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

When Stevenson died in his early prime in 1894, a very different temper inspired Punch's tribute to the Great Romancer: —

The lighthouse-builder raised no lightThat shall outshine the flameOf genius in its mellowest might,That beacons him to fame.And Pala's peak shall do yet moreThan the great light at SkerryvoreTo magnify his name,Who mourned, when stricken flesh would tire,That he was weaker than his sire.Teller of Tales! Of tales so toldThat all the world must list:Story sheer witchery, style pure gold,Yet with that tricksy twistOf Puck-like mockery which betraysThe wanderer in this world's mad maze,Not blindly optimist,Who wooes Romance, yet sadly knowsThat Life's sole growth is not the Rose.

So when in 1901 the late Mr. W. E. Henley published his famous disparagement of the official life of Stevenson, Punch, in an address to the "Beloved Shade" of R. L. S., uttered an indignant protest against the attack on his memory.

Punch enthusiastically greeted the Ruritanian romances of "Anthony Hope" as an antidote to the ultra-realistic novel, and Mr. Kipling's Jungle Book was welcomed in 1894 with a salvo of puns on the Kip-lingo of the Laureate of the Jingle-Jungle, the Bard of the Bandar-log. In 1895 The Men that Fought at Minden is described as "perhaps the most coarse and unattractive specimen of verse that this great young man has yet put forth – a jumble of words without a trace of swing or music. All this Tommy Atkins business is about played out." In 1898, in the series of "Letters to the Celebrated," "The Vagrant," while deprecating the "orgy of Imperialism" which Mr. Kipling had helped to foster, frankly admitted that he was largely responsible for "a quickened sense of the greatness of our mother-land, and a new sympathy for those who fight our battles"; and predicted that his greatest and most enduring title to fame would rest on his verse. In 1899 Mr. Kipling is rebuked for his glorification of machinery – he is called "the Polytechnic Poet" – slang and militarism, while the parody of Stalky and Co. is distinctly hostile to what Punch evidently considered an ignoble travesty of Public School traditions. Punch had himself repeatedly assailed the fetish-worship of Athletics, but Mr. Kipling's Island Race– with its bitter reference to those who

contented their soulsWith the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals —

was more than he could endure. Accordingly his representative conducted an imaginary interview with "The Director-General of the Empire," who had added some fresh lines in violent and obscure abuse of rowing-men, and who explained that he never played games himself, but "spent all his spare time loafing and scoring off masters" – a further hit at Stalky. This mood of resentment had entirely passed by 1907, when Punch depicted Mr. Kipling as "A Verry Parfit Nobel Knight" – on the occasion of his being awarded the Nobel Prize – and in 1910 the perusal of Rewards and Fairies is compared to reading English history by the light of a Will-o'-the-Wisp.

The reviewer notes defects in style and lucidity, but ends on a note of whole-hearted admiration: —

When one considers the quality of Mr. Kipling's invention, the piety of his patriotism, the freshness and vigour of his style, and his astounding understanding of men and movements, why, one forgets all about these little trifling defects and again murmurs, "Wizard."

The Yellow Book

To return to the early 'nineties, Punch saw no virtue, artistic or otherwise, in the movement towards unrestrained self-expression in belles lettres which had its outcome in the Yellow Book and the Savoy, its headquarters at "The Bodley Head," and whose chief hierophants were the avowed disciples of Baudelaire and Verlaine. To Punch the movement was wholly decadent. In the verses "Tell it not in Gath," in 1894, after denouncing "flowers of evil," and the practice of delving in the drains and dustbins of humanity, the writer declares he would far rather remain a Philistine than achieve enlightenment by such unsavoury means. In the same vein he addresses "Any Boy-poet of the Decadence": —

For your dull little vices we don't care a fig,It is this that we deeply deplore:You were cast for a common or usual pig,But you play the invincible bore.

As in his earlier tirades against the Æsthetes, Punch confounded all the contributors to the Yellow Book and the Savoy in one common anathema. The former, with an illustration by "Daubaway Weirdsley," and "Max" as "Max Mereboom," himself one of the finest literary parodists of our time, is held up in 1895 to especial ridicule. The Savoy in 1896 becomes "The Saveloy," with imaginary extracts and further attacks on Max Mereboom, Simple Symons, and Weirdsley; while in the same year in "The Chaunt of the Bodley Head" (after Praed's Chaunt of the Brazen Head) the Savoy School is condemned for its mephitic atmosphere. There was in the movement much deliberate eccentricity, much of the cant of anti-cant, which clamoured for robust satire, but Punch was more happily inspired in his ridicule of the popular and society novels of the time – in his parody of Sherlock Holmes, which was quite good enough for the original, and of Dodo, in which the rowdiness and pseudo-intellectuality of Mr. Benson's heroine are excellently hit off. It opens well with "'Sling me over a two-eyed steak, Bill,' said Bobo." In the sequel the Marquis of Cokaleek, the noble unappreciated husband, gets killed in the hunting field, but Bobo does not marry Bill, her fancy man. She jilts him and "got herself married to an Austrian Prince at half an hour's notice by the A. of C." Punch, let it be recorded, was responsible for the often quoted saying which appeared in 1894 that "the modern novel is a blend of the Erotic, the Neurotic and the Tommyrotic."

Esther Waters, compared and contrasted with Hardy's Tess, is pronounced in 1894 to be not "virginibus puerisque," and a once famous "emancipation novel," The Yellow Aster, by "Iota," long since hopelessly out-distanced in the reaction against reticence, becomes The Yellow Plaster, by "Iõpna," whose "She-notes" wild are amusingly travestied in the same year. The Yellow Aster and Key-Notes were pioneer efforts in the domain of the psychological novel, and the new jargon is ridiculed in such burlesque phrases as "the woman's voice came through the envelope of Margerine's subconsciousness, steely clear as a cheese-cutter." The vogue of The Green Carnation, a roman à clef which created some stir at the same time, is attested in Du Maurier's picture "How Opinion is Formed": —

He: "Have you read that beastly book The Mauve Peony by Lady Middlesex?"

She: "Yes, I rather liked it."

He: "So did I."

Unchristian Criticism of Hall Caine

Du Maurier's Trilby was naturally treated with benevolence, though Punch regretted the theological interludes, but The Sorrows of Satan is rudely dismissed as "a farrago of balderdash and vanity"; the egotism of the author and of Mr. Robert Buchanan in belabouring their detractors is severely rebuked; and Mr. Hall Caine's The Christian is recommended only as an absolute pis aller if you hadn't even a Bradshaw to read. This great work is also parodied as "The Heathen," with Alleluia Grouse and Luke Blizzard in the rôles of Glory Quayle and John Storm. There was still a spice of Bludyer in Punch, and on occasion he could act on the advice of a famous editor, "Be kind, be merciful, be gentle, but when you come across a silly fool, string him up." In later years, as the literary quality of his reviews improved, his clemency to the new-comers approached an uncritical tolerance.

The passing of the three-volume novel in 1894 is noted in a Ballade not untinged with regret, to judge from the "Envoi": —

Prince, writers' rights – forgive the pun —And readers' too forbid the blow;Of triple pleasure there'll be none,Three-volume novels are to go!

"The Trilby mania grows apace. It has reached Peckham. Aunt Maria went to the Fancy Dress Ball of the Peckham season as Trilby in her first costume." —Extract from letter of Miss M. Br-wn to Miss N. Sm-th.

The later manner of Henry James is rather infelicitously described in 1896 as "indifferent Trollopian and second-class Meredithian"; but Punch made no mistake in the following year over Mr. W. W. Jacobs, in whose Many Cargoes– studies of those "who go down to the sea in ships of moderate tonnage" – he found a new fount of joy.

Punch's "literary recipes" place Romance first, then follow the Society Novel (with thinly veiled portraits from life); the Detective Story (Gaboriau and water); and the Religious Novel. The plague of Reminiscences had moved Punch to protest as early as 1893, when he wrote: —

That Memory's the Mother of the Muses,We're told. Alas! it must have been the Furies!Mnemosyne her privilege abuses —Nothing from her distorting glass secure is.Life is a Sphinx; folk cannot solve her riddles,So they've recourse to spiteful taradiddles,Which they dub "Reminiscences." Kind fate,From the Fool's Memory preserve the Great!

Another and a newer aversion was the parasitic patronage of FitzGerald by inferior novelists and writers, which moved Punch to include among "the things that we are still waiting, and it seems, likely to wait for – A Temporary Surcease from Omar Khayyám." This last-named nuisance has ceased to be so vocal of late years, but the plague of "Diaritis" is worse than ever. Mr. H. G. Wells appears on Punch's horizon in 1898, but only as the weaver of circumstantial scientific romances, not as the regulator of the Universe, and discoverer of new Heavens and Hells. The War of the Worlds is parodied in The Martian, but the wonderland of science appealed less to Punch than the dream-world of "Lewis Carroll," whose death inspired a graceful tribute to author and illustrator: —

Lover of children! Fellow-heir with thoseOf whom the imperishable kingdom is!Beyond all dreaming now your spirit knowsThe unimagined mysteries.Darkly as in a glass our faces lookTo read ourselves, if so we may, aright;You, like the maiden in your faërie book —You step beyond and see the light!The heart you wore beneath your pedant's cloakOnly to children's hearts you gave away;Yet unaware in half the world you wokeThe slumbering charm of childhood's day.We older children, too, our loss lament,We of the "Table Round," remembering wellHow he, our comrade, with his pencil lentYour fancy's speech a firmer spell.Master of rare woodcraft, by sympathy'sSure touch he caught your visionary gleams,And made your fame, the dreamer's, one with his,The wise interpreter of dreams.Farewell! But near our hearts we have you yet,Holding our heritage with loving hand,Who may not follow where your feet are setUpon the ways of Wonderland.

Magic, Megalomania, and Sham Culture

From this wonder world Punch turned to "le monde où l'on s'affiche" to castigate the methods of Mr. Hall Caine and Mr. Le Gallienne – the Manx megalomaniac and the Author-Lecturer – and to the realm of blameless banality ruled over by Sir John Lubbock. Sir John's genius for truisms had been guyed in 1894; in 1900 he appears in a special section of "The Book of Beauty" as the author of some enchanting platitudes, e.g. "A man's work will often survive him. Thus, Shakespeare and Watt are dead; but Hamlet and the steam engine survive."

This was the year of the appearance of Lady Randolph Churchill's Anglo-Saxon Review, a sumptuous publication which for a brief period revived the glories of the Books of Beauty and Keepsakes, edited in the 'thirties and 'forties of the last century by that "most gorgeous" lady, the Countess of Blessington.

Pseudo-intellectuality was one of the social shams which Punch loved to pillory, and there is a good example in 1901 in the "Cultured Conversation" of a lady who observes, "I'm devoted to Rossetti – I delight in Shelley – and I simply love Ella Wheeler Wilcox." Punch himself in the same year "delighted" quite sincerely in Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., and "wept tears of laughter" over the episode of "Lisheen Races." This was apparently his first introduction to the work of those two wonderfully gifted Irish cousins, Violet Martin and Edith Somerville, but only towards the end of their long and fruitful collaboration did he recognize in them far higher qualities than those of the mere mirth-provoker.

In 1903 he was destined to make acquaintance with one of the most conspicuous representatives of the opposite tendency, Gorki, the Russian novelist and playwright. In "The Lowest Depths" Punch parodied the dreary, violent and brutal squalors of The Lower Depths, and incidentally had a dig at the Stage Society for producing it. It was in the same year that Punch described the "new curse of Caine" – "to be everlastingly coupled with the name of Miss Marie Corelli" – and paid them both grateful homage as purveyors of "copy": —

From cutting continual capersEv'n Kaisers must sometimes refrain;But you're never out of the papers —Corelli and Caine.

At the time of the Boer war poets had been vociferously active. By 1904 a "slump" had set in; and in an interview Mr. John Lane, of the Bodley Head, had declared that verse had ceased to be remunerative. Embroidering this text Punch traced the cause to the material self-indulgence of the public. People dined too well to want to read rhymes, and poets wanted better pay: —

And this is why no bards occur.None ever knows that aching void,That hunger, prompting like a spur,Which former genii enjoyed;For all the poets dead and gone,Whose Muse contrived to melt the nation,Habitually did it onA regimen of strict starvation.

Notable Newcomers

But if verse was at a discount, new forms of prose were emerging, and the spasmodic discourses of Mr. Bart Kennedy in the Daily Mail moved Punch to parody what he considered to be a variant on Walt Whitman, in which sentences were reduced to a minimum and verbs were dispensed with altogether. Another new writer to whom Punch now paid the homage of parody was Mr. Chesterton, whose glittering paradoxes are travestied in a mock eulogy of Bradshaw, in the manner of "G. K. C.'s" book on Dickens. Bradshaw is praised for his splendid consistency, his adherence to fact, his uniform excellence of style and freedom from extraneous matter. Moreover, he is a great teacher: —

The last and deepest lesson of Bradshaw is that we must be in time. No man can miss a train and miss a train only. He misses more than that. A man who misses a train misses an opportunity. It is probably the reason of the terrific worldly success of Cæsar and Charlemagne that neither of them ever missed a train.

Reviews of books, chiefly novels, became a regular feature of each week's issue in the latter half of this period, and it would be impossible to deal fully with Punch's critical activities. As an example of the frank handling of a bad book it would be hard to improve on the notice of a novel which appeared in 1906: "Anyone who wants to read a vulgar book in praise of vicious vulgarians should read – , by – . All others are counselled to avoid it."

Punch's later and more tolerant mood may be illustrated by his notices of three typical novels by three representative novelists of post-Victorian days. Mr. Wells's Ann Veronica in 1908 is received with guarded praise as that author's first real novel and "a remarkably clever book about rather unpleasant people." In 1910 Punch shies at the excessive length and accumulated detail of Mr. Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger, but admits that the author makes wonderful use of unpromising material in his remarkable work. Thirdly, in 1913, Punch's reviewer proclaims himself a whole-hearted admirer of Mr. Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street, finding the hero "a figure to love," and the whole book marked by passionate honesty, marvellously minute observation, humour, and a haunting beauty of ideas and words. In conclusion, he is "prepared to wager that Mr. Mackenzie's future is bound up with what is most considerable in English fiction," adding, "We shall see."

"We think Lips that have Gone Astray the foulest novel that ever yet defiled the English tongue; and that in absolute filth its Author can give any modern French writer six and beat him hollow!" —The Parthenon.

Fair Author (to her Publisher, pointing to above opinion of the Press quoted in his advertisement of her novel): "And pray, Mr. Shardson, what do you mean by inserting this hideous notice?"

Publisher: "My dear Miss Fitzmorse, you must remember that we've paid you a large price for your book, and brought it out at great expense – and we naturally wish to sell it!"

These views are somewhat difficult to reconcile with those expressed in other parts of the paper about the same time. An eminent conductor and composer has recently stated that no noise which is deliberately made can be said to be ugly – e.g. a railway whistle or a boy whistling in the street. So in letters a similar creed had already come into fashion – any subject was fit for treatment if it was "arresting" or "elemental," a doctrine that Punch outside his "Booking Office" found it hard to swallow. In "The Qualities that Count" one of his writers applied this principle to the poetry and letters of the hour: —

If you're anxious to acquire a reputationFor enlightened and emancipated views,You must hold it as a duty to discard the cult of Beauty,And discourage all endeavours to amuse.You must back the man who, obloquy enduring,Subconsciousness determines to express,Who in short is "elemental," "unalluring,"But "arresting" in his Art – or in his dress.Or is your cup habitually brimmingWith water from the Heliconian fount?Then remember the hubristic, the profane, the pugilistic,Are the only things in poetry that count.So select a tragic argument, ensuringThe maximum expenditure of gore,And the epithets "arresting," "unalluring,""Elemental" will re-echo as before.But if your bent propels you into fiction,You should clearly and completely understandThat your duty in a novel is not to soar, but grovel,If you want it to be profitably banned.So be lavish and effusive in suggestingA malignant and mephitic atmosphere,And you're sure to be applauded as "arresting,""Elemental," "unalluring," and "sincere."

Mr. Gosse and the Georgian Poets

In the same year Mr. Edmund Gosse had indulged in some caustic criticism of the Poetry of the Future. Mr. Gosse had said that "the natural uses of English and the obvious forms of our speech will be driven from our poetry." Also that "verses of excellent quality in this primitive manner can now be written by any smart little boy in a grammar school." Hence a squib in which Punch makes disrespectful fun of "the Sainte-Beuve of the House of Lords," who, it may be added, has since made his peace with the young lions whom he had treated so disrespectfully. In 1913 the cult of Rabindranath Tagore had become fashionable. Here was an Oriental poet who sedulously eschewed the flamboyant exuberance of the westernized Indian, but Punch, while finding him a less fruitful theme for burlesque than the Babu immortalized by Mr. Anstey, regarded his mystical simplicity as fair game for parody, and declined to worship at his shrine. Another foreign importation, Mr. Conrad – whom in virtue of long residence in England, marvellous command of our language and unequalled insight into the magic of the sea and the simple heroism of the British sailorman, we are proud to call one of ourselves and one of the glories of English fiction – fascinated Punch in 1900, the year in which Lord Jim appeared. Punch was a little disconcerted at first by Mr. Conrad's oblique method of narration, but the fascination grew with advancing years.

Farewell to Mark Twain

I find few references to Continental authors, but may single out the "little English wreath" which Punch added to the memorial tributes to Alphonse Daudet on his death in 1897. Daudet's affinities with Dickens, always one of Punch's heroes, naturally appealed to him apart from the humour of Tartarin and the masterly studies of the Second Empire which Daudet had seen from the inside as one of the Duc de Morny's private secretaries. Towards American writers Punch was almost uniformly sympathetic. It is true that he appreciated the earlier and American manner of Henry James more than the later cosmopolitan phase which began with The Portrait of a Lady. But during the short period in which Punch, in his "additional pages," published a number of short stories by various authors, Henry James was a contributor, and Mrs. Medwin appeared in serial form in four successive numbers in August and September, 1901. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who died in 1894, is compared to Elia in the graceful memorial stanzas modelled on "The Last Leaf." Mr. W. D. Howells's papers on London and England in Harper's Magazine in 1904 prompt a generous acknowledgment of their reasonableness, sanity and humour, together with an expression of amazement at the productivity of American short-story writers, mostly in the manner of Mr. Henry James. Punch, both then and afterwards, refused to take Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox seriously, and described her essays, The Woman of the World, as "high-toned but serenely platitudinous; 'bland, passionate, but deeply religious.'" Mark Twain, on his visit to London in 1907, was welcomed with pen and pencil – in the cartoon "To a Master of his Art," where Punch salutes him over the punch-bowl and in some verses, à propos of the dinner at the Pilgrims' Club: —

Pilot of many Pilgrims since the shout"Mark twain!" – that serves you for a deathless sign —On Mississippi's waterway rang outOver the plummet's line —Still where the countless ripples laugh aboveThe blue of halcyon seas long may you keepYour course unbroken, buoyed upon a loveTen thousand fathoms deep!

Some three years later came Punch's "Ave, atque Vale," when Mark Twain died in April, 1910: —

Farewell the gentle spirit, strong to holdTwo sister lands beneath its laughter's spell!Farewell the courage and the heart of gold!Hail and Farewell!

To complete these American references I may add that Punch in 1907 made great play out of the letter addressed by an American "Clippings Agency" to Petrarch, offering to send him press-cuttings of his works. But America has no monopoly of these solecisms. Fourteen years later, when the Phoenix Society revived The Maid's Tragedy, a similar offer was made by a London press-cutting agency to "John Fletcher, Esq." and " – Beaumont, Esq."

JOURNALISM

Already in the early 'nineties the altered status of journalism and the journalist had leapt to the eyes of Punch, who himself was in a sense born and bred in the "Street of Ink." I pass over his ironical disapproval of the St. James's Gazette when that journal, in October, 1892, "sincerely hoped that there was no truth in the rumour that a paper for children will shortly make its appearance, entirely written and illustrated by children under fifteen years of age." The project never materialized, but its spirit has been translated into action by the literary enterprise of our modern enfants terribles. The adult journalist in the 'nineties was not to suffer from this unfair competition for a good many years to come. Meanwhile he could at least congratulate himself that he was better housed and paid: it was not until 1904 that the "wisdom of the East" began to interfere with his freedom as a war correspondent.

Japanese Officer (to Press Correspondent): "Abjectly we desire to distinguish honourable newspaper man by honourable badge."

The Daily Mail Arrives

In 1897 Punch illustrated the change by parallel pictures of the journalist in 1837, writing in a squalid room in the Fleet Prison, and in the year of the Diamond Jubilee, seated in a sumptuously equipped office, fat and prosperous, and smoking a large cigar. In the previous year Punch had saluted the Daily News on the attainment of its jubilee. The connexion was an old and intimate one, for the publishers of Punch had been the first publishers of the Daily News, and it had been renewed in the 'nineties when Sir Henry Lucy ("Toby," of Punch) for a while occupied the chair in which Dickens had sat. A far more momentous event, however, was associated with the year 1896 – the founding of the Daily Mail by Mr. Alfred Harmsworth, subsequently described by one of Punch's writers as "the arch-tarantulator of our times." He was certainly, if unintentionally, invaluable to Punch, and even more stimulating than Mr. Caine and Miss Corelli. By 1900 his genius for discovering a constant succession of scapegoats, and converting the idol of yesterday into the Aunt Sally of to-day, is handsomely acknowledged in the lines "Ad Aluredum Damnodignum." Then it was Sir Michael Hicks-Beach and Mr. Balfour, but Punch foresaw that the habit was inveterate: —