PART II

THE SOCIAL FABRIC

THE COURT

If the word "amazing" had not lost most of its significance through overwork since August, 1914, we should be inclined to apply it to the frankness with which Royalty and the Court were criticized and discussed by the Press in the 'forties and 'fifties. _Punch_, as we have seen, took a leading hand in the game, though he contrived to combine loyalty to the person of the Queen with the most outspoken attacks on the exercise of Court patronage and the extravagance of courtiers. But he did not stop here. The Prince Consort was mercilessly ridiculed for his Germanism, his notions of sport, his passion for tailoring, and, most serious offence of all, his alleged intervention in high politics. After ten years of anti-Albertianism, _Punch_ dropped, to a considerable extent at any rate, the game of baiting the Prince, cordially admitted his services in connexion with the Exhibition of 1851, and for the rest of the period surveyed in our first volume granted him a comparative immunity from hostile criticism.

The change, or conversion, was not due to expediency or to a change of editorship or of the staff. It had already begun several years before the death, in 1857, of _Punch's_ most democratic contributor, Douglas Jerrold. It was typical of a change in the enlightened middle-class opinion of which _Punch_ was the mirror. The Monarchy had gained in popularity, and though there was no great revulsion of feeling about the Prince until after his death, he had earned respect by his active interest in education and philanthropy and the sagacity in counsel which was most freely acknowledged by those who came in closest contact with him. The charges of undue intervention and interference were effectually dealt with by Ministers at the time, though _Punch_ failed to acknowledge his vindication, and the _Life of Lord Beaconsfield_ shows that a much stronger case can be made out against the Queen on this count when she was no longer able to rely on the advice of the Prince.

The change in _Punch's_ conception of his _rôle_ as regards the Court did not come in the twinkling of an eye. But from 1858 onwards he is less of the licensed Court Jester, more of the unofficial Laureate. The old _Punch_, who had his eye on Tsars and Kaisers (like the _Skibbereen Eagle_) and autocrats is not dead yet. He has a tremendous fling in the "Essence of Parliament" in July, 1858, _à propos_ of a contemplated revision of the Prayer-book:--

Lord Stanhope, a Peer exceedingly well entitled to be heard upon any such subject, then obtained an Address for cutting out of our Prayer Books the savage and abject forms of worship which our forefathers, at certain moments of excitement, thought it well to prescribe on certain anniversaries, as Guy Fawkes Day, the Martyrdom Day, and Oak Apple Day. When one reflects that the people who composed such things adulated the dirty old coward and fool, James the First; looked on while the body of the greatest of our English kings (except Alfred)--we mean, of course, King Oliver the First, and unfortunately the Only--was dragged from its grave to the gallows; and ecstatically murmured the _Nunc dimittis_ when the friend of Nelly Gwynn, by no means _his_ worst friend, returned to betray the public honour of England, and debauch that of her private life; one only wonders that such ecclesiastical profanities have been tolerated so long. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of London, Oxford, and Cashel, expressed the sentiments that might be expected from enlightened gentlemen; but the offensive services found defenders in the poor old Bishop of Bangor, in the Bishop of St. Asaph, who has _Mr. Punch's_ royal licence henceforth to sign himself A Sap, and in a brace of foolish Peers, called Marlborough and Duncannon: opposition which was the only thing wanting to show that every man of decent intellect feels alike on the subject.

[Sidenote: _Marriage of the Princess Royal_]

The disparaging allusion earlier in the same year to Prince Albert's Prize Pig and the attack on the bestowal of a K.C.B. on Colonel Charles Beaumont Phipps, the Prince Consort's Treasurer and Equerry to the Queen, are quite eclipsed by this explosion. But _Punch_ was always ready to speak disrespectfully of a dictator. Constitutional monarchy he could respect and even admire, as Herbert Spencer said of the moderate proficiency of an amateur billiard-player. The new voice, the voice of the unofficial Laureate, had already been heard in his "Epithalamium" on the Princess Royal in 1858, over whose engagement, when it was first announced, he had been far from enthusiastic:--

Farewell, young Royal Lady, Ne'er may your life wax shady, Still may your path be shiny, All rosy--nothing spiny.

_Macbeth_, when sitting stately, You were beholding lately, A point, which I may mention, Perhaps won your attention:

The line of Kings, descending From _Banquo_, never ending; I hail you the Queen Mother, Young Bride, of such another.

May the first line long sit in The royal seat of Britain, On Prussia's throne the second, From you to doomsday reckoned.

United in alliance, May those two lines defiance Bid evermore to treason, By governing with reason.

The prophecy in the third and fourth stanzas gives one a shiver: but the word doomsday may pass in the sense of the day of doom. Simultaneously the critic appears in "A Few Queries touching a late wedding":--

Can't our penny-a-liners be loyal, Without writing themselves down flunkeys? Can't our crowd gape at ciphers royal, Without such percentage of "drunkies"?

When we want a wedding cantata For our Princess Royal's espousal, Why for Tennyson Catnach barter, An owl for a singing ouzel?

When English Fiddlers find fingers, And an English composer chords, Can't we find six English singers, Who at least could pronounce the words?

* * * * *

Must we still in ruts of old stick, All alike, both high and humble, Our nobs the slaves of Goldstick, Our snobs the slaves of Bumble?

In the same vein is the protest in the spring of the same year, against the journalistic flunkeyism of the report of the opening concert in St. James's Hall (described as "vast in dimensions, elegant in proportion and splendid in decoration") which was "honoured by the presence of H.R.H. the Prince Consort, a large number of our aristocracy, and a very numerous company belonging for the most part to the better classes of society"--an English revival of the term _optimates_ which _Punch_ very properly disliked and deprecated.

The reorganization of the Government in India brought the Queen a new title, and in his congratulations we see _Punch_ at his best:--

To thee is given another land, Another title of renown, Another sceptre in thy hand, And on thy head another crown. To India now at last appears Hope that before she ne'er had seen. She smiles upon thee through her tears, And looks for aid to England's Queen.

To thee, her last of Monarchs, first She looks for justice, and the reign Of mercy, nor will she have nursed A fond belief, and hoped in vain. No more a victim and a prey, She trusts, with reason why she should, Like all that live beneath thy sway, She will be governed for her good.

This unofficial competition with the Laureate, however, did not prevent _Punch_ from applauding Tennyson's additional stanzas to the National Anthem, which some critics had impugned for their metrical laxity. A little later on, _à propos_ of the Queen's alleged refusal to wear a crinoline in 1859, _Punch_ in a mood of mixed loyalty and levity contributed a new version of his own:--

Long live our gracious Queen, Who won't wear Crinoline, Long live the Queen! May her example spread, Broad skirts be narrowèd, Long trains be shortenèd, Long live the Queen!

O storm of scorn arise, Scatter French fooleries, And make them pall. Confound those hoops and things, Frustrate those horrid springs, And indiarubber rings, Deuce take them all!

May dresses flaunting wide, Fine figures cease to hide; Let feet be seen. Girls to good taste return, Paris flash modes unlearn, No more catch fire and burn, Thanks to the Queen!

The Empress Eugénie, it should be added by way of explanation, had already fallen under the lash of _Punch's_ satire for supporting the crinoline, and starting absurd fashions, amongst which he specially notes the "occipital bonnet"--worn at the back of the head.

[Sidenote: _Punch and the Royal Princes_]

The Princess Royal was already off the Queen's and _Mr. Punch's_ hands. The birth of her son in 1859--_grande et conspicuum nostro quoque tempore monstrum_--is duly celebrated in some lines "On an auspicious event" in which the Duchess of Kent is saluted as a great-grandmother. But in 1859 and 1860 _Punch_, who liked to take himself very seriously as an instructor of youth, is mainly concerned with the education of the Royal Princes. Prince Alfred (the Duke of Edinburgh) was already a middy, and his tour in Egypt and Palestine prompted severe comments on the obsequiousness with which he was _fêted_ in the near East. As for the Prince of Wales, the dangers of sycophancy were (according to _Punch_) much less than those of over-pressure. In the cartoon entitled "The Royal Road to Learning," the Prince in cap and gown is shown surrounded by a group of stout, spectacled, bald and bottle-nosed professors and dons bowing and scraping before the Royal youth. _Punch_ protests, too, in spirited doggerel against the process which threatened to make the Prince Jack-of-all-trades and lord of none. It is at any rate a consolation to think that the Prince of Wales evaded and survived the alleged attempt to convert him into a walking encyclopædia. The Prince's visit to Canada and the United States as "Baron Renfrew" in 1860 is followed with close interest and sympathy, and the frequent references in text and illustrations suggest many curious parallels with the experiences of his grandson in 1920. _Punch_ welcomed the Prince's release from his arduous studies and was gratified with his reception; he did not acquit the American Press of sycophancy, but was obviously pleased when the _New York Herald_ said that his "genial and unpretending" disposition had "gained him the affection of many true and worthy hearts." Perhaps the greatest compliment was paid him by an Irishman who accosted him in his railway car and said: "Come back four years from now and we'll run you for President."

But to us the most interesting comment on the visit is _Punch's_ twice-repeated suggestion that the Prince might do a great deal worse than bring back an American bride. He made it on the Prince's departure in July in an Ode, with the apology, "If the Laureate won't do his work, _Punch_ must," in which he says:

Transcendent charms drive even monarchs frantic, A German Princess must he marry? And who can say he may not carry One of Columbia's fascinating daughters O'er the Atlantic?

And he returns more seriously to the charge three months later:--

COUSINS FOR KINGS AND QUEENS

A Law which Nature contravenes, A rule of Rank and State, Forbids our Princes, Kings and Queens, With British spouse to mate. The safety of the Realm commands Them Protestants to wed; And therefore is their choice of hands Extremely limited.

Their Cousins are our Royal race Confined, almost, to woo, Who, by the nature of the case Are German Cousins too. Now German Cousins far removed All very well may be, But Cousins German oft have proved Too near the parent tree.

Near cousins o'er the German tide, What need remains to seek, Now steamers cross the Atlantic wide, Almost within a week? Of Yankee Land the Beauty pales All Continental Fair; Might not a bride be found for Wales, A distant Cousin, there?

[Sidenote: _Royal Speeches Criticized_]

From this onward for a great many years _Punch_ was not content with supplementing the inactivities of the Laureate, but seldom allowed any event in the Royal annals--births, deaths, engagements or weddings--to pass unchronicled in serious rhyme. The art of eulogy is difficult, and the most that can be said of these efforts is that they were generally graceful and appropriate, and that their loyalty seldom degenerated into fulsomeness. On the subject of royal speeches _Punch_ showed good sense as well as great frankness, in connexion with the public utterances of the Prince of Wales on the occasion of his visit to Ireland in 1861:--

WANTED, A COURT PENMAN

Royal personages, in answering loyal addresses, of course speak only that which is set down for them. If they made speeches of their own they would be continually committing themselves, unawares, to this statement and that, and unwittingly treading upon the corns of various people right and left. At least, to avoid making mistakes of this sort, they would have to take an amount of trouble in composing their replies so great that it would very much interfere with their ordinary business, and entirely spoil their pleasure. It is therefore necessary that Princes should be provided with attendants having the office to compose, and put into form, the platitudes in which they are called upon, from time to time, to acknowledge the compliments which are paid to them. But then the platitudes ought to be expressed in proper terms, such as it may become a Prince to utter; that is, in language which a decently educated person would naturally use. Now, is anybody who has been brought up in any school better than a Commercial Academy capable of delivering himself in such a style as that of the subjoined slip-slop which the Prince of Wales had to read in answer to an address presented to him by the Kingstown Commissioners?--

"Gentlemen,--I most heartily thank you for the gratifying terms in which, on your own behalf and that of the inhabitants of Kingstown, you greet me on my arrival at your port, after a voyage performed with such ease and expedition in the admirable vessel considerately placed at my disposal by its enterprising proprietors."

His Royal Highness is also actually made to say:--

"During former visits to Ireland, and particularly in the course of a tour made some years ago through the country, I had considerable opportunities of witnessing the beauty of her scenery."

Some clue to the authorship of the preceding instances of haberdashers' eloquence may perhaps be found in those characteristic forms of speech, "considerable" opportunities, and "witnessing" the beauty of her scenery. These are the notorious idioms of that sort of penny-a-lining which is the least worth a penny. The advisers of the Prince of Wales should cause their own private secretaries to write the speeches which they give the Prince to make, and not employ for that purpose the undermost reporter engaged on the _Court Circular_. At least let the Queen's son be allowed to speak his Mother's English.

As there is a Poet Laureate, so likewise ought there to be a Royal Professor of Prose, whose office, however, shall not be merely honorary, but shall consist in plainly wording the simple ideas which Royalty is occasionally called upon to express. _Mr. Punch_ could mention some young men who, at a sufficiently high wage, would accept the work.

Whether the hint was taken or not, the fact remains that for a good many years Royal oratory has ceased to deserve such criticism. It may not be Ciceronian; it does not inflame or transport the hearer, but at least it is free from the cheap haberdashers' eloquence which aroused _Punch's_ wrath sixty years ago.

The visit of the Queen and Prince Consort to Ireland in August, 1861, passed off without any untoward incident, but the comments in _Punch_ were mainly ironical, as in the cartoon, "Doth not a meeting like this make amends," in which the Queen observes, "My dear Ireland, how much better you look since my last visit. I am so glad." For the rest there is much pungent criticism directed against the assiduity of the newspaper correspondents in chronicling small beer. The demonstrations were too carefully stage-managed in the operatic style: the odour of the footlights invaded Killarney; and _Punch_ is quite furious with the snobbery of the unfortunate special correspondent who declared that "the Queen and Prince Albert repeatedly expressed their unqualified admiration of the scenery. His Royal Highness said many portions were sublime." It is by such practices, _Punch_ truly remarks, that "the Press is lowered in repute and people think it is the work of a vulgarian to write for it."

In the year 1861 the Queen lost both her mother and her husband. The Prince Consort had outlived a great deal of his unpopularity--faithfully reflected in the pages of _Punch_. Yet even so late as 1858 he met with scant sympathy in the malicious imaginary conversation between the Emperor of the French, the Queen and himself at Cherbourg. The Emperor figures as the _miles gloriosus_, boastful of his strength; the Queen is ironically polite: Prince Albert angular and tactless. The mere suddenness and unexpectedness of his death brought a great reaction; those who had depreciated and disparaged him when living were especially vocal in their praises of the dead; but the full extent and significance of his loss to the Queen was not understood till long afterwards. Those terrible cartoons of Leech will keep coming before our eyes as we read the bland elegiac stanzas in which _Punch_ made amends for ten years of scarifying ridicule:--

It was too soon to die. Yet, might we count his years by triumphs won, By wise, and bold, and Christian duties done, It were no brief eventless history.

This was his princely thought: With all his varied wisdom to repay Our trust and love, which on that Bridal Day The Daughter of the Isles for dowry brought.

For that he loved our Queen, And for her sake, the people of her love, Few and far distant names shall rank above His own, where England's cherished names are seen.

[Sidenote: _Punch and the Princess of Wales_]

The Queen never quite recovered from her bereavement. The next twenty years of her life were spent more or less in retirement; and _Punch_, in his pious and quite sincere request to be allowed to "share her grief," could not be expected to foresee that in less than two years the nation would have grown restive at the Queen's continued seclusion and that he himself would have become active in expressing its discontent. In 1862 the wedding of Princess Alice received the usual meed of ceremonial verse, _Punch_ being happily spared a glimpse into the future in store for her and her daughters; and the refusal of the Greek Crown by Prince Alfred is recognized to be judicious. _Punch_ bore the Prince of Wales no malice for not acting on his suggestion about an American bride; and greeted Princess Alexandra of Denmark as enthusiastically if not as poetically as the Laureate himself. When the wedding procession passed down Fleet Street (the offices of the paper were then at No. 85), the Princess was greeted with an effusion of loyal sentiment and champagne. But in her beauty, grace, and popularity _Punch_ saw a means of rescuing women of fashion from their expensive servility to French milliners, and within a fortnight of his chronicling the marriage festivities he appeals to her to set the fashions for British ladies, hitherto copied from the French, and thus "turn the tide of absurdity in costume from the abyss into which, before her seasonable arrival, it was tending to plunge them." Long dresses, "sweeping and brushing the earth," heraldic gold-dust, powder and hair dyes are especially singled out for condemnation.

The birth of the Duke of Clarence is loyally chronicled in January, 1864, though in the following number _Punch_ could not resist the temptation of printing some verses in parody of Tupper, then at the zenith of his popularity. The birth of the present King in the summer of the following year prompted some frank but friendly comments in _Punch's_ "Essence of Parliament." Sir George Grey moved the address of congratulation to the Queen. Then follows this characteristic passage:--

Mr. Disraeli, who we are glad to perceive had so completely recovered from his gout as to be able to attend at the splendid marriage of Miss Evelina de Rothschild, and make the most tender and graceful of speeches in honour of the occasion, seconded the motion, which _Mr. Punch_, rousing himself for a moment into loyal enthusiasm, has the distinguished pleasure of thirding--and relapses.

The plain fact was that _Punch_ was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the continued retirement of the "Royal Recluse." This dissatisfaction began with a "Loyal Whisper" at the time of the Prince's wedding:--

"Nay, let my people see me." Kind Was She whom then our cheers were greeting: Now, would that Lady bear in mind That words like those will bear repeating.

But it soon swelled to more vocal dimensions. It was one thing to check the extravagances of "indelicate and obtrusive loyalty"; it was another to maintain an almost Oriental aloofness. The subject is returned to again and again, in prose and verse, and in two cartoons by Tenniel: notably that of "Queen Hermione" in 1865. But the candour of _Punch_ reaches its highest level in his comments on the announcement early in 1866 of the institution of a new decoration--the Albert Medal.

[Sidenote: _The "Effete Monarchy"_]

_Mr. Punch's_ loyalty has been proved too often for question. Without the slightest apology, therefore, he proceeds to say what he would have preferred to leave unsaid, for it is not the part of a true friend to be silent when he should speak. _Mr. Punch_ has cordially approved every reasonable effort to preserve the memory of the good Prince whose loss we all deplore. Statues, in far greater number than ever was accorded to an English Worthy, have been reared in honour of the lamented Consort. Though it is now just sixty years since Nelson was laid in St. Paul's, our great sea-captain's monument is unfinished--we hear nothing at all of the national monument to our great land-captain, though it is more than thirteen years since Wellington was laid by the side of Nelson--but the most splendid and costly of memorials is rapidly rising, in the Park, in testimony of our veneration for Prince Albert. When this shall have been completed, will it not be almost time to leave that good man's fame to take care of itself? Society is at least half inclined to believe that enough has been done in this way, and it will not be well that society should begin to smile at persistent efforts to add tribute to tribute. There is really no fitness in giving the Prince's name to the medal that is to reward the noblest of sea-service.

The Prince had no kind of connexion with or special regard for sea-achievements, though the irreverent may remark that his own courage was shown when he voyaged, inasmuch as he notoriously suffered on such occasions more than anyone else on board. Anything like ridicule should not be permitted to connect itself with an honoured memory.

The Albert Medal, as we know, was not restricted to those who exhibited conspicuous gallantry in the rescue of life from shipwreck, and the remarks we have quoted may very well have contributed to its being awarded in recognition of heroic deeds on land as well. A fortnight later a passage quoted from the _New York Herald_ impelled _Punch_ to reaffirm his loyalty to the Monarchy:--

England is completely prepared to become Republican, but the undoubted personal popularity of the Queen will probably sustain the effete monarchy until the time arrives for transmission of the Crown. But as for an Edward the Seventh, that is out of the question.

Whereon _Punch_ observes "are there twenty republicans in England, deducting Bedlam?" On February 6 the Queen opened Parliament in person:--

The Queen has not performed this ceremony during the last five years, and the reason for the Sovereign's seclusion would render it unbecoming for _Mr. Punch_ to say any word upon the subject of Her reappearance, except that it greatly rejoiced the nation and himself.

This emergence was welcome, but it was not followed up and did not satisfy public opinion, as we gather from an appeal made in the following year:--

The _Pall Mall Gazette_, inviting Her Majesty to resume her personal sway over society, says:--

"During the first twenty years of Queen Victoria's reign the salons of London did not reek with tobacco smoke, neither did the noble, the pure, and the young stagger under red wigs, glare with rouge and pearl-powder, or leer with painted eyes."

No. Neither do the noble and the pure stagger, glare or leer now. But if the ignoble, the impure, and some of the young do these things, and can be deterred from them by royal displeasure, manifested in the dignified way in which the First Lady would mark it, we should rejoice to know that the Queen intended to come forward and do an unwelcome duty. No worthier homage can be offered to the dead than a painful sacrifice for the sake of the living. The Crown has direct power over the court-class, and as for the idiots who parody their patrons, the parody, as we firmly believe, would be pursued even if great folks took to virtue and going to church. Which considerations, with the deepest respect, _Mr. Punch_ submits to the notice of his Royal Mistress.

Many of us thought that the lavish use of paint and dye by the young was a portent of Georgian post-war days: it is something of a surprise, possibly a relief, to find it was prevalent more than fifty years ago.

From this point onwards one may notice a disposition to acquiesce in the self-imposed seclusion of the Queen, though any movement towards breaking it down is at once recognized and welcomed--even such a small thing as the publication of her _Journal of our Life in the Highlands_. Thus we read that its issue "on the advice of Mr. Arthur Helps is likely, if such a thing were possible, to endear her still more to the loving hearts of her people," and in a set of verses on "The Queen's Book" the Queen is applauded for her wise and womanly thought:--

What Queen like this was ever known To take her people to her heart? When was Queen's household-life so shown With modest truth and artless art?

The Royal Widow has done well Thus on her people's love to call, Her simple wifely tale to tell And trust her joys and griefs to all.

The writer was evidently well aware that cynics and literary critics would make fun of the book, but the defence of sincerity comes with added weight from one who was always on the look out for ineptitudes in high places.

The announcement of the betrothal of the Princess Louise to the Marquis of Lorne gave _Punch_ a fine opportunity in the autumn of 1870 of vindicating his prescience, and simultaneously revealing Thackeray in the light of a political prophet:--

[Sidenote: _Thackeray among the Prophets_]

THE ROYAL MARRIAGE

_Mr. Punch_ begs leave to make a distinguished bow to his excellent (if Conservative) contemporary, the _Bath Chronicle_. That admirable journal, the studies of whose Conductor are so evidently in a right direction that the success of the paper is a matter of course, has turned back to a somewhat remote Number of _Punch_, and has been amply rewarded by lighting upon an article, which has been transferred to the columns of the _Bath Chronicle_, with appropriate remarks, a portion of which _Mr. Punch_ has the utmost pleasure in reproducing:--

"Twenty-one years ago, in the Number of _Punch_ for February 3, 1849, the late Mr. Thackeray drew an imaginary picture of 'England in 1869,' in supposed extracts from the newspapers of the period. One of these, under the heading of 'Marriages of the Royal Family,' is so applicable to the circumstances of 'England in 1870' that it is worth reproducing. The humourist would have been amused himself had he lived to see how nearly he hit the mark. The following is the paragraph we refer to:--

"'Marriages of the Royal Family.--Why should our Princes and Princesses be compelled always to seek in Germany for matrimonial alliances? Are the youths and maidens of England less beautiful than those of Saxe and Prussia? Are the nobles of our own country, who have been free for hundreds of years, who have shown in every clime the genius, the honour, the splendour of Britain--are these, we ask, in any way inferior to a Prince (however venerable) of Sachs-Schlippenschloppen, or a Grand Duke of Pigwitz-Gruntenstein? We would breathe no syllable of disrespect against these potentates--we recognize in them as in ourselves the same Saxon blood--but why, we ask, shall not Anglo-Saxon Princes or Princesses wed with free Anglo-Saxon nobles, themselves the descendants, if not the inheritors of kings? We have heard in the very highest quarters rumours which under these impressions give us the very sincerest delight. We have heard it stated that the august mother and father of a numerous and illustrious race, whose increase is dear to the heart of every Briton, have determined no longer to seek for German alliances for their exalted children, but to look at home for establishments for those so dear to them. More would be at present premature. We are not at liberty to mention particulars, but it is whispered that Her Royal Highness The Princess Boadicea is about to confer her royal hand upon a young nobleman who is eldest son of a noble peer who is connected by marriage with our noble and venerable Premier, with the Foreign and Colonial Secretaries, and with H.G. the Archbishop of Canterbury. The same "little bird" also whispers that His Royal Highness, Prince Hengist, has cast an eye of princely approbation upon a lovely and accomplished young lady of the highest classes, whose distinguished parents are "frae the North," whose name is known and beloved throughout the wide dominions of Britain's sway--in India, at the Admiralty, at the Home and Colonial Offices and in both Houses of Parliament.'

"The first part of the prediction is being accomplished with a literalness that should drive Zadkiel to despair. The Princess Louise, then a baby not quite a year old, is betrothed to the eldest son of a nobleman actually in office, who comes 'frae the North,' and whose name is certainly known in India, seeing that he is and has for some time been the Secretary of State for India. Moreover he is connected by marriage with the Foreign Secretary, Earl Granville, for he married a Gower, the Earl's first cousin, while as the head of the Campbells he may claim cousinship with the Earl's second wife, Miss Campbell, of Islay, as well as with the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose mother was a Campbell."

[Sidenote: _Opposition to Royal Grants_]

When the question of the Princess's dowry and annuity came up in the House of Commons early in 1871, Parliamentary opposition to Royal grants reared its head, and _Punch's_ summary of the debate is worth quoting:--

Mr. Gladstone, in a long speech, proposed, and Mr. Disraeli, with a gesture, seconded the proposal for granting £30,000 as dowry to Princess Louise, and £6,000 as H.R.H.'s annuity. There was loud acclamation from all parts of the House, and when Mr. Peter Taylor rose, hat in hand, to oppose the grant, the resolution had been carried. Here it may be convenient to add that, at a later stage, Mr. Taylor, rising amid groans from all sides, opposed the grant, and Sir Robert Peel expressed regret that a Princess had, by the advice of Ministers, been allowed to contract herself to the son of a Minister. Mr. Disraeli, as might be expected, treated the matter in a much more graceful way, paid a pleasant compliment to the Marquis of Lorne, and was glad that a Princess had accepted a Member of the House of Commons. Mr. Gladstone corrected Sir Robert, saying that deviation from the established rule of Royal marriage had been advised upon about eighteen months ago, and long before the engagement to the Marquis. The division was the most amusing which _Mr. Punch_ has ever chronicled. There were, for the grant, 350; against it, 1. This unit was Mr. Fawcett, but there were really Three against the grant, namely, himself and two Tellers, Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. Peter Taylor. The Commons roared lustily, and the nation echoed the roar.

With a backing which though minute in numbers was strong in intellect, it was not to be expected that this opposition would disappear. It was again manifested over the grant to Prince Arthur in the same year, when _Punch_ advised Sir Charles Dilke to renounce his title if he persisted in his opposition to royalties, and in 1872 Shirley Brooks gives a lively account of the debate on the proposed inquiry into the Civil List on the night of March 19, when Mr. Gladstone treated Sir Charles Dilke as Ulysses did Thersites:--

Having demolished his man, our Ulysses sat down amid astounding cheers from the Opposition as well as from his own party. Then another Aristocrat followed in the wake of the Baronet. The Honourable Auberon Herbert announced his preference for a Republic. The row then set in fiercely, and _Mr. Punch_ inclines to draw a veil over proceedings that did not greatly redound to the credit of the House of Commons. It is true that they were an index of public opinion in the matter, but Parliament is expected to be decorous, and not to allow cock-crowing as an argument. Even the Gallic Cock could not have behaved worse. The Speaker said that the scene gave him great pain. Counts were attempted, and then strangers and reporters were excluded for an hour, and then there was a division on an attempt at adjournment--negatived by 261 to 23. Mr. Fawcett opposed the motion in a spirited and sensible speech, and denounced the mixing up the question of Republicanism with "huckstering and haggling over the cost of the Queen's household." Finally, there was division on the motion itself, and the voters for it, including Tellers, were three Aristocrats, namely, Baronets Dilke and Lawson, and Mr. Herbert, son of an Earl, and they had one friend, Mr. Anderson, of Glasgow. Against these Four were, without Tellers, Two Hundred and Seventy-Six. The House roared with laughter, and soon went away. The Republican attack on the Queen was about as contemptible as that by the lad who presented the flintless and empty pistol the other day; but in the latter case as in the former, the affair was one for the police, and Constable Gladstone A1, was quite equal to the occasion.

In the same number appears the cartoon, "Another Empty Weapon," in which "Little Charley Dilke," with a large horse-pistol labelled "Motion," is seized by the scruff of the neck by Constable Gladstone A1 as a Royal State coach is passing by.

Dilke returned to the charge again on the marriage of Prince Alfred (the Duke of Edinburgh) in 1874. How strongly _Punch_ felt on this point may be gathered from the statement in the _Life of Sir Charles Dilke_ that Shirley Brooks refused to meet him on account of his Republican speeches. The subject may be dismissed for the present with the excellent, if apocryphal, anecdote in rhyme which appeared in _Punch_ under the heading, "A Problem Solved":--

About the Queen the Bart. C. Dilke Vents talk as acid as sour milk. _Punch_ wants to know if this be true Which, told to him, he tells to you-- How a great Lady deigned to wonder At Charley's anti-Windsor thunder "His father was so kind and mild-- I knew this gentleman a child: I've stroked his hair. I sometimes say I must have stroked it the wrong way."

The Albert Hall was opened on March 28, 1871, and the occasion is seized to administer a comprehensive rebuke to those who found it easy to laugh at the Queen, the Prince Consort, King Cole (Sir Henry Cole) and the Kensington "Boilers." That there were grounds for discontent, and that it was unwise to overlook the existence of industrial unrest, militant Radicalism and Republicanism _Punch_ freely admits in the vigorous doggerel entitled, "Looking Facts in the Face," in which he plays the part of candid friend to Queen, Lords and Commons alike. After examining the just causes for discontent at home, the activities of Bradlaugh and Odger, and the ominous warnings furnished by the Commune and the spread of the new doctrines of Karl Marx and the Internationalists, _Punch_ continues:--

So we, who don't hold that the world To come right must be set topsy-turvy, Those now at the helm from it hurled, And their place taken _crassâ Minervâ_,

Had better look squalls in the face, Make snug for a douche and a drenching, And--Queen, Lords, and Commons--embrace The supports that will stand the most wrenching.

Were I Queen, I'd not so play my _rôle_, As if bent to prove those right who flout me, And show, while folks pay the Crown toll, How well things can go on without me.

Were I Lord, Folly's gales I would thwart, Not by spreading my sails, but by furling 'em: Nor expose my prestige to be caught In the traps of the Gun Club and Hurlingham.

Were I in the Commons, I'd strive More than one Bill a Session to carry; Nor abreast all my 'buses to drive, Till all in a block have to tarry.

As Queen, Lords, or Commons, in fine, My course by the chart were I making, I should take just the opposite line To that Queen, Lords, and Commons are taking.

This was the first time that Karl Marx was mentioned in _Punch_. As for Odger, who is alluded to in the same verses, it may be recalled that at a meeting at Leicester held in this autumn he was credited with the statement that "me and my colleagues have resolved that the Prince of Wales shall never ascend the throne."

[Sidenote: _Anti-Monarchical Sentiment_]

There was undoubtedly a strong wave of anti-monarchical sentiment in England in 1871. It was not confined to agitators or extremists, but found utterance in organs which represented moderate opinion. Lord Morley in his _Life of Gladstone_ quotes from the _Pall Mall Gazette_ of September 29, 1871, to illustrate the depth and wide range of this discontent. He might very well have quoted _Punch_ also as documentary evidence. _The Political History of England_ sums up the grounds of this resentment among friendly critics not unfairly: "Ten years' seclusion from social activity and public duty seemed an excessive indulgence in the luxury of sorrow." The sympathy stirred by the Queen's illness in September, 1871, marked the beginning of a reaction; the acute anxiety "aroused by the dangerous illness of the Prince of Wales in the following December, and the subsequent rejoicings on his recovery, did much to improve the relations between Crown and people"; and _Punch_ quotes the Queen's message of thanks to the nation as the most "acceptable Christmas gift which could have been bestowed on a loyal and affectionate people." In the verses on the Thanksgiving Service in St. Paul's on February 27 he is at pains to meet the sneers of those who only saw:--

A Queen, and Prince and Princess, and their Court, And coaches passing to St. Paul's to prayer; To settle scores with Heaven in stately sort:-- A Show for once! and _our_ shows are so rare.

But the defensive tone is soon dropped for one of congratulation:

Happy the Queen that can, love-guarded, go Still, through a prayerful capital, to pray Happy among these million hearts to know Not one but beats in tune with hers to-day.

It was reserved, however, for later historians to detect in the renewed political activity of the Queen evidence of her distrust in the foreign policy of Gladstone. Among the signs of the times which mark the close of this period and the great Conservative revival which followed, few are more curious than the cartoon headed, "A Brummagem Lion," inspired by the visit to Birmingham of the Prince and Princess of Wales and the courtesy displayed by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain as mayor, in spite of his Radical proclivities.

The references to foreign potentates and their relations with the British Court show little abatement of _Punch's_ old distrust and hostility. Of the French Emperor's flying visit to Osborne in 1857 we read that it was "strictly private--none but policemen were admitted." The most friendly allusion to the Empress Eugénie refers to her having ridden in an ordinary hansom cab during a visit to England _incog._ in 1860. For the rest she is repeatedly attacked for her extravagance in dress, for dabbling in spiritualism, and for her interference in politics and support of the Papal pretensions. "Everyone has his oracle," says _Punch_ late in 1862.... "Didn't Numa Pompilius have his Egeria? Why, then, shouldn't Pius have his Eugenia?" In the same year she is abused for attending a bull-fight, and satirized in a cartoon representing the Emperor as Hercules and the Empress as Omphale. _Punch_ waxes indignant at the patronage extended by the Emperor to the variety stage in 1866, and wonders whether the infection will reach our Court. But his imagination entirely failed to forecast the bestowal of decorations on the heroes of the music-hall. We have moved since then. A famous story is told of Queen Victoria in her later years sending an Equerry to inquire the name of a lively air which had been played by her Court band. The Equerry returned to say that it was a popular song of the day. The Queen was dissatisfied and instructed him to find out and let her know the words. The Equerry went back, returned and proceeded to recite the classic stanza:--

Come where the booze is cheaper; Come where the pots hold more; Come where the boss is a bit of a Joss, Come to the pub. next door.

There the story unfortunately ends, without the Queen's comment. But in the pages of _Punch_ we read how in 1869, when the Constitutional _régime_ had just been inaugurated in France under Emile Ollivier, the programme of one of the Queen's State concerts included "Heaven Preserve the Emperor, with variations," which prompts _Punch_ to ask, "Would not this do for the French National Anthem?" In 1865 _Punch_ devoted a cartoon to commemorate the completion of fifty years of peace between England and France, and in 1869 another on the centenary of the first Napoleon. With the catastrophe of 1870, Sedan and its sequel of exile and suffering, _Punch's_ hostility changed to compassion, and his _In memoriam_ verses on the Emperor, though too laboured and too frequently disfigured by inversions to attain to the dignity of poetry, form one of the best of contemporary summaries and estimates of the career and character of the dead ruler:--

Already scores of ready penmen draft Of his life's course to power their bird's-eye view, Through poverty and perjury and craft, And redder stains that the blurred track imbrue.

Let whoso will count of his faults the cost, And point a moral in his saddened end; This is the thought in England uppermost-- He who has died among us, lived our friend.

If sinners may by suffering, too, be shriven, What penance those lost years had to sustain! The sting of fall and failure deeper driven By the dull stroke of slow and sleepless pain.

* * * * *

The time to weigh him fairly is not now; Nor are the true weights any France can bring: That sprang to fix the crown upon his brow, And her own neck beneath his feet to fling.

Heavily both have answered for their sin: Nor did the Emperor heavier fall undo, Than France, that backed him still while he could win, Nor turned against him till the luck turned too.[13]

But now 'tis England, and not France that stands Silent beside an Exile's dying bed, Mindful of kindness received by his hands, Sorrowing with those that sorrow for their dead.

[Sidenote: _French Emperor and Prussian King_]

_Punch_, as was made clear in the previous volume, was no lover of Prussian rule. On the eve of the war on Denmark he published a truly ferocious attack on King Wilhelm:--

THE SONG OF HOHENZOLLERN

Air--"The Standard Bearer."

I am a King; I reign by Right Divine, As did my sires some hundred years before me; Howe'er their crown was got, I came to mine, Obey me then, O people, and adore me.

My seat I plant upon mine ancient Throne, And order back the waves of Revolution. My will the law, I sit supreme, alone, My footstool is the Prussian Constitution.

Tsar Alexander's cause mine own I've made, Regardless of the blame of any journal. To crush the Poles I render him my aid; Help him enforce his discipline paternal.

I lend a hand to catch the runaway, The fugitive hand over to the slaughter; And, on my mind, whatever you may say Makes no more mark than what blows leave in water.

I'm called the Hangman's Cad, and I don't care For that dishonourable appellation. I carry Poland's garbage to the Bear, Serene amid the loudest execration.

My mind is bent on arbitrary rule; In policy I copy my late Brother. If you presume to say he was a fool, You'll very likely dare call me another.

Hostility to Prussia did not abate in the succeeding years, and in 1866 indignation is expressed at a rumour that the Queen was about to visit Germany. A general friendliness towards King Victor Emmanuel did not prevent _Punch_ from insinuating that he had sold his birthright to the French Emperor, and from expressing the fear that Sardinia as well as Savoy would be ceded to France. The most that can be said of his treatment of the Tsar Alexander II is that it was not quite so vehemently hostile as that meted out to his father. As early as January, 1862, we read that "the Russian Empire, with its body of brass and its feet of clay, will, if it does not take care, be requiring some support some day, to keep it up, on account of the extreme 'weakness of its legs.'"

The annals of Royalty, outside England, certainly afforded little scope for admiration. But the year 1865 was enlivened by a humorous instance of misplaced monarchical ambition. The King of Abyssinia, who had detained certain British subjects as prisoners, "was said to have favoured Queen Victoria with an offer of marriage, and to have imprisoned her lieges in revenge for her non-appreciation of his dusky love."

[Footnote 13: _Punch_ notes that not a single shop was closed in Paris on the day of the Emperor's funeral.]

GENERAL SOCIAL LIFE

From a variety of causes, most of which have been already discussed, reformers, humanitarians and critics of the established order generally display less resentment and acrimony throughout the mid-Victorian period. We have already hinted that the mellowing of _Punch's_ temper may have been due in part to the death of Douglas Jerrold. But the fact remains that _Punch_ had already begun to find less incentive to and less excuse for the _saeva indignatio_ which animated his earlier tirades against the aristocracy, and the selfish detachment of the titled classes. The spectacle of the Cream of Society disporting themselves at Cremorne to the exclusion of the general public is satirized in 1858, but the satire is tempered by the admission that this aristocratic "jamboree" was organized for a charitable purpose and brought in substantial proceeds. An analysis of the special butts of _Punch's_ satire reveals the interesting fact that, while not enjoying a complete immunity from criticism, the dukes are not only displaced from their unenviable pre-eminence, they almost disappear as targets for invective. We find attacks on the promotion of "well-connected politicians" _à propos_ of Lord Clanricarde's appointment as Privy Seal in 1858; and verses in the same year on the worship of the peerage, with "John Bull loves a lord" as text, but the flunkeydom of the Press is already a far less frequent theme of scarifying comment. _Punch's_ favourite occupation as the reviler of "Jenkins" was gone by the 'sixties, but snobbery in high places was not dead. Sir Benjamin Brodie, Sergeant-Surgeon to William IV and Queen Victoria, had been made a baronet in 1834; in 1858, when he was President of the Royal Society, there was some talk of his being made a peer, and _Punch_ in December of that year bitterly attacked the influences and prejudices which he believed were effectual in preventing the bestowal of the honour.

[Sidenote: _Peers and Commerce_]

The reign of the old nobility, however, was not merely threatened by outspoken criticism. The situation crystallized in the title of the play, _New Men and Old Acres_, was already a real thing; prosperous cotton-spinners were beginning to buy estates; by 1865 _Punch_ was contrasting the new representatives of the landed interest with their feudal predecessors--very much to the disadvantage of the former--and by the 'seventies the contrast was a favourite theme of Du Maurier. Simultaneously the converse tendency of the aristocracy to go into trade is noted, but with little sympathy. Thus we find in 1863 the prospectus of the Noble Hotel-keepers' Association (Limited) headed by a list of parasitic peers, including the Duke of Dangleton, the Duke of Dawdleton, the Duke of Diddleton, the Marquis of Hardupton, the Earl of Toadington, Viscount Ortolan, the Lord Verisopht, Sir Lionel Rattlecash, Bart., and so on; and a double-page cartoon shows the scene in the coffee-room of one of the Hotels in which "gents" of different types are being waited on by coronetted and bewhiskered peers. Greed rather than business capacity is indicated as the characteristic of the new recruits of commerce, and the annals of the last fifty years have furnished disastrous and even tragic examples of the results of this titled invasion of the City. Experience has shown that on the whole it is safer to gain a peerage by success in commerce than to exploit a peerage as a short cut to making money.

Commercialism in high places offended _Punch's_ notion of _noblesse oblige_. Much the same sentiment inspired his vehement protest against our selling the house in which Napoleon died at St. Helena for 180,000 francs: "We have an especial dislike to this traffic in a great man's grave. It is turning the funeral urn into a money-box with a vengeance--the vengeance of a miserly shopkeeper." On the other hand, complaints of extravagance and waste, though not so strident as of late years, are freely uttered in connexion with official dinners or loyal demonstrations--for example, when the Prince and Princess of Wales visited Chester in 1869, the Mayor's subscription alone amounted to £500.

In the domain of Commerce and Economics no movement in the Victorian age was more fruitful of results than that of co-operation. But a history of the system which began with Owen, took concrete shape in the famous venture of the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844--twenty-eight working men with a capital of £38--and led to the multiplication of Workmen's Co-operative Societies all over the country, is outside the limits of this survey. The movement came from below; _Punch_ was mainly if not entirely interested in its development as it affected the well-to-do classes by the establishment of "the Stores," and their competition with retail shops, and in the grievances of purchasers and their servants who had to carry their parcels home--grievances which reach their climax in the year 1868. In other words, he approaches the subject as an irresponsible social satirist, not as a student of economics. His pages only show the froth of the movement, not its deep underlying current. So, too, with the cult of Social Science. The periodic Congresses furnished him in the main with matter for chaff, though in 1858 he appeals to the moral engineers of the Social Science Association to devise some means of utilizing "social sewage"--swindlers, fraudulent bankers and trustees. The shortcomings of British cookery always found in _Punch_ a candid critic, but he had no sympathy for those journalists who sought to remedy the deficiency by the publication of elaborate and expensive daily _menus_. Such instruction was a mockery to the poor who had not enough to eat, and did not know how to cook the little they had.

[Sidenote: _Banting and "Hydros"_]

An interesting treatise might be written on Victorian diseases and their remedies. The worship of pastime, exercise and athletics was still in its infancy; whatever its drawbacks, it has undoubtedly given a new lease of life to the middle-aged. Obesity, due in great measure to over-eating and lack of exercise, was the nightmare of the well-to-do, and, if proof be required of the statement, one need only refer to the success of the movement initiated by Banting. Inasmuch as he was a fashionable undertaker--he was responsible for the construction of the Duke of Wellington's funeral car--there was an element of disinterestedness in his efforts to promote longevity. He was also a living example of the virtue of his method, for he reduced himself many stones in weight by the use of non-fat-producing foods. "He had a whalebone frame made to fit his once large waistcoats and coats, and wore the whole over his reduced size--removing this armour to produce a full effect."[14] His famous letter to the Press "On Corpulence" rang through the land: his name was a household word in the 'sixties, and he enriched our vocabulary with a noun and verb which are enshrined in the classic pages of the _New English Dictionary_, though they are practically unknown to the Georgian generation. Hustle and exercise and nerves have removed the evil against which he warred, and in an age in which excessive bulk is a rarity, the name of Banting has passed into semi-oblivion. But _Punch's Almanack_ for 1864 is full of it and him, and for a good many years Banting was as familiar in the mouths of men as Pussyfoot is to-day.

The campaign against over-indulgence was not confined to an attack on starch, fat and sugar. In the 'fifties hydropathy had come to stay, and in the 'sixties hydropathic establishments were to be found all over the British islands and in America, though the abbreviation of "hydro" was not introduced till later. Fortunes were made--and lost--in these institutions, and they still exist, though some of the most sumptuous "hydros" have undergone curious vicissitudes and conversions. One of the best known of all was used as a girls' school during the War. But the rigour of the water-cure treatment was only enforced in the early years of the movement; proprietors gradually realized that it did not pay to run their establishments as uncomfortable hospitals, and with a laxer administration the whole system fell somewhat into discredit. The convivial _Punch_ never smiled on it, as may be gathered from the verses he printed in March, 1869, when hydropathy was still in its prime, on "Sound Port and Principles." They must not, however, be taken to represent _Punch's_ own views, for he was no lover of guzzling. The poem is really a satire, but it is partly inspired by _Punch's_ inveterate dislike of the teetotal fanatics.

[Footnote 14: See "Bant" in _Passing English of the Victorian Era_, by J. Redding Ware.]

Surgery was active, though the days of appendicitis and adenoids were still a long way off. _Punch_, however, was more interested in mental maladies and the pathology of the social system. The Victorian age had no monopoly of superstition and credulity, but prophets and spiritualists and diviners reaped a rich harvest in the 'fifties and 'sixties. The comet of 1857 caused a good deal of anxiety, so much so, that in December of that year an insolvent butcher gave as a reason for his failure "the loss he had sustained in June, when the comet was expected, by a large quantity of meat being spoilt." Dr. Cumming was assiduous in prophesying the end of the world, but unfortunately _Punch_ ascertained that the doctor had renewed the lease of his house for fifty years, and the prophet's defence of his action did not mend matters:--

_Mr. Punch_ finds in a Liverpool journal the following part of a lecture which Dr. Cumming has been delivering on Prophecy:--

"He had been, he said, taunted in the columns of _Punch_ with having, notwithstanding his belief that the world was to come to an end in 1867, recently renewed the lease of his cottage for 50 years. The accusation, he said, although not literally, was generally true, but his answer to it was, that a belief in prophecy should not override commonsense. The doctor was frequently applauded throughout his eloquent lecture."

And by no person should he have been applauded more loudly than by _Mr. Punch_, if that gentleman had had the good fortune to be in the schoolroom at Claughton, where the lecture is reported to have been delivered. The last quoted sentence is so admirably frank that _Mr. Punch_ cannot withhold his tribute of veneration. In other words, although it is all very well, in the way of business, to work the old Hebrew scrolls, which boil down into capital stock for the rather thin yet spicy soup vended by our Doctor, he has no notion of eating his own cookery. We wish we were as certain of our friend's orthography as we are of his commonsense, and would give a trifle (say the next three hundred Tupperian sonnets) to know whether, in his private ledger, he does not spell Prophets as worldly people spell the opposite of Losses.

[Sidenote: "_Diviners and Dupes_"]

The chief exploiters of credulity, however, were to be found in the ranks of spiritualists, mediums, clairvoyantes and professional somnambulists. Men of science still held aloof from this traffic with the unseen, and its terminology was crude, but the methods and results were strangely familiar. Spirit drawings, forerunners of spirit photographs, are mentioned as early as 1857. Under the heading of "Diviners and Dupes" _Punch_ deals harshly with the advertisements of the clairvoyantes and diviners, and once more returns to his familiar complaint against the harrying of humble fortune-tellers while fashionable impostors escaped:--

The gipsies are hardly dealt with in being convicted as rogues and vagabonds for telling fortunes by the cards or the palm of the hand, whilst practitioners in Clairvoyance get their hands crossed with silver, or with postage-stamps, with perfect impunity. There is clearly one law for the Romany, and another for Somnambulists.

David Dunglas Home, born near Edinburgh, of Scottish parents, and descended on his mother's side from a family supposed to be gifted with second sight, returned in 1856 from America where he had spent his youth and early manhood, and in 1860, when he was at the zenith of his fame, elicited a scoffing tribute from _Punch_ under the heading, "Home, Great Home." The first stanza of this poem, which is accompanied by a picture representing a spirit hand placing a wreath on the head of a lady with a goose's head, refers to Home's famous feats of "levitation" or rising in the air as if impelled by some unknown force. _Punch_ was stubbornly sceptical of the whole business. But if any medium ever deserved the title of "great" it was Home. Did he not inspire Browning to write his famous "Sludge, the Medium"--though Mrs. Browning is said to have been a believer? Anyhow, the list of his converts is too remarkable to justify _Punch's_ contemptuous disparagement. It included Dr. Robert Chambers, Dr. Lockhart Robertson, the editor of the _Journal of Mental Science_, John Elliotson, a distinguished physiologist, S. C. Hall, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, F.R.S., the Earl of Dunraven, and the late Sir William Crookes, F.R.S. Home was received into the Church of Rome and had an audience of the Pope in 1856, and eight years later was expelled from Rome as a sorcerer--a tremendous testimony to his powers. He married twice into the Russian _noblesse_, his first wife being a god-daughter of the Tsar Nicholas, and he gave repeated _séances_ before his son Alexander II. The infatuation of the Russian Court for wonder-workers and miracle-mongers was hereditary, and of late years became tragically notorious, but Home was received with equal favour by the King of Prussia, the Emperor and Empress of the French, and the Queen of Holland. The "Spiritual Athenæum" (no connexion, need one say, with the august institution at the corner of Pall Mall) which he founded in 1866 had but a short life, and the gift of £60,000, which he received from a rich widow, was revoked as the result of a Chancery suit, the lady alleging he had obtained it by spiritual influence. But we have it on the authority of the D.N.B. that he "was not a professional medium, and scrupulously abstained from taking money for his _séances_," which answers _Punch's_ sneer at his lucrative traffic with spirits. The writer of the notice concludes with the words, "his history presents a curious and unsolved problem." Taken all round, he was by far the most remarkable personality in spiritualistic circles in the nineteenth century, and "imagination's widest stretch" fails to shadow forth the influence he might have exerted had he flourished sixty years later. Let us be thankful that he lived when he did, and freely own that, if an impostor, he was an impostor of genius and emphatically not a Rasputin.

[Sidenote: _Mediums and Faith-healers_]

Alongside of Home's manifestations, the exploits of other Victorian mediums dwindle into insignificance. But they furnished _Punch_ with food for ridicule, as when the Nottingham spiritualists in 1863 suggested the writing of a new Bible from their direct revelations; or when an American clairvoyante published, and distributed in Great Britain, her claims to having made "the greatest discovery ever made," viz., "Mediation Writing, direct to and from the spirit world, in One Minute, without any mechanism, except Pen, Ink and Paper." Her claim to have communicated with Shakespeare gave _Punch_ a special opportunity, for it was the year of the Tercentenary, and the Bard of Avon must have had the whole history of the squabbles which beset that luckless undertaking inflicted upon him by the American lady. More interesting to us, however, is the reference to success achieved by legitimate conjurers in imitating the manifestations of spiritualists. For in 1860 the late Mr. Maskelyne had already exposed the Davenport Brothers, and greatly surpassed any feats they had accomplished in the way of levitation and the materializing of spirit forms. But _populus vult decipi: decipiatur_; and the game went on. Home was much in evidence in 1870 in the provinces and in Belgravian drawing-rooms, flying "by miracle up to the ceiling, And carrying hot coals on pate or palm, no inconvenience feeling." And in the same year there appeared Dr. Newton, an American faith-healer, or "healing medium," as he was called,

... Out-Homing Home, and curing folks' diseases, Giving blind and dumb, and deaf and halt, eyes, ears, tongues, legs as he pleases; By laying his hands upon them, and bidding their ailments begone, And doing it all for love, and not money--the downy one! And for all our march of intellect, and our monarchy of mind, There's never a Reynard the Fox, but he draws his tail of fools behind; And there's never a quack that quacks, but he finds green geese to echo his quacking, And never a swindler that lowers his trawl, and finds the flat fish lacking!

As Dr. Newton professed to cure diseases partly by mesmerism, partly by the aid of "disembodied assistants," the spiritualist newspapers waxed lyrical in his praise, while _Punch_ contented himself with pointing out the entire absence of any expert verification of his alleged miracles.

If it almost amounted to a privilege to be imposed on by so splendid and well-connected an impostor as Home, the famous Tichborne case exhibited Victorian credulity in a less favourable light. Home's influence was confined to the well-to-do, even well-educated dupes. Though he toured the provinces, lectured and read poetry with considerable acceptance, he was most in his element among the "classes" and in Belgravia. The Claimant's appeal was far wider: he was the hero of the masses and of all the great army of the half-baked. Yet the element of romance was not wanting: there is always something "arresting," as the moderns say, in the emergence of a missing heir; everything connected with the business was on a huge scale--beginning with the physique of the Claimant himself, who weighed twenty-four stone--and at its worst it was far removed from the squalors of "Brides in Bath" and other modern trials. The unshaken belief of the Dowager Lady Tichborne was a great asset; the extraordinary astuteness of Orton in veiling his colossal ignorance and turning the hints of his cross-examiners to good account extorted reluctant admiration even from those most convinced of his guilt. There never was a greater example of the saying that "one lie is the father of many." The force of circumstances was too strong for him. It is generally believed that he would have abandoned his claim long before the first trial but for the pressure of his creditors. He was a seven-years incubus on England, but throughout the whole affair he showed a sort of perverted bulldog tenacity which accounted largely for his popularity.

The notices in _Punch_ begin early in 1867 when, in an illustrated chronicle of the previous month, one of the entries reads, "Sir Roger Tichborne arrived from Australia, after many years absence, and was at once recognized as 'the rightful heir.'" The crescendo of excitement and interest went on for nearly four years before the case came into court. The first action opened on May 11, 1871, and two months later _Punch_ bore witness to its devastating influence on social life:--

GROANS OF THE PERIOD

_Vox Clamantis in Deserto:_ "_Tichborne--Orton--quid refert, O!_"

Who, this side the Channel Ditch born, Can escape the talk of Tichborne? What would I not give in payment, To hear no more of "the Claimant"! Sure as Death to poor or rich born, Comes the inevitable Tichborne, Till with cursing, like a raiment, One is fain to clothe "the Claimant." To what realm, by wind or witch borne, Can I flee from talk of Tichborne? Was life to July from May meant, To be given up to "the Claimant"? Patient I've seen ache and stitch borne, But what's that to talk of Tichborne? O, ye Doctors, make essayment Of some cure for chatt'ring Claimant, Worse to kill than grass called twitch born, The still springing talk of Tichborne. All ask what his little game meant: All are pro or con "the Claimant."

* * * * *

Unto boredom's highest niche borne, There enshrine the name of Tichborne; Crest: two tongues, approuvant, blamant-- Motto: "Rogerne an Arthur Claimant?"

[Sidenote: "_Poor, Persecuted Sir Roger_"]

When, after 102 days' hearing, the jury declined to hear any further evidence on March 5, 1872, _Punch_ joyfully recorded "the collapse of an audacious attempt at robbery, supported by one of the most cruel and dastardly slanders ever devised by rogues in council," and rejoiced in the thought that the folks who lent money in aid of the scheme (by investing in Tichborne bonds) had lost it all. The same number contains a cartoon bearing the inscription, "The Monster Slain," showing _Punch_ saluting Sir John Coleridge, who is standing, armed with the Sword of British Justice, on the prostrate form of the Claimant disguised as a dragon. To the dragon _Punch_ gave the name of "The Waggawock"--a "portmanteau-word" compounded of Wagga-Wagga (where the claimant had lived in Australia) and Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwock," and proceeded to dress that prophetic and mystical poem in plain English.

_Punch's_ "chortling" was a trifle premature: two years had yet to elapse before England was finally rid of her "old man of the sea." In April, 1872, we find a picture representing a flunkey giving notice to his mistress, and when asked for his reason saying, "Well, me Lady, I can't agree with Master's suckasms against that poor, persecuted Sir Roger." The egregious Mr. Whalley, M.P. for Peterborough, at a meeting of 3,000 supporters of the claimant held at Southampton in June, spoke vehemently in his defence. There is a statue of Dr. Watts in Southampton Park, and _Punch_ suggested that if these admirers decided to erect one to "Sir Roger" by its side, they should sing, at its unveiling, one of Watts' _Divine and Moral Songs_ which begins:--

O 'tis a pleasant thing for youth To walk betimes in wisdom's way-- To fear a lie, to speak the truth That we may trust to all they say.

The "Waggawock" was not really slain until February 28, 1874, when after a second gigantic trial lasting 188 days, the claimant was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to fourteen years' penal servitude. But his backers, mortified by the loss of the money they had invested in him, lent a ready ear to those, like Whalley, who ascribed the persecution to a Jesuit conspiracy. The agitation did not subside until Dr. Kenealy, who had led for the defence, who had been disbarred for breaches of professional etiquette, and was returned to Parliament to advocate the claimant's cause, was defeated by 433 votes to 1 on his motion to refer the conduct of the trial and the guilt or innocence of the prisoner to a Royal Commission. The Tichborne case remains for all time a rich treasure-house of materials for psychologists interested in the _Esprit de la Foule_; _Punch_ in his punning days would have spelt the last word differently. It also furnishes a conspicuous and ignoble example of the insular detachment which prevailed in a period of "splendid isolation" and non-intervention. At the time when France, beaten to the dust, was agonizing in the throes of the Commune, England was preoccupied and obsessed by this gross and impudent pretender. He certainly made, and unmade, reputations at the Bar and left behind one immortal translation in the course of the cross-examination designed to test his knowledge of the classics--"The Laws of God for Ever" for _Laus Deo Semper_--but he was a national nuisance as well as a criminal, for he not only ruined himself but discredited thousands of his countrymen whose credulity had been reinforced by greed.

[Sidenote: _Sport and Pastime_]

The craze for sensational or dangerous exhibitions so frequently rebuked by _Punch_ in connexion with the performances of Blondin and his imitators cannot be regarded as a specially Victorian weakness. Over pugilism and prize-fighting, as illustrated by the historic contest between Heenan and Sayers in 1860, he could wax enthusiastic. Sayers, by the way, was alleged to have earned £85,000 in one year, a sum which compares not unfavourably with the gains of modern champions. It was an age of non-intervention, but more robust in the expression of likes and dislikes, passions and prejudices, and in some respects less humane or refined in its pleasures. Sporting wagers which resulted in the riding of horses to death were growing rarer but had not altogether died out. The noble pastime of Alpine climbing was already established in 1858, but the combined attractions of healing waters and gambling tables were a more potent attraction to wearied legislators of the gilded breed. The manners of the British traveller were not always above reproach, and _Punch_ in his Almanack for that year, employs his ironical method to explain our unpopularity:--

WHY ENGLISHMEN ARE BELOVED UPON THE CONTINENT

Because they are always so careful to abstain from either word or action, which, in any way, might hurt the feelings of a foreigner.

Because they never institute odious comparisons between things in general abroad and those they've left at home, unless indeed it is to the disparagement of the latter.

Because they never brag about the "freedom of a British subject," in countries which are under a despotic form of government.

Because they speak so fluently in any continental language, and always are so affable when publicly accosted by a stranger, and so ready at all times to enter into conversation with those they may be travelling with.

Because they don't bawl for beer at a first-class table d'hôte, nor make wry faces at the wine as though it disagreed with them.

Because they never in the least let trifles put them out, and however much they are annoyed they do their utmost to conceal it, instead of (as has been maliciously asserted) seizing with delight on every opportunity to give their temper vent, and express themselves dissatisfied with everything that's done for them.

Because whatever provocation they may think they have received, they are so careful not to let strong language pass their lips; and so far from making extracts from the Commination Service, are never heard to use an exclamation more forcible than "Dear me!" or "Now really, how provoking!"

A few years later _Punch_ took up the cudgels on the other side, but the rebuke here administered was undoubtedly deserved. Foreign travel, however, was restricted by the passport trouble in 1858, and _Punch_ saw in the restriction a chance for the native hotel-keeper, if he would only reduce his charges.

It was not exactly a temperate age. Heavy meals and copious potations play an important part in Dickens's novels; and a great many men ate and drank a great deal more than was good for them. Abernethy's method of dealing with the voracious Alderman might still have been profitably followed by Victorian practitioners. But we say "men" advisedly, for there is no evidence that women gorged and guzzled, certainly none to support the fantastic account of English dinner parties given by a French writer and reproduced in 1861 by _Punch_ with characteristic comments:--

"At a dinner party the ladies retire into another room, after having partaken very moderately of wine; and while the gentlemen empty bottles of Port, Madeira, Claret and Champagne, it is a constant habit among the ladies to empty bottles of brandy."

[Sidenote: _The National Type_]

The extract is taken from a book on _Les Anglais, Londres et L'Angleterre_, with an introduction by no less eminent an authority than M. Emile de Girardin, who vouched for its accuracy. According to the writer the English cared for nothing but roast beef, porter, and spirits. They were "averse to contemplation," had not the remotest conception of grace or feeling, their "climate, coarse food, and black drink being utterly opposed to any mental refinement. To possess taste it is necessary to possess soul, and a large soul; and the English possess nothing but appetite." It was a gross libel, but the misconception was mutual, and _Punch_ had done a great deal to foster it by his persistent representation of the "Mossoo" as a mere figure of fun. And let it never be forgotten that the notion of the English as a gross and crapulous race was in great measure due to our caricaturists, Gillray and Rowlandson, and even Hogarth. We chose the beefy, burly, sixteen-stone top-booted farmer as the national type, and we have retained it long after "John Bull" ceased to be typical of the breed physically. It became a caricature, but we have only ourselves to blame if foreign artists caricatured our own caricature. The process of the mutual discovery of France and England has moved far since the 'sixties, and has reached its climax (on the French side) in _Les Silences du Colonel Bramble_, by our good friend M. André Maurois--a work recently described by Mr. H. A. L. Fisher as "the best psychological study of the English character ever written by a foreigner."

The social history of any period may be studied in its lions, and, if the truth be told, in 1861 Du Chaillu and the Gorilla loom larger than Darwin in the pages of _Punch_, though the _Origin of Species_ is described as "a book of much worth." _Punch_ was not much interested in the theological controversy involved, though he naturally made play later on with Disraeli's famous "Apes and Angels" speech at Oxford. Disraeli was dubbed the new "Angelical Doctor," and in a famous cartoon is exhibited as dressing for an Oxford _bal masqué_, with a contemptuous set of verses on his bewildering versatility, his impartial hostility to Tractarians and Broad Churchmen, winding up with the warning:--

Yet scarce the best mimes can from Nature escape, And what's simious to saintly brooks change ill; Have a care lest thou then should be most of the ape, When most bent on enacting the Angel.

Another and earlier poem is mainly concerned with the lively disputes that broke out between Huxley and Owen and between rival geologists. Du Chaillu's claims were hotly contested; his book was treated by some critics as a collection of traveller's tales, and his meridional exuberance of manner and diction inspired scepticism among some cautious scientists. But _Punch_ espoused his cause--attracted, no doubt, by his championship of Livingstone--promoted the gorilla to the rank of the "Lion of the Season" in May, 1861, and in due course of time Du Chaillu's veracity was substantially confirmed by later explorers.

There were lionesses as well as lions in the 'sixties, and the year 1864 was marked by a new and momentous apparition--that of the American woman of fashion. Hitherto America had sent us only social and dress reformers, but the arrival of the "elegant and fascinating American young lady" was an event which did not escape the vigilance of _Punch_. The War was still raging, and, as we know, he regarded the antagonists with almost equal disfavour; but towards these fair New Yorkers he bore no hostility, and no fewer than three pictures, all by Leech, do justice to their charm while the legends emphasize the "pretty little Americanisms" of their speech. It is a welcome change from the consistent disparagement of their brothers and fathers from Lincoln downwards. But the great lion of 1864 was Garibaldi, who was given the freedom of the City of London and greeted everywhere with the enthusiasm which he deserved. It was this visit that gave rise to one of Palmerston's characteristic sayings. Someone suggested that they ought to find Garibaldi an English wife, and someone else observed that he had already got an Italian one, whereupon Pam cheerfully remarked, "O that doesn't matter. We'll get Gladstone to explain her away."

[Sidenote: _Baker and Stanley_]

Sir Samuel Baker, who returned from his adventurous and fruitful explorations in Central Africa in October, 1865, with his heroic wife and companion of his travels, was the hero of that year, and the lion of the winter of 1873, after his successful but arduous campaign against the slave-traders of the Equatorial Nile basin. In 1866, after Baker was knighted, _Punch_ printed a poem of congratulation to the heroic pair, winding up with the lines:--

Three cheers for the Knight and the Lady so brave, If Echo's asleep let us lustily wake her; For none are more worthy of shout and of stave, Than the Two who ennoble the old name of Baker.

Stanley, whose historic "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" when he found the great missionary-explorer at Ujiji, had been duly chronicled by _Punch_ in July, 1872, found himself famous on his arrival in London later in the year. He was, however, a somewhat intractable lion, and the criticisms of the geographical pundits caused him to roar in a rather formidable fashion. Still he received many gratifying proofs of recognition for his great services. He was entertained at Dunrobin Castle by the Duke of Sutherland; his book and lectures brought him in a handsome sum; and the Queen sent him a gold snuffbox set with brilliants.

[Sidenote: _The Shah-in-Shah_]

The last of the lions of this period was the Shah. The lion-hunting of Royalties was always offensive to _Punch_; it is frequently castigated throughout this period, and here it reached a pitch which moved "the Democritus of Fleet Street" to explosions of sardonic and mirthless laughter. There is true satire in the bitter lines headed, "The Shah's Impressions," in the issue of July 12, 1873:--

Yes! Shah-in-Shah in truth I must be Or why this fuss of the Feringhee?[15] Why all these hosts my steps that crowd, With bows so low and cheers so loud? If the Inglees Queen, so great among princes All this respect for me evinces; If the Tsarevitch, when I appear Falls flat as the flattest of bitter beer; If all these Wuzeers[16] and Aghas, and Khans, For me spend their time and their tomauns[17]; Their parks and their palaces lay at my feet, Muster for me their army and fleet And their miles upon miles of merchant ships; If without their ferashes[18] and their whips, Manchester gathers and Liverpool runs, With voices of men and thunder of guns, To the light of the face of the Shah-in-Shah, As unto the amber is drawn the straw; All this is proof in more than words, I am King of Kings and Lord of Lords!

They told me in leaving Teheran, Danger of eating dirt I ran,-- That out of the realms of the Shah-in-Shah I should find rulers called Light and Law. May the graves of their mothers be defiled That fain with such bosh had their Shah beguiled! For the more of these Feringhee Kaffirs[19] I've known, The whiter to me my face has grown. I've seen the land calls the Russki lord, And there the rulers are Stick and Sword; To the land of the Prusski when I came, The tongue was changed, but the rule the same: The stars on the coats may be sown more thick, But the Prusski's Shah-in-Shah is Stick! And here in the land of the Inglees They live and move but the Shah to please. If my diamonds are as the sun in the skies, What is the brightness of my eyes? As in this land there is no sun, They make a daylight instead of one. The Queen from her palace for me retires To Teheran binding it with wires. Here's Sutherland Beg[20] makes his palace mine, And all but bids skies for me to shine. At the Crystal Palace, Effendi Grove With the rain itself for my pleasure strove, And out of the water brought the fire To compass the Shah-in-Shah's desire. In a wonderful land of wax I've been, And _houris_ fairer than Heaven I've seen; To the Inglees Bank a visit I've paid Where Reuter's gold for me is laid; And all that have seen me, and all I have seen, As dust in the path of the Shah hath been, And instead of eating dirt, I see But Kaffirs eating dirt to me.

[Footnote 15: Frank, European.]

[Footnote 16: Viziers, Ministers.]

[Footnote 17: Cash.]

[Footnote 18: Menials employed to apply the bastinado.]

[Footnote 19: Infidels, unbelievers.]

[Footnote 20: Chief or Lord.]

We need not be surprised, after reading this scathing poem, to find that, when the Shah left our shores, _Punch_ had no difficulty in enduring his bereavement with fortitude. The net result, so far as the million were concerned, was the addition of "Have you seen the Shah?" to the catchwords of the hour.

In the eternal competition between London and the provinces, centralization and local autonomy, it was hardly to be expected that _Punch_, in his jealousy for London, should adopt a judicial or impartial attitude. In earlier years he had protested vigorously against Celtic egotism, when developed at the expense of English sobriety, and the growth of the movement in favour of the vernacular in Wales and the spread of Eisteddfods provoked him to contemptuous antagonism. In the "Essence of Parliament" for May 5, 1862, this hostility is sufficiently outspoken:--

In the course of the debate on Education, the Honourable Douglas Pennant, a Conservative, and member for Carnarvonshire, had the courage to say, that he believed the Welsh language to be the curse of Wales, being the great obstacle to improvement. Of course it is, but while a pack of sentimentalists keep up a twitter about it, and offer prizes for Welsh Odes and such-like Gorilla utterances, how is the fatal jargon to be exterminated? Here's a health to Edward the First, though we are sorry to say that historians now disbelieve that he did spiflicate highborn Hoel, soft Llewellyn, Modred, who made Plinlimmon shudder with his dissonant ballads, and the rest of the Welsh Bards--whose only merit was their having afforded T.G. [Thomas Gray] the subject for an ode that will outlast Snowdon.

The report of the Eisteddfod, held at Bala in the autumn, given in the _Oswestry Observer_, serves as the occasion for a truly ferocious attack on the disloyal "caterwauling" of the Chapel Bards. In particular _Punch_ is exasperated by the fulminations of the Bard Castell, his appeal to his countrymen to "conquer or die," and his final challenge to the English tyrant:--

We scorn your ways, we can despise your terrors, Then take your chains, pray keep them for your errors.

[Sidenote: _Punch's Pet Aversions_]

For a whole column _Punch_ pours the vials of his abuse on the "humbug" and "bosh" of "Bardery." Some critics declare that _Punch_ killed the crinoline, though he himself acknowledged his failure; he was certainly powerless to check the spread of Eisteddfodau and Pan-Celtitis, and he undoubtedly overshot the mark by the violence of his diatribes.

Pseudo-intellectualism and preciosity were a safer target, and towards the end of this period aestheticism in its earlier stages comes in for a certain amount of satirical notice.

_Punch's_ reference to abusive personalities in the Press were no doubt justified, though (as we have seen in his comments on the Welsh Bards) they laid him open to the retort, "physician, heal thyself"; but his withers were unwrung when he assailed the _Saturday Review_ in 1858 for its frigid pedantry; or protested against the maudlin, devotional tone and mock impressiveness of fashionable clergymen; or the vulgar curiosity of snobs at bathing places. The futilities of garrison town life and the dangers which young ladies ran of being entrapped by seedy captains are exposed in the same year, to which also belongs a properly indignant remonstrance with the Lord Mayor of London for advising a thief to enlist in the army, a thoroughly characteristic example of the old middle-class prejudice against soldiers. The humours and trials of studio life play an increasing part in the pictorial side of _Punch_; they were derived largely, no doubt, from the experiences of his own artists, but the multiplication of these references serves to show the growing social importance of the artist; and the same remark, _mutatis mutandis_, applies to amateur theatricals. The allusions to club life are fewer than in earlier years, and are mainly concerned with the Athenæum. It is amusing to find the ancient legend of the alleged unsociability of the Athenæum referred to as far back as 1858. The Almanack for that year contains the following: "Imaginary Conversation--Anybody speaking to anybody at the Athenæum." As for Victorian society generally, it would be hard to find a more instructive sidelight on its usages than that furnished by _Punch's_ protest against "the Morning Call Nuisance":--

"Sir," said Dr. Johnson (or might have done so if he didn't), "the man who makes a morning call pays homage to a custom which the imbecile may bow to, but the sensible contemn." In the presence of his lady readers _Mr. Punch_ has not the courage to confess that he applauds the dictum of the doctor. If it were not for the practice of making morning calls, ladies often would be puzzled to know what on earth to do; and _Mr. Punch_ would not debar them from what is, after all, a harmless act of time-slaughter. But he protests with all his might against the notion which some ladies appear to entertain, that their husbands should attend them when they pay these morning visits. It is bad enough for husbands to be dragged to evening parties, but worse still is their suffering when they are cruelly compelled to make some morning call.

[Sidenote: "_What is always Going On_"]

Social abuses and grievances and disparities were not so flagrant as they had been twenty years before; still _Punch_, though no iconoclast, found plenty of scope for his reforming zeal. Cremation was not pronounced a legal procedure until 1884, but Shirley Brooks was one of the original members of the English Cremation Society formed in January, 1874, as a result of Sir Henry Thompson's advocacy of a method which had been neglected in England since Sir Thomas Browne published his _Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial_ in 1658.

In the summer of 1872 _Punch_ printed a list headed, "What is always going on." It is a reassuring proof of the stability of England that of the twenty-six entries exactly half, quoted beneath, are as topical to-day as they were fifty years ago:--

The weather. The Publicans. Strikes. Jobs. Ireland. An International Something or Other. A Big Subscription. An Inauguration. A Millenary, Centenary, Anniversary or Jubilee. A New Daily Paper. Another English Opera Company. The High Price of Provisions. The Albert Memorial.

CLASS DISTINCTIONS

In the report, printed in February, 1865, of an imaginary Meeting for Promoting the Education of the Rich, addressed by various artisans, tradesmen, an ex-footman, etc., we read that there was "a unanimous call for a vote of compliment to _Mr. Punch_ for his indefatigable exertions to bring all classes into harmony." Self-praise is a dangerous game, and there were occasions, already noted, on which the verdict of posterity will not confirm _Punch's_ complacency. Yet we have seen that along with his increasingly critical attitude towards the working-man he seldom failed to recognize the need of friendly personal relations between employers and employed; he regretted the fact that in many industrial areas the masters lived away from and out of touch with their men. But the local conditions of the great industries render social cleavage inevitable to a considerable extent; it is in the domain of unorganized labour, and in particular that of domestic service, that class distinctions lend themselves more freely to comment, criticism and satire. Nowhere else are master or mistress and man or woman brought so close together; the crowded life of fashionable society was once described as "friction without intimacy," and the phrase might well be applied to the relations between servants and their employers.

[Sidenote: _Mistresses and Servants_]

"Domestic Science" was still in its infancy--the name had not yet been coined--but _Punch_ was deeply interested in the training of girls of all classes in household duties. Throughout the mid-Victorian period he is seldom so serious or sympathetic as when the improvement of cookery is discussed.[21] In earlier years he had been eloquent on the subject of the underpayment of certain classes of servants. These complaints practically disappear from 1857 onwards, though he does not fail to rebuke wealthy mistresses for the scandalously inadequate and insanitary accommodation which was habitually provided for servants in the lordliest mansions. Even the most pampered menials had to sleep in cupboards in the basements or in the attics. But the new note of independence in woman servants is often dwelt upon, and not always in a sympathetic spirit, while in 1861 their extravagance, destructiveness and distaste for needlework form the preface to a noteworthy pronouncement on "Servant-galism _versus_ Schooling," which comes rather as a revelation to those who regard the unpopularity of domestic service as a modern development:--

With an ear to these complaints, and an eye to the instruction of girls in humble life, not merely in the knowledge of how to read and write, but in the useful arts of sewing, cookery, and housekeeping, which are no more learnt by instinct than anatomy or algebra, geography or Greek, a lady four years since established a training school at Norwich, where the object was, she tells us:

"To give the opportunity for gaining a good education, with the addition of plain sewing, mending and cutting out; and also (what every mother was to understand on putting her girl to school) such practical acquaintance with cookery and housework, under my excellent housekeeper, that every girl might know how a house should be kept, and should acquire habits which would hereafter make all the difference between a tidy and happy home or the reverse."

[Sidenote: _The Ignorant Rich_]

After a trial of four years, the lady is compelled to own her scheme a failure, solely because she found the girls too proud to do the housework, and the parents so absurd as to encourage their refusal. In a letter to the _Norwich Mercury_, she says:

"I was not prepared to find the class of parents I had to do with would apparently accept the education, but make every excuse to evade the industrial work, or keep their daughters away when it was to be done, and threaten to remove them if the household duties were required of them. In corroboration of this latter fact, I may observe that twenty-three girls have been taken away from the school expressly because they would not do the housework. Whether in the present day girls are allowed to determine for themselves what they shall or shall not do, or whether their parents are too proud to recognize such industrial work as a duty belonging to their children, it is not for me to decide. I can only act on the result, and close my school. I repeat, I should willingly have continued the plan, had I not met with discouragement and opposition from the parents."

[Footnote 21: The year 1859 is regarded by constitutional historians as a turning-point in our Parliamentary history. _Punch_ mentions, amongst other things, that it was the year in which "the fashion broke out of abusing our wives for bad dinners."]

But if the normal relations between mistresses and servants were becoming steadily worse, _Punch_ was far from acquitting employers. In October, 1864, the North London Working Classes Industrial Exhibition was opened--for the most part organized by working-men, though sundry rich philanthropists, including Miss Burdett-Coutts, had a hand in it. This prompted _Punch_ to describe an imaginary "Industrial Exhibition of the Aristocracy," and to describe the fictitious meeting for the Education of the Rich already referred to. His report is for the most part burlesque, but _Punch_ puts into the mouths of the speakers a good deal of shrewd satire at the expense of the folly and ignorance of rich people. "They were very ignorant, but that was the fault of their bringing up." The ex-footman, now a small-coal man, thought well of them, but they had many faults:--

They had no regard for truth, and would order a servant to deny that they were in the house when they did not wish to see a visitor. Their indolence was frightful; they would lie in bed until twelve in the day. (Sensation.) It was true, he assured the meeting; and a lady at one end of the room would ring a bell and bring a man up several flights of stairs to fetch her a book that lay on a table out of her reach. Still, they were very kind when they knew how to do any kindness, but so few of them took the trouble to know. As a practical man, he must say that he did not think that missionaries from their own class would be favourably received in the houses of the rich. He would mention another thing, showing the folly of the upper orders. On a freezing night, a delicate woman would change her warm dress for a very light one, put on shoes no thicker than ribbons instead of her comfortable boots, and with nothing on her head, shoulders or arms, would go out and sit in all the draughts of a playhouse, or stand on the landing of a staircase, with the wind constantly rushing up from the street door. What could one do with creatures so hopelessly plunged in folly? (Sensation.)

Other speakers dwell on the lamentable ignorance of plumbing, mechanics and anatomy (from the point of view of the butcher). _Punch_ might have quoted the authentic story of a very clever lady in this period who imagined that a hydraulic ram was an animal.

Another ground for legitimate complaint on which _Punch_ frequently insisted was the attempt to introduce dogma into the sphere of domestic service, as, for example, when a "Christian gentleman" advertised for a lady housekeeper of "decided piety" to keep his house, without any salary, in return for a comfortable home. _Punch_ did not believe in religiosity of this character any more than he could stand the snobbery which relegated servants to the gallery or the inferior seats in church. When a Bill was introduced in the summer of 1871 for abolishing the pew system, he quoted the following speeches from the debate on the second reading:--

Mr. Beresford Hope told this story:

"He remembered having many years ago to seek a church where his household could worship. He went to the individual who let the pews in a chapel of ease near his residence, and he said he wished to take a pew. The man produced a plan, and he selected the one nearest the pulpit and the reading-desk. But, unluckily, he dropped the observation that the pew was for his servants, whereupon the man said, 'You don't mean that you are taking the pew for your livery servants.' On his saying, 'Yes, I am,' he received the reply, 'Then I cannot let it you, for if livery servants were to come to the pew, all the ladies and gentlemen in the neighbouring pews would cease to attend.'" (Hear, hear, and laughter.)

Mr. Henley "did not believe that the humbler classes themselves desired to see the parish churches managed in such a way as to allow the costermonger a seat beside that of a duchess. It reminded him of the couplet which says that:

'Something the Devil delights to see Is the pride that apes humility.'"

[Sidenote: _Religious Snobbery_]

What Punch thought of this fashionable Christianity may be learned from his truly admirable comments on the protest of a lady's maid in a provincial paper:--

Here is a letter which might very well have passed muster in the (original) _Spectator_. It is, however, addressed to the Editor of the _Hampshire Independent_, in which journal it appeared the other day under the title, "Is the Church Free?" The Church therein particularly referred to is the old parish church of Millbrook, near Southampton:--

"Sir,--I saw lately in your paper a very pleasing paragraph, asking for free and open sittings in Parish Churches. Now, as the Bishop is coming amongst us, will you kindly insert this letter, that he may know how proper it would be at Millbrook, where the rich people, who are objecting to a new church nearer to the poor, won't let a servant of any station sit in the body of the church, and we are sent upstairs, if the masters or mistresses are agreeable or not.

We don't blame Mr. Blunt, and we hope the Bishop will ask him about it, and order free pews in the new church.--I am, Sir, etc.,

"August 17, 1871. A Lady's Maid."

Well said, Mary. Your rich people at Millbrook, some of them, apparently need to be told that at Service in Church everyone is a Servant, and all Servants are equal. Perhaps, however, those rich exclusives attend Church for the same kind of reason as that which makes them go to County Balls, if they can, or would make them if they could. If their church-going is merely an airing of their respectability, it is needless to remind them that a Church is a place where the Presence they are supposed to enter is no respecter of persons. The Bishop of Winchester will doubtless, if possible, not disappoint Mary's hope that he will order free pews, or seats, to be provided in the new Church at Millbrook. In old Millbrook Church, by Mary's account, existing accommodation would be improved on principle by another arrangement. The sittings could be divided into First, Second, and Third-Class Pews.

Class patronage was always obnoxious to _Punch_, but he was quite ready to admit that the difficulty of getting good servants arose from the impossibility, in most cases, of the lady of the house adapting herself to the peculiar disposition of each one of her domestics. The accompanying advertisement--a remarkably modern achievement for 1865--sounded the note of independence too boldly to suit so moderate a reformer:--

"Domestic Servant.--A Person about Twenty, with excellent character, wishes a Situation where not restricted in becoming dress nor services rendered unnecessarily menial. She would prefer a small Country Family Situation, away from the noise and hurry of Birmingham. Should her mistress prove quiet and amiable, a suitable, respectable, permanent servant would inevitably be secured. Lowest wages accepted, ten guineas."

The Young Lady's grammar, in "wishing a situation," is somewhat arbitrary, but it is enough for her purpose that the reader should know what she means. The restriction in becoming dress probably alludes to the tyranny of a mistress who objected to her china ornaments being knocked down by Betty and housemaid's extensive crinoline. "Services rendered unnecessarily menial" conveys the idea of the wearer of a crinoline being obliged to clean the doorsteps, the attitude necessitated by the nature of this operation being one of supplication so humble, and prostration so abject, as would never be adopted by any wearer of the steel hoops who "could see herself as others see her." The Young Lady would perhaps like to take her quiet tea and beauty sleep in the drawing-room, about four o'clock of an afternoon, talk over family matters with her quiet and amiable mistress, or skim her a few pages of the _Court Circular_. We sincerely trust that the advertiser has obtained the situation she deserves.

[Sidenote: _Fashions in Christian Names_]

It was in the same spirit that a few years earlier a protest had been raised against the fashion of decorative names amongst the poorer classes:--

Our laundress's infants have no great charms, Yet they have a Eugénie in arms; While Victor Albert swings on a gate, And munches his bacon in village state.

'Twould be hard to say there is any blame, There is no monopoly in a name; But it strikes one sometimes as rather absurd That contrast between the child and the word.

And what will it be when years have flown And these finely-named damsels are women grown? When Evelyn Ada must polish the grates While Edith Amelia is washing the plates.

It has been reserved for a later generation to witness the appropriation of the homely names Joan, Betty, Susan, etc., by the social _élite_, while Gladys, Doris, and so forth, have become common form amongst the daughters of Labour.

[Sidenote: _The Victorian Governess_]

The month of April, 1872, was marked by two notable meetings of domestic servants, one at Dundee and one at Leamington, at both of which the forming of a trade union was unanimously decided on. At Dundee _dux femina facti_; and Punch celebrated the event in a set of verses in which the revolt of the "Leamington Flunkeys" is attributed to the alluring example of the housemaids of "Bonny Dundee." The curious will find in the _Annual Register_ for 1872 an account of the Dundee meeting. It had a disastrous sequel in the breakdown of one of the maids who had taken a prominent part in the agitation. _Punch_ comments unchivalrously on the fuss which was made in the local Press over "the hysterics of an ex-servant maid." Modern readers will marvel at the moderation of most of the demands in regard to hours, privileges, etc., put forward at Dundee; but the fact that butlers and footmen had followed suit destroyed any sympathy that _Punch_ might have felt for the movement. The flunkey, as depicted by Du Maurier, is more elegant and refined-looking than the Jeames of Leech, but he continues to be treated with the same implacable ridicule. "Servant-galism" is another matter, and it stands more and more for a claim to consideration which _Punch_, in his more serious moments, cannot wholly withstand. As against pictures of the "what next, indeed!" type, in which excessive demands are treated with a mild resentment, we have to set _Punch's_ championship of the right to be decently housed, and his reproof of an advertiser who asked for a servant who could neither read nor write.

The gibbeting of employers who offered governesses starvation wages continues, but the entries are far less numerous than in the 'fifties. Still, the evil was not wholly removed. In 1867 _Punch_ expressed surprise that among the many strikes lately witnessed there had not been one of governesses. As a rule, he observes, they are extremely overworked and underpaid, and have really far more cause for striking than the tailors:--

Still, there seems but little prospect of our seeing them on strike while we find them putting forward such advertisements as this:--

"A Single Lady, aged 36, with a limited income, offers £20 per annum and two hours' daily instruction to one or two Children in English and the rudiments of music and French, in return for her Board."

We have often known a Governess content with a small salary, but it is a novelty to hear of one content with less than nothing, and even offering to pay a yearly premium for her place. An income which is limited may fail to satisfy the cravings of an appetite which is not; still, unless this single lady be uncommonly voracious, she need scarcely, one would fancy, offer £20 a year, and two hours' teaching daily merely for her board.

The treatment of governesses was one of the blots on the Victorian age. They lived in what might be called No Woman's Land. Their status was semi-menial; their salaries were often much lower than those of cooks; they seldom emerged from the schoolroom; they had little encouragement to be efficient; if they were young and pretty they were frowned upon as potential adventuresses; if they were elderly and ill-favoured they were negligible and neglected. The very term "governess" carried with it a certain hint of social disparagement; and they were for the most part the easy victims of snobbery. If proof be required one has only to turn to the novels of the period, in which very few examples will be found of governesses who succeeded in overleaping the barriers of caste and entering the realms of romance. Charlotte Brontë, the pioneer of the "emancipation novel," was perhaps the first to give the governess a chance in fiction. In fact there was not much improvement in the "governess-trade" on the condition described in Jane Austen's _Emma_ half a century earlier, when Jane Fairfax compared it to the slave-trade, "widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where the difference lies." But then we must remember that class distinctions were then much more clearly drawn than they are to-day. It was not until 1870 that the gold tuft on the cap worn by noblemen at Oxford was discontinued. The dearth of army doctors, on which _Punch_ frequently comments in 1864, was due in his opinion to the snobbery of a system which relegated the members of a noble profession to an inferior social status. It was in the same year, to his lasting credit, that _Punch_ espoused the cause of old ballet-girls, with a view to relieving the necessities of worn-out columbines, fairies and sylphs. He was doubtful of the result of his appeal simply because of the self-protective prudery of polite society:--

I know that most rich people have far too much morality to think of doing anything for such people as poor ballet-girls, who are supposed to be descended from some of the Lost Tribes. Of course Polite Society can never be expected to take anything like an interest in persons of this sort. Still, although Polite Society may not feel disposed to help to keep poor ballet-girls alive, I think Polite Society would not be altogether pleased were ballet-girls extinct.

[Sidenote: _Society and the Stage_]

The correspondence and controversy which grew out of _Punch's_ intervention is too long to be treated in detail. His statements were canvassed, and the existence of theatrical funds adequate to meet the needs of the situation was pointed out. But _Punch_ was not far out when he declared that as ballet-girls grew old their salaries decreased; it was only by hard work that they earned their living in the playhouse, and they barely escaped dying in a workhouse. The episode is creditable to the humanity of _Punch_. It is also interesting to the student of manners from the light which it throws on the conventional attitude of polite society towards the theatrical profession in mid-Victorian days. It was a survival of the old view expressed by the Prussian sovereign in an order referring to "singers, actors, and other rubbish." In their proper place--on the stage--they were amusing people. Socially they were outside the pale, living in a state of semi-outlawry, and to be given a wide berth by all self-respecting citizens. _Punch_, from the intimate connexion of so many of his staff with the drama--Douglas Jerrold, Tom Taylor and Burnand cover nearly the whole period of our survey--never subscribed to this view, though he deprecated mummer-worship as fostering the vanity which was the besetting sin of the actor's calling. He fully recognized the generosity and charity which successful players showed to their less fortunate brothers and sisters. But in the days of which we are now writing _Punch_ did not foresee the swing of the pendulum which resulted in the invasion of the stage by amateurs and the conversion of what had been a social stigma into a social asset.

WOMEN

"Feminism," in the modern sense, as was pointed out in the previous volume, is in English, at any rate, a twentieth century word. Yet the movement was there long before the name was coined or imported, and in the period on which we now enter a notable change reveals itself in the spirit of _Punch's_ dream of womanhood. The change is all the more remarkable when we recall the fact that the paper was still written exclusively by men and appealed mainly to male readers. The first woman contributor with the pen--Miss Betham Edwards--did not appear until 1868. "_Mrs. Punch's_ Letters to her Daughter," however, cannot be said to strike a new note, being for the most part a replica of _Punch's_ own views, with a mild undercurrent of irony so carefully disguised as to be almost invisible. _Mrs. Punch_ disavows all association with committees or causes. She was "not even a novelist"--apparently a hit at Rhoda Broughton, who had recently swum into the ken of the astonished Mrs. Grundy, and whose works are obliquely disparaged under the transparent _aliases_ of "Unwisely but not too well," and "Cometh up as a Nettle." Mrs. Lynn Linton's tirades against the Girl of the Period had appeared in the _Saturday Review_ earlier in the year, and _Mrs. Punch_ follows mildly in the same path, rebuking the extravagances of fashion; monstrous chignons, false and dyed hair, the use of Madame Rachel's cosmetics, and a resort to audacious _décolletage_. In her advice on the choice and management of husbands _Mrs. Punch_ is purely ironic. There is no serious effort to dislodge men from their entrenched positions as lords of creation. The furthest she goes is in a retort on the Young Man of the Period, whom she boldly pronounces an ass, whether he is of the tame cat order; or an "æsthetic" with a genius for disparaging everybody, especially his elders; or a mere conceited ass; or a clerical despot to whom woman is a ministering slave. Finally she deplores the precocity of the Young Children of the Period. Indeed, there weren't any young children at all, only richly-dressed supercilious little men and women; worldly-wise little satirists and snobs.

[Sidenote: _A Change of Type_]

But from 1860 onwards one notes an increasing readiness to take women seriously. They are no longer merely regarded as "dear creatures," ornamental and domestic, as when the appearance of _The Angel in the House_ inspired the comment that the title was one "which might be bestowed on a meritorious cook." Blue stockings are still the subject of much acidulated chaff, and "strong-minded" women are almost invariably represented as flat-chested, ill-dressed slatterns. But within certain limits women are allowed to cultivate intellect without loss of angelical charm. The type of feminine good looks portrayed by Leech remained unchanged to the end of his life. Yet in two directions we note a change. His charming buxom girls show a tendency to revolt against the tyranny of their pert schoolboy brothers;[22] they are beginning to cultivate the faculty of retort even at the expense of learned professors. And again, in the hunting-field, the superior boldness of the hard-riding young lady is frequently glorified at the expense of the more cautious male. In this context it is worthy of record that for many years after Leech's death the bulk of the hunting pictures were contributed by the first of _Punch's_ lady artists--Miss G. Bowers.

[Footnote 22: The "tyranny of the younger brother" who is continually harassing his grown-up sisters was undoubtedly one of the results of the customary large families of the period. In Leech's pictures, again, the tender passion is nearly always illustrated by passages between cousins.]

[Sidenote: _Du Maurier's Women_]

Fainting was still fashionable, but women were beginning to compete, mildly but increasingly, in the domain of sport and pastime. Hunting had long been their great stand-by; it afforded women the greatest opportunities for the display of nerve, skill and endurance, and they were as conspicuous by these qualities in the 'sixties as they are to-day. But the Amazon is a class apart. Archery--by reason of its opportunities for showing off a graceful figure as the arrow was "pulled on the tense string"--was still in its golden prime, and croquet so widely popular as to warrant the publication of a long poem in several instalments. Yet the code of mid-Victorian croquet, to judge by contemporary evidence, was not of a high standard. The ladies were charged with habitual cheating. It was a standing dish at garden parties, but, in a phrase of the time, seemed more closely connected with 'usbandry than 'orticulture. Lawn tennis did not arrive till later, and then only as a species of "pat-ball." But women were becoming more active and athletic. We do not speak merely of the professional gymnasts and performers on the tight-rope and the trapeze who emulated the feats of Blondin and Léotard, occasionally with tragical results; but rather of the change in physique and stature of English women. For one can hardly believe that the Junonian types which Du Maurier was so fond of drawing were purely imaginary, or that the gentle giantess, married to the diminutive husband who figures in the domestic record of Mr. Tom Tit, had no prototype in fact. Leech familiarized us with the Amazon of the hunting-field, but Du Maurier introduced us to the statuesque goddesses of the drawing-room, tall and divinely fair. But the debt of English womankind to his pencil went much further than his consistent homage to their beauty and gracious demeanour. He was more concerned to illustrate the taste of their dress than the absurdities of fashion. And above all he never failed to credit them with wit and subtlety in conversation. In sheer buxom comeliness Leech's women were never surpassed, but in elegance and distinction of feature and bearing the types, or perhaps we should say the type, favoured by Du Maurier raised the "social cuts" in _Punch_ to a higher level. It was part of the general movement of the paper from its "Left Centre" position in the direction of the Right, from its aggressive championship of democratic principles towards a Liberalism tempered by an increasing disposition to criticize the working classes. Yet if _Punch_ paid more attention to, and showed more consideration for Mayfair than in his earlier years, the follies and extravagance and arrogant exclusiveness of fashionable women seldom failed to excite his wrath. As he had regarded the decline and fall of Almack's as inevitable, he betrayed no enthusiasm over its revival in 1858.[23] The old oligarchical rule had its merits, in so far as it recognized that money alone was no passport to the revels of the aristocracy. But towards the end of the old _régime_ the barriers had been partially broken down, as one may gather from the verses in which the re-opening of the Assembly Rooms was duly and unsympathetically recorded:--

Sing for joy, superior classes, But, of course, in tones subdued, Do not bellow like the masses, Bawl not as the multitude; But your joy should be outpoured, For behold Almack's restored!

There shall Beauty, in exclusive Circles, waltz again with Wealth, Sharing exercise, conducive More to pleasure than to health, Whilst the sun ascends the skies, And the common people rise.

* * * * *

Oh! ye Flunkeys, holloa louder, Than the rest, for rampant mirth, In the pride of plush and powder, You'll attend on Rank and Birth. How transported you must wax, Thinking on revived Almack's!

[Footnote 23: Yet Sir Henry Holland, the distinguished physician, states in his _Reminiscences_ (1872) that he knew of cases, which had defied medicine, being cured by a ticket for Almack's.]

[Sidenote: _Belgravian Manners and Maxims_]

The jaded belles who appeared in Hyde Park after dancing till 4 a.m. at Willis's rooms are treated with scant respect, and when Cremorne Gardens were reserved for the Aristocratic Fête organized by Lord Ingestre, a certain malicious satisfaction is expressed that the entertainment was spoilt by the rain. _Punch_ admitted, in "The Cream at Cremorne," that some hundreds of pounds had been raised for charity, but he disapproved of the "exclusive" methods adopted.

The craze for toy-dogs was already rampant. _Punch_ was always a lover of dogs and a good friend of animals, but he detested that form of feminine sentimentality which exalted caninity at the expense of humanity, and in 1858 turned one of Tennyson's lyrics to satiric use in the "Ballad of Poppetina":--

They came and told me where I lay, Poppetina, How that my pet had run away, Poppetina. With but a feather (as they say) You might have knocked me down that day, Poppetina; I almost fainted right away, Poppetina.

Amongst the "Belgravian maxims" published in the same year we note two which have not yet entirely lost their force: "We make our money in London, but we spend it in Paris. England gives us meat, and France sends us cooks." Nowadays we still call them "_chefs_" no matter what their nationality may be. As I write these lines the January sales are in full swing, and the shops of London "ring to the roar of an angel onset." It is interesting, by way of comparison, to give the results of a day's shopping by a middle-class young lady as catalogued in the winter of 1858:--

A TREMENDOUS BAG

Miss Lucy Smith went out shopping the other day, and brought home with her a most tremendous bag. It was so heavy that it was as much as the page could do to bring it into the parlour to be inspected by the ladies. Upon its contents being emptied on to the dining-room table, it was found to contain:--a bottle of Kiss-me-Quick, a pair of white satin shoes, a bulky packet of gloves (cleaned), a dozen rolls of cotton, a paper of pearl buttons (to mend Papa's shirts), a box of cough lozenges, a bundle of violet-powder, a kettle-holder, ten yards of blue ribbon, a pack of club cards, a pair of American overshoes, a pot of bear's grease, a pound of jujubes, a velvet necktie, three cambric pocket-handkerchiefs with "Lucy" embroidered in gay flowers in the corner, a pair of mittens, a small tin can supposed to contain acidulated drops, beads and long pins and gold daggers and imitation coins for the hair, fifteen yards of the best longcloth, a bundle of brushes and small jars of gum for potichomanie work, small curling-irons, several small pots containing perfumes and mysterious volatile essences for the toilette-table, numerous papers of different varieties of Berlin wool with coloured pattern of _Brigand_ for the same, two ounces of shot to sew round the bottom of one's dress, seven yards of edging for night-caps, a set of doll's tea things, two packages of bird-seed for the canary, a bath bun, one _Convent Call_ and _Two Fond Hearts_, with _Ten Thousand a Year_. Besides the above, there was concealed inside the longcloth a yellow book that looked suspiciously like a French novel; but as it was hastily snatched up by Miss Lucy, it is perfectly impossible to mention the name of it. Miss Smith was not a little pleased with the results of her day's sport, having brought down every one of the articles enumerated in the bag herself in the space of little more than four hours and a quarter.

Allowing for the exuberance of the satirist, one may still glean a good deal of information from this portentous list as to the tastes of the young person of the period. "Potichomanie" was the fashionable craze for pseudo-oriental decoration by covering the insides of glass vessels with designs on paper or sheet gelatine, so as to imitate Japanese porcelain. _Ten Thousand a Year_ was Sam Warren's once popular novel, one of the first chronicles of the rise of the "bounder"; _The Convent Call_ and _Two Fond Hearts_ represent the appeal of propagandist Romanism and roseate sentimentality. The name of the French novel is withheld; it might perhaps have been one by Eugène Sue. Major Pendennis said that he had not read any other novelist for thirty years besides Paul de Kock, but we can hardly credit Miss Lucy Smith in 1858 with a choice which would be common form for her grand-daughters. Along with frequent references to the ignorance, and extravagance, the frivolity and futility of girls of the upper classes and to the mercenary marriages made in Society, we find an increasing readiness to recognize and welcome the competition of women in the sphere of art. The first Exhibition of Women Artists had been held in 1857; the name of Rosa Bonheur was already so familiar in England that in the summer of 1858 _Punch_ expressed regret that there was "no picture in the Royal Academy of Prince Albert's prize pig by Sir Edwin or Rosa." The Female School of Art and Design at South Kensington is mentioned in 1860, and in 1861 _Punch_ makes a friendly comment on the announcement that a female sculptor, Miss Susan Durant, had "received a commission to execute one of the poetical marbles for the Mansion House, being, so far as one can recollect, the first English lady who has ever obtained a compliment of this particular kind."

[Sidenote: _Women Artists_]

In music, women, as singers, had long established their claim to the allegiance of the opera-going world. Their recognition as instrumentalists came later. _Punch_ had missed the first appearance of Mlle. Neruda in 1849, but waxes enthusiastic in 1858 over the performance of Mlle. Humler, a distinguished violinist, "a female Paganini, who pleases as well as astonishes," and in the same year extols native talent in the person of Arabella Goddard, the distinguished pianist who rendered admirable service by introducing the works of Beethoven to British amateurs:--

MR. PUNCH TO MISS GODDARD

A VALENTINE

My dear Miss Goddard; A creature foddered On Liszts and Thalbergs, extolled by Ella, Perceives creation Of new sensation When you strike ivory, Arabella.

You've known, Miss Goddard, What 'tis to plod hard, The bee must toil ere he hives the _mella_. Now, music gushes, Or leaps, or rushes To your white fingers, Miss Arabella.

The folks, Miss Goddard, Who yawn, or nod hard At tricksters, whack with the umbrella, When for grand Beethoven The way is cloven To English hearts, by my Arabella.

My dear Miss Goddard, _Punch_ "plies the rod hard On brass Impostors" (see Swift to Stella), And for that reason, Hath praise, in season, For golden Artists, like Arabella.

[Sidenote: _The Female Blondin_]

Such tributes, however, involved no breach with tradition or abandonment of prejudice. The position of women as public performers, whether on the lyric or dramatic stage, or in the circus, was assured and acquiesced in by the general public, always excepting what may be called the Exeter Hall Group, which included real benefactors and philanthropists as well as Chadbands and Jellybys. No objection, however, could be taken to those who sought to restrain the enterprise of managers who engaged women gymnasts to perform dangerous feats. The influence and intervention of the Queen did a great deal in educating public opinion, and the part played by _Punch_ may be gathered from his comments on the tragedy which occurred at a fête of the Order of Foresters held at Aston Park, Birmingham, in July, 1863, at a time when Blondin was drawing large crowds to the Crystal Palace by his performances on the high rope:--

The Foresters of Birmingham, copying the example of the Aristocrats of Sydenham, assembled in a great crowd, on the previous Monday, to see a woman, named Powell, perform some dangerous feats akin to those performed by a man named Blondin. The scene was Aston Park, a place inaugurated by the Queen and Prince Albert, and devoted (as was supposed in this case and in that of the Crystal Palace) to rational recreation. M. Blondin has not yet been killed, but Mrs. Powell's rope broke and she died. She would have been a mother in three months. How the Aristocrats would act under similar circumstances remains to be seen. The Foresters continued their revels, danced, and finished with fireworks. The subject was brought before Parliament by Lord Malmesbury and Mr. Doulton, and the answer of Government is, that no doubt such things are very deplorable, but as the public likes such exhibitions "it is difficult" to interfere, but the Press (to which it is sometimes very convenient for great folks to appeal, and which at other times it is equally convenient to repudiate) is requested to express itself strongly on the matter. We conceive that we do so by simply stating the facts, and adding that the plea of the Government is a most unworthy one. If the very highest idea of a Government is, as Sydney Smith says, a Stout Constable, even that officer should prevent demoralizing exhibitions. Sir George Grey himself could interfere when M. Blondin proposed to carry a child--not unborn--along the Sydenham rope. Parliament would give him a prohibition Bill in three days, if he is afraid to act without one.

As Queen Victoria has been a good deal under the microscope of late, the letter which was written by her command to Mr. C. Sturge, the Mayor of Birmingham, deserves to be quoted:--

"SIR,--The Queen has commanded me to express to you the pain with which Her Majesty has read the account of a fatal accident which has occurred during a fête at Aston Park, Birmingham.

"Her Majesty cannot refrain from making known through you her personal feelings of horror that one of her subjects--a female--should have been sacrificed to the gratification of the demoralizing taste, unfortunately prevalent, for exhibitions attended with the greatest danger to the performers.

"Were any proof wanting that such exhibitions are demoralizing, I am commanded to remark that it would be at once found in the decision arrived at to continue the festivities, the hilarity, and the sports of the occasion after an event so melancholy.

"The Queen trusts that you, in common with the rest of the townspeople of Birmingham, will use your influence to prevent in future the degradation to such exhibitions of the Park which was gladly opened by Her Majesty and the beloved Prince Consort, in the hope that it would be made serviceable for the healthy exercise and rational recreation of the people."

More valuable evidence, however, of the education of the large and growing _clientèle_ represented by _Punch_ is to be found in the recognition of woman's invasion of spheres of activity hitherto restricted to men. In 1859 the telegraph offices are mentioned as opening a new field of employment for women, and in 1860 the subject is discussed, not very graciously, under the heading, "Work for Women":--

What are we to do with our young women? is a question which is now beginning to be seriously asked by the benevolent and by Paterfamilias. Thanks to the prevalent taste for a profusion of finery, combined with a rising Income Tax,[24] girls are getting too dear, that is to say too expensive, creatures, to find husbands. Under these circumstances there has been formed a Society for the Employment of Women. It met, the other evening, at 19, Langham Place, the Earl of Shaftesbury in the Chair. Among various recommendations and suggestions for the accomplishment of its gallant and generous object, Mr. Cookson urged law-engrossing as a suitable occupation for women, described the office established by the Society, which is at present supported by several solicitors, and gave an interesting account of the work done there. Mr. Hastings also spoke of printing as peculiarly well adapted for women, and read a paper contributed by Miss Emily Faithfull on the introduction of women into the printing trades.

[Sidenote: _Punch and the "Strong-minded Woman"_]

Miss Faithfull set up her printing establishment for women in the same year, and the excellence of the work of her "Victoria Press" secured her appointment as printer and publisher in ordinary to the Queen. _Punch_ cordially supported the efforts of Miss Faithfull to extend the sphere of labour, still rigorously limited, for working-women, but showed a good deal of the old leaven of sex-prejudice in his comments on her plan to assist the emigration of educated women:--

For ourselves, we would sooner send away the uneducated women, and keep those who were educated in the country. We have not one too many. If, however, by the term "educated" is meant "Strong-minded," we will give our most cordial assent and hearty co-operation to a scheme at once so useful and beneficent, and one that cannot fail to be for the benefit of all parties, as well as a great relief to England. We would advise the _Great Eastern_ being chartered immediately for this purpose, and we do not mind giving a large subscription in aid of it, providing the vessel sails at a very early period. However, we pity the poor colony that receives the intellectual cargo! The only chance of its escaping this blue-stocking visitation is, that the Strong-minded Women may quarrel amongst themselves on the voyage out, of which there is the most natural probability; so that when the heavily-freighted ship touches the shore, there may not be one of them alive, and nothing but their false back-hair, or magazine tales, left behind them. By all means let so interesting an experiment be carried out, and to the greatest possible number.

[Footnote 24: The income tax was then only 10d. in the pound over £150.]

Coming to the professions, we find a great advance on the somewhat hesitating attitude adopted by _Punch_ in the 'fifties. In the early 'sixties he avowed himself as a convinced supporter of the admission of women to medical degrees. By 1870 he went so far as to advocate "opening the door of every secular profession to every woman qualified to enter it." He trusted their good sense not to attempt the impossible: "only fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and women, all but very rare mad women, fear to tread the rough ways they are unfitted for." _Punch_, along with Disraeli, ranges himself on the side of the angels. This marks the high-water level of his recognition of women's professional claims, but as early as 1862 he had registered his protest against the decision of the Edinburgh College of Physicians, when they refused to grant women the medical diploma, by a majority of 18 to 16 votes:--

We are glad the minority was so large, for we think it was in the right. There is no reason why a lady learned in medicine should be refused a doctor's degree. Nobody would be obliged to employ a medical woman in preference to a medical man. It is very true that it is necessary that a practitioner of medicine should be endowed with reflective faculties; but perhaps reason is not quite exclusively the prerogative of man. One or two women could be named whose works exhibit undeniable evidences of some logical faculty and judgment of causation. A female Harvey or Sydenham, or Hunter, or Abernethy would possibly turn up if the portals of medicine were not shut in her face.

[Sidenote: _The Medical Profession_]

The rejection of Miss Elizabeth Garrett and other women candidates by the Apothecaries and other medical corporations is unsparingly condemned in the issue of February 22, 1868; but the history of the campaign is written at length in the _Life of Sophia Jex-Blake_. It may suffice here to add the most notable, and, allowing for a little pardonable optimism, the sanest of _Punch's_ contributions to the controversy in the period under review in this volume. It appeared in March, 1870, in the form of a letter, but here, as elsewhere, the views are clearly editorial:--

The necessity, Sir, of persevering study will, alone, we may be sure, suffice to keep all women out of the medical profession, but a very few. There is therefore no sort of occasion for the opposition to the movement on behalf of their eligibility to be members of that profession, offered, conceivably, by no men out of it but fools, and by none in it but trades unionists. Assuredly, _Mr. Punch_, rather should every encouragement be given to women desirous to enter the profession of medicine. Paterfamilias is a goose if he do not encourage any daughter of his, endowed with intellect, industry and resolution, who may evince a turn that way. No daughter can Paterfamilias get so thoroughly off his hands as a self-supporting one.

The medical science, _Mr. Punch_, acquired by a lady doctor here and there might prove a leaven which would leaven the whole lump so to speak, with apology for calling the fair sex a lump. And the lump sadly wants leavening. When it had got properly leavened there would soon be an end to advertisements of "corsets," cosmetics and ways of being made beautiful for ever; also an end of low dresses in high life and high latitudes. The death rate from bronchitis and consumption would largely decrease.

There would likewise be an end of Daffy and Dalby, and all manner of domestic quackery in those upper regions where future men and women make the noises which pious Æneas heard, the first thing, in the lower. Moreover, we should hear much less of those noises.

And mark. Whilst the medical profession would be a resource for a clever girl, who, having to live somehow, would like to live single, or at any rate, having a soul of her own as well as a body, would hate to sell herself in the marriage-market, it would by no means debar such an one, matrimonially disposed, from matrimony. For what young medical man wanting a partner could do better than choose a medical lady duly qualified (in every respect) for partnership? And every non-medical man thinking to take a wife would find his account in taking a doctress who would know better than, by continually breaking the natural laws, to let herself in for everlasting headaches, faintings, hysterics, and other ailments, rendering herself a perpetual plague to a husband, and running him up doctor's bills. Finally, the father of a family of children, whose mamma was a medical gentlewoman, would enjoy the advantage, instead of suffering the expense, of having a doctor always in the house.

That the Legislature will compel the Medical Council to grant a diploma to every lady who can satisfy their examiners is the hope of

Yours truly, CELSUS EXCELSIOR.

The question of the admission of women to the Bar had already attracted serious discussion. In June, 1869, _Punch_, generalizing from a particular case, expressed mock horror at the prospect:--

THE BAR FEMININE

(Respectfully but remonstratively recommended to the notice of John Stuart Mill)

Is this, we earnestly ask, in the name of cruelty to legal animals, what Court and Clients must be prepared for when ladies are admitted to practice at the Bar?

The Shedden legitimacy case was resumed this morning for the fifteenth time before the House of Lords. The Lord Chancellor commented upon the extreme prolixity of Miss Shedden's address, which has now occupied fourteen days, and exhorted her to confine her remarks to the evidence. Shortly after commencing to address their Lordships this morning Miss Shedden swooned, and was carried out. Dr. Bond being sent for, testified that the lady was suffering from hysteria, brought on by nervous exhaustion. Their Lordships postponed the case till to-morrow, when, if Miss Shedden should be unable to proceed, her father will be heard.

Talk of "the Subjection of Women," Mr. Mill! Here's the whole force of Law Lords in subjection to one woman ... who, after fifteen days, talks herself into hysteria, and their Lordships into--but what single word can be found comprehensive enough to describe their Lordship's state of body and mind, under the _peine forte et dure_ of this distressingly fluent female. Fancy a Bar of Miss Sheddens! The masculine legal mind recoils in horror from the idea!

[Sidenote: _The Suffrage Question_]

According to the D.N.B. Miss Shedden conducted her case for thirty days. But a few months later _Punch_, discussing the "Professions of Petticoats," approved of the contemplated innovation, and in 1870 wrote: "Open the Bar, forensic as well as tabernary, only insist on the wig and gown--the regulation gown--let the law of judicial vision be the same for female counsel as for male."

The advance in _Punch's_ education in regard to the most controversial of all woman's claims--that to the vote--is much smaller, but it is an advance. He began in ribaldry and ridicule; but the persistence, the ability, and the high character of the advocates of Woman Suffrage converted him (intermittently) to seriousness, and even respect. The successive stages of this change are interesting to trace. In 1857 a Feminist Meeting at Leicester is merely the subject for chaff. We have noted in the previous volume that Mayfair held severely aloof from the Women's Rights movement in its earlier days. But in the summer of 1858, at the same time when Almack's was revived, the Marchioness of Londonderry and Lady Dysart proclaimed their adherence to Woman Suffrage. _Punch_, still somewhat democratic, was not moved by this social portent, and when it was announced that the Ladies' Gallery in the House of Commons was to be enlarged, unfeelingly suggested that it must be a concession to crinoline: otherwise there could be no reason for favouring "a parcel of chattering and giggling women."

In 1859 we find a burlesque account of a woman's meeting, convened to discuss the Suffrage question. But a slightly altered tone is observable in the early 'sixties. Women's indirect electoral power is recognized in the hostile criticism of the _Realm_, a recently-founded Conservative organ, in the issue of April 23, 1864, and when the question of Woman Suffrage came up before the Social Science Congress in 1866, it is significant that _Punch_ abandons ridicule for argument:--

THE WAY TO WOMANHOOD SUFFRAGE

The cause of Womanhood Suffrage was ably pleaded by Madame Barbara Bodichon at the Social Science Congress, and Madame Bodichon was gallantly followed on the same line by Dr. Mary Walker. It may safely be said that if every man is fit to vote, so is every woman; on conditions. These, of course, are, that if women are to exercise political functions, like men, they must accept all the obligations of the sterner sex. For instance, the right of voting would give women a voice in the organization of the army. This ought not to exist apart from liability to be drawn for the Militia, or to become subject to conscription, if that method of recruiting should come to be adopted in this country. The ladies who sigh for the suffrage should lose no time in enrolling themselves in regiments of Amazonian volunteers to signify that whilst they demand the rights, they are ready to accept the duties of citizenship.

Dr. Mary Walker was the American lady who wore a masculine or semi-masculine garb; Madame Bodichon was the benefactress who invented and endowed Girton.

[Sidenote: _J. S. Mill on the Suffrage_]

It was reserved, however, for John Stuart Mill, when, in the debate on the Reform Bill,[25] he moved that in Clause 4 the word "person" should be substituted for "man," to come nearest to breaking down _Punch's_ opposition to Woman Suffrage. Mill's speech shook him very badly, as may be gathered from the full and eulogistic summary in the "Essence of Parliament":--

And now, Ladies, _Mr. Punch_ does you the justice of believing that you would like to know what arguments your Friend advanced. You may be sure that all that could be said was said in the best manner by Mr. Mill, and that such of you as wish to fight the battle may have all the weapons, elegantly polished, at hand, _Mr. Punch_--your devoted slave--lays them before you in the most convenient form. Mr. Mill urged that at present:-

Neither birth, merit, exertion, intellect, fortune, nor even accident can enable any woman to have her voice counted in matters which concern her and hers as nearly as any person in the kingdom.

It is not just to make distinctions between the Queen's subjects, except for a positive reason.

Are women who manage property, or business, or teach more than most male electors know, unfit for the function of voting?

Would they be revolutionary?

Taxation and Representation should go together. Women pay taxes.

The real difficulty felt is not a practical one; it is only a feeling of Strangeness.

That is a thing which wears off. What are the objections?

1. Politics are not women's business.

2. You don't desire the suffrage.

3. You are sufficiently represented by your influence over male relatives.

4. You have power enough already.

The answers are:--

1. Nor are they man's, unless he is a professional politician. He has business of his own, which he does not neglect, for the sake of voting, more than a woman would.

2. But many do, and others would but for fear of being ill thought of. We are not to suppose that leading questions put to ladies elicit their real sentiments. None are so well schooled as women in making a virtue of necessity.

3. Does man apply this argument to rich men and others with influence?

4. You have great power, but it is under the worst conditions, for it is indirect, and therefore irresponsible. And he would have you work by a manly exchange of opinions, and not by cajolery.

There is a feeling which men have, but are ashamed to express--this:

A woman has no right to care about anything but how she may be the most useful and devoted servant of some man.

Mr. Mill professed such indignation at this idea that he would not argue about it.

In the old days woman and man lived apart--that is, the wife was a plaything or an upper servant. His friends were men. This is changed. The women of the family are the man's habitual society. The wife is his chief associate, most confidential friend, most trusted counsellor.

Then, should a man wish that such a companion should be studiously kept inferior to himself, and taught ignorance or indifference about the subjects among which his highest duties are cast?

The time has come when, if women are not raised to the level of men, men will be pulled down to theirs.

[Footnote 25: May 20, 1867.]

As to women being sufficiently protected, he would like a return of the number of women annually beaten or kicked, or trodden to death by their male protectors--of the cases when the dastardly criminal did not get off altogether--of the cases in which such brutes received lighter sentences than are awarded for trifling thefts.

Old educational endowments were for boys and girls alike. The girls have been shut out, as at Christ's Hospital, where there are 1,100 boys and 26 girls.

The Doctors shut out the ladies.

The painters do the same, excluding them from the associateship of the Academy, because they were distinguishing themselves too much.

A husband can tear away every shilling of his wife's and spend it in debauchery, and even then, if she struggles and saves, he can pounce on her earnings, unless she is judicially separated.

Your Champion, Ladies, wound up with an earnest assurance that when the time should come, as come it would, for acceding to his motion, we should never repent of the concession.

And _Punch_ is sure that whether you want votes or not, you will say that the cheers Mr. Mill gained were well earned.

Mr. E. K. Karslake thought Mr. Mill confounded the distinction between man and woman.

Mr. Denman supported him, but thought the Bill already conferred the suffrage.

Mr. Fawcett (a newly married man too) earnestly supported the motion, and said that the time for chaff on the subject had gone by.

Mr. Laing talked nonsense about the ideal of woman, said that Juliet, Ophelia and Desdemona had nothing to do with votes--the poets understood woman better than Mr. Mill.

Sir George Bowyer, like a gallant knight, supported your cause.

Lord Galway said the motion placed admirers of the fair sex in an awkward position.

Mr. Onslow said that two young ladies had told him they would vote for the man who gave them the best pair of diamond ear-rings.

Mr. Mill was pleased, as well he might be, at the fearful debility of his opponents, and took the division, which was,

For the Ladies 73 Against 196 ___ Majority 123 for keeping you out, dears.

This speech of Mr. Mill's was the event of the week.

At any rate it cannot be said that _Punch_ failed to do justice to the debate on its merits. His account is both ampler and fairer than many reports of important discussions in Parliament which appear in the daily press of to-day. But this was the day of verbatim reports. _Punch_ mentions one debate which occupied thirty-six columns of closely-printed small type in _The Times_.

By way of an offset to the admissions made in his Parliamentary report, _Punch_ published a long, open letter to Mr. Mill. The argument founded on the derogatory word "person" need not detain us. The letter is signed "Judy," but the voice is the voice of _Punch_, who would not give women the vote because he believed they could exercise their political rights of sovereignty more effectually by proxy. Why should they wish to exercise power through the franchise when they were already omnipotent over those who had the franchise? Men were not much the happier or the better or the wiser for their politics. Mill's proposal to exclude married women from the franchise is dexterously turned to account as an admission that female influence was paramount as it was; that it was unnecessary to give women what they already exercised through their husbands. In fine, till women were married, they were learning to rule their husbands. After they were married they had their husbands to rule. Politics were the natural occupation of the inferior or slavish sex. When would Mill's logic open his eyes to the fact that, like the Constitutional Sovereign, _la femme règne et ne gouverne pas_?

Such a letter brought but cold comfort to the Suffragists. It was like feeding them with the East Wind. But at its worst it was an immense improvement on the heavy facetiousness of _Punch's_ earlier manner.

In May, 1868, _Punch_ virtually sided with his "dear enemy":--

Mr. Mill presented to the Commons a petition signed by 21,757 women, who asked for the Franchise. The first signature was that of Mrs. Somerville, Mechanist of the Heavens; the second that of Miss Florence Nightingale, Healer on Earth. Right or wrong, the request ought to have been granted to such petitioners.

[Sidenote: _Open Letter to Mrs. Fawcett_]

So when at a meeting in Manchester in December, 1869, it was resolved to form a guarantee fund of £5,000, _Punch_ declared that if the Suffrage was to be had for love or money, women would shortly have it, and went on with characteristic effrontery to claim the credit of being "the Liberator of the Ladies":--

When ladies, ere many months shall have passed over their heads, rush to the poll and tender their votes for the men of their choice, let them not forget to whom they are mainly indebted for ability to exercise the birthright of a Britoness. It has ever been the aim of _Mr. Punch_ to elevate Woman as well as Man. To this end he has directed pen and pencil to the special exposure of the peculiarities which distinguish silly from sensible women to derision. The consequence has been a very general relinquishment of those ludicrous peculiarities, and an awakening the female mind to logical perception, and a sense of the absurd and the grotesque. Hence will sooner or later inevitably result Female Emancipation, for which Female Intellect will have to thank _Mr. Punch_.

These indiscretions, which were apparently only meant in a Pickwickian sense, obliged _Punch_ to regularize his position in a letter to "Mrs. Professor Fawcett" in the following April. He congratulates the Suffragists on dropping the limitation with which they started and going in for repealing the electoral disabilities of all women--married as well as single. In revising their claim they were at once logical and wise in their generation. But on the broad question _Punch_ comes down on the anti-Suffragist side of the fence:--

Has it never occurred to you that in parcelling out life into two great fields, the one inside, the other outside the house-doors, and in creating two beings so distinct in body, mind, and affections as men and women, the Framer of the Universe must have meant the two for different functions? Can you deny, or shut your eyes to the fact that a similar distinction runs through the whole animal kingdom? Surely, so long as the masculine creature keeps aloof from the domain of the feminine, and leaves to her the nursing and rearing and training of the family, and the ordering and gracing of the home, there lies a tremendously strong presumption against the wisdom of the feminine entry on the masculine domain of business and politics.

The conclusion he comes back to is his old argument: Why give women votes when they have them already?

In a word here is my dilemma, dear Mrs. Professor. Either women don't care for votes--in which case they will make a bad use of them; or they do care for them, in which case they have ours.

Look how you rule in that Parliament for the business of which you do care, and whose budget you control and appropriate. What man dares call his home his own? What man, that deserves to be called a man, with a good wife, wishes to be other than her humble servant, breadwinner, hewer of wood and drawer of water, within the walls of that sacred sphere, of which the household hearth is the central sun? Depend upon it, if Nature had meant you for the franchise, you would have had it long ago. But then, if you had been in our place, we should have been in yours. Do you think it would be a better world for the change?

The worldly wisdom and common sense shown in this letter is also to be found in _Punch's_ review of the whole question of Women's disabilities in the same year. The facetious, patronizing tone is largely dropped, and though the cartoon on the "Ugly Rush," inspired by the rejection of Jacob Bright's Suffrage Bill, clearly approves of the result, it fully recognizes the seriousness of the onslaught on man's monopoly of the franchise. The time for chaff on the subject, as Fawcett said, had gone by.

Short of the vote, however, about which he remained recalcitrant, _Punch_ supported the claims of women to official employment in connexion with the Poor Law, Education, Local Government generally. He bestows a tempered approval on the appointment of Women Parish Officers in Bucks in 1868, and when the first elections to the London School Board were held at the close of 1870, unofficially but strenuously championed the three women candidates--Miss Garrett, M.D., Mrs. Grey and Miss Davies:--

There are some very good men in the candidature, but they are well known, and can speak for themselves. _Mr. Punch_ only wishes to point out that three ladies desire to do Woman's Work, and he hopes that they will be accredited to the Board. He seldom condescends to treat of mere political elections, but these Educational Elections are important, and wise men had better look to them.

[Sidenote: _Mrs. Nassau Senior_]

The appointment of Mrs. Nassau Senior by the President of the Local Government Board to inspect and report on pauper schools, and her contribution to the Third Annual Report of that Department, meet with unqualified approval:--

In the midst of that vast blue-book of seven hundred pages there is a bit of motherly writing by Mrs. Nassau Senior, which is delightful to read, and cannot fail to be of immense use. Mrs. Senior has visited pauper schools, and has traced about seven hundred girls who had been educated at pauper schools; and her brief biographies of these poor little waifs are perfect in their simplicity. She believes that the Poor Law system will, in time, come to an end through improvement in education. _Mr. Punch_ is not so sanguine. Mendicity is eternal. But the pauper may be gradually raised to a higher level; and such an inquiry as Mrs. Senior's is likely to do great good in this way.

_Mr. Punch_ is delighted when a lady does in this direction what no man could possibly do. The terse memoirs of these poor little pauper maids are much more pathetic than anything in modern fiction. We trace the poor children from place to place--we see them stunted, sulky, squinting, suffering from ophthalmia, the very refuse of the world. Mrs. Senior, kind and keen in her investigations, tells the Guardians of the Poor (who too often deem themselves mere guardians of the ratepayers) how they may gradually diminish this evil. Mr. Stansfeld did a wise thing when he asked her to undertake the inquiry; if the lessons of it are rightly read, her second contribution to the blue-book will have a far rosier tinge.

The treatment of the Higher Education of Women follows much the same course--from ridicule to respect. When a Women's Library was founded in New York, it is seriously suggested in 1860 that a similar institution might with advantage be established in London, with Miss Bessie Parkes, who was an active promoter of the Social Science Association, as Librarian. But when in the summer of 1862 Mlle. Emma Chenu was admitted to the degree of Bachelor of Science at the Sorbonne, _Punch_ contents himself with drawing up a burlesque list of Lady Professors for the University of Cambridge, most of them popular actresses of the time, including Marie Wilton, Patty Oliver, Lydia Thompson, etc. By way of contrast to this carnival of punning facetiousness we may note the rebuke administered in May, 1863, to the students of University College, who hissed the proposal to admit women to degrees.

[Sidenote: _Girton College_]

Great capital was made out of "Sweet Girl Graduates" by Du Maurier in many characteristic variations on the "Princess Ida" theme. But the movement was rapidly passing beyond the stage in which it could only be treated sentimentally or in a spirit of ridicule. Huxley was lecturing to women at South Kensington in 1870, and in 1871 the Ladies' College at Hitchin (founded in 1869), which owed its origin to the enterprise and liberality of Madame Bodichon--the friend of George Eliot and the zealous advocate of the improvement of women's position in the state--had so far justified itself as to earn _Punch's_ commendation, under the typically frivolous heading of "The Chignon at Cambridge," a good example of inept alliteration's artless aid:--

At the examination lately held at Cambridge a number of students from the Ladies' College at Hitchin passed their "Little-go"; the first time that such undergraduates ever underwent that ordeal. It is gratifying to be enabled to add, that out of all those flowers of loveliness, not one was plucked. Bachelors of Art are likely to be made look to their laurels by these Spinsters, and Masters must work hard or they will be eclipsed by Mistresses, more completely than the Sun was the other day by the Moon. And we may expect that when such competitors of both sexes come to perform upon the classical and mathematical Tripos, a Pythoness will be first upon the former, and another young lady will dance off triumphantly Senior Wrangler.

_Punch's_ prophecy was fulfilled by the exploits of Miss Ramsay (afterwards Mrs. Montagu Butler) and Miss Philippa Fawcett, daughter of Henry and Millicent Garrett Fawcett. The College at Hitchin was moved to Cambridge in 1873, when it entered on a new and prosperous career under the title of Girton. But _Punch_, reverting to his facetious manner, availed himself of the opportunity to publish a set of burlesque regulations and syllabus of lectures for the new College. The same spirit is betrayed in the comments on the proposed Ladies' Club in 1869:--

A Ladies' Club is said to be in process of formation. How the male mind shudders at this most tremendous news! What a field for fearful questions the intelligence suggests! Will there be a Club Committee? and, if so, at its meetings how many ladies' tongues will be allowed to speak at once? Will there be a smoking-room? And, if so, will cigars be suffered to be lighted, or will the fear of being ill restrain the ladies from indulgence in anything except the very mildest cigarettes? Will conversation be restricted to the politics of the nursery and the latest news in bonnets; or what will be the limits sanctioned to recounters of a thrilling bit of scandal, or to narrators of a tale of love, or marriage, or divorce, which has just been set a-wagging in high life? Instead of billiards we presume the younger members will amuse themselves with tatting, while the elder are engaged in a fierce battle at Bézique....

The ladies will, of course, want a title for their Club. Perhaps "The Femineum" would be a fitting name for it; or would its members prefer to call themselves "The Chatterers" while the present fashion lasts? Should the Ladies' Club prove popular, there may doubtless be some little ducks desirous to belong to it. But we trust, however silly may be certain of its members, nobody will ever dream of calling it "The Goose Club."

The promoters might have retorted that such criticisms were worthy of the members of the "Asineum." But _Punch_ was fairly entitled to make such capital as he could out of the advertisement quoted in 1874: "Philosopher wanted, as Secretary to a Ladies' Club."

[Sidenote: _The Economics of Marriage_]

As we have seen, _Punch_ had frankly recognized that matrimony was not and could not be the be-all and end-all of all women--that there were some girls who, though they might marry if they chose, did not wish to; girls who preferred independence to matrimonial servitude; girls, again, who would make excellent wives, but were not chosen because men were stupid enough to be governed in their choice by looks and looks alone. The economics of marriage, again, were becoming an increasingly important consideration as a result of the raising of the standard of life and the cost of living. In the 'forties _Punch_ printed a song of which the refrain was "If I had a thousand a year," which represented a sum almost beyond the dreams of middle-class avarice, to judge by all the things the dreamer would do and all the luxuries he would indulge in, if his income reached four figures. In 1858 _The Times_ started a serious discussion of the problem "Marriage on £300 a year," which the same audience nowadays would regard not as practical politics but an act of insanity. _Punch,_ however, satirized the discussion from the point of view of an agricultural labourer earning a wage of 10s. a week.

Though in the golden days of Gladstonian finance the income tax came down to 4d. and even 3d. in the pound, the standard of living rose, and £500 a year is mentioned in 1867 as a possible basis for matrimony. From whatever the cause--possibly the prevalence of large families had something to say to it--the rapidity with which married people of both sexes grew old, as compared with the juvenile grandparents of to-day, is strikingly illustrated in the pages of _Punch._ Take for example the two pictures "Twelve months after Marriage" and "Twenty years after Marriage" in 1862. When we take into account the earlier age at which people married sixty years ago, the couple in the picture on p. 265 need no be more than forty-five; yet they both look at least seventy. One is reminded of a passage in _Sense and Sensibility_ (though, that, of course, was fifty years earlier), in which John Dashwood, speaking of his mother, who is "hardly forty," suggests that "she may live another fifteen years." The pictures given here represent a happy marriage. _Punch_ had no panacea for unhappy marriages; but he remained of the same opinion, so often expressed in his earlier days, that a cheap Divorce Act was a better cure than the punishment of cruel wife-beaters. And throughout this period he remained constant in his support of the campaign for the amendment of the Women's Property Acts, on the lines of his summary of Lord Brougham's three resolutions moved in the House of Lords on February 13, 1857. They were "First, that their present rights were all wrongs. Second, that a woman was entitled to her own property; and third, that if our ridiculous theory of marriage prevented a woman from having this justice, at all events a profligate husband should be restrained from wasting her possessions." Lastly, he remained unshaken in his adhesion to the cause of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, or, as he termed it, "the Bill for Emancipation of Sisters-in-Law from the tyrannical disqualification which prevents their taking the matrimonial oath when elected by a Briton and a widower."

[Sidenote: _The English Feminine Type_]

By way of conclusion we may add that if _Punch_ reserved to himself the right of castigating the follies of his countrywomen, he was valorous in their defence when they were depreciated or caricatured by foreign critics or artists. In 1858 he falls foul of a German journalist, under the head of "British and German Beauty":--

The Berlin _Charivari_ contains the following humorous remarks on English beauty:--

"Each Nation thinks itself the handsomest in the world. We paint the devil black; the blacks will have him white. Miss Pastrano delights in her beard, and every Englishman thinks his red-haired, crooked-nosed, rabbit-toothed, goggle-eyed, loose-legged, calfless Dulcinea the very perfection of human beauty."

Not quite that. Not so perfect as the raven-haired, Grecian-nosed, white-and-sound-toothed, sloe-eyed, neat-legged young Teutonic lady, with such pretty little feet and ankles at the end of her legs. Of course the Prussian _Charivari's_ notion of an English girl is a bit of fun, complimentary irony; and we are sure our fair countrywomen will feel highly honoured by the mock-depreciation of our cousin German.

Much later on the French caricaturists, who habitually represented Englishwomen as lean, gaunt, ill-favoured and ill-dressed, and with long projecting teeth, roused him to protest with equal vigour against their gross and unseemly libels.

LITERATURE

There is probably no better means of testing a man's literary sense than his estimate of poetry other than that written by authors of established reputation. And as with individuals so is it with papers. _Punch_ deserves no special credit for his devotion to Shakespeare, or for his ridicule of the Baconians who, in his phrase, sought to make the Swan of Avon a Goose. It is curious, however, in this context to note that, on _Punch's_ authority, Lord Palmerston suspended judgment on the question. In the arm-chair commentary on current events which appeared in 1865 under the heading, "_Punch's_ Table-Talk," we read:--

When Ben Jonson's verses, in laudation of William Shakespeare, were mentioned to the late Premier, he said, "Oh, these fellows always stand up for one another. Besides, he may have been deceived like the rest."

It is only one and a small proof of Shakespeare's "myriad-mindedness" that _Punch_ throughout his career has drawn more freely from his plays for subjects for cartoons than from any other source. Shakespeare, as a modern writer puts it, "has always been there before." It was partly no doubt due to _Punch's_ distrust of the national capacity to organize and carry out picturesque demonstrations that led him to treat the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebrations in 1864 with scant respect. But an honourable jealousy for the repute of our greatest writer was enough to warrant his dissatisfaction. There were wide divergences of opinion and considerable friction among the members of the National Memorial Committee, a huge unwieldy body representing all professions and interests, and containing, along with many great and honoured names, not a few thrusting notorieties and even nonentities. The festival at Stratford was a _fiasco_, and the grandiose schemes of the promoters came to little practical result. One is indeed tempted to draw the conclusion that it is almost unnecessary to attempt a special celebration of one who is being celebrated every day and all the time.

As a critic of letters _Punch_ is subjected to more searching ordeal in his references to living and rising than to dead or risen authors. His recognition of James Montgomery--the author of one of the very few fine modern hymns--has been noticed elsewhere. There was chivalry as well as appreciation in his defence of Alexander Smith when the charge of plagiarism was brought against the "City Poems" by the _Athenæum_. The ridicule of the "Spasmodic" school in Aytoun's brilliant burlesque drama _Firmilian_ was a much more damaging criticism, but in recognizing Smith's force and originality _Punch_ ranges himself on the side of Clough and Matthew Arnold, John Forster, Arthur Helps and G. H. Lewes--in other words, the most enlightened and best equipped critics of the time.

Though Tennyson had been Laureate for several years, he was still regarded--surprising and even painful as it may seem to the neo-Georgian reader--with a certain amount of suspicion by austere critics bred up in eighteenth century traditions. Both as regards matter and manner he was considered to be an innovator. _Punch's_ admiration for Tennyson was already an old story. He had lent him the hospitality of his pages in 1846 to reply to Bulwer Lytton's defamatory abuse in _The New Timon_. But in some quarters judgment was still suspended, and Tennyson was not yet held to have completed the period of probation. So when in 1859 the bust of the Laureate was denied admission to the Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, on the ground that the honour was premature, _Punch_ printed a satirical "Fragment of an Idyll" in which the poet's detractors were rebuked in his own manner.

[Sidenote: _A Wonderful Three-penny-worth_]

_Punch's_ championship of Tennyson never faltered, though he was reconciled to Bulwer Lytton, who had called the Laureate a "School-miss," and it dated back to a time when Tennyson's claims to recognition were vehemently canvassed. Still we are inclined to regard as a much more remarkable sign of his _flair_ and enlightenment, the quoting of Meredith's poem, _Modern Love_, in his "Essence of Parliament," in the year 1865. It is only a scrap--four words; yet when one remembers how remarkably small Meredith's audience was in the 'sixties, even for his prose, the quotation is a notable sign of grace. But Shirley Brooks, who distilled the "Essence," was a scholar and something of a poet into the bargain. There was also a special bond between _Punch_ and George Meredith. In 1860, under the heading "An Honest Advertisement," _Punch_ refers to _Once a Week_ as having been enlarged to thirty-two pages, and speaks of it as "already one of the most extraordinarily cheap publications in the world when you consider the brilliancy of the literature and the beauty of the illustrations." This was admittedly a puff, for the proprietors of _Punch_ and _Once a Week_ were the same, but it was no more than the truth. _Once a Week_ was the most wonderful three-penny-worth in the whole journalistic history of the nineteenth century, with Millais, Rossetti, Sandys, Frederick Walker, G. J. Pinwell and Charles Keene as regular illustrators. As for the letterpress, it is enough to say that Meredith's _Evan Harrington_ (illustrated by Charles Keene) appeared in its pages, as well as many of his and Tennyson's poems. In spite of this galaxy of talent the magazine was not a commercial success, and after a few years passed into other hands.

In extending a welcome to Kingsley's[26] _Water Babies_, and later on to _Alice in Wonderland_, our friend _Punch_ did no more than might have been expected of him. But his praise of the former story is pitched in a pretty high key: the author of the "Table Talk" in 1865 declaring that he "would rather have written the _Water Babies_ than any book in the last fifty years." In the controversy that raged over _Poems and Ballads_, in 1866, _Punch_ committed himself truculently to the side of the angels of decorum. In consequence he writes pungently, that "having read Mr. Swinburne's defence of his prurient poetics, _Punch_ hereby gives him his royal licence to change his name to what is evidently its true form--"Swine-born." Name-twisting, with a view to casting odium on an antagonist, is an old but dangerous game. The most that can be said in _Punch's_ defence, which is not much, is that he was not the only offender. In the acrimonious pamphlet warfare that raged between Swinburne and Dr. Halliwell Phillipps, the latter called the poet "Pigsbrook," and the poet retorted by referring to his opponent as "Hell-P." Apart from this error of taste, _Punch_ had at least the support of powerful and distinguished allies in his condemnation. But he overdid his disparagement when four years later he observed that "certain Songs before Sunrise are promised us ere long, from the pen of a young poet." Nor was the allusion to Walt Whitman as "an impostor" in 1869 any happier than his previous description of him as a Yankee rough.

[Footnote 26: In 1858 _Punch_ had chaffed Kingsley for his _Ode to the North-East Wind_ in a parody purporting to be written by a dyspeptic valetudinarian, who resented the strenuous "muscular Christianity" of the original.]

[Sidenote: _Martin Tupper_]

Though by no means an infallible or judicial critic, _Punch_ made no mistakes about bad poets, even though they were popular. Throughout this period he was the champion of the middle-classes in politics; but his championship did not extend to their literary preferences. In the 'sixties, Tupper was widely read and, judged by circulation, the most successful poet of the day. To this generation his name has become a synonym for platitude; and as an author, he survives, if at all, in the immortal parody of Calverley. Yet we can never get away from the fact that he gave pleasure to scores of thousands of decent people by his blameless banalities. Though his _Proverbial Philosophy_ was the quintessence of commonplace and orthodoxy, there are passages in it, as Professor Elton has pointed out, which deviate into something like poetry. He was, though vain, a kindly, good man, and a patriotic citizen, who did good service in promoting the Volunteer Movement. He was not a fool: did he not defeat Mr. Gladstone in the competition for a prize for a theological essay at Christ Church? The University of Oxford conferred on him the honorary degree of D.C.L. in 1847. He was also an inventor in a small way, and patented a screw-top for glass bottles. He was even a Fellow of the Royal Society! But to _Punch_ he was simply a bad poet, and as such a subject for ridicule and parody. Thus, _à propos_ of his _Three Hundred Sonnets_, _Punch_ published in 1860 what purported to be the three-hundred-and-first on "My Five New Kittens," winding up with the couplet:--

O cook, we'll keep the innocents alive, They're five, consider, and you've fingers five.

The illustration alluding to a girl who writes to her lover with the aid of "Tupper's poems and a Dictionary," acquires a peculiar point from the fact, recorded in Spurgeon's Life, that he proposed to the lady who became his wife by help of a passage from Tupper.

Owing to heavy financial losses Tupper accepted a Civil List pension of £120 at the end of 1873, and _Punch_ supported the grant on the ground that though philosophers might have learned little from _Proverbial Philosophy_, there could be no doubt that a work read by the million had either taught or entertained them a good deal. He also hailed it as an earnest of better times coming for authors in general; for if Tupper had received £120 a year, how many times that sum should be awarded to writers of really durable works? This mitigated approval prepares us for _Punch's_ subsequent malice in publishing a burlesque poem, purporting to come from Tupper's pen, on a Royal wedding in January, 1874. But the bestowal of those pensions too often invited direct censure. The notorious "Poet Close" of Kirkby Stephen, Westmorland, who described himself as "Poet Laureate to the King of Bonny," was patronized by Lord Palmerston (who indirectly compared him with Burns) and had been put on the Civil List in 1861, though the pension was afterwards withdrawn. But when _Punch_ learned in 1863 that the poet was poor in more senses than one, he promised him an immunity from ridicule, and wished success to his next work. The promise was hardly fulfilled in the following year when "English literature was enriched" by Poet Close's _Grand Sensation Book_ and by _Cithara_--a selection from the Lyrics of Martin Tupper. Of the latter _Punch_ cruelly remarks: "it contains some new pieces, in which Mr. Tupper has excelled himself: but _Nemo repente fuit Tupperrimus_." The two poets are bracketed (as in one of Gilbert's _Bab Ballads_) in some ironical stanzas, but the conjunction was hardly fair to Tupper, who at his worst was assuredly a cut above "Poet Close." A lower depth, however, was sounded by the poet Young, whose pension was a positive scandal. Tupper is very generously treated in the D.N.B.; "Poet Close" appears, though more as a curiosity than as a writer of any literary merit whatsoever, his verses being described as "metrical balderdash"; but for Young we have to go to _Hansard_ or _Punch_, whose comment in 1867 runs as follows:--

We had some fun by way of ending an important week. Palmerston had his Close, and Derby has his Young, only the doggerel of the latter is not merely vulgar and foolish, but offensive. However, he is pensioned. Mr. Whalley (probably thinking that Young was author of the _Night Thoughts_) defended the grant, and said that Young's sentiments were truly Protestant. Mr. Disraeli said what he could, which was that Lord Derby had been hoaxed, and that it would be a warning to himself never to sign or believe in a Memorial.

The vigilance displayed by _Punch_ in this matter no doubt helped to improve matters, but even as I write, in 1921, the world of letters has been staggered by the bestowal of a decoration on the strength of literary achievements of which no record could be discovered in any publisher's catalogue or library.

[Sidenote: _Thackeray and Dickens_]

One of the great novelists of the Victorian Age, Thackeray, had been for many years a regular and brilliant contributor to _Punch_, and though he retired from the staff in 1854, remained a constant member of the council and sat with them only eight days before his death on Christmas Eve, 1863. The tribute in the issue of January 2, 1864, pays homage more to the affectionate and loyal comrade than to the great writer; but in the following number _Punch_ repels with spirit the charge that Thackeray was a cynic. Thackeray's contributions to _Punch_ belong to an earlier period, but the brilliant burlesques of popular novelists, which he initiated by his travesties of Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, G. P. R. James and Lever were carried on with great spirit by Burnand in _Mokeanna_ (suggested by the romances in the _London Journal_), _Chikkin Hazard_ (founded on Charles Reade's _Foul Play_), and _One and Three_ (after Victor Hugo's _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_). Burnand's burlesques were not nearly so subtle or artistic as Thackeray's; they relied more upon farcical quips and ingenious puns; but still they served a useful purpose in the elevation of parody from mere verbal mimicry into a genuine function of literary criticism, a process in which _Punch_ has played an increasingly active and successful part in recent years.

Dickens's intimate relations with the _Punch_ staff have been noted in the previous volume. There had been friction with the proprietors, but all was forgotten on his death in June, 1870. The lines which recognize him as in the same category as Shakespeare, only say what even modernist critics admit to-day--that he created a new world and peopled it with creatures of his imagination who are as real as those of real life. In the same number _Punch_, with some slight reserves, espoused Disraeli's side when Goldwin Smith had rashly "put on the cap" fitted for him in _Lothair_, and publicly and vehemently protested against being libelled as a "social parasite." In some doggerel verses _Punch_ made acid reference to the professor's bilious temper, intellectual arrogance and general cantankerousness. If Disraeli's attack was cowardly and contemptible, why notice it with such passion?

Trollope is genially commended in the "Honest Advertisement" mentioned above. The popularity of Miss Braddon's _Lady Audley's Secret_ and _Aurora Floyd_ is attested in 1863; Miss Broughton's novels are barely referred to, but the reference clearly indicates disapproval of their audacity. Nor can we find any appreciation of the now unduly neglected novels of George Eliot, though there is a curious mention in 1859 of an anonymous sequel to _Adam Bede_ brought out by an obscure publisher named Newby. It may be recalled that a claim to the authorship of _Adam Bede_ was set up on behalf of a Mr. Liggins, a gentleman as unscrupulous as his name was unromantic.

[Sidenote: _Carlyle and Ruskin_]

The imposture caused great annoyance to the real author, and hastened the divulging of the secret which had hitherto been well kept.

_Punch_ had welcomed Macaulay's peerage, and on his death at the end of 1859 spoke of his as "the noblest name our Golden Book could show." In spite of occasional sharp divergences of opinion, Carlyle is nearly always treated with honour and respect. When he was elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh University in 1866, _Punch_ saluted him in his own peculiar style as a "brave, wise old man" who in an age of "eternal butter and testimonial-plasterings of mediocrity," had flagellated windbags, scourged sham patriotism, spoken words of manly cheer, and in general shown that the root of the matter was in him. _Punch's_ further salute in 1874 when "the Prussian Royal Order of Merit was presented to the English historical biographer of Frederick the Great," is pitched in a key that jars on modern ears by its eulogy of Bismarck and the Emperor William; but the last stanzas of "True Thomas and his Order" are worth quoting:--

Our mother England has no stars For soldiers of the Pen: With us such honours spring from wars Watered with blood of men.

Then let us rather smile than sneer, When from the Vaterland, Whose thought to us he has brought near, There is stretched forth a hand,

To pin the badge of merit fair On Carlyle's manly breast: The star can shed no honour there, 'Tis honoured there to rest.

The only other great Victorian literary lion of whom mention is made is Ruskin, and _Punch's_ attitude towards him is somewhat mixed. In 1871 he addressed an open letter to Ruskin, _à propos_ of his suggestions for preventing inundations of the Tiber, the gist of it being that, whatever he might be as an art critic, he was not infallible as an engineer. _Punch_ admitted the "mystical and musical" eloquence of Ruskin, whom he was quite content to regard as an oracle--though not always intelligible--on Art and Nature, Paintings Old and Modern, Lamps of Architecture, Crowns of Wild Olive, and so forth, but he refused to take him seriously as a writer on economics or social problems. He showed unexpected sympathy with him, however, over the famous road-making experiment in 1874 at Hincksey, when the not very expert efforts of his disciples moved Philistine undergraduates to ribald mirth:--

HINCKSEY DIGGINGS

(See recent Correspondence in _Daily News_, and elsewhere)

'Tis well for snarlers analytic, Who the art of the snarl to the sneer have brought, To spit their scorn at the eloquent critic, Leader of undergraduate thought. Heart of the student it will not harden If from the bat and the oar he abstain, To plant the flowers in a cottage garden, And lay the pipes of a cottage drain.

Pity we have for the man who thinks he Proves Ruskin fool for work like this. Why shouldn't young Oxford lend hands to Hincksey, Though Doctrinaires may take it amiss? Careless wholly of critic's menace, Scholars of Ruskin, to him be true; The truths he has writ in _The Stones of Venice_ May be taught by the Stones of Hincksey too.

Other papers laughed at the "amateur navvies," Oxford caricaturists were busy, and "to walk over to Hincksey and laugh at the diggers became a fashionable afternoon amusement." But the road was wanted, and Ruskin, according to his biographer,[27] saw in it a means of practical protest against the fetish-worship of athletics, to say nothing of his probable desire to dissociate himself from the Postlethwaites and Maudles who had stolen some of their catchwords from Ruskin, but whose creed of "art for art's sake" he cordially loathed. And perhaps the best vindication of the experiment was the fact that the undergraduate road-diggers included Alfred Milner and Arnold Toynbee; and that in encouraging his disciples in the "gospel of labour" Ruskin formulated principles of social service on lines which have been faithfully carried out in the Universities' Settlements in East London and other cities.

[Footnote 27: See the _Life of John Ruskin_, by Sir E. T. Cook.]

[Sidenote: _Punch and American Humorists_]

American humour is not always to English taste. And, conversely, English humour, as represented by _Punch_, has not always commended itself to American critics, though nothing could be more generous than the tribute to _Punch_ paid by New York _Life_ during the late war. At an earlier date we remember a picture in an American comic journal representing a room of torture, crowded with thumbscrews and racks and other engines of malignity, with a pile of volumes of _Punch_ enthroned in the place of honour. In this context one recalls with satisfaction that _Punch_ extended a cordial welcome to two great American humorists--Artemus Ward and Mark Twain--in the 'sixties and early 'seventies. Artemus Ward was in broken health when he visited our shores in 1866, but his lectures at the Egyptian Hall were an immense success, and elicited the admiration of such diverse critics as John Bright, Richard Holt Hutton, of the _Spectator_, who wrote an admirable appreciation of them in his paper, and _Punch_. Hutton once told the present writer that he was never so convulsed with laughter in his life as when listening to the lecture. It may be read in Artemus Ward's collected works, and it is very good reading in cold print, but the effect was enormously enhanced by the contrast between the lecturer's cadaverous appearance and melancholy manner on the one hand, and the extravagant farce of his utterances on the other. This is well brought out in _Punch's_ notice of "A Ward that deserves watching":--

_Mr. Punch_ would recommend "funny men" on or off the stage, to hear Artemus Ward "speak his piece" at the Egyptian Hall, and then, in so far as in them lies, to go and do likewise....

Oh, if these unhappy abusers of gag, grimace, and emphasis--these grating, grinding, grinning, over-doing obtruders of themselves in the wrong place--could take a leaf out of Artemus Ward's "piece," and learn to be as quiet, grave, and unconscious in their delivery of the words set down for them as he is in speaking his own! Unlike them, Artemus Ward has brains. That is, of course, beyond hope in their case. But if they could once be made to feel how immensely true humour is enhanced by the unforced way it drops out of A.W.'s mouth, they might learn to imitate what, probably, it is hopeless to expect they could understand.

To be sure, Artemus Ward's delivery of fun is eminently "un-English." But there are a good many things English one would like to see un-Englished. Gross overdone low comedy is one of them. Snobbishness is another. The two go hand in hand. One of the best of many good points of Artemus Ward's piece is that it is quite free from all trace of either of these English institutions. And it is worth noting, that we owe to another native of the States, Joseph Jefferson, the best example lately set us of unforced and natural low comedy. His _Rip Van Winkle_ was very un-English, too.

[Sidenote: _Artemus Ward in London_]

But _Punch's_ approval was not confined to applause. He invited Artemus Ward to contribute to his columns, and the invitation led to a series of delightful papers--"Artemus Ward in London"--which appeared in 1866. Some have found in them signs of flagging spirits--Artemus Ward died of consumption at Southampton on March 6, 1867--but the mixture of extravagance and "horse-sense" was never better shown than in the visit to the Tower:--

"You have no Tower in America?" said a man in the crowd, who had somehow detected my denomination.

"Alars! no," I anserd; "we boste of our enterprise and improovments, and yit we are devoid of a Tower. America, oh, my onhappy Country! Thou hast not got no Tower! It is a sweet Boon."

The gates was opened after awhile, and we all purchist tickets, and went into a waitin-room.

"My frens," said a pale-faced little man, in black close, "this is a sad day."

"Inasmuch as to how?" I said.

"I mean it is sad to think that so many peple have been killed within these gloomy walls. My frens, let us drop a tear!"

"No," I said, "you must excuse me. Others may drop one if they feel like it; but as for me I decline. The early managers of this institootion were a bad lot, and their crimes was trooly orful; but I can't sob for those who died four or five hundred years ago. If they was my own relations I couldn't. It's absurd to shed sobs over things which occurd durin' the reign of Henry the Three. Let us be cheerful," I continnerd. "Look at the festive Warders in their red flannil jackets. They are cheerful, and why should it not be thusly with us?"

A Warder now took us in charge, and showed us the "Trater's Gate," the armers and things. The Trater's Gate is wide enuff to admit about twenty traters abrest, I should jedge; but beyond this, I couldn't see that it was superior to gates in gen'ral.

Traters, I will here remark, are a onfortnit class of peple. If they wasn't, they wouldn't be traters. They conspire to bust up a country--they fail, and they're traters. They bust her, and they become statesmen and heroes....

Mark Twain did not visit London until seven years later, and _Punch_ greeted the "distinguished humorist" in the quatrain headed "Welcome to a Lecturer":--

"'Tis time we Twain did show ourselves." 'Twas said By Cæsar, when one Mark had lost his head: By Mark whose head's quite bright, 'tis said again: "Therefore, go with me, friends, to bless this Twain."

The greeting was renewed a couple of months later, and _Punch's_ admiration, thus early expressed, never wavered in all the years that elapsed before Mark Twain was entertained by _Punch_ at his table on the occasion of his last visit to England in 1907, when he came over to receive the degree of Doctor of Literature from the University of Oxford.

[Sidenote: _W. S. Gilbert_]

The relations of W. S. Gilbert with _Punch_ were made public property to a certain extent by Gilbert's statement, in the preface to the collected edition of the _Bab Ballads_, that the _Cruise of the Nancy Bell_ had been "offered to the Editor and declined by him on the ground that it was too cannibalistic to suit the taste of his readers." The _Bab Ballads_ (so called from the signature "Bab" which Gilbert appended to his illustrations) appeared in _Fun_, which was founded in 1861, and were, while they lasted, the chief attraction of that paper. Gilbert was undoubtedly nettled by Mark Lemon's decision; had it been otherwise, he might very probably have become a regular contributor to _Punch_. But it is not strictly correct to say, as the author of the notice of Gilbert in the _Encyclopædia Britannic_a does, that Gilbert continued to contribute to _Fun_ because he had failed to gain the _entrée_ into the pages of _Punch_. As a matter of fact he had frequently contributed, both with pen and pencil, to _Punch_ in the early 'sixties. In 1865 his contributions included an amusing illustrated squib on the hydrophobia scare, the lines to "An Absent Husband," and a long prose piece "A wonderful Shilling's worth!" on the performances at the Polytechnic. The last named was Gilbert's final contribution to _Punch_.

_The Nancy Bell_ was offered and rejected early in 1866, and appeared in _Fun_ of March 3 without illustrations. The nonsense verses, "Sing for the Garish Eye," which appeared in _Punch_ on April 16, 1873, were from Gilbert's pen, but the explanation given a fortnight later showed that they had been printed inadvertently; a "valued contributor" having forwarded them for _Punch's_ private diversion and not for publication. They had actually been printed elsewhere ten years earlier. The _amende_ was handsomely made, but Gilbert never contributed again to _Punch_. One cannot help regretting that he began the _Bab Ballads_ with just the only one to which exception could have been taken, for it _is_ cannibalistic!

Holding that a Free Press was an advantage to a nation, _Punch_ had supported the Memorial to Leigh Hunt, who had been sent to prison "for publishing opinions which _Mr. Punch_ in perfect safety may now put forth when he pleases, and the fact that _Punch_ can just say what he likes without a fear of Newgate is owing in great measure to the battles Leigh Hunt fought," for which _Punch_ was content to overlook Leigh Hunt's self-indulgent improvidence--so cruelly satirized by Dickens in Harold Skimpole. But when Charles Knight died in 1873 there was no need for reservation in the homage paid to that life-long and stalwart fighter for the repeal of the taxes on learning:--

Oft times the fuel well nigh failed his flame, And Ruin stood between him and his aim, But manfully he grappled the grim foe, Nor ever yielded sword though oft struck low. And his reward was that he lived to see Cheap Letters broad-cast sown, and knowledge free!

DRAMA, OPERA, MUSIC AND THE FINE ARTS

Before the middle 'fifties critics of the Stage in England--apart from the extreme Puritans--had three main grounds for complaint: the monopoly of the patent theatres, the patronage of foreigners by the Court and fashionable Society, and the popularity of degrading sensational plays; and up to 1857 the pages of _Punch_ were eloquent on all three counts. In the period covered by this volume not only was royal patronage more judiciously and impartially bestowed, but the abolition of the exclusive privileges of the patent theatres had cut at the root of the evil and rendered possible such enlightened ventures as those of Phelps and Mrs. Warner at Sadler's Wells. The immediate result of the Free Trade policy in plays was to stimulate the legitimate drama, and in particular the cult of Shakespeare. Phelps's work in this connexion comes in for repeated approval, especially for his good all-round casts. Shakespearean actors are prominent throughout. The announcement of the death of Scribe in 1861 inspires the comment that the Members of the Dramatic Authors' Association are as well as can be expected. _Punch_ had no love for endless _réchauffés_ of French plays, but he was no bigot where foreign actors of merit were concerned, and cordially welcomed Fechter as Hamlet in 1861, while deprecating the preliminary puffing of his manager. It was not needed, for while admitting that Fechter's accent was disconcerting, _Punch_ had nothing but praise for his admirable play of feature, his graceful ease of attitude and gesture and his intelligent conception of the character. As for the interpretation as a whole, foreigners were entitled to read Shakespeare for themselves: _Punch_ held no brief for the Protection of British Stage Traditions, but believed in free trade in intellect as well as in cotton.

[Sidenote: _Fechter and Ristori_]

At the foot of the notice there is a picture of a stout, shabby tragedian exclaiming "Fechter! Pah! Hamlet with light hair and no points. Pah! The drama's gone." This professional jealousy is again ridiculed in "The Groan of a True Briton" a month later. The "boom" in Shakespeare this winter was quite remarkable, with _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ at Sadler's Wells, Booth in _The Merchant of Venice_ and _King Richard II_, Brooke at Drury Lane, and Fechter at the Princess's. Othello's occupation (on the stage) was extremely popular. We read in the issue of November 9, under the heading "Great Fall of Blacks":--

Five Othellos are stabbing themselves regularly, just now, and there will soon be a sixth, Mr. Charles Kean having ordered the largest pot of blacking Messrs. Day and Martin supply, and having announced that he is cubbing dext.

The vendetta against Charles Kean, it will thus be seen, was so implacable that _Punch_ could not resist the temptation of dragging him in without any provocation.

Another and a greater foreigner dominated the scene in 1863. Of Adelaide Ristori, "the greatest of living actresses" in his opinion, _Punch_ confessed that her genius beggared description. When she appeared at Her Majesty's in the summer of 1863 he declared that "in no English or American dictionary could be found words of sufficient strength" to express his admiration of Adelaide Ristori, or "his compassion for the unhappy person who does not go and behold one or two of her performances. This is a debilitated under-statement of the case.... What a magnificent voice hers is, and how artistically managed. The _vox humana_ is the first musical instrument in the world, but then so few can perform upon it. Our Adelaide is one of the few." Here, at least, _Punch's_ estimate never varied, and was only heightened by further familiarity. When Ristori played Lady Macbeth in English ten years later, _Punch_ owned to some misgivings as to her accent,[28] but on the second performance he only noticed it twice. Otherwise "there was not, from first to last, one single fault to be found with this remarkable performance."

[Footnote 28: The present writer saw and heard Ristori in the sleep-walking scene at Manchester in the early 'eighties, and her foreign accent was undoubtedly most pronounced. Her first words provoked laughter from the gallery, drowned immediately in a storm of cheering, renewed at the end of an impersonation so powerful and even terrifying that one entirely forgot the accent. The episode had an amusing sequel. An old theatre-goer wrote to a Manchester paper to express indignation at Ristori's reception by the gallery. The laughers could not be Manchester men: they must have been boors from Chowbent. A couple of days later a letter appeared from an equally indignant resident at Chowbent repelling the aspersion on a community so civilized that it possessed a Town Hall!]

[Sidenote: _The Drama in Russia_]

Foreign actors and actresses were in the main treated handsomely and on their merits by _Punch_. Bandmann, the German-American actor, was highly commended in 1868 and advised to act Shakespeare. The visit of the audacious Schneider belongs to another phase of the drama, but the condemnation of French acting as a mere "swindle" put into the mouth of "Opie Wing," a "British Veteran--legitimate lead and blank verse heavies," is purely ironical. The methods of the Comédie Française troupe visiting London in 1871 are attacked precisely for the qualities which were their greatest distinction--their refusal to force the note or play to the gallery, their delicacy and self-effacement in the interests of ensemble, as when Delaunay came on in livery just to give a message. _Punch's_ readiness to admit that fruitful suggestions for the improvement of the British Stage might come from the most unexpected foreign quarters receives a curious and even prophetic illustration in his remarks on "The Theatre for the People":--

Russia may well be described as a benighted country! But of all the queer notions ever bred of barbarism, commend us to one in the _Pall Mall's_ latest "Notes from Russia." Conceive a Commission appointed to examine the question of the establishment of a "Theatre for the People"! And more; imagine the Commission reporting strongly that such a theatre should be constructed! A theatre with a moral object! A theatre meant "to divert the people from foolish, vulgar and gross amusements, by providing them with healthy and elevating spectacular entertainments at a cheap rate"! A theatre to contain seats for 2,350 people--say something between Drury Lane and the Lyceum--with 1,300 of the seats at prices varying from 2d. to 4d., and the others from 4d. to 3s. 2d.! This infatuated Committee further report that such a theatre might be made to bring in a profit of £5,000 a year--or ten per cent, on the capital employed. They recommend that the management should be entrusted to a competent private person, of experience, taste and refinement, and have prepared a repertory of 140 pieces in the Russian language, original and translated, calculated, they think, to forward their object of entertaining and elevating.

They further recommend that lotteries, masked balls, and the sale of spirituous liquors be forbidden in the "Theatre of the People."

Hear that, ye stunning sons of the music-halls--hear that, frequenters of our splendid saloons and brilliant bars! Contrast this barbaric dream of a Russian Blue Book, with the civilized reality of London, where Free Trade in theatres does its work, and the demand is allowed to create the supply of theatrical pabulum for the people, from the Victoria[29] to the penny gaff! The idea of the people being condemned to "healthy and elevating" entertainment; when their betters can revel in the Schneider, the Menken, the Cancan and the Opera Bouffe, the indecent burlesque, the breakdown, and the sensational drama!

[Footnote 29: The "Old Vic," now reclaimed very much on the lines of the Russian ideal.]

The historic invasion of the Russians did not occur till about forty years later. Of the famous French players who delighted English audiences between 1857 and 1874 the last and not the least fascinating was Aimée Desclée, who, after an arduous apprenticeship to her art and ten years of weary waiting, had been discovered by Alexandre Dumas _fils_, and leapt into fame in _La Femme de Claude_, _Diane de Lys_, _Princesse Georges,_ and, above all, as the original Frou-Frou in the play of that name. Of her it was well said by a French critic that "she had a strange, wandering, unbalanced look that revealed the troubled depths of her soul. Her voice had a most peculiar _timbre_, and her abrupt utterances, every word of which stung like the strokes of a whip, fell upon a spellbound audience that hung on every word." After fulfilling a brilliant engagement at the Princess's Theatre in 1873 she returned to Paris to die at the age of thirty-seven. The tragedy of her brief success and the exacting temper of the Parisian public are well summed up in _Punch's_ memorial tribute:--

But too late came the harvest of her pains; The roots of Death had struck deep in her heart; And what cares Death for glory or for gains, Guerdon of that short life, so spent for Art?

And she was dying, with the pitiless cry Of box and pit and gallery in her ear, "Give us thy life, but act, and, after, die; It is to live with thy life we are here."

While extending salutations to the foreigners _Punch_ was not slow to acclaim native talent. In 1865 he recognized in Kate Terry "one of the most consummate actresses of her own range of parts we have ever seen on the English Stage." That was said of her appearance in _Henry Dunbar_ in December, 1865, and in June, 1867, in Reade's _Dora_, "a real English Idyll, sweet, simple, natural and breathing of the country," he found her completely satisfying in a part unlike her usual stage self. Three months later _Punch_ bade her farewell on her marriage and withdrawal from the stage, paying homage to her triple endowment of Genius, Goodness and Beauty, her "innocent sensitive face," and her gentle, gracious and womanly presence. Her "delicate influence" was a standing disproof of the arguments of those who despaired of true art and its reign on the stage, and she was retiring "from the top of the ladder reached fairly at last with her laurels still springing and none of them blighted."

[Sidenote: _The Coming of Irving_]

The rise of Irving from comedy and melodrama to Shakespearean drama is attentively and sympathetically followed. His performance in the "nightmare play" of _The Bells_ is pronounced to be a triumph of merit; the sense of relief experienced on the fall of the curtain was in itself the highest praise. The programme at the Lyceum ended with _Pickwick_, with Irving as Jingle. _Punch_ regarded it as an incongruity: he preferred to see Irving play _The Bells_ without the Jingle. There was nothing wrong with _Charles I_ but the play. "His make-up was admirable, his playing of the first and the last Act well-nigh faultless; but between these two Acts the actor was left to make the best bricks possible out of the scantiest wisps of straw.... I have no hesitation in saying that the last Act is as affecting a spectacle as anything I have ever seen on the stage." With Irving's _Richelieu_, in 1873, _Punch_ was disappointed, though allowing him some pathetic moments. But Irving, it is suggested, may have been the victim of the bad traditions attaching to what was after all a pretentious and "wind-baggy" play. Irving's _Hamlet_ was another matter altogether, and is treated very seriously and exhaustively by _Punch_. It was a "genuine and well-deserved success." No such strong and general sensation had been produced since Fechter, over whom Irving had the great advantage of speaking as a native the tongue in which Shakespeare wrote. No impersonation with which _Punch_ was familiar, including that of Macready, displayed a more consistent conception, more sustained intention, more intelligent mastery of this many-sided character. This much granted, _Punch_ severely criticized Irving's cavalier treatment of the text, his suppressions and omissions, his handling of all the scenes with the Ghost. The psychological interpretation of Hamlet's madness erred through over-emphasis on his pathetic and gentle side. The unsound strain was kept too much in the background, and consistency was attained at the expense of the text. Sundry scenic innovations are also condemned, and altogether high praise is tempered with a good deal of acute and legitimate criticism. On the vexed question of Hamlet's madness _Punch_ writes intelligently, but without the wit which inspired the immortal couplet in Gilbert's _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern_:--

Hamlet is idiotically sane, With lucid intervals of lunacy.

There are some good lines, however, in the issue of December 12, 1874, on "Hamlet's Right Hair," whether flaxen or raven. After all, as _Punch_ argues, it is not a question of the thatch of Hamlet's upper storey:

... It is a brain Fitting the part, that's asked to play the Dane.

[Sidenote: "_The Menken_"]

Turning from serious drama to melodrama and comedy high and otherwise, we find a liberal acknowledgment of the excitement furnished by the _Colleen Bawn_, Boucicault's bedevilled version of Gerald Griffin's fine novel _The Collegians_, when it was produced towards the close of 1860. The plot is fully set forth, and "Jack Easel" confesses that he enjoyed the evening very much. "Whatever may be the opinion of the learned regarding Mr. Boucicault as a dramatist, there can be little doubt of his merits 'on the boards.' I can hardly imagine a better stage Irishman." But _Punch_, who had no mercy for Boucicault's resentment of criticism, in March, 1862, printed a mock notice signed "Dion Boucicault," threatening condign punishment on all who disparaged his genius or dared to leave the theatre before the curtain fell and D.B. appeared before the same. And a month later we read a mock trial of an unfortunate pittite who had ventured to make some unfavourable comments on the Cave scene. The production of the melodrama founded on Charles Reade's _Never Too Late to Mend_, in 1865, met with _Punch's_ approval. Some of the audience hissed the prison scenes: yet Menken had been tolerated. This was the famous and notorious Adah Isaacs Menken, a native of Louisiana; dancer, actress, school teacher, journalist and poetess, married first of all to a Jew, whose faith she adopted, and then to the "Benicia Boy," Heenan, the prize-fighter. After a chequered career on and off the stage in America she appeared at Astley's in _Mazeppa_ in 1864, when _Punch_ made reference to her as "a bare-backed jade on bare-backed steed." It was certainly a _succès de scandale_, but "the Menken" made a stir in the literary world and found patrons and friends in Charles Reade, Charles Dickens (to whom her volume of poems, _Infelicia_, was dedicated), and Swinburne. In Paris, to which city she migrated, and where she died in 1869, she enjoyed the friendship of Dumas and Théophile Gautier. "The Menken" was not intended for a placid domestic life; she would not have been in her element at a Mothers' Meeting; but she was a highly educated woman, had studied Latin and Greek, had played Lady Macbeth, and, though not a Sappho, was a much better poetess than Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

Another actress of the "hectic" type, about whom _Punch_ as an informal _censor morum_ was much exercised, was the famous Mlle. Schneider, who incarnated the _canaillerie_ of Offenbach, and was the idol of Paris in the years in which the Second Empire was dancing to its doom. She appeared in _La Grande Duchesse_ and _La Belle Hélène_ in London in the season of 1868, drew the town at the St. James's Theatre, but met with little encouragement from the Press. _Punch_ declares that Schneider was far more vulgar in London than in Paris, though on her native heath her performance was witnessed chiefly by ladies of the faster set; and draws the moral that they manage these things better in France. He found her "perhaps scarcely so extravagant in her vulgarity" in _La Belle Hélène_, but "there is all that excessive grimacing, continual adoption of the 'cad'-tone (which her admirers think so charmingly clever), that pointless introduction of rough horse-play, hitting and kicking, without which Schneider would not be Schneider." So _Punch_ notes, as a "natural consequence" of the indulgence allowed by the Lord Chamberlain to Schneider to "kick up behind and before," like "Ole Joe," on every occasion, the production of the notorious and (for the time) audacious play of _Formosa_ a year later. _Formosa_ was a play of fast life, with scenes at Cookham (hence the name); a strange amalgam of impropriety and sentimentality; and _Punch_ dealt faithfully with the ridiculous situation in which the heroine, discovered by her parents in the most compromising company, "makes a sudden and miraculous leap from the lowest vice to the height of most sublime virtue."

[Sidenote: _Comedy and Satire_]

Schneider and _Formosa_ were, however, excrescences on the history of the British stage. A really characteristic Victorian product was the series of "drawing-room comedies" by T. W. Robertson, associated with the Prince of Wales's Theatre in the Tottenham Court Road, and the management of the Bancrofts. _Punch_ thought _Play_ faulty in construction and tricky in its effects, but had nothing but praise for the acting of Marie Wilton, Lydia Foote, Montague, Bancroft and John Hare. With him the _Play_ was not the thing, but the players; still Robertson's later comedies, for all their artificiality, gave an immense amount of harmless pleasure to Victorian audiences. Elderly playgoers will always retain the pleasantest memories of _School_ and _Caste_; they were a most amusing "sentimentalization" of a phase of society which has passed away, and fitted the company to perfection. The little playhouse in the Tottenham Court Road did excellent work in other ways, as _Punch_ acknowledged in his dream dialogue with Sheridan, when _The School for Scandal_ was revived in 1874 with Bancroft as Joseph Surface, Coghlan as Charles, Hare "a perfect picture" as Sir Peter, and Mrs. Bancroft admirable in "the rural coquette who had adopted all the graces and manners of a woman of fashion." Another notable Sheridan revival was that of _The Rivals_ at the Haymarket in November, 1870, though _Punch_ notes the disconcerting effect of Buckstone's personality: people roared with laughter at him before he spoke, or if he merely winked.

The satiric drama was dormant until 1873, when _The Happy Land_ was produced at the Court Theatre by Miss Marie Litton on March 17. It was founded on Gilbert's _Wicked World_, "a fairy comedy," written for Buckstone and the Kendals, and produced at the Haymarket with only moderate success on January 4. _The Happy Land_ was designed by Gilbert himself, but the stage version was mainly worked out by Gilbert Arthur à Beckett. Gilbert's name did not appear on the bill, on which the piece was assigned to F. L. Tomline (i.e., Gilbert) and à Beckett. _The Happy Land_ was a satire on the Gladstonian administration, and three of the principal actors were made up to caricature Gladstone, Lowe and Ayrton--so closely that after a few days the Lord Chamberlain intervened and the make-up was considerably modified. _Punch_ saw the piece before the Lord Chamberlain's order had been issued, and "crabbed" it heavily. Unlike most of those who saw the play, he found little wit in it. There were three or four "palpable hits" in the opening scene, but ten minutes of it were enough: the satire was of the sledge-hammer order, and the slain were hewn over and over again to weariness. "For a short time the First Act was lively; the Second was a faint shadow of the First." _Punch's_ disparagement is rather odd, in view of à Beckett's connexion with the paper: it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the estrangement from Gilbert, referred to elsewhere, may have coloured his judgment.

The year 1873 was marked by the passing of Macready, who died on April 27. His services to Art, his high aims and neglect of fashion are recognized in the memorial verses, from which we borrow the last stanza:--

Hail and Farewell--thou last of a great line, Who in ideal art moved as at home! Because you bowed at a now empty shrine Was your faith false? Lo, the believing come!

The sentiment is not easily to be reconciled with the generally hopeful view of the theatre expounded by _Punch_, or his comparison of Irving with Macready a few months later. In this personal context it is interesting to find that _Punch's_ misgivings were at least partially removed by the emergence of a new star of the first magnitude. He had already welcomed Ellen Terry as Puck in the revival of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ at the Queen's Theatre; he now paid an unreserved tribute to her performance in _The Wandering Heir_ at the same theatre in March, 1874:--

Considering the present position of our Theatre, such qualities as spontaneity, grace, the finest truth of accent and emphasis, tenderness in grave passages, mirthfulness in gay ones, and all these fused in an atmosphere of buoyancy and brightness which exhilarates like champagne, and irradiates like light, are something to be indeed thankful for, when found combined in one Actress on an English Stage. They are to be seen combined at this moment in Miss Ellen Terry's impersonation of Philippa, in Mr. Charles Reade's drama of _The Wandering Heir_, at the Queen's Theatre. Let those who may doubt if such praise nowadays can have a solid foundation, go and admire for themselves. A new power of graceful comedy and womanly sentiment comes to us with the return to the boards of this young and charming Actress, whose eclipse for the last few years has been hard indeed upon a Stage that had no light to spare.

[Sidenote: _Stage Realism_]

In the earlier years of this period _Punch_ was much concerned with the craze for sensation, and the stage-realism which leaves nothing to the imagination, but exalts the practical carpenter at the expense of the dramatic genius. This stock complaint reaches a climax at the close of 1865 in connexion with the announcement in a fashionable paper that in a play to be shortly produced in Paris there would be "a grand park with a real waterfall" and "a real river flowing through the stage." _Punch's_ comments, if not very subtle, are at least a sane contribution to the everlasting conflict over stage illusion waged between "enterprise" and idealism.

Over-reliance on scenery and machinery was, however, a venial offence compared with the exploits of management recorded in the following year:--

With exquisite good taste a highly enterprising Manager engaged "a few of the survivors" who were rescued from the wreck of the _London_, and has been paying them to appear every evening at his theatre, as a prelude to the gambols of Pantaloon and Clown. With a similar high notion of the duties of men catering to entertain the public, another enterprising Manager has hired "kind old Daddy," late of Lambeth Workhouse, to exhibit himself nightly in a new sensation drama, called _The Casual Ward_. "Sweet are the uses of adversity," when it is utilized in this way for dramatic exhibition; and flourishing indeed is the condition of the drama, when such magnets are deemed requisite to make a play attractive, and to draw a decent house.

If the horrors of the casual ward be thought a fitting subject for dramatic exhibition, perhaps we soon may see a drama called _The Union Infirmary_, with a score of real paupers all lying really