The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858

Punch is the advocate of true manliness. Velvet robes and gilded coronets go for nothing with him, if not worn by muscular integrity; and fustian is cloth-of-gold, in his eyes, when it covers a stout heart in the right place. He has no mercy on snobbism, flunkeyism, or dandyism. He whips smartly the ignoble-noble fops of the household-troops,—parading them on toy-horses, and making them, with suicidal irony, deplore the hardships of comrades in the Crimea. He sneers at the loungers, and the delicate, dissipated roués of the club-house,—though their names were once worn by renowned ancestors, and are in the peerage. Fast young men are to him befooled prodigals, wasting the wealth of life in profitless living. He is not, however, an anchorite, or hard upon youth. On the contrary, he is an indulgent old fellow, and too sagacious to expect the wisdom of age from those sporting their freedom-suits. Still, he has no patience with the foppery whose whole existence advertises fine clothes, patronizes taverns, saunters along fashionable promenades, and ogles opera-dancers. In this connection, his hits at "the rising generation" will be called to mind. Punch has found out that in England there are no boys now,—only male babies and precocious men;—no growing up,—only a leap from the cradle, robe, and trousers to the habiliments and manners of a false manhood. Punch has found out and frequently illustrates this fact, and furnishes a series of pictures of Liliputians aping the questionable doings of their elders. It is observable, however, that he confines these portraits of precocity chiefly to one sex. Whether this be owing to his innate delicacy and habitual gallantry, or to the English custom of keeping little girls—and what we should call large girls also—at home longer, and under more restraint, than in our republic, we cannot say. Were he on this side of the Atlantic, he might possibly find occasion to be less partial in the use of his reproving fun. Young misses seem to be growing scarce, and young ladies becoming alarmingly numerous. The early date at which the cry comes for long skirts, parties, balls, and late hours, for lace, jewelry, and gold watches, threatens to rob our homes of one of their sweetest charms,—the bright presence of joyous, gentle, and modest lasses, willing to be happy children for as many years as their mothers were, on their way to maidenhood and womanhood.

Punch is a reformer,—and of the right type, too; not destructive, declamatory, vituperative; not a monomaniac, snarly, and ill-natured,—as if zeal in riding a favorite hobby excused exclusiveness of soul and any amount of bad temper. He would not demolish the social system and build on its ruins a new one; being clearly of the opinion that the growths of ages and the doings of six thousands of years are to be respected,—that progress means improvement upon the present, rather than overthrow of the entire past. Calm, hopeful, cheerful, and patient, he is at the same time bold and uncompromising, and a bit radical into the bargain. In his own delicious way, he has been no mean advocate of liberal principles and measures. He has argued for the repeal of the corn and the modification of the game laws, the softening of the cruelties of the criminal code, and the fair administration of law for all orders and conditions of men and women. He has had no respect for ermine, lawn, or epaulets, in his assaults upon the monopolies and sinecures of Church and State, circumlocution offices, nepotism, patronage, purchase, and routine, in army or navy. He wants the established religion to be religious, not a cover for aristocratic preferments and dog-in-the-manger laziness,—and government administered for the whole people, and not merely dealing out treasury-pap and fat offices for the pensioned few. Punch is loyal, sings lustily, "God Save the Queen," and stands by the Constitution. He is a true-born Englishman, and patriotic to the backbone; but none are too high in place or name for his merciless ridicule and daring wit, if they countenance oppressive abuses. It is a tall feather in his fool's-cap, that his fantastic person is a dread to evil-doers on thrones, in cabinets, and red-tape offices. Crowned tyrants, bold usurpers, and proud statesmen are sensitive, like other mortals, to ridicule, and know very well how much easier it is to cannonade rebellious insurgents than to put down the general laugh, and that the point of a joke cannot be turned by the point of the bayonet. "Punch" was seized in Paris on account of the caricature of the "Sphinx," but after twenty-four hours' consideration the order of confiscation was rescinded, and the irreverent publication now lies upon the tables of the reading-rooms. So, iron power is not beyond the reach of the shafts of wit; once make it ridiculous, and it may continue to lie dreaded, but will cease to be respected.

Limits permitting, it would be pleasant to refer at length to various other marked graces of Punch,—such, for example, as his care for true Art, by exposing to merited contempt the abortions of statuary, painting, and architecture that come under his accurate eye,—his concern for good letters, exhibited in fantastic parodies of affectations, mannerisms, absurdities of plot, and vices of style in modern poets and novelists,—his "nil nisi bonum," and, where there is no "bonum," his silent "nil," of the dead, whom when living he pursued with unrelenting raillery,—his cool, eclectic judgments, freedom from extremes, and other manifestations of clear-headedness and refined sentiment, glimmering and shooting through his rollicking drollery, quick wit, and quiet humor. But we must pass them by, to emphasize a quality that out-tops and outshines them all,—his humanity.

This is Mr. Punch's specialty, generating his purest fun and consecrating his versatile talents to highest ends. Wherever he catches meanness, avarice, selfishness, force, preying upon the humble and the weak, he is sure to give them hard knocks with his baton, or home-thrusts with his pen and pencil. His practical kindness is charmingly comprehensive, too. He speaks for the dumb beast, pleads for the maltreated brutes of Smithfield Market, craves compassion for skeleton omnibus-horses, with the same ready sympathy that he fights for cheated fellow-mortals. In the court of public opinion, he is volunteer counsel for all in any way defrauded or kept in bondage by pitiless pride, barbarous policy, thoughtless luxury, or wooden-headed prejudice. His sound ethics do not admit that the lower law of man's enactment can, under any circumstances, override or abrogate the higher laws of God. Consequently, he judges with unbiased, instinctive rectitude, when he shows up in black and white the Model Republic's criminal anomaly, by making the African Slave a companion-piece to the Greek Slave, among "Jonathan's" contributions to the great Crystal Palace Exhibition. In this same vein of a wide-ranging application of the Golden Rule, he is ever on the alert to brand inhuman deeds and institutions, wherever found. You cannot very often hit him with the "tu quoque" retort, insinuate that he lives in a house of glass, or charge him with visiting his condemnation upon distant iniquities whilst winking at iniquities of equal magnitude directly under his nose.

Punch is no Mrs. Jellyby, brimful of zeal for Borrio boolas in far-off Africas, and utterly stolid to disorders and distresses under his own roof. Proud of the glory, he feels and confesses the shame of England; and the grinding injustice of her caste-system, aristocracy, and hierarchy does not escape the lash of his rebuke. He is the friend of the threadbare curate, performing the larger half of clerical duty and getting but a tittle of the tithes,—of the weary seamstress, wetting with midnight tears the costly stuff which must be ready to adorn heartless rank and fashion at to-morrow's pageant,—of the pale governess, grudgingly paid her pittance of salary without a kind word to sweeten the bitterness of a lonely lot. He is the friend even of the workhouse juveniles, and, as their champion, castigates with cutting sarcasm and stinging scorn the reverend and honorable guardians, who, just as, full of hope, they had reached the door of the theatre, prohibited a band of these wretched orphans from availing of a kind-hearted manager's invitation to an afternoon performance of "Jack and the Bean-Stalk." Truly, Punch is more than half right, as, in his indignation, he declares, "It will go luckily with some four-faced Christians, if, with the fullest belief in their own right of entry of paradise, they are not 'stopped at the very doors'"; and the parson, in the case, gets but his deserts, when at his lugubrious sham-piety are hurled stanzas like these:—

"Their little faces beamed with joyTwo miles upon their way,As they supposed, each girl and boy,About to see the play.Their little cheeks with tears were wet,As back again they went,Balked by a sanctimonious set,Led by a Reverend Gent."And if such Reverend Gents as heCould get the upperhand,Ah, what a hateful tyrannyWould override the land!That we may never see that time,Down with the canting crewThat would out of their pantomimePoor little children do!"

Punch is the friend of all who are friendless, and, with a generous spirit of protection, gives credit to whom credit is due, whatever conventionality, precedent, monopoly, or routine may say to the contrary. During the Crimean War, he took care of the fame of the rank-and-file of the army. The dispatches to Downing Street, reporting the gallantry of titled officers, were more than matched by Punch's imitative dispatches from the seat of war, setting forth the exploits of Sergeant O'Brien, Corporal Stout, or Private Gubbins. He saw to it that those who had the hardest of the fight, the smallest pay, and the coarsest rations, should not be forgotten in the gazetting of the heroes. Indeed, our comic friend's fellowship of soul with the humblest members of the human family is a notable trait; it is so ready, and yet withal so judicious. It is no part of his philosophy, as already intimated, violently and rashly to disturb the existing order of things, and set one class in rebellion against other classes. He simply insists upon the recognition of the law of mutual dependence all round. This is observable in his dealing with the vexed question of domestic service. The prime trouble of housekeeping comes in frequently for a share of his attention; and underneath ironical counsels, you may trace, quietly insinuating itself into graphic sketches, the genial intent fairly to adjust the relations between life above and life below stairs. Accordingly, Punch sees no reason why Angelina may have a lover in the parlor, whilst Bridget's engagement forbids her to entertain a fond "follower" in the kitchen; and he perversely refuses to see how it can be right for Miss Julia to listen to the soft nonsense of Captain Augustus Fitzroy in the drawing-room, and entirely wrong for Molly, the nursery-maid, to blush at the blunt admiration of the policeman, talking to her down the area. Punch is independent and original in this respect. His strange creed seems to be, that human nature is human nature,—whether, in its feminine department, you robe it in silk or calico, and, in its male department, button a red coat over the breast of an officer of the Guards, or put the coarse jerkin on the broad back of the industrious toilsman. And according to this whimsical belief, he writes and talks jocosely, but with covert common sense. His warm and catholic humanity runs up and down the whole social scale with a clear-sighted equity. His philanthropy is what the word literally signifies,—the love of man as man, and because he is a man. Without being an impracticable fanatic, advocating impossible theories, or theories that can grow into realities only with the gradual progress of the race,—without indulging in fanciful visions of unapproached Utopias,—without imagining that all, wherever born and however nurtured, can reach the same level of wealth and station,—he holds, not merely that

"Honor and shame from no condition rise,"

but also, be the condition high or low, the worthy occupant of it, by reason of the common humanity he shares with all above and all beneath and all around him, has a brother's birthright to brotherly treatment, to even-handed justice and open-handed charity.

We have taken it for granted that Punch is a household necessity and familiar friend of our readers; and, resisting as far as possible the besetting temptation to refer in detail to the many pictorial and letter-press illustrations of his merits, have spoken of him as "a representative man,"—the universally acknowledged example of the legitimate and beneficent uses of the sportive faculties; thus indirectly claiming for these faculties more than toleration.

The variety in human nature must somehow be brought into unity, and its diversified, strongly contrasted elements shown to be parts of a symmetrical and harmonious whole. The philosophy, the religion, which overlooks or condemns any of these elements, is never satisfactory, and fails to win sincere belief, because of its felt incompleteness. All men have an instinctive faith that in God's plan no incontestable facts are exceptional or needless facts. Science assumes this in regard to the phenomena of the natural world; and, in its progressive searches, expects to discover continual proof that all manifestations, however opposite and contradictory, are parts of one beneficent scheme. Accordingly, Science starts on its investigations with the conviction that the storm is as salutary as the sunshine,—that there is utility in what seems mere luxury,—and that Nature's loveliness and grandeur, Nature's oddity and grotesqueness, have a substantial value, as well as Nature's wheat-harvests. Now the same principle is to be recognized in dealing with things spiritual. It may not be affirmed that anything appertaining to universal consciousness—spontaneous, irresistible, as breathing—is of itself base, and therefore to be put away; since so to do is to question the Creative Wisdom. The work of the Infinite Spirit must be consistent; and you might as truly charge the bright stars with malignity as denounce as vile one faculty or capacity of the mind. Consequently, there is a use for all forms of wit and humor.

Punch represents a genuine phase of human nature,—none the less genuine because human nature has other and far different phases. That there is a time to mourn does not prove there is no time to dance. Punch has his part, and his times to play it, in the melodrama, the mixed comedy and tragedy, of existence. What we have to do is to see that he interferes with no other actor's rôle, comes upon the stage in fitting scenes, keeps to the text and the impersonations which right principle and pure taste assign him. His grimaces are not for the church. He may not sing his catches when penitent souls are listening to the "Miserere," drop his torpedo-puns when life's mystery and solemnity are pressed heavily upon the soul,—be irreverent, profane, or vulgar. He must know and keep his place. But he should have his place, and have it confessed; and that place is not quite at the end of the procession of the benefactors of the race. Punch, as we speak of him now, is but a generic name for Protean wit and humor, well and wisely employed. As such, let Punch have his mission; there is ample room for him and his merry doings, without interfering with soberer agencies. Let him go about tickling mankind; it does mankind good to be tickled occasionally. Let him broaden elongated visages; there are many faces that would be improved by horizontal enlargement, by having the corners of the mouth curved upward. Let him write and draw "as funny as he can"; there are dull talking and melancholy pictures in abundance to counterbalance his pleasantry. Let him amuse the children, relax with jocosity the sternness of adults, and wreathe into smiles the wrinkles of old age. Let him, in a word, be a Merry Andrew,—the patron and promoter of frolicsomeness. To be only this is nothing to his discredit; and to esteem him for being only this is not to pay respect to a worthless mountebank.

But Punch is and can be something more than a caterer of sport. Kings, in the olden time, had their jesters, who, under cover of blunt witticisms, were permitted, to utter home-truths, which it would have cost grave counsellors and dependent courtiers their heads to even whisper. Punch should enjoy a similar immunity in this age,—and society tolerate his free and smiling speech, when it would thrust out sager monitors. If it be true that

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,"

something like the converse of this saying is also true. Not fools exactly, but wisdom disguised in the motley of wit, often gains entrance to ears deaf to angelic voices. There are follies that are to be laughed out of their silliness and sinfulness. There are tyrants, big and little, to be dethroned by ridicule. There are offences, proof against appeals to conscience, that wince and vanish before keen satire. Even as a well-aimed joke brings back good-humor to an angry mob, or makes mad and pugnacious bullies cower and slink away from derision harder to stand than hard knocks,—even so will a quizzical Punch be efficient as a philanthropist, when sedate exhortations or stern warnings would fail to move stony insensibility.

As an element in effective literature, a force in the cause of reform, the qualities Punch personifies have been and are of no slight service. And herein those qualities have an indefeasible title to regard. Let there be no vinegar-faced, wholesale denunciation of them, because sometimes their pranks are wild and overleap the fences of propriety. Rather let appreciation of their worthiness accompany all reproving checks upon their extravagances. Let nimble fun, explosive jokes, festoon-faced humor, the whole tribe of gibes and quirks, every light, keen, and flashing weapon in the armory of which Punch is the keeper, be employed to make the world laugh, and put the world's laughter on the side of all right as against all wrong. If this be not done, the seriousness of life will darken into gloom, its work become slavish tasks, and the conflict waged be a terrible conflict between grim virtues and fiendish vices. If you could shroud the bright skies with black tempest-clouds, burn to ashes the rainbow-hued flowers, strike dumb the sweet melodies of the grove, and turn to stagnant pools the silver streams,—if you could do this, thinking thereby to make earth more of a paradise, you would be scarcely less insane than if you were to denounce and banish all

"Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles,Nods, and becks, and wreathèd smiles,Sport, that wrinkled care derides,And laughter, holding both his sides."

THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT

Toward the close of a dreamy, tranquil July day, a day made impressive beyond the possible comprehension of a dweller in civilization by its sun having risen for us over the unbroken wilderness of the Adirondack, a mountain-land in each of whose deep valleys lies a blue lake, we, a party of hunters and recreation-seekers, six beside our guides, lay on the fir-bough-cushioned floor of our dark camp, passing away the little remnant of what had been a day of rest to our guides and of delicious idleness to ourselves. The camp was built on the bold shore of a lake which yet wants a name worthy its beauty, but which we always, for want of such a one, call by that which its white discoverer left it,—Tupper's Lake,—whose waters, the untremulous mirror of the forests and mountains around and the sky above, gleamed to us only in blue fragments through the interstices of the leafy veil that intervened. The forest is unbroken to the water's edge, and even out over the water itself it stretches its firs and cedars, gray and moss-draped, with here and there a moisture-loving white-birch, so that from the very shore one sees only suggestive bits of distance and sky; and from where we were lying, sky, hills, and the water below were all blue alike, and undistinguishable alike, glimpses of a world of sunlight, which the grateful shadow we lay in made delicious to the thought. We were sheltered right woodsman-like;—our little house of fresh-peeled bark of spruces, twelve feet by nine, open only to the east, on which side lay the lake, shielded us from wind and rain, and the huge trees shut around us so closely that no eye could pierce a pistol-shot into their glades. There were blue-jays all about us, making the woods ring with their querulous cries, and a single fish-hawk screamed from the blue overhead, as he sailed round and round, watching the chances of a supper in the lake. Between us and the water's edge, and a little to one side of the path we had bushed out to the shore, was the tent of the guides, and there they lay asleep, except one who was rubbing up his "man's" rifle, which had been forgotten the night before when we came in from the hunt, and so had gathered rust.

Three of our party were sleeping, and the others talked quietly and low, desultorily, as if the drowsiness had half conquered us too. The conversation had rambled round from a discussion on the respective merits of the Sharp's and the Kentucky rifles (consequent on a trial of skill and rifles which we had had after dinner) to Spiritualism,—led to this last topic by my relation of some singular experiences I had met in the way of presentiments and what seemed almost like second-sight, during a three-months' sojourn in the woods several summers before. There is something wonderfully exciting to the imagination in the wilderness, after the first impression of monotony and lonesomeness has passed away and there comes the necessity to animate this so vacant world with something. And so the pines lift themselves grimly against the twilight sky, and the moanings of the woods become full of meaning and mystery. Living, therefore, summer after summer, as I had done, in the wilderness, until there is no place in the world which seems so much like a home to me as a bark camp in the Adirondack, I had come to be what most people would call morbid, but what I felt to be only sensitive to the things around, which we never see, but to which we all at times pay the deference of a tremor of inexplicable fear, a quicker and less deeply drawn breath, an involuntary turning of the head to see something which we know we shall not see, yet are glad to find that we do not,—all which things we laugh at as childish when they have passed, yet tremble at as readily when they come again. J., who was both poet and philosopher, singularly clear and cold in his analyses, and at the same time of so great imaginative power that he could set his creations at work and then look on and reason out the law of their working as though they were not his, had wonders to tell which always passed mine by a degree; his experiences were more various and marvellous than mine, yet he had a reason for everything, to which I was compelled to defer without being convinced. "Yes," said he, finally knocking out the ashes from his meerschaum, as we rose, at the Doctor's suggestion, to take a row out on the lake while the sun was setting,—"Yes, I believe in your kind of a 'spiritual world,'—but that it is purely subjective."

I was silenced in a moment;—this single sentence, spoken like the expression of the experience of a lifetime, produced an effect which all his logic could not. He had rubbed some talismanic opal, pronouncing the spirit-compelling sentence engraved thereon, and a new world of doubts and mysteries, marvels and revelations burst on me. One phase of existence, which had been hitherto a reality to me, melted away into the thinness of an uncompleted dream; but as it melted away, there appeared behind it a whole universe, of which I had never before dreamed. I had puzzled my brains over the metaphysics of subjectivity and objectivity and found only words; now I grasped and comprehended the round of the thing. I looked through the full range of human cognitions, and found, from beginning to end, a proclamation of the presence of that arch-magician, Imagination. I had said to myself,—"The universe is subjective to Deity, objective to me; but if I am his image, what is that part of me which corresponds to the Creator in Him?" Here I found myself, at last, the creator of a universe of unsubstantialities, all of the stuff that dreams are made of, and all alike unconsciously evoked, whether they were the dreams of sleep or the hauntings of waking hours. I grew bewildered as the thought loomed up in its eternal significance, and a thousand facts and phenomena, which had been standing in the darkness around my little circle of vision, burst into light and recognition, as though they had been waiting beyond the outer verge for the magic words. J. had spoken them.