as sidesmen; used to mêlées and capable of using their fists. Liberal terms. Free doctor. Pensions in case of personal injury. Apply, stating qualifications, to High Church Clerical Agency, Kensiton, W.

A propos of muscular Christians, in 1900 Punch mentions that a country curate had recently received notice to quit because though unexceptionable in other respects, his vicar declared that "what this parish really needs is a good fast bowler with a break from the off." Modern clerical methods of acquiring popularity were satirized in 1905. A Congregational minister had taken part in a theatrical performance, and Punch gave a burlesque account of a bishop appearing at a music-hall in a travesty of Hamlet for the benefit of a Decayed Curates' Fund.

Anti-Clericalism in France

Bishops and deans have done wonderful things of late years, but this particular forecast remains fortunately unfulfilled hitherto. To 1906 belongs one of the few cartoons in this period in which the relations of Church and State are directly referred to. For this was the year in which the French Government cancelled the Concordat and laid an interdict on the Religious Orders. The policy found no favour from Punch. In "The Triumph of Democracy" he showed a French priest, a dignified figure, standing outside a doorway guarded by a French soldier, and bearing the notice: "République Française. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Entrée interdite au Clergé."

Hostess: "And do you really believe in Christian Science?"

Visitor: "Well, you see, I've been getting rather stouter lately, and it's such a comfort to know that I really have no body!"

Sabbatarianism gave Punch little or no chance, save for a mild protest against the action of the L.C.C. with regard to the Queen's Hall Concerts in 1898. The change is accurately reflected in the opening lines: —

Ah! County C., why stop our glee?For bigotry is dead;The broader mind can nowhere findRemotest cause to dreadAn instant fall of scruples allIf Sunday's gloom should flee;We're all agreed in word and deed,Except the County C.

Punch's occupation as an anti-Sabbatarian was practically gone by the end of the last century. Bishops had ceased to provoke his satire by their opulence, though the balance-sheet, issued by the Bishop of London in 1905 to prove how hard it was to make both ends meet, excited some good-humoured raillery. Christian Science Punch left severely alone, save for an occasional negligible or oblique reference. His last and most forcible intervention in religious controversy was provoked by the action of the Bishop of Zanzibar in protesting against the administration of the Holy Communion to non-Anglican members. In the cartoon "The Black Man's Burden" in January, 1914, Punch drew two negroes singing as a duet "Why do de Christians rage?" and this scathing comment undoubtedly reflected the views of the great majority of moderate Churchmen at home as well as missionaries and colonial administrators abroad.

I have spoken elsewhere of Punch's share in the Dreyfus controversy, and may add that while laudably free from anti-Semitic partisanship, he did not refrain from satirizing the ostrich-like attitude of the Jews in transition who thought that the signs of race could be obliterated by a change of name.

Reverence and admiration in full measure inspire the tribute to the wise and sagacious Leo XIII, when he died in 1903: —

The long day closes and the strife is dumb,Thither he goes where temporal loss is gain,Where he that asks to enter must becomeA little child again.And since in perfect humbleness of heartHe sought his Church's honour, not his own,All faiths are one to share the mourner's partBeside the empty throne.Refrain by natives of South Africa and Kikuyu

The amende to Cardinal Wiseman has been already noted, and I like to end this section with an even more striking palinode – the most notable that had appeared in Punch since his posthumous tribute to Lincoln. Punch had assailed the Salvation Army and its founder with all the weapons at his command in the early days of that movement. Happily he did not wait till General Booth's death to acknowledge his error. In the autumn of 1908 General Booth and Mr. John Burns had both been subjected to severe criticism at the Trade Union Congress, and are shown in a cartoon standing outside the door of the meeting saying to Mr. Punch: "You see before you two condemned criminals." Punch replies: "Well, I shouldn't worry about that," and they rejoin in unison: "We don't." This was indirect commendation; there were no reserves in the memorial verses on General Booth's death in August, 1912. Punch compares him with the warrior saints of old time and continues: —

Nay, his the nobler warfare, since his handsSet free the thralls of misery and her brood —Hunger and haunting shame and sin that brands —And gave them hope renewed.Bruised souls, and bodies broken by despair,He healed their heartache, and their wounds he dressed,And drew them, so redeemed, his task to share,Sworn to the same high quest.Armed with the Spirit's wisdom for his sword,His feet with tidings of salvation shod,He knew no foes save only such as warredAgainst the peace of God.Scorned or acclaimed, he kept his harness bright,Still, through the darkest hour, untaught to yield,And at the last, his face toward the light,Fell on the victor's field.No laurelled blazon rests above his bier,Yet a great people bows its stricken headWhere he, who fought without reproach or fear,Soldier of Christ, lies dead.

THE ADVANCE OF WOMEN

In the early 'nineties there was a penny weekly paper called Woman, of a mildly "feministic" type, which took for its motto "Forward, but not too fast." There was no reason to suspect its founders of deliberately choosing two adjectives, each of which bore an ambiguous meaning; taken in their literal sense they aptly epitomize the spirit of Feminism in the early years of a phase which began with "emancipation novels" and ended in a resort to physical force. Yet even at the outset the more sober representatives of the movement were being forced into the background to make way for the more strident spokeswomen of the doctrine of equal rights. The prim spinster and the apostles of culture were replaced by the women who were frankly "out" to shock public opinion and flout decorum, who rode bicycles in knickerbockers and wrote "problem" novels. The "New Woman," so constantly referred to in these years, had many variations – athletic, literary, worldly, but was always bent on "self-expression." The fashionable type was caricatured in Dodo; the rebellious daughter was glorified in Grant Allen's story, now only remembered in its title —The Woman who Did. Ibsen was very much in the air, and his remark that the modern daughter felt the need for "a mild kind of Wanderjahr" impelled Punch to discourse on "Rosamund and the Wanderjahr" (a good deal "after" Miss Edgeworth's story of Rosamund and the Purple Jar). His views are non-committal but apparently unsympathetic. On the other hand, he welcomed somewhat prematurely the admission of women to the Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society, recognized their skill and endurance as Alpine climbers, applauded their adoption of the calling of gardeners, hailed the appearance of a Women's Eight on the Thames – coached, it should be added, by a distinguished member of his staff – and duly chronicled the first inter-'Varsity Women's hockey match in 1894. The first illustration of a woman bicycling in knickerbockers occurs in the same year. Under the heading "The 'Arden-ing Process," Orlando addresses his companion: "Tired, Rosalind?" and she replies with quite unfeminine brevity: "Pneumatically." No attempt is made to represent the new garb as unbecoming, as in the days of "Bloomerism," but rather the reverse.Orlando: "Tired, Rosalind?"